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"I'm assuming some bad faith here, because the next person who actually compensates creators, without exception and at the price they ask for the content they p

"I'm assuming some bad faith here, because the next person who actually compensates creators, without exception and at the price they ask for the content they pirate and use will be the first." In your own words, you say copying is human nature. It sounds like the "pay-before-evaluate" model is hoping to change that. I'd say expecting human nature to change is unrealistic. Isn't it easier to just exploit human nature? I mean, isn't that good capitalism? (Everyone's rationalizations are self-serving, including your own, otherwise thinking would be a liability...)

eropple 13y ago
"Taking shit for free because I can" is the nature of a certain audience, yes. Relying on attacks of moral conscience from people already willing to do this is not a workable business model, and because of this, we as a society have evolved a system of copyrights to incentivize content creation[1]. (Tchotchkes with a free game attached is, likewise, not particularly viable.) [1] - No, this is not a defense of Disney at al and ever-growing copyright lengths, but neither is it an allowance that running roughshod over the little guy is acceptable either.
- GhotiFish 13y ago
  a system that makes absolutely no sense for data. no sense. none. Do not try to shoehorn a model where it doesn't fit, and for data: It doesn't fit. A different standard has to be adopted, and piracy is merely a symptom of that.
  - eropple 13y ago
    Whether it makes "no sense" to you is, to be honest, pretty much irrelevant. It is a societal construct and you are a member of society and you take the "bad" (it's not, but, whatever) with the good. Copyright exists because we, as a society, want it to. We want people to make things for us to consume and so we enact laws to make it so they can do so and still eat. Don't like it? Feel free to try to change the law. But that's hard, and hard things aren't fun, so let's just go pirate Game of Thrones, yeah?
    - GhotiFish 13y ago
      nope. Restructuring society happens when enough of it rejects the way things are currently ordered. I don't want to live with the way things are, and neither should you. Copyright exists because a majority of society currently thinks its the best way to produce, and that very well may be in the real world of limited supplies. In a world where the only value is novelty, copyright makes no sense. Once something is created, it's value drops because it's supply is infinite. Currently society thinks the way around that is to artificially restrict supply. I hope one day we will realize that were trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. I would LOVE to pay for game of thrones... to be produced. Buying a copy of game of thrones is not worth its value, it has no value. It is in infinite supply. It is like air. This is why we donate to blogs, subscribe to series, and fund kickstarters. Because that is the economy of the web. The true economy.
    - jholman 13y ago
      I was with you a few comments back, and I think I agree with your overall direction, but in nitpick land, I think the details of your argument have gone off the rails a little, here. I think it's not clear that "society" "wants" copyright to exist. Society, or at least the collection of individuals composing society, is pretty clearly conflicted on the subject. People want to retain creative control over their own work, to a degree that is clearly insane and impossible. And simultaneously people (some of the same people!) want to be allowed to do whatever they feel like with the works of others, to a degree that is... dubious. The sum of these positions is not clear. And in any case, the legal status quo does not derive from any such sum. It derives largely from Disney's lobbying, as you acknowledged. And in fact, what society does about statuses quo is not "take the bad with the good", and "try to change the law". Historically, that's not how the law gets updated. I'm not personally drawing an equivalence between copyvio and e.g. slavery or e.g. marijuana policy or e.g. religious intolerance... but hopefully those examples will demonstrate that in most cases the law follows popular sentiment and disobedience, not leads.
- kybernetikos 13y ago
  > running roughshod over the little guy I assume that piracy of games behaves similarly to piracy of music and films, both of which have had research published suggesting that while piracy harms large, blockbuster style releases it actually helps sales of smaller, more obscure titles.

eropple 13y ago

"Taking shit for free because I can" is the nature of a certain audience, yes. Relying on attacks of moral conscience from people already willing to do this is not a workable business model, and because of this, we as a society have evolved a system of copyrights to incentivize content creation[1]. (Tchotchkes with a free game attached is, likewise, not particularly viable.) [1] - No, this is not a defense of Disney at al and ever-growing copyright lengths, but neither is it an allowance that running roughshod over the little guy is acceptable either.

GhotiFish 13y ago
a system that makes absolutely no sense for data. no sense. none. Do not try to shoehorn a model where it doesn't fit, and for data: It doesn't fit. A different standard has to be adopted, and piracy is merely a symptom of that.
- eropple 13y ago
  Whether it makes "no sense" to you is, to be honest, pretty much irrelevant. It is a societal construct and you are a member of society and you take the "bad" (it's not, but, whatever) with the good. Copyright exists because we, as a society, want it to. We want people to make things for us to consume and so we enact laws to make it so they can do so and still eat. Don't like it? Feel free to try to change the law. But that's hard, and hard things aren't fun, so let's just go pirate Game of Thrones, yeah?
  - GhotiFish 13y ago
    nope. Restructuring society happens when enough of it rejects the way things are currently ordered. I don't want to live with the way things are, and neither should you. Copyright exists because a majority of society currently thinks its the best way to produce, and that very well may be in the real world of limited supplies. In a world where the only value is novelty, copyright makes no sense. Once something is created, it's value drops because it's supply is infinite. Currently society thinks the way around that is to artificially restrict supply. I hope one day we will realize that were trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. I would LOVE to pay for game of thrones... to be produced. Buying a copy of game of thrones is not worth its value, it has no value. It is in infinite supply. It is like air. This is why we donate to blogs, subscribe to series, and fund kickstarters. Because that is the economy of the web. The true economy.
  - jholman 13y ago
    I was with you a few comments back, and I think I agree with your overall direction, but in nitpick land, I think the details of your argument have gone off the rails a little, here. I think it's not clear that "society" "wants" copyright to exist. Society, or at least the collection of individuals composing society, is pretty clearly conflicted on the subject. People want to retain creative control over their own work, to a degree that is clearly insane and impossible. And simultaneously people (some of the same people!) want to be allowed to do whatever they feel like with the works of others, to a degree that is... dubious. The sum of these positions is not clear. And in any case, the legal status quo does not derive from any such sum. It derives largely from Disney's lobbying, as you acknowledged. And in fact, what society does about statuses quo is not "take the bad with the good", and "try to change the law". Historically, that's not how the law gets updated. I'm not personally drawing an equivalence between copyvio and e.g. slavery or e.g. marijuana policy or e.g. religious intolerance... but hopefully those examples will demonstrate that in most cases the law follows popular sentiment and disobedience, not leads.
kybernetikos 13y ago
> running roughshod over the little guy I assume that piracy of games behaves similarly to piracy of music and films, both of which have had research published suggesting that while piracy harms large, blockbuster style releases it actually helps sales of smaller, more obscure titles.