4 ms·

>> "I support TPB's cause. I believe that non-profit sharing of information should be free." And how should the people who take the time to create that 'inform

>> "I support TPB's cause. I believe that non-profit sharing of information should be free." And how should the people who take the time to create that 'information' be compensated?

tomp 12y ago
How are the people who created Facebook compensated? I see no reason why ad-based free distribution couldn't be used for e.g. music and movies. People want convenience more than they want free - nobody uses Diaspora, everybody uses Facebook. Also, there is a lot of money to be earned by selling concerts, cinema performances, memorabilia... (I also wouldn't oppose some reasonably short copyright term, e.g. from a few months to a few years, that would allow authors to more effectively monetize e.g. cinema.)
- davidw 12y ago
  > I see no reason why ad-based free distribution couldn't be used for e.g. music and movies. It could be; whether it's ideal or not is another question: * It likely wouldn't make as much money as having people pay for it. * Imagine how much product placement there would be. If you think it's bad enough now...
- Donzo 12y ago
  Do you believe that content creators should have some say in how their work is distributed? Should they be able to choose whatever monetization system they feel is most appropriate for their work?
  - icebraining 12y ago
    Creators should have complete say in how their work is to be distributed and monetized, within the confines of the law. That doesn't tell us what the law should be, though.
    - the8472 12y ago
      "Their work" presumes ownership. Information does not have inherent ownership, unlike physical objects which can only be controlled one / a few people at a time.
      - Donzo 12y ago
        Yes, it does presume ownership. As owners of creative products, the content producers can do as they feel with them. They can choose which characters die, how the story is told, and how the content is presented. That is because it is "their" work, it is not just information. Freedom of information is a great concept, and one which I support. Tax payers should be able to find out how much organization x donated to politician y. But a movie, a creative work, is more than information. It is a product, an investment, and requires a substantial effort from many people. Please let me know if I am misrepresenting your argument, but it seems that you are using this notion of freedom of information to blanket, what I view as, theft. Just because no one was strong armed for a loaf of bread does not mean that a theft did not occur. No one may have been deprived of physical property, but we do not live an entirely physical world. Piracy deprives content creators of opportunity: the opportunity to distribute their products in the way that they see fit. Perhaps this means that they give all of their work away for free through the channels of their choosing. Perhaps they sell it. Perhaps they don't sell it to people who live in certain regions. As a content creator, shouldn't I have the opportunity to give away my products (or sell them) in a way that I see fit?
        the8472 12y ago
        >That is because it is "their" work, it is not just information. How do they own it if they make a copy and hand over that copy in its entirety to someone else? How do they not relinquish control of that copy? >what I view as, theft But nobody is deprived of something when it gets copied. You can still modify your original and I can do as I please with mine. This is how folk tales and our legends and everything propagates through society. Information, including creative work, flows freely. >As a content creator, shouldn't I have the opportunity to give away my products (or sell them) in a way that I see fit? Sure, that's at your discretion. But once you have given them away I don't see any natural reason why you should have any influence over what others do with a thing you have given away. If you are a wood-carver and make an ornamental table for me, should I not be free to chop it up for firewood if I don't like it anymore just because you think it would be a violation of your work?
  - lmm 12y ago
    You can choose not to sell a thing, or you can choose to sell it. You can even offer it via a contract where people are permitted to do some things with it and not others. But what is really poisonous is the government-prohibited-by-default position of copyright, where people who come into possession of e.g. old, out-of-print books are forbidden from copying them even if noone knows who would or could "own the rights". If you want to keep a work to yourself, trade secret protection is adequate. If you want something that behaves like modern copyright, then you can sell copies of your work with appropriate contracts. But it should be your responsibility to track violators, just like if you sold me some land with a proviso that I had to maintain the orchard on it. Copying should not be guilty-until-proven-innocent the way it currently is.
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  My problem with that is that we have the internet - a system that lets us, the people who derive benefit from the content to compensate the people who created it directly. You want to add middle men that don't need to be there. When it comes to profiting from other things (performance etc.) you are forcing people to do something they may not want to do. What if I create a great album of music but don't fancy uprooting my life, travelling the world on a tiny budget, and leaving behind my family for 10 months of the year? With the internet I could have charged a fair amount direct to the consumer but you decided information should be free.
- mrweasel 12y ago
  You can't have everything be ad-based, in the end someone has to actually sell something to make money that pays for the ads. I always felt that this is a flaw in the ad-based model, you try to compensate for you own product not having any value by pushing other peoples products. Anyway, if we're purely taking music, downloading it of TPB or listing to it on Spotify more or less makes the artist the same amount of money. Software and books are different, because you can't really compensate for lose of sales with performances. Movies I'm unsure of, cinema could make the money needed to cover the prodution cost, but I don't know if that's viable.
icebraining 12y ago
Well, I get paid to create that information and help use it. Others get paid to distribute it personally, usually in a stage. Others yet simply get money from public grants or private donations. There are really too many ways to list here.
zxcdw 12y ago
> And how should the people who take the time to create that 'information' be compensated? Why should they be compensated? Putting in effort does not equate "getting compensated" and it should not. If they can't find a way to be compensated, they should find other work to do. Just as if I can disrupt an industry with some new cool gimmick, and thus put potentially thousands, if not millions of people out of work, why shouldn't I? Why should we play protectionism? Why should we try to build things like DRM just to protect something which itself has little to no intristic value? As if we acknowledged that yes -- "the industry is vulnerable in this new world we live in, but actually adapting to the reality would mean billions, if not trillions of lost revenue, we should rather fight tooth and nail to protect it." I see no sense in this. Yes, it is a race to the bottom. In the end it just means that goods and monetary compensation gets distributed differently. Obviously, those who right now benefit from the said compensation fight tooth and nail to keep their position, but as I do not -- and I say this as a person who spends considerable amount of money on actual physical CDs (along with misc. merchandise) still, most of which I do download illegally before bying and will keep doing so -- I see this as counterproductive. I suppose some people see this first and foremost as an argument about whether or not one should get compensated for the work they do or not. And that's greatly, greatly oversimplifying the matter of immaterial property and copyright laws and wars.
- kristiandupont 12y ago
  >Why should they be compensated? I watch plenty of stuff without paying for it so I don't want to pretend that I am on some high moral horse here, but i don't get this mindset. Of course just putting in effort doesn't give me the right to compensation. If so, I could just start digging holes and ask the world for payment. However, if I made something and you want to see it, I think I am in my good right to set a price. If you don't like that price, you are free to move along. There are plenty of files on my laptop that I created that I don't want to show anyone. They are going to stay there and nobody has the right to see them other than me. And if I decided to show one of them to a someone who gave me money in return, that still doesn't give anybody who didn't pay me or anyone else for that matter, any right to access that file, no matter how little "intrinsic value" it represents. If someone invented a teleport that allowed people to beam to whereever and back, that would cause a rise in theft of tangible goods all over the world. But this would not mean that because the old systems of doors and locks were now inefficient, people should not be allowed to claim ownership of property anymore.

>> "I support TPB's cause. I believe that non-profit sharing of information should be free." And how should the people who take the time to create that 'information' be compensated?

tomp 12y ago

How are the people who created Facebook compensated? I see no reason why ad-based free distribution couldn't be used for e.g. music and movies. People want convenience more than they want free - nobody uses Diaspora, everybody uses Facebook. Also, there is a lot of money to be earned by selling concerts, cinema performances, memorabilia... (I also wouldn't oppose some reasonably short copyright term, e.g. from a few months to a few years, that would allow authors to more effectively monetize e.g. cinema.)

davidw 12y ago
> I see no reason why ad-based free distribution couldn't be used for e.g. music and movies. It could be; whether it's ideal or not is another question: * It likely wouldn't make as much money as having people pay for it. * Imagine how much product placement there would be. If you think it's bad enough now...
Donzo 12y ago
Do you believe that content creators should have some say in how their work is distributed? Should they be able to choose whatever monetization system they feel is most appropriate for their work?
- icebraining 12y ago
  Creators should have complete say in how their work is to be distributed and monetized, within the confines of the law. That doesn't tell us what the law should be, though.
  - the8472 12y ago
    "Their work" presumes ownership. Information does not have inherent ownership, unlike physical objects which can only be controlled one / a few people at a time.
    - Donzo 12y ago
      Yes, it does presume ownership. As owners of creative products, the content producers can do as they feel with them. They can choose which characters die, how the story is told, and how the content is presented. That is because it is "their" work, it is not just information. Freedom of information is a great concept, and one which I support. Tax payers should be able to find out how much organization x donated to politician y. But a movie, a creative work, is more than information. It is a product, an investment, and requires a substantial effort from many people. Please let me know if I am misrepresenting your argument, but it seems that you are using this notion of freedom of information to blanket, what I view as, theft. Just because no one was strong armed for a loaf of bread does not mean that a theft did not occur. No one may have been deprived of physical property, but we do not live an entirely physical world. Piracy deprives content creators of opportunity: the opportunity to distribute their products in the way that they see fit. Perhaps this means that they give all of their work away for free through the channels of their choosing. Perhaps they sell it. Perhaps they don't sell it to people who live in certain regions. As a content creator, shouldn't I have the opportunity to give away my products (or sell them) in a way that I see fit?
      - the8472 12y ago
        >That is because it is "their" work, it is not just information. How do they own it if they make a copy and hand over that copy in its entirety to someone else? How do they not relinquish control of that copy? >what I view as, theft But nobody is deprived of something when it gets copied. You can still modify your original and I can do as I please with mine. This is how folk tales and our legends and everything propagates through society. Information, including creative work, flows freely. >As a content creator, shouldn't I have the opportunity to give away my products (or sell them) in a way that I see fit? Sure, that's at your discretion. But once you have given them away I don't see any natural reason why you should have any influence over what others do with a thing you have given away. If you are a wood-carver and make an ornamental table for me, should I not be free to chop it up for firewood if I don't like it anymore just because you think it would be a violation of your work?
- lmm 12y ago
  You can choose not to sell a thing, or you can choose to sell it. You can even offer it via a contract where people are permitted to do some things with it and not others. But what is really poisonous is the government-prohibited-by-default position of copyright, where people who come into possession of e.g. old, out-of-print books are forbidden from copying them even if noone knows who would or could "own the rights". If you want to keep a work to yourself, trade secret protection is adequate. If you want something that behaves like modern copyright, then you can sell copies of your work with appropriate contracts. But it should be your responsibility to track violators, just like if you sold me some land with a proviso that I had to maintain the orchard on it. Copying should not be guilty-until-proven-innocent the way it currently is.
k-mcgrady 12y ago
My problem with that is that we have the internet - a system that lets us, the people who derive benefit from the content to compensate the people who created it directly. You want to add middle men that don't need to be there. When it comes to profiting from other things (performance etc.) you are forcing people to do something they may not want to do. What if I create a great album of music but don't fancy uprooting my life, travelling the world on a tiny budget, and leaving behind my family for 10 months of the year? With the internet I could have charged a fair amount direct to the consumer but you decided information should be free.
mrweasel 12y ago
You can't have everything be ad-based, in the end someone has to actually sell something to make money that pays for the ads. I always felt that this is a flaw in the ad-based model, you try to compensate for you own product not having any value by pushing other peoples products. Anyway, if we're purely taking music, downloading it of TPB or listing to it on Spotify more or less makes the artist the same amount of money. Software and books are different, because you can't really compensate for lose of sales with performances. Movies I'm unsure of, cinema could make the money needed to cover the prodution cost, but I don't know if that's viable.

icebraining 12y ago

Well, I get paid to create that information and help use it. Others get paid to distribute it personally, usually in a stage. Others yet simply get money from public grants or private donations. There are really too many ways to list here.

zxcdw 12y ago

> And how should the people who take the time to create that 'information' be compensated? Why should they be compensated? Putting in effort does not equate "getting compensated" and it should not. If they can't find a way to be compensated, they should find other work to do. Just as if I can disrupt an industry with some new cool gimmick, and thus put potentially thousands, if not millions of people out of work, why shouldn't I? Why should we play protectionism? Why should we try to build things like DRM just to protect something which itself has little to no intristic value? As if we acknowledged that yes -- "the industry is vulnerable in this new world we live in, but actually adapting to the reality would mean billions, if not trillions of lost revenue, we should rather fight tooth and nail to protect it." I see no sense in this. Yes, it is a race to the bottom. In the end it just means that goods and monetary compensation gets distributed differently. Obviously, those who right now benefit from the said compensation fight tooth and nail to keep their position, but as I do not -- and I say this as a person who spends considerable amount of money on actual physical CDs (along with misc. merchandise) still, most of which I do download illegally before bying and will keep doing so -- I see this as counterproductive. I suppose some people see this first and foremost as an argument about whether or not one should get compensated for the work they do or not. And that's greatly, greatly oversimplifying the matter of immaterial property and copyright laws and wars.

kristiandupont 12y ago
>Why should they be compensated? I watch plenty of stuff without paying for it so I don't want to pretend that I am on some high moral horse here, but i don't get this mindset. Of course just putting in effort doesn't give me the right to compensation. If so, I could just start digging holes and ask the world for payment. However, if I made something and you want to see it, I think I am in my good right to set a price. If you don't like that price, you are free to move along. There are plenty of files on my laptop that I created that I don't want to show anyone. They are going to stay there and nobody has the right to see them other than me. And if I decided to show one of them to a someone who gave me money in return, that still doesn't give anybody who didn't pay me or anyone else for that matter, any right to access that file, no matter how little "intrinsic value" it represents. If someone invented a teleport that allowed people to beam to whereever and back, that would cause a rise in theft of tangible goods all over the world. But this would not mean that because the old systems of doors and locks were now inefficient, people should not be allowed to claim ownership of property anymore.