Hard News: The Casino
578 Responses
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Didn't Russell post last year that in fact each poster retains copyright of our own words, and Public Address owns all the stuff around it?
Don't know, don't care. I bequeath it all to Russell. Anything to avoid turning off Adblock and having Flash crash my workstation and kill my own work in the process.
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Seems like a fair trade.
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Mark, you said:
You need to be clear as to what's on sale, and it's only the object.
Which is clearly not the case. I can have two identical objects. I can point to one and say "famous artist XXX made this, I, who have very little art talent, made the other". People will pay a lot for the first, and not much for the second.
Clearly the object isn't the only thing on sale, the name associated with it, their real or perceived artistic talent, and the history of the object are also part of the value of the object.
Any decent metalsmith could make a VC medal, and if it's well done, someone might give them a few hundred bucks for it. Won't fetch a 6 figure sum at auction like an actual VC medal awarded to a soldier in battle has.
Clearly the object itself is only half the reason art has value. There are many intangibles which can be much more influential.
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But surely theft is not just that the law says theft is?
What else is it, then? Yes, theft is an offense against the law, simply because the law is what defines it. The law is a product of societal decision-making of what is acceptable behaviour. It knows only compliance and infringement. It recognises, via parliamentary representatives, that there are degrees of culpability based around the nature of the damage caused by an infringement, and therefore varying degrees of redress/punishment.
Thus, littering is not held to the same level of offence as dangerous driving, and so the consequences are more severe for the latter. Both are illegal behaviour, but one is considered worse than the other.
Copyright is a legal construct. You can't discuss it without discussing the law, but you help no part of the discussion if you persist in mis-defining it and then arguing based on your private definition.
Aren't we allowed to broaden the defenition (or at least discuss broadening it) to account for technological change, and for ethical considerations that the law may not adequately address?
Did the makers of automobiles steal the livelihood of the wagon makers? Definite technological change. Definite Societal change. Was it theft? What ethical considerations came into play there?
We have laws so that we have a common definition of appropriate behaviour.That is the whole point. Otherwise, "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" would be sufficient. But I would rather not have a masochist do unto me as he would like to be done to (if it were possible), and a sadist would rather not have me do unto him as he would do unto others.
And "do what thou wilt, shall be the whole of the law" has no place at all, in a society that even pretends to be civilized. So, because ethics and morals are bound by perception of what should be acceptable, we* have settled on an objective code of behaviour we call the law.
If you want to change the law, there is a process. But you can't just make stuff up and say "that's what the law should mean so we'll work to that".
The analogy is pretty simple: I steal a CD ni a shop, I'm a thief. I download the same tracks and burn them in the exact same order on a CD, and it's not theft. Surely you see the disconnect?
That analogy is still flawed, because of the definitions. As has been said again and again, if you steal a CD from a shop, you are removing an item of value from the possession of its owner. You not only prevent them selling that item, because they no longer have it, but you also nullify the investment they have made in purchasing it, and turn that into a liability.
If you copy a music track, the original is not removed from the possession of the individual. You may be preventing them from making a sale, but the research is ambiguous on the long term result of that. Some point to it being a positive factor in the overall value of an item, or industry.
The disconnect you perceive is actually reality intruding on your analogy.
I grant, that it is currently illegal to copy someone else's work for profit (some exceptions exist for tightly defined activities); indeed, I have never said or thought otherwise. As a copyright holder, I depend on that for control of my work - as a Creative Commoner, I use that control to explicitly allow certain actions under certain conditions. All this is allowed to me because I respect the law.
But I know that change has come - bigger change than the industrial revolution; change on a par with the development of written language itself. The IR was a change in scale and speed - this is a quantum shift, altering the concepts of scarcity and abundance.
Yes, we need to look at and discuss the rules we live by, but it's pointless to try and apply old economy rules to the new economic reality. I don't know why you can't see that disconnect.
If we're going to have a realistic discussion on the future of copyright, we need to do it objectively, dispassionately and logically. Tossing emotive and mis-defined terms like "stealing" into the mix does not help that discussion.
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Kyle, how many times are you going to bring this to the table?
Which is clearly not the case. I can have two identical objects. I can point to one and say "famous artist XXX made this, I, who have very little art talent, made the other". People will pay a lot for the first, and not much for the second.
Yes. People will pay more. I agree. That's what I said above.
The items are not, however, identical if they were not made by the same person. You can take the same aria, played by the same orchestra, with the same conductor, in the same hall sung by the same singer even - once at age 20, once at age 60 - are they identical? All the features are the same, by your logic above. In case you're wondering, I would hold that they are not identical and, therefore, likely to have different values attached to them.
<Clearly the object isn't the only thing on sale, the name associated with it, their real or perceived artistic talent, and the history of the object are also part of the value of the object.</quote>
As I said previously, that's metadata. Sacha called it context. Whatever. The object is the same object, whther you articulate it's context or not.
What if I switched the labels, selling the authentic one as yours and your one as "made by xxx". As far as objectively observable, if the objects are physically identical and cannot be told apart, the buyer would pay as much for the copy because of the metadata that's now been attached to it, and would be satisfied by the purchase. How, then,can you say that the metadata, the context, is intrinsically part of the object.
People will pay large sums of money (i.e. attribute significant value) for stuff that's only rumoured to be attributable to a particular figure. Not as much as they would if it could be proven, but on the off-chance that it might have belonged to someone they revere in some fashion, or been a part of some history that is important to them.
Even gold has no fixed intrinsic value. It is worth what the market will bear at any given time. What gold has is specific intrinsic properties that make it valuable but it still depends on us* to agree to a specific price.
Any decent metalsmith could make a VC medal, and if it's well done, someone might give them a few hundred bucks for it. Won't fetch a 6 figure sum at auction like an actual VC medal awarded to a soldier in battle has.
True, but see above regarding identical.
Clearly the object itself is only half the reason art has value. There are many intangibles which can be much more influential.
You approach the truth, young jedi ;-) The intangibles are the reasons why people might hold a thing to be of high value when it has limited intrinsic value.
Example: one of Henry Moore's bronzes is incredibly valuable, because of the source of the piece, but the intrinsic value of the bronze is a fraction of the worth. If I bought one (I wish!) and melted it down (my heart skipped as I even typed that), I could make some money back on the intrinsic value, but the intangibles would no longer apply, and thus the high value would cease to exist.
However, we would still know about it, have all the records that and information that led to the high value being ascribed - what we call the provenance - and this would not disappear with the melting. Thus, they are not intrinsic to the piece.
Okay?
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Mark, I suspect Giovanni was making a point about language, not the law. The law only defines langauge in a legal context: outside that, words are defined by common usage.
The battle is far from over, but as far as using the term for illegal digital copying "stealing" is doing ok in the court of "common talk".
Understand your reasoning in wanting such a distinction made evident in language (though not in full agreement), but as a die-hard realist, you'll be well aware wantin' ain't gettin'. ;-) -
The analogy is pretty simple: I steal a CD ni a shop, I'm a thief. I download the same tracks and burn them in the exact same order on a CD, and it's not theft. Surely you see the disconnect?
Kinda, but not really. If at any time up till last November I had copied songs from a CD I'd bought to my iPod, I too would have been committing "theft" . I didn't have the right to copy it.
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Mark, perhaps think about it as performance rather than object - the experience always has context and is often unique.
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And, Mark- in your above argument with Kyle, you just might be conflating "value" with "price". In some contexts that works. In others, not so much.
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If at any time up till last November I had copied songs from a CD I'd bought to my iPod, I too would have been committing "theft" . I didn't have the right to copy it.
Exactly. Legally it was "copyright infringement". But pretty-much noone would call it theft, 'cos pretty much noone thought it was reprehensible.
I 'spect the reason "theft" (or the rather more grandiose "piracy") is commonly used for illegally downloading music and films is because it's fairly consensual that this IS a dodgy way to acquire stuff. -
It's called "stealing" because conversations like this are not deviod of political power - and those are the terms being pushed by resourceful copyright owners.
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Bingo! They're defining the debate and that's half the battle
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<i>Yes, we need to look at and discuss the rules we live by, but it's pointless to try and apply old economy rules to the new economic reality. I don't know why you can't see that disconnect.</i>
Actually, you're the one who keeps applying the old economy, and the old law, by seeing value of creative works in the medium that carries them and the balance sheet of, say, a record store that has bought somebody's music in CD form. The fact that you only see loss and theft when music is purloined in one way rather than another seems supremely illogical to me and stems directly from that narrow model. And your claim that piracy might be good for music (what you call "reality") is just as rubbish as the recording industry's claim that every track downloaded has to be considered as equalling one sale lost. You just don't know, and to assume that it's the case (and that will remain the case in the future) shows your ideological leaning. But even if it were true, surely it should be up to an artist whether or not to promote themselves but giving their creations away or not, and if yes, how?
Did the makers of automobiles steal the livelihood of the wagon makers?
So computer piracy is to the recording industry what the car was to a horse-and-cart? Interesting analogy.
If we're going to have a realistic discussion on the future of copyright, we need to do it objectively, dispassionately and logically. Tossing emotive and mis-defined terms like "stealing" into the mix does not help that discussion.
Coming from one of the readiest-to-insult participants in this discussion, it's a bold statement. And again, what you call a mis-definition, I call trying to account for the views and the interests of all the stakeholders in this debate, and not just your fabled "individual" (who, I take it, is a consumer, or a creator who doesn't care to profit from his or her work - but at this point I'm just guessing).
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Mark, I suspect Giovanni was making a point about language, not the law. The law only defines langauge in a legal context: outside that, words are defined by common usage.
No, I took his point to be about ethics, rather than language. Gio?
The battle is far from over, but as far as using the term for illegal digital copying "stealing" is doing ok in the court of "common talk".
Rob, that's the problem. Everyone will agree that theft is wrong. But what's equally wrong is labelling something that is not theft as theft. It warps the discussion from the beginning.
Understand your reasoning in wanting such a distinction made evident in language (though not in full agreement), but as a die-hard realist, you'll be well aware wantin' ain't gettin'. ;-)
Oh, yeah! But if I stop, the bastids would win by default ;-)
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The analogy is pretty simple: I steal a CD ni a shop, I'm a thief. I download the same tracks and burn them in the exact same order on a CD, and it's not theft. Surely you see the disconnect?
Kinda, but not really. If at any time up till last November I had copied songs from a CD I'd bought to my iPod, I too would have been committing "theft" . I didn't have the right to copy it.
And if we fixed the stupid law to allow for that possibility, would you see the disconnect, or still not?
No, I took his point to be about ethics, rather than language. Gio?
You're both right: "broader than the legalistic definition" works for me. So long as it's a discussion about ethics, it has to be allowed to make full use of language. And if I'm not permitted to use the same word (or at least suggest using the same word in certain respects) to describe taking away a piece of plastic and taking away a livelyhood, the outcome of the discussion becomes predetermined. In other words, Mark: you're trying to define the debate in the same way that the recording industry is. I don't find forcing use of the word "theft" any less manipulative than banning it.
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It's called "stealing" because conversations like this are not deviod of political power - and those are the terms being pushed by resourceful copyright owners.
There's some truth in that- it's a war of words.
But I think you disrespect common talk if you attribute it all to propaganda. And perhaps under-estimate how bit-torrenting, say, every song the Beatles ever recorded, violates a common sense of "natural justice". -
I believe many New Zealanders understand some actions as taking the fruits of someone else's efforts without any way of compensating them. No argument there. I am confident that other behaviour like format shifting is widely supported regardless of the law.
That's the nub of it really - the mismatch between what our laws say and what actually happens and is likely to happen given new arrangements. The conversation gets heated because of the overloading of certain terms, which are not neutral.
I've said several times on these copyright threads that I'm personally more interested in hearing about solutions now than rehashing the issues. S92 has somewhat interfered with that, to be fair.
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The conversation gets heated because of the overloading of certain terms, which are not neutral.
They're not neutral, but they're just words, so we ought to be able to handle them, no?
I've said several times on these copyright threads that I'm personally more interested in hearing about solutions now than rehashing the issues.
Creative Commons is a great start, creating a framework for people to opt out of old copyright. Now there's the small matter of how to look after everyone else (really, Giovanni? Why don't you tell us more?)
I wonder if CC could become the workable blueprint for artists to cede some of their rights, and retain the ability to cash in on others. Like allowing to play a track at a certain bitrate, but selling it at another, or free distribution of digital images at a certain resolution whilst selling the prints. Or lowering the threshold for legitimate creative reuse, or educational fair use.
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Actually, you're the one who keeps applying the old economy, and the old law, by seeing value of creative works in the medium that carries them and the balance sheet of, say, a record store that has bought somebody's music in CD form.
I call "misrepresentation".
Have you ever built a new building on an old site? You have to pull down the existing structure. If it's interdependent with other structures, you have to do it carefully.So you have to define what the problem is with the existing structure and examine the impact of removing it.
We can't discuss the old economy unless we have a shared understanding of nature of it and that means agreement on what the terms are. The only place we can get a shared understanding of what the terms mean, when defining a legal construct is the existing law.
The fact that you only see loss and theft when music is purloined in one way rather than another seems supremely illogical to me and stems directly from that narrow model.
Again, with the misrepresentation.
<deep_breath>
There IS only theft when music is purloined in one way rather than another.
It's not MY perception- it IS the law, as it stands.YOU, on the other hand are trying to conflate some ethical standpoint, regarding artist remuneration, with the legal construct that is copyright, and infringement thereof. When your law is based on a particular set of ethics that are not necessarily shared by all, it is bad law. That is why the law generally eschews ethical and moral aspects in its language and execution (though not necessarily in its creation).
And your claim that piracy might be good for music (what you call "reality") is just as rubbish as the recording industry's claim that every track downloaded has to be considered as equalling one sale lost.
Actually, I'm looking at a growing body of pretty credible research. Whether it's correct or not, I'm still not sure, but examining the research seems a better option than slamming down the hatches and screaming "Piracy is killing the music industry !! (which, just coincidentally, had its best year last year)"
You just don't know, and to assume that it's the case (and that will remain the case in the future) shows your ideological leaning.
See above re research. I don't know that Darwin was right about evolution, but it seems a whole lot more credible to me than "the animals went in two by two".
But even if it were true, surely it should be up to an artist whether or not to promote themselves but giving their creations away or not, and if yes, how?
Please point me where I've said otherwise.
I don't understand the second half of your sentence, sorry. How what?So computer piracy is to the recording industry what the car was to a horse-and-cart? Interesting analogy.
And you have the hide to call me insulting? Ha!
I have not made that analogy. My analogy is that digital technology in the recording industry is to old recording industry business models as the car was to the horse and cart. And yet more. I said before that it's a fundamental change in paradigm, one of the biggest we as a species has ever encountered. The two comparable tipping points are fire, and writing.
Coming from one of the readiest-to-insult participants in this discussion, it's a bold statement.
Sorry, "emotive" is an insult, now? How interesting.
And again, what you call a mis-definition, I call trying to account for the views and the interests of all the stakeholders in this debate,
So, the "pirates" have no stake in this discussion? What about the, let's see, oh yes "users"? Where is your accounting for their views and interests?
In truth, you've only been accounting for copyright holders' perspectives and then only narrowly. I'm a rights holder, yet you don't appear to be accounting for my views and interests.
and not just your fabled "individual" (who, I take it, is a consumer, or a creator who doesn't care to profit from his or her work - but at this point I'm just guessing).
Indeed, you are guessing, which you upbraided me for above. And that's a little strange, as I've been over it before.
Yes, it includes consumers, and creators, but I don't know how you arrive at "who doesn't care to profit" - you obviously haven't examined the research that I've assiduously posted links to.
It includes anyone who doesn't have a corporate structure to cling to, who would, in the old economy, have to use intermediaries and gatekeepers to access knowledge and entertainment.
It's odd - you seem to be ascribing to me the attributes of some arch-pirate who wants it all for free, now and forever. That couldn't be farther from the truth. I don't download copyright music or television shows, because I don't believe it's right. I believe creators should be recompensed.
I do download material that people make freely available, such as books, Libre software and music released under Creative Commons. I watch copyrighted shows that people make available (like the Daily Show on Comedy Central - I didn't use to but their server has got a lot better) and I only download them to the extent that I pause the stream at the start to let it back up, so it doesn't jerk its way through.
I even pay for shareware. I regard myself as both ethical, and moral (and I'm careful about the distinction), and as law-abiding, which is different again. Hell, I even let people into the stream of traffic when I don't have to, because I'm that kind of guy.
But I recognise that the current system is not working. It's actually broken beyond repair in situ because it is entirely based on the old paradigm of scarcity - the lights still flash and the wheels are going round, but the hamster's not making any headway. It needs to be "fixed" to work with the new paradigm of abundance. You can't force scarcity artificially, because it's too easily avoided.
Because of the interdependencies, we have to be careful about fixing the system. We have to know what we're talking about, and we have to agree what the terms mean. If I fall back to the legal language, it's because that's what the system is built in. Just as I would not try to correct a Spanish text using German vocabulary, I don't want to try to dismantle and rebuild copyright for the new paradigm, without doing it properly, and in the right language.
</soapbox>Does that make it a little clearer?
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Creative Commons is a great start, creating a framework for people to opt out of old copyright. Now there's the small matter of how to look after everyone else (really, Giovanni? Why don't you tell us more?)
You seem to be saying that CC is different from copyright. It's not - it's an application of copyright.
I wonder if CC could become the workable blueprint for artists to cede some of their rights, and retain the ability to cash in on others. Like allowing to play a track at a certain bitrate, but selling it at another, or free distribution of digital images at a certain resolution whilst selling the prints. Or lowering the threshold for legitimate creative reuse, or educational fair use.
I understand what you proposing, but I see it as fiddling with the edges, trying to trim the block to make it fit, when we really need a new foundation stone.
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__Kinda, but not really. If at any time up till last November I had copied songs from a CD I'd bought to my iPod, I too would have been committing "theft" . I didn't have the right to copy it.__
And if we fixed the stupid law to allow for that possibility, would you see the disconnect, or still not?
The law was "fixed", over the strenuous objections of the rights-holders, for whom home taping was still killing music, although it's still hedged around with conditions that people won't even be aware of.
But we're now down to some breaches of copyright being theft and some not. Exactly which ones you pick become a matter of taste and judgement. Which is actually how we all navigate copyright law.
But if I grab a track from an MP3 blog and decide I don't like it and won't get the album, is that theft? Have I really deprived an artist of a sale? Is it different if I audition it on Hype Machine? Should an infringing copy always be measured as a lost sale?
Then there's television. I'll cheerfully give you a list of rationalisations for downloading interesting TV shows that probably won't screen here (especially any time soon).
Let's say I hand you a flash drive containing all three episodes of The Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World , from BBC4's Storyville strand -- which may turn up in five years at midnight on the Documentary Channel but because of the quirks of the TV market isn't even offered to NZ broadcasters. It's the most intriguing and useful take on the modernisation of China that I've seen on a screen.
Do you take it?
Might I tempt you with 'Let There Be Light', a recent programme from Alan Yentob's long-running BBC Imagine strand that presents "light art" in a way that I found moving to the point of being momentarily disturbing?
Well, do you?
It's a fuzzy line, which makes me uncomfortable about highly-charged words that aren't reflected in actual copyright law.
But mainly, I digressed because the stealing/infringement debate seems to be perfectly circular :-)
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Creative Commons is a great start, creating a framework for people to opt out of old copyright. Now there's the small matter of how to look after everyone else (really, Giovanni? Why don't you tell us more?)
Well, you do already have your guest-poster permit ...
I think one of the important things about Creative Commons is its simplicity. It creates very simple classes of use -- although definitions in the real world get very tricky: have I breached CC:NC if I share something in a blog with a couple of ads in it?
Oh hang on ... I'm just continuing my last post now. Sorry. I'll stop now. Cheers.
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My final thought for the evening ...
Is it stealing if I fast-forward through the ads on the MySky?
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Is it stealing if I fast-forward through the ads on the MySky?
Absolutely. If you don't watch the ads, how are you going to know what to desire?
</Colbert>
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Do you take it?
Can't speak for Giovanni, but I'd probably take it. I feel pretty squirmy at times, but ethically I'm no Mark Harris on this issue: have done, will do, probably until the law or me ISP stops me.
I can rationalise it til the cows come home, but getting one's hands on as much culture as one can ingest is intoxicating and would be hard to give up.
In that sense I don't think it's entirely an ethical battle. Law and practicality have a big part to play: if it were a lot harder, or there was a serious chance of sanctions- I'd probably change my behaviour.
The critical question is whether such programmes will continue to be made if there's no way to recoup their costs- and if so, how, and by whom?
The BBC is a great model in many ways- I'd be very happy to see a big dollop of that return to NZ broadcasting. But do we want ALL our (professionally produced) culture paid for via taxes? No so appealing.
I find the "CwF" + "RtB" formula (connect with fans/reason to buy) very unconvincing. It disconnects the value of the product (lets say music) with what is actually being sold (some variant of tee-shirts!?) It's pushing the (old way of thinking, Mark?) notion that you CAN compete with free.
But is there an alternative that's not some variety of compulsary levy or tax?
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