Speaker: ACTA: Don't sell us down the river
526 Responses
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Also, thinking about it, copyright as it is now, with authors and musicians as mere serfs of the gatekeepers, is a far worse evil than downloading. Forced to turn their work over to corporations, denied the right to utilise it on their own terms.
That's a bad generalisation. Creators aren't forced to turn over their work to corporations, they choose to do so. They might get screwed in the process.
There are options however, if they want to distribute their material themselves they can do so.
A little different from serfdom, which you get born into and don't have much choice over.
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Yes, and in fact many creatives will retain their moral rights as a matter of course, meaning that the work can only be utilised under their own terms. Screenwriters have no such benefits, however we do form unions, employ agents, and have strikes and generally make sure we get deals that we feel more accurately reflect and reward our creative effort. We don't feel as if we need to be looked after by people who want to circumvent copyright 'for our own good'. I suspect almost all authors (and a reasonable portion of musicians) feel similarly.
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Downloaders won't go away, no matter how much people try. That genie is out of the bottle, and cannot be returned. Better to figure out how to entice people to buy instead of download than to fight the losing battle of winding back the clock.
I would not call them pirates because it gives glamour to what is no more than theft. You entice away to your heart's content, but some people will always want stuff for nothing, and employ a battery of self-serving arguments (copyright is theft, torrenting is fighting the Man, etc) to justify their cupidity. Apparently, it is a fundamental human right to have broadband, whatever purposes to which one puts it. Meanwhile, the legitimate owners of the media which is being stolen must change to accommodate the thieves.
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So, having established that, I take it we are now in agreement that film-makers may need some kind of protection? Like, let's say finding ways to limit 'downloaders'.
No, we're definitely not in agreement. I honestly do not believe that there is any way to limit non-paying consumption of digital materials without unduly impinging on the use of the internet by the general public. I say this as someone who has very strong feelings about civil liberties, and also has over a decade of experience doing various things with IP-based networks that provide content to and connections for the internet. Without trampling on liberties, or trashing the openness that has allowed the internet to flourish into its current form, trying to restrict downloading is a lost cause.
that doesn't mean we ought to try and keep the numbers down as much as possible.
What has worked for the music industry in trying to reverse the tide of downloading has been the rise of services that are convenient, offer value-for-money, and have a good selection. Why can this not work for the movie industry? Obviously the price point will be different (compare DVDs to CDs), but these fundamentals ought to hold true across types of product. A no-copy solution is probably never going to happen, because of the nature of playing back digital media. Until the movie industry accepts that, it will never position itself to offer a product that meets the convenience test. Locking things away in layer after layer of digital restrictions management just pisses consumers off. We've already seen plenty of cases of people with Windows-based computers being unable to play Blu-Ray disks. Way to win friends and influence customers.
You and I are approaching this from completely divergent positions. You believe that it's possible to limit downloading, and that this should be achieved before the movie industry plays ball with digitally-delivered content. I believe that it's fundamentally impossible to limit downloading without doing "bad things"[tm] to civil liberties and/or the internet generally, and don't consider those things to be a worthy trade-off.
Also, the movie industry does have the music equivalent of gigs: cinemas. Once upon a time, cinemas were king of income streams. Movies had to make it on the big screen, because there was no other way to make money. VCR and DVD changed that, and now we're being told that this situation must continue and cannot be reversed. Musicians are starting to return to live performing as the way they make money, with CDs as a side issue. Why can the movie industry not do the same thing? Merchandising ain't going away either, and it's going to be a long time before that changes.
Even if I accept your proposition that downloading can and should be curtailed, I do not accept that it is the duty of the law to preserve given levels of profitability for the major studios.
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Yes, and in fact many creatives will retain their moral rights as a matter of course
Moral rights cannot be assigned, so this is something of a non-point. They vest in the creator, end of story.
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Meanwhile, the legitimate owners of the media which is being stolen must change to accommodate the thieves.
If they hadn't fucked about and fucked about when faced with a glaringly-obvious change in patterns of consumption, they might have stood a chance of being able to keep downloading at moderate levels. Some people will never pay, no matter what. Most others just want things that meet the criteria I have laid out previously. The music industry refused, point blank, to offer product that consumers wanted. There was demand, but the supply only came through illicit channels. Once people found that they could get what the wanted, easily and at a very good price-point, it was going to be very difficult for the music industry to get them back. That any have come back speaks to the success of iTunes and eMusic.
Your position is that it is perfectly acceptable for an entire industry to refuse to supply legitimate, legal products for which their customers are screaming at the top of their collective voice, and then complain when the customers find a way to get what they want. I call it authoring one's own misfortune, and find it very hard to muster any sympathy for anyone that knows what their customers want but isn't prepared to deliver except absolutely on their own terms. It's called a commercial relationship, and supposedly relationships are about giving and taking roughly equally.
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Your position is that it is perfectly acceptable for an entire industry to refuse to supply legitimate, legal products for which their customers are screaming at the top of their collective voice
I'm sorry. Let's say I write a book, and you choose to digitise it and distribute it because it's not available digitally. How is what your doing legitimate and legal again? Just because the consumers want a digital copy of my stuff?
Fuck 'em, you know.
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Matthew, get real; customers are not screaming for legitimate product. Non-customers are taking stuff for nothing, stuff they would never pay for. People are carrying thousands of songs on their iPods, stolen media which they would never have considered buying. This is not a problem of the bad old music industry, the bad old film industry and now the bad old book industry. It is a problem of people stealing stuff, and the parts of Internet (P2P software, torrent sites etc) that have been set up to facilitate that theft.
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Apparently, it is a fundamental human right to have broadband
It is a fundamental human right to communicate and transact. The internet has become the medium for both of these activities, and you should have to have done something really bad before the state could countenance depriving you of such. It's like taking away someone's telephone because they made prank (not obscene, just prank) phone calls.
If someone is conducting commercial copyright infringement using the internet (yeah, good luck with that on what passes for broadband here), then by all means terminate the connection. But that is also a criminal offence, and is being done for monetary gain. Not at all the same thing as downloading movies or music for personal use, and not the same as making a mash-up to upload to YouTube. You do understand that mash-ups are infringement, right? And that as proposed you could lose your internet connection for uploading a couple? How is that in any way a proportionate response?
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Gio, ignoring the significant difference in time and effort involved between digitising a song from a CD (way back when, it used to be roughly a 1:1.5 time factor to rip and then convert from CD to MP3. Now it's more like 1:0.25) to digitising an entire book from a dead-tree original - which says that your scenario is pretty far out in the realms of hypothetical - if your customers have given you clear signals that they want a digital product and you are saying "Nope, no way, not going to happen", you kinda have it coming. It's not legal, or ethical, but you cannot say that you weren't warned.
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How is that in any way a proportionate response?
It is not, nobody is saying it is. But we've GOT TO move on from the idea that we can assume only one of two positions, and refuse to allow that the technologies that mediate the circulation of creative works have very complex repercussions that need to be seriously debated. Saying that there isn't a problem, not even in principle, because copyright is an outdated idea and besides downloading ain't theft, and those big evil corporations should shut up and die, really is just as depressingly stupid as the opposite stance.
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if your customers have given you clear signals that they want a digital product and you are saying "Nope, no way, not going to happen", you kinda have it coming. It's not legal, or ethical, but you cannot say that you weren't warned.
Who are you, Fat Tony? Jesus this is embarrassing.
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customers are not screaming for legitimate product
Erm. Didn't iTunes make a profit of over 500 million US dollars a year or two back?
ETA, wimpishly, that I don't wholeheartedly agree with either Paul or Matthew's positions. Isn't there a place where the twain can meet?
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Isn't there a place where the twain can meet?
Not on PAS, it seems... the local coffee shop, maybe?
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Not on PAS, it seems...
That was a cause of eternal frustration on the copyrights thread, yes. I think we proved rather conclusively that we suck at finding a middle ground or even a common language on this thing.
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It is not, nobody is saying it is.
It looks like Paul is. ACTA and s92A certainly said that it is, and they're supported by big media. So there is definitely at least some part of society that thinks that it's a perfectly proportionate response.
But we've GOT TO move on from the idea that we can assume only one of two positions, and refuse to allow that the technologies that mediate the circulation of creative works have very complex repercussions that need to be seriously debated.
Hey, I proposed just such a debate. You got started, then immediately flipped into "downloaders are t3h evil" mode and we never recovered. If you can phrase your response to my question such that it doesn't assume that the internet is anything other than neutral, I'm quite happy to go back to the debate. I'm not going to let it lie when people imply that there is no paying market for downloads, though.
Saying that there isn't a problem, not even in principle, because copyright is an outdated idea and besides downloading ain't theft, and those big evil corporations should shut up and die, really is just as depressingly stupid as the opposite stance.
Let's try this: I'll not rise to the bait if you don't throw it out there. OK? If you actually think that I don't agree there's a problem, you haven't paid very much attention. Where we disagree is how much of a problem, and how best to deal with it.
I think the historic approach to copyright is insufficient for the modern environment, but all we're getting are band-aid solutions at the behest of very vested interests. I'm not a copyright abolitionist, which I tried very hard to make clear in "that other thread". In fact, I got so fucked off with robbery arguing points as though I was one that I stopped reading it entirely.
Do I think big media should STFU and die quietly? If it will allow us to actually have a meaningful debate about where to go with technology, yes. Should the debate, IMO, be entirely exclusive of any assumption that big media (as opposed to the creators currently trapped in the system) has a right to have existing profit levels maintained? Yes, absolutely. -
Erm. Didn't iTunes make a profit of over 500 million US dollars a year or two back?
I think that's revenue, not profit, but still a very respectable figure.
It's actually quite hard to get real figures about ITMS's turnover and profitability, but Wikipedia is suggesting that the 8-billion download figure was passed in September. That's probably over $8b in lifetime revenue, accounting for the multi-tier pricing structure that's been in place for the last little while. Not bad going for something that's selling things that, apparently, nobody wants.
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Matthew, get real; customers are not screaming for legitimate product. Non-customers are taking stuff for nothing, stuff they would never pay for. People are carrying thousands of songs on their iPods, stolen media which they would never have considered buying.
Have we not worked out that generalisations are the enemy here?
Some people are taking stuff for nothing and aren't interested in paying; others, like myself, are more than happy to pick up singles off iTunes, when I wouldn't have bothered buying them on CD. I'll admit to having downloaded songs illicitly in the past, but in those cases, they were songs I couldn't find elsewhere and would have happily paid for. I am in the minority? No idea, but iTunes' profits suggest I'm at least part of a very large group of people, even if it isn't larger than the group of "thieves".
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To jump on the "non-paying customers" bandwagon...
Matthew, get real; customers are not screaming for legitimate product. Non-customers are taking stuff for nothing, stuff they would never pay for. People are carrying thousands of songs on their iPods, stolen media which they would never have considered buying.
There are various studies that have been done that show that there are plenty of "pirates" who go & buy the CD of the songs they download. This probably ties back into my comment of the experience being more important than the item. An actual PHYSICAL CD is better sometimes if it offers an improved experience.
Sometimes that CD might be of an indie artist rather than a Big Four sanctioned artist... how DARE a consumer look outside the bubble gum cloned music the Big Four provide!
Even if the stats are anecdotal, they still present a falsehood to all the stats that the *AA, et al, throw out. "Pirates" are still buying media... they just might be more selective of what they buy & how they buy it. A CD purchased from a band's website probably doesn't count in the stats as a purchase, instead it may show up as a loss - double loss in fact!
I think another thing that many of the stats don't show is that the lawsuits in the US have had an impact on the consumer. I for one have very rarely bought a CD in the last 5 years or so. Not because I can get it for free off the net, but mostly because I refuse to support an industry that abuses it's talent while also suing it's customers for not buying their crap products.
As I've already mentioned, I happily paid $25 (or whatever) for the NIN CD, after already downloading it for free (legally!). And I also went to their concert... and bought a t-shirt. None of the Big Four got a single cent of that.
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No idea, but iTunes' profits suggest I'm at least part of a very large group of people,
And the ugly elephant in the room, widely ignored, is that unit sales of music are actually up in the digital era, not down as we are repeatedly told. Album sales, and hence dollar value have dropped dramatically. There is overwhelming evidence that people, if they want a song, tend to buy it. For most people it's a pain in the arse to have to fire up Limewire and hunt for a song that you can easily nab for one click on for iTunes. The quantities of one track digital track purchases for the likes of Lady Gaga & Black Eyed Peas are massive, far larger than they were in the pre-net days of singles. People buy tracks, not albums.
Have we not worked out that generalisations are the enemy here?
Yep the generalisations and half truths seem to have mutated into the unquestioned truth upon which arguments and law are made, at least as far as music is concerned.
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And with regard to movies, it may or may not be worth mentioning that the biggest downloaders of torrents that I know are also the biggest purchasers of DVDs.
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Oh, wonder if someone can explain why I can buy a CD for $20, and if I damage it, I have to pay $20 again to get the same thing? Or if I want it on my iPod it'll cost $12 or whatever via the iTunes store (unless I format shift, which only recently became legal).
If I'm buying a license to the music (as the Big 4 claim) then the media shouldn't matter. A CD costs less than $1 to stamp. Surely I should be able to pay $1 (plus p&p) to get a new physical copy of the music I purchased? And I should be able to buy as many physical copies as I wish, as long as I don't break the license. A license controls how I wish to use the music, not the media.
An example:
If I buy a copy of Windows 7 I'm buying a license to use it on a PC. If I damage the physical DVD Microsoft will happily post out a new DVD with Windows 7 on it (probably for free!). If I install it on more than one machine then I'm breaking the license, and thus become liable for infringement.If I want to copy the DVD to another DVD or a flash drive & use that to install the OS, then I'm welcome to do it. It's not infringing.
If I sell a copy then it's copyright infringement.
If I give a copy away, it's not infringing (it's just a DVD after all).
If the person I gave it to installs it without buying a valid key, then they are the ones infringing.I don't see the difference between buying a CD with music and a CD with computer software on it. It's all digital data, it's all subject to the same copyright protections and the same limitations. Yet the media industry seems to think it deserves special protection for some reason.
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For most people it's a pain in the arse to have to fire up Limewire and hunt for a song that you can easily nab for one click on for iTunes.
Not to mention that with legal download services you are quite certain what you're getting. No risk of getting rick-rolled when you think you've just downloaded Britney's latest masterpiece, for example.
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Hey, I proposed just such a debate. You got started, then immediately flipped into "downloaders are t3h evil" mode and we never recovered.
I'm not saying that downloader are the evil, I'm saying that it's not as simple as polarising the argument by reflexively espousing the contrary position of the evil corporations. "Adapt or die" is the shorthand for that, but I think I've said enough here.
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Gio, so we've found the ground on which we should not tread. Can we now go back to that which I proposed last night, of how do we define net good vs net bad outcomes? Because, really, that is what this all comes down to: how do we decide if the use of technology is beneficial or negative? Against what yardstick do we measure?
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