Tuesday Links
Since some of my colleagues may not be in any condition to blog today, some reading:
- Dick Morris’s anti-Hillary PAC has attracted a robust zero dollars.
- Jackie Gehring on the politics of Charlie Hebdo.
- One battle I hope Scalia wins.
- Sadly, Chris Christie’s Cowboys fandom is one of his better qualities.
- The importance of California’s high-speed rail project.
- I’m with Freddie on the “music just wants to be freeeeeeeeeeeee” crowd.
I’m not particularly looking forward to the high speed rail project, if it ever gets completely built. The chosen route will run a few hundred feet from where I live, and will have a significant negative impact on the neighborhood.
Then move to Badger, CA. You’ll be undisturbed by the high speed rail, in fact, you’ll be undisturbed, period.
Go fuck yourself.
Duly noted.
Yes, indeed, if I don’t want to potentially have my home bulldozed, I should move to Badger, California. As I said, go fuck yourself.
It’s to the northeast of where I live, which used to be an orchard be gore it was bulldozed about 20 years ago for houses. See how that works?
Negative impact like train noise? You get used to it, in my experience, in about two weeks.
No, not train noise. More like bulldozing a bunch of homes.
1. So Dick Morris finally managed to exhaust even the near-infinite patience and forgiveness that the Beltway has for hacks whose main qualification is that they once worked on a successful presidential campaign at some point?
Good riddance. I remember when he fucked up bad at projecting the 2012 elections, to the point where even Fox News was sick of him. I still get a laugh when I think about Mark Halperin’s Way to Win book talking about Dick Morris as if he was some great politico that Bill might approach covertly for help in campaigning for Hillary.
5. I wish we had something like that in our area. It’d be a huge boon to be able to take a train down to the southern part of my state (Utah) and then rent a car or walk rather than making the 5 hour drive.
6. They’re a bunch of entitled whiners, constantly complaining about how it’s the content providers’ fault that they don’t pay for anything. I prefer the people who openly admit that they just steal out of convenience and cheapness.
On a completely different subject… I got an email on Monday asking me to give them money to draft Elizabeth Warren to be a presidential candidate. No. Do these people not understand the word no?
Send the money to me–my plan is to draft Gen. Sherman . . .
Crap, just missed the top ten for the bowl-pick’em.
Oh well. One day Oregon will win it all. And even later, one day Oregon will beat Boise State (but probably not any time soon, ’cause they scerred).
But more seriously: mocking slogans is a pretty shitty form of political commentary. Is there anyone serious whose position is “music just wants to be freeeeeeeee”? No. So, because you’ve adopted the freddie position, lets look at it more closely:
1)I’d be surprised if he wasn’t right about this one.
2)This response is true. This original position also has never been said by any non-troll, ever.
3)If this is about music from non-rich musicians, then sure, I guess. You shouldn’t steal music from non-rich musicians! But, again … who says you should?
4)Cool story, bro.
5) This one requires actual, empirical study before any real judgments can be made. Since Freddie offers no evidence for anything he says, this must remain a mystery.
6) People who say this are, indeed, assholes.
7) This is the stupidest thing he writes anywhere. He’s asking for falsifiability for a claims about individual actions and then expecting some sort of general claim to be made out of it. Ok, moron: While I don’t torrent anything, I absolutely pirate things I’ve never heard of, and when its cool, me and my partner buy it. So fuck off.
8) … yes, declining revenues for the recording industry is real. Who says they make money hand over fist? Bonus points if you have anything other than bottom of the barrel twitter assholes saying this.
9) Yes, yes, you are are a good person.
10) While I haven’t read this magnificent book, I would like some evidence or links. I mean, not much evidence or links. But Scott usually requires at least one piece of evidence for his trent richardson hate pieces. So is it too much to ask for some evidence here?
11) *Sigh*
12) “Torrenting is a victimless crime that has no impact on the industries in question. ”
This has literally never been said in earnest by a fan of torrenting ever. And I’m not even a fan of torenting. So … Booo.
so, yeah, good job freddie and good job scott.
Substitute any other product for the words “music” or “movie.” Taking steaks without paying for them is theft. There’s no rationalizing theft by pointing at the supermarket and saying, “But, they make money!!!” Or by making a claim that, after you eat the steak, you’ll come back and pay for it. Or by saying you came across a new recipe you never heard of and thus would never have eaten the steak that way if you hadn’t stolen it.
Stealing is stealing.
I’ve always thought the forms this analogy takes are inapt.
Usually, I see it formulated as “Well, you wouldn’t steal a car, would you?” And, no. I wouldn’t steal a car.
But if I had a magic wand which I could point at any car that would create a perfect duplicate of it? Yes. Yes, I would do that. I wouldn’t even really think of it as stealing.
I assume your magic wand would duplicate, for free, all the work of research, invention, engineering and design that went into that car.
I assume that original car was paid for.
For that matter, when it comes to movies or music, many of my first exposures to new films and new artists came for free out of the picture box in my living room or the radio in my car. I certainly didn’t pay for those.
Anyways, I can’t find myself mustering a tremendous amount of sympathy for oligarchs who built their empires on the multitudinous bodies of musicians who died penniless and continue to this day to make money off of their ‘property’. I pay for my stuff, but I do it directly to the artist and skip that middleman for the most part.
For that matter, when it comes to movies or music, many of my first exposures to new films and new artists came for free out of the picture box in my living room or the radio in my car. I certainly didn’t pay for those.
For certain meanings of “free” that do not involve money.
Both the picture box in your living room and the radio in your car provide entertainment supported by either advertising or subscription fees. Unless, of course, you’re stealing cable by illegally tapping into your neighbor’s feed. In which case, yeah–it’s free. At least until they slap the chrome bracelets on your for, you know, theft of services.
Your goalposts, they move with great rapidity.
What’s the mandatory minimum sentence for switching channels during commercial breaks?
Explain to me how this, or what MPAVictoria says below, deprives the writers, producers, actors, etc. of income? It does not.
Taking someone’s work and not paying for it when your payment is how they get their revenue mean they don’t get paid.
You can wave away my argument with accusations that I’m moving the goal posts, or I’m arguing in bad faith. But at the end of it all it comes down to YOU don’t want to pay for music. All of your arguments flow from this.
You ever watch tv or listen to the radio and skip the commercials?
Dirty thief.
Without endorsing either side with this comment, it is quite true that intellectual property has some fundamentally different properties than lots of other property which means that such simple substitutions fail.
Let’s go with this. You have a magic wand that lets you make an exact duplicate of whatever you want, so it’s not stealing.
Except for all the design and engineering work that went into the original that you’ve copied. But the car companies don’t pay those people all that well, so it’s okay that you get the fruits of their labor without paying for it.
And, of course, when everyone has the magic wand, the cap company ceases to exist because NOBODY is buying cars. So your world has now shrunk as you’re stuck with 2016 Kia Souls as the only cars available–except for the pieces of junk cobbled together by eccentric tinkerers in their garages. Pieces of junk that are promptly copied by people with their magic wands so that even the tinkerers get ripped off.
Not only did you write your comment before mine, yours was better-written and more thoughtful.
There would alzó be cars with an welded-in sound system that is always begging for money.
Well, technically, if the magic wand made perfect copies then the car companies could go out of business and we wouldn’t mind. So all this proves is that the analogy is silly if you take it too far.
What if a chef figured out some recipies based on food from famous restaurants and posted those recipies online? Would you be stealing from the restaurants if you made the recipies at home?
Of course this analogy isn’t exactly the same either. In conclusion, I don’t think you can rely on analogies to answer the question in this case.
This. All these analogies serve to do is shut down the argument.
I’m still waiting for any argument that isn’t some variation on “I don’t want to pay, so let me rationalize my stealing this way.”
That’s as may be, but “It’s like stealing a steak!” is so transparently ridiculous that it doesn’t help make that point.
But there would be essentially no chance of any improvement on the existing design.
“Ladies and gentleman, the Edsel!”
“Ladies and gentleman, the Edsel!”
the Edsel crashed and burned because:
1. it looked funny.
2. it had a funny name.
aside from that it was a perfectly serviceable automobile. it did prove something though:
1. don’t give your kid a weird name.
2. if you insist on giving your kid a weird name, don’t name your product after him/her.
Wait, this really can’t be right.
People get bored. People figure out things. People can figure out who to get paid upfront (e.g., KickStarter for new designs). You don’t have to fund work by letting people exploit a monopoly on the results, you fund the labor directly. This is, in fact, done all the time. This doesn’t mean that people in the current system aren’t being screwed, but let’s make good arguments.
This might not be enough to result in an overall richer society, but I’m going to bet on the replicator world.
And, really, if we had a magic wand for replicating physical goods, that would be awesome. It would completely break our existing economy, but in a terrific way, at least, at the core.
But the magic wand analogy is so much closer to the truth than the stealing-a-steak analogy that the fact that you started with “stealing is stealing” really undercuts your further arguments. It sounds like libertarian reasoning, “taxation is slavery” or something. You’re not arguing in good faith, at this point I wouldn’t trust you to tell me the time or your children’s names.
So, are you saying that illegally downloading music or movies is not stealing? Why wouldn’t it be? Don’t artists and musicians have some right to control their intellectual property? I’d have thought the answer was “duh, yes.” I mean, it’s not like copyright is a new concept.
No, but digital reproduction is.
And that’s what gives this whole topic bite.
Artists and musicians have absolute right to control their IP, within the limits that we as a society set.
But infringing on that IP isn’t theft.* It’s certainly damaging to the IP owner, but it’s not the same as theft.
Making it really, really easy infringe on someone’s IP is the nature of the problem at hand. Because no-one has answers to the questions ‘how much wrong has the infringement done?’ and ‘what do we do about that when frillions of people are involved?’
*I am more than half sympathetic to the thought that this is a smart-alec argument. It can certainly be deployed that way. Except that ultimately, words mean things. And we aren’t going to solve the problem if our starting point involves calling it by the wrong name.
Then maybe we should start by not talking about property, and instead talk about paying people for their work. Outside of gift-giving relationships, if you value something enough to consume it, then you should compensate the producers.
But asserting that is isn’t theft is just the same a priori reasoning as starting from the presumption that it is theft. Which is why I asked the question, because it startled me to realize that some people think it isn’t theft. It just seems obvious to me. The opposite might be obvious to you, but it certainly isn’t to everyone. It is helpful to know that this is where our disagreement lies.
Also, digital reproduction may be new, but mechanical reproduction itself is not. I realize that digital reproduction is a lot easier than photocopying an entire book or taping a friend’s album, but this isn’t a brand-new issue.
No it isn’t.
Theft has a definition. Part of that definition involves depriving somebody else of a thing by taking it or using it up.
If my actions in IP infringement still leave you with a thing that you can use, then the wrong thing that I’ve done isn’t theft. It’s a different wrong thing.
That’s important (from my IANAL perspective) because that means the remedy is different – it has to be appropriate to the wrong – and the way we build systems to dissuade against the wrong is different too.
Yeah. All of this.
I do idly wonder if IP is going to be much more important than tangible property in a few generation’s time. But that might just be the Ian M Banks wish-fulfilment talking.
Are you against libraries, then? What about watching television and skipping the ads?
As a society we need to compensate people who produce valuable work, but there are many ways to do that other than “consumer pays.”
Citation? I mean, you can cite the dictionary, I guess—assuming that it matches your definition—but that’s not really authoritative either. We all know that words just mean what we collectively agree that they mean. And as this entire thread shows, plenty of people agree with me that stealing IP is theft.
But if you don’t like the term “theft,” that’s fine. Let me put it this way, then: how do you defend copying an artistic work when the artist has not given you permission to do so?
Are you against libraries, then? What about watching television and skipping the ads?
OK then, making durable multi-use copies of something valuable enough to consume.
As a society we need to compensate people who produce valuable work, but there are many ways to do that other than “consumer pays.”
Neither is “torrent free-for-all,” but the final response to that always comes down to a sigh and “waddaya gonna do. It’s just so easy.”
If IP infringement is theft, why are the legal consequences different?
If you think that we should class it as theft, are you happy to prosecute it as such, with the different criminal code and burden of proof that implies?
I get that in casual conversation we can call it theft. No worries. But it seems to me that it makes it harder, not easier, to talk about what the legal consequences are or should be. That may not be of the greatest importance, but it’s worth considering as we think through what to do about it.
Like other forms of theft, the level of seriousness depends on the circumstances (value of the property etc.), but criminal copyright infringement is punishable by imprisonment and/or a fine. See 18 U.S.C. 2319.
ETA: if you already knew that, and are suggesting that there’s some significance to the different elements necessary to prove theft of a tangible thing vs. copyright infringement, well, I just don’t find those distinctions all that persuasive. Criminal law is very technical and draws lots of fine distinctions between different types of conduct that we would all generally regard as “theft.”
Even putting aside sibusisodan’s points, at least in the US legal regime, intellectual property law primarily stems from the copyright clause, to wit:
The goal is specific (to promote progress) and the means are restricted (limited times for exclusivity). To call copyright violation “theft” is really to make an analogy or to add an extra definition to “theft”, which is fine but doesn’t advance the argument.
There are lots of (moral) wrongs that can be done without violating copyright. I can “steal” credit via plagiarizing the idea (copyright only protects expression). But “stealing” credit is a form of misrepresentation, not theft.
I think it’s highly questionable, empirically, as to whether extended copyright regimes are a particularly good way to promote the arts. We certainly see lots of problems with patents (in several ways patent trolling, over patenting, idle patents, patents being the goal, etc.) Similarly, copyright terms keep getting extended without any obvious benefit to new creation (is keeping Micky Mouse, to use the standard example, in the exclusive control of Disney really promoting anything but Disney profit)?
This doesn’t mean that doing away with all monopolies would be superior. It’s quite tricky. But I think it doesn’t help to hypostatize intellectual property. After all, it involves restrictions on how we think, what art we may produce, and what ideas we may build upon.
And, of course, as with real property, legal regimes that in practice favor large accumulators are subject to all sorts of problems.
“Don’t artists and musicians have some right to control their intellectual property?”
up to the point where they contractually abrogate it, and give it to the record company, which then pays them.
I’m in no way suggesting that illegally d/l intellectual property is ok, it isn’t, but in the vast majority of cases, the artist has already sold those property rights to someone else.
But that’s part and parcel of the right to control your intellectual property—choosing to whom you will sell it, who will then take over the right that you sold.
ETA: The artist may have given up the right to prevent the buyer from selling it to anyone else. But it detracts from the value of the art to the artist to regard the fact that she sold it as somehow making property rights irrelevant.
If I buy a ticket to see Birdman, then after the movie wander in to the theater next door to watch Boyhood, have I stolen something? The theater certainly thinks so, and I suspect the law agrees. I can argue that I haven’t deprived anybody of anything – my taking a seat in a half empty theater deprived nobody else of the opportunity to see the movie, and I would state that I did not intend to pay to see Boyhood. And yet, I know that it’s wrong to do so. For what it’s worth, it violates the social contract.
The magic wand analogy isn’t so implausible; given some improvements in robotics, cheap energy, etc. it’s the natural conclusion of the industrial revolution. If/when/as that happens, we will need to radically redesign how our economy works. I don’t know what the optimal solution is, but the worst idea is to just let the capitalists collect their monopoly profits, and for anyone who isn’t a capitalist or one of their technicians to starve.
And, of course, advances in artificial intelligence will eliminate the need for musicians as well.
Face it, these sorts of analogies suck ass because there is a bit of a difference between a durable good and an artistic creation. I find the level of disrespect for creative artists in a blog commentariat populated by people who make a living with their wits to be frankly astounding. Yes, artists get screwed by rent-seeking middlemen, but at the end of the day some of what you pay for a musical recording usually winds up in their pocket. Instead of arguing over whether digital copying is “stealing” consider the morality of denying payment to the artist, whatever the disfunction of the system she is paid through.
The information revolution has created vast amounts of wealth and opportunity. My main concern is to distribute this wealth as equally as feasible. Compensating artists is also a concern. These are both important, and we shouldn’t ignore one in the interest of the other. To the extent that artist compensation conflicts with a more equitable distribution of wealth, we need a balanced approach.
For legal streaming services like Pandora and Spotify, the value of “some” is so low as to make this effectively false. Damon Krukowski:
Which, again, doesn’t mean “Pirate away!” It means that if you’re really concerned about creative people getting compensate you need to think beyond just ending piracy. (In the immediate term, I think buying stuff off the artist’s Bandcamp site is probably the way to go if your main concern is making sure they get paid, though I don’t know anything about the internals.)
Let’s go with “there are differences so you can’t just substitute to get ‘theft is theft'”?
Sigh. I guess not. BTW, I’m not pro-information is free per se, but there’s no reason to be silly about it.
Well, I’m not copying the work per se, but the results thereof, right? I notice that you did shift from “steal” to “copy”, which is exactly a key point.
So, if I see a car design and replicate it with my labor, that’s forbidden too? This is, of course, a big issue in software UIs for example.
But patents are time limited monopolies. So at some point, we think that the labor is sufficiently paid off.
There are challenges to a non-scarcity economy, but this is rather silly.
First, we don’t need the car manufacturers in this situation, we just need designers and small run producers (to produce the model that gets copied). There’s no reason to think that in this situation that people wouldn’t band together to get better designs (after all, this, in fact, happens with software). In other words, there’s a lot of discussion that has to happen to get to total collapse.
(And really, this is incoherent on its own terms. There are a zillion models of cars of all sorts, not just Kia Souls. The don’t evaporate just because we have a duplicator.)
Second, while there’s a lot more to pick at, I just don’t see this sort of argument as substantively any better that the MUSIC WANTS TO BE FREEEEEEEE!!!!! and how does that help things? It’s not like this issue hasn’t been debated for forever…do we really need to replay all the details de novo?
Btw, I want people to, for example, to pay my beloved for her music. So I have direct interests on both sides. I don’t know if that helps.
“8) … yes, declining revenues for the recording industry is real. Who says they make money hand over fist? Bonus points if you have anything other than bottom of the barrel twitter assholes saying this.”
the accountant part of me says, prove it. when all I have is some nebulous entity’s word for it, I remain somewhat skeptical. so, let’s see some audited financial statement, with year-by-year comparative data. then, lets see some actual analysis proving that pirating is the actual culprit.
bear something in mind, the entertainment industry has developed its own unique brand of accounting, for the very express purpose of screwing the actual content producers out of as much money as possible. this has been going on since the age of printed music, before even records were invented. it has a long and dishonorable history, which is why there is also a long history of lawsuits between artists and distribution companies. I certainly do believe the artists should be fairly compensated for their talent, but I remain unconvinced that pirating is solely, or even materially, responsible for any claimed drop in revenues in the industry as a whole.
What derelict said. I just can’t imagine any other venue in which someone would be skeptical of the idea that taking things without paying for them on such a massive scale was bad for the bottom lines of producers.
But (and this is an honest question) do we know that the scale of piracy has changed?
I remember my early pre-teen years, holding my cassette recorder next to my clock radio, taping songs every Sunday off of “Breakfast With The Beatles” while being as quiet as I could be. Other than the sound quality of what I did sucking [*], how is this different from what happens today?
* And yes, I do understand that the sucky sound quality played a role in my blowing my first paychecks, several years later, on prerecorded cassettes, which then needed to be replaced by CDs several years after that [**]; and that piracy today has eliminated that.
** And this was a key thing in almost all music media until the late 80s/early 90s – unless you were obsessively careful, and sometimes even then, your favorite albums needed replacing every few years. That is also a source of revenue that was lost.
You answered this in your own footnote
“I just can’t imagine any other venue in which someone would be skeptical of the idea that taking things without paying for them on such a massive scale was bad for the bottom lines of producers.”
“can’t imagine” all you wish, my point remains unanswered:
show me the audited F/S’s, with independent analysis, proving that piracy is even materially responsible for any claimed significant drop in gross revenues. so far, all I hear/see are unsubstantiated claims, made by the very same people who have a vested interest in using them to make bad law.
the fact is, those companies have no such plans to actually prove their claims, everyone is supposed to just accept them at face value. sorry, that isn’t how my profession operates. this is the very same claim, made by the very same industry, 25 years ago, when metallic cassette tape was first introduced. supposedly, because copying an original cassette on to a metallic cassette produced an almost perfect copy, the music industry would collapse. they then lobbied congress to enact a $50 per unit tarrif on metal cassette decks, to be handed over to the RIAA, and split up amongst the various production companies, using some formula. an odd thing happened on the way to congress: nothing. no crashnburn, no artists starving because everyone was just copying that one original cassette sold, no……………nothing. the issue silently died.
yes, theft is wrong, whether it be a tangible/intangible good, this isn’t even an issue for discussion. that said, claims of outrageous misfortune, absent actual evidence to support them, should not be allowed as the basis for draconian laws in response, and that’s where this is headed, especially with their buddies in control of both houses of congress.
In the entertainment biz, the axiom is that “Net is always zero,” so never accept any deal that gives you a percentage of net.
Having said that, I’m still trying to see how the fact that record companies screw the artists justifies stealing the work. “Hey, in my estimation, Sony BMG isn’t paying Steve’s Garage Band enough. So I’ll just steal the only album Steve’s Garage Band has put out. That’ll make Sony pay more!”
I’m tired of artists getting screwed over by middlemen. I’m going to screw them over myself!
I think the rationalization is more “It doesn’t matter to SGB whether I buy their album or not, the record company will steal all the money.” Musicians have asserted things along those lines, that they don’t care if people pirate because they won’t see the money anyway, come see us on tour and we will. I have no idea whether that’s true or not.
Certainly some musicians choose to distribute their music digitally for free. You and I shouldn’t get to make that choice for them.
this is the exact point. i could care less about what happens to the “record companies” as such since they have been a particularly slimy group for decades.
but i do believe in musicians being paid. if the musician chooses to make his or her work available for free as a promotional effort, fine: no problem.
but otherwise: problem.
It’s not possible to make the argument that there’s less money going into the recording industry unless you know literally nothing about it. If you have not been into a record store, if you haven’t looked at Billboard charts, if you’re not familiar with the change in lifestyle experienced by most modern recording artists (e.g., your favorite band probably all have day jobs), then you might ask for evidence.
This record store you speak of, what is that?
Go to any music discussion forum and you’ll find people saying any and all of these. It’s not a strawman. On top of this, there’s the new ‘Nobody pays for music anymore’ thinkpiece genre, which is ostensibly about streaming but really serves to validate this belief that one shouldn’t pay for music anymore.
Yup, I’ve had those discussions. Those things that “literally nobody ever says” I’ve heard from people. Perhaps not Important People or whatever, but actual commentors on the web arguing over pirating stuff in a discussion forum. Most particularly the “victimless crime” bit. Also popular: but I’m not stealing it! It’s still there! When you take a care then the other person no longer has it! As if this makes it not theft.
It’s theft, plain and simple, and yet people will do all sorts of weird mental gymnastics to try and weasel out of admitting it.
People should be paid for their labor, even artists who are apparently supposed to nobly starve or some shit.
I’ve often wondered if music theft might have been slowed if artists had actually been united with record companies on this topic. In the early days of Napster there were a number of fairly well-known artists who said about downloading mp3s, basically, some version of “Why should I care? I’m not getting royalties on CD sales anyway.”
Maybe if the music industry wasn’t such a hive of scum and villany (part & parcel of the “I don’t get royalties on the CDs anyway” situation) there might have been a little less pirating… but I dunno if the difference would be very large. Quite clearly, people rationalize what they want to do.
You’re probably right. One of the somewhat amusing things about getting older is you really notice how many people are just absolutely, irrevocably full of shit.
(It’s like bicyclists. As the great Christina H. pointed out on Cracked.com, bicyclists have hours and hours of arguments about why they should be able to ignore traffic lights, but they boil down to “I don’t want to and no one’s made me.”)
(It’s like bicyclists. As the great Christina H. pointed out on Cracked.com, bicyclists have hours and hours of arguments about why they should be able to ignore traffic lights, but they boil down to “I don’t want to and no one’s made me.”)
Well, no. (Literally ‘ignore’, fine, but that’s largely a strawman.) There’s a legitimate disagreement about whether we should treat bicycles exactly like cars when it comes to stop signs and traffic lights or not.
What’s legitimate about it insisting that bikes can disobey lights and stop signs, ride on the wrong side of the road, ride on sidewalks while insisting that cars obey the law at all times and treat them like super cars that have the right of way all day every day?
That’s the attitude I get out of cyclists who actually engage in the arguments. Maybe they’re just the assholes that think they’re more important than everyone else.
It’s worth pointing out that Christina H. is a bicyclist.
But I knew this would be a hand grenade when I brought it up, and I brought it up anyway, so that’s on me I suppose.
It’s not a hand grenade as much as a touchy subject for people with personal experiences with assholes. Putting all the blame on cyclists is just stupid, as is blaming it all on drivers.
The system would work if people thought more about getting everyone home safely than doing whatever it takes to protect what they think is their own private space on the road.
Motorists need to watch the fuck out for bicycles. Cyclists need to obey the fucking laws and not challenge cars for space on the road. Everyone needs to calm the fuck down about it. It’s not that complicated.
In principle, certainly. In practice, solutions of the form “everyone be nicer to each other” have various levels of success but usually quite low ones. In fact what we need to do is have traffic laws and fucking enforce them, and we could do it, too, if cops didn’t see their jobs as being a combination of hassling drag users and hassling people who park their cars.
“People should just stop being assholes” is true in many areas of life, but it’s well short of what we might call a solution to a problem of public policy.
I remember a guy on USENET ranting that people driving cars had to be prepared to stop on a dime at all times. Essentially, his position was that all driving, and especially driving through an intersection under a green light, had to be done as if you were driving through a school zone during recess. Anybody who couldn’t do that, he was convinced, was at fault in any resultant collision.
It later turned out that he was a cyclist who believed HE had the right to sail through red lights without even slowing down and looking around, which I think sort of explained the motivation of his bizarre rule for cars.
I’d say probably not. Many people like not having to pay for things or to get things at low cost. All the pirate sites are evidence of this.
Car, not care.
Anyway, the “I’m just taking a copy” thing is such bullshit. Yes, it’s technically true, but it doesn’t really matter. Artists get paid by selling their work. Car companies make money by selling cars. If you acquire a song (still under copyright, obviously) or a car and don’t pay for it, you’re stealing, and you’re materially harming the producers of those products.
The rest is just handwaving bullshit so people can tell themselves they’re not stealing.
edit: and the difference between this and making mix tapes off the radio is the scale of it. Making mix tapes was difficult/annoying enough that I doubt it had more than a tiny impact on sales.
+1
I always find it astonishing that people can get so self-righteous about stealing intellectual property.
But the record industry freaked out about it. “Home taping is killing music!” There was a bit of a boy-who-cried-wolf in the early Napster era. (Fifteen years on, of course, the traditional record industry/artist business model is as dead as a doornail, so this seems to have been qualitatively different.)
Dunno if they just jumped the gun on the threat, but the threat was clearly quite real… the tech just wasn’t quite there yet.
If iTunes (or any other way to buy nearly any music file one wanted) had come out before napster, music companies might have been able to keep illegal downloading as some kind of weirdo fringe activity. They were so terrified of what would happen if they sold their product on the internet, they didn’t think of what would happen if they didn’t sell their product on the internet. How long was napster the best way to get music on the internet? 2 years? 4? If there had been a way to buy nearly any music track on line, napster would have never made it out of some weirdo’s garage. (none of which excuses stealing, it’s just another way the record companies shot themselves in the foot.)
That seems clearly true, yes. The industry made a huge mistake by pretending they could hide from technology that scared them.
It’s easy to say this in retrospect, but in general the idea that record companies could have tempered the growth of piracy had they sold mp3s earlier, while possessing some merits, understates the complexities of having to quickly shift from physical product to digital files. Some labels did try to sell music from their own websites–the problem is, without a centralized space for buying music where all record labels could sell their wares (like a record store) finding music from individual artists wasn’t efficient–how many people know an artist’s record label? It took Apple to negotiate contracts with hundreds of major and minor labels, and that took time as it met with understandable skepticism on the part of record labels.
All of which is to say, ‘record companies should have embraced digital earlier’ is another fascile justification for illegally downloading music.
“People should be paid for their labor, even artists who are apparently supposed to nobly starve or some shit.”
Fair enough. it would appear quite a few of them are, judging by the homes they own, the cars they drive and the trips they take. of course, these are the same artists who were getting paid before the digital age, because they are popular, among a fairly large audience. joe’s garage band, I’m sorry to say, isn’t. they weren’t making much before the digital age. the difference is that now they do have the potential to be exposed to a wider potential audience. that being said, if the audience likes them, they should then pay them for their work product.
One annoying thing about Freddie’s article are the unforced errors. E.g.,
As several commenters over there pointed out that if a pirate’s budget is $100, then there isn’t a $400 loss of revenue. There just isn’t. (Now, if you want to argue that it’s likely that if they paid $100 but wanted $500’s worth, then, without piracy, they’d likely go up to $150, then at least that sounds reasonable.)
Similarly, that revenue is in decline *might* be due to increased piracy, but also might be due to subscription services (for example). Eliminating pirarcy might push people into alternative free media rather than raise revenues.
It’s notable that phone apps is a really sucky business because people have been trained by super low prices. I don’t think there is significant iphone app piracy (at least, I’ve not heard of any). So piracy might cause a downward pressure on prices due to devaluing perceptions. But I’d like to see some evidence for that. (And wouldn’t streaming do the job?)
Like a lot of arguments on a lot of topics in the last ten years, Freddie ignores the fact that everyone’s disposable income is fucking gone unless you’re a Kardashian or something. In the absence of piracy, the recording industry would have taken it on the chin anyway. (Likely not to this extent.)
The law, in its majesty, bars both rich and poor alike from stealing.
“The law, in its majesty, bars both rich and poor alike from stealing.”
“The law sir, is an ass.”
This. People don’t steal music because it’s easy. They steal music because they’re fucking broke and they don’t see the sense in playing by rules that screw them coming and going. What has intellectual property done for the people on the bottom half of the income curve lately?
Way too broad a statement, that.
I know people with plenty of money who have pirated stuff. They did it because they could, not because they could not afford to pay.
edit: also, too: that bottom half of the income curve would appear to include quite a few artists whose work has been pirated.
the richest guy i know is also the biggest pirate i know.
I actually would prefer it if you referred to me as a ‘self-employed resource allocator’.
Besides, merchant shipping wants to be free!
Your beard is also not allowed to smoke in Whole Foods, sir.
I agree with Bijan’s comment (that’s the one about “unforced errors” if you’re scrolling up). This is really the worst one:
That is begging the question: Why did the music industry’s revenues crater? The assumption is that it’s from piracy, but there’s no evidence provided. In comments he says that the revenue decline coincides perfectly with the decline of Napster and there’s no alternative narrative, but I can think of several alternatives:
1. Revenues were sustained by consumers’ converting their vinyl/cassette collections to CDs, and CDs’ higher price. The music industry gained bupkis from consumers’ converting their CD collection to digital, because that’s something consumers could do themselves.
2. As Bijan says: The rise of (perfectly legal) streaming/subscription services. I’m listening to Eric Dolphy/Booker Little Live at the Five Spot through Amazon Prime right now. It’s not pirated–but whatever I paid for it is basically going to Amazon. Maybe the record company gets a taste. I’m sure the estates of the musicians (and the musicians themselves) are getting a fraction of a cent if anything. [Actually since these albums came out on Prestige, which was well known for paying upfront and no royalties, it’s pretty moot. Also I have about half the music on used vinyl anyway, which also didn’t help the musicians….]
3. A few people have mentioned the decline of the album in favor of the single. So, that.
4. YouTube might hurt, too. Is it pirating if I watch a video someone uploaded to YouTube? What about the official video? Either way I’m not paying… and I think it’d be harder to get paid for it.
Disclosure: I’ve downloaded a fair amount of out-of-print (often really out of print) stuff and bootlegs, but I don’t pirate stuff I can legally get. I do worry that some of my sharper practices, like buying albums that are priced at 0.99/track and consist of one hour-long track, aren’t helping musicians much at all.
…OK, scrolling down to this excellent comment from Consumatopia and Freddie’s response, I think this is the problem here. Is the move to super-cheap streaming, bundles, etc. mainly a response to piracy? I doubt it–the truth behind the “information wants to be free!” crowd is that digital media is very cheap to distribute, and that means that someone somewhere is likely to try to start making money by distributing it cheaply. (I’m not sure, but I don’t think the rise of the game bundle was a response to piracy, but an attempt to get more money from people who hadn’t already obtained the games a while after release.)
In any case, even if that arose in response to piracy, stigmatizing piracy isn’t going to make it go away.
stigmatizing piracy isn’t going to make it go away.
Stigmatizing anything isn’t going to make it go away. That’s not an argument.
Sorry, pronoun trouble; “it” did not mean “piracy.” Writing mistake on my part.
What I mean is this: Even the complete and utter eradication of piracy, could that be accomplished with a magic wand, is not going to make the subscription streaming services/bundles/etc. go away–even if those things did arise in response to piracy (which I’m dubious about).
So insofar as those subscription streaming services/bundles/etc. are hurting the music/games industries and are hurting creators (the revenue figures for what artists get from Spotify are horrifying), any sort of attack on piracy isn’t really going to help. If we want artists to be able to survive, we need to work toward some kind of alternative structure for paying for stuff.
I hope that makes the argument clearer. Also I hope it makes clearer that it’s not a defense of piracy, or even an argument that we shouldn’t be trying to stigmatize it.
It does, and thanks. A bartender recommended Spotify to me, and even though she’s a hell of a bartender, I’m taking it off my list of things to look into.
I totally don’t think streaming services arose in response to piracy. That is utterly silly. Netflix’s shift to streaming is a response to piracy? Osyter and Scribd are a response to pirating eBooks? This might make sense if the publishers built these services, but they didn’t. And look at the phone app market. These were new “disruptive” companies and streaming is a seductive business model *for those companies* and a great deal for consumers. Publishers and artists…it doesn’t seem so great. Something will have to give there.
But it’s a complex problem. Public libraries really failed to step up (the main difference there is that they paid *more* for their copies and didn’t pay per use).
I agree with most of Freddie’s points, but he’s only interested in the costs of torrenting, not the benefits. The losses to artists and industry have to be weighed against the gains to consumers, which are tremendous. And some of those consumers are in countries where $10 for an album is indeed an outrageous cost.
I wonder about the distributive impact of piracy, a topic I haven’t seen a lot written about. If you have money, it is still easier to just buy stuff. I have pirated less as my income has increased. To what extent is piracy a form of downward redistribution from wealthier to less wealthy consumers? Globally, the impact could be massive, plausibly. I think people should pay for their media if they can afford it, and should torrent if they can’t.
This argument seems pretty weak to me. We’re not discussing cancer drugs here. It’s entertainment.
Therefore, steal it if you can’t afford it strikes me as a lot less defensible.
As has been mentioned upthread, media piracy is simply not equivalent to stealing. If a person who otherwise would not buy an item of media pirates it, there is no cost to anyone, but there is benefit to the pirate. The only reason I can see to be against this is if you view torrenting as a sin, morally bad regardless of consequence.
This presumes that the pirate would not, if pirating wasn’t an option, suck it up and pay. Some would, some wouldn’t. How that nets out might be an interesting academic question, but it really should have no impact on the personal ethical question, IMO.
I do happen to think stealing is bad. I don’t really do “sin” but bad, yeah. Crazy, I know.
And yes, it’s stealing. Your rationalizations are really transparent.
And again, we’re not talking about stealing food b/c you’re starving, drugs because you’re sick, etc. We’re talking about stealing a song ’cause you don’t wanna (or cannot) pay for it.
The “interesting academic question” is the relevant question to me. I mean, I think consequentialism is true. If you think the moral wrongness of piracy is independent of its consequences, then we have nothing to discuss on this topic, because our disagreements here stem from much more fundamental disagreement on the foundation of ethics.
As Mal and I have pointed, you simply assumed there are no negative consequences. That’s pretty obviously untrue: some people, if pirating were not an option (either for ethical or technical reasons), would pay. When those folks pirate, the content producer is harmed.
I overstated my point on personal ethics. Yes, I think consequences matter. However, when the consequences are murky (as they often are!), I’d say there should be a strong (rebuttable) presumption that stealing is wrong. In this particular case, I think it’s obvious that there *is* harm. The academic question, as I put it, is exactly how much harm. That’s interesting, but I don’t really see how it gives you justification for taking stuff w/o paying for it.
What? I said in my initial post that I agreed with Freddie’s points and that there were costs to artists and industry. How am I assuming there is no negative consequences? There are real negative consequences which have to be weighed against the benefits. I just think the benefits are quite large and need to be taken into consideration in any attempt to seriously analyze the issue.
Ah, ok, I apologize if I misread you. You appeared to be totally ignoring pirates who would pay if they had to or felt they had to.
That said, the positive impact is people getting to listen to music they otherwise wouldn’t. The negative impact is artists who created the music suffering a decline in (already unimpressive for all but the biggest names) income.
I dunno, man. Listening to music you like is pleasurable, but I have a hard time putting more (or as much, or really anything close) value on that than on the artists getting compensated for their efforts. It only kinda-sorta works for me if we restrict ourselves to the very tippy top of the industry pyramid.
What about people with no disposable income? I don’t see the social benefit in these people depriving themselves of culture or entertainment out of principle. Yes, I understand that people who can pay rationalize piracy anyways, but there are many who have to choose between paying for their media and food/rent, both in the US and elsewhere.
I guess here we’ll have to just agree to disagree.
It’s entertainment, ffs.
If a person who otherwise would not buy an item of media pirates it, there is no cost to anyone, but there is benefit to the pirate.
I know it is a violation of all Internet traditions to correctly use the phrase “beg the question,” but that is how to beg a question.
Can you explain? I really don’t think it is.
It assumes the conclusion that the pirate would buy $0 of media if s/he couldn’t pirate. Begging the question of whether this is plausible in most cases. I might call it stacking the hypothetical.
EDIT: This reminds me of the rationalization that flying rather than driving somewhere doesn’t really pollute more IF the plane was going to fly without you anyway. True as far as it goes, but everyone can’t be the marginal passenger, just as it can’t be true that no music pirates would ever buy the music if they had to.
Well, it’s a conditional statement. If the condition is false, the conclusion doesn’t hold. So the question is the extent to which the condition holds. I’m not assuming that it always holds. My very first words on this topic were “I agree with most of Freddie’s points”. So, everyone responding to me, can you read Freddie’s points and pretend I said them, so we can talk about the more interesting question of costs vs. benefits?
Whoa, hold on there.
As someone who has done his share of dirty filthy pirating, this isn’t entirely true. Duplicating something isn’t equivalent to stealing it, I don’t think, but people deserve to get paid for their labor.
There’s also the fact that while you’re correct in the abstract, as a practical matter there’s no real way to separate out people who can’t afford/would never pay for music and people who are just cheap.
Well, as a practical matter there’s no way to stop torrenting, period. There is no technical solution at present. Freddie was proposing a social campaign to change attitudes. I agree with this, but I think we can and should distinguish based on ability to pay.
Just FYI, Internet Archive has torrent servers, which I use all the time as I can browse easier using them than their https downloads. The technology of torrenting has nothing to do with what it’s used for.
Yup.
Torrenting has legitimate uses. I use torrenting as a means to create off-site back-ups of my office’s servers.
If a person who otherwise would not buy an item of media pirates it, there is no cost to anyone, but there is benefit to the pirate.
No cost to anyone. Except the artist who’s not getting paid.
Try this on for size: You’re a writer who has worked for a year to write an amazing novel. It’s really good. So, being the savvy intertubes person you are, you decide to self-publish it as an e-book. And somebody downloads your book, then starts giving away copies for free.
The fact that they’re giving away your work doesn’t cost YOU anything, does it? You’re not paying for their bandwidth. So why should you care that you’re not getting paid?
What are the costs to the artists in this case? There’s the moral cost (the item was pirated, after all, and this normalizes piracy) but $0 is $0.
The foregone income is a cost.
Just like if your boss doesn’t give you your pay check.
I guess I needed to specify that our self-publishing author was actually charging people to download the eBook. So, no–it’s not $0.
How many sales can a self-publishing author guarantee? That number is also zero.
How many sales can a self-publishing author guarantee?
Since the author is not guaranteed to make money on his or her book, we should allow a system that guarantees the author WON’T make money on the book.
As a person with a friend who himself is a self-publishing author, I can attest that you could get his book for free from him a short time ago, AND I can personally attest that he sold out his first printing of the physical book and is well through his second.
By your argument, this is impossible. This is why I don’t take that argument seriously, because I have at least one anecdote that proves the reverse….and I sincerely doubt my friend is the only person in the universe able to achieve this unlikely feat.
Amazon has programs which permit books to be offered freely for a short period of time.
One of my many, somewhat haphazard, hats is in digital publishing, and from what I’ve seen, this free period is generally good for business once the title is back at regular price.
I haven’t crunched the numbers enough yet to know what the magnitude of the effect is. But it’s there, wierdly. There’s quite a lot we (or maybe just me!) don’t understand about purchasing and price elasticity in digital content.
As has been mentioned upthread, media piracy is simply not equivalent to stealing. If a person who otherwise would not buy an item of media pirates it, there is no cost to anyone, but there is benefit to the pirate.
When making ethical rules for humans, we should probably take into account what humans are, and how their brains work. The sort of rule you’ve created has a giant loophole we can drive right through, with just a wee bit of unfalsifiable motivated reasoning. Your act-consequentialism needs some rule-consequentialism.
But I did propose a rule in my initial post: people who can afford it should pay, people who can’t, shouldn’t. This is less susceptible to rationalization than asking people to determine for each individual item whether they would or would not pay for it in the absence of alternative means.
If you still think this is too susceptible to loopholes, what about explicit income criteria? If you make between X and Y pirate to your heart’s content, if you make more than Z pay for everything you consume, etc. It seems to me that such a rule, if followed, would be superior to either the status quo or the no-pirating universe. It’s not like the poor are such big consumers anyways.
“Welcome to iTunes! To continue, please upload a notarized copy of your last three tax returns, a notarized copy of your last W-2, any 1099s you have been issued, and copies of your last two years of bank statements.”
djw was talking about ethical rules, not laws. There is no actual technical or legal solution to piracy, so self-policing based on personal ethics is the best you’re going to get.
The California HSR project is interesting. I agree with the Salon article but I’m not sure if its th best transportation project for the state. Many of the cities that are going to be served by it are sprawling, car-oriented low density places. Medium to long distance rail travel is kind of pointless if you need a car once you get to your destination. Part of me thinks that spending the money building intra-urban transit systems or extending those in existence might have been better spent.
In San Francisco, you don’t need a car to get around if you use the transit systems available not just there, but in the area areas around there as well. Los Angeles, not so much, but you can do without a car there as well.
I’d love to be able to drive to Fresno or Visalia from my undisclosed location in southeastern Tulare County to get to San Francisco in about an hour or so, instead of the 5.5 hour drive it would take by car. And I’m sure there are people in the Valley who would like to get to there or LA on the train instead of taking I-5 south from Bakersfield to get there.
San Francisco and even LA or San Diego aren’t the problem. Its the inbetween cities like Fresno and Bakersfield where you are going to need a car after you get off of HSR.
They already use buses to get people to Hanford to the Amtrack station there, and, surprisingly, regional transit around here is slowly improving. They’ve gone from 4 to 8 bus lines here this city in the past few years, and intercity services are increasing as well.
I had a weekend layover in Emeryville a while back. It’s on the Oakland side, near the Bay Bridge.
The hotel was a long way from the nearest BART station but there’s a free shuttle bus that will take you there.
The shuttle that used to run between the UC campus and the Berkeley BART station in the 80s was named Humphrey Gobart.
Los Angeles, not so much, but you can do without a car there as well.
I’ve been to LA multiple times without a car and got by perfectly well, thanks. Public transportation in LA is very underrated.
and improving.
I haven’t been southwards down the Grapevine in years. I’ll take your word for it, and it ’twas not so even 15 years ago.
Medium to long distance rail travel is kind of pointless if you need a car once you get to your destination.
Generally true, but if HSR is HS enough (and California’s should be), it mitigates this problem. The hours saved in travel time trade off against the time/cost/convenience penalties of not having a car when you get there.
I see the CA rail project as highly likely to be a boondoggle.
In general, I find the cost of US infrastructure projects horribly depressing. It’s like healthcare: we pay SO much more for it than other countries – including those with unions, environmental protections, etc. Why? The CA rail project might be a bad project even if that wasn’t a factor, but to me the cost situation ups the stakes on every project. If everything costs more than it should, making mistakes (e.g. Seattle’s fabulous tunnel) is doubly bad.
You know, I’ve always wondered this myself. It’s like, China overbuilds infrastructure super quickly and much more cheaply than we do, but China doesn’t give a shit about their environment or about dispossessing people or using slave labor or whatnot. So I’ve always kind of ignored that.
But plenty of other countries seem to build decent infrastructure at reasonable cost in a reasonable timeframe. There are exceptions, of course; off the top of my head, Toronto can’t get its own head out of its ass when it comes to building out transit. But the US is apparently doing something wrong and I don’t know what it is.
Right. China – bad comparison (authoritarian, much less legacy infrastructure to tiptoe around, environmental concerns only just starting to be addressed). No doubt. But Western European nations seem to be able to complete infrastructure projects much more quickly and for a lot less money. I really doubt this is because they screw over the workers or trash the environment (relative to us, anyway). So what the hell?
I figure we’re doing some things wrong. Badly wrong.
IMHO, it goes back to ‘democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard’.
Kevin Drum wrote about this awhile a go. It seems to amount to a combniation of factors. Other countries have a less extensive review process, no or fewer mechanisms for NIMBYs to gum up the works, and fewer rules governing how these sorts of things are contracted. This means that projects can start earlier and with less money spent on prep work or fighting opponents.
I remember reading Drum on the subject, but even then the explanation seemed vague to me.
I did take away from it that we do things that need to be done in excessively time consuming/difficult ways. Such as environmental impact reviews – those need to be done. Just chucking them would be a bad idea. But man, they take forever and they’re expensive. Surely we could do that better.
I have to think a large part of it is the bidding process.
But in both cases, if you were to ask me, “ok, how do we reform this” I’m just going to blink at you and shrug. I don’t know.
Drum’s account (IIRC) was pretty good. Almost all answers to the question seem vague or unsatisfying because there’s not really one big cost driver; it’s a bunch of little things that add up.
I recall the diagnosis making sense.
I’m vague on “how do we fix this.”
Ah, right. True, no doubt, in part because the causes of the problem are diverse and “fixes” to different parts of it would, independently, only produce a trivial decrease in costs.
I agree it’s immensely frustrating. Thinking about how much more light rail metro Seattle could have with its current taxing authority if costs we comparable to Vancouver is just depressing.
i have only anecdotal rather than empirical evidence on the matter, but in my professional experience, the two biggest drivers of higher costs are nimby-ism precluding cost-effective siting and an environmental regulatory review process that has, over the years, gotten (depending, of course, which state you are in, california being particularly egregious) so expensive and time-consuming as to be a pure disincentive to even trying (so to speak!).
The US thinks that corruption is horrible, that the solution is bureaucracy, and that bureaucracy is made of papers not people. Other countries which tolerate nepotism as long as it works, aaor which don’t neglect the human expertise of their civil servants, aren’t so gameable by the infrastructure industrial complex.
Well, maybe it’s because Rhode Island is so small that it doesn’t attract the national IIC (Bechtel and the like), but it has a remarkable history of endogenous corruption and badly done work! (Though I have to say that the most recently completed road project actually seems to be well done.)
I think the ability of NIMBYs to gum up the works on any infrastructure project before it starts is a more important reason for higher costs. California had to spend a lot of money and time fighting HSR’s opponents before building could begin. Our political system gives NIMBYs many opportunities to wreck mischief that would not be tolerated elsewhere.
And yet we occasionally get really egregious emminent domain cases. There was one here in CT a while back that, IIRC, was just awful.
The trouble with down with the NIMBYs is that it’s easy to say until it’s your back yard…
The really egregious eminent domain cases are much rarer than NIMBYs who frustrate useful works.
Murc beat me to it, but does anyone have an explanation for this phenomenon? In healthcare it’s plausibly explained by the inability of our government to negotiate freely with drug companies and other perverse incentives built into the system (or at least that’s how it’s been explained to me). But what about construction in this country causes it to be so much more than elsewhere?
When something doesn’t work, we try to pass a new law to fix it. Other countries try to hire better bureaucrats.
Maybe other countries also don’t have a political party which advocates for and benefits from things not working.
Every country has wingnuts–they’re just winning the battle here, largely due to the huge misinformation campaigns that make breaking government appear to be a way to save the taxpayers money.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but my impression is that we have more meaningful layers of government than most Europeon countries. Federal, state, county, city/town/township. Are we wasting money/time/political capital on infastructure projects buying of all these interests?
Oooh, yeah, I’ve wondered about that one too. Not just for infrastructure projects. More generally, I think a lot of Americans’ frustration with “too much government” is really about too many layers of government.
Dear Mr. President, we have too many layers of government. Please remove 1. I am not a crank.
OK, daft question time: what would happen if, magically, the Senate could be apportioned by population? Or by some other measure that didn’t take for its fundamental unit somewhat arbitrary subdivisions of a nation?
Would that have an effect on the downstream layers of govt?
I read something about pre-revolutionary France that said one big problem with government was that nothing had been abolished in a thousand years; they just kept adding more and more layers and structures. They badly needed rationalization, and going through a revolution was probably the only way to do that, even if it wasn’t an important goal of the revolutionaries.
Centuries of feudalism and effort of the French kings to get people to respect their authority left the administrative geography of France a mess. One of the most important and enduring victories of the French Revolution was the creation of the departmental system to get rid of the administrative mess.
Here’s a page about French Law in an historical perspective.
DA, that link just goes back to this page.
Sorry about that, chief.
Link
Sorry, don’t want to be repetitive
I tend to think Michigan would do fine without one of our layers of local government and technically, we could do that with a single statewide referendum. Difficult, but much easier than getting rid of states.
Just to toss it out there, saw a tweet noting that a Republican presided over the Senate for the first time in eight years, noting Marco Rubio did it the other day. So, he can now say he was the President, since he “presided” over the Senate.
“Back when I was President …”
In Spain the terrorist attacks took place while a center right party was in power, and that party lied about the attacks and tried to frame someone else…
not comparable at all
There was a recentish New Yorker article about Spotify that presented streaming as a possible philosophical solution to the problem of piracy: rather than owning individual pieces of music, pay a monthly fee for access to (almost) everything. Putting aside how unhappy some artists are about Spotify in particular, I have to say that this is the only kind of solution that makes sense to me.
I was an obsessive music collector back in my teens and twenties (80s-90s), accumulating thousands of LPs and CDs, and when Napster and its spawn came on the scene I started downloading obsessively, building up a huge iTunes library. But once my collecting urge became unhindered by monetary limits I quickly acquired way more music than I can ever actually listen to. I’ve made a smart playlist of never-played tracks that I diligently try to pare down, but it never gets shorter for long because there’s always new stuff, and I don’t have that much time available to listen to music anyway. Really, it’s become a chore, which isn’t a good way to listen to music, but to stop doing it would mean abandoning the goal of listening to everything I have at least once, which also seems ridiculous.
So it seems to me that my method of listening to music, born in an age of scarcity, is now just fundamentally flawed, unsuited for the times. None of the cultural, aesthetic, and social imperatives that made me start collecting music seems all that current these days. I don’t really want to own music anymore, like it’s part of me; I just want to have it available, like it’s a friendly visitor. And I’m sure this is a very common experience.
The thing is that Spotify seems to be really terrible for artists. The revenues are between $.006 and $.0084 per play, they’ve said that that will never go any higher, and, well, just read this piece from Damon Krukowski that I linked above.
A monthly fee for everything, divided among everyone, isn’t going to yield much. The big labels may have enough of an oligopoly to do OK out of it, but little artists aren’t going to make anything, and even the big artists don’t seem happy.
If you download music without paying for it, you’re fucking STEALING it. Not copying, and doing it because other people do it isn’t a fucking excuse.
And save your hate for the music labels. You’re funding a WAY shittier and nastier industry every time you buy or use something that involves petroleum (which is pretty much everything). I hate music labels too, but I don’t go steal gas because I hate Chevron, that’s just fucking stupid, and YES IT IS the same fucking thing.
Why is this even a discussion?
Seriously, how much nuance does this discussion really need? You know when you are ripping a music or movie torrent that you’re stealing it. You also know that it’s illegal and wrong.
You also know that it’s not just the big corporations that get hurt when you do that. In fact, I think you all know who REALLY gets hurt when profits go down at big corporations.
Don’t fucking steal, and don’t embarrass yourself by making excuses for it or defending it.
Eh it is more nuanced than that. You ever listen to the radio or watch a tv show and skip around during commercials?
Well that makes you a dirty thief.
You have the economics backwards. In ad-supported radio and TV, you are not the consumer. You are the product. The consumer is the advertisers who pay for access to the audience. Once the ad appears, they have all the access they can reasonably expect. Meanwhile, the people who make radio and TV shows are getting paid whether I watch the commercials or not. No theft.
But by this logic they’ve also gotten paid whether you download the show after broadcast or watch it during the broadcast and skip the commercials. There’s really no difference as far as getting paid is concerned.
When you throw broadcast media into the mix, the copyright argument becomes much more muddled. It’s pretty obvious to me that snagging a free copy of, say, the complete works of John Scalzi via download is harmful to John Scalzi and his editorial/publishing partners. It is far, far less clear that if I miss an episode of Agent Carter tonight and snag the torrent of the Innertoobs that anyone has been harmed by this at all, given that they were giving it away freely the night before and that that broadcast episode was already paid for by ad sales from the network. And that if I owned a DVR I could have had it free and clear with no ethical problems whatsoever – are we really saying that owners of specific technologies get a free pass on ethical questions that other people who don’t own that technology have to angst about?
No–not when it’s posted on a tor site for any number of people to copy. You have television on a schedule with scheduled and sold advertising on the one hand, or On-Demand with disabled FF, and on the other hand, one person who bought a file and stripped the DRM is sharing with anywhere from one to over a million people. It’s not the same thing.
Artists don’t just get paid no matter how many units they sell.
What if you were to pick up the complete works of John Scalzi at a used book store? The artist gets nothing, the publisher gets nothing. It’s legal to do so under the first-sale doctrine, but is it moral? For the creator, how is it any different than torrenting the work off the tubes?
What if you were to pick up the complete works of John Scalzi at a used book store? The artist gets nothing, the publisher gets nothing.
And there isn’t another copy in circulation. I was able to buy one because someone else sold one. (We also don’t pay authors for rereading their books.)
Of course, with digital we can easily do that. Indeed, one aspect of a subscription service is that number of reads does correspond to what the owner gets. And, of course, this is totally standard for any publicly played recording (though ASCAP and BMI collect and pay based on a statistical model rather than exact counting).
But we could easily do this for “bought” music (i.e., downloaded, etc.). Music players could capture how often you listen to a song, etc.
(Again this might not be ideal!)
But I don’t think there is a sharp difference. Consider textbook editions where the point is to limit the used market. It’s not so easy for e.g., novels or standard non fiction, of course.
In point of fact, if you want to support the author, buy the book, new, when it comes out, and then maybe presents later to keep it on the shelf. Requesting your library to buy a copy is also helpful. Buying from a used bookstore probably isn’t. Lending your copy probably isn’t.
(This isn’t to say that authors dislike these things! We’re all pretty socialised to regard these things as unexceptionable. But that’s just familiarity, really. One thing that bugs people about eBooks is that they often are as expensive as physical books but you have fewer rights and it’s perceived that they are way cheaper to produce.)
He’d already been paid from the original sale.
If I buy a used car, how is that any different from driving one off the dealership lot in the middle of the night? Um, quite a bit, actually.
I’m worried I’m being willfully obtuse here, but from the publisher’s perspective, how is buying the used book any different from making a copy? They are not making any money in either case.
If you steal a car, the dealership has lost the money they paid for the car and the opportunity to sell it. I don’t think this is analogous to intellectual property violations.
When I sell a used book, there is still only one copy in circulation, for which the publisher has been paid.
When I make a copy, there are now two copies in circulation, for one of which the publisher has not been paid.
And when it’s a file that is ripped from a P2P site, you are making a copy, everyone else who wants it is making a copy, their contacts are making copies–it makes exponential growth.
It would be one think if you burned a disk for your friend. It’s quite another when [upcoming artist who has no idea how far his/her career will go based on one popular song] gets some iTunes downloads and gets a little VEVO revenue on Youtube and then a couple million copies explode all over the internet, for which the artist doesn’t get a dime.
Thanks, Hogan. I know I’m not articulating this very well.
You’re right, the unauthorized creation of a copy is a violation of the publisher’s rights. I don’t view that as stealing, but it is against the law. I personally struggle with caring too much about people who violate copyright law. I suppose I’d like to see artists compensated for their labor slightly more than I’d like to see that work be freely available. I don’t have any idea what the best way to balance those two desires is though. Again, sorry for being a bit obtuse.
You’re right, the unauthorized creation of a copy is a violation of the publisher’s rights. I don’t view that as stealing
Since we’re using Scalzi as an example, I happen to have him right here.
This is probably an even more apropos Scalzi link.
He clearly thinks pirating e-books is theft from him (and the publishing company he likes.) And I’m not sure how pirating e-books is different from pirating music.
I noticed that Mr. Scalzi pointed out that those who borrow his book are depriving him of income, just as those who have illegally downloaded it have.
Jesus, what a crock.
And exactly how does that compare to ripping a digital file and keeping to listen to forever?
Derelict wrote,
Yawn. You can rationalize all you want, but the fact is that these days these goods are, simply, non-rivalrous; your pouts don’t make it not so.
Of course, the fact that they’re non-rivalrous isn’t a sufficient condition for the actions described to not be theft, but it certainly does mean that they’re different.
I spent the whole day outside at a meeting with a lawyer and two insurance adjusters, and just read the thread, so let me jump in here. I’m a published author who’s been pirated. I’ve got four books on aspects of my work that are reasonably well known in my engineering niche. (Zombie Rotten McDonald, to his everlasting shame, bought one of them years before he knew me via the inter-tubes.) A couple of years ago, a guy who also works in this niche scanned my best-known book and put it up on his website. To his credit, he took it down after only a few outraged emails from me.
You want to know how the pirated feel? If he’s been in the same room as me when I found out instead of several hundred miles away, I would have knocked his fucking teeth down his throat. I spent years researching and writing the damned thing, but he thought it was information that wanted to be free.
I’m glad you weighed in. Part of my ethical judgment here is informed by whether I could say to an artist’s face, “Yeah, I downloaded a copy of your work for free, and I don’t see anything wrong with that.” I can’t possibly imagine being able to do that, and I have a hard time believing most people could. And everything they say in defense of what they’re doing just sounds like misdirection, smoke, and mirrors.
Yeah. I’d like to sign on to this (particularly as part of my livelihood stems directly from authors being able to benefit from their copyright!).
I may not know whether I think it’s not theft anymore (thanks, Lizzie, for forcing me to go away, read up and sharpen my thinking. Have just been delving into copyhype and related sites), but I do know that’s its a pretty scuzzy action.
I agree.
I think the principled position for “information wants to be free” or “the current IP regime sucks” folks is:
1) to produce free/open content themselves and support people who produce free/open content
2) to agitate for changes to the legal regime that they think will be overall better
I mean, Richard Stallman is a Very Annoying Person, but he does these things and I can’t see there’s anything at all wrong with that.
I agree.
didn’t look much at this whole thread earlier. have to say, the idea “information wants to be free” is just a freaking *joke*. information doesn’t want, or need, *anything*
people who create or organize or whatever the information, though… they want- and need- to do silly little things like eat, have shelter, give their kids nice stuff, etc.- none of which, far as i can tell, is very often “free”
It’s really not that much of a joke, at least originally:
(And obviously, it was a metaphor :))
The linked to essay is very helpful and contains a lovely Thomas Jefferson quote:
It might be worth trying separate out “knowledge” from “entertainment”, I guess. I’m rather dubious about that. What I like about the Brand version is that it centers the tension. Sharing knowledge or art seems important. We have free(ish for the consumer) education. Patents are supposed to weaken the benefit of keeping trade secrets. New art comes from building on older art and the line between inspiration, homage, and rip off can be fine or blatant.
yeah, that’s all good. i thought later i’d probably gotten carried away- and yet i still think my point has validity- somehow people need to keep in mind that all this information they take in- and build on- didn’t just come out of some sort of idealized abstract place where living breathing people don’t deserve credit or compensation
Oh I agree that a lot of info wants to be free people, even the non nakedly self interested ones, can be very annoying. People rationalize and hate paying for some classes of thing.
OTOH, there are huge problems with the current IP regime. Scientific/academic publishing is a real mess. Indefinitely extended copyright is pretty bogus as is ton of patent law.
There’s also plenty of things wrong with book and movie publishing, etc. Lack of public funding of the arts is bad. Streaming/subscription services are a big challenge. Format migration is reasonable seen as something of a rip off. Amazon growing monsopoly is dangerous. Etc etc.
I have just finished reading this thread, and I have a question for people.
I actually agree that pirating media is morally wrong (or at least ethically dubious), and a criminal act. The thing is, where does that leave me? I am probably not what you would call a large-scale pirate, as I don’t visit pirate servers, or download thousands of files. Indeed, I don’t usually download files at all. However I have often visited Youtube and watched various videos featuring songs or old TV shows. Sometimes, I even have downloaded these videos to my computer, although I haven’t sold these files or shared them with anyone else. There was even one occasion where I downloaded a PDF scan of a book to my computer (although I later deleted it).
I highly doubt that the original creator had in most of these cases given permission for those videos to be posted on Youtube, or downloaded. Given this, I am probably guilty of piracy on more than one occasion. Am I thus ethically obligated to tell this to the authorities and accept whatever punishment the legal system would give me?
I probably should do this, but I confess I am highly reluctant to do so, and am apprehensive about what the consequences would be.