Philosophical Quandry: Piracy

[PvK]

Originally posted by geoschmo:

quote:

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Originally posted by PvK:
You can only give stipends to people who receive a certain amount of the voluntary approvals from the consumers.

So why not just cut out the inefficent middle man and just let the buyers buy what they want from the sellers they like. If the seller doesn't make something the buyer wants he'll get it from someone else. There's your voluntary approval right there.

Capitalism, what a concept.

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You're just ignoring the points and the topic. There are many reasons. Two are:

1) Like your previous suggestion, your solution doesn't address unauthorized copying. My system authorizes all copying. Your system retains incentive to copy without paying, but technology makes such copying trivial and costless (except to the creator who loses compensation). Nonetheless, your suggestion works to a limited extent, as evidenced by Shrapnel.

2) Your suggestion doesn't include how to eliminate the current megacorporate leeches which dominate the industry.

PvK

[Baron Munchausen]

Copyright of characters vs. stories...

That is something of a problem. A trademark is traditionally something used to identify a business to its customers. Mickey Mouse is a trademark because he's the 'face' of Disney. The other characters invented by Disney are not necessarily trademarks. Donald Duck, Scrooge McDuck, Goofy, Pluto, etc... Control freaks like Walt Disney, Inc. are obviously not going to be pleased with losing control of even minor characters. But then corporations are often not pleased that they have competition at all, witness Microsoft and the 'pay me for every machine you ship' license on DOS and Windows. The public has to get off its collective arse and make Congress understand that copyright has gone to far. There's no other solution to the problem.

A reasonable limit on copyright duration is just going to have to be sufficient. Give people the time to get some decent benefits from what they invent, and then have a firm end of copyright. I advocate 21 years myself. This is the traditional length of a 'generation' even though we've lowered the voting age to 18 recently. (That was because of the complaints during the Vietnam War that 18 year-olds were old enough to die in war but not old enough to vote, remember.) Anyway, 21 years after a book, song, movie is released you've got a whole new generation of people who have grown up with it. It's just 'part of the world' for them. They can't remember a time when it wasn't around. So, it's time to let it go.

Yes, corporations 'owning' patents and copyrights is a problem. It's the source of the current warping of the law, actually. Because of the direct links of stock value to the compensation of top officers of the corporation suits have an incentive to try every trick they can come up with to increase the bottom line for their corporate monster^H^H^H^H^H^H^ master. You do know that almost all employment contracts include the right of the employer to all creations of the employee on the job, and sometimes even on their own time? Many people don't realize what they are signing, but those contracts really do say that the company owns everything you do. This is something else that needs to be stopped by Congress -- i.e. the general public has to get off their arse.

A real solution to the 'making a living' problem for artists of all stripes would be to set legal limits for the percentage of price for a copyrighted work that a corporate 'distributor' could take. Thus guaranteeing the 'original creator' a certain portion of his earnings. As it is now for example, most contemporary record labels don't pay 'their artists' a red cent in royalties. They have structured the contracts in (frankly illegal) ways that guarantee them all the profits and the artists get all the charges, resulting in the artists owing the corporations money. Most acts only make money on tour. A few actually do own at least a share in their own labels (Anni di Franco, Loreena McKennit, Metallica) and actually get some of the corporate profits.

(Hint: If you buy the CD of your favorite artist directly from them AT THE CONCERT they get the share that normally goes to the retail outlet. This is orders of magnitude more than they would normally get. Don't buy the CD at the store. Wait. Go to see them on tour and buy it directly from them. This doesn't solve the corporate greed problem, but it helps the artists.)

The most evil, slimey, disgusting trick of all is the 'work for hire' clause in those contracts. According to current copyright law a 'performance' cannot be a work for hire. Yet they have had this clause defining all songs/albums as 'works for hire' in their contracts for decades. If the artist notices they get the glad-hander reply 'but that's not valid so it doesn't mean anything'... yes, but all the time they have been lobbying to CHANGE THE LAW. They nearly got it passed a few years ago (it was an amendment or 'rider' on the 1998 copyright extension as I recall). Those b*st*rd suits have been plotting to rob 'their artists' once and for all even while they are whining before congress about how this 'piracy' hurts 'their artists'. How many of the complainers (ahem, Lars from Metallica?) even know this? It was just barely kicked out of the bill before it was finalized.

[ July 16, 2003, 21:32: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[Suicide Junkie]

What about a tax rate of 0.1% per employee?
Don't hire more than 1000 employees, or you're in trouble.

Encourage small, friendly mom & pop home businesses.

[Baron Munchausen]

Originally posted by tesco samoa:
geo you can patient the idea for a train.... There are companies that just patient ideas and only ideas. Major corp's push this all the time.

You no longer have to beat someone to producing a product people like and purchase. You just have to beat the company who builds it by only coming up with a concept and prooving it in court.... That is it.

And the copy would fall under non commerical use. Commerical use would be for another company / person to use the code and sell it for profit...

This is another facet of the 'intellectual property' fiasco. Yes there are corporate 'entities' out there whose sole purpose for existance is to litigate over copyrights and patents. And yes you can patent 'general ideas' like Amazon.com's 'one click purchase' obscenity. This is not so much a function of legal stupidity as incompetent patent officers. The process of getting a patent hasn't been legally changed in generations. The people staffing the office have just gotten stupid. There undoubtedly will have to be some reform of the US Patent office as well as strictly legal reform.

The current hassles that SCO/Caldera is causing with Linux are in this same Category. They had complete turnover of management and the new staff decided that they couldn't make money the legit way and their best chance to get some money out of the corpse of the business was to start suing people. The plan seems to be that either they extort money from IBM by lawsuit or they scare IBM into buying them out before they completely crash and get sued by the shareholders.

[ July 16, 2003, 21:31: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ]

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by PvK:
You're just ignoring the points and the topic. There are many reasons. Two are:

1) Like your previous suggestion, your solution doesn't address unauthorized copying. My system authorizes all copying. Your system retains incentive to copy without paying, but technology makes such copying trivial and costless (except to the creator who loses compensation). Nonetheless, your suggestion works to a limited extent, as evidenced by Shrapnel.

2) Your suggestion doesn't include how to eliminate the current megacorporate leeches which dominate the industry.

PvK

1) My solution adresses it. It's illegal. Just because something illegal is easy to do and hard to stop doesn't mean we give up trying. A better method is like what Baron and Tesco are advocating, getting to the root of the actual problems and solving them rather then scrapping our entire economic system and handing over all art, entertainment, and software to some faceless burocracy.

2) You must not have read it then. I said that corporations should not be able to own copyrights. I said that artists/authors should control the distribution and recive the compensation for their production. What else do you want, beside the right to copy freely any software you feel like jsut because you can?

[PvK]

Originally posted by Loser:
I'm not sure I have a nice rational argument with which to confront your ideas, PvK, but they sound far to socialist to me. Establishing this central agency... well... sometimes such things are necessary, but it's to be avoided as much as possible.

Well the issue of how well an idea or system is carried out is extremely important. Socialism in the Soviet Union was largely a new flavor of abuse. Socialism in Sweden seems to work pretty well. I still don't think I'd label myself a "socialist" (particularly in company that seems to stigmatize the term). Megacorporate capitalism however is getting worse and worse at its own system, taking over governmental and legal powers, dominating media with crud, and soon, dominating computers with "secure" hardware and software which will get everyone to pay them constantly for the right to continue to use corporate intellectual property.

The idea I've proposed could be implemented as a private corporate business model too, but it's a bit less efficient, because you can't completely avoid the copy problem and the media base is less widespread.

For example, MegaMedia Corp can announce a subscription for full access to all the media it "owns", for a yearly fee of only say, $20. If they can control access and make it cheap and convenient to distribute to Subscribers, then probably practically everyone interested will Subscribe.

That's better than the current system, because people get much more content for less, and they don't have to worry about purchasing each title. Copying may be controlled simply by the low price - if it's so cheap and easy to get everything legitimately, then would-be "thieves" won't bother, or will be controlled by peer pressure. "You stole it? You didn't just Subscribe? It's only $20 and I did it - what a lamer!"

The thing is, corporations by their current nature, want to maximize profit, and don't care about society's benefit unless it helps their bottom line, and so they'll probably figure they should shoot for a higher cost, pushing the line where people will want to copy it.

Within the capitalist model, it gets back to the point others have made, that piracy is essentially competition for corporations. Essentially, corporations want to squeeze as much as they can out of their products, even if it means violating the nature of the media, and buying the legal and political influence to impose their will. They may be paranoid and naive to some degree here - they might actually make more money if they just lowered their prices and made simple network distribution.

However, I still prefer the promise of a non-corporate system (executed by conscientious Swedes, of course ) with a charter not to maximize its own profits, but to support the creation of the best media and make it available to everyone.

For one thing, even if the corporate model changes so that they offer all their media for a cheap flat price, they're still going to only give as little as they can to the people who actually make the media.

PvK

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by PvK:
For example, MegaMedia Corp can announce a subscription for full access to all the media it "owns", for a yearly fee of only say, $20. If they can control access and make it cheap and convenient to distribute to Subscribers, then probably practically everyone interested will Subscribe.

That's better than the current system, because people get much more content for less, and they don't have to worry about purchasing each title. Copying may be controlled simply by the low price - if it's so cheap and easy to get everything legitimately, then would-be "thieves" won't bother, or will be controlled by peer pressure. "You stole it? You didn't just Subscribe? It's only $20 and I did it - what a lamer!"

Now this I think is a great idea. As long as it's voluntary. Instead of the coporation though the artists/authors could band together like the guilds of old. This gives them access to enough capital to market their production, but they aren't forced into the contracts that are such a problem.

Just don't make it a government thing that you have to join and have no alternatives to and I would hapily support it.

Geoschmo

[geoschmo]

Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
A real solution to the 'making a living' problem for artists of all stripes would be to set legal limits for the percentage of price for a copyrighted work that a corporate 'distributor' could take. Thus guaranteeing the 'original creator' a certain portion of his earnings.

Well, I have a personal problem with any sort of mandated price limits.

I think a better alternative would be simply to make all these types of contracts illegal. The artist/author should retain complete control of the rights to their work. They should be allowed to enter into agreements with a publisher/distributor/marketer, but have the legal right to recind the agreement at ANY TIME and go somewhere else. An artist could negotiate a deal like this now, and some of the well established stars do. But new artists don't get deals like this because they need the company at first more then the company needs them. Because of this unequal position the company can make unreasonable demands and if the artist doesn't like it they can go back to stocking shelves at the A&P and the company will just find another artist that will sign on the dotted line.

If all these type deals were illegal the company would lose that leverage. They would be forced to actually work for the artist instead of the other way around.

Not setting price limits would allow a new artist to get their foot in the door easier. They could take a pittance at first to gain access to the marketing, distribution channels. They would be taking the risk on their own talent that they think they have. It's the definition of entrepreneurism. Then once they become established they would be free to renegotiate their deal at any time.

Geoschmo

[PvK]

Originally posted by geoschmo:
1) My solution adresses it. It's illegal. Just because something illegal is easy to do and hard to stop doesn't mean we give up trying. A better method is like what Baron and Tesco are advocating, getting to the root of the actual problems and solving them rather then scrapping our entire economic system and handing over all art, entertainment, and software to some faceless burocracy.

2) You must not have read it then. I said that corporations should not be able to own copyrights. I said that artists/authors should control the distribution and recive the compensation for their production. What else do you want, beside the right to copy freely any software you feel like jsut because you can?

I was replying to your short message which I quoted, not your earlier proposal.

The problem with anti-piracy laws is that they're obsolete and unenforceable. Or if you can enforce them, it is with very invasive stuff that forces you to surveil the public, and/or make all your computers look for copyright codes and refuse to copy data that has them. That's scary stuff, which a megacorp near you is working on.

Suppose you're playing Space Empires X, empire creation, and you can choose whether you want your people to have free access to all their own media or not, as a society. Which empire is going to have better research and happiness Ratings? The one where the average citizen can only afford to access 0.01% of the media?

PvK

[PvK]

Both the Baron's and Geo's ideas below sound like they'd be great steps in the right direction, to me. They don't really address piracy, though, just other corporate abuses.

PvK

Originally posted by geoschmo:

quote:

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Originally posted by Baron Munchausen:
A real solution to the 'making a living' problem for artists of all stripes would be to set legal limits for the percentage of price for a copyrighted work that a corporate 'distributor' could take. Thus guaranteeing the 'original creator' a certain portion of his earnings.

Well, I have a personal problem with any sort of mandated price limits.

I think a better alternative would be simply to make all these types of contracts illegal. The artist/author should retain complete control of the rights to their work. They should be allowed to enter into agreements with a publisher/distributor/marketer, but have the legal right to recind the agreement at ANY TIME and go somewhere else. An artist could negotiate a deal like this now, and some of the well established stars do. But new artists don't get deals like this because they need the company at first more then the company needs them. Because of this unequal position the company can make unreasonable demands and if the artist doesn't like it they can go back to stocking shelves at the A&P and the company will just find another artist that will sign on the dotted line.

If all these type deals were illegal the company would lose that leverage. They would be forced to actually work for the artist instead of the other way around.

Not setting price limits would allow a new artist to get their foot in the door easier. They could take a pittance at first to gain access to the marketing, distribution channels. They would be taking the risk on their own talent that they think they have. It's the definition of entrepreneurism. Then once they become established they would be free to renegotiate their deal at any time.

Geoschmo

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