Read Little Brother. Pretty good book by Doctorow.

http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Brother_%28Cory_Doctorow_novel%29

Going to have to read FOR THE WIN.

http://craphound.com/ftw/

I would suggest that people read the Paragraph titled "The Copyright Thing." Good insight there as to Copyright Laws being passed with little or no democratic debate.

>> ^Croccydile:

I think this is getting out of hand when the director of this movie himself has been down with them. Either way, the clips are specifically protected by copyright law under parody. More fuel for the DMCA is stupid fire.
FFS, I would have not even known about this movie (and I wound up getting it) if it were not for these videos!


And both YouTube links to director's 2 favorite versions of the meme are.... "blocked on copyright grounds" by Constantin Film.

I think this is getting out of hand when the director of this movie himself has been down with them. Either way, the clips are specifically protected by copyright law under parody. More fuel for the DMCA is stupid fire.

FFS, I would have not even known about this movie (and I wound up getting it) if it were not for these videos!

Larry Lessig is awesome. I thought he was advising the Obama campaign (when it was still only a campaign) on information technology policy. I can't help but think they must not have given him a swanky government job.

Anyways, I'm a bit curious how much actual Republican support there is for opening up copyright law. I know there's libertarian support for it, and certainly the grassroots left supports it (though it's not really on anybody's hot issue list), but that doesn't mean Republicans are actually going to stand up to the big media companies if those companies' lobbyists say to Republicans "this will put our business model in jeopardy!"

But Lessig is right, in this case deregulation could be a big win for society.

>> ^mizila:
"This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by WMG. The audio has been disabled. "
Great, a music montage with no music. :-|


Well it WAS working just a couple of days ago.
I hate US copyright laws

niiiiiice....
copyright laws have gotten out of hand.
thank you disney,viacom,clear channel!
pricks.

Great sift, but the title misrepresents the talk a bit. It should rather read

The current state of copyright law is a cultural disaster of incredible proportions

Like all issues, Piracy is not black and white and I find that people arguing for either side are frustratingly dogmatic about pointing out arguments that only support their side. Ironically, the people that I've seen that argue from a wider perspective are the people that set up and run piratebay.

As an example, I often see people citing the following in favour of piracy:

1. 'Piracy' as try-before-you-buy to prevent getting defrauded by lying marketers.
2. Piracy allows people to make use of works where the user would otherwise be unable to pay for them.

On the first note, if you're being realistic it's a nice ideal but one that isn't representative of the whole truth. I have downloaded games from the piratebay and other sources; played them through to the end and thoroughly enjoyed them. Often, I have then not gone on to purchase them. I would imagine the same is true for many people who give this argument, as well as those who don't.

On the flip side, I have purchased said games where the game gives me a large amount of replayability and I continue to play it; or where the games has online functionality that requires a purchased key.

However, I should point out that I have also paid for shareware with the exact same reasoning. Software and games that are legal to copy, distribute and use freely where payment is optional, that I have then gone on to purchase.

On the second note, being 'unable' to pay for them is contextual. Like everyone else I have a budget (be it $40/£40 or a bazillion cash monies). For each individual, this budget is quantifiable and correlates to a specific amount of possible purchases and profit made. Being unable to pay for something may not mean that I literaly don't have the money to pay for game X, but that I don't have the money to pay for game X and movie Y and have chosen instead to pay for game X and pirate movie Y instead.

This leads to arguments against piracy:

1. Piracy is theft.
2. For each copy sold, an amount of profit has been taken away.
3. It's the people at the bottom of the industry chain that suffer the most.
4. If nobody paid for intellectual property, nobody would create it.

The first argument has been made many times, and countered with the fact that stealing results in somebody having less of something; which leads on to the second point.

However, as I pointed out, people have quantifiable budgets; and I believe that people spend their gaming / software / entertainment budgets (for that's what defines them). There's a mistake on the part of people who are against piracy in imagining that there is somehow an infinite consumer budget for their property. Meaning that for every copy of a $40 game pirated, they have lost $40. But if my budget allows for me to purchase two games, and I purchase two while pirating two then I have given my entire budget to the games industry. It's not possible for them to have received double my budget, therefore they have not lost half of it regardless of what I do.

I'll repeat the point: I have given my entire budget. What more could somebody who provides a service want? The fact that I gave that budget to person X and not person Y has no bearing on the effects of piracy and is more about the quality of the product which lead me to my purchasing decisions.

I can't imagine that all of the people downloading from piratebay are stockpiling their money into a giant vault with a 'Money we didn't use to pay for intellectual property' label on it.

Going back to points made by the guys who run piratebay themself, along with many individuals with their eye on modern forms of distribution; the above misconception and imaginary infinite budget comes from a dead capitalistic culture where distributors (agents, publishers, managers and other middlemen) have come to assume that payment for creativity is somehow a virtue and not a benefit to be grateful for.

By the same logic, I should start creating simple matchstick men; or drawing squares on paper and wonder why I can not sell them for money (although Martin Creed may beg to differ).

Making profit on something that you have created is a boon, and should not be taken for granted. If you fail to sell something in a world of digital distribution then you have to change either what you are creating or how you are distributing it.

Another point that is often unmentioned is that; in terms of intellectual property (rather than a physical manifestation of work) your sale is based entirely on limitation and restriction, rather than production. You are taking profit on providing the service of not stopping somebody from making a copy of your work; rather than taking profit for creating a copy of your work. This is what licensing, patenting and copyright is all about.

For those who say that it's the people at the bottom of the industry that are hurt the most from copyright infringement (the people who actually do the work), I propose that this isn't a symptom of piracy at all and is entirely about how companies own, sell and trade intellectual property, and how corporation and public companies obey their bottom line. If their sales are hurting, they recoup their costs by hitting the people at the bottom while protecting the incomes of those at the top. This is an entirely different subject of wrong that would take us way off topic and is in no way limited to the effects of piracy.

However, to say that entire industries will die if people stopped paying for them is, in fact valid. So lets imagine for a moment that we live in a world where there is no copyright law; no intellectual property or patents. Is this a world without music? A world without movies or games? In that world, the first thing that would happen is that people will start paying other people to make these things; and that might just be a world where people pay other people for creating something that they want, rather than paying a middleman who takes the largest cut of profit using a retroactive 'license' for some sub par product that they bought from someone else and then marketed as good.

In a world without the expensive middleman, artists can take more risks; independants who work for pleasure rather than profit can thrive; and the enthusiast can sell without trying to satisfy a middleman's arbitrary bar of statistical sellability for a publishing deal.

With Radiohead, NIN, iTunes, netflix, steam and the slow rolling back of DRM, it's a world that we are heading towards; and a world that the piratebays and napsters helped to create.

It actually runs far deeper than you would imagine.
The judges reasoning, was that pirate bay was 'facilitating the breach of international copyright laws'.

Essentially, any company that is connected financially in any way to a search provider that links to a site that hosts copyrighted material, can be liable with this ruling.

ISP's, electrical companies for allowing ISP's DC's to run, contractors that install equipment for data centers...etc...etc..

Its the dumbest ruling in the history of rulings, the pirate bay is a search engine dealing specifically with torrents.

Google indexes them also, but its tough to filter for them unless you know the key DB commands for googles engine (possible btw for google to do a far better job if you know the commands), theres no way this should stand up under appeal if their defence is briefed on how the technology works, and he can convey it in lamen to a judge.

I would be shocked if it did. Its like forcing the roads and traffic authority (the RTA for short, in Australia, its the governmental organisation for standards in road construction, signage, rules and regulations etc.) to uphold the road laws. If someone is drink driving on your freeway, you go to jail for a year.

Thats fucked up.

>> ^Haldaug:
^jwray
Oops, I upvoted your comment before I saw your bashing of copyright. In an undeniably capitalistic world, copyright laws are one of the best ways to assure that people have the incentive to make new and interesting information.


Perhaps copyright should only be used against people who try to SELL copyrighted works without authorization and without substantial value-added derivation.

Good authors were compensated for their work long before copyright existed, and continue to be compensated after it became utterly unenforceable.

^jwray

Oops, I upvoted your comment before I saw your bashing of copyright. In an undeniably capitalistic world, copyright laws are one of the best ways to assure that people have the incentive to make new and interesting information.

Wow, thats so bizzare and really quite insulting. Copyright laws are getting insane. (as if they weren't before, but I didn't think they could get worse.) It seems absolutely ridiculous to me that they wouldn't allow you to bring a Sketchbook to an Art Gallery

In reply to this comment by LooiXIV:
>> ^Fade:
I can walk into any art gallery this very minute, take a picture of any of the many works of art walk out and print out pretty reasonable copies of the work. I'm clearly not committing theft since the original stays where it is.


nothing against your argument but I just want to say that there are a lot art galleries who do not allow people to take any sort of picture. Including hand draw copies. I was in the Philadelphia museum of art and they wouldn't let me carry in a sketch book to this one exhibit because of potential "copyright infringement", stupidest thing ever I couldn't sketch my own interpretation of art. haha I really don't know what to make of such a situation...

It's an intentionally naive piece of childish bullshit.
Look .. you can't just "copy" a bicycle the way you can copy the latest song or movie.
If I'm wrong, please do send me the torrent for your motorcycle, car or house.

'Copying isn't theft because you wind up with more'? Well, if you own the original and you haven't gotten paid for all that "more" that's out there .. do you care? If your work, whatever it is, could just be replicated and given away for free, would you get some satisfaction knowing giggling idiots were singing about it?

"one for me and one for you" .. and nothing for the people who made it too.

We need to work on copyright law and how we handle digital distribution (and obviously prosecution of violators) but this is just fucking stupid. Everything can't be free. People who invest their hearts, minds, souls, careers, and companies .. deserve to have their work protected.

Sorry DFT. I just don't agree with this at all.

It's an intentionally naive piece of childish bullshit.
Look .. you can't just "copy" a bicycle the way you can copy the latest song or movie.
If I'm wrong, please do send me the torrent for your motorcycle, car or house.

'Copying isn't theft because you wind up with more'? Well, if you own the original and you haven't gotten paid for all that "more" that's out there .. do you give a fuck? If your work, whatever it is, could just be replicated and given away for free, would you get some satisfaction knowing giggling idiots were singing about others getting it for free?

"one for me and one for you" .. and nothing for the people who made it too.

We need to work on copyright law and how we handle digital distribution (and obviously prosecution of violators) but this is just fucking stupid. Everything can't be free. People who invest their hearts, minds, souls, careers, and companies .. deserve to have their work protected.

Sorry DFT. I just don't agree with this at all.

NetRunner,

There is little doubt in my mind you will not read what I have posted, as it is a 598 page intellectual monster; but I have looked at the 11 page FAQ you linked, and not even past the first section I have had to stomach conjecture.

I do not know what reading is like for you, but when an author makes a lot of unsubstantiated claims, it is really hard for me to get through it. This is the same reason it is hard for me to ever finish reading the bible. Every time I sit down and try, I am left with more questions than I began with because bold claims are constantly made, yet never explained. How can you stand to read Kangas with a critical mind when he raises more questions than he answers?

The opening section of Kangas' FAQ is "What is liberalism?" Yet after only 4 short paragraphs I was left with more than five times as many questions as the section attempted to answer.

1. "...commercial crimes like fraud, copyright infringement, insider trading, breach of contract, price gouging, etc. Without these laws, the market would function either poorly or not at all."
2. "if we did not have copyright laws discouraging people from pirating all their software, computer programmers could not even make a profit, and would have no incentive to produce."
3. "Yet another function of government is to defend the free market -- for example, with police and military forces."
4. "A dramatic example is Eisenhower's Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, which authorized the creation of over 40,000 miles of interstate highway. These highways interconnected, accelerated and expanded the U.S. economy, with profound results."
5. "Much of this infrastructure was too huge and expensive to be funded by private companies, and languished undeveloped until the public sector stepped in."

These statements only raise questions, they do not explain anything. I'm not saying I agree or disagree with them, but if a uneducated reader came across it they would either have to take them on faith, or be riddled with questions: Why does the market perform poorly without those laws? Why can't programmers make a profit without copyright? Why does the government defend the free market? How did the highways accelerate the economy? Why couldn't private companies fund this infrastructure?

Moreso, they have nothing to do with answering the question "what is liberalism?" If you listed those five claims and asked a person to guess what the author was trying to support, would anyone guess "the definition of liberalism?" Why did he even include these assertions when they do not support the heading; and how is that not intellectually frustrating to you? Its not just conjecture, its bad writing.

I do not enjoy nonfiction which requires faith, because the claims are so intellectually impotent they do not arouse in me any desire to see what the author has to say next. I can force myself through the 11 pages of 10th-grade-level writing from an online pundit such as Kangas, but why should I when the question has already been forcefully answered almost 82 years ago in 224 pages of masterful prose by a genius in the field?

I mean, here are both authors answering the same question:
http://mises.org/liberal/isec1.asp
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/ShortFAQ.htm#liberalism

Just compare the force of writing for yourself.