Originally Posted by roachcoach
Note quite, since the content producer has already been paid for that particualr copy ("Licence"), so it's not actually the same. That individual copy has been paid for, and assuming that the licence is transferable (99% of them are) then thats perfectly OK.
The main point though with second hand content is that is has been paid for once, and the content producer has been paid for their work. So it's nothing like piracy.
That's why I said financially - someone has a copy of something they have not paid the creator for, merely the middle man who takes all.
The second hand market is causing significant rumbles in certain sections.
It is a victimless crime. You wouldn't arrest someone for collecting rain water that would otherwise have went into the water company's river or repository. Because obviously that'd be absurd. Just as the water company has no intrinsic right to more water, the publishing company doesn't have an intrinsic right to more profits.
I have no problem with paying publishers for providing me with the service of distributing media I want to consume in a manner I wish to consume it. Assuming they're actually doing just that, and not ripping the arse out of it.
That's why I buy from steam. And a lot of the time I buy on impulse because they're £3-20 for great games, sometimes I'll randomly gift them to friends, as well, just because they're good games for a reasonable price and I'd like to put more money towards the people who made it. And I don't have to wait in a 2 mile iphone-launch-esqiue queue for 0-day purchases I might be interested in. Because frankly, I have better things to be doing with my time than being psychologically conditioned by some corporation's marketing department.
I want the publishing company to work for my custom, not because they think they have some God given right to the contents of my bank account.
Last edited by aidanjt; 19-05-2011 at 03:11 PM.
aidanjt you keep saying something is victimless using frankly absurd comparisons but keep ignoring an established concept of opportunity cost.
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/o/opportunitycost.asp
Just because something is merely an opp cost (or opp loss as its commonly refereed too) doesn't make it imaginary. If you employed someone to work in your coffee shop and they slacked off, it wouldn't matter too much on the cost front, they are only £10 ph total cost lets say. But if in that time you failed to serve 40 customers you otherwise would your firm could be easily £50 opp costed.
When you start investing money in a public company you start to care about missed opportunities, the mini shareholder revolt at microsoft the other month over tablets and win phones, people are very upset because despite spending all the money on research, having the teams of people capable of doing everything, they didn't. The investors feel their money has been wasted because despite it making a profit and a return, it wasn't as much as it could have been, and its when the could because a should that people feel rightly upset.
So in the case of the copying a book in a store, well thats not morally fair either because they are in the game of selling the books, not providing a free reading service (thou some with their coffee places are doing that now) and as such your physically costing them money no matter how you cut it. Even if the book you were copying was out of copyright.
So when it comes to you 'using' say music for a film, its occupied time, you might have spent it staring at a wall just as much as you might have legitamately bought it but ultimately you've benefitted from something someone else produced, which they didn't want to sell it you for your price.
An example of this idea of ownership I thought was raised incredibly badly on news night by mr grant. Now ok, he used an ugly hooker, which is funny, but do we have any right to laugh at that, should we just steal his private life for our stories. I'm sure you'd say that the hack who printed his medical records crossed a line, but with every encroachment on his private life someone made money, and he didn't immediately loose out, thou I'd figure stories about skanky hookers might damage ones standing and therefore revenue possibilities.
Ultimately that is the thing, if you pirate, it is just intellectual property theft, but that does have value, because the value is determined by the vendor not the burglar.
When you argue it has none because they've lost nothing and I wouldn't have bought it, its akin to a burglar stealing a 10 year old PC, and saying "no don't be silly its only worth £50 anyway you wouldn't pay £2,000 now adays, and heck run linux" it is not the thief who determines the value.
If I had a series of pictures I was selling them for £10k a pop, you stole one, then said its ****, everyone buying them are mugs, it wouldn't change the fact its an opp loss of £10k, and my insurance wouldn't be taking your side no matter how much they'd like too.
</rant>
throw new ArgumentException (String, String, Exception)
Loss of water is an opportunity cost as well. The water company could be selling it instead of that freeloader getting it for nothing.
Getting bored of arguing with you now aidanjt, but I have to come in and point out (as above) that your comparison to rainwater is just absurd. Did the water company produce that water? Did someone in that company spend years of their live crafting that product? No they didn't. Stupid comparison.
That's the key point here..it's not just some faceless reseller trying to make a quick buck out of something that should be free to all (like water) - it's a developer, director, artist trying to make a living by *creating* something and then selling it to a customer.
I'll stop typing now before I say something nasty to you, for a have a suspicion that you are simply trolling to create an argument here.
Spud1/Animus: Purely out of interest, if you feel its a troll it isn't meant to be but feel free to decline to reply for that reason, I won't be offended. It might tip the thread into third party flames and its not worth the bother.
What are your thoughts about the scenario I raised - regional delays/locking?
I agree there are losses for piracy, we can leave that one at the door here, but issues like the one I refer to here makes it really hard for me to get behind the "infringed" party.
Last edited by roachcoach; 19-05-2011 at 04:21 PM. Reason: Moronic spelling
I know the general point you're making and I more or less agree, but .... erm .... you do need to deprive someone, and the intent needs to be to permanently deprive, at least under English law, for it to be theft, in the legal sense.
As for how close it comes to theft morally, well, that all depends on whether you accept the principles of intellectual property, and rights over them.
If you don't accept those principles, then you can say goodbye to any form of publishing industry in the sense and scale that we know it, be it films, music, the written word or a few others. Without the legal right to protect intellectual property, insufficient money could be made from films, music, books, etc, for any investor to be prepared to finance them on a commercial basis.
Say IP rights don't exist. So Dan Brown (or whoever) writes his latest intended blockbuster, a publisher prints it up and spends a lot of money marketing it, and then I come along, buy one copy for a fiver, OCR it and do a quick job of proof-reading it, then I get a million copies printed cheaply and sell it to book trade for half the price the publisher would. After all, I didn't have to spend months researching, writing, editing and revising, and I didn't have to spend all the money on the publicity either.
And if that argument holds for a book, it holds with solid gold bells on the a blockbuster movie that costs millions to make.
Any argument that rejects IP rights and the ability to protect them argues for the destruction of such industries, because those putting in the money, and the months of effort, can't make a return sufficient to justify their investment in time or money, when those that have put nothing into producing the product can just take it for nothing.
Suppose I wander along the seashore, pick up a piece of driftwood (or grow a tree myself and harvest a piece of wood), and from it, I make a beautiful hand-crafted wooden bowl. The materials have cost me nothing, but an investment of time and effort, and turning those raw materials into a beautiful piece of art has cost me, apart from possibly a nominal amount of electricity, my time, effort and application of skill.
The same applies to me producing a painting, or a literary masterpiece. If you take the bowl from me by stealing it, you remove my ability to benefit from the product of my labours.
If you take the ability to protect intellectual rights away from me by copyright infringement, you remove or at least reduce the ability to profit from my labours, and skills, in producing that literary masterpiece.
Clearly, there are differences between a physical product and an intellectual one, in that removing physical property deprives me of that item, whereas making a copy of intellectual property does not .... it just limits my ability to earn from it.
So this all comes down to whether people accept that intellectual property has any right to exist or not. And if you argue it does not, by infringing copyright, then you argue for all such creative works to be limited to those produced for live of art, or at best, on a minimal budget, and you can forget large-scale productions, be it major novels, films, or whatever.
Copyright infringement is not legally theft because theft has a very specific legal definition, all elements of which need to be met for it to be theft, and removal of someone's right to control copies of intellectual property does not fit that definition. It would, however, be relatively simply to adapt the 1968 Theft Act to include the intent to permanently deprive the owner of IP rights of their right to, for instance, control the production of copies. It would, then, be theft, both legally as well as morally.
The argument, therefore, about whether copyright infringement is theft is rather pointless. Legally, it is not, but in the world of IP rights as opposed to physical property rights, it is the direct equivalent.
Don't worry I don't think you are trolling..it's more the comparisons of piracy to stealing rainwater
I agree that regional delays can be annoying - the biggest reason imo is that we in the UK get classed as "Europe" - which has justifiable delays due to language and censorship reasons. We don't tend to see any justification for delays here because we speak the same language, however it can realisitically take weeks or months to convert a movie from its US Theatrical release into one for say the Swiss market, where it needs 3 sets of subtitles, or the german one where the film censorship board goes to town making sure the movie is ruined
So I agree that it's frustrating - it's getting better (Sky are generally only a week behind the US in TV shows these days)..but I don't think it justifies piracy, although without wanting to do a "Ken Clarke" here, that sort of piracy where you watch the TV show a week ahead and then still pay for the content when its in the UK a week later is less serious, whilst still being wrong and something I wouldn't do personally.
Exactly what I was trying to get across, although as usual you have done it better. I did try to get away from the hard definition of Theft as people do tend to argue it literally..but this was my point. Our capitalist economy is build on the idea of IP in almost everything we do, so it's kind of critical to our society.
If I write and publish a book you want, I don't have a God-given right to the contents of your bank account, but you don't have a God-given right to the efforts of my labours, either.
I decide what I want to earn form the book. If you don't want to pay that, don't pay it, but do without the book.
That's the deal, just like with physical property.
If I own it and you want it, make me an offer. If I accept, you get the goods and I get the money. If we can't agree, I don't get your money and you don't get my goods. You don't have a God-given right to my property, even if it's intellectual property in that I have the ability to control copying of my work, any more than you have the right to a wooden bowl I've made and that you want, just because one is physical and one is not.
And the law does say that. It doesn't call copyright infringement theft, but it could by a simple change in the law. It does make such copying illegal, and under some circumstances, criminal.
I don't have a God-given right to the contents of your and account, and you don't have a God-given right to copy copyright-protected works, just because you don't like the price. If you don't like the price do without. If enough people agree with you, either prices will come down or copy-protected items will stop being produced.
If the producer of copy-protected item, wanted to give it away to everyone for nothing, they can. They can put the work in the public domain. If they have not, then they expect to get paid. Your choice is to pay for the use of the IP, or do without, not to copy illegally.
See? Same difference. Publishers don't write books, writers write books. Publishers just duplicate them. They give as little as possible to writers, and get as much as they possibly can from customers. Their duplication costs are extremely low, their profits are obscene.Did the publishing company produce that book? Did someone in that company spend years of their live crafting that product? No they didn't.
Why should water be free? It has to be sanitised, treated, quality controlled. Is it because, perhaps, that water is abundant? Well that sounds like copies of books, since books can logically be copied ad infinitum. Which is actually in stark contrast to water, which can be destroyed by nuclear synthesis.
I agree that the people who put in the creative effort should be rewarded for their workload, but those are rarely the copyright holder these days. If you're actually concerned about the content creators, then surely you'd be in favour of banning copyright transfer and exclusivity contracts?.. Besides, content creators aren't exactly going to the wall in droves from causal piracy, which has been around even before the printing press. Digital piracy has been around since before both of us were born. And suddenly *now* it's a 'problem' (despite publishers showing large increases in revenues)? Nonsense. If publishers are showing profit losses, it's not because pirates are rattling their sabres and yelling 'yarr!', it's because they're making crappy business decisions.
OK I can sort of see where you are coming from - but the argument about piracy is completely separate from the argument of what a publisher pays its content creators.
They have chosen that particular publisher to resell their content, with whatever business decision they choose. It doesn't have a thing to do with piracy..I have been trying to keep it simple in my examples, as piracy isn't limited to user->store->publisher->content creator, it also goes direct from user->content creator..and it affects those people just as much, if not more.
I still think your rainwater argument is silly though.
Not at all. Please read the link I posted and try and understand the concept again.
It is in no way an opp cost that someone is loosing water. That would be an actual loss if it turned out they where running out of water. If they have plenty of water still it makes no difference. Market price for water falling because of rain (I can't believe i'm having to go here) is not an opp loss either. Also water production is not a true free market, as the prices aren't set solely by free market principles. So in all its a terrible example and I think actually discredits what could have been some legitimate points against publishers.
throw new ArgumentException (String, String, Exception)
If you think publishers just duplicate books, I'd suggest that shows a limited knowledge of publishing. It varies from one genre to another, and from one type of book to another, but they do much more than that. One thing they do is a take a lot of risk. It's all very well thinking about best-selling authors where you can be pretty well assured that every new book is going to sell well, but every single one of those best-selling authors started out as a complete newbie, utterly unknown to both publisher and buying public alike.
And publishing an unknown author is a risk. You pay out a lot up-front, and may or may not make make your investment, let alone make a profit.
Publishers are also often, at least with known authors, involved in reading, plot advisories and story development (from a business perspective), with editing and proof-reading, and most importantly, with legal advice and support, business planning, marketing and advertising, contract handling and promotions.
Suppose I write the next big thing book. If I tout it around to book stores myself, how many am I going to sell? One here, and half a dozen there? But if a major publisher backs a book, they'll buy space in major chains, and buy premium space at that. If a customer walks in to a book shop and there's a large display, right in front of him so that he has to walk round it to get into the shop, with a pile of books and colour promotional material, as well as window displays, and the necessary magazine articles, interviews and, if you can swing it, TV interviews too, you're going to sell a shed-load, with any luck. On the other hand, if there's a single copy buried on the bottom shelf right at the back, unless the customer goes in specifically looking for that book, he's probably never going to know it exists, much less buy it.
Publishers do a vast amount more than just duplicate books (which, actually, is a printer's job) and any author with three brains cells to rub together wants the best publisher he can get, if he wants to make any real money.
I get really sick when people claim that business just 'make as much money as possible' and all that tripe.
Think you can do a better job than one of the existing publishers, then try it. We have the interwebblies and Amazon allow a nounces manual to be published on their kindle so the entry costs are very low.
If you don't think you can do a better job, and be more efficent then odds are your just bad talking them.
I'm not saying you can't be annoyed at how expensive advertising is, and how fickle us humans are thou....
throw new ArgumentException (String, String, Exception)
Yeah that the real issue for me - it feels like they're hamstringing themselves. Get rid of these sorts of things and complaints will start making more sense.Don't worry I don't think you are trolling..it's more the comparisons of piracy to stealing rainwater
I agree that regional delays can be annoying - the biggest reason imo is that we in the UK get classed as "Europe" - which has justifiable delays due to language and censorship reasons. We don't tend to see any justification for delays here because we speak the same language, however it can realisitically take weeks or months to convert a movie from its US Theatrical release into one for say the Swiss market, where it needs 3 sets of subtitles, or the german one where the film censorship board goes to town making sure the movie is ruined
So I agree that it's frustrating - it's getting better (Sky are generally only a week behind the US in TV shows these days)..but I don't think it justifies piracy, although without wanting to do a "Ken Clarke" here, that sort of piracy where you watch the TV show a week ahead and then still pay for the content when its in the UK a week later is less serious, whilst still being wrong and something I wouldn't do personally.
There are other cases as well of course - I understand (not a fan myself) that Anime is notoriously difficult to get a hold of legally, it just doesn't get released. Its pirate, airfare to Toyko, or nothing. Don't hold it against me if the situation is changed, I've not checked in detail and I'm in a hurry atm.
Main thrust of my point being so long as there are "morally comfortable" justifications cases for piracy to most reasonable people, the industries are p*****g in the wind. Given that ripping to itunes is just as bad legally as downloading a dvd screener we're a long way away from removing the morally comfortable/reasonable reasons for it.
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