Of course, the tag originally ran long, and they had to edit "so don't look, please." off of the end of it.
I know! Around the Chicago area a new (at least to me) bank has billboards up all over the place. The bank is called "5/3rd Bank."
As if! I'm not putting my money into a bank named after an improper fraction!
Ow, wait, you don't like smarmy advertising, not stupid advertising. Sorry. I couldn't pass up the joke.
Although I kind of like how it pushes the idea that bankers are presumptively dishonest (Frost Bank being the notable exception).
I'm just going to assume that a frost bank is one where the world is depositing bits of frozen water, for use later on once the ice caps have fully melted away.
Frost Bank was how I learned about the FDIC - my childhood savings account was with another local bank that went bust (First City Texas, I think) and my balance got transferred over without a blip.
2: Yes, Fifth Third is the most bizarre name yet. Especially confusing when discussing banks in some sort of ordered list. "Fifth Third is Sixth" and so on.
I think they are new, at least I've only recently started hearing of them.
Funny explanation at their Wikipedia page of how they became "Fifth Third" after the merger because of the alcoholic implications of "Third Fifth."
4: it's for frozen assets, naturally. (Note: could have liquidity issues.)
6: I've always felt that you couldn't throw a rock in the Loop without hitting a Fifth Third branch.* It is a stupid name though.
*"And do me a favor, Fink: throw it hard."
In Columbus, Fifth Third had all the good ATM locations.
We know how to do these things better in Britain.
Funny explanation at their Wikipedia page of how they became "Fifth Third" after the merger because of the alcoholic implications of "Third Fifth."
Not to mention the implications of Three Fifths.
6: they're not new at all, actually. They're a very well established, very conservative (in both their politics and their business practices) bank headquartered in Cincinnati.
I suppose with National City going under, they've had a great deal more room to expand.
It's important that banks have names that can be easily morphed into mocking nicknames, which was why it was so sad when Wachovia ("Walk-all-ova-ya") went under. "Filth Turd," on the other hand, is lovely.
I'm only familiar with Fifth Third from credit card offers in my mailbox. Google tells me they have actual branches in and around Raleigh and Charlotte, but nowhere else in NC.
If you want to visit Ohio and blend in, all you need is a Fifth Third card, an eight dollar hair cut, and an unwavering conviction that dead alien bodies are stored just outside Dayton.
Any normal person should stop as soon as they see the words "We believe" in a corporate slogan, before they even get to the sanctimonious part. How can a corporation "believe" in something? It's all B.S.
Belief attributions to collective agents can be literally true!
In the wake of the Swiss Banking scandals, I learned that there are some really odd Swiss banks. Just a building with some dudes, really.
And IKEA believes in tax efficiency, definitely.
What would worry me is that they think that no one is looking.
I believe the proximate source is a Successories® poster that read: "INTEGRITY. Doing the right thing even when no one is looking."
It's bad enough that a bank has appropriated the slogan, but even worse is when you see the posters put up by the Airports Authority of South Africa (presumably for the encouragement of the employees) that say "Aviation security is doing the right thing even when no one is looking." I don't even want to know why they thought that was an appropriate message.
Unfogged believes they've just had a Labs sighting.
"We believe in doing what's right, but, you know, fiduciary duty, shareholders. What can you do."
It's important that banks have names that can be easily morphed into mocking nicknames
Citi Bank makes it almost too easy.
I kind of liked Norwest bank and their marketing, and I was majorly bummed when they slimed into becoming Wells Fargo. For some reason the colors and the logo make me want to puke. And then what they did . . .
For awhile whilst jobless I participated in on-line marketing research. Talk about beating a horse to death for pennies. But it did give me a chance to chime in on my distaste for the Discover card colors, and my absolute love for some of the Citibank colors - the cobalt blues and greys - I can tell they have caught on. I'm glad I had a tiny part in that.
And UPS trying to make "brown" a good thing?! Yuck. Total Yuck.
UPS have been brown over here as long as I can remember. Are they not in America?
They've always been brown but they've only recently started heavy marketing using the world "brown" as in "What can brown do for you?"
I'd love to see the minutes from the marketing meeting where they decided to cast a black guy to roll out that slogan.
They seem to have been brown ab ovo.
Beating aviation security is doing the right thing even when no one is looking.
Fixed.
||
Can I confess that I read this headline numerous times before I got the joke?
|>
If you want to visit Ohio and blend in, all you need is a Fifth Third card, an eight dollar hair cut, and an unwavering conviction that dead alien bodies are stored just outside Dayton.
Lovin' the Western PA scorn for Ohio. My dad used to criticize Ohio drivers, claiming that back in the day, Ohioans could buy their driver's licenses at the drugstore.
They've always been brown but they've only recently started heavy marketing using the world "brown" as in "What can brown do for you?"
"Only recently" meaning 2002 to 2007.
35: Yes, even more recently they came up with that wonderful new song about logistics.
The thing that's important to know about Frost Bank is that the headquarters building looks like it's going to open up to release the Batcopter.
No, it's God's nose hair trimmers.
He should just use the scissors by the copier like I do. Those spinning things just pull the hair.
38: Well, right. Also good for use when God has a "bat in the cave", as they say.
|| I'm too pissed off not to link this. Fucking amateur hour.|>
Not only do I not hate that tagline, but I've been shamefully manipulated by Frost's advertising into having warm and fuzzy feelings toward it. (I mean, c'mon, the sandwich board guy?)
They have newer ads, hating (indirectly) on Wall Street, but I can't find them online.
Not that I use Frost, of course. I've been 100% bank-free since 2004.
||
I hope you're happy, Halford. Bastards. I'm in mourning.
|>
42: Is that bank-free in the sense of using a credit union, or something more rigorous?
I love the German law firm's name. Lausen Rechtsanwalt. Right....
43:
The operators, currently based in Galway, Ireland, are estimated to have earned over $10 million annually from advertising sales, donations and premium subscriptions.
My heart is not bleeding.
44: Credit union, toward which I have appropriately warm and fuzzy feelings.
The operators, currently based in Galway, Ireland, are estimated to have earned over $10 million annually from advertising sales, donations and premium subscriptions. ... My heart is not bleeding.
I would have thought we'd have learned by now to take claims by prosecutors of the perfidy of the accused with a grain of salt. I really have no idea what kind of money library.nu pulled it, but it certainly didn't look like it was about maximizing revenue. (I'm also not clear on how tight the connection was between it and ifile.it , a generic file-hosting service -- library.nu was a database of links to files hosted elsewhere, many of which where on ifile.it, and I would have imagined that ifile.it both had much greater costs and much greater revenue.)
My ancestors were based in Galway, but they left because they were short of bandwidth.
Many very good books are unavailable in legal electronic form. I'm also sorry to see this taken down.
So, a pirate site that was, blatantly illegally, just pirating books without permission or providing any compensation to authors or pubilshers got closed down. Boo hoo, what an egregious example of the stunning overreach of the intellectual property laws.
41: I don't know how widely this is being reported, but my friend & fellow radical Kristin Razowsky is one of the 6 US citizens who were arrested and are being deported from Bahrain. Ms. Razowsky is one of the most committed and principled activists I know. She has repeatedly put herself in danger as an international observer and has never exploited her notoriety for personal gain. [I'm pretty sure that she's never even asked for financial support for her many travels.] She's also a very talented writer and photographer, and has worked hard to get the message out about human rights abuses in the Occupied Territories and other parts of the Middle East. I'm not sure if they're already gone or what, since they were detained yesterday, so I don't know if there's really much point in emailing the embassy, but it probably wouldn't hurt.
Here's the call and a couple of relevant links:
[Apparently the phone numbers might be sketchy]
TAKE ACTION:
1) Contact the US Embassy in Bahrain: 011 973 1724 2700 and manamaconsular@state.gov and ask for the consulate to insist that the delegate's belongings are returned AND that they are NOT handcuffed for the long journey home.
2) Call the US State Department Bureau of Consular Services, Citizen's Services: (888) 407-4747 and let them know that you are relying on the embassy is to do their job and protect the rights of their citizens who are there as human rights activists.
3) Stand in solidarity with the Bahraini protesters and sign the petition:
https://www.change.org/petitions/the-president-of-the-united-states-stop-any-new-arms-deals-with-bahrain
.
https://witnessbahrain.org/2012/02/six-us-citizens-arrested-in-bahrain-to-be-deported/
(I'm also not clear on how tight the connection was between it and ifile.it , a generic file-hosting service -- library.nu was a database of links to files hosted elsewhere, many of which where on ifile.it, and I would have imagined that ifile.it both had much greater costs and much greater revenue.)
It was asserted to me that they're run by the same people.
51, meet 50. The reason I care about this are twofold: first, they were mostly academic books, many of which are either unavailable electronically or priced for libraries. Second, they had a fair amount of German books, which were otherwise a huge pain to get without DRM--and the DRM-encumbered books were a real bother to make play nice with user-friendly translation dictionaries on my phone. In other words, the legal product was hugely inferior, even when it was available (I still have a Stadtbücherei HD account, and can DL ebooks from there, but the DRM makes them near-useless for me; it was both easier and no more illegal to use l.nu than to crack the DRM).
This certainly wasn't about compensating authors, who generally aren't writing academic texts with an expectation of real remuneration. This was about publishers' increasingly aggressive attempts to control content distribution worldwide.
Clearly, because something is more convenient for you, you should be allowed to steal it.
"more convenient" s/b "available rather than unavailable"
What he's saying is that he wanted a bunch of German books, the books were hard to translate conveniently on his phone, so he stole them. And, some books were priced too high, so he stole those. It would make my life a lot easier if I went downstairs and stole all the almonds from the convenience store, but generally we have to pay for things.
"Copied" from a website that illegally took the material, copied it, and distributed it for free. This is not a hard case.
Do you know what "priced for libraries" means, RH?
You mean, priced for the institution that affords one a way of reading material legally for free?
I mean, the attitude is basically "I want something for free in the most convenient way possible, and if I can't get it OH MY GOD I AM BEING OPPRESSED."
It means "priced for academic libraries".
So, you know, why not just steal shit? If it's not as convenient or as cheap for you as possible, IT'S YOUR RIGHT TO JUST TAKE THINGS.
Oh, FFS. Here's the list of the most recently uploaded books from the google cache of library.nu's homepage:
Measuring Risk in Complex Stochastic Systems
Stem Cells and Cancer Stem Cells, Volume 4: Therapeutic Applications in Disease and Injury
Interfacial Nanochemistry: Molecular Science and Engineering at Liquid-Liquid Interfaces (Nanostructure Science and Technology)
Dan Coates Complete Advanced Piano Solos
The Dirac Equation (Theoretical and Mathematical Physics)
McGraw-Hill's SAT, 2009 Edition
Meine Zahnarztpraxis - Marketing: Patientengewinnung, Markenbildung, Positionierung
Probability, Random Variables and Random Signal Principles (McGraw-Hill series in electrical engineering)
A Cp-Theory Problem Book: Topological and Function Spaces
Algebra: A Graduate Course (Mathematics)
These are not consumer goods whose production or distribution are most efficiently rationed by willingness-to-pay, especially when we think of, for example, the vast potential audience in lower-income countries like India. Even the obvious example on this list of a book produced solely to make a profit, the SAT study guide, demonstrates the ugliness of your ration-knowledge-by-price vision, since the SAT's very raison d'etre is to allocate tickets to middle-class security, and SAT-prep stuff is all about buying a better draw.
I'm not claiming that authors and publishers ought not be compensated. Why, just tomorrow, I'm going on a date to a book-launch event, and if the panel's decent, I'm likely to buy a copy of the book. The point is rather that excluding the vast majority of the world's population from the books because they are unwilling or unable to pay is a huge and socially unnecessary piece of collateral damage from the content industry's scorched-earth war for control.
who generally aren't writing academic texts with an expectation of real remuneration
Wait, what? And to be clear, unlike Halford, I'm not trolling.
I'm not claiming that authors and publishers ought not be compensated.
No, you're just claiming that they ought not to be compensated except on terms unilaterally dictated by you, and if you don't like the terms the authors and publishers are providing, you should just be entitled to take whatever you want.
If your computer doesn't want to translate the version of the book you own, you're supposed to translate that book out of German yourself, x. trapnel. Not STEAL SOMEONE ELSE'S COPY, just because of your gluttonous need to catch up on the adventures of Zahnarztpraxis or whatever his name is.
So, you know, why not just steal shit? If it's not as convenient or as cheap for you as possible, IT'S YOUR RIGHT TO JUST TAKE THINGS.
When someone recently stole my laptop from out of my living room, I was no longer able to enjoy the use of that laptop. I can assure you that this represented a pretty significant fucking difference between the actual theft and a counterfactual molecularly-identical copying of the computer. Halford seems to believe in a right to anticipated profits or revenue, and there is no doubt a sense in which almost everyone feels that they ought to be compensated when others gain benefits as a result of something they themselves contributed to--this is why we have concepts like exploitation, and why worker-owned co-ops are important!--but conflating theft and copying is a source of conceptual confusion with no countervailing utility whatsoever.
In the Kronenhalle they find a table upstairs. The evening rush is tapering off. Sausages and fondue: Slothrop's starving.
"In the days of the gauchos, my country was a blank piece of paper. The pampas stretched as far as possible, inexhaustible, fenceless. Wherever the gaucho could ride, that place belonged to him. But Buenos Aires sought hegemony over the provinces. All the neuroses about property gathered strength, and began to infect the countryside. Fences went up, and the gaucho became less free. It is our national tragedy. We are obsessed with building labyrinths, where before there was open plain and sky. To draw ever more complex patterns on the blank sheet. We cannot abide that openness: it is terror to us. Look at Borges. Look at the suburbs of Buenos Aires. The tyrant Rosas has been dead a century, but his cult flourishes. Beneath the city streets, the warrens of rooms and corridors, the fences and the networks of steel track, the Argentine heart, in its perversity and guilt, longs for a return to that first unscribbled serenity . . . that anarchic oneness of pampas and sky. . . ."
"But-but bobwire," Slothrop with his mouth full of that fondue, just gobblin' away, "that's progress--you, you can't have open range forever, you can't just stand in the way of progress--" yes, he is actually going to go on for half an hour, quoting Saturday-afternoon western movies dedicated to Property if anything is, at this foreigner who's springing for his meal.
Squalidozzi, taking it for mild insanity instead of rudeness, only blinks once or twice.
48: You're right, I should have noted the grain of salt needed. My knee is still jerking toward Halford's side, though.
rather that excluding the vast majority of the world's population from the books because they are unwilling or unable to pay
There's a whole lot of daylight between "unwilling" and "unable."
43: I'm in mourning too... though I spent the last few months dl-ing 900+ texts from LNU, so it's not like I didn't get what I wanted (mostly philosophy, anthro, econ texts, if anyone is interested). Do you know of any replacement sites? I've not really looked for any at this point, though a reddit thread coughed up the names "bibliotik" and "avaxhome". Might have to join a private tracker at this point.
Toward's Halford's overall position, that is, not toward his, uh, presentation of said position.
Wait, what? And to be clear, unlike Halford, I'm not trolling.
History may be rather different here than philosophy or political science or economics, insofar as (a) the book:article balance is different, (b) good writing is more highly valued, (c) history has more mainstreamish/crossover appeal. But are you saying that most history books are written in order to make money, such that the decision to craft the book is intrinsically tightly tied to the potential paying audience, rather than being undertaken as part of a more encompassing practice of being an historian, such that the number of copies sold is rather incidental? I was under the impression that the bestselling history books were somewhat marginal to the overall enterprise of History-Writing, but correct me if I'm wrong...
Textbooks are written to make money. Not quite full stop, but very nearly so. And the list in 65 seems to be comprised largely of textbooks. As for scholarly monographs, I think it's more complicated. People who can sell their books for money usually do so. But that's not a very long list of titles, I suppose, compared to the piles and piles of books that are published to advance a scholarly debate (though that list is shrinking, thank goodness, as university presses are forced to retrench, leaving authors to write what they should have in the first place: articles).
67 to 69. What you're claiming is that in this particular domain, you, and you alone, should have a unilateral right to decide whether or not to pay for a good produced by someone else, based on your own assessment of value. That's not generally how the world works.
The tangible/intangible distinction only gets you so far. Part of the loss to you of your laptop was, presumably, the loss of your ability to make money (or other prospective hedonic value), and part of the reason why we condemn theft is for causing that loss to you. By stealing -- and that's what this website did, there's no grey area around it -- other people's rights in their work, this website took away the ability of authors and publishers to profit from academic texts. You can handwave that away and say it's of no consequence, and it's certainly of less consequence in academia than elsewhere (since professors get compensated for things other than sales of the content they produce), but it's a definite and serious loss to those involved, and certainly likely to discourage others from producing academic textbooks of the kind that, apparently, were being stolen.
Again, this is not a hard case; it's obvious theft of a clearly defined property right for profit.
76.1 -- It's not really based on an assessment of value. As I understand it, the folks supporting theft recognize that the works have value. They just think they're overpriced. They're probably right.
There's a whole lot of daylight between "unwilling" and "unable."
Just between India, Nigeria, and the Philippines, there're around 300m English-speakers whose incomes are such that it is rational for the content industries to price, and sell, only to the very rich, rather than price at the level the average person (PPP GDP per cap $3.7k, $2.6k, $4.1k respectively) could afford. "Piracy" in such a situation isn't a shocking case of rule-breaking, it's the straightforward (and well-understood) consequence of profit-maximization given poverty & inequality.
Look, obviously, I'm going to be fine--for me, it really is just about marginal convenient & cost. But the point is that in their single-minded obsession with squeezing out the dollars from people like me, the content industries are completely willing to simply slam the door on those for whom it really is a question of unlicensed copies or nothing at all.
And Yrruk, "library genesis" may be worth checking.
They may recognize that the works have value, but, as Trapnel has already explained, he's willing to both value the works in an abstract sense but take them for free without any compensation whatsoever to author or publisher.
and certainly likely to discourage others from producing academic textbooks of the kind that, apparently, were being stolen.
We've already had this discussion, and neither of us is likely to change views, but you're just insane if you think that textbooks won't exist without Springer or McGraw-Hill to commission them and take their cut.
79: I check out books from the library, too, and I don't feel guilty at all! -- I'm truly History's Greatest Monster.
The idea that the piracy websites are primarily about providing access to poor folks in the third world is just such utter bullshit.
81 -- right, libraries that bought the book (which is why they are "priced for libraries.")
Look: the legal rights that library.nu was (unquestionably--there's no real doubt there, I agree) violating are rights whose existence can only be justified insofar as their contours are, in fact, appropriate for advancing social values. And they're just not. They incentivize the wrong things, and lock away the stuff that ought to be most available for the sake of preserving the profits of those who have the most. This is most obviously true when it comes to the fact that profit-maximizing marketing strategy guarantees that lower-income segments of lower-income countries (also known as, the majority of the world's population) will simply be priced out of the legal market altogether (and the occasionally and arbitrarily smashed by the hard hand of Authoritah for resorting to the black markets whose existence the pricing strategy guarantees)--really, check out the Media Piracy in Emerging Economies report.
82: As is the idea that unapproved copying is just another form of theft. Bullshit begets more bullshit.
To the OP: x.trap and Halford both believe in doing what's right, even when no one is looking. They may have different conceptions of "right," however.
Which is to say that you don't need to be some kind of "information wants to be free" absolutist to believe that when a legal regime is disobeyed and despised by a substantial chunk of the population, a rethink is in order.
I do think it's "another form of theft." I recognize and get the difference between tangible and intangible goods, but they are (a) less important than often made out to be and (b) we recognize the taking of intangible property interests as "theft," quite properly, in many contexts other than intellectual property. In any event Trapnel is making the unilateral decision to take something that clearly belongs to someone else without paying for it, which I think is what we ordinarily call "theft."
It really is a bummer about library.nu. Now I will go back to... not having the books for my classes, as was the case before!
Suck on it, textbook publishers.
Now I will go back to playing with my new DJ doohickey, which makes it more fun and easier than ever before to DJ with music I didn't pay for.
Except I probably will pay for more music than I did before, because in the dance music world it's pretty much easier to just buy shit from beatport or whatever than it is to go through the hassle of trying to find tracks that you like online.
The idea that the piracy websites are primarily about providing access to poor folks in the third world is just such utter bullshit.
Of course that's not where the majority of the traffic is coming from. But even if most of the users are spoiled freeloaders like me, that doesn't change the fact that, for the (by stipulation) tiny minority of folks logging on from slums in Bangladesh, services like library.nu are the only feasible way to get at the scientific and cultural patrimony of the literate world. It's like shutting off free municipal water provision, justifying it by nothing that the vast majority of the users have the income to buy bottled water--maybe so, but those who don't really need it.
The institutionalization of technological innovation means that, very soon, the technological prerequisites for those Bangladeshi slum-kids reading etexts will be affordable, nearly ubiquitous. The only question is whether, by the time that happens, the content industries will have succeeded in converting the internet into a fully pay-to-play system.
(Also, more concretely, I suspect pirate sites already have a much bigger impact in low-income countries that download statistics would suggest, because the people who use them are pirate (paper) booksellers who download master copies and then sell cheaply-printed versions. And this is a good thing, even if those pirate booksellers are (gasp) making a profit.)
Sometimes libraries buy used books and then circulate them.
All I know is that y'all better be careful when you mention that hot NY Knicks guard. Between dusk and dawn you never can tell what the IP Gestapo have trademarked or copywrited. Done a search on your own name, your nom-de-plume? Your face? Michael Bishop did a hilarious story about a average professor needing plastic surgery because he looked like a movie star.
Fuck em all.
There is of course a whole Marxian analysis of this shit. Everything must be owned so it can be controlled and provide an income stream/rent, and not owned by you, not controlled by you.
Where was that article about the original writer of Gh^&st Ri/der (gotta be careful) being forbidden by court/Disney to ever mention in public that he was the creator? Exaggerated, I'm sure it has to do with prejudicing a rights dispute, but still funny.
(If you didn't know, the German law firm is called Lice & Co, Attorneys at Law.)
In Soviet Russia, used books circulated bought libraries!
(I haven't actually read this thread.)
Trapnel, did you know that the prices of movies and records (I don't really know about books) in foreign countries, and especially in the third world, are not actually controlled by the US or international content industries? Generally speaking, the movie studios have no control whatsoever as to how much a licit copy of a DVD sells for in, say, Brazil, because they have contracted out the rights to sell those copies to a foreign distributor. Whether or not they are priced too high to justify the costs of distribution is something that is almost always decided upon by a purely local concern.
The list in 65 is more persuasive on Halford's side than Halford.
OMG to 93.1, I was thinking about commenting on that separately. Clearly, neither you nor Yglesias has any understanding whatsoever of what a trademark is, how the trademark system works, or how trademark is separate from a copyright. No one "owns" the name "Linsanity" except (possibly, eventually, but probably not) in connection with an identifying mark for certain defined goods, like a "Linsanity" line of clothing.
The tangible/intangible distinction only gets you so far. Part of the loss to you of your laptop was, presumably, the loss of your ability to make money (or other prospective hedonic value), and part of the reason why we condemn theft is for causing that loss to you. By stealing -- and that's what this website did, there's no grey area around it -- other people's rights in their work, this website took away the ability of authors and publishers to profit from academic texts
I think what trapnel's saying isn't really about tangible vs. intangible. It's that not everything that I do that reduces your ability to make money amounts to theft. If you sell me a car on the condition that I not let anyone else drive it (the idea being that my adhering to the condition allows you to sell more cars), I may be breaking a contract by lending it to my aunt, but it's not theft. What turns on this is that if it's not theft then the issue of whether the contract ought to be legally enforceable gets decided on the basis of social utility, whereas if you think of it as theft then people tend to run with the intuition that there's a deontogical natural right here ('it might be socially useful for you to legislate to take away my property, but because I have a natural right to it, it would still be wrong for you do that'). So corporations have an interest in pushing the 'theft' metaphor. That's the argument, at least.
Except I probably will pay for more music than I did before, because in the dance music world it's pretty much easier to just buy shit from beatport or whatever than it is to go through the hassle of trying to find tracks that you like online.
Of course, this is only true because the latter option is illegal.
In any event Trapnel is making the unilateral decision to take something that clearly belongs to someone else without paying for it, which I think is what we ordinarily call "theft."
There's actually some deep stuff underlying Halford's sophistry, but it cuts both ways.
Yes, when I download a Habermas book, I'm making a unilateral decision that I want the book and I shall have it, without asking MIT Press if it's okay that I have it. But saying that I'm "taking" "something that clearly belongs to someone else" assumes what's in question, which is whether the money they're asking for in exchange for that copy belongs to them (they have a copyright) or me (it's my money, in my bank account).
And then let's look at the next step: the publisher sues me. What's going on here? Fundamentally, the publisher is making a unilateral decision that it will take something (e.g., the cash they hope to extract either through a settlement or a judgment) that belongs to me. Halford doesn't call that theft--though some of the copyright settlement shakedowns sure as fuck look like it--because, I suspect, Halford has really internalized the idea that whatever rights the legal system gives you are really yours and exercising them is merely asserting your rights, rather than committing a violent act upon somebody. But from a standpoint that refuses to take legal entitlements as necessarily identical to moral entitlements, suing somebody to demand money for having made a copy of something is at least as much a unilateral decision to expropriate as the initial copying was, if not more--after all, the lawsuit does intend to deprive me of my current resources, and not merely diminish an expected profit.
All of which is to say that if you want to avoid questioning the legitimacy of the title, and focus merely on the unilateral assertion of enjoyment, it's the lawsuit and not the copying that's the clearest assertion of nonconsensual violent action.
Of course, everything in 101 applies just as much to the theft of real or tangible property.
I mean, if the argument is "it's not theft because the real crime is the state's ability to unilaterally enforce the laws to protect the legal rights held by its citizens," well, OK, but that only gets you so far.
Trapnel, did you know that the prices of movies and records (I don't really know about books) in foreign countries, and especially in the third world, are not actually controlled by the US or international content industries?
I don't see what this has to do with much of anything. My point is that, given the structure of both the global income distribution, and the income distribution in poorer countries, the profit-maximizing strategy for exclusive rightsholders appears to be 'price for the rich, and generally tolerate the massive black market for unlicensed goods that serves the non-rich, with occasional arbitrary and arbitrarily harsh crackdowns in order to preserve a symbolic distinction between the "real" thing and the stuff for the commoners.' None of this has much to do with whether this is decided by US or European multinationals or local licensees; what's at issue is the effects, and how it absurd it makes any attempt to moralize "piracy" in such markets.
104: Yeah, a common practice among math grad students when one really wants a hard copy of a book is to get one of the Chinese or Indian students to buy you an "Eastern Edition" when they visit home.
Of course, everything in 101 applies just as much to the theft of real or tangible property.
Well, no, not exactly. There are real differences about rivalrousness here; physical things can only be in one place at one time. I miss my old computer! I want it back! Part of the justification of private property--and this justification becomes stronger the more the thing in question is used in unpredictable ways, with short and unpredictable lead times, and with in ways that leave "personal" traces--flows from this inherent rivalrousness. Nevertheless, this isn't something that's carved into the essence of the universe; it's a function both of technology and of social arrangements. There's an amusing but also (well, potentially) thought-provoking set of billboards around SF advertising some new whatever-sharing service, that poses contrasts like, "Hey, neighbor, can I borrow your chapstick?" "No, but you can borrow my car!" -- while the billboards tent to evoke intuitions that play on the natural/unnaturalness of certain sharings, the very newness of the service reveals how technology and social shifts can make certain things less "obviously" personal and exclusive than they once were.
So anyway, again, there's a kernal of truth in Halford's sophistry: the enclosure movements were both about rearranging property rights and the violent assertion of power against particular claimants on behalf of others, and jailing someone for trespassing in a vacant lot is a real expression of violence.
Speaking of sanctimonious tone, what I don't get about Halford's argument is that he's claiming all sorts of moral high ground here, but there's nothing moral about the precise terms of copyright law.
Set aside that, by Halford's argument, Disney stole, like the most immoral brigand, every character he ever put in a feature film; when Disney created those films, he expected, and relied upon, 30-some years of copyright. Now we know that this copyright has been, and will be, extended indefinitely. No one will ever be allowed to do with Disney's mouse what Disney did with Perrault's Cinderella.
So WTF is the moral issue here? This is purely a matter of statute, like whether a house must be set back 5' or 15' from the property line. We're haggling over price. But Halford wants it to be a great moral concern whether the whore* extracts $5 or $50.
Libertarians** are very concerned about "takings"; I never see similar concern about governmental givings. The Congress has been quite generous in giving the common cultural heritage of us all to a tiny group of very powerful interests. Apparently this is the most morally pure thing that has ever been done.
* Apologies to whores who, unlike Disney's descendants, actually do something to earn their remuneration. Also apologies for making light of sex workers.
* I know of course that Rob isn't a libertarian full stop
given the structure of both the global income distribution, and the income distribution in poorer countries
It may be worth pondering these sentences for a bit.
because in the dance music world it's pretty much easier to just buy shit from beatport or whatever than it is to go through the hassle of trying to find tracks that you like online. .... Of course, this is only true because the latter option is illegal.
I suspect part of what Sifu's getting at with his "eh yes and no" response is that, far from rightsholders finding it "impossible to compete with free," they have a bunch of advantages that have nothing to do with their legal standing and everything to do with their being in an ongoing cooperative relationship with (or being identical to) the creators. The things you need to make a nice, user-friendly music-finding-and-downloading website--the music itself, in various different formats, a knowledge of what goes with what, etc.--is stuff that authorized distributors (to say nothing of creators) will always already have, before anyone else. All of the stunts about pirate sites hacking content industry emails or whatever to get prerelease tracks or whatever--all of that illustrates that the authorized entities have a huge competitive advantage as far as having what customers want, which is why it's all the more frustrating and outrageous when they refuse to sell it to fans, and cripple the legal product. (And all this without getting into the goodwill issue, that fans want to support creators.)
In this particular case, the question is whether Trapnel should have the right, on his own, to decide whether or not authors and publishers should be compensated for their work under the system of laws we currently have established. I'm not really making a "moral" argument, and I dislike them in general. Actually, I think there's a decent "moral" case that property in general is theft, and I get Trapnel's argument in 107. But in the United States we call taking someone else's property without compensation "theft" and that is what Trapnel's claimed right here is.
I mean, I really, really don't think that e.g., Lloyd Blankfein should have as much money as he does and that the government is unfairly complicit in giving it to him. If someone stole $100,000 from his account I might even think it was morally appropriate, but it would still be theft.
The Congress has been quite generous in giving the common cultural heritage of us all to a tiny group of very powerful interests.
This is such bullshit, and typical of the hysteria over these issues.
Stealing econ textbooks does now real good. You have to burn the stock in the warehouses too, and disable or eliminate the economists, or else there will a reinfestation.
It may be worth pondering these sentences for a bit.
If you're trying to silently call up echoes of the "you selfish Americans, global justice demands you pay exorbitant sums for prescription drugs, because only then will the global poor also receive them" chestnut--the argument's bullshit in the case of pharmaceuticals, and it's bullshit here, too. It assumes the centrality & necessity of precisely that complex of institutionalized profit-making institutions whose existence is precisely the tragedy at issue.
Intellectual property law is for Microsoft, Disney, and Halfords. If Disney's or Halford's rights are infringed, they send Halfords after the infringer. If Disney or Microsoft wants to infringe someone else's rights, they also send out the Halfords. It's fun to see him get all righteous about his cash cow. Pretty soon he'll be quoting the Holy Scripture.
Dean Baker at "Beat the Press" writes about intellectual property from time to time.
The things you need to make a nice, user-friendly music-finding-and-downloading website ... is stuff that authorized distributors (to say nothing of creators) will always already have, sometimes even minutes before anyone else.
What I'd like to know is how much our "Robert Halford" paid the real Robert Halford for his name.
111.last isn't just content-free shit-flinging. It's false.
Well done.
Pretty soon he'll be quoting the Holy Scripture
Not without my royalty he won't.
Actually, 114 might be true in all particulars. But it's not just for me, Disney, and Microsoft. In some form, copyright protection is what allows culture to survive and flourish under a capitalist system.
As I've said a thousand times here, there are plenty of particulars in the current legal regime I strongly support changing, and I'd also be open to total rethinkings of society in which we diminish the importance of capitalism generally. But "I have the unilateral right to set my own price for books, or take them for free" is not the way forward.
117 -- you can't copyright a name!
In some form, copyright protection is what allows culture to survive and flourish under a capitalist system.
Bullshit.
If someone stole $100,000 from his account I might even think it was morally appropriate, but it would still be theft.
And you'd be right, because money in an account (though intangible) is rivalrous - if I take it then you can't use it any more. Unlike files. (Which isn't to say that there shouldn't be a sensible legal regime, taking everyone's interests into account, governing file-sharing.)
you can't copyright a name!
That's for the courts to decide.
Seriously, though, I think it's worth thinking about why names aren't considered intellectual property in our society. They're just words, of course, but then so are books.
Oh, what the hell, I'll do what Rob can't be arsed to do, and respond substantively:
The author who might actually appreciate the $0.77 from each marginal sale of a book is not, actually, benefitted by a lifetime+95 year copyright. It is excruciatingly unlikely that, in the already unlikely situation that the work remains available, the trickle of royalties will make a difference in the life outcomes of his heirs and assigns (why we, as a society, should give a shit about their outcomes is a separate issue), because holding one copyright on a 50+ year old book is pretty worthless.
What's worth something is controlling lots of copyrights. Which is the exclusive purview of... large corporations and powerful interests. And their interests do not necessarily coincide with those of content creators, and most certainly not with society as a whole.
I'd just like Rob to explain why it was moral for Disney to use Perrault's Cinderella down to her fairy godmother and glass slippers, but immoral for any of us to use Disney Corp's Cinderella. You wanted to make it moral, Rob. Now teach us. I can't wait.
In any event Trapnel is making the unilateral decision to take something that clearly belongs to someone else without paying for it, which I think is what we ordinarily call "theft."
For certain values of "take" and "belongs to", which is what the whole dispute is about, and perhaps why the "we" who ordinarily refer to infringement of IP rights as "theft" refers more accurately to "people with economic interests in the enforcement of existing IP rights" than to "ordinary speakers of English".
In this particular case, the question is whether Trapnel should have the right, on his own, to decide whether or not authors and publishers should be compensated for their work under the system of laws we currently have established.
If you stay to watch and enjoy a busker's performance for awhile, I think you ought to give some money. I do not think, however, that the busker ought to be able to jail you, or sue you in order to extract a legally specified sum, if you walk away without paying. I don't have "the right to decide whether X should be compensated" in the sense that my thinking something doesn't make it morally so; but neither does Congress thinking it. I'm not sure what Halford thinks about the busker case, since it would otherwise fit with his system--I suspect he would see it as a gotcha, how I want to turn respectable middle-class professionals into street performers. But I don't think there's anything respectable about suing your fans, and insofar as the question is one of the precariousness of our neoliberal world, we need to address that, rather than rationing the cultural and scientific patrimony of the literate world by price.
Ultimately any hope for the future relies on knowledge and culture being disseminated as broadly as possible, for future Norman Borlaugs (or insert some other useful person) not to waste their talents because they were born to illiterate poverty. We've finally achieved the technological ability to make a reality the dream of thinkers since antiquity, to have universal access to the collected knowledge of the past; the main barrier at this point is the power of the content industry, and its social support flowing from the ideology Halford's defending here.
125 -- this is a longer conversation, but obviously copies are rivalrous to the author/publisher's ability to collect money from the goods; that is, the illegal copies prevent or diminish the author/publishers legal right to compensation. You're still "stealing" that person's right to the legally-entitled fruit of his labor. I don't see any basis for not calling that "theft"; you can disagree about how the right should have been structured in the first place, but the same is true for Blankfein's compensation.
127 -- it is! That is why there is a whole body of commentary by courts and others on these issues, which actually is pretty interesting in the specifics. But we never get to the specifics because people like Trapnel always want to just assert the importance of abolishing copyright entirely.
The author who might actually appreciate the $0.77 from each marginal sale of a book is not, actually, benefitted by a lifetime+95 year copyright.
If he wants to sell it he is.
Every form of competition is a diminishment of the fruits of the labor of the original seller, in that sense. But we don't usually call it theft.
Anyway, I think what's really going on with these disputes is that technological change is rapidly making IP laws as currently structured effectively unenforceable. There are various possible ways for society to respond to these changes, and it turns out that people have very different preferences about them stemming from cleavages in underlying values that were mostly latent and unconsidered until recently.
It's astonishing how he keeps treating entirely contingent, and temporary, legal statuses as Moral Law.
Was miscegenation immoral in Virginia in 1962?
Was a gay marriage in Washington State immoral 3 days ago?
Thing is, once you give up the force of moralistic claims, and drop the "stealing" crap, it becomes what it should be: a reasonable discussion of the costs and benefits of any given IP regime. But powerful interests would lose out in such a discussion, and so they make sure that the discussion is in moralistic claims.
And just because Rob, or someone, will claim that my marriage examples aren't germane: what makes denial of gay marriage rights viable is moralistic claims about what's "natural". But as soon as the discussion becomes one about what legal benefits the government will bestow upon various people, the NOM people lose ground, and quickly. The current IP regime that Rob claims to find problematic will only be fixed when moralistic claims such as his become overwhelmed by honest discussions about how the government balances the competing interests of copyright holders and the general public.
Come on trapnel, does it really need to be explained that fiddling on the street corner and writing a textbook on nanochemistry aren't remotely similar endeavors?
copies are rivalrous to the author/publisher's ability to collect money from the goods
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.''The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master -- that's all.'
But we never get to the specifics because people like Trapnel always want to just assert the importance of abolishing copyright entirely.
Hey, if we get back to something remotely reasonable, then we can start talking about how to tinker around the edges. I'll stop insisting upon radical solutions as soon as the status quo stops being so egregiously wrong.
(& even if I didn't believe that, it's important to have radicals arguing for abolitionism, simply because there are powerful and well-organized interests who will always push in the direction of more enclosure. We need to move the Overton Window!)
For the price of a sandwich and a new pair of Buddy Holly glasses, I'm sure C/o/r/y D/o/c/t/o/r/o/w would be happy to drop by Unfogged and make us all wish he'd never been born we'd never heard of copyright.
135: Yes, but I think that's what actually happened is that, between the time that copyright was invented and when modern tech made old-school copyright concepts problematic, an entirely different conception of copyright/IP arose, one that has effectively obscured the discussion at hand.
I assume that I'm not alone in having grown up under the sort of simplistic, "copyright=morally-bound ownership" conception that Halford promotes, only to learn, as a grown-up, that that's not how the Founders viewed it, and that they were taking an entirely practical (not moral!) approach that copyright was a means to an end.
The Founders never intended that an author's copyright was identical to property ownership; I'm not aware of any normal property that reverts to the public domain after X years. But, for whatever reason, people began commonly to think of intellectual property as precisely analogous to physical property, which has muddied the waters considerably.
133: Did you get paid when Congress took 30 years of your right to that copyright and gave it to him to sell? I didn't.
The author who might actually appreciate the $0.77 from each marginal sale of a book is not, actually, benefitted by a lifetime+95 year copyright.
This is not, actually, true. I admit that it's unlikely to be true for any given work, but there are plenty of folks for whom the benefits to the heirs or estate is extremely substantial, and of course other people write hoping to get rich. That brackets a lot of interesting questions about whether or not the interest of those heirs is valid, but it's just not true that there's no value in extended copyright to individual authors or their families.
And their interests do not necessarily coincide with those of content creators, and most certainly not with society as a whole.
The interests of the major content holders (studios, record companies, publishers) absolutely don't always align with either artists or society as a whole. But (aside from universities) we don't really have a better way of financing the creation of culture. The alternatives are basically (a) state funding; (b) patronage from the rich; or (c) people create culture for free as hobbyists. I think (a) is the only viable alternative, but good luck getting that done in the contemporary world, at least at anything like sufficient levels to generate current cultural output. Or have you looked at state funding of universities lately? Trapnel's hopes, like many of those here, seem to lie exclusively with (b) and (c) and I am deeply skeptical.
why it was moral* for Disney to use Perrault's Cinderella down to her fairy godmother and glass slippers, but immoral for any of us to use Disney Corp's Cinderella
Well, there are a number of responses here. First, Disney didn't use Perrault's work in a sense that would have been protectable by copyright (the expressions are different, and the idea of the story itself is not copyrightable), just as it's perfectly possible, even common, to create modern day Cinderella stories without infringing on Disney's copyright. So the analogy is false. Second, it's just not true that we don't have a right to "use" even the Disney version of Cinderella; what we don't have a right to do, without compensating Disney, is to create a copy of that work.
Is your real problem with the term extension in the CTEA? Because that does raise a host of problems, I agree, but they are not about prohibiting the creation of modern day versions of Cinderella.
BTW, I'm aware that 141 is conflating patents and copyright and IP; I'm fairly certain that the distinctions, for the purpose of this discussion, are irrelevant. None exist except at the pleasure of the Congress.
If you stay to watch and enjoy a busker's performance for awhile, I think you ought to give some money. I do not think, however, that the busker ought to be able to jail you, or sue you in order to extract a legally specified sum, if you walk away without paying.
You might find that if the musician is playing in a concert hall, sneaking in and enjoying a listen has legal consequences.
Trapnel's hopes, like many of those here, seem to lie exclusively with (b) and (c) and I am deeply skeptical.
This is no more true than it was the last time Halford said it. This is the kind of thing people like Halford will keep saying could never work on a larger scale, long after such things become totally commonplace (which, just to be clear, is certainly not yet).
I'm sure C/o/r/y D/o/c/t/o/r/o/w would be happy to drop by Unfogged and make us all wish he'd never been born we'd never heard of copyright.
Who needs Doc/tor/ow for that?
You might find that if the musician is playing in a concert hall, sneaking in and enjoying a listen has legal consequences.
And, hey, guess what? We don't even need 18th-century copyright, let alone the DMCA or NET Act or ACTA or SIPA to enforce these consequences.
142: I was making a narrow objection, and agree that the extension was egregious.
Oh right I forgot option (d), voluntary contributions by people over Kickstarter. I remain deeply skeptical.
Good lord this conversation is off the rails. Read that list in 65 again. This is similar to miscegenation and street jugglers how?
Writing those types of books is horribly time consuming and is dependent on having a shitload of prior training and experience in the field. And it's done with the expectation that people will actually pay for the damn thing. What's the alternate to people buying the books? As much as I love the idea of Von Wafer as a Hebrew James Earl Jones I'm pretty sure he's not going to be able to fill local venues with people paying to hear him read his latest tome.
The interests of the major content holders (studios, record companies, publishers) absolutely don't always align with either artists or society as a whole. But (aside from universities) we don't really have a better way of financing the creation of culture. The alternatives are basically (a) state funding; (b) patronage from the rich; or (c) people create culture for free as hobbyists. I think (a) is the only viable alternative, but good luck getting that done in the contemporary world, at least at anything like sufficient levels to generate current cultural output.
This is really the crux of the issue, as we've discussed before, and I'm glad we're back to it because it's both more meaningful and more interesting than a lot of the sniping in this thread so far. I'll reiterate that while I agree that those are the options, I just don't buy that they're as inherently implausible as you say, especially if we treat "current cultural output" as a variable open to societal discussion rather than a constant to be adhered to at all costs.
143.last: Are you saying that I'm allowed to create a mouse called Mickey as long as the expression is different from those Disney has used? Because I've got a manuscript right here that I've been waiting to publish as soon as Disney's lawyers clear it.
You're aware of how case law regarding Fair Use has been shifting, right? This is precisely my point: you cite boundaries that (supposedly) make one thing OK and another thing not, but they're entirely legalistic, not moral. The next copyright extension, or the next court ruling, could suddenly render heretofore legal reuse into illegal, and suddenly it's "stealing."
what we don't have a right to do, without compensating Disney, is to create a copy of that work.
Did anyone get money for my copy of Moby Dick? It's a copy of Melville's work, published within 95 years of his death. So somebody was grievously wronged when it was printed. Either that, or this whole moralistic argument is a pile of shit.
JRoth, I really don't understand Halford to be making a moral argument. Property rights exist as they are legally defined. We don't get to individually decide to define them differently: a mixed-race marriage was legally invalid in Virginia in 1964, regardless of the self-evident (to all of us, I'm safe in assuming) immorality of the laws that made it so. How would such a marriage become legally valid? Not by some private person claiming it to be so, but by a court striking down the offending statute.
There's nothing wrong, surely, with wishing for a different IP regime, or claiming that the current regime is unfair or anachronistic. What I see Halford objecting to, and what I join him in objecting to, is pretending that because it is a flawed system, it is in fact different than it is: because prices are high, the textbook company doesn't really own the right to exclude, and so an unauthorized download isn't stealing.
And with that, I'm out. Sorry for stirring up this shitstorm yet again, everybody.
Oh right I forgot option (d), voluntary contributions by people over Kickstarter.
Structurally I think it's pretty much the same as your (b) (patronage).
Are you saying that I'm allowed to create a mouse called Mickey as long as the expression is different from those Disney has used?
Yes, you are. For reals. You really are.
JRoth, I really don't understand Halford to be making a moral argument. Property rights exist as they are legally defined. We don't get to individually decide to define them differently
Yes, this is really most of what I'm trying to say. Analyzing the overall morality is above my pay grade; it's the claim that you aren't really "stealing" because you disagree with the current system.
Structurally I think it's pretty much the same as your (b) (patronage).
No, really not. Or rather: I think there are important differences both in terms of what sort of creativity it incentivizes, and in terms of the objectionability of the patron/creator relationship.
I think there are important differences both in terms of what sort of creativity it incentivizes, and in terms of the objectionability of the patron/creator relationship.
Fair enough, but the two have important similarities that distinguish them from the other models.
155 is dead fucking wrong and very revealing
Ask the Lovings how the Virginia law was struck down.
We don't get to individually decide to define them differently
And thus the above, though I haven't really decided how to respond to it, partly due to caution about vanguardism, is also, in practice, dead wrong.
This is the liberal problem, it starts with "we must get organized, and everybody gets a vote, and there must be rules" and in zero time you have injustice, atrocities, and exploitation.
The Lovings said fuck it, and it was that decision, and their illegalism and contempt for majority rule that got freedom running.
We don't even need 18th-century copyright, let alone the DMCA or NET Act or ACTA or SIPA to enforce these consequences.
So when you download a free copy of a textbook you think you should just be straight up arrested for something like theft of services?
CC: What I see Halford objecting to, and what I join him in objecting to, is pretending ... an unauthorized download isn't stealing... RH: it's the claim that you aren't really "stealing" because you disagree with the current system.
No, no, no. When I search for "steal" in the US Code, I don't find hits in Title 17 (copyrights) or 35 (patents), because theft is a distinct crime, and when lawyers are actually being precise, they don't call one crime by the name of another. As has been made abundantly clear in this thread, the only way to get "theft" to cover unlicensed downloading is by analogically extending theft to cover the diminishment of expected profit, an extension that would equally cover almost all forms of unlicensed competition. But if someone illegal starts a first-class mail delivery service to compete with the Post Office, nobody would call it theft, even those the USPS clearly has a legal right to be the only carrier of first-class mail, &c.
No one here is denying that library.nu was illegal and was helping me and others commit illegal activities. But we were not "stealing," nor was l.nu, because that's a different crime, and RH's attempt to conflate them isn't just moral argument, it's moral argument trying to masquerade as legal argument, which is the worst of all sorts.
161 -- The Lovings didn't do it themselves. They used, and needed to use, organs of the federal state.
162: the question was about performers in a concert hall. To safeguard that, all you need is prohibitions on trespassing.
162: Probably not, because having a textbook doesn't seem to be a service.
131: (Boring and conciliatory version of 134 and 138 to follow.)
Sure, there are complicated questions involved, and I'm not defending the ultimate conceptual coherence of the following picture, but roughly speaking the usual (moral, as opposed to economics) intuition is that there is on the one hand the usefulness of an item to you in ways that don't involve making money off it (using your car for transport, using your money to buy stuff, using your music file to listen to) and on the other hand usefulness that involves making money off it. If my act diminishes the item's usefulness to you only in the second way (as per my 99, or, e.g., by my making a better gadget that renders the one you have obselete), it's not usually taken to be rivalry in the sense that makes for theft. (This doesn't necessarily mean that it's only theft to take from those who intend to use in the first sense, as opposed to exchange for money. You can argue that even though GM makes cars only to sell, the reason why it's theft to steal from their factory is still based in the use-value of the car, and not its exchange-value.) But yes, this is a longer conversation.
theft is a distinct crime
Not really; there's no traditionally-defined crime or tort of "theft," for the simple reason that crimes and torts in the law refer to specific infringements on specific property rights, which is what we're talkign about here. What theft refers to, informally, is taking someone else's property without permission in violation of one of those rights, and comes up in the intellectual property context in things like the "No Electronic Theft" act.
Probably not, because having a textbook doesn't seem to be a service.
Well yeah, which is why I said "like". So what's reading without paying, trespassing with your eyeballs?
Probably not, because having a textbook doesn't seem to be a service.
We'll have to check with Yglesias to be sure, of course.
I also agree with Charley Carp that you should in these cases obey the laws as written. (I don't think civil disobedience is called for here.)
Further to 168, I should say that the word "theft" comes up in a number of statutes, including some related to intellectual property, but it's not a precisely defined legal term.
And I basically agree with 167.2, but wanted to push back on the assertions of a necessary or fundamental difference between the two kinds of theft.
I also agree with Charley Carp that you should in these cases obey the laws as written.
A bunch of squares, the lot of you! I bet y'all only cross at crosswalks, with the walk-light, too.
173: What are you, some kind of beatnik?
A bunch of squares, the lot of you! I bet y'all only cross at crosswalks, with the walk-light, too.
And never speed, either.
So what's reading without paying, trespassing with your eyeballs?
This is not a library!
171 -- Oh, I'm not saying people should obey the laws as written, not at all. Put me on the side of the Lovings on that one. But I don't think people should break the law -- or appropriate that which is considered property -- without being willing to accept the consequences. Rhetorically, at least.
But I don't think people should break the law -- or appropriate that which is considered property -- without being willing to accept the consequences. Rhetorically, at least.
And this gets us back to the underlying enforcement issue that makes any of this matter in the first place.
The Lovings didn't do it themselves. They used, and needed to use, organs of the federal state.
Keep it clean. Family blog.
172.2: Comity
177: Oh yeah, that's what I meant too. (Hence my restriction to "these cases" and "here".)
Analyzing the overall morality is above my pay grade;
If you apply yourself, you can be promoted to ethicist?
But I don't think people should break the law -- or appropriate that which is considered property -- without being willing to accept the consequences. Rhetorically, at least.
I've always thought this a deeply mistaken view, though many seem to hold this. Still, as I promised hours ago, I need to put this shit aside, and perhaps even get dressed and/or take a shower.
183 or, I should add, having a sound basis (e.g. the Lovings) for contesting the law and willingness to do so.
A bunch of squares, the lot of you! I bet y'all only cross at crosswalks, with the walk-light, too.
Na klar, man muss ja an den kindern denken.
Von Wafer as a Hebrew James Earl Jones
I would bit-torrent that movie.
I'd wait for it to appear on basic cable.
167, 172: The distinction is simpler than that: it's the difference between being able to use something yourself and being able to exclude others from using it. If I take a loaf of bread from your counter, you can't eat it. If I take a digital copy of your book, you can still read it. I'm denying you the right to exclude me from reading it too, but I'm not denying you the ability to use it. The money element comes in because an enforceable right to exclude others means that others are willing to pay to be allowed to use.
Talking about copyright infringement as "theft" is an attempt to take all the moral and social infrastructure built up around rights in physical property and apply it to intellectual property. It's about politics and ideology, not language.
Talking about copyright infringement as "theft" is an attempt to take all the moral and social infrastructure built up around rights in physical property and apply it to intellectual property. It's about politics and ideology, not language.
This is not true. Physical property is not really a coherent concept. Rights in physical property isn't really either.
I'm in the squishy middle on copyright (some, sure, but I don't like the legal regime we have now). But I'm with NPH and others on the linguistic point that copyright violation isn't theft, which, while not a precisely defined legal term, in English means the taking of rivalrous property rather than any violation of any property right. Trespass isn't theft, closing off an easement isn't theft, and copyright violation isn't theft, except by analogy.
While you may not intend to make a moral argument, I have a hard time hearing the repeated use of 'theft' and 'stealing' as anything other than a claim to the moral intuitions associated with theft. If that's not your intent, the conversation will go more smoothly if you drop that analogy for a bit.
Copyright violation: like abstracting electricity.
189: Whether it's coherent or not -- and I'm not arguing that it is -- it's a whole lot more deeply rooted in culture and language than intellectual property.
Eh, so? I don't care about that. That's a purely conservative argument. Property is not a great concept. I don't care that much if people want to force it into new shapes given that's how it came to exist.
By the way, most appropriate title for this thread.
The last time I looked at this, I think the first example of the use of "theft" in a copyright infringement context was in the 18th or 19th century, but I can't remember where I saw that and don't have access to the OED. Anyhow I dispute the assumption that theft necessarily implies in English the denial of use of a tangible good, and I think the line NPH is trying to draw breaks down very quickly once one looks at the actual nature of property rights.
Property is a great concept. I'm very fond of my house.
There is no "actual nature of property rights" such that looking at it solves these kinds of problems.
Brand new garage door opener and newly painted bathroom.
198 -- well, right. There are just a defined set of legal entitlements that have certain characteristics and mechanisms for enforcement, and that's as true for tangible goods as intangible ones.
||
oh my god, guys, my new DJ doohickey is so fucking amazing. Does anybody have a bar mitzvah coming up? Because I will ROCK THAT SHIT for you.
|>
193: I don't object to the general idea that squishy concepts evolve, but that doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't push back against attempts to expand a squishy concept in an undesirable direction.
196.last: Counterexamples? I'm sure there are some, and I wouldn't argue that the line I'm drawing is perfectly bright, but it is there.
201: finish up your time-travel doohickey, and we'll head back to 1981.
bet y'all only cross at crosswalks, with the walk-light, too
The things that marrying a transportation planner has done to me....
Hi, what's going on? I'm with Trapnel.
188: Sure, but I think I was saying the same thing earlier and then responding to Halford's idea that I'm excluding you from using your music file to make money with if I copy and disseminate it.
208: we were discussing the intersection of BDSM and radfem queer theory in later Nintendo launch titles.
205: Provided you're not the lawyer who has to deal with it. LB probably doesn't see much humor in that sort of thing any more.
170: We'll have to check with Yglesias to be sure, of course.
I view downloading as manufacturing. And highly automated manufacturing at that.
207: Someone could make a really bad joke involving asking for a parking variance.
210: the intersection of BDSM and radfem queer theory
Dude. They're in tension*. Try to keep up.
* Something I was sort of interested in, actually.
I'm with Trapnel.
The bookseller is in favor of stealing books? That's a new twist.
The bookseller understands the black and grey markets, and why they exist, and understands that publishers try to control supply (by, among other things, destroying books) which means controlling access, which means being the only suppliers. The parallels between paper and digital books are strained in various ways.
Parsimon probably has puny arms and is all "fuck these boxes of books, I'm launching an offshore hosting site instead".
Is there a way to look up how expensive two hours of well-done video have historically cost? I have a hard time believing that say Being Human costs more in infaltion adjusted money than did the oscar winners of the eighties. Production costs are the unexamined assumption, I'm claiming.
For erudite nonfiction in print, which is how I used library.nu, state funding already obtains, in most cases.
I hear there's more money in that, it's true.
218: The textbook sellers managed to convince my grandfather that Amazon was taking money out of his pocket by selling used copies of his textbooks - even while all but compelling him to produce needless new editions on a regular basis.
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/cyber/ipr/ipr
Parsimon probably has puny arms and is all "fuck these boxes of books, I'm launching an offshore hosting site instead".
I was thinking she was one of the third-world entrepreneurs mentioned above who print out books from these sites and then sell them.
Come to think of it, is "gray market" ever used in a context where something wrong is going on, as opposed to muscling in on someone's market control?
222: That's a tough call. Used book sales do take money out of the author's pocket, at least at the cash register*. (They are, of course, fully legal, as well as morally unobjectionable.) Amazon's decision to provide an outlet for used book selling was controversial initially.
Textbooks are a slightly different matter: they don't have a very long resale life, what with the new editions coming out every few years. Publishers do that for a reason.
* There's a not inconsiderable argument to be made that a writer's work gains a fair amount through the wider dissemination made possible via the sale of used copies. That may have been mentioned upthread.
225: It means it's a grey area, doesn't it? Muscling in on someone's market control, but in a way that might be arguably not quite legal, though not clearly illegal.
Used book sales do take money out of the author's pocket, at least at the cash register
It's an economist's argument, I know, but what about the notion that the ability to resell increases willingness to pay upfront?
228: You mean the potential buyer's ability to resell? I don't know how many people consider that when they decide to buy new as opposed to used. They probably used to much more back in the old days than they do now.
Amazon has a new thing going: 'sell back this book' for X amount. They're actively promoting the notion of reselling (to Amazon themselves, and only for store credit) if/when you're done with the thing. They're sucking up sources in the used book market in so doing, because they're not stupid at what they do.
It would be mightily interesting if a 'used' market for digital books were to crop up: then it would look more like the bookselling market we're familiar with.
Have you seen the unfogged EULA ? It requires Rehypothecation of comments by the commenters. If only there were a quote button.
228: the ability to resell increases willingness to pay upfront
Looking at this from another perspective: of course it does! A robust resale and trade market is much better for all than a market consisting of sell-once-and-then-it's-gone. I don't see how the digital market can duplicate that robustness.
There is another serious problem with the digitization of creative content that bothers me a fair amount: I suppose the internet is just never going to go down? We'll never have a problem with the electricity supply? I just don't like the notion of there being no place for a secondary/used/black/grey market, which, frankly, harbors stuff.
(though that list is shrinking, thank goodness, as university presses are forced to retrench, leaving authors to write what they should have in the first place: articles).
Sob! But of course you don't mean my part-written book, because it is going to be a thing of beauty and a joy forever.
I thought of the option to resell as a hedge against not much liking the book after all. Without it, one is logically more cautious in one's expenditure; fine when the alternative is 'library', dubious if the effect is to reduce the range of what's saleable at all.
I kind of think the ideal average scholarly publication length in history - I offer no opinion on other disciplines - is somewhere between about 50 and 150 pages: articles aren't quite long enough to have the depth of books, books aren't quite deep often enough to sustain the length of books. That publication length doesn't really exist. On paper. You'd think we could change that now.
232: there will always be room for books like yours on my shelf, rfts.
234: I think that's absolutely right. But we're slow to change, aren't we?
articles aren't quite long enough to have the depth of books, books aren't quite deep often enough to sustain the length of books.
I can tell you're not really talking about articles and books.
Halford seems to believe in a right to anticipated profits or revenue, and there is no doubt a sense in which almost everyone feels that they ought to be compensated when others gain benefits as a result of something they themselves contributed to--this is why we have concepts like exploitation, and why worker-owned co-ops are important!--but conflating theft and copying is a source of conceptual confusion with no countervailing utility whatsoever.
No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.
For better or worse, the existing model for the production and dissemination of books remunerates those who have spent time and money in creating them on the basis of a sum per copy sold. Note the word, "COPY". You buy, borrow or steal a copy of a book.
Now only a fool would pretend that this model remains appropriate for current technologies, but the onus is on those who are most anxious to change it to offer a workable alternative which doesn't leave the author, designer, editor, etc. out of pocket.
The argument that academic books aren't written for money is specious: VW has already made the point that it applies only to certain categories of books, and in practice academic books (however you want to define them) are not sold/lent/stolen in a distinct way from others anyway.
I'm waiting for trapnel and NPH to tell me how I'm going to make a living as a writer. If they can, I'll be on their side; if the can't I'm with Halford.
...cont'd. I have known plenty of people over my life who have regarded the textbook they wrote and have continued to update as a significant component of their pension. The view from an obscure branch of philosophy doesn't take in much of the landscape.
I HAVE SEEN ENOUGH, SIR, OF THESE DAMN'D SNAKES ON THIS DAMN'D PLANE!
239
... and in practice academic books (however you want to define them) are not sold/lent/stolen in a distinct way from others anyway.
Is this really true? Aren't the majority of academic book sales textbooks?
239. I'm not counting schoolbooks as academic. Presumably students still buy their own textbooks, on line, or in shops.
91
... But even if most of the users are spoiled freeloaders like me, that doesn't change the fact that, for the (by stipulation) tiny minority of folks logging on from slums in Bangladesh, services like library.nu are the only feasible way to get at the scientific and cultural patrimony of the literate world. ...
This is basically nonsense. Compared to the value of the vast amount of free material (like wikipedia) available on the internet the added value of having access to nonfree stuff is not all that great.
||
Another step on the road to fast, cheap and out-of-control.
I for one will welcome our new swarming overlords.
|>
243
I'm not counting schoolbooks as academic. Presumably students still buy their own textbooks, on line, or in shops.
How many academic books are voluntarily (ie not for use as a textbook) bought by individuals with their own money? I was under the impression that the number was miniscule and that the market for academic books is in fact quite unlike the market for say popular fiction.
246. The market is considerably different. The production and distribution process, and the associated costs are the same, with the exception that the risk attached to textbook publication is lower.
...bought by individuals with their own money?
That's an absurd restriction. When I buy a book with department or grant funds because I need it do my job, it somehow isn't a real sale?
248: not having read the thread, people with department or grant funds available to buy a book would presumably have been vanishingly unlikely to get it off library.nu instead.
Maybe. Just don't insult my book collection.
I didn't even know library.nu existed until this thread.
248
That's an absurd restriction. When I buy a book with department or grant funds because I need it do my job, it somehow isn't a real sale?
It's a real sale but it doesn't depend on convincing someone to part with their own hard earned money. A market dominated by this sort of sale will differ from one like the popular fiction market where books have to compete with all the other ways you could be spending your money.
I once bought a lot of books with fellowship money (which would otherwise have gone away). I had no real need for these books and in fact have never read (or even skimmed) most of them since.
I work on better grants than you. I have to make an actual case that I need the book. I'm not spending my own money, but I didn't buy my own desk and chair either. I expect my employer to buy me the tools for the jobs they give me.
239
The argument that academic books aren't written for money is specious ...
Most of the revenue from academic books does not go to the author. So the argument that the present system is set up for the benefit of authors or that authors would be the biggest losers if it went away is disengenous.
Most academic books (like most academic papers) are of extremely marginal value to society and would be no great loss if they went unwritten.
Most academic book and papers are of marginal value but some of them are of immense value. There isn't really a good way to tell which ones matter ahead of time.
Most of the revenue from academic books does not go to the author. So the argument that the present system is set up for the benefit of authors or that authors would be the biggest losers if it went away is disengenous.
WARNING: THIS IS NOT A LOAD-BEARING STRUCTURE
Most of the time I spend in a pub, I am not drinking beer. (If I spend an hour there, it's unlikely that beer is actually flowing into my mouth for more than a total of a couple of minutes.) Therefore the argument that I go to the pub to drink beer is disingenuous.
Most of the revenue from academic books does not go to the author.
Fixed that for you.
Look, I'm not here to defend the current model of publishing and book distribution. I just want one of the people who are pointing out all its deficiencies to spend ten minutes thinking about how an viable alternative could be structured which would protect the interests of authors, editors, designers, copy readers, translators...
Plus, I actually get very great value from the books I do have. I could pull up the original papers that discuss the same results, and I do when I'm dealing with new work, but it kills huge amounts of time.
I have no real opinion on the substantive point, but atrocities like the one in 256 are why the analogy ban is a thing (honored in the continual breach, of course).
OT: I'm not entirely comfortable with the new, improved, happy me.
Communization and Its Discontents, Noys ed, available free online
Where are we now? In an essay from 2001, the French collective Tiqqun speaks of what they call the cybernetic hypothesis: '[A]t the end of the twentieth century the image of steering, that is to say management, has become the primary metaphor to describe not only politics but all of human activity as well.' The cybernetic hypothesis is, in Tiqqun's view, a vast experiment beginning in the overdeveloped nations after World War II and eventually spreading to swallow the planet in an impervious logic of administration and interconnectivity. 'The cybernetic hypothesis is thus a political hypothesis, a new fable... [It] proposes that we conceive of biological, physical and social behaviour as both fully programmed and also re-programmable.'
Look, it ain't about profit or about rights anymore. It is about social reproduction without supercession, about stasis and control. Look around, how do we get from here to Huxley?
260: I thought it was pretty good, actually. Just because most of X doesn't directly relate to Y does not mean that X itself is not intended for Y.
It is about social reproduction without supercession...
How the fuck do I list those on my vita?
264: Somehow the introduction of "the amount of time I spend actually drinking the beer" as one of the variables sent it completely off the rails for me.
257: Baen, Kickstarter, PLoS, next-chapter-when-tipjar's-full; these are all supporting professionals in various fields, and two and a half of them are explicitly producing public goods.
Shearer, medical and engineering detail usually isn't available free but the Third World needs it. I've slipped US govt employees papers they needed but didn't have access to, too.
I've slipped US govt employees papers they needed but didn't have access to, too.
Wow, I knew times were tough in the public sector but surely they can afford their own Rizlas.
Stretch your butterfly wings, Flip. Or feed us amiable ghouls: show us on the droll where she touched you, and we'll pull you back into the muck.
261: Console yourself with the reflection that this happiness, like all happiness, is shortlived. You'll be back to normal soon enough.
Baen: Valuable for self selected community of nerds
Kickstarter: Very valuable for some start ups. Huge scaling issues
PLoS: Wonderful but doesn't publish books
next-chapter-when-tipjar's-full: Crap. Might work for established fiction writers; unknowns would starve before the tipjar half fills or die of old age before the next chapter appears. Non-fic? I don't think so.
These are toys, exc. PLoS. Give me something real at that level that covers all the markets.
272 is again correct, at least in the summary. I don't know what Baen is.
Also, PubMed Central is very good if you are in the U.S. and looking at health care research.
Give me something real at that level that covers all the markets.
And if such a thing existed, people like x. trapnel wouldn't have to worry about copywright law; the problem would resolve itself.
No reason the same system has to cover all publishing, as we don't have a single system now. 'Literary merit' publishing is already a toy compared to travel/cooking/selfhelp/manuals, and doesn't support most of its writers. A new system doesn't have to be perfect to be justifiable, just no worse than the present one, perhaps with a different distribution of surplus.
I just want one of the people who are pointing out all its deficiencies to spend ten minutes thinking about how an viable alternative could be structured which would protect the interests of authors, editors, designers, copy readers, translators...
This would be a better argument if the status quo were sustainable. It isn't, as demonstrated by widespread disobedience of the current rules and IP owners' push for ever more draconian enforcement tools. I agree that a workable alternative is needed, but one can call bullshit on Halford et al. without assuming the obligation to propose one.
I think there's also a fair argument for "See how things shake out under a new legal regime, and tweak it if we don't like the results." Art and science existed long before copyright, and were paid for all sorts of ways. I think there's a fair argument that no matter what the legal regime, people will figure out a way to continue to produce culture.
That doesn't mean the legal regime is unimportant, but I think that if you want to change the current laws, the baseline assumption is that whatever happens, culture production is not going to shut down, and you don't need to work out all of the details of how everything's going to be done to make that assumption.
I think there's a fair argument that no matter what the legal regime, people will figure out a way to continue to produce culture.
The contrasting cultural output of North and South Korea begs to differ.
You don't like the 50,000 person dance routines?
Oh, come on, North Korea still produces culture. Their last dictator was a film buff!
277 -- There aren't really all that many options for getting money to producers and distributors, and as long as a large class of users feels entitled to take the product, free, without regard to the legal regime, whatever it is, you've already ruled out the most logical source of funds (ie, users).
Their last dictator was a film buff!
Which reveals another gap in Halford's copyright-free content production nexus - kidnapping!
280: Plus he did not declare war when his public image was legally used in films and cartoons.
281: For academic publishing, the other logical source is the writers. Nearly all of the writers are the users and not publishing isn't really an option, so it isn't really a distributional issue. Most of the research is funded by grants and most journals will make an exception for somebody with no budget to publish. In my field, this is paired with a federal requirement that any article based on government funded research has to be free on the internet after 1 year.
281: But that isn't where we are. We've established that there are a lot of users who will take illegally rather than buy on the terms that content owners are currently offering, and this "downloading=theft" marketing campaign might work better if the Disneys of the world hadn't done so much to forfeit any claim to the moral high ground, but a lot of users do pay even with current pricing.
285 -- Look at the list in 65. That's not about Disney's overreach. (I agree that it was overreach, and think the current regime is unfair in many ways. That doesn't make widespread piracy a viable alternative regime.)
It's worth noting that you never download stuff for free, you're always paying your ISP. I think subscription costs, preferably somewhat hidden, are the solution for now.
(Though as Julian Sanchez points out, in a few years all books ever made will fit on something that fits in your hand, at which point things get really hard, unless you put the price into the purchase of memory.)
286: Exactly. That's starting to look like somebody cutting the ground from under the works I need to support my work.
Halford, you are like the worst goddamn advocate for copyright ever. Boo-fucking-hoo, publishers don't get to maximize their revenue, because someone they've never met has sent a PDF to someone else they've never met. That's exactly as bad as breaking into someone's house and stealing their almonds.
One thing that library.nu was very useful for was getting PDFs of books I already owned, so that I could (a) search them or (b) easily excerpt them (pdfjam being much easier to operate than a scanner).
Most of the list in 65 would be viable under a regime of writer pays from existing funding. The exception is software documentation, for which there's an alternate, more complicated arrangement to keep culture flowing.
This really only fails for video production costs and distribution, I think.
291: I don't think so for the statistical texts.
Walt, come on. It is not as bad as breaking and entering and stealing almonds, but is still the taking of something which required work to produce from someone else. Can you argue with that? I don't see how.
And yes, for the record I have made my living at producing and selling intellectual property. Mostly computer software, but also some books and live music performances.
And acting. A little. A very little, but still, a little.
but is still the taking of something which required work to produce from someone else.
Not necessarily. One time in the past when x.trapnel mentioned library.nu, I got curious and went to see if I could figure out how it worked. And I downloaded a book by a dead author that was still in copyright, and read it. I wasn't in the market for that particular book -- there was no real chance that I was going to buy a copy anytime in the near future, certainly not a new copy, so there are no royalties that would have flowed to the copyright holder from my reading the book in the absence of library.nu. If library.nu weren't there, I just wouldn't have read it. So literally no one lost anything.
That's obviously not true of all copyright violation, but it really is true of some copyright violation. It's conceptually different from taking rivalrous property.
Read the comments. I never said that was true in all cases. I was referring to the specific case of someone giving a PDF to someone else, which Robert said was ". . . starting to look like somebody cutting the ground from under the works I need to support my work."
For Robert Halford, that is starting to look bad. For me, referring to the specifics of my life given above, that is starting to look bad.
'[S]tarting to look bad', fine. '[T]aking something', on the other hand, only if the PDF would have been bought and paid for in a way that got copyright to the holder in the absence of a piracy option. It's a real distinction.
My feelings on this are heavily driven by recent(ish) law extending copyrights; I find it really annoying that culture produced before my parents were born is still in copyright. Life of the author + 25, or something like that, seems like plenty to me.
At this point, while it's not a rigorous or well-thought-out position, I am unable to care much about copyright violators as bad people or law-breakers. Come up with a more reasonable and respectable copyright regime, and I will begin to sympathize with people who want to enforce it.
298. But the insanity of current copyright law is an entirely different question from the ethics of enabling the entire population to help themselves to other people's work because they want to.
When I was a kid, author's copyright in Britain was lifetime plus 50 years. That seems fair even now, but I'd listen to arguments that it's too long. The prior law was 42 years or life plus 7, whichever was shorter. Do you prefer that? If so, why, other than for selfish reasons as a consumer?
re: 295
I don't get how whether or not you'd have read it is relevant.
'I wouldn't have consumed this X if X wasn't free.' isn't an argument for making X free.
I agree that it is a distinction, and for the record I also don't like the recent extensions of copyrights and patents. I think the extensions give a HUGE advantage to corporations which never die and which are usually able to fund the fight for ownership long after a writer's or inventors heirs would be about to do it.
I also think that patents on life forms and genomes and software have really tilted things in favor of corporations and away from people.
But I think *people* have a right to benefit from the production of valuable (meaning someone else wants it) intellectual property, and for a reasonable period of time.
If we're worrying about assuring the production of culture, ten years or so, flat, would probably be plenty -- my understanding is that the vast majority of copyrighted material brings in the vast majority of its income in the first few years. While there are works that bring in money well past that, no one who's trying to make a living from culture is counting on that kind of income, so it's not providing an incentive for culture-production (possibly untrue for huge-budget corporate works, but introspection reveals that I don't give a damn about incentivizing the production of that sort of thing.)
So anything over ten years or so, all I'm worried about is the moral claims of the author. Life seems fair, because I can see it being very upsetting having people profiting from your work while you were around to see it. Worrying about the estate? Eh, I don't have a lot of interest in allowing anyone to pass on much of an estate, so mostly I'm worried about minor children or an elderly spouse. Twenty-five years seems like plenty to me; ten wouldn't worry me at all, really, either.
Only skimmed the thread but am in broad agreement with chris y (and tripp in the comment preceding this one).
301: It's not, by itself, an argument that copyright violation isn't wrong. It's an argument that if it is wrong, the wrongfulness doesn't arise from there being any person who is worse off after the violation than they would be if the violation hadn't taken place -- if there's no counterfactual world where the royalties were paid, no one is worse off due to the piracy.
298 is close to my position. I care about getting money into the pockets of the creators of books, music, and movies, but I feel no obligation to respect the so-called rights of corporations milking works essentially forever.
There's also a pretty good economic argument that far-down-the-line benefits have next to no NPV. Instead of hoping that your descendants 75 years in the future get some royalties from your book, just put aside $10 for them now (This was spun out in detail during the failed Eldred challenge to the CTEA).
How do derivative works work, exactly? E.g., A: x, B: x+y, then C: x^2? Does B have any rights vis a vis C, or not? Because if copyrights had a duration that was potentially less than the creator's life, you could end up in a situation where A=C, which seems shitty if B then has some claim. But maybe that's not how things work now. And regardless, it seems like a solvable problem.
Well, yes. On the merits I'd be delighted to see authorial copyright revert to life plus seven years. That's plenty. But that whole discussion is a complete diversion from the question of the ethics of piracy.
If so, why, other than for selfish reasons as a consumer?
Also, to address this specifically: cutting out 'selfish reasons as a consumer' cuts out any reason to have any works go into the public domain ever. The parties in interest here are copyright-holders and consumers: there's no one else. So if you're asking me when something should go into the public domain, but asking me to disregard the interests of anyone who might want to use it, you're begging the question, and presuming that copyright should be infinite in duration.
I don't think you meant to do that, but I do think it's what you said.
Okay, so I could have looked that up myself.
It seems like the more interesting question may be the situation where C: (x+y)^2 and A=C.
But that whole discussion is a complete diversion from the question of the ethics of piracy.
Well, I think it's an argument that this is not an area where the law deserves respect -- compliance with it is a matter of not getting caught and punished. Respect for the interests and (in my own judgment) moral rights of an author might cause me to behave, for ethical reasons, in a manner that incidentally complies with copyright law. But I wouldn't consider "acting in accordance with copyright law" an ethical guideline in the way I do in other areas of law.
I'm waiting for trapnel and NPH to tell me how I'm going to make a living as a writer.
Why should you get to make a living as a writer?
310. 50 bonus points for correct use of "begging the question", but the point is that pirate sites don't distinguish between works by some DWEM whose copyright has been questionably extended by an eeeevil multinational publishing corporation and works by a living poet textbook author starving in a garret with a large family to support. It offers unscrupulous readers the opportunity to nick copies of either.
So, a few things.
First, the debate over the legitimacy of the library.nu site has almost nothing to do with the length of the copyright term. It was a website that aggregated more than 400,000 books, and the most popular downloads were of newer books, particularly textbooks. For precisely the reasons that people have identified in this thread (most people want newer stuff, and there is little demand for older things (which is indeed a reason to favor a shorter copyright term, but see below)) there is vanishingly little piracy over works for which the copyright term was extended in the CTEA. Library.nu was about newer works, not older ones.
Second, Walt described the site as "someone they've never met has sent a PDF to someone else they've never met"; LB says that she only looked at a work that she never would have bought. But both of these descriptions fundamentally misdescribe what the threat is of the site to publishers and authors. Copyright law, both in formal terms and in practice, currently has a wide range of exceptions that allow sharing among single individuals -- the first sale doctrine, mentioned above, is one, and there are many others. But what a site like library.nu does is to aggregate hundreds of thousands of in-copyright works and make them available to the world. While there may be some people who only use it to look at things that they never, ever would have paid for in any other capacity, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the primary use would be to avoid paying for works that people need and that they don't want to pay for, and the fact that the site appears to have been heavily focused on textbooks demonstrates as much.
Third, we could really have a separate and interesting discussion about the length of the copyright term. The honest truth is that no one knows exactly what the right length is -- the term lengths are basically made up out of whole cloth. My personal feeling is that the overall current term is too long -- it should be substantially shorter for books, something close to life of the author, and somewhat longer for audiovisual work (where there are real and genuine preservation and need for distribution issues). It's also worth noting that the Copyright Act has provisions that allow individual authors to recapture, after a certain length of time and in a complicated way, grants made to publishers, so that in many cases under the current system the greatest beneficiaries of long copyright terms are older authors or their heirs, not corporations. Anyhow, that's a separate conversation, that we can get into, but the biggest point is that very old works that are still in copyright are neither that important to the consumption of cultural goods, nor to the piracy sites, and so the length of the term really doesn't matter that much for your position on library.nu.
And that's fair enough. I'd think someone pirating a copy of a work by a living author was doing something wrong, or at least wrong-ish, depending. I do find the "I wouldn't have been able to afford to buy this, so if I pirate it I'm better off and no one is worse off" argument compelling depending on the circumstances, but I don't know how you could possibly enforce that in practice other than on the honor system. (The most sympathetic example I can come up with is something like a medical/nursing student in a developing country, pirating textbooks they can't afford, so that they will be better able to provide health care to the poorest of the poor. Throw in a kitten somewhere, but you see what I mean.)
I'd think someone pirating a copy of a work by a living author was doing something wrong
Did you read the back cover of the authorized Tolkein works from the 1980s?
317 to 315. Some of 317 incidentally works as a reply to 316, but it was written without seeing 316.
I should probably be able to spell his name by now. Sorry.
Just like the "Star Wars" rule of you shouldn't be able own the rights to derivative works for longer than 20 years, I think there should be a rule for textbooks: you can put out as many editions as you want, but once you pass 5 editions, then edition 1 goes into the public domain. The textbook publishing racket is evil.
On the merits I'd be delighted to see authorial copyright revert to life plus seven years. is more like it.
I just see little social utility to long copyrights.
Fred Neill struggled in the Village, wrote and sold "Everybody's Talking" and retired to a boat in Florida, never much to write or perform again. We lost an artist to copyright. I wonder how often this happens.
Also textbooks are a good example of how you can't separate parts of the copyright regime from others. If works entered the public domain in a reasonable amount of time, then many classes would assign textbooks that are in the public domain. It's not like there's huge advances in calculus every year. Yes you could still charge people for new exercises, but not $200 a pop.
If we didn't provide public sector pensions, we wouldn't lose all those firemen so soon.
I'm kind of mystified why the wiki approach hasn't taken over the textbook industry.
321 would be a reasonable principle, but I can already imagine the ways they'd get round it. And in some fields you really do need a new edition every few years. A friend of mine wrote a reference book on British benefits law. Since there's nothing politicians like better than fucking about with benefits entitlements it's regularly out of date and it would be dangerous not to update it. But neither the author nor the publishers would care if old editions were exempted from copyright in that case, because they're valueless.
324:Fred Neil retired at 35. "The Dolphins and Other Side of This Life also got him regular checks.
Obviously Neil is an exception, many more artists get a big payday and keep working for decades. But that just shows they aren't working for the money, at least the great wealth. It's people like Halford, agents, producers, the non-creative types that care so much about the big income streams.
324 is right. Lifetime copyright provides for an author's old age. I neither know nor care who Fred Neill is, but if he wanted to go on writing he would have. If he didn't, he's have got a job as a postman.
Right, so here's the right way to do the law. In order to keep the copyright to a book you must keep the book in print. Printing new editions of the book counts as keeping the book in print, and retains the copyright on four consecutive versions.
The point is the with textbooks publishers really want to do is stop schools from assigning editions where used copies exist. Their goal is to put out a new edition every year and thus require everyone to pay for new books.
The above rule also solves abandoned work issues in copyright.
316.2: it doesn't take a genius to figure out that the primary use would be to avoid paying for works that people need and that they don't want to pay for, and the fact that the site appears to have been heavily focused on textbooks demonstrates as much.
Or can't pay for. I'm not sure why you elide that.
The site likely heavily focuses on textbooks because they are often remarkably expensive.
This may sound like near-trolling, but how would your position change if the price of new books increased tenfold? Suppose that in-print science or economics text were now $2000 rather than $200? The point is that $200 is a not insignificant burden to many: that's why black and grey markets crop up.
328: I'm philosophically opposed to Florida, but actually using the freedom that comes with having money seems like a good thing.
326: Part of the reason why I want more textbooks in the public domain is that it would allow the wiki approach to be more competitive. You could start with Stuart Edition 1 and make it into a wiki, and it would quickly be competitive with the current edition.
I do think that academic publishing is a kind of sui generis animal, for a number of different reasons, including the fact that professors have an independent source of income in the academy, the mandatory compulsion for students (or, in the case of high school texts, every school district in the state) to buy the textbooks, and the purportedly educational nature of the material. It's not an area that fits neatly into the core values of copyright. Nonetheless, simply uploading everything to a pirate site like library.nu and allowing people to download stuff for free without any compensation at all is not the way to go.
333: For purposes of not having kids complain about the grading ("But the book said that when I looked yesterday") few texts will ever take a Wiki approach regardless of copyright.
I agree that "imply uploading everything to a pirate site like library.nu and allowing people to download stuff for free without any compensation" is almost certainly not optimal, however I do think it's *better than the current system*.
and what two said at 313
Why should Paul Kantner expect a tiny tiny check today from Blows Against the Empire? He is better off with people finding that album, and then going to see him perform live at 70. Nobody is going to pay to see John Smith perform the Kantner songs.
(And he should have invested his income from when it was highest, and everybody in an entertainment, sport, or other transient industry should expect to have a bell-shaped or spikey earning curve.)
330.1 wouldn't work at all; there would simply be publishers who commissioned new textbooks.
Anyhow, as I've said here before, there are 100%- compatible-with-current-law solutions to the textbook and academic publishing problems that people complain about here. They would involve some organization on the part of academics, which everyone here seems to assume is impossible, but if your goal is to have cheaper versions of textbooks or academic articles that cut out the publishing industry, there are completely obvious means for academics to do so that don't involve any change in the law.
Nonetheless, simply uploading everything to a pirate site like library.nu and allowing people to download stuff for free without any compensation at all is not the way to go.
Then, in the academic market at least, publishers need to lower their prices or find some other way to acknowledge and accommodate a market whose needs it's not meeting. Otherwise people simply will beg, borrow or steal, or buy used, for paper copies. Cracking a controlling whip is not a solution -- people will fight that degree of control, with very good reason (see: $2000 textbooks).
329:I very much disagree, and we should seriously ask why writing or acting should provide extended rents when plumbing or nursing does not.
If a writer wants a pension, let him organize a union. Actors and some? musicians have.
publishers need to lower their prices or find some other way to acknowledge and accommodate a market whose needs it's not meeting
You may be right, but simply allowing a website that allows free and unlimited downloading of more than 400,000 books (not just textbooks) without any controls or compensation whatsoever would kill the entire compensation scheme for the business and entirely kill off the market for books, including the secondary market that you are involved in.
It's people like Halford, agents, producers, the non-creative types that care so much about the big income streams (and long copyrights).
Aw man, are you saying my book "Writing Atari Games 4 They're Fun" will never hit the big time? I was counting on that.
I will take the fact that no one has taken a stab at answering 313 as tacit agreement with the proposition that writers do not in fact have a moral right to earn a living from their writing, and that the point of copyright law is therefore not to enforce any such right.
339: Begging, stealing, buying used are all fine for the current publishing model because they produce an inferior good. What is needed is a way to have people pay for an electronic copy that is either a superior good to the pirated one or in a way that limits the amount of pirated copying.
There are musician's union. I'm a member. On the other hand, IBM demanded ownership of ALL the intellectual property I produced while working for them, and they hated unions.
So I don't think unions have much to do with this topic, but maybe I'm wrong.
343: Whoa there. All people (including writers) have a moral right to try to sell something they create. Whether someone wants to buy it is a separate issue.
They can also give it away, but that is their choice.
All people (including writers) have a moral right to try to sell something they create. Whether someone wants to buy it is a separate issue.
No argument there.
How about this? If Rowling wants to get published, she joins the union, and gives 5% of her net to the pension fund. Problem solved.
The reason writers actors sports stars are treated as isolated entrepeneurs is exactly because of the huge income streams that can be appropriated by the people Halford really represents. The precarity gives capital power over these producers and product.
History of Hollywood labour has lots of lessons to teach.
writers do not in fact have a moral right to earn a living from their writing
I am not sure what this means. I think we want to encourage writing and other cultural production, and I do also think that the original author and distributor of a work has an entitlement to compensation for their work, at least where it is successful. Copyright (obviously) does not ensure that any given writer can make a living from writing; what it does help to ensure is that a writer whose work becomes popular and well known can be (more or less) assured that he or she will receive some compensation from that fact, which both seems morally right to me and encourages production. The result of the overall copyright regime has been to permit an enormous amount of cultural production in a capitalist system, which has been a very good thing.
Poetry is one area of culture which would not be affected at all by the complete elimination of copyright. Poets mae their livings teaching, lecturing, doing poetry readings, and working as baristas and bookstore clerks. There have been a small handful of exceptions, mainly Allen Ginsberg.
Much the same is true of most other types of serious literature and large areas of music. Copyright today mostly works for blockbusters. Everyone else is screwed.
People have been talking for decades about the increasing crappiness of serious book publishing. Many formerly respectable publishers have been poppified by business consultants. It's really rich for Halford to claim that the present monetized, financialized, copyright-vigilante publishing regime is necessary for the support of culture.
The only art form for which I think that his argument may have some validity is low-budget art movies, which still cost millions to make.
A high proportion of authors self-finance during the creative part of their careers anyway, with not much reasonable expectation of a payoff, and when they finally start making money it's mostly not royalties.
Textbooks are a famously crooked racket. Someone who pirates the 17th fake revision of the standard econ textbook is doing a public service.
History of Hollywood labour has lots of lessons to teach.
I agree with this! Hollywood is the last almost 100% unionized American manufacturing industry, and one that is still world-dominant.
I think we want to encourage writing and other cultural production, and I do also think that the original author and distributor of a work has an entitlement to compensation for their work, at least where it is successful.
I agree with the first but not the second, and this is exactly the distinction I was trying to make.
292. The stats books are a 10-year old poorly reviewed textbook and a book written for modeling finance, published in one of Springer's indiscriminate series. The second author will make more from a single consulting gig than aggregate book sales, I think.
I'm not sure about textbooks, because the best are labors of love for which the authors definitely deserve compensation if they are to keep writing. One model that shows up online is some free content with payment for useful supplementary material. Doesn't lend itself to a single document to be reproduced and distributed, though, which is a real disadvantage.
313. Authors who have something to say get an incentive from being compensated. Reputation is an incentive also. But having textbooks that don't suck in quickly changing fields written by people who are capable and who have other claims on their time is a real advantage.
In other words, I see the role of copyright as incentivizing creative production, full stop. Its usefulness as public policy should be judged on how successful it is at that.
Copyright today mostly works for blockbusters.
I dunno. I've heard that some writers of Erotica who are self-publishing on Amazon are making a pretty good living. I have also heard that plagiarism there is rampant. Some people simply cut and paste other people's complete books and sell it until someone gripes, when they stop and start under another name. I'm talking offering 30 or so non-original works a year.
355: Oh, which shows that in that case copyright is not working. Sorry.
I agree with the first but not the second, and this is exactly the distinction I was trying to make
Then why on earth would anybody write anything? See 238.
Look, the best plumber in America does not make $10 million a year. Why not? Why should the "best" novelist or point guard make the big bucks?
It has to do with the creation of a market, the marketing of a product, and especially the legal or cultural exclusion of competition. It has little or nothing to do with the workers (artists) or the special and remarkable creativity. Rowling is a billion times as good as a Nobel winner?
Nothing to do with Rowling at fucking all. It's the machine that makes the money.
357: I dunno. How much did you get paid to write that comment?
357. Procopius, Bulgakov, and Samuel Johnson walk into a bar. Pay me and I'll finish the joke.
350:
As I say, your choices without copyright are (a) state support, including public universities; (b) patronage from rich people, including private universities; (c) people producing art as a hobby; or (d) voluntary donations through Kickstarter or some such.
Lots of artists/authors are in fact financed right now through some combination of (a)-(c) ((d) not so much), but if you think you could sustain anything like the level of current cultural production, including in high culture, through those options, I disagree strongly.
Fear Allerton, Wrestling Brewster, and Remember Maverick walk into a bar.
The Puritans invented the hippie name.
Why the fuck should the fact that something is or is not a labour of love matter? Or that the people producing academic books are also being compensated in other ways? And fuck all the poncing about in which somehow it's the creative aspect of writing that matters, or the fact that many writers would do the work anyway.
People doing work deserve to get paid; taking their shit without paying them, no matter how you dress it up, is wrong.
344: Begging, stealing, buying used are all fine for the current publishing model because they produce an inferior good.
The thread has moved on; but I don't understand this sentence at all.
I have never worshiped artists, having read the hundreds of midlist mystery/detective writers in the 90s, Burke or whoever, they probably themseves don't know why they made it and the others didn't. I doubt they worked that much harder. Do we really want to so disproportionately reward blind luck of timing or the gifts of birth? Why?
Fred Neil had the blind luck that Jesus, whoever, liked his song and put it in Midnight Cowboy. Musicians hit that luck all the time, Del Rey just got on a tv soundtrack.
This is not, not ever, about the intrinsic worth of these artists. They deserve nothing but a fair day's wage. That is the chasm we need to cross to understand what is going on here.
361: Well, the current commercial content production system is probably doomed in the long run anyway because of technological change undermining the enforceability of IP laws, regardless of whether or how the laws change, so I guess we'll find out.
361. I think an unstated assumption for those who are OK with a) b) c) is that we'll lose stuff like the books linked in 65 (not great, fungible work) rather than say Mermin's or Landau's textbooks; the latter were actually partly composed in prison and required dispensation from the Soviet authorities to be published.
I understand that good television does not fit into this model, at least not yet. I am curious how Netflix-funded productions will turn out.
No, 366 is totally wrong. I think that the profitability will be threatened in part, enhanced in part, but the idea that there is some kind of inevitable technological end to the content industry is wrong, though of course the legal regime matters.
I think that the profitability will be threatened in part, enhanced in part, but the idea that there is some kind of inevitable technological end to the content industry is wrong, though of course the legal regime matters.
So what's the problem, then? Why is any of this an issue?
Robert, we actually do sustain our present level of poetic production through a-c. This is the actual system. It's not too different for a lot of other serious non-fiction and fiction.
You leave out self-publication, performance, and unprotected publication (the 19th-c. system). Pirating can cut into the profits of a legit publisher and parasitize their publicity efforts, but the legit publisher will still be on the market first.
364: People prefer new physical books to used physical books. Not everyone, and not by much, but in general most people who want a book that's in print will buy it new rather than hunting it down used -- for books in print, used (non-rare) books are only competing for the cheapest tier of possible purchasers.
With e-books, a pirated copy can be exactly the same as a copy bought new, so it's competing for the same slice of the market.
People doing work deserve to get paid; taking their shit without paying them, no matter how you dress it up, is wrong.
The important questions remain totally unresolved by this statement. Namely, how does one get paid for one's work, and what constitutes "their shit"?
These questions are important and debatable. For a prime example, see the "first-sale doctrine" and the fact that it only applies in certain jurisdictions and only to certain types of works.
taking their shit without paying them, no matter how you dress it up, is wrong.
Publishers and the music biz already do that. A lot of authors and musicians end up owing their publisher money.
Cue the story of the Chess Brothers.
The last time unfogged had a copyright caged death match I noted that I gladly pay to netflix movies that I could easily get from torrent sites. So do most people and I think that can be taken as evidence that most people most of the time will acquire content legally rather than illegally as long as the content holders aren't being massive dicks about it.
If thriving black markets grow up, that's probably evidence that the content holders are behaving badly to the point that they've undermined their legitimacy with the majority of people.
I don't publish books but I've published several book chapters and many articles, and my feeling is that if pirates drove Elsevier out of business tomorrow the scientific community would owe the pirates a round of thanks. And I've published in Elsevier journals in the past.
What we say it is some kind of injustice that Rowling made billions and D'Engle made cigarette money? Or is this justice?
We "let the market decide?" Christ. The "market" is not a disinterested God/Judge of true value, it is a fucking vampire squid and we all know it.
Thing is, we want to hate Elsevier and yet still think the creators are really something special. That is exactly the key to the expropriation, the one the gets CEOs tens of millions because of their own remarkable talents and abilities.
Artists are just labor, and they can work for $100k and less like the rest of us schmucks.
re: 373
Sure. It was wrong when they did it; it's wrong when I (or you) do it. Also, the actual existing copyright regime is stupid and unjust in many ways. But the argument seems to proceed from that to the idea that people don't deserve to be compensated for their work.
369 -- Well, you still need a copyright system, but you needed a copyright system in the 1700s as well to prevent rampant piracy from the printing press.* Which is to say, technology could kill copyright if it's not enforced, but that has been true for a very very long time.
*Actually, the older regime was to limit by decree the number of printers and publishers, by establishing a guild and restrict the number of printers; the original copyright system was a response to piracy from extra-guild printers who set up shop.
we actually do sustain our present level of poetic production through a-c. This is the actual system.
That's absolutely true, because there is no market whatsoever for poetry. If you're fine with reducing all cultural production to the currently-existing level of production and distribution of poetry in the United States, I can't argue with you, OK. I think that would be a tremendous and tremendously unecessary loss, but that is what the stakes are.
But the argument seems to proceed from that to the idea that people don't deserve to be compensated for their work.
I'm not sure to what extent you're responding to me here, but this isn't what I'm saying. I agree that people deserve to be compensated for whatever work they do within the context of an agreement to compensate them for that work.
that something is or is not a labour of love matter?
Because it's more likely to be worth reading, and less likely to be written with no incentive. It's the boundary case to consider in figuring out what to do, in my mind. I agree that piracy sucks for authors, but I don't care whether or not there are more romance novels or beer commercials five years from now, so I'm indifferent as to whether their creators are paid by the hour or otherwise.
Except for the ripoff revised Econ 101 textbooks, etc., academic royalties seldom reach five figures, including the decimal point. It's a standing joke.
Not mentioned: copyright laws make it possible for a large number of parasitical organizations like Taylor and Francis and Bartels and Stout, which do not fund research and do not pay authors much, if anything, to restrict access to academic publications. Crooked Timber had a grumble thread about this, but no one picked up on my suggestion that someone investigate the process by which these monopolies are assigned.
re: 379
Again, worth has no place here. None. If you think something is worthless, don't buy it.
That's absolutely true, because there is no market whatsoever for poetry. If you're fine with reducing all cultural production to the currently-existing level of production and distribution of poetry in the United States
Huh? You think not a lot of poetry is produced? Or not poetry of sufficient quality?
Or do you just mean there are people making boatloads of money in poetry? It's not "big business", in any sense?
Which is to say, technology could kill copyright if it's not enforced, but that has been true for a very very long time.
True enough, but both the cost of infringement and the cost of enforcement matter a lot for the effectiveness of the legal regime, and those depend a lot on the specific technology involved. I'm not seeing a lot of effective enforcement of current copyright law given the current balance of technologies and costs, and I also don't see that changing any time in the near future. But I could be wrong about that, of course, and in any case you know more about the details than I do.
most people most of the time will acquire content legally rather than illegally as long as the content holders aren't being massive dicks about it.
If thriving black markets grow up, that's probably evidence that the content holders are behaving badly to the point that they've undermined their legitimacy with the majority of people.
I strongly agree with the first sentence but disagree with the second sentence. Without any restrictions or enforcement whatsoever, a site like library.nu -- or, an easy to use pirate version of Itunes -- would become immediately and tremendously popular, regardless of the perceived "legitimacy". Why wouldn't it? The sensible people in the content industry recognize that they both (a) have to make work reasonably available in a licit form and (b) have to crack down on sites like library.nu that would undermine the compensation system for works completely, and that is basically the plan for the future.
Halford, are you talking about markets or Culture. You were just whining that copyright protects Culture production, not that it protects high-volume markets. It's not just poetry either, a lot of high-quality non-fiction and fiction is the same. The interests of the culture producers and the culture marketers are distinguishable, and copyright primarily protects the marketers. Don't make it seem that you're arguing for the culture producers. It's the marketers that pay you to protect pay other right and pay other Halfords to write complex contracts which screw the culture producers.
I've said this before, but our culture would not be harmed in the least if the blockbuster sector of the cultural economy simply disappeared.
377 last is the argument that Kristen fucking Stewart has to get $12.5 million dollars and 2.5% of the fucking gross or we got no culture and just watch reruns of the Honeymooners or something.
Nobody should listen to any part of this for one minute.
I want to see Cruise and Stewart and Pattinson do a version of Beckett's Endgame and demand the huge checks up front.
382 -- there is not a lot of poetry produced, poetry is not widely distributed, disseminated, or read, poetry is not of great cultural importance in the US, and (IMO, with some exceptions) contemporary poetry is pretty terrible and the stuff that is good is specifically made to be inaccessible to a mass audience.
381: Worth does have a place here. Halford is claiming that culture would be impoverished without copyi right. We're doubting that it would, and worth is part of that argument.
OK, Halford's argument is now that culturally speaking, blockbusters are a precious asset to be defended to the death and poetry is of no real importance. He's talking about market sectors.
381, 388: Right -- there are two distinct justifications for copyright: the moral right of the creator to be compensated, and the interest of society in encouraging the production of culture. Halford has said he's not talking about the first at all; he's solely concerned with encouraging the production of culture. At that point worth enters into it -- if it's possible to structure copyright to encourage specifically the production of culture that doesn't suck, that would be good. Likewise, removing an incentive for the production of culture that sucks isn't a problem.
385 -- you would be fine with a system of cultural production more or less exclusively produced by patronage or the academic markets, and that is basically created for, and consumed by, that cultural elite. With some naive artistic hobbyists. Or, the end of mass culture and the artistic professional, in which the only works we get are from hobbyists or those whom the academic, state, or wealth elite choose to support. As you note, there are some sectors of cultural production that work that way right now. We'll just have to agree to disagree as to whether those segments are vibrant and/or serve the population as a whole well, but let's be clear what we are talking about.
371: People prefer new physical books to used physical books. Not everyone, and not by much, but in general most people who want a book that's in print will buy it new rather than hunting it down used -- for books in print, used (non-rare) books are only competing for the cheapest tier of possible purchasers.
I believe you're wrong; UMC bias may be blinding you. See fa's 92: libraries, including academic ones, buy used books (in "as new" condition). I say this from experience: we specialize in scholarly non-fiction, and sell quite a bit to libraries and institutions, as well as individuals, overseas as well as domestic.
I was tickled by the proposition that used books (or those begged, borrowed or stolen) are an inferior product. Sure, if they're beat up; but they very often aren't.
The thread is moving fast and things have moved on.
Suppose "Titanic" had never been made. Where would the loss be? The people who worked on the movie would lose $$$$, but would the world be a poorer or worse place? People would just watch something else. You can say the same of the whole lot of them.
When you start talking about culture as something more than one more market sector, elitist considerations of value enter in. Otherwise it's like complaining that we wouldn't have designer jeans without copyright (and trademarks).
he's solely concerned with encouraging the production of culture
Oh, no, I think there's also a moral right to be compensated for your work.
387:And all that was something done by the "culture-entertainment industry". Poetry used to be an everyday activity among people less-educated than ourselves, and was devalued because there was not enough money to be made from it, and because an appreciation of poetry did not foster an adequately consumerist mindset.
If nothing else this discussion has created a coalition of philistines and naive idealists which is amusing to watch.
387: what does this have to do with copyright (vs. the general public appetite for poetry)? Poetry is protected by copyright, currently, isn't it? Why would removing copyright protection from other works (for which there is stronger public appetite) be expected to create a market that looked anything like the current market for poetry?
The poetry example was meant to show: yes, some people engage in creative cultural production even when the expected financial rewards are very low. There is no dearth of poetry in our society. And presumably, if more people were interested in consuming poetry, there would be an even more vibrant cultural community producing and distributing it.
I disagree about the quality of contemporary poetry [do you think it was on the whole better in some previous era?], but that's probably not an argument worth having.
worth has no place here
To the extent that funding continued production of culture is the basis of the discussion, I do not think this is true. Much but not all worthwhile work is produced without any expectation of gain and the often vain hope for wide dissemination.
It's the worthwhile work produced with hope of profit that needs a creative solution. Essentially a subscription model for either partial material or for everything looks to me like the most viable mechanism.
384.3 is empirically contradicted. If one pirate site, then many, most of which disseminate computer viruses. Both the need for a clean, well-lighted place of business as well as the need to think well of themselves provide incentives to stay with what's legitimate. Think of legitimate culture as fair-trade coffee or organic citrus.
elitist considerations of value enter in
Right. Your argument is that we should kill off the entire cultural industry because you don't care about it or like the product, even though other people do and are willing to pay a lot for it.
394: Sorry, I misunderstood your 111:
I'm not really making a "moral" argument, and I dislike them in general. Actually, I think there's a decent "moral" case that property in general is theft, and I get Trapnel's argument in 107.
Why would removing copyright protection from other works (for which there is stronger public appetite) be expected to create a market that looked anything like the current market for poetry?
Because, in the absence of copyright protection, those sectors that can currently sustain financing based on sales of work (which does not include poetry) would cease to have financing for production or distribution. You would lose professional novelists, filmakers, and most of the professional music industry as it currently exists, together with a fair amount of software.
... writers do not in fact have a moral right to earn a living from their writing, and that the point of copyright law is therefore not to enforce any such
right.
I don't know if it's a moral right, but it seems obvious to me that if people can make a living off of writing/recording/performing/etc . . . than more people will writer/record/perform/etc.
It's obvious, as a historical fact, that the incentives for the creation and distribution of cultural works have changed over time and that, for example, patronage, used to play a much larger role than it does now.
I honestly don't know the history well enough to know which sets of incentives work better than others. I will note, however, that it's important to remember that the total amount of compensation that a culture would like to see directed towards creators is not a fixed pot, but will very over time.
On one hand you might assume that as a society gets wealthier there will both be more people who can afford to subsidize their own creative efforts and who don't depend on their art for an income (and also more people with the money to contribute to original artwork).
On the other hand Baumol Effect would suggest that over time it will take an increasing amount of money to support the same amount of creative work (it's certainly a lot more expensive to live in Greenwich village now than it was in the 50s).
I mention this because it's just one of the many reasons why you can't necessarily go backwards to a previous licensing regime (not that anybody is proposing that).
As I say, your choices without copyright are (a) state support, including public universities; (b) patronage from rich people, including private universities; (c) people producing art as a hobby; or (d) voluntary donations through Kickstarter or some such.
Much shorter than my comment and covers much of what I was thinking.
I don't know if it's a moral right, but it seems obvious to me that if people can make a living off of writing/recording/performing/etc . . . than more people will writer/record/perform/etc.
Right, this is the incentive function of copyright, which is the one I do accept.
Part of the dispute here seems to be that Halford thinks it's plausible that IP law will be changed to become more lenient (along the lines trapnel has suggested, perhaps), and that's the big threat to cultural production rather than technological change making it easier to violate and harder to enforce the current laws. I see that as vanishingly unlikely. If there are any changes to the current regime I presume they will be to strengthen it, and even that seems implausible (as we've just seen with SOPA). Most likely, though, the laws themselves won't change and enforcement will continue to be the issue.
396: Cynicism has no place in this discussion, chris! This is important!
I had been meaning to stay out of this thread honestly. I find the discussion of copyright fascinating, but my own feelings are sufficiently conflicted that I feel like I can't really keep up with all of the back and forth.
I will note, as an observer, that my sympathies tend toward the positions that Halford is defending and that I think he probably does have a better sense of all of the various elements that make the current culture industries work.
I also suspect that the people in this thread who have significant experience being in a position of genuinely not being able to afford the cultural works that they are interested in have a better sense than Halford of the absurdities of the current situation.
Personally, there are things that I would consume if they were free which I don't currently consume, but I've never felt overly constrained by my ability to afford books/music/etc and I do think that plays into my position.
Halford, there would still be a cultural market on the 19th c. model. The author could control first publication and would have the time advantage. The pirate market would later cut into sales the same way that the second-hand market does. One thing that would no longer be possible would be $16 CDs. Prices would be closer to production costs.
If the loot from overpriced CDs went to artists, this would be an entirely different argument. That's a pure hypothetical, though.
I don't think that much culture u're aware of how much culture production is already in your abcd sector -- not just poetry. And you forgot performance, which would be e. Once you look at what copyright actually does and doesn't protect, you still have an argument, but it's much weaker.
||
Hey, dsquared wrote a Choose Your Own Adventure book about the financial crisis in Greece over at CT. Worth a look.
|>
The sensible people in the content industry recognize that they both (a) have to make work reasonably available in a licit form and (b) have to crack down on sites like library.nu that would undermine the compensation system for works completely, and that is basically the plan for the future.
So what's stopping them from getting on with that program? Is it that the sensible people aren't the ones calling the shots?
391: Yet another example of the knee-deep bullshit that's driving this thread. Most of us don't fundamentally disagree with you when you're being vaguely sensible, and some of us even know what it feels like to be in the position of defending problematic institutions against over-the-top criticism, but you keep building bigger strawmen every time comity threatens to emerge.
407: holy shit, the implied arguments here are near-perfect exemplars of something that's been on my mind lately! Is there a name for the idea that hard-won experience provides an interlocutor with a position of nearly unassailable moral authority in an argument? For example, "You can't possible know what you're talking about until you have kids of your own." Or, "I was in 'Nam, man, and your bullshit arguments wouldn't have played outside Da Nang!" Or even, "It's a black thing."
Is there a name or phrase for this kind of argument? If not, there needs to be.
Is 411 actually to 407, or is that a typo?
And whatever it's too, isn't what you're talking about just a sort of reflexive argument from authority?
Is there a name or phrase for this kind of argument? If not, there needs to be./i>
The phrase that I was thinking of, which implies exactly the opposite of unassailable moral authority, is. "where you stand depends on where you sit."
75: Law textbooks (casebooks) with notes and introductions make almost no money for the amount of time spent on them.
It's to 407. Because of:
I think he [Halford] probably does have a better sense of all of the various elements that make the current culture industries work.
the people in this thread who have significant experience being in a position of genuinely not being able to afford the cultural works that they are interested in have a better sense than Halford of the absurdities of the current situation.
Neither is quite perfect. But both proceed from the assumption that because someone arguing X has a particular experience, they in some way have the upper hand in an argument. To be clear, I'm not saying this is necessarily wrong. In fact, I often think it's right. I just want to know if there's a name for such an assumption.
I mean, I think trapnel is wrong in 156 to imply that Halford's position can be completely explained by, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
On the other hand if the questions that we're talking about are closer to being logistical questions than moral questions (though I happen to think there is an important moral dimension) than it seems important to acknowledge that (a) nobody has perfect knowledge of the trade-offs being discussed and (b) different people will have better understanding of different parts of the chain.
reflexive argument from authority
Yes, sort of at least, but there should really be a pithier name than that.
Some spoiled rich adult children I know just made a terrible indie horror movie. (Oh, I shouldn't say it's terrible--I haven't seen it--but the plot sure sounds terrible.) They were doing this basically 100% because they're interested in it, and because they want to fancy themselves "filmmakers" (probably mostly in the hopes that dropping that in casual conversation will help get them laid), and because they have no other useful skills and near-zero real work ethic and don't have any idea what else to do with themselves.
The total cost was about $5m, I believe, including the initial promotion/distribution arrangements they've set up. There's no chance their parents would have bankrolled a project like that if everyone were more upfront that the whole thing is just a hobby for their lazy children. The potential financial reward--"if it's successful, we could make millions! it's a potential career!"--was absolutely critical to the whole thing. So, without strong copyright, we'd lose that.
you forgot performance, which would be e
We've had this discussion before, but (assuming we're talking about music) I view performance as basically within the "hobbyist" category, although this is more complicated in some individual cases. Generally, it is impossible to make money from performance alone as a musician, without the promotional apparatus royalties from work or composition. I am sure our resident drummer will confirm that touring your way to financial stability is not a viable strategy.
While there are certainly some famous acts that made and make the bulk of their money from performance, and not royalties (Grateful Dead are the most obvious) the sustainability of this model in producing anything like the kind of pop music we've had for 60 years or so is extremely improbable to me. But there probably would be professional performers, making not a lot of money and performing largely nonoriginal compositions.
Anyhow, that's kind of a separate discussion.
Argument from authority, then. I was thrown off because 407 didn't seem to be claiming authority on Nick's own behalf.
Hey, dsquared wrote a Choose Your Own Adventure book about the financial crisis in Greece over at CT. Worth a look.
Interesting. Looks like a major improvement from the "argument by smug twitter quip" strategy he's been using multiple times a day for the last nine months or so.
someone arguing X has a particular experience, they in some way have the upper hand in an argument.
One other note. I feel like one set of arguments in which you stereotypically see the sorts of divisions that are going on in this thread is between planners and local users of a resource (whether you're talking about land/water/traffic/etc . . . ). Generalizing broadly a planner is in a position to have a much bigger picture of what's involved but the users have much more familiarity with the facts on the ground. I don't think either side is a priori in an unassailable position -- either body of knowledge could be more useful for a given question.
420: Huh. I know nothing about this industry, but I would tend to think that either (a) enough new recorded music would come out that the market would be happy with it -- maybe a moral problem as recording artists got poorer, but not a social problem from lack of culture or (b) if there wasn't enough recorded music, people would go out to hear live music more. Either performers would be richer, or at least more performers would make a living.
Wafer has a problem with arguments from authority, in their very form?
This is a horrible thread.
So what's stopping them from getting on with that program?
I dunno, what do you want? Most books are available in an e-reader format for not a lot of money. You can get movies and TV shows from Netflix, Hulu, Roku, or whatever for extremely little money. You can get music from Itunes or Spotify or a thousand other services with greater ease and less money than you could 15 years ago. If you go to the websites for the major film studios you can click on two buttons and download recent movies for not that much cost. Nothing's perfect, there's a lot of room for improvement, and maybe things won't be as absolutely as perfectly but the argument that there's not digital distribution that is reasonably available was true in 2001 when Napster first came out but hasn't been true in many years. The business model really is to make reasonable and licit distribution attractive while killing off pure piracy sites like library.nu; that may not always be succeeding, and some content holders are better than others, but you can see it happening in front of you.
421: right. I'm not sure I've ever seen NickS claim authority for himself about anything. That sort of rhetorical move/posturing doesn't seem to be his style. But in this case he seemed to be imputing, based on experience, that authority to others.
425: read my comments, parsi. I note explicitly that, no, I don't necessarily have a problem with those kinds of arguments (though sometimes I do, it's true). Also, if the thread is troubling you, you have many options available to you. Be the change...
428: I think that's closer. But is "combat veteran" or "entertainment lawyer" an identity? I think in both of those cases, I'm talking about experience. Actually, I'm starting to think that maybe what I'm talking about isn't just one thing but many things that I've conflated.
Also, if the thread is troubling you, you have many options available to you. Be the change...
Surely you're not encouraging thread piracy. People worked hard on those threads!
431: an industrious soul could put together a "Best of Unfogged" and make some cash, I bet.
This thread is annoying me. I'm going to pick a random number from 1 to 432 and that person will be the winner.
426: Fair enough. There is progress. Not as much or as fast as we'd like, but progress.
Now tell me: would we have that progress if content industries had been more successful with maximalist enforcement? And is there any reason to think they'd continue to move in the right direction if they hadn't been placed in a position of weakness and forced, kicking and screaming, to finally start to adapt?
429: The horribleness of the thread has nothing to do with you. These are vexed questions, and people become passionate, which is all to the good, since this is important. We've thrown fifty million thousand things into the mix by now, is all, which leads to upset and chaos. People having a stake is good; we lack a framework for the myriad issues under debate. I believe I am stating the facts.
Boy, I've created a monster here.
Chris Y: These are toys, exc. PLoS. Give me something real at that level that covers all the markets.
As others have pointed out, this is a crazy requirement. As you implicitly acknowledge, there isn't just one market, there are different ones, and they function completely differently.
Halford: Anyhow, as I've said here before, there are 100%- compatible-with-current-law solutions to the textbook and academic publishing problems that people complain about here.
And I'm in favor of collectively organizing to come up with Open Access alternatives. But things like library.nu are complementary to this process, just like Napster and Limeware were complementary to the music industry finally developing user-friendly legal digital music purchasing options. Without the pressure of the black market, things would have continued on as before.
More specifically, about academic publishing: much of the reason the current shitty situation has continued as long as it has is that the players who are already organized to coordinate production (for-profit publishers) are the ones who benefit from the status quo, while those who are most screwed (poor students) are often only in that status temporarily and partly for that reason are the least organized. As for the academics themselves, who would be supplying the specialized labor, the incentives are screwy--what's most needed are Open Access intro textbooks, but writing these is (a) not super exciting, and (b) not what gives you tenure or credibility within the profession. Younger academics are the ones most likely to be clued-in about open-access issues, about technology more generally, but they're also the ones who might not have tenure yet, and are least inclined to rock the boat about, say, joining a boycott of Springer or Elsevier (IIRC, this recent effort came out because a Fields medalist got sufficiently pissed off, which did a lot to make it respectable).
Even with textbooks, though, there's been progress; I linked before to this organization, which seems pretty awesome.
Ordinarily, if a government agency burned down a 400,000 volume library, we'd think it an outrage. But copyright is one area where this sort of thing isn't just allowed, it's mandated; and the ones who want to make knowledge available, without cost or hurdles, to everyone, are painted as the bad guys. This is fucked up and bullshit.
Ordinarily, if a government agency burned down a 400,000 volume library, we'd think it an outrage.
It isn't obvious to me how you can both argue that this is like burning down a library and that taking an electronic copy if nothing like stealing.
438: While not endorsing everything X. says, that doesn't seem hard at all. It's different from stealing because it doesn't deprive anyone from using the same book. Shutting it down is like burning a library because it does deprive potential readers from using the books. If you focus on users, he's being perfectly consistent.
re: 390
Yeah, I'm largely concerned with the moral right of the creator. I have no vested interest in the particular structure of content-providing industries or the legal apparatus that provides their income.* I do think people are often self-deluding, though, when they think that the inequities of the legal apparatus somehow absolve them of their moral responsibilities vis a vis the creator. Even if there were _no_ copyright laws, I'd still think it's a dick move to copy someone's work rather than pay them.**
* except to the extent that impinges on my job, which it does, since my job is largely concerned with the preservation and (free) dissemination of culture. So that legal apparatus largely makes my job more difficult.
** although of course I understand that sometimes people really really want some shit, and either don't want to or genuinely can't pay for it.
*** if you can pay, but choose not to pay, that's kind of a dick move.
440: That does make sense that way but I like line even less if you focus on the users exclusively.
ttaM:Also, the actual existing copyright regime is stupid and unjust in many ways. But the argument seems to proceed from that to the idea that people don't deserve to be compensated for their work.
I would say it's the other side of the argument that's the non-sequitur, moving from (a) people deserve to be compensated for their work to (b) we should impose ruinous financial penalties and jailtime to punish those who enjoy works without paying. But of course this doesn't follow, as we can see from structurally similar cases like (a) people ought not cheat on their spouses, so (b) we should criminally prosecute adulterers. And yet I suspect many of us feel that adultery is even worse than illegally downloading a textbook! The fact that X is good doesn't mean that it's reasonable to do everything conceivable to induce X; people seem to forget this in the copyright case.
In the past two weeks, I've bought the following cultural artifacts: 3 trashy YA self-published ebooks; an album by a side-project of a band I'm a big fan of, and whom I first got to know through illegal downloads; the early Girl Talk album. I'm sure I could have found unlicensed copies of these if I'd wanted to, but I didn't. Why did I pay for these, and not for some other things I've acquired recently? Well, partly it's just happenstance. But partly it's that I have a somewhat vague books/music budget in my head, and I tend to allocate it towards creators who make it easy and inviting for me to pay them directly, to feel like I'm really supporting them rather than, say, the Elsevier vampire squid. Similarly, I may buy the anarchist-coop-published book being discussed at the panel I'm going to tonight, if the talk seems good. This is not strange or mysterious; it's entirely predictable once you realize that humans are not Econ 101 caricatures.
Similarly, I may buy the anarchist-coop-published book being discussed at the panel I'm going to tonight, if the talk seems good.
If I have to pick between that and Elsevier, I'm not sure which way I'd go.
440 -- It's only not 'stealing' because you insist it isn't.
Spy sneaks into the Pentagon, takes pictures of the security schematics of the US base in Djibouti, sells them to Al Qaeda. Nothing is stolen: the Pentagon still has the schematics? Plaintiffs' law firm sends paralegal to get job at your old place of employ; paralegal snoops around, finds the confidential memos on strategy & witnesses, and some analyses of non-testifying experts, copies them, and takes the copies to her real employer. Not theft?
If information can be owned, it can be stolen. Surely.
Well, partly it's because I want to provoke another "SAN FRANCISCO ISN'T ALL LIKE THAT I PROMISE!!" reaction from Sifu.
444: They're in merger discussions, so you may not have to choose.
440: If information can be owned, it can be stolen. Surely.
We are arguing, I thought, about information being owned.
Spy sneaks into the Pentagon, takes pictures of the security schematics of the US base in Djibouti, sells them to Al Qaeda. Nothing is stolen: the Pentagon still has the schematics? Plaintiffs' law firm sends paralegal to get job at your old place of employ; paralegal snoops around, finds the confidential memos on strategy & witnesses, and some analyses of non-testifying experts, copies them, and takes the copies to her real employer. Not theft?
Oh, come the fuck on, CC. It's very clear that in these cases the harm done is quite different from the harm done in the standard infringement case. Which may be one reason that things like what you're talking about are considered distinct crimes. (Which is not to say that how we punish this stuff is necessarily appropriate; I just don't know enough.)
In case one, the harm is the security risk to US soldiers; in case two, it's the violation of the confidentiality of the attorney-client relationship, justified by the need to have adequate legal representation. Neither of these interests are particularly similar to the interest in making sure that you profit from every enjoyment of a creative work you made.
Which is just to say: the transmission of information can obviously be the means by which a person's legitimate interests are harmed, in all sorts of different ways; but lumping together all cases where information-transmission happens serves only to conflate importantly distinct cases. Which I'm sure CC knows, being a lawyer; hence my impatience and frustration with the sophistry.
445: Secrets are really a different thing from copyrightable material. If, for some reason, I were a spy who was also a hardliner about IP (imagine Halford as James Bond), and I had all the time in the world, I could take notes incorporating all the useful secret information in either case without violating the copyright. I'd agree that 'stealing' is a very conventional use of language for 'finding out a secret and disseminating it to people who shouldn't know it', but that's related to the specific nature of secrets; the value of a secret is its secrecy, and when you disseminate it, you take that value from the initial holder of the secret. It's not much like the issues in copyright.
I'm still waiting for some reasonably reliable way to get payment to authors. You can give talks and happy anarchists will buy your book don't really count.
If copyright is akin to keeping secrets, well. That's exactly what we think is a very bad idea for society writ large. Patent protection in agriculture is in a sorry state whereby a farmer can't re-use the seeds from his fields, but must purchase them afresh from [Monsanto]: this is not a good direction for us to go in.
454: I can't add to that just yet, but I'm finally getting around to reading "Food Inc," which talks about this kind of thing.
Is there a name for the idea that hard-won experience provides an interlocutor with a position of nearly unassailable moral authority in an argument?
It would probably involve the phrase "epistemic authority" -- perhaps "experiential epistemic authority" or "the epistemic authority of experience/expertise". I haven't followed the literature much, but there may already have been convergence on some term.
Possibly relevant and of interest.
454: Even before the GM stuff, replanting your own corn was relatively uncommon in the U.S. Hybrid seeds often don't keep up the high yield into the next generation. GM seeds do, if your neighbors aren't growing different corn and the wind isn't blowing funny, but the industrialization of agriculture boat sailed long, long ago.
imagine Halford as James Bond
Yes. Yes.
400,000 volume library
Let's be clear about what this thing was. It was a website that offered copies, to the entire world to keep permanently, for free, of materials that the operators of the website had copied without seeking permission. It was a direct threat to the ability of authors or publishers to receive any compensation whatsoever. The authors and publishers had a right to receive compensation from the commercial or mass market exploitation of their work, and this website was not providing it to them.
The authors and publishers had a right to receive compensation from the commercial or mass market exploitation of their work
Are you sure you've put that as delicately as you might have?
re: 443
That's some insane straw-manning right there. What makes you think I back any of those penalties? Or endorse any of the current legal situation vis a vis treatment of copyright infringement by private individuals? And fuck off with the econ 101 shit, also. I work in a fucking library. My entire job is based around making shit available to people for free.
But if I was going to steal some shit [which I certainly have in the past], I'm not going to fucking kid myself about it.
So, basically it was a library, right? Except that the library buys one copy of the book and then, because the law says it's okay (for now), lends it out to however many filthy freeloaders sign up for a library card.
462 to 459. And yes, now I'm just trolling, Agent Halford. But I do think it's bullshit that libraries lend out copies of my work without compensating me. I blame Ben Franklin.
I'm still waiting for some reasonably reliable way to get payment to authors.
I think some smaller presses are trying to work on this--to go in the direction of being a trusted mediator of the reader's relationship to the author, but in a way that minimizes the middleman's cut. Subscriptions, etc. I thought I'd posted some about this in the last copyright dust-up we had, but now I can only find this and the comment a bit under it; I thought I'd posted in more detail. Oh well.
And fuck off with the econ 101 shit, also. I work in a fucking library.
The 2nd paragraph there wasn't really aimed at you; it was aimed at those who seem to think that the availability of free sources will completely destroy the willingness of folks to pay authors. Halford often says things like this, despite it being repeatedly shown to be empirically false.
My entire job is based around making shit available to people for free. ... But if I was going to steal some shit [which I certainly have in the past], I'm not going to fucking kid myself about it.
I guess I'm just puzzled by what I see as a tension here. You clearly don't think it's necessary that every use involve payment (or do you? I guess you could, since the UK does have that library-lending-compensation fund), but you think that it's important that if you DL a copy (or buy a 2nd-hand one, or some other acquisition that doesn't involve compensating the author), you ... what? Feel bad about it? What does "not fucking kidding oneself" about it amount to? I've never denied here the illegality of library.nu or DLing therefrom. It's copyright infringement on a mass scale. Am I somehow kidding myself about it because I resist the term "theft", even though there are morally important distinctions between infringement and core cases of theft, distinctions that have been rehearsed at length in this thread? I fail to see how it's somehow duplicitous to use the legally precise terms.
465: Well, if you're downloading something that you would have bought new, you really are injuring the copyright holder. You broke the law, and if you'd complied with the law the copyright holder would have had more money. If you accept that authors have some moral entitlement to compensation, you're not just breaking the law (which in the context of copyright doesn't bother me much) you're depriving a person of money that you agree they are morally owed (which does bother me). I think most of what ttaM is saying is that you should face up to that as actual wrongdoing, rather than mere lawbreaking.
466 captures what I'm getting at.
Yes, on wrongdoing rather than lawbreaking. Pretty trivial wrongdoing in some cases, certainly understandable in many. One I'd certainly own up to having done myself [in the past, anyway, I don't now]. But I don't think that qualms about copyright law get one completely away from the fact that there's a wrong being done to the author (or musician or whoever) when you make use of their work without compensating them.
You clearly don't think it's necessary that every use involve payment.
No. But in cases where the creator of the content expects payment and you choose not to pay, there's something morally problematic there. I think people really are pretty self-serving on this question.
Then there's the John Fogerty case. He lost the rights to his entire catalog, and when he recorded something new, the Halfords of Fantasy records sued him because his new song too strongly resembled the songs he'd lost control of. He couldn't even play in his own copyright style.
This is about biz, not about artists. Some artists get some spillover but there are too many copyright horror stories. Copyright holders and artists are two different sets (with overlap). Someone makes millions off, e.g., John Lee Hooker, but whatever money he actually sees comes from performance (i.e., his "hobby".)
Let's cut the piety about artists deserving this or that. We're talking about copyright holders, many of whom have teams of layers dedicated to screwing artists.
If you accept that authors have some moral entitlement to compensation, you're not just breaking the law (which in the context of copyright doesn't bother me much) you're depriving a person of money that you agree they are morally owed (which does bother me).
Ah, okay. Well, I don't believe: (a) authors have a moral right to be compensated every time someone enjoys their work. I think that's a crazy principle, and trying to enshrine it in social institutions would lead to a dystopia. More generally, I don't think: (a2) people have a right to compensation for every act they do which benefits others.
But I do believe: (b) authors have a general right to be compensated for people, generally, enjoying their work. (And I suspect this is the core belief that most people have, which leads them, mistakenly, to the version (a) above.) I suspect folks often move from (b) to (a) because we're not sure how to properly deal with imperfect duties. By which I mean, obligations that one must perform, but only some of the time; or services that must be provided at some level X, where is considerably less than "full effort from everyone subject to the obligation". If one ought to help the worse off, does that mean you need to say yes to every such request? No; that would be psychologically unreasonable, and attempting to institutionalize that sort of duty would be incredibly intrusive.
In other words, the proper, universalizable version of the obligation on consumers that corresponds to authors' rightly-understood rights is: one should contribute a reasonable amount to reward those authors whose works you enjoy, preferably tailored towards best incentivizing continued production thereof. But--just as with the very real obligation attaching to middle-class folks in rich nations to donate towards global poverty relief, etc.--this is an obligation that is not violated by each particular failure to support a worthy candidate author or charity, but only when, in the aggregate, our behavior falls below some (obviously imprecise) threshhold. And on the authorial side, we can get a general sense that their rights are violated if tons of people are enjoying their works and nobody's paying, but, crucially, merely having lots of people enjoying the work without paying does not mean their rights are infringed, so long as a sufficient number are paying.
In other words, Metallica's rights were probably not being violated, even if a shit-tons of people were DLing their stuff from Napster without paying.
I hope that clears everything up for everyone, for all time!
(It should be clear, but just in case it's not, I'm talking about moral rights throughout 469. Obviously Metallica's legal rights were being violated, those whiny bitches.)
I just wanted to delurk to say how hard I laughed at 210. (I should be working, but I hate it when you finally stop procrastinating and then actual obstacles that are not your fault thwart you, but you might have been able to fix them in a more timely fashion if you'd started working earlier.)
But in cases where the creator of the content expects payment and you choose not to pay, there's something morally problematic there.
Okay, I think I understand our disagreement, and I think my 469 should clarify where I stand, and why I think you're wrong. Merely having an expectation doesn't by itself impose an obligation, though it can obviously sometimes contribute to the creation of one; in this case, I think it's just wildly unreasonable to have an expectation of payment from every use, as opposed to an expectation of "some remuneration, more or less proportional to how much folks are enjoying my stuff, such that, e.g., if lots and lots of people are really enjoying it, I ought to be able to live on that remuneration."
I could make the principle more precise--perhaps even produce a monograph!--but I don't think anyone would pay for it. =P
Maybe the evilness of stealing could be calibrated in terms of the proportion of the loot that actually reaches the artist. For Bartels and Stout the proportion is near zero. Stealing from them is a public service. Likewise the people who bought blues songs for $50.
268
Shearer, medical and engineering detail usually isn't available free but the Third World needs it. ...
The original claim (91) was
... tiny minority of folks logging on from slums in Bangladesh, services like library.nu are the only feasible way to get at the scientific and cultural patrimony of the literate world. ...
This claim is false, most of the patrimony is available for free. The claim does not become true just because some small portion of the patrimony is not free.
255
Most academic book and papers are of marginal value but some of them are of immense value. There isn't really a good way to tell which ones matter ahead of time.
Actually at least in mathematics (and I expect most technical fields) it is fairly easy to rank publications in real time. Which is not to say the rankings would be prefect but you wouldn't lose much by discarding the lower half.
257
Look, I'm not here to defend the current model of publishing and book distribution. I just want one of the people who are pointing out all its deficiencies to spend ten minutes thinking about how an viable alternative could be structured which would protect the interests of authors, editors, designers, copy readers, translators...
The academic publication market is particularly bad in terms of how much of the revenue goes to the authors. In the case of journal articles basically none of it does and many book authors receive only nominal compensation. But the publications are extremely expensive, often practically unaffordable for individuals. I am on board with protecting the interests of authors but I see no reason to worry about all the other parasites currently supported by the academic publication market. Society would be much better off if they all went away and academic publications were generally free.
281
There aren't really all that many options for getting money to producers and distributors, and as long as a large class of users feels entitled to take the product, free, without regard to the legal regime, whatever it is, you've already ruled out the most logical source of funds (ie, users).
This is nonsense, it doesn't matter if there is a large class of freeloaders as long as there is also a large class of paying customers. This is the same old delusion, that the author is somehow losing the full sale price with every case of infringement when in reality in many cases they are losing nothing.
323
Also textbooks are a good example of how you can't separate parts of the copyright regime from others. If works entered the public domain in a reasonable amount of time, then many classes would assign textbooks that are in the public domain. It's not like there's huge advances in calculus every year. Yes you could still charge people for new exercises, but not $200 a pop.
Unfortunately there is some reason to doubt this. Many professors assign expensive textbooks because they are jerks not because there aren't more reasonably priced alternatives.
335
For purposes of not having kids complain about the grading ("But the book said that when I looked yesterday") few texts will ever take a Wiki approach regardless of copyright.
But an open source model would work fine.
Only 150 more comments before James gets caught up. I know I'm waiting eagerly.
I like this side of Shearer. Shearer, can you stay like this and, like, have your life changed by a brilliant black teenager from the wrong side of the tracks or something?
341
You may be right, but simply allowing a website that allows free and unlimited downloading of more than 400,000 books (not just textbooks) without any controls or compensation whatsoever would kill the entire compensation scheme for the business and entirely kill off the market for books, including the secondary market that you are involved in.
Typical ridiculous overstatement. If for some reason it was impossible to kill off this website it would not have entirely killed off the market for books.
Hiphop/spoken word/rap are poetry, popular, support some artists, and depend on copying enough to spark fair use lawsuits.
Omg what is this thread and why am I in such agreement with Shearer I don't even
Shearer, can you ... like, have your life changed by a brilliant black teenager from the wrong side of the tracks or something?
This is a movie I would pay to see.
363 Why the fuck should the fact that something is or is not a labour of love matter? Or that the people producing academic books are also being compensated in other ways? ... People doing work deserve to get paid; taking their shit without paying them, no matter how you dress it up, is wrong.
Is there a good reason why academic production of books should function differently from academic production of articles? Because at least for the academics I know best, the "compensated in other ways" part means they are paid to do and write about research, but not paid at all by the consumers of that writing. I don't tip people when I download their paper from the arxiv, and I don't expect them to do the same for me. It's just a different model -- people are paid for the work, but not paid per use of the work.
re: 488
If academics want to give their work away, or release it under a CC license or similar, that's great. And if being paid for research enables that, that's great, too. There are lots of models for how academic writing and publishing can work and I'm open about how it works; with a preference for wider and cheaper (or free) access. I'm just annoyed at the way concentrating on a particular not-very-typical case --- very high product prices, combined with little or no pay for authors, who in turn have other incentives for publishing -- sometimes seems to be used to drive the argument.
Except that the library buys one copy of the book and then, because the law says it's okay (for now), lends it out to however many filthy freeloaders sign up for a library card.
And expects them to bring it back; and fines them if they don't; and pays a nominal sum in public lending right to the author every time it's borrowed. But apart from that, yeah.
The business model really is to make reasonable and licit distribution attractive while killing off pure piracy sites like library.nu; that may not always be succeeding, and some content holders are better than others, but you can see it happening in front of you.
We're sorry, but this content is not available outside the United States of America.
Oh man, traveling to Canada was annoying that way. Couldn't watch misfits!
Journals don't want to let authors use a CC license, whether the authors want to or not. I expect that monographs are similar. Big textbooks are different, there the authors really are making money and are motivated by making money, but encouraging such production is actually counterproductive. It'd be much better for the government or a foundation to subsidize the creation of high quality free textbooks.
It'd be much better for the government or a foundation to subsidize the creation of high quality ideologically reliable free textbooks.
pays a nominal sum in public lending right to the author every time it's borrowed
Say what?
UK, libraries pay royalties somehow when a book is borrowed. In case UK readers don't know this, it doesn't work that way in the US -- all the author gets is their share of the purchase price of the book.
all the author gets is their share of the purchase price of the book.
Then I agree with Bob that they need to join a union. That's how they got PLR in Britain.
UK, libraries pay royalties somehow when a book is borrowed.
Basically every year the government gives a pot of money to the PLR. They poll public libraries and find out which books were borrowed most, and pay the authors accordingly (subject to a floor and a cap).
Does the floor mean any book in a library gets the author some money?
PLR is not very much though. Famously the only author who makes more than squat-diddly out of it is Catherine Cookson.
6.05 pence (10 cents) per loan. If nobody borrows it you get nuffink.
499.2 may have been true once, but not now. She's at number 147.
I think she might have died a little bit.
Wow. Agatha Christie still in the top 20.
502: that didn't stop Agatha Christie. I think the problem is more likely that her readers did.
Does the floor mean any book in a library gets the author some money?
No, it means you don't get any money unless you make at least a certain (very low) amount. Also, only books with registered authors count. There are restrictions on who can register.
I'd never heard of Cookson. I've read a bit of Christie but don't really recall much except now I have a vague tendency to avoid Belgians when I've got a guilty conscience.
I'd never heard of Cookson.
I first heard of her when the stat about her being the most borrowed author was revealed. That was a weird feeling. And it wasn't even close - at one point, something like 8 of the 10 most borrowed books were hers.
I suppose the children of Cookson's readers are reading Danielle Steele, but I suppose that only on the evidence of her book covers, because I don't know anybody who's ever read one.
506: Moby hasn't had mussels since that terrible weekend in 1994.
I am like that, but not as bad as when I was a kid. Dissecting fetal pigs in high school made it impossible for me to eat deli ham for something like ten years.
I haven't been able to eat chloroform soaked frogs since 8th grade biology.
What on earth was your teacher up to?
You don't want them to struggle, you know?
508:
I read a good few when I was about 12 or 13. Basically I bought nearly anything half readable in my village newsagents because there wasn't much choice.
515. So were they any good? Should we all read them, or those of us who parent or know pre-teens get them copies?
I read a few Cookson, too, around the same age. Not through design, but my Mum had some out of the library and I hoovered them up in the way I hoovered all books at that age. Ditto Maeve Binchy, and others. I don't remember them being especially good, but 12 year old boys probably weren't her target audience.
516: Not really. They weren't quite aimed at girls either. There was lots of melodrama, serving girls trying to better themselves, moorland/ coal mines/ factories, people marrying for money but carrying torches for someone else, illegitimate children usw. The historical research was apparently thorough and the Northern England grit honestly come by.