h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Having just watched an interesting segment on newsnight where they where discussing the issue of downloading films via Bittorrent my interest was piqued.

What I found interesting is the parralels that the Motion picture industry are making between downloading a film and nicking a DVD from a shop.

I must nail my colours to the mast, I have occasionally downloaded films I didnt own from the internet via Bit-Torrent, I however also go to the cinema at least once a week and buy DVDs regularly.

My question is this, if I download a film that I would never have bought or rented or paid to go and see how is anybody actually worse off? Ok if I download a film I owuld otherwise have bought then yeah they have lost out but if I wouldmt have....

Therefore I think there *is* a difference between downloading something and nicking something from a shop, I think that people recognise this and this is one of the reasons people to wantonly disregard everything that the recording industry and film industry have to say about this.

I agree with you ferrett. The corporate lobbyist argument is that your argument (that you won't buy them if you didn't download them) is false, backed up by their statistical research. I think their research is pretty inconclusive though, it basically amounts to 'we seem to be selling less CDs/DVDs than we used to, it must be piracy'.

Except they're not. CD and DVD sales are both increasing. They're just not increasing enough, it seems.

Ultimately, it comes down to this: people worked to make those films. The deal is, they get to eat because you have to pay to watch them. If you watch without paying, by whatever means, you're stealing, as surely as if you'd stolen a DVD or sneaked into the cinema without paying, even if the cinema was empty apart from you.

That's how intellectual property works. The reason most people don't go along with it is because most people don't CREATE intellectual property for a living and don't really understand (or care) what it means. The non-creative majority only understand concrete, real, hold-it-in-your-hand-type property like an actual DVD.

This is the argument in principle, and in principle it is correct. Unfortunately, most of the people actually using the argument are sleazy fat cat music/film company executives who are already in the top 0.1% richest people on the planet. This does not, however, actually change the fact that they are right. It just makes that fact stick in the craw a little.

H.

Ah, I didn't know that about the CD/DVD sales increasing but not enough. Did they do some sort of projection and find that the rate of increase was decreasing or some such thing?

Anyway, I have some sympathy for your argument but it is only clear that it is 'wrong' in a legal sense (which isn't in dispute anyway). Intellectual property, or equally physical property, is just an institutional arrangement.

"Intellectual property, or equally physical property, is just an institutional arrangement."

Well, yeah. But if you're going to use that argument, MONEY is just an institutional arrangement, in which case, can I have all yours please?

A827381

H.

If someone only ever downloaded overhyped films which were so bad that if they had bought them, they would morally have been justified in asking for a refund, then morally I can't see any problem, though I would wonder why they bothered carrying on downloading more films if they only ever picked turkeys.

If someone only ever downloaded films that they honestly wouldn't dream of buying in practice, then they haven't really deprived anyone of income, though again it's hard to see why they don't just watch TV.
It'd be rather like building your own copy of piece of patented equipment. If you'd never have bought the original, and you don't sell the thing you've built, then you haven't cost anyone else anything, but you have got something for nothing, which is morally wrong.
Paradoxically, in this case, if costly generalised enforcement action takes place, then (assuming fines don't pay for enforcement action), you *could* be said to be costing someone something.

The problem is a slippery-slope one. Many people may well spend a great deal on legal cinemagoing and DVDs, and download the odd film (which they honestly never would have bought) and leave it at that. Others may drift from the odd download to never bothering to buy anything.

At the other end of the spectrum are people who incite or aid others to download. They have no idea whether the people they aid would actually have bought if that was the only choice, so you have to assume that they don't care.

Personally, I haven't ever downloaded music or films. I have some few CDs and tapes copied from friends, which if they were any good have usually caused me to buy much more by the same artists. However, I can't say what would have happened if I had had a friend somewhere who had all the albums I was likely to consider buying (which seems to be more like the download situation). I'd like to think I would still have paid for the majority of my music, but I can't be sure.

If all the downloads were of low fidelity, then I suspect in the long run they'd aid legal sales (of the things actually worth buying). Unfortunately, if the quality is high enough, it may well be a different matter. How good *are* downloaded movies?

" I download a film that I would never have bought or rented or paid to go and see"

I presume however, you are prepared to sit and watch it?

If you've watched it, you've been provided with a service by the people who worked to make it - and as such you've robbed them.

As far as I can see that's the end of it...

Now, personally, I don't know anyone who's never broken a law in their live, so I'm not about to start casting stones here. To me, it's clear it's not right, but after that, it's up to the individual concience of the person doing the downloading. (I don't pay parking tickets if I know I can get away with it - other people download - to me it's roughly the same thing).

I have a friend here who downloads films all the time and he tells me that the quality ranges from very good to extremely poor. The very bad ones are made by people using hand-held cameras in the cinema and I was told sometimes you get people walking in front of the screen, that sort of thing, and the sound is dodgy as well.

I've never downloaded an entire CD but in the past I occasionally downloaded songs. These were either the *one* good song on the album (and this happens a lot) or else they were very hard to find singles of now-dead artists, mostly old blues guys who barely saw a penny of what the music industry made from them.

I've been given a few CD's that were copied from friends' music libraries, again ones that I wouldn't have bought myself if only because I can't actually afford to buy as much music as I would like.

But is this really much different to borrowing books from friends? Which apparently is also 'illegal' if you check the copyright thingy in the front of books.


az

Borrowing or selling books is only illegal if you remove or change the cover or remove the terms and conditions page... The standard phrasing used is pretty tortured but that's roughly the gist of it.

Here's a slightly different question in a possibly greyer area.

If I have a friend abroad with a (non-European region) region-coded DVD player, and I want to give them a DVD that is only (and will only ever be) available with European regional coding, is it morally any more wrong to buy the DVD, rip the content to a usable (for them) form, and give them the now-usable content (*and* the unusable original) than for them to play the original in a region-free player?

Is it actually morally wrong at all to break copyright (and possibly copy-protection) for format conversion reasons if there is no alternative legal route, and as long as only one copy ends up being used per copy bought?

Hoo,

"...if you're going to use that argument, MONEY is just an institutional arrangement, in which case, can I have all yours please?"

To the extent that this is an argument it's a non sequitur. Yes, money is an institutional arrangement. How does it follow that if I question a particular institutional arrangement for intellectual property that I should agree to give you all my money?

Whisky,

"If you've watched it, you've been provided with a service by the people who worked to make it - and as such you've robbed them."

Suppose I lived next door to a pianist who gave private performances in their home for which people pay money to attend, let's imagine it's quite a lot of money, more than I could possibly afford to pay. Suppose I will occasionally sit and listen to these through the thin walls of my house. I have been provided with a service, am I robbing the pianist? I would say no. The pianist is creating a product (providing a service) intended to be consumed by a particular group (the people who pay to come and listen). An unintentional byproduct of this process is that I get to consume this product for free. Since I wouldn't have payed for this service, my receiving it for free cannot have made any difference to the pianist.

If we believe the argument that people download music/videos that they would not have payed for then the situation is very closely analogous to the pianist example.

The pianist analogy isn't a very accurate one I'm afraid... Ok, you end up listening to the music through your thin walled apartment...

The pianist decides to improve his flat so he doesn't annoy the neighbours and installs soundproofing...Does that give you the right to drill through the wall so you can listen in?

Nope?

Didn't think so.

The major difference is that one is passively accepting that you can hear something, the other is actively going out to get something.

(Unless of course - downloaded films just leap mysteriously out of the ether and onto your computer without human intervention - in which case, I guess you might as well watch them.)

As to the zoning problem...
Ok, in the main I don't defend big companies... However, in my time I've run across a few documents for multinationals which have discussed the issue of a worldwide single price for a product... Now, the problem they have is that every single market is different - it may well cost more in one area to distribute a CD than it does in another (labour costs, transport/fuel costs, business taxes, etc...). The product may have to be more heavily advertised in one region, whereas in another, it might already be a household name...

So, what should the company do? Have a one-price-fits-all policy that means that regions where these costs are lower then subsidise the more expensive regions. Or set their prices in accordance with local market conditions?

On the other hand... If a product was unavailable in one format so you bought it in a format you couldn't use and had it converted to a useable format then personally I'd say that's tough on the producing company if they lost out on increased profits - they should have foreseen the demand.

If I am at a friend's house and we watch a DVD that he has bought, am I stealing it? I'm watching it, I'm enjoying it, but I haven't bought it, gone to see it in the theatre or rented it; I haven't paid anything for having seen it.


As far as copying something to a different format that it wasn't available in, I know in the US there are companies that will do that for you. You pay for the service, of course, but you're paying for the service of having a film copied from one format to another, you're not paying for a second copy of the film.

Can someone explain to me why these different dvd formats exist? They don't exist with music CD's. Am I just being stupid for not understanding this?


az

"The major difference is that one is passively accepting that you can hear something, the other is actively going out to get something."

Well, I don't think that is the difference. Suppose I could only hear the piano playing if I opened my window (because my walls and double glazed windows are good but the pianist's walls are not). By opening the window, I have actively chosen to listen to the music rather than passively doing so. If you like, we could also suppose that I have to rush home from work in order to get back in time for the concert, and that it is very cold outside so that I wouldn't open the window except to hear it.

How can listening to a neighbour's music be considered 'theft'?

I mean, honestly . . .


az

One idea is that (for English-language) films, they can be released in the US cinemas, then some of those (very expensive) prints of films can be shipped overseas (UK, etc.) at a later date, once the first weeks/months of high initial demand from US cinemas are over.
With DVD releases now often following quickly after cimema release, the studios wanted a system to enable DVDs to be sold in the US before the films were available in foriegn cinemas without risking losing cinema sales overseas.

Of course, it does make it easier to sell films cheaper in the US than in the UK.

Unfortunately for the studios, the system largely broke down - once region-free players were increasingly available, in many countries, even people unlikely to play out-of-area discs got wary about buying a single-region player.

Well, silly me bought my dvd player about two and a half years ago as, after twelve years living in Spain, I was *desperate* to be able to rent films and see them in original version (almost all video-tape rentals here were dubbed into Spanish). Dvd rentals gave me the option of seeing films in the original verson. And just want to point out that I don't even ever want to see a film, say in Japanese, dubbed. It wasn't because I wanted films in English but because I think ALL dubbed films are grotesque and icky and lots of other nasty words.

Now I see my very same dvd player being offered for a third of the price I paid. And back then the option for a region-free player was far too expensive to even consider. And now it isn't.

For this reason alone I can't see why anyone should feel they are doing anything 'morally' wrong by downloading films. Since there was never any reason in the first place to make dvd's on different formats *except* for these huge companies wanting to make even more money.

So there.


az

Arguably, they were saving money on not making enough prints for everywhere at once, so either making more money overall, or being able to make the same profit at lower prices. It wasn't *necessarily* all about greed.

Regarding your player, you couldn't have bought one for ~€40 three years ago, so you had a choice of buying expensive then, or waiting. No-one else had the choice of throwaway-priced players then either. If no-one had bought them *then*, they probably wouldn't be anything like as cheap *now*. That's the market logic of electronics goods.
It's when you buy a machine and the price halves the next week that you have a real right to get angry.

Oh, I don't know about that, Potholer. I reckon I can get angry whenever I like!


az