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

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.



Dont you mean make the same revenue at lower cost. This means more profit (the difference between outlay and income) which is what motivates the greedy. So it is more greed after all.

Intellectual property is not always greed though.

It is the justifiable chaneeling of rewards towards the person who cam up with a popular idea, whether it be a TV show< design of vacuum cleaner, medicine or melody.

Im not capitalist but I dont see shy anyone else should deny anthoer person the rewards of their mental endeavour. Which is what your doing by copying material you have not paid for. Doing so without permisson equates to theft.

Now if you copy something you have paid for its not theft. If you share it with friends its not theft, which is different to showing it as a service on a coach or oil rig.

If your composer neighbour practices what he makes others pay for and you hear for free its not the same as you making an illicit copy and keeping it.

Now we start to get on to how much its worth these notes that float into the ether. Ideas that you are copying in another product, whiclst not physically the same as shoplifting a CD or knocking a dyson off the back of lorry are denying the creator of some income You have paid for the memory the music is stored on and the materials and labour that went into the counterfeit item but you are not giving the originator their dues and they are due paying because if they werent then you wouldnt want their song or drug *at all*.

one love

Who gets paid every time someone sings 'Happy Birthday'?


az

A subsidiary of AOL Time Warner and a guy called Archibald Hill...


http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/birthday.htm

(Although that's only for 'commercial' use)

So if you guys who dont like the idea of somone else getting cash everytime Happy Brithday is used in a commercial sense then you do have th option of writting your own enduring popular, catchy and easy to sing song for such occasions.

Any takers?

Anyone want to develope their own cough syrup or anit lock breaking system?

Pay actors, musicians, record-label-burghers and their lawyers LESS.


Basically if the prices were reasonable, and trade was free to level inter-country price fixing then the consumer wouldn't need to download material illegally.

The laws on IPR and media are made by representatives of the people (and the firms). So we are responsible.
But, as yet, the powers that be have taken little action against the "fraudsters". Hopefully KaZaa will pull through alright, and record labels will have to sue everyone individually(!!).

So why aren't the regulators/governments getting involved?
- Because they appreciate the cartel-like activities of record lables, film distributors, etc...

If you think artists are paid too much you have the choice as we all do of keeping our money in our pockets.

Robbie Williams £83M pay deal and increasing cinema receipts say we are too stupid to acheieve this simple ploy.

Either that or we like what they produce so much that we are willing to fork out for it (if we cant get it cheaper, sometimes even if we can).

Im not saying that Sports stars earning so much is a *great* idea but it is fair given what their talents are clearly woth in the market place.

"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?"

It's not a non sequitur.

You are stating that while you recognise the legal nicety of IPR law, you see it as merely an institutional arrangement rather than something "real" and deserving of your respect.

I am pointing out that intellectual property is as real as money, and if you are prepared to ignore the reality of IPR, it is reasonable to expect you to ignore the reality of money and... give all yours to me.

Now, if you refuse, you clearly consider money to be more than a mere "institutional arrangement" to be ignored on your whim. But you can't do that, and remain morally consistent with ignoring IPR law. Sorry.

H.

Hoo,

"You are stating that while you recognise the legal nicety of IPR law, you see it as merely an institutional arrangement rather than something "real" and deserving of your respect."

No, we were discussing whether it was right or wrong. I was saying that the fact that it is legally defined to be wrong doesn't make it wrong.

"... if you are prepared to ignore the reality of IPR, it is reasonable to expect you to ignore the reality of money ..."

False premise and non sequitur. (1) I don't ignore the reality of IPR laws as they exist now, I question whether or not they are right. (2) Why would rejecting one institution mean I should reject another?

"Now, if you refuse, you clearly consider money to be more than a mere "institutional arrangement" to be ignored on your whim. But you can't do that, and remain morally consistent with ignoring IPR law. Sorry."

It doesn't follow that my refusal to give you my money means I consider money to be more than an institutional arrangement. I won't give you all my money precisely because money is an institutional arrangement, if it wasn't it would be worthless and I'd give it you by all means (although I might keep some two pound coins, they're quite nice). I choose to participate in the one institutional arrangement (money) through necessity, but the other one (IPR laws) I am less sure about.

What is morally inconsistent about this? Some institutional arrangements are good, some bad. Just as some laws are good and some bad.

Your argument makes sense if you say I must decide between accepting and living by the law as it exists, or rejecting it in its entirety. But this would be a false dichotomy. Laws are facts to be dealt with, not a morally consistent system which one must accept or reject.

The intellectual property question is the source of endless debate in anime fandom, where respect for anime creators and strong fan demand exist side by side, combined with the fact that not all of us can understand Japanese, and not all anime is ever officially licensed for release outside Japan. The closest we've ever come to a consensus on 'fansub ethics' (and that's not very close; the debate is still very much alive) is the view that if you do download or otherwise acquire fansubs (amateur subtitling jobs, of highly variable quality), you'd better buy a fair amount of the anime that does get released locally too, so that you're at least supporting the industry to some extent rather than doing _nothing but_ leech off it. Although the worst that happens to people who don't is that they get criticised; now that fansubs are downloaded rather than sent to clubs by post, there's really no control that can be exercised over their dissemination.

>> If you think artists are paid too much you have the choice as we all do of keeping our money in our pockets.

Very true. But.....

If artists have cartel-like powers through the recording studio and CD distributors then the price of an album or single will be above that that it would be in a free market. In these sorts of situation the government usually steps in.
Cinemas are a case in point: small number of film studios, even smaller number of theatre owners. UCI & Odeon can pretty much charge whatever they like as there are so few alternatives.

The buying public is willing to rip off Robbie Williams by using bitstream/KaZaa, so perhaps they don't value the music so much?
Owning a 128k MP3 of a single is not the same as owning the single, similarly, watching a football match from the top floor of an adjacent block of flats is not the same as being in the stadium. But there are people willing to do both, should be be stopping them?

I have nothing against pop-stars and sportsman being highly paid, but I do think they shouldn't be penny pinching. It's very hard to feel sorry for EMI execs or for Oasis if the consumer wants to shift the power and take a bite of the cash.

The free market is taking action. Let it act!

DVD regioning is, unless I'm misinformed, illegal under European law. Not that there's anything the EU can do about it. DVD regioning is mostly just an irritant these days where you can pick up a multi-region DVD player for barely more than the DVD itself.

I can understand that DVDs would be priced differently in different markets, but the sheer size of the difference is indefensible and clearly artificially inflated.

Its cheaper for me to pay to buy a single DVD and have it shipped to the UK then to buy it in the shops. Bear in mind that these shops have huge economy of scale advantages as far as shipping costs go. Where the hell is that money going?

This being a separate matter really, I do see downloading this stuff off bittorrent as stealing. As does the law, and that's what matters I guess as theft is a legal definition. On the other hand, the law has little real power in this area, so we could just look at it along the lines of taxation and redistribution of the wealth.

"DVD regioning is, unless I'm misinformed, illegal under European law."

How can that be when all of Europe uses the same regional coding?

Well, sort of.

Region sub codes mean that UK releases don't always play on Mainland Europe, and vice versa.

What region sub-codes?

Ok, sometimes you get different versions of a disk available in Europe (For instance I could have bought the latest LotR DVD cheaper via Amazon UK than I could have in France - the difference was that:

1) The version in France has multilingual soundtracks - the UK version is in English full stop.
2) Last year the UK version was missing one of the hidden eastereggs as the BBFC got squeamish about it - the french don't give a damn.

But the machine I use is a Zone 2 player - end of story - there's no 'regional sub-coding' on the disk (and certainly nothing on the player.)

>> >>"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.book"

>>"huh
Dont you mean make the same revenue at lower cost. This means more profit (the difference between outlay and income) which is what motivates the greedy. So it is more greed after all."

'Same revenue at lower cost' (assuming it means same income, less expenditure) rather equates to 'making more money overall'.

Having lower expenses than some hypothetical other way of doing business generally either means making comparatively more profit than the hypothetical way by charging the same prices, or having comparatively lower prices nd the same profit (or some combination). Without knowing what the prices would actually be in the hypothetical alternative, you can't tell which.

No-one has any more right to expect that releases are worldwide (costing the film companies relatively more for no extra income) than to expect a supermarket to have one checkout per customer so no-one ever had to wait. It could be argued that a supermarket has queues because they are greedy, but if 'greed' is going to be used to cover any profit-making activity, it effectively loses any real meaning.

Making enough prints to show everywhere at once, but which had loads of life left in them after the initial release was over (after which many would never be used again) would wasteful in a very real sense.

"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...."

Making a copy of someone's intellectual property is copyright infringement. It it illegal but it is not stealing and to compare it to stealing is both wrong and moronic. I hate the fact that the entertainment industry keep making this pathetic equation.

Basically, if you make a copy of something that *legally* you should have to pay money for then the copyright holder only loses out if you genuinely would have bought the item anyway. For this reason, the huge "losses" the entertainment industry claims it loses to piracy are bogus since they are calculated according to the idea that each piracy is a potential sale. However, the entertainment industry *does* lose out to piracy to some degree so it is not no problem at all.

The general problem is of entrepreneurism versus corporatist capitalism. The attitude of the latter is that the public *owes* them their profits and *should* buy from them at any price they set. It's basically market by rules and regulations. The former sees what the pirates are doing, is annoyed by it, but instead of running to the govenment and crying tries to learn from them and wrest the market share back from them - eg lowering prices (and cutting costs) to compete with the cheaper pirate prices, music downloads instead of pricy CDs etc. Fundamentally, the vast majority of consumers *will* buy official rather than pirate *if* there is a good reason to do so. The secret is not to complain about how unfair piracy is and instead to work out how to grab the market back. Waging a "war" on pirates is pointless since piracy is so massively widespread (and moreso with the internet) that is would be like pissing against a gale. And prosecuting copyright infringers and bellowing preposterous hyperbole about them being "thieves" is counter-productive. The vast majority of those who pirate for personal use are also large-scale legitimate consumers of the same goods and victimising them to make a point *will* lead to selective boycotts out of solidarity. The entertainment industry are simply giant-scale market traders - they have to adapt and begs sales, not whinge and demand a "right" to money.

There's a side-issue to the 'wouldn't have bought it anyway' argument, largely in the area of software.

(Speaking as someone with an actual legal copy), it may well be that if Adobe could eliminate all illegal commercial use of Photoshop, they might end up losing practically no income if they turned even a semi-official blind eye to unpaid personal use, (since *very* few personal bootleg users would ever be likley to pay the high cost of a legal copy), but the producers of (often cheaper) alternative software could be seriously damaged.

Zagreb it is theft.

If someone hacks you bank and cleans out your account its theft even though there has been nothingphysically taken away and no locks forced open.

We dont owe the producers of I.p. anything until we use there I.P. in a way that we legally recognise as one constituting a transaction.

So if you hear a pianist through the wall or watch a film at a friends house you dont have to pay but if you want to poses something someone else has mentally endeavoured to create then that creator is due some remittance and if you really dont want it then you wouldnt pay for it.

Sure Moguls will inflate the amounts they are losing to piracy by various means, they will take account of the full RRP rather than the price charged by discount sellers like supermarkets or whatever. This does not change the fact that piracy is theft by another means.

Now Im not decrying those who subvert the rules of the market by liberating wealth from the hands of the coporate giants but lets call a spade a spade.

one love

Potholer, that's an interesting point about software that I hadn't considered. I don't think it really changes the arguments much, but it is worth bearing in mind. I wonder if they could have separately priced personal and commercial licenses (and I don't mean that they should sell a horribly cut down 'special edition' version at a lower price). I bought the student copy of MS visual studio a few years ago for £100 (it's identical to the normal version except for the price), but there is absolutely no way I would ever have stumped up the (at the time) £1100 for the non-student version. I imagine Adobe do student versions as well, why not extend that principle to personal as opposed to commercial use in general? Well, they've probably thought about it and decided it isn't workable, 'tis a shame though.

It's important, I think, to remember why copyright and intellectual property laws were set up, so that artists could retain the rights over how their work was used, and so that they could make money from it, for the period of their life (and a little beyond). They evolved from the principle that art should belong in the public sphere. There's two main principles at work - the artist should be paid for his/her/their work, and art (from Michaelangelo to Kylie) belongs, eventually, to the public. Early rock n' roll recordings, including early Elvis, are reaching the end of their protected time very soon (in some countries), and will soon be public domain - as it should be. Even if Elvis is still alive, his works have been protected long enough for him to enjoy the rewards. The companies that own such recordings have shown their true colours by lobbying to extend the copyright protection period. There are good arguments made by Louis Barfe right here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/3547788.stm

Intellectual property rights have been subverted by the drive for profit over art. The support that some artists give to file sharing, such as Chuck D - as well as encouraging sampling and amateur remixing of Public Enemy tracks - shows that some realise that profit is not the sole aim of IP. The companies that press charges against people that download films and music may have a point, but it's undermined by the way they mostly run their businesses with a purely profit-driven approach.