Why online piracy isn't theft

Creativity is linked to freedom. Music itself is dependent on the appropriation of musical notations and ideas that came before it.

When we create laws to protect our creative financial livelihoods, we are in many ways cutting off perhaps the greatest wellspring of creativity we have, which is the appropriation of other ideas that came before us.

In that context, it could be considered hubris to think that our creative work is somehow exclusively and uniquely our own.

There is a flow to creativity that when cut off, dies just as surely as
the body dies from lack of sustenance.
 
andersju said:
If you post a picture online, I can't take it. I can only copy it. You still have it, and now I do, too. There are more copies of your picture in the world. I can save your picture to my computer (perfectly legal, naturally). I can even make a small print and put it on my fridge in my home, just like I could cut out a picture from the newspaper; still legal. I can, however, not distribute/republish your picture without your permission.
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andersju

This is a very clear explanation of copyright. Yet many on here will read what you have described and think that it is stealing. Some will be outraged by the idea. Theirs is a strange reaction as what you have described is the current situation.

Many people think that copyright aims to stop people downloading images. It does not. It simply aims to stop people using those images for profit without permission. I am free to download images for personal use, you are too and so are the people who stamp their feet and call it stealing. But it is not. You, I and they are free to copy images as we wish. But copyright law prohibits us all from publishing and profiting from those images.

It amazes me that seemingly intelligent people can hold such strong views without bothering to investigate what it is that upsets them so. I believe the term for it is moral panic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic
 
I agree that IP theft is wrong, but I also think that, as a society, we've done a terrible job of educating people about it, and done a terrible job of coping with the reality of it.

On the web, many things are "free" (as in beer), but a few things are not. The distinction between streaming a song and downloading the song file is an incredibly fine one for most folks: they are absolutely equivalent actions in the minds of many. It is incredibly hard to state the principle by which it is ok to stream the song but not download the song, such that it passes the smell test for most folks. If it's ok to do the one (and folks like Pandora and MOG and Spotify say it is), then it's ok to do the other (the RIAA says it isn't). The technical difference between the two is invisible to most.

That said, there is a feature inherent in society that can be characterized as simply sharing our common culture. Analog equivalents of our "criminal" digital behavior were A-OK: making tapes of albums and giving them to friends, making VHS tapes, borrowing books from the library, selling used books to bookstores, simply giving a book or album to a friend. This is how a culture propagates, how a people form a shared identity: we share.

Digital media is the first time that sharing can be done *so* broadly, with no degredation of experience for anyone down the line: the first person to read an ebook has exactly the same experience as the millionth, whereas a used book falls apart before it can be read a million times, necessitating buying another new one. But the rise of digital media is so recent, while our behavior of sharing our culture is so old and ingrained, that I'm more than a little sympathetic to people who don't really understand why it's a problem. Structurally, our society isn't really built to regard sharing as a crime.

That said, I pirate nothing. I'm a digital elite: I know what the differences are between streaming and downloading, I sell digital content and I want to be paid for it. But I also know that, just as people, if you're saying "it's all just stealing", then you've picked an untenable position. Culture *requires* sharing to exist, so we need a way to provide for this outlet. Because the RIAA "you owe us $200,000 for sharing this one song, or you're going to jail" argument is not only wrong, it's an obscene affront to our shared cultural existence.
 
rxmd said:
Well then I'm sure you're familiar with how the academic model of distribution of knowledge works - namely you can take any idea by anybody and use it for anything, for free, as long as you give full attribution and don't claim as yours something that isn't. This is close to perfect in my book. If all copyright worked this way, I could live with it - do anything with any work and copy anything by anybody, as long as you have to make a clear attribution whose it is.

In the developing country where I work, there is basically very little protection for intellectual property rights (because the state is so weak that it basically has other things to do than to protect people's business models). Yet there are lots of photographers and creative people; I just came back from an exhibition and one third of the audience were people who make their living off photography, without the state protecting them. Somehow they still make a living and don't have a harder time than anyone else already has. This has made me lose respect for a lot of creative people in the West who are creative about everything but their business model and who thlink the end of copyright to the end of the world.

It is not the job of the state to protect business models, not Disney's, not yours. I'm sorry, but the present situation where the state grants monopolies for several generations on average is absurd. Even if we don't get into how together with technology it makes impossible everyday activities like lending e-books or digital albums to friends, you see the absurdity on every step. Just look into that society of yours, where when you get a birthday cake in a restaurant the waitresses can't sing Happy Birthday To You because the lyrics are under copyright (look it up, it's true). No matter how much you throw around big words like "theft" or "piracy", this is just not right by any measure. Is the waitress a thief now if she sings Happy Birthday for your grandad? You can't have the birthday cake and eat it, too.

You may be concerned all the way about your bottom line, but in reality I think all you do is support the bottom line of Disney, Sony and so on. Based on the experience from places where copyright actually is weak, if that state-protected business model would go away, I think the small artists are those whom it would hurt least of all.
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States with weak intellectual property protections are all the poorest on Earth. You can keep your third-world 'utopia'; I'd rather live in the USA. Copyrights and patents are essential for a society as a whole to grow rich. The founders of the United States recognized that when they made protecting intellectual property a duty of the federal government in the US Constitution. The terms of copyright are ridiculously long today, thanks to media industry lobbying, but I think it should be at least for the lifetime of the artist for work created by individual artists.

There is not one prosperous country on the face of the Earth that doesn't strongly protect IP. Living in a deeply impoverished country has zero appeal to me.
 
Chriscrawfordphoto said:
States with weak intellectual property protections are all the poorest on Earth. You can keep your third-world 'utopia'; I'd rather live in the USA. Copyrights and patents are essential for a society as a whole to grow rich. The founders of the United States recognized that when they made protecting intellectual property a duty of the federal government in the US Constitution. The terms of copyright are ridiculously long today, thanks to media industry lobbying, but I think it should be at least for the lifetime of the artist for work created by individual artists.

There is not one prosperous country on the face of the Earth that doesn't strongly protect IP. Living in a deeply impoverished country has zero appeal to me.
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The reasons why this country is impoverished have literally nothing to do with IP; it is completely tangential. You really have to check on your facts before you make statements about IP and prosperity.

The country from which the one I'm speaking of emerged was a major intellectual property exporter and was the second most powerful economy in the world. It did not strongly protect IP, in that case because it didn't have to; the underlying IP model worked differently, by strongly enforcing attribution and by rewarding artists directly. It was one of the things that worked well, even tought there were a lot of things unrelated to IP that were wrong with that country. The country only joined the Berne convention in the late 1970s and never really got strict about enforcing it.

The current second most powerful economy in the world does not strongly respect IP. In fact it came to be the second most powerful by not strongly respecting IP, and I don't see it strongly respecting IP at any point in the future. This is a different model; there are a lot of things unrelated to IP that are wrong with that country, but it shows that you can prosper without respecting IP.

I repeat that if the only way a business can survive is because the government grants it monopolies, then the business model leaves a lot to be desired. It's too vulnerable, which is why the lobbying is so hard and disgusting. It is also morally questionable; if the only way your business can survive is because elsewhere there are people lobbying hard and demanding royalties from Girl Scouts for singing Puff the Magic Dragon, then something is deeply morally wrong, and I'm not sure what the Founding Fathers would have said about that one.
 
Jack Conrad said:
Creativity is linked to freedom. Music itself is dependent on the appropriation of musical notations and ideas that came before it.

When we create laws to protect our creative financial livelihoods, we are in many ways cutting off perhaps the greatest wellspring of creativity we have, which is the appropriation of other ideas that came before us.

In that context, it could be considered hubris to think that our creative work is somehow exclusively and uniquely our own.

There is a flow to creativity that when cut off, dies just as surely as
the body dies from lack of sustenance.
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An excellent point, and one that is often forgotten. Music, like all other creative expressions, has always been about taking/borrowing from what came before and reinterpreting it and building upon it.

This is very much related to what rxmd wrote about the absurdity of copyright lasting for generations. I see this as the biggest problem of current copyright legislation - the locking in of culture - but it is rarely discussed in these kinds of heated debates.

If we could just revert to the terms of copyright law circa 1975, when in the US copyright lasted for 28 years after publication plus an optional extension of 28 more years (still very long, but much more sensible than the current life+70 years, or 95 years after creation for corporate authorship), it would be an immense benefit to culture and mankind. Sadly, Disney & co are hell-bent on lobbying for yet more extensions whenever Steamboat Willie (1928) comes close to entering the public domain.

(Wikipedia: "It could have entered public domain in 4 different years; first in 1956, renewed to 1984, then to 2003 by the Copyright Act of 1976, and finally to the current public domain date of 2023 by the Copyright Term Extension Act (also known pejoratively as the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act") of 1998.")

There's a nice quote by the great filmmaker Jim Jarmusch from his "Golden Rules" published in MovieMaker:

"Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery—celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.""
 
FrankS said:
It is the choice of the artist to share or sell.
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Only in the first instance. Once I've bought a book, it's my own choice whether I lend it. If the author told me I can't do that I'd tell him to go to hell.

Once I've bought a record, it's my own choice whether I make a mix tape. Mix tapes are actually of questionable legality, even though we all did them.

How do you lend an e-book, or an article in Britannica now it's no longer published on paper? You can't. I risk to repeat myself, but you can't have your cake and eat it too. Sharing music with friends is now a criminal offense worth five digits, and lending books to friends is actually on the way out in the long term together with public libraries, thanks to the same people lobbying for the anti-piracy legislation that everybody here seems to be so fond of.
 
The current second most powerful economy has reached this status by stealing every conceivable IP and not respecting the most basic rules of safety and hygiene in its products, giving our children toys made of harmful materials, contaminated milk products and the like. Once this economy is forced to pay its workforce wages above slavery level, I wonder if it will keep that status.
 
EdwardKaraa said:
The current second most powerful economy has reached this status by stealing every conceivable IP and not respecting the most basic rules of safety and hygiene in its products, giving our children toys made of harmful materials, contaminated milk products and the like. Once this economy is forced to pay its workforce wages above slavery level, I wonder if it will keep that status.
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So the first most powerful economy doesn't go in for penal labour then? ... sorry, slave labour I mean
 
Sparrow said:
So the first most powerful economy doesn't go in for penal labour then? ... sorry, slave labour I mean
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Well, I would really like to see what kind of mess the whole world will be in if all countries decide to follow the example of the second most powerful economy 😉
 
As a software developer who has sweated blood into products, I support IP law 100%, some would say its not theft, but that's semantics, as a pirate, you are taking something you have no right to take.

As a developer, do I lose out from pirates stealing my stuff... A kid in his bedroom, playing with new software, no, probably not, he would never have bought it, but I've worked in companies with 100+ members of staff, who routinely stole 10s of thousands of pounds of software, and those developers are being ripped off.

I may not agree with the way Chris Crawford expresses his opinion, but I agree totally.

If you don't like the price of my software, don't use it, or better yet, contact me and I'm usually happy to cut you a deal to make a happy customer.
 
mugent said:
As a software developer who has sweated blood into products, I support IP law 100%
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You mean including the cases where copyright holders sue elderly retirees for illegally downloading movies, and said elderly retiree is living alone and neither has a computer nor a wireless router, and the copyright holder wins the case anyway?
 
Chriscrawfordphoto said:
States with weak intellectual property protections are all the poorest on Earth. You can keep your third-world 'utopia'; I'd rather live in the USA. Copyrights and patents are essential for a society as a whole to grow rich. The founders of the United States recognized that when they made protecting intellectual property a duty of the federal government in the US Constitution.
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You're ignoring the fact that when the US was a developing nation, it completely ignored the rights of foreign authors for a very long time. The Copyright Act of 1790 specifically stated:

"And be it further enacted, That nothing in this act shall be construed to extend to prohibit the importation or vending, Reprinting or publishing within the United States, of any map, chart, book or books, written, printed, or published by any person not a citizen of the United States, in foreign parts or places without the jurisdiction of the United States."

Henry G. Henn, "The Quest for International Copyright Protection" (1954):

"The United States had been among the most parochial of nations so far as copyright protection for published works is concerned. For over a hundred years, this nation not only denied copyright protection to published works by foreign authors . . . but appeared to encourage the piracy of such works."
 
Holy ginger snacks Rocky has this thread got a lot of responses!

I like that!

Let me cause a stir, what I have done with my business is priced my products that includes an amount for the hi-res files. The reception by clients has been very positive and the profit immediately flows to the bottom line! I like that and so does my banker!

Some photographers can get knotted up over the "art" "value" and what will the prints look like and other things like ego, you're stealing my stuff, etc. etc.

Not everyone today wants to have prints made. I do headshot business portraits that may go on a clients web site, business cards, places like facebook & other social media opportunities to get exposure. Some use a family portrait as wallpaper on their work computer. Some use them in an electronic photo frame or on their iPad or iPhone.

Whew!

I guess I would say, many ways are there today to look at photos.

So there, I spoke about what I do. Smiles!

There is only 24 hrs to my day and I'd rather take time to get a client that would spend thousands rather than getting a print order for a few hundred.

My take. It works for me.

Hope I shed some light to help you.

Thanks to the moderators keeping this thread open. For the most part it's been a good debate!
 
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