Is Piracy Progressive Taxation ?

[zelda_pinwheel]

that's a good point. O'Reilly says in his article that "The simplest way to get customers to stop trading illicit digital copies of music and movies is to give those customers a legitimate alternative, at a fair price." a few publishers are smart enough to see this (other than O'Reilly, baen is the obvious example), and they are doing very well. O'Reilly also says :
Lesson 6: "Free" is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service:

(...) Services like Kazaa flourish in the absence of competitive alternatives. I confidently predict that once the music industry provides a service that provides access to all the same songs, freedom from onerous copy-restriction, more accurate metadata and other added value, there will be hundreds of millions of paying subscribers. That is, unless they wait too long, in which case, Kazaa itself will start to offer (and charge for) these advantages. (Or would, in the absence of legal challenges.) Much as AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, Cnet, and many others have collectively built a multi-billion dollar media business on the "free" web, "publishers" will evolve on file sharing networks.

Why would you pay for a song that you could get for free? For the same reason that you will buy a book that you could borrow from the public library or buy a DVD of a movie that you could watch on television or rent for the weekend. Convenience, ease-of-use, selection, ability to find what you want, and for enthusiasts, the sheer pleasure of owning something you treasure.

The current experience of online file sharing services is mediocre at best. Students and others with time on their hands may find them adequate. But they leave much to be desired, with redundant copies of uneven quality, intermittent availability of some works, incorrect identification of artist or song, and many other quality problems.

Opponents may argue that the Web demonstrates precisely what they are afraid of, that content on the Web is "free", that advertising is an insufficient revenue model for content providers, and that subscription models have not been successful. However, I will argue that the story is still unfinished.

Subscription sites are on the rise. Computer industry professionals can be seen as the "early adopters" in this market. For example, O'Reilly's Safari Books Online is growing at 30 percent a month, and now represents a multi-million dollar revenue stream for us and other participating publishers. (...)

(emphasis mine)

how long do you think it will be before we begin to see more of this in the publishing industry ?

[slayda]

Who would buy a car, lawn mower, computer, etc. if they knew that the manufacturer could arbitrarily decide to make them no longer work and the buyer had no legal recourse. We would be fools to do so but that's what the DRM community wants to do with books. Right now ebooks but eventually all books - outside of museums - will be ebooks.

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

that's a good point. O'Reilly says in his article that "The simplest way to get customers to stop trading illicit digital copies of music and movies is to give those customers a legitimate alternative, at a fair price." a few publishers are smart enough to see this (other than O'Reilly, baen is the obvious example), and they are doing very well. O'Reilly also says :
Lesson 6: "Free" is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service:

(emphasis mine)

how long do you think it will be before we begin to see more of this in the publishing industry ?

I'd expect it first with indie publishers, small press and the like, because the people in these companies are usually more technically and culturally savvy. The big players are so entrenched in corporate hierarchy that its going to take them a lot longer, if ever, to see the light. They'll be pushed, rather than jump into the digital world, but by that point their whole business will be seen as quaint by a lot of people. Actually I believe the entertainment corporations will die out in the face of more nimble, cost-effective small press publishers. You can't compete with free, but you will be able, for a short time at least, be able to compete with credibility. Small press publishers will have this credibility where the big companies can never achieve it.

At least that's the way I see it panning out.

[zelda_pinwheel]

i think when you mention credibility you touch on a key factor : by using drm and other systems which lock consumers into a specific business model or out of their legitimately purchased content big corporations have lost a lot of the goodwill of the precise groups they need to survive : their customers (thus the lack of guilt for illicit copying displayed by so many). on the other hand, look at the respect and appreciation people unanimously express for baen ; baen's customers want them to succeed and therefore support them in whatever way they can. even *i* feel invested in their success, although i'm not really a science fiction reader, because i appreciate their business model and wish more publishers would adopt it.

actually i think that if the corporations are replaced by a multitude of smaller presses who are willing to listen to what their customers want everyone will end up winning. fictionwise is also a small company but they make a lot of efforts to maintain good customer relations, and people appreciate and respect that. granted they are not a publisher, and they've also just been bought by barnes and noble who is clearly not small in any way, but if they manage to preserve this philosophy they'll be well-placed to come out on top in years to come.

[fugazied]

Originally Posted by Moejoe

Piracy, although I hate that word for what is essentially "sharing" is, or at least was, part of our cultural heritage. Campfire stories and music, oral tales passed on from generation to generation, embellished or rather, remixed as they passed from one creator to the next. We lost sight of this at some point, our culture was reigned in, stamped with a pricetag and carefully controlled by gatekeepers and taste makers, in the hopes of maximising profits.

So very true.
Copyright has also changed immensely from it's initial intent, where you could share works with others, but only a certain person could print the work.

Copyright has now evolved to the extent where even SHARING a work is penalised. They lock the book you buy with DRM into your kindle, you can't share it. Corporations and lobbyists are constantly seeking extensions to copyright so it affects even more areas/technologies and our daily lives.

I read part of the paper and I think it is fairly well thought out and something that copyright holders should read. Corporations sole intent is to increase their profit, but the way they are approaching the issue they are jeopardizing that goal (treating customers like criminals, limiting technologies). When it is easier to use the pirated material rather than the purchased DRM material, you know there is something fundamentally wrong.

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by fugazied

When it is easier to use the pirated material rather than the purchased DRM material, you know there is something fundamentally wrong.

sad but true.

[ahi]

Originally Posted by fugazied

Copyright has also changed immensely from it's initial intent, where you could share works with others, but only a certain person could print the work.

Indeed! I believe copyright was basically a law meant to protect publishers from each other. It was meant to have next to nothing to do with consumers.

- Ahi

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by ahi

Indeed! I believe copyright was basically a law meant to protect publishers from each other. It was meant to have next to nothing to do with consumers.

- Ahi

It was originally devised in the 17th century to prevent printers from printing a book without the author's permission. Basically a consequence of the invention of the printing press.

[wodin]

Progressive Taxation is Piracy!

[Jaime_Astorga]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Let me have all of you think about the following Star Trek, The Next Generation background prop, the matter converter. The person goes up to the machine, tells it what kind of food the person wants, and the machine create the food out of energy (or something like that). Think about it. As long as there's plenty of energy, there's no shortage of food for anybody. Should they pay a royalty? To whom, for how long? Public domain receipes?
It's an example of the digital world encroaching upon the analog world. It hasn't gotten there yet, but look at the idea of a 3-D printer. They aren't very useful yet, and very expensive, but someday it'll get much better. The digital world is slowy encroaching upon the analog world, which in the long term makes us all richer. It the hybrid period, though, there are winner and losers.

I agree. We have basically reached the technological level where post-scarcity is possible in the digital world, yet people are trying to impose artificial scarcity in order to make this new world economically similar to the old one. I can only hope one day we will reach post-scarcity for physical items as well, as depicted in current works of science fiction.

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by Jaime_Astorga

I agree. We have basically reached the technological level where post-scarcity is possible in the digital world, yet people are trying to impose artificial scarcity in order to make this new world economically similar to the old one. I can only hope one day we will reach post-scarcity for physical items as well, as depicted in current works of science fiction.

I think that's because the "law-makers" are generally anything but progressive and young... I think we'll start to see changes once the older generation, the ones that only started to use computers and such at a more mature age has passed away. Once the majority of the "law-makers" are of the computer generation, we should see some improvement in that matter...

I personally think that piracy could be a good driving force. Look at MP3. As more and more people used the internet to share those music files, more and more shops started to pop up and more and more numbers started to sell individually (compared to buying a whole CD full). MP3 players came around and now it's hard to find anybody without a device that can play MP3 files.

At some point, the amount of legally available content should overshadow the amount of illegally available content. And while piracy will never disappear, it should become less.