Quote:
Originally Posted by hogleg
It would be if I said you were a pirating jerk with a reading comprehension approaching that of an 8-year old and a burning desire to prove that pirating software and downloading books and movies is okay. If You'll notice, I said your arguments and ideas were stupid, not you.
However, pleased to meet you, Pot. My name is Kettle. Nice of you to notice the suntan. Change the subject any?
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Your hostility is out of place. Perhaps you should....check the other threads to get a better idea of the general tone used in these parts.
At any rate, you are basing the morality or lack thereof on some notions that really just don't make any sense.
Al-righty then, let's talk about the morality then.
Something I do not believe I've done in any post here.
So here goes:
There isn't any. I do not believe anything in history has even remotely prepared us to this environment, which, for me at least, makes it more exciting than frustrating.
We are really defining some new things, and re-defining old ones to try to fit into what was conceivably an impossible scheme: A way for practically anyone, anywhere to get something they want, near instantly in some cases, delivered directly to them if they have a magical box in which to use them.
What existing concepts do we have before us that really even begin to define the reality of what we have here?
What appears to be happening is we are trying to hold water in a sieve. We are trying to apply locks to the unlockable, to fit concepts we've established in a reality where physics dictates that a made tangible thing that exists in 3 dimensional space can only be at one place at one time.
The thing is, in the digital reality, this essential rule has not changed; the bits attached to some storage medium cannot be attached to another simultaneously.
The twist is of course, that an exact copy of these bits can be made without any loss. This effectively puts it at multiple places at multiple times, and each of these copies exists without any expenditure of resources to maintain them in this other location whatsoever (the possessor of the duplicate is the owner of the medium storing them).
So the argument turns to what is lost and what is gained here?
The answer: potential revenue. Not real money. Not real materials. A bunch of "not" but not a lot of....anything tangible.
What makes this all so...brutal...is that every point of reception is a point of transmission, or as Ed Perrine told me almost 20 years ago when i first became interested in the software business: "The thing with software is, every customer is a potential competitor."
At this point, the mind reels with trying to bang the square "property" peg into the round "digital" hole.
Sony, bless them, are really the pioneers and trailblazers on this insane notion; we can look to them to see the depth and breadth of their failure. Go back to SCMS (Serial Copy Management System) and work forward. The rootkit debacle shows how far they are willing to go to piss off someone actually giving them money, by being more concerned about people that have no intention of doing so.
Because they don't have to, or need to.
So what we have before is is either the ultimate free market scenario or the ultimate communist utopia.
See that? "Or". I did it myself, that "old thinking" thing. If I were to record what I see, as it is, literally, instead of trying to mold it to either side of an equation, I'd see plainly that is it "neither" because it is essentially "both"...which of course would be "impossible" because they are opposites.
Yeah? Think of it like this: tell someone who has not experienced these things how I can cook food in 1 minute, draw fire from my fingertips at will, and see into other people's homes from across the world and see them and talk to them via my magic picture frame...and see what kind of rational responses you get from revealing to them the "impossible."
I honestly think you are being very one-sided on this issue because you just don't seem to consider the fact that it is not only possible, but acceptable and valid for there to be questions to the question of "Should a creator be paid for his work?"...even within the *existing* framework of what we already supposedly know how to deal with, even tho these questions are asked everyday.
For you, the answer is "Yes."
Not "Yes..." or "Yes," or "Yes:" or "Yes;"
The reality has proven to be far, far more complicated, mostly due to the fact that a fiat has no power in an environment where absolutely nothing within it can exist exclusively.
When an author writes a book, they get an advance. That is their only guaranteed income in a typical publishing scenario. They have been paid by the publisher.
So it isn't then a question of "if" but one of "how much"? The school
used to be the one where you name you price for your offerings and the buyer can "take it or leave it"...with "it" being the product or service offered. A seller's market.
Our digital market is a whole different school altogether because effectively the buyer can simply opt to not pay the seller and have what they want, anyway. This sucks for the seller.
Of course, there is balance here because, the seller can still get a buyer because while the last buyer chose not to accept the price on the table, the seller did not lose the product or service and can offer it intact to a new buyer. Subsequent buyers that agree to the price and pay for it all get the exact same product...but the seller isn't limited to a raw materials pool that drains and needs to be replaced with each subsequent buyer.
I don't believe anyone that can scream from the rooftops that the internet is driving people to the soup lines is anything more than a liar. The evidence clearly shows the content biz is doing *quite* well.
Lying is horribly immoral.
I don't believe that anyone that feels that some kid downloading a crappy mp3 of a canned pop song should be punished the same way wife-beaters and car jackers are is even...sane.
At the end of the day, to me anyway, the whole "morality" argument of copyright in the digital domain is moronic. There effectively isn't any copy control, so asserting THAT aspect copyright (and seemingly, the only aspect that "matters" to this crowd) is a bit less than sane, and a bit more than mental masturbation.
Its like standing on the top of a mountain screaming "mine! mine! mine!" into a valley full of people smiling back at you, shaking their heads.
But what is absolutely the WORST about these discussions of "morality" is that at least from the "they are criminal scum" side of the fence, is that it really isn't about "right or wrong" at all.
It's all about money
-K