[molman]

Originally Posted by Harmon

One reason I don't agree with that position is that it assumes that the content creators are holding up their part of the deal. They aren't.

Broadly speaking, the deal is that the creators have a limited period of time in which to profit from their creation, after which it enters the public domain.

Obviously, there's a spectrum along which the proper point of "limited period" might occur, but basically, in the United States, we have reached the point that for practical purposes, nothing enters the public domain during the lifetime of any adult alive at the time it is created.

When you add to that an attempt by the creator to extract a disproportionate price for the content, leveraging off of the extended time frame of copyright, I think it's fair to say that the deal is off.

That's not a legal argument, so YMMV.

This may be a philosophically nice position to take (and trust me my sentiments are probably closer to this than I may express), but unfortunately it does not match the current situation we find ourselves in. The other thing to remember is that you mention profit, and whilst a major factor copyright and similar laws more broadly provide legally enforceable rights that can include me never selling my creation should I choose.

Originally Posted by Harmon

But there's another point that is a legal one. You are assuming that it is unquestionable that downloading files from pirate sites is illegal. People tend to confuse the clear illegality involved in the unauthorized distributing of copyrighted material, with the downloading of that material for personal use. While the matter is not indisputable, I think that there is a very strong case - stronger than the contra - for the proposition that, legally speaking, merely downloading a file from a pirate site for personal use is not a copyright violation.

You do have to be careful, though, that you are not downloading in a PTP situation, because (as I understand the way the technology works) that involves you with distributing at the same time you are downloading.

My appreciation of this was that it had more to do with the element of harm which it easier in the case of distribution of copyrighted works verses having a copy for private use. I can't say I've looked into it enough, nor could I comment with regards to US law.

Originally Posted by Harmon

Well, without going down the rathole, I would observe that maybe the problem is with the physical abstracts in the first place, not with the translation. I think that the concept of intellectual property is incoherent, but it works well enough to be useful in the physical world. I think that the digital world exposes that incoherence.

This is definitely an element of the challenge with the current approach though even for the physical space I still feel that law isn't without its issues including in my eyes excessive length of protection, but then that’s a different debate.