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Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
To quote a certain police captain: "Just because you say it with conviction, doesn't make it so!" You don't know how many people pirate files, buy files, pirate only because they couldn't find a legit file, or buy legit because they couldn't find a pirate file. And "most are never read" is NOT the same as "none are ever read." You can't make an absolute statement out of suppositions and estimates.
But a review of a book isn't recounting the entire book, it is its own original product; so it's not bound by the laws governing redistributing the entire book.
Yes, we agree on this (alert the media). Copyright was formed using existing "property" metaphors in the first place... and that was probably a mistake--a minor mistake, which did little harm at the outset, but which has gotten to be larger and more troublesome over time thanks to corporate manipulation. Now, we are trying to apply a metaphor-mistaken statute to electronic files, a wholly new entity that was unheard-of when the original copyright laws were formed.
So, we know we need new metaphors that work for electronic files in general, and entertainment media like ebooks and music in particular. The next question is, are there good sources of existing metaphors for electronic media (such as cable TV, broadcast, service industry, utilities, etc), or do we need a completely new set of metaphors for electronic media? And if so, where do we get those?
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Maybe, for a start, that copyright and patent should have the same term, no matter what that term is, and should have the same legal enforcement framework.
The main metaphor problem is - what is ownership in the digital world. Do I buy a copy of 1's and 0's? Do I license it? How do you advertise the sale (lease? license?) You can't make metaphors until you can define (and explain) what you mean. (And everybody else understands what you mean.)
On one hand, you have the old physical (analog) concept of "I pay you money and it's mine, to do with what I wish" world. Everybody understands that world and it's implications.
The only metaphor for the digital world that everybody understands is the "movie ticket" metaphor. You buy a ticket and you see it once. You want to see it again? Buy another ticket. This works because the owners of the product being views keep control of the product. Nobody else gets a copy to keep. This is the basis for cable, only on a fixed price basis (X television for Y dollars a month).
This is the trend today. That's what cloud computing is all about. Your "data" is treated as a license, and you stream it, on a per use basis. Or you set up a custom list, a la Pandora. The idea is that eventually, only crooks and cranks will have their own data.
Because with the technology today, copyright data will always be leaking...