[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by stonetools

People misunderstand. The point is not that DRM stops piracy, the point is that effective LE stops piracy. Once the piracy sites are closed down, authors will feel secure about giving up DRM.

How do you define "the piracy sites" such that they can be shut down without destroying the commercial aspects of the internet?

I don't mean, "what's your top ten list of sites focused on piracy;" I mean "how do you prevent future sites from springing up in their wake if those are shut down; how do you define a piracy site so that policies can be made to prevent them from becoming large focuses of illegal data exchanges?"

At this point, we are telling authors " Give up on DRM and in return, we'll do nothing about protecting your IP rights".

No, we're saying, "give up on DRM so you can focus on maximizing sales and use the law to go after those infringements which are causing you damage, rather than those caused by people just trying to use what they paid for."

Putting down the threat of losses due to filesharing would reassure authors and other copyright holders.

Certainly. And as soon as someone comes up with a way of establishing what those losses are, so they can be mitigated or prevented, policies can be established and legal action can be taken.

You can't prevent losses that don't exist.

I am not saying "there are no losses from filesharing." I *am* saying, "in order to establish the best methods to mitigate those losses, we need to know how many dollars are involved." Who is losing how much money to whom--if we can't answer that, we can't decide on an action.

We could cut back on losses from filesharing by requiring that every post, email, and file transferred online be checked by an individual searching through the entire copyright registry... but that, of course, would be ridiculous. The cost wouldn't be worth the gains.

In order to decide if the cost of a particular measure is worth what it gains, we have to know what losses it's trying to prevent. "Author is deeply offended that people are reading without paying" is not something copyright law addresses.... people have been reading books without paying for them for centuries.

It would also move us to a public, politically accountable process of protecting copyright holder's rights instead of a private, proprietary, and largely ineffective solution.

Sure. Does that include rights to noncommercial IP, like individual blog posts, which are often copied against the will of the author? Or is copyright protection only extended to those creative works attached to a paycheck?