Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Seriously, though, don't you think that the charge should be more serious? Stealing a CD from a store or someone's home results in the loss of one CD; a torrent upload could result in the loss of goodness only knows how many thousands of sales.
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I really don't Harry. I have read your posts on the subject many times when it has come up along with Steve's. While there are certainly lost sales, in reality I think this is a situation that basic 'common sense' doesn't apply. I think that it results in more sales then losses. While a complete free-for-all would most likely bring more losses then sales the current attitude by the industry of Totalitarian rule over the downloads and subsequent action by law enforcement only hurts all that are involved.
I'll give you a few examples. First a personal one.
(And kudos to JSWolf) During the days before I first started using Napster (and Usenet groups for mp3s) I, on average, purchased 2 CD's a week. When the mp3 format and sharing of said files became popular I downloaded probably 10-20 CD's per week (Not saying if they were public domain or not
) . I still purchased about 2 CD's a week at that time. How many album sales did the industry lose during my evil streak? Not one.
One of the false assumptions is that every song (or book, or program) that is pirated would have otherwise been legally purchased. While sometimes this is the case, mostly it isn't. And fans are loyal enough to purchase legit merchandise when they can. I will submit that the oft cried 'It exposes new fans to the material' is generally a cop out as they generally know precisely what they are downloading. But that doesn't mean artists or the industry is losing sales. Just -look- at the markets. While all this horrendous piracy goes on they wind up with record sales.
A second example I would like to point out is software based.
I think you would be hard pressed to find an individual working professionally today in the graphics design and/or image manipulation industry that didn't make their bones using pirated software. I would bet good money that Adobe Photoshop wouldn't have a third of their user base had all the designers tending the developement of the WWW not illegally copied it. And while making a Mel C (Going for the SG trifecta) background for his desktop might not seem like it would benefit the industry you would again not being looking into the issue deep enough. The pirates created filters, shortcuts, tips and tricks which professionals use to this day. They aided in turning it into a powerhouse which everyone uses. Not just the select GD's working in studios that bought the software during the early 90s. And those same pirates turned into web developers, graphic designers, digital artists and what-not.
This is the case with many products in the software arena from graphics design to programming to CAD/CAM to professional audio suites. And the current trend to treat these pirates as one would a plane hi-jacker is driving todays equivilent youth into open-source freeware solutions. So that in the years to come all of that development that advanced the commercial products will no longer be there, but in the packages and ports databases of OS's such as Linux and FreeBSD.
I have pretty much worked in the IT industry my entire adult life. I no longer do except for consultation work. DRM and similar IP issues just became to much of a headache. Spending three times longer prepping a network for users to use a legally licensed program just to make MS feel secure was one of straws that did it for me. That and convoluted laws and EULA's on everything that pretty much left me (as the Admin) as the fallguy if the company stepped out of bounds for five minutes and got into trouble with the BSA.
Having read your posts on the subject, I doubt I'll change your mind on the issue but I really hope you'll consider the possibility that this is a newly emerging distribution model that we are actually quite a ways away from fully understanding and should err on the side of our citizens rights as apposed to nuking them orbit just to be sure.
-MJ
BTW Harry, a scenario you should consider is what if down the road someone notices a post on the forum or an eBook that mobileread's users/staff made a mistake believing to be out of copyright and the law was written and interpretted in such a way that Alexander was accountable for $30,000 for each time it was downloaded? (We'll ignore country bounderies for sake of this discussion, since that is another goal they are going for) Remember, ignorance is not a plausible defense in any of these cases.