Copyright is Out of Sight

[sircastor]

Originally Posted by Enkidu of Abydos

People's principles and stands on copyright and piracy have NOTHING to do with either their age or their source of income, at least if one is truthfull. Principles are a matter of one's world views.
...
Don't mix age / employment status with principles / tastes / views. From what I've seen here it's more of a cultural thing, as the staunchest supporters of copyright here seem to be Americans.

You're countering your own arguments. A person's world view is a function of experience which includes your age, as well as the source of your income. The reason we pin these things on teenagers because most of us went through being a teenager. Teenagers often have their needs provided for them (food, shelter, clothing). They aren't usually involved in managing finances or handling the bills. In spite of what they're told, they typically have a weak grasp on that kind of thing.

So when you look at piracy and copyright violation (which has the indicators of a victimless crime), it's something that works for a lot of teenagers. It "doesn't hurt anyone", it doesn't cost money, and they would like it to continue that way.

It's nearly impossible not to mix opinions and views with your age/status/income. Who we are and what we do affects our outlook on life.

To say that anyone who considers copying digital files not to be theft is teenage and not making a living for themselves is absolutely ridiculous. There are adult software developers who believe in not forcing people to pay for software unless they want to (donate), and still make their living from that.

The difference is that the software developer (who owns the rights to the work) chooses to not require payment. This is different than someone offering their work in exchange for money, and a person who refuses to give money but takes the work anyway.

[Namekuseijin]

Originally Posted by kennyc

Yes, please, me too!

haha, can't help noticing you filtered away my post, so I'm unsure you actually enjoyed it or thought it stupid... how ironic!

[Enkidu of Abydos]

Originally Posted by Enlil.S.Enki

While the original post was largely an unrealisable utopian dream. The majority of posts are all discussing a moral/ethical question as a legal one. We only have the ethos of not copying work because we are indoctrinated from birth with the law.

The law creates a market. Technology creates a way for the law to be easily and virtually undetectably circumvented. When the law can be circumvented and that circumvention goes largely undetected, we are back to ethics and morality. The law has failed. Our options are to enhance the law and strengthen the enforcement/detection capabilities of enforcers. Or to re-examine the situation from a moral perspective given what people will do anyway.

Consider a person lives in the third world, their average income is tiny by your rich first world standards, yet by local standards this person is well off. They save for a year and buy a second hand e-book reader on ebay. They can not buy e-books (even if they could afford them), because no one will sell them to them (their country is out of any supported zone). They can not afford to buy many printed books in their country, and the books they can buy are carefully censored by the repressive regime they live under. (It is the third world after all) Now it is illegal for this person to copy books, but they are left with two options (1, do not read many books or 2, read what they want, but it has to be pirated.)

The world is a better place if they opt for 2, even though they copied someone elses work. Morality wins over law, just because something is illegal does not mean it is wrong, the two concepts are not the same. Regardless of how you have been indoctrinated to think so.

As far as copyright goes in the first world, its far to extensive and over reaching, for something which in most cases amounts to effort only and not original thought. A Patent protects an original thought or invention and it has limited life beyond the date of invention. To get a valid patent the invention has to be novel, it has to never have been done before. It truly can be said to advance the human races collective knowledge in some area. Yet the copyright on a retelling of snow white will last for 70 years or more beyond the authors life. The system is screwed up, is designed to reap maximum returns for publishers, not writers. And is a method of controlling access to information for the poorest (the majority) of the earths peoples. E-books could allow massive and unprecedented amounts of information to reach anyone regardless of their wealth. Copyright in general and DRM in particular monetise information, which prevents this. "Oh, you can only afford to spend US$3 per year on books, sorry, you can only read 1 book every 3 years, the author needs a return, doncha know."

If you live in the USA and do one years work, you are entitled to on average earn $50,233.00. (*Wikipedia stat for 2006). If an author takes a year to write a book, and works 40 hours a week doing it, they should expect to earn the same from selling that book. Its the same amount of endeavour. One author who earns US$23 million for a years work is by that standard over paid. Everyone else needs to work for 457 years to achieve the same result. That author has not put in 457 times the effort of the average american in the same year. Yet few authors are that fortunate, it would be better for the human race, to pay many many authors a reasonable yearly income than pay one a huge amount, and others next to nothing.

E-Book Piracy will not be stopped. It is only growing, and for many of the earths people it is an arguably necessary evil. Ignoring it, or saying, "what about copyright" does not address the problem, the problem can only be addressed by considering, regardless of what's been done before, what should we do now, to sufficiently protect the interests of authors and editors so they keep creating, and to protect the interests of the human race at large so it can keep advancing and improving itself by ready access to information. I don't count the publisher in there, because in an e-book world they are a parasite, not useful part of the process.

I agree with you mostly (superbly written and thought-out post btw) except on two accounts.
First - publishers useless parasites ? While I don't exactly like how much they earn or how they behave, how is a book supposed to get from the author to the reader otherwise ? Somene has to print it (if we're talking about paper books that is, anyone can distribute / sell e-books over the web) and someone has to market them so more people will hear about them.
And as for your sentiment about equal wages for authors instead of some being millioners and others being paupers, that's a beautifull dream but completely impossible in practice (like socialism), even more utopian then the OP's first post. Unless you're going to introduce dictatorship to dictate which books people must buy and at which prices, the authors that are more popular are going to earn more. Period. And as Harry Potter and iPhone prove you don't really have to make something of high quality and mankind-benefiting to make a pile of money. And if Shakespeare was alive today he'd be a pauper compared to J. K. Rowling.

[Enkidu of Abydos]

Originally Posted by spellbanisher

but I do not believe that it will lead to the fall of civilization. Pop music and reality tv will do that.

Originally Posted by spellbanisher

Finally, I know that half the people who see this post will not read of all it;

I did. I always do.

Originally Posted by spellbanisher

instead these high and mighty oh so wise and righteous folk who have everything and everyone else figured out because they've had to pay a few bills in their life will assume I'm just some pimply-faced unemployed teenager living in his parents basement who just wants free stuff. Its surprising. I thought there was less snark and smugness at Mobileread.

I think you can find snark and smugness in any place where you can find homo sapiens. And every other kind of human fault.

[Enkidu of Abydos]

Originally Posted by spellbanisher

If the acquisition or creation of some knowledge requires years of intensely funded research, it is not free.

And just because Oscar Wilde says art is useless doesn't make it useless. To know the usefulness of art, we must first consult Shakespeare. If he has no answer, then we must consult Plato. After him, Aristotle, then Tolstoy, then the Beatles, then Bob Dylan, then Dr. Seuss. I don't know exactly where Wilde falls in the hierarchy of western culture, but he's definitely not ahead of the aforementioned men.

Originally Posted by Namekuseijin

So, in the end it's all about this: a whinning comunist discourse mixed with no wage teen angst. Brilliant, dude....

Well this truly deserves the Golden Raspberry award for being just about the worst sentence I've seen yet on this forum !

Originally Posted by Namekuseijin

And if you think all men are equal and other comunist bs

And this is in the running also.
Bravo for managing to sink this low ! If I was a mod I'd ban you right now for blatant insults to a forum member...
You also managed to insult the ancient Greek, the American founding fathers, the French revolutionists and everyone else who ever believed in the equality of men, if you consider being called a communist an insult that is...
Death to Liberte, egalite, fraternite - die bitch, die !?
OMG

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by James_Wilde

Another thing that most of us are forgetting, because we are children of our times, is that, like so many other things which we think are eternal because we have known them all our lives, like telephones, CDs, computers, people living from writing books is a relatively new phenomenon, and is a lot younger than the invention of the printing press which made it possible. I would go so far as to say that it is largely a 20th century phenomenon.

This really is not true. Numerous authors in the 19th century wrote to make a living: Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott are two examples.

[Enkidu of Abydos]

Originally Posted by spellbanisher

I'm just wondering about how much government policing and control over the internet people will put up with to ensure there is no piracy.

More and more it seems. Until it becomes like in those Orwellian SFs where corporations police your mind...

[sircastor]

Originally Posted by HarryT

This really is not true. Numerous authors in the 19th century wrote to make a living: Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott are two examples.

I understand many (if not all) of Dickens' work was first published as serials in periodicals. It wasn't until later that they were combined into novels. I bring it up because it implies to me that there's probably something to writing and publishing in pieces. In the modern age blogs and other serial media have shown that there's still something to that.

[Enkidu of Abydos]

Originally Posted by HarryT

This really is not true. Numerous authors in the 19th century wrote to make a living: Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott are two examples.

Very true.

[Namekuseijin]

Originally Posted by Enkidu of Abydos

You also managed to insult the ancient Greek, the American founding fathers, the French revolutionists and everyone else who ever believed in the equality of men, if you consider being called a communist an insult that is...
Death to Liberte, egalite, fraternite - die bitch, die !?
OMG

Equal in rights, dude. No 2 men share the same talents and skills -- yes, some are better than others at this or that, including literary or music talent.

You're making the same mistake the other made in equaling knowledge to art.

[Namekuseijin]

Originally Posted by sircastor

I understand many (if not all) of Dickens' work was first published as serials in periodicals. It wasn't until later that they were combined into novels. I bring it up because it implies to me that there's probably something to writing and publishing in pieces. In the modern age blogs and other serial media have shown that there's still something to that.

yes, except he would receive payment for his writing not unlike some article writer for magazines these days. Unlike in blogs where you can hope at best to pay your server time through ads clicked by clueless souls.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by elcreative

Funny, thought that Sweden had one of the most generous Social Security systems in the world... still nice to know that you'll be giving anything, you may own, to charity when you die... most generous...

And in the Uk (and most places) copyright is a Civil enforcement problem not a criminal one unless fraud or counterfeiting is involved.

What? I do not think you know what "entitlement" means.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by sircastor

I understand many (if not all) of Dickens' work was first published as serials in periodicals.

Yes, they were all initially serialised in magazines, but they were all written for the express purpose of making money. A smart cookie was Mr. Dickens: he got paid both for the magazine publication, and then again afterwards, for the novel.

[Enkidu of Abydos]

Originally Posted by sircastor

The reason we pin these things on teenagers because most of us went through being a teenager. Teenagers often have their needs provided for them (food, shelter, clothing). They aren't usually involved in managing finances or handling the bills. In spite of what they're told, they typically have a weak grasp on that kind of thing.

There were and there still are a lot of women who are financially supported by their husbands, commonly called HOUSEWIVES.
Being supported doesn't make one immature. Or unappreciative of financial costs.
And even teenagers who are supported by their parents don't have a limitless source of income (unless their parents are rich) and therefore have to be responsible when spending money.
When are people going to stop equating being a teenager with being stupid / irresponsible / shallow / impulsive / unreasonable ?
In that case I must have skipped that phase.

Originally Posted by sircastor

The difference is that the software developer (who owns the rights to the work) chooses to not require payment. This is different than someone offering their work in exchange for money, and a person who refuses to give money but takes the work anyway.

You misunderstand me again, what I said is that there are adult people who earn from their work producing IP (via donations or any other way) and still believe that copying ANY digital IP from ANYONE can't be designated as theft if there is no loss of physical or virtual value on anyone's part.

Originally Posted by sircastor

A person's world view is a function of experience which includes your age, as well as the source of your income.

One's experiences do determine one's views, but there are also deeper principles / characteristics which some people have from birth.
And for me a job is just something which pays for your upkeep, not something that defines your character in any way. If someone loves their profession regardless of the pay because it's what they like doing then the job is a consequence of character, not vice versa. Being defined / changed by one's job is undesirable and sad.
And some principles / world views may be formed in childhood, puberty or later in life but persist until death.
I am not a teenager, I am 26, and I will have the same views on the matters of piracy and "theft" 30 years from now.
I have to admit I'm tired from all this back-and-forward debating. I should have never opened this thread, but I couldn't resist.

[Namekuseijin]

Originally Posted by Enkidu of Abydos

There were and there still are a lot of women who are financially supported by their husbands, commonly called HOUSEWIVES.
Being supported doesn't make one immature. Or unappreciative of financial costs.

housewives are very much aware of their husbands financial woes to get that new dress.

And even teenagers who are supported by their parents don't have a limitless source of income (unless their parents are rich) and therefore have to be responsible when spending money.

yep, which is why they pirate like crackheads and conspire for a copyright-free world.

I am not a teenager, I am 26, and I will have the same views on the matters of piracy and "theft" 30 years from now.

that goes on to show how mature you are.