Is digital copyright incompatible with technology and / or democracy?

[stonetools]

Originally Posted by darryl

New Zealand, like it or not, is a sovereign nation. While this remains the case, the New Zealand court and not the US DOJ is the arbiter of what is sufficient evidence. The disclosure the New Zealand judge requires is clearly relevant and the Defendant is entitled to it. Access to such basic and relevant material does not amount to "maybe a little bit more".

(Shrug)

So the DOJ will and should satisfy the NZ due process requirements, even if their requirements are a bit stiffer than the US requirements. No problem there.
After that, its welcome to the US justice system, Mr. Dotcom. I wish you a long and happy stay there.

[stonetools]

Originally Posted by plib

Disney, MPAA, RIAA, all the lobbyists etc. are going to make their political meetings, phone calls, PAC contributions etc. a matter of public record? ACTA and TPP are going to hold public negotiating sessions and release their meeting minutes? Terrific.

Like all legislation, there will be a public phase where we, the citizens, can give our input and hold our legislators to account .
Right now, there are private , proprietary solutions, which are broken by private , anonymous persons who post their cracks on the Internet which are made available to those who know the secret handshake ("Apprentice Alf" or whatever). Its fun for geeks, I guess, but it's time for everyone to put on their big boy pants and come up with a legislated solution.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by stonetools

It's actually pretty difficult to keep setting up pirate websites from inside the Jessup Correctional Facility. I don't think they have guaranteed Broadband Internet there.

Ah. So you think that when the *current* round of pirate site hosts are collected and imprisoned, nobody else will start running pirate sites?

I notice you failed to define "pirate sites." Can you define a category of activities that makes a site subject to criminal investigation, and separates it from, for example, secure business data exchanges or open hosting of creative content?

Is google a pirate site for giving people links to free bootleg downloads hosted elsewhere? If not, why is TPB a pirate site? Is Amazon a pirate site for hosting plagiarized ebooks?

My guess is that prosecuting pirates is going to be an ongoing activity like prosecuting bank robbers, counterfeiters, and money launderers.
...
If your point is that you can't move against rights violators until you precisely determine the losses, you are wrong once again.

I don't mean that any particular case can't be tried until exact damages are established; however, to justify substantial expense and other resources on prosecution, we need some measure of the value gained from that prosecution.

Exact losses of counterfeiting aren't known, but the dollar amount is obvious: one counterfeit dollar in circulation is at least one dollar taken away from legitimate business use. The fake dollar is substituted for $1 of goods or services. The additional harm is harder to track, but there's a baseline to work from.

One downloaded PDF of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is worth... what? The unauthorized book might *not* be substituted for one-Pottermore-purchase; it might be substituted for "reading a borrowed copy" or "reading something else entirely." Or it might be substituted for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, because the reader wants the UK version that's not sold in the US.

One downloaded copy of the first episode of Game of Thrones is worth... what? There's no legitimate source of videos to purchase; the only way to get access is to subscribe to a monthly service (HBO) and wait for it to be scheduled to play.

One downloaded copy of Chumbley's Qutub is worth... what? The book's out of print and has no legit ebook version; the author is deceased. Collectible copies sell for upwards of $900--but the rights holders get no share of that; their income for the book is done. (They've announced there will be no reprintings.)

How much taxpayer money should be spent trying to stop these downloads?

I might add that there was all sorts of rejoicing around these parts about the DOJ going after the Price Fixing BPHs, although the alleged damages there can't be precisely fixed.

They can be estimated: damage is "the amount extra customers had to pay after the collusion." We have numbers for that. Before collusion: Bestsellers $9.99. After collusion: bestsellers $12.99 - $14.99. We have sales records to say how much they did pay. We don't have exact numbers for how many people gave up on agency-priced books and found something else to read; we can't measure the cultural harms caused by creating a money-based filter for some books. But we do know how much prices went up, and how many people paid more than they would have without the allegedly-illegal collusion.

How much money did Rowling lose from 10 years of bootleg ebooks floating around the internet?

Its only when it comes to the rights of copyright holders that precisely quantifying losses becomes a bar to action.

No, it's a bar for any action--in order to decide to spend resources stopping an activity, we need to know what good that's going to do.

"It will put criminals in jail" is a good thing. However, when they're only criminals because they're presumably causing economic, not physical, damage--someone has to be able to state how much damage they're causing.

That doesn't mean the cost of prosecution needs to be lower than the damages; we prosecute petty thieves and it costs a lot more than a stolen CD. But we can say how much damage the stolen CD was, and that the deterrent value of potential prosecution is worth the expense of the ones that are prosecuted.

We've yet to see that prosecutions for filesharing have any deterrent value--and this isn't just a matter of jurisdiction. The very shape of the law makes it hard to determine who's breaking it. Without defining "piracy" in a way that doesn't include how the majority think of using their media (sharing books with friends, making mix-tapes, hosting movie night in the student center), there's no public support for the prosecutions.

Well, we could do all sorts of stupidity. I'll settle for extending the rule of law so that those setting up piracy sites in foreign safe harbors can be brought to justice.

How americentric of you. Why not allow those countries to set the world standard for copyright infringement, and require US businesses to go along with them?

Why should other countries be forced to adopt US laws?

We don't have to solve every problem in copyright law before we bring Internet pirates to justice. False dilemma attempt DENIED.

We don't have to solve every problem before we go after the handful that are currently identified as "pirates." We *do* have to fix at least some of those problems to avoid an endless cycle of only chasing whatever's gotten big enough to get mainstream attention.

How many "pirate sites" do you think there are? Twenty? Fifty? Five hundred? Ten thousand?

Is wikileaks a pirate site? Is History Is A Weapon, which hosts A People's History of the United States with the author's blessing but against the will of the publisher, who may hold the legal rights? Is zinelibrary.info a pirate site, or does its activist approach count as fair use for educational purposes? (Some texts are copyrighted; some are creative commons; some are public domain (mostly those are pre-1963 tracts that were never registered.))

(Mods: I will understand if the exact link gets removed; I would prefer it to be replaced with [online library of activist zines] if it's judged to be too far in the direction of bootleg content.)

In order to effectively "shut down pirate sites," they need to be defined. Which sites are worth spending resources to go after? What should be done to prevent new ones from just springing up in their absence?

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by stonetools

Like all legislation, there will be a public phase where we, the citizens, can give our input and hold our legislators to account .
Right now, there are private , proprietary solutions, which are broken by private , anonymous persons who post their cracks on the Internet which are made available to those who know the secret handshake ("Apprentice Alf" or whatever). Its fun for geeks, I guess, but it's time for everyone to put on their big boy pants and come up with a legislated solution.

Like SOPA?

(Legislators who publicly admitted they did not even know what they were legislating about, getting paid big ...err.. compaign contributions, not even willing to let people who <did> know the technology to testify before the drafting committee. That kind of public input?)

You know, Stonetools, if you held the American Congress to the same standards you want to hold Internet "pirates", 99% of the members would be serving multiple life terms for corruption...

[stonetools]

Ah. So you think that when the *current* round of pirate site hosts are collected and imprisoned, nobody else will start running pirate sites?

I notice you failed to define "pirate sites." Can you define a category of activities that makes a site subject to criminal investigation, and separates it from, for example, secure business data exchanges or open hosting of creative content?

Is google a pirate site for giving people links to free bootleg downloads hosted elsewhere? If not, why is TPB a pirate site? Is Amazon a pirate site for hosting plagiarized ebooks?

I don't think the government is going to have much problem defining " pirate sites" . This is maybe a nice philosophical question here on the intertubes but in TRW the governments are closing down pirate sites and prosecuting the offenders. Google and Amazon have lobbyists and lawyers but sooner rather than later laws will be passed barring Google from posting ads to pirate sites.Who knows, maybe they'll even hold Google liable for all the clearly illegal content uploaded to YouTube.

I don't mean that any particular case can't be tried until exact damages are established; however, to justify substantial expense and other resources on prosecution, we need some measure of the value gained from that prosecution.

According to the Administration statement, determining the cost of losses through piracy is difficult-but not impossible. It's enough to justify government action , and that's what counts.

Let us be clear—online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation's most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs. It harms everyone from struggling artists to production crews, and from startup social media companies to large movie studios. While we are strongly committed to the vigorous enforcement of intellectual property rights, existing tools are not strong enough to root out the worst online pirates beyond our borders

Now that's in the middle of a statement that says that legislation and LE isn't enough -the statement is kind of calling for everyone to kumbah yah and work together, which, while a worthy sentiment, is unlikely. What's clear is that your preferred solution-ignore piracy and focus on other things- isn't the Administration approach. Indeed, the day after the statement, they took down Megaupload. Clearly , they think the costs of prosecution justify the approach. So do the UK, French, Swedish and NZ governments.
What's happened is that the Internet has grown up. It's no longer a techie plaything. There are billions of dollars of commerce at issue and businesses and rights holders must feel that their property rights are secure before they are going to invest and do business. They're not going to "trust their customers" or anyone else. In business the rule is " In God we trust: everyone else enters into legally enforceable agreements". IOW, for the free markets for flourish, the rule of law will have to be extended throughout the Internet. Its time for us to grow up and face that fact.

[cjr72]

Originally Posted by stonetools

I don't think the government is going to have much problem defining " pirate sites" .

Well let's hope they can do a better job than the actual copyright holders.

[stonetools]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Like SOPA?

(Legislators who publicly admitted they did not even know what they were legislating about, getting paid big ...err.. compaign contributions, not even willing to let people who <did> know the technology to testify before the drafting committee. That kind of public input?)

You know, Stonetools, if you held the American Congress to the same standards you want to hold Internet "pirates", 99% of the members would be serving multiple life terms for corruption...

Indeed, exactly like SOPA. SOPA was defeated in a public campaign that was out in the open. Now Google funded a lot of the opposition to SOPA and its cash and its army of lobbyists worked to defeat the lobbyists on the other side.
But at least it was in the end up to legislators accountable to we, the people, not a bunch of programmers crafting DRM and anti DRM measures somewhere on the Internet.
The point of the legislative process is not whether the legislators are up on Java or the latest in encryption schemes : its that they are accountable,in the end , to voters.
What that means is that the next time there is a bill on this issue-and there will surely be a next time-we'll get to vote on how to fix this problem and the fix will be done publicly. It may not be done well, but at least the solution will be democratic.

[Greg Benage]

Here's a different author's perspective. Copyright laws emerged to support a pay-per-copy model that had, in hindsight, a brief technological window. When printed books 1) can be manufactured and distributed, and 2) that manufacturing and distributing are costly, you need appropriate property rights for intellectual property to incent the creation, manufacturing and distribution of that content.

As long as we don't start hanging restrictions, limitations and regulations on the technology, the costs of producing and distributing a digital copy are negligible, and popular content will therefore tend to be copied and distributed widely. Pay-per-copy isn't likely to survive in that environment. That, of course, hasn't stopped producers from attempting to redefine ownership of a copy or to restrict the technology, but those efforts will always fail in a free society.

So then what of content creators? Well, we enjoy the fantastic opportunity of creating at a time when it's possible to produce and distribute our work at almost no cost, other than our own creative time and energy -- something we presumably enjoy exercising! There is almost no limit to the audience we can reach that we do not impose ourselves. If we create something that lots of people want, we can attract a vast audience. In that kind of world, creators ought to be able to figure out a way to get paid, if that's what they want.

And if not, think about this: Imagine you could go back in time and interview all the writers who labored prior to the technological window that briefly enabled pay-per-copy, and you could present them with this possibility. They would live in a world in which technological tools made the production of text amazingly simple, and where their creative work could be copied and distributed infinitely the world over at almost no cost. In return, they might have to work eight hours a day at a job that, by historical standards, is safe, physically undemanding and provides a standard of living that is inconceivable to them.

Do you think any of them -- from Aristotle to Dante to Chaucer -- would not take that deal?

Instead of obsessing about whether or not you can get paid for every single copy of your work that is distributed anywhere in the world, perhaps you should embrace the phenomenal opportunity in front of you to reach the largest audience possible for your work. If you do, I suspect good things will happen for you.

[kennyc]

only if you believe "reaching the largest possible audience" is the entire point on being a writer(creator) and are willing to do it for free.

[stonetools]

Here is what another artist says ( rather intemperately):

What people like you refuse to understand: How are individual independent artists supposed to take on the entire for-profit un-authorized use industry? 99 percent of the people harmed by file sharing are the independent artists, the audio engineers, the roadies, the independent recording studios, the independent and specialty labels, the independent record stores, the independent publicists, the bus drivers etc etc. The vast majority of people harmed by unauthorized exploitation of artists rights are not rich and powerful. Unlike the EFF they do not have washington lobbyists to argue their case or employ staff lawyers to troll the internet arguing for their rights. The working class of the music business do not have foundations that receive large corporate donations to help them fight for their rights. The 99% are the 99%! The basic point of the law and civilization is to protect the weak from the corrupt and powerful. When you were an idealistic young law student could you ever imagine that one day you would be arguing against the weak and powerless and for the corrupt and powerful? How do you sleep at night?

I know what you are gonna argue next. May I?

You agree with me on artists rights but inhibiting access to websites that enable unauthorized file sharing, human trafficking, underage prostitution, counterfeit drugmaking and child pornography will require “breaking the internet”. In addition you will argue that there is something deep in the architecture of the web that will not allow any filtering of the web that won’t also be a danger to free speech. I’ve got that right? Right?

This is absolute bullshit. And I should know. I was pushing and “acking” packets back when there was only TCP without the IP. If you don’t know what I’m talking about you can’t possibly know anything about the architecture of the internet. There is nothing in the architecture of the internet that makes policing and free speech incompatible. Anyone that that says otherwise does not know what they are talking about or they are willfully misleading the public under color of technological authority.

LINK

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by kennyc

only if you believe "reaching the largest possible audience" is the entire point on being a writer(creator) and are willing to do it for free.

If you're goal is to make money, there are a lot of easier ways to make money other than writing....

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by stonetools

Here is what another artist says ( rather intemperately):



LINK

Maybe he should listen to Don Henley's Garden of Allah. It sums it up rather nicely...

[plib]

Originally Posted by stonetools

Like all legislation, there will be a public phase where we, the citizens, can give our input and hold our legislators to account .

Can you please point me to the public sessions of ACTA and TPP?

[stonetools]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

If you're goal is to make money, there are a lot of easier ways to make money other than writing....

Look, the whole idea that artists shouldn't be in it for the money is bull$$$$ written by non artists, most of whom are living a lot more comfortably than artists. People who say that just need to stop.

Let's look at Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Maybe the greatest musical genius ever. If you look at his letters, are they full of esoteric fluff about the purity of art? No. They are full of discussions about bills, money and getting paid.
William Shakespeare? Successful playwright and investor in plays.
DaVinci? Very interested in getting paid for his weapons designs.
Chaucer? Comptroller of Customs as his day job.

Artists, like everyone else, want to make a living. Their overwhelming preference is to make a living practicing their art.
I am not an artist, but my preference is that artist focus on making good art. Furthermore, I want to make it easy and straightforward for artists to get paid for their art. I don't want them to have to think up "new business models", develop " new income streams", or do any of the other nonsense that piracy enablers want them to do.
Now the Internet makes it easy for creators of digital media to distribute their art. Unfortunately, it makes it easy for criminals to rip the creators off. Its time for us to stop enabling criminals by extending the rule of law. Contrary to the piracy enablers, that can be done without " breaking the Internet" or imposing Stalinist tyranny on us all.

[stonetools]

Originally Posted by Ralph Sir Edward

Maybe he should listen to Don Henley's Garden of Allah. It sums it up rather nicely...

Not sure what's in there. But I'm quite sure "having some pirate rip me off and exploit my works for free" isn't in it. I bet Henley sides with that musician against you and the pirates.