Software Piracy Seen as Normal 1032
Spad writes "The BBC is reporting that people don't see downloading copyrighted material as theft, despite concerted efforts by the games, music and movie industries to convince them otherwise. The report, titled Fake Nation, claims that '[People] just don't see it as theft. They just see it as inevitable, particularly as new technologies become available...The purchase of counterfeit goods or illegal downloading are seen as normal leisure practices,' However, they also found that while people are generally not buying counterfeit software from dodgy dealers on street corners, they are still happy to purchase them from people they know at the office/pub/school in addition to downloading them.
Nobody can really be that suprised by the 'popularity' of downloading pirated software, but I was a little thrown by the apparent willingness of people to pay for pirated copies of it."
Color me surprised...not (Score:5, Interesting)
Fast forward that to the present: IT'S STILL EASY! Games, movies music are so readily available(for free) i'd be embarassed if i produced any of it. For the less techno-savvy people under us, it's still relatively easy, maybe a magnitude or 2 less, plus they now have a little disposable income to throw around for the sake of convenience, so they might buy the latest movie released from some dodgy bloke out of his trunk. Is this right? NO. Is this illegal? YES! Is it easy? You bet! They're basically doing it because it's convenient, easy, cheap and they've been doing it for years.
Having said that, personally i'm now working and have a lot more money to spend, so i'm buying stuff all the damn time. The solution to all of this: I have no clue, but DRM-short-of-a-gloved-hand-up-the-ass isn't the way to do it.
Because it isn't theft. (Score:3, Interesting)
What's sadder is that the BBC is going along with this campaign of misinformation. They imply that there are only two viewpoints: It's theft, or it isn't a crime at all. Way to inform your readers... not.
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Interesting)
"He who receives an idea from me receives it without lessening me, as he who lights his candle at mine receives light without darkening me."
I'm sure he didn't refer to an iso of GTA: San Andreas found on a Swedish bittorrent page, but the counter-argument at that time also could have been "Candles cost MONEY, I think I deserve something back for the flame you just infringed upon" or "Do you know how much TIME I used to come up with that idea? Now I might have to work the fields instead of thinking out new stuff in the future"
changes (Score:3, Interesting)
"The government has spent millions of pounds to change public awareness of drink-driving and smoking.
"As a society, we need to go through a similar process for creativity and intellectual property."
This isn't the change that needs to happen, and it won't happen. People don't see downloading material as wrong because it isn't wrong: nobody gets hurt by it.
I think big change is required, and the new system should consider these points as axioms:
1. The transfer of digital information deprives nobody of anything, and should be lawful.
2. People who create digital works that society considers desirable should be compensated.
This suggests to me a system whereby the creators are paid once, up front, for their creation, and then it must be freely distributable.
Of course, that's the thinnest shell of a new system, and it would raise many questions and problems. But people aren't going to drop their belief in points 1 and 2, and I see this sort of system as the only way of resolving them.
Re:Taking from the rich has never been seen as the (Score:5, Interesting)
In Ireland at least, the warning that piracy (of films in particular) supports terrorism, is quite true. While those actually pirating the stuff themselves aren't, those who buy pirated movies at the market, etc., are most likely buying from the equivalent of an IRA high street store. One of the IRA's rackets is pirated goods (the others being smuggled cigarettes, diesel, etc.)
Not sure how true the ad at the start of the movie is in the States, but just to let you know, it's not as crazy as it sounds.
one must ask (Score:2, Interesting)
b/ does it must promote ethics even though it goes against general ethics ?
Either answer is problematic.
if a/ then why some law are not still removed ? For instance most people dont care about homosexuality or abortion and they are still forbidden in many places.
if b/ then why some ethics are still against the law ? Looking at the % of "illegal" downloading it should be put as "legal". And what to say about prohibition (whether alcohool, drugs or guns) ?
Who does law must serve ?
The biggest number ? They migth get spinned or just loose their ethics.
Some guardians of ethics ? Now people refuse to follow religion or philosophy ethics and prefer their very own personnal ethics.
Some commercial or political influence ? They tend to only server their own interests, but this has imppacts on wide scale.
Actually... (Score:5, Interesting)
white collar crooks (Score:3, Interesting)
Spoiler Alert
Raising the question of what Tony does for a living, Meadow asks bluntly, "Are you in the Mafia?" Tony replies that some of his money comes from illegal gambling, and probes, "How does that make you feel?" Meadow replies, "Sometimes I wish you were like other dads. Like Mr. Scangarelo, for example. An advertising executive for big tobacco."
If you can handle the sex, violence, copulatory interjections, and (most difficult) the moral ambivalence, rent the episodes and pay attention. It might haved saved the poster of this topic from his career in gormhood.
Re:Not surprising (Score:3, Interesting)
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But if you ask them "Do you think it's appropriate behavior for people to borrow their friends CD and make themselves a copy", you find a very different response.
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It actually IS appropriate in most of the EU, since we pay a levy on recordable CDs, DVDs and cassettes, regardless of whether we will use them for backing up our own digicam photos/homemade music/downloaded freeware or for copying borrowed films and music. That levy makes me feel OBLIGED to sometimes download films via BT (which you are not supposed to, even though recording a TV broadcast is OK), since I have no friends who buy films.
Re:Not surprising (Score:4, Interesting)
It's exactly the same thing as companies who are against software patents while anyway patenting software: That's not hypocrisy, that's staying in business. You may want to change the rules, but as long as you can't, you still need to play by them.
Likewise, I agree with the GP that piracy isn't theft, by definition. That doesn't make it either agreeable or condemnable -- there are other condemnable things than theft (murder, for example). It just means that it's not theft. However, that doesn't mean that I can just go around in public and pirate stuff. As long as the party with the most force behind it (the government, for example) doesn't agree with me, it doesn't matter what I think. If they think it's theft, I'll be thrown in prison for theft regardlessly of whether it actually is theft. It's not hypocrisy, it's common sense.
Re:Copyright isn't theft (Score:2, Interesting)
I guess walking out of Wal-Mart with a DVD isn't theft. After all, I'm not depriving the creator of the original.
Morality (Score:5, Interesting)
We often say the moral action is the one that brings the greatest benefit to the largest number of people.
Therefore copying software, many gain something for free, at the cost of depriving a few of income.
By the above argument you have a moral obligation to copy as much software as possible... Or the justification for 'moral-war' is invalid. Both cannot be true as that would be a self contradiction.
You could argue that by copying, people will stop writing software - but that is obviously rubbish as we can see from the free-software movement.
Besides, if people stop writing generic software because of piracy, people will have to pay programmers directly to adapt free software to their needs. If the ammount of money available to invest in new software is constant - more money will now be spent on new features and entirely new software products... In other words copying software stops companies writing one product and then sitting back and collecting money for effectively doing nothing.
"Piracy" often == "Fair Use" (Score:2, Interesting)
"Fair Use" is non-commercial personal or educational use, which describes the majority of the "Piracy" that occurs.
Nothing has been legally mandated into the public domain since the 40's. "Fair Use" has all but been eliminated. So, why are we spending taxpayers $$$ to defend these "Rights" without the reciprocal benefits to society?
If I download a copy of a $700 program like Adobe Photoshop, with the mere goal of learning how to use it, or learning what it's capabilities are, I am downloading it under the very definition of "Fair Use". When I use this program to produce graphics that people pay me money for, that's when I am in excess of "Fair Use".
I used "Pirated" copies of Photoshop to learn how to use it. When I had a client come to me and offer me $7500 to make a few graphics for them, I promptly went out and laid down $700 for Photoshop.
This is the spirit of Copyright law.
Ignoring all of this the lesson that IP owners can learn from this study is that you can charge money for IP, even if it could be copied under "Fair Use", as long as what you charge is reasonable.
I am very careful about what I buy on the iTunes music store, as I may not have heard it in it's entirety, and if I download 20 songs just to hear them once I spend $20. If they put them at, say, a 10 price point, it wouldn't hurt me badly enough financially after downloading 100 songs that I would feel any regret. As it sits I spend maybe $10 at the iTunes music store a month. If songs were 10 a piece, I would likely spend $100 a month at the iTunes music store.
If people are willing to pay for copyrighted works, even if they are using it in a "Fair Use" manner, doesn't it stand to reason that they would pay a similar amount to acquire this IP "legally?"
-=(Lord Crosis)=-
Not a theft, but still a crime... (Score:2, Interesting)
the real problem.. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:That's because it isn't Theft (Score:3, Interesting)
[phew, I had no idea I can be _that_ paranoic]
Re:Not a theft, but still a crime... (Score:1, Interesting)
> because people preferred to pirate Photoshop.
So, following your logic, everyone who decides to use the Gimp instead of your shareware app, hurts the developer as much as a pirated Photoshop does?
Re:Not surprising (Score:2, Interesting)
The OED merely documents usage of words, there is no authoritative reference for correct english, unlike the way the way some french try to impose an "official" french language. If a few people (very few in the case of the unabridged OED) use a word to mean something, and Oxford find out, in it goes.
Re:NEWS FLASH! (Score:2, Interesting)
You describe two different crimes: breaking/entering and theft. If a copyright infringer broke into Adobe's campus to copy some software, most people would agree that that is a more serious offence that downloading a copy from the Internet. If someone can drive by my house and make a copy of my television, without entering my home, then I have no problem with that.
I support copyright laws as long as they remain within the Constitutional objective "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". I do not support perpetual copyright, nor the use of incorrect terms (piracy, theft) for copyright infringement.
Re:People don't mind paying (Score:3, Interesting)
All of a sudden, I get the feeling that the implications of the term "global market" have yet to sink in for some of the big boys...
Lord MacAulay (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a pity he's not around today when some of his targets are getting to be so big again.
Re:Taking from the rich has never been seen as the (Score:2, Interesting)
BitTorrent is a high-tech weapon in the war against Terrorism! By downloading movies and music from the Internet, we can deprive Terrorists of their ability to fund operations. We're at threat-level yellow: rev up your downloaders!
BTW, al Qaeda is also supposed to support their operations by selling bootlegs.
Re:164 year old prophecy comes true (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, in some cases, the publisher refuses to sell licenses for the item (such as abondonware). If the publisher won't sell the item, there's no active market for that item, and again, it could be argued that the value of the item is $0.
Now, I don't particularaly like these arguments since that property does have value, but the publishers are making it seem to consumers that it does not. Or at least they're leaving the door open for the arguments to be made. And people are great at using arguments like these when they want to rationalize behavior they think (or know) is wrong.
Personally, I think that dropping the copyright length to something more reasonable (on the order or 10-20 years) would really help curtain infringement. People who want the item now will pay for it. People who can wait will wait. People who can't afford the latest and greatest can now use something older rather than priate the lastest stuff.
But I'm way to cynical to believe this will ever happen
Re:164 year old prophecy comes true (Score:2, Interesting)
When you download Photoshop, you are forcing Adobe to compete with a free, easy to get version of their own product. This is incredibly destructive to the free market as it applies to software. Instead of paying Adobe for the goods they provide, you pay them for those goods in light of the fact that you can also get them for free. Note, this is not an attack on Free Software, I'm talking about the situation where a company is forced to compete with a low risk free version of their own product once it hits the market.
So, my bet is that if they were to offer a $50 version of Photoshop and piracy were impossible, maybe half the Photoshop pirates out there would buy it. If, however, piracy were possible, they may have to make their price, say, $20 to get half the pirates to buy a copy.
So that's that. Piracy devalues the product. It doesn't matter if you wouldn't have bought a copy anyway, or that it's overpriced or anything. By pirating, you are taking away the expected revenue of a product by making the company that releases it compete with a free product. You may not see it as stealing, but that company had to put a certain amount of money into development and they are losing some portion (not all) of their revenue due to the fact that piracy has devalued their software.
By your argument does that company have to lose enough revenue that they lose money in the venture before you call it stealing?
Re:Not surprising (Score:3, Interesting)
That's the problem with literalism. Semantic gymnastics far too easily can lead to absurdities.
Now you only consulted the dictionary (which is the wrong place to look in the first place since the judiciary does not consult the dictionary to interpret the law but that's beside the point)
If you next appy the same reasoning to the bible or the koran, you'll be stoning adulterers and shooting abortionists in no time.
Re:No surprise (Score:2, Interesting)
However, we are living in the 21st century, and the world is different. Jeffersonian democracy hasn't existed since the U.S. Civil War. I'd like to think our 21st century world is more enlightened.
My part time job is working at the Electrical and Computer Engineering department at a university, and I can assure you, lots of research is going on - and if you honestly think that copyright law is going to hinder that research, you are very badly mistaken.
For that matter, copyright never did hinder it. You see, copyright deals with a specific implementation, if you want to put it that way. And holding the copyright means that you control how your work, be it sculpture, a novel, some programming code, will be distributed. If you want to release it to the public domain, that is your choice. If you want to give first publication rights to a publisher and try to make some money off it, that's your choice too. That's what copyright assures. It is, in the here and now, meant to keep artists and creative minds from having their work co-opted against their will.
You cannot copyright a name, any more than you can copyright an idea. All you can copyright is your implementation of it. So please don't talk about how copyrights restrict creativity - that's bullsh*t. It restricts plagerism
There is nothing wrong with attacking the abuse of copyright law - certainly it exists. But don't attack copyright law because some people are abusing it. Go after the people abusing it.
Re:No way. (Score:3, Interesting)
Innovation does not usually imply profit. It may require incentive for profit, and that incentive may or may not require copyright. That is why it is so important to remember that the purpose of copyright is to promote Science and Useful Arts and not to reward authors. Rewarding authors is a mean to an end. The limited-time clause is also very telling, in that the founding fathers did not find it positive to reward authors via exclusive copying rights, but a "necessary evil".
Just because financial needs aren't the ONLY incentive, this does not eliminate the fact that people need money.
People need money, but copyright is not a law meant to give people money (see above).
Niche cases? Those niche cases would be where someone spends 8 hours a day developing software, and thus don't have time to make money in exchange for another form of labour? That's a strange definition of niche.
The vast amounts of existing Free Software prove that for non-niche needs, copyright is not a required incentive for creation. It is as simple as that. And note all this Free Software is happening today, when many programmers face the choice between:
A. Writing copyrighted software for a good chance of making money.
B. Writing Free Software in their spare time without a good chance of making money.
And many choose B! Now imagine how many would choose B when option A is not there, or yields substantially less money.
Is this the model you seek? Is that really superior to today's model? I wonder.
No, the model I seek is Free Software for the vast majority of software, and programmer or firm-for-hire for the rest of software which is not good enough in the Free Software world.
Most popular open source software today is subsidised by hardware sales, business consulting, support contracts, and advertising (IBM, HP, RedHat, OSDN, Google, etc.).... Is this sustainable if the hardware business starts to falter, or if the business consultants lose large deals?
No, most Free Software is not subsidised at all! The few top opensource projects are subsidised, but the vast majority aren't.
If closed-source software disappears, then suddenly a lot more companies will have a lot to gain from more and better Free Software, so prepare for high subsidies in such a case.
Hmm. You'll have to rethink that one, I think (a sole proprietor is a legal entity, you don't need to do much of anything to be one, and the legality of this would get very tricky).
I don't understand the problem in that case.
Copyright is about protecting copies. So what you're saying above, is it's free to pirate software (binary form -- no copyright) but not free to copy source code (it's copyright) if you're a legal entity.
No, binaries would be protected against copying, provided that the source is copyrighted. The idea is, though, that the binaries themselves will not be copyright-able.
Another thing: I can write software, and not distribute the source code. Period. Companies like Amazon.com and Google are pretty powerful because they offer a service and don't redistribute their code.
Indeed, I have no problem with that. Its just that they can't expect a copyright in such a case.
Are you going to force people to distribute source code? I find that unlikely give the values of nearly every European and American country about overt coersion to perform involuntary acts beyond paying taxes.
There is no involuntary action involved. The idea is simply that copyright is granted if you provide source, or not if you don't. You are free to distribute just a binary, you just get no legal defense if you do that.