7 ms·

Here is the thing, someone has gone ahead and spent time and effort to create and sell something, someone then has gone on out of their way and attempted to ste

by madao 14y ago

Here is the thing, someone has gone ahead and spent time and effort to create and sell something, someone then has gone on out of their way and attempted to steal it. That being said with any form of piracy it is in effect stealing. If one were to go down to the local store and steal a product from the shelves and make a run for the doors, you will also be caught, brought up to the police, charged and taken before the courts. Now is the methods being used by the record companies correct? probably not. But do they have a right to try and protect their profits from looters and moochers of the world? they sure do. I think digital media is the way of the future, especially being able to access it from anywhere in the world with little or no effort. I just think that piracy in this sense has been taken for granted for much to long and we should work towards naming it as it should be named and stop getting up and arms about it as much as we do and just pay for what we use instead of running off to the local torrent site and downloading the shit out of it.

Osiris 14y ago
The problem is this common analogy is completely off base. When you steal from a store, that store had purchased a physical product from a wholesaler. This is know as the "cost of goods sold." The store maintains an inventory of product for which they have already paid a significant sum of money in order to place it on the shelves. When you steal from the store you remove an item from their inventory which they cannot sell. The cost of that item that was already paid now has to be covered by profits made up from selling other items in the inventory, thus increasing (albeit very little) the price of the rest of the inventory. In other words, the physical good is moved from one place to another, depriving the original owner of its value. File sharing, on the other hand, has no marginal cost to each "copy" of a file. If I write a song or software and put it on the internet, it costs me nothing if 1 or one million people share the file (assuming it's not my bandwidth to pay for). Also, if one user downloads my file it does not disappear or transfer from me to them. I do not have to manufacture another item. File sharing is copying. Stealing is transfer of ownership. So, you cannot directly compare file sharing, which has no marginal cost, to physical items that have a marginal cost of production. What owners of copyrighted works are trying to recover are their fixed costs in producing the work.
wazoox 14y ago
This old dead horse doesn't need any more beating, but apparently the obvious has to be stated once again: when you copy a digital "good" you don't deprive its owner from it. Therefore this is NOT stealing in any way. Not even remotely akin to stealing. Let's get it straight a last time (I hope): if you have an apple and I take it, you haven't got it anymore. Digital goods are INFORMATION. When you give me an information YOU STILL F*CKING HAVE IT. By your twisted way of thinking, people reading headlines in papers at the store are burglars, and so are people reading the time on your watch without asking you first. This cannot be the case. This shouldn't be the case. This won't be the case.
- madao 14y ago
  Your twisting my words now, people pay for headlines with advertising and what not, we are talking about music or perhaps even movies, these people produce and create these forms of entertainment expressly for money, not for your enjoyment or for your friends enjoyment, them make it and package it. Then someone comes downs rightfully buys it and enjoys the fruits of others labours. What is not right is to reward artists by telling them that their hard work is just information free to be handed out to everyone, seriously call it what you want, you are stealing from these people. They don’t want you to give it to your friends or random people off the internet, they want you to pay for it. If you really don’t like it, go and create your content and release it under creative commons and stop watching and listening to commercial movies/radio.
  - wazoox 14y ago
    > these people produce and create these forms of entertainment expressly for money Just to make it clear: I've been a professional musician, a composer an arranger, and I've played with Touré Kunda and recorded with Deep Forest. I've also been a graphic artist and built the official TV CGs effects for World Cup 1998. I pretend to know quite a bit about why people (including myself) create music or art, and I can affirm you that even the worst commercial, tasteless eurodance artist doesn't do it for the money first. They want to perform their art first, then seek a way to get money while doing it. Selling your art can take numerous forms. For musicians, most of the time the better part of their revenue comes from concerts and not recorded music (usually at best they get a few percents of a CD price anyway). > you are stealing from these people. I've only extremely rarely downloaded any media from the net, and only things unavailable by other ways. I'm standing on principles and not looking for excuses. > If you really don’t like it, go and create your content and release it under creative commons and stop watching and listening to commercial movies/radio. Amusingly enough, that's exactly what I'm doing.
Gormo 14y ago
>Here is the thing, someone has gone ahead and spent time and effort to create and sell something, That's a capital investment. Putting resources into a designing and manufacturing a product before you've got anything to sell is a risky proposition, but it's how the vast majority of all economic activity takes place. Investors bear the risk that people won't be willing to pay for the finished product, and understand that there's a chance that they will lose money instead of making it. Simply putting effort into creating and selling something doesn't entitle you to a positive return; you have to make something that customers are willing to buy, and people who make their own copies of intangible, non-rival goods are just another category of people who aren't willing to pay. Indeed, in practical terms, they're the last segment of your potential market you'd want to pursue; much better to focus on people who aren't buying your product for other reasons entirely. > someone then has gone on out of their way and attempted to steal it. But no one is stealing the work that was created. "Stealing" implies depriving someone of something they own, but this is impossible with respect to creative work. No one can remove the pattern of ideas that defines the work from the creator's mind. What's happening here is that people are making their own replicas of the creator's original work. This isn't "stealing" anymore than someone is stealing your house by building their own house using a design based on yours. Making a copy doesn't deprive the original author of anything; all it does is alter the external market conditions under which that author might seek to obtain revenue from selling copies of that original work. But he never had any right to a positive market return in the first place; his profit is inherently contingent on the willingness of others to pay him, and people who aren't willing to pay him because they made their own copies of the work are no different than people who aren't willing to pay him for any other reason, unless you assume that he already had the exclusive right to make those copies. Do you see the paradox here? You can only posit that the creator has an inherent right to restrict others' copying if you assume that he has an inherent right to a positive ROI when marketing the work, but you can only assume an right to a positive ROI in a scenario where people making their own copies is already legally censured, because otherwise, there's no legal distinction between people who didn't pay him because they copied the work, and people who didn't pay him because they just didn't want the work at all.
- JoeAltmaier 14y ago
  And that's the mental gymnastic that lets people steal all sorts of intellectual property - they rationalize it, pretend it isn't somebody's property and livelihood, and take it mostly because they just want it and its hard to secure so it ok, right? If I'm not willing to pay him, then he's not owed anything. Hey! I'm not willing to pay for lots of things; now I can just take them. Thanks, Gormo! I'm free of social responsibility!

by madao 14y ago

Osiris 14y ago

The problem is this common analogy is completely off base. When you steal from a store, that store had purchased a physical product from a wholesaler. This is know as the "cost of goods sold." The store maintains an inventory of product for which they have already paid a significant sum of money in order to place it on the shelves. When you steal from the store you remove an item from their inventory which they cannot sell. The cost of that item that was already paid now has to be covered by profits made up from selling other items in the inventory, thus increasing (albeit very little) the price of the rest of the inventory. In other words, the physical good is moved from one place to another, depriving the original owner of its value. File sharing, on the other hand, has no marginal cost to each "copy" of a file. If I write a song or software and put it on the internet, it costs me nothing if 1 or one million people share the file (assuming it's not my bandwidth to pay for). Also, if one user downloads my file it does not disappear or transfer from me to them. I do not have to manufacture another item. File sharing is copying. Stealing is transfer of ownership. So, you cannot directly compare file sharing, which has no marginal cost, to physical items that have a marginal cost of production. What owners of copyrighted works are trying to recover are their fixed costs in producing the work.

wazoox 14y ago

This old dead horse doesn't need any more beating, but apparently the obvious has to be stated once again: when you copy a digital "good" you don't deprive its owner from it. Therefore this is NOT stealing in any way. Not even remotely akin to stealing. Let's get it straight a last time (I hope): if you have an apple and I take it, you haven't got it anymore. Digital goods are INFORMATION. When you give me an information YOU STILL F*CKING HAVE IT. By your twisted way of thinking, people reading headlines in papers at the store are burglars, and so are people reading the time on your watch without asking you first. This cannot be the case. This shouldn't be the case. This won't be the case.

madao 14y ago
Your twisting my words now, people pay for headlines with advertising and what not, we are talking about music or perhaps even movies, these people produce and create these forms of entertainment expressly for money, not for your enjoyment or for your friends enjoyment, them make it and package it. Then someone comes downs rightfully buys it and enjoys the fruits of others labours. What is not right is to reward artists by telling them that their hard work is just information free to be handed out to everyone, seriously call it what you want, you are stealing from these people. They don’t want you to give it to your friends or random people off the internet, they want you to pay for it. If you really don’t like it, go and create your content and release it under creative commons and stop watching and listening to commercial movies/radio.
- wazoox 14y ago
  > these people produce and create these forms of entertainment expressly for money Just to make it clear: I've been a professional musician, a composer an arranger, and I've played with Touré Kunda and recorded with Deep Forest. I've also been a graphic artist and built the official TV CGs effects for World Cup 1998. I pretend to know quite a bit about why people (including myself) create music or art, and I can affirm you that even the worst commercial, tasteless eurodance artist doesn't do it for the money first. They want to perform their art first, then seek a way to get money while doing it. Selling your art can take numerous forms. For musicians, most of the time the better part of their revenue comes from concerts and not recorded music (usually at best they get a few percents of a CD price anyway). > you are stealing from these people. I've only extremely rarely downloaded any media from the net, and only things unavailable by other ways. I'm standing on principles and not looking for excuses. > If you really don’t like it, go and create your content and release it under creative commons and stop watching and listening to commercial movies/radio. Amusingly enough, that's exactly what I'm doing.

Gormo 14y ago

>Here is the thing, someone has gone ahead and spent time and effort to create and sell something, That's a capital investment. Putting resources into a designing and manufacturing a product before you've got anything to sell is a risky proposition, but it's how the vast majority of all economic activity takes place. Investors bear the risk that people won't be willing to pay for the finished product, and understand that there's a chance that they will lose money instead of making it. Simply putting effort into creating and selling something doesn't entitle you to a positive return; you have to make something that customers are willing to buy, and people who make their own copies of intangible, non-rival goods are just another category of people who aren't willing to pay. Indeed, in practical terms, they're the last segment of your potential market you'd want to pursue; much better to focus on people who aren't buying your product for other reasons entirely. > someone then has gone on out of their way and attempted to steal it. But no one is stealing the work that was created. "Stealing" implies depriving someone of something they own, but this is impossible with respect to creative work. No one can remove the pattern of ideas that defines the work from the creator's mind. What's happening here is that people are making their own replicas of the creator's original work. This isn't "stealing" anymore than someone is stealing your house by building their own house using a design based on yours. Making a copy doesn't deprive the original author of anything; all it does is alter the external market conditions under which that author might seek to obtain revenue from selling copies of that original work. But he never had any right to a positive market return in the first place; his profit is inherently contingent on the willingness of others to pay him, and people who aren't willing to pay him because they made their own copies of the work are no different than people who aren't willing to pay him for any other reason, unless you assume that he already had the exclusive right to make those copies. Do you see the paradox here? You can only posit that the creator has an inherent right to restrict others' copying if you assume that he has an inherent right to a positive ROI when marketing the work, but you can only assume an right to a positive ROI in a scenario where people making their own copies is already legally censured, because otherwise, there's no legal distinction between people who didn't pay him because they copied the work, and people who didn't pay him because they just didn't want the work at all.

JoeAltmaier 14y ago
And that's the mental gymnastic that lets people steal all sorts of intellectual property - they rationalize it, pretend it isn't somebody's property and livelihood, and take it mostly because they just want it and its hard to secure so it ok, right? If I'm not willing to pay him, then he's not owed anything. Hey! I'm not willing to pay for lots of things; now I can just take them. Thanks, Gormo! I'm free of social responsibility!