File-Sharing: Has it affected the RPG industry?

[The Sigil]

As I read this, the actual work of producing a book is of no value, it is only the transmission of that book to a medium that has any value.

Not quite... an idea itself has no "value" in monetary terms because the idea can spread at no cost to the originator himself. In other words, it's worthless to try to assign a monetary value to that which is ephemeral and that which I can give to you without impoverishing myself by the loss of it.

The work required to translate from "abstract, ephemeral concept" to "communicable medium" by which the idea can be shared is where the value lies. In other words, it's not the idea of "boy meets girl" that has value, but rather the time and effort you spend in transcribing the story about "boy meets girl" to paper, cd, or other tangible medium that has value. The value is not bound up in the work itself, but rather in the effort that created it.

This does actually seem to defend the idea that the individual has a moral imperative to grab whatever one can download. When you have an idea, then work on that idea, then produce that idea, the only value is the paper it's printed on -- if I can take that (which is my *right* as intellectual work belongs to everyone) without stealing paper, I'm almost morally required to do so. I don't see it that way.

I must have come across badly then. The effort and time take to type are where most of the value lies (the physical cost of the paper it's printed on or the plastic CD it's recorded on make up some cost as well).

In other words, the idea itself for "your kewl prestige class" is worth squat. The effort you spend organizing words - and that set of words - that communicate your idea is where the value lies. The EXPRESSION of the idea - and the effort spent crafting that expression - is what's important.

--The Sigil

Please make an argument for the position that the results of intellectual work instantly belong to the public that goes beyond simply instructing ourselves to "divorce ... from the concept". Instead of the concept in which copyright is society graciously refraining the work produced - as is 'our' right- for a period of time, I hold that copyright protects the individual to gain the benefit from intellectual labors in the same way that the laws protects the labor of the person who prints the book by making the removal of the physical book a crime.

"He who lights his taper at mine receives light without darkening me." (Thomas Jefferson)

Intellectual work by its very nature belongs to the public, as the purpose of society is to enrich its members. If I share an idea with you, you are enriched, and I am not impoverished. Thus, sharing ideas allows all to be enriched and impoverishes none. Furthermore, once thought of, an idea is very difficult to "un-think."

The purpose of copyright is to ensure that you enrich the public by adding your idea to the common pool. However, if you do the work of writing it down, drawing it, etc., and get nothing in return, you have no reason to do so. You should expect to enrich yourself by hoarding your idea (since once you share it, you have no control over where it goes), in which case the idea goes with you to the grave and all of society is poorer for its loss.

To this end, the public proposes to grant you a time period to profit from your work and cleverness in exchange for you enriching all. This is copyright.

In this sense, the expiration of copyright due to time would have to be justified under a form of social "taxation" in which the IP is public domain (at a point after most of the benefits to the creator will have been obtained) in order to promote the dissemination of knowledge and to encourage the generation of new material. In this cases, there should be a "you can't take it with you" clause where copyright does not long survive the death of the author.

This sounds very much like what Thomas Babington MacAulay concluded. I've quoted him before and you can google him if you wish. His argument, in a nutshell, is this:

1 - We need ideas and "IP" works contributed to society.
2 - Nobody can afford to/will do the work required to achieve #1 without some sort of reward.
3 - We can either reward IP creators using private parties, in which case they are beholden to the interests of the rich, or we can tax society as a whole.
4 - Taxing society as a whole gives us the greatest freedom in producing ideas as there are no "special interests" that direct the creation of ideas.
5 - To tax society as a whole, we create a monopoly called copyright.
6 - Monopolies are always evil and serve only to unjustly drive up the prices of that which is monopolized.
7 - Given #2, #4, and #6 above, the optimal solution is a short copyright, as it uses a necessary evil of monopoly to bring about a great good of IP creation.
8 - Doubling a copyright term doubles the "evil" of the monopoly by doubling its duration but does NOT double the amount of good received by the public; in fact, it can be argued that it does nothing or even DECREASES the good received by the public.
9 - Copyright must hit the "sweet spot" where the evil of the monopoly generates enough revenue to justly reward the creators, but then immediately pass into the public domain.
10 - Macauley didn't like booksellers (media giants) who buy copyrights from artists "in their distress" for what amounts to pennies on the eventual dollar.

I'm running low on time, but is that good enough for you?

Copyrights are a tax of the nastiest kind - monopolies - that should be considered a necessary evil for the creation of IP and should last just long enough that the "evil" done does not offset the good of creation.

My opinion: Copyright terms as they currently exist currently do WAY too much evil and have offset completely the good of creation.

--The Sigil

 

[Lazybones]

First off, thanks to all who participated in this debate and helped an agonizingly slow Friday in the office go just a bit faster. While law-talk (my wife's an attorney) generally puts me to sleep, I find this particular topic to be very interesting.

Second, I agree entirely with Sigil and feel that his interpretation of copyright is spot on. I suppose it's natural for publishers (who have an inherent stake in seeing their monopoly on their ideas continue indefinitely) to feel differently. Also I suppose it's natural for someone like me, who has written a great deal of unpublished material, and who has been unable to break into the narrow world that is publishing today, to prefer the public domain.

Ideas are great. The people who create new ideas deserve to be compensated for their creativity. But to have a situation where the words "You're fired" are registered as a trademark, where media created today won't enter into the public domain for hundreds of years, and where songs like "Happy birthday" cannot be sung in public without compensating someone (while at the same time big companies can pay to have classic Gershwin and other tunes as their corporate jingles)... I just feel that this goes against the initial intent of copyright law.

The public domain is a great place. When I was teaching history, I'd build my own course readers from public material and save my students $40 off the cost of a published compendium (that was largely the same kind of stuff). But when I got to the 20th century, it was much harder, because of the strangehold that copyright law has placed upon the exchange of ideas. So instead, you have to make students buy $14 copies of works whose authors have been dead for, in some cases, for nearly a century.

 

[Umbran]

...I do not hold that an action is acceptable or unobjectionable (or, more strongly, unactionable - if that is a word) merely because it does not represent an immediate, easily quantifiable economic loss...

Right. Now, what happens when we start allowing action against things that don't represent a quantifiable loss? You think this nation is litigious now, wait until you've set a precedent that says you don't need to have a loss to legally call someone out onto the carpet.

I suppose the center of my starting point is that I would ask "Why?" to the above statement. You seem to be saying that the value of the work taht was put into the material is dependant on the material itself.

Not quite. The value of the finished product is partially dependant on the value of the materials. And there may be synergy involved - between intellectual content and physical manifestation. Plus, there's an added complication...

But, at its base, it is easy to say what has been lost; the information contained within the book which was the source of the inherent value of the book.

Yes, but that information has not be taken away from the seller! The book and it's data are still preent, and may still be sold.

This is why we must be careful in dealing with electronic media. In standard theft, the thief denies the owner the ability to sell a product - the product is physically no longer persent, and cannot be given to a paying customer. Also note that the damage a traditional thief can do is limited by how many items he or she can physically carry away.

With electronic copies, the thief leaves behind the thing that was to be sold. He does not fully deny the seller the ability to sell it. But, note that while he only made one copy at the time of the theft, he has the ability to deny the original owner more than one sale, if he desires.

This is why we must deal with theft of information differently. Sometimes the theft represents no loss. Sometimes is represents a very large loss.

The person took a commercial product without paying for it, ergo, as I see it, the person stole it.

Yes. I don't deny that. The question, though is what harm was done in the theft. That whole, "make the punishment fit the crime" thing comes into play.

I would say that the argument that material can be taken if there is no immediate, easily quantifiable economic loss is 'just negotiating'.

Yes. When did you become of the opinion that our legal systems didn't involve a whole lot of negotiating? Sure, if you like we can go back to the days where a thief had his hand cut off, no matter what was stolen. But somehow I don't see that as a movement forward in our social development.

If we don't have an accurate idea about the losses, then ... we don't have an accurate estimate of the losses. I'm not talking about whether a given copyright law is best or not, but about what is right to do.

That's fine. I was not trying to slap a simple label of right and wrong on it. Copyright is about protecting the income of those who spend precous time and effort to create new ideas and new combinations of ideas. In order to properly protect them, we have to know more than "right/wrong". We need to know how much loss they incur.

Note that I never said that the lack of clear economic loss made the thing right. But our justice system is not fully digital. It is at least partially analog. We use how much damage is done to another to determine how wrong an act was.

Might not this wave of pirating have had the effect of killing the PDF project, representing a quite real loss?

Yes, but that's aside from the point I was making at that time. But the issue I was addressing was more akin to askig: what loss did WotC feel from those folks who photocopied old modules after the modules went out of print, but before the pdf project started?

No. Just because the hypothetical 'you' is being a jerk and doing a disservice to Mr. Martin and the fans does not mean that the moral position of someone who steal the book is in any way improved, as I see it.

Okay. So you don't seem to be a moral relativist. Unfortunately for you, our legal system is at least partially relativist. Until that changes, you'll be somewhat unsatisfied with it. To consider that any further, though, would be roaming into politics, and I'm not gonna do it.

 

[Kalanyr]

It is reasonable to think that some of the downloads might possibly have been by the same people at different times, appearing as different IP's. That seems reasonable.

What I cannot agree with is the leap that the author loses nothing if the material is stolen, er, downloaded, by someone who "wouldn't have bought the product anyway." If a thief breaks into a bookstore and steals merchandise, has the thief only stolen a value equal to what the thief could have paid for? The most apparent difference between this case and the cases being discussed is that the material stolen has definite physical reality, but shouldn't that just be changed to the price of printing the books, in this view?

If someone receives the, I guess I'll call it the "commercially useful portion", of a product (the information in a book, the ability to listen to a piece of music) without paying a price to the vendor, then the material has been stolen. I don't see the moral high ground to downloading for free what normally has a price.

There seems to be a perception that the individual has a genuine right to have access to material produced by a second party, and if the work is unavailable (by being OOP), or if the price of the goods are above what the indidvidual in question thinks is appropriate, then the individual has the right (it almost seems like it is being considered an absolute moral imperative) to get the material for less/free - by any means necessary. I would like to see this addressed.



So if someone has decided that they weren't willing to pay the asking price on a product, then they have the moral right to grab it illicitly? I don't get your logic at all. If you are saying that this theft is all right because the source wasn't going to see any money for it anyway, then I disagree in that if the material has "no value" to them dowloader, why do they have it? If the response is that they were always going to have budgeted for other things, then their decision-making process was altered by the idea that they was something they wanted enogh to take that they didn't have to pay for.

What is the "right" someone has to someone else's work?

(Sorry for the large quote but its been several pages)(And apologies if this has been said I'm reading through answering in order)

Okay here's the difference a thief in the bookstore takes the merchandise which prevents it being sold to someone else therefore you do not lose money to the thief, he probably wouldn't have been interested anyway, but you lose the money because you can't sell the stolen product to someone who would have paid for it, this is not an issue with electronic copies.

However, I have NEVER anywhere in that post claimed that anyone has a right to the contents, they still stole the work, however you cannot claim it as a LOSS, because quiet frankly if they wouldn't have paid for it in the first place you have lost $0.

And would someone please tell me where I said they had the right to grab it if they couldn't pay for it please ? I'm fairly sure I said that you can't claim it as a loss, not that they have the right to steal it. There's a difference between the reality of economic loss and the more mental structure of morality.

 

[Kalanyr]

Kalanyr, if you think my assessment is an extreme, then your views are the opposite extreme. He did lose more than $1200. Based on repeat openings, he's got a lost of 1200 people with stable IP addresses. That right there alone represents the willingness to steal $14,000, not a mere $1200. Publishers only hurt themselves by trying to quantify how many downloads would have represented buyers, since that relies on the false justifications that the thieves offer up as an excuse for their activities.

(Apologies again)

Yes if I'd said $1200 was the highest estimate I'd take I'd agree its a low end, but I didn't, in fact I deliberate avoided positing an actual loss estimate, because I know it'd be impossible to tell how much he lost, but computing every copy as a loss is the maximum extreme (comparable to claiming that he lost $0 because none of the downloaders would have paid for it (which is admittedly more mathematically improbable)). He almost certainly lost more than $1200 but less than the estimate you provided.

 

[Thanatos]

You still have flaws in your thinking. DHCP simply means your IP address is asigned via network communications, nothing more. Most cable systems rely on DHCP assigning the IP address based on a locally maintained table on their servers. My IP address via comcast is assigned via DHCP, yet every time the modem resets (which happens about 4 times per week, between 1 AM and 3 AM) my IP address is always the same. Only time it changed was during the transition between comcast@home to comcast.net

Same can be said for all the other addressing methods. Unless you're using dialup, MAC, NAT, etc. assigned on the LAN in your home are irrelevant.

How does my thinking have flaws? Also, I know what DHCP means and I know individuals that get a new address each time their cable modem resets and it happens at least one or two times a week. It is completely relevant to the issue at hand. How do you figure it can not be? Those kind of things are completely capable of skewing the statistic.

Lost, sold, deleted, whatever. This really doesn't matter thanks to the way the warez community is now starting to be prosecuted. The download record is sufficient proof that you had 3 copies in your possession.

No, the download record is not sufficient proof in and of itself that you have 3 copies in your posssession, nor is even sufficient proof WHO downloaded it ( If more then one person has acccess to the computer you have). How about all those IP addresses the RIAA served warrants are...some of those people didn't even have computers or were not used by them? IP Addresses are far, far from being a smoking gun, despite what you seem to believe.

 

[Kalanyr]

Having just finished reading the extra couple of pages of this thread I'd like to say ignore all my posts Sigil and Umbran are saying pretty much exactly what I'm trying to say, only far far more eloquently and clearly.

 

[Heretic Apostate]

And please do not get me started on how corporations are using the public domain, then copyrighting it!

Are you talking Disney, with regard to such things as Snow White and such? Or something else entirely?

(Sorry, you got me curious...)

*********************************************

I consider some items to be true abandonware when the company selling them do not live up to the promises that accompany the sale. For instance, I own a copy (legally bought, still the original file...) of "The Castle of Winds," a rather good and cheap game from over five years ago. It specifically states, in one of the files (as well as the website?), that one only has to contact the company to get a boatload of freebies to go with the game.

Only thing is, the company sold the rights to some corporation. And the corporation doesn't feel obligated to give out the freebies. (Freebies being such things as "a Word document that has tips and tricks and types of items and such"... basically, a Strat Guide on the cheap.) They don't want to honor their commitment, so I feel no qualm about giving the game out. (Of course, there's a website out there already doing it, so not much point in me doing it. But if someone were to ask, I'd be very tempted to send a copy...)

 

[Dr. Harry]

Not quite... an idea itself has no "value" in monetary terms because the idea can spread at no cost to the originator himself. In other words, it's worthless to try to assign a monetary value to that which is ephemeral and that which I can give to you without impoverishing myself by the loss of it.

Well, if we think about the idea - and I am using 'idea' in this case to represent the developed work, the content of the hypothetical book in question - in terms of "capital", then it does not have value from intrinsic materials, but it does have value due to the work done by the author, the value of the author's time. Now, once the work is done the value of the work as a commercial product depends upon the demand for the

This means that while the market value of the material varies, there is no point at which it has zero value. Additionally, the spread of the material, even among people who say that they would never have purchased it, will have an effect on the demand for the product.

The value is not bound up in the work itself, but rather in the effort that created it.

But not strictly in the act of transferring the product from existing as an electronic file to paper. Hang on, we're about to agree more in a moment.

I must have come across badly then.

What surprised me was that your line of reasoning could (it seems to me) easily be swung around into a claim as a moral basis for "file-sharing", the request I made of the pro-fileshare posters. I didn't want to start from the idea that that was where you were going yourself, but I could see *someone* going there, so I wanted to address it first thing. From the way I defined what I was referring to as an "idea" above, we're not as far apart as we could be.

The effort and time take to type are where most of the value lies (the physical cost of the paper it's printed on or the plastic CD it's recorded on make up some cost as well).

In other words, the idea itself for "your kewl prestige class" is worth squat. The effort you spend organizing words - and that set of words - that communicate your idea is where the value lies. The EXPRESSION of the idea - and the effort spent crafting that expression - is what's important.

So the electronic version of your product has value, value which can be enhanced by the medium but is not totally dependant on the medium.

"He who lights his taper at mine receives light without darkening me." (Thomas Jefferson)

Intellectual work by its very nature belongs to the public, as the purpose of society is to enrich its members. If I share an idea with you, you are enriched, and I am not impoverished. Thus, sharing ideas allows all to be enriched and impoverishes none. Furthermore, once thought of, an idea is very difficult to "un-think."

Are we back to an idea as just a cool thought? If Thomas Jefferson ran a fire-producing business, then if someone came in and lit his taper it would be a theft of services.

We are bouncing back and forth between an idea as the electronic aspect of a commercial product and an idea as an abstract iota of knowledge or enlightenment. Context is also improtant. I spent a lot of time, effort, and money to get my Ph.D., but if someone asks me a question I can answer about astronomy, physics, or something else I have expertise in, then I'll talk their ears off and consider it a full Thomas Jefferson moment, but someone sneaking into a class that I teach is stealing by virtue of taking for free what a number of other people are paying for. Context.

To this end, the public proposes to grant you a time period to profit from your work and cleverness in exchange for you enriching all. This is copyright.

It is interesting that both our descriptions of copyright could appeal to this sentence, but the difference is where the sense of moral power lies; does the intellectual work done belong to society which allows the author to benefit from his/her work, or does the contructed work in some sense the property of the author, who allows the work to be inheirited eventually by society in exchange for society's protection of the individual's exclusive right to distribute their work for the time before that?

This sounds very much like what Thomas Babington MacAulay concluded. I've quoted him before and you can google him if you wish.

I will try this on Monday, when I'm back at work on a computer that can multitask. 'Til then, I'll say that much of this seems reasonable (in fact, I'll skip the stuff that seems cool straight off) without necessarily endorsing this guy until I know his full position so I don't get slammed if he endorsed playing croquet with kittens or the extension of slavery to anyone who has got a knighthood, or some such .

5 - To tax society as a whole, we create a monopoly called copyright.
6 - Monopolies are always evil and serve only to unjustly drive up the prices of that which is monopolized.

#1-#4 I'm cool with, but I don't think that #6 is correct. There are some monopolies that I think are positive goods. For example, medicine is in some sense a monopoly, as there are strict governmental restrictions as to who can practice medicine. I consider this as a good in that there are then at some checks are to what type of fruit loop can claim to be a medical doctor. I think that the condition of having the police force as a state monopoly is much better than having them a part of competing private forces, and I would wager that the cost is lower as well.
To say that exclusive rights to material generated by the worker = a monopoly seems excessive. If one source controls gasoline to an area (the Keewenaw penninsula of the UP of Michigan) that's a bad thing. If only one company can produce a specific sourcebook, I cannot imagine that to be comparable. As I see it, the author is the one being "taxed" by the limited life of copyright for society's help in enforcing the copyright.

10 - Macauley didn't like booksellers (media giants) who buy copyrights from artists "in their distress" for what amounts to pennies on the eventual dollar.

True, but as I responded to in a different post, it is not a moral thing to do a non-moral thing to a bastiche.

I'm running low on time, but is that good enough for you?

Zowie.

Copyrights are a tax of the nastiest kind - monopolies - that should be considered a necessary evil for the creation of IP and should last just long enough that the "evil" done does not offset the good of creation.

And here is where we break ranks.

 

[Dr. Harry]

Right. Now, what happens when we start allowing action against things that don't represent a quantifiable loss? You think this nation is litigious now, wait until you've set a precedent that says you don't need to have a loss to legally call someone out onto the carpet.

First, just because the loss is difficult to assign a dollar value to does not mean that we cannot see that loss has occured. Secondly, it is possible to call someone to account for a indeterminate loss, the trial (ideally) also serving to generate a value based upon an idea of the damage done and the settlement as a punative act against the offending party. Also note that I said "immediate, easily quantifiable", not "not quantifiable".

Not quite. The value of the finished product is partially dependant on the value of the materials.

But it is not entirely dependant on the material; the file has some non-zero value, so it's removal is a form of stealing.

Yes, but that information has not be taken away from the seller! The book and it's data are still preent, and may still be sold.

The information contained within the book which was the source of the inherent value of the book has been removed from the store. The thief removed what the store had for sale without paying for it. The punishment might be changed in context, but the action seems straightforward.

This is why we must deal with theft of information differently. Sometimes the theft represents no loss. Sometimes is represents a very large loss.

I completely disagree that the theft can represent no loss, unless you posit a case where the material is downloaded and immediately erased.

Yes. When did you become of the opinion that our legal systems didn't involve a whole lot of negotiating? Sure, if you like we can go back to the days where a thief had his hand cut off, no matter what was stolen. But somehow I don't see that as a movement forward in our social development.

What the smeg page are you on? You are completely missing my point. In the context of the anecdote, the 'just negotiating' comment was to say that the claim of "My stealing isn't really stealing because I'm goin' after the 'Man'", or "My stealing isn't really stealing because there's no 'economic loss'" is no more moral than any other type of theft of a luxury item. The woman in the story who would prostitute herself for a million dollars is no different in quality from someone who would do it for twenty, if there is a difference in degree. I don't see a difference in quality between different types of stealing. To move to a point of "I call no harm, so no punishment", I feel , is a weak rationalization.
We do not have a system where the punishment is to be set as equal to the immediately demonstrable monetary value. There are bins: petty theft, grand theft, copyright infringement, etc. The file-share person might argue about which bin they should be in, but they "pat on the back and a lollypop" bin isn't one of the choices.
If one person steals a copy of a book that sells out, and another steals a copy of a book where the rest just sit on the shelves have still committed the same crime. If one person makes a download available, and that happens to noticeably damage the sales of a product, and another person makes a download available that they argue have had no effect on sales, it's still the same action.

The system does allow for adding consequences if the consequences from the criminal action are excessively large, but no the other way to let the first shoplifter from the last paragraph off.