Piracy

[Halivar]

Artists have a moral right to be compensated and credited for their work if they so choose.

Gotta pick this nit because I think it's important. "Moral rights" are a big deal in international copyright law, and not all countries take the same side on the issue.

During the Berne Convention, the United States refused to sign on because it objected to the concept of "moral rights" of IP holders. In 1952 the Universal Copyright Convention was convened to address the concerns of the US. Even after the Berne Convention Impelmentation of 1988, the US still does not completely recognize IP holders as having moral rights to the extent that the Berne Convention envisioned.

In the US, content creators have the following moral rights (under VARA and other laws [I'm not a lawyer and I'm not that well read ]):
- The right to claim authorship or prevent false claims of authorship
- The right to non-attribution (using a pseudonym)
- The right to prevent changes to content ("mutilation")

There are others, I'm sure, but the right to not have content swiped is not a moral right in the US; it more closely akin to fraud and unfair competiton laws.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Perhaps a better analogy for you to use would be if someone scanned their PHB and offered to sell you a memory stick with it, or something like that. Or, if you don't mind getting off the topic of RPGs, buying bootlegged video cassettes/DVDs.

I don't think so. The problem is that physical objects have value. They may not have much value but, just by being made of physical matter, there is some intrinsic value to them. Data is not the same way. Information can be useful, but if a piece of information is extremely widely known or of very little use, it doesn't have any value at all.

Try selling a PDF of the PHB to someone who has no desire to play D&D. They will think it has no value at all. If you try selling a physical copy of the book to someone for 50 cents, they might consider it in that they could sell it to a used book store for more than that and make a profit. Or recycle the paper and maybe get more than 50 cents for it.

That's the problem with the entire discussion. We are now moving toward an information based economy. But information doesn't have any value except whatever value we assign it. Those who want to make money off of information are attempting to influence society so that it views information as having value. But there is a large group of people who don't believe it does.

And that's the core of the pirating argument. A bunch of people are saying, "This video file on my hard drive is just a piece of information that was copied for free, it's worth nothing. It can be copied 100,000 times for free. It's something I'm going to watch for 2 hours and maybe never look at again."

The people making the movies are saying, "It cost us 200 million dollars to make this movie. The resulting video file is worth 200 million dollars."

But there is no objective way of measuring the cost of information and data. The value becomes even muddier when you consider things like movies that make a PROFIT equal to how much money I make at my job if I worked 13,000 years at it. Is it worth that much, or is the value of it overinflated?

 

[xechnao]

I don't think so. The problem is that physical objects have value. They may not have much value but, just by being made of physical matter, there is some intrinsic value to them. Data is not the same way. Information can be useful, but if a piece of information is extremely widely known or of very little use, it doesn't have any value at all.

Try selling a PDF of the PHB to someone who has no desire to play D&D. They will think it has no value at all. If you try selling a physical copy of the book to someone for 50 cents, they might consider it in that they could sell it to a used book store for more than that and make a profit. Or recycle the paper and maybe get more than 50 cents for it.

That's the problem with the entire discussion. We are now moving toward an information based economy. But information doesn't have any value except whatever value we assign it. Those who want to make money off of information are attempting to influence society so that it views information as having value. But there is a large group of people who don't believe it does.

And that's the core of the pirating argument. A bunch of people are saying, "This video file on my hard drive is just a piece of information that was copied for free, it's worth nothing. It can be copied 100,000 times for free. It's something I'm going to watch for 2 hours and maybe never look at again."

The people making the movies are saying, "It cost us 200 million dollars to make this movie. The resulting video file is worth 200 million dollars."

But there is no objective way of measuring the cost of information and data. The value becomes even muddier when you consider things like movies that make a PROFIT equal to how much money I make at my job if I worked 13,000 years at it. Is it worth that much, or is the value of it overinflated?

Nice post.

In ancient Greece theatric play competitions had to be sponsored by the law -it was something as a tax paid from the high class towards entertainment. I am not sure about this but I believe that eurovision is sponsored by EU. Perhaps the state should get involved and try to control this...entertainment-information quality we are talking about.

 

[Mercutio01]

Gotta pick this nit because I think it's important. "Moral rights" are a big deal in international copyright law, and not all countries take the same side on the issue.

Okay - actual legal terminology aside, the point still stands. Authors have the right to compensation for their work just as much as salesmen, etc. That's all based on market whims, of course, but a large point behind copyright laws was to prevent people other than the creator from profiting from the creator's work as though it was their own.

Hence, I write a book of poems and publish it. I sell copies of it. Someone takes it home and makes copies of it to distribute it. That's copyright infringement at its essence. Now take it a step further. The infringement on the copyright doesn't bother me half as much as the fact that there are now people out there with copies of the work that I didn't profit from. They are recipients of an illegally copied work, and it doesn't matter one whit to me that they can attribute it to me. That attribution does me no good when the next electric bill comes in. That's what I'm arguing against.

 

[DaveMage]

But there is no objective way of measuring the cost of information and data. The value becomes even muddier when you consider things like movies that make a PROFIT equal to how much money I make at my job if I worked 13,000 years at it. Is it worth that much, or is the value of it overinflated?

"Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it."

Personally, (and I know this would be unpopular amongst many game designers and authors) I think creative expression (art, fiction, lyrics, poetry, music, gaming material, etc.) should have an exclusive rights limit the same as a patent (14-20 years) after which time it enters the public domain. (The "start" time on the exclusive rights would begin the moment such a work is first offered for public or private sale.) That gives the creator time to profit off of it, but not generations of decendents, etc.

 

[CharlesRyan]

The problem is that physical objects have value. They may not have much value but, just by being made of physical matter, there is some intrinsic value to them. Data is not the same way. Information can be useful, but if a piece of information is extremely widely known or of very little use, it doesn't have any value at all.

It's easy to think that something you can hold has intrinsic value, but is there really that big a difference between the physical and the intangible, in terms of value?

• If physicality confers value, nothing should be more valuable than real estate. And yet we've seen real estate values plummet in the last year. In some places, there's simply no floor--the only thing supporting any price at all is the willingness of speculators to come in and grab the property for a song, on the prospect that it will, someday, again increase in value. Absent such speculators (in other words, absent people who are assigning imaginary value to the property), the property is literally unsellable at almost any price.
• Look at the car lots--especially those packed with Hummers. Big, physical items. The dealerships practically can't give them away.
• Consider the fully-recyclable plastic packaging I throw away because my council won't take it in the recycling bin. Why not? Because there's insufficient market for recycled plastic. It has value in the sense that it's useful, but nobody wants it. So, in a monetary sense, it has no value.
• What about services? Do they have less inherent value than goods, simply because they can't be weighed or measured?

I think recent events in the economy really do illustrate that physicality does not equal inherent value. (Just ask anybody currently paying a mortgage that's twice what their house is currently worth.) Some of my points above might be slightly exaggerated for effect, but my broader point is that you can't really assess IP value properly if you cling to the idea that physical objects somehow have "real" value that intangible properties do not.

At the end of the day, every single thing is worth exactly what people are willing to pay for it. That's the only definition of monetary value, and the subject's physical or nonphysical nature have absolutely nothing to do with it.

 

[Charwoman Gene]

They are recipients of an illegally copied work, and it doesn't matter one whit to me that they can attribute it to me.

So your arguments are about greed.

If you've finished all labor on a project, there is no fundamental reason you should be rewarded in perpetuity for already completed projects.

There is a lot of reason to make an artificial construct to encourage creative works, but no, its not fundamental.

It's about using greed as a motivator for artistic creation.

 

[xechnao]

It's easy to think that something you can hold has intrinsic value, but is there really that big a difference between the physical and the intangible, in terms of value?

• If physicality confers value, nothing should be more valuable than real estate. And yet we've seen real estate values plummet in the last year. In some places, there's simply no floor--the only thing supporting any price at all is the willingness of speculators to come in and grab the property for a song, on the prospect that it will, someday, again increase in value. Absent such speculators (in other words, absent people who are assigning imaginary value to the property), the property is literally unsellable at almost any price.
• Look at the car lots--especially those packed with Hummers. Big, physical items. The dealerships practically can't give them away.
• Consider the fully-recyclable plastic packaging I throw away because my council won't take it in the recycling bin. Why not? Because there's insufficient market for recycled plastic. It has value in the sense that it's useful, but nobody wants it. So, in a monetary sense, it has no value.
• What about services? Do they have less inherent value than goods, simply because they can't be weighed or measured?

I think recent events in the economy really do illustrate that physicality does not equal inherent value. (Just ask anybody currently paying a mortgage that's twice what their house is currently worth.) Some of my points above might be slightly exaggerated for effect, but my broader point is that you can't really assess IP value properly if you cling to the idea that physical objects somehow have "real" value that intangible properties do not.

At the end of the day, every single thing is worth exactly what people are willing to pay for it. That's the only definition of monetary value, and the subject's physical or nonphysical nature have absolutely nothing to do with it.

I would accept this if everybody had the same value of money or from a different POV if every money had the same value or even a stable value. This is not the case. One could even say it is not that houses cost less, it is that some money lose their value.

 

[Asmor]

So your arguments are about greed.

If you've finished all labor on a project, there is no fundamental reason you should be rewarded in perpetuity for already completed projects.

There is a lot of reason to make an artificial construct to encourage creative works, but no, its not fundamental.

It's about using greed as a motivator for artistic creation.

Whoa, I don't think I could possibly disagree with that more.

A movie company isn't paid to make a movie, for example. They make the movie at their expense, and then try to recoup that expense afterward.

I agree that the movie company isn't fundamentally entitled to recoup their costs or make a profit, but they certainly should have the exclusive rights to sell that movie for a reasonable amount of time.

The arts are strange; they're similar to other professions in that they must produce something to make a living. The problem is, all the difficulty is in the original production; once something is created, it is trivial to recreate it. Anyone can re-type a best selling novel, for example, or make a movie which is virtually identical to a blockbuster hit (never mind literally copying the movie...).

This might not seem like such a big problem for a major movie or album. Even without copyright law, it would have been foolish for someone to try and copy Schindler's List, for example, since that movie saw a major worldwide release and was well known already. At the very least, people have already seen it, diminishing the potential audience; even worse, the copycat studio could suffer some bad PR for the stunt.

The problem is when someone tries to make a large, wide-scale re-release of a small project, or even a small-scale one in a different market. If I take a great photograph, it might make me some money and get me a bit of fame in my local area. If the New York Times then published that photo without attributing it to me, they'd get all the credit everywhere else for it and make all the money off my work.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

It's easy to think that something you can hold has intrinsic value, but is there really that big a difference between the physical and the intangible, in terms of value?

I still believe there is. It is true that a physical item's value can be so low that it becomes pointless to own it or try to sell it, but it still does have SOME value. Sure, a property might be perceived to have enough value so that they refuse to sell it for what people will actually pay for it. Sometimes it becomes more expensive to own something than it is worth.

In fact most of your examples just prove my point that items are worth what people are willing to pay for them. Big ticket items like real estate, Hummers, are perceived to have so much value that people refuse to sell them for what they are actually worth, so they sit there unsold.

Your point about the plastic just means that it costs more to collect all the plastic and to recycle it than it is worth. However, they still HAVE value, just not enough to set up a wide scale collection program. On the other hand, plastic bottles can still be used for all sorts of things on a smaller scale. Someone might use them for crafts, to hold water in, or any number of other things I'm not thinking of. And on a small scale, some company might actually pay to recycle them. Someone has a use for it somewhere, even if its just as a paperweight. Because they DO something they are worth money. Even if its so little money that you'd need thousands of them to get a penny. Even if the economy collapses and we have to resort to the barter system, they are worth something.

The same is not really true of a text file that says "The sky is blue". It doesn't have any value at all. Even if you have 10 million of them no one would even pay you a penny for them.

At the end of the day, every single thing is worth exactly what people are willing to pay for it. That's the only definition of monetary value, and the subject's physical or nonphysical nature have absolutely nothing to do with it.

I agree with the first point but disagree with the second. There is a minimum value on everything physical. An item is worth something even if it is just being used to prop something up. I will agree that the value of certain physical objects is so negligible so as to be worthless.

Also, I find that information and non-physical items are simply more subjective about how useful they are.