Good for them.
This artificial scarcity of media doesn't make any sense. Why should something that I can get for free cost money?
Are you for real?
An MP3 only has artificial scarcity. The energy it costs to copy an MP3 is infinitesimal. The point of the artificial scarcity is to allow the artist to make money by selling his information. In an economy with no scarcity, this doesn't work. The artist needs to make money by selling something that is scarce, like a live performance.
If the artist wants to keep people from selling music they've produced, they're free to do so, by not selling it or giving it away. When they've sold something, however, it's not up to them to control another's actions indefinitely.
Obviously this is heavily at odds with current law where I live, but fortunately it's easy to get around said law by using licenses which give legal weight to rights a person should have with respect to easily copied materials.
When you purchased their music, you most likely entered an agreement not to reproduce/distribute it.
That doesn't mean US courts won't enforce it anyway, of course. :( Eventually that will change, I expect.
Let's say foo is 15 and he wants to download Super Expensive Program 9000. He spends all day looking for a torrent. Then, once he's downloaded it, the next day it takes him another full day to figure out how to install it and get the various cracks working and everything configured.
Right, that's fine. Here's the problem:
Time passes, foo's grown up. He's 25, and a software engineer, making $75k a year. He goes to thepiratebay.org and finds Super Expensive Program 9000 immediately. He downloads it in about an hour. It installs immediately with no requirement to apply a crack or any other technical detail. It just installs and works.
Okay, I have a problem with the second one, because once piracy becomes a one-click solution it starts to hurt those that make the program. The first isn't a problem because 15 year olds don't buy programs anyway, but they might buy it when they grow up (Like I did with Visual Assist).
If there's a way to make it artificially hard to get something for free, I say let them get it, because only the committed will be able to. If it's easy (Napster, ThePirateBay, etc) it needs to be made harder.
Also, making money by giving away people's work for free in a one-click solution is just evil. If you're going to give it away for free, make it hard, and don't make any money from it.
If someone broke into the owner's house or office and copied their work, then clearly a crime has taken place. However, in the vast majority of cases, the owner gives or sells a copy to someone, and a descendant of that copy is what ends up being repackaged or copied for free. In this case, the problem was not that someone "took someone's work and repackaged it as free", but that the owner already sold the work.
The idea that the owner can sell something and still own it is simply at odds with digital copying. No law will change this, but it's apparently harder to communicate than King Canute's point about the tide was. :)
There's no turning back now, unless there's an international movement to start policing the internet which involves cutting off countries that have been declared piracy havens from the rest of the internet. This, of course, contradicts the principles of the internet.
I'm too much of a moral relativist to think the Pirate Bay is evil. Stalin was evil. George W. Bush is evil. Making something people want (one click access to free information) is not evil. Laws are not inherently good and violating laws is not inherently evil.
I'll admit that it's not practical for all information to suddenly be free, but in the long run, information will be free. In the meanwhile, people like you and me get to argue about how free our information should be. This debate is part of the process of freeing our information.
Would you tell PG that Viaweb should've been free? Why? Because it's a service? There's no fundamental difference between a service and a piece of desktop software, except you can't steal it.
In a society where everyone has access to free software and an internal moral compass is the only thing that deters us from piracy, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to release desktop software with no service component.
People in the music industry have been doing their best to stretch the despised word "stealing" over onto this new behavior they want to discourage, but that doesn't make it so.
At best it's a metaphor to call illicit copying "stealing," but really more of a lie.
But I don't understand. Let's say Wal-Mart is selling a chair. Some guy comes in and steals the chair. Wal-Mart "forgoes some revenue they feel their entitled to" because of the missing chair. Except wait, they were legally entitled to that revenue, same with music's licensing agreements. The only difference is you can't prove that someone that stole music would've bought it if he didn't have the option to steal it.
..So because it's a gray area it's not stealing? Making up a new word to call the behavior just to make everyone feel better seems like a bad idea.
Imagine if you had a machine that could reproduce something from a photograph of it. You could then go to a shop and take a photo of a chair, and reproduce yourself a chair from it. But the shop wouldn't take an actual loss in that case.
There's nothing gray about that difference. If you steal a chair, the value of their inventory decreases by one chair, and if you merely reproduce one from a photo, it remains the same.
Nor do we need to make up a new word for the behavior. The English word is "copying." It's centuries old at least, and the behavior, in the case of manuscripts, goes back millennia.
So I'm not proposing we use a new word to make everyone feel better. I'm proposing we continue to use the existing word, instead of the one the music industry is trying to get us to switch to to make everyone feel worse.
Let's look at it from another angle. Let's say someone paints a nice painting of a hand scrunching up a piece of cloth. If you think about it, an original painting is a form of artificial DRM. It's artificially more valuable than a copy, which causes implicit DRM.
But let's say it wasn't. For whatever reason, people just didn't feel like the originals were worth paying for. What do the artists do who want to make a living that way, if they're not good at other skills yet? Maybe they've devoted their whole life to painting. It puts a lot of creative people out of business for no good reason. It's not because their work isn't valuable, it's just because people can copy it.
Do you think they should be protected?
A little post-modernist theory, just to add fuel to the fire. People have been struggling with the issues surrounding cheap and easy reproduction since the 30s - but art has survived. It just changes.
It's fine with me if people want to use the phrase "illegal copying," but they should understand that they're on swampy semanic ground, because the meaning of "illegal" fluctuates depending what laws the music and movie industries have most recently bribed their pet congressmen to pass.
How to encourage young artists is a totally separate question. However, I will say (having been one) that most social-engineering type approaches go badly wrong.
:)
Did a monk making a copy of a manuscript "take control" of it? Not as most people use the word "control."
By "control" of something, I mean the ability to decide what happens to it. A monk copying a manuscript doesn't take control of the original, but he is able to then decide what happens to that information. That's what's being taken.
In the case of a monk I would guess spreading a religious text wouldn't be a problem for the person who gave it to him. But when someone copies the latest Harry Potter manuscript the author/publishers do have a problem, because they are losing something. As they can no longer control what happens to that content their ownership is diminished. And when someone's ownership is taken from them against their wishes, what else would you call that, other than "stealing"?
Web applications are one way to solve the problem of "how do I sell use of software without making the copy they're using easily copied". Other ways include, for example, DRM, but web applications are a far more robust solution than DRM, for the class of applications they can provide solutions for.
No, web applications are not a panacea. But some business model will work, and finding that business model is far more profitable than attempting to legislate a hold on digital copying. If there's some particular type of thing for which there is no profitable method of distribution, then that thing won't be produced for profit. Law can distort this to a degree, but such distortions always produce more problems than they solve. The market always wins. :)
..But because it's so easily copied, it's not really worth anything unless the laws enforce it, which can be heavy-handed. So I don't know the right balance.