12 Feb
2013
12 Feb
'13
5:31 p.m.
On Tue, 2013-02-12 at 14:28 +0000, James Harkins wrote:
Louigi Verona <louigi.verona@...> writes:
In the past I made tons of illegal copies and later I bought the
recordings and software.
Today, no joke, we have informers who sue people in Germany.
I don't make illegal copies anymore, but I also don't buy commercial
music and software anymore.
If somebody wants me to buy software I'll test it as long as I want and
without limits. If somebody wants me to buy vinyl, but there are tons of
licenses that are enforced in a brutal way, I don't want it even as a
donation. The books that are interesting for me are scientific books,
hard to get, coping does cost more than a book, but the books are
already impertinent expensive. I only own a few of such books. There's
no need to make knowledge that expensive, it's poor greed of some
scientists, that are more than just rich.
In my country the graduation often depends to the richness of the
parents and seldom to the skills of the pupils.
Since a lot of people in Germany stopped consuming and using things that
cost too much money, I'm not a freak regarding to this issue, we get
nice new laws. The current law is regarding to broadcasting. For each
habitation the resident needs to pay a large amount of money for radio,
television and computer radio and television, even if you don't own a
radio, television or computer, antenna, Internet connection. If you
aren't homeless you have to pay. You can't imagine the radio and
television broadcasts that are produced with this money. I won't listen
or watch most of it for free, much less I want to pay for that crap.
I like to watch TV, I'm missing watching TV, but most of this
"intellectual content" is crap.
Testing with illegal copies and after it's tested not to use it anymore
or to pay for it, for sure fed more hungry people than the way it's done
today. Today most people are poor and just a few people are rich and
rich also does mean to be able to get more knowledge. In many areas in
Europe 1/4 of the people don't have work or a good education, the other
people who have got full time jobs often still needs to get welfare to
have enough to survive.
There isn't one day without annoying mails from this "click and pay to
use my apple" account. I won an iPad, I'm using it, but I neither buy
applications, nor do I use illegal software.
I don't have a problem with copyrights and strange licenses, but it
would be fair that people don't try to enforce to get money from people
who aren't interested in their "intellectual property", I also don't
pay
for goods that I don't own.
Why do I pay a collecting society, IOW why do I have to pay the
"intellectual property" of other musicians, when I buy empty tapes to
record my own "intellectual property"?
I don't have the impression that consumers rip of artists, coders etc.,
I've got the impression that some artists, coders etc. rip of the
consumers and especially the people who don't consume their stuff.
When I sold my work, I also delivered the ownership of this work. When I
sold a graphic, it would have been unethically for me to still own
nearly all rights for the usage of this graphic.
Always take a look who gets how much money, buy what law, usage of what
license ever and what gets the customer for the money.
Btw. staff sometimes gets less money, staff sometimes pays the
development, not the boss, but all ideas from the staff, that the boss
enables to make billions, is owned by the boss.
Copyright laws and ideas about such laws usually are unbalanced.
I would advice this short book for all those interested in a copyright
debate.http://mises.org/document/3582Although the book is called "Against IP",
the first part gives a very thorough and fair overview
of both sides. The arguments there are much
deeper than the usual "artists
will starveand we will have no music".
I just read through it on a flight. I admit, the first sentences gave me cause
to read it skeptically, by using the term "libertarian" but not as a
pejorative.
Conspicuously absent from his account is the situation of people who earn their
entire living by producing intellectual content. He tries to dismantle concepts
both of intellectual "property" and of contracts to protect an author's
labor,
but has no answers: it's a purely negative exercise. He invokes "fairness"
but,
in his view, if you write a book and I use materials that I own to reproduce the
text and sell it, profiting from work that I couldn't have produced on my own,
this is "fair." It's a silly conclusion: If I sell a copy of someone
else's
work, I could charge roughly the price of, say, a printed novel. If I sell a
sheaf of blank paper for the same cost, it would be fraud. My profits from
selling the copy depend on the value added by another's work. I didn't do the
work myself and I haven't paid for it, but I'd be earning profit based on it. He
has no answer for this. In fact, he simply pretends this scenario either doesn't
exist, or is insignificant. Effectively, he denies that the original author made
any meaningful contribution to the goods from which I'm profiting: It's MY blank
paper, and if I want to use it to copy your work, too bad. My material rights
trump your non-material labor. (Typical libertarian claptrap, blindly following
principles all the way through to stupid results.)
In his defense, he is quite good at reductio ad absurdum argumentation,
extending copyright or contractual protection into situations where the result
really is mad. But he assumes artistic creation is the same, without arguing
why. That's important. Reductio ad absurdum works by analogy. If the analogy is
false, then the absurdity proves nothing.
I wanted to be impressed. I'm not a big fan of copyright myself, and I hoped
this would provide some strong counterarguments. Unfortunately, merely declaring
that the artist's labor has no value worth protecting does not make it so.
I also think the opposition to "reward" that you expressed on your site needs
to
explain why governments and other organizations are slashing arts funding, if it
really is inevitable that societies will provide fair funding for essential
human activities.
I don't think copyright is the answer, but it's also a mistake, I think, to
discard every economic protection of an artist's work because the current forms
of that protection are flawed. "It's a hard problem, so let's not try."
I'm not
buying it.