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[sneakey pete]

You know what I think? maybe humanity as a whole doesn't deserve free and equal access to information. If they did, it'd mean that... what, the code i'm spending a year working on with the help of a very knowledgeable professor who has spend years studying, and resources the University has spent a lot of money aquiring, would be given to free to what... people who sit around on internet message boards all day and talk political theory? that seems even less fair than the current capitalistic system.

[SalmonGod]

I like when people come onto message boards to belittle other people who they only know through interaction on message boards, and thus feel it safe to assume that they don't do anything but hang out on message boards.

[G-Flex]

You know what I think? maybe humanity as a whole doesn't deserve free and equal access to information. If they did, it'd mean that... what, the code i'm spending a year working on with the help of a very knowledgeable professor who has spend years studying, and resources the University has spent a lot of money aquiring, would be given to free to what... people who sit around on internet message boards all day and talk political theory? that seems even less fair than the current capitalistic system.

You're doing it wrong. You can't nail yourself to the cross while standing on your high horse. That's just messy.

[sneakey pete]

Ok, apologies for trying to belittle you and other people. That was uncalled for. However, my opinion in general about copyright still stands. Theft by revenue loss etc.

[Hitty40]

Is Copyright Infringement Theft?

I don't know, is masturbating a sin?

[Bauglir]

The loss isn't revenue, it's the effort you put in. There's a significant difference, and it's one that is critical to the debate. There's definitely merit to the argument that you deserve compensation of some kind for the effort you put into learning how to code, how to model whatever it is you're working on, and actually constructing the program. There's also merit to the argument that you lose nothing from people who wouldn't have paid you anyway, while they gain (and therefore piracy is a net good). They're not mutually exclusive, really.

The solution, at a guess, lies in what sort of compensation you're entitled to. Some level of respect, and the ability to live in a society where you can get the information you need to create more and better such programs more efficiently, would probably be an important part of that, but as SalmonGod says, in a world where you need to get paid in order to live, that's not enough. There really do need to be some fundamental revisions to the economics somewhere.

[Montague]

Copyright infringement takes out a lot of the incentive to create orginal works. If a company's research and trade secrets are freely given up so other companies or individuals can make infinite copies of it, it makes it pointless for a company to persue any orginal research, since they'd just be giving their rivals money. It also harms smaller businesses who would just have their intellectual property replicated by larger firms with more capital. Even communtarian governments recognize the need to protect intellectual property, because without it, progress slows to a crawl when the incentive to develop is removed.

You can't really say that the information or intellectual property should be free, because it isn't, it'd just have been paid for by somebody else. Research and original works cost money to develop after all. There is a place for free exchange of information, but it doesn't mean all information should be freely distributed.

Intellectual property laws are not just about teenagers in their mom's basement downloading music from pirate bay or whatever, the implications of it have a greater scope and any laws about intellectual property must have universal applicability in a free democratic society.

[Nadaka]

Copyright infringement takes out a lot of the incentive to create orginal works. If a company's research and trade secrets are freely given up so other companies or individuals can make infinite copies of it, it makes it pointless for a company to persue any orginal research, since they'd just be giving their rivals money. It also harms smaller businesses who would just have their intellectual property replicated by larger firms with more capital. Even communtarian governments recognize the need to protect intellectual property, because without it, progress slows to a crawl when the incentive to develop is removed.

You can't really say that the information or intellectual property should be free, because it isn't, it'd just have been paid for by somebody else. Research and original works cost money to develop after all. There is a place for free exchange of information, but it doesn't mean all information should be freely distributed.

Intellectual property laws are not just about teenagers in their mom's basement downloading music from pirate bay or whatever, the implications of it have a greater scope and any laws about intellectual property must have universal applicability in a free democratic society.

Trade secrets are not protected by any IP law. Original research is covered by patent law.

You can't even say that copyright infringement harms small businesses. Every dollar that isn't spent on copies of media can be spent at small businesses, even media companies.

None of that matters to this topic though because none of that is theft.

[SalmonGod]

Fun fact:  I probably wouldn't have my degree if not for piracy. 

I began my college career in computer science and found I wasn't cut out for it.  I switched to New Media (basically digital arts) and studied a little bit of everything (cinematography, game design, audio engineering, etc).  Through these years, I had a 0-3 year old son and a job, and campus was a half hour drive away.  I couldn't afford to spend a lot of time there, so I needed access to all the expensive software I was studying at home.  I pirated it all.  Almost every student who couldn't spend most of their waking hours on campus did, unless they had tens of thousands of dollars lying around to spend on software that they only needed for 4 months, which some actually did.

I took an interest in 3d, but didn't really take off with it for a long time.  Most of my classmates produced better work than me.  Towards the end of the 2nd class dealing with max/maya, a classmate showed me a new program he was toying around with.  ZBrush.  It blew me away.  I pirated a copy and quickly fell in love with it.  I bought a legitimate copy a few months later (for only $500, when most major 3d softwares were many times that price).  It was the only digital sculpting software at that point, and hadn't been around for very long.  The school wasn't teaching anything about it.  So I learned mostly by frequenting the forums at zbrushcentral.com. 

A couple years later (my second to last semester) I took the highest level 3d class, at the same time as the department 3d guru was incorporating ZBrush for the very first time.  I ended up helping him teach portions of it, because I knew the software better than him, thanks to all the professionals on the forums providing tons of free instruction.  We had to make a dinosaur as close to photo-realistic detail as possible, and he taught by going through the process with us.  My model ended up better than his.  He had me show my work off to a class full of graduate students who gave me a huge round of applause.  I then excused myself because I was late getting home to my family, and they gave me another larger round of applause, because they couldn't believe I'd produced such a thing while caring for a family.

None of this would have been possible without a bunch of software pirating, and generous direct interaction with people who did 3d work professionally or even sold instructional DVDs but enjoyed spreading their knowledge online for free.  Now I have the potential to build a career with these skills, which not only means being productive for society but also that I will eventually have real cause and ability to purchase those other softwares I pirated (if the economy ever doesn't suck) when I probably never would have otherwise. 

[Nadaka]

I posted this in another thread. but everyone needs to listen to it here as well.

http://boingboing.net/2011/12/27/the-coming-war-on-general-purp.html

Yes, I know that it is 1 hour, the speech itself is half an hour. It is not a waste of time.

[GlyphGryph]

However, my opinion in general about copyright still stands. Theft by revenue loss etc.

And has been demonstrated time and again, revenue loss is neither a sufficient nor necessary component of theft, and using it as not only the central but sole component of your argument renders your argument entirely invalid. Essentially, you are saying "it is theft because I want it to be" and nothing more.

[G-Flex]

However, my opinion in general about copyright still stands. Theft by revenue loss etc.

And has been demonstrated time and again, revenue loss is neither a sufficient nor necessary component of theft, and using it as not only the central but sole component of your argument renders your argument entirely invalid. Essentially, you are saying "it is theft because I want it to be" and nothing more.

Revenue loss isn't a sufficient or necessary component of piracy, either! People can, do, and will pirate things that they would never actually buy, and also will pirate things prior to purchasing them; strictly speaking, most of the music I've ever purchased, I was introduced to via copyright infringement.

[Montague]

However, my opinion in general about copyright still stands. Theft by revenue loss etc.

And has been demonstrated time and again, revenue loss is neither a sufficient nor necessary component of theft, and using it as not only the central but sole component of your argument renders your argument entirely invalid. Essentially, you are saying "it is theft because I want it to be" and nothing more.

Revenue loss isn't a sufficient or necessary component of piracy, either! People can, do, and will pirate things that they would never actually buy, and also will pirate things prior to purchasing them; strictly speaking, most of the music I've ever purchased, I was introduced to via copyright infringement.

Yeah there is a point there. Its not that every infringed upon product is a direct sale loss. If there was no way to do it for free, they'd never bother buying it either, so revenue losses are hard to measure.

Also wondering, before the internet people could still make copies of music, using a tape recorder and taping songs on the radio and everyone did that. It seems slightly silly to make recording of broadcasted music to be illegal, so why is it illegal when recorded off the internet? I guess there are certain songs radio stations are permitted to play and others you can only hear at a concert or on a CD or whatever, eg, you pay for them.

I think people have a right to make money off their products, but I wonder how much harm this sort of copyright infringement (without the intention of making money of it) really does. I think the industries effected by copyright infringement like this should figure out another model for making a profit, or figure out a way to compete with the (freely available) sources of pirated media, because its pretty clear that pirating isn't going to go away.

[G-Flex]

Also wondering, before the internet people could still make copies of music, using a tape recorder and taping songs on the radio and everyone did that. It seems slightly silly to make recording of broadcasted music to be illegal, so why is it illegal when recorded off the internet?

It's always been illegal to varying degrees, and there's always been some industry backlash. There was a campaign a long time ago called, I believe, "Home Taping is Killing Music"; anti-piracy paranoia isn't new.

We've had "Home Taping is Killing Music", video camera bootlegs in theaters, "Don't Copy that Floppy", and probably a bunch of other copyright infringement/bootlegging issues and responses, all before the Internet came onto the scene... not to mention the godawful tricks used by music distributors to make discs vary from standard as part of ill-advised (or outright horrible, e.g. the Sony "rootkit" scandal) copy protection methods. It all just matters a bit more now because the Internet is so powerful. For instance, home taping isn't the kind of thing you can send goons after, and wasn't as widespread or consequential (or available) as internet-based piracy, being something basically just shared between friends, one of whom encountered the music at least somewhat legitimately in the first place.

[palsch]

https://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2012/pre-1976