what happens if SOPA passes?

Here's a slightly-less-near-future scenario. You're on the sofa and you want to watch Bridesmaids 3.

1. You get up and/or grab your device (you only need one), and you face a choice between pushing button A and getting what you want for free and pushing button B and getting exactly the same thing for a few cubits. No appreciable difference in simplicity or time involved.

2. Without getting off your arse, you press a button on the remote and watch Bridesmaids 3 for free. Of course.

― Little GTFO (contenderizer), Thursday, 19 January 2012 12:21 (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

That is not a reasonable scenario imo, given that button A does not and has never existed.

like what would you consider 'spread of information w/ zero transaction costs' pre-20th century?

yeah, i agree and said something earlier. what we're seeing with file sharing can't be easily compared to other things because it's so radically different in kind. still think it's instructive to think about how few examples there are in the world of things we pay for that we could just as easily get for free.

well when you phrase it like that, tons of stuff. I paid someone to make me a sandwich tonight (note: not subway) etc. etc. I think schlaf's right in principle, that people will pay for convenience, but the question is whether that convenience margin will always exist.

Think the margin is only getting wider. I have bought albums off iTunes on my phone when I already own them on CD and am too damn lazy to get out of bed and rip them and sync.

And the iPhone it's basically impossible to download MP3s outside the store, so any TV on the same model is never going to have a Button A

Also people still buy books when there are libraries. It only takes a small margin of hassle.

I have bought albums off iTunes on my phone when I already own them on CD and am too damn lazy to get out of bed and rip them and sync

i have done this (although not when i was in bed)

yeah but will people still buy books when they can torrent them in 3 seconds / 'online borrow from the library' / etc. xp

That is not a reasonable scenario imo, given that button A does not and has never existed.

but it will, imo. within the next decade, absent some massive intervention on behalf of copyright holders, i suspect that it will be much, much easier to find and download almost any kind of "content" imaginable. i mean, think about where we were a decade ago relative to where we are now. there's no reason to think those trends won't continue.

what's the equivalent case on which your assumption is based? is there anything that people have long paid a lot for that they've long been easily able to get for free in exactly the same form (i.e., without sacrificing perceptible quality)?

bottled water

Not that it's really important but, I closed my album share site down. After reading this thread and keeping in mind all of the great reissue labels doing great work, I really can't provide links with whole rips of records with a good conscience, even if they aren't in print. I'm going to redo my site and only post a few songs, with links of how to find the records if they are in print. I created it thinking people would go out and look for records and buy more if they knew there is more music to be found and discover. I don't really know anymore. I think I just ended up giving away a lot of free music.

/That is not a reasonable scenario imo, given that button A does not and has never existed./

but it will, imo. within the next decade, absent some massive intervention on behalf of copyright holders, i suspect that it will be much, much easier to find and download almost any kind of "content" imaginable. i mean, think about where we were a decade ago relative to where we are now. there's no reason to think those trends won't continue.

It was arguably easier a decade ago with Napster than it has been with everything until Spotify came along. And it's legal.

Seems to me if you have the servers and software chops and content you need to make something equivalent to iTunes, you are either going to take them on and charge for it, or you are going to get sued into dust.

what! the dark underworld is better than ever xp

I can torrent some obscure french movie today

books in the library example is interesting. sandwich too. i'd argue that what we buy when we buy a book is not just a reading experience, but ownership. library does not offer that.

still, we do pay for a lot of services, even when we have the ability to do those things for ourselves. i'd argue, however, that we usually pay for services only when the work involved is substantial. therefore we pay people to prepare our food, but not to tie our shoes. difficulty levels on the internet more resemble the latter than the former.

Dunno about that. You can buy and pay more for pre-grated cheese, ffs

iatee otm on the depth and capacity of the dark underworld of today vs. the napster era. so much more available, so much easier to find and get.

okay, prepared food granted. lot of these examples are food-related, i notice. tempted so say that it proves more about people's willingness to cook than anything else.

bottled water covered a while back. its market dominance is a fairly recent phenomenon, and it's unique as far as i can tell. wouldn't bet a lot on that model.

I can torrent some obscure french movie today

this might be a ridiculous question, but did the music or film industry ever have a problem with individuals selling used copies of their products?

I agree w/ you overall ct and I think in the long-run we can expect the convenience margin to shrink. like, when I was a kid, computers were this complicated crazy thing that my parents were afraid of, these days my dad sends me attachments from his iphone etc. etc. could I teach him how to dl obscure french film torrents in about 2 minutes? yes.

iatee otm on the depth and capacity of the dark underworld of today vs. the napster era. so much more available, so much easier to find and get.

Nowadays it's like a nightmare of finding the right tracker, getting an invite off someone, getting in, keeping yr ratio up, etc. will pay quite a lot to avoid all that. Oink was the high point for the dark side.

Usenet can gtf.

To continue the food analogy, I think this is a more accurate scenario:

A) you get off the couch, walk in to subway, have the sandwich artist make the sandwich to your specifications, pay for it and eat the sandwich

B) from the comfort of your couch, you pick up your tv remote, press a button, and katy perry drowns

http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ly09ouvTYE1qcb5fko1_500.png
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some people seem to be vastly overstating the level of difficulty involved in dealing with torrents and the "dark net". For one thing, i'm not sure why you would even use torrents in most cases. You can get a download of the vast majority of albums in ten seconds with a .rar search in google and the same applies to movies more or less. It's really not that far off just pushing a button

could I teach him how to dl obscure french film torrents in about 2 minutes? yes.

― iatee, Thursday, 19 January 2012 12:50 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Including the torrent client, the suite of codecs, the port forwarding, how to find a copy that has English audio/subtitles and how to avoid being sued? In two minutes?

ok like 5 mins tops

You can get a download of the vast majority of albums in ten seconds with a .rar search in google and the same applies to movies more or less. It's really not that far off just pushing a button

― Number None, Thursday, 19 January 2012 14:05 (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

"Download NOW"
click
"ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT"
click
"Sign up NOW for PREMIUM with FAST downloads or click HERE for FREE DOWNLOAD"
click
"ADVERTISEMENT ADVERTISEMENT"
click
"Download NOW"
click
"9.2 kb/s 4 hours remaining"
wait
"File downloaded"
open
"un film de Michael Bay"

you suck at the internet dude

my dad already downloaded 5 obscure french movies btw

he's pretty psyched

Please Enter Captcha
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http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ly09ouvTYE1qcb5fko1_500.png
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this might be a ridiculous question, but did the music or film industry ever have a problem with individuals selling used copies of their products?

― JacobSanders, Wednesday, January 18, 2012 5:48 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

yes they did, tried to go after used CD retailers in the 90's and that was just one of a long list of beefs

Recently I read something about them trying to shut down PIANOLAS, if that's true this has been going on a while

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100712/18325210185.shtml

If you're a student of copyright history, you know that the 1909 Copyright Act in the US was driven in large part due to fear over a new-fangled technology that was going to make copying music so easy that musicians wouldn't be able to make any money any more. Yes, that's right, that dastardly player piano, with its automated paper piano rolls that could play songs without musicians. The fear was so great that lots of lobbying was done of Congress, leading to the 1909 Copyright Act, which brought about compulsory licensing on mechanical rights.

hell of too long; don't read, i beg you

in gaming, cross-platform incompatibility challenges the supposed moral and ethical arguments against piracy. or at least this one: "digital piracy represents theft, in the form of lost sales (or ~potential~ income)." like, say i know a guy that has copy of a game---we'll call it skymir, a spacestation rpg---that is not available for purchase on (ie is systematically incompatible with) his chosen platform. if it was, he'd have paid for it (this is a hypothetical that exerts no influence on the argument i'm making, fwiw).

anyway, he has this game, and it works. it works because someone modified their maybe-purchased, maybe-pirated copy of the game in such a way that it plays nice with the otherwise-incompatible gaming system, and this someone made it available on the internet, for free. so this guy downloads it, and likes it, and is then targeted by the company that made it, and charged with piracy. nb - i am not sure that this has even happened, but

we have to now consider who is guilty of what, and why it would be at all justifiable for the gaming company to feel aggrieved in any sense. is the guy guilty of piracy? not really: he downloaded what to him, via the magic of GUI abstraction, was a Complete and Functional application---it just worked. so Gaming Company can't rightly say that he even has Their Thing (plz, legal eagles, i dare you to wade into this thorny metaphysical mess). i suppose they could say that the guy was ~party~ to theft/piracy of Their Thing; prosecuting this would be like arresting people for accepting mix CDs from their friends that had just one track of pirated music that they knew was pirated. abetting!

also, the gaming company wasn't currently producing---and had no public plans for---Their Thing for the guy's platform. they did not lose a sale in this act of piracy. the gaming company's financial well-being has been impacted in ~no way at all~, unless you feel comfortable penalizing the guy for hurting the bottom-lines of all the platforms he didn't purchase at the time of his gaming platform decision.

ok so maybe it was an act of patent or trademark infringement. it'd be insane to say that the guy did it; is the guy that buys a pickup with calvin pissing on a FORD logo committing trademark infringement? or would it be copyright? what about someone that puts an exact-duplicate ford engine in a chevy and then sells it? is the ~buyer~ guilty of patent infringement? waht?

it all comes down to the assumption that digitally replicable stuff can be legitimately---fucking ontologically---commodified. the ACT OF EXPERIENCING some replication of human effort, somewhere, possibly at the exact same time as someone else, is not the same as the act of possessing a unit of material substance brought into circulation from necessarily limited reserves (nb this is not a gold std argument). fungible commodities may be interchangeable, but they cannot be duplicated, amplified, almost instantaneously, and at a cost (in another fungible commodity) that is mathematically insignificant. digital stuff can.

sorta lost my train of thought there but q e fukkin d i guess??

also, the gaming company wasn't currently producing---and had no public plans for---Their Thing for the guy's platform. they did not lose a sale in this act of piracy. the gaming company's financial well-being has been impacted in ~no way at all~, unless you feel comfortable penalizing the guy for hurting the bottom-lines of all the platforms he didn't purchase at the time of his gaming platform decision.

The devil's avocado would say that (a) he could have bought the console in question and the game, and (b) that IP infringement is IP infringement regardless of the motive or circumstance.

Now if you were to apply exactly the same argument to a game that's arbitrarily not allowed to be sold in, say, New Zealand, purely because the publisher couldn't be arsed making it available there AND took active measures to prevent its existence there in any form (including through the use of the console's region locking), the legal defence would be almost identical but you would be hard pressed to find a single person who would take sides against the person who got hold of it.

The reason I'm bringing that up is that the latter example is utterly indefensible, yet is single-handedly responsible for a healthy slice of the world's piracy.

http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/18/google-collected-4-5-million-anti-sopa-signatures-today/

a link on the Google homepage and thousands of shares have produced a mind-blowing 4.5 million signatures on their anti-SOPA petition.

need to (a) stop (b) numbering everything

I think gbx's last paragraph is key

sorta lost my train of thought there but q e fukkin d i guess??

:-/

gbx's philosophical argument is interesting, but i'm not sure it's convincing. we might argue that since a new thing (a duplicate digital copy) is necessarily created in the process of downloading a file, if the data being copied is someone else's intellectual property and they have not granted permission, then a form of infringement must have occurred. unauthorized copies of owned intellectual property have been manufactured and distributed. crucially, they have been "manufactured" not by a single bootlegger, but instead by everybody who has downloaded them. the closing ontological non-materiality argument is defeated by the same general logic we use to protect patents, trademarks and copyrights.

Man, have I ever missed ILX.

Have we talked anywhere about how downloading shit illegally is fraught with all kinds of spyware risks?

Embarrassed to say that I just got around to signing that petition

patents, trademarks and copyrights are about preventing someone else from profiting off yr intellectual/creative labor - the bigger picture problem is that nobody will be able to profit from some forms intellectual/creative labor

xp to ct

forms of

another take, not necessarily one I endorse but:

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/internet-regulation-the-economics-of-piracy/

Megaupload shut down, employees indicted!
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/worlds-largest-file-sharing-sites-megauploadcom-shut-company-15396031#.TxhxZ_m9YqR

^^^ Just coming in to post that.