[LINK] In other news....

[Craig Sanders]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2007 at 08:00:50AM +1000, Stilgherrian wrote:
> Craig, I think the real problem here is that your emotional engagement
> with the issue is causing you to assume that because I spoke about
> some aspects of this issue I'm holding many other beliefs connected
> with them.

actually, i suspect it is you that has an emotional engagement with the issue
- perhaps because your income is at least partially dependant on copyright
income.

i'm more interested in the principle of the issue - which is that
rebranding copyright infringement as theft, and especially corrupting
government to externalise the expense of enforcing a CIVIL matter by
making it a criminal matter is just plain wrong.

that corruption is the crime. it causes massive harm to everyone in
society, compared to the non-harm caused by an individual who infringes
copyright for personal use.

> > no, i'll read it in the bookshop.  theft?
> 
> Not "theft", though certainly a breach of the agreed social contract about
> what happens in bookshops. If you want to read it once without paying, you
> go to the library (see above).

depends.  some bookshops even encourage it by having a cafe and comfy chairs.

my partner and i owned a bookshop for 2 years. customers who read
but don't buy are bloody annoying(*) but i would never have even
considered having them charged with theft. allowing people to browse
(aka "try-before-they-buy") is an unavoidable - even essential - part of
the sales process.

(*) but not anywhere near as annoying as the mothers who assume that
you're a free child-minding service (even for children as young as 2 or
3) and try to sneak out and dump their kids on you while they go to the
supermarket.


> > no, i'll try buy before i buy by downloading it - if it's any good, i'll buy
> > it.  theft?
> 
> Well this is where books are different from digital copies of films. And
> this is what the law has to explore.
> 
> What's wrong, I believe, if your unilateral assumption that you should be
> able to do this without consideration of what the other party in the
> transaction would like. If you don't like the deal they're offering, you're
> welcome not to take it up.

my assumption is based on the credo "do what you want as long as it doesn't
harm anyone".

no matter how hard i try, i can not see ANY harm whatsoever in
downloading or copying something that an individual copier would never
have purchased anyway.

sure, i see significant harm in commercial, for-profit copyright
infringement....but not in personal, individual copying.

in fact, almost everyone i know who copies stuff (music in particular)
uses it as an informal, unauthorised try-before-you-buy scheme. if they
like it, they buy it. if they don't, they delete it. either way, no harm
is done.  so there are two possible outcomes:

1. no sale is made. no loss (no harm) because there wouldn't have been
one anyway.

2. a sale is made. net gain for the author because the sale wouldn't
have been made without the trial usage.


> In every single one of these examples you're unilaterally deciding that it's
> going to be a different deal than the one which was first offered. In ANY
> social exchange, YOU can't unilaterally decide what it is. It has to be an
> agreement.

i thought you said that borrowing from a friend/library was OK? that
reading in a bookshop was dodgy but OK? that waiting for a discount was
OK? that leaves only one out of the four example which your criticism
*might* apply to.

that's hardly "every single one of those examples". more like "one of,
maybe, but it's debatable".


> If you don't like the deal on offer, you're welcome to decline.

i'll tell that to my slaves - if they dont want to work for nothing,
they're welcome to starve and be whipped.


> Something bad HAS been done. Someone has ignored the way that as social
> animals we negotiate exchange: offer made -> possible counter-offer made ->
> both sides accept [handshake / contact signed] -> exchange takes place.

that's a very simplistic model - naive almost to the point of being
Libertarian.

> What's happened here is that instead of the second party accepting the
> initial offer or making a counter-offer, they've unilaterally decided
> "Bugger the deal, I'll your stuff anyway on my terms without getting an
> agreement from you."
> 
> Bzzzt! Wrong, that's not how the process goes.
> 
> The tribe says they must be punished.

no, "the tribe" doesn't. the tribe as a whole has no problem with
sharing and, in fact, "tribe members" are often surprised when informed
that such sharing is allegedly somehow wrong.

> I agree that it shouldn't be called "piracy" or "theft". But I think
> we need a word that more strongly indicates that social rules have
> been broken than the rather lame "copyright infringement".

one major trouble with your interpretation, though, is that you're
assuming that it is the copyright infringer who has broken the social
rules. that is simply not true - it is the copyright/patent industries
who have broken the social rules, inflicting their preferred version
of the rules on the rest of us by corrupting government to introduce
legislation that suits them.

borrowing and sharing, especially of information, has always been a
common element of human interaction. it is only in recent centuries (and
particularly the last decade or two) that THAT social rule has been
systematically transgressed.


a second major problem with your interpretation is that you are
presuming that copyright is a natural right, rather than a short-term
government granted monopoly (a monopoly granted in order to promote and
encourage the arts, not as any kind of recognition of a natural right of
posession). i.e. your false presumption is that information is something
that can actually be owned.

> This whole issue is often perceived as being about Big Bad Corporations
> screwing over the little people who just want to watch movies or use
> software or whatever. And of course that's party true, because the Big Bad
> Corporations are the ones with government friends and can use words like
> "piracy" to frame the debate.

more importantly, they can lobby government to turn a civil matter (where THEY
bear the expense of enforcing their copyright) into a criminal matter (where
we, the public, bear the expense of enforcing their copyright).

and it's not "partly true", it's "mostly true".

> However the "content producers" (ugh!) are also little people -- like
> my partner who's a photographer. Creating one image for final use
> might take days of work -- a couple of half-day sessions exploring
> the theme, processing many images, choosing, improving etc before
> there's a final image which cab be printed and framed or inserted into
> a magazine.

and who is the likely infringer of your partner's copyright? an
individual using the photo for personal, not-for-profit reasons, or a
business (e.g. newspaper, magazine) infringing for financial gain?

there is a huge difference between commercial copyright infringement,
and non-commercial infringement.

craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>

Acid -- better living through chemistry.