No, most do it because they think they can make money off it.
Movies are expensive to make, and without the expectation of making that money back (or more - its an investment), why would make the movie? Books can take years to write (cough, GRRM), and the authors are frequently paid up front for the book. Would GRRM still be writing ASOIF if he wasn't able to make a living off it? Perhaps, perhaps not. Paying him makes it a lot more likely.
I have a cabinet full of discs holding movies I could more conveniently just have downloaded. I chose not to as I believe that this is not an acceptable behaviour for me.
Now lets just assume that people like me become a really small minority and the only way to use digital distribution effectively would be to implement DRM in its fullest draconian beauty.
For this I'll say that if this is the only way to have a digital distribution, we should let it go.
First of, we will only loose the digital distribution, that did not contain any monetary interest anyway.
It would not mean that there is no money to made be in the movies. There are still cinemas. Yes, we will loose convenience, but this is in my opinion a small price for the greater good if it has to come to this.
Second, the financing model assumed here is not the only option.
Many movies get made, at least in Europe, based on the money from the culture funds, national or private. Perhaps the budgets of these movies are not really huge, but interesting work still gets done.
There also exists the kickstarter model. Nowhere it is told that the only way to finance a big budget movie should be by to movie studios. Perhaps it would not work for all the ideas, but I can see it working for novel and promising ones. It is possible that the quality of the work will actually increase.
But copyright and DRM is about forcing people to pay - this has nothing to do with being able to make a living or not.
Which, in my opinion, is not an unreasonable thing. If you want to consume the content, you pay the content creator in their currency of choice (be it github stars, their name immortalized in an attribution clause, or cash).
And even with all that, we don't guarantee you an income, we only offer you help hurting people who don't pay you. You can still go broke and nobody cares, which I think shows that it's not about helping creators or rewarding hard work.
I consider doing this as a gesture of politeness, but nothing that should be enforced by violence.
I disagree. The rights of a content creator are, after all, enshrined in the constitution. That's a bit more than "being polite". That said, the right of the public to have access after a defined period of time is also enshrined, so that does need to be taken into account.
> nothing that should be enforced by violence
Thats quite the jump - violence? I'm going to make the assumption that you're referring to the idea that no law should be made that you aren't willing to resort to violence to support.
Even under that assumption, I am OK with this being the law of the land. I believe that a person has the right to demand compensation for access their work, regardless of the form that work takes.
All laws are enforced by violence, that is what makes them law.
Law is force, Force is violence. Every law, from Jay Walking, to First Degree Murder is based by the threat that an armed agent from the government will enforce that rule upon you.
Not really - a law is a codification of desired human behavior.
> an armed agent from the government will enforce that rule upon you.
This is definitely at the extreme end of the list of possibilities. The enforcement of those laws can take any number of forms, but most do not involve armed agents. Most involve certified letters and negotiations between lawyers in front of an (unarmed) judge. This is especially true when we're discussing copyright (with the occasional exception proving the rule). Even speeding tickets are handled more and more frequently by mail.
Armed agents are typically reserved for cases where harm to either a body or a property are possible.
No, that's a standard.
> This is definitely at the extreme end of the list of possibilities.
No, it's in the middle of the inevitable steps of escalation. A speeding ticket becomes an armed agent hitting you with a stick and jail time if you wait long enough. As does a court judgment over an illegally downloaded song.
At which point you've broken a separate law, and have been held in contempt of court. Ditto the copyright infringement example.
If you break the law, and then willfully break the law again, you can't expect to be treated with leniency.
>>Most involve certified letters and negotiations between lawyers in front of an (unarmed) judge.
While the judge himself may be unarmed, he has armed protection often several armed protectors at the ready.
And if you ignore the commandment of the judge he/she has no problem ordering those armed agent to bring violence upon you to compel your obedience
Which is drastically different from an armed agent coming to get you. I know of COOs of corporations who have armed bodyguards - does that make them a direct threat to you?
> if you ignore the commandment of the judge
If you ignore a judge, then you're breaking a separate law, and being held in contempt of court. At which point, you're playing in a whole separate ballgame than if you were caught speeding.
This is the game libertarians play with 'Initiation of force'.
You're saying that you're allowed to disagree, can negotiate with an unarmed judge, won't be hurt, etc, but then if you ignore a ruling - boy howdy you initiated violence against the state and they have a right to hurt you.
If I'm not free to ignore the outcome of the first issue (speeding, as you say) then the men with guns have metaphorically been there all along.
Stop dodging and just admit it - our laws are backed by the threat of lethal force. All of them, from murder down to jaywalking or posting speed-trap data on twitter.
In what society are you free to ignore the penalties for breaking the law without consequence?
Saying that the lethal violence is at the forefront of our legal system because you're not free to ignore the law with impunity seems quite disingenuous.
I won't disagree that ultimately our laws are backed by the threat of lethal force. All societies have this same reality, though. Even in a pure anarchy, violence is the ultimate deciding factor.
Violence is certainly not the first tool of enforcement, however. Most US citizens can speed, or park illegally, or download a movie via BT, all without fear of being killed as an outcome.
Outside of these types of laws, enforcement of other laws like Copyright, Drug Possession, etc are unethical initiation of force.
Here is a quote from what many consider a foundation book on libertarian legal theory
http://bastiat.org/en/the_law.html#SECTION_G004
The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all.
This is key for a few reasons. By rephrasing everything from 'X is wrong because ...' to an issue of the right transgressed you're entirely sidestepping the issue of victimless crimes. Second, they're by nature proportional.
> only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do
Right, a collective is the sum of its members so it has their rights and no more.
This firmly roots all power in the individual. It's semantically incorrect to write a libertarian law allowing actions that people themselves don't have the right to perform. Again, sidestepping entirely the tyranny of the majority.
It's not perfect, but it's a far better base to start from.
Color me crazy or something, but it's the possibility of being shot that stands out.
It's extreme only in its brutality, not its rarity.
> Even speeding tickets are handled more and more frequently by mail.
Right, but as soon as you don't agree with the outcome the men with guns are right there.
> a law is a codification of desired human behavior.
A self-help book is a codification if desired human behavior. (The author usually doesn't threaten to beat/jail/kill you if you don't follow their advice.)
Law is a set of rules and punishments.
What I essentially said was that nobody should be forced to work for unfair compensation. If this compensation can not be reached, we should accept that there will be less work created, instead of enforcing this compensation at the expense of our other more important civil rights.
I'm not aware of any penal servitude in the United States.
Further the sole reason they may use my software it because it is free, any attempt to even charge $1 for it exceeds the monetary value of the software.
If you really are willing to change to a different software (or see/listen a different movie/music) just because you are not willing to pay a dollar, then the value of that software/song/movie really is lower than a dollar.
How is that controversial?
Last I check no one is being forced to create movies, music, books, software, or any other creative works.
I work in software development. I have had commercial projects fail miserably, I have spent 100's of hours on projects that have earned me $0, why because while I valued them clearly no one else saw enough value in them to provide me with money for them. I have no right to compensation for that labor. I only have the right to ask people to compensate me, if they choose not to then I miscalculated the market.