It's not. It's a problem for all of us. High quality books are an asset for society, and we all should be interested in finding a solution. Not necessarily by enforcing unenforceable rules from previous centuries. But we need something else that works.
A society in which only those with too much time on their hands write books is an intellectually poor one. We need authors who spend full time on producing high quality books, be it on non-fictional educational topic or on fictional entertainment. No worlds-best-expert is going to sit down and spend years of their life compiling a well-written book on a subject, just as little as Tom Cruise is going to shoot the next Top Gun for free (and the rest of the production company as well). We need to find a way, otherwise education will be stuck with outdated material and 5min ad-ridden clips on youtube by non-experts. (No offense, there are lots of experts on youtube, but there is a lot of crap out there too, and a 5 min clip on quantum entanglement just can't compete with a proper book. Whoever disagrees with this has likely watched too many such clips and never consumed a good book.)
That is a real problem, but copyright is not an attempt to solve that problem. Copyright is an attempt to limit the distribution of information throughout society, supposedly to make content creation more financially rewarding. Piracy, on the other hand, is an attempt to increase the distribution of information throughout society, and supposedly makes content creation less financially rewarding.
The problem you describe is real, but neither copyright systems nor piracy (at least according to the popular naive descriptions I provided) are an attempt to solve it. They’re both just choices about whether the distribution of information throughout society or the financial rewards for content creation are more important.
It’s amazing the lengths people go to justify self serving bullshit. The apologetics in this thread are no different than the ones made 20 years ago for stealing music and software. Indie software only escaped because the sass model made piracy hard. Music is in terrible shape and its only saving grace is that it’s also a performance medium.
If piracy makes it so that it doesn’t make much sense to produce novels, it’s the world that’s poorer. Justifying that because it happens or because it’s easy is nothing more than the naturalistic fallacy.
If you learn that a trillion aliens from andromeda were reading your book right now are you horribly upset and graciously harmed by this blatant copyright infringement? What if they instead land and take all the worlds water? Note the difference between the two scenarios?
A lot of defenders of copyright often liken ip violation to theft. I remember a famous campaign where I'm from saying "piracy is theft". This is misinformation and fallacy. Copyright infringement is not theft, and there is no reason it should be treated as such
2. If you're making the argument that theft is limited to tangible things, well, you're entitled to that belief, but generally the consensus is that intangible property is still property. Money is property.
3. If you're making the argument that zero marginal cost items are not private property, that's an extremely radical position that I doubt you actually endorse after thinking about the incentives in a society where that was the dominant view.
The most legitimate argument for large scale copyright theft is eminent domain style seizure on the grounds that it benefits society. I would even endorse a weak version of that argument in narrow, well defined instances. And do. Copyright should expire, and it should definitely be harder to extend. And it should be possible to seize copyright from estates where the creator is no longer living, in certain circumstances, or at least expand fair usage in some graded manner.
That's not what's being argued about though, what people in this thread, and what people who steal music and software used to believe was that those products weren't really property and so they could take them. It's flimsy justification for bad behavior.
The argument is not about tangibility. If you steal someone's virtual money, they still cease to have it.
> If you're making the argument that zero marginal cost items are not private property, that's an extremely radical position
On the contrary, I'd argue that allowing people to literally own numbers is absurd.
Your entire argument boils down to the idea that musicians shouldn't own distribution rights to their work and that sass software licenses should be free. It's a stupid position to hold that falls apart immediately.
So yes, either you're under thirty and haven't thought it through or your ability to reason about this stuff is limited.
Not really. It's about copying not being the same, in benefits and drawbacks, as stealing. If you want to engage in good faith debate, you should acknowledge the difference.
Copying datas/ideas is easy, beneficial to many and not at all clear to always be harmful to society.
The theoretical benefits to society from distributing people's IP for free is that people who otherwise couldn't afford the money for a book or song or piece of software are able to use it.
Of course, it becomes impossible to support yourself as an indie producer of (software/music/literature/etc) in a world where your work can be taken for free. That reduces the number of people who can participate in the creation of that sort of thing to hobbyists and large businesses that are capable of protecting their IP through other avenues.
Getting rid of intellectual property rights is a short sighted exercise and all you end up doing once you've run through the trove of contemporary and historical IP is impoverishing the world to a much greater degree by destroying incentives for creators to create new things.
The only solutions that I've heard defenders come up with is some version of <hand waving> "it doesn't matter, people will still produce art" Yeah, people will produce, but like 1/10th what they could if they can't make a living off it or aren't trust funders.
Current copyright is life of the author + 70, which is too long. Still, even in that situation, those who wouldn't otherwise have access to those books will eventually get it for free as works enter public domain. If you want to argue that we should drastically reduce the length of copyright, I'd agree with you. But pretending that IP theft doesn't matter is naive.
Not a big loss. There's enough art in the world. And things that are not made for money tend to be better quality.
Is this what we want though?
We are flooded with bad quality books, songs, movies, and it is hard to find something worth the time of a consumer who expects quality.
This flood of rubbish is apparently immensely profitable, even while all the copying is going on.
Why would high penalties for copying increase the average quality of production? There would be even more money in the business, attracting even more rubbish production.
Contrary to the above sibling comment, amateurs do not often produce better art than professionals—promising amateurs learn their craft as professionals and tend to produce their best work mid-career. This conflicts with the lay understanding of creative endeavors, of course.
Any examples? Do you believe the widespread availability of stuff on the internet makes it not possible to make a living writing software, books, TV show scripts or creating music?
I agree with you in the sense that distributing stuff on the Internet for free may cause lower revenue of the author than there would be without that. But the author and distributor should be aware of the Internet and its tendency to copy what is of interest and execute marketing/selling strategy to make it work anyway. Many do.
Yes, the conditions are as they are. Literature by dint of being pure text is probably in deep shit, but that's not what we're talking about—we're talking about whether the wide scale tragedy of the commons that is zero-friction IP theft is on balance, a bad thing.
2. No, that’s not the argument I’m making. If someone steals the money on your bank account, you still lose a quantifiable amount of that money. Your private property is being taken. If someone infringes on your copyright, they have infringed on your right to exclusivity to the content, but they have not stolen any of your property.
Note that here, I’m not making a judgment of value. Copyright infringement is a crime under the law of most countries, and it is definitely bad in some systems of values.
But it’s just not stealing. Something can be a crime without being thievery.
As a comparison (not metaphor), say somebody organizes a barbecue in your lawn while you’re absent, without your authorization. They bring their own stuff, they don’t damage anything, and when you come back you don’t even realize they were here.
Did they commit a crime? Yes, they infringed on your property
Did you lose money? Maybe. It may be so that they would have paid you money to use your lawn if they had no choice. Or maybe they wouldn’t have had that barbecue at all.
Did they steal something of yours? No. Their crime is trespassing, not thievery.
3. That’s closer, but distorted. First, I never argued that copyright should be abolished. You are arguing on a weaker version of something I did not even mention. The only thing I was commenting on was that your argument for it was based on calling ip violation thievery, which it is not. Most modern systems of values consider thievery wrong, thus you create an emotional response to copyright by likening the two. But that is not a correct argument because copyright infringement is not thievery.
> and what people who steal music and software used to believe was that those products weren't really property and so they could take them. It's flimsy justification for bad behavior.
Those products didn’t exist before they made illicit copies themselves. If I make a fake Louis Vuitton bag for myself and wear it, I did not steal it. I certainly infringed on the designer’s IP, but my crime is counterfeiting, not thievery.
> that's an extremely radical position that I doubt you actually endorse after thinking about the incentives in a society where that was the dominant view.
Now that’s the interesting part. Now that we have admitted that copyright infringement is not thievery, ie not innately morally wrong in at least some systems of values (and I’m pretty sure it is actually a very recent notion), we can ask ourselves the right question: does it have a positive impact on society? The answer to that is mixed:
- It creates incentives for artists and people who transmit knowledge
- But it also creates inequality in access to culture / knowledge
- And it creates counter-incentives for people to access culture and knowledge. Thus making individuals less learned and knowledgable
No doubt that the first effect largely compensates the 3rd, and that globally it has a good effect on society. Remains that it is not optimal at all.
But can we create a better system of incentives? That’s the real question. My take on that is "probably.".
"Steal" has many meanings and only some of them involve the loss of the thing stolen.
The Oxford American Dictionary provides several examples (I'm using "___" to indicate indentation in the following) that illustrate the range of what can be stolen:
steal | stēl |
verb (past stole | stōl | ; past participle stolen | ˈstōlən | )
1 [with object] take (another person's property) without permission or legal right and without intending to return it: thieves stole her bicycle | (as adjective stolen) : stolen goods | [no object] : she was found guilty of stealing from her employers.
• dishonestly pass off (another person's ideas) as one's own: accusations that one group had stolen ideas from the other were soon flying.
• take the opportunity to give or share (a kiss) when it is not expected or when people are not watching: he was allowed to steal a kiss in the darkness.
• (in various sports) gain (an advantage, a run, or possession of the ball) unexpectedly or by exploiting the temporary distraction of an opponent.
• Baseball (of a base runner) advance safely to (the next base) by running to it as the pitcher begins the delivery: Rickey stole third base.
2 [no object, with adverbial of direction] move somewhere quietly or surreptitiously: he stole down to the kitchen | figurative : a delicious languor was stealing over her.
• [with object and adverbial of direction] direct (a look) quickly and unobtrusively: he stole a furtive glance at her.
noun [in singular]
1 informal a bargain: for $5 it was a steal.
2 mainly North American an act of stealing something: New York's biggest art steal.
• an idea taken from another work: the chorus is a steal from The Smiths' “London”.
• Baseball an act of stealing a base.
• Basketball & Hockey an act of taking possession of the ball or puck from an opponent: point guard Kaleb Joseph finished with eight points, four steals, and seven assists.
PHRASES
steal someone blind
___informal see blind.
steal a march on
___gain an advantage over (someone) by acting before they do: stores that open on Sunday are stealing a march on their competitors.
steal someone's heart
___win someone's love.
steal the show
___attract the most attention and praise.
steal someone's thunder
___win praise for oneself by preempting someone else's attempt to impress. [from an exclamation by the English dramatist John Dennis (1657–1734), who invented a method of simulating the sound of thunder as a theatrical sound effect and used it in an unsuccessful play. Shortly after his play came to the end of its short run he heard his new thunder effects used at a performance of Macbeth, whereupon he is said to have exclaimed: ‘Damn them! They will not let my play run, but they steal my thunder!’.]
> someone stole his intellectual property and distributed it for free
I'm struggling to extend the analogy to books, though. The mental image of a kindergarten teacher reading a book and holding it up for the class to see the illustrations is a bit weak... perhaps theater serves as the post-movie and post-book medium alike.
Until the United States economy no longer recognizes intellectual property rights, this is a critical distinction, whether we're discussing books, music, or proprietary software and hardware designs.
The labor theory of value is obviously complete bunk, but it sticks around anyway because it's a central tenet of Marxism.
More likely: it sticks around as a tenet of Marxism because it's a thing many people find intuitively plausible. "I did all this hard work, so I should be rewarded" is a pretty natural thing to think.
Is it really? I rolled a boulder up and down a hill all day, pay me.
"Nobody asked you to do that and nothing productive was accomplished. Nobody will pay you for that."
But I worked really hard! Labor creates value, therefore I am entitled to payment.
Whether you're rolling a boulder or writing a book, your labor hasn't created value unless you've actually produced something other people subjectively believe to be valuable. The subjective theory of value is common sense. The labor theory of value is obvious bullshit. It might fool children but for an adult to believe it requires brainwashing.
If you want to volunteer for homeless shelters or something, then you can sleep sound with the knowledge that what you're doing is worth a great deal to people who can't afford to compensate you for it. But writing books nobody wants to buy is not that sort of selfless act of charity.
This is also the crux of why I cannot understand how people follow LTV. It just doesn't make sense upon even the slightest introspection.
To rebut this, you need to either argue that this won't happen, suggest an alternative incentive for books to get written, or maybe even disagree that this result is bad.
Making books less profitable would suppress the production and make the quality stand out. A net positive for humanity.
If someone wants to release his book for free he can do it, we have a law that protects those that do not.
> Just because you spent time doing something doesn't give you the right to deny everyone else their right of sharing information.
He doesn't deny anything to anyone, as I said before if someones wants to write books for free he can do it and he can share it with everyone. You deny his right to get paid for his work.
> You deny his right to get paid for his work.
I think he (and me) is saying there is no such right in general. There is only "copyright" - the right to distribute the copies, or sell the license. But there is no right to get paid.
What a crappy comment. Sad that there are people whose only apparent ability is to hurt, destroy, and consume.
What a convenient way to make oneself feel comfortable living a moral-free life. Like as if this changes anything for the end result that someone stole something, and someone else has to foot the bill for that. You’re arguing off the premise that „the distributor is big anyway, so stealing from them doesn’t hurt anyone”. And the premise that it won’t hurt the author. It appears worthy of consideration that there may be a lack of fantasy here on your part.
Most books I download and read are some scholarly or technical stuff, where I read maybe one or two pages that interest me and then never open the book again for a year.
I could never get all the books from stone-walled library or buy them all. But fortunately I do not have to, they are all available in the Public Library called the Web, and using this is beneficial to me, and harmless to anybody else.
Guessing certain types of readers are more likely to pirate than others. The reality you're describing is one in which pirating readers have fewer books written for them. As someone who doesn't pirate books, I'm reluctantly fine with that. My authors will get compensated and write. Others' authors will find something else to do; they can make podcasts or whatever.
More people write books. (as will be more money in it)
World 1.1 Pays your bills. Doesn't make you rich.
More crappy books. More high quality books.
World 1.2 Can make you rich.
Many people will write purely for financial reasons. Some people will be doubly motivated - financial and professional success. They can focus solely on their area of interest, and creating content for it knowing they can also achieve financial success with it. More books written by companies. More crappy books. More high quality books.
World 2: Not one person on earth pays. Every single book has to be for free.
The fewest books produced. Hobbyists or retired people only. People will write for passion. Not necessarily the most qualified people.
World 3: Somewhere in between (our world)
In-between.
Look at youtube which is close to world 1.2. There certainly is a TON of crappy content. However, there's also very high quality, professionally produced content in there. No financial incentive means few of those high quality ones would be there.
You're not "losing" anything, you just have expectations that aren't compatible with reality.
> The question is - why should you have a right to spread _my work_ for free?
Why shouldn't I? Is it somehow my responsibility to keep the food on your table?
> I spent almost 2 years on writing the book.
Just because you spent time doing something doesn't give you the right to deny everyone else their right of sharing information. Writing books isn't profitable anymore? Don't write books for living, do something else. That how the rest of us lowly peasants get by when we invest our time into something that flops.