Political Crossfire Forums

cap'n queasy · Joined: 15 May 2004 Posts: 34968

Quote: Again, we are speaking from a moral standpoint, so appeals to "the law" are irrelevant.

You mean an immoral standpoint. You are saying there is nothing wrong with depriving someone from the fruits of their labor.

That's the same thing as robbing them.

cap'n queasy · Joined: 15 May 2004 Posts: 34968

Royalties are that artists bread and butter. When you download music you are taking his work for free. And providing that work to the public.

That is definitely stealing.

If you owned a store and I said there is nothing wrong with anyone coming in there and eating whatever they want, because they are hungry, would you have a problem with that?

After all it is the store owner who is depriving those hungry people of food. :lol:

prometeus · Joined: 15 May 2006 Posts: 2993 Location: Over the edge

I do not think that the analogies to R&D and patents are appropriate. If they were, there would not be separate laws for the right of artistic media, etc.
So the copyright protects the artists pocketbook period. I wholeheartedly agree that mass reproductions of CD/DVDs, the bootleg market is wrong, because they are making a profit on someone else's work, that is not the major issue here. The downloading is, and for the industry to go after teenagers who do not profit from it is appalling. All for what? So that rappers can wear not hub cap sized bling bling but more like manhole cove sizes and that they can put more expensive spinners on their Escalades? So that they, along with that S*** (my opinion)Britney Spears can further subvert the youth? Yea, it is their right that is a fact. Or is it so that people totally devoid of talent can get $20 mil for a crappy movie. The law is the law, but i tell you it it is wrong and it would not be needed but for the greed of the "celebrities."

prometeus · Joined: 15 May 2006 Posts: 2993 Location: Over the edge

cap'n queasy wrote: Royalties are that artists bread and butter...

If it were no one would be discusing it. What is fair value?

cap'n queasy · Joined: 15 May 2004 Posts: 34968

What someone does with their earnings is their business and gives no justification for depriving them of their income.

It's no different than taking cars off a car lot and giving them away for free. No one is going to buy a car if you are giving them away.

prometeus · Joined: 15 May 2006 Posts: 2993 Location: Over the edge

Can anyone name an artist that has sufered and to what extent because of downloads.

cap'n queasy · Joined: 15 May 2004 Posts: 34968

prometeus wrote: cap'n queasy wrote: Royalties are that artists bread and butter...

If it were no one would be discusing it. What is fair value?

What the market decides is fair value.

prometeus · Joined: 15 May 2006 Posts: 2993 Location: Over the edge

You think? Look at the statistics of who are the majority, vast majority od CD buyers, and then tell me they know what they are doing...

cap'n queasy · Joined: 15 May 2004 Posts: 34968

prometeus wrote: Can anyone name an artist that has sufered and to what extent because of downloads.

All of them. For every person that gets their album for free the artists do not receive their royalties.

You are getting their product, that they produced and distributed at a high expense, for free. When they don't want to give it away.

That is stealing by definition.

cap'n queasy · Joined: 15 May 2004 Posts: 34968

prometeus wrote: You think? Look at the statistics of who are the majority, vast majority od CD buyers, and then tell me they know what they are doing...

What does that have to do with anything? They are rightly paying to enjoy someone's work.

I'm not sure what you are trying to say.

prometeus · Joined: 15 May 2006 Posts: 2993 Location: Over the edge

Again, I would not argue it if there was fair pricing on their products.

prometeus · Joined: 15 May 2006 Posts: 2993 Location: Over the edge

Quote: All of them

Yea, my heart bleeds for them, that should be the greatest suffering for humanity...

Todd D. · Posted: Fri May 19, 2006 3:54 pm Post subject:

Quote: You mean an immoral standpoint. You are saying there is nothing wrong with depriving someone from the fruits of their labor.

That's the same thing as robbing them.
False. It is the same thing as not buying it in the first place.

Quote: It's no different than taking cars off a car lot and giving them away for free. No one is going to buy a car if you are giving them away.
Again, false. If you take a car, then the car owner no longer has a car. This is entirely different. This is more like buying a car and then giving it away for free. Are you saying that should be illegal?

Quote: What the market decides is fair value.
On this, we agree. In this case, the prevelance of perfect duplication and the ability to distribute those copies has led to a saturation of supply. The market has dictated that the fair value of these goods is no longer even measurable in a monetary sense.

Quote: All of them. For every person that gets their album for free the artists do not receive their royalties.
There is significant evidence that file sharing has actually helped in the promotion of lesser known bands that aren't signed to major labels and INCREASED their sales.

Quote: You are getting their product, that they produced and distributed at a high expense, for free. When they don't want to give it away.

That is stealing by definition
No, it is more like dumping, buying high and selling low to saturate a market and put a competitor out of business, but that's irrelevant. At some point, a CD was sold. That's the transaction that we're dealing with here. The artist has received their money there. Anything after that is transactions that do not involve the original artist.

What you are saying is that it should be illegal to make a mix tape to give to your girlfriend, or to give away a CD once you no longer want it (or, by implication, to sell it to a second hand CD store). It's entirely preposterous.

On a side note, I do agree with Cap'n that what they do with their money is entirely independent of how moral an action is. Robbing from Steven Speilberg (true robbery, I mean) is just as much a crime as robbing from someone with significantly less money. The idea of "They have enough money, this doesn't matter" is a horrible one to use, because it's like saying that the police shouldn't protect those that are rich.

Duchifas · Joined: 22 Jun 2004 Posts: 9950

Todd D. wrote: Quote: Copyright laws stimulate innovation and progression by providing financial incentives to innovators. If people have no incentive to innovate, most will not. Some will, but very few. If I am really good at writing fiction, but I know that the day I publish a book, it will be immediately published by 100 other people and I will not receive a return on my investment (of time and effort in writing the book), I will not write the book. Simple as that. It's not even so much a matter of wanting, as a matter of being able to afford to spend time on producing a creative expression which will not be compensated.
I can certainly see that as being the case, I just think that in competetive markets, the opposite would be true.

How? Why? What I described applies to competitive markets.

Quote: Quote: From the justice perspective, I don't see why the labor of your hands is so much more worthy of protection than the labor of your mind.
Because the labor of your hands is a product of the labor of your minds.

First of all, huh? I don't think there is much mindwork in janitorial services, for example. Or cotton picking.

Second of all, even if what you said were true, so? What exactly is just to compensate the labor of your hands but not the labor of your mind? You didn't address that at all.

Quote: Quote: The opposite would occur if patents weren't available. The payoff for R&D wouldn't be high enough if the company next to you could copy your design, and immediately use it at little or no cost to them.
The open-source software movement certainly seems to run counter to that theory.

I think there is a confusion here of patents and copyrights. The two protect very different things. Copyrights protect expression, while patents essentially protect...ideas. Also, patent law is extremely more restrictive than copyright law.

Thus, what works well for open source software, may not work very well elsewhere. I think one of the main reasons that it works reasonably well in software is because it is relatively easy to cooperate in software design. All you need is an internet connection and a computer and a central repository.

The model would never work for other areas such as bio, chem, medical research, with high start up costs, fixed costs, and the need for centralized location. To do that, you need an investment. And in order to get people to invest in your idea, you need to assure them that they will get a nice return on their investment. Patent law guarantees that, and that is its beauty.

Case in point of how the model fails in other areas - wikipedia. While it is very nice and convenient because it is free and easily accessible, overall it is trash, with monumental errors in 90% of articles, and I doubt it will ever be an authoritative source of anything. [Which will not prevent me from quoting it here. :)]

cap'n queasy · Joined: 15 May 2004 Posts: 34968

Quote: False. It is the same thing as not buying it in the first place.

Except for the fact that you get to enjoy the fruits of their labor with out paying for their labor.

Just like as if you stole an apple from a fruit cart.

cap'n queasy · Joined: 15 May 2004 Posts: 34968

Quote: Again, false. If you take a car, then the car owner no longer has a car. This is entirely different. This is more like buying a car and then giving it away for free. Are you saying that should be illegal?

It's not like buying a car at all. You bought nothing, you stole it and then gave it away.

It's like stealing a lot of cars and giving them away.

cap'n queasy · Joined: 15 May 2004 Posts: 34968

If you download music the artist no longer can gain royalties from sales of his work.

You deprive him of his property. It's the same as stealing a car deprives someone of their car.

It is stealing.

Todd D. · Posted: Fri May 19, 2006 4:01 pm Post subject:

Quote: Except for the fact that you get to enjoy the fruits of their labor with out paying for their labor.

Just like as if you stole an apple from a fruit cart.
Again, absolutely not. If you steal an apple from a fruit cart, then that fruit cart no longer has that apple. This is NOT the case with what we are talking about here.

Unfortunately, any analogy from the real world won't fit because we are dealing with low cost perfect duplication, something that does not exist outside of the electronics world. That's precisely why this is such an issue, becasue it's only been very recent that perfect duplication was available on such a wide scale for so little cost.

Duchifas, I will repsond to your post tommorow, I gotta take off from work and am heading to Boston tonight. I'm not ignoring you though.

Duchifas · Joined: 22 Jun 2004 Posts: 9950

prometeus wrote: Can anyone name an artist that has sufered and to what extent because of downloads.

They don't suffer. They just don't get proper compensation for their efforts. Take away their copyright protection, and artistry will be an unprofitable business, leading artists to seek other fields of work. Being that they, as people, are pretty useless to society in general, most would probably head into politics. Do you really want George Clooney running for office? And Michael Moore? There ARE enough idiots in some places in this country that would actually elect them somewhere.

Thus, for my part, I am happy to pay the rental fees at Blockbuster in order to keep George Clooney doing what he does best -- making idiotic movies -- and keeping him where he is rather harmless to me and to society in general.

:)

cap'n queasy · Joined: 15 May 2004 Posts: 34968

Duchifas wrote: Todd D. wrote: Quote: Copyright laws stimulate innovation and progression by providing financial incentives to innovators. If people have no incentive to innovate, most will not. Some will, but very few. If I am really good at writing fiction, but I know that the day I publish a book, it will be immediately published by 100 other people and I will not receive a return on my investment (of time and effort in writing the book), I will not write the book. Simple as that. It's not even so much a matter of wanting, as a matter of being able to afford to spend time on producing a creative expression which will not be compensated.
I can certainly see that as being the case, I just think that in competetive markets, the opposite would be true.

How? Why? What I described applies to competitive markets.

Quote: Quote: From the justice perspective, I don't see why the labor of your hands is so much more worthy of protection than the labor of your mind.
Because the labor of your hands is a product of the labor of your minds.

First of all, huh? I don't think there is much mindwork in janitorial services, for example. Or cotton picking.

Second of all, even if what you said were true, so? What exactly is just to compensate the labor of your hands but not the labor of your mind? You didn't address that at all.

Quote: Quote: The opposite would occur if patents weren't available. The payoff for R&D wouldn't be high enough if the company next to you could copy your design, and immediately use it at little or no cost to them.
The open-source software movement certainly seems to run counter to that theory.

I think there is a confusion here of patents and copyrights. The two protect very different things. Copyrights protect expression, while patents essentially protect...ideas. Also, patent law is extremely more restrictive than copyright law.

Thus, what works well for open source software, may not work very well elsewhere. I think one of the main reasons that it works reasonably well in software is because it is relatively easy to cooperate in software design. All you need is an internet connection and a computer and a central repository.

The model would never work for other areas such as bio, chem, medical research, with high start up costs, fixed costs, and the need for centralized location. To do that, you need an investment. And in order to get people to invest in your idea, you need to assure them that they will get a nice return on their investment. Patent law guarantees that, and that is its beauty.

Case in point of how the model fails in other areas - wikipedia. While it is very nice and convenient because it is free and easily accessible, overall it is trash, with monumental errors in 90% of articles, and I doubt it will ever be an authoritative source of anything. [Which will not prevent me from quoting it here. :)]

Well, the difference about Open Source is that they set out to give their work away from the beginning.

They don't get a patent issued because they want folks to tinker with the source code.

It's an innovative idea. But does it really produce better software?

That remains to be seen.

Someone who seeks to have their ideas or expressions protected does this so they can profit by the fruit of their labor. They shouldn't have to be forced to give it away for free.

No one would produce and distribute anything of value anymore. There's no profit in it.

Sure the artist will probably still play music, but why should he go to the trouble of recording it at his own expense to distribute for no payment?

The recording industry pays a high premium to produce this work. They expect a profit. And I don't blame them. It's a nightmare business to be in.