17 Jan
2003
17 Jan
'03
8:09 a.m.
The bottom line here is that with intellectual property, the only moral
choice is that if the author wishes to be paid for the USE of their
creation, they should be. Whether you'd have bought it if you couldn't
have gotten it for free or not is irrelevant, it's like sneaking into a
movie theater and sitting in an empty seat. You acquired some benefit
from the material, and since the author didn't
chose to make it public
domain, you are morally obligated to pay for it. As
someone who is in
the process of writing his first novel (revising, really, the original
draft was a NaNoWriMo creation) I can assure you that I am not doing
this for free. Granted, if I choose to make the novel publicly
available online as well as publishing (I hope, I hope), it may
increase my sales, but it was still MY choice. It is immoral for
anyone else to make that choice for me by simply stealing the work,
even if it benefits me in the end.
Furthermore, I think that copyrights should be extended to permanence
so long as the work in question is available for purchase by the
public. eg: If Disney wants to keep SteamBoat Willie copyrighted for
eternity, they have to sell you a copy at will. I have far greater
problems with companies that take a copyright and sit on it and make it
unavailable to the public than I do with those who want to protect
their revenue stream.
The flip side of this is that IMHO there need to be a lot more
restrictive guidelines on how and who can be sued (in general, but
specifically for copyright infringement). IMHO it's perfectly fair for
Disney to sic lawyers on anyone using clips from SteamBoat Willie who
didn't pay for it. But if I make a movie called SteamBoat Bob,
starring Bob the Chicken, they shouldn't be able to sue and win, and
they shouldn't be able to sue just to force me out of business from the
expense of fighting them off.
Anyway, that's my two rubles worth. Megan said it more directly anyway.
-Jim
On Friday, January 17, 2003, at 11:19 AM, Dan Wright wrote:
Megan said:
The problem is that the "theft" argument assumes that EVERY copy = 1
lost
sale. This argument is total bullshit. Most people who copy
music/movies/whatever wouldn't have bought it if they couldn't copy
it, so no
(or at best, very few -- FAR fewer then the number of copies that are
made)
actual SALES are lost. (If you don't believe me, there has been a lot
of
statistical research done that shows this; about the only
contradiction comes
from the RIAA's highly dubious closed-books "research". Sorry I don't
have
any sources at hand, but it's easy to find them on the WWW.) No lost
sales
means there's no equivalent to real-world theft, because no property
is gone
(the author/copyright owner still has their copy) and no money has
been lost
(because the copy wouldn't have been a sale, anyway).
- Dan Wright
(dtwright(a)uiuc.edu)
(http://www.uiuc.edu/~dtwright)
-] ------------------------------ [-] --------------------------------
[-
``Weave a circle round him thrice, / And close your eyes with holy
dread,
For he on honeydew hath fed, / and drunk the milk of Paradise.''
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kubla Khan
Ah, but why are you taking a copy? Is it perhaps because it has
value to you? That it entertains? If so, then someone had to
go through the process of creation to produce it. Not unlike
building a house. They deserve something to compensate them.
Yes, they do...but please see below...
that makes a copy of something *may* be depriving
an author of
possibly
income, but if someone is too cheap or really can't afford to buy it
in
the first place, "lost income" is just BS.
That seems to be the general argument of the recent and current
generations... that just because they can't pay for something
shouldn't preclude them having it... "they are entitled to it".
WRONG! If it has value to you, then pay for it.