So then, what if I am willing to pay for it?

I would very much like to watch US TV shows. Preferably on a computer, since I don't have a TV (but on TV would be a good effort too!) Unfortunately, somebody has decided that I am not allowed to.

If try to buy Hulu Plus, I am greeted with a nice message telling me to fuck off back to where I came from. Same with Netflix. Hell, I can't even watch a 2 minute clip of the Daily Show without resorting to browser gymnastics.

So I pirate US TV shows. Mercilessly. I can't see a downside. If the piracy has no effect on their profit margins, then we continue to get great TV content. If they go bankrupt, then some people who I violently despise lose their jobs. It's win/win!

I would gladly pay double the price for Netflix Canada if the service was as good as it is in the states. I don't mind paying for something if it provides me a good service, but it doesn't. Netflix canada is a steaming pile.

So, "Use your money to invest in services that ARE paving the way to the future." is impossible because if big companies like Netflix can't even do it, no amount of money is going to help the situation.

EDIT: Turns out it's canada's fault, not the us's when it comes to why we don't get hulu/netflix/etc.

If something is available legally and at a reasonable price (by which I mean not only available second hand for £100 as a collectable, rather than "99p for an MP3, that's outrageous" etc...) I either buy it or accept I won't have it.

If it's not available I have no real issue with getting it illegally.

Frankly if the media companies adopted day and date releases worldwide for content and worked to make their back catalogues widely available through convenient means (by which iTunes, Amazon, Netflix and so on count) a lot of the best arguments in favour of piracy dry up.

You are assuming the world is full of honorable people like yourself. Unfortunately, that's not the world we live in. In the words of Scott Adams:

"The least effective system ever invented is something called the honor system. The theory guiding this system is that people are not huge weasels."

Why do you seek out and watch the content made by people you violently despise?

When I explain that I don't really like piracy I get some very strange looks.

I think people often overestimate how many people are willing to consider ethics at all in purchasing decisions. I know plenty of otherwise nice and decent people who would happily purchase a product that they knew was made by child slavery, hell people even joke about it.

It seems that considering the consequences of your actions isn't hip anymore once consumerism is involved.

Do you also apply this principle to sex?

What about borrowed books, good views, jokes, ideas, intelligent conversation, exercise?

You have a right to exercise. You don't have the right to walk into Gold's Gym and use their facilities without paying. I don't have the right to enter your home and use the equipment in the basement.

You have a right to have mutually consensual sex with someone else without paying. You don't have the right to rape a prostitute if they only offer sex for money because you didn't want to pay. I don't have the right to demand sex from your family.

You have the right to borrow a book from your friend if he's willing to lend it to you. You don't have the right to borrow your buddy's book without their permission just as you don't have the right to walk into a bookstore and borrow their books without permission. I don't have the right to take your books from you.

Yes people can choose to make their work available for free, and that's great. But that choice again lies in the person who created the work, not the person who consumes it.

And to be perfectly clear, I have no delusion that piracy will ever go away. It's a fact of the digital world. My point is pirates should not delude themselves into thinking what they do is justified. It's not.

Copying isn't stealing, so yea, it's different.

As for the final paragraph, all of those are rather easily solved by realizing that information will be copied whether you like it or not. If you don't want it out there, don't release it. Fake government monopolies on information copying is a dying model, the death throws of the old guard trying to cope with a world they don't understand. Information will be free, eventually.

city41 wrote "If they are not willing to pay for it, then they have no right to enjoy it." in the context that "it" is copyrighted work that is offered for sale, not just anything. You know it as well as everyone here.

But I do believe that if somebody has something you want and they only offer to you for a price (be it money or otherwise), you don't have a right to it for free, pretty much whatever "it" is. (assuming they have the right to that control in the first place obviously) See biot's comment for eloquent point-by-point explanation.

Why? Where did that right comes from. Who legislates enjoyment? Or are you saying it is a moral law?

(Studies have shown that the sales-displacing effect of piracy in music ranges from 42% to no effect at all[1]. If all piracy could be prevented, that's an awfully large deadweight loss)

[1] http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~rtelang/SmithTelang.pdf

In this case $0 or even a negative value amount is what you can plug into something. Why? Think about artists that tried pay-what-you-want model. A lot of people pay $0. Some pay $0.10. But a lot pay $0.

However, what they pay with is with their time and attention.

I used to know someone who managed a movie theater. He would sneak us into movies quite often. Good and bad. And quite often after coming out of the movie I felt like wanting "my free back".

Let's say an artist is unknown and I am a customer that has quite a few connection ( a blog with a large following perhaps ). Then what would make sense is for me to pay a negative amount ( the artist would pay me to spend my time listening to his new cool record in the hopes that I might spread the news about it ).

FWIW, the only album I've paid for in years was a pay-what-you-want deal. I paid something like $3. Which was all that was left in my bank account after I paid my rent and bought groceries for that month - I'm a college student.

Do you have any evidence that the costs outweigh the benefits?

And without exception, all of those "pirates" that I know have much larger legal bluray and record collections than I do.

A prostitute performs a personal service for you. Not paying directly hurts him/her.

When copying information on the other hand, nothing happens, you don't feel it when your information is copied. (yes, you can say it does indirectly through some convoluted story, but that's always debatable)

The future economy will be more about directly personalized experiences and services that cannot be copied, or are much less interesting when copied, instead of trivial fan-outs of information. It is all about scarcity. Better to let that sink in than try to preserve what is already lost, at the cost of freedom.

(edit: why do I say future? It is already the present for many of us)

But you surely felt the months of work that went into writing your book in the first place, or the months of practice that allowed you to give that one great performance in the recording studio.

> It is all about scarcity.

Some of us prefer quality to quantity. Sadly, producing good quality usually requires a significant amount of hard work, and that isn't going to change any time soon.

You just validated my point. The people that prefer quality still pay for people to work (hard?) for them. Without needing any violent enforcement or censorship.

Don't fetishize information, focus on what you (and other people) can do with it. Until brain patterns can be copied (if ever), skill and experience will still be scarce.

Perhaps I don't really understand your point, then. It seems to me that most of the works being ripped off via TPB and the like are the products that many people have worked on to get to a high level of quality, which of course are also the ones that are expensive to make because of that, and yet clearly a lot of people aren't paying for them.

Throughout history, work has always been either about making physical objects, food, or services rendered to either a person or a group interactively. Those are scarce. That's still the case.

Yes, the market for cookie-cutter experiences "make once, sell zillion times" will become smaller (or at least, stop growing). I'm not sure whether that's something laudable or something sad, but it is happening before our eyes.

Things are changing, let's try to make the transition less painful instead of more painful as we move into the post-information age.

Unfortunately, if we take your idea to its natural conclusion, a lot of industries that create and distribute valuable works are going to change direction or possibly split several ways.

Those projects that can be run without ever giving the underlying data to customers, such as interactive software that can be turned into SaaS where the code never leaves a server under the provider's control, might follow that path. This naturally leads to a subscription model, where customers pay over and over for the same functionality, rather than paying a one-off charge as they have in the past.

Then you have things like textbooks and training videos, which are based on expert knowledge and insight that took a lot of time to acquire but is relatively stable and easily shared once concentrated and well presented in a fixed medium. These tend to have relatively small but high-value markets, but become commercially unattractive if unrestricted copying becomes legal. A plausible alternative is that experts shut down their open distribution channels and only share their knowledge and advice in person, charging the kind of rates for training and consultancy that make even lawyers and accountants wince.

A related case is entertainment performances. The performers themselves can pull the same trick by moving toward live performances as their revenue stream, and some of the production team will be necessary for that as well. It's not clear how key people like songwriters and composers get paid in this set-up, though.

Some projects with critical mass could move to essentially a charity model, whether that is by literally accepting donations, by being created directly by volunteer labour, or by appealing to wealthy patrons who can afford to subsidise entire projects single-handed or within a small-group of like-minded philanthropists. This can work, but there is a danger of reducing every work to "good enough".

There are some interesting ideas in terms of getting lots of people to pay up-front before a work is created, but then of course they're taking on trust that the work will be good enough to justify the cost. That might be viable for established artists, but seems unlikely to work for many new ones. It also suffers from the "good enough" risk.

Some projects would find a business model based on a very large market paying a trivial amount of money to access the data conveniently, but that strategy is more effective against casual piracy today than it would be in a world where commercial alternative services could legally set up, rip your content, and then run in direct competition to you. Realistically, a project trying this approach would probably have to convert to something based more on charity and pitching themselves as the legitimate supplier of the content in some sense.

Finally, there are those projects that produce middle-value fixed products for medium-sized markets, such as books and videos catering to a lot of niche markets. These are the ones that are really in trouble, lacking any means to control the data once a customer has bought it, being too expensive and not wide enough in appeal for most charity/trivial money models based on volume to cover the costs, but not being good enough when stacked up against high-end alternatives for charity models based on patronage to kick in.

These ideas basically all come down to one of three possibilities:

1. Restrict access to the data to recreate the scarcity (typically with a significant reduction in the number of people who benefit and a significant increase in the cost to those who do).

2. Aim for some sort of charity/trust/volunteer model (which only works if you've have relatively extreme volume of sales or price, and risks reducing everything to "good enough").

3. Fail.

None of these seems likely to be better at either producing high quality works or distributing them to wide audiences than an economic system such as copyright.

I think that was a common sentiment at the end of each "age". How to go from here, all the alternatives suck from our point of view. I really like (2) myself, but it might not be everyone's cup of tea.

But no matter what, copyright is harder and harder to enforce as copying of information becomes cheaper, and it has the potential to get really messy.

At a certain point, the ends don't justify the means anymore. DMCA was ok-ish, but I think we reached that point with SOPA and similar laws. Especially as those means are the same as can be used to censor other things, and will very likely be abused for that, with the militarization happening all over the world.

So that solution falls under (3) fail as well. Which leaves the other options, including those we haven't thought of yet. People are creative and will find ways to get by...

I think there's potential there, but there would need to be a dramatic cultural shift so it didn't just become a case of anything "good enough" was done, with no meaningful incentive to put the final polish to turn good works into great ones. Take a look at the Open Source software community today: it's full of "good enough" products, which do the basic jobs perfectly well for a lot of people, but which often lack the power, flexibility or usability of commercial software because no-one wanted to write the edge cases or spend the time doing tedious polishing-up work.

> But no matter what, copyright is harder and harder to enforce as copying of information becomes cheaper, and it has the potential to get really messy.

Unfortunately, that isn't really true. It would be relatively easy to enforce copyright on the Internet with modern technology. It's just that I (and, I suspect, most other people here) would prefer not to accept the unfortunate side-effects that come with compulsory mass surveillance and automated charges.

Yes, the edge cases, the personalization, the polishing. There will always be work in that. Adapting systems to their specific surroundings. Every place, every person is unique, and has specific demands. That's what I meant with the cookie-cutter stuff going away.

it would be relatively easy to enforce copyright on the Internet with modern technology

Sure, but is just as easy to avoid copyright enforcement with the current technology. And for those desperate there is always the analog hole. That kind of summarizes the DRM "war".

compulsory mass surveillance and automated charges

Because that'd effectively be an Orwellian world. So we'd need to go to a total surveillance state, centrally controlled world, just to make sure things keep working as they do now. Just to make some people happy at the expense of the rest. That's not only inhuman, but very unstable as well.

"Unfortunately, if we take your idea to its natural conclusion, a lot of industries that create and distribute valuable works are going to change direction or possibly split several ways."

This is not a strong argument. I could equally look at the time of the enlightenment and say "if people weren't forced to give their money to the Catholic church, think of all the lovely buildings and choral music we'd be denied. Therefore - people should be forced to give money to the church!"

In the case of copyright, you need to consider this opportunity cost. i.e. things we don't have because copyright has made them impossible. As with the church example, there is also a significant cost of freedom.

There is no demonstration that an economy with copyright is superior to an economy without copyright, and plenty of current and historical annecdotal evidence to suggest that copyright is strongly detrimental to economic success.

Which you haven't cited, I notice.

If an alternative economic model provides a more effective incentive than copyright, then it is unlikely that today's copyright laws prevent anyone from adopting that model instead and reaping the rewards. Obviously you can give lots of examples where this has been done successfully to back up your case, then?

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,710976,...

    > Which you haven't cited, I notice.

I'll take another angle. Live-and-let live should be the default case. Copyright is an intrusion on this. If someone wants to drive a tank through freedom by introducing something like copyright, then the onus is on the tank drivers to make the case that the benefits justify the intrusion on freedom.

I've never seen a remotely reasonable attempt at putting that case. The best you get is claims that people wouldn't produce things unless they had vast legal protections and that's plainly false. Mendelssohn wrote symphonies. I write code, in a commercial setting, with copyright not being the justification for it.

Handel is an even better example, because it's well documented that he rearranged lots of previous stuff. We wouldn't have any record of some of those earlier tunes had he not repurposed them in his own works. Handel's _Israel in Egypt_ could not be performed or distributed under current western-world copyright law.

"If an alternative economic model provides a more effective incentive than copyright, then it is unlikely that today's copyright laws prevent anyone from adopting that model instead and reaping the rewards."

When you have copyright law it creates a powerful lobby group and any attempt at reform will come up against them. Much as with my discussion about the church above - an institution that impeded progress and freedom, but which fought ferociously to retain privilege at every step.

What could cause the dam to break would be a major economic slump and a desperate move to try something new to attract smart people. Or something like SOPA may be a step too far, and cause Sweden or New Zealand or Singapore or a special economic zone in China to make a play at being a free-state-style intellectual capital.

If you only have to pay the price of one day's lunch for access to a library of content, then downloading a title rather than watching it on its official outlet will reduce subscription fees and thus impact revenue sharing. So rather than buying less than 10%, there may in fact be no threshold at which pirating becomes more practical, once the initial monetary threshold (being able to afford the subscription fee) is met.

Therefore, copyright infringement can result in a much stronger loss in revenue than you presume, even though I personally agree that it doesn't constitute "stealing", as no physical good has been removed and appropriated illegally. However, what that copyright infringement can do is impede or obstruct certain consumer-favoring (IMO) business models from being viable.

It's possibly true, in my opinion, that sharing in a gray area of material whose market has not yet matured may increase visibility and have future benefits, but no company which deals with content producers and the platform to deliver content can afford to acknowledge this to the content producers or to the audience without risking legitimizing copyright infringement and therefore delegitimizing their own business (which is why I'm not disclaiming where I work, other than it is familiar with these issues).

Not that I'm arguing that there should be no such thing as sharing, but making the moral argument to justify it that stealing isn't putting the company in a worse position is a poor rationale. It's not true and it's not something that can be defended against in public.

Nor am I arguing that piracy will make or break a business. If it's big enough to be popular, it may be big enough to grow a legitimate market faster than the illegitimate alternative. However, this also relies on cooperative content producers and an audience willing to pay for the content. It's a tricky balance but the reality is that while violation of copyright may not produce economic devastation on its own, neither is it devoid of any impact.

tl;dr: Reasonable people should pay for content available to them that they enjoy, especially when affordable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_good -- shut down today in SOPA protest

With a club good there is a tangible thing such as a running machine. By my use of it, you are unable to use it. But we judge the tradeoff to be worth it because we don't each want to go out and buy a gym.

That is unlike copyright where the cost of making a copy is nothing, and may even increase the value of the copied data through network effects.

> Examples of club goods include private golf courses, cinemas, cable television, access to copyrighted works, and the services provided by social or religious clubs to their members.

Also this definition on econport.org;

> Club Goods: Goods that are excludable but non-rival, or non-subtractable. This means that while certain people can be excluded from the consumption of a good, one person's consumption of it does not diminish another person's.

The point is; people say copyright violation is stealing, is isn't stealing, and arguments occur. To have a good conversation about it, it's useful to distinguish club good from private goods, because then we can talk about the difference between "unauthorised access to a club good" (piracy) and "unauthorised posession of a private good" (theft).

Sure, let's have a very pedentic notion of stealing and keeping framing the debate around 'stealing'.

OK... "taking something which isn't yours and/or you don't have permission to take". In most minds, that's the same as stealing, hence the standard use of the word 'stealing'. But substitute the phrase above for 'stealing' and, imo, it becomes harder to justify. Just because I an not doing an actual verifiable economic harm to someone doesn't mean it's right. Doesn't necessarily mean it's wrong, but doesn't make it right either.

    - Copyright Act of 1790 - established U.S. copyright 
      with term of 14 years with 14-year renewal
    - Copyright Act of 1831 - extended the term to 
      28 years with 14-year renewal
    - Copyright Act of 1909 - extended term to 28 years 
      with 28-year renewal
    - Copyright Act of 1976 - extended term to either 
      75 years or life of author plus 50 years 
    - Copyright Renewal Act of 1992 
      removed the requirement for renewal
    - Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA) of 1994 
      restored U.S. copyright for certain foreign works
    - Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 extended terms 
      to 95/120 years or life plus 70 years
    - Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 
      criminalized some cases of copyright infringement

So you can talk about right versus wrong, good versus evil and so on, but clearly something stinks about this picture, which is why I don't blame "pirates" for justifying their acts, as their acts are justified.

And, how fucked up is it that restaurants are afraid of singing "Happy Birthday to You"? Are those singing it thieves?

But copyright infringement is not stealing. You could make an argument about it if the period was still 14 years (i.e. the author has only 14 years to collect revenue from it, so if you want it either pay up or wait 14 years, which is doable). But that's not the case.

Also, discussing the morality of copyright infringement is also important, as copyright infringement does not rob the owner of the item itself. It only duplicates it.

I'd argue that property exists because things (apples, cars, gym equipment) have limitations on their use. If I eat an apple, you can't. If you grow a crop on this property, you can't. While he uses this gym equipment, they can't.

Even in historical contexts where there has been no effective government (silk road, dark ages iceland), ideas of property have evolved that are strikingly consistent, because it extends from realities of the world.

As states developed, they came to give stronger definition to property law. But then people who were well-connected to government decided that it would be a good idea to extend these convenient powers to things which were not property, sometimes by falsely labeling them as property.

So it comes down to who has control over the language.

Is property a distinct idea, or is it just a bundle of whatever rights the government of the day declares it to be.

And if you choose the latter, if the government says that black is white, is it so?

I'd like to extend on this concept and add ownership into equation.

In the example with an apple. I own it, therefore only I can eat it. It is my property. Now what happens if I give the apple to somebody else? It's their property now, so you would naturally assume they own it? And therefore they can eat it.

Alas, it's not the case with music/etc. I bought a CD with music, but it appears that I don't own it. I cannot listen to it in public (Happy Birthday to You), nor I can give it to someone else (lend DVD to a friend for a pint).

So this doesn't work out very well, the CD is my property, but I don't own it? To me owning means having right to do whatever I please with it. Imagine if blending an iPhone would become a criminal offence...

I'll try to explain what I mean by anti-right though I'm unpracticed here.

(1) Society is oriented around a presumption of live-and-let-live. Most laws give rights that state the boundary of live-and-let live, and these are positive rights.

(2) In the case of copyright, only the creator has the ability to live-and-let-live in the context of the protected thing: everyone else is restricted from it. Hence, this is a negative right, or "anti-right".

When rights and anti-rights clash, you get nasty situations develop where they can't all be true at the same time.

i.e. in order to make IP anti-rights work, the laws need to inhibit 'real' property rights.

i.e. I am not allowed to do things with magnetic signals in the privacy of my own home because that impedes an anti-right that the government has granted to someone else.

If you build complex software with a permissions model that contains both positive and negative permissions (i.e. where a user has a permission that is "can't see" something rather than being a positive right), you'll find similar nasty situations develop.

Obviously this is a strange concept since the contents of the CD are a physical part of the CD itself.

If you ever have something stolen from you, you'll quickly realize the difference between theft and copyright infringement.

Debates such as these keep orbiting around the definition of stealing because the term keeps getting used for copyright infringement out of lazy thinking or in order to facilitate an agenda.

Stealing is intrinsically "wrong" from a societal perspective because it puts those who take by force into a better position than those who earn by earning it, which is not sustainable.

Whether anyone is put into a worse position by copyright infringement (e.g. in the form of illegal downloading of music) is up for debate. But any serious debate should avoid the term stealing to describe the issue at hand.

It's not taking, either.

You're not using your flat, it's there anyway, you've not lost anything, nothing has been broken or damaged, he's gone before you're back so it's fine right?

Let's use another example. I order food, but don't eat all I get. If you will eat it, I would be very glad, as it wouldn't go to waste.

After all, at the time they created it the legal and commercial framework, as well as the social norms, said that they could expect payment from anyone who consumed their work.

Why are you allowed to override their expectations yet someone using your property without your permission isn't allowed to override yours?