The Generational Divide in Copyright Morality. Article by David Pogue.
Now he has me worried.
Update: I was being a little tongue-in-cheek here, just a little. I'm not all that worried. Things will always find a balance, and the bulk of people are willing to pay for what they get, given that they can pay easily and the price is fair.
Personally I keep sharing within reason, and if my customer/visitors do the same, I don't attack them. I have never attacked anybody for sharing a few dozen images from my sites, not even a few hundred. On rare occasions it has ventured into the thousands, and then I have addressed the poster or the host with a polite request to remove them. I think that's reasonable.
11 comments:
I'll put it briefly (hey! please wake up from your shock, man!):
It's not just that downloading takes nothing solid from the copyright holder, so "it doesn't feel like stealing" technically.
It's also that the big companies are widely perceived as the bad guys. "The filthy rich monopoles that exploit and control the world".
Faceless, money-grabbing arrogant tyrants, looting and polluting both us and the planet, etc.
The young feel a little like Robin Hood in self-service. The timeless anarchist utopia seduction. I don't support them, but I fully understand. It's a rebellious mentality that's near-universal in countries with greatly corrupt regimes like Lebanon.
[Um... I'm NOT saying that the USA are a corrupt regime! Nor the contrary.]
Exactly. It's been proven that consumers want to reward artists they deem worthy. But trying to impose a fee on producing copies of bits is just as hopeless an idea as claiming the rights to a saying and then demanding that anyone who utters those words pay you a license fee.
Over time this whole issue will be resolved differently to both the consumers' and the producers' satisfaction. At the moment, in trying to cling to the old ways, the corporations and government are only delaying progress.
I think eolake's shock might partly come from his livelihood depending on protecting those oh so easily copyable bits and bytes.
I'll admit to being part of generation leach and I certainly dabble in the many forms of gray illustrated by Pogue; but there is some creative intellectual rights that should be respected despite how easily they can be pirated. I don't know the solution either, but I'm still in the library paradigm where I don't feel so guilty if it's something I could get at a library and I'd rather save a few steps and be willing to sacrifice image/audio quality for convenience as I watch/read something the one time.
Thought of the day:
You want to be treated ethically? What happened to good old-fashioned abuse? --anon
"At the moment, in trying to cling to the old ways, the corporations and government are only delaying progress."
Yes, the old ways are way past obsolete. Antiquated laws, high-tech high-speed evolving world. America's CO2 causes famins in Africa and Bangladesh. Who can you sue after a typhoon, dark-skinned pennyless illiterate peasant?
In Lebanon, sale of porn magazines is forbidden, they barely allow softcore publications like Playboy or Newlook, under opaque wrapping with a firm "Adult" warning printed on it.
But, this is one of the few arab countries where the internet is not tightly locked, and you can find all the online hardcore you like, even the most extreme. No limits.
Same goes for unapproved political content on the cyberspace. (See my post about the "scandalous videogame affair" for one extreme example.)
Those bits and bytes ARE oh so easily copyable. But paper books could also be, with a photocopying machine. It's simply a new form of an old problem. Intellectual property theft is far from being a new thing. When Guttenberg invented the printing press, his business partners sued him in court demanding that he revealed to them his technical secrets, hoping to make money without him some day. (The judge rejected their demand.)
Basically, it all boils down to the reward of one's work, I feel. Morally speaking. Easy copying should, essentially, help drastically cut down production costs, and therefore the price asked from the consumer. If the media majors realized that, they might get less greedy, appear more honest, and inspire the like from users.
Domai already asks a very reasonable price for some high quality, high resolution image series. Especially that micro-payment page. Perhaps part of the reason is that Eolake doesn't feel the need to inflate his benefits, hire lots of staff, make very costly advertising, etc. He plays the "low distribution cost" game to the max. (Plus quality, naturally.)
If movies spent less millions on advertising, and reflected those cost savings by cutting in half the prices of movie tickets and DVDs (advertising is often half the expenses!), I bet the global sales would INCREASE, and pull the benefits up markedly.
Quality doesn't need mass-advertising, pleased people do all the promoting.
In Lebanon, the nation of shameless, widespread piracy, I do buy official DVDs or videogames sometimes. But very rarely. The high cost is a very powerful deterrent. Paying $66 for the limited, 3-disc edition of masterpiece Metal Gear Solid 3 : Subsistence is something I won't do every year. Once every two years is already stretching my reasonability.
People here are making masses of money by selling this stuff at $4 a disc. If official stuff was TWICE that, I'd buy masses of it, and merrily. And the legitimate companies would make a raw benefit of $4 apiece, plus whatever the bootleggers are making.
As it is, software publishers are not losing money from piracy. Practically nobody could afford their prices anyway, in a country where minimum wage is $300 a month, and not even enforced by law anyway.
To be blunt, I feel that the rich countries OWE us the right to some low-cost fun. After all, those same rich countries politically encouraged/tolerated the 32 year-long war that made "the Switzerland of the Middle-East" a bankrupt country. The USA near-officially left Lebanon as a prize to Syria for its support to the first Gulf war against Saddam. For 14 years. Comparatively, playing videogames and watching movies without enriching those same USA feels like the lesser of two wrongs. By far. No law or jurisdiction will ever prosecute those who DECIDED to have the destiny and lives of 3 million people destroyed.
You may object that movie companies are not the US administration. Except when they pay millions to support the campaigns of politicians, that is!
(Yes, I'm ever so slightly bitter, what gave me away?)
Sure, young people in the West are seldom deprived of their most basic human rights. But in 2007, few world problems are all black and white, or unrelated. Cracking down of piracy by the authorities in Lebanon is a hopeless effort. It exists, but the population is completely uncooperative. Nobody will "feel" with the moral excuses of a completely corrupt local regime.
I wouldn't steal material from Eolake, simply because I feel he's making all the efforts one could reasonably ask for. But Pixar's Cars 1-disc DVD still costing $35 TODAY? More than 10% of minimum wage? No wonder the official stores are sagnating in Beirut! Relailers would rather NOT sell than make less benefit by the unit.
"You want to be treated ethically? What happened to good old-fashioned abuse? --anon"
It's bought a luxury condo in Midtown Beirut.
Moral hypocrisy A.M.M.G.A.B.R.O.
It's weird and tricky. Generally the "copy right" of copyright was, the right TO COPY something. Yet Eolake's pictures, technically speaking, are COPIED by my computer when I access them via the internet. The image on my screen is a COPY of the JPG file that resides on his server. He's given me a copy of a copy of a copy, we are all copying all the time. The reason these issues are so muddy is that nobody ever experiences an original any more in the first place.
I like Pascal's idea that the developed west "owes" poorer nations some free fun. In an overarching moral universe, I think it makes a lot of sense.
I also like the idea that there's a difference between "art" (like maybe the new DOMAI sculpture) and differently "images" and "texts" (either of which can now be duplicated with so little change that the duplication is considered EVEN BY THE ARTIST to be a "proper" version, not a weaker one). You can get a copy of a book, or you can download a copy of a picture of a DOMAI girl. But to receive the sculpture, you actually have to get a real one shipped to you by a postal carrier (UPS or Fed Ex maybe?) and you have to find a place in your living room to house it. It has weight.
Doesn't that have something to do with the issue at hand here? That "illegal" downloading off the internet has no "weight"? There's no Fed Ex delivery guy involved, so it must be right to do it, right?
Yes, Final, that's pretty much the summary of that generational divide. "I take nothing material from anyone, so technically it's not stealing." A copy is not identical to theft, of course, since the owner still has his own item. But it's about depriving one of earning a living from their work. Of course.
If I make a pun at a party, and a professional comedian asks me: "May I use that?", I'll probably answer "Sure".
If I earn my living from cinema and he wants to take stuff from my comedies, I might feel less generous because he's direct competition and I did the effort.
I'm reminded of when The Simpsons were stealing cable. The pamphlet said, among other things, that "Cable companies are big, faceless corporations, which makes it okay."
Haha, that's perfect.
Something to think about.
Hey, did I hear "cable"?
Allrighty then (as the Cable Guy would say), there I go again making you benefit cultural learnings about my glorious nation of Kazakhstan... I mean Lebanon!
Practically nobody here would have the means to pay for a conventional subscription. So, for $10 a month, private providers will give you satellite TV channels. They themselves manage to get them in sometimes unspecified ways. Maybe piracy, maybe official contracts with the original providers, or both sometimes, I don't know.
We end up paying a subscription anyway (at a reasonable fee), but I'm not at all sure it benefits to the "big faceless corporations".
On the other hand, local providers make truckloads of moolah. Because, let's face it, we have very few radioactive mutants that could psychologically survive on just the programs of local TV stations.
That was today's documentary about the geographical divide in copyright morality. As they say in Yughuristan, zay gezunt.
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