Re: sf not worth stealing?

On Tue, 18 Dec 2007 10:44:22 -0500, Jack Tingle <wjtingle@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

On Mon, 17 Dec 2007 18:03:29 -0800, John Schilling
<schillin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


That's not a particularly good analogy. The framers intended to
prevent people buying one copy of a book, a printing press, and making
copies to sell. No one I've ever heard of objects to various industry
groups going after individuals who copy large amounts of material for
sale. Where that enforcement of copyright steps over the line is the
question still being determined.

The intent of the framers has to be extrapolated to the range of
possibilities afforded by new technologies, however.

If every household has a printing press, the person who makes just
two copies, gives each of them to a friend, and reasonably expects
that they will each make two copies, lather, rinse, repeat, has
accomplished exactly the same thing as your miscreant with the one
high-volume printing press, with the same intent, and so I can't
see why he shouldn't be treated the same way.

If there were some effort to keep distribution limited to a narrow
circle of mutual friends, that might be a mitigating circumstance,
but if "friend" is expanded to "all participants in a particular
p2p or social network", that's just a different technological means
of accomplishing the same criminal intent, and I doubt the framers
of the Constitution would have any problem with it.

And had the various IP owners stopped at laws and technologies to make
that sort of thing easy to detect and penalize (watermarking or social
engineering, for example [1]), I doubt we'd be having this discussion.

The DRM technology they seem to demand goes beyond that, secretly
turning a sale price into a rent. If they cut the price accordingly, I
also don't think anyone would get as bent out of shape. When you sell
me something outright at full price, but want to decrease my rights to
its use, though, that gets people upset.

Conversely, the IP rights holders argue just as you did (and rightly
so, IMO) that a large number of free copies hurts their business. I'm
not sure, in the case of the recording industry, if that holds water,
since they sell albums unrestricted.

Twenty people can buy an album together, rip the four or so good songs
off of it, and all walk away with less expense than buying one
encrypted song off a music selling site. I think the RIAA wants it
both ways, and are very unimaginative too boot.

There's a difference, however, between "twenty people" and "twenty
million people". As I said, nobody much cares about this sort of
thing if it's confined to a narrow circle of mutual friends. Not
even the RIAA, I suspect.

But there's no shortage of people who loudly proclaim that it is not
only their right but their moral obligation to "share" Evil Greedy
Big Corporation music with millions of total strangers, and that is
bad for EGBC. They want for this to not happen, and rightly so.
They will not and should not settle for your alternative of, "when
this happens, the spoiled brat who did it gets caught", because that
doesn't undo the damage to them and because there's an unlimited
supply of spoiled brats to replace the ones who get caught.

That means proactive as well as reactive enforcement of copyright, and
if you aren't willing to buy under those terms, then don't. There are
still, for the moment, those unrestricted albums, presumably on account
of most spoiled brats prefer the push-button solution to the drive-to-
the-mall approach.


--
*John Schilling * "Anything worth doing, *
*Member:AIAA,NRA,ACLU,SAS,LP * is worth doing for money" *
*Chief Scientist & General Partner * -13th Rule of Acquisition *
*White Elephant Research, LLC * "There is no substitute *
*John.Schilling@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx * for success" *
*661-951-9107 or 661-275-6795 * -58th Rule of Acquisition *

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