Peachpit press really ticked me off as their books advertise a free ebook download if you buy their books. Well their books on OS X are like $60 each, and I wanted to finish my ACSA so I bought a bunch of them. Then I go the site to download my free ebook and get this, it is a free trial of their proprietary online book system, that uses their own format and filled with DRM and that has a monthly subscription fee.

How is any of that free or appealing? Peachpitt press just lost me as a possible online customer and how dare they charge me $15 a month to download a book I already paid $60 for?

Same with Safari Books (Addison/Wesley).

That's exactly what we have now. No policeman does 25-to-life for shooting a drug dealer.

In the first case, that's another take-to-the-extreme example. In any large sample there will be enough people that want Photoshop to keep Adobe in business (lowering their prices would help). And the people at MySQL A.B. are doing alright by giving away the product and selling support. Same with WordPress.

In the second case, artists will make a career the same way they did before copyright existed - by live performances and original, quality artwork. Digital copies of the Mona Lisa in no way degrade the value of the original, in many ways they increase it by increasing recognition and increasing the Louvre's ticket sales to see the original.

In a more pedestrian case, enough people will want the hardcover version of HP to keep Bloomsbury in the black. Lending the hardcover version to a friend and lending a digital version to a friend are exactly the same, so why is the former acceptable but not the latter?

Peachpit Press = Safari Books...total sham, will NEVER support it.

I was considering getting Safari Books. I have no money on the Internet (no cards yet) so I can't afford to get such junk. I'd rather download Torrent, almost - but I don't :)

Quoting from your own following sentence, "that's another take-to-the-extreme example." Although the circumstances are usually in the officer's favor, it still depends on the circumstances.

And why expect artists to make a living the way they did before copyright? Musicians often made the bulk of their money not from performances, but from selling sheet music. More recently, musicians have had to rely on live performance because of unfair accounting and copyright issues. Earlier, there was patronage. The world has changed. Businesses fail when they don't keep up. The way art is created and distributed is changing. Business models need to change, too. But not all businesses can have the same model. The model of giving away a product and selling the support (or some other tangential item or service) is vey limited.

Digital copies of Mona Lisa isn't a good example. The original's value (and potential revenue) is calculated differently from, say the value of a work meant to mostly be distributed digitally, as in the case of music nowadays. The problem is that digital copies are easy to pirate. If free pirated copies flood the market, demand is reduced, and profits suffer. Knockoff designer clothes, etc, are treated as a serious problem. Digital copyright infringement should be considered equally serious.

It's a complicated issue, and I've been mulling it over (I was a working artist before the kids came along, and I expect to be once they are a little older). Copyright was created to account for changing markets. It's been updated as markets continue to change, although not necessarily to everybody's satisfaction. I agree with the concept of copyright, but not entirely with its implementation. Times and technology may be changing, but the basic concept of paying for something you did not produce yourself hasn't. If you are enjoying the fruits of somebody else's labor, you owe them some tangible compensation.

That is not the way the law works. Nor should it be the way the law works in my opinion. When a corporation steals, they should be prosecuted just like when an individual steals.

The definition of steal is:

You'd like to rewrite the dictionary?

Trevor

I still think the idea of buying a license, and not a tangible good can be asinine. For example, I am of the philosophy if I am just buying the license and not a piece of media, then I should be able to discard that piece of media and download said licensed item. After all, I am not buying a tangible good, I am buying a license.

An example was back in the day I went out and purchased a Windows 98se disk. I bought it OEM when I built a computer, and I was in high school and had disposable income so it was not a huge deal. Well come to find out the CDROM drive I was using was warped just a bit so the disk would spin at a slight angle and put a nice huge scratch in my media.

MS told me I had to rebuy it, but I didn't own the media, I just owned a license... Luckily, when I was a kid I was into table top strategy war games, and the local hobby shop there was a guy I knew who worked for Microsoft. I told him about what had happened and the very next day he had a brand new unopened copy of Windows for me. He was pretty high up on the sales side of MS for whatever district my city is in for the company and he had access to all sorts of software to give out to clients.

So, what ticks me off about some of the ways corporations sell media to us, is by design to make us spend more money. The copyright laws protect the creators/owners and that is a good thing, but they also harm consumers.

No, Trevor, I simply disagree with the second definition. To me, stealing involves property. Ideas, credit, words, etc. are not property.

George Lucas owns the rights to the word, "Droid." Every time someone uses that word commercially they owe him royalties. I think that is a bit of a stretch but that is how it is in practice.

By the way, what about the British laws on music?

major corporations have enough legal resources to more-or-less get away with it. And a $2000 fine isn't even petty cash. The concept you state is sound but the practical implication is unbalanced.



That part, yes. An electronic copy of an intangible item that has not deprived the creator of anything does not qualify as "stolen".


Exactly. I purchased a movie on VHS in 1999, thus also purchasing the lifetime rights to view said movie in my own home. Why is it "wrong" to download a digital version today?

Hands up anyone who thinks TLarkin should have simply handed MS another $100.

As I was saying, the British think that if you buy an album, you're really paying for a cassette/CD/vinyl album that happens to have content (music). Therefore, you have to buy another download that happens to have content (the same music) and put it on your iPod.

There was a website that let you buy your CD, and download an MP3 copy of the album. Likely banned in the UK.

According to the DMCA anytime you transfer something you own to a different media/medium you have to repurchase it.

I don't think you have a correct understanding of British copyright law. Your first paragraph is clearly not true. I don't know what website you are talking about, but there is no reason that such a site would be "banned" under British law.

I'm not sure that you did purchase the "lifetime rights". You may want to check on that.
Whilst there is a perfectly reasonable case for making backups of data that you own, it could certainly be argued that a digital download and VHS are not the same product, on quality grounds, or on the grounds on the versatility of the digital product.
However, I do see that there is some merit in the argument that if you have made a payment to the artist, then some greater flexibility might be permitted, rather than someone who just expects to get everything for free.

TLarkin's story of the MS disk is actually the reverse of usual. If you licence the software, then MS should provide you with another media. However, if you believe that you "own" the software, then if it gets damaged, you will need to buy another, as with a physical book, say.

The real problem is that people give away copied files. If they kept them to themselves, that would be reasonable. If they sold them, then that is a clear case where the artist is missing out on revenue from his labour.
When you lend someone your book, you no longer have it. When you give someone a copy, you have "bred" another instance of the book. Semantics about stealing is pointless. But just because it might not be stealing, doesn't mean it isn't necessarily wrong or illegal.

The idea that musicians should just earn a living from live gigs, and artists from physical work of arts (no digital media artists, then!) does not seem to be of any use to writers and composers. Authors of novels, writers of articles, composers of sheet music need to sell instances (copies) of their work.

I'm all for revision of copyright law, but those who create need to be reimbursed for their work. The argument that "a builder doesn't get paid again for the house" isn't a correct analogy. An author is not simply paid for the first copy of his work -- he makes a small income from each copy. Thus, if his work is popular, he earns a goodly sum. If it is unpopular, then he earn little. If you think an author should just be paid for the first year, or the first 1000 books, -- then why would anyone strive to make something that everyone wanted? Why would a publisher want to sell millions of copies?

I cannot see any other way but cultural ruin if some form of protection did not exist for artists. I'm not being melodramatic. I for one would not do the creative work that I currently get paid for, if there were no copyright laws. It simply would not be possible.

See that is my point. You aren't buying a piece of media you are buying a license. However, if your media gets lost, damaged, or stolen you have to buy a whole new license. Even though you are not actually buying the product on the CD, you are leasing it via a license.

There is where you buy something but don't actually own it. Recently there have been debates in our government (USA) about what owning a license actually legally means. I cannot find the article at the moment but I recall reading one recently about it. It had to do with redefining a few things in the DMCA.

I don't know what consumer protection legislation is like in the US -- (sounds a bit too goddam pinko! :D) But it might be possible to take MS to a small claims court. It's probably cheaper for them to give you a new disk than unleash the lawyers, whatever the merits of the case.

But that is clearly a case of MS wanting to have it both ways to suit them.
However, bad examples of companies shafting customers do not necessarily mean that the concepts of licensing or of copyright are necessarily a bad thing.

I certainly think that if you buy hardware, you should be able to mod it.

To be fair, this is the policy of everyone not just MS. All major record labels, all software and tech companies, and all publishing companies that put out any sort of digital goods. You are never buying a product you are leasing a license. Even when you buy a ticket to say a sporting event, you are actually agreeing to a small contract, in which you may exchange the ticket for a seat at said sporting event but you must agree to all the terms and conditions of the ticket and purchasing one assumes you agree to all of them.

Yes, I know about licences!:rolleyes:

I'm saying that if a company does say "you have a licence to use the software", then you should be able to play them at their own game, and insist that they give you a new copy -- like Apple does for bundled OS disks, for a nominal fee, rather than having to buy a new one.
In other words, there are times when the terms of the licence have consequences that are beneficial to the end user, and you should insist upon enforcing them.