IMO, no one has a "right" to anyone's intellectual property beyond the stated wishes designated by the property owner. This means that unauthorized exchanges are unethical. Illegal file sharing violates this principle . . . period!

from Voldenuit. Regulating technologies in their infancy is a bad idea. Imagine had the Supreme Court agreed with appellants and had said VCR's are illegal, because you could build them to have that control. Today, VCR's garner more income for the music industry than movies. They would not exist had the studios gotten their wish and had them banned.

There are lots of alternative uses for VCRs than to facilitate illegal copying and dissemination of videos. That's the point that carried the day.

Every time a new technology comes along, those with a vested interest in the old technology first ask the courts to ban it. Thankfully, the courts say no, and when they do, the copyright holders then find a way to make money off that new technology.

I don't understand how artists and record companies would make money on illegal file sharing. And consider, too, that no record labels are complaining about Apple's music store, nor even the new deals by Napster and others. Those are relatively new technologies as well, but no one's trying to shut them down.

Re: "Look Mom, no hands!"
 

Yep, saw you winking at me. I just chose to make an objective point.
Cheers!

;)

There's yet another, slightly ironic wink of history told in this blog:

http://www.corante.com/copyfight/arc...ed_culture.php

British TV BBC failed to preserve -then expensive- tapes of many early broadcasts and now asks those who the copyright-hardliners do not hesitate to call thieves to hand over what you'd probably have to call "pirated copies" on a volontary basis.

Fortunately, back in the day, at least there were no DRM-schemes in place.

Stave church rebuilt -- thanks to illegal videos
 

May I add another amazing story?

Just outside Bergen, Norway, where I live, stood an exceptionally beautiful stave church, built in the middle of the 12th century. It was one of less than 30 remaining in the world. In 1994 it burned to the ground -- torched by a black metal musician.

Fantoft stave church has since been rebuilt. I visited it many times while master carpenters were giving it form, using time-honoured building techniques (some of which they refused to tell me anything about). Tourists and locals flock to see the result, which is truly amazing!!

However, its reconstruction would not have been possible without extensive amateur photographs and video footage -- all of which was illegal. You see, photography by visitors was strictly forbidden in the original church.

With best regards,
ArcticStones

There must be a possibility of an essentially decentralised peer-to-peer networks, where the exchange of copyrighted data is mediated by a central supernode. The supernode could authorise transfers if the data's recipient pays. The copyright owner could even pay the sender a commission. Data could still be protected by a DRM scheme.

The advantages are the copyright owner doesn't need a large dedicated server for the data. If they're smart early adopters get their money back (through commissions). And the supernode doesn't just have to 'sell' music. Could sell anything.

A distributed version of ITMS, in other words, where clients run P2P that is only accessible through the supernode. Nice. Instead of a commission, they could get "free picks", i.e., supernode charges $1, and the delivering client gets 10 cents in credit with the supernode.

Ideas worth expanding on!
 

Bramley & NovaScotian,

What a fascinating idea!
The idea of honest p2p networks handled through a supernode with built-in copyright management is cerainly well worth discussing. I hope you or other thread participants can take the time to expand on this.

As far as I know, absolutely all Internet traffic passes through a few such supernodes. Without going into specifics, we already know that there are some very "interesting" filtering and surveillance technologies in place at these supernodes.

Voluntary, well-designed solutions are sure to be better than Orwellian ones. iTMS is already a great, legal alternative to the ubiquitous p2p downloading. And its popularity seems to be increasing exponentially. Why? Because there are plenty of people who respect copyright – and more who will do so when additional, sensible alternatives appear.

It seems to me that Judge Noonan is one of several Supreme Court Justices challenging the RIAA to be more creative in their meeting with new technologies.
Anyone else with thoughts on what that technology might look like?


With best regards,
ArcticStones


PS. There is a lot of fascinating detail in the Supreme Court decision. Voldenuit, thanks for pointing out some of them! I’m looking forward to reading it in its entirety given the first opportunity.

To add to this thought, it would be an added benefit if the credits were transferable, i.e. could be traded among users via the supernode. An alternative "reward" might be free play of the items being stored, but with protections in place to make it impossible to copy (i.e. read only on the parent machine) without first paying. If I paid, the supernode would unlock the item I payed for so I could move a copy elsewhere.

I should say here that I'm just embroidering Bramley's idea. The credit for it is his.

Some interesting stories. I had intended to come here and post my own, albeit less important, story of legally using "piracy enabling" technology this weekend.

We were planning to fly to Orcas Island off the coast of WA on Thursday morning. Thanks to America West's greed and incompetence, instead we spent 13 hours sitting in an airport (they overbooked all flights by 10-15 seats). We had ripped one movie from DVD to watch on the plane (first use of "piracy" technology). This is perfectly legal, I believe, and certainly ethical. We do this because the optical drives kill the battery so fast. We didn't plan for problems and more "dead" time, so we had only one movie on the HD, the other was in our checked luggage. Well, P2P to the rescue, we downloaded a copy of the movie that was in our luggage. Legal or not, I don't know and I don't care, but certainly ethical.

Obviously these aren't common occurences, but good uses of "piracy" technologies do exist.

Bigger picture
 

Thanks for the great followups on the BBC-story.
There are also some pretty creative ideas tossed around here in how p2p could evolve and the diversity of examples how what is forbidden today criminalises uses that finally turn out to be a Good Thing.

I shall enlist no less than Cory Doctorow with his paper that explains to Microsoft why DRM is a Bad Thing:

http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt (link to various translations and formats)

Ideas Ganymede has brought to this thread first look rather interesting to me. What we are looking at here is a lot bigger than just another minor shift in technology. So far, the printing press, producing disks etc. required big investments and needed big honking marketing to make economical sense.

That is all history for quite a couple of years now. Some creative mind, a Mac and some assorted tidbits in hard- and software are all it takes to produce books, music and films in a quality indistinguishable from what the industry puts out these days. Of course talent doesn't hurt.

I believe we are about to see a big change in how the market for creative content will look like in the future. If everything goes fine, we'll see new ways of finding the talented nuggets in the overwhelming quantity of mediocre talents. We will probably also see a richer diversity of cultural expression than what can be pushed down the line of todays industry logic.

The question at hand is less about what we could do to fix a paradigm that has outlived its usefulness and a lot more about what we can do to make sure that the desperate moves of an obsolete and doomed industry lobby do not ruin the very technology that is key to an inevitable evolution.

There are lots of great things that fail to see the light of trditional publication for one reason or another. For example I don't know why exactly the deal with Addison Wesley to produce this great book about C finally fell through but before the net existed, the author would not have had the possibility to publish it at all rather than shelve it:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/dmjones/cbook1_0a.pdf

In the domain of software, we've seen what impressive wealth of programs are produced by small companies and one-guy-and-his-Mac operations. More often than not, there is extremely attentive customer-care associated with these smaller outfits because they realise that customer-satisfaction is what the whole game is all about.

I firmly believe that ideas such as

http://creativecommons.org/

and other concepts, some of which are still to invent, have the potential to create an open marketplace for creative content where both the creators and the consumers will greatly benefit in diversity, open formats and less revenue diverted from the artists.

The only open question I see is to what extent the content industry as it has survived while stubbornly ignoring innovation will be able to delay the inevitable by lobbying elected governments to legislate against the best interest of their electors.

Hmmm.... a few years ago I was told that the net was un-policeable, that it was too big & too pervasive for anyone to control at all. I believed it then, but not anymore.

In fact I'm convinced that eventually our assorted nanny states will end up legislating most of the web into dinky little "legal" bite-size portions. Don't get me wrong; as a struggling artist (and a very bad guitarist!) I agree that stealing is utterly reprehensible. But I think that the wider problem is that - generally - we now seem to accept being told what to do, rather than figurin it out for ourselves.

We all know that stealing is wrong. So most of us don't do it. It's OUR choice!

We can all talk about moral implications and policies until we're blue in the face, but that still doesn't get to the root of the problem. The public is fed up with the rediculous prices the entertainment industry is asking for it's products. That's why file sharing (illegal downloading) is so popular.

Does anyone remember when CD's first came out? At the time, tapes were $10 and CD's were about $15. We (the consumers) were told that this was to pay for the development of the new technology, and the price would eventually stabilize. Nowdays, tapes are still in the $10 range, but CD's have gone up considerably. The last new CD I bought was $17.95. After tax it was 19-something... I gave the man a twenty and got change back, no bills. The price of CD players has come down a lot, so has the price of the media, but not the price of audio CD's. The same is true of Video/DVD players. Do you remember when a VCR used to cost $300? Now you can find a slew of DVD players for $39 at WalMart.

When movie stars absolutely have to get paid $10,000,000 per movie, and musical artists refuse to perform for less than 10,000 screaming fans... they alienate their fan base and (consequently) the source of their income. Every manager and publicist wants a bigger share of the pot, and as it trickles down the line, the consumer pays for the increase. In my opinion, the industry has done this to themselves.

Maybe entertainers should be happy with the fact that they work in the industy they love and settle for a mere 2 to 3 million dollar salary. Isn't this industy supposed to be about the fans? Just my $.02.

Cameranerd makes some good points. But count yourself lucky. Here in the UK a new CD will cost £15.95, which works out at $28 (at today's exchange rate).

Cameranerds contribution is probably a pretty widespread reasoning.

Let me first take care of the part that doesn't fly:

Someone will most likely step up and say:
"Don't we need rules in a civilised society everybody respects ?"
Not much to disagree with so far.
"Don't we have both free enterprise and copyright and isn't the customer free to buy or not, yet not supposed to steal ?"

Bang. Stuck.

Now, you might be surprised to see me write this kind of rebuttal. But I really have no problem at all with any people getting filthy rich in the industry.

What bothers me, as I explained at greater length earlier in this thread, is that they don't stop at not understanding the internet, they are constantly lobbying to take more and more rights away from what they should perceive as their customers. However, all they manage to do so far is to frustrate people to the point where they get attitudes such as cameranerd expressed.

And every time legal action takes away liberties to explore new forms of distribution of creative content, resulting in less expensive overhead for the benefit of both the creator and the customer, we lose.

Voldenuit, with all due respect, I don't think the problem is "not understanding the Internet" so much as wanting to prevent unauthorized use of intellectual property. There is no "liberty" to illegally obtain another's intellectual property, as the Supreme Court explained. The "attitudes" expressed by cameranerd hardly justify such unauthorized use, and neither does the amount of money other people make. No one has a right to someone's intellectual property because you think that person already has enough money. That's ridiculous. And not to worry about overpaid movie stars. When/if their movies don't net a return, their fee will be reduced.

This thread's probably on its last gasp. I'm away on a trip, so am not able to keep up as well. Another other mod/admin, feel free . . . ;)

Supreme Court points to RIAA’s lack of understanding
 

Phil, let me quote none other that Justice John T. Noonan admonishment of the RIAA and its lawyers:

So I think the Supreme Court itself is highlighting the fact that the recording industry has failed to understand the Internet!

To truly “understand the Internet” is to understand this technology’s impact on your business – and to act accordingly. That is something that takes great vision. And I think there is widespread agreement that the recording industry has been acting at a snail’s pace. They have had many years’ opportunity, and yet they have failed. (To everyone’s misfortune, the porn industry has been far more effective.)

This has left a vacuum. Which is the primary reason for the ubiquitous illegal downloading of music that we have seen for quite a few years. But there are other players who do understand the Internet. Let me just mention one of them:

Apple! They have seized the lion’s share of the legal download market precisely through understanding what the recording industry did not. And they have acted where the RIAA could and should have acted years ago.

With best regards,
ArcticStones

Let me clarify my above rant as I think people may be taking it the wrong way.

I work 2 jobs, IT during the week and, for the last 10 years, I work a "weekend" job as a photographer. I'm also a musician (though lately I've had little time to put into music) and I've played in several all-original bands. As a photographer (and a musician), I understand the value of intellectual property as good or better than anyone. You would be surprised how many people say "We just love this photo so we scanned it into our computer and made it our desktop" or something similar. When someone scans (or steals for that matter) one of my photos, they decrease my potential to earn money.

Obviously, stealing is not right (or legal), and I certainly don't advocate stealing. The problem comes from the consumer feeling like they are "entitled" to free stuff because they feel they have already "paid" for it. When an above situation happens to me, it forces me to analyze the situation and decide what I want to do about it: lower prices, legally persue the action, lower prices for just this one customer, raise prices, use a new distribution method, or something else entirely. I wouldn't have much business if I sued everyone who scanned a photo.

Granted comparing my 2-bit photo business to the entertainment industry is like comparing apples to apple trees, but I think the idea of intellectual property is similar. Honestly, I think the view I expressed earlier in this thread is typical of the average consumer. It may not be right, but it's reality.

edit: grammar

Obviously, stealing is not right (or legal), and I certainly don't advocate stealing. The problem comes from the consumer feeling like they are "entitled" to free stuff because they feel they have already "paid" for it. . .

I don't get it. :confused: Who's paid for what? The recording industry isn't objecting to "free stuff."

Sorry guys, I'm not following your reasoning. My primary interest in all this has been the ethics of the situation, and hoping that the law would be congruent in some way.

I see another thread has been started taking on a wider topic, so I'll close this one now as I believe we've been over the SC decision in depth. ;)