Re: Cory #6
Brit, my banking bits are no easier to DRM than any other bits.

I guess I don't follow what you're saying.

My complaint was that halfway through the video, he tries to reduce digital content to "special bits" that "should not be copied", and says this is all wrong. Calling digitial media "special bits" - while showing a 24-bit number - attempts to confuse a simple binary sequence with complex digital media. To me, it's a little bit like calling human beings, "just a configuration of atoms"; it's overly reductionistic. The obvious purpose is to lead the listener down a particular pathway of thought. It's absurd to think a 24-bit number can be controlled, so they try to get people thinking of digital media as a 24-bit number. (Similarly, if I could get people to think of human beings as just a particular configuration of atoms, then I could legitimize all kinds of crimes - murder, theft, etc - because we don't think of crimes as crimes when they happens to "configurations of atoms".) My point being: if you can get people to think a certain way (in both cases, an erroneously reductionistic way), then you can push forward a bunch of wrong ideas on top of it.

In fact, if we take the Cylon's argument seriously, then all copyright laws should be abolished, including Creative Commons because they are attempts to control "bits", and therefore completely wrong. Yet, BoingBoing puts BBTV under a Creative Commons non-commercial/attribution license. Based on the cylon's logic, who is BoingBoing to tell me what I can do with a bunch of bits? Who is BoingBoing to tell me that certain bits can't be sold, or must be attributed to BoingBoing?

It's all just bits. That's right.

Will you be sending us your banking information now, Cory? It's all just bits.

#1 posted by Thane Eichenauer
Man folks, if you read past the first four paragraphs you get to "...so I'm exaggerating..."

My initial reaction to your comment was that you were making up that quote and making fun of Karl Schroeder's obvious hysteria. Then I opened the link and read it for myself: "Okay, so I'm exaggerating, ..."

Sorry to rain on everyone's parade, but this was done years ago. Lookup "goodle news" and you can check the dates (done back in 2004). Anyway, you can check out their page here:
http://www.theinternetnowinhandybookform.com/bahoogle/goodnews.html

Including news items, such as:
World Peace sparks outpourings of joy
BBC - 1 hour ago
Almost all of the human race were united today in a vast expression of joy in response to the newfound world peace.

Bush takes XTC, goes to rave
New York Times - 12 hours ago
"He was jumping around, blowing a whistle, and kept asking me if I had any chewing gum," says Alison, 19, who danced with the President and his team of advisors at an unnamed club until 4am. "Rumsfeld gave me a kick-ass back rub."

All music to be free
The Scotsman - 4 hours ago
Record companies are to give away their music. Artists will give free concerts. iPods to be given to every child at birth.

We are not alone
Reuters - 3 hours ago
Representatives from other planets in the galaxy were in contact with world leaders today to discuss admission in a peaceful galactic federation of planets. "We believe that Earth has fulfilled all the criteria for entry," said a spokesalien, "bar a few details over voting rights."

Not really that surprising. I think much of what we perceive as "racism" is really "culturalism" and "classism" - which tend to align along racial lines. When a group of people vary from some other group (in education, culture, affluence, etc), then there are bound to be heuristics (read: discrimination) that affect people's interactions.

"Brit, I just checked the Students for a Free Tibet site. They don't link to Parenti's article."

Click on dougrogers' link. See the four links? Look at the third one. It says "Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth"

"They claim to have a copy of the 2003 version. I don't know if it's an accurate copy. The one I linked to, on Parenti's site, was updated in 2007."

I'm not sure what you mean by "I don't know if it's an accurate copy." Do you think that they might've created a fake copy? I quick glance over the article seems to show a lot is the same. I don't think Parenti's position has changed so significantly that the 2003 version is useless.

Oddly enough, the www.studentsforafreetibet.org website contains the same Michael Parenti essay Will linked to.

Anyway, I don't really get Will's point. The Parenti article says that pre-Chinese-invasion Tibet contained lots of religious, feudal, serfdom problems. Does Will think that Parenti is right when he says Westerners erroneously think Tibet was a wonderful, heavenly place? I certainly never thought so - so that whole section of Parenti's article is completely lost on me. It's apparently meant to explain why Western people favor Tibet independence, but certainly a lot of us DON'T think that. If you believe Parenti, then it legitimizes discounting the opinions of Western people on Tibetian independence.

Admittedly, Parenti's article isn't really pro-Chinese, either. I was disappointed that Parenti never even attempted to raise the question of people's legitimate right to self-rule. He talks about good and bad things China did for Tibet, but I couldn't help but think, "Isn't Parenti ignoring the elephant in the room by not even raising that question?" In Parenti's world, apparently, the right of China to control Tibet depends on how good or bad Tibet was pre-Chinese invasion, and how many good and bad things the Chinese did for Tibet since then. If that's the case, then first-world countries should be allowed to invade third-world countries all over the world - provided that they make the place better than it was when they arrived. (Colonialism anyone?) Any right to self-rule is completely ignored.

And, given that virtually all businesses *are* manned even though it appears they would make more money if they weren't, humans are more perfect than most people think they are.

That statement depends a great deal on the type of people who are doing the shopping, the value of the products, etc. I would expect most fresh vegetable shoppers buying food in rural locations are probably fairly responsible people. (I personally think small towns are more honest because of something called "reputation" - which works better in small groups, but is much weaker in large groups like cities.) Switch your business to a different location with different products, and you will have a very different situation. For example, setting up an "honor system" for buying crack or alcohol in the middle of a city (particularly if it's in a poor neighborhood), and I'd bet you'd get a lot less than 80-90%. All this experiment proves is that the clientele who buy fresh vegetables at that location are fairly honest. In fact, the article itself hints that there is variability in these numbers: it says "they make only 80 percent to 90 percent of what they should", but then later talks about "more than half of my vegetables were stolen every day". So, there is obviously a lot of variability.

Yeah, something smells fishy about this whole story - like half of the information is made-up to create a better story. Another article states: "Six Masai warriors, who are so fierce they kill male lions with their bare hands". http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/02/nmasai102.xml
Uh - right. This isn't still April 1st, is it? "They may be tempted to engage in their natural sport of hunting in England, particularly if they spot a cow, sheep or pig in a field." This sounds like sensationalist writing from a couple hundred years ago: see the wild men of Africa, untouched by civilization!

By the way, the article you link to is a few days old. The winner of the race (a Kenyan) finished in 2 hours, 5 minutes. The Maasai finished in under 5 hours 30 minutes.
Sources:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/04/14/do1402.xml
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/14/nmarathon114.xml

So, the question is whether more artists have been put out of business by the net than have been put into business by it.

This whole paragraph is worded strangely. First of all, you frame the question as "whether more artists have been put out of business by the net than have been put into business by it". Actually, whether the internet has helped or hurt artists is irrelevant to the question of piracy. When OK Go put their little viral video up on the web, they were using the internet. It wasn't piracy. You could count them as an artist who had been "put into business" (or, more correctly, helped in their business) by the internet, not by piracy. So, the question you pose isn't relevant unless we're sitting around debating whether the internet is a good or bad thing - and that's not really the question.

The net positively overflows with musicians, fine artists, visual artists, filmmakers, etc who are making art and reaching an audience (and, presumably, making money at it).

I don't think this has anything to do with the question of piracy. Merely to state that there are lots of "musicians, fine artists, visual artists, filmmakers, etc" on the web doesn't tell you anything. Are we supposed to assume they *made it* because of the internet (which, is again, distinguished from piracy)? I'm sure the Beatles are all over the internet, therefore we should conclude that the internet made them? Should be conclude (an even bigger stretch) that internet piracy "made them"? Obviously, the Beatles fame has nothing to do with the internet because they predated it. Yet, we're supposed to assume that for every other artist and musician? Every artist has to get out on the internet to pull in new fans. It's part of advertising in the 21st century.

Couldn't you do this with any city? Pick 5 arbitrary points, draw a pentagram, and go ZOMG SATAN!

It's hard to tell from the image on this post - but the streets connect the points together. (The dotted-line image shown above is an area where the street doesn't go through, though.) Here's a google map:
http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ie=UTF8&t=k&om=1&ll=38.903057,-77.037849&spn=0.029991,0.04343&z=14

Somebody said "you cannot be 7 more happy than me", which is true, but isn't it similarly absurd to say "you're 7 more valuable than me"?

The problem is the way you phrased the statement. Saying "you're 7 more valuable than me" leaves out the units (7 what?) and also incorrectly assumes money measure the value of a person. If you formulate it correctly: "you have $7 more than me", it makes sense. You can measure dollars and cents. You can't measure "the beauty of your poetry" or the "intelligence of our public debate".

How silly. First of all, GDP is just an economics number. Do you really want your bank to say, "We aren't going to tell you how much you have in your bank account - because happiness isn't measured by the amount of money you have in the bank." The definition and value is what it is - even if people make wrong assumptions about it.

Second, how would you even measure those things? You're going to measure "beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate"? Yikes - tell me that isn't ripe for propaganda. I can already see governments rewriting their own numbers. China says Tibet is very, very pleased with their Chinese overlords, Saudi Arabia is doing far better than the US in the "our poetry is beautiful because it praises Allah" scale, and Iraqis are experiencing vast upswings in the 'happiness index' ever since the US invaded? Okay, whatever you say. The fact of the matter is that the desire to twist this information is directly proportional to its popularity. If it ever became very popular, the powers-that-be will twist it into being worthless.

Third, just because Robert F. Kennedy gave a speech mentioning the deficiencies of GDP in measuring happiness doesn't mean he advocated creating an index for it, and it doesn't mean he thinks it can be measured. The last sentence of the article: "Somewhere, Robert F. Kennedy is smiling." is purely wishful thinking. Even if you could attach a number to these things - from the "strength of our communities" to the "integrity of our natural heritage" - all highly subjective values - the way you compile them together into some larger index is also highly subjective. You might think that the government is underestimating the "destruction of the environment" and the beauty of emo in our society. Other people might complain that "immigrants are messing up our society" and a number should be attached to that. Someone else might think the "strength of our communities" should be weighted much, much heavier in the resulting index.

I think the whole thing is just plain silly. Why not declare that America has a bubillion scrumpfuls and that no other nation in the world even comes close?

Early in the war, Japan was casting itself as a liberator against Western Imperialism. I think that's what this cartoon is about. 1936 was still five years before Pearl Harbor, but it was after Japan began invading Manchuria. In 1936, France was in control of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The US was in control of the Philippines. The Dutch controlled Indonesia. The British controlled Hong Kong, India, Burma, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Solomon Islands, Fiji, parts of New Guinea, etc. The Japanese cast themselves as "good" against the backdrop of Western Imperialism - a trick still used today by dictators everywhere (Hugo Chavez, anyone?)

Well, I'm not really surprised. I do occasionally see young men with those types of long, untrimmed beards - and all of them are Muslims, and presumably fundamentalist Muslims (not cutting the beard is a belief in some fundamentalist circles - in fact, the Taliban outlawed shaving or trimming beards - but not even the Saudis are that fundamentalist). I think it's pretty well established that young men with those types of beards are likely to be Muslim fundamentalists. Of course, being a Muslim fundamentalist is not the same as being a terrorist or jihadi. While I would grant that men with those types of beards are more likely to be terrorists than the average guy on the street, it's still pretty unlikely. One can hardly be surprised that some people would be alarmed seeing him, though.

> Since when is one's appearance grounds for arrest?

He wasn't arrested. Hence, you have no basis for that statement. He was stopped and talked to in order to determine if he was a threat. Maybe that's an unnecessary hassle, but it's not "one's appearance [is] grounds for arrest".

Related links:
British Officials stop James Hetfield (of Metallica) for having a "Taliban-like beard." (July 2007)
http://news.aol.com/entertainment/music/story/_a/hetfield-held-up-for-taliban-beard/20070709082409990001

"They (Taliban) jail for 45 days those people who shave their beards in addition to awarding seven lashes to those who trim their beard," the Afghan refugee said."
http://www.rawa.org/beard.htm

"The rules prescribe 10 days in jail for trimming or shaving beard," said the head of the Taliban's most feared organ."
http://www.rawa.org/beard2.htm

Seems that Cory dropped out of the conversation.

One other point I should make a little more explicitly is the fact that Cory turns "intellectual property" into "knowledge". That makes his "knowledge can't be owned" more persuasive mostly because when people think of "knowledge" they think of learning, how-to manuals, tutorials, reference books, etc. Knowledge helps us improve the world by being more capable. So, saying "knowledge can't be owned", he makes it sound like this idea, this principle, is going to move the world forward and bring education to everyone. The problem is that when you look back at Cory's switch from "intellectal property" to "knowledge", you realize that not all IP is knowledge (at least not in that way). A copy of "Spiderman 3" is IP. Is it knowledge? When we think of education and learning things to move our society forward, do we think, "You know what would help? If everyone had access to the movie 'Spiderman 3'?" A lot of IP is entertainment. Cory lumps all of it into the category of "knowledge" in order to seem presuasive when he says knowledge can't be owned". In the real-world, this can be reworded into "movie producers have no right to deprive the public of free downloads of Spiderman 3", which sounds pretty ridiculous when it's put in those terms.

I once read that whoever controls the language of a debate has half the job done. It's worth pointing out that Cory is attempting to control the langauge of the debate by using inaccurate words like "knowledge".

Cupcake Faerie:
What if some person, any person, decides to copy down all of my words, maybe change them enough so that they are not verbatim, but copy the ideas intact, get a publisher and publish my ideas as his work?

Ideas of stories are not protected IP. However, your words verbatim are protected IP (with the exception of fair use). Under the program advocated by anti-copyright crusaders (like Cory, Teresa), your verbatim words are not protected, and if someone or some company wants to steal your story and publish it without paying you a dime or even including your name, that's perfectly fine - according to the anti-copyright crowd. It's important to understand what exactly these people are advocating to understand why their ideas are ridiculous.

Regarding Cory's article:
The term wasn't in widespread use until the 1960s, when it was adopted by the World Intellectual Property Organization, a trade body that later attained exalted status as a UN agency.

"exalted status", huh? You can see right away that Cory is attempting to bias his audience towards a particular conclusion.

people who've "had their property stolen" are a lot more sympathetic in the public imagination than "industrial entities who've had the contours of their regulatory monopolies violated"

See - Intellectual Property belongs to big evil corporations, therefore, we should deprive them of it by eliminating the concept of Intellectual Property. Please ignore the obvious weaknesses of this argument (not all IP is owned by corporations, being a corporation doesn't necessarily make you evil, being a corporation doesn't mean the public has a right to all your stuff).

That's entirely true - and it's exactly why the phrase "intellectual property" is, at root, a dangerous euphemism that leads us to all sorts of faulty reasoning about knowledge.

I don't think this leads to "all sorts of faulty reasoning about knowledge". Sure, you can make the point that IP can be copied without depriving the original owner of the property, but Cory makes a giant leap from saying "IP isn't like regular property" to "IP should be free for the taking".

Faulty ideas about knowledge are troublesome at the best of times, but they're deadly to any country trying to make a transition to a "knowledge economy".

Yes, faulty ideas about knowledge can be deadly to any country moving to a knowledge economy, which is why I oppose faulty Cory's ideas. Failure to protect Intellectual Property causes the "knowledge economy" to falter by depriving creators from being able to fully benefit from their creations. The anti-copyright crowd wants to put everything in the public domain, and that seriously undermines making a living by creating ideas.

But there's plenty of stuff out there that's valuable even though it's not property. For example, my daughter was born on February 3, 2008. She's not my property.

Quite frankly, I don't know why Cory brings this up. He's going to say Intellectual Property isn't property, and therefore it's free for the taking (talk about jumping to an unjustified conclusion), but then he wants to say that his daughter isn't property, but there are certain laws and restrictions. Huh? Why not apply the same concepts to Intellectual Property? If you don't want to treat Intellectual Property somewhat like real property, that's fine as long as you create a different system that still gives creators protections similar to ones that exist for real property. (In fact, this double system already exists: copyrights and patents expire. On the other hand, your ownership of your car doesn't expire.) Instead, Cory want to advocate just the opposite: all intellectual property is free for the taking.

given all the investment his members had put into recording the ceremony on the 60th anniversary of the Dieppe Raid in the second world war, they should be given the right to own the ceremony, just as they would own a teleplay or any other "creative work". I immediately asked why the "owners" should be some rich guys with cameras

If you setup a camera and film something, you own your own footage. Unless they somehow had exclusive rights to film it, they should have exclusive rights to their film (but not exclusive rights to all possible footage of the ceremony). Other people can film it if they want. Besides, what would be the logical conclusion of Cory's idea here? That books can't be copyrighted because the words exist in dictionaries elsewhere? That your photograph of nature isn't yours because you don't own the atoms in a tree or a sunset? I especially like how Cory tried to spike the punch here by calling them "rich guys with cameras", as if by attaching unattractive adjectives to the people, he can convince his readers that we can seize their work.

If we're going to achieve a lasting peace in the knowledge wars, it's time to set property aside, time to start recognising [sic] that knowledge - valuable, precious, expensive knowledge - isn't owned. Can't be owned.

So - Cory's solution to "lasting peace in the knowledge wars" is for the creators to surrender? That's an awesome solution. I'll have to advocate that for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the only way to achieve lasting peace is for the other side to unconditionally surrender. What? You don't like that solution? Of course not, because it's a one-sided, selfish, we-win-everything solution.

I also think it's wrong to switch from "intellectual property" to "knowledge" to "knowledge can't be owned". As a software developer, I don't see my programming work as "knowledge". It's a set of instructions for the computer, but it's pretty meaningless for people directly. People don't ever see any of this "knowledge" that I am creating (which is different from say, an article I write). Sure, there may be concepts and knowledge embedded inside the software which is intended for human consumption, but most of it isn't "knowledge" in my opinion. Further, I don't see what's wrong with the ownership of knowledge anyway. I've heard other people comment that copyrights should be a two-tier system: users should be allowed to upload and download music to pirate bay, but companies shouldn't be allowed to steal my creations and sell it without paying me. Of course, by advocating that position, you are treating "knowledge" as not entirely free. You are letting some concepts of "real property ownership" leak in. If my creation isn't mine, then what right do I have to stop a company from coming along and selling it to the public while ignoring me entirely? (And of course, we're supposed to believe that treating IP like real property is bad, bad, bad - and "knowledge" can't be owned.)

I sometimes think it would be an interesting and appropriate protest against Cory's ideas if I did google-searches for everything he's ever written, copied it, stripped out his name and replaced it with a fictional one, and put it up on a website. Maybe I could earn some money off it by putting up web ads or google adsense. I'd just like to see how quickly Cory would get upset. Hey, buddy - knowledge isn't property. Unfortunately, I am actually too nice to actually do such a thing, but if someone is going to advocate bullying, then I think they should see what it's like to be on the receiving end of it.

BTW, Hitler was an artist at one time.
http://www.fpp.co.uk/Hitler/artist/Price/WashingtonPost210402a.html

Hmmm. Scent is actually small particles floating in the air. Your nose detects them chemically. Since space close to completely empty, I have to wonder if he's actually smelling the spacecraft itself. Perhaps the process of opening and closing the airlock shears off tiny bits of metal from the spacecraft itself (say, from the air rushing out into space). That would explain why "space" smells metallic and resembles the smell of arc welding.

You silly, silly Western people! The Burka is not a symbol of oppression. What crazy ideas will you come up with next? Will you tell us that the Jews don't like wearing special badges on their clothing? That women don't enjoy being chauffeured in Saudi Arabia?

Women love their burkas. They love them so much that they love it when Pakistanis threaten to throw acid in their faces for not wearing them. Only silly Westerners think women don't love the burka. Markus Kison has it perfectly right when he says, "it is often *perceived* in the west as a symbol of repression."

[T]he Dukhtaran-e-Millat has been at the forefront of the campaign to impose the burqa on Kashmiri women. Its members threw acid and paint on the faces of women who dared to defy its diktat in the early 1990s. Last year, when a little-known militant group ordered Kashmiri women to wear the burqa, the Dukhtaran-e-Millat backed and helped enforce the immensely unpopular campaign.

In case you want to learn a little about DeGray and his ideas:

The seven types of aging (according to DeGray):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey#The_seven_types_of_aging_damage_proposed_by_de_Grey

The talk he gave at TED:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/39

#43 posted by noen , February 4, 2008 10:00 AM
Still not hearing any serious proposals, just attitude.

So, do *you* have anything to contribute? I listed a number of things. You seem to be content to drag your feet to maintain the piracy status-quo.

New technologies have enabled people to steal on a whole new level. People's conscience is one possible buttress against stealing. Unfortunately, a number of "data isn't property" people want to eliminate any sense of guilt associated with piracy. Funny how you don't even spare a breath to even complain about this "philosophy", it's effects, and the obvious one-sided selfishness of it. Cracking down on the uploaders and facilitators is important. (And, to get back to piratebay: they're working on an anonymous system so that people can steal things with less concern for getting caught. Again, you don't spare a breath to condemn these actions.)

People keep bringing up music companies to legitimize sticking it to the man by stealing music, but digital media isn't just music. Even the tiniest companies that have nothing to do with the music industry get pirated. Pirates don't care about which company they're ripping off, and are probably not even aware of which company their ripping off at any given moment. I know one guy who runs a one-man company (no other employees) and he gets pirated.

Since I work in games (which is digital, and therefore easy to rip off), let's look at Kelly's list to see if there's any realistic advice for the games industry.

Immediacy - claim: people can get legitimate copies more quickly through legitimate channels than through piracy. This is barely true - and it's only true for major companies selling big-budget games (e.g. Halo 3). Companies have to push the hype to make people want to get the game within days. Anything longer than that and it will be available on pirate-websites. Speaking of Halo, perhaps that's not the best example. A pirated copy of Halo 3 was available a few days before its official launch, and a pirated copy of Halo 2 available about a month before release. Does this mean that the "immediacy" bullet point favors piracy over legitimate sales? (Microsoft did strike-back against the pirates: when the XBox "phoned home", it identified people with pirated copies and banned them. Making people connect to your servers for various value-added things like multiplayer matching is at least a useful strategy for fighting piracy - assuming the game can incorporate some value-added online stuff. Hopefully, they won't manage to duplicate the servers.) I should also add that DRM actually *helps* with the "immediacy". If it takes a week to crack the DRM, then you have an immediacy advantage (of one week) over the pirates.

Personalization - is anyone going to customize games at the "factory" level for each individual user? I think not. We can allow the user to customize things on his user's end - but that means the pirates have the same abilities. Asking game companies to customize games before they reach the hands of the consumer is not realistic. For one thing: what do we know about each individual user before he has a copy of the game? Second: if we did customizations he's talking about, they would be permanent. Giving the user the ability to customize things to his preferences or customizing them after installation is far more useful for real users.

Interpretation - make people pay for support? Hey, that might work fine when you sell your software to rich companies, but what kind of support would we possibly charge for when selling a game? Quite frankly, it's better if everything works intuitively and has good documentation. (One of the problems I have with this model is that it incentivizes software companies to make software that is difficult to use, or causes user-interface issues to be given lowest priority because it undercuts selling support.)

Authenticity - "might like to be sure it is bug free, reliable, and warranted". Right - like an "official" copy is somehow more bug-free or reliable than a pirated copy made with the exact same digital bits of information.

Accessibility - you have to keep your software "tidy, up-to-date, and in the case of digital material, backed up". If someone is pirating a game and their hard-drive crashes, they can just get another copy from the same internet they got their first pirated copy from.

Embodiment - you want to see it on the big screen, so you go to a theater instead of pirating it and watching it on your home computer. Okay, but when does anyone want to play "your favorite (free) game with 35 others in the same room?" Kelly sounds out-of-touch with reality if he thinks 35 people want to stand around watching people play games. And exactly what percentage of game users would want to do this, even if it wasn't zero? And how, exactly, would game companies profit from some occasional eccentric guy renting out a movie theater to play Halo?

Patronage - "audiences WANT to pay creators". I think this is overrated. I have friends who have written shareware (i.e. pay the owner if you want). If you want some spare cash, fine. It certainly isn't going to pay your mortgage. This model will reduce game company earnings to a fraction of their current value. Kelly's example of Radiohead? The average donation per download of their album was $2.26. Admittedly, that's probably not bad relative to the money they'd get from a record company. Although, that's not quite fair since one of the main jobs of record companies is to increase the volume of sales through marketing, advertising, and existing media contacts. An artist getting $10 per sale on 1,000 sales is a lot worse than getting $1 per sale on 100,000 sales. Radiohead is famous and they used their donation model to drum up *a lot* of free publicity. So, assuming it worked out well for them, it only shows that established bands with existing media interest and an uncommon sales strategy to drum up publicity (while it's still uncommon) can profit from the strategy. If you want to add all the advertising costs into it (along with everything else publishers would have done, but now you have to do yourself), that $2.26 is going to get a lot slimmer.

Findability - yeah, like you can't search for digital media if you want to pirate it. Most of this is about ways major corporations (Amazon, TV networks) can direct viewers to other things they might like.

If a Russian website wants to sell tracks for pennies then, given the GDP in Russia, then that is the nature of the interwebs.

What Russian Mp3 websites were doing was theft. No one outside of Russia got any money from any sale. It's the equivalent of me selling my ripped MP3's on the internet and pocketing all the money. I never bought music from that website, and told other people to avoid it as well, because I knew they were ripping off the people who created the music.

I won't assume I know everyone's position on the matter, but I've seen a lot of anti-copyright people on the internet. For example, on a recent thread ("Galactic Civilizations II: big budget game, no DRM"), peterus made the claim that "Data isn't property." The only logical conclusion of that statement is that all digital media is free to everyone. I can't help but feel like a farmer living in Russia during farm collectivization, and a mob has arrived on my door claiming I have no right to my property - and it's going to be taken from me and added to the collective because it's "better for everyone". Even worse, they have no obligation to pay me anything - unlike the USSR which paid bad government wages to everyone. (And the fundamental flaw with communism is that they didn't take into account that people don't like working for the collective; they want to profit from the sweat of their own brow, not have their reward stolen away by the collective. The "digital media isn't property" crowd wants to do that to digital-media creators.) Ironically, many of the anti-copyright people use an argument similar to the communists: big, bad capitalists are abusing the common worker, which sounds a bit like "music companies are screwing the musician". First of all, music isn't the only digital media. Second of all, while I don't particularly like the music companies, the RIAA, or the ridiculous copyright extensions, it's a convenient excuse for pirates to grab free stuff.

When Napster came out, I downloaded hundreds of songs and began buying 1-2 CDs per WEEK. Next, go look at how many CDs local bands in your area are selling. Contrast this with the music industry's own "losses" for the last 10 years.

And, what's the point? No one is stopping small bands from uploading their stuff to the internet. If this is truly a viable strategy, then companies will want to take advantage of it. Don't steal stuff off the internet, and claim you're doing the companies a favor.

Take this blog as an example. BoingBoing has been around a long time and everything on it is easily copied, reproduced and distributed around the world. So ask yourself what about this blog can't be easily reproduced? Hint: it isn't the content.

Yes, someone could steal the content and put it on another website, but people come for the regular updates and also the server-side code that permits commenting, too. (So the thief would need to copy BoingBoing regularly and write his own server-side code.) But, what would make his website better than the original? Why not come here directly, instead? If you charged for access, he'd compete with you on price. I've actually seen people rip off websites, by the way. There is a software-development website I used to visit. People would upload articles on software development, and it grew into a great resource with thousands of articles. Every once in a while, someone would write a script that would copy the entire site. He'd then duplicate the website on a different domain and put his own ads up. It was actually pretty irritating that someone would come and rip-off a website that people had spent years building up.

Second, not all digital products can be supported by ads like BoingBoing. Do you really want your games, word processors, and movies showing ads to eek-out a living? They'd never make much money, and that means everything would be low-budget. Don't assume your model, based on a website, can possibly work for all forms of media. For example, I own one piece of software that costs over $3000. It's remarkably powerful, took an enormous amount of work to create, and do you really think they will generate $3000 worth of ad-revenue from me alone? Do you think that selling access to web-community centered around this software is worth $3000?

Ok Downpressor, outerjohn, let's hear your solution. DRM doesn't work, it gets hacked as fast as they can release it.

I think you need to begin making some finer distinctions. First, I think it's important that people recognize that they don't have a *right* to every piece of digital media for free. People worked hard on creating this stuff. Simply reducing the percentage of piracy is important, and people's conscience can play a role - but that *only* works if people understand that piracy is wrong.

My number one irritation is with the piracy advocates. The "data isn't property", "I don't believe in intellectual property", "you can't own culture" ideas that are just other ways of saying "digital media belongs to everyone, not the author, artist, or worker who created it; therefore - mine, mine, mine!". At least if people are going to rip off digital media, they shouldn't have the convenience of believing that what they are doing is right. I recently read an interview with the creator of piratebay, and the interview was completely neutral. He was said something to the effect that 'People think we hate copyright, but the truth is that we simply don't care about copyright.' I was appalled that those kinds of ideas and the creator of piratebay get completely neutral, non-judgmental treatment from a magazine. Fundamentally, they are saying that if I spend a hundred million dollars and my entire life creating a movie, music, software, or any other digital product, that it belongs to the public domain, and I have no more right to profit from it than any random person on the street. I think that's pretty galling. I find it galling that people *preach* that it's the way things *should* be.

Second, if people are going to take digital media and facilitate it's theft (like piratebay), I think we should all recognize that it's sleazy and needs to be illegal.

What should we do? Should let the NSA and AT&T sniff every single bit on the internet and if you're caught off you go to jail? Should we let Sony and all the other corps put their root kits on every customers' machine and let them all spy on us so they can be sure no one steals a single song? What should be done?

Saying things like "sniff every single bit on the internet" and make sure "no one steals a single song" are clearly unattainable goals. Don't propose ridiculous "solutions" to try to make your position look like the only sensible one. If I came to you and said, "Burglary is bad, we need to catch these them", would you roll your eyes and say, "oh, gee - what are we going to do? Hire a million cops and put video-cameras on everyone's houses to make sure not a single burglary happens anywhere at any time?"

> When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.

Depending on how you read that, it might be an extremely simplistic and ridiculous statement. When copies are super-abundant, you can't charge anyone for a copy. However, they can still be extremely valuable. Take OpenOffice as an example: is it worthless? In the sense that you can charge people money to get a copy, it is worthless. In the sense that it helps people, the answer is a definite "no" - it's NOT worthless. I recently uploaded an application (which I wrote) to my website. I'm giving stuff away for free, and plan on giving away other stuff for free. Does that make them worthless? Don't be ridiculous. I give them away because I hope other people find them as valuable as I do. I think adding to the common-domain helps people, and helps to build the world up.

> DRM may increase the value of copies, but it generally diminishes the value of the idea itself, resulting in an economic loss.

I really don't understand the thinking of the anti-copyright crowd. It's an economic loss compared to what? Everyone ripping off the creator? In many ways, I can't help but look at pirates as motivated by anything except pure selfishness - the desire to steal the works of others as if they have a god-given right to it. The fact of the matter is that a DRM-laced software is more valuable than non-existent software. And if people constantly rip-off the creators, then what is the ultimate fate of the creators? They won't produce any more software. Like I've said before, there's no point in my writing software if piracy is so bad that mowing lawns becomes more lucrative. So what do you want: do you want me to write software, get paid, and help thousands of people benefit from the fruit of my labor, or do you want me to spend my days mowing some stranger's lawn. It would be a huge waste of my mind and my talent, but if pirates and piracy-promoters don't get their head on straight, then you're making that choice for me.

The pirates are just a mob of people who want to kill the golden goose, but think that killing the golden goose = golden eggs for everyone, instead of figuring out that killing the golden goose means no more gold eggs. Here's a thought for all you pirates: by pirating, you increase the incentive for creators to use DRM. This means YOU are responsible for DRM in the products you buy. This is because NO creator would even consider using DRM if piracy wasn't happening. YOU are the ones at fault for this situation.

> The conveyor belt is designed to exactly match
> the speed of the wheels, moving in the opposite > direction.
>
> So when the aircraft is moving 10 MPH forwards,
> the conveyor belt is moving 10 MPH backwards.
> Since the wheels on an aircraft are free-wheeling
> (that is they do not provide propulsion), the
> wheels will just spin at 20 MPH.

Right, but read the instructions again: "The conveyor belt is designed to exactly match the speed of the wheels, moving in the opposite direction." That means the conveyor belt is moving at 20MPH because the wheels are. But, that means the wheels are now spinning at 30MPH, repeat, repeat, repeat.

> The common misconception is due to people
> thinking in automotive terms, where the wheels
> are providing propulsion. In an aircraft that is
> not the case.

No, you aren't understanding what's really going on in this problem. The problem is this: the question is framed ambiguously. We all know that the plane takes off due to the airspeed. The question is this: is the plane moving relative to the world? The question is ambiguous - some people say "yes", and some people say "no". If the plane is moving relative to the world, then it has an airspeed, and it will take off. If the plane is not moving relative to the world (and we ignore windspeed and the effects of the propeller pushing air under the wings), then it has no airspeed, and it will NOT take off.

The odd thing is that aircraft use propellers / jets to push themselves forward on the runway, not wheels. So, when the question says, "The conveyer belt is designed to exactly match the speed of the wheels, moving in the opposite direction." - the ONLY way that can happen is if the aircraft has zero airspeed. If the aircraft has any airspeed at all, this becomes nonsensical because the spinning of the wheels *cannot* be the same as the movement rate of the conveyor belt. To put it in other terms: the speed of the wheels = airspeed + conveyor belt speed. However, the question says "the speed of the wheels = conveyor belt speed", so what about the airspeed? Is it zero? If the propeller/jet is pulling the aircraft through the air, then the airspeed will not be zero and so, the speed of the wheels is NOT equal to the conveyor belt speed. People create different answers because the question can be interpreted in two very different ways. However the Mythbusters "test" this, they're going to take one or the other interpretation - and whichever interpretation they take will be "the winner".

Yawn. More pro-piracy propaganda from Cory. I hate how these pro-piracy monologues conflate a bunch of different things together so that they can justify stealing stuff. The video confuses re-mixing information into new and unique forms with the flat-out stealing of an unaltered movie, music, or software. Of course, the video mixes these two things together so they can point to the first one (see the great things remixing adds to the world), and justify the latter (and that's why pirates are doing the world a favor by being freeloaders on society and the entire creative community). Why does the pro-piracy crowd always conflate a bunch of completely different situations together - unless they don't really want an honest discussion? It's because piracy - stealing the hard work of real artists, real producers, real workers - and sharing it with your closest ten-thousand friends - is indefensible from any kind of objective standpoint, so they have to muddle the issue, thereby justifying their own desire to get free shit and pretend like they aren't crossing any kind of moral boundary.

If he, a poor chess player, can defeat grandmasters, why isn't he world champion?

Here's a video of the chess game, with the explanation at the end:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evZmpsl3jI0

As far a magicians go, you have to understand that there's a mixture of a lot of things going on. One of the common tricks is to use actors. For example, I remember reading that a lot of stage magicians use identical twins in their show. Just because a magician says he's not lying, or just because someone is made to look like a random stranger, it doesn't mean they are.

I once saw a Christian creationist use a bunch of these fake-giant-human photos (including the one shown above) as "evidence" that the Genesis account was true (using the "Genesis 6:4 There were giants in the earth in those days..." verse).

It might still be possible to pull the YouTube video out of the browser cache of someone who saw this on YouTube. It's possible to do that - I've done it in the past.

YouTube link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wmx6Q0YLH8A

Here's the Penn and Teller version (it appears about 2:30 minutes into this video):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pU0O2-o67C0

The whole thing rotates to one side - the camera, the table, everything is part of the set. If you rotate them together, you won't perceive any movement on the video. At the end, he takes the camera off the tripod, but I think that's a different set (and, if you look closely, the objects aren't in the exact same position). He has one set that rotates and one set that doesn't. Notice, also, how sparse the sets are? That makes it easier to create two identical sets, and reduces the number of things that have to be nailed down in place. There's a video of Penn and Teller doing the same thing.

I have to laugh at Cory's comparison to the Soviet Union. In this article he says, "It would be a great Sovietisation of the world's digital printing presses". In an earlier article, he says, "DRM is Lysenkoism for the digital age." Uh huh. This from the guy who thinks intellectual property should be free - which to me sounds an awful lot like "from each according to his abilities" (Karl Marx). It's pretty ironic that Cory raises the specter of the Soviet Union when he advocates something so similar. Does he really think we'll all run like scared little children because he invokes the ghost of the USSR to scare us? Further, Cory hopes to hoodwink everyone into thinking that copyright enforcement = Soviet Russia. (Just don't upset his fantasy by telling him that the first US copyrights were established in 1790.)

"Viacom sent over 100,000 takedown notices to YouTube last February, but seconds after it was all removed, new users uploaded it again." No, it wasn't. This is an obvious exaggeration.

I'd be a lot more impressed with Cory's arguments if it wasn't so much exaggeration, fear-mongering, non-sequiturs, and strawman arguments. But, he'll always be popular because he's saying what millions of people want to hear: they should have free access to all the music, software, and digital media they want for free. It's like telling children that they can have whatever they want whenever they want it from Toys 'R Us - for free.

Phasor3000:
"prosecute the hell out of the violator"
I disagree with this method. It's a bit like pulling over a few drivers for speeding and prosecuting them for attempted murder. Yes, you could argue that speeding = reckless endangerment of people's lives, but putting people in prison for speeding isn't the way to solve this. Part of the problem is that it's costly to prosecute people, and that makes it uneconomical to prosecute them for small crimes.

Like I said on Digg last night, how can there be such a huge disconnect between American science/media and the rest of the world?

I which direction? I remember one famous Indonesian scientist claiming that it was just a small human. Most all scientists seem to agree (month ago) that this was a separate species. There seems to be a few scientists with the unlikely idea that they were human, and I've seen some creationists claim they're just human (apparently, they're really afraid of any kind of species approaching human, but not quite human).

I'm continually amazed by people's excuses to justify their own piracy of other people's work.

shabumike
I love hearing every one whine about how they're losing money and fabricate b.s. statistics about how much they "could have made"....
Yeah, shabumike. We're all just making stuff up about our losses to filesharing.

...File sharing is here PERMANENTLY! If you can't deal with it get another job/life or move to SriLanka.
Interesting that you undercut your own argument. First, you act as if no one is losing money due to filesharing, then, in the very next sentence, you say that filesharing is here and if we don't like it we need anther job. The second part shows that *even you* admit that the first section was a lie.

Adrienne L. Travis:
For me (and, clearly a lot of other people), it boils down to: If you don't trust me, why would i want to give you money?
Ah, what a wonderful excuse. I suppose you *won't* be shopping at stores that employ security guards against shoplifters, you *won't* be shopping at stores that use tag detectors at the exit, you *won't* be shopping at stores that have video cameras. Give me a break. Besides, it isn't anything personal. You know that as well as I do. Yet, you react with some kind of mixed-up outrage.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden:
His secondary point is that doing without DRM doesn't make the situation any worse. This is also demonstrable.
I doubt it. Yes, there are cases where artists give stuff away for free. This is most beneficial for new artists who are trying to build a name for themselves. It's an investment, an advertisement for other songs on their CD or an advertisement for their next CD. I do think that new artists have a lot to gain by having their music spread around the web, and I know there are artists who want their music passed around for free - but they only gain a lot because they are building a name for themselves. It's an investment in their future.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden:
(applauds EnglishNerd)
I'm unsure why you're applauding. EnglishNerd does a good job of pointing out how much copyright has actually helped book authors.

Andrew Katz:
Oh god. Johen, I suppose someone has to point out that this *isn't* stealing. It's not theft. When you steal a can of soup from a store, the store no longer has it. They can't sell it to someone else. You have deprived them of it. Permanently.
Stealing isn't simply about depriving someone of their property. I've spent about 6,000 hours working on my current software. If someone comes along and takes it without paying me, I don't lose anything tangible. However, I lose a potential sale, and the thief gets 6,000 hours worth of my work for free. Somehow, it's perfectly okay for someone to take 6,000 hours worth of work without paying any compensation. When I sell my software, it'll probably cost around $25. That's a hell of a bargain for 6,000 hours of work. Yet, some people obviously think it costs too much. That's the big problem I have with IP thieves, they see nothing wrong with getting something for nothing - even though the author asks them to pay a minimal cost. It's parasitic. At it's root, it's about people making up excuses about why they should benefit from the fruits of other people's labor, and get something for nothing. But, hey, it's hard to think about doing the right thing when you're getting stuff for free by ignoring it.

Please don't refer to copyright infringement as "theft". It isn't. Any more than it's rape or genocide. Or, for that matter, piracy. (Which is, admittedly, a crime when it involves boats and people going "ooh arr").
Real piracy "admittedly [is] a crime". And taking IP isn't? Well, you've shot down all the words people use to denote copyright theft, and avoid suggesting a new one. Do you believe it is not a crime? (Apparently so.) Or are you just hoping that IP theft remains a nameless crime, so no one can really get mad at it?

sabik:
Of course, the real question with software isn't about piracy but about FOSS; how are you going to compete with that? If you can't compete with FOSS, piracy is rather a moot point...
FOSS actually does a poor job of writing games. They can do an okay job with tasks that are well defined, and have a large market (e.g. webservers, wordprocessors, spreadsheets, databases), but tend to do a poor job getting creative content to market. Part of it is because creative things like games can be constructed in trillions of different ways. Either they'll build a game differently, or the open-source team will get bogged down in debates about how the game should work, or the game will get to market slowly because everyone is working day-jobs, etc. Saying FOSS is going to destroy the games industry is like saying the guy on the corner playing guitar is going to cause people to lose interest in buying music CDs - because "the guy with a guitar can play all the songs".

Fundamentally, what is going on is that there are creators and consumers. The internet has enabled the copying of a lot of creative works without compensation for the creator. Sometimes, people's conscience stands in the way of IP theft. Other people have created excuses to legitimize their "getting something for nothing", even though that something was created by someone and not offered for free. If the consumers get too greedy, everyone loses - the consumers lose the creative works, and the creators are forced into other lines of work because the consumers aren't paying them. Believe it or not, some DRM has worked. Yes, there have been colossal failures in the music industry, but in the games industry, most of our sales happen early - often within the first year. If we have DRM that isn't cracked for six months, that helps us a lot because it means we get full payment for that period when the demand is strongest. As we attempt to redress the imbalance created by file-sharing (an imbalance skewed disproportionately against creators, and to the benefit of consumers) through DRM, some people even frame the situation as "you don't trust me". DRM was created to rebalance the equation. I admit that I don't always like DRM, have concerns about long-term access and abuse by the creators. Heck, I even think that copyrights are too long. But, that doesn't mean I err to the extreme opposite direction in thinking that people should be allowed to take whatever digital IP they want for free because "it's only bits" and "it's not real theft".

I've never been impressed with people's comments regarding intellectual property and the internet-based information economy. My situation is this: I write computer games. Now, when you say "information economy", we aren't talking simply about knowledge - we're talking about anything digital: music, games, etc.

Now, you talk about the problem of getting copyrighted intellectual property off the internet. Okay. You talk about all the great new things the internet enables people to do. Okay. But, what does that mean for me? If my software is plastered all over the internet, few people will buy a copy, and I might as well give up and go mow lawns for money. Yes, that's a horrible waste of my brain, my talent, and my experience - but if people are stealing my stuff, I don't get paid, and I will make more money mowing lawns. Who suffers in that case? I suffer, and my potential users suffer because they can't use the software I would have built them. Some people have suggested that software companies should give their software away for free, and charge for services - which might work fine as long as you're writing business software for companies. It doesn't work for me.

Some people claim that people only steal software when they wouldn't pay for it anyway (actually, based on tests I've seen, that's demonstrably untrue). My whole business depends on my users not uploading my software (an impossible hope given any large number of users), and potential users not downloading it for free off the internet (which depends on people's cumulative honesty, and the non-existence of a piracy culture). At best, I can hope that software piracy is infrequent enough that I can pay my bills, and I'll try not to think too much about how much money piracy costs me in lost sales. (If you think it's galling when you see how much the government takes in taxes, try paying a double tax - taxes to the government on top of the lost sales to software pirates.) Some companies don't even attempt to sell software in China because the piracy is too bad. Blizzard has millions of customers in China for World of Warcraft - and that's because customers must connect to WOW servers and pay monthly to play the game. I've read that many game companies don't even attempt to sell conventional games there because they get worked-over by software pirates. The fact that millions of Chinese are paying for WOW on a monthly basis shows that they are capable of paying for conventional games - they just choose to get the game and keep their money at the same time.

So, what's your advice? Oh sure, you can say that I shouldn't be too worried about piracy, or that I should give it away for free (which is apparently, what you do with your book). But, people don't like to read books on a computer monitor. I'd much rather read a printed copy. On the other hand, a pirated version of a game is every bit as good as a bought version. Quite frankly, I can't see anything useful for me in your essay. That's how all these essays seem to work. As things stand, shutting down the pirates and using copy-protection schemes are the only clear ways for us to make money. Everything else I've read on this subject seems naive, or resigned to decently large losses due to piracy (though it usually involves a little tap-dance to try to distract intellectual property producers from thinking about their losses). I don't much care for DRM, but I'm not convinced of any other way. We need more robust mechanisms for IP producers to get rewarded for their work. We don't want tiny slices of our "just" payment for what is literally years of work. Many businesses are already on the edge, balancing between revenue and costs, and I've seen lots of game companies go bankrupt.