Remember last week’s uproar about the New York Times and factchecking? In today’s paper, we see a great example of how this works.
Former Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd’s new job is as a lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America, which means he’s leading the charge in support of SOPA, the bill that big media companies believe will stop online “piracy.” Opponents see it as a potentially devastating blow to free speech on the Internet, and they seem to have had great success in turning the tide of the debate. This is not good news for people like Dodd, the Times reports:
Mr. Dodd said Internet companies might well change Washington, but not necessarily for the better with their ability to spread their message globally, without regulation or factchecking.
“It’s a new day,” he added. “Brace yourselves.”
That’s right, people–through the magic of the Internet, misinformation will spread without being checked. Not like the old days, when newspapers stepped in to stop this stuff from spreading. Just two paragraphs later, the Times reports this claim from the MPAA:
The Motion Picture Association of America says its industry brings back more export income than aerospace, automobiles or agriculture, and that piracy costs the country as many as 100,000 jobs.
Do the MPAA’s jobs claims add up? They’ve been challenged on their research throughout this debate; is there any reason to believe these figures are any more reliable? It’s something readers can check for themselves on the Internet. But that’s where nothing is ever factchecked.
Thanks for putting quotes around “piracy”.
Proponents of net censorship really have a leg up when they get people referring to copyright infringement as
“piracy.”
Real pirates, the ones who kill people, should be insulted.
Internet theft is a real problem. It is a criminal act committed thousands of times daily.
While it is arguable that the current legislation may need to be revised, it is an attempt to address a situation where movies, television shows, books, and music are repeatedly stolen with no thought toward the people who made them. It’s the same as if someone walked into a bookstore and stole the books they wanted.
Let’s call the problem what it is – stealing. It is not a victimless crime, and just because some people don’t want to pay for books and movies does not make them free.
Well, Kevin, the facts are these: under copyright law, there is the situation addressed of the sale of copyrighted works that is called “First Use.” This is a provision in which someone can purchase a work – a book, video, magazine, or other copyrighted item – and then sell it one time. This protects used bookstores, for example. Copyright law does not even address giving away copies of copyright work for free, which is what most file-sharers are actually doing, users of such sites as The Pirate Bay, being an example of file-sharing. Thus my “sharing” of a copyrighted work is neither illegal nor immoral, and is therefore not “criminal” anymore than your giving a book as a present or loaning a DVD to your neighbor.
If SOPA or PIPA addressed only the issue of the unauthorized *sales* of copyrighted works there would have been no argument from anyone except the criminals, but since both these pieces of legislation were an indiscriminate shotgun blast against any and all forms of distribution, including free distribution, there was indeed a backlash.
Of course, this is not the only objection about the bad legislation, being as they both completely ignore the technical issues that are involved, which issues center around the actually physical breaking of the Internet, always a bad idea.
Internet “piracy” is indeed a serious issue, but the debate should not be framed solely by the people who are trying to steal form the commons forever and then charge us for it. A fair return and fair enforcement should be part of the debate, but there differences betwene the “theft” of property over which you have exclusive rights and intellectual property, which can be shared. The very idea of monopolies over intellectual property was considered controversial at the founding of the US. Most of American history has seen very limited terms of monopoly and then reversion to the commons. This perpetual monopoly stifles science and creativity and is counter-productive for everyone but those who have so many perpetual monopolies that they can accumulate capital solely off of those rights without generating new content. Let’s carve out some happy median that reflects the realities of current technology and the needs of contemporary society.
Well, fazzazz31, I actually agree with you when it comes to addressing issues of people sharing works they have purchased themselves. But this isn’t a matter of buying a present for someone, or sharing a DVD, or taking a book out of the library.
We’re talking about theft. Not sharing. Let’s give a simple example. To make a current Hollywood movie like, say, the 2009 Wolverine movie, cost the producers many millions of dollars, to pay the cast, the many crew members and to build and ship all the materials needed. In order for such an investment to work, people will need to actually buy tickets to see this movie in the theater, or buy or rent the movie for home viewing in whatever form (DVD, Blu-ray, streaming). But before many movies are shown in theaters or at home, they are stolen and then posted on the internet where they are illegally downloaded millions of times all over the world. It’s the same as if someone either broke into the movie theater or stole the DVDs off the store shelf.
As a result, the studios make less movies, given that they won’t make the same return on their investment. As a result of that, less people will be employed to make those movies. So the theft really does have a cost for people like me, who work on the set. The other, hidden cost, is that the crew members like myself also depend on the sales to fund our health coverage. If everyone steals the movies or music or whatever, there will be no funds to pay anyone’s salaries or pension or health or anything else. As I said, it’s not a victimless crime.
This isn’t a matter of discussing copyright in perpetuity – I agree it’s ridiculous to have such a thing, and it’s not what was intended when the original laws were drafted. I’m specifically talking about people who are stealing and then hiding behind the notion that they’re just “sharing”. And this isn’t just about unauthorized “sales” – it’s a matter of theft, followed by distribution of stolen goods. If someone walked into a video store and stole the DVDs off the shelf, and then walked out and handed them out on the street for free, would this be considered good or legal behavior?
I confess. I did it. I’m the one who put the baseball stadiums out of business. I watched hundreds of baseball games on tv: not once did I buy a ticket to a game. Abner Doubleday, I’m so ashamed…
Something tells me the baseball stadiums are mostly doing just fine. And if you’re watching televised games, it doesn’t hurt them at all – particularly since the TV stations have paid for the right to broadcast the games. What would hurt them would be repeatedly sneaking into the stadiums and stealing the food without paying for either the ticket or the food.
If the argument is, it’s a rich company and it can afford if I steal from it, that’s a pretty specious argument. The reality is that all of these entertainments are provided by lots of regular people who need to be paid for their work. People don’t volunteer to work 12-14 hours a day or more, five days a week. Stealing the product only makes sure that the producer has less incentive to make the product, or to pay anyone to do so.
If you are going to broadcast over airways, music, TV or whatever the frequencies permeate everything and EVERYONE. So if you send out the signal it should now be free. I did not ask to be bombarded with signals and if your signals is near me its MINE.
Have tried fruitlessly to find out if the 1995 Home Recording Act is still in force. If so, than when I buy a cd to burn my family pictures on, I am paying a royalty to the rrecording industry. If I am paying royalty, than, what is their bitch…..oh, never mind…the $$ amount is probaby not enough.
Kevin….Do you feel guilty and feel like you are ripping someone off (the author) when you borrow a book from the library?
Mike, if you don’t want to deal with signals, you could just live without a television, radio or cell phone. People did it for thousands of years without a problem. And nobody has a problem with people watching what they want on television or hearing what they want on the radio. Particularly if you’re talking about premium channels on cable television, where you’re paying a fee to watch those movies anyway. Are you saying that if there’s a pay TV signal coming in to your home in scrambled form, you’re entitled to find a way to unscramble the signal and steal the content without paying for it?
Johan, you seem to not be reading what I’ve posted very carefully. Copying something you own is not a problem for anyone. I believe you’re correct that any time you buy recordable media (like a CD-R or DVD-R), there’s a small charge to cover the expected use of your materials to make a copy for yourself. That doesn’t mean anyone says it is okay to then go on the internet and steal the latest movie or album to record onto that CD-R. You ask sarcastically if I feel guilty about going to the library when I’ve already explained there’s no problem with that. A book at the library has already been paid for, and is provided for the express purpose of being shared by everyone in the community. I’m sure you’re not saying that you think it’s okay to steal books, CDs and DVDs and then put them in the library. Or are you?
Johan, would you feel guilty about going to your local bookstore and taking some books without paying for them? How do you think the bookseller or the author would support themselves if everyone stole their work?
The Internet is not simply a giant library of free knowledge. It’s a virtual public square in which you can certainly find libraries and forums. And you can find stores and businesses. And you can find seedier allies where people are pawning or giving out stolen goods. It is entirely appropriate to point out criminal behavior and to discourage it. Stealing is not free speech.
Sorry for the typo. Meant to write “alleys”, not “allies”.
TV is an advertising medium. Baseball games are free because an audience is being delivered to advertisers. 10k free viewers or 100k free viewers, it’s all about advertising.
Have any MSM conglomerates used the website Megaupload.com? How about elected officials? Intelligence agency personnel? Should we know? Do we have a right to know?
I have not seen a single media account that accurately informs the consumer exactly what SOPA and PIPA do. As a matter of fact, if stopping the theft of copywrited material was the only issue, their would be nothing wrong with the law. I watched a Young Turks segment, and it was more a defense of piracy as Robin Hood on the net than an intelligent report on the free speech and due process issues. False claims are being made in other forms of media all the time, many of those false claims cause serious financial and sometimes actual injury to people. It’s not just in commercials either. For instance, do you think wacky “documentaries” on “Sun Gazing” might be a threat to young children? The subject of intellectual property law, and regulation of media both need serious review. Ha ha to that. The two party tyranny is incapable of good government. We need a new order.
It is important to note that one of Chris Dodd’s most notorious acts, just prior to leaving the Senate, was authoring the law that removed the debt elimination provision of bankruptcy protection for US consumers. This single move, made as bankers and politicians were quietly discussing the strong likelihood of massive decrease in US home values, locked US Homeowners into a virtual debt servitude under the bailed-out banking giants.
Now Dodd has graduated from evil multi-National Bank lobbyist into sinister multi-National Media Conglomerate Lobbyist, under the veneer of “saving Jobs”.
I agree that an honest debate about these bills has yet to take place. On the one hand, there have been a lot of discussions about potential overreach ranging from concern to outright predictions of the internet being shut down. On the other hand, defenders of the bills have not been forthright in addressing people’s concerns. I’d rather see an even-handed discussion of what is and what is not in the legislation.
That said, the bills are being reconsidered by the House and Senate and may be rewritten now in a manner that specifies their intent. If the overreaching is taken out and the bills get down to specifics about online stealing without attacking everyone who uses or operates a search engine, I think they’ll have more support. The impetus behind the bills is still correct – something has to be done about the massive amount of online theft other than people shrugging their shoulders. Given the work Congress is agreeing to do now, opponents of the bills now have an opportunity to actually contribute to the discussion rather than just saying no.
The bankruptcy overhaul was not done for purposes of the “evil multi-National bank” people. It was done to address the fact that bankruptcy has become more of an attractive option for many people than it once was. 30 years ago, going bankrupt was something to be avoided – it had a social stigma in addition to destroying your credit. It meant that either you had been hit with something truly catastrophic (like a massive set of hospital bills that wiped out all your savings in one shot – and in that case, there was no social disapproval), or that you had spent in an unwise fashion on things you couldn’t afford.
Over the last few years, it’s been much more common for people to get in trouble with their finances due to spending way beyond their means – the housing bubble was only one part of this problem. Too many people maxed out their credit cards trying to get the latest gadgets, the more expensive car, the nicer house that was out of their ability to afford. During the bubble, it was briefly possible to buy a house you couldn’t afford, flip it a year later, and see a nice profit,which could then pay off your other debts. But even then there were still people maxing out their cards and then declaring bankruptcy to avoid having to pay what they owed. The inevitable collapse of the housing bubble just amplified the problem.
The point of the bankruptcy overhaul was to say that people could still file for bankruptcy protection but that they couldn’t just walk away from the outstanding amounts still owed for the television or the computer or the car. If anything, bankruptcy became more of a payment plan.
Among the internet’s several functions, that of advertising medium is by no means least. The vast majority of shared files do not represent lost sales.
Many shared files do not represent lost sales. But stolen content is still stolen goods. An illegally obtained movie is still a bad thing to have on a website for sharing or anything else.
Disclaimer: I stole this from the internets. Persons sensitive to “internet theft” need not read any further (I dare you!).
“In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.” (McLuhan 7) Thus begins the classic work of Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, in which he introduced the world to his enigmatic paradox, “The medium is the message.” But what does it mean? How can the medium be its own message?”
JollyD, don’t be silly.
Quoting Marshall McLuhan is not the same thing as committing theft. Now, if you had stolen Annie Hall, where McLuhan appears in a scene, and then posted the movie to “share”, then THAT would be internet theft. See the difference?
JollyD, don’t waste your time. Kevin will never get it. He’s too busy showing himself how moral he is…
Really, “Junk Dummy”? Do you believe that stealing is okay? Your comment about advertising on television was correct – free television actually is paid for by the advertisers.
But do you think this is just a moral question? It’s not. It’s a matter of people’s livelihoods. If nobody buys a ticket or a DVD of a movie but instead chooses to steal it, that means the studio doesn’t have a reason to make it. If all movies, records and books were free to everyone, how would the people who created them make a living? Are they all to work as volunteers? How do they pay their rent? You may think that’s a moral issue, but it’s actually a logistical one. Reducing the income to the business through piracy and stealing means that there will be less business. Less business means less jobs. Less jobs means that people like me can’t make a living.
And stealing isn’t a matter of morality. It’s a criminal act. There’s a difference you may be missing. If you understand that free television is actually funded by advertising, you should be able to tell the difference between a question of morality and criminality.
Piracy is cool….If your for it -please list your address and when you are not home,I will come to your home and Rob you blind free of charge.Yes i wear a pirate costume.ARRGH There ye go
A couple of things….
I agree that stealing is wrong, but I have some trouble equating file-sharing to stealing. When you steal a physical object, you’ve deprived the owner of that object. With file-sharing, the act leads to both parties owning the object (the original owner doesn’t lose anything, except for maybe a lost sale, but even libraries cause lost sales). This isn’t to say that that’s the end of the argument, but it certainly makes it less clear that file-sharing is the same thing as stealing.
It’s also commonly neglected that file-sharing also has positive effects, namely exposure for smaller bands and studios. That presents an ulterior motive for the MPAA and RIAA to be pushing so hard for restrictions.
To go back to the discussion of SOPA and PIPA, they would have very seriously harmed the internet as we know it, without doing anything more than creating a minor annoyance for those contributing most to the file-sharing problem, so they needed to be discarded.
Illegal file-sharing will continue in some fashion regardless of what laws are put in place. The best solution is to selectively target the worst of it, but in my opinion, the movie studios and record labels need to adapt to the new landscape and take advantage of all the benefits available through streaming and downloading. It should be possible — look at Netflix, Hulu, iTunes and Spotify. People will pay for these services as long as they’re not over-priced and more convenient to use than bittorrent.
File sharing is not necessarily the same thing as stealing, unless the situation involves theft. For example, taking a ripped Blu-ray and posting it on a file-sharing service would be a matter of sharing stolen goods. Or taking the digital file of an uncompleted movie about to be released (like Wolverine) and posting that for mass distribution would be a matter of sharing stolen goods.
Libraries are not necessarily a cause of lost sales. Usually, the copy you can get from a library is well-used, given that you’re sharing a physical copy with many people. Pages or the cover may be missing. The disc may be scratched. It’s not really the same thing, and I’ve been a happy supporter and patron of public libraries all my life.
There are certainly some positive effects of smaller bands and studios sharing their work for free on the internet. Some indie groups get exposure – many others just get a post on Facebook that gets lost among millions of similar items. But that’s not the same thing as one person buying a CD, ripping the contents and posting them on a file sharing service, and then millions of other people downloading those tracks without paying the artist for them. Or the same thing as one person ripping a DVD or a Blu-ray and then posting the audio/visual files online for millions to download for free rather than purchase the DVD themselves.
The MPAA and RIAA were not trying to stifle the indie labels when they opposed online theft. They were trying to protect their own livelihoods from being undone by rampant crime. Back in the day, if you wanted to have a decent copy of a song, you had to buy the record. You could tape it off the radio if you wanted, but the sound quality always suffered. Nowadays, you can download a digital copy of a CD track which is virtually identical to the best possible commercial CD copy you could buy. And you don’t have to pay for it, which means that the people who recorded it and the company that produced it see nothing from this, other than a dim hope that maybe someone will decide to actually pay for one of these songs someday. No business could operate from that model.
As for SOPA and PIPA, an open discussion about the merits and problems of the bills should happen in Congress, and should include a full examination of exactly how these proposed laws are intended to operate. I don’t know that they would have seriously harmed the internet, but it’s best to fully examine them and ask the hard questions about how each situation would be handled. If the answer is vague, then that part of the law should be rewritten to clarify the situation.
The argument that criminal activity will always take place anyway is of course correct, but it’s also irrelevant. Drug dealing happens every day in every major city but you don’t see police refusing to deal with it on that basis. The right answer is to make clear that the activity is illegal and to take action against people who are caught engaging in that activity.
Im a little lost here.Stealing is Ok if it is done in the modern age because all hands are clean?First unless someone/anyone releases their work for free distribution- it is stealing.And THEY loose the copy write payment on their property.The other falsehood is nothing can be done about it.Tons can be done about it.The computer age cuts both ways.As open as it is…it also provides complete oversight.Wanna make a lot of money for the treasury?Start putting a fine for illegal activity on this behavior.A friend of mine(a DJ) got hit with a fine for downloading.I have read about a type of boot that could go on your computer that would shut it down.Only after paying a fine would it be removed.Try to copy something a big warning pops up….you back out or else.Think people people can get around it?Maybe the worst and brightest can.For a time.The hunt for big bucks will end at their door.A jerk who lived not far from me got hit for kiddie porn.Tell him how secret and safe the internet is.By the way I used to love Tower Records.They got blown away due to loss of revenue due to “sharing”.