Advice On File Sharing For a Swedish MP? 86
theper writes "A little over a week from now, I have a dinner planned with an old friend and a member of the Swedish parliament. I know a thing or two about the internet, piracy and file sharing, and she's asked for my advice on new legislation on that subject. Her (and her party's) stance is not very controversial: Rights holders must get paid one way or another, and at the same time record companies has to change their old business models and must do more to keep up with technology. With this kept in mind, what advice should I give her?"
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Yes, most of us want information that should be public (such as everything related to the government, which we fund and is supposed to belong to us) to be freely available. That other kind of information should not be publicly available since it is information about private citizens.
Re:not very controversial (Score:5, Insightful)
Many slashsheep are programmers, and likely not software pirates. Many are musicians and also realize that copyright infringement is wrong. But most also understand the American Home Recording Act and know damn straight that they can make copies of music for their friends, and dislike bullies like the RIAA. Most are also intelligent and believe that examining their own computer's RAM and operation is an inalienable right no matter what a EULA says.
Most are also suspicious of trolls like you, so someone had to make this response.
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Why is copyright infringement wrong? Is it wrong to sing Happy Birthday in a restaurant? There may be laws in place that say you can't do something, but ignoring those laws is not necessarily wrong. Fortunately, laws aren't definitions of right and wrong.
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Re:not very controversial (Score:5, Interesting)
"Happy Birthday To You" is not in the public domain. The copyright holders make thousands (if not millions) of dollars off the song every year. From the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org],
This is one of the really good examples of how messed up our copyright laws are. That's why I used it. An important part of our culture is locked up.
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When I said infringement, I guess I was taking a moral examination, not a legal one. If musicians regularly engaged in copyright infringement -- blatantly stealing and performing songs of others -- it would severely harm the less popular artists
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And you certainly shouldn't drop coins into a buskers hat/instrument case! they are breaking the law too!
copyright infringement happens in more places than just the obvious.
Ask her a few questions. (Score:4, Interesting)
Ask her how she thinks "pirates" can be shut down without interfering with legitimate traffic. Ask her if she knows about the recent Media Defender DoS. The *AAs, aka "rights holders", are criminals that continue to abuse laws to shut down all alternate distribution channels. Any power given to them will be abused in a similar way. From there you can move the discussion to the benefits of free publication and copyright reform.
NOT Information wants to be free (Score:5, Insightful)
I suspect that would be a very bad thing to say to someone who at this point is open to accepting guidance. I would stress that while some say "Rights holders must get paid one way or another", that it would be very wrong to assume guilt of theft on an innocent person's part and tax them in some way, such as for blank media that is used for perfectly legal personal data uses, taxes on Internet connections that are then handed over to the RIAA or MPAA, or restrictions on P2P networks that are used for many very legitimate uses.
I would also talk some about how the MPAA and RIAA have been greatly abusing their positions, acting much like racketters and threatening people when they have no proof, strong arming with threats of lawsuits, doing many illegal things to attack people's computers and networks, illegally planting files that they then claim represent copyrighted material, and outright having agents doing illegal denial of service attacks on completely legal businesses. It might not hurt to mention that the real artists and creators of the works in question have historically be cheated by the the companies that the RIAA and MPAA work for, and that the real creators of the works never see any profit from the RIAA and MPAA gangster like activity. Perhaps the RIAA and the MPAA deserve a much closer look before one delving into the issue of file sharing and how to separate the perfectly legal file sharing from that which might not be.
If you have made those points and the MP is still showing an interest in talking, you might want to get to the issue of "property" itself. I'll assume that your country or some local subdivision of it has some sort of tax on real property. If that's the case, you might want to ask why corporations can amass vast amounts of "intellectual property", expect the government to go out of it's way to provide special protections for it, and yet that property, which the corporations will insist is very real, is not taxed. Perhaps if any file sharing enforcement does need to be done, it should be financed by the people who want their property protected, not by the individuals who are doing perfectly legal file sharing (including artists who are trying to distribute their works and not fall under the control of the RIAA racketter labels who would cheat them of their rightful profits).
Please let us know how your evening goes.
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I'll assume that your country or some local subdivision of it has some sort of tax on real property. If that's the case, you might want to ask why corporations can amass vast amounts of "intellectual property", expect the government to go out of it's way to provide special protections for it, and yet that property, which the corporations will insist is very real, is not taxed.
Bad assumption. At least where I live(US) there is no tax on property at the federal level. There are local taxes on land, cars and boats, but general property is not taxed.
Businesses do not pay tax on assets they own, but instead get a tax deduction for the supposed loss in value(depreciation) of the item over its lifetime.
Under your logic, companies should take a tax deduction when a patent or copyright runs out.
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Punishment must fit the crime (Score:2)
Someone sharing a file should not be fined their entire life's savings. Slap them with a small fine and let them go in peace.
Simple way (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Simple way (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Simple way (Score:5, Insightful)
Which means that anything you add on top of that is likely to be far too broad. For example, criminalizing the act of breaking copy protection makes it impossible to play DVDs with free software, in either sense of "free". Criminalizing illegal trackers makes it difficult to run a public tracker -- you're now making it the responsibility of the public forum to police its content.
About the best you could do, beyond basic copyright, is DMCA-style takedown notices.
But none of this will eliminate piracy. The government can't eliminate piracy, or significantly reduce it, without too many casualties. The industry can, by treating piracy as they would any other competitor.
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Removing the ability to transfer rights would fundamentally change copyright law and would result in every created work being licensed and not sold. Paintings, software, music, books, and possibly other things like clothing.
First sale doctrine would become moot because no one would be able to transfer rights, and thus there would be no ownership of the copy.
You should tell her (Score:5, Insightful)
There are myriad ways that the **AA can adapt to piracy, most of them involve earning less than when they had direct control over distribution, but such are the winds of change. There are many cost reducing alternatives that they can entertain (pun intended), so I'm not sure they have trimmed the fat necessary for me as the consumer to feel too bad for them.
Re:You should tell her (Score:4, Informative)
Swedish translation. (Score:2)
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Hey, if you're going to use Mock Swedish, [wikipedia.org] at LEAST include the "börk! börk! börk!"!!!
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Re:You should tell her (Score:5, Interesting)
And please show her this youtube'd old Rapport news broadcast from Swedish National Television. It's from the 70's and the music industry says they want a DISCO FEE because the new DISCO music is killing the [old] music industry. Sounds familiar? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdjcSGo1hJg [youtube.com]
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Don't look at file sharing exclusively (Score:4, Interesting)
IANAL (in Sweden or anywhere else), but I imagine that illegal file sharing in Sweden is illegal because it is in violation of Sweden's copyright laws. If this is the case, then any changes that your friend tries to make to the law should address all of the behavior governed by copyright law, not just file sharing. Part of the reason that file sharing has been such a big issue is that, when it became commonplace, existing legislation was ill-suited to it. So we have vast numbers of people engaging in behavior that is generally considered to be illegal, and companies are suing many people that have, by most accounts, done nothing wrong.
If you favor increased freedom to file share for consumers, then you should advocate increased freedom to share in general. New legislation should anticipate that new technologies will be created. That way, maybe there won't be another big mess twenty years from now.
Re:Don't look at file sharing exclusively (Score:4, Insightful)
Sooner or later, we will have to change to Accessright protection, where particular individuals license access to content under various terms, if we want to continue to facilitate the monetizing of intellectual property content, since merely copying has lost all relevance. Now it's only a question of striking a workable balance between the property rights of licensors and licensees, and to safeguard the privacy of users of the accessright licensing system. Once this is taken care of, we will be ready to move forward with a general intuitive understanding of IP protection again. As it is now, we're trying to fit an outdated model onto an incompatible distribution medium.
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I think you've touched on something here that I'd like to expand upon. Namely, that the perceptions of the users sharing songs and the record companies suing those people are radically different.
Government, especially in a socialist country like Sweden, should have more responsibility than just passing laws and enforcing them.
Remind her of the point to copyright. (Score:5, Insightful)
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As someone else has posted, the song "Happy Birthday to you" was originally copyrighted in 1935, and remains under copyright until 2030. I can't think of a single benefit to society in this.
I've got no problem at all with copyright being granted as an exclusive licence for a limited period; whoever makes to effort to produce good "stuff" should gain some benefit from it for a period of time.
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well, not quite (Score:2)
Untrue. The real values are the ones that are not put into actual cash values, aka how well known a company is in the market and the loyalty they create through their customers.
Getting paid for your work is a shortsighted answer to a long term problem: Just because you charge people for something doesn't mean they care to buy it at all.
In contrast, radiohead's selling their cd online and nine inch nails doing the same sho
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Charging money before the presence however, will cost you an infinite loss of presen
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Creators must make money somehow, or else most of them won't have a strong incentive to create, and culture will suffer.
First contrary example that came to mind was the Blues... [wikipedia.org]
I'd always considered music something that most musicians [note, I didn't use the term artists...] use to express themselves. Heck, the fact that the word "music" comes from "Muse" would learn more toward expression than money-lending.
That music companies consider music a "product" is irrelevant. It can be, but IMHO, its primary role is that of expression.
People want to share and they will share (Score:1)
That said, there is a difference between sharing with friends and peer to peer networks. Although they don't cause major harm, I still don't think it's right for them to be encouraged. And there is a lot less public support for file sharing networks, apart from the file sharers.
Any draconian punishment shou
Err on the side of caution (Score:4, Insightful)
Her position won't change on the issue of copyright infringement or wholesale piracy of intellectual property, so don't focus on that. Rather, direct her goals towards legally codifying the "fair use" rights of consumers, and spell out the processes that IP holders may and may not "defend" their property, such as requirements for DRM-based systems to expire gracefully to unlock the data upon the expiration of the copyright period, via a PGP style key that is issued by the government at the time of the application approval.
At the same time, recommend suggestions on how shorter protection times and stricter controls on what might be copyright-protected can actually benefit society as a whole. Advise her to consider legally recognizing licensing systems such as the GPL, Creative Commons, and Open Source. Fund public education programs to teach people about what options are available. Encourage non-profit endeavors that create content and release it unencumbered into the public domain.
The message that should be sent is that technology isn't a crime, and sharing information should be encouraged rather than punished. Carefully delineate what is and what isn't proper to be shared, then emphasize the benefits of an open society instead of protecting the interests of a few.
Respect copyrights, but respect the rights of your citizens more.
Address actual piracy, not the technology (Score:5, Insightful)
Before the modern era of easy bit-exact digital copies, people copied songs and movies from friends and off the TV/Radio.
With that in mind, if you can get her to grasp just one basic concept, convince her that P2P doesn't equate to piracy, it just makes the transfer of files (legal or otherwise) considerably more efficient.
A complete ban (even if effective, an unlikely possibility) on P2P would have very nearly no effect on actual piracy. It would simply drive people to other methods of copying media, whether online or off.
Shooting for a more rose-tinted view of what you might accomplish, I consider it critical for politicians to eventually understand what "piracy" actual entails; namely, that we have four basic categories of "pirates" - Samplers, collectors, casual users, and cheapskates.
- "Samplers" should count as Mass Media's best friend, because they
tend to buy a lot, and just want to see what they'll get before
spending their money.
- "Collectors" may or may not buy a lot, but as
they have the impossible goal of possessing a copy of everything,
they will not ever buy as much as they want. Whether or not to consider
them pirates in the negative sense depends on whether they collect to
replace buying, or merely to supplement what they can
afford.
- "Casual users", the majority of people IMO, don't care one
way or the other about piracy, and may not even realize what crosses
the line. They buy most of their content, but if a friend offers them
a copy of a new CD, they won't turn it down.
- "Cheapskates" alone I would consider the "bad" kind of pirate.
They pirate for the simple reason that they can get something for
free, rather than out of either love for the content, obsession to
"catch 'em all", or mere ignorance.
Of these, only the last category (and perhaps some of the collectors, who may well also count as cheapskates) represent actual lost sales.Until politicians understand that, we'll keep fighting this same battle. We'll keep winning, because they can't win, but we'll see more and more peripheral rights stripped away in the attempt.
Re:Address actual piracy, not the technology (Score:4, Interesting)
Sort of related, I recently had dinner with three people who used Oink extensively before it shut down. I mentioned that the one user who I knew very well had basically stopped buying music after Oink shut down. She used to spend about $1-2k/year on music, but since Oink's demise she cut back to about $50/year. She didn't do it out of spite. She did it because she could no longer sample broad ranges of music under the guidance of a knowledgeable community's recommendations. The free and legal methods for sampling music are obviously quite limited in order to prevent piracy.
Back to my dinner. The other two users (none of the three knew that the others used Oink before this night) were almost shocked, because they had done the exact same thing. They used to find music they liked on Oink and then buy it. Now they just don't buy music.
A bunch of angry and closed-minded people like to respond to this type of post on Slashdot with disbelief or simply an accusation that the poster is a filthy thief. I, personally, never used Oink and I also buy about one album per year because I only care about a couple bands, so I'm close to being completely uninvolved with the music industry. Since long before Oink, however, I've known a lot of people who have downloaded songs for free, and in most cases the free downloads resulted in them buying more music. I'm sure a ton of downloaders don't buy music because of it, but I'm also sure that a ton of those don't buy less music because of it. Deny it or not, the fraction of people who buy (or bought) more music because of free downloads is substantial, so much so that I'm not convinced the music industry really has a net loss due to piracy for personal use.
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Why?
I don't go to concerts.
I don't listen to crappy radio.
I don't get to know the bands through the radio like I do listening to them off of p2p or shoutcast.
I do not go to crappy clubs that play crappy syndicated music.
So that few thousand dollars I spent at all would have never been spent except for the internet allowing me to find obscure bands I would like to support.
I'm sure theres at least 1/2 billion to 1 billion more cust
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THE service that needs to be offered is 'online radio' and i don't mean the pointless reproduc
Limit Damages (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course, I'm sure the studios would find a way around that too (just look at movie accounting in the US - they have amazing ways of dividing everything up and marking it up all over the place so they are the only ones who can realize a profit - the movies are always los
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Selling unauthorized copyrighted material? That's a misdemeanor or a felony, depending on the magnitude. Think of the point at which "speeding" becomes "reckless driving".
Manufacturing bootlegs for fraudulent sale/counterfeiting? Felony. Call it drunk driving.
Note how these are all crimes
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In the USA, all it takes is a cop to say "I saw him going 75 because I was going 75 to match him"... and he is believed regardless.
Copyright Court? "I downloaded X song from Y IP address, and I'm hired by the rightsholder. Fine him!" 100$ fine. Little/no recourse.
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In traffic court, an Officer of the Court (i.e. the cop)testifies and brings charges. I'm suggesting that it be done exactly the same way - an Officer of the Court can gather evidence/bring charges for copyright violation, NOT a private citizen. This has the effect of limiting prosecution - no police department is going to allocate the resources needed to stamp out copyright infringement REGARDLESS of how hard the **AA's yell and stam
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I understand your idea, however what would happen if a legitimate suit needed to be brought, but now an individual couldn't bring it (such as the guy who had the picture of a hotel that a company used for an ad without paying him). Since he has no clout, who is to say the i
Consumers shouldn't be assumed to be criminals (Score:2)
Some simple steps (Score:3, Insightful)
Once you realize it's just another taxation system in an odd form it's much easier to create a rational political discussion around it; what does this cost the taxpayers today? What do they get from it? Are we maximizing the creative wealth funded by this tax? Perhaps the money same money could be paying more artists and creative people? At what point is the public interest no longer served by handing more money to one creator, but rather putting a ceiling on the state-sponsored payouts and handing it downwards the long tail?
Second; forget trying to check for or control the copying. It doesn't matter what the Swedish state does in the end; the pressure has been strong enough for long enough that darknets are unavoidable. There are a few years left during which traffic will be monitorable at all, beyond that everything will be encrypted friend-to-friend-to-friend automated distributed searches and transfers. You'll never see anything but your closest friends, so everyone is protected against everyone else. Thanks for screwing the efficiency of the network for the next generation, but there we go.
Third, if you want to apply a fee, apply it where it's appropriate. Adding a fee to a broadband connection isnt appropriate; if you do, I want to get paid for commenting on slashdot. The place to tax is simply the one making money from the copy. Let anyone make copies and then tax ads on Pirate bay and hand the money to the creator of the copied material. Put a salestax on copied media in stores and let the stores themselves copy the material. Allow print-as-you-go bookstores, write-your-own-CD kiosks, etc, but hand the proceeds of a sales tax to the creators.
Oh, and like all transfer systems, the actual management of collection and payouts should be under state control, not in the hands of private interests like IFPI or the MPAA/RIAA corps. State-protected taxation rights in the hands of private corporations is the worst of two worlds; the private sector should always operate in unprotected competition, otherwise it can exceed even governments in waste.
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Well said.
Libraries (Score:2)
very controversial (Score:2)
Some thoughts (Score:5, Insightful)
For example in the music industry, it is common for artists to be poorly paid. Popular bands are often barely living above the poverty line based on the revenues earned from their CDs sales (the piracy issue that receives the most attention). In reality, most performers earn the majority of their money either through long term ownership of the rights to their music (which they are often forced or tricked into signing away with their first recording deal), or through revenues generated by concerts and collateral merchandising.
The important lesson to learn is that piracy has little direct impact on recording artists. The majority (90-95%) of the money goes to the music labels and middlemen.
Similarly, it's long been known that movie studios somehow manage to never make any money on any movie. In large part this explains why movie actors get such huge upfront fees. If they agree to a lesser fee with a percentage of the residuals, there just never seem to be any. Thus by the very nature of the business piracy mostly affects the producers who are the only people still making money after the movie has been released. The only time an actor or director is actually hurt by piracy is when they are also a producer for the film.
The people who argue for expanded copyright laws, almost always use the excuse that the laws are not to benefit themselves but to benefit people you actually like. However, in all truthfulness, any benefits will be hijacked by the labels and the studios long before it gets to anyone else.
Much of the real argument over copyright is about control and manipulation rather than making things better for the creators of artist content. Stronger copyright laws benefit the centralization of artist production into the hands of a few groups. When they band together they can afford high paid lobbyists and lawyers. The lobbyists work to further tip the field in favour of the labels and the lawyers harass anyone who has success outside of their oligopoly with the simple intent of ruining them through frivolous lawsuits and thus protection the oligopoly.
Weaker copyright laws (up to a point) actually benefit the artists by weakening the label's hold and thus making it less desirable to deal with them unless they're offering a reasonable deal. Legal protections against circumvention disproportionately benefit the people who deal with masses of content and thus the cost of the security mechanism can be amortized across all the handled content. Thus it is a centralizing factor, and when combined with another seemingly innocent centralizer that requires video or music players to only play "authorized" content, you can easily see how the copyright protection mechanism has been turned into a competitive advantage that favors the established parties, and thus has raised the barrier to entry to the artistic industries and simultaneously have limited competition. Weaker copyright laws can also make it less desirable for the labels to pressure the artists into giving the rights to their work to the labels as a condition of working with the label. If the rights are worth less financially, then there is simply less incentive for the labels to wrestle control away from the actual creators.
Thier Business is Backwards (Score:1)
Dear Slashdot (Score:2)
selling what isnt yours bad, sharing good. (Score:1)
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Really, your idea sounds absolutely horrible.
Focus on consumer rights, legal safety and privacy (Score:2)
1. Mass-market DRM has never worked. Last now AACS/BD+ has been broken, using the most powerfu
Tell her what you think (Score:2)
If an entity distributes copyrighted material and makes a profit doing so, then a portion of the profit should go to the copyright holder. If an entity gives away copyrighted material, then said entity has no obligation to compensate the copyright holder.
Unfortunately, this model will only encourage greater use of DRM. Can anybody improve upon it?
Tell her to think carefully (Score:2)
If she's interested in furthering her political career and running her country better than others at the same time (which most well-intentioned politicians really are interested in), then she needs to consider this:
Would Sweden be better served giving into demands of the USA's RIAA and MPAA organizations, whom through campaign donations and lobby coziness with our government are a cheaply acquired and paid-for type of mercenary force seeking to enforce copyright laws of the US primarily for their own gain
Broader implications of copyright and filesharing (Score:2)
What has happened is that som
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What is/was the purpose of copyright? (Score:1)
No new business models needed - return to old ones (Score:1)
Re:No new business models needed - return to old o (Score:1)
Advice on file sharing? (Score:2)
www.piratpartiet.se (Score:2)
If she's going to Almedalen this year, she's more than welcome to look us up. We're even having a seminar on copyright's cost to society.
My problem with music "the old way". (Score:2)
So I'm willing to pay for the music I like, but I'd rather pay for just what I want to have and listen to, and not for the 90% of the songs on the album that I do not want. This has become possible in the digital age!
With "old fashioned" production and distribution of CDs, a big percentage of what I pay go to production and distribution of the physical CD. Among others t
Some additional points (Score:1)
1) Rightsholders must be paid
2) Record Companies must change
to which I want to add a third:
3) Citizens set the terms
Rightsholders must be paid
Yes, but for the current value, rather than sustaining some rate received in the past. And via a mechanism to be defined, not necessarily an existing method. Neither the unit revenue nor the total revenue of yesterday is guaranteed tomorrow in any business.
Record Companies must change
Yes, perhaps even disappear. It may be that exi
Landowners... (Score:2)
Copyright shouldn't enable a new landowning class. What's happening with American copyright laws is that they are being used by a small group of people to own and charge rent on American culture.
Copyright law needs to be modified to strike a compromise between the need for an information worker or artist to make a living, and the need for a people to freely exchange their shared culture. If copyright owners want strong restrictions; they should also have to release works into the Public Domain in 5-10 ye