The beginning of the end for P2Ps/Torrent Sites?

[chuck]

Originally Posted by Sean

There's no debate as far as I'm concerned.

Unfortunately - the debate has to be had here in NZ - it's been shaped/forced through by the record labels/big business. They blatantly attack the technology as the reason for piracy - read the quote I reference above - IF you use p2p - YOU WILL get infected with viruses etc, etc. The wording of the new law is insanity - and leaves the door wide open for businesses, libraries, schools all to be cut off the Net - under the accusation of guilt.

How do they prove who's downloaded what? Under the NZ law - they don't have to prove it, the ISP must terminate the connection, if they receive notice that a user has been downloading illegal content. No proof, no court case, and the user has no way to defend themselves against the charge - because you don't have to provide evidence.

Under this legislation wireless hotspots - like in Starbucks or the airport will have to be shut down, regardless of the fact that you can't prove who's downloaded what. I have a wireless point at home - how can I prove it's not been hacked by the neighbour, who's then downloaded the latest episode of Heroes.

What if an artist wants to download their own music - from a torrent site - how do they prove their the author/creator of that content. They can be cut off.

If you taped a copy of Heroes or BSG for me in the US - then mailed me the cd or the vhs tape - because it won't screen in NZ for another month - who's broken copyright?

Some good discussion here and here.

The debate is being led by certain interests here in NZ (and possibly around the globe) - and the majority of our parlimentarians are ignorant of the implications - or the consequences of a simple black and white solution.

Besides, all it's going to take is several letters of complaint to the ISP's that supply Parliament for them to realise how insane this legislation is.

Chuck - what if suddenly your students stole their lessons from you for free, so there was no way for you to be paid for teaching? Would it be cool with you to hear people say "hey - the future of teaching is writing and selling books, not teaching in a classroom".

Um - well, I give away my lessons for free, as I work in a public school. The government pays me - it's a social good/social contract kind of thing. Taxes pay my wages - just like they pay the wages of the police, the nurses, doctors, garbage collectors. I assume that my students are going to take my ideas, add them to their own experiences, combine them with the teachers, coaches and family that they have around them as they grow up and then create, design, build, write their own ideas.

NO teacher works in a vacuum - all teachers will use, reuse, reshape ideas.

I use the internet and content on the net to inform and put together the majority of my lessons. I expect my students to do the same - there's a case that could be made for leaving them all at home and telling them to use google to learn. There are dozens of websites where you can download worksheets, pdfs, lesson plans - many set up by teachers. Most homeschooling parents will do the same.

Most teachers don't expect to make money off their lesson plans, but they are their intellectual property - and so if I started putting my materials up online, I'd slap a Creative Commons notice on them - just as I do on my flickr page.

If you're talking about making knowledge propietary and enforcing copyright of ideas - that's another topic. There is grounds for it I guess - but if you look up iTunes U - or MIT's Open courseware or even TED - knowledge is getting more open, more available and oddly enough, the majority of it is FREE.

[Sean]

Originally Posted by cacophony

but that's traditionally how most artists have made their money. most record contracts with large labels are structured so that the artists make zilch off of record sales and unless their album goes friggin' platinum they'll never make enough off of simple record sales to recoup the cost of production. on the other hand, touring is where they make bank. performance and merchandise is where artists become financially successful. not record sales.

I'm not talking about financially successful. I'm just talking about financially viable. Like me - I'm not looking to make bank - besides being unrealistic, I just don't want to have to dig into my mortgage money to continue being able to have some songs released.

And for the record, I don't agree with the extreme measures big record companies are taking, either. All I'm saying is that the habit that's developed in our society of stealing music with zero remorse is hurting independent artists. No ifs ands or buts. That's what's happening, and it needs to be considered as the decisions that will shape the music industry's future happen.

[cacophony]

i'm not disagreeing with you in general, just on the point that performance and merchandising isn't where artists get their income. i think the argument that it's not theft because the original owner retains the original copy is just a way to split hairs and absolve yourself of guilt. intellectual property theft is different from physical property theft. it's apples and oranges.

the problem is, the availability of free pirated creative works has turned us all into gollum: "we wants it, so we takes it." wanting a piece of music isn't justification for just outright taking it.

we can quibble about where to split the hair, is it when you look at the pretty painting, or when you take a pretty pictue of the pretty painting, or when you scan the pretty picture of the pretty painting.... it's all a bunch of self-soothing faux-intellectual crap. you know when you launch bittorrent whether you're planning on getting your grubby mitts on a piece of music that is commercially available for pay. period. if the intention of the artist was to make their artistic expression available in exchange for money, then you're stealing when you choose not to exchange money for it. end of story, it's no more complicated than that.

does that mean i'm squeaky clean? nope. i'm part of the problem, too. by and large i pay. i pay for 99.9% of what i have. but every now and then there's that single that was released as a b-side in 1992 and isn't available anywhere online or in stores or on ebay.... and what do you know, i have a copy of bittorrent installed right here on this machine.

but i'm not going to write oodles and oodles of paragraphs debating whether or not it's stealing. it's friggin' stealing. i don't care how hard it is to find or how badly you wanted it, it's still stealing.

call it what it is.

[chuck]

OK - let's call it what it is.

Let's call the speed limit what it is as well.

Because that's a 'law' - as I understand it - and of course, we're all law abiding citizens - and no-one breaks the law.

I understand your definition of stealing - but as I see it - there is a difference. And you might all insist that it's splitting hairs, but if we can't even agree on the language, then it's a pointless argument. Again - the OTT language that is used by NZFACT and the industry here in NZ basically says, if you use p2p technology - YOU WILL DIE FROM A HORRIBLE DISEASE AND YOUR CHILDREN'S CHILDREN WILL BE CURSED.

It's bullshit, and excessive, and ignores the reality.

You might say it's all faux-intellectual claptrap, but it strikes me that many of us break the law constantly, and we don't all get locked up or penalised for it. How many have been to Asia and bought a pair of cheap Diesel jeans? Or cheap Adidas? Or made a copy of the CD that you've bought and paid for - for the iPod? What's the difference between the copy of Lost on your Tivo - or the copy of Lost that you recorded to VHS? Sung Happy Birthday? Yes - Warner Music own the rights to that one too.

These cases are being argued on the basis of intellectual and copyright law - and the RIAA/MPAA is rampantly screwing people, without any regard for fair use, or any grasp of reality. The new Section 92A of NZ law will be impossible to police or credibly maintain - ISP's are in a lose-lose situation. They can be sued by big business who say they are allowing copyright infringement, and they can be sued by terminated clients, for not having the proof of said infringement. Because the NZ law is based on "accusation of guilt".

This case is indicative. And the fact that the RIAA opposed the case being streamed on the net - seems to me like a case of "cake" and "choking on it". But they might win - some of the people trying to argue the case - are just getting out. For reasons like this:

2. The Current State of Copyright Law is too depressing

This leads me tomy final reason for closing the blog which is independent of the first reason: my fear that the blog was becoming too negative in tone. I regard myself as a centrist. I believe very much that in proper doses copyright is essential for certain classes of works, especially commercial movies, commercial sound recordings, and commercial books, the core copyright industries. I accept that the level of proper doses will vary from person to person and that my recommended dose may be lower (or higher) than others. But in my view, and that of my cherished brother Sir Hugh Laddie, we are well past the healthy dose stage and into the serious illness stage. Much like the U.S. economy, things are getting worse, not better. Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together again: multilateral and trade agreements have ensured that, and quite deliberately.

I'm all for artists being compensated fairly - but the film industry pisses me off for treating me like a criminal and insulting my intelligence by showing their shit "You wouldn't steal a purse. DON'T DOWNLOAD" - at the start of a movie, I've paid for, and a DVD I've paid for. We are getting to the point where the anti-piracy ads will be .

Anyone else see the irony in an industry that attacks the technology for destroying their livelihoods - then uses that technology to show us .

The Warner Music Group and Youtube split has caused some interesting and and . It really is a bit shit when anymore. Yes, yes, I understand it's been published in an online environment... but good god, talk about how to alienate and piss off the very people you want to purchase your product.

[Jan]

Just imagine if usage of the Amen break would be illegal (technically it is, but the Winstons don't/didn't care)... an entire genre of music gone. If you think about it, culture is just taking something old and rearraging it slightly. Too restrictive copyright will lead to less cultural diversity.

I know 90% of the music I listen to from the Internet... what would happen if copyright law actually was enforced! I guess we would return to sharing cassettes and CDs like 'in the old days', but that was very limited.
As a music lover I feel criminalized... I spend a lot of money for CDs and try to buy everything I like. How is that different from going into a record store and listening to CDs there before you bought them (I wish there was a good record store here, I love good record stores).

Right now, I think there are two possibilities:

1) There will be a 1984 scenario. The Internet is shut down, and we will listen to generated music coming from the telescreens.

2) Copyright changes from the arbitrarily prolongable (we'll be at 95(!) years soon) tool of the music industry back to its original intent, which was that people gave a little of their freedom away in exchange for more content, nothing more nothing less. Just because you had a hit single or invented Mickey Mouse doesn't mean that your grandchildren are set for life.

Originally Posted by Sean

she made no money at all because the releases were immediately made available for free on P2Ps and torrent sites by some jerk-offs.

There will always be idiots like those, but this is a general problem of society and not limited to this one aspect.

[Sean]

Originally Posted by chuck

Unfortunately - the debate has to be had here in NZ - it's been shaped/forced through by the record labels/big business. They blatantly attack the technology as the reason for piracy - read the quote I reference above - IF you use p2p - YOU WILL get infected with viruses etc, etc. The wording of the new law is insanity - and leaves the door wide open for businesses, libraries, schools all to be cut off the Net - under the accusation of guilt.

I'm fully in agreement with you that this is too extreme.

Originally Posted by chuck

Um - well, I give away my lessons for free, as I work in a public school. The government pays me - it's a social good/social contract kind of thing. Taxes pay my wages - just like they pay the wages of the police, the nurses, doctors, garbage collectors. I assume that my students are going to take my ideas, add them to their own experiences, combine them with the teachers, coaches and family that they have around them as they grow up and then create, design, build, write their own ideas.

NO teacher works in a vacuum - all teachers will use, reuse, reshape ideas.

I use the internet and content on the net to inform and put together the majority of my lessons. I expect my students to do the same - there's a case that could be made for leaving them all at home and telling them to use google to learn. There are dozens of websites where you can download worksheets, pdfs, lesson plans - many set up by teachers. Most homeschooling parents will do the same.

Most teachers don't expect to make money off their lesson plans, but they are their intellectual property - and so if I started putting my materials up online, I'd slap a Creative Commons notice on them - just as I do on my flickr page.

If you're talking about making knowledge propietary and enforcing copyright of ideas - that's another topic. There is grounds for it I guess - but if you look up iTunes U - or MIT's Open courseware or even TED - knowledge is getting more open, more available and oddly enough, the majority of it is FREE.

I wasn't actually presenting that as a literal and 100% accurate hypothetical. My point is simply that very few people could afford to do a job that didn't give them the necessary capital to simply get the job off the ground, or even costs them money in the process. Musicians need some measure of return on a release in order to get a tour and merchandising off the ground. If all they get is financial losses with each release, and no way to measure the release's success, then the tour and merchandising simply cannot follow. If you had to pay to be a teacher, you probably couldn't afford to be one.

[Sean]

Originally Posted by Jan

Just imagine if usage of the Amen break would be illegal (technically it is, but the Winstons don't/didn't care)... an entire genre of music gone. If you think about it, culture is just taking something old and rearraging it slightly. Too restrictive copyright will lead to less cultural diversity.

It needs to be restrictive enough that it stops people from stealing the work of musicians.

Originally Posted by Jan

I know 90% of the music I listen to from the Internet... what would happen if copyright law would actually be enforced! I guess we would return to sharing cassettes and CDs like 'in the old days', but that was very limited.
As a music lover I feel criminalized... I spend a lot of money for CDs and try to buy everything I like. How is that different from going into a record store and listening to CDs there before you bought them (I wish there was a good record store here, I love good record stores).

Listening to a preview is one thing. But if you then walked out of the CD store with CDs you didn't pay for, then that's stealing. And that's exactly the same as downloading a free digital copy of an album or single that's commercially available.

Originally Posted by Jan

There will always be idiots like those, but this is a general problem of society and not limited to this one aspect.

Agreed. And these idiots are why we have laws - to hold them accountable for the actions they take that hurt others.

[Sean]

Originally Posted by cacophony

i'm not disagreeing with you in general, just on the point that performance and merchandising isn't where artists get their income.

I do absolutely acknowledge that performance and merchandising are huge aspects of an artist's income. I never meant to imply any different. But if you're an independent artist, or just trying to get started and your album is stolen, it can sink your career - or at least deal it a serious set-back. It kind of kills your chance to maybe organize a tour, or to design and market your merchandise.

[Deckard]

It comes back to what I always say: only ever steal from the big guys.

[cacophony]

so, what, the argument is, "the law only exists where punishment exists?"