What if it creates lots of little holes all around the area and the oil continues to leak. Now you have a bigger problem on your hands -- stopping lots of leaks a mile below the surface instead of just one.
Funny how the most upvoted comment here has pretty much nothing to do with the premise of the article. This community is going down hill rapidly...
I used to click on the discussions first to see what people were saying related to the article, but now I just come in and click on the articles and more and more I'm not even doing that because everything is about flash, facebook, apple or google.
pg, you say you are spending your time on thoughts to make the community remain great, but whatever you are doing isn't working... I wonder if this type of degradation is inevitable when the masses invade... Maybe it's time for a functional programming flood...
You have no idea of what I have an idea. Why do conversations here seem to degrade into "You don't know what you're talking about?" Or as camperbob puts it, "Clearly you've thought a lot about this?"
bit sharing and open source are two topics that are so religious around here. This community has a huge axe to grind against powerful organizations who have profited off intellectual property. Why?
What exactly is so wrong about profiting off intellectual property? Software, music, movies?
Yes, when you download it. Specifically, when you acquire possession of the material. If you steal someone's money, but don't spend it, you still stole it.
It's not a victimless crime. The victim is the artist who should have received compensation for your acquisition of the material.
Some laws do outlive their relevance, but these laws are just as relevant today as they were when the printing press was invented or audio recording devices.
Guns made murder easier, but not more legal -- or more moral.
If you aren't paying for the music, you aren't paying for the production. If you were paying for the production, you'd pay what the artists' time was worth to create it, the studio time to record it, the post production editing...
But you'd never pay that much. That's why the artists/record labels/whoever spreads out that cost over all the copies of the of the recording. Then they account for risk, some cash to reinvest, and profit.
When you buy a book, you aren't paying for production either. Nor when you buy a piece of art. Or watch a movie.
All this arguing on behalf of the people who think stealing music is okay is really immature. Everyone knows it is wrong and no one would want someone taking their livelihood away from them -- yet plenty of consumers argue, "oh, it's fine to 'pirate' music... because of yada yada"
Everyone knows it's not okay. It's not okay.
Look at the arguments you make:
A) It's not stealing -- it's a copy
B) Record labels deserve it
C) Piracy is actually *good*!
D) Everyone else is doing it!
E) It's so easy!
Seriously! These are piracy proponents arguments! It's a pity really. Pathetic that people of rational minds would stoop to such irrationality when it suits their wants.
If we have to stop calling equating it with stealing, then we also have to stop equating it with piracy, because pirates didn't make copies of the goods they stole either.
You're making the point that paying for content is good because it enables the artist to eat while concentrating on creating the content -- rather than some other task to earn money.
And no, record labels may not always be around in some form if they can't make money doing what they do.
It's called "checking out a book" or you could use the term "borrowing."
Look, this "it's not stealing" argument is a bunch of hog wash. If you think it isn't stealing because the "stolen" goods are simply a copy, why do you use the term "piracy"? Did pirates make a copy of the loot?
When you say someone is stealing music -- everyone knows what is happening. People use the same term with cable television -- they're stealing cable. It means they are enjoying the benefits of cable -- without paying the cable company.
You can use whatever term you want for the behavior -- we all know what it is and why it isn't right and it is just as wrong as stealing IMO.
Two wrongs don't make a right. Everyone knows when you enter into a legal contract you should understand what the legal words mean or don't sign it.
I don't care about the major labels, what I care about is maintaining a social structure where creativity can be rewarded and the investment and time put into great quality intellectual products isn't wasted.
I'm saying that open office creators want you to use it for free. Creators of music do not want you to use it for free. They want to make some money that they can use to pay for rent and time to invest in more music. If you download a song, you are not entering into any product/consumer agreement.
There is a way, it's called the internet. They can put their music on their website and let paypal handle the transactions -- except people don't pay for it that way either and no one hears of the artist when they do...
I'd just do without. Just like I do without the latest version of photoshop or microsoft office. Instead, I use open office in a manner which its creators want me to use it.
The record labels never stole anything. They entered into agreements with the artists. They put cds in stores that consumers agreed to pay for.
How can people on your side, in one argument say it isn't stealing to copy music, but it is stealing to enter into an agreement whereby one party exchanges something (music) for something else (money) and all parties freely choose to do so?
I don't believe that two products are different simply because one is represented in bronze and the other in bits. No one would suggest it is okay to steal a bronze sculpture.
I've heard the arguments and when you take something without compensating the creator -- or otherwise rightful owner -- it's stealing. If you don't believe it is stealing because of some semantic argument, then it the effect is the same -- you're taking something of value without paying for it and harm is caused to the market in which that product exists because value is lost.
1) Informational copies aren't infinite, they take server space, electricity, and maintenance.
2) and more importantly, how do you overcome the hurdle that production itself requires resource consumption? Stuff at the lower level of Maslow's hierarchy: Food, Shelter?
Producing quality content requires investment. How is a producer of that content to get a return on that investment if people don't pay for the product after it is produced?
I agree that we should all produce and share, but not all sharers produce. Just because you have the bits on your hard drive does not mean the product those bits define are yours to share. Those bits are not simply bits, they are the definition of something that creates value. It takes risk to create the order of ones and zeros and if that risk is not rewarded, then the risk/reward ratio becomes too high and there is no incentive to take the risk to create the product.
I know that many people create for the love of the game, but those creators have to make money somehow. They have to have day jobs or something that distracts them from the many hours it takes to create quality content. If they could get paid for the content after it is produced, then they could spend more time creating more quality content for us to consume.
There was a quote from Ayn Rand about money where she describes money as a battery that stores labor so we can benefit from that labor over a longer time than it takes to perform the labor. Well, those bits are just like that. Bits are a battery that stores the labor required to create the order of bits. Content production is the opposite of entropy and to defeat entropy, we must take energy from outside the system. The artist in this metaphor is the closed system -- the artist's brain is the system that creates the content. The consumer is outside that system and must put energy into it in the form of food so that artist can use that energy to create order from a disordered set of random bits.
Money is that energy required to oppose entropy. Without a transfer of energy, there is no way to create order. Without order, there is no content. It's just white noise and consumers don't want that...
If consumers don't pay for the content, where will the energy to produce it come from?