Your heart’s in the right place, but this is just plain wrong. Back in the early 80’s I was a teenaged gamer, and pretty much all of my friends pirated all their software. Effectively unauthorized copying (“piracy”) was every bit as rampant (if not moreso) for the things that could be copied back then.
(For the record, I bought pretty much all my own software. I continue to do so today, when I can’t use Free Software. I’m sympathetic, but not a participant).
Personally I think the main reason is that requiring some third party’s authorization to copy something on your own consumer hardware is so obviously stupid (and arguably immoral) that no amount of propaganda can change the situation.
Its almost exactly like the bit in Blazing Saddles where the heroes tried to slow down an army of bad guys by setting up a tollbooth in the middle of the open prairie. The only thing is that in the movie it was supposed to be ridiculous, but here people actually expect everyone to take their “LePetomaine Thruway” tollbooth seriously.
It is very very rare that I get a downvote on a SE site, and have no clue why. Rare enough, that I don’t really see this as a problem.
I think a lot of folks who complain about mystery downvotes are really asking for a chance to argue back at folks who disagree with their answer. That’s rarely productive, and typically the result is no fun at all to have to wade through as a third party.
Personally, I’d rather see SE go the other way, and put in new stuff to discourage comment flamewars. Perhaps a “lets take this to chat” button as part of the basic commenting interface. But then again, as a stack mod my perspective is probably a bit different that the average user’s.
Indeed. I wasn’t really debating the moral aspect of the whole ‘piracy’ issue. I personally think that the large media industry’s business model is completely outdated, and should adapt to piracy (/sharing/whatever you want to call it) rather than the other way around (flame war initiation not intended, btw).
I just loved every other post since my last one, about “piracy”! Love to see how some great thoughts were brought after mine, which came after fselem’s and all thanks to Jeff as usual.
Maybe even more important as those who agree, are those who rationally disagree. They help on keeping the social mind working (I’m often on the disagreeing side as well):
“internet piracy” as you call it doesn’t mean loss of incentive either, as I’ve already pointed. The difference between “internet piracy” and “free data sharing” is just in the supposedly "owner"s eye. Ideas have no owners, they only have first authors and copyright exists to incentive building them indeed, but only because that’s how we managed to capitalize it in the past. I do agree with your general thought, but you have to be careful with choice of words. It can easily conceive the wrong idea ( ← and boy, have you overused that word?! :P).
Anyway…
I disagree. Here’s yet another simple idea incentivized by “piracy”. Please do copy away, modify it and improve upon it. I hope this works as a sample and probably not as a catalyst:
We need to remove data copyright, people must be allowed to copy away as to incentivize sharing ideas, learning from them and eventually making it grow. But we need to do it in a way which will still pay for “inventors”. Right? Well, here’s the good news: all of this already exists and is already in place. Wikipedia, redhat linux, google, small artists and big ones (such as weird al)… The bad news is a lot of old hags and selfish newborns want to keep abusing the old system for their own profit (I don’t need to bring names here). This kind of people will always exist, as long as we are homo sapiens, no matter if we manage to throw away the broken system. They even help, unpurposely, to improve on this “system” - even the most irrational ones. There is no “how” to “do it”, it is already done and in movement.
Now there comes the big leap: IMHO opinion all we need to do is hang in there. The singularity must be near. And we soon shall artificially evolve into something else (either biologically, cibernetically or etherially)!
Blazing Saddles…that takes me back! Camp fires and beans…
As for the topic at hand, I’m one of the few who read the whole manual before use. I don’t like surprises nor breaking things. There are exceptions, like using items I’m already familiar with (riding a motorcycle), and I’ll read those later. I do because that’s where I learn about the features beyond the basics.
I don’t understand how this provides any real information. For those whom had to write down the books they read in high school they were able to cheat - they could write down any books they could think of and nobody would know. There is no way to validate what they wrote.
With the Ten Commandments there is no cheating - there are 10. That’s it. The participants can’t make up commandments because there is a single, concrete answer and it’s very possible to validate.
The test they took was a completely different set of questions, like a math test or something… Participants cheated less on this other test after they recalled the ten commandments.
My problem with tutorials or FAQs is they are either too dumbed down (“first, turn on the computer…”) so that they take an hour of fluff to get 5 minutes of relevant, important, nonobvious info, or they simply don’t contain the answer to the question you need answered, or it does but in a way it cannot be found. Some are searchable, though not all. After wasting several hours, smart people give up since they realize that statistically, although they might run across a good FAQ or tutorial (for a badly designed site that cannot be figured out), most are just a waste of time.
Consider this box I’m typing this comment in. It has an easy editor that does what I expect since it behaves like most programs. I don’t need a tutorial for that, but might want to do something outside what the menu offers. Then I need to find just those “out of band” things easily. I don’t need a rehash of how to make something bold or italic. If I couldn’t figure out those things without going to the FAQ or tutorial it would be bad design.
I agree, especially if it can be done in a way that doesn’t necessarily stigmatize down-voting. There are plenty of times when I’ve posted something that later becomes obsolete, and it no longer deserves the votes it has.
Perhaps instead of simple down-voting there should be multiple choice labels, with different options having more effect on your reputation. So something that becomes obsolete would affect the answer’s score but not your reputation; whereas something off-topic, offensive, misleading, or just plain wrong would.
I guess I’m usually up for correction. But, sometimes the answer is correct and I still get a down vote (rare, but happens). So there must be some other reason for the down vote. The last down vote I received it was a correct answer but the Questioner liked someone else’s implementation more. So, there was no reason for a down vote. It would have been nice for some feed back so I could change the answer if necessary, or delete the answer. But it was just mysterious. Forced comments on down votes would help me make any corrections.
I think that these are valid points in some regards. I don’t think that these things cause piracy. But I do believe that honest people have a more difficult time than pirates.
An example: My wife wanted to take a DVD into school for her class to watch. We had it on Blu-ray, so I let her take my laptop to plug into the projector. When she went to play the film I had a frantic phone call to tell me that it wasn’t working. I popped in and spent over an hour trying to get this movie to play through to the projector.
Despite having a laptop with the right software, codecs etc - because of arbitary rules based on the playback qulity - I simply could not get the movie to play. The players complained about the graphics drivers, or needed purchase for mroe codecs. Trial software grumbled about incompatibilities.
At the end of it I mused on the fact that I could have gone home and downloaded the movie in 10 minutes flat and could have played it on any device. I paid for it - but by doing so I’ve trapped myself into this proprietary nightmare where I can only watch a movie if I do so in a way that movie companies have decided. Let’s not forget that ripping a movie from a DVD or similar is technically illegal as well.
In a technical world (as this is a technical blog essentially) - it flies in the face of freedom to choice.
Being honest when it comes to software, and movies seems to mean that you have to behave in a walled garden and woe to you if you don’t want those shackles.
I do try to live my technical life making sure that I can use my computer, watch my movies, and listen to music in the most versatile way possible. My phone carries my music which are ripped from real CDs. I don’t subscribe to movie and audio streaming services because they hamper my choice and viewing with their selection and where they decide to deploy their “apps”.
The clever thing is that subscribing to this mentaility, for the most part, IS the path of least resistence. We’re being sucked into the idea that we don’t need to own these things anymore. We pay for living in these walled gardens only enjoying the fruits that we are being offered. As long as we don’t want to peek over the fence - everything is rosy.
But for those that actually want to peek over the wall or do something different - you meet that resistence. Then you realise maybe the easy way isn’t the easy way after all.
Bringing it back onto topic - it’s the honest person who has to break the rules. He’s not a rampant pirate - he just wants a fair deal and sometimes (as Jeff has said in the post) he needs to break some rules to acheieve this.
My wife wanted to take a DVD into school for her class to watch.
Being an eastern-(middle?)European I don’t really know the US copyright laws, but isn’t it also illegal to show a copyrighted movie/film/etc. in a public place like a school? In the VHS era (I think that was the last time I have seen one of those copyright texts pre-movie) the copyright notice at the beginning of films said the movie can’t be presented in public places like schools, prisons or oil rigs. (I remember because it was specifically funny. In Hungary there are no oil rigs.)
Let’s not forget that ripping a movie from a DVD or similar is technically illegal as well.
Isn’t it the same with CDs? Just because you are saying
My phone carries my music which are ripped from real CDs
I don’t know. In Hungary you get to make a copy of any media you own as long as you don’t distribute it. (It is also legal to download media from virtually any source as long as it is not fro redistribution.)
I don’t subscribe to movie and audio streaming services because they hamper my choice and viewing with their selection and where they decide to deploy their “apps”.
Also I don’t know the cell bandwidth where you live, but in Hungary it could be laggy if you travel to the country. (Not to mention that most streaming services has no contract with mobile providers (I only know one exception) so you can only stream against your data plan.)
Not quite - you’re circumventing copy protection with DVDs et all - not CDs which is plain audio data.
With apps such as Spotify and Deezer you can cache you favourite music on the device before travelling.
Schools can pay for a license to do this. Also if you play music in a public place (or even an office) you need a license from PRS! Cha-ching!
Interestingly the UK is WAY behind on this. We’ve only recently had the law amended to allow legal copying to secondary devices (although it’s still illegal to make additional copies for family in the same home - go figure): It's no longer illegal to rip CDs | WIRED UK
There’s also an interesting ammendment about complaining to the secretary of state about if DRM makes it too difficult to use - although I imagine that the effort required to get permission to copy a DVD might be a little extreme
So you are telling me that bypassing copy-protection (which is a technical and not a legal action) makes it illegal to rip DVDs, while not bypassing the non-existent copy protection makes ripping CDs legal? Again I don’t really know if it works that way in the United States/United Kingdom, but I strongly doubt. I think bypassing the copy protection is part of the DVD ripping procedure like don’t bypassing the non-existent copy protection is also part of the CD ripping procedure, so the “legality” of those actions is not based on the technical details of the ripping, but the copyright regulations. (But once again: I might be wrong.)
According to common sense, the “strict” sort of regulation is that you are allowed to copy stuff (even between different mediums) the author lets you copy, and you are not allowed to copy stuff if the author does not. In this point of view the content is bound to the carrying medium and can not be reproduced or transferred by any means. The “loose” sort of regulation would go by you (as the consumer) pay to obtain a right to consume the content of the medium (films from the DVD, music from the CD, etc.) by any means you wish to. In that case you should be allowed to rip contents from the medium or even copy them as long as you remain the consumer.
Now that is something I did not know about. I don’t use any of those for the same reason you do.
That’s why I linked to the artcle. Until very recently in the UK it was illegal to copy music for any reason - but now fair use copying has been legalised.
Regarding DVDs etc - you’re breaking the law because you’re cracking an encrypted medium. That’s nothing to do with copyright, you’re just breaking a new set of laws instead.
Ultimately I think that we agree - the consumer should have the right to choose and have free format exchange for herself.
I don’t own many Mac / iOS devices because I don’t want to be trapped in an Apple-centric eco-system where FLACs aren’t recognised
Likewise I don’t like where Google is going lately. If you buy a track from Play - downloading is completely restricted on any device other than Android handsets. I’m really uncomfortable with that.
You don’t HAVE to enter these ecosystems of course, but they make it so easy that it’s easy for the consumer to be trapped in this.
I want choice, I want freedom, and I want to do it legally. I don’t understand why it has to be so hard to have those three things.
We are going massively off-topic here so I’ll shut up now
This article is very interesting in the way that it shows us how people actually think, it helps realize that people don’t like to be babied and forced into making decisions and a little freedom with the right persuasion is better than forcing someone to follow your ideals. When making programs this helps because you want the user to do things for them selves and enjoy the experience rather than being forced to do anything
If software developers made it harder to break their software in the first place then it becomes easier for users to do it right in the first place without reading the manual.
Yes, it should be illegal. You may not be stealing a physical object but you are removing money from someone’s income.
Is the way it works now good? No. People are still catching up with the digital age. Your example of the theatre company is a good example of someone who gets it. The point is though, it was their choice to share their content on youtube and for those who want to stick to the old way, let them.
