0 thoughts on “Copying Is Not Theft”

  1. Uh, what? As someone who makes his money in IP monopolies, I would think you’d get that:
    1) Copying is not theft of the thing copied.
    1a) It is theft of potential proceeds from the thing copied.
    2) Regardless of whether it’s theft or not, it infringes on the creator’s rights to their work.

    I wonder how you’d feel if Disney decided to make a TV show based on Under the Bed, with your iconography and ideas, without your permission, and share none of the money. Copying is fun?

    yrs–
    –Ben

  2. So, here’s the thing: the word “theft” is deliberately chosen to obfuscate what is, it turns out a new issue.

    Copyright stemmed from a particular 18th century problem: printing presses would find a text they liked and print it. There’s a notable example of a press sending an author money at the end of a lifetime’s print runs in thanks.

    So, now we have copyright, right?

    The issue is that copyright is being used by the equivalent of presses — Sony, Disney, etc. — as a cudgel against the entire rest of the society, claiming that the entire society is “stealing” their IP.

    That’s IP not created by a corporation, because corporations can’t create. They’re not people, whatever legal fictions you can produce that say they are. The creators — the people who actually made images, words, music, 3d models, code, and so forth — they have no right to their own creation because, in order to create that stuff, they have to sign it over. Copyright is being used *against* creators.

    Just like I’m in principle OK with the death penalty, but see it so constantly and inequitably misused that I can’t stand for it practically, I’m pretty sure that copyright, as it exists, has become a corrupt institution.

    My work is, of course, copyrighted. I’m the creator. That’s important to me, just like it’s important to me that you retain copyright of your work when you write for me. But if I see Shock: up on filesharing sites, do I feel like I’m being stolen from? No, it’s a different feeling. There’s something new going on there. And while copyright law probably has the answer, the current implementation of it seems to be a death spiral of power-to-the-powerful.

  3. I’m not arguing the state of law as it is is a paradise. That’s clearly dumb, and also not what I said.

    I’m arguing that “copying is fun” and thus should be free is a argument which, ultimately, will benefit the powerful media corps at the expense of artists.

  4. I think “Copying is a new, unexplored legal area which still needs defining in order to best protect the rights of creators while preventing exploitation by corporations” is maybe a little harder to make into a catchy lyric for an animated short, don’t you?

  5. Well, part of what I like about this is that it’s counterridiculousness. Fundamentally, it’s right: copying information is how you learn things.

    But of course, hairy details are hairy. What I like about this video is not that it reveals the subtlety of the situation, which it doesn’t. But if you start from the premise that *sharing information* is the root of communication, then you find yourself at a different conclusion than if you start with the premise that information is a rare commodity that has to be guarded against others learning (i.e. stealing) it.

    Copying of information, particularly information that *starts* digital is an *inevitability*. The RIAA’s 28,000 lawsuits show that they have become an enemy of their own society, and it’s copyright law that protects its members over both the creators and enthusiasts, that is the problem.

    Your concern, if I’m correct, is that someone with greater budgets than you or I will discover something good in our works and then be able to unapologetically copy it. It’s true that copyright is my protection against that. That’s what copyright was designed to mitigate. The motive there on the part of, say, Disney, would be *profit* — that such an organization could make more money for its stockholders by copying something I made, than if they created something themselves. If copyright itself is concerned with profit, rather than the copying itself, that’s a different matter. No one copies Lady Gaga’s albums and then *sells* them. There’s no profit motive. They copy it because they want the album (for some reason). The question of whether she’d make more money from selling that many albums is moot — many wouldn’t buy it at $16, and it’s not like digital copying is going to *go away*. It’s hard to say if she’s “losing potential money” that way. But it’s clear that no one else is making it. That’s because, while money is a limited commodity, copies of the music *aren’t*. It’s a different thing.

  6. Bret, yeah. The RIAA and MPAA are both hitting the propaganda bowl pretty hard these days. Propaganda is *effective*. But it can’t be subtle.

  7. First, it’s not a new area at all. We’ve had cheap copying since the invention of printing. It’s just that the means of production (oops! It’s Marx again!) have shifted from producers to consumers. Apparently when corporations shaft authors, it’s evil, but when individuals shaft authors, it’s a bold new future.

    Second, you’re reading in that “protect the rights of creators” is a priority for these crews. I see zero evidence of that, and a lot of evidence to the contrary. Indeed, I’m really shocked at Joshua uncritically parroting a propaganda piece by people who want him to starve.

    yrs–
    –Ben

  8. First, it’s not a new area at all. We’ve had cheap copying since the invention of printing.

    If your definition of “cheap” is “fills an entire building with specialized equipment and multiple people staffing it”, then yeah.

    Apparently when corporations shaft authors, it’s evil, but when individuals shaft authors, it’s a bold new future.

    Individuals can do a lot less damage. They’re also subject to reputation and criminal charges in a way that corporations aren’t.

    Second, you’re reading in that “protect the rights of creators” is a priority for these crews. I see zero evidence of that, and a lot of evidence to the contrary.

    I’d like to see this evidence, because this is something I think about a lot. I think what you’re seeing, though, is a protestation of the gross abuses I’m talking about. If the question came down to creators’ copyrights (which are the tiny seed of the issue, but still tiny), I think that “these crews” would have a) a less strong opinion, and b) come down on the side of creators’ rights. That obfuscation, though, is on the part of the RIAA/MPAA, who pay pitifully little for the actual creation, but use their talent as a moral shield.

  9. I recall specifically when Panty Explosion was pirated, and the PDF sales collapsed, a huge crew of screaming monkeys descending on Jake, swearing up and down that he just didn’t understand, that piracy drove sales, and he must be a lying shill for the RIAA because, well, piracy caused his sales to collapse.

    This is not an isolated incident.

    yrs–
    –Ben

  10. I will discuss this with him.

    Note that the “piracy drives sales” is what the Evil Hatketeers say, too, though recently the amount of pre-order piracy had Rob sort of upset.

  11. I imagine that the effect of piracy on sales varies product to product, market to market.

    It costs me money with Bliss Stage, I’m pretty sure. Maybe $40-50 a month. I’m not really willing to play whack-a-mole with download sites for that kind of chump change, though.

  12. Though, I will note, that as long as a huge chunk of the internet is ideologically dug into “piracy drives sales, period” as an article of faith, there’s no real way to determine the conditions under which this is true, and the conditions under which piracy undermines sales, because any discussion of the topic is ideological rather than rational.

  13. I think Disney has no leg to stand on when it comes to copying, given that their fortune was made by copying stuff.

    The entire premise of copyright was to give protection against copying for a period of time. That gives people the incentive to create and publish. What people do not have the right to do is to hold onto copyrights forever. Disney gets to copy the brothers Grimm but no one ever gets to copy Disney?

  14. I really enjoyed this thread. As a guy who likes the hip-hop and techno music, snippets of music are sampled with reckless abandon. Simple drum hits from old funk records are folded into the latest tunes. But who is to say that a simple kick drum sound is simple inspiration or outright plagiarism. Its such a grey area. And who has the energy to track this stuff. I guess is when it becomes obvious someone speaks up. But that is totally subjective. Imagine copyrighting a letter of the alphabet? Hmmmm.

  15. Josh and Michael, here are some important things about copyright law:

    Copyright is not haphazard. You can’t, for instance, copyright an idea or something that already exists. Disney, for instance, hasn’t copyrighted The Little Mermaid (by Hans Christian Andersen). Disney has a copyright on those particular paintings, frames, digital models, pieces of music and other parts of that specific implementation of The Little Mermaid.

    There are, in fact, other version of The Little Mermaid. You see them in video stores sometimes, designed to toe the line of confusion of the customer. But then, of course, Disney is already using Mr. Andersen’s famous story, so who are they to complain? There’s no actual IP being violated, either trademark or copyright (different laws, btw).

    The question of sampling is an interesting one. Copyright covers, I believe, seven consecutive notes of music. That is, you can’t copyright six notes, just like you can’t copyright letters of the alphabet (even ignoring the fact that it’s got 4000 years of prior art behind it). Remember Vanilla Ice’s argument the he hadn’t knocked of Bowie/Queen’s Pressure by saying it was “dun dun dun dadun dun”, not “dun dun dun dada dun dun?” He lots the case because it wasn’t sufficiently distinctive from the Queen riff — it sounded to the jury like it had seven consecutive notes.

    The Amen Break — now often known as the Jungle Beat and the heart of Drum & Bass — is another curious case. Boom — Bap! badadoomdadum bap! was originally by G.C. Coleman, but has appeared in sets of samples that publishing companies have had the audacity to copyright themselves. Not music made with it. Just CDs of samples. They fuckers just sampled his music, then put a copyright notice on it.

    Now, in that case, my guess is no jury would find for the plaintiff, and the company (I don’t remember who it was) would say it was a mistake. But that strikes me as the same kind of corruption of the system as patenting existing genes, a practice which has become commonplace.

    So, here’s what I want to see from copyright law:

    • An assertion that it can only be owned by the creator of a work — it can not be “signed away”, so attribution must be made. It’s probably best if payment must take the form of royalties.

    • Sufficient flexibility to allow sampling, commentary, parody, and other “fair use”. The policy of fair use is challenged constantly by large media publishers.

    Outside of copyright law, I’d love to see a way for people to make micropayments to creators. iTunes is effective in part because it’s not a big deal to pay ¢99 for a track or $10 for an album. It’s just not. And it’s faster than Bittorrent. At that point, Pitchfork matters more than EMI.

  16. My (personal) objection to copyright law has nothing to do with sales, but the fact that the laws as written amount to “everyone has as much IP protection as they can afford.” I’m also not a fan of organizations rather than individuals holding rights.

    Music and movies are not terribly good examples to work with, seeing as those industries are 75% middleman by volume and based on business models that make being anally raped in a bus station bathroom seem compassionate.

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