Show me one person who never either bought or pirated any digital content.
You might call a specific AAA game a "luxory", but information itself is a very universal thing, and pretty much all of it created in the past century is locked away as someone's (probably a corporation's) IP, so you absolutely WILL end up paying for every time you are trying to interact with modern pop-culture.
Maybe a "tax" is not the most fortunate analogy in that regard. Someone earlier said that copyright is like a street musician trying to force every passerby to pay for listening. People would sometimes willingly stop for a short time, enjoy it, and still not pay. They would have a chance to circle around him on other streets if they don't want to pay, and they still wouldn't make that effort. The musician could rant about how he ought to lock down the whole whole street, and he is being robbed of his property, but most would feel that the music is just a positive benefit of the surroundings, (like the scenery, or the frends you meet on the street) and they are not morally responsible for the man's livelihood (even if they might as well really donate to him).
Thats how most people look at the Internet as well. It's just like taking a stroll: you post on forums, look at cat pictures, look at funny remixes on youtube, read the news, look at Pony pictures, suddenly there is a jingle stuck in your head, that old viral animated one, so you look it up on youtube, then argue with someone about Copyright, then there is another song in your head, that one from Grease, you look it up on youtube, then you suddenly feel like playing Sim City, the first one, from your childhood, that hasn't been sold anywhere for years, then you argue on the Escapist about which was the best Sim City, then you order a hardcover copy of that book that you last read from Amazon, then you get kinda curious about the latest big movie, but not so much to actually walk to the cinema or care about decent image quality, it's just about knowing how that twist ending is played out....
At which point is one supposed to know that the stroll changed to stealing?
Retorical question, we both know our copyright law pretty well, but for most ordinary people, locking down large parts of that "information superhighway" for some publisher's ensued profitability, is just as arbitary as locking down streets or a fiddler's sake.
Sure, it's nnice that they are there, and you might even care to support them, but why all that control?
micahrp said:
If being a piece of culture is the criteria for what product must be freely distributed then who gets to decide what is culture? Because if that is the standard what is to stop the manufacture from stamping everything "This is not culture, this is a product." If it is the society, shall we vote everything is culture?
Strange question, I would say that it's exactly the problem of the copyright system.
I DON'T think that culture should be artificially made free just because it's culture. I exactly think that copying control should lifted from all data that is now being restricted with the justification that "it must be profitable because this is culture".
A product or service should be anything, that is actually scarce, like a game server, and ad space, a hardcover book, or a cinema seat. Culture should be something that's just naturally happening whle these things are sold, not something that gets it's own special protection as that information
printed in the hardcover books, or projected on the silver screen, that needs it's own control.
micahrp said:
I still don't understand why the copyright model is outdated?
When was the last time you followed a link promising a funny remix video, and it led to only a DMCA notice? When did you hear your latest horror story about some kid or a grandma thrown into jail for downloading a handful of shitty pop songs? When was the last time a famous game broke down because of DRM? Remember SOPA?
These are not isolated incidents. When there is a system where billions are sharing their files, and you want to protect your old copyrights, is to have far, far more control than the users. You can't just start asking for court orders every time someone uploads your movie to youtube, you need an automated mechanism that takes down EVERYTHING that is suspect. You can't just nicely ask pirates for the price of the song they downloaded, you need to scare millions of others by making an example of a first few.
As you (or was it someone else) said in thi thread, downloading is only going to get easier in the future. A year from now, five years from now, ten years from now, there will be even more sites, even more technologies, and even higher speed with which grab all the data that you need. And there is no possible way for publishers to make sure that all your shared pdf, mp3, and avi files are clean, without some massive privacy-breaking system.
The only way to keep even the current, (already pretty faulty and pirate-ridden) status quo, will be even more gratuitous website takedowns, and even harsher examples made. The idea that piracy is just a constant that always happened and always going to happen on the sideline, is not true.