Downloading is a human right.

[Lilani]

Or you could put it like this: if I want an original Monet, I will need to pay a few million. I can buy a print of a Monet for ten dollars. Or I can go to a museum and see it in person for five. Why do these have monetary value, and is that reasonable?

Why wouldn't they have monetary value?

I mean really, how does this "real artists do it for free" logic even work? Where do you think they get the money for their supplies? How do you think they pay rent and live? Art has been a business for thousands of years, dating back to the first pottery and spiritual totems carved and traded. Art has never not been a business. Even the abstract expressionists of the mid 20th century, as renowned as they were for doing everything "from the soul" sold their pieces and had some incredible marketing forces behind them. The only way you can run around claiming that art is something that should be free for everyone is if you are completely ignorant of how art is created and distributed.

 

[Something Amyss]

However, things regarding piracy get more complicated when you're talking about things that are rare or never got a proper release, or when it comes to old games that never got a release on digital stores.

It's amazing. When you don't treat something as black and white, it becomes...Complicated.

The problem is, even the people you were tarring with that broad brush are complicated.

You're wrong.

Because ponies, I assume.

Being an artist does not include the notion of being compensated for provision of services - that's a function of the prevailing economic attitudes of the day.

And it's only in relatively recent times where that became an issue.

Further, imagine the likes of Da Vinci getting bitched out by pirates for the audacity to demand compensation for his work. Oh right, that didn't happen because the self-serving logic of the day hadn't come along to redefine things yet.

Maybe the proof is in my inbox which is somehow full of such opinions.

Elaborate, because this looks like an argumentum ad populum logical fallacy here, but I can't quite be sure.

 

[Mykal Stype]

Or you could put it like this: if I want an original Monet, I will need to pay a few million. I can buy a print of a Monet for ten dollars. Or I can go to a museum and see it in person for five. Why do these have monetary value, and is that reasonable?

Why wouldn't they have monetary value?
I mean really, how does this "real artists do it for free" logic even work? Where do you think they get the money for their supplies? How do you think they pay rent and live? Art has been a business for thousands of years, dating back to the first pottery and spiritual totems carved and traded. Art has never not been a business. Even the abstract expressionists of the mid 20th century, as renowned as they were for doing everything "from the soul" sold their pieces and had some incredible marketing forces behind them. The only way you can run around claiming that art is something that should be free for everyone is if you are completely ignorant of how art is created and distributed.

Yay, somebody gets it!

 

[Mykal Stype]

That sounds about fair, since art is also something that you can profit from with a simple talent, that you could learn without paying money and without putting years of dedication into it.

You can make a living from drawing a stick figure comic panel three times a week. You can become a BILLIONAIRE from publishing your amateurish fanfiction with the trademarked names changed.

Getting paid isn't about exactly how hard work was, but about whether you can offer a scarce service that there is enough demand for.

I certainly don't agree with most of what Blood Brain Barrier said about how artists shouldn't get paid at all, but mduncan50's reaction was a massively wrong counterargument by implying that all possible work must be equally treated as a "job", and Barrier's analogy appropriately pointed out the difference between an effort, and a needed job.

You seemed to recognized that distinction in your reply, but then still played along with mduncan50's ideas, and pretend that it's only about the amount of effort making a difference between long-term dedication that must always get paid, and temporary effort that doesn't.

Which still doesn't make sense, if that would be the case, then flipping burgers would be just as worthless as standing on hands, while building an elaborate beautiful castle on your lot would automatically give you the right to get paid by someone for enriching the neighborhood's image, as much as for writing a beautiful novel with great skill and years of effort.

If the person drawing stick figures is trying to do it for a living, no matter how bad they are, it's a job, just like any other job. But it also means you suck at it, which means no one will buy it, which is like getting fired.

the person with the castle is building the castle for nothing but their own benefit, so that wouldn't be a job. And if the neighbors find no value in it, they don't pay for it. The difference between stealing and that is that a thief claims there is no value in what they are stealing, and therefore they should be allowed to steal it, despite that they are actually claiming it has value.

 

[Mykal Stype]

I think this is the best argument for paying artists:

An artist can't pay bills in accolades, and can't eat off of pats on the back. So how do you think we survive when no one is paying us? We have to pick up a dead end job unloading boxes at the Piggly Wiggly. When we have no time to make art and are extremely tired when we do have time, we either won't produce more art, or the art suffers significantly.
And why do we work at a dead end job? Because it does give us a minor amount of time that we can work on our now shitty art, which we do because despite how you all steal our work, we still want to do it, because that's all we have left.

So what do you want? And artist that has time to put in thought to our work, or an artist that is constantly tired, depressed, and barely can deal with the art you all keep begging for anyway?

 

[Entitled]

If the person drawing stick figures is trying to do it for a living, no matter how bad they are, it's a job, just like any other job. But it also means you suck at it, which means no one will buy it, which is like getting fired.

Uhhh... I guess that's possible (and so is actually making a living from one, see XKCD, Order of the Stick, MS Paint Adventures), but I have the feeling that we are starting to completely lose the analogy about whether or not hardd long effort deserves to be rewarded for it's own sake.

the person with the castle is building the castle for nothing but their own benefit, so that wouldn't be a job. And if the neighbors find no value in it, they don't pay for it. The difference between stealing and that is that a thief claims there is no value in what they are stealing, and therefore they should be allowed to steal it, despite that they are actually claiming it has value.

Having a beautiful fancy building in your neighborhood has an aesthetic value, and it can even have a tangible financial benefit in the form of slightly raising local real estate prices.

In other words, you are wrong, "something that others are benefit from" isn't a proper justification why certain acts must get rewarded, either.

In economy, an act that has added benefits for surrounding people, is called a positive externality [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality#Positive], and it is usually considered a good thing. Other classic examples would be how having another apartment above helps to insulate your ceiling, or turning on a porch light as you step outside, to see the stairs, and a passerby on the street next to you using it to read the newspaper in their hand.

When a service or product ends up having benefits to other people beyond it's original investor, that's considered a good thing, because it increases value without unnecessarily increasing payment.

There is no reason why culture couldn't be treated like one of these, so it gets created by investors through any possible business model that they hope to profit from, but afterwards it's just there, accessible for the general population's mutual benefit.

Again, we already have multiple meiums that work like this, including much of the TV industry, most websites, and some smaller fandom-supported niches.

 

[Vegosiux]

So what do you want? And artist that has time to put in thought to our work, or an artist that is constantly tired, depressed, and barely can deal with the art you all keep begging for anyway?

First of all, I'll ask myself "Is that artist any good?" As a subjective assessment, of course. Do I like that artist's work? If not, then I will not be paying a dime. And, well, of course, if not I won't clutter my hard drive with pirating his stuff either, I mean, if I don't like something I'm not going to take it just because I can get it for free, I still don't like it and all.

If yes, well, then I'll do what I can to support that artist, to the point of a balance between how much I personally think support is deserved, and my ability to do so.

 

[Phuctifyno]

Apologies if anybody has already said the same thing, the comments have built up so I didn't read them all.

"You don't have rights, you have privileges." -George Carlin

I think it only truly becomes a right if you don't need anybody's help to do it. Rights exists as a sort of agreement that, for the better of society, the powerful will not opress the powerless; but those aren't true rights as long as they can be taken away. Unless you have the know-how and resources to build the computer, get it online, write the code and move the information all by yourself, it will remain a privilege that can be undone by those with power.

Not that I'm altogether happy about it, because I'm not powerful and only a novice programmer, but it seems that "easy come, easy go" are words to live by. Maybe in the distant future, education will focus a lot more on computers and those skillsets may become a regular thing to everybody. That's what I hope for, anyway, and that's when it will become an inalienable right.

As for the article, eh. Good news I guess.

 

[Vigormortis]

Well that's cool and all but people still deserve to be paid for their work.

There is plenty of other ways to get paid. Like donations. Or collecting the money first, Kickstarter style. And there is probably other possible schemes too.

The internet, destroying the most basic principle of humans and economics, day by day

And don't you love how the concept of, "I made this thing and am looking for people interested in buying it." is not only viewed as antiquated now-a-days, but as something worthy of scorn and ridicule?

It's either "pay me first or I'm not doing a thing" or "take this thing I spent untold hours of hard labor on and, if you like me enough, toss a few bucks into the tip can".

 

[Entitled]

Well that's cool and all but people still deserve to be paid for their work.

There is plenty of other ways to get paid. Like donations. Or collecting the money first, Kickstarter style. And there is probably other possible schemes too.

The internet, destroying the most basic principle of humans and economics, day by day

And don't you love how the concept of, "I made this thing and am looking for people interested in buying it." is not only viewed as antiquated now-a-days, but as something worthy of scorn and ridicule?

If you ignore the elephant in the living room that is the Internet, and how it fundamentally functions, you deserve to be ridiculed.

I'm not even saying that these changes are desirable, or that they will lead to a healthier culture and prospering arts, (although I happen to think that they will), but even if they would be neutral or unfortunate, closing your eyes and plugging ears so you can pretend that we are still living in one of those centuries where publishers could and needed to actively guard every (industrially printed) copy of their work to sell them, *is* ridiculous.

Practically every new digital medium appearing in the past decades had started out on new business models, and that's no accident.

Old-school funding is is only held together by status quo, and in literature and cinema because of how those are still tied to physical content (movie theatres and printed books), while their digital equivalents are seen as mere cheap replacements.

Video games might be the only ones that might get away with actually continuing to charge for digital cotent in itself, because the future cloud might work as a failsafe DRM that only lets in registered online members to the servers. But then gaming would still have to deal with the last entertainment form that does that, in a world where it's impossible to keep track of all those text, music, and video files distributed all over the Internet.

 

[Vigormortis]

snip

The irony of your forum name aside, you're reading way more into my post than is actually there. I wasn't speaking on the industry, or publishers, or any of the other superfluous shit you're bringing up. I was speaking of the *entitled* nature of consumers today and the mindset that paying someone for something they made is considered "bad". Where you read anything else is beyond me. Perhaps you misquoted? Are you imagining things?

Or are you implying we should move to the truly antiquated system of "pay first for services to be rendered later"? Because, the idea of Kickstarter and "donations" is exactly that.

(Oh, and another thing, the "internet", as you so eloquently pointed out, renders that form of purchase even more antiquated.)

 

[micahrp]

On my side, the argument is not really "capitalism versus other market-type", so much as between two possible forms of capitalism, one where everything that has a "value" in any informal sense must be pretended to be analogous to physical goods, and another one where only scarce goods should actually be sold, and the other, more intangible "values", such as culture, should be allowed to form without much government interaction.

Look at it this way: "fame" is a form of value. It's something that people want, and what they work for. But that doesn't mean that the government should actively give famous people authority to tax the general populance to reward their work that gave them fame. If there would be, people would argue that such a system is necessary to "pay for these goods", otherwise no one would be properly rewarded for being famous. But we don't have, so now we understand that fame is all right being either the goal for itself, or just a positive externality that people get while trying to be successful in other, more economically tangible business models.

It's the same with the value of "culture". You produced a piece of culture? Congratulations. You might even get paid for it, if you play your cards right and find a viable business model. You might even fund a corporation that will mass-produce cultural values by following that business model. There is already precedent for systems such as over-the air broadcasted TV, or most of all websites, that showed that content can get created without limiting the distribution of accees.

Creators can get a profit from ad space, from merchandise, from donations and crowdfunding, from live presentations, from selling physical copies, etc, etc. We can admit that corporations can already support themselves for these things, so we don't have to give them extra authority to protect their peculiar, outdated form of business wher they are playing gatekeepers, directly charging for access to any piece of culture, for seeing, for reading, for copying, for and playing.

For the multiple economies, who gets to move products between the economies and do they get to profit off that movement or are all the economies kept completely separate (supply and demand side)?

Copyright holders aren't actively taxing everyone just because their product exists like the fame example. You can 100% avoid the extanglement with the copyright holder and the government by not having anything to do with an unauthorized copy of their product.

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?

I still don't understand why the copyright model is outdated? Gatekeepers of different stripes exist all over societies from bar front doors to zoos to sporting events and those all have products that fit this use of the word culture behind their gates. Is the objection to the amount of upkeep the copyright holder has to do to the product versus the amount those other venues do?

You have alternatives and the best one is to create a better product and distribute it as you see fit. So easy to tear down, but so much better to build up.

 

[Entitled]

The irony of your forum name aside, you're reading way more into my post than is actually there. I wasn't speaking on the industry, or publishers, or any of the other superfluous shit you're bringing up. I was speaking of the *entitled* nature of consumers today and the mindset that paying someone for something they made is considered "bad". Where you read anything else is beyond me. Perhaps you misquoted? Are you imagining things?

My username is not ironic, it refers to exactly that, to people feeling entitled to constantly grab for more and more rights, and personal benefits, and values, and control, as much as possible. And to my willingness to admit that I'm one of them.

You can talk all you want about "artists' rights", or about forced comparisons to taking away someone's property, or whatever it is why you think that people SHOULDN'T feel entitled to information that is already there and easily distributable, but the fact is, that this is all just a tug-of-war between multiple different interests, publishers, artists, consumers, the public, pirates, all feeling entitled to dictate the terms of what's coming next.

Or are you implying we should move to the truly antiquated system of "pay first for services to be rendered later"? Because, the idea of Kickstarter and "donations" is exactly that.

I'm not supporting any specific model, what I certainly know is that pretending that digital content can still be a kind of scarce product, obviously doesn't work. There are a number of systems that work, some of them healthier than others.
For example I wouldn't be particularly glad to see any more ad-based systems. I'm also a bit concerned about more and more games tying themselves to forced online content to justify selling accounts.
Charging for physical copies only is one of the healthier ones, as it lets everyone share and absorb the content itself, while especially rewarding the ones that make devoted fans willingly buying one for their shelves.
The Kickstarter model appears to function on small scale, we will see if it ends up attracting enough backers to fund blockbuster-budget products as well.
Then there are of course the medium-specific models, such as musicians having concerts, or anime selling it's buckets of merchandise (most of it very Japanse culture-specific).

(Oh, and another thing, the "internet", as you so eloquently pointed out, renders that form of purchase even more antiquated.)

Huh? Crowdfunding is rendered antiquated by the Internet? Ok, I'm listening that one.

 

[Entitled]

Copyright holders aren't actively taxing everyone just because their product exists like the fame example. You can 100% avoid the extanglement with the copyright holder and the government by not having anything to do with an unauthorized copy of their product.

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?

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.

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.

 

[micahrp]

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?

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.

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.

I am confused about bought versus pirate digital content. If you meant "Show me a person who has never pirated digital content." without the bought part I would volunteer myself. Every game on my pc was either bought by me or written by me. All the other programs on my computer either came with the operating system or are GNU General Public License free softwares or are registered free programs like visual studio 2010. Every mp3 in my mp3 player is from the napster pay service (which i didnt realize had disappeared but i havent gotten new music in a while) or is from the artists who created the music and gave it to me or from the original CD that I still have. I have all the window operating system disks i've bought with their original liscence key all the way back to Win 95 still. Heck I made the jpg for my avatar picture here because I wouldn't steal someone else's image they created (and I keep thinking i should use one of my fractals i wrote as a better avatar).

I don't wander the net sticking things in my computer any more than I would wander walmart sticking things in my pocket. To take the analogy further I also don't wander down the back alley's of the net looking for a dealer to hand me a copy of something he assures me is primo stuff or climb in the broken windows of websites looking for stuff to steal.

I think it takes thought and self-control. Choosing to be a bad citizen is a choice no matter how easy or tempting the gains are.

I agree copyright holders shouldn't get special protection but they should get no less protection than any other item taken without the owner's express consent. And since the product is different it needs a different set of safe guards. I've worked in a drug store that kept an armed guard on the premises, what is the ditigal equivalent? I've worked in a photo lab and we refused to make copies of copyrighted works, what entity in your computer is doing that refusal? I am working as a programmer and I take it no less seriously.

 

[Vegosiux]

I agree copyright holders shouldn't get special protection but they should get no less protection than any other item taken without the owner's express consent. And since the product is different it needs a different set of safe guards. I've worked in a drug store that kept an armed guard on the premises, what is the ditigal equivalent? I've worked in a photo lab and we refused to make copies of copyrighted works, what entity in your computer is doing that refusal? I am working as a programmer and I take it no less seriously.

But that's where it gets muddy. "Taken" implies that the original owner no longer has that particular item. Just saying, different terms need to be used here.

 

[Mykal Stype]

the person with the castle is building the castle for nothing but their own benefit, so that wouldn't be a job. And if the neighbors find no value in it, they don't pay for it. The difference between stealing and that is that a thief claims there is no value in what they are stealing, and therefore they should be allowed to steal it, despite that they are actually claiming it has value.

Having a beautiful fancy building in your neighborhood has an aesthetic value, and it can even have a tangible financial benefit in the form of slightly raising local real estate prices....

The main difference I see is that the castle is forced upon others, while art isn't. If you don't want someone's art, you don't pay for it.
The rest of what you said, which I snipped because it was long, I can understand. I don't agree with it, but I can get your argument. The case is a bit of a grey area in some parts, but I still think it's entitlement: what I want has value, but I don't want to follow up on that value.

 

[Mykal Stype]

So what do you want? And artist that has time to put in thought to our work, or an artist that is constantly tired, depressed, and barely can deal with the art you all keep begging for anyway?

First of all, I'll ask myself "Is that artist any good?" As a subjective assessment, of course. Do I like that artist's work? If not, then I will not be paying a dime.

No one is forcing you to buy anything. If you find no value in the work, don't buy it.

And, well, of course, if not I won't clutter my hard drive with pirating his stuff either, I mean, if I don't like something I'm not going to take it just because I can get it for free, I still don't like it and all.

Right there you have placed no value on the work, which is fine. But what you are doing when you pirate is saying that the work has value, you just don't want to follow up on it. After all, if it has no value to you, why do you have it?

If yes, well, then I'll do what I can to support that artist, to the point of a balance between how much I personally think support is deserved, and my ability to do so.

So why do you think you get to set a value on someone's work? Unless you can change how much the materials used to make the work cost, you can not define the base value.
For example, I'm going to make a painting. I have to pay $50 for the canvas and frame, $25 for the painting supplies, and $75 for paints as I am using multiple colours. Why do you get to say "this has no value whatsoever. Now give it to me for free."

You have to understand that art isn't made in a vacuum. Artists have to pay for everything that they use to make it, plus time in which we could be working a job instead of making stuff for you to take for nothing. If you say that our art has no value but you want it anyway, why do you think we're going to take time and money just to make it for you? So that you can say "hey, good job. Now make another thing so I can tell you it has no value, but use it anyway."

 

[Entitled]

I am confused about bought versus pirate digital content. If you meant "Show me a person who has never pirated digital content." without the bought part I would volunteer myself. Every game on my pc was either bought by me or written by me.

By "Show me a person who has never pirated digital content", I merely wanted to point out, that it's not really true that "You can 100% avoid the extanglement with the copyright holder", because you will EITHER have to pay for every singe copyrighted data that you see, OR pirate stuff, but there isn't really an option of just "leaving" copyrighted content alone.

In that way, we can make simplicistic analogies about designing a castle, or locking down a street, or other examples where you have the option of simply not being there, but the problem with copyright that it really *is* everywhere, and in that way, similar to a general tax that I didn't ever agree to pay.

(which doesn't necessarily make it right to ignore it, but makes it more necessary to question why is it there to begin with.

I don't wander the net sticking things in my computer any more than I would wander walmart sticking things in my pocket. To take the analogy further I also don't wander down the back alley's of the net looking for a dealer to hand me a copy of something he assures me is primo stuff or climb in the broken windows of websites looking for stuff to steal.

And what makes your analogies more appropriate than mine with the street musician?

Other than the fact that they are all illegal, which on it's own shouldn't be a source off morality. Other than the fact that right now the letter of the law says so, What makes copyright ifringement SELF-EVIDENTLY more comparable to stealing, than to walking on a street and choosing to stop next to a street musician for a few minutes?

I agree copyright holders shouldn't get special protection but they should get no less protection than any other item taken without the owner's express consent. And since the product is different it needs a different set of safe guards. I've worked in a drug store that kept an armed guard on the premises, what is the ditigal equivalent? I've worked in a photo lab and we refused to make copies of copyrighted works, what entity in your computer is doing that refusal? I am working as a programmer and I take it no less seriously.

Vegosiux said it best. It's a simple fact that IP is NOT a physical product, and it's control is not about whether something gets TAKEN from it's creator. The very idea that intellectual work must have an "equivalent" level of control to drug stores, leads to flawed analogies.

If we would take that claim to it's logical extreme, IP laws shouldn't have Public Domain, or Fair Use limits, since you don't get to fairly use other people's physical property, and physical property doesn't become public after 95 years, lost to it's owner . So even our current system admits that you can't draw direct paralells.