I'm sick of goddamned streaming services

If you like, you can say that all property is fiction. I am not sure that that is quite true, but if it is, then a more precise form of the current argument would be that material private property and immaterial intellectual property are two different, distinct fictions, and you can't derive agreement or disagreement for one from the other. That the fictions are separate is shown, as I said before, by the fact that the victim of material theft is deprived of the object. It is not material theft to offer a similar product that makes it harder for someone else to sell theirs. In the fiction of copyright, this is reversed. The presumed victim still owns a copy of the object, and on the other hand, offering a similar product that could diminish their product's value is considered a violation of IP.

Nope, that is a completely different issue. Privacy is a separate right from property.

Not generally true. It can protect or harm individuals.

In many ways. Take Straczynski: He created Babylon 5, but he can't create any more B5; and it would have been unfeasible to ever get the original series produced if he hadn't agreed to such a deal. This is not in the creator's interest.

How can you be so sure it was stolen? Someone had to have purchased it initially. I am not entering into any sort of agreement with the media creators/company.

I'm not rationalizing bad behavior, because it isn't bad behavior. Again, if I can access the media easily on one of the streaming services to which I subscribe, I am more than happy to pay a fair price for that content. But if it's not available, and I want to see it, I don't really have any other options. It's not that I go out of my way every day and I'm pirating terabytes worth of pirated material. I exercise that option sparingly when the media companies leave me no other reasonable option.

You buy a movie. Watch it once and say, "That's nice I want to share it," and then you rip and put it on a server for anyone to download. Or use it on your streaming service that people subscribe to. How is this supporting the owner/creator again? How do you justify this?

Are you saying people shouldn't be able to enter a contract, or shouldn't have to honor it once they have? No one put a gun to his head. He should have negotiated a better deal.

I've entered bizarro land.

So you're saying the inventor shouldn't be able to sell his patent? He shouldn't expect to be able to recover losses if someone copies his design without his authorization after buying one of the devices he made?

This is really fucked up.

That's completely unrealistic in the current copyright system; it is designed to take control over their creation away from creators.

so by giving them no control after someone buys a copy is more control? Fascinating.

K is someone whose opinions I've learned to respect.

Palladin and Zombie are two that I don't.

That I'm agreeing with the latter two (and they with me) and not K gives me pause.

I need reprogramming to accept that piracy is OK. Or some better examples of how it benefits anyone but the pirates and their fans. This isn't an extreme, it's business as usual on the interwebs.

Why should I justify something I don't even do?

"How do I know it was stolen?" is a copout.

By downloading copyright protected material from bittorrents or jail-broken firesticks you're as guilty as the guy who uploaded the media.

Here's a good lawyer.

Or maybe you could grow the fuck up and realize that people can't be put into neat little categorical boxes. I've agreed with K and disagreed with Paladin on plenty of items.

Instead of automatically dismissing someone because they are not on the same political side as you maybe you should take the time to actually pay attention to what is being said.

It's paradoxical, and it demonstrates that current IP law is broken. Right now, the law that supposedly puts creators in control of their creations has created an industry that controls their creations in their place. If Straczynski sells you a copy of a B5 episode and you put it online, he remains free to tell more B5 stories. If he sells it to a studio in the current copyright system, he loses that right.

I am not arguing that we should abolish creators' rights. But once we understand that they are utterly artificial, we can consider which parts work and which don't. When a good could be easily delivered to customers around the world, but copyright struggles prevent that, nobody wins by having such laws.

"Fiction?" "Artificial?" What parts of the law aren't?

Um.

Here's another. So back in 2004, I published my first book, through a publishing house. It eventually went out of print, but demand remained, and used copies were being sold at increasing prices. The publisher still had the rights, and had no interest in doing another print run, much less the completely overhauled second edition I favored. I eventually convinced them to sell an ebook version, which was pirated almost immediately. The ebook vastly improved distribution of my book, increased my audience, and contributed to new contracts with other publishers. So people 'stealing' 'my' book helped me.

You might take the publisher's side on this, and you could claim that I sold my rights to them legitimately and it was now their call. But you can't say that these laws were beneficial to the creator, or his continued creativity. Pirating the work was.

My argument is not that piracy is generally a good thing; only that it is not universally to the detriment of the creators, and to condemn it in general for hurting the creators misses the reality of the situation.

I have no notice of the conditions imposed on the licensing of such media. How could I be fairly bound by such conditions without violating due process?

Again, I'm perfectly content with the licensing constraints on 99.9% of my media intake. Don't make that last 0.1% difficult, and I won't have to sidestep the constraints.

Oh I've paid attention...

I'd argue you made a deal with the devil to get your book published.

A bad deal: if they weren't willing to do another printing, you should have had a clause that would release the book back to you. This probably wasn't an option as I'm guessing you didn't pay for the 1st printing.

If you did it over would you bother with a print version? You could have posted it on a website in 2004 and gotten your exposure without any commitments to a publisher. I'm guessing (again) you didn't do this as there was value in the service you agreed to.

ETA: anything you publish on the internet (at least in this country) is protected by default. Unless you state that you are freely giving it to the public domain, that is. Most artists will require credit when their work is used this way.

Tell me again what control it is you lack?

You absolutely entered into a contract that later you felt remorse over. Tough titty.

Ignorance of the law is not a defense.

Are you 8 years old? Downloading 1st run movies or TV shows from a torrent is piracy.

I think you're saying contract law is artificial and shouldn't be honored. Maybe artists are too naive and should have protections from entering into agreements.

The artist must exercise control by not signing agreements he will later regret. Ahhhh yes, the offer of fame and fortune: just sign on the dotted line. This is an old theme.

I didn't, but they got paid handsomely. A substantially different deal wasn't an option anyway, not with any major publishing house here. That's the first half of what I'm saying: In capitalism, you very often don't have the practical choice of negotiating a good contract; you accept a bad contract or refrain from doing business.

The second half is this:

That is definitely a point of view. What it isn't is compatible with the claim that the current copyright system helps creators. It helps the industry they work for, often enough to their detriment: "Tough titty." Vice versa, when that industry loses part of its effective control through piracy, that is often in the creators' interest.

No. I am saying that intellectual property law is artificial and needs to be changed if it effects the opposite of what it was originally designed to do.

Which leaves us without art.

But you see how your position has now shifted. You seem to have started off by saying that intellectual property law was morally right, and that it helped creators. You're now saying it happens to be the law, and that the fact that creators get harmed by it is acceptable, or that creators might need protection from the effects of these laws.

I'm saying both: it is morally and legally right, and it helps the creator (if they choose the right publisher and negotiate a good contract). Otherwise just put it online yourself and ask for money if people like it. You still hold the copyright.

wiki

Using your model, Andy Weir would not have had a marketable property once his book was in the wild.

It's a hell of a lot more than 0.1%, but I agree with your overall point.

I was bitching at home about Disney pulling out from Netflix, and CBS only showing Discovery on their own service, and how many damn streaming services do they expect people to afford, etc. My wife pointed out that if we dropped cable, we could afford 16 streaming services at $10 a month each.

That if in the brackets might as well read 'if hell freezes over' with the current system, or more simply 'not'.

Works for most books, doesn't work for most AV products. For those, crowd funding returns us to the old system of patronage, and then copyright becomes unnecessary.

I didn't propose a model. All I said was that your preferred model can hurt creators as much as it can help them.

How is it morally right, separately from the supposed benefit to creators that I doubt?

You've mentioned moral rights and how Germany and the rest of the world treat these, and the concept of copyright as well and contrasted this with the US (and GB). I'm not sure I understand what you're talking about after taking time to read more about the two concepts.

You've expressed disdain for copyright law and singled out the US as particularly offensive. Why is this, when the US, Germany, and most of the world (including China) have agreed to the Berne Convention which defines copyright and its economic impacts? The US was late in agreeing to this: Germany signed on in 1886 and the US more than 100 years later (we were party to other copyright agreements prior to 1989). The US' reservations pertained mainly to Berne's requirement that all works are copyright by default, and not just because they were officially registered. wiki

There are specific moral rights written into code by civil law jurisdictions (i.e. France, Germany) and to a lessor extent by common law jurisdictions (i.e. GB, US). The difference is less when you consider that in civil (Napoleonic) law everything is specified in code, in advance; common law relies on precedence and leaves it up to jurisdictions to draft ordinances. Artists' moral rights may have more protection in the US depending on precedence, jurisdiction and the court. In either case these moral rights pertain to the integrity of the work, not allowing anyone but its creator to make changes but not the economic aspects. Sure this is a gross simplification, but I don't think this is what you mean by "moral rights," is it? wiki

What morals are you referencing? Christian morals? Pirate code? I'd really like to know.

Like the ring of doom we need one streaming service to rule them all. That way I can pay $9.95 a month and see everything legally.