MMAF.NET DEBATE: Should we replace Copyright with Copyleft? (free sharing)

[don king]

Copyright laws as they stand need to be overhauled severely

They are a relic of an extinct paradigm. But the ones whom they benefit have all the power in our society.

[Spectre]

Copyright laws as they stand need to be overhauled severely, so the theoretical "copyleft" would be a move in the right direction.

Definitely. Technological revolutions quickly transform the very fabric of our economies, and as such, our lives and interaction with each other. Law is sometimes slow to catch-up, and when that happens you have massive movements towards civil disobedience and social revolution.

Piracy is rampant, not because people are all thieves, but because the idea that file-sharing is stealing, is completely alien to the masses. It's about as ludicrous as saying that personal property ought be considered stealing from the King. That's another idea that was once taken seriously, before humanity left it behind.

So now we stand at a point in human history where every bit of information that can be digitized and uploaded, whether it be songs, books, movies, pictures, software, any of it- can now be accessed by anyone, anywhere, and instantly.

On the one hand, we have all that untapped human potential. On the other, we have the outdated edicts of ever more irrelevant and reactionary industry elites. One of these must give. The choice is obvious.

[Spectre]

[LordZardoz]

Copyleft is already a thing and does not require laws to be put to use (consider the GPL type licenses). Replacing Copyleft with Copyright would only work in a communist society. The big problem is how you would financially compensate the people who created the content? If you can give a realistic answer to that, then the notion is worth considering.

One way to look at is if your product is so popular that it is being pirated then more than likely you have made millions off it. It doesn't make it right to pirate but if your product is **** then nobody buys or pirate's it , kind of a bit of free advertising in exchange for having your product pirated. Look what piracy has done for DTV and Dish, both were and one is still heavily pirated and subscriber enrollment continues at a rapid pace. Some by natural growth and some by increased security making piracy more difficult.

The idea that 'the creators are already rich' does not carry as much truth as you might think.

Piracy is not a terrible threat to something like games in the 'Assassins Creed' series or a movie like The Avengers. Piracy probably put something like Assasins Creed at making 40 million instead of 60 million; A noticeable dent but the game still made an absurd amount of profit. But Piracy will absolutely murder the hell out of any product that is a legitimate 7 / 10 level of quality. Think of games like Saints Row or a movies like Gangster Squad; Not terrible, but not great. If a movie would break evan or post a modest profit without piracy, then piracy turns the entire endeavour into a money loser.

Some people are cheap bastards who will pirate any damn thing they can because fuxk spending money. But most people pirate things that they are not sure are worth the value. If you pirate a movie that is worth watching exactly once, I somehow doubt your going to decide to pay for it after you watched it.

Copyright laws and their enforcement are broken, and the laws that govern copyright are in practical terms unenforcable. **** needs to be fixed, and the content providers need to rethink what the hell a reasonable cost is. But banning copyright mechanisms entirely is not the answer.

END COMMUNICATION

[Spectre]

Replacing Copyleft with Copyright would only work in a communist society.

Unless you substantiate that, it's an incredibly dumb comment. It's also the second time one of you anti-filesharers has had to redbait in this thread. *Yawn* Learn some new tricks.

The big problem is how you would financially compensate the people who created the content? If you can give a realistic answer to that, then the notion is worth considering.

A few responses:

1) Most people who create content get no compensation. Corporate control and abuse of copyright has created a system in which only a few artists get rich, while others stay in perpetual debt. So even IF copyleft doesn't result in an abundance of new compensation, that's not a harm that's unique to this proposition, and is certainly worse under the status quo.

2) You could have public or crowdsourced funding for artists.

3) People frequently purchase content they like after they've downloaded it.

4) Sites such as youtube that can pay based on a number of hits model.

5) Art by commission.

6) The tremendous exposure of file-shared material will make other forms of it profitable to the artist (such as concerts, big screen showings, hard copy books, etc). Currently, these are avenues cut off by corporate 360 deals.

7) Direct sale by the artist for a reasonable price. Louis C.K. did this and it was a huge success.

And these are just a few ideas. All of them better than the oppression of copyright combined with corporate exploitation.

But most people pirate things that they are not sure are worth the value.

So most people pirate things they weren't initially going to buy anyway? You just knifed your own argument for lost revenues. Try harder.

[Spectre]

Also of note, it's not just about the relative values of copyright v. copyleft. It's also about the illegitimate and abusive costs of maintaining the status quo. Copyright requires an intrusive police state to enforce it, so the burden of proof falls on the reactionary authoritarians that back it.

Consider:

* Anti-filesharing laws destroy due process! Due to the nature of the internet, websites can't simply be told to cease and desist, they have to be taken down entirely, which is how most of this enforcement takes place. See for instance the megaupload scandal. This means that, without proper due process of law, trial, and conviction, people are already being punished with loss of property and state police power. Between sacrificing basic due process rights in place from the Magna Carta, and sacrificing the monopoly of Hollywood, I'd rather sacrifice Hollywood.

* These same laws destroy privacy! In order to enforce and deter, the state needs to employ sophisticated methods for tracking online movements, the online stream of data, and for matching up your personal information with your IP address. That's a complete violation of privacy.

* These laws violate your natural right to copy! The right to copy far predates the "rights" of intellectual property. To threaten to put someone in jail for the simple act of copying what they see, and sharing it with others, should bring with it a heavy burden.

Or in otherwords: Even if file-sharing is bad, punishing someone for file-sharing is worse! The punishment does NOT fit the crime!

For all these reasons, oppose copyright, support copyleft.

[Spectre]

For my capitalist brahs: Argument from market efficiency

Opponents of file-sharing seem to be employing a crude version of the Luddite fallacy. Basically the argument goes "you can't have file-sharing because that will hurt X industry". Translated into economic terms, it basically means that file-sharing will, if their claims are correct, free a certain amount of capital that would otherwise go to things such as record labels. As a result, they claim this results in a loss of employment, and a loss of goods that are otherwise beneficial to society.

Both of these claims are false. Recognize that excess capital doesn't just lay around doing nothing, especially when you consider that movie-goers have a high marginal propensity to consume. If it's true that with copyleft, we'll now spend less on things like movies and music, then it stands to reason that we can and will spend more on other things, boosting demand in other fields, and thus creating goods and employment there.

In addition, considering how most artists are already making very little if anything at all, then it stands to reason that file-sharing will create not just the same amount of goods, but vastly more.

Think back to the original Luddites. It was thought that labor saving technology in factories would lead to mass unemployment. In fact, the opposite was true. The new excess of capital/decrease in price, allowed more people to consume, and more money to be invested elsewhere, thus growing not only the size of the textile industry, but of the economy as a whole. Similarly, a dollar taken from Universal studies and given to a website such as Google, is not a tragedy.

Trust the market to solve here. Supply will chase demand. People will always want nice movies, thus there will always be people willing to provide it, just as the advent of sewing machines didn't destroy the availability of high quality hand made garments. Onward to the future and a proper equilibrium provided by the invisible hand!