File Swapping and the Analog Hole 271
forehead writes "Lawmeme is running an interesting piece on piracy in the digital age. It covers a number of the logical fallacies often cited by the major media companies and certain lawmakers."
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File Swapping and the Analog Hole
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I've noticed several design suggestions in your code.
The real "digital" threat (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the most prominent and recurrent arguments of the copyright interests is that "digital piracy" is far worse than "analog piracy" and thus justifies the imposition of draconian paracopyright laws, such as the DMCA and CBDTPA. I refer to this argument as the "analog fallacy." The fallacy is that analog piracy is not nearly as threatening as digital piracy because analog copies degrade with every generation while digital copies remain pristine no matter how many copies are made. While true in a strict sense, the fallacy is that most of the assumptions necessary for this argument to be true are not realistic.
But surely the real 'threat' of digital media is actually the close-to-zero marginal cost of copying the original.
With a VCR each copy is a real, physical, medium. With digital everything is, well, virtual.
There are different responses to this - in software, free software is a response. Free software advocates accept that digital 'objects' can and will be copied, so build that in.
I'm not convinced that model works for music and movies though.
Free software is built on a pre-existing cultural norm - ie hacking - that doesn't exist for these other media.
Furthermore, no government contracts (the States), or direct support (elsewhere) is available to create the movie-making equivalent of MIT's AI lab.
The real cost of swapping movies (Score:2, Interesting)
Pirate vids et al (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Digital is different. (Score:4, Interesting)
The fact is, digital pirating is likely just as difficult, just as widespread, and just as damaging as analog pirating. Actually, many cam rips (when someone sits in a theater with a camera and records the whole movie) are analog to begin with, then later converted to a digital format, and additionally put through some lossy compression schemes to bring it down below 700Mb to be put up on servers.
"It's much more of a danger to the Music Industry, and they have a right to protect themselves."
Actually, this article is about the Movie Industry, not music, I see you didn't take time to read it. And yes, they have the right to protect themselves, but suing KaZaA, Morpheus, iMesh, Napster, and so on for allowing this to take place is like suing UPS for allowing people to send drugs illegally through the mail. The fact is, they SHOULDN'T know what's inside the files that are being swapped, just as much as UPS shouldn't know what's inside a package they deliver.
And, forcing companies to create hardware that won't allow you to make illegal copies is stupid, too. That's like making Xerox put something in their copiers that won't allow people to make photocopies of of pages out of copyrighted books without permission (which is illegal, too). How does a DVD player know that the DVD you're playing in it is being copied to another DVD, and how does the DVD burner (in the case of copying DVD's) tell that the incoming signal is copyrighted material, not the owner's home movie of his son building a sandcastle?
The fact is, if something is being done illegally, the MPAA needs to go for the people who are committing a crime using these devices, not the people who make the devices.
Re:The real "digital" threat (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe it should.
What is hacking? Eric S Raymond has an interesting definition [tuxedo.org], but I don't think that's what you mean. I think you're talking about the "sharing code" aspect of free and open-source software; this is the sense in which RMS was referred to as "The Last Hacker"
Slashdot has had other stories of people sharing things other than software -- stories, music, etc (note that I am not speaking of Napsteresque file swapping, but of artists who choose to make their work available). Perhaps I am an optimist, since I know of no scientific evidence of this, but I believe that sharing and helping one another are things that people do naturally. Isn't that what society is about? Isn't society all about individuals and small groups mingling together to improve the quality of life for those people? There are different lines of thought regarding internal structure and philosophy which are beyond this discussion, but I have difficulty imagining anyone other than a hard-core collectivist disagreeing with me.
I've had arguments with aquaintances about this. They say (I kid you not) that a libertarian philosophy will never work because almost all people are evil and greedy, that the government must step in and do something (it's interesting that they disagree about what exactly the goverment must do - a liberal, by which I mean a specific liberal and not liberals in general, says that we must redistribute the wealth in the US, and a conservative says that we need a strong military to defend the country, but I disgress). That's not the world I live in. The existance of NGOs and non-profit organizations proves that people will rally behind the causes they believe in, be it making free software [fsf.org], helping people [redcross.org], or stopping torture [amnesty.org]. It's not a world in which private colleges and universities thrive on grants and donations well out of proportion to their government-funded counterparts. In the real world, people actually do show compassion; while there are certainly heartless people in the world, there are not as many as those projecting friends of mine would have you believe.
What's this got to do with the current topic? If people are willing to share physical property, intellectual property should be even less of a leap. It is therefore a shame that the greedy few, the MPAA, the RIAA, the BSA, and their kin, are placed as an example of what is considered normal. Although it has been bought by an RIAA member, plenty of artists still have their music on MP3.com gratis. A precious few even have music which is libre [mp3s.com].
Sharing is everywhere. You just have to know where to look.
Re:The Effect of Piracy - Future Speculation (Score:2, Interesting)
There's obviously a demand for "video on demand"--what's there's not a demand for is "pay every time you watch the video you bought," which is what the industry wants to sell.
So they buy legislation in an attempt to cram it down our throats. Ultimately, we all lose.
Re:The Effect of Piracy - Future Speculation (Score:2, Interesting)
If you want to talk TV shows...
The current model is based off of a certain number of episodes per year, shown a week apart. Half the year gets reruns so people can catch up.
There is the problem -- people no longer need half-a-year to catch up. They can get the episodes they missed by downloading them. If the industry wants to compete, then do it with convenience.
Make a central location (i.e.- getSouthPark.com) that people can go to and d/l an episode for $5 or so. High-speed servers that make your P2P look like shit. Don't have to hunt, don't have to worry you're getting inferior VHS to DivX after-the-dog-chewed-the-tape copies, don't have to wait. Hell, $5 for ones with the commercials or $7.50 sans ads.
Lots of people would jump on that. Add a subscription service for a show -- get all the episodes sent directly to your TiVo for $50 a season. Sort of like "League Pass" with the sports.
The problem is the model is changing and the industry execs don't want to change with it. They are comfortable.
take a trip to china man (Score:1, Interesting)
Do you think there would be a market for (example) pirated MS Office in Beijing if it sold for a more reasonable $75 per individual license.
And while on the subject, when are the morons who handle the pricing and sales structure for all these software programs (I'm thinking adobe here) going to realize that "hey, guess what, you don't stand a chance in hell of EVER being able to track indivudual user privacy!"
The smarter path (and the one MS first adopted to get where they are) is to give the damned sofwtare away to individual users (who you can't stop anyway) and conentrate on cracking down on licensing corporate users. Its a hell of a lot easier to go into an office and say "100 seat/installs, you owe use $$$$" than breaking down mr. and mrs. smiths door to see what Jimmy installed onthe family machine.
I'd really like to see the figures on Adobe's percentage return from individual (non-corporate/business) users... I'd bet its under 5%.
-rt
Re:what the hell is the loss? (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem is that the companies realize this, and instead of trying to bring down the prices to increase the convenience issue they're attacking the "convenience" part and trying to decrease the convenience of downloading music. They're also allowing it to carry over to other areas such as CD burning, broadband, etc.
It's like the whole damned prostitution thing. Instead of making it easier [like Nevada--regulating the prostitution] they crack down on it and push it further underground to make it even less convenient.
The more we bring it to their notice the further they'll push us.
In my opinion, we should band together and remain silent about the aspects of filesharing already deemed illegal, and instead raise hell in a UNIFIED VOICE about the aspects of our lives that are in danger of being crippled. Stop the cry to arms about "I can steal music if I want to." Instead yell out at the top of your lungs that you've genuine concerns about the rights which our government is preparing to deny us.
"Dear Senator:", we should write. "I do not support any legislation which will take away our right to innovate and advance the human race. I do not believe that this is in the best interest of any of us, nor do I believe that it furthers the interests of the copyright holders."
Doesn't that speak a lot louder than immature whinings about how we won't buy the darned CD in the first place?
-Sara
They Don't Care (Score:3, Interesting)
The record companies don't care about me, you and john down the street downloading songs off of Napster/AudioGalaxy/Kazza/Whatever. The songs we download and don't pay for only make up the smallest percentage of the companies revenues. Even then, most of us (well I know I do) still go out and buy the damn CD. I believe what the record companies are really scared of is losing THE ARTISTS.
Here in Australia, if an artist is signed to a record company, and they produce a top album, for all their hard work they receive less than $2 per copy sold. Each CD retails for $30+ each. Of this $30, the record company, the distributor, the retailer and even worse, the government take their share. This leaves the artists with very little. In this brave new world, the artists will not need any of these people. They will be able to go into a studio, hand over their $$, record an album and distribute it online, all without the need of some giant company threatening them with contracts, intelectual property etc. Even if they sold online copies for $5 each, and every second person gave it to a mate for free, they still make more money than they did under the record company reign of terror.
The record companies have realised this, but they can't go to the press and tell the public 'Stop Napster, cause it will send us broke, and you will be able to buy albums for $5 each'. The public wouldn't care less for their plight. So, they make up these figures on how much it is costing them, and how piracy is the reason you pay so much for music.
This, I see the same with the large movie distributors like Fox. They aren't concerned with us pirating Star Wars or Spiderman.. We will all still want to go see it in the cinema with the sound, the screen and the atmosphere. They just use this excuse to cover the fact that soon, people will be able to make and distribute movies without them.
What can I say? I love a good theory.
A/./
Article misses a fundamental point (Score:1, Interesting)
On any decent stereo, a person with reasonably good hearing can tell the difference between a "pristine" original (ripped from a CD) and an MP3 of that same piece encoded at the standard 128kbps, even using the very best encoder (e.g. Fraunhofer reference coder or a recent version of LAME). Personally, I can (and have) successfully ABX 128kbps stuff better than 90% of the time, and my ears are pretty average.
And yet MP3s, which are somewhat (or considerably) degraded from the original, have become is, uh, rather popular and widespread. The point is that many people will be satisfied with a first-generation copy as long as the degradation (due to conversion to analog, lossy compression, etc.) is not too obnoxious.
And therein lies the fundamental point about the "analog hole." So long as content is eventually reduced to analog form (as it has to be, for a human being to watch or listen), one can always record it (sound card with analog in plus an A/D converter; camcorder in a theater) and make a reasonably good digital version of that recording. From that point on, the recording in question can be spread all around the world, regardless of how well protected the "pristine master" was.
And unless someone comes up with a watermarking technology that can reliably survive an arbitrary analog-to-digital encoding (a few have been claimed, but I've seen nothing conclusive in the literature), like a camcorder pointed at a movie screen, or a microphone in front of a set of speakers, even "certified" recording devices (CBDTPA-style) will still record this stuff.
None of these insane laws will, or can, shore up this "hole." They can, however, do a great deal of damage to the technology industry which would be tasked with complying with them.
Re:The Effect of Piracy - Future Speculation (Score:2, Interesting)
That is one of the problems, and it's a big one, but it's not the only one...
Another problem is that what's currently called "ecommerce" (credit cards are a 1950s-era system, and they were not designed for the internet) takes far too large of a bite out of a $5 payment (which doesn't settle for sure for over a month, even with the big-bite). This bite is especially hard on "little-guys" (assuming they can even GET a merchant account, they'll pay more & be treated worse).
I sell something that can help little guys get around the getting-paid bottleneck simply, and with a far-smaller bite taken out of the payment. The big guys, whose generals are busily fighting the previous war, don't want to think about it yet, of course...
JMR
(My opinions, not any employer's)