Pew Study: File Traders Don't Care About Copyright 494
An anonymous reader writes "A recent poll by the Pew Internet and American Life Project focused on that portion of the file trading community that is over 18. The major finding is that two-thirds of all file traders in this age bracket are not concerned about violating copyright laws. This remained consistant even when they split up the respondents by sex, income, and race."
This shows the RIAA is done economically (Score:5, Interesting)
My question is, the media like to talk about how the average person doesn't know what file sharing is and what the issues at stake are, but if there are 60 million people doing it then how can that possibly be true? If one fifth of the population of your country does anything on a regular basis, then how can you seriously claim that they don't understand what that activity is? It seems like so many other ridiculous claims ginned up by journalists like that disgraced NYTimes reporter, and repeated unthinkingly by the rest of the news crowd.
OK, so if that's bunk, and those 60 million people do understand what is at stake with file-sharing, then why aren't they making themselves heard in the government? Why isn't that anger translating politically? My theory is there is no membership organization they can focus their voice through. If we had something like the AARP or NRA for online freedoms, my bet is you'd start seeing politicians learning to dance to our tune in an awful hurry. (and no, the EFF is not that organization. they do great work, but a membership organization they are not).
Methodology questions (Score:4, Interesting)
Quoted from the report:
Kinda half-serious, half-joking, but I wonder if those that participated in this survey should also be categorized as folks that are willing to submit to phone surveys. Is that something that's worth considering?
And am I reading the above correctly that of the 2,515 folks they called, only 32.7 percent actually responded? That's a little over 820 individuals. Is a survey successful if only 32% responded? Inquiring minds and all that.
Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if they did a similar survey among folks that use computer software in the workforce and found that most people don't comprehend that software itself is copyrighted. I still meet plenty of folks that pirate alot of software, with rather innocent looks on their faces when told that they're not supposed to do that. I'm not talking about lone computer users... I'm talking about the head of a business that oversees a few dozen machines and they're all running Word with pirated numbers, etc.
Re:Sweet (Score:3, Interesting)
I know you were joking, but there is an important distiction here: citing a small part of M-W to explain something is fair use, but distributing it as a whole without a licence is a copyright violation.
Too simplistic, I want to know WHY don't they care (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, do people not care because they don't even think about it, because they think they won't get caught, or because they think a monopoly is abusing both copyright law and the campaign finance system? Some of the above ? None of the above ?
My only reaction to the study in its current form is like "well duh-uh !!!".
And yet (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:No kidding, really? (Score:5, Interesting)
In other news, I had an mp3, named after a particular Metallica song, of my voice saying to not buy, purchase or download anything Metallica related. I'd rather just see those meatheads not sell another album or concert ticket. Now, that's been downloaded hundreds of times.
It's no real mystery what people do with P2P applications.
Re:No kidding, really? (Score:2, Interesting)
Society's laws grow from its mores (Score:5, Interesting)
They're like the air on a hot summer day. We swim in an ocean of ideas - our own indistinguishable from those around us. We inhale and osmose and exclaim and excrete all as natural instinctive intellectual processes. We are not built to recognize such artificial distinctions as "the owner of a song" (or a sentence, or an idea) because they are simply unnatural. This ownership must be violated at every instant - as you sing in the shower, as you share a rumor, as a teacher teaches or a librarian lends you our richest treasures. Calling it "intellectual property" is itself propaganda - it is the most shocking of bad metaphors in recent times.
Copyright is the barest of fictions, intended to allow artists to live, not Michael Eisner to summer in Tenerife. It does make for some interesting, even good, results, in the way they were originally practiced (as intended by the folks who founded our nation, for instance) - where for a few (like seven!) years there were some artifical means for an artist to thrive from her work, that didn't involve the help of wealthy patrons (which was how the old world used to do it).
But I think if you asked Washington he would be very surprised at the idea of copyright taken precedence over sharing - though of course he and his colleagues would have shaken their heads at the complexity of "mass-scale distributed sharing."
They would certainly rage at and mock the outrageous "extend every time mickey mouse is in danger" new time limits (one of the more transpareant examples of the subversion of democracy by a wealthy cartel). And if informed of the new punishments for violators, or pre-punishment of potential violators, or direct trust "taxes" on things which might be used to violate... they would pick up their arms and fight.
You think it's melodramatic to say so, but America is a nation of ideas, of rational supremacy, and the economic achievement that can only come from intellectual liberty. The new rules that Disney and Microsoft have mutated intellectual property with over the last decade choke off that liberty in the most violent way, by destroying the commons of ideas, erasing the essential quality of trust in our democracy, and violating the supremacy of free speech and free expression that made our country wealthy, successful in affairs of state, and also a fun place to live.
And all this, not for some grave end - to fight terrorism or feed the hungry - but only so a publisher can increase their profit margins.
Not even the politicians would countenance it, ordinarily. It's bad for almost everyone but a select few, and it is even bad for them - content creators need the commons more than anyone. But politicians have a unique respect for those who control the media...
Remember what copyright was originally intended to do. Consider the new tools we have - there are better ways now than what we did in the past, and anything is better than what the cartel wants.
Re:Sweet (plus a little of a rant) (Score:5, Interesting)
No, Congress is supposed to set the limits that best serve the public, i.e. what the PEOPLE want. And yes, it does need to be changed. You got the millions of dollars needed to lobby Congress? Neither do I. I do have the power to write to my reps incessantly to make my point heard. (In fact, I think that's what I'll do today...write to my new reps [just moved])
BTW, "life + 90 years" is NOT reasonable. The copyright law needs to revert back to the 14-year limit, with certain circumstances making that time frams SHORTER. To use everybody's favorite OS as an example, if I want to run Win95 for some reason and MS doesn't sell it anymore, than I should be free as the wind to make as many copies as I desire. It's not as if I'm taking away from their revenue stream, they weren't going to sell it to me anyway. (No jokes about forced upgrade paths, please.)
The same holds for music, books, movies, whatever. If I want a copy of a book or CD that the original copyright holder/publisher/etc. doesn't make available, then I should be free to make my own copy as I see fit, even if has been less than 14 years since the copyright took effect.
"Intellectual Property" my ass.
What People do with P2P Applications (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Provide free advertising for the RIAA, MPAA and proprietary software
2) Make it harder for independent musicians, independent filmmakers, and free software to be seen through all the noise of the more well-known, possibly inferior products
3) Prove that the RIAA, MPAA and proprietary software vendors are relevant by demonstrating that their marketing works even if their products are inferior
4) Giving the RIAA, MPAA and proprietary software vendors a leg to stand on when they go to congress to complain about illegal file sharing on P2P networks
Sharing content that the RIAA, MPAA and proprietary software vendors own the copyrights to doesn't help anybody's cause except the RIAA's, MPAA's and proprietary software vendors'. Do you want to be counterproductive?
Re:WHAT GOES AROUND COMES.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Copyright is largely an artificial construct, unlike theft (which certain people like to erroneously and politically link it to.) It's never really existed in any significant portion of our evolution, so (I'd say) it's not really considered a real thing: it's an artificially imposed prohibition.
If the same principle was applied to food, or furniture, with everyone having their own little Star Trek replicators, people wouldn't respect it then, either.
Maybe it means: since everyone has their own printing-press, making a significant living from the prohibition of duplication of a work, is nolonger feasible or realistic? Like any number of other professions (starving (visual) artists languishing in obscurity and poverty, anyone?)
I don't think it's so much about price (though it's always a factor) as people's psychology: copyright doesn't really make sense in a world where things are easily and cheaply copyable; where the means of production and dissemination is in the hands of everyone.
Is that noise I hear the fingernails of the copyright cartels screeching down the cliff-face of a paradigm shift?
Re:Mensa? but you made a mistake... (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't believe Mensa membership gets you discounts at the grocery store, you don't earn points towards frequent flyer programs, you can't get free upgrades on your hotel or car rental, so honestly, what is the point? You can get credit card offers and insurance anywhere.
If you are a
- Your local chapter of 2600
- Slashdot meet-ups
- Toastmasters
- Association of Computing Machinery
- IEEE
- A user group for Linux or a retired OS, proprietary server software, programming language, etc.
If you are looking for that elite publication, some of the groups mentioned above have a more focused publication, as opposed to something across the board. Here are some of my "intelligentsia publication picks:"- IEEE Spectrum
- Bohemian Club Library Notes
- Science News
- Policy Review
- any museum quarterly/newsletter
- Cinema Journal
What this all boils down to is: none of the intelligent elite crowd waste their time pirating the copyrighted material of their circles. Seriously, when was the last time a film director ran a site containing screenplays or what-not of a rival director he/she didn't like? How often do you see nuclear physicists ripping each other's ideas off? Their papers are about 30% acknowledgements/references as it is. Most truly innovative computer software is either government funded and top secret, or it is public domain and funded any number of ways.I see the RIAA as the champion of those who make their money off of cultural information. Musicians, actors, etc. The RIAA is trying to keep the poor from having the cultural enrichment that they think is entitled to them. Think about it, people are stealing copies of Harry Potter, not Jules Verne, JRR Tolkien, or Joseph Conrad.
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
Most games I buy nowdays, I never touch the CD...I pay the cash, download an ISO, install the crack, and usually get better performance in the bargain.
And the companies wonder why they're losing money.
It's not I don't care. It's I don't understand! (Score:5, Interesting)
The average person doesn't understand what a copyright is. It's too abstract. A CD or a book is something they can physically hold. To them they think they own the book not a "COPY" of the book. Stealing a book is easy to understand and visualize. Stealing potential profits that one has a limited right (sic) to is something that is harder for people to understand or care about.
If they can't see and touch it they don't care. Many people bitch and moan about ATM fees because they can see that $2 charge taken away from them right at the time of withdrawal. Yet they don't realize that the amount of taxes a person has withheld on a paycheck is really double. They don't see so they don't understand it or they don't care.
They don't understand the difference between a constitutionally granted right and a constitutionally protected right. Copyrights are granted rights. Free speech and the right to bear arms are protected rights.
Despite the Slashdot wish that this was a grand showing of defiance against the evil corporations most people don't understand about that and don't care.
Wonderful Idea (Score:2, Interesting)
Based on your argument that copyright is largely an artificial construct and people don't really buy into the who idea of paying for things that are cheaply copiable, then no one should have a problem with the following.
When O'Reilly publishes a new book, I should buy it, scan in the pages into an electronic format and put it on the internet for the whole world to copy. After all, "copyright doesn't make sense in a world where things are easily and cheaply copiable", and all I did was easily and cheaply copy a book.
O'Reilly is abusing people with the high costs of his books. For example, "Programming Perl" is $49.95. This is far more that the cost of the paper to publish this book, so there is obviously some sort of collusion to artificially keep the costs of books so high. I think a valid form of protest is to boycott buying books.
Maybe if we are lucky, then OReilly will go out of business since his business model is selling copyrighted materials at artificially high prices, and it seems like everyone is against that.
Of course, this screws people like Larry Wahl who make money selling copyrighted materials. One of the common arguments I've seen is that in this world of easy duplication, that musicians should make their money touring and not selling CDs/Records, then Larry should make his money touring giving speaches and not get any money selling his books.
This could be bad since Larry might not get much money and may not be able to continue Perl development. But if Perl dies and Larry goes bankrupt, then it will be sad, but too bad for him since he hopped into bed with the man and proffiteered by selling copyrighted materials.
If all works perfectly, OReilly goes out of business, Larry Wahl goes bankrupt and Perl dies. But such is the consequence of people rejecting copyrights that don't make sense any more.
Is this really the future that everyone wants?
Re:WHAT GOES AROUND COMES.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Same goes for software and DVDs. DVDs are now the default technology, yet they are higher than tapes. Instead, tapes should be lower, and DVDs should be the same price. Software is at an all-time high, because they all sell to business.
Why spend $600 on Office, when you can pirate it, or (if you want to stay legal) pay $0 for OpenOffice? Why do games cost $50? If I play a game at the arcade 100 times, I'd spend those $50, but most games aren't even worth playing 100 times like that. Then people are sick of spending MORE money on required expansion packs and monthly fees for MMOs. (Why is Star Wars Galaxies $15/mo? Inflation, or just trying to suck up as much money as you can get?)
The current business model demands that prices eventually go down as they age. Web hosting has gone down; the price of a watch has gone down; bikes have gone down. And they have all had improvements to their former models. However, the case seems to be the opposite for the media industry. So, yes, people are pissed off, and they really don't care about copyrights anymore.
Re:Sweet (plus a little of a rant) (Score:4, Interesting)
Yup. You should write your reps if you feel that your are not being sufficiently represented. Unless they know what the people want, they can't do it.
Why do they NEED to be changed?
BTW, "life + 90 years" is NOT reasonable. The copyright law needs to revert back to the 14-year limit,
The same holds for music, books, movies, whatever.
I disagree. I like the life + 90, and I think it is very reasonable. Perhaps the post-life extent could be shorter, but 14 years... Tell your favorite author what you want to do to their work -- most authors don't get paid as well as musicians and other artists...
Anyway, as for your Win95 example, you are hurting their business - Win95 is the ancestor of Windows XP, they would really like you to buy XP -- but if you can get Win95 for free... then they have to compete with themselves, and while they did attempt to make improvements over previous versions, free is a hard price point to beat, especially when many applications will run on either OS.
Re:We need another poll (Score:1, Interesting)
4
5
Copyright is not a Constitutional right (Score:5, Interesting)
Copyright could be abolished tomorrow if you could just get the votes in Congress required to pass a bill to repeal it. Sure, Dubya might veto it, but if you can get a two thirds majority in Congress, you can override a veto.
If you don't think this can happen, consider that more Americans are trading files today than voted for George Bush. Yes, many if not most file traders are under eighteen, but political upheavals usually take time. The sort of time that would allow most of today's youthful peer-to-peer users to come of age.
My new piece Change the Law [goingware.com] explains this in more detail. It recommends several specific steps you can take to repeal copyright. The recommendations I give are:
- Speak Out
- Vote
- Write to Your Elected Representatives
- Donate Money to Political Campaigns
- Support Campaign Finance Reform
- Join the Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Practice Civil Disobedience
If you're under eighteen, you can do all of those things but vote. And your right to vote will come in time. The RIAA is not going to go away.Finally, Should Copyright Even Exist? [goingware.com] considers the question of whether the ability of computers to make faithful copies of digital data without significant cost so outweighs any benefit that copyright may have to society, that we would be better off if copyright were eliminated entirely.
Re:Sweet (plus a little of a rant) (Score:3, Interesting)
Prepare to see all SORTS of artists going even more starving. I'm an aspiring photojournalist. Guess what all the folks who made it tell me. If you're great, it takes 5 years to build an archive of shots that is going to be able to moderately support you and allow you to start paying off your debts. It's copyright that gives a photographer that ability. If 9 years later those images that I took go into the public domain, I will be forever working to maintain a barely-decent level of income.
If *I* make it, I get to control it until my death. Period.
If I take a photograph and post it on my web site for people to see for free, I don't want to see it end up in a commercial tomorrow. Copyright is the only thing protecting me from that.
Life + 90 years is not reasonable, I don't see why my great grandkids should profit from my work, but neither is 14 years.
Slightly Misleading Headline (Score:2, Interesting)
That's why filesharing is so popular. The average person knows, deep down inside, that even with all the lawsuits and threats that: 1. They aren't doing anything wrong, and 2. They aren't hurting anyone.
-dbc
Re:No kidding, really? (Score:5, Interesting)
The arrogance and mistreatment coming out of the recording industry, combined with the corrupt actions of the Congress, makes copyrights a game of the elite. Hence, I have as little respect for it as I would have for some fop strutting around America with some European royal title.
Anyway, grabbing a song off of a site, board or p2p user is hardly a violation of copyright, since (waaaait for it, this is important) I claim fair use. For almost all of the songs I've grabbed, I eventually buy the disc. This is similar to when I zip down my local highway at 70mph, right past the sign that says "SPEED LIMIT 60". I don't care about the technical aspects of law-breaking
If the entertainment industry wants me to tone back my claim of fair use, then they should really clean up their act. Taking an MP3 song from some Russian site primarily hurts the industry, not the artists (since in practice I can't hurt the artists more than the industry is doing right now). But I've been hurting the industry for years
(But don't think that that method itself is not under threat. I know people who run used book stores, and every so often the book industry makes noises about regulating and therefore taxing them on the sales of their books. I'm sure the used CD industry has been similarly threatened for the same reasons
As for the Congress
Soooo
Re:Sweet (plus a little of a rant) (Score:3, Interesting)
OK, I'll grant you that. For the individual, I can see where copyright until death can be a good thing. As has been stated, what is yours is yours. When I said that in some cases the copyright epiration would come less than 14 years, I was thinking cases such as the creator's death. It's hard to hold a copyright and benefit when you're dead.
The next argument I can see is the income from a copyrighted work supporting the family after the author's passing. Ponder this for a moment: in some cases, a retired worker's pension will go to the widow/widower on the retiree's death. I can see the same principle applying to a copyright if the "until death" time limit is used. A copyright on a income-producing work can be transferred to the spouse who then holds the copyright until their death. After that, it's in the public domain.
As far as copyright held by a corporation, I stand by the 14-year term. Generally you won't see a company seriously use a work to generate income for a long period of time, as times and cultures change.
Case in point: I have a particular CD that is a copy of one that my parents have. I couldn't buy it as it was only marketed for a short period of time and was no longer available and would not be made available by the publisher. Therefore, I should be free to copy it as desired. Now, to prevent copyright "stalking," I can understand where a time frame may be desired as it would prevent people from waiting for something to go into the public domain before obtaining it. In such a case, a 14-year copyright lifetime would be appropriate.
It's a fine line between protecting the artist and benefiting the public; a fine line that in the current time has been stretched, mangled, and generally jerked about nearly at will by big corporations with the ability to buy laws.
Re:Sweet (Score:3, Interesting)
That's not the way it works in the real world. If I work my butt off at a factory for a year, I can't expect to get money from them when I quit.
If you create something and it flops, only to be successful years later - sure, it sucks, but life sucks. Get off your butt and get a job. If you make a fatal mistake in launching a product, you don't deserve to make money from it.
Why should an individual be able to cash in on a creation for their entire life? I won't be supported for the rest of my life by the company I work for at present. Why should someone be able to think up something and live off it for the rest of their life, while others have to work hard their entire life to make ends meet?
Just because you had a good idea doesn't mean that you should be able to live off it forever.
Re:Amen! (Score:3, Interesting)
but steve gerber was limited by donald the duck
"Back in the late 1970s, the Walt Disney Company threatened to sue Marvel Comics over the design of Howard the Duck, which, or so they claimed, was too similar in appearance to Donald Duck. To avoid litigation, Marvel's old management signed an incredibly stupid agreement with Disney. Under its terms, all future appearances of Howard must conform to a set of designs that Disney provided for the character. You've seen this design. It's the one from the black-and-white HTD magazine, with the ghastly swollen beak, the beady eyes, and the baggy trousers that make the duck look like a derelict. What's absolutely astonishing, though, is that the Disney agreement is worded in such a way that Marvel isn't even permitted to create a new, alternative design for the character, even if that design bears no resemblance to Donald."
donald duck debuted in 34, 40+ years later they were using ip law to throttle the creativity of others based on a passing resemblence
Mod parent down! (Score:3, Interesting)
Err, actually, we live in a republic:
Why is there always some idiot who spouts this crap!! (And get modded up no less!)
Not only do a lot of slashdot readers not live in a republic but the words republic and democracy are not incompatible with one another.
The USA has a presidency rather than a monarchy, that makes it a republic, the government is elected by the people that makes it a democracy (a representative democracy to be more precise). This is not hard to understand.
"Republic" and "democracy" are not alternatives to one another. A country can be both or neither or either one but not the other.
Iraq, pre-war, was a non-democratic republic.
The UK is a democratic monarchy.
Saudi Arabia is a non-democratic monarchy.
The USA is a democratic republic.
And Brannon & Braga will be first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Re:Huh? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah. Or trying to play some games on a tablet pc without a cd-rom. Maybe I should send an email to Microsoft to see if they can work on "convincing" developers to forego the needed CDs.
Bah. Who am I kidding? I'm just a speck of crap on Microsoft's shoe anyway, at least to them. I'll just continue with the CD cracks.
Re:What the actually title for this story should b (Score:2, Interesting)
My understanding was that the poster was attacking the notion of copyright in general, and arguing that copyright is an outdated concept. I would argue that in the case of the original constitutional law, it is not outdated, and in case of the "mangled version", it is wrong-headed in places more than it is "outdated".
He's not saying it is worthless, but he is saying that giving an author control of copyrights to a work as an incentive to create more works needs to be re-evaluated.
I think if you don't allow the author to control distribution through EULAs or copyrights, you do end up devaluing brain work.
I haven't come up with an altrernative method, but personally I would like information to spread more rapidly than it does now, with no restrictions.
Well, that's the problem. You can't have it both ways. If you have "no restrictions", how are the creators of such works compensated ?
but for useful information such as works that teach people "how to" do something, it is easy to see the benefit to the country as a whole. For instance, I come up with a new algorithm that makes not only one application more efficient, but also a slew of other applications more efficient if the knowledge of it were spread.
You're discussing patents here. This is not the same as copyrights. I was specifically discussing copyrights. In principal, I'm not opposed to the idea of patents, but unfortunately, the current patent system is horribly botched.
Where do you shop? I pay $22 on the average per CD.
amazon.com, for example. Most of the CDs I buy, excluding those where the artist is deceased, are $15-$18. I'm talking about CD prices in the US.
From my experience, many works are out of print and no one but the copyright holder has the ability to make them available, thanks to copyright laws. Yes, you can search used/specialty shops for the original, But what if you cannot find it. What if you can only find a copy of it on a file-sharing system because one of the few holders of the original media has chosen to share it? You forgot to handle that case.
That's a corner case. I believe examples like this can be used to argue for copyright reform, but I don't think it makes a very convincing case for abolishing copyright.