DRM Causes Piracy 413
igorsk recommends an essay by Eric Flint, editor at Baen Publishing and an author himself, over at Baen's online SF magazine, Baen Universe. In it Flint argues that, far from curbing piracy of copyrighted materials, DRM actually causes it. Quoting: "Electronic copyright infringement is something that can only become an 'economic epidemic' under certain conditions. Any one of the following: 1) The products they want... are hard to find, and thus valuable. 2) The products they want are high-priced, so there's a fair amount of money to be saved by stealing them. 3) The legal products come with so many added-on nuisances that the illegal version is better to begin with. Those are the three conditions that will create widespread electronic copyright infringement, especially in combination. Why? Because they're the same three general conditions that create all large-scale smuggling enterprises. And... Guess what? It's precisely those three conditions that DRM creates in the first place. So far from being an impediment to so-called 'online piracy,' it's DRM itself that keeps fueling it and driving it forward."
indeed (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you think I care this movie is now being copied by my friends?
He's got it right... (Score:5, Insightful)
I bought XIII and had to pirate it to play it in my laptop (without the CD)
I wanted to buy KT Tunstall's CD, but since I listen to my music on the computer, I had to pirate it (it's copy-protected)
My wife and I have a collection of some 200 CD's, all of which are ripped to my computer, but we haven't bought a new CD in almost a year.
There's a limit as to when we start pushing our customers too far, and they start to push back
Sounds Familiar (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Commodification (Score:4, Insightful)
If only the UK goverment realised this. (Score:3, Insightful)
Digital rights issues have been gaining increasing prominence as innovation accelerates, more and more digital media products and services come onto the market and the consumer wants to get access to digital content over different platforms. Many content providers have been embedding access and management tools to protect their rights and, for example, prevent illegal copying. We believe that they should be able to continue to protect their content in this way. However, DRM does not only act as a policeman through technical protection measures, it also enables content companies to offer the consumer unprecedented choice in terms of how they consume content, and the corresponding price they wish to pay.
It is clear though that the needs and rights of consumers must also be carefully safeguarded. It is reasonable for consumers to be informed what is actually being offered for sale, for example, and how and where the purchaser will be able to use the product, and any restrictions applied. While there is good reason to expect the market to reach a balance as these new markets develop, it is important that consumers' interests are maintained in the meantime.
Apart from the APIG (All Party Internet Group) report on DRM referred to in your petition, Digital Rights issues are an important component in other major HMG review strands on Intellectual Property, New Media and the Creative Economy. In particular, the independent Gowers Review of Intellectual Property commissioned by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, published its report on 6th December 2006 as part of the Chancellor's Pre-Budget Report. Recommendations include introducing a limited private copying exception by 2008 for format shifting for works published after the date that the law comes into effect. There should be no accompanying levies for consumers. Also making it easier for users to file notice of complaints procedures relating to Digital Rights Management tools by providing an accessible web interface on the Patent Office website by 2008 and that DTI should investigate the possibility of providing consumer guidance on DRM systems through a labelling convention without imposing unnecessary regulatory burdens.
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
Only if you use their choice of OS, their choice of browser, their choice of media player, their choice of hardware, etc.
I'm not to familiar with music, but ebooks sure don't follow this. I've often seen paper books for $60 and their electronic equivalents for $50. Only $10? I don't think so. Publishers claim that the majority of the cost of a book is printing, binding and shipping. All of those costs are gone with ebooks. Now you have server costs (much smaller than distribution costs for real books). So, it may cost slightly less, but is certainly not cheaper considering what you are giving up. Of course, you still have to be using their choice of software (OS, reader, etc), as few outfits provide unencumbered ebooks in PDF format or something.
Users expect to be able to use and move their stuff around. That is sadly not always possible. iTunes may be the exception, but I don't know not having used it personally.
Laws == Crime (Score:5, Insightful)
dvds (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nonsense (Score:3, Insightful)
Weren't you listening??? DRM protected content is much less useful than the physical equivalent. To some people it's worth nothing at all since they can't play it on their own preferred music player. So they look for content they actually use.
And while the music industry has yet to lose a sale from me because of illegal downloading, they're not producing much I want to hear these days either. Hip-Hop, and Rap Music (an oxymoron if there ever was one) are not on my playlists. The Beatles are, but they can't be bought on-line yet.
Re:Isn't that what they want? Not Quite! (Score:5, Insightful)
Not so fast here. The ads may not have ticked you off the first time you played the disc. But what about the second time? After all, nobody buys a DVD to only play once.
Re:Commodification (Score:2, Insightful)
Only on Slashdot would this kind of tripe be regarded as 'Insightful'.
To the original poster - please explain to us how you 'decommoditize' sexual organs (are yours commodities too, assuming you have some?), and who the industry-Yids are, and what you mean by Yid? ?
To those who modded it insightful, I have to wonder what possible nugget of truth you feel could be hidden in this anti-semitic rant which seems to regard all females (and particularly wives?) as commodities??
Baen Books has always gotten this: (Score:3, Insightful)
Jim Baen died last summer, but Baen Books still gives away a huge number of books in completely unencrypted, un-DRM'd formats. I think I have bought well over $100 of their buyable e-books, because I can read them on anything I want, any time I want.
Re:Sounds Familiar (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of the crime is created in response to the problem of illegality. Junkies steal to buy heroin because it's sold at vastly inflated prices by dealers, they daren't seek help for fear of dropping their mates in the s#!t, and anyway they're already criminals just for having a toot so what's a bit of thieving between friends? Tobacco is more addictive than heroin (to the extent you can compare an illegal drug with a legal one), yet smokers are generally law-abiding. Apart from the ones who are bleeding the National Health Service dry by buying tobacco abroad
Re:Sounds Familiar (Score:3, Insightful)
That's why it's OK for Americans to be addicted to cigarettes and alcohol but not cocaine or crystal meth.
Having everyone addicted to cocaine is a threat to national sovereignty.
Having them addicted to meth is a threat to profits.
The free market would have everyone buying cheap meth or homemade shine, or addicted to foreign produced coke.
As it stands now, they're buying whiskey, cigarettes and cough syrup, which is just the way those on top like it.
The war on terror, on the other hand, is easy to fix.
Keep your military and your CIA at home, and there will be no terrorism.
The terrorists are after vengence because they have been and continue to be systematically wronged. By Americans.
Well, it might be too late now. I imagine there are a lot of orphaned children who aren't going to forget what was done to them.
Yeah... come to think of it... I think you guys are fucked.
However (Score:5, Insightful)
"There are some people out there, possessed by the firm delusion that "information wants to be free"--as if bits of data had legs and went walking about on their own..."
This is a strawman, and dumb. The contention that "information wants to be free" is a catchy way of saying "the properties of digital goods are such that their natural marginal cost is zero or practically indistinguishable from zero."
Bad news for most people who would like to marginalize/otherwise dismiss the free culture argument: the economic basis for the contention that "information wants to be free" is rock solid. Scientific. To escape it you have to resort to name-calling etc., as here.
Re:Sounds Familiar (Score:3, Insightful)
Only if you count the war on cannabis as "the war on drugs." If you exclude that miscatagorized weed, you get almost exactly the purposes they say the War on Drugs is for.
If it weren't for use if illegal drugs, Richard Pryor would still be able to perform and Kurt Cobain would likely still be alive.
Re:Sounds Familiar (Score:4, Insightful)
(what percentage of people interact with 'the war on terror' anywhere else?)
It all depends on what value you assign to the lives of the various other people on the planet; if you use the apparent acceptable rate of car accident deaths(~1/10000 a year in the US), we are spending way too much on anti terror measures(the death rate due to terrorism is way lower than that for US citizens, even if you include 9/11 and soldiers dying in Iraq and so forth). Basically, the free market would ignore it and move on, much to the chagrin of the dead, but to the profit of the living.
Re:If DRM causes piracy... (Score:5, Insightful)
In fact, the reason that most of the people I know didn't buy a copy of XP, and won't buy Vista, is the heavy handed DRM attached to it, which requires you to get permission from Microsoft to run your computer after 5 hardware changes. I can make 5 hardware changes in 5 minutes when I'm testing hardware. There is no way that I am going to spend half the night on the phone calling Microsoft. If I'm having a problem with hardware, I don't need the additional aggravation. I have a legit copy on my laptop--which never changes hardware--but I'll never install one on my desktop machine.
Re:Laws == Crime (Score:3, Insightful)
I guarantee you that they would not go unpunished. The punishment in an anarchistic society could even be rather extreme. I'd kill you, and your entire family. Who would stop me?
Re:However (Score:5, Insightful)
Moreover, there is an information-theory perspective as well, involving the inherent nonconservative nature of information in its most basic forms. Digitization brings "information" closer to that basic form, by detaching it more thoroughly from physical media (books, tapes, etc.) and allows its basic attributes to come forward.
There's nothing you can do to put that genie back in the bottle.
Re:However (Score:2, Insightful)
The contention that information wants to be free is a catchy way of ignoring that "the properties of digital goods are such that their natural startup cost is non-zero for any information which is concise, categorized, and subject to quality assurance/quality control."
You can argue about marginal costs of reproduction until the end of time, but the information that people want to acquire is scarce, costly (in the sense that finite human labor is a necessary element of its creation and rendering into a useful form), and most importantly, at least in modern economies, rivalrous. Vast stores of old information are discarded in favor of "superior" new information, at least in part because consumption of information still entails an opportunity cost to the consumer.
To those who selectively quote the marginal cost pricing aspect of economics that they learned in their survey course, I suggest that you review the vast body of literature discussing the so-called "hot news doctrine" in law and economics. You could start here [umd.edu].
No (Score:3, Insightful)
The whole [some factor] "causes" [some behavior] is simply an assault on free will and an invitation to elite social engineers to take away more freedom from people.
People behave the way they want to.
(Example: Did videogames "cause" the Columbine massacre, or did some kids decide to massacre some people?)
Re:Sixth column of a series (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sounds Familiar (Score:2, Insightful)
Cocaine is illegal because it is ridiculously addictive and can immediately cause heart attacks (much worse than nicotine, which is ridiculously addictive but mildly cancer-causing). There's no grand conspiracy to keep you addicted to "local" drugs but not "foreign" ones.
Personally I believe that you should be able to do whatever you want in your own home, but the FDA thinks otherwise.
There will always be piracy (Score:2, Insightful)
No matter how low you price a movie or CD, it will always be too expensive for somebody. You can save money on anything by stealing it.
There are two reasons why people pirate media: 1) It's easy. 2) It's free. 3) There are no repercussions (for the vast majority of people who do it). That's it, that's all. It's not a big secret. People want stuff for free. If people could get away with copying TV's or cars for the cost of materials, most would do that also, regardless of legality.
DRM doesn't promote piracy. Piracy was around before computers. Piracy was prevalent before there was any sort of DRM on CD's (and there still isn't DRM on most CD's). The reason DRM sucks is because it's a huge pain in the ass and does absolutely nothing to prevent large scale piracy. That's reason enough to dislike it without making shit up about how it causes piracy. Piracy has been around much longer than DRM.
It's a shame this part of the article was quoted, because it's really his weakest point. The rest of his article basically says, "Selling unrestricted, open media creates more revenue than piracy takes away" which is a much stronger argument.
Re:However (Score:5, Insightful)
it takes energy to set it in a meaningful pattern that enables all those free copies.
And that energy, when amortized over 6,578,462,507 [census.gov] people approaches zero, a fact that copyright fanatics like to ignore.
With copyright law as it currently stands the cost of pretty much any mass market information is orders of magnitude higher than the cost of production. In other words, highly inefficient production with massive losses in marketing, controlling distribution and policing.
I don't know what the complete answer is but I do know that the people who claim that copyright law as it is currently implemented is the only possible way information creators can benefit are fanatics, very likely entrenched interests and middlemen who know full well that they add no value. Parasites in other words.
Intellectual property law is a pure product of the mind and can be anything that we want it to be. Even something as simple as discussing what the correct copyright period should be, right down to zero, should be discussed and scientifically justified rather than the hand waving like "nobody will create without copyright" (that's nonsense) or "copyright is the only option" (that's also nonsense).
---
Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Re:Sounds Familiar (Score:3, Insightful)
Reductionism rules! (Score:5, Insightful)
That doesn't explain why the US government has so aggressively gone after marijuana cultivation here in the US. It also doesn't explain why the extremely powerful tobacco lobby keeps losing in court battles, or how these profits are "centrally controlled."
Umm... you do know that crystal meth [wikipedia.org] is produced in the United States, right? You seem to also imply that the only reason cocaine is illegal almost everywhere [wikipedia.org] stems from the fact that coca leaves don't come from the United States. Perhaps that's right, if you assume that cocaine is a benign substance, and there's a globe-spanning conspiracy to keep this beneficial substance from citizens everywhere.
By that logic, the fact that so many Americans can't do without coffee should be serious cause for alarm. Time to crank up the Blackhawks, bring the SEALs down to Columbia, and lets take control of those coffee fields!
Is that because meth-addicted people will buy less alcohol and cigarettes?
That would be swell. I like that idea. More addiction for everyone!
Yes, because The Sinister Cabal that runs America has made it so. The tobacco lobby is totally unrelated to the fact that in many southern states, the biggest cash crop is tobacco. Voters there probably don't want to promote the interests of tobacco growers. They've been forced to do so by The Man. Likewise, the alchohol distributors have effectively maintained a monopoly by keeping foreign-supplied beer, wine, whiskey, and every other form of alchohol out of America. Oh, wait. They haven't.
Of course it is. Whenever the world is binary, the solution is obvious.
Absolutely right. It wasn't until the US pulled out of Northern Ireland that the terrorism there and in the UK stopped. The Red Brigades and the Red Army Faction were terrorizing Italy and Germany until the US military left Europe. The Basque ETA. The Pakistani groups operating in India. Abu Sayyaf. All of these groups obviously will disappear as soon as the CIA disappears and the US military ends all its foreign presence.
Again, you see through the nuance quite clearly. There are no opportunists in the world of terrorism. These are all idealogically committed individuals, ready to give their lives for higher principles. Certainly none of them are using terrorism as a vehicle to further profiteering or mere power grabs. I think we can all agree that any problems that occur anywhere in the world are the result of America's negative influence.
You're right. All of the Shia children whose parents were killed by Sunnis, and all the Sunni children whose parents
THAT IS NOT PIRACY (Score:5, Insightful)
I know what you are trying to say but you are playing right into the hands of the MPAA and RIAA and the like with these statements.
Ripping a CD you bought to put the music on your mp3 player is NOT piracy. Yes the RIAA likes to call it that, wich is why they want to add a tax on mp3 players and want to force you to rebuy a track for each piece of equipment you buy it on.
That CD you play on your stereo, a itunes track for your PC, the ring tone version for your phone and so on.
HOWEVER that is NOT what you are legally required to do.
As far as downloading a crack to run software that you bought, in free countries were politicians are not in the pocket of industry, this is 100% legal. Imagine it would be illegal for you to take the tape out of a cassette player and put it on a spindle player instead. For that matter, imagine the police tried to arrest you for breaking into your own car.
The actions you claim to have done DO NOT fall under piracy (well unless you did them whole boarding a vessel with a cutlass between your teeth), they are fair use actions that your a perfectly entitled to do.
To even call this piracy is to give the RIAA and MPAA exactly what they want, that consumers think that limits can be put on what can be done with products you own.
Protecting our interests... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the major mstake we make, as a country, is assuming we have the right to interfere in the internal affairs of other nations. This is usually done to protect our "interests", which in turn is code for protecting the interests of our various companies and corporations. Read "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq [amazon.com]" and you'll see the same patterns repeated again and again and again.
Re:However (Score:3, Insightful)
Your arbitrary generalisation is unwarranted.
I'm sure there may be alternatives to copyright that have better results, but the favoured alternative of many -- piracy -- is not one of them.
Moreover, there are different justifications for copyright. I discussed this with several friends and colleagues prior to submitting my comments to our government's review on the subject a few months ago. The comments in favour ranged everywhere from purely economic arguments (copyright as incentive to produce and distribute new works) to ethical/academic mindset ones (copyright as fair recognition of authorship, or the question of whether someone should ever be able to profit off the back of someone else's work without compensating them). Many of the people expressing these views were just average people, who might have had incidental benefits from copyright in some cases, but certainly not people who made money off the work of others by taking advantage of the system.
All laws are the product of the mind. The natural order of things is that if I'm bigger and stronger than you, better armed than you, or in a larger gang than you, I get my way. Fortunately today's societies typically recognise that the "might is right" argument is not the most beneficial way for people to work together, and thus legal systems are born where hopefully the largest "gang" is society as a whole, and the weight of the legal system overcomes any individuals who like to throw their weight around.
To give a specific example, the law of property ownership is a product of the mind. The natural state of things is that if I see something and it isn't tied down or guarded, it is mine if I want to take it. I always find it odd that people trot out the same tired arguments about how "intellectual property" and "real property" aren't at all the same thing, when in fact they are more similar than different. Both are artificial concepts created by the law. The consequences of taking someone else's property are different in the two cases of course, but they are not zero in either case.
And tell me, how are you "scientifically" going to justify a "correct" copyright period? Different people have different views on the ethicality of copyright protection and on the economic benefits, and there is no one universal justification for having the concept in the first place. How therefore you can you have a single test for what is "correct"? (Please don't bother with any reply involving the US Constitution. Copyright is an international concept with far wider implications than US-specific laws.)
Re:However (Score:5, Insightful)
So, next time you want to make a $6 million dollar movie, you can distribute it for free as long as you can get everyone on the planet to mail you 1/10 of a cent up front to help you produce it. Good luck with that.
Re:However (Score:1, Insightful)
The entire concept of "hot news" as you would portray it is a slippery slope to universal employment for lawyers. It serves no value in encouraging the progress of the useful arts and sciences but it does have a strong potential to add friction to that very progress by getting in the way to enrich the people who are merely in the right place at the right time but don't add value. Copyright is broken enough already.
Re:Sounds Familiar (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Commodification (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:However (Score:3, Insightful)
First of all, trying to discredit the argument with an emotional appeal (i.e., calling it "tired") is a fallacy.
Second, you're missing the point. "Real property" and "intellectual property" are different, and here's why:
Imagine I'm holding a rock. The physical reality of the fact that I'm holding (i.e., owning) it prevents anyone else from holding (i.e., owning) it at the same time. Moreover, I can use that piece of property without having to give it to anyone else first (for example, I can tie it to the end of a stick and go kill an antelope with it). Moreover, I can only use it if I haven't given it to someone else.
Now, imagine that I'm thinking of an idea. Obviously, this does me no good whatsoever unless I communicate it to someone else. But then once I do share it with someone else, I can't claim to "own" it anymore. As "property," it's inherently useless; therefore it makes no sense for it actually to be property.
Now, you're right that a law allowing me to put down my rock and walk off while still "owning" it is a construction of society. However, such laws are still based on and justified by the physical reality of the situation. As a consequence, laws that try to establish the same thing for "intellectual property" have no basis or justification!
In other words, although we, as a society, build up artificial constructs of law, eventually it all boils down to the physical fact that a rock cannot be used by both you and me at the same time, but an idea must be shared between us in order to be used. Everything else must follow from that, or else we end up with the situation we have here, which is that everyone disregards the law.
Re:However (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:If DRM causes piracy... (Score:1, Insightful)
Oh...you must be new here.
Re:Sixth column of a series (Score:2, Insightful)
I disagree. The headline says DRM causes piracy. The premise is to blame DRM for piracy as some pseudo-justification for it. People do this all the time--"The RIAA made me do it!" It's bogus. You're responsible for your actions, not some technology. You say it's a discussion of cause and effect, but again, DRM doesn't cause piracy. People cause piracy.
Re:There will always be piracy (Score:3, Insightful)
4) The illegally obtained file is less restricted and more useful than its for-pay equivalent. In short, you're choosing between paying nothing for a better product and paying something for a more frustrating, restrictive product.
That's what they mean when they say, "DRM promotes piracy." If someone sells me an unencumbered file at a reasonable price, I'll accept it happily and move on. But if someone sells me a file that I'm allowed to play for a period no longer than five (5) years, on no more than two (2) authorized devices running our patented Music-N-Abled software... well, if I really, really feel that the artist deserves support, I might buy it before searching out an unencumbered file on BitTorrent. But either way, if I want it, I'm going to search out a file that does what I want, rather than waiting for the distributor to try and sell me the same product over and over again.
You seem to want to interpret the statement "DRM promotes piracy" in a completely different way, that makes DRM responsible for every instance of piracy. I'm going to chalk it up to poor reading comprehension.
Re:However (Score:4, Insightful)
You were missing the point that it makes no sense to speak of "taking someone else's property" in the context of "Intellectual Property," because it makes the false presumption that "Intellectual Property" is actually property. In other words, you're saying "P implies Q," but failing to realize that P is false.
My argument is one based on the physical reality of the universe; economics is irrelevant to it. In addition, you can't use "today's intellectual property laws" to justify themselves; that's a circular argument.
Yep, I completely agree.
I agree here too.
If we first postulate that a "copyright holder" exists, then yes, I can indeed see how he can be damaged, economically. Now, here's the problem: it doesn't make sense, physically speaking, for any such "copyright holder" to exist in the first place!
Your entire argument seems to be based on the presumptions that copyright exists and that it's possible to enforce. You then argue that, from those presumptions, that copyright infringement has negative consequences for the copyright holder, etc. In addition, you explain how copyright is desirable in terms of ethics (e.g. by giving authors fair credit for their work). That's all fine and dandy; I'm not disagreeing with any of it.
All I'm disagreeing with is your claim that "intellectual property" is the same thing as "real property." If we had Star Trek-style replicators, then I'd agree with you (and, of course, extend my claims to include "real property" as well). But we don't, so the fact that "intellectual property" is inherently copyable while "real property" isn't causes them to be different in a very significant way. The consequence of that fact -- which is a feature of physical reality, not economics -- is that your postulates (that copyright can exist and be enforced) are false and the whole argument is moot. In other words, yes, P -> Q, but ~P, so you have (so far) failed to prove Q!
My "final claim" wasn't a claim. Or at least, it wasn't a claim made for the purpose of justifying the rest of my argument. Still, you're right that I overstated it when I said "everyone" (which I meant in a colloquial sense).
Also, which "success[ful] online music services" are you referring to? The ones that don't use DRM (e.g. eMusic, AllOfMP3), the ones that aren't actually successful (e.g. PlaysForSu
Re:Commodification (Score:2, Insightful)
just my 10 bits
Now about DRM causing piracy... I can see that. Lets make a law banning DRM
Not wrong, just possibly flawed. (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't really have any problem with people trying to make movies, or even to make money by making movies. That's a legitimate occupation in my book.
What I have a problem with, is when they try to alter the economic and technological landscape in order to make it easier for them to use a particular business model. That's where I draw the line. I could think of a lot of ways that I could change the world that would make it easier for me to make money, but that's just not how it works. The rest of us basically have to work within reality as it's presented to us, and we have to figure out ways of making money and otherwise surviving within that.
The content producers want to, and are petitioning (read: bribing) government for, is to entrench their business model at the expense of other possibilities, and at the expense of a whole lot of other things besides (not least of which is my freedom to do whatever the hell I want with the equipment I've purchased).
There's nothing inherently wrong with their business model, it just may not work. They're welcome to try, but if it doesn't work, I expect them to pick up and go back to the drawing board and figure out another way to finance movies, if making movies is what they want to do. For them to instead pour a ton of cash into, and generally mess up and corrupt, government, in order to keep a flawed business model around, is unacceptable.
Re:Wrong Use of "anti-semitic" (Score:2, Insightful)
You dumbass. The word 'anti-semitic' does, in fact, mean 'anti-jewish', or, more specifically, 'jew-hater'.
Why? Because that's what it was coined to mean, fairly recently, and that's what people use it to mean. You cannot deconstruct words into their root forms and argue that the roots mean the word means something different, language doesn't work that way.
In your universe, a 'light switch' is a misnomer because it's actually controlling electricity, not 'light', and an 'automobile' would include those subway trains that drive themselves, but not cars.
Re:Statement: Insightful. Sarcasm: overrated (Score:4, Insightful)
The really fun thing about any copyright discussion here is watching one set of people arguing 'What is needed', namely, how we 'need' copyright law, against people who say that copyright law is a violation of their rights, past people who are arguing 'What is true', that copyright law used to rely on a level of inconvenience that is now gone and thus is almost totally unenforceable.
We may, indeed, need copyright law to continue to encourage content producers. That is totally orthagontal to whether or not enforcing copyright law is possible in a digital world.
If you fall out of an airplane without a parachute, you can argue that you 'need' to reduce your speed before you hit the ground, and you'd be correct. You could argue that free-falling is kinda fun, and you'd be right too. Or you could argue that you have no way to do the first thing, and you'd also be correct. Sometimes there is not actually a 'correct' solution.
We may, indeed, smash into the ground so hard we destroy quite a lot of produced content. Arguing that we 'shouldn't' do that is rather surreal, considering we already jumped from the plane.
If everyone works together, they might be able to invent, at least, a hang glider or at least aim for a lake. But we have way too many people arguing about what 'should' happen, without considering that there is absolutely no way to do what they think 'should' happen so perhaps they should aim for something a bit more likely.
Re:However (Score:4, Insightful)
I've also been thinking about all this recently from the standpoint of the expense of resources. The use of natural resources, the expense of pollution, the expense of the distribution chain, internet bandwidth, and even hard drive space. It's odd to think about in these terms, since it's usually painted as an issue of consumer rights vs. corporate profitability, or as the desires of the audience vs. the needs of the consumer.
However, the pictures changes if, for a moment, we re-imagine it as a problem for society to solve: how do we efficiently manage the distribution of recorded arts? For the sake of argument, lets disregard the other concerns, such as managing who is authorized to view what, or financial reimbursements to artists. Just think of the problem of distribution of information, as though it's assumed that the information is free.
Suddenly it becomes clear that physical distribution, in this day and age, is *stupid*. We have this huge network at our fingertips, and we're going to waste materials on manufacturing millions of CDs? Many of those CDs are going to ripped to MP3 and then sit on a shelf. For what purpose? We use land and materials to build physical record stores (and Best Buy), we use the materials for the actual media, we pay people to search/maintain the inventory, there's the trucks and the shipping, and all that crap. Think of all the man-time and materials wasted.
Also, users needing to rely on the hard drives in their home computer to store a specific copy of a top-40 hit or a Hollywood movie is nonsense. Right now, the top movie on iTMS is "The Prestige". Consider for a moment if I had bought that movie from iTunes 20 minutes before my hard drive died. Now, why should I need to keep a copy on my local hard drive? The movie has already been ripped, and the data exists elsewhere on the Internet. In order for me to download the movie again would only cost in used bandwidth, but those costs can be mitigated, ironically, by the sheer number of people downloading it. I'm sure that it's obvious to everyone here that the solution is P2P (bittorrent).
It's become clear to me that for a society concerned with using resources efficiently, sharing information via P2P networks is a solution that's almost too good to be true. I'm not just talking about hippy-talk "conservation" in the environmentalist sense. I'm talking about the human resources, the expense of intellectual thought, and the money spent. Overall, those resources, too, would be more efficiently managed through P2P distribution.
Now, some people would complain that jobs would be lost, but that's inherent in using human resources efficiently. Some of the human resources currently spent on these distribution issues are being spent unnecessarily. That we don't break windows makes less work for the window-makers, but breaking windows does not generate wealth. (Yes, I guess I'm suggesting that the MPAA/RIAA have become an example of the broken-window fallacy, and therefore create a net-loss for society)