No CD Petition

[Akaoz]

Originally posted by padillah


If something I posted gave you the impression that copyright law is the same everywhere (or that I held this belief) than I miscommunicated. I was meerly stating that "the protection of writen and artistic works" is an accepted principle in every country. There are forms of copyright laws in every country and they are, indeed, implemented to greter or lesser degrees.

Ah, well, that settles that then Misscomunication can happen in the best of families.

[padillah]

Originally posted by nbarclay


Piracy is NOT stealing. It's definitely a form of freeloading that takes unfair advantage of other people's effort, but it's not stealing.

If I steal something from you, you no longer have it. My act of theft causes you to have less than you would have if I had never been born. I'm actively harming you by depriving you of something you previously had.

In contrast, when a person pirates a computer program, the effect on the company that makes the program is exactly the same as if the pirate had never been born. The pirate does not actually take anything away from the software company. The pirate just denies the software company an opportunity to make money (and thus denies it a reason to keep producing software).

So let me get this stright: your argument is that piracy doesn't take anything away except the potential to earn money so it's OK?

I don't think that's a well thought out position.

If people only consider something worth five dollars when the sales price is fifteen, or only consider it worth twenty dollars when the sales price is fifty, it is illegal for them to use the content at all. If those people follow the law, the result is that society is deprived of the value those people would have been willing to pay. The people don't get the content, and the publishers don't get any money from those people, so everyone loses.

However, value is not established by the customer, worth is. Value is established by the seller. Your examples don't follow through - say the guy selling something for $15 doesn't sell anything, what now? Does he just quit? I hope he would try a different price point and see what happens to sales. Then he can use that information to determine if he overvalues his product and adjust permanent pricing as needed.

It's called Capitalism and it's worked quite well for years. Your example also discounts hard goods, the same issues and arguments can be made regarding them. If a seller overvalues any product the argument above can apply, copyright doesn't apply to shovels though so it's not a good copyright argument.

Worse, the current economic model encourages content producers to deliberately limit the value society can get from their work. The higher the price, the higher the profit margin, but the fewer people are willing and able to pay the price. So if a company can charge a price that brings four times the profit margin but only sell a third as many units, it comes out ahead by preventing two thirds of the people who would have been willing to pay the lower price from being able to use their product legally at all. The one third who can afford the higher price might get a little bit better product because the company can afford to put a little more money into development. But the product is rendered worthless to the two thirds who are not allowed to use it because they are unwilling or unable to pay the inflated price.

Again, not an example of copyright so much as Capitalist economy in general. I'm sure my brother would love to have a backhoe to help him in his yard, he can't afford one so he doesn't get one. A construction company has no problem buying two or three and so it does. I'm sure this has a name but I don't know it so I call it Market Balance. To suggest that a person make less money so more people can use their ideas and products is close to Communism (not the "bad" Communism, the ideal of Communism). Not a bad ideal but it's rather difficult to implement.

That problem is most serious with music CDs, where production costs are trivial compared with the amount of money the recording artists and record companies demand, and with old movies that long ago earned enough money to pay their production costs.

So are you advocating that no one MAKE any money with their works? They just need enough money to cover production costs, right? If not then who establishes how much money a work should make before it's turned over to the Public Domain?

Piracy helps society get back some of the value that is lost due to companies' pricing many or even most of their prospective customers out of the market. Piracy provides a way for people to get access to content that they regard as being worth something but not as being worth what they would have to pay to purchase it legally. As long as the only things people pirate are things there is no way they would buy legal copies of, no harm is done.

Looks good on paper but the truth is if someone is caught USING a copyrighted work, that's illegal. So as much as you can play around at home you couldn't actually contribute to society as you suggest. So the worth of pirating works is lowered significantly. It's been reduced to games and insignificant use programs. No one is producing "Toy Story 3" on a pirated version of Maya. And if they did they would, ironically, expect to make money for their efforts regardless of the fact that the efforts are based on the illegal use of products. Now, how do compensate the work sufficiently?

But that "as long as" poses its own problems. For one thing, once people start to regard piracy as acceptable, they can too easily rationalize away their piracy by telling themselves they wouldn't have bought something even though in reality they would have. They probably wouldn't have bought everything they're pirating, but they would have bought at least some of it, so they are in fact depriving companies of income. That, in turn, damages the quality and variety of products available to other customers, and may force companies to charge higher prices to their paying customers (which, in turn, creates a still greater incentive for piracy).

Also, there is no way our laws can possibly make it legal to pirate things people know they wouldn't buy anyhow while keeping it illegal for people to pirate things they might, or even definitely would, have bought if piracy were not an option. Thus, as long as payment for content creators depends on people's buying their content, piracy has to be illegal. Similarly, piracy needs to be something our social pressures discourage.

I have a more substatial question, why do you need something you don't want to buy? There are, in their simplest forms, two types of works - One's used for entertainment and ones used in creating other works. Think Need For Speed and Maya. Now, it should be understood that no one NEEDS a game or entertainment enough to justify stealing it, so that leaves creating works. Well, you can't publish or release any works based on stolen properties so there's no reason to pirate those either.

So exactly what would someone need enough to justify piracy but not enough to justify buying it for legal use?

In the meantime, unless and until we can find a better economic model, I think it's both grossly unfair and contrary to the public interest the way content providers seek to maximize their own profits at the expense of the public interest.

So you wouldn't mind doing your job for free? That's what you are asking the corporations to do, work for free. Or at least at a substantial loss. If I had a job offer for you that paid you 10times as much as you make right now, would you ask me not to? Your argument is that you would ask me to pay you less because you don't feel you should earn too much money for your work, right? I don't think this economic model works at it's fullest. Needs more work.

Companies should be viewed as having a civic responsibility, and ideally a legal responsibility as well, to honor the "fair use" rights of their customers. And I regard being able to use a program without having to wear out my CD-ROM drive, and possibly the CD, as a legitimate fair use right.

So I would definitely like to see a “No CD” patch for Civ IV.

And this is why there are lawyers that argue this sort of thing in courts of law - you may be correct on some level. It may be a valid point to argue that the restriction places undue wear and tear on the CD drive, blah, blah, blah... You are more than welcome to try.

Tom P.

[LzPrst]

an important thing to remember is that copyright-loving-companies have been challenged in their previous monopoly, distribution.

the inability of the software\music\movie industry to get with the times and accept that they can no longer control distribution like they could in the past gives piracy a leg up. it is in fact this "stoneage" mentality that causes the problems, instead of adapting to the new technology these companies lobby governments for laws to haul us back to the pre-internet era. it is a bypassing of the laws of free market, if current ways of distributing material is becoming outdated companies should try to think in new ways, not demand that their old ways are protected. its called progress and it is one reason why I dont find piracy all that detestable.

[yin26]

Originally posted by MadDjinn
let's make it perfectly clear.

Honest people do not care about having the CD in. they may find it an inconvenience, but they won't attempt to bypass it.

Not true. I have two kids who hover around the computer all the time, and they have wrecked more than one game before (scratches, etc.). Thus, I invested 20 minutes of Web research one day and figured out how to bypass the CD requirement of the games I bought quite legally. Anybody else who cares to could do the same.

[nbarclay]

Padillah, I don't think you read my post carefully enough. Several of your responses seem to interpret things I wrote in ways that directly contradict other things I wrote in the same message. I won't try to respond to your post paragraph by paragraph, but rather will address it in terms of the underlying issues. Note that the points I'm making are heavily interrelated, so it is important to consider how they fit together if you want an accurate picture of my views.

1) You characterize me as taking the position that piracy is okay. In doing so, you completely ignore two things in my post that clearly indicate otherwise. In the very first paragraph, I wrote, "It's definitely a form of freeloading that takes unfair advantage of other people's effort." Later, I wrote that in our current economic system, society needs to make piracy illegal and to have social pressure against it. So even though I reject the idea that piracy is stealing, I do not take the position that it is okay either. Rather, I view piracy as somewhere in between "okay" on one hand, and taking something away from someone so that the original owner no longer has it on the other. From a moral perspective, I think where on the spectrum it fits depends in large part on the likelihood that the person would have bought the product if he hadn't pirated it, since that is ultimately what determines whether or not the producer of the content actually loses anything as a result of any particular act of piracy.

2) I believe very strongly in the power of capitalism. That belief includes a belief in the importance of profit as an incentive for investment and risk-taking. That's why I wrote, "But at the same time, a viable economic model would have to have a way of paying content producers based on the value of what they produce."

3) The way capitalism normally works is that the minimum cost people have to pay to get a particular quality of product or service is driven by two things: the cost of actually producing the product or service (including pay for people's time), and the profit people who invest and take risks consider necessary to justify their risks and investment.

Consumers sometimes pay higher prices because they want a particular brand for snob value, or because they don't take the time to comparison shop, or because they don't mind paying extra to get something that's styled a little bit differently. But by and large, prices are driven by production cost plus a reasonable profit.

4) Those rules change radically where a particular producer or group of producers can exercise monopoly power. A monopolist can make additional profit by artificially inflating prices above and beyond what is necessary to repay costs and make a reasonable profit. When faced with monopoly power, the only choices consumers have are to pay the arbitrarily inflated price or to do without.

Copyright is, by definition, a grant of monopoly power over production of a particular work. Competition exists to the extent that people can buy an alternative product that is in the same general category. But copyright law deliberately prevents competitors from selling a virtually identical product at a lower price, which is what normally happens in a capitalist system when profits get out of hand.

5) The reason your brother can't have a backhoe is that we don't have Star Trek style replication technology. If making a backhoe were just a matter of borrowing one from a friend and using a replicator to copy it, it would be trivial and dirt cheap for everyone who wants a backhoe to have one. The only limiting factor would be parking space, but even that could be dealt with if the replication technology could turn the backhoe's subatomic particles into something else when your brother is finished with it.

Where information content is concerned, we do in fact have Star Trek style replication technology. Creating additional copies is so cheap that it might as well be free. Once content is put in electronic form, the only serious obstacle to everyone being able to use every piece of content they want is a legal obstacle created by our current economic and legal systems. Those systems thus greatly restrict the value the content can offer.

6) The problem is, how do we find a better economic system that actually works? If we would eliminate copyright without providing a strong alternative path to for content creators to make a good profit, the quantity and quality of material created would decrease enormously. Just getting rid of the copyright system without coming up with a suitable alternative would be a recipe for disaster.

7) However, some reduction in content creation ought to be considered acceptable in exchange for making the content that is created available to greater numbers of people. If the quantity and quality of new content would be reduced by a combined factor of twenty-five percent, but greater freedom in distributing content would allow society to get twice as much value from what is produced, the net result would be a clear and significant net gain for society. It's just plain stupid if we're so paranoid about any possible reduction in content creation, no matter how small, that we allow content creators to write their own tickets in demanding exorbitant profits from their successful works at the expense of the actual value their works contribute to society as a whole.

In conclusion, I think the copyright system as it currently exists, especially in the United States, is very seriously broken. At a minimum, I think we should dramatically reduce copyright durations, especially for works that have clearly already paid their reasonable production costs. (For works created after the change in laws, there should be strict limits on how high a salaries can be considered part of reasonable production costs; it makes no sense to accept longer copyright durations just so rich actors, singers, and such can get even richer.) And I think we should be trying to find alternatives to the entire copyright approach that would provide suitable rewards to content creators while making content far more widely available.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by greenday_234
Its not going away...

It won't go away if we don't take matters in our hands.

OTOH, we can write to various publishers and indicate that we don't want any copy protection. We are legit buyers, not thieves.

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by padillah

I have a more substatial question, why do you need something you don't want to buy?

I'm responding to this separately because I think it deserves special attention. People don't genuinely need any kind of entertainment content. But neither do entertainers genuinely need multimillion dollar salaries. So trying to use the concept of "need" as an excuse to rationalize copyright laws that put the interests of wealthy entertainers ahead of the interests of the general public makes absolutely no sense, at least in my view.

That clash is most obvious in the music industry, where the industry expects poor college students to pay a bunch of money to help record companies and multimillionaire singers get even richer than they already are. From a perspective of need, such an expectation is completely absurd. The college students need their $15, give or take a bit, a whole lot more than the record company and recording artist need the extra profit. And it's not as if recording artists and record companies need anywhere near as much money as they're currently making for music to continue to be made.

(Note the difference between copying music and stealing a CD from a store. If a person steals a CD from a store, the victims of the theft have to eat costs of manufacturing, shipping, inventory control, and space on the store shelves. Copying a CD from a friend creates no such costs.)

I'm not saying this to defend piracy. Rather, I'm saying this to argue that copyright law as it currently exists is horribly flawed and needs to be either fixed or replaced with a better underlying economic model.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by padillah
So let me get this stright: your argument is that piracy doesn't take anything away except the potential to earn money so it's OK?

I have yet to see a serious research (not coming from RIAA for example) that indicates "piracy" has any serious impact on sales. In fact, all the researches I have seen, including one from UNC+Stanford, indicates otherwise.

Furthermore, there's a Harvard paper arguing that the traditional concept of stealing does not apply to "IP"*




* I loath that term

[nbarclay]

Originally posted by padillah
So you wouldn't mind doing your job for free? That's what you are asking the corporations to do, work for free. Or at least at a substantial loss.

No I'm not. If I were convinced that the only way Firaxis can make enough money to repay its investment in Civ IV and make a reasonable profit is to require people to insert the CD when they play, I would reluctantly support their taking that step to protect their ability to make money. For one thing, they've certainly earned it. For another, having to have the Civ IV CD in the drive when I play is a lot better than not having the game at all because it wasn't worth producing. And then there's the fact that I want Firaxis to stay in business so there can be a Civ V.

But at least at present, I view that as a false choice. Yes, not having that protection would increase the number of illegal copies a bit. And yes, some of those illegal copies would come at the expense of sales (although other illegal copies would lead to sales to people who try an illicit copy and like the game enough they're willing to buy a legal one). But I see no evidence that the net loss of sales would be great enough to be a make-or-break issue for Firaxis. And I regard it as fundamentally immoral to destroy value in order to increase profits unless there is a genuine need to do so in order to make a reasonable profit (in which case the destruction of some of the value is the only thing that makes producing the part of the value that's left worthwhile).

I would also point out that figures for how much money is lost to piracy tend to be very seriously inflated because they assume that everyone who pirates a work would otherwise have bought it. The reality is that the vast majority of piracy comes from people who would be either unwilling or unable to pay the market price for what they pirate. Pirates don't just pirate things that are worth enough to them that they would be willing to pay for them otherwise. They pirate a lot of things that they regard as worth having but don't regard as worth anywhere near the asking price.

I'll emphasize again that I'm not trying to argue that piracy is okay. I'm just trying to point out problems with current laws and corporate behavior, and with arguments used to defend those laws and behaviors.

[greenday_234]

Honestly my opinion on the issue aside, I suspect that this thread should probably be closed now. I'm post #85. If anyone can remember 84 posts ago this was just supposed to be a petition that you'd sign. That has clearly died. Also the arguements being had right now, whether or not I agree with them, are the same arguements we've had for the past 20 posts except reworded. Everyone gets the idea.

[LzPrst]

as I started this I'll end it. this petition is as I see it dead due to the interjections of people who wouldnt care to sign it. regardless the discussion has been an interesting one so I dont consider this a waste, however if anyone feels like they want to start a new petition please do, I will sign it, just make sure you state very clearly that people who disagree can refrain from posting. I wont do it myself cause I dont want to be accused of spamming identical threads.

thank you all for your contributions, even those I disagree with.

And just to wrap it up with a quote, here's a classic one from SMAC

"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."

-Commissioner Pravin Lal

[greenday_234]

LzPrst,

I first want to apologize about the hositilty in my last post, I wasn't quite feeling well this morning and apparently it showed.

as I started this I'll end it. this petition is as I see it dead due to the interjections of people who wouldnt care to sign it.

And I feel that I did indeed contribute to that problem, I apologize.

However next time you do a petition of sorts your best bet is to post a poll because if your intention is to get the attention of firaxis its doubtful that they'll sift through posts. Give them something to "glance at" and then if they so desired they could read the opinions of others.

[gunkulator]

Originally posted by LzPrst
an important thing to remember is that copyright-loving-companies have been challenged in their previous monopoly, distribution.

the inability of the software\music\movie industry to get with the times and accept that they can no longer control distribution like they could in the past gives piracy a leg up. it is in fact this "stoneage" mentality that causes the problems, instead of adapting to the new technology these companies lobby governments for laws to haul us back to the pre-internet era. it is a bypassing of the laws of free market, if current ways of distributing material is becoming outdated companies should try to think in new ways, not demand that their old ways are protected. its called progress and it is one reason why I dont find piracy all that detestable.

I've heard this argument before and my response is: Be careful what you ask for. Technology exists today that can track almost anything that goes on in your computer. Sufficiently complicated encryption exists now to force you to use a music providers codecs that could, say, automatically debit your credit card (over a wireless connection for portable devices) every time you listen. Technology is a double edged sword. Along with more freedom to access information is the ability for 3rd parties to snoop into what you are doing.

[Badtz Maru]

If the game didn't require the CD to be in, my friend never would have bought his own copy after I loaned him mine. Someone who's computer savvy would know they could go download a no-CD crack, but not everybody knows how to do that, as evidenced by the existence of this thread.

And downloading a crack has it's own drawbacks. For one thing, you are installing a modified .exe written by some hacker you don't know. You can scan it for viruses, but it might have game-breaking glitches. And whenever a patch comes out, you have to wait for someone to make a new crack for the new version, which can sometimes be a week or two (or never, if interest in the game has subsided by then).

I'm a little ashamed to admit that I never bought Alpha Centauri, even though I really liked it at the time and played it a lot. It didn't require the CD to be in the drive, so I just borrowed a friends copy and installed it. Back then I didn't have internet access nor did I know about no-CD cracks, and they probably weren't as common back then anyway. I would have bought Alpha Centauri if it required the CD.

[Solver]

Then again, CD-cracks are now sort of a thing of the past. Virtual drives are getting used more and more, and they don't have the issue you mention with patches.