Whenever you rent a movie, the multinational media industry forces you to watch their propaganda. They claim that downloading movies is the same as snatching bags, stealing cars or shoplifting. That’s simply not true – making a copy is fundamentally different from stealing.
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Jaws
16 years 36 weeks 3 days 20 hours ago
This is the dumbest article
This is the dumbest article I've seen posted here. While I don't believe people should go to jail or be labeled a criminal, it's still stealing if you share it with someone who hasn't paid for it. If possible, civil penalties should be the norm in these cases.
"We believe that consumers are willing to pay if offered good quality at a fair price. We also believe that sharing is expanding culture – not killing it."
So, the Greens have never heard of supply and demand? If I rent a car(movie), make a key(copy) for it, return the car(movie), are they saying I can just take it again without paying and when I'm done share it with another person? I'd certainly be expanding that persons culture unless they killed themselves in that car when the police were chasing them for car theft.
I guess it's who's propaganda you fall for, me I'm somewhere in the middle.
AndrewMin
16 years 36 weeks 3 days 20 hours ago
Definitely agree.But you
Definitely agree, Jaws.
But you left out something. If we make sharing legal, then the movie industry will lose tons of money. Good thing? No. Because then, the movie industry will not be able to pour as much money into the films, which means that you'll get crummier and crummier movies.
kuratkull
16 years 36 weeks 3 days 18 hours ago
Don't seem to be connected
The facts:
* Movie budgets are rising pretty fast, year by year
* Released movies are crummier by the year
* P2P sharing is increasing by the year
So, we can see that P2P has no serious effect on movie budgets or quality of movies. It could even be said, that movies are decreasing in quality, despite the rising budgets. So pirates are not to blame for the low sales of CDs, since the marked is flooded with garbage that a large number of people find not worth the price that is asked for them.
Just my opinion :)
kiba
16 years 36 weeks 3 days 14 hours ago
It is copying, not
It is copying, not stealing.
Stealing is the act of depriving someone of property.
Copying is making an identical copy of someone's property.
Regardless of the damage, copying is copying, NOT STEALING.
Jaws
16 years 36 weeks 2 days 20 hours ago
Oh stop it, you're just
Oh stop it, you're just rationalizing. Talk about being morally bankrupt.
Just because you don't equate non-material things to material thing doesn't make it all right. Morally it's still wrong if you share it. Intellectual property is still property, whether you can touch it or not.
I would agree if you made a copy of a movie you rented and never shared it. I can go along with that. If you share it, you're giving it to people that never paid for it. Any way you cut it, that's stealing.
A question -- if you made a documentary with a terrific idea you had and shopped it around with no takers (but unknowingly was copied) and after a while you saw your documentary at the theater or on TV, is that OK with you? And after they made millions, is it still OK? And would you try to sue them? After all, they're expanding culture - not killing it.
I wonder what good quality at a fair price really is?
aboutblank
16 years 36 weeks 2 days 3 hours ago
Intellectual Property Is Intentionally Confusing
Some quotes takes from this article. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html
The term carries a bias that is not hard to see: it suggests thinking about copyright, patents and trademarks by analogy with property rights for physical objects. These laws are in fact not much like physical property law, but use of this term leads legislators to change them to be more so. Since that is the change desired by the companies that exercise copyright, patent and trademark powers, the bias of “intellectual property” suits them. The bias is enough reason to reject the term.
The term “intellectual property” is at best a catch-all to lump together disparate laws. Non-lawyers who hear one term applied to these various laws tend to assume they are based on a common principle, and function similarly.
Nothing could be further from the case. These laws originated separately, evolved differently, cover different activities, have different rules, and raise different public policy issues.
Copyright law was designed to promote authorship and art, and covers the details of expression of a work. Patent law was intended to promote the publication of useful ideas, at the price of giving the one who publishes an idea a temporary monopoly over it—a price that may be worth paying in some fields and not in others.
Trademark law, by contrast, was not intended to promote any particular way of acting, but simply to enable buyers to know what they are buying. Legislators under the influence of “intellectual property”, however, have turned it into a scheme that provides incentives for advertising.
Since these laws developed independently, they are different in every detail, as well as in their basic purposes and methods. Thus, if you learn some fact about copyright law, you'd be wise to assume that patent law is different. You'll rarely go wrong!
The term “intellectual property” also leads to simplistic thinking. It leads people to focus on the meager commonality in form that these disparate laws have—that they create artificial privileges for certain parties—and to disregard the details which form their substance: the specific restrictions each law places on the public, and the consequences that result. This simplistic focus on the form encourages an “economistic” approach to all these issues.
sepreece
16 years 36 weeks 9 hours 32 min ago
not confusing to lawyers
Your note points out that the term intellectual property can confuse non-lawyers into thinking that the different sub-disciplines are closely related. However, the reason the term exists is that lawyers tend to group the study and practice of these subjects together. They are typically taught in the same course in law school and the lawyers who practice them tend to practice more than one (my daughter is a trademark lawyer, but occasionally gets copyright work, too; her previous job was patent litigation).
I submit that the confusion isn't in using the term, but in the way non-lawyers hear it. Suggesting that there is some intent to confuse in using the term is unsupported. Claiming that there is no connection between them ignores the facts - they are connected, among other things, by the fact that the same people and firms study and practice them.
aboutblank
16 years 36 weeks 8 hours 34 min ago
We should be careful with our words
This is the point.
another quote from the article:
Another problem is that, at the broad scale of “intellectual property”, the specific issues raised by the various laws become nearly invisible. These issues arise from the specifics of each law—precisely what the term “intellectual property” encourages people to ignore. For instance, one issue relating to copyright law is whether music sharing should be allowed. Patent law has nothing to do with this. Patent law raises issues such as whether poor countries should be allowed to produce life-saving drugs and sell them cheaply to save lives. Copyright law has nothing to do with such matters.
We should not refer to an item covered under a certain law as "intellectual property". Example would be not to refer to "Microsoft's Windows Intellectual Property" but instead say "the copyright, trademark, and patent laws that cover Microsoft's Windows".
kiba
16 years 36 weeks 1 day 14 hours ago
I never actually say
I never actually say anything like that!
Once again, I repeat my message for the final time.
Copying is copying someone's property in its complete likeness. Stealing is the taking of someone's property.
Even if it is very morally wrong to copy, it is still copying.
akf
16 years 36 weeks 2 days 2 hours ago
alternative fundings
Let me make clear, that the makers of this article propose alternative fundings: “Fees, in the form of advertising tax on TV, radio, billboards, cinema and printed media, could be used to finance cultural work. [...] There are already fees for songs played on radio, web sites, restaurants, etc, being distributed to artists. Such a system could be set up to support moviemakers as well.”
http://www.iwouldntsteal.net/support.htm
Well, of course it will no longer be feasible to make such expansive films as today. But, so what? I can live with some fewer “special effects”. Then the focus could go more to the story of the film. Today we often have films with no story at all.