"Stopping online piracy isn't a bad thing. It's understandably illigal to download things like albulms and software. We just need to go about it carefully so it doesn't censor the internet or invade anybody's privacy, or punish people into poverty."
Understandably illegal and incredibly moronically stupid, backwards, greedy yet illegal fall into the same category here. When civilization figures out a way to not pay the tv networks (in a grand sense) of the world, and rather the individuals involved in actually creating a piece of art, perhaps we'll have a reason to get pissy about copyright laws.
But even beyond art and simple human enjoyment and benefit of watching a movie, listening to a song, reading a book, reading a controversial blog, etc, there are more serious reasons that may appeal to you more, to hate copyright laws and all things like them. Science itself is being held back, yes, human advancement, because people feel like they need to own and make money off research. Scientific research done for companies stays with them, that means any biological, chemical, pharmaceutical research, is illegal to share. Even publicly funded research gets published in journals that cost money non-trivial amounts of money to subscribe to,, even though the information is a few clicks away, even though all the physically needed hardware to access that supposedly public information.
Copyright laws are artificial barriers, and they are throw-overs from a time past, and no longer serve their purpose in a publicly beneficial way. Instead, they're walls that coporations which control media use to keep themselves as wealthy as possible. As technology advances, society and how it functions should also advance.
If you believe that downloading albums and software's illegal, think about your public library. Are libraries illegal? Why not? Man are they ballzy, they practically
flaunt the fact that they not only have books for free, but yes! even movies and music.
What has changed now from the industrial revolution when libraries became a 'thing', such that the idea of a digital libraries (ie: the internet) is wrong? I mean, some libraries work on...donations! *shudder* Such an evil thing, the library should pay dearly for the rights to keep a book or album in their stock, just like Blockbuster did, may it RIP.
And what about second-hand stores? Selling your old CD collection is far worse...whoever buys them isn't even paying the artist! They're paying some third party that's unconnected to the original artist, clearly second-hand stores are an epidemic of mass proportions that will lead to the downfall of society.
Intellectual property rights are creeuz bznis.
Ultimately, the difference between what's existed in terms of copyright infringment back then and now, is the
ease at which we can work around not paying for something. We no longer need to make a trip to the library. We no longer have to search through bins at CD Warehouse, and then pay the establishment which probably bought it from a petty criminal who stole someone's entire album collection in the first place. Technology, which brought about the whole idea of 'albums' in the first place because you were limited by the size of your record or the roll of your tape, has surpassed the need to have producers and marketers and especially labels. Societies' have just been slow in catching up. People aren't slow to change, but filthy rich people who have innordinate power due to our free market philosophies, understandably, aren't ready to relinquish the Royal status that they have.
http://www.free-culture.cc/
I don't actually agree with one of the main tennets of this guy's ideal, that we must maintain the idea of ownership, and I never made it to the end of the book because of that, but there are some pretty good stories in there. And in it exists a philosophy that should work well with current-day society.
Regardless if you think all this rambling is garbage though, fact is is that copyrights for individuals is 7 years vs ??? years for corporations, (thanks to Walt Disney apparently).
Yes, this is all outside of SOPA and ACTA because I haven't read them (although I believe that they are probably bad), but stopping online 'piracy' IS a bad thing. The music industry got pissed off about Napster (may it RIP), coined the term 'piracy', spread it around that it was stealing plain and simple, and the public has adopted this view of it. Even though there already existed tons of forms of intellectual 'piracy' before the internet was a thing; even though no one in their right mind would label a public library as bad; even though anyone in my cohort used VCR's extensively and no one gave a shit; even though lending your friend your favorite physical copies of books wasn't wrong; even though second hand stores still follow valid business models even though they're clearly 'pirating'.
(Wait, it totally makes sense why the world adopted this view of piracy so easily; people who used Napster were at the time, young, impressionable people like me who were so giddy at the idea that we could listen to anything we wanted so easily, the days of taping music off the radio were gone!, we couldn't help but feel guilty at the prospect of it. Even with our playlists full of cartoon intros and hitlist music from over a decade ago-still past the 7 year copyright mark. Such free nostalgia has to be wrong, right?)
It is a very recent thing for corporations to be able to have this much control over the art they released, Disney notwithstanding...they became Royalty decades ago.
Unfortunately, that someone can even think that doing something like downloading Beatles music is wrong shows that the coporate backlash is working. Win the minds and you've won the fight.
The direction this whole kerfuffle will ultimately go towards, (the question is
when), and the questions we should be asking ourselves, is fitting this ease-of-use into our lifestyle in a fair way, equitable way. (And here's where I get controversial and say that you
can't fit such free art in a fair way with capitalism, and so we should ditch capitalism instead of ditching free art, or not paying artists at all.) Instead of thinking of all this free art as wrong, and then calling into question all these other free things, like libraries, we should be thinking of all this free art as right and good. Current DRM is doing an inadequate job/is working counter art.
I want to think that the most recent pushes of corporations towards reigning in their digital rights is like a final, last death surge as they struggle to stay alive, but I suspect we'll see far worse.
Pertinent to the discussion, just this morning my bf got a statement from Rogers (internet provider) saying that he was in violation of copyright laws for torrenting a south park episode. Only a warning though, but he freaked out about it, and deleted the file that's been a seeding torrent for months.
The sad, sad thing is that Rogers doesn't give a shit about this, but they're getting pressure from Vitacom to do this. And we pay ****ing 200$/month for phone, internet and cable from Rogers, and that isn't ****ing good enough. We go through their stupid hoops in their PVR schedule to record the tv we watch, but sometimes there's too much overlap, or we miss something, or we don't get the station, and so we torrent. We can't live without internet, no way no how, even if we can live without cable and illegal torrents, so we can't even ****ing boycott Rogers properly to put pressure on them. And I'm also pretty damned sure the creators of South Park don't give a shit either. It's all Vitacom, or whatever it's called. They call the shots.