There is an interesting video on the matter by a university lecturer,
we were watching it in film school, I'll try to find it.
In Australia, copyright is free and automatic, you do not even need to
place a copyright symbol or any copyright notice to your work at all
for it to be 'protected', property law is completely separate from
copyright law here, actual property (including electronic/digital
property) and ownership of copyright are two -completely- different
things - like here, how a photographer can own the negatives or
digital photographs of your wedding when he was paid by you, and you
own the copyright.
I'm honestly sick of the "boohoohoo someone took my 'art'" line, then
threaten that they'll simply stop making 'art', or trying to sue
people who were never going to pay for it anyway, I'd like to welcome
these people to the real world, people will always do this, they need
to learn to deal with it.
Little Johnny, a school student who may have pirated $10,000 "worth"
of software (the worth of such software to me is quite subjective, so
lets just say thats the retail cost) in a year, Johnny has not caused
any "revenue loss" to any company, as A) It would be impossible for
him to have paid for it in the first place.
The amount of copies of something pirated, multiplied by its retail
value is most certainly not the amount revenue "lost", that is utter
BS, something copied does not equal the loss of a sale, most people
cannot afford to pay for the total "value" of everything they have
downloaded.
Hell, it may even help exposure, with file sharing and "piracy" people
pirate/download all sorts of things that they would never buy in the
first place, a lot of this may be wasted bandwidth to them, but they
may find a gem amonst it all that they would have never considered,
I'm sure there's a large portion of the furry community that started
this way, or first found and then followed an artist this way.
Historically, copyright infingement has not actually done the music or
movie industry any harm, and any claim otherwise is codswallop.
Large corporations don't actually care about people infringing on
copyright, what they care about is something like this "oh, there's
another avenue of revenue to be milked from consumers!", I would not
be surprised if movies were leaked intentionally over p2p to create an
avenue or suing p2p users or organisations.
You cannot deny that all they care about is money, and how to increase
their profits, they would not fund an artistically brilliant movie or
recording artist that would have major contributions to society if
they didn't think it would make them a tidy profit in the process.
There is much more to being compensated for your work than in a
monetary fashion.
P2P is a beautiful thing, it is a great benefit to man kind, you could
say similar to the VCR - to you know, how the VCR actually -help- the
film industry (most likely it was the best thing for the film industry
ever), contrary to what Jack Valenti wanted you to believe in 1982 (
http://cryptome.org/hrcw-hear.htm ).
He is still in charge and saying the same BS about P2P, the same BS I
here from a lot of those in the furry community and in the anti-piracy
camp at large.
Though I guess he may be right to fear P2P - As it may just wrest
power and control away from the MPAA, having the independant sector
steal a huge portion of market share.
Very very few people make money from P2P and file sharing, the amount
of "damage" done to copyright holders is extremely questionable.
But I suppose you lot would rather label the majority of the general
population dirty rotten thieves and have such a holier than thou attitude.
If the law is labelling the majority of people as "thieves" (to which
they are not), then it is the law that is immoral, and it is the law
which has something wrong with it.
Received on Sun Sep 28 2008 - 13:43:15 CDT