I belive no one has seen the end of SOPA and PIPA. i agree with parts of it, but they went about it in the worst way.
Parts of it? To me, it seemed like an unjust law, and I am glad they didn't pass. Pretty much anything that would allow "conviction" without trial in the United States is an outrage. Not to mention the shear insanity to it, attempting to block off websites for posting copyrighted things is rather stupid, I assume that most of the pirated copies are done by people and not the websites themselves.
I can't look at the torrentfreak.com video/site..... can you just summarize it for me? Websense is always picking the most inopportune things to block off
I can't look at the torrentfreak.com video/site..... can you just summarize it for me? Websense is always picking the most inopportune things to block off
Here you go.
In Switzerland, just as in dozens of other countries, the entertainment industries have been complaining about dramatic losses in revenue due to online piracy.
In a response, the Swiss government has been conducting a study into the impact downloading has on society, and this week their findings were presented.
The overall conclusion of the study is that the current copyright law, under which downloading copyrighted material for personal use is permitted, doesnât have to change.
Their report begins with noting that when it comes to copying files, the Internet has proven a game-changer. While the photocopier, audio cassette tape and VCR allowed users to make good quality copies of various media, these devices lacked a in-built distribution method. The world-wide web changed all that.
Distribution method or not, the entertainment industries have opposed all these technological inventions out of fear that their businesses would be crushed. This is not the right response according to the Swiss government, which favors the option of putting technology to good use instead of taking the repressive approach.
âEvery time a new media technology has been made available, it has always been âabusedâ. This is the price we pay for progress. Winners will be those who are able to use the new technology to their advantages and losers those who missed this development and continue to follow old business models,â the report notes.
The government report further concludes that even in the current situation where piracy is rampant, the entertainment industries are not necessarily losing money. To reach this conclusion, the researchers extrapolated the findings of a study conducted by the Dutch government last year, since the countries are considered to be similar in many aspects.
The report states that around a third of Swiss citizens over 15 years old download pirated music, movies and games from the Internet. However, these people donât spend less money as a result because the budgets they reserve for entertainment are fairly constant. This means that downloading is mostly complementary.
The other side of piracy, based on the Dutch study, is that downloaders are reported to be more frequent visitors to concerts, and game downloaders actually bought more games than those who didnât. And in the music industry, lesser-know bands profit most from the sampling effect of file-sharing.
The Swiss report then goes on to review several of the repressive anti-piracy laws and regulations that have been implemented in other countries recently, such as the three-strikes Hadopi law in France. According to the report 12 million was spent on Hadopi in France this year, a figure the Swiss deem too high.
The report further states that it is questionable whether a three-strikes law would be legal in the first place, as the UNâs Human Rights Council labeled Internet access a human right. The Council specifically argued that Hadopi is a disproportionate law that should be repealed.
Other measures such as filtering or blocking content and websites are also rejected, because these would hurt freedom of speech and violate privacy protection laws. The report notes that even if these measures were implemented, there would be several ways to circumvent them.
The overall suggestion the Swiss government communicates to the entertainment industries is that they should adapt to the change in consumer behavior, or die. They see absolutely no need to change the law because downloading has no proven negative impact on the production of national culture.
Aside from downloading, it is also practically impossible for companies in Switzerland to go after casual uploaders. In 2010 the Supreme Court ruled that tracking companies are not allowed to log IP-addresses of file-sharers, making it impossible for rightsholders to gather evidence.
Well I can see some of that maybe being true... I have friends on the internet and non-internet friends (yes, my imagination counts >_>who download stuff and almost never buy. Several times I've heard/read "I totally just downloaded Sonata Arctica's "Dream Thieves," "Shy," "Don't Say a Word" illegally... or I get asked "why don't you just download all of their albums like I did?" "Bands get most of their money from concerts anyway." Cd's from that band (and I'd imagine most other ones) run from 10-~50 US dollars (retail)depending on the rarity (actually some of the rarest are >100...but those are just for collectors and not actually the price of the song/album). People may very well go to more concerts in a proportional amount to downloading... but what of all of these bands and people who live in another country?... a country on another continent across the ocean...? Even if you do make it to one of their concerts when they're over here, I doubt the price of a concert ticket equates to the price of their entire discography. What about works that aren't from bands? How does the whole "goes to concerts" thing workout with movies?
Lets say that a gastroenterologist makes most of her money doing colonoscopies. Her patients refuse to pay for having feeding tubes put in. Just because she can still survive and even live more than comfortably off of her colonoscopy money doesn't mean that you can justifiably not pay her for her other services.
Unless my friends have gone to Europe or across the country to a Sonata Arctica concert (and not told me), then I already know of >$200 (the 200 is the theoretical minimum) that weren't spent on legitimately acquiring cds from just a handful of people with regard to just one band. I can't imagine the total amount that each person would owe... let alone all of them totaled together.
There's a difference in requesting what's owed you and inflating a loss so as to squeeze out extra money from people who don't actually owe you all that much.
Even if you can download something for personal use, isn't it true that you're not, in accordance with the law, allowed to redistribute that copyrighted file in mass? so.... putting it up on a file sharing site would be a no go, right? So are we going to defend one part of the law b/c it is law and then just ignore the other half?
its over ( in my opinion), all they care about is money, and getting reelected. They wont get either one of them if they reintroduce SOPA or PIPA again.
Lets say that a gastroenterologist makes most of her money doing colonoscopies. Her patients refuse to pay for having feeding tubes put in. Just because she can still survive and even live more than comfortably off of her colonoscopy money doesn't mean that you can justifiably not pay her for her other services.
Even the studies conducted that support the claim of file sharing hurting CD sales, it only showed it could have attributed to 10% of the drop in sales .
The effect of internet piracy on CD sales in 2002 is estimated to -2 % (= -8 Ã- 0.25) of internet piracy on CD sales. However, CD sales declined by 8.9% in the US in 2002, while economic growth picked up to 2.45%. Thus internet piracy alone can only explain 22.5% of the CD decline in 2002 and is most likely not to be a significant factor in 2003 as the percentage of internet users who download music is reported to have declined further after the series of legal actions undertaken by the RIAA in the summer of 2003. We should stress that in order for internet piracy to fully account for the 8.9% decline in CD sales, the coefficients associated with internet piracy would have had to be at least 4 times bigger (assuming that GDP has no effects on CD sales). This is unlikely since we already argued that our estimated partial effect of internet piracy is an upper bound.
One thing I'm not seeing addressed here is ow the industry is refusing to change their business model to reflect the change in times. Going back to your example, let's say technology had advanced to the point where requiring the doctor's service to put the feeding tube in was no longer necessary. The technology allows for the individual to do it themselves. The doctor in this case is complaining their patients are refusing to pay for this service and on these grounds wants to make it illegal to allow them to do it themselves. This is the sort of behavior we are seeing from companies like the RIAA and MPAA.
However there are some who argue that even this compression is inaccurate as we are comparing something physical tangible good to something that is not.
Another thing to consider is the effect piracy has on innovation.
In this article, we showed that current IPR protection systems fail to protect the digital goods industry. Due to the nature of these goods - they tend to be public goods - a phenomenon of softlifting exists among the consumers (we show that this can be seen as the usual free-riding behaviour), and the extent of softlifting behaviour is such that IPRs are virtually unenforceable. The conventional wisdom related to innovation predicts that in such a situation the innovation process in the digital goods industry should stop, or at least decrease. We show that, on the contrary, piracy pushes firms to innovate. First of all, innovations in the anti-piracy protection systems are required in order to decrease the publicness of the digital goods. Secondly, we point out that, due to technological limitations, the original digital good and a copy of this good are not always perfect substitutes, as the quality of the copy may be lower than the original. Thus firms are incited to innovate in order to maintain a difference of quality between the original and the copy. These innovations tend to restore the market power of the firms. Unfortunately, we show that this increase in market power only lasts for a short period of time, as protections are always âcrackedâ, and as the technological progress always reduces the quality gap between the original and the copy. Therefore, piracy, by decreasing the market power of the firms place them in a highly competitive environment. Firms are pushed to innovate continuously in order to gain market power, and the positive economic profits associated with it. Our next step was to show that even if piracy triggers innovation, quality of innovation produced may be insufficient. Indeed we consider that a part of the innovation caused by piracy is in fact useless. The innovation related to antipiracy protection systems doesnât increase the social welfare, and wouldnât even exist if the digital goods were either completely private or completely public. On the other hand we show that the innovation related to quality tend to increase the global welfare, and thus is a âusefulâ innovation. As the level of innovation triggered by piracy may not be sufficient, we then try to establish what could be a good policy to solve this inefficiency problem. We first show that, despite the fact that increasing the level of IPR protection is often seen as the best solution, this increase, in addition to harming competition and decreasing welfare, could also decrease the incentive to innovate. More particularly, we show that the current protection system increases the market concentration ratio. The consequence of that is that these protections not only create monopolies, but that these monopolies are often a monopsony at the same time. Thus instead of one market distortion, high levels of protection in fact result in a double market distortion. Last but not least, we show that IPR protections, such as patent and copyright, can be used by the firms as strong barriers to entry. Thus IPRs acquire an intrinsic strategic value and become independent of innovation. The link between IPR protection system and innovation becomes consequently weaker. Whatâs more, we show that when firms are too well protected, their incentive to innovate decreases. Finally, we show that for the same reasons that firms canât prevent piracy, it would be too costly, from a social point of view, to reinforce IPR laws and to try to enforce them. Therefore, even though digital goods are not pure public goods, they should be considered as such: it is indeed more expensive to try to exclude people from the consumption of these goods, than to force consumers to consume these goods. Thus we show that a system of taxing digital blank media, that is associated with subsidies given to the creators of digital goods, can be a sufficient incentive to achieve an efficient level of innovation. In this last part we also discuss recent research work showing that due to the fact that digital goods are only quasi-nonrival, it is possible to reach an efficient level of innovation in a perfectly competitive market without IPR protection system.
This is again something we see companies like the RIAA and MPAA fighting. Instead of trying to offer a better product they just want to offer the same old low quality crap they always produced.
This is exactly the sort of thing that needs to stop.
Founded in March, the Las Vegas-based Righthaven has begun buying out the copyrights to newspaper content of the Las Vegas Review-Journal for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post, or even excerpt, those articles without permission.
