heinousjay's Journal: Trends in Copyright Violation

There is an interesting sense of entitlement that seems to run through people's desire to be entertained. A surprising amount of mental energy is devoted to creating and maintaining elaborate threads of thought to justify piracy of copyrighted content, be it movies, music, or game software. Most of these justifications rely on the basis that if the company won't make something available in the way a consumer wants, then they have every reason to take the content under their own terms (which surprisingly never involve paying anybody for what is taken.)

My question is this: what developed this sense of entitlement? Why do people believe they have a right to be entertained, on their own terms nonetheless? This mindset is completely foreign to me, so any insight that could be lent is appreciated.

Who is depriving who of what?

[Timothy Brownawell]

It's probably that these things cost nothing to copy.

The basic reason that stealing is wrong is that whoever you took the thing from doesn't have it any more. Copying something doesn't cause this problem, and doesn't harm anyone.

I think there's a basic idea of having to do useful work in order to get paid (which I'd paraphrase as "if anyone chooses not to work, he's also chosen not to eat"). Copyright (and patents) are a case of someone getting paid to do absolutely nothing (really, if you don't pay the

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[heinousjay]

To start with replying to your subject line: copyright violators are depriving copyright holders of their Constitutionally granted right to control distribution of copyrighted works.

Now I'm not talking about theft - I fully understand that is a different crime, and I have no desire to engage in the word games so common to this discussion. This is copyright infringement. It is a unilateral removal of a person's granted right.

I'm also not discussing things like the length of copyright, incentives to donate

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[HTH NE1]

Obviously something has been done for which these authors desire to be paid. If there was nothing worthy of payment, they would make no money at all. Since there is indeed a large and active market for such content, what, again, could be the justification for the widespread infringement of the copyright these authors hold?

To provide access to the works to those considering purchase, much like why radio and movie channels on TV exist: providing content to people for free at advertiser's cost or for a reasonable fee (premium channel rate, not PPV rate) in hopes that it will induce purchase of the same content on durable media. Someone who downloads a crappy cam may not be able to get to a theater, but may still end up purchasing or renting the DVD later, and usually disposes of the copy because, hey, cams are crappy. (Much

Freedom of Creative Contemporary-Culture Speech

[HTH NE1]

Of course, underlying much of that are the very reasons you don't wish to discuss: copyrights are being extended too long, what public domain exists they want to lock up into private ownership and slap fresh copyright upon, obtaining rights is restricted to corporations that can still derive a profit after the fees, "information wants to be free," etc.

And then there's the people who mix, who like to upload videos of them dancing to music on YouTube or cut up footage from ReBoot and run it against music to f

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[Timothy Brownawell]

Unless it's parody. How did we get to the point where parody is protected but creating works of serious artistic merit are illegal only due to the nature of the raw materials used?

Probably because a parody of something necessarily must be a derivative work of it, and so parodies as a category could not exist at all if they didn't have that exception.

Society has demanded those who lack a certain threshold of natural talent must not be allowed to communicate effectively in most media categories until they a

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[Timothy Brownawell]

What I am referring to, specifically, are actions such as downloading current in-theater movies through BitTorrent,

Watching movies at home is very different from watching them in a theatre, so I'd say that the in-theatre movies are a different product from the downloaded movies. I'd be more curious about the reasons for downloading widely-available-on-DVD movies.

or cracking in-store games

There are two varieties of this. One is to play a legally-purchased game without annoying CD checks and the like. The

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[Bill Dog]

I want to answer your subject line as well: You are depriving us of quality future entertainment. Someone opined here recently that capital-intensive content production efforts will wane, like full-blown theatrical movies. The album is dying. It's a future of music singles, YouTube videos, and more reality shows and infomercials. I.e. cheap junk. It's the discouragement of big-budget, big-risk endeavors. And likely much less quality entertainment.

The basic reason that stealing is wrong is that whoever you t

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[Timothy Brownawell]

You are depriving us of quality future entertainment.

I'll take that in the general sense, since I am not depriving you of anything. "quality entertainment" is not synonymous with "high-budget entertainment", in the same way that "quality software" is not synonymous with "proprietary software". And there will always be a demand for live entertainment anyway, which should be mostly unaffected by this. (You're also forgetting about "90% of everything is crap". There's always a lot of cheap junk, you just don'

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[Bill Dog]

How does this fit into your world?

It doesn't -- in my world, "the public good" is an insufficient motivator of people.

Pot, kettle.

[Bill Dog]

What amuses me is, all the kiddies here who are pro-piracy, rail at big corporations when they act unethically. But they're doing it for the same reason -- because they can.

Junior thieves grow up to be adult thieves -- they'll be cheating the systems then too, and become exactly what they criticize now.

Because they can.

[sacdelta]

I could come up with many reasons why people can justify it to themselves.

Both video and music content (not all, but a lot of it) have been freely available through over-ther-air TV and radio for decades. With the exception of pay channels like HBO, most people probably view cable content as free thinking they are paying for the service and not the content.

Some may feel that the companies/artists/actors are making huge amounts of money as it is and won't miss their $16 that they can put to better use than

The constitution is not infallible

[iminplaya]

And despite what is printed there, you cannot own a divulged idea any more than you can own the light that comes from your light bulb or the smoke that comes out of your chimney. Once it's out, it's out, and that's that. You shall get paid for your work as I get paid for mine... when you perform it. Your demand for royalties is the same as me demanding payment for every mile you drive your car after I fix it. You only have one natural right to your work... that you are the creator. You have no right to cont