How to combat piracy? (1 Viewer)

[Will_B]

Keith don't worry, I was just interested in the discussion.

The difficult in applying a price to merchandise today is that a "reasonable" price is hard to decide upon, when some people make billions and others make very little. Legitimate product is more attractive when it is priced affordably, but how does a company decide what is affordable in that context?

"let the market decide" is pretty much the only way to figure out what the market will bear... except, when they discover that the market doesn't quite bear it, and in fact many people seek the product other ways, they don't put 2+2 together and lower the prices. Indeed, sometimes they raise the prices.

Though I hear that CDs may drop back to ten bucks this year, which will be nice.

 

[Will_B]

John, for me the question of whether "letter of the law" makes any sense ultimately comes to this near-future vision:

If it were technologically possible to charge a person every time they "thought back" to a movie they saw, would it be piracy if one refused to pay?

Letter of the law would say that the recreating of the parts of the film in your brain is the use of someone else's copyrighted material, and they are absolutely entitled to be paid for your use of it.

 

[AaronMK]

Say a person is the primary user of more than one computer. He buys a sigle license for each piece of software he uses, but installs a copy on each of his machines, sometimes bypassing copy protection measures to do so.

Is he a pirate?

Is he a DMCA violator?

Are his actions wrong?

Music and movie studios, as well as software publishers would want everyone to believe that any copying is piracy. They want people to have to pay for their products many times so they can get use they should have been allowed when paying for it once. They hide under DMCA when doing so.

I would say that these attitudes by publishers, and peoples' measures to get use they should be alowed through a single purchase, are a big cause of "piracy" as they call it.

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

One of the problems is that the consumers don't have lobbyists, whereas the entertainment industry does. So when the lobbyists push at the legislators and get them to pass ever more restrictive laws, the point that laws are supposed to uphold the public good gets somehow forgotten and instead are used to benifit the corporations' right to make more money.

That's not how it's supposed to be, IMHO. More people are bothered by the DMCA than benifit from it, again IMHO... yet it's now a law in the US.

 

[John_Berger]

Letter of the law would say that the recreating of the parts of the film in your brain is the use of someone else's copyrighted material, and they are absolutely entitled to be paid for your use of it.

The "letter of the law" also says that if you rip a CD that you just bought to MP3s, you're breaking the law because you made a copy of that CD in a format OTHER than its original RedBook/CD-Audio format; therefore, it is not an exact duplicate; therefore, it is illegal. So, because of the "letter of the law", EVERY person who has ripped even ONE song from an audio CD to an MP3 - even for personal use - has committed and illegal act and must therefore be branded as a "pirate" because they violated proper archival backup laws.
The whole issue of piracy really comes down to intent. Did you purchase that piracted software or movie or whatever with the EXPLICIT intention of not buying the original and/or with the EXPLICIT intention of denying the copyright holders their share of what would have been an appropriate sale? If so, press "1" and label yourself as a pirate. If not, press "2" and wait for tunnel-visioned, hard-liners to call you a pirate anyway.