Would UK Politicians Support The Digital Economy Bill If It Applied To Offline Activities As Well?
from the equivalencies? dept
The entertainment industry always likes to take the digital world and compare it to the physical world as if the two were the same -- often making claims like unauthorized downloading is "just like stealing a CD from a store." However, they don't seem to like it when you do that back to them to prove all the inconsistencies in their arguments. Lee Griffin wrote up a good blog post about the Digital Economy Bill in the UK, wondering how people would feel if the same rules were applied offline:Would you appreciate being put under house arrest not because of any court determined guilt, but because of someone making accusations of copyright infringement against you for something that may or may not have occurred in your property at the time? Is it even remotely justified to put you under house arrest, to stop you from going to the library, to work, or to socialise with your friends because of those accusations alone?Of course, supporters of the DEB will claim that "this is different!" but they seem to be the same people who will still insist that infringement is no different than theft. Funny how that works.
Or how about point 4...how would you feel if the police were stopping you from accessing your local community centre because a single individual or organisation had threatened the local council in such a way that it is too much for the council to risk the financial cost of allowng it to continue functioning for the community? Imagine arriving at your local pub only to find it inaccessible to you, even though anyone that is visiting from another town can use it freely; not for anything that you or your town have necessarily done, but because of the implications made by an individual in a completely unscrutinised manner?
Finally, point 5 would be very interesting. Could you imagine the police coming and turfing you out of a building you've legitimately bought, and putting it back on the market without paying you a penny, simply because you knew it was in a good location and could make some money off of the future sale? Somehow I don't think that's all too likely!
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Filed Under: digital economy bill, uk
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individual liberties: the only scarce good that matters...
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Re: individual liberties: the only scarce good that matters...
So it's theft when YOUR rights are infringed but not when you infringe another person's rights?
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These rights are self-evident and all that jazz.
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removal is theft, at least in an analogical manner. once the thing, in this case a right, is removed, the origional possesor there of no longer posseses it (in the case of a right, one could make the case that it's not theft, but willful destruction of property, because not only does the origional owner no longer have it, it no longer exists... but that's another logical tangle we don't need for the moment.)
infringement is not. even if you're talking about the right, if you infringe upon it, the right itself is still there. (though due to different logic than that which leaves the copied file in the possession of the original owner)
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So if YOUR rights are infringed then those rights are completely annihilated, but if a copyright is infringed it remains as it was, completely unaffected?
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I wasn't aware that the constitution outlined a self-evident right to be a copyright-infringing freeloader...
Can anyone cite the appropriate passage from their United States of Unicorns constitution?
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According to the copyright cartel, copyright trumps due process.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Hammurabi
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2. These are 2 different types of infringement with 2 different kinds of consequences. In the first instance, the "owner" of the infringed music loses nothing. They still have the original music, which they can still sell to anybody who wants it. The only thing they've lost is the *potential* to sell at that instance to that person, and even that makes the massive assumptions that said person would have bought had the opportunity to infringe not existed, and will never buy in the future.
On the other hand, a person who has their internet removed may suffer actual losses, including but not limited to: their business and livelihood (if they run a home business), the ability to contact certain family & friends, financial, educational, employment & low-cost retail opportunities, their telephone & entertainment options (if they use Skype/Hulu/Netflix instead of a cable & traditional phone) and many, many other things that the internet can provide.
All on the accusation of wrongdoing. This is clearly unbalanced.
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Re: Re: individual liberties: the only scarce good that matters...
Infringing a positive right is theft, infringing a negative right must be the opposite. So infringing a copyright is anti-theft.
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What you meant to say was that when you call the police and try to report civil copyright infringement with poor evidence, they laugh at you and hang-up.
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Right. Which is why the argument that downloading a song is anything like stealing a CD is misleading.
I'm glad you finally agree.
Of course, you also got your facts wrong (you do this a lot). Because if you actually were robbed, the police would pay attention. The problem -- as has been explained to you countless times, so it's odd that you would repeat it -- is that what is happening is not theft, but civil infringement. And the cops know that, even if you seem to have trouble grasping it.
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The equivalent actions in the physical "old" world (i.e pre-internet), would actually be more akin to tape recording songs off the radio, or photocopying books - for personal use (not to sell them).
Recording songs off the radio was common when I was a kid. It's interesting that nobody ever mentioned it as a problem. The record companies allow these songs to be "broadcast" into the airwaves, and anyone can "catch them" with a radio receiver and keep a copy, if they have a recording device. The internet is really just another way to "broadcast" them - but over a different medium, copper wires and glass fibre, instead of airwaves. I guess the difference is that the radio broadcasters pay the record companies each time they broadcast the song - whereas internet folks don't.
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Not saying I don't agree with you, just pointing out the facts
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Not quite.
If you record off the airwaves/cable for your own personal use that may fall under fair use or fair dealing as you are not depriving the creator of a single penny in reality or potentially. Anyway, who's to know if you just watch/listen at home or in the car?
OTOH if you record then sell your tapes then that is copyright infringement and the creator may or may not choose to recover real and potential earnings. Of course not all do. See Grateful Dead and/or bootleg concerts.
Which reminds me that what we now call piracy was once called bootlegging.
Notice that while copyright holders have insisted that copyright violation is theft for a long time when it's actually a civil issue the names given to violators, often by those wanting to paint them as criminal, seem to follow a pattern of while being criminal are also covered in a romantic aura. Pirate and Bootlegger. Both, in fiction, often battling against unreasonable or oppressive authority.
Seems like the **AA's just can't get out of the fictional world of scripts that they live in or songs describing such things where pirates, bootleggers, smugglers and even highwaymen often are the heros and liberators.
These people prefer the fictional world of the Errol Flynns and Johnny Depps to the real one. Is it any wonder they can't figure out how to operate when the real world and the on line world are stopping being separate things and becoming one and the same.
This is roughly the same as the fictional world the **AAs inhabit where artists are actually paid by them instead of being constantly ripped off and not paid by virtue of creative "accounting".
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Another reason that downloading only "potentially" deprives the vendor from selling it to you - is that you could still buy it at a later time, if you choose to.
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"You wouldn't tape record a song off the radio would you..."
The cinema audience just burst out laughing! I don't think it would work.
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Quantum Copying
The more copies there are floating around, the worse this effect gets. Eventually all the data degenerates into a totally quantumized haze of quantumational noise.
So you see, piracy is worse than just ripping off some content creator or other; it actually destroys the quantumic order of the Universe.
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should be you can't tell
sorry.
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Point 5
This point starts to sound similar to the worrying trend over "Eminent Domain" in numerous US cities. OK, perhaps it is not a case of not "paying you a penny", but the rest definitely applies.
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what i nwould love to know is
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Wait a second?
how come the penalties for downloading are so much more severe then if I stole it from a store
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One can hope the English politicians are not like their republican counterparts in the U.S. that declared in public they are owned by the insurance companies LoL
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A person that is falsely accused has more to lose than a potentially possible lost sale of a plastic disc.
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