Originally posted by: brownboi512
doin research on piracy and copyright infringement for senior research paper and i wanted the opinions of the internet community
how do u guys feel about the RIAA and MPAA policies on copyright infringement?
how can people be justified by downloading music?
how do users justify online sharing of media?
any one have any solutions on the issue of piracy?
any info on piracy or how u feel about the issue is appreciated. just wanted to know some other viewpoints on the issue.
thanks
To answer the direct question, piracy is wrong. Artists, musicians, writers and other creators deserve to profit from their work.
But.....
That having been said, I have a hard time feeling sorry for copyright conglomerates. The idea of copyright has been perverted from the original intent.
US Constitution Article I, Section 8, Clause 8
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
To begin, the transmission of ideas has changed over the last few centuries. Two centuries ago, disseminating ones work could take many years. The process of distribution has been changed with technology. Instead of having to write a book in longhand, typewriters and computers increased the productivity of authors. Spelling and grammar checkers have sped up the editorial process. Printing is now a matter of sending a computer file to a print shop, no more painful typesetting process. And now with the Internet, not only has production of new works sped up, but distribution is almost instantaneous. The return on investment for creators come far faster now than it did 200 years ago. If anything, copyright should have gotten shorter, not longer.
Second, due to the influence of corporate money and the fact that corporations are by law, people who never die, copyright is essentially limitless now. Every time Mickey Mouse is about to enter the public domain, along comes congress to rob the American people of their contractual rights. The citizens held up their end of the bargain and gave Disney the sole right to distribute Steamboat Willie but Disney keeps changing the deal, and the American people suffer for it.
How do we suffer you might ask? At least one way is the loss of culture. Do a little research into the film industry and how many early films have been lost, never to be seen again. Many reels of film were stored in damp basements and simply disintegrated. You could say it was just the film studios' loss, but was it? Those works were supposed to enter the public domain (meaning they'd be owned by society as a whole) after copyright expired, but because copyright prevents anyone but the copyright holder from legally duplicating works, nobody was able to do so. The Library of Congress does some archiving, but it's by no means comprehensive. As any techie knows, redundancy is the best way to preserve data, but continual extensions of copyright prevent that.
Think about how DRM (an attempt by copyright holders to extend copyright forever) is going to affect the passing of works into the public domain. Think of an obscure movie you saw that was released in 2006 that you enjoyed. Under current US copyright laws, that movie will be copyrighted until the next century. Corporate authored works currently have a copyright of 95 years. Do you think your DVD player will still work in 2101? What format do you think we'll be using? Now consider the fact that if the movie you're thinking of isn't a blockbuster movie, it's doubtful that the studio will continue to release that movie in ever new format. Sure, we still see Charlie Chaplain movies, but how many other movies from the silent era are currently on DVD? Back to the movie from 2006, this means that when copyright finally expires on that movie, the only viable copy will reside in a box in a studio warehouse somewhere. What are the chances that the movie ever sees the light of day again? Not good.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure most pirates aren't downloading copies of Spiderman 3 for such lofty goals, but the fact is that if there were no pirates there'd be nobody standing up to the media giants who are locking up our culture in their vaults and using it to extort money from us endlessly. And don't think for a second that if piracy suddenly vanished, that those media giants would suddenly decide to loosen their grip on their ?intellectual property?. Those companies are not fighting pirates because some nerdy kid in his basement robbed Sony of $12 by downloading that copy of Spiderman 3 instead of buying the DVD. Fighting piracy is just a convenient excuse for the media giants to lock up their content and squeeze consumers for every penny they have. They don't want to just sell you Spiderman 3. They want to sell it to you 12 times. If they could, they'd put a scanner in your living room that told them how many friends you had over to watch a movie, and they'd bill you per person. And then they'll charge you again to watch it on your iPod, simply because it's a different format.
I could go on and on, but these are a couple ideas for you to ponder in your research. On one hand, I detest piracy because it takes away incentive for artists to create. On the other hand, corporations have created an environment that fosters piracy with high prices and attempts to restrict fair use.
