I think the whole tree-and-ballpark analogy has gone waaayyy overboard.. :D

re: 2nd comment: fair enough ;)

cool, I made my own tl;dr during which Luke posted :)

okay short and sweet:

1) given the price of a DVD is 1-2 hours’ work depending on your post-tax wage, I’d still consider the free download less work. Plus once you’ve unpacked a couple of .rar files, it’s trivial to unpack in future.

2&3) Are you kidding? Surrounded by skyscrapers? The owner should capitalise and sell up the land for a tasty fat profit :D

I think this is where the analogy falls apart though. By climbing the tree, the kids are wilfully engaging in countermeasures to defeat the owner’s wishes. By looking out the window of your own apartment, you’re not engaging in countermeasures. It’s the owner’s decision whether or not to block your view. If he does and you take steps to circumvent it, then yes, we’re back at the same situation with kids-in-a-tree.

4) But building a roof would increase ticket salesand get revenue that way. People who can’t watch anymore who really want to would have to get a ticket. After all, the ball park is so close!

5) I know, I just find baseball tedious :)

Whether something is legally termed theft or a more arcane legal term is to some extent irrelevant. The act of taking something without consent is still the same concept.

[quote post=”2296″]The truth is, I consider downloading stuff a crime, but not much of a crime. I rate it on the level of double-parking in light traffic – you don’t really inconvenience people, but you still shouldn’t really do it (also if everyone did it, it does become a bigger problem).[/quote]

Ah, see – same here. I do not claim downloading is a right thing to do. It’s just so damn easy it is hard not to. It is not necessarily a victimless crime – but it is close to one. I do acknowledge that it probably does have some impact on the sales but this goes both ways – on one hand you get lost sales, on the other you get free promotion. Net result of gains and losses is probably oscillating close to zero sometimes swinging to your advantage, and sometimes against you – but never enough to bankrupt you or make you rich. :P

But I agree with what you said there. It is wrong – I don’t deny it. I just like to call the crime by it’s proper name. And legally, it is not theft (which is a criminal offense) but infringement. The theft thing just muddies the waters because it is a much more serious crime.

Nah, I know it’s not a personal attack because you’re counter-arguing, not calling me stupid ;)

in rebuttal:
1) I was comparing more to a DVD than a movie experience. You do have a point that your downloaded .iso may just be the movie without extras, but conversely your downloaded .iso doesn’t force you to sit through menus and intros either. Most DVDs don’t really have worthwhile extras anyway, but your point about sound is a good one.

2) I don’t think there’s much of a barrier to entry these days for torrenting. Well-seeded torrents for popular stuff is easy to find, but as soon as it’s not popular, yes it does get more difficult. When I started torrenting, I made the comment that I couldn’t find what I wanted – and my friend replied ‘just use google. type in what you want and ‘torrent”. It can work surprisingly well for rarer stuff. In any case, in the analogy, the kids that climb the tree presumably don’t have the capacity to buy a ticket (as they are ‘kids’ and not ‘people’). I know I have the capacity to buy what I torrent, I just don’t.

I do know that I have an mp3 collection built entirely from unbought music – I haven’t bought a CD this century. I’ve pulled my collection from friends and customers’ computers and have about 40GB worth, half of which is chaff. And I’m mocked for having a small collection. I find my experience to be more common than those who buy music regularly as well as download, though those people do exist.

Tonight at the gym I’ll be listening to Rage Against the Machine, Black Flag, System of a Down, and possibly a little Dead Kennedys. It keeps me motivated to keep doing cardio; without it I’d stop. I get a very real, tangible benefit from this music, and I haven’t paid a cent for it, just the mp3 player.

3) But it’s the same with the ball game – if you’re not in the tree when the game’s on, you’re just going to see an empty field. If you don’t want the movie when it’s popular, no, you’re less likely to get it via download. Also, trees do grow to a maximum height :)

4) The real point here is that people are trying to define this issue as a ‘victimless’ crime and therefore not a crime at all. Tobias says that since the artist isn’t having their house trashed, it’s not theft. But I can take $5 from someone’s wallet without their permission, and that is theft. The person isn’t particularly harmed by it – you have to be quite poor for $5 to matter – but it’s theft just like having a house ransacked is theft. Different magnitude, but same scale. I don’t remotely believe the labels when they project, but neither do I believe there is no harm done.

Credit card info can be used for things other than straight-out moneymaking, but anyway, taking the actual info is still theft, regardless of whether it’s used or not.

Anyway, the point as I see it is that the downloader is taking something that has not been released for free and not giving anything in return. Whether it’s actual loss or projected loss by the victim, it’s still the victim not being recompensed for a non-free service. How the labels treat the artists is distracting chaff – the issue is that the service user is not recompensing the service provider.

The real problem I have is that people that strongly advocate free downloading of non-free material all seem to be people whose real motivation is that they want their entertainment for free, but don’t have the balls to say so. I admit, I’m a selfish bastard when it comes to music, I don’t want to have to pay for it when I can get it free, so I don’t. But I’m not going to pretend that my entertaining myself without recompense to the people that made my entertainment should be considered a blow for the forces of good. It’s selfish, plain and simple, and it’s taking something I don’t have a right to take. But hey, that’s the way this facet of the world works at the moment (which is a different ethical debate)

5) The big three for me are baseball (the sport they had to design to be more boring than soccer), soccer (while I like a low-scoring game, a game where nil-all draws are common after 90 minutes is beyond the pale), and tennis (been going downhill ever since they stopped wearing slacks).

Tennis is so bad that when I watch tennis with a tennis fan, I just commentate everything the players do. Turns out they don’t spend much time doing anything – there was a study done that said 1 in 6 minutes is actually playing the sport, the rest is basically wandering around scratching your arse. Also, any game that needs 5 times as many officials as players is just asking for trouble.

The sports I like to watch are basketball and gridiron, and on a really hot day where you can’t move and you can’t be stuffed thinking and there’s beer at hand and maybe a friend for lazy conversation, cricket (which is dull at all other times).

The truth is, I consider downloading stuff a crime, but not much of a crime. I rate it on the level of double-parking in light traffic – you don’t really inconvenience people, but you still shouldn’t really do it (also if everyone did it, it does become a bigger problem). Don’t get me wrong, I think things need to change, but I definitely believe in fair use (even though I don’t follow it :) ) – if I buy a song, I should be able to play it on any system I own, keep it however I want, back it up and so forth. I also think it’s not a moral thing to make copies for friends. But I’d double-park to pick up a friend by the side of the road…

/waffle

[quote post=”2296″]I really look forward to seeing how the law will change once the technically literate generation gets in power. Sadly, that could take anywhere from 1-2 decades. By that time, damage could be severe.[/quote]

I’m teaching the CMPT 109 now I’m more and more convinced that this is not going to happen. These kids are all like 5-6 years younger than me (if not more) – they all have facebook and myspace accounts. They all essentially live online – and yet they are still incredibly clueless. So the new generations are not getting more computer savvy – they just learn a very narrow set of computer skills they absolutely need.

So in 1 or 2 generations we might not have a Ted Stevens level of idiocy walking around, but people still will be calling IT for the stupidest shit.

Then again copyright might be the one area where higher exposure to the internet may improve things. So you might be right.

@vacri – but LEGALLY it is not theft. When RIAA or MPAA sues you no criminal charges are brought against you. It is a civil suit, and you are usually just expected to pay a hefty fine.

Anyways, on to your points:

1. I would say that original movie is much more convenient to work with. Typically all you need to do is to open the box, and pop the DVD into the player. With a downloaded copy you may need to jump through several hoops. For example tons of scene groups like to ship large movies as a collection of 20-30 rar files (this is how they dump it on usenet before it hits torrent sites). So you need to extract it. Most common question in the comments for each torrent is “how do I unpack this”. The second most common one is “how do I play this”. Usually you either get a disc image or a video file. You either burn it to CD/DVD or you might need a special player/codecs. And like Muhammad said, if you don’t burn it you will be watching it at your desk on your monitor screen instead of a big TV sitting on your couch.

2. Ok, my analogy is not perfect. Let’s assume that the ball park is surrounded by a ring of skyscrapers. Everyone who lives above ground level can peek over the fence. During big games thousands of people watch from the windows, balconies, roofs and etc. Is that better?

3. See above.

4. The only way to prevent tenants of the neighboring buildings from watching the game is to put a roof over the field which is actually very expensive. In addition one of ballparks revenue streams is from advertising blimps and planes which fly over the stadium during big games. Some advertisers even mount billboards on the roofs of the nearby buildings, and during big games hang banners and other advertising on the closest ones. Building a roof would mean giving up on all these advertising options.

5. I’m not a baseball nut, I was simply looking for something most people could relate to. ;)

@ vacri: I have a few comments for regarding the points you raised..

1) I wouldn’t agree that downloading the movie gets you a better experience. For starters, there’s no way you can emulate the whole giant theatre screen at home. A 46″ TV may be huge, but a 2-storey high screen is really something else altogether. Also, with DVDs, you could get 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound, deleted scenes, alternate endings, outtakes, bloopers, director’s comments, languages, subs, etc. For a normal 700MB or 1.4GB dvd-rip-of-the-movie download, all i get is the movie probably in 640×352 with 5.1 if the encoding is good. If you have the patience to download a DVD-R (4.7GB), but no goodies mentioned previously. Also, there is no guarantee that what you download is really the movie itself. Dun let me get into CAM, TS or TC quality.

2) I would assume that most downloads are music, as they are relatively small to download and easily found via P2P clients. Torrents, I feel, remain in the realm of the semi-savvy. And well-seeded public torrents are very hard to find.

3) As I have said before, well-seeded public torrents are very hard to find. On public trackers, once the download are finished, people simply don’t seed. I know. Cos I am one of them. There’s no incentive for me to let people leech off my bandwidth. And I think you’re over-simplifying the matter. If the ball park owners can erect higher walls, the kids can be savvy enough to build platforms enabling them to go higher than the tree (ala. diff forms of P2P technologies). Also, the tree is always growing right (ala. internet is also growing)?

4) The definition of data theft is wholly different from “normal-tangible-object” theft. The victim for “normal” theft is deprived of the stolen object; his car, money, etc. For a victim of data theft, can you also say that he is deprived of a sale? You can’t. Cos people who “stole” his data (music, movies, etc) may not buy it in the first place. That’s why loss incurred due to piracy is not actual loss but a projected loss, with the underlying assumption that everyone who pirated will buy. But of course, the assumption is always in super fine print and will never be part of a headline.

Also, you seem to be equating credit-card information copying to music/movie copying, which, to me, is vastly different! To me, the former is “normal theft” while the latter is “data theft”. With the credit card info, I am stealing a person’s money if I use that info, am I not?

5) Toe-may-toe, toe-mah-toe. Substitute “baseball” with the sport of your choice. It’s soccer for me. What’s yours? Hehe. :D

vacri, I hope you don’t regard this as a personal attack. Just my two cents. Feel free to point out where I’ve gone wrong! :)

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/05/015231&from=rss
Lets not forget how much they steal from the musicians.

Thank you very much for the tree analogy! I have been trying hard to convince my fiancee that downloading != stealing.

I guess the MPAA propaganda ad had really got to her. LoL! :P

Very nicely said. I wish more people would recognize this difference – imagine a musician trying to explain to someone who’s had their house done over, their computers, backup drives and the irreplaceable photos and documents contained within taken from them, that having your music pirated on bittorrent is “the same thing”.