[r0ckstarr]

Hey Metallica, I am not going to buy your cd's, dvd's, or go to your overpriced concerts. But, I will download your music off of the internet so that I can admire it for inspiration while I am driving in my car.

I wonder what they would think of that.

Oh, wait....

[jstevewhite]

Hey Metallica, I am not going to buy your cd's, dvd's, or go to your overpriced concerts. But, I will download your music off of the internet so that I can admire it for inspiration while I am driving in my car.

I wonder what they would think of that.

Oh, wait....

LOL! I got one of those messages many years ago, when peer-to-peer first came out. I had all the Metallica albums on vinyl, and was collecting high quality digital rips via p2p (of the music I already owned). They sent me the notice that if I didn't stop downloading their shite they would sue me. I sold all their albums ( hoping a used sale cost them a new sale ), deleted all their music, and stopped listening to it. I'm not interested in supporting a band that will sue their fans. Particularly when a man who declared $12m us on his taxes that year tells a reporter he wakes up in the middle of the night worried and sweating because someone is STEALING HIS MUSIC. LOL.

[Chex]

I gladly dl'd most of their albums when all that napster crap hit the fan, and I don't even listen to them, I think Lars and the rest of those clowns should remove their heads from their ashes

[debbie]

That means the person got my copyrighted photo for free, which means a photo I could have sold, didn't and I got nothing out of having that photo for sale.

If you have a photo for sale and intend to keep the original, as in being able to reproduce it in an unlimited number, how much is one copy worth?
Why do you think prints (photos and graphical ones) are made in limited series?

Because it is otherwise worthless. This is how it works, art is also an economy and has the same rules applied to it as other economies.
Rarities are always more expensive for a reason. Its rare!

A low-res reproduction of a photo in an unlimited series, what kind of money did you miss?

[jstevewhite]

If you have a photo for sale and intend to keep the original, as in being able to reproduce it in an unlimited number, how much is one copy worth?
Why do you think prints (photos and graphical ones) are made in limited series?

Because it is otherwise worthless. This is how it works, art is also an economy and has the same rules applied to it as other economies.
Rarities are always more expensive for a reason. Its rare!

A low-res reproduction of a photo in an unlimited series, what kind of money did you miss?

Good observation, speaking to actual damages (Which used to be the standard for copyright infringement).

[RioRico]

That means the person got my copyrighted photo for free, which means a photo I could have sold, didn't and I got nothing out of having that photo for sale.

That's exactly right. Well, sort of. They likely would not have bought the photo from you anyway. So your gain was only potential, and your loss was imaginary. As with copied music: 14 zillion downloads doesn't mean 14 zillion lost sales; there's no way to compute a loss without polling each of the 14 zillion downloaders as to whether they might have paid (and hoping they tell the truth).

And as I mentioned here, posting ANY file ANYWHERE on the net means that the file is copied onto the computers of ALL those who access it. Despite what copyright laws may lead you to believe, once you post something, you no longer control it. You have GIVEN UP control (and ownership, effectively) by posting it. IF someone tries to exploit it commercially in a jurisdiction you can access, and IF you can afford legal costs, you MIGHT have legal recourse, and MIGHT gain satisfaction. In USA you can file for a DMCA takedown, and good luck with it.

This loss of control applies to physical media as well. Anything that CAN be digitized WILL be digitized (if anyone cares) and WILL be posted and WILL go feral. Publications and prints are scanned, recordings are ripped, electronic signals are intercepted, etc. Ownership is an illusion. The bag is empty, the cat is gone. Welcome to the New World Order.

[jstevewhite]

That's exactly right. Well, sort of. They likely would not have bought the photo from you anyway. So your gain was only potential, and your loss was imaginary. As with copied music: 14 zillion downloads doesn't mean 14 zillion lost sales; there's no way to compute a loss without polling each of the 14 zillion downloaders as to whether they might have paid (and hoping they tell the truth).

And as I mentioned here, posting ANY file ANYWHERE on the net means that the file is copied onto the computers of ALL those who access it. Despite what copyright laws may lead you to believe, once you post something, you no longer control it. You have GIVEN UP control (and ownership, effectively) by posting it. IF someone tries to exploit it commercially in a jurisdiction you can access, and IF you can afford legal costs, you MIGHT have legal recourse, and MIGHT gain satisfaction. In USA you can file for a DMCA takedown, and good luck with it.

This loss of control applies to physical media as well. Anything that CAN be digitized WILL be digitized (if anyone cares) and WILL be posted and WILL go feral. Publications and prints are scanned, recordings are ripped, electronic signals are intercepted, etc. Ownership is an illusion. The bag is empty, the cat is gone. Welcome to the New World Order.

Brilliant! Unfortunately, there are those who make it their solemn goal to put the cat back in that bag - at gunpoint, if necessary (some infractions under the DMCA are criminal!).

[rworegon]

Cable companies issue DVD-R's specifically for reproducing and copying shows and movies you miss. You later view them for home/personal use. I've never seen a cable company be taken into court for providing this equipment, and you never see lawsuits involving movie execs suing home viewers who have copied their movies. In the days of VCR's was anyone ever sued for copying TV shows or movies? Of course not, but only if they turned around and publicly broadcasted them later or tried to sell them.

Ever heard the audio they play during every NFL and MLB game. They explicitly state that this broadcast is the property of "insert team name here" and intended for the private use of our audience, any rebroadcast blah blah blah of the accounts of this game without the expressed written permission of " insert governing body here" are prohibited.

If this is being aired on television somebody paid for it, if its on cable that somebody includes you. Therefor you can record it on your DVR and watch is as many times as you want. What you can't do is rebroadcast it, or the highlights publicly.

The same should apply to photographs created by photographers who are professionals. ie. people who make their living off photography. Unfortunately in todays world its a "gimme what I want now for free" mentality.

If you're posting photo's on the web and don;t want them to be printed, copied, etc, put a big old ugly watermark on em. Honest folk will not use them anyway but most people aren't honest.

[magkelly]

A few years ago right before the advent of home DVD recorders a cable guy came out to look at our cable modem set up and I had to run some tests on my computer to check to make sure my network card was working properly with it. I accidentally clicked on the TV card icon and brought up the recorder software that I used in lieu of a VCR. I had just started saving my shows onto DVD's realizing that soon VCR's would be obsolete and that I would need to have them on DVD to still be able to watch them.

He about had a fit at the sight of it. He told me I had no right to be using my computer as a VCR and that making digital recordings of their TV shows and saving them to disk was nearly criminal. I politely reminded him that I was paying for cable and for access to those shows to the tune of more than $125 a month and told him I would continue to record my shows in my way for my own viewing, period. I also told him that I already had plenty of VHS tapes to transfer to DVD when VCR's would be replaced with DVD recorders and that I didn't need any more.

He said "Well, you'll have to just buy replacement DVD's then, won't you?"

A couple of days later I got a phone call from a local supervisor who basically tried to convince me that recording my shows on my computer to DVD wasn't permitted and that I had to have a cable box installed something I had till then avoided. I knew why because I had worked for this cable company at one time. They wanted to make sure that the only access I had to their programs was via the cable box, so they could scramble the signal for the upper tiers of the channels so that my TV card could no longer bypass their modem and record directly to my computer.

I told them no, and the guy actually threatened to yank my cable entirely. I told him to go right ahead and that I would just go elsewhere to get my shows, my phone service and my internet. He backed down pretty quickly after that but continued to grumble.

Now the funny thing about this is a year later DVD recorders got cheap enough for everyone to buy and they became common appliances, replacing VCR's only a few years later. So less than a few years after this discussion tons of people were by then recording their shows in digital format. The only difference between what I prefer to do and the way everyone else prefers to record their shows is that many DVD recorders won't allow you to record in digital format and then rip the resulting DVD to your computer.

Since I don't like to waste DVD or shelf space, having merely 3 shows on a dvd doesn't work for me. I usually record 11 episodes to a disk using xvid format. That way a season of a show takes up only 2 DVD's instead of 8. Simple right? Well, if my local cable company had their way I would not be able to do that at ALL.

Let's face it the ultimate goal of anyone who makes any kind of media, be it a DVD, a CD, or printed media is to convince the consumer to buy more of the same thing. The seller doesn't want the consumer to be able to make their own comparable copies of anything that they want to sell. If they can, to them, that's lost business. But some people won't just buy and buy and buy and digital formats are making that less and less of a necessity.

In terms of the most beloved artists in my music collection I have literally bought their entire catalog from album, to tape, to CD, to in some cases gold CD/DVD. I am not about to also go out there and buy digital formats as well just so I can have their music on my MP3 player. I am not about to go out and purchase every show I ever taped on VHS (Some of which are unavailable and which will likely never be released to DVD anyway!) on DVD just to be able to watch them on my computer. (Which is my personal TV now actually...) Most of the time even if I wanted to do that I have to fight DRM crap just to be able to record them to disk. Might as well buy the DVD's anyhow and in many cases I just don't want to do that, or can't.

I'm not made of money and I already have the VHS tapes. So why should I spend $25-100 per season just to get DVD's of shows I already spent hours and hours taping? I did the same thing with my professionally done VHS tapes actually. I just bypassed the scrambling device they used on old VHS tapes and made digital recordings of the VHS tapes I already owned rather than buying new ones.

If I want to buy a TV series on DVD I will, but I seldom do, honestly, and I don't buy CD's much anymore either. I save buying in professional formats for things I really want to have extra good copies of, like my absolute favorite, must have in the best quality possible, TV shows, and even then I make copies and archive the original to save the original media. That's a habit I have had since I bought my first cassette tape and you know what? It has served me well doing that.

I have TV shows and recordings of things I could never get now. Things that I listen to ALL the time and that had I lost to time I would have been very sad not to have. I would not have those things if I had not flouted the wishes of the media companies to make my own backups.

Getting back to photographs? Ditto some images I've acquired over the years. I have copies of photos from magazines saved to digital format that I use for wallpapers et all that I could never replace now, even if I wanted to. I'm not one for getting my own pic taken, but the ONLY set of photos I am really happy with, the ones that I had taken when I was 19? The only reason I have them is because I insisted upon retaining a set of the negatives for the shoot at the time. I'm really glad I did because a few years ago when I went to find the guy? To have him make a larger, nicer print for me of one of them? He was deceased and his widow had destroyed all of his negatives that were left.

My personal opinion on this kind of thing is rather mixed. As a photographer I would like to have people come to me for prints of my work, but let's face it, sh- happens, people lose their records and their work all the time, things go out of print, and we never know that we CAN get what we need from the original producer of said item down the road.

Recently a major genre magazine lost their entire archive of back issues to a warehouse fire. The only thing that saved their arse when it happened was that the fans of the magazine, the people who had bootlegged every single issue, stepped up with full digital copies. If it had not been for people like this all record of that great magazine, would have been lost. There are great films out there that are being restored because of people like this. One day? Who knows? I might just be very grateful that I have people out there with bootleg copies of my work. Conversely, I am territorial about where I post my stuff online, but I'm often not too sure that my being quite so anal about that is a good thing. I've already lost a few good photos, some good music, and some writing I did to bad CD backups....

[Schraubstock]

Hi
I am not sure what I write here is relevant to the topic, but let me put his argument into the mix:

I never understood the principal of royalties paid to, say, composers of music.
They write a song(s) put it on LP/CD and get paid every time one of those is sold. O.K. But now they get paid also when a song of theirs is played on radio or elsewhere in public...

I am a mattress manufacturer, I sell mattresses to a public place called a hotel. Now I have made a profit selling the mattress to the hotel once but I also think I should (like the song writer) be entitled to a royalty every time a guest of the hotel sleeps on my sold mattress. That would be fair wouldn't it?

Greetings

[RioRico]

If you have guilds and corporate associations that can *persuade* legislatures-parliaments-congresses to write laws granting you royalties on usage of your mattresses, then yes, it's fair. If not, tough patootie. In our IP legal environment (in USA anyway), composers/writers get mandated royalties, and performers get whatever is in the contracts they sign. Is that fair? This has been fought over politically and legally for a long long time. And don't get me started on the absurdity of many IP laws and the criminality of many of the players. Grrr...

Bottom line: Form a power matress-makers' lobby. Bribe and coerce lawmakers, judges, cops. Hire thugs; form alliances with criminal syndicates. You'll get your laws, your royalties. Have fun.