Justifiable Piracy

[RThurmont]

My opinion on this matter is as follows:

I cannot condone infringement on other people's copywritten works, period. I also to some extent frown upon people doing things to public domain works to abuse the creator...a hypothetical example would be with the British composer Arthur Sullivan, who requested that his organ piece, The Lost Chord, never be played in burlesque. The copyright on that work, if indeed it ever had one, most likely expired in the 1950s, and someone would indeed be legally free to play the piece in burlesque, but doing so IMO would be extremely offensive, IMO.

Contrariwise, I detest DRM and what I consider "abusive copyright licensing." DRM is wrong, as it interferes with legitimate, fair use rights of consumers, and abusive copyright licensing is wrong, for reasons that vary, depending on why the licensing policy is abusive.

I advocate reform to current IP legislation that would accomplish the following:

- Forbid the use of DRM in distributed media. DRM could still be used by companies, government agencies, and private citizens, to control documents containing sensitive information.

- Legalize the re-distribution of non-distributed copywritten works. A consumer, who had a copy of a software program, that was no longer availible for sale, would be able to provide a friend with a copy of said program, provided they charged no money for it. This would effectively legalize abandonware, and it would also allow for a legal solution to Admiral Valdemar's problem: since the originally released version of the film was not distributed in his country, he would, under this legislation, be allowed to receive a copy of the original, unmodified version, from someone else, at no charge.

This would be onerous to comply with, and it would probably cause some headaches for Microsoft. Thus, the law would exempt "minor changes", including, for example, reapirs to sound track problems (i.e. if you accidentally released a film to a movie theatre with hisses in the sound track, and corrected it for the DVD, the DVD would not consitute a different work), bugfixes and security patches for software, and other such changes. To be eligible for redistribution under these terms, the variance between the availible work and the unavailible work would have to be material (and there already exist legal standards for determining materiality).

-Other consumer hostile practices, including, but not limited to, limitations on the number of devices an individual consumer could use the copywritten work on, and the use of region specific encoding, would be abolished.

The above legislation, I would argue, would be extremely fair to both producers and consumers of content, by protecting the rights of both. Additional measures could be inserted, to, among other things, legally affirm open source/free software/libre licensing, make it easier for small businesses and individuals to pursue IP litigation against infringers, and perhaps also better mechanisms for private corporations to prosecute government agencies for IP violations.

Of course, the above has exactly zero chance of happening.

As an aside, I'd argue that Republicans ought to support such a plan, as most media companies donate primarily to Democrats, and IMO, shaping legislative policy that both harms your opponent and benefits everyone else is strategically sound. The downside is that historically the GOP has failed to attack the media industry at all, fearing perhaps an even greater media backlash against them. IMO this is a tad retarded, given that most media outlets do nothing other than continuously pan the GOP in every conceivable way. This bill would have a chance of passing if the GOP wasn't so retarded in this respect, as the GOP votes + the votes of a few, how to put it, electronically informed, Democrats, would probably be enough. In other countries, I'm not aware of the political nuances this would have to deal with.

[General Zod]

My opinion on this matter is as follows:

I cannot condone infringement on other people's copywritten works, period. I also to some extent frown upon people doing things to public domain works to abuse the creator...a hypothetical example would be with the British composer Arthur Sullivan, who requested that his organ piece, The Lost Chord, never be played in burlesque. The copyright on that work, if indeed it ever had one, most likely expired in the 1950s, and someone would indeed be legally free to play the piece in burlesque, but doing so IMO would be extremely offensive, IMO.

I suppose you find artists like Weird Al offensive as well according to this logic? Though frankly I'm having a hard time seeing how an artist can be "abused" through remakes or parody.

Frankly if someone's going to bother asking people not to play their music in a certain way then they're going to come off as an uptight prick and probably deserve to be mocked for it.

As an aside, I'd argue that Republicans ought to support such a plan, as most media companies donate primarily to Democrats, and IMO, shaping legislative policy that both harms your opponent and benefits everyone else is strategically sound. The downside is that historically the GOP has failed to attack the media industry at all, fearing perhaps an even greater media backlash against them. IMO this is a tad retarded, given that most media outlets do nothing other than continuously pan the GOP in every conceivable way. This bill would have a chance of passing if the GOP wasn't so retarded in this respect, as the GOP votes + the votes of a few, how to put it, electronically informed, Democrats, would probably be enough. In other countries, I'm not aware of the political nuances this would have to deal with.

Why would the GOP attack the media industry when they practically have half of it in their pocket as it is?

[Big Orange]

I hope I Am Legend has the alternative ending for the SE version on DVD, but it does seem very pointless and spiteful that the orginal cut of 1408 is not commericially available, when they could've easily had two versions of 1408 available. And Hollywood having no ethics is reflected in the current WGA's strike being enabled by the studios' own short-sightedness, and the current music copyright laws lacking common sense and fucking over consumers.

Is it so wrong to either illegally download a television show or getting it on pirate DVD because the short sighted studios denied it being legitimately published on licensed DVD? It is unethical to get a pirate product that is a counterfeit of a widely available existing product, but if a product is not provided by the studios because of self-defeating copyright or other easily avoidable reasons, then they've only got themselves to blame by forcing consumers to get their products elsewhere from illegitimate sources.

[Darth Wong]

Of course different versions make sense. But that doesn't justify the region coding system. In case you're totally clueless about the region coding system, it actually LOCKS OUT players from the "wrong" region so they can't play the disc. That's why some people like to buy "region free" players, even though these technically violate copyright law.

I wasn't attempting to justify region-locking at all, though. I was just saying why having different versions for different areas make sense. That was the only part of Zixinus' post I had an issue with.

Zixinus was specifically talking about the region LOCKING system, in case you can't read. There was no part of his post which wondered why people in different countries might have different language preferences

[Admiral Valdemar]

The Region system was made from the start to manipulate the market. I'm pretty sure the MPAA themselves, along with the holy crusaders against consumer freedom in Hollywood studios, admitted as much. That it was soon made obsolete by the cracking of CSS and hardware companies finding a good niche market in multi-region players tells of yet another copyright ploy gone horribly tits up.

I expect if Blu-ray ever goes mainstream, that the same thing will happen to Sony's much beloved fascination with DRM. We've seen the system cracked before, and I don't see how they can keep ahead of the game without quite literally locking the content out to anyone at all.

I'm sure in their twisted minds, the CEOs of major media outlets would keep every copy of what they produce behind lock and key, like their precioussss.

[General Zod]

Zixinus was specifically talking about the region LOCKING system, in case you can't read. There was no part of his post which wondered why people in different countries might have different language preferences

Then I misunderstood what he meant about different "editions". To me that implies more than just region encoding.