I’m sure many of us believe in following and enforcing laws (even flawed laws like 150yr copyright), but are still made uneasy by this development. I think the source of that discomfort is - what happens if your service is cut in error. Do you trust ATT to have a fair, easy appeals process?
Competition in the form of space internet can’t come soon enough, not to enable pirates, but to ensure normal people have reasonable service levels and alternatives to unfair decisions.
References to 150-year copyrights is (deliberate or not) pure obfuscation. We're talking about downloading the latest box office hits†, not century-old texts bound by unjust extensions to copyright.
The story doesn't have any such details. Please remember that the most famous such case, the prosecution of Aaron Swartz until he committed suicide, was for downloading academic papers from JSTOR, presumably including many century-old texts, and that the current best system for obtaining academic papers you're legally allowed to get — Sci-hub — is on the receiving end of a series of lawsuits from companies who didn't even write the texts being copied in the first place and never paid their authors.
It has everything to do with the story because it shows that most copyright claims are done in absolute bad faith and consumers are given no real tools to defend themselves.
Right now for the majority of people who get a DMCA, there is nothing they can do. There is no functional appeals process, there is no office in charge of handling bad DMCAs. Shy of actually going to court with a lawyer and attempting a suit, if a company files a bogus DMCA then you are boned.
That is an abortion of free speech and property rights, and the Swartz case is a perfect example of that. Most of the papers Swartz obtained were supposed to belong to the public, and yet he was sued into oblivion for DOING NOTHING ILLEGAL. He had no counterclaim short of going to full court with lawyers, something entirely out of his grasp and reach, and because he felt he had no alternatives to having his life ruined, he committed suicide.
It's not a farcical tragedy, it's a flipping shame for the human race.
At has at least 2 things to do: it involves copyrights, and it shows that copyright enforcement (and strict at that) is not just about "the latest hits" (like with movie/music piracy for example).
Personally I can't feel guilty about it. Copyright was a compromise. A limited privilege of exclusive rights to encourage the creation of new works after which they would fall into the public domain and everyone would have full access to them.
Companies have gone back on their end of that bargain and now we have perpetual copyrights and new works will never enter the public domain. Deal broken, I feel no need to uphold my end by respecting the rights they were granted.
Sure. But it's not intellectually honest to justify downloading terabytes of the latest Hollywood blockbusters on the grounds that it's unfair that those downloads are treated the same as century-old texts. You're smuggling in an irrelevant grievance.
> what happens if your service is cut in error. Do you trust ATT to have a fair, easy appeals process?
This is where many of the arguments against government regulation break down. If you take government out of the picture, you're still left dealing with massive institutions and bureaucratic regulations. The main difference is that those institutions are even less accountable to the average person than the government, and they have obvious interests in tilting every table to advantage themselves.
Dealing with a corporate bureaucracy is dealing with a regulatory body that's been totally captured by that corporation.
> This is where many of the arguments against government regulation break down. If you take government out of the picture, you're still left dealing with massive institutions and bureaucratic regulations.
This is only true of uncompetitive markets. If Target refused to sell you clothes because someone made a false copyright infringement claim against you, you would laugh in their face and go shop at any of a thousand other stores. And for exactly that reason they don't even attempt to do things like that.
Moreover, in many cases the regulations are what make markets uncompetitive. Providing internet service to urban areas is highly lucrative and has relatively low costs -- if you could pull $40/month from each of a hundred people just for wiring a single high rise, companies would be lining up left and right to do that. But you aren't allowed to do that without also providing service to an area covering hundreds of square miles, including random farmhouses that are ten miles apart from one another. A competent government would instead solve that problem through direct subsidies to providers who expand into rural areas (or leave it to the market to figure out how to connect sparse farmhouses with some kind of medium-speed directional wireless or similar), and then there would be more competition. But we haven't got that.
Moreover, even when there are actual natural monopolies (like roads or rural internet) that can justify government involvement, what works best in those cases is often for the government to just provide the thing directly rather than trying to regulate some independent private entity with a 96% chance of capturing the regulators.
> "This is only true of uncompetitive markets. If Target refused to sell you clothes because someone made a false copyright infringement claim against you, you would laugh in their face and go shop at any of a thousand other stores. And for exactly that reason they don't even attempt to do things like that."
what you say would be true of (increasingly rare) mom-and-pop shops, but the relationship you use is highly asymmetric and favorable to the large bureaucratic organization, no matter the competitive dynamics of the market. target would be the one laughing in your face, not the customer.
the false dichotomy of preferring one bureaucracy over another because one is private and the other public is silly (in case it's unclear, you should prefer neither).
the rest of what you said is reasonable however. direct provision, direct subsidies, or removal of regulatory barriers in rural access would be better than the convoluted compromise we have now.
> target would be the one laughing in your face, not the customer.
Target has a thousand competitors selling substantially identical products for similar prices. Walmart, Amazon, eBay, Kmart, Costco, Staples, J.C. Penney etc. They have no market power.
By contrast, if you can't get internet from Comcast you basically have to move to another state.
and yet, target can mark up their products higher on average than the competitors you named (e.g., http://blogs.marketwatch.com/great-columnist/2012/10/15/reta...). so they really have no market power? why do you think target spends so much on branding?
really understanding a firm's market power and the competitive dynamics of it's market requires a bit more depth than noting that products are similar.
(there are also different forms of market power, but i'll leave that for another day)
> and yet, target can mark up their products higher on average than the competitors you named
Costco and Amazon have lower unit margins because they charge annually for memberships or Prime. Walmart has lower nominal markups because they don't use promotions, so all their nominal markups are their actual markups rather than regularly getting eroded by promotions.
When it all shakes out, the thing that costs ~$15 at Target costs ~$15 at Walmart.
> why do you think target spends so much on branding?
That's what companies with no market power do. They can't significantly raise prices so they push to drive sales volume.
> really understanding a firm's market power and the competitive dynamics of it's market requires a bit more depth than noting that products are similar.
On the other hand, when they're independently selling the same product for the same price...
Branding isn't pricing power. If you see a McDonald's, you know what's in there. It may not be a premium product, but it's consistent, and consistency is worth something.
Buying a branded product is really buying two separate products. One is the commodity and the other is certification of the commodity by the brand. People might pay more for a product certified to be a known quantity than one that isn't, but that isn't the same as market power because certification can be a commodity too. Some random hole in the wall can't compete with McDonald's on being known and consistent, but Burger King and Wendy's can, which is sufficient to keep their prices in check.
Charging more because you're providing something some competitors don't have is not market power when some different competitors do have it.
> Moreover, in many cases the regulations are what make markets uncompetitive.
Regulation is necessary to prevent monopolies, and monopolies by definition make markets uncompetitive. Antitrust regulation protects capitalism from itself. Unfortunately the Antitrust division of the Justice Department has not been doing its job for several decades.
Antitrust enforcement is a completely different type of regulation than most others because the number one problem with most regulations is that they harm small businesses and add fixed costs that promote business consolidation. By contrast, antitrust by its nature applies only to very large businesses and does not have that problem.
Yep. We need government, because without government nobody would save us from the abuses of copyright law, enforced by the government! And let's not forget, there is no competition - because the ISP has a legal monopoly, also enforced by the government.
>> "A natural monopoly is a monopoly in an industry in which high infrastructural costs and other barriers to entry relative to the size of the market give the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, an overwhelming advantage over potential competitors. This frequently occurs in industries where capital costs predominate, creating economies of scale that are large in relation to the size of the market; examples include public utilities such as water services and electricity.[1] Natural monopolies were discussed as a potential source of market failure by John Stuart Mill, who advocated government regulation to make them serve the public good."
> Yep, government regulation sounds great. /s
You're right, it does sound great; especially when you remove the blinders of misunderstanding. Admittedly, it's not entirely without it's own problems, but those problems are best solved without re-introducing the problems that regulation successfully mitigates.
Despite popular belief, ISPs are not geographical monopolies at all. When they are monopolies, they are purely artificially formed ones, like in the US.
As you hint at, this is also a space where the FCC considers dial up and cell phone service (AFAIK) to be competitors when it comes to regulatory requirements. I got some copyright notices from a roommate's habits and Comcast was the only high speed ISP that was available at my house. Given that my work involves regular working from home, this was highly concerning.
At least they (Comcast) just send you an email now and don't inject their notices into the HTML of the websites you're visiting like they were doing a few years ago. It was basically a MITM attack, done by the ISP.
AT&T is not going to be too eager to cut your service. They want your $50 - $150/month (or more) if they can get it.
FTA: The bottom line: Very few copyright infringers ever get booted from their broadband provider, pointing to the severity of these cases and the number of steps at which the customer is told they are violating copyright before they are cut off from AT&T's service. Copyright infringers are often illegally pirating hundreds of hours of stolen content, not a song or two from their favorite band.
They might feel it's worth it to lose that money in the short term if they can make an example out of pirates and try to establish account termination for unproven allegations of infringement as an industry standard practice. Long term it isn't smart but there are media industry mouthpieces claiming they will be losing $52 billion to internet piracy by 2022. How many DSL customers will they be willing to drop if they think it'll help stop the billions their parent companies are "losing" annually.
Competition in the form of space internet can’t come soon enough, not to enable pirates, but to ensure normal people have reasonable service levels and alternatives to unfair decisions.