Let us be clear—online piracy is a real problem that harms the American economy, and threatens jobs for significant numbers of middle class workers and hurts some of our nation's most creative and innovative companies and entrepreneurs. It harms everyone from struggling artists to production crews, and from startup social media companies to large movie studios.
One of these things is not like the others.
While we are strongly committed to the vigorous enforcement of intellectual property rights, existing tools are not strong enough to root out the worst online pirates beyond our borders. That is why the Administration calls on all sides to work together to pass sound legislation this year that provides prosecutors and rights holders new legal tools to combat online piracy originating beyond U.S. borders while staying true to the principles outlined above in this response.
We fully support the censorship of the internet, which baffles and scares us. However, this single step may have been too drastic. Please allow us some time to find stepping stones.
To me, bullshit indicates that the speaker does not actually believe what he says.
Is it possible that Obama just has different values from you? The way I read it, he very plainly is in favor of prosecuting copyright violators, and simply wants to eliminate some of the more egregious provisions of the currently proposed law.
I don't think Obama is trying to obfuscate that view in any way, and is being very clear about it.
Unless the WH response stated that explicitly, it's probably phrased specifically to sound like a reasonable position to everyone who reads it, regardless of their position.
Perhaps values themselves can be bullshit. The word sounds more like cursing than terminology, so when someone says that something is bullshit, it is not clear if the meaning is "something is a lie" or "something is incorrect" or something else.
Yes, if he doesn't believe what he says he is lying. If he doesn't care whether it's true or false, but feels what he's saying will further his goals, he's bullshitting.
Attempting to alienate the President from an official press release from the White House is pushing a bit too far on a technicality. His administration is responsible for the ideas expressed in that release, whether his name is on it or not.
I didn't mean to "alienate the president" from this in policy position terms, but speaking of rhetorical style and flourishes, it seems a little silly to use "Obama says" to cover anything written by anyone officially on behalf of his administration.
Any provision covering Internet intermediaries such as online advertising networks, payment processors, or search engines must be transparent and designed to prevent overly broad private rights of action that could encourage unjustified litigation that could discourage startup businesses and innovative firms from growing.
Proposed laws must not tamper with the technical architecture of the Internet through manipulation of the Domain Name System (DNS), a foundation of Internet security
etc etc
It's not a perfect statement, but real politics is about compromise.
Perhaps a solution can be found so goods manufactures can have some course of action against counterfeit-good websites, without it destroying the internet. I'm not sure what that solution could be, but we shouldn't preclude the possibility.
Politics isn't a compromise, it's a ratchet. The laws the entrenched interests want are rarely repealed - they are only passed. So we get the DMCA, but we never compromise and eliminate some of the bad parts. We get SOPA (perhaps watered down), and once it's passed, we'll never eliminate the bad parts. Then they try again.
In much the same way, the emergency of 9/11 is over, yet the patriot act still lives. Similarly, bureaucracies get created, but never seem to get destroyed.
Compromise slows things down, but it never seems to stop it. And compromise always goes one way. That's why we can't be satisfied with compromise.
Very few governments will ever willfully simplify themselves. The trend is always for more complexity, more departments, more officials, more wars, more government employees. This happened with the Maya, the Romans, the Egyptians, and practically ever other fallen civilization. That's because a civilization gets used to solving problems in a certain way and when they start to get a negative marginal return on their investment, they keep trudging along and eventually the society collapses unless there's a new source of technological capability that can keep things moving along. Anyway, that's just Joseph A. Tainter's "Collapse Of Complex Societies" in a nutshell for ya'.
Isn't this sentiment self-fulfilling, if shared by enough people? (full disclosure: although I don't work in politics, I live in DC and my SO works in congress).
When Lamar Smith held hearings on the bill, Google was the only anti-SOPA tech company invited to speak. Truth is, Google was a cynical choice for the token opposition, since they aren't very popular in congress right now — because of anti-trust, among other things — and they're terribly disorganized when it comes to politics. So there was no real tech input in crafting or modifying this legislation (I don't count GoDaddy). If this response is genuine in its request for legislation crafted by both sides of the issue, it will not be an amended version of any of the current bills. Anyway, I'm told that it's extremely unlikely SOPA will make it out of committee — non-judiciary members who don't have a stake in the issue are inclined to vote no after being flooded by constituent calls, and leadership doesn't like to introduce bills on the floor of the house that won't pass.
If you're offered a seat at the table, isn't it better to try to influence the process? Sure, if you get steam-rolled and ignored you have every right to complain and be angry, but why not do so when and if that happens, not before?
Better example: 18th amendment (1919) vs. 21st amendment (1933). Prohibition empowered three bureaucracies that were then disempowered over a dozen years later. I don't see how that can be seen as a ratchet.
There are many such examples from all over the world; millions if you look at the actual details of laws, rather than just the broad strokes.
Things are much worse now than they were pre-Prohibition. We have the awful three-tier system which means higher prices and less choice for consumers. Not to mention the accumulated brewing knowledge that was lost by Prohibition + a 45 year ban on homebrewing. It's only in the past 20 or so years that we've begun to undo the damage, and we're still worse off.
I would pick a different example. The 21st Amendment rescinded much of the power 18th Amendment gave, but then retained: "The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited."
So, perfect example of the ratchet effect: go forward, but then not all the way back. Okay, okay, ratchets don't allow any backward movement, but close enough.
Sure it does. Womens suffrage didnt repeal any laws, remove ant government powers, or destroy any beauracracies. Try repealing the 19th amendment and see how far you get.
> It's not a perfect statement, but real politics is about compromise.
We can't win by repeatedly compromising between the status quo and the extremist positions adopted by the MAFIAA. The best we can do is lose more slowly. To win, we need to take the offensive legislatively as well as technologically. I tweeted 25 proposals for this yesterday; here are a couple:
• Instead of fighting to keep DMCA's safe-harbor provisions, let's work to expand them. For example, make filing a false notice costly for the filer: provide a civil cause of action to the speaker whose speech is squelched, with statutory damages of, say, US$3000.
• Legalize noncommercial copyright infringement completely, as long as proper credit is given. The current copyright law was written over the course of 200 years with the idea that it was regulating the commercial activities of publishing companies, and it's far, far too complex to expect ordinary people to understand, particularly in relation to their hobbies. But over the last 30 or 40 years, it's accidentally come to apply every time you SMS your friends or celebrate a birthday in a restaurant. Laws should codify and enforce social norms, not contradict them. This proposal would bring copyright law in line with current social norms among the YouTube set.
• The NET Act redefined "commercial gain" to include the expectation of receiving copyrighted works. Repeal that, because otherwise it criminalizes BitTorrent. (It was actually enacted in order to criminalize David LaMacchia's open-access FTP site, which was a sort of mid-1990s version of MediaFire or DropBox.)
• Require all software developed under government contracts to be released as open source unless it's classified. Taking taxpayer money and investing it in the creation of privately-owned capital goods, such as valuable software copyrights, is straight-up corruption, bordering on embezzlement. If the taxpayers paid for it, they should have the right to use it, as long as that use doesn't interfere with the use it was built for.
• Eliminate FCC device approval for license-free bands like ISM 2.4GHz; prosecute only if illegal emissions occur. This would open up an immense space for hobbyist experimentation in new means of communication, and additionally make it a lot easier to get Wi-Fi cards working on Linux, since right now manufacturers claim the FCC forbids them from providing source to their radio firmware.
> Perhaps a solution can be found so goods manufactures can have some course of action against counterfeit-good websites, without it destroying the internet. I'm not sure what that solution could be, but we shouldn't preclude the possibility.
Yeah, but then the new class of "rightsholders" would have to pay for the enforcement of these new "rights" themselves. Surely they're entitled to have their "rights" enforced at others' expense.
When rights of Imaginary Property ("IP") are upheld more vigilantly than the rights of due process (see: Manning, NDAA, SOPA, PIPA, OPEN, etc), you know the system of checks and balances is broken.
Manning is being court-martialed under the UCMJ, like any other soldier would be, for leaking classified information. I don't see how either IP or lack of due process apply here. Manning is being given due process, and his offense had nothing to do with IP any more than that of Julius Rosenberg or Jonathan Pollard.
Compromise is appropriate and necessary when advancing civil liberties and protections that have traditionally been ignored by society, not when compromise involves abolishing existing protected liberties.
Its pretty clear that the government wants is to inject themselves in the whole distribution chain of online commerce, from advertising, search, payment, etc. DNS was just one link. That's pretty worrisome.
Is this "passivity" a critique or praise of Obama? Not to go too far off-topic, but...
Despite the economy and foreign policy being by far the most important issue throughout his presidency, his administration has been quite active and successful on LGBT issues.
They've repealed DADT, changed the rules for LGBT in foreign service and passed Matthew Shepard hate crimes legislation.
He's done all this without making LGBT issues a public spectacle, with a Congress that hates him and a public that hasn't made up its mind. It's for these reasons that HRC provides its full-throated support for Obama.
Again -- I'm sorry for derailing the SOPA discussion, but we should keep our facts and impressions well-founded or our primary arguments will fall flat.
"While we have serious concerns with SOPA as written, we look forward to working with the Committee to find focused mechanisms that effectively target foreign rogue sites. Already, Google and other companies are engaged in voluntary, industry-led efforts to attack the problem. As detailed below, we believe that legislation guided by common sense principles and focused on eliminating the financial incentives for rogue sites – while avoiding collateral damage – would receive wide support from the technology sector."
Not everyone who is against SOPA is also (publicly) OK with online piracy...they limit their arguments to the logistical problems introduce by SOPA enforcement
You put too much into their words, but it's simple, they just don't get it. And it's not just the US Government, or the UK Government, or any other Government, it's the entire ruling class who just sits with its head in the sand and wishes that things would just remain the same. The last two times when that huge of a disconnect happened we had the French Revolution and Lenin's grabbing of power in Russia, let's just hope that this time things will be smoother.
I disagree; actually, they _do_ get it. The ruling class gets it very well indeed. They saw the use of the Internet in the Jasmine Revolutions, and are shit scared about it spreading to other countries. This is why they want to jump in and get control of the Internet _now_, while there is still time.
This time they tried the excuse of music and movies (because hey, who doesn't like good music and entertainment?). Next time they'll try with something else (maybe the usual standby, child porn).
Make no mistake about it: SOPA/PIPA will happen, unless we really ratchet up the resistance. A few phone calls to a senator don't cut it. Users likes us, and companies like Google, Facebook, etc. need to put down some serious cash.
In what way do the authors of this statement "not get it"?
This thread seems to be full of a depressing amount of cynicism, FUD, or outright lies aimed at the people responsible, but it seems to be one big ad hominem. I don't see a lot of comments even trying to address the substance of the statement.
I do see several posts dismissing the whole response as empty rhetoric that doesn't say anything, even though there are several measures they say quite plainly and unambiguously they won't support (and it is good that they won't). OK, we get it, some of you don't trust Obama/government/the US/whoever. If you start from the position that they're just generating emtpy waffle to appease the critics, you have immediately rendered any contribution you might make irrelevant, since you presuppose that nothing you say matters anyway.
I don't see a single post acknowledging that any realistic official position on this sort of issue must strike a balance between addressing genuine problems with piracy and addressing genuine technical/ethical concerns with the measures used to do so. In fact, that's my big problem with much of the opposition to proposed laws like this: it's all reactive and complaining about bad laws, but no-one is stepping up to propose a real solution that is more technically and ethically acceptable and still does something about the original problem. Shouting abuse from the cheap seats isn't going to advance the debate in any useful way.
Sadly, the level of debate here is more like Slashdot lite than anything constructive: information wants to be free, they wouldn't have bought it anyway so it's not a lost sale, artists aren't entitled to any income and should just give live performances, the big media companies are asking for it with their consumer-hostile policies, intellectual property isn't real property and copyright infringement isn't theft, yada yada. It's just rationalising breaking the law, and I would bet good money that most people doing so haven't got the slightest clue about how many people work in creative industries and the real economics of those industries, though I'd also bet that the same people are among the first to complain about the state of the economy as their taxes go up, unemployment rises, their investment/pension returns fall, and so on.
So, can we please try to have a constructive, balanced debate about this issue from now on? We have clearly reached a tipping point. There is potentially more public awareness and support for action from other businesses both large and small now than at any time in a generation. We can make a robust case that the whole system is broken and needs to be restored to some kind of sanity that can be accepted as reasonable by most people and enforced against the remainder, or we can continue to throw stones at the glass house and convince the political classes beyond any doubt that the lobbyists are the only sane people in the game.
>I do see several posts dismissing the whole response as empty rhetoric that doesn't say anything, even though there are several measures they say quite plainly and unambiguously they won't support (and it is good that they won't).
I agree that there is rampant cynicism abound, but it is not without merit. Obama "quite plainly" (in fact, explicitly) doesn't support NDAA, yet he somehow managed to reconcile has lack of support with making the bill into law. The people believe the white house is full of shit.
>Sadly, level of debate here is more like Slashdot lite than anything constructive:
No HN post is complete without a smug jab at an inferior web community, great way to elevate the debate.
>yada yada. It's just rationalizing breaking the law
Another quality debate technique: aggregate every position enumerated by the silly neckbeards and broadly dismiss them all in a single rhetorical stroke.
>I would bet good money that most people doing so haven't got the slightest clue about how many people work in creative industries and the real economics of those industries
That is just insulting. Particularly on HN, many of those who take the positions you casually dismiss represent a surplus of extremely creative and successful software developers who endure the dubious menace of piracy on a daily basis. The reason these people say things like "do live shows" is because they responded to the reality of a digital world by creating value that is not intrinsically bound to a sequence of ones and zeroes (SaaS etc) instead of refusing to adapt.
>So, can we please try to have a constructive, balanced debate about this issue from now on? We have clearly reached a tipping point. There is potentially more public awareness and support for action from other businesses both large and small now than at any time in a generation.
I agree that a more constructive debate would benefit everyone, but we don't just throw all our ideas out the window in an effort to placate those who might just be on the wrong side of history.
In my mind I can theoretically believe piracy is costing someone somewhere some money.
My problem with this kind of legislation however is:
- that it vastly overestimates the real scale of the problem
- that when legitimate alternatives appear - like with iTunes vs music piracy - the problem tends to evaporate or at least start a significant downward trend
- that even if the 2 previous points were incorrect, it still doesn't take into account the relative weight of the problem it tries to correct and the problem it creates
So IMO, not implementing the legislation will not damage the other industries, while at the same time not impede the downward trend in piracy - provided legitimate alternatives are available. Implementing the legislation OTOH may or may not stop piracy quicker, at the cost of a lot of collateral damage.
If lawmakers absolutely must legislate something, I'd propose to make laws that remove barriers and obstacles to implement those "legitimate alternatives". For example, set up globally centralized licensing to break down geographic barriers, or an official way to figure out from who you need to license a song, a movie, code. Basically remove every obstacle between the consumer and the licensor. If that happens, I'm willing to bet that piracy will be a fraction of the problem it is now.
But yes, you'll never eliminate it completely - but I think that even the most strident pro-IP people realize they'll never be able to banish all piracy from this world.
>no-one is stepping up to propose a real solution that is more technically and ethically acceptable and still does something about the original problem.
To do that would be to accept the premise that there was an original problem. I think most people here would agree with me when I say that the current laws are entirely adequate to deal with online piracy. We've already compromised. Current laws restrict our free speech a little bit to protect the profits of copyright holders. I'd prefer if current laws were relaxed or repealed, Hollywood would prefer if my rights were infringed upon even more. In what way is the status quo not an adequate compromise?
> In what way is the status quo not an adequate compromise?
In the way that the current laws are flagrantly abused by significant numbers of people, at an unknown but substantial cost to the legal rightsholder.
Whether new laws are required to address this situation or more effective enforcement of existing laws would suffice is a different question, of course.
> In what way do the authors of this statement "not get it"?
The times are changing. I'm not saying "they don't get it" as in "they're stupid, they don't know what they're talking about" (they certainly do, otherwise they wouldn't have received lobby money), I'm just saying that they cannot see that the whole world is changing, or if they do see that, they have the audacity to think that they can do something to stop it.
Anyway, as a guy living in Europe this whole SOPA thing reminds me of one of Marx's stories, about a English industrialist in the mid 1800s who had just set foot in Australia and who wanted to mimic the same capitalistic conditions there (children working 16 hours per day etc.) as he had done in native England. But much to his surprise, Australia being a new world with new rules and capitalism not being a universal or Platonic-like truth, he wasn't able to exploit people in Australia as he used to do in England.
And about "cynicism", I know I'm probably in the minority, but to my knowledge there's nothing wrong with thinking critically about the world surrounding you and not just thinking that there's some "ideal" to which all those around you would eagerly submit.
I agree that the times are changing. The Internet provides us with a means to share information quickly and cheaply, with a wider audience than ever before, and it allows anyone from a single person working alone to a global business to contribute that information initially.
But some things are not changing. Good content does not create itself. Most of the time, the best content is not created by hobbyists working in their spare time, either. We've been trying this experiment for a while now, and everything from Open Source software to self-published books paints a very clear and consistent picture: while there are the occasional gems, most of the work simply isn't very good by professional standards.
Creating the most informative, useful, interesting or entertaining content usually involves a lot of hard work. Often that work is done by a whole network of people with specialist skills. Often that work is not particularly enjoyable or glamorous. Often that work is not done by people who are going to reap vast rewards if the product is a hit, but rather by people paid a relatively low wage for their efforts. Still, the people doing that work have rent to pay and mouths to feed and interests of their own to support.
Now, I will be the first to agree that modern copyright laws in many jurisdictions have gone way too far in some respects. That is harmful to consumers, because it prevents them from doing otherwise reasonable things (or punishes them if they do those things anyway). IMHO, it is also harmful to businesses, because any law that loses the support of the public by going too far also loses any useful impact to the extent that the underlying idea is reasonable.
But a lot of the nay-sayers in this debate seem to see only the free side of this situation. They see that the marginal cost of distribution is now near zero, and conclude that everyone should be entitled to good content for free because it's out there anyway. They ignore, deliberately or out of ignorance, the often very high fixed costs associated with creating good content in the first place, or they decide (within some ethical framework that I have never understood) that it's OK for other people to contribute to that cost but they don't have to themselves. Then they rationalise their position with the kinds of excuse I mentioned before.
If this trend continues, we will develop an entire generation with a horribly damaging entitlement culture, and unless a viable alternative economic model develops sooner rather than later, content production will become a race to the bottom and good content (by today's professional standards) will become one of those mythical things we explain to our grandchildren starting with the words "When I was your age...".
This is not inevitable. All it takes to stop it is near-global standardisation on a fair economic framework that promotes the creation of good content. Whether that is copyright or something else is an interesting question. But as long as we confine the debate to a black-and-white "Big Media Bad, Cheap Freeloading Good" or "Cheap Freeloading Bad, Big Media Good" result, no real solution is going to get anywhere and we're just going to see a continuing arms race between commercial content producers and freeloaders with increasingly absurd penalties hitting the players on both sides when they lose.
In my view, a utopian society produces a lot of high-quality art, which everyone is free to consume, to study, to modify and to share with a friend.
Laws concerning art should get us as close to that society as possible. We should value both our freedoms and plentiful art, not just the latter as you seem to be arguing.
Copyright and patents are a compromise: since there are no effective business models that generate high-quality liberated content, we will make do with high-quality restricted content instead. It's the poverty mentality: since we can't have both our freedoms and high-quality content, we'll take just the latter.
Increasingly, though, the premise of that compromise is no longer true. Thanks largely to the Internet, more and more businesses are successfully generating high-quality open source software, and more and more artists are distributing high-quality art that they encourage people to be creative with.
Since we don't need that compromise as much any more, one would expect to see IP laws get gradually less and less restrictive. Every year, we should be seeing fair use getting expanded, copyright terms getting shorter and software patents getting weaker. We don't need to abolish copyright and patents all at once, until we find good enough business models that are widely applicable. But we certainly don't need more laws like SOPA.
> "But some things are not changing. Good content does not create itself. Most of the time, the best content is not created by hobbyists working in their spare time, either. We've been trying this experiment for a while now, and everything from Open Source software to self-published books paints a very clear and consistent picture: while there are the occasional gems, most of the work simply isn't very good by professional standards."
I suggest you familiarise yourself much more with open source software. I would argue that the best operating system kernels, the best browsers, the best servers, the best programming languages, the best databases, the best virtualization software and the best media players are all open source. Most of these (such as Linux, Apache, Firefox, Chrome, Hadoop, etc) are not developed solely by "hobbyists", but primarily but by fully-paid developers. The same goes for books: a lot of O'Reilly's books nowadays are licensed freely, and yet they still make a profit. These products are definitely very good by professional standards. Computer engineers were the first to catch on to these business models, but they will spread to other types of art, just as the Internet is spreading across domains. The law should embrace this change, not resist it.
While it's tempting for me to caricature my idealogical opponents using examples of pithy, meaningless platitudes such as this one, I shall strive not to follow your example. If you really do value honest discussion, I think you'll find such preaching to be self-defeating.
> "...everything from Open Source software to self-published books paints a very clear and consistent picture"
Please do break this down with some stats and examples. You can't possibly be so naive to think this statement will be taken as axiomatic.
> "...while there are the occasional gems, most of the work simply isn't very good by professional standards."
Ah, an ad-hominem of your own, most self-righteously disguised. I am writing this comment entirely using tools that are covered under OSS licenses. I earn my living using the same tools, and my work is also covered under an OSS license. You'll note that I said "earn", and from that you might deduce that commerce and OSS are not mutually exclusive. You might also observe a counter-point to your rather haughty categorizations of "professional" and "hobbyist" creation. I even have hope that you may perceive the irony of accusing your opponents of being "black-and-white". Speaking of which...
> But as long as we confine the debate to a black-and-white "Big Media Bad, Cheap Freeloading Good" or "Cheap Freeloading Bad, Big Media Good"
You seem to have created your own personal straw-man using the most radical contingent of anti-IP viewpoints. I'm surprised you didn't call them freetards. Your post consists almost entirely of shallow, difficult-to-argue-with assertions seemingly aimed at thick-headed techno-communists. Do you honestly expect many folks here to recognize only the marginal cost of content production? Any answer other than "no" will tell me that you haven't been paying much attention. So long as you only hear what you want to hear, you won't be able to intelligently converse with the many folks here who are somewhere in between the extremes. Folks like me, who might say things like...
- I highly value content and the minds that produce it. Perhaps more than anything else, art is what makes life worth living for me. I require it, and I thus require content producers to produce it. I am willing to pay for it, but like everything else that I buy, the cost must be sustainable.
- Technology has long been at point where content is presented and used in its purest form: a totally non-rivalrous and totally non-excludable commodity. The carriers required in earlier times, e.g. books, CDs, etc., are no longer required. Any piece of content is now exactly equivalent to any other piece of information -- the words of a book, a song, a picture, an idea, a rumor, a number. There is nothing novel to me about the idea of copyright, or in its value as a temporary monopoly on the distribution of information intended to incentivize the creation of said information. Again, if you pay attention, I think you'll find this to be a commonly accepted notion around here.
- When non-rivalrous and non-excludable goods are treated like rivalrous and/or excludable goods for the purposes of regulation, bad things generally happen. The methods by which this must be done are obtuse, ineffective, and in my opinion, often unethical. Think censorship, DRM, security-through-obscurity, etc.
- It seems to me that if someone wants to make money from a completely non-rivalrous and non-excludable product, the onus is very much on them to distribute their product in a commercially viable way. Some artists are embracing the inevitable challenges of making money from information in today's market. The large distribution cartels (e.d. RIAA) have completely rejected them, and expect governments to maintain the old business models for them using force.
There is indeed much room for compromise, but be not mislead about the depth of the convictions of those who disagree with you, nor of the scope of their knowledge and experience.
You seem to have spectacularly misunderstood my position, and even reading back over the earlier posts in this thread, I honestly can't see why. I am in favour of balance, recognising that there is a genuine problem with piracy and real economic damage being done to creative industries, but also recognising that ill-conceived legislation like SOPA is not the way to fix it. I want to see a balanced legislative approach that restores copyright to something respectable and faithful to the basic idea without the excessive protections and penalties that have been developing in various jurisdictions today. But I also have no sympathy with the "information wants to be free crowd", because I think they are at best economically naive and at worst selfish freeloaders. I genuinely can't understand how my comments in the grandparent post seem to have convinced you that I am some sort of evil copyright zealot.
To address your specific points:
> Please do break this down with some stats and examples.
OK, Open Source first:
Linux vs. Windows/MacOS (on the desktop)
OpenOffice vs. MS Office or Apple iWork
GIMP/Inkscape/Scribus vs. Adobe Creative Suite
Blender and related tools vs. Autodesk suite and related tools
??? vs. Exchange Server
??? vs. Skyrim/Battlefield 3/any other AAA game you like
??? vs. any serious CAD package
??? vs. any serious business admin suite
And those are all big name products, the kind of thing where there is critical mass for developers to build and sustain a serious OSS project, and where there are plausible alternative revenue streams available via selling support, commercial sponsorship by a company that wants to software to exist for other reasons than selling it directly, etc. Generally, OSS does best in those sorts of areas: system/server software, programming software, geek toys, mass-market content production/consumption tools, basically anything a lot of geeks are going to be interested in. There are very few OSS success stories in more specialist niches or in building the kinds of professional software that keep businesses running.
As for self-published books, I'll give you the challenge on that one: please name one textbook that you would want your kids' school to use that was self-published by the author(s) without any sort of copyright-based incentive scheme but is as good or better in quality than textbooks produced following the traditional publishing route.
> Ah, an ad-hominem of your own, most self-righteously disguised.
You need to look up what ad hominem means. I am not attacking the creators of the work. I am attacking the quality of the work. There is no logical fallacy there.
> You seem to have created your own personal straw-man using the most radical contingent of anti-IP viewpoints.
The trouble is, they aren't particularly radical viewpoints among the anti-IP crowd. Read any debate on tech-heavy forums like this one or Slashdot, and you'll find plenty of people who really believe we should abolish penalties for any non-commercial copying of works under copyright. Plenty of people really do quote the "information wants to be free" line and use the near-zero marginal cost to justify rampant piracy while totally disregarding the fixed up-front costs of development. Plenty of people really do claim that piracy isn't costing copyright holders anything because there's no guarantee that anyone ripping a copy without paying would have paid for a legal copy anyway, a position about as plausible as the movie industry claiming that their actual losses due to infringement are greater than the global GDP. This is not some extreme caricature I've conjured up to make an argument. These are views publicly expressed by large numbers of anti-copyright advocates all the time. When faced with this sort of advocacy, often by people who are essentially defending breaking the law by claiming it's bad law, it's hardly surprising that politicians who aren't particularly technically literate are sceptical.
> Do you honestly expect many folks here to recognize only the marginal cost of content production?
Based on the overwhelming consensus of the comments that had been made when I wrote my first post to this thread -- not to mention the common groupthink on various other forums with an ongoing interest in this subject -- I not only expect it, I think it is pretty much proven beyond any doubt. A few more reasonable people have posted to this particular discussion since, fortunately.
> It seems to me that if someone wants to make money from a completely non-rivalrous and non-excludable product, the onus is very much on them to distribute their product in a commercially viable way.
And what way is that, exactly, if we don't enforce copyrights?
> Some artists are embracing the inevitable challenges of making money from information in today's market.
And they represent a tiny fraction of the content consumed today.
Indeed, one of the strongest arguments for the effectiveness of copyright as an economic tool and against the effectiveness of various oft-proposed alternative incentive schemes is that typically today's copyright laws don't prevent anyone from adopting one of the alternatives if it really does provide a better incentive. However, almost no-one has done so successfully.
> The large distribution cartels (e.d. RIAA) have completely rejected them, and expect governments to maintain the old business models for them using force.
That is how laws work. But bizarrely, a lot of people seem to think it's entirely reasonable for the law to prohibit copyright infringement, yet for the entire burden of finding infringers and bringing them to justice to fall on the copyright holder. I wonder how those people would feel if their houses were burgled and the police told them to do their own forensic work, arrest the burglers when they found them, and take them to court personally? Or, to give a more directly comparable scenario to avoid any concerns about comparing physical and intellectual property, how would those people feel if they were tricked out of a normal return on their retirement savings by professional fraudsters, and the police gave a similar response?
> There is indeed much room for compromise, but be not mislead about the depth of the convictions of those who disagree with you, nor of the scope of their knowledge and experience.
The scale of global piracy makes the convictions of those who disagree with me (or just don't care) quite clear.
Additionally the timing is very "suspicious". When already a co-sponsor of the bill announces that some re-drafting is necessary it seems like a very convenient timing to join the train.
One of these things is not like the others.
While we are strongly committed to the vigorous enforcement of intellectual property rights, existing tools are not strong enough to root out the worst online pirates beyond our borders. That is why the Administration calls on all sides to work together to pass sound legislation this year that provides prosecutors and rights holders new legal tools to combat online piracy originating beyond U.S. borders while staying true to the principles outlined above in this response.
We fully support the censorship of the internet, which baffles and scares us. However, this single step may have been too drastic. Please allow us some time to find stepping stones.