I agree with most of what you say except one crucial point. I think we
should stop calling file sharing of all-rights reserved works piracy.
There is some point where it ceases to be useful to use the term piracy
and we must call it stealing.
Piracy is a great marketing strategy for software companies. Many
students cannot afford the licenses of the softwares their courses
require them to purchase so they steal the software. So the students
'pirate' it which in the end works well for the producers of the software.
Calling this piracy softens the blow on the proprietary software
companies - they are not turning students into pirates (this term is too
soft and has too many +ve connotations in many parts of society). The
software companies are criminalising the students - turning them into
criminals of necessity.
That is how stupid copyright is and how stupid and blind educational
institutions are.
We need to do the same with books - stop calling it piracy. Call it
stealing and start a movement not to 'pirate' but to not steal ie.
produce free content. Don't tell a student to pirate a book or software
tell them to get involved in a movement requiring and producing free
software and free content.
adam
On 01/29/2012 06:51 PM, h w wrote:
Adam wrote:
=========================================
We need to get rid of these fears, stop hiding behind licenses,
upholding old values and processes of closed culture within free culture and
embrace the values and consequences of free culture no matter how uncomfortable
they might be.
=========================================
Normally I am a total lurker on this list. I was very active some years ago.
I've been following this discussion, and what I quoted from Adam above is,
IMHO, a really crucial and important point. Simon (Hi Simon!) asked about the
legalistics, and that is also a good question. I think it is also a question
that comes out of the fear that Adam describes above, and it is a real one.
What this discussion is dancing around is Power. The media companies have it, and the
rest of us don't. The media companies get to call file sharing, "Piracy". I
never understood how some 12 year old boy in the comfort of his mother's basement
downloading Katie Perry's latest offence against 40,000 years of music making is some how
morally equivalent to the forcible seizure of watercraft by a gang of armed bloodthirsty
thugs hellbent on the slaughter and/or enslavement, rape, and pillaging of the crew, the
theft of the boat's contents, and then the final gleeful burning and murderous sinking of
the vessel and all left on board.
So, firstly - it's not PIRACY. It is file sharing or file trading. Stop calling
it Piracy, and if someone calls it Piracy, correct them. If they insist on
calling it Piracy, tell them you will not discuss the matter until they use
your language. That's my beef with the Pirate Party. By adopting the epithet as
an appropriation of a term to be worn as some badge of honour is a dated tactic
and suboptimal at best. It doesn't help the argument and it obfuscates what is
really going on: file sharing. So, please: It's Not Piracy. Period.
Secondly - we need to get over the notion that the Internet is rhizomatic and
flexible. Egypt proved otherwise. Sure, some people quickly routed around it,
but for the vast majority who are not tech saavy, the internet went dark for
them. SOPA and PIPA and C11 and ACTA are all just more nails in the coffin. The
Internet is now arboretic - it is stiff and lacks flexibility - it is being cut
into planks and nailed together into walled gardens as we speak. That's the
whole point of replacing laptops with mobile devices.
Thirdly - people want files. They are easy to copy. My research has found that
most of the pdf files of full length books I've DL'd tend to be around 5 megs
in size. ePubs are smaller - averaging around 750k to 1 meg. The library at the
school where I teach has about 550,000 books. At 1 meg each, that's 550 GB of
ePubs, a few terabytes of pdfs. As epubs, the entire library would fit on a
drive I can buy this afternoon for $69. I could dupe that drive very quickly
via USB3. Why my university doesn't simply distribute such drives to each
student when they pay their student fees would elude me if it wasn't for Adam's
point about fear...
Fourthly - A license that says "use this I don't care" is not a license. A license has to be
enforceable as it is a contract, and a contract has to be enforceable otherwise it's not a contract. It's
just a proposal or a statement. If it is not enforceable, it is not a license. This means that without state
sanctioned violence that is necesary for the enforcement of contracts and the disposition of property you
cannot have a "use license". You can make a statement "Use this I don't care" and that's
fine. But anything that has any restriction must have enforceability and consequences for infraction. The
consequences are backed by state sanctioned violence. Because that's how civilisation works. The problem
isn't license. The problem isn't even the illusion of property. The problem is this notion of civilisation,
where people live in such density in specific areas that the importation of resources is REQUIRED. That is
where the violence begins, and this is
the source of the fear that Adam describes.
The first step is to re-set our notions of property. That's a different
discussion, and I need to go prepare lunch for my family....
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--
--
Adam Hyde
Founder, FLOSS Manuals
Project Manager, Booki
Book Sprint Facilitator
mobile :+ 49 177 4935122
identi.ca : @eset
booki.flossmanuals.net : @adam
http://www.flossmanuals.net
http://www.booki.cc
http://www.booksprints.net
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