On copyrights and piracy

[Deadman1709]

I usually put these kinds of monologues in the Sickos box, but this is less sensitive so I put it here.

The war between copyrights holder, publishers and large corporations and pirates has been and will likely to be continuing for quite some time. [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] has launched a crusade against people downloading music in America. The RIAA first blackmail the victim into paying a few thousand dollars; and if they refuse, they take it to the court and ask for ~20000-30000 US$ compensation per song downloaded. And they usually claim ~20 songs or so. And with their army of minion lawyers, they already have a nice kill streak. On RIAA note, you gotta agree that Singapore Odex basically got the right idea, but they had some slip-ups: Singapore’s law wasn’t on their side (American law is on RIAA side). But just imagine what would happen if Odex is another RIAA. Otakus in Singapore will crap themselves. On a brighter (or darker note), Singapore does criminalize piracy (aka: piracy is a crime and a felony, punishable by jail time or fine or both) while USA does not criminalize. Piracy and copyright infringement are within the realm of US non-criminal laws.

Other cases also show the intensified efforts: the recent war on scanlators by manga publishers. Ubisoft’s cut-throat Digital Rights Management of recent games. The [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] of an anime licensor CEO recently as well.

Anyway, people say different things about the root of this war, depending on the side they make. Anti-copyrights advocates will hold corporate greed at fault. The “pirated” works should not be commercialized and the people should be able to enjoy them freely. Large corporations keep chanting the mantra (as well as Singapore’s government) “piracy is stealing/a crime/, etc …” and point fingers at the people’s greed. “Pay up motherfuckers!” is probably their modus operandi.

My view is that even though I myself is a pirate, I have to agree that the corporatists has some truth to it. For every piece of thing you can pirate the shit out of it, at the end of the day, some people still need that product to be sold so that they can pay for their homes, their food, and their lives. The author of a book, a manga. The crews necessary to get the book out to the people. In the case of movies and animations: just know that there’s a lot of people. These people depend on their work to make some profits to make ends meet. Having said this, I’m not saying that the corporations’ actions were entirely rights, certainly some rich people get an unequal and undue cut of the profit; the anti-copyright people also have a point here. But that’s not the main point here. The point is for these people, the work of art is a kind of labour: they trade it with you in return for money.

And you have to then accept the cruel fact that without these large business, the favourite thing you just pirated will not have the same fame or quality otherwise. Call of Duty will not be itself without Activision (but they were kind of douche lately). Bleach, Naruto or any manga will not achieve the fame they got without publishers. Linkin Park will not be Linkin Park if not for the large recording industry. What you may get instead would be a plethora of products with varying quality, and not some mainstream, very famous and quality works. You may argue that without companies, people can put out excellent works but you have to agree that they generally don’t have the same capacity to market it as large companies. Also, without the sales, there is a lack of motivation for good works.

Well, the above points can be debated endlessly. But the main point of this monologue (pardon the lengthy intro to the problem) is not to point fingers or to decide who’s right. But rather to see if anything can be done to change all this.

I boil down the root cause of the war to three main points:

1) The authors need to earn money from their work. It’s no longer the romantic: “I just want my work to be read”. They need to be SOLD, as their works are usually their main source of labour to trade in with people.

2) The people who fund the authors (publishers, etc …) need the product to sell and to profit from it. It can be pure human greed or the need to fund the next project.

3) No one among the first 2 people and the pirates wants to give in. They all want to get the most for the least. Pirates want everything without paying a quarter. Corporations sure don’t want to give in and so are the authors.

To end the war once and for all, you need to address the three problems. And here's what it should look like:

1) The authors don’t need profit from their work. Their only desire will be for people to see it, read it, hear it, comment it, etc … ONLY. No profits involved.

2) The funders don’t care about the profit, but rather the quality of the end result ONLY.

3) As long as the first two conditions are met, the third condition is not necessary.

People have been asking for whether there is a new business model that can allow these. Well, business will be business, and if no profits involved, it’s no longer business.

But indeed there is already a system where people work on their projects, publish their works with only the pure desire of people to read it. And the funders don’t (mostly) care about the profits. How could such system exist?
Well, it does exist. It’s the publishing system which the majority of scientists and researchers are in. What I list out may not be the exhaustive feature of the academic publishing world; I list some features just to make a point.
First, scientists and researchers do produce a lot of papers to be published in journals. These journals are usually for sale or subscription; but the authors generally don’t directly profit, at least monetarily, from publications. If I’m not wrong one of the editors of one of the two most prestigious scientific journals (Nature and Science) said this “They send in paper for us to publish, for free. And we sell their work back to them for money. I’ll call that monopoly”. So yes, generally academic authors don’t profit from publications, not directly. They do get profits, but that will be for later.

Second, although publishers do get profits from publishing other’s people work and don’t pay anything back, they are not really stingy about profits. Piracy gotta be among their least worry; partially due to the very small readership. But if the authors ask for their work to be publically available for free, publishers generally abide. US National Institute of Health declared that any work funded by it will be published and available to everyone for free. And publishers abide. Imagine a manga author bringing his draft to a publisher and ask the exact same thing; mostly likely he’ll be kicked out of the door.

Even more dramatically, PLoS ONE, an online-only and free for access relies on a pay-by-author system (~1350 US$ per paper). You read it right. You want your paper to be published? Better pay up, though the fee is waived if the author is really broke (rarely, they have millions of funding for their project, so a few thousands is nothing much). Imagine a book author gotta pay to get his book published, without receiving any benefits.

So is academia work on the code of philanthropy? Actually not. Researchers do profit from their work being published and read, though through a roundabout way. Getting their work published and cited in other people’s publication is like a life line for people in academia. “Publish or Perish”, that’s the motto. The more you get published, the more times people cite your work, the more “prestige” you got. And that decide a lot of things: job security, tenure (a position in an institution without any possibility of being fired whatsoever), grants and funding for future works. If you are a PhD student, the number of papers published can determine whether you stay on the program or drop out. Yes, though the authors don’t get a cent directly from their publication (in the case of PLoS ONE, it even cost them money), they profit immensely from getting published.

Well, then we get to the problem of funders and sponsors. To create a truly free availability for every publication, the funders must not care about the actual profit of the work (by publication, application or other ways) ; rather the quality of the work alone (it’s like aiming for an Oscar winning movie: very high quality; shit profits). Generally two source of funding for science: private and federal. Private funding can be of immense quantity, outrunning anything possible from the government. However, it has a downside: it still boils down to business. No matter how groundbreaking your research are, if the answer to “Can your research sell?” is “No”, expect them to pull the plug. So the truly basic and foundation research are not generally funded by private funding. Federal funding does. And this is the source without care for profit but rather, quality and prestige. Where does the money come from? Taxpayers’ money. For a government to fund scientific research, it has to have a surplus of some sort to give away to scientists to do God-knows-what. Like

1) [Only registered and activated users can see links. ].

2) [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] (Conclusion: “It appears that the elephant is highly sensitive to the effects of LSD - a finding which may prove to be valuable in elephant-control work in Africa “).

3) [Only registered and activated users can see links. ].

View it this way: science research funding is like a huge welfare program for really, really smart people; so smart that they are useless for anything else. And the government gotta help them out; without any requirement for actually benefits from the research. In fact, this attitude is quite necessary. President Nixon, along with his War on Drugs, launched a War on Cancer, mostly a political thing. He failed to understand that there were, are and will be very quality, very valid research on cancer; as long as it is NOT related to the attempt to stop cancer tomorrow.

I can feel some tax payers’ rage right now, “where the fuck does my money go to? Couldn’t it be used to help to help poor people instead?”. As potential future tax-payers’ money waster, I would say that we are highly unlikely to use them for say … hiring some very expensive first class hookers or spend it on some lavishly expensive restaurants or placing a one million dollars bet on an online website. Your tax money is at work, people. Though you may not live long enough to benefit from it.

Back to the topic, we can construct a hypothetical system like this: authors with potentially good idea for a work of art: books, movies, anime, manga, etc … write a proposal and ask for a grant from one of the many federal funding agencies. Grants will be given out based on the potential of the project and the author’s personal prestige and reputations from earlier projects. The authors will have great incentives to work hard and put out good works to build their reputation. Their works will be freely available for people to view, comment and rate.

Sounds too good to be true? Actually it has been put to work. By OUR, the Vietnamese government for a long time? Is the system reliable and capable of putting out good products? Well, I’ll just advise you go and see some of the recent “great” movies made for historical anniversaries. Like ... Dien Bien Phu, 1972 bombing of the North and the recent 1000 years of Hanoi.

They stink.

So this system may not work well (though we can always blame the shitty screen writer, shitty director, shitty actors, etc ...) And we are back to the war without a solution.

Personally, I feel that this kind of system introduce a factor which is very likely to hamper the development of arts: the imposed direction of the work: "it must be historically accurate (more like more acceptable views)", "it must contribute to the (whatever) progress", "it must not criticize (x, y, z)". There is an element of conservatism inherent in the system, while the goog=d work of arts in general is to break the conventional, break the conservatism.

Some of you, after reading this wall of text may start raging at me now: “why write so long without a solution?”. Well, if I already have a working solution, I wouldn’t write this piece. I would have already been in some very high position in say, the RIAA.

[Aoi_sora9x]

nice essay. anyway your essay reminds me of one incident happened last year.

World of Goo is quite fa famous indie game, and last year, its creator gave the game away for free, and asked the ppl who downloaded it to just pay whatever amount they want to pay

needless to say, lots of ppl didn't pay at all.

pirates need to die (though im a pirate, but recently im moving away from pirating and began to pay for my games. LOL

[Strawberry]

Nguyên văn bởi Deadman1709

If I’m not wrong one of the editors of one of the two most prestigious scientific journals (Nature and Science) said this “They send in paper for us to publish, for free. And we sell their work back to them for money. I’ll call that monopoly”. So yes, generally academic authors don’t profit from publications, not directly. They do get profits, but that will be for later.

oh, recently, the Springer even intended to charge authors a fee, if they wanted to publish their papers online. And, we have to pay a fee if we want our dissertation to be an ebook in school's library. Hihi, the publishers know very well the need of citation

[Deadman1709]

Nguyên văn bởi Strawberry

oh, recently, the Springer even intended to charge authors a fee, if they wanted to publish their papers online. And, we have to pay a fee if we want our dissertation to be an ebook in school's library. Hihi, the publishers know very well the need of citation

PLoS ONE is currently charging author about 1350 US$ per paper to get published . But their publication is open for access.

Monopoly.

[Mano]

IIRC, aion alert (yes a 3rd party program for mmorpg boting) author released it for free and got a handsome amount of donate. And tehparadox, if i am not wrong they run their server by donation.

[Deadman1709]

Just a side note. Last October, there was a huge convention for people in porn industry to meet and discuss how to combat piracy. Well, it seems that piracy also hit the porn industry quite hard

The official website for the convention (SFW) [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]

Is there anything pirates should be worried about? May be yes. Why?

Because porn apparently lead the world of consumer technology. While big studios were fidgeting over fear of piracy when the VHS tape came out (and even attempted to [Only registered and activated users can see links. ], porn had already get on with it and people were able to get their wank on in the private of their room. Then the same thing happened with the CD, DVD and Blue Ray.

The Internet was shaped by porn: online payment, order, video streaming, P2P, Flash etc ... all started because of the need to deliver porn efficiently and discretely.

[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]

[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]

The development of the personal cameras and handheld cam were also partially because people don't want to shoot some naked pics and realize that the guys at the photo lab would furiously wank on it.

Yes folks, no matter how hard someone try to denounce porn, just show them how porn have changed the world as we know it.

BTW, porn are pushing the limits with live phone (sex)chat and 3D porn. The revolution is here.

Back to the issue of piracy. Since porn have been leading consumer technology for a long time, if any robust anti-piracy technology is to come out; it's likely to be from porn.

This puts all of us in a tough situation: what shall we do?

- Fight relentlessly for the right to enjoy porn for free? Or
- Boycott porn?

[drakemetal]

Most people will choose the first option