Some links on illegal file-sharing and IPR
There is almost nothing I could think to say that has not been said by the people whose posts are collected in this linkspam by
troisroyaumes.
If you only read one post, though, make it
colorblue 's this is not a post about yoga!:
snarp's post On Digital Piracy, By Way of My Confession That I Am a Deranged Criminal approaches what I consider the real meat of the matter only obliquely--I don't actually think this is actually about the woes of the publishing industry in the United States, at least not primarily--but she does in this paragraph get at some of the facets in common:
It always amazes me, at cons when this debate flares up, the extent to which completely unrelated people will emotionally identify with creators they've usually never even met (
coffeeandink's point about people identifying "up" in a hierarchical system is certainly relevant here), to the point of attacking people who disagree with them quite virulently. I support the right of creators to profit from their creative works, but creators and their royalties are secondary to the corporate interests that make the real money off intellectual property, and to think that this debate is primarily about creators and consumers and the moral obligations between them is to ignore the real question entirely.
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If you only read one post, though, make it
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The current system of intellectual property rights, embedded in the racist classist hegemonic individualist capitalist Western ownership system that by now has been imposed, in one way or another, on everyone, with or without their consent - this system is not just completely fucked up, it is a weapon wielded by those who have power, a weapon aimed directly and deliberately at the hearts of the people and communities and cultures that are considered lesser.To try to reconstruct what I said in the first version of this post, which somehow got eaten by either Chrome or DW: I have very little patience with the concept of "intellectual property rights"; their rise is part and parcel of the neoliberalization first of so-called advanced industrial societies, and then the rest of the world; the shredding of social safety nets globally; the commercialization of scholarship and the reduction of the value of all knowledge to the price it is projected to fetch in the so-called "free market"; the patent-ization of scientific research part and parcel with increased corporate profiteering therefrom. IPR are used systematically to disenfranchise and disempower vulnerable groups at all levels of societies globally, and then, the disenfranchisement complete, to sell that content back to those groups at immense profit--but only at fair market price, of course.
In this way, it is a system that does exactly what it has been designed to.
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If you find this scenario depressing, there is always the dystopian-future alternative, if you're into those. Each nation, according to its own inclination, shall have a War on Piracy, similar to my own proud homeland's excellent War on Drugs, in which we will prosecute only working-class people and ethnic minorities, most of whom will have no legal access to books because they're all digital now and we have shut down most of the libraries due to budget shortfalls, and as Tucker Carlson says, "why do they need libraries? People should go to Barnes and Noble anyway." I offer this scenario freely to Cory Doctorow for use in a work of lifeless, repellent didactic fiction.To digress slightly into my own direct experience: this is an argument that's been going around anime and manga circles for years now--first it was the debate about downloading fansubs, and since the bottom dropped out of the anime market in the States, now it's about scanlations. I put my translations of manga--my own intellectual property, and a significant investment of my time and energy--up for free on this journal under a Creative Commons license, I work with scanlation groups directly and indirectly, and the images from which I make my translation are at best semi-legal. All of which is to say, it should surprise no one that my first sympathies in this debate aren't with the huge, global corporate conglomerates; they are with the readers and the consumers of content, first and foremost.
It always amazes me, at cons when this debate flares up, the extent to which completely unrelated people will emotionally identify with creators they've usually never even met (
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HAHAHAA! Tucker Carlson is sexxxxxy. Barnes & Noble was going bankrupt, last time I looked. Coincidence?
Yeah. The entire reason I learned Japanese in the first place was to throw what little power I have into the fight against corporate license-holders, especially and specifically because, in the "official" weeaboo industry, 'authorized merchandise' = trash. For some strange reason? Infuriating! I have never been able to understand this subculture-wide deference for "licensing." It was already licensed, whatever it was, or you wouldn’t have been able to see it to begin with!!!!!! It would still be sitting on the mangaka’s hard drive!!!!! Not that I’m bitter.
Anyway, I will read some or all of these articles, and become increasingly enraged about the issue. Thank you!
What I meant to say was:
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Yeah, and then the parochialism of the whole "licensing" thing too--as other people have said recently, "X has been licensed" inevitably only refers to licensed in the States, but sites everywhere pull X anyway.
Whenever I get into this debate at cons I always wind up harping on the "corporate profits ≠ creator royalties" and the "if rights holders don't like piracy, they should improve digital distribution systems globally" themes. And sure enough, look at the anime market; the rise of legit streaming websites has drastically reduced fansubbing. I can't remember the last time I downloaded a fansub, and I'm sure when I did it wasn't a current show.
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I have my own problems with IP rights (mostly because they've become a hindrance to their purpose), but most of my annoyance is due to the fact that the companies haven't yet established a way to deal with a global consumership. I ordered one book from Amazon Japan once. It cost me 16€. By the time shipping etc. were added to that, it was 46€. When my mother got the package, she had to pay an extra 10€ to customs. It's much easier to get English language books, mostly because they're produced cheaper than German books (lower quality paper, for example), so that reading English books is something that I do to save money. It also depends on the exchange rate between Euro and Dollar. In fact, I once wanted to read a German book but the English translations all were cheaper. I ended up buying a used copy that was as cheap as the unused English ones.
When creators are upset, I think this is mainly due to a misunderstanding of internet piracy. I spend more money on media than I would without pirating copies, for example. This is because pirating took the place of the radio (which only plays music I dislike), TV (which airs dubbed versions, if it airs the series/movies at all) and flipping through the book at the store or in a library (none of these carry the books I want). Pirating never took the place of the actual, legal non-digital copy, that I generally do buy after a while if I do like the book/series/film/CD. But corporations still present pirating as theft akin to stealing someone's possessions in advertisements and articles, and people do buy what the industry says.
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Numbers on this are naturally hard to get to, but my sense is that for every consumer of pirated works like you and me there is another that just wants something for free.
Also, the internet pirates that creators see and deal with and sic their publishers on are those who are doing the distribution with obvious flagrant disregard for the creators getting paid, with new sites popping up in their Google Alerts daily. Which half the time are repeat offenders with a new site. Not so much misunderstanding as seen from a different perspective, of a different data set.
---L.
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And yeah, I think the idea that "1 pirated X = 1 lost sale of X" is really seductive, but just fundamentally untrue.
Yeah, IPR are bound up with the global copyright regime and the WTO enforcement thereof, which has really hindered access to a lot of different things worldwide--the first example I always think of is sheet music. Due to WTO restrictions, it's virtually impossible for people in the States to buy scores and parts for most of the major works of classical music of the past four centuries, with the result that if you don't already have the music or have an in with an organization that does, enabling you to photocopy their music (which does emphatically represent a lost sale), you have no repertoire. Which really fundamentally benefits no one, not even the rights-holder.
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their rise is part and parcel of the neoliberalization first of so-called advanced industrial societies, and then the rest of the world; the shredding of social safety nets globally; the commercialization of scholarship and the reduction of the value of all knowledge to the price it is projected to fetch in the so-called "free market"; the patent-ization of scientific research part and parcel with increased corporate profiteering therefrom. IPR are used systematically to disenfranchise and disempower vulnerable groups at all levels of societies globally, and then, the disenfranchisement complete, to sell that content back to those groups at immense profit--but only at fair market price, of course.
I have to quote this at length, because you've covered it so very well. Thank you.
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The trade publishing system in the United States is more than a little broken, and had been even before the disruptive technology of e-books came along. One reason many creators cling to it (even aside from identifying up) is that it largely, if increasingly less so, shields them from having to deal with the marketing and distributing of books. They can focus on the creation and let others deal with the business aspects, which are considerable, and which are why the publishers get such a large share of the revenue. If every writer has to be their own managing editor, and book producer, and marketer, and distributor, and accounting department, when do they have time to write -- to tell the stories that is why they started writing in the first place? And if every one-writer business is trying to find let readers know, hey you might want to read this, how among those tens (hundreds) of thousands of "LOOK HERE!"s does a reader find what they're looking for?
Until a viable system for handling the business side develops, it will be hard to get creators who want to profit from their creative works to stop supporting the current one.
Access to works from outside the zone of their current license is a whole 'nother bucket of crabs, one that I dip into gingerly.
---L.
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Yeah, exactly, and like I said, I really do think that
And, not that this applies to you or to anyone else in this debate afaik, quite frankly I think anyone who excoriates people for reading books out of libraries doesn't deserve the time of day, let alone to be taken seriously.
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Janni goes through occasional rounds of "okay, I guess it was time for my publisher to be the one to wear the ass-hat" gloom. Since the Big Six seem to pass it around in order.
---L.
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I have very little patience with the concept of "intellectual property rights"; their rise is part and parcel of the neoliberalization first of so-called advanced industrial societies, and then the rest of the world; the shredding of social safety nets globally; the commercialization of scholarship and the reduction of the value of all knowledge to the price it is projected to fetch in the so-called "free market"; the patent-ization of scientific research part and parcel with increased corporate profiteering therefrom. IPR are used systematically to disenfranchise and disempower vulnerable groups at all levels of societies globally, and then, the disenfranchisement complete, to sell that content back to those groups at immense profit--but only at fair market price, of course.
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Do you mind if I ETA my post to add a link here, too?
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