And now the thread starts to fall into the theft vs copyright debate.
Lets skip the semantics for a minute and look at the big picture (and make some generous assumptions while we're at it)...
Take a recording artist and assume that the only source of income they have is from their music sales (no promo goods, live shows or anything else) and lets assume too that anyone who copies their music would have otherwise have bought it (if the copying route wasn't available)...
So - morally, is it theft or not? We've deprived them of income (their relative wealth is irrelevant BTW). Simple as that. Don't these artists have a right to feed themselves and their families?
So there was an article on torrentfreak about Kim Dotcom suggesting, via his twitter feed, that the music industry has a few key points to overcome as a means to reduce piracy.
The RIANZ responded and basically said, suing for copyright infringement under 3-strikes law and basically making examples of people is the only way to stop piracy.
I think that is a unfair misrepresentation of what they said.
what they said was that they had basicaly fulfilled each and every one of Kim Dotcoms suggestions in NZ, and yet people were STILL pirating music.
" "The music industry has delivered on all five points suggested by Dotcom" And they've respond to each of Kim DotCom's 5 points with the following:
1- Create great stuff "Great" is obviously subjective but with legal digital services offering tens of millions of music tracks there's surely something for everyone out there. 2- Make it easy to buy New Zealanders have access to 20 legal digital music services, not only for buying but for on-demand and curated playback. The world leading brands in each category i-tunes, Spotify and Pandora are open for business in New Zealand. These are available 24/7 and very easy to use. The website nztop40.co.nz provides multiple links to the most popular international and local tracks and albums every week. 3- Same day worldwide release The overwhelming majority of newly released music is available simultaneously worldwide. In fact due to time zone differences New Zealand is often the first country in the world to have access to new superstar releases. 4- Fair price Music has never been cheaper to buy or access. Some on-demand services even have a totally free option. Tracks from albums are can be purchased individually, often for under $2. Premium on-demand services are as little as $3 per week. 5- Works on any device Tracks and albums purchased from legal digital download services are DRM - free and all are usable across multiple devices using Android and iOS operating systems - i.e. the overwhelming majority of devices in the marketplace. Likewise on-demand services all have apps for multiple platforms and devices. Your piece gave a forum to Dotcom's views for ending piracy. You called it simple and elegant and ask how likely or possible it would be to implement. With regards to the music industry, I think we have shown above that it is already being done."
note that this obviously only applies to music. Alot of these suggestions are not available for movies/tv/games, but since we are talking about Riannz thenlets confine the discussion to music.
I tend to agree here. Services like Spotify are available on practically every phone, tablet, pc etc, and is free for an ad version or $13 per month for the non-ad version. It allows you to listen to virtually any song you can imagine, as much as you like,yet people still pirate hundreds or thousands of songs despite its existence. and although it is a streaming service and so not practical over 3G for the cost, it DOES allow you to download tracks whilst on wifi to listen to later, so that is not an issue at all as far as I am concerned.
In IPv4, we have 65,535 usable TCP ports. This means that we are able to load up to 65535 useful connections per IP address. Some of these ports should not be used (1-1024, for instance, are 'service ports').
- We take an internal IP address (based on RFC1918 - like 192.168.30.77) and give it to our user. - We translate connections coming from this address, as they pass to the Internet through our gateway, into real addresses - like 203.96.91.1 - We make a note of this connection in our database, with the following attributes: Source IP (192.168.30.77), Destination IP (76.10.154.38 - in this case, an American DSL provider), Source port (randomly from our range 1025-65535), Destination port (randomly from the peer's P2P client), the date and time down to the second, and the amount of data used in bytes while this connection was open.
Alot of CGN vendors now produce radius accounting records per flow, with those above details.
Alot of infomation yes, which would be a major pain for the ISP's to record and process.
All they need now is the detection agency to supply port numbers, along with IP addresses.
Not a simple or elegant solution by any means, but the law is the law. Saying "oh we use CGN, so *shrug*" isn't going to go down well.
kiwirock: The work is owned by the original owner unless it's rights have been transferred or explicitly state it's free to copy and distribute. It's not for another to decide what should happen with the owner's property, intellectual or physical.
Copyright in particular is quite a different beast. Essentially governments grant certain protections in law to the creator of some types of intellectual work. These are works which are easily (to a greater or lesser extent) reproduced. Most of this can be described as 'art'. If a work is copied it is not criminal theft like physical property. It is a copyright violation which is a civil matter.
DaveDog: Lets skip the semantics for a minute and look at the big picture
Based on your assumptions and presentation anyone will agree with your argument about the morality of copyright infringement. It is still copyright infringement and not theft. Thinking otherwise leads to fuzzy thinking and really annoying advertisements.
They claim that, but they aren't being entirely truthful here. The point about worldwide releases really hits home - any claims that music is actually available here within even an eon of being available in the United States is an outright lie. No less than twice in the past 2 months I've had to go to US iTunes in order to purchase a track simply because I didn't want to pirate it. In one of those cases, it was a relatively new track getting quite a lot of radio airplay in NZ (hence, I consider it unacceptable that it not be available if I want to purchase it) and in the other case the song was released in 2006. Frankly, I've not seen a single new release track become available in NZ within an acceptable period of being in the States - definitely not any cases where it's been released here first.
And fair price, I still contend that NZ does not get a fair price. Most certainly he's lying that songs are "often" under $2, as $2.39 is the price of the overwhelming majority of tracks in iTunes. Compared to US $1.29 that Americans pay, we are being ripped off (remember, there is no GST on iTunes purchases as they are sold by Apple Australia).
I do, however, agree with him that the other three issues really aren't an issue here in NZ. "Great" is indeed subjective and you will always find someone who dislikes a particular style of music. We certainly don't have a problem with accessibility what with Marbecks, the mobile carrier stores, iTunes, Pandora, Spotify, Vevo, Rdio and the list goes on. And for downloaded music it does tend to work on anything.
That said, I don't consider piracy an alternative to purchasing music/movies/whatever. I buy quite a lot of music and movies, though the music industry would probably argue that I might as well be pirating because I buy from the overseas (United States, NOT Russia) stores.
I don't pirate music (any more) and I am satisfied enough that the current system (I use iTunes) addresses the five points under discussion. I think the price is too high, especially given that a digital download has almost zero marginal cost and I think bringing the price down will further discourage music piracy.
As far as movies and TV goes....we are now where music was a decade ago. I believe Dotcom's points were based on TV and Movie piracy, yet RIANZ have chosen to respond on Music only.
While Music is at a point where all five points are covered (Reasonably enough that you can't really argue that piracy is your only option), the only one you could say they have achieved for TV/Movies is point 1 - make great stuff.
ajobbins: I don't pirate music (any more) and I am satisfied enough that the current system (I use iTunes) addresses the five points under discussion. I think the price is too high, especially given that a digital download has almost zero marginal cost and I think bringing the price down will further discourage music piracy.
As far as movies and TV goes....we are now where music was a decade ago. I believe Dotcom's points were based on TV and Movie piracy, yet RIANZ have chosen to respond on Music only.
While Music is at a point where all five points are covered (Reasonably enough that you can't really argue that piracy is your only option), the only one you could say they have achieved for TV/Movies is point 1 - make great stuff.
thats because Riaanz is purely a music organisation
i agree that movies and TV are well behind this though.
ajobbins: yet RIANZ have chosen to respond on Music only.
That's because they only "represent" music artists :) I don't know that there are any associations in NZ for Movies/TV Shows which are active in the copyright enforcement space TBH. RIANZ are very active in this space (chasing contact centres, shops, etc. for public performance licensing etc).
DaveDog: Lets skip the semantics for a minute and look at the big picture
Based on your assumptions and presentation anyone will agree with your argument about the morality of copyright infringement. It is still copyright infringement and not theft. Thinking otherwise leads to fuzzy thinking and really annoying advertisements.
Exactly no matter how much of a strawman you decide to setup set up it's copyright infringement not theft, by legal definition.
ajobbins: yet RIANZ have chosen to respond on Music only.
That's because they only "represent" music artists :) I don't know that there are any associations in NZ for Movies/TV Shows which are active in the copyright enforcement space TBH. RIANZ are very active in this space (chasing contact centres, shops, etc. for public performance licensing etc).
No they don't. You are probably thinking of APRA. One of APRA's major concerns is getting media companies to pay recording artists for their work. This is RIANZ.
The Recording Industry Association of New Zealand Inc (RIANZ) is a non-profit organisation representing major and independent record producers, distributors and recording artists throughout New Zealand.
and more specifically:
RIANZ acts as an advocate for the recording industry. One of our principal objectives is to promote and strengthen the legal rights of all member companies and their recording artists, by lobbying government for the introduction and improvement of [ahem] effective rights legislation.
RIANZ claiming to represent artists is a bit misleading. Their board is mostly major media company representatives for instance. Artists often have a very different opinion and orientation to these issues compared to their recording companies.
Up until now we have been discussing copyright infringement by individuals and that mostly in relation to P2P and the economics of detection and enforcement vs alternative business models.
Dotcom case is something different. Dotcom and some associates in relation to his previous company are accused of organised criminal conspiracy. Guilty or not, it is an accusation of intent in relation to criminal commercial piracy for profit.
This isnt a full second worth of connections - Its only 5 connections from the log. If you are running a torrent application, it is typical that it will cause thousands of connections to be logged within a very small amount of time - perhaps a few minutes. The subscribers behind this router are causing the log file to grow at about 2 kilobytes per second. Its now just after 7pm and its now growing at about 2.3kB/sec. None of the subscribers have triggered a concurrent connection limit alarm - which means none have started a p2p session yet. A single connection on average will be about 210 bytes added to the log file.
I run a small ISP serving 260 rural households, but even so, if connection logging was enabled across the whole network, thats about a gigabyte per day of log files. Thats alot of log files.
For this reason, i am slowly moving our subscribers to public ip addresses, however in the next few years, a solution will need to be found as it is not feasable for a large isp to store such huge amounts of data. It also raises privacy concerns.
The discussion so far has been interesting. My proposed solution of course isnt going to be taken seriously by the RIANZ and yes, alot of thought will need to go in to it.
Any apnic members here wanna sell me some of your unused ip space?
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