An "ad hominem" implies that I am trying to prove your claim is false by attacking your person, but all you're doing is putting your fingers in your ears while singing "Lalalala, the rules don't apply to me."  There's nothing to claim is false.

And yes, there is a lot your can do to force someone to obey the laws.  The fact that you can't see that makes you either young and sheltered, a malignant narcissist or a sociopath.  I still think you're just young.

Haha!  Fourteen!  My guess is you're fourteen, Alpha!  It could go a few years either way, you could be an old-twelve year old or a young eighteen year old, but I hold to fourteen.  ^_^

You're right.  Technically it would be considered as a Commodity Money (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity_money), where the value of exchange is intrinsic to the item itself.  Where commodity money fails is that the value is very subjective dependent upon my immediate needs:  if I don't need any more bread, and don't know anyone else who I can trade it with, it carries a low value for me, but to my neighbor, who's starving, it can carry a much higher value.

Mmmhmm, see how you believe in ownership when I take your cows, break your plow and then fuck your wife. 

Because that's what you're effectively doing from an outsider perspective.  By disregarding copyright law, you are behaving in a way that, legally, only the original copyright holder can behave in. 

Assuming you live in the US, you live in a republic.  You voice is heard through your vote for your representative, as well as any conversation you may have with him or her convincing her of your point.  The representative secures rights, in this case copyrights, through legislation, which aim to, yes, reflect "things just generally agreed on based on the whims of contemporary culture."

The point I've been trying to make throughout this whole ordeal, disagreeing with that legislation doesn't grant you the right to be exempt from copyright.  In fact, I doubt you can understand why the "whims of contemporary culture" deem a certain level of it necessary.  

Which is actually understandable if you've never been in a position to have produced something for which copyright granted a noticeable benefit, yet have been in a number of positions where you have either seen or felt the negative repercussions of breaking copyright.  

But the people who actually produce something will always be given the preferential treatment.  As they should be.

That's fair.  Not giving a shit about infringing on other people's ownership is actually a lot more refreshing than the belief that it's your right to be given that ownership.

What's a right:


Or, the specific type of right to our case, the "Claim Right":


Where rights come from:


And the specific claim right of Copyrights within the United States:

Those recording fees are a hold over from the days when recording music wasn't so ridiculously cheap and easy.  Now anyone can record an album in their bedroom with a laptop with Garage Band and release it via iTunes. 

Even fifteen years ago, in order to record music of any quality at all, you needed a recording studio with expensive equipment, people trained in using that equipment, ties with manufacturers who could produce records/CDs, marketers and advertisers, distribution networks, shipping costs, etc, all of which don't exist anymore, no matter what the RIAA wants you to believe. 

This is why the last decade has been the rise of the indie musician: they don't need to sell their copyrights to the record companies anymore, because they can do the job of the record companies themselves for a lot cheaper, and arguably better.

Well, then you're wrong.  Another person's copyrights don't belong to you.  You can try to convince them to let you use it, but in the end, it's their decision to make.

In this case, land is a resource (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource), meaning it acts as a source from which some benefit is derived, in this case you live there, you can grow crops on it, etc.  As such, you are right, the land does have a value associated with the derived benefits.

In the barter system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barter_system), you would exchange use of the land directly with other resources.  You could rent out a corner of it for a baker to set up shop on, and in turn he gives you a hundred loaves of break a week.

But a hundred loaves of bread is a lot of bread, much more than you can eat.  You could try to find someone else who needs them before they spoil, such as the blacksmith, where you can give him 5 loaves of bread for a new shovel.  But if he, lets say, already made a set of knives for a baker for 20 loaves, he doesn't have any need for bread and the loaves spoil, so you would need to find someone else to trade with.

But this is a lot of work, so you set up a Medium of Exchange (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medium_of_exchange).  In this case, every week the baker gives you a hundred coupons each worth a loaf of bread.  Whenever you want a loaf of bread, you would give him a coupon.  You could then buy your shovel from the blacksmith for five coupons, and then the blacksmith can exchange it whenever he needs bread, or he can go to the local tailor and trade in a bread coupon to fix his shirt that he burnt while working on the forge.

After a while, the king notices your new private bread currency (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_currency), and thinks it's a nifty idea and the whole kingdom should use them.  So he commands his royal scribes to write bread coupons and his royal bakers to accept them for bread, and then commands all the people in the land to accept them as an official state-mandated currency (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Currency). 

And that's the story of how a resource became a currency. 

I agree all the way.  The issue is that estates of dead creators have kept pushing for longer and longer copyright periods so they can keep profiting off of the deceased creator's work, but all that is is a form of leeching.

People have the right to utilize their copyrights however they want, and that includes releasing it into the public domain, or under creative commons.  But if they want to control the copyright a little tighter and release it only to people who pay them, like in your commission example, that is also their right, and not yours to just take it.

Okay, I get your argument now:  because you haven't found a way to get compensation for doing the things you love, you've gained the right to take from those who have. 

That's great, you have a hobby.

But you're condemning the vast majority of musicians from making a career of playing music.  They will always need to do something else.  No one becomes a musician for the money, just like no one becomes a teacher for the money either, but bills still need to get paid, and you're not only leeching off of the artists' hard work, but also claim that you're morally right to leech off of them, and are trying to encourage others to do the same.

Way to be an asshat. 

Maybe not.  You can use a non-currency money to pay for something, see my example above about paying a tailor with a check.

Most likely, Bitcoins are forms of money transfer, not a currency, though the process is easy and anonymous enough to treat them as such.

Where it gets weird, is whether Bitcoin is a currency or just money.  It has certain characteristics of currency, but it may just be a (mostly) anonymous form of money, though users think of it as a currency.

Okay, this is bullshit.  I'm a comedian and a comedy writer, and know a lot of actors and musicians, and they all want to get paid, because although they are doing what they love, at the end of the day, they still need to eat.

I personally creative commons everything I write, but that's because I have a career outside of writing, and I don't plan on making money off of it or doing it as my full time job.  But most of my friends have to work at shit jobs like waiting tables and clerks at law offices just to make ends meet, so they can do the thing that they love.

And you say, "Musicians should just do concerts!"  Concerts are one of the most grueling things a musician can do, months away from friends and family, traveling from unknown place to unknown place, and guess what?  Musicians already do them!  It's how they make ends meet to begin making their next album.

Your entitled attitude is astounding.  Maybe its because you're looking at that small percentage of musicians and actors who make a lot of money, and are forgetting about that 99.99% of them that are just figuring out how to get enough money to buy a few packs of ramen to eat. 

I will admit, I pirate a fair amount of stuff, but I also budget a certain amount of money each month to go back and buy the albums I like and will re-listen to.  If you're broke, I get it, I've been there, and it didn't stop me from downloading music, but quit with the entitlement shit.  It makes you look like an asshole.

There's two things at work here, and they're not necessarily the same thing:  what's legal and what's ethical.  In your drug example, China, India or Cuba mass producing a drug that's too expensive for them to buy may be the ethical thing to do, but it's still breaking international patent law.

To give you a flip example from the business world, I'll give you a case study from the startup Callpod and their dealings with Target:  Callpod produces a universal charging device called Chargepod, which has become a big hit.  Attempting to increase distribution, Callpod seeks a deal with Target in order to nationally distribute the Chargepod, but the deal hits a snag, but eight months later, a clone of the product, being produced by Target themselves, appears in their stores.  Callpod, which was smart enough to file a number of patents on the Chargepod technology, sues Target, who never had any real desire to sell the original Chargepod in their stores, and wins damages.

Target behaved illegally and maybe immorally in this case, but every move they did was the right move from the business perspective.  They knew that startup companies aren't usually the best at defending cases of patent infringement.  Most of the time, they don't pursue any civil suits, and if they do, they hire inexperienced lawyer friends who get beat in court.  In this case, Target was wrong, but more often than not, they would be able be able to sell the product without having to pay any of the licensing fees or any negative repercussions.  And even in this case where there were repercussions, they weren't enough to damage, or even noticeably dent Targets earnings.

When you download files off the internet, you're behaving like Target:  you may have virtually no chance of getting caught, and are gaining access to tools you wouldn't otherwise, but it's still copyright infringement.  Spare us the rationalizations, and have the balls to admit that you're doing something illegal, even if you won't get caught.

I'm not Serge, but I like putting in my two cents, so here we go. 


It's not theft, but it's still copyright infringement.  It's like saying stealing a Maserati isn't theft because you couldn't afford one anyway.  Not losing revenue doesn't change what it is, just arguably changes the damages. 


The Betamax case, which states viewers are allowed to time-shift their television watching, puts you into a legal grey area, as it would the website hosting the file.  The person who uploaded it would have been breaking copyright law.   

If you owned the DVD, and were ripping it to watch on your computer/iPad, you would be breaking the law under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act due to the fact you were circumventing copyright protection, despite the fact that you were covered by Fair Use.  (I agree, this is asinine).


This is allowed under Fair Use.


Believe it or not, this is one of those cases that's never been judged.  A company was sued by the entertainment industry over this, but the company's legal fees caused it to go bankrupt before a decision was made, so who knows how this could go?  Overall, it seems like the record industry really doesn't care that much.

On a side note, copyright was created originally as a legal agreement between the government and content creators, saying that if you agree to make stuff, we'll give you control over that stuff for a limited period of time.  After that period of time is up, it passes into the public domain, which means anyone can riff off of it, and create their own material based off of it.  But companies and estates have pushed copyright to become so ridiculously long, it essentially excludes anyone from ever being able to use anyone else's work without paying for it because copyright now goes on for essentially forever, here in the States.

This video is very interesting:  http://youtu.be/tk862BbjWx4