The law and morality and necessarily one and the same thing.

You can stand up for political ideology that you believe to be right, and still end up in prison for it. That doesn't mean you're morally wrong (or morally right), it just means you may have to face the consequences of your actions.

Don't be a matyr Bartleby, of course it won't get you banned.

While in theory I like the "information want to be free" side of the argument, in practice I don't think it can support creative production at anything close to our current level, so I have to support the status quo. Crowd support can be very effective for popular projects (eg order of the stick comic just raised over a million dollars to reprint their books and some other projects, which is amazing to me), but it risks a tyranny of the mob where ONLY popular/well known creators and projects have a decent chance.

On tsumego collections:

I believe the phenomenon of tsumego collections spread without solutions is in part due to the copyright discussions around and the SL policy to present classical tsumego collections without their contemporary solutions. The point is that the classical tsumego collection is public domain while the recent solutions and comments by whomever are not, obviously this doesn't work the same way for contemporary tsumego collections. I guess this is in part due to a misunderstanding of the said SL policy / discussion that people spread contemporary collections the same way.

As far as I can tell the tsumego on cards series is pretty popular and offers something that a raw copy a .pdf etc. does not. I would advise anyone planning to publish a tsumego collections to do this on flash cards.

On author rights:

What irks me most is that despite all discussions about author rights many translations of supposedly ghost written books don't even bother to mention the genuine authors: the ghost writers. I want their names printed in big letters before I can take discussions about author rights seriously.

Let's have some fun. This position sounds like it's simple and consistent, but it's actually quite difficult to justify.The idea that the government should use my resources to protect you from Jimbob's actions is odd if you're going to be strict about individual rights. After all, I'm not Jimbob, so why should I be liable for what he does? What's next? Making me pay for your house because you don't have enough money? See Robert Nozick's brilliant Anarchy State and Utopia for a serious discussion of the issue. Strawman. Your views of what the Founding Fathers thought are quite debatable.

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Occupy Babel!

I'm stealing from a store. Assume you're not cowardly, you can feel entitled to punch me to stop me.

Now, I'm next to you reading a copied book. Care to take a swing?

Seriously, I think there's really good evidence on this subject. People grasp theft at an intuitive level. They often do the wrong thing, but they don't have to be browbeaten to recognize the issue.

Update: just in case it's not completely clear what I'm saying (I got a PM), you're saying piracy is like theft. And we don't just fine people for theft, or wag our fingers at them on the internet. We regularly send them to jail, or even use physical force to restrain them if we need to. I doubt many people here would go to such lengths, because they get the badness of theft at a gut level that doesn't translate to copyright infringement. And I think that's entirely accurate. Copyright infringement just isn't theft, however you slice it. That doesn't mean it's right, or even that it should be perfectly legal, just that there's a big difference.

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Occupy Babel!

the trouble is that piracy results in no consequences for a common downloader. there is hardly any effective way how to stop it. and efforts made and publicized recently makes me feel more uneasy for the intrusion of my privacy than i believe it would help authors. so what to do?

FlyingAxe:
i am strongly inclined to agree with you, but there is one analogy that undermines my determination - it occurs to me that piracy is pretty much like free riding, except the impossibility of an enforcement. i use a service (or obtain informations) that is offered anyway and i don't generate more expenses for the provider. if i want to be able to use the service of public transport, the provider has to be paid and i am afraid that crowd sourcing wouldn't do the job. it could, but it would not...

RobertJasiek:
i can understand that you are annoyed by FlyingAxe's posts and want to deal with him, but your arguments along the line "it is (il)legal, so it doesn't matter whether it is (im)moral" make me nervous and remind me of Milgram's experiment. if you saw a law that you considered morally wrong, wouldn't you argue against it?

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Spilling gasoline feels good.

I might be wrong, but probably not.

As I have said, laws immoral of the kind "violates human rights etc." are bad. Possible moral inconsistency related to copyright law is much weaker though; it is related to questions like "copying a book is illegal but copying a game sequence is legal - how can both at the same time be moral?" or "copying a book is illegal but copying results of scientific research produced after equally much mental effort is legal...". If both kinds followed the same moral, the world be an entirely different place. Possible in theory but in practive there would be many millions of jobless people until not only consistent moral were applied but also a major reform of the world economical system. IOW, there is also the social moral. We live in a complex world. Getting one dimension of moral right from a philosophical POV does not automatically guarantee getting all moral dimensions right.

So what I advocating by following copyright law is the current more or less balanced system of the world's jurisdictional, economic and social morals. (I know, there are also the much worse parts of it that really do need change such as peoples feeding more and more cash to the banks.)

Sorry, but pirating John Fairbairn's books does not make you Galileo. In fact, I would say John Fairbairn plays the role of Galileo (producer of useful content), and pirates play the role of the Inquisition (ideologues who chill the desire to create useful content).

Also, before you call pirates a persecuted class of free thinkers, you should consider:

How many pirates have asked John's permission before copying and distributing his work?
How much have pirates compensated John (and his collaborators) for using the pirated content?
What have these pirates done to promote change in the copyright laws they dislike?

If the answers ever become "most", "a fair amount", and "more than complaining on forums", copyright holders will rein in the "thugs".

To make it easier for people to do the right thing on the second question, perhaps the New in Go blog should add something like this (on their own site's account, of course) :

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I am Tartuffe from GoDiscussions.com

You started off so well...

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Occupy Babel!

If it hasn't already happened, I'm sure its just a matter of time before crowd sourcing funds meta projects, e.g. a record label like thing supports some appropriate group of musicians.

I would add to Peter's questions this one: how many of the pirates who need to support themselves would accept not being paid for their work? After all, writing may be an art but it's also a job.

Is property theft?

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North Lecale

In order for something to be a legitimate service, it does not have to provide any kind of expense on the side of the provider. I own a piece of land that I inherited from my grandfather. I lease it out to you. It's a service/product that costs me nothing to provide.

The bottom line is not whether or not what the "pirates" do is nice or not, but whether they are really violating anyone's rights -- which should be the only reason to prosecute anyone in a civilized society.

RobertJasiek:

I think we are going in circles. You seem to be saying that legal = moral, and that depending on which society we are talking about (rain-forest natives vs. America vs. Europe), different things can be made moral by law. I consider this position to be morally bankrupt. It allows the governments to do anything they want. I already gave many examples of immoral laws. Furthermore, where would the impetus to change laws come from, if we have no way to figure out whether or not they are fair/moral, since they are always fair/moral by definition?

In my opinion, a society needs to figure out what moral or immoral is and then create the laws to safeguard that. Of course different society will have different ideas about morality. Different societies will also have different knowledge of how human body works and, as a result, different kinds of medicine.

If you're NOT saying that moral = legal, then what is the point of talking about legal distinctions between different kinds of information? You tell me it's immoral to buy a book, use the information from the book, and reprint the book without the author's permission. But's it's not immoral to watch a game, take the information from the game, and reprint it in a book. (Or discuss it on your free blog.) I am asking you: what is the fundamental difference between these two types of information? How are you stealing in one case and not in the other? How is information = property in one case and not in the other? You go back to legalese talk. Seems like a vicious circle to me.

Furthermore, I am pointing out that before you make something illegal, you have to justify its illegality. Otherwise, you're stamping on the rights of the people who perform this activity. For instance, if a husband claims that his rights were violated when a wife refused to have relations with him, you have to prove that he had any rights in this area to begin with. You have not provided any justification for making free use of information illegal. You have not provided any proof that the authors' rights are being violated when someone "steals" the content of his book after buying the book. The burden of proof is on you (or anyone else who holds such views), since you are proposing to fine or jail the intellectual "pirates".

Btw, I really like your books and will consider buying one after my next paycheck.

While legal doesn't mean moral, most people believe it is immoral to pirate. Therefore laws have been written to try to prevent it. Of course it's impossible to completely stop, but arguing that piracy is moral is ridiculous to me.

I doubt most people believe so. There is a whole industry devoted to it in Asia the most populated area on earth. Many of my university books are from there, 2 or 3 dollars each.

Not exactly but close enough so that I need to restrict time spent on this thread so that I can spend more on writing the next book.

Clarification: A reasonable person who is on the victim end of piracy is almost always aware that piracy is immoral, while a typical person who is only the beneficiary of piracy will twist themselves into a pretzel rationalizing why they are entitled to benefit from someone else's labor without giving compensation.

- Marty Lund

Exactly, they'll bend them selves so much that they will rally against the pirates while pirating themselves.

Yeah, there was nothing illegal about those fake Apple stores the government closed down.

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North Lecale

I think that the method by which payment gets to a content creator needs to be updated for the times. I just don't know the best way to do it.

With today's technology, it's easier than ever to copy and redistribute files. It's the way of the future. We should figure out a way to get the compensation model caught up. Like I said, I don't know how... But the old, "I take this product and give you money for it" method of doing business doesn't seem like it can work that well in the longrun.

We need to find a more modern way to compensate content-creators - one that is aligned with modern technology.

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be immersed