Some of you who know me better know me as a pirate. Not the rum-swilling, fancy coat wearing type (though also applicable) and not just the file copying variety but a full fledged Pirate Movement member. A philosophical pirate if you will. And the pirate movement is a real movement. It's not just a bunch of people who want things for free and take them. Those are called anarchists. Pirates of the cultural and political breed have a purpose behind their actions. And in this case it's about fighting to take back culture. But let's start with some history.
Copyright, in it's modern incarnation, started with the Statute of Anne in 1709. This gave exclusive copying and reproduction writes to printed works to the authors of said work, instead of publishers. These rights were limited to 14 after publication. After that all works went into the public domain. This act changed the copyright game in two ways.
The really short version of history after this can be put into a few eras. After this publishing companies and eventually movie studios actually wanted copyright to expire as soon as possible. Shocking, no? The reason is the faster things went into public domain the faster these places could reprint or film adaptations of a work. It wasn't uncommon for movie studios to film recent plays from other countries because it took longer for anyone to notice copyright infringement had occurred. When film was a new medium Edison held all the patents on it. Well, a bunch of industry speculators decided to go far enough west that no one could touch them on piracy and use Edison's methods to make competing studios to Edison's own Black Mariah. These people went so far west the got to California and founded Hollywood.
Once communication grew to the point that simply moving far away couldn't stop people from noticing copyright infringement these producers and distributors of media realized that there was more money to be had in owning rights than in stealing them. If they couldn't make money from stealing other people's works then they could make money be ensuring no one stole from them. So producers became right owners. At this point, when it became more lucrative to own rights, sudden;y legislation started popping up to extend copyright lifespans. At the forefront of this modern pro-copyright fight has been Disney. Originally the character of Mickey Mouse was supposed to become public domain sometime in the mid 80s but they passed a law to extend rights until the early 2000s. Then when that came close they pushed through more law so that now he's owned until 2019 (although there is some evidence that the Steamboat Willy version of Mickey Mouse is public domain ). This is all very ironic since Disney has been screwed out of their first mascot by bad copyright choices as well as basing most of their famous movies on public domain stories while still having yet to contribute anything back to the public domain.
When modern copyright first started it gave the creator rights for 14 years starting at the date of publication. Now works can be held by the production company for 94 years after the death of the creator. This is particularly distressing when you realize that the original goal of copyright (starting with the Statute of Anne) was to encourage people to write so that the public domain could expand. At the time there was no long tail market so 14 years as an acceptable lifespan of a written work. When the US colonies adopted similar law they did so with the idea of creating a thriving intellectual marketplace. That is irony.
History lesson over. Contemporary lesson begins. Now that you have all that in context perhaps you can see what pirates are fighting for. And by pirates I don't just mean file copiers. I mean people who want ideas to be free after a reasonable commercial life. People who see expanding legislation as a protective measure not just for companies but against citizens. Pirates and copyfighters (copyright fight) are locked in a conflict over culture. Can you imagine if fairy-tales were still copyrighted? Disney would be nothing. Because of both real and perceived copyright laws people are now being told at drugstores that they cannot make enlargements of 100 year old family portraits. Hell, there are cases where photo counter workers are in such fear that they refuse to make copies of photos that the customer has taken because they might be professional. It's strange how fear has always ruled the modern copyright industry, because copyright is now a moneymaking industry on it's own, though copying technology has almost always led to improved production for these same fearful tyrants of rights.
VCRs were fought when they first came out. Movie companies feared it would be the end of theaters. If you could watch a movie whenever you wanted at home, copied even, then no one would pay to see them ever again. And now we have an enormous and thriving home movie market that rivals that of theaters but still pays the production companies. They're reaping the benefits from two markets, one (movie production) was based on copyright infringement and the other (home theaters) they fought tooth and nail out of fear. The same thing happened with audio cassettes. And let's not forget Napster. MP3s are encoded using a method that was made for compressing the audio tracks on DVDs. Someone took that software (piracy) and made a method of encoding CDs (piracy). Today iTunes and self-publishing albums have shifted the consumer music market, making more distribution and production cheaper, creating a more versatile product and making the end result both more lucrative to make and cheaper to buy. Yet all of this started with piracy and the music industry is still throwing tantrums about this technology. Still not fully accepted but getting there is the home-brew game industry. You can see this by the Wiiware market and the XBox arcade where you can purchase games made by regular people. On previous systems you had to violate warranty and possibly law to modify systems play these types of games.
The pattern throughout the history of copyright and advancement seems to be this:
Copyright, in it's modern incarnation, started with the Statute of Anne in 1709. This gave exclusive copying and reproduction writes to printed works to the authors of said work, instead of publishers. These rights were limited to 14 after publication. After that all works went into the public domain. This act changed the copyright game in two ways.
- It gave authors the rights rather than publishers.
- The main intent other than compensating the creator was to encourage new works and therefore expand on public domain contributions.
The really short version of history after this can be put into a few eras. After this publishing companies and eventually movie studios actually wanted copyright to expire as soon as possible. Shocking, no? The reason is the faster things went into public domain the faster these places could reprint or film adaptations of a work. It wasn't uncommon for movie studios to film recent plays from other countries because it took longer for anyone to notice copyright infringement had occurred. When film was a new medium Edison held all the patents on it. Well, a bunch of industry speculators decided to go far enough west that no one could touch them on piracy and use Edison's methods to make competing studios to Edison's own Black Mariah. These people went so far west the got to California and founded Hollywood.
Once communication grew to the point that simply moving far away couldn't stop people from noticing copyright infringement these producers and distributors of media realized that there was more money to be had in owning rights than in stealing them. If they couldn't make money from stealing other people's works then they could make money be ensuring no one stole from them. So producers became right owners. At this point, when it became more lucrative to own rights, sudden;y legislation started popping up to extend copyright lifespans. At the forefront of this modern pro-copyright fight has been Disney. Originally the character of Mickey Mouse was supposed to become public domain sometime in the mid 80s but they passed a law to extend rights until the early 2000s. Then when that came close they pushed through more law so that now he's owned until 2019 (although there is some evidence that the Steamboat Willy version of Mickey Mouse is public domain ). This is all very ironic since Disney has been screwed out of their first mascot by bad copyright choices as well as basing most of their famous movies on public domain stories while still having yet to contribute anything back to the public domain.
When modern copyright first started it gave the creator rights for 14 years starting at the date of publication. Now works can be held by the production company for 94 years after the death of the creator. This is particularly distressing when you realize that the original goal of copyright (starting with the Statute of Anne) was to encourage people to write so that the public domain could expand. At the time there was no long tail market so 14 years as an acceptable lifespan of a written work. When the US colonies adopted similar law they did so with the idea of creating a thriving intellectual marketplace. That is irony.
History lesson over. Contemporary lesson begins. Now that you have all that in context perhaps you can see what pirates are fighting for. And by pirates I don't just mean file copiers. I mean people who want ideas to be free after a reasonable commercial life. People who see expanding legislation as a protective measure not just for companies but against citizens. Pirates and copyfighters (copyright fight) are locked in a conflict over culture. Can you imagine if fairy-tales were still copyrighted? Disney would be nothing. Because of both real and perceived copyright laws people are now being told at drugstores that they cannot make enlargements of 100 year old family portraits. Hell, there are cases where photo counter workers are in such fear that they refuse to make copies of photos that the customer has taken because they might be professional. It's strange how fear has always ruled the modern copyright industry, because copyright is now a moneymaking industry on it's own, though copying technology has almost always led to improved production for these same fearful tyrants of rights.
VCRs were fought when they first came out. Movie companies feared it would be the end of theaters. If you could watch a movie whenever you wanted at home, copied even, then no one would pay to see them ever again. And now we have an enormous and thriving home movie market that rivals that of theaters but still pays the production companies. They're reaping the benefits from two markets, one (movie production) was based on copyright infringement and the other (home theaters) they fought tooth and nail out of fear. The same thing happened with audio cassettes. And let's not forget Napster. MP3s are encoded using a method that was made for compressing the audio tracks on DVDs. Someone took that software (piracy) and made a method of encoding CDs (piracy). Today iTunes and self-publishing albums have shifted the consumer music market, making more distribution and production cheaper, creating a more versatile product and making the end result both more lucrative to make and cheaper to buy. Yet all of this started with piracy and the music industry is still throwing tantrums about this technology. Still not fully accepted but getting there is the home-brew game industry. You can see this by the Wiiware market and the XBox arcade where you can purchase games made by regular people. On previous systems you had to violate warranty and possibly law to modify systems play these types of games.
The pattern throughout the history of copyright and advancement seems to be this:
- An industry and market exists.
- A small number of pirates use technology to make some sort of innovation. This innovation fills a market demand that the industry is not meeting.
- The industry sees the market they did not capture and moves to make money off of it, replacing the pirate market.
- END RESULT: The original industry now has a larger stake in their market and the consumer has a better product.
- An industry and market exists.
- A small number of pirates use technology to make some sort of innovation. This innovation fills a market demand that the industry is not meeting.
- The industry fights back, introducing stricter laws, restrictive end user license agreements and media crippling DRM.
- The pirates keep control of the new market and their numbers grow.
- Steps 3 and 4 repeat ad infinitum.
- END RESULT: The market is never brought into the mainstream so piracy starts to take away from the industries base of users. In addition the regular consumer ends up getting a product that is increasingly faulty while pirates end up with a product that is increasingly superior.
- CDs A while back Sony tried to DRM a bunch of CDs so people couldn't transfer them to MP3 players. They ended up installing virii on a large number of computers and had to replace all infected CDs. It was better to pirate the music even if you had purchased the CD rather than using the official product.
- DVDs Most DVDs have basic copy protection on them making it a pain to transfer a movie from DVD to, say, an iPhone. However, you own that movie. It's already a digital copy and should transfer with a single step. But you're supposed to buy a DVD and a copy from iTunes. It's better to rip the DVD yourself but while making a backup of your own movie is legal it is illegal to break through that basic copy protection.
- Downloadable TV shows While sites like Hulu.com are making real progress in streaming TV shows it's still not completely convenient. If you use bittorrent to download a TV show you can watch it on your laptop without an internet connection, put it on a DVD to see on your TV the way god intended or drop it on your iPhone for the road. Not only that but shows tend to appear online within hours of air time rather than up to 8 days later. What if you miss Heroes or House and want to watch it that night? Hulu says you're boned but the open waters of bittorrent "piracy" can deliver that product in a superior format at higher quality with little wait.
Star Wars Yes, Star Wars fits this same format, though on a much smaller scale. Lucas made Star Wars, a great set of movies. Think of that as the market: Star Wars is a market. Well, to "improve" upon it he made the special editions. Han shoots first and the fans rebel. There was such an outcry that VHS and even Laserdisc rips started making the rounds. Fans wanted Han as a scoundrel and there was to be no ghost of Hayden Christensen at the end of Return of the Jedi! Lucas saw this and eventually re-re-re-released the movies on DVD with both the special version as well as the original. The end result is more money to him and a better product back to the fans. Piracy can be used as tool to fill in gaps for supply and demand. And historically piracy either made up a small portion of consumers or evolved into a whole industry on it's own.
At this point in time the MPAA and RIAA have a guilty until proven innocent mentality. They champion enforcement over innovation even at the expense of their consumer base and product quality. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is used as a blanket buzz-word to scare people. That is the act that makes breaking copy protection a violation regardless of whether the user/owner has the right to the copy protected material. That's like buying a house but then having to pay a toll at the doorway to each room you want to enter. That's called bullshit. It forces regular consumers to become criminals just to use the items they have purchased. Maybe that means these laws that were meant to protect creators and enhance the public domain have strayed a little far from acceptable. Out of fear Canadian law makers are claiming that bittorrent should be illegal but that's tantamount to saying the internet is legal but HTTP is not. Artists are seeing less return on their music while producers see more at the same time that fans are being sued on the artist's behalf.
And that is what pirates and copyfighters are trying to fix. By keeping the innovative side piracy alive we're pushing at laws and technology to help everyone enjoy their purchases more which in turn leads to more purchases. There are things we're doing with media that we'd gladly pay for except no one offers it as a product. I copy multi-DVD sets to my media center PC so I can watch season of shows at a time. I trade movies and series online that have never been released to the public or even aired on TV. I pull the DRM off audio books not to save money (they're library copies) but so I can put them on an iPod or my iRiver because the Microsoft DRM no longer works after I put an open source operating system on my MP3 player. I sometimes download digital comics because I can then, under Fair Use, use the images to do illustrated reviews which in turn can increase buyer numbers. It's not about stealing. It's about improving the world. US copyright was supposed to be a tool to encourage creators to add to the public domain by giving them rights for the main lifetime of their works. Now copyright is a battle between consumers and options-holders while the creators are mostly pushed to the sidelines. No one benefits from that situation except for middlemen right holders. That's not how our idyllic intellectual market should work.
I hope that helps clarify why pirates aren't just thieves as well as why consumers are becoming thieves out of necessity. It's a complicated battleground, part of it based in the court systems and part of it in the underground digital market.
And guess what: I want to help everyone out on this rickety ground. So I'm going to start up a series of blogs called This Digital Life. I'll be telling you how to do things with technology that are (most likely) free and (hopefully) useful. I'll tell you how to get a poor man's push-mail so you know when people have sent you mail without a computer or fancy phone at hand. I'll show you how to create a free "personal assistant" to send you e-mail, twitters and texts to remind you to do things and keep track of your schedule, as well as take notes and remember things for you. Oh, and it's run by e-mail or voice. And because this all came to me over this copyfight article the first installment will tell you how to skip over Tivo, Hulu and commercials to get TV delivered to you. All the shows you want, anywhere you want, the same day as they air. For free. And it's (pretty) legal.
But to cap off this post here are some link you might want to go through to get more information on all of this as well as jump into the underground legal-illegal world of being a consumer.
A great episode of the Canadian radio show Ideas entitled "Who Owns Ideas?" Grab it while you can because their web site says: "The Best of Ideas podcast is updated every Monday. Please note: podcasts are archived for 4 weeks only. Due to copyright restrictions not all Ideas programs are available for podcast."
But don't worry. Since I downloaded it to my computer I have a copy I can share if it's rotated off the site. Just let me know you need it.
The Pirate's Dilemma While at times a bit heavy handed or hokey this is still a great source to explain the copyfight landscape and get some historical background from real examples. When you go to purchase it you can name any price, even $0 if that's all you can afford. Buy it for free and then pay for a second copy if you love it. Do take note of the self-defeating copyright notice inside the book and revel in the irony. Revel!
FairUse4WM This nifty little program will let you convert DRMed WMA and WMV media files to unprotected files. This only works on media you have the licence to access. Also, Microsoft stopped fighting the guy who made this. This will let you free media you already have the right to from the following sources:
- Library audio books from many internet sources
- Amazon unboxed rentals that are set to expire or not be transferred
- Any other service that delivers controlled media through the Windows Media DRM
DVD Shrink This will let you take a DVD and re-encode it. You can shrink DVDs down to fit on a single layer DVD even if the original is dual layer and too big. The up sides to this are letting you take off audio languages you don't want/need as well as making the copy region free so you can get foreign DVDs to work on your DVD player. See, another market demand that was put in place by distributors to provide more licencing fees to them and an inferior product to you.
DVD Decrypter Oh no! The DVD you want to make region free is copy protected and DVD Shrink can't help you out! Never fear. This will analyze the protection scheme and create an image that you can then re-process in DVD Shrink or any other DVD program.
RipIt4Me Some studios are getting tricky and creating dead regions on DVDs so while DVD players don't notice them computers do and get hung up. It's literally media made faulty. This is yet another program that actually runs on top of DVD Decrypter that will drop out these dead spots and intentional disc errors. It actually fixes media that was made faulty on purpose.
That's all for now. Keep an eye out for the first in the This Digital Life series. If there's anything you've heard of that you want to know how to do, drop me a line about it. If there's something that you want but don't know if it can be done, let me know as well. I'll be looking for topics to address and will keep the series of how-to's going as long as i have ideas and requests.
Next time - free high quality commercial free TV that you can have delivered to your computer.
DVD Decrypter Oh no! The DVD you want to make region free is copy protected and DVD Shrink can't help you out! Never fear. This will analyze the protection scheme and create an image that you can then re-process in DVD Shrink or any other DVD program.
RipIt4Me Some studios are getting tricky and creating dead regions on DVDs so while DVD players don't notice them computers do and get hung up. It's literally media made faulty. This is yet another program that actually runs on top of DVD Decrypter that will drop out these dead spots and intentional disc errors. It actually fixes media that was made faulty on purpose.
That's all for now. Keep an eye out for the first in the This Digital Life series. If there's anything you've heard of that you want to know how to do, drop me a line about it. If there's something that you want but don't know if it can be done, let me know as well. I'll be looking for topics to address and will keep the series of how-to's going as long as i have ideas and requests.
Next time - free high quality commercial free TV that you can have delivered to your computer.
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