Well, to be fair, the VCR didn't have a distribution system attached that allows sharing worldwide.
I still agree with you, though; times change, and nobody "deserves" business-model protection. The legacy copyright industries already get massive state subsidies through the legal enforcement of artificial monopolies - degrading everyone's computing to prop them up further is insane.
>I still agree with you, though; times change, and nobody "deserves" business-model protection.
Is that true though?
Because laws against theft (physical theft of actual products I mean, let's not get into whether "copying" is theft here) are a business-model protection too.
As are most business laws (e.g. contract law).
Why pay at a restaurant when you can just walk out and run for it? Isn't making it illegal a "business model protection"?
So what makes some business models (selling physical stuff) more protectable?
You're making false comparison here. DRM is extremely invasive - it's akin to being forced to wear handcuffs inside a store to prevent theft, or perhaps being strip searched every time you walk past a store. Both of those actions can also be sold as "business protection against theft", but our legal framework currently says that we're ready to tolerate some amount of shoplifting and we're not going to allow stores to strip people naked at the exit to check for stolen goods. The profit fallout of shoplifting is just too small to allow for such egregious attacks on legitimate customers.
Same story with DRM - yes, piracy IS illegal. But DRM as a response is hugely disproportionate to damage done, causes huge issues to LEGITIMATE buyers. What DRM proponents defend is attacking paying customers with restrictions, lockdowns and costs to hunt a rather small profit loss (the relative smallness of lost sales due to piracy have been repeatedly demonstrated in these last years).
At least for the US, I think you are overestimating the restrictions on private establishments.
Stores don't do invasive things because it doesn't make business sense, not because the legal system particularly enjoins them.
Like if I opened a candy shop that required agreeing to an NDA for entry, what law do you think would make me let people in without signing the NDA? It might not be enforced, but there isn't anything that would stop me from requiring the signature for entry (other than it being silly).
The risk to a shoplifter is unfathomably larger than the risk to a pirate, and the leakage is infinitely less.
Analogies generally don't serve this debate well. Saying DRM is like physically invasive security to your person is just as ridiculous as Studios' claims that piracy is the same as theft. Both attempt to communicate real issues, but are ridiculously inaccurate.
> So what makes some business models (selling physical stuff) more protectable?
Food is a scarce[1] resource. Concepts like "property" and "theft" relate specifically to managing scarcity. Taking food deprives the owner of their meal, because we cannot make perfect copies of baryonic matter. After Shannon introduced the idea of "digital communication" that allowed information to be copied indefinitely without errors, the bit was no longer scarce.
Note: I didn't say anything about how the information was created in the first place. The creation of data - which requires work/energy - should not be conflated with copying existing data. The method used by the restaurant to create or acquire a recipe doesn't create the scarcity that is inherent to the food that implements that recipe.
Laws against theft, contract enforcement, etc. are general laws for the benefit of everyone. (They also derive from common law, which dates back over a thousand years, as opposed to statutory laws that are routinely bought by lobbying, but let's put that aside.) They are a sort of 'legal primitive' - don't cheat, don't steal - that attempt to provide a baseline of trust in society.
Mandates that computers must respect special rules based on legal definitions are laws that tell me how my machines must operate and how you must build machines. They are arbitrary restrictions the degrade capabilities (make the machines less valuable) solely for the purpose of enabling a few industries to be lazy and not figure out how to be relevant in a changing world.
If you want to go down that path, you're going to be "picking winners and losers" - something I hear we are supposed to dislike. Which business models "deserve" protections?
- Do long-haul truckers "deserve" to keep working in the face of self-driving trucks?
- Do corner groceries "deserve" protection from Whole Foods/Amazon or Walmart's logistics innovations?
> So what makes some business models [...] more protectable?
As a descriptive matter, it appears that that's closely related to one's investment in lobbying.
>If you want to go down that path, you're going to be "picking winners and losers" - something I hear we are supposed to dislike. Which business models "deserve" protections?
I'd say that should not be up to the availability of the relevant technology to decide, but up to society.
Just because we can obliterate or replace something doesn't automatically mean we should, or that it would be better for us if we did.
So I'm perfectly OK with society picking winners and losers, and not OK with a jungle race where "invisible hands" and market forces (including the one's people forget, like lobbies, monopolies and under the table deals) decide.
> So I'm perfectly OK with society picking winners and losers, and not OK with a jungle race where "invisible hands" and market forces (including the one's people forget, like lobbies, monopolies and under the table deals) decide.
Uh, I specifically called out lobbies and monopolies.
And in theory I agree with you. In practice, "society" doesn't serve that role. The "invisible hands" are exactly the actors doing the picking.
Don't get me wrong - I love me some theory, it is so much cleaner than the real world. But we don't get to live there.
Business model protection is if some particular model gets legal privileges that give it an advantage over competing business models without a justification based on the common good. So, none of the examples that you cite are cases of business model protection.
Just because a business model (e.g. retail sales) is so prevalent as to be invisible as such, and laws that enable it seem like natural laws or obvious for the common good, doesn't mean it's not a business model like any other. Just that some are unable to see it as such.
There has been criticism of the prevalent model too (e.g. from the "property is theft" type to money-less sharing communities etc).
Contract laws and laws forbidding theft (and establishing the private ownership of physical objects) are literally cornerstones of almost all human societies that ever existed. Protecting retail is incidental.
Consider this thought experiment: we invented Star Trek replicators and made them as expensive as computers or microwave ovens. Retail business would, and IMO rightfully should, literally stop existing that very moment. Trying to restrict replicating everyday object would be wrong, and would go against the very nature of replicator-enabled reality.
This is to show that laws should align with the reality they exist in, instead of making lives of the many worse to make lives of the few a bit easier.
>Consider this thought experiment: we invented Star Trek replicators and made them as expensive as computers or microwave ovens. Retail business would, and IMO rightfully should, literally stop existing that very moment. Trying to restrict replicating everyday object would be wrong, and would go against the very nature of replicator-enabled reality.
I don't see why it would be inherently "wrong". Wrong is for humans to decide.
Consider this alternate though experiment: we invented a device giving people the ability to murder anyone in the world without anybody having proof of who did it. Would it be wrong trying to restrict that machine's sales and use, and would it go against the very nature of killing-without-evidence-machine-enabled reality?
In your example, it wouldn't be wrong, because this machine enables severe violation of one of the fundamental things people agree on - the wish of individuals to live, and live without fear of getting killed. On one level up, for humans as social animals, there are pretty universal concepts of fairness, that seem to include personal property rights (communism tried to do away with that, and it created a disaster) and the desire for reward for one's work. Societies tend to enshrine those desires in laws. We also have desires for sharing and social expectations that it's good for people with surplus to share with people who have less than they need. Moreover, the concept of helping those in need is also pretty fundamental as humans go.
I bring it up because your example with murder-machine deals with a different set of concepts than the replication machine.
The replicator example was meant to show that retail business model doesn't make sense when there's zero marginal cost of producing and distributing a good past the very first item - retail stops bringing any value to customers. Trying to artificially limit replicators to save retail would be wrong, both by going against the fundamental concepts of society and by making something trivial and good much more difficult to perform.
By the same line of thinking, it's worth considering whether DRM and IP laws aren't protecting some business models that don't make sense anymore, and by this causing damage to society.
Because it prevents people from creating wealth for themselves in order to make sure that other people can profit from selling to them, thus creating a privilege that hurts the common good. Aka "protection of a business model".
That does not make it business model protection. Please try to actually understand what people write, it doesn't help discussions if you simply ignore the other's point.
True, but they still kept earning billions through peak global torrents distribution and Netflix happily made people pay for them because they were accessible. And now they run after the DRM train like everyone else.
>True, but they still kept earning billions through peak global torrents distribution
Isn't that kind of irrelevant though?
Whether a business still makes money is not an argument as to whether torrenting their stuff would be OK.
A physical business (e.g. clothes store) might make millions even though people steal stuff, but we wouldn't consider that as making stealing OK.
(And I don't care for the "copying is not stealing" argument. It might or it might not be, but I'm making an analogy here, and the core of it is: whether a business is still coming out on top, making money, etc, doesn't mean another practice against them is OK).
It's extremely relevant when we're debating how far we're letting companies go at restricting your freedoms and where do we curb them.
A similar example: warranties. In EU at least, we demand that companies invest money to make their hardware work at least 24 months without issues. Even though this costs corporations money and they'd probably prefer your TV to die in 24 hours because that would increase their revenue flow. It benefits the society at large and makes life better for everyone at the expense of some cash flow of businesses.
I see DRM as the same kind of issue - it actively ruins cultural experience of society at large, forces locked down devices on people, demands that culture must not be experienced repeatedly and forces people to become renters of content. I'd prefer businesses to lose some profits due to piracy instead of having to tolerate all the horse shit DRM pushes on us.
And my talk about profits is all about that - even though piracy exists, businesses still can generate huge profits. As such I argue that thus DRM isn't necessary at all considering all horrible consequences it brings.
> Whether a business still makes money is not an argument as to whether torrenting their stuff would be OK.
But it should be in whether or not we spend lots of resources in helping them to increase their profits further.
> A physical business (e.g. clothes store) might make millions even though people steal stuff, but we wouldn't consider that as making stealing OK.
But at the same time we also don't attempt to prevent all theft, right? I mean, we absolutely could take tax money and have police officers strip you naked whenever you leave some store to make sure that thefts don't happen. We don't. Why not?
Playing devil's advocate, is a lot of tax money spent on protecting copyright? Aren't most infringers "caught" by private companies hired by the industry, who then send DMCA takedowns, letters to ISPs and file civil lawsuit?
Tax money is not the only way that society spends resources on enforcing rules.
Those DMCA takedowns, for example, need to be processed by hosting platforms and ISPs, so they have to pay people for doing so, and that's then necessarily part of the price that you pay for ISP service, or that, I dunno, youtube video makers get less revenue from their videos.
Just because the state doesn't spend tax money on it, doesn't mean it doesn't consume public resources.
And much more insidious are the opportunity costs, because they are more or less invisible: For example, the DMCA makes it a criminal offense to circumvent any technology that was intended to "protect copyright" or something to that effect. Now, there might be the opportunity for who knows what kind of technical innovation if that wasn't illegal. People could possibly build all kinds of nifty devices that allow you to use media in new ways or circumstances that would be perfectly legal as far as copyright is concerned--but people don't because that would be criminal. How much value for society is thus not created as a side effect of this ban? That value is also part of what we spend on enforcing copyright.
Or how about security holes in DRM software? As it's illegal to reverse-engineer DRM software, security researchers don't touch DRM software. But essentially all software that security researchers have ever looked at does have vulnerabilities. So, who knows how many people have been hacked via vulnerabilities in DRM software? How many people's data was stolen that way? Maybe people were the victim of identity theft due to vulnerabilities in DRM software? All of that also would be part of the resources that we spend on this.
Or what about when John Deere holds the data hostage that the tractors that they supposedly sold to farmers collects? And people aren't even allowed to swap out the tractor's software for their own due to DRM and the above criminalization of circumventing it?
You have to consider all the negative consequences that the existence of those rules has, because that all comes out of our collective wealth in order to prop up their business model.
I still agree with you, though; times change, and nobody "deserves" business-model protection. The legacy copyright industries already get massive state subsidies through the legal enforcement of artificial monopolies - degrading everyone's computing to prop them up further is insane.