TV licensing...

[Mick F]

Whilst you're at it, nick the car, the cats and the parrot, let alone the IT stuff, the contents of the freezer and even the furniture.
Many a home has been cleared out by thieves.

[Mick F]

I suggest all you TVL dodgers watch this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vY0hXBghTwk

[mjr]

The harm is done because you then have ten people with a copy of the product when they have only paid once.

For people who make their living producing maps, or films, or books, or software that is a serious issue.

Only if you're stuck in the past trying to be paid for each copy rather than being paid to produce. Now that copying is so cheap, the copy-control business model - which was already so weak as to be propped up by laws and recently criminalisation of civil disputes - would only be sustained by increasingly draconian device-usage-control laws which will hold back society in realising the potential of widespread digital computers. Who will dare to be the first to shoot their economy in the foot like that?

Given your attitude to copy protection... if Incan break into your house and take Mercian and Moulton, then Inshould be free to do so - you didn’t make it impossible....

That's not equivalent. If you can break in, you should be allowed to copy them freely and keep the perfect copies. Why not? If it were possible, who would be hurt by that action more than flawed business models?

[[XAP]Bob]

The harm is done because you then have ten people with a copy of the product when they have only paid once.

For people who make their living producing maps, or films, or books, or software that is a serious issue.

Only if you're stuck in the past trying to be paid for each copy rather than being paid to produce. Now that copying is so cheap, the copy-control business model - which was already so weak as to be propped up by laws and recently criminalisation of civil disputes - would only be sustained by increasingly draconian device-usage-control laws which will hold back society in realising the potential of widespread digital computers. Who will dare to be the first to shoot their economy in the foot like that?

So who is going to pay anyone to write a book, or produce an album?

The economics require that the recompense comes from the end consumers. If the end consumers don't pay anything, then there is no recompense available for the people producing work - so there will be no people producing decent content...

That's why copyright is a good thing - it has been over extended, and abused, but it isn't fundamentally a bad thing to have a time limited monopoly on creative works.

[philvantwo]

I always used to copy cd's I'd bought but now if I want any song I download it from MP3 skulls!
What's Mick F on about his cats and his parrot for?

[Mick F]

Bob was suggesting he could break in and steal my bikes, so I offered the parrot and the cats too.



If I bought a book, I could sell it. The writer/publisher would not see my selling, neither would they care even if I made a profit.
They were paid when the book was originally sold.

If I were to copy it, they wouldn't care either, unless I was passing them off as originals and making a business of it.

[[XAP]Bob]

Bob was suggesting he could break in and steal my bikes, so I offered the parrot and the cats too.



If I bought a book, I could sell it. The writer/publisher would not see my selling, neither would they care even if I made a profit.
They were paid when the book was originally sold.

If I were to copy it, they wouldn't care either, unless I was passing them off as originals and making a business of it.

No - the principle of first sale is still there.

Think about software - if only one person bought some piece of software, then copied it for all their friends, who copied it for all their friends... then there is no financial possibility of making any software updates, or new software.
The same applies to music, books, whatever.

If you give someone your copy, and cease your own use of the product (software or music), then that's a different thing entirely - and I'll fully support the right to resale.

But technically you don't buy the disc the music, or software, is on - you buy a license to play that disc in certain circumstances. One of the things that is explicitly included in CD licensing is Radio play (with various limitations), and that license is not included in streaming services (Spotify et al) OR mp3 download services (amazon music).


The fact that copying such things no longer has any significant cost, nor is it self limiting (it's actually fairly expensive to print out a book for instance) doesn't change the economics for the producers.

It should mean that digitally delivered copies are cheaper than physically delivered copies (tax excluded - why ebooks attract VAT and books don't is beyond me). It shouldn't mean that you are free to copy and distribute.


Personally my tune changes when things are broadcast on FTA TV - because any copy you acquire after that could reasonably be considered time shifting.

[mjr]

So who is going to pay anyone to write a book, or produce an album?

The economics require that the recompense comes from the end consumers. If the end consumers don't pay anything, then there is no recompense available for the people producing work - so there will be no people producing decent content...

Sorry but Who usually pays them at the minute? It's not usually the end consumers! Most producers are paid by speculators (sometimes called production companies, ironically, or publishers) usually some sort of fixed fee in exchange for their monopoly and then the speculators are paid by end consumers again and again and again. I feel that's a big part of the reason why our creative industries are currently so, erm, uncreative and we have 1001 similar first person shooter games and a seemingly-endless succession of Britain's Best Home Sewing Bee Celebrity Island Apprentice Brother Off game shows extending at least 20 years so far.

Edit: I think it's also why many people feel little guilt in copying works without paying. The main party hurt is the holder of the copying monopoly, which is more often the speculator rather than the creator. And now we're in a stupid situation where even if you wanted to pay for copying a DVD, there's usually no way to do it and now copyright infringement has been criminalised, asking how would be tantamount to sending a "please arrest me and make an example of me" invitation.

It would probably be far better if the end consumers were paying the people producing work directly. There have been some projects in that line through Kickstarter, Patreon, GoFundMe and so on, but it's still a small market, for complex reasons.

That's why copyright is a good thing - it has been over extended, and abused, but it isn't fundamentally a bad thing to have a time limited monopoly on creative works.

If we rolled back from Mickey Mouse copyright to the Queen Anne original 14 years renewable for 14, it would be much less troublesome, but I think it's still fundamentally unsustainable and rewards speculation more than creation.

[mjr]

Think about software - if only one person bought some piece of software, then copied it for all their friends, who copied it for all their friends... then there is no financial possibility of making any software updates, or new software.

One obvious possibility is some sort of cooperative hiring of the author(s) to make the updates or new works and each copy becomes an advert or reason to join in the hiring - but it's difficult to make that competitive in the current environment. There's a bit of a chicken and egg because if you've been producing for the monopolists, then at some point you basically have to convince N people to pay you X for Y months while you produce some clean work before they see anything in exchange for their money. I think the most likely routes are to have enough of a track record for people to trust you to make what they want or to have one of those special convincing ideas that you can tell people without someone else being able to make it before you get enough subscribers.

That said, I think many software companies recognise that first-sale is poor because they keep trying to transition to subscriptions, partly to address the awful problem of old software that's been found to have security flaws but users won't update it because they'd have to pay and at the moment the main obvious risk to the owner of an infected machine is their internet service being restricted or disconnected or running up additional costs - unless the infecter is daft and wees in their swimming pool, of course, but I think that rarely happens and trying to promote updates based on that is dismissed as scaremongering.

This problem of high cost and low return for updated versions is basically a problem described in 1989's The Cuckoo's Egg (and probably before, but that's when I was starting out in software) and the monopoly-based first-sale economics is a big part of why it continues to be widespread to this day.

[[XAP]Bob]

Think about software - if only one person bought some piece of software, then copied it for all their friends, who copied it for all their friends... then there is no financial possibility of making any software updates, or new software.

One obvious possibility is some sort of cooperative hiring of the author(s) to make the updates or new works and each copy becomes an advert or reason to join in the hiring - but it's difficult to make that competitive in the current environment.

It's impossible to make that work... because it isn't fair or equitable for the users, and it doesn't actually reliably fund the projects that need to get funded.
A speculator taking the risk, and funding the work in return for possible future profit, is one way..



I'm going back to books, because I have seen the commercials from a couple of different viewpoints...

You actually can't know what a book is going to be like before it's written.
Yes, the publisher takes a cut - they fronted the capital to make the book possible:
- Author's advance
- Editor
- Typesetter
- Proof reader
- Graphic designer
- Printers
- Marketing
- Channel partners...

Of all of the above listed people, generally only the Author has a continued financial interest in the book.
Of each book sold the publishing company pays for the printing and distribution, the author receives their contracted cut (often a fixed percentage of the sale price) and the remainder is 'profit', with the hope that the total profit exceeds the initial costs. That won't be the case for all books, so that 'profit' has to balance between projects as well.

How much does it cost to get a book through a *proper* publishing route (even if you ignore the publisher, you still need the edit/typeset/proof/edit/typeset/proof cycle (which runs at least twice) to be paid for)?

It's many thousands of pounds worth of work, by highly skilled people - and these people are generally paid for 'work done' with no future financial interest in the process. You *need* speculators to be able to run the process.
Or you can 'self publish' and the result of that is generally absolute dross.

[mjr]

One obvious possibility is some sort of cooperative hiring of the author(s) to make the updates or new works and each copy becomes an advert or reason to join in the hiring - but it's difficult to make that competitive in the current environment.

It's impossible to make that work... because it isn't fair or equitable for the users, and it doesn't actually reliably fund the projects that need to get funded.
A speculator taking the risk, and funding the work in return for possible future profit, is one way..

Are you seriously claiming that the current speculators "reliably fund the projects that need to get funded"? I don't think that's true at all.

As I acknowledged, it's difficult to make cooperative hiring of producers work, but I think it is possible.

You actually can't know what a book is going to be like before it's written.

That's not a unique problem. All production has that problem, no matter how it's funded. At some point, someone has to pay for something to be created without knowing what it'll be like. Why do you only seem to count that problem against cooperative funding? With speculator funding, consumers still pay for the failures (what you called "that 'profit' has to balance between projects as well"), but it's usually a lot less transparent what failures you're funding.

Of all of the above listed people, generally only the Author has a continued financial interest in the book.

You seem to have missed the publisher off your list - and in my experience, it's not a certainty that the Author has a continued financial interest beyond the minimum required.

the author receives their contracted cut (often a fixed percentage of the sale price)

"Citation required", as they say on wikipedia. I suspect that, as with films, newer performers are getting a percentage of the net at best, not the gross.

You *need* speculators to be able to run the process.
Or you can 'self publish' and the result of that is generally absolute dross.

Self-publishing just seems like people who basically speculate on their own works. It's probably generally allowed by the monopolists because it doesn't threaten their business model.

Or consumers can cooperatively hire producers and it results in stuff like the All The Stations documentary series, to give a recent crowdfunded example.

Even if my suggestion is flawed, it seems no less flawed than speculating and there are probably other non-monopolistic ways to skin this cat which I'm not thinking of right now.

Returning to TV licensing, I think the Netherlands public broadcasting system is still made up of listeners' (later viewers') associations. You can probably guess who weakened that public participation by introducing a TV licence fee (since replaced by funding from general taxes) in the early 1940s, opening the door to them eventually also being beholden to copyright restrictions and speculators...

[Mick F]

Yes, the publisher takes a cut - they fronted the capital to make the book possible:
- Author's advance
- Editor
- Typesetter
- Proof reader
- Graphic designer
- Printers
- Marketing
- Channel partners...

............. and you can buy a book for a quid or two.

[NATURAL ANKLING]

Hi,
Not read all the posts but when I buy a CD for 5K......................you need a licence to run it.

[Mick F]

Crack the code, and then it's free.

[Mick F]

Latest letter from the TVL people.
Say they have passed the issue over to an Officer of the Plymouth Enforcement Division.

The Enforcement Officer will explain why they are visiting and will be polite and fair .................... if they find evidence ............... they will interview you under caution ....................... If you are prosecuted, you could be fined up to £1,000 plus legal costs.

We look forward to his/her visit.