Comments on: Web 2.0 as a metaphor for 'rip-off'

perspective CNET News.com's Charles Cooper says a frank discussion of copyright protection in the new cyber-age is long overdue.

[coryschulz]

Does no one understand my perspective?

I feel like I've explained it a thousand different ways....

The concept of "borrowing" CAN NOT exist on the internet naturally when it comes to media and information, unless we consciously implement a system, such as DRM, to enforce these standards. It is neither stealing or borrowing, it is copying. Mass copying is not something that applies in the physical world. No one is going to go out and photocopy a book and give it away, it just doesn't work, mostly because we are limited by time and resources. But on the internet mass copying is something that every person has done every time they downloaded a web page and 1 Million other people downloaded that same web page with that same image and text. This type of distribution would not be possible in the physical world at the same cost. Also, "sharing" a file can not exist nor can "returning" a file. All of these terms: sharing, borrowing, returning, are of a physical nature. They involve physical limitations where only one person can have posession of an object and they describe the transition in one persons posession of that property to another persons property of that object. But in the world of computer, it is different. If I want to give someone else access to a file of mine, then I just e-mail or upload them a copy. It's easy. I get a copy, they get a copy, and that's just how computers function.

Imagine having a "magic sheet" that is huge, like the size of the Titanic. And when you put that sheet over something, and say Abracadabra! then you magically get a copy of that object when you remove the magic sheet. So you go home and you put your cell phone under it, and now you have 2 cell phones. You put your dog under it, and now you have 2 dogs. You put $500 under it and now you have $1000. So then you cover your entire house, and now you have 2 houses. So now you go to the store and cover all of the food with your blanket, and now you have twice as much food. And you don't need 2 houses, or all of this food, so instead you transfer posession/access of these items to people that don't have a house, and who don't have food... You give your dog to someone who really wants a dog and your money to someone who can put it to good use. Would this be wrong if you could physically duplicate all of this? Surely it would be a threat to our economy!!! Now EVERYONE can have WHATEVER they want with out paying for it!! All they have to do is use my magic curtain. You could solve world hunger, produce infinite amounts of gasoline, you could give everyone a home... Is this stealing? I didn't build my home, but I paid for it? If I make a copy of it, is that copy still owned by the person who built it? Is that dog that I made a copy of, not a real dog? Is giving that money to someone who will put it to good use, wrong? I do not think that you realize what I am talking about. This is more then just a concept of what is right and wrong and what is stealing and what isn't. This is an entirely new emergent system that we have never seen before. And right now we are deciding its fate... And all I'm saying... is that what we once thought of as stealing, maybe doesn't apply in this world where supply is unlimited. And what is traditionally wrong, maybe isn't always wrong anymore... and maybe this is a good change, and we should see it from an optimistic perspective and use it to its potential so that we may grow and develop as people. If we take it, and adapt it to make it function under the same physical laws that we have now, then we will be spoiling the very properties that make it so useful and precious. Give it time... and you might see things differently as well...

[coryschulz]

Evidence behind my perspective...

http://www.uwm.edu/~sensat/courses/241/presentations/hume01_files/frame.htm#slide0011.htm

In my philosophy class we recently discussed this theory of property rights. You will notice that the only environment where property rights are able to exist is in a world of limited altruism and moderate scarcity, which is the world that most of us live in. But on the internet, it is a world of both extreme generousity, where people are willing to go out of their way to make their files accessable to others, and it is an environment of huge abundance, since supply is unlimited and is as easy as copy and paste.

What media companies are attempting to do is to use DRM as a means to create a "Stable Moderate Scarcity" by limiting the number of copies of media that people have access to. This prevents people from carelessly copying and distributing files over the internet and illiminates abundance. Then they attempt to limit how generous people are with their songs by shutting down P2P sites, and suing tons of people for thousands of dollars, and putting everyone else in so much fear of the consequences of being generous, that they are shakin in their boots over sharing a few songs on a P2P network. This helps illiminate generousity and creates a "Stable Limited Altruism".

Now usually in the material world these things are not a factor. If everyone has an abundance of peaches, like TONS of peaches, and I go and steal one from your hand, that's ok because you have hundreds more sitting right next to you. But this pretty much never happens... And when it does, it's things that we don't normally think about like someone taking a pencil or pen from us, when we know we have a box of 250 back at home in our supply closet that we got for really cheap at Office Max on sale for $10 with an extra 20% off.

Extreme generousity happens in situations like family or friends, where there may not be a lot of food, but we are just as worried about everyone else as we are ourselves, and maybe even more so about everyone else. And so even if there is only 1 piece of pie left, and you really wanted it, but someone else wanted it too, so you let them have it and you let yourself be extra generous. This usually only happens in private settings, but for the most part I've observed that most people are good hearted people and will gladly help out a stranger and be extra generous if another person is nice and asks their help.

And so this is what media companies are attempting to do. They also recognize the internet as a place where property rights do not exist, and they are attempting to create rules to do so. It is justified in their motivation to want to get paid for their labor and their "property". But then they should not release their information onto a platform where generousity and endless surplus are everywhere and their information is broadcasted to everyone in such an uncontrolled manner. And consumers do not want to pay for these things. They will, in a state of fear or lack of other options. But they will not do it willingly. And if companies want to get paid, then they need to develop some other model to fund themselves. Advertisements are the best bet right now. And really, making money on information is hard. Look at the YouTube conundrum. How can such a valuable web site that attracts so many consumers, not have a means to produce any major cash flow besides selling itself to Google? Maybe we are no longer consumers. Maybe if property rights do not exist, then neither do business and neither does the business-consumer relationship? Maybe we have nothing we care to offer them... ever... even if we had money, would we pay a monthly fee for things like YouTube or Google Spreadsheets? Maybe some... but I doubt most. We are not consumers. In fact, we are the ones supplying the content, and we are the ones giving access to it. We are business, we are content, we are government, and we are the internet. And the natural laws of the internet exist in such a way that I feel we can benefit from them. We do not need capitalism on the internet. Maybe a capitalistic internet is an oxymoron? Every company comes here looking for money and all they find is surplus and generousity and they are discusted with it and want to change it??? The majority of people on the internet, who make the internet and expand the internet, are not the ones whose morals are malfunctioning. It is these companies that seek to put limitations on the naturally fragile and precious properties of this newly emerging system. The internet is an amazing thing that we have created, but we don't completely understand. It is a conscious living thing. The billions of neurons in my body and head are to my consciousness, what all of the people and computers on the internet are to a higher consciousness. An emergent system that we create in the same way we are based on emergent systems. Maybe we don't think of ourselves as little neurons supporting a bigger living thing, but I'm sure neither do the cells in my body. They only know that they are cells and we only know that we are humans. And this whole internet thing... is way more complex then you ever imagined.

[gernblan]

You definitely have a point

I said elsewhere that their distribution models just don't work anymore. They need to evolve and change with the rest of the world.

If they don't, and they make themselves extinct, that's their problem.

[mattumanu]

that is the essence of piracy

>>Would this be wrong if you could physically duplicate all of this? Surely it would be a threat to our economy!!! <<

Nice fantasy. The internet is nothing like that at all. Let's take a quick look at what piracy has been and is today. modern music piracy began with the first reusable media: Audio tape. The rules set down in that age was that as long as you weren't mass producing copies of music against copyright, you were ok. The minute you mas produce copies of something you become a pirate. The same thing happened after videotape was introduced. Movies have at the beginning a statement that it's illegal to copy, in whole or in part, the material you are about to watch. Again, the general rule was you could copy something, but the minute you begin mass producing it, you violate copyright. The law on this is rather draconian, but necessary to curb illegal activity.

Now, we have the internet. Using your analogy and comparing it to what the law says, it becomes very clear that copying a copyrighted file is out and out stealing. The person who provided the file is guilty and the person who chose to copy the file is guilty of piracty. Basic economics tells you the in order to enter into commerce one must have something that others are willing to compensate for, in this case, Music or Movies. These are both commodities, and are governed under copyright laws that give sole ownership to the one who produced it.

Enter the lowly internet user with a fast connection and a dvd/cd burner. The only way this user can justify using his equipment to copy anything is to appeal to the masses, IE, consensus gentium, since the consesus is it's ok to download music and movies and not pay for them. One person rips a copy of a movie, say it's borrowed from the library, then makes that copy available on the internet for others to burn copies of to dvds. The consesus of the masses may be that this is ok, but under black letter law, it's illegal.

It doesn't matter that the nature of the internet is "copying". If you look at the bottom of any website you'll see a link that says "terms of service", which spell out what a user can do with the content they just downloaded. This is how the internet is.

Just because you can use the internet a certain way doesn't mean you should.

[Trane Francks]

Whatever happened to /robots.txt

The real question is whether the site in question bothered to put an entry in /robots.txt to keep Google's bots from trolling the site for content. It's obvious to anybody who has ever seen a website's logs that Google's bots check for the existence of that file at every visit.

So, while it could be argued that Google stole copyrighted material and profited from the act, a more lenient outlook would be that Google's bots checked for permission to troll the site and tacitly got it.

My personal take is that the Belgian site didn't do enough to protect its content. A few lines in a text file is all it would have taken. I see this as not a victory for the protection of intellectual property and copyright, but of the continued exercising of lawsuits in place of common sense.

[booboo1243]

What ARE you HIGH? And On WHAT?

Google makes content "findable" by millions, without them those extra millions of people would not see your website, your ads and read your articles.

By your logic they should be charging you for driving readers to your site.

get a clue!

[bw94382]

You've missed the point

The issue here is whether publishers own the copyright on their web content, and whether they have the right to control how it's re-used.

It would really help the quality of debate on this site if people refrained from personal attacks in their postings and focused on the issue being discussed.

[kkleyboecker]

Tune your TV to NBC, ABC, CBS

All that content comes to you for no more than the cost of the television. It is a platform for displaying ads. If web content providers use THAT revenue model then the only thing they need to worry about is weather they are providing free access to copyrighted material. If google grabs an article then it ought to grab the advertising that is displayed with it. Then nobody will get upset.

[Kjell.andorsen]

I'm amazed that a CNET editor...

...could be so woefully ignorant about services such as google news. Let me try to state this in very simple terms. Google news does NOT host any content apart from short snippets from news articles, and links to the news articles themselves which are hosted by the ORIGINAL content provider. That means all their links will go directly to the website of the content holder, increasing the content holders page hits, making them more valuable for advertising etc. Essentially what google is providing is a win-win situation where google makes money, but also increases revenue for the content holder through increased traffic. The article snippets offered at the google news site easily fall within "fair use" and only serve to benefit the content owner. This is the same for google's book scanning project which allows a reader to read a couple of pages from scanned books and then provides links to purchase the books in question. Free advertising and immensly useful. Another win-win.

How apparently intelligent people can fail to see the benefit google is providing to content holders is quite frankly beyond me.

[tagbert]

THIS is what this STUPID article is about

"Web 2.0 as a metaphor for 'rip-off
CNET News.com, CA - Oct 20, 2006
... The European court struck at the heart of the Web 2.0 assumption that it's perfectly all right to profit from another company's content without permission and ..."

That was it. 232 charters.

I did a news search and Google showed me that snippet of the article with citation and a VERY brief bit of the text that is closely analogous to an abstract. It then provided a link to that article. If I was interested, I could click through to the article and read it. I would then see the article all the ads that paid for the article.

We are not talking about Napster, Child pron, or any of the other bugaboos that people through up to confound and inflate.

This is a service that connect customers (me) and a seller (CNET). AND THEY KNOW IT.

This seems like a very disingenuous attempt to stir up something in a teapot when the actual purpose is to generate publicity for NEWS.com and Mr. Cooper. If they really think that Google is IMMORALLY STEALING their content, then they should just stick a robots.txt file in the root of NEWS.com and block all search engine traffic.

Go ahead and lock the door. Sorry if you also lock out a bunch of your customers.

[carr2ns]

Ridiculous premise

Google did not reprint the article without permission. They simply provided a link to the newspaper's OWN WEBSITE - they are the ones who posted it for public consumption. If the newspaper doesn't want it freely available, they need to make their site subscription only. Google provides links to many sites that do this (not just wide-open sites). This is similar to providing a printed newspaper at a news stand - you can read the headlines freely, but must purchase the paper to continue reading.

[dterrie]

He's right - sorry dudes

Dudes,

Sit down, take off your Birkenstocks, and think for a minute before mindlessly shouting down an opposing view. Turn it around. Were a newspaper to hook into Google's search engine without permission and display the results but with their own ads, Google might just object. If the newspapers are ok with Google summarizing their content, and formally agree to do so, fine. But otherwise, their hard work is simply fodder for the Google ad revenue machine. It is not up to Google to decide this for the content creator.

[mrstevenCCC]

Finally, some intelligent thought...

All you folks raging against the machine can hopefully can understand the premise behind the article...it doesn't matter what Google's good intentions are, nor does it matter what 'service' they provide. Google is not the Rightsholder for the content and they are not allowed to determine what they can and can't do with copyrighted content. The fact that they display only a link has nothing to do with anything. In order to display a link, Google must index the text of the work. That's how you and I can search it. That's called making a digital copy and since google would not have a business w/out digital content, it's not a fair use question at all. And anything that is copyrighted prevents people from making digital copies w/out permission. Google is making copies of everything w/out permission but most rightsholders believe the increased traffic outweights the copyright issue. Apparently, that's not the case for all.