[advocacy] DRM in OGG - A Proposal

[Tim Ivorson]

> > (even true 'piracy' is not stealing, because no owner of
> > a legal copy is deprived of their copy)
> 
> A label might have a lot of unsold copies of an album left in a warehouse 
> though, and fail to cover the costs of recording. Plenty of artists get 
> dropped by the major labels - they are businesses, after all.

The 'piracy' (unauthorised reproduction of copyrighted material) may deprive the rights holder of something, but it is not stealing, because stealing is something more specific than getting something without paying that due fee, and depriving someone of somthing. I believe that only a special kind of 'piracy' (the kind where the listener copies something that they would have bought anyway, and then decides not to buy it) would cause large quantities of copies to remain unsold, or bands to be dropped. I think stealing is (to paraphrase a definition I remember reading on another mailing-list) depriving someone of something that they own, by fraudulently assuming ownership of that same thing. No act of 'piracy' can fulfil this definition. That doesn't mean that unauthorised reproduction of copyrighted material is morally acceptable, just that it is a different kind of morally unacceptable act (in those cases in which it is not morally acceptable).

> > being told that music is not
> > available at any price offends me.
> 
> Even if the person witholding the music is the artist?

No. Only if it is available to some people but not others. If it is available to a radio station, to concert audiences, to readers of a magazine, or to the first thousand customers, then it ought to be available to me too, at whatever price the publisher chooses to charge (though in a perfect world prices would be limited).

> Some p2p music is demo 
> material that the artist may not wish to be released because they don't think 
> it's good enough. 

I consider such demo tracks and other *properly* unreleased material to be private information. Once it has been heard by the public this is no longer true.

Tim Ivorson
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