(quote)
Even more disturbingly, 50 per cent of 14-24 year olds do not believe that illegal file sharing is stealing.
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Well, I'm familiar only with the definition of stealing in the UK Theft Act, and the Victorian Crimes Act - and according to those definitions they're perfectly correct.

Other legal systems have different definitions, but my guess is that they're probably not that different. (I'd be interested to hear about it if I'm wrong)

The argument taken to its logical conclusion suggests it would be a disaster if the large corporate music and movie industries collapsed due to piracy. Assuming that is a realistic and factual assessment of the risks of piracy I'm wondering whether it would be a bad thing if young people got behind their local musicians and arts groups rather than the corporate players? All kinds of moral questions are raised by the digital divide. I'd like to see a discussion of those.

So Microsoft making 70% profit on windows was not "stealing" from the public?

Copyright as it stands today is more about protecting monopoly profits and excluding new players than it is about protecting artists/creators.

Software is nothing more than a really long string of numbers and I dont think you should be able to copyright numbers.

Corporate control of copyright has restricted creativity and progress not helped it. The burgeoning free and copyleft software movements have increased opportunities for people to create and improve unlike the propriety model so loved of the ideologues who prefer restriction and exclusion and greed over progress.

What is having a far bigger impact than piracy on corporate profits is the fact than people are now choosing to simply generate their own material (music, movies, software, etc.) and share it with each other free of charge.

Linux (available for free) is currently the world's fastest growing operating system. Many home-made Youtube videos have been viewed tens of millions of times. The fact is, the paid content is now having trouble competing with the free content.

So instead of just sitting absorbing information in front of a one-way TV, people can now interact with both the content and other users. Many people now spend hours a day communicating with each other instead of watching some crap sitcom with canned laughter.

And besides all that, it's not even certain that piracy does actually reduce profits:

http://www.thebookseller.com/news/120264-piracy-may-not-affect-revenues-says-new-report.html

Like many conservative commentators, the author seems to want to have his cake and eat it too. It may be true that creative artists will stop producing if they don't get paid. It may be true that some people won't like this. But this is hardly a 'catastrophe' when the solution is so simple: start paying them again.

If enough people want to watch new movies and read new books, then they will find a way to pay the creators. On the other hand, if we're all happy with old movies and old books, then why should we pay people to make more? Right now we already have access to many more books, songs and movies than anyone could absorb in several lifetimes. Why on earth should anyone think we need new ones?

Except the people who get paid to create them, of course. But since there are many times more people who consume entertainment than create it, a democratic government should be on the side of the consumers.

Thank you! At last an article championing for our very talented art content creators be it music, films, games developers, authors of books, software developers and all the associated technicians and industries involved and dramatically impacted upon by the freeloading culture of today and it is just not file sharers decimating the entertainment industry... it is the enablers like:

Google is profiting from adsense ads on websites where unauthorised distribution of copyrighted material takes place. They could shut down these websites if they wanted to do so but they choose not to do this because they generate income for Google through advertising.

ISPs provide the internet connection – they are laughing all the way to the bank – they know who the many millions are, downloading from illegal torrents sites and hogging bandwith (it is after all their network) they throttle their accounts until piraters go premium and pay more for their connection for an unlimited fast internet connection.

And also it is just not the younger generation who are illegally downloading and not giving any thought about the artists that they are robbing

I have neighbours who 10 years again were huge media buyers be it music or movies...

They have not bought any entertainment media in 10 years...However they have profited and have saved money from not buying media which enabled them to have the fastest internet connection available to download illegally, they have the lastest entertainment system in the living room with a huge huge wide screen televison. They have the best and fastest family member computers in the house to download illegal booty to the network hard drive attached to the huge huge wide screen tv so they can watch their favourite stuff all for free and with nothing going to the creators... it is obscene that they have passed on the stealing culture to their children who think that it is ok not paying for stuff that you want!

I think it's very easy to forget the sheer amount of work which goes into so much of the music and software we listen to. To me, if someone (or a group of people) invest a large amount of time, thought and creativity to create something new and interesting which the broader community wants, and if they want to charge money for that material, then they should have the right to copyright and make money out of their work. Surely this is a no-brainer

On the issue of ‘sharing,’ if one were share an item or sell a product second hand in the ‘real world’, then, after the transaction, you would have lost the product. However, with online ‘sharing’, both the giver and receiver have complete copies of the product. Online sharing and ‘real world’ sharing are different beasts, though I have no idea about the legal technicalities.

On the issue of big companies, if a group of people want to sell something they have worked to produce, then surely the size of that group, or how much money they might make from the product, are secondary considerations. The fact is that people are still downloading the latest music, software, games and songs. Perhaps this is due to successful large-corporation advertising, or perhaps it is simply a reflection of the huge amount of work they have put into their products, I don't know. But to me, the size of a corporation and how much money they make out of a product is not the central issue. The central issue is that we don't think twice about acquiring a commercial product which the creators have put huge amounts of time and effort into, and which, quite deservedly, they want to make a profit out of.

The issue of free software is an interesting one. If people want to create music and software and freely distribute it, I’m not going to complain! But today, people still want commercial products, and, as long as that’s the case, people should have to pay for the material.

Freeware only sometimes compares in performance with commercial products.

Most download sites are foreign, and contain foreign software, music and films, and I have found young people who download so much from other countries, they have no idea that software or even music and films can be produced in this country.

If they want something, they get it from somewhere else. This is accentuated by teachers in the education system, who tell students to “get it from the internet”.

These teaches and students will rarely make anything, and it leads to a cargo-type mentality.

They are unlikely to make or produce anything themselves in the future, just wait for the latest version to fall from the internet.

Obviously it is difficult for people to see the crime they are committing. Unlike any other kind of "stealing" if I download music I have not deprived anyone of that music. Its a bit like fishing or scavenging at a rubbish dump. The assertion that people will stop making music, movies or writing books is quite ridiculous. Much of the best music ever created was written long before there was any hope of making money from it. There are many reasons people embark on artistic endeavours and money is probably fairly low down on the list.
People will only obey the law when it is in keeping with our general idea of morality.
I think the answer would be the creation of a personal copyright licence which would enable a person to download any copyrighted material from the internet provided it was for their own use in a private setting. I think many people who currently download would be happy to pay for such a licence to give themselves legitimacy.

I honestly would have thought we had learned by now.

Standing in the way of progress - however you define it - is a pointless exercise. My old mate Canute tried to demonstrate this a while back, but his actions were widely misunderstood.

Music (and books, and films) are now digital commodities. They can - to a point - be digitally protected.

But "protecting" them using techniques that require a completely new definition of ownership - simply in order to enforce notions of "theft" that have changed little since it was the principal cause of Australian immigration - is clearly inappropriate.

The laws of supply and demand are being perverted here.

If the public is not prepared to pay for a musician's product, then - surely? - it is an obvious indication that the musician in question is over-supplying the market.

Check with any Economics 101 textbook. Examine closely the graphs that illustrate the relationship between demand, supply, and price.

http://tinyurl.com/24ahcpx

Internet piracy was a phrase invented by the "music industry" simply in order to first stigmatize, then criminalize, the basic human act of sharing, in the context of recorded music.

If the "industry" is doing anything positive and constructive in its relationship to musicians, composers etc., it should be accurately priced into the product.

This will be visible, and appropriately valued, by the music-buying public.

If they are not - and in fact are discovered to be just another layer of parasitic hangers-on - then the market will, inevitably, bypass them.

Can't come soon enough.

"Piracy" is an invention of the corporate middle-men who won't acknowledge their industry is dead and their services unwanted.
"Theft" is what the corporate middle-men are practising by continuing to charge for artificial scarcity. Bullying by scaring customers with lawsuits is typical of their behaviour, their value added is practically nothing.
The internet is the distribution and the marketing channel, the corporations are getting in the way of artists and their customers. Once you see this situation you realise that the morals and ethics of the "illegal download" generations (ie. Most of us) is fine. The real problem is with the corporations, their pet politicians and complicit legal friends trying to maintain a 20th century business model in the modern post-internet age.
These scum-bags are nearly as bad as bankers. Horrible little middle-men who fight like cornered rats, and provide much the same utility to society.
Piracy is a non-issue to the real economy...Censorship is the biggie