The library of the Future

I disagree with much of your extrapolation. The idea that the flow of material (books or music, for example) will continue unabated without the protection of copyright is deeply flawed. It's all about money. If you look at professional authors who support themselves exclusively by their writing, they will simply not be able to continue without the income provided by copyrighted publication. It is their JOB, hence "professional" writer. If all works eventually become free, the overall volume and quality of those works will decline because those writers will have to get a different job to support themselves. Production of intellectual property will be reduced to a mere hobby. Very few creators will be able to support themselves through the goodwill of their fans, and that generally takes a certain critical mass that most creators will never achieve (e.g., Nine Inch Nails releases all their music for free on their site, but they already have enough real fans who willingly pay to support them).

Your theory of national libraries also only applies to those countries that would pass such laws requiring submission of works. I doubt seriously such a law would ever pass in the United States, for example.

You are also quite wrong about the Kindle. The Kindle is not simply hardware. It is an entire service. Your purchase of a Kindle includes a lifetime subscription to the built-in wireless download service from Amazon, and the copyright holders decide what to allow Amazon to put on the Kindle and how much money to charge for it. That's part of the reason it is so expensive -- the sale price includes the cost of the infrastructure required to support the download service and, I suspect, some "overhead" related to copyright/licensing fees. If Amazon could not make money off the Kindle, there would be no Kindle. I'm sure there are or will be stand-alone e-book readers, but the copyright holders won't be supporting that since they won't make money off it.

Saying that "if X is free at the library, then obtaining X for free online is the same thing" is false, even for Books24x7. They support copyright and have come to an agreement with the copyright holders whose works they provide, and I'm sure part of that agreement is how those works are distributed. If your library subscribes to their service, it is legal for you to go down there and review an electronic copy, while it remains illegal for you to download it from some random network.

This is the same flawed reasoning that a lot of proponents of illegal downloads make. "I could do it legally this way, so that makes doing it illegally this other way okay." No, it does not. One way is legal and the other way is illegal. If you don't like that, then lobby your legislative body to change those laws (which I know is actually a pretty strong movement in some countries), but until that time, the activity is, in fact, illegal. If you browse a book on a store shelf or go get it from the library, that's legal. If you download someone's illicit copy of it, that's illegal. It's that simple.

I hate to make an ad hominem argument, but I suspect very strongly that your lack of fanaticism for copyright is directly proportional to how much of your income depends on the sale of your copyrighted material. If you were 40 years old with a wife and two kids to support and your ONLY income was the sale of your books and games, I think you would feel differently.

Not really an argument for semantics but it sounds more like ethical practices rather than human morality since the subject is dealing with information.

A point to consider is the agency of copyright and what it is:
Copyright is a privilege of protection against unlawful use of rights. Its not a moral/ethical issue in any case for the rights holder to do whatever he wishes to do with the IP. It would only be a moral/ethical issue with the end user (or non-copyright holder) that wishes to abuse an established social contract.

A counterpoint to "free information is warranted":
Information is not free, at some point distribution will always come in and cause a cost -- whatever media form the information takes, it will cost someone money/effort to distribute it. From an ethical standpoint, it doesn't matter HOW the information is distributed or HOW EFFICIENTLY the information is shared. If a copyright holder feels that his work is being used in violation, then he can claim copyright violation -- that's the ethical crux, a violation of terms.

how a person can resolve this ethical dilemna:
What it comes down to is how the end user decides to treat the privilege of shared information; does he put the value more on ACQUIRING the information OR does he give more value to the OWNERSHIP of the copyright?

simpson

Publishers claim this all the time! Just google "internet piracy" and you can see a thousand hits where publishers make either an explicit claim that downloads = lost sales, 1:1. Or consider all the news reports about piracy being a $x industry, where $x is the retail price of the games times the number of times they've been downloaded. The music industry made the exact same claim about mp3 players, and before that they made it about CD-burners, and before that it was cassette tapes, and before that radio. Each time they've emerged stronger than before exactly when they've harnessed the technology, rather than cowering in fear from it.

Look, I didn't quote any numbers. I just said it stood to reason that there were benefits to permitting copying and sharing as well as costs, and that these benefits are rarely taken into account when the overall effect of piracy is reported.

Taking an example from our tiny world of boardgame design, consider print-and-play, which is what started this debate. Many games are originally released as completely print-and-play, so their authors create and distribute them with no intent of profiting from them. That alone destroys your original thesis, which is that games won't be created if there's no money to gain.

But, you say, what about commercially released games? Surely the necessary materials to print your own copy of Pandemic would be well-guarded, right? Yet a cursory search of BGG shows that even fairly big game publishers (Z-Man, in this case) routinely upload the full rulesets, boards, and cards for their games. These are among the most popular downloads for any entry on BGG that offers them. You say that this would necessarily destroy the income stream, but the facts are against you -- many people buy these same games, even though they could easily assemble them themselves. Indeed, Z-Man publishes the rules and board precisely BECAUSE he knows that, in large part, these drive future sales. Another example: Lost Cities is a wonderful but overproduced game that famously requires no more than two decks of cards and a marker, and for which the rules and even the card designs are easily available online. But it sells just fine.

The story I think you're talking about here is this one:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350

I would encourage people interested in this sort of thing to read it. It talks exclusively about casual games, however, and leaves a lot of questions unanswered. Check the comment thread for some of those questions.

There's also a brief follow-up that answers some but not all of them:
http://gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17408

Basically, fixing the simplest way for people to pirate drove sales up 70%, but we're talking about a change in the percent (increase) of a percent (legitimate copies) of a percent (taken online after downloading). Other methods had little or no effect, especially against the bigger picture.

I only mention this because you brought it up. I don't really want to get into a discussion of the practicalities of casual computer game DRM and other anti-piracy measures here, as I think there are better places for that. I'm more interested in the morality of these actions, especially as it relates to board games.

Yeah, he can try. But if it's a library's lending policy that's causing him to "feel" like his work is being used in violation, then he will lose his case. And why? The government has simply declared that libraries can lend books to people. Presumably there's a reason for this; libraries serve some public good. What public good do they serve that Larienna's "library of the future" (ie p2p downloading) doesn't?

As for the drowning analogy, you make a false comparison. Drinking water is good only in so far as it allows the body to live, not because it's good on its own merits. It is a means to an end, where the end is life. On the contrary, widespread knowledge is held by supporters of libraries to be a meritorious end in and of itself, and I agree completely. But if that's the case, more of this end good (knowledge) is better than less of it, just as a more alive body is better than a, er, less alive one.

As I've said, I still haven't seen a clear line in the ethical sand between library lending and peer-to-peer filesharing except my need to walk down the street for one and not the other, and a few clauses in the US copyright code that offer no explicit moral or ethical justification for their presence.

I still don't see what you're talking about with correlation and causation. I know very well that one doesn't mean the other. How is that relevant here?

Agreed! But I said precisely the opposite, as I tried to make clear in my last post. "Anything" is demonstrably NOT better in greater quantities; on this we agree. My point is that the one thing that IS necessarily better in larger quantities is something valued for itself -- an end, rather than a means. Drinking water is a means to live, not an end, therefore it is not necessarily better in larger quantities / greater efficiencies / etc. Which is why drowning is bad: not because it's "too much of a good thing" but because it undermines the original end, that being life.

The relevant "end" for the library debate is the spreading of information, presumably (is there another? enlighten me!). Libraries do it, as do stores, as does filesharing. One might argue that physical libraries do it better than filesharing in some ways, because you can take a book with you to the beach, while your computer screen washes out in the sun, and printing your own copy of War and Peace from a computer file is expensive, time-consuming, and aesthetically dubious. Physical books (whether lent or store-bought) don't need batteries, either. The Kindle changes much of this, of course, as will its descendants. Your talk of the "existing social contract" assumes that it never changes, but it is a constantly evolving fabric binding all of us together; ethics are informed by the current contract but not bound by it, because (presumably) immoral behavior is immoral no matter what a given society permits at the moment.

But all this is dancing around the issue. What's the line? I can borrow a book from a library, and I can borrow a book from my friend, because borrowing is good because spreading knowledge is good. But if that's the case, why not borrow in such a way (ie electronically) that both my friend and I can simultaneously enjoy the book, and therefore spread knowledge better?

Why are libraries good and filesharing bad? Surely libraries hurt first-party sales, make some people less likely to purchase books, etc (surely they also serve all of the positive purposes I outlined in my first post, as well, perhaps more or perhaps less than their negative effects). But regardless of their cost to publishers and content creators, their right to lend is enshrined in the law. Why? Is our goal to make people get off their asses and go outside if they want free books? To give librarians jobs? To have a pretty building downtown? These are all great examples of ways in which a library differs from filesharing, but none of them are advanced by defenders of libraries. The thing I hear is that knowledge is good in and of itself. It is an end, not a means, they say. Filesharing is another way of achieving this end, but is illegal. Somewhere between legal library lending and illegal filesharing there must be some line, right?

Right?

Actually, my thesis is that the overall quantity and quality of "content" will decrease without the protection of copyright, not that it will disappear. I had this argument with a friend after my previous post.

With copyright protection:
* A professional creator can spend 40 hours a week making a living by creating content.
* He could optionally spend additional "free time" each week on creating content, say, 24 hours per week.
* A professional can thus spend AT LEAST 40 hours per week and as much as 64 hours per week creating.

Without copyright protection:
* A creator must first work his "day job" 40 hours per week to support himself.
* He can then spend his free time creating content for 24 hours per week.
* A hobbyist can thus spend AT MOST 24 hours per week creating.

I don't think it is any more plain than that: less time spent creating content means lesser quantity and/or quality of content. The exceptions (the very popular, the well-marketed, the extremely prolific, etc.) will just prove the rule.

I think a big reason for this cultural shift away from copyright is due largely to the ease of conducting the illegal acts, and a reason why board games are a poor candidate for "piracy" -- it is actual work to make your own homemade copy of most boardgames, whereas it is effortless to download (and make practical use of) a PDF or MP3 file.

This is what bothers me the most about the current trend -- that it is essentially saying, "It is very easy to get what I want illegally, therefore it should stop being illegal." I just don't think that way, I guess. I tried to make the following comparison with my friend, regarding the "it doesn't hurt sales" argument:

You are a carpenter. You make and sell tables for a living. You have several copies of a table in your store when Alice comes in and takes a table home to use -- she doesn't pay you, and she never intends to actually buy the table, but she takes it home for 3 months to use it, then returns it to your store. You never sell out of that model of table, so her taking it did not reduce your sales (and as I mentioned, she never intended to buy one anyway).

I think most people would agree that Alice is in the wrong in that scenario. Why do written words or performed music matter less than tangible goods? In all cases, the creator had a cost to produce the work (time, effort, materials, education, whatever) and then placed a value on that work. If you want to enjoy his work, you must pay that value.

Anti-copyright basically says that a creator does not deserve to be compensated for his work if technology allows us ignore his desire for compensation. That's the part that bugs me.

Just had a listen to this:
http://www.softwarefreedom.org/podcast/2009/jan/20/0x05/

This podcast isn't entirely applicable to this discussion, but the history and background given in the first part of the podcast is very interesting and well worth a listen.