this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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well it's a really interesting concept. there's really no other form of media where you could put something out there and then recall it somehow. like if you wrote a book that you didn't like, there's absolutely no legal way you could prevent people from reading it, etc. sort of ties into the Barbra Streisand effect
What's interesting with the comparison to books is that you can stop it from being published. You can't force people to give up the copy they already bought, but they can't make more copies and distribute it.
Hard to draw that distinction in the digital world
And if you want a better comparison, though of YouTube like a drive-in theater. You're not allowed to make a copy of the film with your camcorder and go distribute it.
it's almost more of a philosophical question than a legal one. sure, maybe they can prevent you from recording the drive-in movie and showing it to other people, but would they have the moral authority to say that you couldn't repeat the storyline to someone else?
let's say someone produces some documentary that ends up containing some hideously embarrassing error. something that could really ruin some third party's life. you pull the documentary from theaters, you pull it from streaming services, anybody who owns a copy owns it illegally. but, anybody who's seen it, or heard it described, could sit down in front of an audience and act out the entire thing piece by piece, attributing the entire thing to the original producer's name.
it ties into a line of thinking I had the other day when reading my credit card number to somebody over the phone. me talking to another person, giving them digit by digit, it was like two computers talking but we were people. if we had been computers, using a speaker and a microphone to communicate numbers in that way, we would have laughed at it and called it stone age technology, but that still how humans communicate with each other.
This gets into a weird debate about the difference between reproducing a thing and describing a thing. With sufficiently accurate description you can create a reproduction.
And when you take that into the realm of computing, where we've functionally automated the process of describing things with extreme accuracy it gets really blurry. But we can all agree that "take what you want, give nothing back" is not a good way to run a society, least of all an economy :D
So we're left with the task of crafting internally consistent legislation that attempts to allow certain types of reproductions, but not others.
The thing is, this is the type of debate just should be happening at the administrative level, in Congress, etc. But instead, special interest groups and lobbyists are doing the legislating on this stuff.