TheAllPurposeNothing

Start of hypothetical.

Vertical integration.

Time Warner owns Time Warner Cable and Road Runner Cable.

They own HBO, Cinemax, and Turner Broadcasting.

They own Warner Bros and New Line.

The own AOL.

The company that makes my cable box has large shares in the major broadcast and cable networks.

My TV is produced by a company that also produces entertainment for the box.

So big deal...what's the point? Follow me on this.

Let's say I subscribe to Time/Warner cable. I'm not offered my channels a la carte. I am required to pay for a package of channels to get the three or four channels I want. So I shell out $60 a month to get a basic cable package so my wife can watch Lifetime, my kids can watch Nikelodeon and Cartoon Network, and I can watch Comedy Central.

Time Warner, which is technologically quite capable of offering me the channels a la carte, will not. Why not? Because with a la carte, I may only pay $8-10 a month for my four channels. Their way, irregardless of what I watch, I pay minimum of $60. So I'm shelling out $50 extra per month to them for the privilege of watching the four I want. And a good amount of those channels that I have to pay for regardless...they own.

End of hypothetical.

Do they care that they rip me off $600 per year on channels that I will not watch? Hell, no. Because of vertical integration, every major media conglomerate collects a check from me monthly for goods I do not want and have not requested.

So do I feel bad about trading shows between Replays across the country, d/ling a movie every once in a while, or heaven forbid, watching one of their programs minus commercials, without paying for the $50 DVD box set? Hell, no.

For me, its a matter of quid pro quo. If you are going to force me to pay for services that I have no want for because it better lines your pockets, then I will be happy to pull from your library whenever it strikes my fancy. IMHO, I have already paid them for that and beyond.

Is it legal? Likely no. But do I feel justified? Hell yes!

EDIT: Oh yeah...forgot one more thing. Because of the convenient placement of a green box by the cable company on my street, the phone company is unable to offer me DSL. So if I want high speed internet, I still have to shell out double to the cable company. They basically screw me from all sides.

aynrandgirl

If channels are offered only ala carte, does any new cable channel have a chance at success? I would say no. I would also bet that ala carte pricing makes second-tier channels like Sci-Fi Channel close to non-viable. They make a few cents per customer now. If only subscribers pay, probably 90% of their revenue instantly disappears, and they'd have to charge several dollars a month just to get back what they lost, which will probably drive many of the rest away.

ScandalUMD

That's because money is an actual thing you're stealing. If you defraud the bank to get more money from them than you're supposed to, you've taken something from the bank.

The argument isn't that it's not stealing because it happens on a computer. The argument is that it's not stealing because nobody suffers a loss as a result of it.

ScandalUMD

You're completely missing what makes plagiarism bad. Plagiarism is like fraud. Downloading is like trespass.

TheAllPurposeNothing

Not necessarily true. Your assumption is that most people would ask for the channels a la carte, which is probably not true.

For the most part, a significant number of viewers like surfing the channels, and would keep their current plans. If not, things like digital cable would largely be a bust.

But the companies should be offering a la carte for those subscribers interested in such a plan.

And I wouldn't worry about Sci-Fi Channel. It would probably be one of he netowrks that did best in an a la carte world.

das Monkey

A channel that shows Braveheart and Law & Order is not seond-tier. Wtg, Bonnie!!!

das

das Monkey

I'm not going to stump for "the man" on this issue, and I do my fair share of "speeding" myself, but the reality is that you don't have to subscribe to their product. While the fan in me would love to argue otherwise, watching television is not a right.

das

TheAllPurposeNothing

Problem is that my family wants his product. Outside of the Daily Show from time to time, the only TV I watch is Veronica Mars and House. I'd happily give it up in a second.

And lets alter your last comment. Watching "cable" television is not a right. Broadcast "television" is sent out over the "public" airways, very definitely making it my right.

maxfisher

How so? Are you saying that with plagiarism, the theft of IP isn't as immoral as fraudulently representing that material as one's own?

If we want to do an even more accurate comparison, downloading a song or movie would be the equivalent of going to the library and making a photocopy of a short story you wanted to have. I don't know what kind of restitution a publisher can seek from someone who does this, but I'm guessing it's a little shy of $150,000 a pop.

tonyc3742

Someone mentioned the '1's and 0's' argument. By simply playing with some computer code, all I do is change the totals in certain columns. 1's and 0's. Most money "in" banks isn't money anyway, it's all 'virtual'/electronic. Now, if I withdraw the cash, then yes, it's an actual "thing".

And something that's wrong, isn't dependent on impact to be wrong. If you have a bunch of stuff in your garage that you never go into anymore, maybe boxes from moves three houses ago, but I go in and take it, is that okay? You're not 'suffering' at all from it, you probably don't even know I took it.

Cable: Yes, you have the 'right' to get networks for free. Cable/satellite is a voluntary agreement between you and the vendor, saying You can have X for this much money. No one is 'forcing' you to buy it. When I go out to eat, many times my meal comes with a salad which is included in the price; "bundled" if you will, even though I do not want and will not eat that salad. That doesn't give me the right to walk over to the kitchen and grab something else that I want, just because they 'forced' me to get a salad.
You haven't paid for anything that the company publishes; you've paid for certain programs viewed in a certain form. That would be like me paying college tuition, and feeling entitled to wander in to any class and get full use of it, including credits. "Entitlement" is the word that pops into my head when reading that post

The whole cable a-la-carte versus bundle thing is a different issue; while I don't like some of the bundles, I do agree that going fully a la carte would most likely make it more difficult for new or niche channels to survive. And it's quite likely costs would go up, since some of those channels pay to be included. I would like some more flexibility in the bundles, but I don't think pure a la carte would be that good. Then again, I'm only paying 105.xx for virtually every channel, a HDDVR, and broadband internet, so I actually couldn't get much cheaper with their offerings.

ScandalUMD

Like rights to real property, the IP right is fundamentally about a right to exclude.

For example, suppose I own a forest. I build a fence around it and charge people ten bucks to go for a walk in the woods. Because I own the forest and have the right to exclude people from it, I can operate this business.

Now, suppose you sneak over the fence and walk in the woods without paying. That's pretty much what you do when you download a movie illegally.

Plagiarism is about being caught in a deliberate misrepresentation in a context where your integrity is a primary asset of what creates value in your work. The problem is not that you used someone else's work without their permission, but that you fraudulently represented that work as your own. If you obtained full consent of the creator of the work you plagiarize, if you try to claim it as your own, that's not mitigating.

maxfisher

I still don't get why you're drawing a line here. I get the difference between the two, but in your woods example, plagiarism would be like taking a couple people into your woods while you were gone and claiming I owned them. In either case, I'm violating your right to exclude, just for different reasons, i.e. personal enjoyment vs. impressing others.

Anyway, this is off on a tangent and I'm not sure why. I originally compared the two to point out that penalties someone can seek for copywright infringement of written works seem to be way less than for music or movies. You seem to be saying plagiarism is worse, which I think would only make the disparity more unfair?

rw2516

Agreed. Channels are bundled to the cable company. Cable company pays a particular amount for all the channels. The less popular are thrown in with the popular ones. Turner Classic Movies is commercial free and offered with basic service, probably tossed in with the deal when a cable company pays for the other Turner/Time Warner channels like TBS, TNT, CNN, etc. My Comcast has never carried Boomerang and I believe it's because it's not part of the package to the cable company(in other words ala carte to the cable company) and Comcast doesn't think it's popular enough to pay extra for and they wouldn't be able to charge extra for it. A local broadcast channel did a news story on ala carte cable and stated that ESPN alone would cost $60 a month alone to a subscriber under ala carte. And I believe it. I find it hard to believe that niche channels like Sci-Fi and TV Land which are thrown in as part of the deal to the cable companies would be very cheap. Maybe $30-40 a piece per month to subscriber. Look at it this way. Under the current system you are paying for the 4 or 5 most popular channels(whether you watch them or not) and you're getting all the rest for free.

ScandalUMD

No. Plagiarism is not about the appropriation of someone else's IP. The issue of plagiarism has nothing to do with IP. It has to do with misrepresentation. It is academic fraud.

That's why there's no licensing agreement that permits plagiarism. That's why there's no public domain for plagiarism. If you misrepresent someone else's work as your own then you've blown all credibility.

Now, the "Opal Mehta" fiasco is a bit of a different situation, because cribbing a few sentences in a work of fiction is very different from plagiarism and literary fraud in other contexts. This is more a response to the damage done to the publishers of liars and fabricators like Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, and James Frey. If it was an IP related issue, they probably could have settled the matter with the authors of the cribbed works for much less than it cost them to pull the book from the shelves. In that case, if the publisher's tolerated an author's fraud in that context, readers would doubt the integrity of their nonfiction titles, and that's the basis behind it.

Plagiarism has absolutely no connection to, and is in no meaningful way analogous to downloading media.

maxfisher

Are you talking about a legal distinction or a moral one? I don't know IP law well enough to debate this if you're talking legally, but if we're talking morally, I still think there's no reason to draw a line. Again, in both cases, IP that someone else struggled and worked to create is being taken and being used without their consent. In plagiarism, the end use also involves further wrongdoing, while with downloading, once you have the music or movie, you're probably going to be using it in an otherwise acceptable manner.

Let's drop plagiarism altogether, though, and go with my other example. If a high school teacher went to the library and made 30 copies of a short story for one of his Lit classes, do you think the book publisher would be able to sue him for $4.5 million?

ScandalUMD

The IP rights of the person being copied have nothing to do with plagiarism. If the plagiarized source is public domain, or if the IP owner gives permission, it's no mitigation when plagiarism occurs. Any infringement of IP is completely incidental. It's simply not a relevant comparison, because it's not a similar wrong. Unpermitted use of IP is trespass, plagiarism is fraud, and conversion of a chattel is theft, and all these wrongs are different and unrelated.


Theoretically yes. The civil damages permitted in copyright claims are absurd and disproportionate to the harm. That's what you get when you have a powerful and highly motivated interest group pushing legislation which nobody has organized to oppose.

The theoretical penalties, both civil and criminal, for noncommercial copyright infringement are very high. The practical penalties are very low. Law enforcement agencies have been willing to bust commercial bootlegging enterprises, but have never, to my knowledge, enforced the criminal copyright provisions against someone whose violation was for a noncommercial purpose. As a political matter, the cost of legislating for the interest is very low, and the cost of actually enforcing the legislation is very high. There'd be considerable public outcry if the FBI started hauling downloaders off to prison.

The only civil cases against noncommercial violators have been the RIAA suits, which they settle in the $2500 range against people generally caught sharing hundreds or thousands of songs. While the statutes permit high damages, it's unlikely that any jury would impose heavy damages for file sharing activity, and it is a near certainty that no content owner intends to put the question before a jury.