talkmagic.co.uk

i didnt torrent it by the way

No, no, no; dig UPWARDS!

i used orbitt. am sorry i didnt know it would cause this much upset. i have bought a proper copy now from derrens website

Lawrence wrote:

froggymchop wrote:I'm not interested in this enough to have a debate over it. I've posted my 2 cents. But for the record I'd say I only have one foot in the hole.

So if I walked into your house and stole your television would that be OK because technically your bank balance stayed the same?

...

Remember when I mentioned how real life analogies of theft don't work? If you want to make a copy of my tv though, electronically, from your own house, go ahead.

And I think this thread has gotten a little off topic now. Devil's Picture Book is good, OP has bought one, yay.

:: oh dear ::

rikgrimsby wrote:i didnt torrent it by the way

rikgrimsby wrote:i used orbitt

Is the equivalent of saying "I didn't nick that bar of chocolate from the shop by putting it in my coat pocket, I put it in my bag". Orbitt uses RTMP, which is simply a different protocol to do similar tasks to Bittorrent

Mate, there's too many knowledgable people around here who can call bullsh*t. And there's too many shop owners, writers, publishers, working magicians and inventors around here to give a damn

rikgrimsby wrote:i used orbitt. am sorry i didnt know it would cause this much upset.

I think the problem is that you still don't seem to understand what you have done wrong and you are only try to stop people moaning at you rather than trying to do the right thing. I feel the need to explain it to you.

Simply put, you watched copyrighted material that you didn't pay the owner for the privilege to watch.

This is a wrong thing to do in all cases but in this case you have illegally watched magic related materials which is heavy frowned upon in the magic community since selling teaching materials is part of how a lot of magicians can make a living, including some of the members on the forum.

Do you understand? I'm guessing not.

froggymchop wrote:Remember when I mentioned how real life analogies of theft don't work? If you want to make a copy of my tv though, electronically, from your own house, go ahead.

And I think this thread has gotten a little off topic now. Devil's Picture Book is good, OP has bought one, yay.

Real life analogies do work you just have to make them a bit more complex.

Let us use paintings as they are easy to imagine copying (anything else works it's just not as easy to visualise a copy). You paint some pretty pictures then host them in a gallery for people to come and look at buy. People come and look but instead of buying any they just take a picture. They do not necessarily get a good quality copy or the extra information from the artist but they get something that is pretty much fit for purpose. Those with better cameras will be able to make copies indistinguishable from the original unless closely examined.

Now you, as the painter, still have all of your paintings. You will eventually stop producing art work as you get frustrated with everyone copying your work and no-one buying it. As I said above the same would be true if this were a television, house, car etc.

The real problem with IPT is that the perpetrator very rarely considers it theft, purely because they do not see the producer as actually having lost anything. In essence they have not but the compound effect means that people stop bothering production and/or make virtually nothing from it financially.

As for downloading something you already own this is something that I increasingly find tempting however it is a vicious circle. The only way it can be downloaded is if it is shared illegally, en mass to people with no intention of also buying an original copy.

A way around this may be to include an eVersion with every "real" copy, but again you get some people who will also share this. You then end up with situations where you are given an electronic copy but can effectively do little with it (in my case at least on my Sony Reader, other eReaders may be different), a good example of this being Naked Mentalism. I bought a hard copy from Tomo and he very kindly supplied an electronic version also, however due to the necessity for some people to want to steal his work it is passworded (I do not blame him in the slightest for this, he is protecting his work).

So in summary, although on the face of things it appears downloading means no harm done, it actually results in innovators being financially disadvantaged, discouraged, leading to less ideas being released and the stuff that is released being so heavily protected that in the modern age you might as well not bother and just own the hardcopy unless you want to lug a laptop/ipad around with you to view it.

I admit in my younger days I did not see it this way and it took me awhile to realise but it is true that it is not until it begins effect you personally do you tend to actually realise the implications.

A conversation with my wife when I purchased Prism is a classic example I will end with.

Me: I got an absolute bargain, that magic shop had a copy of Prism for $40!
Her: You paid $40 for a book???!?!?
Me: No, I paid $40 for what is in the book.

That's a better analogy I think. And I do agree with what you're saying. If we looks at theft in two parts, 1) someone obtains something without paying, copyrighted material and 2) someone loses something then we can see how it is theft. It just takes number 2 a while longer to become apparent.

I do not advocate illegally downloading copyrighted material, I should make that clear, but I do feel there are some people in this thread who were stuck up towards Rik.

Also, I've noticed another thread opened by Rik has been hijacked with posts on this subject too. Strikes me as very petty.

froggymchop wrote: Strikes me as very petty.

Yeah, well, if you're going to come on here and admit to being a theif you can't expect people to start taking your other questions seriously.
Certainly when he is asking for material!

Lawrence wrote:

froggymchop wrote: Strikes me as very petty.

Yeah, well, if you're going to come on here and admit to being a theif you can't expect people to start taking your other questions seriously.
Certainly when he is asking for material!

My thoughts exactly.

A_n_t wrote:Now you, as the painter, still have all of your paintings. You will eventually stop producing art work as you get frustrated with everyone copying your work and no-one buying it. As I said above the same would be true if this were a television, house, car etc.

I undestand what you're saying and broadly agree. The difficulty comes from assessing how far a creator is genuinely disadvantaged. In terms of finance, how does one calculate how many people illegally downloaded an mp3, as an example, that they really would not have bought outright. You talk about increasingly unwieldy DRM. DRM disadvantages honest customers, and a distributor does not want to do this. So the real question is, at what level of genuine financial loss does it become worthwhile to disadvantage your customers. And at what point does a consumer feel that this level of disadvantage is insurmountable so they do without or even acquire it in an illegal but more manageable format.

In the world of real products, there is the notion of "shrinkage". Shoplifting is a crime, but it will always happen and legitimate customers are disadvantaged in that they subsidise the shrinkage. They pay for the stolen items.

Lost product equals lost sales. If distributors could have a genuine understanding of how many lost sales they get, they could factor that back into their business model.

My partner listens to a great deal of avant garde music. What we've noticed smaller (more vulnerable) record labels are doing is to release overpriced, limited run editions; real fetish objects aimed at customers they know can and will pay for them. This is, we're sure, there to offset any lost revenue from illegal file sharing. It's a more manageable problem, though, because it's a niche interest in the first place.

There is an element of a genie being let out of the bottle here. The technology of consumption is superimposed over the technology of reproduction, meaning that there will never be a DRM system that will work, because the means of breaking the DRM security is needed in order to consume. We are sold products with a lock on them, and given a key. There's little to stop people getting extra keys cut.

What is required is a change of attitude in artist, cosumer, and distributor. It is dreadful that pdfs are distributed online. It's also dreadful that companies like Amazon charge more for hardback editions of ebooks than they do the paperback editions. The only difference, usually, is currency. The consumer faces a new paradigm; no longer paying for a more expensive mode of production, the consumers must ask themselves "how much is the newness worth?"

We consume IP, therefore we should pay for IP. That is the basic fundemental requirement, but it is fogged because historically we have always paid more for the means by which the IP is delivered, than we have the IP itself. The reason we find ourselves in a situation where the artists and legitimate consumers are painted as victims, and illegal downloaders and unethical companies are painted as monsters, I suspect stems more from the companies than anywhere else. They are illuminating monks facing a world in which the printing press now exists.

Mr_Grue wrote:The reason we find ourselves in a situation where the artists and legitimate consumers are painted as victims, and illegal downloaders and unethical companies are painted as monsters, I suspect stems more from the companies than anywhere else.

This may well be true in the world of mass media companies but the magic industry operates on a much smaller scale and the companies and individuals involved work much closer to their customers. Every time someone rips off a magic video, instead of paying £20-£50 for it, a more significant loss is made by the seller. Have they really lost anything? Yes! See below...

Let's say that there are 250,000 magic consumers in the world, just for the sake of easy maths. And that the number of music consumers is 25,000,000 (a ridiculous underestimation). Every time someone downloads a copy of The Devil's Picturebook that's one less person who is going to buy it. So the seller has been denied 1/2,500th of his total possible sales. No money has disappeared from his account, but there was a potential income that has now disappeared.

If someone downloads a music album, the seller loses just 1/250,000th of his possible sales. It's still wrong, but not nearly as directly harmful in terms of the business surviving.

Then consider that the smaller magic shops etc operate on different scales of expense, so every loss is further magnified.

This is all just economics, but there is also a principle (both legal and moral) involved. Breaking copyright is wrong. If a product is horrendously-priced and over-packaged then don't buy it (even if you really, really want the music/movie/trick). Market forces should bring the price down to what most people will stand. Ripping it off is no good for anyone except thieves.

T.

I agree with you entirely.

And yet, things are stolen.

Mr_Grue wrote:I agree with you entirely.

And yet, things are stolen.

And as you said things unfortunately will always be stolen. Magic is like the niche music you were referring too. Eventually it will only be released as a limited edition and very expensive item rather than as a mass release.

The major problem with IP is that people do not naturally recognise it's inherent worth (or do not choose too). If they buy a CD they get something for their money, a shiny wrapper, the CD itself, the blurb in the cover etc. they forget that the reason they bought the CD was for the actual music. I have heard the argument countless times that a CD should not be so expensive as you can buy a pack domestically at about £10 for 100. They look at the material contribution not the intellectual contribution.

I think on the larger mass market scale the companies have to carry a great deal of the blame. MP3 sharing has been available since at least the last 15 years but iTunes is a relatively new concept and although there are other options, they are not appropriately marketed meaning for many people it is actually easier to steal than buy music.


With magic the same problem exists however it is more difficult to solve as the effect is deliberate. We do not want magic to be affordable to every random person that decides they want to know how something is done so it will always cost more than the material cost will warrant, until people begin to value the intellectual contribution and realise that this is what they are purchasing, the problem will never be resolved.