cruz737 wrote...
yummines wrote...
who is technically stealing by law
Quite the slippery slop we got here if viewing modified(often heavily) non-commercialed work is "stealing". By that logic, viewing let's plays or listening to a some fans cover of a certain song is also stealing.
I don't think it's as cut and dry as many people think, but as long as the legal precedence is there people will continue to be obnoxious and vindictive assholes about this.(entitled, entitled, entitled, entitled)
As someone who wants to wants to create content(vidya games) that's enjoyed and appreciated by many, I wouldn't feel right about trying to protect my IP that hard, especially in areas where the service is non-existent or illegal. Piracy generally opens up more doors than it closes. I'm not to fond of steam these days but Gaben was right, Piracy generally is a service problem.(that netflix idea doesn't seem bad to be honest)
I don't think the video game metaphor works here, because part of the whole point of video games is the experience of it. Playing Dark Souls 2 and beating it yourself is much much different from watching a Let's Play. Reading a book and having someone read it to you is essentially the same thing (i.e. audiobooks). Saying that they are heavily edited (i.e. translated, sometimes redrawn to uncensor it) doesn't change the the source material. Patching in the German language in Dark Souls 2 and redoing some of the textures doesn't give me the right to distribute it for free on the internet without expressed permission of From Software and Namco Bandai.
Also music covers and parodies are directly protected by the law. There is no grey area here, you are allowed to do so even without expressed permission of the original artist (Weird Al only asks to be polite for his parodies).
I do agree that having an iron grip on your IP isn't exactly the best way to go (look how explosively popular Touhou is in doujin circles, mainly due to how the author allows usage of his characters) but the fact of the matter is that scanlators don't go up to artists and ask them if they can put their works up on the internet for free (correct me if I'm wrong). Not to mention that distributors and publishers have costs of their own, they don't just get tons of money from publishing books they have to go through a whole process.
Basically what I'm trying to get is that while file-sharing is in a very legal grey area, it is in the right of the copyright holder to send takedown notices when there is blatant copyright infringement.
I heard a story about how Monty Python found out that people were uploading low quality clips of their movies on the internet. So they put up their own clips and put a link for their dvd sets saying "dvd on sale now." Then their sales shot up. Having samples of your work is a fairly good business practice, but samples are just that, not the complete thing. I'm not saying that I want them to do this, I mean after all I like free stuff too. However there really isn't anything we can say against it other than this isn't the best thing to do in a business sense.