"They never tried that. They just kept posting more signs, because they were convinced that they were right.

This pattern is common. We often try to fight problems by yelling at them instead of accepting the reality of what people do, from controversial national legislation to passive-aggressive office signs. Such efforts usually fail, often with a lot of collateral damage, much like Prohibition and the ongoing “war” on “drugs”.

And, more recently (and with much less human damage), media piracy.

Big media publishers think they’re right to keep fighting piracy at any cost because they think it’s costing them a lot of potential sales.

It is, but not as many as they think, and not for the reasons they think…

Relying solely on yelling about what’s right isn’t a pragmatic approach for the media industry to take. And it’s not working."

"1. Pricing: In general I want the pricing model to be simple & transparent. I don't mind a slight difference in pricing between movies with regard to the age of the movie.
* Rentals should not exceed 1/3 of the cinema price.
* Purchases should not exceed the cinema price.
* Monthly flat rate prices should not exceed 3 visits to the cinema.
* TV shows should cost 1/3 the price of movies.
* Payments are for the content, not bandwidth.

2. Languages
* I can obtain the audio in every language produced for the content.
* After purchasing a movie, all the languages are available.
* Fans are legally allowed to create and share subtitles for any content.

3. Convenience
* The content I paid for is instantly available.
* Content is delivered without ads, or disrupting infringement warnings.
* I can find movies or TV shows by year, director, language, country, genre, iMDB ID, etc.
4. Choice And Release Dates
* The release date is global. There are no limits regarding the country I live in…"

"5 Million Dollars 1 Terrabyte (2011) is a sculpture consisting of a 1 TB Black External Hard Drive containing $5,000,000 worth of illegally downloaded files. A full list of the files with clickable download links can be found here: http://www.art404.com/5million1terrabyte.pdf "

[A thread on Twitter about interdisciplinarity…]

"Interdisciplinarity" seems so formal, like a treaty organization. I like the version that's about smuggling stuff across borders. [http://twitter.com/swarthmoreburke/status/63037778606292992 ]

@swarthmoreburke @publichistorian "Idea Smuggler". Love it. [http://twitter.com/navalang/status/63039078488211456 ]

@swarthmoreburke @navalang @publichistorian Cross-disciplinary. Anti-disciplinary. Black-market scholarship. [http://twitter.com/tcarmody/status/63041041145663488 ]

@tcarmody @swarthmoreburke @navalang @publichistorian Bricolage. [http://twitter.com/ayjay/status/63042045635334144 ]

[Additional, unassembled thoughts: discipline tunneling, cross-pollination, kludge, bilge, edupunk, thought trafficking, pirates, buccaneer scholar, clandestine, etc.]

"What alternative roles might designers take and what new strategies and ideas might the ‘design community‘ employ in response to these challenges?<br />
What happens when we move from severing corporate interests to the interests of the community?<br />
How can new tools and resources of rapid prototyping, digital and bio hacking, and DIY culture as a whole be used to create new economies?<br />
What services might we design if our constraints move from concerns about legal implications to personal ethical considerations?<br />
If instead of designing for the free market, what if we designed for the street, or black market?"

"My work revolves around reading & since I commute & travel it's difficult not to have texts with me. … A tablet full of PDFs struck me as a good replacement for the books in my library that don't have high-resolution imagery. Moreover … [it] strikes me as a better way to go paperless in the classroom … & it's no longer a physical artifact between my students and myself. My initial impression is that this will be a tremendous success for me." + others' intended use; the future of books, book piracy. "Having easily searchable text will transform scholarship. Reading scholarly books cover to cover may become as odd as listening to albums cover to cover." "All that said (and I thought I'd mention that all this was written on an iPad that I am using a bluetooth keyboard with), I can't deny that the iPad makes me feel like it's 2010, just as using a DVD for the first time in bed on my laptop in 2001 (and yes, it WAS 2001: A Space Odyssey) made me feel like it was 2001."

"I'm outraged that the Obama administration is supporting the RIAA on the case against Jammie Thomas, a single mother of four who has to pay them $1.92 million for downloading songs. That's more expensive than murder & 6 other crimes: • Child abduction: $25,000 & up to 3 years in prison, which can be accounted as $50,233/year (median household income in 2007). Total: $175,699. • Steal the CDs: total of $275,000, $52,500 fine for the CDs. • Steal a lawnmower from your neighbour: $375,000. • Burn someone's house while playing The Doors: $375,000. • Stalk a Gizmodo editor: Class 4 felony...just $175,000. • Start a dogfighting ring: $50,000. • Murder someone on 2nd degree, Class 1 felony: $778,495 = $25,000 fine & 4-15 years in prison. Heck, you can do all these crimes & the total amount will be only $2.2 million. Of course, you can't really quantify years spent in prison using dollars, but I don't care. The case of Jammie—and many like hers—is still absolutely outrageous."

"For me, either the suspiciously accurate novel or the eminently readable comic go a long way in turning a distant – though critical – concern into a real, tangible problem. It makes me wish that more journalists and activists would look for creative ways to tell these stories and make them more real to readers."

"Some are clearly just gangsters. But others are trying to stop illegal dumping and trawling" also here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-hari/you-are-being-lied-to-abo_b_155147.html

"[1] the Internet is an open platform... [2] Moore's Law, which has worked its usual magic on Internet bandwidth... [3] piracy. Users prefer it not just because it's free, but because it's more convenient." ... "After decades of running an IV drip right into their audience, people in the entertainment business had understandably come to think of them as rather passive. They thought they'd be able to dictate the way shows reached audiences. But they underestimated the force of their desire to connect with one another."

"Thinking of buying from audible.com or iTunes? Remember, if you pirate something, it's yours for life. You can take it anywhere and it will always work. But if you buy DRM-locked media, and you ever switch operating systems or new technology comes along, your collection could be lost. And if you try to keep it, you'll be a criminal (DMCA 1201). So remember: if you want a collection you can count on, PIRATE IT. Hey, you'll be a criminal either way."

"The gaming, music, & movie industry would do well to take note of key sentence: "Anything that made purchasing & starting to play difficult - like copy protection, DRM, 2-step online purchasing routines - anything at all standing between impulse to play & playing in game itself was seen as legitimate signal to take free route." Last week, I tried to buy an episode of a TV show from iTunes Store. It didn't work and there was no error message. Thinking the download had corrupted something, I tried again and the same problem occurred. (learned later that I needed to upgrade Quicktime) Because I just wanted to watch the show and not deal with Apple's issues, I spend 2 minutes online, found it somewhere for free & watched the stolen version instead. I felt OK about it because I'd already paid for the real thing *twice*, but in the future, I'll be a little wary purchasing TV shows from iTunes & maybe go the easier route first."

"We have the capacity to surveil and control adolescents ion a way we’ve never done before. We chase them indoors and then we tell them that all the virtual places they might gather, we need to surveil them because of the ever-present threat of pedophiles and because of the ever-present need to market to them. We've really hemmed in adolescence in a way we never have before."

"The Pirate’s Dilemma tells the story of how youth culture drives innovation and is changing the way the world works. It offers understanding and insight for a time when piracy is just another business model, the remix is our most powerful marketing too

"Copyright law in the 21st century tends to be less concerned about concrete cases of infringement, and more about criminalizing entire technologies because of their potential uses...undermines the freedom of choice...chilling effects on innovation"

"DMCA takedown notices should be viewed skeptically...Colleges and universities should pay close attention to the findings, given that students often face harsh penalties from their institutions if they are hit with a DMCA notice."

"No matter how far back you go in the origin of a piece of work, you will find ... idea was built on or inspired by the work of someone else before it. I consider remixed videos to be original works. The finished piece is more than the sum of its parts"

"A presentation from the eTech Ohio 2008 conference. The topics of the presentation are copyright law and how to create a great PowerPoint presentation."

"Sharing is an essential quality of all of the media this fifteen year-old has ever known. In his eyes, if it can’t be shared, a piece of media loses most of its value. If it can’t be forwarded along, it’s broken."

"So, why try to mimic the current model when it comes to pricing if the costs are mostly gone?"

"what pirates are actually doing is highlighting a better way for us to do things; they find gaps outside the market – and better ways for society to operate"

"Between LimeWire and Bittorrent, the ongoing and extremely widespread popularity of P2P as a media delivery vehicle suggest that music prices remain stuck at too high a level while the capacity of portable media players continues to balloon."

"The focus is on issues related to legal regulation of technology, and especially on legal attempts to restrict the right of technologists and citizens to tinker with technological devices. But we reserve the right to write about anything that strikes our

"By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings."

"But we should be skeptical of claims that tougher laws are necessarily better laws. Sometimes imitation isn’t just the sincerest form of flattery. It’s also the most productive."

"brings together John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights, and the “ASCAP cartel” to build a case for creative freedom...pins down key shortcomings of our dusty, pre-digital intellectual property laws...reveals how bad laws beget bad code"

"Modern pirates have long plagued Southeast Asia’s Strait of Malacca, robbing sailors, kidnapping crews, and stealing entire ships."

"Someone, somewhere, I thought, must have written the definitive article on how new business models for pop music are being forged in Japan. But it's probably in Japanese. All I could find was a growing anxiety, on the part of the creators and distributor

"companies and organizations are now struggling with a new dilemma in increasing numbers. As piracy continues to change the way we all use information, how should we respond? Do we fight pirates, or do we learn from them? Should piracy be treated as a pro

"Though buccaneering is back with a vengeance, stepped-up law enforcement and high-tech tools are helping protect shipping on the high seas"