Here’s one for the copyright lawyers with a mind for ethical matters
Let’s just say I’ve purchased some media from overseas, legally and ethically from a source that doesn’t cheat the original artists out of their fair share.
Now let’s assume that the content of the media is in a language that I don’t speak and that it hasn’t yet been released with subtitles.
I’ve gone and transferred this media to my hard-drive so I can watch it on my computer (in a Matroska container, with video encoded with XVID and audio encoded with OGG Vorbis), but not so that I can distribute it, which I haven’t, nor will I do.
I then go and look for a torrent of a pirated copy of the media that is distributed with a community generated English subtitle stream included as a separate file. I select this separate file for download, but do not download any of the copied media – why would I? I already have a higher quality copy on my hard-drive!
Then I take this English subtitle stream into the Matroska file and voila! I have a version of the media on my hard-drive, that I can watch on my computer with subtitles (or on the Cowon A3 if I owned one.)
All as a result of using bit-torrent, a Matroska editor, XVID and the OGG Vorbis audio codec. All things which the corporate copyright lobbyists hate. Heck, I’ve seen IT staff talk about Matroska, XVID and OGG like they were exclusively the tools of pirates (yet Windows Movie Maker remains on the systems they run.)
Indeed, while downloading the subtitle stream (entirely hypothetically of course), I’ve also been running PeerGuardian2 to block the IP addresses of known Anti-P2P groups. Aside from (hypothetically) keeping the RIAA out of my business (i.e. they can’t download so much as a packet from me to confirm what I do or don’t have on my hard drive, nor can I download from them to show that I’m leeching supposedly copyrighted product), PeerGuardian2 has a nice history feature, that lists the identities of known Anti-P2P groups by IP and date-stamp, as they try to interact with you on-line.
Once you connect to a bit-torrent tracker, you should (umm… hypothetically) see just how the Anti-P2P IP blocks start accumulating. Just look at them go! I wouldn’t honestly want to ever pirate (or legally transfer) anything over P2P without using the blocklist that ships with PeerGuardian2.
So you tell me. What have I done wrong? What’s wrong with this picture? Should I have to give up on these freedoms so that some corporation can.. well… have its will enforced?
~ Bruce
Nice scenario. It doesn’t seem at first glance like you are (hypothetically) manipulating the originals, and are doing little more than the equivalent of running a psychadelic visualizer on top of an audio work.
I wonder if the following is also a subtlety…
* You buy a totally legit piece of work.
* The work has a glitch (bad sector, whatever)
* You could either
** organize a replacement of the defective work, which puts a burden on the legitimate supplier…. or ….
** get the “patch” from a torrent to replace the “glitch”, which places no burden on the legitimate supplier, and if anything, the costs are born by the torrent supplier.
p.s. I’ve only used torrent once (to get an open-source program), saw what was going on under the hood, and went “nup… don’t like this one bit”, then de-installed the torrent rpms. I’ll take the inconvenience of grovelling for local mirrors to keep piece of mind (and anyway, the RIAA could be going through a TOR or anonymizer proxy… that’s what I’d be doing if i was one of them!)
I’ve wondered about something similar the scenario you outline myself. What about if you have an old audio cassette collection, with degraded tape and mechanics in the cassette?
Is it so wrong to download a better quality copy of music to restore your listening experience to what it was when you first forked out your cash?