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The New York Times on Hypocrisy of US IP Policies
jwinterboy writes "
The New York Times has an article (free blah di blah) criticizing the intellectual property framework that the U.S. places on developing countries, given that it was a large pirate of intellectual property during it's own industrialization.
"
Indeed. British authors used to get very upset over the way their books were pirated in the US, and the practice didn't really stop until the US publishing industry was sufficiently large and international to want protection of their own. But then developing nations, like entrepreneurs, always need a bit of help up the ladder. Who was it said "I never ask a man how he made his first million dollars?"
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
As much as I dispise american (and western) IP laws and attitude. How can you hold people accountable for something someoneelse did 200 years ago, and how can it possibly be hypocrisy?
When IP law was first passed, the spirit was basically "Let the guy why invented something cool have a monopoly for a while. After a decade or so, give other people a chance." The problem is now copywrite is valid for such an insane length of time that there's little competition. End result: citizen loses (I hate the word 'consumer'). When did companies earn the priviledge to own copywrite?
but ...
My dad used to drive drunk occasionally when he was young. He's in AA now and thinks that drunk drivers should lose their licenses and go to jail.
Hypocrisy? Perhaps. But maybe he just wised up in his old age.
Just like how the US clearcut vast forests for the lumber and turned millions of square miles of diverse swampland into flat farmland, but we're now trying to stop Brazil from doing the same for their individual economic gains.
You know, some of those people behaving so hypocritically are descended from Goths who sacked Rome. Should the be equally ashamed over atrocities committed by their great^17th grandfather as by their grandfather?
This is not to say that we should blow off injustice. It really sucks to be on the receiving end, and knowledge of that suction should temper our dealings with those who claim to be feeling the vacuum.
But let's not wear the hair shirt too excessively...
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
This is probably another very uneducated opinion, but IMHO the patent system is traditional On/Off system. When on, it should enforce equal rights and limitations to everyone - otherwise people will just find ways to exploit it. When off, it should be off for everyone.
It is not just IP that the US is trying to clamp down on, the whole U. S. policy towards emerging countries is hypocritical: but there has always been a good historical president for it:
/. know so well: silicon is litteraly dirt cheep, ic chips made from silicon are perhaps the most expensive substance by weight.
Just to take one example: the U. S. is pushing for all sorts of free trade agreements. Why? Well, for the first hundred years of our existence, the main form of revenue for our government had been tariffs (taxes on imports---taxes on exports are actually prohibited by the constitution.) At the time of the Revolutionary War, the main U.S. exports were cotton, tobacco, from the South and lumber from New England. You may notice that these are either raw materials or agricultural goods. But the money is in the value added, as readers of
It is no secret that the U.S. used protective tariffs to protect early manufacturer's (who otherwise could not compete with England). It is also no secret that the U. S. really did not like it when others tried to do the same. Now we are doing it with GATT. Throughout the last century we were not so sublte: Marines were sent throughout this hemesphere to make sure that bananas were grown and local governments were not too concerned about the welafare of the common man at the exoence of U. S. buisness interests.
The tragic thing is, just as with development of manufacture, this colonial IP policiy hurts both the developin countries and the people in developed nations. They can't form a manufacturing base, we can't get real, honest, labor unions. And of course, by keeping so many people in the unmechanized fields and unsecured mineshafts, we are really missing out on the increadible behefits that a well educated _global_ populace could bring.
The article is about a report which criticizes the intellectual property framework which the U.S. places on developing countries. The article itself is not criticizing the framework.
The NY Times can be a bit biased at times, but let's at least give them a little credit...
Typefaces/fonts are an interesting area. American companies apparently used typefaces (which tradionally all came from European type design houses) without paying any royalties or licences, but are now starting to try to get protection.
http://nwalsh.com/comp.fonts/FAQ/cf_14.htm
"The reluctance of Americans to press for typeface copyright may have been influenced by a feeling that typeface plagiarism was good for U.S. high-tech businesses who were inventing new technologies for printing, and plagiarizing types of foreign origin (Europe and England). If the situation becomes reversed, and foreign competition (from Japan, Taiwan, and Korea) threatens to overcome American technological superiority in the laser printer industry, then American firms may do an about-face and seek the protection of typeface copyright to help protect the domestic printer industry. Such a trend may already be seen in the licensing of typeface trademarks by Adobe, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Imagen, and Xerox in the U.S. laser printer industry."
With added commentary by yours truly...
Everyone realises and acknowledges that Microsoft is a business, there to make a profit to share with it's marjor stakeholders, from it's shareholders to it's employees. However
For example, Microsoft's Internet Explorer containscurrently 20 unpatched vulnerabilities, a disproportionately high number in comparison to all the other browers on the market today. Also, because of a general disregard for security in the past, many of those same vulnerabilities are exploitable though other Microsoft applications.
And there is many a CIO discovering that the new Microsoft enterprise licensing agreement is far more expensive than before.
The next section is very IMPORTANT.
In fact, the term "intellectual property" is a misnomer, a more correct term would be intellectual monopoly. Patents, Copyrights and even Trademarks are a government granted monopoly, they do not occur naturally. That does not mean that they are a bad thing per-say, but their use should be dictated by the benefit to socitety in general, with approprate limits so their use cannot be abused.
These statutes give the power that the ol' Mercantile laws gave to those monopolies. There is no true effective choice in the market. Compainies like Microsoft are sustaining it's dominate position in the markerplace by using a state-constructed and granted monopoly, which gives Microsoft the monopoly over it's protocols, effectively just as restrictive as the East India Trading Company trading zone monopoly of the Orient.
Compulsory licensing of IP at a rate like this:
Take the lowest bulk licensing rate in the G8 (if they don't license, then the lowest rate per pill or copy of the software or whatever minus the expected costs of producing each copy).
Multiply this by the ratio of country Foo's MIN(mean, median) income over the G8's MAX(mean, median) income.
Then the industrialized nations have a reason to increase their income equality and they have a reason to make poorer nations less poor. And, poorer nations have the chance to make things without being overburdoned by the IP laws of the rich nations.
And for those of you keeping score at home, YES this is effectively giving away IP to poorer nations, but so what? The richer nations should be paying for their own IP within their own economies and they should look at any money gotten from poorer nations only as gravy.
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
Interesting use of the AIDS drug issue to highlight the possible negative effects of strong IP. The author got one thing on AIDS in Africa wrong when he said: an estimated 30 million people have H.I.V. in Africa. That is just plain wrong and is an indication of the ignorance of the problem. Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa and Malawi together probably has that amount on their own! And on top of that people are starving right now, so AIDS-deaths are only really starting to impact right now. These people do not have the money to pay IP cost on top of the manufacturing cost of a drug - and usually IP is 95% of that. This huge tragedy prompted the scrapping of IP on those products.
Now we ask ourselves - WHY does it take something of this scale for people to let go of IP? and then only after lots of lobbying, pressure and pleading. I mean W.T.F.!!!
Tis said that in ~1810 he memorized the schematics to the automated weaving machine to get around the British prohibition on the export of technical schematics.
Whole cities (some bearing his name) in Massachusetts sprung up around this invention, and it lead to a spread of large scale agriculture in the south and west. Previously textile raw materials had to be exported to England for manufacture into garments, then imported back to the US for sale- and enormous impediment for efficiency and growth.
The development of American factories also changed the face of urban demographics- large quantities of the lower classes were pulled into dense cities that were previously enclaves of the wealthy (and their abundant domestic help). Since the best (most nimble & most managable) factory workers were girls, unmarried single women finally got the opportunity to support themselves financially while mantaining their virtue.
The violation of patents lead to progress like this, which had a much greater impact than breaking copyright and reading Dickins on the cheap.
That really gets on my nerves too. Take that whole Save the Whales thing. It is easy to be an enviromentalist when you are just trying to forbid a bunch of Scandinavian Rednecks from killing some whales or shooting a few sealinos because they are so cute. It is even easyer to jump all over African or Pakistani tribesmen for shooting mountain sheep. But when it comes to the Germans, French English or Americans paying 3% more for the Kg of meat so an animal can be kept in a pen that is not full of filth and so narrow the animal can not even lie down with the result that it gnaws the skin off its neighbors shoulders crazed with the monotony of its existance that is an outrage. In the idealism of most enviromentalists ends at the point where they have to pay for their ideals in hard or $$$.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
So the Germans stole from the Brits but the Yanks stole from the Germans. I recall that the Germans invented the Mauser bolt-action rifle mechanism, considered the finest in the world at the that time. After the First World War, the US Springfield arsenal was sued for failing to pay royalties on their wartime production of the 1903 Springfield rifle, the standard US Army rifle for WWI. Of course, this was heard in a US court that was not sympathetic to a German claim.
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
on that topic, of hypocrisy wrt ones past, it brings up another point... more recent world events...
Funny, and they are also (because they were victors (those who control the present control the past)) describe their Revolution is a just and honourable war.
The US Revolution was really a terrorist effort. Disproportional warfare was fought by the Americans, the British, and other power powers of the time had strict rules of engagement. Certain things were "allowed" and "unallowed" during warfare. The Americans, outmatched by the British Forces employed distinctly divergent tactics (raids, ambushes etc) that were -- at the time -- considered barbaric, disgraceful and un-honourable.... Terrorism.
Today, the US, faced with a rebellion; fought against them by a weaker force -- required to employ techniques that change the rules of engagement -- the Americans are now condemning them as barbaric, disgraceful: terrorists.
Am i trying to justify recent acts of violence? No. I just find it INCREDIBLY amazing that a country, that has, to be exceeded by no other -- Chosen to live by the sword -- are so self-righteous and smug wrt the barbarians at the gate. My American neighbours: Witness the fruits of Neo-Imperialism. BTW, anyone who harms another is barbarian - you cannot except yourself from the label just because you tell yourselves so on CNN.
What else do you expect the US to do today wrt IP? We have not progressed beyond State-Politics to the point where international or non-national policies are employed. Presently, the Americans enjoy a great deal of influence in a world's dynamics that they have spent a great deal influencing. "They've made the rules", within the framework of national power (recent history)... America, the present world power is the only one (short of revolution and uprising or a challenge of that power, often bloody - but not absolutely mandatory. The Americans have the opportunity to ADJUST THE SYSTEM OF POWER. To say finally, the present system is broken (look at the war, famine, etc etc) and we will be a part of devising a NEW system.... they shun most all international effort that doesn't serve them explicitly. So, am i surprised that the NYT sees Yankee IP law as hypocrisy? not at all, its more of the same, and not at all unique.
At the Commission on Intellectual Copyright website.
You can download the whole thing in PDF format, or browse online.
(btw I submitted a story about this over a month ago)
I'm not sure if developing countries really benefit from not having IP laws in the long run. For example, I know people in Malaysia (a country where almost all software and movies are sold openly by pirates) who tried to produce a home-grown music videotape of songs by local singers.
Guess what happened - pirated immediately copied it, and the original producers ended up with thousands of unsellable tapes! So maybe the US is actually doing these countrys a favour by encouraging them to enforce IP laws.
- Snow White and the Seven Dwarves - stolen
- Pinnochio - stolen
- Cinderella - stolen
- Mary Poppins -stolen
- 20,000 Leagues under the sea - stolen
- Beauty and the Beast - stolen
- Robinhood - stolen
- The Jungle Book - stolen
- Tarzan -I believe they actually pay royalties to the Burroughs estate -- and hate having to do it
- The Little Mermaid - stolen
- Mary Poppins - stolen
- Peter Pan - stolen
The list goes on and on. In fact, it appears that the whole success of the second phase of the Disney corp (The first wave of animated features) rides firmly on the back of the public domain. When they start producing their own stories in the 70's they fail miserably ("Escape from Witch Mountain", "The World's Greatest Athelete", ad nauseum).It's not so much the re-using the public domain for source material that I have a problem with, it's the bald-faced refusal to let "their" "intellectual property" loose when it's legitimately part of the common public culture. For damn sure now, every westerner knows who Mickey Mouse is, that's why he's worth so much. But he wouldn't be worth so much if everyone didn't know him. That is exactly the same reason why Disney found value in the commons when it was establishing itself as a company. The same reason their first feature was "Snow White".
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I this Shoppa is mistaken. Brazil clear-cuts most (approximately 95%) of the forests it cuts down for domestic wood consumption (mostly cooking wood and to farm the land in non-intensive modern farming. They use very little for paper exports.
y _r eport_america/resources.html
Sure, we chopped down a huge amount of US forests for paper, furniture, cooking and ship building purposes. But then we got rich. Then this happened:
<i>Today, the volume of wood in U.S. forests is about 25 percent greater than it was 40 years ago. The United States has about the same amount of land covered by trees today as it did 80 years ago. In Vermont, for example, forest cover has more than doubled - from 37 percent in 1850 to 77 percent forest today. In New Hampshire, forest cover was 50 percent in 1850 compared to 87 percent today.
Each year, there are 1.5 billion tree seedlings planted in the United States - that's more than five new trees for each American, and nearly 2,000 for every bear. Forest planting in the United States currently averages about 2.4 million acres per year. </I>
http://www.timberhunt.com/country_report/countr
Reality is that which refuses to go away when I stop believing in it. --Phillip K. Dick (remove SPAM to email)
I used to be one of those people who thought those anti-globalization protesters were just treehugging tenderhearts looking for something to do. Mostly because I'm for free trade on principle. But then I realized how our farm subsidies caused starvation in poorer countries by destroying local food production industries. But our attack on those countries industrial sector with IP laws is part of the same picture.
The IMF orders those same third world countries we dump our subsidized food into on good years to stop helping local farmers buy chickens with something as simple as insurance that if the chick they buy doesn't become a 1 year old chicken it will be replaced. Then the free trade negotiators show up and tell them they can get rid of that 33% tariff on the president's widgets if he will just get rid of that tariff that protects his countries maize production and well prevents his family's competitors from coming out with better widgets by making those patent laws stronger, err in line with American standards.
What does it mean when we complain about a 55 year copyright in Taiwan, which hasn't even been around that long, much less democratic in that time? They are in line with international standards, and have trouble policing such an overlong copyright already, much less the kind of permanent monopoly the US wants them to establish on words.
PS As I understand it the farm subsidies are even worse in the EU, esp France, and this is causing problems with Eastern European countries who wouldn't get the subsidies if they joined the EU. This is from the economist which isn't an unbiased source; is it true?
These developing countries are soveriegn nations, after all. They can adopt any internal IP polices they want, much like the US did in it's past. And the fact is that they do. It's up to these countries to decide what is in their own self-interest,
What would the world be like if there was no IP to speak of?
s te amengine.htm
We can take an example from England early in the industrial revolution, where machinery was sealed in iron boxes, or even further back in time when Kings would intentional cripple their blacksmiths so their sword making technology couldn't escape.
Everything would be kept as trade secrets, under non-disclosure agreements.
Anyone remember the wheel, the steam engine, + others.
The steam engine was patented, as was pretty much all technology developed after 1700.
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bl
http://www.gsn.uk.com/watt.html
The fact is that the patent system has been around since the early industrial revolution, and a lot of historians cite the development of the patent system as the root cause of the rapid development of technology in the industrial world over the past 300 years. Anyone proposing that patents be abandonded really needs to consider the early history of the patent system, and what went on before patents were introduced.
...was rather bothered by American bootleggers, too. But unlike Charles Dickens, he didn't go on a big U.S. tour to lobby for stronger international copyright protection. He and his publisher issued a higher-quality print of his novels, sold them for a reasonable price (a bit higher than the bootlegs, but not much), and made an appeal to his fanbase to boycott the unauthorized version.
The result was, he made a lot of money, and the unauthorized version didn't sell very well.
Neat, huh?
The whole "free enterprise" and whatnot that's supposed to encourage entrepreneurship is nothing more than national propoganda.
::IRAQ::
::PANAMA (oldie but goodie)::
::VIETNAM::
::BOMBING AFGHANISTAN::
::ISRAEL/PALESTINE::
::WORLD WAR II:
::REVOLUTIONARY WAR::
::CIVIL WAR::
::THE ENVIRONMENT::
::BIOLOGICAL WARFARE (this is reaching into speculation, mind you)::
::NUCLEAR WEAPONS::
::MILITARY STRUCTURE::
::AL QAEDA::
...well, look no further than right here at home.
the US govt can't see why the rest of the World...takes offense at this
You really think that the US govt can't see? It's the normal US citizenry that can't see, because they get fed piles upon piles of propoganda.
Let's take a look:
Gov't line: We need to bomb them to protect the freedoms of the Kuwaiti people
Reality: we have big oil ties with the whole area, and any one country becoming dominant enough to be able to set oil prices or do anything but lie their passively while we import their national resources at dirt-cheap prices would be an economic unpleasantness. Much better to keep them afraid (at least for fifty years, until their oil runs out, at which point we couldn't care less what happens, just like we don't care what happens in places like Africa).
Gov't line: We need to suppress rebels and ensure stability, so we're moving in troops.
Reality: We want to build a canal at some really awful terms for Panama. Panama doesn't bite. We fund rebel groups, stir up a bit of unrest, move in troops to "maintain Western Hemisphere stability", and build the canal in the middle of their country, letting Panama know that they can have it back in a hundred years. Quite profitable for us.
Government line: we want to protect democratic rights in Vietnam, so we're helping fund a fair government
Reality: we want a lapdog government on the borders of communist nations to stop the spread of communism.
Government line: We're bombing terrorist camps, protecting the human rights of women and others who the Taliban is suppressing.
Reality: There's no big signs on people saying "I am a terrorist." There are a shitload of warlords and private groups and villages. Basically, any faction that doesn't buy into the lapdog government that we're in the process of setting up is portrayed on CNN as a "terrorist group" that we're bombing. Of course, this kills lots of women and children and people that have never had the slightest to do with bombing things in the United States, but we can make up for it by finding the occasional poster person in Afghanistan who is now "freed from the bonds of the veil" and can partake of Western products.
Government line: we're "facilitating the peace process" because we're concerned about the parties involved. Palestine keeps breaking the peace agreements.
Reality: We didn't care in the least about Israel back in the Six Day War, when Israel was about to get invaded by five or so armies. Why? Because we were convinced that Israel was about to get toasted, and we don't really have any interest in pulling anyone's feet out of the fire. After Israel pulled off the most stunning military feat in the last century and won, we decided that Israel was the person to buddy up to. Both Palestine and Israel have regularly violated the rights of each other's people, and both hate each other's guts -- Palestine is no worse here than Israel -- but because Israel is currently the top dog, we villify Palestine.
It goes on and on. US World War II propoganda is particularly amusing, if you ever look back at it, because it's so ridiculous. Speaking of which:
Government line: we need to go after Germany because they're evil and empire-building (in modern times, there is a perception that we got involved to "save the Jews").
Reality: Most people in the US were entirely uninterested in helping any Jews out, which were pretty much seen as job-taking immigrants. Germany's building an empire...but we didn't care when France was doing the same. No, we just happened to have significantly more economic ties to England and France.
Modern propoganda spin: Our Founding Fathers were noble idealists who were throwing off the shackles of an unjust government.
Reality: Our Founding Fathers were vandals (sorry, that's just what the Boston Tea Party was) who didn't want to pay taxes to pay for the military protection that they had had from Indians for decades.
Modern spin: fought to save the country from slavery
Reality: Slavery not primary issue to the majority of people fighting, Union or Confederacy. Union cared mostly about not allowing any states to leave the United States (which would weaken the states as a whole), and the Confederacy was mostly interested in being able to have much more power at a state level.
Government line: the US is the most environmentally conscious of nations, putting out extreme efforts to product emissions-free cars, and using as much clout as it can to require developing nations to be clean.
Reality: The US is quite interested in countries being environmentally conscious -- as long as it isn't us. It's in our interests to drive up their costs and down ours. We've been the single major holdout against international antipollution agreements over the past few years. We *do* care about polution that immediately impacts US citizens (dumping chemicals in rivers that go to reseviours), but as for conservation of international resources...we use so many times our share of energy that it's ridiculous.
Government line: We stopped offensive germ warfare efforts about twenty years ago. We focus only on defense now.
Reality: Not sure one way or another, but if you remember, when we were proposing the (very sweet for us economically) "food for oil" trade agreement after we arranged for an international embarge of Iraq, and Iraq was holding out, claiming that they had plenty of food resources, there was a very unusual sudden mass outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease throughout Iraq's cattle. Go figure.
Government line: The US government wants to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of "rogue states" and terrorists to keep the world safe for everyone.
Reality: The US wants to keep nuclear weapons away from *anyone else*. Our current nuclear weapon reductions are meaningless -- both Russia and us have easily enough to destroy the other, even enough to overwhelm antimissile defenses. We just ignore allies that have nukes. Yet a nuclear weapon is just about the only meaningful resistance a country can put up in case of a US attack -- the US doesn't want any resistance to be possible. We have overwhelming conventional force, and we want things to stay that way.
Government line: "Defense spending". Our military is for "defense".
Reality: And yet, over the last fourty years, almost all our military spending has gone into making our military faster, lighter, and easier to move around the world via ships in battle groups. Why? Not cost effective at all for defense -- we can defend our shores just fine traditional approaches -- but amazingly good at bombardment and intimidation of countries that we aren't getting along with.
Government line: Al Queda is a bunch of cowards who can't take an honest fight who went after innocent people.
Reality: Assuming bin Laden himself was behind Sept. 11, he's one of the most successful military tacticians in the last hundred years. Think about it. He has a force that is outgunned, and outmanned. The people he's working with, Afghanis, have been used by the US governent as disposable tools against US enemies and then dropped when they were no longer useful (much like the Kurds, the Cuban revolutionaries at the Bay of Pigs). The understandably feel some resentment. Their religion (at least the political side of said religion) has been rather oppressed and attacked by Western culture that seems quite evil to them (loss of emphasis on the family, sexual promiscuity, etc). Most of the eastern countries being exploited for their oil are Islamic, and the US has had quite a hand in dirty work in the region. So what does he do, with no tanks, airplanes, or anything else? He uses our own airplanes against us. Who does he attack? Not the US soldiers, the grunts who are being paid to attack other countries, but against the people who are directly responsible for the decisions that caused so much damage to his country and people -- US politicians (the White House), the overbearing US military (the Pentagon), and the powerful corporations that have been encouraging said oil exploitation (rich suits in the World Trade Center).
The US government is just as guilty as the Soviets, the Chinese, and anyone else in putting out bogus propoganda. It's more successful because people are happy and rich. If you think that people that bought into Soviet or North Korean propoganda must have been incredibly stupid
Now, that doesn't mean that US propoganda is *bad* for us. US citizens enjoy an extremely high standard of living, rights (even in other countries) to ignore local laws that are simply unheard of (Clinton can get a vandal off in Singapore from being punished for his crimes, but if Taiwan tried to get someone off for copyright infringement, I doubt they'd have any success). Most of this comes, counter to said propoganda, not from "rights" or the long-dead "American self-sufficiency" or anything along those lines. It's because we're happy to use our military power to whack people if it gives us an economic benefit. You get to live the good life because there are people in our government who are willing to do the dirty, unethical work that keeps you enjoying your life.
What let most of our modern economy be built? Roads and fuel. Centralization of manufacturing and specialization came directly from those. Why do we get our oil so much cheaper than people in any other countries? Because we club the crap out of anyone that opposes us exporting their oil at dirt-cheap prices. We happily put tariffs up against countries importing, but use every last bit of our clout to prevent countries from taxing US imports. And it's been enormously successful over the past two centuries, making us the dominant economic power, and making us extremely successful.
No, I'm not arguing that this should stop. I'd just like to see that people be aware of what we're doing, and make a conscious decision to do what they're doing. Being the bully on the block can be pretty pleasant, but something feels vaguely wrong about being the bully on the block and thinking that you're the saint.
May we never see th
Pardon me, but Snopes is full of bull.
Many of their articles are pure political spin
pieces. All of them are supercilious tripe, even
when they manage to get the facts right, but
worse they go on to derive invalid conclusions
from their "facts", in order to refute their
straw-man "legends".
Besides which, there was nothing -- nada -- zip --
zilch -- about the post to which you respond to
give it the credibility which would merit a
refutation, thus making your response a tendentious
pedantry up with which I cannot put.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
The Slashdot line: We want to protect starving artists who are being exploited by the RIAA.
Reality: Almost everyone on Slashdot pushing this has vague notions of "unlimited free music" available, without them having to put any resources into production of future music. As for people that claim (and frequently have rationalized their behavior to the point of believing it) that their goals really *are* to defend the artist rather than get free music...I ask, how many of you were crusading against the recording industry's exploitation of the artist *before Napster was around*?
The Slashdot line: Windows is highly insecure. Anyone using it is asking to get broken in to. Linux/Unix is much better.
Reality: Windows and other Microsoft products have had security holes, the same as Unix/Linux has. For every egregious MS bug (active content), there's an equally egregious Unix/Linux bug (massive numbers of buffer overflows in ssh, which is frequently deployed at secure sites and is relied upon to be solid). For every MS program with a miserable security history that runs with administrative permissions (IIS), there's a Unix program that does the same (sendmail).
Slashdot line: H1Bs exploit foreign workers by bringing them to come to the United States and then work at lower wages than other US workers. H1Bs produce workers that produce code of abysmal quality. H1Bs should be eliminated to protect the workers that are being exploited. The US economy would be better (by employing more US workers) if we got rid of the H1Bs.
Reality: H1Bs let people get into the country. Workers coming to the US are quite happy to work at lower wages for a period of time if it means they get their foot in the door and can get permanent residency. People aren't being forced to take H1Bs -- they want them! They work at lower wages than US workers because US tech wages are astronomical compared to the amount of effort required to gain the skillset necessary to do the job. Many H1B workers are *very* skilled, more so than their US counterparts. If a company is going to go all the way over to another country *and* sponsor a worker, it is damn well going to do an even more stringent examination of the worker's competence than it would a domestic worker. Eliminating H1Bs wouldn't make any H1B-users happy at all -- they *choose* to come to the United States and work at 90% the normal US wage because it beats the snot out of working at 10% the normal US wage in a foreign country. As for the US economy being better by helping domestic workers...that's simply not true. What US workers want is guaranteed jobs (or at least jobs with a heavy edge given them in hiring). Costs of paying US workers more is then passed down to the consumer. So people in favor of labor protectionism are asking the entire United States to subsidize their highly-paid lifestyle when there's a more efficient alternative. Plus, it's easy to move software development to another country -- everyone speaks C++, work is fairly independent, and collaboration (and tools for collaboration) are pretty good and easy. If the US does labor protection, in the long term, companies will either move to other countries or go out of business, beaten by companies in countries with cheaper workers. That's *bad* for the economy.
Slashdot line: Sweatshops are evil. They exploit the foreign worker. They should be eliminated.
Reality: This is mostly AFL/CIO-initiated propoganda. Sweatshops are hiring foreign workers at low prices because that's the only way they can be competitive. If you want to pay $50 more for your hard drive, go for it...but competition on price is what has driven down wages. Eliminating sweatshops, as some have proposed, wouldn't do anything to help the foreign worker -- they're willing to work at inhumanly low rates because that's the only way they can get enough for food. Wipe the sweatshops out, and they simply starve. The only people to benefit are US unskilled labor, which gets a short term boost in hiring. This is much the same as the H1B item mentioned above.
Slashdot line: Drug legalization is good because I'm concerned about the human rights of the nonviolent offenders that are put in jail. The Constitution doesn't give the federal government the right to ban drugs.
Reality: Most people taking this view are interested in smoking up, not primarily concerned about potential constitutional violations. Why? I don't see complaints of constitutional violations (libertarian types aside), despite the fact that most of the Bill of Rights is pretty much ignored by the federal government (I remember doing a breakdown at one point of how many are actually strictly followed...something like two of the amendments.)
May we never see th
Snopes is the calm voice of reason that people seem to ignore, in HTML form. People who are way too gullible for their own good will believe practically anything told to them by "trusted friends" (who, in turn heard it from "another friend"), even if it contradicts logic, facts, and everything else. They sum it all up in an easy-to-read format.
As for his/her post not being a response, I'd say you're wrong. It was a response to the fact that this person was repeating a lie like it was a fact. Stopping the spread of lies, and general enlightenment, is something that everyone in society should try to do. By ending stupidmemes like the girl who masturbated with a lobster dieing with baby-lobsters in a sensitive place, you make the society a better place to be.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.