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The Semantics of File Sharing
ethericalzen writes "The LA Times has published an opinion article about the legal semantics and analogies of file sharing. The article includes arguments from those who believe file sharing is theft and those who strongly disagree. As it points out, the common analogies to theft are often incomplete or inaccurate. The author states, "balancing the interests of content creators against the public's ... is a much more complicated task than erecting a legal barrier to five-fingered discounts." He recognizes that it is not a trivial concept, and that the clamoring from both camps about definitions and moral boundaries will dictate how businesses and users function in the future."
So in other words its just an article that is what Slashdot is like every time an *AA story gets posted? Some calling it theft and others saying its not?
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
The last resort of the desperate Internet argument.
Still, this will either a) finally put down on paper that file sharing is not theft, or b) put down on paper that the exchange of copyrighted information is, in fact, theft, and then everyone is in a world of poop. My old VHS recordings of Red Dwarf and The Muppets will suddenly become a complicated legal quagmire.
Now, quagmire is semantically defined as...
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
This is very much worth the read. It is surprisingly erudite for a newspaper and it is also pretty nuanced. The critical points are illuminated (theft as deprivation of a good or theft as an unjust enrichment), the debate is balanced and excellent sources are used. Well worth the click away from /..
Some things really just need to be explained in terms of themselves. Computer networks are not highway systems. They're not houses. They're not cars, or floor waxes, or dishwashing detergents. They do a totally unique thing, using technologies and paradigms that didn't even exist before computers were invented to make use of them.
OF COURSE analogies don't work.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
It is my opinion that factual clarity leads to intellectually honest debate and discussion about important issue, and that means clarifying fact from opinion, legal from morals, etc. Sometimes it may be necessary to put it down as semantics however, but I fele this is too often a cry used to exxtinguish debate/discussion, a promotion of intellectual dishonesty if you will;.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
It always amused me how the popular analogy from the other camp was "Oh, so if you want a car, it's okay to steal it is it?" So they can get all high and moral. But when you break it down and say "Okay, I'm going to make an exact duplicate of your car, never once depriving you of the usage of it. It will not inconvenience you in any way." The argument rather falls flat on it's face.
The whole "filesharing = theft" equation is almost entirely down to MPAA, RIAA and other organizations brainwashing people. Saying something a 1000 times doesn't make it true. If it did, downloading WOULD be theft by this point. But it's still copyright violation, which is why these groups, with their large political donations, have made copyright violation are far FAR harsher crime than theft ever was.
I break into your house and nick your Transformers DVD, at worst I'd probably go down for 30 days, unless I'm haibitual. Small fine probably. The charge will be breaking and entering, theft etc... I download Transformers from you instead, we BOTH face tens of thousands of dollars in fines, and many years in jail.
You're better off, from a jailtime perspective, heading into your local WalMart, nicking a few DVD's, then rape the cashier on the way out. You'll serve less time than if you get caught downloading the movie.
The semantic aren't really the issue here, as the powers that be want to have their cake AND eat it too. They want the association in the public eye to be IT'S THEFT! IT'S NO DIFFERENT THAN STEALING A CAR! But in the back rooms they know this is bullshit, and continue to push on with copyright violation punishments being exponentially increased.
What you or I call it is irrelevant.
"Downloading a movie off of the Internet is the same as taking a DVD off a store shelf without paying for it," adds the Motion Picture Assn. of America.
If this were true, the punishment would be the same.
I...I'm attacking the darkness!
Any time you find weasel words and bad analogies going unchecked, follow the money trail. This isn't about artist's rights. If anyone gave a crap about that there'd be an uproar about unfair record contracts and middle men getting all the money. Basically in this case you have:
1) Artists who hope to get rich by gaming the system (as a few artists certainly have).
2) Middle men going to extreme measures (like bankrupting or jailing people, draconian drm) to protect their "right" to collect most of the money.
3) Lots of people who are happy to take content without compensating anyone for it.
There are exceptions but the status quo is pretty bad. Still, the human race has bigger problems. Pollution. Overpopulation. War. Disease. Compared to that this is all petty bullshit and a waste of words. All these people just need to stop grubbing for every last dollar and accept that sometimes life isn't going to hand them what they're due, what they're worth, or what they've earnt. Other people will take you for all that you're worth if they can - it doesn't give you the right to adopt the same attitude.
In other words: Life ain't fair. Get over it. There are many more important things than the latest film or pop song. Stop penalizing everyone you can to protect your own money grubbing arse.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
This article brings out the common observation that copies of files are, in theory, unlimited. If this is true, it means that the way music (and movies, and books, etcs.) are sold must change.
BUT this does not mean that music should be free--it means that today's "a la carte" method of selling music is obsolete.
A rough comparision would be to the cable industry. When you subscribe to cable, you are not forced to pay for each television show that you watch (think iTunes), you simply pay a flat rate and watch as much as you want. This is how recorded music must now be "sold." Selling music one file at a time does not reflect the "fluid" nature of digital media and is rightfully held in low regard by filesharers.
Looks more like, "Cue the trolling and stereotyping. Brought to us by our favorite, the ignorant anon. cowards. Stay tuned now for logic, followed by flamewar, Only on Slashdot!"
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
I think what's really positive here (besides the very good article) is that these ideas have finally hit mainstream. There's at least acknowledgement of a debate, and I think that will really help to move things forward. About the only point that's missing is that the temporary (I use the term loosely) monopoly provided to creative works should be set so as to balance the production of work with the public interest. We've seen several lengthenings of copyright, but there was no discussion of whether or not these were a good deal for the public at large. Greg London's Bounty Hunters (http://www.greglondon.com/bountyhunters) gives a good picture of this side of the issue.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
Seriously. The copies have value (otherwise, why would you spend the time to get them?). When you download something, the result is that more people have these valuble copies. For some kinds of things, this may even increase the value of copies that other people already have (anything that has network effects). So by downloading a copy of something, you create value. The only catch is, the copyright holder isn't able to take out their cut.
Copyright violation is not theft. Period, and end of story. There is no semantical issue here, its simply not true.
Now, that said it may ( or may not ) be a civil offense, and even may become a criminal offense if the IP industry gets it way, but its not by definition theft nor will it ever be.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Internet Protocol theft? How is that done exactly?
If you meant Intellectual Property theft then it is not theft as Intellectual Property is a nonsense term invented by greedy lawyers for something that does not exist.
Yes, there are some who will make various intellectual arguments for why it should always be legal to rip the latest Disney movie for free. In the end, it's for the common good that we have created an artifical set of rules that allow creators to be compensated for their otherwise easily copied works. The guy on the street overwhelmingly agrees with this, just as he also agrees on an artificial speed limit for his car.
But there is room for serious dispute over where that artificial line is drawn, and how the rules get enforced. The problem isn't that copyright makes piracy (aka "sharing") illegal. It's that technological enforcement of copyright via "digital rights management" (DRM) just goes too far in restricting human nature. And such attempts to force universities or ISPs to police their students from committing piracy is draconian (plus so lame).
The hard problem isn't to decide whether or not to have copyright law. It's how do we let Disney be paid for every copy of a movie, while still allowing the common man to make a backup copy of his DVD library, or lend a movie to a friend, or use a clip in a remix?
No.
Theft is Theft.
Copyright infringement is Copyright infringement.
Both illegal, but both very distinct and seperated.
Why do people not get this?
yeah ok
go on paying large corporations too much money
I'll keep downloading until they're gone completely and the truly dedicated musicians have learned a little html
and don't give me a line about movies. there hasn't been a movie worth paying for in decades
Why do we need analogies? Why do we need to find similarities? It is a simple case of two parties, one of which is accusing the other as the source of their financial losses. It does not matter what do you call it. If one side can prove that their losses were because of the actions of another, that's it. Copyright violation is already a crime. If I make a VHS tape of the Seinfeld episode, they will have hard time proving that I incurred significant losses on NBC. If I made a torrent out of it and put it on the seeder it's another issue.
See? No need for bad or any analogies.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Analogies are always incomplete and inaccurate (the former necessarily implies the latter, anyhow); if they were complete and accurate, they would be equivalencies, not analogies.
What is important is whether the similarities in the things which are held up as analogous support the conclusion drawn from the analogy; IOW, whether and to what degree the similarities (or, conversely, the inaccuracy and incompleteness of the analogy) are relevant to the purpose of the analogy.
I have a word for "file sharing": I call it "speech". I have the Right (as in God-given, inalienable, fundamental, and/or natural -- take your pick) to repeat any speech that enters my realm of experience from any source.
Before the internet became popular, copyright did not very significantly encroach upon the territory of Free Speech. Now, no one can reasonably claim that copyright does not restrict Free Speech and education. Obviously, Free Speech is more important than copyright, just as Democracy is more important than monopoly privileges.
File sharing is Free Speech.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
Sharing files without permission is.
/. summary isn't. Big surprise there...)
"File sharing" is just a technology that lets people share files.
When it is used to share files without authorization legal issues come up, with copyright violation being the top one.
But, if I share a Ubuntu ISO over a file sharing program, no laws anywhere are being broken.
Can we please be more specific? With specificity, it is hard to have an argument.
(The article is correct, the
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Clearly, you've never had an idea that you could sell.
1178161 is prime...
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
How about sharing the contents of your bank account?
Let's face it folk. IP theft is theft. Just because it is easy to do or everyone does it does not make it right.
Yes, obviously. I totally agree with you. Those 2 examples are as much theft as p2p sharing.Now, I can't find my bridge. Is there any space left under yours?
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
Every illegal download is a lost sale.
Their entitled to THOUSANDS OF TIMES THEIR ACTUAL LOSSES from every infringer they haul into court.
You can absolutely identify the infringing user and computer from nothing more than an IP address and a timestamp.
There is no other explanation for the overall decline in CD sales.
We're only doing this for the artists.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
No. Theft is Theft. Copyright infringement is Copyright infringement. Both illegal, but both very distinct and seperated. Why do people not get this?
Either way, you're getting something you haven't paid for, so the distinction is lost on most people.
"No, having a copy of this CD isn't stealing because it's intellectual property!" doesn't make sense to most people.
DATABASE WOW WOW
I had to put an end to comments on this article somehow, before it rehashes absolutely every argument that has appeared in every other article about filesharing and the RIAA.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Of course it's not. Theft is shoplifting the CD out of the store and getting a slap on the wrist for doing so. Copyright violation is a $220,000.00 fine from an ignorant, plus having to listen to the RIAA crow about their ONLY court win so far.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
No. Theft is Theft. Copyright infringement is Copyright infringement. Both illegal, but both very distinct and seperated. Why do people not get this?
Either way, you're getting something you haven't paid for, so the distinction is lost on most people.
"No, having a copy of this CD isn't stealing because it's intellectual property!" doesn't make sense to most people.
How about "No, having a copy of this CD isn't stealing because I didn't take it away from anyone!"?Go out and repeat the already plagiarized I Have A Dream speech, and the King estate will sue you for copyright infringement. All this despite the fact that it was read for free at a highly attended public gathering.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
How come some information wants to be free, and some private?
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
How come some information wants to be free, and some private? That is a completely different discussion, and has more to do with people (and the legal system) being able/willing to use knowledge about you to harm you.
That I am able to copy something from you without you being able to stop me is called EVOLUTION!
Excellently put. Let me just add a little about why privacy is different than copyright:
The main difference between privacy and copyright is that copyrighted materials are not secrets. Copyright seeks to protect the materials after they have been published and disseminated to the public. Copyright does not and cannot influence information that is not shared publicly for profit or for free. Copyright does not restrict whether information can be shared. It restricts who is allowed to share that information.
Privacy is about protecting one's personal business from the outside world. Originally, this was just the government and neighbors. Now the scope has grown to include corporations and other malicious multinational entities. In other words, privacy is an opposite of copyright because no one seeks to share their private secrets while copyright would be meaningless in the absence of publication and dissemination.
Think of a video. One might film a video of an interesting story and sell or share it. It would make no sense to keep something like that locked up as the creator already knows the story and could easily just imagine it.
On the other hand, who would want to share a video of a secret love affair. The leak of such information would be devastating to both lovers.
Copyright proponents also often seek to violate privacy. DRM systems often include schemes which allow copyright holders to scan and sometimes even delete files on your computer from a remote location. Publishers also often compile lists of who reads what books and sell those lists for a profit (I hope you did not buy Catcher in the Rye from Amazon).
Can anyone still have any confusion about the difference between copyright and privacy?
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
This article gives a surprisingly nuanced and fair overview of the issues at hand. We've been over these things a million times on Slashdot, of course. Still, it's encouraging to see the greater public getting their heads around what really is a complex issue.
The one point I don't think gets mentioned nearly enough is the potential value of free copying to society. We hear plenty about the supposed cost. But in a world with liberal sharing of creative works, those works will get into the hands of many more people, including people of limited means. People will be exposed to amazing works they might have otherwise missed. Works will have to compete for attention based more purely on their content, rather than on the marketing muscle behind them. New works will be created that are inspired by, and in some cases built from, the numerous creative sources made available through sharing.
Best of all, free copying creates a worldwide decentralized backup system for these works. Many works will be saved which might have been otherwise lost because they were copyrighted for far longer than they were profitable.
We are witnessing the beginning of a new era, where creativity spews forth from all corners and mixes in many unexpected ways. Much of it will be crap, but some of it will be mind-blowingly fantastic. An environment of sharing with few restrictions will make this possible, and it will preserve the best of what is produced for generations to come.
Then perhaps you'd like to purchase the rights for public demonstrations of the "happy birthday" song that you will inevitability sing when something increments their age count.
Yes the "Happy Birthday" song is copyrighted and still collecting fees to this day from radio stations, etc. It's set to expire in 2030 apparently (i'm sure copyright extensions will prevent that).
The real question that should be asked is, at what point does a piece of music become part of the public domain culture? What's next? A patent on Christmas?
For an awesome (legal download) documentary on piracy, copyright, etc I highly recommend Steal this film 2.
I like this quote:
Put this way, it seems obvious that the sharing of ideas (and intellectual property is essentially ideas, isn't it?) is free speech. So, the question is: Is free speech free as in beer, or free as in... my head hurts.
How about "No, having a copy of this CD isn't stealing because I didn't take it away from anyone!"?
No, but neither artist nor label has the $10 now.
Why most people don't care to distinguish between the different kinds of economic gain you can have at someone else's expense.
DATABASE WOW WOW
Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear,.. ah crap..
That's retarded.
...and I replicated myself a nice new car, just like yours. Then I go and find Linus and replicate the uber-badass laptop I imagine he must have, and finally I go next door and replicate my neighbor's candybar. Is that illegal? Hell no.
The argument doesn't hold up because bread is physical. It's a collection of atoms. You can't wave a magic wand and have an exact duplication of that bread. Data is more ethereal. It's easy to duplicate.
The real argument goes like this:
If you come over to my house and take my candybar, you are in possession of a candybar and I am without.
That's theft.
In the digital age, if you come over to my house and take a copy of my CD, you are in possession of a CD, and I am *STILL IN POSSESSION OF MY FUCKING PROPERTY*, you just have an exact duplicate.
It's not theft.
The music companies want you to believe you have harmed them out of their fair share.
But what if tomorrow I invented a replicator just like you'd see on Star Trek.
I'm not against the *AA because I want free music, I'm against the *AA because they are trying to legislate against one of the basic things about computers and data. It's easy to duplicate and they don't want it to be without paying them money or fines or whatever.
They can get fucked.
There's no place like
I've seen this argument before, verbatim. It's bunk, of course.
The contents of a CD, DVD, or book have been released to the public already; they're copyrighted materials. The contents of my bank account or computer, are more akin to trade secrets.
In short, you fail at analogy.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
The internet IS a peer to peer file sharing tool.
expandfairuse.org
Yes. Lots of people get that copying is not theft. But some miss it on downloading. There is no such thing as "illegal downloading". Or there shouldn't be-- I fear that the MAFIAA may yet succeed in temporarily outlawing and prosecuting downloading. It is the uploading of copyrighted material without permission that is illegal. Otherwise, anyone listening to radio, either old fashioned AM/FM or streaming via the Internet, could be a criminal, especially if they are recording the broadcast. Anyone could put up a web site that plays some copyrighted jingle, and thus make every visitor into a crook. And, no one can tell for sure whether some data is copyrighted if they can't examine it. How should anyone know without listening to it whether something labeled as a song by, say, Prince, is in fact what it says it is, or is some parody or karaoke performance or a free ringtone version or a fan's live recording of Prince in concert? Or is the real thing, a polished studio recording, but is totally legal to download because Prince gave it away or because its copyright has expired?
And note, an actual transfer has to occur, merely "making available" is not enough to be guilty of copyright infringement. But even uploading isn't always illegal. In the case of a P2P system like BitTorrent, I would say only the person who ripped a copyrighted work and seeded an encoding of same without permission is committing copyright infringement. The rest of the people who participate in the sharing of some copyrighted work are only uploading what they downloaded, even starting to upload before they've finished downloading because that's how BitTorrent works.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
They also didn't have it before, and weren't necesarily prevented from getting it by my copying -- maybe I never would have bought their CD anyway.
have been giving away free content since inception. this is of course supported by advertising. the business model works just fine
business based on the distribution of books, dvds, cds, etc., meanwhile is based on the control of tangible media you need to manufacture, put on a truck, and ship to a store
what the internet did was force the radio/ tv economic model on the book/ dvd/ cd distributors
it's disruptive technology defined. and, unfortunately for entrenched business interests based on distribution of tangible media, completely irreversible and completely unstoppable
meanwhile, all of the moral arguments are complete bullshit. it's just a business earthquake, plain and simple. pointing to morality is merely crocodile tears on the part of some very powerful, but dying businesses
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
You've got all this bits that need to go somewhere... so you get disk drives.
Sure they're cheap, but they are not green. They break, then you throw them out...
Wouldn't it be nice if *you* didn't have to store those bits? All those songs are "out there", somewhere. If you could legally and conveniently get them "on demand", you wouldn't have to be storing them yourself.
So, what's the fair price for "everything online"?
I dunno. I pay $40 a month for a bunch of crappy TV... (although I think I could do without it sometimes. Maybe when the kids move out...) It seems like a lot, but there is no DRM on it. It goes to all 5 TVs in the house, I can record it onto Disc, my computer, even old VHS, if I want... Everyone in the house can watch it. People kind of expect that you have a TV, and that it has lots of channels.
No one expects you to have lots of music.
Rhapsody charges $12.99/month for "unlimited"... of course it is not really "unlimited", you do have bandwidth limitations, right? Still, I don't subscribe... it is still "too much" (and it has DRM, etc.) I just can't see spending $150+ year when I have "free" radio, songs I already own, books to read, yard work to do, and oh, yeah, that crappy TV. I just don't have time enough to listen to justify the extra cost for "just music". (Besides, when I listen to Jonesy's Jukebox (radio), I get free music AND someone else does the work of selecting the playlist.)
Let's say you could get any song ever published for $X/month. If it could be downloaded to your player of choice, DRM free, what is the value of X?
Ok, Time for dinner, so enough of this ramble. I think that gives you the gist... I agree with the parent. We need a cheap "service" that offers everything unencumbered. There will always be leeches, but... so what?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Here's an analogy for you:
Supposing the leader of country, lets call him Hitler, made it such that all the german cultural productions couldn't be sold or broadcast unless they went through an organization of his. This organization diddled the originators out of what money they thought they were going to get. Furthermore the artists basically wanted to have their works heard by all the people, but the government decided when and what people could listen too, except for the wealthy who could pay to have their own copies of the large bodies of work.
The money raised by this organization was used to persecute a minority based on their choice of a religion that was a foundation of Christianity which is the dominant religion.
So if a person copied a piece of their culture so that they could listen to it when they wanted to should they be bankrupted for the rest of their lives?
Answer: Of course! They are a pirate, and that's how the law says we treat pirates. You want to obey the law right?
You might argue about how it depends on the use of the money. Well ok, I guess the people working for the RIAA need to open up their uses of the money so that we can judge if revenue from our culture is being spent appropriately or not.
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
maybe I never would have bought their CD anyway
But now that you already have it, you definitely won't pay for it. 90% of the time, that's true all the time.
Maybe you didn't cause economic damages. But you took something you have no right to and compensated no one.
DATABASE WOW WOW
What the real problem is is the view in our society that monetary value is the ultimate achievement, that piece of paper with the number on it or the number in your bank account has no more real value than the ASCII code of the song you download. In theroy a random number generator could produce any of the songs that are downloaded. Would that still be considered stealing, to randomly create a code that is translated into the song? No matter how you want to place a value on an object (be it money or materials or work done) it is easy to say that for a real object, but ideas should be free flowing because if everyone adds something to that idea then they will all have paid for it.
maybe I never would have bought their CD anyway
But now that you already have it, you definitely won't pay for it. 90% of the time, that's true all the time.
Maybe you didn't cause economic damages. But you took something you have no right to and compensated no one.
This is where we have to decide whether we're talking about legal rights or moral rights. I don't have the legal right to do that, but it is very much a matter of debate whether I have the moral right (or rather, whether anyone else has the moral right to prevent me from making a copy without paying them).That's crap.
Stealing is a verb. It is an act that involves taking something to which you're not entitled. That's it. You are, once again, conflating theft (a legal construct which involves deprivation of property) with stealing (a verb). THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING. You are also conveniently ignoring the fact that the onus under the law is on the person committing the act, not the impact on the owner.
It doesn't matter that the owner has more, even if there are infinitely many more. You aren't punished because someone has lost something; you're punished because you have committed a transgression against someone. We don't care, as a legal matter, whether you took a dollar from a dishwasher or from Donald Trump, who'd never even know it was gone. It's something that is legitimately and legally for sale, which you acquired without paying for. You have stolen. Idiotic semantic arguments (which use 'steal' and 'theft' interchangeably, but try to split hairs on fractional parts of hand-picked definitions) notwithstanding, there's no issue here.
This is worse than the utterly moronic "piracy is only on boats" horseshit that is scattered around Slashdot. Newsflash, Dexter: 'piracy' has been used in the modern sense since the 1880s. It's a word more deeply established than "computer".
The real problem here is that the RIAA exists in it's present form in the first place. Why should the distributor make most of the money? They aren't a hard working group of people that earn a small honest margin spreading the word about musicians, they are a cartel that controls the music industry. If I download, they have effectively done nothing anymore. They have offered no service, no physical media for my convenience, nothing at all. Why should they get any money? The one tiny thing they do for the artists is obsolete, only their totalitarian control of the industry keeps them where they are, and they are frightened because they know their currently existing power is the only thing keeping them around. If we bought direct from artists at several times what they make now from the RIAA, we'd be paying next to nothing for music, benefitting the artists more, and be exposed to more varieties of better music. I say steal from the RIAA until they rot and die and their bloated carcass has to be dynamited after washing up on the beach, just send a few $ to the artists.
If that's the assumption we're working with, then ok, sure.
I don't think i've bought an album without hearing what's on it in a long time though, and i'm really not likely to either. I prefer (morally, if you will) to support artists i like directly, and that's because i know the money won't actually make it to them otherwise.
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
Oh yes it would be!!
If such a replicator existed, then the manufacturers of cars, candy-bars and computers absolutely would be claiming copyright (or whatever kind of "intellectual property" they could muster) on their products.
Sure it would be a stupid idea, and sure it wouldn't work ... but since when has that stopped people?
Simple: if it was theft they wouldn't need copyright law or DMCA to prosecute file sharing etc, they _could_ choose to use the various laws covering theft for that. Not saying they would but they could.
:).
Of course, if they convince enough people and the courts that it's theft, then legally speaking it'll be theft, BUT that hasn't happened yet, so meanwhile, the rest of us are going to keep saying its not theft
What's closer to theft is the Corporations convincing the government(s) to _retroactively_ take stuff out of the public domain and make it theirs.
When that was done we lost a lot of access/use of those stuff, stuff that we used to have the right to use freely.
What filesharing does is it makes the Corporations lose a lot of access to our money. But the last I checked, they didn't have an automatic right to our money.
OK you have two types of things property, it just is at the founding of the US that potentially included other people but it was something had. The right to own property and keep is is a basic fundamental right, it can be taken away via the courts or via eminent domain but otherwise it's yours to do what you please with.
Copyright created IP and is supposed to last for a limited time only to foster the creation of more creative works. We started going down the slippery slope when it got extended further and further. As people had control over things via copyright for longer and longer it looks more and more like property.
There needs to be a balance between the two competing forces some copyright holders have lots of money and have been buying congress critters for years (Disney and others) to keep expanding the scope of copyright. The people who have a lot of money as a whole but little on the average have a desire to be able to use things freely after copyright has expired. It would appear that the people in general ignore copyright it does little for them in there view. Striking a balance does not seem to hard music more than a few years old is past it's peak same for movies. Software is a bit of a special class as it's iterative so lets put that as maybe a few years without updates. To some extent go back to requiring registration of copyright but add a copy be sent to archive at the library of congress in it's most complete form (copy's of the original film or studio master as released, binary and source for software). Mix in the freedom to format shift copyright material. Allow the import of materials legally acquired in the source country. Ban any technical/contractual means restricting the application of users rights. After thats done you could look at making personal copyright infringement a minor criminal infraction like j walking or speeding nothing to go to court for and leave egregious forms like mass duplication of fake DVD's where they are. You might end up with a working system at this rate IP is the prohibition of our age it looked good on paper but not in application.
No sir I dont like it.
goes the familiar RIAA/MPAA-endorsed jingle...
And you know what? They're right. But neither would I attempt to steal the artist's living through creative accounting. I think the point they're trying to make is that they're far bigger jerks than you could ever hope to be, so don't mess with them.
Next time someone talks about filesharing as if it's stealing, remind them that you lose money on every download. You have to pay for the bandwidth, the equipment, and - by golly! - that all gets very expensive. By the time you're done, you just don't have anything left to pay the record companies... sorry!
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Well if you want something to be private, you normally don't put it out for display in stores where _anyone_ can enter.
Graduate students and most professors are no smarter than undergrads.
They're just older.
What the real problem is is the view in our society that monetary value is the ultimate achievement, that piece of paper with the number on it or the number in your bank account has no more real value than the ASCII code of the song you download
Apparently you don't understand money. Yes, some people may value the piece of green paper, but it's not the paper or what's printed on it that is important.
The important part is what the money represents.
Yeah, I could trade you 10 cows for a new car, but what if I don't want your car. What if I simply want to give you the 10 cows for the promise that you will give the car to whomever I denote. It's really a standardized form of bartering.
There's no place like
If my argument is flawed, tell me exactly what is the rule for determining what information wants to be free and what doesn't.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
Copyright infringement is more like trespass than like theft.
In trespass, you're violating the property owner's legally conferred right to control use of his/her property.
Trespass law balances social good against property rights. For example, in the UK (if I understand right) you can't stop hikers from crossing your meadow. The analogy to hiking would be the activities that constitute fair use.
Trespass, like copyright violation, can be commercial or non-commercial. Commercial copyright infringement is like subletting your apartment without ever leasing it in the first place.
Where the analogy breaks down is that even just walking across someone's land is more intrusive than sharing a file. Another breakdown is that there's no common meatspace equivalent to inviting thousands of people to bypass a toll booth.
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If you could make a copy of it without taking away my copy, sure. But bank accounts don't work like that, do they? So this is also completely different.
Actually, bank accounts do work like that. A bank balance really is nothing more than a number. Same with things that are easily fungible into bank balances, such as invoices. The purpose of double-entry book-keeping, which has existed since the 15th Century, is to create certainty in the otherwise uncertain world of banking. For every number I put here, I must have a corresponding number somewhere else. However, that broke down some time ago, and nowadays banks create money out of nothing more or less as they see fit, restrained only by statutes requiring them to actually be able to present some tiny percentage of the money they owe and are owed.
You've got it all wrong.... You build the replicator then charge the people that own ip on things to allow their stuff to be duplicated with your replicator!
Step 1: Build replicator
Step 2: Arrange replication contracts...
Step 3: ?
Step 4: ?
Step 5: Profit!?!?
Consider yourself blessed if you are sneezed on by a dragon and only get wet, it could have been a fireball.
"Stealing" is also a noun. What are you going to say to that???
Obligatory car analogy in comic form.
Thus, I can only conclude that you weren't talking about mere legality, in which case I maintain that no transgression has been committed against anyone (in any but the most basic legal sense). Quit trolling. Quit dishonestly accusing people of trolling just because they disagree with you. First and foremost, the free section on Craigslist is a section where individuals with title are offering to transfer it to you for the low, low price of coming to pick it up. The Pirate Bay is a web site where individuals are offering to transfer files to me for an equally low price. "Title" is irrelevant here because we're not talking about mere legality. Second, "taking the free one" isn't done without permission and contrary to the law, because they're offering it to you. Taking the free album off a torrent site isn't done without permission either: everyone else in the swarm is offering it to you. (Once again, "contrary to the law" is irrelevant here because we're not talking about mere legality.)
Now, you might point out that it's being done without the permission of someone else who isn't party to the transaction, namely the copyright holder. But that's true of the microwave too! Sears certainly didn't give me permission to get a free microwave somewhere else instead of buying one from them, and neither did any of the people selling free microwaves on eBay. Of course, their permission doesn't matter; they don't get to veto my craigslist transaction just because they'd like to sell me a microwave.
I contend that the copyright holder's permission doesn't matter either: they shouldn't get to veto my Pirate Bay transaction just because they'd like to sell me a copy. If I can find someone else who's willing to give me the product for free, whether it's a song or a microwave, I should be able to take them up on that offer.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
You're both quite correct.. Money is supposed to be a representation of personal bartering power, and it is also becoming increasingly abstracted from the physical medium it's used to represent. These two things aren't mutually exclusive at all, and that poses some interesting issues.
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
That's an interesting thought. Serious questions then: what is there to stop banks just changing the figures, giving themselves more money just by adding a couple of zeros here and there? It's not the sort of thing that would necessarily appear on the annual report...
Barbara Felden claims prior art on the flip phone, sues Motorola, Nokia.
Copyrights have a certain commercial value, which is derived from the saleability of whatever the copyright applies to, and the fact that the copyrighted work should be unavailable from anywhere else. You can buy and sell them as much as you want, but the copyright will be commercially worthless unless its potential for money-making is used. that potential is in the form of sales, where money is handed over in exchange for a copy of the work. Value is exchanged for value.
Every time you pirate a CD, you are undermining the copyright. You have created another source from which copyrighted works can come, which eats into the value of the copyright itself. You are gaining the value of the copyrighted work, yet there is no equivalent exchange. The copyright holder ends up with a slightly depreciated version of what he owned before you pirated the work. You are stealing value from the copyright holder for your own gratification.
But that's just the way I rationalise it. I can see why people would not see piracy as stealing. I was pretty sympathetic to your viewpoint right up until here:You have. They have entitlements to their fair share, being the ones who have and who are paying for those copyrighted works, and their distribution. They are the ones lowering the barrier of entry for artists. They spend lots of money promoting artists, encouraging them, and risking their all important finances (they're a corporation after all) in doing so. They at least deserve some money if you like the music.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Even more so, the thing that annoys me most about the music/video industries is that the associated companies want it both ways. They want to reap the benefits of cheaper distribution, more profits from cutting out middle-people, and more. The benefits of digital mean that they get a much bigger cut than they once did. But instead of passing along those savings to the consumer willingly, they fight tooth and claw to keep as much profit as possible. Look at all the hullabaloo against iTunes from the record companies saying that they're forcing the prices to be too low, when a lot of people think that they should be even lower.
I happen not to be big into file sharing, because it's not my style. But I don't buy music in the numbers I once did. It's gotta be a truly amazing product to get me to spend even a buck these days.
The CB App. What's your 20?
While I completely agree with you, it should be noted that the labels funded the recording process. That and advertising are what they're there for, though they're needed for each less and less every year.
There are still a few good labels out there, but they're certainly not the controlling majority of the RIAA, and most refuse to even be members.
"The cup is in turn designed for holding hot or cold liquids, and has an open rim and closed base." --US Patent #5425497
...that changing the part of speech doesn't change the word stem or take a word and make it a term of art. A stealing is that which is stolen, which gets you right back to the verb.
Congratulations on making it to distinction without a difference land, though. I'm sure they're happy to have you.
The music companies are motivated by greed, pure and simple. All that "piracy" and "theft" are just fancy words to hide their true intentions. Maybe they should look into ways to make their products more attractive instead of criminalising their customers with the aid of their mercenary lobbyists/legislators.
> Congress can repeal copyright at any time.
This small point is where it all hinges. Copyright infringement is violating a government granted monopoly, and only that. So it IS illegal but only immoral in the sense that a moral person shouldn't violate the law except in exceptional circumstances, especially in a nation that remains mostly self governed. (Although Obama will certainly be planning some CHANGES in that department... and the next revolution comes ever closer.)
But copyright infringement can't be theft or even considered fundamentally immoral. It is just a government policy decision and is no more moral or immoral than tax policy or some obscure OSHA regulation could be. Because Congress could abolish the whole mess tommorrow on a bare majority vote with no worries about what the courts might say. And the new copyright free reality would be exactly as moral as what we live in now. Whereas if it were 'property' the idea that Congress could legislate a legitimate property right out of existence on a mere 51-49 vote would be cause for loading up the sporting goods.
> Oh, and the order that items appear in the Constitution is not any indication of priority.
And just picking nits.... but order within the Consitiuition isn't important at all, but the order of Amendments is VERY important. They are basically patches, and if you don't apply yer patches in the right order unexpected things can happen.
Of course one interesting side effect I suspect hasn't been pondered a lot would be what impact does the 1st Amendment have on the copyright clause? If you have this absolute right to print granted by the 1st and it runs into a government granted monopoly putting whole swaths of creative output out of print and UNPRINTABLE for a century and growing every time Mickey Mouse nears the public domain.... might make for an interesting case to watch the Supremes ponder.
Democrat delenda est
(8) Another of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter's brother, spoke up, (9) "Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?"
(10) Jesus said, "Have the people sit down." There was plenty of grass in that place, and the men sat down, about five thousand of them. (11) Jesus then took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed to those who were seated as much as they wanted. He did the same with the fish.
(12) When they had all had enough to eat, he said to his disciples, "Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted." (13) So they gathered them and filled twelve baskets with the pieces of the five barley loaves left over by those who had eaten.
sqrt(-13) For thirty pieces of silver, the boy told the Bakers what Jesus did. Then the Bakers went out and began to plot with the Fishermen how they might kill Jesus, for they thought to themselves "How are we going to get money to eat if he gives food for free?"(a)
(a) All ancient authorities do not contain verse sqrt(-13).
Privacy law has expanded to cover information shared to others. For example laws regarding my medical records give protections that extend beyond my doctor to anybody else who might as a matter of business come in contact with them. Same applies to certain financial records that I share as a matter of business when making large purchases.
Just as I want to share certain private information yet have it protected, copyright holders seek the same thing. It all comes down to being protected in how the information is used after it is shared with interested parties. Thats why privacy laws aren't just about keeping your information secret, it's about making sure others don't disseminate the information; same as copyright is about making sure others don't share the information they acquire through purchase, license, etc.
One applies to me, the other applies to somebody else.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
The principle that "a person's work is his own and it is not for others to take without consent" is pure fiction, at least when applied to works which are composed of information. We use other people's work all the time, without obtaining their permission first, and no one bats an eye except when those works happen to be the kind that are sold on shiny plastic discs. Once again, you're dropping the issue entirely. Individuals on Pirate Bay don't have any right to offer the work of others to you. You don't have a free speech right to the verbatim work of others. You mean the law doesn't recognize my right to speak the verbatim work of others. Aside from the law, I have exactly the same right to speak it as I do to give away a microwave: it's a voluntary transaction for everyone involved, so I have the right by default. You don't have a right to co-opt someone else's work, waiting until their labor has produced it, and then take it as your own. The only way to "take it as your own" is to claim authorship, and I agree, no one has the right to lie about having written something that was actually written by someone else. Some random person can't agree to give you something that isn't theirs to give, whether it's a microwave or a movie. But it is theirs to give; it's right there on their hard drive. Just like the microwave, they may not have designed or built it, but that doesn't mean they can't give it away. It's simply not possible in a society valuing individual autonomy and privacy to argue that one has a right of any kind to the work or thoughts of others. What a bizarre thing to say. Of course it's possible, and in fact it's quite reasonable to argue that everyone has a right to share information.
Privacy doesn't even enter into it, because we're not talking about information that was meant to be kept secret. If you offer some information for sale to the public, giving it away to every stranger who shows up with money in his hand -- and especially if you give it to radio stations to be broadcast to millions of people who didn't even request it -- you can't claim that it's somehow still "private" after all that and expect to be taken seriously. It would be possible if such works were without value, but because they unquestionably have value, there are boundaries to it. The value of a copy is approximately zero, since copies can be made for next to nothing. The true value is in the labor that went into producing the works in the first place.
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If you went into somebody's house while they were at work and copied all their CDs, would they be angry??
I think the answer is "only if you made a mess or broke the door lock".
If you left everything just as it was, most people would just shrug it off.
If they called the police and said "somebody was in here and I think they copied some CDs" I'm betting they'd just shrug as well.
Favourite quote FTA: "I like the MPAA's logic that downloading a movie is the same as stealing a DVD. That would mean that those folks who get caught should be punished the same way as you would punish someone who physically stole a DVD or CD. Submitted by: Mark"
At the moment the punishment for file-sharing is much greater than the theft of physical CDs. How is this possible?
No sig today...
Assuming that copyright infringement is wrong (which is not unanimously concluded here at /.,) who is it that commits the wrong?
A) The person making the "goods" available without permission?
B) The person who acquires said goods without IP holder's permission/going through the legal channels of acquiring said "goods?"
C) A&B?
And as for the "thoughts of others", the notable thing about ideas and thoughts is that while the recipient is enriched, the giver is none the poorer. Thomas Jefferson's views on the matter are instructive: If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
[...]
Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.
Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body. Our Founders created our system of copyright (based on England's) to promote progress in the arts. One can believe that this was a well-designed system without claiming it's somehow an inherent right. It's not. It's a system created by the government for a public purpose, and as such it's fair to debate whether or not the public's purposes are best served by such a system.
I'm not arguing the earlier post was right, but the argument he's making is not simply "vacuous".
Step 1: Build replicator
Step 2: Make a ton of uber-weapons
Step 3: Blow away the old-tech competition
Step 4: ?
Step 5: WORLD DOMINATION.
Fuck profit!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I contend that "Intellectual Property" is emphatically not speech (or press) and that if the owner of the IP wants it to be considered as property then the IP should not get any first amendment protections.
This is all, however, a distraction from the original case which you've failed to make, which is to show that, taking all factors into consideration, you have any sort of entitlement or that the other party does not.
There is no extralegal right to bar trespassing, and there is no direct harm, but it is a clearly defined societal transgression against one's recognized autonomy. Where there is clearly a party which retains a functional right to exercise some degree of dominion, and where that right is violated, there is clearly a transgression. This is not antithetical to any fundamental right. It is not a silencing of voices. It's simply a protection of something society values. It is not without some cost, but that is true of anything. As long as the basic fact of commercial value exists, some form of protection is an organic development of society, as "natural" as anything else.
What was the RIAA doing in the 70's and 80's, during the explosion of home taping where everyone and their mothers were making mix-tapes for their friends and relatives ? Did they run around suing everyone that just happened to own a dubbing deck ?
The problem is that today, the concept of "friend" has expanded far beyond the dozen classmates and neighbors. On the internet, everyone is your "neighbor". The music industry was not prepared for this social shift, and the retail world doesn't have any idea how to adapt - it's quite likely not even possible. Distributors, wholesalers, retailers, they've all become obsolete overnight. Who needs a middleman when you can service the customer directly and all it takes is a free (or cheap) web host ?
The internet effectively disembowels a trillion-dollar industry with a single mouse click. If we must use analogies, then how about the farmer's market ? You go directly to the producer, pay a much better price for fresher produce. The grocery chain gets nothing, the truck drivers get nothing, the ad agency gets nothing... but the farmer's market, unlike the internet, is tied to a very specific physical location. You can't buy fresh tomatoes unless you live near the market. On the web, you can buy anything anywhere from anyone, and that's why the RIAA is in trouble. It's one company vs the world.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
alright so file sharing is not stealing or sharing, exactly. We've waded through the BS, now is there a solution? A way for the content producers to get paid and the consumers to have easy access?
"90% of the time, that's true all the time." /. biggest non-sequitor of 2008 award with an honorable mention for managing it in a discussion on filesharing, it takes some doing to be less logical than the entire discussion when that topic comes up !
Congratulations, you won the
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Copyright says that if I have a book, I can't tell you what sequence of words is in it without getting someone else's permission, and if I have a song file on my hard drive, I can't tell you what sequence of bytes is in it without getting someone else's permission. That's a restriction on sharing information. You cannot simultaneously have a natural right to control the distribution of the intellectual works of others while claiming a natural right to restrict access of the same. False generalization. You can indeed divide information into that which is public and that which is private, and treat them differently. Absolutely. And the manner in which that value is recouped is in small doses spread over many years. That's a manner in which it may be recouped. Hardly the only one, or even the most sensible one. This is all, however, a distraction from the original case which you've failed to make, which is to show that, taking all factors into consideration, you have any sort of entitlement or that the other party does not. You've failed to make the opposing case, so I guess we're even. There is no extralegal right to bar trespassing, and there is no direct harm Stop right there: of course there's harm, and thus there's an extralegal right to bar it. Land is a limited resource. If you're standing on one square foot of my land, that's one square foot that I can't stand in, or park my car in, or pave over. You have deprived me of the use of that land. It is not a silencing of voices. It's simply a protection of something society values. At the cost of destroying something else society values, namely freedom of speech.
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Hmmm.., an interesting scenario, I propose that access to the replication technology will be restricted, perhaps like access to supercomputing time. The replicator will be programmed so that it cannot create another replicator without perhaps some form of a code/password. The people who work and earn their share of the replication time will be able to access stuff apart from the bare necessities, like maybe luxury items. This will allow it to be integrated into the current monetary system.
Yes, sooner or later, the system will become a little obsolete, however currently that is all we have, and the above scenario is I guess for the near future rather than for 3020 AD.
blog plug -> The Darker Side of Light
It used to be that if you wanted to hear music you had to;
A. Learn to play or know someone who does
B. Wait for someone who was able to play to come by.
Since we live in a capitalist system the way to get them to come was to pay them. Been that way since forever really.
Up until about 1950 or so being a Musician was a respectable profession. You could make enough to live on. And you didn't have to go on tour, the speakeasy or night club paid you well enough.
Then along came Record Companies.
Now if you know a Musician, he or she is treated kind of like a Junkie without the fun of the Heroin. They have to have second "REAL" jobs. Artists are in the same boat. People had real paintings on their walls and you could make a real living at it. Oh and Actors too, don't forget them. And Stagehand, Ushers, ticket takers, bouncers, barkeeps, cigarette girls, hatcheck girls, etc etc etc....
Record Companies threw all these people out of work but thats ok, because they could hear music on phonographs and radios, watch TV and Movies in the theater and the productions values were much better but the plots kept going down hill. You get the picture. If not watch a movie called That Thing You Do! (1996) Pay attention and you will understand what I am getting at.
Fast Forward, but before the Computers and CDs, then DVDs. Most of the people who threw those people out of work back in the 50's realized in the 70's that they were next. Nobodies could make their own music and publish in on cassettes. DIRECTLY TO THE PUBLIC!!!! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warning:_Parental_Advisory
Hello RIAA/MPAA
Well they claim that downloaders are putting people out of work, but how come the Chemical Brothers shows are always sellouts and the never get airplay? Celine Dion and Barbara Streisand tickets sell for $200 a pop. Bands don't make money from records anymore, they make if from shows. Like they used to. The ones I know (I'm from Seattle) like it that way. Give it some time, well do in the MPAA too. Seriously Hollywood blows chunks.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
The issue at law is at a higher level: whether that taking should be authorized. It currently is not, and while I believe it should be, that's a fertile ground for debate. Otherwise we wouldn't have articles in the LA Times about whether to consider it "file sharing" or "theft" or something in-between. Sure we would. It's a matter of great debate at a functional level. In order for either "theft" or "file sharing" to take hold, the law would have to change. The debate currently exists because the law as it stands doesn't distinguish 'casual piracy' from the kind actually deserving of those harsh punishments. It's unquestionable that casual file sharing is currently piracy; it's distribution, which is one of the exclusive reserved rights of the owner. The question is whether we should redefine or place limits on those definitions at law.
I believe we should, but I also believe that making that case is infinitely harder when people make broad, sweeping statements about their entitlement to the work of others. It scares the crap out of people, for good reason. Laws are moderated by the practice of their enforcement, and there's an argument to be made that the burdens of the legal system place a de facto floor on what's worth litigating. If particularly vocal minorities broadcast their intent to flaunt any compromise, it doesn't really incentivize anyone to bother with changing it. I'm not arguing the earlier post was right, but the argument he's making is not simply "vacuous". Of course it is. It divorces reality from the process, grotesquely distorting and oversimplifying the nature in an attempt to wriggle out of unauthorized copying being a transgression. In society as it exists, that's an argument that does not stand. The question isn't whether casual piracy is a transgression, but rather whether it should be a permissible one, i.e. an affirmative defense to a claim of copyright infringement. This is a subtle, but critical distinction.
There can be. The Klingon language, for example, was (mostly? completely?) made up by Marc Okrand.
And if someone reprinted the Klingon dictionary, Okrand would be on top of it. The only reason to release a dictionary and grammatical guide is to spread that information. That's a precise case in point for copyright, since you're clearly showing how knowledge spreads without interference while still providing a fruitful grounds for protecting an author's rights.
You see, all languages are fundamentally open source; that's just the way it works. If someone isolates some portion, it is no longer part of the language and it is replaced by something else that is more freely accessible. From those elements, people build proprietary expressions that are protected. It's not a language if it's not distributed with consent to use freely. But a creator has that choice.
Likewise, an artist has a choice on how to release his or her expressions. There's nothing that says a writer or a painter or a musician can't give away all the rights s/he wants but neither does there need to be a forced surrender of all rights we vest in creators. There's no compelling need to encroach on that autonomy, that freedom to release as much or as little as the author chooses. There's no requirement that you consume from artists.
Such as calculus, the speed of light, the way to fold a paper airplane, the way to build a house, etc... not to mention everything that was written, drawn, sculpted, or recorded before the 1900s. These are all things that we freely use without anyone's permission, and no one bats an eye.
You just named facts, observations, and information. None of that is copyrightable. Information isn't covered; expression is. My prose instructions and illustrations depicting how to fold that airplane are protected. No one bats an eye because we're not using their work. I'll ask again: what work do we use without permission? Say it with me: facts are not copyrightable.
Copyright says that if I have a book, I can't tell you what sequence of words is in it without getting someone else's permission, and if I have a song file on my hard drive, I can't tell you what sequence of bytes is in it without getting someone else's permission. That's a restriction on sharing information.
It is not. Repeating the expressive work of others verbatim is NOT sharing information. You're not talking about what you learned. You're not using it to enrich culture. You're just repeating expressions. A restriction on your ability to copy someone else's work in no way limits your ability to share the information gleaned from that work.
You can indeed divide information into that which is public and that which is private, and treat them differently.
Not if you insist on your ridiculous "natural rights" position. There's no such distinction. If you have a natural right to repeat anything you've seen/heard, you can't have a natural right to privacy, because there is no way from stopping someone from spreading that information. If your response is, "never let it out of your head," you're no longer talking about a right.
You've failed to make the opposing case, so I guess we're even.
Hardly. You're the one advocating a change from the status quo; you've failed to meet your burden as the affirmative. Equipoise tips to the negative.
That's a manner in which it may be recouped.
That's exactly what I said. It's the one we as a society have chosen. As for a more sensible one, you'll find none. It's not a coincidence that every post-industrial country adopted it. No other system balances access, provides such a low barrier of entry, and preserves value at the same time.
You have deprived me of the use of that land.
No. If I cross your field, I'm not occupying space that you're using. Your
This wouldn't sound so silly if copyright infringement was equivalent to stealing.
My enjoyment of the music does not go down through knowing that I've paid for it and that she did not; on the contrary, it increases because now I can talk to her about it and discuss what we like or dislike about the music. And in due time she might very well reciprocate and give me a copy of one of her CD's, thus turning this into a mutual win.
The only thing weighing against that is the bonus of some unknown, faceless corporate overlord. That person lives far away in a huge mansion, owns three ferrari's and a private jet, and has a bad reputation for being a money-grabbing bastard who has pretty much destroyed all creativity in music and treats his people like slaves. I don't *want* to make him any richer so making the copy makes me feel good, rather than bad.
Note: Dell is still selling this model, so you might be charged with the crime of... Uhh... "Acquisition Without Payment of Something that is Legitimately and Legally For Sale". I'm not sure what the sentence for that is, but you will be depriving Dell of their potential income, and going by RIAA standards that is probably worth 20-to-life.
And you're entitled to that opinion, but by your reasoning...
Listening to your car stereo at 120dB in a residential neighborhood on a Sunday morning is free speech.
Yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater is free speech.
Threatening to kill your neighbor is free speech.
Standing across the street from an elementary school and exposing yourself is free speech.
Carrying a sign that says "F*** N***ers" in Harlem is also free speech.
Oh right, none of those things are actually protected as free speech. Just because you can say or display things doesn't make it a free speech issue. It's okay to quote minor excerpts of a book. However, there's a magic line where it becomes copyright violation. If you're sharing entire works, you're crossing that line.
Ok, ok, so it's not theft, using the definition you cite. I can understand that you and others feel as though you have to be in possession of something tangible for something to be considered theft. And I also understand that you feel that for an action to be theft, then the victim then has to be without said tangible object.
It doesn't mean it's not a crime. And if it's not a crime, it's at the very least wrong, by any stretch of the imagination. And even if you don't feel it's wrong, it's a violation of the rights of the entities who sell the licenses to listen to that music.
What you're paying for when you buy music is the right to listen to that work. It matters little whether it's digitally downloaded, on cd, or whatever. You are paying for a license. That license gives you the right to do what you want with that music, so long as it's used for your own private purposes. You can play the song, you can even play it for your friends at a party. You cannot, however, transfer that license to anyone else. They have to buy their own license. Meaning you can't give them a copy, at least not legally. Unless you have the rights, given by the distributors of that license, to do so, which I suspect you don't.
When you listen to music on the radio, your license to listen to that music is paid for by advertisers, or in the case of XM, by your subscription fees. If you go see the band perform live, your ticket price gives you license to see and hear the performance of that music. That's why when you sneak in to a concert, you can at the very least be thrown out.
So when the RIAA or whomever wants to prosecute, ok, it may not be a criminal act, so they may not have legal rights to do so (although I'm thinking about the FBI notices at the first of my DVDs, so why is music different?). However, they have more than enough legal ground to sue you, and they should. They are bound by the agreements with their artists to protect the artists' interests, and although I know the argument can be made that their track record isn't great in that respect, the duty still exists. And the fact remains that the record companies paid good money to have the music recorded, hire producers, engineers, pay for studio time, packaging, promotion, and loads of other costs, and they have every right to see to it that they can recover those costs and make a profit on top of that. And you, by not buying a license, are infringing their rights to recoup those costs and make that profit. So they have been damaged, in a legal sense, and the court can and will "make them whole". Which means you can be sued.
And whether you want to cite existing laws, make analogies, convict the RIAA, stand on principle, it's stealing, in the truest sense of the word. Someone has created a work, released it, made it available for purchase, and if you circumvent the part where you pay for your enjoyment of what they created, you have stolen. And here's to your bread analogy: yeah, you didn't steal bread. But you've, in essence, stolen bread from the artists' mouths.
Think about this as well. The more people download music without paying for it, the more the RIAA perceives value in their product, and the more dogged they will be in stopping downloaders. If you don't like what the RIAA is putting out enough to pay for it, don't download it either. And if you don't like what the RIAA has to offer, explore independent music, and purchase from entities who guarantee that the lion's share goes to the artist.
What irritates me is that for some reason, there is a large group of people out there who think they have some right given to them by someone to share things that should be paid for.
Pay for the music. It won't hurt you. It will hurt the artists if you don't, and will ensure that fewer artists get to do their thing. It's a symbiotic relationship that music fans are hurting.
Don't have enough cash to pay for it? Then get a better job. I don't have enough cash to pay for a Ferrari, but I'm not about to go for a joy ride in someone else's. I just have to work harder so I can buy my own.
The New York Times (I know, not a video, but if they had one they'd leak it for sure)
But have you really? The cost to copy and distribute a digital copy is essentially zero, or close to it. Otherwise everybody and their granny wouldn't be able to get everything they want off bittorrent in the first place. Any share of zero, fair or otherwise, is neccessarily still zero. These companies are trying to claim a non-zero "share" out of a zero-sized pie. It just can't work.
Now, if you'd said that the content producers, the artists themselves, were being denied their fair share then you'd be right. But lets face it, the artists have already been denied their fair share by the very companies that are supposed to represent them. That's why they make most of their money from concerts and whatnot. They're the ones that deserve some money.
I'm not trying to justify the flagrant copyright breaches that do take place. But it certainly isn't stealing, because there simply isn't anything to steal.
Santa's suicide mission go!
that is not true. you don't steal the music from your neighbor - but you steal the music from the musician. if you buy a cd - you buy the plastic and the information (the music)- if you buy a download you only buy the information - which is the intellectual property of the musician. you can copy that for your private use - but the musicians make a living from their work - if you want to own the piece of intelectual work they did (and that's immaterial) you should be so fair and pay him (and forget the music industry - it's like in other branches too - the suply and want money for it - ok - shall be) i think it is ok to think that they take a too big share but that doesn't excuse intellectual theft. all the best rainerklang
I could trade you 10 cows for a new car
No you can't.
I don't want all that cowshit all over the place.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Suppose that Marc Okrand declares, "Since I invented the Klingon language, you're only allowed to learn about it through me. If you want to know what a certain word means, I insist that you buy my book and look it up."
If he were to do that, then would you consider it "stealing" to translate Klingon words for someone without Mr. Okrand's permission? After all, that would be giving his work away for free, right? You just named facts, observations, and information. None of that is copyrightable. But by your logic, it should be. People worked to produce that stuff, and as you said, "a person's work is his own and it is not for others to take without consent". Or do you only value the work of Britney and Bono, and to hell with Newton and Edison?
Besides, as I explain below, there's no real distinction between facts and copyrightable works. Repeating the expressive work of others verbatim is NOT sharing information. It certainly is. There's a whole bunch of factual information about cultural phenomena that copyright makes it illegal to share.
For example, it's a fact that the first line of the song "Yesterday" is "Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away". There are millions of physical objects out there in the world where those words are represented, and telling someone about those words is fundamentally no different from telling them "the yellow button on an Xbox 360 controller is labeled Y".
It's also a fact that the second line is "Now it looks as though they're here to stay". And the line after that is "Oh, I believe in yesterday".
I could go on and tell you several more facts, but pretty soon I'd be infringing the Beatles' copyright - by sharing too many facts about that song and describing too many of the sensations that have been experienced by the millions of people who've heard it. If you have a natural right to repeat anything you've seen/heard, you can't have a natural right to privacy, because there is no way from stopping someone from spreading that information. I haven't asserted a natural right to privacy. But a society that values privacy more than it values free speech can certainly distinguish between information that was meant to be kept secret, and information that was meant to be released to the public. Your speech is protected; if it's not yours, it's of no fundamental concern to you. If it's coming out of my mouth, or my pen, then it's my speech. others have an essential right to express themselves as they see fit, and that includes controlling the means of that expression if they so choose. If by "controlling the means of that expression" you mean preventing others from saying the same thing, then that's just absurd. It's like claiming that your right to practice your religion includes the right to be the only man on earth who practices it: there's no reason it has to be an exclusive right at all.
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If you were to duplicate a car, it would be illegal. That's because the company that first produced the car has a lot of R&D put into the car. They hold IP for it. Even if you duplicate the car with no cost to anyone, you would still be duplicating their IP. It's basically the same as copying a CD. It's still illegal, but not theft.
Listening to your car stereo at 120dB in a residential neighborhood on a Sunday morning is free speech.
It is also annoying. So people will (barring other avenues of redress) beat the shit out of you and turn it off. So laws to give another avenue of redress is made to cut down on the beatings.
Yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater is free speech.
If there's a fire, it's a good idea to yell it out. If you cause a panic, that's bad and people could sue you for malicious actions.
Threatening to kill your neighbor is free speech.
Yup. Else why isn't Ballmer in Jail for "I'll fucking KILL Google"? If it's expected that you'll carry out that threat, rather than wait until the death has taken place, try to prevent it.
Standing across the street from an elementary school and exposing yourself is free speech.
How can having your bits out be speech?
Carrying a sign that says "F*** N***ers" in Harlem is also free speech.
Yup. See the 120dB example above however. Feel free to do this (and don't use "*"). They shouldn't have killed you, but that doesn't make you alive again. And note, they WILL be done for killing you, if caught.
Look up theft of service. It seems to me that that could apply to your movie theater analogy.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
"becoming increasingly abstracted from the physical medium" and being a "representation of personal bartering power" go hand in hand. Increasingly abstract.
Personally, I consider money to represent "favor surplus". Bartering power is too related to an exchange of goods in these service-based times. The more money you have, the more favors can you call in from the world. If you're net worth is negative, you are owing favors to the world.
Mind you, this means I disagree with gold-backed currencies. An increasingly efficient (read: abstract) currency should not be bound to physical goods.
I lost my sig.
If you pirate music or software, you can't make the argument (you could, but it is a stupid argument) that you haven't stolen anything because you copied bits and not a physical item like a CD. You have deprived the copyright owner of the money that is due to them for the production of the bits you stole. Don't go and say that the copyright holder isn't deprived anything because you wouldn't have bought the material in the first place. You copied the bits, therefore you wanted the bits. You just didn't want to pay for the bits.
Whether or not the way the music/movie/book industry works is fair is a red herring in this argument. The fact remains you took something that someone else wants to receive compensation for. Period. It's not the complicated.
Finally, Karl Sigfrid is making the inaccurate assumption that creativity and craft that is desirable by others is an unlimited resource. It a limited resource like any other. If creativity and craft were limitless, we'd all have talent and wouldn't need records, movies, or books. We could make our own entertainment.
Why do you believe the share is fair? They have lion share not fair share. The elephant nobody wants to see is that fairness is not absolute. If there is consensus that copying for private use is fair and just, then it is fair! Sweden anyone? They believe it is ok to share (not sure, but for the sake of an argument), should their belief be considered unfair?
You don't like open source, do you? Because its another source from where your operating system can come from, which diminishes the saleability of your BeOS (or whatever).
The value of a work is not defined by copyright. Copyright is just a vehicle to promote the arts and sciences -- well, in theory, it should.
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
Violating copyright is a crime, but you'll never convince me that it's immoral. What is immoral is buying laws to constantly extend the term of copyright such that nothing created in my lifetime will ever leave copyright in my lifetime. The Constitutional idea of copyright is not to provide a lifetime's income for a single piece of work. It is to promote creation of new material. Extending copyright negates this premise. The longer one profits from a single creation, the less incentive there is to create more.
I feel no obligation to pay attention to laws that are immoral. The extent to which I follow them at all is that I do not wish to be harrassed by the authorities who must uphold the law, however wrong it is.
I tried to find my original message (posted on a different article), but I can't, so I'll just summarize:
- Imagine your boss tasked you to write a 100 page document, and after a week of work, you produce said document. The boss says, "Beautiful; great job" and you go home.
- You wait.
- And you wait some more, but no check arrives. You just gave away a week's worth of labor, and received no pay for that effort. That's called THEFT OF LABOR and is a violation of your basic rights.
----- Now imagine that your name is Stephen King, and the document you created was actually your latest short story. Your "boss" (aka the readers) copied the story off the internet, never paid for the story, and thus stole Stephen King's labor.
----- In another time (1700s/1800s) that would have been called slavery: Working for people, producing products, but not getting paid for it. It's a violation of the most basic human rights.
I don't consider downloading to be stealing property.
Instead I consider it to be theft of another man's labor.
I wouldn't want it done to me (creating documents w/o pay),
and I'm sure Mr. King, et al do not like it either.
In my opinion: If you download a product, and you either (a) enjoyed it or (b) stored it in your personal library, then you have committed a Human Rights violation. You've enslaved another person to entertainment you, and stolen their labor without just compensation. IMHO you should pay the writer some cash; give him what he deserves.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
The notion that a 3rd party which is not in any way a part of a given transaction can be transgressed against is completely absurd. The lack of a positive effect is not indicative of a negative. Just because I choose to obtain a free copy from a friend does not mean I transgressed by not choosing to pay the originator. Unless you consider breaking the law a "transgression". But if so, you aren't actually arguing with anyone, you're just playing word games.
If you cannot separate legal protections from moral or ethical considerations, you should at leat realize that others can and do. You may argue on those points, but to pretend that there's anything more to your argument is disingenuous.
Yes, a replicator would disrupt current bussiness practices just like the Internet has disrupted the media distributing industry. Will that lead to anarchy? I don't know. We, as in our society, can simply adapt. How will "hardware" providers adapt to that is another question alltogether. If you can replicate (out of a bunch of almost free matter, I presume) a brand new Ferrari, how is anyone paying anything for a ferrari anymore? This would be probably be outlawed - out of pressure from the industry if nothing else. Curiously, IANAL, but I would defend that replicating something doesn't infringe on whatever patent was used to build it - since you don't have to *know* oe even *use* any of the methods described in the patent to replicate it. Weird.
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
Most people haven't, because ideas are, for the most part, worthless. People get dozens of them every day. Most of them are bad, and the ones that are good have likely already been thought of by hundreds or thousands of people before you. The implementation of an idea is where all the hard work goes.
Argument by analogy.
Let's say that you are the only person in town that grows pumpkins. Come Hallowe'en time, children need pumpkins in order to carve Jack'o'Lanterns. Since you're the only person supplying those pumpkins, you can charge $30 each for them if you want.
Now, imagine that I came along, and last year I bought one of your pumpkins for your outrageous $30 price tag. However, instead of just making a Jack'o'Lantern out of it, I opened it up, took out the seeds, and planted them in my own garden. Now, I've got a lot of pumpkins to sell. And maybe I'm very charitable. Let's say that I planted the pumpkins in a field that I otherwise wasn't using. And I just left them to grow however they wanted, with no watering and no fertilizer (because, let's face it, pumpkins grow like crazy). Since it's cost me nothing but a bit of time to grow these pumpkins, I have no issue with giving them away for free. Especially if it's the responsibility of the people who want the pumpkins to find one that's nice and big and round, to cut it free from the vine, and to carry it to their car.
Look at what I have done. I have just created another avenue for the supply of pumpkins, which undermines the value of the pumpkins that you're growing. Is what I've done something that you would consider theft?
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
The simplest distinction is that information that is made public "wants to be free". It is ONLY the legal construct of copyright that prevents such information from being legally distributable by a 3rd party for any price the party cares to name, which may be no price at all.
That is the lynchpin of the argument. Theft of physical goods has been established since pre-history as being a moral crime against the owner of the property. It is simple to understand that depriving someone of a physical good formerly in their posession is not morally acceptable. There is no such understanding with respect to copyright. In fact, most people don't understand how anyone could consider it theft when their friend hands them a copy of a CD. The friend is freely giving it away, how could it be stealing?
What i would like to see is a detailed study of how reducing the length of the debated copyrights to a realistic term. Something at least within the ballpark of patents. (yes copyrighted works probably should be longer because the intellectual value does have a longer shelf life.) But i have hard time taking a law seriously thats saying the legalese version of a kid saying "it's mine and i wanna keep it forever!" If material would be release into public domain after 30-40 years i'd be much more likely to respect this sort of law. As it is now stuff my grandparents read and listened to could quite possibly still be copyrighted after i'm dead. Thats just silly. Not even fucking stupid. Its beyond expletives. The current law is the equivalent of law saying anything you find on the sidewalk has to have been there for at least a century and half because it still belongs to the owners otherwise
A key difference between privacy law and copyright law is who the law protects. The idea of copyright is to provide incentive to creators to make their creations accesible to the public. The ultimate beneficiary of the law is supposed to be the Public. Copyright has been twisted such that it only benefits the creator, or even worse, the mere owner of the copyright.
On the other hand, privacy law is intended to benefit the Public (slightly ironic, huh?). It does this by preventing, amongst others, corporations from sharing information about you such that they profit at your expense.
Your analogy would be much improved if you were talking about yeast or bread dough.
Person A is a provider of live yeast. He has a big ball of dough and sells little bits of it to customers who can then incorporate it into their unyeasted bread dough to make it rise.
Person B comes along and instead of paying for a little bit of dough he just takes a tiny piece without paying.
Person A is not deprived of his yeast. The remaining yeast will replicate as it does normally and he can continue selling to his paying customers.
Person B has acquired goods which were being offered for sale at a price without paying. Is this stealing?
Person B if he is clever can use the bit of dough he now has to pass on yeasty goodness to his friends Person C, Person D and Person E.
Person C, Person D and Person E could have gone to Person A for yeast but this is free yeast and besides it's sharing not stealing. Person A isn't being deprived of his yeast.
*sigh*
So lets get this straight, he can take a full copy (against my wishes) , and if he wants to, he can play it every day for 6 hours a day, but still decide its not worth anything right?
In which case I demand a refund for every piece of music or movie I ever bought, as I have suddenly decided that despite still enjoying music and movies, I put in place my voluntary ability to declare them worthless.
This is just silly wordplay to avoid paying for stuff, and everyone knows it. If you enjoy the fruits of someone else's labour, and they are charging for it, you should pay for it. That's just decent manners.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Try telling that to the number one Carbonated Beverage company in the world. The exact formular for Coca Cola is a company secret. Tell me again how that's worthless?
1) I never buy The Killer's Hot Fuss. I hear their music on the radio, and I enjoy it, but I don't want to spend the money on the CD.
2) I download a copy of The Killer's Hot Fuss. I listen to it daily.
In neither of these scenarios does anyone associated with The Killer's get any money from me. I've harmed them as much in scenario 2 as I have in scenario 1. In scenario 2, they probably don't even know that I've downloaded their works.
The last quoted line of yours is the telling one. They don't deserve anything just because I like the music. They don't even deserve anything just because I listen to it, or just because I have a copy of it which I can listen to on demand, except for the fact that absurd laws claim that they do.
I'm not against copyright in the least. I think that we wouldn't live in the culture-rich world we have if it wasn't for them. But I can't abide by the tricks that the media cartels have used to increase their stranglehold on media. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Bono_Copyright_Term_Extension_Act says it best: This law effectively 'froze' the advancement date of the public domain in the United States for works covered by the older fixed term copyright rules. Under this Act, additional works made in 1923 or afterwards that were still copyrighted in 1998 will not enter the public domain until 2019 or afterwards (depending on the date of the product) unless the owner of the copyright releases them into the public domain prior to that or if the copyright gets extended again. Laws like this and the DMCA, which allows companies to arbitrarily remove certain of people's rights, are simply unacceptable. The major content producers who lobby for these laws aren't playing by the rules--why should we, as consumers?
You know, before the internet, really the only way for musicians to be noticed was to go around to their local venues and radio stations and get noticed by a big time agent that could have them go mainstream (TV EXPOSURE, MANY RADIO STATIONS) which, of course, costs a ****load of money, time, and resources.
However we ARE afterall in the digital world now, exposure can be obtained extremely easily (and cheaply) via social networking sites. Personally, I see a future where there are several big music sites who offer exposure to bands and a place where they can sell their music and be able to take MUCH more than the **AA allows them to take home. The Internet allows people to take everything home and it's much better than relying on an organization that sues the fans of the bands they represent. The more than an individual receives, the less a corporation can receive.
So what if we're cheating the **AA out of their 'rightful dues', they're going to wind up fizziling away eventually because people will realize that all they are doing is hurting the industry rather than embracing the shift of the industry to the internet and its users.
I don't really think that most file sharers would stop just because the production studio decided to give more money to the artist. Most people I know justify their copyright infringement by saying that they wouldn't have bought the song/album/movie anyway, so the studio isn't really out any money.
There are probably some who feel this way, but I doubt that it's the majority.
are now synonyms for plagarism?
I can think of a bread analogy that does work. Sourdough starter yeast It's physical yet can be shared. There is also a tradition in some places in Europe of bakers regarding their yeast as a trade secret (and some yeasts are over 100 years old)
Obviously the copyright law sees it differently - as you say, the law prohibits copying/distribution of any sort, with some limited affirmative defenses such as fair use. Clearly there is quite a bit of recent argument over what should be considered fair use. The debate currently exists because the law as it stands doesn't distinguish 'casual piracy' from the kind actually deserving of those harsh punishments. It's unquestionable that casual file sharing is currently piracy; it's distribution, which is one of the exclusive reserved rights of the owner. The question is whether we should redefine or place limits on those definitions at law. I agree completely with the sentiment that most casual copying violates the current law, and that the question is whether we should redefine the law. I believe we should, but I also believe that making that case is infinitely harder when people make broad, sweeping statements about their entitlement to the work of others. Broad, sweeping statements are often problematic. But the broad assumption underlying your statement is that generating a piece of information entitles a person to prevent others from having that information. That assumption turns copying into a transgression that we may choose to allow, versus copying being the natural state that we may choose to forbid.
Both views, when taking into account the various practical considerations, may eventually lead to a similar copyright law. But I think there's a real philosophical difference there. And I think the historical record of copyright law favors the view that information sharing is the norm which Congress was empowered by the Constitution to restrict for limited times, in order to "promote progress in science and the useful arts". Thus holding a copyright is not an entitlement, it's a government-granted monopoly provided to promote a public good. I think it's useful to keep in mind what the goals of the law are when we discuss how it should be reformed.
There are a number of good articles by Cory Doctrow on intellectual property and digital information in general but basically he argues that we have to recognise the differences between knowledge and property or face 'an endless war between intractable positions of ownership, theft and fair dealing.'
First of all the RIAA does not go after the individual who downloads songs they go after the person who allows others to download songs. This is one fact that seems to be ignored, the sharer simply rebroadcasts the work for others to enjoy. It would be like someone rebroadcasting a pay-per-view boxing match or showing it at a bar that only paid the individual charge. There was an infringement (they rebroadcast or redistributed with out the express written consent), this is not stealing, this is breaking the terms and conditions when service was purchased (which may not be disclosed and therefore invalid). Second when Karl stated that the music is a limitless resource he was saying the physical work has a limitless supply because it can be copied nearly infinitely with no direct cost. If as you state that by coping a work you are using up creativity and craft then the work would diminish as it was copied, this obviously does not happen which is why it is infinite.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
The act of taking does not itself require a corresponding act of removal; it's not a zero-sum definition.
But what if tomorrow I invented a replicator just like you'd see on Star Trek. ...and I replicated myself a nice new car, just like yours. Then I go and find Linus and replicate the uber-badass laptop I imagine he must have, and finally I go next door and replicate my neighbor's candybar. Is that illegal? Hell no.
It would likely be made illegal, and would almost have to be. Otherwise, one person would buy say the newest AMD processor with some neat cool thing that makes computer 100 fold faster. How would AMD recoup their investment costs if after one sale no one buys it? They wouldn't be able to do so. The people enabling the copying could make a lot of money though, but thats about it. Even the people that built the replicator would be in trouble, because a larger replicator can replicate a smaller one...
Basically, it would destory our economy.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
You're running in an endless circle. People worked to produce that stuff, and as you said, "a person's work is his own and it is not for others to take without consent". Or do you only value the work of Britney and Bono, and to hell with Newton and Edison? That's flatly untrue. Newton and Edison didn't create facts, and any books they wrote would have enjoyed legal protection commensurate with their historical perspective. If there is information in a Britney Spears song, you're allowed to use it--you won't find any, though. The mere shuffling of words is not information; it's expression.
If you're going to keep dishonestly conflating the two, there's little wonder your arguments are so unbalanced. For example, it's a fact that the first line of the song "Yesterday" is "Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away". There are millions of physical objects out there in the world where those words are represented, and telling someone about those words is fundamentally no different from telling them "the yellow button on an Xbox 360 controller is labeled Y". You're really bad at this. A fact is not an expression; yes, you can convey an expression as fact, but that is not the same as merely duplicating the expression. What fact in that language can you glean and use somewhere else? If you're making a reference to the song, you're allowed to refer to excerpts of lyrics to make your point. You're not conveying the expression of the work, nor is anyone prohibiting information of fact that enriches culture. You can't copyright the speed of light. telling someone about those words is fundamentally no different from telling them "the yellow button on an Xbox 360 controller is labeled Y". Neither one is a recitation of an expression of a significant work. A single phrase or a single sentence is not the product of one's intellectual work. If you expand that into a whole book on the Xbox or a single lyric to an entire song, you'll see that the same protection applies to both. The fact of the yellow button's label isn't protected. The repetition of that fact isn't barred. The repetition of the expressive work is barred, because it's not your speech, it's not sharing of fact, and it has no impact on the spread of knowledge. You can write your own book on those facts and release it how you see fit. If it's coming out of my mouth, or my pen, then it's my speech. No, it's not. If it's not the product of your intellect, it's not yours in any meaningful sense of the word. It's like claiming that your right to practice your religion includes the right to be the only man on earth who practices it Well, apart from being a terrible but unexpected misapplication of logic, here's the thing: you CAN practice a religion to the exclusion of everyone else if you choose to. But once again, If by "controlling the means of that expression" you mean preventing others from saying the same thing, is irrelevant. You're not prevented from saying the same thing. You're prevented from saying the same thing, in the same way, using the exact same words. That's not a bar at all; in fact it encourages independent and continuing work. It requires originality in order to be rewarded.
There's a social one, there's a legal one, and there's a functional one. The social and legal ones are grounds on which you can't win, and the functional argument is at best a draw (as to who has a basic entitlement). Trying to drive it into a "but it's not immoral" ground doesn't do you any good. I agree that it's not immoral to some because they've created a complex rationalization and based it on a functional entitlement outside reality. I don't believe it matters, because the basic premise of society stands: intellectual works have value, and that value is protectable. It is essential to the continued employment of most of the American workforce, and it is not in conflict with any organic right. It's not any more or less artificial than any other kind of standard.
Without completely upending society, your argument simply cannot stand. That's fine; you're free to create your own society if you'd like, but I'll again point out that there's a reason no such society exists in the post-industrial world, and it's because it creates huge social and economic problems that are insurmountable by a large, modern society.
It is always illegal, but it is generally a violation of civil law rather than criminal law, which is a very important distinction. In countries like the USA and UK, some forms of copyright infringement are indeed crimes, but IIRC that's generally reserved for cases where someone is actually running a commercial counterfeiting operation or something along those lines. The exact threshold varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
* Unlike theft, which is always a crime. You may draw your own conclusions.
To take is to acquire. Period. Full stop. You can take something from a shelf, you can take an idea from observing an event, you can take a picture, you can take an award. There is no negative element to the verb take requiring that anyone give something up in order for you to acquire it.
Most people aren't linguists, aren't trained in semantics, and aren't sharpened legal minds. If you want to show me a bracketed display of lexemes and make a sense/reference case, do it. If I don't see anything in response involving a -role, I'll assume you're not versed in semantics, either.
We're not talking about mere legality, remember? You're the one saying everyone deserves to own their work; are you now saying they only deserve to own their work if that work falls into the narrow categories protected by today's copyright laws? If he publishes the book, people can use the information in that book. Yes, legally they can, but should they be able to? According to your logic, no, because that information is Marc Okrand's work and he gets to control it. Right? That's flatly untrue. Newton and Edison didn't create facts, and any books they wrote would have enjoyed legal protection commensurate with their historical perspective. They worked to produce information. Calculus and the light bulb are as much a product of human effort as "...Baby One More Time". Why do you want to take Newton and Edison's work away from them without their consent? The repetition of the expressive work is barred, because it's not your speech, it's not sharing of fact, and it has no impact on the spread of knowledge. You can write your own book on those facts and release it how you see fit. No, I can't. At some point, someone will decide that I've shared too many facts about the lyrics of that song, and they'll sue me for infringement.
If you think that's not the case, then I guess I've just found a loophole in copyright law, eh? Just hack your file sharing program to send each byte separately as a sentence like "The 1st byte of this file is 'd5'" and you can share all you want. If only it worked that way. You're not prevented from saying the same thing. You're prevented from saying the same thing, in the same way, using the exact same words. What a ridiculous attempt at hair-splitting. If I can't use the same words, then I can't say the same thing - I can only say something else that happens to be about the same subject.
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Your position relies on the fallacy that a copy is a lost sale.
I find being offended by me offensive.
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You're begging the question. You've assumed the validity of copyright in order to make your argument.
Further, your argument fails to sustain "infringement is theft" even with the assumption of copyright's validity. Simply gaining financially while diminishing the value of someone else's property is not sufficient to establish "theft".
Consider, for example, if two people own adjacent plots of land. One plot has a house on it, with a nice view of the mountains across the other plot. One day, the second landowner decides to build a similar house on his plot. Because he's blocked some the view of the mountains, he's eaten into the value of his neighbor's property. Because he's increased the value of his land by more than the cost of the house, he's made a material gain for himself. Yet no rational being (not counting the neighbor) would say that he's committed theft.
They tried to have home taping banned and/or taxed. However, they failed. A decade or so later, they did manage to kill DAT, but were blindsided by the recordable CD.
"I drink your milkshake!"
Copyright infringement is often a crime, and it's a violation of the legal rights of the entities who sell that music. But both those things are only true because those entities have enough pull to buy laws, and I don't. There's no moral argument there; it's just might makes right, or a version of the Golden Rule (not that one, but "He who has the gold, makes the rules").
This is not true, even in the current legal framework they've bought. There is no "right to listen". They can't sell such a right because it doesn't exist. There is no law giving them exclusive control over "listening to the copyrighted work". If they purport to sell you such, they are perpetrating a fraud on you. What you're buying when you buy a CD is a copy of the work.
Incorrect. Paying money, some of which will go to the RIAA, hurts me, as they use it to buy laws (like the DMCA) which harm me.
If your rich buddy let you use his Ferrari when he wasn't using it, are you stealing from Ferrari?
Paramount thinks you need their permission to do so.
As far as I know, Ritchie doesn't claim a similar copyright on all C programs...
Heh.. In that sense, the copyright holders could be perceived to be at fault for believing that they have the inherent right to control the information after it leaves their sphere of influence.
An interesting (and perhaps logical) idea... though i doubt you'll get much agreement from the incumbents.
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
The whole debate only exists because people like you want to "educate" an ignorant public. Here's the rub, though: your "education" is no less misleading than the people who call it larceny (which is, well, no one, but it makes for a good straw man).
Coming into possession of something for free, being given to you by someone who doesn't have a right to give it to you, is wrong. If it weren't, you wouldn't need to be debating.
Every time you pirate a CD, you are undermining the copyright. You have created another source from which copyrighted works can come, which eats into the value of the copyright itself.
Does this really make sense? If so, it would also imply that every new legitimate copy of a copyrighted work decreases the value of the copyright itself. For example, every time MS sells another copy of Vista, the value would decrease? It also implies that the value of more popular music that sells millions of copies would be far less than music that only sell a few thousand copies. That doesn't make sense. I think, rather, what you're getting at, is that when you make illegal copies of IP, what you are diluting is not the value per se, but you are *removing the artificial scarcity* that the seller has attempted to put in place (distorting the market by forcing the producer to compete with free versions of their own product - making it harder to sell).
The "value" of a copyrighted work is basically the value it imparts to the end-user. A good piece of music that I like, is *exactly* as good, to me, *regardless* of how many other people on the planet have a copy. I get the same "value" out of a software product regardless if I've pirated it or paid for it. Scarcity != value, scarcity = price. Maybe by "value" you really were referring to the *ability* of the IP owner to sell an IP product at a given *price* in the market (it's a bit ambiguous as you stated it). Piracy weakens the seller's ability to determine a selling price.
I still say copyright infringement is NOT stealing: If I make a copy of an album for, say, 100,000,000 or so of my closest friends, I can still get just as much enjoyment out of the album as I could before - the enjoyment is not diluted (except in cases where elitism is part of the experience).
The difference is crucial, there are THREE parties involved not two: When you steal a car from your friend, your friend no longer has a car - but the CAR MANUFACTURER is not affected at all (in fact, he might be MORE likely to sell another car, since your friend now needs a new one, and you were too poor to buy one anyway). When you make a copy of some IP from your friend, your friend STILL has their IP - but the "MANUFACTURER"'s market position is weakened. (It's still not theft, theft is only an anology.)
A related anecdote, yesterday I wondered into a music store (near a big university) I used to sometimes buy CDs from over a decade ago when I was a student, and asked if they still bought and sold used CDs. 'No --- we're closing down'. I asked why, and they said, with a shrug and a sigh, 'people don't buy CDs anymore - they don't want to pay for music'.
That seems kind of sad on one hand. But OTOH maybe music just isn't all as valuable to us as the price tags have led us to usually think. Firstly music competes not only with pirated versions of itself, but also other forms of mainstream entertainment that were unusual ten years ago. Secondly most of the music being pushed by the major labels now really is just crap, and of course people are less likely to buy crap (duh).
Any attempt to say otherwise is terribly misguided. There's no value to the labor of typing and filling out forms; the dealing in services and information depends entirely on those services maintaining a level of volume.
Not a programmer on earth would get paid if intellectual work had no value. An information economy must still be managed as an economy. Most people wouldn't have jobs under your scenario.
That analogy makes sense for the pumpkin market, but *by definition* it doesn't really apply to Intellectual Property. IP by definition states that by law only the original pumpkin grower would be allowed to sell those pumpkins - and while that sounds bad for pumpkins, it's not for IP - because in the analogy, he spent ten years of his life and all his savings *inventing* pumpkins, they literally DID NOT EXIST before he invented them, and it cost him a lot to invent them.
A great novel is nothing like a pumpkin, neither is a movie, these things weren't provided by nature and left in a field somewhere and someone just found them and declared a sole right to sell.
Also, Jack O'Lanterns are not a basic need; if $30 was truly "outrageous", everyone could simply choose not to buy them and go without. If people are voluntarily paying $30 for a Jack O'Lantern, it means that the Jack O'Lantern is worth MORE to them than $30, so why is it "outrageous" to charge what the market will bear? Nobody "needs" the latest Britney album or whatever.
IP theft is theft. Just because it is easy to do or everyone does it does not make it right.
There's the source of your confusion right there - you are getting uppety and making irrational claims because you assume that claiming IP infringement to NOT be theft is inherently an argument that it is "right". Who made that claim? IP infringement is NOT theft AND it is not right. That is not a contradiction (strange as that might seem to you), because theft isn't the only 'wrong' activity in the world.
"Theft" and "stealing" are at best metaphors for IP infringement, i.e. "similar to stealing in some respects", but by legal definition IP infringement is not theft and it is not stealing. Is it still wrong, certainly, but stop calling it what it by definition is not just to keep the explicit value judgement.
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It doesn't matter that the owner has more, even if there are infinitely many more. You aren't punished because someone has lost something; you're punished because you have committed a transgression against someone. We don't care, as a legal matter, whether you took a dollar from a dishwasher or from Donald Trump, who'd never even know it was gone. It's something that is legitimately and legally for sale, which you acquired without paying for. You have stolen.
Actually, you are only half right. You are correct in your assertion about that "the law" doesn't care about who you steal from; however, the law does care about the value of what you stole. Stealing one dollar is a treated far differently than stealing 10,000 dollars. So if the owner has infinitely many more how can the loss of one be viewed as a massive theft? Now, if you play the every theft = lost sale game, we'll just have to agree to disagree
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
But no one's saying that the work has no value, now are they? In fact, I'm saying the opposite: the work that goes into creating a new program, song, movie, etc. is exactly where the value is -- not in the resulting copies. An information economy must still be managed as an economy. Most people wouldn't have jobs under your scenario. Hilarious! Somehow abolishing copyright is supposed to prevent anyone from selling their labor. You really do live in a fantasy world, don't you?
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And the fact that the second word of that song is "all" isn't the Beatles' labor either, right? And so on for the third word, fourth word, and all the way to the end. There's a fact about each one of those words, and those facts aren't anyone's labor. Right?
So then, since those are all just facts and not anyone's labor, why is it that I shouldn't be allowed to share all those facts with someone else? Or have I got that wrong: are you saying I should be able to share all those facts? No. For fuck's sake, INFORMATION IS NOT AN EXPRESSIVE WORK. FACTS ARE NOT WORK. Work -- that is, labor -- went into discovering them. You don't think calculus, the light bulb, the theory of relativity, and the speed of light all just popped into someone's head overnight, do you?
People had to work to discover that stuff, and you've told me that people own the fruits of their labor, so I don't know why you still insist on taking their work away from them without their consent. Lyrics aren't facts. Lyrics can be described with facts: it is a fact that the first word of that song is "yesterday". If you prohibit someone from sharing the lyrics, you also prohibit them from sharing the facts that describe them. You're pushing an empty definition which results in nothing more than trolling. There's another one of those dishonest accusations, but don't let me stop you. By all means, keep showing your true colors. There's no intellectual work in that product ["The 1st byte of this file is 'd5'"]. I didn't say there was, but so what - are we only allowed to speak in "intellectual works" now? We can't just state facts?
I must say, you're putting on quite an impressive dance to avoid admitting that copyright makes it illegal to share information. I mean, I can still see right through it, but kudos for trying. What exactly do you stand to gain from duplicating existing knowledge? Sometimes it feels good to share. I understand that you've probably never tried it, but maybe, just once, you should. You might learn something. How does that enrich culture, expand understanding, or push society forward? It doesn't. On the contrary, society benefits from greater access to all sorts of information (or "works", if you insist on drawing a distinction). The printing press enriched society, not by making it possible to express things that couldn't be expressed before, but by making it possible for those things to reach a wider audience. File sharing does the same thing. You can say the same thing; but if you're not investing any intellectual labor into doing so, you're not saying anything. You're just repeating what someone else has said. Actually, when I open my mouth and words come out, I am saying those words. That's what "saying" means.
And this comes after you accuse me of "pushing an empty definition"? You're truly a comic genius, sir.
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They also would not BUY if you could just wave a magic
wand and make piracy technically impossible. THAT is
the problem with assigning "value" or "damages" to any
of this activity.
It exists only because the technology allows for the
"consumer" to buy at zero cost. Demand of any luxury
good is inversely proportional to cost, so the demand
of any luxury good is going to tend towards infinity
as the purchase price reaches zero.
Media moguls are seeing this apparent demand, getting
greedy and erroneously thinking that they can somehow
turn all these null sales into real money. They also
don't care how much collateral damage they do.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
People do things they would objectively consider wrong in another person all the time. A shocking 80% of employees would embezzle company money if they knew they could get away with it. That's neglecting the survey respondents who lied because they didn't want to admit they'd do the same.
It's clearly and objectively wrong. People doing it anyway simply reflects that the benefits outweigh the costs. Of course you can move the goalposts around all you like, but it's not going to make you right.
Well, by that logic, the fact that the first word of "Yesterday" is "yesterday" isn't the Beatles' labor, right?
No. You're pushing a vacuous definition of 'fact' that has no place in the discussion. A fact is separate from the collected expression of thoughts, facts, and information.
So then, since those are all just facts and not anyone's labor,
They're not facts. The act of choosing the word is the labor, and so the "fact" that the first word of Yesterday is 'yesterday' is only a "fact" because of that labor. Thus, it is not a fact. It's not an independent piece of information underlying the work that would have any value when separated from the expression. Of course you know this, because you're stupid but you're not stupid, you know?
People had to work to discover that stuff, and you've told me that people own the fruits of their labor, so I don't know why you still insist on taking their work away from them without their consent.
That's horseshit, and it's been dealt with decisively. They still have the work that is theirs exclusively; their expressions. Nothing has been taken from them. Your discovery of fact is not an expression; it's not a work.
We can't just state facts?
That's an intellectually dishonest question stemming from a disingenuous person engaged in trolling for the sheer benefit of preaching to a choir of imbeciles. Stating facts isn't an issue. When you take a collection of facts and state them in precise duplication of an original work of expression, you're not stating facts. You're coopting expression.
You can state facts if you like. The "fact" that a published expression is what it says is not a fact at all. A collection of facts and observations, expressed in original prose, isn't a fact, either. "The speed of light is c" is not an original expression. A book on the practical applications or the history of the calculation of c isn't a fact in and of itself. It's an expression. Repeating it exactly isn't a recitation of fact; it's a cheap and intellectually dishonest attempt to subvert original expression.
The printing press enriched society, not by making it possible to express things that couldn't be expressed before, but by making it possible for those things to reach a wider audience. File sharing does the same thing.
The printing press enriched society because it opened access to a new class of individuals who could not afford it. Copyright did the same thing, by lowering the cost of acquisition and allowing for the masses to have access to artwork they could not otherwise afford. The printing press' lowered costs made it economical to spread knowledge.
File sharing does no such thing. Human knowledge is not broadened by your free access to a copy of Britney Spears' latest crap. Your access to knowledge is not improved by file sharing, because you already have access to knowledge for free. File sharing does nothing more than wrest self-determination and control over one's own expressions from the person to which it is organically and legally vested. There's nothing wrong with the legalization of casual sharing; but doing so doesn't have anything to do with spreading knowledge...it simply has to do with limiting commercial exploitation by record labels. It is not a crusade.
Show me one instance of knowledge being locked up by copyright that isn't some bullshit "fact" like "this is the text of the latest Tom Clancy:".
I must say, you're putting on quite an impressive dance to avoid admitting that copyright makes it illegal to share information. I mean, I can still see right through it, but kudos for trying.
You can't see much of anything at all. Copyright doesn't protect information. It says so right in the Copyright Act. It says so in all the contemporary commentary on the development of the system. An original expression, a work of intellectual labor, is not infor
The value of the thing you stole is a factor in sentencing (or in calculation of damages to be awarded), but has exactly zero part in the finding of commission of the act.
In case you can't connect the dots on your own
Person A legally purchased music then added bandwidth and computer time to pass along the music to others.
I wonder if that's the first bread analogy on
Where I strongly disagree with the RIAA on this is in the area of fair use. If I buy the music I buy a license to use it in any way I see fit for me. I should be able to make copies for my car, MP3 player, living room and computer. Basically, though, I don't buy any music which restricts me on that.
It may well be the most gut-wrenching, life destroying, and expensive *encouragement* the artist will endure. Too often, the artist winds up below broke, even while the label profits on the investment. There are record labels and impresarios who genuinely care, who work as partners, but they're a rare breed. Their influence isn't felt at the head offices of the large corporate labels - they work for the "indie" labels. Some of them sell a lot of records, too. True North, Arts & Crafts are a couple of the Canadian ones that I can think of. (There's an interview with the co-founder of Arts & Crafts here: http://www.canadianbusiness.com/managing/strategy/article.jsp?content=20071019_154318_5700)
If you're already a winner, the guys with the big guns are with you every step of the way
The future of the recording label's business is going to be in the service of the artist - as a business manager, consultant, and agent. Not as the purveyors - although the end of the distribution for profit model is farther off than they like to complain it is. They'll help artists with (and take a larger percentage of) organizing live shows, merchandising, and boutique content (digital downloads of live shows are currently quite popular). Maybe we'll *actually* see record labels nurture and develop their artists/partners again. And, maybe we'll see the decline of the superstar, and see a return to the journeyman musician. I think that overall, that would be better for music, musicians, and the fans too.
From the article linked above: CB: Charlatans have announced they are going to give away their next album for free, and just make money off touring. Is that a viable business model for bands?
JR: On some levels it is. It definitely means that you're going to have to always be touring. And what we're seeing happen in the live market is everyone, on some level is realizing this, and so the traffic and the choice in terms of what concerts you go to as a music fan are getting broader and broader. You open up the street weeklies in Toronto and the amount of concerts every night is getting limitless. Every club's full every night. Lots of great bands coming through. So that's what I mean about the music business being healthy, but you can only go to so many shows.
CB: It seems like a fan's paradise.
JR: Absolutely. You have so many options. And, because you have so many options, no single band gets a large swath of the pie.
I prefer (morally, if you will) to support artists i like directly, and that's because i know the money won't actually make it to them otherwise.
That's nice, but record labels provide a service, too - marketing, television appearances, music videos, etc. If the band doesn't think the record label's services are worth their fees, fine - but lets leave that up to the bands, shall we?
DATABASE WOW WOW
If by that you mean a stereo with two tape decks, one of which can record off the other, than yes. They claimed that its mere existence was evidence of intent to violate their copyright. They tried to prevent the marketing of the devices. The Supreme Court eventually reigned them in. IANAL, and may have blurred in part of the story of VCRs.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
First of all, one should never let the immoral acts of another affect their own morality. In other words, two wrongs don't make a right. Because you feel what has gone on with the purchasing of laws, etc., absolutely has no affect whatsoever on how moral *your* actions are. The constitutional clause states "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.". You may interpret "limited time" as one thing, others (I suspect the artist) would interpret it differently. All in all, the length of time is set by law, not by the constitution. So your statement that it is not meant to be for a lifetime is no more correct or relevant than the recording industry's claim otherwise. It's simply two opposing views on the subject, and in the current state, the law is on their side. Which brings me to the idea of "buying laws". First of all, the length of time a copyright is in effect has been in place for a lot longer than you may realize. It's not something that the current regime in the recording industry has all of a sudden put into effect. Moreover, yes, laws are bought, so to speak. It happens. I agree that it's not moral or ethical, and I feel lobbying is doing more damage to America than most other activities. However, whether the law is bought or not is open to speculation. In my assessment, I don't find the idea of having a law in effect to protect one's right to profit for their lifetime, and to be able to pass that right to profit to one or two successive generations to be excessive. I myself am an artist, so I may be biased here. But I suspect if you had worked for two or three decades to produce a work and saw people essentially stealing that work, you may change your views on the subject. Your feeling that the law is "wrong" or "right" has no bearing on whether it is in actuality right or wrong. It's your assessment, nothing more. You may disagree with a speed limit, but you're likely going to get a ticket if you violate it, and there's nothing at all you can do about it, unless you go to court and fight it. Then, you can work to change the city ordinance that set the speed limit in the first place. Until that time, you have no right whatsoever to stage a protest by breaking that speed limit. It's the same thing here. If you are going to do nothing at all to change the current copyright law, then you can complain all you want, but nobody with any ability to affect the change is going to hear you. In other words, change it or shut the hell up. And if you get arrested or sued, awesome. You broke the law, you deserve it. Period. One other thing you say is that "the longer one profits from a single creation, the less incentive there is to create more". I ask you, what incentive is there to create more, when every time you create something your profit from that item is undercut by high school and college aged punks, who feel they have some sort of constitutional right to obtain your hard work for free? You think what you're doing is helping the situation? I would nearly guarantee that people would be much more inclined to create new works if they knew those new works would also be protected. Take the protection away, take the profit away, and not only will artists no longer create the works for public consumption, but you will absolutely guarantee that the record companies will no longer take chances on anything other than "sure things". So enjoy the new Britney album. Your judgment of your own immoral act is thin, at best. If it allows you to do what you do, whatever. But in my assessment, and I am not part of the RIAA or any *AA, if you download something that should be paid for and you don't pay for it, it should and may be a crime, and it is absolutely immoral. And once you're out in the business world a bit longer and realize how important your work is, you'll probably change your mind. If you worked in an office doing some programming or whatever, and at the end
Well, some would say, "Yes, that's exactly what we intend to do", but anyways, moving along...
Where does the value of a copyright come from? Did it fall from the sky? Was it divinely bestowed upon writers/artists/musicians by the creator like the Divine Right of Kings? Or is it a balance of competing interests in society? Those of us who are critical of the status quo are saying that that balance needs to be re-examined.
If nothing else, what about the observation that when copyright law was enacted, private non-commercial copyright infringement was not a concern? I think we can safely say that nobody was thinking about things like file sharing at the time, since, um, computers and the internet didn't exist.
So copyright law, when it was originally conceived, was more of an industrial regulation. If you VOLUNTARILY decided to get into the "book publishing business" (for example), this type of restriction of your freedom was just the cost of doing business. If you didn't like it, go find some other line of work.
But currently copyright law is acting in a way it was never intended to: It is a restriction on the actions of _everyday citizens_.
This is different. This is not how the law originally functioned, or even how it functioned 50 years ago.
Nobody was given a vote on this. This is unintended consequences of a law due to technological changes.
We live in a democracy. If the way a law is going to work is going to change in such a fundamental way, I think that the citizenry of whatever country you reside in ought to have a say on it.
I'll tell you what: if you can get 1 in 20 people to sign a petition stating that they honestly believe that a fine of hundreds of thousands of dollars PER INFRINGEMENT for a college kid downloading some songs in a non-commercial context, then not only will I support your thesis that copyright infringement == theft, I'll eat that petition and put it on youtube. So make sure it's a long list.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
Nah, it's not about expanding the definition of friend. Though the music industry types like to play dumb in public (what's an MP3? Me dumb exec, me no understand!), I suspect they're smarter than that.
What's really going on is, at some point the record labels figured out that it's easier to control the distribution channels than it is to find, sign, and nurture good artists. Control of the distribution has the side effect of giving you the power to force artists into signing contracts that are more appropriate for the relationship between pimps and prostitutes. In effect, it's a monopsony.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony
When your game is the only game in town, it doesn't matter if it's crooked.
So the reason they're having histrionics now over private non-commercial copyright infringement where they didn't in the era of home taping/mix tapes is that home taping didn't threaten their control over distribution. But the internet does. They know it, they're scared, and they're right to be scared.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
I'm aware of the system, but the company loaning the money to the artists.
Maybe saying they funded it was the wrong word, but it is their investment that makes the whole recording process happen. Of course they expect a return on that investment, but they are still taking a risk on a new artist.
"The cup is in turn designed for holding hot or cold liquids, and has an open rim and closed base." --US Patent #5425497
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For someone who's flinging as many accusations about definitions as you are, you sure seem to have a shoddy grasp of what words actually mean. The act of choosing the word is the labor, and so the "fact" that the first word of Yesterday is 'yesterday' is only a "fact" because of that labor. Thus, it is not a fact. Uh-huh. Let me try one: the act of painting my house blue is the labor, and so the "fact" that my house is blue is only a "fact" because of that labor. Thus, it is not a fact. (What is it, then? Is it just an opinion that my house is blue? Is it a musing, a side note, an anecdote? Maybe it's a mackerel, or a brooch, or a squad car!)
That was amusing but pointless. Let's stick with the normal definition of "fact", shall we? For brevity's sake, I'll skip responding to the other inane ramblings of yours that are predicated on your bizarre, opposite-day definition of "fact", since my response in each case would be "No, that's not what 'fact' means; look it up or ask someone who's a native speaker of English." The printing press enriched society because it opened access to a new class of individuals who could not afford it. Which, of course, is exactly what file sharing has also done: opened access to a class of individuals who otherwise couldn't afford it. You don't think those college students with iPods full of music can afford to spend $10,000+ on CDs, do you? File sharing does nothing more than wrest self-determination and control over one's own expressions from the person to which it is organically and legally vested. Funny how you call it organic when, in the absence of copyright law, there is no control over one's own expressions - as Thomas Jefferson so famously pointed out, such things cannot, in nature, be the subject of property. Show me one instance of knowledge being locked up by copyright that isn't some bullshit "fact" like "this is the text of the latest Tom Clancy:". I'm sorry you think facts are bullshit. On the other hand, that revelation goes a long way toward explaining the content of your posts. What is a free speech right? It's one that fundamentally prohibits the government from stopping you from expressing yourself. Another made-up definition, eh? You should publish your own dictionary; at least that way, you'll have a source to point to the next time someone calls you out on your desperate semantic wankery. You have not been barred from expressing your thoughts or information you know. And now I see you've made up a new definition for "information", or maybe "know", or hell, maybe the magic fantasy word in that sentence is "barred". What an ingenious puzzle! Clearly the work of a brilliant mind that knows it's trapped in a corner with no leg to stand on.
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Of course, you know that, or you wouldn't go for cute to conceal your intellectual failings.
You're not interested in an actual discussion. You're just puttering around as the bloviating gasbag you are for the sheer sake of inanity. Let me try one: the act of painting my house blue is the labor, and so the "fact" that my house is blue is only a "fact" because of that labor. You are quite skilled at clumsily failing to maintain parallelism. The fact that your house is blue is of independent significance. Yours is the blue house. Moby Dick is the book about the ill-fated hunt for a white whale. That's a fact, too. The expression isn't an independent fact; it's not an objective reality. It's an original narrative containing fact. The elements of its plot are facts. The location of its sentences in the text are fact. The sum of the expression is not a fact having any significance to the universe. It's an expression, an original production of substance and intellect that belongs only to its creator. There is zero value and zero need for your desire to repeat it--to do so is not out of an interest to convey fact, but simply to coopt the original expression of another for your own gain (including the petulant spite of another). Another made-up definition, eh? You should publish your own dictionary; at least that way, you'll have a source to point to the next time someone calls you out on your desperate semantic wankery. In fact I have. It's called the U.S. Reports. "Desperate semantic wankery" coming from someone who clearly has no credible background in semantics is pretty rich. Show me a semantic map. Mark out the lexemes and -roles. Back it up with a valid Fregian proposition. Put up or shut up.
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So what bizarre definition of "wrong" are you using if (a)legality and (b) belief don't determine this for people? If "wrong" is moral, it's based purely on belief. If it's ethical, it's based on collective wisdom of society (which has repeatedly acted consistent with that individual belief. If it's simply technical, then it's plainly illegal.
Now go ahead, tell me those are really elephants, not facts. The fact that your house is blue is of independent significance. Yours is the blue house. Moby Dick is the book about the ill-fated hunt for a white whale. That's a fact, too. The expression isn't an independent fact; it's not an objective reality. Moby Dick is also the book that starts out "Call me Ishmael." That's a fact and an objective reality. Denying it only proves how detached from reality you are, because anyone can look in the book and verify that fact to be objectively true. There is zero value and zero need for your desire to repeat it--to do so is not out of an interest to convey fact, but simply to coopt the original expression of another for your own gain (including the petulant spite of another). Ah yes, spite. That must be what it's about, because a jealous, angry hoarder like you simply can't understand why anyone would choose to share something with other people. Amusing but sad. "Desperate semantic wankery" coming from someone who clearly has no credible background in semantics is pretty rich. Not nearly as rich as the fact that despite knowing all about semantic maps and lexemes, you still somehow manage to remain hopelessly ignorant of what words like "say", "speech", and "fact" mean in common use. It's like watching someone who's studied books about bicycles for years, but still falls down the first time he tries to ride one. All that blustering about your "credible background" doesn't do a thing to hide the fact that you've just fallen flat on your ass.
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Nice use of a useless word, but I think the RIAA should quit while they're still in the green and reinvent itself as a nationwide broadband ISP.
Like Bugs Bunny once said, if you can't beat 'em, lick 'em.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
The best you can do is disingenuously take the long-standing distinction between fact and expression which has been operative since the days of the Framers and cobble together, with limited skill and no rational basis, a definition that creates a distinction without a difference.
Fact and expression are absolutely distinguishable when dealing with the terms as used wrt intellectual works. Creating a tautological argument for the sheer sake of being a pompous ass doesn't have any credibility; be it logical, legal, or philosophical. Moby Dick is also the book that starts out "Call me Ishmael." That's a fact and an objective reality. Denying it only proves how detached from reality you are I don't deny that that is the case. But if you extend that sentence for the next 400 pages, you're no longer reporting fact. You're coopting expression, and doing so for no legitimate purpose. Anybody can see through that, even those with such limited ability to form an effective, nuanced argument as yourself. That must be what it's about, because a jealous, angry hoarder like you simply can't understand why anyone would choose to share something with other people. On the contrary, you're so blinded by your need to grasp at straws that you conflate a formalistic argument with my personal viewpoint, and take a protection as the exclusion of the alternative. As I've said many times, you're absolutely free to share your work as you desire. This isn't about that, though, and unless you're totally unhinged, you know that. Other people choose to share their expressions on their own terms, and they have every right to do so. what words like "say", "speech", and "fact" mean in common use. I know very well what they mean in common use. But clearly, common use is inadequate for a specific, technical situation in a thread about semantics and formalism. The only one on his ass is you.
Once again, put up or shut up. You've already demonstrated you can't put up. Only one thing left to do.
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So, either you knew that what you said was false, which makes you a liar, or you didn't, which makes you ignorant. I find it hard to believe that someone with your credible background in semantics could be so ignorant about the meaning of such a common everyday word, but if you'd like to go with that option, I guess I'll take your word for it. I don't deny that that is the case. But if you extend that sentence for the next 400 pages, you're no longer reporting fact. Now that's a fascinating theory. How many facts do you need to report before they magically stop being facts, then? A hundred? A thousand? Exactly 400 pages' worth? As I've said many times, you're absolutely free to share your work as you desire. This isn't about that, though, and unless you're totally unhinged, you know that. Indeed, we both know it isn't about that, and yet you've just brought it up out of nowhere. I guess that makes you unhinged. But clearly, common use is inadequate for a specific, technical situation in a thread about semantics and formalism. Inadequate for your dishonest argument, you mean. As if your intellectually bankrupt position is any less bankrupt when described in your made-up definitions. I know very well what they mean in common use. Ah, I see. So you're not ignorant after all, just a lying troll. Got it.
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What definition of wrong?
That's not scientific, it's not rational, it's not logical, and it's certainly neither semantically valid nor legally sound.
Also, sequences of independent adjectives are separated by commas. It's "common, everyday word." But you know, common, everyday words aren't always so: 'orbital' means quite different things in medicine, astronomy, and chemistry. But goodness, how important the word 'fact' is, since it encompasses every word ever uttered, every though ever expressed, and every theory disproved! Obviously the operative level escapes you. Indeed, we both know it isn't about that, and yet you've just brought it up out of nowhere. How quickly you forget your own words: "...simply can't understand why anyone would choose to share something with other people." That is a bogus ad hominem meant to distract from an utterly vaporous case. The issue of choosing to share was never once on the table, nor is there anything to evidence my thoughts on the subject. Inadequate for your dishonest argument, you mean. As we've seen time and again, you're the only one being dishonest in your approach, utterly failing to produce a sound argument in any context that doesn't rely on tautological definitions and selective manipulation to the exclusion of the contrary. You've committed nearly every classical logical fallacy on the books, and each time you come back with an absurd, cute remark to distract from your unfortunate and embarrassing failure to make a sound argument.
The proof, as they say, is in the pudding: I'm happy to put forth the "bankrupt" argument of Framers and philosophers in place from the time of the birth of our nation, articulated by four dozen Supreme Court justices, and solidly backed by a field of linguistic professionals, and demonstrably expressive of the collective will. But sure, go for the cheap shot because you can't wrest victory from the jaws of utter intellectual defeat. We're sleeping fine.
That doesn't mean facts are baseball, or dinosaurs, or books. I know it's easier for you to pretend that I've equated facts and expressions, but anyone reading my posts can see that I haven't (and I certainly remember it myself, as I assume you do also), so you're not accomplishing much by doing that. Ignoring it 10 times in a row won't make it go away, nor will substituting a generic definition in order to make a case that isn't falsifiable. Huh, I guess you don't know what "falsifiable" means either. That's a shame. You can look this stuff up online for free, you know. But goodness, how important the word 'fact' is, since it encompasses every word ever uttered, every though ever expressed, and every theory disproved! Does it? I sure haven't said that. There are facts about words, thoughts, and theories, but those things aren't necessarily facts themselves. Leave your strawman at home, pal. How quickly you forget your own words: "...simply can't understand why anyone would choose to share something with other people." That is a bogus ad hominem meant to distract from an utterly vaporous case. The issue of choosing to share was never once on the table, nor is there anything to evidence my thoughts on the subject. Of course it was. File sharing, remember? In case you've forgotten about this popular new technology, it's where people use their own internet connections to transmit files to other people (whether they produced those files themselves or obtained them somewhere else), usually for no personal benefit other than the knowledge that they're helping someone else get the files they want.
Are you trying to redefine "sharing" to include the requirement that the thing shared must be the sharer's own creation? Sorry, not gonna happen. We speak English here. As we've seen time and again, you're the only one being dishonest in your approach, utterly failing to produce a sound argument in any context that doesn't rely on tautological definitions and selective manipulation to the exclusion of the contrary. Hmm, I think I see where you got that impression. Let me straighten you out: the dishonest posts that rely on phony definitions are yours. You can tell because they say "by mr_matticus" at the top. I'm happy to put forth the "bankrupt" argument of Framers and philosophers in place from the time of the birth of our nation, You mean like the one who said these intangible things cannot, in nature, be the subject of property? and demonstrably expressive of the collective will. Wha-- oh, I get it! You're saying the laws paid for by Big Content represent the "collective will". Irony, right? Or is that sarcasm? You tell me, you're the one with all the credentials. Anyway, that's a good one... I thought you were done making jokes, but this zinger is my new favorite.
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More glib, cute lines and still no substance. Keep working at it; maybe you'll fall sideways into something valid sooner or later.
Not, if physical access is restricted, and physical access is the only way to issue commands to it. I haven't taken security protocols as course work, but friends who have have said that although it is not possible to remove all security breaches but it is possible to take that to a 'leve' higher ie. make breaching the security so difficult that what you gain from the breach would not be able to take care of the costs of the breach itself. Don't know if I managed to explain it too well. ermm... I am sure that supercomputer time is managed well and hacking that is not so easy is it ? after all you(not you, but some person in general) cannot give your self 100 minutes of it just because you are Mr. Uber HAX0r can you ?
Any ways, I can only say that it's just an idea off the top of my head, might not be profound or world changing as such.
blog plug -> The Darker Side of Light
There are too many issues to be addressed here, and i take mild offense at your appeal to expertise.. so let me ask you a rather loaded question: are these artists products or customers (or both)?
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
I too am a relativist, and I agree with your point, but as part of fairness being relative, it's also relative to certain frames of reference. Popular opinion is one, like you say, but not the only one. If you were to measure fairness against, for example, the capitalist dream, then anything where you work hard to create that is popular deserves money, in which case, file sharing doesn't have a case. You could also measure it against what is healthy for further art creation in the future, and file sharing doesn't have a case there either. What the people want and what will make them happiest (in the long term) are sometimes completely different things.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Looking at file-sharing as a business model for supplying the world with culture, it's not hard to see why it won't work. The file-sharing business model is supplied by the copyright industry, and yet it competes with it. The file-sharing business model is considerably more attractive than the copyright model, so it should end up eating pretty much all of the customer base of the copyright model. The copyright model would die, but then, where would the file-sharing model get its new fix of art?
File sharing is NOT a stable, viable alternative, because it's just a leech on the side of the copyright industry. Once the industry is sucked dry, file sharing can't go on, unless people are content with listening to the same music over and over, watching the same movies over and over, etc.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
While we're here, though, I'd also like to say that the exorbitant amounts for each infringement make a certain amount of sick sense. You're being punished not just for your offences, but for every offence down the line. You share to 20 people, they each share to another 20, then each of the 400 share to another 20, etc, etc. All those copies are a copy from your copy. There is A LOT of potential damage from each infringement, and the numbers reflect that.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I'm just going by the common dictionary definition of "fact". By that definition, it's quite possible for something not to be a fact. For example, a dog is not a fact; a fact is a concept, and a dog is an animal, not a concept. There are facts about dogs: for example, "George W. Bush's dog is named Barney" is a fact about a dog. But that fact is not a dog, and Barney the dog is not a fact. Similarly, a song is not a fact, even though there are plenty of facts about songs. [There are facts about words, thoughts, and theories, but those things aren't necessarily facts themselves] Then what are they? A word is a word, a thought is a thought, and a theory is a theory. That's not much of an answer, of course, but I don't know what else you expect me to say. You and I both agree that words, thoughts, and theories aren't facts themselves, and you've even admitted that there are facts about those things, so I'm not sure where the disconnect is coming from. Sharing, in order to be permissible, like anything else, needs to be something you're entitled to share. You said earlier, "The issue of choosing to share was never once on the table, nor is there anything to evidence my thoughts on the subject". Obviously, that wasn't true: you are saying that this type of sharing isn't permissible, while I'm saying it is. Amazingly, they were writing to distinguish fact and expression, something you've still to learn. Well, except for all those posts where I did distinguish them, including this one. Hard to forget about those, since there have been so many of them, but somehow you've done it anyway. Have you considered the possibility that you might have Alzheimer's?
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An expression is not a fact. Since facts are not protected and expressions are the result of proprietary labor, there is no valid claim to the expression of another.
It occurs to me that maybe you have an ideological opposition to the idea of making it illegal to state certain facts, which is why you display such cognitive dissonance when faced with the reality that doing so is a necessary part of enforcing copyright. Perhaps you'd have an easier time if you accepted that reality instead of continuing down this path of denial, and simply reevaluated the importance of enforcing copyright in the first place.
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Basically, the OP is stating that copyrights are awesome because they provide monopolies on a certain product. I've tried to point out that it is not a good thing to protect monopolies just for the sake of protecting the profits of the monopolist, and, in fact, most of the time protecting the monopolist hurts the end consumer. There must be a greater gain in protecting the monopolist than the loss to the end consumer. (and yes, in copyrights, that gain is supposed to be the encouragement to develop new works, but the OP did not argue that)
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
I offered up the pumpkin analogy against your argument that people that infringe copyrights are stealing:
I believe the pumpkin analogy works against this argument in isolation. I have created another source from which the pumpkins can come, and because I've broken the monopoly, I've undermined the value of the original pumpkin grower's wares.
Now, to get to work on this statement:
Lets say this pumpkin grower has spent 15 years breeding pumpkins to be big, and round, and bright orange, and generally perfect for jack-o-lanterns. I've taken those seeds from him to grow other pumpkins. When I grow my own pumpkins, I'm not going to bother weeding, or picking them, or washing off the dirt. The people who take my pumpkins are going to have to do that. Similarly, when I share a set of music files on a P2P network, I'm not going to be burning them to a CD, including fancy cover art, and giving it to the people that want it in a nicely shrink-wrapped jewel case.
What do the record companies charge money for? Is it for the physical CD? Or is it for a license to listen to the music on the CD? If the former, then there should be no problem with making copies. If the latter, then they should be completely willing to replace broken CDs at a reasonable replacement cost. Have you ever tried to get a broken or scratched CD replaced?
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--Scott Adams
I don't think we've touched on the issue of whether I have a right to know facts. If you want to argue that I don't, then go ahead. Right now what we're stuck on is getting you to face the reality that suppressing the spread of expressions also requires suppressing the spread of facts. (No, genius, that doesn't mean the expressions are the facts.) You pretend to believe in privacy, but you don't, because I have a natural right to tell your boss your latest rant which was told to me in confidence. You mean breaking a promise? No, I've never condoned that. Yet another strawman. Repeating any number of facts about an expression will never replace that expression except in a hollow, meaningless, desperate broadening of fact to include the universe. Another transparent lie, easily shot down by even the most basic application of logic. I will now demonstrate this logic for you, not because I think it'll convince you (you're obviously too deep in your mental illness, or having too much fun trolling, for that), but to provide one more easily bookmarked example of how dishonest and/or deluded you really are:
"Every man for himself" is an expression, not a fact.
"I'm thinking of a four word expression" is a fact.
"The first word of that expression is 'every'" is a fact.
"The second word of that expression is 'man'" is a fact.
"The third word of that expression is 'for'" is a fact.
"The fourth word of that expression is 'himself'" is a fact.
By conveying those five facts, I've provided enough information for anyone to reconstruct the whole expression. Ergo, if you want to prevent me from sharing that expression with anyone else, you also have to prevent me from sharing some of those facts. The logic above is trivially extensible to expressions of any length; thus if you want to prevent me from sharing any particular expression, you also must prevent me from sharing some facts. QED.
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An inference isn't a fact; an opinion isn't a fact; an expression isn't a fact. An expression isn't just a sum of facts, and no rational person would take a collection of "it is a fact that the 37,435th word of the book is 'contrary'." There's no value in that "fact" unless it is couched in a greater expression, and a vacuous expression isn't work, and therefore not proprietary.
Compare it to an actual fact, like that the speed of sound at sea level is ~750mph. That's something of meaning, of value, and of significance. most basic application of logic. Explain the formal logical structure of your argument.
You won't, you see, because every time you've been confronted with the task of making a viable argument, you fail miserably. You make glib remarks, offer vacuous definitions, or come back with an unsupportable allegation of a straw man. You've lost the linguistic argument, the legal argument, the semantic argument, the formalistic argument, the historical argument, the ethical argument, and the organic argument. Your only hope relies on what is at best a draw on a moral argument, which isn't compelling under any formal standard of debate.
An expression isn't a fact. Reporting facts doesn't include "facts" of the elements of an expression for no other purpose than the subversion of that expression. You continually refer to a base definition of "fact" in a desperate and wholly unconvincing effort to make the distinction meaningless. There's no difference in your unsupportable, moronic, and utterly inutile assessment than were you to enter a child's discussion of fact and opinion, a scientific discussion of fact and theory, a moral discussion of fact and value, a legal discussion of fact and law, or indeed a linguistic discussion of fact and expression, arguing that fact subsumes the orthogonal pairing. It is a sophistry, a sophistry and a tautology bereft of significance, given by a cheap and laughably irrational man.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Sorry, I'm not going to fall for it. The argument is there. The structure is simple enough for anyone to grasp, even you. You can either (1) disprove it, (2) concede it, or (3) implicitly concede it by continuing to avoid dealing with it directly.
So far it looks like you're going for #3, which is fine with me. Your Honor, let the record show that the troll declined to refute my argument. You've lost the linguistic argument, the legal argument, the semantic argument, the formalistic argument, the historical argument, the ethical argument, and the organic argument. Oh, you're doing the Black Knight bit from Holy Grail now? Nice. Not quite as good as the original, but it's good that you haven't lost your sense of humor. An expression isn't a fact. As we have both agreed many times over. Reporting facts doesn't include "facts" of the elements of an expression for no other purpose than the subversion of that expression. In other words, "a fact is only a fact when I say it is". Sure. You continually refer to a base definition of "fact" in a desperate and wholly unconvincing effort to make the distinction meaningless. Apparently "base definition" means "the common one found in the dictionary and used in everyday speech by everyone except trolls". There's no difference in your unsupportable, moronic, and utterly inutile assessment than were you to enter a child's discussion of fact and opinion You're right - even a child could stomp your ridiculous arguments into the ground. Even a child has a better grasp of logic, definitions, and reading comprehension than you've shown. It's good that you can admit that; that's the first step toward recovery.
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An expression isn't a fact. Reporting facts doesn't include "facts" of the elements of an expression for no other purpose than the subversion of that expression. You continually refer to a base definition of "fact" in a desperate and wholly unconvincing effort to make the distinction meaningless. There's no difference in your unsupportable, moronic, and utterly inutile assessment than were you to enter a child's discussion of fact and opinion, a scientific discussion of fact and theory, a moral discussion of fact and value, a legal discussion of fact and law, or indeed a linguistic discussion of fact and expression, arguing that fact subsumes the orthogonal pairing. It is a sophistry, a sophistry and a tautology bereft of significance, given by a cheap and laughably irrational man.
So, now that you understand things can be related without being identical, you should be able to understand how facts and expressions are related. The relation between them is such that for every expression, there's at least one set of facts which is sufficient to fully describe it; anyone who knows those facts can fully reconstruct the expression. I am dealing with it head on. You've posited a "logical" argument; if it is so, then clearly you can support it with formal logic. Hint: the way to deal with an argument head on, especially one stated as plainly as mine was, is not to demand to see its formal underpinnings.
The logic there is a simple contrapositive; as you know, "if you learn these facts then you can reconstruct the expression" is logically equivalent to "if you must not reconstruct the expression then you must not learn these facts". Go ahead and replace the clauses with P's and Q's if that's the only way you can understand it, but surely a man with your impressive credentials didn't need someone to spoon-feed that to him.
Demanding to see the formal underpinnings is, however, a great way to implicitly concede the point. Thank you. Now that you've conceded it, let's move on to the cut 'n' pasting session you have lined up for us. An expression isn't a fact. As we have both agreed many times over. Reporting facts doesn't include "facts" of the elements of an expression for no other purpose than the subversion of that expression. In other words, "a fact is only a fact when I say it is". Sure. You continually refer to a base definition of "fact" in a desperate and wholly unconvincing effort to make the distinction meaningless. Apparently "base definition" means "the common one found in the dictionary and used in everyday speech by everyone except trolls". There's no difference in your unsupportable, moronic, and utterly inutile assessment than were you to enter a child's discussion of fact and opinion You're right - even a child could stomp your ridiculous arguments into the ground. Even a child has a better grasp of logic, definitions, and reading comprehension than you've shown. It's good that you can admit that; that's the first step toward recovery.
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The relation between them is such that for every expression, there's at least one set of facts which is sufficient to fully describe it
No, because an expression isn't a fact any more than an opinion is a fact or a value is a fact or a theory is a fact. They're orthogonal pairings. A collection of "facts" that merely reconstruct an expression aren't facts at all, because they have no value apart from the expression. It's a sophistry that is laughed out of every formal arena of debate on Earth. Go into a courtroom and argue that "it's a fact that the law is x" and therefore it's a factual question and see how long it takes for the entire room to burst into tears laughing.
When discussing a traditional orthogonal pairing, it's perfectly vacuous to state the non-fact as a fact. It's pure, unadulterated sophism. You can't escape it. There are certainly facts in expressions, but not every element is a fact, or the expression would just be a fact. This is a null distinction.
The logic there is a simple contrapositive
Ah! There you go. First, this isn't an illustration of the logic I asked for (it was your expression->fact->expression safari, and how you "logically" change expression to facts to expression again [but somehow they remain facts after being an expression again]). But I'll roll with it for a moment. Your statement is contrapositive to its negative, but that says nothing of your argument, because guess what? That's a tautology! What a wonderful example of that sophistry we've all become so used to from you. Contrapositives always match the proposition! The formal logic we're still waiting for is establishing the truth values of your proposition.
What's even more delicious is that you've completely blown contraposition, because "if you must not reconstruct..." is NOT the logical negative of "if you learn..." The logical negative is "if you don't learn the facts, you can't reconstruct the expression." Contrapositive, indeed.
It must be frustrating to try so hard and yet come up so terribly short.
Demanding to see the formal underpinnings is, however, a great way to implicitly concede the point.
If by 'concede the point' you mean, definitively illustrate that you're talking out of your ass and still can't make a valid argument, then yes, absolutely.
In other words, "a fact is only a fact when I say it is". Sure.
It's pretty clear, and it's not something I invented, but rather enjoys a rich history spanning over three centuries and including such notables as Hume, Mansfield, Bradley, Locke, Rousseau, Madison, Rawls, and countless others. An expression does not lose its distinction as an expression merely by sophistry; reporting each word, each note, or each brush stroke for the sake of duplicating the existing expression is not fact. It is, beyond all doubt, a cheap attempt at subversion of expression and cannot be defended as a reporting of fact.
Apparently "base definition" means "the common one found in the dictionary
A dictionary is a starting point, not a destination. The willful mixing of separate homonyms does not make it a suitable exercise. The "common one" is a disingenuous remark for a word with 16 definitions in the OED, which of course rarely paints a complete picture as it is; the definition of 'aspirin' is hardly complete for all but the most basic circumstances. Your definition is inadequate for any scope of argument in fact/opinion, fact/law, fact/theory, fact/value, fact/perspective, and yes, fact/expression. Your handwaving is no more effective here than to barge onto a construction site or an airport waving a piece of cloth and declaring it an apron. No one disputes the technical truth, but merely its misapplication.
You're right - even a child could stomp your ridiculous arguments into the ground.
That's just as clumsy, inelegant, devoid of cleverness, and ineffective th
My apologies, I've misread one of your lines:
Your original statement wasn't, "you can reconstruct the expression if you have all the facts." Accordingly, the logical negative I corrected should read "you can't reconstruct the expression if you don't learn the facts."
But now you're saying that's not the case. Perhaps, then, you could tell me what they are. What do they call an objectively true statement on your planet when the subject of that statement is an expression, if they don't call it a "fact"? A "sandwich", maybe, or a "ball-peen hammer"? There are certainly facts in expressions, but not every element is a fact, or the expression would just be a fact. Again, what a shame it is that you lost the ability to distinguish between "related" and "identical". Nearly everyone else in the world manages to wrap their minds around the idea that a fact can be about something without being that thing, but that simple distinction still eludes you. Such a tragic waste of human potential. Your statement is contrapositive to its negative, but that says nothing of your argument, because guess what? That's a tautology! Indeed, and that just makes it all the more hilarious that you're arguing against it. It's no more than a simple restatement of an accepted and obvious premise, but somehow it blows your mind. The formal logic we're still waiting for is establishing the truth values of your proposition. Then perhaps you could point to the proposition you feel is untrue. They're all pretty self-explanatory to those of us who aren't trolling:
1. There are facts about expressions. (From the definition of fact: anything can be the subject of a true statement. You admitted this yourself in the post I linked above, so I assume this isn't the one you disagree with.)
2. Knowing enough of those facts is sufficient to reconstruct the expression. (A simple observation about the ability of humans to put things together. If you know the expression is 4 words long, and you know what those 4 words are, in order, then you can put them back together.)
3. To prevent someone from reconstructing the expression, you must prevent them from knowing the facts. (This follows from #2.) It must be frustrating to try so hard and yet come up so terribly short. Well, you're the expert on that, so I'll take your word for it. (At least I assume you're trying, although your unblemished record of failure suggests that that assumption might be mistaken.) Your definition is inadequate for any scope of argument in fact/opinion, fact/law, fact/theory, fact/value, fact/perspective, and yes, fact/expression. That's funny, because everyone else considers it quite adequate for fact/opinion, fact/theory, and fact/expression, at least. Once again, you're speaking your own little language. I'll say again, the preservation of fact does not include pseudo-facts collected for the sole sake of subverting expression. Oh, I see, they're pseudo-facts. I guess a pseudo-fact is a special kind of fact that scares trolls into an irrational frenzy, then?
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That's funny, because earlier you admitted [slashdot.org] that facts about expressions are, indeed, facts.
Facts about expressions are indeed facts. They cease to be facts and become "facts" when their character and purpose is nothing more than the reconstruction of an expression. This is pretty clear: if the product begins as an expression, is deconstructed by sophistry to a lengthy tired of "facts", and the end result is that expression again, it's still merely the expression.
Again, what a shame it is that you lost the ability to distinguish between "related" and "identical".
Look in the mirror, there. An expression doesn't stop being an expression when you engage in this ridiculous behavior that erases the distinction. Fact and expression ARE RELATED. They are an orthogonal pair. When the facts in an expression are lost in a sea of "facts" that merely duplicate the expression, that collection doesn't cease being a cheap and pointless case.
Again, "it is fact that the law is x" does not make a legal issue a factual one. You see, it's technically a true statement, but it is tautological and a sophistry. It is an empty case.
expression is 4 words long, and you know what those 4 words are, in order, then you can put them back together.
And the end result is still nothing more than that proprietary expression. They're not facts when they're an expression. You've not culled facts when you're just superficially and deceptively changed the expression into "facts". You seem to be having trouble getting past that.
Then perhaps you could point to the proposition you feel is untrue.
That an expression is a mere collection of facts. Duh. Each word isn't a fact. It's just a word. If you're depending on the truth value of the presence of each word, you're merely describing a tautology--it's impossible for something not to be a fact in any scenario. Also patently false is that an expression ceases to be an expression when reproduced in its entirety for no purpose other than reproducing that expression.
1. There are facts about expressions. (From the definition of fact: anything can be the subject of a true statement.
Can be != is.
2. Knowing enough of those facts is sufficient to reconstruct the expression.
Words are not facts just like songs are not facts. "It is a fact that you have HIV" is not a fact simply because someone said so, I observed it, and now I'm repeating it.
3. To prevent someone from reconstructing the expression, you must prevent them from knowing the facts.
Bzzzzt! Knowing the facts is the point of making an expression. Reproducing the expression is just reproducing the expression, no matter what hollow Rube you put it through. It is not repeating fact or employing those facts to any fertile or legitimate use.
That's funny, because everyone else considers it quite adequate for fact/opinion, fact/theory, and fact/expression, at least.
Hardly. An opinion isn't fact because someone said it. The ONLY fact is that someone said it, and except through fallacious manipulation of homonyms 'fact', you can't get anywhere with it. The fact remains that someone said it, and the content of the opinion remains an opinion. This is true of the entire subsequent list of orthogonal pairs. You really just have no clue what you're saying, and can't support any of your arguments.
This discussion has run its course long ago because you are highly confused about language. It's unfortunate that you have to engage in repeated sophistry to make an empty point about a plainly illegitimate subversion of the orthogonal pairing of fact and expression. It's unfortunate that you can't shed the fallacious arguments and untrue propositions and that you have been so thoroughly defeated in your attempts to make a case. It's also unfortunate t
Here, however, "fact" just refers to an objectively true statement. [Then perhaps you could point to the proposition you feel is untrue.] That an expression is a mere collection of facts. Duh. Each word isn't a fact. Ah, I see the problem: you've hallucinated a proposition that wasn't actually there.
I didn't say an expression was a mere collection of facts; I said that if you have enough facts whose subjects are a particular expression, you can reconstruct that expression. Just like, oh, if you had enough facts about a house -- if you knew the exact placement of each beam and shingle and so on -- you could reconstruct that house. [anything can be the subject of a true statement] Can be != is. It is the subject of a true statement as soon as someone says that statement. For example, the first word of that last sentence is not yet the subject of a true statement, but I'll tell you "the first word of that sentence was 'it'", and now it is. Words are not facts just like songs are not facts. "It is a fact that you have HIV" is not a fact simply because someone said so, I observed it, and now I'm repeating it. Correct. However, "Billy told me that you have HIV" is a fact. "Billy wrote 'you have HIV' on this piece of paper" is also a fact, and so is "Billy wrote three words and the first one was 'you'". An opinion isn't fact because someone said it. The ONLY fact is that someone said it, and except through fallacious manipulation of homonyms 'fact', you can't get anywhere with it. The fact remains that someone said it, and the content of the opinion remains an opinion. This is true of the entire subsequent list of orthogonal pairs. Yes, that's exactly what I've been saying. I guess we're in agreement, then, that the common definition of fact which I've been using works just fine for distinguishing opinions from facts, theories, and expressions.
"Dogs are animals" is a fact, "dogs are fun to pet" is an opinion, and "some people think dogs are fun to pet" is a fact about an opinion. See? No problem. This discussion has run its course long ago because you are highly confused about language. The fantasy-world language you're speaking, yes. You could have avoided all that confusion, however, simply by speaking in English and interpreting my posts as English, instead of going off about how objectively true statements are only "facts" when you want them to be and other such nonsense.
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Let's put this in very simple and clear terms. Go back to high school. You are asked, "what are the facts that the author uses to make his argument?" Now, if you turn around with a mere list of words and their order, have you completed the assignment in good faith or are you just being a giant pain in the ass? However, "Billy told me that you have HIV" is a fact. Then so would be "you have HIV" under your definition. As soon as I say it, it is fact, after all. If 'you' is a fact to share, 'have' is a fact to share, and 'HIV' is a fact to share, then the sum of those facts must be a fact. 'You have HIV' is thus inevitably a fact under your base definition. the common definition of fact which I've been using works just fine for distinguishing opinions from facts, theories, and expressions. No, it does not. A proposition cannot simultaneously be fact and opinion, or the distinction is meaningless. If each element of a statement is a fact, the entire statement must be a fact. Truth values can't magically switch.
I would also not have listed facts like "the first word of his argument is 'the'" because, although they are facts, they aren't the facts that support the argument, and thus they don't answer the question. "The capital of Nebraska is Lincoln" doesn't answer the question either, but of course that doesn't mean it isn't a fact. Then so would be "you have HIV" under your definition. As soon as I say it, it is fact, after all. Nope. It's a fact that you've said something, but the thing you said may or may not be a fact itself. "You have HIV" is only a fact if your test comes back positive. "Billy told me you have HIV", however, is a fact as long as he really said that, even if he was lying when he said it. If 'you' is a fact to share, 'have' is a fact to share, and 'HIV' is a fact to share, then the sum of those facts must be a fact. 'You have HIV' is thus inevitably a fact under your base definition. Nice try, but since we both agree that words on their own aren't facts, your conclusion doesn't follow.
If you want to make those into facts, here's how you'd do it:
"Billy told me three words" = fact;
"The first word was 'you'" = fact;
"The second word was 'have'" = fact;
"The third word was 'HIV'" = fact;
Therefore: "Billy told me 'you have HIV'" = the sum of those facts.
Notice that those statements have to be about something to even have the potential to be facts. You know, a subject and a verb, describing something that either happened or did not happen. "You" by itself is not a statement, has no truth value, and cannot possibly be a fact. On the other hand, "The first word Billy told me was 'you'" is a statement about Billy's actions, its truth value can be determined by listening to what actually came out of his mouth, and if it's true then it's a fact. A proposition cannot simultaneously be fact and opinion, or the distinction is meaningless. If each element of a statement is a fact, the entire statement must be a fact. Truth values can't magically switch. I completely agree.
Some propositions are facts, and others are opinions. There are also facts about those propositions, but the existence of those related facts doesn't affect whether the proposition they describe is a fact or an opinion.
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But of course that doesn't appear anywhere in the definition. Facts can be relevant or irrelevant to any particular conversation, but that's orthogonal to their factualness. "The capital of Nebraska is Lincoln" doesn't suddenly stop being a fact the moment we start talking about something other than state capitals.
Nice try moving the goalposts, though.
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This is over.
You can write something which conveys the fact that a certain number beginning with 09 F9 decrypts HD movies, without even mentioning those digits, and if you put in enough effort and imagination then it'll be a bona fide artistic expression. By the same token, you could write a story or a song about any other expression, providing enough facts about that expression for someone to reconstruct it. And if you want to enforce copyright, then that story or song will have to be suppressed too, just like any other restatement of those facts. That sophistry has been outside the goal posts from the very beginning. Perhaps you misunderstood where the goal posts were.
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Reposed.