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Secret Copyright Treaty Leaks. It's Bad. Very Bad.
Jamie found a Boing Boing story that will probably get your blood to at least a simmer. It says "The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama's administration refused to disclose due to 'national security' concerns, has leaked. It's bad." You can read the original leaked document or the summary. If passed, the internet will never be the same. Thank goodness it's hidden from public scrutiny for National Security.
and that would be a good reason for me not to want to put myself under fair use. I don't want you to use my product either.
Incidentally, do you own a business? Or is your opinion worthless to me?
Obama is nothing like Bush. This is a transparent government that doesn't hide anything or plan on passing any bills that would take away rights and freedoms like Net Neutrality or a Secret Copyright Treaty that would screw over consumers and competitors.
We would hope for change that BushObama, er ah George W. Obama, er ah Barrack W. Bush, er ah President Obama is not becoming a Black Bush and finish off George W. Bush's third term as a Closet Republican Neocon in a Liberal Democrat suit. :)
Health Care will be universal, and we can ignore that 30% hidden tax in the bill to pay for it, as your employer would get a 30% tax on your salary as well, as that would never happen in the USA as it did in Sweden. Oh now Obama is going to do it with Congress for free, with more TARP and stimulus money for banks, GM, and other organizations that lobbied money to Congress and his administration, but ignore that, as it is the cost of Free Health Care, just Free as in Speech not as in Beer. :)
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
How's that "hope and change" working out for you?
I think it's actually going great: the more time passes, the more you have to hope for change.
The purpose of the ACTA treaty is actually to attack user-generated user-shared content, Youtube, Flickr, et al. Users, ISPs and content hosters will all shy away from such activity should such a treaty be ratified. The rise of crowd-sourced or independent content is the single biggest threat to the bottom line of Big Content, over and above any piracy or counterfeiting.
Time I spend on youtube not watching TV is time they can't make money out of. This scares them.
Witness the death of the Internet as we know it. Observe the demostrable impact of Koreas change in copyright law following the free trade agreement with the U.S. some years back. Increasingly draconian laws saw a down turn in user content generation, and providers shying away from serving koreans due to the liability and cost.
I'm disturbed that big corporates can do a end run around our (surposedly) democratic legislative systems. Note the plural. Remember a international treaty dictates law in the signing countries, overiding democratic soverenity.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
They can mix it all they want. I don't want them selling those mixes in competition with my original.
Can you imagine, you put all of your hard work into a song for three years, put it out there. It starts to sell. Then someone takes your song, adds a techno beat to the background, and sells it too.
It's the same, but different enough that you know what, most people like the mix version a little better. So your original doesn't sell at all.
The mix guy spent ten minutes adding a looping background beat. And you get nothing.
But really, I remain horribly confused. Everyone here replying to me -- and wow too many to count -- seem to feel that the original artist/inventor/author deserves no actual reward for all of the work. I can't imagine that you or your cohorts have every spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars from your pocket to invent something out of nothing. This isn't some hundred-hour piece of programming that rounds floating point numbers. This is tens of thousands of hours of work. I've paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars to suppliers and vendors, and advisors. During a recession I've paid people family income. You'd have me not even earn that money back?
We aren't talking about profitting. We're talking about making back the money spent first. You won't even give me that!
Now, if you said, "hey, sure, you get 33% of derivative works until you make back your inital costs, and then you get to fend for yourself" then I'd say hey, that's a pretty even attitude. I can see that, and even get behind it as something which would benefit societies in a very socialist manner.
But you're having me take a huge loss for having invested every dollar I have.