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Swedish File-Sharers File For Religious Status
nloop writes "A group of file-sharers in Sweden have requested that their religion, Kopimism, be officially recognized in Sweden. Although this status has been denied once in the past the struggle for religious freedom from persecution continues. Aside from deeming CTRL+C CTRL+V as sacred symbols other beliefs include the flow of information being ethically right and closed source software being 'akin to slavery.'"
All who follow the mighty Jobs know that the only proper religious symbols are cmd-c, cmd-v
Look I get that companies providing content (or more accurately, managing content distribution) are acting like thugs. I even agree that individual copyright violations for personal use aren't that big a deal. But are we going to go so far as to support something this ridiculous? To read summaries like this you get the sense there isn't any value to intellectual property at all. If content producers know that anything they produce is "up for grabs", what incentive do they have to keep producing? Why is the idea of purchasing intellectual property of any sort, from software to movies, "akin to slavery"? Its economic privilege to assume they can just do it "as a hobby" or "contribute to open source". Open source has a place, but so does closed source. Fighting back against individual prosecutions is worthwhile and laudable. Framing those who wish to produce intellectual property and then charge for it as "slavers" is dishonest and counterproductive.
This is not the way to get the ethos behind file-sharing taken seriously. It's counter-productive and childish.
Wait, how is desiring to collect more entertainment than could ever be consumed in a human lifetime without compensating the creators not a form of personal greed?
Don't miss out on Member of European Parliament Christian Engström's suggestion for a religious version of the Beginning for this religion.
Short version:
1. There was chaos and soup.
2. Somebody in the soup learned to copy. Thus was Life.
3. Having learned to copy, they built magnificent things.
4. We honor the beginning by copying and building magnificent things.
Not bad, I think.
So what you're trying to tell us is that it already has a lot in common with a vast array of existing religions?
do you see the irony of requiring compensation on something that will not be ever used on a lifetime, and the same thing also being reproduceable/copiable faster than the original author can say 'copyright' ?
Read radical news here
You refer to this question:
I guarantee it has been answered in the past ten years. You have just not been paying attention. But I will answer it again.
Having free access to more oxygen than can be consumed in a human lifetime is not considered personal greed. Why not? Because the good is abundant. Same for data. Once it exists, it is even more abundant than oxygen. It can be duplicated endlessly without costing anyone anything. Therefore, performing such replication is not greedy.
If my copy of it prevented you from having a copy of it, then grabbing up more than I need would be greed. Since that isn't the case, the word greed does not apply.
There you go, answered. You might disagree (and you would be wrong) but you can no longer claim that it hasn't been answered.
Having free access to more oxygen than can be consumed in a human lifetime is not considered personal greed. Why not? Because the good is abundant. Same for data. Once it exists, it is even more abundant than oxygen. It can be duplicated endlessly without costing anyone anything. Therefore, performing such replication is not greedy.
Movies aren't like oxygen. If people don't pay to watch them the businesses that make movies will do something else instead. Talking about the costs of making a copy (zero) and neglecting the cost of making the original movie (hundreds of millions of dollars) completely misses the point that the reason people are willing to invest money in making movies is because they expect to get that money back and more from selling the right to see it. If everyone pirated it rather than paying to see it there would be no reason to invest money in making future movies. Thus movies would not get made.
So the people that pirate are reducing the chance of future movies from being made by reducing the profits on the ones that exist. They are a bit like customers that go to a restaurant and eat their fill but don't pay - in the long run they will force the restaurant out of business. That could easily be described as greedy by other non free loading patrons. Not to mention by the owner.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
You are free to believe in copying and preach about it all you want, but if you break the law, you will still get cuffed and jailed.
A cult may believe in human sacrifice or slavery or under-aged marriage or the execution of homosexuals. Thank god (or gov to be more accurate) it has never given them the right to do it.
Something being part of your religion does not necessarily make it not illegal. In the USA, the standard used would be the Lemon test. If file sharing was criminal-illegal (rather than civil law illegal) and the 'church' challenged this on first amendment grounds, the state would need to show:
1 the law had a secular legislative purpose
2 the law's primary effect is not to advance or inhibit religion
3 the must not result in an "excessive government entanglement" with religion
An anti file sharing law would have no trouble passing these tests.
Of course, this is all in Sweden, so different laws/precedent will apply.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
How about said authors do the right thing: Just /stop/. If you're not making money off of it, and you need said money, stop making things! Maby we'll end up with /less/ crappy movies and formula fiction. The only thing that would be left is A, things that were done for free /just because/, and B, stuff that relies on other buisness models(Like advertising - you don't pay to watch it). You might even see crowdsourced stuff: Pay upfront and everyone gets it. /lot/ less corporate parasitism.
Sure, you wouldn't have many 100m+ budget movies... but do you need it? People will figure out ways to do things cheaper, and you'd have a
I suspect we'd see a lot less crap, an overall reduction in total volume, and a better signal-to-noise ratio. And that's a good thing.
copying data deprives no one of anything
What about the person/group/corporation that originally created the data? Do you think it costs no money or time to make a movie? Do they just push a button and the Automatic Movie Generator Machine System spits one out? Well that machine cost them money, too. And what about the people who built that machine. That took years of R&D.
There really is no scenario in which piracy does not deprive somebody of something. Sure, you're copying data rather than taking it, but that's why there's something called "licensing". It costs money to produce entertainment media and licensing is how you recoup your investment.
(Does this mean I agree with how the **AA are handling things? No. They're a bunch of assholes that need to be shot. But that doesn't mean piracy isn't depriving them of money. And that doesn't make Kopimism or whateverthefuck any less stupid.)
he reason people are willing to invest money in making movies is because they expect to get that money back and more from selling the right to see it
They don't make money and haven't for the longest time yet they still keep making movies so obviously they aren't doing it to make money.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting#Examples
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
There really is no scenario in which piracy does not deprive somebody of something.
Oh please, not this one again.
If you want n dollars for a movie, I have n * 0.1 dollars and I instead copy the movie, have I deprived you of n dollars? Had I offered you 0.1 * n dollars you would've spit in my face...
What if I copy your movie as an alternative to not watching it at all?
These are both perfectly reasonable and likely situations.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
So not only can the pirates watch movies for free, but they also reduce the chances a multi-billion dollars CGI piece of crap will be released in the future ? Sounds like a win-win to me.
If you want n dollars for a movie, I have n * 0.1 dollars and I instead copy the movie, have I deprived you of n dollars?
Yes you have. You (as an average person) might have bought the movie at a later point in time when you did have n dollars.
Statistically, some people will actually save up money in order to buy the movie so, statistically, you ARE depriving them of money. Not n dollars but rather n * chance_of_somebody_saving_up_money_and_buying_it_later dollars.
Now it could be that you as an individual simply don't want to save up money in order to buy something. But if that is the case, then we're discussing moral values, not economics.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
The main failure of the Western world is believing that you're not engaged in abuse of your fellow man just because you outsource poor treatment of workers which you would find unacceptable (and illegal) in your own country.
If WTO wanted to live up to its ostensible aims, it would equalise the playing field across countries by requiring broadly equal worker treatment across countries engaged in free trade. In fact, all it has produced is a careful concoction of newspeak and slave management.
There really is no scenario in which piracy does not deprive somebody of something.
Oh please, not this one again.
If you want n dollars for a movie, I have n * 0.1 dollars and I instead copy the movie, have I deprived you of n dollars? Had I offered you 0.1 * n dollars you would've spit in my face...
What if I copy your movie as an alternative to not watching it at all?
These are both perfectly reasonable and likely situations.
Not THIS argument again. People downloading movies aren't too poor to pay to watch them. They're just too cheap to pay to watch them. If something costs n dollars, and you have n*0.1 dollars, either wait until it costs less or you've saved more. It's easy to say "I wouldn't have bought it anyway," when you plan from the start to download it rather than buying it.
You folks always talk about the cost of producing movies/books/music, as if it were of any relevance to the debate. The cost of producing anything is an economic risk that lies squarely with the producer. Whether you are recording an album or manufacturing a car is irrelevant. What we should be talking about is the value of things. People pay significant premiums to have an Adidas logo on their running pants or a BMW sign on their car. The retail prices of both the pants and the car have very little to do with the cost of producing either but everything to do with how much people are willing to pay for having them, ie.: their value.
Apparently the perception of media's value has changed over the last decades. Where the producers - or more to the point: the distributors - see the value stable or even going up, the consumers see it going down. Way down. Films, music, books have become a commodity. IMDb gives 4,579 films released in 1970 and 20,578 in 2010. Those numbers may not be completely representative but they do get the point across: There is so much media competing with each other that the value of individual works has decreased. Add to that the vastly reduced cost of reproduction and you end up with a product which is seen as almost worthless by its supposed consumers.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
The above is actually a much more important point than it seems. According to this guy (about 9 mibutes in) the Copenhagen summit consensus panel estimated that loosening of trade barriers and subsidies in the US and EU would result in pulling hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in only 2-3 years and result in massive gains for the world economy. This would result also in wages going up in third world countries, making outsourcing less profitable and in turn putting money in the pockets of workers in the first world countries. The reason this isn't done is because it is more profitable for the corporations operating in those countries to have this poverty. To bring this train of thought back on topic, economically, sharing and globalism have an end result of making everyone better off. The question with copyright law as with free/fair trade is corporate profits vs social gains. Now choose.