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Pirate Bay Founders Lose Final Appeal
therufus writes "Sweden's Supreme Court announced its decision not to grant leave to appeal in the long-running Pirate Bay criminal trial. This means that the previously determined jail sentences and fines handed out to Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström will stand."
That's the second time today. How many final appeals are they going to reject?
It's a sad day. Fuck judges, lawyers, politicians, and may death come painfully to them and ehti family by natural causes of course.
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2648903&cid=38891841
Dear MPAA/RIAA drone,
You are cordially invited to lick my taint while working the shaft with one hand and the balls with the other.
--Slashdot Community
You, sir, have far too much time on your hands.
This is guaranteed to get modded down because it's anti-piracy.
No, it should get modded down because its a canned response from fucking Mafiaa shill.
Slashdot troll investigation?
What did you do, look in the mirror?
Strawman arguments are lies.
Oh look, copypasta from fuck knows how many years ago. Slashdot isn't dead, the art of trolling is.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
Simple black and white worldview horseshit.
There are more libertarians here than there are at a Tea Party rally. And while there are folks here who without a doubt pirate because they're cheap and build rationalizations around it, there's an awful lot more who wouldn't dream of stealing.
It's not about getting free beer, it's about freedom of ideas and expression. And it's about draconian, unworkable solutions that will only stifle freedom of expression, innovation and open communication without censorship.
Techniques like dns blocking, holding a repository site responsible for every single client's actions, enforcing search engine censorship simply won't stop piracy. But it will build a framework to further stifle freedom of expression on the web, and to enhance mega corporation and government control.
You are attempting to paint those who are for an open internet in simplistic black and white terms, to impose a simpleton's view on others.
Check your premises.
GPL code must be protected because it's free shit, yet copyright must also be abolished so we can get free shit--even though the GPL is a copyright license!
Result of GPL enforcement: More work available to the public.
Result of shortening copyright: More work available to the public.
Do you understand now or do you still have some homework to do?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
"your posts have a score of -1 by default. When this is the case, no-one bothers to mod you down anymore"
-This is because by default most people will not see these posts.
Modding is definitely misused. People will post their inflammatory opinion, and get lots of up mods from people with the same attitude, as a way to say, "yes I share your opinion".
The problem: People spend there mod points in a way that is more like stackoverflow, where they agree with or support someone else's opinion. Stackoverflow is great, but that is not the system in place here at Slashdot.
The fix: People should understand what insightful and clever is, and not mod things up or down just based on whether they share the same opinion. That's why they are called moderation points, and not votes.
Really you should have to go through a little quiz that makes sure you understand what the definition of insightful is. Some examples that you mod, and see how well you do.
Well, it looks like they haven't updated http://thepiratebay.se/legal in quite a while...
You are stealing from artists who created content.
So what if i download some Michael Jackson or John Lennon music or how about the game L.A Noire. Am i hurting the artists who are dead or the game studio which is shut , where is the harm to the artist here ?
Suck it up. Some people don't agree with copyright. Why follow laws which are unjust?
(insert trollface guy)
If I die, does that mean you can come to my house and take my stuff?
If I die should my job still pay me?
Putting the pirate bay founders in jail is not based on locking down/censoring the internet any more than arresting the guy on the street selling bootlegs is. Being anti-piracy does not mean pro-SOPA. Monitoring "every single" thing on every site is impossible, but the Pirate Bay is named the Pirate Bay and there is a lot of evidence besides that indicating they encouraged and new about rampant copyright infringement. Black and white worldview indeed.
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
And while there are folks here who without a doubt pirate because they're cheap and build rationalizations around it, there's an awful lot more who wouldn't dream of stealing.
It's not about getting free beer, it's about freedom of ideas and expression.
I consider myself a Libertarian, and yes I make a living because of copyright. I also think that 100+ years is too long, I also think that piracy is rampant. A LOT of people don't realize it is wrong.
But the general feeling I get from the average slashdotter is "copyright is evil because I want free stuff." I hear time and again how the publishers are screwing the creators, or the general public, so the slashdotter is going to stick it to the man and copy the item anyways. Or the price is too high, so they will copy it. As long as they get their tv and music and games for free.
I think that things like SOPA are bad. But not that copyright should be abolished. I also think there are a lot of people here who thing they way you think in that it is a matter of principle. BUT the noisiest argument tends to "I want my shit for free" Of course these people then call the "mafiaa" greedy
(tempting though it is to reply to your bulletpoints which show very shallow insights, I would rightfully expect some off-topic moderation to my post)
I think the thing to remember here is that the pirate bay people are almost certainly guilty of breaking said laws. Not saying the laws are just, but the fact that they appeal it repeatedly and keep getting the same decision to a degree shows that at least that facet of the system is working as designed. Piracy will always be around, but when piracy gets to a certain height it indicates there is an underlying problem that needs to be addressed more urgently. It's like running a restaurant that keeps having problems with cockroaches - sure the cockroaches shouldn't be there, but there's probably an underlying problem (lack of proper sanitation) that is encouraging the problem. But almost all the laws on the books right now advocate busting out bigger and bigger cans of RAID, they ignore the underlying cause.
Look at china, piracy there is so completely out of control it's a joke. Carts on streetcorners full to overflowing with pirated media for sale dirt cheap. Imagine seeing that on the streets of London or Washington. Bad laws, lead to bad behavior, leading to worse laws. And then they justify the worse laws because of the bad behavior, ignoring the bad laws that initiated the problem to begin with. Until they get rid of the root cause, they'll never bring the intermediate issues into check. But like consulting, there's a lot less profit to be made solving a problem than there is in mitigating it, and so that's what we're doing. One of the major problems of democracy. :(
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Gee, I wonder what the reactions on Slashdot will be. I can only guess.
You don't have to guess; you can just read the comments from the mysterious past, AKA this morning.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Just like sex, I believe in paying for it. (joke)
But, seriously, if you use someone's work, then you should be willing to pay for their work. That can take any number of routes, but the emphasis is on 'being fair'. (This implies that work not be overpriced.)
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
The sad thing is, you have a good case, but you squander it on strawmans, deliberate incorrect use of words and ad hominem. In reading your post, I had to remind myself that your viewpoint makes sense despite your terrible argumentation or I guess really despite the absence of any actual arguments. If your only objective was to rant in public, then I'd say you succeeded.
Well at least we know that the /. dupe machine is still working well.
Om, nomnomnom...
If I die, will I go to heaven?
...
So bitter. So venomous. Is that you, Chris Dodd? YAR! HAR! HAR!
Wrong analogy. The right one is: "If I die, does that mean you can come to my house and take photographs of my stuff?"
Not to feed a troll, but...
1) You have too much time on your hands.
2) The posts you linked are irrelevant.
3) Complaining about moderation, poll options, isn't going to make you any friends.
4) Your usernames in the citations relate to being a troll or a karma whore.
5) Trying to score FP with copy and paste drivel isn't going to make you any friends.
You may think you're smart, funny, and devastatingly handsome. Since we haven't seen a picture of you, all I can say is that you're wrong on at least 2 counts. In that, you've probably managed to get some people to specifically mod *you* down.
Finally, you don't seem to really understand who the "moderators" are. It's all of us. As long as you can manage to write something intelligent occasionally, you'll get mod points. It's not a secret gang of moderating thugs out to ruin your life. I've seen my own posts go from -1 to 5 with a couple dozen moderations, usually based on the controversy of the topic.
I fully expect this post to be modded down, because it did not lend anything to the topic at hand. That's fine, because I will post my opinion in another comment, which isn't tainted by your stench.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
I think (s)he means that YOU won't care if (s)he comes to your house and takes your stuff. Other people may care, but claiming that the original owner of the stuff cares is probably a shaky position to hold.
@v1 China will rule the world anytime soon. So all these laws enforcements in the occidental coutries are useless, or will be.
I've had anti-piracy comments modded up in the past. Despite what some people say, slashdot is not a hive mind with a single opinion on everything.
The problem that many people here have with anti-piracy efforts however are quite reasonable:
1. The legal liability of having committed some form of infringement can exceed by orders of magnitude the liability of shoplifting the same content.
2. The legislation aimed at stopping piracy has considerable collateral damage.
3. Copyright duration is excessive far beyond reasonableness. Two schoolteachers wrote a little song in 1893 called "Good Morning to All". A few variations later and it morphed into the more familiar "Happy Birthday to You". Copyright for this was later filed in 1935 and under current US law does not expire until 2030. I am not aware of actually having met anyone who was alive when this song was written, though I'm told I briefly met my great-grandmother shortly after I was born. She would have been a young child when the song was written.
4. There are many indications that it's not necessarily even a revenue loss, or that if there is any revenue lost that the amount is significant. All damage estimates go by the assumption that a download == a lost sale. There is no guarantees that someone who pirated something would necessarily have bought it otherwise. This does not make their actions legal or moral, but from a fiscal perspective no harm has been done to the copyright holder.
The dichotomy you think you see (or claim to see) on slashdot is not a matter of "GPL infringement bad, media infringement good!" It's a matter of commercial vs non-commercial infringement. Most here will be hesitant to punish or call for strong penalties on a non-commercial infringer of any stripe, while being perfectly willing to see commercial infringers strung up. That can include both a company claiming GPL code as their own, or a guy selling illegal burned CDs/DVDs out of a warehouse somewhere.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
More simple than that, it's not about piracy being good or bad, but about piracy being inevitable.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
At least the editors waited for the story to fall all the way to the bottom of the front page before duping it!
this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice
Because they're there.
The way to protest laws isn't by breaking them, because this makes you a criminal.
Like it or not, the majority will not listen to someone branded as a criminal.
You'd rather your job reap all the benefits of your contribution than have your family get it? More power to corps, smart.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Result of GPL enforcement: More work available to the public.
Result of shortening copyright: More work available to the public.
The difficulty is the big studios don't want this otherwise there will be plenty of entertainment experiences for us all to enjoy without paying our tithe to them. To keep making money, churning out the same experiences over and over, the old experiences need to be as hard to access as possible.
For your hours worked, yes. If I die feb 27th I expect my employer to pay my estate for all of the wages I earned to that point, and if I am due monies later for the work done in that period (say the contract isn't paid until june) my estate would still get paid for my portion of the work.
If my estate, which at that point is transfered to someone else (who may have legally paid for my services such that my work was work for hire for them) they may continue to be paid for that work even though I'm long since dead. My work is also never entirely my own. Michael Jackson and John Lennon are good examples. If they had gotten divorces rather than died they would still be obliged to pay child support and alimony up until today. Michael jackson was not the only person who contributed to his music. All of his investors, his spouse(s), other employees etc. He is credited with having been the guy on stage, but for him to be there hundreds of other people are involved.
Should you have to pay less for a car if one of the designers died 3 years ago even though they were paid by GM?
As to L.A. Noire. The studio is shuttered but money you pay *does* go to the studio. It didn't disappear. It still exists as a legal entity with debts (that's why they went out of business), and that money goes to the artists who are still owed back wages, the owners or investors who paid the artists in the first place to make it. As of october 75% of Team Bondi debts were to former employees who weren't paid. So not paying for the game is a giant fuck you to those guys who made the game and never got paid for it, when if you did pay for the game that money would be disbursed to them. The publisher (Rockstar) who contributed to the actual making of the game, paid team bondi and participated heavily in development also would get money which they are entitled to.
How do you think the basically bankrupt interplay stays afloat? People keep buying baulders gate etc. on gog.com or similar and that gives them a trickle of revenue.
The Pirate Bay is a search engine. I remember a time when that wasn't illegal.
Don't be surprised to see this bullshit come to more popular search engines. Hell, Google pulls search results because of DMCA notices -- who knows why -- and there's already a push from the content industries for search engines to "promote" "valid" sources of content over "invalid" sources.
Lawyers are the worst thing to happen to the Internet.
Breaking a law does not make someone a 'criminal' in many cases, such as breaking non-criminal (civil etc.) law.
Where's Anonymous when they're needed?
Wouldn't the work copyrighted under the GPL just fall into the public domain?
It's not big, but it's clever!
A LOT of people don't realize it is wrong.
Correction: A lot of people do not believe that it is wrong. This is the case despite the fact that we have experienced 20+ years of propaganda intended to convince us that violating copyright is exactly the same as physical property theft (e.g. "You wouldn't steal a car, would you??").
On Slashdot, piracy is awesome and copyright is evil, yet GPL theft is a terrible thing. GPL code must be protected because it's free shit, yet copyright must also be abolished so we can get free shit--even though the GPL is a copyright license!
If there was no copyright, there would be no GPL (by definition) But also, if there were not copyright, there would be no need to have the GPL.
Learn to love Alaska
Copyright is evil because it puts a monopoly on culture. I'll argue that if older material were released to the public domain as the founders intended, there would be more than enough free material to bring down piracy on newer creations. People pirate the new stuff because the old stuff has been out of print for so long (which benefits no one), they've forgotten about it. Put it in the public domain rather than let it gather dust.
> Monitoring "every single" thing on every site is impossible
How wrong you are. I suggest you read up about "Lawful Intercept" (which is as backward a term as you can get). The US Feds (FBI,NSA) can watch the world's traffic in real-time thanks to trade laws they have that require friendly non-US countries to install Lawful Intercept gear in their ISPs. The data is then squirreled away in their colossal data farms. What used to be impossible now is completely possible. Plus, many first world countries store the IP traffic that passes their borders. It wouldn't surprise me if this was shared (in the same way signal intelligence is shared via the ECHELON network). Do some Googling about those keywords I've mentioned. Oh, yeah, and welcome to 1984 for real.
Of course these people then call the "mafiaa" greedy
Ah ... excuse me, but they are greedy, to an extent that makes British Petroleum look positively philanthropic. The feeling I get from most Slashdotters is far more balanced than you are trying to portray: getting things for free is irrelevant. Being able to communicate and use the Internet as we see fit is of paramount importance, and keeping the media companies and governments in their place is necessary in order to do that. I'm a software engineer, and I make my living via copyrights and patents as well ... yet I recognize that the needs of the copyright industry should not be placed above all else.
... they tried to make it illegal. In fact, anything that they perceive as a threat to their hegemony, their iron-fisted control of content distribution, is to be eliminated regardless of cost, and regardless of who gets hurt.
... or a few rich sociopaths with all the vision and foresight of a toadstool.
Frankly, entertainment is just not that important in the overall scheme of things, in spite of the megalomaniacal mental state that seems to permeate that industry. You may find this hard to believe, but the Internet is actually used for other things than copyright infringement (that's the correct term under U.S. law, you know: "piracy" is reserved for those who commit infringement for profit.) But PIRACY just sounds so much nastier, doesn't it? Evokes images of swashbuckling, one-eyed peg-legged types murdering and raping and pillaging and all that. It's just cartel PR, though.
What I would hope you would do, before commenting upon this subject any further, is research the history of the content industry (all of it, books and print media, music, and motion pictures.) What you will soon discover, if you're sufficiently intellectually honest, are organizations who need to be opposed, at all levels, out of simple self-preservation. This is not about free stuff. This is about having any stuff. Yes, it's that serious.
Keep in mind that the Internet, to the content cartels, is just another annoying technology to be opposed, limited, neutered, and if possible eliminated. Cassette tape, VHS, writeable DVDs and CDs, Digital Audio Tape, you-name-it
So get it out of your head that this is about free copies. It's not. It never has been. It's about whether the greatest invention in human history will be continue to be used for the good of all
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Don't be evil story - Jan 24th.
http://search.slashdot.org/story/12/01/23/2045235/facebook-twitter-and-myspace-to-google-dont-be-evil?sdsrc=rel
Even the first few comments after the announcement article on google+ integrating search were not what you'd call positive.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/01/10/1627213/google-merges-google-into-search?sdsrc=rel
Google+ Antitrust lawsuit discussed as well..
http://search.slashdot.org/story/12/01/14/1726244/ftc-expands-its-google-antitrust-investigations
Original Google anti-trust lawsuit.
http://search.slashdot.org/story/11/06/23/2137243/ftc-to-open-antitrust-investigation-against-google?sdsrc=rel
While the iOS/Android market share stuff is harder to find, a quick search finds
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/12/01/24/230257/apple-announces-most-profitable-quarter-in-history with the first few comments quite favourable in apples direction, but also noting its hard to compare from this data android/apple numbers - and then it descends into some M$/Apple argument.
I do however recall reading on slashdot about the entire iOS/Android market share swinging in Apples favour by a few fractions of a percentage, I'm just lost trying to find the actual article I read this in.
I'm not too sure where you're getting your information from, but maybe you don't read the same slashdot I read. If anything, you are more likely to be modded down because you ARE a troll and simply trying to spread disinformation.
As per the article:
"One of the defendants informs TorrentFreak that they will now appeal at the European Court of Justice. But this, however, won’t prevent the sentences from being executed in Sweden."
"Today’s news doesn’t necessarily means that the defendants will have to go to prison. It is common in the Swedish justice system to deduct 12 months from any prison sentence on cases over 5 years old. Since the case in question meets that criteria the Pirate Bay defendants would qualify, but the decision lies with the court."
Effectively, however, as far as Sweden is concerned the verdict is good, it is still undermined if jail time will be served.
cc
If that's true, I'd like to steal Star Wars Episode I from Lucas so he won't have it anymore.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
And it's so easy when you're evil....
I do it all for free, your tears are all the pay I'll ever need.
Way to fall for his reverse psychology. I guess because he accused us of being biased we should all turn an about face and donate money to Chris Dodd's presidential campaign.
You know, there are places in the world where copyright infringement for personal use is perfectly legal and explicitly guaranteed in law. So, chastising the folks from the pirate bay for doing stuff which is quite legal in most of the world is not a good way to try to demonstrate your worldly knowledge.
And moreover, the only reason there is this hissy fit due to copyright is due to the US's pressure on the world to pass legislature which forces a perfectly legal, acceptable and even desirable act, particularly to copyright holders, to become illegal, all this without providing any shred of reasoning to back it up. Well, at least if you don't count blackmail as reasoning.
It's also inevitable that people will lie to you, but that won't stop them from being punished when they're caught doing it.
The fact that it's easy to pirate software and media doesn't make it right to pirate software and media, and no amount of rationalization or twisted logic will make downloading a cracked copy of Battelfield 3 a "courageous stand against corporate greed". It's all about cheap entitlement-babies who think that they should be able to take anything that isn't somehow nailed down for free. It's not about culture, it's about online shoplifting.
Everybody gets what the majority deserves.
Gee! I didn't know Chris Dodd read /.
I guess happy to hear the White House declaration. You should get yourself an account!
You seem to be living in a delusional fantasy world where everyone on Slashdot gives a crap about this, just because there are a few vociferous young commenters who guard these stories from other's opinions.
Most Slashdotters just see it as a brief news item, think "huh, that Pirate Bay thing again?" and move on to the next trivial bit of information about Firefox's latest release and why the kids think Firefox isn't cool anymore.
But still, thank you for presuming that we are all a hivemind, and all share the same opinion just because we didn't care to read all of the comments once we saw how redundant and sophomoric they are (on both sides of the fence).
Goddammit, I just spent the last of my 15 mod points, and THEN I read this?!
Well said, mooingyak. Couldn't have said it better myself.
The US Feds (FBI,NSA) can watch the world's traffic in real-time thanks to trade laws they have that require friendly non-US countries to install Lawful Intercept gear in their ISPs. The data is then squirreled away in their colossal data farms.
Would you care to estimate what the world's internet traffic amounts to, per day.
Just pointing out, sometimes the very act of protesting is illegal. So how do you protest unjust laws then?
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience
I'll bite.
If you want to play the car analogy, it can't be about stealing the car. Pirating software diminishes the value of the work to the author, so to do a proper car analogy, you would need to do something to the car that diminishes its value to its owner, while not actually taking anything physical away.
One example is keying the car. I can be an ass by taking a key, pressing it against the side of the car and walking along, minding my own business. After I'm done, the car is still driveable, it gets the owner from point A to point B just fine, none of the performance characteristics are diminished and I'm all the happier for having revelled in the screeching noise I got to make. Did I physically steal the car or any piece of it? No. Was I within my rights then?
A second example is taking the car for a joyride, but taking care not to demolish it. After the joyride I respectfully return it to the place I stole it from before the driver gets back. Now, the driver still has his/her car, there are just a few miles on it... I'm all the happier for having driven it without having to buy. Was I within my rights? I didn't *steal* it after all, did I?
So no, pirating isn't stealing in the common sense, but it is taking something of value from the owner. How do you quantify that? Well, if the owner gets a lawyer after you, they'll try to make it into the most horrendous theft of property and argue that the car is almost worthless after your escapade. That's what lawyers do, they try to extract the maximum that the law allows for their client. I will be the first to argue that the owner cannot argue any more damages and loss of revenue than the car's resale value (actually, just a fraction of it), but I will not stand up for you if the court decides you need to do some time and neither should anyone else.
If you shorten copyrights, it also means less GPL work available to the public.
I guess the homework is on you: basic logic 101.
I'm sorry, bot you need to get to your "basic logic 100" first. Shortened copyright simply means more work in public domain, initially GPL or not.
Secondly, for 30-year copyright or 50-year copyright, who the fuck cares if Linux 2.0 loses their copyright protection in 2052??
Seriously - I have mod points, but I'm going to forsake them for replying to your post...
You are currently at +4 Interesting. That alone says enough for me that your first and last sentences are just plain WRONG. While you gleefully generalise slashdot mods (and even general commentors), the fact is that people have different opinions, and it's how they present them that gives you points in this forum. You have a valid point, but I hope you take the time to read the people who have replied to you, and acknowledge the merits of their argument as well as their position.
People who constantly say "I'm going to get modded down for this...." annoy me. You underestimate the value of discussion, and you diminsish us all.....
This got modded down because you are not part of a discussion. You are preaching to us all. Have a discussion with people and if you don't like the responses you are hearing walk away.
You are extremely ignorant
a) of laws in other countries.
In Canada is is perfectly _legal_ to download copyrighted material.
b) of the breakdown of /. and their 3 camps ...
i) The small minority who say abolish this nonsensical artificial "right". _Publishers_ invented copyright because they didn't want _other_ publishers from printing & making money.
ii) The majority who say copyright is reasonable, but its current duration is absurd.
iii) The extremely minority who think the current duration is just fine.
> You are stealing from artists who created content.
You keep using this word 'stealing.' I don't thin it means what you think it means.
How am I "stealing" when I share a number?? Who's property have I deprived??
> No system can work in which nobody gets compensated for their work.
And your proof is where again?
> You're not contributing anything back when you pirate something.
So if I buy a DVD/Bluray and let my family watch, are they "leeching"?
What if I invite 50 of my friends over? Are they leeching?
Why am I not allowed to share with strangers?
What about libraries? They sure as hell share content with many, many people, yet the original artist never receives compensation. With your logic libraries should be illegal.
--
AC = Arrogant Cunt
No system can work in which nobody gets compensated for their work.
Strawman. False Dilemma.
No one is talking about a system when producers never get paid anything for their work.
Can someone explain to me how that is not harmful to my business?
But but... Information wants to be free! And since software is information, all software should be free!
(the official Slashdot groupthink)
Please do not confuse the typical slashdotter with a normal person from society in general. For starters, a normal person has a girlfriend or a wife.
> And does anyone remember when Slashdot pulled its Spider-Man 2 review because of plagiarism?
Plagiarism is unrelated.
Copyright has to do with permission to copy something. If you don't have permission to copy a copyrighted work (from the copyright holder) it is a copyright violation to do so. This is mitigated by Fair Use in many cases, but the principle remains.
Plagiarism is fraud. It is passing off someone else's work as your own. It may also be copyright violation, but it doesn't have to be. The two are orthogonal.
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
As a developer who struggles with this, the problem is that you are making too many assumptions about lost sales that might not hold up in reality.
How many people who downloaded the product used it more than once? How many of them would have bought it anyway? How many of them went out afterward and bought a legitimate copy? How many of them bought a competitor's product because it was superior?
It's easy to get defensive when you see a cracked copy of your work (and I always do). But it's not a one-size-fits-all issue. You might be better off focusing on selling more copies to people who might buy them, then assuming you'd be making a sale for every pirated download.
Some even murmur about the advertising potential of piracy, as if to try to do something about it that isn't just pointing fingers. The real world's a brutal place, and any software dev who makes a product worth pirating knows this. But at some point we have to stop obsessing over it like we have any real power to stop it.
Besides that, you're the one fooling yourself if you don't think that the "solutions" to piracy aren't losing sales and eroding real life freedoms. You're living in your own little bubble and being defensive, not a harbinger of undesirable truths.
This is a bit of a whoosh.
The "You wouldn't steal a car, would you?" line is directly from anti piracy clips included on many DVDs and possibly back on VHS tapes.
If I have a copy of Word and I give a copy to my friend, how does that diminish the value of my copy? It doesn't. It may diminish the value to the author of Word, if he's trying to sell it, but not to me. Who's the "owner" of software? The license owner? The author? And that's the problem with physical analogies - they don't work because of one fundamental difference: you can not make physical copies at virtually no cost. If at some point in the future some genius invents a device that allows us to make copies of things for free, I would support people's right to do just that.
True, the GPL makes guarantees that would be gone without copyright, but that's a side-effect. See history of copyleft (err... there's probably better references but I don't know them off the top of my head). Basically, RMS's preferred fix would be to eliminate copyright, but in the absence of being able to do that, he devised the GPL.
Would you care to estimate what the world's internet traffic amounts to, per day.
One strawberry.
This. And add SSL to the mix as well...
You neglect that some jurisdictions have ruled that downloading copyrighted content for personal use is not illegal. Of course, somehow it becomes legitimately illegal once the U.S. government economically blackmails my country into passing legislation that over rides our prior court rulings.. Please do not assign your simple, binary worldview to the rest us. Frankly, to be equated with your stupidity is insulting.
Noam Chomsky's Libertarian Socialism. No government, everything decided by popular consensus of the people. Want to paint your house blue, only if 90% of your neighbors think its a good idea (But that's silly, really, in Libertarian Socialism, there is no personal property). Want to be a software engineer, only if popular consensus agrees with you. Its the ultimate in mob-rule, an its the banner all these occupy protests have been waiving around. I say fear your govt, fear the corporations, but please don't forget to fear the Noam Chomsky freaks.
>You know, there are places in the world where copyright infringement for personal use is perfectly legal and explicitly guaranteed in law.
[citation needed]
And so, we enter War.
"Libertarians" /= "Noam Chomsky's Libertarian Socialists". Libertarians believe in limited government. Libertarian socialists believe in NO government an no property rights. Please stop mixing up libertarians with the wackadoodles in the so called 99%.
Libertarians are jerks
The problem is that there is no -1 wrong mod. What do you do when you've already moderated correctly in a story, and you run across a post that says "Abraham Lincoln was a Democrat, and all those liberal democrats want a strong central government."
It's a statement of one fact presented as fact that's provably wrong, and one opinion presented as fact that's also wrong. So, do you post a correction, invalidating your other moderations, or just mod them "-1 wrong"? Since there is no "wrong" mod, people pick others.
Learn to love Alaska
IIf at some point in the future some genius invents a device that allows us to make copies of things for free, I would support people's right to do just that.
We are working on it ( http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Global_Village_Construction_Set ), but it will not be a single device, at least not in the near term. It will be an "ecology" of devices that will make parts for each other. That is because ceramics, metals, plastic, wood, etc. generally need different processing techniques, and it's not easy to put that all into one device. But nothing stops you from having a large workshop with various machines, and then a robot does the assembly at the end, and have it all driven by a single 3D object file.
As a practical matter, there will always be some parts you have to buy. For example, you won't be replicating what intel does in it's factories any time soon. But you can place bought parts on storage shelves for the assembly robot to grab when it needs them. What needs doing is lots of grunt level design and programming to make the "ecology" as closed-loop as possible and minimize the bought items.
Hey! This story posted at 8:53am today with the title "Swedish Supreme Court Refuses Appeal In Pirate Bay Case". That story even had more links than this post does.
I'll reply to both above posts here. As to whoosh.. What I was trying to say is that although the "stealing" analogy is a simplification, it's not entirely wrong as it does cause loss to the owner of the car.
As for copying: you aren't the owner of the game. You are just paying for the privilege of playing (license). It's a little like renting or timesharing the said car. You don't exactly own the game, just like you don't exactly own a timeshared car even though you do get to drive it around and you can tell your friends it's yours. This is not an exact analogy, but I think you get the idea. Now if you let your friend have a copy of the game, the person losing the value is the owner of the work, i.e. the author. In the case of the timeshared car, if you let your friend joyride the car off the record you are putting the other co-owners in a losing situation that is probably against the agreement you have with them about using the car.
So, in both of the above situations, you yourself aren't losing value, you're absolutely right about that! But when the MPAA puts its "you wouldn't steal.." motto, they don't mean stealing from an owner of a copy of the tape. They mean themselves, of course. They are basically saying that by copying you are robbing them of the opportunity to charge you. Although that is not stealing literally, if someone robs you of your right to make a buck (note that you do have that right), you can sue for damages in the amount that you justifiably argue that you would have earned, if you weren't robbed of the opportunity.
Now, the amount of damages that the MafiAAs are asking for is usually ludicrous, since all the pirates would NOT buy their music. Quite often these associations just multiply the number of downloads by the price. While this is obviously wrong, you can still argue that someone putting up an operation like The Pirate Bay is actually providing the product for free to a significant number of folks who would otherwise buy, if they couldn't get it for free. How significant? The Swedish court seems to think this to be about $7M, which equals "only" about 350-700k CDs. Now, you and I know that The Pirate Bay probably facilitates for people the download of a fair bit more CDs than that in a week. The court (thankfully) seems to recognise that not all the downloaders are potential buyers. This is why the actual damages are "just" $7M and not some ludicrous number in the billions that the propaganda folks would like the public to believe. Still, I'd hate to owe 7 mil, as I'm finding a $300k mortgage to be plenty.
While it's true that copyright seems long to the point that works on which copyright is expiring have lost 99.99% of their value and are useless as constituents of other works. That doesn't make piracy right though. Check what people usually pirate: it's the shiny new stuff that has been out for days. How many 20 year old movies do you find on TPB? How many 10 year old? How many 10 day old? Get my drift?
Scratching a car increases that rate of entropy effecting it, which will eventually render it useless. "Borrowing" a car for a joy ride produces the same effect as the previous, even if you were kind enough to refill the gas tank. Entropy is a physical trait, which is why ownership has been an important view for most cultures. Owning an object, or in the past another person, conferred responsibility, and exclusivity in order to maintain said responsibility.
Ideas do not share this property, in so much that entropy can only effect the artifacts that are used to contain such ideas: books, CDs, human memory, etc. We do attach ownership to ideas, also as a form of conferring responsibility. A call for, or the enticement to murder, carries with it a form of responsibility as a form of causality. Yet the ability to cause direct damage to an idea is impossible, because it does not exist in such a form. Therefore it's value, as far as it's condition is concerned, cannot be diminished.
Perceived value of an idea is indeed mutable, and subjective. In fact many of the arguments for and against copyright seem to fall into this category. Creation of useful ideas, also subjective, is beneficial to the reputation of the creator. Reputations have also been an important part of civilization, in so much as measure of trustworthiness. This is the main reason plagiarism is looked down upon, as it is the acquiring of undue trust though duplicitous means.
I don't believe anyone its arguing for the legalization of plagiarism, hopefully. The argument comes done to one of belief in undue rewards. Copyright and patents are a monetary reward for the creation of usefully ideas, beyond the original reward of reputation. To maintain such a reward system, the curtailment of actions is placed upon the entire civilization. These actions may or may not effect the actual monetary reward, very little actual research is done, or ever used if it is done.
So this breaks down to two arguments:
1 – Now reward beyond that of reputation should be conferred to the creator
2 – The creator deserves monetary rewards, and a system must be in place to enforce this
Most arguments are of the second type usually ignore the first type. In fact many proponents of the second type will denigrate those who believe the in first. Man, that was a long way to get here. I fit in the first category by the way, and you seem to be in the second. I believe most arguments of the second type fit this quote.
“We've already agreed that you're a whore, now we're just negotiating price.”
Price, being the freedoms you wish to curtail so someone can make more money, whore.
Note there is a huge amount of redundancy in most traffic. You don't have to store every single bit, dontcha know?
Because people have limited budgets to spend on their daily lives. If they pirate one thing, that just frees up money to buy another thing. Ending piracy does not "increase sales", because people don't magically have more money to spend than before.
Is it REALLY that hard to understand? If you want higher sales then demand Congress raise taxes on the rich and increase wages of the poor and middle class. Then everyone will have more money to spend, including on your own products.
You went awry with your analogy as soon as you considered how piracy diminished value to the owner. You need to rewrite your analogy in terms of how it affects the manufacturer. For example, instead of asking how the joyride scenario affects the owner, how does it affect Ford?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Neither the fact that it is easy to pirate software, nor that we've caved on naming it piracy makes it wrong to pirate software and media.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
All I have to say is that if there is a crack for every piece you write then a) you write bad software. Or b) you write wildly overpriced software. Sounds like its number two. So at the risk of karma I will say it this way. I see no value in your software. I would rather hear you say, 'Would you like fries with that.' than deal with overpriced software, (overpriced anything above $50)
And even it isn't, this isn't that time any more. You will only make good money working for a big corporation. So quit whining. Software piracy is a mixture the we need to see phenomena, laziness and copyright infringement. (Piracy by definition involves water, I wouldn't use it any other way)
So How about this, I don't care. The bulk of the populous doesn't care. So you can either accprct it as the cost of doing business, or get that nice steady govt job. I suggest number two.
holy crap, you duped an article posted 9 HOURS AGO. a few weeks or a month is one thing, but not even half a day? do the editors even actually read /. themselves anymore?
Thank you.
If it's any consolation, I made it to 5 anyway.
Randomly aside, I've yet to receive 15 mod points in one shot. I'm guessing it's because I rarely use up all 5 when they give me that much.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
So get it out of your head that this is about free copies. It's not. It never has been.
Yes it is. The stuff about an open Internet is 50%genuine principles, and 50% a pompous rationalization from greedy geeks who want free copies.
entertainment is just not that important in the overall scheme of things
Agreed. And you'll see that here on /. when people get all supercilious and uppity about how bad movies are, they're all rubbish, etc., etc.
But they still pirate it.
Way to avoid the hard question, coward.
“I, for one, welcome our new tyrannical mob ruling overlords”
In the case of Michael Jackson, I remember a time when he received a billion dollars up front for his next 7 albums (tried to find a link, but google is saturated with current stories...). He hadn't even made them yet. The idea is that they pay him up front and then they receive money afterwards. He gets a reduced payout, but it is also de-risked. No matter what kind of crap he put out, he would still have the money.
Clearly the people who payed him (I believe it was Sony) was expecting to make a profit. The more money they think they will make in the future, the more money they can afford to pay the artist up front. It is true that you can't hurt someone who is dead, but if the studios feel that they will make less money, they will offer less up front. It is also true that reduced sales (for whatever reason) by the recording companies will reduce the amount of money they offer to artists in the future.
I don't like the way the recording industry works. I don't like the current copyright laws (especially the length of copyright). This, despite the fact that for most of my life I have made my living off of copyright (as a programmer). I especially don't like the direction that copyright law seems to be going. I believe there are other, better ways to do business.
But, I also believe it is completely factual to say that artists who rely on the existing system will be hurt by any lack of sales resulting from copyright infringement (whatever that may be).
No, it should get modded down because its a canned response from fucking Mafiaa shill.
Even if it is a canned response, it's still true.
the man speaks the truth, right down to his prediction of reflexive downmodding.
i bet it burns the average angry /. users ass when an AC lights them up and their downmods go wasted.
get butthurt, pussies. year of linux on the desktop, etc. lulz.
Since popularity is driven by marketing, the more popular something is the less likely it is to have real value. I only download torrents with fewer than 4 peers.
How about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy#Canada
And every other country on that page...
Your response is a bit of a whoosh. Can you answer the point he made? No?
No, actually Janimal was bang on. Answer his argument if you can, rather than making specious non-sequiturs.
If I die, will I get raped by a pack of niggers?
We can only hope.
Well said.
This is guaranteed to get modded down because it's anti-piracy
Yes, and everyone is predictably screaming "noooo, no no no, not because it's anti-piracy". If that wasn't it, people would leave it up and instead answer with well thought out debating points.
But nope. Like you say, forget trying to express an anti-piracy position here. Pointless.
Please, mod this jackass post troll - judged by his gross generalizations and contrived attempts at flaming.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
Your car analogies are *idiotic*. The actual analogy would be a device that you can point at any car, which creates an exact copy(minus any personal items) back in your garage. It doesn't affect the original owner of the car, aside from resale value, which was never guaranteed. The device would obviously be a miraculous boon in many ways, and the car manufacturers would find themselves in the exact same position as the **AAs and be falling over themselves to push for ever-stronger penalties and more heavy-handed preventative measures against people copying their designs, and would call the scanning "stealing" (and it would still be a misnomer). And yes, their old business model would be rendered rather obsolete. Independant groups would undoubtably arise to design their own cars which could be freely copied, although without the money and expertise of the large manufacturers behind them, most people would probably still perfer copies of the big names, at least initially. Things like custom-designed cars for each person and susbcription services where you can go into a showroom to scan a new car each month, or have the car dealers' scanners deliver new cars automatically, would undoubtably become a larger part of the business of the car companies that survived the transition.
(I should note I'm ignoring negative exernalities [increased pollution, etc.] for the purposes of this analogy, as digital data transfers are a bit different from physical objects in that sense. You could actually make a decent connection between increased traffic congestion due to free cars and increased bandwidth usage due to piracy, though. Still a net positive on that front in my opinion, especially as things like legal streaming services are making more bandwidth necessary anyway)
From your own link:
In conjunction with the levy, the Copyright Act allows individuals to make copies of sound recordings for their own private, non-commercial use. They may not distribute the copy.
So explain again how this applies to TPB.
Of course, no jurisdictions have ruled that DISTRUBUTING copyrighted content is legal. Which is, of course, what all the cases are about. The usual idiot slashtards tend to ignore that little fact.
No, actually Janimal was bang on. Answer his argument if you can, rather than making specious non-sequiturs.
OK. I download some MP3s from a friend because I want to hear them. I decide I don't really like them very much and don't listen to them anymore. How is the value of the work diminished to its creator? It isn't. I probably wasn't going to buy the MP3s to begin with, and having confirmed that I don't really like the music, I won't. No net gain or loss to either myself or the creator.
On the other hand, if I do like the music, who's to say I won't buy the CD? If I do, the value to the creator is actually increased, isn't it? Admittedly, most people who download a lot of MP3s probably aren't going to buy the CDs, but some do. Therefore the act of possessing MP3s does not itself diminish anything.
The problem here is that, even if a reasonable person can understand that getting music without paying for it is wrong, there's a disconnect between the law as written and promoted and people's innate sense of morality. It's like saying "marijuana must remain outlawed because we did a survey of one hundred rapists and all of them were high on reefer, proving that dope smokers are violent rapists." Now, we already KNOW that marijuana is against the law. We don't really WANT to think of ourselves as lawbreakers. But we hear this ruling, and we think, "Wait a minute. I smoke weed. Gary over there smokes weed. So do Janet and Steve. In fact, everybody I know smokes weed, and nobody has ever raped anybody." Thus, contempt for the law grows.
In the case of file sharing, movie studios are reporting record profits, rap stars are bragging about all the hundreds of millions they make and renting out entire floors of hospitals so their wife can give birth in private, and yet the content lobby is telling us that your 16-year-old son is a criminal because he didn't pay for the Korn MP3s on his iPod, and libraries are stealing because they want to let people borrow the same e-book more than 20 times. To a reasonable person, even one who believes that taking things without paying for them is wrong, these assertions just don't add up.
Breakfast served all day!
JAIL TIME for letting people copy bits. you think that's just?
if you approve of that, you're not human. simple as that.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
DPI and filtering in hardware does NOT sink the whole stream to disk. the whole point is to set smart triggers and capture the 'sensitive' traffic.
I've turned down more jobs that are DPI related than I can shake a stick at. makes me puke to think of my field being perverted to 'serve' bad governments. ie, ALL of them!
every single core and high speed router has intercept and triggering/thresholding. no gov agency would buy 'dumb' routers anymore. again, makes me sick to think what datacomm (the field) has become ;(
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
switzerland.
a friend of mine lives there, now (got corp. relocation and is living well over in .ch)
he brags about how its fully legal to 'download' there and he's amassed quite a media collection.
so, there's your citation. the swiss allow it (as just 1 example).
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I prefer the BSD license, so does that mean its ok for me and I'm not being a hypocrite if I download copyrighted video's? :-P
Thanks for a well reasoned reply. But here's what I meant about Janimal's comments.
The examples of keying a car or taking it for a joyride are clearly describing actions that are wrong, but how is it different from the arguments in favor of piracy? I won't repeat all of Janimal's arguments. Suffice to say I haven't seen any responses that actually answer those questions.
It doesn't matter whether Beyonce or Lady Gaga or Elton John can afford the loss of a few dollars. Wrong is wrong. But even if you go that route, those examples you mention are the few, the elite, the top of the food chain. There are thousands more who are struggling to make a living from their passion for music.
On and on it goes.
On the other hand, if I do like the music, who's to say I won't buy the CD?
There's the problem. Will you buy the CD? If you've already got your free copy, why would you? And even if you do, there are plenty of posters on Slashdot who proudly and defiantly announce "no way, _I_ won't buy a CD" and then ramble on about how it's justified because of the evils of the RIAA.
"Make a donation to the musician", etc., are all nice theories, but they're mainly just platitudes. People don't. Ask the bands who've tried it that way. Most of them will never do it again.
But you need to concede that there is a very big difference between stealing a physical object and stealing a virtual one.
Let's look at the car analogy.
Let's say that pirating something is similar to keying a car.
When something is pirated, a potential sale is lost. The owner/distributor of that product loses the potential to make money, but there is no real damage caused.
When a car is damaged, you have the quite real cost of repairing it.
So you're equating the actual cost of repairing the damage caused by someone keying your car (which is something you pay to repair) to the loss of potential income (which you probably never would have received, based on the reasons why people pirate).
Want to compare piracy to someone joyriding in your car?
First, let's just assume that whoever takes it replaces whatever gas they use, just so we don't end up quibbling over details like that.
Cars wear out with use. The more you use your car, the more maintenance it needs.
By using your car, there is the actual cost of repairing it, whereas by pirating software, there is no maintenance that must be done, and no damage caused to it.
And of course, this wear on the car is something that I need to pay for in order to keep using it, but if your software is being pirated, there are no costs involved.
You do not need to maintain it better or repair it in order to keep selling it.
So again, we come down to the issue of comparing an actual cost to a potential profit, which cannot readily be compared. I can just as easily blame negative reviews for a lack of sales, but we would hardly call that theft or vandalism, even though it indirectly causes a loss of sales.
Let's turn the question around though. What if I could "steal" your car the same way that I can pirate something?
What if I had a magic box that could create an exact duplicate of your car, but without causing any damage to it, and without causing any direct loss to you.
Would that still be theft?
Better yet, who would I be stealing from if it was? Would I be stealing from you, the owner of the car I copied, or would I be stealing from the company who sold you the car?
Would the $30,000 that I did not pay the company for a car I never bought be considered damage? What if I never had any intention of buying that car, and only copied it because it was free?
I'm not trying to suggest that one is better or worse than the other, but trying to explain copyright infringement with "Would you steal a car?" is naive and absurd.
There is a considerably difference between capturing and storing the data and parsing it and operating logic on it in real time. As you point out the government stores the information. If it was so easy to process they would catch on to every (or at least a very high percentage 99+%) dangerous communication that hits the wire. The reason they don't get hit rates nearly this high is because they CAN'T process in real time that much information within their budgets. This is, however, exactly what the MPAA/RIAA expect the search engines to do and to do it on the search engines dime.
I should mention that storing all that data is really only useful if you know who you want to investigate. If you have a tip or a target you can most likely find something incriminating on them but picking out complex communication patterns automatically is much much harder to do with that much data. I know I sure don't feel any safer having these systems around.
The parent was only asking for a citation to countries that allow copying for non-commerical purposes. I never claimed it was relevant to TPB case. That being said; Isohunt is hosted here. Their case is still being argued in the Supreme Court, however ATM it's all legal and legitimate.
Did you find this pole?
I was one of the "Yes" votes. I want to assfuck you. I don't know who the other guy is, but he can join in.
I'd have used one of my 5 to mod you up if you hadn't already reached +5.
I used to get 15 all the time and rarely used any of them. I stopped getting 15 when I got modded down for something. Maybe it was meta modded as negative also. I doubt I'll use more than 1 of the 5 that I have now.
I've been here so long that I just don't notice the points and haven't worried about karma since it went to "good". The kids these days they know nothing about moderation anyhow, and very few people could ever mod up something they disagree with.
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
What makes piracy right is the laws of nature, not any irrelevant facts about the age of the typical copied item. Which you don't know in any case. You're just guessing that most pirated stuff is new.
How do you propose to enforce the existing model? To forcibly stop people from copying? You can't. No one can stop it. Or do you seriously expect a big enough majority to agree with the bankrupt morality that copying is bad? If you're counting on that, forget it. We have seen how good sharing is for everyone, and we're not going to give that up.
I suppose your next point is the "starving artists" wheeze. How can artists make any money without copyright, you ask as if there's no other conceivable way of compensating them. There is another way. It's called patronage, and it has worked in the past, and still works now. And you forget that most artists do rather poorly under copyright, what with Hollywood Accounting and demands that in exchange for next to nothing, authors have to transfer all their rights away. It's not just artists that get screwed by copyright, it's all of us every time some rights holder abuses these rights to shut down competition, censor others, hold a valuable public resource hostage, or sit on great work of art.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
The stuff about an open Internet is 50%genuine principles, and 50% a pompous rationalization from greedy geeks who want free copies.
Ignoring the 'greedy' part, which is a gratuitous characterisation, yes, emphatically yes. I want free copies. It's called sharing; you might have heard about it.
What people who bitch about piracy never adequately explain, when they're busy deriding the so-called pirates, is why according to this report at least, widespread copying is actually making things better for said writers/musicians/artists/designers/videographers. Even the content distributors (who are the ones we're really talking about when we mention SOPA/PIPA/ACTA) are profiting more than they ever have, deriving more 65% of their revenues from technologies they swore would kill them.
Sharing is a public good; everyone from Jesus to Hobbes to RMS[*] has espoused this principle. And you know what kind of person is most likely to share? The ones with the least. I live in a Least Developed Country, and the generousity shown here makes society in North America look absolutely sick.
And yet here we have the so-called content owners, who insist on transfer of authorship before they'll even consider distributing your material, telling me I can't have a working Internet because I wanted someone else to listen to a song? Imprisoning people just because they want to help me share? Fuck that.
And before you dare call me selfish or a thief, and before you accuse me of taking crumbs from the mouth of the poor, starving artist: I get paid to write, code and take photos, and yet I still manage to give almost all of that output away. If I can do it, then so can others. The plain fact is that others are thriving in this gift economy. The only ones who aren't are those complacent, sclerotic few who think that artificial scarcity is valid economics. Well, as far as I'm concerned, they can go rot.
-----------------
[*] Okay, visually that's not much of a gamut, but you get my point...
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
What? There never was an episode 1.
The only Star Wars film was labelled episode 4 for some strange reason.
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
I stopped caring about using about all my points long enough ago that I can't remember when. Of course, the first time I got them I was very excited, and they were rare enough for a while that I made a point of making sure I used them all.
I think I may have modded up something I disagreed with once or twice. It's not easy to do, and the ones I've modded up were generally in the "maybe I've been wrong about this the whole time" caliber. I've very much done the reverse though -- I've modded down plenty of things I agree with if the poster was more of an asshole than necessary or if the arguments were flimsy.
But lately most of my mod points end up going to subtle jokes that I think will go over too many heads.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
I must have missed the part where we went from, "We want a criminal investigation of someone that openly admits to bribing members of congress", even if that was a fruitless request directed at the wrong people, to "the rule of the delusional internet crazies who think that millions of people should die"?
I'm among the first to say the rhetoric gets pretty stupid around here sometimes, but equidistant from rational in the opposite direction isn't right either.
The Internet was founded for the free exchange of information amongst mankind. It has to defend against tyrannical governments seeking to silence it, and it has to thwart off various other powers seeking to limit or control it. Greed nor the incompetence of fools shall hinder it. It has a higher purpose and we will gladly lay upon the alter and sacrifice industries and technologies that have waxed past their time of relevance. Should they prove to be a hindrance they shall be ground to dust as an example.
This is yet another example of how we need to produce more than Bull Shit and Bullets.
Take the Red Pill.
Go back and count how many posts are advocating revolution and war in that story alone - let alone in the other SOPA-related stories.
Your identity is not a physical object, nor is your credit. So, trashing your credit rating and tying up all of your available credit shouldn't be illegal, should it?
It's not a physical object. They haven't taken anything physical from you...
How much do you estimate after removing the redundancy?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The closest to real-world I can think of to compare to copy~1 infringement is operating a water butte filter. If you pay for your domestic supply on a meter and you water your garden or fill your tub from a butte rather than use the main, you're depriving the water company of *potential* income. The difference here is that the water company is claiming ownership of something that FALLS OUT OF THE SKY. Well, I suppose as far as publishers are concerned artistic proof falls out of the sky as well, but we'll not dwell on their delusional nature, eh?
My argument in this instance (and it's worked in court to defend the perfectly lawful butte operation and to argue against paying nearly £1,000 per year) is this: why should I pay a private company 10% of my gross income to poison something that is essential for life, that I can easily obtain in practically its purest form for practically nothing?
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
You are currently at +4 Interesting. That alone says enough for me that your first and last sentences are just plain WRONG
Well now that the thread has finalised the post is at 0 Flamebait. This is disappointing as, while it's an angry rant, at least it comes across as genuine.
As someone who generally reads threads after they are done and dusted (Australian time zone) the GP rings true to me. Calm and well-reasoned anti-piracy posts are often modded down while sarcastic one-liners get +5 Insightful if they are against copyright.
Slashdot has plenty of great discussion, even on this topic, but taken as a whole the piracy mods seem to forget the guideline that disagreeing isn't a reason to downgrade.
Please provide any proof that copyright infringement devaules the actual work.
I have yet to be convinced of yoru BASE PREMISE, so your analogies don't particularly work.
So, if you can provide an argument that the work itself is devalued (NOT that they "lost that sale") I would be willing to listen.
As far as I know, the sound fidelity of the CD's and tracks at Apple are in now way affected by me downloading a copy from somewhere.
There's much we can learn from the Swiss.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Way to demonstrate his point.
Agreed. For example it depends what you are interested in. If you want to prove copyright infringement you might need to store enough of the file to be able to prove that it wasn't fair use. But if you are looking for a terrorist chances are their stuff is going to be relatively small: emails, a few pictures, not a 4GB DVD rip. Buffer crap when you see things like bomb, die, american scum etc save the whole thing. Otherwise ignore.
Just to screw with NSA every once in a while I through in a "Hail Hitler, death to America jerka jerka Jihad" just to waste their time.
But, I also believe it is completely factual to say that artists who rely on the existing system will be hurt by any lack of sales resulting from copyright infringement (whatever that may be).
And the blip in history where musicians could aspire to be in sixth sigma of income earners will be noted in textbooks as being caused by a quirky combination of new technology, artificial scaricty imposed by a cartelized industry, and government regulations created to enforce that scarcity.
"When the new government was formed in 2032, real property rights were favored over 'intellectual' ones, thereby sustaining a boom in both economic and cultural output".
Find me in the future.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
In the case of music, many artists depend on album sales. That the industry as a whole is recording profits in no way negates the harm being done to artists. I agree with you that merely the possession of MP3s does not diminish anything however. And at least you acknowledge that not everyone who keeps the MP3s plans on actually buying the album. Artists don't release their music as shareware. There is a problem with music being treated as if it's WinZip or PKZip, where people keep a copy on hand to "evaluate" once in a while, but never actually buy.
There are more libertarians here than there are at a Tea Party rally.
There are more pirates than here than at a Pirates of the Caribean convention
There are more basement dwellers here than at a woodlouse sanctuary.
It's absolutely about the free moonshine.
>How many people who downloaded the product used it more than once?
Does that matter? I don't want to own a pair of pants. I go to the store, buy a pair, wear it once, then return it to get my money back. Acceptable? Can I replicate this behavior over multiple different types of purchases? Why does infrequency of use somehow give as much as a 100% discount to the user? All these questions only work to divert attention. This software developer has already taken into account the possibility of a user not liking the software and instead using a competing product. Clearly, he is only talking about people who like the software and who will continue to use the software but who will not pay for it.
>You might be better off focusing on selling more copies to people who might buy them, then assuming you'd be making a sale for every pirated download.
Your response to him is to work harder to make up for the loss? Okay, but seems a bit like a fuck you, doesn't it?
The difference here is that the water company is claiming ownership of something that FALLS OUT OF THE SKY.
No. The water company is charging for the service of delivering water through pipes to your property. This can be trivially seen in places where the water is not metered, but rather a fixed fee is paid. They could be compared with the pre-internet shareware & PD libraries, who would charge for sending shareware and PD on a disk in the mail. But they didn't have any rights to the files they put on those disks.
The analogies on this site just get worse and worse... Do you put even 2 seconds of thought into them?
If I have a copy of Word and I give a copy to my friend, how does that diminish the value of my copy? It doesn't. It may diminish the value to the author of Word, if he's trying to sell it, but not to me.
Obviously. The author of Word is the copyright owner, and he's the one who is a victim of the unauthorised copying.
Who's the "owner" of software? The license owner? The author?
Those aren't the question. The question is "Who owns the copyright?" What is being taken is being taken from him, and the value of what he has is diminished when people do unauthorised copies.
Oh, I saw. The shouters were out in force. I probably would've even agreed (at least in part) with your sentiments if you'd limited it to a few ignorant slashdotters.
However, attributing that disproportionate level of noisy stupidity from a handful of goofs (that probably couldn't competently operate a firearm if you wrote an O'Reilly book for it) to everyone that wants something something done about corruption in government... well, that's just unfair.
I agree with most, that SOPA was a disgraceful thing. But most people are not cowardly basement revolutionaries clamoring for rivers of blood. We're just normal people that want our representative government to work for us.
Property does not expire, but copyrights do. They are a time limited monopoly granted by us, the people, as an encouragement to make more. The ultimate owners of all creative works is society as a whole. We deferred our rights temporarily, just like with patents, on the theory by doing that, more will get created and end up in society's hands in the end. Copyright holders have tried to tilt the deal more and more in their favor, and some of us feel that they have gone too far.
Ideas do not share this property, in so much that entropy can only effect the artifacts that are used to contain such ideas: books, CDs, human memory, etc.
Calling them "ideas" is weasel wording. Ideas can be a flash of inspiration, an idea can come in a moment. But works such as movies, music and books, that are the things that are generally pirated take a lot of hard work, time and skill to produce. That's why they're generally called works, not ideas.
Creators need to earn a living. To put a roof over their head. To feed their families. I'm damn sure you don't do whatever work solely for "reputation" and not money. (If in fact you're old enough to have responsibilities.) And you shouldn't expect the people who create the art and entertainment you enjoy to do so either.
How do you propose to enforce the existing model? To forcibly stop people from copying? You can't. No one can stop it.
You can't stop shoplifting, burglary, or littering the street either. So by your argument it's a "law of nature" that they should be allowed.
"Wrong is wrong."
This is the point where you've stumbled. You've fallen into the black & white world outlook, and are apparently unable to apply situational conditions to your morality meter. You might think that's a good thing and it is "principals", but to others it is rigid inflexibility, and a shallow lack of wisdom. Just because you say some thing is wrong, does not make it fact.
Oh, and janimal's analogies are in the physical world and aren't applicable, btw. Put some thought into it and you might see why.
It's called sharing; you might have heard about it.
You call it sharing. The media industries call it sealing. Neither is the correct word to use for the action, both are intended as no more than a way of implying good or bad actions from an adopted word.
If widespread pirating is indeed good for content creators, then they are free to give their stuff away. It's not for you to unilaterally declare what's good for them, just because you want free stuff.
I'm reminded of last summers "riots" in England. Lots of youths trying to come up with justifications for looting, when the only real reason was they wanted free stuff.
I absolutely agree that copyright shouldn't extend beyond the life of the author. But that justification doesn't have any weight on the pirating of the works of living people, which comprises the vast majority of what's pirated.
If I die should my job still pay me?
Just offering up:
A person or a company pays for the "rights" to something (a song or a game) *in advance* of earnings because of that entity anticipates revenue in excess of the money they are risking up front. They are risking their current equity in the hopes of recouping revenue in excess of the equity as well as inflationary depreciation.
The content creator accepts this "risk equity" payment from the entity in lieu of sales. The content creator is thus ensured a livable wage which enables them to continue to create (assuming this content creator has good legal representation or exceptional negotiation skills). The reasons for accepting this are varied. Maybe the artist is unsure of the value of their product? Maybe the artist is poor? Maybe the artist doesn't want to be bothered with distribution?
(Which brings up why things like SOPA are so bad because IMHO they are the digital equivalent to empowering the buggy whip manufacturers to write our transportation laws and designing our roads / highways)
In the argument of the depreciation of the car- the point is that by duplicating the supply of the content you proportionality devalue it (aka supply and demand). This doesn't hold exactly true, but that sort of the argument. If I had a magic ray gun and could clone cars - I think GM, Ford, and other car companies would have a real problem with all their equity risk, investment, and knowledge is simply taken with no compensation to the content creator (or holder of rights to content created). And they'd get REALLY pissed off if was simply duplicating the cars on their showroom and giving them away for free.
(Granted, this goes into the whole who really pirates and why, etc. which is entirely moot - this is about why / what duplication of a product does to its market value)
So, if your job is creating content that does indeed have value even if you are deceased - yes. Your job still pays. Perhaps not you, but maybe your employer. Or your agent. If you are working to produce retail software that will be sold over and over again, you are compensated in the form of salary and benefits in lieu of any claims to revenue generated from each sale.
Some employees have uniquely valuable knowledge that affords them the ability to negotiate a royalty of each sale, or accept royalty in lieu of salary on especially risky ventures (common in the gaming community among start ups).
So - yes, if you die your job will still pay. Maybe not you, but maybe a spouse (if your company provides that as a benefit) or a person / company that has compensated you for future earnings.
This is just how I see it, but I'm easily the dumbest person on the Internet.. and some people think I'm giving myself too much credit in saying that.
/me sips his coffee and ponders a new sig...
To which the answer is of course: no you can't without permission from the estate. Outdoors is public domain. Indoors is not morally acceptable.
aww com'on. that's comedy
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
I can't answer his argument, since I disagree with his premise.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
When's the last time a politician has been punished for lying to me (the public)?
You see, people are quickly realizing that there are two standards of law and that they have gotten the short end of the stick. And you want to try to guilt people into upholding this system and supporting those that got the big end of the stick? Good luck with that.
You want to take a swipe at "entitlement-babies"? Take your misplaced rage and direct it against the big media companies, the banks/insurance/financial firms, big pharma, big oil. THAT is where the attitude of entitlement exists. They have 95% of everything, but that's not enough, they want it all. Instead you're here, whining about a handful of people getting some free games or music. BFD.
No - this is putting someone in jail because he gives you the adress of somone that is givving away bootlegs...
Something completeley different...
I think a lot of us believe that stealing the metaphorical car in this case is wrong. But we also believe that the penalty for stealing the metaphorical car shouldn't be 10 consecutive life sentences. We don't like that researching car security systems is a crime and that simply telling someone where there is an easily-stealable car is viewed no differently than actually stealing it. We're worried that if that precedent is set, we might one day inadvertently help someone steal a car and be subject to these extreme penalties.
I think it's a bit of a strawman argument to claim that most people here advocate piracy. We don't like it and we want to see content creators fairly compensated. We want to pay for DRM-free content that gives us the flexibility to consume it however we'd like. And we want to see those responsible for the piracy punished fairly. We see an industry that should be able to provide their product to customers at a price they're willing to pay and, seemingly, refuses to do so and blames customers for looking elsewhere to find the product they want.
I, personally, support filing lawsuits against torrent users, but I believe the potential damages should be limited to the maximum value of sales lost by the infringer's actions. If there are 100 people downloading a torrent of a movie that could be bought for $20, the damages should be capped at $2000. I don't believe in jailing people that index or help other people violate copyright. It may make illegal downloading more convenient, but the transgression belongs to the person actually violating the copyright. However I also support anyone's right to research pretty much anything...the pursuit of knowledge and the exercise of curiosity are basic human rights. And we're social beings, so I support our need to share our cultural experiences.
As an example, about a year ago, my father passed away. I spent the better part of 2 days putting together a slideshow for his memorial that included photographs of him, our family and friends and also his artwork and artistic photographs. I set the slideshow to 4 of his favorite songs...songs that he loved and that had become associated with many fond memories for myself and many others. I received no less than 100 requests at the memorial for a copy so that they could re-watch it. Currently, copyright law does not allow me to do so, but I did it anyways. Considering that my father bought each song in question 2-3 times (CD, iTunes and one on vinyl as well), I don't feel that I'm in the moral wrong on this one. We've let copyright law get in the way of creating new art and I disagree with that.
So there you have it...my shade of grey as an answer to your black and white. Most of us are not immoral people. We want to do what we feel is right. But what we feel is right does not conform perfectly to the law's version of what is allowed and what isn't. I'm sorry I can't relate that back to a car analogy.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
You consider poor analogies to be hard questions?
"if you let your friend joyride the car off the record you are putting the other co-owners in a losing situation"
assumption
* maybe my friend would never have bought the car in the first place
* maybe he instead will buy it after the joy ride, or do something else positive (recommend the car, buy the next model, go to a car expo, buy car manufacturer tee-shirts)
Sneak teach kids Algebra using a game
Imagine you need a tuxedo. For some reason no one will rent you a tuxedo. Sure, there's that purple one in the dumpster you walked by on your way to work that you could use but it smells like dead hobo and cat urine, might as well wear a pair of jeans and a t-shirt instead. Would it really be wrong to make an exact copy of a tuxedo that the local tailor is selling for $5,000? Do you think the tailor would be right in claiming you deprived him of $5,000 for not buying the tuxedo? Even though clearly your only other options in reality were No tuxedo or Purple smelly hobo-smelling tuxedo from dumpster?
I've been in similar situations software-wise (and yes, I'm also a developer), I needed software that did a particular thing, it was for personal use (as in, I wasn't making money off it) and the only software available that actually had the feature(s) at hand was way overpriced for me (especially considering these situations are somewhat rare for a lot of people, you need it now, not now, tomorrow, the day after that and all of next week).
An example of what I'm talking about, I used to have (well, still have but don't use) a legit license for a fairly expensive 3d modelling/animation program and I was trying to do some camera tracking. I had already paid $2,500+ for the software but the built-in camera tracking module/feature was horrible, several types of camera movement were untrackable and it wasn't really doing the job. Now, I knew from work that there was another piece of software that basically only did camera tracking which I knew was much better, I only needed it once and a single-seat license cost more than $5,000. Do you honestly think I should've gone out and wasted about a month's pay on a license for something I needed to use for about 20 minutes, once, for a personal project that I was working just for fun? Or are you sane enough that you realize that in a situation that like piracy just may be the reasonable option? (The alternative options, within reason and a normal person's budget, available here being: Use other 3d modelling package (would've required money + time to convert my data and correct for errors that appeared during conversion) or "hand-track" (either using my existing package's tracking module and correcting it manually every two or three frames or by re-filming my video this time measuring every feature of the area down to fractions of an inch so I could manually recreate the scene in my 3d software).
Pirating software diminishes the value of the work to the author, so
Well, that post died very early on, right there. There is absolutely no guarantee that a person downloading a certain content, would have paid for it if it weren't available as a download. In fact, it's highly likely exactly the opposite. It's also highly likely that, once you hear a certain CD or see a certain movie, you'll go and buy a copy on legitimate media - because it often (not true for software "protected" by DRM shit) adds value. That's how I ended up buying Wall-E special edition DVD and went to the movies with that hot asian chick to see it *after* I've seen the version I downloaded via torrent. Same thing goes for half of my classical music CDs. The big media have lots to thatnk Bittorrent and TPB.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Your dichotomy-based-thinking style is no match for my continuum model technique!
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
The President can refer something to the Justice department for review. Hell, they should just unleash Patrick Fitzgerald on these guys with a mandate to investigate all bribery and corruption in congress and unlimited funds to do so. That'd be fun for the whole family right there.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
All those things you mentioned-- shoplifting, burglary, littering, etc-- involve physical items, cause harm, are difficult to hide, and take effort. They are not the same as copying. Copying occurs every time anyone speaks to more than 1 person. Every instant that light shines on an object produces many images of that object. Radio and TV stations can broadcast information to a wide audience because that's the way the universe works. Trying to control copying is like trying to make water flow uphill.
You might argue that copying causes harm to the authors, but you can't prove it. You can't prove that someone who made a copy would have paid for a copy if they could not make one for free. In fact, we know that many people would not pay. Simple law of supply and demand. And you can't prove that their actions did not in fact lead to more sales because of the unintentional endorsement and advertising.
That definition of harm is too broad. Under that interpretation, every time someone walks instead of drives, that harms the oil companies, auto manufacturers, road construction contractors, and anyone else connected to transportation. If you shop at WalMart, you harm KMart. If you eat at McDonalds, you harm Kentucky Fried Chicken. If you cook your own food, you harm both restaurants. If you skip a meal, you harm the restaurants and the grocery stores. Similarly, whenever art is borrowed from a public library or bought used, that could be interpreted as harmful to the authors. So this cannot be the meaning of harm. If no one lost anything that they didn't already have, no harm is done! The act of copying does not cause a loss of anything already in someone's possession.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Your analogy fails to account for the reality of copying. Had you looked at the pattern of the pants, and proceeded to make your own pair out of materials you rightfully own, then your analogy would be accurate.
You, like the original poster, assume that all infringers that are unwilling to pay, must be all converted to fully paying customers or you will be unable to stay in business.
Impossibly false assumptions:
- all infringers are not unwilling to pay
- all infringers could ever be converted to non-infringers
- all infringers act for the same reason
Therefore, we should break down different sets of infringers:
+U – Those who do want to use the product
-U – Those who do not want the product and only wish to collect it, weird pack-rats
+P – Those will to pay at a lower than existing price point
-P – Those who would never pay, regardless of price point
+M – Those who will use the product repeatedly
-M – Those who will use the product only once
+C – Those who will use all features of the product
-C – Those who will use only some features of the product
+D – Those who will buy products with DRM
-D – Those who will not buy products with DRM, reasons withstanding
And on, and on...
There is much overlap between these sets, and it can be argued that under certain conditions members of +U, +P, +M, -M, +C, -C, or -D can be converted to paying customers, but the conditions for each is not the same. There is no silver bullet to the solution, any attempts at such will only create more divergent sets of infringers.
Now the original poster asked how infringers could ever be considered not harmful to his business. The answer to this is obvious, they are not harmful, in fact they are incapable of causing direct harm because they are secondary effects of law and the business decisions that have already been made. The only harm caused is by the decisions that lead to such effect: high prices increase group +P, DRM increases group -D, etc. The law may also cause direct harm, but this outside the direct control of business, or should be. Wither such actions are moral is irrelevant, they will occur in every system: create draconian laws, increases law breakers, and so on. Decisions must be made that maximize the chances that a particular individual will fall outside the reasons that may drive them to infringe, at least from a business perspective.
Attempts to change law or public perception, may also be a valid if not dubious way of creating a solution, but they require the spending of large sums. Bribery to alter laws to gain yourself monetary advantage over your current situation, is generally frowned upon, also known as lobbying.
So I think this explains the situation: bribe your way to greater entitlements, make better business decisions to maximize your paying user base, or cry about how in a perfect world designed for you, you could make so much more money.
Hope that helps.
Say it like it is.
Also, a kind of "success-makes-success" feedback loop sometimes biases products in a frustrating way. Say, in a music or app store you first manage to get your product in the "Most popular" list. That in turn makes people more likely to see/buy it, keeping it more firmly in the list, and so on. Some "Interesting picks of the day" list would be more fruitful. ;)
I just thought of a way that search engines could pay for processing lots of extra information. Pull ALL search results apparently related to any content represented by MPAA/RIAA and then charge them per appearance if they want anything related to content they represent to turn up in search results anywhere ever. Moreover, once the search engine charges them for allowing their content to turn up, the search engine can then require them to agree to a service license indemnifying the search engine against accusations of harm regardless of the nature of the search results provided. Practically, would there be much difference between filtering out references to content represented by the MPAA/RIAA and the sort of filtering they're doing for the Chinese?
Well, mr "Ignorant" everything isn't black or white is it? First of all these people did't break ANY copyright laws they only owned a tracker and website with torrent files on it, right? Right! Sentencing these people to jail is outrageous. For what? For facilitating copyright infringement. HAHAHA! This is the same thing as convicting some car manufacturer or the road builder for the drivers speeding or maybe accident. This should be right because this evil car manufacturers have created a car that is going faster than the speed limit and the road builders built a motorway thus facilitating crimes as speeding and accidents. This is actually the case for megaupload since everything on that website was uploaded by someone else and not the owner. This is some other discussion though since in this case it kind of is the owners responsibility to maintain the website legal. But as I said before thepiratebay didn't host one single piece of copyrighted material. Ah and your talk about GPL and plagiarism is just a bunch of mumbo jumbo. FYI plagiarism is taking someone else work or ideas and passing them off as one's own. So how about facilitating copyright infringement? I actually think everyone should be convicted because they facilitate death, you know cause they live and will someday die... those mean people daring to live and be free.
The use of the word “idea” was intentional to include things like inventions, business theories, and other such forms of intellectual pursuit. Forgive me for not being clearer, you may be right that “works” might have been a better choice, also pirating is the act of monetizing infringement. I tried hard not to conflate pirating and general infringing, I may have failed.
Need and desired are not the same. No one needs to make a living writing music, inventing, etc. It is only a desire to be self sustained by such activities, not a demand. I do in fact, create software and fiction write, solely for my enjoyment and that of others. I used to even be payed for such things, before my job moved to china, literally, I had to create training materials. Lovely kick in the balls that last part was.
Now I understand that if direct monetary reward was missing from such activities, there would be a decrease in the total number who pursue such things, but life went on before copyright existed. It most likely will continue on if it was abolished, how ever unlikely.
What if I circumvent planned obsolescence by scanning in a broken pot-metal part and using my CNC mill to make one out of something stronger? Wouldn't the custom crash tests make getting permission to drive custom designed cars on public roads kind of expensive?
And THAT is why encryption and stenography exists. Want to google for CP? Just need to know the trigger words du jour and you will find. And let's not even start with freenet. It is naive to think that they will catch well organized criminals with these approaches, they only get the low hanging fruit. The more they pressure it the more they go underground. What really breaks the organized crime is real police work, like infiltrating the crime ring.
BUT the noisiest argument tends to "I want my shit for free"
That's nonsense, pirates are perfectly OK to pay for the stuff (some studies shows that pirates spend more on intelectual property then average non-pirate). What they aren't OK with is completeley artifical and unnecessary restriction on sharing the information which is simply stupid and serves only to the publishing and distribution monopolies so they can protect their distributions channels and revenue streams and obsolete bussiness models.
Pirates don't pirate because they don't want to pay to the authors. Pirates love to consume intelectual property, why would they want to hurt the people which produce it?
Supporters of copyright are modern-time pony-express owners fighting against the emerging automobile industry. Copyright is unsustainable in digital age and does much more harm then good. Any sane person should see this now and that's the main reason why pirates do what they do. It just does't make sense to support artifical restrictions which tries to ignore technological progress (we saw this situation many times in the history)
I completely agree that it is moronic to fine / incarcerate someone to a greater degree for linking to files than aggravated assault, manslaughter, armed robbery etc, and that overly long copyright stifles innovation... BUT, I have a small problem with the analogy you made. And it is not a fault of the analogy.
It just made me realise that, at the moment, if I REALLY want or need a car, I have to buy it. If I can’t afford it, I will have to do without it. I can’t just bitch about the manufacturers overcharging for cars. So even if I *would* have purchased a car, if I can now get one for free, I would be stupid to do so. Why would anyone pay for something they can get for legally for free? A fair amount of pirated content can be counted as lost sales, since people would have purchased it if they really wanted it and had no other option.
What exactly is it about his post that makes you think this? I'll give you a hint: if it's because it's anti-piracy, then his point is proven.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Change copyright laws so that non-natural entities (companies,corps, etc) can't own copyrights for longer than 5 years. Copyrights are only naturally awarded to natural creators. So now, if a company has one or more employees working on something, those employees get the copyright, and can hold it for a much longer peroid of time, say 25 years. Companies could license the copyright exclusively from their employees to retain the longer copyright terms, but doing so means the actual creators get payment for it. Companies could put into their employment contracts that employees must give their employers first option on licensing any copyrightable materials created on company time, at reasonable prices. If the employee leaves the company, then they have to renegotiate terms for continued licensing. Alternatively, companies can do whay they do now and claim copyright for all work done by their employees on company time, but then they get the five year limit. This system means the actual creators get financial renumeration for their work, and are given direct incentives to continue creating.
My theory here is that if a company with all it's resources (I'm thinking large company) cannot capitalise on copyrighted material within 5 years, that material probably isn't worth much anyway. Individuals, or small businesses where letting individuals keep copyright is a much easier thing anyway, who don't have the resources, get a longer time peroid to extract financial gain from the material.
Making a copy of an electronic file is not the same as shoplifting, burglary or littering.
No, anyone can contribute to culture with or without copyright. You can't copy other people's contributions to culture, but you are free, and always have been free, to contribute your own original works. The monopoly has been on copying specific works, but then again, it's hardly immoral to put a monopoly on something that very likely would not have existed without it.
Why is it that the anti-copyright arguments almost always brush over or outright ignore the issue of the work existing in the first place? Oh right, because without doing that, there really is no moral or practical argument against copyright. Gotcha.
(I do agree that we need to release more to the public domain though.)
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Except he wasn't. At all. Not even close.
Keying a car is vandalism, so wtf does that have to do with either copyright infringement or theft?
Jack and shit....and Jack left town.
Word, dude.
If it is agreed in the terms under which you agreed to work for them, then yes, they definitely should!
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I live in Switzerland, I concur! But beware when using torrents, it's illegal since you're seeding as soon as you have a bit of content.
But if people have tons of old quality movies available they won't watch "I know what you transformered last Star wars 8".
I write software for a living too, and so do many of my friends.
If you are "losing" money, it is because your business model is ill-concived.
(N.B., I am replying to your point alone, this does not imply that I condone anything that the pirate bay folks may have done)
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz
Which is probably why Rapidshare is based there.
I really really love the Swiss and Switzerland. My parents recently moved out there, and whenever I visit it is just such a refreshing thing to be surrounded by polite, friendly, helpful, industrious, and overall *sensible* people. Plus, most government is local, not national (ever heard the Swiss prime minister talk about Swiss policy?), so the locals get more of a say in how they want to live.
*So no, pirating isn't stealing in the common sense, but it is taking something of value from the owner. How do you quantify that?*
none of this has to do with if you believe it to be WRONG or not.
copying is not wrong, copying is preserving. cultural use value outweights the value in the creator being able to dictate who gets to see it.
anyways, if you steal a car that's very different to just using a car without authorization anyways, stealing implies you took it for parts or as a whole.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Essentially, the pirate bay is in the wrong because they encourage piracy. It's as simple as that. It's the artists' right not to have their works copied, and the pirate bay has built their living around robbing them of this right. It is completely within their interests to make the problem significantly worse, especially given that it has earned them multiple millions so far. Almost every single dollar made so far has been at the expense of someone else's hard work.
I like to think of them as a documentary film-maker filming the exploits of a serial killer. He watches, and profits from, every kill made. The serial killer will ask him about the locations of certain individual, and the film-maker will happily oblige him (after all, he wasn't to know they'd necessarily be butchered, right?). In fact, if anyone pulled the film-maker up on this behaviour, he would simply cite the many times the killer asked for the nearest petrol station or convenience store, painting himself as a dumb source of information that couldn't be held responsible for how the serial killer used his information. But, in the end, he knows exactly how the serial killer will use the information, and every time he commits another heinous crime, it's more money in the film-maker's bank.
When the film-maker is finally placed in jail where he belongs (but the killer escapes justice), the serial killer turns to this nice guy at an information kiosk (let's call him, say, Google). His job is to hand out lots of information to lots of people. The serial killer asks him about various locations of people and places, and he happily obliges, the same as he would any other customer. Google is aware that a serial killer is on the loose, but he has no more reason to suspect one person over another, and so instead of stopping (or severely restricting) service to everyone, he decides to keep his job and just deliver people what they ask for. Google may have aided the serial killer many times, but unlike the film-maker, Google really is just a dumb source of information. He has as much reason to believe the information he provides will be used for the benefit of everyone, rather than to murder people, and this is the source of his income. His position is perfectly morally justifiable.
Now, let's see how much this gets torn apart.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Ever watch something on Youtube that wasn't 100% user created? Yeah? Well you're a pirate and a hypocrite.
Firstly I don't have a big problem with TPB being shut down. I consider TPB to have been a net cost to society.
It's not a morality thing. Never has been. The point of copyright is simply to provide an incentive to publish. You are publishing. Copyright is working. Not perfectly, but adequately.
If we actually explicitly allow large scale piracy then the system breaks down. It's hideously naive to assume that absolutely nobody will choose a pirate copy over an original, or that the "advertising" benefits outweigh these losses. If we punish people too harshly for copyright infringement then we end up with a totally unjust system. So we need to tolerate, grudgingly, a certain amount of infringement to balance these objectives. Still not a perfect system but one that apparently works in that people are publishing.
As for harm to consumers, I am pretty certain that piracy is largely responsible for films and TV shows coming out in Britain at about the same time as the US. I suspect that streaming services exist because the media companies recognised the need to compete with downloads. It's pretty rare that the price has any relation to the production cost (otherwise, why do popular musicians not sell their albums at a fraction of the price of less popular ones?) so prices aren't pushed up that much
Jihad jerka jerka, shoe bomb car bomb, plastic explosives, ammonium nitrate for Allah jerka?
> Creators need to earn a living. To put a roof over their head. To feed their families.
But they do not have to be creators. They do not have to enforce a copying prohibition. They could do something entirely else. Nobody wants to deprieve them of an income. But I do not want to have less rights solely to enable somebody elses income where naturally (meaning, if we could vote on it, as in a democracy) he would not have it.
"law of nature" means democracy. It means that if we were allowed to vote on it, copyright in its current form would not exist. We, as society, wouldnt agree that it is useful to us. Copyright is not in a state of consensus. It is not inner sense of right and wrong made into a law. It is a piece of back room behind closed doors shady deals autocracy, which is systematically being held back from democracy, because they _know_ how we would vote.
"law of nature" means a stable equilibrium it means that a majority agrees on something. it does not mean that a tiny influential minority decides something, then tries to radically enforce it against the majority, categorically refusing any vote on policy.
The Swiss allow it because they are allowed to vote on it. (direct democracy). It is not that "we" somehow dont allow it, nobody asks us. Copyright policy is decided behind closed doors between a few influential stakeholders. The general public is completely shut out from the decision making. We do not have a way to vote on it. If we would vote on it like the swiss do, I guess we would adopt a similar policy. But the fact is, our democracy is hijacked by special interests and stakeholders, and before we fight copyright, we have to fight to get our democracy back. Then copyright policy will sort itself out naturally.
There was, but it was pirated until it became really bad to the point where movie theaters refused to run it.
>it's about freedom of ideas and expression
For a very small minority. For majority, it's about taking something at zero cost to everybody: taking that does not take away, because it would never be taken for a paid value.
If I am streaming something, the only people who suffer are folks who are running their little shady streaming website, because I am using ABP and NS.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Google is next to useless when searching for good streaming. The sites that are on top of the search in Google are SEO'd blogspam.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
The problem is that the value has changed. Seeing and hearing something no longer has any value. It has no value because there is too much content. Your individual content is irrelevant. Find another way to monetize on it. The only reason people are still getting is paid is because not everyone has caught up to this idea. There are too many systems in place to reinforce old ideas. It's just a matter of time before the rest of the world catches up.
Pirating content is like watching a street artist from the back row: you are not taking anybody's space, because the people that can see from that distance and above the heads of people in the front row have enough room at the same distance.
You see no value in the street performance, it's more of a catchy distraction from the real purpose of your passing through the market square or town court. Standing is inconvenient, your old meniscus soccer injury is killing your knees, you are in the crowd and you don't like to be crowded.
You would not even think of attending this street performance if it would be under an improptu tent and a burly bouncer would take the money from people coming.
That's what modern entertainment content EXACTLY is, minus obscene amount of money revolving it.
The only people who give power to MAFIAA are users, and the only people who can take power from them are users.
Start with pirating, get tired of the idiocy of the content, realize that rare "exceptions" that you think are good, are just more thoroughly masqueraded bullshit, lift your ass from your lazyboy recliner and finally replace this content with more fulfilling entertainment: friends, creativity, etc.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
On the other hand, if I do like the music, who's to say I won't buy the CD?
No one. However, my gut feel (from talking to friends and acquaintances) is that most people will think "Well, I've already got the mp3s, so... why buy the CD?". Hell, I've seen people swap hard drives of music, movies, etc around between themselves.
I'm sure a lot of people do use it as a means to try before they buy; but I know that a lot of people just use it as a means to skip the buying part altogether.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Way to reply to your own post.
If I die should my job still pay me?
For your hours worked, yes.
So your entire rant boils down to the fact you agree with the parent. You should only be paid for work you have done.
Copyright does not do this. Currently these people have power of law to get paid for work their great grandparents did 150 years ago.
Yet you seem to be arguing for both cases... That you should only be paid for the work you do, and that the system in place to get paid for the work your great grandparents did 150 years ago is the correct solution.
Perhaps if you believed the first sentence you said in your post, you would not support a system that completely goes against that idea.
The "file upload service" was for .torrent files, not the copyright-protected content. Way to distort the truth there buddy...
There is a better analogy. Right now, people are proud of their expensive sports cars because they are rare. What if everyone could have a Ferrari? The original owners don't loose anything tangible. Their car isn't damaged like when it's keyed, and they aren't deprived of it's use for a period of time like in the case of a joyride. All they lose is the feeling of exclusivity.
It doesn't work like that. When I buy a CD I get two things: a physical disc and a license granted by law. The disc is like any other physical object I own, it can be lent, sold, gifted or donated. The license gives me the right to listen to the music, make a limited number of copies for personal use and to use exerts under fair use. Like the physical disc it is full transferable via lending, selling, gifting or donating.
What media companies want now is to write their own license rather than using the one the law provides. This new license is a really bad deal for consumers because they lose all their rights. It also screws the public domain.
Furthermore the extremely long copyright terms is theft from the public domain. If you write a song in English using known musical instruments and influenced by centuries of music theory and evolution then you are not the sole creator of that work. Either accept that copyright terms are limited to, say, 10 years or pay us some royalties for the use of our intellectual property.
And yes, I do want stuff for free, and in fact there has always been plenty of free ways to get it. Songs on the radio, films on TV, demos of games on magazine cover discs etc. The difference now is that I can choose what I want rather than being forced to have what the media companies pay to ram down my throat. That actually benefits artists because I spend more money on stuff I have discovered and actually like than I ever did on random crap spewing out of my radio. It also helps smaller artists who don't have vast marketing budgets, independent movie makers, smaller game studios etc, so really the only people who lose out financially are the big media companies and their largely talentless gimps.
Actually there is another reason to pirate. Sometimes the DRM on stuff is so nasty I just don't want to be exposed to it. I'll take a DRM free pirate copy instead, and that being the case I might as well try before I buy as well. If it turns out to be good enough I'll spend some money on it, even if the box is just going to sit on my shelf. Having said that I will wait until the price comes down, after all I can't sell it second hand now thanks to DRM so it is worth less. People don't just pull money out of their arses when something they want comes along, they notice that they don't have any cash because they can't sell that old game like the used to so will have to buy less new stuff now.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
This is guaranteed to get modded down because it's anti-piracy.
Well, let's test this hypothesis: Piracy is wrong. There I said it. Mod me down.
But here's the ting: the piratebay case and all the "intellectual property" discussion is is not about whether the "creative" people deserve to get paid or should be ripped of. It is a fight between the RIAA, MPAA, et al on the one side and the pirates on the other side over who gets to rip them of. Search for "Hollywood accounting", read Courtney Love does the math, or find out why some guy suddenly was called "the artist formerly known as prince" if you don't believe me about the real goals of the "MAFIAA". Now there are some exceptions to these rules; both the MAFIAA and the pirates are willing to pay some of the creators for some of the work they produce but these exceptions are few and far between.
In a fight between MAFIAA and pirates it is very easy to see who the real assholes are (hint: it's the guys promoting global censorship and life crippling penalties for what could arguably be called the equivalent of stealing a CD). That's why the discussion is so "one-sided". But all of this doesn't change the fact that pirating content is legally wrong in many countries.
the performer on a CD isn't the only person who gets a cut. In most cases the songwriter gets a cut since they wrote the song. Others could be musicians (session hired guitar player, drummer, etc) the engineer, the producer, etc, etc.
It's called the point system. Points = percentages. A producer/engineer/drummer/guitarist/etc may get 2-3% of the profit. Many only work for points, so them not getting this majorly hurts their income.
I suppose if you want to research that everyone involved in making the CD is dead, then you're only hurting the family members and the deceased who would be receiving that money (which I'm not approving, just stating who gets the money).... Chances are someone involved is alive on most of the CDs you'd download.
On the other hand, if I do like the music, who's to say I won't buy the CD?
The problem is an entire generation of people have grown up not buying, they JUST 'download some MP3s from friends' aka p2p networks...
Yeah, the groupthink is strong with this one.
Keying a car is vandalism, so wtf does that have to do with either copyright infringement or theft?
His point was that he still hasn't deprived the owner of his property. And he's right, he hasn't. It's just as valid an argument for keying a car as it is for copying a CD. I key your car, you still have it, you can drive it, I haven't deprived you of it, nothing.
If you say "but wait, you've lowered the value of the vehicle", then (i) copyright infringement does the same, and (ii) take the second argument of a joyride. I park my car, I'm at a concert for a few hours, the attendant takes my car for a quick spin - so what? I don't need it while I'm in the concert. It's there when I get back.
Heck, why not just say any random stranger can come in off the street and walk in your front door and take a nap in your bed while you're at work? You haven't lost anything. That's even better than copying the CD. Copying a CD - if you don't buy it, that's a potential sale gone west. Stranger napping in your bed? You weren't planning on renting it out like a hotel room, were you? No potential sales loss at all. Go ahead, splutter and bitch. This is just as logical as what everyone else is saying.
Apparently the difference is you think vandalism is wrong, and copyright infringement & theft are okay. Boy, that's messed up.
And in addition to BasilBrush, not just did you demonstrate his point, but the absurd moderation (+5 Insightful for *that*? The mind really fucking boggles at the morons who fill /. A lesson for you and every idiot who modded you up: a dissenting opinion does not make someone a "shill") has reinforced it.
Hi Sock puppet. Your comment was modded down because it took the cartels' side. And this is very much turning into a them versus us situation.
There is nothing wrong with paying for content. There is everything wrong with paying too much, tolerating DRM, and seeing courts consistently treat infringement worse than murder. When you take that into account, shilling for the MAFIAA is not going to be well received.
Wanting to buy your idea of stolen value, if copyright holders refrain from overcharging costumers to "level up" the value of their "property" then I can honor copyright and buy their stuff, it will be cheap anyway!
But as soon as companies overprice, they are giving me permission to pirate, they already charged anybody else for my copy anyway!
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
But that does not nullifies the fact that companies overprice their products, specially music companies, and the real copyright owner usually dont see much more than a few percent points of the actual profits, so we are actually supporting a system that is taking (money) value from other products, is increasing the virtual money problemwe currently have AND is exploiting other persons' copyright ownership at great scale.
Give things the right value and people will accept the current law proposals, but dont expect to get away with all the tricks you can think to profit out of thin air (AKA american dream these days), people are not that stupid.
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
We could stop most wars, but I dont visualize them vanishing anytime soon, so yes, a lot of bad things are being done, and will be done for long time, and no law is being enforced against some of them that really damage a lot of people in physical ways, so why should we care so much about copyrighting virtual property or even information?
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
Most wars are prevented. There's a whole profession who's most fundamental task is preventing wars - they're called diplomats. It's the few incidents and situations that escalate all the way to war that we remember. But there are far more that diplomacy prevents.
So, no, that isn't an argument for not trying to prevent unauthorised copying.
Once again, we must suffer through another pro-piracy story.
Well, no. I don't believe we do. In fact, we don't even have to come here. We could frequent some pro-**AA site and enjoy all the anti-privacy stories we could possibly want. Well, I suppose if we were paid by the MPAA or the RIAA to shill for them then we would have to come here and suffer, but I don't know anyone like that. Do you?
On Slashdot, piracy is awesome and copyright is evil, yet GPL theft is a terrible thing.
I could ask you to go ahead and state your ideas fully; however,... You seem to be saying that those two beliefs are inconsistent with each other--that there's no way one could be opposed to copyright and yet in favor of the GPL. Here's the way I see it (and please be aware that I haven't been nominated to speak for everyone here)...some people believe that the free expression of ideas leads to better conditions for the greater number of people. Of those, some have decided to work within the system to advance free expression. There are other people who work outside the system to restrict free expression. When that happens, some of the people who earlier decided to work inside the system to advance free expression use the system to stop those who are restricting free expression. See, what seems to be happening is that you're viewing things with blinders on. The blinders might be called legality or rule following or authoritarianism. Whatever they are called, others don't wear those particular blinders. And, in fact, those others aren't necessarily some kind of clones of each other. It's entirely possible that one group of people who are in favor of free expression become vocal whenever copying is discussed, and an entirely different group (with possibly some cross-overs) become vocal when enforcement of the GPL is discussed. Slashdot is monolithic in some ways. For example, I might venture to say that everyone here has used a computer at some point in their lives. In other ways we aren't quite so monolithic. For example, I have recently heard a rumor that three or four of the visitors here are not male. I have even heard that there is at least on person here who is in favor of the MPAA or the RIAA.
The only respectable pirates are the ones who freely admit that they do it because they want shit for free. Slashdot, however, invents convoluted moral platitudes to justify it.
I have a favor to ask of you. Would you please be a little more careful in your use of language? I'm personally of the belief that civil conversation is much to be admired as it leads to better understanding and communication. In particular, I'm asking that you not use the word "piracy" when referring to propagating information. Piracy happens when one group of people kill or ransom another group, take their rum or their sugar, and sink their ships. Copyright violation happens when one person duplicates a movie or a song or some other authored work when doing so is unauthorized. If you find that absolutely impossible to do then would you allow me the same liberty? You can call unauthorized copying piracy and I'll call copyright restrictions sodomy. I'm in favor of piracy (just as example. I'm not saying I'm actually in favor of piracy.) and you're in favor of sodomy. You like hearing stories about when some people sodomize other people, and you especially like it when the other person doesn't want to be sodomized. You like people to earn money sodomizing others. You like it when that's the only way the sodomites earn their living, because you want people to do a lot more sodomizing. Does that make it a little clearer? Shall we refrain from using loaded words and expressions? Or shall we not, motherfucker?
You are stealing from artists who created content.
Well, you see there? We aren't. What I mean to say is that people who make unauthorized copies aren't stealing from artists. Let me give you an example from my own life. I'm an engineer. Thirty years ago I designed
I aim to misbehave.
Yes 1984 with everything including 14k modems. When it comes to data mining the FBI can't find it's ass with both hands,
The problem here is that, even if a reasonable person can understand that getting music without paying for it is wrong
But it isn't! It absolutely isn't!
Most artists would love for you to get their material for free. It's called advertising. You are not going to buy their CD if you have never heard of them. Big media companies use TV and radio, most people now use the internet via something like Facebook (or MySpace back in the day).
Free music is good for just about everyone, except for the big music labels.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The answer is, Buggy Whip Manufacturer.
It's sad that those people with those skill sets may no longer be able to work in those professions and earn a living. But it's not our job as a society to prop them up and pass laws to make their chosen profession economically tenable. I want to be paid to sit at home all day and play games and watch movies, where's the legislation to make "coach potato" a workable profession?
People by and large are violating copyright because they don't care about it, which is to say that they don't value the IP enough to pay for it or jump through extra hoops just to be nice when they want to try something out. Or at least don't value it as much as the owners seem to think they should.
I'm actually for keeping copyright laws around, just with much shorter time frames. Maybe 7 years initially, then allow extensions of 1 year with a fee paid into a national public library fund that scales such that anything more than 20 years is practically impossible.
Maybe a bit too simple:
You put time, effort and money into something he wants to sell and make money from.
Somebody comes along, creates a copy and uses his work for free.
So, wouldnt you be angry about it?
There are other aspects and not just everything black and white (overpriced greedy corps and so on), but think about it.
All those things you mentioned-- shoplifting, burglary, littering, etc-- involve physical items, cause harm, are difficult to hide, and take effort. They are not the same as copying.
I didn't imply they were the same. Analogies only apply to the point that is made with them. And that was the one about whether things that cannot be prevented shouldn't be against the law.
Copying occurs every time anyone speaks to more than 1 person. Every instant that light shines on an object produces many images of that object. Radio and TV stations can broadcast information to a wide audience because that's the way the universe works. Trying to control copying is like trying to make water flow uphill.
Right, so it's not like any of the things I mentioned, but it is like this rather fanciful list. Does that get us anywhere? No.
You might argue that copying causes harm to the authors, but you can't prove it. You can't prove that someone who made a copy would have paid for a copy if they could not make one for free.
Proof is only in the realm of mathematics and a court of law. Certainly some people have copied something, which if they'd been unable to get a copy they would have bought. If we're honest we've all seen this, or done that ourselves. And some instances are all that's required to demonstrate there is a loss.
In fact, we know that many people would not pay.
Sure, but no matter how many of them there are, it doesn't cancel out the ones that would pay if they couldn't get the copy for free.
That definition of harm is too broad. Under that interpretation, every time someone walks instead of drives, that harms the oil companies, auto manufacturers, road construction contractors, and anyone else connected to transportation. If you shop at WalMart, you harm KMart. If you eat at McDonalds, you harm Kentucky Fried Chicken. If you cook your own food, you harm both restaurants. If you skip a meal, you harm the restaurants and the grocery stores.
No. If you pirate something, you are only able to do so because of the work that went into the original by the creators. That doesn't apply to anything you've listed. My ability to walk has not been enabled by the oil companies. I'm not taking advantage of KMarts work when I shop at Walmart, etc.
The movie equivalent to the things you've listed is choosing a different movie, possibly one that you can see at home on broadcast TV for free, rather than catching the latest at the Theater or watching a DVD. Or doing something else to do rather than watching the movie. It isn't pirating the movie that otherwise you'd have to pay for.
That's very good, you and the moderators have just confirmed his points without in any way having to bother responding to his arguments.
Excellent work, folks.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Lawyers are the worst thing to happen to the planet.
FTFY.
However, attributing that disproportionate level of noisy stupidity from a handful of goofs (that probably couldn't competently operate a firearm if you wrote an O'Reilly book for it) to everyone that wants something something done about corruption in government... well, that's just unfair.
The worrying thing is that these goofs probably can competently operate their collection of firearms if they're American. However, anyone who thinks that a revolution is primarily about out-shooting the government has obviously read very little history, or indeed even concentrated on world news in the last year or so. As long as the military support them, the government will always have more helicopter gunships, tanks, fighter bombers, etc than even the most well armed local nutjob militia.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Very well said! It's too bad I can't "favorite" a post in Slashdot, because this would be in there simply for the use as a reference.
Need and desired are not the same. No one needs to make a living writing music, inventing, etc. It is only a desire to be self sustained by such activities, not a demand.
No one needs to make a living as a dentist, but it's fortunate that some people choose make their money that way. Otherwise the rest of us wouldn't be able to get our teeth fixed. No one has to run a bar. But it's fortunate some people choose to make their money that way as many people enjoy going to a bar from time to time.
Likewise it's a good job that some poepl choose to make their money from film making. Because lots of us like to watch feature films.
The amateur argument doesn't work, because in most cases there is huge gap in expertise between professionals and amateurs. People wouldn't go to film-making school unless there was a career to go into. Nor would they get the experience from evenings and weekends to develop to the best professional standards. Amateurs mostly produce the kind of shorts you see on YouTube. Some will progress to making a 15 minute zombie movie. But amateurs are never going to produce a Shindlers List or a Star Wars. Not only do they not have the stills, they don't have the budgets. It's not just people's time that costs money in movie making. Equipment, sets, costumes, locations, offices, transport etc. It all costs money.
The stuff that people want to copy relies on lots of people investing lots of money, time and talent in making it. If everyone took the same attitude as the illicit copiers, then there would be litle worth copying.
Now if you can find another way of financing the professionals. Like for example a tax. Then OK. But the idea that amateurs will fill the void left by professionals is just not realistic.
recognize copyright
It's a little like renting or timesharing the said car. You don't exactly own the game, just like you don't exactly own a timeshared car even though you do get to drive it around and you can tell your friends it's yours. This is not an exact analogy, but I think you get the idea. Now if you let your friend have a copy of the game, the person losing the value is the owner of the work, i.e. the author. In the case of the timeshared car, if you let your friend joyride the car off the record you are putting the other co-owners in a losing situation that is probably against the agreement you have with them about using the car.
So, in both of the above situations, you yourself aren't losing value, you're absolutely right about that! But when the MPAA puts its "you wouldn't steal.." motto, they don't mean stealing from an owner of a copy of the tape. They mean themselves, of course. They are basically saying that by copying you are robbing them of the opportunity to charge you. Although that is not stealing literally, if someone robs you of your right to make a buck (note that you do have that right), you can sue for damages in the amount that you justifiably argue that you would have earned, if you weren't robbed of the opportunity.
It is inherently difficult (perhaps impossible) to contrive a situation with physical property that is parallel to violating copyright. I do like this example (better than the ones in your earlier post, which I have heard before and in my opinion are not very relevant).
A more accurate (though rather contrived) example in my view would be a group of people carpooling in a shared car.
What if we take a small group of individuals (let's say 4) who all happen to be housemates, and all work at the same place (or near enough that they park in the same parking lot). They realize that they spend almost no time traveling by car to anywhere aside from their workplace. Each of them come to the point where they plan to buy a new car. They each go look at cars independently, make a purchasing decision, get their finances arranged, and are prepared to each purchase a car.
Before they make their purchases, however, they happen to have a discussion about this and come up with a money-saving plan. To save money, they each decide not to buy a new personal car and instead split the cost to buy one that they will all share. They buy the car, and share it.
The auto manufacturing and resale industries have clearly lost 3 sales. Is it wrong for the housemates to do this, merely because of the fact they are taking 3 sales away from two extremely significant industries?
This is still not a perfect example, but I think it at least flows with the copyright problem logically.
There are issues with this comparison in the real world, primarily with convenience. Even though our 4 housemates above determined it would be convenient to share a car, that is a contrived and probably rare situation. With copying music/video/text in the digital era convenience is no longer a barrier. Someone can easily and conveniently copy an mp3 file many, many times with no loss in quality. Large numbers of individuals can then listen to these mp3 copies independently with no impact on convenience or experience.
Still, we often make decisions in the real world that cause 'loss of sale' in an industry. Sometimes we are still able to fully experience a product while causing the loss of sale.
So the question becomes: is it morally wrong to cause loss of sale in an industry while still legally utilizing the product? Is it only morally wrong if it is extremely convenient for you to do so? Perhaps. But it obviously is very different from theft.
I consider myself a Libertarian, and yes I make a living because of copyright.
Correction: you take advantage of copyright to make a living. If there was no copyright, I believe that you would still make a living; possibly in a different field, possibly utilizing your other talents, possibly more successfully, possibly even benefiting society more than you do now.
I also think that piracy is rampant.
And I think that fornication is rampant.
And it was also rampant in the state of Virginia before 2005 (It was a criminal offence until Martin v. Ziherl).
Doesn't make it wrong though.
A LOT of people don't realize it is wrong.
Correction: A LOT of people don't AGREE that it is wrong.
And maybe, just maybe, the same "A LOT of people" are right about this.
But the general feeling I get from the average slashdotter is "copyright is evil because I want free stuff."
Funny. The arguments that I hear are that copyright -- in its current reincarnation -- creates artificial scarcity, locks down culture, limits the freedom of expression, robs the public domain, etc. Some of them laid down more logically are presented more eloquently than others but then, not everyone is a natural public speaker.
I hear time and again how the publishers are screwing the creators
Dont' they?
or the general public
Dont' they?
I think that things like SOPA are bad. But not that copyright should be abolished.
And I think that it should be. But then, I also believe that corrupt politicians and dirty cops should be thrown in jail to rot and corporate officers should be legally responsible for the actions of their respective corporations so it tells you how much my ideas are worth.
I also think there are a lot of people here who thing they way you think in that it is a matter of principle. BUT the noisiest argument tends to "I want my shit for free"
Then perhaps you should pay more attention to the quietly stated reasonable arguments and learn to tune out the noise.
Of course these people then call the "mafiaa" greedy
Aren't they?
If you want to play the car analogy, it can't be about stealing the car. Pirating diminishes the value of the work to the author, so to do a proper car analogy, you would need to do something to the car that diminishes its value to its owner, while not actually taking anything physical away.
Except that this "value" that you speak of was not something that the author was naturally entitled to, it was only created by the artificial scarcity imposed by the copyright grant.
One example is keying the car.
Stupid example. You are altering the owner's car in ways he does not approve of. If, by way of some weird quantum principle, copying a work would alter the original then your analogy might have merit.
A second example is taking the car for a joyride, but taking care not to demolish it.
Another stupid example. The original object is modified (gas consumption, wear of parts) as well as being physically unavailable to the owner for the duration of your joy ride.
So no, pirating isn't stealing in the common sense, but it is taking something of value from the owner.
You want a car analogy, I'll give you one. You have a car; now I start selling identical cars for $10 each (or even giving them away for free). The resale value of your car just vanished in a puff of logic. Did I take something of value from you? Are you entitled to compensation?
You could post a link to an infopage for your software so people could see if they want to buy it
It's called sharing; you might have heard about it.
If widespread pirating is indeed good for content creators, then they are free to give their stuff away. It's not for you to unilaterally declare what's good for them
He didn't. He implied that sharing is good for society as a whole, not for the "content creators" in particular.
just because you want free stuff.
I think you missed the part where he mentions that he *gives* stuff (that he created) for free.
Let me quote it for you:
> And before you dare call me selfish or a thief, and before you accuse me of taking crumbs from the mouth of the poor, starving artist:
> I get paid to write, code and take photos, and yet I still manage to give almost all of that output away. If I can do it, then so can others.
I think you missed the part where he mentions that he *gives* stuff (that he created) for free.
I didn't miss it at all. But his choice to give stuff away doesn't give him the right to take from others.
Two facts: 1. Not every copyrighted work is a cultural artifact. 2. Not every right reserved copyright is meant to limit distribution. There is probably more copyrighted work that the author wants distributed freely than there is copyrighted work that the author wants to suppress distribution. Failure to understand this is the worst impact of all this "anti-piracy" movement.
You disagree with someone else's opinions so they are automatically a troll? I agree what they said, people don't magically have all the money in the world. They will pick and choose and if you are able to provide content at a reasonable rate, with the benefits of pirating, then you're getting somewhere. All movies, TV shows, and music need to be available on-demand, online, for either free (with ads) or through a subscription service. If you buy a CD, you should be legally allowed to put it on your PC and then transfer it to an mp3 player. What these big players don't understand is how society functions, and they try hard to manipulate it but they can't win. They need to be reasonable instead of being greedy. Movie stars can make $100,000/movie, and $1mil max for the superstar AAA type. They don't need to be paying their designers $600/hr; and they don't need to be paying anyone more than market value. They can decide to reduce the budget of a movie down to $30mil at most and sell copies at $1-$5 each instead of $50-$60. They need to allow users to download it when it's released, not be forced to wait 6-8 months for the DVD. They need to stop charging over $30/rental when the movie is still in theaters. I can go on and on, and it's the reality on how things work. People want convenience and affordability, especially in times like these when the economy is so bad.
I believe the chances of all paying customers becoming infringers an impossibility, as least within a couple of generations, past that, who knows. Revenues maybe decline they may not, things may become chaotic and then reach equilibrium similar to what we have now, it's impossible to say. Humble Bundle is a good example of money made without copyright, were the individual pays the subjective value she deems fit. To get back on track, this argument seems to have evolved into one of economic justification, which is hollow, because such justification can be provided for any activity, whether moral or not. I was attempting to frame the discussion as one of curtailment.
While both professions you describe require support structures and expertise. On provides entertainment the other provides a health service, except in that case of whitening and other cosmetic procedures. One could make an argument over which professions provide to the culture usefulness or have higher demand, but this is irrelevant. Each one provides a service, both of which are not required for life and society to continue, also irrelevant. People are willing to pay for these services, I would not make such a demand that either must work for free for my own befit, yet if they choose to I will not deny them that. I would demand that they not seek control over my actions as a way to increase their own profits.
Following the logic applied to creators of “intellectual property” to that of a dentist:
Local dentist board, or whatever you wish to call it, in you area has license to all dental care for said area. Anyone who receives care from someone out side this group is denying that local dentist their rightful pay. In fact brushing you own teeth could be seen as an attempt to deny them of their pay. They have been charged by the state to maintain the health of the populations' teeth. Their schooling was expensive, and they provide a useful service to the community, so it is only just that we pay them for their work, work which belongs to them by law.
My analog may be missing some finer points, but I hope the general tone could be elucidated. I disagree with the need to have controlling rights to my actions so that anyone may enrich themselves. Your other points I find sound and have no disagreement with. Lack of an artificial flow of excess money into the creative arts would cause some economic upheaval, large or small it is hard to judge. Quality of certain works would fall for a time until technology made such things reachable. The pace of such technology might not advance at the same pace as well. In the lifetime of those accustomed to such things it may be unbearable, I claim no right to demand such things of others. I claim only the right to be free in my actions when they cause no harm to others, actual harm, not perceived harm.
I do find your idea of a tax to continue to provide support for creative work quite agreeable, as a substitute for curtailment of rights. Many things society finds useful as a whole are provided for by all, and this would be a good case of such things. It may even be justified in the current mindset, since the public payed for it, the public owns the rights to it, paid works for hire and such. In fact if such things were in place, I think we might find more funds than were available before. Nothing would need to be spent on litigation, DRM schemes, and other such distractions. Much work would need to be done to prevent government censorship of certain works, but I think it could be done.
I think you missed the part where he mentions that he *gives* stuff (that he created) for free.
I didn't miss it at all. But his choice to give stuff away doesn't give him the right to take from others.
See? It's exactly this attitude - that you can't share without being a thief - that makes me want to punch someone in the face.
How dare you imply that I don't respect the rights of others? You should be ashamed. Just because you can't imagine a world in which sharing doesn't equate with stealing doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Troll? Go get 'em metamods.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
so, the wars on the last couple of decades were absolutely unavoidable ?
really nice
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
You can't copy other people's contributions to culture, but you are free, and always have been free, to contribute your own original works.
You mean like Walt Disney did with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, etc etc?
Actually I started with the trivial case, and expanded to the more sophisticated one. None of them are mutually exclusive, and none of which was a rant. If you can accept that you are due to be paid for work you did even though you're dead, then we're arguing a matter of degree.
You (assuming you're the same AC as before) are jumping from MJ, John lennon and Team Bondi, all of which have immediate survivors (ex wives, children, notably, junior children in the case of MJ, the actual people) to 150 years. That's a bit of a stretch.
I put it in the frame of 'what would I be legally obligated to, and would I reasonably be able to collect payments for if I were still alive'. A corporation is a somewhat messier problem because they are legally obliged indefinitely, and naturally anyone with a brain would want to try and transfer copyright to a corporation or similar if that was an advantage.
If a 26 year old does good work, and no one discovers it's value until they are 65 (so there has been no commercial value to it for that time) should they suddenly not profit from it because it's been too long? That seems a tad unfair. My thesis is my thesis, just as my house is my house, I'm not really fond of the idea that I could ever lose rights over work I did just because the time has expired, and I'm not really fond of the idea that underage children could equally lose out for the same reason. If my work has value - either as a contract work for hire for someone else, or oh its own to be copyrighted it shouldn't magically expire. A company I was tangentially interacting with just lately discovered that it had never paid employees for a particular day. Ever. (if date the same number problem). So you dig back through your employee records for 10 years, and pay people (and some lawyers because obviously it's a bit more complicated than that). That only seems right. Even if the work I did took an hour when I was 5, it was still my work and I should be paid the entire value of that work, either per hour or as long as it generates money. The question of beyond that, which right now in the EU and I think US is life of author + 70 years. I'm not sure you really need more than that (or even that much really). But again, that's arguing degree. If you don't think you or or your estate should get paid for work you did a long time ago then we're going to have trouble having a discussion at all. I know music is different than general copyright and there's probably a sweet spot between music at whatever it is, 50 years I think, and life + 70. But in any case, the 3 examples you cited, I come down on the side of the beatles should still have ownership of their music, MJ's kids should have ownership of his, and Team Bondi employees should still get paid whatever they can from sales of LA noire.
If you want a more dramatic case, something like Lord of the Rings... which just made what, 6 billion dollars despite it having been written in the 1920's by a guy who died in the 1970's is a bit murkier. It would seem woefully unfair that you could simply wait 30 more years and not have to pay his heirs a penny of 6 billion dollars that owes itself to him, and yet doing that to Gilbert and Sullivan which is only from 40 years before Tolkien wrote LOTR would not seem unreasonable, so maybe I am biased by an exceptional case (or maybe the law should explicitly deal with the diminishing value of copyright over time).
A LOT of people don't realize it is wrong.
Correction: A lot of people do not believe that it is wrong. This is the case despite the fact that we have experienced 20+ years of propaganda intended to convince us that violating copyright is exactly the same as physical property theft (e.g. "You wouldn't steal a car, would you??").
Violating copyright doesn't have to be "exactly the same as physical property theft" to be wrong.
If you genuinely believe that copyright is wrong in itself, that is a defensible position, but you have to apply it to everything equally and not use the standard slashdot argument that you would be happy to pay X amount as long as it doesn't have DRM. That is not your choice. You do not have a right to acquire anything you want purely on your own terms. If you don't like a product, don't buy it - we're talking about entertainment here, not food and water that you have no choice but to buy from somewhere.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
"By using your car, there is the actual cost of repairing it, whereas by pirating software, there is no maintenance that must be done, and no damage caused to it.
And of course, this wear on the car is something that I need to pay for in order to keep using it, but if your software is being pirated, there are no costs involved. "
Im in total agreement with TheVelvetFlameBait on this one...
People seem to think that because they are making a copy of the digital media, they are not "stealing" anything, but rather denying the seller of a potential sale. They say "hey, but that sale could have been lost due to other factors like, it was just a poor product". But it wasn't was it? That sale was lost because you copied something and did not pay for it. It is ridiculous to claim otherwise.
You think copying without stealing has no effect? Lets say i'm a film maker and I invest a lot of my time, energy, and a large sum of my own personal money into making a film and I get a media company to distribute it. To make things extrmely simple, lets say every one pirates it and there are zero sales of the film. They didn't actually steal anything substantial or physical, but they denied me as a film maker a potential sale which I would have made a small profit on after the distributor to a large chunk. In this scenario, I may have gone into personal bankruptcy because I invested all I had into making a film, and I made nothing back. In this case, pirates really did ruin my life in a very personal way. In a scenario where pirating my film was very limited or non-existant, I may have made my fortune by making this film, and not simply recuperated my costs.
Now, im fully aware that copyright law sucks, that my scenario is uncommon (but not non-existant), that media companies operate on a whole other level, that media companies are greedy, and that they use morally wrong tactics to try to stop pirating, but the law is the frickin law, and every one of us voted for this by electing the people we did, and not reacting every time the law got changed and copyright got extended.
Copyright needs to change, to reflect common sense again. We need to demonstrate/vote/'vote' with our dollars to get this changed.
Copyright serves a valid purpose when used correctly.
But don't for one second think that because copyright law does suck so much in it's current form, that it makes it ok for you to pirate something. You're still breaking the law.
If copyright didn't exist, there would be no incentive for innovation. Most people would give up because as soon as they made something or invented something, their neighbour could make a copy of it (either physical thing or digital data).
"Everyone knows that vi vi vi is the number of the beast" -- Richard Stallman
You do understand that if copyright was enforced the fracture between free and paid would be HUGE! The Pirate Bay and Torrentz, ISOHunt and so forth would be just as popular but populated with free content.
It should be obvious that the internet is wires, an OS is required to make a computer run and a browser is an obvious way of handling the web (or equivalent technology) that these things are still "owned" and controlled by U.S. companies is a tribute to the work of the OSS developers who worked for universities to build something brilliant. They got there first and sold it insanely cheap, otherwise everyone would have gotten there on their own, by a more freedom embracing path. (In both culture and software)
I do agree that this recent trend of artists trying to embrace free and open source and getting incredible community support are short lived. Albums like the NIN 7 Million $ free release aren't sustainable, artists are chasing it with the same scary look of inexperienced investors.
The problem with a truly open information economy and system is that it really embraces the notion of critics. The problem with that is the classic critic dilemma of high vs low culture (Linux vs OSX if you will), an eternal struggle with the same ups and downs as the economy... violent stuff.
If the PirateBay was entirely populated by free content we wouldn't need as many distribution channels, there would be the 1 "most liked" movie and it would sit there for aeons with no financial incentive to displace it. While I support the notion of a few classics that should be widely digested the possibility of a "path of perfection" in culture, software or news is terrifying.
You can examine music from the 1940's (just before Rock) or the 1910's (before Swing and Flappers) and you'll find a very single minded approach, very quickly you'll get a notion of the "perfect song" all the artists are trying to produce. Bad for multiculturalism, good for avoiding cliquishness and social isolation but bad for innovation and the appreciation of a variety of brilliance.
Forgot to add one small point:
Another common argument is that "hey man, the media companies are dinosaurs living in the technological past, and they just want to retain their monopoly and profits! They won't let us _download_ stuff, and they're forcing us to obtain our media in a non-convenient way, maaan".
All true.
And still, it doesn't give you the right to break the law does it? I just love those "all information should be free" clowns. Buy your own house, get a job and support a family, then come back when you've grown up.
"Everyone knows that vi vi vi is the number of the beast" -- Richard Stallman
it doesn't diminish the value of your copy, but it does deny the author/seller that one sale.
One sale. What's that eh? They make enough money anyway don't they, it's not like they're going to go bankrupt or anything? Right?
Boil that down, and it's plain old jealousy of someone elses success. Or a desire to limit an entities success because of jealousy of their success and criticism of they way they operate. But those are _still_ separate issues!
And if you cannt see that the "owner" of something is irrelevant then you need to look harder. The person who wrote the code/filmed the film/sang the song, made a deal with a company or worked for a company purely because that enabled them to distribute their work as widely as possible. If the 'company' gave them a bad deal on that, then that was their choice, and is a separate matter. The fact is that the 'company' then had a legal stake in that work, and was entitled to profit from it.
You know, im just some IT support guy, have nothing to do with media whatsoever, and hate the current state of affairs as much as the next guy, but im constantly amazed at peoples inability to understand all this.
"Everyone knows that vi vi vi is the number of the beast" -- Richard Stallman
another sane voice.
"Everyone knows that vi vi vi is the number of the beast" -- Richard Stallman
Let's say that pirating something is similar to keying a car. When something is pirated, a potential sale is lost. The owner/distributor of that product loses the potential to make money, but there is no real damage caused. When a car is damaged, you have the quite real cost of repairing it. So you're equating the actual cost of repairing the damage caused by someone keying your car (which is something you pay to repair) to the loss of potential income (which you probably never would have received, based on the reasons why people pirate).
:) So...
I support piracy, but arguing is fun
Let's take the analogy in a different direction.
The damage to the car is superficial, the actual usefulness of the car isn't diminished (pretending that rust and public image don't exist, in this case) there is still the effect of people being less attracted to the product and having a diminished mental image of it's price. The relationship between the perceived value of a good and it's actual value is much more direct than the one between supply and demand, particularly for luxury goods. If CD's cost $40 people would buy less and savor them more, they wouldn't be mind boggled that they didn't instead cost $10 or $5. The music industry would adjust, producing fewer albums with more innovation and variety (to lure in consumers at a higher price point) and spending more to produce each album (maybe $2.50 of a CD price instead of the current $1.25).
By embracing the notion that music is omnipresent we are diminishing it's social cache. To return to the car analogy, cars would no longer be status symbols. They would be commodity, the $2000 car would be a reality... the Mazzarati a sci-fi fantasy. And homes would cost 30-40% more. With the $2000 car would come the "interchangeable car" (just like piracy will create the "best song EVAR" and the "best movie EVAR" as voted by U!) which would diminish the sense of freedom that comes with car ownership (See the world from inside a box rather than through a screen! Have sex on the hood and other uncomfortable locations!)
The goal of OSS is to make every Honda Civic rolling off the line a Buggati Veyron (about the same amount of metal [ok bad example] and robots do all the work anyway, the problem is no one is objective enough to care (except nerds), to most people it's relative (try telling someone some piss poor piece of software is the end all and be all and be amazed as they master it with ease, at the same time take something brilliantly engineered... tell a user something better will be along in 5 months and that they shouldn't get too attached and watch them give up because they can't find "save" button). P.S. the car you want is the 1988 Toyota Tercel, they're still on the road in numbers if you would like a test drive.
Nerds will do to music what they do to cars, they'll make an uber Tercel (Toyota Uber VS Veyron: 1001 vs 1000 HP, 400KG vs 2000KG. [The Veyroners will still get all the girls of course, but we'll know they're chumps who might as well be wearing makeup]).
Anyway to return to the original arguement, there is a relationship between the perceived VALUE of music and it's price, and the price/value/overall industry income/industry perception which is reflected in the numerous silly people who thing that because they know an F scale they're the next MJ... sometimes, almost randomly it seems they're right. The content industry does some hugely bullshit things but criticizing artists for their wealth is silly, half the time half the ostentation is paid for by publicists (for the artist or the label), that white stretch limo... yea SONY owns that. 50cents 50 cars, if he lost his contract that'd be 5 cars. The industry loves it because they can tax write off, the government loves it because it glamorizes an apparently egalitarian element of society, and we love it because it keeps optimistic teenagers plugging away in their garages turning out unexpectedly brilliant mistakes.
Anyway, I love this argumen
Chill.
People like you try to make the world a better place for everybody.
Just remember that and ignore the trolls.
I agree. The difference is that physical property theft is wrong - with or without laws to make it so. This is generally not debatable. (The glaring exception would be a hypothetical society where the concept of personal property truly does not exist.)
The 'copyright is wrong' argument is much more complicated, with a lot more gray area. For example, I would say that copying a CD for a buddy is difficult to attack on moral grounds alone, while making and distributing copies on a large scale for profit is not very defensible and probably wrong. But, is making a lot of your personal music collection available to others wrong? Maybe, but it's very debatable.
First, your modified car analogy still doesn't make sense to me because it still doesn't overcome the fact that you're dealing with a physical piece of property that can't be duplicated for free. If you're timesharing a car (or any other physical property), what you're being "charged" for is the time you're renting the specific physical piece of property. Whether you joyride it or your friends joyride it, doesn't make any difference to the owner because you and only you are responsible for that specific car. If you return it late or damaged you're responsible regardless of if you lent the car to your friends or not. With physical property you can have accounting of ownership and responsibility. You can't do that with information.
The second part of your statement I take issue with is that people have the right to make a buck. That is simply false. Perhaps you meant people have the right to an opportunity to make money, but even that is false. There is no law that states any such thing and there are plenty of people who are in situations where they don't even have an opportunity to make money - who are they going to sue? Nobody, because their rights weren't violated. The constitution does protect your *physical* property.
You're missing the point.
Richard Stallman *****HATED***** copyright. Hated it with a passion. He found the very concept repugnant. So, he wrote the GPL to essentially say "do whatever you want with this, just don't say you invented it from scratch and don't prevent anyone else from doing the same." The GPL is essentially about removing copyright restrictions, and preventing someone else from re-implementing them back onto the same body of work.
So, while copyright law does in fact make the GPL enforceable, the whole pint of the GPL is to use copyright law to remove copyright. Hence why it's often called copyleft - compared to a normal copyright, it's kinda the logical opposite.
And if we're getting into poop-flinging on "logic 101" I recommend studying what logic actually is. Formal Logic; Informal Logic (aka Natural Language Logic); Symbolic Logic; Mathematical Logic... there's several different types of "logic." This discussion revolved primarily around the informal variety, which your parent post used correctly.
Weylin
67.5% Slashdot Pure I guess I need to work on that....
If you're not pro-piracy you're too dumb to own a computer. Dumb people making dumb statements on Slashdot (or elsewhere) tend to get moderated.
It seems like you may be confusing the concepts of "right" and "legal".