So, you are saying that someone that made music should not deserve to be paid for it? Or someone that created a good story (aka. book) doesn't deserve to be paid for it? After all, this is all just information and it should be free? Nowhere did I say anything like that, and you've completely missed the whole topic of discussion in this particular thread. The question in this thread is whether or not copyright (or the lack thereof) is the natural state for a human society. This is a completely different question than whether or not copyright is good.
I personally have no problem with copyright. I support copyright in its original US form and the original duration (14 years plus a possible 14 year extension in the US I believe). I do not support copyright in it's current ridiculous form. Copyright in most parts of the world now defaults to 50 or 70 years after the author/artist's death. That's outrageous. Before that's up, someone will have lobbied for yet another extension as they have in the past, and repeat ad nauseum leading to truly eternal copyright, which is not at all what copyright was intended for.
Unfortunately for your, and his, case, copyright doesn't actually cover information. It covers created works, which are considerably different. Well, yes and no. Most "created works" today are information in some form, and many are only information and not intended to be anything else (such as entertainment). And these days, if you have information that you want restricted all you need do is record it in some manner and have it copyrighted.
Also, the free sharing of ideas is protected under copyright law, which does not allow for an idea to be copyrighted, No but ideas can be patented, and by now so many things are so broadly patented it's almost impossible to find an idea that's not. But this whole discussion is not really about "ideas" - it's about being able to share information/entertainment/humor/etc. with whoever you like (whether that be five close friends or five million people on the internet).
and has fair use limitations on the control over the content that a creator can possess, ensuring the right for the creation of derivative works (a right that is enshrined in American law, which states that in an infringement case where the content is at issue, the judge must side for the party that provides a precedent allowing greater creative freedom - for more information, read "The Mythology of the Public Domain" at http://llr.lls.edu/volumes/v36-issue1/martin-origi nal1.pdf). All of which has been rendered nearly meaningless with the advent of the DMCA as well as litigations by large corporations with vast resources (such as the RIAA) setting precedents.
A concept of copyright is perfectly natural in a society which has both the concept of one's creations being one's property That's your opinion. And that's the premise upon which we disagree. If you create a chair, of course the chair you made is your chair, but the knowledge to make that chair not so much. People have long held to the idea that "If I buy a chair you made, and I can figure out how to make one myself there's nothing wrong with that, nor is there anything wrong with making some for my family and friends so they don't have to buy them from you. And making them to sell is a bit underhanded, but not necessarily wrong." The idea is that if I care about your personal wellbeing and want to be nice to you, I won't make your kind of chairs and deprive you of some customers. And that's what copyright (and patents) are all about - the public making an agreement to care about the wellbeing of artists and creators.
I personally hate to think about all the rich culture and literature we might well not have if ancient civilizations had copyright laws like ours today.
No, you missed his point which is why you can't see why he's been modded up. His position is that the free sharing of information is the natural state of things, and in general is beneficial to society as a whole. Copyright therefore is unnatural and creates an aberration, and is only "wrong" because government has decided to step in and take more control. Murder and rape on the other hand are not the natural state for humans (they've been considered "wrong" in every human society and in all of recorded history, which seems to indicate that the vast majority of humans intrinsically know that murder and rape are not a good thing) and most definitely are not beneficial for society as a whole.
You might disagree with some of his premises but his logic is sound.
First, are you out of your mind? Speaking of bad logic... even comparing actual Theft (let alone copyright infringement) with murder and rape is outrageous. Murder and rape take something that can NEVER be restored.
Second, Theft actually deprives you of your personal belongings. That means you're going to have to spend more money to buy it again. Copyright infringement deprives you of potential earnings. This loss (though it is a real problem, and could ruin a person financially) is completely impossible to quantify in most cases, due to variables that are impossible to know. For example, you have no way of knowing if every person who obtained the copy of your work illegally would ever have paid for a legal copy if he could not have obtained one illegally. This does not make copyright infringement right or even OK, but it does mean that your "lost income" may well never have existed at all, and you have lost nothing.
Third, it has been shown many times in many ways that copyright infringement can actually help the author/artist by spreading his work and making it far more popular than if the copyright infringement had never occurred.
All moral and ethical questions aside, if sharing music files is a Bad Thing (TM) then the uploading of files for "personal storage" (yes even if it's encrypted) is something that must be outlawed. It's not that hard to share a little.txt file giving the URL and login info for where the "personal" music is being stored.
Running with your apartment analogy, it's like you had a nice little apartment somewhere that anyone could teleport to instantly and free of charge, and when they got there you have an unlimited supply of blank CDs and a CD-copying machine along with your massive music collection that includes several thousand albums. All you need is the address and the key to get in the apartment.
So honestly I have to say this is no more ridiculous than anything the RIAA has been doing here in the US. It's really to be expected. Watch for the same thing in the US in the near future.
It's a lot like wine. The average person who doesn't make wine a hobby (like me for instance) can't really tell a whole lot of difference between an average wine and one that's a little better. Anyone can taste different flavors in different types of wine, but a typical person who's not a wine enthusiast might well like a cheap wine better than some of the better fine wines. It's an acquired taste. The same thing goes for books - if you're not really into books as a hobby you'll consider any book you liked a good book. And there's nothing wrong with this. But for people who are literary enthusiasts there are books that are objectively better, and these are largely agreed-upon by literary enthusiasts the world over.
I know your questions were directed primarily at wrf3 and I do not presume to speak for him, however these are the answers to the best of my understanding.
I understood this as to be a test of faith. You have free will so you have to choose to accept Christ. It's not so much a test of faith as it is a question of whether or not you want to have a relationship with God. Just as you must choose whether or not you wish to have an intimate relationship with any particular human. But yes, you must do the choosing.
Your last sentence suggests it may actually be God who chooses. God may come to you, or not. Am I misunderstanding? God is omnipresent. He's everywhere. That means he's always there with you, waiting for you to choose. God "comes" to everybody; he doesn't pick and choose certain people. Some people are more sensitive and receptive to God, and these people may not need a human messenger to bring the Gospel to them.
Well, getting the same laptop at $599 instead of $649 is a nice little savings. It's not huge. The real reason that this is important however is that there needs to be some incentive for people other than those of us who already use Linux to buy a Ubuntu PC from Dell. So now the choice is you can either a.) stick with the familiar Windows system or b.) save a little cash. If they were priced the same there would be very few new people trying the Ubuntu PCs and sales would be too low for it to really be profitable to Dell to offer them at all, and they'd probably eliminate them from the lineup again in a year or two.
Yes you are.
Why should content creators have to give this right [to distribution] up in the digital age? If our country was actually still functioning as a democracy, it's not up to the content creators to keep or give up this "right". It's not some right they ought to have that they are giving up. It's an unnatural "right" that the consumers are extending to the content creators, and it's up to the consumers if they want to keep extending that "right" (keeping in mind of course that some of those same consumers might also be in the content creator group).
But unfortunately IP is no longer being operated as a democracy in the US, and the people controlling the majority of entertainment IP want everyone to think exactly as you're thinking.
Yeah there's always at least one person who has to look at copyright backwards.
Why should the people have to give up the right to share things they found funny/interesting with other people in the digital age?
Please take another look at our Constitution and Bill of Rights. The "right to make money off a creative work" is not listed as an inherent right. The right to express yourself however you choose is. Copyright in its original form was intended to be an agreement between the public and the creator for the public to temporarily give up those rights to freedom of expression in order to allow the creator a brief period of time of no competition to market his creative work, if it is indeed marketable.
Ugh, the worst feature ever. It would turn on silently if you held down one of the outer buttons (which my pocket did, by itself, frequently.) Then, when a call came in, it would shout, over speakerphone, "Call from... "
Thankfully, they removed it from the more recent models. It was so damn disruptive... OMG, you have no idea how much that pissed me off on my old phone. Every damn time I pulled it out of my pocket it had switched to driving mode. The best part? You couldn't switch it OFF with that button while it was "ringing". (If it hadn't been possible to shut the damn thing up with the volume button I swear I would have crushed that phone into a small pile of powder.) So many times I had to let calls go to voice mail because it would have been too disruptive to answer it while it was in driving mode. I'm still debating how that phone should meet its ultimate doom. Some possible choices include drowning it in a mud puddle, driving over it with my car or death by hammer, however none of those seems severe enough to deliver justice. Or maybe I should find out who designed this "feature" and make them use the phone for two years.
And if you're running WinXP SP2 don't forget to go into the Security Center and tell it NOT to alert you about Automatic Updates. Otherwise the Security Center will make a popup bubble every 5 minutes whining about Automatic Updates being turned off.
Um... did you even read all of the post you're replying to?
The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct. That sounds like a pretty good system to me.
You do realize that "a number of other people" here could refer to even several dozen or several hundred?
So clearly it's not going to be just one person that determines the answer for unknown captchas.
Yeah my thoughts exactly. I don't own one (chose the DS instead) but my friend does, and it's a really nice piece of electronics. And even for people who don't give a shit, adding phone functionality (even if it turns out a bit cludgy or hard to use) is definitely a nice move by Sony and I applaud it.
Someone should mod down that AC.
Re:Piracy is marker of immature market
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Piracy Economics
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No not really. It's called infringement. More specifically, copyright or patent infringement. Terms which have been around since oh... about the same time copyright and patents were invented.
I think we're mostly on the same page. But here's a few ways my opinions differ from yours.
I just think a right to privacy is a fundamental principle to live by. I couldn't agree more, but I don't really see this being a violation of your right to privacy. It's more a thing where "for this kind of job, we need to be extra careful." It's not like they're demanding your fingerprints at the grocery story, or worse yet coming to your house.
I won't work for a company that does drug testing, I will. Regardless of whether we like it or not, right now it's illegal to use certain kinds of drugs. They're just protecting themselves from lawsuits. And these days I really can't blame them, when I see the huge number of ludicrous lawsuits that should be thrown out without a second thought... and some of them are actually won.
I don't mind background checks if you are going to work with sensitive information but I think privacy is very important as I see it eroding everywhere these days. Yeah, but with global connections like the internet, what do you really expect? We're trading privacy for convenience, simple as that. Look at the way identity theft is increasing by leaps and bounds. The only way to really deal with it is... yep... to give up even more privacy. It's only going to get worse.
I didn't mean to give the impression that it was impossible to tighten the budget with kids, merely that it was a lot more difficult than the parent poster led on and that such decisions can have very negative repercussions both on the kids and on the wife. When you have multiple points of view to consider the decision is far more difficult and more often than not results in accepting the loss of privacy.
Given that I am not encumbered in the same way I will stand up loud and try to make sure others who are will not be forced down the wrong path. Of course it's my opinion that its the wrong path. I believe the discussion is debatable for certain circumstances which is why I don't believe it should be outlawed. Yeah, and I respect that.:)
I want to sympathize and agree with you. Really I do. But I just can't. In the US especially, there's millions of jobs available every day. It's completely up to the employer what requirements he wants to demand for potential employees, as long as said requirements are not illegal. And that's how it should be: he's paying you to work for him; if you don't want to do it like he wants it done there's no reason he should hire you. If you don't like his requirements, you're free to find another job. If his requirements really are too strict, he won't be able to find anyone to meet them and eventually he'll have to lower them. I know job-hunting is not easy. I've spent way more time at it than I care to. But the fact is, job opportunities in the US are everywhere. If someone really wants to find a job, there's no reason he/she can't. You might not be able to find a job that's exactly what you want, but that's fairly normal. Tightening "the diaper budget" may not be as easy as tightening your belt, but it's certainly doable. Think it's tough getting by with three kids? Try it with eleven. Believe me, there's lots of things you can do to get by. There really is something to living within your means. But most of us are spoiled now and really haven't a clue what it's like to have to make do with the bare necessities. (Hint: giving up the cable TV and your night out is the easy part.)
Yeah, as soon as I posted I realized I should have said "the same sound you get at the concert or the recording studio." (Hey, live recordings on CD do sound pretty much like the original concert if you've got the equipment to crank it up that loud...) Unfortunately, unlike most message boards this one does not have an edit function... *cough*
No, "better" in this case is not subjective at all. I think you entirely missed his point. His point is that you can create any sound you want with digital. Any sound at all. If you wanted to make a digital version of a track that sounded like it did on vinyl, you could do that and put it on CD. The issue here is that CD audio is a lot closer to the original live audio. Therefore it's a better reproduction. Just as 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375 10 is a better representation of Pi than 3.14 is. So the question isn't so much "do you like CD or vinyl better". The question is "do you like live music or vinyl better". Because with CD, you've basically got the exact same sound as if you were actually at the concert.
Well, Nintendo has had as many such "innovative" special controllers as Sony and more, besides the innovations they've made on the base systm controllers.
I think Sony's real innovation was making their PlayStation a lot more developer-friendly. If I have my facts straight, not only was the PS easier to code for than the N64, Sony was also a lot easier to work with than Nintendo was at the time. And Nintendo paid for it dearly. The use of optic media also helped the PS a lot despite the high loading times, as it had quite a bit more space and was (debatably) more reliable.
I really don't think a return of Atari consoles would be good though, as the people responsible for the great Atari consoles have long since moved on. Sega on the other hand... I'm still not really sure why the DreamCast tanked. Did they just have a bad ad campaign? Because it certainly was a good system for the time.
Note that I didn't say Nintendo invented the D-pad. I said they invented the current ubiquitous layout with the D-pad on the left, thumb buttons on the right and start/select in the middle. If you find some evidence proving me wrong on this, please post a link. The link you did post just shows pictures of... the Famicom controllers.:) Also the history of consoles with D-pads on that Wikipedia page lists the Famicom as the first one in 1983.
And for what it's worth, I'm really not a fan boy of any console. (I do own a Playstation, GameCube, and a DS.) I play mostly PC games. I was just pointing out some things I found interesting about Nintendo's history of console controllers.
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I personally have no problem with copyright. I support copyright in its original US form and the original duration (14 years plus a possible 14 year extension in the US I believe). I do not support copyright in it's current ridiculous form. Copyright in most parts of the world now defaults to 50 or 70 years after the author/artist's death. That's outrageous. Before that's up, someone will have lobbied for yet another extension as they have in the past, and repeat ad nauseum leading to truly eternal copyright, which is not at all what copyright was intended for.
I personally hate to think about all the rich culture and literature we might well not have if ancient civilizations had copyright laws like ours today.
No, you missed his point which is why you can't see why he's been modded up. His position is that the free sharing of information is the natural state of things, and in general is beneficial to society as a whole. Copyright therefore is unnatural and creates an aberration, and is only "wrong" because government has decided to step in and take more control. Murder and rape on the other hand are not the natural state for humans (they've been considered "wrong" in every human society and in all of recorded history, which seems to indicate that the vast majority of humans intrinsically know that murder and rape are not a good thing) and most definitely are not beneficial for society as a whole.
You might disagree with some of his premises but his logic is sound.
First, are you out of your mind? Speaking of bad logic... even comparing actual Theft (let alone copyright infringement) with murder and rape is outrageous. Murder and rape take something that can NEVER be restored.
Second, Theft actually deprives you of your personal belongings. That means you're going to have to spend more money to buy it again. Copyright infringement deprives you of potential earnings. This loss (though it is a real problem, and could ruin a person financially) is completely impossible to quantify in most cases, due to variables that are impossible to know. For example, you have no way of knowing if every person who obtained the copy of your work illegally would ever have paid for a legal copy if he could not have obtained one illegally. This does not make copyright infringement right or even OK, but it does mean that your "lost income" may well never have existed at all, and you have lost nothing.
Third, it has been shown many times in many ways that copyright infringement can actually help the author/artist by spreading his work and making it far more popular than if the copyright infringement had never occurred.
All moral and ethical questions aside, if sharing music files is a Bad Thing (TM) then the uploading of files for "personal storage" (yes even if it's encrypted) is something that must be outlawed. It's not that hard to share a little .txt file giving the URL and login info for where the "personal" music is being stored.
Running with your apartment analogy, it's like you had a nice little apartment somewhere that anyone could teleport to instantly and free of charge, and when they got there you have an unlimited supply of blank CDs and a CD-copying machine along with your massive music collection that includes several thousand albums. All you need is the address and the key to get in the apartment.
So honestly I have to say this is no more ridiculous than anything the RIAA has been doing here in the US. It's really to be expected. Watch for the same thing in the US in the near future.
It's a lot like wine. The average person who doesn't make wine a hobby (like me for instance) can't really tell a whole lot of difference between an average wine and one that's a little better. Anyone can taste different flavors in different types of wine, but a typical person who's not a wine enthusiast might well like a cheap wine better than some of the better fine wines. It's an acquired taste. The same thing goes for books - if you're not really into books as a hobby you'll consider any book you liked a good book. And there's nothing wrong with this. But for people who are literary enthusiasts there are books that are objectively better, and these are largely agreed-upon by literary enthusiasts the world over.
I got a good chuckle out of that. Thanks. :-)
Well, getting the same laptop at $599 instead of $649 is a nice little savings. It's not huge. The real reason that this is important however is that there needs to be some incentive for people other than those of us who already use Linux to buy a Ubuntu PC from Dell. So now the choice is you can either a.) stick with the familiar Windows system or b.) save a little cash. If they were priced the same there would be very few new people trying the Ubuntu PCs and sales would be too low for it to really be profitable to Dell to offer them at all, and they'd probably eliminate them from the lineup again in a year or two.
That's my take on it anyway.
But unfortunately IP is no longer being operated as a democracy in the US, and the people controlling the majority of entertainment IP want everyone to think exactly as you're thinking.
Yeah there's always at least one person who has to look at copyright backwards.
Why should the people have to give up the right to share things they found funny/interesting with other people in the digital age?
Please take another look at our Constitution and Bill of Rights. The "right to make money off a creative work" is not listed as an inherent right. The right to express yourself however you choose is. Copyright in its original form was intended to be an agreement between the public and the creator for the public to temporarily give up those rights to freedom of expression in order to allow the creator a brief period of time of no competition to market his creative work, if it is indeed marketable.
Most of the ones I use have already been mentioned. One that hasn't is http://www.technewsworld.com/
Good point. I'll be sure to take that into consideration.
Ugh, the worst feature ever. It would turn on silently if you held down one of the outer buttons (which my pocket did, by itself, frequently.) Then, when a call came in, it would shout, over speakerphone, "Call from... "
Thankfully, they removed it from the more recent models. It was so damn disruptive... OMG, you have no idea how much that pissed me off on my old phone. Every damn time I pulled it out of my pocket it had switched to driving mode. The best part? You couldn't switch it OFF with that button while it was "ringing". (If it hadn't been possible to shut the damn thing up with the volume button I swear I would have crushed that phone into a small pile of powder.) So many times I had to let calls go to voice mail because it would have been too disruptive to answer it while it was in driving mode. I'm still debating how that phone should meet its ultimate doom. Some possible choices include drowning it in a mud puddle, driving over it with my car or death by hammer, however none of those seems severe enough to deliver justice. Or maybe I should find out who designed this "feature" and make them use the phone for two years.
And if you're running WinXP SP2 don't forget to go into the Security Center and tell it NOT to alert you about Automatic Updates. Otherwise the Security Center will make a popup bubble every 5 minutes whining about Automatic Updates being turned off.
You do realize that "a number of other people" here could refer to even several dozen or several hundred?
So clearly it's not going to be just one person that determines the answer for unknown captchas.
Yeah my thoughts exactly. I don't own one (chose the DS instead) but my friend does, and it's a really nice piece of electronics. And even for people who don't give a shit, adding phone functionality (even if it turns out a bit cludgy or hard to use) is definitely a nice move by Sony and I applaud it.
Someone should mod down that AC.
No not really. It's called infringement. More specifically, copyright or patent infringement. Terms which have been around since oh... about the same time copyright and patents were invented.
Given that I am not encumbered in the same way I will stand up loud and try to make sure others who are will not be forced down the wrong path. Of course it's my opinion that its the wrong path. I believe the discussion is debatable for certain circumstances which is why I don't believe it should be outlawed. Yeah, and I respect that.
I want to sympathize and agree with you. Really I do. But I just can't. In the US especially, there's millions of jobs available every day. It's completely up to the employer what requirements he wants to demand for potential employees, as long as said requirements are not illegal. And that's how it should be: he's paying you to work for him; if you don't want to do it like he wants it done there's no reason he should hire you. If you don't like his requirements, you're free to find another job. If his requirements really are too strict, he won't be able to find anyone to meet them and eventually he'll have to lower them. I know job-hunting is not easy. I've spent way more time at it than I care to. But the fact is, job opportunities in the US are everywhere. If someone really wants to find a job, there's no reason he/she can't. You might not be able to find a job that's exactly what you want, but that's fairly normal. Tightening "the diaper budget" may not be as easy as tightening your belt, but it's certainly doable. Think it's tough getting by with three kids? Try it with eleven. Believe me, there's lots of things you can do to get by. There really is something to living within your means. But most of us are spoiled now and really haven't a clue what it's like to have to make do with the bare necessities. (Hint: giving up the cable TV and your night out is the easy part.)
Yeah, as soon as I posted I realized I should have said "the same sound you get at the concert or the recording studio." (Hey, live recordings on CD do sound pretty much like the original concert if you've got the equipment to crank it up that loud...) Unfortunately, unlike most message boards this one does not have an edit function... *cough*
No, "better" in this case is not subjective at all. I think you entirely missed his point. His point is that you can create any sound you want with digital. Any sound at all. If you wanted to make a digital version of a track that sounded like it did on vinyl, you could do that and put it on CD. The issue here is that CD audio is a lot closer to the original live audio. Therefore it's a better reproduction. Just as 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375 10 is a better representation of Pi than 3.14 is. So the question isn't so much "do you like CD or vinyl better". The question is "do you like live music or vinyl better". Because with CD, you've basically got the exact same sound as if you were actually at the concert.
Well, Nintendo has had as many such "innovative" special controllers as Sony and more, besides the innovations they've made on the base systm controllers.
I think Sony's real innovation was making their PlayStation a lot more developer-friendly. If I have my facts straight, not only was the PS easier to code for than the N64, Sony was also a lot easier to work with than Nintendo was at the time. And Nintendo paid for it dearly. The use of optic media also helped the PS a lot despite the high loading times, as it had quite a bit more space and was (debatably) more reliable.
I really don't think a return of Atari consoles would be good though, as the people responsible for the great Atari consoles have long since moved on. Sega on the other hand... I'm still not really sure why the DreamCast tanked. Did they just have a bad ad campaign? Because it certainly was a good system for the time.
Note that I didn't say Nintendo invented the D-pad. I said they invented the current ubiquitous layout with the D-pad on the left, thumb buttons on the right and start/select in the middle. If you find some evidence proving me wrong on this, please post a link. The link you did post just shows pictures of... the Famicom controllers. :) Also the history of consoles with D-pads on that Wikipedia page lists the Famicom as the first one in 1983.
And for what it's worth, I'm really not a fan boy of any console. (I do own a Playstation, GameCube, and a DS.) I play mostly PC games. I was just pointing out some things I found interesting about Nintendo's history of console controllers.