Yes, this guy commits economic fallacy after economic fallacy.
"With all that pirated material available, it creates tremendous disincentives to content owners who need to invest in new content," Cotton says, "and that just hurts consumers over time. If NBC wasn't copying/pirating the ideas of others in the first place, they would have ZERO content. Whether they are copying/pirating English language words, whether they are copying/pirating television format genres such as a comedy or drama which fits into a 30 minute or 60 minute block of time, whether they are copying/pirating the behavior and mannerisms of people like doctors and police, whether they are copying/pirating the images of persons such as the hooker involved in the Eliot Spitzer scandal, whether they are copying/pirating the images of persons being charged with crimes on their nightly news, whether they are copying/pirating names of persons who had those names before NBC copied/pirated those names such as "Bob" or "Steve", whether they are copying/pirating the method of P2P delivery, whether they are copying/pirating the business model of delivery of content by P2P... everyone wants to get in on the "piracy" bandwagon, even NBC.
NBC is nothing but a dinosaur middleman delivering commoditized content while massively profiting 100% from the sale of consumer eyeballs. By definition the only thing of value for NBC being sold is commercials. Advertisers don't need to pay NBC one single cent; advertisers can just bypass NBC completely and pay viewers to watch commercials in cold hard cash (we see what they are willing to pony up on events like the Superbowl). Viewers, flush with cold hard cash (we are talking 100% of the billions of NBC profit) can do with that cold hard cash received from advertisers whatever they wish, including pooling their money into content projects. But not just commoditized content projects which need to fill a 24/7/365 schedule, but high quality content which better meshes with the relatively fewer hours per day most viewers have to watch television.
Here's a good economic experimental analysis to undertake. Add up all the money spent by advertiser subsidized content like television shows PLUS non-advertising-supplemented content such as movies without commercials per year and divide it by the number of hours the average consumer watches content. You'll still end up with a ridiculously large number of dollars which will voluntarily be devoted to content development even in the absence of any copyright protection. American Idol Actors work for free, because they are paid in fame.
But let's say advertisers spend about $0.01 per viewer per minute of advertising, and there are an average of 20 minutes of advertising per highest quality program, that means around $0.20 buys the episode, well near the sweet spot range people are willing to pay to download content from a trusted site whilst completely avoiding the hassles of quality questions and availability access.
Let's cut these fools and their commercials 100% out for the best quality content. The model already worked (and by that we mean cha-ching grand slam) for HBO's The Sopranos.
Nope, all you would have to do is challenge a particular copyright that was say 100 years old and get it invalidated. Goodbye United States Code Title 17. The Supreme Court would be wholly unable to itself *modify* the Law such that copyright protection remained for copyrights filed before Date X and was eliminated for copyrights filed after Date X. The entirety of all copyrights granted under the prior ruled unconstitutional version of US Code Title 17 would be invalidated. By definition the moment they were granted, they were granted in an unconstitutional manner, an unconstitutional form. The only possible redress would be instant public domain for all unconstitutionally granted copyrights, everything which is copyrighted becomes public domain. The monopoly distribution grant is unconstitutional from the moment it was granted precisely because the grant was given in an unconstitutional manner. The terms can't be amended by the Supreme Court; they are ruled unconstitutional and the copyright grant is by definition stripped. Every copyright grant is granted on the exact same specified terms.
Uh, yes it does make the copyright itself wholly unconstitutional. The Supreme Court can't line item veto the section laying out fines nor the section laying out the length of the copyright term. They can merely rule the Copyright Statute, in whole, is unconstitutional. Abusive greed has netted an effectual copyright protection of nothing. Yes, this is irony of the highest degree. You can't go to the Copyright Office and decide to register for your own personal Constitutional version of copyright protection. You just have what protection [racket] laws the Copyright Office can offer, or nothing. Unfortunately (for those wishing to secure "legitimate" copyright protection), both possibilities are nothing.
Unconstitutional claims, unconstitutional actions, are simply that, unconstitutional. And thus all copyright claims, as currently registered under existing copyright law, are nothing but losing lottery ticket pieces of paper.
If you want Constitutional Copyright protection, try writing a constitutional copyright law in the first place.
Sorry, but you are incorrect. There is no legitimate Constitutional copyright law. The law is unconstitutional for excessive fines and non contemporary limited term length. Just because some politicians vote for something doesn't mean it actually matters. It's a factual impossibility for any individual or any corporation to legitimately copyright any material whatsoever, given the current unconstitutional USA copyright statutes.
Not to mention, I.P. addresses are not persons. Every settlement letter ever mailed to every person is a violation of a multitude of RICO predicates. Not to mention every error made in the past shows a pattern of incompetence to be admitted as counter evidence to any and all future claims.
Really, though, if you want to win the war against the RIAA overnight, you hold an academic legal conference at an Elite Law School, and brainstorm for 40-50 RICO predicate counts, and then forward the results to a politically connected prosecutor to initiate subpoenas and charges. Publicize and open the conference for $99 attendance fees. Many of those RIAA lawyers, MediaSentry investigators, and music industry executives will end up facing 30 year prison terms, and confiscation of corporate and personal assets. It's that simple. And many mid level fish will turn and rat out the higher ups before you can say "Jack Robinson".
I would gather names of those who are provably falsely accused and contact the FBI, to see what if any additional domestic terrorism charges can be brought.
And of course, the icing on the cake is Sarbanes-Oxley to get them on Hollywood Accounting violations, along with tax evasion and IRS resources.
You combine this, and the RIAA is literally fucked up the creek without a paddle. We just need a little bit of national organization activism to combine disparate academic entities, individuals, government agencies, and groups like the EFF et al.
And as bonus, no politicians will seriously touch their future lobbying efforts with a ten foot pole for decades to come. Eliot Spitzer is going down now; the RIAA can go down 50 times harder with just as much, if not much more, ease.
You threaten the CEO, the CFO, the CIO, et al, with charges of fraud under Sarbanes-Oxley. See WorldCom. See Enron. Back up the truck with all the motions and charges copies + pasted to Comcast executives. If the FCC cannot handle this itself, then forward on to the Department of Justice. Also notify the GAO, Congressional Committees and Subcomittees that the FCC is incapable of performing their duties, and recommend dissolving of the FCC and/or firing of the members of the FCC. The FCC can get a written statement signed by the CEO that Comcast will not in the future discriminate against arbitrary file types or traffic and settle now for a paltry $1 million fine, without admitting or denying guilt. If Comcast refuse, onward to swearing in the executives under oath, and investigating them the same way Major League Baseball steroids were just investigated.
This currently need not to be any more than a warning shot across the bow of the Comcast, as long as in exchange you put into the record the intent of Comcast not to discriminate against traffic and file types in the future, such as fake packets terminating P2P connections. If they refuse, gather testimony from businesses who have data which may be effected by Comcast abuse, such as from Vonage.
This would be a win for the FCC, making them look good (and let's face it, they desperately need some good PR), a win for consumers, and a win for businesses which compete against Comcast. A 3-2 vote to draft the settlement letter is of sufficient political expedience.
In so many less words, you can demonstrate absolutely nothing regarding the fanatical religious doomsday predictions of so called climate change science.
Models are routinely published in the literature, but they wouldn't make for very exciting reading in the mainstream media. Oh, I don't know about that. When people start to realize "scientists" are predicting 25% climate changes caused by human actors they might start to question the sanity of climatologists. And breaking down and showing the best guess weighting of the variables determining the Average Earth Temperature clearly exposes the *fraud*. But thank you for demonstrating zero, nothing. A gargantuan percentage of the anthropogenic global climate change "believers" are merely religiously parroting doctrine, not demonstrating science.
The problem with your demand is you're looking for something that doesn't exist. E=mc^2 is an explicit relationship that follows mathematically from fundamental physical principles. You can't just write down an "Average Earth Temperature" formula broken down into the contributions of various components that has any meaningful predictive power. You're asking for someone to simplify a chaotic non-linear system of equations into a single linear equation averaged over time and the entire globe which is a fool's errand. Therefore, the resulting reductions of predictions to the Human Activity variable elements on "climate change" are *nothing* but pure fraud. Q.E.D. Any % change forecast of Average Earth Temperature is, as you say, "a fool's errand". Three degree change forecasts, any degree change forecast, from any possible variable whatsoever in Average Earth Temperature, are fraudulent religious indoctrination, backed up by zero evidence, backed up by wholly unsound methodology, devoid of any reference to the actual true variables which determine climate and temperature. That was exactly my point.
I'm pretty certain the IPCC reports include a breakdown similar to what you're asking for, maybe you should try reading them? Of course they aren't there. These papers are nothing less than pure scientific fraud. Consider the claim demonstrated.
global warming deniers And there you have a perfect example of politicized fraud masquerading as non demonstrated scientific conclusion. Global warming deniers is meant to invoke an equivocation feeling to "Holocaust deniers".
But put or shut up, I say. To quote myself:
"No, it has more to do with politicized scientific fraud. Global Warming "scientists", now going by the more PR friendly label "Climate Change" scientists, claim an average Earth Temperature T and present no model, no formula of variables. They pretend all non human variables are constant, and reduce their "hidden" formula to Human Activity = Average Earth Temperature. Then they go on to talk about 25% percent changes in Average Earth Temperature being caused by Human Activity (3 degrees divided by 13 degrees equals 23%). It's the biggest bullshit fraud of the last millennium masquerading as "science". And that's the simple reason nobody has seen a climate model, a temperature formula along the lines of Sun + Core + Volcanoes + Ocean Currents + Human Activity = Average Earth Temperature, where Human Activity would be weighted around 0.0001 in the model. Because that would too easily expose what total bullshit fraud the global "climate change" scientists are pushing. Cosmetologists have more credibility than climatologists. Where's the fucking E=mc^2 formula for average earth temperature?! Exactly, "global warming theory", "climate change theory", is pure fraudulent bullshit."
So Mr. "Smart Guy" convinced he knows and understands the global warming science, just one question.
A.) What and where is the temperature formula, climate model, with the explicit variables and their respective weightings in the output equaling Average Earth Temperature? Don't know off the top of your head? Then you're nothing but a liar and/or bamboozled capital F Fool who pretends he knows things he does not.
Not one global warming "believer" has ever delivered on the simple request for the Average Earth Climate model formula. These are socialist religious nuts who are tarnishing the name of "science" in their hyper crisis global warming catastrophe agenda fear mongering. Raul654 (453029) is just another zealot with claims backed by zero demonstration. Oh, but he can bravely ad hominem attack those who would seek demonstration of proof with an advance "global warming deniers" label. How convincing...
But, there are many things (mainly, philosophical questional) that some would try to group under science because they believe they can conjecture out an answer. Talk about hubris. I find it very funny that scientists too often forget their methodologies spring directly from black and white epistemological either/or full set/empty set principles. Statistics doesn't establish the validity of statistics, and neither does the scientific method establish the validity of the scientific method.
Seriously, though, people who tend to quickly polarize over Global Warming tend to do so because of the seemingly obvious ramifications of admitting whether Global Warming exists. In short, the issue has more to do with people unwilling, on both sides, to go over the evidence and accept the proof that's available and leave it at that. No, it has more to do with politicized scientific fraud. Global Warming "scientists", now going by the more PR friendly label "Climate Change" scientists, claim an average Earth Temperature T and present no model, no formula of variables. They pretend all non human variables are constant, and reduce their "hidden" formula to Human Activity = Average Earth Temperature. Then they go on to talk about 25% percent changes in Average Earth Temperature being caused by Human Activity (3 degrees divided by 13 degrees equals 23%). It's the biggest bullshit fraud of the last millennium masquerading as "science". And that's the simple reason nobody has seen a climate model, a temperature formula along the lines of Sun + Core + Volcanoes + Ocean Currents + Human Activity = Average Earth Temperature, where Human Activity would be weighted around 0.0001 in the model. Because that would too easily expose what total bullshit fraud the global "climate change" scientists are pushing. Cosmetologists have more credibility than climatologists. Where's the fucking E=mc^2 formula for average earth temperature?! Exactly, "global warming theory", "climate change theory", is pure fraudulent bullshit.
(1) stop sharing someone else's hard work for free?! How would you like it if people could share your paycheck on line? (not that I agree with how much is charged for their "art", but it IS illegal) The Alphabet called. They want you to cease and desist from copying their letters.
Write a program to fight gerrymandering by randomly drawing district lines based on population dispersion. Statistician + Programmer = Solution. Let's see the results, what maps would look like, then we can force all politicians running to support it with a national marketing campaign called The Contract Against Incumbent GErrymandering (C.A.I.G.E.)
The Statutory damages are already unconstitutional. Appealing this all the way to the Supreme Court will completely invalidate all copyright law in whole. Yes, they are *also* unconstitutional on not contemporary limited length of term.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. There's a whole load of rulings which can be added in support, starting with excessive punitive damages more than three times actual damages being unconstitutional. $150,000 for a $0.99 is clearly an unconstitutional excessive fine. QED.
Net effect: there is no copyright law. The effective copyright protection is zero. Simply because the copyright law is blatantly unconstitutional on multiple fronts.
Yes, I believe I may have seen a blank canvass hanging in a museum right next to the blank canvass with a dot in the middle. Perhaps copies of these can be hung in the Patent Office? By definition the Patent Office is not checking 100% of all Prior Art, so perhaps a court injunction can be slapped on them to shut them down completely? A little copy + paste of every single court injunction alleging patent infringement against "Compnay X" can be resubmitted with "USPTO" inserted where "Compnay X" was inserted? We need some Gorilla Law Methods such as those used by and against government agencies like the EPA, or CDC, or FDA, to be applied to the USPTO. Their few lawyers are probably sitting bored next to red emergency phones overcome with jungle cobweb growth.
What if you're the guy with a lab in his basement, or a computer farm in his garage, and you come up with something new and novel? Who is going to pay you for it? Back to the Strawman, Part II. How are you going to go back in time to reinvent what you already invented after you are paid ex post from the patent for work you already by definition did prior to the grant of patent? I call my invention the "Flush Capetenter", it flushes stupid patent idea submissions down the toilet.
We should also immediately use all new archeology evidence of prior technology or methods as prior art. Perhaps the patent office needs to subscribe to archeology journals and magazines, what with ancient Roman plumbing and "the mysterious Antikythera mechanism--one of the world's oldest computers."
But if my "house" was Disneyland Disneyland "stole" the idea of big top circus tents displaying entertainment, "stole" the idea of theaters with seats for viewing stage entertainment, "stole" the idea of launching fireworks into the sky as entertainment, and "stole", and "stole", and "stole" a whole lot more of ideas they themselves didn't create. Then they "borrow" public domain stories, celebrate and glorify a "morally bankrupt" culture of piracy with releases like Pirates of the Caribbean, and have the audacity to make claims of copyright on their forms of ideas which they themselves have "stolen". Their Mickey Mouse stole the idea of humanizing animals by giving them pet names.
If it's ok for Disneyland to name their mascot mouse Mickey, it's just as ok for anyone and everyone to compete in selling merchandise of a mouse named Mickey that looks exactly similar to Disney's "Mickey Mouse". To use government political interference to prevent that free market competition resulting in higher quality lower priced "Micky Mouse" merchandise is nothing less than true piracy. To do so for as long as they have is more deserving of the label "Pharaoh" rather than the legal fiction protection RACKET known as copyright, or corporation for that matter.
This is exactly right. The abusive greed which tramples on the real rights of the general citizenry has resulted in clear wholly unconstitutional protection for all ideas which are subject to copyright laws. They've effectually bought zero protection as evidenced by the elite widespread organizing backlash. We are all well on into the process of knowing you can copy everything with zero consequence (if the appeals system process all the way to the Supreme Court ruling unanimously that the copyright term is unconstitutionally not limited to well within contemporary lifetimes was even remotely legitimate). The copyright lobby propaganda is well on the path to being regarded by a super-majority contempt as cowardly and unpatriotic. If the term were half as long as the far more society valuable patent term length (half of 20 being 10 years), it would have been much much harder to so easily harness public opinion toward the total abolishment of all imaginary property protection.
They *stole* the benefit of public domain benefit being received in contemporary lifetimes that was granted in exchange for limited time exclusive monopoly distribution. And then they started stealing from future generations as well by tacking on 70 years PLUS life protection. These people are the true criminals, and they will end up paying a huge price when their personal civil as well as corporate assets are seized and forfeited and they end up serving sentences of 30 years to life for a multitude of RICO violations (not just the RIAA employees but the music industry executives who conspired to employ those RIAA employees).
If you thought public outcry against WorldCom and Enron was bad, you ain't seen real blowback yet. You couldn't have started a more stupid war against the masses by targeting college campuses and free speech. Now these groups are voluntarily mobilizing across the spectrum, and they've got all the positive PR little guy underdog good guy momentum. The rest is mostly the technicality of time as inevitability runs its course, as the intellectual arguments and persuasions of the imaginary property proponents were utterly crushed like some medieval religious notion of the Sun revolving around the Earth. When it's done, those of us who contributed can take our places as heroes in history on par with the Civil Rights Movement for liberating the Progress of Science and the Arts.
Freedom to choose not to sell your property at any price (reasonable or not) seems to be a fundamental aspect of ownership. That's exactly why imaginary property claims are an assault on true private property because they restrict the use of the private property of others by prohibiting it from being transformed into shapes or manners which are identical or similar to the private property of others. Imaginary property is nothing less than an uncompensated *trespass* onto the real physical property of others.
Every house is a copy of the idea walls + roof + windows + doors.
More importantly, why would you want to tax ideas out of existence? And even more importantly, why would you want to tax real physical property out of existence? All voluntary free trade only occurs because that which is received is valued more than that which is given away in exchange. All taxation is *causing* poverty, is *causing* the world to be net poorer than it otherwise would be. Thus, you have a Legion of government bureaucrats, lawyers, and politicians sitting on their asses doing wholly unproductive work, rather than what they should be doing, productive work, such as cutting your grass for minimum wage, or investing in starting their own businesses.
A property is something you posses. There are many definition to the word 'property' and you seem to be getting hung up on the land definition as being the only one. If Sony possesses copyright ownership of a song such that you are prohibited from making a copy from your hard drive to your iPod, they *are* possessing partial ownership of your hard drive and your iPod. That's why you are restricted from freely making properties. So theoretically, Sony could, instead of being taxed on the intangible copyrighted ideas, be taxed on the real physical property goods which are being restricted from being true private property. This latter tax method, however, would be many times more burdensome a tax (not to mention complicated to divy up the appropriate relative tax burdens to be assessed to imaginary property "claimants").
Utterly @$%^ing brilliant. And also add to the RICO violation RIAA counter suits counts (you only need 3 RICO predicates, but we should be able to get the RIAA on 40-50 RICO predicates), tax evasion, and conspiracy to commit tax evasion.
Well then we have to consider that copyrighted works are intangible, and bare little resemblance to physical property. You can appraise the value of a warehouse, factory, store or residence. How do you appraise the value of a copyrighted work? The value for all things is 100% extrinsically subjectively determined by human actors, including for "intangible" things like musical ideas and words. You can determine the property tax by multiplying the number of copies sold x the price paid (they are claiming they own all copies of all such things as songs). So a million copies sold of a $0.99 song is equivalent to a $990,000 house. And this tax would be to be paid yearly, just like real property taxes. If they fail to pay the taxes, I'd assume the imaginary property would be "seized" (lol) and auctioned, just like the houses they kick old grannies who can't pay out of. This could also explain the recent price drop in Vista.:P
But yeah, a company like Microsoft would be mega socked on property taxes owed yearly, on ALL past revenue, until the imaginary property claims expired. So assume $500 million in 2007 revenue of sales of Microsoft imaginary property products and a property tax rate of 10% (profit is *immaterial* to the value of the imaginary property) and Microsoft pays property taxes of $50 million per year EVERY YEAR on all that imaginary property they own (the customers by definition don't own it so Microsoft pays the tax) which eats 100% of their past revenue in a mere ten years with a 10% property tax*.
*not complicating with inflation, present value, etc.
Too bad for your faulty ideological bent, copyright is entirely enforced by government interference in the free market, by violating private property and free speech rights. Copyright prevents others from shaping their own personal private property in ways that copy the personal private property of others. And the justification for property emanates with ownership of one's own body -- you don't get to tell others what to do with it or force them to do things they don't want to do. That's the sole reason the entirety of the concepts of crime, wrong, harm, evolved -- theft, rape, murder.
Oh, my, god. "Heidi", look at her "counterfeit product". It is so "fake". *scoff* She looks like, one of those "stereotypical group" girlfriends. But, you know, who understands those "stereotypical group"? *scoff* They only talk to her, because, she looks like a total prostitute, 'kay? I mean, her "counterfeit product", is just so "fake". I can't believe it's just so "low quality", it's like, out there, I mean - gross. Look! She's just so... "poor"!
I like big "knockoffs" and I can not lie You other "slashdotters" can't deny That when a girl walks in with an "counterfeit product" And a round thing in your face You get sprung, wanna pull out your "trademark" 'Cause you notice that "counterfeit product" was "copied" Deep in the jeans she's wearing I'm hooked and I can't stop staring Oh baby, I wanna get with you And take your picture My "lawyers" tried to warn me But that "counterfeit product" you got makes me so horny This Public Service Message brought to you by the Nudist Front Group Foundation to Stop Stealing the ideas of others by wearing clothing, or by making clothing, for that matter.
That's fine, and that's the goal. The "how" isn't made available now anyways. The problem is people are patenting the "what", not the "how". Anybody should be able to copy or design their own "how" for any "what". This means there will always be service work for programmers, for customization. The ultimate incentive, for the productivity code delivers, doesn't disappear in the slightest with the removal of patents. If designers want to keep their methodology a secret, let them try -- it changes nothing from the way it already is with the patent system. Nobody (as in We the People) gets delivered to their mail, or sees posted, the ingredients or methodological steps for creating any product which was ever patented. You won't mass profit from any technological improvement without by definition trading it in some form, even obscured/hidden/scrambled, to others for money. No difference whatsoever, it what is already done with patent submissions anyway.
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NBC is nothing but a dinosaur middleman delivering commoditized content while massively profiting 100% from the sale of consumer eyeballs. By definition the only thing of value for NBC being sold is commercials. Advertisers don't need to pay NBC one single cent; advertisers can just bypass NBC completely and pay viewers to watch commercials in cold hard cash (we see what they are willing to pony up on events like the Superbowl). Viewers, flush with cold hard cash (we are talking 100% of the billions of NBC profit) can do with that cold hard cash received from advertisers whatever they wish, including pooling their money into content projects. But not just commoditized content projects which need to fill a 24/7/365 schedule, but high quality content which better meshes with the relatively fewer hours per day most viewers have to watch television.
Here's a good economic experimental analysis to undertake. Add up all the money spent by advertiser subsidized content like television shows PLUS non-advertising-supplemented content such as movies without commercials per year and divide it by the number of hours the average consumer watches content. You'll still end up with a ridiculously large number of dollars which will voluntarily be devoted to content development even in the absence of any copyright protection. American Idol Actors work for free, because they are paid in fame.
But let's say advertisers spend about $0.01 per viewer per minute of advertising, and there are an average of 20 minutes of advertising per highest quality program, that means around $0.20 buys the episode, well near the sweet spot range people are willing to pay to download content from a trusted site whilst completely avoiding the hassles of quality questions and availability access.
Let's cut these fools and their commercials 100% out for the best quality content. The model already worked (and by that we mean cha-ching grand slam) for HBO's The Sopranos.
Nope, all you would have to do is challenge a particular copyright that was say 100 years old and get it invalidated. Goodbye United States Code Title 17. The Supreme Court would be wholly unable to itself *modify* the Law such that copyright protection remained for copyrights filed before Date X and was eliminated for copyrights filed after Date X. The entirety of all copyrights granted under the prior ruled unconstitutional version of US Code Title 17 would be invalidated. By definition the moment they were granted, they were granted in an unconstitutional manner, an unconstitutional form. The only possible redress would be instant public domain for all unconstitutionally granted copyrights, everything which is copyrighted becomes public domain. The monopoly distribution grant is unconstitutional from the moment it was granted precisely because the grant was given in an unconstitutional manner. The terms can't be amended by the Supreme Court; they are ruled unconstitutional and the copyright grant is by definition stripped. Every copyright grant is granted on the exact same specified terms.
Uh, yes it does make the copyright itself wholly unconstitutional. The Supreme Court can't line item veto the section laying out fines nor the section laying out the length of the copyright term. They can merely rule the Copyright Statute, in whole, is unconstitutional. Abusive greed has netted an effectual copyright protection of nothing. Yes, this is irony of the highest degree. You can't go to the Copyright Office and decide to register for your own personal Constitutional version of copyright protection. You just have what protection [racket] laws the Copyright Office can offer, or nothing. Unfortunately (for those wishing to secure "legitimate" copyright protection), both possibilities are nothing.
Unconstitutional claims, unconstitutional actions, are simply that, unconstitutional. And thus all copyright claims, as currently registered under existing copyright law, are nothing but losing lottery ticket pieces of paper.
If you want Constitutional Copyright protection, try writing a constitutional copyright law in the first place.
Sorry, but you are incorrect. There is no legitimate Constitutional copyright law. The law is unconstitutional for excessive fines and non contemporary limited term length. Just because some politicians vote for something doesn't mean it actually matters. It's a factual impossibility for any individual or any corporation to legitimately copyright any material whatsoever, given the current unconstitutional USA copyright statutes.
Not to mention, I.P. addresses are not persons. Every settlement letter ever mailed to every person is a violation of a multitude of RICO predicates. Not to mention every error made in the past shows a pattern of incompetence to be admitted as counter evidence to any and all future claims.
Really, though, if you want to win the war against the RIAA overnight, you hold an academic legal conference at an Elite Law School, and brainstorm for 40-50 RICO predicate counts, and then forward the results to a politically connected prosecutor to initiate subpoenas and charges. Publicize and open the conference for $99 attendance fees. Many of those RIAA lawyers, MediaSentry investigators, and music industry executives will end up facing 30 year prison terms, and confiscation of corporate and personal assets. It's that simple. And many mid level fish will turn and rat out the higher ups before you can say "Jack Robinson".
I would gather names of those who are provably falsely accused and contact the FBI, to see what if any additional domestic terrorism charges can be brought.
And of course, the icing on the cake is Sarbanes-Oxley to get them on Hollywood Accounting violations, along with tax evasion and IRS resources.
You combine this, and the RIAA is literally fucked up the creek without a paddle. We just need a little bit of national organization activism to combine disparate academic entities, individuals, government agencies, and groups like the EFF et al.
And as bonus, no politicians will seriously touch their future lobbying efforts with a ten foot pole for decades to come. Eliot Spitzer is going down now; the RIAA can go down 50 times harder with just as much, if not much more, ease.
You threaten the CEO, the CFO, the CIO, et al, with charges of fraud under Sarbanes-Oxley. See WorldCom. See Enron. Back up the truck with all the motions and charges copies + pasted to Comcast executives. If the FCC cannot handle this itself, then forward on to the Department of Justice. Also notify the GAO, Congressional Committees and Subcomittees that the FCC is incapable of performing their duties, and recommend dissolving of the FCC and/or firing of the members of the FCC. The FCC can get a written statement signed by the CEO that Comcast will not in the future discriminate against arbitrary file types or traffic and settle now for a paltry $1 million fine, without admitting or denying guilt. If Comcast refuse, onward to swearing in the executives under oath, and investigating them the same way Major League Baseball steroids were just investigated.
This currently need not to be any more than a warning shot across the bow of the Comcast, as long as in exchange you put into the record the intent of Comcast not to discriminate against traffic and file types in the future, such as fake packets terminating P2P connections. If they refuse, gather testimony from businesses who have data which may be effected by Comcast abuse, such as from Vonage.
This would be a win for the FCC, making them look good (and let's face it, they desperately need some good PR), a win for consumers, and a win for businesses which compete against Comcast. A 3-2 vote to draft the settlement letter is of sufficient political expedience.
Only one million J. Smith, versus one hundred million J. Wang. Guess everybody should post by their government issue unique number to avoid confusion.
But put or shut up, I say. To quote myself:
"No, it has more to do with politicized scientific fraud. Global Warming "scientists", now going by the more PR friendly label "Climate Change" scientists, claim an average Earth Temperature T and present no model, no formula of variables. They pretend all non human variables are constant, and reduce their "hidden" formula to Human Activity = Average Earth Temperature. Then they go on to talk about 25% percent changes in Average Earth Temperature being caused by Human Activity (3 degrees divided by 13 degrees equals 23%). It's the biggest bullshit fraud of the last millennium masquerading as "science". And that's the simple reason nobody has seen a climate model, a temperature formula along the lines of Sun + Core + Volcanoes + Ocean Currents + Human Activity = Average Earth Temperature, where Human Activity would be weighted around 0.0001 in the model. Because that would too easily expose what total bullshit fraud the global "climate change" scientists are pushing. Cosmetologists have more credibility than climatologists. Where's the fucking E=mc^2 formula for average earth temperature?! Exactly, "global warming theory", "climate change theory", is pure fraudulent bullshit."
So Mr. "Smart Guy" convinced he knows and understands the global warming science, just one question.
A.) What and where is the temperature formula, climate model, with the explicit variables and their respective weightings in the output equaling Average Earth Temperature? Don't know off the top of your head? Then you're nothing but a liar and/or bamboozled capital F Fool who pretends he knows things he does not.
Not one global warming "believer" has ever delivered on the simple request for the Average Earth Climate model formula. These are socialist religious nuts who are tarnishing the name of "science" in their hyper crisis global warming catastrophe agenda fear mongering. Raul654 (453029) is just another zealot with claims backed by zero demonstration. Oh, but he can bravely ad hominem attack those who would seek demonstration of proof with an advance "global warming deniers" label. How convincing...
Geek Solution:
Write a program to fight gerrymandering by randomly drawing district lines based on population dispersion. Statistician + Programmer = Solution. Let's see the results, what maps would look like, then we can force all politicians running to support it with a national marketing campaign called The Contract Against Incumbent GErrymandering (C.A.I.G.E.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eighth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. There's a whole load of rulings which can be added in support, starting with excessive punitive damages more than three times actual damages being unconstitutional. $150,000 for a $0.99 is clearly an unconstitutional excessive fine. QED.
Net effect: there is no copyright law. The effective copyright protection is zero. Simply because the copyright law is blatantly unconstitutional on multiple fronts.
Yes, I believe I may have seen a blank canvass hanging in a museum right next to the blank canvass with a dot in the middle. Perhaps copies of these can be hung in the Patent Office? By definition the Patent Office is not checking 100% of all Prior Art, so perhaps a court injunction can be slapped on them to shut them down completely? A little copy + paste of every single court injunction alleging patent infringement against "Compnay X" can be resubmitted with "USPTO" inserted where "Compnay X" was inserted? We need some Gorilla Law Methods such as those used by and against government agencies like the EPA, or CDC, or FDA, to be applied to the USPTO. Their few lawyers are probably sitting bored next to red emergency phones overcome with jungle cobweb growth.
We should also immediately use all new archeology evidence of prior technology or methods as prior art. Perhaps the patent office needs to subscribe to archeology journals and magazines, what with ancient Roman plumbing and "the mysterious Antikythera mechanism--one of the world's oldest computers."
If it's ok for Disneyland to name their mascot mouse Mickey, it's just as ok for anyone and everyone to compete in selling merchandise of a mouse named Mickey that looks exactly similar to Disney's "Mickey Mouse". To use government political interference to prevent that free market competition resulting in higher quality lower priced "Micky Mouse" merchandise is nothing less than true piracy. To do so for as long as they have is more deserving of the label "Pharaoh" rather than the legal fiction protection RACKET known as copyright, or corporation for that matter.
This is exactly right. The abusive greed which tramples on the real rights of the general citizenry has resulted in clear wholly unconstitutional protection for all ideas which are subject to copyright laws. They've effectually bought zero protection as evidenced by the elite widespread organizing backlash. We are all well on into the process of knowing you can copy everything with zero consequence (if the appeals system process all the way to the Supreme Court ruling unanimously that the copyright term is unconstitutionally not limited to well within contemporary lifetimes was even remotely legitimate). The copyright lobby propaganda is well on the path to being regarded by a super-majority contempt as cowardly and unpatriotic. If the term were half as long as the far more society valuable patent term length (half of 20 being 10 years), it would have been much much harder to so easily harness public opinion toward the total abolishment of all imaginary property protection.
They *stole* the benefit of public domain benefit being received in contemporary lifetimes that was granted in exchange for limited time exclusive monopoly distribution. And then they started stealing from future generations as well by tacking on 70 years PLUS life protection. These people are the true criminals, and they will end up paying a huge price when their personal civil as well as corporate assets are seized and forfeited and they end up serving sentences of 30 years to life for a multitude of RICO violations (not just the RIAA employees but the music industry executives who conspired to employ those RIAA employees).
If you thought public outcry against WorldCom and Enron was bad, you ain't seen real blowback yet. You couldn't have started a more stupid war against the masses by targeting college campuses and free speech. Now these groups are voluntarily mobilizing across the spectrum, and they've got all the positive PR little guy underdog good guy momentum. The rest is mostly the technicality of time as inevitability runs its course, as the intellectual arguments and persuasions of the imaginary property proponents were utterly crushed like some medieval religious notion of the Sun revolving around the Earth. When it's done, those of us who contributed can take our places as heroes in history on par with the Civil Rights Movement for liberating the Progress of Science and the Arts.
Every house is a copy of the idea walls + roof + windows + doors.
Utterly @$%^ing brilliant. And also add to the RICO violation RIAA counter suits counts (you only need 3 RICO predicates, but we should be able to get the RIAA on 40-50 RICO predicates), tax evasion, and conspiracy to commit tax evasion.
But yeah, a company like Microsoft would be mega socked on property taxes owed yearly, on ALL past revenue, until the imaginary property claims expired. So assume $500 million in 2007 revenue of sales of Microsoft imaginary property products and a property tax rate of 10% (profit is *immaterial* to the value of the imaginary property) and Microsoft pays property taxes of $50 million per year EVERY YEAR on all that imaginary property they own (the customers by definition don't own it so Microsoft pays the tax) which eats 100% of their past revenue in a mere ten years with a 10% property tax*.
*not complicating with inflation, present value, etc.
Too bad for your faulty ideological bent, copyright is entirely enforced by government interference in the free market, by violating private property and free speech rights. Copyright prevents others from shaping their own personal private property in ways that copy the personal private property of others. And the justification for property emanates with ownership of one's own body -- you don't get to tell others what to do with it or force them to do things they don't want to do. That's the sole reason the entirety of the concepts of crime, wrong, harm, evolved -- theft, rape, murder.
It is so "fake". *scoff* She looks like,
one of those "stereotypical group" girlfriends.
But, you know, who understands those "stereotypical group"? *scoff*
They only talk to her, because,
she looks like a total prostitute, 'kay?
I mean, her "counterfeit product", is just so "fake".
I can't believe it's just so "low quality", it's like,
out there, I mean - gross. Look!
She's just so
I like big "knockoffs" and I can not lie
You other "slashdotters" can't deny
That when a girl walks in with an "counterfeit product"
And a round thing in your face
You get sprung, wanna pull out your "trademark"
'Cause you notice that "counterfeit product" was "copied"
Deep in the jeans she's wearing
I'm hooked and I can't stop staring
Oh baby, I wanna get with you
And take your picture
My "lawyers" tried to warn me
But that "counterfeit product" you got makes me so horny This Public Service Message brought to you by the Nudist Front Group Foundation to Stop Stealing the ideas of others by wearing clothing, or by making clothing, for that matter.
That's fine, and that's the goal. The "how" isn't made available now anyways. The problem is people are patenting the "what", not the "how". Anybody should be able to copy or design their own "how" for any "what". This means there will always be service work for programmers, for customization. The ultimate incentive, for the productivity code delivers, doesn't disappear in the slightest with the removal of patents. If designers want to keep their methodology a secret, let them try -- it changes nothing from the way it already is with the patent system. Nobody (as in We the People) gets delivered to their mail, or sees posted, the ingredients or methodological steps for creating any product which was ever patented. You won't mass profit from any technological improvement without by definition trading it in some form, even obscured/hidden/scrambled, to others for money. No difference whatsoever, it what is already done with patent submissions anyway.