Copyright can be eliminated purely by legal means of mimicking the tactics and actions of all copyright claimants. There isn't a single piece of copyrighted work that does not copy the ideas of innumerable others on innumerable levels. Lawsuits will completely bog down the judicial system. Those who want to police imaginary property have financial assets just begging to be seized. We don't want to be stupid unorganized, or ineptly organized 1960s hippies. We want results. A billion times more economic damage than the Boston Tea Party is already a good start. Also stop voting for false choices between mainstream political parties. Start voting third party, whether Libertarian, Green, or Independent.
Also as technology allows for the transfer of ever bigger sized files at faster speeds it will be ever easier to rogue connect all the creative content ever created by connecting something as innocuous as a keychain sized flash drive. Long-term, copyright is ruined by simple supply and demand economics. And most importantly, don't buy any of this content ever again. Starve the bastards out, as assuredly as any classical siege of a medieval city.
We can undertake competing propaganda campaigns, slogans, bumperstickers, such as "Copyright Is Terrorism!" Even big media like Disney likes to profit from the glorification of piracy. See "Pirates of the Caribbean". Just don't pay for seeing "Pirates of the Caribbean". Would a real pirate *pay* to see a movie which copies their lifestyle? I don't think so.
Imagine you are the first person to grow, eat, and sell food. Should somebody be able to open up a competing grocery store in your neighborhood, or anywhere else in the world for that matter? More competition just means you won't be able to price gouge as much, cutting into your potential economic profit. Opening a grocery store is as much a creative idea as writing a song. Now we can clearly see, violently establishing monopoly charter grants for lines of business, such as is done with copyright and patent, is exactly the same thing as the medieval ages guild system. That only results in less competition, less production, less innovation, lower quality, and higher prices. That's the economic analysis of reality.
Right - First, let's pull the copyrights off of any piece of music with the word "love" or a I-IV-V progression. And how many books feature people falling in love? Let's pull copyright off of any book containing a love story. Any how many movies have somebody getting shot? Let's pull copyright off of any movie with violence. And how many pieces of software allocate memory to store data? Let's pull copyright off of any software with a malloc(). Are they, or are they not, knowingly or unknowingly, copying the ideas of others? It's a yes or no question. Answer: yes they are.
I only see one problem... If authors aren't paid to write, we'll see a lot fewer books... If producers/directors/actors/etc aren't paid to distribute movies, we'll see a lot fewer movies. If software companies aren't paid to distribute software, we'll see a lot less new software. And if posters aren't paid to post, according to your provably false logic, we'll see a lot fewer posts on the internet. Yet, here is Exhibit A, from you personally, someone who claims such creative productive behavior should not be occurring, with a new free post. What's next, are you going to claim you are the sole judge and arbiter of the value of differing forms of creative content?
Maybe I just need to go back and check my math... You might want to add P+W+N+D, since you just were, by me.
Giving a license != giving ownership. Reread the ToS. Giving them unlimited license without any compensation for any and all use not limited to that website certainly synthetically equates to effectual non-exclusive ownership for the creator of any created content. As anything you could do with your work created and posted to that site, so too could Microsoft. I bolded the small print legal B.S. specific writing which hides Microsoft's theft of work created by others.
Microsoft does not claim ownership of the materials you provide to Microsoft (including feedback and suggestions) or post, upload, input or submit to any Services or its associated services for review by the general public, or by the members of any public or private community, (each a "Submission" and collectively "Submissions"). However, by posting, uploading, inputting, providing or submitting ("Posting") your Submission you are granting Microsoft, its affiliated companies and necessary sublicensees permission to use your Submission in connection with the operation of their Internet businesses (including, without limitation, all Microsoft Services), including, without limitation, the license rights to: copy, distribute, transmit, publicly display, publicly perform, reproduce, edit, translate and reformat your Submission; to publish your name in connection with your Submission; and the right to sublicense such rights to any supplier of the Services.
Now that I think about it, people's views generally are largely based upon the views of others. Every step of their reasoning, in retrospect, seems to be heavily guided by their perception of morality, which comes from external influences. You mean views, morals, laws, even logical methodological processes, are COPIED!? How are the children supposed to absorb this education, including obedience to copyright law, if by definition doing so would be copying the ideas of others?
I realize that I may sound self-righteous announcing this perhaps bizarre behavior of mine, but I feel obligated to express that I actually believe this stuff and try to compensate the artists I enjoy in the most efficient way manageable. Why? Those very same artists don't devote the slightest ounce of energy to compensating those whose ideas they've freely copied.
Artists wouldn't be creating music in the first place if they weren't copying the ideas of others. If the very product made by artists freely copies the ideas of others, in whole or in part, it's completely hypocritical for those artists to advocate nobody copy them. How many songs inserted the word "love" in to them? How many songs copy I-IV-V progressions? It's epistemologically impossible to not copy. There might as well be a law against exhaling poison carbon dioxide into the air. Second hand breathing kills!
Not only that, but Microsoft didn't invent or create the ring tone. Is Microsoft paying the people who were the first to create ring tones a licensing fee for every ring tone created by the kids on that site? Microsoft is perfectly fine with stealing the ideas of others. Like all those who believe in mythical imaginary property, they are solely hypocrites bent on silencing competition, do the economic detriment of the rest of society.
They can *try* to make something retroactively legal. But they will certainly fail when it's disclosed the retroactive legal immunity violates all sorts of constitutional clauses, such as equal protection and application of the laws. Just because the Congress passes a law, doesn't mean the law is Constitutional, or will be upheld as Constitutional. See, if the law isn't repealed for everybody to spy with impunity upon everyone else, if everyone isn't granted retroactive plus forthcoming immunity, this law will be ruled unconstitutional. These corrupted politicians are just wasting their votes for bribes, er campaign contributions, exposing their records to clear corruption, in the end for naught.
Yes, you are exactly right. All you have to do is undertake a class action lawsuit and the corresponding appeals. Any arguments the government or telecos make against overturning the retroactive immunity will be an argument against the original law itself. How silly do they think they are? The law is clearly unconstitutional. Or rather then submit a tax payment to the IRS, cut out the portion of the law that refers to the telecos and paste in payment of taxes to the IRS and mail that instead of your tax form and check. Perhaps something at a very local level can be passed granting its citizens retroactive immunity from tax collections, and then they can undertake a class action lawsuit against the IRS for all taxes paid. Mimic the legals tactics, until the system implodes. That's the way to victory, as paved by the progressives.
Passing a law granting retroactive immunity doesn't mean the law passed is Constitutional. The telecoms (or the taxpayers) will just spend more on legal fees overturning any immunity bill before eventually the telecoms seek out a financial settlement, exactly as the tobacco companies did, exactly as Microsoft did. Don't believe for a second, a tobacco immunity law would've been worth the paper it was written on either.
Everybody is in oblivious denial. There's been billions and billions of dollars of content dumped into the public domain sea on the internet. This already is far bigger than the Boston Tea Party. Lies can't compete with the truth in a free market. Closed source can't compete with open source. See wikipedia. This has all happened, and happened super fast. There's massive credibility damage sustained by the old mainstream medias and governments, internationally. We are in the midst and upon the cusp of vast historical tides. And it isn't even all that big of a deal yet. So called internet "effects" (Streisand,/., digg, et al) are eventually going to touch these many corrupt politicians, who have profited by selling our liberty for pittances, personally. It's simple unstoppable economics; economic law doesn't stop at the border of some first world banana republic's silly laws, any more than the law of gravity does.
The next step will be broad-based organization of new competing political parties, such as the Libertarian and Pirate Parties. The abolition of copyright is a war that can be won, and it will be a big victory for free speech and artistic and technological innovation, and the advancement and material benefit of all peoples world-wide without regard to international border. It's simple unstoppable economics. Recording equipment isn't going anywhere, as even government databases fill to the terabytes per seconds; all storage, access, dissemination can only occur by copying, for all files, copyrighted/uncopyrighted/"legal"/"illegal". But it's sure funny as hell to watch the clueless put on the Emperor's New Clothes at the Emperor's New Clothes Assembly Ball.
Serious legal action counter measures haven't even started yet. But suffice to say the records of past policing action by the content creators enforcement arms has subjected them to far more financial liability than their bottom line net worths, not to mention the personal prison terms and civil forfeiture penalties awaiting the executives of these racketeering media companies. With copyright, everybody can be a copyright troll similar to the patent trolls, and fish big settlement dollars from those with the means to pay. Talk about a gargantuan legal mess.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
The parable describes a shopkeeper whose window is broken by a little boy. Everyone sympathizes with the man whose window was broken, but pretty soon they start to suggest that the broken window makes work for the glazier, who will then buy bread, benefiting the baker, who will then buy shoes, benefiting the cobbler, etc. Finally, the onlookers conclude that the little boy was not guilty of vandalism; instead he was a public benefactor, creating economic benefits for everyone in town.
The fallacy of the onlookers' argument is that they considered only the positive benefits of purchasing a new window, but they ignored the cost to the shopkeeper. As the shopkeeper was forced to spend his money on a new window, he obviously could not have spent it on something else. For example, the shopkeeper may have spent the money on bread and shoes for himself, but now cannot so enrich the baker and cobbler because he must fix his window.
Thus, the child did not bring any net benefit to the town. Instead, he made the town poorer by at least the value of one window, if not more.
That's exactly why copyright is already de facto dead in the digital age. Merely attempting to enforce it turns the internet literally into a legal mine field. Those with the greatest monetary assets will lose the most from policing mistakes. It's epistemologically impossible for police enforcers to not copy everything in the first place just to see whether or not something is copyrighted or not. I'm actually surprised nobody has yet sued these people in the first place. There's zero doubt the content creator enforcement arms have *already* committed more financial liability than the worth of all the content they've all ever created, many times over. If the current laws were actually enforced, the music and movie industries would be bankrupt overnight. Make sure you take that into account when you value their stock.
Do you check to see what chunk the content creator gets before you 'justify' each torrent? or do you just leech what the fuck you want anyway, and screw the creator? Don't look now, but that's exactly what you just did with every single word you copied.
We currently have thriving creative industries. Widespread piracy will kill them all off. I'm not asking for anyone's sympathy, just pointing out that the music and movie loving warez kids are acting like the easter island occupants. Nope, all of those industries are founded upon copying the ideas of others. They are just attempting to use copyright/patents to shut out competition to create an artificial monopoly of scarcity to price gouge and silence critical free speech.
I don't expect to change any hardcore pirates minds anyway, you all think that other people exist purely to entertain you at our expense. This is why content is increasingly aimed at young kids or people over 30. People make content aimed at who buys it, not who likes it. People don't buy content they don't like. That's an unsustainable economic model. And those young kids are just loaded with money to pay for content, lol/sarcasm.
The content creators have ripped off the free speech copying rights of all of society. What once was an original bargain of a *limited time* monopoly for exclusive distribution in return for the content being released into the public domain has now been completely voided by the IP racketeering laws which release absolutely nothing into the public domain for content created in a person's lifetime. Not surprisingly, there's zero incentive to respect bogus laws that violate one's natural free speech copying rights, because the audience gets absolutely nothing in return, even though it's the audience that originally sacrificed their rights to grant creators privileges to allegedly increase creative content production incentives. We see now the results of that original IP compromise error: it servers a potential platter for never ending monopoly abuses, political bribery, and police state enforcement. The only solution is the wholesale elimination of all IP protection. That will only result in more competition, more innovation, and lower prices. The incentives to produce will still be the same as fame, media attention, is a valuable commodity.
All that's occurring is the middlemen are being cut out. When advertisers are willing to pay to shove content to be seen, the customers might as well be the ones being payed to view advertisements + content, rather than the monopoly broadcasters and distributors pocketing a single cent. Measures like this will only serve to convert more and more people to the cause of wholesale elimination of imaginary property, such as you yourself have hypocritically committed yourself to as well, as evidenced by your blatant wholesale copying of words you yourself didn't invent or create.
Nobody copies more copyrighted files than those attempting to police enforcement. Every file viewed must be copied. Every file with any name must be downloaded and viewed *before* copyright can even begun to be attempted to be determined.
When consumers got pop up Microsoft bubbles informing them they cannot make a mixed burn cd, even though they had legitimately purchased all the cds, or they cannot load legitimately purchased.mp3 files onto their iPod, it would be over practically overnight, as in it would put the Sony rootkit fiasco to shame, possibly permanently ruining the reputation credibility of component manufacturers.
These RIAA goons are living in total fantasy land. A single bit of data can be broken down in an infinite number of random combinations, not to mention a larger size file can have each of it's bits randomly broken down into an infinite number of random combinations of infinitely randomly sized data bits. It would be impossible to distinguish legitimate from "illegitimate", exponentially increasing the processing power and cost of that processing power merely to view files, which must by definition be COPIED to be seen and heard, on the internet. Oh, wait, they call that attempt "Vista". The more they try, the more they will just price themselves out of the revenue maximizing sweet spot with excessive encumbrance.
A sample block bubble would say: "I'm sorry, the word "Love" is used in xxx,xxx copyrighted songs. This is a copyright violation." when you were sending an email to a [banned] one.
The great thing about the free market is that the copyright holder has a choice. Huh? That's *not* the free market. That's government interference in the free market, restricting free speech and granting an artificial time period monopoly to the copyright holder.
This is often a business decision; your personal goals and the free market work together to make their magic. Many Slashdotters would like these rights taken away from the producers, for the benefit of the consumers. Again, huh? The rights to free speech, the rights to freely copy, are originally taken away in the establishment of copyright. There are no "rights" for creative producers. There are mere limited term *privileges* granted by the audience to creative producers -- at the expense of the audience's original free speech rights! (And the audience is now getting ZIP ZERO in return in the audience lifetime for creative work created during the audience lifetime as copyrights exceed a lifetime and add 70 years to the lifetime!) And those privileges have been vastly abused, harming society in general. So please try to be more accurate in your future propaganda.
"You've gotta fight, duh nuh, for you're right, duh nuh, to COPYYYYYYYYY!" Oh noes, don't sue me. No actually, please do. I relish the opportunity to have the entire copyright laws overturned on multiple platforms at the Supreme Court level.
That's my point, though. Some things would be created far less if the copyright were short. If it takes a year to write a book and six or seven years to shop it around to publishers (not unusual for new authors), a ten year copyright term would basically mean that few would consider becoming a novelist. Hello. Welcome to the internet. Convert your novel to a.pdf file. Click post. Bingo, you're published.
Look at how short the copyright is for individual posts on the internet, yet look at the ever geometrically growing trillions of posts. How do you explain that?
Copyright was established, and granted by the audience (it is not a fundamental right of creative producers) to promote the advancement of the arts. The original period of 14 years was established when information flowed much much slower. Now that information can be spread near instantaneously the copyright term (if one were to even allow for such a violently established trampling upon the free speech rights of others, not to mention the original economic incentives justification for copyright is fundamentally in error) should reflect that reality and be closer to a term of one to two years.
But in actuality, copyright only stifles innovation, causes a vast wasting of squandered productive resources and human energy in attempted legal profession enforcement, and results in lower quality creative works at higher prices then would be the case in the absence of copyright. You need look no further then the establishment of wikipedia, or free contribution sites like/., which has done more for the spread of knowledge in a shorter time then centuries, if not a millennium, of academia.
After witnessing the massive abuse, corruption, and tyranny of those pushing copyright extensions and penalties, it is time to abolish the means for that abuse, corruption, and tyranny all together. It will only lead to increased innovation, increased competition, and better quality at a lower price, as removing all violent government interference monopoly restrictions does.
Actually, the cause of the 1929 depression was Wilson's government granting loans at subsidized rates. That caused people to invest money on companies that seemed profitable, because their profit rate was above the fictional loan rate. No, the cause of the Great Depression was the erection of world wide protectionist trade barriers such as the Smoot-Hawley tariff that stifled the wealth creation that occurs for both parties from every instance of trade. That which is received is valued more than that which is given away in exchange. Even though the exact same A + B goods exists after the trade of A for B as exist before the trade of A for B, the economy is net wealthier from the trade. When you make trade illegal or more expensive, you kill the reason for the existence of productive manufacturing business of surplus goods meant for exchange for other surplus produced goods for trade produced by other real people on different sides of completely artificial imaginary lines borders.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot-Hawley_Tariff_Act
The Hawley-Smoot Tariff (or Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act)[1] was signed into law on June 17, 1930, and raised U.S. tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods to record levels, and, in the opinion of most economists, worsened the Great Depression. Economists have now generally regarded this Tariff Act (i.e., tax increase on imported goods) as the greatest policy blunder in American economic history, coming as it did after the 1929-30 recession and preventing the economy from a full, natural recovery which had already started by the Spring, 1930. Many countries retaliated with their own increased tariffs on U.S. goods, and American exports and imports plunged by more than half. There it is, plain as day! International trade dropped by 50%! That means you don't need half your workers because half your business customers have been shut down by government interference in the free market. The protectionist trade barriers variable should be weighted somewhere around 90% of the cause of the Great Depression, with federal monetary policy the next biggest weighted variable.
The gold standard itself may be theoretically workable in a perfect system, but in real world practice (the 1930s for example) it has a lot of shortcomings that cause problems. It's like communism in a way, it works great on paper, but it makes assumptions that aren't true in the real world where real people are trying to game the system and where you have to interact with other (not gold-based) economies. Absolutely every trade for absolutely every *thing* is between DIFFERING goods. People don't trade 10 bars of gold for 2 bars of gold. That would be completely absurd. People trade 10 bars of gold for 8 hours of labor, or twenty dollars for a dvd movie, or an apple for an orange. People interact with each other precisely because that which is received is valued MORE than that which is given away in exchange. This *is* the real world. Absolutely every single real good and real service is extrinsically subjectively non-constantly valued. Gold and fiat paper dollars are both extrinsically subjectively non-constantly valued. And the value of fiat paper dollars issued since the Federal Reserve starting printing them in 1913 has declined over 95%. Yet you claim this is a success?
Too many knee jerk reactionaries like to pretend they know what they are talking about in the economics field. And your claim of "it works on paper like communism" is a perfect example of that ignorant attitude devoid of factual scientific economic understanding. Using violent fiat force to make something like non-scare paper have artificial positive economic value is the ignorant bubble inducing irrational unrealistic absurdity. It's exactly as absurd as pretending farts are substitutes for drilling for petroleum fuel. Yet you want to pretend fiat currency is some logical scientifically established market based reality? Really, who's the loon?
Paying more taxes does not make the economy healthier. Absolutely correct. In fact, paying more taxes by definition makes the economy sicker. Trade occurs because that which is received is valued more than that which is given away in exchange. Thus, both parties to every voluntary trade transaction profit at the moment of exchange. If that wasn't true, people wouldn't trade in the first place, as by definition they would be better off not doing any particular trades. If something is not voluntarily forthcoming, forcing the transfer only causes the creation of poverty. If you went to the store to buy the movie 300, but instead the government taxed the money you were going to trade for the movie 300 away, and instead offered you the Spice Girls movie as a government entertainment social service (and you didn't like that movie), you would by definition be immediately poorer, precisely because the government has taken away your money from which you could choose how to best benefit yourself.
Eliminating taxes benefits absolutely everybody, no matter who the particular arbitrary individuals are who have marginal pieces of their taxes subsequently untaxed.
Do you need "empiricism" to statistically analyze whether you wrote a post or not? Absolute not; epistemologically there are only two possibilities. A) You wrote a post. B) You did not write a post. Even the methodological approach of "empiricism" is not empirically established. It's deductively established from a priori principles. Empiricism in economics is the anachronistic school of economic thinking. They are just too blind and foolish to confront their methodological errors, even when they are laid bare before their eyes, especially as their bogus 20th century monetarist prognostications collapse in the 21st century.
None of the major economic scientific principles were established from empiricism. Supply and demand, marginal utility, the profit creation from trade; all were deductively established. Empiricists just take those as "given". True total empiricism would make no sense whatsoever, as there would be no differential meaning between 'A' and 'B'. I must've written trade only occurs because that which is received is valued more than that which is given away in exchange over a thousand times by now. If that wasn't the case, there would be no reason to trade in the first place. Yet "empiricist" fools contradict this simple economic law with impunity. Empiricism is purely for second and third rate academic hacks to institute a make work welfare scheme for tenure jobs churning and burning, plugging and playing, "formulas" (which aren't even "empirically" established) pretending mathematical masturbation is shedding light on the science of human action.
Violence has economic implications which cause poverty, which cause society to be net less wealthy than otherwise. Or perhaps you are one of those brave empiricists trying to get funding to argue the case that slavery is an economically efficient system. But non-libertarians embrace violence. They lie to themselves and others, pretending that forcing and demanding others do things they don't want to do, is not violence. And then they hypocritically get upset when others impose their intolerant violence on them.
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright can be eliminated purely by legal means of mimicking the tactics and actions of all copyright claimants. There isn't a single piece of copyrighted work that does not copy the ideas of innumerable others on innumerable levels. Lawsuits will completely bog down the judicial system. Those who want to police imaginary property have financial assets just begging to be seized. We don't want to be stupid unorganized, or ineptly organized 1960s hippies. We want results. A billion times more economic damage than the Boston Tea Party is already a good start. Also stop voting for false choices between mainstream political parties. Start voting third party, whether Libertarian, Green, or Independent.
Also as technology allows for the transfer of ever bigger sized files at faster speeds it will be ever easier to rogue connect all the creative content ever created by connecting something as innocuous as a keychain sized flash drive. Long-term, copyright is ruined by simple supply and demand economics. And most importantly, don't buy any of this content ever again. Starve the bastards out, as assuredly as any classical siege of a medieval city.
We can undertake competing propaganda campaigns, slogans, bumperstickers, such as "Copyright Is Terrorism!" Even big media like Disney likes to profit from the glorification of piracy. See "Pirates of the Caribbean". Just don't pay for seeing "Pirates of the Caribbean". Would a real pirate *pay* to see a movie which copies their lifestyle? I don't think so.
Imagine you are the first person to grow, eat, and sell food. Should somebody be able to open up a competing grocery store in your neighborhood, or anywhere else in the world for that matter? More competition just means you won't be able to price gouge as much, cutting into your potential economic profit. Opening a grocery store is as much a creative idea as writing a song. Now we can clearly see, violently establishing monopoly charter grants for lines of business, such as is done with copyright and patent, is exactly the same thing as the medieval ages guild system. That only results in less competition, less production, less innovation, lower quality, and higher prices. That's the economic analysis of reality.
Artists wouldn't be creating music in the first place if they weren't copying the ideas of others. If the very product made by artists freely copies the ideas of others, in whole or in part, it's completely hypocritical for those artists to advocate nobody copy them. How many songs inserted the word "love" in to them? How many songs copy I-IV-V progressions? It's epistemologically impossible to not copy. There might as well be a law against exhaling poison carbon dioxide into the air. Second hand breathing kills!
If that were even remotely true, then the terms would specifically state that limitation, and not specifically state unlimited terms of use.
Not only that, but Microsoft didn't invent or create the ring tone. Is Microsoft paying the people who were the first to create ring tones a licensing fee for every ring tone created by the kids on that site? Microsoft is perfectly fine with stealing the ideas of others. Like all those who believe in mythical imaginary property, they are solely hypocrites bent on silencing competition, do the economic detriment of the rest of society.
They can *try* to make something retroactively legal. But they will certainly fail when it's disclosed the retroactive legal immunity violates all sorts of constitutional clauses, such as equal protection and application of the laws. Just because the Congress passes a law, doesn't mean the law is Constitutional, or will be upheld as Constitutional. See, if the law isn't repealed for everybody to spy with impunity upon everyone else, if everyone isn't granted retroactive plus forthcoming immunity, this law will be ruled unconstitutional. These corrupted politicians are just wasting their votes for bribes, er campaign contributions, exposing their records to clear corruption, in the end for naught.
Yes, you are exactly right. All you have to do is undertake a class action lawsuit and the corresponding appeals. Any arguments the government or telecos make against overturning the retroactive immunity will be an argument against the original law itself. How silly do they think they are? The law is clearly unconstitutional. Or rather then submit a tax payment to the IRS, cut out the portion of the law that refers to the telecos and paste in payment of taxes to the IRS and mail that instead of your tax form and check. Perhaps something at a very local level can be passed granting its citizens retroactive immunity from tax collections, and then they can undertake a class action lawsuit against the IRS for all taxes paid. Mimic the legals tactics, until the system implodes. That's the way to victory, as paved by the progressives.
Passing a law granting retroactive immunity doesn't mean the law passed is Constitutional. The telecoms (or the taxpayers) will just spend more on legal fees overturning any immunity bill before eventually the telecoms seek out a financial settlement, exactly as the tobacco companies did, exactly as Microsoft did. Don't believe for a second, a tobacco immunity law would've been worth the paper it was written on either.
Everybody is in oblivious denial. There's been billions and billions of dollars of content dumped into the public domain sea on the internet. This already is far bigger than the Boston Tea Party. Lies can't compete with the truth in a free market. Closed source can't compete with open source. See wikipedia. This has all happened, and happened super fast. There's massive credibility damage sustained by the old mainstream medias and governments, internationally. We are in the midst and upon the cusp of vast historical tides. And it isn't even all that big of a deal yet. So called internet "effects" (Streisand, /., digg, et al) are eventually going to touch these many corrupt politicians, who have profited by selling our liberty for pittances, personally. It's simple unstoppable economics; economic law doesn't stop at the border of some first world banana republic's silly laws, any more than the law of gravity does.
The next step will be broad-based organization of new competing political parties, such as the Libertarian and Pirate Parties. The abolition of copyright is a war that can be won, and it will be a big victory for free speech and artistic and technological innovation, and the advancement and material benefit of all peoples world-wide without regard to international border. It's simple unstoppable economics. Recording equipment isn't going anywhere, as even government databases fill to the terabytes per seconds; all storage, access, dissemination can only occur by copying, for all files, copyrighted/uncopyrighted/"legal"/"illegal". But it's sure funny as hell to watch the clueless put on the Emperor's New Clothes at the Emperor's New Clothes Assembly Ball.
Serious legal action counter measures haven't even started yet. But suffice to say the records of past policing action by the content creators enforcement arms has subjected them to far more financial liability than their bottom line net worths, not to mention the personal prison terms and civil forfeiture penalties awaiting the executives of these racketeering media companies. With copyright, everybody can be a copyright troll similar to the patent trolls, and fish big settlement dollars from those with the means to pay. Talk about a gargantuan legal mess.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window The parable describes a shopkeeper whose window is broken by a little boy. Everyone sympathizes with the man whose window was broken, but pretty soon they start to suggest that the broken window makes work for the glazier, who will then buy bread, benefiting the baker, who will then buy shoes, benefiting the cobbler, etc. Finally, the onlookers conclude that the little boy was not guilty of vandalism; instead he was a public benefactor, creating economic benefits for everyone in town. The fallacy of the onlookers' argument is that they considered only the positive benefits of purchasing a new window, but they ignored the cost to the shopkeeper. As the shopkeeper was forced to spend his money on a new window, he obviously could not have spent it on something else. For example, the shopkeeper may have spent the money on bread and shoes for himself, but now cannot so enrich the baker and cobbler because he must fix his window.
Thus, the child did not bring any net benefit to the town. Instead, he made the town poorer by at least the value of one window, if not more.
That's exactly why copyright is already de facto dead in the digital age. Merely attempting to enforce it turns the internet literally into a legal mine field. Those with the greatest monetary assets will lose the most from policing mistakes. It's epistemologically impossible for police enforcers to not copy everything in the first place just to see whether or not something is copyrighted or not. I'm actually surprised nobody has yet sued these people in the first place. There's zero doubt the content creator enforcement arms have *already* committed more financial liability than the worth of all the content they've all ever created, many times over. If the current laws were actually enforced, the music and movie industries would be bankrupt overnight. Make sure you take that into account when you value their stock.
The content creators have ripped off the free speech copying rights of all of society. What once was an original bargain of a *limited time* monopoly for exclusive distribution in return for the content being released into the public domain has now been completely voided by the IP racketeering laws which release absolutely nothing into the public domain for content created in a person's lifetime. Not surprisingly, there's zero incentive to respect bogus laws that violate one's natural free speech copying rights, because the audience gets absolutely nothing in return, even though it's the audience that originally sacrificed their rights to grant creators privileges to allegedly increase creative content production incentives. We see now the results of that original IP compromise error: it servers a potential platter for never ending monopoly abuses, political bribery, and police state enforcement. The only solution is the wholesale elimination of all IP protection. That will only result in more competition, more innovation, and lower prices. The incentives to produce will still be the same as fame, media attention, is a valuable commodity.
All that's occurring is the middlemen are being cut out. When advertisers are willing to pay to shove content to be seen, the customers might as well be the ones being payed to view advertisements + content, rather than the monopoly broadcasters and distributors pocketing a single cent. Measures like this will only serve to convert more and more people to the cause of wholesale elimination of imaginary property, such as you yourself have hypocritically committed yourself to as well, as evidenced by your blatant wholesale copying of words you yourself didn't invent or create.
Nobody copies more copyrighted files than those attempting to police enforcement. Every file viewed must be copied. Every file with any name must be downloaded and viewed *before* copyright can even begun to be attempted to be determined.
When consumers got pop up Microsoft bubbles informing them they cannot make a mixed burn cd, even though they had legitimately purchased all the cds, or they cannot load legitimately purchased .mp3 files onto their iPod, it would be over practically overnight, as in it would put the Sony rootkit fiasco to shame, possibly permanently ruining the reputation credibility of component manufacturers.
These RIAA goons are living in total fantasy land. A single bit of data can be broken down in an infinite number of random combinations, not to mention a larger size file can have each of it's bits randomly broken down into an infinite number of random combinations of infinitely randomly sized data bits. It would be impossible to distinguish legitimate from "illegitimate", exponentially increasing the processing power and cost of that processing power merely to view files, which must by definition be COPIED to be seen and heard, on the internet. Oh, wait, they call that attempt "Vista". The more they try, the more they will just price themselves out of the revenue maximizing sweet spot with excessive encumbrance.
A sample block bubble would say: "I'm sorry, the word "Love" is used in xxx,xxx copyrighted songs. This is a copyright violation." when you were sending an email to a [banned] one.
"You've gotta fight, duh nuh, for you're right, duh nuh, to COPYYYYYYYYY!" Oh noes, don't sue me. No actually, please do. I relish the opportunity to have the entire copyright laws overturned on multiple platforms at the Supreme Court level.
Look at how short the copyright is for individual posts on the internet, yet look at the ever geometrically growing trillions of posts. How do you explain that?
Copyright was established, and granted by the audience (it is not a fundamental right of creative producers) to promote the advancement of the arts. The original period of 14 years was established when information flowed much much slower. Now that information can be spread near instantaneously the copyright term (if one were to even allow for such a violently established trampling upon the free speech rights of others, not to mention the original economic incentives justification for copyright is fundamentally in error) should reflect that reality and be closer to a term of one to two years.
/., which has done more for the spread of knowledge in a shorter time then centuries, if not a millennium, of academia.
But in actuality, copyright only stifles innovation, causes a vast wasting of squandered productive resources and human energy in attempted legal profession enforcement, and results in lower quality creative works at higher prices then would be the case in the absence of copyright. You need look no further then the establishment of wikipedia, or free contribution sites like
After witnessing the massive abuse, corruption, and tyranny of those pushing copyright extensions and penalties, it is time to abolish the means for that abuse, corruption, and tyranny all together. It will only lead to increased innovation, increased competition, and better quality at a lower price, as removing all violent government interference monopoly restrictions does.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot-Hawley_Tariff_Act The Hawley-Smoot Tariff (or Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act)[1] was signed into law on June 17, 1930, and raised U.S. tariffs on over 20,000 imported goods to record levels, and, in the opinion of most economists, worsened the Great Depression. Economists have now generally regarded this Tariff Act (i.e., tax increase on imported goods) as the greatest policy blunder in American economic history, coming as it did after the 1929-30 recession and preventing the economy from a full, natural recovery which had already started by the Spring, 1930. Many countries retaliated with their own increased tariffs on U.S. goods, and American exports and imports plunged by more than half. There it is, plain as day! International trade dropped by 50%! That means you don't need half your workers because half your business customers have been shut down by government interference in the free market. The protectionist trade barriers variable should be weighted somewhere around 90% of the cause of the Great Depression, with federal monetary policy the next biggest weighted variable.
Too many knee jerk reactionaries like to pretend they know what they are talking about in the economics field. And your claim of "it works on paper like communism" is a perfect example of that ignorant attitude devoid of factual scientific economic understanding. Using violent fiat force to make something like non-scare paper have artificial positive economic value is the ignorant bubble inducing irrational unrealistic absurdity. It's exactly as absurd as pretending farts are substitutes for drilling for petroleum fuel. Yet you want to pretend fiat currency is some logical scientifically established market based reality? Really, who's the loon?
Eliminating taxes benefits absolutely everybody, no matter who the particular arbitrary individuals are who have marginal pieces of their taxes subsequently untaxed.
Do you need "empiricism" to statistically analyze whether you wrote a post or not? Absolute not; epistemologically there are only two possibilities. A) You wrote a post. B) You did not write a post. Even the methodological approach of "empiricism" is not empirically established. It's deductively established from a priori principles. Empiricism in economics is the anachronistic school of economic thinking. They are just too blind and foolish to confront their methodological errors, even when they are laid bare before their eyes, especially as their bogus 20th century monetarist prognostications collapse in the 21st century.
None of the major economic scientific principles were established from empiricism. Supply and demand, marginal utility, the profit creation from trade; all were deductively established. Empiricists just take those as "given". True total empiricism would make no sense whatsoever, as there would be no differential meaning between 'A' and 'B'. I must've written trade only occurs because that which is received is valued more than that which is given away in exchange over a thousand times by now. If that wasn't the case, there would be no reason to trade in the first place. Yet "empiricist" fools contradict this simple economic law with impunity. Empiricism is purely for second and third rate academic hacks to institute a make work welfare scheme for tenure jobs churning and burning, plugging and playing, "formulas" (which aren't even "empirically" established) pretending mathematical masturbation is shedding light on the science of human action.
Violence has economic implications which cause poverty, which cause society to be net less wealthy than otherwise. Or perhaps you are one of those brave empiricists trying to get funding to argue the case that slavery is an economically efficient system. But non-libertarians embrace violence. They lie to themselves and others, pretending that forcing and demanding others do things they don't want to do, is not violence. And then they hypocritically get upset when others impose their intolerant violence on them.