The only thing I can think of is that proprietary software isn't really safe, either without copyrights or patents.
At which point, if the market for an application is not predominantly commercial or relies on a large proportion of consumer purchases to support it, what is the point in the companies making the software in the first place when they're not going to make their money back?
There are alternate models such as subscription for your apps (which is the antithesis of freedom by removing copyright) and support contracts, but most users don't want to pay the current one-off costs at the prices they are and do without support contracts. If they don't want support contracts now, why would they want them when they don't even have to pay for the software?
People who show their code will attract more trust than those who don't.
But that argument should apply equally as well now as it would without copyright law, but it isn't generally the case. Most people consider proprietary software more secure because lots of free software is hobby-created (and so not thoroughly QAed) and because of misinformed ideas about having the source code being the only way to find bugs.
Now if you want a study that shows that the quality and benefits of life without copyrights, there are quite a few cited in chapter 2 of the book I referenced in my original post.
And who is that a benefit to? And over what period? And making what assumptions about people's ability to produce creative content when they can't earn money from most of it (book writers wouldn't do well doing gigs, for example) and so have to spend what is currently creative time doing a 'normal' job instead?
Yes, in theory life without copyrights and everyone having access to all of the creative media would be a good thing, but without copyright you have no method that will allow all creative media to be recompensed, so the quality and quantity will go down. Given what's in the charts already, some of the crap that is on TV and some of the trash books that get published, I dread to think what we would get if the quality of various media went downhill from where it is now.
Or, in terms that some Slashdot readers will understand better: if there is no way to stop the free distribution of porn then porn sites won't make anywhere near as much money, so they won't be able to pay their actresses, so the actresses will have to find "proper" jobs so they can afford to live, so the porn won't have the "good" actresses, so the studios won't be able to afford to make films, so you'll be stuck with any old ugly attention-seeking whore who just wants to do it on the cheap in low quality in their own house to get their face (or other body parts) on the Internet.
But if you're saying that people can legally fileshare when not making a profit, what is the difference between that and freeloading? I know the pirate parties aren't focussing on the freeloading side and don't want to be associated with it, but once you legalise file-sharing I can't see any end point other than people freeloading everything they can with legal immunity.
Based on a quick skim of the start of that article (translated by Google) if you're worried about the whole "no copyright at all" issue, then a) I didn't say they would do it, just that they might and if they did then it'd be too far and b) "reforming" copyright so that it allows free and unconstrained non-commercial copying is effectively the same as abolishing a section of it (the private, non-corporate section).
If you can find a study that shows that IP is good for the economy, I'd love to read it.
And if you can find a study that definitively shows that we won't have a loss of music/film/stories/games or a degradation in quality when everyone can freely copy it with no recourse or recompense then I'd love to read it;)
Yes, IP law can be bad when used wrongly (things like stupid patents on things that shouldn't be patented, excessively long copyright periods, excessive restrictions on or removal of "fair use" rights) but that doesn't mean that the idea of someone controlling how the work that they put their own time and effort in to is necessarily a wrong thing in itself.
I'm not denying that musicians and inventors can make music/inventions for the fun of it, but as an open source (GPL) supporting software developer who writes my own GPLed apps I know I'd be far less likely to write anything if copyright were removed, destroying the basis of the GPL and its "payment" back to me of other people also making their work free. There may still be people who would do it, but if they can't make some kind of living from it (and I'm talking of a moderate living, not the excessive "everyone should be a superstar" living) then they have to do another job, and if they have to do another job then they don't have time to concentrate on music/invention/etc, and if they don't have that time then quality, quantity or both will have to drop.
Using the levels of Ackoff's hiearchy, data and information may be free, but that doesn't mean that the knowledge and wisdom that create them don't have a price.
You should be able to get an upgrade for free/cheap a year after you signed up I believe.
Nope, they want to charge us £60 to install the damned thing as part of a "recommend a friend" that we did with the in-laws. We're waiting for Sky to contact us at the moment, but if they don't then it'll be £60 that we save and all we'll miss is the ability to record 99% crap off the TV.
If you want to buy DVD's then fine, there's nothing preventing you doing that now or in the future.
That depends on whether it is still viable to make DVDs, or even to make the content that goes on DVDs. If everyone is free to pirate it then where does the revenue come from to make publishing DVDs a viable idea? And where would the revenue be predicted to come from to make it worth recording in the first place? I'm not just talking about short-term "while the channels are still thinking they'll make money and paying for the series", I'm talking about the longer "once people won't watch it on TV because they don't want the adverts and won't buy it because they can download it for free without legal implications" view.
Again, 11.5% of the British public is actively involved in pirate filesharing. That's a massive amount! The readership of The Sun is only 3.1 million, and that's our best selling daily newspaper.
Ignoring the fact that it's a guesstimate based on surveys, a) I'll re-iterate that just because lots of people are doing it doesn't make it either legal or sensible in the long term (for a physical alternative, see binge drinking and the effects of that), b) the readership of The Sun are probably some of the ones who don't have a clue about the technology but would happily never pay another penny again if they could get "huhuhuh, free boobs!" and c) I'm slightly ashamed to live in a country where The Sun is our most read source of written news.
Your statement leaves me to conclude that you think allowing free redistribution of copyrighted stuff doesn't give people what they want (presumably due to the removed profit incentive on the producer side of the equation). Why do you think this?
It gives people what they want (a proportion of them) but then so does freely allowing shoplifting and burglary, but for physical items. What free redistribution where it isn't specifically licensed doesn't give is adequate compensation in whatever form the creator chose (generally payment for most media, or code and contributions for open source/creative commons works).
I think it's an empirical question what the effect of changing copyright law would be. Would people stop making music? Probably not, but the amount and quality would probably decline. How about movies? They're much more expensive, so maybe we'd only have short films by film students posted on youtube. How happy or unhappy would people be about this? I think that's something we should measure (or at least approximate) rather than guesstimate.
Which is part of my point. If people no longer have to 'risk' getting caught breaking the law (which is low risk for most P2P activity as most people keep on going) then it'll increase, so people won't have the inclination or funding to make expensive media and entertainment.
Some people may still continue for the love of it, but most won't because they need to either focus on the media or work on another job to live and can't do both at the same time to a sufficiently high degree. Most people are happy with the short-term view of "I get to copy [insert band here] for free" but don't take the longer-term view of "will the quality and quantity of what I get in the future suffer because the artists aren't being compensated?".
Before copyright (the "long time before", as in before people thought it was necessary) was an entirely different system, though. Corporations and human greed in a capitalist culture, along with the technology that eases copying and even allows you to make those copies in the first place* have severely skewed things so that the recompense for the artist is in small transactions rather than being paid by a patron or other methods.
* try going back several thousand years and sharing a copy of a musician's performance with a friend - it would be somewhat impossible since there wasn't a good way to record that performance, but now there is and so it needs to be taken in to account
Dude, we both have sky. Why don't you set your sky box to series link your favourite shows, then watch them all at your convenience, fast forwarding through the adverts?
Because I've got a Sky box, not a Sky+ box. Even with fast-forwarding through adverts you still end up with terrible cuts on most shows where the adverts is obviously inserted based on time rather than based on fitting in with a scene change.
No you are misinterpreting the process I think.
If I am then so are you. You put forward the idea that ad-supported content should mean that the content is free and it is a business model for the producer. With TV shows that isn't the case - the ad-supporting is to the channel, not the producer. The channel will pay for the content, but it won't pay the ad money to the producer. Either way I'd still rather buy and own a DVD than have to wade through adverts (which is why Formula 1 on the BBC is better than it being on ITV)
Yes they really will. pirates are the music industry's largest source of legitimate customers. People are desperate to spend money on their favourite media, and they are doing exactly that when you provide them with good, value-for-money products.
I've seen those reports, and they're a good reason not to punish legitimate customers by putting DRM and "Don't Steal" adverts on things.
Those who pirate most at the moment probably do buy lots as well, but the general public don't normally know how easy file sharing is and how low the risk of being caught is. If it becomes legal to file share then there'll be far more "normal" users spending money purely for the reason that they don't have to.
I don't disagree... but that's exactly the point isn't it? You can't turn back time and make bittorrent not exist, so it's pointless trying to legislate against it's users, and many believe it's not even necessary in order for companies to keep making money.
No, you can't turn back time, but that doesn't mean it should be legal to use it to freely infringe copyright. You can't turn back time and un-invent the gun either, but that doesn't mean that we should make bank heists with deadly weapons and murder legal;)
It's strange how people still claim that we 'have to' pay for DVD's and the like when TV shows are constantly being broadcast into our homes which are 100% free and advertisement supported.
And I hate adverts with a vengeance. Given the choice between watching Bones or House or something on Sky with adverts or watching it on a DVD I bought/rented (so no adverts) I'd go for paying for it every time (as long as I had the money). If people can freely copy digital versions, what's going to encourage people to make the DVDs? And if they stop making the DVDs, what's to encourage them to make the show in the first place? The advert revenue on TV goes to the station, not to the show.
I can't personally make head or tales of your suppositions, since the most money i've ever spent on merch for a show is on Pure Pwnage, a web show that i'm very fond of, and which is distributed 100% free over the internet.
And everyone is going to act in the same way as you to a sufficient degree that it'll be able to fund all of the creative media we have at the moment? The reason why piracy and P2P has taken off is because people can get it for free with almost no chance of repercussions. If you then completely remove any chance of repercussions by removing the existing law against low-scale copying then what makes you think people won't just get more of the free stuff because it's free and because they don't need to pay for anything?
If 7 million people in the UK are sharing, then 11.5% of the population has been criminalised for a normal activity!
That depends on what you mean by a "normal" activity. At 11.5% then it might be a moderately common-place activity, but that's not the same as normal.
Is it really fair for the government to put out a law that is almost immediately worth £50k * 7 mil = £350 billion in fines?! That's 1/6th of Britain's entire GDP! That's pretty out of touch with reality if you ask me.
Exactly, and I'm not arguing with that at all. The current legislation is completely out of whack in favour of the big companies and record labels, but take it too far the other way and no-one benefits from putting their effort in to making music or books or games and so none of them end up existing any more.
If, in your opinion, the pirate party is wrong... don't vote for them. Your ideals obviously don't match theirs.
IMO they could be wrong if taken literally and as far as they could be. I agree with their general ideas, but the extent of the ideal can be another thing. Also, it can be better to vote slightly too far one way than it is to vote way too far the other compared to your actual stance.
So why don't they shut up and finally stop working? Right. Because they are scared that nobody would miss them once they're gone.
No, that'd be because they're being recompensed for their time at the moment.
If copyright didn't exist and I couldn't release my code under the GPL then I probably wouldn't be writing an open source army builder because people wouldn't have to contribute changes and improvements back to say "thanks" for my efforts. Instead I'd just end up playing more computer games (if they still existed) and pirating Army Builder (assuming Lone Wolf Development had written it in the first place and hadn't decided that there was no point in writing it because everyone would just steal it and not pay for it anyway).
Copying things you own for personal use (including bypassing any "copy protection" measures) should be legal - after all you own it and you should be able to back it up. Copying things from other people just leads to a market where no-one need buy anything, which leads to no-one buying anything, which leads to no-one (not even the author) profiting from making anything, which leads to no-one bothering making anything because they can't afford to, which leads to no market. Granted, it's a long slope, but that's where it ends once you're on it.
It's good to know that someone is considering it, since a lot of people can get a bit carried away and go from "I don't see why I should pay big corporations for downloading music" to "it must be copyright's fault - lets remove copyright and sod the consequences"!
Huh? What's that got to do with the right to freely copy anything without saying "thank you, your time was well spent, here is some recompense" to the original author? Whether it's in money (a normal purchase) or in code (as GPL licensed code), people should get some recompense for their time or else a huge chunk of them won't spend that time in the first place.
What a party states and what the end up doing aren't always the same thing, so whatever they say now may be further out or not as far out as what they actually do. If they start fairly moderate but then get more extreme as they gain votes then they may end up taking it too far no matter what they say now.
As for the quotes, IMO that is too far. Why would anyone buy anything if they can legally (rather than just easily) get it all for free? I'm all for helping benefit the author rather than some corporation in the middle, but how can the author benefit from profits if no profits are made?
Hopefully this'll just be an extreme position to bring the current legislation to somewhere more reasonable.
It's good to hear that there's at least some sense at the top and that there won't be copyright abolition:) Maybe there's actually now a party to vote for in the UK. Before it was a waste because they all came up with the same policies once they got in to power anyway (like the right-wing Conservatives ending up making more left-wing suggestions because the left-wing Labour party was in power making right-wing laws).
And I agree - convincing people that copyright is excessive is almost certainly easier than convincing them that it's completely unnecessary.
It's not just the swimming pools in Hollywood (which are only owned by the tiny minority who are paid too much), it's the general abolition of copyright and people's ownership of their own work. I like the GPL as a software license because it lets me say "I've given up my free time to write something, so please pay me back in code by making your changes free". Without copyright and with everyone free to copy everything without recourse then the GPL is dead and large corporations can take whatever code they want without any return.
It sounds promising that we now have a "Pirate Party" in the UK who will stand up on copyright issues, but I suspect they'll take it too far. It makes sense to decrease the legislation that is heavily in favour of the company rather than the consumer (things like making it illegal to make personal backups or making fines for infringement hugely out of proportion) but if they get to complete freedom to pirate everything then they've taken it too far the other way and the economy will falter again.
People need the right to own what they've bought, but people don't need the right to own everything for free that's digital.
a federal law has nonetheless made it illegal to manufacture or traffic in a device or tool that permits a consumer to make such copies
My computer can copy bits from a CD, making it a device or tool that permits me (a customer) to copy copyrighted stuff. Does that make my computer illegal as well (if I ever hauled it to America)?
Yes - in America. That's part of why Fedora doesn't include it but Suse does - Fedora is quite American-centric, while Suse has always been quite German-centric. Just because using libcss2 in the US is illegal to make use of "fair use" rights doesn't mean that it's illegal in the rest of the world;)
...says Mike Milinkovich, executive director of the Eclipse Foundation, one of the many organizations now offering an open source license with more generous commercial terms than GPL."
Surely that depends on your definition of "generous". The GPL is the most generous when it comes to commerce as a whole - anyone who makes a change and redistribute it then contributes to the world. That's very generous. It may not be profitable to the company to make its work public (assuming that it's using the wrong business model) but it's certainly generous to commerce and non-commerce alike.
Virtual Box will still run without VT, it just won't be optimal. I've got an old Athlon 64 that doesn't support VT or its AMD equivalent, but I can still run a Windows XP Virtual Box instance on it;)
Why RAR? JPEGs are compressed, FLAC is compressed, PDF is compressed (or any images would be at least) so why try to put some heavy and comparatively slow compression on top? Just slap it all in a TAR. You probably won't notice much of a file size difference, it'll be lighter weight to open and it'll be more open as a standard.
Never mind that, isn't it just an iTunes album download? I bought Placebo's Meds recently and that came with a PDF of the booklet. One of the other albums I bought (another Placebo one - although possibly Meds again) had a movie in there.
Okay, it wasn't stored in a single file, but a) that makes it easier to work with, b) I still downloaded it as if it was one file and c) they're trumpeting lyrics and album art as if it's something amazing, yet iTunes already does it in some situations and Apple could probably embed album art if they wanted (since the M4A and MP3 formats support it).
Any sort of "digital album" will necessarily have that functionality, negating the whole album concept.
Either that or they're purposefully trying to push people back to the "playing a number of tracks from the album" way of listening to music.
Given that they aren't likely to be compatible with existing players (if they are then they're basically just an archive and you've got to extract them first, defeating the idea of an "album file") they're going to have to have their own player with their own controls.
There's a difference between security through obscurity ("lets hide the code so that they can't break in, because that's bound to work(!)") and security through control of assets ("lets keep all of the gold in a vault so no-one can steal it, because it's safer than letting the general public hold on to it");)
I didn't read the content, but I read the URL and got the idea. It's not overly surprising that it happens on occasion, after all how much evidence goes missing or gets ruined (either accidentally or "accidentally")? And how many eye witnesses against the police suddenly decide that perhaps they don't want to testify? Just because it's video footage (a more reliable way of identifying someone than an eye witness) doesn't mean that it's immune to malicious removal.
You've obviously not seen the latest comment that points out that (once again) the Express are sensationalising for a headline and that isn't going to be used and that the Express made it up (or someone lied to them).
Besides, even if they were monitoring those families on CCTV, it's a hell of a lot nicer than some of the more drastic measures to cut the problem (including putting the entire family in prison, which gets them on CCTV, or medical procedures to stop them having more kids and taking the kids away).
Slashdot Mirror
At which point, if the market for an application is not predominantly commercial or relies on a large proportion of consumer purchases to support it, what is the point in the companies making the software in the first place when they're not going to make their money back?
There are alternate models such as subscription for your apps (which is the antithesis of freedom by removing copyright) and support contracts, but most users don't want to pay the current one-off costs at the prices they are and do without support contracts. If they don't want support contracts now, why would they want them when they don't even have to pay for the software?
But that argument should apply equally as well now as it would without copyright law, but it isn't generally the case. Most people consider proprietary software more secure because lots of free software is hobby-created (and so not thoroughly QAed) and because of misinformed ideas about having the source code being the only way to find bugs.
And who is that a benefit to? And over what period? And making what assumptions about people's ability to produce creative content when they can't earn money from most of it (book writers wouldn't do well doing gigs, for example) and so have to spend what is currently creative time doing a 'normal' job instead?
Yes, in theory life without copyrights and everyone having access to all of the creative media would be a good thing, but without copyright you have no method that will allow all creative media to be recompensed, so the quality and quantity will go down. Given what's in the charts already, some of the crap that is on TV and some of the trash books that get published, I dread to think what we would get if the quality of various media went downhill from where it is now.
Or, in terms that some Slashdot readers will understand better: if there is no way to stop the free distribution of porn then porn sites won't make anywhere near as much money, so they won't be able to pay their actresses, so the actresses will have to find "proper" jobs so they can afford to live, so the porn won't have the "good" actresses, so the studios won't be able to afford to make films, so you'll be stuck with any old ugly attention-seeking whore who just wants to do it on the cheap in low quality in their own house to get their face (or other body parts) on the Internet.
But if you're saying that people can legally fileshare when not making a profit, what is the difference between that and freeloading? I know the pirate parties aren't focussing on the freeloading side and don't want to be associated with it, but once you legalise file-sharing I can't see any end point other than people freeloading everything they can with legal immunity.
Based on a quick skim of the start of that article (translated by Google) if you're worried about the whole "no copyright at all" issue, then a) I didn't say they would do it, just that they might and if they did then it'd be too far and b) "reforming" copyright so that it allows free and unconstrained non-commercial copying is effectively the same as abolishing a section of it (the private, non-corporate section).
And if you can find a study that definitively shows that we won't have a loss of music/film/stories/games or a degradation in quality when everyone can freely copy it with no recourse or recompense then I'd love to read it ;)
Yes, IP law can be bad when used wrongly (things like stupid patents on things that shouldn't be patented, excessively long copyright periods, excessive restrictions on or removal of "fair use" rights) but that doesn't mean that the idea of someone controlling how the work that they put their own time and effort in to is necessarily a wrong thing in itself.
I'm not denying that musicians and inventors can make music/inventions for the fun of it, but as an open source (GPL) supporting software developer who writes my own GPLed apps I know I'd be far less likely to write anything if copyright were removed, destroying the basis of the GPL and its "payment" back to me of other people also making their work free. There may still be people who would do it, but if they can't make some kind of living from it (and I'm talking of a moderate living, not the excessive "everyone should be a superstar" living) then they have to do another job, and if they have to do another job then they don't have time to concentrate on music/invention/etc, and if they don't have that time then quality, quantity or both will have to drop.
Using the levels of Ackoff's hiearchy, data and information may be free, but that doesn't mean that the knowledge and wisdom that create them don't have a price.
Getting off topic, but:
Nope, they want to charge us £60 to install the damned thing as part of a "recommend a friend" that we did with the in-laws. We're waiting for Sky to contact us at the moment, but if they don't then it'll be £60 that we save and all we'll miss is the ability to record 99% crap off the TV.
That depends on whether it is still viable to make DVDs, or even to make the content that goes on DVDs. If everyone is free to pirate it then where does the revenue come from to make publishing DVDs a viable idea? And where would the revenue be predicted to come from to make it worth recording in the first place? I'm not just talking about short-term "while the channels are still thinking they'll make money and paying for the series", I'm talking about the longer "once people won't watch it on TV because they don't want the adverts and won't buy it because they can download it for free without legal implications" view.
Ignoring the fact that it's a guesstimate based on surveys, a) I'll re-iterate that just because lots of people are doing it doesn't make it either legal or sensible in the long term (for a physical alternative, see binge drinking and the effects of that), b) the readership of The Sun are probably some of the ones who don't have a clue about the technology but would happily never pay another penny again if they could get "huhuhuh, free boobs!" and c) I'm slightly ashamed to live in a country where The Sun is our most read source of written news.
It gives people what they want (a proportion of them) but then so does freely allowing shoplifting and burglary, but for physical items. What free redistribution where it isn't specifically licensed doesn't give is adequate compensation in whatever form the creator chose (generally payment for most media, or code and contributions for open source/creative commons works).
Which is part of my point. If people no longer have to 'risk' getting caught breaking the law (which is low risk for most P2P activity as most people keep on going) then it'll increase, so people won't have the inclination or funding to make expensive media and entertainment.
Some people may still continue for the love of it, but most won't because they need to either focus on the media or work on another job to live and can't do both at the same time to a sufficiently high degree. Most people are happy with the short-term view of "I get to copy [insert band here] for free" but don't take the longer-term view of "will the quality and quantity of what I get in the future suffer because the artists aren't being compensated?".
Before copyright (the "long time before", as in before people thought it was necessary) was an entirely different system, though. Corporations and human greed in a capitalist culture, along with the technology that eases copying and even allows you to make those copies in the first place* have severely skewed things so that the recompense for the artist is in small transactions rather than being paid by a patron or other methods.
* try going back several thousand years and sharing a copy of a musician's performance with a friend - it would be somewhat impossible since there wasn't a good way to record that performance, but now there is and so it needs to be taken in to account
Because I've got a Sky box, not a Sky+ box. Even with fast-forwarding through adverts you still end up with terrible cuts on most shows where the adverts is obviously inserted based on time rather than based on fitting in with a scene change.
If I am then so are you. You put forward the idea that ad-supported content should mean that the content is free and it is a business model for the producer. With TV shows that isn't the case - the ad-supporting is to the channel, not the producer. The channel will pay for the content, but it won't pay the ad money to the producer. Either way I'd still rather buy and own a DVD than have to wade through adverts (which is why Formula 1 on the BBC is better than it being on ITV)
I've seen those reports, and they're a good reason not to punish legitimate customers by putting DRM and "Don't Steal" adverts on things.
Those who pirate most at the moment probably do buy lots as well, but the general public don't normally know how easy file sharing is and how low the risk of being caught is. If it becomes legal to file share then there'll be far more "normal" users spending money purely for the reason that they don't have to.
No, you can't turn back time, but that doesn't mean it should be legal to use it to freely infringe copyright. You can't turn back time and un-invent the gun either, but that doesn't mean that we should make bank heists with deadly weapons and murder legal ;)
And I hate adverts with a vengeance. Given the choice between watching Bones or House or something on Sky with adverts or watching it on a DVD I bought/rented (so no adverts) I'd go for paying for it every time (as long as I had the money). If people can freely copy digital versions, what's going to encourage people to make the DVDs? And if they stop making the DVDs, what's to encourage them to make the show in the first place? The advert revenue on TV goes to the station, not to the show.
And everyone is going to act in the same way as you to a sufficient degree that it'll be able to fund all of the creative media we have at the moment? The reason why piracy and P2P has taken off is because people can get it for free with almost no chance of repercussions. If you then completely remove any chance of repercussions by removing the existing law against low-scale copying then what makes you think people won't just get more of the free stuff because it's free and because they don't need to pay for anything?
That depends on what you mean by a "normal" activity. At 11.5% then it might be a moderately common-place activity, but that's not the same as normal.
Exactly, and I'm not arguing with that at all. The current legislation is completely out of whack in favour of the big companies and record labels, but take it too far the other way and no-one benefits from putting their effort in to making music or books or games and so none of them end up existing any more.
IMO they could be wrong if taken literally and as far as they could be. I agree with their general ideas, but the extent of the ideal can be another thing. Also, it can be better to vote slightly too far one way than it is to vote way too far the other compared to your actual stance.
No, that'd be because they're being recompensed for their time at the moment.
If copyright didn't exist and I couldn't release my code under the GPL then I probably wouldn't be writing an open source army builder because people wouldn't have to contribute changes and improvements back to say "thanks" for my efforts. Instead I'd just end up playing more computer games (if they still existed) and pirating Army Builder (assuming Lone Wolf Development had written it in the first place and hadn't decided that there was no point in writing it because everyone would just steal it and not pay for it anyway).
Copying things you own for personal use (including bypassing any "copy protection" measures) should be legal - after all you own it and you should be able to back it up. Copying things from other people just leads to a market where no-one need buy anything, which leads to no-one buying anything, which leads to no-one (not even the author) profiting from making anything, which leads to no-one bothering making anything because they can't afford to, which leads to no market. Granted, it's a long slope, but that's where it ends once you're on it.
It's good to know that someone is considering it, since a lot of people can get a bit carried away and go from "I don't see why I should pay big corporations for downloading music" to "it must be copyright's fault - lets remove copyright and sod the consequences"!
Huh? What's that got to do with the right to freely copy anything without saying "thank you, your time was well spent, here is some recompense" to the original author? Whether it's in money (a normal purchase) or in code (as GPL licensed code), people should get some recompense for their time or else a huge chunk of them won't spend that time in the first place.
What a party states and what the end up doing aren't always the same thing, so whatever they say now may be further out or not as far out as what they actually do. If they start fairly moderate but then get more extreme as they gain votes then they may end up taking it too far no matter what they say now.
As for the quotes, IMO that is too far. Why would anyone buy anything if they can legally (rather than just easily) get it all for free? I'm all for helping benefit the author rather than some corporation in the middle, but how can the author benefit from profits if no profits are made?
Hopefully this'll just be an extreme position to bring the current legislation to somewhere more reasonable.
It's good to hear that there's at least some sense at the top and that there won't be copyright abolition :) Maybe there's actually now a party to vote for in the UK. Before it was a waste because they all came up with the same policies once they got in to power anyway (like the right-wing Conservatives ending up making more left-wing suggestions because the left-wing Labour party was in power making right-wing laws).
And I agree - convincing people that copyright is excessive is almost certainly easier than convincing them that it's completely unnecessary.
It's not just the swimming pools in Hollywood (which are only owned by the tiny minority who are paid too much), it's the general abolition of copyright and people's ownership of their own work. I like the GPL as a software license because it lets me say "I've given up my free time to write something, so please pay me back in code by making your changes free". Without copyright and with everyone free to copy everything without recourse then the GPL is dead and large corporations can take whatever code they want without any return.
It sounds promising that we now have a "Pirate Party" in the UK who will stand up on copyright issues, but I suspect they'll take it too far. It makes sense to decrease the legislation that is heavily in favour of the company rather than the consumer (things like making it illegal to make personal backups or making fines for infringement hugely out of proportion) but if they get to complete freedom to pirate everything then they've taken it too far the other way and the economy will falter again.
People need the right to own what they've bought, but people don't need the right to own everything for free that's digital.
My computer can copy bits from a CD, making it a device or tool that permits me (a customer) to copy copyrighted stuff. Does that make my computer illegal as well (if I ever hauled it to America)?
Yes - in America. That's part of why Fedora doesn't include it but Suse does - Fedora is quite American-centric, while Suse has always been quite German-centric. Just because using libcss2 in the US is illegal to make use of "fair use" rights doesn't mean that it's illegal in the rest of the world ;)
Surely that depends on your definition of "generous". The GPL is the most generous when it comes to commerce as a whole - anyone who makes a change and redistribute it then contributes to the world. That's very generous. It may not be profitable to the company to make its work public (assuming that it's using the wrong business model) but it's certainly generous to commerce and non-commerce alike.
Virtual Box will still run without VT, it just won't be optimal. I've got an old Athlon 64 that doesn't support VT or its AMD equivalent, but I can still run a Windows XP Virtual Box instance on it ;)
Why RAR? JPEGs are compressed, FLAC is compressed, PDF is compressed (or any images would be at least) so why try to put some heavy and comparatively slow compression on top? Just slap it all in a TAR. You probably won't notice much of a file size difference, it'll be lighter weight to open and it'll be more open as a standard.
Never mind that, isn't it just an iTunes album download? I bought Placebo's Meds recently and that came with a PDF of the booklet. One of the other albums I bought (another Placebo one - although possibly Meds again) had a movie in there.
Okay, it wasn't stored in a single file, but a) that makes it easier to work with, b) I still downloaded it as if it was one file and c) they're trumpeting lyrics and album art as if it's something amazing, yet iTunes already does it in some situations and Apple could probably embed album art if they wanted (since the M4A and MP3 formats support it).
Either that or they're purposefully trying to push people back to the "playing a number of tracks from the album" way of listening to music.
Given that they aren't likely to be compatible with existing players (if they are then they're basically just an archive and you've got to extract them first, defeating the idea of an "album file") they're going to have to have their own player with their own controls.
There's a difference between security through obscurity ("lets hide the code so that they can't break in, because that's bound to work(!)") and security through control of assets ("lets keep all of the gold in a vault so no-one can steal it, because it's safer than letting the general public hold on to it") ;)
I didn't read the content, but I read the URL and got the idea. It's not overly surprising that it happens on occasion, after all how much evidence goes missing or gets ruined (either accidentally or "accidentally")? And how many eye witnesses against the police suddenly decide that perhaps they don't want to testify? Just because it's video footage (a more reliable way of identifying someone than an eye witness) doesn't mean that it's immune to malicious removal.
You've obviously not seen the latest comment that points out that (once again) the Express are sensationalising for a headline and that isn't going to be used and that the Express made it up (or someone lied to them).
Besides, even if they were monitoring those families on CCTV, it's a hell of a lot nicer than some of the more drastic measures to cut the problem (including putting the entire family in prison, which gets them on CCTV, or medical procedures to stop them having more kids and taking the kids away).