"www" in that address is a hostname, not a subdomain. It doesn't seem that other subdomains show up though, i.e. if you look up US universities. Maybe you have to register them explicitly.
Your scenario is a bit inconsistent, because software companies as we know them would not exist without copyright. It's not very profitable selling copies of software if anyone can produce those same copies. I think removing copyright would make the software industry a lot healthier, it could become more like carpenting or something like that. Companies could still keep things binary-only though, but I'm not sure it would be an advantage in a copyright-free industry.
point me at the animal bill of rights, written by the animal(s). could you?
Severely mentally disabled people can't write bills of rights either, nor understand them. Yet they have rights. According to your argument, they would have no rights. Does this sound like a good system?
Doh it was an analogy. Making a program suid-root reduces safety, and should be avoided as much as possible. Giving a program access to kernel space reduces safety, so why should we not try to avoid it?
Please explain the apparently large difference between these two words. In my dictionary, "kill" is to end someone's life, and "murder" is to unlawfully kill someone. I think it would be a good idea not to use the word "unlawful", or something equivalent when you're defining the "law" (i.e. the bible) though.
If this was the only thing that changed if copyright law disappeared, you would be right. That would not be a very likely scenario however. How do you think anyone could make money selling binary copies of software if copyrights did not exist? If copyright law disappeared, the way software is commercially written would completely change. It's hard to say what would happen, but maybe people would pay for the actual creation of software instead of the distribution, and then they would probably want the source code as well. In such a scenario, there would be no incentive to keep the source closed anyway.
If the early Linux users had not found GNU they would have hacked out their own tools.
This sounds reasonable. However, the same applies to GNU. If the Linux kernel had not come along, they would have hacked out their own kernel. I really doubt if the troubles with HURD are technical, it's probably a lack of developers. For most people, working on Linux is just more rewarding, since it already works so well and is so widespread.
Re:Stallman is just plain wrong here
on
RMS On eBooks
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· Score: 1
I think you may be right when you say that neither of the extremes may work very well, at least in the context of today. You are wrong about that the removal of copyrights would help large media corporations though. Sure, Time-Warner could republish your stuff, but why would they do that, since they wouldn't have copyright on what they publish? Anyone else could simply republish what they published, so they wouldn't make any money from it. Even more so if it would be in digital form.
As long as noone else can claim to be the author of something, I don't think there will be problems. If everyone republishes your work, you will become well-known, and people will probably start hiring you to write things (I don't know what you write, but say editorials for a newspaper or something).
Copyright is not so old
on
RMS On eBooks
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· Score: 1
One point that Stallman and his anti-intellectual-property cronies seem to miss is this: A) AUTHORS/MUSICIANS/EVERYONE HAVE TO EAT. B) YOU CAN'T SELL SUPPORT FOR BOOKS AND MUSIC
I think everyone agrees on that authors/musicians/programmers somehow need to be able to get money for what they do. Who says that copyright is the way to do it though? Stallman says that copyright laws were created for completely different reasons than what they are used for today, and in a completely different technological environment. Do you disagree with this statement? So unless someone can come up with some strong arguments why copyright law should still be valid and useful, we should come up with new laws, created with the current technologies in mind.
NO, they're going to go to SLEEP, because they're tired from their MENIAL LABOUR, which is the ONLY WAY TO MAKE MONEY WHEN THERE'S NO INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY.
Copyright law has only existed for a few hundred years, so according to your arguments, all previous authors and musicians had to work in a coal mine to make a living. Is this true? No, it is not true. Before copyright existed, authors and musicians were paid to actually produce books and music, not just resell things they had previously done. If you look at this change, I think you will start to question the correctness of copyright law. An author/musician today can be productive for a year, and then keep making money, even though he is no longer productive. There is essentially no other job for which that applies (if we do not consider investing your original wealth as a job). So if we reverted to the old ways, when copyright did not exist, authors and musicians would have to work like normal people. Someone would hire them to write a piece, and they would have to write it. What is so hard about that? They would be more like carpenters instead of investors, which I think is more appropriate. The same argument would apply to programmers, and this was the way programmers worked originally I assume, i.e. they were paid to program something, and not for their previously produced intellectual property.
But physical and intellectual property are fundamentally different, why should they be treated as exactly the same? When you pay for a house, you have paid for raw materials, and several months of labor from a team of workers. When you pay for a copy of a piece of music, you pay for the insignificant amount of labor from a CD press, or if you buy an mp3, the bandwidth from the server. It would be interesting to see how much money the architect, and his managers, of a mass-produced house design receive for each such house produced, and then compare that to the money an artist, and his managers, receive for a CD.
But your entire argument relies on that intellectual property laws are right, I'm not so sure they are. This was what I was arguing about, that paying them for writing songs for me is right, but paying them to make a copy (or to let me make a copy) non-exclusively of work they have already done doesn't feel so right.
The problem with your arguments is that they assume that intellectual property laws are right. If we assume that, I agree with you. If we don't assume that, you implicitly have a circular argument. In your first post you (implicitly) were arguing that intellectual property is right, because people have a right to be paid for their work. Now you are arguing that people have a right to be paid for their work because of intellectual property laws.
Your second paragraph here is a bit contrived, because when you pay for a record, you are not paying the authors to write the songs on the record, they've already done that. You're just paying for a copy of the intellectual property. This was the distinction I wanted to make, that paying someone to actually produce something feels very natural, but paying for something which amounts to no work for the artists doesn't feel very good. You could argue that the intellectual property system we have now is a way to retroactively pay artists for the work they did while writing, but there's no proof it's the best solution, or even a good solution. The actual medium for carrying intellectual property, and the means for reproduction have changed so much since the copyright laws were originally written, so there is no reason why the original arguments should still apply.
People have a right to make money off of their work
I see this statement a lot on Slashdot, and it's incorrect! People may feel they have a right to make money off of their work, but there exists no inherent right which should be upheld. There is a difference if someone asks you to do work, and you agree, or if you spontaneously produce something. There is nothing that says that people should suddenly pay for what you have produced. If this was not true, then unemployment would not exist, because people could make up some interesting assignments for themselves, and then force other people to pay them for it.
This is ridiculous. Copyrights are not economic censorship, unless the copyright holder chooses to use it as such.
Make up your mind, either it's censorship or it's not. If the author can select who will or will not be able to see the information, he is by definition a censor.
Guess ritual rape and mutilation is free speech too,
You have confused "information" (or speech) with "expression". The act of ritual rape involves raping a person, while a (digital) picture of a ritual rape involves a stream of binary digits. One could argue that not all information should be free to distribute. This however means you no longer have a free flow of information, or "free speech". This is a clear case where you can't have the cake and eat it too. If someone gets to choose what is allowed information and what is not, then you simply cannot say that information is free. Also, if you want your restrictions to be enforcable, you cannot allow anonymity.
Initially, I also considered Slashdot's moderation system to be censorship, but I don't any more. There is a clear rule that no post is ever deleted, so all information is available to everyone. Censorship by definition involves removal, so the term does not apply here. The cases in the article do involve removal, and that is why people are fighting back. If someone put "Score: -1 Immoral" above a link to cphack or DeCSS, I don't think anyone would care.
The Slashdot moderation system is a rating system, governed by your fellow readers. What this produces is a rating which reflects the opinion of a (presumably) representative majority of the reader base. This can be useful for extracting related information from the responses (such as related links), but is generally not useful for opinion-related discussions, as it tends to filter out uncomfortable criticism.
While a rating system can be useful, I don't think thresholds are. I always keep my threshold at -1, and even though most -1 posts are just noise, some are very intelligent and funny. The Slashdot trolls are like South Park in a way, and just like South Park plays an important role in criticizing our culture (mostly American though), so do the trolls for this subculture.
The definition you have just described is the computer systems definition. In virtual reality contexts, real time means what it sounds like, i.e. the appearance of a real time flow. I don't think there exists an established rigorous definition in the literature, but it's commonly defined as a visual update frequency of ~30 Hz, and sometimes also as a correspondance between virtual time and real time. Presumably the question referred to the second definition.
While it might be a compelling argument, it doesn't seem to be very correct. The human brain is an intelligent, spiritual machine. If someone has proven it cannot exist, there must be something wrong with the proof, or with the definitions.
In some of the previous cases discussed on Slashdot (DeCSS for example), the judge's ruling took effect immediately, and noone seemed to have a chance to delay it with an appeal. Discussions about this trial seem to imply that the actual effect of the ruling will be delayed until a long series of appeals. Why is there a difference?
Thanks for the info. Some of the relevant information is here. The Sorenson codec seems to use the same methodology as MPEG-1, with some slight detail differences. It would be very interesting to see some experimental results though. It seems a lot of companies are deliberately choosing proprietary codecs, even though MPEG-1 is much better (the early AVI and QuickTime codecs for example, and maybe even the later codecs as well), so I think some suspicion is healthy. For example, I think Sorenson is only available for QuickTime and not AVI, thus Apple can leverage this proprietary codec to use their player, and push the QuickTime name. Wasn't some version of the Star Wars trailer only available as Sorenson/QuickTime?
Because the Sorensen codec has the best file size::picture quality ratio.
Could you provide the comparison from which you have drawn this conclusion please? Also, I would be interested to find out how you define "picture quality". I've never tried Sorenson, but I've played around with Indeo5 and MPEG-1, and I think I've come to the conclusion that MPEG-1 is better than Indeo5 for most purposes, Indeo5 is at least not good enough to justify its existence. First of all, MPEG-1 has parameters to adjust, which Indeo5 doesn't (does Sorenson?). Also, Indeo5 always has irritating artifacts. MPEG-1 can get artifacts if you choose good compression parameters, but you can also remove them. Could you tell me more about Sorenson, so I can see why MPEG-1 is not good enough, especially since its open? Maybe we can decide on some data, and you (or someone else) get to encode it with Sorenson, and I with MPEG-1, and then we can make some comparisons.
What??? I don't see how you can even pretend that there is a major difference here. If I run a download site that offers music copied from some other label I am clearly "trading using someone elses material, which they have invested time and money developing".
I don't think a lot of people here are condoning running a commercial download site. The important difference is the commercialism. You could say that "copyright" could be interpreted as the right to copy in commercial contexts. This has some base in law, at least in Sweden. There was a discussion about copying music (or computer games) on the radio, and an official from the Justice Department explained that copying one of your CDs and giving the copy to a friend is not illegal, while selling the copy would have been. I'm not sure how this applies to mass distribution, but I assume that at some point, even non-commercial distribution is illegal.
The truth of the matter is that it takes money to make music[...]
Why exactly does it take money to make music? I would say just the opposite. This is one of the main differences between physical and virtual objects, physical objects require raw material and equipment to produce, while virtual objects do not, they only require time. The other main difference is that physical objects are expensive to replicate, while virtual objects are not, which is the base of this whole issue.
Um...you know wrong. You can be charged with possession of a deadly weapon if you assault someone with a pillow.
Okay, I shouldn't have said "as far as I know", I should have said "realistically", or something. This does not seem like a very well thought-out law. The more tools I use to commit a crime, the harsher the sentence? I don't see why that should have any impact on the sentence. This just seems to be some kind of way to magnify the sentence for a crime, which feels a bit wrong to me.
I don't think anyone is questioning why they were charged with the various thefts and unauthorized accesses. The charge which seems erroneous is the possession of L0phtcrack. Either something is illegal to possess, or it's not, doing something with it shouldn't change that fact. As far as I know, if you murder someone with an otherwise legal tool (a pillow for example), you cannot be charged with possession of a pillow, it's simply not relevant. There is no reason why the same should not apply to L0phtcrack.
Slashdot Mirror
"www" in that address is a hostname, not a subdomain. It doesn't seem that other subdomains show up though, i.e. if you look up US universities. Maybe you have to register them explicitly.
Your scenario is a bit inconsistent, because software companies as we know them would not exist without copyright. It's not very profitable selling copies of software if anyone can produce those same copies. I think removing copyright would make the software industry a lot healthier, it could become more like carpenting or something like that. Companies could still keep things binary-only though, but I'm not sure it would be an advantage in a copyright-free industry.
Severely mentally disabled people can't write bills of rights either, nor understand them. Yet they have rights. According to your argument, they would have no rights. Does this sound like a good system?
Doh it was an analogy. Making a program suid-root reduces safety, and should be avoided as much as possible. Giving a program access to kernel space reduces safety, so why should we not try to avoid it?
"murder != kill"
Please explain the apparently large difference between these two words. In my dictionary, "kill" is to end someone's life, and "murder" is to unlawfully kill someone. I think it would be a good idea not to use the word "unlawful", or something equivalent when you're defining the "law" (i.e. the bible) though.
Well, the researchers were European.
If this was the only thing that changed if copyright law disappeared, you would be right. That would not be a very likely scenario however. How do you think anyone could make money selling binary copies of software if copyrights did not exist? If copyright law disappeared, the way software is commercially written would completely change. It's hard to say what would happen, but maybe people would pay for the actual creation of software instead of the distribution, and then they would probably want the source code as well. In such a scenario, there would be no incentive to keep the source closed anyway.
This sounds reasonable. However, the same applies to GNU. If the Linux kernel had not come along, they would have hacked out their own kernel. I really doubt if the troubles with HURD are technical, it's probably a lack of developers. For most people, working on Linux is just more rewarding, since it already works so well and is so widespread.
I think you may be right when you say that neither of the extremes may work very well, at least in the context of today. You are wrong about that the removal of copyrights would help large media corporations though. Sure, Time-Warner could republish your stuff, but why would they do that, since they wouldn't have copyright on what they publish? Anyone else could simply republish what they published, so they wouldn't make any money from it. Even more so if it would be in digital form.
As long as noone else can claim to be the author of something, I don't think there will be problems. If everyone republishes your work, you will become well-known, and people will probably start hiring you to write things (I don't know what you write, but say editorials for a newspaper or something).
I think everyone agrees on that authors/musicians/programmers somehow need to be able to get money for what they do. Who says that copyright is the way to do it though? Stallman says that copyright laws were created for completely different reasons than what they are used for today, and in a completely different technological environment. Do you disagree with this statement? So unless someone can come up with some strong arguments why copyright law should still be valid and useful, we should come up with new laws, created with the current technologies in mind.
Copyright law has only existed for a few hundred years, so according to your arguments, all previous authors and musicians had to work in a coal mine to make a living. Is this true? No, it is not true. Before copyright existed, authors and musicians were paid to actually produce books and music, not just resell things they had previously done. If you look at this change, I think you will start to question the correctness of copyright law. An author/musician today can be productive for a year, and then keep making money, even though he is no longer productive. There is essentially no other job for which that applies (if we do not consider investing your original wealth as a job). So if we reverted to the old ways, when copyright did not exist, authors and musicians would have to work like normal people. Someone would hire them to write a piece, and they would have to write it. What is so hard about that? They would be more like carpenters instead of investors, which I think is more appropriate. The same argument would apply to programmers, and this was the way programmers worked originally I assume, i.e. they were paid to program something, and not for their previously produced intellectual property.
But physical and intellectual property are fundamentally different, why should they be treated as exactly the same? When you pay for a house, you have paid for raw materials, and several months of labor from a team of workers. When you pay for a copy of a piece of music, you pay for the insignificant amount of labor from a CD press, or if you buy an mp3, the bandwidth from the server. It would be interesting to see how much money the architect, and his managers, of a mass-produced house design receive for each such house produced, and then compare that to the money an artist, and his managers, receive for a CD.
But your entire argument relies on that intellectual property laws are right, I'm not so sure they are. This was what I was arguing about, that paying them for writing songs for me is right, but paying them to make a copy (or to let me make a copy) non-exclusively of work they have already done doesn't feel so right.
The problem with your arguments is that they assume that intellectual property laws are right. If we assume that, I agree with you. If we don't assume that, you implicitly have a circular argument. In your first post you (implicitly) were arguing that intellectual property is right, because people have a right to be paid for their work. Now you are arguing that people have a right to be paid for their work because of intellectual property laws.
Your second paragraph here is a bit contrived, because when you pay for a record, you are not paying the authors to write the songs on the record, they've already done that. You're just paying for a copy of the intellectual property. This was the distinction I wanted to make, that paying someone to actually produce something feels very natural, but paying for something which amounts to no work for the artists doesn't feel very good. You could argue that the intellectual property system we have now is a way to retroactively pay artists for the work they did while writing, but there's no proof it's the best solution, or even a good solution. The actual medium for carrying intellectual property, and the means for reproduction have changed so much since the copyright laws were originally written, so there is no reason why the original arguments should still apply.
I see this statement a lot on Slashdot, and it's incorrect! People may feel they have a right to make money off of their work, but there exists no inherent right which should be upheld. There is a difference if someone asks you to do work, and you agree, or if you spontaneously produce something. There is nothing that says that people should suddenly pay for what you have produced. If this was not true, then unemployment would not exist, because people could make up some interesting assignments for themselves, and then force other people to pay them for it.
Make up your mind, either it's censorship or it's not. If the author can select who will or will not be able to see the information, he is by definition a censor.
You have confused "information" (or speech) with "expression". The act of ritual rape involves raping a person, while a (digital) picture of a ritual rape involves a stream of binary digits. One could argue that not all information should be free to distribute. This however means you no longer have a free flow of information, or "free speech". This is a clear case where you can't have the cake and eat it too. If someone gets to choose what is allowed information and what is not, then you simply cannot say that information is free. Also, if you want your restrictions to be enforcable, you cannot allow anonymity.
Initially, I also considered Slashdot's moderation system to be censorship, but I don't any more. There is a clear rule that no post is ever deleted, so all information is available to everyone. Censorship by definition involves removal, so the term does not apply here. The cases in the article do involve removal, and that is why people are fighting back. If someone put "Score: -1 Immoral" above a link to cphack or DeCSS, I don't think anyone would care.
The Slashdot moderation system is a rating system, governed by your fellow readers. What this produces is a rating which reflects the opinion of a (presumably) representative majority of the reader base. This can be useful for extracting related information from the responses (such as related links), but is generally not useful for opinion-related discussions, as it tends to filter out uncomfortable criticism.
While a rating system can be useful, I don't think thresholds are. I always keep my threshold at -1, and even though most -1 posts are just noise, some are very intelligent and funny. The Slashdot trolls are like South Park in a way, and just like South Park plays an important role in criticizing our culture (mostly American though), so do the trolls for this subculture.
The definition you have just described is the computer systems definition. In virtual reality contexts, real time means what it sounds like, i.e. the appearance of a real time flow. I don't think there exists an established rigorous definition in the literature, but it's commonly defined as a visual update frequency of ~30 Hz, and sometimes also as a correspondance between virtual time and real time. Presumably the question referred to the second definition.
While it might be a compelling argument, it doesn't seem to be very correct. The human brain is an intelligent, spiritual machine. If someone has proven it cannot exist, there must be something wrong with the proof, or with the definitions.
In some of the previous cases discussed on Slashdot (DeCSS for example), the judge's ruling took effect immediately, and noone seemed to have a chance to delay it with an appeal. Discussions about this trial seem to imply that the actual effect of the ruling will be delayed until a long series of appeals. Why is there a difference?
Thanks for the info. Some of the relevant information is here. The Sorenson codec seems to use the same methodology as MPEG-1, with some slight detail differences. It would be very interesting to see some experimental results though. It seems a lot of companies are deliberately choosing proprietary codecs, even though MPEG-1 is much better (the early AVI and QuickTime codecs for example, and maybe even the later codecs as well), so I think some suspicion is healthy. For example, I think Sorenson is only available for QuickTime and not AVI, thus Apple can leverage this proprietary codec to use their player, and push the QuickTime name. Wasn't some version of the Star Wars trailer only available as Sorenson/QuickTime?
Could you provide the comparison from which you have drawn this conclusion please? Also, I would be interested to find out how you define "picture quality". I've never tried Sorenson, but I've played around with Indeo5 and MPEG-1, and I think I've come to the conclusion that MPEG-1 is better than Indeo5 for most purposes, Indeo5 is at least not good enough to justify its existence. First of all, MPEG-1 has parameters to adjust, which Indeo5 doesn't (does Sorenson?). Also, Indeo5 always has irritating artifacts. MPEG-1 can get artifacts if you choose good compression parameters, but you can also remove them. Could you tell me more about Sorenson, so I can see why MPEG-1 is not good enough, especially since its open? Maybe we can decide on some data, and you (or someone else) get to encode it with Sorenson, and I with MPEG-1, and then we can make some comparisons.
I don't think a lot of people here are condoning running a commercial download site. The important difference is the commercialism. You could say that "copyright" could be interpreted as the right to copy in commercial contexts. This has some base in law, at least in Sweden. There was a discussion about copying music (or computer games) on the radio, and an official from the Justice Department explained that copying one of your CDs and giving the copy to a friend is not illegal, while selling the copy would have been. I'm not sure how this applies to mass distribution, but I assume that at some point, even non-commercial distribution is illegal.
Why exactly does it take money to make music? I would say just the opposite. This is one of the main differences between physical and virtual objects, physical objects require raw material and equipment to produce, while virtual objects do not, they only require time. The other main difference is that physical objects are expensive to replicate, while virtual objects are not, which is the base of this whole issue.
Okay, I shouldn't have said "as far as I know", I should have said "realistically", or something. This does not seem like a very well thought-out law. The more tools I use to commit a crime, the harsher the sentence? I don't see why that should have any impact on the sentence. This just seems to be some kind of way to magnify the sentence for a crime, which feels a bit wrong to me.
I don't think anyone is questioning why they were charged with the various thefts and unauthorized accesses. The charge which seems erroneous is the possession of L0phtcrack. Either something is illegal to possess, or it's not, doing something with it shouldn't change that fact. As far as I know, if you murder someone with an otherwise legal tool (a pillow for example), you cannot be charged with possession of a pillow, it's simply not relevant. There is no reason why the same should not apply to L0phtcrack.