In addition, in terms of societal costs/benefits, it prevents the person most capable of producing a left-handed widget from making that widget at a lower cost than you may be able to deliver it for.
The problem with this argument is that it completely discounts the startup cost. If I'm a pharmaceutical company that just spent $10m on R&D to come up with some super-advanced antibiotic, I want to be able to recoup those costs.
Yes, some company can come along and sell my pill for $3 instead of the $10 I charge, but that's because they didn't have to pay the $10m in R&D - they just reverse-engineered one of the pills my company produced. The result of this, in my opinion at least, is that innovation stops - why the hell am I going to spend $10 million to create a drug when some company is going to use all of my research for free, undercut my sales, and therefore cause me to go out of business?
This analogy doesn't adapt quite as well to the software industry, but I think the pharmaceutical industry is the best example of why patents should not simply be abolished.
You are assuming that every download is a purchase avoided. I doubt very much that college kids with hundreds of MP3s could actually have purchased all those CDs.
so? If they have those hundreds of MP3s, they must like the music, and the artists should be compensated. If they couldn't have purchased all of those CDs then they shouldn't have downloaded the songs from them.
Just to use an extreme analogy, if I have $30,000 saved and steal an $80,000 Mercedes, does that make it right, since I never would've bought the car anyways?
How in the heck are they supposed to filter our pirated music?
Well, as mentioned in the PDF, even a simple filename check (a file doesn't show up in the index unless it has a filename of X) would do wonders. Sure, people can still rename "Britney Spears - Oops! I Did It Again.mp3" to "Indie Band - Some Song.mp3", but what good will that do? People will search for Britney Spears, see nothing, and then leave.
We're just tired of paying 16 bucks for a piece of plastic when less than half of it goes to the artist.
Ah, my favorite argument. So, with your highly developed logical skill, please explain why you decide to protest this by downloading the MP3 for free and giving the artist $0 instead of $2 or $3?
Let us not forget though, the Napster case isn't about Napster, it's about _all_ of the Internet. Do you think that http will be the next attack? We all know you can download mp3's from the web! And oops, someone emailed me an mp3... I suppose we'll have to do away with email next...
Is the web (or ftp, gopher, etc)'s primary purpose to promote copyright infringement? No. If you took a look at all of the web sites, you would not find that 90% of the sites are dedicated to some form of piracy.
Napster is being prosecuted because their service is being used overwhelmingly to pirate music.
Another question that copyrights become extremely hard to enforce, especially if RIAA wins. It is sad that artists will suffer, but this is life. Freedom is more important that good music, though I would prefer not to have this choice.
You think the ability to copy artist's music without compensation is a sign of freedom? So, by your rules, I should be able to walk into a bookstore, photocopy any book I find in there, and then walk out? How about plagiarism...is claiming someone else's work as my own part of freedom too?
Our society is based on people getting compensation for their services. Musicians provide a valuable service, and they deserve to be compensated for it.
Why is so hard to understand that if you take money away from the record companies, you are also taking money away from the artists??
Yes, if you choose to effectively steal a CD by downloading every single track from Napster and then burning it to a CD-R, you will stop the record company from getting its $12 or whatever. However, you also stop the artists from getting their share.
This is somewhat similar to saying "well, the people at company X get poorly paid, so I'll just do everything I can to bankrupt company X (which signs the paychecks for the poorly paid employees) to help them out. Sorry, doesn't make sense to me.
If you photocopy a book that I wrote, I lose a royalty payment. That's the problem.
Yes it is a problem, but it's not theft, it's unauthorized reproduction Tom-ay-to, tom-ah-to in my opinion, but I don't really want to fight over semantics.
The vast majority of musicians are doing it as a second job, playing anywhere they can find gigs on weekends, or performing for free as church organists, choirs, and what-not
I know -- I, too, am a musician (with a day job), and I sure as hell don't use music to support me. In fact, I know that I wouldn't be able to do so without teaching (although that probably has something to do with the fact that my genre is jazz).
Do I really think that the royalties the big artists lose from Napster is significant to them? Not at all, but that's not the point. I still view MP3 copying as a form of theft, and I still feel that Napster's sole purpose was to promote the copying of illegal MP3s.
If I take your photograph, I'm not stealing your soul. Likewise, if I photocopy a book that you own a copy of, you lose nothing
The point about the photograph is irrelavent; there is no intellectual property involved in a picture of me. The book example; let's change it a little bit. If you photocopy a book that I wrote, I lose a royalty payment. That's the problem.
People here may not like the major labels or the fact that the labels take so much $$. The solution is not to steal from the labels - it is to not buy from them at all.
To equate copyright violation with theft is silly hyperbole
Why? If I am a musician, you are taking something that I have spent many hours on (time creating the songs, time practicing the songs, time recording the songs, time editing & mastering the songs), and taking it without compensation.
The same thing applies to plagiarism -- theft of an idea / effort is just as, if not more, damaging as theft of a physical item.
All of this has nothing to do with my point, which is that anybody who actually makes a living writing three-chord rock anthems or hip-hop tracks should learn to appreciate just how good they have it and stop worrying about a few dumb warez kids swapping "kid rock" dubs that they don't even get around to listening to.
Those "three-chord rock anthems" sell hundreds of thousands of albums. You may think it's crap, but clearly many people across the country don't. If you don't like it, then don't buy it.
Thomas Jefferson's original draft of the declaration of independence said "life, liberty and property." This was changed to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" to further expand what was implied by property.
Although I agree with your post completely, I just want to say that this clause was actually changed over slavery (yes, believe it or not, slavery was an issue even in the 1700s) -- some of the writers of the Declaration were afraid that the Declaration would be used to justify slavery (since in those times, slaves == property).
Hey I got lucky.......right about the time school (high school) started and I had LOTS less money, Napster came out....I am getting for free what I wouldn't have paid for anyway It may not technically be legal, but it is from my viewpoint, ethical ??? You think it's ETHICAL to take something that you admittedly would never buy? If you would never buy it, then don't listen to it. Don't steal it.
It's a political year. If 10 million Napster users got seriously active and organized, there's actually a real possibility of pressuring congress into 'clarifying' the current Copyright rules to make it clear that things like napster are OK.
Why are things like Napster OK? Napster is basically a service to allow people to pirate software.
Please don't give me the "it's just a tool! If someone takes a knife and stabs someone, we shouldn't hurt knife manufacturers!" excuse. The people who run Napster have made no effort whatsoever to crack down on illegal MP3 trading, and they told a judge that to do so would reduce their profits to almost nothing. Clearly, they rely on, and must implicitly support, MP3 piracy. Napster is not OK; it should have been shut down.
Of course, if they find out, you can probably get arrested for doing so; I'm pretty sure trading CDs through snail mail constitutes some form of mail fraud.
Seeing as the typical beginning songwriter is making $10 an hour at their day job schlepping coffee at Starbucks, if they make anything over $200 off the royalties on their song they are coming out way ahead for doing something they love, and have no right to complain about 12-year-old kids dubbing tapes or downloading MP3's without paying for them.
Bullshit. If you think they're coming out way ahead on royalties, DON'T BUY THE CD. You should not protest by effectively stealing the CD.
I know people who download an entire album from Napster and then burn it to a CD. There is absolutely no difference between this and walking into an HMV and taking a CD without paying for it.
Napster's purpose was to make money off of music piracy. If you think that's not true, then consider that Napster's CEO said that it would not be possible to make money if they were to stop the flow of copyrighted MP3s through their servers. If that doesn't show the true purpose of Napster, I don't know what does.
Of course fans have the right not to buy the crap churned out by major labels.
They don't, however, have the right to download it for free..and let's face it, probably 90% of the mp3s on Napster are from copyrighted CDs.
Re:How many chickens was it?
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Endgame For SCO
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...and if you had ever listened while being taught to write papers, you would know that even paraphrasing a passage requires attribution, and he just says "osOpinion expands on this in further depth," which is not attribution.
Re:Was Linux the competitor?
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Endgame For SCO
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· Score: 1
Linux isn't a drop in replacement for SCO. Yes, Linux has binary compatibility (at least I assume it does; I've never tried to run a SCO binary), but the configuration and administration aren't the same; SCO is strictly SysV, while Linux is a kind of SysV and BSD hybrid. Granted, it's a lot easier to replace SCO with Linux than with NT, but it's not a seamless replacement...that's like saying HP-UX and AIX are completely interchangable.
Well, that's not really true. Parker took chord changes from other charts and put his own melody (and often tempo) over them. He didn't take the composers melody, or their solos, which are IMO the heart of any jazz chart...just the chord changes. This is because chord changes are not (and can't be) copyrighted. This practice isn't limited to jazz, of course; there are probably over 10,000 songs that use the blues as their harmonic background.
Incidentally, one of the most famous jazz books, the Real Book, is illegal, because it does publish the melody in conjunction with the chord changes, without paying the publishers a licensing fee. Nowadays there is a "New Real Book" out, which provides about 1/3 of the songs for the same price, but is legal.
C'mon, don't be stupid. There are just as many, if not more, Linux machines that aren't going to have all of the security advisories applied. Also, [you didn't say this but other people have], the idea that all NT/Win2000 admins are morons is kind of stupid as well. You can find just as many incompetent Unix admins as you can NT admins. I personally run FreeBSD and Linux at home, but this blatant "Micro$oft Sucks D00DZ!!@#!@$" is just stupid.
And people say the Linux world is fragmented? At least all 2.2-based distributions use ipchains, all 2.4-based use netfilter, etc
FreeBSD and OpenBSD aren't two distributions of BSD. They're separate OSs. Yes, they tend to merge code from each other every once in a while, but they're not the same - FBSD and OBSD aren't nearly as close as, say, RedHat and Debian.
Your argument is something like saying "Win98 calls it Internet Connection Sharing and FreeBSD calls it natd...and people say the Linux world is fragmented?"
Just reading this thread shows that this is still a problem...
Do I think that all or even most Linux users are like this? No, not really.
However, without a doubt, those Linux users who are 12 year olds who can't say a rational statement if their life depended on it are the most vocal.
I know that this has been said before, and said by people with much more influence than me, but this Linux "advocacy" (Linux rulez!@$@!$!@$ Micro$ofts Winblows is a piece of shit!@$@!) doesn't help us. Even if you make a useful point, nobody is going to read your comments if you phrase it like most of the/. readers seem to be doing...
I've read a LOT of posts on here that keep saying "old Linux software, why not a 2.3 kernel, why rh5.2?, etc."
Did you READ the Part III? The RH engineers chose to use RH 6.0 and Linux 2.2. They specifically said that they thought 2.3 was too unstable to get setup in time for the benchmark.
I'm much more of a unix-head than an NT person. However, I can still look at things objectively. This test seems pretty fair to me.
Most Linux servers in the enterprise would be running Samba, not exporting filesystems over NFS, since Windows is certainly the dominant desktop OS, like it or not. I think it's clear that NT does fileserve better than Linux at least for now.
The biggest problem with the test (IMO) is that Mindcraft didn't use a mix of static and dynamic pages. However, I don't think that serving dynamic pages would make such a dramatic difference.
Another suggestion that I've seen is to cluster Linux servers. Although I admit I'm not too familiar with clustering software, isn't Beowulf still in a very beta or unstable state? I didn't think that it was anywhere near a useful solution of yet. What would making a 4 server cluster do?
And the third point is TCO. Come on, these are people who will spend $20k on a server. How much do you think the $700 to buy NT server and maybe the extra $500 for licenses is going to affect them? IIRC, a unix sysadmin's average salary is higher than his NT counterpart, so you don't gain anything there. You have to watch Bugtraq for both OSs, and competently administrating a Unix server is just as hard as administrating an NT one.
The fact is, that right now, Linux, in my opinion, is not enterprise capable. I think Linux is extremely well suited to other network services (DNS, mail, possibly FTP depending on popularity of the site), and it is also very suitable for non-enterprise environments, but for those places where performance is vital, Linux doesn't work.
You need to take things in perspective; Linux was originally developed by hobbyists, and for the most part it still is. How many of us routine access to the kind of servers that Mindcraft was using?
Linux's original intent was for low-end and middle-end servers, and it fulfills those purposes well. Will it develop to be a capable enterprise platform? Probably, but it will take time. IMO, none of the free Unices can compete at the very high-end (FreeBSD has a better TCP/IP stack, but both it and Linux lack a JFS, etc), no matter how much we wish they could.
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The problem with this argument is that it completely discounts the startup cost. If I'm a pharmaceutical company that just spent $10m on R&D to come up with some super-advanced antibiotic, I want to be able to recoup those costs.
Yes, some company can come along and sell my pill for $3 instead of the $10 I charge, but that's because they didn't have to pay the $10m in R&D - they just reverse-engineered one of the pills my company produced. The result of this, in my opinion at least, is that innovation stops - why the hell am I going to spend $10 million to create a drug when some company is going to use all of my research for free, undercut my sales, and therefore cause me to go out of business?
This analogy doesn't adapt quite as well to the software industry, but I think the pharmaceutical industry is the best example of why patents should not simply be abolished.
so? If they have those hundreds of MP3s, they must like the music, and the artists should be compensated. If they couldn't have purchased all of those CDs then they shouldn't have downloaded the songs from them.
Just to use an extreme analogy, if I have $30,000 saved and steal an $80,000 Mercedes, does that make it right, since I never would've bought the car anyways?
Well, as mentioned in the PDF, even a simple filename check (a file doesn't show up in the index unless it has a filename of X) would do wonders. Sure, people can still rename "Britney Spears - Oops! I Did It Again.mp3" to "Indie Band - Some Song.mp3", but what good will that do? People will search for Britney Spears, see nothing, and then leave.
Ah, my favorite argument. So, with your highly developed logical skill, please explain why you decide to protest this by downloading the MP3 for free and giving the artist $0 instead of $2 or $3?
Is the web (or ftp, gopher, etc)'s primary purpose to promote copyright infringement? No. If you took a look at all of the web sites, you would not find that 90% of the sites are dedicated to some form of piracy.
Napster is being prosecuted because their service is being used overwhelmingly to pirate music.
You think the ability to copy artist's music without compensation is a sign of freedom? So, by your rules, I should be able to walk into a bookstore, photocopy any book I find in there, and then walk out? How about plagiarism...is claiming someone else's work as my own part of freedom too?
Our society is based on people getting compensation for their services. Musicians provide a valuable service, and they deserve to be compensated for it.
Yes, if you choose to effectively steal a CD by downloading every single track from Napster and then burning it to a CD-R, you will stop the record company from getting its $12 or whatever. However, you also stop the artists from getting their share.
This is somewhat similar to saying "well, the people at company X get poorly paid, so I'll just do everything I can to bankrupt company X (which signs the paychecks for the poorly paid employees) to help them out. Sorry, doesn't make sense to me.
Yes it is a problem, but it's not theft, it's unauthorized reproduction Tom-ay-to, tom-ah-to in my opinion, but I don't really want to fight over semantics.
The vast majority of musicians are doing it as a second job, playing anywhere they can find gigs on weekends, or performing for free as church organists, choirs, and what-not
I know -- I, too, am a musician (with a day job), and I sure as hell don't use music to support me. In fact, I know that I wouldn't be able to do so without teaching (although that probably has something to do with the fact that my genre is jazz).
Do I really think that the royalties the big artists lose from Napster is significant to them? Not at all, but that's not the point. I still view MP3 copying as a form of theft, and I still feel that Napster's sole purpose was to promote the copying of illegal MP3s.
The point about the photograph is irrelavent; there is no intellectual property involved in a picture of me. The book example; let's change it a little bit. If you photocopy a book that I wrote, I lose a royalty payment. That's the problem.
People here may not like the major labels or the fact that the labels take so much $$. The solution is not to steal from the labels - it is to not buy from them at all.
To equate copyright violation with theft is silly hyperbole
Why? If I am a musician, you are taking something that I have spent many hours on (time creating the songs, time practicing the songs, time recording the songs, time editing & mastering the songs), and taking it without compensation.
The same thing applies to plagiarism -- theft of an idea / effort is just as, if not more, damaging as theft of a physical item.
All of this has nothing to do with my point, which is that anybody who actually makes a living writing three-chord rock anthems or hip-hop tracks should learn to appreciate just how good they have it and stop worrying about a few dumb warez kids swapping "kid rock" dubs that they don't even get around to listening to.
Those "three-chord rock anthems" sell hundreds of thousands of albums. You may think it's crap, but clearly many people across the country don't. If you don't like it, then don't buy it.
Although I agree with your post completely, I just want to say that this clause was actually changed over slavery (yes, believe it or not, slavery was an issue even in the 1700s) -- some of the writers of the Declaration were afraid that the Declaration would be used to justify slavery (since in those times, slaves == property).
Hey I got lucky.......right about the time school (high school) started and I had LOTS less money, Napster came out....I am getting for free what I wouldn't have paid for anyway It may not technically be legal, but it is from my viewpoint, ethical ??? You think it's ETHICAL to take something that you admittedly would never buy? If you would never buy it, then don't listen to it. Don't steal it.
Why are things like Napster OK? Napster is basically a service to allow people to pirate software.
Please don't give me the "it's just a tool! If someone takes a knife and stabs someone, we shouldn't hurt knife manufacturers!" excuse. The people who run Napster have made no effort whatsoever to crack down on illegal MP3 trading, and they told a judge that to do so would reduce their profits to almost nothing. Clearly, they rely on, and must implicitly support, MP3 piracy. Napster is not OK; it should have been shut down.
Of course, if they find out, you can probably get arrested for doing so; I'm pretty sure trading CDs through snail mail constitutes some form of mail fraud.
Bullshit. If you think they're coming out way ahead on royalties, DON'T BUY THE CD. You should not protest by effectively stealing the CD.
I know people who download an entire album from Napster and then burn it to a CD. There is absolutely no difference between this and walking into an HMV and taking a CD without paying for it.
Napster's purpose was to make money off of music piracy. If you think that's not true, then consider that Napster's CEO said that it would not be possible to make money if they were to stop the flow of copyrighted MP3s through their servers. If that doesn't show the true purpose of Napster, I don't know what does.
They don't, however, have the right to download it for free..and let's face it, probably 90% of the mp3s on Napster are from copyrighted CDs.
Linux isn't a drop in replacement for SCO. Yes, Linux has binary compatibility (at least I assume it does; I've never tried to run a SCO binary), but the configuration and administration aren't the same; SCO is strictly SysV, while Linux is a kind of SysV and BSD hybrid. Granted, it's a lot easier to replace SCO with Linux than with NT, but it's not a seamless replacement...that's like saying HP-UX and AIX are completely interchangable.
AFAIK, it's ready for production use -- we've had alpha support for a long time.
Incidentally, one of the most famous jazz books, the Real Book, is illegal, because it does publish the melody in conjunction with the chord changes, without paying the publishers a licensing fee. Nowadays there is a "New Real Book" out, which provides about 1/3 of the songs for the same price, but is legal.
C'mon, don't be stupid. There are just as many, if not more, Linux machines that aren't going to have all of the security advisories applied. Also, [you didn't say this but other people have], the idea that all NT/Win2000 admins are morons is kind of stupid as well. You can find just as many incompetent Unix admins as you can NT admins. I personally run FreeBSD and Linux at home, but this blatant "Micro$oft Sucks D00DZ!!@#!@$" is just stupid.
Please check your facts before posting. FreeBSD also runs on the Alpha.
FreeBSD and OpenBSD aren't two distributions of BSD. They're separate OSs. Yes, they tend to merge code from each other every once in a while, but they're not the same - FBSD and OBSD aren't nearly as close as, say, RedHat and Debian.
Your argument is something like saying "Win98 calls it Internet Connection Sharing and FreeBSD calls it natd...and people say the Linux world is fragmented?"
Do I think that all or even most Linux users are like this? No, not really.
However, without a doubt, those Linux users who are 12 year olds who can't say a rational statement if their life depended on it are the most vocal.
I know that this has been said before, and said by people with much more influence than me, but this Linux "advocacy" (Linux rulez!@$@!$!@$ Micro$ofts Winblows is a piece of shit!@$@!) doesn't help us. Even if you make a useful point, nobody is going to read your comments if you phrase it like most of the /. readers seem to be doing...
Did you READ the Part III? The RH engineers chose to use RH 6.0 and Linux 2.2. They specifically said that they thought 2.3 was too unstable to get setup in time for the benchmark.
I'm much more of a unix-head than an NT person. However, I can still look at things objectively. This test seems pretty fair to me.
Most Linux servers in the enterprise would be running Samba, not exporting filesystems over NFS, since Windows is certainly the dominant desktop OS, like it or not. I think it's clear that NT does fileserve better than Linux at least for now.
The biggest problem with the test (IMO) is that Mindcraft didn't use a mix of static and dynamic pages. However, I don't think that serving dynamic pages would make such a dramatic difference.
Another suggestion that I've seen is to cluster Linux servers. Although I admit I'm not too familiar with clustering software, isn't Beowulf still in a very beta or unstable state? I didn't think that it was anywhere near a useful solution of yet. What would making a 4 server cluster do?
And the third point is TCO. Come on, these are people who will spend $20k on a server. How much do you think the $700 to buy NT server and maybe the extra $500 for licenses is going to affect them? IIRC, a unix sysadmin's average salary is higher than his NT counterpart, so you don't gain anything there. You have to watch Bugtraq for both OSs, and competently administrating a Unix server is just as hard as administrating an NT one.
The fact is, that right now, Linux, in my opinion, is not enterprise capable. I think Linux is extremely well suited to other network services (DNS, mail, possibly FTP depending on popularity of the site), and it is also very suitable for non-enterprise environments, but for those places where performance is vital, Linux doesn't work.
You need to take things in perspective; Linux was originally developed by hobbyists, and for the most part it still is. How many of us routine access to the kind of servers that Mindcraft was using?
Linux's original intent was for low-end and middle-end servers, and it fulfills those purposes well. Will it develop to be a capable enterprise platform? Probably, but it will take time. IMO, none of the free Unices can compete at the very high-end (FreeBSD has a better TCP/IP stack, but both it and Linux lack a JFS, etc), no matter how much we wish they could.