In other news, Richard Stallman and Santa Clause are fat guys with beards.
Both of whome bring you gifts, often of such mangifiscence that, once you've recovered from the initial surprise and delight, you find yourself wondering how you ever did without.
The system is no longer GNU + Linux kernel. If it's about giving credit in proportional amounts, then X, perl, Berkeley, Apache, Netscape, and many other major contributors should also be recognized.
That is just flatout nonsense, and has been rebutted so many times, so effectively, that one seriously wonders how people can still say that with a straight face, much less get modded up to +5 for it. The reasons, of course, are ad homonim... people dislike RMS for various reasons, his sometimes abrasive personality and lack of tact almost certainly among them.
The core UNIX/Linux operating system consistes of the kernel, various file and binary utilities, a few core libraries, and (arguably) a compiler. It most certainly does not include a GUI windowing system (Microsoft's confusion as to what constitutes an operating system aside), nor does it include a web browser, much less a web server.
The core Linux operating system consists of the Linux kernel and a collection of critical components that were written by the GNU folks long before Linux came along. You may not like RMS's request, or argument, that Linux systems ought to go by the moniker of GNU/Linux, but only someone completely ignorant of operating system design, and of the internals and components of the Linux operating system, would ever argue that "if we call it GNU/Linux we should call it Berkely/GNU/X/Apache/Netscape/Linux." That, or someone who knows better, but has a political ax to grind and is willing to bend the truth more than a little in order to do so.
As an excersize, remove GNU glibc from your (GNU/)Linux system and reboot. If that doesn't make clear the fallacy of your argument, then I suspect nothing ever will.
Call it GNU/Linux, or just call it Linux if you prefer, but please cease and desist spreading absolute nonsense about what is and is not a part an operating system v. what are user space utilities that run on top of an operating system.
I've been wondering something for a bit. Would someone tell me why people dumb huge wads of cash on these big plasma screen displays when they could spend a coupld of grand on a decent digital XGA projector and project the picture onto a screen/wall at 9 feet by 6 or something like that?
Because, on a sunny afternoon, you won't be able to see the projected image. You'll have to either get European style metal blinds you can lower to block out all sunlight (afternoon if you have west facing windows, morning if east facing, both if south facing), or only watch TV at night.
Having said that, I agree that plasma panels have abysmal resolution. That is why I opted for a 24" LCD monitor (Samsung SyncMaster 240T) instead. It cost half as much as the plasma alternatives, gives me 1920x1200 resolution, and works as an awe inspiring monitor when I'm sitting at the computer, and an excellent (if not gigantic) TV when I'm lounging in the couch across the room.
The plasma's, or even better, giant LCDs, will interest me only once they are capable of 1080i or 1080p and can be driven digitally by my computer as my Samsung is now. Unfortunately there is a very good chance the media cartels will cripple high resolution, big flatscreen technology so that general purpose computers cannot drive these screens (hdcp copy protection schemes, etc. embedded into the dvi interface, for example), which, if it is ever actually implimented, will likely condemn consumer HDTV products to the same fate as consumer DAT recorders.
You are clearly a nut with too much free time and completely fouled up priorities. [emphesis added]
As a worthless troll I really shouldn't respond to this, but it amuses me to point out that you are not only quite clearly a person who needs to develop their interpersonal communications skills, but also a person who desperately needs a remedial course in basic reading comprehension:
If you don't require instant gratification, and schedule your time intelligently (do the capture while you're out, do a quick edit and start the export before grabbing a shower, and do the transcode while you're out to dinner or for drinks), your total involvement in doing this is typically 5 minutes / episode
Perhaps after you've attended that remedial reading course you will attend one in math and gain the necessary skills required to realize that a 5 minute investment in time to cut out 12-18 minutes of commercials results in a net time savings when you actually watch the broadcast, not a net loss. But then, that presupposes that you are more intelligent than the average troll, and we can't really make that assumption, can we?
As for screwed up priorities, if you consider removing undue and unwelcome efforts at influence and repetative conditioning from your life in an effort to insure and protect your own self-determination as a screwed up priority, then I suggest that says a great deal more about you than it does about me.
For somebody who seems to want his entertainment for free or very little cost, you sure do bitch a lot about commercials. You can't have it both ways, man.
Commercials, through ongoing repetition, indoctrinate. This means that your ability to make conscious decisions, as opposed to reacting to unconscious conditioning is affected, possibly severely if you are a chronic television viewer.
So I too object to commercials, and I have edited them out of my life, without giving up any of the television I pay for each month ($50.00 cable bill). Turner's CEO, Disney's Eisner & other cartel leaders may be trying to modify the already prevelent 'newspeak' into considering commercial-skipping (or, in my case, editing) theft, but not only is that clearly not the case, I am taking back my own self-determination by no longer letting these people condition me for their own petty profits.
How, you ask?
Like so:
I have a $300 firewire A/D converter (you know, like the one the media cartels want to cripple?). However, you could do this with V4L or V4L2 and a video capture board just as well.
I use dvgrab, cronned up to record Max Headroom each Friday, Enterprise each Wednesday, and SG-1 each Saturday. SG1 is nice because no commercial editing is required.
I use kino (a simple NLE for dv video) to quickly snip out the commercials, and This entire process takes about 3 minutes to do. Then I export the result to another directory, again as dv video (but now without the commercials).
At this point I can either record the result onto dv tape via my camcorder, or convert it to the video format of my choice. I typically convert it to high quality xvid format using a smart deinterlacer plugin for transcode, then burn the result to dvd-r or dvd-rw. The exact procedure I use is detailed here.
The files are typically larger than 2 GB, so I use ext2 filesystems rather than UDF or ISO9660 to get around the 2GB filesize limit. Then it goes into a binder with all my B5 divx recorded episodes (which, alas, are much lower quality, but still quite viewable and better than VHS). The newer stuff I'm doing in xvid format is typically broadcast quality and looks fantastic even on my 1080p capable monitor (I actually watch it in 1200p, since my 1920x1200 resolution allows that).
The transcode step is the only step that takes any real time... on my dual 1 GHz P3 system it manages around 8 frames/second encoding, so I typically fire it off in the evening, go out for dinner, come back a couple of hours later and enjoy my program, commercial free, before going to bed, either on my 24" Samsung SyncMaster 240T, or via the video out on my NVidia card on the television itself.
If you don't require instant gratification, and schedule your time intelligently (do the capture while you're out, do a quick edit and start the export before grabbing a shower, and do the transcode while you're out to dinner or for drinks), your total involvement in doing this is typically 5 minutes / episode, and your result is a very high quality, commercial free, timeshifted program you can watch once and delete, or burn to DVD and put in your personal video library.
The only catch is you have to use your computer to watch it (my videos require GNU/Linux because of the filesizes and filesystem I use, but you can do this all under Windoze too if you're so inclined, though that may require more supervision, and possibly more than just 5 minutes of your time)... but in this day and age, if you want to have control over your audio-visual media, you have to use a general purpose computer, as opposed to the already horribly crippled consumer video products out there. Why do you think the cartels are working so hard to neuter your computer?
Just my.02, Advertising costs are added to product costs. Since we're pay for the products why should we have watch the ads that we've also paid for. With the exception of new product awareness and occasional reminders of a products existence this whole vicious circle just ends up costing the consumer more money.
Ads are more than annoyances that people like to ignore/skip, they also cost us $.
That, my anonymous friend, is a very interesting point (quoted here so that others browsing at +1 or +2 may see it as well).
[Please mod the parent up instead if you're thinking of modding this comment]
There is nothing sophomoric in pointing out the foolishness of observing a negative trend in one's society and then calling on everyone to "sit back and do nothing, don't worry and be happy" as you do.
There is nothing "cute" or "niave" in pointing out to people that, if they do follow your amazingly bad advice they and their society will likely reap the worst sort of outcome those trends can lead to... a future in which the freedoms of the past are exchanged for a more authoritarian future.
Indeed, the only thing more sophomoric than your elitist stab at uninformed cynicism in this thread is the fallacy that your vacation (or, unlikely but possible, work) in Cambodia somehow makes you more of an authority on what people should and should not be concerned about than someone who has chosen, instead, to spend their vacation in, say, Kenya or Nepal, or has instead worked in, say, China, Japan, and much of Europe, or for that matter someone who has never visited any of those places but has had the intelligence and wisdom to be observant as to the goings on in their own society and even, perhaps, try to do someting about it.
Well, actually, there is another thing even more sophomoric than that: tossing out insults like 'cute' and 'niave' rather than following up with a substantive rebuttal, another fallacy commonly referred to as 'ad homonim', and even more commonly as 'trolling.'
think you've described advertising a little bit more insidius than it usually is. Most advertising is nothing more than brand or product awareness, as the prior poster excellently described
You mistake motive and means. If you study some of advanced texts in marketing (I had a friend who studied marketing, so I did read some of these texts, and had some very interesting and illuminating conversations on the subject with her as a result), or peruse some of the even more interesting graduate work that has been done in the field, it is all about indoctrination and conditioning, much of it through repetition (not all of it, there are other rather insidious and borderline-subliminal techniques that are used... indeed some of the techniques are outright subliminal).
That isn't to say that techniques of indoctrinating or conditioning the masses are being used to promote this evil goal or that evil goal, as I said in my final paragraph, the reason these techniques, which most people, were they aware of them, would consider evil or at least unethical, are being used is for a much more banal reason: simple profits, be they profits for a legitimate, small time entrepreneur (like another friend who runs a computer consultancy), al egitimate large corporation, or a neferious large corporation (e.g. Monsanto or Microsoft).
No neferious agenda is needed for the methodology itself to be insidious, and any scruitiny of our current marketing methodologies shows their lack of compunction in employing some of the more neferious strategies available, and known to the non-military world, in doing so.
The ends may be relatively benign (as in my coca-cola example), but the means are appalling and dehumanizing, to say the least.
This may surprise you, but this statement is contradicting itself. By naming a specific brand, you are proving that television does have an effect on you.
schon is absolutely right here, though the actual impact is missed (brand awareness is a very small part of the overall marketing picture).
Repetition is one of the most reliable indoctrination (often called by the misnomer "brain washing") techniques around, particularly if you are working without a deadline (if you do have a deadline, there are other, quite effective means of breaking a person and reconstructing the desired attitude, but while they are faster, none of these are anywhere near as reliable as simple repitition over an extended period of time). If you do not believe that marketing involves the application of serious indoctrination techniques, I suggest you read a couple of advanced textbooks, or graduate level thesis, on the subject. Indoctrination is most definitely what it is about, though that terminology is generally avoided.
In short, you can be talked into liking and desiring the most unlikely of things through sheer repetition, particularly if such repetition begins during early childhood (but it doesn't need to... adults can be convinced of anything, given enough time. There was once a study done where an adult was convinced the sky was red through sheer repetition alone, despite knowing otherwise. Although that didn't hold... their knowledge that the sky was blue was too powerful, and no harsher techniques were employed to break them down first, the subjects of the study had a difficult time differentiating between red and blue for a very long time after the study was concluded. I wish I could find the exact reference to that study, but I'm at work and the name of the study doesn't spring to mind for a handy google search. Perhaps some kind soul reading this will provide a link). Something like, say, a disgustingly flavored, surupy dark brown sugary drink laced with cocain or, when that becomes illegal, caffein. Especially if it has a nice bright, easilly recognized logo that can be plastered about, reinforcing that conditioning in people's every day lives, and especially if it has a short, rythmic name like, say, Coca-Cola.
When was the last time you made it through the day without seeing that logo, or hearing the name, at least once?
Advertisers do not want to allow us to change our viewing habits because doing so takes away one of the primary conduits by which they can condition us to want their products, and advertisers pay top dollar for access to these conditioning conduits. Believe it or not, we as viewers are sold as chattel to advertisers, literally, at a little over a dollar an hour for our viewership.
They have no desire to sell the content to us, to make us their customers. We are the chattel they sell to their paying customers today, the advertisers, and they don't believe they'll ever make as much money selling their entertainment to us as they do selling us to their advertisers.
It is rather a sobering and disturbing thought... George Orwell's nightmare didn't come from government, it came from industry, powered not by some sinister desire to dominate mankind, but by simple, benal human greed. There is a very profound social lesson in all of this, though I'm not sure we as a society are very equipped to learn from it.
This message will doubtlessly spawn messages accusing the industry of lack of ability to change with advances in technology, and so forth along with the usual crapola about "it's our airwaves, dammit" [emphesis added]
How on earth is that "crapola?" They are public airwaves that the broadcaster's are using... the fact that the broadcasters have used them with relative impunity for 70+ years doesn't change that, and pointing that fact out certainly isn't "crapola" by anyone's definition, except perhaps that of the broadcasters themselves.
It may win on some minor points, but it mostly just gives the broadcasters time to secure settlements with PVR companies and come up with alternate technologies and models.
Based on the demands of Hollywood and the recording industry to date, and the trends in Washington, how on earth can you justify a "don't worry, be happy" attitude like this? Those new technologies and models are likely to incorporate the worst in big brother activity monitoring (perhaps even two way samplers?) and certainly draconian copyright controls, if those industries have their druthers (and it looks like they very well might). In the context of what has been happening a "don't worry, be happy" attitude is absolutey and completely unjustified. Indeed, it such an attitude is likely to insure that one of the more repressive scenerios is more likely to play out.
This mantra of don't get involved, don't worry, relax, be apathetic, go one with your life, nothing to see here, is exactly why we are in the mess we are in today. I really can't believe people were stupid enough to moderate that up to +5 insightful, except that some gullible people hear cynicism and mistake it for worldliness, intelligence, and even wisdom, when in fact it is none of those things, nor does it even imply any of those things.
Yes, the sun will come up tommorow. It rose and set perfectly on schedule over the killing fields of cambodia and the repressed millions in the old soviet block, and it will rise and set right on schedule over the western world, whether that world enjoys the freedoms of the past, or a future of authoritarian rule grounded in the enforcement of "intellectual property" in a society whose technology has long since made that notion incompatible with individual freedom.
If people follow your advice and do nothing, the latter becomes signficantly more likely.
Just to clarify, with support of the Afghan (and possibly a couple of other) government at the time, the Taliban.
Osama "the fallatio queen" bin Laden
I didn't realize I'd left that in there. That comes from a private joke centered around the notion of abducting Osama, bringing him to the US for a sex change operation, then sending him back to live under Islamic law as a woman. The joke was that his own men wouldn't recognize him, and even if they did, they would likely relegate him to fallatio whore status. An amusing joke, and one I've grown accustomed to typing into emails, but I didn't really intend to include it here.
"This case illustrates the failure of law enforcement agencies to implement adequate protection against the abuse of information they collect."
This case illustrates the failure of trusting and empowering large beaurocratic entities to snoop into everyone's lives in the mistaken notion that will somehow make us all "safer."
Individuals have never come close to committing the level and magnitude of atrocities that governments, including our own (USA), have, in terms of lives destroyed and even taken, not to mention human suffering in unthinkable numbers. Consider WW I, WW II, the Nazi regime, the Stalin regime, the Mao regime, the Khmere Rouge regime, the Saddam Hussein regime, and the Taliban regime. Even Osama bin Laden, with government support was unable to match any of those in shere atrocities committed (and what Osama "the fallatio queen" bin Laden did manage to do he likely couldn't have pulled that off without ongoing aid and support from the Taliban regime).
If events like these do not illuminate the fallacy of giving up freedom and handing the government authority over our lives in the mistaken notion that it will keep us safer, then really nothing will and our society as such is doomed.
Re:There ARE other ways
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George has a far better reason to avoid fan fiction. If someone writes a fan fic called "episode 3: they came from outer space" and it follows the movie george eventually releases, the fanfic author can attempt to sue George for copyright violation.
That is an interesting take, however it really doesn't justify George Lucas' draconian stance on fan fiction (and he isn't alone, plenty of other areas of fan fiction have been suppressed as well).
He owns the copyright on the Star Wars universe, he need merely make as a condition that any fan fiction written be licensed for use by him, for inclusion in any later Star Wars work, at his discretion. Any works, and artists, not agreeing to said license, would then be in violation of his license. Not a perfect solution, but certainly better than the wholesale censorship we're seeing now.
More reasons why copyright stiffles innovation.
Amen. Copyright law makes a mess of this no matter how you slice it, which is why I advocate coming up with a replacement scheme that does not grant restrictive government mandated monopolies as a means of compensating artists, but employs some other methodology more compatable with societal freedom instead. I've thrown out several ideas, all of which I believe meet the minimum standard of not being significantly worse for the artist than the existing copyright situation, and one of which would likely be quite a bit better for most not-so-well known artists. Unfortunately, only one other person has seen fit to toss out a suggestion (see the last paragraph of his post, and he and I disagree deeply on the usefulness of copyright)... everyone else seems to be engaged in a knee-jerk defense of the existing approach without even really considering the issues in any depth. Even though he and I disagree, he's thus far the only one to offer a constructive suggestion as to how this might be addressed.
Not a terribly promising indication of what the future holds in store, I'm afraid.
In my opinion the solution is the creation of alternative economies in which the big boys don't get a chance to play because the copyright is held in common.
While I disagree with much of your post, and your assumptions, I won't belabor the issue further as I suspect we're the only two reading this thread at this point, and we are going to have to agree to disagree I think.
But I did want to compliment you on this final thought. You are, I believe, the only person in this entire thread who responded to my call for suggestions as to alternatives and ideas to address these issues in a creative context that doesn't necessarilly include copyright, and given the current framework we have to work with (copyright laws as they now stand) your suggestion is quite brilliant.
While not an alternative system to copyright per se, the idea of creating an alternative economy where copyright is held in common is fascinating. Indeed, it is a very interesting alternative to copyright as it is currently being exploited (and in some ways analogous to the GPL, which for certain philosophical reasons I like), and until a better regime can be put into place (if that ever becomes possible) it is a very cool idea for creating something of a public commons in the interim.
It won't end the social costs and criminalization of common human patterns like sharing that copyright has come to entail in the digital age, but it may at least allow the creation of an island of sanity amidst the madness, and that is certainly a good start.
Quantum physics does NOT imply that there are a finite number of states. The "Hilbert space" of quantum physics may be either finite or infinite.
You are correct, and I meant (and should have used the the word) can rather than does, ie. QM can imply a finite number of states. My entire point was that it was a mistake to argue that QM justifies the sumary dismissal of Wolfram's work before we've even read it, not to take sides in a question that is, afaik, still open and unknown.
In any case, no self-respecting physicist would infer that the universe as a whole has a finite number of states on the basis of a formalism used to describe experiments on things which are on the order of magnitude of Planck's constant.
You're right, it is unlikely any physicist would argue that point one way or the other, since it really isn't known one way or the other whether space-time is continuous, or granular, at that level, or at scales even smaller than that (if they in fact exist), much less whether the number of possible states is finite, or infinite. Again, I worded the first sentence of my post poorly, as I believe I acknowledged in another post as well. This is slashdot, and the web interface isn't terribly helpful in trying to proofread even short posts like this (as most people's spelling, mine included, reflect)... luckily there are plenty of knowledgable folks like yourself around to keep me honest when I mispeak.:-)
Linus has always favoured pragmatic reasons over idealogical ones. In this case, all he was doing was trying to avoid referencing a highly political organization, the FSF, in favour of a more neutral one.
In other posts he told people to get rid of references to the FSF. When the keeper of the HOWTO objected, saying they had always referenced the FSF and, like it or not, political questions do arise, then Linus came back with the comment you quoted. It was very clear from the context of the entire thread that he wants references to the FSF expunged from the kernel documentation, which, like it or not, is a very political stance for him to be taking. As a person he has a right to take a political stance, but it is profoundly hypocritical to be taking a political stance against a person or an organization and then claiming to be 'non-political.'
It would have IMHO been ok to list a fairly "neutral" site (though Debian seems to be fairly firmly in the Freedom camp), but why not list it (and the opposing opensource site as well) in addition to an already existing reference to the FSF, and let people make up their own mind. Why censor all references to the FSF, if one is, as he claims, "apolitical?"
Why expunge and, in effect, censor out any reference to the FSF, particularly when they are the ones that have provided most of the tools that made Linux possible in the first place, and particularly when RMS has asked, even begged, that they at least include a pointer to the FSF so people are aware they exist and can find out what they are about? Unless Linus is simply letting his personal dislike for RMS dictate this policy, it simply doesn't make any sense to me.
Indeed, it seems to me to be an act of profound contempt and ingratitude, and it disgusts me very deeply. I say this as one who has never been a particularly strong advocate of the FSF v. the Open Source movement, having tended toward the more pragmatic view on things myself (though my own recent experiences with Blender, and the arguments of both sides, are changing that stance somewhat. More so as I watch all of this unfold).
Re:There ARE other ways
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And if George Lucas' work is so worthless, why then do you care whether or not you can copy it?
More logical fallacy.
Being allowed to write fiction set within the same universe as another story does not constitute copying that story.
Pointing out that some of the fan fiction is superior to the last two scripts Lucas has produced does not equal a claim that George Lucas' work is worthless, merely inferior in one subjective opinion.
Insisting that the social cost of copyright is too high, as are the restrictions it imposes on freedom of speech as exemplified by the fan fiction example I provided does not equal bitterness or resentment, though both emotions are considered by most to be justified when one's freedoms and liberties are being trampled upon for something as banal as the financial betterment of another.
Furthermore, stating that you provided an example showing two demonstrably (and in my previous post shown in great detail to be) different things to be the same thing[1] when in fact you did not does not change the fact that you failed to provide any supporting evidence that a right or privelege to do something equates a requirement to do something else.
Finally, stating that I did not offer a compelling proof that two things that are different by all definitions of the concepts and words as expressed in the English language, when in fact I did provide a clarifying example[2] to underscore that point, is both inaccurate (see above) but also irrelevant, as the burden of proof on equating two disparate and different things lies on the person claiming the two prima facia different things are, in some context, the same. You fail in this spectacularly, and your obtuseness leads me to the reluctant conclusion that I haven't been engaged in a discussion with an intelligent person here, but rather have been feeding a troll.
Discussion is over.
Indeed.
[1][FreeUser] What is more, you are equaiting two different things: the right to copy and build on something v. the requirement to cite and credit a source.
[sheldon]Odd since they are the same thing.
[2]right != requirement. inclusion != citation. Works citing other works != Derivative works.
As an example of the last, since it seems to be escaping you, it is quite common for academic research papers to cite other works in the field, even works upon which they are not themselves basing or building their research upon, because such works refer to interesting tangents or asides which come up from time to time, or because the publication explores a parallel thought on the subject (or the same thought from a different angle). Including a footnote with a book's title and author (a citation), with or without including any excerpts from the cited work, does not make the document a "derivative work" in any sense of the word, any more than this text is a derivative work of the roman alphabet (despite being written in the same).
Re:There ARE other ways
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What is more, you are equaiting two different things: the right to copy and build on something v. the requirement to cite and credit a source.
Odd since they are the same thing.
A right to use something is the same thing as a requirement to credit the source?
It is you who do not understand logic. Argument by analogy is a perfectly accepted form of argument, particularly when used to clarify and restate an illogical comment in terms more commonly understood. On the other hand, making unsupported statements that a right to do something equals a requirement to do something else is a logical fallacy not accepted by anyone other than the inane.
As an analogy (which is a useful discussion tool despite your bold, and incorrect, assertion that it implies a lack of understanding of logic), you have said the logical equivelent of "red is the same thing as green." That may be true, if you are discussing the texture of an apple's skin, or the resolution of an Apple iMac's screen, but without supporting argument clarifying, in rational, logical, and above all factual terms, why you think two completely different concepts are the same, in this case the right to incorporate one work within another derivative work (a right which does not exist in copyright, and for which a 'fair use' exception to copyright was later made to accomodate) to the academic requirement that sources cited be credited, you are simply making a flatout illogical statement without support. To clarify for the logically challenged:
right != requirement. inclusion != citation. Works citing other works != Derivative works.
As an example of the last, since it seems to be escaping you, it is quite common for academic research papers to cite other works in the field, even works upon which they are not themselves basing or building their research upon, because such works refer to interesting tangents or asides which come up from time to time, or because the publication explores a parallel thought on the subject (or the same thought from a different angle). Including a footnote with a book's title and author (a citation), with or without including any excerpts from the cited work, does not make the document a "derivative work" in any sense of the word, any more than this text is a derivative work of the roman alphabet (despite being written in the same).
Your other logical fallacy is of course your statement, without logical support, that allowing (e.g. Star Wars) fan fiction would result in a world where Star Wars was the only form of fiction. This is demonstrably false, as evidenced by the rich variety of legend and fiction that existed prior to the invention of copyright, particularly in stage plays and operas throught Europe from the enlightement onward.
You eliminate fan fiction and you haven't promoted innovation... you've merely silenced an entire genre of interesting fiction. People obsessed with Star Wars, or Star Trek, or whatever aren't going to start inventing their own worlds because their fan fiction has been banned, they will simply stop writing altogether, or continue writing and sharing their fiction amongst themselves in an underground, black market of ideas and creativity (which is what the vast majority of such folks do). Meanwhile our culture as a whole is diminished, because the rest of us do not ever have access to that work (much of which is quite good.
Don't get me wrong, George Lucas has good reason to ban serious fan fiction from his universe. Much of it is vastly superior to the tripe he has been putting out of late (Ep. 1 and 2). He is certainly richer as a result of being able to silence other creative people who are fans of that particular mythos... our culture, however, is poorer for it.
Without Linus's kernel, the "Gnu system" would be completely irrelevant today.
That simply isn't true. Indeed, your next sentence admits as much
The BSDs would still have gotten out of the legal wrangling with AT&T before the HURD was done, and FreeBSD would have taken the mindshare that Linux got.
Which would have been fine. The reason I ended up using GNU/Linux instead of BSD was because of that legal wrangling... at the time, FreeBSD was the first free operating system I found, and while there were a lot of GNU tools in use on Sun and other BSD systems, Linux was relatively unknown. The legal issues forced myself and others to look further, and Linus' kernel was the only other offering at the time.
However, had BSD won the mindshare the GNU/Linux has, it wouldn't have hurt the FSF at all. As others have noted, much of the GNU stuff is being used in the BSD world today because it is good software. Contrary to popular myth, BSD and the FSF/GPL are not all that adversarial. Their disagreement is more one of strategy not philosophy. Indeed, the FSF specifically endorsed using the BSD license with the ogg-vorbis stuff, specifically because it was a more strategic license for getting the standard more widely adopted in embedded systems.
And, unlike Linus' recent comments on the LKML saying in effect "take any references to the FSF out of the FAQ, none of our documentation should point people to the FSF at all", the BSD folks seem happy to coexist with the FSF and even mention them on occasion, despite having no affiliation. In other words, the FSF would be just as big a player had BSD won the majority of the mindshare as it is with Linux having won it, only to have some of its leadership actively trying to steer people away from the FSF and the message they are trying to convey.
I must admit I lost most of my respect for Linus when he made that comment. He claims not to want to be political, but then he takes very political stances on questions like that, actively steering people away from the one organization to which he owes his fame and much of his career. Being anti-FSF is as political a stance to take as being pro-FSF, and deliberately trying to silence the voice of those who have contributed 90% of what makes Linux a UNIX-like operating system is not only profoundly political, it is indefensibly political against the very people to whome the community owes so much.
It is ironic that, as someone who has been using GNU/Linux since the 0.48x days (and who was as unfuriated as the rest with RMS's lignux nonsense) that I have come full circle to understand and respect RMS's point of view, and that now the behavior of Linus and some others, whome I've held in high regard for over a decade, is such that they have become in some respects as offensive to me as RMS once was.
I will continue to use the operating system, and to contribute in my way, because I believe in free software and have profited greatly from it, but while I am quite critical of RMS, I am utterly disillusioned with Linus' rather hypocritical stances on these issues and the profoundly arrogant ingratitude he seems to be displaying of late.
Re:A By No Means Exhaustive List
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Patronage. Patronage has frequently been a serious problem for both free speech and the free market as patrons try to assert control over the artist's work. In addition, there are a number of cases where the person just doesn't get paid.
How is this any different from "works for hire" which is how most artists (authors excepted) are effectively paid these days, be they actors, screenwriters, or musicians. Indeed, the RIAA tried (and nearly succeeded) to have all works defined as work for hire, then backed off when the realized the PR fallout that would ensue.
A patronage-only scheme in which only labor is compensated, and the actual created work is considered to be not property doesn't give the artist much room to negotiate more compensation.
Most artists have very little room to negotiate now, at least until they become well known. Prince (or the Artist Formerly Known As) is one of many examples of very successful artists who had no room to negotiate when he started out, got rooked, and then, to get out of it, had to give up his very identity in the process. I do not know the statistics on the number of artists who manage to negotiate something resembling a fair contract vs. those who do not (because, lets face it, the media cartels hold most of the cards in such negotiations, particularly in the beginning), but I would be very surprised if more than a small fraction of the artists in question had anything approaching a fair contract. In other words, I do not think copyright is any better at protecting artists in this regards than the patronage system, and it has a hell of a lot of societal costs associated with it.
Buskering. I agree with your criticisms as to its weaknesses in a copyright free world with no alternative system to replace it (and I offer a solution below, where I discuss possible alternatives to copyright that don't involve simply abandoning it and leaving a vacuum in its place).
You point out some important pros of copyright, but these pros are not innate in copyright itself, nor is copyright required in order to have them.
1: Legal grounds for proof of authorship.
Copyright could be replaced with a Requirement of Authorship, where an author is required to be given credit for their work (and those making changes in a derivative work required to take responsibility for those changes, in addition to citing the author's initial contribution). This question is completely orthogonal to the question of granting government mandated monopolies to authors or artists, and does not require copyright in order to be addressed.
2: Control over how the work and derivative work is used.
While there are pros to this kind of requirement (the GPL uses it to leverage more openness out of a public commons than might otherwise arise), it is my opinion that the cons (denying people access to and the ability to use material as they like) is greater. BSD, for example, doesn't rely on these controls, and while it isn't as strategic in countering the likes of Microsoft as the GPL is, I think the gain in giving that up far outweighs the downside.
Indeed, with BSD this has happened (consider Apple's OS X), and it hasn't appeared to harm BSD at all. It is a fair argument that a free market, rather than coercian for or against source code availability (in a copyright-free scenerio) is perhaps a better way to resolve the question.
However, that having all been said, there appears to be an assumption in all of this that I am advocating an abandonment of copyright with nothing to replace this. I find it curious that this is the assumption everyone is operating from, particularly when my original post called for discussion on possible alternatives to copyright that might accomplish the same purported goals (insuring the artist gets just compensation) without the social costs (government mandated and enforced monpolies and a command marketplace).
Somehow copyright discussions seem to entail an incredible lack of creativity. The IP proponents argue we must have copyright because of X, Y, and Z, and no one seems to question whether X, Y, and Z are (a) even desirable in the larger picture or (b) require copyright to be accomplished.
Take the busking example. In a world without copyright, but with a Requirement of Authorship, and Perhaps a corrallary Exemption of Authorship that exemps works sold by the artist (or a duly appointed publisher) from taxes that would be levied against a competitor selling the same book/record/etc. you could give artists an economic edge over others, not authorized but nevertheless entitled to publish and sell a work, without granting them an all out monopoly, or restrict how others might use or incorporate said works in their derivative material.
There are literally dozens if not hundreds of possible approaches and variations on this kind of concept, where systems could be put in place that are relatively unobtrusive, help stack the free market in favor of the creative artist without throwing away the free market altogether and granting artificial monopolies the government then has to go around in jackboots enforcing.
In other words, getting back to my original call for an exploration of alternatives to copyright, we should consider designing, from the ground up, a system designed to maximize the freedom of the artist and the society while insuring just compensation (which I would not equate with 'the right to get rich' or 'the right to make sure no one else can make anything on the work', but rather the right to get paid for the work, and perhaps the right to an advantage in the marketplace in trying to get paid for the work) and, most importantly, without trampling on the freedoms of the rest of society at large.
Re:There ARE other ways
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A small number of the most popular artists would be able to make enough money through contributions, patronage, endorsements, etc. to do fine. It's the millions of other writers, artists, programmers, analysts, etc. that I'm more worried about.
You know, it isn't any different from the world we currently inhabit with copyright. The Stephen Kings and Ansel Adams' of the world do fine, and generally are able to negotiate reasonable contracts from their publishers, while the millions of lesser known artists are not, and generally are victimized as a result, earning pennies on the dollar (at best) and often losing all rights to their own creation in the process. Their alternative to not playing ball by the publisher's rules (in this case, the recording or movie industry)? No exposure at all, and no ability to earn from their craetion anyway.
None of the approaches I suggested off the top of my head, with virtually no thought, are any worse at all in this respect, and with a little creativity I think we could come up with something a whole hell of a lot better.
But first we have to be willing to consider the possiblity that copyright is not the right way to be going about this, and thus far, as far as I can tell, there are very few people open minded enough to even consider the possibility, much less explore what alternatives there might be.
Good news to IP proponents, to publisher, to the recording industry, and to Hollywood. Bad news for artists, for consumers, and for the tech industry that is about to get steam rollered under those very same laws, and their natural extentions to the digital world.
Re:A By No Means Exhaustive List
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I certainly agree that releasing open-source and open-content is a good thing but the GPL IS NOT DESIGNED TO NEGATE THE RESTRICTIONS OF COPYRIGHT, INSTEAD IT DEPENDS ON THEM TO ENSURE THAT DERIVATIVE WORKS ARE ALSO FREE. Without copyright, there can be no copyleft. The ONLY thing that keeps free software free is the existence of a copyright law that permits users to control derivative works.
Oh. My. God.
You really do not get free software, do you, much less Free Media or Open Content.
The GPL exists for the sole purpose of insuring the 4 freedoms as laid out by the Free Software Foundation: the freedom to use, the freedom to copy, the freedom to modify, and the freedom to share your modifications with others. Without copyright you would have all of these freedoms, and as Richard Stallman himself, the author of the GPL, has said, without copyright the GPL wouldn't be necessary at all.
The existence of free software doesn't depend on copyright. The existence of free software depends on licenses like the BSD and GPL licenses because copyright law makes the world a hostile place to free software by default. They are a defense against a hostile system that happens to use that system's own rules against itself. Do not confuse the existence of the hack (the GPL) with the existence of free software. The former by definition relies on copyright, the latter exists in spite of copyright.
In fact, all of these approaches insure the exact opposite.
Thus far, I have backed up my assertions with real world examples of it functioning (albeit not always perfectly). You, on the other hand, have just made a very broad statement without a single shred of evidence to back it up. I do hope your academic publications were a little more rigorous than that.
Re:There ARE other ways
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I'm also curious how copyright limits your freedom of speech.
One example is fan fiction. If I write a very original, interesting novel set in the Star Trek universe, for example, Universal can and will keep me from sharing that work widely (certainly from publishing it, even not-for-profit). George Lucas is notorious for this in the Star Wars universe, so much so that when he coopted the Fan Fiction convention he immediately turned around and banned 80% of the material or so, because it wasn't a spoof or parody, it was serious fiction that happened to be set in the same universe he owns the copyright on.
These peoples creative works are no more derivative than most other peoples (who take their sources from public domain materials like the Grimm Fairytails in Disney's case, or more classical works in other cases. Think of all the books that have been based on the Legend of King Arthur, for example.
Banning all those creative works is a limitation on people's freedom of speech, and a non-trivial limitation at that. It also diminishes us culturally, and leads to a lot of lost creativity as a result. That impoverishes all of us.
It seems the same would be true of plagarism rules in our academic environments.
That is a logical fallacy. You are equating a general restriction on all of society with a very specific restriction in a private environment regarding a specific task. What is more, you are equaiting two different things: the right to copy and build on something v. the requirement to cite and credit a source.
As an example, what you are saying is equivelent to "Legalizing cigarrettes would be equivelent to allowing cigarette smoking in school" which of course simply isn't true. Doing away with copyright doesn't do away with the concept of plagarism at all, any more than the existence of free software does away with the concept of cheating on homework problems in your CS class.
Re:An Inaccurate Characterization
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Being a bit pedantic, aren't we?
Not really. The problem with much of the discussion of copyright law, and IP law in general, is that people take as axiomatic assumptions that the law makes, but that a longer view of history indicates aren't warranted.
Much of the justification for IP law has, at its heart, a circular argument much like the one given above.
You can believe you should have certain priveleges to restrict others from expressing themselves in a manner which mimics an expression you made earlier (such as singing a tune you came up with, etc.), to paraphrase your non-circular statement, but now that it has been made in a non-circular manner it is easy and straightforward for another to say "I don't believe you should have the right to restrict my expression merely because you think of something first", and at that point it is possible to have a reasonable discusion on the pros and cons of either approach.
Until you clarify and eliminate the circular reasoning and statement of assumptions as if they were unassailable axioms so endemic in IP thought today, it simply isn't even possible to discuss the topic, except in terms set by just one side (those who favor copy restrictions over freedom of expression).
Slashdot Mirror
In other news, Richard Stallman and Santa Clause are fat guys with beards.
Both of whome bring you gifts, often of such mangifiscence that, once you've recovered from the initial surprise and delight, you find yourself wondering how you ever did without.
The system is no longer GNU + Linux kernel. If it's about giving credit in proportional amounts, then X, perl, Berkeley, Apache, Netscape, and many other major contributors should also be recognized.
... people dislike RMS for various reasons, his sometimes abrasive personality and lack of tact almost certainly among them.
That is just flatout nonsense, and has been rebutted so many times, so effectively, that one seriously wonders how people can still say that with a straight face, much less get modded up to +5 for it. The reasons, of course, are ad homonim
The core UNIX/Linux operating system consistes of the kernel, various file and binary utilities, a few core libraries, and (arguably) a compiler. It most certainly does not include a GUI windowing system (Microsoft's confusion as to what constitutes an operating system aside), nor does it include a web browser, much less a web server.
The core Linux operating system consists of the Linux kernel and a collection of critical components that were written by the GNU folks long before Linux came along. You may not like RMS's request, or argument, that Linux systems ought to go by the moniker of GNU/Linux, but only someone completely ignorant of operating system design, and of the internals and components of the Linux operating system, would ever argue that "if we call it GNU/Linux we should call it Berkely/GNU/X/Apache/Netscape/Linux." That, or someone who knows better, but has a political ax to grind and is willing to bend the truth more than a little in order to do so.
As an excersize, remove GNU glibc from your (GNU/)Linux system and reboot. If that doesn't make clear the fallacy of your argument, then I suspect nothing ever will.
Call it GNU/Linux, or just call it Linux if you prefer, but please cease and desist spreading absolute nonsense about what is and is not a part an operating system v. what are user space utilities that run on top of an operating system.
I've been wondering something for a bit. Would someone tell me why people dumb huge wads of cash on these big plasma screen displays when they could spend a coupld of grand on a decent digital XGA projector and project the picture onto a screen/wall at 9 feet by 6 or something like that?
Because, on a sunny afternoon, you won't be able to see the projected image. You'll have to either get European style metal blinds you can lower to block out all sunlight (afternoon if you have west facing windows, morning if east facing, both if south facing), or only watch TV at night.
Having said that, I agree that plasma panels have abysmal resolution. That is why I opted for a 24" LCD monitor (Samsung SyncMaster 240T) instead. It cost half as much as the plasma alternatives, gives me 1920x1200 resolution, and works as an awe inspiring monitor when I'm sitting at the computer, and an excellent (if not gigantic) TV when I'm lounging in the couch across the room.
The plasma's, or even better, giant LCDs, will interest me only once they are capable of 1080i or 1080p and can be driven digitally by my computer as my Samsung is now. Unfortunately there is a very good chance the media cartels will cripple high resolution, big flatscreen technology so that general purpose computers cannot drive these screens (hdcp copy protection schemes, etc. embedded into the dvi interface, for example), which, if it is ever actually implimented, will likely condemn consumer HDTV products to the same fate as consumer DAT recorders.
As a worthless troll I really shouldn't respond to this, but it amuses me to point out that you are not only quite clearly a person who needs to develop their interpersonal communications skills, but also a person who desperately needs a remedial course in basic reading comprehension:
Perhaps after you've attended that remedial reading course you will attend one in math and gain the necessary skills required to realize that a 5 minute investment in time to cut out 12-18 minutes of commercials results in a net time savings when you actually watch the broadcast, not a net loss. But then, that presupposes that you are more intelligent than the average troll, and we can't really make that assumption, can we?
As for screwed up priorities, if you consider removing undue and unwelcome efforts at influence and repetative conditioning from your life in an effort to insure and protect your own self-determination as a screwed up priority, then I suggest that says a great deal more about you than it does about me.
For somebody who seems to want his entertainment for free or very little cost, you sure do bitch a lot about commercials. You can't have it both ways, man.
... on my dual 1 GHz P3 system it manages around 8 frames/second encoding, so I typically fire it off in the evening, go out for dinner, come back a couple of hours later and enjoy my program, commercial free, before going to bed, either on my 24" Samsung SyncMaster 240T, or via the video out on my NVidia card on the television itself.
... but in this day and age, if you want to have control over your audio-visual media, you have to use a general purpose computer, as opposed to the already horribly crippled consumer video products out there. Why do you think the cartels are working so hard to neuter your computer?
Commercials, through ongoing repetition, indoctrinate. This means that your ability to make conscious decisions, as opposed to reacting to unconscious conditioning is affected, possibly severely if you are a chronic television viewer.
So I too object to commercials, and I have edited them out of my life, without giving up any of the television I pay for each month ($50.00 cable bill). Turner's CEO, Disney's Eisner & other cartel leaders may be trying to modify the already prevelent 'newspeak' into considering commercial-skipping (or, in my case, editing) theft, but not only is that clearly not the case, I am taking back my own self-determination by no longer letting these people condition me for their own petty profits.
How, you ask?
Like so:
I have a $300 firewire A/D converter (you know, like the one the media cartels want to cripple?). However, you could do this with V4L or V4L2 and a video capture board just as well.
I use dvgrab, cronned up to record Max Headroom each Friday, Enterprise each Wednesday, and SG-1 each Saturday. SG1 is nice because no commercial editing is required.
I use kino (a simple NLE for dv video) to quickly snip out the commercials, and This entire process takes about 3 minutes to do. Then I export the result to another directory, again as dv video (but now without the commercials).
At this point I can either record the result onto dv tape via my camcorder, or convert it to the video format of my choice. I typically convert it to high quality xvid format using a smart deinterlacer plugin for transcode, then burn the result to dvd-r or dvd-rw. The exact procedure I use is detailed here.
The files are typically larger than 2 GB, so I use ext2 filesystems rather than UDF or ISO9660 to get around the 2GB filesize limit. Then it goes into a binder with all my B5 divx recorded episodes (which, alas, are much lower quality, but still quite viewable and better than VHS). The newer stuff I'm doing in xvid format is typically broadcast quality and looks fantastic even on my 1080p capable monitor (I actually watch it in 1200p, since my 1920x1200 resolution allows that).
The transcode step is the only step that takes any real time
If you don't require instant gratification, and schedule your time intelligently (do the capture while you're out, do a quick edit and start the export before grabbing a shower, and do the transcode while you're out to dinner or for drinks), your total involvement in doing this is typically 5 minutes / episode, and your result is a very high quality, commercial free, timeshifted program you can watch once and delete, or burn to DVD and put in your personal video library.
The only catch is you have to use your computer to watch it (my videos require GNU/Linux because of the filesizes and filesystem I use, but you can do this all under Windoze too if you're so inclined, though that may require more supervision, and possibly more than just 5 minutes of your time)
Just my .02, Advertising costs are added to product costs. Since we're pay for the products why should we have watch the ads that we've also paid for. With the exception of new product awareness and occasional reminders of a products existence this whole vicious circle just ends up costing the consumer more money.
Ads are more than annoyances that people like to ignore/skip, they also cost us $.
That, my anonymous friend, is a very interesting point (quoted here so that others browsing at +1 or +2 may see it as well).
[Please mod the parent up instead if you're thinking of modding this comment]
Good lord.
... a future in which the freedoms of the past are exchanged for a more authoritarian future.
There is nothing sophomoric in pointing out the foolishness of observing a negative trend in one's society and then calling on everyone to "sit back and do nothing, don't worry and be happy" as you do.
There is nothing "cute" or "niave" in pointing out to people that, if they do follow your amazingly bad advice they and their society will likely reap the worst sort of outcome those trends can lead to
Indeed, the only thing more sophomoric than your elitist stab at uninformed cynicism in this thread is the fallacy that your vacation (or, unlikely but possible, work) in Cambodia somehow makes you more of an authority on what people should and should not be concerned about than someone who has chosen, instead, to spend their vacation in, say, Kenya or Nepal, or has instead worked in, say, China, Japan, and much of Europe, or for that matter someone who has never visited any of those places but has had the intelligence and wisdom to be observant as to the goings on in their own society and even, perhaps, try to do someting about it.
Well, actually, there is another thing even more sophomoric than that: tossing out insults like 'cute' and 'niave' rather than following up with a substantive rebuttal, another fallacy commonly referred to as 'ad homonim', and even more commonly as 'trolling.'
think you've described advertising a little bit more insidius than it usually is. Most advertising is nothing more than brand or product awareness, as the prior poster excellently described
... indeed some of the techniques are outright subliminal).
You mistake motive and means. If you study some of advanced texts in marketing (I had a friend who studied marketing, so I did read some of these texts, and had some very interesting and illuminating conversations on the subject with her as a result), or peruse some of the even more interesting graduate work that has been done in the field, it is all about indoctrination and conditioning, much of it through repetition (not all of it, there are other rather insidious and borderline-subliminal techniques that are used
That isn't to say that techniques of indoctrinating or conditioning the masses are being used to promote this evil goal or that evil goal, as I said in my final paragraph, the reason these techniques, which most people, were they aware of them, would consider evil or at least unethical, are being used is for a much more banal reason: simple profits, be they profits for a legitimate, small time entrepreneur (like another friend who runs a computer consultancy), al egitimate large corporation, or a neferious large corporation (e.g. Monsanto or Microsoft).
No neferious agenda is needed for the methodology itself to be insidious, and any scruitiny of our current marketing methodologies shows their lack of compunction in employing some of the more neferious strategies available, and known to the non-military world, in doing so.
The ends may be relatively benign (as in my coca-cola example), but the means are appalling and dehumanizing, to say the least.
This may surprise you, but this statement is contradicting itself. By naming a specific brand, you are proving that television does have an effect on you.
... adults can be convinced of anything, given enough time. There was once a study done where an adult was convinced the sky was red through sheer repetition alone, despite knowing otherwise. Although that didn't hold ... their knowledge that the sky was blue was too powerful, and no harsher techniques were employed to break them down first, the subjects of the study had a difficult time differentiating between red and blue for a very long time after the study was concluded. I wish I could find the exact reference to that study, but I'm at work and the name of the study doesn't spring to mind for a handy google search. Perhaps some kind soul reading this will provide a link). Something like, say, a disgustingly flavored, surupy dark brown sugary drink laced with cocain or, when that becomes illegal, caffein. Especially if it has a nice bright, easilly recognized logo that can be plastered about, reinforcing that conditioning in people's every day lives, and especially if it has a short, rythmic name like, say, Coca-Cola.
... George Orwell's nightmare didn't come from government, it came from industry, powered not by some sinister desire to dominate mankind, but by simple, benal human greed. There is a very profound social lesson in all of this, though I'm not sure we as a society are very equipped to learn from it.
schon is absolutely right here, though the actual impact is missed (brand awareness is a very small part of the overall marketing picture).
Repetition is one of the most reliable indoctrination (often called by the misnomer "brain washing") techniques around, particularly if you are working without a deadline (if you do have a deadline, there are other, quite effective means of breaking a person and reconstructing the desired attitude, but while they are faster, none of these are anywhere near as reliable as simple repitition over an extended period of time). If you do not believe that marketing involves the application of serious indoctrination techniques, I suggest you read a couple of advanced textbooks, or graduate level thesis, on the subject. Indoctrination is most definitely what it is about, though that terminology is generally avoided.
In short, you can be talked into liking and desiring the most unlikely of things through sheer repetition, particularly if such repetition begins during early childhood (but it doesn't need to
When was the last time you made it through the day without seeing that logo, or hearing the name, at least once?
Advertisers do not want to allow us to change our viewing habits because doing so takes away one of the primary conduits by which they can condition us to want their products, and advertisers pay top dollar for access to these conditioning conduits. Believe it or not, we as viewers are sold as chattel to advertisers, literally, at a little over a dollar an hour for our viewership.
They have no desire to sell the content to us, to make us their customers. We are the chattel they sell to their paying customers today, the advertisers, and they don't believe they'll ever make as much money selling their entertainment to us as they do selling us to their advertisers.
It is rather a sobering and disturbing thought
This message will doubtlessly spawn messages accusing the industry of lack of ability to change with advances in technology, and so forth along with the usual crapola about "it's our airwaves, dammit" [emphesis added]
... the fact that the broadcasters have used them with relative impunity for 70+ years doesn't change that, and pointing that fact out certainly isn't "crapola" by anyone's definition, except perhaps that of the broadcasters themselves.
How on earth is that "crapola?" They are public airwaves that the broadcaster's are using
It may win on some minor points, but it mostly just gives the broadcasters time to secure settlements with PVR companies and come up with alternate technologies and models.
Based on the demands of Hollywood and the recording industry to date, and the trends in Washington, how on earth can you justify a "don't worry, be happy" attitude like this? Those new technologies and models are likely to incorporate the worst in big brother activity monitoring (perhaps even two way samplers?) and certainly draconian copyright controls, if those industries have their druthers (and it looks like they very well might). In the context of what has been happening a "don't worry, be happy" attitude is absolutey and completely unjustified. Indeed, it such an attitude is likely to insure that one of the more repressive scenerios is more likely to play out.
This mantra of don't get involved, don't worry, relax, be apathetic, go one with your life, nothing to see here, is exactly why we are in the mess we are in today. I really can't believe people were stupid enough to moderate that up to +5 insightful, except that some gullible people hear cynicism and mistake it for worldliness, intelligence, and even wisdom, when in fact it is none of those things, nor does it even imply any of those things.
Yes, the sun will come up tommorow. It rose and set perfectly on schedule over the killing fields of cambodia and the repressed millions in the old soviet block, and it will rise and set right on schedule over the western world, whether that world enjoys the freedoms of the past, or a future of authoritarian rule grounded in the enforcement of "intellectual property" in a society whose technology has long since made that notion incompatible with individual freedom.
If people follow your advice and do nothing, the latter becomes signficantly more likely.
That is what security services are for.
[ begin Max Headroom quote]
"Protecting your right to unlimited television and consumer credit.
"Security Systems. In your home, in your place of work, wherever you go, there we are."
[ end Max Headroom quote ]
Even Osama bin Laden, with government support
Just to clarify, with support of the Afghan (and possibly a couple of other) government at the time, the Taliban.
Osama "the fallatio queen" bin Laden
I didn't realize I'd left that in there. That comes from a private joke centered around the notion of abducting Osama, bringing him to the US for a sex change operation, then sending him back to live under Islamic law as a woman. The joke was that his own men wouldn't recognize him, and even if they did, they would likely relegate him to fallatio whore status. An amusing joke, and one I've grown accustomed to typing into emails, but I didn't really intend to include it here.
"This case illustrates the failure of law enforcement agencies to implement adequate protection against the abuse of information they collect."
This case illustrates the failure of trusting and empowering large beaurocratic entities to snoop into everyone's lives in the mistaken notion that will somehow make us all "safer."
Individuals have never come close to committing the level and magnitude of atrocities that governments, including our own (USA), have, in terms of lives destroyed and even taken, not to mention human suffering in unthinkable numbers. Consider WW I, WW II, the Nazi regime, the Stalin regime, the Mao regime, the Khmere Rouge regime, the Saddam Hussein regime, and the Taliban regime. Even Osama bin Laden, with government support was unable to match any of those in shere atrocities committed (and what Osama "the fallatio queen" bin Laden did manage to do he likely couldn't have pulled that off without ongoing aid and support from the Taliban regime).
If events like these do not illuminate the fallacy of giving up freedom and handing the government authority over our lives in the mistaken notion that it will keep us safer, then really nothing will and our society as such is doomed.
George has a far better reason to avoid fan fiction. If someone writes a fan fic called "episode 3: they came from outer space" and it follows the movie george eventually releases, the fanfic author can attempt to sue George for copyright violation.
That is an interesting take, however it really doesn't justify George Lucas' draconian stance on fan fiction (and he isn't alone, plenty of other areas of fan fiction have been suppressed as well).
He owns the copyright on the Star Wars universe, he need merely make as a condition that any fan fiction written be licensed for use by him, for inclusion in any later Star Wars work, at his discretion. Any works, and artists, not agreeing to said license, would then be in violation of his license. Not a perfect solution, but certainly better than the wholesale censorship we're seeing now.
More reasons why copyright stiffles innovation.
Amen. Copyright law makes a mess of this no matter how you slice it, which is why I advocate coming up with a replacement scheme that does not grant restrictive government mandated monopolies as a means of compensating artists, but employs some other methodology more compatable with societal freedom instead. I've thrown out several ideas, all of which I believe meet the minimum standard of not being significantly worse for the artist than the existing copyright situation, and one of which would likely be quite a bit better for most not-so-well known artists. Unfortunately, only one other person has seen fit to toss out a suggestion (see the last paragraph of his post, and he and I disagree deeply on the usefulness of copyright)... everyone else seems to be engaged in a knee-jerk defense of the existing approach without even really considering the issues in any depth. Even though he and I disagree, he's thus far the only one to offer a constructive suggestion as to how this might be addressed.
Not a terribly promising indication of what the future holds in store, I'm afraid.
In my opinion the solution is the creation of alternative economies in which the big boys don't get a chance to play because the copyright is held in common.
While I disagree with much of your post, and your assumptions, I won't belabor the issue further as I suspect we're the only two reading this thread at this point, and we are going to have to agree to disagree I think.
But I did want to compliment you on this final thought. You are, I believe, the only person in this entire thread who responded to my call for suggestions as to alternatives and ideas to address these issues in a creative context that doesn't necessarilly include copyright, and given the current framework we have to work with (copyright laws as they now stand) your suggestion is quite brilliant.
While not an alternative system to copyright per se, the idea of creating an alternative economy where copyright is held in common is fascinating. Indeed, it is a very interesting alternative to copyright as it is currently being exploited (and in some ways analogous to the GPL, which for certain philosophical reasons I like), and until a better regime can be put into place (if that ever becomes possible) it is a very cool idea for creating something of a public commons in the interim.
It won't end the social costs and criminalization of common human patterns like sharing that copyright has come to entail in the digital age, but it may at least allow the creation of an island of sanity amidst the madness, and that is certainly a good start.
Quantum physics does NOT imply that there are a finite number of states. The "Hilbert space" of quantum physics may be either finite or infinite.
... luckily there are plenty of knowledgable folks like yourself around to keep me honest when I mispeak. :-)
You are correct, and I meant (and should have used the the word) can rather than does, ie. QM can imply a finite number of states. My entire point was that it was a mistake to argue that QM justifies the sumary dismissal of Wolfram's work before we've even read it, not to take sides in a question that is, afaik, still open and unknown.
In any case, no self-respecting physicist would infer that the universe as a whole has a finite number of states on the basis of a formalism used to describe experiments on things which are on the order of magnitude of Planck's constant.
You're right, it is unlikely any physicist would argue that point one way or the other, since it really isn't known one way or the other whether space-time is continuous, or granular, at that level, or at scales even smaller than that (if they in fact exist), much less whether the number of possible states is finite, or infinite. Again, I worded the first sentence of my post poorly, as I believe I acknowledged in another post as well. This is slashdot, and the web interface isn't terribly helpful in trying to proofread even short posts like this (as most people's spelling, mine included, reflect)
Linus has always favoured pragmatic reasons over idealogical ones. In this case, all he was doing was trying to avoid referencing a highly political organization, the FSF, in favour of a more neutral one.
In other posts he told people to get rid of references to the FSF. When the keeper of the HOWTO objected, saying they had always referenced the FSF and, like it or not, political questions do arise, then Linus came back with the comment you quoted. It was very clear from the context of the entire thread that he wants references to the FSF expunged from the kernel documentation, which, like it or not, is a very political stance for him to be taking. As a person he has a right to take a political stance, but it is profoundly hypocritical to be taking a political stance against a person or an organization and then claiming to be 'non-political.'
It would have IMHO been ok to list a fairly "neutral" site (though Debian seems to be fairly firmly in the Freedom camp), but why not list it (and the opposing opensource site as well) in addition to an already existing reference to the FSF, and let people make up their own mind. Why censor all references to the FSF, if one is, as he claims, "apolitical?"
Why expunge and, in effect, censor out any reference to the FSF, particularly when they are the ones that have provided most of the tools that made Linux possible in the first place, and particularly when RMS has asked, even begged, that they at least include a pointer to the FSF so people are aware they exist and can find out what they are about? Unless Linus is simply letting his personal dislike for RMS dictate this policy, it simply doesn't make any sense to me.
Indeed, it seems to me to be an act of profound contempt and ingratitude, and it disgusts me very deeply. I say this as one who has never been a particularly strong advocate of the FSF v. the Open Source movement, having tended toward the more pragmatic view on things myself (though my own recent experiences with Blender, and the arguments of both sides, are changing that stance somewhat. More so as I watch all of this unfold).
And if George Lucas' work is so worthless, why then do you care whether or not you can copy it?
More logical fallacy.
Being allowed to write fiction set within the same universe as another story does not constitute copying that story.
Pointing out that some of the fan fiction is superior to the last two scripts Lucas has produced does not equal a claim that George Lucas' work is worthless, merely inferior in one subjective opinion.
Insisting that the social cost of copyright is too high, as are the restrictions it imposes on freedom of speech as exemplified by the fan fiction example I provided does not equal bitterness or resentment, though both emotions are considered by most to be justified when one's freedoms and liberties are being trampled upon for something as banal as the financial betterment of another.
Furthermore, stating that you provided an example showing two demonstrably (and in my previous post shown in great detail to be) different things to be the same thing[1] when in fact you did not does not change the fact that you failed to provide any supporting evidence that a right or privelege to do something equates a requirement to do something else.
Finally, stating that I did not offer a compelling proof that two things that are different by all definitions of the concepts and words as expressed in the English language, when in fact I did provide a clarifying example[2] to underscore that point, is both inaccurate (see above) but also irrelevant, as the burden of proof on equating two disparate and different things lies on the person claiming the two prima facia different things are, in some context, the same. You fail in this spectacularly, and your obtuseness leads me to the reluctant conclusion that I haven't been engaged in a discussion with an intelligent person here, but rather have been feeding a troll.
Discussion is over.
Indeed.
[1][FreeUser] What is more, you are equaiting two different things: the right to copy and build on something v. the requirement to cite and credit a source.
[sheldon]Odd since they are the same thing.
[2]right != requirement.
inclusion != citation.
Works citing other works != Derivative works.
As an example of the last, since it seems to be escaping you, it is quite common for academic research papers to cite other works in the field, even works upon which they are not themselves basing or building their research upon, because such works refer to interesting tangents or asides which come up from time to time, or because the publication explores a parallel thought on the subject (or the same thought from a different angle). Including a footnote with a book's title and author (a citation), with or without including any excerpts from the cited work, does not make the document a "derivative work" in any sense of the word, any more than this text is a derivative work of the roman alphabet (despite being written in the same).
What is more, you are equaiting two different things: the right to copy and build on something v. the requirement to cite and credit a source.
... you've merely silenced an entire genre of interesting fiction. People obsessed with Star Wars, or Star Trek, or whatever aren't going to start inventing their own worlds because their fan fiction has been banned, they will simply stop writing altogether, or continue writing and sharing their fiction amongst themselves in an underground, black market of ideas and creativity (which is what the vast majority of such folks do). Meanwhile our culture as a whole is diminished, because the rest of us do not ever have access to that work (much of which is quite good.
... our culture, however, is poorer for it.
Odd since they are the same thing.
A right to use something is the same thing as a requirement to credit the source?
It is you who do not understand logic. Argument by analogy is a perfectly accepted form of argument, particularly when used to clarify and restate an illogical comment in terms more commonly understood. On the other hand, making unsupported statements that a right to do something equals a requirement to do something else is a logical fallacy not accepted by anyone other than the inane.
As an analogy (which is a useful discussion tool despite your bold, and incorrect, assertion that it implies a lack of understanding of logic), you have said the logical equivelent of "red is the same thing as green." That may be true, if you are discussing the texture of an apple's skin, or the resolution of an Apple iMac's screen, but without supporting argument clarifying, in rational, logical, and above all factual terms, why you think two completely different concepts are the same, in this case the right to incorporate one work within another derivative work (a right which does not exist in copyright, and for which a 'fair use' exception to copyright was later made to accomodate) to the academic requirement that sources cited be credited, you are simply making a flatout illogical statement without support. To clarify for the logically challenged:
right != requirement.
inclusion != citation.
Works citing other works != Derivative works.
As an example of the last, since it seems to be escaping you, it is quite common for academic research papers to cite other works in the field, even works upon which they are not themselves basing or building their research upon, because such works refer to interesting tangents or asides which come up from time to time, or because the publication explores a parallel thought on the subject (or the same thought from a different angle). Including a footnote with a book's title and author (a citation), with or without including any excerpts from the cited work, does not make the document a "derivative work" in any sense of the word, any more than this text is a derivative work of the roman alphabet (despite being written in the same).
Your other logical fallacy is of course your statement, without logical support, that allowing (e.g. Star Wars) fan fiction would result in a world where Star Wars was the only form of fiction. This is demonstrably false, as evidenced by the rich variety of legend and fiction that existed prior to the invention of copyright, particularly in stage plays and operas throught Europe from the enlightement onward.
You eliminate fan fiction and you haven't promoted innovation
Don't get me wrong, George Lucas has good reason to ban serious fan fiction from his universe. Much of it is vastly superior to the tripe he has been putting out of late (Ep. 1 and 2). He is certainly richer as a result of being able to silence other creative people who are fans of that particular mythos
Without Linus's kernel, the "Gnu system" would be completely irrelevant today.
... at the time, FreeBSD was the first free operating system I found, and while there were a lot of GNU tools in use on Sun and other BSD systems, Linux was relatively unknown. The legal issues forced myself and others to look further, and Linus' kernel was the only other offering at the time.
That simply isn't true. Indeed, your next sentence admits as much
The BSDs would still have gotten out of the legal wrangling with AT&T before the HURD was done, and FreeBSD would have taken the mindshare that Linux got.
Which would have been fine. The reason I ended up using GNU/Linux instead of BSD was because of that legal wrangling
However, had BSD won the mindshare the GNU/Linux has, it wouldn't have hurt the FSF at all. As others have noted, much of the GNU stuff is being used in the BSD world today because it is good software. Contrary to popular myth, BSD and the FSF/GPL are not all that adversarial. Their disagreement is more one of strategy not philosophy. Indeed, the FSF specifically endorsed using the BSD license with the ogg-vorbis stuff, specifically because it was a more strategic license for getting the standard more widely adopted in embedded systems.
And, unlike Linus' recent comments on the LKML saying in effect "take any references to the FSF out of the FAQ, none of our documentation should point people to the FSF at all", the BSD folks seem happy to coexist with the FSF and even mention them on occasion, despite having no affiliation. In other words, the FSF would be just as big a player had BSD won the majority of the mindshare as it is with Linux having won it, only to have some of its leadership actively trying to steer people away from the FSF and the message they are trying to convey.
I must admit I lost most of my respect for Linus when he made that comment. He claims not to want to be political, but then he takes very political stances on questions like that, actively steering people away from the one organization to which he owes his fame and much of his career. Being anti-FSF is as political a stance to take as being pro-FSF, and deliberately trying to silence the voice of those who have contributed 90% of what makes Linux a UNIX-like operating system is not only profoundly political, it is indefensibly political against the very people to whome the community owes so much.
It is ironic that, as someone who has been using GNU/Linux since the 0.48x days (and who was as unfuriated as the rest with RMS's lignux nonsense) that I have come full circle to understand and respect RMS's point of view, and that now the behavior of Linus and some others, whome I've held in high regard for over a decade, is such that they have become in some respects as offensive to me as RMS once was.
I will continue to use the operating system, and to contribute in my way, because I believe in free software and have profited greatly from it, but while I am quite critical of RMS, I am utterly disillusioned with Linus' rather hypocritical stances on these issues and the profoundly arrogant ingratitude he seems to be displaying of late.
Patronage. Patronage has frequently been a serious problem for both free speech and the free market as patrons try to assert control over the artist's work. In addition, there are a number of cases where the person just doesn't get paid.
How is this any different from "works for hire" which is how most artists (authors excepted) are effectively paid these days, be they actors, screenwriters, or musicians. Indeed, the RIAA tried (and nearly succeeded) to have all works defined as work for hire, then backed off when the realized the PR fallout that would ensue.
A patronage-only scheme in which only labor is compensated, and the actual created work is considered to be not property doesn't give the artist much room to negotiate more compensation.
Most artists have very little room to negotiate now, at least until they become well known. Prince (or the Artist Formerly Known As) is one of many examples of very successful artists who had no room to negotiate when he started out, got rooked, and then, to get out of it, had to give up his very identity in the process. I do not know the statistics on the number of artists who manage to negotiate something resembling a fair contract vs. those who do not (because, lets face it, the media cartels hold most of the cards in such negotiations, particularly in the beginning), but I would be very surprised if more than a small fraction of the artists in question had anything approaching a fair contract. In other words, I do not think copyright is any better at protecting artists in this regards than the patronage system, and it has a hell of a lot of societal costs associated with it.
Buskering. I agree with your criticisms as to its weaknesses in a copyright free world with no alternative system to replace it (and I offer a solution below, where I discuss possible alternatives to copyright that don't involve simply abandoning it and leaving a vacuum in its place).
You point out some important pros of copyright, but these pros are not innate in copyright itself, nor is copyright required in order to have them.
1: Legal grounds for proof of authorship.
Copyright could be replaced with a Requirement of Authorship, where an author is required to be given credit for their work (and those making changes in a derivative work required to take responsibility for those changes, in addition to citing the author's initial contribution). This question is completely orthogonal to the question of granting government mandated monopolies to authors or artists, and does not require copyright in order to be addressed.
2: Control over how the work and derivative work is used.
While there are pros to this kind of requirement (the GPL uses it to leverage more openness out of a public commons than might otherwise arise), it is my opinion that the cons (denying people access to and the ability to use material as they like) is greater. BSD, for example, doesn't rely on these controls, and while it isn't as strategic in countering the likes of Microsoft as the GPL is, I think the gain in giving that up far outweighs the downside.
Indeed, with BSD this has happened (consider Apple's OS X), and it hasn't appeared to harm BSD at all. It is a fair argument that a free market, rather than coercian for or against source code availability (in a copyright-free scenerio) is perhaps a better way to resolve the question.
However, that having all been said, there appears to be an assumption in all of this that I am advocating an abandonment of copyright with nothing to replace this. I find it curious that this is the assumption everyone is operating from, particularly when my original post called for discussion on possible alternatives to copyright that might accomplish the same purported goals (insuring the artist gets just compensation) without the social costs (government mandated and enforced monpolies and a command marketplace).
Somehow copyright discussions seem to entail an incredible lack of creativity. The IP proponents argue we must have copyright because of X, Y, and Z, and no one seems to question whether X, Y, and Z are (a) even desirable in the larger picture or (b) require copyright to be accomplished.
Take the busking example. In a world without copyright, but with a Requirement of Authorship, and Perhaps a corrallary Exemption of Authorship that exemps works sold by the artist (or a duly appointed publisher) from taxes that would be levied against a competitor selling the same book/record/etc. you could give artists an economic edge over others, not authorized but nevertheless entitled to publish and sell a work, without granting them an all out monopoly, or restrict how others might use or incorporate said works in their derivative material.
There are literally dozens if not hundreds of possible approaches and variations on this kind of concept, where systems could be put in place that are relatively unobtrusive, help stack the free market in favor of the creative artist without throwing away the free market altogether and granting artificial monopolies the government then has to go around in jackboots enforcing.
In other words, getting back to my original call for an exploration of alternatives to copyright, we should consider designing, from the ground up, a system designed to maximize the freedom of the artist and the society while insuring just compensation (which I would not equate with 'the right to get rich' or 'the right to make sure no one else can make anything on the work', but rather the right to get paid for the work, and perhaps the right to an advantage in the marketplace in trying to get paid for the work) and, most importantly, without trampling on the freedoms of the rest of society at large.
A small number of the most popular artists would be able to make enough money through contributions, patronage, endorsements, etc. to do fine. It's the millions of other writers, artists, programmers, analysts, etc. that I'm more worried about.
You know, it isn't any different from the world we currently inhabit with copyright. The Stephen Kings and Ansel Adams' of the world do fine, and generally are able to negotiate reasonable contracts from their publishers, while the millions of lesser known artists are not, and generally are victimized as a result, earning pennies on the dollar (at best) and often losing all rights to their own creation in the process. Their alternative to not playing ball by the publisher's rules (in this case, the recording or movie industry)? No exposure at all, and no ability to earn from their craetion anyway.
None of the approaches I suggested off the top of my head, with virtually no thought, are any worse at all in this respect, and with a little creativity I think we could come up with something a whole hell of a lot better.
But first we have to be willing to consider the possiblity that copyright is not the right way to be going about this, and thus far, as far as I can tell, there are very few people open minded enough to even consider the possibility, much less explore what alternatives there might be.
Good news to IP proponents, to publisher, to the recording industry, and to Hollywood. Bad news for artists, for consumers, and for the tech industry that is about to get steam rollered under those very same laws, and their natural extentions to the digital world.
I certainly agree that releasing open-source and open-content is a good thing but the GPL IS NOT DESIGNED TO NEGATE THE RESTRICTIONS OF COPYRIGHT, INSTEAD IT DEPENDS ON THEM TO ENSURE THAT DERIVATIVE WORKS ARE ALSO FREE. Without copyright, there can be no copyleft. The ONLY thing that keeps free software free is the existence of a copyright law that permits users to control derivative works.
Oh. My. God.
You really do not get free software, do you, much less Free Media or Open Content.
The GPL exists for the sole purpose of insuring the 4 freedoms as laid out by the Free Software Foundation: the freedom to use, the freedom to copy, the freedom to modify, and the freedom to share your modifications with others. Without copyright you would have all of these freedoms, and as Richard Stallman himself, the author of the GPL, has said, without copyright the GPL wouldn't be necessary at all.
The existence of free software doesn't depend on copyright. The existence of free software depends on licenses like the BSD and GPL licenses because copyright law makes the world a hostile place to free software by default. They are a defense against a hostile system that happens to use that system's own rules against itself. Do not confuse the existence of the hack (the GPL) with the existence of free software. The former by definition relies on copyright, the latter exists in spite of copyright.
In fact, all of these approaches insure the exact opposite.
Thus far, I have backed up my assertions with real world examples of it functioning (albeit not always perfectly). You, on the other hand, have just made a very broad statement without a single shred of evidence to back it up. I do hope your academic publications were a little more rigorous than that.
I'm also curious how copyright limits your freedom of speech.
One example is fan fiction. If I write a very original, interesting novel set in the Star Trek universe, for example, Universal can and will keep me from sharing that work widely (certainly from publishing it, even not-for-profit). George Lucas is notorious for this in the Star Wars universe, so much so that when he coopted the Fan Fiction convention he immediately turned around and banned 80% of the material or so, because it wasn't a spoof or parody, it was serious fiction that happened to be set in the same universe he owns the copyright on.
These peoples creative works are no more derivative than most other peoples (who take their sources from public domain materials like the Grimm Fairytails in Disney's case, or more classical works in other cases. Think of all the books that have been based on the Legend of King Arthur, for example.
Banning all those creative works is a limitation on people's freedom of speech, and a non-trivial limitation at that. It also diminishes us culturally, and leads to a lot of lost creativity as a result. That impoverishes all of us.
It seems the same would be true of plagarism rules in our academic environments.
That is a logical fallacy. You are equating a general restriction on all of society with a very specific restriction in a private environment regarding a specific task. What is more, you are equaiting two different things: the right to copy and build on something v. the requirement to cite and credit a source.
As an example, what you are saying is equivelent to "Legalizing cigarrettes would be equivelent to allowing cigarette smoking in school" which of course simply isn't true. Doing away with copyright doesn't do away with the concept of plagarism at all, any more than the existence of free software does away with the concept of cheating on homework problems in your CS class.
Being a bit pedantic, aren't we?
Not really. The problem with much of the discussion of copyright law, and IP law in general, is that people take as axiomatic assumptions that the law makes, but that a longer view of history indicates aren't warranted.
Much of the justification for IP law has, at its heart, a circular argument much like the one given above.
You can believe you should have certain priveleges to restrict others from expressing themselves in a manner which mimics an expression you made earlier (such as singing a tune you came up with, etc.), to paraphrase your non-circular statement, but now that it has been made in a non-circular manner it is easy and straightforward for another to say "I don't believe you should have the right to restrict my expression merely because you think of something first", and at that point it is possible to have a reasonable discusion on the pros and cons of either approach.
Until you clarify and eliminate the circular reasoning and statement of assumptions as if they were unassailable axioms so endemic in IP thought today, it simply isn't even possible to discuss the topic, except in terms set by just one side (those who favor copy restrictions over freedom of expression).