>>If he succeeds, then REAL scifi authors could have a field day. No more helicopters, hovercraft, or zillions of other inventions they wrote about without getting their permission first...
>Wicked Lasers designed their laser to look like a lightsaber. They say they didn't - so I guess until a judge says whose right it's just your word against theirs.
>Lucas owns the trademark on the lightsaber name and look. So ? Trademark law only applies within similar field. This is not a movie prop, it's not a toy and it's not even a sword-like weapon. It's an industrial cutting laser. That is a radically different market. What's next, will you suggest the manufacturers of Linux Brand Tile Soap (yes it exists, and there are about a dosen other products with the name) get to sue Linus Torvalds ?
>Lucas sues to protect his trademark. Trademark law doesn't apply - and the letter never mentions it anyway, it clearly states that it's a copyright letter. Until they prove that a real utility device can violate the copyright of a fictional device with a completely different purpose - their letter is just a threaten-them-and-hope-they-back-down.
>This will somehow lead to the downfall of civilization as "REAL scifi authors" attempt to enforce trademarks they do not have. Your +4 Insightful shames us all.
Well it certainly appears that this is how George Lucas thinks it should work, don't fault the GP for pointing this out.
No they bloody well aren't. The article clearly states that these are fully functional portable laser devices - intended primarily for industrial and military use. In fact the amount of people buying them for non-industrial use has led the company to modify them and ship them with significant extra safety features to prevent accidents from people buying them as novelties.
>The concept of this non-functioning object is taken from the movie....
No, it is not. The movie has a device in it which violates the current laws of physics. Light that only travels a short distance then stops, cuts through metal but cannot move through OTHER light of the same kind... While THIS device is cutting laser, much like the ones used for surgery or industrial machining. The difference is only that this device is portable.
>Helicopters, communication devices, and other thought of ideas became inventions that could not really be disputed. It's because >those inventions were a concept the -author could not make- into reality
As pointed out above, the concept of a lightsaber cannot be made into reality - it violates every known law of physics so short of a radical new discovery or something "like light" which ISN'T - it's NEVER going to exist. Therefore no functional real world device can possibly be said to be based on it.
>I'm pretty sure george lucas could have financed and made the same/similar toys if he felt like it.
He does. This is not a toy.
>Now I'm not saying that i agree with this action. Consider it like this: you have to pay the owner of the "Gundam" name in order >to call a humanoid robot machine a "Gundam" the same probably is going to be argued with these lightsaber toys.
That's trademark law - and it doesn't exist to protect companies (another reason "ip" is a bad term) it exists to protect consumers - so that when I by a defy fridge I can be reasonably sure it's not a cheap knock-off but the real thing I'm paying a premium for.
>As stated in the article, the company has made similar devices before. Only this time it was intended to look like a lightsaber.
How the hell did you manage to READ the article yet miss all the other actual FACTS in it ? Like that the device is not a toy, was not itended to "look like a lightsaber", and was never intended to be sold to the general public - so much so in fact that when hte public started to buy them they had to ALTER the design to make it safe ?
Well whose surprised ? Form sometimes must follow function. It's not an ACCIDENT that the Martin Aircraft Company's real Jetpacks look so much like the one Boba Fet had on - it's the only shape a backpack with a jet-engine CAN be.
Are you seriously suggesting that Pixar and Tarantino TOGETHER have made them as much money as Snow White alone ? Not to mention Rapunzel, The hunchback of Notre Dame, Alladin, Tarzan (again - came out within a year after Buroughs original copyright expired).
They have a roughly 80 year history of films made from stories that were in the public domain, not to mention the additional income from toys and other branding. The pixar and Tarantino branches are both only in the last 20 years or so of that period. Disney has a history of taking works from the public domain and creating profitable works from them - and then claiming copyright on said derivations. I have my doubts about the morality of this but it's certainly legal. The point is though - Disney is so intent on keeping their one truly original creation (Mickey Mouse) under copyright and NOT contributing it to the world as the people they took from did that they have ensured the extension of copyright TWICE to make it happen. That's not even considering that where it suited them - they have on occasion actually outright stolen stories that were copyrighted creating highly profitable works - simply because the small companies they were stealing from simply could not afford to try and sue them. The lion king is perhaps the worst example of that.
Tit for tat goes the saying. We set up copyright in the way it is so THAT companies like Disney could take it's stories and make movies people love - that's fine. It's NOT fine to refuse to play ball and give you own works BACK to that pool when the time comes so that OTHER companies and people can do the same.
>And it goes without saying that this doesn't apply at all to anaphylactic reactions like allergies to bee stings, shellfish, nuts, or things like that.
Indeed, those go the other way entirely. I've been allergic to bee stings my whole life. As a child the symptoms were about as benign as they could be: delayed swelling (by about 12 hours). With each subsequent sting however, the allergy got worse and worse. The last time I got stung I ended up in hospital needing antihistamine injections and an tube down my throat as the swelling was making it impossible to breath. That was a good ten years ago though, I'm very careful around them - which is why I haven't been stung since, and I keep an epi-pen with me at all times.
>Whether we like it or not Disney and Paramount and NBC make some decent products.
To answer your question: Disney made the vast majority of it's fortune by borrowing FROM the public domain. The scripts for nearly all their best selling movies were based on older stories on which the copyright had expired (or never existed).
So why should Disney be allowed to BENEFIT from the expiration of the copyright once owned by Hans Christian Anderson and the Brother's Grimm but not be expected to CONTRIBUTE in the same way to the NEXT generation of artists ?
No, of course not - but it ought to ONE of the considerations surely ? And it's the only one that we CAN mathematically work out. We can only make predictions on the outcome with a limited amount of success, we can only make determinations on how good or bad such an outcome would be based on philosophy and believe systems (which are not the same things despite having overlaps). You made it quite clear that our ideas about what would constitute a good outcome is radically different, arguing the pros and cons of it is rather besides the point of the discussion I think (which is why I didn't) but I'm up for it if you insist.
That will not be a purely scientific discussion though. We can use science to inform the philosophical discussion but science doesn't answer the questions we'll be asking, only provides facts we can use to strengthen possible answers. There is no formula for a good civilization and you cannot calculate "goodness" Indeed there are people around today, most of PETA, for one that genuinely believe that "good" is the unfettered survival of every OTHER species, even if the price is human extinction. Very few other humans would agree. You cannot determine which is better without asking "better for WHO exactly" - and that is the one question science doesn't ask or try to answer.
Even if you agree on the who - you can still have a long debate about what is "good" for that who. This is ALWAYS a matter of believe. But we can at least identify an evolutionary trend that favors sharing of resources and declare it a basic human trait as it is among ALL social animals (and indeed in all social animals there are thieves too - the moment sharing shows up as a survival tactic, you set the stage for the evolution of cheating) but we sure as hell don't want to let the cheaters be in charge or resource allocation ! NO social animal is THAT stupid.
>You've taken the step from seeing what humanity is (science, fact), to declaring the purpose it is "created" to achieve (application of arbitrary, subjective belief), and that it is "wrong" to deny that purpose.
I did nothing of the kind. Your inability to see past this perception, combined with your absolute cynicism makes you completely unable to appreciate anything I'm saying and makes further debate utterly pointless. I NEVER said that humanity was created with a purpose. I SAID that since we are ABLE to set goals, it would be a good idea if we DID set goals. I said that such goals have the best chance of succeeding if we look at science (including our evolutionary history) to determine the ones most readily achievable and stated a belief that much of human history consists of (often unknowingly) doing just that. Doing it knowingly means we can be rational and selective in how we do it however- and that HAS to work better.
Until you can acknowledge the VAST difference between this and what you percieve me to be saying there is no point in answering anything else you said on the simple principle that you're debunking arguments I never made. Without understanding their context, it's impossible to understand their substance - and ergo, you're arguing against something other than what I said in your entire post.
Everything you say makes sense but you're still missing out on the fact that there IS some science. That there is a degree of philosophy in my thinking is true (but I beg to differ - it's not religious in the least, on the contrary - it's decidedly humanist) but that the things I stated here are based on verifiable scientific fact is not even worth arguing about. Every species has a basic urge to survive. Every member of every species a basic urge to procreate. The fewer offspring a species produces the stronger it's parental-care urges become - by whatever route - survival of the species is the most basic driving force instilled by evolution in every living thing. It has to be- because any living thing WITHOUT a drive to ensure it's own survival (this need not be a conscious process, an amoeba doesn't KNOW it's securing it's species' survival when it splits down the middle) doesn't survive. I did not however say we should be LIMITED to our basic evolutionary basis- the small clans you accurately describe. Lion males make a habit when taking over a female of killing any cubs sired by the previous male, to ensure more food for their own offspring.
That's evolutionary drive to ensure your own genetics too. We can and should be MORE than our evolution, but we cannot deny it's existence. Evolution made us what we are, but (accidentally but that's not the point) it also gave us the ability to be more than our basic drives. We can codify our ideals into laws. We can invent lies like justice, honor, love, peace and beauty.
Rip up the universe, grind it down to it's component atoms and find me just ONCE atom of justice. There isn't such a thing. But we have the power to make it up - and the power to reify it and, in an odd way, MAKE it exist. We didn't evolve so that we'd have this ability, but we evolved until we did anyway (by which I don't mean we're DONE evolving, I'm just describing the present state).
Now we are ABLE to care, to love, to pursue peace (or war), to preserve life or destroy it, to create justice or injustice, beauty or terror. You're suggesting that nothing can let us choose our path here except unfounded belief systems, and that one is as good as another. Bullshit. We can study history, we can consider our basic drives, we can learn to acknowledge our shared humanity and we can make civilizing choices. There will be resistance from belief systems that are built on seperatism, but to declare that the volcano god's desire for a sacrifice is an equal belief to the one that says "there is a basic drive to survive in all living things -and therefore it's only to be expected that we as humans should try to survive as a species" is just plain stupid.
The second one is based on observable, testable, verifiable science. The conclusion drawn FROM that source can be debated, but there MUST be a point where the few conclusions drawn from a scientific source gets more respect than those drawn from imaginary stories about why it rains.
Either way -none of this changes or is even all that relevant to the point I tried to make. Sharing rituals are core to every child-raising pattern everywhere in the world. The belief in sharing is a fundamental drive - we demand and expect to see the wealthy (selfish and greedy as they are) do charity because we expect of them to share. We never stop thinking they are selfish and greedy when they do, but that illusion of sharing still somehow satisfies us even as they amass billions while so many of our kinsmen starve. It plays to our evolutionary drive to share resources (it's bad theater but it works). We borrow sugar from our neighbors and we set up carpools. We pool our time-and-labor to build factories and whole economies. Sometimes we cooperate to slaughter the people in the next valley. But humans want to cooperate, they want to share - with their friends, neighbors, families. As the communications technology of our age makes the gaps between people ever easier to traverse cultures merge ever more the size of our groupings get bigge
>Wow. You're comparing the freedom to make poor choices for yourself to someone ELSE deciding to kill you. Oh yes, sure, we should treat those two categories in exactly the same way, I'm sure that would work well.
No, what I (and Schneier whom I was quoting) are saying is that humans are really bad at threat assessment. Our abilities in this regard came from an evolution that gave us "flight or fight" and defined "unusual" as "dangerous". That's FINE if you're trying to dodge lions on the savannas but it's absolutely terrible for judging real risk. Quite frankly as another poster pointed out - if you see it in the news, it's never going to happen to you. News by definition are things that happen incredibly rarely and are unusual. Our ancient brains equate that with risk - but to get accurate risk assessment in a complex world and actually become safer you need the exact OPPOSITE response.
It's the USUAL threats, the common everyday things that never make the news - those things will kill you. You will probably die from one of those- because they are common, usual threats. They become MORE dangerous because we do NOT think of them as being dangerous, they are too familiar. Cars are still the number one killer in the world. Yet even after my 100th flight I still feel a knot in my stomach when the plane takes of. I don't feel that sense of dread when I get in a car. Neither as a passenger nor as a driver - because I get in a car every day. But my stomach is being bad at risk assessment, I am far more likely to get killed by a drunk driver (or just a rude one who doesn't consider how dangerous an activity he is engaged in: i.e. almost all of them) than I am of every dying in a plane crash - with or without a terrorist helping.
Don't trust your instincts here- trust maths and science. Then you can take precautions that make SENSE.
Here's one of my all-time favorite examples. Not long ago your news stories were filled with the threat of the plague of Africanized (I wish I could HIT the person who made up that word btw...) honey bees. So much more aggressive, and coming in droves. Charts were shown of their every growing expansion through Texas. Funny the number of people dying from bee-sting every year hasn't gone up yet, and it's still pretty much limited to people who have allergies. I'm a allergic to bees and I live IN Africa. A couple of people came across some of our bees and didn't know to avoid them as they are a bit more aggressive than yours - got stung and made news. But it was news because it was unusual, it's a rare thing, and it will always be a rare thing. Every one of your news stories shows you this rare and terrible event -then tries to convince you that it's about to become common, that it could happen to you... you know what that's the same slogan the lotteries use. Yeah it could happen to you - but it never wil.
Well by your logic how do you justify a right to live ? Let alone more esoteric rights like property ? The right to live is something we all recognize because by collectively protecting life we increase our overall stability - and thus survival rates, the same could be said for the right to share.
There is of COURSE a major logical gap here - because on one side we're talking about legal and moral issues, on the other about science and yes, the universe couldn't give a crap about us.
But we SHOULD !
What I am trying to say is that any discussion of anything remotely like universal natural rights MUST consider the source of the desires and actions those rights are meant to protect. Those things which are most concretely built-into use a species are likely to be the rights and morals that the vast majority of people can and will recognize. The right not to be murdered, the right not to have your share of the food stolen from you (e.g. the foundation of property rights), the right to share and cooperate -these can all be traced back to basic survival and evolutionary urges, codified into law later on when we developed the idea of making laws. There is hardly any civilization that has ever existed which didn't have these laws, in part because any civilization without them would be denying it's citizens their most basic humanity - and that would inherently make it an incredibly unstable civilization. In recognizing these rights, a civilization greatly increases it's survival rate as a whole. Heck I would go so far as to say the first time one of our ancestors started painting on the wall of the cave - he was discovering the drive that would lead us to declare freedom of speech a right.
Now previously - we as a species were significantly geographically separated so our cultures, physical appearance and many other things separated as well. Until VERY recently we believed these differences to be so manifestly huge as to be utterly insurmountable. Most of us choosing to believe that our own version must therefore be superior - and then you're only one step away from where we were, to say that these rights are ours but not everybody else's. A lot of people STILL haven't evolved enough to figure out that the differences between us are insignificantly small next to our similarities, but many of us (all the smarter ones) have. We don't recognize race as an IDEA anymore, and many are starting to reject the concept of culture. I myself have long since ceased to think of myself as an Afrikaner from South Africa. I'm a human from planet earth. What I was born is just one tiny part of what I became as a person - mostly by learning (from living within) other cultures.
So indeed despite the differences we CAN recognize a common humanity, and certain natural inalienable rights. It is only sensible that the ones we recognize as such be the ones rooted in our most basic shared humanity - and our evolutionary history is the very soul of that.
I never said evolution defined morality - but sure it has HELL did define our nature. I spoke about NATURAL rights, not moral ones.
Indeed we can and SHOULD be above our mere evolution - any other claim is just the naturalistic falacy - but we'd be idiots to DENY it. It HAS made us social animals and sharing is the cornerstone of that, this makes it a NATURAL right.
It's funny how we keep ignoring the people who actually KNOW about this stuff. Bruce Schneier would call your entire post factually incorrect, this is roughly a summary of his blogposts over the past few years:
The risk of dying in a terrorist attack is far, far lower than the risk of dying from one too many cheeseburgers. Heck you have a much higher risk of breaking your neck from slipping in the shower ! But we don't DEMAND slip-free mats in every shower by law do we ?
The reality is that terrorism is in fact an incredibly rare and unlikely event even at the worst of times an ANY money spent on preventative measures is a guaranteed waste anyway. Terrorists don't do movie plot threats. Secure against the obvious and crucial things - but don't do anything beyond that because your predictions are guaranteed to be wrong and all those excessive measures actually make you LESS safe as they encourage people not to care and to skip steps.
What CAN we do to reduce the risk ? Only this: effective after-the-fact law enforcement with open trials and proper punishment... same thing as for any other crime. Effectively catching the perpetrators, bringing them to justice (with fair trials) and then punishing them is a very good deterrent - just as much so for terrorism, and the only one that has any chance of working.
Banning me from taking a bottled water on an airplane does not make anybody any safer at all.
We got the fear, we got the control - and the sad thing is, we didn't even GET the security for it, we got a farce.
Benjamin Franklin had this right: a nation that would exchange essential liberty for a little temporary safety will lose both, and deserve neither.
>"Nearly all the value of nearly all copyrighted works comes from ideas that the author learned from people who came before and who the author didn't pay."
Easy it's an established fact and there are many ways to verify it. A simple one: the man we consider the greatest poet and playwright of all. Mister William Shakespeare. Every single one of his plays was a derivative work of older plays that already existed. He never payed a royalty. If modern copyright laws had existed -every single one of Shakespeare's plays would be deemed a "pirate copy".
All creation, invention and authorship (with perhaps a one in a hundred billion exception rate) is built on the work that came before. This is true in science, in art, in philosophy - it's the very essence of HOW creation happens. Newton called it "Standing on the shoulders of giants".
Any author who claims otherwise is incredibly, stupidly arrogant and wrong.
>Who decides that it's naturally/obviously "right" to share and "wrong" to steal?
Evolution ? Humans developed as SOCIAL animals because it improved our SURVIVAL rates. Social groupings (societies) if you will are functionally NOTHING more than "systems of cooperation". "Sharing of resources" is essentially synonymous to "cooperation' for nearly all the purposes here. It's not just a natural RIGHT to share, it's a natural OBLIGATION. And "natural" is EXACTLY the right word - this is something in our very core nature, it's what makes us - as humans -SOCIAL animals as opposed to loners. Wolves hunt together and share the catch. Leopards hunt solo and get to keep the catch.
But wolves successfully hunt FAR bigger pray than leopards can and are arguably far better able to survive a change in the surrounding ecology because of their wider options of pray.
Only idiots think humans are leopards. We are by our NATURE and evolution designed to cooperate - like the wolves do.
The very reason we HAVE societies is because we are innately social - and thus cooperation and sharing is indeed our natural and most fundamental right, duty and obligation. That doesn't mean that we should or can share ALL resources ALL the time - but it damn sure says that we must share as much as we can, when we can. The restriction is that resources are not unlimited, if we aren't EVER selfish - with limited resources, everybody will be passing them around and nobody will actually ever EAT the sandwhich until we all starve. But when there is something which truly IS an unlimited resource (we can never use up all the copies because we can make more at any time) - there is absolutely NO justifiable way to restrict the natural sharing of that resource. The idea of copyright is to increase the source of the resource - more things to copy in the first place. In fact we do NOT reward authors because we think they deserve it - that's against ALL legal traditions. We reward them so the PUBLIC DOMAIN will get bigger. Copyright has failed so miserably at this goal (and is now actually REDUCING the size of the shared common resources by REMOVING things from the public domain that used to be there) that it clearly should be gotten rid of. Sharing IS our right. I'm happy to do my share to help find away to compensate authors (being one - I do care about it) so they can add to the list of things we have available to share, but I am no longer willing to accept the argument that sacrificing this natural, social imperative to share is a worthwhile sacrifice anymore.
>The moral rights that you are referring to is more akin to natural rights. Natural rights do not rest on the belief of the individuals. Rather, they rest on some universal value that is shared by all of mankind. This subject has been discussed to death (see the writings of Locke and Paine) since the Enlightenment.
It goes back to the ancient Greeks and may we BE lucky enough that it goes on forever. There will always be those in power, wishing to extend that power indefinitely - and the only way to combat it is for people to have a clear way of expressing what they believe their rights should be- and stand up for those. It's not ideal (people often don't value their most needed rights while actively participating in losing them - especially if the restrictions will combat something they find scary [a word that means "different" or "unusual" or "not like me"])
But it's a damn sight better than nothing which currently is the alternative.
It's well worth remembering that the law has on many cases been utterly wrong and done things which was morally reprehensible. Slavery used to be legal remember. Not long ago- the law in my country made it illegal for a black man to swim at the same beach as me. Only a racist would call that law "good" though or think that just because the law said so I was SUPPOSED to have a "right" to a beach with only whites on it.
Sometimes when our democratic methods are not serving us, we are forced to change the law by civil disobedience - perhaps even force. Rosa Parks on her buss did just that - and led to the end of a lot of wrong laws in America - laws that would never have changed in an election since the people suffering were a minority and the majority group didn't consider them wrong (at the time).
I would even go further. It is my fundamental belief that an action continuously undertaken by the majority of people cannot justifiably be illegal under a democratic system. There should be a qualifier here if the action has a genuine risk of significant harm for others but that's the only justifiable restriction. So speed limits make sense even if most people ignore them - a way to make roads safer without them would be better.
The very numbers the RIAA sites about how many people share their copies of creative works, and obtain some of their own through sharing - says that the people HAVE voted on this issue- and copyright law MUST be abolished. Now having come to that conclusion (that it's clearly an unjustifiable restriction on a behavior that most people do NOT consider something which should be illegal) we can have a USEFUL debate. There is no harm to an author through copying, if anything there is the only benefit that actually matters: his work serves society. But to get more works - we should compensate authors. A debate that WILL be of use is how BEST to do so. Clearly copyright is no longer and option worthy of consideration for this purpose, even if it wasn't an abject failure at the goal anyway.
Well some might say that alternative energy sources IS that next frontier for you.
Seriously - how much do you spend on oil every year ? How much on the wars to secure that oil ?
These loans all-together is still a fraction of one year in Iraq - and they pay of for many, many generations to come.
The bit I don't get is that the very same people who complain when a government spends their taxes on building infrastructure has no problem when the government uses their taxes to maintain a massive military during peace-time, or make senseless and expensive wars with...
The bit about the whole global warming debate that really makes NO sense though is this. So let's assume it's not true - human activity has no influence at all on climate (well there goes chaos theory and pretty much all of quantum physics as well since the idea of anything being without influence and the influence having the capacity violates their most basic precepts but what the heck). So we put these efforts we're suggesting in place. We get cleaner air and water. We reduce the incidence of asthma and lung disease. We spend less money on the (generally rather hostile) suppliers of oil. We get to actually SEE the sky again. Yeah that would be terrible - making a much better world if there ISN'T an imminent crisis to force us eh...
I never said that. I SAID the free market struggles with projects that have very high initial capital expenses and very slow profit. When it's going to take 20 years to make your money back it makes no sense to invest it.
And NONE of the money made THAT was has happened WITHOUT politicians.
Moreover we could argue that the greater majority of wealth created by such projects NEVER go to the investers, it's made in the form of every penny saved by a million commuters with better transport, every restaurant having an extra customer because a tunnel under a channel brought more tourists, every child that can study for a few hours more and get into college because he has light after the sun sets.
THAT kind of profit is felt by ALL of us, but the guy who made the big investment gets no MORE of it than we all do (most such projects that WERE privately funded has historically CONSISTENTLY gone bankrupt - the British side of the channel tunnel project was already bankrupt years ago until they got government loans, the French side which was a public enterprize is doing well all this time).
The only way we KNOW of to successfully fund high-cost projects where the profit is benefit to society as a whole rather than to the people who actually invest the money is to SPREAD the investment over everybody - and in our society, as it stands the only practical system we HAVE for doing that is called "Taxes'.
Only an American could honestly convince himself that paying a bit of his income so EVERYBODY (including himself) can have a better life is somehow a LOSS for him.
The bank loaned me half-a-million to buy my house, they sure as hell didn't GIVE me half a million and if I don't make my payments on that loan you can bet your short-and-curly's they'll take my house.
Government loans to help large projects with long-term profitability get founded is not unusual in the world and has on many occasions been critical to getting projects done. Corporations have a massive problem justifying a short-term large expense with slow long-term profits. But such projects can be important investments in needed infrastructure, so governments find ways to help justify it. One way which America did with most telephone companies was to say "spend the money - and we'll give you a monopoly on selling telephone services"... how did that work out for you ?
Now "here's a LOAN, that way the expense is ALSO long-term just like the profits so you have no reason not to do it and you have access to the capital" may actually be a MORE free-market solution to a problem the free-market is utterly incapable of solving without intervention. Somebody has to make the investment for any large infrastructure project to happen. Individuals - want to be sure of a return in their lifetime. Corporations want to be sure of a return at the next stockholder meetings. That leaves pretty much -government.
There is one OTHER way - that is when you live in a culture that things doing awesomely cool projects for the hell of doing it is so great that everybody will be happy to invest KNOWING they will never see a return. England once ruled half the world because they thought like that. They built great bridges and ships and towers not because there was any chance of making money but "for queen and country". America simply won't build a great bridge (or solar power station) for President and Country - it doesn't fit in your culture's way of thinking at all. So you get to choose HOW government will intervene, not IF... unless you choose to never again make any noteworthy progress as a nation in the fields of engineering and infrastructure (in case you were wondering THAT is a very efficient way to become a very poor nation very very fast).
Actually - here's an even better example. As any WoW player will tell you before engaging a raid it's common practise to watch videos on youtube showing screencasts of the fight. This is among the best way to study tactics for it.
Those videos usually have three core parts: 1) The actual gaming things captured. This is copyright blizzard (Actually it's a derivative work, the art in the game belongs to them but the screencast is not the art itself and has more to it) - but blizzard has already given explicit permission for the creation and distribution of such derivative works. 2) Usually there is a voice-over explaining the tactics you are looking at. This is copyright whoever is reading it, it may even have another owner if it was written by somebody else. 4) Then there is usually a lot of guild-chatter as well. This is even trickier. Every single person typing there owns the copyright to the line of text they wrote which appeared on screen during the video. For most raids - that's 25 people, if the caster had the guild window open it could be 100 or more people's copyright - in one short video.
So let's say 80 copyright holders involved. Only ONE of them is a major media company and that company HAS already given permission for this to be created. Of the remaining 80 all but one is nearly impossible to identify as their only available identification there is a character name. Youtube may not even know on which realm - to find them youtube would have ot demand their account details from Blizzard who because of their strict security measures would demand a subpoena.
78 subpoena's, a note from the voice-over guy... all this so that you could show a video of how to defeat Sartharion ?
That's what the RIAA's system would demand of youtube. Well it doesn't work like that because it would be, let me see, batshit insane ! Instead doesn't it rather make sense to let such actions be handle BY those right's holders ? That even takes care of the rare case where blizzard may actually have a valid reason for wanting a video pulled that isn't covered by the permission they gave- say if you had posted a screencast of Cata taken during the NDA period that they felt was sufficiently problematic to want pulled.
It goes way beyond that though. This is corporatism at it's worst. The RIAA carefully hides here the fact that they are not the holders of the majority of the copyright out there. Under international law, every time I take a picture, write a/. comment or a blogpost or make a recording on my cellphone I own the copyright to it. That makes ME a rightsholder.
The system as it stands, despite the problematic parts of the DMCA actually rather works okay here. The balance struck wasn't struck where the RIAA says it was, with damn good reason. Say I post a video of something silly to my blog, you like it and upload it to youtube. Technically you've committed copyright infringement -but chances are, if you credit me and link the blog I would be grateful rather than angry. But it's impossible for youtube to know how I would feel. What the current DMCA means is -if I don't like it, I can file a takedown notice and get it down if I want, or say thank you and leave it up if I want. What the RIAA wants here would remove that level of self-decision from the millions of rights-holders who are NOT the RIAA and turn ISP's into a police force. Youtube would have to somehow verify that you either created the video yourself or have an agreement with me about it everytime you do an upload ! That's a massive legal overhead and in the very vast majority of the cases it would be a complete waste. That's not even considering that a video you don't own, nor know the creator of may have been published under a CC license - and now youtube has the duty to go find the original web-page and check that ?
I agree with the judge here - the onus for identifying and reporting should belong to those rights-holders who desire to excercise control, not with the ISP's whose job ought to be to build reliable fast servers that are not so congested as to be unusable. The moment and IT company has more lawyers than developers things go to hell for customers. Just look at Microsoft. Let's not force that to be the case for every ISP and 1-man hosting company in the world as well !
The support mechanisms for women in abusive relationships are still pretty pathetic. The support mechanisms for MEN who are being abused are.. right non-existent.
Anyway, all the trained councilors in the world can't do half as much to restore your image of how people should treat you as ONE person who actually treats you that way.
Slashdot Mirror
>Someone should send a C&D to Lucas for acting like an ass. There was prior art on that a loooong time ago.
Yeah but Shakespeare is dead so I don't think he'll be enforcing Bottom from "A midsummer night's tale" as an invention here....
>>If he succeeds, then REAL scifi authors could have a field day. No more helicopters, hovercraft, or zillions of other inventions they wrote about without getting their permission first...
>Wicked Lasers designed their laser to look like a lightsaber.
They say they didn't - so I guess until a judge says whose right it's just your word against theirs.
>Lucas owns the trademark on the lightsaber name and look.
So ? Trademark law only applies within similar field. This is not a movie prop, it's not a toy and it's not even a sword-like weapon. It's an industrial cutting laser. That is a radically different market. What's next, will you suggest the manufacturers of Linux Brand Tile Soap (yes it exists, and there are about a dosen other products with the name) get to sue Linus Torvalds ?
>Lucas sues to protect his trademark.
Trademark law doesn't apply - and the letter never mentions it anyway, it clearly states that it's a copyright letter. Until they prove that a real utility device can violate the copyright of a fictional device with a completely different purpose - their letter is just a threaten-them-and-hope-they-back-down.
>This will somehow lead to the downfall of civilization as "REAL scifi authors" attempt to enforce trademarks they do not have.
Your +4 Insightful shames us all.
Well it certainly appears that this is how George Lucas thinks it should work, don't fault the GP for pointing this out.
>These lightsabers are toys. Not real inventions.
No they bloody well aren't. The article clearly states that these are fully functional portable laser devices - intended primarily for industrial and military use.
In fact the amount of people buying them for non-industrial use has led the company to modify them and ship them with significant extra safety features to prevent accidents from people buying them as novelties.
>The concept of this non-functioning object is taken from the movie....
No, it is not. The movie has a device in it which violates the current laws of physics. Light that only travels a short distance then stops, cuts through metal but cannot move through OTHER light of the same kind...
While THIS device is cutting laser, much like the ones used for surgery or industrial machining. The difference is only that this device is portable.
>Helicopters, communication devices, and other thought of ideas became inventions that could not really be disputed. It's because >those inventions were a concept the -author could not make- into reality
As pointed out above, the concept of a lightsaber cannot be made into reality - it violates every known law of physics so short of a radical new discovery or something "like light" which ISN'T - it's NEVER going to exist. Therefore no functional real world device can possibly be said to be based on it.
>I'm pretty sure george lucas could have financed and made the same/similar toys if he felt like it.
He does. This is not a toy.
>Now I'm not saying that i agree with this action. Consider it like this: you have to pay the owner of the "Gundam" name in order >to call a humanoid robot machine a "Gundam" the same probably is going to be argued with these lightsaber toys.
That's trademark law - and it doesn't exist to protect companies (another reason "ip" is a bad term) it exists to protect consumers - so that when I by a defy fridge I can be reasonably sure it's not a cheap knock-off but the real thing I'm paying a premium for.
>As stated in the article, the company has made similar devices before. Only this time it was intended to look like a lightsaber.
How the hell did you manage to READ the article yet miss all the other actual FACTS in it ? Like that the device is not a toy, was not itended to "look like a lightsaber", and was never intended to be sold to the general public - so much so in fact that when hte public started to buy them they had to ALTER the design to make it safe ?
Well whose surprised ? Form sometimes must follow function. It's not an ACCIDENT that the Martin Aircraft Company's real Jetpacks look so much like the one Boba Fet had on - it's the only shape a backpack with a jet-engine CAN be.
Are you seriously suggesting that Pixar and Tarantino TOGETHER have made them as much money as Snow White alone ? Not to mention Rapunzel, The hunchback of Notre Dame, Alladin, Tarzan (again - came out within a year after Buroughs original copyright expired).
They have a roughly 80 year history of films made from stories that were in the public domain, not to mention the additional income from toys and other branding. The pixar and Tarantino branches are both only in the last 20 years or so of that period.
Disney has a history of taking works from the public domain and creating profitable works from them - and then claiming copyright on said derivations. I have my doubts about the morality of this but it's certainly legal. The point is though - Disney is so intent on keeping their one truly original creation (Mickey Mouse) under copyright and NOT contributing it to the world as the people they took from did that they have ensured the extension of copyright TWICE to make it happen.
That's not even considering that where it suited them - they have on occasion actually outright stolen stories that were copyrighted creating highly profitable works - simply because the small companies they were stealing from simply could not afford to try and sue them. The lion king is perhaps the worst example of that.
Tit for tat goes the saying. We set up copyright in the way it is so THAT companies like Disney could take it's stories and make movies people love - that's fine. It's NOT fine to refuse to play ball and give you own works BACK to that pool when the time comes so that OTHER companies and people can do the same.
>And it goes without saying that this doesn't apply at all to anaphylactic reactions like allergies to bee stings, shellfish, nuts, or things like that.
Indeed, those go the other way entirely. I've been allergic to bee stings my whole life. As a child the symptoms were about as benign as they could be: delayed swelling (by about 12 hours). With each subsequent sting however, the allergy got worse and worse. The last time I got stung I ended up in hospital needing antihistamine injections and an tube down my throat as the swelling was making it impossible to breath.
That was a good ten years ago though, I'm very careful around them - which is why I haven't been stung since, and I keep an epi-pen with me at all times.
>Whether we like it or not Disney and Paramount and NBC make some decent products.
To answer your question: Disney made the vast majority of it's fortune by borrowing FROM the public domain. The scripts for nearly all their best selling movies were based on older stories on which the copyright had expired (or never existed).
So why should Disney be allowed to BENEFIT from the expiration of the copyright once owned by Hans Christian Anderson and the Brother's Grimm but not be expected to CONTRIBUTE in the same way to the NEXT generation of artists ?
> your IDE is defecating at all, I think that's a good sign you need to look around for a new one.
Suddenly "core dumped" has taken on an altogether more sinister meaning...
No, of course not - but it ought to ONE of the considerations surely ? And it's the only one that we CAN mathematically work out. We can only make predictions on the outcome with a limited amount of success, we can only make determinations on how good or bad such an outcome would be based on philosophy and believe systems (which are not the same things despite having overlaps). You made it quite clear that our ideas about what would constitute a good outcome is radically different, arguing the pros and cons of it is rather besides the point of the discussion I think (which is why I didn't) but I'm up for it if you insist.
That will not be a purely scientific discussion though. We can use science to inform the philosophical discussion but science doesn't answer the questions we'll be asking, only provides facts we can use to strengthen possible answers. There is no formula for a good civilization and you cannot calculate "goodness"
Indeed there are people around today, most of PETA, for one that genuinely believe that "good" is the unfettered survival of every OTHER species, even if the price is human extinction. Very few other humans would agree. You cannot determine which is better without asking "better for WHO exactly" - and that is the one question science doesn't ask or try to answer.
Even if you agree on the who - you can still have a long debate about what is "good" for that who. This is ALWAYS a matter of believe. But we can at least identify an evolutionary trend that favors sharing of resources and declare it a basic human trait as it is among ALL social animals (and indeed in all social animals there are thieves too - the moment sharing shows up as a survival tactic, you set the stage for the evolution of cheating) but we sure as hell don't want to let the cheaters be in charge or resource allocation ! NO social animal is THAT stupid.
>You've taken the step from seeing what humanity is (science, fact), to declaring the purpose it is "created" to achieve (application of arbitrary, subjective belief), and that it is "wrong" to deny that purpose.
I did nothing of the kind. Your inability to see past this perception, combined with your absolute cynicism makes you completely unable to appreciate anything I'm saying and makes further debate utterly pointless.
I NEVER said that humanity was created with a purpose. I SAID that since we are ABLE to set goals, it would be a good idea if we DID set goals. I said that such goals have the best chance of succeeding if we look at science (including our evolutionary history) to determine the ones most readily achievable and stated a belief that much of human history consists of (often unknowingly) doing just that.
Doing it knowingly means we can be rational and selective in how we do it however- and that HAS to work better.
Until you can acknowledge the VAST difference between this and what you percieve me to be saying there is no point in answering anything else you said on the simple principle that you're debunking arguments I never made. Without understanding their context, it's impossible to understand their substance - and ergo, you're arguing against something other than what I said in your entire post.
Everything you say makes sense but you're still missing out on the fact that there IS some science. That there is a degree of philosophy in my thinking is true (but I beg to differ - it's not religious in the least, on the contrary - it's decidedly humanist) but that the things I stated here are based on verifiable scientific fact is not even worth arguing about.
Every species has a basic urge to survive. Every member of every species a basic urge to procreate. The fewer offspring a species produces the stronger it's parental-care urges become - by whatever route - survival of the species is the most basic driving force instilled by evolution in every living thing.
It has to be- because any living thing WITHOUT a drive to ensure it's own survival (this need not be a conscious process, an amoeba doesn't KNOW it's securing it's species' survival when it splits down the middle) doesn't survive.
I did not however say we should be LIMITED to our basic evolutionary basis- the small clans you accurately describe. Lion males make a habit when taking over a female of killing any cubs sired by the previous male, to ensure more food for their own offspring.
That's evolutionary drive to ensure your own genetics too. We can and should be MORE than our evolution, but we cannot deny it's existence. Evolution made us what we are, but (accidentally but that's not the point) it also gave us the ability to be more than our basic drives. We can codify our ideals into laws. We can invent lies like justice, honor, love, peace and beauty.
Rip up the universe, grind it down to it's component atoms and find me just ONCE atom of justice. There isn't such a thing. But we have the power to make it up - and the power to reify it and, in an odd way, MAKE it exist. We didn't evolve so that we'd have this ability, but we evolved until we did anyway (by which I don't mean we're DONE evolving, I'm just describing the present state).
Now we are ABLE to care, to love, to pursue peace (or war), to preserve life or destroy it, to create justice or injustice, beauty or terror.
You're suggesting that nothing can let us choose our path here except unfounded belief systems, and that one is as good as another. Bullshit. We can study history, we can consider our basic drives, we can learn to acknowledge our shared humanity and we can make civilizing choices. There will be resistance from belief systems that are built on seperatism, but to declare that the volcano god's desire for a sacrifice is an equal belief to the one that says "there is a basic drive to survive in all living things -and therefore it's only to be expected that we as humans should try to survive as a species" is just plain stupid.
The second one is based on observable, testable, verifiable science.
The conclusion drawn FROM that source can be debated, but there MUST be a point where the few conclusions drawn from a scientific source gets more respect than those drawn from imaginary stories about why it rains.
Either way -none of this changes or is even all that relevant to the point I tried to make. Sharing rituals are core to every child-raising pattern everywhere in the world. The belief in sharing is a fundamental drive - we demand and expect to see the wealthy (selfish and greedy as they are) do charity because we expect of them to share. We never stop thinking they are selfish and greedy when they do, but that illusion of sharing still somehow satisfies us even as they amass billions while so many of our kinsmen starve. It plays to our evolutionary drive to share resources (it's bad theater but it works). We borrow sugar from our neighbors and we set up carpools.
We pool our time-and-labor to build factories and whole economies. Sometimes we cooperate to slaughter the people in the next valley. But humans want to cooperate, they want to share - with their friends, neighbors, families. As the communications technology of our age makes the gaps between people ever easier to traverse cultures merge ever more the size of our groupings get bigge
>Wow. You're comparing the freedom to make poor choices for yourself to someone ELSE deciding to kill you. Oh yes, sure, we should treat those two categories in exactly the same way, I'm sure that would work well.
No, what I (and Schneier whom I was quoting) are saying is that humans are really bad at threat assessment. Our abilities in this regard came from an evolution that gave us "flight or fight" and defined "unusual" as "dangerous". That's FINE if you're trying to dodge lions on the savannas but it's absolutely terrible for judging real risk.
Quite frankly as another poster pointed out - if you see it in the news, it's never going to happen to you. News by definition are things that happen incredibly rarely and are unusual. Our ancient brains equate that with risk - but to get accurate risk assessment in a complex world and actually become safer you need the exact OPPOSITE response.
It's the USUAL threats, the common everyday things that never make the news - those things will kill you. You will probably die from one of those- because they are common, usual threats. They become MORE dangerous because we do NOT think of them as being dangerous, they are too familiar. Cars are still the number one killer in the world. Yet even after my 100th flight I still feel a knot in my stomach when the plane takes of. I don't feel that sense of dread when I get in a car. Neither as a passenger nor as a driver - because I get in a car every day.
But my stomach is being bad at risk assessment, I am far more likely to get killed by a drunk driver (or just a rude one who doesn't consider how dangerous an activity he is engaged in: i.e. almost all of them) than I am of every dying in a plane crash - with or without a terrorist helping.
Don't trust your instincts here- trust maths and science. Then you can take precautions that make SENSE.
Here's one of my all-time favorite examples. Not long ago your news stories were filled with the threat of the plague of Africanized (I wish I could HIT the person who made up that word btw...) honey bees. So much more aggressive, and coming in droves. Charts were shown of their every growing expansion through Texas.
Funny the number of people dying from bee-sting every year hasn't gone up yet, and it's still pretty much limited to people who have allergies. I'm a allergic to bees and I live IN Africa. A couple of people came across some of our bees and didn't know to avoid them as they are a bit more aggressive than yours - got stung and made news. But it was news because it was unusual, it's a rare thing, and it will always be a rare thing.
Every one of your news stories shows you this rare and terrible event -then tries to convince you that it's about to become common, that it could happen to you... you know what that's the same slogan the lotteries use.
Yeah it could happen to you - but it never wil.
Well by your logic how do you justify a right to live ? Let alone more esoteric rights like property ?
The right to live is something we all recognize because by collectively protecting life we increase our overall stability - and thus survival rates, the same could be said for the right to share.
There is of COURSE a major logical gap here - because on one side we're talking about legal and moral issues, on the other about science and yes, the universe couldn't give a crap about us.
But we SHOULD !
What I am trying to say is that any discussion of anything remotely like universal natural rights MUST consider the source of the desires and actions those rights are meant to protect. Those things which are most concretely built-into use a species are likely to be the rights and morals that the vast majority of people can and will recognize. The right not to be murdered, the right not to have your share of the food stolen from you (e.g. the foundation of property rights), the right to share and cooperate -these can all be traced back to basic survival and evolutionary urges, codified into law later on when we developed the idea of making laws.
There is hardly any civilization that has ever existed which didn't have these laws, in part because any civilization without them would be denying it's citizens their most basic humanity - and that would inherently make it an incredibly unstable civilization. In recognizing these rights, a civilization greatly increases it's survival rate as a whole. Heck I would go so far as to say the first time one of our ancestors started painting on the wall of the cave - he was discovering the drive that would lead us to declare freedom of speech a right.
Now previously - we as a species were significantly geographically separated so our cultures, physical appearance and many other things separated as well. Until VERY recently we believed these differences to be so manifestly huge as to be utterly insurmountable. Most of us choosing to believe that our own version must therefore be superior - and then you're only one step away from where we were, to say that these rights are ours but not everybody else's. A lot of people STILL haven't evolved enough to figure out that the differences between us are insignificantly small next to our similarities, but many of us (all the smarter ones) have. We don't recognize race as an IDEA anymore, and many are starting to reject the concept of culture.
I myself have long since ceased to think of myself as an Afrikaner from South Africa. I'm a human from planet earth. What I was born is just one tiny part of what I became as a person - mostly by learning (from living within) other cultures.
So indeed despite the differences we CAN recognize a common humanity, and certain natural inalienable rights. It is only sensible that the ones we recognize as such be the ones rooted in our most basic shared humanity - and our evolutionary history is the very soul of that.
I never said evolution defined morality - but sure it has HELL did define our nature.
I spoke about NATURAL rights, not moral ones.
Indeed we can and SHOULD be above our mere evolution - any other claim is just the naturalistic falacy - but we'd be idiots to DENY it.
It HAS made us social animals and sharing is the cornerstone of that, this makes it a NATURAL right.
It's funny how we keep ignoring the people who actually KNOW about this stuff.
Bruce Schneier would call your entire post factually incorrect, this is roughly a summary of his blogposts over the past few years:
The risk of dying in a terrorist attack is far, far lower than the risk of dying from one too many cheeseburgers. Heck you have a much higher risk of breaking your neck from slipping in the shower !
But we don't DEMAND slip-free mats in every shower by law do we ?
The reality is that terrorism is in fact an incredibly rare and unlikely event even at the worst of times an ANY money spent on preventative measures is a guaranteed waste anyway. Terrorists don't do movie plot threats. Secure against the obvious and crucial things - but don't do anything beyond that because your predictions are guaranteed to be wrong and all those excessive measures actually make you LESS safe as they encourage people not to care and to skip steps.
What CAN we do to reduce the risk ? Only this: effective after-the-fact law enforcement with open trials and proper punishment... same thing as for any other crime. Effectively catching the perpetrators, bringing them to justice (with fair trials) and then punishing them is a very good deterrent - just as much so for terrorism, and the only one that has any chance of working.
Banning me from taking a bottled water on an airplane does not make anybody any safer at all.
We got the fear, we got the control - and the sad thing is, we didn't even GET the security for it, we got a farce.
Benjamin Franklin had this right: a nation that would exchange essential liberty for a little temporary safety will lose both, and deserve neither.
Well - now we have neither.
>"Nearly all the value of nearly all copyrighted works comes from ideas that the author learned from people who came before and who the author didn't pay."
Easy it's an established fact and there are many ways to verify it.
A simple one: the man we consider the greatest poet and playwright of all. Mister William Shakespeare. Every single one of his plays was a derivative work of older plays that already existed. He never payed a royalty. If modern copyright laws had existed -every single one of Shakespeare's plays would be deemed a "pirate copy".
All creation, invention and authorship (with perhaps a one in a hundred billion exception rate) is built on the work that came before. This is true in science, in art, in philosophy - it's the very essence of HOW creation happens.
Newton called it "Standing on the shoulders of giants".
Any author who claims otherwise is incredibly, stupidly arrogant and wrong.
>Who decides that it's naturally/obviously "right" to share and "wrong" to steal?
Evolution ? Humans developed as SOCIAL animals because it improved our SURVIVAL rates. Social groupings (societies) if you will are functionally NOTHING more than "systems of cooperation". "Sharing of resources" is essentially synonymous to "cooperation' for nearly all the purposes here.
It's not just a natural RIGHT to share, it's a natural OBLIGATION. And "natural" is EXACTLY the right word - this is something in our very core nature, it's what makes us - as humans -SOCIAL animals as opposed to loners.
Wolves hunt together and share the catch.
Leopards hunt solo and get to keep the catch.
But wolves successfully hunt FAR bigger pray than leopards can and are arguably far better able to survive a change in the surrounding ecology because of their wider options of pray.
Only idiots think humans are leopards. We are by our NATURE and evolution designed to cooperate - like the wolves do.
The very reason we HAVE societies is because we are innately social - and thus cooperation and sharing is indeed our natural and most fundamental right, duty and obligation.
That doesn't mean that we should or can share ALL resources ALL the time - but it damn sure says that we must share as much as we can, when we can. The restriction is that resources are not unlimited, if we aren't EVER selfish - with limited resources, everybody will be passing them around and nobody will actually ever EAT the sandwhich until we all starve.
But when there is something which truly IS an unlimited resource (we can never use up all the copies because we can make more at any time) - there is absolutely NO justifiable way to restrict the natural sharing of that resource.
The idea of copyright is to increase the source of the resource - more things to copy in the first place. In fact we do NOT reward authors because we think they deserve it - that's against ALL legal traditions. We reward them so the PUBLIC DOMAIN will get bigger. Copyright has failed so miserably at this goal (and is now actually REDUCING the size of the shared common resources by REMOVING things from the public domain that used to be there) that it clearly should be gotten rid of.
Sharing IS our right. I'm happy to do my share to help find away to compensate authors (being one - I do care about it) so they can add to the list of things we have available to share, but I am no longer willing to accept the argument that sacrificing this natural, social imperative to share is a worthwhile sacrifice anymore.
>The moral rights that you are referring to is more akin to natural rights. Natural rights do not rest on the belief of the individuals. Rather, they rest on some universal value that is shared by all of mankind. This subject has been discussed to death (see the writings of Locke and Paine) since the Enlightenment.
It goes back to the ancient Greeks and may we BE lucky enough that it goes on forever. There will always be those in power, wishing to extend that power indefinitely - and the only way to combat it is for people to have a clear way of expressing what they believe their rights should be- and stand up for those.
It's not ideal (people often don't value their most needed rights while actively participating in losing them - especially if the restrictions will combat something they find scary [a word that means "different" or "unusual" or "not like me"])
But it's a damn sight better than nothing which currently is the alternative.
It's well worth remembering that the law has on many cases been utterly wrong and done things which was morally reprehensible. Slavery used to be legal remember. Not long ago- the law in my country made it illegal for a black man to swim at the same beach as me. Only a racist would call that law "good" though or think that just because the law said so I was SUPPOSED to have a "right" to a beach with only whites on it.
Sometimes when our democratic methods are not serving us, we are forced to change the law by civil disobedience - perhaps even force. Rosa Parks on her buss did just that - and led to the end of a lot of wrong laws in America - laws that would never have changed in an election since the people suffering were a minority and the majority group didn't consider them wrong (at the time).
I would even go further. It is my fundamental belief that an action continuously undertaken by the majority of people cannot justifiably be illegal under a democratic system. There should be a qualifier here if the action has a genuine risk of significant harm for others but that's the only justifiable restriction.
So speed limits make sense even if most people ignore them - a way to make roads safer without them would be better.
The very numbers the RIAA sites about how many people share their copies of creative works, and obtain some of their own through sharing - says that the people HAVE voted on this issue- and copyright law MUST be abolished.
Now having come to that conclusion (that it's clearly an unjustifiable restriction on a behavior that most people do NOT consider something which should be illegal) we can have a USEFUL debate. There is no harm to an author through copying, if anything there is the only benefit that actually matters: his work serves society.
But to get more works - we should compensate authors. A debate that WILL be of use is how BEST to do so. Clearly copyright is no longer and option worthy of consideration for this purpose, even if it wasn't an abject failure at the goal anyway.
Well some might say that alternative energy sources IS that next frontier for you.
Seriously - how much do you spend on oil every year ? How much on the wars to secure that oil ?
These loans all-together is still a fraction of one year in Iraq - and they pay of for many, many generations to come.
The bit I don't get is that the very same people who complain when a government spends their taxes on building infrastructure has no problem when the government uses their taxes to maintain a massive military during peace-time, or make senseless and expensive wars with...
The bit about the whole global warming debate that really makes NO sense though is this. So let's assume it's not true - human activity has no influence at all on climate (well there goes chaos theory and pretty much all of quantum physics as well since the idea of anything being without influence and the influence having the capacity violates their most basic precepts but what the heck).
So we put these efforts we're suggesting in place. We get cleaner air and water. We reduce the incidence of asthma and lung disease. We spend less money on the (generally rather hostile) suppliers of oil. We get to actually SEE the sky again.
Yeah that would be terrible - making a much better world if there ISN'T an imminent crisis to force us eh...
I never said that.
I SAID the free market struggles with projects that have very high initial capital expenses and very slow profit. When it's going to take 20 years to make your money back it makes no sense to invest it.
And NONE of the money made THAT was has happened WITHOUT politicians.
Moreover we could argue that the greater majority of wealth created by such projects NEVER go to the investers, it's made in the form of every penny saved by a million commuters with better transport, every restaurant having an extra customer because a tunnel under a channel brought more tourists, every child that can study for a few hours more and get into college because he has light after the sun sets.
THAT kind of profit is felt by ALL of us, but the guy who made the big investment gets no MORE of it than we all do (most such projects that WERE privately funded has historically CONSISTENTLY gone bankrupt - the British side of the channel tunnel project was already bankrupt years ago until they got government loans, the French side which was a public enterprize is doing well all this time).
The only way we KNOW of to successfully fund high-cost projects where the profit is benefit to society as a whole rather than to the people who actually invest the money is to SPREAD the investment over everybody - and in our society, as it stands the only practical system we HAVE for doing that is called "Taxes'.
Only an American could honestly convince himself that paying a bit of his income so EVERYBODY (including himself) can have a better life is somehow a LOSS for him.
Erm... you and title = fail.
How the hell is a LOAN = "gives money to" ?
The bank loaned me half-a-million to buy my house, they sure as hell didn't GIVE me half a million and if I don't make my payments on that loan you can bet your short-and-curly's they'll take my house.
Government loans to help large projects with long-term profitability get founded is not unusual in the world and has on many occasions been critical to getting projects done. Corporations have a massive problem justifying a short-term large expense with slow long-term profits.
But such projects can be important investments in needed infrastructure, so governments find ways to help justify it. One way which America did with most telephone companies was to say "spend the money - and we'll give you a monopoly on selling telephone services"... how did that work out for you ?
Now "here's a LOAN, that way the expense is ALSO long-term just like the profits so you have no reason not to do it and you have access to the capital" may actually be a MORE free-market solution to a problem the free-market is utterly incapable of solving without intervention.
Somebody has to make the investment for any large infrastructure project to happen. Individuals - want to be sure of a return in their lifetime. Corporations want to be sure of a return at the next stockholder meetings. That leaves pretty much -government.
There is one OTHER way - that is when you live in a culture that things doing awesomely cool projects for the hell of doing it is so great that everybody will be happy to invest KNOWING they will never see a return. England once ruled half the world because they thought like that. They built great bridges and ships and towers not because there was any chance of making money but "for queen and country".
America simply won't build a great bridge (or solar power station) for President and Country - it doesn't fit in your culture's way of thinking at all. So you get to choose HOW government will intervene, not IF... unless you choose to never again make any noteworthy progress as a nation in the fields of engineering and infrastructure (in case you were wondering THAT is a very efficient way to become a very poor nation very very fast).
Actually - here's an even better example. As any WoW player will tell you before engaging a raid it's common practise to watch videos on youtube showing screencasts of the fight. This is among the best way to study tactics for it.
Those videos usually have three core parts:
1) The actual gaming things captured. This is copyright blizzard (Actually it's a derivative work, the art in the game belongs to them but the screencast is not the art itself and has more to it) - but blizzard has already given explicit permission for the creation and distribution of such derivative works.
2) Usually there is a voice-over explaining the tactics you are looking at. This is copyright whoever is reading it, it may even have another owner if it was written by somebody else.
4) Then there is usually a lot of guild-chatter as well. This is even trickier. Every single person typing there owns the copyright to the line of text they wrote which appeared on screen during the video. For most raids - that's 25 people, if the caster had the guild window open it could be 100 or more people's copyright - in one short video.
So let's say 80 copyright holders involved. Only ONE of them is a major media company and that company HAS already given permission for this to be created. Of the remaining 80 all but one is nearly impossible to identify as their only available identification there is a character name. Youtube may not even know on which realm - to find them youtube would have ot demand their account details from Blizzard who because of their strict security measures would demand a subpoena.
78 subpoena's, a note from the voice-over guy ... all this so that you could show a video of how to defeat Sartharion ?
That's what the RIAA's system would demand of youtube. Well it doesn't work like that because it would be, let me see, batshit insane !
Instead doesn't it rather make sense to let such actions be handle BY those right's holders ? That even takes care of the rare case where blizzard may actually have a valid reason for wanting a video pulled that isn't covered by the permission they gave- say if you had posted a screencast of Cata taken during the NDA period that they felt was sufficiently problematic to want pulled.
>I actually donate money to a completely silly online game because even FB game developers need to eat
So YOU'RE the guy funding farmville... you BASTARD... GET HIM !!!!
It goes way beyond that though. This is corporatism at it's worst. The RIAA carefully hides here the fact that they are not the holders of the majority of the copyright out there. Under international law, every time I take a picture, write a /. comment or a blogpost or make a recording on my cellphone I own the copyright to it.
That makes ME a rightsholder.
The system as it stands, despite the problematic parts of the DMCA actually rather works okay here. The balance struck wasn't struck where the RIAA says it was, with damn good reason. Say I post a video of something silly to my blog, you like it and upload it to youtube. Technically you've committed copyright infringement -but chances are, if you credit me and link the blog I would be grateful rather than angry.
But it's impossible for youtube to know how I would feel. What the current DMCA means is -if I don't like it, I can file a takedown notice and get it down if I want, or say thank you and leave it up if I want.
What the RIAA wants here would remove that level of self-decision from the millions of rights-holders who are NOT the RIAA and turn ISP's into a police force. Youtube would have to somehow verify that you either created the video yourself or have an agreement with me about it everytime you do an upload !
That's a massive legal overhead and in the very vast majority of the cases it would be a complete waste. That's not even considering that a video you don't own, nor know the creator of may have been published under a CC license - and now youtube has the duty to go find the original web-page and check that ?
I agree with the judge here - the onus for identifying and reporting should belong to those rights-holders who desire to excercise control, not with the ISP's whose job ought to be to build reliable fast servers that are not so congested as to be unusable. The moment and IT company has more lawyers than developers things go to hell for customers. Just look at Microsoft. Let's not force that to be the case for every ISP and 1-man hosting company in the world as well !
And if my Aunt had a penis she'd be my Uncle.
The support mechanisms for women in abusive relationships are still pretty pathetic. The support mechanisms for MEN who are being abused are.. right non-existent.
Anyway, all the trained councilors in the world can't do half as much to restore your image of how people should treat you as ONE person who actually treats you that way.