A Web Page created by a person is usually created for a task in mind - Showing off a project... A Blog is usually created as a online journal or diary, often for a group of friends.
Updated frequently... "posted by"... dates... hosted on one of the popular blogging sites... Links to and is linked from other weblogs
Sounds like the news sections of most SourceForge.net projects I've run into. They're updated frequently (release early, release often), the maintainers frequently post status updates on given dates, SourceForge.net has a lot of them, and they link to other projects that use their code or that contribute code that they use.
It's stealing the recipe to make and sell your own bread.
Now your analogy assumes that published recipes can be "stolen". When defining copyright's morality through analogy, you can't appeal to copyright without reasoning in circles.
If you want to sell bread, come up with your own recipe.
A simple recompile and test is enough only when the various platforms have source-compatible APIs (as with POSIX's C library), but in this case, they don't. Say QuickTime has a.mov parser and a Foozbat video decoder. Xine also has a.mov parser. Apple would have to adapt the Foozbat video decoder to match Xine's.mov parser and the rest of Xine's API. I'd give a small team a week to a couple weeks for the engineers and patent lawyers to get the details ironed out, which correlates with somewhere between $10,000 and $100,000.
So you think the QuickTime team could knock out an acceptable player in a couple of minutes then?
oops: by "few thousand" I meant less than $100K. I'm guessing it wouldn't take much longer than a month for them to fit at least the common variants of QuickTime video (no exotic transformations, etc) into the Mplayer or Xine architecture.
By the way, no problem using GIMP in an inkjet printer...
No problem here either (Canon S520 printer, Windows 2000 OS). That's because GIMP for Windows just feeds the DIB data structure to the part of Windows GDI that handles printing, and Microsoft has already licensed patents on reasonable quality conversion from sRGB (Windows's native color space) to CMYK spaces.
Disney and Apple getting together? Horse hockey. It's one of Hollywood's worst kept secrets that Apple CEO and Pixar CEO Steve Jobs hates Disney CEO Michael Eisner and would rather lose Nemo.
Otherwise, you have a valid point. Can somebody translate the preceding paragraph into Klingon for me?
[Legalizing slavery] is an extreme example, of course, but so is the 'Happy Birthday' thing.
The means are delineated by the extremes.
If you ask them whether an artist should have any control over his or her music after it leaves his or her mouth, most of them will say yes.
If you ask them whether an artist should have any control over his or her music after he or she dies, what will most of them say? My argument isn't against copyright, which I consider a useful tool, but rather against excess and abuse.
You never did answer the 'theft of services' point
Thanks for reminding me to address the issue. I have done so. And about sneaking into a concert: For one thing, additional labor is needed to clean up after those who fill empty seats.
I find that the most obvious way to define theft of service is in terms of the marginal cost of adding another customer. Unauthorized use of electricity is theft because coal has a marginal cost. Unauthorized use of point-to-point communication networks such as phones and cellphones[1] is theft because switches and trunk lines (or cell towers) have a marginal cost. Unauthorized use of basic cable television signals is theft because signal distribution amplifiers have a marginal cost.
Copyright, on the other hand, is a different matter. Production of an original work of authorship and copies thereof involves large fixed costs of product development (including your office supplies) and negligible marginal costs of replication (especially in the age of peer-to-peer digital dissemination networks). Copyright is a subsidy from the government "to promote the progress of science and useful arts" (U.S. Const. I.8.8). The most obvious business model under copyright is sale of copies[2], which fakes divisibility of the fixed costs, but once the publisher has sold enough copies to pay off the cost of the labor involved in production, then what do the proceeds from sales of further copies pay for, and from whom do so-called "lost sales" "steal"?
Also, if an infringement occurs after the copyright owner has refused to authorize a specific use of a work, what has been stolen from the copyright owner?
[1] I don't find adding a "cloned cellphone" to be theft of service if done with the full knowledge and consent of the account holder who pays the bill to the cellphone service provider. In fact, many cellphone service providers now advertise cloned cellphones as an option in plans.
[2] There are alternatives to the copy sales model that do not require copyright, such as patronage (e.g. having an advertiser commission the labor of a songwriter and a recording artist) or the so-called Street Performer Protocol. I do not discuss them further because arguing against copyright itself is beside the point.
I'm guessing that your argument is that "narrowcasting" does not count as a public performance. Let me get more specific, quoting from 17 USC 101:
To perform or display a work ''publicly'' means -
(1) to perform or display it at a place open to the public or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered; or (2) to transmit or otherwise communicate a performance or display of the work to a place specified by clause (1) or to the public, by means of any device or process, whether the members of the public capable of receiving the performance or display receive it in the same place or in separate places and at the same time or at different times.
The key point of the definition of public performance lies in whether or not strangers can perceive the performance. It would appear that opening up even one simultaneous iTunes stream to strangers is a public performance.
The typical "Lunix fanboy" would shun Photoshop for Linux, and bellow about how much better the Free GIMP software is.
Yeah, until the time he has to do print work. See, GIMP can't do print work because GIMP can't do color space conversion because acceptable-quality color space conversion is patented and GPL software such as GIMP ordinarily cannot accept patented methods.
Likewise, who's to say the Xine developers won't get hit with a patent lawsuit?
Yeah, I can't believe [the maintainers of Quicktime and Windows Media Player] won't spend $$$millions to support.00000001% of the desktop market.
Exaggeration. FreeBSD and Linux together have at least 2% of the desktop market, and I don't think it'd cost more than a few thousand for a few engineers at Apple or Microsoft to throw together a plug-in for Mplayer or Xine.
Even in the United States, reverse engineering for "interoperability purposes" is legal.
Not if the end result is unauthorized distribution of an implementation of a patented invention; then, it's called "patent infringement". Or do you claim that Sorenson owns no valid patents on methods used in its codec?
Define "property" in colloquial terms so as to include copyrights. Most people I surveyed did not believe that "Happy Birthday to You" was morally the "property" of Warner Chappell music publishing.
Don't take what's not yours.
Define "yours". This will probably come in terms of "property".
All of that Spam software could have a legitimate purpose as well.
Rumor has it that some of the commercial spam software packages include the full versions of legitimate mail server programs such as Sendmail and Postfix. There's a "substantial legitimate use" right there.
"Belonging" means... To have exclusive rights over.
Do you believe that such exclusive rights, as they are currently defined by law, match prevailing moral standards? Including the ban on singing "Happy Birthday to You" in public without the permission of AOL? Most people I ask are surprised that some older works are still under copyright, which can only mean that the exclusive rights in those works exist only in the legal code, not the moral code.
If you're using "theft" in a moral sense, match it up with a moral code. For rights such as the Bono Act and the DMCA that exist only in the legal code, only the legal definition of "theft" (the taking of physical property, such as larceny, automobile theft, robbery, and embezzlement) makes sense. Mixing legal and colloquial senses of a given word willy-nilly would in Microsoft executives getting life sentences for "killing" the competition. Though many Slashdotters would like to see that happen, I don't believe such a punishment would remotely fit the crime, morally or legally.
Being that the 'recipient' has no access to the actual media file itself, only playback thereof
Under United States copyright law, the owner of copyright in a musical work (most often the songwriter's publisher) has a monopoly to authorize public performances of the work, which is generally delegated to a performance rights organization such as Broadcast Music Inc. The definition of "public performance" includes broadcasting. In addition, the owner of copyright in a sound recording (most often the artist's label) has a monopoly to authorize public performances of the sound recording through a digital transmission, except through the convoluted rules of 17 USC 114. Hiring attorneys and accountants to make sense of section 114 may prove more expensive than just licensing the recordings from the labels.
it would help if Herr Jobs would kick up the Store's encoding crew a notch or two.
Please hold your horses. If a recording artist's label is not one of the top five in the United States (BMG, EMI, Sony, Uni, WB), the delay could be because Apple just hasn't yet got around to negotiating with that label or encoding that label's catalog. Remember that Apple isn't as big as Microsoft.
Many of the artists I'm interested in aren't there
For iTunes feedback to be effective, you have to contact both Apple (through the iTunes program) and the artist's record label.
I did say "human-experience-complete", didn't I? Saying "Pika-chu" is language is like saying "Woof-woof" is language. It's the cry of an animal, like "hoothoot" or "meowth".
[goes on to mention the South Park variant of the Smurf language]
So there's a demonstrative pronoun with wide application. It reminds me of my mom's dialect, which overuses th-words such as "this", "that", "there", and "thing", even when the listener is in the other room and cannot see the antecedent. But even worse: Here is a language spoken by fictional sea creatures with thousands of pronouns and no nouns.
Correction: mi moku e jan == "I eat people". (The direct object takes an 'e' particle after verbs other than preposition-type verbs.) But for Bob's sake, I hope you mean that in the sexual sense.
"And close is all you ever get in that language."
Close is all you ever get in any human language, save perhaps Lojban.
"It isn't very specific"
That's because Toki Pona speakers learn more by doing than by saying. For example, pali e tomo la (when building a house), instead of having measurements, they learn in person what is mute pona (enough).
"sounds goofy"
toki Inli li nasa sama ala sama? Isn't English just as goofy?
"at least with Klingon you sound as if your tearing apart small animals."
Small animals or small people? I'd almost imagine the Morlocks of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells speaking a language reminiscent of Klingon.
Slashdot Mirror
A Web Page created by a person is usually created for a task in mind - Showing off a project ... A Blog is usually created as a online journal or diary, often for a group of friends.
What about one hostname whose HTTP space contains both a project web page and a related online journal? Such as my site or Forgotten's site or a random SourceForge.net project?
Updated frequently ... "posted by" ... dates ... hosted on one of the popular blogging sites ... Links to and is linked from other weblogs
Sounds like the news sections of most SourceForge.net projects I've run into. They're updated frequently (release early, release often), the maintainers frequently post status updates on given dates, SourceForge.net has a lot of them, and they link to other projects that use their code or that contribute code that they use.
Is SourceForge.net a blog?
It's stealing the recipe to make and sell your own bread.
Now your analogy assumes that published recipes can be "stolen". When defining copyright's morality through analogy, you can't appeal to copyright without reasoning in circles.
If you want to sell bread, come up with your own recipe.
Then what if it turns out that the most basic recipe for bread itself is copyrighted? Then nobody can make bread at all.
A simple recompile and test is enough only when the various platforms have source-compatible APIs (as with POSIX's C library), but in this case, they don't. Say QuickTime has a .mov parser and a Foozbat video decoder. Xine also has a .mov parser. Apple would have to adapt the Foozbat video decoder to match Xine's .mov parser and the rest of Xine's API. I'd give a small team a week to a couple weeks for the engineers and patent lawyers to get the details ironed out, which correlates with somewhere between $10,000 and $100,000.
So you think the QuickTime team could knock out an acceptable player in a couple of minutes then?
oops: by "few thousand" I meant less than $100K. I'm guessing it wouldn't take much longer than a month for them to fit at least the common variants of QuickTime video (no exotic transformations, etc) into the Mplayer or Xine architecture.
By the way, no problem using GIMP in an inkjet printer...
No problem here either (Canon S520 printer, Windows 2000 OS). That's because GIMP for Windows just feeds the DIB data structure to the part of Windows GDI that handles printing, and Microsoft has already licensed patents on reasonable quality conversion from sRGB (Windows's native color space) to CMYK spaces.
Walt Disney Inc. / CIA / Apple conspiracy
Disney and Apple getting together? Horse hockey. It's one of Hollywood's worst kept secrets that Apple CEO and Pixar CEO Steve Jobs hates Disney CEO Michael Eisner and would rather lose Nemo.
Otherwise, you have a valid point. Can somebody translate the preceding paragraph into Klingon for me?
[Legalizing slavery] is an extreme example, of course, but so is the 'Happy Birthday' thing.
The means are delineated by the extremes.
If you ask them whether an artist should have any control over his or her music after it leaves his or her mouth, most of them will say yes.
If you ask them whether an artist should have any control over his or her music after he or she dies, what will most of them say? My argument isn't against copyright, which I consider a useful tool, but rather against excess and abuse.
You never did answer the 'theft of services' point
Thanks for reminding me to address the issue. I have done so. And about sneaking into a concert: For one thing, additional labor is needed to clean up after those who fill empty seats.
I find that the most obvious way to define theft of service is in terms of the marginal cost of adding another customer. Unauthorized use of electricity is theft because coal has a marginal cost. Unauthorized use of point-to-point communication networks such as phones and cellphones[1] is theft because switches and trunk lines (or cell towers) have a marginal cost. Unauthorized use of basic cable television signals is theft because signal distribution amplifiers have a marginal cost.
Copyright, on the other hand, is a different matter. Production of an original work of authorship and copies thereof involves large fixed costs of product development (including your office supplies) and negligible marginal costs of replication (especially in the age of peer-to-peer digital dissemination networks). Copyright is a subsidy from the government "to promote the progress of science and useful arts" (U.S. Const. I.8.8). The most obvious business model under copyright is sale of copies[2], which fakes divisibility of the fixed costs, but once the publisher has sold enough copies to pay off the cost of the labor involved in production, then what do the proceeds from sales of further copies pay for, and from whom do so-called "lost sales" "steal"?
Also, if an infringement occurs after the copyright owner has refused to authorize a specific use of a work, what has been stolen from the copyright owner?
[1] I don't find adding a "cloned cellphone" to be theft of service if done with the full knowledge and consent of the account holder who pays the bill to the cellphone service provider. In fact, many cellphone service providers now advertise cloned cellphones as an option in plans.
[2] There are alternatives to the copy sales model that do not require copyright, such as patronage (e.g. having an advertiser commission the labor of a songwriter and a recording artist) or the so-called Street Performer Protocol. I do not discuss them further because arguing against copyright itself is beside the point.
Technically, iTunes sharing is narrowcasting
I'm guessing that your argument is that "narrowcasting" does not count as a public performance. Let me get more specific, quoting from 17 USC 101:
The key point of the definition of public performance lies in whether or not strangers can perceive the performance. It would appear that opening up even one simultaneous iTunes stream to strangers is a public performance.
If you didn't help bake the bread, you don't get to eat the bread.
Does this help explain the copyright owner's right to forbid others from preparing derivative works, that is, from adding ingredients to the bread?
That would be the MPAA, not the RIAA.
Almost. The more prominent RIAA members have a hand in video production as well: music videos.
The typical "Lunix fanboy" would shun Photoshop for Linux, and bellow about how much better the Free GIMP software is.
Yeah, until the time he has to do print work. See, GIMP can't do print work because GIMP can't do color space conversion because acceptable-quality color space conversion is patented and GPL software such as GIMP ordinarily cannot accept patented methods.
Likewise, who's to say the Xine developers won't get hit with a patent lawsuit?
Yeah, I can't believe [the maintainers of Quicktime and Windows Media Player] won't spend $$$millions to support .00000001% of the desktop market.
Exaggeration. FreeBSD and Linux together have at least 2% of the desktop market, and I don't think it'd cost more than a few thousand for a few engineers at Apple or Microsoft to throw together a plug-in for Mplayer or Xine.
Or VP3, since anyone who has Sorenson has VP3.
Especially because VP3 is free software now.
Even in the United States, reverse engineering for "interoperability purposes" is legal.
Not if the end result is unauthorized distribution of an implementation of a patented invention; then, it's called "patent infringement". Or do you claim that Sorenson owns no valid patents on methods used in its codec?
Property is property.
Define "property" in colloquial terms so as to include copyrights. Most people I surveyed did not believe that "Happy Birthday to You" was morally the "property" of Warner Chappell music publishing.
Don't take what's not yours.
Define "yours". This will probably come in terms of "property".
All of that Spam software could have a legitimate purpose as well.
Rumor has it that some of the commercial spam software packages include the full versions of legitimate mail server programs such as Sendmail and Postfix. There's a "substantial legitimate use" right there.
Not sure what you mean [by "zoomed out jpeg"].
Circle it in the original image, and then place it side-by-side with the detail image.
"Belonging" means ... To have exclusive rights over.
Do you believe that such exclusive rights, as they are currently defined by law, match prevailing moral standards? Including the ban on singing "Happy Birthday to You" in public without the permission of AOL? Most people I ask are surprised that some older works are still under copyright, which can only mean that the exclusive rights in those works exist only in the legal code, not the moral code.
If you're using "theft" in a moral sense, match it up with a moral code. For rights such as the Bono Act and the DMCA that exist only in the legal code, only the legal definition of "theft" (the taking of physical property, such as larceny, automobile theft, robbery, and embezzlement) makes sense. Mixing legal and colloquial senses of a given word willy-nilly would in Microsoft executives getting life sentences for "killing" the competition. Though many Slashdotters would like to see that happen, I don't believe such a punishment would remotely fit the crime, morally or legally.
Being that the 'recipient' has no access to the actual media file itself, only playback thereof
Under United States copyright law, the owner of copyright in a musical work (most often the songwriter's publisher) has a monopoly to authorize public performances of the work, which is generally delegated to a performance rights organization such as Broadcast Music Inc. The definition of "public performance" includes broadcasting. In addition, the owner of copyright in a sound recording (most often the artist's label) has a monopoly to authorize public performances of the sound recording through a digital transmission, except through the convoluted rules of 17 USC 114. Hiring attorneys and accountants to make sense of section 114 may prove more expensive than just licensing the recordings from the labels.
it would help if Herr Jobs would kick up the Store's encoding crew a notch or two.
Please hold your horses. If a recording artist's label is not one of the top five in the United States (BMG, EMI, Sony, Uni, WB), the delay could be because Apple just hasn't yet got around to negotiating with that label or encoding that label's catalog. Remember that Apple isn't as big as Microsoft.
Many of the artists I'm interested in aren't there
For iTunes feedback to be effective, you have to contact both Apple (through the iTunes program) and the artist's record label.
Pika! Pika-pi! Pikachu!
I did say "human-experience-complete", didn't I? Saying "Pika-chu" is language is like saying "Woof-woof" is language. It's the cry of an animal, like "hoothoot" or "meowth".
[goes on to mention the South Park variant of the Smurf language]
So there's a demonstrative pronoun with wide application. It reminds me of my mom's dialect, which overuses th-words such as "this", "that", "there", and "thing", even when the listener is in the other room and cannot see the antecedent. But even worse: Here is a language spoken by fictional sea creatures with thousands of pronouns and no nouns.
"Mi moku jan."
Correction: mi moku e jan == "I eat people". (The direct object takes an 'e' particle after verbs other than preposition-type verbs.) But for Bob's sake, I hope you mean that in the sexual sense.
"And close is all you ever get in that language."
Close is all you ever get in any human language, save perhaps Lojban.
"It isn't very specific"
That's because Toki Pona speakers learn more by doing than by saying. For example, pali e tomo la (when building a house), instead of having measurements, they learn in person what is mute pona (enough).
"sounds goofy"
toki Inli li nasa sama ala sama? Isn't English just as goofy?
"at least with Klingon you sound as if your tearing apart small animals."
Small animals or small people? I'd almost imagine the Morlocks of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells speaking a language reminiscent of Klingon.
So using only those 60 or so words/phrases say "water".
The Toki Pona word for water is telo .