"I doubt that bittorrent is going to get banned, it is however being brutalized, and rightfully so, do you think that most of the bittorrent traffic out there is legit? Just like napster, it's a great idea, has some good purposes, but the primary purpose is the pirate music."
When it was first introduced, the only purpose of VHS was to "pirate" movies. I think you'll find VHS has held up pretty nicely over the years.
"Plagiarism is easy to catch, as long as there is some way (e.g. posting on the 'net) to establish you wrote it first."
The way to establish you wrote it first is not necessarily failproof (is that even a word?). But I agree with you, simply because plagiarism hasn't proven much of a problem so far. It's something professors and students accuse each other of, hardly the thing that should keep society awake.
Small children understand the value of property. If I have a cookie, I want it to remain mine.
Small children also understand the value of sharing. If I have a story, it only has value once shared.
Sometimes, that value is increased when I can claim that the story was made up by me. Other times it really doesn't matter who thought up the story.
"If I work hard, charge for the fruits of my labors, I'm the bad guy. Well that just puts every FOSS fan right in the same camp as my less savory former employers. "Why should I pay for what you're doing?""
Your savoury and unsavoury employers should pay you for your hard work, because you have an agreement with them that says so. You work hard in exchange for money, which is what both parties agreed to.
Working hard by itself does not entitle you to a reward. You need an agreement between parties to describe what exactly entitles you to a reward.
Now what kind of agreement did you reach with the FOSS camp?
As I write this I am watching a compilation of clips about the return trip on NASA TV. While Sergei Krikalev was closing the hatch, you could hear John Philips explain that his work was going slow, because he was using floppy disks to transfer data on. He also said something about needing USB (solid state?) disks, I did not quite catch that. Would these work on the ISS?
BTW, it is fairly trivial to see for yourself what they are using up there, as NASA publish hi-res photos of the interior of the ISS.
Now NASA TV is running a longish interview with Leroy Chiao. He confirmed that the capsule roled over to its side upon landing.
"Good point. And not only that, a lot of these "draconian" copyright laws were forced on the U.S. by the Europeans, via the Berne Convention..."
I don't know if you have noticed, but the US generally doesn't let anything be forced upon it, whether it is environmental agreements, or an international court. I think it is pretty safe to assume that the US relished adopting draconian copyright laws. And if you are an American, then it probably is your fault for choosing the wrong politicians in the first place.
On behalf of the rest of the world, and especially on behalf of my fellow Europeans: thanks, but no thanks.
Oh, by the way, next time you "adopt" our "draconian" copyright laws, try to adopt them literally. Because you extended recording rights way beyond the European term, we now have wankers like Cliff Richard (PDF) and U2 (PDF) clamouring to have your laws pushed onto us.
"I'm seeing a lot of comments about how IP is "good" and "bad", but what really strikes me in the realm of copyright law is how would reducing copyright terms effect the GPL?."
The GPL does not talk about the term of protection, so I don't see how this would affect anything.
"Say we go back to the basics, set copyright back to the original 14 years. Doesn't that mean that GPL'd code would be dumped unprotected into the public domain?"
Code that is promoted to the public domain gets the best chance of protection and the best chance of survival. Furthermore, the GPL is an artificial construct to mimic the public domain. Obviously, getting to the real public domain is even better.
Works do not get "dumped" in the public domain. The public domain is the best thing that can happen to works once created. Also, works are not protected by copyright; they are destroyed by it.
What surprises me is that you apparently have had the time to conclude from discussions about the GPL that it is the "darling" of the "Slashdot crowd", yet you haven't been able to conclude from those same discussions what the GPL is about. Are you just slow, or are you trolling?
"If you were unwilling to sell at any price [...] then the powers that be would need to assess a fair value for tax purposes. (This too could get ugly.)"
I live in a country where TPTB do take care of the appraisal, and it does get ugly, for two reasons:
1) You need an expensive system of arbitration so that everybody gets a fair deal.
2) Appraised value follows market value. Rents follow appraised value (because the rents need to cover the taxes). However, rentals are a completely different market than buys.
Regarding that last point: houses are usually rented by people who do not wish to settle down yet, or by people who cannot afford to buy. Although buying is cheaper in the long run, it requires a lump sum that low-income people are not able to afford.
The Netherlands recently (four or five years ago) got new tax laws, which started taxing income less and consumption and property more.
I actually liked this idea, because when you progressively tax income, the fat cats are going to complain that you are taxing their success. (Unfortunately, as happens with these things, the law got watered down by any parliamentarian who felt his stakeholders were maligned.)
The tax on property works out as follows; a certain small amount (the threshold) is untaxed. Then, the government estimates the average dividend people get off of property, and taxes that for a certain percentage.
(The threshold is currently about 19,000 euro, the tax is 30% over 4% estimated income, and you do not pay an additional income tax over income generated by property. I don't own that much, but the way I understand it, if you own a house worth 200,000 euro, you pay 30% of 4% of that amount, but if you rent the house to someone else, you do not pay tax over the rent money. If the rent money netts you more than 4% of the value of the house: profit!)
I live in a town with mostly 3 to 5 storey buildings. Window cleaners have copyright-like powers over here. (But the great thing is they did not need government to grant them those powers.)
It seems you have trouble taking your own medicine. Some examples:
"This header frames the article in such a way as to draw unthinking rants against IP policy, rather than a decent discussion. This is one of the reasons so many have stopped reading slashdot."
Oh? Any proof of that?
"To give the author of the article some credit, at least he admits that "IP is a good thing" near the end. It is."
Oh? Any proof of that?
It seems to me your comment is dripping with bias.
"--If someone is publishing an online comic for fun, they're not making money and hence cannot afford to pay a copyright fee."
Where on earth did you get that idea? The idea behind the fee is that an author goes through a nominal amount of trouble to show he has an interest in the work. The fee itself does not need to be high.
Although I dislike the Eldred act because it panders to a wrong interpretation of the law, in and of itself it is sensibly thought out: let authors or their heirs or the people they transfered their rights to pay a fee of 1 dollar, 50 years after the first publication of the work.
50 years should be sufficient to determine whether the work is valuable to you or not. 1 dollar is an amount that the author should be able to pay; if not, he clearly hasn't enough of an interest in the work.
"If the author of a work is not making money on the work, then why should the author be allowed to restrict others from using the work?"
Presumably the value of the work isn't recognized early on. Think of graffiti, which wasn't considered an art form in its early days.
"I think novels, essays, painting, music should be protected under copyright law.
[...]
Does this make sense?"
No, because copyright law cannot protect novels, essays, paintings and music. Copyright law destroys these things. The only thing that copyright law protects is the interests of authors/publishers, and possibly it creates a welcoming environment for the creation of works. (Although, as Boyle notes, there aren't enough data to justify claiming the latter.)
"--And you are assuming that there is an inherent right to public access of those works.
Actually, no, he isn't.
The state of nature, i.e. the default state, is that anybody is allowed to copy anything."
I assumed he was talking about unpublished works. Of course you don't have a right to stop somebody from copying a work that they own (apart from the artificial copyright), but I do not see how you have a right to force someone to publish what they wrote.
Slashdot Mirror
"Taking something without paying for it should generate a strong emotional response. It's wrong."
Not always.
"I doubt that bittorrent is going to get banned, it is however being brutalized, and rightfully so, do you think that most of the bittorrent traffic out there is legit? Just like napster, it's a great idea, has some good purposes, but the primary purpose is the pirate music."
When it was first introduced, the only purpose of VHS was to "pirate" movies. I think you'll find VHS has held up pretty nicely over the years.
"Plagiarism is easy to catch, as long as there is some way (e.g. posting on the 'net) to establish you wrote it first."
The way to establish you wrote it first is not necessarily failproof (is that even a word?). But I agree with you, simply because plagiarism hasn't proven much of a problem so far. It's something professors and students accuse each other of, hardly the thing that should keep society awake.
Small children understand the value of property. If I have a cookie, I want it to remain mine.
Small children also understand the value of sharing. If I have a story, it only has value once shared.
Sometimes, that value is increased when I can claim that the story was made up by me. Other times it really doesn't matter who thought up the story.
"Is terrorist the word you're looking for?"
"Terrorist", "Anonymous coward"; tomorrow another word will be the mot-du-jour...
"A terrorist expresses dissent by violence, mayhem, murder, or destruction of property."
That's what "terrorist" used to mean. Nowadays it means "dissident".
"--Why would you pay for art?"
"To provide support to the artists. So they will be able to continue to produce things you like."
"Providing me with what I like" is no reason to write a law that restricts the rest of population in what it can do.
"Steve Jobs is Apple. When Apple hired Jobs, they hired his charisma, his contacts, his reputation, his expertise."
So they were smart enough to recognize all these qualities and hire him? Seems like they should have the ultimate control then.
"people should be compensated for their work"
Why?
"If I work hard, charge for the fruits of my labors, I'm the bad guy. Well that just puts every FOSS fan right in the same camp as my less savory former employers. "Why should I pay for what you're doing?""
Your savoury and unsavoury employers should pay you for your hard work, because you have an agreement with them that says so. You work hard in exchange for money, which is what both parties agreed to.
Working hard by itself does not entitle you to a reward. You need an agreement between parties to describe what exactly entitles you to a reward.
Now what kind of agreement did you reach with the FOSS camp?
As I write this I am watching a compilation of clips about the return trip on NASA TV. While Sergei Krikalev was closing the hatch, you could hear John Philips explain that his work was going slow, because he was using floppy disks to transfer data on. He also said something about needing USB (solid state?) disks, I did not quite catch that. Would these work on the ISS?
BTW, it is fairly trivial to see for yourself what they are using up there, as NASA publish hi-res photos of the interior of the ISS.
Now NASA TV is running a longish interview with Leroy Chiao. He confirmed that the capsule roled over to its side upon landing.
"What does a soyuz look like (on the outside) after it makes bumpdown?"
Use http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/search.cgi to search for "soyuz" and "landing". Mostly landing party, but also some interesting pictures of the capsule.
"A postage stamp sized video that takes 100% of a 3ghz machine to play.
Well done NASA, you guys rock."
Come on! Don't tell me that it is news to you that the NASA requires ten times the resources the Russians would use to do twice the work?
"Without IP people would be free to use GPL code any way they want, without contributing back.
Is this what you want."
Yes, I want people to be free.
I find your hatred of freedom interesting, and disturbingly familiar. Are you perhaps a Red State American?
"Good point. And not only that, a lot of these "draconian" copyright laws were forced on the U.S. by the Europeans, via the Berne Convention..."
I don't know if you have noticed, but the US generally doesn't let anything be forced upon it, whether it is environmental agreements, or an international court. I think it is pretty safe to assume that the US relished adopting draconian copyright laws. And if you are an American, then it probably is your fault for choosing the wrong politicians in the first place.
On behalf of the rest of the world, and especially on behalf of my fellow Europeans: thanks, but no thanks.
Oh, by the way, next time you "adopt" our "draconian" copyright laws, try to adopt them literally. Because you extended recording rights way beyond the European term, we now have wankers like Cliff Richard (PDF) and U2 (PDF) clamouring to have your laws pushed onto us.
"If the creator doesn't want to make it available, that's their perogative."
No it's not.
"I'm seeing a lot of comments about how IP is "good" and "bad", but what really strikes me in the realm of copyright law is how would reducing copyright terms effect the GPL?."
The GPL does not talk about the term of protection, so I don't see how this would affect anything.
"Say we go back to the basics, set copyright back to the original 14 years. Doesn't that mean that GPL'd code would be dumped unprotected into the public domain?"
Code that is promoted to the public domain gets the best chance of protection and the best chance of survival. Furthermore, the GPL is an artificial construct to mimic the public domain. Obviously, getting to the real public domain is even better.
Works do not get "dumped" in the public domain. The public domain is the best thing that can happen to works once created. Also, works are not protected by copyright; they are destroyed by it.
What surprises me is that you apparently have had the time to conclude from discussions about the GPL that it is the "darling" of the "Slashdot crowd", yet you haven't been able to conclude from those same discussions what the GPL is about. Are you just slow, or are you trolling?
"Cheaper enough to have one of their lawyers decide to cut, say, the least used 10 percent."
If the maintenance fee is $200 per year, it would probably be cheaper to fire a couple of lawyers.
"If you were unwilling to sell at any price [...] then the powers that be would need to assess a fair value for tax purposes. (This too could get ugly.)"
I live in a country where TPTB do take care of the appraisal, and it does get ugly, for two reasons:
1) You need an expensive system of arbitration so that everybody gets a fair deal.
2) Appraised value follows market value. Rents follow appraised value (because the rents need to cover the taxes). However, rentals are a completely different market than buys.
Regarding that last point: houses are usually rented by people who do not wish to settle down yet, or by people who cannot afford to buy. Although buying is cheaper in the long run, it requires a lump sum that low-income people are not able to afford.
The Netherlands recently (four or five years ago) got new tax laws, which started taxing income less and consumption and property more.
I actually liked this idea, because when you progressively tax income, the fat cats are going to complain that you are taxing their success. (Unfortunately, as happens with these things, the law got watered down by any parliamentarian who felt his stakeholders were maligned.)
The tax on property works out as follows; a certain small amount (the threshold) is untaxed. Then, the government estimates the average dividend people get off of property, and taxes that for a certain percentage.
(The threshold is currently about 19,000 euro, the tax is 30% over 4% estimated income, and you do not pay an additional income tax over income generated by property. I don't own that much, but the way I understand it, if you own a house worth 200,000 euro, you pay 30% of 4% of that amount, but if you rent the house to someone else, you do not pay tax over the rent money. If the rent money netts you more than 4% of the value of the house: profit!)
" How do you propose paying for art outside the current system?"
Why would you pay for art?
I live in a town with mostly 3 to 5 storey buildings. Window cleaners have copyright-like powers over here. (But the great thing is they did not need government to grant them those powers.)
It seems you have trouble taking your own medicine. Some examples:
"This header frames the article in such a way as to draw unthinking rants against IP policy, rather than a decent discussion. This is one of the reasons so many have stopped reading slashdot."
Oh? Any proof of that?
"To give the author of the article some credit, at least he admits that "IP is a good thing" near the end. It is."
Oh? Any proof of that?
It seems to me your comment is dripping with bias.
BTW, bias is not a bad thing.
"--If someone is publishing an online comic for fun, they're not making money and hence cannot afford to pay a copyright fee."
Where on earth did you get that idea? The idea behind the fee is that an author goes through a nominal amount of trouble to show he has an interest in the work. The fee itself does not need to be high.
Although I dislike the Eldred act because it panders to a wrong interpretation of the law, in and of itself it is sensibly thought out: let authors or their heirs or the people they transfered their rights to pay a fee of 1 dollar, 50 years after the first publication of the work.
50 years should be sufficient to determine whether the work is valuable to you or not. 1 dollar is an amount that the author should be able to pay; if not, he clearly hasn't enough of an interest in the work.
"If the author of a work is not making money on the work, then why should the author be allowed to restrict others from using the work?"
Presumably the value of the work isn't recognized early on. Think of graffiti, which wasn't considered an art form in its early days.
"I think novels, essays, painting, music should be protected under copyright law.
[...]
Does this make sense?"
No, because copyright law cannot protect novels, essays, paintings and music. Copyright law destroys these things. The only thing that copyright law protects is the interests of authors/publishers, and possibly it creates a welcoming environment for the creation of works. (Although, as Boyle notes, there aren't enough data to justify claiming the latter.)
"--And you are assuming that there is an inherent right to public access of those works.
Actually, no, he isn't.
The state of nature, i.e. the default state, is that anybody is allowed to copy anything."
I assumed he was talking about unpublished works. Of course you don't have a right to stop somebody from copying a work that they own (apart from the artificial copyright), but I do not see how you have a right to force someone to publish what they wrote.