There's no great value given to the original manuscript of a novel either (well, maybe for some of Charles Dickens' papers) - at least not as much value as is given to the original of a painting. Possibly because the mass reproduction of a film or a book captures the essense of it exactly (words or images) whereas the painting also has texture, etc. that you can't see unless you are right there with it. There's more value to having the original of a painting, since it's not as completely reproducible.
I bet that if someone buys up culture and destroys it, that society will henceforth value its culture a little more than money. In fact, I believe that this has happened in the past - people buying and destroying works by an artist in order to make other works that they own more valuable. Perhaps society will then enact laws to protect rare bits of culture that are irreplaceable, or else require those things to be under lock and key.
If society wants to have rights to something, then that needs to be expressed through the law. Right now such rights are not, at least in the U.S. You can't invent a right after the destruction happens; such a right isn't protecting anything at that point.
I'm not sure that I agree with you that that's how things should be, but I'm pretty sure that things are not that way at the present.
Off topic: Don't you have to belong to a "private club" in order to order alcohol at a bar in Utah? Kinda sounds like they're re-using an approach that's worked well in the past:)
If altered distribution becomes legal, we won't need copyleft, because copyright won't mean anything anyway. The day that the GPL no longer works is the day that we no longer need it.
IIRC, Redhat's founders have stated that their goal was not to take away part of Microsoft's share of a multi-billion dollar market; their goal was to use cheap software to reduce the size of the market while maintaining their absolute market position, thus increasing their relative market share. You can take that for what it's worth; it may not be their strategy any more but at the time it sounded like a pretty good plan.
It's only music that was out of print, and thus not being published on CD anyway, that she suggests would be a part of this experiment. It says nothing about a total shift to online sales.
It's an open format, because there are freely available tools to read and write the format. It is not necessarily an unencumbered format, in the sense that you may have legal troubles if you try to use the format in an open manner. But the details of the format are well-known; in fact it is the legal encumbrance itself (the mp3 encoding patents) which force the format itself to be open and known.
To draw a half-hearted analogy, MP3 is open but encumbered the same way that some software is Open but not necessarily Free.
I dunno, would it be the higher population density, fewer broadcast stations, greater interest in high technology, or perhaps having fewer rural areas where it's not worthwhile to upgrade to digital? Any one of those reasons would do nicely.
That's what it looks like from within the States, as well. I believe the President pretty much defined consumption as a citizen's duty in order to rescue the economy. Apparently, if you don't want to return the economy to the sky-high levels we had before, you're unpatriotic. Frankly, I think that pouring good money after bad into an unsustainable economy (constructed primarily by weasels in Wall Street and Silicon Valley) would be even more unpatriotic, and stupid to boot, but that's just another reason why I'll never be elected President:)
That's definitely out of order - The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was always the first book (as of about ten years ago). IIRC The Magician's Nephew was book five out of seven (or something like that, it's been a while); definitely near the end of the series. The definitive order is, of course, the order in which he wrote them, not the order that they were repackaged into for later publishing.
And also in a Heinlein short story "The Roads Must Roll", I believe - rather than having freeways stretching across the nation, he had moving belts of different speeds, where you could quickly and safely step up to high-speed belts for mass transit.
Re:The FCC is going to screw us
on
Future of Wi-Fi
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
FCC Regulation is like Communism - it's never really been tried.
Or, to be more precise: regulation in the public interest. The FCC is specifically chartered to not be required to act in the interests of the average citizen; they are aimed at preserving spectrum stability above all else, and spectrum stability is the friend of entrenched interests, not the little guy with the Next Big Idea. Even though Wi-Fi and LPFM might be the greatest communication improvements for civil society in this country, the FCC has a built-in bias against encouraging that sort of thing. So, it's not (entirely) that the FCC is unethically in bed with large, moneyed interests; it's more that the FCC is required to be in bed with them by act of Congress.
If you want to live without fear of bad regulations from the FCC, then you first have to get Congress to recharter the FCC and direct it to act in the interests of all of the public.
What I want to know is why the astronomy community continues to publicize these before all the data is in? Every time they say "it could destroy the Earth!" followed by a retraction a few days later. What would be the harm in waiting a month or two to make sure that the data is valid, before announcing the end of the world 20 years from now? Surely the month wouldn't make much difference over that amount of time, and it would reduce the amount of needless panic (and, later, humor at the expense of astronomers everywhere) that these premature announcements cause.
Couldn't agree more. Man, I miss living in Indiana, without all the damn clock changing to deal with. If Hoosier farmers can survive without Daylight Savings Time, why can't the rest of the nation?
But somehow if a politician got multiple telephone calls supporting a particular side of the issue, from AARP members or whatever, you can bet that it wouldn't count as spam. Multiple visits by lobbyists for the same cause? Again, not spam. Somehow political lobbying through inexpensive and commonly available means like email have become a Bad Thing.
I think there's a bit of a double standard here - if the common man tries to make their position known via email, and three other people happen to agree with them, then that's just gratuitous, but a mass telephone or snail mail campaign is just fine.
Why don't you just throw out all the letters that
express opinions contrary to your own while your at it?
I can only assume that you're being sarcastic at this point:)
I do agree that the government should heed all opinions from constituents, even if they have some small grammar or spelling errors. As long as the idea gets through, the government has the responsibility to take it into consideration. After all, there have been plenty of those in government themselves who were a little lacking on the speaking and writing side (Dan Quayle, George W. Bush, Richard M. Daley).
That being said, I do appreciate a comment in which someone does take the time to use correct grammar and spelling, especially if (like myself) they are writing without the benefit of a spelling checker. And it does occur to me that if we'd ignored those public figures listed above because they weren't well-spoken, we probably would have been better off after all:)
Ah, good call. I missed a key word in there. You'd think they'd charge him with one count on each actual sale, but perhaps they can't prove all of them, if he was smart enough to not leave a paper trail. Although if he didn't know it was illegal, then why would he "lose" the paperwork?
~400 games at an average price of $20 (this is probably high, considering that they were PSOne games, but I have seen around those prices for some games). This comes out to an $8000 actual loss due to piracy, probably less since some people probably wouldn't have bought the games if they were full retail price. Do offenses which have fines in the $8000 range normally also carry jail time? If so, what is the normal amount of jail time associated with that kind of offense? Of course, this only counts restitution and not punitive damages (or whatever those are called in criminal cases) but still the amount cannot be more than, say, $24000.
I don't see any reason to put someone in jail for a non-violent offense, as long as they have the means to pay restitution, court costs, and whatever damages are attached. It's only if someone can't pay for their crimes with money that it's necessary to make them pay with their time:)
How can it be unauthorized use of a computer, if it was his computer? Similarly, anyone who bought a chipped machine from him authorized that use (unless he didn't tell customers that they were chipped, but why would he do it that way?). I see nothing in this law that says you can't do whatever you want to a computer you own, since by definition you have authority over your own property.
I think the whole article and prosecution are a red herring; they could have got him on simple copyright infringement with no problems. The real story hear is the inclusion of the mod chipping charges in order to build legal precedent and popular sentiment for similar prosecutions of mod-chippers in the future.
I think you're being kind of silly to assume that your conclusion is blindingly obvious. Most people are not advanced users of Windows; the functionality that they do make use of is already replicated quite well under Linux. Advanced users might have to learn some things, but then again advanced users are advanced because they weren't afraid to learn in the first place.
The FCC already screwed the pooch on that one, by planning to force consumers to upgrade. Because market forces just aren't enough for the U.S.A. anymore...
Slashdot Mirror
There's no great value given to the original manuscript of a novel either (well, maybe for some of Charles Dickens' papers) - at least not as much value as is given to the original of a painting. Possibly because the mass reproduction of a film or a book captures the essense of it exactly (words or images) whereas the painting also has texture, etc. that you can't see unless you are right there with it. There's more value to having the original of a painting, since it's not as completely reproducible.
I bet that if someone buys up culture and destroys it, that society will henceforth value its culture a little more than money. In fact, I believe that this has happened in the past - people buying and destroying works by an artist in order to make other works that they own more valuable. Perhaps society will then enact laws to protect rare bits of culture that are irreplaceable, or else require those things to be under lock and key.
If society wants to have rights to something, then that needs to be expressed through the law. Right now such rights are not, at least in the U.S. You can't invent a right after the destruction happens; such a right isn't protecting anything at that point.
I'm not sure that I agree with you that that's how things should be, but I'm pretty sure that things are not that way at the present.
Off topic: Don't you have to belong to a "private club" in order to order alcohol at a bar in Utah? Kinda sounds like they're re-using an approach that's worked well in the past :)
If altered distribution becomes legal, we won't need copyleft, because copyright won't mean anything anyway. The day that the GPL no longer works is the day that we no longer need it.
IIRC, Redhat's founders have stated that their goal was not to take away part of Microsoft's share of a multi-billion dollar market; their goal was to use cheap software to reduce the size of the market while maintaining their absolute market position, thus increasing their relative market share. You can take that for what it's worth; it may not be their strategy any more but at the time it sounded like a pretty good plan.
However, some do write their own songs, and thus are also artists.
It's only music that was out of print, and thus not being published on CD anyway, that she suggests would be a part of this experiment. It says nothing about a total shift to online sales.
It's an open format, because there are freely available tools to read and write the format. It is not necessarily an unencumbered format, in the sense that you may have legal troubles if you try to use the format in an open manner. But the details of the format are well-known; in fact it is the legal encumbrance itself (the mp3 encoding patents) which force the format itself to be open and known.
To draw a half-hearted analogy, MP3 is open but encumbered the same way that some software is Open but not necessarily Free.
I dunno, would it be the higher population density, fewer broadcast stations, greater interest in high technology, or perhaps having fewer rural areas where it's not worthwhile to upgrade to digital? Any one of those reasons would do nicely.
That's what it looks like from within the States, as well. I believe the President pretty much defined consumption as a citizen's duty in order to rescue the economy. Apparently, if you don't want to return the economy to the sky-high levels we had before, you're unpatriotic. Frankly, I think that pouring good money after bad into an unsustainable economy (constructed primarily by weasels in Wall Street and Silicon Valley) would be even more unpatriotic, and stupid to boot, but that's just another reason why I'll never be elected President :)
That's definitely out of order - The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was always the first book (as of about ten years ago). IIRC The Magician's Nephew was book five out of seven (or something like that, it's been a while); definitely near the end of the series. The definitive order is, of course, the order in which he wrote them, not the order that they were repackaged into for later publishing.
"Resh-peck-o-biggle" :)
And also in a Heinlein short story "The Roads Must Roll", I believe - rather than having freeways stretching across the nation, he had moving belts of different speeds, where you could quickly and safely step up to high-speed belts for mass transit.
FCC Regulation is like Communism - it's never really been tried.
Or, to be more precise: regulation in the public interest. The FCC is specifically chartered to not be required to act in the interests of the average citizen; they are aimed at preserving spectrum stability above all else, and spectrum stability is the friend of entrenched interests, not the little guy with the Next Big Idea. Even though Wi-Fi and LPFM might be the greatest communication improvements for civil society in this country, the FCC has a built-in bias against encouraging that sort of thing. So, it's not (entirely) that the FCC is unethically in bed with large, moneyed interests; it's more that the FCC is required to be in bed with them by act of Congress.
If you want to live without fear of bad regulations from the FCC, then you first have to get Congress to recharter the FCC and direct it to act in the interests of all of the public.
What I want to know is why the astronomy community continues to publicize these before all the data is in? Every time they say "it could destroy the Earth!" followed by a retraction a few days later. What would be the harm in waiting a month or two to make sure that the data is valid, before announcing the end of the world 20 years from now? Surely the month wouldn't make much difference over that amount of time, and it would reduce the amount of needless panic (and, later, humor at the expense of astronomers everywhere) that these premature announcements cause.
Couldn't agree more. Man, I miss living in Indiana, without all the damn clock changing to deal with. If Hoosier farmers can survive without Daylight Savings Time, why can't the rest of the nation?
"No way man, I'm not falling for that old trick!" -- the DMCA
But somehow if a politician got multiple telephone calls supporting a particular side of the issue, from AARP members or whatever, you can bet that it wouldn't count as spam. Multiple visits by lobbyists for the same cause? Again, not spam. Somehow political lobbying through inexpensive and commonly available means like email have become a Bad Thing.
I think there's a bit of a double standard here - if the common man tries to make their position known via email, and three other people happen to agree with them, then that's just gratuitous, but a mass telephone or snail mail campaign is just fine.
I can only assume that you're being sarcastic at this point :)
I do agree that the government should heed all opinions from constituents, even if they have some small grammar or spelling errors. As long as the idea gets through, the government has the responsibility to take it into consideration. After all, there have been plenty of those in government themselves who were a little lacking on the speaking and writing side (Dan Quayle, George W. Bush, Richard M. Daley).
That being said, I do appreciate a comment in which someone does take the time to use correct grammar and spelling, especially if (like myself) they are writing without the benefit of a spelling checker. And it does occur to me that if we'd ignored those public figures listed above because they weren't well-spoken, we probably would have been better off after all :)
Ah, good call. I missed a key word in there. You'd think they'd charge him with one count on each actual sale, but perhaps they can't prove all of them, if he was smart enough to not leave a paper trail. Although if he didn't know it was illegal, then why would he "lose" the paperwork?
What a stupid thing to write into the statute.
~400 games at an average price of $20 (this is probably high, considering that they were PSOne games, but I have seen around those prices for some games). This comes out to an $8000 actual loss due to piracy, probably less since some people probably wouldn't have bought the games if they were full retail price. Do offenses which have fines in the $8000 range normally also carry jail time? If so, what is the normal amount of jail time associated with that kind of offense? Of course, this only counts restitution and not punitive damages (or whatever those are called in criminal cases) but still the amount cannot be more than, say, $24000.
I don't see any reason to put someone in jail for a non-violent offense, as long as they have the means to pay restitution, court costs, and whatever damages are attached. It's only if someone can't pay for their crimes with money that it's necessary to make them pay with their time :)
How can it be unauthorized use of a computer, if it was his computer? Similarly, anyone who bought a chipped machine from him authorized that use (unless he didn't tell customers that they were chipped, but why would he do it that way?). I see nothing in this law that says you can't do whatever you want to a computer you own, since by definition you have authority over your own property.
I think the whole article and prosecution are a red herring; they could have got him on simple copyright infringement with no problems. The real story hear is the inclusion of the mod chipping charges in order to build legal precedent and popular sentiment for similar prosecutions of mod-chippers in the future.
I think you're being kind of silly to assume that your conclusion is blindingly obvious. Most people are not advanced users of Windows; the functionality that they do make use of is already replicated quite well under Linux. Advanced users might have to learn some things, but then again advanced users are advanced because they weren't afraid to learn in the first place.
"Fix It Again, Tony" :)
The FCC already screwed the pooch on that one, by planning to force consumers to upgrade. Because market forces just aren't enough for the U.S.A. anymore...