Sorry to have misunderstood you. I am certainly not defending piracy and I do not engage in piracy. It sounded to me as if you were defending the RIAAs actions.
You'll be able to download a copy from the RIAA for 99 cents...
Except that everybody would rather download it from iTunes for 99 cents, thus screwing RIAA out of... whatever. Still, they'd get screwed out of something.
Consider if you had spent a year creating a great program, perhaps something to make web browsing impervious to spybots. Then at the end of the year your employer shows you the door, and never pays you, but instead distributes your program for free over the net.
How would you feel about creating a year-long "work of art" and not getting paid for that program? Well that's how musicians feel. It's called theft of labor.
Well, okay, let's grant that your last statement is true (although I disagree that it is theft). The question being debated here is whether the end justifies the means. Apparently you think that any evil end (such as prosecuting people who didn't even own a computer, using questionable investigation firms that aren't licensed for the purpose, insisting that individual persons can be accurately identified by IP addresses) is okay to protect a musician from what you call theft?
Do you really believe that?? Because I am having a difficult time believing that any/.er with two functioning brain cells to rub together can possibly believe such a thing.
"I do have a cause though. It is obscenity. I'm for it. Unfortunately the civil liberties types who are fighting this issue have to fight it owing to the nature of the laws as a matter of freedom of speech and stifling of free expression and so on but we know what's really involved: dirty books are fun. That's all there is to it. But you can't get up in a court and say that I suppose. It's simply a matter of freedom of pleasure, a right which is not guaranteed by the Constitution unfortunately. Anyway, since people seem to be marching for their causes these days I have here a march for mine. It's called...
Smut! Give me smut and nothing but! A dirty novel I can't shut, If it's uncut, and unsubt- le.
I've never quibbled If it was ribald, I would devour where others merely nibbled. As the judge remarked the day that he acquitted my Aunt Hortense, "To be smut It must be ut- Terly without redeeming social importance."
Por- Nographic pictures I adore. Indecent magazines galore, I like them more If they're hard core.
(Bring on the obscene movies, murals, postcards, neckties, samplers, stained-glass windows, tattoos, anything! More, more, I'm still not satisfied!)
Stories of tortures Used by debauchers, Lurid, licentious, and vile, Make me smile. Novels that pander To my taste for candor Give me a pleasure sublime. (Let's face it, I love slime.)
All books can be indecent books Though recent books are bolder, For filth (I'm glad to say) is in the mind of the beholder. When correctly viewed, Everything is lewd. (I could tell you things about Peter Pan, And the Wizard of Oz, there's a dirty old man!)
I thrill To any book like Fanny Hill, And I suppose I always will, If it is swill And really fil thy.
Who needs a hobby like tennis or philately? I've got a hobby: rereading Lady Chatterley. But now they're trying to take it all away from us unless We take a stand, and hand in hand we fight for freedom of the press. In other words,
Smut! (I love it) Ah, the adventures of a slut. Oh, I'm a market they can't glut, I don't know what Compares with smut.
Hip hip hooray! Let's hear it for the Supreme Court! Don't let them take it away! " --Tom Lehrer
Not to belabor the point but what about the state of:
Illinois (Blagojevich, current)
New York (Spitzer, 2008)
North Carolina (Edwards, 2008)
New Jersey (McGreevey, 2004)
Connecticut (Rowland, 2004)
Arizona (Mecham, 1998)
And yet, there I was in a computer lab with my students (third year university general education) with the shiny new improved ribbon interface and, golly if I didn't have 30 hands shoot up simultaneously asking "how do I open/save/print?"
If M$ thinks that they keep changing their UI to please their customers, then they're truly delusional.
Nobody likes to be made to feel stupid. Having to learn again how to use a software product that you've been using for 15 years is not a productivity enhancement!
I don't understand your claim that the US is a democracy.
50% + 1 of the people cannot enact an illegal statute because the courts have the ability to declare the statute illegal, no?
Isn't there a big difference between us and ancient Athens?
I If the government is giving a researcher/professor/whatever a grant from taxes based on his or her past accomplishments, the university gets a huge chunk of it - unless I'm mistaken (and I very well could be.)
Oh, yeah. The grant industry is a money-maker for the university. At mine, we take off-the-top I think it's something like 50% for "administrative" purposes.
Religion is one of the fundamental aspects of society. Religious texts are published, copies, and scrutinized by both true believers and critics. Can you imagine the Roman Catholic Church claiming copyright over the Bible? If you're a critic of Scientology, you can.
Actually, IIRC, that was exactly the case during the medieval and renaissance period -- Jews had problems getting rights to print the Torah from the Church.
But I like your analogy -- what if you had to pay some hideous fee just to use a bible quote in your wedding invitation or church newsletter or whatnot?
Well, it must be admitted that, in some places like the UK, pretty much any Neandertal scatalogical finding enjoys seemingly permanent Crown Copyright.
I do some editing work for a UK-based charitable/educational organization in the area of medieval history and apparently you MAY NOT photograph medieval carvings and reproduce them not-for-profit in a community newsletter without paying a truly hideous fee, which is something our small organization cannot afford.
To me it's simply not clear how something created by someone who went on to his other-earthly final rewards more than 600 years ago has not entered into the public domain, especially when it is located within a public location.
As to the first part of your question, society enforces copyright by enacting copyright laws and financing the judicial system which enforces them.
As for Hollywood and the record companies "needing" armies of lawyers, if you'll visit just about any/. thread initiated by NewYorkCountryLawyer, you might be persuaded that the need is artificial and motivated by a mafia-like business model of grossly inflated judgements for piracy against people who don't own computers, etc., and based upon faulty assumptions such as that IP addresses accurately identify any given defendant, all the while ignoring the vast amount of commercially-motivated piracy that goes on outside the U.S.
For what it's worth, I pay for my movies and music. I pay for my commercial software. I pay my shareware fees. I contribute financially towards FOSS that I use. Please don't tar us all as a bunch of thieving, conniving losers who want to rob you blind.
However, I must also say in your defense that the college-age population seems to have absolutely zero moral objections to file-sharing. I teach a general education course on "the computer impact on society" and my last discussion prompt for my students was on piracy and copyright. Maybe one student made a serious argument against piracy, and that student is at least 55 years old. So I do understand why artists get pissed off; I just ask you to consider that not everyone is out to get you.
As a software developer you should know that some ideas are good and some are bad....but sometimes you never know if you don't try. The key here is innovation and experimentation...
I see some people ragging on Office 2007, but I think it's an example of something Microsoft has done extremely well. The new interface is a fantastic change, and I'm really impressed with it. Defaulting to the "old" GUI would be a step in the wrong direction.
Yeah, really friggin' fantastic, unless you're the one with a classroom full of 30-odd adults who suddenly can't figure out how to save their Word file, open/play a P0werp0int presentation, etc.
And don't even get me started on how none of the machines could see flash drives...
5) say the problem is super urgent, but then refuse to try anything you say.... I will be rich when I invent a device to stab someone in the face over the internet.
I'll never understand what it is about computers that brings out so much of what must be latent stupidity. In your list, number five really captures it. I can't tell you how common that one is although it sounds like you know from experience.
Okay, I've had the reverse of this problem. Just this last year, when M$ inexplicably decided to switch from PhotoDraw to ImageComposer (both of which basically did the same thing but with radically different UIs), and I wasn't warned about this change (satellite campus; I'm a part-timer and not primarily a Windows user), I show up to teach my little unit on how to make a photo hoax using a 12-page handout I'd created with elaborate screenshots (course was for non-CS majors) and I discover 5 minutes before class that I had PhotoDraw on my computer, and also on the one student work station I'd previously tested, that nobody else has PhotoDraw, only ImageComposer, that my handout, which had taken many hours to create, was useless, and that we were about to waste 3 hours of semester's classtime.
So I went to IT and asked if they could load the software for me.
Their response was that they could not because we didn't have a license for the software for which, only the month before, we clearly did have a license.
So I asked them if something dreadful happened, like, did M$ revoke our license? Did we run out of TP and somebody had an unfortunate accident? Did the dog eat the license? Did we forget where we put it?
No, no, no and no. So I asked why the software was still on the instructor's machine. Too complicated to mess up the instructor's machine. Okay, why was it on the one student machine I checked? We don't know. Okay, so, was it okay for us to have the software on the instructor's machine and one student machine? Yes. Alrighty, so, if we can have it on two machines in the lab, why can't we have it on the other 22? Because we don't have a license for the software.
This reminds me of the time I taught a class to a group of incoming college freshman who the university assured me were highly tech-literate.
So, there I am with two back-to-back sections of 30 students each, running frantically around the lab calling out, No! They don't go in sidewards/backwards/upside-down!
I don't even want to think about how many drives got damaged that day...
I once had a student who was, say, 50 or 60 years old and took my intro class. He was a former cardiac surgeon, so the man was certainly no idiot.
But, of course, the reason why he was a former cardiac surgeon was that he had developed tremors. This initially was a huge problem in mastering the mouse.
But the real killer was that the computer lab was one which we used almost exclusively for our higher-level CS major courses and apparently one of the little boogers decided to remap the mouse buttons.
If I'd ever found the kid who did it I'm certain I would have strangled him/her... (I suspect it was a him).
I once tried to teach a fifty-year-old something about computers.
First of all, instead of watching the screen and listening to what I was telling him, he was taking notes. Detailed notes.
However, the reason I'm writing this isn't that. It's the mouse.
First it took me a while to explain him what it is, how it is used – he did take detailed notes about that, too, including details on left, right and middle click – and then I had to try and make him stop looking at the goddamned mouse while he moved it.
Instead of looking at the screen to see where he was moving the mouse, he kept looking at his hand moving the mouse.
OMG, been there, done that!
I'm now thinking of doing a series of video tutorials. I just wish I had the technical ability (and maybe I do but am simply lazy) to produce the sort of interactive tutorials like used to ship with Apple computers ca. system 6. Those were VERY good.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry to have misunderstood you. I am certainly not defending piracy and I do not engage in piracy. It sounded to me as if you were defending the RIAAs actions.
... and I don't even have to put on clothes or leave my parent's basement to watch it!
And still not meet hot chicks. Yeah, that's an improvement.
You'll be able to download a copy from the RIAA for 99 cents...
Except that everybody would rather download it from iTunes for 99 cents, thus screwing RIAA out of... whatever. Still, they'd get screwed out of something.
Consider if you had spent a year creating a great program, perhaps something to make web browsing impervious to spybots. Then at the end of the year your employer shows you the door, and never pays you, but instead distributes your program for free over the net.
How would you feel about creating a year-long "work of art" and not getting paid for that program? Well that's how musicians feel. It's called theft of labor.
Well, okay, let's grant that your last statement is true (although I disagree that it is theft). The question being debated here is whether the end justifies the means. Apparently you think that any evil end (such as prosecuting people who didn't even own a computer, using questionable investigation firms that aren't licensed for the purpose, insisting that individual persons can be accurately identified by IP addresses) is okay to protect a musician from what you call theft?
Do you really believe that?? Because I am having a difficult time believing that any /.er with two functioning brain cells to rub together can possibly believe such a thing.
As my five-year-old son used to say when he was experimenting with profanity but hadn't gotten the hang of it yet, "Oh, for heaven's fuck."
My then-five son's favorite was Jesus Creepers!
"I do have a cause though. It is obscenity. I'm for it. Unfortunately the civil liberties types who are fighting this issue have to fight it owing to the nature of the laws as a matter of freedom of speech and stifling of free expression and so on but we know what's really involved: dirty books are fun. That's all there is to it. But you can't get up in a court and say that I suppose. It's simply a matter of freedom of pleasure, a right which is not guaranteed by the Constitution unfortunately. Anyway, since people seem to be marching for their causes these days I have here a march for mine. It's called...
Smut!
Give me smut and nothing but!
A dirty novel I can't shut,
If it's uncut,
and unsubt- le.
I've never quibbled
If it was ribald,
I would devour where others merely nibbled.
As the judge remarked the day that he
acquitted my Aunt Hortense,
"To be smut
It must be ut-
Terly without redeeming social importance."
Por-
Nographic pictures I adore.
Indecent magazines galore,
I like them more
If they're hard core.
(Bring on the obscene movies, murals, postcards, neckties,
samplers, stained-glass windows, tattoos, anything!
More, more, I'm still not satisfied!)
Stories of tortures
Used by debauchers,
Lurid, licentious, and vile,
Make me smile.
Novels that pander
To my taste for candor
Give me a pleasure sublime.
(Let's face it, I love slime.)
All books can be indecent books
Though recent books are bolder,
For filth (I'm glad to say) is in
the mind of the beholder.
When correctly viewed,
Everything is lewd.
(I could tell you things about Peter Pan,
And the Wizard of Oz, there's a dirty old man!)
I thrill
To any book like Fanny Hill,
And I suppose I always will,
If it is swill
And really fil
thy.
Who needs a hobby like tennis or philately?
I've got a hobby: rereading Lady Chatterley.
But now they're trying to take it all
away from us unless
We take a stand, and hand in hand
we fight for freedom of the press.
In other words,
Smut! (I love it)
Ah, the adventures of a slut.
Oh, I'm a market they can't glut,
I don't know what
Compares with smut.
Hip hip hooray!
Let's hear it for the Supreme Court!
Don't let them take it away! "
--Tom Lehrer
Not to belabor the point but what about the state of: Illinois (Blagojevich, current)
New York (Spitzer, 2008)
North Carolina (Edwards, 2008)
New Jersey (McGreevey, 2004)
Connecticut (Rowland, 2004)
Arizona (Mecham, 1998)
California (Der Gropenfuehrer).
There -- fixed that for ya'!
In a world where greater than >85% of users can barely click on an email, only 15% of students will need real computers. The rest want an appliance.
I once had a student who was supposed to email me her take-home essay midterm component.
After about six tries over the space of more than a month, she finally figured out how to actually attach the file.
Sigh.
One such example is Microsoft Publisher. This is a loathsome application.
That turd is still around??? God I hated that app!
And yet, there I was in a computer lab with my students (third year university general education) with the shiny new improved ribbon interface and, golly if I didn't have 30 hands shoot up simultaneously asking "how do I open/save/print?"
If M$ thinks that they keep changing their UI to please their customers, then they're truly delusional.
Nobody likes to be made to feel stupid. Having to learn again how to use a software product that you've been using for 15 years is not a productivity enhancement!
I don't understand your claim that the US is a democracy. 50% + 1 of the people cannot enact an illegal statute because the courts have the ability to declare the statute illegal, no? Isn't there a big difference between us and ancient Athens?
True security theater!
Right. I agree entirely. I was just going for 'the bigger point'.
I If the government is giving a researcher/professor/whatever a grant from taxes based on his or her past accomplishments, the university gets a huge chunk of it - unless I'm mistaken (and I very well could be.)
Oh, yeah. The grant industry is a money-maker for the university. At mine, we take off-the-top I think it's something like 50% for "administrative" purposes.
Religion is one of the fundamental aspects of society. Religious texts are published, copies, and scrutinized by both true believers and critics. Can you imagine the Roman Catholic Church claiming copyright over the Bible? If you're a critic of Scientology, you can.
Actually, IIRC, that was exactly the case during the medieval and renaissance period -- Jews had problems getting rights to print the Torah from the Church.
But I like your analogy -- what if you had to pay some hideous fee just to use a bible quote in your wedding invitation or church newsletter or whatnot?
Well, it must be admitted that, in some places like the UK, pretty much any Neandertal scatalogical finding enjoys seemingly permanent Crown Copyright.
I do some editing work for a UK-based charitable/educational organization in the area of medieval history and apparently you MAY NOT photograph medieval carvings and reproduce them not-for-profit in a community newsletter without paying a truly hideous fee, which is something our small organization cannot afford.
To me it's simply not clear how something created by someone who went on to his other-earthly final rewards more than 600 years ago has not entered into the public domain, especially when it is located within a public location.
As to the first part of your question, society enforces copyright by enacting copyright laws and financing the judicial system which enforces them.
/. thread initiated by NewYorkCountryLawyer, you might be persuaded that the need is artificial and motivated by a mafia-like business model of grossly inflated judgements for piracy against people who don't own computers, etc., and based upon faulty assumptions such as that IP addresses accurately identify any given defendant, all the while ignoring the vast amount of commercially-motivated piracy that goes on outside the U.S.
As for Hollywood and the record companies "needing" armies of lawyers, if you'll visit just about any
For what it's worth, I pay for my movies and music. I pay for my commercial software. I pay my shareware fees. I contribute financially towards FOSS that I use. Please don't tar us all as a bunch of thieving, conniving losers who want to rob you blind.
However, I must also say in your defense that the college-age population seems to have absolutely zero moral objections to file-sharing. I teach a general education course on "the computer impact on society" and my last discussion prompt for my students was on piracy and copyright. Maybe one student made a serious argument against piracy, and that student is at least 55 years old. So I do understand why artists get pissed off; I just ask you to consider that not everyone is out to get you.
That guy in a Chinese sweat shop will be cranking off cheapie knock-offs with or without things entering the public domain.
As a software developer you should know that some ideas are good and some are bad....but sometimes you never know if you don't try. The key here is innovation and experimentation...
And extensive end-user testing !
I see some people ragging on Office 2007, but I think it's an example of something Microsoft has done extremely well. The new interface is a fantastic change, and I'm really impressed with it. Defaulting to the "old" GUI would be a step in the wrong direction.
Yeah, really friggin' fantastic, unless you're the one with a classroom full of 30-odd adults who suddenly can't figure out how to save their Word file, open/play a P0werp0int presentation, etc.
And don't even get me started on how none of the machines could see flash drives...
Flash sucks.
5) say the problem is super urgent, but then refuse to try anything you say. ... I will be rich when I invent a device to stab someone in the face over the internet.
I'll never understand what it is about computers that brings out so much of what must be latent stupidity. In your list, number five really captures it. I can't tell you how common that one is although it sounds like you know from experience.
Okay, I've had the reverse of this problem. Just this last year, when M$ inexplicably decided to switch from PhotoDraw to ImageComposer (both of which basically did the same thing but with radically different UIs), and I wasn't warned about this change (satellite campus; I'm a part-timer and not primarily a Windows user), I show up to teach my little unit on how to make a photo hoax using a 12-page handout I'd created with elaborate screenshots (course was for non-CS majors) and I discover 5 minutes before class that I had PhotoDraw on my computer, and also on the one student work station I'd previously tested, that nobody else has PhotoDraw, only ImageComposer, that my handout, which had taken many hours to create, was useless, and that we were about to waste 3 hours of semester's classtime.
So I went to IT and asked if they could load the software for me.
Their response was that they could not because we didn't have a license for the software for which, only the month before, we clearly did have a license.
So I asked them if something dreadful happened, like, did M$ revoke our license? Did we run out of TP and somebody had an unfortunate accident? Did the dog eat the license? Did we forget where we put it?
No, no, no and no. So I asked why the software was still on the instructor's machine. Too complicated to mess up the instructor's machine. Okay, why was it on the one student machine I checked? We don't know. Okay, so, was it okay for us to have the software on the instructor's machine and one student machine? Yes. Alrighty, so, if we can have it on two machines in the lab, why can't we have it on the other 22? Because we don't have a license for the software.
Recursion anyone? I kid you not.
This reminds me of the time I taught a class to a group of incoming college freshman who the university assured me were highly tech-literate.
So, there I am with two back-to-back sections of 30 students each, running frantically around the lab calling out, No! They don't go in sidewards/backwards/upside-down!
I don't even want to think about how many drives got damaged that day...
It depends upon their fine motor skills, though.
I once had a student who was, say, 50 or 60 years old and took my intro class. He was a former cardiac surgeon, so the man was certainly no idiot.
But, of course, the reason why he was a former cardiac surgeon was that he had developed tremors. This initially was a huge problem in mastering the mouse.
But the real killer was that the computer lab was one which we used almost exclusively for our higher-level CS major courses and apparently one of the little boogers decided to remap the mouse buttons.
If I'd ever found the kid who did it I'm certain I would have strangled him/her... (I suspect it was a him).
I once tried to teach a fifty-year-old something about computers. First of all, instead of watching the screen and listening to what I was telling him, he was taking notes. Detailed notes.
However, the reason I'm writing this isn't that. It's the mouse. First it took me a while to explain him what it is, how it is used – he did take detailed notes about that, too, including details on left, right and middle click – and then I had to try and make him stop looking at the goddamned mouse while he moved it. Instead of looking at the screen to see where he was moving the mouse, he kept looking at his hand moving the mouse.
OMG, been there, done that!
I'm now thinking of doing a series of video tutorials. I just wish I had the technical ability (and maybe I do but am simply lazy) to produce the sort of interactive tutorials like used to ship with Apple computers ca. system 6. Those were VERY good.