Presumably he values the knowledge he gained more than the amount that was saved. Perhaps a little unrealistic but it hardly effects his point if your hours are cheaper than the training cost.
Essentially the saving is through cutting out the middleman. This may be a problem where the middleman is needed.. self learning may well be more time consuming than it's worth.
There appears to be a grey duckling in our choir...
Seriously though, why bother with the generalising and us against them bullshit? Any honest to GNU open source proponent doesn't give a damn about 'converts' or 'killing microsoft'. If those things are going to happen they will happen whether people bitch about them or not.
I think perhaps I have spotted where your perception of open source 'zealots' has come from. Those that have such an attitude are hardly the cream of the crop and there is little reason for anyone with a better idea to correct them. As you say, preaching to the choir.. except we seem to be absent the choirmasters as open source is about the freedom of community.
Open source will prosper due to the inherent qualities that have carried it thus far. It needs no screaming and shouting to be better, a small community of smart people who can ignore the screaming and shouting is not that much less effective than a large community of potential 'zealots'. After all, the size of the problem open source has to solve is only as big as it's community.
Why was this modded troll? I'm very pro-linux and I can see a well spoken point about usability here.
Having said that, it is pretty easy for websites to provide.rpm and.deb files as well as relying on repositories (notwithstanding dependency issues).
One thing that does annoy me about linux and installing programs is there is currently no simple way for a user to install programs locally rather than system-wide. It would be a very nice feature for those who run multi user setups, though a lot of work to implement. One for the ubuntu feature requests maybe.
One reason why these laws are so stupid. Aside from all the issues about whether they should be trying to tell us what to view.. the measures have hardly a chance in hell of doing what they set out to achieve.
Are you disallowed from watching murder mysteries on the basis that you might go out and murder someone tommorow? That would be one counter-argument.
Another would be lack of credit for the idea that thinking something in any way equates to wanting to do it.
Yes it is thought crime, and thought crime is not to be feared solely on a basis of liberty but for the reason behind the need for liberty. Every freedom you take away from people unnecessarily, chips away at the ability of people to be responsible for their own actions.
We already have adequate laws punishing those who cause harm. To introduce laws that punish people for thinking about harm or even viewing harm takes away their responsibility to make that decision. If there is a law against murder a person is still capable of reading books about murder and deciding for themselves that murder is a bad thing. If there is a law against reading about murder then a person is denied the opportunity to make that distinction.
It is easy to go from 'murder is bad because it is harmful' to 'murder is bad because the law says it is harmful' and the choice is based upon the credibility of the law. As all are subject to the law the next lot of lawmakers will be less able to make that decision themselves and although murder may stay illegal they may make a new law that says murder is sometimes OK because they do not appreciate fully why it was illegal in the first place.
Also consider the detrimental effect making a subject taboo has on peoples ability to make an informed choice. Curiosity is a healthy thing and i fear for future generations' ability to make moral choices should it be stifled.
The people who want to draw a line are right, a line needs to be drawn. What they do not seem to understand is that the line needs to be drawn by the individual, not the law.
The drawing of a line for obscenity counters the notion that people should be responsible for their actions. As long as you associate thinking about things that may be illegal with doing them, people are going to become less capable of drawing the line themselves.
Consider the same principles applied to violence: it is illegal to kill, therefore it is illegal to read murder mysteries. People stop reading murder mysteries.. violence becomes a taboo. How long before hitting a mugger is a more serious crime than stealing? It seems unlikely but that is because there is no taboo against thinking about violence. All the while, those who would have killed kill anyway as the penalty has not actually been increased.
If we go down the route of 'dealing' with the sexualisation of minors in artwork then the same laws should in an equal society apply to Britney Spears or whatever the latest pop sensation is. Such portrayals of child sexuality being marketed towards children are a much bigger problem than those being targeted by these laws.
Would distinguishing South Park from South Pron serve any useful purpose though? If South Park is considered ok because it is not porn then what is to stop people making porn that is marketed as comedy.
Re:Islamic groups are pushing censorship worldwide
on
UN Attacks Free Speech
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm no expert on ancient law, but I am guessing that they didn't have anything on the books about statutory rape in those days.
While your point about him being an unsuitable role model is a reasonable matter of opinion.. calling the guy a rapist for having sex with a child is ill informed or flamebait.
An interesting point, anything can lead to violence if the person is pre-disposed to violence. Trying to limit violence in this way will likely just make people find another reason.
And many consider hate speech law to be a short sighted solution to a symptom of ignorance.
Anyway, defamation of religion is very different from say, racism. Religion is something you can choose, race is something you are. You can believe there is a god and still not follow him. To deny someone their race is to deny their existance, hardly the same as calling them a fool for their choice in following a diety.
You cannot charge someone based on suspicion alone and grounds for a search would have to be more specific than believing they are criminals else politicians would get no privacy.
I think you are failing to grasp a key factor in morality, everyone is different.
If you believe something is immoral, that is part of your moral code. While you can try and impose that moral code on others.. it is always their choice.
To believe that your moral code is right and someone else's is wrong is inherent in the idea of morals. You choose what you believe is right. However, to believe that your moral code is always and wholly right is believing that you are infallible.
So, having cleared up that your morals may not be my morals.. I would say that the statement you quoted is true. It is rather limited in its scope however. I think it would be more fitting as "It's not immoral to break rules if I don't believe the rules should apply to anyone".
No one said it was an unjust state. I am guessing that your issue is that you feel Thoreau's actions were only justified by the fact that it was the constitution that he disagreed with. While that is a perfectly reasonable view.. Hatta was basing his statement on what Thoreau actually said. You seem to be basing your statement on what you think Thoreau would have felt.
And *yawn* at the you're so selfish jabs. They are poorly used on a complete stranger.
Although I am not sure English is your first language, I think I understand what you're getting at.
Is it likely that those that can pay for a license would be more likely to pay if they felt that harm was being done by stealing and that using encryption and intimidation isn't enough? Wouldn't another additional measure be building consensus by releasing accurate and verifiable numbers related to economic damage?
You seem to be saying that rather than the current methods of WAR! on copyright infringers that rights holders should instead concentrate on realistically identifying the effect that infringement has.
I agree that such an approach would be a lot better than what they are doing now and may even be successful. I am of the opinion that given the options of telling someone what to do against telling them about the consequences of their actions to enable them to make an informed choice, the latter should always be prefered.
Having said that, I do not believe that such a thing would be enough to justify copyright to those who believe it does more harm than good or doubt it's effectiveness.
As well, economic figures are notoriously hard to put into a useful context but easy to manipulate for a chosen goal if that goal includes making lots of money.
It would be easy to show that copyright generates lots of money.. after all, as someone who opposes copyright I would be the first to say how big an impact it has. Copyright means more artists; more artists mean more works of art; more works of art generally lead to more money being made from art. If your goal is to create jobs then it may be considered a big success.
That is only one side of the story though, for all the positive spin you can put on the effects of copyright.. it is usually taking at least as much away from society as it gives.
More artists is a given, the worth of those artists is not.
While copyright is often marketed as an incentive for creativity, it is more likely to marginalise creativity as a drip feed for a money making monster. When the incentive is based on how many records you sell.. good business is keeping new material to yourself until your previous record stops selling. Provided of course that you aren't a manufactured band in the first place who's creativity is based on market research.
Economically speaking you can think of it in terms of resources. People are only ever going to spend as much on entertainment as they have spare and will usually spend less. With copyright, you have lots of artists. The constant influx of new records means that lots of money will be spent on them. Because records are an infinite resource, there is no upper limit on how much one artist can make; if they are popular they can become rich. Those that fail to sell so many records (maybe they aren't in fashion or don't have funds for a global advertising campaign) will receive a vastly smaller sum because people will be less likely to spend money on them. As well, the knock on effect of there being more artists and filthy rich artists is that there is less physical wealth in the economy to go around.
So, without copyright.. I think: Artists would be fewer. Creativity would be better rewarded. The economy would be better off by the decrease in money going into music. Artists would have more wealth between them and it would be more evenly distributed.
The downside? People having to choose to invest in artists? I believe that is where copyright is failing most dramatically and that even if everyone who currently pirates didn't start spending money on artists, the artists who were left would still be better off as would the economy as a whole.
You seem to be mixing up public protesting with civil disobedience. While one may lead to the other.. they are different things. Civil disobedience may involve a public protest (as in your example) but it doesn't have to.
If you were to stop paying your taxes because you did not want to fund the war in Iraq.. that would be civil disobedience and depending on your intent, a protest.
If you were to chain yourself to a troop transport, that would also be civil disobedience as well as a public protest.
The example you give of vandals and thugs does not give a very good indication of intent as we do not know what the protest was about. If the protest was about being able to enter abandoned buildings for example then yes they may be exercising civil disobedience, by breaking the law in order to assert their right to enter the building.
If they were breaking the law for the hell of it then that is civil disobedience in the same way that physical harm is surgery; while it may be technically accurate it isn't the established use of the phrase.
That seems a rather improper rebuttal. To quote Mr Thoreau:
âoeUnder a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.⦠where the State places those who are not with her, but against her, â" the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor.⦠Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.â
Just because people are not objecting to slavery or war in this instance does not make his writings any less relevant.
I also wonder how he would feel about this issue, and I wouldn't be so sure that he'd agree with you. As he's dead it's a rather pointless argument, though.
IANAL but my understanding is that copyright infringement is rarely dealt with under criminal law.
That may seem like pedantry but it is an important distinction. If people are criminals for copyright infringement then they are also criminals for driving over the speed limit. This may well be your view, in which case a significant portion of the population should be considered criminals.
I take the view that choice is more important than law. To base a decision solely on law is to me a sign that someone is incapable of making the decision in the first place. I would rather have a society full of petty criminals who choose not to be violent because they abhor the consequences than a society full of people who follow the law blindly and get led into a war because wars are lawful.
As I don't have mod points to mod you down as troll..
We are all a bunch of hypocrites. Of course I strongly disapprove of blocking P2P or throttling. It may become a big problem. However it is hypocritical to pretend that P2P is used mostly for legal purposes.
A rather strong assumption that everyone who uses P2P claims it is for mostly legal purposes.
Say what you like, but downloading music and movies for free is still theft, no matter how you look at it. So, you don't approve of the current content owners' distribution policies, you think that CDs are overpriced, and that DRM sucks, and that everything should be available cheaply and conveniently online. I completely, 100% agree. However this is no excuse for stealing. Don't like the policies - don't use the product. End of story. Anything else is simply unethical.
Apart from you mixing up stealing with copying songs.. I think you should research ethics. Ethics is more about acting on what you believe to be right despite outside influence than defining right from wrong. You may take issue with people's choices but trying to paint a picture of morality with copyright infringers on the wrong side seems an arrogant attempt to impose your choices on others.
Come on people, it is unethical. If I try to sell you a piece of crap for $1000 you are not obliged to buy it, but you don't have the right to steal it either.
What does buying and selling scrap have to do with anything? If you want an analogy try one that has the scrap as a piece of art and instead of buying it someone takes a picture of it.
Let's face it, illegal downloading of movies and songs is really rampant. I have more than a few acquaintances in Europe who have collections of many thousands songs, movies (and software packages), without having _EVER_ bought a single one. They will never buy a CD or a movie, for any price, while they can download it for free. They never go to the cinema either because they download all new movies. They act as if they are entitled to this product for free, just because they consider it too expensive or too inconvenient to buy. Personally I find that disgusting (even though I agree with the expensive and inconvenient part).
This is a much more sensible point and one which I am glad to respond to. If people are not willing to pay for something.. then they make the choice not to invest in it. In the case of material goods.. this means you walk away as you cannot have the goods without depriving someone else. If the goods are infinite then there is nothing lost should you choose not to invest in the person who created them.
It is easy to make a concious choice as to whether you want to support the person who creates something. It is harder to make this concious choice if you are forced by law to pay the creater regardless of whether you wanted to or not. To those like me who oppose it, copyright law adds nothing to society.. it only takes away through creating a society where everything people do has to be a commodity and that people such as musicians are only worth as much as you spend on their CD's.
Distribution of pirated software is a subject that I find close to my heart. It takes a _lot of_ money to develop software. Perhaps not everybody realizes it, but programmers need to pay rent and eat. So do musicians and movie makers.
Everyone needs to make a living somehow. If you cannot work out how to do it without copyright.. don't be a software developer. There are plenty of people out there who would be glad for less competition.
Afaik they still haven't fixed it for parts of the product. This is the Symantec Endpoint Protection package. The problem pretty much made a server useless as it stopped the whole windows file sharing protocol working.
The really annoying part however was the constant news that a working version was just around the corner.. which would have the same issue again. If they'd just called the stuff Beta until it had been properly tested then I'd not be so bothered.
In my view, copyright law can never be justified. The law is bad in principle because civil law where I come from is supposed to enforce contracts made by people, not create contracts in itself. However supposedly noble the goal, law is the wrong way to go about it. It is up there with the war on drugs on the list of bad ideas that have made law into a pick and mix.
You went through in detail the commodity aspect of copyright, so I shall try and follow on from the issue of incentive.
Making creativity into a career all of its own has consequences beyond providing money to those who create. If you let people charge money for making an original song then you get lots of people making original songs.. but if the primary motivation is money then people can make many original songs with very few original ideas by latching on to whatever the idea of the last popular song was. This may have the effect of drowning out original ideas because no one gets to hear them.
Another consequence may be the division between career driven artists and everyone else. With so many people devoting their lives to making music, why bother trying it if you already have a job? While those who create as a career will produce much more polished art, the variety of art may be diminished as a result. Art historically has been about expression.. if all you see or hear is career driven art then you are surely losing out by not experiencing those who are not professional artists.
I recently got burnt by symantec and their inability to provide a working product for Windows 2008 Server x64 a year after its release and after numerous patches that claimed to make their product compatible.
There always be value attached to any digitized media, or set of computer control instructions. And the creator should say whether he wants it to put into a communal plot. Most of the value comes from creator's time invested creating the creation + his time experienced learning trades of his profession. most self serving creators will not put their work in the communal plot if that is thier primary source to generate income.
Value can be attached to anything, if only by sentiment. The idea that a free market requires consideration to non commissioned works in the name of encouragement is, I think, counter-intuitive.
Intellectual Property laws are comparable to mandating that all legal advice must be paid for unless the counsel explicitly says otherwise and that anyone else who uses that advice must also pay the counsel.
Somehow the lawyers still get paid even though the product of their efforts is essentially as free as Open Source software.
Your assertion seems to be that the only value in an intellectual creation is the time and effort put into it and therefore that we should mandate a price on all time and effort put into a creation, effectively making it a material resource.
The problem is, we already have the material resource.. the person. Much like the legal counsel, a programmer can in fact rely on their skills to make a living regardless of the material value of their work.
Intellectual Property law actually works counter to the free market in making certain peoples time and effort a material resource based upon their skill-set rather than treating people as people and their time and effort as a personal resource.
The issue specific to Open Source vs Proprietary software is that as long as states enforce Intellectual Property law, you rely on the goodwill of people to not take advantage of the law and to sell you their services as people rather than sell you the results of their work as a material commodity. I view it as a testament to the enlightened world-interest of people who make open source software that it is successful despite the laws. The fact that proprietary software is so successful is a testament to how greed can take advantage of poorly thought out laws and how hard that is to undo.
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Presumably he values the knowledge he gained more than the amount that was saved. Perhaps a little unrealistic but it hardly effects his point if your hours are cheaper than the training cost.
Essentially the saving is through cutting out the middleman. This may be a problem where the middleman is needed.. self learning may well be more time consuming than it's worth.
There appears to be a grey duckling in our choir...
Seriously though, why bother with the generalising and us against them bullshit? Any honest to GNU open source proponent doesn't give a damn about 'converts' or 'killing microsoft'. If those things are going to happen they will happen whether people bitch about them or not.
I think perhaps I have spotted where your perception of open source 'zealots' has come from. Those that have such an attitude are hardly the cream of the crop and there is little reason for anyone with a better idea to correct them. As you say, preaching to the choir.. except we seem to be absent the choirmasters as open source is about the freedom of community.
Open source will prosper due to the inherent qualities that have carried it thus far. It needs no screaming and shouting to be better, a small community of smart people who can ignore the screaming and shouting is not that much less effective than a large community of potential 'zealots'. After all, the size of the problem open source has to solve is only as big as it's community.
Why was this modded troll? I'm very pro-linux and I can see a well spoken point about usability here.
Having said that, it is pretty easy for websites to provide .rpm and .deb files as well as relying on repositories (notwithstanding dependency issues).
One thing that does annoy me about linux and installing programs is there is currently no simple way for a user to install programs locally rather than system-wide. It would be a very nice feature for those who run multi user setups, though a lot of work to implement. One for the ubuntu feature requests maybe.
One reason why these laws are so stupid. Aside from all the issues about whether they should be trying to tell us what to view.. the measures have hardly a chance in hell of doing what they set out to achieve.
Are you disallowed from watching murder mysteries on the basis that you might go out and murder someone tommorow? That would be one counter-argument.
Another would be lack of credit for the idea that thinking something in any way equates to wanting to do it.
Yes it is thought crime, and thought crime is not to be feared solely on a basis of liberty but for the reason behind the need for liberty. Every freedom you take away from people unnecessarily, chips away at the ability of people to be responsible for their own actions.
We already have adequate laws punishing those who cause harm. To introduce laws that punish people for thinking about harm or even viewing harm takes away their responsibility to make that decision. If there is a law against murder a person is still capable of reading books about murder and deciding for themselves that murder is a bad thing. If there is a law against reading about murder then a person is denied the opportunity to make that distinction.
It is easy to go from 'murder is bad because it is harmful' to 'murder is bad because the law says it is harmful' and the choice is based upon the credibility of the law. As all are subject to the law the next lot of lawmakers will be less able to make that decision themselves and although murder may stay illegal they may make a new law that says murder is sometimes OK because they do not appreciate fully why it was illegal in the first place.
Also consider the detrimental effect making a subject taboo has on peoples ability to make an informed choice. Curiosity is a healthy thing and i fear for future generations' ability to make moral choices should it be stifled.
The people who want to draw a line are right, a line needs to be drawn. What they do not seem to understand is that the line needs to be drawn by the individual, not the law.
The drawing of a line for obscenity counters the notion that people should be responsible for their actions. As long as you associate thinking about things that may be illegal with doing them, people are going to become less capable of drawing the line themselves.
Consider the same principles applied to violence: it is illegal to kill, therefore it is illegal to read murder mysteries. People stop reading murder mysteries.. violence becomes a taboo. How long before hitting a mugger is a more serious crime than stealing? It seems unlikely but that is because there is no taboo against thinking about violence. All the while, those who would have killed kill anyway as the penalty has not actually been increased.
If we go down the route of 'dealing' with the sexualisation of minors in artwork then the same laws should in an equal society apply to Britney Spears or whatever the latest pop sensation is. Such portrayals of child sexuality being marketed towards children are a much bigger problem than those being targeted by these laws.
Would distinguishing South Park from South Pron serve any useful purpose though? If South Park is considered ok because it is not porn then what is to stop people making porn that is marketed as comedy.
I'm no expert on ancient law, but I am guessing that they didn't have anything on the books about statutory rape in those days.
While your point about him being an unsuitable role model is a reasonable matter of opinion.. calling the guy a rapist for having sex with a child is ill informed or flamebait.
It is interesting that you post exactly the same point twice under the same thread, hardly a dozen posts apart. I hope someone mods you troll.
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1179457&cid=27374669
An interesting point, anything can lead to violence if the person is pre-disposed to violence. Trying to limit violence in this way will likely just make people find another reason.
And many consider hate speech law to be a short sighted solution to a symptom of ignorance.
Anyway, defamation of religion is very different from say, racism. Religion is something you can choose, race is something you are. You can believe there is a god and still not follow him. To deny someone their race is to deny their existance, hardly the same as calling them a fool for their choice in following a diety.
I wish I could mod you +1 PUNK just for the obscure reference :o
You cannot charge someone based on suspicion alone and grounds for a search would have to be more specific than believing they are criminals else politicians would get no privacy.
I think you are failing to grasp a key factor in morality, everyone is different.
If you believe something is immoral, that is part of your moral code. While you can try and impose that moral code on others.. it is always their choice.
To believe that your moral code is right and someone else's is wrong is inherent in the idea of morals. You choose what you believe is right. However, to believe that your moral code is always and wholly right is believing that you are infallible.
So, having cleared up that your morals may not be my morals.. I would say that the statement you quoted is true. It is rather limited in its scope however. I think it would be more fitting as "It's not immoral to break rules if I don't believe the rules should apply to anyone".
No one said it was an unjust state. I am guessing that your issue is that you feel Thoreau's actions were only justified by the fact that it was the constitution that he disagreed with. While that is a perfectly reasonable view.. Hatta was basing his statement on what Thoreau actually said. You seem to be basing your statement on what you think Thoreau would have felt.
And *yawn* at the you're so selfish jabs. They are poorly used on a complete stranger.
Although I am not sure English is your first language, I think I understand what you're getting at.
Is it likely that those that can pay for a license would be more likely to pay if they felt that harm was being done by stealing and that using encryption and intimidation isn't enough? Wouldn't another additional measure be building consensus by releasing accurate and verifiable numbers related to economic damage?
You seem to be saying that rather than the current methods of WAR! on copyright infringers that rights holders should instead concentrate on realistically identifying the effect that infringement has.
I agree that such an approach would be a lot better than what they are doing now and may even be successful. I am of the opinion that given the options of telling someone what to do against telling them about the consequences of their actions to enable them to make an informed choice, the latter should always be prefered.
Having said that, I do not believe that such a thing would be enough to justify copyright to those who believe it does more harm than good or doubt it's effectiveness.
As well, economic figures are notoriously hard to put into a useful context but easy to manipulate for a chosen goal if that goal includes making lots of money.
It would be easy to show that copyright generates lots of money.. after all, as someone who opposes copyright I would be the first to say how big an impact it has. Copyright means more artists; more artists mean more works of art; more works of art generally lead to more money being made from art. If your goal is to create jobs then it may be considered a big success.
That is only one side of the story though, for all the positive spin you can put on the effects of copyright.. it is usually taking at least as much away from society as it gives.
More artists is a given, the worth of those artists is not.
While copyright is often marketed as an incentive for creativity, it is more likely to marginalise creativity as a drip feed for a money making monster. When the incentive is based on how many records you sell.. good business is keeping new material to yourself until your previous record stops selling. Provided of course that you aren't a manufactured band in the first place who's creativity is based on market research.
Economically speaking you can think of it in terms of resources. People are only ever going to spend as much on entertainment as they have spare and will usually spend less. With copyright, you have lots of artists. The constant influx of new records means that lots of money will be spent on them. Because records are an infinite resource, there is no upper limit on how much one artist can make; if they are popular they can become rich. Those that fail to sell so many records (maybe they aren't in fashion or don't have funds for a global advertising campaign) will receive a vastly smaller sum because people will be less likely to spend money on them. As well, the knock on effect of there being more artists and filthy rich artists is that there is less physical wealth in the economy to go around.
So, without copyright.. I think: Artists would be fewer. Creativity would be better rewarded. The economy would be better off by the decrease in money going into music. Artists would have more wealth between them and it would be more evenly distributed.
The downside? People having to choose to invest in artists? I believe that is where copyright is failing most dramatically and that even if everyone who currently pirates didn't start spending money on artists, the artists who were left would still be better off as would the economy as a whole.
Glad am I, to poke a hole in your reality.
You seem to be mixing up public protesting with civil disobedience. While one may lead to the other.. they are different things. Civil disobedience may involve a public protest (as in your example) but it doesn't have to.
If you were to stop paying your taxes because you did not want to fund the war in Iraq.. that would be civil disobedience and depending on your intent, a protest.
If you were to chain yourself to a troop transport, that would also be civil disobedience as well as a public protest.
The example you give of vandals and thugs does not give a very good indication of intent as we do not know what the protest was about. If the protest was about being able to enter abandoned buildings for example then yes they may be exercising civil disobedience, by breaking the law in order to assert their right to enter the building.
If they were breaking the law for the hell of it then that is civil disobedience in the same way that physical harm is surgery; while it may be technically accurate it isn't the established use of the phrase.
That seems a rather improper rebuttal. To quote Mr Thoreau:
âoeUnder a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.⦠where the State places those who are not with her, but against her, â" the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor.⦠Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.â
Just because people are not objecting to slavery or war in this instance does not make his writings any less relevant.
I also wonder how he would feel about this issue, and I wouldn't be so sure that he'd agree with you. As he's dead it's a rather pointless argument, though.
IANAL but my understanding is that copyright infringement is rarely dealt with under criminal law.
That may seem like pedantry but it is an important distinction. If people are criminals for copyright infringement then they are also criminals for driving over the speed limit. This may well be your view, in which case a significant portion of the population should be considered criminals.
I take the view that choice is more important than law. To base a decision solely on law is to me a sign that someone is incapable of making the decision in the first place. I would rather have a society full of petty criminals who choose not to be violent because they abhor the consequences than a society full of people who follow the law blindly and get led into a war because wars are lawful.
As I don't have mod points to mod you down as troll..
We are all a bunch of hypocrites. Of course I strongly disapprove of blocking P2P or throttling. It may become a big problem. However it is hypocritical to pretend that P2P is used mostly for legal purposes.
A rather strong assumption that everyone who uses P2P claims it is for mostly legal purposes.
Say what you like, but downloading music and movies for free is still theft, no matter how you look at it. So, you don't approve of the current content owners' distribution policies, you think that CDs are overpriced, and that DRM sucks, and that everything should be available cheaply and conveniently online. I completely, 100% agree. However this is no excuse for stealing. Don't like the policies - don't use the product. End of story. Anything else is simply unethical.
Apart from you mixing up stealing with copying songs.. I think you should research ethics. Ethics is more about acting on what you believe to be right despite outside influence than defining right from wrong. You may take issue with people's choices but trying to paint a picture of morality with copyright infringers on the wrong side seems an arrogant attempt to impose your choices on others.
Come on people, it is unethical. If I try to sell you a piece of crap for $1000 you are not obliged to buy it, but you don't have the right to steal it either.
What does buying and selling scrap have to do with anything? If you want an analogy try one that has the scrap as a piece of art and instead of buying it someone takes a picture of it.
Let's face it, illegal downloading of movies and songs is really rampant. I have more than a few acquaintances in Europe who have collections of many thousands songs, movies (and software packages), without having _EVER_ bought a single one. They will never buy a CD or a movie, for any price, while they can download it for free. They never go to the cinema either because they download all new movies. They act as if they are entitled to this product for free, just because they consider it too expensive or too inconvenient to buy. Personally I find that disgusting (even though I agree with the expensive and inconvenient part).
This is a much more sensible point and one which I am glad to respond to. If people are not willing to pay for something.. then they make the choice not to invest in it. In the case of material goods.. this means you walk away as you cannot have the goods without depriving someone else. If the goods are infinite then there is nothing lost should you choose not to invest in the person who created them.
It is easy to make a concious choice as to whether you want to support the person who creates something. It is harder to make this concious choice if you are forced by law to pay the creater regardless of whether you wanted to or not. To those like me who oppose it, copyright law adds nothing to society.. it only takes away through creating a society where everything people do has to be a commodity and that people such as musicians are only worth as much as you spend on their CD's.
Distribution of pirated software is a subject that I find close to my heart. It takes a _lot of_ money to develop software. Perhaps not everybody realizes it, but programmers need to pay rent and eat. So do musicians and movie makers.
Everyone needs to make a living somehow. If you cannot work out how to do it without copyright.. don't be a software developer. There are plenty of people out there who would be glad for less competition.
Afaik they still haven't fixed it for parts of the product. This is the Symantec Endpoint Protection package. The problem pretty much made a server useless as it stopped the whole windows file sharing protocol working.
The really annoying part however was the constant news that a working version was just around the corner.. which would have the same issue again. If they'd just called the stuff Beta until it had been properly tested then I'd not be so bothered.
Well put.
In my view, copyright law can never be justified. The law is bad in principle because civil law where I come from is supposed to enforce contracts made by people, not create contracts in itself. However supposedly noble the goal, law is the wrong way to go about it. It is up there with the war on drugs on the list of bad ideas that have made law into a pick and mix.
You went through in detail the commodity aspect of copyright, so I shall try and follow on from the issue of incentive.
Making creativity into a career all of its own has consequences beyond providing money to those who create. If you let people charge money for making an original song then you get lots of people making original songs.. but if the primary motivation is money then people can make many original songs with very few original ideas by latching on to whatever the idea of the last popular song was. This may have the effect of drowning out original ideas because no one gets to hear them.
Another consequence may be the division between career driven artists and everyone else. With so many people devoting their lives to making music, why bother trying it if you already have a job? While those who create as a career will produce much more polished art, the variety of art may be diminished as a result. Art historically has been about expression.. if all you see or hear is career driven art then you are surely losing out by not experiencing those who are not professional artists.
ESET and Kaspersky in that order.
I recently got burnt by symantec and their inability to provide a working product for Windows 2008 Server x64 a year after its release and after numerous patches that claimed to make their product compatible.
There always be value attached to any digitized media, or set of computer control instructions. And the creator should say whether he wants it to put into a communal plot. Most of the value comes from creator's time invested creating the creation + his time experienced learning trades of his profession. most self serving creators will not put their work in the communal plot if that is thier primary source to generate income.
Value can be attached to anything, if only by sentiment. The idea that a free market requires consideration to non commissioned works in the name of encouragement is, I think, counter-intuitive.
Intellectual Property laws are comparable to mandating that all legal advice must be paid for unless the counsel explicitly says otherwise and that anyone else who uses that advice must also pay the counsel.
Somehow the lawyers still get paid even though the product of their efforts is essentially as free as Open Source software.
Your assertion seems to be that the only value in an intellectual creation is the time and effort put into it and therefore that we should mandate a price on all time and effort put into a creation, effectively making it a material resource.
The problem is, we already have the material resource.. the person. Much like the legal counsel, a programmer can in fact rely on their skills to make a living regardless of the material value of their work.
Intellectual Property law actually works counter to the free market in making certain peoples time and effort a material resource based upon their skill-set rather than treating people as people and their time and effort as a personal resource.
The issue specific to Open Source vs Proprietary software is that as long as states enforce Intellectual Property law, you rely on the goodwill of people to not take advantage of the law and to sell you their services as people rather than sell you the results of their work as a material commodity. I view it as a testament to the enlightened world-interest of people who make open source software that it is successful despite the laws. The fact that proprietary software is so successful is a testament to how greed can take advantage of poorly thought out laws and how hard that is to undo.