Umm, the intellectual property that Cisco used has long since been mutated into something that doesn't even resemble the original code. Sorry, I think you're beating a dead horse here. 15 years ago maybe you could have made that argument, but not today.
AHH, but the intellectual property that they started with was used as the foundation for all their new R&D. The fact that the public provided the seed, should entitle them to this equity. It would be like if I robed the Fed, kept 15 years worth of interest, and then returned it back expecting nothing of it. No - it's doubtfull that intellectual property should be as omnipresent as it is to begin with, but that the taxpayers should plant the seed is outrageous.
I'm very happy about cisco's success. But none the less, Stanford recieves a huge amount of public money - and the intellectual property that Cisco has should rightly belong to the public domain.
I really have no objection of them using it, or being successfull becaus of it, but locking everyone else out is what I really have a problem with. (especially since I probably paid for it)
I think that you're wrong in two ways. First, people that go off to different parts of the world to give food and medicine have behaviors and social values that rub off on local populations and make the transition to a developed society far more easy.
Second, population and over-taxed resources are not the problem, but the symptom. In places where volunteers have a chance to influence, I would imagine it would actually help to ease the symptoms.
Our real mistake is trying too hard be to politically nutreal - like watering down values like freedom-of-speech and freedom-of-religion, or writing them off as just differences in opinion. When we do that, we water down our social values for the sake of getting along - and thus water down our influence on other peoples freedoms.
It'd be great if we could use this for cheap
solar cells. Regular solar cells are pretty expensive. (I'm almost convinced that other industries are screwing with the market to make them cost so much). Anyhow, does anyone know how much this new stuff would cost?
PS: nuclear's my favorite, but it's too easy for the govt to regulate.
well, I thought this argument pretty much died out, but that was so false - I can't let it go unanswered
me:for every one idea you loose control over, there are billions that you would have access to without cost that you wouldn't have before
you:Well that's pretty much the Communist paradigm in a nutshell, isn't it? Probably won't get very far with that argument in this day and age.
Communisim failed because it ignored the fact that physical property has natural limits in supply and demand and a free market is the most efficient mechanisim to allocate those resources. Well guess what? that cd you just recorded, everybody can have a copy of it and it won't deprive you of your copy at all.
you again:That's just silly. When I buy a piece of land, that also "automatically puts a restriction on billions of other people" who aren't allowed to trespass on it. I don't think anyone could reasonably call my ownership of that land a "massive monopoly". Ditto for my IP.
Wrong! If those billions of people used your land, it would drasticly impact your use of it, if those billions of people have a copy of your cd - you could still do whatever the hell you want with your copy and noone would notice - they probably wouldn't even give a damn what you did.
you again:Tell me this, Mr. Marx, if I don't have control over my ideas, who does? The government?
It figures that you would get my name wrong, because you got all your other facts wrong too.
But this statement shows your whole problem - ownership of an idea is not exclusive, me, the government, and anyone else can use your idea and it wont prevent you from using it too. If the government restricted the natural supply of oranges, you could see how it could fuck up the market, but if it restricts the natural supply of information and ideas - you don't seem to get it at all. It's not a property right, it's a regulation!
PS: I'm a hard line libertarian, this communist stuff is silly.
Most people don't understand that the broadcast media are not a true free press, but a limited free press. The content is very heavially regulated... you half to play certain types of music, you half to have programs that show no more than such and such percent nudity, you half to show a certain amount of childrens programs, you half to give certain percentials of political coverage, and so on. This is all made possible by federal regulations and the FCC - that would be impossible without bandwidth regulations. And it does much to ensure that the powers that be are never exposed to ideas too far outside the "main-stream". You'd be a fool to believe that anybody involved in the process ever cared about a tragedy of the commons ever, that is simply bull - it is such a lie, it almost hurts.
In fact, the FCC regulations are some of the few laws in human history that protect against something that we have never even witnessed, ever. You would think that with all these regulations, they would at least have some example of why we need them.
for all this regulation - there was never even a single exapmle of this happening
I think you got it all wrong, the issue of who owns intellectual "property" is not an issue in a society where the governing authority has final authority over all ownership (no matter how enlightened it is ) It is only in free societies where individuals can be expected to privately own things that the question becomes an issue.
The issue is this: either copyrights are like a property right that upholds freedoms, or they are like a government regulation (on information) that restricts freedoms. Can't we all just get along is not an option any more than in the 1850's when fools suggested that the slave states could peacefully get along with the free states. They just didn't get it.
so please read carefully "If you accept that you can be a slaves master, then you must also accept that you can be a master's slave"
The same is true with licenses, the options that uphold true freedoms minimize the harm of copyrights - sorry if that offends people, but the right to contoroll what I do with information in my posession is not a right and I refuse to accept it as such - GPL or not.
Correct. And people didn't just pull intellectual property rights out of their noses, either. In a society where ideas are becoming as valuable as physical objects, is it any surprise that IP rights have evolved?
Thankyou, and the factor that naturally limits good ideas isn't the distribution system, but the individuals who create them. When we quit trying to monopolize one, it will give more inherit value and to the other and bring more respect to creative individuals. Or let me put it another way, for every one idea you loose control over, there are billions that you would have access to without cost that you wouldn't have before. This is why the GPL paradigm is going to win out over the copyright paradigm every time.
PSS: copyrights are massive monopolies, because any one copyright you get automatically puts a restriction on billions of other people arround the world who are not allowed to copy and redistribute that information. Sounds pretty massive to me?
The very notion of "rights" (including "property") is a fairly recent invention in human history, but that's not really relevant to the discussion.
What? Rights are the the whole point of this discussion. people didn't just pull property rights out of their nose. The entire foundation of property rights derives from the fact that not everyone can use everything at the same time, get it!
PS: copyrights by their very nature are massive monopolies
So you don't believe in any sort of "intellectual property" rights at all? That seems like a good way to snuff the Information Age in its infancy.
I've also heard that alot, and it also disheartens me. Society has been progressing at regular rate long before "intellectual property". The entire renissance happened without it.
Why do people believe that need to have massive monopolies, or innovation will suddenly come to a halt? that didn't happen with Linux!
This attitude was also common in the 1830's with another form of "property" - slavery! There were actually people who believed that the great success and wealth of america rested on it's strong base of plantations, and it was widely believed that it would be impossible to maintain it without slavery. They had no incentive to grow cotton without slaves - right? Sadly 2 million people died over that mistaken belief. Ironically, many of them were very educated.
Personal remark : sorry, but the users have the freedom to refuse if they want to buy a software.
Of course, it is better if they have free alternatives, but to sell a software is not immoral, while there is an alternative. If there's a fight to give, it is not against the proprietary softwares because they exist, it is against the proprietary softwares, but trying to give better solutions ( good luck ). Anyway, it's a matter of choice, and of freedom of choice.
This logic is too similar to saying that if you don't like slavery - don't own slaves, if you don't like nazisim - don't join the nazis. Both of these were said in US history, and both were dead wrong because this is as much about our choices as it is about how we deal with those who are trying to impose massive restrictions on the rest of us. Copyrights are much more like a federally imposed regulation than a property right. They are simply an imposition, and simply dishonest, and need to be minimized wether we use the GPL or not.
PS: I know of no requirement that keeps me from selling GPL software, just ones that keep me from monopolizing it and forbidding others to copy and sell it too.
License choice is entirely up to the author of the code, and that's that.
That is simply not true, and it breaks me when I hear it because it so widely accepted inspite of the fact that it is very conceputally dishonest. Copyrights by their very nature are a government imposed monopoly that give a person the power to impose on millions of people. This is not a moral right, and when a person is deprived of this power, they are not violated even if they feel violated. Even the people who put them in the US constitution realised that - which is why copyrights have an expiration date. Perhaps the CEO of Ford would feel violated if I bought a car made in Japan - well sorry, no un-natural monopoly is a right.
Why do none of our other rights have an expiration date? In fact, they didn't even look at copyrights like a property at all back then. Copyrights in the USA were primairly designed to get away from the english system of copyrights which said "if you don't publish anything bad about the king, I'll give you a copyright". By giving copyrights to anybody unconditionally - it got away from this censorship. Unfortunately, those who believe that copyrights are some form of property ruin this, it can only lead to more DMCA rules that take away everyones freedoms.
Or the right to own property. Why do you leave that one out?
Maybe because you are an intellectually bankrupt little child who does not understand what freedom really means.
Go live in Afghanistan for a year, and report back to us on software communism and how important it is to exert your freedom on others property.
Or the "right" to own slaves? Why leave that one out?
Maybe it's because not everyone understands that just because the government calls something a property right does not mean that it is.
Thanks for your Afgan offer, but the good ole US of A is doing plenty to restrict peoples freedoms here (even though granted, we are better than most places in the world)
In a perfect anarchist society, one could easily break the GPL license you insist they use especially if they have enough power to keep you at bay since no government would protect you.
Who said anything about anarchy? All I can think of is perhaps my statement that "rights exist inspite of government, not because of it" was taken to imply anarchy. That statement does not promote anarchy though, it is just saying that I have a right to the freedom of speech (and to copy) wether a government acknowledges it or not.
Besides the main purpose of the GPL is to undo the dammage caused by copyrights. In anarchy, copyrights would be rather irrelavent anyhow.
Half the point is that this is not about a popularity contest. Niether were freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, or half the other rights we enjoy for that matter. These rights we take for granted every day offend most the moderates in the rest of the world. Even here, not so long ago, freeing slaves offended most of the moderates as a form of stealing.
MS is wrong, going down the path of copyrights is where there is no turning back - they started out as short term incentives 200 years ago, now they are eternal corporate "properties", that trump most our first amendment rights. Just look at all the DMCA court cases, these are copyrights brought to their logical conclusion. Surely we couldn't expext to tell all these entities that they have glorious intellectual property rights without wanting them to secure these "rights"
I don't understand RMS's obsession with powerless freedom.
Any freedom that means something is, in some way, an expression of power. The GPL does not deny true powers and freedom. like if someone copys your code and says that they wrote it instead of you, you still have legal rights to defend against that type of fraud.
The freedom to own my own home and house my family is meaningless unless I can exercise the power to keep others out. The freedom to own your own house derives from the fact that not everyone could use it at the same time without massively intefering with each other. Properties just didn't come about because such and such institution said so.
The freedom to speak out against the government is empty unless there is power to prevent government censorship. Copyrights are a form of censorship. Rights are something that exist inspite of government, not because of it.
The GPL's guarantees of freedom to take, use, modify and distribute source code are meaningless without the power to enforce them. And it has that power, I cant take GPL'd code and stick it into closed software, and that's legally enforceable.
Freedom without power is no freedom at all.
I totally recommend domain discover, after dealing with NSI - it was like night and day. I moved over 400 domains over there, and am totally satisifed. (as well as my employer who got better service for less cost) Domain discover does not claim the inherent rights to your domain name either. Have you ever read NSI fine print? it is scary - they could pratically take your domain if they liked the name.
WARNING!
DON't DEAL WITH NSI AT ALL! not even to make minor changes before the domain is moved over! Don't even deal with them even if the email cotacts on NSI domains need to be updated first to reach your new address for approval. DONT!
If you can proove to domaindiscover that you have the right to that domain, they will deal with the rest. Just don't deal with NSI at all - switch over and then do with any changes you half to make.
One time I was forced to re-register a domain at NSI because I was afraid it would expire under my nose before the process of transfering to another registar could be completed. I then proceeded to quickly try to continue registration at domaindiscover (which BTW, will honor your NSI registration periond in addition to their initial registration period if you switch over), and was outraged to find out that there was a mandatory 3 month waiting-period between switching registars. - No problem, domaindiscover just kept on it till the waiting period expired and automatically took over the domain with all the updated records. But please, whover you go with - don't deal with NSI.
PS: I don't like verisign either, but that one is up to you.
PSS: I have absolutely no financial interest in domain discover at all other than that I have choosen to register alot of domains there.
Think about this, just because an institution calls something a property right does not mean that it is. Copyrights are much more like a federal monopoly regulations than some moral pinacle of property. It is doubtfull copying could even justly be called stealing (since the authors are always able to keep a copy of the original). The moral and historical foundation of property derives from the foundation that property has natural limits on supply and demand.
Incentive is a very poor foundation for property. I might have no incentive to grow cotton without slave properties. I mivht have no incentive to grow orange trees unless I can plant them in your front yard.
We are not talking about wether they are entitled to recognition for their works, but wether they are allowed to coerce others who may wish to use them. This can have serious civil-liberties implications in the information age. Ones that infringe on real rights like the first amendment.
It should also be pointed out that at the poles the atmosphere is at a tangential angle to the sun whose radiation creates the ozone. You are never going to get alot of ozone with the sun comming into the atmosphere at that angle, the UV light would half to travel thru dozens of times more atmosphere than at the equator.
The real questions we should be asking are ones like why did NASA propose and get a multi-million dollar satelite to study ozone deplletion, when they know darn well that this is normal. Why did freeon become illegal the day after DOW-chemical's patent ran out (DOW also has a patnet on the only known replacement that hasn't expired yet!) These are the real reasons why the ozone is a big deal. Freeon is a very heavy gas, the dispertion probability of it getting up into the upper atmosphere is almost non-existent.
It shouldn't need mentioning that the source code to crypto and steno are already in the hands of nearly every orginisation on the planet. Making it illegal now would be like making the secret of how to make an A-bomb illegal after it was published in the New York Times.
Being the patriotic person that I am, I want my government to spend my money wehre it will have the most effect against these types of evils. History has shown that this is not the place. Did internment of the Japs and price controlls really help us win WWII? did the suspenion of Habius Corpus and freedom of the press really help us win the Civil War?
Actually, in times like this liberties should be maximized. A 2nd terrorist wave would be much less effective if everyone on a plane was 'required' to carry a knife. People wanting to turn in terrorists, but not reveal their identies would feel alot more secure with TRUE internet privacy. What if security units stationed at the top of the WTC were allowed to purchase anti-aircraft missles?
and we should be asking serious questions like, did our war on drugs drive up the price of afgan narcotics helping finance the Talaban? Did our overly restrictive immigration policy lead to chanels of established smuggelers that the terrorists could have used. Chanels that would not have been there if we had a reasonable policy for letting in people who honestly want to work here.
Okay, I'm sorry to keep posting like this, but I'm having a brainstorm.
....Enviromental regulations prohibiting the use of Halon should be lifted - it is simply dozens of times better than anything else and could save lives in suvere fires like the WTC and the pentagon. Hell, if it stopped the fires the buildings might not have collapsed. I'm sorry, but this is a bigger priority than the small amout of potential ozone depletion that may be caused.
.... Authentication should be done by digital signatures on the ID card that verify our picture and citizenship, and even fingerprint, not done by centralized databases.. Terrorists are known to use ID theft - and decentralizing would make it a lot harder. This is much more accurate and privacy safe - then licenses which are all checked against a central database. Also instead of halving to constantly update a list of 250 million citizens, the government(s) would only half to keep lists of known criminals. The SS number is so easy to rob, it is a crime and should be abandoned. this would enhance privacy and reduce fraud and more ID theft.
more security should be passive, like the black boxes on airplanes that are never even looked at unless a crime happens. It appears, these are helping us alot more then the X-ray machines at airports (to prevent future disasters)
And silly restrictions like forbiding cell phone use on planes should now just look plain stupid to industry experts. They obviously have helped more than they have hurt.
And what about the NSA. What if all that power was put to use detecting things like rogue flights and responding and coordinating quickly rather than just listening to phone calls - which the terrorists know are being listened to and which didn't seem to help against these attacks anyhow.
I hope we beat the SH*T out of the people who did this to us, and hope even more that we put an information infrastructure in place that would make tyrants unable to controll information or people ever again.
Also I should add, our response should maximize liberties in who we attack. Look at Japan. We killed tens of thousands of Japans soldiers, and dropped nuclear bombs on two of their cities, but do we fear terrorist threats from Japan? no! it is specifically because when we rebuilt japan - we set up a government that was accountable to upholding individual liberties like ours is. Productivity difuses hatred, and this is exactly what happened. In many countries, leaders encourage hatred of the US to distract from their own tyrany. If we get rid of the tyrrany, we difuse the hatred.
And what about taxes, it's been showen that time and time again - individuals can distribute and provide more efficiently than governments. We should rely on this. Certainly if voters could accept 20 bil in aid to NY, they they could have done it even better if they had that money in their pockets!
And what about secrecy, America's strength is in it's ability to grow - not in its ability to keep secrets. We should take advantage of that to grow technological solutions at a faster rate than our competitors can copy. We should share knowledge and technology to encourage growth not hide it. Our enemies don't even have the ability to get close to our computer technology - even though how to make conputer chips is pretty well known, and not a national secret.
Think, that is all we half to do.
Also, cheap computers and internet arround the world will help thwart ruthless leaders who try to controll information, and distort truth.
I just wanted to say that im times of disaster, liberties should be maximized, not minimized. We should seriously consider options like requireing everyone on an airplane to carry a knife. Encouraging private gun owners to guard and visit important places. Can you imagine hijackings or terrorist attacks then?
We sould consider options like forcing crypto technology to use the GPL, and forceing the use of freenet and p2p technology. Things like this would make cyber - terrorist atacks much more difficult. Or targeting people based on beliefs much more harder.
we should decentralize economic institutions like the FED, and open the government to accept any types of liguid currencies as payment. This would make attack on centralized economic institutions much more difficult.
If we think, we will find that distributed institutions are always much more stable and harder to kill then central ones.
The simple fact is that many of the leaders in the Islamic world simply treat their people like shit. They half to make up some enemy to distract from the fact that they are tyrants and any decent people would overthrow them. The peacfull state of Isreal is a perfict target - and likewise their strongest ally the USA.
The current assinations used in self defense by Isreal are a perfict example. The peace process was going along nicely until Airifat started to face political unstability - immeadiately Isreal started to be provoked. Lets make no mistake about it - it was not at all for religious reasons, or at all for moral reasons, but only because political islamic leaders started to feel threatened and needed an enemy to distract the people from the current corrupt powers.
In a way, it is America's fault. We should never have tolerated such an injust government as Saddam Husseins (spelling) to stay in power. He has more than anybody used the war mentality to distract the people from the fact that they are murdered and pillaged (by him) not the USA. But displacing him, and not tollerating others like him was politically costly so the USA simply put up with them, and managed it. - That was a fatal mistake that we paid for this tuesday.
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Umm, the intellectual property that Cisco used has long since been mutated into something that doesn't even resemble the original code. Sorry, I think you're beating a dead horse here. 15 years ago maybe you could have made that argument, but not today.
AHH, but the intellectual property that they started with was used as the foundation for all their new R&D. The fact that the public provided the seed, should entitle them to this equity. It would be like if I robed the Fed, kept 15 years worth of interest, and then returned it back expecting nothing of it. No - it's doubtfull that intellectual property should be as omnipresent as it is to begin with, but that the taxpayers should plant the seed is outrageous.
I'm very happy about cisco's success. But none the less, Stanford recieves a huge amount of public money - and the intellectual property that Cisco has should rightly belong to the public domain.
I really have no objection of them using it, or being successfull becaus of it, but locking everyone else out is what I really have a problem with. (especially since I probably paid for it)
I think that you're wrong in two ways. First, people that go off to different parts of the world to give food and medicine have behaviors and social values that rub off on local populations and make the transition to a developed society far more easy.
Second, population and over-taxed resources are not the problem, but the symptom. In places where volunteers have a chance to influence, I would imagine it would actually help to ease the symptoms.
Our real mistake is trying too hard be to politically nutreal - like watering down values like freedom-of-speech and freedom-of-religion, or writing them off as just differences in opinion. When we do that, we water down our social values for the sake of getting along - and thus water down our influence on other peoples freedoms.
It'd be great if we could use this for cheap solar cells. Regular solar cells are pretty expensive. (I'm almost convinced that other industries are screwing with the market to make them cost so much). Anyhow, does anyone know how much this new stuff would cost? PS: nuclear's my favorite, but it's too easy for the govt to regulate.
well, I thought this argument pretty much died out, but that was so false - I can't let it go unanswered
me:for every one idea you loose control over, there are billions that you would have access to without cost that you wouldn't have before
you:Well that's pretty much the Communist paradigm in a nutshell, isn't it? Probably won't get very far with that argument in this day and age.
Communisim failed because it ignored the fact that physical property has natural limits in supply and demand and a free market is the most efficient mechanisim to allocate those resources. Well guess what? that cd you just recorded, everybody can have a copy of it and it won't deprive you of your copy at all.
you again:That's just silly. When I buy a piece of land, that also "automatically puts a restriction on billions of other people" who aren't allowed to trespass on it. I don't think anyone could reasonably call my ownership of that land a "massive monopoly". Ditto for my IP.
Wrong! If those billions of people used your land, it would drasticly impact your use of it, if those billions of people have a copy of your cd - you could still do whatever the hell you want with your copy and noone would notice - they probably wouldn't even give a damn what you did.
you again:Tell me this, Mr. Marx, if I don't have control over my ideas, who does? The government?
It figures that you would get my name wrong, because you got all your other facts wrong too. But this statement shows your whole problem - ownership of an idea is not exclusive, me, the government, and anyone else can use your idea and it wont prevent you from using it too. If the government restricted the natural supply of oranges, you could see how it could fuck up the market, but if it restricts the natural supply of information and ideas - you don't seem to get it at all. It's not a property right, it's a regulation!
PS: I'm a hard line libertarian, this communist stuff is silly.
Most people don't understand that the broadcast media are not a true free press, but a limited free press. The content is very heavially regulated ... you half to play certain types of music, you half to have programs that show no more than such and such percent nudity, you half to show a certain amount of childrens programs, you half to give certain percentials of political coverage, and so on. This is all made possible by federal regulations and the FCC - that would be impossible without bandwidth regulations. And it does much to ensure that the powers that be are never exposed to ideas too far outside the "main-stream". You'd be a fool to believe that anybody involved in the process ever cared about a tragedy of the commons ever, that is simply bull - it is such a lie, it almost hurts.
In fact, the FCC regulations are some of the few laws in human history that protect against something that we have never even witnessed, ever. You would think that with all these regulations, they would at least have some example of why we need them. for all this regulation - there was never even a single exapmle of this happening
I think you got it all wrong, the issue of who owns intellectual "property" is not an issue in a society where the governing authority has final authority over all ownership (no matter how enlightened it is ) It is only in free societies where individuals can be expected to privately own things that the question becomes an issue.
The issue is this: either copyrights are like a property right that upholds freedoms, or they are like a government regulation (on information) that restricts freedoms. Can't we all just get along is not an option any more than in the 1850's when fools suggested that the slave states could peacefully get along with the free states. They just didn't get it.
so please read carefully "If you accept that you can be a slaves master, then you must also accept that you can be a master's slave" The same is true with licenses, the options that uphold true freedoms minimize the harm of copyrights - sorry if that offends people, but the right to contoroll what I do with information in my posession is not a right and I refuse to accept it as such - GPL or not.
Correct. And people didn't just pull intellectual property rights out of their noses, either. In a society where ideas are becoming as valuable as physical objects, is it any surprise that IP rights have evolved?
Thankyou, and the factor that naturally limits good ideas isn't the distribution system, but the individuals who create them. When we quit trying to monopolize one, it will give more inherit value and to the other and bring more respect to creative individuals. Or let me put it another way, for every one idea you loose control over, there are billions that you would have access to without cost that you wouldn't have before. This is why the GPL paradigm is going to win out over the copyright paradigm every time.
PSS: copyrights are massive monopolies, because any one copyright you get automatically puts a restriction on billions of other people arround the world who are not allowed to copy and redistribute that information. Sounds pretty massive to me?
The very notion of "rights" (including "property") is a fairly recent invention in human history, but that's not really relevant to the discussion.
What? Rights are the the whole point of this discussion. people didn't just pull property rights out of their nose. The entire foundation of property rights derives from the fact that not everyone can use everything at the same time, get it! PS: copyrights by their very nature are massive monopolies
So you don't believe in any sort of "intellectual property" rights at all? That seems like a good way to snuff the Information Age in its infancy.
I've also heard that alot, and it also disheartens me. Society has been progressing at regular rate long before "intellectual property". The entire renissance happened without it. Why do people believe that need to have massive monopolies, or innovation will suddenly come to a halt? that didn't happen with Linux!
This attitude was also common in the 1830's with another form of "property" - slavery! There were actually people who believed that the great success and wealth of america rested on it's strong base of plantations, and it was widely believed that it would be impossible to maintain it without slavery. They had no incentive to grow cotton without slaves - right? Sadly 2 million people died over that mistaken belief. Ironically, many of them were very educated.
Personal remark : sorry, but the users have the freedom to refuse if they want to buy a software. Of course, it is better if they have free alternatives, but to sell a software is not immoral, while there is an alternative. If there's a fight to give, it is not against the proprietary softwares because they exist, it is against the proprietary softwares, but trying to give better solutions ( good luck ). Anyway, it's a matter of choice, and of freedom of choice.
This logic is too similar to saying that if you don't like slavery - don't own slaves, if you don't like nazisim - don't join the nazis. Both of these were said in US history, and both were dead wrong because this is as much about our choices as it is about how we deal with those who are trying to impose massive restrictions on the rest of us. Copyrights are much more like a federally imposed regulation than a property right. They are simply an imposition, and simply dishonest, and need to be minimized wether we use the GPL or not.
PS: I know of no requirement that keeps me from selling GPL software, just ones that keep me from monopolizing it and forbidding others to copy and sell it too.
License choice is entirely up to the author of the code, and that's that.
That is simply not true, and it breaks me when I hear it because it so widely accepted inspite of the fact that it is very conceputally dishonest. Copyrights by their very nature are a government imposed monopoly that give a person the power to impose on millions of people. This is not a moral right, and when a person is deprived of this power, they are not violated even if they feel violated. Even the people who put them in the US constitution realised that - which is why copyrights have an expiration date. Perhaps the CEO of Ford would feel violated if I bought a car made in Japan - well sorry, no un-natural monopoly is a right.
Why do none of our other rights have an expiration date? In fact, they didn't even look at copyrights like a property at all back then. Copyrights in the USA were primairly designed to get away from the english system of copyrights which said "if you don't publish anything bad about the king, I'll give you a copyright". By giving copyrights to anybody unconditionally - it got away from this censorship. Unfortunately, those who believe that copyrights are some form of property ruin this, it can only lead to more DMCA rules that take away everyones freedoms.
Or the right to own property. Why do you leave that one out?
Maybe because you are an intellectually bankrupt little child who does not understand what freedom really means.
Go live in Afghanistan for a year, and report back to us on software communism and how important it is to exert your freedom on others property.
Or the "right" to own slaves? Why leave that one out?
Maybe it's because not everyone understands that just because the government calls something a property right does not mean that it is.
Thanks for your Afgan offer, but the good ole US of A is doing plenty to restrict peoples freedoms here (even though granted, we are better than most places in the world)
In a perfect anarchist society, one could easily break the GPL license you insist they use especially if they have enough power to keep you at bay since no government would protect you.
Who said anything about anarchy? All I can think of is perhaps my statement that "rights exist inspite of government, not because of it" was taken to imply anarchy. That statement does not promote anarchy though, it is just saying that I have a right to the freedom of speech (and to copy) wether a government acknowledges it or not.
Besides the main purpose of the GPL is to undo the dammage caused by copyrights. In anarchy, copyrights would be rather irrelavent anyhow.
Half the point is that this is not about a popularity contest. Niether were freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, or half the other rights we enjoy for that matter. These rights we take for granted every day offend most the moderates in the rest of the world. Even here, not so long ago, freeing slaves offended most of the moderates as a form of stealing.
MS is wrong, going down the path of copyrights is where there is no turning back - they started out as short term incentives 200 years ago, now they are eternal corporate "properties", that trump most our first amendment rights. Just look at all the DMCA court cases, these are copyrights brought to their logical conclusion. Surely we couldn't expext to tell all these entities that they have glorious intellectual property rights without wanting them to secure these "rights"
I don't understand RMS's obsession with powerless freedom.
Any freedom that means something is, in some way, an expression of power.
The GPL does not deny true powers and freedom. like if someone copys your code and says that they wrote it instead of you, you still have legal rights to defend against that type of fraud.
The freedom to own my own home and house my family is meaningless unless I can exercise the power to keep others out.
The freedom to own your own house derives from the fact that not everyone could use it at the same time without massively intefering with each other. Properties just didn't come about because such and such institution said so.
The freedom to speak out against the government is empty unless there is power to prevent government censorship.
Copyrights are a form of censorship. Rights are something that exist inspite of government, not because of it.
The GPL's guarantees of freedom to take, use, modify and distribute source code are meaningless without the power to enforce them.
And it has that power, I cant take GPL'd code and stick it into closed software, and that's legally enforceable.
Freedom without power is no freedom at all.
I totally recommend domain discover, after dealing with NSI - it was like night and day. I moved over 400 domains over there, and am totally satisifed. (as well as my employer who got better service for less cost) Domain discover does not claim the inherent rights to your domain name either. Have you ever read NSI fine print? it is scary - they could pratically take your domain if they liked the name.
WARNING!
DON't DEAL WITH NSI AT ALL! not even to make minor changes before the domain is moved over! Don't even deal with them even if the email cotacts on NSI domains need to be updated first to reach your new address for approval. DONT!
If you can proove to domaindiscover that you have the right to that domain, they will deal with the rest. Just don't deal with NSI at all - switch over and then do with any changes you half to make.
One time I was forced to re-register a domain at NSI because I was afraid it would expire under my nose before the process of transfering to another registar could be completed. I then proceeded to quickly try to continue registration at domaindiscover (which BTW, will honor your NSI registration periond in addition to their initial registration period if you switch over), and was outraged to find out that there was a mandatory 3 month waiting-period between switching registars. - No problem, domaindiscover just kept on it till the waiting period expired and automatically took over the domain with all the updated records. But please, whover you go with - don't deal with NSI.
PS: I don't like verisign either, but that one is up to you.
PSS: I have absolutely no financial interest in domain discover at all other than that I have choosen to register alot of domains there.
Translation ... they've decided to consolidate all their opperations under windows and phase out the extra cost of UNIX gurus.
Analysis ... the manager is getting some kind of kickback from M$ and wants to get rid of the competition.
Think about this, just because an institution calls something a property right does not mean that it is. Copyrights are much more like a federal monopoly regulations than some moral pinacle of property. It is doubtfull copying could even justly be called stealing (since the authors are always able to keep a copy of the original). The moral and historical foundation of property derives from the foundation that property has natural limits on supply and demand.
Incentive is a very poor foundation for property. I might have no incentive to grow cotton without slave properties. I mivht have no incentive to grow orange trees unless I can plant them in your front yard.
We are not talking about wether they are entitled to recognition for their works, but wether they are allowed to coerce others who may wish to use them. This can have serious civil-liberties implications in the information age. Ones that infringe on real rights like the first amendment.
It should also be pointed out that at the poles the atmosphere is at a tangential angle to the sun whose radiation creates the ozone. You are never going to get alot of ozone with the sun comming into the atmosphere at that angle, the UV light would half to travel thru dozens of times more atmosphere than at the equator.
The real questions we should be asking are ones like why did NASA propose and get a multi-million dollar satelite to study ozone deplletion, when they know darn well that this is normal. Why did freeon become illegal the day after DOW-chemical's patent ran out (DOW also has a patnet on the only known replacement that hasn't expired yet!) These are the real reasons why the ozone is a big deal. Freeon is a very heavy gas, the dispertion probability of it getting up into the upper atmosphere is almost non-existent.
It shouldn't need mentioning that the source code to crypto and steno are already in the hands of nearly every orginisation on the planet. Making it illegal now would be like making the secret of how to make an A-bomb illegal after it was published in the New York Times.
Being the patriotic person that I am, I want my government to spend my money wehre it will have the most effect against these types of evils. History has shown that this is not the place. Did internment of the Japs and price controlls really help us win WWII? did the suspenion of Habius Corpus and freedom of the press really help us win the Civil War?
Actually, in times like this liberties should be maximized. A 2nd terrorist wave would be much less effective if everyone on a plane was 'required' to carry a knife. People wanting to turn in terrorists, but not reveal their identies would feel alot more secure with TRUE internet privacy. What if security units stationed at the top of the WTC were allowed to purchase anti-aircraft missles?
and we should be asking serious questions like, did our war on drugs drive up the price of afgan narcotics helping finance the Talaban? Did our overly restrictive immigration policy lead to chanels of established smuggelers that the terrorists could have used. Chanels that would not have been there if we had a reasonable policy for letting in people who honestly want to work here.
Okay, I'm sorry to keep posting like this, but I'm having a brainstorm.
....Enviromental regulations prohibiting the use of Halon should be lifted - it is simply dozens of times better than anything else and could save lives in suvere fires like the WTC and the pentagon. Hell, if it stopped the fires the buildings might not have collapsed. I'm sorry, but this is a bigger priority than the small amout of potential ozone depletion that may be caused.
.... Authentication should be done by digital signatures on the ID card that verify our picture and citizenship, and even fingerprint, not done by centralized databases.. Terrorists are known to use ID theft - and decentralizing would make it a lot harder. This is much more accurate and privacy safe - then licenses which are all checked against a central database. Also instead of halving to constantly update a list of 250 million citizens, the government(s) would only half to keep lists of known criminals. The SS number is so easy to rob, it is a crime and should be abandoned. this would enhance privacy and reduce fraud and more ID theft.
more security should be passive, like the black boxes on airplanes that are never even looked at unless a crime happens. It appears, these are helping us alot more then the X-ray machines at airports (to prevent future disasters)
And silly restrictions like forbiding cell phone use on planes should now just look plain stupid to industry experts. They obviously have helped more than they have hurt.
And what about the NSA. What if all that power was put to use detecting things like rogue flights and responding and coordinating quickly rather than just listening to phone calls - which the terrorists know are being listened to and which didn't seem to help against these attacks anyhow.
I hope we beat the SH*T out of the people who did this to us, and hope even more that we put an information infrastructure in place that would make tyrants unable to controll information or people ever again.
Also I should add, our response should maximize liberties in who we attack. Look at Japan. We killed tens of thousands of Japans soldiers, and dropped nuclear bombs on two of their cities, but do we fear terrorist threats from Japan? no! it is specifically because when we rebuilt japan - we set up a government that was accountable to upholding individual liberties like ours is. Productivity difuses hatred, and this is exactly what happened. In many countries, leaders encourage hatred of the US to distract from their own tyrany. If we get rid of the tyrrany, we difuse the hatred.
And what about taxes, it's been showen that time and time again - individuals can distribute and provide more efficiently than governments. We should rely on this. Certainly if voters could accept 20 bil in aid to NY, they they could have done it even better if they had that money in their pockets!
And what about secrecy, America's strength is in it's ability to grow - not in its ability to keep secrets. We should take advantage of that to grow technological solutions at a faster rate than our competitors can copy. We should share knowledge and technology to encourage growth not hide it. Our enemies don't even have the ability to get close to our computer technology - even though how to make conputer chips is pretty well known, and not a national secret.
Think, that is all we half to do.
Also, cheap computers and internet arround the world will help thwart ruthless leaders who try to controll information, and distort truth.
I just wanted to say that im times of disaster, liberties should be maximized, not minimized. We should seriously consider options like requireing everyone on an airplane to carry a knife. Encouraging private gun owners to guard and visit important places. Can you imagine hijackings or terrorist attacks then?
We sould consider options like forcing crypto technology to use the GPL, and forceing the use of freenet and p2p technology. Things like this would make cyber - terrorist atacks much more difficult. Or targeting people based on beliefs much more harder.
we should decentralize economic institutions like the FED, and open the government to accept any types of liguid currencies as payment. This would make attack on centralized economic institutions much more difficult.
If we think, we will find that distributed institutions are always much more stable and harder to kill then central ones.
The simple fact is that many of the leaders in the Islamic world simply treat their people like shit. They half to make up some enemy to distract from the fact that they are tyrants and any decent people would overthrow them. The peacfull state of Isreal is a perfict target - and likewise their strongest ally the USA.
The current assinations used in self defense by Isreal are a perfict example. The peace process was going along nicely until Airifat started to face political unstability - immeadiately Isreal started to be provoked. Lets make no mistake about it - it was not at all for religious reasons, or at all for moral reasons, but only because political islamic leaders started to feel threatened and needed an enemy to distract the people from the current corrupt powers.
In a way, it is America's fault. We should never have tolerated such an injust government as Saddam Husseins (spelling) to stay in power. He has more than anybody used the war mentality to distract the people from the fact that they are murdered and pillaged (by him) not the USA. But displacing him, and not tollerating others like him was politically costly so the USA simply put up with them, and managed it. - That was a fatal mistake that we paid for this tuesday.