Why is it that only geeks say things like "orthogonal"?
I said sys admins aren't free, regardless of OS. That's true. It highlights the fact that free software is not cost-free.
What is with this "corporate overlord" stuff? Of course, it is unwise for any country to become dependent on any single source for IT, including the U.S. Ditto for any critical segment of its infrastructure. There have always been plenty of alternatives to Microsoft, and there still are, even ignoring free software. Sure, MS preloaded hardware via unsavory tactics, but no one held a gun to anyone and forced them to continue using Windows. If Linux can make inroads against Windows, even as small as they currently are, then something else could have done it earlier.
I didn't say free software "ever costs more" than MS. I said what I said. Go read it again.
I'm not asserting that people should use MS in preference to free software. One more time, read what I wrote. Is it factually wrong? Can free software be any cheaper than free? Does the free software community run a business providing support? No, so it can have no impact on the cost of support. MS, if it chooses, can give Windows away and cut the cost of its paid support.
Note, if you will, that that isn't an argument in favor of using MS. It's just a statement of fact.
And you would trust the current Chinese government more than you would MS? Geez. If anyone is going to spy on the Chinese people, its the Chinese government.
My point about support costs, as I said, is that MS is in a postion to both lower the cost of acquiring its software and of lowering the cost of buying its support, if it chooses to do that. The free software community cannot do that, because its product is already free and it provides no direct support.
Last I looked, there was also a license encumbering my use of open source. The GPL makes it rather difficult to make money with open source, which is a more pressing issue than developing an IT infrastructure.
The primary advantage of F/OSS compared with proprietary software is that it can be acquired without cost. That's a big advantage. Once acquired, though, very real costs are incurred in installing, training, and maintaining. Sys admins do not work for free, regardless of the development model used by their OS.
Microsoft could, presumably, reduce the cost advantage of F/OSS by cutting the price of Windows. While the loss of potential revenue would be large in countries as populous as India or China, it would be much easier to absorb in small countries like Bhutan, Lesotho, or Gambia.
The consequence is that MS is in a position to make Windows cheaper to acquire, and, potentially, to reduce the cost of support it provides directly. F/OSS, on the other hand, cannot reduce the acquisition cost of its products and has no real control over the cost of support.
Many Western eyes typically fail to see the differences throughout the underdeveloped world. Some nations have a burgeoning IT sector and a veneer of prosperity riding atop massive poverty. Opprtunities for indivudal economic success are present in some countries, while in others opportunity is stifled by ideology or religion, corruption, and incompetence.
Many nations cannot (or do not care enough to) provide their populations with safe drinking water, minimal health care, and sufficient caloric intake. Rather than conjuring visions of besting Microsoft in these markets, the F/OSS community would be of better service if it conjured ways to use its products to enable these nations to tackle those more pressing problems.
1. I don't have an agenda. If you think it is important to assert that illegally depriving someone of potential gain is not theft, that's fine with me. The distinction is not relevant. Presumably it is important to you to score debating points, though.
2. I said Lessig is, in my opinion, often wrong. If you can't tell the difference between diagreeing with someone's views and a personal attack, that's not my concern.
3. >> Without copyright, there is no exclusive right on any creative work you make public. Period. Copyright gives you those rights by taking that freedom away from others. We've been over this.
You are fundamentally wrong about this. Laws, of any kind, do not and cannot create or grant rights. The law can only recognize and protect rights that exist naturally. My ownership and exclusive rights to my own unique creations is a natural right. No one in that collection of individuals called "society" has any rights to unless I give them that right. The copyright laws recognize all that and provide a legal framework for me to transfer those rights, as I see fit, to others. You haven't proved otherwise because it cannot be done.
4. The "expression of an idea" is in know way equivalent to an idea. Nothing can be expressed without language, symbols and a medium that transmits the expression. It's the combination of language and symbols on a medium that can be copyrighted, not ideas. How can copyright regulated the right to own, duplicated and distribute ideas when it is impossible to own, duplicate or distribute an idea? Ideas are only thoughts in someone's head. They have no existence in the real and physical world.
5. I've already expressed my opinion on copyright length and the entertainment industry.
I see no further purpose in continuing this. I've presented logical justifications for my positions. You have presented ideological fervor, falsely accused me of an ad hominem attack on Lessig, and continued to childishly harp on your "theft" sorepoint long after it became clear that I just don't care.
1. Of course something is different if it isn't the same. What's your point? If you feel better to say that copyright infringement isn't theft, fine. Neither in fraud, manslaughter, or arson, or speeding. I don't see why this is so important. Do you imagine that someone charge with copyright infringement is going to storm into court waving a dictionary open to the definition of "steal" or "theft"?
2. I'm not attacking Lessig. I said I think he's often wrong because I disagree with the community or societal premise of many of his arguments. I.e., I believe one thing, he believes another. That leads us to two different places.
3. Every right protected by copyright law is derived from an author's original exclusive rights. Copyright law recognizes and protects -- rather than creates -- the exclusive right I acquire when I create my work. It is impossible for anyone else to have rights to do anything with that work -- the original item -- unless I give them that right. That has nothing to do with copyright law. I can give you the right to make one copy and no more. I can give you the right to make as many copies as you wish if you agree to sell them and give me a percentage of your profit. In other words, any rights to do anything with any copies of my original work derive from my original exclusive rights and any portion of them that I transfer to someone else.
4. Copyright law concerns the duplication and dissemination of work of art via a medium of some nature. Copyright law is not about controlling access to ideas or the duplication and distribution of ideas. It is all about controlling access to things, not ideas. I can copy a book, a piece of paper, a digitized song, whatever. But, I cannot copy an idea. Nor can I own an idea, market an idea, or steal an idea. Ideas remain in our heads until they are conveyed, in words and symbols carried on a medium, to someone else. Only then does copyright apply.
5. I don't understand your fixation on this "owning" thing. If I create a unqiue work, who else can own it besides me? It is no different than if I go to my kitchen and create a sandwich. I own that sandwich, not you. Likewise, if I go to my keyboard and create a novel, I own that novel, not you. Not the "idea" of a novel, or the actual words and dialogue that may be mulling about in my head, but the actual digitized file that I create on my hard drive. I own that thing, and that things is a bunch of symbols, not a bunch of ideas.
6. Do you actually believe if you got everyone to agree with you that copyright infringement was not theft, that anything would change?
7. Copyright length is a political issue that has and will vary over time. I think it's too long now, but I also don't think that it matters much. People will neither suffer harm or be benefited if something like Mickey Mouse stays copyrighted.
1. Potential exists. Loss of potential exists. Loss of potential benefits exists. Why are you insistent on treating this like a semantic issue? By your reasoning, potential gain doesn't exist, either. Therefore, depriving me of present-day rights for the sake of the potential benefit of others in the future is absurd since, as you say, a potential benefit does not exist.
2. >> Not getting something you don't already have is not the same as losing something you do have
Of course, it's different. So what? Depriving me of potential gain is still a loss for me. Is it the same thing as the loss of something I currently possess? No, but it is quite real, nonetheless.
You knw, you wouldn't make much of a banker, since your insistence that future potential doesn't exist would rather eliminate the basis of home mortgages and loans in general. How can banks expect people to pay back loans with money that doesn't exist yet?
3. I think Lessig is usually wrong because he bases much of his argument on balancing the rights of the individual with the rights of society. I believe society is only a usual fiction for purposes of discussion, that society as an entity does not exist. Societies are comprised of individuals who have rights, responsibilities and obligations. To argue, however, that a "society" has rights, responsibilities and obligations is modern-day mysticism.
4. Of course, I'm not claiming I know the motives of every person who downloads copyrighted music. I am claiming that, in most circumstances, it is illegal, ought to be illegal, and is typically practiced by people who are motivated by the prospect of "free stuff" rather than principle. However, the focus on the individual downloader ignores the industrial-scale uploaders who deliberately make illegal copies of thousands of products available for further illegal copying.
5. I'm not interested i changing my mind, or in changing your's. (BTW, those quotes are just something you made up; they didn't come from me.)
In my opinion, if I create something, I own what I have created. Only one copy exists. I have full and total rights to do with it as I please. No one else has any rights to it, period. I might decide to burn it. I might decide to put it in a closet. I might decide to release it with an open source license and agree to allow everyone in the world to make as many copies as they wish. I might sign a contract with a publisher that transfers some of my rights in exchange for copying and marketing my work. In turn, purchasers of each copy of my work would acquire those rights, and only those rights, I have agreed to transfer to them. All other rights -- those that I have not transferred -- remain with me. Ownership of the original work, of course, remains with me as long as I wish.
I've never seen Lessig or anyone else present a convincing case that explains how ownership and all rights to that single original work pass from its creator to someone else without the permission and sanction of the work's creator. There is much discussion of "ideas" and such, but that is all besides the point, since the discsussion is not about ideas.
Understand, I think that the entertainment industry is acting reprehensibly when it starts suing teenagers for downloading CD tracks. I think they're well within their rights to sue people who host thousands of tracks on the web. I still don't like them, but they're right and the guys hosting the tracks are wrong.
I also think the current copyright flap exists because we apply copyright to a category of material that did not exist at the time of the Founding Father's. That is, mass market entertainment, I do not feel comfortabe applying the current copyright law both to serious works and to commercial products created as disposable temporary entertainment,
And, I think copyright terms should correspond to the life of the work's author, not to some fixed term.
1. Potential for future benefits exists and is very real. E.g., if someone builds a sewage treatment plant across the street from you house, you've lost a lot of potential increase in the value of your house. Come tax assessment time, you'll see how real that is.
2. A loss of future benefits is just as real as the loss of something you hold in your hand at present. The only difference is that, in the present, we do not know the size and scale of the loss. Would you argue that murder does not involve loss because the victim does not yet live in the future?
3. You keep saying "theft" and "steal" I'm talking about illegal deprivation of potential benefits. AS for "own", well, if I create an original work, it seems rather obvious that at that moment in time I own it. Since copyright law gives me exclusive rights to it, i, and only I, can determine who can make copies, and in what circumstances, and that I can limit the rights I transfer to the owners of those copies, that seems like ownership to me.
4. Don't go on about Lessig. I think he's usually wrong.
5. People infringe copyright because they want free stuff. Don't even try to convince me those cheap bastards have a clue about copyight.
Don't believe I said outsourcing was good or bad. It is just the natural course of events. People -- corporations or you or me -- will seek to reduce their spending. Labor is a cost. If a business can spend less by outsourcing, they will do that unless something else stops it.That's not "evil", it is simply normal human behavior.
>>...what, exactly, that you own is being taken from you when someone infringes your copyright?
Potential for future benefits, as I've repeatedly stated. You may not want to use the word "steal" to describe what happens when someone illegally deprives me of potential benefits that may accrue to me as a consequence of my exclusive right to control my copyrighted work, but that's the effect of the infringement. The loss exists.
Example: Suppose I'm due to received 5% of the net from a movie I scripted, once it is released. Just before its release date, someone releases an unauthorized copy on the net. As a result, the release date is pushed back and the film produces less revenue than it would have otherwise. A copyright infringer deprieved me of those potential earnings.
This is precisely the kind of behavior copyright law is intended to stop. Today, anyone with a computer can be a copyright infringer. In the past, prior to the creation of copyright law, printers and publishers commonly marketed an author's work without his permission and awareness, and paid him nothing. As a result, the livelihood of anyone who used his pen to make a living was threatened. Preventing this was the impetus for copyright law.
Why should I be interested in responding to your "requests" to demonstrate why infringement is "theft" or "stealing"? I don't care. If you don't want to use those words, fine. If someone breaks into my house and steals things, he's a thief. He's also a called burglar. So what? The words we use don't change the nature of our behavior. In my book, "illegally depriving" me of something that belongs to me is tantamount to theft.
Your assertions lead me to conclude that you believe the words "steal" or "theft" should onlly be applied to physical property. If so, that's OK, Maybe you want to use some other words to in reference to what I lose as a result of copyright infrinement.
I'm not at all interested in playing word games. If you believe copyright infringement does not deprive the victim of potential benefit, say so.
Your point would be...what? That the cost of labor in other countries should be higher? The only way that;s going to happen is if higher-paying jobs migrate their. People outside the US want IT jobs for the same reason as Americans: they pay well. Give it a decade or so and Indians will be complaining about their corporations outsourcing their jobs.
Most of your diatribe is beside the point. You think "corporatists" are bad people. So? Even "good" people have an incentive to lower their production and labor costs. Even if corporations were populated with saints, they'd still need to outsource. If they didn't, they'd eventually disappear, taking all their jobs with them.
Yep, that's about it. I don't have any obligation to pay more for a product that I can get away with. Why should I buy an overpriced IT product from an overpaid IT worker in the States when the same product is available cheaper from somewhere else?
I don't need any IT products. If the government is persuaded to step in an thwart the normal course of events, all that will happen is that American products will price themselves out of the market and no one will buy them anyway.
If you think the distinction between stealing and depriving me of potential benefits is important, fine. I don't. In both cases, something I own is taken from me illegally.
If copyright infringement is illegal, what difference does it make if people use the word "theft" in talking about it? Would use of a different vocabularly alter the illegality of the behavior?
It isn't "odd" that corporate content producers rely on copyright to protect their interests. It is normal behavior from people trying to protect their own interests. I don't have much use for those content producers, and I think the current copyright terms are excessive. But that doesn't mean I believe copyright infringement is not a crime or that the very existence of copyright should be questioned.
Finally, I don't believe I've argued that copyright infringement is property theft. It does deprive me of something, but whether or not that something is considered property is not important to me. The customary argument about whether or not IP is actually property or if ideas can be owned and controlled is a red herring and of no interest to me.
Outsourcing is bad for the person whose job goes elsewhere.
But the job goes elsewhere because someone else can do it cheaper.
It happens all the time. Sooner or later, all those guys in India will price themselves out of the market and lose their jobs to people in China or Africa.
I have sympathy for people who lose their jobs. I have no sympathy for people who want government to distort economics.
I haven't said copyright infringement equates to property theft. You have gone off on a tangent about imaginary property, apparently intending to assert that only physical property is real or of value.
I've said that copyright infringement deprives me of potential benefit. If your boss fired you without cause and got you blacklisted in your industry, would you not agree that your boss had deprived illegally of potential benefit? Whether or not the word "property" is used in this regard has no effect on your loss. Or would you argue that it was all imaginary and go away quietly?
Again, I am not talking about ideas, or stories, or any other kind of analogue for "idea". I am talking about the physical medium on which I have recorded my work. The work is not the story; the work is not the idea; the work is the medium on which I have placed symbols that represent my ideas. That is something entirely different from an idea or a story. You are quite free to have your own ideas, regardless of their similarity to mine. What you cannot do without my permission is copy and distribute my work.
To reiterate, that work is not an idea or a story.
I am not interested in stopping you from having ideas, from copying my ideas (whatever that means) or from telling the same stories. Ideas and stories are noncorporeal thoughts. I am very interested in stopping you from illegally copying the little piece of some medium that I have modified to contain the symbolic representation of my ideas and stories.
Better desktop searching is welcome, but how about something that imposes some order and structure on the data on my machine?
Not in terms of a filesystem, and not in terms of a tool that indexes everything and points a search engine at the index. Rather, I want something that overlays all that and imposes structure and organization on the information and knowledge that is recorded in all the those data.
Having done that, give me the tools to browse and manipulate it.
Gnome's Dashboard seems to be sniffing around the edges of this notion. But I'm thinking of something more significant, something that might potentially represent the user's concept of the machine, relegating filesystens, files, and data formats to lower and less relevant levels.
I.e. computer users do not need to be aware of the actual structure of their hard drive, or how their chips and circuit boards operate, because the OS and other software abstract all that out of the way. Why not bump it up?
>> Potential earnings cannot be stolen from you because you do not have them yet.
It is the potential you are stealing from me. That potential is precisely what copyright is intended to protect: the author's exclusive right to his work for a period of time. Inherent in that right is the right to benefit from the distribution of the work. If you limit my ability to distribute my work by copying and distributing it without my permission, you are violating my exclusive right to do precisely that, and, hence, stealing my potential benefit.
>>...equate imaginary property to physical property which it clearly isn't.
Property does not need to be physical to be real. In all likelihood, the closest your income comes to being physical in nature is its existence as stored binary data. In any case, we do not copyright our thoughtsm which are, in fact, noncorporeal. We copyright the symbolic expressions of our thoughts that are made using one physical medium or another: paper, vinyl, silicon, etc. In other words, I may jave a bestselling novel rattling around in my head, but I can't copyright it until I place words on some kind of physical medium.
>> Without copyright law, everyone would be free to copy the work without restriction.
No more than they are free to enter my residence and acquire and copy any of my other possessions. If I make something -- a chair, an apple pie, a book -- no one has any right to it unless I permit it.
Copyright law does not, in any way, give you ownership of the idea, whether or not you created it.
I am not discussing ideas. We do not, in fact, cannot, copyright ideas.
Your exclusive rights are at the expense of others.
Well, yes, but only if you imagine that my possession of anything else is at the expense of others. Is my ownership of the computer I'm using at this moment at the expense of someone else? If not, how does that differ from my ownership of the single copy of the manuscript of a book I may have just written? Since you appear to focus on ideas, if someone independently conjures up the same ideas expressed in that manuscript, fine. Have at it. It is impossible to own ideas. But, I own that manuscript.
Finally, I'm quite aware of fair use and the U.S. copyright law, having used attornies several times to sort out copyright issues. But, fair use -- and the examples you site -- exist only within the overall context of copyright.
Copyright protects my exclusive right to benefit from my ownership of the work I created. If you infringe my copyright, you steal from me a certain amount of my potential fto benefit from control of that work. That loss skyrockets if you, in turn, illegally copy and distribute copies of my work, depriving me of that part of the potential market.
Whether or not you want to call this theft or whether or not you actually do believe that physciality is a prerequisite for theft doesn't concern me. Those are semantic issues of little concern.
What does interest me is a belief that the illegal obstruction of my future benefits is good for society. In the case of copyright, I simply don't accept that.
I think to sustain your argument you need to show how rights to my work pass from me to someone else. If I create something, by definition, and the Constitution, I have exclusive rights to it. Within the term of copyright for that work, how could amy of those rights legally pass to anyone else absent my deliberate transfer of them?
All rights to a copyrighted work are derived from the rights held by its author and pass to others only with the permission and intent of the author.
Yuu're trotting out the same ponderous arguement that other fanatics do. It simply boils down to a belief on your part that, somehow, you have a right to something that I own. Then you deliverately obfuscate the issue by goiong off on a tangent about the mean of words like "steal" and "theft".
It isn't important if depriving me of revenue by stealing my wallet is called theft and depriving me of revenue by infringing my copyright is called something else. Both are wrong, both are illegal, and both occur because someone takes something that does not belong to them.
Here's the point: If I create something, I own it. I have full rights to it. No one else can own it, copy it, or have any rights to it in any form unless I transfer those rights to them. That seems self-evidently clear to me. How could you, for example, have rights to something that did not exist until I created it?
Specifically, if I write a book, no one has any right to read, copy, or otherwise use that book unless I transfer that right to them.
To argue otherwise is simply an exercise in ideological wish fulfillment. But that is a common occurence here.
It is irrelevant that DOS was a rebadge of a quick hack. It is also irrelevant what Microsoft's attitude toward users was or is. Typical computer users have never wanted to work at the shell prompt. If they did, GUI's would still be in the labs. Command.com might have become the best shell in history, but that would have made little impression on sales.
As for Unix, it has been around longer than Windows and everyone who tried to market it as a desktop for normal users has failed. As Linux is finding out, the best way to convince normal people to use Unx is to hide it. (I say that as someone who's happily spent 80 percent of his computer life in Unix and Linux,)
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Why is it that only geeks say things like "orthogonal"?
I said sys admins aren't free, regardless of OS. That's true. It highlights the fact that free software is not cost-free.
What is with this "corporate overlord" stuff? Of course, it is unwise for any country to become dependent on any single source for IT, including the U.S. Ditto for any critical segment of its infrastructure. There have always been plenty of alternatives to Microsoft, and there still are, even ignoring free software. Sure, MS preloaded hardware via unsavory tactics, but no one held a gun to anyone and forced them to continue using Windows. If Linux can make inroads against Windows, even as small as they currently are, then something else could have done it earlier.
Nope, you argued that people shouldn't trust American coporations for fear of backdoors in their software.
Compared to the existing oppression of the Chinese people by their government, that concern seems a bit less worrisome.
I didn't say free software "ever costs more" than MS. I said what I said. Go read it again.
I'm not asserting that people should use MS in preference to free software. One more time, read what I wrote. Is it factually wrong? Can free software be any cheaper than free? Does the free software community run a business providing support? No, so it can have no impact on the cost of support. MS, if it chooses, can give Windows away and cut the cost of its paid support.
Note, if you will, that that isn't an argument in favor of using MS. It's just a statement of fact.
And you would trust the current Chinese government more than you would MS? Geez. If anyone is going to spy on the Chinese people, its the Chinese government.
My point about support costs, as I said, is that MS is in a postion to both lower the cost of acquiring its software and of lowering the cost of buying its support, if it chooses to do that. The free software community cannot do that, because its product is already free and it provides no direct support.
>> ...if we get countries to switch to Free Software, they'll stop sending money to Microsoft and instead use it to feed their own computer scientists.
Dream on.
As I said, it's only the initial acquisition that's free. It costs money to support IT regardless of whose software you're using.
I didn't say that we need to "solve poverty" before doing anything else. To the contrary, actually.
Last I looked, there was also a license encumbering my use of open source. The GPL makes it rather difficult to make money with open source, which is a more pressing issue than developing an IT infrastructure.
What's that got to do with improving health, education, economies and governments? Stallman is an ideologue. The world already has too many of them.
The primary advantage of F/OSS compared with proprietary software is that it can be acquired without cost. That's a big advantage. Once acquired, though, very real costs are incurred in installing, training, and maintaining. Sys admins do not work for free, regardless of the development model used by their OS.
Microsoft could, presumably, reduce the cost advantage of F/OSS by cutting the price of Windows. While the loss of potential revenue would be large in countries as populous as India or China, it would be much easier to absorb in small countries like Bhutan, Lesotho, or Gambia.
The consequence is that MS is in a position to make Windows cheaper to acquire, and, potentially, to reduce the cost of support it provides directly. F/OSS, on the other hand, cannot reduce the acquisition cost of its products and has no real control over the cost of support.
Many Western eyes typically fail to see the differences throughout the underdeveloped world. Some nations have a burgeoning IT sector and a veneer of prosperity riding atop massive poverty. Opprtunities for indivudal economic success are present in some countries, while in others opportunity is stifled by ideology or religion, corruption, and incompetence.
Many nations cannot (or do not care enough to) provide their populations with safe drinking water, minimal health care, and sufficient caloric intake. Rather than conjuring visions of besting Microsoft in these markets, the F/OSS community would be of better service if it conjured ways to use its products to enable these nations to tackle those more pressing problems.
1. I don't have an agenda. If you think it is important to assert that illegally depriving someone of potential gain is not theft, that's fine with me. The distinction is not relevant. Presumably it is important to you to score debating points, though.
2. I said Lessig is, in my opinion, often wrong. If you can't tell the difference between diagreeing with someone's views and a personal attack, that's not my concern.
3. >> Without copyright, there is no exclusive right on any creative work you make public. Period. Copyright gives you those rights by taking that freedom away from others. We've been over this.
You are fundamentally wrong about this. Laws, of any kind, do not and cannot create or grant rights. The law can only recognize and protect rights that exist naturally. My ownership and exclusive rights to my own unique creations is a natural right. No one in that collection of individuals called "society" has any rights to unless I give them that right. The copyright laws recognize all that and provide a legal framework for me to transfer those rights, as I see fit, to others. You haven't proved otherwise because it cannot be done.
4. The "expression of an idea" is in know way equivalent to an idea. Nothing can be expressed without language, symbols and a medium that transmits the expression. It's the combination of language and symbols on a medium that can be copyrighted, not ideas. How can copyright regulated the right to own, duplicated and distribute ideas when it is impossible to own, duplicate or distribute an idea? Ideas are only thoughts in someone's head. They have no existence in the real and physical world.
5. I've already expressed my opinion on copyright length and the entertainment industry.
I see no further purpose in continuing this. I've presented logical justifications for my positions. You have presented ideological fervor, falsely accused me of an ad hominem attack on Lessig, and continued to childishly harp on your "theft" sorepoint long after it became clear that I just don't care.
1. Of course something is different if it isn't the same. What's your point? If you feel better to say that copyright infringement isn't theft, fine. Neither in fraud, manslaughter, or arson, or speeding. I don't see why this is so important. Do you imagine that someone charge with copyright infringement is going to storm into court waving a dictionary open to the definition of "steal" or "theft"?
2. I'm not attacking Lessig. I said I think he's often wrong because I disagree with the community or societal premise of many of his arguments. I.e., I believe one thing, he believes another. That leads us to two different places.
3. Every right protected by copyright law is derived from an author's original exclusive rights. Copyright law recognizes and protects -- rather than creates -- the exclusive right I acquire when I create my work. It is impossible for anyone else to have rights to do anything with that work -- the original item -- unless I give them that right. That has nothing to do with copyright law. I can give you the right to make one copy and no more. I can give you the right to make as many copies as you wish if you agree to sell them and give me a percentage of your profit. In other words, any rights to do anything with any copies of my original work derive from my original exclusive rights and any portion of them that I transfer to someone else.
4. Copyright law concerns the duplication and dissemination of work of art via a medium of some nature. Copyright law is not about controlling access to ideas or the duplication and distribution of ideas. It is all about controlling access to things, not ideas. I can copy a book, a piece of paper, a digitized song, whatever. But, I cannot copy an idea. Nor can I own an idea, market an idea, or steal an idea. Ideas remain in our heads until they are conveyed, in words and symbols carried on a medium, to someone else. Only then does copyright apply.
5. I don't understand your fixation on this "owning" thing. If I create a unqiue work, who else can own it besides me? It is no different than if I go to my kitchen and create a sandwich. I own that sandwich, not you. Likewise, if I go to my keyboard and create a novel, I own that novel, not you. Not the "idea" of a novel, or the actual words and dialogue that may be mulling about in my head, but the actual digitized file that I create on my hard drive. I own that thing, and that things is a bunch of symbols, not a bunch of ideas.
6. Do you actually believe if you got everyone to agree with you that copyright infringement was not theft, that anything would change?
7. Copyright length is a political issue that has and will vary over time. I think it's too long now, but I also don't think that it matters much. People will neither suffer harm or be benefited if something like Mickey Mouse stays copyrighted.
1. Potential exists. Loss of potential exists. Loss of potential benefits exists. Why are you insistent on treating this like a semantic issue? By your reasoning, potential gain doesn't exist, either. Therefore, depriving me of present-day rights for the sake of the potential benefit of others in the future is absurd since, as you say, a potential benefit does not exist.
2. >> Not getting something you don't already have is not the same as losing something you do have
Of course, it's different. So what? Depriving me of potential gain is still a loss for me. Is it the same thing as the loss of something I currently possess? No, but it is quite real, nonetheless.
You knw, you wouldn't make much of a banker, since your insistence that future potential doesn't exist would rather eliminate the basis of home mortgages and loans in general. How can banks expect people to pay back loans with money that doesn't exist yet?
3. I think Lessig is usually wrong because he bases much of his argument on balancing the rights of the individual with the rights of society. I believe society is only a usual fiction for purposes of discussion, that society as an entity does not exist. Societies are comprised of individuals who have rights, responsibilities and obligations. To argue, however, that a "society" has rights, responsibilities and obligations is modern-day mysticism.
4. Of course, I'm not claiming I know the motives of every person who downloads copyrighted music. I am claiming that, in most circumstances, it is illegal, ought to be illegal, and is typically practiced by people who are motivated by the prospect of "free stuff" rather than principle. However, the focus on the individual downloader ignores the industrial-scale uploaders who deliberately make illegal copies of thousands of products available for further illegal copying.
5. I'm not interested i changing my mind, or in changing your's. (BTW, those quotes are just something you made up; they didn't come from me.)
In my opinion, if I create something, I own what I have created. Only one copy exists. I have full and total rights to do with it as I please. No one else has any rights to it, period. I might decide to burn it. I might decide to put it in a closet. I might decide to release it with an open source license and agree to allow everyone in the world to make as many copies as they wish. I might sign a contract with a publisher that transfers some of my rights in exchange for copying and marketing my work. In turn, purchasers of each copy of my work would acquire those rights, and only those rights, I have agreed to transfer to them. All other rights -- those that I have not transferred -- remain with me. Ownership of the original work, of course, remains with me as long as I wish.
I've never seen Lessig or anyone else present a convincing case that explains how ownership and all rights to that single original work pass from its creator to someone else without the permission and sanction of the work's creator. There is much discussion of "ideas" and such, but that is all besides the point, since the discsussion is not about ideas.
Understand, I think that the entertainment industry is acting reprehensibly when it starts suing teenagers for downloading CD tracks. I think they're well within their rights to sue people who host thousands of tracks on the web. I still don't like them, but they're right and the guys hosting the tracks are wrong.
I also think the current copyright flap exists because we apply copyright to a category of material that did not exist at the time of the Founding Father's. That is, mass market entertainment, I do not feel comfortabe applying the current copyright law both to serious works and to commercial products created as disposable temporary entertainment,
And, I think copyright terms should correspond to the life of the work's author, not to some fixed term.
1. Potential for future benefits exists and is very real. E.g., if someone builds a sewage treatment plant across the street from you house, you've lost a lot of potential increase in the value of your house. Come tax assessment time, you'll see how real that is.
2. A loss of future benefits is just as real as the loss of something you hold in your hand at present. The only difference is that, in the present, we do not know the size and scale of the loss. Would you argue that murder does not involve loss because the victim does not yet live in the future?
3. You keep saying "theft" and "steal" I'm talking about illegal deprivation of potential benefits. AS for "own", well, if I create an original work, it seems rather obvious that at that moment in time I own it. Since copyright law gives me exclusive rights to it, i, and only I, can determine who can make copies, and in what circumstances, and that I can limit the rights I transfer to the owners of those copies, that seems like ownership to me.
4. Don't go on about Lessig. I think he's usually wrong.
5. People infringe copyright because they want free stuff. Don't even try to convince me those cheap bastards have a clue about copyight.
BTW, you presented assertions, not facts.
Don't believe I said outsourcing was good or bad. It is just the natural course of events. People -- corporations or you or me -- will seek to reduce their spending. Labor is a cost. If a business can spend less by outsourcing, they will do that unless something else stops it.That's not "evil", it is simply normal human behavior.
>>...what, exactly, that you own is being taken from you when someone infringes your copyright?
Potential for future benefits, as I've repeatedly stated. You may not want to use the word "steal" to describe what happens when someone illegally deprives me of potential benefits that may accrue to me as a consequence of my exclusive right to control my copyrighted work, but that's the effect of the infringement. The loss exists.
Example: Suppose I'm due to received 5% of the net from a movie I scripted, once it is released. Just before its release date, someone releases an unauthorized copy on the net. As a result, the release date is pushed back and the film produces less revenue than it would have otherwise. A copyright infringer deprieved me of those potential earnings.
This is precisely the kind of behavior copyright law is intended to stop. Today, anyone with a computer can be a copyright infringer. In the past, prior to the creation of copyright law, printers and publishers commonly marketed an author's work without his permission and awareness, and paid him nothing. As a result, the livelihood of anyone who used his pen to make a living was threatened. Preventing this was the impetus for copyright law.
Why should I be interested in responding to your "requests" to demonstrate why infringement is "theft" or "stealing"? I don't care. If you don't want to use those words, fine. If someone breaks into my house and steals things, he's a thief. He's also a called burglar. So what? The words we use don't change the nature of our behavior. In my book, "illegally depriving" me of something that belongs to me is tantamount to theft.
Your assertions lead me to conclude that you believe the words "steal" or "theft" should onlly be applied to physical property. If so, that's OK, Maybe you want to use some other words to in reference to what I lose as a result of copyright infrinement.
I'm not at all interested in playing word games. If you believe copyright infringement does not deprive the victim of potential benefit, say so.
Your point would be...what? That the cost of labor in other countries should be higher? The only way that;s going to happen is if higher-paying jobs migrate their. People outside the US want IT jobs for the same reason as Americans: they pay well. Give it a decade or so and Indians will be complaining about their corporations outsourcing their jobs.
Most of your diatribe is beside the point. You think "corporatists" are bad people. So? Even "good" people have an incentive to lower their production and labor costs. Even if corporations were populated with saints, they'd still need to outsource. If they didn't, they'd eventually disappear, taking all their jobs with them.
Yep, that's about it. I don't have any obligation to pay more for a product that I can get away with. Why should I buy an overpriced IT product from an overpaid IT worker in the States when the same product is available cheaper from somewhere else?
I don't need any IT products. If the government is persuaded to step in an thwart the normal course of events, all that will happen is that American products will price themselves out of the market and no one will buy them anyway.
If you think the distinction between stealing and depriving me of potential benefits is important, fine. I don't. In both cases, something I own is taken from me illegally.
If copyright infringement is illegal, what difference does it make if people use the word "theft" in talking about it? Would use of a different vocabularly alter the illegality of the behavior?
It isn't "odd" that corporate content producers rely on copyright to protect their interests. It is normal behavior from people trying to protect their own interests. I don't have much use for those content producers, and I think the current copyright terms are excessive. But that doesn't mean I believe copyright infringement is not a crime or that the very existence of copyright should be questioned.
Finally, I don't believe I've argued that copyright infringement is property theft. It does deprive me of something, but whether or not that something is considered property is not important to me. The customary argument about whether or not IP is actually property or if ideas can be owned and controlled is a red herring and of no interest to me.
Outsourcing is bad for the person whose job goes elsewhere.
But the job goes elsewhere because someone else can do it cheaper.
It happens all the time. Sooner or later, all those guys in India will price themselves out of the market and lose their jobs to people in China or Africa.
I have sympathy for people who lose their jobs. I have no sympathy for people who want government to distort economics.
I haven't said copyright infringement equates to property theft. You have gone off on a tangent about imaginary property, apparently intending to assert that only physical property is real or of value.
I've said that copyright infringement deprives me of potential benefit. If your boss fired you without cause and got you blacklisted in your industry, would you not agree that your boss had deprived illegally of potential benefit? Whether or not the word "property" is used in this regard has no effect on your loss. Or would you argue that it was all imaginary and go away quietly?
Again, I am not talking about ideas, or stories, or any other kind of analogue for "idea". I am talking about the physical medium on which I have recorded my work. The work is not the story; the work is not the idea; the work is the medium on which I have placed symbols that represent my ideas. That is something entirely different from an idea or a story. You are quite free to have your own ideas, regardless of their similarity to mine. What you cannot do without my permission is copy and distribute my work.
To reiterate, that work is not an idea or a story.
I am not interested in stopping you from having ideas, from copying my ideas (whatever that means) or from telling the same stories. Ideas and stories are noncorporeal thoughts. I am very interested in stopping you from illegally copying the little piece of some medium that I have modified to contain the symbolic representation of my ideas and stories.
Better desktop searching is welcome, but how about something that imposes some order and structure on the data on my machine?
Not in terms of a filesystem, and not in terms of a tool that indexes everything and points a search engine at the index. Rather, I want something that overlays all that and imposes structure and organization on the information and knowledge that is recorded in all the those data.
Having done that, give me the tools to browse and manipulate it.
Gnome's Dashboard seems to be sniffing around the edges of this notion. But I'm thinking of something more significant, something that might potentially represent the user's concept of the machine, relegating filesystens, files, and data formats to lower and less relevant levels.
I.e. computer users do not need to be aware of the actual structure of their hard drive, or how their chips and circuit boards operate, because the OS and other software abstract all that out of the way. Why not bump it up?
>> Potential earnings cannot be stolen from you because you do not have them yet.
It is the potential you are stealing from me. That potential is precisely what copyright is intended to protect: the author's exclusive right to his work for a period of time. Inherent in that right is the right to benefit from the distribution of the work. If you limit my ability to distribute my work by copying and distributing it without my permission, you are violating my exclusive right to do precisely that, and, hence, stealing my potential benefit.
>>...equate imaginary property to physical property which it clearly isn't.
Property does not need to be physical to be real. In all likelihood, the closest your income comes to being physical in nature is its existence as stored binary data. In any case, we do not copyright our thoughtsm which are, in fact, noncorporeal. We copyright the symbolic expressions of our thoughts that are made using one physical medium or another: paper, vinyl, silicon, etc. In other words, I may jave a bestselling novel rattling around in my head, but I can't copyright it until I place words on some kind of physical medium.
>> Without copyright law, everyone would be free to copy the work without restriction.
No more than they are free to enter my residence and acquire and copy any of my other possessions. If I make something -- a chair, an apple pie, a book -- no one has any right to it unless I permit it.
Copyright law does not, in any way, give you ownership of the idea, whether or not you created it.
I am not discussing ideas. We do not, in fact, cannot, copyright ideas.
Your exclusive rights are at the expense of others.
Well, yes, but only if you imagine that my possession of anything else is at the expense of others. Is my ownership of the computer I'm using at this moment at the expense of someone else? If not, how does that differ from my ownership of the single copy of the manuscript of a book I may have just written? Since you appear to focus on ideas, if someone independently conjures up the same ideas expressed in that manuscript, fine. Have at it. It is impossible to own ideas. But, I own that manuscript.
Finally, I'm quite aware of fair use and the U.S. copyright law, having used attornies several times to sort out copyright issues. But, fair use -- and the examples you site -- exist only within the overall context of copyright.
Copyright protects my exclusive right to benefit from my ownership of the work I created. If you infringe my copyright, you steal from me a certain amount of my potential fto benefit from control of that work. That loss skyrockets if you, in turn, illegally copy and distribute copies of my work, depriving me of that part of the potential market.
Whether or not you want to call this theft or whether or not you actually do believe that physciality is a prerequisite for theft doesn't concern me. Those are semantic issues of little concern.
What does interest me is a belief that the illegal obstruction of my future benefits is good for society. In the case of copyright, I simply don't accept that.
I think to sustain your argument you need to show how rights to my work pass from me to someone else. If I create something, by definition, and the Constitution, I have exclusive rights to it. Within the term of copyright for that work, how could amy of those rights legally pass to anyone else absent my deliberate transfer of them?
All rights to a copyrighted work are derived from the rights held by its author and pass to others only with the permission and intent of the author.
Yuu're trotting out the same ponderous arguement that other fanatics do. It simply boils down to a belief on your part that, somehow, you have a right to something that I own. Then you deliverately obfuscate the issue by goiong off on a tangent about the mean of words like "steal" and "theft".
It isn't important if depriving me of revenue by stealing my wallet is called theft and depriving me of revenue by infringing my copyright is called something else. Both are wrong, both are illegal, and both occur because someone takes something that does not belong to them.
Here's the point: If I create something, I own it. I have full rights to it. No one else can own it, copy it, or have any rights to it in any form unless I transfer those rights to them. That seems self-evidently clear to me. How could you, for example, have rights to something that did not exist until I created it?
Specifically, if I write a book, no one has any right to read, copy, or otherwise use that book unless I transfer that right to them.
To argue otherwise is simply an exercise in ideological wish fulfillment. But that is a common occurence here.
It is irrelevant that DOS was a rebadge of a quick hack. It is also irrelevant what Microsoft's attitude toward users was or is. Typical computer users have never wanted to work at the shell prompt. If they did, GUI's would still be in the labs. Command.com might have become the best shell in history, but that would have made little impression on sales.
As for Unix, it has been around longer than Windows and everyone who tried to market it as a desktop for normal users has failed. As Linux is finding out, the best way to convince normal people to use Unx is to hide it. (I say that as someone who's happily spent 80 percent of his computer life in Unix and Linux,)