I know replying to your own post is a sign of memory loss, but...
If I was an RIAA lawyer, I would argue that this ruling upholds the traditional concept of fair use as not encompassing a true and faithful reproduction of the entirety of a work.
I wouldn't be happy about this ruling, but I could make a case that the ruling does not bear on the legality of serving duplicate tracks on the Internet.
Careful. This ruling does not mean "we're allowed to harmlessly" copy CD's.
The ruling specifically nooted that Arriba removed the full-size images after making the thumbnails, and that the thumbnails can not be converted into a duplicate of the orginal image. This is equivalent to being unable to reconstruct the complete, original track.
Wait and see what happens next. Is Arriba finished with the legal process?
And, finally, this decision does not set a precedent.
Why does anyone expect the situation to change in their favor thanks to yet one more discussion of the legality and morality of filesharing.?
Morality is a moot point, since it is relative and varies from person to person. Changing someone's behavior by changing their morality is a very difficult thing to do, if at all.
Legality, frankly, seems to favor the RIAA. Someone might make a convincing case that sharing a handful of files on a home netowrk is fair use, but not that sharing thousands of files with unknown people all over the globe constitutes fair use. Any such ruling in a lower court would be immediately appealed and joined by the rest of the media and publishing industries, plus any other organziation that has a vested interest in protecting copyright. (Note that this fuss would be about fair use, not copyright duration. They're two different concepts.)
In the end, if there is more money to be made marketing product online than on CD's, one or more companies will fo that, probably reducing their CD catalog in proportion.
And, sooner or later, CD's will be sold that won't allow themselves to be copied.(Or, consider this scenario: Microsoft strikes a deal with XYZ company to allow Windows users to copy a certain number of CD files per month for a fee. Windows, and the CD's, are tweaked to count the copies made on your machine. CD's from companies not in on the deal won't copy in Windows. Plus, there';s code on the CD's that recognize the OS and block the copy of it isn't Windows.)
>> Even at the lower price the supermarket is still likely to be making a profit on the sale.
Of course. That's why they sell things.
In any case, those prices are lower than what I was paying several years ago.
Re: Microsoft -- When I lived in the UK, software prices also tended to be a one-to-one match for their U.S. dollar price. I.e., if Windows cost $100 in the States, it cost 100 pounds in the UK. All vendors (or was it the retailers?) seemed to play this game, not just MS. I believe MS assembled and shipped their UK products from a facility in Ireland, but attributed the UK price hike to the cost of importing everything from the U.S.
Well, I doubt that they'll go after ordinary downloaders. After all, there'd be nothing to download if other people weren't hosting it. It's the big-time hosters the RIAA is after. Start closing them down and, they expect, the small-time hosters will get the message.
Bringing suit against Sammy CollegeKid because he grabbed 3 MP3's isn't cost effective.
In the end, I expect the entertainment industry will figure out how to manufacture digital products that can't be copied without authorization. It'll be ugly, but it'll happen.
As for entrapment, my guess is no, it wouldn't be. Everything is under copyright as soon as it is created, at least in the U.S.
I'm a Yank, but I lived in the UK in the early 90's. Bought more than my share of CDs at the time. I remember a bit of hubbub about unfair CD pricing, essentially predatory pricing at a 1-to-1 dollar-to-pounds ratio. Is a CD that sells for, say, $18 in the States still selling for 18 pounds in the UK?
By rights, I mean the creator and owner of a work is solely entitled to make use of the work, to determine its disposal, to determine and control any reproductions, to control the distriubtion of those copies, to set the conditions for others use of the original or copies of the original, etc.
>> ...one should be able to use a song as long as you do not deny the use to the original creator..
"Should" is your statement of a desired state of affairs. Fine, but it does not reflect reality.
>>...You cannot base an argument on pure logic.
Amazing. What else would it be base on? Emotion? Morals? Ethics? Come on. An argument based on anything but logic is simply an emotional outburst.
I base my belief that the creator of a work owns the work on perfect and simple reason. If something does not exist, it is impossible for anyone to own it. At the moment that it is created, it can only be owned by its creator (unless the creator had previously transferred ownership elsewhere.) That seems obvious and self-evident. Who else could it be owned by? Can you assert otherwise?
The notion of "public domain" when applied to works of art such as books, music, etc., has nothing to do with government ownership or adminsitration. It simply means that no one holds a copyright on that work.
You have rolled out a lot rhetoricl assertions about rights, along with a number of half-baked analogies.
All of that is irrelevant to your case.
You appear to be claiming that you have rights to something I make. I am stating that you only have rights to something I make if I grant you those rights. (Beats me why you bring up NDA'a.) The most common way for the creator of a work to transfer rights to other parties is via copyright and publishing. That transfer typically gives you the right to purchase copies of my work. Unless I, or a subsequent copyright holder specifcally state, or place the work in the public domain, an owner of a copy of the work does not have the right to make and distribute additional copies of the owrk.
I'm tired of saying it, but you haven't presented any evidence or logic to refute the fact that the creator of a work is its original owner and holds all rights to the work. If you can't refute that, you cannot argue that you have rights in the work not granted by the owner.
Oh. You are, I think, suggesting that the RIAA needs to ante up a special file in order to identify a filesharer.
I believe that all they need to do is to download one of the filesharer's files and then use commonly available software to identify the IP of the server hosting the file. Once they have that IP (which will take only a few seconds), they can use public records to identify the registrar of the IP. In almost every case, this will be an ISP, from whom they can acquire the identity of the responsible individual (at least in the U.S.)
In other words, no entrapment. The Internet is a public place.
I suspect it is perfectly legal to "go after" a single individual for a single instance of copyright infringement.
Is it prudent? Is it an effective way to stop what the RIAA views as wholesale theft of their members' products? No.
However, it seems to me that successfully bringing suit against a few poeple who are warehousing thousands of titles and offering them up on the net will, quite likely, have the RIAA's intended effect.
Nor do I expect to see much court intervention, beyond, perhaps, reducing the amount of the damages due the RIAA when it wins a suit. I've had several occasions to deal with copyright law and lawyers re: the issue of copying and distribution, and I can think of no way that the law is on the side of the filesharers.
You are bound by the laws that apply within the political entity where you live. For example, if a work is under copyright, your purchase of that work gives you the rights established by the law where you live. That law and that copyright is the mechanism by which rights are transferred from the orginal creator to the purchaser of a copy of the work. You, as the legal owner of a copy, have no more and no fewer rights than what is specified by law. Your legal responsibility to obey the law is explicit; no contracts are needed.
You keep bringing up the notion that making copies of a work does no harm to the work's creator. Whether or not harm is done isn't the point. The point is that the right to reproduce the original work is owned only by the work's creator until he transfers it elsewhere. If he does not transfer that right to you, any copy you make is unauthotized and, in almost all nations, illegal.
If you don't dispute that I own the work I create, how do you suggest that ownership and rights to that work can be transferred elswhere absent my consent? It seems to me that the transfer of ownership without the lawful owner's consent is theft.
>> So why could a society not decide that the legal limit is 5 minutes, or 5 seconds, or 5 nano-seconds?
They can. I'm not arguing that society has no interest in this, just that the person who makes something owns and has exclusive rights to it until he transfers ownership and/or rights elsewhere. I can conceive of no way to refute the notion that the individual who creates something that did not previously exist is the orginal owner.
>>...the public domain is not a legal entity that you can transfer rights to.
No, but you misconstrue the public domain. When something moves into the public domain, ownership and rights to it are transferred to the public. I.e., it is now in the domain of the public. This is in perfect harmony with the fact that all rights flow for the creator of a work. The creator can deliberately place his work in the public domain, or the work can devolve into the public domain after the expiration of copyright. In the first instance, the creator acts on is own volition; in the second instance, the work moves to the public domain according to the laws governing such affairs, which the creator give his assent to by living in that jurisdiction. Nor do the rights 'evaporate". They belong to the public.
>>...what are you basing it upon?
As I said, simple logic. See above.
>> You yourself acknowledge that you do not control the transfer to the public domain.
To repeat, the creator of work assents to the law governing devolution to the public domain simply by living in the place. There's nothing extraordinary about that concept.
>> If ideas (or expressions of ideas) can be owned...
Don't think I ever talked about the ownership of an "idea". I'm talking about the ownership of works such as novels, books, songs, recording, films, and other works that use imagery and symbolic representation to record the thoughts of their creators. The "ideas" remain within the minds of individuals, but the work they create based on those thoughts is an actual piece of property. (I tend to agree that ownership of an idea is a non sequitur, but only because I don't know how to identify an idea as something other than a pattern of firing synapses inside one person's brain.)
The recovery from bankruptcy can be explained by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the arrival of a market economy. In addition, don't forget that Estonia, as well as Latvia and Lithuania, had long histories as independent sovereign nations before being occupied by the Soviets.
As for the cost of Internet, I'm curious about the balance of access and use in the home versus access in the office and cafes and such.
I don't think the RIAA is after every bloke who has ever downloaded an MP3. They're after people who are, in effect, wholesale providers. If they can successfully close down a few of those, they expect to see a ripple effect.
People copying a few CD's here and there are probably just noise to them, akin to passing around cassette tapes not so many years ago. But, when someone starts distributing most of a company's catalog, that's a different matter.
>>..two people can possess the same data at the same time without the other loosing it...
Again, this confuses "information" with the property that is created. If you purchase a book that I have published, you have obtained a legal copy that I have authorized to be printed via a rights transfer to a publisher.
(If you have made or obtained an unauthorized copy, you have violated my rights because my rights, as owner, include determining who can make copies. If you have an authorized copy, you do not have the right to make more copies unless I specifically granted you those rights.)
Obviously, as you read the book, you "absorb" the information I put into the book. Does that absorption of information deprive me of anything? Of course not, but that is entirely beside the point.
You are able and allowed to read my book only because I have given you permission, via that rights transfer to a publisher, to do that. Absent the permission that flows directly from my ownership of my work (not the authorized copy you own, but the actual work) you would not have a book, period.
All rights to a work orginate at and flow from the creator of a work. How could they not? A work does not exist prior to its creation. At its creation, it is self-evident that, excepting a pre-creation rights transfer, the work belongs exlcusively to its creator. To argue otherwise is to argue that someone else can own something prior to its coming into existence. That, clearly, is impossible.
To support the assertion that a work's creator transfers ownership when someone else comes into possession of a copy of the work, you need to explain: (A: Why that copy is equivalent to the work itself, and; (B) How that the work's creator did not fully own his work at the moment of its creation.
>> According to this argument, term limits on intellectual properties (i.e. patent expiry) is theft...
No, that is not my argument. The creator of a work agrees to legally defined IP limits by virtue of living in that particular society. In essence, they are legally mandated transfers of rights and ownership.
You keep making reference to morality and moral positions. I'm not basing my argument on morals ot ethics. To me, it is very logical to state that I own and have exclusive rights to something I make until I transfer ownership and rights elsewhere. Absent that transfer, I cannot understand how someone else can possibly own what I make.
>> f I ride a bus thru NewYork city, and completely memorize the layout, and build an exact replica of the city. Then it is my right to do whatever the hell I want with that replica.
Sorry, not if the city is under copyright. (Absurd, I know, but so is your statement. A better analogy would be that watching a movie doesn't give you the right to make and distribute copies of the move.)
I do not forfeit my rights in something I made simply because you happen to notice it or to look at it, nor do you have an absolute right to copy anything you see. My rights vested in my creation are absolute and, therefore, include the right to make and distribute copies.
More fundamentally, you've failed to explain how, apart from my transferring ownership or rights, someone other than myself can own or have rights to something I made. Until you do that, you are describing you own desired state of affairs, not reality.
(It's interesting to note that advocates of software licenses like te GPL, which profess to "free" software, seldom point out that the person licensing the software can only do that because, as its creator, he as exclusive ownership and rights. If he did not, he would be powerless to place the code under that license.)
>> If you make a chair, you own it. If I make a copy of it, then I own my copy and you own your copy.
If I have retained rights to the distribution and reproduction of my chair, you have made an illegal copy.
>> Me copying your information does not deprive you of your original, and doing whatever the heck you want with it.
Again, if I retain rights to distribution and reproduction, you have made an illegal copy. Your creation of that illegal copy does, in fact, deprive me of future potential gain from the reproducing and distributing my work. Your statement implies that the only reason I might create something is for my own, sole, personal pleasure. To the contrary, I might just as readily make something for the sole purpose of deriving revenue from its marketing. When you make an illegal copy, you deprive me of the revenue otherwise due me by a sale to you and of potential lost revenue when you start distributing illegal copies of my work.
..Do the people who made your running shoes (not the company, the people) own your shoes?
As I noted, this is a case of the shoe maker transferring rights to the shoe before it is made. In this case, as a condition of employment.
You go on to assert: "Because that's how the laws are set up.. Well, yes, but, presumably, laws that do not recognize the right of an individual to barter skills and labor for money would provoke a range of serious problems.
>> They could equally say that a song is owned as long as you do not share it and at the point of sharing the person who heard it has equal ownership rights to the person who sang it.
They might say it, but it isn't true. The statement is imprecise. One doesn't "hear" a song. One hears a performance of a song. You can't acquire ownership of a song by listening to its performance anymore than you can acquire ownership of New York City by riding on a tour bus in Manhattan.
>> How much did Beethoven make off of ownership of his 9th symphony?
How much he earned from it is not relevant to the fact of his ownership.
>> what does your simplistic view of intellectual property have to say about the fact that in large part Shakespeare ripped off plots from ancient and contemporary writers?
Not much. He owned what he wrote. Others owned what they wrote. To them is due any gain and benefit from the marketing of their works, until the work passes into the public domain. (Note that arguments about the duration of copyright do not bear on the fundamental notion that a work is owned by the work's maker until the rights of ownership are transferred elsewhere, which can happen at the expiration of copyright.)
So, yes, absent devolution into the public domain, Shakespeare's heirs are entitled to royalties.
Finally, copyright is not ownership. If I make something, I own it.
Because it does what they need better than the proprietary stuff. It's nice that it is "free", but no rational compnay would trade "free but inappropriate" for "proprietary and appropriate".
I've been involved in any number of rather large software contracts and I have never known the buyer to even ask about access to source, or any other questions re: doing their own development. They're buying a tool, and if they need to do something else later on, they'll buy more tools.
Nor do they want to "study" the code, anymore than they want to "study" the trucks they rent. Nor do they have any interest at all in "redistributing" anything. In fact, they'd think that was simply donating what they bought to their competitors, a strikingly stupid thing to do.
The arguments you raise are often raised regarding open source and free software, but, frankly, they only apply within the confines of a segment of the software development community. In the world of business, no one has reason to care.
>> Perhaps you feel you should own a monopoly on distribution just because you created something...
Absolutely, and I've no need to resort to claims of morality.
If I make something -- a chair, a book, whatever -- it is impossible for anyone else to own that property or any rights to it until and unless I transfer it to them. To argue otherwise is to argue against logic and reality.
Before I make a chair, there is no chair. When I make the chair, the chair exists. Who owns it? I do. Since the chair had no previous existence, it is clearly impossible for anyone else to own it.
The same logic applies to a book, a song or any other work. The person who creates it owns it and has absolute rights to it until some or all of those rights are transferred elsewhere. (Note than rights transfer can take place prior to the creation of the work.)
You appear to be arguing that any work utilizing language, the alphabet or mathematics is communally owned by "everyone" because languge, math and the alphabet are everyone's common inheritance. (What is this silly business about "How do you know these weren't created on the terms that all derivitave creative works be shared freely?"
Again, that isn't logical or honest. Trees are also the common inheritance of all. Would you claim that fact means that I have a right to the furniture on sale at the store down the street? I doubt that, but yet your "logic" leads to the assertion that the people who wrote the books on sale at the bookshop down the street have no right of ownership vested in those books and act immoraly by attempting to derive profit from their efforts.
The author and the chairmaker both use existing material (language and wood) to make something unique. That's what they own, anbd we buy. (Rather like a cook in a restaurant making meals out of common groceries. But, by you logic, I own those meals, not the restaurant.)
Information is not property because the government says it is. Information is property because it is something that belongs to the person who created it.
Information does not fill the Universe, waiting to be discovered. Information -- a book, a song, an image, a piece of software -- doesn't exist until someone creates it. At that point, the information creator owns that information, as clearly as a furniture maker owns the chair they just finished building.
Slashdot Mirror
I know replying to your own post is a sign of memory loss, but...
If I was an RIAA lawyer, I would argue that this ruling upholds the traditional concept of fair use as not encompassing a true and faithful reproduction of the entirety of a work.
I wouldn't be happy about this ruling, but I could make a case that the ruling does not bear on the legality of serving duplicate tracks on the Internet.
Careful. This ruling does not mean "we're allowed to harmlessly" copy CD's.
The ruling specifically nooted that Arriba removed the full-size images after making the thumbnails, and that the thumbnails can not be converted into a duplicate of the orginal image. This is equivalent to being unable to reconstruct the complete, original track.
Wait and see what happens next. Is Arriba finished with the legal process?
And, finally, this decision does not set a precedent.
Why does anyone expect the situation to change in their favor thanks to yet one more discussion of the legality and morality of filesharing.?
Morality is a moot point, since it is relative and varies from person to person. Changing someone's behavior by changing their morality is a very difficult thing to do, if at all.
Legality, frankly, seems to favor the RIAA. Someone might make a convincing case that sharing a handful of files on a home netowrk is fair use, but not that sharing thousands of files with unknown people all over the globe constitutes fair use. Any such ruling in a lower court would be immediately appealed and joined by the rest of the media and publishing industries, plus any other organziation that has a vested interest in protecting copyright. (Note that this fuss would be about fair use, not copyright duration. They're two different concepts.)
In the end, if there is more money to be made marketing product online than on CD's, one or more companies will fo that, probably reducing their CD catalog in proportion.
And, sooner or later, CD's will be sold that won't allow themselves to be copied.(Or, consider this scenario: Microsoft strikes a deal with XYZ company to allow Windows users to copy a certain number of CD files per month for a fee. Windows, and the CD's, are tweaked to count the copies made on your machine. CD's from companies not in on the deal won't copy in Windows. Plus, there';s code on the CD's that recognize the OS and block the copy of it isn't Windows.)
>> Even at the lower price the supermarket is still likely to be making a profit on the sale.
Of course. That's why they sell things.
In any case, those prices are lower than what I was paying several years ago.
Re: Microsoft -- When I lived in the UK, software prices also tended to be a one-to-one match for their U.S. dollar price. I.e., if Windows cost $100 in the States, it cost 100 pounds in the UK. All vendors (or was it the retailers?) seemed to play this game, not just MS. I believe MS assembled and shipped their UK products from a facility in Ireland, but attributed the UK price hike to the cost of importing everything from the U.S.
Well, I doubt that they'll go after ordinary downloaders. After all, there'd be nothing to download if other people weren't hosting it. It's the big-time hosters the RIAA is after. Start closing them down and, they expect, the small-time hosters will get the message.
Bringing suit against Sammy CollegeKid because he grabbed 3 MP3's isn't cost effective.
In the end, I expect the entertainment industry will figure out how to manufacture digital products that can't be copied without authorization. It'll be ugly, but it'll happen.
As for entrapment, my guess is no, it wouldn't be. Everything is under copyright as soon as it is created, at least in the U.S.
You have a point.
I'm a Yank, but I lived in the UK in the early 90's. Bought more than my share of CDs at the time. I remember a bit of hubbub about unfair CD pricing, essentially predatory pricing at a 1-to-1 dollar-to-pounds ratio. Is a CD that sells for, say, $18 in the States still selling for 18 pounds in the UK?
By rights, I mean the creator and owner of a work is solely entitled to make use of the work, to determine its disposal, to determine and control any reproductions, to control the distriubtion of those copies, to set the conditions for others use of the original or copies of the original, etc.
...one should be able to use a song as long as you do not deny the use to the original creator..
...You cannot base an argument on pure logic.
>>
"Should" is your statement of a desired state of affairs. Fine, but it does not reflect reality.
>>
Amazing. What else would it be base on? Emotion? Morals? Ethics? Come on. An argument based on anything but logic is simply an emotional outburst.
I base my belief that the creator of a work owns the work on perfect and simple reason. If something does not exist, it is impossible for anyone to own it. At the moment that it is created, it can only be owned by its creator (unless the creator had previously transferred ownership elsewhere.) That seems obvious and self-evident. Who else could it be owned by? Can you assert otherwise?
The notion of "public domain" when applied to works of art such as books, music, etc., has nothing to do with government ownership or adminsitration. It simply means that no one holds a copyright on that work.
You have rolled out a lot rhetoricl assertions about rights, along with a number of half-baked analogies.
All of that is irrelevant to your case.
You appear to be claiming that you have rights to something I make. I am stating that you only have rights to something I make if I grant you those rights. (Beats me why you bring up NDA'a.) The most common way for the creator of a work to transfer rights to other parties is via copyright and publishing. That transfer typically gives you the right to purchase copies of my work. Unless I, or a subsequent copyright holder specifcally state, or place the work in the public domain, an owner of a copy of the work does not have the right to make and distribute additional copies of the owrk.
I'm tired of saying it, but you haven't presented any evidence or logic to refute the fact that the creator of a work is its original owner and holds all rights to the work. If you can't refute that, you cannot argue that you have rights in the work not granted by the owner.
End of story.
Oh. You are, I think, suggesting that the RIAA needs to ante up a special file in order to identify a filesharer.
I believe that all they need to do is to download one of the filesharer's files and then use commonly available software to identify the IP of the server hosting the file. Once they have that IP (which will take only a few seconds), they can use public records to identify the registrar of the IP. In almost every case, this will be an ISP, from whom they can acquire the identity of the responsible individual (at least in the U.S.)
In other words, no entrapment. The Internet is a public place.
I suspect it is perfectly legal to "go after" a single individual for a single instance of copyright infringement.
Is it prudent? Is it an effective way to stop what the RIAA views as wholesale theft of their members' products? No.
However, it seems to me that successfully bringing suit against a few poeple who are warehousing thousands of titles and offering them up on the net will, quite likely, have the RIAA's intended effect.
Nor do I expect to see much court intervention, beyond, perhaps, reducing the amount of the damages due the RIAA when it wins a suit. I've had several occasions to deal with copyright law and lawyers re: the issue of copying and distribution, and I can think of no way that the law is on the side of the filesharers.
You are bound by the laws that apply within the political entity where you live. For example, if a work is under copyright, your purchase of that work gives you the rights established by the law where you live. That law and that copyright is the mechanism by which rights are transferred from the orginal creator to the purchaser of a copy of the work. You, as the legal owner of a copy, have no more and no fewer rights than what is specified by law. Your legal responsibility to obey the law is explicit; no contracts are needed.
You keep bringing up the notion that making copies of a work does no harm to the work's creator. Whether or not harm is done isn't the point. The point is that the right to reproduce the original work is owned only by the work's creator until he transfers it elsewhere. If he does not transfer that right to you, any copy you make is unauthotized and, in almost all nations, illegal.
If you don't dispute that I own the work I create, how do you suggest that ownership and rights to that work can be transferred elswhere absent my consent? It seems to me that the transfer of ownership without the lawful owner's consent is theft.
>> So why could a society not decide that the legal limit is 5 minutes, or 5 seconds, or 5 nano-seconds?
...the public domain is not a legal entity that you can transfer rights to.
...what are you basing it upon?
They can. I'm not arguing that society has no interest in this, just that the person who makes something owns and has exclusive rights to it until he transfers ownership and/or rights elsewhere. I can conceive of no way to refute the notion that the individual who creates something that did not previously exist is the orginal owner.
>>
No, but you misconstrue the public domain. When something moves into the public domain, ownership and rights to it are transferred to the public. I.e., it is now in the domain of the public. This is in perfect harmony with the fact that all rights flow for the creator of a work. The creator can deliberately place his work in the public domain, or the work can devolve into the public domain after the expiration of copyright. In the first instance, the creator acts on is own volition; in the second instance, the work moves to the public domain according to the laws governing such affairs, which the creator give his assent to by living in that jurisdiction. Nor do the rights 'evaporate". They belong to the public.
>>
As I said, simple logic. See above.
>> You yourself acknowledge that you do not control the transfer to the public domain.
To repeat, the creator of work assents to the law governing devolution to the public domain simply by living in the place. There's nothing extraordinary about that concept.
>> If ideas (or expressions of ideas) can be owned...
Don't think I ever talked about the ownership of an "idea". I'm talking about the ownership of works such as novels, books, songs, recording, films, and other works that use imagery and symbolic representation to record the thoughts of their creators. The "ideas" remain within the minds of individuals, but the work they create based on those thoughts is an actual piece of property. (I tend to agree that ownership of an idea is a non sequitur, but only because I don't know how to identify an idea as something other than a pattern of firing synapses inside one person's brain.)
The recovery from bankruptcy can be explained by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the arrival of a market economy. In addition, don't forget that Estonia, as well as Latvia and Lithuania, had long histories as independent sovereign nations before being occupied by the Soviets.
As for the cost of Internet, I'm curious about the balance of access and use in the home versus access in the office and cafes and such.
I don't think the RIAA is after every bloke who has ever downloaded an MP3. They're after people who are, in effect, wholesale providers. If they can successfully close down a few of those, they expect to see a ripple effect.
People copying a few CD's here and there are probably just noise to them, akin to passing around cassette tapes not so many years ago. But, when someone starts distributing most of a company's catalog, that's a different matter.
>> ..two people can possess the same data at the same time without the other loosing it...
Again, this confuses "information" with the property that is created. If you purchase a book that I have published, you have obtained a legal copy that I have authorized to be printed via a rights transfer to a publisher.
(If you have made or obtained an unauthorized copy, you have violated my rights because my rights, as owner, include determining who can make copies. If you have an authorized copy, you do not have the right to make more copies unless I specifically granted you those rights.)
Obviously, as you read the book, you "absorb" the information I put into the book. Does that absorption of information deprive me of anything? Of course not, but that is entirely beside the point.
You are able and allowed to read my book only because I have given you permission, via that rights transfer to a publisher, to do that. Absent the permission that flows directly from my ownership of my work (not the authorized copy you own, but the actual work) you would not have a book, period.
All rights to a work orginate at and flow from the creator of a work. How could they not? A work does not exist prior to its creation. At its creation, it is self-evident that, excepting a pre-creation rights transfer, the work belongs exlcusively to its creator. To argue otherwise is to argue that someone else can own something prior to its coming into existence. That, clearly, is impossible.
To support the assertion that a work's creator transfers ownership when someone else comes into possession of a copy of the work, you need to explain: (A: Why that copy is equivalent to the work itself, and; (B) How that the work's creator did not fully own his work at the moment of its creation.
>> According to this argument, term limits on intellectual properties (i.e. patent expiry) is theft...
No, that is not my argument. The creator of a work agrees to legally defined IP limits by virtue of living in that particular society. In essence, they are legally mandated transfers of rights and ownership.
You keep making reference to morality and moral positions. I'm not basing my argument on morals ot ethics. To me, it is very logical to state that I own and have exclusive rights to something I make until I transfer ownership and rights elsewhere. Absent that transfer, I cannot understand how someone else can possibly own what I make.
>> f I ride a bus thru NewYork city, and completely memorize the layout, and build an exact replica of the city. Then it is my right to do whatever the hell I want with that replica.
Sorry, not if the city is under copyright. (Absurd, I know, but so is your statement. A better analogy would be that watching a movie doesn't give you the right to make and distribute copies of the move.)
I do not forfeit my rights in something I made simply because you happen to notice it or to look at it, nor do you have an absolute right to copy anything you see. My rights vested in my creation are absolute and, therefore, include the right to make and distribute copies.
More fundamentally, you've failed to explain how, apart from my transferring ownership or rights, someone other than myself can own or have rights to something I made. Until you do that, you are describing you own desired state of affairs, not reality.
(It's interesting to note that advocates of software licenses like te GPL, which profess to "free" software, seldom point out that the person licensing the software can only do that because, as its creator, he as exclusive ownership and rights. If he did not, he would be powerless to place the code under that license.)
>> If you make a chair, you own it. If I make a copy of it, then I own my copy and you own your copy.
If I have retained rights to the distribution and reproduction of my chair, you have made an illegal copy.
>> Me copying your information does not deprive you of your original, and doing whatever the heck you want with it.
Again, if I retain rights to distribution and reproduction, you have made an illegal copy. Your creation of that illegal copy does, in fact, deprive me of future potential gain from the reproducing and distributing my work. Your statement implies that the only reason I might create something is for my own, sole, personal pleasure. To the contrary, I might just as readily make something for the sole purpose of deriving revenue from its marketing. When you make an illegal copy, you deprive me of the revenue otherwise due me by a sale to you and of potential lost revenue when you start distributing illegal copies of my work.
..Do the people who made your running shoes (not the company, the people) own your shoes?
As I noted, this is a case of the shoe maker transferring rights to the shoe before it is made. In this case, as a condition of employment.
You go on to assert: "Because that's how the laws are set up.. Well, yes, but, presumably, laws that do not recognize the right of an individual to barter skills and labor for money would provoke a range of serious problems.
>> They could equally say that a song is owned as long as you do not share it and at the point of sharing the person who heard it has equal ownership rights to the person who sang it.
They might say it, but it isn't true. The statement is imprecise. One doesn't "hear" a song. One hears a performance of a song. You can't acquire ownership of a song by listening to its performance anymore than you can acquire ownership of New York City by riding on a tour bus in Manhattan.
>> How much did Beethoven make off of ownership of his 9th symphony?
How much he earned from it is not relevant to the fact of his ownership.
>> what does your simplistic view of intellectual property have to say about the fact that in large part Shakespeare ripped off plots from ancient and contemporary writers?
Not much. He owned what he wrote. Others owned what they wrote. To them is due any gain and benefit from the marketing of their works, until the work passes into the public domain. (Note that arguments about the duration of copyright do not bear on the fundamental notion that a work is owned by the work's maker until the rights of ownership are transferred elsewhere, which can happen at the expiration of copyright.)
So, yes, absent devolution into the public domain, Shakespeare's heirs are entitled to royalties.
Finally, copyright is not ownership. If I make something, I own it.
Because it does what they need better than the proprietary stuff. It's nice that it is "free", but no rational compnay would trade "free but inappropriate" for "proprietary and appropriate".
Of course, creating an OSS product that doesn't require distribution of the source ewas exactly what O'Reilly is getting at.
It's interesting that Linux and OSS are creating an environment that appears to be pushing the GPL into irrelevance outside the development community.
I've been involved in any number of rather large software contracts and I have never known the buyer to even ask about access to source, or any other questions re: doing their own development. They're buying a tool, and if they need to do something else later on, they'll buy more tools.
Nor do they want to "study" the code, anymore than they want to "study" the trucks they rent. Nor do they have any interest at all in "redistributing" anything. In fact, they'd think that was simply donating what they bought to their competitors, a strikingly stupid thing to do.
The arguments you raise are often raised regarding open source and free software, but, frankly, they only apply within the confines of a segment of the software development community. In the world of business, no one has reason to care.
>> Perhaps you feel you should own a monopoly on distribution just because you created something...
Absolutely, and I've no need to resort to claims of morality.
If I make something -- a chair, a book, whatever -- it is impossible for anyone else to own that property or any rights to it until and unless I transfer it to them. To argue otherwise is to argue against logic and reality.
Before I make a chair, there is no chair. When I make the chair, the chair exists. Who owns it? I do. Since the chair had no previous existence, it is clearly impossible for anyone else to own it.
The same logic applies to a book, a song or any other work. The person who creates it owns it and has absolute rights to it until some or all of those rights are transferred elsewhere. (Note than rights transfer can take place prior to the creation of the work.)
You appear to be arguing that any work utilizing language, the alphabet or mathematics is communally owned by "everyone" because languge, math and the alphabet are everyone's common inheritance. (What is this silly business about "How do you know these weren't created on the terms that all derivitave creative works be shared freely?"
Again, that isn't logical or honest. Trees are also the common inheritance of all. Would you claim that fact means that I have a right to the furniture on sale at the store down the street? I doubt that, but yet your "logic" leads to the assertion that the people who wrote the books on sale at the bookshop down the street have no right of ownership vested in those books and act immoraly by attempting to derive profit from their efforts.
The author and the chairmaker both use existing material (language and wood) to make something unique. That's what they own, anbd we buy. (Rather like a cook in a restaurant making meals out of common groceries. But, by you logic, I own those meals, not the restaurant.)
Information is not property because the government says it is. Information is property because it is something that belongs to the person who created it.
Information does not fill the Universe, waiting to be discovered. Information -- a book, a song, an image, a piece of software -- doesn't exist until someone creates it. At that point, the information creator owns that information, as clearly as a furniture maker owns the chair they just finished building.
If something can be owned, it is property.