I sort of switched. I bought a Mac Mini last week because I'm tired of my wind tunnel of a PC in the living room. The PC is back in the office where it belongs, I still have my Toshiba notebook, but most of my work is done on the Mini. With 1GB of RAM, it's really quite a good performer - not on par with the AMD64 that it "replaced", but fast enough. And small. Very, very small.
Good point - we'll never know until an Allofmp3 case ends up in court, but all of the verbal wrangling that goes on here about who copied what and where the copy was made is just so much rationalization. It's also not worth arguing about - the rationalizers simply won't admit that it's not legal...they'll keep coming up with more tortured reasons of why what they do isn't against the law.
For my part, I download from Allofmp3.com and I don't have any illusions about whether or not it's legal.
Ignore the people around you- the ones you have to worry about in terms of being an "intellectual" state would be the people in the government- and they could be more supportive.
Seriously? US federal, state and local governments are promoting more science and math instruction, then this sort of thing comes along.
You mean my engineering degree was lacking because it didn't teach me that file-sharing is wrong?
If you got your degree within the past 10 years, you were taught that, although you may not have realized it. Part of the accreditation requirements for engineering schools is a certain number of hours of "engineering ethics".
Among other topics, an overview of copyright law is part of that. At my school, it was lumped into the Junior Seminar, a class that covered everything that ACE required, but wasn't in the other classes.
Maybe it wasn't spoon-fed to you, but it was there - or it should have been.
DRM itself does not help Linux users. Look how we've had an uphill battle to get an open source DVD player... We're relegated to using a legally questionable decss library. So I can see how having an anti-DRM clause might force software vendors to come up with another way of doing some things.
True, but on the other hand, an anti-DRM clause could just as easily cause software vendors to just give up - or to just write non-compliant software.
So what is your point? That when we were cavemen there was no copyright? OK, I'll give you that. You're also telling me that the cost per copy of a creative work has come down over the past 3000 years? That seems reasonable, too. You're saying that the "industry" charges too much for a copy of some digital media? That's a matter of opinion, but if you're asserting that, I'll accept it.
So, what exactly, is the historical bit that has slipped my mind? It's not that from the end of the middle ages until the beginning of the 19th century almost all creative works were commissioned and paid for by wealthy and powerful patrons who controlled access to those works. It's not that the artists didn't do what they did only for the love of it. It's not that the US Constitution authorized the enforcement of copyrights to allow a limited monopoly on the performance and/or distribution of a creative work to allow the creator to benefit from its creation and encourage others to take advantage of the same protection.
I haven't forgotten history. It seems to me that your beef is that you think that we're being charged too much money for digital media because you don't think that it costs that much to produce. Maybe so - I don't know what the per-unit cost was of the last CD that I purchased, but, to be honest, I really enjoyed the CD, so I felt that I got my money's worth.
But to say that we are renting our culture from the "industries" is to ignore the fact that our culture didn't just pop up because a bunch of people altruistically decided to create it. In fact, our current culture (if you can call it that) is much more egalitarian than what has come before - access to creative works is available on a scale that is unprecedented in our history.
It's no kool-aid - compare your library of books and music to that of your grandparents'. Go back a few generations more and see just what the state of access to creative works was.
The only reason copyright exists is because of a clause in the constitution that grants congress the power to create it expressly for the purpose of encouraging more stuff to be created. So, it's not there for the benefit of the creators at all, it's for the benefit of everybody else.
Copyright does not just cause "more stuff to be created". Its effect was intended to be similar to patents (as envisioned at the time) - it gives the creator a time limited monopoly to enjoy the fruits of his work - thus encouraging others to be creative and enjoy the fruits of their labor. At the end of the copyright period, everybody else gets a crack at it.
In that regard, copyright does imply ownership - for a limited time, for, just as a patent is owned, a copyright is owned. The real problem is that "limited" has been stretched very nearly into "unlimited".
The only right you naturally have is the right not to give it to anybody else.
So if I say that you may not have my creative work if you are going to copy it, does that mean that you've violated my right? Or are you saying that if I give my creative work to one person, then I have to give it to everyone?
How the hell can someone take more information than their fair share? I really don't understand how that works. It's not like anyone needs to go without.
Indeed, but in this perfect world, there needs to be production. Without the production of information, there will be damn little consumption. And under Stallman's system, it'll be pretty hard to be compensated for the work of information production - after all, why pay for it when you can get it for free? Sure, there will be people who will produce that information because "it wants to be free", but free information doesn't pay the bills.
So, I suspect that there would be a whole lot more takers than givers. And that's what I implied.
But it's not as rarified and theoretical as all that. Common sense tells you what is copying and what is sharing. Look, if you copy a homework problem from your college roommate, is that the same thing as looking at his homework, having an "aha" moment and then doing the problem yourself? Or, a step away, having your roommate explain how he solved the problem? To me, one case is copying and the other two are sharing.
We intuitively know what is copying and what is sharing. When we start bandying about definitions, that's when I start thinking that we're trying to rationalize behavior that is either wrong or illegal. I guess that it's like the old saying that it's not wrong unless I get caught.
Oh, and for the benefit of the guy who replied to me earlier, this is all just my opinion - it's not fact.
You believe that so you state it as a fact. Everyone does this. Your point, that he presents things he believes to be true as if they are true, is silly. Yes, I state that as a fact... because I believe it.
I sort of figured that a reasonable person would view what I said as my opinion. The difference between what I say and what Stallman says is that Stallman is doing more than expressing an opinion - he is presenting his belief as the stone cold, iron clad gospel of absolute truth and using his position within the Free Software movement to bolster his authority. Me? I'm nobody, but I still think that he's wrong.
By being pedantic, you're avoiding the real issue, you know.
The assertion that copyrights and patents have any social or economic merit at all is at best unproven.
You can say that with a straight face? Great works have been produced for millennia because the economic systems that were in place prior to the early 19th century precluded the need for copyright protection. Things changed with the industrial revolution. C'mon, this is basic history.
So, please explain to me how you can have a sane system of laws that restrict things like sharing over P2p and don't restrict things like letting a friend read a book. In a digital world, I do not believe this is possible.
I suspect that the answer to your question is quite apparent to you, but you're really looking to generate a theoretical debate about what form "information" must take to be considered infringing. We don't live in a digital world, we live in a practical world - think practically.
RMS has made a cottage industry out of passing his opinions off as fact. He believes that copyright laws are unethical, therefore it is a fact that copyright laws are unethical.
Now maybe in a reality-free zone where everybody works for the common good and nobody takes more than his* fair share, that would be a reasonable thing to pass off as a fact. But Stallman's "facts" are impractial in the real world.
The guy is an idealogue. More power to him for practicing what he preaches, but his "my way or the highway" philosophy really marginalizes any arguments that he presents.
Amen to that, brother. My employer will spend $1.5 billion on research and development this year. That's all for new product development and it's typical of the other companies in the same business (a semiconductor manufacturer). So, if we sold one chip, it would be pretty expensive. Since we sell millions, the price drops. But it doesn't drop to next to nothing because, besides the manufacturing costs, the capital costs also have to be recovered. In my industry, R&D is the number one expense.
Slashdot Mirror
Only if you use the built-in tuner.
" Also, all of their loyal customers and developers would probably just bail on them for doing so. "
to what?
To Dell, HP/CPQ, etc., I suppose.
I sort of switched. I bought a Mac Mini last week because I'm tired of my wind tunnel of a PC in the living room. The PC is back in the office where it belongs, I still have my Toshiba notebook, but most of my work is done on the Mini. With 1GB of RAM, it's really quite a good performer - not on par with the AMD64 that it "replaced", but fast enough. And small. Very, very small.
Oh, and I have to say that Entourage is aces.
-h-
Good point - we'll never know until an Allofmp3 case ends up in court, but all of the verbal wrangling that goes on here about who copied what and where the copy was made is just so much rationalization. It's also not worth arguing about - the rationalizers simply won't admit that it's not legal...they'll keep coming up with more tortured reasons of why what they do isn't against the law.
For my part, I download from Allofmp3.com and I don't have any illusions about whether or not it's legal.
-h-
Think a bit about what I wrote. At no point did I ever mention peer to peer filesharing.
Ignore the people around you- the ones you have to worry about in terms of being an "intellectual" state would be the people in the government- and they could be more supportive.
Seriously? US federal, state and local governments are promoting more science and math instruction, then this sort of thing comes along.
-h-
You mean my engineering degree was lacking because it didn't teach me that file-sharing is wrong?
If you got your degree within the past 10 years, you were taught that, although you may not have realized it. Part of the accreditation requirements for engineering schools is a certain number of hours of "engineering ethics".
Among other topics, an overview of copyright law is part of that. At my school, it was lumped into the Junior Seminar, a class that covered everything that ACE required, but wasn't in the other classes.
Maybe it wasn't spoon-fed to you, but it was there - or it should have been.
-h-
DRM itself does not help Linux users. Look how we've had an uphill battle to get an open source DVD player... We're relegated to using a legally questionable decss library. So I can see how having an anti-DRM clause might force software vendors to come up with another way of doing some things.
True, but on the other hand, an anti-DRM clause could just as easily cause software vendors to just give up - or to just write non-compliant software.
bet all you "hacks" in comp. sci. or engineeering wouldn't be able to "hack" medicine, or vetinary science.
Or spelling. Hooked on foniks phuked u up.
Wow, did anybody else read this as ""did you guys read the headline as Y?" Now THAT's hilarious! I guess I'd better lay off the caffeine!
-h-
So what is your point? That when we were cavemen there was no copyright? OK, I'll give you that. You're also telling me that the cost per copy of a creative work has come down over the past 3000 years? That seems reasonable, too. You're saying that the "industry" charges too much for a copy of some digital media? That's a matter of opinion, but if you're asserting that, I'll accept it.
So, what exactly, is the historical bit that has slipped my mind? It's not that from the end of the middle ages until the beginning of the 19th century almost all creative works were commissioned and paid for by wealthy and powerful patrons who controlled access to those works. It's not that the artists didn't do what they did only for the love of it. It's not that the US Constitution authorized the enforcement of copyrights to allow a limited monopoly on the performance and/or distribution of a creative work to allow the creator to benefit from its creation and encourage others to take advantage of the same protection.
I haven't forgotten history. It seems to me that your beef is that you think that we're being charged too much money for digital media because you don't think that it costs that much to produce. Maybe so - I don't know what the per-unit cost was of the last CD that I purchased, but, to be honest, I really enjoyed the CD, so I felt that I got my money's worth.
But to say that we are renting our culture from the "industries" is to ignore the fact that our culture didn't just pop up because a bunch of people altruistically decided to create it. In fact, our current culture (if you can call it that) is much more egalitarian than what has come before - access to creative works is available on a scale that is unprecedented in our history.
It's no kool-aid - compare your library of books and music to that of your grandparents'. Go back a few generations more and see just what the state of access to creative works was.
-h-
Care to expand/continue that thought?
I'm no history major, so I'd be interested in some details...
Me neither. There some excellent examples to be seen right here in this thread.
-h-
The only reason copyright exists is because of a clause in the constitution that grants congress the power to create it expressly for the purpose of encouraging more stuff to be created. So, it's not there for the benefit of the creators at all, it's for the benefit of everybody else.
Copyright does not just cause "more stuff to be created". Its effect was intended to be similar to patents (as envisioned at the time) - it gives the creator a time limited monopoly to enjoy the fruits of his work - thus encouraging others to be creative and enjoy the fruits of their labor. At the end of the copyright period, everybody else gets a crack at it.
In that regard, copyright does imply ownership - for a limited time, for, just as a patent is owned, a copyright is owned. The real problem is that "limited" has been stretched very nearly into "unlimited".
The only right you naturally have is the right not to give it to anybody else.
So if I say that you may not have my creative work if you are going to copy it, does that mean that you've violated my right? Or are you saying that if I give my creative work to one person, then I have to give it to everyone?
-h-
It's just my opinion, but I suspect that GPLv3 will not be used by many software packages at all. GPLv2 is a license. GPLv3 is a rant.
-h-
How the hell can someone take more information than their fair share? I really don't understand how that works. It's not like anyone needs to go without.
Indeed, but in this perfect world, there needs to be production. Without the production of information, there will be damn little consumption. And under Stallman's system, it'll be pretty hard to be compensated for the work of information production - after all, why pay for it when you can get it for free? Sure, there will be people who will produce that information because "it wants to be free", but free information doesn't pay the bills.
So, I suspect that there would be a whole lot more takers than givers. And that's what I implied.
-h-
But it's not as rarified and theoretical as all that. Common sense tells you what is copying and what is sharing. Look, if you copy a homework problem from your college roommate, is that the same thing as looking at his homework, having an "aha" moment and then doing the problem yourself? Or, a step away, having your roommate explain how he solved the problem? To me, one case is copying and the other two are sharing.
We intuitively know what is copying and what is sharing. When we start bandying about definitions, that's when I start thinking that we're trying to rationalize behavior that is either wrong or illegal. I guess that it's like the old saying that it's not wrong unless I get caught.
Oh, and for the benefit of the guy who replied to me earlier, this is all just my opinion - it's not fact.
-h-
You believe that so you state it as a fact. Everyone does this. Your point, that he presents things he believes to be true as if they are true, is silly. Yes, I state that as a fact... because I believe it.
I sort of figured that a reasonable person would view what I said as my opinion. The difference between what I say and what Stallman says is that Stallman is doing more than expressing an opinion - he is presenting his belief as the stone cold, iron clad gospel of absolute truth and using his position within the Free Software movement to bolster his authority. Me? I'm nobody, but I still think that he's wrong.
By being pedantic, you're avoiding the real issue, you know.
-h-
The assertion that copyrights and patents have any social or economic merit at all is at best unproven.
You can say that with a straight face? Great works have been produced for millennia because the economic systems that were in place prior to the early 19th century precluded the need for copyright protection. Things changed with the industrial revolution. C'mon, this is basic history.
-h-
So, please explain to me how you can have a sane system of laws that restrict things like sharing over P2p and don't restrict things like letting a friend read a book. In a digital world, I do not believe this is possible.
I suspect that the answer to your question is quite apparent to you, but you're really looking to generate a theoretical debate about what form "information" must take to be considered infringing. We don't live in a digital world, we live in a practical world - think practically.
-h-
I'll be your buddy.
RMS has made a cottage industry out of passing his opinions off as fact. He believes that copyright laws are unethical, therefore it is a fact that copyright laws are unethical.
Now maybe in a reality-free zone where everybody works for the common good and nobody takes more than his* fair share, that would be a reasonable thing to pass off as a fact. But Stallman's "facts" are impractial in the real world.
The guy is an idealogue. More power to him for practicing what he preaches, but his "my way or the highway" philosophy really marginalizes any arguments that he presents.
-h-
* the "gender-neutral" "his"
Amen to that, brother. My employer will spend $1.5 billion on research and development this year. That's all for new product development and it's typical of the other companies in the same business (a semiconductor manufacturer). So, if we sold one chip, it would be pretty expensive. Since we sell millions, the price drops. But it doesn't drop to next to nothing because, besides the manufacturing costs, the capital costs also have to be recovered. In my industry, R&D is the number one expense.
-h-
To be pedantic, Joshua Kapellen is Canadian, not American.
Don't you mean North North Dakota?
As Shakespeare said, "...brevity is the soul of wit."
And, with apologies to the poet, you doth protest too much, methinks.
-h-
Hyperbole, thy name is IgnoramusMaximus.
Snicker...Bose..."higher-end"...snicker...