Get the Details With Netflix you can rent as many DVDs as you want from the comfort of your home and have them delivered to your door in about 1 business day! There are no late fees and no due dates, and shipping is free both ways. Plans start at $9.99 plus any applicable tax. With our most popular plan, 3 at-a-time (Unlimited), you can rent as many DVDs as you want for just $17.99 a month plus any applicable tax. You keep a revolving library of up to 3 DVDs at a time and can exchange them for new available DVDs as often as you like. There are no additional charges. Click here to learn about other available plans.
That's the language they're using in December/2005. To actually see that language, purge any Netflix cookies you might have before you click otherwise the link may redirect you to their main page. In 1999, when I signed up, there wasn't a "1 business day" qualifier. There's no small print in that offer other than the tax reference and there wasn't in 1999. The "click here to learn about other available plans" link just gives you pricing info on different numbers of disks and refers to the capped service. The capped service is a new addition since 99.
You're right about litigation being the American way. At its best, it provides a mechanism for people to rectify fraudulent business practices when the government chooses to ignore them. At its worse, it's a get-rich-quick scheme.
...well did ya really think the 7 dollar plan was gonna be the same as the 20 dollar plan? I mean, come on.
It's called fraud when you sell one thing and deliver another.
Had Netflix sent a letter out to their customers saying "We have to cap the number of DVDs you can rent on plan Y to X per month. If you want to see more than X DVDs then we have these upgrades available," the suit wouldn't have had any basis. However, Netflix advertised they offered "unlimited rentals" on their least expensive service when, in fact, they didn't.
Your post implies you think that honesty in day to day business is too much to ask for. It'll be too bad if that becomes a common sentiment.
Christ! I'm sounding like a geezer... guess I must be one but anyway, back in 86, we had a 5 mouse hit. We're in a garage so I set up our sales accounting spreadsheets myself and plugged in the local sales tax for California sales. If you were out of state and buying our product, no sales tax was charged otherwise you paid our local tax rate. We're chugging along and time comes for the first quarterly sales report to the Franchise Tax Board. It goes in on time, numbers are right and I forget about it. A few weeks later, I get a letter from the FTB telling me I'd screwed up - I hadn't reported according to the buyer's tax rate. Oops. Call up the FTB and ask for a copy of their database so I can properly collect and categorize tax charges.
"We don't have one."
"You don't have one? How the heck am I to know what to charge then?"
Long period of phone transfers and whispered conversations. I eventually end up shuttling my way up to the person in charge of our county. She agrees that it's ridiculous for the state to require me to charge according to my customer's location since they don't have a database that tells me what to charge. There were areas in the Santa Cruz mountains that you have to know what side of a street the house is on to charge the right rate. Further south, which side of a river you're on determines the local tax. In both cases, the zip codes don't vary but the tax rates do.
"Just charge your local rate like you've been doing. That'll be fine," she says.
At this point, I'm a bit suspicious so I ask her to write me a letter re-iterating that sentence. She did and things were fine. But now I knew that the rules weren't very clear. So when I bought my next car a few years later, I insisted they bill me at my local rate instead of the higher rate in the Bay Area where I bought the car. The took my word for what the sales tax rate was in my hometown as there was still no database. I saved enough to buy a nice dinner on the way home.
Like I said, I'm a geezer. I remember in the early 60's that sales tax was 4%. Now, 40 years later, it's doubled to 8% what with local add-ons. Now they want another.5% to pay for buses. Services haven't improved, in fact they're worse. The reason has to do with so many state workers retiring in their mid 50's and collecting significant pensions. Prison guards, for example, earn just shy of $100k and collect 90% pensions when they retire after 30 years. So while that newly retired prison guard is fishing for the next 25-30 years, you have to pay his replacement. You think GM has problems with their $1800/car medical costs? There's no one more generous than a politician spending other people's money.
Whatever the national sales tax rate is when it's first enacted, it won't stay there. It'll rise faster than local tax rates because you won't have anywhere near the leverage over Congress that you do over your local city hall. Remember that income tax was 1% when it was first enacted. Social Security was low when it got going as well. The best time to kill a tax is before it gets going and the revenues nurture an interest group that wraps itself so tightly around the national weal you can't cut it out for fear of damaging the patient.
It looks as if you weren't paying attention. When I was a young turk, I kept taking over projects that some programmer that had 15-20 years on me hadn't completed. I'd finish it, look around and he'd be gone. Even though I was very well paid, I was cheaper than the guy I was replacing. I'd say I was smarter too but that wasn't always the case.
One day I realized I was at the top of the pay scale and, remembering my predecessors, realized I would be the one on the cost chopping block. When the inevitable happened, I went off and founded a few software companies. I'm on my third one.
I was fortunate when I was working for other folks that my managers, save one, were very competent. The save one manager made me realize that it was for the best that I'm on my own - idiocy is only tolerable if its your client's, not your boss'. If your boss is stupid, it makes going to work dreadful.
Will people remember this farce and say thanks but no thanks to Blu-Ray because they're not sure what the drivers will do to their computer? And if you can't trust Sony's Blu-Ray drivers, who's to say the HD-DVD drivers will be any safer?
It would be ironic if somebody at Sony who was worried about selling a few copies of a country-western CD ended up jeopardizing a billion dollar market.
three 3.2GHz high-frequency PowerPC processor cores...
Seems not too long ago, Mac fanatics were dissing IBM for not hitting Jobs' 3GHz target. It appears from the article IBM not only hit it, they surpassed it three ways to Sunday. A little later in the article, there's a discussion of how parts of the chip shut down when not in use to minimize heat production. Perhaps the earlier speculation about the Mac to Intel switch that Jobs just didn't want to pay IBM's asking price is closer to the mark.
Three identical cores, each with its own embedded vector and fpu units along with 128 registers - the chip sure looks like it's the fastest cpu out there. Wouldn't it be ironic if Apple ends up running on crufty old x86 and Vista ends up running on PowerPc - a proprietary PowerPc to boot?
You're thinking of the tenth amendment to the constitution reads:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Then again, there's the commerce clause which states:
"To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes."
Clearly, if the states adopt incompatible document standards, there would be a problem. Ostensibly, Congress dealt with this issue when it created the National Bureau of Standards and left standardization issues to them. However, in this case, there's clearly a set of deep pockets wandering around trying to influence Congress to take a special oversite interest in this particular standard.
How to counteract somebody handing out millions of dollars? Talk to your congressperson.
Back when Clinton was pushing the Clipper chip, I put together a group of technologists and setup a meeting with my local congressman. We told him why Clipper was a bad idea and why people needed strong encryption. Once he understood that banking and trade could be adversely affected if people couldn't be sure their purchases were secure, he agreed to vote against the proposal.
There were lots of geeks doing the same thing across the country and the Clipper died as a result. It can happen again.
The market has a solution - don't buy it if you think it's crap. I'd rather let the market sort out what's crap than some vexatious litigant combined with a lawyer looking for a huge payout.
How's this device different than this case?. Seems odd that the developer gets sued but the used car dealer gets away with doing essentially the same thing.
I worked on an air defense system back in the 70's. It was built for the King of Morroco so he could show off to the other despots in North Africa. It wasn't as if Morocco was seriously threatened by anyone but I guess that having been overrun by the Germans, French and the occasional American task force rescuing a Greek who claimed to be an American, the king was a little concerned. The system consisted of two radars parked on a couple of mountaintops talking to a single cpu which updated a couple of consoles and huge wall screen. Whereas the consoles got the standard cryptic designators for each plane, the wall screen got elaborate detailed descriptions since they were for the king to read. The cpu was the fastest cpu of the time, a 16 mhz behemoth that filled a room.
The guy I reported to was one of the smartest people I've ever met and fortunately for the project, he was responsible for the software. He'd come into our offices (the only people that worked in cubicles back then were HP employees) and see how we were doing. He'd frequently find us waiting on a compile as the machine was hard pressed to have 30 or so developers using a single computer to compile with. It began to bother him quite a bit because he'd read the design spec which called for the system to handle a couple of 1000 radar returns each minute. As he was technically capable, he sat down one day and wrote a radar simulator that fed radar packets to a "processor." All the processor did was count the number of packets it received and all the radar simulator did was send empty packets. Not a very complicated piece of software but it was enough to show the hardware wasn't going to meet the spec. It couldn't do that simple task, let alone process the packets, draw positions on the controller screens etc.
He wrote a memo and sent it up the chain. A week passed and no response so he wrote another memo saying the same thing but he changed the memo title. The new title was "I know you're out there - I can hear you breathing." That got his bosses moving and the problem was addressed.
Not having seen the device or the instructions that come with it, it may well be that the instructions say something to the effect "don't block airflow...." Of course, nobody reads the instructions, which means some power supplies may well have been tossed onto plush rugs, sofa pillows or bed blankets.
In a few weeks, we might see some stickers on the sides of the equipment that politely tell people to not be idiots. Who knows? Maybe they'll be region specific stickers. In Boston you'll see "YO! Put a couple of brewskis under me will ya!" whereas in San Francisco, you'll see "Be a sweetie and put me on a trivet."
Way back when I was starting my first software company, one of my investors set up a dinner with an ad exec who had a long history of wins in advertising. That night was the first time I had heard the advertising dictum, "I don't care what you say about me, just spell my name right."
I guess Jock Thomsen had dinner with the same ad exec.
The Gravity probe has been delayed so long that its probable results are old hat. The experiment was conceived in the 60's when the first lasers were built. Since then, airliners now zip around the globe using gyroscopes that shoot a laser around a triangle. If one of the three mirrors accelerates relative to the other two, i.e., the plane turns, the timeframe for the accelerating mirror shifts slightly which shows up as a slight time shift in the laser's transit time. No moving parts and the laser gyro is more accurate, by far, than the old spinning gyros it replaces.
Einstein would probably have been surprised at this particular application of relativity.
H5N1 called the other day asking to get in on the Christmas season. I tried being nice but the facts are that we've already booked our advertising for this season and H5N1 missed the deadline.
From my perspective, season's over - call me earlier next year and we'll talk. Try telling that to a virus who won't take no. Carried on every which way - tried everything from tears, bribing me, to threatening me but when the season's booked, it's booked pal. To top it off, from what I hear on the street, next year's hot virus may just be swine flu but you know fow fickle virus fashions can be so there's just no telling.
Evolution from lower life forms indicates an increase of genetic material from the lower form to a higher. Sure, dogs are bred to weed out undesirable traits and to accentuate desirable ones, yet this is still a dog. In 100,000 years of breeding, I'm not going to get a dog that has the slightest bit more genetic material than the one I started with 10,000 years ago.
You're assuming that genetic transmission is 100% accurate, i.e., if I start out with 10,000 base pairs, I'll end up with 10,000 base pairs. That was one of the earliest questions geneticists had - was that true? Turns out it isn't. There are all kinds of transmission errors that occur - translocation, repetition, transposition, deletion to name a few. Two of those transmission errors, deletion and repetition, change the number of base pairs in a genome. Sometimes an error kills the organism and sometimes it aids the organism. Start with an amoeba, roll the dice enough times, and you have enough genetic material to build a pooch.
What makes radiometric dating viable is that when you cross date a sample using different isotopes you tend to get agreement within the margins of error of the various isotopes. Kepler had a similar problem when he started out - he had to make some guesses as to the nature of the solar system. By discarding the guesses that didn't fit the data, he eventually arrived at the truth.
Unless you're afraid of what you might find, that there actually is a God of universe. Yep, I see a whole lotta fear out there.
It's not fear you're seeing - it's skepticism coupled with a disdain for promulgating sloppy thinking. Pushing God as a solution to our origin is another way of saying "It's too difficult a problem for you to understand so just take our word for it. By the way, don't forget to tithe." When a child recognizes the inherent recursiveness in Deism and wonders "Well if God created us because we're too complex to have arisen on our own, then who created God?" and is told by his "science" teacher - "that's an unsolveable mystery" then the child's intellect is being stunted.
The fear you speak of is within yourself. You're afraid that there's no deity out there watching over you and that there may not be a master plan that includes you. You fear that if there's no God, there's no meaning to life so you embrace a mythos that gives you emotional sustenance but leaves you intellectually empty.
There's a lot of truth in the aphorism - dust to dust, ashes to ashes. We arose from dust and will return to dust. Neither event needs a Creator.
Before folks get all riled up just remember, there is a limit here. Heck, F.B.I uses three letters and NSL uses another three leaving a total of 20. At the rate they're going, they'll be out of letters in no time at all.
I agree that granting copyright without any action on the creator's part is absurd. If the creator thinks the work's worth protecting then it should be up to the creator to apply for a copyright. The original 14 years was plenty of protection, and given today's accelerated market, a shorter time frame would probably serve as well. When the original 14 years was arrived at, people moved stuff by horse.
It doesn't strike me as feasible to have negotiable copyright lengths. I certainly don't like the idea of some clerk negotiating on behalf of the government as to what the minimum incentive would be. What might make sense is to require reapplication every year for a limit of up to 14-20 years. Once the revenue stream declines to the point where it's not worth enforcing the copyright, the copyright would lapse within a year.
I also am unwilling to provide economic incentives for every artist and their work. Unlike Europe, you only need pay for the works you take. You're not providing incentives for every artist, just the artist's whose works you take.
I just want their works, freedom with regard to those works, and the least possible cost, if any, in order to accomplish this. That's fine as long as you don't steal the work. Theft means either taking a copy without paying for it or making copies and selling them without compensating the creator.
If you want creative works, you have to pay for them. While copyrighted, they're not yours for the taking. Even if you are a lawyer.
The goals of society are to both encourage the creation of works and to have those works be in the public domain. That's true but only after a period in which the author has had an opportunity to be compensated. That's why copyrights exist - to foster the creation of new works with an eye towards the betterment of society at large.
We should provide no more incentive than the minimum amount necessary to get the maximum amount of net public benefit (i.e. the benefit of creation minus the harm caused by their not being in the public domain). To provide more of an incentive would be wasteful. I agree completely. The current implementation of 75 years is wasteful but the original poster was arguing that copyright shouldn't exist at all and that it's a form of slavery. It's that point I was responding to.
Although if there were a moral component, it'd be in favor of pirates, who spread and enjoy knowledge and help ensure that works will survive, as opposed to authors, who act as gatekeepers.
Piracy is a degenerate act - it requires little effort and has the negative effect of discouraging creation. If you want a society in which people create new bodies of work, you have to reward them. It's foolhardy to think that artists will create new works without regard to how they will feed and house themselves.
Copyrights are particualrly evil because they have the effect of stealing away our culture and giving it to hollywood.
You're forgetting that if the author isn't protected from theft, he/she will be less inclined to produce the culture that's being "stolen." Creation takes work and that work needs to be compensated otherwise it'll cease. Slavery arises when a man is required to work for nothing which from the jist of your post, is exactly what you think creators should be paid. After all, it costs them nothing to duplicate their work so why pay them?
It's not the protection from theft that's evil, it's the theft itself that's evil.
Slashdot Mirror
What fine print? Read their webpage.
That's the language they're using in December/2005. To actually see that language, purge any Netflix cookies you might have before you click otherwise the link may redirect you to their main page. In 1999, when I signed up, there wasn't a "1 business day" qualifier. There's no small print in that offer other than the tax reference and there wasn't in 1999. The "click here to learn about other available plans" link just gives you pricing info on different numbers of disks and refers to the capped service. The capped service is a new addition since 99.You're right about litigation being the American way. At its best, it provides a mechanism for people to rectify fraudulent business practices when the government chooses to ignore them. At its worse, it's a get-rich-quick scheme.
It's called fraud when you sell one thing and deliver another.
Had Netflix sent a letter out to their customers saying "We have to cap the number of DVDs you can rent on plan Y to X per month. If you want to see more than X DVDs then we have these upgrades available," the suit wouldn't have had any basis. However, Netflix advertised they offered "unlimited rentals" on their least expensive service when, in fact, they didn't.
Your post implies you think that honesty in day to day business is too much to ask for. It'll be too bad if that becomes a common sentiment.
"We don't have one."
"You don't have one? How the heck am I to know what to charge then?"
Long period of phone transfers and whispered conversations. I eventually end up shuttling my way up to the person in charge of our county. She agrees that it's ridiculous for the state to require me to charge according to my customer's location since they don't have a database that tells me what to charge. There were areas in the Santa Cruz mountains that you have to know what side of a street the house is on to charge the right rate. Further south, which side of a river you're on determines the local tax. In both cases, the zip codes don't vary but the tax rates do.
"Just charge your local rate like you've been doing. That'll be fine," she says.
At this point, I'm a bit suspicious so I ask her to write me a letter re-iterating that sentence. She did and things were fine. But now I knew that the rules weren't very clear. So when I bought my next car a few years later, I insisted they bill me at my local rate instead of the higher rate in the Bay Area where I bought the car. The took my word for what the sales tax rate was in my hometown as there was still no database. I saved enough to buy a nice dinner on the way home.
Like I said, I'm a geezer. I remember in the early 60's that sales tax was 4%. Now, 40 years later, it's doubled to 8% what with local add-ons. Now they want another .5% to pay for buses. Services haven't improved, in fact they're worse. The reason has to do with so many state workers retiring in their mid 50's and collecting significant pensions. Prison guards, for example, earn just shy of $100k and collect 90% pensions when they retire after 30 years. So while that newly retired prison guard is fishing for the next 25-30 years, you have to pay his replacement. You think GM has problems with their $1800/car medical costs? There's no one more generous than a politician spending other people's money.
Whatever the national sales tax rate is when it's first enacted, it won't stay there. It'll rise faster than local tax rates because you won't have anywhere near the leverage over Congress that you do over your local city hall. Remember that income tax was 1% when it was first enacted. Social Security was low when it got going as well. The best time to kill a tax is before it gets going and the revenues nurture an interest group that wraps itself so tightly around the national weal you can't cut it out for fear of damaging the patient.
Anyone seen my walker?
... we just went bit by bit.
It looks as if you weren't paying attention. When I was a young turk, I kept taking over projects that some programmer that had 15-20 years on me hadn't completed. I'd finish it, look around and he'd be gone. Even though I was very well paid, I was cheaper than the guy I was replacing. I'd say I was smarter too but that wasn't always the case.
One day I realized I was at the top of the pay scale and, remembering my predecessors, realized I would be the one on the cost chopping block. When the inevitable happened, I went off and founded a few software companies. I'm on my third one.
I was fortunate when I was working for other folks that my managers, save one, were very competent. The save one manager made me realize that it was for the best that I'm on my own - idiocy is only tolerable if its your client's, not your boss'. If your boss is stupid, it makes going to work dreadful.
Will people remember this farce and say thanks but no thanks to Blu-Ray because they're not sure what the drivers will do to their computer? And if you can't trust Sony's Blu-Ray drivers, who's to say the HD-DVD drivers will be any safer?
It would be ironic if somebody at Sony who was worried about selling a few copies of a country-western CD ended up jeopardizing a billion dollar market.
Three identical cores, each with its own embedded vector and fpu units along with 128 registers - the chip sure looks like it's the fastest cpu out there. Wouldn't it be ironic if Apple ends up running on crufty old x86 and Vista ends up running on PowerPc - a proprietary PowerPc to boot?
Then again, there's the commerce clause which states:Clearly, if the states adopt incompatible document standards, there would be a problem. Ostensibly, Congress dealt with this issue when it created the National Bureau of Standards and left standardization issues to them. However, in this case, there's clearly a set of deep pockets wandering around trying to influence Congress to take a special oversite interest in this particular standard.
How to counteract somebody handing out millions of dollars? Talk to your congressperson.
Back when Clinton was pushing the Clipper chip, I put together a group of technologists and setup a meeting with my local congressman. We told him why Clipper was a bad idea and why people needed strong encryption. Once he understood that banking and trade could be adversely affected if people couldn't be sure their purchases were secure, he agreed to vote against the proposal.
There were lots of geeks doing the same thing across the country and the Clipper died as a result. It can happen again.
You must be new here. You expect the original poster and the /. editor to read and understand the underlying article.
The market has a solution - don't buy it if you think it's crap. I'd rather let the market sort out what's crap than some vexatious litigant combined with a lawyer looking for a huge payout.
How's this device different than this case?. Seems odd that the developer gets sued but the used car dealer gets away with doing essentially the same thing.
The guy I reported to was one of the smartest people I've ever met and fortunately for the project, he was responsible for the software. He'd come into our offices (the only people that worked in cubicles back then were HP employees) and see how we were doing. He'd frequently find us waiting on a compile as the machine was hard pressed to have 30 or so developers using a single computer to compile with. It began to bother him quite a bit because he'd read the design spec which called for the system to handle a couple of 1000 radar returns each minute. As he was technically capable, he sat down one day and wrote a radar simulator that fed radar packets to a "processor." All the processor did was count the number of packets it received and all the radar simulator did was send empty packets. Not a very complicated piece of software but it was enough to show the hardware wasn't going to meet the spec. It couldn't do that simple task, let alone process the packets, draw positions on the controller screens etc.
He wrote a memo and sent it up the chain. A week passed and no response so he wrote another memo saying the same thing but he changed the memo title. The new title was "I know you're out there - I can hear you breathing." That got his bosses moving and the problem was addressed.
In a few weeks, we might see some stickers on the sides of the equipment that politely tell people to not be idiots. Who knows? Maybe they'll be region specific stickers. In Boston you'll see "YO! Put a couple of brewskis under me will ya!" whereas in San Francisco, you'll see "Be a sweetie and put me on a trivet."
I guess Jock Thomsen had dinner with the same ad exec.
It's difficult to evolve without sex.
Einstein would probably have been surprised at this particular application of relativity.
P.S. Your paranoia is showing. No worries though, there's a gene for that too.
From my perspective, season's over - call me earlier next year and we'll talk. Try telling that to a virus who won't take no. Carried on every which way - tried everything from tears, bribing me, to threatening me but when the season's booked, it's booked pal. To top it off, from what I hear on the street, next year's hot virus may just be swine flu but you know fow fickle virus fashions can be so there's just no telling.
You're assuming that genetic transmission is 100% accurate, i.e., if I start out with 10,000 base pairs, I'll end up with 10,000 base pairs. That was one of the earliest questions geneticists had - was that true? Turns out it isn't. There are all kinds of transmission errors that occur - translocation, repetition, transposition, deletion to name a few. Two of those transmission errors, deletion and repetition, change the number of base pairs in a genome. Sometimes an error kills the organism and sometimes it aids the organism. Start with an amoeba, roll the dice enough times, and you have enough genetic material to build a pooch.
What makes radiometric dating viable is that when you cross date a sample using different isotopes you tend to get agreement within the margins of error of the various isotopes. Kepler had a similar problem when he started out - he had to make some guesses as to the nature of the solar system. By discarding the guesses that didn't fit the data, he eventually arrived at the truth.
Unless you're afraid of what you might find, that there actually is a God of universe. Yep, I see a whole lotta fear out there.
It's not fear you're seeing - it's skepticism coupled with a disdain for promulgating sloppy thinking. Pushing God as a solution to our origin is another way of saying "It's too difficult a problem for you to understand so just take our word for it. By the way, don't forget to tithe." When a child recognizes the inherent recursiveness in Deism and wonders "Well if God created us because we're too complex to have arisen on our own, then who created God?" and is told by his "science" teacher - "that's an unsolveable mystery" then the child's intellect is being stunted.
The fear you speak of is within yourself. You're afraid that there's no deity out there watching over you and that there may not be a master plan that includes you. You fear that if there's no God, there's no meaning to life so you embrace a mythos that gives you emotional sustenance but leaves you intellectually empty.
There's a lot of truth in the aphorism - dust to dust, ashes to ashes. We arose from dust and will return to dust. Neither event needs a Creator.
Update your copy of Firefox or clean your system. I'm running FF 1.0.7 and the link worked fine for me.
Before folks get all riled up just remember, there is a limit here. Heck, F.B.I uses three letters and NSL uses another three leaving a total of 20. At the rate they're going, they'll be out of letters in no time at all.
It doesn't strike me as feasible to have negotiable copyright lengths. I certainly don't like the idea of some clerk negotiating on behalf of the government as to what the minimum incentive would be. What might make sense is to require reapplication every year for a limit of up to 14-20 years. Once the revenue stream declines to the point where it's not worth enforcing the copyright, the copyright would lapse within a year.
Unlike Europe, you only need pay for the works you take. You're not providing incentives for every artist, just the artist's whose works you take.
I just want their works, freedom with regard to those works, and the least possible cost, if any, in order to accomplish this.
That's fine as long as you don't steal the work. Theft means either taking a copy without paying for it or making copies and selling them without compensating the creator.
If you want creative works, you have to pay for them. While copyrighted, they're not yours for the taking. Even if you are a lawyer.
That's true but only after a period in which the author has had an opportunity to be compensated. That's why copyrights exist - to foster the creation of new works with an eye towards the betterment of society at large.
We should provide no more incentive than the minimum amount necessary to get the maximum amount of net public benefit (i.e. the benefit of creation minus the harm caused by their not being in the public domain). To provide more of an incentive would be wasteful.
I agree completely. The current implementation of 75 years is wasteful but the original poster was arguing that copyright shouldn't exist at all and that it's a form of slavery. It's that point I was responding to.
Although if there were a moral component, it'd be in favor of pirates, who spread and enjoy knowledge and help ensure that works will survive, as opposed to authors, who act as gatekeepers.
Piracy is a degenerate act - it requires little effort and has the negative effect of discouraging creation. If you want a society in which people create new bodies of work, you have to reward them. It's foolhardy to think that artists will create new works without regard to how they will feed and house themselves.
You're forgetting that if the author isn't protected from theft, he/she will be less inclined to produce the culture that's being "stolen." Creation takes work and that work needs to be compensated otherwise it'll cease. Slavery arises when a man is required to work for nothing which from the jist of your post, is exactly what you think creators should be paid. After all, it costs them nothing to duplicate their work so why pay them?
It's not the protection from theft that's evil, it's the theft itself that's evil.