Actually most who defend copyleft would much rather prefer a world where neither copyright than copyleft existed.
This assertion is an interesting one, and one I had already considered, but it is not substantiated by reality. If it were the case, there'd be considerably more people who just explicitly state that they are putting their project is put into public domain, instead of bothering with a lengthy copyright license.
We would actually be far better without mainstream art, because most of it is utter trash that suffocates much better works because of the weight and power of corporations behind it.
Most NON-mainstream art that is self-published is utter rubbish and suffocates much better self-published works too. For crying out loud, how many cat videos do people need to watch?
I'm not suggesting that nobody will publish without copyright... I'm just suggesting that a whole lot less will. And that if the current state of the world is any indication, there's absolutely *NO* reason to think that the decrease in commercially published content would somehow result in an any sort of significant increase in the amount of content that is self-published that is of any appreciable quality. If anything, that will probably suffer as well.
The law codifies a set of actions which, if believed to have occurred and in isolation of mitigating factors, would be illegal
Actually, the law codifies a set of actions which *ARE* illegal. Period. Whether or not anyone, whether it is the public or a judge believes they occurred does not alter that... the only thing that such belief alters is whether any particular person can be rightfully prosecuted for engaging in that act. Heck, the acts themselves are illegal even if nobody actually ever even does them. That's what the law is.
You cannot know that they did not break the law without due process.
If you want to get technical, you can't even really *know* that they broke the law even *WITH* due process... you can only come to the belief that they did based on a preponderance of evidence which indicates it.
You cannot know that they did not break the law without due process
This is true, but that's an entirely different thing than knowing (or believing, if you want to be technical) whether or not a law has been broken. Sure, in some cases a not-guilty verdict might rule that no law had been actually been broken, but that's still pretty far from the universal case.
If a work isn't distributed, then nobody else other than its creator gets to enjoy it. A fat lot of good that does. It's self-censorship, even at best.
But it's still exclusivity.
Your argument that people would just publish and put stuff into public domain is not a strong position, because if that were really the case, then for stuff that some people *DO* currently release for free, there would be at least *SOME* propensity to put into public domain already. Take the GPL or BSD license for instance... neither license commits the accompanying work to public domain. They both *EXPLICITLY* state that the work is actually copyrighted. If the notion that people would be willing to put stuff into public domain were actually true, there would at least be some already existing propensity to do that. But there isn't. The inescapable fact is that content makers genuinely do like exclusivity.
So please. Enlighten me as to where you get this notion that destruction of copyright is going to bring out a whole new generation of self-publishers that somehow wouldn't have existed otherwise.
Because if the current status of society is any indication, if we take away copyright, the only thing that's going to go away is the production of formally published works... Printed books, movie theaters, music and video stores, etc. And the *ONLY* thing that will be left over is self-published works and the publication of stuff by people or organizations that have an agenda in their distribution. The net result is still going to be a decrease in cultural content.
This would lead to stagnation, and, as I said... bored societies do crazy shit.
Actually, it's not copyright that has been the only way to achieve that... it's exclusivity.
There has *ALWAYS* been exclusivity on content distribution... even before copyright.
Exclusivity used to be implicit because copying works was so difficult and error prone that it was typically not worth anyone's time or effort to try to copy somebody else's work without authorization.
Copyright is supposed to be the modern equivalent... except it doesn't work when people disrespect it. When publishers lose confidence in copyright to protect their interests of exclusivity, they can and will resort to other means, which will ultimately reduce the availability of content for the general public.
The only defense an artist has against plagiarism *IS* copyright.... I'm not talking about academic dishonesty, I'm talking about blatantly taking somebody else's content and publicly publishing it as your own. If some well-known person plagiarizes some sufficiently unknown person's content, the plagiarism might go completely unnoticed except by those who personally know the actual creator. Without copyright, however, any confrontation by the lesser known entity would be toothless.
No. Due process (in criminal court) is the method that we use to determine whether or not a suspect is guilty of a crime, not whether or not the action itself was criminal. Whether or not an act itself is criminal is typically codified into the law itself. A person can be found guilty by due process without actually having broken any law if the evidence is sufficiently incriminating, and a person can potentially break a law without ever being found guilty.
Again, they may not be considered guilty until they have undergone due process, but that has absolutely no bearing on whether or not a law has already been found to be broken.
No... but then my comment wasn't exactly something that many people would be interested in either... my original point stands. Most self-published content is of negligible interest to people outside of a closed group, and if that was actually *all* that there was, there'd be a correspondingly smaller amount of content intake, leading to cultural stagnation. When civilizations get bored, they do crazy shit.
The question stands. If current status self-published content is any indication, how in the world does anybody think that the absence of copyright will actually result in anything other than just an unending deluge of self-published shit?0
Before copyright, the time, expense, and effort involved in making copies of works tended to be adequate to provide a sufficient measure of exclusivity for the patrons who would commission the works. Now, copying can be done with a push of a button, so the same checks and balances no longer apply. As for user-generated content, sure... some big companies will probably make a living off of it, like youtube. At least with copyright intact, a smalltime content maker has an equal chance of being seen, and an assurance that nobody else is going to take credit for what they did (or do you think that plagiarism would even have any meaning without copyright?)
And who do you think will publish content in this idealist future copyright-free world? Or do you think that the general public will be truly satisfied with unending ads, unwanted porn popups, spam, and amateur cat videos?
I don't know if you are trying to deliberately be obtuse by taking points out of context or if you genuinely do not understand. In the example of the robbery I described above, I *explicitly* stated that a person had held up a gas station and that the event was captured on video. You then decided to insert a hypothetical scenario of the
security camera's footage being faked, which is utterly irrelevant to the example I supplied.
But it's clear to me that you are clearly conflating the terms of "guilty" and "illegal". Here's a breakdown for you. Actions that are criminal are illegal. Period. It doesn't matter whether or not a person has even been tried, let alone prosecuted, for a such an action, the action itself is really still illegal. You can know that a crime occurred (based upon a preponderance of evidence, proving beyond all reasonable doubt, since you seem to take objection to the concept of "objective proof"), whether it is a robbery, murder, rape, arson, kidnapping, or any number of other very obvious felonies... without even having a suspect in custody, let alone having already found any particular person guilty of that act.
The point of a criminal trial is generally to ascertain the status of guilt of a suspect, not whether or not the action was ever actually legal (because if were legal before they were brought to trial, then there would be no reason to bring the person to criminal court in the first place, since the person would not have done anything wrong). Civil court can sometimes decide on issues governing whether or not something was legal, but that's not criminal court. The subject you started here was on the matter of legality.
I'm generally not big on language bashing, but the biggest problem I have with Perl is with its complexity, having numerous operators and several special syntaxes. What this almost invariably means is that you can get short, but extremely complex code with many syntax errors which take some time to understand. Even worse, it often also means that reading someone else's code is difficult, and often maintenance of somebody else's Perl project can be an intractable problem. While it's entirely possible to write difficult to understand code in any language, everything that I have ever seen in Perl seems to indicate that the language, through its complexity and especially because of the many operators is possesses, practically encourages people to write extremely terse, and correspondingly highly obfuscated programs to all but extremely trained people who more than likely would have learned Perl when there weren't that many other options for things like web cgi.
But legacy code maintenance is generally considered an entry-level position, and it stands to reason that people maintaining the code that one writes today will not have as much experience the one creating it for the first time. As such, clarity is paramount. Perl does not achieve this.
I would maintain that this reason is an objectively valid reason to disregard this language as viable in the 21st century, where there are many other choices.... its best use today should only be that of maintaining older software that was already developed in it... not the writing of new stuff.
You can often know that a crime has been committed even before you know who has done it
No, you can't
Of course you can.
Example: Security cameras at a gas station might capture a person holding up a cashier. Say that the person takes the money and runs before law enforcement manages to arrive. The video footage objectively *PROVES* that the law was actually broken, but yet they do not yet even have a suspect in custody. Witness reports might help them track down a suspect, but long before the trial, but even then the only thing you have not proven is the GUILT of any particular person that you bring into custody. This is not remotely the same thing as saying that the law hasn't been broken in the first place.... which is what it means when you try to say that nothing illegal has occurred until you have brought a suspect to justice (again, the very notion of which is a contradition, since if no law was broken, there would be no reason to try the person in the first place).
As the topic in this particular thread is "Not Illegal Until Found Guilty", and you were the one who started the thread, with that exact headline, while I may be off topic from the point of the summary, but I'm pretty sure I'm spot on with respect to this dialog. It could be argued that you initially diverged from the topic in the article by bringing the matter up in the first place. All I was doing was pointing out that there's no possible way what you said could ever be true. You can often know that a crime has been committed even before you know who has done it, let alone tried and found a person guilty of the act. It's laughable to think that actions can somehow never be illegal until a suspect has been tried and convicted for them. The most you could reasonably say is that it is a cornerstone principle of a fair justice system to not *PUNISH* somebody who has not been already been found to be guilty in a fair trial... a principle that I most heartily agree with.
But you didn't say that originally. Allow me to quote what you said:
A person's actions are not illegal until they are found guilty.
(emphasis mine)
My point is that a person's actions can very much be *ENTIRELY* illegal even before he has been tried, let alone found guilty. To assert that such actions are somehow not even against the law just because a person who is alleged to have done them hasn't been found guilty of committing them yet defeats the entire purpose of having laws in the first place!
It isn't. But Perl is an utterly abysmal programming language choice.
The fact that Perl isn't even a GNU project means that they don't even have an excuse of wanting to stick with GNU for picking a crappy language to work with! If they were going to go outside GNU, there were dozens of free languages that they could have picked that would have been a better choice.
Honestly, about the only worse programming language choice I think they could have made is if they decided to redo TeXinfo in COBOL.
One's perception of events does not make them illegal, but that doesn't mean that the actual actions themselves may not be.
If a person's actions are not considered illegal until they have been found guilty, then in fact, there is nothing to find them guilty of, since no law will have been broken *UNTIL* they are found guilty.
Yes.... that amendment I would certainly agree with.
To presume that the actions themselves aren't even illegal until they are found guilty is to create an scenario where even attempting to pursue a person who had supposedly done something is entrapment, since a person who is alleged to have done something wrong will not have actually broken any laws until they are caught and found guilty. It's simply absurd to even think about.
Unless you live completely isolated from civilization (unlikely, since you have an Internet connection) idiots already tell you how to spend your money... it's up to you to discern which notions are idiotic and ignore them.
A person's actions are not illegal until they are found guilty.
You realize that this is the same thing as saying that it's entirely legal to do things like kill people and rob banks, as long as you don't get caught, right? (because if you're not caught, then there's no possible way you can be found guilty).
Possibly... although I tend to hear that the "intelligence" in ID is supposedly God from people who detract from it *FAR* more often than I hear it from supporters of the notion.
Regardless, it's still an unfalsifiable premise without inventing time travel and going back to watch.
They probably could... but the resulting bad press would probably bankrupt them in months if they didn't reverse the decision (and the only reason it would even take that long is because they are so big). Thus, they have inventive to not discriminate for such reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
Great idea.
Thought of anything yet?
This assertion is an interesting one, and one I had already considered, but it is not substantiated by reality. If it were the case, there'd be considerably more people who just explicitly state that they are putting their project is put into public domain, instead of bothering with a lengthy copyright license.
Most NON-mainstream art that is self-published is utter rubbish and suffocates much better self-published works too. For crying out loud, how many cat videos do people need to watch?
I'm not suggesting that nobody will publish without copyright... I'm just suggesting that a whole lot less will. And that if the current state of the world is any indication, there's absolutely *NO* reason to think that the decrease in commercially published content would somehow result in an any sort of significant increase in the amount of content that is self-published that is of any appreciable quality. If anything, that will probably suffer as well.
Actually, the law codifies a set of actions which *ARE* illegal. Period. Whether or not anyone, whether it is the public or a judge believes they occurred does not alter that... the only thing that such belief alters is whether any particular person can be rightfully prosecuted for engaging in that act. Heck, the acts themselves are illegal even if nobody actually ever even does them. That's what the law is.
If you want to get technical, you can't even really *know* that they broke the law even *WITH* due process... you can only come to the belief that they did based on a preponderance of evidence which indicates it.
This is true, but that's an entirely different thing than knowing (or believing, if you want to be technical) whether or not a law has been broken. Sure, in some cases a not-guilty verdict might rule that no law had been actually been broken, but that's still pretty far from the universal case.
If a work isn't distributed, then nobody else other than its creator gets to enjoy it. A fat lot of good that does. It's self-censorship, even at best.
But it's still exclusivity.
Your argument that people would just publish and put stuff into public domain is not a strong position, because if that were really the case, then for stuff that some people *DO* currently release for free, there would be at least *SOME* propensity to put into public domain already. Take the GPL or BSD license for instance... neither license commits the accompanying work to public domain. They both *EXPLICITLY* state that the work is actually copyrighted. If the notion that people would be willing to put stuff into public domain were actually true, there would at least be some already existing propensity to do that. But there isn't. The inescapable fact is that content makers genuinely do like exclusivity.
So please. Enlighten me as to where you get this notion that destruction of copyright is going to bring out a whole new generation of self-publishers that somehow wouldn't have existed otherwise.
Because if the current status of society is any indication, if we take away copyright, the only thing that's going to go away is the production of formally published works... Printed books, movie theaters, music and video stores, etc. And the *ONLY* thing that will be left over is self-published works and the publication of stuff by people or organizations that have an agenda in their distribution. The net result is still going to be a decrease in cultural content.
This would lead to stagnation, and, as I said... bored societies do crazy shit.
Actually, it's not copyright that has been the only way to achieve that... it's exclusivity.
There has *ALWAYS* been exclusivity on content distribution... even before copyright.
Exclusivity used to be implicit because copying works was so difficult and error prone that it was typically not worth anyone's time or effort to try to copy somebody else's work without authorization.
Copyright is supposed to be the modern equivalent... except it doesn't work when people disrespect it. When publishers lose confidence in copyright to protect their interests of exclusivity, they can and will resort to other means, which will ultimately reduce the availability of content for the general public.
The only defense an artist has against plagiarism *IS* copyright.... I'm not talking about academic dishonesty, I'm talking about blatantly taking somebody else's content and publicly publishing it as your own. If some well-known person plagiarizes some sufficiently unknown person's content, the plagiarism might go completely unnoticed except by those who personally know the actual creator. Without copyright, however, any confrontation by the lesser known entity would be toothless.
No. Due process (in criminal court) is the method that we use to determine whether or not a suspect is guilty of a crime, not whether or not the action itself was criminal. Whether or not an act itself is criminal is typically codified into the law itself. A person can be found guilty by due process without actually having broken any law if the evidence is sufficiently incriminating, and a person can potentially break a law without ever being found guilty.
Again, they may not be considered guilty until they have undergone due process, but that has absolutely no bearing on whether or not a law has already been found to be broken.
No... but then my comment wasn't exactly something that many people would be interested in either... my original point stands. Most self-published content is of negligible interest to people outside of a closed group, and if that was actually *all* that there was, there'd be a correspondingly smaller amount of content intake, leading to cultural stagnation. When civilizations get bored, they do crazy shit.
The question stands. If current status self-published content is any indication, how in the world does anybody think that the absence of copyright will actually result in anything other than just an unending deluge of self-published shit?0
Before copyright, the time, expense, and effort involved in making copies of works tended to be adequate to provide a sufficient measure of exclusivity for the patrons who would commission the works. Now, copying can be done with a push of a button, so the same checks and balances no longer apply. As for user-generated content, sure... some big companies will probably make a living off of it, like youtube. At least with copyright intact, a smalltime content maker has an equal chance of being seen, and an assurance that nobody else is going to take credit for what they did (or do you think that plagiarism would even have any meaning without copyright?)
My question stands.
And who do you think will publish content in this idealist future copyright-free world? Or do you think that the general public will be truly satisfied with unending ads, unwanted porn popups, spam, and amateur cat videos?
But it's clear to me that you are clearly conflating the terms of "guilty" and "illegal". Here's a breakdown for you. Actions that are criminal are illegal. Period. It doesn't matter whether or not a person has even been tried, let alone prosecuted, for a such an action, the action itself is really still illegal. You can know that a crime occurred (based upon a preponderance of evidence, proving beyond all reasonable doubt, since you seem to take objection to the concept of "objective proof"), whether it is a robbery, murder, rape, arson, kidnapping, or any number of other very obvious felonies... without even having a suspect in custody, let alone having already found any particular person guilty of that act.
The point of a criminal trial is generally to ascertain the status of guilt of a suspect, not whether or not the action was ever actually legal (because if were legal before they were brought to trial, then there would be no reason to bring the person to criminal court in the first place, since the person would not have done anything wrong). Civil court can sometimes decide on issues governing whether or not something was legal, but that's not criminal court. The subject you started here was on the matter of legality.
I'm generally not big on language bashing, but the biggest problem I have with Perl is with its complexity, having numerous operators and several special syntaxes. What this almost invariably means is that you can get short, but extremely complex code with many syntax errors which take some time to understand. Even worse, it often also means that reading someone else's code is difficult, and often maintenance of somebody else's Perl project can be an intractable problem. While it's entirely possible to write difficult to understand code in any language, everything that I have ever seen in Perl seems to indicate that the language, through its complexity and especially because of the many operators is possesses, practically encourages people to write extremely terse, and correspondingly highly obfuscated programs to all but extremely trained people who more than likely would have learned Perl when there weren't that many other options for things like web cgi.
But legacy code maintenance is generally considered an entry-level position, and it stands to reason that people maintaining the code that one writes today will not have as much experience the one creating it for the first time. As such, clarity is paramount. Perl does not achieve this.
I would maintain that this reason is an objectively valid reason to disregard this language as viable in the 21st century, where there are many other choices.... its best use today should only be that of maintaining older software that was already developed in it... not the writing of new stuff.
Of course you can.
Example: Security cameras at a gas station might capture a person holding up a cashier. Say that the person takes the money and runs before law enforcement manages to arrive. The video footage objectively *PROVES* that the law was actually broken, but yet they do not yet even have a suspect in custody. Witness reports might help them track down a suspect, but long before the trial, but even then the only thing you have not proven is the GUILT of any particular person that you bring into custody. This is not remotely the same thing as saying that the law hasn't been broken in the first place.... which is what it means when you try to say that nothing illegal has occurred until you have brought a suspect to justice (again, the very notion of which is a contradition, since if no law was broken, there would be no reason to try the person in the first place).
As the topic in this particular thread is "Not Illegal Until Found Guilty", and you were the one who started the thread, with that exact headline, while I may be off topic from the point of the summary, but I'm pretty sure I'm spot on with respect to this dialog. It could be argued that you initially diverged from the topic in the article by bringing the matter up in the first place. All I was doing was pointing out that there's no possible way what you said could ever be true. You can often know that a crime has been committed even before you know who has done it, let alone tried and found a person guilty of the act. It's laughable to think that actions can somehow never be illegal until a suspect has been tried and convicted for them. The most you could reasonably say is that it is a cornerstone principle of a fair justice system to not *PUNISH* somebody who has not been already been found to be guilty in a fair trial... a principle that I most heartily agree with.
(emphasis mine)
My point is that a person's actions can very much be *ENTIRELY* illegal even before he has been tried, let alone found guilty. To assert that such actions are somehow not even against the law just because a person who is alleged to have done them hasn't been found guilty of committing them yet defeats the entire purpose of having laws in the first place!
It isn't. But Perl is an utterly abysmal programming language choice.
The fact that Perl isn't even a GNU project means that they don't even have an excuse of wanting to stick with GNU for picking a crappy language to work with! If they were going to go outside GNU, there were dozens of free languages that they could have picked that would have been a better choice.
Honestly, about the only worse programming language choice I think they could have made is if they decided to redo TeXinfo in COBOL.
One's perception of events does not make them illegal, but that doesn't mean that the actual actions themselves may not be.
If a person's actions are not considered illegal until they have been found guilty, then in fact, there is nothing to find them guilty of, since no law will have been broken *UNTIL* they are found guilty.
Yes.... that amendment I would certainly agree with.
To presume that the actions themselves aren't even illegal until they are found guilty is to create an scenario where even attempting to pursue a person who had supposedly done something is entrapment, since a person who is alleged to have done something wrong will not have actually broken any laws until they are caught and found guilty. It's simply absurd to even think about.
Unless you live completely isolated from civilization (unlikely, since you have an Internet connection) idiots already tell you how to spend your money... it's up to you to discern which notions are idiotic and ignore them.
You realize that this is the same thing as saying that it's entirely legal to do things like kill people and rob banks, as long as you don't get caught, right? (because if you're not caught, then there's no possible way you can be found guilty).
Possibly... although I tend to hear that the "intelligence" in ID is supposedly God from people who detract from it *FAR* more often than I hear it from supporters of the notion.
Regardless, it's still an unfalsifiable premise without inventing time travel and going back to watch.
They probably could... but the resulting bad press would probably bankrupt them in months if they didn't reverse the decision (and the only reason it would even take that long is because they are so big). Thus, they have inventive to not discriminate for such reasons.