I realize those are the dates that wikipedia is reporting for Slackware, but I know from direct personal experience that they are wrong.
The wiki page reports it as having been first released in July of '93, whereas I had been using it for some months previous to that point. I started with the MCC distribution of Linux in early 1992, and I remember migrating to SLS in the summer of that year, and I also remember doing my first Slackware install during Christmas break. I did a major move at the end of May in 1993, particularly memorable for me, since it was I was moving away from the city where I had lived my whole life, about a quarter of the way across the country for a new job, and had already been using Slackware Linux for some months at the time. I was even recommending it as a preferred installation over SLS to some friends of mine by that time (of the few that I could even convince that Linux had any sort of viable future). I honestly have no explanation for why the wiki says that it started up in July of 1993 when I was using it in '92.
If you have some factual data that contradicts the dates above, that i mentioned, please supply them.
Because simply blindly (completely, no less) contradicting allegedly factual information without actually supplying any additional information which might controvert the supplied data is a pretty good way to make oneself look like someone who has no idea what they are talking about.
To reiterate: Linux was first released in September '91, and ports in August of '94, the origins of which started with the FreeBSD project, which itself was released in mid 1993.
So please explain to me how it is that ports is alleged to have existed before Linux, exactly
You're right...technically it's optional, but it's not something that anybody has to go even slightly out of their way to install... the notification that there are updates available is presented very clearly to a user whenever they pop up iTunes, and a lot of people have been indoctrinated sufficiently with the importance of keeping up to date (so that they can be confident they are using something they is still supported) that unless one is aware of a specific reason why they would *not* want to update, the default mental process is probably going to learn towards updating one's system, and one would generally have to make a deliberate choice to *not* install it, as long as they have hardware compatible with it.
But my point is that they've said that it was the *defining* new feature. It seems strange to me that they would make this application compatible with older phones at all when they actually weren't going to support them.
This is why I compared it to not entirely dissimilar laws regarding possession of stolen property. The law does not try to deal with cases where people have come across stolen property that has not been identified as such. It's still illegal, but there is no enforcement system in place for it because the people who have it have not been discovered.
... then *ALL* of the hardware that the iOS upgrade was compatible with would support the feature.
Voice turn-by-turn is not available on the iPhone 4 or 3GS.
So about the only significantly new feature... and most importantly, the alleged "killer feature" of the app, isn't even available for a a lot of existing iPhone owners.
It reminds me a lot of the whole Sony removing the "other OS" feature on the playstation debacle.
I'm suggesting that infringing content that is ambiguous is not something that my suggestion even tries to deal with. Theoretically, I suppose it's possible that somebody could commit rampant copyright infringement on an enormous scale without being addressed by what I proposed simply by restricting their activities to the obtaining of such content.
But in reality, that's not going to happen. That's not what most people who download infringing content do.
Because if the only real online piracy that copyright holders had to worry about were just the ambiguous cases, the fact that people can make copies at home under an alleged "personal use" right, and then turn around and give those copies to their friends or other personal associates would probably be a *FAR* bigger deal than online piracy. Such unauthorized distribution to one's own personal network is still a problem with respect to copyright, but at least that problem doesn't scale like Internet distribution does.
You know, even as I was writing my last comment up, I was thinking I might need to put some sort of disclaimer in there to note that I was simply drawing an analogy from another law... not that I was saying that copyright infringement was like stealing physical property. I had presumed it should be unnecessary... that the fact that I had even literally said that I was making comparison to another law should be enough for a reader to draw the conclusion that I meant what I was literally saying... and merely comparing the laws for their similarity, and not suggesting the different activities covered by the different laws are somehow the same thing. My bad, I guess.
However...
I've been asserting that most online piracy happens to utilize data whose origins are not ambiguous. In my own experience with people I've encountered who I've discovered, either in casual conversation where the subject of online media has come up, or by them openly admitting as much, that when I've inquired for more details, they may (perhaps reluctantly) admit that they realize that the source of where they obtained the content from was not an authorized source... their justification, however, is often not much different than "everybody does it", or "it doesn't hurt anybody", and *NEVER* something along the lines of "I didn't know its copyrighted status", or anything that might even be considered equivalent to it. At most, they might not be aware that downloading such content might have some ramifications on the overall value of copyright, but the bulk of pirated content seems to be on recently released and commercially available materials, either software, movies, or music, where the intellectual property holder is generally quite well known, and there is no cause for ambiguity.
So I know that my suggestion depends on the notion that at least a majority people who commit piracy realize the infringing nature of the work they are getting a copy of. If this notion is wrong, then I also know that what I've suggested wouldn't accomplish much at all. My own encounters with people who I've discovered do such things suggests that it is not, however.
No.... possession could still be illegal. It's just that it may not be generally possible to verify that a law was ever even broken in the first place if the actual acquisition of the infringing material was not ever observed.
To draw a comparison to another law, its also illegal to simply possess stolen merchandise (although there is not any legal punishment if a person has reasonable grounds to claim they did not know it was stolen, but even then, they do still lose the merchandise, and that loss is at their own expense).
If, by some circumstance, you acquire something stolen, then once it is among your own possessions, it may very well no longer be readily identifiable to anyone else as stolen property, unless there was some distinguishing factor that could make it stand out as such. But even that doesn't mean that the stuff isn't actually stolen anymore, and in particular, if it were to ever actually be correctly identified as such, there could still be possible consequences for you, unless you have a plausible explanation for not realizing its status (but even then, you would still lose the merchandise, at your own expense, and without compensation).
And we're talking about stuff that *could* be objectively identified as contraband in the first place. If it's not objectively identifiable as such, then there would be no reason to presume that it is. In general, as I said above, that would tend to entail actually catching a person in the act of acquiring it.
That doesn't mean that if they've acquired it without getting caught that they wouldn't be still breaking the law by keeping it.
Yeah... except that if it's already *IN* your possession, then it can't necessarily be traced back to being obtained from infringing content in the first place. Whereas content that one is *IN* the process of acquiring can be.
You don't have to justify the content that's already *IN* your possession, any more than you might get a ticket for speeding last week when you weren't actually caught then (even if you were), just because at a random roadside drunk driving check, you happen to get pulled over while you are driving a sports car that is perhaps fairly well known for being driven like a racing vehicle on highways.
The pirated material coming from obviously pirated sources might be the bulk of actual internet traffic
... and...
but it's a fringe case in your argument
are not entirely mutually exclusive. Either it's the bulk of actual piracy, or else it's not.
I was suggesting that it is, and that we wouldn't really have to worry about the ambiguous remainder, because if that ambiguous remainder was really all of the online piracy that there was, then I doubt that it would be seen to be as dangerous a threat to copyright as, for example, people privately making copies of copies for of content on burnable dvd's or usb drives, and giving them away to their friends would be.
And while I don't want to say that's not a problem at all, it's my position that because such a problem does not readily scale the same way online distribution does, it's really not as serious a problem, in the long run.
Your proposed case of people learning how to hide their online piracy better is highly plausible, but I do not think that a majority of people who fit into the unambiguous piracy case are genuinely savvy enough to actually know how to do this. Slashdot users and the like are not remotrely typical, and I'm quite aware that people with enough technical competency could continue to get away with breaking the law in the case I've been describing. But such technically competent people are also quite few compared to the number of people that knowingly download pirated content without fear of consequence. If I'm wrong about this, then at the very least, the stupid ones will still be paying a penalty... and the situation could be reexamined in a few years to see if it can be improved, if online piracy continues to be a major problem. So even the very least that could possibly happen is that the Internet gets smarter.
But in the end, perhaps if I wasn't trying to offer any real argument for any of your ambiguous cases, it's because I've been suggesting that they aren't the bulk of piracy anyways. If we are unable to agree on that premise, then there's not really any point in discussing this further.
No... all it requires is that the authorities are able to identify where and when you are obtaining what content, to the extent that you've done so in the clear (which is most online infringement). If you downloaded infringing content, then you possess infringing content. Simple.
Or... if you got it another way, sneakernet or what have you... that might not be observed by anybody else, but such distribution mechanisms do not scale like Internet distribution does, and could even push back piracy frequency to pre-napster levels.
And let's face it... if what I was suggesting was such an abysmally bad idea, there'd be no particular reason for those who might be opposed to it to actually object, or try to argue with me... Since it would fail anyways. The notion that innocent people could get prosecuted fails to account for the fact that I had suggested that the circumstances actually be examined for each case. Finally, of course, the fact that the system is not perfect and will not catch everyone should not preclude its adoption based solely on the notion that must be unfair. If it is unfair to anyone, it's only unfair to people who can't figure out how to not get caught. This is pretty much how practically all law normally works anyways, so I fail to see any reason to make the objection in the first place.
And the consequences that I see happening as a result are as follows:
1) Smart pirates figure out ways to hide their online activities well enough that they don't get noticed. This means that it must, by definition, fall below the legal radar, and there's nothing that could ever hope to be done.
2) Stupid pirates get caught, and pay the price. Frequency of piracy drops.
3) People resort to other means of piracy, which do not scale. Overall frequency of piracy drops.
4) People start to educate themselves on how to tell infringing works from non-infringing works, and try to make smarter choices about whether or not content can be trusted to be non-infringing. Frequency of piracy drops.
3 out of the above 4 outcomes have reduced piracy rates. The remaining one does not, but, to be honest, I sincerely don't think that most people would fit in that category.
I would argue that the only reason so much of the content on the internet is infringing right now is primarily *BECAUSE* there's no real consequences for people who download it, even while realizing its infringing origins. Or do you genuinely believe that most infringing content is downloaded without any realization whatsoever on the part of the downloader that the originator did not actually have any permission to distribute such copies?
Because I don't. I believe most people quite readily recognize infringing content for what it is... even if they do not openly admit as much. They simply do not care, simply because there are no consequences for them that would require paying attention to that detail to be important for them. Admittedly, perhaps, this belief is based on the personalities of all the people that I have personally met who have, at one point or another, implied while making conversation or sometimes even openly admitted that they download movies or songs off the internet, and that, when asked about it, they also admit to knowing that they didn't download an authorized copy. This set of people doesn't even intersect the set of people I consider to be friends, but simply people with whom I've happened to have conversations that somehow got onto the topic of media, so I don't think that my own personal affiliations are biassing the results in that direction.
(Although, I admit that I cannot rationally preclude the possibility that may only be because my friends know me well enough to realize that if they were to ever admit something like that to me, they'd get more than an earful about it, and I'd make no apologies for that fact).
But would what I described above eliminate piracy? Of course not. It might, however, at least bring it down a few notches.
The fact that it wouldn't be "normally punished" is not in any way a defense of the plan.
Considering that's how the law ordinarily works in other circumstances that I was trying to draw analogy, I would disagree with that assessment.
If you try to spend a counterfeit dollar bill that you thought was genuine, for instance, then you're not actually punished for pushing counterfeit currency, even though if you *HAD* known it was counterfeit, you would be guilty of a very serious crime. Ignorance of the law is not an excuse to break it, but ignorance that a law is even being broken in the first place, in cases where another ordinary person in the same circumstances could have just as easily been unaware of such lawbreaking, seems to be perfectly reasonable grounds to not be punished for it.
You could, I suppose, compare it to the notion of plausible deniability, if you wanted. Because in general, if you genuinely do not have any *REASONABLE* way to tell that something was not right, then you shouldn't be expected to realize that it could be wrong. You might, however, still face some consequences for it being wrong... although those consequences would not be as severe as those you would face if you knew it was wrong beforehand.
Warning.... a large block of text that may be subject to a tl;dr follows.
On the other hand say places like youtube, where there is plenty of infringing material and plenty of non-infringing material and no way for the regular person to tell them apart, would make your idea hugely problematic, and would lead to a vast amount of "accidental criminals".
This is true... but at least that's a plausible explanation that is likely to be believed. Youtube has a sufficient quantity of legit material that unless something is pretty obviously a copy of a known copyrighted work, and being distributed by a username that doesn't readily map to an entity recognized to be authorized to distribute such a work, that there would be no compelling reason to hold a downloader criminally accountable for downloading infringing material from that web site (although if caught, they would still lose it, at their own expense)... as long as the circumstances behind it were such that it's genuinely believable that most people really wouldn't have known the difference.
And so, like counterfeit currency, "accidental" possession would not actually be criminal. Circumstances behind how it came to be in one's possession could be examined to determine whether an excuse for not being aware of its infringing nature was plausible or not.
I can't possibly know the exact copyright status of each individual thing I see on the internet. Some books are in the public domain in some countries, yet not in others. How am I as a reader supposed to know the difference?
You educate yourself with regards to its status in your own country. If it's not copyrighted where you are, then it's fine to download. If you still can't figure it out, and you want to download it, then you do so at your own risk, but if the circumstances are such that it is that difficult to tell whether or not it is copyrighted, then if it turns out to be infringing, you've probably got a pretty believable excuse for not knowing that it was, and if you are caught, you'd likely pay no penalty beyond losing the content at your own expense. Such an experience, however, would likely be an educational one, and you might be in a better decision to make wiser choices about what content you decided to obtain in the future.
To put it to the test, all you have to do is understand that if the end viewer is supposed to be guilty of copyright infringement for simply possessing a copy of an infringing work, then there has to be a reasonable expectation that the person can find out if it's infringing. Now tell us how you'd go about finding out if any part of this discussion is copyrighted, and who exactly owns that copyright, and if their copyright agreement allows you to make a local copy of it.
If you are located in North America, for instance, then it is. My quoting of your comments in my reply to you are consistent with the notion of fair use, since they are contextually relevant to what am saying in order to reply to the very comment. Specifically, you own the copyright on the portions that you wrote, and the portions that I wrote are copyrighted by me.
Then do the same for something more realistic, like a random video on youtube
The creator of the video owns the copyright. In the case of youtube, and for a video that was not obviously infringing, it could probably generally be presumed by a downloader that the uploader of any video actually had permission to distribute it (since that is part of youtube's terms of service that allows one to publish a video on there in the first place).
a random search result in google
I would expect that to fall well under the notion of "fair use". They are facsimile reproductions that (ideally) refer a person to an actual copyrighted work, and are no more infringing on the copyright on that work than a person wh
... by making mere possession of any infringing copyrighted work an illegal act, much like possessing counterfeit currency is illegal. If the source material was infringing, then any copies made of it are also infringing. No ambiguity. Downloaders would thus obtain content from territories not subject to the same laws as the downloader entirely at their own risk. They either must be prepared to gamble that the site they are downloading from wouldn't be breaking the law if it was domestic, or else they must take pains to really educate themselves to discover how to tell if a particular source is legitimate or not.
Of course, one can probably still just always claim they didn't know that the content was infringing if they were caught downloading infringing content, and assuming that the excuse worked, about the most that would happen is that they'd simply lose access to the content... and much like counterfeit currency, entirely at their own expense. Although to be fair, I think it's unlikely that this excuse would keep working repeatedly, without regard for circumstances.
Because of course, if someone downloads some content off of, say, pirate bay for example, and that they don't know for a fact is being distributed through that venue legally, then there's a pretty darn good chance that it's infringing, and anybody who even knows enough to be aware of places like that also has a pretty darn good chance of being aware of that fact. And to be fair, I'd dare say that 99.99+% of all the legal content you can get off of a place like pirate bay is just as easily acquired (even as torrents) from other, much less dubious sources. So really, I'd expect that claiming that one didn't know that infringing content obtained from such sources was actually infringing has a chance of being believed that is probably very very close to zero.
Actually, Google never wrote that map application that the iPhone used before iOS6. It was powered by Google Maps, but I believe Apple was the actual author.
Slashdot Mirror
No.
But I believe the odds are pretty heavily in favor of nobody actually noticing.
One would hardly think that offering distribution via the Internet, to people one does not even actually know would still qualify as "personal use".
This could be extremely interesting when somebody invents ways to transfer information or data between human minds and computers.
I realize those are the dates that wikipedia is reporting for Slackware, but I know from direct personal experience that they are wrong.
The wiki page reports it as having been first released in July of '93, whereas I had been using it for some months previous to that point. I started with the MCC distribution of Linux in early 1992, and I remember migrating to SLS in the summer of that year, and I also remember doing my first Slackware install during Christmas break. I did a major move at the end of May in 1993, particularly memorable for me, since it was I was moving away from the city where I had lived my whole life, about a quarter of the way across the country for a new job, and had already been using Slackware Linux for some months at the time. I was even recommending it as a preferred installation over SLS to some friends of mine by that time (of the few that I could even convince that Linux had any sort of viable future). I honestly have no explanation for why the wiki says that it started up in July of 1993 when I was using it in '92.
If you have some factual data that contradicts the dates above, that i mentioned, please supply them.
Because simply blindly (completely, no less) contradicting allegedly factual information without actually supplying any additional information which might controvert the supplied data is a pretty good way to make oneself look like someone who has no idea what they are talking about.
To reiterate: Linux was first released in September '91, and ports in August of '94, the origins of which started with the FreeBSD project, which itself was released in mid 1993.
So please explain to me how it is that ports is alleged to have existed before Linux, exactly
You're right...technically it's optional, but it's not something that anybody has to go even slightly out of their way to install... the notification that there are updates available is presented very clearly to a user whenever they pop up iTunes, and a lot of people have been indoctrinated sufficiently with the importance of keeping up to date (so that they can be confident they are using something they is still supported) that unless one is aware of a specific reason why they would *not* want to update, the default mental process is probably going to learn towards updating one's system, and one would generally have to make a deliberate choice to *not* install it, as long as they have hardware compatible with it.
But my point is that they've said that it was the *defining* new feature. It seems strange to me that they would make this application compatible with older phones at all when they actually weren't going to support them.
No.
Linux started up in 1991. Personally, I started using in '92.
ports began in '94.
Linux predated ports by 3 years.
... go to the scene in "My Stepmother is an Alien" where she's eating batteries like candy?
This is why I compared it to not entirely dissimilar laws regarding possession of stolen property. The law does not try to deal with cases where people have come across stolen property that has not been identified as such. It's still illegal, but there is no enforcement system in place for it because the people who have it have not been discovered.
Voice turn-by-turn is not available on the iPhone 4 or 3GS.
So about the only significantly new feature... and most importantly, the alleged "killer feature" of the app, isn't even available for a a lot of existing iPhone owners.
It reminds me a lot of the whole Sony removing the "other OS" feature on the playstation debacle.
I'm suggesting that infringing content that is ambiguous is not something that my suggestion even tries to deal with. Theoretically, I suppose it's possible that somebody could commit rampant copyright infringement on an enormous scale without being addressed by what I proposed simply by restricting their activities to the obtaining of such content.
But in reality, that's not going to happen. That's not what most people who download infringing content do.
Because if the only real online piracy that copyright holders had to worry about were just the ambiguous cases, the fact that people can make copies at home under an alleged "personal use" right, and then turn around and give those copies to their friends or other personal associates would probably be a *FAR* bigger deal than online piracy. Such unauthorized distribution to one's own personal network is still a problem with respect to copyright, but at least that problem doesn't scale like Internet distribution does.
You know, even as I was writing my last comment up, I was thinking I might need to put some sort of disclaimer in there to note that I was simply drawing an analogy from another law... not that I was saying that copyright infringement was like stealing physical property. I had presumed it should be unnecessary... that the fact that I had even literally said that I was making comparison to another law should be enough for a reader to draw the conclusion that I meant what I was literally saying... and merely comparing the laws for their similarity, and not suggesting the different activities covered by the different laws are somehow the same thing. My bad, I guess.
However...
I've been asserting that most online piracy happens to utilize data whose origins are not ambiguous. In my own experience with people I've encountered who I've discovered, either in casual conversation where the subject of online media has come up, or by them openly admitting as much, that when I've inquired for more details, they may (perhaps reluctantly) admit that they realize that the source of where they obtained the content from was not an authorized source... their justification, however, is often not much different than "everybody does it", or "it doesn't hurt anybody", and *NEVER* something along the lines of "I didn't know its copyrighted status", or anything that might even be considered equivalent to it. At most, they might not be aware that downloading such content might have some ramifications on the overall value of copyright, but the bulk of pirated content seems to be on recently released and commercially available materials, either software, movies, or music, where the intellectual property holder is generally quite well known, and there is no cause for ambiguity.
So I know that my suggestion depends on the notion that at least a majority people who commit piracy realize the infringing nature of the work they are getting a copy of. If this notion is wrong, then I also know that what I've suggested wouldn't accomplish much at all. My own encounters with people who I've discovered do such things suggests that it is not, however.
No.... possession could still be illegal. It's just that it may not be generally possible to verify that a law was ever even broken in the first place if the actual acquisition of the infringing material was not ever observed.
To draw a comparison to another law, its also illegal to simply possess stolen merchandise (although there is not any legal punishment if a person has reasonable grounds to claim they did not know it was stolen, but even then, they do still lose the merchandise, and that loss is at their own expense).
If, by some circumstance, you acquire something stolen, then once it is among your own possessions, it may very well no longer be readily identifiable to anyone else as stolen property, unless there was some distinguishing factor that could make it stand out as such. But even that doesn't mean that the stuff isn't actually stolen anymore, and in particular, if it were to ever actually be correctly identified as such, there could still be possible consequences for you, unless you have a plausible explanation for not realizing its status (but even then, you would still lose the merchandise, at your own expense, and without compensation).
And we're talking about stuff that *could* be objectively identified as contraband in the first place. If it's not objectively identifiable as such, then there would be no reason to presume that it is. In general, as I said above, that would tend to entail actually catching a person in the act of acquiring it.
That doesn't mean that if they've acquired it without getting caught that they wouldn't be still breaking the law by keeping it.
Yeah... except that if it's already *IN* your possession, then it can't necessarily be traced back to being obtained from infringing content in the first place. Whereas content that one is *IN* the process of acquiring can be.
You don't have to justify the content that's already *IN* your possession, any more than you might get a ticket for speeding last week when you weren't actually caught then (even if you were), just because at a random roadside drunk driving check, you happen to get pulled over while you are driving a sports car that is perhaps fairly well known for being driven like a racing vehicle on highways.
are not entirely mutually exclusive. Either it's the bulk of actual piracy, or else it's not.
I was suggesting that it is, and that we wouldn't really have to worry about the ambiguous remainder, because if that ambiguous remainder was really all of the online piracy that there was, then I doubt that it would be seen to be as dangerous a threat to copyright as, for example, people privately making copies of copies for of content on burnable dvd's or usb drives, and giving them away to their friends would be.
And while I don't want to say that's not a problem at all, it's my position that because such a problem does not readily scale the same way online distribution does, it's really not as serious a problem, in the long run.
Your proposed case of people learning how to hide their online piracy better is highly plausible, but I do not think that a majority of people who fit into the unambiguous piracy case are genuinely savvy enough to actually know how to do this. Slashdot users and the like are not remotrely typical, and I'm quite aware that people with enough technical competency could continue to get away with breaking the law in the case I've been describing. But such technically competent people are also quite few compared to the number of people that knowingly download pirated content without fear of consequence. If I'm wrong about this, then at the very least, the stupid ones will still be paying a penalty... and the situation could be reexamined in a few years to see if it can be improved, if online piracy continues to be a major problem. So even the very least that could possibly happen is that the Internet gets smarter.
But in the end, perhaps if I wasn't trying to offer any real argument for any of your ambiguous cases, it's because I've been suggesting that they aren't the bulk of piracy anyways. If we are unable to agree on that premise, then there's not really any point in discussing this further.
No... all it requires is that the authorities are able to identify where and when you are obtaining what content, to the extent that you've done so in the clear (which is most online infringement). If you downloaded infringing content, then you possess infringing content. Simple.
Or... if you got it another way, sneakernet or what have you... that might not be observed by anybody else, but such distribution mechanisms do not scale like Internet distribution does, and could even push back piracy frequency to pre-napster levels.
And let's face it... if what I was suggesting was such an abysmally bad idea, there'd be no particular reason for those who might be opposed to it to actually object, or try to argue with me... Since it would fail anyways. The notion that innocent people could get prosecuted fails to account for the fact that I had suggested that the circumstances actually be examined for each case. Finally, of course, the fact that the system is not perfect and will not catch everyone should not preclude its adoption based solely on the notion that must be unfair. If it is unfair to anyone, it's only unfair to people who can't figure out how to not get caught. This is pretty much how practically all law normally works anyways, so I fail to see any reason to make the objection in the first place.
And the consequences that I see happening as a result are as follows:
1) Smart pirates figure out ways to hide their online activities well enough that they don't get noticed. This means that it must, by definition, fall below the legal radar, and there's nothing that could ever hope to be done.
2) Stupid pirates get caught, and pay the price. Frequency of piracy drops.
3) People resort to other means of piracy, which do not scale. Overall frequency of piracy drops.
4) People start to educate themselves on how to tell infringing works from non-infringing works, and try to make smarter choices about whether or not content can be trusted to be non-infringing. Frequency of piracy drops.
3 out of the above 4 outcomes have reduced piracy rates. The remaining one does not, but, to be honest, I sincerely don't think that most people would fit in that category.
I would argue that the only reason so much of the content on the internet is infringing right now is primarily *BECAUSE* there's no real consequences for people who download it, even while realizing its infringing origins. Or do you genuinely believe that most infringing content is downloaded without any realization whatsoever on the part of the downloader that the originator did not actually have any permission to distribute such copies?
Because I don't. I believe most people quite readily recognize infringing content for what it is... even if they do not openly admit as much. They simply do not care, simply because there are no consequences for them that would require paying attention to that detail to be important for them. Admittedly, perhaps, this belief is based on the personalities of all the people that I have personally met who have, at one point or another, implied while making conversation or sometimes even openly admitted that they download movies or songs off the internet, and that, when asked about it, they also admit to knowing that they didn't download an authorized copy. This set of people doesn't even intersect the set of people I consider to be friends, but simply people with whom I've happened to have conversations that somehow got onto the topic of media, so I don't think that my own personal affiliations are biassing the results in that direction.
(Although, I admit that I cannot rationally preclude the possibility that may only be because my friends know me well enough to realize that if they were to ever admit something like that to me, they'd get more than an earful about it, and I'd make no apologies for that fact).
But would what I described above eliminate piracy? Of course not. It might, however, at least bring it down a few notches.
Considering that's how the law ordinarily works in other circumstances that I was trying to draw analogy, I would disagree with that assessment.
If you try to spend a counterfeit dollar bill that you thought was genuine, for instance, then you're not actually punished for pushing counterfeit currency, even though if you *HAD* known it was counterfeit, you would be guilty of a very serious crime. Ignorance of the law is not an excuse to break it, but ignorance that a law is even being broken in the first place, in cases where another ordinary person in the same circumstances could have just as easily been unaware of such lawbreaking, seems to be perfectly reasonable grounds to not be punished for it.
You could, I suppose, compare it to the notion of plausible deniability, if you wanted. Because in general, if you genuinely do not have any *REASONABLE* way to tell that something was not right, then you shouldn't be expected to realize that it could be wrong. You might, however, still face some consequences for it being wrong... although those consequences would not be as severe as those you would face if you knew it was wrong beforehand.
Warning.... a large block of text that may be subject to a tl;dr follows.
This is true... but at least that's a plausible explanation that is likely to be believed. Youtube has a sufficient quantity of legit material that unless something is pretty obviously a copy of a known copyrighted work, and being distributed by a username that doesn't readily map to an entity recognized to be authorized to distribute such a work, that there would be no compelling reason to hold a downloader criminally accountable for downloading infringing material from that web site (although if caught, they would still lose it, at their own expense)... as long as the circumstances behind it were such that it's genuinely believable that most people really wouldn't have known the difference.
And so, like counterfeit currency, "accidental" possession would not actually be criminal. Circumstances behind how it came to be in one's possession could be examined to determine whether an excuse for not being aware of its infringing nature was plausible or not.
You educate yourself with regards to its status in your own country. If it's not copyrighted where you are, then it's fine to download. If you still can't figure it out, and you want to download it, then you do so at your own risk, but if the circumstances are such that it is that difficult to tell whether or not it is copyrighted, then if it turns out to be infringing, you've probably got a pretty believable excuse for not knowing that it was, and if you are caught, you'd likely pay no penalty beyond losing the content at your own expense. Such an experience, however, would likely be an educational one, and you might be in a better decision to make wiser choices about what content you decided to obtain in the future.
If you are located in North America, for instance, then it is. My quoting of your comments in my reply to you are consistent with the notion of fair use, since they are contextually relevant to what am saying in order to reply to the very comment. Specifically, you own the copyright on the portions that you wrote, and the portions that I wrote are copyrighted by me.
The creator of the video owns the copyright. In the case of youtube, and for a video that was not obviously infringing, it could probably generally be presumed by a downloader that the uploader of any video actually had permission to distribute it (since that is part of youtube's terms of service that allows one to publish a video on there in the first place).
I would expect that to fall well under the notion of "fair use". They are facsimile reproductions that (ideally) refer a person to an actual copyrighted work, and are no more infringing on the copyright on that work than a person wh
Of course, one can probably still just always claim they didn't know that the content was infringing if they were caught downloading infringing content, and assuming that the excuse worked, about the most that would happen is that they'd simply lose access to the content... and much like counterfeit currency, entirely at their own expense. Although to be fair, I think it's unlikely that this excuse would keep working repeatedly, without regard for circumstances.
Because of course, if someone downloads some content off of, say, pirate bay for example, and that they don't know for a fact is being distributed through that venue legally, then there's a pretty darn good chance that it's infringing, and anybody who even knows enough to be aware of places like that also has a pretty darn good chance of being aware of that fact. And to be fair, I'd dare say that 99.99+% of all the legal content you can get off of a place like pirate bay is just as easily acquired (even as torrents) from other, much less dubious sources. So really, I'd expect that claiming that one didn't know that infringing content obtained from such sources was actually infringing has a chance of being believed that is probably very very close to zero.
What do you have against Woz? Woz is a decent guy... It's Jobs who was the scumbag.
I'm pretty sure that iTunes allows you to do full restores, as long as you made a backup of your device before upgrading.
Where is this formal announcement, exactly? Do you have a link, or is it just hearsay?
Actually, Google never wrote that map application that the iPhone used before iOS6. It was powered by Google Maps, but I believe Apple was the actual author.