If you read a little further in that wiki reference, you would note that "... a German committee member of the International Electrotechnical Commission proposed giga as a prefix for 10^9 in the 1920s, drawing on a verse by the humorous poet Christian Morgenstern that appeared in the third (1908) edition of Galgenlieder (Gallows Songs). This suggests that a hard German [É] was originally intended as the pronunciation." It's my understanding that the alternative "jigga-" pronunciation has always been a mispronunciation, even though it fell into fairly widespread use for several decades (it may have been a fairly common mispronunciation in 1955, but by the 1980's, which is when the movie was made and released any actual scientist would have known better... Of course, I don't fault Christopher Lloyd for the error, regardless).. My point was, however, not so much to focus on the pronunciation, but that it is interesting to consider that the actual amount of power in a bolt of lightning is about the same order of magnitude has a gigawatt (slightly more, actually)... so 1.21 gigawatts from lightning is a perfectly plausible amount of energy to extract from such an event, assuming you had the technology to contain and harness the energy.
Actually, the original script read "gigawatts", but in 1985, not very many people outside of certain technical fields (including, evidently, the actor and obviously several of the people involved in Back to the Future's production) knew the proper pronunciation of the prefix "giga" at that time.
For what it's worth, the amount of power in a bolt of lighting is of the order of magnitude of a few billion watts... allowing for some inefficiencies of power-extraction, the prefix "giga" is almost certainly correct.
Actually, even before copyright was invented, the creator of a work automatically had a right of exclusivity... and there is squat all that anybody else could do about it if the creator did not ever publicly release their work in the first place. The whole point of copyright is to offer some incentive for the creator to retain some of their exclusivity as an incentive to publish and share it with the community. Prior to the printing press being invented, the fact that copying was labor intensive and error prone was typically sufficient guarantee for the creator to retain their exclusivity in the event that they published. As copying became easier and more reliable, some mechanism, admittedly arbitrary, was needed to maintain the same balance so that most creators would continue to have an incentive to publish. Take away all promise of exclusivity, and what incentive do you leave content creators with any incentive to publish their works at all, except to release it to a very tightly controlled group of elect people that the creator believes are somehow "worthy" to receive it?
Some (relatively small) percentage of people who pay for a legitimate copy of a work will create unauthorized copies of it and distribute to other people. This is completely unavoidable as long as copying is easy to do (and is why companies have been trying to invent schemes that make copying hard to do... or at least harder and less convenient. The chief problem with the approach that these companies are taking is that only a single unauthorized copy is all that it actually takes to completely defeat all of that extra work they did).
My earlier remark about more people making unauthorized copies from legitimate purchases as more people purchase it is a generalization of the above fact about a percentage of legitimate purchases making infringing copies, and should not be construed as a universal truth. In fact, the point that you have mentioned, which is that because more legitimate customers have it, the product is more widely known about, perceived of as more ubiquitous, and this increased visibility increases the number of people who will want it and try to seek it via illegal means, is probably a much greater contributing factor to piracy than the point that I made.
Nonetheless, the point that I was making can still stand... which is that lowering the price of the work can, in fact, sometimes cause the net amount of piracy on the work to actually increase. It is not my contention that this situation would ever be universally true, but it most certainly can happen.
Utimately, the "it's too expensive" justification for piracy is just a lazy excuse used by somebody who figures that, for whatever reason, they have a right to take something simply because they can.
And if word of that happened to get out that company X never returns defective products because they don't want the security risk, everybody in the area jumps on it and sells them inferior products at regular prices. What's the company going to do about it? Return it? They can't... due to internal policies.
Yeah, it's collusion.... yeah, it's illegal. But a warranty would protect a customer from that. It's the company's own choice to not utilize such a warranty.
So their best bet would probably be to actually *own* a hard drive company, or otherwise be in the business of making hard drives.
Should that denominator be the average actual age of the teachers at the school? Or The average years of experience teaching?
Because not everyone starts teaching at the same age.... and heck, a person with more life experience that is only just starting out teaching may be entirely able to outpace younger people with more experience in the field. Not everybody holds the same career their entire life anymore. In fact, most don't.
Is it your position that absolutely everything that anyone ever releases to anyone else should be public domain? I can pretty much guarantee that would be a disincentive for a lot of people to bother to publish anything at all.
If someone holds a copyright, then they are supposed to have exclusivity on deciding who else may copy the work. By somebody else copying it without permission, the very definition of the term "exclusive" is compromised, so the copyright holder loses some of that exclusivity, depreciating the merits of their copyright (and, for that matter, the merits of utilizing copyright in the first place for all copyright holders, since copyright is a social contract - temporary exclusivity is offered to content creators as an incentive to publish in the first place, and society in turn benefits from the publication of new works, if the contract is not respected, the offer of exclusivity that it is supposed to offer creators is weakened). As for not believing you can steal something intangible, if a person has a lawfully recognized right to some resource, and another person utilizes a portion of that resource such that there is less of that resource available to the former person, then there is some logical validity to the notion that the latter person has stolen that measure of the resource from the former person. Belief only comes into play in the matter that a rights holder believes that they are entitled to entitled to their exclusivity... but, as it happens, the law sides with the rights holder in this particular case.
And again, this so-called "vague idea" of exclusivity is at the very core of copyright. Exclusivity is an expectation that a majority of content creators have *ALWAYS* expected... even before copyright existed (before the printing press was invented, copying was error prone and difficult enough to do that this factor alone gave the creators a sufficient measure of their desired exclusivity. After the printing press, copyright was invented to artificially offer creators the same thing). If you don't think that's right, then by all means, put everything that you ever create into public domain, and I applaud wholeheartedly support your rights to do so... but what right do YOU have to be telling other creators that you expect them all to do likewise? (Because public domain is the only alternative to the exclusivity).
I suppose, if they could somehow rationalize in their own minds about why it could be okay, then yeah... probably.
People are generally very good at coming up with justifications for the things that they do to convince themselves that what they are doing is not actually wrong or acceptable behavior... so good at it, in fact, that they themselves genuinely believe them.
I never said it takes away his rights... I said it takes away some of his exclusivity that by virtue of being a copyright holder, he has a legally recognized right to. This co-called "vague idea"of exclusive right to decide who else may copy a work is the very foundation of copyright itself, and, as I said... it happens to be upheld by the law.
Just as you correctly observed that people do not generally steal cable because it is so easy to get caught, it's sadly the case that most people who steal copyrighted works do so predominately because they can get away with it. While it may be true that in many cases they also might not be able to afford the prices being asked for, this fact is largely superficial, and lowering prices does not tend to produce substantially more purchases when the relative convenience and ease with which the work can be obtained for free, even if illegal, has not actually been altered (in fact, as the price is lowered, often the net amount of piracy on the work increases, because although the number of people that that buy it increase with increased affordability, a certain percentage of the new purchasers acquired will also make unauthorized copies of it, and distribute it to others, making it even easier for people who want to get it for free to do so).
In cable, very few people steal it because they are so easily caught
So if *were* easier to get away with not being caught, then you believe that the cable company should have an obligation to lower their prices, simply because more people would steal it?
It's also worth noting that long before copyright ever existed, people who created works always had some measure of guarantee on their exclusivity of control over the copies on their work. Before the printing press existed, this guarantee came in the form of copying being too difficult and to unreliable to do by hand for any sizable work. After the printing press, copyright was invented to take its place. What do you propose to take its place if you abolish copyright? What will the creators get out of such abolishment? What, unless they were willing to surrender their work into public domain anyways (not merely make freely available, but completely relinquishing all forms of ownership on, surrendering it entirely into PD), would be the incentive for anybody to bother to publish anything?
Again... this has nothing to do with financial benefit... it is still ultimately about control.
But if they continue to want to use it, then it *DOES* continue to have that value. So a person who continues to use software they are proclaiming is too expensive to pay for is actually defeating his own position. Nowhere is it written, in stone, or otherwise, that everybody should be entitled to have everything that they want, simply because they can take it.
I fail to see how any of what you're talking about somehow proves me wrong. The amount of value that people place on something is entirely independent of its price.
Case in point... how much do you pay for air? How much do you value breathing?
Actually, every single piece of software on my households 3 computers is either compeletly free software (gimp, inkscape, open office, etc), or else has been completely paid for. I am not a big company. I am not rich... My household income is somewhat below the national average. I see myself just an ordinary individual who recognizes that I don't have any real right to arbitrarily try to include myself in a demographic that a copyright holder did not intend to target when doing so means breaking the law.
Ah... but there is a loss. Just not a financial one. The fact that there is a loss, arguably, could entitle the copyright holder to some compensation... although the exact amount of compensation is often a matter of considerable subjectivity, and not one that I wish to get into here.
What does the copyright holder lose when piracy happens? Exclusivity. Copyright is supposed to be be an exclusive right to decide who may copy a work. When somebody else does that without permission, they directly impact the copyright holder's exclusivity on their control of the work. Whether a person believes that the creator should never have had that level of control over the work in the first place is entirely irrelevant - the law still recognizes it.
I don't think I ever suggested that it was absolute. People really need to stop thinking in terms of dollars and cents when the word "value" is mentioned.
many people outside that demographicâ"the people who cannot afford itâ"are going to pirate it because it still has utility, but not enough to justify the cost
That's like suggesting that cable companies should just accept that people outside of the demographic that cable TV is marketed to are going to, if you'll forgive the expression, "steal" cable simply because they want to have it.
Give me one good reason to expect that anyone should ever have some sort inalienable right to have absolutely everything that they might happen to desire, for whatever reason, simply because they have the ability to do so?
just downloading it doesn't mean that they place a "high amount of value on the work"
They place just as much value on the work as somebody who was willing to pay for it, because the reason a person is willing to pay for it is because they want to use it, and the reason a person downloads a work is because they want to use it.
The same value, either way. If it wasn't worth the amount of money being asked for, then nobody would be in the former category.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought that in Canada, Futureshop stores were being gradually phased out in favor of Best Buy, who now owns the former chain.
If you read a little further in that wiki reference, you would note that "... a German committee member of the International Electrotechnical Commission proposed giga as a prefix for 10^9 in the 1920s, drawing on a verse by the humorous poet Christian Morgenstern that appeared in the third (1908) edition of Galgenlieder (Gallows Songs). This suggests that a hard German [É] was originally intended as the pronunciation." It's my understanding that the alternative "jigga-" pronunciation has always been a mispronunciation, even though it fell into fairly widespread use for several decades (it may have been a fairly common mispronunciation in 1955, but by the 1980's, which is when the movie was made and released any actual scientist would have known better... Of course, I don't fault Christopher Lloyd for the error, regardless).. My point was, however, not so much to focus on the pronunciation, but that it is interesting to consider that the actual amount of power in a bolt of lightning is about the same order of magnitude has a gigawatt (slightly more, actually)... so 1.21 gigawatts from lightning is a perfectly plausible amount of energy to extract from such an event, assuming you had the technology to contain and harness the energy.
They're just discovering all kinds of new applications for electroshock therapy these days! It almost feels like 1945 all over again!
Actually, the original script read "gigawatts", but in 1985, not very many people outside of certain technical fields (including, evidently, the actor and obviously several of the people involved in Back to the Future's production) knew the proper pronunciation of the prefix "giga" at that time.
For what it's worth, the amount of power in a bolt of lighting is of the order of magnitude of a few billion watts... allowing for some inefficiencies of power-extraction, the prefix "giga" is almost certainly correct.
Actually, even before copyright was invented, the creator of a work automatically had a right of exclusivity... and there is squat all that anybody else could do about it if the creator did not ever publicly release their work in the first place. The whole point of copyright is to offer some incentive for the creator to retain some of their exclusivity as an incentive to publish and share it with the community. Prior to the printing press being invented, the fact that copying was labor intensive and error prone was typically sufficient guarantee for the creator to retain their exclusivity in the event that they published. As copying became easier and more reliable, some mechanism, admittedly arbitrary, was needed to maintain the same balance so that most creators would continue to have an incentive to publish. Take away all promise of exclusivity, and what incentive do you leave content creators with any incentive to publish their works at all, except to release it to a very tightly controlled group of elect people that the creator believes are somehow "worthy" to receive it?
Some (relatively small) percentage of people who pay for a legitimate copy of a work will create unauthorized copies of it and distribute to other people. This is completely unavoidable as long as copying is easy to do (and is why companies have been trying to invent schemes that make copying hard to do... or at least harder and less convenient. The chief problem with the approach that these companies are taking is that only a single unauthorized copy is all that it actually takes to completely defeat all of that extra work they did).
My earlier remark about more people making unauthorized copies from legitimate purchases as more people purchase it is a generalization of the above fact about a percentage of legitimate purchases making infringing copies, and should not be construed as a universal truth. In fact, the point that you have mentioned, which is that because more legitimate customers have it, the product is more widely known about, perceived of as more ubiquitous, and this increased visibility increases the number of people who will want it and try to seek it via illegal means, is probably a much greater contributing factor to piracy than the point that I made.
Nonetheless, the point that I was making can still stand... which is that lowering the price of the work can, in fact, sometimes cause the net amount of piracy on the work to actually increase. It is not my contention that this situation would ever be universally true, but it most certainly can happen.
Utimately, the "it's too expensive" justification for piracy is just a lazy excuse used by somebody who figures that, for whatever reason, they have a right to take something simply because they can.
And if word of that happened to get out that company X never returns defective products because they don't want the security risk, everybody in the area jumps on it and sells them inferior products at regular prices. What's the company going to do about it? Return it? They can't... due to internal policies.
Yeah, it's collusion.... yeah, it's illegal. But a warranty would protect a customer from that. It's the company's own choice to not utilize such a warranty.
So their best bet would probably be to actually *own* a hard drive company, or otherwise be in the business of making hard drives.
Should that denominator be the average actual age of the teachers at the school? Or The average years of experience teaching?
Because not everyone starts teaching at the same age.... and heck, a person with more life experience that is only just starting out teaching may be entirely able to outpace younger people with more experience in the field. Not everybody holds the same career their entire life anymore. In fact, most don't.
Is it your position that absolutely everything that anyone ever releases to anyone else should be public domain? I can pretty much guarantee that would be a disincentive for a lot of people to bother to publish anything at all.
If someone holds a copyright, then they are supposed to have exclusivity on deciding who else may copy the work. By somebody else copying it without permission, the very definition of the term "exclusive" is compromised, so the copyright holder loses some of that exclusivity, depreciating the merits of their copyright (and, for that matter, the merits of utilizing copyright in the first place for all copyright holders, since copyright is a social contract - temporary exclusivity is offered to content creators as an incentive to publish in the first place, and society in turn benefits from the publication of new works, if the contract is not respected, the offer of exclusivity that it is supposed to offer creators is weakened). As for not believing you can steal something intangible, if a person has a lawfully recognized right to some resource, and another person utilizes a portion of that resource such that there is less of that resource available to the former person, then there is some logical validity to the notion that the latter person has stolen that measure of the resource from the former person. Belief only comes into play in the matter that a rights holder believes that they are entitled to entitled to their exclusivity... but, as it happens, the law sides with the rights holder in this particular case.
And again, this so-called "vague idea" of exclusivity is at the very core of copyright. Exclusivity is an expectation that a majority of content creators have *ALWAYS* expected... even before copyright existed (before the printing press was invented, copying was error prone and difficult enough to do that this factor alone gave the creators a sufficient measure of their desired exclusivity. After the printing press, copyright was invented to artificially offer creators the same thing). If you don't think that's right, then by all means, put everything that you ever create into public domain, and I applaud wholeheartedly support your rights to do so... but what right do YOU have to be telling other creators that you expect them all to do likewise? (Because public domain is the only alternative to the exclusivity).
I suppose, if they could somehow rationalize in their own minds about why it could be okay, then yeah... probably.
People are generally very good at coming up with justifications for the things that they do to convince themselves that what they are doing is not actually wrong or acceptable behavior... so good at it, in fact, that they themselves genuinely believe them.
I never said it takes away his rights... I said it takes away some of his exclusivity that by virtue of being a copyright holder, he has a legally recognized right to. This co-called "vague idea"of exclusive right to decide who else may copy a work is the very foundation of copyright itself, and, as I said... it happens to be upheld by the law.
A person who doesn't pay for a work, but instead downloads an infringing copy of it, is not a customer at all.
Just as you correctly observed that people do not generally steal cable because it is so easy to get caught, it's sadly the case that most people who steal copyrighted works do so predominately because they can get away with it. While it may be true that in many cases they also might not be able to afford the prices being asked for, this fact is largely superficial, and lowering prices does not tend to produce substantially more purchases when the relative convenience and ease with which the work can be obtained for free, even if illegal, has not actually been altered (in fact, as the price is lowered, often the net amount of piracy on the work increases, because although the number of people that that buy it increase with increased affordability, a certain percentage of the new purchasers acquired will also make unauthorized copies of it, and distribute it to others, making it even easier for people who want to get it for free to do so).
By a staggering majority, the number one reason that people that I know who pirate give is because they know they can get away with it.
So if *were* easier to get away with not being caught, then you believe that the cable company should have an obligation to lower their prices, simply because more people would steal it?
It's also worth noting that long before copyright ever existed, people who created works always had some measure of guarantee on their exclusivity of control over the copies on their work. Before the printing press existed, this guarantee came in the form of copying being too difficult and to unreliable to do by hand for any sizable work. After the printing press, copyright was invented to take its place. What do you propose to take its place if you abolish copyright? What will the creators get out of such abolishment? What, unless they were willing to surrender their work into public domain anyways (not merely make freely available, but completely relinquishing all forms of ownership on, surrendering it entirely into PD), would be the incentive for anybody to bother to publish anything?
Again... this has nothing to do with financial benefit... it is still ultimately about control.
But if they continue to want to use it, then it *DOES* continue to have that value. So a person who continues to use software they are proclaiming is too expensive to pay for is actually defeating his own position. Nowhere is it written, in stone, or otherwise, that everybody should be entitled to have everything that they want, simply because they can take it.
So what you're saying is.... that as long as you can get away with it, then it's all good?
I fail to see how any of what you're talking about somehow proves me wrong. The amount of value that people place on something is entirely independent of its price.
Case in point... how much do you pay for air? How much do you value breathing?
Actually, every single piece of software on my households 3 computers is either compeletly free software (gimp, inkscape, open office, etc), or else has been completely paid for. I am not a big company. I am not rich... My household income is somewhat below the national average. I see myself just an ordinary individual who recognizes that I don't have any real right to arbitrarily try to include myself in a demographic that a copyright holder did not intend to target when doing so means breaking the law.
What does the copyright holder lose when piracy happens? Exclusivity. Copyright is supposed to be be an exclusive right to decide who may copy a work. When somebody else does that without permission, they directly impact the copyright holder's exclusivity on their control of the work. Whether a person believes that the creator should never have had that level of control over the work in the first place is entirely irrelevant - the law still recognizes it.
I don't think I ever suggested that it was absolute. People really need to stop thinking in terms of dollars and cents when the word "value" is mentioned.
That's like suggesting that cable companies should just accept that people outside of the demographic that cable TV is marketed to are going to, if you'll forgive the expression, "steal" cable simply because they want to have it.
Give me one good reason to expect that anyone should ever have some sort inalienable right to have absolutely everything that they might happen to desire, for whatever reason, simply because they have the ability to do so?
They place just as much value on the work as somebody who was willing to pay for it, because the reason a person is willing to pay for it is because they want to use it, and the reason a person downloads a work is because they want to use it.
The same value, either way. If it wasn't worth the amount of money being asked for, then nobody would be in the former category.