If people are "too cheap" to buy your product maybe your product is too expensive.
This is a bit of a self-defeating position... because a person who claims that the work is too expensive as an excuse to download an infringing copy of it is still proclaiming that they actually *DO* place a high amount of value on the work - the real problem is, quite simply, not that the work does not have the value being asked for (a view which is contradicted by the fact that some people are willing to actually pay for the work), but that the person expressing that sentiment is just being cheap - whether that is because they genuinely cannot afford the work or not. Perhaps it had not occurred to such people that people who consider the work to be too expensive were outside of the demographic for which the work was targetted in the first place? Never mind the notion that the creators might make more money if they widened their demographic, the fact that they might be still choosing to market it only to a particular one that is willing to pay for the work is still their full right to do.
The GPL code author has chosen to retain his exclusive rights to determine who may copy the work (which would be anyone who agrees to abide by the terms of the GPL). If somebody copies the work without abiding by those terms, they have directly compromised the integrity of the GPL code author's rights, and in some sense, have effectively taken away a measure of some of the exclusivity that he or she once had.
It's less about "I want money" than it is about "I want exclusivity". Copyright is supposed to provide that. If it really weren't about exclusivity in even the free cases, people who do publish works and release them for free would tend to put them into public domain instead of choosing to retain copyright control.
there's no way to force someone to pay for the use of digital goods
Actually, there is.
Don't publish them.
And require that some person who has a direct (and ideally personally) vested interest in the work not being copied by anyone else directly oversee the 100% of the use of the work by others. Also, mandate that the work is being temporarily loaned only... and the person who oversaw the use of the work leaves the site with the work, and does not leave any copies behind (since he has a vested interest in not allowing anybody to make a copy, there is motivation for him to do this job well).
Of course, the commercial viability of such a model is somewhere near zero... but that's entirely beside the point. If the work is useful enough, there might be somebody somewhere who would be willing to pay for its use, and the above model would effectively force them to pay for it.
Hey... I admitted it was an oversimplification. I know the reality is much more complicated than that, but I couldn't think of a concise way to describe it.
Anyways, you may be right... and although I'm skeptical, I still hope that you are. We will see someday, perhaps.
Rather, I am stating that I imagine it will take no fewer than a like number of synaptic connections to understand what each group of synaptic connections in the brain does and how they actually work. By the pigeonhole principle, and especially owing to the fact that we already do know a lot of other stuff, there cannot possibly be enough room in our brains to understand how the brain actually works. We may asymptotically approach a full understanding, but I strongly suspect we will never actually have it.
I suspect that we will never really understand it... we might asymptotically approach an understanding of it, but I don't think we will ever get to a point where we fully do.
The reason for this is because we, ourselves, are limited in complexity of what is cognizable by the capacity and complexity of our own brains. I apologize profuesly in advance for the following oversimplification, but I imagine it would be like trying to an entire additional litre of water into another 1 litre cup that already has lots of other stuff in it. There just isn't any room to hold it all.
If they don't admit to any wrongdoing, but they still try to settle for a smaller payout, aren't they basically advertising that they are a company that can be blackmailed?
Occam's razor suggests it... doesn't mean it's true.
And what if it were true? What if the person genuinely did forget? Suspiciously coincidental or not, ultimately the premise of contempt of court is built entirely on circumstantial evidence.
And there is no time-limit on being held for contempt of court, so one could be in jail until they die simply because they were forgetful.
Nice.
Can a person who then kills himself upon being subjected to such an ultimatum also be guilty of contempt of court for failing to disclose the password? (After all, if a person is lying and willing to go to jail for life over the matter, then they may as well be willing to take their own life as well).
Gah! I really hate it when I see generalizations like this. Of course it is possible to prove a negative. The only requirement is that there be some condition which is mutually exclusive to what you are trying to disprove. For example, you can fairly easily prove that no rational number exists which satisfies the criteria of being the square root of a whole number that is not itself the square of another whole number. That's proving a negative right there.
The last 2 laptop computers I purchased did not come with any disks at all... and it was assumed that one would make restoration disks oneself after completing their system setup. This is very annoying, because then the restoration disks end up putting back all the bloatware that the manufacturer puts on it.
It's less a matter of simply a high confidence level with such disproofs than it is the fact that certain terms have specific, and often mutually exclusive definitions. This is easiest to do with mathematics, but it can be done to a certain extent with other things as well, such as physics. For example, you can trivially show that there are no photons within the visible light spectrum that are being emitted from a particular piece of material that is held in darkness, since "visible light" has a particular and very rigid range of frequencies, as does the term "photon", and we can make sensors today that can, in fact, detect individual photons. If you decide extend the definitions of the things being discussed to be arbitrarily inclusive, then of course you can't necessarily prove the non-existence of things which satisfy the extended criteria, but when you expand the definitions in this way, you are not necessarily talking about the same thing anyways, and are simply using the same term to describe something else entirely.
I'm not saying that a proof that complex quantum computers can't exist is just around the corner... in particular, since simple ones have already been created, this strongly suggests that complex ones could reasonably exist as well. Although almost certainly any such proof would be far more likely to depend entirely on whatever level of confidence we have in our existing theories of the universe, rather than on the actual definitions of things. For example, if any proof should surface that the technique for simple ones does not actually scale (for example, it violates relativity, as one example), would be sufficient to show that complex quantum computers cannot actually exist (unless relativity is also wrong). Since relativity is assumed, a priori, to be true, because it is backed strongly by previous observations, and has not yet been disproven.
Can you establish even an iota of plausible evidence, that is not contradicted by any other criteria, that there could possibly exist any two integers such that the ratio between them is the square root of 3? The square root of 3, you may assert, is irrational, so of course such a number would not exist... but that is a circular proof unless you have already proven that the square root of 3 is irrational, which, interestingly enough, requires proving (by contradition) that no rational number exists which can possibly satisfy the criteria.
Of course you can proove something doesn't exist. You just need to have certain assumptions about its nature first, such that you can qualify, without any doubt, that properties which satisfy that nature cannot exist. For example, an early mathematical proof that no rational exists which satisfies the criteria of being the square root of 2 is a proof of the non-existence of something. The notion that one cannot ever prove something impossible is, itself, a fallacy of generalization.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a bit of a self-defeating position... because a person who claims that the work is too expensive as an excuse to download an infringing copy of it is still proclaiming that they actually *DO* place a high amount of value on the work - the real problem is, quite simply, not that the work does not have the value being asked for (a view which is contradicted by the fact that some people are willing to actually pay for the work), but that the person expressing that sentiment is just being cheap - whether that is because they genuinely cannot afford the work or not. Perhaps it had not occurred to such people that people who consider the work to be too expensive were outside of the demographic for which the work was targetted in the first place? Never mind the notion that the creators might make more money if they widened their demographic, the fact that they might be still choosing to market it only to a particular one that is willing to pay for the work is still their full right to do.
The GPL code author has chosen to retain his exclusive rights to determine who may copy the work (which would be anyone who agrees to abide by the terms of the GPL). If somebody copies the work without abiding by those terms, they have directly compromised the integrity of the GPL code author's rights, and in some sense, have effectively taken away a measure of some of the exclusivity that he or she once had.
It's less about "I want money" than it is about "I want exclusivity". Copyright is supposed to provide that. If it really weren't about exclusivity in even the free cases, people who do publish works and release them for free would tend to put them into public domain instead of choosing to retain copyright control.
... which is legally recognized as a form of property.
Actually, there is.
Don't publish them.
And require that some person who has a direct (and ideally personally) vested interest in the work not being copied by anyone else directly oversee the 100% of the use of the work by others. Also, mandate that the work is being temporarily loaned only... and the person who oversaw the use of the work leaves the site with the work, and does not leave any copies behind (since he has a vested interest in not allowing anybody to make a copy, there is motivation for him to do this job well).
Of course, the commercial viability of such a model is somewhere near zero... but that's entirely beside the point. If the work is useful enough, there might be somebody somewhere who would be willing to pay for its use, and the above model would effectively force them to pay for it.
What... haven't you heard of homonyms?
Words are allowed to have multiple meanings, you know.
Anyways, you may be right... and although I'm skeptical, I still hope that you are. We will see someday, perhaps.
Rather, I am stating that I imagine it will take no fewer than a like number of synaptic connections to understand what each group of synaptic connections in the brain does and how they actually work. By the pigeonhole principle, and especially owing to the fact that we already do know a lot of other stuff, there cannot possibly be enough room in our brains to understand how the brain actually works. We may asymptotically approach a full understanding, but I strongly suspect we will never actually have it.
Parent is marked as troll, but makes a valid point IMO. Requiring registration is always annoying.
I suspect that we will never really understand it... we might asymptotically approach an understanding of it, but I don't think we will ever get to a point where we fully do.
The reason for this is because we, ourselves, are limited in complexity of what is cognizable by the capacity and complexity of our own brains. I apologize profuesly in advance for the following oversimplification, but I imagine it would be like trying to an entire additional litre of water into another 1 litre cup that already has lots of other stuff in it. There just isn't any room to hold it all.
It might very well do... but the appeal of cheap slave labor may still be enough to compensate for that.
If they don't admit to any wrongdoing, but they still try to settle for a smaller payout, aren't they basically advertising that they are a company that can be blackmailed?
For definitions of "close" that are different by more than an order of magnitude, I suppose.
Why shouldn't screwing count, exactly?
I don't know... but it could certainly be interesting to find out.
So grossly negligent encryption is a crime?
Occam's razor suggests it... doesn't mean it's true.
And what if it were true? What if the person genuinely did forget? Suspiciously coincidental or not, ultimately the premise of contempt of court is built entirely on circumstantial evidence.
And there is no time-limit on being held for contempt of court, so one could be in jail until they die simply because they were forgetful.
Nice.
Can a person who then kills himself upon being subjected to such an ultimatum also be guilty of contempt of court for failing to disclose the password? (After all, if a person is lying and willing to go to jail for life over the matter, then they may as well be willing to take their own life as well).
Gah! I really hate it when I see generalizations like this. Of course it is possible to prove a negative. The only requirement is that there be some condition which is mutually exclusive to what you are trying to disprove. For example, you can fairly easily prove that no rational number exists which satisfies the criteria of being the square root of a whole number that is not itself the square of another whole number. That's proving a negative right there.
But what choice do consumers even have anymore? I mean other than to just not buy a laptop at all?
The last 2 laptop computers I purchased did not come with any disks at all... and it was assumed that one would make restoration disks oneself after completing their system setup. This is very annoying, because then the restoration disks end up putting back all the bloatware that the manufacturer puts on it.
But doesn't "information want to be free"?
You mean kinda like holding information hostage and not allowing access to normal content during the SOPA protests last month?
I'm not saying that a proof that complex quantum computers can't exist is just around the corner... in particular, since simple ones have already been created, this strongly suggests that complex ones could reasonably exist as well. Although almost certainly any such proof would be far more likely to depend entirely on whatever level of confidence we have in our existing theories of the universe, rather than on the actual definitions of things. For example, if any proof should surface that the technique for simple ones does not actually scale (for example, it violates relativity, as one example), would be sufficient to show that complex quantum computers cannot actually exist (unless relativity is also wrong). Since relativity is assumed, a priori, to be true, because it is backed strongly by previous observations, and has not yet been disproven.
Can you establish even an iota of plausible evidence, that is not contradicted by any other criteria, that there could possibly exist any two integers such that the ratio between them is the square root of 3? The square root of 3, you may assert, is irrational, so of course such a number would not exist... but that is a circular proof unless you have already proven that the square root of 3 is irrational, which, interestingly enough, requires proving (by contradition) that no rational number exists which can possibly satisfy the criteria.
Of course you can proove something doesn't exist. You just need to have certain assumptions about its nature first, such that you can qualify, without any doubt, that properties which satisfy that nature cannot exist. For example, an early mathematical proof that no rational exists which satisfies the criteria of being the square root of 2 is a proof of the non-existence of something. The notion that one cannot ever prove something impossible is, itself, a fallacy of generalization.