Well... if SOPA had been around in 2005, most people would not know what Youtube is today, because it would have been shut down long before it became really popular, because a significant number of its users kept uploading infringing content to it. While how things actually went with Youtube was that copyright holders kept having to notify them to take infringing content down, and Youtube complied, according to the law, with SOPA, the entire site could have been blocked completely.
So, in a nutshell, nothing really innovative or new will be likely to ever happen again on the Internet... or at least not something that gets to the point of being an international phenomenon, because when enough people use it for piracy, it will be shut down, preventing it from ever actually achieving any significant notoriety in the US.
It's not like the general public are going to get a vote on this issue.... and by the time they have a chance to vote the people out of office that voted on this, it will be too late... SOPA will be in place and much harder to get rid of, even if new people are put in office.
You are wrong. People searched for those terms without autocomplete. Google identified that those terms were being searched for, and eventually put those terms in its autocomplete list. Google did not define those terms, nor did they create the association. It merely added arbitrary words to its autocomplete list that were searched often enough to impact other people's search queries.
Soon, I expect it will be illegal for any private individual to utilize the services of a foreign DNS. Blocking by IP address will probably start happening. Owing to the lack of availability of IPv4 address space, the practicality of places using different IP's to continue to allow connectivity will be impeded, so IP address blocking may enjoy limited success. Incentives for IPv6, where there is no lack of address space, will start to quickly rise among the pirate communities to get around this limitation, but I expect this will likely be perceived as a measure that is created to bypass SOPA, and so new laws will probably be formed that will limit IPv6's overall adoption rate.
I hope I'm wrong. I just have a really awful feeling I'm not.
"And communism was never tried, not in a large scale"
That's because real communism fails long before a situation can ever get to a "large scale". Communism does appear to work with small to modestly sized communities, but once the number of people grows beyond a certain size, communism starts to break down because of unavoidable human condition factors such as greed and laziness. Communism only works as long as there are enough people in it that are willing, for whatever reason, to work for each other and give to each other. As the number of people who may not share this ideal reaches a critical mass in any community, it quickly outweighs the rest of that community's ability to support itself, and the system falls apart. The general breaking point for communism appears to be when the group becomes large enough for people to not feel any personal obligation to the society as a whole, which, owing to size limits on the number of people that any one person can directly socialize with on any level, coupled with the fact that subgroups inevitably form where everybody knows everybody in the subgroup, and they mostly socialize only with eachother, in practice seems to be no more than several hundred people. Larger groups can have limited apparent success at implementing communism, but in practice, it is always shown that they cannot sustain themselves indefinitely, and the system invariably falls apart.
... that the average income of everyone excluding the top 20% is approximately $48,936, and unless you are in the top 20%, this is more in line with the salary that you can expect to see.
If you wanted to quit early, you could just not come in at all... although doing so without giving any suitable notice is considered rude, and will probably reflect poorly on how the employer thinks of you afterwards. Doing this may also constitute breach of contract, and as such you may be liable for damages that are stipulated by that contract. In the absence of any such explicit contract, and barring nations which condone or endorse slavery, an employee is always free to leave an employer at any time. They are not required to pay you for any time not worked, of course.
The page you link to describes what employees *ought* to do... not what they are legally required to do.
Quitting without notice may constitute breach of contract, depending on the job... but without the contract, you cannot legally be forced to continue to work for somebody against your will.
"Free speech" as a constitutionally protected right has absolutely nothing to do with vocalization. If you can communicate something meaningfully to somebody else, then regardless of the means by which you do it, then the something that is communicated is speech, and that speech is protected (the exact means that you might use to communicate the message may not be, however... if it happens to violate some already existing law).
In the UK, just cause is required to terminate any employee after their probationary period, and "looking for another job" is not considered just cause according to UK employment law.
Strong advocates of at-will employment might feel that such policies can saddle companies unnecessarily with incompetent workers. This is a non-issue, however, since poor performance *is* considered a perfectly just cause for termination, as long as the applicable paperwork has been done to confirm this is actually the case.
Even in the UK, you are entitled to leave your job anytime you wish as well. Anything else is slavery, which hasn't been recognized as legal in the UK for well over 400 years (in some parts, as much as 900 years).
So if my 6 year old grandson plays the game and shows a distinct penchant for flying poorly to anyone watching him IRL, will he be mistaken for a terrorist practicing crashing planes?
All of the fundamental restrictions of the DMCA, et al could exist, even without copyright involved... in the case of something like the DMCA, all that would be required is that the content publisher put a digital lock on the product. It wouldn't merely be against the law to break a digital lock on a copyrighted product, it would be against the law to break a digital lock on *ANY* product without permission from the distributor of that product. And you would have to break the law to acquire the tools necessary to break such a lock, which, unless you are skilled enough to manufacture them yourself, increases the likelihood that you might get caught. Acts like SOPA would be utilized to block *ANY* content that was deemed to threaten the integrity of the electronic infrastructure.
. Without copyright and the DMCA, those unskippable ads will be history before you can say "Elcomsoft".
What, praytell, would you copy them with? Right now we still have desktop computers... think they'll still be manufactured the same way they are today if copyright goes away? Think again.
no, that's where SOPA is leading us. That's the exact opposite of what would result from lack of copyright. That's what results from strong copyright enforcement. Because that's what it takes to enforce copyright.
content publishers are going to expect, and get, I'm afraid, all the legal protection they want... with or without copyright in place, because the production of new content is perceived as healthy for a developing culturally rich society, and the exclusivity that copyright currently offers is a significant incentive for people to publish in the first place. If this were not the case, a majority of works would simply be immediately put into public domain. Without copyright, other legally mandated measures would have to be taken.
The freedom that you describe in absence of copyright comes at a painfully high price... I described such a distopia in my comment above.
Freedom comes at a price of being responsible with that freedom... and that, ironically, means obeying certain restrictions. Otherwise you don't have freedom, you have anarchy... and only those with money and power would enjoy any real sense of freedom.
I think that the big problem is that people don't understand the inherent problems that so-called "non-commercial" copyright infringement brings to the very principles of copyright, and how such infringement actually harms society.
Copyright is supposed to be a time-limited exclusive right to decide who else may copy that work. There are explicit exemptions, such as fair use, but the very notion of 'exclusive' means that nobody else is doing it... so if you copy a copyrighted work without permission, you are encroaching on that exclusivity, and thereby weakening the worth of copyright for all copyright holders, since the promise of that exclusivity is getting compromised by the public. Copyright holders might then be inclined to resort to other means to protect their interests, such as DRM, which only serves to anger and alienate their customers... but other than that, the only exclusivity they could be offered at all is to just not publish and distribute in the first place.
The reason that exclusivity is important is that it provides an avenue for creating an incentive for people to publish their works. Without it, the only avenue that would exist is that if you published anything at all, your work would automatically be considered public domain. While there is no shortage of people who *do* place their works into public domain, the fact that a majority of people do not do this, even among people who intend for their work to be freely available and distributed, suggests that copyright is actually perceived of as valuable by most people who do produce content. And if copyright were eliminated entirely, there would only be a significant drop in the number of works produced per year, all that would be left is public domain content. If one looks at the current state of content that is actually copyright-free, however, one notices that there is a sharp contrast in the average quality between it and most copyrighted content. In a world without copyright, one would therefore have to work much harder to find the relatively few public domain works that actually had any merit and were worth obtaining in the first place.
Meanwhile, the former book publishers, no longer able to utilize their former guarantee of exclusivity (at least insomuch as with copyright it is a crime to violate that exclusivity for the duration of the copyright) as a means of producing a possible income from content, will probably have to stop printing books almost entirely. Practically all content offered by publishers would be digital... and more than likely laced with advertisements throughout... simply because the publishers would have no other means by which to secure their income. Electronic readers would likely be programatically designed to pause every 15 minutes or so, and display an ad to the reader, which the reader would be completely powerless to skip without aborting using the content entirely. The relatively low price point of such readers, as well as the lack of alternative commercial-free content would tend to cause the public, hungry for new content, to look past the limitations and simply consume such works eagerly. General purpose programmable computers would be prohibited from connecting to any public network without a special government granted license to do so, and working on free and open source software would likely be seen as a "terrorist activity", where the intent is to compromise the safety and security of the society's electronic infrastructure. The relatively few physical books that are printed would likely have to be either funded by a benefactor or else subsidized by some organization, and would therefore only tend to reflect or promote certain agendas. In the end, free speech would be sharply curtailed.
That distopia is a society without copyright. It is one that the general public which is indifferent to copyright is creating for themselves, and I fear that they will ultimately achieve it.
But of course, some might suggest that "non-commercial" copyright infring
Actually it does. First there was no copyright. The only thing stopping people from freely copying anything that they saw was the time and expense that was involved in making such copies entirely manually. Then the printing press was invented, which made it economically possible for anyone with a printing press to do wide scale copying of a work. The cost of a printing press was somewhat prohibitive already, but ultimately copyright came into being as a further means of ensuring that others would not copy somebody's work. In the 20th century, copying started getting much easier... the cost of buying a printing press alone was no longer a barrier to copying itself, and more people started choosing to disregard copyright, at their convenience. When works started becoming digital, the problem only skyrocketed. Content producers responded to this problem by making their works more difficult to copy. This had the side-effect of also making it more difficult to do legitimate things like back up the data, but there was little recourse. By the turn of the 21st century, new laws had been proposed and some had already been passed which made certain acts criminal. The laws will only become increasingly draconian as long as people keep disregarding them... and of course, the more draconian the laws become, the more people *DO* disregard them, because they are perceived of as unfair or wrong.
Well, I did begin my statement above with the condition of "assuming copyright is a good thing"... if one does not agree with the premise of copyright, for whatever reason, then the whole argument is moot.
I don't ever recall advocating long copyright terms either... I only suggest that if copyright is valuable to society, then infringing on it is bad for that same society. Lengthening copyright is almost certainly harmful to society as well, but I think that point #5 at http://www.ethicsscoreboard.com/rb_fallacies.html adequately addresses the notion of responding to one bad thing with another, and I personally share that position.
Given that copyright was, by your own words, created to get more people to create content for the public domain, one could reasonably conclude therefore that harming the value of copyright is also counterproductive to getting people to create content for the public domain as well.
Only if you stream the content without storing it or caching it. If you store it, you are making a local copy (a personal use copy, admittedly... although if the source copy was infringing, then there is a plausible argument that even a personal use copy made from that should be infringing also). But you are nitpicking... I was talking about online copyright infringement in general, and had not used the term 'downloading' once in my above comment.
Not quite... When you "steal" a movie online, you take away some of the copyright holder's exclusivity to determine who is allowed to actually make such copies in the first place. Since exclusivity, by definition, means that nobody else is doing it, you are permanently depriving the copyright holder of that right, which was supposed to be guaranteed to him by having a copyright in the first place. This effectively lessens the worth of copyright for *ALL* copyright holders, not just the the copyright holder on whose work you may have infringed on, and, assuming that copyright is valuable to society, would, by extension, be harmful to society as a whole.
Slashdot Mirror
Well... if SOPA had been around in 2005, most people would not know what Youtube is today, because it would have been shut down long before it became really popular, because a significant number of its users kept uploading infringing content to it. While how things actually went with Youtube was that copyright holders kept having to notify them to take infringing content down, and Youtube complied, according to the law, with SOPA, the entire site could have been blocked completely.
So, in a nutshell, nothing really innovative or new will be likely to ever happen again on the Internet... or at least not something that gets to the point of being an international phenomenon, because when enough people use it for piracy, it will be shut down, preventing it from ever actually achieving any significant notoriety in the US.
It's not like the general public are going to get a vote on this issue.... and by the time they have a chance to vote the people out of office that voted on this, it will be too late... SOPA will be in place and much harder to get rid of, even if new people are put in office.
You are wrong. People searched for those terms without autocomplete. Google identified that those terms were being searched for, and eventually put those terms in its autocomplete list. Google did not define those terms, nor did they create the association. It merely added arbitrary words to its autocomplete list that were searched often enough to impact other people's search queries.
Soon, I expect it will be illegal for any private individual to utilize the services of a foreign DNS. Blocking by IP address will probably start happening. Owing to the lack of availability of IPv4 address space, the practicality of places using different IP's to continue to allow connectivity will be impeded, so IP address blocking may enjoy limited success. Incentives for IPv6, where there is no lack of address space, will start to quickly rise among the pirate communities to get around this limitation, but I expect this will likely be perceived as a measure that is created to bypass SOPA, and so new laws will probably be formed that will limit IPv6's overall adoption rate.
I hope I'm wrong. I just have a really awful feeling I'm not.
That's because real communism fails long before a situation can ever get to a "large scale". Communism does appear to work with small to modestly sized communities, but once the number of people grows beyond a certain size, communism starts to break down because of unavoidable human condition factors such as greed and laziness. Communism only works as long as there are enough people in it that are willing, for whatever reason, to work for each other and give to each other. As the number of people who may not share this ideal reaches a critical mass in any community, it quickly outweighs the rest of that community's ability to support itself, and the system falls apart. The general breaking point for communism appears to be when the group becomes large enough for people to not feel any personal obligation to the society as a whole, which, owing to size limits on the number of people that any one person can directly socialize with on any level, coupled with the fact that subgroups inevitably form where everybody knows everybody in the subgroup, and they mostly socialize only with eachother, in practice seems to be no more than several hundred people. Larger groups can have limited apparent success at implementing communism, but in practice, it is always shown that they cannot sustain themselves indefinitely, and the system invariably falls apart.
... that the average income of everyone excluding the top 20% is approximately $48,936, and unless you are in the top 20%, this is more in line with the salary that you can expect to see.
And given its length, I was bound to find one thing that I agreed with.
I personally happen to support the notion of the death penalty as well for a limited number of types of crimes.
Pretty much everything else in that list I either disagree with or had not previously formed any position.
For what it's worth, I didn't vote Conservative.
If you wanted to quit early, you could just not come in at all... although doing so without giving any suitable notice is considered rude, and will probably reflect poorly on how the employer thinks of you afterwards. Doing this may also constitute breach of contract, and as such you may be liable for damages that are stipulated by that contract. In the absence of any such explicit contract, and barring nations which condone or endorse slavery, an employee is always free to leave an employer at any time. They are not required to pay you for any time not worked, of course.
The page you link to describes what employees *ought* to do... not what they are legally required to do.
Quitting without notice may constitute breach of contract, depending on the job... but without the contract, you cannot legally be forced to continue to work for somebody against your will.
Not that I doubt it's fake, but what movie was this part of a trailer for? The article at your link did not say.
"Free speech" as a constitutionally protected right has absolutely nothing to do with vocalization. If you can communicate something meaningfully to somebody else, then regardless of the means by which you do it, then the something that is communicated is speech, and that speech is protected (the exact means that you might use to communicate the message may not be, however... if it happens to violate some already existing law).
Strong advocates of at-will employment might feel that such policies can saddle companies unnecessarily with incompetent workers. This is a non-issue, however, since poor performance *is* considered a perfectly just cause for termination, as long as the applicable paperwork has been done to confirm this is actually the case.
Even in the UK, you are entitled to leave your job anytime you wish as well. Anything else is slavery, which hasn't been recognized as legal in the UK for well over 400 years (in some parts, as much as 900 years).
So if my 6 year old grandson plays the game and shows a distinct penchant for flying poorly to anyone watching him IRL, will he be mistaken for a terrorist practicing crashing planes?
All of the fundamental restrictions of the DMCA, et al could exist, even without copyright involved... in the case of something like the DMCA, all that would be required is that the content publisher put a digital lock on the product. It wouldn't merely be against the law to break a digital lock on a copyrighted product, it would be against the law to break a digital lock on *ANY* product without permission from the distributor of that product. And you would have to break the law to acquire the tools necessary to break such a lock, which, unless you are skilled enough to manufacture them yourself, increases the likelihood that you might get caught. Acts like SOPA would be utilized to block *ANY* content that was deemed to threaten the integrity of the electronic infrastructure.
What, praytell, would you copy them with? Right now we still have desktop computers... think they'll still be manufactured the same way they are today if copyright goes away? Think again.
content publishers are going to expect, and get, I'm afraid, all the legal protection they want... with or without copyright in place, because the production of new content is perceived as healthy for a developing culturally rich society, and the exclusivity that copyright currently offers is a significant incentive for people to publish in the first place. If this were not the case, a majority of works would simply be immediately put into public domain. Without copyright, other legally mandated measures would have to be taken.
Freedom comes at a price of being responsible with that freedom... and that, ironically, means obeying certain restrictions. Otherwise you don't have freedom, you have anarchy... and only those with money and power would enjoy any real sense of freedom.
I think that the big problem is that people don't understand the inherent problems that so-called "non-commercial" copyright infringement brings to the very principles of copyright, and how such infringement actually harms society.
Copyright is supposed to be a time-limited exclusive right to decide who else may copy that work. There are explicit exemptions, such as fair use, but the very notion of 'exclusive' means that nobody else is doing it... so if you copy a copyrighted work without permission, you are encroaching on that exclusivity, and thereby weakening the worth of copyright for all copyright holders, since the promise of that exclusivity is getting compromised by the public. Copyright holders might then be inclined to resort to other means to protect their interests, such as DRM, which only serves to anger and alienate their customers... but other than that, the only exclusivity they could be offered at all is to just not publish and distribute in the first place.
The reason that exclusivity is important is that it provides an avenue for creating an incentive for people to publish their works. Without it, the only avenue that would exist is that if you published anything at all, your work would automatically be considered public domain. While there is no shortage of people who *do* place their works into public domain, the fact that a majority of people do not do this, even among people who intend for their work to be freely available and distributed, suggests that copyright is actually perceived of as valuable by most people who do produce content. And if copyright were eliminated entirely, there would only be a significant drop in the number of works produced per year, all that would be left is public domain content. If one looks at the current state of content that is actually copyright-free, however, one notices that there is a sharp contrast in the average quality between it and most copyrighted content. In a world without copyright, one would therefore have to work much harder to find the relatively few public domain works that actually had any merit and were worth obtaining in the first place.
Meanwhile, the former book publishers, no longer able to utilize their former guarantee of exclusivity (at least insomuch as with copyright it is a crime to violate that exclusivity for the duration of the copyright) as a means of producing a possible income from content, will probably have to stop printing books almost entirely. Practically all content offered by publishers would be digital... and more than likely laced with advertisements throughout... simply because the publishers would have no other means by which to secure their income. Electronic readers would likely be programatically designed to pause every 15 minutes or so, and display an ad to the reader, which the reader would be completely powerless to skip without aborting using the content entirely. The relatively low price point of such readers, as well as the lack of alternative commercial-free content would tend to cause the public, hungry for new content, to look past the limitations and simply consume such works eagerly. General purpose programmable computers would be prohibited from connecting to any public network without a special government granted license to do so, and working on free and open source software would likely be seen as a "terrorist activity", where the intent is to compromise the safety and security of the society's electronic infrastructure. The relatively few physical books that are printed would likely have to be either funded by a benefactor or else subsidized by some organization, and would therefore only tend to reflect or promote certain agendas. In the end, free speech would be sharply curtailed.
That distopia is a society without copyright. It is one that the general public which is indifferent to copyright is creating for themselves, and I fear that they will ultimately achieve it.
But of course, some might suggest that "non-commercial" copyright infring
Actually it does. First there was no copyright. The only thing stopping people from freely copying anything that they saw was the time and expense that was involved in making such copies entirely manually. Then the printing press was invented, which made it economically possible for anyone with a printing press to do wide scale copying of a work. The cost of a printing press was somewhat prohibitive already, but ultimately copyright came into being as a further means of ensuring that others would not copy somebody's work. In the 20th century, copying started getting much easier... the cost of buying a printing press alone was no longer a barrier to copying itself, and more people started choosing to disregard copyright, at their convenience. When works started becoming digital, the problem only skyrocketed. Content producers responded to this problem by making their works more difficult to copy. This had the side-effect of also making it more difficult to do legitimate things like back up the data, but there was little recourse. By the turn of the 21st century, new laws had been proposed and some had already been passed which made certain acts criminal. The laws will only become increasingly draconian as long as people keep disregarding them... and of course, the more draconian the laws become, the more people *DO* disregard them, because they are perceived of as unfair or wrong.
Well, I did begin my statement above with the condition of "assuming copyright is a good thing"... if one does not agree with the premise of copyright, for whatever reason, then the whole argument is moot.
I don't ever recall advocating long copyright terms either... I only suggest that if copyright is valuable to society, then infringing on it is bad for that same society. Lengthening copyright is almost certainly harmful to society as well, but I think that point #5 at http://www.ethicsscoreboard.com/rb_fallacies.html adequately addresses the notion of responding to one bad thing with another, and I personally share that position.
Given that copyright was, by your own words, created to get more people to create content for the public domain, one could reasonably conclude therefore that harming the value of copyright is also counterproductive to getting people to create content for the public domain as well.
Only if you stream the content without storing it or caching it. If you store it, you are making a local copy (a personal use copy, admittedly... although if the source copy was infringing, then there is a plausible argument that even a personal use copy made from that should be infringing also). But you are nitpicking... I was talking about online copyright infringement in general, and had not used the term 'downloading' once in my above comment.
Not quite... When you "steal" a movie online, you take away some of the copyright holder's exclusivity to determine who is allowed to actually make such copies in the first place. Since exclusivity, by definition, means that nobody else is doing it, you are permanently depriving the copyright holder of that right, which was supposed to be guaranteed to him by having a copyright in the first place. This effectively lessens the worth of copyright for *ALL* copyright holders, not just the the copyright holder on whose work you may have infringed on, and, assuming that copyright is valuable to society, would, by extension, be harmful to society as a whole.