he copied the place, composition, color schema, subject matter
No, he didn't copy any of these - he imitated them. The two pictures are clearly not identical copies, and neither one of them has what I would subjectively call originality or artistic merit.
does Rolex have the right to stop vendors selling genuine Romex watches?
Can't say I'm familiar with the Romex brand per se. If it is just a good imitation - it looks pretty much like a Rolex, but is not sold so as to fool people into thinking they have actually bought a Rolex - then sure, good for them making a cheaper alternative to an expensive toy. Otoh if Romex markets their watches in such a way that a reasonable person would believe he was buying a Rolex, when in fact he got a Romex, then they are committing fraud.
Afaik the defendant in this case was not selling copies of his photograph under the pretense they were the work of the plaintiff. He was rather using his own photograph for his own business purposes.
i'm a musician and am about to sink a couple of grand into getting my album recorded,
Do you really think it's wise to invest your hard-earned money into a moribund, socially regressive business model?
do you think someone ought to be able to change a couple of words in the chorus of one of my songs and call it his own?
Absolutely! Now if he recorded his own version of the song you wrote, and tried to sell it by misrepresenting it as a recording of you singing, then he would be a fraudster. So long has he identifies it as his own work, good for him.
You don't get to steal something just because you don't like the price you know,
Whoa, whoa, whoa... I recall no mention of burglary in TFA. Where's this theft you're talking about? Infringing a monopoly on Idea Property is not even similar to theft, everyone knows that. Now if the defendant had broken into the plaintiff's studio and physically stolen his negatives/disks/etc then this would be an completely different case.
there are literally thousands of CC and public domain pictures he could have helped himself to but that wasn't good enough, he wanted THAT picture and when he couldn't get it for nothing he just took it, no different than some record company taking my album and sticking a new label on it and selling it.
Except it's a totally different photograph, that happens to be unoriginal and hackneyed in a similar way to the first photo.
So let's say someone asks to buy a copy of my super deluxe "hello world" app. I quote him $1,000,000/yr license fee. Finding my price excessive, he writes it himself. If I were English could I sue him now?
Nah - just don't make any art. That's a much better solution, and will be certain to keep the lawyers from attacking you. Remember, your creativity isn't worth as much as the trademark holder's creativity.
That entire combination of so many visual and behavioral similarities is clearly a design copy.
They're clearly very similar; but they're also clearly not exact copies. Toshiba isn't trying to fool anyone into thinking they have purchased an Apple product - they're just slavishly imitating a popular design. Immitation != copy.
Those are Toshiba devices, not iOS devices. You literally can't tell the difference from the picture.
It's not the greatest picture. But I can still tell they're not Apple devices just by looking at them.
If they create something that great, then they deserve the rewards from it for a limited period of time.
What if they create something that sucks dog balls - do they still deserve a reward? If so, how much in proportion to the "great" work? I just "created" an artistic recording of myself farting into my cellphone - how much reward do I deserve? Where can I apply to be the guy who decides - officially! - what's awesome and what blows?
People do, generally, follow copyright. Millions of people buy books or DVDs or music or software.
People do still buy (a few) books. However in this case people are mostly paying for a rather durable and ergonomic storage medium. Note how books of similar physical size tend to be priced similarly, regardless of their content.
But who do you know who still buys DVDs? I know no one. There are a few who have large legacy collections left over from the Bad Old Days before the net universalized access to cultural data - but these collections are physically unwieldy and often seen as burdensome. Lotta people are using Netflix instant or similar services offered by cable carriers. This is seen less as "renting movies", more as "renting small box that magically pops any movie I want onto HD teevee".
Some affluent people still purchase copies of music data from iTunes etc, for sake of convenience or guilt. There's likewise a small but stable secondary market in physical media containing music data too obscure to be readily downloaded. Not sure who buys radio pop music tracks anymore. Certainly the aisles of the few remaining mass market record stores are empty of customers. Maybe a lotta rich+dumb baby boomers who can't figure out p2p still downloading the Beatles & similar crap from iTunes.
Companies and people using software for their profession still buy licenses. Not aware of anyone who does that for their home computers. We who live in the Free world just use apt-get et al., and want not for abundance. Our Windows-encumbered brethren tend to have a godawful mess of factory-installed crapware, pirated warez, and spy/malware on their home systems. Not a paid MS Word in sight...
Those that don't often give reasons like "I wanted to try it before buying it" or "It's not available for sale [where I live]/[in a format I want]" or "I can't afford it anyway", suggesting that they would follow the laws given the right circumstances.
Nah - it suggests you're guilt tripping them.
People generally understand that it's virtuous and mutually beneficial to share cultural data, regardless what the law says. The actions of countless millions speak to this. The idea monopoly companies have spent big bucks on PR campaigns to make people feel guilty for accessing cultural data without permission. How long you think they can keep that up before people get numb? It takes an awful lot of ad time to persuade people that petty oppression is in the public interest.
Things like earthquakes, power blackouts, network outages, etc do happen. It's a lot harder to geographically distribute one big mainframe than 20 commodity crapboxes.
Interesting point - but the numbers don't work out for me. Base price to order a new Ford Mustang is $22k. On Autotrader there are zero Ferraris available at or below that price within 100mi of San Francisco. Local Craigslist has only one available below that price - a 1984 Ferrari 400i. Top speed of that car is only 140mph. There's also a 1975 Dino 308 GT4 for around $24k (competitive with a realistically equipped Mustang), but it's top speed of 154mph falls just slightly short of the mark.
FWIW, it might not look so bad when applying for your next position. Quitting one's job rather than obeying an unethical order is a sign of great personal integrity. Some people value working with ethical colleagues, and thus would view that quite favorably.
Ah, the good old "omg jobz!!1!!" argument. It's ever so useful - problem is, it fails to distinguish between jobs that are useful to society, and those that are harmful. Or maybe you think spam is good for society? Anyways, see below how your argument can be applied to another fine industry:
The impact of preventing toxic sludge from being dumped in the river would be fair greater than most people here seem to think. Think of all the "toxic sludge" that gets dumped, ever thought about how many people are employed concocting and dumping that stuff? Or airborne arsenic? Or radiological waste? Or untreated sewage?
Or how many jobs are kept around because of toxic sludge dumping?
I'd bet you the cost of letting that factory keep on dumping it's sludge is less than the tax revenue it enables businesses to bring in.
Probably 90% by weight of the mail I receive through USPS is straight-to-the-recycle spam. It's a really phenomenal waste of trees, oil, and labor. I suspect the USPS would have a lot more public support if they didn't enable such wanton and annoying waste of resources.
Thai people outside of the country, who are not subject to the laws, also adore him.
My local Thai restaurant took down their portrait of the king around the time the army overthrew the hugely popular elected prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra. Maybe people start to love the monarchy just a little bit less when the threat of police violence no longer forces them to love it.
Do you reserve the right to judge which of these limits are reasonable and which ones aren't?
Abso-fuckin-lutely.
All lese majeste laws are an offensive to the dignity of free people. When a man is not free to criticize his government, he is unquestionably a subject not a citizen. Some libel, defamation, slander, etc laws are overreaching, consequently harmful to public discourse, and perhaps outdated. Even so, imho they are not categorically, intrinsically incompatible with free democratic citizenship. Lese majeste is.
We have two political parties because our election system -- with its winner-take-all, no run-off rules -- naturally gravitates towards a two party system.
And also because bigmedia refuses to give substantive coverage to candidates who do no represent one or the other face of the Establishment Party.
We have a free press. Just because you don't like what some branches of the press report doesn't mean they aren't free.
We have some press freedom. However you are fooling yourself if you think the bigmedia are not heavily censored.
And you're claiming that books and music are censored?
I have heard all sorts of censored version of rap songs. Some books are too. I first became aware of pervasive American censorship back as a high school kid, when I ended up with two copies of Moby Dick. One of them had been censored to make Melville's famous description of his captain - "moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face" - less offensive to philistine religious zealots. You may argue, and I will concede, that's (probably) wasn't government censorship - but it's censorship all the same. Also consider the not-super-recent case of controversial psychologist WIlhelm Reich, whose books were (literally) burned, and who died while imprisoned by the US government for his writings.
My impressions of military sentiment are similarly second-hand, but with soldiers who served in the 2000s. Some I spoke with only faced the threat of being deployed; while others saw active combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. These folks I had a pretty uniformly dim view of both wars, and of the governmental leadership that got us into those quagmires.
Yes, they are professional soldiers, and quite respectful of authority. It's totally unrealistic to suppose they would ever refuse a lawful order to attack a foreign country, no matter how politically stupid such an attack might be. Thank goodness, too - whatever one's politics, it's a Very Good Thing(tm) to have a military that is firmly under civilian control.
But if you imagine a much more extreme (and one must hope unlikely) future situation, where the military is given an unconstitutional order like "attack New York City" - then I think the outcome would be far less certain.
The rank and file of the military - i.e. the guys actually carrying guns - are also part of the 99%. While it's a safe bet they are loyal to the idea of America, it's rather less safe to assume they are unblinkingly loyal to the oligarchy.
Are you really clueless enough to believe it matters which Establishment Party presidential candidate you choose? Have you not noticed that black Bushbama's anti-freedom, pro-elite record is every bit as impressive as that of white Bushbama?
they still rubber-stamped the PATRIOT Act and only made TSA more heinous.
And if they hadn't the Republicans would have been running wall-to-wall commercials about how they were leaving the US vulnerable to attack. Fox News would have made it headline for weeks.
Yup, I can picture the scene in Democrat party headquarters: "Thank god, at last we can repeal the notoriously tyrannical PATRIOT Act. But wait - oh noez! Our political opponents are going to say bad things about us! We can't let that happen - it seems we have no choice but to vote for tyranny."
No, The problem is that software is not in the same league as human rights and freedoms.
Not yet.
Software is different from many other technologies, because it augments the mind rather than the body. The reasoning capacity of the typical modern person (of even modest education) is hugely enhanced by the use of complex software tools. Imagine trying to make business (or governmental) decisions without access to an internet search engine, spreadsheets, databases, modeling software, etc. You would be at a huge disadvantage compared to an equally intelligent person possessing those tools.
As more and more powerful software tools come into popular use, humanity's ability to make decisions about things like human rights, traditional freedoms, war, economic policy, business planning, etc will become increasingly dependent on them. Those who control the software, in a sense control others' ability to reason effectively. That's why software freedom is important - because it will in turn effect so many other areas of human life.
Slashdot Mirror
27 Feb 1933 : Germany :: 11 Sep 2011 : USA
If Obama can deliver better education, health care, and redistribute wealth
Optimism springs eternal...
he copied the place, composition, color schema, subject matter
No, he didn't copy any of these - he imitated them. The two pictures are clearly not identical copies, and neither one of them has what I would subjectively call originality or artistic merit.
does Rolex have the right to stop vendors selling genuine Romex watches?
Can't say I'm familiar with the Romex brand per se. If it is just a good imitation - it looks pretty much like a Rolex, but is not sold so as to fool people into thinking they have actually bought a Rolex - then sure, good for them making a cheaper alternative to an expensive toy. Otoh if Romex markets their watches in such a way that a reasonable person would believe he was buying a Rolex, when in fact he got a Romex, then they are committing fraud.
Afaik the defendant in this case was not selling copies of his photograph under the pretense they were the work of the plaintiff. He was rather using his own photograph for his own business purposes.
i'm a musician and am about to sink a couple of grand into getting my album recorded,
Do you really think it's wise to invest your hard-earned money into a moribund, socially regressive business model?
do you think someone ought to be able to change a couple of words in the chorus of one of my songs and call it his own?
Absolutely! Now if he recorded his own version of the song you wrote, and tried to sell it by misrepresenting it as a recording of you singing, then he would be a fraudster. So long has he identifies it as his own work, good for him.
You don't get to steal something just because you don't like the price you know,
Whoa, whoa, whoa... I recall no mention of burglary in TFA. Where's this theft you're talking about? Infringing a monopoly on Idea Property is not even similar to theft, everyone knows that. Now if the defendant had broken into the plaintiff's studio and physically stolen his negatives/disks/etc then this would be an completely different case.
there are literally thousands of CC and public domain pictures he could have helped himself to but that wasn't good enough, he wanted THAT picture and when he couldn't get it for nothing he just took it, no different than some record company taking my album and sticking a new label on it and selling it.
Except it's a totally different photograph, that happens to be unoriginal and hackneyed in a similar way to the first photo.
So let's say someone asks to buy a copy of my super deluxe "hello world" app. I quote him $1,000,000/yr license fee. Finding my price excessive, he writes it himself. If I were English could I sue him now?
Nah - just don't make any art. That's a much better solution, and will be certain to keep the lawyers from attacking you. Remember, your creativity isn't worth as much as the trademark holder's creativity.
That entire combination of so many visual and behavioral similarities is clearly a design copy.
They're clearly very similar; but they're also clearly not exact copies. Toshiba isn't trying to fool anyone into thinking they have purchased an Apple product - they're just slavishly imitating a popular design. Immitation != copy.
Those are Toshiba devices, not iOS devices. You literally can't tell the difference from the picture.
It's not the greatest picture. But I can still tell they're not Apple devices just by looking at them.
If they create something that great, then they deserve the rewards from it for a limited period of time.
What if they create something that sucks dog balls - do they still deserve a reward? If so, how much in proportion to the "great" work? I just "created" an artistic recording of myself farting into my cellphone - how much reward do I deserve? Where can I apply to be the guy who decides - officially! - what's awesome and what blows?
People do, generally, follow copyright. Millions of people buy books or DVDs or music or software.
People do still buy (a few) books. However in this case people are mostly paying for a rather durable and ergonomic storage medium. Note how books of similar physical size tend to be priced similarly, regardless of their content.
But who do you know who still buys DVDs? I know no one. There are a few who have large legacy collections left over from the Bad Old Days before the net universalized access to cultural data - but these collections are physically unwieldy and often seen as burdensome. Lotta people are using Netflix instant or similar services offered by cable carriers. This is seen less as "renting movies", more as "renting small box that magically pops any movie I want onto HD teevee".
Some affluent people still purchase copies of music data from iTunes etc, for sake of convenience or guilt. There's likewise a small but stable secondary market in physical media containing music data too obscure to be readily downloaded. Not sure who buys radio pop music tracks anymore. Certainly the aisles of the few remaining mass market record stores are empty of customers. Maybe a lotta rich+dumb baby boomers who can't figure out p2p still downloading the Beatles & similar crap from iTunes.
Companies and people using software for their profession still buy licenses. Not aware of anyone who does that for their home computers. We who live in the Free world just use apt-get et al., and want not for abundance. Our Windows-encumbered brethren tend to have a godawful mess of factory-installed crapware, pirated warez, and spy/malware on their home systems. Not a paid MS Word in sight...
Those that don't often give reasons like "I wanted to try it before buying it" or "It's not available for sale [where I live]/[in a format I want]" or "I can't afford it anyway", suggesting that they would follow the laws given the right circumstances.
Nah - it suggests you're guilt tripping them.
People generally understand that it's virtuous and mutually beneficial to share cultural data, regardless what the law says. The actions of countless millions speak to this. The idea monopoly companies have spent big bucks on PR campaigns to make people feel guilty for accessing cultural data without permission. How long you think they can keep that up before people get numb? It takes an awful lot of ad time to persuade people that petty oppression is in the public interest.
Guess they'd probably have to run the robot using the controllers it came with, rather than try to control it with random future technology. Derp!
(And yeah, good idea to keep some spare parts off-site, etc...)
Things like earthquakes, power blackouts, network outages, etc do happen. It's a lot harder to geographically distribute one big mainframe than 20 commodity crapboxes.
Interesting point - but the numbers don't work out for me. Base price to order a new Ford Mustang is $22k. On Autotrader there are zero Ferraris available at or below that price within 100mi of San Francisco. Local Craigslist has only one available below that price - a 1984 Ferrari 400i. Top speed of that car is only 140mph. There's also a 1975 Dino 308 GT4 for around $24k (competitive with a realistically equipped Mustang), but it's top speed of 154mph falls just slightly short of the mark.
$2,500/notice * 100,000 notices = $250,000,000. That might be worth the time...
Also, eating factory farmed meat in general is killing us and destroying our environment:
True. But I don't think cows wandering free on thousands of acres of ranch land really count as "factory farmed".
FWIW, it might not look so bad when applying for your next position. Quitting one's job rather than obeying an unethical order is a sign of great personal integrity. Some people value working with ethical colleagues, and thus would view that quite favorably.
Ah, the good old "omg jobz!!1!!" argument. It's ever so useful - problem is, it fails to distinguish between jobs that are useful to society, and those that are harmful. Or maybe you think spam is good for society? Anyways, see below how your argument can be applied to another fine industry:
The impact of preventing toxic sludge from being dumped in the river would be fair greater than most people here seem to think. Think of all the "toxic sludge" that gets dumped, ever thought about how many people are employed concocting and dumping that stuff? Or airborne arsenic? Or radiological waste? Or untreated sewage?
Or how many jobs are kept around because of toxic sludge dumping?
I'd bet you the cost of letting that factory keep on dumping it's sludge is less than the tax revenue it enables businesses to bring in.
Probably 90% by weight of the mail I receive through USPS is straight-to-the-recycle spam. It's a really phenomenal waste of trees, oil, and labor. I suspect the USPS would have a lot more public support if they didn't enable such wanton and annoying waste of resources.
The US has changed which parties the "two parties" are a number of times. Look it up!
Afaik, there has been no change in the two faces of the Establishment Party since the dawning of the mass media age (~1920s).
Thai people outside of the country, who are not subject to the laws, also adore him.
My local Thai restaurant took down their portrait of the king around the time the army overthrew the hugely popular elected prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra. Maybe people start to love the monarchy just a little bit less when the threat of police violence no longer forces them to love it.
Do you reserve the right to judge which of these limits are reasonable and which ones aren't?
Abso-fuckin-lutely.
All lese majeste laws are an offensive to the dignity of free people. When a man is not free to criticize his government, he is unquestionably a subject not a citizen. Some libel, defamation, slander, etc laws are overreaching, consequently harmful to public discourse, and perhaps outdated. Even so, imho they are not categorically, intrinsically incompatible with free democratic citizenship. Lese majeste is.
We have two political parties because our election system -- with its winner-take-all, no run-off rules -- naturally gravitates towards a two party system.
And also because bigmedia refuses to give substantive coverage to candidates who do no represent one or the other face of the Establishment Party.
We have a free press. Just because you don't like what some branches of the press report doesn't mean they aren't free.
We have some press freedom. However you are fooling yourself if you think the bigmedia are not heavily censored.
And you're claiming that books and music are censored?
I have heard all sorts of censored version of rap songs. Some books are too. I first became aware of pervasive American censorship back as a high school kid, when I ended up with two copies of Moby Dick. One of them had been censored to make Melville's famous description of his captain - "moody stricken Ahab stood before them with a crucifixion in his face" - less offensive to philistine religious zealots. You may argue, and I will concede, that's (probably) wasn't government censorship - but it's censorship all the same. Also consider the not-super-recent case of controversial psychologist WIlhelm Reich, whose books were (literally) burned, and who died while imprisoned by the US government for his writings.
Have you even been to America
Born, reared, and still a citizen. Mofo.
My impressions of military sentiment are similarly second-hand, but with soldiers who served in the 2000s. Some I spoke with only faced the threat of being deployed; while others saw active combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. These folks I had a pretty uniformly dim view of both wars, and of the governmental leadership that got us into those quagmires.
Yes, they are professional soldiers, and quite respectful of authority. It's totally unrealistic to suppose they would ever refuse a lawful order to attack a foreign country, no matter how politically stupid such an attack might be. Thank goodness, too - whatever one's politics, it's a Very Good Thing(tm) to have a military that is firmly under civilian control.
But if you imagine a much more extreme (and one must hope unlikely) future situation, where the military is given an unconstitutional order like "attack New York City" - then I think the outcome would be far less certain.
You may want to check out this video, for one Iraq vet's take on the NYPD's recent attack on Occupy Wall St: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dY9-ARvX1VM
The rank and file of the military - i.e. the guys actually carrying guns - are also part of the 99%. While it's a safe bet they are loyal to the idea of America, it's rather less safe to assume they are unblinkingly loyal to the oligarchy.
Are you really clueless enough to believe it matters which Establishment Party presidential candidate you choose? Have you not noticed that black Bushbama's anti-freedom, pro-elite record is every bit as impressive as that of white Bushbama?
they still rubber-stamped the PATRIOT Act and only made TSA more heinous.
And if they hadn't the Republicans would have been running wall-to-wall commercials about how they were leaving the US vulnerable to attack. Fox News would have made it headline for weeks.
Yup, I can picture the scene in Democrat party headquarters: "Thank god, at last we can repeal the notoriously tyrannical PATRIOT Act. But wait - oh noez! Our political opponents are going to say bad things about us! We can't let that happen - it seems we have no choice but to vote for tyranny."
No, The problem is that software is not in the same league as human rights and freedoms.
Not yet.
Software is different from many other technologies, because it augments the mind rather than the body. The reasoning capacity of the typical modern person (of even modest education) is hugely enhanced by the use of complex software tools. Imagine trying to make business (or governmental) decisions without access to an internet search engine, spreadsheets, databases, modeling software, etc. You would be at a huge disadvantage compared to an equally intelligent person possessing those tools.
As more and more powerful software tools come into popular use, humanity's ability to make decisions about things like human rights, traditional freedoms, war, economic policy, business planning, etc will become increasingly dependent on them. Those who control the software, in a sense control others' ability to reason effectively. That's why software freedom is important - because it will in turn effect so many other areas of human life.