Not liking them doesn't give you the right to steal from them.
Luckily, that's not what IIS was doing. Of course, not liking the policies of the RIAA doesn't give us the right to infringe their copyrights, which does seem to have been going on. So IIS loses this one on merits.
But "infringement" is not "theft" because (in a sane, logical world) intellectual output is not "property". IIS has taken nothing from the RIAA or its members. What IIS did was, of course, violate an exclusive right given to the RIAA by the Constitution through the much-mangled Copyright Act. This is not the same thing as "theft"... any more than illegally preventing someone's access to his/her place of work would be "murder".
There is nothing to do with courts or police having to do with this situation. This was an out of court settlement. IIS paid the fine because they agreed to not because they were ordered to.
I see. The threat of a long costly litigation, with a decent chance of losing and having to pay even more exorbiant court-ordered fines -- a threat backed up by the judicial power of the United States -- had absolutely nothing to do with IIS' decision to settle? Ah, the scales fell from their eyes; they saw the error of their ways; and they gratefully shelled out $1M as a voluntary penace along with the admonition to go and sin no more? All on their own, in a conversion experience that might as well have happened on the road to Damascus?
Just how is the weather on your planet, anyway?
If the courts were not enthusiastically subscribing to the RIAA's view of reality, then the RIAA would not have the giant bludgeon they currently wield. Coypright infringement is a matter of law; it is settled in the courts, ultimately; and any out-of-court settlement certainly derives from the potential mediation of the courts. The legal climate is the prime mover here, too, even if the formal process isn't followed.
Can you store your shirt on a server and make identical, perfect copies of it?
Which is why, of course, it is absurd to call intellectual output "property". Of course, originally it wasn't considered "property" -- that is why the Framers saw fit to put in a specific Copyright Clause in the first place. Since the sanctity of (actual) property was already well-established, if intellectual output had been property, they wouldn't have needed a separate clause to protect it. (A major premise of constitutional law is the economy of words.)
So, I agree that the "antiquated" laws are not the problem. It's the newfangled ones that are mucking us up... as was so often the case, the Framers -- if you study their thinking as well as the document -- got it right.
I think if IIS is going to pay the fine, then they should hook up some huge loudspeakers to the outside of their building, and crank it up to concert level. Then they will be giving a public performance
Heaven help me for being even marginally on the same side as the RIAA, but this suggestion is wrong-headed. IIS paid a fine, not a license fee. They shelled out because they were caught infringing copyright and are being punished for it. They did not secure the right to play in concert.
Or do you think paying a traffic ticket gives you the "right" to speed?
"There is a risk of completely demystifying the [filmmaking] process," producer Bouzereau says, "which is why it [DVD production] needs to be controlled by the filmmaker."
Aah, the usual argument from an elite that feels the ground slipping out from under it. (Believe me, I don't despise elites... just ones that can't provide enough extra value to maintain their survival). "Demystification" is a tired rallying cry used by people defending the status quo... It boils down to, "I can't tell you why I am an expert and you are an uninformed boob, but it's just so. Now listen to me!"
Again, we see that a major concern of the Content Cartel is not preventing illegitimate copying or even maximizing profit. It's about maintaining control. It boggles my mind that in a culture that purports to embrace individuality and democracy in politics, we suffer the arrogance of people who despise that impulse in art. If art is about universal human truths, maybe actual humans should have a say.
Coppola points out the impetus behind things like CSS and the proposed CBDTPA:
"Once computers become married with film, the form becomes promiscuous," Coppola says, "and that can bring about new ways of making movies that the studios can't control."
'Cause as my man Cosmo said, "It's about who controls the information... what we see and think".
Those developments, and video on demand in particular, had the potential of endangering the lucrative retail home video market in much the same way that the free downloading of songs eventually hurt the music business.
You mean, by empowering end users and thus driving further sales of things they would otherwise not buy? Oh, yeah, I guess it's true. Exactly the same way the VCR "killed" Hollywood.
It disturbs me to see such a misreading of the actual trends (hmmm: Napster peaks, CD sales soars; Napster shut down, CD sales contract) slipped so quietly into an article about something else.
That's ghastly! It's like having a wall of Mona Lisas and passing out sharpies to all of the museum-goers.
No, it's like printing many copies of the Mona Lisa and selling them to people who might have Sharpies at home and who might be inclined to draw on their copies.
I'm not (just) being pedantic here. The one original "true" Mona Lisa remains safely in the Louvre, available to all for adulation. Yet the viewer also gets a chance to make a statement. Since the great piece of art is not defaced, I don't see how it is threatened. And of course, maybe, just maybe, new art can be created.
Here's a different analogy: This is like handing out copies of a story and Bic ballpoints to people. They get to go edit the story, modify its order, change its dialog. Horrors of horrors! All that you get from that kind of mucking is... Hamlet. To quote one of many sources,
Shakespeare's Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark is based on a 12th century tale by Saxo Grammaticus... the missing link between Saxo and Shakespeare may be an earlier play about Hamlet (called by scholars the Ur-Hamlet), which may or may not have been written by the Ur-Revenger himself, Thomas Kyd, based in turn on François de Belleforest's Histoires tragiques (1570), a free translation of Saxo.
In other words, since a story can be easily copied and modified, the public domain is rich and future writers can build upon and reinterpret earlier ones. Often, the result is transitory garbage. But sometimes it is Shakespeare. Or West Side Story. I don't see the overriding merit of the artist's vision. Saxo's Hamlet has faded to obscurity, dwarfed by Shakespeare's. On the other hand, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet -- itself drawn from earlier sources -- gave rise to West Side Story. WSS is extremely popular (ask any high school drama department) yet Shakepeare's is still performed. I guess I see more value in a free market in artistic ideas, much as I do in political ideas. The truly significant and important will survive by dint of being truly important and significant, not by decree of a self-proclaimed critical expert class.
ObPoliticalRant: And that's why recent and proposed copyright law -- giving unprecedented "access control" to copyright holders -- is a disaster of the first magnitude for the arts and for science. The partitioning of the public domain into private little plots threatens our intellectual future and makes a mockery of copyright law as a means "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" (Article I Section 8 of the US Constitution).
As audiences became acclimated to music videos' jump-cutting and nonlinear storytelling techniques, they were able to absorb information more rapidly and in different ways, allowing filmmakers to short-cut exposition and action without necessarily sacrificing clarity.
I suppose. Or maybe audiences just got desensitized to mishmash logic and gaping plot holes, because their attention spans were shrunken past the Schwarschild radius... I happen to believe that the influence of music video directors on mainstream media has been a disaster that's consigned nearly a whole generation of films to the dustbin of failed art.
And don't even get me started about the influence of advertisement directors....
Unless there are some centralized controls, content owners cannot really put their best content forward and at least maintain some semblance of control over the end-user experience. [emphasis added]
Why on Earth should content owners -- notice how they're not even "content providers" anymore -- have any "control over the end-user experience"? Why on Earth would I be interested in using a network that gave them such?
Funny, when I buy a book, I can read it. Or read it aloud. Or throw it in the garbage. Or donate it to a library. Or lend it to a friend. Or tear it up and make origami out of it. (OK, not that last -- it'd be cool if I knew how to make origami). Last I checked, neither the author, the publisher, or the distributor can say diddly about my final use, except in the narrow sense that I cannot illegitimately copy it. Why should digital content be given any special treatment?
At least and at last, copyright holders are showing their true colors, with watermarks and generation controls and "authorization devices". It's not about stopping infringement. It's not about selling more stuff. It's about control -- about securing total control to allow eventual maximization of access and profit. And to hell with the end user if they don't like it.
There's a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think... it's all about the information!
The problem with today's theme...
on
April Fools Wrap Up
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
is actually manifold but can be summed up as
The more like a legitimate news site you try to make slashdot, the less valid -- and less funny -- randomly placed, intentionally wrong stories are
A lot of awfully weird crap is happening these days -- ASCII Quake, free-form case mods, CBDTPA -- and it's getting harder to tell what's been made up
People subscribe to slashdot and expect some return, not a lost day
Not everyone has the time or inclination to go slogging through an entire day's worth of fakery to see if there's a nugget of truth anywhere
As Josh Lyman might put it, you forgot to bring the funny... the "humor" simply wasn't humorous, for most of the "articles". Of course, YMMV -- but don't tweak people in an area as subjective as humor and then be angry if people flame you
Well, another one zapped by the Microsoft machine. In their context, LaTeX and gnuplot are the standard. Ever wonder why the Los Alomos preprint server offers the papers in that format?
I buy music, I buy video games, why should I EXPECT StarOffice to be free?
You actually buy music and video games? What are you doing on slashdot? *grin*
Seriously, this is a good point. A lot of us like to claim that freely-downloadable doesn't have to be the death knell of commerce. This is one test case. Let's see where it takes us.
OK, I guess that avoids the "taking" problem. But only at the cost of mucking with the Constitution. I find the current content quagmire pretty worrisome but I'm not sure I would be willing to go that far. Considering the power that corporations weild right now, I'm not sure I want to mark the Constitution as open for revision. I seriously doubt what comes out would be in the interests of citizens.
In brief, Yahoo! split their Marketing Preferences into a bunch of categories, and defaulted the new categories to opted-in.
All well and good. But the default should be to opt out. If you really want the email you'd set it up. But as a default the system should be as un-intrusive as possible.
OK, I know. I'm living in a fantasy world. But that's how it should be. Since they chose to do it their way, I don't see how they have any defense to charges that they are abusing user trust and misusing user data.
I have personally seen a group of 6 Win2k machines run computations at near 100% processor time for 3 days. No problem.
Wow. Three whole days. Impressive.
I'm sorry but I guess I expect a little bit more than that. For goodness' sake, when I was in grad school, we were running a DEC 5100(?) using whatever bizarre version of Unix it had (Ultrix, I think). I worked on it for three years. My two office mates and my advisor worked on it as well. We were doing spectroscopic reduction, numerical simulation of black hole systems, and theoretical mapping of the magnetic field around pulsars rotating at 0.1c (retarded potentials, relativistic Doppler, the whole nine yards). All of these were processor-intense -- as was the constantly-running POV-Ray program making a movie of that magnetic map.
Oh, and it was our Web server for the group.
It failed precisely once during that three year period, when the internal fan froze and the chip overheated. We had program crashes -- our own and our vendors -- but we never had the OS get taken down. And that was ages ago in the Unix world.
I would think that this is a way to get people to see movies repeatedly in the theater at the inflated price...
I would think this would be so obvious as to hardly be worth noting. In economic terms, look at it this way: Every time you see LOTR (unless you are an addict), your marginal utility drops. Eventually it falls below the unit price, at which point you are no longer willing to spend the money to see the film. If prices could fluctuate, the ticket price might fall to entice you back in. But movie tickets are essentially fixed. So it seems like they could never make more money off this from you.
But lo! They add some teaser material. Now, assuming you want to see the teaser, they've added marginal utility back to the experience. Your ticket, at say $8, buys more and, if they're right, this raises your satisfaction to the level where you're willing to shell it out.
But that isn't to say that the new material need be worth $8. It might only be worth $0.40 to you. But if you value seeing LOTR again at $7.60 -- if that were the price you'd have been willing to pay to see it -- then, with the additional material, your utility is $8 and you're willing to go back. So that little bit of value, small in itself, might still justify the trip.
But you can escape from a catch-22. All you have to do is refuse to play their game. Read the book -- that's Yossarian's answer, and it can be made to work here.
Granted, the Content Cartel control most of the "traditional" media. But they worry about the Net precisely because it is so huge and so (potentially) shatteringly effective at getting a message out without the traditional media. They fear that the Net will give birth to a spark, an episode, a movement they cannot foresee and cannot control.
Stop worrying about how we get the "traditional" media to cover this. Stop trying to figure out how to "get our message out" in all the ways that have been tried before. Get out and educate, whatever way you can... and make the Net part of it.
If we get enough people talking about it, the fight will spill over into the nightly news. And then we win.
Revert the term of copyright to 14 years, immediately and retroactive to all existing works.
This would be a terrible idea to enact. As soon as this law was enacted, we'd have massive suits by content holders that it was a "taking". Either the government would have to overturn the law or it would have to "justly compensate" each and every holder of any copyright of any value. Bleh.
On the other hand, saying that new copyrights last for only 14 years is not a taking, as a thing not yet created has no value. I think I could accept the tragic loss of public domain we've suffered, if I knew for sure it was a temporary aberration.
So by your own logic I could copy any number of, say, other people's writing and use it for my homework...
um, no. That would be "plagarism" and, most likely, "cheating", but it wouldn't be "stealing"
...or take a picture of some famous painting and post it all over.
um, still not stealing. It's certainly an infringement of copyright.
In both cases the original is left intact.
Which is why it is copyright infringement. Copyright is, logically enough, the right to make copies. If someone makes an illegitimate copy, they certainly infringe on your (state-sanctioned exclusive) right to make copies of the work. Hmmm, that must be why it's "copyright infringement"... but it's not stealing.
It is using it without their permission that is the issue.
Well, actually, this is just one of the issues. Another is the attempt to move content toward a pay-per-use model. Another is the attempt to maintain a chokehold on distribution. Another is a bid for massive control over what we see, hear, speak, think. There are in fact many issues.
Illegitimate copying is most certainly one of them. And it is most certainly not stealing.
You'd think that, with the value of content and all, they'd have a law that makes it illegal to deprive someone of legitimate income by illegitimately copying their work. You'd think that such behavior would be a crime. Oh, wait. There is such a crime. It's called "copyright infringement" and it is NOT theft!.
Stop letting the content cartel dictate the terms in order to make you think this is something other, something more heinous, than what it is.
Pirates, like the mafia, have a mixed image in the English speaking world
But the connotation is entirely negative in a courtroom, which is where it matters. Especially because most of these issues are not settled by jury but by judge -- someone considerably less likely to be swayed by the swashbuckling romantic image. I don't think judges decided based solely on the term; but I do belive the term was picked to create a certain state of mind.
I can't swear to the origin of "piracy" in the copyright corporations but I strongly suspect it did arise there. The earliest use I have seen referred to "pirate radio" stations, and I will concede that the term might have arisen because often such stations are broadcast from ships just outside the legal boundaries of the nation. But I think it is definitely used by the content cartel for its illegal connotations as well as to build mindshare for the idea that copyrights are truly "property" that can be "stolen", and not what they truly are, which is monopoly rights that can be infringed.
Leaving aside the trivial counterexamples some others have offered (F=GM1M2/R^2), this is actually 100% wrong, as would be known if you consulted anything higher than a high school physics textbook. Even if you want (as the post seems later to imply) to disavow a connection between gravity and inertia, you'd be wrong. Gravitational mass is the same as inertial mass. This has been both empirically validated for 350 years and theoretically established by the Equivalence Principle in General Relativity. Gravity and inertia are one and the same, in ways we don't entirely understand.
So if you could actually reduce G, which is what these guys basically claim, you would indeed be reducing the inertial mass as well. Of course other weird effects would have to propagate, as well.
How much does one tip a windmill, anyway? Is it the standard 15% or do you give more for superior service?
More seriously, assuming you meant tilting at windmills(*), well, you have sort of half a point. On the one hand, the usage is common and we're never really going to get people to stop using it. On the other hand, the usage is stupid and was invented solely to create evil connotations for the crime of copyright infringement, since that by itself is, well, boring. The word was adopted wholy for its emotional baggage, which makes no actual sense in the way it's used.
So I rather hope we all keep "tilting at windmills" and pointing out how cynical and manipulative the choice of "piracy" was. And no, "piracy" is not significantly easier to say or use than "infringement"; it's just sexier.
(*) Yes, it's "tilting". When two jousters combat on the tourney list, it's called "tilting". From Merrian Webster:
tilt (v)
to charge against "tilt an adversary"
to engage in a combat with lances : JOUST
The total phrase, of course, is a reference to Don Quixote.
Slashdot Mirror
Luckily, that's not what IIS was doing. Of course, not liking the policies of the RIAA doesn't give us the right to infringe their copyrights, which does seem to have been going on. So IIS loses this one on merits.
But "infringement" is not "theft" because (in a sane, logical world) intellectual output is not "property". IIS has taken nothing from the RIAA or its members. What IIS did was, of course, violate an exclusive right given to the RIAA by the Constitution through the much-mangled Copyright Act. This is not the same thing as "theft"... any more than illegally preventing someone's access to his/her place of work would be "murder".
From Merriam-Webster:
So by definition a trickle is small.
I see. The threat of a long costly litigation, with a decent chance of losing and having to pay even more exorbiant court-ordered fines -- a threat backed up by the judicial power of the United States -- had absolutely nothing to do with IIS' decision to settle? Ah, the scales fell from their eyes; they saw the error of their ways; and they gratefully shelled out $1M as a voluntary penace along with the admonition to go and sin no more? All on their own, in a conversion experience that might as well have happened on the road to Damascus?
Just how is the weather on your planet, anyway?
If the courts were not enthusiastically subscribing to the RIAA's view of reality, then the RIAA would not have the giant bludgeon they currently wield. Coypright infringement is a matter of law; it is settled in the courts, ultimately; and any out-of-court settlement certainly derives from the potential mediation of the courts. The legal climate is the prime mover here, too, even if the formal process isn't followed.
Which is why, of course, it is absurd to call intellectual output "property". Of course, originally it wasn't considered "property" -- that is why the Framers saw fit to put in a specific Copyright Clause in the first place. Since the sanctity of (actual) property was already well-established, if intellectual output had been property, they wouldn't have needed a separate clause to protect it. (A major premise of constitutional law is the economy of words.)
So, I agree that the "antiquated" laws are not the problem. It's the newfangled ones that are mucking us up
Heaven help me for being even marginally on the same side as the RIAA, but this suggestion is wrong-headed. IIS paid a fine, not a license fee. They shelled out because they were caught infringing copyright and are being punished for it. They did not secure the right to play in concert.
Or do you think paying a traffic ticket gives you the "right" to speed?
Aah, the usual argument from an elite that feels the ground slipping out from under it. (Believe me, I don't despise elites... just ones that can't provide enough extra value to maintain their survival). "Demystification" is a tired rallying cry used by people defending the status quo... It boils down to, "I can't tell you why I am an expert and you are an uninformed boob, but it's just so. Now listen to me!"
Again, we see that a major concern of the Content Cartel is not preventing illegitimate copying or even maximizing profit. It's about maintaining control. It boggles my mind that in a culture that purports to embrace individuality and democracy in politics, we suffer the arrogance of people who despise that impulse in art. If art is about universal human truths, maybe actual humans should have a say.
Coppola points out the impetus behind things like CSS and the proposed CBDTPA:
'Cause as my man Cosmo said, "It's about who controls the information... what we see and think".
You mean, by empowering end users and thus driving further sales of things they would otherwise not buy? Oh, yeah, I guess it's true. Exactly the same way the VCR "killed" Hollywood.
It disturbs me to see such a misreading of the actual trends (hmmm: Napster peaks, CD sales soars; Napster shut down, CD sales contract) slipped so quietly into an article about something else.
No, it's like printing many copies of the Mona Lisa and selling them to people who might have Sharpies at home and who might be inclined to draw on their copies.
I'm not (just) being pedantic here. The one original "true" Mona Lisa remains safely in the Louvre, available to all for adulation. Yet the viewer also gets a chance to make a statement. Since the great piece of art is not defaced, I don't see how it is threatened. And of course, maybe, just maybe, new art can be created.
Here's a different analogy: This is like handing out copies of a story and Bic ballpoints to people. They get to go edit the story, modify its order, change its dialog. Horrors of horrors! All that you get from that kind of mucking is... Hamlet. To quote one of many sources,
In other words, since a story can be easily copied and modified, the public domain is rich and future writers can build upon and reinterpret earlier ones. Often, the result is transitory garbage. But sometimes it is Shakespeare. Or West Side Story. I don't see the overriding merit of the artist's vision. Saxo's Hamlet has faded to obscurity, dwarfed by Shakespeare's. On the other hand, Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet -- itself drawn from earlier sources -- gave rise to West Side Story. WSS is extremely popular (ask any high school drama department) yet Shakepeare's is still performed. I guess I see more value in a free market in artistic ideas, much as I do in political ideas. The truly significant and important will survive by dint of being truly important and significant, not by decree of a self-proclaimed critical expert class.
ObPoliticalRant: And that's why recent and proposed copyright law -- giving unprecedented "access control" to copyright holders -- is a disaster of the first magnitude for the arts and for science. The partitioning of the public domain into private little plots threatens our intellectual future and makes a mockery of copyright law as a means "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" (Article I Section 8 of the US Constitution).
I suppose. Or maybe audiences just got desensitized to mishmash logic and gaping plot holes, because their attention spans were shrunken past the Schwarschild radius... I happen to believe that the influence of music video directors on mainstream media has been a disaster that's consigned nearly a whole generation of films to the dustbin of failed art.
And don't even get me started about the influence of advertisement directors....
Why on Earth should content owners -- notice how they're not even "content providers" anymore -- have any "control over the end-user experience"? Why on Earth would I be interested in using a network that gave them such?
Funny, when I buy a book, I can read it. Or read it aloud. Or throw it in the garbage. Or donate it to a library. Or lend it to a friend. Or tear it up and make origami out of it. (OK, not that last -- it'd be cool if I knew how to make origami). Last I checked, neither the author, the publisher, or the distributor can say diddly about my final use, except in the narrow sense that I cannot illegitimately copy it. Why should digital content be given any special treatment?
At least and at last, copyright holders are showing their true colors, with watermarks and generation controls and "authorization devices". It's not about stopping infringement. It's not about selling more stuff. It's about control -- about securing total control to allow eventual maximization of access and profit. And to hell with the end user if they don't like it.
Ah, Cosmo (of Sneakers , you said it best:
Well, another one zapped by the Microsoft machine. In their context, LaTeX and gnuplot are the standard. Ever wonder why the Los Alomos preprint server offers the papers in that format?
You actually buy music and video games? What are you doing on slashdot? *grin*
Seriously, this is a good point. A lot of us like to claim that freely-downloadable doesn't have to be the death knell of commerce. This is one test case. Let's see where it takes us.
OK, I guess that avoids the "taking" problem. But only at the cost of mucking with the Constitution. I find the current content quagmire pretty worrisome but I'm not sure I would be willing to go that far. Considering the power that corporations weild right now, I'm not sure I want to mark the Constitution as open for revision. I seriously doubt what comes out would be in the interests of citizens.
All well and good. But the default should be to opt out. If you really want the email you'd set it up. But as a default the system should be as un-intrusive as possible.
OK, I know. I'm living in a fantasy world. But that's how it should be. Since they chose to do it their way, I don't see how they have any defense to charges that they are abusing user trust and misusing user data.
Wow. Three whole days. Impressive.
I'm sorry but I guess I expect a little bit more than that. For goodness' sake, when I was in grad school, we were running a DEC 5100(?) using whatever bizarre version of Unix it had (Ultrix, I think). I worked on it for three years. My two office mates and my advisor worked on it as well. We were doing spectroscopic reduction, numerical simulation of black hole systems, and theoretical mapping of the magnetic field around pulsars rotating at 0.1c (retarded potentials, relativistic Doppler, the whole nine yards). All of these were processor-intense -- as was the constantly-running POV-Ray program making a movie of that magnetic map.
Oh, and it was our Web server for the group.
It failed precisely once during that three year period, when the internal fan froze and the chip overheated. We had program crashes -- our own and our vendors -- but we never had the OS get taken down. And that was ages ago in the Unix world.
Three days? Please.
I would think this would be so obvious as to hardly be worth noting. In economic terms, look at it this way: Every time you see LOTR (unless you are an addict), your marginal utility drops. Eventually it falls below the unit price, at which point you are no longer willing to spend the money to see the film. If prices could fluctuate, the ticket price might fall to entice you back in. But movie tickets are essentially fixed. So it seems like they could never make more money off this from you.
But lo! They add some teaser material. Now, assuming you want to see the teaser, they've added marginal utility back to the experience. Your ticket, at say $8, buys more and, if they're right, this raises your satisfaction to the level where you're willing to shell it out.
But that isn't to say that the new material need be worth $8. It might only be worth $0.40 to you. But if you value seeing LOTR again at $7.60 -- if that were the price you'd have been willing to pay to see it -- then, with the additional material, your utility is $8 and you're willing to go back. So that little bit of value, small in itself, might still justify the trip.
Gotta love Econ 101.
Granted, the Content Cartel control most of the "traditional" media. But they worry about the Net precisely because it is so huge and so (potentially) shatteringly effective at getting a message out without the traditional media. They fear that the Net will give birth to a spark, an episode, a movement they cannot foresee and cannot control.
Stop worrying about how we get the "traditional" media to cover this. Stop trying to figure out how to "get our message out" in all the ways that have been tried before. Get out and educate, whatever way you can... and make the Net part of it.
If we get enough people talking about it, the fight will spill over into the nightly news. And then we win.
This would be a terrible idea to enact. As soon as this law was enacted, we'd have massive suits by content holders that it was a "taking". Either the government would have to overturn the law or it would have to "justly compensate" each and every holder of any copyright of any value. Bleh.
On the other hand, saying that new copyrights last for only 14 years is not a taking, as a thing not yet created has no value. I think I could accept the tragic loss of public domain we've suffered, if I knew for sure it was a temporary aberration.
I am far from being a lawyer but I believe the ban on ex post facto applies only to criminal law.
um, no. That would be "plagarism" and, most likely, "cheating", but it wouldn't be "stealing"
um, still not stealing. It's certainly an infringement of copyright.
Which is why it is copy right infringement. Copyright is, logically enough, the right to make copies. If someone makes an illegitimate copy, they certainly infringe on your (state-sanctioned exclusive) right to make copies of the work. Hmmm, that must be why it's "copyright infringement"... but it's not stealing.
Well, actually, this is just one of the issues. Another is the attempt to move content toward a pay-per-use model. Another is the attempt to maintain a chokehold on distribution. Another is a bid for massive control over what we see, hear, speak, think. There are in fact many issues.
Illegitimate copying is most certainly one of them. And it is most certainly not stealing.
You'd think that, with the value of content and all, they'd have a law that makes it illegal to deprive someone of legitimate income by illegitimately copying their work. You'd think that such behavior would be a crime. Oh, wait. There is such a crime. It's called "copyright infringement" and it is NOT theft!.
Stop letting the content cartel dictate the terms in order to make you think this is something other, something more heinous, than what it is.
But the connotation is entirely negative in a courtroom, which is where it matters. Especially because most of these issues are not settled by jury but by judge -- someone considerably less likely to be swayed by the swashbuckling romantic image. I don't think judges decided based solely on the term; but I do belive the term was picked to create a certain state of mind.
I can't swear to the origin of "piracy" in the copyright corporations but I strongly suspect it did arise there. The earliest use I have seen referred to "pirate radio" stations, and I will concede that the term might have arisen because often such stations are broadcast from ships just outside the legal boundaries of the nation. But I think it is definitely used by the content cartel for its illegal connotations as well as to build mindshare for the idea that copyrights are truly "property" that can be "stolen", and not what they truly are, which is monopoly rights that can be infringed.
Leaving aside the trivial counterexamples some others have offered (F=GM1M2/R^2), this is actually 100% wrong, as would be known if you consulted anything higher than a high school physics textbook. Even if you want (as the post seems later to imply) to disavow a connection between gravity and inertia, you'd be wrong. Gravitational mass is the same as inertial mass. This has been both empirically validated for 350 years and theoretically established by the Equivalence Principle in General Relativity. Gravity and inertia are one and the same, in ways we don't entirely understand.
So if you could actually reduce G, which is what these guys basically claim, you would indeed be reducing the inertial mass as well. Of course other weird effects would have to propagate, as well.
How much does one tip a windmill, anyway? Is it the standard 15% or do you give more for superior service?
More seriously, assuming you meant tilting at windmills(*), well, you have sort of half a point. On the one hand, the usage is common and we're never really going to get people to stop using it. On the other hand, the usage is stupid and was invented solely to create evil connotations for the crime of copyright infringement, since that by itself is, well, boring. The word was adopted wholy for its emotional baggage, which makes no actual sense in the way it's used.
So I rather hope we all keep "tilting at windmills" and pointing out how cynical and manipulative the choice of "piracy" was. And no, "piracy" is not significantly easier to say or use than "infringement"; it's just sexier.
(*) Yes, it's "tilting". When two jousters combat on the tourney list, it's called "tilting". From Merrian Webster:
The total phrase, of course, is a reference to Don Quixote.
Ugh. Does that mean we have to marry our representatives? They say politics makes strange bedfellows, but...
:)