>Did you know that it's illegal to sell sharp objects to anyone under the age of 16 in the UK?
No, but that is a MOST interesting stat. Thanks!
Is it also illegal for people under the age of 16 to own a knife as well? Just wondering, because it's not exactly a difficult item to manufacture...
I guess this knife control explains why a friend of ours asked us to buy him a large buck-knife from a store here and bring it over on the next vacation. He must be the talk of the town!;-)
That's a 5.6% difference. Wow. The net effect that will have on reducing accidents, assuming every km/h matters?
We will go from having 398,068 accidents a year to (drumroll) 397,838 accidents per year. A total difference of: 0.058%
Applying that to how many deaths occurr due to accidents per year in ontario, this would result in a net reduction from 1,090 deaths to (drumroll again) 1,090 deaths. ie: Net result: NOTHING.
Why not spend that money putting the (few, fortunately) lard-ass officers on a health program? Seems more likely to save at least one life, perhaps even dozens.
>The UK has (very) restrictive gun laws for precisely this reason, and they enjoy huge majority support.
If we're banning things by assuming there is a correlation between restricting freedom and how many times the thing is used in a crime, Canada has far less restrictive laws than the UK, yet, AFAIK, fewer crimes involving any shooting at all (never mind murders by gun).
>Do table knives kill 3,000 people per year in the UK?
Stabbings, at least in Canada, seem to be one of the most popular ways of gruesomely offing someone. 3,000 a year, I don't know. But the number is FAR higher than that for guns, which you seem to vehemently support restricting.
Wouldn't it make sense to restrict a weapon used in more crimes than guns at least as much as guns, assuming there is a correlation?
>Hence, I'm in favour of virtually ANY regulation of motorists. Nobody has a god-given right to carry themselves about in two tons of steel - especially in a small and crowded country like the UK with an adequate public transport infrastructure.
I'm pro-cutlery regulation for exactly the same reasons.
Nobody has the right to use anything but sporks. They could hurt me with anything sharper.
Dunno, but the difference is due to the very low GDP for Australia vs. the very high GDP for the USA. The accounts for the difference in wages between many different countries.
In the US itself, though, there are places where $10 US an hour is well below poverty and you would be expected to drift from shelter to shelter (Parts of California), and also places where $10 US an hour will make you rich (Alaska?).
>Does anyone protest when the menu guys flood your doorstep? No... What about when Target or some other megaconglomerate sends bs in the mail that you didn't ask for?
No, because you have the right to refuse such mail. If these companies continue to send it to you after filling out that form, they are fined/someone goes to jail. (I wonder if there's something similar for my country -- probably there is -- then again, a lot of nice mail carriers are willing to separate bulk and real mail into separate "mailboxes" for you where I live).
>Not to mention a possible fine you could get for having litter you didnt leave in front of your house.
??? Unlikely. I know if I were to go to a parking lot and plaster the cars with flyers, unless the police were blind, they'd read one and charge me at least a $100 littering fine. They wouldn't check the license plates up and send the owners the fine.
>Want to give me cost ratios go ahead and I'll do a breakdown in sanitation costs if you think mail and menus cost nothing.
How about I do it for you? I pay $4 common area per square foot at my local business, of that about $1/sq ft. goes to sanitation. Now, since I would say that mail is approximately 1% of my daily "junk" (1 pizza box holds hundreds of letters) and I would say 25% of my mail is bulk, that means 0.25% of that $1/sq ft. goes towards me throwing away my mail.
My business is 900 sq ft. That means I pay $2.25 per month in "sanitation" due to this mail. Yay. Considering this is sunk cost, and wouldn't change at all if I didn't receive the mail, customers do *NOT* pay for junk mail.
Unlike spam, junk mail is easy to deal with. If it's colourful, not in an envelope, or has "bulk" written on it, it goes into the trash unopened. If all spams had "ADV:" in the subject, I'd be a happy man. As it stands, larger companies almost need one admin just to deal with something that should be simple -- they need an admin to deal with the mail server. That sucks, and that costs a lot more than a few bucks a month.
>So ask yourself, if you were in a business and were told how to run it which was against the way you were running it
It's already happened. I couldn't move into my choice location because it was designated for mini-marts only. Yes, the city expected a total of 8 mini-marts to move into one plaza, with 10 units (2 were zoned for either a dentist or mini-mart -- beats the hell out of me why). My real-estate agent was amazed as well.
>wouldn't you leave
I already did, considering I couldn't set up stakes there to start with.
>what if someone was threatening you because it does happen wouldn't you quit while you were ahead too?
No. Heck, while I was working as a screwdriver lackey at another shop I had customers threatening to sue! I didn't care, not my problem.
Then again, now that I'm running my own screwdriver shop, it isn't been a problem.
>Stupidest comparision in the known universe; the people who think this don't know anyone they care about who has cancer or AIDS.
People who think that like should have no say about anything medical. If my doctor got all upset everytime he had to do surgery on a patient, he'd be sued weekly for malpractice.
In short, time to take a breather. I'm sorry someone in your family is hurt, but making the world a sadder, more depressing place isn't the answer to your problems.
YES. If you want to be so picky, I can join in too: The vote isn't official until someone is elected. This happens instantly as soon as the last vote is added to the system.
>i'd bet apart from writing the number and someone reading it for counting the system is pretty much electronical in any european country too.
If Canada does anything like Europe, the votes are not only written by hand (put an X in the box for the party you are voting for), but also tallied by hand*. After being tallied by hand, the results are reported, IIRC, by courier to another larger station where they are counted "electronically" (ie: Totals entered into a computer) officially.
Things have worked well in elections here -- considering how little I ever hear of fraudulent election results, perhaps we'd be a good country to model?
* Note this comes from a teacher 10 years ago, things may have changed since then.
>dunno about a nuclear melt down (although I think this is highly unlikely, the analog backups weren't affected...) but I don't think it would result in genocide.
The definition of genocide simply requires an entire group of people to die. For example, if Pickering Nuclear blows up well enough, it's probably going to destroy that entire city (Pickering), which is genocide, as the entire culture of Pickering, Canada is lost forever. It's a bit of an overdefinition, but for a smaller country, it could result in that.
>Don't truck out extraordinary circumstances and then use them to demonstrate that people who aren't in those circumstances are equally stupid.
I'm just pointing out that it is possible for these things to happen, and that they have happened in the past.
>Are you sure Michael Dell and Bill Gates barely passed high school?
If they're anything like Albert Einstein, sure...:-)
>Do you know for sure that Gates and Dell keep their virus definitions and updates up to date or if they even have virus checkers on their machines? You just assume so because you respect them for their knowledge. If they didn't would they be stupid now?
Yeah, if they didn't they'd be really stupid. Especially since Bill Gates ensured there was a virus checker as part of the OS he "programmed"...
>It's mind blowing to me when I see people born within the last 20 years start smoking...not having a virus checker...no.
Well, I have another word for that: Moronic. Stupid is a bit worse than idiotic, and moronic is about as dumb as you can get without some real mental retardation.
Just my 2 cents.:-)
Re:My Cellphone is Cool....no really.
on
Flaming Cellphones
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· Score: 4, Informative
The battery was shorted out.
With NiCad batteries, this means several amps of current through a wire mean to handle perhaps.3 amps.
That means heat.
It doesn't mean the cellphone will spontaneously set on fire. It will only happen if the phone is damaged to the point the battery is shorted.
A virus *could* be even more than just life threatening, it could cause genocide if it were targetted at poorly enough designed systems, such as those at that power plant.
>People, even educated ones, do bad stuff all the time even though they are constantly being told about the dangers of doing them.
They do, and that's what makes them stupid. I know a lot of "educated" people who I'd have no qualms about calling stupid, and I know a lot of people who barely passed high school (if they passed it at all) who I respect for their level of knowledge. Bill Gates and Michael Dell being two...
>Know what? I dont daily check USRobotics.com to make sure I have the latest modem firmware, nor do I go to logitech to make sure I have the latest mouse drivers.
You would if you had a USR 33.6 with the pause bug.
In the case of people running windows, after their first virus they should learn.
But so few ever do.
It's like people who buy stuff from a store, break it, then exchange it, break the replacement, etc, etc. It's boring and, quite simply, stupid.
I expect that when a national newspaper tells you every few months to buy anti-virus software you, at a minimum, consider it. And if you don't, then you probably can't read, and if that's due to being poorly educated... You can figure out the rest...
>Assuming you would have paid if you didn't have the copy, this now means you have deprived PJ of that ticket price.
And that's where the analogies on piracy always break down. Generally, they can NEVER prove someone would have paid for something.
It's like when you watch people's court and everyone sues for "lost sales", "lost business", or "lost paycheques" unsuccessfully. You can't sue for something you can't prove would have happened. If it isn't valid in a court, I don't see why I should find it valid here.
>What if you didn't wait until release date, and decided to encode your copy of LOTR:ROTK on VCD and sold 1,000,000 copies at a fiver each. You have now clearly deprived PJ of that income, and the effect of your piracy is much greater.
Agreed on depriving him of income. Not agreed on why.
The reason why he has lost income at that point is because he has been defrauded. He has had his legitimate product sold illegitimately. It wouldn't matter if it were pirated or stolen at this point -- it's the fraudulent sale that's at fault.
To put it another way, let's say he makes his own movie, a version of LOTR that doesn't include any of the original copyright footage. It's all 100% his. He decides to call the work LOTR:FOTR and sells it as such. He even fakes the credits to show the names of the people involved in the original, more popular work. He sells that for $5. PJ loses an identical amount of money, despite the lack of copyright violation, because the method of crime is the same: fraud.
The crime of copyright infringement is very benign, it's the *other* crimes that can follow that are the real problem. This is akin to speeding where just speeding is NOT harming anyone, just annoying them. But if you speed, and hit someone, you did harm. But it isn't the speed that is the problem, it's crashing into another car that is. It wouldn't matter if your car dropped from an airplane and hit the other car on the way down, it's the crash that matters, not the speed.
>I would love to know when copying without permission became known as "Piracy".
Beats me! But, afaik, it's the only single word that legitimately describes copyright infringement. I don't like its connotations any more than you, but at least it is a legitimate description.
>And just to quibble a bit, you don't have to have the item in your possession for it to be theft. The crime has been committed as soon as you "take and carry away" the item in question with the intent to permanently deprive. You can throw it away after that, and it's still theft. You can even return it after that, and it's still theft if you intended, at the time you took it, to not return it later.
Okay, perhaps I should have said you needed to have the item in your posession. Stupid tenses giving me trouble... It would be hard to take away an item from someone if it weren't (illegally) in your posession... I bet you're going to come up with an exmaple, now, aren't you? Damn.;-)
And hey, no arguments that copyright isn't a crime. It is. It's just that it simply isn't stealing. And, even in the colloquial sense, it's an odd fit.
>That or they just couldn't afford to develop it anymore because piracy was eroding their sales too much...
Then how does not selling it at all improve the situation?
I fail to see the logic in discontinuing a program which they obviously see as popular (unpopular programs don't get pirated) rather than finding out a solution that works. Generally, bringing the price down/improving service/including extras with paid version are a good start. Shutting down development just ensures you're out of pocket.
>Intellectual property as a concept has existed much longer than the RIAA or DMCA. The fact that it's not physical property doesn't make it any less real.
It has? The RIAA has existed since the 1950's when they were first incarnated as the standard setter for Phono Preamps.
I feel that it's misleading to suggest this. In fact, it wasn't until the 1970's when Bill Gates released his open letter to computer clubs on piracy that people even had an "anti-pirate" to laugh at.
>What is it about a person coming in to possession of the 'bits' without obtaining the physical packaging that makes the lost opportunity for profit imaginary or the loss any less direct?
The fact that it costs the originator of the work positively nothing when you pirate.
Prove to me that, for example, Microsoft loses even $0.01 if I were to pirate windows from a newsgroup. Consider the fact that I prefer to use linux, and that I already own a copy of windows for my laptops. My piracy of windows would be pointless, as I already own what I need for myself, but still possible.
You see, if I steal a car I already own, there is a proveable loss. Someone has no car. But if I pirate an OS I already own (perhaps say for a POS computer in my basement that I'm just using to prove my point) you can't think that I would pay for it twice, so that doesn't count.
So where's the loss?
>You're right that under current law you may not be charged with theft
I'd RATHER be charged with theft. Current piracy laws are even stronger than those used against rapists and murderers.
>I'm trying to ensure that they understand that (in my opinion) making an illegal copy of a software package is little different than walking in to the store and taking it off the shelf. The value of the software is not attached to the packaging.
Hey, no problem. I completely understand, and I certainly wouldn't say that piracy is a good thing. It is a "bad thing", however, it is a distinct thing from theft, and, in most cases, is certainly not viewed by most as being as bad as, or worse than, plain old theft.
>I'm no fan of the BSA, (or RIAA or DMCA for that matter) but here we definitely disagree. There certainly are victims. However you feel about certain software companies, their pricing, their licensing, whatever, the fact remains that the victim is the owner of the intellectual property (sorry, there's that term again) that the violater now possesses without having made any compensation.
The only way to define them as a victim is similar to the way that when I receive a speeding ticket I pay a "victim's surcharge". It's defined in the sense that the absolute worse violators (the ones that commit fraud by selling pirated goods as original) do cause there to be a victim (the company CLEARLY loses sales in those cases, or the speeder kills because he was doing 200 mph). But, in the general sense, there is no clear way to prove the company is a victim. The only possible defense that they are a victim from a home user sharing their software with their friend, apart from copyright infringement, is that the company has suffered emotional distress from having it's directives violated. This is similar to my feelings when, for example, someone buys something I spent my hard time on (oh, let's say a painting) and makes it into an effigy. I feel bad, but it doesn't make me a "victim".
So, that just doesn't cut it for me. For me to call someone a victim, I need to see a loss, or some real pain. Without those, I just can't justify the use of the word in the legal sense.
And, as far as copyright goes, law is the only thing holding it together, because the general populous doesn't agree with how it is set up.
Sorry to answer my own post, but they've already given us the answer to my questions:
The support forum will continue and the plugins shall remain for another month, however, the main installer is no longer available for download and as of the 31st August 2003 all sales of Soundprobe have stopped.
It seems that by "stopping piracy" they've put themselves out of business.
That's not very smart, is it? Doesn't that prove that piracy increased their sales? Because while it was being pirated, it was for sale. Now that it isn't pirated, it isn't for sale.
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>Did you know that it's illegal to sell sharp objects to anyone under the age of 16 in the UK?
;-)
No, but that is a MOST interesting stat. Thanks!
Is it also illegal for people under the age of 16 to own a knife as well? Just wondering, because it's not exactly a difficult item to manufacture...
I guess this knife control explains why a friend of ours asked us to buy him a large buck-knife from a store here and bring it over on the next vacation. He must be the talk of the town!
>Seems effective to me.
That's a 5.6% difference. Wow. The net effect that will have on reducing accidents, assuming every km/h matters?
We will go from having 398,068 accidents a year to (drumroll) 397,838 accidents per year. A total difference of: 0.058%
Applying that to how many deaths occurr due to accidents per year in ontario, this would result in a net reduction from 1,090 deaths to (drumroll again) 1,090 deaths. ie: Net result: NOTHING.
Why not spend that money putting the (few, fortunately) lard-ass officers on a health program? Seems more likely to save at least one life, perhaps even dozens.
>The UK has (very) restrictive gun laws for precisely this reason, and they enjoy huge majority support.
If we're banning things by assuming there is a correlation between restricting freedom and how many times the thing is used in a crime, Canada has far less restrictive laws than the UK, yet, AFAIK, fewer crimes involving any shooting at all (never mind murders by gun).
>Do table knives kill 3,000 people per year in the UK?
Stabbings, at least in Canada, seem to be one of the most popular ways of gruesomely offing someone. 3,000 a year, I don't know. But the number is FAR higher than that for guns, which you seem to vehemently support restricting.
Wouldn't it make sense to restrict a weapon used in more crimes than guns at least as much as guns, assuming there is a correlation?
>They may indeed be a nuisance. However, photo radar was very effective at keeping the speed down on the 401.
:-)
Bullshit.
It was highly ineffective. To the extreme. A light breeze would have done better than those cameras.
Also, the minority of accidents are caused by speeding.
HAND!
>You nkow, I've never heard of anyone EVER getting a speeding ticket for going 1 mile over the speed limit, except in movies (comedies mostly).
Anybody who does should take it to court and show the judge this.
The guns simply lack the accuracy to show a 1 mph speed violation.
>Hence, I'm in favour of virtually ANY regulation of motorists. Nobody has a god-given right to carry themselves about in two tons of steel - especially in a small and crowded country like the UK with an adequate public transport infrastructure.
I'm pro-cutlery regulation for exactly the same reasons.
Nobody has the right to use anything but sporks. They could hurt me with anything sharper.
>Tell me, how do they cope?
Dunno, but the difference is due to the very low GDP for Australia vs. the very high GDP for the USA. The accounts for the difference in wages between many different countries.
In the US itself, though, there are places where $10 US an hour is well below poverty and you would be expected to drift from shelter to shelter (Parts of California), and also places where $10 US an hour will make you rich (Alaska?).
The US is quite strange like that.
Instead, open the mail. Find the "return to business" envelope.
Shred their ad and stuff it in the envelope. That will get delivered, and does cost them.
>Does anyone protest when the menu guys flood your doorstep? No... What about when Target or some other megaconglomerate sends bs in the mail that you didn't ask for?
No, because you have the right to refuse such mail. If these companies continue to send it to you after filling out that form, they are fined/someone goes to jail. (I wonder if there's something similar for my country -- probably there is -- then again, a lot of nice mail carriers are willing to separate bulk and real mail into separate "mailboxes" for you where I live).
>Not to mention a possible fine you could get for having litter you didnt leave in front of your house.
??? Unlikely. I know if I were to go to a parking lot and plaster the cars with flyers, unless the police were blind, they'd read one and charge me at least a $100 littering fine. They wouldn't check the license plates up and send the owners the fine.
>Want to give me cost ratios go ahead and I'll do a breakdown in sanitation costs if you think mail and menus cost nothing.
How about I do it for you? I pay $4 common area per square foot at my local business, of that about $1/sq ft. goes to sanitation. Now, since I would say that mail is approximately 1% of my daily "junk" (1 pizza box holds hundreds of letters) and I would say 25% of my mail is bulk, that means 0.25% of that $1/sq ft. goes towards me throwing away my mail.
My business is 900 sq ft. That means I pay $2.25 per month in "sanitation" due to this mail. Yay. Considering this is sunk cost, and wouldn't change at all if I didn't receive the mail, customers do *NOT* pay for junk mail.
Unlike spam, junk mail is easy to deal with. If it's colourful, not in an envelope, or has "bulk" written on it, it goes into the trash unopened. If all spams had "ADV:" in the subject, I'd be a happy man. As it stands, larger companies almost need one admin just to deal with something that should be simple -- they need an admin to deal with the mail server. That sucks, and that costs a lot more than a few bucks a month.
>So ask yourself, if you were in a business and were told how to run it which was against the way you were running it
It's already happened. I couldn't move into my choice location because it was designated for mini-marts only. Yes, the city expected a total of 8 mini-marts to move into one plaza, with 10 units (2 were zoned for either a dentist or mini-mart -- beats the hell out of me why). My real-estate agent was amazed as well.
>wouldn't you leave
I already did, considering I couldn't set up stakes there to start with.
>what if someone was threatening you because it does happen wouldn't you quit while you were ahead too?
No. Heck, while I was working as a screwdriver lackey at another shop I had customers threatening to sue! I didn't care, not my problem.
Then again, now that I'm running my own screwdriver shop, it isn't been a problem.
>Are these hams precooked?
No, they're steamed.
>Sure, installing a patch, or working a couple of hours overtime if you didn't is certainly comparable to having AIDS or cancer. Moron
LOL.
Like I said, take a pill. You gotta chill out, and fast, before you have a heart attack.
>Stupidest comparision in the known universe; the people who think this don't know anyone they care about who has cancer or AIDS.
People who think that like should have no say about anything medical. If my doctor got all upset everytime he had to do surgery on a patient, he'd be sued weekly for malpractice.
In short, time to take a breather. I'm sorry someone in your family is hurt, but making the world a sadder, more depressing place isn't the answer to your problems.
>To the second? or to the femtosecond?
YES. If you want to be so picky, I can join in too: The vote isn't official until someone is elected. This happens instantly as soon as the last vote is added to the system.
HTH.
>i'd bet apart from writing the number and someone reading it for counting the system is pretty much electronical in any european country too.
If Canada does anything like Europe, the votes are not only written by hand (put an X in the box for the party you are voting for), but also tallied by hand*. After being tallied by hand, the results are reported, IIRC, by courier to another larger station where they are counted "electronically" (ie: Totals entered into a computer) officially.
Things have worked well in elections here -- considering how little I ever hear of fraudulent election results, perhaps we'd be a good country to model?
* Note this comes from a teacher 10 years ago, things may have changed since then.
>The total population of the European Union is larger than that of the United States of America, so clearly that cannot be true.
Does everyone in the entire EU vote for a new president/prime minister/leader at the exact same time?
>dunno about a nuclear melt down (although I think this is highly unlikely, the analog backups weren't affected...) but I don't think it would result in genocide.
:-)
:-)
The definition of genocide simply requires an entire group of people to die. For example, if Pickering Nuclear blows up well enough, it's probably going to destroy that entire city (Pickering), which is genocide, as the entire culture of Pickering, Canada is lost forever. It's a bit of an overdefinition, but for a smaller country, it could result in that.
>Don't truck out extraordinary circumstances and then use them to demonstrate that people who aren't in those circumstances are equally stupid.
I'm just pointing out that it is possible for these things to happen, and that they have happened in the past.
>Are you sure Michael Dell and Bill Gates barely passed high school?
If they're anything like Albert Einstein, sure...
>Do you know for sure that Gates and Dell keep their virus definitions and updates up to date or if they even have virus checkers on their machines? You just assume so because you respect them for their knowledge. If they didn't would they be stupid now?
Yeah, if they didn't they'd be really stupid. Especially since Bill Gates ensured there was a virus checker as part of the OS he "programmed"...
>It's mind blowing to me when I see people born within the last 20 years start smoking...not having a virus checker...no.
Well, I have another word for that: Moronic. Stupid is a bit worse than idiotic, and moronic is about as dumb as you can get without some real mental retardation.
Just my 2 cents.
The battery was shorted out.
.3 amps.
With NiCad batteries, this means several amps of current through a wire mean to handle perhaps
That means heat.
It doesn't mean the cellphone will spontaneously set on fire. It will only happen if the phone is damaged to the point the battery is shorted.
>Compared to the above things, which are proven to be life threatening, anti-virus software is pretty low on the list.
Hmmm... you want a life threatening virus?
A nuclear power plant got infected.
Just wait until one is targetted by a virus.
A virus *could* be even more than just life threatening, it could cause genocide if it were targetted at poorly enough designed systems, such as those at that power plant.
>People, even educated ones, do bad stuff all the time even though they are constantly being told about the dangers of doing them.
They do, and that's what makes them stupid. I know a lot of "educated" people who I'd have no qualms about calling stupid, and I know a lot of people who barely passed high school (if they passed it at all) who I respect for their level of knowledge. Bill Gates and Michael Dell being two...
>Know what? I dont daily check USRobotics.com to make sure I have the latest modem firmware, nor do I go to logitech to make sure I have the latest mouse drivers.
You would if you had a USR 33.6 with the pause bug.
In the case of people running windows, after their first virus they should learn.
But so few ever do.
It's like people who buy stuff from a store, break it, then exchange it, break the replacement, etc, etc. It's boring and, quite simply, stupid.
I expect that when a national newspaper tells you every few months to buy anti-virus software you, at a minimum, consider it. And if you don't, then you probably can't read, and if that's due to being poorly educated... You can figure out the rest...
>Assuming you would have paid if you didn't have the copy, this now means you have deprived PJ of that ticket price.
And that's where the analogies on piracy always break down. Generally, they can NEVER prove someone would have paid for something.
It's like when you watch people's court and everyone sues for "lost sales", "lost business", or "lost paycheques" unsuccessfully. You can't sue for something you can't prove would have happened. If it isn't valid in a court, I don't see why I should find it valid here.
>What if you didn't wait until release date, and decided to encode your copy of LOTR:ROTK on VCD and sold 1,000,000 copies at a fiver each. You have now clearly deprived PJ of that income, and the effect of your piracy is much greater.
Agreed on depriving him of income. Not agreed on why.
The reason why he has lost income at that point is because he has been defrauded. He has had his legitimate product sold illegitimately. It wouldn't matter if it were pirated or stolen at this point -- it's the fraudulent sale that's at fault.
To put it another way, let's say he makes his own movie, a version of LOTR that doesn't include any of the original copyright footage. It's all 100% his. He decides to call the work LOTR:FOTR and sells it as such. He even fakes the credits to show the names of the people involved in the original, more popular work. He sells that for $5. PJ loses an identical amount of money, despite the lack of copyright violation, because the method of crime is the same: fraud.
The crime of copyright infringement is very benign, it's the *other* crimes that can follow that are the real problem. This is akin to speeding where just speeding is NOT harming anyone, just annoying them. But if you speed, and hit someone, you did harm. But it isn't the speed that is the problem, it's crashing into another car that is. It wouldn't matter if your car dropped from an airplane and hit the other car on the way down, it's the crash that matters, not the speed.
>I would love to know when copying without permission became known as "Piracy".
Beats me! But, afaik, it's the only single word that legitimately describes copyright infringement. I don't like its connotations any more than you, but at least it is a legitimate description.
>And just to quibble a bit, you don't have to have the item in your possession for it to be theft. The crime has been committed as soon as you "take and carry away" the item in question with the intent to permanently deprive. You can throw it away after that, and it's still theft. You can even return it after that, and it's still theft if you intended, at the time you took it, to not return it later.
;-)
Okay, perhaps I should have said you needed to have the item in your posession. Stupid tenses giving me trouble... It would be hard to take away an item from someone if it weren't (illegally) in your posession... I bet you're going to come up with an exmaple, now, aren't you? Damn.
And hey, no arguments that copyright isn't a crime. It is. It's just that it simply isn't stealing. And, even in the colloquial sense, it's an odd fit.
>That or they just couldn't afford to develop it anymore because piracy was eroding their sales too much...
Then how does not selling it at all improve the situation?
I fail to see the logic in discontinuing a program which they obviously see as popular (unpopular programs don't get pirated) rather than finding out a solution that works. Generally, bringing the price down/improving service/including extras with paid version are a good start. Shutting down development just ensures you're out of pocket.
It doesn't make sense.
>Intellectual property as a concept has existed much longer than the RIAA or DMCA. The fact that it's not physical property doesn't make it any less real.
It has? The RIAA has existed since the 1950's when they were first incarnated as the standard setter for Phono Preamps.
I feel that it's misleading to suggest this. In fact, it wasn't until the 1970's when Bill Gates released his open letter to computer clubs on piracy that people even had an "anti-pirate" to laugh at.
>What is it about a person coming in to possession of the 'bits' without obtaining the physical packaging that makes the lost opportunity for profit imaginary or the loss any less direct?
The fact that it costs the originator of the work positively nothing when you pirate.
Prove to me that, for example, Microsoft loses even $0.01 if I were to pirate windows from a newsgroup. Consider the fact that I prefer to use linux, and that I already own a copy of windows for my laptops. My piracy of windows would be pointless, as I already own what I need for myself, but still possible.
You see, if I steal a car I already own, there is a proveable loss. Someone has no car. But if I pirate an OS I already own (perhaps say for a POS computer in my basement that I'm just using to prove my point) you can't think that I would pay for it twice, so that doesn't count.
So where's the loss?
>You're right that under current law you may not be charged with theft
I'd RATHER be charged with theft. Current piracy laws are even stronger than those used against rapists and murderers.
>I'm trying to ensure that they understand that (in my opinion) making an illegal copy of a software package is little different than walking in to the store and taking it off the shelf. The value of the software is not attached to the packaging.
Hey, no problem. I completely understand, and I certainly wouldn't say that piracy is a good thing. It is a "bad thing", however, it is a distinct thing from theft, and, in most cases, is certainly not viewed by most as being as bad as, or worse than, plain old theft.
>I'm no fan of the BSA, (or RIAA or DMCA for that matter) but here we definitely disagree. There certainly are victims. However you feel about certain software companies, their pricing, their licensing, whatever, the fact remains that the victim is the owner of the intellectual property (sorry, there's that term again) that the violater now possesses without having made any compensation.
The only way to define them as a victim is similar to the way that when I receive a speeding ticket I pay a "victim's surcharge". It's defined in the sense that the absolute worse violators (the ones that commit fraud by selling pirated goods as original) do cause there to be a victim (the company CLEARLY loses sales in those cases, or the speeder kills because he was doing 200 mph). But, in the general sense, there is no clear way to prove the company is a victim. The only possible defense that they are a victim from a home user sharing their software with their friend, apart from copyright infringement, is that the company has suffered emotional distress from having it's directives violated. This is similar to my feelings when, for example, someone buys something I spent my hard time on (oh, let's say a painting) and makes it into an effigy. I feel bad, but it doesn't make me a "victim".
So, that just doesn't cut it for me. For me to call someone a victim, I need to see a loss, or some real pain. Without those, I just can't justify the use of the word in the legal sense.
And, as far as copyright goes, law is the only thing holding it together, because the general populous doesn't agree with how it is set up.
Sorry to answer my own post, but they've already given us the answer to my questions:
The support forum will continue and the plugins shall remain for another month, however, the main installer is no longer available for download and as of the 31st August 2003 all sales of Soundprobe have stopped.
It seems that by "stopping piracy" they've put themselves out of business.
That's not very smart, is it? Doesn't that prove that piracy increased their sales? Because while it was being pirated, it was for sale. Now that it isn't pirated, it isn't for sale.
What a crazy company.