We can not reply to your question because the question is wrong.
You are the one trying to dumb down the issue. IP infringement is NOT theft. By downloading a song, I am not depriving anyone of that song, or even - realistically - an income from selling a copy of that song.
In your contrived carrot case, it's more like I take a photo of the carrot. After I "steal" it, it's still there. I have not deprived anyone of anything. Maybe the farmer wanted to sell me an image of the carrot and that counts as a lost sale because I have a 1000mm telephoto lens (I actually do.:-) but in no way, shape or form can that constitute theft or even "depriving him of the fruit of his labour".
Your argument is basically that if I sit outside Wembley Stadium while the Rolling Stones are playing, listening to Sympathy for the Devil, I am depriving Mick Jagger of the fruits of his labour since I did not pay for a ticket. That is your "basic principle" from my point of view.
Here's a simple question for you, Ohreally - if you hear a street musician, do you always pay him or her? Or are you a music thief? =)
But what makes the farmer be entitled to those fruits?
Is it because of his hard work in the fields? What then if someone invents a machine that automatically tends the crop? Or if the farmer himself never sets foot on his land, would the farmhand be entitled to the fruits of the labor?
Is it because he owns the land? Well, can you really own land, or do you just own the rights to farm and use the land? What of the landowner who rents out his land, would the crop belong to him instead of the farmer?
Philosophical questions aside, let's get to the economics:
What makes a copy-based governmentally backed monopoly the best suited method for compensating artists? This business method did not even exist a few hundred years ago, simply because it was not practical for anyone except a select wealthy few to produce copies. Now, when everyone can make perfect copies, it's out of date. To enforce it legally and efficiently would require a brutal police state. Wouldn't it be better to adapt the business methods so artists can get paid from a multitude of other sources; to reduce their dependance on the record companies, to spread the wealth around a bit (the music biz' renumeration stats are one of the most skewed with very few artists getting $BIGNUM and very many getting nothing) and to actually promote the useful arts?
This whole schtick about "artists getting paid" is a dishonest ruse. If the record companies suddenly care so fucking much about their artists, why don't they start paying out due royalties?
A simple mercury thermometer could measure temperature in a vacuum (assuming the temperature is within the scale of the thermometer). All you do is wait for the temperature to stop changing, and thats it. Just because no conduction takes place doesn't mean you can't measure the temperature. Your suggested experiment would measure the temperature of the thermometer, not the surrounding space. The value then becomes dependant on if the thermometer is in the shade or in the sun and then what colour it is. If it is in the shade, it would eventually read "Mercury frozen solid" quite a bit before you'd get a meaningful reading from it. A different type of thermometer would stop at a little under 3K, but this would still be the thermometer's temperature, not space's.
Space, essentially being a vacuum, has no intrinsic temperature. Particles in space may themselves have temperatures in the thousands range, but they are relatively far between and won't heat the thermometer enough to affect it's reading.
Either way, there is no way for law enforcement to know who was driving... Unless the camera takes a picture of the driver and the Police compares this shot to the photo of the car's registered owner that the DMV should have on file. If they match, they send out the fine. If it doesn't, they drop the case as it's too much work digging up and comparing photos of all possible drivers.
BTW, this is how automated speeding cameras work here in Sweden.
many of the problems with technological documentation could be solved by just keeping me in the loop throughout the project I have on occasion had to more or less forcibly inject myself into projects just to be in the loop. I have also threatened the entire development staff with a baseball bat or simply coming around and sit on them (I'm fairly big) if they didn't give me useful data. It worked so-so - getting on the projects worked better, even though it took a lot of time from writing. It probably helped that I'm trained as a programmer originally and could actually contribute a little bit to the projects.
will making documentation more entertaining actually work to get people to read it? Yes. I tried this out with the TenFour TFS Gateway manuals back in 1998. When I added humour to virtually all examples given, support incidents clearly went down. In spite of this, I was ordered to take them back out since they could be perceived as being "un-serious".
An example from the cc:Mail section:
The TFS post office can not be used for addressing. Mail sent directly to the TFS (gatelink) post office without having been addressed to a routing post office will go to e-mail heaven immediately. It would not be delivered if you put 40,000 volts through it. This was a big problem. People constantly addressed e-mail to the gatelink PO and they went in the bit-bucket. When I added that snippet to the manual, these problems went way down for new installs. I worked in support as well as doing the docs, so I knew the incidence rates.
why are you counting the hardware as levy? Because in many countries, recording and storage devices are taxed according to their capacity. This levy is then (in an ideal world) distributed to needy artists, composers and songwriters. In reality, the administration eats most of it and the rest goes to the already rich and popular artists.
TFA gets it wrong too: "And did we mention the board is based on NVIDIA's nForce 680i SLI chipset and has three full length, PCI Express x16 slots for multi-GPU action?"
From TPB's about page: "To report child abuse or other similar unlawful activities please do so to your local authority. In Sweden you can contact ECPAT Hotline or email childabuse@rkp.police.se to report child abuse matters. Please do so."
If ECPAT and/or the Police has received complaints and seemingly ignored them in the past, it's either because they investigated them and found no illegal material (there are lots of misnamed torrents) or because they themselves put them there as a setup. My money is on alternative #1.
Oh, and the reason that TPB wants you to report these kind of things to ECPAT and the Police is so they can investigate it and possibly apprehend the persons responsible. If they just delete the torrents without reporting it to the authorities, the Police are none the wiser.
I have followed the posting of this material on TPB for a long time, despite many complaints the administrators have done nothing. 1. All complaints are reviewed by the TPB moderators. Anything suspicious gets reported to ECPAT. If ECPAT thinks it's kiddie porn, they call the police. 2. Why haven't you notified ECPAT yourself? Or, have you done so and they decided that it was not child pornography?
We got a bunch of "examples" of child porn torrents reported to us today - all of them so far have been mislabeled torrents (like several with fully clothed fashion teen model shots or newly shaved 25-year old girls trying to look like Lolitas, failing miserably).
If you find child pornography on the Bay (or anywhere else, for that matter), report it to ECPAT, just like it says in the About. It will get checked out by professionals and either dismissed or reported to the police who may then have a better chance at catching the bastards making it. Blocking TPB is just as stupid as blocking Google or MSN, for the same reasons. It's basically a search engine and blocking it will not help the children one damned bit.
No wonder British SF is so obsessed with the idea of their country becoming a fascist state. At this point, it's not so much British SF being obsessed with the idea, but the government and Parliament...
The Russian sites are able to sell tracks for $0.10 each because they need not worry about paying the supplier. Except, well, they actually do. The difference is that in Russia, they pay 17% of the price, not a fixed amount. Furthermore, this all goes to the artists (via a collection agency), not the labels. Or it would, if the labels didn't hog the copyrights so the artists can't apply for their own money.
Your entire argument is an oft-repeated one, but still has very little bearing on reality. Studies show that entrepreneurs value factors like time-to-market, trademark recognition and actual innovation much higher than patent protection (Mazzoleni and Nelson, 1998; Cohen et al., 2000). Besides, the actual copycat threat comes from low-wage countries like China who basically doesn't give a rat's ass about US patent protection in the first place.
There's an anecdote from a local (to me) innovation and manufacturing company making tilt-rotors for excavators. They have at least one major copycat competitor and they *love* the competition. It seems they copycats are very low quality and doesn't really cut into the innovator's sales since the ones buying the copy would not be getting the innovator's product anyway. That is, until after they tried the copycat's product, got hooked on the functionality and got tired of adding new hydralic fluid every week (the copies apparently leak like sieves). Having a copycat is like free marketing to a whole new market segment, a bit like how the fashion industry works - the copycats are what drives innovation and new looks.
--- Mazzolini, R. and R.R. Nelson, The Benefits and Costs of Strong Patent Protection: A Contribution to the Current Debate , Research Policy 27 (3), p. 273-284, 1998.
Cohen, W., R.R. Nelson and J. P. Walsh, Protecting their Intellectual Assets: Appropriability Conditions and Why U.S. Manufacturing Firms Patent (or Not), Working Paper 7552, Cambridge, National Bureau of Economic Research (available at http://www.nber.org/papers/w7552), 2000.
AllOfMP3 was a business model based on zero costs, because they never paid anything to copy their output and had no investment costs. They paid 17% of their revenues to the Russian royalty collection agency FAIR. You see, Russia had laws for compulsory licensing of music, much like the US has for radio. As for investment costs, if it were free to setup a site like theirs, why hasn't any RIAA members done so? It'd be free money for them and a great way to get out of Steve Jobs' force field.
Freely share downloaded music from iTunes? Did they abolish copyright law in France? I had no idea! Well, seeing as the current law stems from an absinthe dream Victor Hugo had... On a more serious note, it's perfectly legal in most European countries to share music with a few friends, the exact number varies from country to country. Now, you mail a friend a copy of a song, he sends it on and suddenly the local version of the RIAA tears you a new, roomy, asshole. It's all fun and games until information gets on the loose, isn't it?
Someone steals my iPod and they'll be able to figure out my name?!? Someone steals your iPod/hacks your computer/whatever and spreads the music on p2p networks, prompting the RIAA to sue you to hell and back (if they have closed Gitmo by then, that is).
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We can not reply to your question because the question is wrong.
:-) but in no way, shape or form can that constitute theft or even "depriving him of the fruit of his labour".
You are the one trying to dumb down the issue. IP infringement is NOT theft. By downloading a song, I am not depriving anyone of that song, or even - realistically - an income from selling a copy of that song.
In your contrived carrot case, it's more like I take a photo of the carrot. After I "steal" it, it's still there. I have not deprived anyone of anything. Maybe the farmer wanted to sell me an image of the carrot and that counts as a lost sale because I have a 1000mm telephoto lens (I actually do.
Your argument is basically that if I sit outside Wembley Stadium while the Rolling Stones are playing, listening to Sympathy for the Devil, I am depriving Mick Jagger of the fruits of his labour since I did not pay for a ticket. That is your "basic principle" from my point of view.
Here's a simple question for you, Ohreally - if you hear a street musician, do you always pay him or her? Or are you a music thief? =)
But what makes the farmer be entitled to those fruits?
Is it because of his hard work in the fields? What then if someone invents a machine that automatically tends the crop? Or if the farmer himself never sets foot on his land, would the farmhand be entitled to the fruits of the labor?
Is it because he owns the land? Well, can you really own land, or do you just own the rights to farm and use the land? What of the landowner who rents out his land, would the crop belong to him instead of the farmer?
Philosophical questions aside, let's get to the economics:
What makes a copy-based governmentally backed monopoly the best suited method for compensating artists? This business method did not even exist a few hundred years ago, simply because it was not practical for anyone except a select wealthy few to produce copies. Now, when everyone can make perfect copies, it's out of date. To enforce it legally and efficiently would require a brutal police state. Wouldn't it be better to adapt the business methods so artists can get paid from a multitude of other sources; to reduce their dependance on the record companies, to spread the wealth around a bit (the music biz' renumeration stats are one of the most skewed with very few artists getting $BIGNUM and very many getting nothing) and to actually promote the useful arts?
This whole schtick about "artists getting paid" is a dishonest ruse. If the record companies suddenly care so fucking much about their artists, why don't they start paying out due royalties?
That's easy enough to fix by having the automated image screening software black out the passenger's seat.
An example from the cc:Mail section: The TFS post office can not be used for addressing. Mail sent directly to the TFS (gatelink) post office
without having been addressed to a routing post office will go to e-mail heaven immediately. It would
not be delivered if you put 40,000 volts through it. This was a big problem. People constantly addressed e-mail to the gatelink PO and they went in the bit-bucket. When I added that snippet to the manual, these problems went way down for new installs. I worked in support as well as doing the docs, so I knew the incidence rates.
That's a very good question. It has been yanked off the firehose page, too.
Anyway, here's a link to TFA: http://apcmag.com/6735/interview_con_kolivas
TFA gets it wrong too: "And did we mention the board is based on NVIDIA's nForce 680i SLI chipset and has three full length, PCI Express x16 slots for multi-GPU action?"
From TPB's about page:
"To report child abuse or other similar unlawful activities please do so to your local authority. In Sweden you can contact ECPAT Hotline or email childabuse@rkp.police.se to report child abuse matters. Please do so."
If ECPAT and/or the Police has received complaints and seemingly ignored them in the past, it's either because they investigated them and found no illegal material (there are lots of misnamed torrents) or because they themselves put them there as a setup.
My money is on alternative #1.
Oh, and the reason that TPB wants you to report these kind of things to ECPAT and the Police is so they can investigate it and possibly apprehend the persons responsible. If they just delete the torrents without reporting it to the authorities, the Police are none the wiser.
2. Why haven't you notified ECPAT yourself? Or, have you done so and they decided that it was not child pornography?
We got a bunch of "examples" of child porn torrents reported to us today - all of them so far have been mislabeled torrents (like several with fully clothed fashion teen model shots or newly shaved 25-year old girls trying to look like Lolitas, failing miserably).
If you find child pornography on the Bay (or anywhere else, for that matter), report it to ECPAT, just like it says in the About. It will get checked out by professionals and either dismissed or reported to the police who may then have a better chance at catching the bastards making it. Blocking TPB is just as stupid as blocking Google or MSN, for the same reasons. It's basically a search engine and blocking it will not help the children one damned bit.
"If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him."
-- Cardinal Richelieu.
Your entire argument is an oft-repeated one, but still has very little bearing on reality. Studies show that entrepreneurs value factors like time-to-market, trademark recognition and actual innovation much higher than patent protection (Mazzoleni and Nelson, 1998; Cohen et al., 2000). Besides, the actual copycat threat comes from low-wage countries like China who basically doesn't give a rat's ass about US patent protection in the first place.
There's an anecdote from a local (to me) innovation and manufacturing company making tilt-rotors for excavators. They have at least one major copycat competitor and they *love* the competition. It seems they copycats are very low quality and doesn't really cut into the innovator's sales since the ones buying the copy would not be getting the innovator's product anyway. That is, until after they tried the copycat's product, got hooked on the functionality and got tired of adding new hydralic fluid every week (the copies apparently leak like sieves). Having a copycat is like free marketing to a whole new market segment, a bit like how the fashion industry works - the copycats are what drives innovation and new looks.
---
Mazzolini, R. and R.R. Nelson, The Benefits and Costs of Strong Patent Protection: A Contribution to the Current Debate , Research Policy 27 (3), p. 273-284, 1998.
Cohen, W., R.R. Nelson and J. P. Walsh, Protecting their Intellectual Assets: Appropriability Conditions and Why U.S. Manufacturing Firms Patent (or Not), Working Paper 7552, Cambridge, National Bureau of Economic Research (available at http://www.nber.org/papers/w7552), 2000.
Submit it here: halfbakery.com
I'd be happy to clarify what "people-ready business" means to me.