While it is possible for two separate courts to come to conflicting conclusions, it seems that Google's biggest worry should be that one judge will award damages based on both interpretations simultaneously. This would set a precedent allowing both distribution and counterfeiting laws to be abused in digital information cases, defining mp3 files as some sort of "hyper-product" that can be controlled in any manner the copyright owner likes.
I accept your qualitative evidence of plausibly complicit infringement in those cases. You have said nothing about how you came to the conclusion that the "vast majority" of Megaupload content was infringing, the claim I was most interested in disputing.
You can doubt it all you want... but that doesn't make it any less true. It's fairly trivial to show show that a vast majority content on megaupload was copyrighted, and unlikely to have been uploaded to it with any permission from the copyright holder.
If it's so trivial to prove, why don't you share the proof with us? So far all I see are border-line-trolling comments saying it is "obvious" without stating why. Maybe it's because that's all those commenters have ever used it for, but that's anecdotal not statistical evidence.
Plus, as a recent article about Youtube shows, "likely infringing" and "actually infringing" are two very different things. If you go around claiming that anybody uploading stuff who isn't a big name is by default infringing, you end up trampling on a lot of peoples' rights.
And don't get me started on the comparison of copyright infringement and terrorism. Unexpectedly, they are remarkably similar: they are both symptoms of a larger problem in society that depriving people of rights will not solve, they are both used to justify unchecked expansion of government with new powers that can be easily abused, and they both reduce to simple law-enforcement issues when you strip away the propaganda.
I appreciate your well-considered response. You have very aptly paraphrased the slippery-slope argument. Once we accept that merely possessing bombs is a crime, outlawing the knowledge or intention of making bombs is a logical extension. Extend it further, so that merely expressing interest in learning about bombs becomes a crime, and every 12-year-old boy in the country will be incarcerated.
The only plausible defense of the ban on explosive materials and firearms is that, even absent ill intent, accident, theft, or mental instability could result in them being used to hurt people. Knowledge is useless without materials, but it can be spread to others just as weapons can be sold or stolen. I guess where I'm going with this is that only the intent of the suspect should be a factor in the case. A chemistry professor likely knows more about making bombs than any terrorist, but absent intent he is no more guilty of terrorism than you or I. If the court is basing their judgment of intent on one line in a text file on a thumb drive found in his house, that seems a little shaky to establish intent.
The one thing I hope, though, is that someone like this man will get psychological therapy while in prison. While some terrorists may be incorrigible militants bent on world destruction, others are just normal people suffering from emotional disorders who ran out of ideas. They deserve a second chance, just like people who attempt suicide.
I see your point about other actions that have been banned because they are likely to result in causing harm to others. But it appears that you are attempting to draw a false equivalence between possessing material and possessing knowledge.
Yes, owning bombs is illegal, and owning the ingredients for bombs is also frequently illegal. But when you criminalize *knowing* how to make a severely exothermic chemical reaction (bomb), what you have is a thought-crime. A normally-law-abiding citizen who has a minor slip-up can dispose of a gun or alcohol or explosives and no longer be breaking the law, but they cannot dispose of knowledge. This is the reason that the FBI should, and usually does, start tracking people when they discover "intent" but doesn't arrest them until material is purchased or other concrete preparations are made. (The real reason, of course, is that they need the evidence for the case to hold up in court, so we have due process to thank for it. The courts unfortunately failed in this case.)
The freedom of thought is an inescapable prerequisite to the freedom of speech and cannot be compromised by anyone who actually values the American Constitution.
Now there's the Internet, and all groups connected to it find themselves being drawn into a single global culture with English as a unifying language. Some folks, Konrad von Finckenstein among them, lament this development because of what's being lost, but what about the bad things we're losing and the good things we're gaining? All these separate languages and cultures are interesting, but they have also prevented us from communicating and understanding each other, which has all too often resulted in violence and bloodshed.
Sounds like you just described the Internet as a modern-day Tower of Babel. I hope it works out for us better than it did the last time.
Nah, it's easy. Just use ad-block AND no-script, and just enable scripts for the site without enabling them for the parasitic ad domains, and all you have to do is wait the 30 seconds while staring at a blank page.
A government that passes abusive regulations is suffering from corruption. The only way to fix it is to bring in new people and undo the bad rules. Typically this is done by instituting rules of conduct enforced by a different part of the government to perform audits on the rest of it. This won't happen if, as you so rightly observed, everyone in the system is party to the corruption, which is why there are so many cartels with government protection alive and well all over the world.
I was trying to point out that a "government-supported cartel" can be invincible if the government in question pulls out all the stops. The absence of protectionist tariffs in this case was the chink in their armor. The simpler solution is to have the government police itself so the cartel does not form in the first place.
Definition of THEFT a : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it
b : an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property
Let me know when copyright infringement deprives anyone of actual property. And no, customers are not "property".
I don't think the RIAA/MPAA deliberately wants to destroy our freedoms, they just don't want to have people profiting from their work.
Tell me how sharing songs on Kazaa or bittorrent for free constitutes "profiting from their work". If that were the case, then they would ONLY have sued the providers of the services (that get ad revenue when people use them), not the users themselves. But you are right, they don't want to destroy our freedoms per se, they just want to take our money by whatever means possible.
3D printers, and CAM in general are great for prototyping, but they're not going to make a dent in the cost of finished goods.
I beg to differ. While it is true that 3D printing cannot hold a candle to the efficiency of bulk injection molding, it is already bringing down the prices of other types of products. For example, I am involved with the design of a robotic mechanism that had lots of tiny, hard-to-machine parts and needed lots of assembly time. With 3D printing, we could basically print half the parts pre-assembled in shapes that would be physically impossible to either machine or mold (blind holes, internal cavities, crazy angles and contours, etc). The resulting drop in machine and assembly time cut the cost by a factor of ten, even when produced in quantity. Plus, since we don't have to order parts in batches, we can afford to offer them at a lower price while order volume is low.
3D printers are also revolutionizing the replacement-part industry for cars, aircraft, and antiques. High-quality, high-strength parts can be made by printing steel or titanium, and also by coating plastic parts with metal. True, they won't replace your bike sprocket or drive shaft, but they can do a lot more than 99 cent plastic toys.
There are two unusual reasons that worked out in Dow's favor: 1) He was in a different country where he could start his company without interference from the German cartel; and 2) The German government neglected the important step of adding tariffs to his imported bromine.
The reason anti-trust laws are so important is because these circumstances are rare. If Dow had lived in Germany at the time, they would have taken an immediate interest in his start-up and likely either stolen his process or squashed his company before he became a threat. This is precisely what is happening in the U.S. with the entertainment industry: government-supported cartels are forcing all the (media distribution) innovation overseas, and now they want SOPA to quash even that.
You gave as a counter-example a story that is the opposite of the question. The men were perfectly free to get a clergy to "marry" them and then go around telling people they were married. They sued because they wanted the set of benefits conferred to married couples under the law by the government. The authority of the government to confer benefits is strictly dependent on the letter of the laws on the books, which did not include recognizing marriage between members of the same sex.
File sharing, on the other hand, originates as freedom of speech and has nothing to do with the government until they stick their ugly head into it in the form of copyright law and related crap. Therefore, the absence of such laws on the books means the government has no right to do anything about it.
It's really fucking hilarious, like parents suing a school because they don't have a rule that says "any kid caught punching Johnny will get suspended", as though they were entitled to make rules for every school just because a few other schools caved to their incessant whining.
Minor piece of historical correction: The mirror was supposed to parabolic, not flat, so measuring it was not quite a simple matter. It was not NASA but a subcontractor who did the actual grinding, and they used as a reference a defective measurement device when grinding it. Since they did not want to re-grind the mirror, they ignored the data from two functioning devices that said the mirror was flawed. NASA for its part did not perform sufficient quality control on the process to notice that only one device was used to measure it, and apparently did not test (or have the ability to test) the mirror independently.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope#Flawed_mirror
Or maybe it is that evolutionary factors are rendered pretty much irrelevant after the hormone raging teens and early 20s -- by then most people who are going to reproduce have and problems that crop up later are not selected out on any sort of widescale pattern. The human body, because of the early procreation tendencies, hasn't adapted for older age, and so there are all kinds of conditions that crop up in middle age that we haven't evolved past by selecting against those.
I've always thought it interesting how we treat our elders in human societies. Virtually all human cultures, which are just as much a product of evolution as our genetic code, generally include respect for their elders. I can't help but think that this trait gives an evolutionary advantage to their offspring because they are able to pass on more knowledge and wisdom to their children and grandchildren than if they just keeled over after their kids turned 21. It is certainly not a direct genetic effect, since your kids will probably do fine even if you die early, but every population has some members who outlive the others and can pass on valuable wisdom that helps the whole tribe survive. Any genetic group in which this never occurred would be doomed to fail the next time they did not prepare for a 100-year flood that everyone had forgotten about or something.
I wonder if anyone has written a story about a eugenics-based society where people are only permitted to reproduce after their parents or grandparents reach a certain age without issue. Of course genetic testing could make the waiting unnecessary, but these issues have been around a lot longer than genetics.
Rights are granted by default, not by enumeration. Much like the arguments over software patents, adding "on a computer" or "on the Internet" to a fundamental human right like freedom of speech does not make it a new right that must be separately protected. It already IS protected, and singling it out for "special" protection only provides a means for those protections to be revoked. Just because you pass a law that says "no censoring the Internet" does not make censoring it okay after you repeal the law, but it's very easy to make people believe that it is.
Slashdot Mirror
While it is possible for two separate courts to come to conflicting conclusions, it seems that Google's biggest worry should be that one judge will award damages based on both interpretations simultaneously. This would set a precedent allowing both distribution and counterfeiting laws to be abused in digital information cases, defining mp3 files as some sort of "hyper-product" that can be controlled in any manner the copyright owner likes.
I accept your qualitative evidence of plausibly complicit infringement in those cases. You have said nothing about how you came to the conclusion that the "vast majority" of Megaupload content was infringing, the claim I was most interested in disputing.
Tune in next week for another installment of CITOGENESIS.
You can doubt it all you want... but that doesn't make it any less true. It's fairly trivial to show show that a vast majority content on megaupload was copyrighted, and unlikely to have been uploaded to it with any permission from the copyright holder.
If it's so trivial to prove, why don't you share the proof with us? So far all I see are border-line-trolling comments saying it is "obvious" without stating why. Maybe it's because that's all those commenters have ever used it for, but that's anecdotal not statistical evidence.
Plus, as a recent article about Youtube shows, "likely infringing" and "actually infringing" are two very different things. If you go around claiming that anybody uploading stuff who isn't a big name is by default infringing, you end up trampling on a lot of peoples' rights.
And don't get me started on the comparison of copyright infringement and terrorism. Unexpectedly, they are remarkably similar: they are both symptoms of a larger problem in society that depriving people of rights will not solve, they are both used to justify unchecked expansion of government with new powers that can be easily abused, and they both reduce to simple law-enforcement issues when you strip away the propaganda.
And we wouldn't keep pissing off our allies by blowing shit up in their territory without telling them. We wouldn't want that.
I appreciate your well-considered response. You have very aptly paraphrased the slippery-slope argument. Once we accept that merely possessing bombs is a crime, outlawing the knowledge or intention of making bombs is a logical extension. Extend it further, so that merely expressing interest in learning about bombs becomes a crime, and every 12-year-old boy in the country will be incarcerated.
The only plausible defense of the ban on explosive materials and firearms is that, even absent ill intent, accident, theft, or mental instability could result in them being used to hurt people. Knowledge is useless without materials, but it can be spread to others just as weapons can be sold or stolen. I guess where I'm going with this is that only the intent of the suspect should be a factor in the case. A chemistry professor likely knows more about making bombs than any terrorist, but absent intent he is no more guilty of terrorism than you or I. If the court is basing their judgment of intent on one line in a text file on a thumb drive found in his house, that seems a little shaky to establish intent.
The one thing I hope, though, is that someone like this man will get psychological therapy while in prison. While some terrorists may be incorrigible militants bent on world destruction, others are just normal people suffering from emotional disorders who ran out of ideas. They deserve a second chance, just like people who attempt suicide.
Already in the works, these articles from last summer, and at least two companies planning to use the man-rated Atlas 5 rocket
http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_space_thewritestuff/2011/07/nasa-ula-look-to-man-rate-atlas-v.html
http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n1108/04boeingatlas/
http://www.sncspace.com/space_exploration.php
I see your point about other actions that have been banned because they are likely to result in causing harm to others. But it appears that you are attempting to draw a false equivalence between possessing material and possessing knowledge.
Yes, owning bombs is illegal, and owning the ingredients for bombs is also frequently illegal. But when you criminalize *knowing* how to make a severely exothermic chemical reaction (bomb), what you have is a thought-crime. A normally-law-abiding citizen who has a minor slip-up can dispose of a gun or alcohol or explosives and no longer be breaking the law, but they cannot dispose of knowledge. This is the reason that the FBI should, and usually does, start tracking people when they discover "intent" but doesn't arrest them until material is purchased or other concrete preparations are made. (The real reason, of course, is that they need the evidence for the case to hold up in court, so we have due process to thank for it. The courts unfortunately failed in this case.)
The freedom of thought is an inescapable prerequisite to the freedom of speech and cannot be compromised by anyone who actually values the American Constitution.
How about the plans to a Ford Model T or Model A ? Should be in the public domain by now....
Not if they were never published. Trade secrets can stay that way forever. I forget what the law says about leaked trade secrets, though.
I wanna download an A-bomb!
Won't do you any good unless you can find a plutonium ink cartridge.
"You can always trust America to do the right thing - after they have exhausted all other possibilities." -- Winston Churchill
Now there's the Internet, and all groups connected to it find themselves being drawn into a single global culture with English as a unifying language. Some folks, Konrad von Finckenstein among them, lament this development because of what's being lost, but what about the bad things we're losing and the good things we're gaining? All these separate languages and cultures are interesting, but they have also prevented us from communicating and understanding each other, which has all too often resulted in violence and bloodshed.
Sounds like you just described the Internet as a modern-day Tower of Babel. I hope it works out for us better than it did the last time.
Nah, it's easy. Just use ad-block AND no-script, and just enable scripts for the site without enabling them for the parasitic ad domains, and all you have to do is wait the 30 seconds while staring at a blank page.
A government that passes abusive regulations is suffering from corruption. The only way to fix it is to bring in new people and undo the bad rules. Typically this is done by instituting rules of conduct enforced by a different part of the government to perform audits on the rest of it. This won't happen if, as you so rightly observed, everyone in the system is party to the corruption, which is why there are so many cartels with government protection alive and well all over the world.
I was trying to point out that a "government-supported cartel" can be invincible if the government in question pulls out all the stops. The absence of protectionist tariffs in this case was the chink in their armor. The simpler solution is to have the government police itself so the cartel does not form in the first place.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/theft
Definition of THEFT
a : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it
b : an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property
Let me know when copyright infringement deprives anyone of actual property. And no, customers are not "property".
I don't think the RIAA/MPAA deliberately wants to destroy our freedoms, they just don't want to have people profiting from their work.
Tell me how sharing songs on Kazaa or bittorrent for free constitutes "profiting from their work". If that were the case, then they would ONLY have sued the providers of the services (that get ad revenue when people use them), not the users themselves. But you are right, they don't want to destroy our freedoms per se, they just want to take our money by whatever means possible.
3D printers, and CAM in general are great for prototyping, but they're not going to make a dent in the cost of finished goods.
I beg to differ. While it is true that 3D printing cannot hold a candle to the efficiency of bulk injection molding, it is already bringing down the prices of other types of products. For example, I am involved with the design of a robotic mechanism that had lots of tiny, hard-to-machine parts and needed lots of assembly time. With 3D printing, we could basically print half the parts pre-assembled in shapes that would be physically impossible to either machine or mold (blind holes, internal cavities, crazy angles and contours, etc). The resulting drop in machine and assembly time cut the cost by a factor of ten, even when produced in quantity. Plus, since we don't have to order parts in batches, we can afford to offer them at a lower price while order volume is low.
3D printers are also revolutionizing the replacement-part industry for cars, aircraft, and antiques. High-quality, high-strength parts can be made by printing steel or titanium, and also by coating plastic parts with metal. True, they won't replace your bike sprocket or drive shaft, but they can do a lot more than 99 cent plastic toys.
There are two unusual reasons that worked out in Dow's favor: 1) He was in a different country where he could start his company without interference from the German cartel; and 2) The German government neglected the important step of adding tariffs to his imported bromine.
The reason anti-trust laws are so important is because these circumstances are rare. If Dow had lived in Germany at the time, they would have taken an immediate interest in his start-up and likely either stolen his process or squashed his company before he became a threat. This is precisely what is happening in the U.S. with the entertainment industry: government-supported cartels are forcing all the (media distribution) innovation overseas, and now they want SOPA to quash even that.
Do prepaid debit cards allow non-charge-back deposits by third parties? Sounds like that would be pretty easy to prevent.
You gave as a counter-example a story that is the opposite of the question. The men were perfectly free to get a clergy to "marry" them and then go around telling people they were married. They sued because they wanted the set of benefits conferred to married couples under the law by the government. The authority of the government to confer benefits is strictly dependent on the letter of the laws on the books, which did not include recognizing marriage between members of the same sex.
File sharing, on the other hand, originates as freedom of speech and has nothing to do with the government until they stick their ugly head into it in the form of copyright law and related crap. Therefore, the absence of such laws on the books means the government has no right to do anything about it.
It's really fucking hilarious, like parents suing a school because they don't have a rule that says "any kid caught punching Johnny will get suspended", as though they were entitled to make rules for every school just because a few other schools caved to their incessant whining.
Minor piece of historical correction: The mirror was supposed to parabolic, not flat, so measuring it was not quite a simple matter. It was not NASA but a subcontractor who did the actual grinding, and they used as a reference a defective measurement device when grinding it. Since they did not want to re-grind the mirror, they ignored the data from two functioning devices that said the mirror was flawed. NASA for its part did not perform sufficient quality control on the process to notice that only one device was used to measure it, and apparently did not test (or have the ability to test) the mirror independently. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope#Flawed_mirror
Or maybe it is that evolutionary factors are rendered pretty much irrelevant after the hormone raging teens and early 20s -- by then most people who are going to reproduce have and problems that crop up later are not selected out on any sort of widescale pattern. The human body, because of the early procreation tendencies, hasn't adapted for older age, and so there are all kinds of conditions that crop up in middle age that we haven't evolved past by selecting against those.
I've always thought it interesting how we treat our elders in human societies. Virtually all human cultures, which are just as much a product of evolution as our genetic code, generally include respect for their elders. I can't help but think that this trait gives an evolutionary advantage to their offspring because they are able to pass on more knowledge and wisdom to their children and grandchildren than if they just keeled over after their kids turned 21. It is certainly not a direct genetic effect, since your kids will probably do fine even if you die early, but every population has some members who outlive the others and can pass on valuable wisdom that helps the whole tribe survive. Any genetic group in which this never occurred would be doomed to fail the next time they did not prepare for a 100-year flood that everyone had forgotten about or something.
I wonder if anyone has written a story about a eugenics-based society where people are only permitted to reproduce after their parents or grandparents reach a certain age without issue. Of course genetic testing could make the waiting unnecessary, but these issues have been around a lot longer than genetics.
Rights are granted by default, not by enumeration. Much like the arguments over software patents, adding "on a computer" or "on the Internet" to a fundamental human right like freedom of speech does not make it a new right that must be separately protected. It already IS protected, and singling it out for "special" protection only provides a means for those protections to be revoked. Just because you pass a law that says "no censoring the Internet" does not make censoring it okay after you repeal the law, but it's very easy to make people believe that it is.