I gave up the fight when I spent an hour researching and drafting a well-worded letter against ACTA only to receive a 5-minute form letter saying, "Thank you for your support. I agree that ACTA is very important to US survival in our troubled world and I will do everything in my power to get it passed."
If you're downloading something and you think it might be distributed against the wishes of the copyright owner, double-check or delete it. If you don't have any belief that it's not legit then continue. Congratulations, you have passed the mens rea test and are not a criminal.
Random word in Google -- yes, it was almost certainly copyrighted (most things are). Yes, the distribution was almost certainly authorized. The owner is probably attributed on the site you downloaded it from or is the same as the owner of the site.
For example, not four inches below this text box it says, "Comments owned by the poster. (c) 2012 All Rights Reserved." -- Look at that, Slashdot claims copyright on its web pages and attributes its posters. Surprise, surprise. You'll find that a lot of web sites have things like this on them to help clarify for you.
Yes, I understand that everything is copyrighted. That doesn't mean common sense goes out the window.
Correct, downloading copyrighted material is not illegal. Downloading it against the rights provided by the rights holder is.
Things formatted for web viewing you can usually safely assume that the rights holder is giving you the right to download for the purpose of viewing at the time of download. There's a long-standing implicit assumption that the right to view is being granted when the rights holder is putting it up on the web. There is no implicit assumption when someone who is not the rights holder is the one who uploaded it. Therefore, you should be wary of sites that look like the material uploaded was not uploaded by the rights holder or with the permission of the rights holder.
Now, this is also an area where mens rea comes into play. I'll wait while you google that. Okay, now that you read that, it's hard to say that when you google "stream (new movie title)" or "torrent (new movie title)" you're doing that with the full belief that it's legal. We've been bombarded with the message to the contrary. If you just google "(new movie title)" and the first link is a streaming link rather than the official website, sure it may be decided that mens rea was not present, but you know what? That's a defense to be used in court, not an excuse to say, "Whatever, whatever, I download what I want."
When you're actively looking to download media or art for free it's hard to argue you don't know exactly what you're doing.
Uhm. 99.999999999% or more of it matches with common sense.
1. Don't assume you have more rights than the ability to view -- this would stop almost all repurposing. (Which I think is more insidious.) 2. Does it look like the official site or official distributor for band X? No, Pirate Bay does not look like the official site or official distributor for band X.
If you want to ask then ask the copyright holder. If you can't figure out who the copyright holder is ask the distributor.
Nope. That's an entirely reasonable change to the system, but that gets us to underlying chemical being unpatentable but what about the delivery mechanism?
Also, in that case, who tests efficacy and safety of the underlying chemical and how do they do that without a delivery mechanism?
Ah, so I'm required to be an MD who is specialized in all things seen and unseen in order to deserve to live. Nice to know.
Seriously though, I can't possibly think of all the possible ways in which I could die and act on them. I need some way of narrowing it down for me. Drug ads give/some/ information -- I don't think it should be the only and it doesn't need to be the primary source, but they're not entirely, 100% without value.
The fact that Jonas Salk didn't patent his vaccine means nothing -- he could have patented it and licensed it for free and got the same result. If less money spent on medication were a pure boon to the economy then shouldn't we pay nothing for food, housing and transportation, too? Oh, wait, costs still need to be paid and the difference is whether they get paid before or after you see the money.
Maybe profit-based pharma isn't the best solution, that's why in another part of this long and twisting thread that is now out of my control to respond to I posited requiring pharmaceutical research companies to be non-profits.
Drug commercials became legal and popular before Google was. They also come to market sooner than reference material. Not all PCPs will have direct connections to all possible specialists or even realize off the bat that some set of symptoms is likely connected to some specialty. Maybe direct marketing has run its course now that things like Watson are coming online, but historically, doctors need more information than what they used to have.
Yes, it does try to drum up market share for some company's drug. It also informs the patient that he should be asking about X. I don't think it's the best possible system either, but I don't think it has zero or negative value.
I'm going to assume that the NCI does basic research and private companies bring those potential drugs to market? Yep, looks to be the case.
I'm not saying that the NIH and other government programs shouldn't be doing basic research, just that in our current system pharma companies have a role in bringing those discoveries to market.
It's just an example, sheesh. Insert a less common sense ailment then. For example, without marketing I wouldn't know about the various smoking cessation products, including the nicotine vaccination.
True, it hasn't been proven. There is, however, a huge correlation between free market enterprise and successful product innovation.
With respect to non-profitable drugs, the US actually gives tax breaks to companies that research non-profitable drugs. Maybe we just need to make those tax breaks higher to incentivize it more.
Most/successful/ research. Plenty of drug line attempts fail because, again, drug research is hard. Modifying existing drugs is more likely to succeed because it's much closer to a successful line. Then again, those tweaks rarely cover much more than their own costs anyway.
+1 Insightful. You're the only responder to my massive Devil's advocating that I can't find any glaring errors with. I guess I should watch that TED talk!
It does have the one problem that you should stretch out the approval process to rack up more costs for drugs you think are definitely going to be blockbusters. Even just adding time to the process adds salary costs and doing that would keep it out of patients' hands longer, potentially costing lives. But that's not a very likely situation, I don't think.
Unless it advises a potential patient to a more effective treatment that leaves him alive instead of dead at the end.
If I never hear about Lipitor maybe I never bother getting a cholesterol screening and then die of heart disease at 37 instead of going to my doctor at 35 and saying, "Hey, I heard about this Lipitor thing and that men from age 35 should have cholesterol screenings."
So you're saying that if we dissolved every last pharma company today new drugs would come to market exactly as they are now with no other changes to the infrastructure?
That's what I'm getting at -- I know that NIH does basic biology research and I know that pharmaceuticals often get things wrong -- but they do provide a part in the system. Unless you have a plan to/replace/ them, you don't have a plan.
I think the government is great at basic research. I think it's absolute shite at creating a product out of that basic research. I think private organizations are better suited to that step in the process.
Maybe all we need to do is only provide the basic research information to actual non-profits, encouraging our pharma companies to become non-profits. Maybe we'll find that that's still untenable though. But to assume that they can only possibly be a drain on the system is to put ideology above logic.
It's not necessarily wasteful if it grows the budget by more than it costs.
For example, let's say I have a small company and my non-marketing costs are $10k a year (example numbers here.) Furthermore, let's say it'll cost me that $10k a year no matter whether I sell nothing or sell 100 units. (Actual pill-by-pill production is cheap. Setting up the factory is expensive. Getting a drug approved is expensive. Finding a drug to get approved is expensive.)
If I spend $2k in marketing maybe I can sell $8k in product, providing the drug to 80 people a year. Okay, sure, not terrible. Maybe if I spend $4k in marketing I sell $10k in product, providing for 100 people. Maybe if I spend $10k I sell $20k in product, proving for 200 people.
Is that $10k in marketing "a waste"? Well, if I spent half as much I'd make less profit. If I spent half as much I'd help fewer people. If I spent half as much I'd have less profit to put into creating new drug lines.
I understand where you're coming from, the idea that marketing is a drain on the economy since it produces nothing, but for an individual company it could be the difference between new drugs being developed or the company going bust.
I think what you're actually proposing is a pure collectivization of drug discovery. The problem I see with that is how do we then ensure we culture the right drugs? Drug discovery is hard. Immensely hard. Failures are often and expensive and government is poorly equipped to make entrepreneurial decisions. That's why we currently rely on private companies to make the decisions on who is a good research and who is a bad researcher when a company in total only makes two or three really profitable drugs every decade. We can allow those companies to fail if they can no longer produce. It's a lot harder to let a government program "fail" like that.
Not quite. There's nothing illegal about downloading a copyrighted file that is being distributed according to whatever terms the author has set. In the vast majority of cases the author is allowing distribution for consumption through a web browser. The author is not, however, giving up all rights to the copyrighted work. The most common case where this is fought is when images are illegally used. Furthermore, in US law, at least, it/is/ the downloader's problem if he downloads copyrighted works outside of legitimate distribution.
I am not endorsing the current state of affairs, just reporting them.
Please, everyone knows that academics is 99% politics and professors are, in general, technically clueless. Sure, they're really smart with numbers and all but give them a bare machine and tell them they're on their own and they'd be lost. It's their students that are growing up in this freeloading floss (funny how floss is only good for finding bits of discarded food) culture that is setting them up with Linux, and once they're on Linux they're locked in to those "OSS" (also known as inferior) tools since most professional packages don't even run on Linux. Wow, I haven't read such blatant trolling in a long time. How did anyone get tricked into thinking this was insightful?
Slashdot Mirror
I gave up the fight when I spent an hour researching and drafting a well-worded letter against ACTA only to receive a 5-minute form letter saying, "Thank you for your support. I agree that ACTA is very important to US survival in our troubled world and I will do everything in my power to get it passed."
Okay, let's try this a different way.
Look up mens rea. Now read it again.
If you're downloading something and you think it might be distributed against the wishes of the copyright owner, double-check or delete it. If you don't have any belief that it's not legit then continue. Congratulations, you have passed the mens rea test and are not a criminal.
Random word in Google -- yes, it was almost certainly copyrighted (most things are). Yes, the distribution was almost certainly authorized. The owner is probably attributed on the site you downloaded it from or is the same as the owner of the site.
For example, not four inches below this text box it says, "Comments owned by the poster. (c) 2012 All Rights Reserved." -- Look at that, Slashdot claims copyright on its web pages and attributes its posters. Surprise, surprise. You'll find that a lot of web sites have things like this on them to help clarify for you.
Yes, I understand that everything is copyrighted. That doesn't mean common sense goes out the window.
Correct, downloading copyrighted material is not illegal. Downloading it against the rights provided by the rights holder is.
Things formatted for web viewing you can usually safely assume that the rights holder is giving you the right to download for the purpose of viewing at the time of download. There's a long-standing implicit assumption that the right to view is being granted when the rights holder is putting it up on the web. There is no implicit assumption when someone who is not the rights holder is the one who uploaded it. Therefore, you should be wary of sites that look like the material uploaded was not uploaded by the rights holder or with the permission of the rights holder.
Now, this is also an area where mens rea comes into play. I'll wait while you google that. Okay, now that you read that, it's hard to say that when you google "stream (new movie title)" or "torrent (new movie title)" you're doing that with the full belief that it's legal. We've been bombarded with the message to the contrary. If you just google "(new movie title)" and the first link is a streaming link rather than the official website, sure it may be decided that mens rea was not present, but you know what? That's a defense to be used in court, not an excuse to say, "Whatever, whatever, I download what I want."
When you're actively looking to download media or art for free it's hard to argue you don't know exactly what you're doing.
Uhm. 99.999999999% or more of it matches with common sense.
1. Don't assume you have more rights than the ability to view -- this would stop almost all repurposing. (Which I think is more insidious.)
2. Does it look like the official site or official distributor for band X? No, Pirate Bay does not look like the official site or official distributor for band X.
If you want to ask then ask the copyright holder. If you can't figure out who the copyright holder is ask the distributor.
Nope. That's an entirely reasonable change to the system, but that gets us to underlying chemical being unpatentable but what about the delivery mechanism?
Also, in that case, who tests efficacy and safety of the underlying chemical and how do they do that without a delivery mechanism?
Ah, so I'm required to be an MD who is specialized in all things seen and unseen in order to deserve to live. Nice to know.
Seriously though, I can't possibly think of all the possible ways in which I could die and act on them. I need some way of narrowing it down for me. Drug ads give /some/ information -- I don't think it should be the only and it doesn't need to be the primary source, but they're not entirely, 100% without value.
The fact that Jonas Salk didn't patent his vaccine means nothing -- he could have patented it and licensed it for free and got the same result. If less money spent on medication were a pure boon to the economy then shouldn't we pay nothing for food, housing and transportation, too? Oh, wait, costs still need to be paid and the difference is whether they get paid before or after you see the money.
Maybe profit-based pharma isn't the best solution, that's why in another part of this long and twisting thread that is now out of my control to respond to I posited requiring pharmaceutical research companies to be non-profits.
Drug commercials became legal and popular before Google was. They also come to market sooner than reference material. Not all PCPs will have direct connections to all possible specialists or even realize off the bat that some set of symptoms is likely connected to some specialty. Maybe direct marketing has run its course now that things like Watson are coming online, but historically, doctors need more information than what they used to have.
Yes, it does try to drum up market share for some company's drug. It also informs the patient that he should be asking about X. I don't think it's the best possible system either, but I don't think it has zero or negative value.
I'm going to assume that the NCI does basic research and private companies bring those potential drugs to market? Yep, looks to be the case.
I'm not saying that the NIH and other government programs shouldn't be doing basic research, just that in our current system pharma companies have a role in bringing those discoveries to market.
It's just an example, sheesh. Insert a less common sense ailment then. For example, without marketing I wouldn't know about the various smoking cessation products, including the nicotine vaccination.
True, it hasn't been proven. There is, however, a huge correlation between free market enterprise and successful product innovation.
With respect to non-profitable drugs, the US actually gives tax breaks to companies that research non-profitable drugs. Maybe we just need to make those tax breaks higher to incentivize it more.
Most /successful/ research. Plenty of drug line attempts fail because, again, drug research is hard. Modifying existing drugs is more likely to succeed because it's much closer to a successful line. Then again, those tweaks rarely cover much more than their own costs anyway.
Awareness is one of the functions of marketing. Doctors don't magically know every single drug ever everywhere; they're only human.
+1 Insightful. You're the only responder to my massive Devil's advocating that I can't find any glaring errors with. I guess I should watch that TED talk!
It does have the one problem that you should stretch out the approval process to rack up more costs for drugs you think are definitely going to be blockbusters. Even just adding time to the process adds salary costs and doing that would keep it out of patients' hands longer, potentially costing lives. But that's not a very likely situation, I don't think.
Unless it advises a potential patient to a more effective treatment that leaves him alive instead of dead at the end.
If I never hear about Lipitor maybe I never bother getting a cholesterol screening and then die of heart disease at 37 instead of going to my doctor at 35 and saying, "Hey, I heard about this Lipitor thing and that men from age 35 should have cholesterol screenings."
So you're saying that if we dissolved every last pharma company today new drugs would come to market exactly as they are now with no other changes to the infrastructure?
That's what I'm getting at -- I know that NIH does basic biology research and I know that pharmaceuticals often get things wrong -- but they do provide a part in the system. Unless you have a plan to /replace/ them, you don't have a plan.
I think the government is great at basic research. I think it's absolute shite at creating a product out of that basic research. I think private organizations are better suited to that step in the process.
Maybe all we need to do is only provide the basic research information to actual non-profits, encouraging our pharma companies to become non-profits. Maybe we'll find that that's still untenable though. But to assume that they can only possibly be a drain on the system is to put ideology above logic.
It's not necessarily wasteful if it grows the budget by more than it costs.
For example, let's say I have a small company and my non-marketing costs are $10k a year (example numbers here.) Furthermore, let's say it'll cost me that $10k a year no matter whether I sell nothing or sell 100 units. (Actual pill-by-pill production is cheap. Setting up the factory is expensive. Getting a drug approved is expensive. Finding a drug to get approved is expensive.)
If I spend $2k in marketing maybe I can sell $8k in product, providing the drug to 80 people a year. Okay, sure, not terrible.
Maybe if I spend $4k in marketing I sell $10k in product, providing for 100 people.
Maybe if I spend $10k I sell $20k in product, proving for 200 people.
Is that $10k in marketing "a waste"? Well, if I spent half as much I'd make less profit. If I spent half as much I'd help fewer people. If I spent half as much I'd have less profit to put into creating new drug lines.
I understand where you're coming from, the idea that marketing is a drain on the economy since it produces nothing, but for an individual company it could be the difference between new drugs being developed or the company going bust.
I think what you're actually proposing is a pure collectivization of drug discovery. The problem I see with that is how do we then ensure we culture the right drugs? Drug discovery is hard. Immensely hard. Failures are often and expensive and government is poorly equipped to make entrepreneurial decisions. That's why we currently rely on private companies to make the decisions on who is a good research and who is a bad researcher when a company in total only makes two or three really profitable drugs every decade. We can allow those companies to fail if they can no longer produce. It's a lot harder to let a government program "fail" like that.
You're under the impression that the private pharmaceuticals do nothing by way of funding the drug discovery process?
What's your proposal for funding drug research?
You're probably right in that the current method is not perfect, but I could come up with a number of worse systems.
Virgin Mobile.
Not quite. There's nothing illegal about downloading a copyrighted file that is being distributed according to whatever terms the author has set. In the vast majority of cases the author is allowing distribution for consumption through a web browser. The author is not, however, giving up all rights to the copyrighted work. The most common case where this is fought is when images are illegally used. Furthermore, in US law, at least, it /is/ the downloader's problem if he downloads copyrighted works outside of legitimate distribution.
I am not endorsing the current state of affairs, just reporting them.
Dingdingding! I promise I won't troll next time, guys. Thanks for playing!
Please, everyone knows that academics is 99% politics and professors are, in general, technically clueless. Sure, they're really smart with numbers and all but give them a bare machine and tell them they're on their own and they'd be lost. It's their students that are growing up in this freeloading floss (funny how floss is only good for finding bits of discarded food) culture that is setting them up with Linux, and once they're on Linux they're locked in to those "OSS" (also known as inferior) tools since most professional packages don't even run on Linux. Wow, I haven't read such blatant trolling in a long time. How did anyone get tricked into thinking this was insightful?
That would make it illegal under its own TOS...