No, criticizing the government is one of the most important uses of free speech, but it extends far beyond that. The reason a NDA could be legally binding is because it's a contract with a private entity. However, it would still have to fall within the bounds of contract law. So, if the terms were unreasonable, such as no disclosure for 50 years, or there was a compelling public interest, like being asked via NDA to cover over up a crime, the contract would be invalid.
Unless you're suggesting that Congress shouldn't be able to regulate the sale of goods and services within the United States, I think your argument is shit.
No, copyright is not covered under the commerce clause. If it were, then Sonny Bono could have legitimately gotten his wish of explicitly eternal copyright.
"The only justified one" mandate is not listed in the Constitution. Perhaps you'd be so kind as to point it out?
I'd love to: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." It's so firmly entrenched as the reason, that the promotion of progress is the actual power given to congress, with copyright being simply the means of doing so.
Naturally, this means that any law you disagree with is thus no longer enforceable and you don't have to worry about the consequences. Well, I disagree with the speed limit down my road... it's not in the "public's benefit", as I'm the public, and I see no benefit in it. VRRRRRrooooom!
Strawman argument. Also, other Congressional powers are not as strictly bound as copyright. That's why, for example, trademarks can last forever, while copyrights can not.
Amazing. First "the law can be wrong, and often is", so I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, to find your rhetoric including an argument about the legitimacy of the law. Perhaps it's only certain laws we should follow. You know, like a law buffet. Just put on your plate what looks tasty and ignore the rest.
Yes, certain laws are valid and certain laws are invalid. One of the Supreme Court's roles is to assess whether those laws are valid in regards to their Constitutionality, although a law can be Constitutional and still unjust. Exercise of a power not given is as blatantly illegitimate as a legal process can be. In regards to the legal theory of copyright as rooted in labor, this has been correctly ruled as not within the bounds of copyright law.
Well, as I have done more than just "support" the arts, but actually been the starving artist, I do oppose the arts... unless of course you're going into them either because you're gay, or really really want to piss off your parents. Otherwise, get a real job -- there's no money in art. Okay, maybe I don't oppose it per-se, but let's just say don't quit your day job, mmm?
As have I, although I still have my day job as well.
And as for sharing information; I suppose now's a bad time to point out that information comes in more than two varieties (one and zero)... and amazingly, different kinds of information has different value. You can't abstract so far away from what it represents to say it's just "information"... This is a false equivocation in the extreme.
I see no point in differentiation relevant to this argument. Sharing music is good. Sharing knowledge is good. Sharing visual art is good. Sharing film is good. There are some exceptions, such as privacy, but they are completely unrelated to copyright. Sharing copyrighted works is itself good. The justification for limiting such sharing is that it will ultimately lead to having more or better works to share. If that fails to pan out, then this exception is not justified.
So we have a complex marble-cake system of Demesne, feudal lords, and serfdom, and more urgently: We don't have taxes to worry about, just as long as we produce at least one son for the military? Or... perhaps, you have no idea what the hell you're talking about and are going for emotional rhetoric.
No, we had a system of censorship and cronyism that was slightly modified for a nominally benevolent cause. It's pretty well established fact that this was the purpose of the Stationer's Company's
Yes, I understand that, mathematically there is "nothing lost with additional transactions". But, I think that we both agree there are some sales lost, some people would have bought the work if they couldn't get their hands on them for free. Probably a minority of sharers, but still.
That's not relevant. A hypothetical where they could have made more money doesn't mean that they've lost money. There is no product loss and no additional expenditure or time, therefore there is no loss to be compensated for. The same kinds of losses happen when another business is in the same market and has a product that is in some ways superior, but we call that competition, and generally regard it as a good thing.
One cannot say that their work is priced out ridiculously high, a song on itunes etc costs peanuts, and her paperback or kindle books are well within reach of everyone. You cannot say that the way these works are priced is a bad service for the public or for general culture.
Whether or not a price is good or not is relative to a number of factors too numerous to list. One of the simplest of which being that the price is disproportionate to the quality. It's not unlikely, given that Sturgeon's law pretty much applies to every medium and genre.
The way I see it: my musician producer friend always has his finger on the pulse so to speak, and he makes a kind of commercial music that is popular amongst clubbing teenagers (and it gives me a headache). He is quite respected with doing work for in essence all the major labels.
That might be a key right there. The changes in environment have been a major competitive disadvantage to major labels. They generally employ more or less brute force techniques, which are less effective in this environment. However, their loss has been largely a gain for independent labels and self produced musicians. Another factor might be that the model of selling CDs has gone out of fashion. Major label commercial music had one or two songs, maybe three per album that sold the 12 songs on the CD to 98% of the audience. With iTunes and the like, artists that don't produce an entire album's worth of worthwhile material are only making money off of the singles, so the income is something like a fifth of what it would be otherwise. Cutting the cruft means that there is less fat, and there is less fat on his plate.
Regarding my writer friend, she is a practical woman, I expect she'll prefer bread on the table now rather than possible fame in the long run. She in fact will not go obscure soon, her books get consistently good reviews.
Obscure is relative. Unless your friend's last name is Rowling or Meyer, then filesharing is not hurting her. Those are the people that there's some degree of evidence that she's affected by. For basically everyone else, being popular on filesharing translates to very few lost sales, and a large number of sales gained by greater notoriety.
I don't think it is the right thing to do.
Again, that's not relevant. You can think a number of things are right or wrong to do, but that doesn't matter. And again, you make it about the authors, which is a mistake. Copyright law cares fuck all about the authors. The reason to be concerned is if the creative output or quality falls, which we've seen no indication of.
I accept the difference between the fruit and the labor itself. I also think that it is ok for a creator to ask money for his fruit or not; or not to mind spreading it without compensation or not wanting that to happen without income.
And there's strike three. 'Compensation' is a term that doesn't make sense in this context. File sharers are sharing amongst themselves, so there is no new labor and no new product. There is nothing be compensated for because there is nothing lost with additional transactions. It has nothing to do with them, so why should they have a say in the matter? You are exposing yourself as someone who can just parrot a bunch of sound byte talking points. If you don't show signs of rational thought soon, I'm done wasting my time with you.
Regarding my producer friend, I can assure you that it is not the home recordings or the global scale that halved his income.
And I can assure you with equal validity that it was the result of the Reptilian Illuminati thwarting him because he is too close to exposing their web of lies. I can also assure you, again with the same validity of your statement, that it's the result of the Tohoku earthquake.
One more example is another friend, a midlist author of YA novels. She makes some money with her books, being translated in a number of languages, it is not enough for her household but essential. She doesn't like the idea of people distributing her work on the internet without her getting compensation.
She can not like it all that she wants, but that doesn't change anything. Realistically, your friend has a far greater enemy in obscurity than filesharing.
The heart of the problem is that you are trying to make money from the 'fruit' of the labor instead of the labor itself. The fruit is intangible, and as I've said before, is not a valid legal theory in regards to copyright. If you bring up the fruit of your labor or the sweat of the brow, you are using invalid arguments. As for the music producer, I'd say that a far bigger factor in his income would be the lowering of the barrier to entry. Home recordings are much more viable these days, so there are more people competing in the same territory . Furthermore, he's competing on more of a global scale, so while, if he plays his cards right, he can reach much wider audiences, he also faces far greater competition.
Would you be happy, in the name of free access to information, if your own salary would be halved because some people would simply grab the fruit of your work (assuming that you didn't GPL it etc)?
I wouldn't think there was anything wrong with it. It's also bad taste to try and make the argument a personal one. Many industries have suffered far worse things due to progress, but those that stand in the way of that progress are Luddites. You've talked about entitlements, but it is people like you that think that someone is entitled to make a living in a particular field. That's not true. You can be the greatest buggy whip maker in the world, but that doesn't mean the world owes you a salary. If the niche you fill disappears. you adapt or you die.
You can pay a reasonable sum to authors without copyright. In fact, absent copyright, authors generally got considerably more reasonably sums. Perhaps the top authors wouldn't get as handsome a return, but they would still get enough to make it worth their while in virtually all cases. The benefit of the copyright system is mostly for publishers, to the detriment of the public and often, authors.
However, even if this wasn't the case, the only thing that matters in copyright policy is the benefits the public gets out of it. They waive their freedom to copy, share and use works for a short while in order to have more works to copy, share and use. Balancing these two public interests is the only legitimate consideration in copyright policy. The only reason to be concerned for the welfare of authors is in regards to their output. Copyright is a means to an end, not an end unto itself. People who lose sight of this are dangerous and destructive forces against human progress.
Re: freeloading... it is just a word, you get my gist.
The particular word doesn't matter. You'd be only slightly less of an idiot if you were complaining about free riders. The problem is that your underlying economic argument is deeply flawed and throughly debunked.
All artists 'freeload', as do all people. The only way you would know someone who doesn't freeload would be if they are someone who was raised by wolves and continues to live in such a state. The good news is that there's nothing wrong with freeloading on information, as it is inexhaustible. That's very important, because freeloading off of the last few millennia of accomplishments of humanity is vital to human success. If you think freeloading is immoral, live alone in the woods without any technology, don't use language, medicine, or knowledge that you didn't gain from firsthand experience. Or just pull your head out of your ass, since you didn't even come up with your idiotic notion of morality yourself.
Well, "dura lex set lex" - should you ever be so unlucky to be fined for downloading say the new Iron Man movie, then I suggest that you find a stronger legal defense than that.
I'm not making a legal defense. I'm saying that the law itself is bad, and strictly speaking, it doesn't pass a strict Constitutional muster. The law as it stands is clearly following a different philosophy than the only justified one (public benefit), so it should not be respected, and if anything, should be actively defied. Believe it or not, the law can be wrong, and often is. Also, your broken latin phrase doesn't apply, since the law is not harsh, but injust. It is often grossly disproportionate to the extent that there have been Constitutional challenges to statutory damages, and the harshness of the law is a major concern, but the bigger flaw is that it's based in medieval economics, and has no place in the modern world. The relevant terms are themselves quite telling. 'Copyright' originated from the right to copy, back when it conveyed a positive right to make copies, because it was part of a censorship regime in which proliferation of unsanctioned knowledge was forbidden. If you are ignorant on the matter, look up the Stationer's Company. 'Royalties' are another big hint that the system is antiquated, although a number of prominent organizations calling themselves 'guilds' doesn't help the matter much.
simply freeloading the result of someone's hard work because you can, is not the answer either. I find it unethical. I don't find it wrong to pay a reasonable price for music, movies or books that interest me. And for those that I don't want to pay the price for, well then I don't download them.
Sweat of the brow arguments are legally invalid in regards to copyright law, per Feist v. Rural. And ethically, sharing information is generally a good thing, with only a few exceptions. I do no oppose supporting the arts, and I likely have done more towards that end than you have.
You've also thrown out the term 'freeloading,' yet another sign of an incompetent copyright proponent. Are you TRYING to fill up your bingo card on that? I would direct you to read Mark Lemly's paper on the subject.
The same could be said of Google. I'm sure Google links to far more objectionable things, and does so more directly. Also, shut the everloving fuck up about 'entitlement.' Asshats like you don't understand that copyright is an exception to the norm of free flow information, It is justified only to the extent that the public benefits, and beyond that, it is an embarrassment to society, as Thomas Jefferson would put it. The current system clearly does not provide a net public benefit, so there is no reason to respect those laws.
Let's take it back to the real point here. You defined 'reasonably priced' as sub-$1000. Realistically, they wouldn't shift from being reasonable to unreasonably priced at $1001. The difference is insignificant, and outside of Americans buying the base model tax free (which they can't legally do anywhere, but enforcement is lax) with no shipping costs, you are paying more than $1000. So your argument only applies to a miniscule portion of the userbase and applying a ridiculously strict metric for something that is inherently ona spectrum. If you head was any further up your ass, it'd be coming out of your mouth.
So, the Chinese citizen is Prometheus and the US government is Zeus? Didn't they have anything better to do, like turn into swans and rape young women?
How is he proven wrong? $999 is a psychological price point to fool the part of your brain that sucks at math into thinking it's far less than $1000. However, in practice, you are probably going to have to pay taxes and/or shipping, and even if you don't, you are a moron for thinking the difference is substantial.
Cool strawman, bro. There's not much of a reason to increase something that isn't the bottleneck (and if you had an argument that it was typically the bottleneck, you would have made that argument instead of being a jackass). I'm not saying that there aren't advantages, just that there are almost certainly better ways to spend the same money and get better performance.
I'm not saying that technology doesn't present significant improvements, but i haven't seen a compelling argument that it's going to make a real world difference for someone using a Mac Pro or similar setup. Obviously, at some point, a SATA III setup would be the bottleneck, but it's hard to say at that point, what the technology in question replacing it would be.
Ah, but when it comes to credit and Apple, you don't have to do things first, you just have to be the first to masturbate into a a massive crowd about doing it. Apple are masters at dropping tech at the crossover between early adopter and early majority. It's got a very good ratio in R&D investments to PR payoffs.
Sorry, I missed the 'USB' part of USB ethernet in your post, probably because the thought of using such a thing makes me die a little inside. Yes, I'm sure your USB ethernet port today might have more bandwidth than your old ISA card way back when. It might even have had better latency by virtue of the speed increases of all the parts involved. However, a real ethernet port will have considerably better performance across the board. All other factors equal or roughly equal, a more direct connection is virtually always superior in regards to performance. However, if you are comparing modern to 20-30 year old technology, this can be probably be overcome pretty easily.
I'm not aware of it happening. Maybe a defendant gets off if there's good evidence that the police had a disproportionate racist response or something, but that's just an issue of politics and a condition of making the bad press go away. The only other closest thing I can think of is questioning the probable cause. if the evidence was gathered with probable cause, it can get thrown out.
Yes, that's totally a valid comparison. The actual ethernet port is virtually always soldered on to the motherboard, making it more directly connected. However, using an ethernet cable would be a big step down for supercomputers, which use far more robust interconnects and tend to put as much as possible on a single board. Now, it's true that you could probably do more with ethernet today than you could with more direct interconnects 25-30 years ago by virtue of the increased speeds of all of the components involved, but that's a completely different issue.
It's not justified and it's rarely enforced. If it were actually enforced properly, all of the major studio execs would be in jail, as they engage on infringement on the grandest scale in the most definitively commercial manner. Even if you stupid enough to support the notion of copyright, any commercial infringement on a major level is a big enough target to warrant the costs of a civil case.
>You might also want to get checked for narcissism.
Nah, it's more misanthropy. I rarely think of myself as good at much, only managing to not be awful Also, I claimed superiority over some of my friends, not the entirety of the general population
Yes, being able to socialize well by pretending to be less different than I am, picking up analytical means of reading body language et al, and fitting in well in nerd rich environments is a real blow to humanity.
You could pass a law saying that anything was illegal. That doesn't make enforcing that law just or a good use of resources. The claim that started this thread is that copyright law is insane, not that copyright law doesn't exist.
You can't completely stop speeding, but it is mostly enforced by the self-interest of reasonable people. The legitimate involvement of police is to fill in the gap of the unreasonable people who don't care about putting themselves and others in danger because they want to get somewhere faster.
By contrast, you can't even be remotely effectively at reducing the sharing of copyrighted files. Everyone has a networked computer, which is a copying and distributing machine, and those machines by their very nature do not treat legal copying and sharing differently than illegal copying and sharing. Furthermore, the issue at hand is a bizarre holdover from a censorship regime that has no place in modern economics.
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No, criticizing the government is one of the most important uses of free speech, but it extends far beyond that. The reason a NDA could be legally binding is because it's a contract with a private entity. However, it would still have to fall within the bounds of contract law. So, if the terms were unreasonable, such as no disclosure for 50 years, or there was a compelling public interest, like being asked via NDA to cover over up a crime, the contract would be invalid.
No, copyright is not covered under the commerce clause. If it were, then Sonny Bono could have legitimately gotten his wish of explicitly eternal copyright.
I'd love to: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." It's so firmly entrenched as the reason, that the promotion of progress is the actual power given to congress, with copyright being simply the means of doing so.
Strawman argument. Also, other Congressional powers are not as strictly bound as copyright. That's why, for example, trademarks can last forever, while copyrights can not.
Yes, certain laws are valid and certain laws are invalid. One of the Supreme Court's roles is to assess whether those laws are valid in regards to their Constitutionality, although a law can be Constitutional and still unjust. Exercise of a power not given is as blatantly illegitimate as a legal process can be. In regards to the legal theory of copyright as rooted in labor, this has been correctly ruled as not within the bounds of copyright law.
As have I, although I still have my day job as well.
I see no point in differentiation relevant to this argument. Sharing music is good. Sharing knowledge is good. Sharing visual art is good. Sharing film is good. There are some exceptions, such as privacy, but they are completely unrelated to copyright. Sharing copyrighted works is itself good. The justification for limiting such sharing is that it will ultimately lead to having more or better works to share. If that fails to pan out, then this exception is not justified.
No, we had a system of censorship and cronyism that was slightly modified for a nominally benevolent cause. It's pretty well established fact that this was the purpose of the Stationer's Company's
That's not relevant. A hypothetical where they could have made more money doesn't mean that they've lost money. There is no product loss and no additional expenditure or time, therefore there is no loss to be compensated for. The same kinds of losses happen when another business is in the same market and has a product that is in some ways superior, but we call that competition, and generally regard it as a good thing.
Whether or not a price is good or not is relative to a number of factors too numerous to list. One of the simplest of which being that the price is disproportionate to the quality. It's not unlikely, given that Sturgeon's law pretty much applies to every medium and genre.
That might be a key right there. The changes in environment have been a major competitive disadvantage to major labels. They generally employ more or less brute force techniques, which are less effective in this environment. However, their loss has been largely a gain for independent labels and self produced musicians. Another factor might be that the model of selling CDs has gone out of fashion. Major label commercial music had one or two songs, maybe three per album that sold the 12 songs on the CD to 98% of the audience. With iTunes and the like, artists that don't produce an entire album's worth of worthwhile material are only making money off of the singles, so the income is something like a fifth of what it would be otherwise. Cutting the cruft means that there is less fat, and there is less fat on his plate.
Obscure is relative. Unless your friend's last name is Rowling or Meyer, then filesharing is not hurting her. Those are the people that there's some degree of evidence that she's affected by. For basically everyone else, being popular on filesharing translates to very few lost sales, and a large number of sales gained by greater notoriety.
Again, that's not relevant. You can think a number of things are right or wrong to do, but that doesn't matter. And again, you make it about the authors, which is a mistake. Copyright law cares fuck all about the authors. The reason to be concerned is if the creative output or quality falls, which we've seen no indication of.
And there's strike three. 'Compensation' is a term that doesn't make sense in this context. File sharers are sharing amongst themselves, so there is no new labor and no new product. There is nothing be compensated for because there is nothing lost with additional transactions. It has nothing to do with them, so why should they have a say in the matter? You are exposing yourself as someone who can just parrot a bunch of sound byte talking points. If you don't show signs of rational thought soon, I'm done wasting my time with you.
And I can assure you with equal validity that it was the result of the Reptilian Illuminati thwarting him because he is too close to exposing their web of lies. I can also assure you, again with the same validity of your statement, that it's the result of the Tohoku earthquake.
She can not like it all that she wants, but that doesn't change anything. Realistically, your friend has a far greater enemy in obscurity than filesharing.
I wouldn't think there was anything wrong with it. It's also bad taste to try and make the argument a personal one. Many industries have suffered far worse things due to progress, but those that stand in the way of that progress are Luddites. You've talked about entitlements, but it is people like you that think that someone is entitled to make a living in a particular field. That's not true. You can be the greatest buggy whip maker in the world, but that doesn't mean the world owes you a salary. If the niche you fill disappears. you adapt or you die.
However, even if this wasn't the case, the only thing that matters in copyright policy is the benefits the public gets out of it. They waive their freedom to copy, share and use works for a short while in order to have more works to copy, share and use. Balancing these two public interests is the only legitimate consideration in copyright policy. The only reason to be concerned for the welfare of authors is in regards to their output. Copyright is a means to an end, not an end unto itself. People who lose sight of this are dangerous and destructive forces against human progress.
The particular word doesn't matter. You'd be only slightly less of an idiot if you were complaining about free riders. The problem is that your underlying economic argument is deeply flawed and throughly debunked.
All artists 'freeload', as do all people. The only way you would know someone who doesn't freeload would be if they are someone who was raised by wolves and continues to live in such a state. The good news is that there's nothing wrong with freeloading on information, as it is inexhaustible. That's very important, because freeloading off of the last few millennia of accomplishments of humanity is vital to human success. If you think freeloading is immoral, live alone in the woods without any technology, don't use language, medicine, or knowledge that you didn't gain from firsthand experience. Or just pull your head out of your ass, since you didn't even come up with your idiotic notion of morality yourself.
I'm not making a legal defense. I'm saying that the law itself is bad, and strictly speaking, it doesn't pass a strict Constitutional muster. The law as it stands is clearly following a different philosophy than the only justified one (public benefit), so it should not be respected, and if anything, should be actively defied. Believe it or not, the law can be wrong, and often is. Also, your broken latin phrase doesn't apply, since the law is not harsh, but injust. It is often grossly disproportionate to the extent that there have been Constitutional challenges to statutory damages, and the harshness of the law is a major concern, but the bigger flaw is that it's based in medieval economics, and has no place in the modern world. The relevant terms are themselves quite telling. 'Copyright' originated from the right to copy, back when it conveyed a positive right to make copies, because it was part of a censorship regime in which proliferation of unsanctioned knowledge was forbidden. If you are ignorant on the matter, look up the Stationer's Company. 'Royalties' are another big hint that the system is antiquated, although a number of prominent organizations calling themselves 'guilds' doesn't help the matter much.
Sweat of the brow arguments are legally invalid in regards to copyright law, per Feist v. Rural. And ethically, sharing information is generally a good thing, with only a few exceptions. I do no oppose supporting the arts, and I likely have done more towards that end than you have.
You've also thrown out the term 'freeloading,' yet another sign of an incompetent copyright proponent. Are you TRYING to fill up your bingo card on that? I would direct you to read Mark Lemly's paper on the subject.
The same could be said of Google. I'm sure Google links to far more objectionable things, and does so more directly. Also, shut the everloving fuck up about 'entitlement.' Asshats like you don't understand that copyright is an exception to the norm of free flow information, It is justified only to the extent that the public benefits, and beyond that, it is an embarrassment to society, as Thomas Jefferson would put it. The current system clearly does not provide a net public benefit, so there is no reason to respect those laws.
If there's no censorship, then there's no such thing as 'illegal material' in regards to information.
Even more telling is that he was off by hundreds of dollars, but nitpicked over a single dollar.
Let's take it back to the real point here. You defined 'reasonably priced' as sub-$1000. Realistically, they wouldn't shift from being reasonable to unreasonably priced at $1001. The difference is insignificant, and outside of Americans buying the base model tax free (which they can't legally do anywhere, but enforcement is lax) with no shipping costs, you are paying more than $1000. So your argument only applies to a miniscule portion of the userbase and applying a ridiculously strict metric for something that is inherently ona spectrum. If you head was any further up your ass, it'd be coming out of your mouth.
So, the Chinese citizen is Prometheus and the US government is Zeus? Didn't they have anything better to do, like turn into swans and rape young women?
How is he proven wrong? $999 is a psychological price point to fool the part of your brain that sucks at math into thinking it's far less than $1000. However, in practice, you are probably going to have to pay taxes and/or shipping, and even if you don't, you are a moron for thinking the difference is substantial.
Cool strawman, bro. There's not much of a reason to increase something that isn't the bottleneck (and if you had an argument that it was typically the bottleneck, you would have made that argument instead of being a jackass). I'm not saying that there aren't advantages, just that there are almost certainly better ways to spend the same money and get better performance.
I'm not saying that technology doesn't present significant improvements, but i haven't seen a compelling argument that it's going to make a real world difference for someone using a Mac Pro or similar setup. Obviously, at some point, a SATA III setup would be the bottleneck, but it's hard to say at that point, what the technology in question replacing it would be.
Ah, but when it comes to credit and Apple, you don't have to do things first, you just have to be the first to masturbate into a a massive crowd about doing it. Apple are masters at dropping tech at the crossover between early adopter and early majority. It's got a very good ratio in R&D investments to PR payoffs.
Sorry, I missed the 'USB' part of USB ethernet in your post, probably because the thought of using such a thing makes me die a little inside. Yes, I'm sure your USB ethernet port today might have more bandwidth than your old ISA card way back when. It might even have had better latency by virtue of the speed increases of all the parts involved. However, a real ethernet port will have considerably better performance across the board. All other factors equal or roughly equal, a more direct connection is virtually always superior in regards to performance. However, if you are comparing modern to 20-30 year old technology, this can be probably be overcome pretty easily.
I'm not aware of it happening. Maybe a defendant gets off if there's good evidence that the police had a disproportionate racist response or something, but that's just an issue of politics and a condition of making the bad press go away. The only other closest thing I can think of is questioning the probable cause. if the evidence was gathered with probable cause, it can get thrown out.
Yes, that's totally a valid comparison. The actual ethernet port is virtually always soldered on to the motherboard, making it more directly connected. However, using an ethernet cable would be a big step down for supercomputers, which use far more robust interconnects and tend to put as much as possible on a single board. Now, it's true that you could probably do more with ethernet today than you could with more direct interconnects 25-30 years ago by virtue of the increased speeds of all of the components involved, but that's a completely different issue.
It's not justified and it's rarely enforced. If it were actually enforced properly, all of the major studio execs would be in jail, as they engage on infringement on the grandest scale in the most definitively commercial manner. Even if you stupid enough to support the notion of copyright, any commercial infringement on a major level is a big enough target to warrant the costs of a civil case.
>You might also want to get checked for narcissism. Nah, it's more misanthropy. I rarely think of myself as good at much, only managing to not be awful Also, I claimed superiority over some of my friends, not the entirety of the general population
Yes, being able to socialize well by pretending to be less different than I am, picking up analytical means of reading body language et al, and fitting in well in nerd rich environments is a real blow to humanity.
Actually, only part of Parliament is elected by the people. The House of Commons is elected by the people, but the House of Lords is appointed.
You could pass a law saying that anything was illegal. That doesn't make enforcing that law just or a good use of resources. The claim that started this thread is that copyright law is insane, not that copyright law doesn't exist.
You can't completely stop speeding, but it is mostly enforced by the self-interest of reasonable people. The legitimate involvement of police is to fill in the gap of the unreasonable people who don't care about putting themselves and others in danger because they want to get somewhere faster.
By contrast, you can't even be remotely effectively at reducing the sharing of copyrighted files. Everyone has a networked computer, which is a copying and distributing machine, and those machines by their very nature do not treat legal copying and sharing differently than illegal copying and sharing. Furthermore, the issue at hand is a bizarre holdover from a censorship regime that has no place in modern economics.
Except there's no justifiably criminal act involved.