I find it sad that people in this argument are demonizing the copyright holders for wanting to protect their rightful discretion over who is allowed copies of their works (or works delegated to their stewardship)
Perhaps they don't agree that said discretion is rightful. Legal monopolies were once commonplace, but now, with modern economics, the only place they make sense is in areas that are by their nature opposed to normal competition, like the infrastructure of utilities. However, the intangible is on the absolute opposite end of the spectrum, being a resource most efficiently distributed without controls.
Furthermore, even if you naively think that an economic tool that was designed for censorship and then slightly tweaked in hopes of furthering public learning, the current set of laws is clearly not aimed at that noble goal. For many Americans, the public domain has not only failed to expand, but has actually SHRUNK in their lifetimes. There isn't even an illusion of social benefit in this scenario, and debates seem to rarely consider what is in the public interest other than as a tangential bonus.
The value of a copyright is in it's ability to make somebody money. If copying is reduced, but the reduction in copying doesn't mean there is more money made for the rightsholders via copyright, then it is not a profitable move for copyright holders, let alone society in general (whose sake is the only reason a legal monopoly like copyright is possibly justified). If you wanted to effectively reduce 'free data duplication', you could take a baseball bat to every computer, VCR, printing press, or anything else that allows for cheap and easy copying, but that would be a step back in profitability, not to mention clearly a bad social policy. Greater scarcity does not inherently equal greater profits, and conglomerates of rightsholders have shown themselves again and again to not know what's actually in their best interest, fighting things that would lead to greater profits. It's important to keep in mind that copyright doesn't actually function like property does, which is part of why using the term 'intellectual property' is so often idiotic, and there was absolutely no point in using that term here.
Blackmailed? Did the US say "we are going to drop some nukes on you if you don't sign"? Did the US say "we are going to reveal the extramarital escapades of your prime minister if you don't sign"? I doubt that. What the US may have said is "if you want to trade with us/loans from us, you sign this". That's not "blackmail", that's a business deal, and Spain can take it or leave it. What the US can negotiate is already strongly constrained by WTO rules anyway.
Trade sanctions are economic threats, and can sometimes have just as much of a harmful effect as acts of violence. That's bullying. If you support this behavior, you are supporting thugs.
So the US is at fault because Europe can't get its political act together and different countries in Europe are acting against each other's interest?
No, different countries in Europe want different laws. They have different economies from each other, so that's perfectly fine. A nation is just fine to set it's own laws, that's what makes them a sovereign nation. That's how the US whooped the rest of the world's ass in the music and movie industries. We told the Berne Convention off for a century, and during that century, we left the rest of the industrialized world behind due in large part to our much more permissive copyright laws.
Also, India isn't being coerced, they have a choice: trade with the rest of the world on equal terms or don't. But they can't pick and choose which rules to obey and which ones to ignore.
Yes, they can. They are their own country. That's what being a country is about. They can have different laws within their country. They can choose to not subsidize an industry with legal monopolies. You act like trade is a privilege, and that having legal monopolies are an inherent right. You've got that backwards. Stopping trade requires a very strong justification, and not supporting the harmful use of outdated economic tools is not such a justification.
IIRC, the bill Spain was blackmailed into went beyond US laws in a couple of regards, as did the law Canada was pressured into.
Are you aware that many European publishers and artists are screaming bloody murder because European Internet parties managed to stop ACTA? They wanted tougher IP laws. It seems whatever special interest group in Europe isn't getting its way, they are always blaming the US instead of fixing their problems at home.
I think their primary beef was that they didn't get the designated origins provisions that the US was going to have no part of. However, you are correct that there are parasites on both sides. The REAL show is that, among industrialized nations, the maximalists want to have areas where foreign laws are stronger, so they can crank up the copyright ratchet. For example, Disney was able to save Mickey by whining about how European authors were getting a better deal. They weren't trying to get perpetual copyright, honest, they were just trying to get on an equal footing with European authors.
Europe is every bit as big and powerful as the US.
The EU as a whole is, but individual countries can be pressured, and you may not know this, but there are countries other than Europe. Like, for example, India, who objects to these treaties because they don't want to have to have their people die because they can't get cheap drugs.
These agreements are in practice not equally binding on all. In many cases, foreign governments are pressured into having laws that are not part of US law. More importantly, not all countries are on even terms of negotiation. Like you said, trade is good, so about the only rules should be that I don't put tariffs on your goods, you don't have tariffs on my goods, I don't bomb you, you don't bomb me.
It seems that part of Austin is in that district, and Austin has a larger population than his whole district and a relatively liberal bent. Perhaps a large number of Austin residents could 'move' into the district in time to be a registered voter for the 2012 elections and get the bastard out.
It's still about bullying other countries into passing laws they don't want. It undermines national sovereignty, and just because it may deal with an issue that is actually important to the US economy doesn't make it okay.
Most likely EU forcing this on Canada. It would seem to be a version of Droit de suite, which is french for "right to follow", which Europe has and Canada doesn't. I think in practice, it pretty much only applies to art auctions. It's really stupid anyway, though.
There is no significant risk to the wealthy. If they have to pay a steep medical bill, it's not that big of a deal for them, while it could destroy someone poor. On average, insurance is stupid, and the only reason that it has utility to poor people is because the bill can ruin them, while the pain of having insurance is bearable. A wealthy person would take the mathematically advantageous route, which is not having insurance. If wealthy people want to actually reduce risks, they wouldn't do so by having insurance, but by buying houses to cheat donor lists.
It would seem pretty stupid to get insurance if you were rich. Insurance companies make money, but they don't actually provide medical service, so they are just additional overhead. The utility of that overhead to ordinary people is that it softens the blows on the off chance of having high medical bills they can't pay (basically like winning a lottery, except in reverse). However, if you are rich, that is not a real possibility for you, and you could do it directly.
If they were just fed up about having poor candidates, you'd think they would actually support reasonable people running for office rather than waiting for big campaign contributors to decide for them.
The problem is that they won't vote for the reasonable person because they know their vote won't count, so they vote for what they see as the lesser of two evils Basically everybody hates republicans and democrats and would rather see a literal pile of manure take their place, but they vote for one to keep out the other, and this mass of people voting against the two parties is why the two parties are the only game in town.
He's a lottery winner. There was nothing special about facebook. He happened to be at the right place at the right time to have his otherwise unremarkable network become popular, and he didn't turn it to complete shit as fast as myspace did.
France has historically had different philosophical underpinning for their copyright law. While the British and American traditions are based on a pragmatic system intended to further creativity by loaning the author a portion of their freedom to encourage authorship, the French take a more author centric viewpoint, believing that the author has a natural right to the works they have authored.
In all fairness, developing a system that actually encourages technological progress requires a deep understanding of economics, psychology, game theory, and a couple of other disciplines, and the Statute of Monopolies predated a remotely modern version of any of those. Even then, the statute changed monopolies from "whatever the king felt like granting monopolies on" to just novel inventions. It was quite a progressive change for the time. The problem is that we've largely regressed in that matter and not realized that they should have kept pecking away at monopolies until they were completely gone.
I think you are oversimplifying things. One may prefer to be around people that are similar to them because they have more in common, particularly shared culture. This would be especially true if one grew up in an area that was predominantly one's own ethnicity. Ethnicity is one that is pretty easily noticed, as is age, so these are factors that one is quicker to latch on to for common ground than say, your preferred package manager. A large number of one's friends may also have similar tastes in music, film, and hobbies as well.
I think you mean PageRank, which is a part, but not the entirety of Google's search algorithm. And without Bayh-Dole, it wouldn't be property at all, which is how things should be. Google would still be free to implement PageRank into their search, but so would Yahoo, Bing, AltaVista, etc. That said, it would seem like a difficult patent to enforce anyway, given that the interal functions of a search engine are not visible to the public.
The US health care system is fucked, but that doesn't mean the solution is adopt the system used by others. For starters, a national health care system would be roughly on par with a EU-wide health care system, which is just too large of a scale to be manageable. Handling most things at the state level would be much smarter. Another issue is the way federal money is spent. Tax dollars fund a lot of medical research, and pharmaceutical companies and bio companies are allowed to double dip, benefiting from R&D they didn't pay for and getting a patent on that R&D. Fixing that business would allow us more cheap generics. Throwing free money at people for aid often results in companies selling at the roughly the same cost to consumers with higher margins for the companies and less availability to those outside of that particular system of aid. There are also many peculiar accounting practices, and the fact that it's actually bad for your credit after a certain point to pay off your medical bills, which leads to more people not paying, which leads to higher prices for medical bills to make up for, and thus even more people who can't pay because the medical bills are too high.
Also, there are lots of other expenditures in the US besides health care, such as military spending. lower tax rates in a simpler system doesn't mean that less taxes are paid. It's the billionaires that have the resources to take advantage of all of these loopholes, so getting them to pay all of a lower rate could easily be more than a fraction of a higher rate.
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Perhaps they don't agree that said discretion is rightful. Legal monopolies were once commonplace, but now, with modern economics, the only place they make sense is in areas that are by their nature opposed to normal competition, like the infrastructure of utilities. However, the intangible is on the absolute opposite end of the spectrum, being a resource most efficiently distributed without controls.
Furthermore, even if you naively think that an economic tool that was designed for censorship and then slightly tweaked in hopes of furthering public learning, the current set of laws is clearly not aimed at that noble goal. For many Americans, the public domain has not only failed to expand, but has actually SHRUNK in their lifetimes. There isn't even an illusion of social benefit in this scenario, and debates seem to rarely consider what is in the public interest other than as a tangential bonus.
The value of a copyright is in it's ability to make somebody money. If copying is reduced, but the reduction in copying doesn't mean there is more money made for the rightsholders via copyright, then it is not a profitable move for copyright holders, let alone society in general (whose sake is the only reason a legal monopoly like copyright is possibly justified). If you wanted to effectively reduce 'free data duplication', you could take a baseball bat to every computer, VCR, printing press, or anything else that allows for cheap and easy copying, but that would be a step back in profitability, not to mention clearly a bad social policy. Greater scarcity does not inherently equal greater profits, and conglomerates of rightsholders have shown themselves again and again to not know what's actually in their best interest, fighting things that would lead to greater profits. It's important to keep in mind that copyright doesn't actually function like property does, which is part of why using the term 'intellectual property' is so often idiotic, and there was absolutely no point in using that term here.
Those logs aren't publicly accessible, though, so DDL is harder to track from the outside than torrents.
He's probably so baffled, he can't even remember his name. Poor fellow.
Martyrdom is pretty good as a recruitment tool. It's a pretty good way to unite people with minimal charisma.
Eh, we just need a court to overturn Diamond v. Chakrabarty and say that living things cannot be patentable subject matter.
Too bad, it's not an invention, so you can't get a patent on it.
No, it makes perfect sense as a political statement about an agency that wants to grope you or see your naked profile
Trade sanctions are economic threats, and can sometimes have just as much of a harmful effect as acts of violence. That's bullying. If you support this behavior, you are supporting thugs.
No, different countries in Europe want different laws. They have different economies from each other, so that's perfectly fine. A nation is just fine to set it's own laws, that's what makes them a sovereign nation. That's how the US whooped the rest of the world's ass in the music and movie industries. We told the Berne Convention off for a century, and during that century, we left the rest of the industrialized world behind due in large part to our much more permissive copyright laws.
Yes, they can. They are their own country. That's what being a country is about. They can have different laws within their country. They can choose to not subsidize an industry with legal monopolies. You act like trade is a privilege, and that having legal monopolies are an inherent right. You've got that backwards. Stopping trade requires a very strong justification, and not supporting the harmful use of outdated economic tools is not such a justification.
IIRC, the bill Spain was blackmailed into went beyond US laws in a couple of regards, as did the law Canada was pressured into.
I think their primary beef was that they didn't get the designated origins provisions that the US was going to have no part of. However, you are correct that there are parasites on both sides. The REAL show is that, among industrialized nations, the maximalists want to have areas where foreign laws are stronger, so they can crank up the copyright ratchet. For example, Disney was able to save Mickey by whining about how European authors were getting a better deal. They weren't trying to get perpetual copyright, honest, they were just trying to get on an equal footing with European authors.
The EU as a whole is, but individual countries can be pressured, and you may not know this, but there are countries other than Europe. Like, for example, India, who objects to these treaties because they don't want to have to have their people die because they can't get cheap drugs.
These agreements are in practice not equally binding on all. In many cases, foreign governments are pressured into having laws that are not part of US law. More importantly, not all countries are on even terms of negotiation. Like you said, trade is good, so about the only rules should be that I don't put tariffs on your goods, you don't have tariffs on my goods, I don't bomb you, you don't bomb me.
It seems that part of Austin is in that district, and Austin has a larger population than his whole district and a relatively liberal bent. Perhaps a large number of Austin residents could 'move' into the district in time to be a registered voter for the 2012 elections and get the bastard out.
It's still about bullying other countries into passing laws they don't want. It undermines national sovereignty, and just because it may deal with an issue that is actually important to the US economy doesn't make it okay.
Most likely EU forcing this on Canada. It would seem to be a version of Droit de suite, which is french for "right to follow", which Europe has and Canada doesn't. I think in practice, it pretty much only applies to art auctions. It's really stupid anyway, though.
There is no significant risk to the wealthy. If they have to pay a steep medical bill, it's not that big of a deal for them, while it could destroy someone poor. On average, insurance is stupid, and the only reason that it has utility to poor people is because the bill can ruin them, while the pain of having insurance is bearable. A wealthy person would take the mathematically advantageous route, which is not having insurance. If wealthy people want to actually reduce risks, they wouldn't do so by having insurance, but by buying houses to cheat donor lists.
It would seem pretty stupid to get insurance if you were rich. Insurance companies make money, but they don't actually provide medical service, so they are just additional overhead. The utility of that overhead to ordinary people is that it softens the blows on the off chance of having high medical bills they can't pay (basically like winning a lottery, except in reverse). However, if you are rich, that is not a real possibility for you, and you could do it directly.
The problem is that they won't vote for the reasonable person because they know their vote won't count, so they vote for what they see as the lesser of two evils Basically everybody hates republicans and democrats and would rather see a literal pile of manure take their place, but they vote for one to keep out the other, and this mass of people voting against the two parties is why the two parties are the only game in town.
Perhaps Verizon shouldn't have buried their 'property' in my lawn.
He's a lottery winner. There was nothing special about facebook. He happened to be at the right place at the right time to have his otherwise unremarkable network become popular, and he didn't turn it to complete shit as fast as myspace did.
No, you own the particular copy of the work, but not the copyright to the work.
France has historically had different philosophical underpinning for their copyright law. While the British and American traditions are based on a pragmatic system intended to further creativity by loaning the author a portion of their freedom to encourage authorship, the French take a more author centric viewpoint, believing that the author has a natural right to the works they have authored.
The right in question is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droit_de_suite
In all fairness, developing a system that actually encourages technological progress requires a deep understanding of economics, psychology, game theory, and a couple of other disciplines, and the Statute of Monopolies predated a remotely modern version of any of those. Even then, the statute changed monopolies from "whatever the king felt like granting monopolies on" to just novel inventions. It was quite a progressive change for the time. The problem is that we've largely regressed in that matter and not realized that they should have kept pecking away at monopolies until they were completely gone.
I think you are oversimplifying things. One may prefer to be around people that are similar to them because they have more in common, particularly shared culture. This would be especially true if one grew up in an area that was predominantly one's own ethnicity. Ethnicity is one that is pretty easily noticed, as is age, so these are factors that one is quicker to latch on to for common ground than say, your preferred package manager. A large number of one's friends may also have similar tastes in music, film, and hobbies as well.
I think you mean PageRank, which is a part, but not the entirety of Google's search algorithm. And without Bayh-Dole, it wouldn't be property at all, which is how things should be. Google would still be free to implement PageRank into their search, but so would Yahoo, Bing, AltaVista, etc. That said, it would seem like a difficult patent to enforce anyway, given that the interal functions of a search engine are not visible to the public.
The US health care system is fucked, but that doesn't mean the solution is adopt the system used by others. For starters, a national health care system would be roughly on par with a EU-wide health care system, which is just too large of a scale to be manageable. Handling most things at the state level would be much smarter. Another issue is the way federal money is spent. Tax dollars fund a lot of medical research, and pharmaceutical companies and bio companies are allowed to double dip, benefiting from R&D they didn't pay for and getting a patent on that R&D. Fixing that business would allow us more cheap generics. Throwing free money at people for aid often results in companies selling at the roughly the same cost to consumers with higher margins for the companies and less availability to those outside of that particular system of aid. There are also many peculiar accounting practices, and the fact that it's actually bad for your credit after a certain point to pay off your medical bills, which leads to more people not paying, which leads to higher prices for medical bills to make up for, and thus even more people who can't pay because the medical bills are too high.
Also, there are lots of other expenditures in the US besides health care, such as military spending. lower tax rates in a simpler system doesn't mean that less taxes are paid. It's the billionaires that have the resources to take advantage of all of these loopholes, so getting them to pay all of a lower rate could easily be more than a fraction of a higher rate.