I do drive properly. My driving and the driving of others like me is not worse for emissions nor safety. Police officers who understand that their role is to protect and serve do not enforce such laws. Cops, on the other hand, do seek to enforce such laws, and their predatory tactics make the roads less safe and result in more gas used.
Just so you know, I've never received a speeding ticket in my life, but I still object to the tactics that certain law enforcement officers engage in, making the roads I drive on less safe.
Exactly? I'm not sure. It could be any number of things, ranging from an actual assassination (which would be particularly easy to pull of within a prison system) to merely a dragged out character assassination that draws the attention away from the awful things the government is doing.
I suspect that extradition treaties don't often go into great detail on what offences receive extradition and what ones don't. They might have some clear cut rules about meeting a certain level of fine or sentence, but it seems like the kind of issue that largely boils down to 'good faith' that the country seeking the extradition will use it sparingly for only the most heinous of crimes.
I can't speak for the UK law, but I know there are two concerns for speed limits in the US. Safety and emissions. Being overly concerned with one's speed isn't too good for either, especially in areas where the roads aren't always flat and straight. That's why I'm not okay with my local police engaging in predatory tactics trying to catch someone going just fast enough to issue a speeding ticket.
The lack of formal charges suggests that it doesn't have to be dealt with, and it reeks of a setup. It's not that Assange would never rape someone, but rather that this seems very suspicious given the timing of it.
Apple's constant whining to the ITC and such is legal enforcement against a more open platform, and strangling of open platforms means that it can be far more of a hassle to have an open system. So, no, there isn't a threat that we will be legally forced to use a walled garden, but there is the threat that it will be a great hassle in doing so.
I understand it's arbitrary, but the English system seems more consistent with conventional usage of commas and periods. Digit group separators have a smaller break than decimal separators, just like a comma has a shorter break in the written word than the period.
The price of the phone is rather insignificant in comparison to the money made from a contract (and I refuse to believe that the listed retail price isn't total bullshit. It makes no fucking sense for a dumpphone and an iPod touch to cost less than an iPhone), and even if the new phone is subsidized, it generally involves extending your contract.
I would think that it wouldn't affect the rate of muggings all that much, just the rate at which cell phones are taken in muggins, just like easily cancelled credit cards would reduce the rate at which muggers attempt to use those after they mug someone. Muggers often won't know what kind of cell phone you have until they mug you, and there are probably bigger clues to a good target. The most obvious to me would seem to be a nice gold watch, as well as general attire. That said, despite the stereotypes, I seem to recall the most common victims of mugging (and most violent crime except for rape) to actually be poor black males in the US.
You said entitled twice and brought up socialism. It's quite clear you are an idiot behind help, and this conversation won't go anywhere productive. I kindly ask, that, as an author myself, you quit trying to make authors look like jackasses.
Yes, the scarcity of copies of a work is created by copyright. That's why endless copies of a work can be made. If I were so inclined, I could literally make a million copies of my 'Free as in Freedom' PDF on my computer. You can argue that artificially making copies of a work is justified under certain conditions, but the scarcity is completely artificial.
Again, let's look at things before the printing press. There was no real regulation of producing copies. If I owned a copy and had the ability or resources to pay someone else to, I could make and distribute more copies as I pleased and nobody would date accuse me of wrongdoing. There was no artificial scarcity, and the limits of making copies were due to a limited number of scribes only being capable of a limited amount of output. The change the printing press brought wasn't on the author's side, but rather, on the scribe's side, so nothing would inherently change for the author like it did for the scribe.
It's worth remembering that a major component of how the DMCA came to be was saying that the US had to comply with WIPO provisions. Also, a major justification for the CTEA was also to 'harmonize' with European law, and said attempt at 'harmonization' was a large component for why the majority of SCOTUS erred in not striking down the retroactive extensions. Also, for most of the 20th century, US copyright law was much weaker than European law, and there are still some areas where it is more permissive. The solving lining of that godawful CTEA was the Fairness in Music Licensing Act, which allowed small restaurants to play radio stations under certain conditions without paying money to performing rights societies. The European Communities complained that it wasn't in line with the Berne Convention, and we had to pay them a few million to shut up, despite the fact that the radio stations that broadcast the music ALREADY pay those thugs money.
Anyway, getting into a national pissing contest is pointless. Even if you think the EU and your national government are several orders of magnitude more corrupt than the US, your government is still very corrupt and you should be pissed off about it instead of bragging about how your government doesn't screw you as hard as mine does. Personally, I'm quite sure I hate my government more than you hate my government.
That's a rather difficult period to assess, and it looks at things from the wrong angle. Negligible isn't clearly defined, and can vary greatly over time as well as how you slice 'typical.' More importantly, it has nothing to do with what is best for the public, which is the most favorable output of works for input of liberties waived.
Technically speaking, it would seem to be European politics. It is politics, and it is in Europe. The corruption issues may be limited to the national level, so it wouldn't be corruption at the EU level. That said, I'm sure that corruption is quite prevalent at the EU level as well. As I've already said, pretending that it isn't makes you the blind one.
It's actually in line with a lot of the tradition of copyright law. It has generally been an industrial issue, so personal usage wasn't regulated, at least in practice.
If society determines that software producers, musicians, artists, and authors, do not have protections of copyright in order to recoup their expenses and investment, then I say fine, so long as I can eat the farmers crops, drive the car makers cars, wear the miners gold, and live in the carpenters house, all for free, without paying for the benefits the use of said items bring.
All of those are naturally scarce resources. The scarcity created by copyright is artificial, and the ultimate goal of said scarcity is to benefit society. It might be worth considering how the printing press changed things. Before the advent of the printing press, making a copy required close to the same amount of labor as the creation of the original, and we had no copyright. The change the printing press brought about was not that it took more labor to author original works, but rather, that existing works could be copied with less labor. That someone else didn't have to do so much work didn't give the author the copyright, as such a statement makes no sense whatsoever. Rather, the change was thinking that by controlling the lower costs the printing press brought, the King and Church could proliferate pro-establishment works while squelching dissent, err, I mean, learning could be advanced.
Also, you haven't really quantified the matter of 'do not have the protections of copyright'. At what point do you feel that this happens? Anything shorter than eternity would be inferior to naturally scarce property. Or is it fine for the period to be brief, so long as such a period exists. How about two seconds for copyright? That's technically protection, but it is so little protection that it's not worth filing the paperwork.
He didn't say that American politics wasn't corrupt. He didn't even say that American politics was less corrupt than European politics. The argument he made seems to be that European politics is all kinds of corrupt, which would put the not liking to hear the truth as YOUR flaw.
Generally speaking, prosecuted monopolies tend to make it unreasonable to make an alternative choice. For example, it is still quite difficult to buy a new desktop computer that has a non-Windows operating system installed, and it was even more difficult back when MS was under antitrust investigations. In addition to that, it was at the time very difficult to NOT have IE installed on said computer. IIRC, they even used their position in the desktop OS market to ensure that Netscape was not installed on computers.
By contrast, all a user has to do to not use Google is to go to a different search engine. Hell, Google can even help you find them.
It's more akin to saying water wants to flow downhill. Now, the water doesn't actually express any human desire either, but given circumstances that allow water to flow downhill, it will flow downhill. Likewise, the 'flow' of information tends to be from the one to the many, given circumstances that allow such a change in knowledge to occur. Public education and libraries exist to facilitate such flow of information. Even copyright and patents themselves have the ultimate goal of enriching the public in a manner that outweighs the social costs a legal monopoly brings, at least in the US legal tradition.
Both copyright and patents are legal monopolies. However, the market they create monopolies on is often very small. Autodesk has a monopoly on Autocad, not the CAD market as a whole. That's it's a monopoly that is very narrow in scope doesn't make it not a monopoly, it just means that said monopoly isn't very likely to be prosecuted by competition/antitrust law. Absent the interference by the government through copyright, anybody could sell Autocad, driving the per unit price down drastically. This is quite apparent in the pricing of generic drugs, and it would be apparent in works falling into the public domain, if only that happened for us.
As for rent seeking, it doesn't apply to the authoring itself, but rather, to trying to extract more money than free competition would allow via a legal monopoly after a work is finished. Rent seeking doesn't mean that the party seeking rent has never done anything productive, just that they aren't doing anything productive any more in a certain regard.
The Walt Disney company has been very productive in the past, and is productive today as well. However, by seeking retroactive copyright extensions, they were engaging in textbook rent seeking behavior. You might argue that copyright increases the number or perhaps the quality of works produced, you might even be dumb enough to think that adding 20 more years of protection to new works would encourage more works to be produced, but retroactive extensions can't possibly encourage more works to be produced, and thus, is clearly rent seeking.
You are using some fuzzy economics there. The economic impact of not buying and illegally downloading are identical, so it's just as much theft as not getting it at all.
The economics of theft and copyright infringement are completely different. If your argument has any merit at all, it can stand on it's own instead of free riding on the economic arguments of theft. People who call copyright infringement theft are either idiots or relying upon an appeal to emotion.
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I do drive properly. My driving and the driving of others like me is not worse for emissions nor safety. Police officers who understand that their role is to protect and serve do not enforce such laws. Cops, on the other hand, do seek to enforce such laws, and their predatory tactics make the roads less safe and result in more gas used.
Just so you know, I've never received a speeding ticket in my life, but I still object to the tactics that certain law enforcement officers engage in, making the roads I drive on less safe.
Exactly? I'm not sure. It could be any number of things, ranging from an actual assassination (which would be particularly easy to pull of within a prison system) to merely a dragged out character assassination that draws the attention away from the awful things the government is doing.
Because there's nothing close to a crime the US can charge him with.
I suspect that extradition treaties don't often go into great detail on what offences receive extradition and what ones don't. They might have some clear cut rules about meeting a certain level of fine or sentence, but it seems like the kind of issue that largely boils down to 'good faith' that the country seeking the extradition will use it sparingly for only the most heinous of crimes.
I can't speak for the UK law, but I know there are two concerns for speed limits in the US. Safety and emissions. Being overly concerned with one's speed isn't too good for either, especially in areas where the roads aren't always flat and straight. That's why I'm not okay with my local police engaging in predatory tactics trying to catch someone going just fast enough to issue a speeding ticket.
He's more of a patriot to the US than most of our elected and appointed officials, which is quite sad, given he's not even a US citizen.
The lack of formal charges suggests that it doesn't have to be dealt with, and it reeks of a setup. It's not that Assange would never rape someone, but rather that this seems very suspicious given the timing of it.
I doubt the Swedes are the puppetmasters here, that role likely being American. And the rape accusation seems very dubious and quite convenient.
If you are famous for political actions and the charges brought against you are clearly part of a foreign country's political agenda.
Yes, it does. That's Freedom 2: the freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
Apple's constant whining to the ITC and such is legal enforcement against a more open platform, and strangling of open platforms means that it can be far more of a hassle to have an open system. So, no, there isn't a threat that we will be legally forced to use a walled garden, but there is the threat that it will be a great hassle in doing so.
I understand it's arbitrary, but the English system seems more consistent with conventional usage of commas and periods. Digit group separators have a smaller break than decimal separators, just like a comma has a shorter break in the written word than the period.
The price of the phone is rather insignificant in comparison to the money made from a contract (and I refuse to believe that the listed retail price isn't total bullshit. It makes no fucking sense for a dumpphone and an iPod touch to cost less than an iPhone), and even if the new phone is subsidized, it generally involves extending your contract.
I would think that it wouldn't affect the rate of muggings all that much, just the rate at which cell phones are taken in muggins, just like easily cancelled credit cards would reduce the rate at which muggers attempt to use those after they mug someone. Muggers often won't know what kind of cell phone you have until they mug you, and there are probably bigger clues to a good target. The most obvious to me would seem to be a nice gold watch, as well as general attire. That said, despite the stereotypes, I seem to recall the most common victims of mugging (and most violent crime except for rape) to actually be poor black males in the US.
You said entitled twice and brought up socialism. It's quite clear you are an idiot behind help, and this conversation won't go anywhere productive. I kindly ask, that, as an author myself, you quit trying to make authors look like jackasses.
Yes, the scarcity of copies of a work is created by copyright. That's why endless copies of a work can be made. If I were so inclined, I could literally make a million copies of my 'Free as in Freedom' PDF on my computer. You can argue that artificially making copies of a work is justified under certain conditions, but the scarcity is completely artificial.
Again, let's look at things before the printing press. There was no real regulation of producing copies. If I owned a copy and had the ability or resources to pay someone else to, I could make and distribute more copies as I pleased and nobody would date accuse me of wrongdoing. There was no artificial scarcity, and the limits of making copies were due to a limited number of scribes only being capable of a limited amount of output. The change the printing press brought wasn't on the author's side, but rather, on the scribe's side, so nothing would inherently change for the author like it did for the scribe.
It's worth remembering that a major component of how the DMCA came to be was saying that the US had to comply with WIPO provisions. Also, a major justification for the CTEA was also to 'harmonize' with European law, and said attempt at 'harmonization' was a large component for why the majority of SCOTUS erred in not striking down the retroactive extensions. Also, for most of the 20th century, US copyright law was much weaker than European law, and there are still some areas where it is more permissive. The solving lining of that godawful CTEA was the Fairness in Music Licensing Act, which allowed small restaurants to play radio stations under certain conditions without paying money to performing rights societies. The European Communities complained that it wasn't in line with the Berne Convention, and we had to pay them a few million to shut up, despite the fact that the radio stations that broadcast the music ALREADY pay those thugs money.
Anyway, getting into a national pissing contest is pointless. Even if you think the EU and your national government are several orders of magnitude more corrupt than the US, your government is still very corrupt and you should be pissed off about it instead of bragging about how your government doesn't screw you as hard as mine does. Personally, I'm quite sure I hate my government more than you hate my government.
That's a rather difficult period to assess, and it looks at things from the wrong angle. Negligible isn't clearly defined, and can vary greatly over time as well as how you slice 'typical.' More importantly, it has nothing to do with what is best for the public, which is the most favorable output of works for input of liberties waived.
Technically speaking, it would seem to be European politics. It is politics, and it is in Europe. The corruption issues may be limited to the national level, so it wouldn't be corruption at the EU level. That said, I'm sure that corruption is quite prevalent at the EU level as well. As I've already said, pretending that it isn't makes you the blind one.
All of those are naturally scarce resources. The scarcity created by copyright is artificial, and the ultimate goal of said scarcity is to benefit society. It might be worth considering how the printing press changed things. Before the advent of the printing press, making a copy required close to the same amount of labor as the creation of the original, and we had no copyright. The change the printing press brought about was not that it took more labor to author original works, but rather, that existing works could be copied with less labor. That someone else didn't have to do so much work didn't give the author the copyright, as such a statement makes no sense whatsoever. Rather, the change was thinking that by controlling the lower costs the printing press brought, the King and Church could proliferate pro-establishment works while squelching dissent, err, I mean, learning could be advanced.
Also, you haven't really quantified the matter of 'do not have the protections of copyright'. At what point do you feel that this happens? Anything shorter than eternity would be inferior to naturally scarce property. Or is it fine for the period to be brief, so long as such a period exists. How about two seconds for copyright? That's technically protection, but it is so little protection that it's not worth filing the paperwork.
He didn't say that American politics wasn't corrupt. He didn't even say that American politics was less corrupt than European politics. The argument he made seems to be that European politics is all kinds of corrupt, which would put the not liking to hear the truth as YOUR flaw.
Generally speaking, prosecuted monopolies tend to make it unreasonable to make an alternative choice. For example, it is still quite difficult to buy a new desktop computer that has a non-Windows operating system installed, and it was even more difficult back when MS was under antitrust investigations. In addition to that, it was at the time very difficult to NOT have IE installed on said computer. IIRC, they even used their position in the desktop OS market to ensure that Netscape was not installed on computers. By contrast, all a user has to do to not use Google is to go to a different search engine. Hell, Google can even help you find them.
It's more akin to saying water wants to flow downhill. Now, the water doesn't actually express any human desire either, but given circumstances that allow water to flow downhill, it will flow downhill. Likewise, the 'flow' of information tends to be from the one to the many, given circumstances that allow such a change in knowledge to occur. Public education and libraries exist to facilitate such flow of information. Even copyright and patents themselves have the ultimate goal of enriching the public in a manner that outweighs the social costs a legal monopoly brings, at least in the US legal tradition.
Both copyright and patents are legal monopolies. However, the market they create monopolies on is often very small. Autodesk has a monopoly on Autocad, not the CAD market as a whole. That's it's a monopoly that is very narrow in scope doesn't make it not a monopoly, it just means that said monopoly isn't very likely to be prosecuted by competition/antitrust law. Absent the interference by the government through copyright, anybody could sell Autocad, driving the per unit price down drastically. This is quite apparent in the pricing of generic drugs, and it would be apparent in works falling into the public domain, if only that happened for us.
As for rent seeking, it doesn't apply to the authoring itself, but rather, to trying to extract more money than free competition would allow via a legal monopoly after a work is finished. Rent seeking doesn't mean that the party seeking rent has never done anything productive, just that they aren't doing anything productive any more in a certain regard.
The Walt Disney company has been very productive in the past, and is productive today as well. However, by seeking retroactive copyright extensions, they were engaging in textbook rent seeking behavior. You might argue that copyright increases the number or perhaps the quality of works produced, you might even be dumb enough to think that adding 20 more years of protection to new works would encourage more works to be produced, but retroactive extensions can't possibly encourage more works to be produced, and thus, is clearly rent seeking.
You are using some fuzzy economics there. The economic impact of not buying and illegally downloading are identical, so it's just as much theft as not getting it at all.
The economics of theft and copyright infringement are completely different. If your argument has any merit at all, it can stand on it's own instead of free riding on the economic arguments of theft. People who call copyright infringement theft are either idiots or relying upon an appeal to emotion.