Did Dennis Miller start writing for Old Man Murray? I think he is pretty much spot on, though. Adventure games became insufferably stupid. Infocom was the only company making witty, intelligent games, but they didn't adjust with the times, and computing power was not sufficient in the eighties to create an immersive, graphical world with substantive characters and meaningful ways to interact with them. Some of the most important communication humans have with one another are subtle, like body language, but no one has been able to put this into a game that I am aware of.
I don't like the government set rate. Anyone is free to remake anything with a compulsory license, and I think this is one of the things that makes the music industry work as well as it does. I would prefer industry standard percentages, but since the government is the one saying that ideas are property, it will probably be the government saying what the standard rate will be.
You don't have to buy something to be bound by a copyright. If I am walking by someone's house, and they are blaring music through the front door, the government says I cannot use the material I just heard. I consider that a good thing, because I think it benefits me in the long run, but don't you think it is a contract for a minute. I can't just go out and remake Brittney Spears' hits for nothing, even though I have never bought any of her stuff, or even sought to listen to it. I hear it just going about my business on a day to day basis. If you can get compulsory licenses there (with a remake), what's the big deal in extending it to reprints?
I understand your concern, but I have no natural right to control something which I willingly allowed to be removed from my position, unless I agreed to a contract with whomever I gave it to. We create (IP laws are created, not natural,\ rights) these rights to benefit the public. Frankly, I am unconcerned with the artist maintaining control with something which is in my possession. The way to have artistic control is to release it in a form which cannot be altered, or don't release it at all. Don't go about using the governments big bully power to control everybody else's actions.
Making a big deal about what the artist wants after the fact is nonsense. Once I buy/obtain it, it is my wishes that I will be concerned about. If the artist wants something different, let him create the different thing and listen/look at it all day. I don't buy a CD so a musician can be happy.
That still doesn't invalidate the comment. Some people are so offended that they would rather have a government, which can and does use that information to kill people to a bunch of companies using the information for reasons unknown. It is sort of the "devil you know" syndrome. Do I understand it? Nope. But if the government never killed anyone you know, it's pretty easy to dismiss their actions.
The danger of making Microsoft the Prime Evil of computing is then any action against Microsoft can be justified. Of course, then the actions taken against Microsoft may be applied to other companies and individuals, but by then such actions have been legitimated.
I'm concerned about this myself. I don't have a problem with what Oracle did, and I wouldn't have had a problem if it was Microsoft, either. But there is an awful lot of kneejerk condemnation of any action undertaken by Microsoft. There is definitely a lunatic fringe amongst Linux enthusiasts, and it is distressing. Not everything Microsoft does is bad. I only have a problem with Microsoft to the extent that they use government force and attempt to make the government change rules to favor their objectives. How Microsoft engineers its contracts or software is unimportant to me. How Microsoft engineers legislation to suppress free thought and information exchange is very important to me.
Companies are always checking out the competition. As long as Oracle is not using government force (say through draconian patent and copyright law) or fraud, I don't really see the problem. If the PI firm is breaking the law, then there may be some culpability, but absent that, hiring a PI to check out how Microsoft is attempting to use government force is not only ethical, they would be fools not to do it. Microsoft was attempting to manipulate the government to further its own ends (be those ends morally right or wrong). It is in its competitors' interests to find out how, and to expose the attempts if that is appropriate.
These people are allocating bandwidth and monitoring their own network. I think that is pretty legal. If you get a service agreement with your provider that they will not do that, then you have legal recourse against them if they implement something like this. I actually would prefer a college to handle Napster, Gnutella, and other programs in this way rather than by blocking ports and whatnot. Haven't ISPs been managing bandwidth already?
Shame on O'Reilly? What is their purpose for being in business if not to sell books? I don't see the big deal. I have read books about Math which did not get into every gory detail about equations. Stephen Hawking's most popular books have almost no equations. That's not the point. Someone else can put out the technical manual.
Come on, they knew they were going to be facilitating trading of music for free. They should have made the service more all-purpose, rather than choose to only distribute a file format which is used almost (but not quite) exclusively to distribute copyrighted material. I think the Napster fiasco will alert others to go with something like gnutella or some other general purpose transfer mechanism. Hotline was my favorite on the Mac. By restricting the type of information being traded, Napster opened themselves up to all sorts of scrutiny that Hotline never did, even though copyright violations were rampant on that service which last I used it (3 years ago).
As for your utilitarian view, I can't agree with it because although it sounds very objective, it isn't. It still boils down to a very subjective opinion of what the public good is.
But the Constitution says that is the purpose of copyrights and patents. Should we examine whether or not action we take to attain a stated goal? I know what I do in my personal life, but perhaps government is different.
It all depends on whether a song is the property of its creator or not. If the songwriter does have natural rights to his works, then copyright laws are not much different than laws against theft and trespass. But if the songwriter does not have natural rights to his works, then you have to follow this to its logical conclusion - that programmers have no rights to copyright their works. That means no GPL and no defense against encrypted binary-only derivations.
No, programmers do not have a natural right to code, and a song is property until it is shared. Once I have heard the song, it is no longer your exclusive property. I cannot unhear it. That being said, we create artificial rights to benefit the public by allowing artists limited monopolies. The only test to me is the benefit the public part. Whatever will give the most public benefit is the right idea. To do anything else is a misuse of government force, IMHO. And yes, even the GPL would be invalidated by elimination of copyrights, but I do not support copyright elimination. I support changing the lengths back to something reasonable, and I think people should be able to reverse engineer things if they wish. I also don't much care for patenting algorithms. I think it is extraordinarily dangerous to build an economic model which is completely dependent on government force (which is the case with IP). There have been societies with widespread respect for natural rights without strong goverments, but IP cannot exist without strong goverments, and strong governments are almost invariably bad ones.
And what about the songwriter? Alvin can write a damn good song, but he can't sing or dance or operate the sound board. Bert takes Alvin's song for free and makes a million on his worldwide tour. Alvin gets nothing.
But, you say, Bert would certainly hire Alvin to keep writing his songs. True, except that Chuck already hired Alvin for 5$ an hour. Bert "stole" the song off of Alvin' and Chuck's demo release. Bert knows that he doesn't have to hire Alvin, he only needs to copy his stuff.
So Alvin and Chuck end up working at McDonalds to feed their family all because of some stupid philosophy that selling songs is evil.
First, let me say that I beleive IP laws are a good idea, but I do think that they have gotten out of hand in recent times. That being said, what about the songwriter? I don't think that the purpose of government is to guarantee that certain professions have value. If songwriters cannot make money without government protections, perhaps their vocation should die. Not all government entitlements are good.
I wasn't serious, but you've probably right. The computers are a tool for expression and since freedom of speech is guaranteed... yadda yadda yadda.
Actually, if computers became too much of a threat to intellectual property, I could see them being outlawed by requiring that everyone made have the equivalent of a clipper chip to prevent unauthorized use. Authoratarianism is on the rise, and it is not hard for me to envision a future which is quite a bit more horrifying than what even Orwell thought up. Sir Author Conan Doyle (through Sherlock Holmes) said that there is nothing new under the sun. If IP laws really get out of control, think if the implications of that truism. There really is nothing new. Exhaustive patent searches and lawyers may be the norm for coming out with any new product or idea. By thinking of IP laws as the right of the originator rather than somethin which benefits the public, I could see copyrights and patents never expiring, eventually locking any non-established players out of most business.
Since they will be able to pick the country they are collecting taxes for, will that mean that said country will be collecting more taxes than the other members of the EU?
I've read about people protesting their labor practices, but I've never seen anything describing the results of an (impartial) check of Nike's factories, the conditions found there, and how they compare to other companies working in the same country.
That's not the point, though. Many Americans are not moral relativists on this issue. They say companies should be held up to an American standard, not the standard of the country being discussed. For example, China has what amounts to slave labor. That's legal there. American companies which take advantage of it are not going to get good press, even though it's legal, and is probably required if they are to be competitive in that market.
Not a problem from where I sit
on
Copyrant
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· Score: 2
I would much rather have software companies protect their products with contracts and copy protection than use government force to do it. If I could trade the current system for one with few, if any, sofware patents, copyrights with shorter terms, and no laws against reverse engineering (except for patents), I would gladly suffer software which is bound to particular hardware, or copy protection dongles which have to be plugged into the parallel port. There would always be alternatives. It's not until government starts interfering that alternatives dry up.
I agree with much of what you have to say, but I would add that Microsoft can have you arrested, and can have your property taken away. This is not simply the government meddling in technology. The government meddled from day one by awarding software patents and making it difficult to reverse engineer legally. While I disagree with the ruling, I do not have a problem in theory, at least, with the government, which enabled Microsoft's profits through intellectual property laws (which are monopolies according to the Constitution), testing to see if Microsoft is abusing the privilege (IP is only a right if you assume that government grants rights rather than protects them, IMHO.)./P
I think perhaps schools should start tailoring marketing classes to the Internet generation. Corporations, for the most part, have no clue how to take advantage of the free publicity they can get from Internet fan sites. I think they should have the sites all sign contracts regarding the type of content allowed on sites which use copyrighted materials. That way, you pull the plug on access to those materials for someone who is publishing materials you find defamatory, but not for everyone in general. This is as stupid as the Viacom/Star Trek thing.
I agree wholeheartedly. I have an old IBM 4019 printer which I cannot get to print properly in Linux, but it works out of the box perfectly in Win2000. I run VMWare and print from the virtual machine to/dev/lpt0 whenver I need to print a web page or document. I think it is ridiculous that there are only about 30 different drivers for printers when I use the control panel. Hopefully, I will learn to do a bit of programming some day to help fix this.
Another thing I wonder is... is this the first time that a games console has been licenced like this? I don't recall any others doing this; Nintendo boxes have always been Nintendo. Likewise with Sega, Atari, et al, including, until now, Sony.
I think 3DO did this when their console came out. The licensed the technology so that others could make compatible units.
Mandrake is cool - I'm running Mandrake 7.1beta with ReiserFS. The only problem I had with it was XFree 4.0 - it crashed the install (but hey - it is a beta...). They have updated the installer, so the small issues there were with the installer in Mandrake 7.0, is gone.
You might try the 4.06 XFree86 server. I got it at rpmfind.net/linux/MandrakeCooker/contrib/Mandrake/ RPMS (that's the FTP site). It worked when the one that came with 7.1 crashed on me as well. I have an NVIDIA card, and it works pretty well.
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Did Dennis Miller start writing for Old Man Murray? I think he is pretty much spot on, though. Adventure games became insufferably stupid. Infocom was the only company making witty, intelligent games, but they didn't adjust with the times, and computing power was not sufficient in the eighties to create an immersive, graphical world with substantive characters and meaningful ways to interact with them. Some of the most important communication humans have with one another are subtle, like body language, but no one has been able to put this into a game that I am aware of.
I don't like the government set rate. Anyone is free to remake anything with a compulsory license, and I think this is one of the things that makes the music industry work as well as it does. I would prefer industry standard percentages, but since the government is the one saying that ideas are property, it will probably be the government saying what the standard rate will be.
You don't have to buy something to be bound by a copyright. If I am walking by someone's house, and they are blaring music through the front door, the government says I cannot use the material I just heard. I consider that a good thing, because I think it benefits me in the long run, but don't you think it is a contract for a minute. I can't just go out and remake Brittney Spears' hits for nothing, even though I have never bought any of her stuff, or even sought to listen to it. I hear it just going about my business on a day to day basis. If you can get compulsory licenses there (with a remake), what's the big deal in extending it to reprints?
Making a big deal about what the artist wants after the fact is nonsense. Once I buy/obtain it, it is my wishes that I will be concerned about. If the artist wants something different, let him create the different thing and listen/look at it all day. I don't buy a CD so a musician can be happy.
. . . no one will listen to people who predict the future.
That still doesn't invalidate the comment. Some people are so offended that they would rather have a government, which can and does use that information to kill people to a bunch of companies using the information for reasons unknown. It is sort of the "devil you know" syndrome. Do I understand it? Nope. But if the government never killed anyone you know, it's pretty easy to dismiss their actions.
Companies are always checking out the competition. As long as Oracle is not using government force (say through draconian patent and copyright law) or fraud, I don't really see the problem. If the PI firm is breaking the law, then there may be some culpability, but absent that, hiring a PI to check out how Microsoft is attempting to use government force is not only ethical, they would be fools not to do it. Microsoft was attempting to manipulate the government to further its own ends (be those ends morally right or wrong). It is in its competitors' interests to find out how, and to expose the attempts if that is appropriate.
These people are allocating bandwidth and monitoring their own network. I think that is pretty legal. If you get a service agreement with your provider that they will not do that, then you have legal recourse against them if they implement something like this. I actually would prefer a college to handle Napster, Gnutella, and other programs in this way rather than by blocking ports and whatnot. Haven't ISPs been managing bandwidth already?
Shame on O'Reilly? What is their purpose for being in business if not to sell books? I don't see the big deal. I have read books about Math which did not get into every gory detail about equations. Stephen Hawking's most popular books have almost no equations. That's not the point. Someone else can put out the technical manual.
My understanding is Plan 9 (the OS) was designed to raise UNIX from the dead, echoing the plot of the awful, awful movie.
Whoa, a Microsoft person around here? Kill, Persecute the heretic!. Your Life of Brian sig made me think of that.
Come on, they knew they were going to be facilitating trading of music for free. They should have made the service more all-purpose, rather than choose to only distribute a file format which is used almost (but not quite) exclusively to distribute copyrighted material. I think the Napster fiasco will alert others to go with something like gnutella or some other general purpose transfer mechanism. Hotline was my favorite on the Mac. By restricting the type of information being traded, Napster opened themselves up to all sorts of scrutiny that Hotline never did, even though copyright violations were rampant on that service which last I used it (3 years ago).
But the Constitution says that is the purpose of copyrights and patents. Should we examine whether or not action we take to attain a stated goal? I know what I do in my personal life, but perhaps government is different.
No, programmers do not have a natural right to code, and a song is property until it is shared. Once I have heard the song, it is no longer your exclusive property. I cannot unhear it. That being said, we create artificial rights to benefit the public by allowing artists limited monopolies. The only test to me is the benefit the public part. Whatever will give the most public benefit is the right idea. To do anything else is a misuse of government force, IMHO. And yes, even the GPL would be invalidated by elimination of copyrights, but I do not support copyright elimination. I support changing the lengths back to something reasonable, and I think people should be able to reverse engineer things if they wish. I also don't much care for patenting algorithms. I think it is extraordinarily dangerous to build an economic model which is completely dependent on government force (which is the case with IP). There have been societies with widespread respect for natural rights without strong goverments, but IP cannot exist without strong goverments, and strong governments are almost invariably bad ones.
First, let me say that I beleive IP laws are a good idea, but I do think that they have gotten out of hand in recent times. That being said, what about the songwriter? I don't think that the purpose of government is to guarantee that certain professions have value. If songwriters cannot make money without government protections, perhaps their vocation should die. Not all government entitlements are good.
Actually, if computers became too much of a threat to intellectual property, I could see them being outlawed by requiring that everyone made have the equivalent of a clipper chip to prevent unauthorized use. Authoratarianism is on the rise, and it is not hard for me to envision a future which is quite a bit more horrifying than what even Orwell thought up. Sir Author Conan Doyle (through Sherlock Holmes) said that there is nothing new under the sun. If IP laws really get out of control, think if the implications of that truism. There really is nothing new. Exhaustive patent searches and lawyers may be the norm for coming out with any new product or idea. By thinking of IP laws as the right of the originator rather than somethin which benefits the public, I could see copyrights and patents never expiring, eventually locking any non-established players out of most business.
Since they will be able to pick the country they are collecting taxes for, will that mean that said country will be collecting more taxes than the other members of the EU?
That's not the point, though. Many Americans are not moral relativists on this issue. They say companies should be held up to an American standard, not the standard of the country being discussed. For example, China has what amounts to slave labor. That's legal there. American companies which take advantage of it are not going to get good press, even though it's legal, and is probably required if they are to be competitive in that market.
I would much rather have software companies protect their products with contracts and copy protection than use government force to do it. If I could trade the current system for one with few, if any, sofware patents, copyrights with shorter terms, and no laws against reverse engineering (except for patents), I would gladly suffer software which is bound to particular hardware, or copy protection dongles which have to be plugged into the parallel port. There would always be alternatives. It's not until government starts interfering that alternatives dry up.
I agree with much of what you have to say, but I would add that Microsoft can have you arrested, and can have your property taken away. This is not simply the government meddling in technology. The government meddled from day one by awarding software patents and making it difficult to reverse engineer legally. While I disagree with the ruling, I do not have a problem in theory, at least, with the government, which enabled Microsoft's profits through intellectual property laws (which are monopolies according to the Constitution), testing to see if Microsoft is abusing the privilege (IP is only a right if you assume that government grants rights rather than protects them, IMHO.)./P
I think perhaps schools should start tailoring marketing classes to the Internet generation. Corporations, for the most part, have no clue how to take advantage of the free publicity they can get from Internet fan sites. I think they should have the sites all sign contracts regarding the type of content allowed on sites which use copyrighted materials. That way, you pull the plug on access to those materials for someone who is publishing materials you find defamatory, but not for everyone in general. This is as stupid as the Viacom/Star Trek thing.
I agree wholeheartedly. I have an old IBM 4019 printer which I cannot get to print properly in Linux, but it works out of the box perfectly in Win2000. I run VMWare and print from the virtual machine to /dev/lpt0 whenver I need to print a web page or document. I think it is ridiculous that there are only about 30 different drivers for printers when I use the control panel. Hopefully, I will learn to do a bit of programming some day to help fix this.
I think 3DO did this when their console came out. The licensed the technology so that others could make compatible units.
You might try the 4.06 XFree86 server. I got it at rpmfind.net/linux/MandrakeCooker/contrib/Mandrake/ RPMS (that's the FTP site). It worked when the one that came with 7.1 crashed on me as well. I have an NVIDIA card, and it works pretty well.