How is seizing a domain not violence? It's government backed, legal violence, but it is. And there are threats of jailing people also. Jailing someone is physical violence.
And what can you say about non "FLOSS" programs? What do you know about bugs in proprietary software, other than the bugs that really blow in your face? And what stats do you have about number of bugs that get fixed/go unfixed, and what part of the budget in proprietary software goes to fix known bugs instead of implementing new features?
In my case, I just make up that stats, and I believe there's no way to be more certain.
Whether the motivation is espionage or "encouraging growth of domestic companies", the results are similar. China has no problems bending the laws to benefit their companies at the expense of foreign ones.
Shocking!! It's not only their right, changing the rules in favour of their companies is the only ethical thing to do, if they think it is what benefits their citizens. The only thing they have to take into account is possible negative consequences for their own people, and if they can afford them.
... Top down economies and societies have a relatively short shelf life; the Soviet Union proved that. When you have a small group of elites deciding the go forward path of any large economy, the results will be unstable... as the mistakes of these elites compound expect China to cannibalize more foreign business interests. I have no idea when this will happen, but I'd bet a few bucks that it will happen eventually.
And how are capitalistic societies not top-down ? What percentage of the US population belongs to the political class? What percentage of the US population can reach wall street? That is what I would call a small elite.
I agree that top down is bad, but I have never seen anyone seriously try an alternative.
You mean that a soy producer, after growing RR soy/RR wheat year after year, applying Roundup every time, for the length of ten years, is free to stop doing that and growing some other grain? I was under the assumption that it's not that easy to walk away from herbicide-based crops. Please enlighten me, I'm all ears.
The point of patents is not to allow the public to use the actual patent. It's to prevent the knowledge in the patent from being lost....
Duh. That was the point of my post. Knowledge like the combustion engine is valuable for humanity for a hundred years, so it's good to pay some guy to develop it, in the for of a government-granted monopoly. Knowledge like a particular video codec is worthless to the public after a few decades, so paying for it, as a society, makes no sense. Let guilds keep their codecs secret, if they so wish. Patents don't even serve the purpose of ensuring future access to content, in a world where things like DRM seem fair to so many people.
Anyhow, h.264 will be about as useful 15 years from now as Intel Indeo is right now. Patents on nineteenth century machines kind of made sense, because they might have helped moving some industries forward. Of course, patents did last a short amount of time compared to the usefulness of the invention. Right now we are still using combustion engines, and for the most part of the time they had no patents. Patents in software, right now, cover a lot more than the lifetime of the invention. That way, they are useless to the general public.
It's not that you and your grandchildren will be dead, it's that patents will expire long after the technology becomes obsolete.
First, there is no such thing as "intellectual" property and then "personal" of "physical" property. "intellectual" property is just a way to call a group of different kinds of distribution rights, but it shares nothing in common with actual property, so it's confusing in a discussion.
Aside from that, the issue is that the length of copyrights does change the picture. If you make an awful picture, with beautiful photography, it doesn't make financial sense for theaters to keep copies just in case they can use your shots in the future. They would have to wait more than a hundred years to use your footage. With a shorter copyright term, archival would make economic sense to more people, and thus cultural production would be safer from disappearance.
The foundation of copyright is that you sell your works, get in exchange a monopoly for a limited time, and after that the public owns it. So, I'm not sure if you were aware of that, but author != owner.
After Avatar copyright expires, ownership goes to the public domain. If the original authors didn't keep good copies after copyright expiration, they are harming the general public, which is the owner.
Boxee is not an excellent example. It's just a particular case. People who find bugs in Ubuntu usually help fixing them upstream. In this case, it can't be done, because Boxee is proprietary software. They do they own releases, and they decide when and what to fix. The thing is that proprietary stuff doesn't work OK with processes meant for free software. Similar things happened to me with vmware (switched to virtualbox ose) and nvidia drivers. But Ubuntu doesn't have to pamper proprietary software. If they don't give good support, tough luck.
The headline suggests that China is using import rules to bolster security. I think it is the other way round. They are using the demand for source code as a barrier to trade to (unfairly) help domestic firms. Not very many overseas firms are going to provide source code, leaving the market open to Chinese firms.
I would agree with you if you didn't say "(unfairly)". Access to source code is a legitimate security concern. Fair trade doesn't mean that you can't set high standards if foreign providers can't reach them.
>>>it would be useful to just release to the public domain, but in the world we live now, your works could be repackaged against users.
Why does that matter? The original code you released is still public domain. Users may choose the repackaged product, or choose your public domain product, however they desire. The novel Tom Sawyer is in the public domain, and while someone might choose to rework it and copyright it, that doesn't stop Sawyer from still being public domain.
Your example is right. About your question, well, you are asking why proprietary software is harmful to users. I know you, and I think you already know that, you might not agree, but you can start reading about it here anyhow: http://www.fsf.org/about//
Copyleft is a response to copyrights in software, to try and turn copyright against itself.
In Stallman's view, the good things from having no copyright would outweigh the issues you name. In a world without software copyrights, some people _could_ sell binaries, but it would be a lot harder as a business model if your binaries can be shared. The scarcity would be at development time and not at distribution, so you would have to charge for development or other services and not for distribution.
Anyhow, you can't steal an idea (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1633548&cid=32012984). Patents make it possible for someone to restrict you from using your own idea, but getting rid of software patents would take care of that.
In most practical respects everything is better now than before.
The thing is that one and two hundred years back most modern societies were aiming close to where we are now. I think it's no longer aiming towards a beautiful future. Luckily, lots of people are working on that, I try to be one of them.
The other half of the students, steeped in remix and sampling culture and fancying themselves anti-IP warriors, routinely copy and paste without citing, then give me lectures about how IP is coming to dominate society. They intentionally refuse to cite out of a misguided sense of activism and as a result flunk assignments and even classes and are referred to disciplinary bodies where they presumably make the same arguments.
I don't think it's a misguided sense of activism. While plagiarism is almost unanimously regarded as a bad thing, what you describe is typical activism. They are pushing the boundaries, going too forward in some cases, and suffering the consequences. They might be on to something. At least, the situation can't get any worse.
Every time I see someone from two centuries ago respond so clearly to the dumbasses that rule today, I get more convinced that the world is advancing in the wrong direction.
Also note that not all of us agree with your goal of destroying copyright. Speaking for myself, I merely want to limit it to its original 14-year-lifespan with the possibility of ONE renewal of that license by the original creator (see US Copyright Act of 1790). i.e. I think everything pre-1980 should be public domain.
Of course Stallman and the rest always have the right to NOT copyright their creations. They have the right to release it to the public domain for the benefit of all.
Duh. The GPL gives _users_ even more than public domain (patent protection, for instance, in the case of the GPLv3). Only distributors would benefit from public domain, and they are not the subject of free software, users are. Of course, in a world without software copyrights it would be useful to just release to the public domain, but in the world we live now, your works could be repackaged against users.
The GPL is a fence around a copyleft playground, that even guards you against other menaces. You can have our software, but you have to be nice to others, too.
Free software _is_ about freedom, and about the balance between users and programmers.
I'd say the word 'balance' is a misconception. Free software is about users BEING programmers....
But in reality - or in a system that works - they're the same people.
I don't think so. I should have said "distributors" instead of programmers, because I was referring to the producer - consumer relationship between programmers and users. Free software does differentiate them, and defends the right of the user to have more power in that relationship.
Users are not necessarily programmers, they have the _power_ of the programmer, but they can use it themselves, ask for help, or pay someone to use it for them. You are right in that they are not a different class, but users don't need to be programmers.
The key is that the GPL removes power from the programmer/distributor and gives it to the user. After selling a GPL'ed program, the programmer keeps his expertise, but loses the tactic advantage of being the only guy who has the source code . Of course, that could be perceived as a bad thing by some developers, but it's fair for the user.
You started with the wrong foot. "Open source advocates" are guys who think that open source is good from a technological standpoint. They don't envision the future, they code. You don't want to extract an ideology from programmers talking about programming.
You should read some free software material. Free software _is_ about freedom, and about the balance between users and programmers. _Some_ of the ideas inherent to free software can be applied to the whole of society. The "balance" between the different actors is similar in software and in music.
Here's the thing. Software is easy to see, because free software is almost as old as proprietary software. Both had a similar start from a cultural standpoint. That's why it's easier to understand. On the other hand, we have had proprietary music all our lives, and almosta all business models are anchored to that. It's hard to see a world without copyrights in music. That doesn't make it a bad world, it just makes it unusual.
This is what _I_ think: 300 years ago, copyright arised as an bargain, an incentive for authors to publish. Publishing was hard and expensive, and required upfront investments. Right now, we don't need that. We would have the same amount of cultural production without copyright, so the public is getting nothing from copyright, and its costs are getting higher and higher.
I don't care if some music company wants to restrict distribution of songs they publish, let them do that, but I think it's nonsense that I have to pay for it. And it's nonsense that my internet connection is threatened by their whims. I think the only solution would be to go back to the bargain table, and get a better deal. With copyright, the public is losing a lot, and getting nothing in exchange.
(Of course, authors do have some inalienable rights that should be protected, like authorship, to prevent plagiarism and stuff, but a monopoly on distribution is not an inalienable right, it's just the result of a bargain)
In a country known for the government being big brother they are blocking streets so google can't take pictures? What?
I don't know about you, but if I absolutely _had_ to choose someone to take pictures of me, I'd much rather prefer it was the government that I can hold accountable, instead of a multinational corporation. I'm intrigued about your reasoning, though.
>>>Under US law, Google has to secretly give them whatever information they have.
And under Constitutional Law, google could tell the cops to "go fuck off" because Constitutional Law reigns ABOVE U.S. law and U.S. officials. Constitutional Law requires a search warrant issued by a judge.
If google provides this information, they do it voluntarily. Instead what they should be doing is taking a stand as they did in China, and rather than release the information to unconstitutional warrantless searches, instead erase the information from their databases.
I was referring to how you can't talk about being seized by the FBI when they are chasing "terrorists" and stuff, but of course, I'm no expert, I might be wrong.
Right now, close to everything you post in any sites with US offices is very easy to track by the US government. Under US law, Google has to secretly give them whatever information they have. That means the US government knows who posts what in Orkut. From a national security standpoint, it would only be sane for the Brazilian government to want to have the same knowledge.
Social sites have a lot of political relevance. Where I live, there was a part of the ruling party militants that only organized through Facebook. Imagine the implications of having _all_ the information they share among them, if those ever reach parliament seats, or get to be presidents. Of course, it would be better to keep private info private, but if some other government already has info on your citizens, trying to get it yourself doesn't make the situation any more Orwellian, only more balanced and safer for your citizens.
I don't understand the need to make all those straw men, when you could make a good argument without them. This is not like someone spray painting your wall, or protesters in your mall.
Google published the post, they were not vandalized, and they _are_ responsible for it. The summary is wrong saying that they were vandalized, Google encourages people posting on their sites. Of course it has a lot of legal risks, but they do not outweigh the earnings, so they take the chance.
Not all speech should be protected, and it's good to fight libel, for example (not so sure about hate speech, though). The fact that Brazil law doesn't absolve the publisher in those cases doesn't mean they have less freedom of speech, it's just a difference in style from other countries. We would not be having this argument if it was a print article, it's not that clear why digital publishing should be less responsible than print one.
Slashdot Mirror
How is seizing a domain not violence?
It's government backed, legal violence, but it is.
And there are threats of jailing people also. Jailing someone is physical violence.
And what can you say about non "FLOSS" programs?
What do you know about bugs in proprietary software, other than the bugs that really blow in your face?
And what stats do you have about number of bugs that get fixed/go unfixed, and what part of the budget in proprietary software goes to fix known bugs instead of implementing new features?
In my case, I just make up that stats, and I believe there's no way to be more certain.
Whether the motivation is espionage or "encouraging growth of domestic companies", the results are similar. China has no problems bending the laws to benefit their companies at the expense of foreign ones.
Shocking!!
It's not only their right, changing the rules in favour of their companies is the only ethical thing to do, if they think it is what benefits their citizens. The only thing they have to take into account is possible negative consequences for their own people, and if they can afford them.
... Top down economies and societies have a relatively short shelf life; the Soviet Union proved that. When you have a small group of elites deciding the go forward path of any large economy, the results will be unstable... as the mistakes of these elites compound expect China to cannibalize more foreign business interests. I have no idea when this will happen, but I'd bet a few bucks that it will happen eventually.
And how are capitalistic societies not top-down ?
What percentage of the US population belongs to the political class?
What percentage of the US population can reach wall street?
That is what I would call a small elite.
I agree that top down is bad, but I have never seen anyone seriously try an alternative.
In the Caribbean, route taxis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BdsZRNov95.jpg/) carry 20 people inside, plus driver, plus conductor.
You mean that a soy producer, after growing RR soy/RR wheat year after year, applying Roundup every time, for the length of ten years, is free to stop doing that and growing some other grain?
I was under the assumption that it's not that easy to walk away from herbicide-based crops.
Please enlighten me, I'm all ears.
... cows have been fed corn -- or worse -- instead of wheat (because it's just as good!).
No way.
Cows are supposed to eat grass, off the ground.
They do that here in Uruguay, and it's one of the reasons why we get good prices for the beef.
The point of patents is not to allow the public to use the actual patent. It's to prevent the knowledge in the patent from being lost. ...
Duh. That was the point of my post. Knowledge like the combustion engine is valuable for humanity for a hundred years, so it's good to pay some guy to develop it, in the for of a government-granted monopoly.
Knowledge like a particular video codec is worthless to the public after a few decades, so paying for it, as a society, makes no sense. Let guilds keep their codecs secret, if they so wish.
Patents don't even serve the purpose of ensuring future access to content, in a world where things like DRM seem fair to so many people.
You are right about the 15 years.
Anyhow, h.264 will be about as useful 15 years from now as Intel Indeo is right now.
Patents on nineteenth century machines kind of made sense, because they might have helped moving some industries forward. Of course, patents did last a short amount of time compared to the usefulness of the invention. Right now we are still using combustion engines, and for the most part of the time they had no patents.
Patents in software, right now, cover a lot more than the lifetime of the invention. That way, they are useless to the general public.
It's not that you and your grandchildren will be dead, it's that patents will expire long after the technology becomes obsolete.
First, there is no such thing as "intellectual" property and then "personal" of "physical" property.
"intellectual" property is just a way to call a group of different kinds of distribution rights, but it shares nothing in common with actual property, so it's confusing in a discussion.
Aside from that, the issue is that the length of copyrights does change the picture.
If you make an awful picture, with beautiful photography, it doesn't make financial sense for theaters to keep copies just in case they can use your shots in the future. They would have to wait more than a hundred years to use your footage.
With a shorter copyright term, archival would make economic sense to more people, and thus cultural production would be safer from disappearance.
The foundation of copyright is that you sell your works, get in exchange a monopoly for a limited time, and after that the public owns it. So, I'm not sure if you were aware of that, but author != owner.
After Avatar copyright expires, ownership goes to the public domain. If the original authors didn't keep good copies after copyright expiration, they are harming the general public, which is the owner.
Boxee is not an excellent example. It's just a particular case.
People who find bugs in Ubuntu usually help fixing them upstream. In this case, it can't be done, because Boxee is proprietary software.
They do they own releases, and they decide when and what to fix.
The thing is that proprietary stuff doesn't work OK with processes meant for free software. Similar things happened to me with vmware (switched to virtualbox ose) and nvidia drivers. But Ubuntu doesn't have to pamper proprietary software. If they don't give good support, tough luck.
The headline suggests that China is using import rules to bolster security. I think it is the other way round. They are using the demand for source code as a barrier to trade to (unfairly) help domestic firms. Not very many overseas firms are going to provide source code, leaving the market open to Chinese firms.
I would agree with you if you didn't say "(unfairly)".
Access to source code is a legitimate security concern. Fair trade doesn't mean that you can't set high standards if foreign providers can't reach them.
>>>it would be useful to just release to the public domain, but in the world we live now, your works could be repackaged against users.
Why does that matter? The original code you released is still public domain. Users may choose the repackaged product, or choose your public domain product, however they desire. The novel Tom Sawyer is in the public domain, and while someone might choose to rework it and copyright it, that doesn't stop Sawyer from still being public domain.
Your example is right. About your question, well, you are asking why proprietary software is harmful to users. I know you, and I think you already know that, you might not agree, but you can start reading about it here anyhow: http://www.fsf.org/about//
Duh^2.
Copyleft is a response to copyrights in software, to try and turn copyright against itself.
In Stallman's view, the good things from having no copyright would outweigh the issues you name.
In a world without software copyrights, some people _could_ sell binaries, but it would be a lot harder as a business model if your binaries can be shared. The scarcity would be at development time and not at distribution, so you would have to charge for development or other services and not for distribution.
Anyhow, you can't steal an idea (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1633548&cid=32012984). Patents make it possible for someone to restrict you from using your own idea, but getting rid of software patents would take care of that.
I didn't say going backwards.
In most practical respects everything is better now than before.
The thing is that one and two hundred years back most modern societies were aiming close to where we are now. I think it's no longer aiming towards a beautiful future. Luckily, lots of people are working on that, I try to be one of them.
The other half of the students, steeped in remix and sampling culture and fancying themselves anti-IP warriors, routinely copy and paste without citing, then give me lectures about how IP is coming to dominate society. They intentionally refuse to cite out of a misguided sense of activism and as a result flunk assignments and even classes and are referred to disciplinary bodies where they presumably make the same arguments.
I don't think it's a misguided sense of activism.
While plagiarism is almost unanimously regarded as a bad thing, what you describe is typical activism. They are pushing the boundaries, going too forward in some cases, and suffering the consequences. They might be on to something. At least, the situation can't get any worse.
Every time I see someone from two centuries ago respond so clearly to the dumbasses that rule today, I get more convinced that the world is advancing in the wrong direction.
Also note that not all of us agree with your goal of destroying copyright. Speaking for myself, I merely want to limit it to its original 14-year-lifespan with the possibility of ONE renewal of that license by the original creator (see US Copyright Act of 1790). i.e. I think everything pre-1980 should be public domain.
Of course Stallman and the rest always have the right to NOT copyright their creations. They have the right to release it to the public domain for the benefit of all.
Duh.
The GPL gives _users_ even more than public domain (patent protection, for instance, in the case of the GPLv3). Only distributors would benefit from public domain, and they are not the subject of free software, users are. Of course, in a world without software copyrights it would be useful to just release to the public domain, but in the world we live now, your works could be repackaged against users.
The GPL is a fence around a copyleft playground, that even guards you against other menaces. You can have our software, but you have to be nice to others, too.
Free software _is_ about freedom, and about the balance between users and programmers.
I'd say the word 'balance' is a misconception. Free software is about users BEING programmers. ...
But in reality - or in a system that works - they're the same people.
I don't think so. I should have said "distributors" instead of programmers, because I was referring to the producer - consumer relationship between programmers and users.
Free software does differentiate them, and defends the right of the user to have more power in that relationship.
Users are not necessarily programmers, they have the _power_ of the programmer, but they can use it themselves, ask for help, or pay someone to use it for them. You are right in that they are not a different class, but users don't need to be programmers.
The key is that the GPL removes power from the programmer/distributor and gives it to the user. After selling a GPL'ed program, the programmer keeps his expertise, but loses the tactic advantage of being the only guy who has the source code . Of course, that could be perceived as a bad thing by some developers, but it's fair for the user.
You started with the wrong foot.
"Open source advocates" are guys who think that open source is good from a technological standpoint.
They don't envision the future, they code. You don't want to extract an ideology from programmers talking about programming.
You should read some free software material. Free software _is_ about freedom, and about the balance between users and programmers. _Some_ of the ideas inherent to free software can be applied to the whole of society. The "balance" between the different actors is similar in software and in music.
Here's the thing. Software is easy to see, because free software is almost as old as proprietary software. Both had a similar start from a cultural standpoint. That's why it's easier to understand. On the other hand, we have had proprietary music all our lives, and almosta all business models are anchored to that. It's hard to see a world without copyrights in music. That doesn't make it a bad world, it just makes it unusual.
This is what _I_ think: 300 years ago, copyright arised as an bargain, an incentive for authors to publish. Publishing was hard and expensive, and required upfront investments. Right now, we don't need that. We would have the same amount of cultural production without copyright, so the public is getting nothing from copyright, and its costs are getting higher and higher.
I don't care if some music company wants to restrict distribution of songs they publish, let them do that, but I think it's nonsense that I have to pay for it. And it's nonsense that my internet connection is threatened by their whims. I think the only solution would be to go back to the bargain table, and get a better deal. With copyright, the public is losing a lot, and getting nothing in exchange.
(Of course, authors do have some inalienable rights that should be protected, like authorship, to prevent plagiarism and stuff, but a monopoly on distribution is not an inalienable right, it's just the result of a bargain)
In a country known for the government being big brother they are blocking streets so google can't take pictures? What?
I don't know about you, but if I absolutely _had_ to choose someone to take pictures of me, I'd much rather prefer it was the government that I can hold accountable, instead of a multinational corporation. I'm intrigued about your reasoning, though.
>>>Under US law, Google has to secretly give them whatever information they have.
And under Constitutional Law, google could tell the cops to "go fuck off" because Constitutional Law reigns ABOVE U.S. law and U.S. officials. Constitutional Law requires a search warrant issued by a judge.
If google provides this information, they do it voluntarily. Instead what they should be doing is taking a stand as they did in China, and rather than release the information to unconstitutional warrantless searches, instead erase the information from their databases.
I was referring to how you can't talk about being seized by the FBI when they are chasing "terrorists" and stuff, but of course, I'm no expert, I might be wrong.
And thus, cartels were born.
Right now, close to everything you post in any sites with US offices is very easy to track by the US government.
Under US law, Google has to secretly give them whatever information they have. That means the US government knows who posts what in Orkut. From a national security standpoint, it would only be sane for the Brazilian government to want to have the same knowledge.
Social sites have a lot of political relevance. Where I live, there was a part of the ruling party militants that only organized through Facebook. Imagine the implications of having _all_ the information they share among them, if those ever reach parliament seats, or get to be presidents. Of course, it would be better to keep private info private, but if some other government already has info on your citizens, trying to get it yourself doesn't make the situation any more Orwellian, only more balanced and safer for your citizens.
I don't understand the need to make all those straw men, when you could make a good argument without them. This is not like someone spray painting your wall, or protesters in your mall.
Google published the post, they were not vandalized, and they _are_ responsible for it.
The summary is wrong saying that they were vandalized, Google encourages people posting on their sites.
Of course it has a lot of legal risks, but they do not outweigh the earnings, so they take the chance.
Not all speech should be protected, and it's good to fight libel, for example (not so sure about hate speech, though). The fact that Brazil law doesn't absolve the publisher in those cases doesn't mean they have less freedom of speech, it's just a difference in style from other countries. We would not be having this argument if it was a print article, it's not that clear why digital publishing should be less responsible than print one.