the survival of the fittest part is irrelevant without the random mutation part.
The random mutation part is irrelevant without the survival of the fittest part. Why, then, do you attack the strawman version of evolution which has only random mutation, and no pressure from selection?
And if I am misunderstanding you, why don't you explain it in more detail?
Consider the following analogy: you have twenty ordinary, six-sided dice. You want to roll them so that they all show sixes. Consider two ways of doing this.
One way is to roll all of the dice, and if they don't all show sixes, to roll them all again. Naturally, this will take a very long time, since the probability of them all showing sixes on a single roll is very low. This is analagous to random mutation without any selective pressure. Similarly, the chance of a human coming together out of random mutation without any selective pressure is very low. However, this is not how evolution operates, except perhaps in the minds of some creationists who are looking for a strawman to cut down.
The other option is to roll the dice, then leave any dice which already show sixes alone, and re-roll only those which aren't showing sixes. Repeat until all dice show sixes. Naturally, this method will result in all dice showing sixes much much faster than the other method. This is analagous to random mutation plus selective pressure.
Lesson: things which would be incredibly improbable by chance alone can be highly probable when chance and selective pressure work together.
What does survival of the fittest say? That those that are fit to survive will? That doesn't really prove much.
Seems pretty obvious, doesn't it? And yet you fail to acknowledge it yourself, just a few sentences later:
When it comes down to it, evolution IS about random events; without mutations, any sort of Darwinian catch-phrase is moot
See, now you've already forgotten about that "survival of the fittest" part. The initial generation of mutations is random; the determination of which mutations die out and which ones thrive is not. Is that idea really that hard for you to grasp?
Unless things have changed in the last couple of years, high school and the A.P. biology curriculum are based on the "fact" that evolution is a random changes in organisms that, over time, result in massive variation in organisms. Nice theory, and something I cannot find fault in, when you look at different races of humans and what not. The big leap, in my opinion, comes when you say that humans evolved from non-life through billions of years of random mutation.
As others in this thread have pointed out, evolution does not occur purely through random mutation, but through random mutation influenced by natural selection.
Here's an analogy as to the difference. Consider the sentence, "This sentence has ___ a's, ___ b's, ___ c's, [etc. etc.] ___ y's, and ___ z's." The problem is to fill in each blank with a number, written out in words, so as to make the sentence a true statement.
Someone once asserted that this problem could not be solved by computers (within some length of time, several decades I think). He was wrong, because he considered only the brute force approach. If you try just picking random numbers to fill in the blanks, you are unlikely to solve the problem in any reasonable amount of time.
But it turns out this problem is actually quite trivial to solve by computer, using an iterative scheme. First, pick random numbers to fill in the blank. Count up the number of each letter in that sentence, then use those numbers for the next trial. Repeat. Sometimes you will settle down into a loop of a few different sets of values, and you will have not found a solution. If so, start over with a different set of random numbers. Quite often you will find a solution within a fairly small number of iterations.
Finding a solution to this problem by picking random numbers alone is absurd, and is analogous to evolution purely by random mutation. No wonder creationists like to falsely characterize the theory of evolution in this way, since it is so ridiculous. But the latter algorithm, the iterative process, is analogous to random mutation influenced by natural selection.
Basically, our schools are teaching that humans became humans from, effectively from mutations that started from single-celled organisms.... So, the same thing that causes cancer in humans today brought about life as we know it?
Some viruses are known to cause cancer. They insert their DNA (or DNA complementary to the virus's RNA, in the case of retroviruses) into the host's cellular DNA. Sometimes they insert it into a critical region, mucking up the cell's normal processes and leading to cancer.
Viruses are not cells. They are obligate parasites, meaning they must act as parasites in order to reproduce. They must have a host. No biologist claims that viruses were the first organism to evolve, since cellular organisms had to be around before viruses, in order for the viruses to have a host.
Bacteria are the most common form of one-celled organisms. Bacteria are not viruses, viruses are not bacteria. Bacteria do not cause cancer, as they don't go about inserting their DNA into the genome of animal cells.
I despair for our higher educational system when someone who's about to get a degree in biochemistry doesn't know the difference between bacteria and viruses.
Looking at the human body, I simply cannot believe that all of its complexity arose from random mutations.
Looking at the human body, I simply cannot believe that all of its flaws arose from an "intelligent" designer. Where's my second spine? Where's the eyes in the back of my head? And what is this appendix and these wisdom teeth doing here? (Oh, I forgot, I had to have my wisdom teeth removed several years ago, due to the poor "design" which put them in a mouth that wasn't big enough to fit them.)
I'm a Christian myself, but I can't bring myself to believe that God deliberately designed the human body with all the flaws it has. Perhaps creationism is easier to believe for someone who is willing to accept a non-omniscient, fallible creator.
Just to follow up, on a discussion board I read regularly this topic came up, and just last night someone posted that he was able to tell the difference between MP3s at 192kbps and WAVs, and I have no reason to doubt him, so it wouldn't be unheard of if your roommate could tell the difference even at this level.
I can hear a difference from WAVs at 128kbps (if I listen carefully) but not at 160kbps, but as I mentioned in my earlier post my hearing is below average.
Most downloaded MP3s are at a bitrate (often 128 kbps or less) that you can hear the difference. I'd suggest that at better bitrates, you can't tell the difference.
Try an experiment: download a decent CD ripper (I use Xing Audiocatalyst, which seems to work fine for me, but I haven't really compared different ones) and try ripping a track at a higher bitrate--say, 192 kbps or better. You won't get quite the compression ratio, but according to your opponent, if the compression is 7:1 then the quality should still be 1/7 of the original, right?
(Even better, try one of the variable bitrate settings--the "Medium/High" VBR setting on Audiocatalyst sounds as good as CD to me, and the compression ratio is almost as good as 128 kbps constant bitrate. I also have a bit of hearing loss in the upper frequencies in one ear, so I'm probably not the best judge of that.)
Now, see if he can tell the difference between the MP3 and the WAV. Do it in a blind test: run a number of trials (20 or so), and each time, immediately before the trial, flip a coin to determine whether you will play the MP3 or the WAV. Make sure it's done in a way that he can't see which one you're playing. Ideally, you should have the WAV on your hard drive, just like the MP3, so he can't get a clue from the spinning CD drive. Definitely do not play them on different equipment--no fair playing the MP3 on your tinny computer speakers while playing the CD on your expensive stereo system.
After each play, have him tell you whether he thinks it was the MP3 or the WAV. Do not tell him the correct answer after each one--wait until the end of all the trials to reveal the correct answers. See how many he gets right. I won't go into all the details of the statistical analysis of the results--you can look that up--but suffice it to say that if he gets 15 or more right (out of 20) then you should accept his claim that he can tell the difference, while if he gets 12 or fewer he probably can't. 13 or 14 is pretty fuzzy.
The losses from MP3 compression occur at the high frequencies. Get an MP3/WAV player that has one or more frequency spectrum visuals. Watch it as you play the MP3 and WAV. You'll be able to see the loss in high frequencies on the MP3, even if you can't hear them.
Fair use, unfortunately for the people who might like to actually make fair use of a work, isn't a black or white issue--it's all shades of gray. Unless you're the judge or jury in a particular case involving fair use, you can't say for sure whether a use is fair or not. But, as I said, there are shades of gray. If you are the defendant in a copyright infringement suit, and you claim that your use of the copyrighted material was fair use...
You are more likely to prevail if:
You copied only a small portion of the work
You copied the work for educational or academic use only
You did not make very many copies of the work
You were not selling your copies for a profit
Your actions caused no economic loss to the copyright holder (including loss of potential sales)
You are less likely to prevail if:
You copied the entire work, or large portions of it
The copies were not solely for academic or educational use
You made lots of copies of the work
You were selling the copies for a profit
You did cause economic loss to the copyright holder (including future potential sales).
Further complicating the matter is that these are not all given equal weight, and different courts may weigh these different elements differently. You can't just count them for a particular instance and say, "well three of these are in my favor and two are against me, so I'm OK."
If you were making a few copies of a CD and giving them to a few friends, then you have in your favor that you did not make many copies, and that you were not profiting from them. You have against you that you copied the entire work, did not do it for educational/academic purposes, and you were costing the copyright holder potential sales. Courts would generally not consider this to be fair use.
You ignore that there's an argument from capitalism against the current system, as well.
Why is it that the artists get back so little of the revenue from album sales? Is it because that's the fair market value they can get? It seems awfully unlikely, when they're getting less than 10%.
Given that there are several different record labels, one would think that competition between those labels would allow the artist to get a fair deal. Exactly what that fair deal is, I don't know. But it seems like it would be more than 10%.
Given that artists are not receiving fair market compensation for their work from labels, despite the fact that there are several labels, there can be only one conclusion (to the capitalist): the record labels are behaving monopolistically, as a cartel, and thus are in violation of anti-trust laws.
Do you deliberately read the articles so that you can be offended and rant?
I won't speak for idlmx, but I do.
I loathe Katz's writing. (At least his/. writings. I find his writings on freedomforum.org to be much better, probably in part because he has an editor there, and in part because he's not trying to talk about technology to a bunch of people who know more about technology than he does.) But I love to hate Katz's writing. Every time I see a new Katz article, I'm drawn to it for the adrenaline rush I get out of being pissed off at his article.
People who say "If you don't like Katz then don't read him" don't understand how good it can feel to be righteously angry.
The Yahoo article notes that 60,000 people have signed the boycott petition, and if each of those doesn't buy one CD that they would otherwise buy, it would cost the recording industry $1 million.
Sounds pretty good, until you realize that $1 million is a drop in the bucket to the recording industry. I don't know what their revenues are off-hand, but I will say that I work for a large corp. (somewhere around #150 on the Fortune 500, I think), and we don't even blink at the gain or loss of $1 million.
The boycott has a long way to go if it wants to have an impact on the recording industry.
IIRC, in that case the library in question put censorware on all terminals. Many libraries are now putting censorware on all-but-one terminals, with the idea that that satisfies constitutional restrictions, and AFAIK that has not yet been challenged in the courts.
There are some (don't recall which) filters which block usenet, but they go overboard--generally doing it on a by-group basis. I remember reading about one which had the entire rec.games.* blocked for children as "gambling", including such depraved groups as rec.games.chess.analysis. (Insert your own "Sicilian Dragon" joke here.)
You're right, I should have excluded non-profits from my statement.
I'm not sure I agree with you about for-profit corporations, though. Sure, there's some "good" corporations out there--I'm certainly not one of those who believes all corporations are evil--but I see it as a question of whether the corp. is concerned with profits in the long term or short term.
To rephrase my statement, all for-profit corporations are in it for the money, but some are interested in making money in the short term, while others have a long-term view.
The ones that are interested in being profitable in the long run tend to (note: not always) be the nice ones. They know if they screw their customers over today for a few dollars, they'll be hurting themselves in the long run. So they practice good customer relations, even if that means a short-term loss, because they know it will lead to a long-term gain.
I'm just saying that if you let yourself indulge in the fantasy of a for-profit corporation as a champion for your pet cause, you're bound to be disappointed eventually.
It's only hypocrisy (note spelling) if you persist in your delusion that Napster is a brave knight out to slay the evil dragon Intellectual Property. It is not. It is a corporation, and its goal is to make money. Allowing people to trade music files (with or without permission of the copyright owner) is consistent with that goal. Protecting their own Intellectual Property to the fullest extent of the law is also consistent with that goal.
Napster is hypocritical in that it is claiming to be a champion defending the right and freedom to share and then refuses to share its own information, including programing APIs, protocol speficiations, or simple access to the virtual net they've constructed from their users' PCs.
No, Napster only claims that they are defending the right and freedom to use Napster to share music which is put on Napster with the permission of the copyright owner. Napster has never claimed to defend the "right and freedom" to use Napster to share copyrighted materials without the permission of the copyright owner.
A lot of posters seem to be seeing Napster as hypocritical apparently because they believed (wanted to believe?) that Napster had a higher purpose than just making money. How incredibly naive. And now that their naivete is exposed, they try to cover themselves by claiming that Napster once had such a higher purpose. It never did.
In short, never send a capatalist to do an activist's job. The results will disappoint you every time.
That is exactly right. What mystifies me is how many people confused Napster with an activist, when it has been a capitalist all along.
It's not hypocritical, in fact it's entirely predictable. Every corporation is eminently predictable. The guiding force of every corporation, Napster included, is the desire to make money.
Napster position one - Other people create music, we profit from it. Napster position two - We create a protocol, and we won't let other people communicate using it so they can make a profit. Or, to put it another way, Napster position one - we can make money off your work. Napster position two - you can't make money off our work.
Napster position one - we want to make as much money as possible. Napster position two -- we want to make as much money as possible.
I'm constantly amazed at the number of people who are surprised when a corporation tries to make money.
A lot of/.ers seem to think Napster's actions are hypocritical. I think this is because a lot of/.ers want to get rid of copyright entirely. They wanted to see a white knight in Napster who would slay the evil dragon copyright.
If this were Napster's goal, they would be right to call Napster hypocritical.
But that is not and never has been Napster's goal. Napster's goal is and always has been to make money. Some people are inexplicably confused, perhaps because their actions in allowing trading of music files serves both their true goal of making money, and the wished-for goal of bringing down copyright. Once you recognize that Napster's true goal is to make money, and not to destroy copyright, you quickly see that Napster's actions are both eminently consistent with this principle.
Napster position one - Other people create music, we profit from it.
Well, yes. In the same way Kinko's profits when someone uses their machines to make copies in violation of copyright laws.
Napster is facilitating the exchange of material owned by others. They don't seem to have a problem with this.
It's not a question of whether they like it or not--it's a question of whether it's up to them to enforce other people's copyrights or not.
Would you argue that just because a copy shop doesn't check to make sure you're not using their machines to copy someone else's copyrighted material without permission, that they therefore "don't have a problem" with those copies being made?
Now tell me why would Napster say they forbid copyrighted material on their servers, yet play mickey-mouse games when it actually comes to banning people?
Because it's not their responsibility to enforce other people's copyrights?
When you go into a Kinko's no one watches over you to make sure you're not copying anything you shouldn't be. If you look on the wall, you'll also see a notice about copying copyrighted materials, but that doesn't mean that Kinko's enforces it.
they wont share their property but they dont have anything against sharing others property
Try, "they enforce their own intellectual property rights, but do not feel obligated to enforce anyone else's property rights."
Is that so wrong? Is a copy shop obligated to make sure that no one uses their copying machines for illegal purposes? If they don't, does that mean that they're hypocritical to protect their own copyrights and trademarks?
It's the fact that they're in the business of "sharing" pirated music, and seem to hold the belief that music copyrights aren't important and can be ignored, but their own copyrights (their software) are still protected.
Not at all. Nowhere do they say (or have they ever said, IFAIK) that they believe that music copyrights can be ignored. Some people may perceive that because that is what they wish to perceive--some people don't like copyright at all, and want to see in Napster the white knight that will bring it down. Napster is not that knight, nor has it ever claimed to be.
As was pointed out above, Napster, like any corporation, is in it for the money. It is profitable for them to enforce their own intellectual property rights, so they do so. It is not profitable for them to enforce musicians' copyrights, so they don't do so. That doesn't mean that they believe musicians should not have any copyrights at all.
Hypocritical? No. If you go into a Kinko's to make copies, is there someone there to watch over you and make sure you don't make any copies in violation of someone else's copyrights? Of course not. That doesn't mean that Kinko's is an enemy of intellectual property, nor does that make them hypocrites if they go after someone for violating their copyrights or trademarks.
Hate to follow up my own post, but upon re-reading it I realized that the old Yogi Berra quote applies to Usenet, and sums up perfectly what I was trying to say:
Slashdot Mirror
The random mutation part is irrelevant without the survival of the fittest part. Why, then, do you attack the strawman version of evolution which has only random mutation, and no pressure from selection?
And if I am misunderstanding you, why don't you explain it in more detail?
Consider the following analogy: you have twenty ordinary, six-sided dice. You want to roll them so that they all show sixes. Consider two ways of doing this.
One way is to roll all of the dice, and if they don't all show sixes, to roll them all again. Naturally, this will take a very long time, since the probability of them all showing sixes on a single roll is very low. This is analagous to random mutation without any selective pressure. Similarly, the chance of a human coming together out of random mutation without any selective pressure is very low. However, this is not how evolution operates, except perhaps in the minds of some creationists who are looking for a strawman to cut down.
The other option is to roll the dice, then leave any dice which already show sixes alone, and re-roll only those which aren't showing sixes. Repeat until all dice show sixes. Naturally, this method will result in all dice showing sixes much much faster than the other method. This is analagous to random mutation plus selective pressure.
Lesson: things which would be incredibly improbable by chance alone can be highly probable when chance and selective pressure work together.
Seems pretty obvious, doesn't it? And yet you fail to acknowledge it yourself, just a few sentences later:
When it comes down to it, evolution IS about random events; without mutations, any sort of Darwinian catch-phrase is moot
See, now you've already forgotten about that "survival of the fittest" part. The initial generation of mutations is random; the determination of which mutations die out and which ones thrive is not. Is that idea really that hard for you to grasp?
As others in this thread have pointed out, evolution does not occur purely through random mutation, but through random mutation influenced by natural selection.
Here's an analogy as to the difference. Consider the sentence, "This sentence has ___ a's, ___ b's, ___ c's, [etc. etc.] ___ y's, and ___ z's." The problem is to fill in each blank with a number, written out in words, so as to make the sentence a true statement.
Someone once asserted that this problem could not be solved by computers (within some length of time, several decades I think). He was wrong, because he considered only the brute force approach. If you try just picking random numbers to fill in the blanks, you are unlikely to solve the problem in any reasonable amount of time.
But it turns out this problem is actually quite trivial to solve by computer, using an iterative scheme. First, pick random numbers to fill in the blank. Count up the number of each letter in that sentence, then use those numbers for the next trial. Repeat. Sometimes you will settle down into a loop of a few different sets of values, and you will have not found a solution. If so, start over with a different set of random numbers. Quite often you will find a solution within a fairly small number of iterations.
Finding a solution to this problem by picking random numbers alone is absurd, and is analogous to evolution purely by random mutation. No wonder creationists like to falsely characterize the theory of evolution in this way, since it is so ridiculous. But the latter algorithm, the iterative process, is analogous to random mutation influenced by natural selection.
Basically, our schools are teaching that humans became humans from, effectively from mutations that started from single-celled organisms.... So, the same thing that causes cancer in humans today brought about life as we know it?
Some viruses are known to cause cancer. They insert their DNA (or DNA complementary to the virus's RNA, in the case of retroviruses) into the host's cellular DNA. Sometimes they insert it into a critical region, mucking up the cell's normal processes and leading to cancer.
Viruses are not cells. They are obligate parasites, meaning they must act as parasites in order to reproduce. They must have a host. No biologist claims that viruses were the first organism to evolve, since cellular organisms had to be around before viruses, in order for the viruses to have a host.
Bacteria are the most common form of one-celled organisms. Bacteria are not viruses, viruses are not bacteria. Bacteria do not cause cancer, as they don't go about inserting their DNA into the genome of animal cells.
I despair for our higher educational system when someone who's about to get a degree in biochemistry doesn't know the difference between bacteria and viruses.
Looking at the human body, I simply cannot believe that all of its complexity arose from random mutations.
Looking at the human body, I simply cannot believe that all of its flaws arose from an "intelligent" designer. Where's my second spine? Where's the eyes in the back of my head? And what is this appendix and these wisdom teeth doing here? (Oh, I forgot, I had to have my wisdom teeth removed several years ago, due to the poor "design" which put them in a mouth that wasn't big enough to fit them.)
I'm a Christian myself, but I can't bring myself to believe that God deliberately designed the human body with all the flaws it has. Perhaps creationism is easier to believe for someone who is willing to accept a non-omniscient, fallible creator.
I can hear a difference from WAVs at 128kbps (if I listen carefully) but not at 160kbps, but as I mentioned in my earlier post my hearing is below average.
Try an experiment: download a decent CD ripper (I use Xing Audiocatalyst, which seems to work fine for me, but I haven't really compared different ones) and try ripping a track at a higher bitrate--say, 192 kbps or better. You won't get quite the compression ratio, but according to your opponent, if the compression is 7:1 then the quality should still be 1/7 of the original, right?
(Even better, try one of the variable bitrate settings--the "Medium/High" VBR setting on Audiocatalyst sounds as good as CD to me, and the compression ratio is almost as good as 128 kbps constant bitrate. I also have a bit of hearing loss in the upper frequencies in one ear, so I'm probably not the best judge of that.)
Now, see if he can tell the difference between the MP3 and the WAV. Do it in a blind test: run a number of trials (20 or so), and each time, immediately before the trial, flip a coin to determine whether you will play the MP3 or the WAV. Make sure it's done in a way that he can't see which one you're playing. Ideally, you should have the WAV on your hard drive, just like the MP3, so he can't get a clue from the spinning CD drive. Definitely do not play them on different equipment--no fair playing the MP3 on your tinny computer speakers while playing the CD on your expensive stereo system.
After each play, have him tell you whether he thinks it was the MP3 or the WAV. Do not tell him the correct answer after each one--wait until the end of all the trials to reveal the correct answers. See how many he gets right. I won't go into all the details of the statistical analysis of the results--you can look that up--but suffice it to say that if he gets 15 or more right (out of 20) then you should accept his claim that he can tell the difference, while if he gets 12 or fewer he probably can't. 13 or 14 is pretty fuzzy.
The losses from MP3 compression occur at the high frequencies. Get an MP3/WAV player that has one or more frequency spectrum visuals. Watch it as you play the MP3 and WAV. You'll be able to see the loss in high frequencies on the MP3, even if you can't hear them.
You are more likely to prevail if:
You are less likely to prevail if:
Further complicating the matter is that these are not all given equal weight, and different courts may weigh these different elements differently. You can't just count them for a particular instance and say, "well three of these are in my favor and two are against me, so I'm OK."
If you were making a few copies of a CD and giving them to a few friends, then you have in your favor that you did not make many copies, and that you were not profiting from them. You have against you that you copied the entire work, did not do it for educational/academic purposes, and you were costing the copyright holder potential sales. Courts would generally not consider this to be fair use.
Why is it that the artists get back so little of the revenue from album sales? Is it because that's the fair market value they can get? It seems awfully unlikely, when they're getting less than 10%.
Given that there are several different record labels, one would think that competition between those labels would allow the artist to get a fair deal. Exactly what that fair deal is, I don't know. But it seems like it would be more than 10%.
Given that artists are not receiving fair market compensation for their work from labels, despite the fact that there are several labels, there can be only one conclusion (to the capitalist): the record labels are behaving monopolistically, as a cartel, and thus are in violation of anti-trust laws.
I won't speak for idlmx, but I do.
I loathe Katz's writing. (At least his /. writings. I find his writings on freedomforum.org to be much better, probably in part because he has an editor there, and in part because he's not trying to talk about technology to a bunch of people who know more about technology than he does.) But I love to hate Katz's writing. Every time I see a new Katz article, I'm drawn to it for the adrenaline rush I get out of being pissed off at his article.
People who say "If you don't like Katz then don't read him" don't understand how good it can feel to be righteously angry.
Sounds pretty good, until you realize that $1 million is a drop in the bucket to the recording industry. I don't know what their revenues are off-hand, but I will say that I work for a large corp. (somewhere around #150 on the Fortune 500, I think), and we don't even blink at the gain or loss of $1 million.
The boycott has a long way to go if it wants to have an impact on the recording industry.
IIRC, in that case the library in question put censorware on all terminals. Many libraries are now putting censorware on all-but-one terminals, with the idea that that satisfies constitutional restrictions, and AFAIK that has not yet been challenged in the courts.
There are some (don't recall which) filters which block usenet, but they go overboard--generally doing it on a by-group basis. I remember reading about one which had the entire rec.games.* blocked for children as "gambling", including such depraved groups as rec.games.chess.analysis. (Insert your own "Sicilian Dragon" joke here.)
Looks like you're a troll.
Go into your local copy shop and copy bills yourself, and see if anyone stops you.
Then tell me that copy shops protect their machines from illegal use.
I'm not sure I agree with you about for-profit corporations, though. Sure, there's some "good" corporations out there--I'm certainly not one of those who believes all corporations are evil--but I see it as a question of whether the corp. is concerned with profits in the long term or short term.
To rephrase my statement, all for-profit corporations are in it for the money, but some are interested in making money in the short term, while others have a long-term view.
The ones that are interested in being profitable in the long run tend to (note: not always) be the nice ones. They know if they screw their customers over today for a few dollars, they'll be hurting themselves in the long run. So they practice good customer relations, even if that means a short-term loss, because they know it will lead to a long-term gain.
I'm just saying that if you let yourself indulge in the fantasy of a for-profit corporation as a champion for your pet cause, you're bound to be disappointed eventually.
My point exactly--not unlike Napster saying, "Don't trade copyrighted music without permission," but not enforcing it.
And did Office Depot actually check on their own whether you had permission or not? Or did they just take your word for it?
It's only hypocrisy (note spelling) if you persist in your delusion that Napster is a brave knight out to slay the evil dragon Intellectual Property. It is not. It is a corporation, and its goal is to make money. Allowing people to trade music files (with or without permission of the copyright owner) is consistent with that goal. Protecting their own Intellectual Property to the fullest extent of the law is also consistent with that goal.
No, Napster only claims that they are defending the right and freedom to use Napster to share music which is put on Napster with the permission of the copyright owner. Napster has never claimed to defend the "right and freedom" to use Napster to share copyrighted materials without the permission of the copyright owner.
A lot of posters seem to be seeing Napster as hypocritical apparently because they believed (wanted to believe?) that Napster had a higher purpose than just making money. How incredibly naive. And now that their naivete is exposed, they try to cover themselves by claiming that Napster once had such a higher purpose. It never did.
In short, never send a capatalist to do an activist's job. The results will disappoint you every time.
That is exactly right. What mystifies me is how many people confused Napster with an activist, when it has been a capitalist all along.
Napster position one - Other people create music, we profit from it. Napster position two - We create a protocol, and we won't let other people communicate using it so they can make a profit. Or, to put it another way, Napster position one - we can make money off your work. Napster position two - you can't make money off our work.
Napster position one - we want to make as much money as possible. Napster position two -- we want to make as much money as possible.
I'm constantly amazed at the number of people who are surprised when a corporation tries to make money.
A lot of /.ers seem to think Napster's actions are hypocritical. I think this is because a lot of /.ers want to get rid of copyright entirely. They wanted to see a white knight in Napster who would slay the evil dragon copyright.
If this were Napster's goal, they would be right to call Napster hypocritical.
But that is not and never has been Napster's goal. Napster's goal is and always has been to make money. Some people are inexplicably confused, perhaps because their actions in allowing trading of music files serves both their true goal of making money, and the wished-for goal of bringing down copyright. Once you recognize that Napster's true goal is to make money, and not to destroy copyright, you quickly see that Napster's actions are both eminently consistent with this principle.
Napster position one - Other people create music, we profit from it.
Well, yes. In the same way Kinko's profits when someone uses their machines to make copies in violation of copyright laws.
It's not a question of whether they like it or not--it's a question of whether it's up to them to enforce other people's copyrights or not.
Would you argue that just because a copy shop doesn't check to make sure you're not using their machines to copy someone else's copyrighted material without permission, that they therefore "don't have a problem" with those copies being made?
Because it's not their responsibility to enforce other people's copyrights?
When you go into a Kinko's no one watches over you to make sure you're not copying anything you shouldn't be. If you look on the wall, you'll also see a notice about copying copyrighted materials, but that doesn't mean that Kinko's enforces it.
Try, "they enforce their own intellectual property rights, but do not feel obligated to enforce anyone else's property rights."
Is that so wrong? Is a copy shop obligated to make sure that no one uses their copying machines for illegal purposes? If they don't, does that mean that they're hypocritical to protect their own copyrights and trademarks?
Not at all. Nowhere do they say (or have they ever said, IFAIK) that they believe that music copyrights can be ignored. Some people may perceive that because that is what they wish to perceive--some people don't like copyright at all, and want to see in Napster the white knight that will bring it down. Napster is not that knight, nor has it ever claimed to be.
As was pointed out above, Napster, like any corporation, is in it for the money. It is profitable for them to enforce their own intellectual property rights, so they do so. It is not profitable for them to enforce musicians' copyrights, so they don't do so. That doesn't mean that they believe musicians should not have any copyrights at all.
Hypocritical? No. If you go into a Kinko's to make copies, is there someone there to watch over you and make sure you don't make any copies in violation of someone else's copyrights? Of course not. That doesn't mean that Kinko's is an enemy of intellectual property, nor does that make them hypocrites if they go after someone for violating their copyrights or trademarks.
"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."
Newer? What time warp did you come through? I have an eleven-year-old answering machine and it lets me skip messages with a single button push.