That means about 220 million articles of clothing will be produced in the year 2013 for sale in the U.S. market alone.
And? There are almost 300 million people in America. I expect that number to grow by quite a bit by the year 2013. If each of those people purchase only ONE item of clothing in a year, they will need to make a lot more than 220 million articles of clothing in 2013.
Even if you're referring to 20% cyber-clothing being 220 million articles, that doesn't sound exorbitant. That would assume that each of 300,000,000 people were only buying about 3.5 items of clothing a year on average.
Personally I think the idea that 1/5 of all clothing would be cyber-clothing is a bit optimistic. But I can see one in five people buying an accessory-type garment that contained a computer or other electronic gear. Computer belts, cell phones as jewelry (as if they aren't already a form of jewelry in some cases), PDAs built into vests, etc, all seem reasonable to me.
I would like to retract the statements about ESR and the DDoS "hacker". Obviously ESR's involvement in this situation was positive and he had no real ability to bring any such hacker "to justice". Nevertheless, I do not consider ESR a leader of any movement in which I believe I am taking part.
Clearchannel and the RIAA run a tight squeeze on music and it won't change without some serious consumer action and hopefully federal litigation.
No, they don't. Except with respect to radio frequencies this assertion is patently false. While ClearChannel are hogging the airwaves, there is no scarcity in the realm of music, either live or recorded. There is no real limit to the number of songs that can be written, performed live, or sold on any number of available media or transmitted to listeners over the internet. Other than opening the airwaves up to real competition again, please keep the federal government out of this.
Why not make the fines proportional to income? This, however, was a "settlement". As in "we'll take $2,000 and your crying face on TV telling the world how sorry you are in exchange for not doing our level best to destroy your lives forever." Apparently the family weighed the odds of winning against the cost of hiring a lawyer good enough to at least keep them from paying punitive damages, and decided that $2,000 was a bargain. After all, it will cost them $2,000 to just get the case going with a lawyer.
You completely missed my original point, which was that MLK wrote a very eloquent piece about when it was right to break the law-- and I clearly stated that file sharing did not meet MLK's standards.
And I'm sorry, but it sounds like maybe you watch too much TV.:)
(yes, they were found guilty in a court of law of price fixing, which does actually deprive a consumer of resource, namely money).
No they weren't. They settled the case with the states to avoid a court battle. They neither admitted guilt (in fact, they defended the practice that was targeted) nor were they ever tried by judge or jury.
I referenced King's letter to point out precisely that there was almost no chance for file sharing to be a form of civil disobedience in the sense that King would suggest. The comparison is most certainly reasonable in that it was made to illustrate the differences, not the similarities.
BTW, by Aaron Sorkin I assume you mean the WHITE guy who writes for "West Wing"? Why the heck would I care what he thinks? He makes millions of dollars writing leftist dreck for Time Warner... not only that, unlike the black kids I ride the bus with every day, when Sorkin got busted for a major drug possession he was not locked in prison for years, having his present and future life destroyed, he was sent back to Hollywood to proselytize for the status quo on prime time television!
It's not so much that the money is "lost" as it is that the money is never "made" in the first place. It is extremely optimistic to count every infringing copy as though it would have been a sale. That said, I don't think sharing is the reason for the low demand here. Even geeks seem to be of the mindset that eBooks are mostly useless. I've read more than one "Great Book" from Gutenberg on my Palm while riding the bus, but there's no way I'm paying money for a book that costs a similar amount of money in dead tree form.
So basically Dune recycled the tune? That's a pretty clear-cut case of a derived work. I don't understand why Dune would do that. Why not just write their own tune?
Re: fonts. Once again, what's the issue? While it's no small task to go from basic letters to very high quality font data, there's no one saying you can't make and share your own fonts. I know because I've done it (and had people reformat my fonts, rename them, post them to every font sharing site on the net with and without attribution, etc). And if you're not very imaginative, it is always possible to scan in existing texts and use those letters as the basis for your font, no? So again, I'm not sure what the issue is. We have choices. If we make wise choices now (rather than throwing our lot in with the RIAAs and the Adobes of the world), we will continue to have those choices in the future. No?
I am not familiar with the Dune/A7 dispute. But copyright does not protect independently created works from each other as far as I know. The trick is proving that the more recent work was not derived from the former. In any case, that is an isolated incident. Overall, we have many choices of music, including a tremendous, incredible body of public domain works which can be used verbatim or derived from at will!
Your second example isn't even real. Microsoft hasn't sued OpenOffice and seems unlikely to do so-- especially since a format would not be protected by copyright (although reverse engineering certain formats may violate the DMCA). That would be a patent issue, I think-- and it's probably a bit late to get a patent on "a method for storing text data with markup in a binary computer file". In any case, where's your alternative? Save your file in OO's XML format or something like that. All important information should be stored as text anyway.
So if I photocopy a book in its entirety and start giving out copies, does that make it OK?
Yes. Provided that book was published in the U.S. prior to 1923. In that case you are in the clear, both legally and ethically. Why is the ethics of this dependent on the age of the work in question? Your answer to that question is the basis for the answer to your next question.
At what point do we protect the rights of the producer of a good to make sure they are able to make a living off of it?
There is no such thing as a right to make a living. There is also a big difference between producing a good for sale and controlling the right of others to make similar goods (even when similar means to the point of the goods being indistinguishable). The clause in the U.S. Constitution from which copyright derives is not there to promote any right to make a living or any sort of inherent property right that attaches to the realm of the intellect, the stated purpose is to "promote the progress of science and useful arts". The question really ought to be: is the law achieving its stated goal?
The question for file-sharers is: at what point does sharing become a valid act of civil disobedience. For the most part, it is clear that we are not there. While I strongly believe that sharing songs, stories, ideas, and information is a natural human right (essentially the right to free speech and the right to use one's own property as one sees fit), I am not sure that sharing 1000s of copies of the latest top 40 hits really makes this point.
Personally I don't like your characterization of file sharing as "stealing". Indeed, the penalties for shoplifting a CD are lesser than those for sharing the information contained on the CD! But while the former directly deprives the store of an actual scarce good (the physical CD), the latter does not (i.e. the record company still "owns" the music and can make all the copies they like).
But as long as there are legal alternatives such as buying non-RIAA-member-produced music, you have the right approach: support alternatives. It is only in an unlikely, but perfectly possible (using "trusted computing" combined with heavy-handed DRM) future that file sharing could become an act of civil disobedience. The requirement would be that it was literally impossible for an individual or non-affiliated entity (e.g. independent record labels) to produce and distribute music, movies, stories, etc etc. However, if that does happen it is still a long way off-- and smart people will support alternatives now, so that such a future will never come about.
No, but when someone like ESR decides to make it sound as though the Open Source community both claims this person as a member and then takes no steps to bring this person to justice for an obvious criminal act, that reflects negatively on the Open Source community as a whole. But then I absolutely rejected ESR as a "leader" some time ago, myself.
Personally I'm waiting for Darl to write an open letter to those of us in the Free Software movement-- one where he recognizes the philosophical underpinnings behind the movement as valid desires and stays away from the distracting nonsense about business models.
And anyway... has SCO specifically accused any software of being infringing other than the Linux kernel itself? If only Linux is (allegedly) infringing that would make all this talk about development models (in addition to all the business model garbage) a lot of hot air (i.e. BS). Have they mentioned that any of the BSDs may be infringing? How about the HURD? How about the larger GNU system? Perl? Ruby? Apache? MySQL or PostgreSQL? KDE? Well, SCO? When are you going to stop with the unsupported vague assertions and give us actionable information?
With Jane Doe, aka nycfashiongirl, they looked at the meta tags in her files, which included stuff like "ripped by l33t crew" and so on.
Agreed. That's a pretty obvious giveaway that you aren't ripping your own stuff.
Additionally, her MP3s identically matched checksums of files originally available on Napster and the chance of her ripping her own identical copies is vanishingly small.
Is that really the case? If you were the type (like myself) to rip your new CDs within 24 hours of purchase, perhaps as soon as removing them from shrink-wrap, wouldn't my default-settings rip be the same as someone else's rip who was using the same software with the same defaults?
When Asimov started writing about robots, there was already a sizable literature regarding same going back over at least half a century prior. Most notably (at least to Americans) would be Frank Baum's Tin-Man and other mechanical men. That puts the idea into the public domain.;)
That's an interesting take on Sec 117. As you noted, we still have the problem of whether or not I own the copy of the software I have. And we can't look at the "stolen goods" pattern for an answer (that was the majority of what my journal entry was about). I see no reason to believe I am not the owner of the copies I have, so I would tend to use Sec 117 to support the notion that I can not only continue to own my copy of Linux, but use it as well.
It really wasn't intended to be some sort of insightful analysis-- just an amusing example and a couple of off-hand remarks to illustrate that the RIAA is probably not to be trusted when it comes accurate analysis of the underlying issues.
No, it actually came with a licensed Windows CD and everything. Virtual PC emulates x86 hardware. With VPC you are running a window in Mac OS that was the equivalent of the Windows GUI. You also had to create virtual drives as files on your hard drive. There are (or were) versions of Virtual PC that run Red Hat Linux, too.
You may be thinking of WINE for Linux (and I don't know that it runs on PPC), which actually emulates the Windows API (as I understand it), so that Windows software can run without a copy of Windows.
If the services Microsoft is supplying are done by people on Microsoft's payroll they aren't going to deduct the value of the services the way your or I would deduct a cash contribution, they are going to account for the payroll expense normally-- which lowers their net profit, which lowers their tax. So that's pretty good right there. And the way I stated it was not at all clear.
Now when those people suggest that Microsoft might be willing to donate Windows licenses, that becomes a donation of a tangible item, which didn't cost MS that much to make (on an incremental basis), but is there any reason to believe that MS would not be allowed to count that donation at its fair market value?
IRS Publication 526 is not relevant as it only applies to individual charitable donations. Microsoft is a corporation with entirely different rules. Furthermore, I do not find anywhere in 526 (admittedly a quick skimming) where it says that individual donations are to be deducted at anything other than fair market value. Do you have a more specific reference?
Finally, if you are an individual you cannot deduct for the value of your donated services at all (at least that's my reading of 526-- you're right, I'm neither a tax attorney or a CPA). But Microsoft, being a corporation, will be able to skirt this by having these people on their payroll, which is a corporate expense, effectively reducing their net profit, which is a primary input into the amount of tax they owe.
Sure you can, Virtual PC is an excellent emulator... or at least it was when I used it. A bit slow perhaps, but a whole lot better than what's out there for emulating a Mac OS on a Wintel system.
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That means about 220 million articles of clothing will be produced in the year 2013 for sale in the U.S. market alone.
And? There are almost 300 million people in America. I expect that number to grow by quite a bit by the year 2013. If each of those people purchase only ONE item of clothing in a year, they will need to make a lot more than 220 million articles of clothing in 2013.
Even if you're referring to 20% cyber-clothing being 220 million articles, that doesn't sound exorbitant. That would assume that each of 300,000,000 people were only buying about 3.5 items of clothing a year on average.
Personally I think the idea that 1/5 of all clothing would be cyber-clothing is a bit optimistic. But I can see one in five people buying an accessory-type garment that contained a computer or other electronic gear. Computer belts, cell phones as jewelry (as if they aren't already a form of jewelry in some cases), PDAs built into vests, etc, all seem reasonable to me.
Dry cleaning? I'm holding out for nanotech that actually roams around looking for dirt and carries it away.
I would like to retract the statements about ESR and the DDoS "hacker". Obviously ESR's involvement in this situation was positive and he had no real ability to bring any such hacker "to justice". Nevertheless, I do not consider ESR a leader of any movement in which I believe I am taking part.
Interesting theory, but if your assertion is correct, the music industry should be screeching to a halt any time now.
Clearchannel and the RIAA run a tight squeeze on music and it won't change without some serious consumer action and hopefully federal litigation.
No, they don't. Except with respect to radio frequencies this assertion is patently false. While ClearChannel are hogging the airwaves, there is no scarcity in the realm of music, either live or recorded. There is no real limit to the number of songs that can be written, performed live, or sold on any number of available media or transmitted to listeners over the internet. Other than opening the airwaves up to real competition again, please keep the federal government out of this.
Why not make the fines proportional to income? This, however, was a "settlement". As in "we'll take $2,000 and your crying face on TV telling the world how sorry you are in exchange for not doing our level best to destroy your lives forever." Apparently the family weighed the odds of winning against the cost of hiring a lawyer good enough to at least keep them from paying punitive damages, and decided that $2,000 was a bargain. After all, it will cost them $2,000 to just get the case going with a lawyer.
You completely missed my original point, which was that MLK wrote a very eloquent piece about when it was right to break the law-- and I clearly stated that file sharing did not meet MLK's standards.
:)
And I'm sorry, but it sounds like maybe you watch too much TV.
(yes, they were found guilty in a court of law of price fixing, which does actually deprive a consumer of resource, namely money).
No they weren't. They settled the case with the states to avoid a court battle. They neither admitted guilt (in fact, they defended the practice that was targeted) nor were they ever tried by judge or jury.
I referenced King's letter to point out precisely that there was almost no chance for file sharing to be a form of civil disobedience in the sense that King would suggest. The comparison is most certainly reasonable in that it was made to illustrate the differences, not the similarities.
BTW, by Aaron Sorkin I assume you mean the WHITE guy who writes for "West Wing"? Why the heck would I care what he thinks? He makes millions of dollars writing leftist dreck for Time Warner... not only that, unlike the black kids I ride the bus with every day, when Sorkin got busted for a major drug possession he was not locked in prison for years, having his present and future life destroyed, he was sent back to Hollywood to proselytize for the status quo on prime time television!
It's not so much that the money is "lost" as it is that the money is never "made" in the first place. It is extremely optimistic to count every infringing copy as though it would have been a sale. That said, I don't think sharing is the reason for the low demand here. Even geeks seem to be of the mindset that eBooks are mostly useless. I've read more than one "Great Book" from Gutenberg on my Palm while riding the bus, but there's no way I'm paying money for a book that costs a similar amount of money in dead tree form.
So basically Dune recycled the tune? That's a pretty clear-cut case of a derived work. I don't understand why Dune would do that. Why not just write their own tune?
Re: fonts. Once again, what's the issue? While it's no small task to go from basic letters to very high quality font data, there's no one saying you can't make and share your own fonts. I know because I've done it (and had people reformat my fonts, rename them, post them to every font sharing site on the net with and without attribution, etc). And if you're not very imaginative, it is always possible to scan in existing texts and use those letters as the basis for your font, no? So again, I'm not sure what the issue is. We have choices. If we make wise choices now (rather than throwing our lot in with the RIAAs and the Adobes of the world), we will continue to have those choices in the future. No?
I am not familiar with the Dune/A7 dispute. But copyright does not protect independently created works from each other as far as I know. The trick is proving that the more recent work was not derived from the former. In any case, that is an isolated incident. Overall, we have many choices of music, including a tremendous, incredible body of public domain works which can be used verbatim or derived from at will!
Your second example isn't even real. Microsoft hasn't sued OpenOffice and seems unlikely to do so-- especially since a format would not be protected by copyright (although reverse engineering certain formats may violate the DMCA). That would be a patent issue, I think-- and it's probably a bit late to get a patent on "a method for storing text data with markup in a binary computer file". In any case, where's your alternative? Save your file in OO's XML format or something like that. All important information should be stored as text anyway.
So if I photocopy a book in its entirety and start giving out copies, does that make it OK?
Yes. Provided that book was published in the U.S. prior to 1923. In that case you are in the clear, both legally and ethically. Why is the ethics of this dependent on the age of the work in question? Your answer to that question is the basis for the answer to your next question.
At what point do we protect the rights of the producer of a good to make sure they are able to make a living off of it?
There is no such thing as a right to make a living. There is also a big difference between producing a good for sale and controlling the right of others to make similar goods (even when similar means to the point of the goods being indistinguishable). The clause in the U.S. Constitution from which copyright derives is not there to promote any right to make a living or any sort of inherent property right that attaches to the realm of the intellect, the stated purpose is to "promote the progress of science and useful arts". The question really ought to be: is the law achieving its stated goal?
Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote this Letter from a Birmingham Jail which talks about when breaking some laws is OK.
The question for file-sharers is: at what point does sharing become a valid act of civil disobedience. For the most part, it is clear that we are not there. While I strongly believe that sharing songs, stories, ideas, and information is a natural human right (essentially the right to free speech and the right to use one's own property as one sees fit), I am not sure that sharing 1000s of copies of the latest top 40 hits really makes this point.
Personally I don't like your characterization of file sharing as "stealing". Indeed, the penalties for shoplifting a CD are lesser than those for sharing the information contained on the CD! But while the former directly deprives the store of an actual scarce good (the physical CD), the latter does not (i.e. the record company still "owns" the music and can make all the copies they like).
But as long as there are legal alternatives such as buying non-RIAA-member-produced music, you have the right approach: support alternatives. It is only in an unlikely, but perfectly possible (using "trusted computing" combined with heavy-handed DRM) future that file sharing could become an act of civil disobedience. The requirement would be that it was literally impossible for an individual or non-affiliated entity (e.g. independent record labels) to produce and distribute music, movies, stories, etc etc. However, if that does happen it is still a long way off-- and smart people will support alternatives now, so that such a future will never come about.
No, but when someone like ESR decides to make it sound as though the Open Source community both claims this person as a member and then takes no steps to bring this person to justice for an obvious criminal act, that reflects negatively on the Open Source community as a whole. But then I absolutely rejected ESR as a "leader" some time ago, myself.
Personally I'm waiting for Darl to write an open letter to those of us in the Free Software movement-- one where he recognizes the philosophical underpinnings behind the movement as valid desires and stays away from the distracting nonsense about business models.
And anyway... has SCO specifically accused any software of being infringing other than the Linux kernel itself? If only Linux is (allegedly) infringing that would make all this talk about development models (in addition to all the business model garbage) a lot of hot air (i.e. BS). Have they mentioned that any of the BSDs may be infringing? How about the HURD? How about the larger GNU system? Perl? Ruby? Apache? MySQL or PostgreSQL? KDE? Well, SCO? When are you going to stop with the unsupported vague assertions and give us actionable information?
Huh? I, for one, love adware/spyware/MS Outlook-- best arguments for Free Software ever made.
With Jane Doe, aka nycfashiongirl, they looked at the meta tags in her files, which included stuff like "ripped by l33t crew" and so on.
Agreed. That's a pretty obvious giveaway that you aren't ripping your own stuff.
Additionally, her MP3s identically matched checksums of files originally available on Napster and the chance of her ripping her own identical copies is vanishingly small.
Is that really the case? If you were the type (like myself) to rip your new CDs within 24 hours of purchase, perhaps as soon as removing them from shrink-wrap, wouldn't my default-settings rip be the same as someone else's rip who was using the same software with the same defaults?
When Asimov started writing about robots, there was already a sizable literature regarding same going back over at least half a century prior. Most notably (at least to Americans) would be Frank Baum's Tin-Man and other mechanical men. That puts the idea into the public domain. ;)
That's an interesting take on Sec 117. As you noted, we still have the problem of whether or not I own the copy of the software I have. And we can't look at the "stolen goods" pattern for an answer (that was the majority of what my journal entry was about). I see no reason to believe I am not the owner of the copies I have, so I would tend to use Sec 117 to support the notion that I can not only continue to own my copy of Linux, but use it as well.
It really wasn't intended to be some sort of insightful analysis-- just an amusing example and a couple of off-hand remarks to illustrate that the RIAA is probably not to be trusted when it comes accurate analysis of the underlying issues.
You're right, I did miss that. Thank you for clarifying.
No, it actually came with a licensed Windows CD and everything. Virtual PC emulates x86 hardware. With VPC you are running a window in Mac OS that was the equivalent of the Windows GUI. You also had to create virtual drives as files on your hard drive. There are (or were) versions of Virtual PC that run Red Hat Linux, too.
You may be thinking of WINE for Linux (and I don't know that it runs on PPC), which actually emulates the Windows API (as I understand it), so that Windows software can run without a copy of Windows.
If the services Microsoft is supplying are done by people on Microsoft's payroll they aren't going to deduct the value of the services the way your or I would deduct a cash contribution, they are going to account for the payroll expense normally-- which lowers their net profit, which lowers their tax. So that's pretty good right there. And the way I stated it was not at all clear.
Now when those people suggest that Microsoft might be willing to donate Windows licenses, that becomes a donation of a tangible item, which didn't cost MS that much to make (on an incremental basis), but is there any reason to believe that MS would not be allowed to count that donation at its fair market value?
IRS Publication 526 is not relevant as it only applies to individual charitable donations. Microsoft is a corporation with entirely different rules. Furthermore, I do not find anywhere in 526 (admittedly a quick skimming) where it says that individual donations are to be deducted at anything other than fair market value. Do you have a more specific reference?
Finally, if you are an individual you cannot deduct for the value of your donated services at all (at least that's my reading of 526-- you're right, I'm neither a tax attorney or a CPA). But Microsoft, being a corporation, will be able to skirt this by having these people on their payroll, which is a corporate expense, effectively reducing their net profit, which is a primary input into the amount of tax they owe.
last I checked you can't run a M$ OS on a G3
Sure you can, Virtual PC is an excellent emulator... or at least it was when I used it. A bit slow perhaps, but a whole lot better than what's out there for emulating a Mac OS on a Wintel system.