... it would be used as THE damning evidence in any... It was destruction of evidence...
Evidence of what? Of waterboarding? CIA has not and is not denying using the technique. They admit to it, claiming — rightly or wrongly — that it was a legal thing to do. So, once again, evidence of what?
I agree with the poster you quote. The ability to control my creations is not an intrinsic right.
Actually, the poster I quoted denies you any right — "intrinsic" or not — to control, how your creations are copied and distributed. You may disagree with me, but you don't agree with him either.
It is a bargain made with society. I agree to distribute my work and to permit certain uses of it under the banner of fair use, and society agrees, in return, to enforce my exclusivity.
Well, if it is "a bargain", it is the same kind of bargain, the citizens have been making with their governments — the government is supposed to defend against thieves and other criminals — since time immemorial. In fact, if the 10 Commandments were as "living" a document as the US Constitution is often argued to be, the "thou shall not steal" would have long been construed to apply to intellectual property the same way it is applied to the regular tangible kind.
Now, you are welcome to stick to your opinion and be thankful to society/government for allowing you to profit from your creations (rather than taking this right as "intrinsic"), but do not try to impose your view on other creators. They don't do this. While the view I advocate still allows you to live by your view (and give your creations away to whomever you wish — fair use, etc.), your view would prevent others from imposing whatever limitations they wish to impose...
In other words, my approach allows you to be as liberal as you wish, but yours would require others to be as liberal as you expect. This attempt to impose your will on other creators is why your approach is wrong — objectively.
Please explain this to me -- is "controlling your creation" the same as "making money off of your creation?"
They aren't related. The right to control can be (and often is) used to make money, but it can also be used to destroy the creation, or to give it away, or license its use under any terms — to provide some more examples.
A great many artists have few rights to their own songs which instead are owned, by and large, by the record companies
The right to control one's creation naturally and necessarily includes the right to sell that control to someone else — such as a record company.
The distinction between the actual creator and whoever they sell their creation to — although frequently brought up in this sort of debates — is irrelevant to the discussion and should never be brought forward.
I'm glad, the creator's rights to control their creations have been upheld.
I know, this is quite inflammatory for this forum, but it is still true. A musician should be able to attach a license to their songs and enforce it just as much as the software authors should be able to uphold their licenses. Yet Slashdot cheers the latter and comes up with all sorts of ridiculous reasoning against the former.
Many Slashdot participants, like myself, believe that copying and redistribution should be legal with or without the author's permission [emphasis mine -mi].
If anybody sees him holding a candle-light vigil next to TorrentSpy's offices, ask him, if his view applies to the authors of GPL software too.
When the CIA destroys evidence that they tortured prisoners, the entire Justice Department...
The CIA's tapes were destroyed in 2005 — long before any investigations into "torture" came about. Thus it was not "destruction of evidence", but merely "destruction of tapes". CIA today does not deny, that they did use waterboarding, so it is not clear, what those tapes would be in evidence of.
For it to be called "destruction of evidence", the destroyed materials must be important to an ongoing investigation/lawsuit... This is what TorrentSpy (unlike CIA, they did it to hide doing, what they now claim they have not done) has done, according to the judge, and your attempt to defend them on the basis of their being "a small company" is quite pathetic.
a person engages in the business . . . or accepts employment
So, if somebody paid me to investigate the source of spam they were getting, I would need a license to do the work, otherwise the spamming victim would not be able to use my results to go after the spammers? Wonderful logic...
Texas (and other states) may have a requirement, that all such investigators be licensed. But — as the subject of the thread still says — the requirement should be bothersome, if it is deemed to apply to the kind of harmless investigation performed over the Internet.
I repeat, there may be a legitimate need to regulate the traditional investigators (think Dr. Watson or "Maltese Falcon"), who may sometimes hurt or otherwise unduly interfere with the subject of the investigation.
But to apply the same regulation to MediaSentry or, indeed, to (paid) spam-fighters, whose investigations are limited to the virtual world entirely, is completely bogus.
You can sue people in court after investigating them yourself, but if someone else pays you, you need a license. Think lawyers: you can always defend yourself, but you need a license to defend others.
Bad analogy. Lawyers are licensed to ensure quality representation to their clients. Whether they are licensed or not, is not the other side's business (and no, you don't need a license to represent anyone in a civil suit anyway)
The grandmother is not a MediaSentry's client.
And no, this is not a "bogus defense" and we should be cheering it.
Well, of course it is "wrangling" and thus bogus, no matter who — a corporation (acting corporationy) or a person — is doing it.
is exactly what the other side is doing
How is it the same? RIAA is trying to collect and present the proof, that the grandma has violated the licensing terms. The grandma is claiming, that the methods used to collect the evidence are somehow invalid. Regardless of who is "right", there is no similarity whatsoever...
What have you done with the information you got from your investigations?
I filed complaints with the ISPs and — in a few cases — with the government.
Did someone pay you to make those investigations? I don't know the Texas law on private investigators, but I believe the requirement for a license comes in when someone pays you to do the investigation on their behalf.
Me, no. But the guy, who posts the entertaining accounts of his suing the spammers in small courts here, can well be construed as conducting investigations for profit. Next time he loses in court, it may well be due to the spammer complaining to the judge, that they were subject of an "unlicensed investigation". Slashdot will call the judge an idiot — hypocritically...
Technically you may be right — the licensing law may, indeed, not apply to the volunteer vigilantes. But it is a bogus defense regardless, and we should not be cheering it.
In my humble opinion a way to grow is opening up the code that people
can improve.
Forget improving. I'd like to be able to simply compile a native version for my FreeBSD/amd64 system. As things stand, there is not even a version for Windows/x64!
Something tells me, Slashdot's outrage about Microsoft's anti-competitiveness back then had little to do with the fate of Netscape. All Microsoft had to do to appease most people here, was to release a Linux version of IE.
Is it bad to download a few songs from an artist that you've heard of but never heard? I've done that several times.
I've also done "several" investigations of the spammers — using tools like whois and nslookup. I was not licensed to perform the investigations — in any state.
According to this grandma's counter-suit and — more importantly — to all the kudos she got from the Slashdot crowd, all of those spammers should have a good case against me...
I may understand (and even accept) the desire to keep tabs on gun-wielding private detectives like Dr. Watson or "Maltese Falcon"'s main character, but MediaSentry, no doubt, has never even set foot in Texas, all their "investigations" being limited to the Internet. Twisting the law in this fashion should be troubling... But hey, it is RIAA, so whoever sticks whatever up theirs is our hero...
I suggest that the W3C should take a look at the whole Flash ecosystem as they think about upgrading the HTTP protocol.
Frankly, I can't believe this. Slashdot, which gave Sun so much crap for making Java source code available under a wrong kind of license, is front page-advocating wider adoption of software, for which no source code is available at all...
Go right ahead. I'm passionate about this issue, reasonably articulate, and I believe in the freedom to copy as a principled free speech issue, not just a means to an end.
Well, then, you should not care for the guy in the article either — just as I said, as a typical Slashdot participant would not. Because where there is "freedom to copy", there is certainly "freedom to modify" — otherwise you'd be limiting the "principled free speech". The modifier should not, of course, pretend, that they are distributing (repeating) the original work (speech) — it would be fraud. But the fraudsters described in the article don't do that. They modify the name and the copyright of the original and claim it as their own. (The term is plagiarism.)
Well, as the other commenter pointed out, I was going for George-Lucas-the-Star-Wars-creator, not George-Lucas-the-man.
This correction does not make sense. George Lucas the man is George Lucas the Star Wars creator.
you now understand the difference between fraud and copying
Verbatim copying — if done contrary to the author's wishes — is itself bad (fraudulent or otherwise wrong) in my book. In your book there is nothing wrong with it. Your view, however, is internally self-contradictory, because you would still ban modifications of the originals — even if there is no attempt to pass them on as the original.
If anything, your stance is contrary to the principle of free speech — there is little to no value in verbatim repetitions of somebody else's speech, while modifying it may be valuable. Yet you are fine with the former but would ban the latter.
Maybe, you have not thought "long and hard" enough about this yet...
Many Slashdot participants, like myself, believe that copying and redistribution should be legal with or without the author's permission (emphasis mine -mi)
Thanks, I'll bookmark your post to illustrate my argument in future debates.
but that doesn't mean we approve of fraud. Sharing copies of Star Wars is not the same as telling everyone you're George Lucas.
Broken analogy. The injured software author in the article is not being impersonated. If you want to stick with movies, the situation being discussed is more like Michael Moore renaming "Star Wars" into "Stripe Wars" and replacing Emperor with Bush.
I am a Slashdot participant. Information wants to be free. I can download other people's music and movies, and share them with millions of my friends via the Internet. Why can't somebody else do the same with software?
Any time we discuss UAV-based monitoring, someone would always bring up Big Brother. Any time there is a talk about detailed databases (government or corporate), there will is talk of totalitarianism.
But collecting of very precise maps of every square meter of the ground (including all the stuff lying on it at the time of survey) does not seem to offend anyone...
I don't really agree with the doom-sayers personally, just pointing out an inconsistency here.
Wherever the scum riots, they are easily suppressed by real determination (which the mayors of the cities listed evidently lacked). When the Los Angeles scum moved to trash another neighborhood, for example, they were stopped by armed citizens (thank you, Second Amendment!), and, eventually, by police and National Guard...
You don't need a flying super-laser to suppress a riot.
Face it, your politicians are scared shitless of you.
If true, that's a very good thing. But it has nothing to do with maintaining our military's edge against adversaries.
You mean like launching nuclear weapons, especially at non-military targets?
Nope, I don't even know, what you are talking about. What I meant was turning (voluntarily or otherwise) into an inherently evil regime, such as Communist.
And that attitude is exactly why America isn't exactly the favourite country in the minds of the world.
but brutal dictatorships and military juntas are A-OK as long as they play ball with the US.
There has been no US-backed junta/dictatorship, that was anywhere near as evil, as a typical Communist one. Maybe, that's because they quickly fall out of favor with the US, when they get evil. Or, maybe, it is because we would not back evil ones from the get-go. Or both...
Pinochet's — frequently cited as the most brutal/evil by the US-critics — has killed very few people (most of whom were Communists, and thus deserving death). He also left Chile as the Latin America's top economy (by far), unlike Argentina, Brazil, and — most infamously — Cuba, where our Communism-suppression efforts were less successful...
a) Socializing the petroleum industry != communism.
The oil industry was confiscated from its owners. Not exactly "socializing". The prime minister, who preceded the "freely elected" one (whom Britain and US helped overthrow) was assassinated. Unlike the claim on the same page, that the Soviet backing of the nationalization was merely a "misconception", this was a fact...
According to the deposed guy's own biografy, he asked the Shah for emergency powers. When the Shah (the Head of State) refused and dismissed him, he was forced to reinstate him after massive protests, where Communists did play a major role.
Iran was not at all pretty and even though the then-government may not have intended to join the USSR, the USSR could very well have taken over as it did with a number of countries before and after.
Britain's and American intervention, which helped tip the scales slightly (Shah always remained a Head of State with non-trivial powers), was a good idea...
b) Each country has a right to go through whatever political process it wishes
No, certain things endanger humanity and should be prevented if at all possible. Becoming a Communist country certainly qualifies.
c) Says who? Because communism didn't happen? If America didn't intervene, you can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that Iran was to become communist?
The danger was rather high. The small price paid (by all concerned — Iranians included) was well worth the reduction of the risk.
If there are enough authors writing books under the current system, there's no need to give them further incentive by adding further restrictions
Even if all today's authors stop writing today, there will still be more books left already written, than a human being can read in their life-time. The point is to keep improving the quality, and this is something, which requires reward... Many creators feel rewarded by the peer-recognition, but they all still need to eat, and I want the best of them to be able to spend more time writing.
But that's all about efficiency. There is also a fairness component — the fairness demands, that the creators are to be free to control the fruits of their creativity in any way they want. They ought to be able to burn it, to sell it, to rent it (for any price), to give it away — anything.
But if a particular author's terms are unacceptable to you, you can stick to reading the others... I fail to see the compelling need to force the control over a creation out of the creator's hands.
We pay a price per copy as a poor substitute for how useful the original creation was, because there's no other good way to set a price on how much the original work was worth.
You are right — and paying every time we read something is a (much) better substitute!
There's nothing inherently right about someone getting continued payments for doing absolutely nothing.
I feel, there may well be in many cases. Doing something in the past may entitle you to being paid continuously afterwards. Writing a good book or making a good movie qualifies...
Should you have to pay your plumber for the toilet he installed every time you flush it?
Yes, as a matter of fact, sometimes such a deal is quite desirable — small (or 0) initial payment, and then a "micro-payment" for each flush, until it breaks and he has to come again to fix it. This would be an incentive for him to do a good job and allow me to switch to a different plumber without paying too much to the bad one. See also "maintenance contract".
Slashdot Mirror
Evidence of what? Of waterboarding? CIA has not and is not denying using the technique. They admit to it, claiming — rightly or wrongly — that it was a legal thing to do. So, once again, evidence of what?
Actually, the poster I quoted denies you any right — "intrinsic" or not — to control, how your creations are copied and distributed. You may disagree with me, but you don't agree with him either.
Well, if it is "a bargain", it is the same kind of bargain, the citizens have been making with their governments — the government is supposed to defend against thieves and other criminals — since time immemorial. In fact, if the 10 Commandments were as "living" a document as the US Constitution is often argued to be, the "thou shall not steal" would have long been construed to apply to intellectual property the same way it is applied to the regular tangible kind.
Now, you are welcome to stick to your opinion and be thankful to society/government for allowing you to profit from your creations (rather than taking this right as "intrinsic"), but do not try to impose your view on other creators. They don't do this. While the view I advocate still allows you to live by your view (and give your creations away to whomever you wish — fair use, etc.), your view would prevent others from imposing whatever limitations they wish to impose...
In other words, my approach allows you to be as liberal as you wish, but yours would require others to be as liberal as you expect. This attempt to impose your will on other creators is why your approach is wrong — objectively.
They aren't related. The right to control can be (and often is) used to make money, but it can also be used to destroy the creation, or to give it away, or license its use under any terms — to provide some more examples.
The right to control one's creation naturally and necessarily includes the right to sell that control to someone else — such as a record company.
The distinction between the actual creator and whoever they sell their creation to — although frequently brought up in this sort of debates — is irrelevant to the discussion and should never be brought forward.
I'm glad, the creator's rights to control their creations have been upheld.
I know, this is quite inflammatory for this forum, but it is still true. A musician should be able to attach a license to their songs and enforce it just as much as the software authors should be able to uphold their licenses. Yet Slashdot cheers the latter and comes up with all sorts of ridiculous reasoning against the former.
Here goes one (+3 Insightful!) example:
If anybody sees him holding a candle-light vigil next to TorrentSpy's offices, ask him, if his view applies to the authors of GPL software too.
The CIA's tapes were destroyed in 2005 — long before any investigations into "torture" came about. Thus it was not "destruction of evidence", but merely "destruction of tapes". CIA today does not deny, that they did use waterboarding, so it is not clear, what those tapes would be in evidence of.
For it to be called "destruction of evidence", the destroyed materials must be important to an ongoing investigation/lawsuit... This is what TorrentSpy (unlike CIA, they did it to hide doing, what they now claim they have not done) has done, according to the judge, and your attempt to defend them on the basis of their being "a small company" is quite pathetic.
So, if somebody paid me to investigate the source of spam they were getting, I would need a license to do the work, otherwise the spamming victim would not be able to use my results to go after the spammers? Wonderful logic...
Texas (and other states) may have a requirement, that all such investigators be licensed. But — as the subject of the thread still says — the requirement should be bothersome, if it is deemed to apply to the kind of harmless investigation performed over the Internet.
I repeat, there may be a legitimate need to regulate the traditional investigators (think Dr. Watson or "Maltese Falcon"), who may sometimes hurt or otherwise unduly interfere with the subject of the investigation.
But to apply the same regulation to MediaSentry or, indeed, to (paid) spam-fighters, whose investigations are limited to the virtual world entirely, is completely bogus.
Excellent logic!
Bad analogy. Lawyers are licensed to ensure quality representation to their clients. Whether they are licensed or not, is not the other side's business (and no, you don't need a license to represent anyone in a civil suit anyway)
The grandmother is not a MediaSentry's client.
Well, of course it is "wrangling" and thus bogus, no matter who — a corporation (acting corporationy) or a person — is doing it.
How is it the same? RIAA is trying to collect and present the proof, that the grandma has violated the licensing terms. The grandma is claiming, that the methods used to collect the evidence are somehow invalid. Regardless of who is "right", there is no similarity whatsoever...
I filed complaints with the ISPs and — in a few cases — with the government.
Me, no. But the guy, who posts the entertaining accounts of his suing the spammers in small courts here, can well be construed as conducting investigations for profit. Next time he loses in court, it may well be due to the spammer complaining to the judge, that they were subject of an "unlicensed investigation". Slashdot will call the judge an idiot — hypocritically...
Technically you may be right — the licensing law may, indeed, not apply to the volunteer vigilantes. But it is a bogus defense regardless, and we should not be cheering it.
Forget improving. I'd like to be able to simply compile a native version for my FreeBSD/amd64 system. As things stand, there is not even a version for Windows/x64!
Something tells me, Slashdot's outrage about Microsoft's anti-competitiveness back then had little to do with the fate of Netscape. All Microsoft had to do to appease most people here, was to release a Linux version of IE.
I've also done "several" investigations of the spammers — using tools like whois and nslookup. I was not licensed to perform the investigations — in any state.
According to this grandma's counter-suit and — more importantly — to all the kudos she got from the Slashdot crowd, all of those spammers should have a good case against me...
I may understand (and even accept) the desire to keep tabs on gun-wielding private detectives like Dr. Watson or "Maltese Falcon"'s main character, but MediaSentry, no doubt, has never even set foot in Texas, all their "investigations" being limited to the Internet. Twisting the law in this fashion should be troubling... But hey, it is RIAA, so whoever sticks whatever up theirs is our hero...
Frankly, I can't believe this. Slashdot, which gave Sun so much crap for making Java source code available under a wrong kind of license, is front page-advocating wider adoption of software, for which no source code is available at all ...
Well, then, you should not care for the guy in the article either — just as I said, as a typical Slashdot participant would not. Because where there is "freedom to copy", there is certainly "freedom to modify" — otherwise you'd be limiting the "principled free speech". The modifier should not, of course, pretend, that they are distributing (repeating) the original work (speech) — it would be fraud. But the fraudsters described in the article don't do that. They modify the name and the copyright of the original and claim it as their own. (The term is plagiarism.)
This correction does not make sense. George Lucas the man is George Lucas the Star Wars creator.
Verbatim copying — if done contrary to the author's wishes — is itself bad (fraudulent or otherwise wrong) in my book. In your book there is nothing wrong with it. Your view, however, is internally self-contradictory, because you would still ban modifications of the originals — even if there is no attempt to pass them on as the original.
If anything, your stance is contrary to the principle of free speech — there is little to no value in verbatim repetitions of somebody else's speech, while modifying it may be valuable. Yet you are fine with the former but would ban the latter.
Maybe, you have not thought "long and hard" enough about this yet...
Thanks, I'll bookmark your post to illustrate my argument in future debates.
Broken analogy. The injured software author in the article is not being impersonated. If you want to stick with movies, the situation being discussed is more like Michael Moore renaming "Star Wars" into "Stripe Wars" and replacing Emperor with Bush.
I am a Slashdot participant. Information wants to be free. I can download other people's music and movies, and share them with millions of my friends via the Internet. Why can't somebody else do the same with software?
Any time we discuss UAV-based monitoring, someone would always bring up Big Brother. Any time there is a talk about detailed databases (government or corporate), there will is talk of totalitarianism.
But collecting of very precise maps of every square meter of the ground (including all the stuff lying on it at the time of survey) does not seem to offend anyone...
I don't really agree with the doom-sayers personally, just pointing out an inconsistency here.
Being the pervert that I am, I'll just wait for Slashdot to customarily post links to other people's awesome mods and hacks...
An excellent question of terminology. The current generation of spacecraft waters safely on land. Will the next one be able to water on water?
No, it did not. US had its own share of rioting scum — Los Angeles in 1992, Seattle in 1999...
Wherever the scum riots, they are easily suppressed by real determination (which the mayors of the cities listed evidently lacked). When the Los Angeles scum moved to trash another neighborhood, for example, they were stopped by armed citizens (thank you, Second Amendment!), and, eventually, by police and National Guard...
You don't need a flying super-laser to suppress a riot.
If true, that's a very good thing. But it has nothing to do with maintaining our military's edge against adversaries.
Nope, I don't even know, what you are talking about. What I meant was turning (voluntarily or otherwise) into an inherently evil regime, such as Communist.
In the minds of fools and impotents.
There has been no US-backed junta/dictatorship, that was anywhere near as evil, as a typical Communist one. Maybe, that's because they quickly fall out of favor with the US, when they get evil. Or, maybe, it is because we would not back evil ones from the get-go. Or both...
Pinochet's — frequently cited as the most brutal/evil by the US-critics — has killed very few people (most of whom were Communists, and thus deserving death). He also left Chile as the Latin America's top economy (by far), unlike Argentina, Brazil, and — most infamously — Cuba, where our Communism-suppression efforts were less successful...
The oil industry was confiscated from its owners. Not exactly "socializing". The prime minister, who preceded the "freely elected" one (whom Britain and US helped overthrow) was assassinated. Unlike the claim on the same page, that the Soviet backing of the nationalization was merely a "misconception", this was a fact...
According to the deposed guy's own biografy, he asked the Shah for emergency powers. When the Shah (the Head of State) refused and dismissed him, he was forced to reinstate him after massive protests, where Communists did play a major role.
Iran was not at all pretty and even though the then-government may not have intended to join the USSR, the USSR could very well have taken over as it did with a number of countries before and after.
Britain's and American intervention, which helped tip the scales slightly (Shah always remained a Head of State with non-trivial powers), was a good idea...
No, certain things endanger humanity and should be prevented if at all possible. Becoming a Communist country certainly qualifies.
The danger was rather high. The small price paid (by all concerned — Iranians included) was well worth the reduction of the risk.
Pompous and wrong.
Even if all today's authors stop writing today, there will still be more books left already written, than a human being can read in their life-time. The point is to keep improving the quality, and this is something, which requires reward... Many creators feel rewarded by the peer-recognition, but they all still need to eat, and I want the best of them to be able to spend more time writing.
But that's all about efficiency. There is also a fairness component — the fairness demands, that the creators are to be free to control the fruits of their creativity in any way they want. They ought to be able to burn it, to sell it, to rent it (for any price), to give it away — anything.
But if a particular author's terms are unacceptable to you, you can stick to reading the others... I fail to see the compelling need to force the control over a creation out of the creator's hands.
You are right — and paying every time we read something is a (much) better substitute!
I feel, there may well be in many cases. Doing something in the past may entitle you to being paid continuously afterwards. Writing a good book or making a good movie qualifies...
Yes, as a matter of fact, sometimes such a deal is quite desirable — small (or 0) initial payment, and then a "micro-payment" for each flush, until it breaks and he has to come again to fix it. This would be an incentive for him to do a good job and allow me to switch to a different plumber without paying too much to the bad one. See also "maintenance contract".