Release the "work" with a license that forbids removing the credits and/or advertising.
Sorry, you don't have any rights to that "work". Remember, we are talking about a world in which there is no such thing as intellectual property. As soon as you create something, it immediately passes into public domain. There is no licensing -- anybody can do anything with it, including re-releasing under their own name.
As long as the creators are guaranteed to get credit, movies, TV shows and software will continue to be created
You mean movie studios are really stupid -- they pay tens of millions of dollars to make a movie, when all they need to do is promise to run credits on screen?
Movies are not sofware. You cannot make them with $1000-pieces of consumer hardware and pure brainpower.
Certainly they are talented and should recieve compensation for their talents.
But that's exactly the problem. Let's say I am a musician who writes electronic music (that is, I make music by messing around with computers and software, not with strings and keys). Obviously, I cannot perform. How will I be paid?
What you are asking for is not rights to a piece of property but the right to dictate the actions of others.
Yes, by consensual contact. That's normal and happens every day. Any employment, for example, is a contract though which your employer gets limited rights to dictate your actions.
For alice to claim the right to stop the transaction, she is claiming the right to influence transactions between other people, that do not involve her.
Not really. Alice is claiming the right to hold Bob to his promise, which he voluntary made in return for getting the poem, that he will not give the copy to anyone. Again, perfectly normal and very reasonable.
Does it mean artists wont be able to make money? Hell no.
First, not all artists can perform. Electronic musitians come to mind. And what about writers? Second, think, for example, about movies. Movies are expensive to make. In a world without IP the only movies (not of the my-backyard-and-my-dog kind) that will be made are those which very rich people commission to make, or which the government pays to make. This, essentially, means that no good (full-length, feature) movies will be made, ever.
There is a sort of producers' supply and demand that would take place... [snip]... there would be a fame incentive.
That's not enough. Sure, I'd just love to make a great movie, but who's going to give the money to do it? The money to hire actors and operators and costume designers, the money to build sets and fly me and my crew to location, the money to program special effects...
The point isn't that nobody will want to make movies. The point is that nobody will put money into making movies.
or example, suppose the government collected a 'music tax' from all music loving citizens. This money would be offered up as prizes in a yearly contest among musicians to produce the best content.
You mean if I say to the government that I am not music-loving, it will not collect this tax from me?;-)
But really. Your solution is more taxes and only government-funded art. I don't think you can be serious.
In fact, if movie theatre owners pooled their resources, they could probably afford to hire people to make movies for them. These movies would show in the theatres of those who paid for them,
Uh-uh. Say, I own a movie theater. I do NOT pool my resources and do NOT hire anybody to make movies for me. Other guys spend their money and make a movie -- which I will show in my movie theater (there is no IP, right? So they will not be able to prevent me from showing the same movie they paid for and I didn't at the same time)
Perhaps, but look at television.. nearly all of the programs are paid for by advertising.
Yes, but that's because the TV studios own these programs. Take away copyright, let anybody with a TV transmitter broadcast everybody's programs, and see how many of them will be made.
This is a classic "freeriders" or "tragedy of the commons" problem, well-known in economics.
Something that any person can replicate for $0 cost can not be owned. It is not Property.
Ahem. I think you meant to say it should not be property. Just because your definition of "property" does not include non-tangible stuff does not mean other people think of it the same way.
The entire concept of property exists because "Stuff" is finite and any resource that exists in "meatspace" is thus, on some level, scarece.
Yes, to some degree, but that's not the whole story. I would like you to consider two points:
(1) Let's take music. You would say that any given song is not scarce because we can replicate it at zero cost. OK. However, think about it in a different way: good music is definitely a scarce resource. Let's say I like Britney Spears:-) Her songs are a scarce resource because there is a finite number of them. I want her to produce more songs, make more of that scarce resource. Therefore I have to motivate her -- with what? Fame and recognition? Yes, it helps, but money is a bigger motivator than you probably want to acknowledge. So, no, the argument that intangible stuff isn't scarce doesn't fly. It is.
(2) Let's say copyright is abolished. However freedom of contract still remains, right? Let's say I made a song. It is mine just because I don't show it to anybody and don't let anybody to listen to it. Now I come to you and make a contract with you -- you can listen to my song, but you cannot make copies of it, cannot redistribute it, cannot broadcast it, etc. etc. I can perfectly well make such a contract and if you agree to it, it's valid. In this way, just through contracts, I can reconstruct the whole copyright law.
To avoid the problem you'll either have to radically restrict the freedom of contract (doesn't look like a good idea, does it?) or you'll have to say that as soon as I made a song it's not mine any more, I have no rights to it. And, of course, as soon as I wrote an essay, or a piece of code, or drew a picture -- I lose all rights to them. Somehow this doesn't sound appealing as well.
So, no, I don't think that the concept of IP is so "unnatural" as you make it to be. Yes, for the tangible property there is the "loss of use" argument -- if somebody takes away my car, I cannot use it any more -- which does not apply to IP. However, there is still the "create incentive to produce more" argument that is just as valid for IP as it is for traditional physical property.
The notion that there should be restrictions on copying of information is a form of protectionism.
Not any more than the idea that a man with a bigger club cannot just take away your house is protectionism.
The arguments to justify IP ie "protect the creators" seem more socialist to me... [snip]...A "free market" is one in which there are no artificial barriers to entry, and the price of an article becomes the price of production.
Well, free markets are a little bit more complicated than than (and pricing goods at production cost doesn't have much to do with them anyway). One particular issue is that a market presupposes property -- you cannot sell what you don't own. If there is no IP, then there could be no market in software, music, writings, etc. etc. -- why would anyone buy it when one could copy it for free? And that leads us straight into the "tragedy of the commons" and freeriders problems.
To give an example, let's say there is no copyright any more -- anybody can copy anything freely. In such a world, why would anybody make a movie? I mean a good movie with sets, and special effects, and location shoots, etc. etc.? It all costs money (as in millions of $) and given that you could never get enough monetary return from it, movies would simply not be made any more. Of course you'll get unlimited amount of amateur footage of backyards and dogs shot on consumer-grade camcorders, but that probably wouldn't quite compensate, would it?
Except that for the geeks, nobody owning anything == everyone owning it. Possesion is decentralized, but instead of a watering down of value an addition of value occurs.
Sorry, doesn't fly. Ownership is a bundle of rights, the most important of which is the right to exclude others. I don't own GPL-ed (or public domain, etc) software that I use. I do have the right to use, but that's a far cry from ownership.
With the code available, no doubt one or more companies would take the opportunity to run with it and develop new OS's compatible with legacy Windows products. Microsoft remains free to "innovate", whatever that means, and everyone else remains free to do so also. Maybe someone starts a GPL fork of the code. Maybe someone else starts a BSD-type fork of the code. Maybe someone wants to make a closed-source version.
I see. So you want application developers to deal with a multitude of similar operatins systems all of which are subtly incompatible and slightly to not-so-slightly buggy?
"Yes, our application works with WindowsA, WindowsK and WindowsN. It also works with WindowsD if patch 2.876 has been applied, and with WindowsJ versions 1.17 to 1.19. If you download a patch from our website, you can make it work with WindowsC, but we do not support it..."
That's a shitty analogy. Why? Three points: 1 - it is legal for you to record music off the radio.
But from the original poster's point of view that's probably theft as well. After all you get a tape of somebody's music without having paid a cent for it -- it MUST be theft.
2 - it is illegal for you to copy video cassettes (unless allowed to by the copyright holder.)
Wrong. I can copy all I want under the fair use provisions. It's perfectly legal for me to buy a video and make a copy of it.
3 - it is illegal to distribute both recorded movies off TV and music off the radio.
Yes, so? Nobody is arguing that copying MP3s is not a copyright infringement under current law. So what? Laws change. It was probably illegal to tape movies off a TV before that Supreme Court decision.
Lowering myself to answering AC posts, but this is too funny to be ignored...
It is the absolute measure of an individual's identity (the property, either physical or intellectal, that he or she owns.)
Heh. Of course, if your identity is nothing but what you own, then, of course, who am I to argue... I, personally, still like to entertain illusions that my own identity doesn't have much to do with the kind of property that I have.
One of these days you Slashdot kiddies are going to learn that property matters.
Sure, property matters. Now, go to a bookstore and buy (no, don't read it inside the store -- that's theft) a basic textbook on property, standard issue for first year of law school. Perhaps you'll learn that property right are quite a complicated issue and are not absolute by any means. Besides, property rights for intellectual property are significantly different from those for tangible property, and there is good reason for this, too. Reading stuff tends to be more useful than walking around the block.
Deep down, you know that you are a thief and a liar as well, but as long as you can continue parroting the liberal line of moral relativism, you can rationalize it and continue to fool yourself into thinking that you're really not a thief.
Ah, a man who knows me better than myself! So, sir, pray tell me what should I do? Should I repent, cover myself with sackcloth and ashes, and prostrate myself before the trinity of RIAA, MPAA and the almighty dollar? Can I still be saved? Aiiiie, I feel the flames of hell licking me!...
Or maybe you are a thief, but you're a nice sort of thief, all cuddly and furry and stuff.
Cuddly and furry and stuff?? [boggles] [boggles some more] [gives up]
Here's hoping you put your favorite artist out of a job by flying into a violent rage every time he dares to ask money for his work product.
My favorite artists tend to be either dead or multimillionaires.
And besides that, flying into violent rage? Me? Wasn't I cuddly and furry just the sentence before that?
Why the dig at Justice Thomas? Do you not like black people? Conservative people? Or is it just black conservative people who get your goat?
I don't care if he's black and I do like at least some conservatives -- for example, I think that Scalia is currently the best Supreme, and he ain't no liberal. My dislike of Thomas stems from the fact that he was a politically-motivated politically-correct appointee who, IMHO, does not measure up to the Supreme Court level intellect-wise.
People, stop kidding yourself: Napster is a tool that is used exclusively to steal from legitimate artists.
Er, guy, take that ramrod out of your ass. Must be really uncomfortable, living like this.
Obviously your morals are your own business, but I wonder if you ever exceed speed limits or jaywalk. These are against the law, you know? Doing it is bad, eeeeeeevil. By exceeding speed limits you are endangering innocent lives, including children -- yeah, that's right, you are killing children every time you go 40 in a 35 mph zone!
So I don't see what the big deal (morality-wise, not from the point of view of RIAA) about MP3 is. Sure, I get stuff from Napster, listen to it for a while, then delete it. If I like something, I'd buy a CD since my stereo system has waaaay better speakers than my PC.
30 years ago you would probably been screaming that taping TV shows on my VCR is theft. Well, the Supremes tend to be smart people (Thomas excluded) so they said that it's all fine. I guess once the court opinion came down, your morals stopped having problems.
I don't think the recording industry's position is viable. They'll have to come up with new ways to make money from music distribution and I am sure they will. Some will probably die out on the way to the new future, but being a dinosaur sucks anyway.
So, no, I don't think that listening to music I got on Napster is theft. My morality is stretchable enough to accomodate it. Hint: if the morality of 90% of the population can accomodate it, the law is probably wrong. I can also spout a lot of legalese about fair use, right to preview and all that, but it's irrelevant. Morality, after all, is a personal choice. I sleep well at night.
you've taken women who use the Internet and lump them together as "Chickclickers"
This is called product placement.
Notice that Jon Katz talked to the head of a site called ChickClick? I guess she wouldn't object to all women on the Web being called chickclickers, would she?
Yeah, I can see the writing on the wall just as well as you do.
Maybe none of this concerns you now, but how long until it does?
Oh yes, it does. My only difference with you is that I am much more sensitive to governmental power and tend not to take corporate power too seriously. A government (1) is much more interested in direct (as opposed to economic) power, compared to a corporation; and (2) can do much more nasty things to you.
If these people have the power and will to destroy all of Freenet (like you believe), then they definitely have the power and will to destroy freedom on the Web completely.
Well, no. Freenet is likely to end up a flashpoint, and may turn out to be a subject of a show trial/raid/execution -- you know, public hangings of ringleaders do wonders to make citizenry law-abiding:-)
I think it's hopeless to try to suppress freedom on the 'net. Even full-scale assault will just lead to more semi-underground sites, IRC channels, VPN-ed mini-networks, probable resurgency of BBSes, etc. etc. The 'net and the world is too damn large (see? I am not always pessimistic).
With Freenet it's mostly a matter of size. If it manages to establish a robust network of 1000s of nodes across North America, Europe, Japan, and the Third World then it will be very hard to kill. On the other hand, there could be smart people who'll try to kill you before you get large...
And my point wasn't that it is all hopeless. My point is that Freenet should be build to withstand active attacks by a major power. As a first-order approximation, imagine a situation that the government of China decides to shut you down. What is the worst that it can do to you?
Keep in mind also that everything has a price. As you can see from my email, I have an account at freedom.net. I used to browse the web anonymously, but now do it only rarely. Why? Because there is a big speed and latency price. Freenet will also have a speed-of-access price and that means that it will tend to collect mostly illegal stuff. That by itself is not a problem (at least for me, although there are a bunch of mealy-mouthed hypocrites at Slashdot who are worried by this), but it is going to limit your growth rate. And the bigger Freenet is, the harder it will be to suppress it.
If your attacker has a total capacity greater than the entire network and is persistant in his attack, then any network can be taken down.
I think there is a bit of misunderstanding here. When I say "DOS attacks" I do not mean classic net attacks of the smurf kind. With regard to those, Freenet is just a subset of the 'net and is no more and no less vulnerable to them. What I mean by denial-of-service attacks is basically pushing bogus/malicious information into Freenet. Note that for this attack you do not have to saturate the bandwidth: all you need to do is to overwhelm the legitimate traffic. Maybe the "denial-of-service" term was misleading: by it I don't mean cutting off Freenet nodes from the 'net -- I mean, in a sense, data poisoning.
a search engine is no more reliable then a descriptive Freenet key.
No, that's not true. Nobody mounts attacks against search engines (although you may remember a brief period when putting multiple instances of a single word in meta tags would push you to the top of the search engine's listing). Freenet must expect attacks to be mounted against it. Besides attacking search engines will get you sued (and/or prosecuted) while I have a deep suspicion that law enforcement will not overexert itself to stop attacks on Freenet.
Plus, again, it's a matter of scale. This is one of the cases where size matters.
somebody told you about Slashdot, or you got saw a hypertext link from somewhere - both of which are equally possible on Freenet.
That's not a good metaphor. URLs point to a single place (we'll ignore load-balancing stuff like Akamai for the time being). Freenet keys do not "point" anywhere -- they are keys to retrieve a chunk of information from, basically, a distributed database. Unless you maintain global uniqueness of keys (hard to guarantee) a single key may pull in different chunks of data depending upon your point of entry into the Freenet system. There are both "poisoned data" and "cancer node" problems.
I wish you success, guys, it's just that I am naturally pessimistic and can see how, given the resources of, say, AOL, to effectively shut down Freenet. If I am proven wrong -- so much the better.
I guarantee you that, given the sort of statement I quoted, law enforcement officials will NOT be amused.
I am fairly sure that Ian Clarke does not have "amuse law enforcement officers" in his to-do lists. I am also fairly sure that not many people around here are concerned with the degree of amusement of cops.
It will be apparent (to them) that this system was created for the express purpose of distributing illegal materials.
Yes, maybe, and? So what's the charge going to be? You might also want to consider two other things: (1) what's illegal depends on where you live. Nazi propaganda happens to be illegal in Germany, but legal in the USA; (2) it's perfectly legal, for example, to sell bongs (marijuana pipes) in the US, although it is apparent to everyone what they are intended and used for.
Slashdot Mirror
Release the "work" with a license that forbids removing the credits and/or advertising.
Sorry, you don't have any rights to that "work". Remember, we are talking about a world in which there is no such thing as intellectual property. As soon as you create something, it immediately passes into public domain. There is no licensing -- anybody can do anything with it, including re-releasing under their own name.
As long as the creators are guaranteed to get credit, movies, TV shows and software will continue to be created
You mean movie studios are really stupid -- they pay tens of millions of dollars to make a movie, when all they need to do is promise to run credits on screen?
Movies are not sofware. You cannot make them with $1000-pieces of consumer hardware and pure brainpower.
Kaa
Certainly they are talented and should recieve compensation for their talents.
But that's exactly the problem. Let's say I am a musician who writes electronic music (that is, I make music by messing around with computers and software, not with strings and keys). Obviously, I cannot perform. How will I be paid?
What you are asking for is not rights to a piece of property but the right to dictate the actions of others.
Yes, by consensual contact. That's normal and happens every day. Any employment, for example, is a contract though which your employer gets limited rights to dictate your actions.
For alice to claim the right to stop the transaction, she is claiming the right to influence transactions between other people, that do not involve her.
Not really. Alice is claiming the right to hold Bob to his promise, which he voluntary made in return for getting the poem, that he will not give the copy to anyone. Again, perfectly normal and very reasonable.
Does it mean artists wont be able to make money? Hell no.
First, not all artists can perform. Electronic musitians come to mind. And what about writers?
Second, think, for example, about movies. Movies are expensive to make. In a world without IP the only movies (not of the my-backyard-and-my-dog kind) that will be made are those which very rich people commission to make, or which the government pays to make. This, essentially, means that no good (full-length, feature) movies will be made, ever.
Kaa
Please stop buying into the trolls who reply to *every* post I make calling me a karma whore.
:-)
Heh. You just get called a karma whore, I get Vogon poetry quoted at me. If it's any consolation, you're mentioned there, too
Kaa
There is a sort of producers' supply and demand that would take place ... [snip] ... there would be a fame incentive.
...
;-)
That's not enough. Sure, I'd just love to make a great movie, but who's going to give the money to do it? The money to hire actors and operators and costume designers, the money to build sets and fly me and my crew to location, the money to program special effects
The point isn't that nobody will want to make movies. The point is that nobody will put money into making movies.
or example, suppose the government collected a 'music tax' from all music loving citizens. This money would be offered up as prizes in a yearly contest among musicians to produce the best content.
You mean if I say to the government that I am not music-loving, it will not collect this tax from me?
But really. Your solution is more taxes and only government-funded art. I don't think you can be serious.
In fact, if movie theatre owners pooled their resources, they could probably afford to hire people to make movies for them. These movies would show in the theatres of those who paid for them,
Uh-uh. Say, I own a movie theater. I do NOT pool my resources and do NOT hire anybody to make movies for me. Other guys spend their money and make a movie -- which I will show in my movie theater (there is no IP, right? So they will not be able to prevent me from showing the same movie they paid for and I didn't at the same time)
Kaa
because of CALEA the firms know where your cell phone is (if turned on and future ones won't turn off totally 8^( )
I would like to see a cell phone (or any other device, actually) that will able to transmit my location after I disconnect its battery.
Kaa
Keep in mind that capitalism requires growth to survive. It can't be in equilibrium with anything else - it must constantly grow.
Er... capitalism as opposed to what? Soviet Union, for example, found out that growth is necessary for survival the hard way.
Replace 'capitalism' with 'technology-based society' and I might agree with you.
Kaa
Perhaps, but look at television.. nearly all of the programs are paid for by advertising.
Yes, but that's because the TV studios own these programs. Take away copyright, let anybody with a TV transmitter broadcast everybody's programs, and see how many of them will be made.
This is a classic "freeriders" or "tragedy of the commons" problem, well-known in economics.
Kaa
Something that any person can replicate for $0 cost can not be owned. It is not Property.
:-) Her songs are a scarce resource because there is a finite number of them. I want her to produce more songs, make more of that scarce resource. Therefore I have to motivate her -- with what? Fame and recognition? Yes, it helps, but money is a bigger motivator than you probably want to acknowledge. So, no, the argument that intangible stuff isn't scarce doesn't fly. It is.
Ahem. I think you meant to say it should not be property. Just because your definition of "property" does not include non-tangible stuff does not mean other people think of it the same way.
The entire concept of property exists because "Stuff" is finite and any resource that exists in "meatspace" is thus, on some level, scarece.
Yes, to some degree, but that's not the whole story. I would like you to consider two points:
(1) Let's take music. You would say that any given song is not scarce because we can replicate it at zero cost. OK. However, think about it in a different way: good music is definitely a scarce resource. Let's say I like Britney Spears
(2) Let's say copyright is abolished. However freedom of contract still remains, right? Let's say I made a song. It is mine just because I don't show it to anybody and don't let anybody to listen to it. Now I come to you and make a contract with you -- you can listen to my song, but you cannot make copies of it, cannot redistribute it, cannot broadcast it, etc. etc. I can perfectly well make such a contract and if you agree to it, it's valid. In this way, just through contracts, I can reconstruct the whole copyright law.
To avoid the problem you'll either have to radically restrict the freedom of contract (doesn't look like a good idea, does it?) or you'll have to say that as soon as I made a song it's not mine any more, I have no rights to it. And, of course, as soon as I wrote an essay, or a piece of code, or drew a picture -- I lose all rights to them. Somehow this doesn't sound appealing as well.
So, no, I don't think that the concept of IP is so "unnatural" as you make it to be. Yes, for the tangible property there is the "loss of use" argument -- if somebody takes away my car, I cannot use it any more -- which does not apply to IP. However, there is still the "create incentive to produce more" argument that is just as valid for IP as it is for traditional physical property.
Kaa
The notion that there should be restrictions on copying of information is a form of protectionism.
... [snip] ...A "free market" is one in which there are no artificial barriers to entry, and the price of an article becomes the price of production.
Not any more than the idea that a man with a bigger club cannot just take away your house is protectionism.
The arguments to justify IP ie "protect the creators" seem more socialist to me
Well, free markets are a little bit more complicated than than (and pricing goods at production cost doesn't have much to do with them anyway). One particular issue is that a market presupposes property -- you cannot sell what you don't own. If there is no IP, then there could be no market in software, music, writings, etc. etc. -- why would anyone buy it when one could copy it for free? And that leads us straight into the "tragedy of the commons" and freeriders problems.
To give an example, let's say there is no copyright any more -- anybody can copy anything freely. In such a world, why would anybody make a movie? I mean a good movie with sets, and special effects, and location shoots, etc. etc.? It all costs money (as in millions of $) and given that you could never get enough monetary return from it, movies would simply not be made any more. Of course you'll get unlimited amount of amateur footage of backyards and dogs shot on consumer-grade camcorders, but that probably wouldn't quite compensate, would it?
Kaa
So, you think that we should turn off this Computer. Do you realise that what you're suggesting would be murder?
On the contrary. Given adequate backups an AI should be quite hard to kill (as in eliminate, eradicate, etc.)
Read Permutation City for plentiful brain food about this topic.
Kaa
Let's concentrates on making the PEOPLE smarter, then worry about the machines.
Well, one obvious approach is called eugenics. I has a really, and I mean really, bad reputation.
Kaa
Except that for the geeks, nobody owning anything == everyone owning it. Possesion is decentralized, but instead of a watering down of value an addition of value occurs.
Sorry, doesn't fly. Ownership is a bundle of rights, the most important of which is the right to exclude others. I don't own GPL-ed (or public domain, etc) software that I use. I do have the right to use, but that's a far cry from ownership.
Kaa
Perhaps a John Katz piece?
Aaaahhh.... [runs away screaming]
Kaa
With the code available, no doubt one or more companies would take the opportunity to run with it and develop new OS's compatible with legacy Windows products. Microsoft remains free to "innovate", whatever that means, and everyone else remains free to do so also. Maybe someone starts a GPL fork of the code. Maybe someone else starts a BSD-type fork of the code. Maybe someone wants to make a closed-source version.
I see. So you want application developers to deal with a multitude of similar operatins systems all of which are subtly incompatible and slightly to not-so-slightly buggy?
"Yes, our application works with WindowsA, WindowsK and WindowsN. It also works with WindowsD if patch 2.876 has been applied, and with WindowsJ versions 1.17 to 1.19. If you download a patch from our website, you can make it work with WindowsC, but we do not support it..."
Kaa
If Bill Gates had a dime for every time a Windows box crashed ... oh, wait a minute -- he already does.
Heh. Windows 9x costs around $90, that's 900 crashes -- hey, I'm getting my crashes for free now! Woo hoo!
Kaa
I've heard some rumours that the US government is actively studying the impact of completely abandoning Microsoft and going elsewhere
Massive reality check failure detected...
Kaa
That's a shitty analogy. Why? Three points: 1 - it is legal for you to record music off the radio.
But from the original poster's point of view that's probably theft as well. After all you get a tape of somebody's music without having paid a cent for it -- it MUST be theft.
2 - it is illegal for you to copy video cassettes (unless allowed to by the copyright holder.)
Wrong. I can copy all I want under the fair use provisions. It's perfectly legal for me to buy a video and make a copy of it.
3 - it is illegal to distribute both recorded movies off TV and music off the radio.
Yes, so? Nobody is arguing that copying MP3s is not a copyright infringement under current law. So what? Laws change. It was probably illegal to tape movies off a TV before that Supreme Court decision.
Kaa
Lowering myself to answering AC posts, but this is too funny to be ignored...
It is the absolute measure of an individual's identity (the property, either physical or intellectal, that he or she owns.)
Heh. Of course, if your identity is nothing but what you own, then, of course, who am I to argue... I, personally, still like to entertain illusions that my own identity doesn't have much to do with the kind of property that I have.
One of these days you Slashdot kiddies are going to learn that property matters.
Sure, property matters. Now, go to a bookstore and buy (no, don't read it inside the store -- that's theft) a basic textbook on property, standard issue for first year of law school. Perhaps you'll learn that property right are quite a complicated issue and are not absolute by any means. Besides, property rights for intellectual property are significantly different from those for tangible property, and there is good reason for this, too. Reading stuff tends to be more useful than walking around the block.
Deep down, you know that you are a thief and a liar as well, but as long as you can continue parroting the liberal line of moral relativism, you can rationalize it and continue to fool yourself into thinking that you're really not a thief.
Ah, a man who knows me better than myself! So, sir, pray tell me what should I do? Should I repent, cover myself with sackcloth and ashes, and prostrate myself before the trinity of RIAA, MPAA and the almighty dollar? Can I still be saved? Aiiiie, I feel the flames of hell licking me!...
Or maybe you are a thief, but you're a nice sort of thief, all cuddly and furry and stuff.
Cuddly and furry and stuff?? [boggles] [boggles some more] [gives up]
Here's hoping you put your favorite artist out of a job by flying into a violent rage every time he dares to ask money for his work product.
My favorite artists tend to be either dead or multimillionaires.
And besides that, flying into violent rage? Me? Wasn't I cuddly and furry just the sentence before that?
Kaa
Why the dig at Justice Thomas? Do you not like black people? Conservative people? Or is it just black conservative people who get your goat?
I don't care if he's black and I do like at least some conservatives -- for example, I think that Scalia is currently the best Supreme, and he ain't no liberal. My dislike of Thomas stems from the fact that he was a politically-motivated politically-correct appointee who, IMHO, does not measure up to the Supreme Court level intellect-wise.
Kaa
People, stop kidding yourself: Napster is a tool that is used exclusively to steal from legitimate artists.
Er, guy, take that ramrod out of your ass. Must be really uncomfortable, living like this.
Obviously your morals are your own business, but I wonder if you ever exceed speed limits or jaywalk. These are against the law, you know? Doing it is bad, eeeeeeevil. By exceeding speed limits you are endangering innocent lives, including children -- yeah, that's right, you are killing children every time you go 40 in a 35 mph zone!
So I don't see what the big deal (morality-wise, not from the point of view of RIAA) about MP3 is. Sure, I get stuff from Napster, listen to it for a while, then delete it. If I like something, I'd buy a CD since my stereo system has waaaay better speakers than my PC.
30 years ago you would probably been screaming that taping TV shows on my VCR is theft. Well, the Supremes tend to be smart people (Thomas excluded) so they said that it's all fine. I guess once the court opinion came down, your morals stopped having problems.
I don't think the recording industry's position is viable. They'll have to come up with new ways to make money from music distribution and I am sure they will. Some will probably die out on the way to the new future, but being a dinosaur sucks anyway.
So, no, I don't think that listening to music I got on Napster is theft. My morality is stretchable enough to accomodate it. Hint: if the morality of 90% of the population can accomodate it, the law is probably wrong. I can also spout a lot of legalese about fair use, right to preview and all that, but it's irrelevant. Morality, after all, is a personal choice. I sleep well at night.
Kaa
you've taken women who use the Internet and lump them together as "Chickclickers"
This is called product placement.
Notice that Jon Katz talked to the head of a site called ChickClick? I guess she wouldn't object to all women on the Web being called chickclickers, would she?
Kaa
But look at where things are headed.
:-)
Yeah, I can see the writing on the wall just as well as you do.
Maybe none of this concerns you now, but how long until it does?
Oh yes, it does. My only difference with you is that I am much more sensitive to governmental power and tend not to take corporate power too seriously. A government (1) is much more interested in direct (as opposed to economic) power, compared to a corporation; and (2) can do much more nasty things to you.
If these people have the power and will to destroy all of Freenet (like you believe), then they definitely have the power and will to destroy freedom on the Web completely.
Well, no. Freenet is likely to end up a flashpoint, and may turn out to be a subject of a show trial/raid/execution -- you know, public hangings of ringleaders do wonders to make citizenry law-abiding
I think it's hopeless to try to suppress freedom on the 'net. Even full-scale assault will just lead to more semi-underground sites, IRC channels, VPN-ed mini-networks, probable resurgency of BBSes, etc. etc. The 'net and the world is too damn large (see? I am not always pessimistic).
With Freenet it's mostly a matter of size. If it manages to establish a robust network of 1000s of nodes across North America, Europe, Japan, and the Third World then it will be very hard to kill. On the other hand, there could be smart people who'll try to kill you before you get large...
And my point wasn't that it is all hopeless. My point is that Freenet should be build to withstand active attacks by a major power. As a first-order approximation, imagine a situation that the government of China decides to shut you down. What is the worst that it can do to you?
Keep in mind also that everything has a price. As you can see from my email, I have an account at freedom.net. I used to browse the web anonymously, but now do it only rarely. Why? Because there is a big speed and latency price. Freenet will also have a speed-of-access price and that means that it will tend to collect mostly illegal stuff. That by itself is not a problem (at least for me, although there are a bunch of mealy-mouthed hypocrites at Slashdot who are worried by this), but it is going to limit your growth rate. And the bigger Freenet is, the harder it will be to suppress it.
Kaa
If your attacker has a total capacity greater than the entire network and is persistant in his attack, then any network can be taken down.
I think there is a bit of misunderstanding here. When I say "DOS attacks" I do not mean classic net attacks of the smurf kind. With regard to those, Freenet is just a subset of the 'net and is no more and no less vulnerable to them. What I mean by denial-of-service attacks is basically pushing bogus/malicious information into Freenet. Note that for this attack you do not have to saturate the bandwidth: all you need to do is to overwhelm the legitimate traffic. Maybe the "denial-of-service" term was misleading: by it I don't mean cutting off Freenet nodes from the 'net -- I mean, in a sense, data poisoning.
a search engine is no more reliable then a descriptive Freenet key.
No, that's not true. Nobody mounts attacks against search engines (although you may remember a brief period when putting multiple instances of a single word in meta tags would push you to the top of the search engine's listing). Freenet must expect attacks to be mounted against it. Besides attacking search engines will get you sued (and/or prosecuted) while I have a deep suspicion that law enforcement will not overexert itself to stop attacks on Freenet.
Plus, again, it's a matter of scale. This is one of the cases where size matters.
somebody told you about Slashdot, or you got saw a hypertext link from somewhere - both of which are equally possible on Freenet.
That's not a good metaphor. URLs point to a single place (we'll ignore load-balancing stuff like Akamai for the time being). Freenet keys do not "point" anywhere -- they are keys to retrieve a chunk of information from, basically, a distributed database. Unless you maintain global uniqueness of keys (hard to guarantee) a single key may pull in different chunks of data depending upon your point of entry into the Freenet system. There are both "poisoned data" and "cancer node" problems.
I wish you success, guys, it's just that I am naturally pessimistic and can see how, given the resources of, say, AOL, to effectively shut down Freenet. If I am proven wrong -- so much the better.
Kaa
I guarantee you that, given the sort of statement I quoted, law enforcement officials will NOT be amused.
I am fairly sure that Ian Clarke does not have "amuse law enforcement officers" in his to-do lists. I am also fairly sure that not many people around here are concerned with the degree of amusement of cops.
It will be apparent (to them) that this system was created for the express purpose of distributing illegal materials.
Yes, maybe, and? So what's the charge going to be?
You might also want to consider two other things: (1) what's illegal depends on where you live. Nazi propaganda happens to be illegal in Germany, but legal in the USA; (2) it's perfectly legal, for example, to sell bongs (marijuana pipes) in the US, although it is apparent to everyone what they are intended and used for.
Kaa
They will charge him, try him, and convict him, and fry him.
Er... charge him with what? Creating an information storage-retrieval system?
If I store kiddie porn pictures in MS Access, does it make Microsoft liable for this? (now, that's an idea...)
Kaa