Of course, the one trade-off of this is that as these technologies allow for more driver error, there is the potential we could lean too hard on these devices to protect human life. It's a very dangerous idea to have a vehicle that is so protective of its passengers that the passengers become careless
Personal injury is only one reason why people don't drive carelessly. Also very high up on the list are "not wanting to wreck their car", "not wanting to incur liability for damaging others' property", and "not wanting to hurt other people". Until everybody has unwreckable cars, improved driver safety isn't likely to make anyone drive more recklessly.
Yeah, it's pretty sad when you have to put "New Mexico - USA" on the license plates because otherwise yokel state troopers in other states would pull you over and demand to see a green card.
"No officer, I'm not lying to you. New Mexico is a STATE
"Git outta tha car, boy. I'm gonna hafta call this in."
Shatner was making a living as a stage and television actor long before he did Trek. You don't get callbacks for Shakespeare if you suck. With ST:TOS he wasn't exactly getting Shakespeare-quality scripts to work with...
I think the only problem with Shatner's acting was that he couldn't seem to turn down his "stage presence". On TV he always looked like he was doing live theater and exaggerrating every word and movement "so the people in the back of the theater could [see|hear] it". Either he never realized, or the director never told him, that on TV you should tone it down just a little.
Actually, in Iraq, the Corps is working to: restore oil production, restore electricity, dispose of enemy munitions, build bases for the US military, and build bases for the Iraqi military.
Sorry. Didn't mean to imply that they only do flood control. I was just citing what, historically, has been their main contribution-- they "leveed up" the entire mississippi river, for example. As I stated in the above post, their main job is CONSTRUCTION. You know, bulldozers, concrete, backhoes, and the like. IT infrastructure is one thing they DON'T do. The United States Army Information Systems Engineering Command (USAISEC) does that.
I didn't say the CoE had only "easy" jobs, nor did I imply that they wouldn't be able to handle building IT infrastructure if they had the proper training and equipment. I'm merely pointing out that IT engineering isn't what the CoE does. The United States Army Information Systems Engineering Command (USAISEC), not the CoE, handles all the Army's IT needs. The point is, the military isn't really designed as a big public works department, so they're not particularly well suited to rebuilding things like country-wide communications networks. That's why they hire civilian contractors.
I thought the whole point of having an Army Corps Of Engineers was so that when technical skills were needed in a war zone, the Army would be able to provide them.
The CoE does mostly CIVIL engineering. Dams, flood control, and miscelaneous hydrology are their main contribution to infrastructure creation. They're mainly a construction corps. Anything requiring esoteric technical knowledge is generally contracted out to private companies that specialize in those sorts of things.
"And since Fall, there's all there `gatherers` and `sharers` going around. I reckon that there's a lot more gathering than sharing."
RMS is not the first person to try to paint forced taking as sharing, you know, and I'm sure he won't be the last. It's an old rhetorical trick, to paint the extortion as redistribution for the good of the many at the expense of the greedy few. But there's a good name for the tactic: demagoguery.
WIth copyright, there is no "taking", it's all "sharing". There is no diminishment of property in copying. Your ROTK quote is about redistribution of physical property, i.e. food. Sharing a song, a story, or an idea with 100 people results in 100 people having a full song, a full story, or a full idea. It's important to keep this in mind when discussing copyright issues.
I forgot to mention - today's performance is outdoors, in the park. Public property and all that, but you still have to buy a ticket and bring your own blanket to sit on. None of that ticket nonsense for me, though - am I doing anything wrong?
It is possible to trespass on public property, you know.
As a former member of our illustrious armed forces I can tell you the "soldier" in the picture has never been one!
I was particularly impressed by the "combat" boots with shiny metal eyelets. The zippered cargo pockets on the BDU pants and the way he had the top button buttoned on his BDU shirt were amusing as well. How could anyone possibly take that clown seriously?
Anyway, try this on, then. Suppose I sneak into a Broadway play without paying, and watch the whole thing. I even stand in the back, in the aisle, so there's no way I'm taking up a seat that would be otherwise occupied by some paying customer. Have I done anything wrong in so doing? Why or why not?
Trespass. Your purchase of a ticket is your permission to enter the premises. Without that or some other form of permission from the property owner or his agents, you are guilty of trespassing. You'll certainly be charged with that and fined according to the law regarding trespass. They most certainly will NOT fine you the price of ticket to the show!
No, by law, they can demand compensation from those who partake of the service they provide. By law, their product is defined as a service, and taking it without paying for it is defined as theft, not copyright violation or some other junk you think it ought to be. You can argue that the law should be some other way, but you don't get to make shit up about how it is.
I'm not saying the law isn't that way, I'm just saying that it's not the moral equivalent of skipping out on a cab ride, as you claim.
You're joking, right? The service being provided to you, the thing that you value enough to expend the effort to intercept, is the entertainment and information you receive upon so doing. Are you seriously going to argue that entertaining you and informing you is not providing you with a service? Do you pay for a newspaper or magazine simply because you like the texture of the paper? Of course not - you pay for the information contained therein, and the service of having it dropped on your front door every morning.
I could very well order the paper because I like to have my birds shit on it. It's value to me has absolutely no bearing on what it costs me to get it.
Same with DTV - you pay for the service someone provides you with, the service of entertaining you and informing you.
I pay for whatever reason I decide makes it valuable to me. You're an idiot if you think you have some magical insight into the what constitutes value for someone else. You can quote what the company hopes is the value in their service, but in the end, when you get right down to it, all they are selling is a decryption key. The exchange between me and DirecTV is $50 to them, in exchange for them keeping my decryption key valid. Where I find value from that is up to me. If I find all the TV channels I can access to be of no value to me, can I demand my $50 back? No, I cannot, because I am not purchasing anything more than one month's ability to decrypt the stream.
No, the way it differs from broadcast TV is that, although neither is free, for broadcast TV, you pay for it indirectly, via HyperGloboMegaCorp's ad budget.
If I don't buy anything I see on TV, am I stealing TV then? There is no contract between me and the broadcaster. Sure, I may pay "indirectly", as you call it, but by that "logic" we all pay indirectly for everything, as the whole economy is a big intertwined web.
The overt act of illicit decryption is itself prima facie evidence of the value provided thereby
Hogwash. You cannot say that I don't crack decryption just for the challenge. You can make all kinds of snide comments about how "everybody knows you do it to get free TV", but "everybody knows" does not constitute evidence of anything. My motivation for doing it has absolutely no bearing upon whether or not DTV's has the moral right to dictate what I do in my own house that harms no one.
Uh, no. This morally stunted techno-geek attitude that suggests that anything we can do should somehow be permitted is absurd and ridiculous, and never seems to get any play beyond the world of signal theft for some reason. I wanna put these transistors together in this particular arrangement and you can't stop me, you have no moral right to tell me what I can or can't do, nyah nyah nyah. GMAFB.
The argument gets play anywhere one person demands that the freedom of the general public should be infringed to protect their business model. Anything that does not infringe upon the rights of others should be allowed. DTV has no right to demand money for services I have not requested.
This notion that the world is someone's personal playground, and they can do whatever they want with it, everyone else's interests be damned, is a notion that really should have been nipped by about the fourth grade or so. Here in the adult world, we balance competing interests against one another, and here in the adult world, society has dec
I have to say California is often times a step ahead of the country. A step ahead in mostly wrong, silly, stupid and self destructive ways.
Why did 'Proposition 13' suddenly spring to mind when I read that?
I don't know. Why? Do you think the state and local governments should be able to tax my grandmother's house at its appraised value of $200,000 rather than the $12,000 she paid for it forty years ago? Jacking up people's taxes based on a something they have no control over (housing prices) is ridiculous. Even when a corporation buys, say, a $1.5 million building and five years later it's worth $5 million, there's no rational justification for taxing them based on the $5M figure. Just because it's worth $5M doesn't mean the owner would be willing or even able to buy it at that price, were he buying it at that time.
I think his point was 'why the hell does every hotel room have to have a bible?'... and i agree. It is pointless and a waste of money 99 times out of a 100.. People are competant enough to go buy, checkout or borrow scripture if they so choose. It just seems like a waste...
The hotels don't pay for the bibles, the Gideons do. It's not a waste of their money because that's what they do. It's simple evangelism. Feel free to argue the inefficiencies and wastes of evangelism, but you'll most likely be wasting your time.
And for that matter, why not have the Kuran in there along with the Mormon's additional Testament?
If some LDS or Muslim folks collect some donations and want to put copies of their books in hotels, they're welcome to do the same.
I always wanted someone to say this to me. Then I could say "Really? That's great! Send him over after dinner. I'll get some candy corn and we can sit on the porch and watch!"
It's like saying if this car has a turbo-charger, then it should only be compared to other cars that have a turbo-charger.
I think it's more akin to comparing a car that always comes turbocharged (java) to one that has the turbocharger as an option you have to specify before ordering (C++). Is it not more fair to compare the "always turbo" Java with run-time profiling with compile-time profiled C++?
(/me runs screaming from soon-to-be-burning building)
Is there something about flame-conducive subjects that make people want to "pick the scab", so to speak, or is it that sensitive subjects make people want to set stuff on fire? I think the Java vs. C++ holy wqar has even surpassed the EMACS vs vi one. (This is a good thing, I think, because arguing over vi vs. EMACS is a waste of time when it's clear that EMACS is better)
But somehow the DTV folks aren't entitled to due compensation? How on earth does that work?
By law they can demand it, but really only because of the DMCA and similar legislation. They can't demand "compensation" because they expend no additional resources beaming the satellite signal on your house if you're a hacker than if you're not. You cannot demand compensation for normal operating expenses.
Garbage. If they don't pay, they have no contract with the service provider and hence no right to receive benefits as though they did.
If you have no contract with DTV, they also have no right to demand payment for services you have not requested. They have no moral right to dictate what you do with electromagnetic radiation on your own property. Regular antenna-broadcast TV can't send you a bill. How is this different?
You cannot unilaterally dictate the terms of how someone will provide a service that you find valuable by simply taking it without compensation.
The sticking point is what determines "service"? This service isn't the radio signal. They're beaming the radio signal from the satellites to every square foot of land and water in North America. The way it differs from broadcast TV is this: the service they're selling is the decryption. They have no moral right to forbid someone from doing whatever he wants with the radio signal they're raining down on his roof. The law has allowed them to forbid it, but the law is often the handmaiden of corporate interests. What if the signal was not encrypted? Should it be illegal to watch unless you've sent them their $50/month? What if their "encryption" was merely inverting the picture? Should it be illegal to watch such "encrypted" TV in a mirror? Absurd idea, right? Well then, at what point is disallowing decryption not absurd? I say that if I can decrypt the signal without paying them for the decryption key, then maybe they need better encryption! It's not right to use the law to cover technical shortcomings.
And of course you find it valuable - if you didn't, you wouldn't expend the effort to decode it. So basically, you want something of value to you, but you don't want to compensate those who bring it to you.
If they want people to stop taking it for free, they need to either (a) stop beaming it down on their property when they haven't paid, or (b) render the signal worthless by making decryption of it impossible without the "key" that they sell. See my paragraph above.
And here you are hoist by your own petard. If not for you, he would have been free to pick up a paying passenger.
Make up your mind - am I responsible for his lost revenue or not?
Yes. Lost actual revenue, a.k.a due compensation for time and expenses providing service to you. Not to be confused with "potential revenue", which is imaginary income you might have made, but have no actual loss of time or material from which to calculate it. How can you demand compensation when there is no loss to be compensated?
You are receiving a service to which you are not entitled - the fact that you don't think you're depriving anyone is completely spurious. Do satellites launch themselves? Do transmissions broadcast themselves?
It is not my responsibility to ensure that DirecTV has a profitable business model. They're giving away the signal and selling the decryption. If people are making their own decryption at home, then DirecTV needs better encryption, not laws dictating the behavior of private citizens in their own homes.
Does content produce itself?
FWIW DirecTV doesn't produce content, it just delivers it. The content production is largely paid for by advertisers (tv) or box office/DVD sales (movies).
So why is the taxi driver entitled to compensation for the service he performs, but the DTV people are not?
They're entitled to compensation for providing me a decryption key
The original post specifically excluded potential lost revenue as a rationale for declaring it to be wrongdoing.
I perhaps should have explained initially that "potential revenue" isn't the same thing as "due compensation". "Lost potential revenue" is a calculation based upon the spurious assumption that those hacking satellite would have paid for the service had hacking not been an option. There is no automatic legal entitlement to potential revenue. For example, Dell cannot sue me for lost potential revenue because I built my own computer, thus depriving them of the opportunity to sell me one.
No, you deprived him of due compensation. "Potential revenue" is the spurious calculation based on the initial premise of "if reality were somehow other than it is". No one has any automatic entitlement to potential revenue. In the case of satellite hackers, the "potential revenue" argument assumes that those people hacking it would have paid for the service had hacking it not been an option.
He was going somewhere anyway, you tool, regardless of whether or not I'm in the car
He wasn't going anywhere until you got in the car and stated a destination.
if it wasn't me, it would have been someone else.
And here you are hoist by your own petard. If not for you, he would have been free to pick up a paying passenger. If you were to hack DirecTV's signal, that does not in any way diminish their capacity to provide it to others.
In the case of a cab, you have hired a man to do a job and then refused compensation upon completion of said job. In the case of satellite hacking, you've hired no one and diminished no one's capacity to provide service. The two are not the same thing.
Oh, bullshit. By that logic, at worst I owe him about $0.50 for depreciation - I guess he can sue me for his four bits then.
It's not bullshit. In cities like Santa Monica, that's why bus rides are only 75 cents- you're only paying for the amortized cost of the service for dozens of riders along fixed routes. A cab driver gets more because you are monopolizing his time. You must pay the cost of the driver's time.
Irrelevant points. He's a taxi driver - he was going to be driving around, using gas, and putting miles on regardless of whether or not I get in the car. It's exactly the same "you were going that way anyway" argument that is apparently being used to rationalize signal interception.
If you are riding in his cab, he can't take another passenger. He most certainly was not "going that way anyway", you knob. Your argument might have had merit in the case of a bus, but even then every person is a load on the vehicle decreasing gas mileage, adding stress to the drivetrain, and rubbing away the vinyl covering on the seat padding.
Why is it that people can't accept that hacking DTV broadcasts doesn't directly cost them any money? I swear, every time the subject comes up someone counters the "no diminishment of property" with a crackhead comparison like: "so if it's OK to decode satellite signals, you shouldn't mind if I come into your house and murder you in your sleep-- after all, it's the same thing!"
Please, if you're going to make the argument, think it through. Decoding a satellite signal is not the same thing as:
eating the food in my fridge
using my telephone
not paying a cab fare
shoplifting DVDs
setting fire to pre-schools
dropping an atomic bomb on Hollywood*
Let's have a rational debate, please.
* I'm all in favor of nuking Hollywood, but this is for reasons unrelated to DirecTV hacking
Slashdot Mirror
Personal injury is only one reason why people don't drive carelessly. Also very high up on the list are "not wanting to wreck their car", "not wanting to incur liability for damaging others' property", and "not wanting to hurt other people". Until everybody has unwreckable cars, improved driver safety isn't likely to make anyone drive more recklessly.
Yeah, it's pretty sad when you have to put "New Mexico - USA" on the license plates because otherwise yokel state troopers in other states would pull you over and demand to see a green card.
"No officer, I'm not lying to you. New Mexico is a STATE "Git outta tha car, boy. I'm gonna hafta call this in."
Whatever you say, sport. Area 51 is over 700 miles away from Albuquerque.
I think the only problem with Shatner's acting was that he couldn't seem to turn down his "stage presence". On TV he always looked like he was doing live theater and exaggerrating every word and movement "so the people in the back of the theater could [see|hear] it". Either he never realized, or the director never told him, that on TV you should tone it down just a little.
Sorry. Didn't mean to imply that they only do flood control. I was just citing what, historically, has been their main contribution-- they "leveed up" the entire mississippi river, for example. As I stated in the above post, their main job is CONSTRUCTION. You know, bulldozers, concrete, backhoes, and the like. IT infrastructure is one thing they DON'T do. The United States Army Information Systems Engineering Command (USAISEC) does that.
I didn't say the CoE had only "easy" jobs, nor did I imply that they wouldn't be able to handle building IT infrastructure if they had the proper training and equipment. I'm merely pointing out that IT engineering isn't what the CoE does. The United States Army Information Systems Engineering Command (USAISEC), not the CoE, handles all the Army's IT needs. The point is, the military isn't really designed as a big public works department, so they're not particularly well suited to rebuilding things like country-wide communications networks. That's why they hire civilian contractors.
The CoE does mostly CIVIL engineering. Dams, flood control, and miscelaneous hydrology are their main contribution to infrastructure creation. They're mainly a construction corps. Anything requiring esoteric technical knowledge is generally contracted out to private companies that specialize in those sorts of things.
Ranier Wolfcastle: "Up and AT THEM!"
Director: "No no no...up and ATOM!"
RW: "Up and AT THEM!"
D: "Up and ATOM!"
RW: "Up and AT THEM!"
RMS is not the first person to try to paint forced taking as sharing, you know, and I'm sure he won't be the last. It's an old rhetorical trick, to paint the extortion as redistribution for the good of the many at the expense of the greedy few. But there's a good name for the tactic: demagoguery.
WIth copyright, there is no "taking", it's all "sharing". There is no diminishment of property in copying. Your ROTK quote is about redistribution of physical property, i.e. food. Sharing a song, a story, or an idea with 100 people results in 100 people having a full song, a full story, or a full idea. It's important to keep this in mind when discussing copyright issues.
It is possible to trespass on public property, you know.
I was particularly impressed by the "combat" boots with shiny metal eyelets. The zippered cargo pockets on the BDU pants and the way he had the top button buttoned on his BDU shirt were amusing as well. How could anyone possibly take that clown seriously?
Trespass. Your purchase of a ticket is your permission to enter the premises. Without that or some other form of permission from the property owner or his agents, you are guilty of trespassing. You'll certainly be charged with that and fined according to the law regarding trespass. They most certainly will NOT fine you the price of ticket to the show!
Try again?
I'm not saying the law isn't that way, I'm just saying that it's not the moral equivalent of skipping out on a cab ride, as you claim.
You're joking, right? The service being provided to you, the thing that you value enough to expend the effort to intercept, is the entertainment and information you receive upon so doing. Are you seriously going to argue that entertaining you and informing you is not providing you with a service? Do you pay for a newspaper or magazine simply because you like the texture of the paper? Of course not - you pay for the information contained therein, and the service of having it dropped on your front door every morning.
I could very well order the paper because I like to have my birds shit on it. It's value to me has absolutely no bearing on what it costs me to get it.
Same with DTV - you pay for the service someone provides you with, the service of entertaining you and informing you.
I pay for whatever reason I decide makes it valuable to me. You're an idiot if you think you have some magical insight into the what constitutes value for someone else. You can quote what the company hopes is the value in their service, but in the end, when you get right down to it, all they are selling is a decryption key. The exchange between me and DirecTV is $50 to them, in exchange for them keeping my decryption key valid. Where I find value from that is up to me. If I find all the TV channels I can access to be of no value to me, can I demand my $50 back? No, I cannot, because I am not purchasing anything more than one month's ability to decrypt the stream.
No, the way it differs from broadcast TV is that, although neither is free, for broadcast TV, you pay for it indirectly, via HyperGloboMegaCorp's ad budget.
If I don't buy anything I see on TV, am I stealing TV then? There is no contract between me and the broadcaster. Sure, I may pay "indirectly", as you call it, but by that "logic" we all pay indirectly for everything, as the whole economy is a big intertwined web.
The overt act of illicit decryption is itself prima facie evidence of the value provided thereby
Hogwash. You cannot say that I don't crack decryption just for the challenge. You can make all kinds of snide comments about how "everybody knows you do it to get free TV", but "everybody knows" does not constitute evidence of anything. My motivation for doing it has absolutely no bearing upon whether or not DTV's has the moral right to dictate what I do in my own house that harms no one.
Uh, no. This morally stunted techno-geek attitude that suggests that anything we can do should somehow be permitted is absurd and ridiculous, and never seems to get any play beyond the world of signal theft for some reason. I wanna put these transistors together in this particular arrangement and you can't stop me, you have no moral right to tell me what I can or can't do, nyah nyah nyah. GMAFB.
The argument gets play anywhere one person demands that the freedom of the general public should be infringed to protect their business model. Anything that does not infringe upon the rights of others should be allowed. DTV has no right to demand money for services I have not requested.
This notion that the world is someone's personal playground, and they can do whatever they want with it, everyone else's interests be damned, is a notion that really should have been nipped by about the fourth grade or so. Here in the adult world, we balance competing interests against one another, and here in the adult world, society has dec
Pffff! That's exactly the sort of nonsense I'd expect from a vi user!
heh
Why did 'Proposition 13' suddenly spring to mind when I read that?
I don't know. Why? Do you think the state and local governments should be able to tax my grandmother's house at its appraised value of $200,000 rather than the $12,000 she paid for it forty years ago? Jacking up people's taxes based on a something they have no control over (housing prices) is ridiculous. Even when a corporation buys, say, a $1.5 million building and five years later it's worth $5 million, there's no rational justification for taxing them based on the $5M figure. Just because it's worth $5M doesn't mean the owner would be willing or even able to buy it at that price, were he buying it at that time.
The hotels don't pay for the bibles, the Gideons do. It's not a waste of their money because that's what they do. It's simple evangelism. Feel free to argue the inefficiencies and wastes of evangelism, but you'll most likely be wasting your time.
And for that matter, why not have the Kuran in there along with the Mormon's additional Testament?
If some LDS or Muslim folks collect some donations and want to put copies of their books in hotels, they're welcome to do the same.
I have the n'sync-with-a-pony dream all the time. I should start a blog about it.
I always wanted someone to say this to me. Then I could say "Really? That's great! Send him over after dinner. I'll get some candy corn and we can sit on the porch and watch!"
I think it's more akin to comparing a car that always comes turbocharged (java) to one that has the turbocharger as an option you have to specify before ordering (C++). Is it not more fair to compare the "always turbo" Java with run-time profiling with compile-time profiled C++?
(/me runs screaming from soon-to-be-burning building)
Is there something about flame-conducive subjects that make people want to "pick the scab", so to speak, or is it that sensitive subjects make people want to set stuff on fire? I think the Java vs. C++ holy wqar has even surpassed the EMACS vs vi one. (This is a good thing, I think, because arguing over vi vs. EMACS is a waste of time when it's clear that EMACS is better)
By law they can demand it, but really only because of the DMCA and similar legislation. They can't demand "compensation" because they expend no additional resources beaming the satellite signal on your house if you're a hacker than if you're not. You cannot demand compensation for normal operating expenses.
Garbage. If they don't pay, they have no contract with the service provider and hence no right to receive benefits as though they did.
If you have no contract with DTV, they also have no right to demand payment for services you have not requested. They have no moral right to dictate what you do with electromagnetic radiation on your own property. Regular antenna-broadcast TV can't send you a bill. How is this different?
You cannot unilaterally dictate the terms of how someone will provide a service that you find valuable by simply taking it without compensation.
The sticking point is what determines "service"? This service isn't the radio signal. They're beaming the radio signal from the satellites to every square foot of land and water in North America. The way it differs from broadcast TV is this: the service they're selling is the decryption. They have no moral right to forbid someone from doing whatever he wants with the radio signal they're raining down on his roof. The law has allowed them to forbid it, but the law is often the handmaiden of corporate interests. What if the signal was not encrypted? Should it be illegal to watch unless you've sent them their $50/month? What if their "encryption" was merely inverting the picture? Should it be illegal to watch such "encrypted" TV in a mirror? Absurd idea, right? Well then, at what point is disallowing decryption not absurd? I say that if I can decrypt the signal without paying them for the decryption key, then maybe they need better encryption! It's not right to use the law to cover technical shortcomings.
And of course you find it valuable - if you didn't, you wouldn't expend the effort to decode it. So basically, you want something of value to you, but you don't want to compensate those who bring it to you.
If they want people to stop taking it for free, they need to either (a) stop beaming it down on their property when they haven't paid, or (b) render the signal worthless by making decryption of it impossible without the "key" that they sell. See my paragraph above.
And here you are hoist by your own petard. If not for you, he would have been free to pick up a paying passenger.
Make up your mind - am I responsible for his lost revenue or not?
Yes. Lost actual revenue, a.k.a due compensation for time and expenses providing service to you. Not to be confused with "potential revenue", which is imaginary income you might have made, but have no actual loss of time or material from which to calculate it. How can you demand compensation when there is no loss to be compensated?
You are receiving a service to which you are not entitled - the fact that you don't think you're depriving anyone is completely spurious. Do satellites launch themselves? Do transmissions broadcast themselves?
It is not my responsibility to ensure that DirecTV has a profitable business model. They're giving away the signal and selling the decryption. If people are making their own decryption at home, then DirecTV needs better encryption, not laws dictating the behavior of private citizens in their own homes.
Does content produce itself?
FWIW DirecTV doesn't produce content, it just delivers it. The content production is largely paid for by advertisers (tv) or box office/DVD sales (movies).
So why is the taxi driver entitled to compensation for the service he performs, but the DTV people are not?
They're entitled to compensation for providing me a decryption key
I perhaps should have explained initially that "potential revenue" isn't the same thing as "due compensation". "Lost potential revenue" is a calculation based upon the spurious assumption that those hacking satellite would have paid for the service had hacking not been an option. There is no automatic legal entitlement to potential revenue. For example, Dell cannot sue me for lost potential revenue because I built my own computer, thus depriving them of the opportunity to sell me one.
No, you deprived him of due compensation. "Potential revenue" is the spurious calculation based on the initial premise of "if reality were somehow other than it is". No one has any automatic entitlement to potential revenue. In the case of satellite hackers, the "potential revenue" argument assumes that those people hacking it would have paid for the service had hacking it not been an option.
He was going somewhere anyway, you tool, regardless of whether or not I'm in the car
He wasn't going anywhere until you got in the car and stated a destination.
if it wasn't me, it would have been someone else.
And here you are hoist by your own petard. If not for you, he would have been free to pick up a paying passenger. If you were to hack DirecTV's signal, that does not in any way diminish their capacity to provide it to others.
In the case of a cab, you have hired a man to do a job and then refused compensation upon completion of said job. In the case of satellite hacking, you've hired no one and diminished no one's capacity to provide service. The two are not the same thing.
Oh, bullshit. By that logic, at worst I owe him about $0.50 for depreciation - I guess he can sue me for his four bits then.
It's not bullshit. In cities like Santa Monica, that's why bus rides are only 75 cents- you're only paying for the amortized cost of the service for dozens of riders along fixed routes. A cab driver gets more because you are monopolizing his time. You must pay the cost of the driver's time.
If you are riding in his cab, he can't take another passenger. He most certainly was not "going that way anyway", you knob. Your argument might have had merit in the case of a bus, but even then every person is a load on the vehicle decreasing gas mileage, adding stress to the drivetrain, and rubbing away the vinyl covering on the seat padding.
Please, if you're going to make the argument, think it through. Decoding a satellite signal is not the same thing as:
eating the food in my fridge
using my telephone
not paying a cab fare
shoplifting DVDs
setting fire to pre-schools
dropping an atomic bomb on Hollywood*
Let's have a rational debate, please.
* I'm all in favor of nuking Hollywood, but this is for reasons unrelated to DirecTV hacking