The laws of supply and demand still apply without patents.
In case of a shortage, unless there is some kind of mechanism (like a patent) limiting production capacity, production capacity will increase, and more players will enter the market, lured in by the higher prices.
I never said the price of production should be subsidised. There's a difference between subsidising research and production. The current system is actually a kind of production-based subsidy, come to think of it.:-)
(By the way. I vaguely remember somebody accusing me of being a communist in another thread. Still think that applies?)
The Internet is an open system. Anybody can hook their stuff up as long as they get themselves a connection. There are no license fees due to any organisation holding patents on Internet technology. The Internet itself is a success story in openness, and demonstrates that large complex technological systems can be created without resorting to patents for financing, or closed standards, or other restrictive legislation.
The Internet is what it is today *because* of how unencumbered by patents and how open it is.
There's a difference between the infrastructure passing packets on the Internet and the actual sites on the Internet. As far as I'm aware, there are no direct government subsidies to sites like this one, so they have to make do with ads. And I see no real need for any either, seeing sites like this work just fine, and don't really rely on any kind of copyright law. In fact, sites like this thrive on the fact like people like you and me partially relinquish copyright to get our comments published, and that the web allows hyperlinks to other web sites, allowing Slashdot to quote entire articles without it costing them a dime.
Without any sort of incentive for a writer to get paid, for a publisher to risk shareholder money on an artist, etc., this world would be filled with mediocre books, mediocre music and mediocre movies.
As opposed to today... a world filled with mediocre books, music and movies? Oh wait. Not much of a difference is there.:-)
99% of everything is crap. This is a universal constant, and doesn't change with copyright.
Great litterature, art, music, and science existed way before copyrights and patents were even conceived. Now, given, 99% of that was also crap. Which is why nobody talks about it much these days.
As an example: Shakespeare, Mozart and Sir Isaac Newton, among many others produced a long time copyright was even conceived.
If a company creates something, they do have a certain right (in the liberal market economic sense) to do whatever the hell they want with it regardless of how poor their business model is. The opining of the Norwegian Pirate Party does not negate this. If you are going to argue that laws to protect copyright are outdated because technology to more easily subvert them has been invented, why not argue that the advent of the firearm should mark the end of murder laws?
There is a subtle difference. Bad business models can't and shouldn't be outlawed, but that doesn't mean there should be laws on the books specifically supporting poor business models.
If I invent wonderful technology that acts as a huge catalytic converter, sucks in smog from cities, processing it into clean air, then putting it back into the atmosphere, should I have the right to require random people from breathing the cleaner air they did not solicit or ask for?
The analogy isn't 100%, of course, and I don't want to get drawn into a discussion of this particular analogy, but my point is that legislation shouldn't be used to prop up poor business models.
When it comes to comparing homicide laws with copyright law -- any law is based on a lot of balances. Will an introduction of a law harm or help society as a whole? Does a law represent the predominant values of those within its jurisdiction? It's clear that laws against murder are a clear benifit to society, irrespective of the fact that killing people, even en masse is technically very easy.
It's not as clear that free distribution of material is harmful in the same way, in fact, we feel that restrictions on redistribution are more harmful to society as a whole than the redistribution itself, which we even feel is benificial.
These anti-IP arguments essentially break down to the same knee jerk pro-communism arguments that were very prominent 50 years ago. Socializing goods/services for the purposes of making them "free" to the people who want them has rarely demonstrated anything but disaster for those goods/services. Forcing companies to relinquish ownership of goods (even if technology has made them intangible) will have side effects that go far beyond sticking it to the very rich and getting stuff for free.
There's a big difference between the tangible and the intangible. But please do try to inform yourself better before dismissing pirate idiology as a knee-jerk reaction.
We in the Swedish Pirate Party have a well-defined ideology based on reform of copyrights, patents and privacy. If you take a few minutes to read our declaration of principles (available from this page, look at the bottom of the page for a link to the file), you can see it's not just a loose cloud of concepts, it's in fact a cohesive argument for reform (not abolition) of copyright and patent laws to fit modern society.
And if anything is knee-jerk, it's comparing the Swedish Pirate Party or Norwegian Venstre to communists. The Pirate Party has no specific political direction. I am personally of a similar general conviction of the Norwegian Venstre party -- centre-right. But the leadership of the Pirate Party contains people from all sides of the political spectrum.
(And btw, if you don't like copyright laws, please don't complain the next time someone turns something licensed under the GPL into a closed source product.)
This is a very good point. In fact, Richard M Stallman has approached the Pirate Party with these concerns in the past.
I don't agree with him on these points, how appealing as they ever seem, though. Basically, he wants to legislate putting source code for proprietary software in escrow, and re
Yes. Yes. That's all well and good. But patents aren't the only source of income for pharmaceutical companies to create R&D. There are other methods of funding pharmaceutical development that are already in place -- such as government grants, and research done in academia, that don't involve artificially inflated prices on the newest drugs.
Except this actually *has* made it from the youth section to the main party. That's why this is a big story.
Youth sections holding opinions like this (albeit less well-defined) is nothing new. It's a joke among us in the Swedish Pirate Party that we actually have 8 youth sections. Our own, and one for every single major political power currently represented in parliament.:-)
Good point. But I distrust the government to allocate funding just as much as I distrust Big Pharma.:-)
In Europe, government funding of organisations for the advancement of arts has worked relatively well in the past, I see no reason for it to work in the future for pharmaceutical development, as long as it's not politicised.
Great! Imagine how boring the world would be if everybody were identical of opinion. So I'm glad we can agree to disagree, and even agree to some point.:-)
The Society the Swedish Pirate Party is proposing is hardly radical nor different. We just want laws to match the current information society that is already developing.
The society where these singing muppets on Youtube is technically illegal because the copyright owner has most probably not explicitly permitted Youtube to share that particular piece of video.
But does the presence of this clip and hundreds like it diminish our society? No! It improves it! I feel the world is a much better place now I know that singing muppets are only a few clicks away.:-) Not to mention all the derivative works...
Except I'd rather the authors I like not have to write in their spare time and on lunch breaks. I'd rather they get paid to write, and then have more time to write their books. From a purely consumer standpoint, the idea of less quality books irks the snot out of me. I read voraciously. I don't mind paying for books.
And there's also a lot of crap free stuff on the internet. People who would never normally be given an outlet, and I have to wade through them.
True. 99% of everyting is crap. That includes the 99% of crap that get submitted to publishers on a regular basis.
How do you propose we pay these aspiring big-name writers?
The fact of the matter -- the problem of the starving author is here, not beceause of copyright law, but despite it.
If you have a solution to solve it, great. Let's hear it, but it certainly doesn't have anything to do with copyright law.
Finally, let me point out that neither Venstre nor the Swedish Pirate Party is proposing a complete abolition of copyright -- we just want to make it clear that it should only cover *commercial* exploitation of a work.
Hardcopies of books will still sell, maybe even more if they're freely available on the net before purchase. I can count several books (of a technical nature) that I have purchased of hardcopies, even though the entire contents of the book was (legally even) available for free on the Internet. This is still not a solution to the starving author problem, but still...
Then can you explain why companies holding intellectual property try to prevent its theft? They pay money to create something that can easily be copied, why should they not have exclusive rights on its distribution?
If you actually go back and examine the logic of that statement it borders on the absurd.
Are you seriously suggesting that if a company has a poor business model it's anybodies fault but their own?
The companies holding intellectual property do just that, *hold* it. They're not on anybodys side but their own, in fact, I could argue that they're damaging to society.
I see no reason to continue to support this "industry" based on reinforced outdated legislation. Do you really it's a good idea for a single company to have rights of redistribution to something that's so trivial to redistribute, that millions of people around the world are doing it without even batting an eyelid?
We don't need the companies help to redistribute things any more. If they don't like it, they're welcome to take their profits, close up shop, and pull out. Culture will find its way without them, even better than before they arrived.
Exactly. So if you expect to get paid, don't go writing a book. The starving author is a staple stereotype of today's society, and it isn't because evil pirates are going around xeroxing his book.
Making money on books is *hard*, even today, and that hasn't stopped people from writing books.
So what is it that drives these people to write, even though they almost certainly won't get paid? Probably not copyright.
Creativity needs outlets, and they'll always exist. Why do you think there's so much great free stuff on the Internet? Free software, free music, entertaining webcomics, and even the occasional interesting blog. I've even read a few books published on the Internet.
Except that: 1. Music isn't the only thing that can be copyrighted. Movies can't exactly be performed live and neither can software. 2. Since the invention of the printing press there has been technology for nearly unlimited copying save for a small cost for the actual copy. The xerox allowed for private individuals to make copies. Copyrights exist exactly for this reason, saying technology makes it pointless means you don't know the first thing about them.
There's a big difference between the printing press, the xerox machine, and file sharing.
The printing press meant that organisations could suddenly print large numbers of copies of a single work. Production of copies wasn't the largest cost any more, it was the actual production of the content. Rightly, copyright was instated to prevent other bookprinters from profiteering off somebodyelses work. To this day, the Pirate Party does not condone or support copyright infringement for commercial gain.
The Xerox machine was a revolution in copying technology, but was very limited in its scope. It took considerable work to copy books with a xerox machine. It's self-regulating in that way. There wasn't really any pressure to update copyright laws because the societal impacts of the Xerox machine weren't nearly significant enough.
With file sharing and the Internet, suddenly anybody can make infinite copies at neglible cost of any information that can be stored digitally.
This is a *good thing*, and is a fact of life -- and the status quo can't be maintained through outdated legislation.
You make good points that making money off movies might be hard in the future, but the fact is that the big bucks in movies comes from movie theater tickets. The DVD sales are just extra cream on top, and those crappy cams and telecines you see on file sharing networks are definitely no substitute for the real thing.
Sure, DVD sales may diminish, but that's always been extra cream on top -- not the main bottom line.
Either way, if you start trying to charge for something that's more convenient than file sharing, they will come. It worked for All Of MP3 (shady non-compensation of artists aside), and it would work for the movie industry too. I for one would rather pay a few dollars to watch a movie in DVD-quality using streaming downloading (entirely possible with technology today) than having to wait a few hours to get it off bittorrent. Instead, the content industry has made their own "legitimate download" services more cumbersome than the illegal alternative, and it'll be their undoing.
A similar argument should be made that IP rights to pharmeceuticals should be overturned, so that any company should be allowed to produce knock offs of drugs.
Yes!
In fact, the Swedish Pirate Party (of which I am a member) uses the pharmaceutical industry as an example of an area where patents are harmful.
The pharmaceutical industry today spends more money on advertising than on R&D, and also receives a very large bulk of its funding through government grants and other subsidies.
Getting rid of the patent system would be a big win for society at large. Maybe then we'd get more drugs for things like AIDS and not as many drugs for erectile disfunction.:-)
Speaking of AIDS drugs, a lot of people in the third world can't afford AIDS treatment because of the artificially inflated drug prices due to patents. Are pharmaceutical patents really worth their cost in human lives?
No -- let the governments continue to fund pharmaceutical research -- maybe more than before, and get rid of patents. It's better for everybody in the long run, except for Big Pharma.
This probably got addressed already, but Apple only provides DRM-free versions of their operating system.
Mac OS X contains plenty of DRM. FairPlay technology which restricts copying of songs purchased through iTunes (or more precisely, prevents playback unless the DRM technology is used to unlock the file).
The DVD player software contains DRM software (though thoroughly ineffective, DVD-Jon has seen to that).
I've also heard there may be some DRM in OS X to prevent hackers from running Mac OS X on a generic PC -- but I'm not clued in on that area sufficiently to make a positive assertion of that.
Sure, you can argue that the DRM isn't active unless you have DRM:ed files, and it's the files that are the problem, and not the OS itself -- but the fact is that the DRMed files wouldn't be there if they weren't supported by software.
Yep, working for the people who want to get stuff for free.
Now the people who aren't going to get paid for their work... that's a different matter entirely.
This mentality is behind a lot of misconceptions when it comes to pirate politics.
As Pirates (I am a member of the Swedish Pirate Party) we believe there is no inherent right in getting paid for copies. We do however believe in a right to charge for performing a work.
If artists who are out to make money stop producing due to copyright reform -- good riddance. There'll still be plenty of music and culture left, just as there has always been.
To take one example, in the Music Industry, even the big labels don't see recorded music as a product any more -- but rather as advertising for other events and products.
The fact is that technology for unlimited copying is here -- and the laws preventing private exploitation of this technology are outdated and counterproductive. With new technologies, people and products are made redundant. This happens all the time -- today nobody sees the sharp decline in sales and production of horse-whips after the widespread adoption of the automobile as a bad thing for example.
Interestingly enough, this is an almost word-for-word translation of the Swedish Pirate Party's declaration of principles.
The Swedish Pirate Party didn't explicitly permit this copying, except for declaring their pages to be "No Copyright". I guess Venstre practice what they preach, and the Swedish Pirate Party has also come out with a statement saying that they welcome this act of copying.:-)
More information about this (in Swedish) from Piratpartiet can be found here.
Most DRM hinges on the fact that the content must stay readable, in however limited a sense. In other words, you're giving the encrypted content to the attacker, who also has to have the key in order to use it. The attacker and the intended recipient are the same person.
When you take away that requirement, encryption actually becomes workable.
That's a completely different can of worms though. That's a matter of Microsoft DRM preventing what you can actually do, not a matter of what you should legally be able to do.
I guess the option here is simply... don't run Windows, I guess.
The way I see it, the state has one of two options: 1. Institute seat belt laws. 2. Make it so that even if you are at fault in an accident, if the other party wasn't wearing a seat belt, you don't have to pay a dime.
For the sake of argument, I'm going to grant that installing software means making a copy and as such is covered by copyright law. I can even, for the sake of argument, grant that loading the software into memory means making a copy.
However, that act of making a copy isn't neccessarilly illegal unless permitted by EULA. There is such a thing as "fair use" among other things, which allows you, among other things, to make a copy of your favorite music CD for your own personal use, for example.
I fail to see how installing software would be any different, as I understand it.
My conclusion: EULA's are bogus, and as long as the original is legally obtained, making copies within your own household for personal use cannot be regulated by copyright law. This should mean that you can buy one single copy of Vista Home Edition and put it on every single of your 473 computers in your basement, including the virtual machines.
I'm not sure how this would apply to businesses though. I don't imagine copying every single machine from a single copy of Windows Vista Home Edition would count as fair use.
An even smarter industry would just have put the decoding and decryption chip in the disc reader itself.
Though I guess that means they wouldn't be able to cash in on licensing fees for multiple pieces of hardware, but it would make a lot of engineering sense.
Slashdot Mirror
The laws of supply and demand still apply without patents.
:-)
In case of a shortage, unless there is some kind of mechanism (like a patent) limiting production capacity, production capacity will increase, and more players will enter the market, lured in by the higher prices.
I never said the price of production should be subsidised. There's a difference between subsidising research and production. The current system is actually a kind of production-based subsidy, come to think of it.
(By the way. I vaguely remember somebody accusing me of being a communist in another thread. Still think that applies?)
Non sequitur.
The Internet is an open system. Anybody can hook their stuff up as long as they get themselves a connection. There are no license fees due to any organisation holding patents on Internet technology. The Internet itself is a success story in openness, and demonstrates that large complex technological systems can be created without resorting to patents for financing, or closed standards, or other restrictive legislation.
The Internet is what it is today *because* of how unencumbered by patents and how open it is.
There's a difference between the infrastructure passing packets on the Internet and the actual sites on the Internet. As far as I'm aware, there are no direct government subsidies to sites like this one, so they have to make do with ads. And I see no real need for any either, seeing sites like this work just fine, and don't really rely on any kind of copyright law. In fact, sites like this thrive on the fact like people like you and me partially relinquish copyright to get our comments published, and that the web allows hyperlinks to other web sites, allowing Slashdot to quote entire articles without it costing them a dime.
I really don't want to point to iTunes as a good example due to their usage of DRM, effectively locking you into a single portable music player.
I'm as much against DRM as I am against enforcement of copyright law for non-commercial purposes.
99% of everything is crap. This is a universal constant, and doesn't change with copyright.
Great litterature, art, music, and science existed way before copyrights and patents were even conceived. Now, given, 99% of that was also crap. Which is why nobody talks about it much these days.
As an example: Shakespeare, Mozart and Sir Isaac Newton, among many others produced a long time copyright was even conceived.
There is a subtle difference. Bad business models can't and shouldn't be outlawed, but that doesn't mean there should be laws on the books specifically supporting poor business models.
If I invent wonderful technology that acts as a huge catalytic converter, sucks in smog from cities, processing it into clean air, then putting it back into the atmosphere, should I have the right to require random people from breathing the cleaner air they did not solicit or ask for?
The analogy isn't 100%, of course, and I don't want to get drawn into a discussion of this particular analogy, but my point is that legislation shouldn't be used to prop up poor business models.
When it comes to comparing homicide laws with copyright law -- any law is based on a lot of balances. Will an introduction of a law harm or help society as a whole? Does a law represent the predominant values of those within its jurisdiction? It's clear that laws against murder are a clear benifit to society, irrespective of the fact that killing people, even en masse is technically very easy.
It's not as clear that free distribution of material is harmful in the same way, in fact, we feel that restrictions on redistribution are more harmful to society as a whole than the redistribution itself, which we even feel is benificial.
There's a big difference between the tangible and the intangible. But please do try to inform yourself better before dismissing pirate idiology as a knee-jerk reaction.
We in the Swedish Pirate Party have a well-defined ideology based on reform of copyrights, patents and privacy. If you take a few minutes to read our declaration of principles (available from this page, look at the bottom of the page for a link to the file), you can see it's not just a loose cloud of concepts, it's in fact a cohesive argument for reform (not abolition) of copyright and patent laws to fit modern society.
And if anything is knee-jerk, it's comparing the Swedish Pirate Party or Norwegian Venstre to communists. The Pirate Party has no specific political direction. I am personally of a similar general conviction of the Norwegian Venstre party -- centre-right. But the leadership of the Pirate Party contains people from all sides of the political spectrum.
This is a very good point. In fact, Richard M Stallman has approached the Pirate Party with these concerns in the past.
:-)
In fact, he will be speaking at Göteborg University in about a month, and will specifically take up what he thinks we're doing wrong.
I don't agree with him on these points, how appealing as they ever seem, though. Basically, he wants to legislate putting source code for proprietary software in escrow, and re
I meant to paste a link into my reply above, but somehow I must have lost it before it got lost. Oops.
:-)
Anyway, I suggest you read the Swedish Pirate Party's stance on the position of pharmaceutical patents. It's a much more eloquent document than I could hope to reproduce in a slashdot comment at this hour.
Yes. Yes. That's all well and good. But patents aren't the only source of income for pharmaceutical companies to create R&D. There are other methods of funding pharmaceutical development that are already in place -- such as government grants, and research done in academia, that don't involve artificially inflated prices on the newest drugs.
Except this actually *has* made it from the youth section to the main party. That's why this is a big story.
:-)
Youth sections holding opinions like this (albeit less well-defined) is nothing new. It's a joke among us in the Swedish Pirate Party that we actually have 8 youth sections. Our own, and one for every single major political power currently represented in parliament.
Good point. But I distrust the government to allocate funding just as much as I distrust Big Pharma. :-)
In Europe, government funding of organisations for the advancement of arts has worked relatively well in the past, I see no reason for it to work in the future for pharmaceutical development, as long as it's not politicised.
Great! Imagine how boring the world would be if everybody were identical of opinion. So I'm glad we can agree to disagree, and even agree to some point. :-)
The Society the Swedish Pirate Party is proposing is hardly radical nor different. We just want laws to match the current information society that is already developing.
:-) Not to mention all the derivative works...
The society where these singing muppets on Youtube is technically illegal because the copyright owner has most probably not explicitly permitted Youtube to share that particular piece of video.
But does the presence of this clip and hundreds like it diminish our society? No! It improves it! I feel the world is a much better place now I know that singing muppets are only a few clicks away.
How do you propose we pay these aspiring big-name writers?
The fact of the matter -- the problem of the starving author is here, not beceause of copyright law, but despite it.
If you have a solution to solve it, great. Let's hear it, but it certainly doesn't have anything to do with copyright law.
Finally, let me point out that neither Venstre nor the Swedish Pirate Party is proposing a complete abolition of copyright -- we just want to make it clear that it should only cover *commercial* exploitation of a work.
Hardcopies of books will still sell, maybe even more if they're freely available on the net before purchase. I can count several books (of a technical nature) that I have purchased of hardcopies, even though the entire contents of the book was (legally even) available for free on the Internet. This is still not a solution to the starving author problem, but still...
Are you seriously suggesting that if a company has a poor business model it's anybodies fault but their own?
The companies holding intellectual property do just that, *hold* it. They're not on anybodys side but their own, in fact, I could argue that they're damaging to society.
I see no reason to continue to support this "industry" based on reinforced outdated legislation. Do you really it's a good idea for a single company to have rights of redistribution to something that's so trivial to redistribute, that millions of people around the world are doing it without even batting an eyelid?
We don't need the companies help to redistribute things any more. If they don't like it, they're welcome to take their profits, close up shop, and pull out. Culture will find its way without them, even better than before they arrived.
Exactly. So if you expect to get paid, don't go writing a book. The starving author is a staple stereotype of today's society, and it isn't because evil pirates are going around xeroxing his book.
Making money on books is *hard*, even today, and that hasn't stopped people from writing books.
So what is it that drives these people to write, even though they almost certainly won't get paid? Probably not copyright.
Creativity needs outlets, and they'll always exist. Why do you think there's so much great free stuff on the Internet? Free software, free music, entertaining webcomics, and even the occasional interesting blog. I've even read a few books published on the Internet.
There's a big difference between the printing press, the xerox machine, and file sharing.
The printing press meant that organisations could suddenly print large numbers of copies of a single work. Production of copies wasn't the largest cost any more, it was the actual production of the content. Rightly, copyright was instated to prevent other bookprinters from profiteering off somebodyelses work. To this day, the Pirate Party does not condone or support copyright infringement for commercial gain.
The Xerox machine was a revolution in copying technology, but was very limited in its scope. It took considerable work to copy books with a xerox machine. It's self-regulating in that way. There wasn't really any pressure to update copyright laws because the societal impacts of the Xerox machine weren't nearly significant enough.
With file sharing and the Internet, suddenly anybody can make infinite copies at neglible cost of any information that can be stored digitally.
This is a *good thing*, and is a fact of life -- and the status quo can't be maintained through outdated legislation.
You make good points that making money off movies might be hard in the future, but the fact is that the big bucks in movies comes from movie theater tickets. The DVD sales are just extra cream on top, and those crappy cams and telecines you see on file sharing networks are definitely no substitute for the real thing.
Sure, DVD sales may diminish, but that's always been extra cream on top -- not the main bottom line.
Either way, if you start trying to charge for something that's more convenient than file sharing, they will come. It worked for All Of MP3 (shady non-compensation of artists aside), and it would work for the movie industry too. I for one would rather pay a few dollars to watch a movie in DVD-quality using streaming downloading (entirely possible with technology today) than having to wait a few hours to get it off bittorrent. Instead, the content industry has made their own "legitimate download" services more cumbersome than the illegal alternative, and it'll be their undoing.
In fact, the Swedish Pirate Party (of which I am a member) uses the pharmaceutical industry as an example of an area where patents are harmful.
The pharmaceutical industry today spends more money on advertising than on R&D, and also receives a very large bulk of its funding through government grants and other subsidies.
Getting rid of the patent system would be a big win for society at large. Maybe then we'd get more drugs for things like AIDS and not as many drugs for erectile disfunction.
Speaking of AIDS drugs, a lot of people in the third world can't afford AIDS treatment because of the artificially inflated drug prices due to patents. Are pharmaceutical patents really worth their cost in human lives?
No -- let the governments continue to fund pharmaceutical research -- maybe more than before, and get rid of patents. It's better for everybody in the long run, except for Big Pharma.
The DVD player software contains DRM software (though thoroughly ineffective, DVD-Jon has seen to that).
I've also heard there may be some DRM in OS X to prevent hackers from running Mac OS X on a generic PC -- but I'm not clued in on that area sufficiently to make a positive assertion of that.
Sure, you can argue that the DRM isn't active unless you have DRM:ed files, and it's the files that are the problem, and not the OS itself -- but the fact is that the DRMed files wouldn't be there if they weren't supported by software.
As Pirates (I am a member of the Swedish Pirate Party) we believe there is no inherent right in getting paid for copies. We do however believe in a right to charge for performing a work.
If artists who are out to make money stop producing due to copyright reform -- good riddance. There'll still be plenty of music and culture left, just as there has always been.
To take one example, in the Music Industry, even the big labels don't see recorded music as a product any more -- but rather as advertising for other events and products.
The fact is that technology for unlimited copying is here -- and the laws preventing private exploitation of this technology are outdated and counterproductive. With new technologies, people and products are made redundant. This happens all the time -- today nobody sees the sharp decline in sales and production of horse-whips after the widespread adoption of the automobile as a bad thing for example.
Interestingly enough, this is an almost word-for-word translation of the Swedish Pirate Party's declaration of principles.
:-)
The Swedish Pirate Party didn't explicitly permit this copying, except for declaring their pages to be "No Copyright". I guess Venstre practice what they preach, and the Swedish Pirate Party has also come out with a statement saying that they welcome this act of copying.
More information about this (in Swedish) from Piratpartiet can be found here.
There's a funamental difference here.
Most DRM hinges on the fact that the content must stay readable, in however limited a sense. In other words, you're giving the encrypted content to the attacker, who also has to have the key in order to use it. The attacker and the intended recipient are the same person.
When you take away that requirement, encryption actually becomes workable.
So how do you explain the relative success of Farscape? 4 seasons and at least one movie.
That's a completely different can of worms though. That's a matter of Microsoft DRM preventing what you can actually do, not a matter of what you should legally be able to do.
I guess the option here is simply... don't run Windows, I guess.
The state could do both.
This does seem like a red herring though.
For the sake of argument, I'm going to grant that installing software means making a copy and as such is covered by copyright law. I can even, for the sake of argument, grant that loading the software into memory means making a copy.
However, that act of making a copy isn't neccessarilly illegal unless permitted by EULA. There is such a thing as "fair use" among other things, which allows you, among other things, to make a copy of your favorite music CD for your own personal use, for example.
I fail to see how installing software would be any different, as I understand it.
My conclusion: EULA's are bogus, and as long as the original is legally obtained, making copies within your own household for personal use cannot be regulated by copyright law. This should mean that you can buy one single copy of Vista Home Edition and put it on every single of your 473 computers in your basement, including the virtual machines.
I'm not sure how this would apply to businesses though. I don't imagine copying every single machine from a single copy of Windows Vista Home Edition would count as fair use.
An even smarter industry would just have put the decoding and decryption chip in the disc reader itself.
Though I guess that means they wouldn't be able to cash in on licensing fees for multiple pieces of hardware, but it would make a lot of engineering sense.