Cops don't fuck around - it's their life on the line
Hah! Not only is their job far safer than many others, but they're far more likely to kill or seriously injure the person they stop than vice versa. In the vast majority of cases they're the only armed parties and usually are not there alone.
This border guard for instance had NO reason to fear for his safety at all. He'd already been in the vehicle with the suspect - the very place he'd have been knifed, etc, and was now safely back out of the vehicle. If he had felt threatened he'd have backed off and waited until other heavily armed guards could arrive - in seconds.
I think you meant to say: "Cops fuck around when it's only your life on the line."
Canadian police use the exact same procedure (keep the person in the car
It's policy!? OMFG. Well why didn't you say so!
It's also passive aggressive. You've been stopped. You need to leave your hands visible, not make any sudden movements, and now sit and wait - often ten or more minutes. (And that's for routine traffic stuff.)
I'm sure they love the freedom that comes from you being afraid and sitting in your car - it gives them time for a snack, but it's thoroughly unreasonable to say that merely getting out of your car to go talk to them is confrontational. People have a right to question those who stop them, and can reasonably be expected to do so.
It's just another in the endless list of unknowable laws you can break and procedures you can interfere with that will be used to criminalize you.
Just get in the fucking car and ask why on the way, don't be an ass.
Ahh yes, because questioning orders makes you an ass.
Clearly delaying laying down by a few seconds would have cost the hostages their lives - oh wait, no hostages, no urgency, no problem.
Like I said, this is potentially life or death for these guys, they don't have the luxury
Again, pity the people with all the power, the protection, and the weapons. Pity them because they might break a nail while beating someone.
Customs agents certainly do not die at the hands of border crossers often enough to qualify it as a dangerous job. However enough border crossers are beaten and killed without good reason (ie, no weapons, smuggling, etc) to qualify crossing the border as a dangerous action.
... kind to every asshole out there because one of them could be a drug-runner willing to kill a couple cops to get away
Strange definition of kind you have - merely not beating him would have sufficed.
Pft. If a drug runner decided to shoot his way out he wouldn't wait until he'd been given a stupid order and then question it, he'd just start shooting.
These are all just pointless excuses, and pointless justifications from you, for something that is at best a total fucking waste of tax money. If all you have to offer is trying to sweep things under the rug then shut the fuck up.
I imagine that's what they're expecting, if not looking forward to.
We'll devalue our currency to facilitate paying back the loan, our total world power will match that of the Bahamas and they'll have pulled something like a Reagan on us.
If they were afraid and needed to control him they wouldn't close to punching range in his car where he could grab a weapon, they'd have backed off and used pepper spray. (If words didn't work - surely five minutes of talking someone down is cheaper than applying force.) Fists and batons are pretty much always pointless violence.
And this isn't efficient or useful. Better roadside manner would have gotten more cars searched which is what we're paying these jackasses to do.
People start arguing technicalities and lose sight of the real issue, which is that these people are our employees and we're not getting good value. At best they're engaged in pointless busywork. I bet everyone on the law enforcement side got a ton of overtime out of this.
It's telling in these police-brutality threads that the thug justifiers always use the brutality as tautological proof of why you shouldn't do something. "They told him not to, he did, and then they had to beat him." They never get into why a public trained to unconditionally follow orders would be a good thing.
Sure, if we leave it for slime like you, it's not. You'll twist anything to draw useless distinctions between simultaneous events.
the jurors saw the video. They convicted. End of story.
No asshole. The middle of one story, about someone being beaten for no good fucking reason. And the beginning of the story for a room full of jurors who only now hear about how they could have just refused to convict for the crime of failing to stroke police ego (er, sorry, failing to follow pointless orders with a smile). That's going to leave them bitter and wondering why they bother paying taxes, worried someone will rig another innocent jury and do the same to them some day.
Yeah yeah, this trial, these charges, etc. All hand-picked of course to remove any question of the legitimacy of the orders, the urgency, etc. Their conviction was assured because they were talking about such a narrow issue, but that's why it's totally irrelevant to the larger issue of abuse of authority.
If Watts is stupid it's for being born into a world full of thugs and thug defenders like you.
No amount of being beaten for failing to follow retarded orders is ever okay. The police have those powers so they could theoretically use them to save lives, etc - not so that every little bullying action is swept under the rug.
IF what he did was a crime, and by crime, I mean in the eyes of the people who fund the system not just in the cops' eyes, then warning followed by arrest would have been warranted, not beatings. There's a world of difference between temporary non-compliance and a threat needing subduing.
That they've managed to cherry-pick the specific set of actions that makes him a criminal without discussing their actions that make them violent psychopaths is a mere legal technicality not a societally valid defense.
No it's not, you're pretending to be picked on for your unconventional attitude when really it's just you intentionally missing the point. You're trying to spin the "monopolists'" position into something crazy like 100% ownership of something.
The power MS abused (against vendors offering OS choices, etc) came from being a monopoly - the ability to dictate terms because of the other party's lack of options. Arbitrary pricing, exclusive deals, etc.
Put simply, if you asked the man in the street what valid alternatives to MS-Windows were they couldn't have named any. That's the monopoly.
No, you're reading that incorrectly. He has a point, seriously.
The 3-month time-frame is a made up number but the point isn't that old data isn't important, but that if old data is important we need to assume the enemy could collect it and use it.
I mean, if we were really worried because the North Koreans could figure out the number of soldiers we had deployed, then we're hooped. This data just isn't secret. You could install traffic counters at fast-food stores near bases in the USA and get vague trends that way, combine with sat photos, facebook leaks, , old-fashioned spying, etc, and you'd be able to piece together a fairly good guess.
So what we need to do is twofold. First, obviously, clamp down where possible on leaks, but realistically, assume that after some short period the enemy is reading our email and make changes to defenses that would be weakened. (change passwords and other secrets.)
should we give [NK] the plans just because Russia has them?
No. We give our own people the information.
NK can already get anything from Russia/etc so we aren't protecting anyone.
It's just the safe way to plan - assume the enemy learns your secrets quickly and uses your tricks against you.
Yes, including the secret parts Microsoft isn't let into.
just like Microsoft used to leverage Windows marketshare to gain marketshare for IE
Outright crimes? Deliberately ruining standards processes? Lying about and suing their competition?
You're a roaring idiot. Microsoft got ahead by breaking laws and acting like assholes. Google got ahead by providing better results and a decent user experience.
What government ever has other plans for the people who it forces to be IDed?
Universal health care and education don't require IDs, separating out dissidents does.
Are you sure you're nobody's Tutsi, Hutu, Jew, Palestinian, Commie, Capitalist, Intellectual, copyright violator, etc? It's a big world and people are creative when drawing lines.
I don't subscribe to the Singularity, a deus ex machina if ever there was one,
Not if you don't expect it to save you from anything. It's as likely to be evil AI, grey goo, or gene-mod werewolves as to be helpful stuff.
That's the point, it's by definition the stuff you can't predict. At that, it's tautological. For any knowledge base, there has to be something you can't reason about.
It might never get to the point where everything changes unpredictably by tomorrow as in fiction. Or, as some have suggested it's already passed the majority by. (As in, trying to make a complex determination about something is already just chance for many.)
Time spent on the site, the number of people who post--we're the leader.
You know who else has a ton of comments? Youtube.
Craigslist is full of inarticulate twats and the flat message mode makes any serious discussion nearly impossible.
Also annoying is the amount of censorship (This comment has been removed by moderators...) At least Slashdot (mostly) just hides stuff from casual view.
we're the leader. It could be we're doing one or two things right.
It's like they stopped webdev in '96 or so. If they're successful, it's inertia.
I would guess that I have spent far more time than most people in this discussion researching the legalities and economics of how copyright is implemented today, the merit or otherwise of the underlying principle, the differences between copyright in different jurisdictions and the impact those have
And yet in the end you still buy into the tired argument that government monopolies promote anything other than lawyers.
The huge Hollywood studios would be unlikely in a world without copyright, sure. By the standard that a copyright must promote THESE things, no alternative comes close.
But the purpose of government is to make all aspects of life better, not to tax or oppress in one area to improve another. What would the world be like? Would we be right here now but with less works being produced? No, we'd also be taxed less, free to copy anything we could see, free of EULAs, etc.
Further, the idea that less works would be produced seems unlikely, as many people create and yet don't expect monetary rewards - FOSS, YouTube, amateur porn, fiction/fanfic, howtos/faqs, etc. Few would reach the polish of a blockbuster movie, but there are fewer blockbuster movies...
My problem with the anti-copyright crowd isn't that I can't imagine a different world. It's that I have explored many of them, and I have yet to find one that stands up to scrutiny as well as the basic idea of copyright plus the obvious reforms to prevent abuses by various participants that are widespread today.
That's what I mean. You have a bunch of unstated requirements that a copyright replacement must meet (to produce near identical results to now) and anything which doesn't is ignored.
Any rational set of guidelines (by and for the people) would say "can't be used to censor or take something out of print" (How does that help the public?). But we don't have this currently and so you place little value on it when considering options - likely not even giving it much thought.
I value simple laws and little enforcement. To be policed effectively things like copyright need an enforcement arm bigger than what we use to stop murderers and bank robbers, as well as draconian laws that would prevent you (3 strikes and you're off the net) from connection your computer to another if you've ever even been accused of unwittingly participated in the duplicating of some piece of a copyrighted work. How does that promote science and the useful arts?
You see Hollywood blockbusters, I see the BSA forcing their way into a business - with armed marshals - and performing forced audits. You see CNN/Fox news , I see CRU using copyright to fight the leaking of their emails, and Oracle leveraging EULAs into NDAs.
I can't propose anything that generates the funds that someone in your position would say is a requirement, based on matching our current situation. Rupert Murdoch, etc, make fortunes that a less powerful copyright system would not ensure. But in my scenarios we don't need armed thugs holding back the digital tide. What's better in the end depends if you're stuck paying for the thugs to collect the loot or are being given the loot.
So no, I don't think you see or fully consider/understand many of the options, such as just dropping the whole mess.
On this point I am really saddened by the Obama administration. The 3-strikes-and-out is hugely unpopular including amongst artists.
Nah, it's cool. They're applying the longer copyrights retroactively as well, and are going to find Disney in violation.
Actually, that's it. It's not just the longer copyrights, it's the longer copyrights back-dated just far enough to help Disney, but not far enough to hurt. If these things weren't fucked with by lobbyists we might respect them a bit.
Homer didn't have to invest thousands or even millions of dollars in special effects or recording studios in order to "write" the Odyssey
Nor do most authors.
Pirating is stealing.
No, stealing removes something from the original owner's possession. Copying is abuse of government monopoly, that's it.
They're stealing because technology makes it easy and safe.
No. Because the nature of the thing makes 'protecting' it the irrational and impossible choice. Copying a book used to be hard, now it's trivial to have happen accidentally. Strange, I don't feel like a hardened criminal when my backup script grabs the ebooks, or even if I read one book on many devices.
If you saw someone wearing a cool hat/jacket and copied them you'd be doing the equivalent of using a patented technology, or copying a copyrighted look, yet nobody would say you stole (deprived the original dresser of) their clothes...
Of course, if they were an aspiring fashion designer they'd probably feel as entitled to copyright protection as some yahoo smacking a shutter, or writing a poem. All are moderately creative works.
Well, among the fundamental differences are that pizzas are commodities and paintings are not
Paintings would be if you had to redo them to eat...
producing a pizza takes seconds while producing a good painting takes days
Taking a photo takes seconds. In fact, it can often be done multiple times in a second. With less skill. Pressing the shutter blindly can result in a copyrighted inside-of-the-lens-cap image - ala John Cage.
Bad pizzas are an abomination.
producing a pizza requires throwing some ingredients on a base while producing a good painting requires skill and talent.
And yet, even crap is protected...
The biggest reason is that we had 'pizza' before we had lawyers.
The ability to easily copy books and other materials wasn't even around until the printing press
Exactly, and yet books were written, even without a mass market audience.
As another poster pointed out, the invention of the printing press was followed shortly by the invention of copyright.
Which was mainly about governmental control at first.
gloss over the works that current industries produce, and then even leave out an entire industry worth billions of dollars... well it doesn't say much for your argument.
The same way you ignore the fashion industry, etc.
Yes, some things would change, others would not. Already, because of copying and increased user control many top-end games require you to play on authorized servers. They give away WoW and still get people to pay to use it.
That's essentially how it'd work without copyright.
And frankly, I just don't care to support this anymore. Taxes fund copyrights, and I'm not getting good value.
That's a trademark/truth-in-advertising issue. There's a difference between asking for Coke and getting Pepsi, and Pepsi simply trying to taste more like Coke.
Slashdot Mirror
Cops don't fuck around - it's their life on the line
Hah! Not only is their job far safer than many others, but they're far more likely to kill or seriously injure the person they stop than vice versa. In the vast majority of cases they're the only armed parties and usually are not there alone.
This border guard for instance had NO reason to fear for his safety at all. He'd already been in the vehicle with the suspect - the very place he'd have been knifed, etc, and was now safely back out of the vehicle. If he had felt threatened he'd have backed off and waited until other heavily armed guards could arrive - in seconds.
I think you meant to say: "Cops fuck around when it's only your life on the line."
Canadian police use the exact same procedure (keep the person in the car
It's policy!? OMFG. Well why didn't you say so!
It's also passive aggressive. You've been stopped. You need to leave your hands visible, not make any sudden movements, and now sit and wait - often ten or more minutes. (And that's for routine traffic stuff.)
I'm sure they love the freedom that comes from you being afraid and sitting in your car - it gives them time for a snack, but it's thoroughly unreasonable to say that merely getting out of your car to go talk to them is confrontational. People have a right to question those who stop them, and can reasonably be expected to do so.
It's just another in the endless list of unknowable laws you can break and procedures you can interfere with that will be used to criminalize you.
Just get in the fucking car and ask why on the way, don't be an ass.
Ahh yes, because questioning orders makes you an ass.
Clearly delaying laying down by a few seconds would have cost the hostages their lives - oh wait, no hostages, no urgency, no problem.
Like I said, this is potentially life or death for these guys, they don't have the luxury
Again, pity the people with all the power, the protection, and the weapons. Pity them because they might break a nail while beating someone.
Customs agents certainly do not die at the hands of border crossers often enough to qualify it as a dangerous job. However enough border crossers are beaten and killed without good reason (ie, no weapons, smuggling, etc) to qualify crossing the border as a dangerous action.
... kind to every asshole out there because one of them could be a drug-runner willing to kill a couple cops to get away
Strange definition of kind you have - merely not beating him would have sufficed.
Pft. If a drug runner decided to shoot his way out he wouldn't wait until he'd been given a stupid order and then question it, he'd just start shooting.
These are all just pointless excuses, and pointless justifications from you, for something that is at best a total fucking waste of tax money. If all you have to offer is trying to sweep things under the rug then shut the fuck up.
I imagine that's what they're expecting, if not looking forward to.
We'll devalue our currency to facilitate paying back the loan, our total world power will match that of the Bahamas and they'll have pulled something like a Reagan on us.
Exactly. Nothing justified this.
If they were afraid and needed to control him they wouldn't close to punching range in his car where he could grab a weapon, they'd have backed off and used pepper spray. (If words didn't work - surely five minutes of talking someone down is cheaper than applying force.) Fists and batons are pretty much always pointless violence.
And this isn't efficient or useful. Better roadside manner would have gotten more cars searched which is what we're paying these jackasses to do.
People start arguing technicalities and lose sight of the real issue, which is that these people are our employees and we're not getting good value. At best they're engaged in pointless busywork. I bet everyone on the law enforcement side got a ton of overtime out of this.
It's telling in these police-brutality threads that the thug justifiers always use the brutality as tautological proof of why you shouldn't do something. "They told him not to, he did, and then they had to beat him." They never get into why a public trained to unconditionally follow orders would be a good thing.
It's not a question of who said what
Sure, if we leave it for slime like you, it's not. You'll twist anything to draw useless distinctions between simultaneous events.
the jurors saw the video. They convicted. End of story.
No asshole. The middle of one story, about someone being beaten for no good fucking reason. And the beginning of the story for a room full of jurors who only now hear about how they could have just refused to convict for the crime of failing to stroke police ego (er, sorry, failing to follow pointless orders with a smile). That's going to leave them bitter and wondering why they bother paying taxes, worried someone will rig another innocent jury and do the same to them some day.
Yeah yeah, this trial, these charges, etc. All hand-picked of course to remove any question of the legitimacy of the orders, the urgency, etc. Their conviction was assured because they were talking about such a narrow issue, but that's why it's totally irrelevant to the larger issue of abuse of authority.
If Watts is stupid it's for being born into a world full of thugs and thug defenders like you.
Watts is an asshole, pure and simple.
Choke and die motherfucker. Please.
You're blaming the victim.
No amount of being beaten for failing to follow retarded orders is ever okay. The police have those powers so they could theoretically use them to save lives, etc - not so that every little bullying action is swept under the rug.
IF what he did was a crime, and by crime, I mean in the eyes of the people who fund the system not just in the cops' eyes, then warning followed by arrest would have been warranted, not beatings. There's a world of difference between temporary non-compliance and a threat needing subduing.
That they've managed to cherry-pick the specific set of actions that makes him a criminal without discussing their actions that make them violent psychopaths is a mere legal technicality not a societally valid defense.
No it's not, you're pretending to be picked on for your unconventional attitude when really it's just you intentionally missing the point. You're trying to spin the "monopolists'" position into something crazy like 100% ownership of something.
The power MS abused (against vendors offering OS choices, etc) came from being a monopoly - the ability to dictate terms because of the other party's lack of options. Arbitrary pricing, exclusive deals, etc.
Put simply, if you asked the man in the street what valid alternatives to MS-Windows were they couldn't have named any. That's the monopoly.
No, you're reading that incorrectly. He has a point, seriously.
The 3-month time-frame is a made up number but the point isn't that old data isn't important, but that if old data is important we need to assume the enemy could collect it and use it.
I mean, if we were really worried because the North Koreans could figure out the number of soldiers we had deployed, then we're hooped. This data just isn't secret. You could install traffic counters at fast-food stores near bases in the USA and get vague trends that way, combine with sat photos, facebook leaks, , old-fashioned spying, etc, and you'd be able to piece together a fairly good guess.
So what we need to do is twofold. First, obviously, clamp down where possible on leaks, but realistically, assume that after some short period the enemy is reading our email and make changes to defenses that would be weakened. (change passwords and other secrets.)
should we give [NK] the plans just because Russia has them?
No. We give our own people the information.
NK can already get anything from Russia/etc so we aren't protecting anyone.
It's just the safe way to plan - assume the enemy learns your secrets quickly and uses your tricks against you.
Google datamines everywhere on the Internet.
Yes, including the secret parts Microsoft isn't let into.
just like Microsoft used to leverage Windows marketshare to gain marketshare for IE
Outright crimes? Deliberately ruining standards processes? Lying about and suing their competition?
You're a roaring idiot. Microsoft got ahead by breaking laws and acting like assholes. Google got ahead by providing better results and a decent user experience.
Just because china is crappy to its citizens doesn't mean we [don't recognize] their sovereignty.
Actually, yes, it does. That, and its claim on others such as Taiwan and Tibet, who have made their wishes clear.
What government ever has other plans for the people who it forces to be IDed?
Universal health care and education don't require IDs, separating out dissidents does.
Are you sure you're nobody's Tutsi, Hutu, Jew, Palestinian, Commie, Capitalist, Intellectual, copyright violator, etc? It's a big world and people are creative when drawing lines.
Like that Taiwan is another country?
And when the fact that monkeys have weird monkey sex gets out, the world will end.
IMHO, the law is for the benefit of the blackmailer... And optional.
Thats what you'd tell him.
Actually, that's a good idea... Who else can you rob without moral qualms other than someone who supports robbing?
I don't subscribe to the Singularity, a deus ex machina if ever there was one,
Not if you don't expect it to save you from anything. It's as likely to be evil AI, grey goo, or gene-mod werewolves as to be helpful stuff.
That's the point, it's by definition the stuff you can't predict. At that, it's tautological. For any knowledge base, there has to be something you can't reason about.
It might never get to the point where everything changes unpredictably by tomorrow as in fiction. Or, as some have suggested it's already passed the majority by. (As in, trying to make a complex determination about something is already just chance for many.)
Less browser support so they usually don't play?
Visiting a myspace/etc page on someone else's computer reminds me how many different forms of blink tag there are.
<blink rate='epilepsy inducing'>
Time spent on the site, the number of people who post--we're the leader.
You know who else has a ton of comments? Youtube.
Craigslist is full of inarticulate twats and the flat message mode makes any serious discussion nearly impossible.
Also annoying is the amount of censorship (This comment has been removed by moderators...) At least Slashdot (mostly) just hides stuff from casual view.
we're the leader. It could be we're doing one or two things right.
It's like they stopped webdev in '96 or so. If they're successful, it's inertia.
Craigslist wants to disable mashups? Their prerogative.
Not really. They can try by banning user agents, but you can get around that easily.
As long as they give you their data they can't control how you use it.
I would guess that I have spent far more time than most people in this discussion researching the legalities and economics of how copyright is implemented today, the merit or otherwise of the underlying principle, the differences between copyright in different jurisdictions and the impact those have
And yet in the end you still buy into the tired argument that government monopolies promote anything other than lawyers.
The huge Hollywood studios would be unlikely in a world without copyright, sure. By the standard that a copyright must promote THESE things, no alternative comes close.
But the purpose of government is to make all aspects of life better, not to tax or oppress in one area to improve another. What would the world be like? Would we be right here now but with less works being produced? No, we'd also be taxed less, free to copy anything we could see, free of EULAs, etc.
Further, the idea that less works would be produced seems unlikely, as many people create and yet don't expect monetary rewards - FOSS, YouTube, amateur porn, fiction/fanfic, howtos/faqs, etc. Few would reach the polish of a blockbuster movie, but there are fewer blockbuster movies...
My problem with the anti-copyright crowd isn't that I can't imagine a different world. It's that I have explored many of them, and I have yet to find one that stands up to scrutiny as well as the basic idea of copyright plus the obvious reforms to prevent abuses by various participants that are widespread today.
That's what I mean. You have a bunch of unstated requirements that a copyright replacement must meet (to produce near identical results to now) and anything which doesn't is ignored.
Any rational set of guidelines (by and for the people) would say "can't be used to censor or take something out of print" (How does that help the public?). But we don't have this currently and so you place little value on it when considering options - likely not even giving it much thought.
I value simple laws and little enforcement. To be policed effectively things like copyright need an enforcement arm bigger than what we use to stop murderers and bank robbers, as well as draconian laws that would prevent you (3 strikes and you're off the net) from connection your computer to another if you've ever even been accused of unwittingly participated in the duplicating of some piece of a copyrighted work. How does that promote science and the useful arts?
You see Hollywood blockbusters, I see the BSA forcing their way into a business - with armed marshals - and performing forced audits. You see CNN/Fox news , I see CRU using copyright to fight the leaking of their emails, and Oracle leveraging EULAs into NDAs.
I can't propose anything that generates the funds that someone in your position would say is a requirement, based on matching our current situation. Rupert Murdoch, etc, make fortunes that a less powerful copyright system would not ensure. But in my scenarios we don't need armed thugs holding back the digital tide. What's better in the end depends if you're stuck paying for the thugs to collect the loot or are being given the loot.
So no, I don't think you see or fully consider/understand many of the options, such as just dropping the whole mess.
On this point I am really saddened by the Obama administration. The 3-strikes-and-out is hugely unpopular including amongst artists.
Nah, it's cool. They're applying the longer copyrights retroactively as well, and are going to find Disney in violation.
Actually, that's it. It's not just the longer copyrights, it's the longer copyrights back-dated just far enough to help Disney, but not far enough to hurt. If these things weren't fucked with by lobbyists we might respect them a bit.
Homer didn't have to invest thousands or even millions of dollars in special effects or recording studios in order to "write" the Odyssey
Nor do most authors.
Pirating is stealing.
No, stealing removes something from the original owner's possession. Copying is abuse of government monopoly, that's it.
They're stealing because technology makes it easy and safe.
No. Because the nature of the thing makes 'protecting' it the irrational and impossible choice. Copying a book used to be hard, now it's trivial to have happen accidentally. Strange, I don't feel like a hardened criminal when my backup script grabs the ebooks, or even if I read one book on many devices.
If you saw someone wearing a cool hat/jacket and copied them you'd be doing the equivalent of using a patented technology, or copying a copyrighted look, yet nobody would say you stole (deprived the original dresser of) their clothes...
Of course, if they were an aspiring fashion designer they'd probably feel as entitled to copyright protection as some yahoo smacking a shutter, or writing a poem. All are moderately creative works.
Well, among the fundamental differences are that pizzas are commodities and paintings are not
Paintings would be if you had to redo them to eat...
producing a pizza takes seconds while producing a good painting takes days
Taking a photo takes seconds. In fact, it can often be done multiple times in a second. With less skill. Pressing the shutter blindly can result in a copyrighted inside-of-the-lens-cap image - ala John Cage.
Bad pizzas are an abomination.
producing a pizza requires throwing some ingredients on a base while producing a good painting requires skill and talent.
And yet, even crap is protected...
The biggest reason is that we had 'pizza' before we had lawyers.
The ability to easily copy books and other materials wasn't even around until the printing press
Exactly, and yet books were written, even without a mass market audience.
As another poster pointed out, the invention of the printing press was followed shortly by the invention of copyright.
Which was mainly about governmental control at first.
gloss over the works that current industries produce, and then even leave out an entire industry worth billions of dollars... well it doesn't say much for your argument.
The same way you ignore the fashion industry, etc.
Yes, some things would change, others would not. Already, because of copying and increased user control many top-end games require you to play on authorized servers. They give away WoW and still get people to pay to use it.
That's essentially how it'd work without copyright.
And frankly, I just don't care to support this anymore. Taxes fund copyrights, and I'm not getting good value.
That's a trademark/truth-in-advertising issue. There's a difference between asking for Coke and getting Pepsi, and Pepsi simply trying to taste more like Coke.
Fanfic is one example of unprotected creation. Disney stole their characters from someone, but you'd better be 100% original.
Often, as in the recent Games Workshop thread, you see examples of the unprotected work being more prolific and of higher quality.
You'd see much higher quality if not for the copyright holders trying to destroy the works and prohibit the practice.
Bullshit. That's how you'd like to see it done, but any disobedience to civil authority is civil disobedience.
The type where you leave your name is the worthless kind, because they break your fingers.