Where does the definition of a high performance, high altitude SAM end, and the definition of an ABM begin?
More to the point, and the main reason I think the Missile Defense Shield is pure Wile E. Coyote, is: What happens when the incoming missile's radioactive waste splatters the city below it? What about the EMP that will knock out all communications equipment on the ground at about the same time? Yeah, they can hit a missile or two. The side-effects will be almost as disastrous as if they'd just let the damn things hit the ground.
Re:Yeah, it's SO much better to do NOTHING...
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The USSR (gone now - but not forgotten) has had an operational national ABM system since 1980. Read this.
Well, I tried. I stopped cold at this sentence: one of President Bush's top priorities in his election campaign and one that enjoys widespread public support from clear-thinking Americans.
A badly disguised ad-hominem attack, only two paragraphs in! I didn't bother with the rest of it.
Bush has other options. Where this missile defense shit always heads is to the fantasy-land of False Alternative.
In the real world there are usually more than two options, and they usually do not stand in direct opposition to each other. But with the Missile Defense Salesmen, there are only two ways. Missile Defense, or Horrible Death! Panic!
Re:Not the first time, not the last.
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Canada had the most brilliant fighter plane design, something like 20 years in advance of his time, but when the "Parti Conservateur" took place instead of Liberal party, they cut the Avro Arrow project just because it came from another political party
And I saw the exibit in the big-ass museum (whatever it was) in Toronto! It sure looked cool.
Re:Hemos, this is not a great satellite idea...
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It's a frigging NASA-built webcam!
So is Hubble. In fact, most important astronomical instruments involve cameras pointed at something.
Maybe the little soul in the little human gets split in half?
Oh NO! I've been splitting little half-moons off of my soul into a trashcan while I was reading this. SHIT! I do that every week when my nails start catching on the guitar strings! I've gotta get all that back, or I'll become . . . EVIL!!!!!
I can't wait to have another 'me' in a cold locker somewhere, or the ability to create one very quickly. Grow it without most brain functions
I believe, also, that if we ever achieve anything close to immortality, it will be this way. But before you start building a meat locker in your shed, read Orson Scott Card's "Fat Farm." It will give you the willies.
Bush revealed himself as a political opportunist with respect to this issue
Sputters, sprays drink all over keyboard. Whaddaya mean revealed?. As if no one could tell already? What other kind of politician could get elected in the current, thoroughly corrupt climate we live in?
Science was once dominated by Aristotleian philosophy
There was a whole competing school of thought at the time, exemplified by guys like Democritus who did use the inductive methods employed today, and whose conclusions about such things as atoms and the shape of the solar system were surprisingly accurate. They were ridiculed, silenced, and accused of such things as "religious impiety."
Hence, Ptolemaic models... which became increasingly complicated (for instance, adding epicycles) in order to maintain the basic geocentric assumption.
These models, and indeed the entire mystical-bullshit-inspired Platonic mode of thinking (the ideal world / shadows on the wall of a cave thing in the Republic) were adopted wholesale by the Church because it more or less dovetailed neatly with their world view. Plato, and most of the so-called Greek "Philosophers" could get along with early xians philosophically because they willfully and deliberately ignored empiricism. They thought it much better to sit around and think about things. Experiment was frowned on. So when Christianity really started to peak in the middle of the First Millenium, it wasn't surprising that they married all of the other refuse floating around in the Dark Ages with their philosophy, and adopted the badly flawed science and philosophy of the anti-empricist Greeks into their canon of approved thoughts. This effectively held the advance of human knowledge in check for nearly fifteen hundred years.
"Slippery slope" is the name of a logical fallacy. You believe in deliberately making errors in your argument. The reason why "slippery slope" is defined as a logical fallacy is very simple. You cannot reason such an extreme conclusion from such an innocuous premise. You have not demonstrated all of the intervening steps. In particular, you've just pulled out "mix in cloning" out of your ass. Here is a fine definition. And here is another. All of the examples read just like yours. But go ahead. Your foot appears to suit your mouth well.
Rape, spy, kill, cheat, lie, steal, oppress - but don't limit our internet access!
I would agree, but information is not trivial. As I recall, the Vietnam War became unpopular (and was eventually ended) largely because news coverage and stories coming back from the vets. I work with two of 'em, and it's really startling how savage things were over there, and how out of control. Thought control is mostly the control of what goes in to the brains of your populace. And it's controlling what they can communicate to the outside. Losing that level of control would be devestating for dictators of all stripes. That seems to be why the Taliban has banned floppy disks, and all other manner of things, and why China filters, and why the gov^H^H^Hcorporations of the US so heavily filter such things as job boards and fucked-company type sites (as well as porn).
The Internet offers a powerful means of allowing those ideas to spread all over the place, and because it can escape, from time to time, the jurisdiction of governments, it allows us to realize that the government only controls us because we permit it. I think the reaction of the legions of independently minded programmers of the world to increasing geographic controls of the internet will be more distributed peer-to-peer type applications, which might allow dangerous ideas to cross borders once again.
I have two quotes (and what's turned into a big-ass essay) for you:
"Intellectual property is to property as fool's gold is to gold." -- multiple, anonymous, unattributable (and wonderful) internet quote
"The value of a thing is what the thing will bring." -- ancient maxim of law and economics.
When you create a piece of "intellectual" property, it can only be of any use to you if you share it with someone. It's fundamentally an idea. If you lock it in a box and keep someone from knowing about it, it will be silent and useless. Once you allow someone to read it, see it, or hear it, the idea escapes. It now is part of a conversation you have initiated with your audience. Copyright was originally granted by royal fiat, and later encoded in law, as a means of keeping printing presses in line. Around the 17th and 18th centuries, it became a legal protection for printers. When copies were limited and difficult to produce, it worked. The value of the copy could be expressed as partially the value of the intellectual effort of its creator, and partly the material investment of the publisher, printer, film studio, whoever. Now that copies are trivially easy to create digitally, this paradigm no longer applies, and people are trying to restrict copy rights based solely on the intellectual value of the property, and they're doing so by treating their customers as criminals, guilty until proven innocent, bunch of thieving bastards, all of them.
Release an album under a major label and watch as people download your material, without your permission, off of AudioGalaxy
I don't know if you've done this Vilk. I really don't care. When I was playing with up-and-coming bands in the late 1980's, I remember a hilarious scene with one of the many, dreary "battle of the bands" gigs I played. One of the acts in the seemingly endless lineup tried to get some sort of agreement or something that no one would attempt to steal "their" songs. It was funny because their music sucked, but it revealed generally how absurd and paranoid people have become about granting ideas the status of property. Anyone at the event could have "stolen" their songs. It was simply a matter of watching and listening, and about half the bands there had already demonstrated via their ability to play covers, that they could ape another's songs. The only way they could have avoided "song theft," to me, was to take the obvious precaution of not playing their material aloud.
Digital media has only excaberated this already precarious status. The cat is no longer in the bag, if ever it was. Songs and music were routinely copied back in the days of the cassette tape. It's just that the activity was not happening in an open, trackable public forum. What gives your "intellectual property" any value is that people are willing to pay for, not only the material, but the packaging and officialese that go along with a legitimized sale. If they aren't willing to do that, you won't ever have a career as an artist, or author, or otherwise.
I have yet to see any data showing how artists are starving on their feet because of napsterized "piracy." Being purely honest, I have to say that I have never, ever, not once in my life, logged on to or downloaded from Napster. I have on occasion been provided with some pirated mp3's by friends. I have retained only one of the cd's thus pirated, the Barenaked Ladies' debut "Gordon." And in all honesty I can say that I believe I've fairly compensated BNL for that CD, even though I have yet to buy a legit copy, because after hearing the songs on Gordon I went on to buy copies of "Born on a Pirate Ship," "Maroon," and "Stunt," all of which I have enjoyed immensely. I will, at some point in the future, make good on my however miniscule debt and buy a legitimate copy of "Gordon," if only because I want to see the packaging, and get back some of the loss from the mp3 compression. But I feel that if I had never been given a rip of "Gordon," I would probably have gone the rest of my life without putting $50 or so into the purchase of other BNL cd's. So whether or not it's paid for as a physical object, as an idea, it has paid for itself because the open circulation of a non-legitimate copy resulted in a willing fan who expended the effort and cash on other material from the group.
I know the intellectual-property hard-liners will have a problem with this kind of argument. To them a copy of a CD is as good as the original, and every copy represents money that the owners could make. However if I had been chased down by some sort of campus cop or "pirate hunter" and forced to relinquish my ripped mp3's of that CD, I probably would have gone on to avoid any further trouble from that area altogether.
There is a middle ground for all of this, I firmly believe, that allows artists and authors to be compensated for their efforts, as much as is possible. It will probably involve re-gaining the trust of audiences (do NOT call us consumers, please!), which could start with not chasing down kids in college dorms, confiscating people's equipment, slapping them with lawsuits, etcetera. Not that I expect that to happen.
But fundamentally, the rules have changed. There's a great song by the Presidents of the USA that I think is about this kind of thing. It's on their latest CD and it's called Blank Baby. "You might see somone taking pictures. You can't put them back and I'll tell you why . .." And later on "You might see a painting in a studio / might test the paint to see if it is wet / might start scraping down as far as you can go / till the canvas is as blank as it can get / even though the paint is dry / you can just erase it all by rolling back your eyes." Art exists between an artist and an audience. It is a dialogue. You have to give your end of the dialogue to your audience, or you're not going to be able to carry on the conversation. If you restrict that conversation, it ends because the audience can always find other people to talk to. They will be for the most part unwilling to give up their rights just to accomodate your profit motive, which is where we're headed with draconian copyright laws and the DMCA. A law which is absurd and trivially easy to violate is a law which is not respected, and when the law is not respected, it doesn't mean much anymore. If the law makes innocuous harmless activity criminal, as we have obviously seen with Napster, a large segment of the population has no problem being innocuous, harmless criminals. Certainly they've been primed for this role with invasive and idiotic drug laws. Laws keep honest people honest, and when they make criminals out of formerly honest people, they and their makers lose their credibility.
It may be that it is not practical to make money as an artist in the digital era. It may be that you have to go back to making money off of live performance, or find yourself a patron. It does not seem "natural" or inevitable that society will bend itself to accomodate that profit motive.
The horse and buggy companies, before they all but vanished in the early part of the 1900's, were able to get all kinds of aggressive and draconian laws applied to automobile drivers, requiring (as I recall) what probably timed out as a 10-minute ritual on the part of an automobile driver at a stop sign, of standing, jumping around, waving, honking, firing a pistol, and the like. No small part of that was probably on behalf of horse-and-buggy proprietors to make the use of automobiles less convenient, and so they probably hoped, kill what was certainly a stupid fad before it got out of control. But for all the protestations, all the fiddling, the technology was there, it was in demand, and they were unable to stop it.
Digital music isn't quite an apples-and-oranges comparison, but it similarily makes trivially easy what was monstrously difficult before, and threatens to put a lot of people out of work. I don't know where it's written in the Constitution that anyone has a natural inalienable right to a job, nor to a guaranteed protection of their "revenue stream." Certainly music and art existed long before profit could be made thereby, and the fundamental urge to create is not driven by profit, but by need. Songwriters write songs because they need to, first, before they discover they can make money at it. I can easily see, if heavens forfend, the RIAA and all their members go out of business, that culture will somehow survive. Whether individual artists survive depends on how smart they are, and how willing to accomodate to a new reality they are. Browbeating their audience, I predict, will be a career-limiting move. You can see how much credibility Metallica pissed away with their Napster suit (please remember, Metallica gained their original legion of fans through the open trading of their bootlegged demos). Accomodating them, respecting them, treating them as participants in your conversation -- that will be a winning strategy.
If the DMCA and other absurd extensions to copyright laws aren't struck down, I suspect the general level of civil disobedience will rise, and the credibility of our lawmaking and corporate institutions will take another major hit. How low can they go?
Said that, I _do_ recognize the natural right of an author to dispose of the product of its work as he/she wants, including allowing only users with blue eyes to use it, and only on Wednesday from 15:00 to 17:00, while standing upside-down, at the modicum price of $100 per second
If the above quoted falls under the category of "promoting the useful arts," I'm a monkey's uncle. As an author myself (I do have a copyrighted work resting in the Library of Congress) I believe and subscribe to the concept that once an idea is disseminated to an audience, through whatever medium, that idea becomes part of a common conversation.
Copyright is the right to copy, not the right to dictate use, nor the right to dictate fitness of the user, or their method of use. Once you (or I) write a book and publish it, we relinquish most of our ownership of that idea. We are granted an artificial monopoly by the government over the copying of that idea, for the purposes of encouraging people to do it more. But if we were to really and truly enforce that monopoly in the fashion you dictate above, we would by the very nature of our dictatorial control over the material squeeze any meaning or purpose out of it. Draconian copyrights, copyrights that treat the consumer like a potential criminal, rather than the endpoint of your conversation, are killing the goose that laid the golden egg. If a perfect encryption scheme was created, and a book or movie or CD could be locked up for pay-per-view or pay-per-read use only, reading, listening to music, and watching movies would rapidly become pastimes of yesteryear. Maybe people would have to fall back on gathering for live performances, and memorizing the books before they are yanked from their personal collections and burned.
What happened with napster was the revalation of how artificial the copyright monopoly is. People have been copying and trading music amongst themselves for years. Napster just made it visible.
Please don't give me your starving artist routine. I know it too well, and I've been there myself, and I just don't care. Artists, authors, programmers, and musicians can make plenty of money, still, by charging for their presence and appearance. It's the tremendous parasitical apparatus that seeks to put itself in the position of fee-charging gatekeeper of "intellectual property" which stands to suffer from the free exchange of information and intellectual "property."
Ideas are only worth something to the human race if they are easily available. An idea locked in a box might as well not exist. And a book that can only be read on alternate tuesdays by the blue-eyed upside-down persons who qualify for the free discount on reading fees will be passed over by those not meeting its terms, for the book that everyone can read for a moderate and reasonable fee. A book is a thing. It can exist or not exist. The words on the page, however can only exist while someone is reading them. A book which cannot be read or a CD which cannot be played or a film which cannot be watched will become a brace for a wobbly table leg. I see the quote from time to time, "intellectual property is to property as fool's gold is to gold." I can't think of a more current and relevant platitude to have stenciled on my car bumper.
I never said that, why do you pretend that I've said something I haven't and then proceed to argue that non-existent statement? I don't think that we should ban police from the street, I'm talking about surviellance camers.
Reality Master 101 loves the straw man. Stuffed with fluff, and easy to punch, he don't talk back, that straw man. Especially if you load him up with Pure False Alternative.
Police make the same mistakes. People videotape in public now, and can turn over those tapes to the police if they thought they saw a criminal . . . No one has given a satisfactory answer as to why extending the eyes of the police is any different to putting more police on the street.
This isn't just extending the eyes of the police. It's giving them a database on us, a searchable, programmable, easily accessible database. The owners of the database should be 100% responsible to what they do with it, and answerable to the public to a much stronger degree than they are now. If I find myself in that database, and yet not charged with a crime, I should be able to demand, instantly, that my record be purged. If my record is misused in any way (as it was in the story that started all this), I should expect there to be a powerful application of discipline (immediate firing, barring from further public employment, etc) of the person who misuses it. If I am mistakenly identified as a criminal, and my life is disrupted in any way, I should expect immediate and unconditional apologies and reparations, and proof that disciplinary or corrective action has been taken towards those who made the mistake. The problem with this kind of system is that it's granting a tremendous level of power and access to a group of people who frankly have not proven themselves trustworthy of their previous level of power and access.
The reason it's being done is the overriding, overhasty rush to wipe out a percieved crime wave. I don't know about you, but I've lived in middling to large cities all my life and I've never been mugged. I've worked or gone to school in a crowded downtown area in a city of more than a million inhabitants for ten years running, and I just don't have that problem. Crime has been on a decline, but these systems are installed, and our rights are slowly eroded, by the public's hysterical perception that crime is somehow on the rise, and they are increasingly at risk, when in fact the opposite is demonstrably true. So not only do I see an unreasonable level of power and access being granted to police, I also am unable to find a corresponding force to drive this except the continuing press-driven crime hysteria. At this juncture, I really would rather risk being a victim of a mugging than a police "mistake" just about any day. As several others have mentioned, a child-support rap you can laugh off. Being mistaken for a pedophile or murderer could ruin your career.
Do feel free to barter away your freedom for your safety. Just keep your hands off mine, thanks.
The only people who don't want this are 1) criminals, and 2) people who cheat on their spouses and don't want to get caught.
You left out 3) Everyone who disagrees with you and 4) Straw men who are easy for you to tear down
I don't worry about my privacy. I do worry about finding my way into a database whose users are not answerable to the same public that they are supposed to be protecting. What happened in the article above is a clear indication that it's not going to be pretty.
One of these days, someone is going to make a claim on one of these absurd, vague, obvious, and incredibly arrogant patents that will be the last straw, and the sheeple in congress will be moved to reduce the patent office's power. Here's hoping it's today.
But I also had a lot of tolerence for what they, in my mind, where allowed to do in the story. I think they just went too far for most people.
All throughout the movie, I kept asking Lucas, silently, "was that really necessary?
On the whole, Episode I could have been a really fantastic film. Even now, with just a couple of edits, it could still be saved. Cut 1: take Threepio out of the film. He adds absolutely nothing to the advancement of the plot, and it stretches the suspension of disbelief to the breaking point that he was built (or rebuilt) by the dorky little kid that Anakin Skywalker is portrayed as. He's little more than a victim-bot throughout, and his lines are meaningless. Cut 2: most of Jar Jar's scenes could be removed. He could just be digitized out of about half of his scenes, and no one would notice. The actors don't really react to him anyway, since he doesn't exist on the soundstage while they're filming. He could be brought in only where he advances the plot, such as in the scene where he brings Amidala to the Gungans.
There's nothing to be done about the kid. His acting can't be improved by digitizing it, and I suspect any attempt to do so would just make it worse. But taking those two irritating elements out of the story would vastly improve its belivability. The rest of the plot is fair-to-middling, and I really didn't have any problems with it.
There's a difference between pausing while running one task, and starting another, and being interrupted in the midst of your train of thought. I can do just fine if I am choosing the tasks which I flip between. Start a compile in one window, run a batch job in another, start loading a program on a different terminal. But if you come along in the middle of all that, sit on the edge of the desk, and start asking me questions about some completely unreleated topic, three trains get derailed and it takes me sometimes an hour to get back on track.
On the other hand, if I try to play Unreal while talking to my Mom on the phone, she usually groks that something is up.
I one time wrecked a perfectly good tape recorder trying to capture a 20 hz sound coming out of my TV. I was going to take the sound and amplify it on my stereo (this was before I had both hooked together). Believe me, it can be done. The lawsuits will start a-flying if this becomes a standard practice.
Knowing the facts, there are only two ways to argue against missile defense: you are either in favor of M.A.D., or you believe that taxpayer dollars shouldn't pay to protect us from a very likely threat of nuclear devestation.
Or, you are highly suspicous of a system that has not ever worked, is threatening to throw 30-year old treaties into disarray, and appears to exist only for the purpose of forking over huge wads of my cash to defense contractors.
Face it, if there was a GPS transmitter on the missile, the test was rigged, rigged, rigged. No other assumption can be made. If they can do the test without the transmitter, it would pass a bullshit detector. But as it stands right now, it stinks.
I do not feel like paying any amount of my tax money for a system which promises so little and is guaranteed to cause so much additional distress and unpleasantness. We were de-commissioning nukes before this, were we not? Dumbya is simply cashing the check the defense industry wrote for him. He's not interested in the long-term effects at all.
Oh, nice argument, by the way. You accuse Jamie of producing a red herring, and then proceed to funnel five paragraphs of your straw-man reasoning into his mouth. Cute.
the problem is that many content producers' revenue models are built with the assumption that most of the users will be viewing advertisements
That isn't my problem. If I pay to watch TV (which, with cable being so prevalent and broadcasters putting out such a shitty signal, you do anyway), I expect a level of quality. If I am not paying, I realize that what I get is free and is worth exactly what I paid for it. I will not mourn the passing of commercial television. It's 99.999% crap and has no redeeming qualities.
Not me. I'm getting up and walking out if I have to pay to see an advertisement. I buy a ticket to see a movie. If they aren't making enough money off a $7 ticket, they obviously need to find a consumer with more disposable cash. I can always find something more entertaining to do.
Slashdot Mirror
More to the point, and the main reason I think the Missile Defense Shield is pure Wile E. Coyote, is: What happens when the incoming missile's radioactive waste splatters the city below it? What about the EMP that will knock out all communications equipment on the ground at about the same time? Yeah, they can hit a missile or two. The side-effects will be almost as disastrous as if they'd just let the damn things hit the ground.
Well, I tried. I stopped cold at this sentence: one of President Bush's top priorities in his election campaign and one that enjoys widespread public support from clear-thinking Americans.
A badly disguised ad-hominem attack, only two paragraphs in! I didn't bother with the rest of it.
Bush has other options. Where this missile defense shit always heads is to the fantasy-land of False Alternative.
In the real world there are usually more than two options, and they usually do not stand in direct opposition to each other. But with the Missile Defense Salesmen, there are only two ways. Missile Defense, or Horrible Death! Panic!
And I saw the exibit in the big-ass museum (whatever it was) in Toronto! It sure looked cool.
So is Hubble. In fact, most important astronomical instruments involve cameras pointed at something.
Oh NO! I've been splitting little half-moons off of my soul into a trashcan while I was reading this. SHIT! I do that every week when my nails start catching on the guitar strings! I've gotta get all that back, or I'll become . . . EVIL!!!!!
I believe, also, that if we ever achieve anything close to immortality, it will be this way. But before you start building a meat locker in your shed, read Orson Scott Card's "Fat Farm." It will give you the willies.
Sputters, sprays drink all over keyboard. Whaddaya mean revealed?. As if no one could tell already? What other kind of politician could get elected in the current, thoroughly corrupt climate we live in?
ALEC GUINESS VOICEOVER I'D LOVE TO HEAR: Washington, DC. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villany. We must be cautious.
That would be a priceless sound clip to have.
There was a whole competing school of thought at the time, exemplified by guys like Democritus who did use the inductive methods employed today, and whose conclusions about such things as atoms and the shape of the solar system were surprisingly accurate. They were ridiculed, silenced, and accused of such things as "religious impiety."
Hence, Ptolemaic models... which became increasingly complicated (for instance, adding epicycles) in order to maintain the basic geocentric assumption.
These models, and indeed the entire mystical-bullshit-inspired Platonic mode of thinking (the ideal world / shadows on the wall of a cave thing in the Republic) were adopted wholesale by the Church because it more or less dovetailed neatly with their world view. Plato, and most of the so-called Greek "Philosophers" could get along with early xians philosophically because they willfully and deliberately ignored empiricism. They thought it much better to sit around and think about things. Experiment was frowned on. So when Christianity really started to peak in the middle of the First Millenium, it wasn't surprising that they married all of the other refuse floating around in the Dark Ages with their philosophy, and adopted the badly flawed science and philosophy of the anti-empricist Greeks into their canon of approved thoughts. This effectively held the advance of human knowledge in check for nearly fifteen hundred years.
You are funny!
"Slippery slope" is the name of a logical fallacy. You believe in deliberately making errors in your argument. The reason why "slippery slope" is defined as a logical fallacy is very simple. You cannot reason such an extreme conclusion from such an innocuous premise. You have not demonstrated all of the intervening steps. In particular, you've just pulled out "mix in cloning" out of your ass. Here is a fine definition. And here is another. All of the examples read just like yours. But go ahead. Your foot appears to suit your mouth well.
I would agree, but information is not trivial. As I recall, the Vietnam War became unpopular (and was eventually ended) largely because news coverage and stories coming back from the vets. I work with two of 'em, and it's really startling how savage things were over there, and how out of control. Thought control is mostly the control of what goes in to the brains of your populace. And it's controlling what they can communicate to the outside. Losing that level of control would be devestating for dictators of all stripes. That seems to be why the Taliban has banned floppy disks, and all other manner of things, and why China filters, and why the gov^H^H^Hcorporations of the US so heavily filter such things as job boards and fucked-company type sites (as well as porn).
The Internet offers a powerful means of allowing those ideas to spread all over the place, and because it can escape, from time to time, the jurisdiction of governments, it allows us to realize that the government only controls us because we permit it. I think the reaction of the legions of independently minded programmers of the world to increasing geographic controls of the internet will be more distributed peer-to-peer type applications, which might allow dangerous ideas to cross borders once again.
"Intellectual property is to property as fool's gold is to gold." -- multiple, anonymous, unattributable (and wonderful) internet quote
"The value of a thing is what the thing will bring." -- ancient maxim of law and economics.
When you create a piece of "intellectual" property, it can only be of any use to you if you share it with someone. It's fundamentally an idea. If you lock it in a box and keep someone from knowing about it, it will be silent and useless. Once you allow someone to read it, see it, or hear it, the idea escapes. It now is part of a conversation you have initiated with your audience. Copyright was originally granted by royal fiat, and later encoded in law, as a means of keeping printing presses in line. Around the 17th and 18th centuries, it became a legal protection for printers. When copies were limited and difficult to produce, it worked. The value of the copy could be expressed as partially the value of the intellectual effort of its creator, and partly the material investment of the publisher, printer, film studio, whoever. Now that copies are trivially easy to create digitally, this paradigm no longer applies, and people are trying to restrict copy rights based solely on the intellectual value of the property, and they're doing so by treating their customers as criminals, guilty until proven innocent, bunch of thieving bastards, all of them.
Release an album under a major label and watch as people download your material, without your permission, off of AudioGalaxy
I don't know if you've done this Vilk. I really don't care. When I was playing with up-and-coming bands in the late 1980's, I remember a hilarious scene with one of the many, dreary "battle of the bands" gigs I played. One of the acts in the seemingly endless lineup tried to get some sort of agreement or something that no one would attempt to steal "their" songs. It was funny because their music sucked, but it revealed generally how absurd and paranoid people have become about granting ideas the status of property. Anyone at the event could have "stolen" their songs. It was simply a matter of watching and listening, and about half the bands there had already demonstrated via their ability to play covers, that they could ape another's songs. The only way they could have avoided "song theft," to me, was to take the obvious precaution of not playing their material aloud.
Digital media has only excaberated this already precarious status. The cat is no longer in the bag, if ever it was. Songs and music were routinely copied back in the days of the cassette tape. It's just that the activity was not happening in an open, trackable public forum. What gives your "intellectual property" any value is that people are willing to pay for, not only the material, but the packaging and officialese that go along with a legitimized sale. If they aren't willing to do that, you won't ever have a career as an artist, or author, or otherwise.
I have yet to see any data showing how artists are starving on their feet because of napsterized "piracy." Being purely honest, I have to say that I have never, ever, not once in my life, logged on to or downloaded from Napster. I have on occasion been provided with some pirated mp3's by friends. I have retained only one of the cd's thus pirated, the Barenaked Ladies' debut "Gordon." And in all honesty I can say that I believe I've fairly compensated BNL for that CD, even though I have yet to buy a legit copy, because after hearing the songs on Gordon I went on to buy copies of "Born on a Pirate Ship," "Maroon," and "Stunt," all of which I have enjoyed immensely. I will, at some point in the future, make good on my however miniscule debt and buy a legitimate copy of "Gordon," if only because I want to see the packaging, and get back some of the loss from the mp3 compression. But I feel that if I had never been given a rip of "Gordon," I would probably have gone the rest of my life without putting $50 or so into the purchase of other BNL cd's. So whether or not it's paid for as a physical object, as an idea, it has paid for itself because the open circulation of a non-legitimate copy resulted in a willing fan who expended the effort and cash on other material from the group.
I know the intellectual-property hard-liners will have a problem with this kind of argument. To them a copy of a CD is as good as the original, and every copy represents money that the owners could make. However if I had been chased down by some sort of campus cop or "pirate hunter" and forced to relinquish my ripped mp3's of that CD, I probably would have gone on to avoid any further trouble from that area altogether.
There is a middle ground for all of this, I firmly believe, that allows artists and authors to be compensated for their efforts, as much as is possible. It will probably involve re-gaining the trust of audiences (do NOT call us consumers, please!), which could start with not chasing down kids in college dorms, confiscating people's equipment, slapping them with lawsuits, etcetera. Not that I expect that to happen.
But fundamentally, the rules have changed. There's a great song by the Presidents of the USA that I think is about this kind of thing. It's on their latest CD and it's called Blank Baby. "You might see somone taking pictures. You can't put them back and I'll tell you why . . ." And later on "You might see a painting in a studio / might test the paint to see if it is wet / might start scraping down as far as you can go / till the canvas is as blank as it can get / even though the paint is dry / you can just erase it all by rolling back your eyes." Art exists between an artist and an audience. It is a dialogue. You have to give your end of the dialogue to your audience, or you're not going to be able to carry on the conversation. If you restrict that conversation, it ends because the audience can always find other people to talk to. They will be for the most part unwilling to give up their rights just to accomodate your profit motive, which is where we're headed with draconian copyright laws and the DMCA. A law which is absurd and trivially easy to violate is a law which is not respected, and when the law is not respected, it doesn't mean much anymore. If the law makes innocuous harmless activity criminal, as we have obviously seen with Napster, a large segment of the population has no problem being innocuous, harmless criminals. Certainly they've been primed for this role with invasive and idiotic drug laws. Laws keep honest people honest, and when they make criminals out of formerly honest people, they and their makers lose their credibility.
It may be that it is not practical to make money as an artist in the digital era. It may be that you have to go back to making money off of live performance, or find yourself a patron. It does not seem "natural" or inevitable that society will bend itself to accomodate that profit motive.
The horse and buggy companies, before they all but vanished in the early part of the 1900's, were able to get all kinds of aggressive and draconian laws applied to automobile drivers, requiring (as I recall) what probably timed out as a 10-minute ritual on the part of an automobile driver at a stop sign, of standing, jumping around, waving, honking, firing a pistol, and the like. No small part of that was probably on behalf of horse-and-buggy proprietors to make the use of automobiles less convenient, and so they probably hoped, kill what was certainly a stupid fad before it got out of control. But for all the protestations, all the fiddling, the technology was there, it was in demand, and they were unable to stop it.
Digital music isn't quite an apples-and-oranges comparison, but it similarily makes trivially easy what was monstrously difficult before, and threatens to put a lot of people out of work. I don't know where it's written in the Constitution that anyone has a natural inalienable right to a job, nor to a guaranteed protection of their "revenue stream." Certainly music and art existed long before profit could be made thereby, and the fundamental urge to create is not driven by profit, but by need. Songwriters write songs because they need to, first, before they discover they can make money at it. I can easily see, if heavens forfend, the RIAA and all their members go out of business, that culture will somehow survive. Whether individual artists survive depends on how smart they are, and how willing to accomodate to a new reality they are. Browbeating their audience, I predict, will be a career-limiting move. You can see how much credibility Metallica pissed away with their Napster suit (please remember, Metallica gained their original legion of fans through the open trading of their bootlegged demos). Accomodating them, respecting them, treating them as participants in your conversation -- that will be a winning strategy.
If the DMCA and other absurd extensions to copyright laws aren't struck down, I suspect the general level of civil disobedience will rise, and the credibility of our lawmaking and corporate institutions will take another major hit. How low can they go?
If the above quoted falls under the category of "promoting the useful arts," I'm a monkey's uncle. As an author myself (I do have a copyrighted work resting in the Library of Congress) I believe and subscribe to the concept that once an idea is disseminated to an audience, through whatever medium, that idea becomes part of a common conversation.
Copyright is the right to copy, not the right to dictate use, nor the right to dictate fitness of the user, or their method of use. Once you (or I) write a book and publish it, we relinquish most of our ownership of that idea. We are granted an artificial monopoly by the government over the copying of that idea, for the purposes of encouraging people to do it more. But if we were to really and truly enforce that monopoly in the fashion you dictate above, we would by the very nature of our dictatorial control over the material squeeze any meaning or purpose out of it. Draconian copyrights, copyrights that treat the consumer like a potential criminal, rather than the endpoint of your conversation, are killing the goose that laid the golden egg. If a perfect encryption scheme was created, and a book or movie or CD could be locked up for pay-per-view or pay-per-read use only, reading, listening to music, and watching movies would rapidly become pastimes of yesteryear. Maybe people would have to fall back on gathering for live performances, and memorizing the books before they are yanked from their personal collections and burned.
What happened with napster was the revalation of how artificial the copyright monopoly is. People have been copying and trading music amongst themselves for years. Napster just made it visible.
Please don't give me your starving artist routine. I know it too well, and I've been there myself, and I just don't care. Artists, authors, programmers, and musicians can make plenty of money, still, by charging for their presence and appearance. It's the tremendous parasitical apparatus that seeks to put itself in the position of fee-charging gatekeeper of "intellectual property" which stands to suffer from the free exchange of information and intellectual "property."
Ideas are only worth something to the human race if they are easily available. An idea locked in a box might as well not exist. And a book that can only be read on alternate tuesdays by the blue-eyed upside-down persons who qualify for the free discount on reading fees will be passed over by those not meeting its terms, for the book that everyone can read for a moderate and reasonable fee. A book is a thing. It can exist or not exist. The words on the page, however can only exist while someone is reading them. A book which cannot be read or a CD which cannot be played or a film which cannot be watched will become a brace for a wobbly table leg. I see the quote from time to time, "intellectual property is to property as fool's gold is to gold." I can't think of a more current and relevant platitude to have stenciled on my car bumper.
Reality Master 101 loves the straw man. Stuffed with fluff, and easy to punch, he don't talk back, that straw man. Especially if you load him up with Pure False Alternative.
This isn't just extending the eyes of the police. It's giving them a database on us, a searchable, programmable, easily accessible database. The owners of the database should be 100% responsible to what they do with it, and answerable to the public to a much stronger degree than they are now. If I find myself in that database, and yet not charged with a crime, I should be able to demand, instantly, that my record be purged. If my record is misused in any way (as it was in the story that started all this), I should expect there to be a powerful application of discipline (immediate firing, barring from further public employment, etc) of the person who misuses it. If I am mistakenly identified as a criminal, and my life is disrupted in any way, I should expect immediate and unconditional apologies and reparations, and proof that disciplinary or corrective action has been taken towards those who made the mistake. The problem with this kind of system is that it's granting a tremendous level of power and access to a group of people who frankly have not proven themselves trustworthy of their previous level of power and access.
The reason it's being done is the overriding, overhasty rush to wipe out a percieved crime wave. I don't know about you, but I've lived in middling to large cities all my life and I've never been mugged. I've worked or gone to school in a crowded downtown area in a city of more than a million inhabitants for ten years running, and I just don't have that problem. Crime has been on a decline, but these systems are installed, and our rights are slowly eroded, by the public's hysterical perception that crime is somehow on the rise, and they are increasingly at risk, when in fact the opposite is demonstrably true. So not only do I see an unreasonable level of power and access being granted to police, I also am unable to find a corresponding force to drive this except the continuing press-driven crime hysteria. At this juncture, I really would rather risk being a victim of a mugging than a police "mistake" just about any day. As several others have mentioned, a child-support rap you can laugh off. Being mistaken for a pedophile or murderer could ruin your career.
Do feel free to barter away your freedom for your safety. Just keep your hands off mine, thanks.
You left out 3) Everyone who disagrees with you and 4) Straw men who are easy for you to tear down
I don't worry about my privacy. I do worry about finding my way into a database whose users are not answerable to the same public that they are supposed to be protecting. What happened in the article above is a clear indication that it's not going to be pretty.
One of these days, someone is going to make a claim on one of these absurd, vague, obvious, and incredibly arrogant patents that will be the last straw, and the sheeple in congress will be moved to reduce the patent office's power. Here's hoping it's today.
All throughout the movie, I kept asking Lucas, silently, "was that really necessary?
On the whole, Episode I could have been a really fantastic film. Even now, with just a couple of edits, it could still be saved. Cut 1: take Threepio out of the film. He adds absolutely nothing to the advancement of the plot, and it stretches the suspension of disbelief to the breaking point that he was built (or rebuilt) by the dorky little kid that Anakin Skywalker is portrayed as. He's little more than a victim-bot throughout, and his lines are meaningless. Cut 2: most of Jar Jar's scenes could be removed. He could just be digitized out of about half of his scenes, and no one would notice. The actors don't really react to him anyway, since he doesn't exist on the soundstage while they're filming. He could be brought in only where he advances the plot, such as in the scene where he brings Amidala to the Gungans.
There's nothing to be done about the kid. His acting can't be improved by digitizing it, and I suspect any attempt to do so would just make it worse. But taking those two irritating elements out of the story would vastly improve its belivability. The rest of the plot is fair-to-middling, and I really didn't have any problems with it.
On the other hand, if I try to play Unreal while talking to my Mom on the phone, she usually groks that something is up.
I one time wrecked a perfectly good tape recorder trying to capture a 20 hz sound coming out of my TV. I was going to take the sound and amplify it on my stereo (this was before I had both hooked together). Believe me, it can be done. The lawsuits will start a-flying if this becomes a standard practice.
Yeah, it's got to be tough having all that money. (Sighs the weight of the world off his shoulders). Glad it's not me.
Guess what's between my index finger and my thumb? It's not the world's smallest violin playing "my heart bleeds for you," Sony. It's just a booger.
Or, you are highly suspicous of a system that has not ever worked, is threatening to throw 30-year old treaties into disarray, and appears to exist only for the purpose of forking over huge wads of my cash to defense contractors.
Face it, if there was a GPS transmitter on the missile, the test was rigged, rigged, rigged. No other assumption can be made. If they can do the test without the transmitter, it would pass a bullshit detector. But as it stands right now, it stinks.
I do not feel like paying any amount of my tax money for a system which promises so little and is guaranteed to cause so much additional distress and unpleasantness. We were de-commissioning nukes before this, were we not? Dumbya is simply cashing the check the defense industry wrote for him. He's not interested in the long-term effects at all.
Oh, nice argument, by the way. You accuse Jamie of producing a red herring, and then proceed to funnel five paragraphs of your straw-man reasoning into his mouth. Cute.
The "end" of media credibility has already occurred. The media just haven't figured that out yet.
That isn't my problem. If I pay to watch TV (which, with cable being so prevalent and broadcasters putting out such a shitty signal, you do anyway), I expect a level of quality. If I am not paying, I realize that what I get is free and is worth exactly what I paid for it. I will not mourn the passing of commercial television. It's 99.999% crap and has no redeeming qualities.
Not me. I'm getting up and walking out if I have to pay to see an advertisement. I buy a ticket to see a movie. If they aren't making enough money off a $7 ticket, they obviously need to find a consumer with more disposable cash. I can always find something more entertaining to do.