You have placed your faith in a formed 5 billion year old earth where bacteria were here before us.
For most people who follow this tack, it's nothing about faith. It's a lot simpler: I'm here to see the universe for what it is, rather than filter my perceptions of it through the hokey myths of a long-dead civilization.
The only real requirement I've seen of good science fiction is a collision between the exotic and the familiar. Star Trek was interesting because it explored familiar themes in exotic locations, themes that all too frequently could not be explored directly in the medium of television without raising the alarms of the censors. They could talk about what to do with war veterans, for example, by setting the whole affair on an alien planet, stripping away the labels that would ordinarily gather a thousand angry letters to the station management. They could talk about homosexuality by inverting the equation and making a heterosexual in a society of hermaphrodites the outsider. They could talk about not interfering with other cultures of the world with the very convincing Prime Directive, which got played for countless thought experiments. What they couldn't do at any time was put those familiar and emotionally charged themes into a familiar context. Any effort to do so by conventional TV shows was usually rigidly suppressed. So now that there is almost nothing you can't talk about on TV, Star Trek has kind of a challenge: What to talk about next?
If they are so far into their "franchise" mode that they can't get back to that basic concept the series will be a dreadful failure. More guns and bigger explosions can be had on any afternoon of Toonami. So what? Star Trek had an intellectual approach (at least in the first two series) that put it far above its peers. I didn't get very far with Voyager or DS9. I just didn't have time to see them replay the same old plots over and over again. I don't expect much from this series, and am of the opinion that they need to quit while they're ahead.
Enforcement would be impossible. It would be worse than the "drug wars," and of little tangible benefit to anyone. Their resources would be utterly exhausted after a couple of years, since many musicians would countersue and claim (quite rightly) that performance would entail fair use.
The difference is that no one ever reasonably expected to get paid for typing song names into a public database for convenience's sake. One does reasonably expect to get compensated for writing and recording the song, however.
Anyone who makes such a claim has likely never created a damned thing in their life,
You know, you're so right. Besides three full-length novels, about a hundred songs, and two hundred or so programs, I haven't written a thing.
they would know what sort of effort it takes
Yeah, the novels didn't take more than about four months to a year of concentrated effort to research and write. The songs I just tossed off over a period of seven or eight years. The programs I do in a month or more. I don't know what these guys are whining about.
Slathering Marxist all over an argument is a good way to make it look bad without really explaining why. As far as I can tell, your feeble rebuttal has been nothing more than an attack on what you think I don't know.
As others have pointed out, Godwin's law is dogslop. This is how the German economy ran under the Nazis, and it's not wrong because Nazis were evil, boogeyman-type people who need no other reason to hate them than an ad-hominem slur. It's wrong because it's a corrupt way to run an economy, and will ultimately cause said economy to collapse. Taking advantage of a government-assigned privledge to operate gives a company a blank check for abuse. Their product can be crap, their database (in this example) can be riddled with spelling errors and totally incorrect entries (and, believe me, it is), and there is nothing to force them to change it.
If a company like this provided a required service (like water) they would face revolts from a panicked populace at their heavy-handed exploits. Imagine your local water co. going around and bombing people's backyard wells.
Since the service Gracenote provides is a mere convenience, and one that could be easily done without, they are guilty of at the very least creating a feeble-minded business model. No one really needs the track titles for the fuckin' CD to play. You can still hear the music.
If they make it irritating enough for people to use their service, they will either migrate to a better one (freedb) or just give up on it entirely. If they piss a segment of their user base off, as they have just done, they run the same risk.
something you made without compensating you for it? Almost like... Napster?
I think he's trying to point out the absurdity of someone making a profit off of something they were handed on a silver platter for free. Not like Napster a bit.
Wow, how sloppy can you get? If you want to win an argument with someone, the first thing you have to do is convince them of your point of view. If they have committed logical or factual errors in arriving at their conclusion, it is your responsibility to point them out, and in addition provide reasons why they should accept your conclusion instead of theirs. But if all you're going to do is name a popular fallacy and say "ha! I got you," you're as likely to convince them to grow wings and fly to the moon. And, you will lose the argument. Since you aren't even positing an argument of your own, all your "invocation" contributes is noise.
Honestly, why not? They sure do. Their claims of ownership are absurd, their "business model" a joke, and they deserve all the vitriol they recieve. Honestly what we should do is send a bill for a 10c-per-character typing fee for every CDDB entry we personally have committed to their database.
Need I bring up the bloke at the US patent office at the end of the 19 century that thought everything had already been invented?
Please don't, because no one ever said any such thing.
Rather, let us apply a more appropriate Carl Sagan quote: "The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition." It may be that the physical laws we have discovered actually represent limits to what we can do.
If *you* can create any "intellectual property" in a vacuum, with neither precedents nor a critical audience, you are welcome to try. However, I doubt you could invent the whole of literature in your head and write a completely original novel from scratch. In fact, I would categorically state that such a thing is impossible. It's also categorically impossible for anyone to write a wholly original song. One only learns to create intellectual property by first imitating that which has come before. Let's think about how many Disney movies, for example, were based on 17th or 18th century fairy tales? Hmm?
One of the points he makes in his talk (which *you* clearly did not read) was that the ever-increasing lifetime of copyright means that starting with the 20th century, some works will never enter the public domain. The interesting outcome of this, which Stallman didn't explore, but which I think would change some peoples' minds, is the "black hole" of our culture. Simply put, authors and songwriters have an expectation of semi-immortality. Once their career ends, their nostalgic audience will pass down their works to children, who will eventually write it into its proper place in history books. Thus the hue and clamor over the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame, and who does and does not belong in it.
The problem is that in order to survive a work has to be copied. A large business concern (for example, whoever holds the legal right to copy the Beatles' albums) will continue issuing copies as long as its economically feasible. But after the interest dies down, they won't have a reason to continue issuing CD's or vinyl. History has proven (with the example of abandonware in particular) that a publisher or copyright holder will squat on a piece of property that no longer makes money, rather than release it to the public domain.
So set our wayforward machine to 2062. The Beatles are surely dead by this time, and their works, by US and European retroactive copyright laws, are locked in vaults and no longer available in stores. The only people who would want to copy their music would be fans who were alive during the group's career. I was born just exactly at the period that the Beatles' career was ending, and I am probably one of the youngest people who maintains an active interest in collecting their recordings. I will surely be dead and gone by 2062, and I doubt I'll be able to transfer my interest to my son. So the mouldy old CD's in the attic of my house will probably be thrown out, or get left in the heat and melted, or in some other way be destroyed. And the warehoused copies that some enormous conglomerate record company owns? Well, suppose they are just costing storage money, and the company decides to throw them out?
This is a long-drawn out scenario but it's too easy to see it happening. In the case of literature, one of the real problems in studying the history of literature, or the language it's written in, is the accuracy of the source text. It's generally determined that we do not have an original copy of the Cantebury Tales in Chaucer's own hand. So there is some doubt that maybe Chaucer was someone else, or didn't write what we thought he did, or didn't do it as well. The same kind of confusion exists for Shakespeare's works. We don't have the originals in many cases, and we doubt that we are looking at the authentic thing. Maybe we read an "improved" copy.
It's pathetic that in one hundred years, despite the ready availability and incredibly low cost of duplication, that we may be wondering what the hell happened to the great works of the 20th century. Even worse, we won't have great works of the 20th century. We'll just have the bubble-gum dreck of the current moment. This is a distinctly frightening, orwellian concept. As restricted-use schemes become the norm, it may be impossible for us to rewind our tapes, or books, or music, to capture them. We may only have access to machine-generated drivel, and our art and music will have no cultural meaning except as advertising and propaganda.
as you sit in front of your pentium class computer system that was made possible only by a long series of intellectual property defended by law,
I would defy you to prove that patent law protections were required for our technology to exist. Most especially in the case of Intel, they have a physical product they are selling. Yeah, ripoffs can be made, but Intel can always fight the ripoffs by making their product more efficiently, of higher quality, and cheaper. This is the essence of competition. A company that cannot survive by making a better product than their competition doesn't deserve to.
I would also defy you to prove that literature, music, and art require copyright to exist. The converse is quite easy to prove, since without literature and music, there would be nothing to protect. But artists and authors and musicians have demonstrated throughout history that not only will they create their works for free, they will often do so under highly adverse circumstances, even risking their lives to express their opinions. An artist or author incapable of viewing their output as anything but a monetary investment is likely not a very good one.
I think you have hit the nail on the head. People who rush out and do an intellectual-property land-grab (whether its for technology they invented, then allowed to be come widespread, then jumped on people's shit about, like this, or otherwise) believe that they are entitled to making a profit.
I'm disappointed. After hours and hours, to my knowledge, no one has played with the puns. Is Compaq a "patent suit magnet" because they make lots of money with technology?
Code is copyrighted, isn't it? Copyright is what we do to works of expression, verbal or otherwise. Patent is what we do to machines. Unfortunately jackasses who want to own ideas instead of do work have made patenting ideas (as opposed to patenting functional machines) a valid concept, and therefore we see code that is both copyrightable and patentable. The line is blurred, and it's being done for the convenience of entities such as this. Whether the public benefits from these laws or not doesn't appear to be a concern.
How I wish this were earlier in the week, when it seemed I had infinite mod points. If demonstrated, this point could be made to show the blatantly anti-competitive nature of the MPAA's action and ensure an antitrust investigation. Not only does CSS prevent people from making DVD players, it would make it possible to lock out amateur DVD distributors -- putting their own work out on DVD. I see the same sort of thing looming with SDMI and other secure music distribution technologies.
The RIAA and MPAA have to be aware that with digital technology, the quality of recording and film equipment that used to cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars now costs hundreds of dollars, and amateur filmmakers and musicians now have cheap personal access to what was state-of-the art twenty years ago, and most of that technology can be installed in a home computer. With the equipment I now own, which costs about what a personal PC does, I can make a multi-track recording of the same quality that you would find in the store, burn it to a CD, and sell it all without ever having to haggle with a record company. Most people I've played it for cannot tell the recording fidelity from that of a commercial CD.
I cannot help but notice that most anti piracy mechanisms will, if widely adapted, shut me out of the current standardized market. Coupled with that I see currently established artists openly defecting from their recording companies to distribute their materials for free online (napster, etc). In every way possible, digital technology empowers us to cut out the expensive and unneccesary middleman when we want to express ourselves. The DMCA is just a feeble attempt to turn back the clock and make it all like it were. Please couldya?
The same is true of fully-automatic rifles or lumps of uranium-235. When things can be used "for good or ill" and when there is reason to suppose that they will typically be used for ill, then those things will typically be heavily regulated.
I'm just trying to see how a DVD decryption utility could be viewed as a potential threat to human lives in the same fashion that a homemade nuclear bomb or even an automatic rifle could. Not doing it, so far, but give the MPAA time. Lost revenues could kill people, I guess. If film directors and executives' starving children were brought into it we could have the pity argument. But not without the sarcasm.
Slashdot Mirror
For most people who follow this tack, it's nothing about faith. It's a lot simpler: I'm here to see the universe for what it is, rather than filter my perceptions of it through the hokey myths of a long-dead civilization.
Somewhere in South Dakota there's a rock on a 150-ft peak that looks like a big wang. I doubt we'll be seeing that one on a quarter anytime soon.
Uh, now you're seeing a premise in my argument that I don't recall putting there.
The only real requirement I've seen of good science fiction is a collision between the exotic and the familiar. Star Trek was interesting because it explored familiar themes in exotic locations, themes that all too frequently could not be explored directly in the medium of television without raising the alarms of the censors. They could talk about what to do with war veterans, for example, by setting the whole affair on an alien planet, stripping away the labels that would ordinarily gather a thousand angry letters to the station management. They could talk about homosexuality by inverting the equation and making a heterosexual in a society of hermaphrodites the outsider. They could talk about not interfering with other cultures of the world with the very convincing Prime Directive, which got played for countless thought experiments. What they couldn't do at any time was put those familiar and emotionally charged themes into a familiar context. Any effort to do so by conventional TV shows was usually rigidly suppressed. So now that there is almost nothing you can't talk about on TV, Star Trek has kind of a challenge: What to talk about next?
If they are so far into their "franchise" mode that they can't get back to that basic concept the series will be a dreadful failure. More guns and bigger explosions can be had on any afternoon of Toonami. So what? Star Trek had an intellectual approach (at least in the first two series) that put it far above its peers. I didn't get very far with Voyager or DS9. I just didn't have time to see them replay the same old plots over and over again. I don't expect much from this series, and am of the opinion that they need to quit while they're ahead.
Actually, Radio stations appear to make quite a pile from payola.
All music is already open source. In fact, most of the music you hear is directly derived from what came before it.
Enforcement would be impossible. It would be worse than the "drug wars," and of little tangible benefit to anyone. Their resources would be utterly exhausted after a couple of years, since many musicians would countersue and claim (quite rightly) that performance would entail fair use.
The difference is that no one ever reasonably expected to get paid for typing song names into a public database for convenience's sake. One does reasonably expect to get compensated for writing and recording the song, however.
You know, you're so right. Besides three full-length novels, about a hundred songs, and two hundred or so programs, I haven't written a thing.
they would know what sort of effort it takes
Yeah, the novels didn't take more than about four months to a year of concentrated effort to research and write. The songs I just tossed off over a period of seven or eight years. The programs I do in a month or more. I don't know what these guys are whining about.
Slathering Marxist all over an argument is a good way to make it look bad without really explaining why. As far as I can tell, your feeble rebuttal has been nothing more than an attack on what you think I don't know.
If a company like this provided a required service (like water) they would face revolts from a panicked populace at their heavy-handed exploits. Imagine your local water co. going around and bombing people's backyard wells.
Since the service Gracenote provides is a mere convenience, and one that could be easily done without, they are guilty of at the very least creating a feeble-minded business model. No one really needs the track titles for the fuckin' CD to play. You can still hear the music.
If they make it irritating enough for people to use their service, they will either migrate to a better one (freedb) or just give up on it entirely. If they piss a segment of their user base off, as they have just done, they run the same risk.
No freedb for joo! (CDDB nazi)
I think he's trying to point out the absurdity of someone making a profit off of something they were handed on a silver platter for free. Not like Napster a bit.
If we're using the spammer's $500, it doesn't cost us a damn thing. And why should we care? It's what they do to us every day.
Wow, how sloppy can you get? If you want to win an argument with someone, the first thing you have to do is convince them of your point of view. If they have committed logical or factual errors in arriving at their conclusion, it is your responsibility to point them out, and in addition provide reasons why they should accept your conclusion instead of theirs. But if all you're going to do is name a popular fallacy and say "ha! I got you," you're as likely to convince them to grow wings and fly to the moon. And, you will lose the argument. Since you aren't even positing an argument of your own, all your "invocation" contributes is noise.
Honestly, why not? They sure do. Their claims of ownership are absurd, their "business model" a joke, and they deserve all the vitriol they recieve. Honestly what we should do is send a bill for a 10c-per-character typing fee for every CDDB entry we personally have committed to their database.
Please don't, because no one ever said any such thing.
Rather, let us apply a more appropriate Carl Sagan quote: "The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition." It may be that the physical laws we have discovered actually represent limits to what we can do.
One of the points he makes in his talk (which *you* clearly did not read) was that the ever-increasing lifetime of copyright means that starting with the 20th century, some works will never enter the public domain. The interesting outcome of this, which Stallman didn't explore, but which I think would change some peoples' minds, is the "black hole" of our culture. Simply put, authors and songwriters have an expectation of semi-immortality. Once their career ends, their nostalgic audience will pass down their works to children, who will eventually write it into its proper place in history books. Thus the hue and clamor over the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame, and who does and does not belong in it.
The problem is that in order to survive a work has to be copied. A large business concern (for example, whoever holds the legal right to copy the Beatles' albums) will continue issuing copies as long as its economically feasible. But after the interest dies down, they won't have a reason to continue issuing CD's or vinyl. History has proven (with the example of abandonware in particular) that a publisher or copyright holder will squat on a piece of property that no longer makes money, rather than release it to the public domain.
So set our wayforward machine to 2062. The Beatles are surely dead by this time, and their works, by US and European retroactive copyright laws, are locked in vaults and no longer available in stores. The only people who would want to copy their music would be fans who were alive during the group's career. I was born just exactly at the period that the Beatles' career was ending, and I am probably one of the youngest people who maintains an active interest in collecting their recordings. I will surely be dead and gone by 2062, and I doubt I'll be able to transfer my interest to my son. So the mouldy old CD's in the attic of my house will probably be thrown out, or get left in the heat and melted, or in some other way be destroyed. And the warehoused copies that some enormous conglomerate record company owns? Well, suppose they are just costing storage money, and the company decides to throw them out?
This is a long-drawn out scenario but it's too easy to see it happening. In the case of literature, one of the real problems in studying the history of literature, or the language it's written in, is the accuracy of the source text. It's generally determined that we do not have an original copy of the Cantebury Tales in Chaucer's own hand. So there is some doubt that maybe Chaucer was someone else, or didn't write what we thought he did, or didn't do it as well. The same kind of confusion exists for Shakespeare's works. We don't have the originals in many cases, and we doubt that we are looking at the authentic thing. Maybe we read an "improved" copy.
It's pathetic that in one hundred years, despite the ready availability and incredibly low cost of duplication, that we may be wondering what the hell happened to the great works of the 20th century. Even worse, we won't have great works of the 20th century. We'll just have the bubble-gum dreck of the current moment. This is a distinctly frightening, orwellian concept. As restricted-use schemes become the norm, it may be impossible for us to rewind our tapes, or books, or music, to capture them. We may only have access to machine-generated drivel, and our art and music will have no cultural meaning except as advertising and propaganda.
I would defy you to prove that patent law protections were required for our technology to exist. Most especially in the case of Intel, they have a physical product they are selling. Yeah, ripoffs can be made, but Intel can always fight the ripoffs by making their product more efficiently, of higher quality, and cheaper. This is the essence of competition. A company that cannot survive by making a better product than their competition doesn't deserve to.I would also defy you to prove that literature, music, and art require copyright to exist. The converse is quite easy to prove, since without literature and music, there would be nothing to protect. But artists and authors and musicians have demonstrated throughout history that not only will they create their works for free, they will often do so under highly adverse circumstances, even risking their lives to express their opinions. An artist or author incapable of viewing their output as anything but a monetary investment is likely not a very good one.
I think you have hit the nail on the head. People who rush out and do an intellectual-property land-grab (whether its for technology they invented, then allowed to be come widespread, then jumped on people's shit about, like this, or otherwise) believe that they are entitled to making a profit.
I'm disappointed. After hours and hours, to my knowledge, no one has played with the puns. Is Compaq a "patent suit magnet" because they make lots of money with technology?
Sheesh.
Textbook of a successful crackpot. Excellent reading, for those who wish to boil their blood.
1. Mixdowns of my self-produced music, to take out to my much-better-sounding car stereo to check the levels. Freqency -- about 5 per week.
2. Running off copies of my self-produced music, giving it away to friends.
So did this one. Is that supposed to mean something?
I have been looking for Bluto's Brutus incarnation for years. I am quite sure I saw a Popeye cartoon with a foe named Brutus. Once, maybe.
Code is copyrighted, isn't it? Copyright is what we do to works of expression, verbal or otherwise. Patent is what we do to machines. Unfortunately jackasses who want to own ideas instead of do work have made patenting ideas (as opposed to patenting functional machines) a valid concept, and therefore we see code that is both copyrightable and patentable. The line is blurred, and it's being done for the convenience of entities such as this. Whether the public benefits from these laws or not doesn't appear to be a concern.
The RIAA and MPAA have to be aware that with digital technology, the quality of recording and film equipment that used to cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars now costs hundreds of dollars, and amateur filmmakers and musicians now have cheap personal access to what was state-of-the art twenty years ago, and most of that technology can be installed in a home computer. With the equipment I now own, which costs about what a personal PC does, I can make a multi-track recording of the same quality that you would find in the store, burn it to a CD, and sell it all without ever having to haggle with a record company. Most people I've played it for cannot tell the recording fidelity from that of a commercial CD.
I cannot help but notice that most anti piracy mechanisms will, if widely adapted, shut me out of the current standardized market. Coupled with that I see currently established artists openly defecting from their recording companies to distribute their materials for free online (napster, etc). In every way possible, digital technology empowers us to cut out the expensive and unneccesary middleman when we want to express ourselves. The DMCA is just a feeble attempt to turn back the clock and make it all like it were. Please couldya?
I'm just trying to see how a DVD decryption utility could be viewed as a potential threat to human lives in the same fashion that a homemade nuclear bomb or even an automatic rifle could. Not doing it, so far, but give the MPAA time. Lost revenues could kill people, I guess. If film directors and executives' starving children were brought into it we could have the pity argument. But not without the sarcasm.