If you vote for a third party candidate, you're telling both of the existing two-party candidates that you do not trust them, and you signal why - maybe you don't think they're strong enough on civil liberties, or economic liberties (various libertarians), or perhaps you feel they're not environmentalist enough (Green), or that they do not provide enough protection for consumers (Nader), or perhaps that they're not religious enough (Constitutionalist), etc.
By voting third party candidate when you feel that neither party is remotely close to what you want, you at least indicate to them the direction they should be going in.
It doesn't always work, especially if the "third party campaign" is more of a vindictive wrecking campaign (as an example, Gore was very clearly an environmentalist, but thanks to Nader's "Green Party" campaign, Gore was kicked out and the Democrats lurched away, with no viable environmentalist candidates.) But if you seriously believe neither Republicans nor Democrats can be trusted enough on any serious issues, that they're both equally likely to undermine the principles you strongly believe in, a third party vote is exactly what you should be considering.
Of course, never write off the directly opposing party too. There have been times in the last thirty-forty years where one was better on civil liberties, and times the other has. I can't imagine Ashcroft or anyone else Bush is likely to appoint supporting the Miranda decision, but that target of right-wing hate Janet Reno did exactly that, in front of the Supreme Court. But there have been times when the shoe has been on the other foot.
I don't believe it ever went to court. DEC was suing over design issues anyway, I don't believe they ever said there were actual bits of VMS in NT.
I've used VMS extensively FWIW, it's nothing like NT on the surface, and only shares a handful of features at a low level. An OS based upon VMS, perhaps with VMS's irritating habit of SHOUTING IN CAPITAL LETTERS, and with a slightly saner way of expressing volumes, directories, and filenames (eg: Workbench:Tools/Commodities/Blanker rather than WORKBENCH_DISK:[TOOLS.COMMODITIES]BLANKER.EXE) would make for a very nice operating system.
If open source is about choice, I've just lost the choice to use both Phillips-based webcams and linux. Now my choice is one or the other.
Open source is about source code availability and the freedom to use that source code. It has nothing to do with "choice", it's just choice - the right to use something other than what a proprietary software vendor has told you to do - is one of the many, many, benefits.
But if by "rules" you mean that the linux developers are making me -- and many others -- bear the costs of the developers' ideological fights, then say so. Explain to me honestly that linux isn't about "choice", it's about forcing anyone who wants to play with linux to license everything under the GPL (or BSD, or release to the public domain).
Actually, no. If you want the camera driver to be part of the Linux kernel, then, yeah, you have to abide by the GPL both directly and in spirit. If you want to have a camera driver in userland, however, available as an option to the Philips driver writer and specifically rejected for, what I can only see as, ideological reasons, then you're free to do so.
Whatever the case, proprietary software is proprietary. You can't say "The great advantage of Linux is that it's open source!" in one breath and then say "Well, actually, you can't do anything with this camera driver" in the other.
Philips, not the various Linux contributors, has made the decision not to allow the free flow of information about how their devices work. It is Philips who are responsible for this, not the Linux contributors. They are the people who are restricting your freedoms. Address your complaints to them.
Believe it or not I did RTFA, I just made the mistake of doing so at 7.30 in the morning and posting a kneejerk response to all the "They're all zealots" posts.
Still, I disagree anyone, except outanowhere and Nemosoft Unv, are being "zealots" in this case. There are perfectly good reasons for avoiding having proprietary, closed, code run at a kernel level with kernel privileges, and by Unv's own admission, there are other ways of achieving the same thing. He just doesn't want to do them:
I've considered the alternative, taking PWC/PWCX out of the kernel and supporting it solely as an add-on module, but rejected it. It would mean a demotion of PWC to a 2nd rank module, and probably quite a bit more work to maintain. Also, PWC would not work out-of-the-box anymore, while it does now. That would be acceptable if it's rarely used module, but that is not the case and it would probably confuse a lot of people.
This really is a matter of deciding whether he's maintaining proprietary code to operate a proprietary device, in which case, unfortunately, he's going to have to seperate his work from everyone else's, or whether he's not in which case he's going to have to press Philips harder to get out of the NDA. Ultimately, one way or another, he has many, many, options available to him that will ensure his camera will work under Linux. He's chosen to reject all routes except one that makes a lot of other people very uncomfortable. I'd say he's far more guilty of "zealotry" than the kernel maintainers he flames.
...which it still could. It's a USB camera driver, it doesn't have to be a part of the kernel. Indeed, the guy says it himself:
I've considered the alternative, taking PWC/PWCX out of the kernel and supporting it solely as an add-on module, but rejected it. It would mean a demotion of PWC to a 2nd rank module, and probably quite a bit more work to maintain. Also, PWC would not work out-of-the-box anymore, while it does now. That would be acceptable if it's rarely used module, but that is not the case and it would probably confuse a lot of people.
I find this hilarious. He, and the submitter, have decided to attack the kernel maintainers for being ideological, when actually they're just trying to ensure the kernel remains legal for redistribution (it's licensed under the GPL, after all.) There's a route open to them that allows them to make a restricted product work under Linux, albeit in a slightly restricted way, but they're not taking it because it's horrid and PWC would be demoted to being second rank.
Well diddums! Complain to frickin' Philips then! They're the people being arseholes here by requiring people who want to make their bought, paid-for, hardware work under alternative operating systems sign NDAs. In the meantime, there are alternatives, the authors can still produce tools that will make their cameras "just work", it's going to be harder, but that's the downside of getting a proprietary device.
I wonder if any of the people who are currently flaming the Linux developers as out-of-touch zealots are aware that the kernel is licensed under this thing called the GPL, a license that requires anyone redistributing the kernel to release full source code, by law?
I wasn't aware that "zealotry" and "obsessive" meant "trying to meet the minimum requires to remain legal", but obviously I'm in a minority here...
And why is it that you cannot argue? Maybe it's because the poster actually has got a point.
Or maybe you should learn to read or at least, if you're going to pretend it's some other reason, learn not to cut and paste the actual reason when you're quoting me and trying to come up with a "response".
Copyright holders have achieved a coup by making sure that "stealing" (a morally wrong act) becomes synonymous in the general public consciousness with "copyright infringement" (violation of a privilege granted to entities by Congress with the idea that it would advance the public Good).
Copyright holders believe, with some justification, that if someone gains something of value and doesn't pay for it, and that something of value would otherwise have been paid for, that it's tantamount to stealing. It isn't exactly like stealing, but the fact is anyone with even a basic grasp of concepts like amortization can see that (a) the type of material commonly copyrighted usually takes time and effort and resources and hence money to produce, and (b) that if you make it on the understanding that people who use it will pay for it, and instead those people don't pay for it, but they use it anyway, they're obtaining something that cost you without paying for it.
The fact the money's already been spent doesn't change that. And to many people, with some justification, that's stealing.
People who disagree with digital copyright law are not "extremists," though copyright holders would like to label them as you do. There are many such people, here and elsewhere. They are not freaks of society. They have a voice that will only get louder and more influential with time.
Nobody used the word "extremists", I said, and you quoted me as saying, that individuals such as the GGP, were more extreme than the idealists I was refering to. I think that's a reasonable depiction, given the idealists I was refering to, who were people who simply want to create an infrastructure providing a conduit for, and encouragement for the creation of, free art, are certainly less far away from the mainstream than those who argue, as you do, that existing copyrights should be ignored, that someone who's invested in producing music, or literature, or movies, or God-knows whatever, should have their legal rights to claw back their investments from those who exploit their creations curtailed. The attitude of "Fuck the artists" is most definitely more extreme than the idealists I was refering to.
Artists turn to the RIAA because they see it as the "deluxe" means of distributing their work. The marketing, concert bookings, etc. are hard to resist, especially when compared with how daunting it is to go it alone and have any chance of widespread recognition. That's the reason the RIAA makes a "great deal of music we actually like." They are the customs house.
...and, aside from being technically inaccurately worded (the RIAA is an association represents its members, it doesn't publish anything itself and artists most assurably do not try to get the RIAA to publish anything) that means nothing whatsoever. Those artists still choose, as is their right, to require people who exploit their creations to pay towards the costs of making those creations.
The fact is that all of this effort spent on creating a legally challengable network for the coercise redistribution of works by artists so that people didn't have to pay for them could have been spent on creating an infrastructure with a little bit of accountability that allowed artists an alternative way of distributing their music that bypassed copyright control blocs altogether. The RIAA, as proven here, can legally cause immense damage to this system, and the operators of these networks have done everything they can to encourage people to break the law and suffer the consequences. Meanwhile, artists who tried to work within
No? Those distributing songs came by their collections by some means. The most likely means is that they bought their CD collections themselves. In fact, I would surmise that the larger the collection for share, the larger the investment the file sharer has made in the RIAA's labels.
I would suggest precisely the opposite. I would suggest the sheer weight of economics means that those who are sharing the most amount of music probably have the least number of the original albums.
The first thing to do is to dissassociate law and morality. A law can be moral or immoral. And, you can be of a stripe that feels it's immoral to break a law, whether or not the law itself is moral.
Thanks, but if you read my paragraph again you'll see this diversion really has nothing to do with anything I wrote.
But I, and a lot of the people maybe you call "idealists," want to first challenge a), that these laws are just at all. We think it's a fundamental fallacy to apply the rules that govern physical property to intellectual property. The concepts of ownership, scarcity, reproduction, and distribution are completely different for information than for matter. A lot of the points us "idealists" make are subtle, and non-intuitive, because, frankly, people are not wired, are not evolved, to deal with non-scarce goods. RIAA and the like play on these naive intuitions by calling file sharing "stealing" because that's what it feels like, when in fact nothing is being stolen, because nothing is being lost. Only distribution "rights" are being violated. And these are a wholly artificial construct.
You're not what I'm refering to as a swivel-eyed idealist, you're more extreme than that, and yes, I'm aware you exist, and I'm even aware there are people more extreme than that, and there's nothing much I can do to argue because we live on different planes.
I see nothing wrong whatsoever in creating a network where artists can voluntarily distribute their music far and wide to ensure that that music is heard, and if such a network challenged the copyright-kept blocs, then so much the better. The unfettered distribution of art is a beautiful thing.
But that, I'm sure you'll agree, is entirely different to coercing artists who have produced music to have their works distributed far and wide. Which is what anyone who rips music and puts it on a network for mass distribution to anonymous strangers, and anyone who takes those files and also makes it available for mass distribution to anonymous strangers, is doing.
We, society, have a written contract with producers of new and wonderful things that guarantees them the right to restrict redistribution of their works so that they can try to make some money from the people who use those works. The best part of this contract is that it's voluntarily, if you don't want to play a part in it, for the most part you can simply pretend that the music, books, films, etc, never existed. After all, with much of the work, it actually wouldn't.
Copyright is abused, and the current copyright laws are clearly abusive. There needs to be basic restrictions on how far a creator can go in restricting usage of their works (the DVD CSS fiasco is an example.) Copyright terms are excessive, I know very few businesses who would consider anything more than a twenty or thirty year investment a reasonable length of time to get a return. But this doesn't mean there's anything inherently immoral with copyright itself.
In any case, there's little or no excuse for putting the music of RIAA members (or anyone else) onto P2P networks without authorization. They had a right to at least be given a chance to recoup their investment from the people who use their music, we, through our legislators, gave them that right. Their rights do not restrict ours. We can do anything we want with the music we create. The only reason we have this discussion at all is because, obviously, RIAA members appear to produce a great deal of the music we actually like.
How would you propose doing this? Magical Metallica detectors that can identify Sandman no matter how much its compressed or how its encoded? This is what the RIAA wanted earlier in this war on P2P software.
Rather easily, as a matter of fact. If you want to publish music, you sign it, and you sign it with a verifiable signature.
Or you serve it from your own, tracable, website.
Your solution doesn't create responsibility incidentally, it just traces what music is being published. It says nothing about who is publishing it, and provides no means for the person responsible for ripping and uploading it to be caught. So I'm not sure why you suggested it, other than trying to come up with a randomly technically-unfeasable solution to try to ridicule something entirely appropriate. FWIW, I don't think it would help us create responsibility if we transfered the music only at a speed faster than light either.
If I recall correctly, there have been successful prosecutions of copyright infringements on the basis of four musical notes. On a more recent subject, sampling lead to some major (and successful) prosecutions too.
If it's a derivative, I don't see how any new music could be released, every note possible has been hit and recorded so far you would think.
You're confusing copyrights and patents. For you to breach copyright, you must have copied something. If you were on a Desert Island from birth, and started singing "Happy Birthday" to the copyright lawyer who just rescued you at the age of 25, a song identical to "Happy Birthday" but that you'd composed yourself by sheer coincidence, then you'd not be in violation of any kind of copyright.
Additionally, while the bulk of already composed music and produced sentences may mean everything's been composed and written, it's also the case that this works for you in that all these little sentence fragments et al you think are copyrighted are actually public domain by now.
This is generally true of music too. Most record stores I see usually have listening booths. In addition, visit a band's website and it's very often the case that you can stream that band's music to your browser. Certainly that seems to be true of most bands I know of that aren't overplayed by the Clear Channel/Viacom bloc.
Of course, you can't usually download entire albums and keep them stored on your hard drive without paying for them, but then, a car dealership would balk at you keeping your "test drive" car at home, or driving it several hundred miles, while you wait to decide whether you're going to buy it.
I still maintain that suing your customers, whether your are the RIAA or SCO, can have a chilling effect on sales.
Which is presumably why the RIAA is suing people it clearly believes are not "its" (or rather its members') customers. Remember, the RIAA is suing people for "sharing" (mass distribution to anonymous strangers without authorization) the music made by its members, so that those anonymous strangers do not need to visit record stores or the iTMS and actually buy anything. I don't see a customer relationship there, I see a competitive relationship (copyright infringers vs the members of the RIAA), and one where one of those groups, the infringers, are apparently acting illegally.
Back when Napster was having every law in the book thrown at it, many Slashdotters argued that this was morally wrong because it was only Napster's customers who were infringing on copyrights, not Napster itself. In general, the operators and creators of these networks have, quite deliberately, created a tool that makes copyright infringement easy and potentially accidental. Meanwhile the focus has changed to these people.
I'm really wondering who's morally in the wrong here. The RIAA? Music owned by the members of the RIAA (and their suppliers) is, very obviously, being illegally distributed on P2P networks. The users? In many cases, the redistribution is obviously illegal but many still seem to believe in some kind of loophole to protect them, from a belief that they only downloaded the music (not realising that it became automatically "shared" the moment they did, and in any case knowing full well they were encouraging that illegal distribution to begin with), to a belief "fair use" implies any kind of not-for-profit redistribution (it doesn't..)
Sharman networks and their ilk? I'm sure there are a few idealists amongst these groups who envisage millions of garage-based bands turning their music into MP3s and distributing it for free, but, come on, when Shawn Fanning wrote Napster as an alternative to IRC based distribution, what were the majority of MP3s that were being distributed?
Sometimes it's necessary to side with the "bad guys". The entire problem with P2P could have been resolved had anyone been willing to build responsibility into the networks, so that nobody would have thought redistributing music without authorization was something they could do without getting caught to begin with. All this infrastructure has been built instead of building something that would have created a genuine, independent, alternative to the major commercial record labels - I say instead, because as things currently are, the current infrastructure is open to legal attack, and, clearly from the lawsuits, the networks seem to be predominantly used to distribute the music of the major commercial record labels, not the alternatives.
So, what we have here isn't custom, it's competition. It's legally challenged competition. It's not really doing anything the swivel-eyed idealists said P2P would do, because it's not designed to. I don't think the RIAA is suing its (members') customers.
In Europe, though, it's practically forbidden to acknowledge that Hitler ever existed.
Yep. Other than the year or two of history lessons, the semi-compulsory tours of concentration camps for school children (if you're German), the regular TV history series' on WWII, not to mention the constant references in the press and other media, we yurp-ians don't no nuffink about that hilter dude. Wasn't he some actor or something? You know, the guy with the moustache, did a lot of slapstick comedy...
I'm absolutely baffled anyone could make such a statement as the one quoted above.
Why do most European countries insist on covering up any history of Hitler?
They don't. Indeed, if you're German, a trip to a concentration camp is part of your schooling. Elsewhere in Europe, World War II, the roots of it, the rise of fascism and Nazism in Germany and elsewhere, the holocaust, etc, are required (compulsory) parts of your education.
Don't confuse the sale and promotion of Nazism and icons thereof with trying to cover up what happened. Europeans do not want that regime glorified. That's why some countries have laws such as this French law.
What the hell are you talking about? Where did I say circumventing an ACM wasn't a DMCA violation?
Circumventing an access control mechanism, as defined by the DMCA, most assuredly is against the DMCA, which is one of many reasons why the DMCA sucks, is anti-content user, and should be repealed.
So, let me see if I understand you correctly. You're saying I should plug an ADB keyboard into a PowerBook G4. And what would I plug that into then? The USB sockets? The power socket? The telephone port? My ears?
As far as Apple keyboards go, no, there are no Apple keyboards I like. So I bought a generic USB keyboard that I actually do like. One with a feel I like. One with a built-in trackpoint.
The only issue with this particular is the lack of a command key. Rather than use a keyboard I do not like, which you appear to feel I should on the grounds that you appear to believe that Apple users should plug ADB keyboards into their computers, even on computers that do not have ADB sockets, like practically every Apple computer manufactured in this millenium, I've decided to go for one I do like, and hacked Darwin to support it.
You may find that objectionable, I don't know. But for me, it is the better of the evils, especially those evils you offer as an alternative.
Actually, regional DVD's aren't about price fixing as much as it has to do with selling rights.
Selling rights to what? Selling rights to walk around? Selling rights to watch TV? Selling rights to stand on top of a building and yell "I'm Rob Malda and I'm not going to take it any more!"?
Or selling rights to be the exclusive distributor in a specific market with little or no recourse for customers who want DVDs in that market to shop elsewhere? In other words, selling rights to price fix?
Regional DVD's were most likely developed to keep the distributer from competing with the producer.
Well, few producers actually distribute, but in any case, does it matter who's not competing against who? If it's all down to contractual arrangements, how is it a different breach of contract for one distributor to issue region-free DVDs compared to, say, a distributor selling to outlets and advertising heavily in a region they're not supposed to be?
It really boils down to one thing: distributors want to be able to monopolize a market rather than risk people comparing prices in some other market and importing craploads - either directly through the world wide web, or indirectly through grey-importers. And if it forces someone to buy the same DVD twice, both times at an uncompetitive price, when they move, then all the better.
I don't like the naming convention of firstSecondThird. first_second_third is simply more readable.
This is a matter of personal opinion. Personally, I always rather liked Sinclair QDOS's "two module letters_name" convention, but it's not very scalable... Whatever the situation, making names less verbose would strike me as a good thing.
I don't like try, catch. It's important to roll up errors but try, catch just turns into a mess usually. Perl's "or die()" way of doing things isn't great but I do like it better.
I'm happy with try... catch. What I don't like is the abuse the Java library gives to exception handling. The major issue with try... catch isn't that it's inherently bad, it's that some programmers, unfortunately some of which work at Sun, think it's a great replacement for "goto". Perfectly reasonable conditions that are not errors and do not need to be "caught" in the way Sun thinks are routinely returned using exception handling. That's not acceptable.
I don't like strongly typed languages. Dealing with an overloaded object as a basic type that automatically does what you would do normally, usually requiring less variable names and code is a win.
Strongly typed languages are fine as long as you can translate between types and have means to specify groups of related types, all of which Java allows you to do. The major advantage of a strongly typed language is that it catches logic errors in the code before you even get to run it, and that's a good thing.
I know why people like weak typing, I used to be a fan of it myself, and it somehow "feels" easier, it just throws up a lot of errors when used.
There's too much overhead in Java. I believe that the only sufficient documentation for code is code. Comments can be wrong and never telly you precicely what is happening so a good programmer never relies on them, you have to read the code to figure out what is going on. Having to read through lots of overhead is a waste of programmers time. Things should be represented consisely so they can be read and understood quickly. Lots of programmers have a hard time with perl because it's so dense but I'd rather read a 1 line regex than a 20 line function that does the same thing any day.
This, for the most part, is a fault of the standard library which makes doing simple things much more complicated than it ought to be. But I covered that:)
If you're copying to a DVD-R, then you have various options, not the least of which is to bypass CSS given the information as to what it is has been public domain for several years, and several programs now exist that use that information to decrypt it.
I guess the MPAA should have said "The CSS would have protected DVDs against copying if it wasn't for those meddlin' kids and their dog, though there hasn't been massive illegal copying, so what was our point again?"
Probably worth noting that it's the access control mechanism (as defined by the DMCA), not copy protection system. It doesn't prevent anything from being copied.
It does make it more difficult for people to produce region free DVD players though, because only authorized DVD players may access the DVD (legally bypass the ACM), and a DVD player will not be authorized if it's region free, at least in the US. (Yes, there are hacks for many DVD players, but they're not supposed to be there, and more importantly, if a DVD manufacturer advertised the feature they'd lose their license instantly.)
It's all about price fixing in the end. And it's legal. Don't you just love it?
Making it changable would help Mac users too, as the "Windows" key on Mac systems acts as the "command" key.
Which is actually annoying if you're using a keyboard without a Windows key. I had to reprogram Darwin to get the Left-Alt to work the same way (and have to keep updating it every time I get a point-point release of OS X in a Software Update.)
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If you vote for a third party candidate, you're telling both of the existing two-party candidates that you do not trust them, and you signal why - maybe you don't think they're strong enough on civil liberties, or economic liberties (various libertarians), or perhaps you feel they're not environmentalist enough (Green), or that they do not provide enough protection for consumers (Nader), or perhaps that they're not religious enough (Constitutionalist), etc.
By voting third party candidate when you feel that neither party is remotely close to what you want, you at least indicate to them the direction they should be going in.
It doesn't always work, especially if the "third party campaign" is more of a vindictive wrecking campaign (as an example, Gore was very clearly an environmentalist, but thanks to Nader's "Green Party" campaign, Gore was kicked out and the Democrats lurched away, with no viable environmentalist candidates.) But if you seriously believe neither Republicans nor Democrats can be trusted enough on any serious issues, that they're both equally likely to undermine the principles you strongly believe in, a third party vote is exactly what you should be considering.
Of course, never write off the directly opposing party too. There have been times in the last thirty-forty years where one was better on civil liberties, and times the other has. I can't imagine Ashcroft or anyone else Bush is likely to appoint supporting the Miranda decision, but that target of right-wing hate Janet Reno did exactly that, in front of the Supreme Court. But there have been times when the shoe has been on the other foot.
I've used VMS extensively FWIW, it's nothing like NT on the surface, and only shares a handful of features at a low level. An OS based upon VMS, perhaps with VMS's irritating habit of SHOUTING IN CAPITAL LETTERS, and with a slightly saner way of expressing volumes, directories, and filenames (eg: Workbench:Tools/Commodities/Blanker rather than WORKBENCH_DISK:[TOOLS.COMMODITIES]BLANKER.EXE) would make for a very nice operating system.
Whatever the case, proprietary software is proprietary. You can't say "The great advantage of Linux is that it's open source!" in one breath and then say "Well, actually, you can't do anything with this camera driver" in the other.
Philips, not the various Linux contributors, has made the decision not to allow the free flow of information about how their devices work. It is Philips who are responsible for this, not the Linux contributors. They are the people who are restricting your freedoms. Address your complaints to them.
Still, I disagree anyone, except outanowhere and Nemosoft Unv, are being "zealots" in this case. There are perfectly good reasons for avoiding having proprietary, closed, code run at a kernel level with kernel privileges, and by Unv's own admission, there are other ways of achieving the same thing. He just doesn't want to do them:
This really is a matter of deciding whether he's maintaining proprietary code to operate a proprietary device, in which case, unfortunately, he's going to have to seperate his work from everyone else's, or whether he's not in which case he's going to have to press Philips harder to get out of the NDA. Ultimately, one way or another, he has many, many, options available to him that will ensure his camera will work under Linux. He's chosen to reject all routes except one that makes a lot of other people very uncomfortable. I'd say he's far more guilty of "zealotry" than the kernel maintainers he flames.Well diddums! Complain to frickin' Philips then! They're the people being arseholes here by requiring people who want to make their bought, paid-for, hardware work under alternative operating systems sign NDAs. In the meantime, there are alternatives, the authors can still produce tools that will make their cameras "just work", it's going to be harder, but that's the downside of getting a proprietary device.
I wasn't aware that "zealotry" and "obsessive" meant "trying to meet the minimum requires to remain legal", but obviously I'm in a minority here...
Or maybe you should learn to read or at least, if you're going to pretend it's some other reason, learn not to cut and paste the actual reason when you're quoting me and trying to come up with a "response".
Copyright holders believe, with some justification, that if someone gains something of value and doesn't pay for it, and that something of value would otherwise have been paid for, that it's tantamount to stealing. It isn't exactly like stealing, but the fact is anyone with even a basic grasp of concepts like amortization can see that (a) the type of material commonly copyrighted usually takes time and effort and resources and hence money to produce, and (b) that if you make it on the understanding that people who use it will pay for it, and instead those people don't pay for it, but they use it anyway, they're obtaining something that cost you without paying for it.
The fact the money's already been spent doesn't change that. And to many people, with some justification, that's stealing.
Nobody used the word "extremists", I said, and you quoted me as saying, that individuals such as the GGP, were more extreme than the idealists I was refering to. I think that's a reasonable depiction, given the idealists I was refering to, who were people who simply want to create an infrastructure providing a conduit for, and encouragement for the creation of, free art, are certainly less far away from the mainstream than those who argue, as you do, that existing copyrights should be ignored, that someone who's invested in producing music, or literature, or movies, or God-knows whatever, should have their legal rights to claw back their investments from those who exploit their creations curtailed. The attitude of "Fuck the artists" is most definitely more extreme than the idealists I was refering to.
The fact is that all of this effort spent on creating a legally challengable network for the coercise redistribution of works by artists so that people didn't have to pay for them could have been spent on creating an infrastructure with a little bit of accountability that allowed artists an alternative way of distributing their music that bypassed copyright control blocs altogether. The RIAA, as proven here, can legally cause immense damage to this system, and the operators of these networks have done everything they can to encourage people to break the law and suffer the consequences. Meanwhile, artists who tried to work within
I see nothing wrong whatsoever in creating a network where artists can voluntarily distribute their music far and wide to ensure that that music is heard, and if such a network challenged the copyright-kept blocs, then so much the better. The unfettered distribution of art is a beautiful thing.
But that, I'm sure you'll agree, is entirely different to coercing artists who have produced music to have their works distributed far and wide. Which is what anyone who rips music and puts it on a network for mass distribution to anonymous strangers, and anyone who takes those files and also makes it available for mass distribution to anonymous strangers, is doing.
We, society, have a written contract with producers of new and wonderful things that guarantees them the right to restrict redistribution of their works so that they can try to make some money from the people who use those works. The best part of this contract is that it's voluntarily, if you don't want to play a part in it, for the most part you can simply pretend that the music, books, films, etc, never existed. After all, with much of the work, it actually wouldn't.
Copyright is abused, and the current copyright laws are clearly abusive. There needs to be basic restrictions on how far a creator can go in restricting usage of their works (the DVD CSS fiasco is an example.) Copyright terms are excessive, I know very few businesses who would consider anything more than a twenty or thirty year investment a reasonable length of time to get a return. But this doesn't mean there's anything inherently immoral with copyright itself.
In any case, there's little or no excuse for putting the music of RIAA members (or anyone else) onto P2P networks without authorization. They had a right to at least be given a chance to recoup their investment from the people who use their music, we, through our legislators, gave them that right. Their rights do not restrict ours. We can do anything we want with the music we create. The only reason we have this discussion at all is because, obviously, RIAA members appear to produce a great deal of the music we actually like.
Or you serve it from your own, tracable, website.
Your solution doesn't create responsibility incidentally, it just traces what music is being published. It says nothing about who is publishing it, and provides no means for the person responsible for ripping and uploading it to be caught. So I'm not sure why you suggested it, other than trying to come up with a randomly technically-unfeasable solution to try to ridicule something entirely appropriate. FWIW, I don't think it would help us create responsibility if we transfered the music only at a speed faster than light either.
Additionally, while the bulk of already composed music and produced sentences may mean everything's been composed and written, it's also the case that this works for you in that all these little sentence fragments et al you think are copyrighted are actually public domain by now.
Of course, you can't usually download entire albums and keep them stored on your hard drive without paying for them, but then, a car dealership would balk at you keeping your "test drive" car at home, or driving it several hundred miles, while you wait to decide whether you're going to buy it.
Back when Napster was having every law in the book thrown at it, many Slashdotters argued that this was morally wrong because it was only Napster's customers who were infringing on copyrights, not Napster itself. In general, the operators and creators of these networks have, quite deliberately, created a tool that makes copyright infringement easy and potentially accidental. Meanwhile the focus has changed to these people.
I'm really wondering who's morally in the wrong here. The RIAA? Music owned by the members of the RIAA (and their suppliers) is, very obviously, being illegally distributed on P2P networks. The users? In many cases, the redistribution is obviously illegal but many still seem to believe in some kind of loophole to protect them, from a belief that they only downloaded the music (not realising that it became automatically "shared" the moment they did, and in any case knowing full well they were encouraging that illegal distribution to begin with), to a belief "fair use" implies any kind of not-for-profit redistribution (it doesn't..)
Sharman networks and their ilk? I'm sure there are a few idealists amongst these groups who envisage millions of garage-based bands turning their music into MP3s and distributing it for free, but, come on, when Shawn Fanning wrote Napster as an alternative to IRC based distribution, what were the majority of MP3s that were being distributed?
Sometimes it's necessary to side with the "bad guys". The entire problem with P2P could have been resolved had anyone been willing to build responsibility into the networks, so that nobody would have thought redistributing music without authorization was something they could do without getting caught to begin with. All this infrastructure has been built instead of building something that would have created a genuine, independent, alternative to the major commercial record labels - I say instead, because as things currently are, the current infrastructure is open to legal attack, and, clearly from the lawsuits, the networks seem to be predominantly used to distribute the music of the major commercial record labels, not the alternatives.
So, what we have here isn't custom, it's competition. It's legally challenged competition. It's not really doing anything the swivel-eyed idealists said P2P would do, because it's not designed to. I don't think the RIAA is suing its (members') customers.
I'll get my coat...
Sorry suwain_2, just re-read your comment. At least, I hope you were being sarcastic. ;)
6 meters? What's that in small cars? I'm assuming it's way smaller than a Rhode Island, or even a Library of Congress.
I'm absolutely baffled anyone could make such a statement as the one quoted above.
Wow. Just wow.
Don't confuse the sale and promotion of Nazism and icons thereof with trying to cover up what happened. Europeans do not want that regime glorified. That's why some countries have laws such as this French law.
Circumventing an access control mechanism, as defined by the DMCA, most assuredly is against the DMCA, which is one of many reasons why the DMCA sucks, is anti-content user, and should be repealed.
As far as Apple keyboards go, no, there are no Apple keyboards I like. So I bought a generic USB keyboard that I actually do like. One with a feel I like. One with a built-in trackpoint.
The only issue with this particular is the lack of a command key. Rather than use a keyboard I do not like, which you appear to feel I should on the grounds that you appear to believe that Apple users should plug ADB keyboards into their computers, even on computers that do not have ADB sockets, like practically every Apple computer manufactured in this millenium, I've decided to go for one I do like, and hacked Darwin to support it.
You may find that objectionable, I don't know. But for me, it is the better of the evils, especially those evils you offer as an alternative.
Or selling rights to be the exclusive distributor in a specific market with little or no recourse for customers who want DVDs in that market to shop elsewhere? In other words, selling rights to price fix?
Well, few producers actually distribute, but in any case, does it matter who's not competing against who? If it's all down to contractual arrangements, how is it a different breach of contract for one distributor to issue region-free DVDs compared to, say, a distributor selling to outlets and advertising heavily in a region they're not supposed to be?It really boils down to one thing: distributors want to be able to monopolize a market rather than risk people comparing prices in some other market and importing craploads - either directly through the world wide web, or indirectly through grey-importers. And if it forces someone to buy the same DVD twice, both times at an uncompetitive price, when they move, then all the better.
I know why people like weak typing, I used to be a fan of it myself, and it somehow "feels" easier, it just throws up a lot of errors when used.
This, for the most part, is a fault of the standard library which makes doing simple things much more complicated than it ought to be. But I covered thatI guess the MPAA should have said "The CSS would have protected DVDs against copying if it wasn't for those meddlin' kids and their dog, though there hasn't been massive illegal copying, so what was our point again?"
It does make it more difficult for people to produce region free DVD players though, because only authorized DVD players may access the DVD (legally bypass the ACM), and a DVD player will not be authorized if it's region free, at least in the US. (Yes, there are hacks for many DVD players, but they're not supposed to be there, and more importantly, if a DVD manufacturer advertised the feature they'd lose their license instantly.)
It's all about price fixing in the end. And it's legal. Don't you just love it?
What is a "Mac keyboard" as opposed to a USB keyboard? Do you mean an Apple keyboard? If so, can you point me at one that I actually like?
Which is actually annoying if you're using a keyboard without a Windows key. I had to reprogram Darwin to get the Left-Alt to work the same way (and have to keep updating it every time I get a point-point release of OS X in a Software Update.)