We've had that policy for years now and it's working quite well. Using.net for everything may be a bit of a pain at times, but it beats having to test every app twice a month when a new version of Java comes out.
Other than the obvious point of high school, which is to provide a prison-like environment for our children so we can all take a little break from them, he's truly missed the point of high school.
High school has nothing to do with what you are going to do in real life. Oh, it may seem that way in your last year, but in truth, all you really end up deciding at that stage what you might do in the grossest of terms.
No. High school is supposed to be about building mental abilities that will allow you to go out into the world and function as a reasonably useful person. What you learn is somewhat important, but learning how to learn and apply material effectively is what you are really there for.
Think of it this way. Athletes spend a lot of time on the practice field learning their sport. But they also spend a lot of time in the gym building muscle. If they didn't build those muscles up with time in the gym, they might understand their own sport, but they'd have a hard time succeeding at it because they didn't spend time building up the general muscle required to apply that knowledge.
Never once at a football game have I seen a quarterback call for the reverse arm curl play. But I doubt you'd get any arguments from a football player that time in the gym was time well spent. The same applies for academics. You may never need to know how to do trig, or compose a sonnet, but doing those things in high school helps build up mental muscle for later.
So yes. You do have to do things you suck at, because, not surprisingly, you get the most out of learning how to do things you suck at. As to who decides what you'll take, well, that's easy. Gather your facts that describe why you think a change should be made, put them together in a cohesive argument, write a paper that shows how your plan will provide positive change, and then present it to the folks who decide. (Of course, you might find this hard if you didn't take Math, Science, English and Social Studies in high school...)
I understand exactly how you feel. I've spent most of my life feeling exactly the same way. Your "I'm not autistic. I'm not disgusting." realization took me more than a decade of adulthood to reach. I'm married now and most days feel as though I am someone a woman would find, if not attractive, at least acceptable as a potential suitor.
Mellon's post is great for making yourself more attractive to women, but it only gets you half the way there. Attractive you still has to meet women and stay out of the friend zone. Here are some of the things I learned through very hard trial and error:
Sanity check: The average guy gets turned down far more often than not. It may not seem that way from the outside, but it's true. Yes, there are superstars who are amazing looking and can get any girl they want, but this is mostly the exception, not the rule.
Location: Where you look for someone is probably the single most important factor in whether or not you will be successful. As an adult, usually work and school are not the best places to meet women looking for men. "Fun" classes like drama, fencing, toastmasters, etc... will sometimes yield good results, but don't take those classes unless you are actually interested because really, you just don't want to be the guy who trolls classes looking for women. If you're looking for dates in these places, be prepared to be turned down a lot.
If you don't want to go straight to the dating web sites, and the bar scene is not for you (it sure wasn't for me), then social events are usually the best bet. Dinner parties, backyard BBQ's, sports events and the like are usually the best chance to meet someone you'll actually want to date (yes, that's important too!) and who will want to date you. You have something in common (friends, or whatever the event is) and you can ask around about her availability before approaching her. (Otherwise you risk becoming that creepy guy who hits on all the women at the BBQ...)
At the end of the day, if a woman is in a place where social interests are not at the forefront of her mind, her first thought about people she meets won't be "this is the guy". (Unless she's in desperate mode, which you do not want...)
Resources: Don't try to manage this alone. You're in the friend zone with a bunch of women? Good! These are your best resources. If you really are friends with them, let them know you're looking. If you're a good guy who just can't quite seem to make the right connection, these girls will be more than happy to help you out by inviting you to social events (parties, dinners, movie night, whatever) where you can meet people. A direct setup by a woman with a friend of hers can work, but in my experience it tends to be a mixed bag of good and bad. Nothing wrong with kissing a few frogs though, so I'd go on those setups just for the experience.
Image: Mellon is right, you can't just project an image, but if you are a person who is happy, successful and confident, then you need to project that image in order to be attractive to women. They say you should dress for the job you want. You should also dress for the woman you want, and think you have the most in common with. Market who you are to your target audience. When a woman looks at you, she assesses who she thinks you are, and that affects your interactions with her. You may be "Cool, Guitar Playing Guy" or "Director of Really Important Stuff", but you dress like "Bored Country Bumpkin", then "Cool, Drum Playing Gal" and "Manager of the Big Accounts Woman" aren't going to notice you.
Communication: Again, Mellon hits on this one. Learn how to speak to people, and more importantly, how to listen. (You may know how, or you may just think you know.... Find out). Do you make good eye contact? Do you stand up straight or hunch over? Do you mumble or run on? Do you listen to what the other person is saying or are you just waiting for your turn to talk again? There are lots of classes where you can learn these skills. Take one. Even i
"The "limited time" is what makes it not ownership. Your patent is like a rented house -- you have the rights to the house you rented, but you don't own it. "We the people" own the work, the author is simply the tenant"
---
That's a tricky one, because in the case of a story you write, unless you sell those rights, your "limited time" ownership is the span of your natural life. To the average person, that's going to seem a lot like ownership. Your analogy also doesn't take into account that the "tenant" built the house. In the case of an author who has written a story, he was the one who actually built the thing. Unless he sells it, it is his to control for the entire span of his life. To most people, that would seem like ownership, and improper use of that material would seem a lot like theft, especially if he was in a position to profit from the use of that material.
As a side note, it's funny that you use a rented house in your analogy. Because based on the idea you've put forward, people don't "own" their homes either.
Consider: Because my mortgage is paid out, I say that I own the house and land. It is mine. However, in truth, the city/state has the ability to take back (annex) that home and land if it feels it is in the best interest of the people. By the standard you set above for copyright/patent, I wouldn't "own" my home either. The people own it, I have simply made a financial arrangement that allows me to use it until such time as the actual owner wants it back. Not sure how most people would feel about that idea...:)
While I would agree that the term "ownership" seems inappropriate to an intangible, the net effect of controlling the publication amounts to the same thing. As the entity who controls the publication of a story, you can limit who reads it, or even prevent everyone from reading it. From that perspective, you "own" it to the extent that it may as well be a diamond locked in a safe - no one can see it or use it unless you open the safe door and allow them access.
For an entity who has essentially "locked their story in a safe" (even if it is a safe that allows a select group of participants access), the act of having someone else access that story without permission would feel very much like theft. At the very least it would feel like a violation of some sort and the victim would be right in requesting assistance in preventing it from happening again and in punishing the violators. Is it right to call the story property? Likely not, but it may be the closest we can come to something the layperson will understand and properly identify as wrong.
That is, of course, assuming you don't believe that all creative work shouldn't become public domain the instant it is created. But that's a whole other argument.
Then run the most powerful magnets you can find over the hard drive when you turn it back in. Most IT staff are lazy about this sort of thing. If you report it not working, and you turn it in unable to boot to the OS, they'll just wipe it and put the company standard image back on. No one will be the wiser.
I'm a big fan of Michael Geist, but I think he's missed it here.
He's talking about declining rates of business software piracy and camcording. But both of these areas have avenues of detection and enforcement. Theaters are on the watch for camcorders (and apparently big bags of M&M's hidden in my wife's purse...), and there are many ways businesses are outed for using pirate software (auditors, whistleblowers, etc...) What the US is complaining about are the infringements where enforcement is lax or non-existent in Canada, specifically music and digitally copied movies (does anyone really watch those awful cam copies?).
When Geist discusses movies, music and video games, he cites growth and sales figures in those industries as evidence that piracy rates are dropping. I'm not convinced. It most likely only shows an improvement in the economy since the economic meltdown of 2008. At any rate, the actual cause cannot be determined from this data alone. This is a classic case of not understanding the idea that correlation does not imply causation. He should know better than to even try this approach.
Canada's laws allow Canadians to pirate whatever they like at will with no fear of repercussions. That absolutely creates a climate that would be considered a haven for pirates. It's great that some are choosing to pay for their IP, but let's not kid ourselves about what it is we have going on here. Citing growth figures in legitimate sales doesn't prove that piracy is on the decrease, it only shows that the industry is doing better.
That's a whole different kettle of fish. If you want to argue that 'random song selection' on an mp3 player should not warrant protection under IP, that's a different discussion altogether. What we're talking about here is theft of IP for personal use.
Scarcity laws were designed to work with physical items. Non-physical items that have value cannot be measured in this way.
(BTW, I'm not saying that what these companies do is fair -- I'm just saying that applying scarcity laws to something without a physical presence is idiotic.)
But then it seems like you go on to act as if your opinions are actually facts (that copyright should exist and must be protected).
I said nothing of the kind. I said intellectual property should be protected. I don't think copyright in its current form is reasonable and would like to see reform, but I stand fast by my opinion that IP must be protected if we expect to continue to see creative works.
Really? A lot of the technology has multiple uses. I doubt much of it is specifically designed to allow people to more easily infringe upon another's copyright without getting caught.
Bittorrent software is designed to allow people to download pirate movies and music. Yes, a very small group of IT folks use it for sharing open source, but the average user doesn't. (I'm surprised you even tried this approach...)
I understand your frustration with the system, but this is what we've got to work with. You either make it work for you, or you lose summarily. The idiot lawmakers will pass something. Our best bet is to keep the dialog open by having an honest discussion with them. My point is that using an obviously flawed (and one sided) defense like the scarcity approach isn't the way to do it. It's transparent and deliberately obtuse.
I think that's great, and if someone were to propose a system that would allow for it, I'd support it, but so far we've not seen anything that would work. To tell the folks who are currently getting robbed blind (by this I mean the creators, not the distributors), that they'll simply have to wait it out seems unfair.
I do not support PIPA/SOPA/ACTA as written because of the infringements to fair use and how wide the boundaries are around what qualifies as sufficient grounds to take action against a site. I do however support the rights of authors (and for now, distributors) to have immediate legal recourse against those who steal their property or who provide others with a means to do so.
How should IP be protected? I would start by revamping the copyright laws to something more sensible. (In what is protected, how fair use is applied and how long it is protected for.) Then proposed solutions to protect content may not seem quite so draconian. Not sure I'll see that in my lifetime though...
This was in specific response to the "scarcity" legal defense which the pirate community likes to cite when folks say that copying movies/music is theft. When non-tangibles began to appear as items for mass distribution of sale (music/movies), the laws changed to protect them as property, even though the concept of scarcity clearly did not apply. (This happened with the first introduction of copyright/trademark etc...)
I'm not referring to the recent group of laws which intends to make fair use illegal.
I support the spirit, if not the execution. I agree that what is proposed in that legislation is deeply flawed, but the intent, to protect IP from theft is a good one.
Well said. Unfortunately, the lot who are busy beating the broken drum of scarcity are making it difficult for the rest of us who are honestly interested in fair laws around IP.
Should IP be protected? Absolutely. I like that people get paid to be creative and provide me with entertainment. If we don't protect it and pay the people who created it (and yes, when necessary, distributed it), then we'll not have it anymore. To do that, the laws have to, and had to, change. And those laws must be enforced.
Piracy is out of hand today. As 'geeks', we've provided the public with the ability to break IP protection laws with impunity. It's not acceptable to the creators of such content, and it is not sustainable.
Now, that said, I'm fine with why it happened. It happened because of improved technology, and to be sure there are companies that reject the model on that basis alone. While I want to see legislation that will protect content owners, I would hate to see them protect and prop up those who fail to adopt their business models to match the new technology. But as long as people focus on something as stupid as the "scarcity" defense, we're not going to convince the lawmakers, content owners, or even the general public that a fair version of these laws would do good. They will see us as thieves, looking to use a loophole to rationalize our theft.
“We have now moved into an era where the consumer is in control, and where thanks to the Internet and mobile devices, you cannot control access any more,”
And thank God for that. What country does this guy think he lives in? I'd expect that in communist China but in Canada? Ouch.
I suppose it's just one more example of a government being unhappy about losing control of the minds of its people. In all honesty, if Canadian content can't compete with American then it deserves to lose.
The role of IT is to provide ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONS. When we start providing a one-off scratch for every itch that a corner office user gets, we make a mess of the whole thing and we actually hinder the business.
It constantly amuses me to hear people talk about IT as a road block. Most IT people are solution oriented. The last thing they want to be is a roadblock. They want to find solutions to problems, but through hard experience we've learned that we have to approach it systematically and with planning. When people think IT is roadblocking because of this philosophy, to help them understand, I usually compare it to how the mail works.
Can you imagine, if on any given street, each person could choose how he receives mail? Say 30% favour a local group of mailboxes, 60% prefer delivery to the house, the remaining 10% would like to pick up at the local post office. Each method is a valid solution, and may actually be the best solution for each person, but the logistics of it would be a nightmare and the cost would be three times what it would be by just picking one of those solutions and rolling it out for everyone.
Just because a device has a legitimate purpose, it doesn't mean that you need to make it happen. It means you consider it when developing your enterprise solution, but that's it.
No one disagrees that IT's job is to support people. And sometimes that does make our job harder, but anywhere there are large numbers of people who rely upon a service, be that mail, road/air traffic, legal, financial, or whatever, there are established ways of doing things that benefit the majority. The second we start making exceptions for every malcontent with a complaint, we lose what makes the system work for everyone else.
I have mixed feelings about this Bill. On one hand, parts of the Bill seem very reasonable. For example, reducing the maximum penalty for infringement and going after the enablers both seem like sensible approaches. Extensions to education for fair dealing also seems reasonable.
The less reasonable parts obviously include not being able to make a video library from what you record from TV, and not being able to bypass digital locks for media transfers. On its face, those parts of the Bill seem ludicrous and clearly influenced by US policies and lobbyists. Deeper down, I suspect the former is rooted in how copyright law works (you must aggressively pursue all forms / violators of piracy or you may lose your ability to protect the work in the future), and the latter allows the government to prosecute people directly for breaking digital locks rather than messing about in copyright law.
Looking strictly at the law, not allowing permanent TV recordings is completely unenforceable by the police (though easily enforceable through technology). The section about not breaking digital locks will make it a challenge for Canadians to acquire the software to convert our CD's and DVD's to digital storage, but for determined users, not impossible. I suspect this too will be nearly impossible to enforce in that arena. Where it will be easy to enforce is torrenting, which obviously bypasses digital locks on material and thus qualifies under that section as prohibited.
The government is in an odd position. They are not accustomed to enforcing copyright law -- at least not in a non-commercial sense. Large scale piracy for profit, yes, individual for home use, no. Now they are being asked to. And for good reason - piracy is easy and pretty much everyone who knows how to do it, *is* doing it. Some more than others, but it's happening a lot. It's gone past the point where civil law can handle it -- it's time for it to become criminal. But how? They definitely don't want to be involved in individual criminal copyright cases. Too much ambiguity and complexity. So instead, digital locks. Nice and simple. We don't care about the material, we only care about the lock you bypassed by downloading (and made available while doing so) a torrented copy. You'll not have an easy time defending that.
Makes sense in a twisted kind of way. That said, I agree with Geist when he says that the digital lock portion of the Bill will have the unfortunate side effect of making legitimate use of ripping music/movies nearly impossible for the average Canadian. It will be very much like winding the clock back 10 years to a point where only the computer geeks had the tools to rip their own music/movies. I'm not sure what the alternative is though.
Of course, the interesting bit continues to be gathering proof that a person is downloading materials they don't have a right to. I'm curious to see how that process will work and what Canadian judges will accept as evidence.
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We've had that policy for years now and it's working quite well. Using .net for everything may be a bit of a pain at times, but it beats having to test every app twice a month when a new version of Java comes out.
Other than the obvious point of high school, which is to provide a prison-like environment for our children so we can all take a little break from them, he's truly missed the point of high school.
High school has nothing to do with what you are going to do in real life. Oh, it may seem that way in your last year, but in truth, all you really end up deciding at that stage what you might do in the grossest of terms.
No. High school is supposed to be about building mental abilities that will allow you to go out into the world and function as a reasonably useful person. What you learn is somewhat important, but learning how to learn and apply material effectively is what you are really there for.
Think of it this way. Athletes spend a lot of time on the practice field learning their sport. But they also spend a lot of time in the gym building muscle. If they didn't build those muscles up with time in the gym, they might understand their own sport, but they'd have a hard time succeeding at it because they didn't spend time building up the general muscle required to apply that knowledge.
Never once at a football game have I seen a quarterback call for the reverse arm curl play. But I doubt you'd get any arguments from a football player that time in the gym was time well spent. The same applies for academics. You may never need to know how to do trig, or compose a sonnet, but doing those things in high school helps build up mental muscle for later.
So yes. You do have to do things you suck at, because, not surprisingly, you get the most out of learning how to do things you suck at. As to who decides what you'll take, well, that's easy. Gather your facts that describe why you think a change should be made, put them together in a cohesive argument, write a paper that shows how your plan will provide positive change, and then present it to the folks who decide. (Of course, you might find this hard if you didn't take Math, Science, English and Social Studies in high school...)
I understand exactly how you feel. I've spent most of my life feeling exactly the same way. Your "I'm not autistic. I'm not disgusting." realization took me more than a decade of adulthood to reach. I'm married now and most days feel as though I am someone a woman would find, if not attractive, at least acceptable as a potential suitor.
Mellon's post is great for making yourself more attractive to women, but it only gets you half the way there. Attractive you still has to meet women and stay out of the friend zone. Here are some of the things I learned through very hard trial and error:
Sanity check: The average guy gets turned down far more often than not. It may not seem that way from the outside, but it's true. Yes, there are superstars who are amazing looking and can get any girl they want, but this is mostly the exception, not the rule.
Location: Where you look for someone is probably the single most important factor in whether or not you will be successful. As an adult, usually work and school are not the best places to meet women looking for men. "Fun" classes like drama, fencing, toastmasters, etc... will sometimes yield good results, but don't take those classes unless you are actually interested because really, you just don't want to be the guy who trolls classes looking for women. If you're looking for dates in these places, be prepared to be turned down a lot.
If you don't want to go straight to the dating web sites, and the bar scene is not for you (it sure wasn't for me), then social events are usually the best bet. Dinner parties, backyard BBQ's, sports events and the like are usually the best chance to meet someone you'll actually want to date (yes, that's important too!) and who will want to date you. You have something in common (friends, or whatever the event is) and you can ask around about her availability before approaching her. (Otherwise you risk becoming that creepy guy who hits on all the women at the BBQ...)
At the end of the day, if a woman is in a place where social interests are not at the forefront of her mind, her first thought about people she meets won't be "this is the guy". (Unless she's in desperate mode, which you do not want...)
Resources: Don't try to manage this alone. You're in the friend zone with a bunch of women? Good! These are your best resources. If you really are friends with them, let them know you're looking. If you're a good guy who just can't quite seem to make the right connection, these girls will be more than happy to help you out by inviting you to social events (parties, dinners, movie night, whatever) where you can meet people. A direct setup by a woman with a friend of hers can work, but in my experience it tends to be a mixed bag of good and bad. Nothing wrong with kissing a few frogs though, so I'd go on those setups just for the experience.
Image: Mellon is right, you can't just project an image, but if you are a person who is happy, successful and confident, then you need to project that image in order to be attractive to women. They say you should dress for the job you want. You should also dress for the woman you want, and think you have the most in common with. Market who you are to your target audience. When a woman looks at you, she assesses who she thinks you are, and that affects your interactions with her. You may be "Cool, Guitar Playing Guy" or "Director of Really Important Stuff", but you dress like "Bored Country Bumpkin", then "Cool, Drum Playing Gal" and "Manager of the Big Accounts Woman" aren't going to notice you.
Communication: Again, Mellon hits on this one. Learn how to speak to people, and more importantly, how to listen. (You may know how, or you may just think you know.... Find out). Do you make good eye contact? Do you stand up straight or hunch over? Do you mumble or run on? Do you listen to what the other person is saying or are you just waiting for your turn to talk again? There are lots of classes where you can learn these skills. Take one. Even i
"The "limited time" is what makes it not ownership. Your patent is like a rented house -- you have the rights to the house you rented, but you don't own it. "We the people" own the work, the author is simply the tenant"
---
That's a tricky one, because in the case of a story you write, unless you sell those rights, your "limited time" ownership is the span of your natural life. To the average person, that's going to seem a lot like ownership. Your analogy also doesn't take into account that the "tenant" built the house. In the case of an author who has written a story, he was the one who actually built the thing. Unless he sells it, it is his to control for the entire span of his life. To most people, that would seem like ownership, and improper use of that material would seem a lot like theft, especially if he was in a position to profit from the use of that material.
As a side note, it's funny that you use a rented house in your analogy. Because based on the idea you've put forward, people don't "own" their homes either.
Consider: Because my mortgage is paid out, I say that I own the house and land. It is mine. However, in truth, the city/state has the ability to take back (annex) that home and land if it feels it is in the best interest of the people. By the standard you set above for copyright/patent, I wouldn't "own" my home either. The people own it, I have simply made a financial arrangement that allows me to use it until such time as the actual owner wants it back. Not sure how most people would feel about that idea... :)
While I would agree that the term "ownership" seems inappropriate to an intangible, the net effect of controlling the publication amounts to the same thing. As the entity who controls the publication of a story, you can limit who reads it, or even prevent everyone from reading it. From that perspective, you "own" it to the extent that it may as well be a diamond locked in a safe - no one can see it or use it unless you open the safe door and allow them access.
For an entity who has essentially "locked their story in a safe" (even if it is a safe that allows a select group of participants access), the act of having someone else access that story without permission would feel very much like theft. At the very least it would feel like a violation of some sort and the victim would be right in requesting assistance in preventing it from happening again and in punishing the violators. Is it right to call the story property? Likely not, but it may be the closest we can come to something the layperson will understand and properly identify as wrong.
That is, of course, assuming you don't believe that all creative work shouldn't become public domain the instant it is created. But that's a whole other argument.
Then run the most powerful magnets you can find over the hard drive when you turn it back in. Most IT staff are lazy about this sort of thing. If you report it not working, and you turn it in unable to boot to the OS, they'll just wipe it and put the company standard image back on. No one will be the wiser.
Problem solved.
I'm a big fan of Michael Geist, but I think he's missed it here.
He's talking about declining rates of business software piracy and camcording. But both of these areas have avenues of detection and enforcement. Theaters are on the watch for camcorders (and apparently big bags of M&M's hidden in my wife's purse...), and there are many ways businesses are outed for using pirate software (auditors, whistleblowers, etc...) What the US is complaining about are the infringements where enforcement is lax or non-existent in Canada, specifically music and digitally copied movies (does anyone really watch those awful cam copies?).
When Geist discusses movies, music and video games, he cites growth and sales figures in those industries as evidence that piracy rates are dropping. I'm not convinced. It most likely only shows an improvement in the economy since the economic meltdown of 2008. At any rate, the actual cause cannot be determined from this data alone. This is a classic case of not understanding the idea that correlation does not imply causation. He should know better than to even try this approach.
Canada's laws allow Canadians to pirate whatever they like at will with no fear of repercussions. That absolutely creates a climate that would be considered a haven for pirates. It's great that some are choosing to pay for their IP, but let's not kid ourselves about what it is we have going on here. Citing growth figures in legitimate sales doesn't prove that piracy is on the decrease, it only shows that the industry is doing better.
Funny, and I agree.
Also, if it is intended as a joke, I'm not quite getting it, so I'm going with the idea that it's a mistake.
Your tag should read "For all intents and purposes", not intensive purposes...
We may have evolved past the point where the shareware concept is enough for the average programming company to keep the lights on. :)
That's a whole different kettle of fish. If you want to argue that 'random song selection' on an mp3 player should not warrant protection under IP, that's a different discussion altogether. What we're talking about here is theft of IP for personal use.
Because they don't apply here.
Scarcity laws were designed to work with physical items. Non-physical items that have value cannot be measured in this way.
(BTW, I'm not saying that what these companies do is fair -- I'm just saying that applying scarcity laws to something without a physical presence is idiotic.)
But then it seems like you go on to act as if your opinions are actually facts (that copyright should exist and must be protected).
I said nothing of the kind. I said intellectual property should be protected. I don't think copyright in its current form is reasonable and would like to see reform, but I stand fast by my opinion that IP must be protected if we expect to continue to see creative works.
Really? A lot of the technology has multiple uses. I doubt much of it is specifically designed to allow people to more easily infringe upon another's copyright without getting caught.
Bittorrent software is designed to allow people to download pirate movies and music. Yes, a very small group of IT folks use it for sharing open source, but the average user doesn't. (I'm surprised you even tried this approach...)
Not sure if you are serious.
In under 2 minutes I can start downloading any movie, tv show or music recording ever created.
That's out of hand.
And yet, here we are in a democracy.
I understand your frustration with the system, but this is what we've got to work with. You either make it work for you, or you lose summarily. The idiot lawmakers will pass something. Our best bet is to keep the dialog open by having an honest discussion with them. My point is that using an obviously flawed (and one sided) defense like the scarcity approach isn't the way to do it. It's transparent and deliberately obtuse.
I think that's great, and if someone were to propose a system that would allow for it, I'd support it, but so far we've not seen anything that would work. To tell the folks who are currently getting robbed blind (by this I mean the creators, not the distributors), that they'll simply have to wait it out seems unfair.
I do not support PIPA/SOPA/ACTA as written because of the infringements to fair use and how wide the boundaries are around what qualifies as sufficient grounds to take action against a site. I do however support the rights of authors (and for now, distributors) to have immediate legal recourse against those who steal their property or who provide others with a means to do so.
How should IP be protected? I would start by revamping the copyright laws to something more sensible. (In what is protected, how fair use is applied and how long it is protected for.) Then proposed solutions to protect content may not seem quite so draconian. Not sure I'll see that in my lifetime though...
Hi!
This was in specific response to the "scarcity" legal defense which the pirate community likes to cite when folks say that copying movies/music is theft. When non-tangibles began to appear as items for mass distribution of sale (music/movies), the laws changed to protect them as property, even though the concept of scarcity clearly did not apply. (This happened with the first introduction of copyright/trademark etc...)
I'm not referring to the recent group of laws which intends to make fair use illegal.
I support the spirit, if not the execution. I agree that what is proposed in that legislation is deeply flawed, but the intent, to protect IP from theft is a good one.
Well said. Unfortunately, the lot who are busy beating the broken drum of scarcity are making it difficult for the rest of us who are honestly interested in fair laws around IP.
Should IP be protected? Absolutely. I like that people get paid to be creative and provide me with entertainment. If we don't protect it and pay the people who created it (and yes, when necessary, distributed it), then we'll not have it anymore. To do that, the laws have to, and had to, change. And those laws must be enforced.
Piracy is out of hand today. As 'geeks', we've provided the public with the ability to break IP protection laws with impunity. It's not acceptable to the creators of such content, and it is not sustainable.
Now, that said, I'm fine with why it happened. It happened because of improved technology, and to be sure there are companies that reject the model on that basis alone. While I want to see legislation that will protect content owners, I would hate to see them protect and prop up those who fail to adopt their business models to match the new technology. But as long as people focus on something as stupid as the "scarcity" defense, we're not going to convince the lawmakers, content owners, or even the general public that a fair version of these laws would do good. They will see us as thieves, looking to use a loophole to rationalize our theft.
“We have now moved into an era where the consumer is in control, and where thanks to the Internet and mobile devices, you cannot control access any more,”
And thank God for that. What country does this guy think he lives in? I'd expect that in communist China but in Canada? Ouch.
I suppose it's just one more example of a government being unhappy about losing control of the minds of its people. In all honesty, if Canadian content can't compete with American then it deserves to lose.
Sorry friend, you have it backwards.
The role of IT is to provide ENTERPRISE SOLUTIONS. When we start providing a one-off scratch for every itch that a corner office user gets, we make a mess of the whole thing and we actually hinder the business.
It constantly amuses me to hear people talk about IT as a road block. Most IT people are solution oriented. The last thing they want to be is a roadblock. They want to find solutions to problems, but through hard experience we've learned that we have to approach it systematically and with planning. When people think IT is roadblocking because of this philosophy, to help them understand, I usually compare it to how the mail works.
Can you imagine, if on any given street, each person could choose how he receives mail? Say 30% favour a local group of mailboxes, 60% prefer delivery to the house, the remaining 10% would like to pick up at the local post office. Each method is a valid solution, and may actually be the best solution for each person, but the logistics of it would be a nightmare and the cost would be three times what it would be by just picking one of those solutions and rolling it out for everyone.
Just because a device has a legitimate purpose, it doesn't mean that you need to make it happen. It means you consider it when developing your enterprise solution, but that's it.
No one disagrees that IT's job is to support people. And sometimes that does make our job harder, but anywhere there are large numbers of people who rely upon a service, be that mail, road/air traffic, legal, financial, or whatever, there are established ways of doing things that benefit the majority. The second we start making exceptions for every malcontent with a complaint, we lose what makes the system work for everyone else.
I have mixed feelings about this Bill. On one hand, parts of the Bill seem very reasonable. For example, reducing the maximum penalty for infringement and going after the enablers both seem like sensible approaches. Extensions to education for fair dealing also seems reasonable. The less reasonable parts obviously include not being able to make a video library from what you record from TV, and not being able to bypass digital locks for media transfers. On its face, those parts of the Bill seem ludicrous and clearly influenced by US policies and lobbyists. Deeper down, I suspect the former is rooted in how copyright law works (you must aggressively pursue all forms / violators of piracy or you may lose your ability to protect the work in the future), and the latter allows the government to prosecute people directly for breaking digital locks rather than messing about in copyright law. Looking strictly at the law, not allowing permanent TV recordings is completely unenforceable by the police (though easily enforceable through technology). The section about not breaking digital locks will make it a challenge for Canadians to acquire the software to convert our CD's and DVD's to digital storage, but for determined users, not impossible. I suspect this too will be nearly impossible to enforce in that arena. Where it will be easy to enforce is torrenting, which obviously bypasses digital locks on material and thus qualifies under that section as prohibited. The government is in an odd position. They are not accustomed to enforcing copyright law -- at least not in a non-commercial sense. Large scale piracy for profit, yes, individual for home use, no. Now they are being asked to. And for good reason - piracy is easy and pretty much everyone who knows how to do it, *is* doing it. Some more than others, but it's happening a lot. It's gone past the point where civil law can handle it -- it's time for it to become criminal. But how? They definitely don't want to be involved in individual criminal copyright cases. Too much ambiguity and complexity. So instead, digital locks. Nice and simple. We don't care about the material, we only care about the lock you bypassed by downloading (and made available while doing so) a torrented copy. You'll not have an easy time defending that. Makes sense in a twisted kind of way. That said, I agree with Geist when he says that the digital lock portion of the Bill will have the unfortunate side effect of making legitimate use of ripping music/movies nearly impossible for the average Canadian. It will be very much like winding the clock back 10 years to a point where only the computer geeks had the tools to rip their own music/movies. I'm not sure what the alternative is though. Of course, the interesting bit continues to be gathering proof that a person is downloading materials they don't have a right to. I'm curious to see how that process will work and what Canadian judges will accept as evidence.