Do you know how capitalism works? Capitalism is based on supply and demand, not price fixing. IF customers arent willing to pay more than $1000, this means Ferraris should cost $1000, PERIOD.
The Ferrari company shouldnt be able to set the price to $100,000 and then sue anyone who builds their own Ferrari look alike and sells that.
someone actually said that?! I didnt know people could be that ignorant. I'm ashamed if they are an American.
I guess if President Bush says "Slavery is legal, its the law!" all the minorities in this country who believe anything thats legal is right will jump up and say "Hey if its legal it must be right! I mean its the law!"
I really hope people arent this dumb, sure I might be wrong with my views on filesharing but I at least did my own research and came to my own conclusion and didnt just believe everything illegal is wrong and everything legal is right.
Find out who made that quote, I think thats the dumbest thing I've ever read on slashdot.
Consider the fact that the majority of people choose to share files. 43 million is alot of people. This leads me to believe that alot of people support file sharing and to these people sharing is more important than copyright.
Sure most of these people dont understand what they are doing, just like most people dont understand why the internet was built, but the change in culture that these people are creating by being early adopters will completely change our system.
Sharing at this point actually is helping progress, not so much because everything has been patented or is under copyright and stopping innovation but mainly because the Music industry is totally abusing copyright.
The software industry is abusing copyright, and monopolies, price fixing and other issues actually cause alot of people who would willingly pay for m usic and movies to start file sharing.
"Perhaps instead of concerning yourself with the morality of the issue, you should spend more effort becoming informed about the subject, and then attempting to determine whether or not a scenario where mob rule invalidates the social contracts regarding intellectual property, "
Democracy is built upon mob rule, not $ rule. Why shouldnt the people have influence at least in the laws?
File sharing, the internet, and all of this stuff was built to increase freedom, increase information sharing and take us to the next level, I think instead of fighting progress we should adapt our laws to the new world we are in.
You cannot use laws designed for the old world in the new world, imagine how the world will be once we are using nano technology if we still have copyright. Imagine how the world will be when people get the genes for Apples and copyright those, imagine if just a few companies own all the copyrights for all foods on earth and sued people who live in third world countries who may try to copy that food.
I think at some point we need to release the information to the world for the benefit of the world itself, making money isnt everything, its all about progress and a real scientist or musician wants to see the field evolve.
Because it benefits society for us all to be driving in nice cars.
It doesnt benefit you the car designer, but it benefits everyone else.
What matters more, a few car designers or society in general? IF these new cars use hydrogen fuel cells and other new technologies suddenly our enviornment would be cleaner, this benefits everyone.
P2P and File sharing benefits more people than it hurts.
"Cool. Then if you spend a year writing a piece of software, Microsoft can have as many copies as they want without compensating you even if you're trying to negotiate with, say, IBM to purchase the software. That sounds brilliant."
IF you are such a good programmer, you should be able to write a new peice of good software.
With copyrights removed everyone will be able to write better software, you wouldnt have a "Microsoft" entity who can bully people. Every programmer would have increased freedom, wouldnt it feel nice to know that any peice of code you find or see can be used in your code without being sued? No more license fees, everything open source.
Everyones code would be better, while no one would profit off ideas, because everyones code would be better, they'd be more valueable as programmers. A programmer is like any other job, you lazy bum, you shouldnt expect to get rich off one small line of code just because its a good line of code, you should write code every day and get rich off writing quality code on a daily basis.
Without copyrights we'd still need programmers, you'd program as a service, you'd write the code because we need people to write code, someone will pay you to write code.
I dont think we need copyright law anymore, at one point we did but now we are entering a phase where copyright law is slowing progress, the main goal of capitalism is progress.
Once someone copyrights all the possible ways of writing software, your world where software writers live off copyrights will fade away because theres only so many things you can patent before you patent the industry to a standstill.
Its already beginning to happen. The lawsuits are increasing and eventually you wont be able to code unless you work for a big company, or you have your own group of lawyers to check all your code and see if your code is clean.
So what happens to Eminems ability to profit? Eminem if he were a musician would profit from his ability to create good music. Eminem however is no longer a musician, hes a producer, song writer, label owning businessman. If he decided to profit off of his music he has fans in every country around the world, he can go on tour and make millions of dollars.
He does not need CD sales, but you see he doesnt want to be just a musician, he wants to be a rich businessman.
As a Musician he'd still be rich, but not as rich as he'd be if he were an exec.
The intellectual property is everyones property, who decides when copyright runs out? We dont. Look, if copyright ran out after 5-10 years no one would be complaining, copyright never runs out, this is why I take such an extreme point of view, if we were to slowly phase it out, I wouldnt be here posting this but because they keep extending it over and over I'm not against the whole idea of copyright.
The service industry does not pay you to sell your ideas, it pays you to produce them.
In my opinion a programmer is paid to produce new ideas on a regular basis, not produce one good idea and then charge everyone in the world each time someone else tries to use it.
Once an idea is created its free, when you are paid a salary you are paid to be a producer of new ideas in your field, if your field is music you produce good music, if its really good consumers dont care if other people copy it and make it better.
Same with software, if software were open and we could all edit windows to our liking people wouldnt hate Microsoft anymore.
I believe every idea or information should be free, I do not believe inventions however should be free, if you invent a new physical technology like a CPU, ram, or something which costs money to actually produce this should be free. Thoughts dont cost anything to produce so it makes no sense why we sell them when we have absolutely no shortage of new ideas.
Theres 6 billion people on this planet, the population grows on a daily basis however we continue to try to keep the information in a smaller and smaller group of peoples hands. Eventually this information will be in the hands of just a few rich CEOs after they buy most of the smaller companies and we will get to a point where new information cannot be produced because everything is already owned.
This is bad for the world, so while it may be good for a few people, now the world will be without work because a few people want to control all the knowledge on the planet using the capitalism excuse.
Knowledge should be more important than capitalism, I had thought the purpose of capitalism was to promote progress, sharing knowledge speeds up progress.
This is because there isnt unlimited oil, why do people post such stupid responses as "Well why cant people just print money! why cant people just drain the oil wells"
Both are physical objects. Money is a physical object, you print more money and you change the whole economy, I'm not saying filesharing and removing copyright wont change the whole economy, it would change the economy for the better. People would have to actually work hard to earn their money and not rely on some license sales to make a living.
If you are good, you dont need a system to protect you, I mean if you are a good musician people will go to your concerts, if you are a good programmer people will pay you to keep generating high quality code, you wont be able to make a living off one good song or one license.
This depends on the value you put on the work. To the average consumer the value is equal to its use/function.
Music is valueable if it sounds good, art is valueable if it looks good, code is valueable if it works.
This is what the people care about, and they dont NEED copyright because they have a choice and it seems half of the internet users have already decided, to go with increased freedom in exchange for the removal of copyright.
You can listen to the people, or you can ignore 43 million people and call them criminals just to protect several thousand CEOs and small businesses who own copyright.
If you work for a corperation you dont own that code or those whitepapers.
Books you dont own either unless you get a good deal with your publisher. Webcontent you own only if its for your own company.
Please prove to me you own the copyrights to your stuff because 99 percent of programmers and artists that I know dont own shit. Most programmers go open source for the simply reason that they arent going to own their code, instead of having some corperation own it they'll GPL it and have everyone be able to use it.
Why? They decide to give up copyright for increased freedom.
To some people freedom is more important than copyright. And just because you make your career off copyright doesnt mean you are useful, if no one can see or improve on your code to society you are useless, while you may have function in generation of code if people are forced to re-create your code your code is useless.
Dont expect people in third world countries to have the money to license your code, and these people are the ones who do most of the coding these days.
Copyright for certain industries are pointless and actually slow innovation now.
Take programming, you write a program and its almost 100% impossible to write any program without using someone elses code, so when you do you have to pay a fee, this feee makes people think twice about innovating because all work is based on other peoples work.
What copyright does is force everyone to reinvent the wheel over and over again to avoid being sued, this slows progress.
Musicians do not OWN the copyrights to their own work.
Metallica does not own the copyrights to their own work.
Metallica is a rare group whos upset because their music sucks and no ones been going to their concerts, they seem to think that by getting mad at fans that it would increase sales.
The only musician who does make money on CD sales that I know of is Eminem, even Micheal Jackson made $0 on his invincible Album.
"And really, stealing your face? Well, maybe if someone got plastic surgery to look like you, went to your job, took your pay cheque and then proceeded to go to the bank and empty the account, you MAY see how immitating and copying differ slightly. "
Before you comment, please learn how the industries work, artists be it musician, programmer or graphic designer, make absolutely no profit from copyrights, the only ones who do are the ones who sell so many CDs or who have been doing it for so long that they run their own label, or their own business.
Despite what you may have thought musicians dont make a penny from CD sales most of the time, they also dont own any intellectual property most of the time.
Their contract says the record company owns anything they make,the record company keeps about 95% of what their CD makes from sales, Musicians end up getting a $30,000 a year salary from CD sales after selling millions of copies, they only make real money from tours, concerts and so on.
Do musicians care if you buy their CD? No they dont because most of them dont make any money off their CDS, CDs are marketing to get you to go to their concerts.
Learn how the music industry works.
The software industry is the same way, programmers dont own any copyrights, everything is owned by the company, programmers get paid to make the software, they dont get paid when each copy of windows or whatever is sold, those profits go to Bill Gates.
You see, the people who do all the work and who create the information, do not own the information, so why does it matter if we rob the thieves?
Because the true owners never owned anything to begin with and the current owners steal from the true owners using their monopoly power to do it.
I smell class warfare. I dont think you, I, or the common man has anything to do with deciding the laws.
SO at any time our government can say "You all are criminals!" and lock us all in prison.
Look, Laws should apply only when people vote or have some say in their creation, otherwise the government could tomorrow outlaw white socks and suddenly everyone commited a crime.
a : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it b : an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property
You cannot STEAL information because information by design is not physical and cannot be contained.
This is like me getting mad at someone for stealing my thoughts! Should I be able to copyright facial expressions and then sue anyone who makes that expression? Well?
If you use it you are STEALING my face right?
Thats what I thought. But believe it or not, intellectual property exists simply to protect stupid abilities and rights such as these which dont even matter while removing our personal freedom.
So we lose personal freedom in exchange for someone to have the right to "own" facial expressions, let me ask you all something, how much intellectual property do each of you own? Unless every American owns tons of intellectual property, why do we give up our personal freedom which we all currently own in exchange for something of absolultely no value to us? Sure it matters to a rich CEO, if you are one of these guys then yes you care but to me and to the average person, it only reduces our creativity and freedom.
If you dont like the laws, buy new ones, it works for Disney.
The constitution is fake, no one ever follows it, freedom of speech? You dont have it, profit comes first.
Its funny how 1% of the population who owns the information can force their rules on the 100 million or so file sharing people who dont own any intellectual property and who dont think its morally wrong to share it.
Since when did capitalism decide the concept of right and wrong? I guess some peoples religion is capitalism, and I suppose this government is run by capitalism and not democracy.
If this is the case why should normal working class people stay in the USA? Its slavery if you cannot even get to vote on an issue such as this, no you are automatically a felon.
You get labeled some wicked name like a "pirate" when sharing has absolutely nothing to do with being a pirate, because sharing sounds so morally right they make up new words and terms to put a negative spin on it, now you are a pirate, a cyber terrorism, and every chance they get they try to compare sharing information with robbing a bank, or running into a CD store and stealing CDs at gunpoint. No you arent stealing the CD you are copying the CD, stealing means someone is missing something, either a physical object or a profit.
You can steal a profit by selling someone elses Cd, you take eminems CD, burn it and sell it, this is stealing a profit, this should be a crime.
However, if you just copy it and give it away, theres no stealing and theres no way you can convince any sane person that its morally wrong to share when it benefits society to share.
SHARE, but dont STEAL, if someone wants to pay for Eminems CD, Eminem made the music and should get to profit from his work, however if someone refuses to pay for it and just wants to hear it, why not let them?
Why keep it illegal? I dont understand what the point of this is, we cannot lock 100 million people up in prison, so why waste our money filling prisons up with people who share files and smoke pot, its ridiculous.
It makes me wonder if this actually is some kinda police state, I mean what happened to democracy? IF we dont think its morally wrong, and only a few rich CEOs who happen to own the information think its wrong to share it, why should the ones who have money rule over the ones who dont? Thats not democracy anymore, thats plutocracy and if this is what the USA is about then I'm leaving.
Its debateable if file swapping if morally wrong at all. Some of us believe its a personal freedom, like freedom of speech, and that its not morally wrong but morally right.
The only few who think its morally wrong are a few guys who happen to own copyrights, the average American does not own any intellectual property is cares more about defending their freedom to share files than defending some unknown CEOs freedom to own them.
I've got into this exact arguement before only to get into a flamewar with CEOs and other big shots who claim "Well you dont have to worry about losing your job to indian workers if you just work harder and smarter, get a degree masters degree in computer science from MIT and you'll be fine"
Now, for the average joe who doesnt have a masters degree in computer science from MIT, well we are screwed.
Just like some people dont like big government, some dont like big corperations, and its for the same reasons. You dont want all the power to be in one persons hands.
If you want people to stop begging the USA for money perhaps we should help them start their own businesses in their own countries instead of forcing our businesses into their countries, I dont know any arabs who asked for Mc Donalds to expand there, in fact it pisses them off.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you know how capitalism works? Capitalism is based on supply and demand, not price fixing. IF customers arent willing to pay more than $1000, this means Ferraris should cost $1000, PERIOD.
The Ferrari company shouldnt be able to set the price to $100,000 and then sue anyone who builds their own Ferrari look alike and sells that.
someone actually said that?! I didnt know people could be that ignorant. I'm ashamed if they are an American.
I guess if President Bush says "Slavery is legal, its the law!" all the minorities in this country who believe anything thats legal is right will jump up and say "Hey if its legal it must be right! I mean its the law!"
I really hope people arent this dumb, sure I might be wrong with my views on filesharing but I at least did my own research and came to my own conclusion and didnt just believe everything illegal is wrong and everything legal is right.
Find out who made that quote, I think thats the dumbest thing I've ever read on slashdot.
"If it's illegal, it MUST be wrong!"
The FCC can ease up regulations on big companies but we cant have regulations eased up on us?
so if I quote your comment I'm sued?
Consider the fact that the majority of people choose to share files. 43 million is alot of people. This leads me to believe that alot of people support file sharing and to these people sharing is more important than copyright.
Sure most of these people dont understand what they are doing, just like most people dont understand why the internet was built, but the change in culture that these people are creating by being early adopters will completely change our system.
Sharing at this point actually is helping progress, not so much because everything has been patented or is under copyright and stopping innovation but mainly because the Music industry is totally abusing copyright.
The software industry is abusing copyright, and monopolies, price fixing and other issues actually cause alot of people who would willingly pay for m usic and movies to start file sharing.
"Perhaps instead of concerning yourself with the morality of the issue, you should spend more effort becoming informed about the subject, and then attempting to determine whether or not a scenario where mob rule invalidates the social contracts regarding intellectual property, "
Democracy is built upon mob rule, not $ rule. Why shouldnt the people have influence at least in the laws?
File sharing, the internet, and all of this stuff was built to increase freedom, increase information sharing and take us to the next level, I think instead of fighting progress we should adapt our laws to the new world we are in.
You cannot use laws designed for the old world in the new world, imagine how the world will be once we are using nano technology if we still have copyright. Imagine how the world will be when people get the genes for Apples and copyright those, imagine if just a few companies own all the copyrights for all foods on earth and sued people who live in third world countries who may try to copy that food.
I think at some point we need to release the information to the world for the benefit of the world itself, making money isnt everything, its all about progress and a real scientist or musician wants to see the field evolve.
Because it benefits society for us all to be driving in nice cars.
It doesnt benefit you the car designer, but it benefits everyone else.
What matters more, a few car designers or society in general? IF these new cars use hydrogen fuel cells and other new technologies suddenly our enviornment would be cleaner, this benefits everyone.
P2P and File sharing benefits more people than it hurts.
And I said instead of selling ideas you can sell your ability to create them. Not everyone can write easy to read bug free code.
Programming should be a service. You should get a contract to write code, you write the code and you should get paid.
You should not be able to OWN the code, you should get paid to WRITE the code.
I know musicians who make all their money from concerts at oolleges and other places.
Try again.
The more intellectual property Microsoft and other big companies own the less chance you'll ever be able to start your own software company.
The price of entry will eventually be so high that it will take millions of dollars.
The purpose of Capitalism is to generate progress. THe purpose of copyright is to support Capitalism.
When copyright slows progress like its doing now, its BAD, so why do we support it? Well because it still helps capitalism, heres the problem.
DO we want a world where every peice of information is owned forever by a company, or do we want information to be free?
"Cool. Then if you spend a year writing a piece of software, Microsoft can have as many copies as they want without compensating you even if you're trying to negotiate with, say, IBM to purchase the software. That sounds brilliant."
IF you are such a good programmer, you should be able to write a new peice of good software.
With copyrights removed everyone will be able to write better software, you wouldnt have a "Microsoft" entity who can bully people. Every programmer would have increased freedom, wouldnt it feel nice to know that any peice of code you find or see can be used in your code without being sued? No more license fees, everything open source.
Everyones code would be better, while no one would profit off ideas, because everyones code would be better, they'd be more valueable as programmers. A programmer is like any other job, you lazy bum, you shouldnt expect to get rich off one small line of code just because its a good line of code, you should write code every day and get rich off writing quality code on a daily basis.
Without copyrights we'd still need programmers, you'd program as a service, you'd write the code because we need people to write code, someone will pay you to write code.
I dont think we need copyright law anymore, at one point we did but now we are entering a phase where copyright law is slowing progress, the main goal of capitalism is progress.
Once someone copyrights all the possible ways of writing software, your world where software writers live off copyrights will fade away because theres only so many things you can patent before you patent the industry to a standstill.
Its already beginning to happen. The lawsuits are increasing and eventually you wont be able to code unless you work for a big company, or you have your own group of lawyers to check all your code and see if your code is clean.
So what happens to Eminems ability to profit? Eminem if he were a musician would profit from his ability to create good music. Eminem however is no longer a musician, hes a producer, song writer, label owning businessman. If he decided to profit off of his music he has fans in every country around the world, he can go on tour and make millions of dollars.
He does not need CD sales, but you see he doesnt want to be just a musician, he wants to be a rich businessman.
As a Musician he'd still be rich, but not as rich as he'd be if he were an exec.
The intellectual property is everyones property, who decides when copyright runs out? We dont. Look, if copyright ran out after 5-10 years no one would be complaining, copyright never runs out, this is why I take such an extreme point of view, if we were to slowly phase it out, I wouldnt be here posting this but because they keep extending it over and over I'm not against the whole idea of copyright.
The service industry does not pay you to sell your ideas, it pays you to produce them.
In my opinion a programmer is paid to produce new ideas on a regular basis, not produce one good idea and then charge everyone in the world each time someone else tries to use it.
Once an idea is created its free, when you are paid a salary you are paid to be a producer of new ideas in your field, if your field is music you produce good music, if its really good consumers dont care if other people copy it and make it better.
Same with software, if software were open and we could all edit windows to our liking people wouldnt hate Microsoft anymore.
I believe every idea or information should be free, I do not believe inventions however should be free, if you invent a new physical technology like a CPU, ram, or something which costs money to actually produce this should be free. Thoughts dont cost anything to produce so it makes no sense why we sell them when we have absolutely no shortage of new ideas.
Theres 6 billion people on this planet, the population grows on a daily basis however we continue to try to keep the information in a smaller and smaller group of peoples hands. Eventually this information will be in the hands of just a few rich CEOs after they buy most of the smaller companies and we will get to a point where new information cannot be produced because everything is already owned.
This is bad for the world, so while it may be good for a few people, now the world will be without work because a few people want to control all the knowledge on the planet using the capitalism excuse.
Knowledge should be more important than capitalism, I had thought the purpose of capitalism was to promote progress, sharing knowledge speeds up progress.
This is because there isnt unlimited oil, why do people post such stupid responses as "Well why cant people just print money! why cant people just drain the oil wells"
Both are physical objects. Money is a physical object, you print more money and you change the whole economy, I'm not saying filesharing and removing copyright wont change the whole economy, it would change the economy for the better. People would have to actually work hard to earn their money and not rely on some license sales to make a living.
If you are good, you dont need a system to protect you, I mean if you are a good musician people will go to your concerts, if you are a good programmer people will pay you to keep generating high quality code, you wont be able to make a living off one good song or one license.
This depends on the value you put on the work. To the average consumer the value is equal to its use/function.
Music is valueable if it sounds good, art is valueable if it looks good, code is valueable if it works.
This is what the people care about, and they dont NEED copyright because they have a choice and it seems half of the internet users have already decided, to go with increased freedom in exchange for the removal of copyright.
You can listen to the people, or you can ignore 43 million people and call them criminals just to protect several thousand CEOs and small businesses who own copyright.
If you work for a corperation you dont own that code or those whitepapers.
Books you dont own either unless you get a good deal with your publisher. Webcontent you own only if its for your own company.
Please prove to me you own the copyrights to your stuff because 99 percent of programmers and artists that I know dont own shit. Most programmers go open source for the simply reason that they arent going to own their code, instead of having some corperation own it they'll GPL it and have everyone be able to use it.
Why? They decide to give up copyright for increased freedom.
To some people freedom is more important than copyright. And just because you make your career off copyright doesnt mean you are useful, if no one can see or improve on your code to society you are useless, while you may have function in generation of code if people are forced to re-create your code your code is useless.
Dont expect people in third world countries to have the money to license your code, and these people are the ones who do most of the coding these days.
Copyright for certain industries are pointless and actually slow innovation now.
Take programming, you write a program and its almost 100% impossible to write any program without using someone elses code, so when you do you have to pay a fee, this feee makes people think twice about innovating because all work is based on other peoples work.
What copyright does is force everyone to reinvent the wheel over and over again to avoid being sued, this slows progress.
Musicians do not OWN the copyrights to their own work.
Metallica does not own the copyrights to their own work.
Metallica is a rare group whos upset because their music sucks and no ones been going to their concerts, they seem to think that by getting mad at fans that it would increase sales.
The only musician who does make money on CD sales that I know of is Eminem, even Micheal Jackson made $0 on his invincible Album.
"And really, stealing your face? Well, maybe if someone got plastic surgery to look like you, went to your job, took your pay cheque and then proceeded to go to the bank and empty the account, you MAY see how immitating and copying differ slightly. "
Before you comment, please learn how the industries work, artists be it musician, programmer or graphic designer, make absolutely no profit from copyrights, the only ones who do are the ones who sell so many CDs or who have been doing it for so long that they run their own label, or their own business.
Despite what you may have thought musicians dont make a penny from CD sales most of the time, they also dont own any intellectual property most of the time.
Their contract says the record company owns anything they make,the record company keeps about 95% of what their CD makes from sales, Musicians end up getting a $30,000 a year salary from CD sales after selling millions of copies, they only make real money from tours, concerts and so on.
Do musicians care if you buy their CD? No they dont because most of them dont make any money off their CDS, CDs are marketing to get you to go to their concerts.
Learn how the music industry works.
The software industry is the same way, programmers dont own any copyrights, everything is owned by the company, programmers get paid to make the software, they dont get paid when each copy of windows or whatever is sold, those profits go to Bill Gates.
You see, the people who do all the work and who create the information, do not own the information, so why does it matter if we rob the thieves?
Because the true owners never owned anything to begin with and the current owners steal from the true owners using their monopoly power to do it.
I smell class warfare. I dont think you, I, or the common man has anything to do with deciding the laws.
SO at any time our government can say "You all are criminals!" and lock us all in prison.
Look, Laws should apply only when people vote or have some say in their creation, otherwise the government could tomorrow outlaw white socks and suddenly everyone commited a crime.
Why not call it by its true name.
"The No Electronic Information Sharing (NEIS)Act"
Why? Because thats what it is.
Define theft,, heres theft
a : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it b : an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property
You cannot STEAL information because information by design is not physical and cannot be contained.
This is like me getting mad at someone for stealing my thoughts! Should I be able to copyright facial expressions and then sue anyone who makes that expression? Well?
If you use it you are STEALING my face right?
Thats what I thought. But believe it or not, intellectual property exists simply to protect stupid abilities and rights such as these which dont even matter while removing our personal freedom.
So we lose personal freedom in exchange for someone to have the right to "own" facial expressions, let me ask you all something, how much intellectual property do each of you own? Unless every American owns tons of intellectual property, why do we give up our personal freedom which we all currently own in exchange for something of absolultely no value to us? Sure it matters to a rich CEO, if you are one of these guys then yes you care but to me and to the average person, it only reduces our creativity and freedom.
If you dont like the laws, buy new ones, it works for Disney.
The constitution is fake, no one ever follows it, freedom of speech? You dont have it, profit comes first.
Its funny how 1% of the population who owns the information can force their rules on the 100 million or so file sharing people who dont own any intellectual property and who dont think its morally wrong to share it.
Since when did capitalism decide the concept of right and wrong? I guess some peoples religion is capitalism, and I suppose this government is run by capitalism and not democracy.
If this is the case why should normal working class people stay in the USA? Its slavery if you cannot even get to vote on an issue such as this, no you are automatically a felon.
You get labeled some wicked name like a "pirate" when sharing has absolutely nothing to do with being a pirate, because sharing sounds so morally right they make up new words and terms to put a negative spin on it, now you are a pirate, a cyber terrorism, and every chance they get they try to compare sharing information with robbing a bank, or running into a CD store and stealing CDs at gunpoint. No you arent stealing the CD you are copying the CD, stealing means someone is missing something, either a physical object or a profit.
You can steal a profit by selling someone elses Cd, you take eminems CD, burn it and sell it, this is stealing a profit, this should be a crime.
However, if you just copy it and give it away, theres no stealing and theres no way you can convince any sane person that its morally wrong to share when it benefits society to share.
SHARE, but dont STEAL, if someone wants to pay for Eminems CD, Eminem made the music and should get to profit from his work, however if someone refuses to pay for it and just wants to hear it, why not let them?
Why keep it illegal? I dont understand what the point of this is, we cannot lock 100 million people up in prison, so why waste our money filling prisons up with people who share files and smoke pot, its ridiculous.
It makes me wonder if this actually is some kinda police state, I mean what happened to democracy? IF we dont think its morally wrong, and only a few rich CEOs who happen to own the information think its wrong to share it, why should the ones who have money rule over the ones who dont? Thats not democracy anymore, thats plutocracy and if this is what the USA is about then I'm leaving.
Its debateable if file swapping if morally wrong at all. Some of us believe its a personal freedom, like freedom of speech, and that its not morally wrong but morally right.
The only few who think its morally wrong are a few guys who happen to own copyrights, the average American does not own any intellectual property is cares more about defending their freedom to share files than defending some unknown CEOs freedom to own them.
No I'm not new, alot of people know me.
I've got into this exact arguement before only to get into a flamewar with CEOs and other big shots who claim "Well you dont have to worry about losing your job to indian workers if you just work harder and smarter, get a degree masters degree in computer science from MIT and you'll be fine"
Now, for the average joe who doesnt have a masters degree in computer science from MIT, well we are screwed.
Just like some people dont like big government, some dont like big corperations, and its for the same reasons. You dont want all the power to be in one persons hands.
If you want people to stop begging the USA for money perhaps we should help them start their own businesses in their own countries instead of forcing our businesses into their countries, I dont know any arabs who asked for Mc Donalds to expand there, in fact it pisses them off.