That's why the FairTax has a prebate, in the amount of tax which would be paid up to the poverty level.
One problem here is coming up with a single number to use for this prebate, as the cost of living differs significantly from area to area, and is often HIGHER in poor areas. In poor urban areas, this is because businesses operating in those areas must deal with lower availability of capital and higher losses of goods, both resulting from the higher crime rates, and thus must charge more to compensate for the higher interest rates on loans and higher loss of goods.
In poor rural areas, the higher cost is associated with the cost of transport to get the goods out into the boonies.
Then we have the difficulty of defining poverty... Just where is the poverty line or level, and how do we define this in a sensible way most people are willing to accept?
Another problem with this system is that many types of purchases that have long term educational value to those looking to improve their lot in society will be taxed, such as non-fiction books, non-fiction DVDs, computers, software, internet access, tools needed to learn trades, and so forth, as the acquisition of these won't fall within the prebate amount.
Yet another set of problems with this system arise from the fact that supply and demand still operate. The higher the cost of the item, including taxes, the less the demand. Each item not sold reduces the profits of the merchant, the manufacturer, and everybody else involved in the system.
Thus a sales tax directly reduces the ability of people in poor neighbourhoods to get jobs, since the merchant will have less money to spend on hiring people (or on bonuses for good work).
You also get poorer selection: the higher the sales tax, the fewer items merchants can take a chance on selling. Stores in poor areas already have much more limited selections than those in other areas, which has an impact on things like health.
Similarly, due to the reduced profits, the availability of capital will be lower, for things like repairing or maintaining or expanding the buildings the merchants operate in.
You also negatively impact the willingness of people to produce educational materials to help the poor develop job skills, or to provide services that help with this.
All this is basic economics, unfortunately it's not going away without massive government regulation that does more harm than good.
Most people do NOT stay in poverty their entire lives (most basic books on economics will discuss this at length), but the more you create obstacles to developing marketable skills (or getting low paid jobs that allow individuals to get skills) through legislation, the more you limit this mobility. Over the long run, you create a class system.
If you're going to tax goods or services, tax things like ESPN, which nobody needs.
Agreed, but by taxing income, you allow taxation to be avoided by deferring income, having income received outside the country, etc. Tax consumption, and you reduce opportunity to avoid the tax.
No, you simply shift the avoidance of taxes to different mechanisms. Black markets become more profitable, and you see an increase in smuggling and barter, as well as services provided "off the books" or "Quid pro quo". No tax system can prevent this: there will always be inefficiency in any system. Think of it as entropy if you like.
Having both income and sales taxes buys you the worst of both worlds, and there's all kinds of second and third order negative consequences that flow from having multiple types of taxes operating at once. Far better just to tax job and inheritance income.
There's a lot that could be done to clean up inheritance tax. For example, don't allow people to hide money in trusts or similar mechanisms (or at least clean up the rules for doing this). Also, you might set some reasonable maximum for the money that can be received by
Answering your question from a historical perspective, several things are clear:
1. Warship design is a very complex field of endeavour. It makes rocket science look childishly simple. Even the design of WW I warships was enormously complex (take a look at some of the books by Norman Friedman to get a sense of this, and even then you won't get most of the engineering details!), and things have only gotten more complex since then. It's actually really hard to get good engineering information on warships, even those from a century ago, let alone today.
2. Lots of mistakes are made in the design of ships (and their associated equipment) by the naval officers responsible for these designs. Technology changes fast, and this can invalidate even good decisions. For example, in WW2, every single major navy in the world failed to design their ships with adequate defences to meet the air threat (aircraft became a lot faster, and hence more difficult targets, in a relatively short time), and the cruisers were not designed to handle the torpedo threat (torpedos deployed in WW2 for many navies were far more effective than had been the case in WW1).
This is not necessarily due to a lack of naval professionalism or competence. The problems involved in figuring out what needs to go on a ship, and keeping up with technology (while staying off the bleeding edge), and making this happen in a large, complex organization with many political constraints, are really, really hard problems.
Note that these failures didn't make naval units useless: they still played a critical role, but more lives were lost as a result.
3. Even more mistakes are made by politicians (including politicians in uniform) in the funding of construction and renovations (or lack thereof). For example, the British Navy told the politicians the Hood needed a refit long before WW2 started, but the politicians refused to pay for it (in part because the public didn't want to support the military). Also, there is the issue of pork-barrel politics.
4. Government agencies and contractors make their own share of mistakes. Lots of ships have had problems with their systems (e.g. engines that keep breaking down), or even their fundamental design (smokestacks that blind the crew, inability to operate in bad weather) with parts or designs from one particular contractor or government agency. My favorite example: the government agencies running the US Navy in WW2 managed to deploy dysfunctional torpedoes to the entire fleet at the start of the war, using a design that was not properly tested.
5. What "everybody knows" is often proved wrong, misleading, or incomplete in combat. Manufacturing problems, maintenance issues, morale issues, weather, organizational politics, lack of experience, inadequate training, and so forth, not to mention overconfidence or arrogance, can all result in bad or incorrect decisions, causing units that "should" in some weird theoretical sense be able to defeat an opponent (or at least inflict significant damage) to lose badly. Shit happens. Look at the Battle of Savo Island, from WW2 for an enlightening example. Also look at the loss of the carrier Glorious in WW2.
6. Even decisions made for good reasons will get criticized after the fact, by people that don't understand the issues or the reasoning behind the decisions (i.e. the press, the politicians, the self-appointed "experts" amongst the public, and even naval professionals with a political agenda). A lot of myths and misleading information persist as a result. Consider the "controversy" about wooden flight decks on WW2 carriers, for example. Or the question of battlecruiser design and "vulnerability".
In short, history shows that it's very difficult to generalize or draw accurate conclusions about warship design. Most people get it wrong, including many professionals, and the only real test is combat. Even then, the assessment of how designs actually performed can be difficult.
I never understood this line of thought that but it's just for personal use so that makes it ok. It doesn't. The copyright owners have the right to charge for their film, including 'personal use' (indeed, this is almost the entire point of releasing on DVD). Today's copyright law rightly grants them this prerogative.
The issue is considerably more complex than you seen to realize. Copyright law in the USA needs to handle things like loaning a copy out to another person, without giving the copyright owner authority to control this process. This is how public libraries work, and public libraries are an essential component to a free society, as they provide a means for any citizen to get at least some education (making up for the many deficiencies in the public education system, for those with the motivation to pursue lifetime learning). Public libraries often provide much of the information citizens need to participate in and sustain a free society.
Copyright law also needs to handle the issue of library loans of audio books and DVDs, where copyright owners only get to charge once for a work, but it can then be temporarily copied into the memories of multimedia players (this is how all multimedia systems work: you can't avoid a copying process if you want to display something to a tv screen or monitor or play audio) by thousands of people taking that work home and playing it in the privacy of their homes (can't get more personal than that).
Nobody worried about this in the old days, of course, when the copies were analog and thus unreliable over the long term (like the analog copy your brain makes when you watch a movie: nobody cares about that even today, except some would-be thought police). Playing a DVD at home is certainly a personal use, but should the copyright owner be able to charge for every time a copy is made simply to play it? Historically that has not been the case.
Similarly, copyright law needs to handle the copying of works for non-commercial research purposes to the benefit of society, and for situations involving public oversight over businesses, over non-profit organizations, and over the government. There is a big problem with "paywall" setups in this respect. Many people believe they have a long term right to know what their tax dollars are being spent on, and thus on a personal basis have a right to read research papers that receive public funding.
All of these varied scenarios are accommodated by the section of copyright law that provides for "Fair Use" rights. The text in the law code is fairly short, but there are many precedents that one must read if you want to understand what the courts make of this. In essence, this section of the law provides for the freedom to make copies or other derivative works (such as satire) without the permission or knowledge of the copyright owner under certain not-well-defined circumstances.
To make matters even more complicated, in the USA we have an open-ended Bill of Rights. This is what the 9th Amendment creates, by providing for unspecified rights "retained by the people", and the 10th Amendment, with unspecified rights "reserved to the people". This potentially places limits on what can be put into the law, according to what the people decide those limits are, which means neither the letter of the law nor the courts have the final say on what is or is not legal, or what is or is not a right.
A right for live human beings to engage in reasonable individual conduct is certainly high on the list of rights that might reasonably be asserted as being protected under the 9th Amendment. In this case, we would have to decide when copying without the copyright owner's permission is reasonable conduct. Many arguments can and have been made with respect to this issue, which you can doubtless find in prior Slashdot discussions.
In this respect, one key point to think about is the idea many people believe have receiving intellectual property protection is a privilege society provides
Now how much is wasted? I don't know, but the result could be shocking.
There are fundamental limitations on systems. There is ALWAYS inefficiency in ANY system (see: thermodynamics, entropy).
Mechanical systems (engines) started out at about 1% efficiency (these were systems for pulling water out of mines). They slowly got better, with the development of improved definitions and measurement techniques (the two are closely related in science) eventually leading to an improved understanding on what was really going on, but even today it's really hard and often not practical to get high efficiency out of physical systems.
Now compare that history to the situation in current science research. Determining "waste" in this context is essentially a measurement problem in social science, since even when the research projects involve physical science those projects are carried out by human beings. Here we DON'T have good measurement techniques, or even a good definition of what efficiency in this context means. That in turn implies we can expect any approach we come up with for improving "efficiency" in this context to be ad-hoc and unreliable (and we may even do more harm than anything else by trying to change things).
Further, what's a "good" efficiency in this context? Is 1% ok? Those mine engines were enormously popular and useful even with just this low efficiency. How do we determine what is good?
The fact is, while reading is indeed an intellectual activity, it's an intellectual activity that appeals to people to varying degrees. Some people simply do not find intellectual nourishment from books. Now, perhaps it's because they are stunted in their intellect or imagination, but often, there are other ways they stimulate their brain.
While intellectual nourishment may be a valid reason for reading, it is not the primary one. The primary reason reading is put on a pedestal is that, at present, good readers can absorb vastly more information about a lot of topics important to the long term development of society (the physical sciences, the social sciences, history, law, philosophy) from reading a book than is possible from interacting with any other medium. The assumption is that if we can get people to read more, they will benefit from this efficiency. This in turn can help make people informed citizens, as opposed to ignorant sheep.
A lot of political decision making is oriented towards things that sound like good ideas in the minds of ignorant people (of whom there are many), while actually being really bad ideas with lots of negative consequences over the long term. Most introductory economics books will provide lots of good examples of this phenomenon. Getting people to do more reading is potentially the most efficient way to change this state of affairs.
A college or university degree does not make somebody educated. At best, it lays a foundation for building one's education. The actual process of becoming educated requires far more years, and exposure to a much wider variety of material, than any degree program exposes students to. With the learning technology available today, getting this education will require a lot of reading. Hence the pedestal.
Clearly, reading books alone will not build skills (other than the skill of reading), but it can lay a foundation for learning a surprising variety of skills. Also, reading books does not necessarily build critical thinking skills (it can help with this, provided one already has an appropriate foundation). There is still a place in education, in many and perhaps most subject areas, for teachers and for hands-on training.
This is not to say that mathematics or juggling are without value, but you won't learn much about economics, for example, by doing either in isolation.
Yes, I know a lot of modern economics research is math-driven, but the math involved in the basics of the subject is simple enough that one can learn a lot just by reading about it, if one is a good reader and has basic grade-school mathematics skills. Then there's the issue that mathematicians tend to work in fantasy worlds, and sometimes that can be counter-productive for understanding the real world. The balance between application and abstraction, theory and practice, is critical for true understanding of the world.
Video and audio courses are now a good alternative (or at least a supplement) to reading for many subject areas. We're slowly moving away from the book as a dominant tool for lifetime learning. Even when such courses are available, however, it isn't necessarily the case that the course will be complete enough to stand on its own without being supplemented by outside reading.
A good plan for lifetime learning balances those things that can be learned through books with those things that can't.
Make some time to read good books, then go and get other forms of intellectual nourishment as you see fit.
It's a very good argument for shorter copyright, as copyright holders apparently can't be trusted to ensure that our cultural legacy survives.
While I love to see good arguments for shorter commercial copyright, it's not clear that even this would provide protection for situations like this. It's taken significant fan efforts, for example, to keep some software programs alive that are less than 20 years old. Even then, all they have is the binaries, not the source code. There's all kinds of commercial software running in obscure corners of research labs for which the original provider, and the source code, is long gone.
Another possibility would be to require copies of commercial works to be given to the care of a neutral third party, which would contract to keep the work available and to release the work after a period of time, in return for the privilege of receiving legal protection for the work. Sort of like the function the Library of Congress used to perform in the USA, but without as much government involvement.
A requirement to provide well documented source code in the repository could be included for software (with a rule that it be build-able to the exact binaries released) .
A certain amount of money could also be required to be held aside, as another condition for receiving protection, thus forcing some of the profits or potential profits for the work to not be available until after the work was put in the public domain, as an incentive to get things right. This might help encourage long term thinking in the business world, something that seems quite lacking at present.
1) All Punitive damages are given to the state, to set up a compensation fund for victims, or to the General Fund.
Great idea, but there's a potential problem here. I'd predict that over time the state will simply start to ensure that most parties in suits that have money will lose the suit and be subject to high punitive damages (in order to fund that state's continuing budget deficits), irregardless of the merits of the case. They'll even invent lots of new torts, with all kinds of excuses for awarding high punitive damages, to facilitate this. They'll let a few people win on the merits from time to time so they can still claim the moral high ground (and hide what's really going on, just like now!).
Just think of all the things they tried to charge Aaron Swartz with (and in doing so, violated all kinds of fundamental rights the government officials involved swore oaths to uphold), and you'll get a pretty good idea of the abuse that would follow the implementation of this rule.
In other words, this approach would create an ethical conflict of interest for the state to game the system, either before the case starts by clever manipulation of the laws, or while the case happens by means of various options available to the judge (not to mention the fact that all kinds of propaganda would probably be created to try to manipulate the jury, and jury sequestration is problematic enough from a fundamental rights perspective as things stand).
We already see this happening on a routine basis in MANY jurisdictions in the handling of purported traffic violations. There's a huge ethical conflict of interest if the money obtained from tickets can go ANYWHERE into the budget of the applicable government, but to date the legal profession and government have both found it inconvenient to acknowledge this huge ethics problem. Thus, history strongly suggests if we create a conflict of interest and give the government the option of abusing it's power, it will proceed to do so.
As an alternative, I'd suggest the winning party be required to directly donate the money for punitive damages to some cause (such as a charity, or a research project) that benefits humanity subject to the following conditions: a) no organizations associated with the cause can operate in any of the the jurisdictions associated with the suit (we might limit this to the jurisdictions in which the winners or their families live or operate), b) the cause can not ask for the money (to limit junk mail and propaganda intended to influence the result), c) none of the winners or their families can do work for the cause, and c) the cause must make its full budget publicly available and list all contributors by name and amount.
If the government was a party to the suit, the rules would need to be a bit more complex.
The government, thus, has no control over this money except to make sure a few relatively simple rules are followed, removing the conflict of interest.
A similar approach could be used to handle the traffic violations problem, incidentally.
In some cases, such as large class action suits, it would be tricky to do this, but a workable option might be to require the cause to be out of the country for those cases (assuming most members of the class are in the country).
The entire post is nonsense. Historically, the vast majority of the world's great artists, in every art, have been professionals. Look at Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Michaelangelo, Leonardo, and so forth. These people were paid for their art (although they sometimes had trouble making ends meet), and invested considerable portions of their lives and their selves in doing their art. That's what it means to be a professional in art. They were not dabblers, toying with art because of a social perception that doing so is somehow cool or worthy.
Getting good at ANY art requires an enormous investment of time, and of energy, and perhaps a portion of one's soul. This simply isn't practical for most people.
Only a tiny few of the composers that are found in the history books were amateurs, and these were invariably wealthy dilettantes. In other situations, we find great works done by some priests, who were financially supported by their religion, which in turn freed up the time to do art at a high level. But ordinary people, with a day job, working for a living? They simply don't have the time or motivation to become great at art unless they're getting paid for it.
It's impossible for amateurs to destroy professional art. Make no mistake: if there are people taking money away from the legacy music industry, it is because these so-called-amateurs are themselves professionals that have been mislabelled by people that don't understand how art really works.
It's interesting to note that VMWARE advertisements state that one can "Run Windows XP forever". I infer from this that there's a lot of people in business that want to do just that.
From a Gamer's perspective, there seem to be lots of great classic games that run well on Windows XP, and not-so-well on newer versions of the Windows OS family or on Linux WINE, which provides a good motivation for keeping it around, and not just in a Virtual Machine. Dual boot works well.
That should not be extrapolated into tenured professors being worse teachers overall. I'm pretty certain that for advanced studies, the opposite is true, if nothing else because the untenured teachers don't have the same chance to specialize.
Not clear what "advanced studies" means.
From my perspective, with graduate degrees in EE and CS, and considerable experience as a teaching assistant, I'd expect good students with an interest in teaching and a Master's degree should be able to teach most Master's level courses in these fields (typically 500-700 level) and, of course, anything lower level. In such cases, they can easily do a better job than most PhD's, who have the specialization but little interest in teaching. I certainly learned more from some of my teaching assistants and my peers than from many of the professors, and I tried to do the same for my students.
In industry, these same people (with a few years of experience under their belts) are the ones who end up teaching the "new guys (or gals)", and if the motivation and interest is there they'll do a good job (this is common), so there's a clear precedent that people without PhDs in these fields are capable of being good teachers.
In all likelihood, the first semester will be a bit rough, but things will get better fast. I certainly made my share of mistakes as a teaching assistant, but I was able to quickly learn from those mistakes.
Remarkably few PhDs in engineering and physical science fields spend any time at all reading about psychology, education, sociology, leadership, and so forth, and very few have formal training in teaching or even public speaking, which means they are essentially approaching the task from a position of ignorance. There seems to be a common assumption that they're too smart to have to do that kind of prep work, or that the approach their (often equally ignorant) teachers took is good enough.
It's hard to learn from one's mistakes if one doesn't even realize one's mistaking mistakes, and while book learning doesn't make one good at any art, it DOES provide an intellectual foundation to help with recognizing one's mistakes. The vast majority of "professional" engineering instructors with Phds make huge numbers of mistakes, often very basic ones, in their approach to teaching, so the absence of this is a big problem (they make just as many basic mistakes in running their research groups, so it's not just the teaching part of their jobs that suffers).
I'd consider "advanced studies" to be research courses (800-900 level). Here, most of the students will be PhD students or post-Docs, and considerable experience with the research area is needed. Even here, a PhD student working in that research area might be a far better teacher than their mentor.
In my opinion, as a society we should be re-thinking the whole PhD concept. There is value in research, but there is also a huge price to be paid by students and ultimately the whole of society by having the academic system place too much emphasis on it. I'd like to see two types of PhD: one with an emphasis on multi-disciplinary learning and teaching, the other with the current emphasis on research. People with the former degree could provide most of the instructors at the university level, while people with the latter degree would primarily be involved in research.
Well to bring it back to the question I asked in the article: Why do we have a right to remain silent for defendants, but not for witnesses?
The simple answer is tradition. There are many aspects of the US legal system that don't necessarily make sense (and, in some cases, are even contradictory), but which the legal profession chooses to accept as valid.
We learn from social sciences such as sociology and anthropology that study human behaviour that dysfunctional, irrational, and inconsistent behaviour patterns are actually quite common amongst many (possibly most or even all) social or cultural groups. As members of the legal profession certainly form a social or cultural group, realizing that this group also exhibits dysfunctional, irrational, and inconsistent behaviour patterns should come as no surprise (the ethics issues involved in the practice of law tend to aggravate this: contradictions and inconsistencies in the legal system inevitably increase the demand for the services of legal professionals).
For a more complex answer:
The right to remain silent for defendants is probably there solely to remove any pretext for torture. This doesn't stop all forms of abuse committed by police against prisoners they've decided are guilty (often with little knowledge of the facts), but it at least discourages an official, organized, systematic policy of using torture or abuse.
Obviously the situation with respect to witnesses is problematic. In serious cases, the accused will probably have a bigger stake than any witness, which provides a partial justification for extending greater protection. A good legal system (as opposed to the one we have) would make this explicit, and would extend similar protection to witnesses in cases where they too had a high stake in the outcome.
We don't have to go all the way to the 5th Amendment to see problems with the current system. There is a clear contradiction between the 1st Amendment provision stating that Congress shall make "no law" infringing freedom of speech and then having Congress turn around and pass laws giving the authority to federal courts to coerce testimony. Similarly, there is a direct contradiction in that Congress has also given itself the authority to coerce testimony from people coerced to appear before Congress.
In my opinion, the existing policies represent a clear violation of the oaths all the legal professionals involved have made to uphold the Bill of Rights, and unethical practice of law. The only possible resolution consistent with those oaths, and with ethical practice of law, is to have another Amendment that serves to modify the 1st Amendment to authorize freedom of speech to be infringed under certain circumstances, clearly spelling out those circumstances and the extent of the infringement allowed, worded in a way that can be clearly understood by ordinary people, and clearly prohibiting contradictory policies, practices, precedents, or laws (unlike, for example, the existing situation with respect to so many of the Amendments).
That, of course, begs the question of when it is appropriate to infringe freedom of speech with respect to defendants or witnesses.
I propose the following rules as a starting point:
1. No defendant in any case, whether criminal or civil, can be forced to testify. 2. An employee of the government, or an agent acting on behalf of the government, can be required to testify with respect to only those actions conducted as part of that relationship (the goal here is to allow public oversight with respect to their "official" duties while still providing reasonable protection of their private lives). 3. A person that chooses to testify, whether as a defendant or as a witness, can be expected to answer honestly (but not necessarily to volunteer information, also note the use of the word "honestly" instead of "truthfully": it's dangerous to allow any government to be in the business of deciding what "the truth" is), and may be cross-e
This has been studied extensively. Every study I have read on this shows that judges tend to toss out the frivolous lawsuit and that the majority of cases that got to trial actual have some merit.
Any how many of these studies are either a) done by legal professionals, or b) done by people who receive research funding from legal professionals? Even if a claim is made that the funding for a given study does not come from, say, a Bar Association, would we have any reason to believe that claim to be true?
No rational person can study the US legal system without coming to the conclusion that the system is heavily biased to the benefit of the legal profession (not every person who conducts such a study, of course, will admit this, for obvious reasons).
We have a) enormously complex laws (just look at the length of the Patriot Act or the Obama Health Care act), we have b) laws that penalize people by absurd amounts for minor offences (look at some of the penalties for copyright infringement), we have c) no oversight of the legal system or of legal ethics by non-lawyers (most members of Congress are lawyers, so they clearly don't count), and we have d) contradictory laws (consider how many laws violate the "no law" provision of the 1st Amendment, or the "may not be infringed" provision of the 2nd Amendment, or the many rights that can reasonably be asserted under the 9th Amendment).
All of this creates a complex, confusing, even contradictory legal system, and a quite scary one (just look at the number of fences that have gone up around property that is not being used, a huge infringement of the right to travel, simply because the people responsible for those properties are scared of being sued -- in some cases, insurance companies are even requiring this), which in turn creates a huge artificial demand for the services of the legal profession.
The conclusion follows that the legal professionals making up Congress and most state legislatures have created a legal system to the benefit of their profession. This is not a question of conspiracy, it's a matter of people without a strong sense of integrity recognizing shared advantage, in a system with no meaningful check or balance on them to keep things in hand. In ethics terms, the core problem here as a name: "conflict of interest".
So long as the legal profession has control over determining the nature, scope, and form of the legal system, problems of this kind are inevitable. The issues with tort law, bad though they are in themselves, are just one symptom of the underlying ethics problems.
Claims that the USA is the land of the free and the home of the brave are no longer tenable in the face of the disastrous mess the US legal system has become over the past 6 decades. Now it is more apt to describe the USA as the land of excessive law, excessive bureaucracy, abusive government, and of people who are scared of their own legal system. All too often it seems as though the concept of government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" has been replaced by the concept of government "of the lawyer, by the lawyer, and for the lawyer".
Fixing this is going to be enormously difficult. Even a quick study of high court decisions shows the high courts are unwilling to seriously address ethics issues regarding the legal profession. This should not be entirely surprising, given the nature of the selection process for these offices, but this means that neither the legislative nor judicial branches can be relied on for sponsoring reform. The only hope for reform short of revolution seems to be another Civil Rights movement on the same massive scale as the last one.
Suppose I'm a bookstore owner and I get a court order to tell the police about any future purchases of one of my customers.
You can't simultaneously have a Bill of Rights where Congress can pass NO LAW infringing freedom of speech and federal court orders requiring one to speak to federal agents, judges, or congressional investigators.
Forcing someone to speak is an infringement of freedom of speech.
Why then, do we have such a system, where there are massive contradictions in fundamental areas of law?
The answer is simple. It's not in the interests of the legal profession to law a legal system that people can understand. Having a complex, confusing, even contradictory legal system creates long term business for their profession.
Similarly, for those who wish to abuse power, or who wish to bribe the government to act in their favour, a complex and contradictory legal system provides pretexts that serve as an umbrella under which they can hide their actions. They simply choose to justify their actions in terms of the laws and precedents that favour their point of view, and ignore the ones that don't. As long as they can spend more money on legal fees than their opponents, they are likely get away with this. Secret courts just make the problem worse.
In ethics terms, this problem has a name: "Conflict of Interests." If there is a single root cause to the current disaster that masquerades as a legal system in the USA, this ethics issue is that root cause.
If there are circumstances under which it is appropriate for the government to coerce people to talk, then the only ethical way to implement this is to create another amendment that changes the wording of the 1st. Of course, this isn't likely to happen, because our legal profession has discovered that they don't have to be ethical to be successful.
What we need to be doing is asserting a right to ethical practice of law and to ethical government, as a right "retained by the people" under the 9th Amendment, and "reserved to the people" under the 10th, and going after the government and the legal profession for violations of their oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights in these kinds of situations. This is the only way I can see to try to fix the mess we're in that makes an effort to work within the system, as opposed to another revolution.
How many of the top schools are in Sweden? How many of the top research institutions?
Don't make the common mistake of confusing teaching with research. Very few people are good at both teaching and research. The vast majority of researchers are terrible teachers. Also, for the most part, being at a top research institution only matters to PhD students, who are a tiny part of the total student body. There is, admittedly, status associated with being a top research institution, but don't confuse the illusion of quality with the reality.
Further, there is no reason why getting a PhD should be something associated with schools: we could just as easily have separate institutions dedicated to research and these could train people interested in research careers "on the job". Such separate institutions would probably provide better training, and might easily spend their funds far more efficiently, both advantages from the perspective of society. For that matter, public oversight over both types of institution would be easier if we didn't have the mingling of budgets and functions.
The Publish-or-Perish system at Universities is a huge disaster for society. Forcing people that really don't care about teaching, and who aren't being rewarded for being good at teaching, to be teachers, and then forcing huge numbers of students to take their classes, wastes enormous amounts of people's time (both instructors and students). It's like kidnapping on a massive scale. This seems to be a problem in both Europe and the USA. It's a legacy of the shared history of the university system, an aspect of the past we haven't been wise enough (yet) to break free from.
In the case of the USA, it's bad enough we have these terrible student loan systems, but then we compound the problem by giving (in most cases) an extremely poor return for a student's time.
Don't forget the opportunity costs of these programs.
First, there's the lost ability to use real-estate. Stadiums and other athletic facilities take up huge amounts of land that could otherwise be used for parking, student housing, labs, or classrooms. Ever wonder why the student to teacher ratio is so awful in so many settings? In a lot of places, a big factor is because there isn't enough space for classrooms: even if they could pay for more teachers they couldn't use them.
Similarly, many campuses do not have adequate parking and are located in areas where the opportunity to build new buildings is limited. Given the choice between a stadium right next to campus, and a parking garage, guess which one the school is likely to choose? Of course, you could have a stadium located at a separate site distant from campus, but that doesn't usually go over well with alumni, who donate lots of money to schools with athletic programs.
You might suppose that having a stadium implies good parking, but it doesn't necessarily work that way. In practice what can happen is on game days the fans park all over town and walk to the stadium, with people and businesses in the area turning their driveways, parking lots, and garages into temporary, very high priced, private pay parking lots. None of which helps the (generally poor) students who need to get to class on a regular basis.
Second, these programs can consume large amounts of time, both for the athletes, the students, the instructors, and for the local residents. On game days in some college towns, you might as well stay home, because trying to drive anywhere is a nightmare, with visitors massively overloading the local road network. Better hope you don't need emergency medical care or the fire department, either, good luck getting that to show up in a timely manner. At some campuses, instructors will cancel classes, office hours, and labs on game days because they don't want to drive home through the traffic. Athletes in many of these programs will spend hardly any time on their classes. This lost time, of course, is lost educational time.
None of this is to say that athletic programs are bad, but the costs of supporting these programs are often far higher and far more varied than folks realize.
Thank the move away from requiring mens rea and toward strict liability in recent laws for this. Because, you know, it's easier to prosecute if the perp had no knowledge of, or intention of, committing a crime.
If ignorance of a particular law is not a defence when a person is reasonably ignorant of that law, this creates an artificial demand for the services of legal professionals. Legal professionals are in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to both writing such laws, and also with respect to enforcing such laws or using such laws on behalf of a client.
The right to be subject to ethical practice of law is certainly a fundamental right arising under the 9th Amendment (rights retained by the people) and the 10th Amendment (rights reserved to the people). Even the appearance of conflict of interest must be avoided when possible. It does not require any act of government to create this right, or any other right "retained by the people": the Bill of Rights is all the authority needed.
For legal professionals to be enforcing a law that does not recognize reasonable ignorance goes far beyond just the appearance of conflict of interest: it is full fledged, in-your-face, extreme conflict of interest.
Hence, any law that does not recognize a reasonable degree of ignorance as creating a valid defence is an unconstitutional and hence illegal law. Enforcement of such laws by legal professionals is unethical practice of law, and a violation of their oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights.
By definition, rights retained by the people are, well, retained by the people. Retained by the people does not mean the same thing as steal-able by the government. Hence, no entity of government can take away the right to ethical practice of law, and thus no entity of government -- not the President, not the Congress, not the Supreme Court, and not State or Local government -- can authorize any law,r create any precedent, or execute any order that has the effect of limiting or infringing such rights. Any attempt to do so by a person who is sworn by oath to uphold the Constitution or to uphold The Law is a violation of that oath, immediately and permanently disqualifying that person from holding any position requiring such an oath.
With respect to rights "retained by the people", the determination of what is "reasonable" is ultimately up to the people. We do not have a government of the lawyer, by the lawyer, and for the lawyer, and hence the legal profession has no authority to create or to use laws in any manner that works to the benefit of the profession at the expense of society.
You could appeal a conviction all the way to the Supreme Court if you have millions for legal fees and are willing to gamble 20 years of your life on the outcome, or you could just plead guilty to the other charge with the 10 year sentence, and hope to get out in five.
Isn't it interesting how the legal system has "evolved" to the point where this is required? Is the time, cost, and risk required to get a case before the Supreme Court all that different from the time, cost, and risk required to bring something before the King of England in colonial times?
Think about having to make a long journey across the sea on an unreliable ship, facing storms and pirates and bad weather, then having to bribe one level of royal advisor after another in order to get something (like correcting an injustice) to the level where a decision could actually be made.
Is it really all that different today? The details of getting a case before the Supreme Court have changed, but the cost, and length, and uncertainty of the process is still substantial (and way beyond anything consistent with the "land of the free" and the "home of the brave").
More to the point, the copyright laws need to be simple and straightforward, and not interfere with reasonable conduct.
All to often laws are unclear, contradictory, or excessively complex, leading to the presumption that the law was written in that fashion by legal professionals to create long term business for their profession. Similarly, the laws are often written in such a manner as to require one to file a law suit, or engage in complicated and time consuming procedures, or write a legal contract in order to benefit from the law, all of which creates business for the legal profession.
As with any business, people in the law business recognize that if one can create an artificial demand for their product, then, the supply being relatively inelastic, that automatically increases the money they make (a point that is all to often ignored when people consider the laws and the legal system).
The right to ethical practice of law, and to ethical government, must ultimately supersede the right of content creators to make a living. Only if the copyright laws can be written in such a manner as to coexist with ethical practice of law (and I believe this is possible, but certainly not what we have at present) can they be allowed to exist.
Further, giving content creators a reasonable chance to prosper from their creativity is a very different thing from attempting to maximize their profits. Laws that attempt to do the first thing are much more likely to meet reasonable standards of what governments can legitimately do than laws that attempt the second. We have far too many examples of abuse of fundamental rights by the government and the legal system abuse as things stand today, without adding to the problem.
There is also a need to insure that content creators have some protection from abuse by those with greater bargaining power. All to often the basic assumption of contract law, namely that bargains are created between two relatively equal parties, each free to walk away from the contract, is not in fact how things work.
How did the Zero compare to the Hurricane and Spitfire? I had the impression that the design philosophies of the three fighters (and the ME-109) were pretty similar, especially in comparison with most (all?) of the US planes.
Rather than stop using Windows, why not take it over using Eminent Domain and make the source code and derivative works public property? Then we can fix the security bugs, while still having an operating system capable of running most of the world's software?
This means that streaming a movie from an unauthorised source will be considered a more serious offense than vandalism, trespassing, simple assault and prostitution.
Well in the last case, good, since it shouldn't be a crime. For the rest, yeah it's fucked up.
Don't be to quick to assume the laws regarding trespassing are good. This is another one of those things that is more complicated than it might appear at first.
In many cases, "trespassing" is just another way of violating the right to travel, a right which, once upon a time, was recognized by federal courts as a fundamental right, one of those rights arising under the 9th Amendment and subject to "strict scrutiny".
Ever since the USA became the Land of the Lawsuit, people have become terrified of being sued (or having any interaction at all with the legal system), and are blocking access to land that is not being used for any legitimate commercial, agricultural, or industrial purpose, and does not contain a home. This in turn can block access to public lands and waterways, and to other sites of interest to the public.
While some access is merely for leisure purposes (such as hiking, photography, and boating) -- which are certainly things one should be extremely free to do in a free country -- in other cases blocking this access can have more serious consequences. It can, for example, interfere with yet another fundamental right, namely the right to long term public oversight over government and business. Independent scientists, for example, might have reason to want to measure chemical, biological, or radiological contamination on a piece of property, and this can be prevented by means of laws regarding trespassing, with serious consequences for long term oversight. Thus we have yet another set if negative consequences flowing of the inability of the US legal profession to understand ethics and the inability of the government to obey the Bill of Rights.
In general, the government has no authority to authorize private entities or third party agencies to violate fundamental rights that the government itself can not violate. Thus, as a consequence of the "strict scrutiny" aspect of the right to travel, the government has no authority to create trespassing laws except when those laws protect other fundamental rights, as those laws effectively delegate the authority to violate fundamental rights to third party agents. Taken to an extreme, if the government had such authority, it would allow the government to violate any right at all simply by turning all "public" land into "private" land managed by third parties with appropriate arrangements to have the third parties violate the rights as desired. Similarly, private entities could try to hide massive violations of fundamental rights, such as toxic waste disposal destroying the environment, under the guise of "private property".
Hence, a small amount of property that is primarily a home can reasonably be protected by trespassing laws as a reflection of the 9th Amendment right to privacy in the home, but large properties and properties that are not primarily a home can not be so protected (nor may they be posted or fenced off except to the extent that doing so in reasonably viewed as the minimum necessary for a business or government operation to function, i.e. strict scrutiny for both).
It's not in the ethical interest of the legal profession to remove contradictions from the legal system, or to recognize any rights arising under the 9th Amendment if they can possibly avoid it, so good luck actually getting a court to recognize this. In practice, it appears that "Strict scrutiny" only applies to rights when the legal profession finds it convenient.
Any entity which is not the company has no right to copy those parts.
Be careful when you find yourself temped to put the words "no right" into a sentence in any discussion of how the law does work (or should work).
In order to deal with the objections made by the Anti-Federalists to the Constitution, James Madison created an open-ended Bill of Rights, providing for unspecified rights not explicitly stated but nevertheless "retained by the people" (9th Amendment) and "reserved to the people" (10th Amendment). With respect to the US legal system, it is always incorrect to make statements to the effect that "y is not in the Bill of Rights (or the Constitution, or state law, or city law, or whatever) therefore there is no right to do y", where "y" refers to some issue or potential right under discussion.
All legal professionals, all government executives and law enforcement officers are required by their oaths to recognize the existence of such rights, as a precondition for holding such positions. Obviously there are many situations where it will be inconvenient for persons in these positions to remember this.
For that matter, a strong case can be made that it is inconvenient for the entire legal profession, as a class in society, to remember this, which may account for the fact that there are relatively few court cases in which these rights are explicitly discussed (with a few notable exceptions such as Roe vs. Wade). Of course, the fact that issues such as ethical conflict of interest might make it inconvenient for legal professionals and others to remember these rights exist in no way removes them from existence.
To complicate matters further, US Copyright law provides for something known as "fair use" rights which authorizes copies to be made without infringement. A list of example criteria regarding situation in which "fair use" may apply is part of the written law code, but the list is not, of course, limiting or all inclusive as a result of the word "such as" in the statement of the this.
Thus, it is simply not possible to say that there is "no right to copy" without careful considering of whether or not such a right might reasonably be asserted as "fair use".
In one case I dimly recall reading many years ago, a judge decided that an appropriate penalty for attempting to remove by contract "fair use" rights was complete loss of the copyright. I don't have a legal database on hand to try to find the particular case reference for you. But, it certainly can reasonably be supposed that "fair use" rights will supersede a written contract (including employment contracts) in at least some situations.
Indeed, it would not be hard to go further and assert that "fair use" rights exist as an expression of one or more underlying rights "retained by the people" and thus are an example of rights are protected by the 9th and 10th Amendments, which would cause the use of this right in typical circumstances to supersede laws (whether passed by Congress or the State Governments), executive orders, court orders, and even the "usual practices of law".
For example, a right to long term public oversight over businesses and government might reasonably be asserted as arising under the 9th Amendment.
It would certainly be a reasonable consequence of such as right to make copies of any materials that might be needed for such long term oversight and which otherwise might be lost or "accidentally misplaced". Such a right, as a fundamental right, would naturally supersede the authority of government to create laws such as "industrial espionage", "trade secret", or "intellectual property" laws which might otherwise prevent certain actions (another point that doubtless many parties associated with the legal system would find inconvenient to acknowledge).
The assertion of such a right would not, of course, be in the interest of a certain class of business executives (namely the unethical ones), so I suppose in any case where such a right was aire
This won't last long, NCAA will just amend their terms so that all athletes must give up likeness rights to compete.
While we're at it, let's make sure to limit contract law so that fundamental rights can't be given up in a contract where multiple items are bundled together. Hence, organizations that deal with athletes and other celebrities must have a separate contract with those individuals, written exclusively with respect to the rights such as the right to privacy or the right to publicity, and so forth, if they wish to take advantage of anything more than an individual's basic skills.
Obviously the legal profession has a vested interest in keeping the scope of contract law as broad as possible. That in itself is a good reason to limit it: anything that discourages the legal profession from unnecessarily expanding the scope of legal practice makes for better legal ethics and a better legal system.
It seems tragic that the only way to expose the overstepping of the government on human rights is to have lone leakers throw themselves under the bus and expose information, often haphazardly, to the world. There should be a system in place where government employees can appeal anything they consider unconstitutional to a special court for review. It is up to the judicial branch to uphold the constitution and seems utterly ridiculous that these secret overreaches by the executive branch are not eligible to the same checks and balances put in place for public laws.
The problem is the judicial branch has been aiding and abetting government overreach. This has been the case throughout US history, since the founding. From time to time, it has also worked to limit it. That contradiction, in a nutshell, is the essence of Constitutional Law.
The worse abuses of the slave system were tolerated by the judicial branch. It took a civil war to end that. The military was segregated by law, and the legal profession accepted that. It took WWII, and a rare president with integrity, to end that. During WWII, Japanese-Americans were put into concentration camps without evidence, trial, or due process, and the legal profession accepted that. It took more than 50 years to (partially) correct that. The civilian "separate-but-not-actually-equal" segregation system in the South was tolerated by the judicial branch. It took a major civil rights movement to end that.
Today, we have many laws that violate even the explicit text of the 1st and 2nd Amendments, to say nothing of the (many) laws that violate rights arising under the open-ended Amendments (9th and 10th, rights retained by the people, rights reserved to the people).
We have judges permitting cases to go forward under a broken patent and copyright system. We have judges permitting cases to go forward that abuse fundamental rights in the name of tort law (hence "Land of the Lawsuit"). We have all kinds of aspects of the legal system that can reasonably be supposed to involve ethical conflict of interest on the part of the legal profession (such as the many abuses in the area of Contract Law), and those legal professionals holding judgeships have allowed that to happen.
In short, both history and current events suggest there isn't much reason to hope for integrity from the judicial branch, or the legal profession.
This, of course, is why the Anti-Federalists did not trust the Constitution. It is the nature of power to corrupt. The government that governs best, governs least.
I want to see publicly nominated and vetted judges sitting on a board to review classified procedures and actions for their constitutionality. The proceedings can be secret, but the number of cases overturned and left standing should be made public. It may be a pipe dream, but I think this would go a long way to restoring the people's trust in their government by restoring the accountability that was supposed to be there in the first place.
The public nomination part is a nice idea. There are some complications, though. At present, when a federal judge (or group of judges) rules in favour of an issue where a violation of fundamental rights is involved, we have to ask ourselves whether the ruling resulted from simple incompetence, stupidity, ethical conflict of interest, a lack of integrity, or possibly more than one of these. One presumes judges can be influenced to make particular rulings by secret promises for support to higher office. Thus, even public nomination has limited value in getting competent judges with integrity.
The idea of having secret proceedings is a tricky issue. Certainly in some situations privacy rights will be an issue. However, look up the history of the "Star Chamber" to learn about the history of issues with secrecy in legal proceedings.
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That's why the FairTax has a prebate, in the amount of tax which would be paid up to the poverty level.
One problem here is coming up with a single number to use for this prebate, as the cost of living differs significantly from area to area, and is often HIGHER in poor areas. In poor urban areas, this is because businesses operating in those areas must deal with lower availability of capital and higher losses of goods, both resulting from the higher crime rates, and thus must charge more to compensate for the higher interest rates on loans and higher loss of goods.
In poor rural areas, the higher cost is associated with the cost of transport to get the goods out into the boonies.
Then we have the difficulty of defining poverty ... Just where is the poverty line or level, and how do we define this in a sensible way most people are willing to accept?
Another problem with this system is that many types of purchases that have long term educational value to those looking to improve their lot in society will be taxed, such as non-fiction books, non-fiction DVDs, computers, software, internet access, tools needed to learn trades, and so forth, as the acquisition of these won't fall within the prebate amount.
Yet another set of problems with this system arise from the fact that supply and demand still operate. The higher the cost of the item, including taxes, the less the demand. Each item not sold reduces the profits of the merchant, the manufacturer, and everybody else involved in the system.
Thus a sales tax directly reduces the ability of people in poor neighbourhoods to get jobs, since the merchant will have less money to spend on hiring people (or on bonuses for good work).
You also get poorer selection: the higher the sales tax, the fewer items merchants can take a chance on selling. Stores in poor areas already have much more limited selections than those in other areas, which has an impact on things like health.
Similarly, due to the reduced profits, the availability of capital will be lower, for things like repairing or maintaining or expanding the buildings the merchants operate in.
You also negatively impact the willingness of people to produce educational materials to help the poor develop job skills, or to provide services that help with this.
All this is basic economics, unfortunately it's not going away without massive government regulation that does more harm than good.
Most people do NOT stay in poverty their entire lives (most basic books on economics will discuss this at length), but the more you create obstacles to developing marketable skills (or getting low paid jobs that allow individuals to get skills) through legislation, the more you limit this mobility. Over the long run, you create a class system.
If you're going to tax goods or services, tax things like ESPN, which nobody needs.
Agreed, but by taxing income, you allow taxation to be avoided by deferring income, having income received outside the country, etc. Tax consumption, and you reduce opportunity to avoid the tax.
No, you simply shift the avoidance of taxes to different mechanisms. Black markets become more profitable, and you see an increase in smuggling and barter, as well as services provided "off the books" or "Quid pro quo". No tax system can prevent this: there will always be inefficiency in any system. Think of it as entropy if you like.
Having both income and sales taxes buys you the worst of both worlds, and there's all kinds of second and third order negative consequences that flow from having multiple types of taxes operating at once. Far better just to tax job and inheritance income.
There's a lot that could be done to clean up inheritance tax. For example, don't allow people to hide money in trusts or similar mechanisms (or at least clean up the rules for doing this). Also, you might set some reasonable maximum for the money that can be received by
Answering your question from a historical perspective, several things are clear:
1. Warship design is a very complex field of endeavour. It makes rocket science look childishly simple. Even the design of WW I warships was enormously complex (take a look at some of the books by Norman Friedman to get a sense of this, and even then you won't get most of the engineering details!), and things have only gotten more complex since then. It's actually really hard to get good engineering information on warships, even those from a century ago, let alone today.
2. Lots of mistakes are made in the design of ships (and their associated equipment) by the naval officers responsible for these designs. Technology changes fast, and this can invalidate even good decisions. For example, in WW2, every single major navy in the world failed to design their ships with adequate defences to meet the air threat (aircraft became a lot faster, and hence more difficult targets, in a relatively short time), and the cruisers were not designed to handle the torpedo threat (torpedos deployed in WW2 for many navies were far more effective than had been the case in WW1).
This is not necessarily due to a lack of naval professionalism or competence. The problems involved in figuring out what needs to go on a ship, and keeping up with technology (while staying off the bleeding edge), and making this happen in a large, complex organization with many political constraints, are really, really hard problems.
Note that these failures didn't make naval units useless: they still played a critical role, but more lives were lost as a result.
3. Even more mistakes are made by politicians (including politicians in uniform) in the funding of construction and renovations (or lack thereof). For example, the British Navy told the politicians the Hood needed a refit long before WW2 started, but the politicians refused to pay for it (in part because the public didn't want to support the military). Also, there is the issue of pork-barrel politics.
4. Government agencies and contractors make their own share of mistakes. Lots of ships have had problems with their systems (e.g. engines that keep breaking down), or even their fundamental design (smokestacks that blind the crew, inability to operate in bad weather) with parts or designs from one particular contractor or government agency. My favorite example: the government agencies running the US Navy in WW2 managed to deploy dysfunctional torpedoes to the entire fleet at the start of the war, using a design that was not properly tested.
5. What "everybody knows" is often proved wrong, misleading, or incomplete in combat. Manufacturing problems, maintenance issues, morale issues, weather, organizational politics, lack of experience, inadequate training, and so forth, not to mention overconfidence or arrogance, can all result in bad or incorrect decisions, causing units that "should" in some weird theoretical sense be able to defeat an opponent (or at least inflict significant damage) to lose badly. Shit happens. Look at the Battle of Savo Island, from WW2 for an enlightening example. Also look at the loss of the carrier Glorious in WW2.
6. Even decisions made for good reasons will get criticized after the fact, by people that don't understand the issues or the reasoning behind the decisions (i.e. the press, the politicians, the self-appointed "experts" amongst the public, and even naval professionals with a political agenda). A lot of myths and misleading information persist as a result. Consider the "controversy" about wooden flight decks on WW2 carriers, for example. Or the question of battlecruiser design and "vulnerability".
In short, history shows that it's very difficult to generalize or draw accurate conclusions about warship design. Most people get it wrong, including many professionals, and the only real test is combat. Even then, the assessment of how designs actually performed can be difficult.
This is a point that is probably a bit
I never understood this line of thought that but it's just for personal use so that makes it ok. It doesn't. The copyright owners have the right to charge for their film, including 'personal use' (indeed, this is almost the entire point of releasing on DVD). Today's copyright law rightly grants them this prerogative.
The issue is considerably more complex than you seen to realize. Copyright law in the USA needs to handle things like loaning a copy out to another person, without giving the copyright owner authority to control this process. This is how public libraries work, and public libraries are an essential component to a free society, as they provide a means for any citizen to get at least some education (making up for the many deficiencies in the public education system, for those with the motivation to pursue lifetime learning). Public libraries often provide much of the information citizens need to participate in and sustain a free society.
Copyright law also needs to handle the issue of library loans of audio books and DVDs, where copyright owners only get to charge once for a work, but it can then be temporarily copied into the memories of multimedia players (this is how all multimedia systems work: you can't avoid a copying process if you want to display something to a tv screen or monitor or play audio) by thousands of people taking that work home and playing it in the privacy of their homes (can't get more personal than that).
Nobody worried about this in the old days, of course, when the copies were analog and thus unreliable over the long term (like the analog copy your brain makes when you watch a movie: nobody cares about that even today, except some would-be thought police). Playing a DVD at home is certainly a personal use, but should the copyright owner be able to charge for every time a copy is made simply to play it? Historically that has not been the case.
Similarly, copyright law needs to handle the copying of works for non-commercial research purposes to the benefit of society, and for situations involving public oversight over businesses, over non-profit organizations, and over the government. There is a big problem with "paywall" setups in this respect. Many people believe they have a long term right to know what their tax dollars are being spent on, and thus on a personal basis have a right to read research papers that receive public funding.
All of these varied scenarios are accommodated by the section of copyright law that provides for "Fair Use" rights. The text in the law code is fairly short, but there are many precedents that one must read if you want to understand what the courts make of this. In essence, this section of the law provides for the freedom to make copies or other derivative works (such as satire) without the permission or knowledge of the copyright owner under certain not-well-defined circumstances.
To make matters even more complicated, in the USA we have an open-ended Bill of Rights. This is what the 9th Amendment creates, by providing for unspecified rights "retained by the people", and the 10th Amendment, with unspecified rights "reserved to the people". This potentially places limits on what can be put into the law, according to what the people decide those limits are, which means neither the letter of the law nor the courts have the final say on what is or is not legal, or what is or is not a right.
A right for live human beings to engage in reasonable individual conduct is certainly high on the list of rights that might reasonably be asserted as being protected under the 9th Amendment. In this case, we would have to decide when copying without the copyright owner's permission is reasonable conduct. Many arguments can and have been made with respect to this issue, which you can doubtless find in prior Slashdot discussions.
In this respect, one key point to think about is the idea many people believe have receiving intellectual property protection is a privilege society provides
Now how much is wasted? I don't know, but the result could be shocking.
There are fundamental limitations on systems. There is ALWAYS inefficiency in ANY system (see: thermodynamics, entropy).
Mechanical systems (engines) started out at about 1% efficiency (these were systems for pulling water out of mines). They slowly got better, with the development of improved definitions and measurement techniques (the two are closely related in science) eventually leading to an improved understanding on what was really going on, but even today it's really hard and often not practical to get high efficiency out of physical systems.
Now compare that history to the situation in current science research. Determining "waste" in this context is essentially a measurement problem in social science, since even when the research projects involve physical science those projects are carried out by human beings. Here we DON'T have good measurement techniques, or even a good definition of what efficiency in this context means. That in turn implies we can expect any approach we come up with for improving "efficiency" in this context to be ad-hoc and unreliable (and we may even do more harm than anything else by trying to change things).
Further, what's a "good" efficiency in this context? Is 1% ok? Those mine engines were enormously popular and useful even with just this low efficiency. How do we determine what is good?
The fact is, while reading is indeed an intellectual activity, it's an intellectual activity that appeals to people to varying degrees. Some people simply do not find intellectual nourishment from books. Now, perhaps it's because they are stunted in their intellect or imagination, but often, there are other ways they stimulate their brain.
While intellectual nourishment may be a valid reason for reading, it is not the primary one. The primary reason reading is put on a pedestal is that, at present, good readers can absorb vastly more information about a lot of topics important to the long term development of society (the physical sciences, the social sciences, history, law, philosophy) from reading a book than is possible from interacting with any other medium. The assumption is that if we can get people to read more, they will benefit from this efficiency. This in turn can help make people informed citizens, as opposed to ignorant sheep.
A lot of political decision making is oriented towards things that sound like good ideas in the minds of ignorant people (of whom there are many), while actually being really bad ideas with lots of negative consequences over the long term. Most introductory economics books will provide lots of good examples of this phenomenon. Getting people to do more reading is potentially the most efficient way to change this state of affairs.
A college or university degree does not make somebody educated. At best, it lays a foundation for building one's education. The actual process of becoming educated requires far more years, and exposure to a much wider variety of material, than any degree program exposes students to. With the learning technology available today, getting this education will require a lot of reading. Hence the pedestal.
Clearly, reading books alone will not build skills (other than the skill of reading), but it can lay a foundation for learning a surprising variety of skills. Also, reading books does not necessarily build critical thinking skills (it can help with this, provided one already has an appropriate foundation). There is still a place in education, in many and perhaps most subject areas, for teachers and for hands-on training.
This is not to say that mathematics or juggling are without value, but you won't learn much about economics, for example, by doing either in isolation.
Yes, I know a lot of modern economics research is math-driven, but the math involved in the basics of the subject is simple enough that one can learn a lot just by reading about it, if one is a good reader and has basic grade-school mathematics skills. Then there's the issue that mathematicians tend to work in fantasy worlds, and sometimes that can be counter-productive for understanding the real world. The balance between application and abstraction, theory and practice, is critical for true understanding of the world.
Video and audio courses are now a good alternative (or at least a supplement) to reading for many subject areas. We're slowly moving away from the book as a dominant tool for lifetime learning. Even when such courses are available, however, it isn't necessarily the case that the course will be complete enough to stand on its own without being supplemented by outside reading.
A good plan for lifetime learning balances those things that can be learned through books with those things that can't.
Make some time to read good books, then go and get other forms of intellectual nourishment as you see fit.
It's a very good argument for shorter copyright, as copyright holders apparently can't be trusted to ensure that our cultural legacy survives.
While I love to see good arguments for shorter commercial copyright, it's not clear that even this would provide protection for situations like this. It's taken significant fan efforts, for example, to keep some software programs alive that are less than 20 years old. Even then, all they have is the binaries, not the source code. There's all kinds of commercial software running in obscure corners of research labs for which the original provider, and the source code, is long gone.
Another possibility would be to require copies of commercial works to be given to the care of a neutral third party, which would contract to keep the work available and to release the work after a period of time, in return for the privilege of receiving legal protection for the work. Sort of like the function the Library of Congress used to perform in the USA, but without as much government involvement.
A requirement to provide well documented source code in the repository could be included for software (with a rule that it be build-able to the exact binaries released) .
A certain amount of money could also be required to be held aside, as another condition for receiving protection, thus forcing some of the profits or potential profits for the work to not be available until after the work was put in the public domain, as an incentive to get things right. This might help encourage long term thinking in the business world, something that seems quite lacking at present.
1) All Punitive damages are given to the state, to set up a compensation fund for victims, or to the General Fund.
Great idea, but there's a potential problem here. I'd predict that over time the state will simply start to ensure that most parties in suits that have money will lose the suit and be subject to high punitive damages (in order to fund that state's continuing budget deficits), irregardless of the merits of the case. They'll even invent lots of new torts, with all kinds of excuses for awarding high punitive damages, to facilitate this. They'll let a few people win on the merits from time to time so they can still claim the moral high ground (and hide what's really going on, just like now!).
Just think of all the things they tried to charge Aaron Swartz with (and in doing so, violated all kinds of fundamental rights the government officials involved swore oaths to uphold), and you'll get a pretty good idea of the abuse that would follow the implementation of this rule.
In other words, this approach would create an ethical conflict of interest for the state to game the system, either before the case starts by clever manipulation of the laws, or while the case happens by means of various options available to the judge (not to mention the fact that all kinds of propaganda would probably be created to try to manipulate the jury, and jury sequestration is problematic enough from a fundamental rights perspective as things stand).
We already see this happening on a routine basis in MANY jurisdictions in the handling of purported traffic violations. There's a huge ethical conflict of interest if the money obtained from tickets can go ANYWHERE into the budget of the applicable government, but to date the legal profession and government have both found it inconvenient to acknowledge this huge ethics problem. Thus, history strongly suggests if we create a conflict of interest and give the government the option of abusing it's power, it will proceed to do so.
As an alternative, I'd suggest the winning party be required to directly donate the money for punitive damages to some cause (such as a charity, or a research project) that benefits humanity subject to the following conditions: a) no organizations associated with the cause can operate in any of the the jurisdictions associated with the suit (we might limit this to the jurisdictions in which the winners or their families live or operate), b) the cause can not ask for the money (to limit junk mail and propaganda intended to influence the result), c) none of the winners or their families can do work for the cause, and c) the cause must make its full budget publicly available and list all contributors by name and amount.
If the government was a party to the suit, the rules would need to be a bit more complex.
The government, thus, has no control over this money except to make sure a few relatively simple rules are followed, removing the conflict of interest.
A similar approach could be used to handle the traffic violations problem, incidentally.
In some cases, such as large class action suits, it would be tricky to do this, but a workable option might be to require the cause to be out of the country for those cases (assuming most members of the class are in the country).
The entire post is nonsense. Historically, the vast majority of the world's great artists, in every art, have been professionals. Look at Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Michaelangelo, Leonardo, and so forth. These people were paid for their art (although they sometimes had trouble making ends meet), and invested considerable portions of their lives and their selves in doing their art. That's what it means to be a professional in art. They were not dabblers, toying with art because of a social perception that doing so is somehow cool or worthy.
Getting good at ANY art requires an enormous investment of time, and of energy, and perhaps a portion of one's soul. This simply isn't practical for most people.
Only a tiny few of the composers that are found in the history books were amateurs, and these were invariably wealthy dilettantes. In other situations, we find great works done by some priests, who were financially supported by their religion, which in turn freed up the time to do art at a high level. But ordinary people, with a day job, working for a living? They simply don't have the time or motivation to become great at art unless they're getting paid for it.
It's impossible for amateurs to destroy professional art. Make no mistake: if there are people taking money away from the legacy music industry, it is because these so-called-amateurs are themselves professionals that have been mislabelled by people that don't understand how art really works.
It's interesting to note that VMWARE advertisements state that one can "Run Windows XP forever". I infer from this that there's a lot of people in business that want to do just that.
From a Gamer's perspective, there seem to be lots of great classic games that run well on Windows XP, and not-so-well on newer versions of the Windows OS family or on Linux WINE, which provides a good motivation for keeping it around, and not just in a Virtual Machine. Dual boot works well.
That should not be extrapolated into tenured professors being worse teachers overall. I'm pretty certain that for advanced studies, the opposite is true, if nothing else because the untenured teachers don't have the same chance to specialize.
Not clear what "advanced studies" means.
From my perspective, with graduate degrees in EE and CS, and considerable experience as a teaching assistant, I'd expect good students with an interest in teaching and a Master's degree should be able to teach most Master's level courses in these fields (typically 500-700 level) and, of course, anything lower level. In such cases, they can easily do a better job than most PhD's, who have the specialization but little interest in teaching. I certainly learned more from some of my teaching assistants and my peers than from many of the professors, and I tried to do the same for my students.
In industry, these same people (with a few years of experience under their belts) are the ones who end up teaching the "new guys (or gals)", and if the motivation and interest is there they'll do a good job (this is common), so there's a clear precedent that people without PhDs in these fields are capable of being good teachers.
In all likelihood, the first semester will be a bit rough, but things will get better fast. I certainly made my share of mistakes as a teaching assistant, but I was able to quickly learn from those mistakes.
Remarkably few PhDs in engineering and physical science fields spend any time at all reading about psychology, education, sociology, leadership, and so forth, and very few have formal training in teaching or even public speaking, which means they are essentially approaching the task from a position of ignorance. There seems to be a common assumption that they're too smart to have to do that kind of prep work, or that the approach their (often equally ignorant) teachers took is good enough.
It's hard to learn from one's mistakes if one doesn't even realize one's mistaking mistakes, and while book learning doesn't make one good at any art, it DOES provide an intellectual foundation to help with recognizing one's mistakes. The vast majority of "professional" engineering instructors with Phds make huge numbers of mistakes, often very basic ones, in their approach to teaching, so the absence of this is a big problem (they make just as many basic mistakes in running their research groups, so it's not just the teaching part of their jobs that suffers).
I'd consider "advanced studies" to be research courses (800-900 level). Here, most of the students will be PhD students or post-Docs, and considerable experience with the research area is needed. Even here, a PhD student working in that research area might be a far better teacher than their mentor.
In my opinion, as a society we should be re-thinking the whole PhD concept. There is value in research, but there is also a huge price to be paid by students and ultimately the whole of society by having the academic system place too much emphasis on it. I'd like to see two types of PhD: one with an emphasis on multi-disciplinary learning and teaching, the other with the current emphasis on research. People with the former degree could provide most of the instructors at the university level, while people with the latter degree would primarily be involved in research.
Well to bring it back to the question I asked in the article: Why do we have a right to remain silent for defendants, but not for witnesses?
The simple answer is tradition. There are many aspects of the US legal system that don't necessarily make sense (and, in some cases, are even contradictory), but which the legal profession chooses to accept as valid.
We learn from social sciences such as sociology and anthropology that study human behaviour that dysfunctional, irrational, and inconsistent behaviour patterns are actually quite common amongst many (possibly most or even all) social or cultural groups. As members of the legal profession certainly form a social or cultural group, realizing that this group also exhibits dysfunctional, irrational, and inconsistent behaviour patterns should come as no surprise (the ethics issues involved in the practice of law tend to aggravate this: contradictions and inconsistencies in the legal system inevitably increase the demand for the services of legal professionals).
For a more complex answer:
The right to remain silent for defendants is probably there solely to remove any pretext for torture. This doesn't stop all forms of abuse committed by police against prisoners they've decided are guilty (often with little knowledge of the facts), but it at least discourages an official, organized, systematic policy of using torture or abuse.
Obviously the situation with respect to witnesses is problematic. In serious cases, the accused will probably have a bigger stake than any witness, which provides a partial justification for extending greater protection. A good legal system (as opposed to the one we have) would make this explicit, and would extend similar protection to witnesses in cases where they too had a high stake in the outcome.
We don't have to go all the way to the 5th Amendment to see problems with the current system. There is a clear contradiction between the 1st Amendment provision stating that Congress shall make "no law" infringing freedom of speech and then having Congress turn around and pass laws giving the authority to federal courts to coerce testimony. Similarly, there is a direct contradiction in that Congress has also given itself the authority to coerce testimony from people coerced to appear before Congress.
In my opinion, the existing policies represent a clear violation of the oaths all the legal professionals involved have made to uphold the Bill of Rights, and unethical practice of law. The only possible resolution consistent with those oaths, and with ethical practice of law, is to have another Amendment that serves to modify the 1st Amendment to authorize freedom of speech to be infringed under certain circumstances, clearly spelling out those circumstances and the extent of the infringement allowed, worded in a way that can be clearly understood by ordinary people, and clearly prohibiting contradictory policies, practices, precedents, or laws (unlike, for example, the existing situation with respect to so many of the Amendments).
That, of course, begs the question of when it is appropriate to infringe freedom of speech with respect to defendants or witnesses.
I propose the following rules as a starting point:
1. No defendant in any case, whether criminal or civil, can be forced to testify.
2. An employee of the government, or an agent acting on behalf of the government, can be required to testify with respect to only those actions conducted as part of that relationship (the goal here is to allow public oversight with respect to their "official" duties while still providing reasonable protection of their private lives).
3. A person that chooses to testify, whether as a defendant or as a witness, can be expected to answer honestly (but not necessarily to volunteer information, also note the use of the word "honestly" instead of "truthfully": it's dangerous to allow any government to be in the business of deciding what "the truth" is), and may be cross-e
I have never seen a program for which a wiki-based approach to documentation added any value. Can you give an example, please?
This has been studied extensively. Every study I have read on this shows that judges tend to toss out the frivolous lawsuit and that the majority of cases that got to trial actual have some merit.
Any how many of these studies are either a) done by legal professionals, or b) done by people who receive research funding from legal professionals? Even if a claim is made that the funding for a given study does not come from, say, a Bar Association, would we have any reason to believe that claim to be true?
No rational person can study the US legal system without coming to the conclusion that the system is heavily biased to the benefit of the legal profession (not every person who conducts such a study, of course, will admit this, for obvious reasons).
We have a) enormously complex laws (just look at the length of the Patriot Act or the Obama Health Care act), we have b) laws that penalize people by absurd amounts for minor offences (look at some of the penalties for copyright infringement), we have c) no oversight of the legal system or of legal ethics by non-lawyers (most members of Congress are lawyers, so they clearly don't count), and we have d) contradictory laws (consider how many laws violate the "no law" provision of the 1st Amendment, or the "may not be infringed" provision of the 2nd Amendment, or the many rights that can reasonably be asserted under the 9th Amendment).
All of this creates a complex, confusing, even contradictory legal system, and a quite scary one (just look at the number of fences that have gone up around property that is not being used, a huge infringement of the right to travel, simply because the people responsible for those properties are scared of being sued -- in some cases, insurance companies are even requiring this), which in turn creates a huge artificial demand for the services of the legal profession.
The conclusion follows that the legal professionals making up Congress and most state legislatures have created a legal system to the benefit of their profession. This is not a question of conspiracy, it's a matter of people without a strong sense of integrity recognizing shared advantage, in a system with no meaningful check or balance on them to keep things in hand. In ethics terms, the core problem here as a name: "conflict of interest".
So long as the legal profession has control over determining the nature, scope, and form of the legal system, problems of this kind are inevitable. The issues with tort law, bad though they are in themselves, are just one symptom of the underlying ethics problems.
Claims that the USA is the land of the free and the home of the brave are no longer tenable in the face of the disastrous mess the US legal system has become over the past 6 decades. Now it is more apt to describe the USA as the land of excessive law, excessive bureaucracy, abusive government, and of people who are scared of their own legal system. All too often it seems as though the concept of government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" has been replaced by the concept of government "of the lawyer, by the lawyer, and for the lawyer".
Fixing this is going to be enormously difficult. Even a quick study of high court decisions shows the high courts are unwilling to seriously address ethics issues regarding the legal profession. This should not be entirely surprising, given the nature of the selection process for these offices, but this means that neither the legislative nor judicial branches can be relied on for sponsoring reform. The only hope for reform short of revolution seems to be another Civil Rights movement on the same massive scale as the last one.
Suppose I'm a bookstore owner and I get a court order to tell the police about any future purchases of one of my customers.
You can't simultaneously have a Bill of Rights where Congress can pass NO LAW infringing freedom of speech and federal court orders requiring one to speak to federal agents, judges, or congressional investigators.
Forcing someone to speak is an infringement of freedom of speech.
Why then, do we have such a system, where there are massive contradictions in fundamental areas of law?
The answer is simple. It's not in the interests of the legal profession to law a legal system that people can understand. Having a complex, confusing, even contradictory legal system creates long term business for their profession.
Similarly, for those who wish to abuse power, or who wish to bribe the government to act in their favour, a complex and contradictory legal system provides pretexts that serve as an umbrella under which they can hide their actions. They simply choose to justify their actions in terms of the laws and precedents that favour their point of view, and ignore the ones that don't. As long as they can spend more money on legal fees than their opponents, they are likely get away with this. Secret courts just make the problem worse.
In ethics terms, this problem has a name: "Conflict of Interests." If there is a single root cause to the current disaster that masquerades as a legal system in the USA, this ethics issue is that root cause.
If there are circumstances under which it is appropriate for the government to coerce people to talk, then the only ethical way to implement this is to create another amendment that changes the wording of the 1st. Of course, this isn't likely to happen, because our legal profession has discovered that they don't have to be ethical to be successful.
What we need to be doing is asserting a right to ethical practice of law and to ethical government, as a right "retained by the people" under the 9th Amendment, and "reserved to the people" under the 10th, and going after the government and the legal profession for violations of their oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights in these kinds of situations. This is the only way I can see to try to fix the mess we're in that makes an effort to work within the system, as opposed to another revolution.
How many of the top schools are in Sweden? How many of the top research institutions?
Don't make the common mistake of confusing teaching with research. Very few people are good at both teaching and research. The vast majority of researchers are terrible teachers. Also, for the most part, being at a top research institution only matters to PhD students, who are a tiny part of the total student body. There is, admittedly, status associated with being a top research institution, but don't confuse the illusion of quality with the reality.
Further, there is no reason why getting a PhD should be something associated with schools: we could just as easily have separate institutions dedicated to research and these could train people interested in research careers "on the job". Such separate institutions would probably provide better training, and might easily spend their funds far more efficiently, both advantages from the perspective of society. For that matter, public oversight over both types of institution would be easier if we didn't have the mingling of budgets and functions.
The Publish-or-Perish system at Universities is a huge disaster for society. Forcing people that really don't care about teaching, and who aren't being rewarded for being good at teaching, to be teachers, and then forcing huge numbers of students to take their classes, wastes enormous amounts of people's time (both instructors and students). It's like kidnapping on a massive scale. This seems to be a problem in both Europe and the USA. It's a legacy of the shared history of the university system, an aspect of the past we haven't been wise enough (yet) to break free from.
In the case of the USA, it's bad enough we have these terrible student loan systems, but then we compound the problem by giving (in most cases) an extremely poor return for a student's time.
Don't forget the opportunity costs of these programs.
First, there's the lost ability to use real-estate. Stadiums and other athletic facilities take up huge amounts of land that could otherwise be used for parking, student housing, labs, or classrooms. Ever wonder why the student to teacher ratio is so awful in so many settings? In a lot of places, a big factor is because there isn't enough space for classrooms: even if they could pay for more teachers they couldn't use them.
Similarly, many campuses do not have adequate parking and are located in areas where the opportunity to build new buildings is limited. Given the choice between a stadium right next to campus, and a parking garage, guess which one the school is likely to choose? Of course, you could have a stadium located at a separate site distant from campus, but that doesn't usually go over well with alumni, who donate lots of money to schools with athletic programs.
You might suppose that having a stadium implies good parking, but it doesn't necessarily work that way. In practice what can happen is on game days the fans park all over town and walk to the stadium, with people and businesses in the area turning their driveways, parking lots, and garages into temporary, very high priced, private pay parking lots. None of which helps the (generally poor) students who need to get to class on a regular basis.
Second, these programs can consume large amounts of time, both for the athletes, the students, the instructors, and for the local residents. On game days in some college towns, you might as well stay home, because trying to drive anywhere is a nightmare, with visitors massively overloading the local road network. Better hope you don't need emergency medical care or the fire department, either, good luck getting that to show up in a timely manner. At some campuses, instructors will cancel classes, office hours, and labs on game days because they don't want to drive home through the traffic. Athletes in many of these programs will spend hardly any time on their classes. This lost time, of course, is lost educational time.
None of this is to say that athletic programs are bad, but the costs of supporting these programs are often far higher and far more varied than folks realize.
Thank the move away from requiring mens rea and toward strict liability in recent laws for this. Because, you know, it's easier to prosecute if the perp had no knowledge of, or intention of, committing a crime.
If ignorance of a particular law is not a defence when a person is reasonably ignorant of that law, this creates an artificial demand for the services of legal professionals. Legal professionals are in a position of ethical conflict of interest with respect to both writing such laws, and also with respect to enforcing such laws or using such laws on behalf of a client.
The right to be subject to ethical practice of law is certainly a fundamental right arising under the 9th Amendment (rights retained by the people) and the 10th Amendment (rights reserved to the people). Even the appearance of conflict of interest must be avoided when possible. It does not require any act of government to create this right, or any other right "retained by the people": the Bill of Rights is all the authority needed.
For legal professionals to be enforcing a law that does not recognize reasonable ignorance goes far beyond just the appearance of conflict of interest: it is full fledged, in-your-face, extreme conflict of interest.
Hence, any law that does not recognize a reasonable degree of ignorance as creating a valid defence is an unconstitutional and hence illegal law. Enforcement of such laws by legal professionals is unethical practice of law, and a violation of their oaths to uphold the Bill of Rights.
By definition, rights retained by the people are, well, retained by the people. Retained by the people does not mean the same thing as steal-able by the government. Hence, no entity of government can take away the right to ethical practice of law, and thus no entity of government -- not the President, not the Congress, not the Supreme Court, and not State or Local government -- can authorize any law,r create any precedent, or execute any order that has the effect of limiting or infringing such rights. Any attempt to do so by a person who is sworn by oath to uphold the Constitution or to uphold The Law is a violation of that oath, immediately and permanently disqualifying that person from holding any position requiring such an oath.
With respect to rights "retained by the people", the determination of what is "reasonable" is ultimately up to the people. We do not have a government of the lawyer, by the lawyer, and for the lawyer, and hence the legal profession has no authority to create or to use laws in any manner that works to the benefit of the profession at the expense of society.
You could appeal a conviction all the way to the Supreme Court if you have millions for legal fees and are willing to gamble 20 years of your life on the outcome, or you could just plead guilty to the other charge with the 10 year sentence, and hope to get out in five.
Isn't it interesting how the legal system has "evolved" to the point where this is required? Is the time, cost, and risk required to get a case before the Supreme Court all that different from the time, cost, and risk required to bring something before the King of England in colonial times?
Think about having to make a long journey across the sea on an unreliable ship, facing storms and pirates and bad weather, then having to bribe one level of royal advisor after another in order to get something (like correcting an injustice) to the level where a decision could actually be made.
Is it really all that different today? The details of getting a case before the Supreme Court have changed, but the cost, and length, and uncertainty of the process is still substantial (and way beyond anything consistent with the "land of the free" and the "home of the brave").
More to the point, the copyright laws need to be simple and straightforward, and not interfere with reasonable conduct.
All to often laws are unclear, contradictory, or excessively complex, leading to the presumption that the law was written in that fashion by legal professionals to create long term business for their profession. Similarly, the laws are often written in such a manner as to require one to file a law suit, or engage in complicated and time consuming procedures, or write a legal contract in order to benefit from the law, all of which creates business for the legal profession.
As with any business, people in the law business recognize that if one can create an artificial demand for their product, then, the supply being relatively inelastic, that automatically increases the money they make (a point that is all to often ignored when people consider the laws and the legal system).
The right to ethical practice of law, and to ethical government, must ultimately supersede the right of content creators to make a living. Only if the copyright laws can be written in such a manner as to coexist with ethical practice of law (and I believe this is possible, but certainly not what we have at present) can they be allowed to exist.
Further, giving content creators a reasonable chance to prosper from their creativity is a very different thing from attempting to maximize their profits. Laws that attempt to do the first thing are much more likely to meet reasonable standards of what governments can legitimately do than laws that attempt the second. We have far too many examples of abuse of fundamental rights by the government and the legal system abuse as things stand today, without adding to the problem.
There is also a need to insure that content creators have some protection from abuse by those with greater bargaining power. All to often the basic assumption of contract law, namely that bargains are created between two relatively equal parties, each free to walk away from the contract, is not in fact how things work.
How did the Zero compare to the Hurricane and Spitfire? I had the impression that the design philosophies of the three fighters (and the ME-109) were pretty similar, especially in comparison with most (all?) of the US planes.
Rather than stop using Windows, why not take it over using Eminent Domain and make the source code and derivative works public property? Then we can fix the security bugs, while still having an operating system capable of running most of the world's software?
This means that streaming a movie from an unauthorised source will be considered a more serious offense than vandalism, trespassing, simple assault and prostitution.
Well in the last case, good, since it shouldn't be a crime. For the rest, yeah it's fucked up.
Don't be to quick to assume the laws regarding trespassing are good. This is another one of those things that is more complicated than it might appear at first.
In many cases, "trespassing" is just another way of violating the right to travel, a right which, once upon a time, was recognized by federal courts as a fundamental right, one of those rights arising under the 9th Amendment and subject to "strict scrutiny".
Ever since the USA became the Land of the Lawsuit, people have become terrified of being sued (or having any interaction at all with the legal system), and are blocking access to land that is not being used for any legitimate commercial, agricultural, or industrial purpose, and does not contain a home. This in turn can block access to public lands and waterways, and to other sites of interest to the public.
While some access is merely for leisure purposes (such as hiking, photography, and boating) -- which are certainly things one should be extremely free to do in a free country -- in other cases blocking this access can have more serious consequences. It can, for example, interfere with yet another fundamental right, namely the right to long term public oversight over government and business. Independent scientists, for example, might have reason to want to measure chemical, biological, or radiological contamination on a piece of property, and this can be prevented by means of laws regarding trespassing, with serious consequences for long term oversight. Thus we have yet another set if negative consequences flowing of the inability of the US legal profession to understand ethics and the inability of the government to obey the Bill of Rights.
In general, the government has no authority to authorize private entities or third party agencies to violate fundamental rights that the government itself can not violate. Thus, as a consequence of the "strict scrutiny" aspect of the right to travel, the government has no authority to create trespassing laws except when those laws protect other fundamental rights, as those laws effectively delegate the authority to violate fundamental rights to third party agents. Taken to an extreme, if the government had such authority, it would allow the government to violate any right at all simply by turning all "public" land into "private" land managed by third parties with appropriate arrangements to have the third parties violate the rights as desired. Similarly, private entities could try to hide massive violations of fundamental rights, such as toxic waste disposal destroying the environment, under the guise of "private property".
Hence, a small amount of property that is primarily a home can reasonably be protected by trespassing laws as a reflection of the 9th Amendment right to privacy in the home, but large properties and properties that are not primarily a home can not be so protected (nor may they be posted or fenced off except to the extent that doing so in reasonably viewed as the minimum necessary for a business or government operation to function, i.e. strict scrutiny for both).
It's not in the ethical interest of the legal profession to remove contradictions from the legal system, or to recognize any rights arising under the 9th Amendment if they can possibly avoid it, so good luck actually getting a court to recognize this. In practice, it appears that "Strict scrutiny" only applies to rights when the legal profession finds it convenient.
Any entity which is not the company has no right to copy those parts.
Be careful when you find yourself temped to put the words "no right" into a sentence in any discussion of how the law does work (or should work).
In order to deal with the objections made by the Anti-Federalists to the Constitution, James Madison created an open-ended Bill of Rights, providing for unspecified rights not explicitly stated but nevertheless "retained by the people" (9th Amendment) and "reserved to the people" (10th Amendment). With respect to the US legal system, it is always incorrect to make statements to the effect that "y is not in the Bill of Rights (or the Constitution, or state law, or city law, or whatever) therefore there is no right to do y", where "y" refers to some issue or potential right under discussion.
All legal professionals, all government executives and law enforcement officers are required by their oaths to recognize the existence of such rights, as a precondition for holding such positions. Obviously there are many situations where it will be inconvenient for persons in these positions to remember this.
For that matter, a strong case can be made that it is inconvenient for the entire legal profession, as a class in society, to remember this, which may account for the fact that there are relatively few court cases in which these rights are explicitly discussed (with a few notable exceptions such as Roe vs. Wade). Of course, the fact that issues such as ethical conflict of interest might make it inconvenient for legal professionals and others to remember these rights exist in no way removes them from existence.
To complicate matters further, US Copyright law provides for something known as "fair use" rights which authorizes copies to be made without infringement. A list of example criteria regarding situation in which "fair use" may apply is part of the written law code, but the list is not, of course, limiting or all inclusive as a result of the word "such as" in the statement of the this.
Thus, it is simply not possible to say that there is "no right to copy" without careful considering of whether or not such a right might reasonably be asserted as "fair use".
In one case I dimly recall reading many years ago, a judge decided that an appropriate penalty for attempting to remove by contract "fair use" rights was complete loss of the copyright. I don't have a legal database on hand to try to find the particular case reference for you. But, it certainly can reasonably be supposed that "fair use" rights will supersede a written contract (including employment contracts) in at least some situations.
Indeed, it would not be hard to go further and assert that "fair use" rights exist as an expression of one or more underlying rights "retained by the people" and thus are an example of rights are protected by the 9th and 10th Amendments, which would cause the use of this right in typical circumstances to supersede laws (whether passed by Congress or the State Governments), executive orders, court orders, and even the "usual practices of law".
For example, a right to long term public oversight over businesses and government might reasonably be asserted as arising under the 9th Amendment.
It would certainly be a reasonable consequence of such as right to make copies of any materials that might be needed for such long term oversight and which otherwise might be lost or "accidentally misplaced". Such a right, as a fundamental right, would naturally supersede the authority of government to create laws such as "industrial espionage", "trade secret", or "intellectual property" laws which might otherwise prevent certain actions (another point that doubtless many parties associated with the legal system would find inconvenient to acknowledge).
The assertion of such a right would not, of course, be in the interest of a certain class of business executives (namely the unethical ones), so I suppose in any case where such a right was aire
This won't last long, NCAA will just amend their terms so that all athletes must give up likeness rights to compete.
While we're at it, let's make sure to limit contract law so that fundamental rights can't be given up in a contract where multiple items are bundled together. Hence, organizations that deal with athletes and other celebrities must have a separate contract with those individuals, written exclusively with respect to the rights such as the right to privacy or the right to publicity, and so forth, if they wish to take advantage of anything more than an individual's basic skills.
Obviously the legal profession has a vested interest in keeping the scope of contract law as broad as possible. That in itself is a good reason to limit it: anything that discourages the legal profession from unnecessarily expanding the scope of legal practice makes for better legal ethics and a better legal system.
It seems tragic that the only way to expose the overstepping of the government on human rights is to have lone leakers throw themselves under the bus and expose information, often haphazardly, to the world. There should be a system in place where government employees can appeal anything they consider unconstitutional to a special court for review. It is up to the judicial branch to uphold the constitution and seems utterly ridiculous that these secret overreaches by the executive branch are not eligible to the same checks and balances put in place for public laws.
The problem is the judicial branch has been aiding and abetting government overreach. This has been the case throughout US history, since the founding. From time to time, it has also worked to limit it. That contradiction, in a nutshell, is the essence of Constitutional Law.
The worse abuses of the slave system were tolerated by the judicial branch. It took a civil war to end that. The military was segregated by law, and the legal profession accepted that. It took WWII, and a rare president with integrity, to end that. During WWII, Japanese-Americans were put into concentration camps without evidence, trial, or due process, and the legal profession accepted that. It took more than 50 years to (partially) correct that. The civilian "separate-but-not-actually-equal" segregation system in the South was tolerated by the judicial branch. It took a major civil rights movement to end that.
Today, we have many laws that violate even the explicit text of the 1st and 2nd Amendments, to say nothing of the (many) laws that violate rights arising under the open-ended Amendments (9th and 10th, rights retained by the people, rights reserved to the people).
We have judges permitting cases to go forward under a broken patent and copyright system. We have judges permitting cases to go forward that abuse fundamental rights in the name of tort law (hence "Land of the Lawsuit"). We have all kinds of aspects of the legal system that can reasonably be supposed to involve ethical conflict of interest on the part of the legal profession (such as the many abuses in the area of Contract Law), and those legal professionals holding judgeships have allowed that to happen.
In short, both history and current events suggest there isn't much reason to hope for integrity from the judicial branch, or the legal profession.
This, of course, is why the Anti-Federalists did not trust the Constitution. It is the nature of power to corrupt. The government that governs best, governs least.
I want to see publicly nominated and vetted judges sitting on a board to review classified procedures and actions for their constitutionality. The proceedings can be secret, but the number of cases overturned and left standing should be made public. It may be a pipe dream, but I think this would go a long way to restoring the people's trust in their government by restoring the accountability that was supposed to be there in the first place.
The public nomination part is a nice idea. There are some complications, though. At present, when a federal judge (or group of judges) rules in favour of an issue where a violation of fundamental rights is involved, we have to ask ourselves whether the ruling resulted from simple incompetence, stupidity, ethical conflict of interest, a lack of integrity, or possibly more than one of these. One presumes judges can be influenced to make particular rulings by secret promises for support to higher office. Thus, even public nomination has limited value in getting competent judges with integrity.
The idea of having secret proceedings is a tricky issue. Certainly in some situations privacy rights will be an issue. However, look up the history of the "Star Chamber" to learn about the history of issues with secrecy in legal proceedings.