Well, the business community should care, as IPR is part of what makes western cost levels prohibitively high. From a macroeconomic perspective monopoly rights are equatable with taxation (having exactly the same effect as, for example, VAT) and should really be counted as part of the total tax level in an economy.
That, of course, means that any 'gained jobs' that the monopoly rights proponents claim to get are taken from someone else. And that any jobs lost in those industries are gained elsewhere as consumer discretionary income is directed to other services. Which means that other unions should certainly consider any support, as it's their members that lose their jobs as more money is directed to Hollywood.
Don't underestimate the bandwidth of physical media in the real world. It's entirely possible to create a transmission form that would send routing information over the network and then simply switch disks (possibly in a suggested optimal pattern for maximum amount of transmitted material) with friends and family to achieve the underlying movement of files. Just like the old times of vhs and tape copying but augumented with the ability to 'request' and use multiple sources.
I don't particularly trust Greenpeace, but Monsanto are so far on the other side that you can trust them to be evil. They will knowingly and willingly dump toxic waste, they'll bribe and coerce as far as they can, to the point that one can question if making money is actually less important to them than simply being vile.
So if Monsanto wants something you can trust it to be harmful in some way.
Teaching people to grow and eat varied crops is of course another way to deal with specific vitamin deficiencies, while keeping up biodiversity and avoiding the dangers of relying on one specific crop.
But then again, that wouldn't leave people helpless in the hands of Monsanto, the posterboy for despicable corporate behaviour.
Considering that the 'conflict' in question causes fatalities on par with freak bathtub accidents (which kill about 300 people per year) it seems that the TSA and DHS aren't exactly appropriate responses.
Or maybe we're lacking a bathtub inspection agency. Hey, with that we could solve whole problem with employment of voyeurs without actually having to fork out money for scanners, they could just hang around bathrooms making sure no accidents happen...
So, what's your plan in the much more likely event that the LEO sticks your child in the same cell as that psycho because they consider him a terrorist after reading his tweets, blogs and IM's?
See, if it's just the insane guy you have a chance. If it's the government, you're going to join the suspect list for complaining. Heck, we've already heard here that you're of the opinion that doing whatever it takes to get him back is ok, so maybe you're planning violence.
It was about 150 cases in Sweden registered this far compared to estimates of about less than a dozen lives saved (to be fair, some estimates claim 40-60 lives saved over two years; it depends on the mortality rates in the non-vaccinating countries you compare with).
We can argue the definition of 'many' as in many saved or many hurt in this case, the incidence of either is small compared to the numbers vaccinated. Which is really the whole problem; when the mortality rates are as low as with the swine flu, even a low incidence of nasty side effects will tip the balance from vaccination being a great idea to doing more harm than good. Weigh in the economic cost of the program and the possible lives that could have been saved with other use of the resources and you end up deep in the red.
Either way the point I'm making is that while vaccinations are often a good idea it's not as clear cut as to say they're always the right choice. Further, without the ability to make epidemiological studies on control groups it's not easy to catch rare effects like this (which in this case really stood out as the incidence was ten times the normal and there were huge immediate control groups available). Dismissing concerns out of hand increases both the risk that more untested vaccines will be deployed with insufficient care and the risk that rare effects that are visible only on aggregated data will be missed.
I can say that I've personally foregone about $3500 of Sony purchases over the last five years where their products were the best option in the price range I was looking at (projector, console, etc), entirely due to Sony's vile behaviour, and I've probably influenced several others to avoid them in some instances.
It may not be a large dent. But then again, Sony has not exactly been performing that well, which may very well be partly attributable to their piss poor reputation.
Here's one link http://www.thl.fi/en_US/web/en/pressrelease?id=26352 or just search for pandemrix and narcolepsy. Sweden and Finland who performed mass vaccinations have seen more than a hundred cases of narcolepsy strongly linked to the vaccinations. This can be compared to estimates of number of lives saved due to the mass vaccinations being less than a dozen.
The mechanism by which narcolepsy happens from the vaccine is as yet not fully determined, but apparently this form looks like it might be immune mediated and tightly linked to a genetic risk factor.
I used to agree with that, but the recent example with swine flu vaccinations and the strong indications that they're causing many narcolepsy cases suggest that the medical profession can't be trusted to make the best choice either.
By the time the vaccines were getting widely deployed in response to the 'pandemic' it was quite obvious that the flu in question was less deadly than even an ordinary seasonal flu, yet some countries went ahead with mass vaccinations anyway. With the result that many kids most likely got their lives ruined while potentially saving a fraction as many lives (comparisons between mass-vaccination countries vs target group vaccination countries show miniscule differences in mortality rates).
Due to the corruptive nature of copyright I regard it as unethical to give any money to the industry. While I support independent productions, I regard anything that starves the corrupting agencies of funding as a positive thing; intellectual monopoly laws have to go, the rent seeking that damages freedom of speech and free markets follows naturally by the nature of the laws.
Of course there are other ways to ensure extra funding for creative endeavours that don't have the built-in flaws of the monopoly systems.
But until then, depriving the industry of money is one of the better ways to reduce their ability to buy legislation.
No. The easiest way to demonstrate why is to examine what happens to the copies when copyright expires. There is no transfer of property at that point. The copies are and have always been the property of their respective possessor.
The monopoly right is more like a taxation right on the act of copying.
Calling it 'property' and trying to think about it as 'property' inevitably muddies your thinking. Which was the whole point of trying to call it 'property' in the first place.
Culture has always been created for free and most culture today is created with little reasonable expectation of profit. If the only thing you have to express is 'I want money', chances are the loss of that piece of culture isn't exactly that much of a loss. Culture will survive and thrive as long as there are people with something to say and with infinite replication and mingling there is and will always be a vast oversupply of such expressions.
If you have a boss paying your pay check he's paying to tell you what to code. If he doesn't want to pay for it he doesn't get to direct your activities. Get another job and if you enjoy coding, code on your own time and release it or not.
The Fed's balance sheet and the price of gold suggest otherwise...
Asset inflation is mainly driven by monetary expansion, but asset prices are usually not included in 'official' inflation measure which are almost entirely based on numbers tightly coupled to wages. As production outstrips demand we're not going to see significant inflation in wages as there is a huge oversupply of labour as we leave the age of scarcity behind.
Separating official 'inflation' figures from real inflation has many political advantages, especially for the friends of power, so we can expect it to continue or even get more separated from reality than the current hedonics pretense (there have been serious suggestions to modify the calculations with ideas like 'if food gets more expensive people eat less food so there's been no inflation as the amount they pay for food is the same').
According to TFA they were not necessarily requiring the defendant to provide the passphrase but would allow merely entering it unmonitored, thus providing the contents it protected. They're trying really hard to bypass the fifth.
Not at all. One way to accomplish, if one truly believes creative arts cannot survive on their own merit, it would be to have a 'creators VAT' on creative materials. Then you can merely account for the number of sold copies of a specific work and reimburse the creator appropriately. As there would no longer be a competitive block preventing anyone from creating copies and selling them prices would fall towards the marginal cost of creating copies, thus making pirate copies less appealing, while it would be possible to assure that the creator got a substantial part of the sales price.
It's not that hard to find examples of terrorism in the Soviet Union and considering the likelyhood of media blackouts and a western lack of interest (or support in the case of 'freedom fighters') leading to fewer widely publicised reports I see little reason to think Soviet methods were exceptionally good at preventing it. And they certainly got their fair share in places like Afghanistan.
Fear of disproportionate responses is only useful if the enemy has something they value more than their desire to retaliate against the object of their hatred. And as any disproportionate response is likely to create more enemies who have nothing they value more than that the disproportionate response ends up being counter productive.
Ah, but if you're afraid you'll have to write off part of a loan, you just buy a CDS. From, for example, AIG. And then, as the US banks like to say for the moment, you have zero net exposure to europe (well, assuming that the CDS counterparty wont implode, but then again if it does it'll get bailed out by the US tax payer).
Intellectual property doesn't make an economy more competitive. In itself its effects are roughly equivalent to a very high sales tax on specific goods with the only difference being it's privately collected. However, economic waste grows from protected revenue streams so it's easily on par with the worst tax funded agencies in inefficiency.
It's not a coincidence that 'manufacturing powerhouses' and growing economies have much laxer IP laws. If the west wanted to get competitive on the global arena again, the best thing it could do would be to abolish IP rights.
Increasing the number of parties involved is the point; they have to agree to clear a site.
As it is, even besides getting hacked, there isn't a registrar that won't hand over false keys to any security agency in a country they're based. But it might be a bit more difficult for one party to lean on notaries in the US, Russia, China and Switzerland at the same time. Once they don't agree, you know that there's something going on.
Artists are a dime a dozen. The publishing industry knew that even when they lobbied for copyright from the start; simply taking somebody elses work and getting exclusive rights to it because you published it was a bit strong to pass politically so they used artists and creators as an excuse.
From the perspective of economics and power it didn't matter anyway if the creators got a pittance, they'd never get more as there is and has always been a vast overproduction of creative materials. The scarcity is in channel space and consumer attention, not in getting material to shove in there.
Had copyright ever been for the sake of creators then reproduction and distribution would have been unhindered but with the creator automatically entitled to a share of every sale. As it is now, they're the weak party to the bargain and as long as copyright works the way it does, they're screwed, and if they don't want to get screwed anymore, they'll be replaced with someone else.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the business community should care, as IPR is part of what makes western cost levels prohibitively high. From a macroeconomic perspective monopoly rights are equatable with taxation (having exactly the same effect as, for example, VAT) and should really be counted as part of the total tax level in an economy.
That, of course, means that any 'gained jobs' that the monopoly rights proponents claim to get are taken from someone else. And that any jobs lost in those industries are gained elsewhere as consumer discretionary income is directed to other services. Which means that other unions should certainly consider any support, as it's their members that lose their jobs as more money is directed to Hollywood.
Don't underestimate the bandwidth of physical media in the real world. It's entirely possible to create a transmission form that would send routing information over the network and then simply switch disks (possibly in a suggested optimal pattern for maximum amount of transmitted material) with friends and family to achieve the underlying movement of files. Just like the old times of vhs and tape copying but augumented with the ability to 'request' and use multiple sources.
I don't particularly trust Greenpeace, but Monsanto are so far on the other side that you can trust them to be evil. They will knowingly and willingly dump toxic waste, they'll bribe and coerce as far as they can, to the point that one can question if making money is actually less important to them than simply being vile.
So if Monsanto wants something you can trust it to be harmful in some way.
Teaching people to grow and eat varied crops is of course another way to deal with specific vitamin deficiencies, while keeping up biodiversity and avoiding the dangers of relying on one specific crop.
But then again, that wouldn't leave people helpless in the hands of Monsanto, the posterboy for despicable corporate behaviour.
The Feds should be going after the MAFIAA execs for fraudulent accounting, withholding taxes, racketeering and corruption.
But it seems they've got a lot of dirty cops and bought judges on their payroll these days.
Considering that the 'conflict' in question causes fatalities on par with freak bathtub accidents (which kill about 300 people per year) it seems that the TSA and DHS aren't exactly appropriate responses.
Or maybe we're lacking a bathtub inspection agency. Hey, with that we could solve whole problem with employment of voyeurs without actually having to fork out money for scanners, they could just hang around bathrooms making sure no accidents happen...
So, what's your plan in the much more likely event that the LEO sticks your child in the same cell as that psycho because they consider him a terrorist after reading his tweets, blogs and IM's?
See, if it's just the insane guy you have a chance. If it's the government, you're going to join the suspect list for complaining. Heck, we've already heard here that you're of the opinion that doing whatever it takes to get him back is ok, so maybe you're planning violence.
If fighting terrorism involves violating people's rights I suspect we're going to breed a lot more terrorists.
It was about 150 cases in Sweden registered this far compared to estimates of about less than a dozen lives saved (to be fair, some estimates claim 40-60 lives saved over two years; it depends on the mortality rates in the non-vaccinating countries you compare with).
We can argue the definition of 'many' as in many saved or many hurt in this case, the incidence of either is small compared to the numbers vaccinated. Which is really the whole problem; when the mortality rates are as low as with the swine flu, even a low incidence of nasty side effects will tip the balance from vaccination being a great idea to doing more harm than good. Weigh in the economic cost of the program and the possible lives that could have been saved with other use of the resources and you end up deep in the red.
Either way the point I'm making is that while vaccinations are often a good idea it's not as clear cut as to say they're always the right choice. Further, without the ability to make epidemiological studies on control groups it's not easy to catch rare effects like this (which in this case really stood out as the incidence was ten times the normal and there were huge immediate control groups available). Dismissing concerns out of hand increases both the risk that more untested vaccines will be deployed with insufficient care and the risk that rare effects that are visible only on aggregated data will be missed.
I can say that I've personally foregone about $3500 of Sony purchases over the last five years where their products were the best option in the price range I was looking at (projector, console, etc), entirely due to Sony's vile behaviour, and I've probably influenced several others to avoid them in some instances.
It may not be a large dent. But then again, Sony has not exactly been performing that well, which may very well be partly attributable to their piss poor reputation.
Here's one link http://www.thl.fi/en_US/web/en/pressrelease?id=26352 or just search for pandemrix and narcolepsy. Sweden and Finland who performed mass vaccinations have seen more than a hundred cases of narcolepsy strongly linked to the vaccinations. This can be compared to estimates of number of lives saved due to the mass vaccinations being less than a dozen.
The mechanism by which narcolepsy happens from the vaccine is as yet not fully determined, but apparently this form looks like it might be immune mediated and tightly linked to a genetic risk factor.
I used to agree with that, but the recent example with swine flu vaccinations and the strong indications that they're causing many narcolepsy cases suggest that the medical profession can't be trusted to make the best choice either.
By the time the vaccines were getting widely deployed in response to the 'pandemic' it was quite obvious that the flu in question was less deadly than even an ordinary seasonal flu, yet some countries went ahead with mass vaccinations anyway. With the result that many kids most likely got their lives ruined while potentially saving a fraction as many lives (comparisons between mass-vaccination countries vs target group vaccination countries show miniscule differences in mortality rates).
Due to the corruptive nature of copyright I regard it as unethical to give any money to the industry. While I support independent productions, I regard anything that starves the corrupting agencies of funding as a positive thing; intellectual monopoly laws have to go, the rent seeking that damages freedom of speech and free markets follows naturally by the nature of the laws.
Of course there are other ways to ensure extra funding for creative endeavours that don't have the built-in flaws of the monopoly systems.
But until then, depriving the industry of money is one of the better ways to reduce their ability to buy legislation.
No. The easiest way to demonstrate why is to examine what happens to the copies when copyright expires. There is no transfer of property at that point. The copies are and have always been the property of their respective possessor.
The monopoly right is more like a taxation right on the act of copying.
Calling it 'property' and trying to think about it as 'property' inevitably muddies your thinking. Which was the whole point of trying to call it 'property' in the first place.
There's a greasemonkey script that blocks the 'like' plug-ins. It's a Good Thing.
Culture has always been created for free and most culture today is created with little reasonable expectation of profit. If the only thing you have to express is 'I want money', chances are the loss of that piece of culture isn't exactly that much of a loss. Culture will survive and thrive as long as there are people with something to say and with infinite replication and mingling there is and will always be a vast oversupply of such expressions.
If you have a boss paying your pay check he's paying to tell you what to code. If he doesn't want to pay for it he doesn't get to direct your activities. Get another job and if you enjoy coding, code on your own time and release it or not.
The Fed's balance sheet and the price of gold suggest otherwise...
Asset inflation is mainly driven by monetary expansion, but asset prices are usually not included in 'official' inflation measure which are almost entirely based on numbers tightly coupled to wages. As production outstrips demand we're not going to see significant inflation in wages as there is a huge oversupply of labour as we leave the age of scarcity behind.
Separating official 'inflation' figures from real inflation has many political advantages, especially for the friends of power, so we can expect it to continue or even get more separated from reality than the current hedonics pretense (there have been serious suggestions to modify the calculations with ideas like 'if food gets more expensive people eat less food so there's been no inflation as the amount they pay for food is the same').
According to TFA they were not necessarily requiring the defendant to provide the passphrase but would allow merely entering it unmonitored, thus providing the contents it protected. They're trying really hard to bypass the fifth.
Not at all. One way to accomplish, if one truly believes creative arts cannot survive on their own merit, it would be to have a 'creators VAT' on creative materials. Then you can merely account for the number of sold copies of a specific work and reimburse the creator appropriately. As there would no longer be a competitive block preventing anyone from creating copies and selling them prices would fall towards the marginal cost of creating copies, thus making pirate copies less appealing, while it would be possible to assure that the creator got a substantial part of the sales price.
It's not that hard to find examples of terrorism in the Soviet Union and considering the likelyhood of media blackouts and a western lack of interest (or support in the case of 'freedom fighters') leading to fewer widely publicised reports I see little reason to think Soviet methods were exceptionally good at preventing it. And they certainly got their fair share in places like Afghanistan.
Fear of disproportionate responses is only useful if the enemy has something they value more than their desire to retaliate against the object of their hatred. And as any disproportionate response is likely to create more enemies who have nothing they value more than that the disproportionate response ends up being counter productive.
Ah, but if you're afraid you'll have to write off part of a loan, you just buy a CDS. From, for example, AIG. And then, as the US banks like to say for the moment, you have zero net exposure to europe (well, assuming that the CDS counterparty wont implode, but then again if it does it'll get bailed out by the US tax payer).
Intellectual property doesn't make an economy more competitive. In itself its effects are roughly equivalent to a very high sales tax on specific goods with the only difference being it's privately collected. However, economic waste grows from protected revenue streams so it's easily on par with the worst tax funded agencies in inefficiency.
It's not a coincidence that 'manufacturing powerhouses' and growing economies have much laxer IP laws. If the west wanted to get competitive on the global arena again, the best thing it could do would be to abolish IP rights.
Increasing the number of parties involved is the point; they have to agree to clear a site.
As it is, even besides getting hacked, there isn't a registrar that won't hand over false keys to any security agency in a country they're based. But it might be a bit more difficult for one party to lean on notaries in the US, Russia, China and Switzerland at the same time. Once they don't agree, you know that there's something going on.
Enterprise Solution - Solvent used for dissolving piles of cash in corporate vaults.
Artists are a dime a dozen. The publishing industry knew that even when they lobbied for copyright from the start; simply taking somebody elses work and getting exclusive rights to it because you published it was a bit strong to pass politically so they used artists and creators as an excuse.
From the perspective of economics and power it didn't matter anyway if the creators got a pittance, they'd never get more as there is and has always been a vast overproduction of creative materials. The scarcity is in channel space and consumer attention, not in getting material to shove in there.
Had copyright ever been for the sake of creators then reproduction and distribution would have been unhindered but with the creator automatically entitled to a share of every sale. As it is now, they're the weak party to the bargain and as long as copyright works the way it does, they're screwed, and if they don't want to get screwed anymore, they'll be replaced with someone else.