What right do they have to have it protected? When any corporation with sufficient $$$ can purchase laws as they wish, maybe people should do their own thinking about what is right and wrong.
What they are doing is down-right vile, but disagreeing with corporate practices doesn't justify theft (obtaining something without proper payment).
This statement is meaningless on it's face. Firstly, violation of copyright is not theft, nor is it criminal, it's a civil matter. This has been stated at least a dozen times in every thread about P2P, but people still don't get it.
Secondly, what justifies compliance with their desires for copyright? Should people be required to comply with every outdated business model that some company desires, just because companies say they should? Should people follow unjust laws, simply by virtue that someone with sufficient money and influence has gotten them onto the books? History shows us that not all laws should be followed.
Very True. Although it would be hard to beat ashphalt shingles for the lease permanant roofing material ever, they already need to be replaced every 25 years or so.
If this cost # is true, then the cost of this solar panel is approximately the same as the cost of ashphalt shingles. And if *that* is true, there would be no reason to put any sort of roof on a house except for a roof made of this stuff...
if you can't see that it's wrong, legally and ethically
...
Ethics != The Law != Morality
Ethics, the Law, and morality are three different horses, and they are not all running in the same direction. Nor are the ethics or responsibilities of one party necessarily in line with the others.
A journalist or publication, ala Think Secret should be (and is) reporting on interesting information, regardless of whether someone else thinks it should be secret or not. Without this, the press would be a mouthpiece for corporate 'press releases' aka propaganda. The fact that the legal system has been manipulated into the supression of speech / information is wrong and immoral, and the law should be changed. Note that it is not immoral or unethical to disobey an immoral or unethical law.
If you can't see that this is true, then, well, we have nothing further to discuss.
I think that everybody is in agreement that the Xanadu ideas are great
I don't think that everyone is in agreement. For example, many people don't think the royalty stuff is such a great idea. Just like lots of people don't think DRM today is that great of an idea, and don't want to support or use it.
I agree with many of your comments in general regarding the scope & applicability of the geneva conventions, However...
I wouldn't agree that the Taliban were not the recognized government of Afghanistan. The government of the USA and many multinational corporations negotiated with them in such a capacity, they were obviously in control of the country, these are facts, no one disputes this. This recognized government argument is ridiculous. By the same logic, Taiwan does not exist. Second, the Geneva Conventions are in some ways absolutely absurd.... In a lot of ways the Geneva Conventions are a reflection of a 1920s notion of how gentlemen ought to act to each other in a state of peace; they do not speak very much to the modern state of the world or to the modern state of war.
I think that this comment shows that you totally miss the point. Now and then, what we want is for soldiers and officers, on both sides, to be acting like gentlemen, and to realize that participation in a war is not always an optional thing. The Taliban's or Iraq's soldiers weren't all 'terrorists', most of them were just collecting paychecks. If opponents in war know that when they are captured or surrender, we'll treat them like gentlemen and let them return to their lives and families as soon as possible, aren't they more likely to surrender? Compare that to the situation now, where as soon as US troops land, enemy combatants have realistic expectations of being disappeared and tortured. Fighting to the death doesn't seem like as bad of an option.
Also, while the president may or may not be violating the strict terms of the Geneva Conventions as originally written down, the issue is more complicated than that. Apart from being an actual statute, Geneva Conventions have served as a standard of conduct for civilized nations in war, and as civilization and society has evolved, so has the standard.
What seems outrageous is that instead of leading the world in acting fair and treating prisoners well, the US is trying to roll back the clock on this progress.
What you describe is called in the open source world forking. In the example you gave, Microsoft could definitely put out their own version of Java and bundle it. However, if Java were open source and licenced under the GPL, they would have to provide the source as well, so anyone could add their 'improvements' back to other forks. In a GPL world, this argument just doesn't hold water.
people seem to now expect the music industry to accept that people can defraud them of their due revenues by unlawful copying and distribution
I think one point that you, and many others, seem to be missing, is that many people no longer believe that record companies are due the revenues they recieve. Civil Society is a consensus reality; if people no longer believe that the record companies deserve money when they want to listen to music, they will not. And the people have spoken!
This argument reminds me a lot of Cory Doctrow's recent book (reviewed here on slashdot) 'Down and out in the magic kingdom'.
In the book, at first when they invented the life increasing technology (backups of your brain), lots of people were opposed to it and didn't take advantage of it. They tended not to outlive those that did take advantage of it. After a few years, everyone who had moral opposition to the technology was dead, and those who didn't have such moral quandries (and their kids) populated the earth.
I don't see how this situation is any different. Regardless of whether everyone genetically modifies thier children, or only some, the result is the same. In the future, everyone will be genetically modified.
Apparently people are willing to allow those with the guns to do it, and not realize its the first step to losing their own rights.
Apparently you don't realize that the only reason there is IP at all is that people with guns say so. Without the threat of Police / Jail / Force, why would anyone agree that someone else can OWN an IDEA, or a STORYBOOK, or a piece of DNA, and charge everyone else to use it. Intellectual property is the LAW, but that doesn't mean it's RIGHT, and it is not immoral to break an unjust law.
...the issue of pirating music on gnutella, napster and so on is primarily an ethical one. ...
With this I agree.
The fact that millions of ordinary Americans engage in this theft is no excuse - ethically and legally, it is wrong.
With this I do not.
There is a complete disconnect between ethicality (right / wrong )and legality (can I be punished).
action that is unethical is not necessarily illegal
action that is illegal is not necessarily unethical
It is clearly against the law to copy songs. This topic needs no further discussion.
The short term question is, is it unethical to break a law that you don't agree with? If so, and I think the answer on inspection will be yes, then everyone is not acting unethically. It is only unethical to be a hipocrite.
The long term question is should the government continue to create Intellectual Property through law? The only socially useful end result of all the legal wrangling over Napster, DSS, etc. is a new debate on this question.
I have yet to see a discussion where people can seperate these two issues in a lgoical way.
Depending upon the context and actual numbers involved, his assumptions are not necessarily wrong, and since no one is talking about real numbers here, it seems a little pretentious to describe him as completely incorrect!
I would agree that an average small ICE ( like one used in an automobile ) is probably not as efficient as a mechanical engine than a power plant, if you measure the output of both engines at the output shaft. I would, however, bet money ( and here I have no statistics of my own:) that a small ICE, running in it's efficient ' sweet spot ' is more efficient at moving an automobile down the road than a power plant generating mechanical energy, driving a generator to produce electricity, distributing that electricity through a 'leaky' grid, converting it into potential chemical energy in the batteries, allowing the chem. reaction to convert it back into electricity, and then converting that electricity back into motive force. Even if you estimated the distribution grid losses at only 50% ( conservative ! ), add in the multiple conversions and you can't be far from the efficiency of an ICE ( in the area of 40% overall I think ?)
As for your SUV comment, from a study I did three years ago, your chances of survival in many types of automobile collision are related in a linear fashion to the ratio of the weight of your vehicle to the weight of the other vehicle. So, in a general sense, if you are in an accident, it IS safer to be in the larger vehicle, ala SUV / truck / 18 wheeler.
A good background on the electric car stuff is the book ' Natural Capitalism', which I believe was reviewed on slashdot before. It describes the electric car fallacies in great detail!
I don't think many will argue that the DMCA is a flawed and very unfair piece of legislation, and that for many different reasons it should be repealed / struck down.
I also think that most would agree that the goal ( of the online community, at least ) in mind is to be able to share / trade information freely, without being monitored / jailed / oppressed / etc.
So why are we considering trying to live within the tiny confines of a flawed system, when we should be trying to defeat the system itself? Live with the DMCA so that we can use it's relatively insignificant protections? I say, to hell with the DMCA, to hell with hundreds of years of copyright protection, to hell with intellectual property feudalism. Lets try and get down to the real root issues that people don't like, and solve the problem from the ground up. Trying to cobble together a compromise on top of a hundred years of irrelavant law may be impossible.
I think that these comments WRT us ( the enlightened internet community ) being afraid of them ( RIAA, the MPAA, the government, etc. ) are ridiculous in light of the greater issues at hand.
If what we really want is to continue the status quo, have these huge organizations and bueracricies ( sp? ) running our lives and pulling on the puppet strings, then we should be careful not to piss them off too much while they relieve us of our rights slowly.
If what we really want is to change the way things work in this society, enlighten or eliminate our buracricies ( sp? ), take control of our own affairs, and shake off the oppressive yolk of other men who wish to control our lives, we should stand up to them using whatever means we have!
We may be defeated in court many times, napster may be shut down, and the next napster will be shut down, and the next, but the economic reality of the situation is that we as a people can no longer be controlled in all the same ways as before. The more they try and grasp and attack, the worse they will fair in the court of public opinion, and eventually public support will turn against them.
This is one of the battles in the 'Information Revolution' that we are technologically destined to win, if we just suck it up and fight!
There are a lot of different ways to generating website revenue. Different strokes for different folks...
Why not combine a few different options and let users choose which one they want? Example: If Slashdot can generate $.10 ( wild guess ) per user per week running ads, why not allow registered users to make a micropayment of $.10 or more ( to cover overhead, maybe $.15 ) and choose not to be shown ads. That way, whether you want to see ads or not, slashdot doesn't go broke.
It wouldn't even have to be a 'micro' payment, really.. You could stick $10 into your slashdot account and watch it tick down $.20 / week, not seeing ads for a year.
You could make it really fun, and tie the amount taken out every week to the ad rate that slashdot is charging, users could sell futures options for karma... ok, thats too much:)
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't it be a nice slashdot.org feature to be able to moderate the quality of the post itself?
What right do they have to have it protected? When any corporation with sufficient $$$ can purchase laws as they wish, maybe people should do their own thinking about what is right and wrong.
What they are doing is down-right vile, but disagreeing with corporate practices doesn't justify theft (obtaining something without proper payment).
This statement is meaningless on it's face. Firstly, violation of copyright is not theft, nor is it criminal, it's a civil matter. This has been stated at least a dozen times in every thread about P2P, but people still don't get it.
Secondly, what justifies compliance with their desires for copyright? Should people be required to comply with every outdated business model that some company desires, just because companies say they should? Should people follow unjust laws, simply by virtue that someone with sufficient money and influence has gotten them onto the books? History shows us that not all laws should be followed.
Very True. Although it would be hard to beat ashphalt shingles for the lease permanant roofing material ever, they already need to be replaced every 25 years or so.
If this cost # is true, then the cost of this solar panel is approximately the same as the cost of ashphalt shingles. And if *that* is true, there would be no reason to put any sort of roof on a house except for a roof made of this stuff...
Ethics != The Law != Morality
Ethics, the Law, and morality are three different horses, and they are not all running in the same direction. Nor are the ethics or responsibilities of one party necessarily in line with the others.
A journalist or publication, ala Think Secret should be (and is) reporting on interesting information, regardless of whether someone else thinks it should be secret or not. Without this, the press would be a mouthpiece for corporate 'press releases' aka propaganda. The fact that the legal system has been manipulated into the supression of speech / information is wrong and immoral, and the law should be changed. Note that it is not immoral or unethical to disobey an immoral or unethical law.
If you can't see that this is true, then, well, we have nothing further to discuss.
I think that everybody is in agreement that the Xanadu ideas are great
I don't think that everyone is in agreement. For example, many people don't think the royalty stuff is such a great idea. Just like lots of people don't think DRM today is that great of an idea, and don't want to support or use it.
I agree with many of your comments in general regarding the scope & applicability of the geneva conventions, However...
... In a lot of ways the Geneva Conventions are a reflection of a 1920s notion of how gentlemen ought to act to each other in a state of peace; they do not speak very much to the modern state of the world or to the modern state of war.
I wouldn't agree that the Taliban were not the recognized government of Afghanistan. The government of the USA and many multinational corporations negotiated with them in such a capacity, they were obviously in control of the country, these are facts, no one disputes this. This recognized government argument is ridiculous. By the same logic, Taiwan does not exist.
Second, the Geneva Conventions are in some ways absolutely absurd.
I think that this comment shows that you totally miss the point. Now and then, what we want is for soldiers and officers, on both sides, to be acting like gentlemen, and to realize that participation in a war is not always an optional thing. The Taliban's or Iraq's soldiers weren't all 'terrorists', most of them were just collecting paychecks. If opponents in war know that when they are captured or surrender, we'll treat them like gentlemen and let them return to their lives and families as soon as possible, aren't they more likely to surrender? Compare that to the situation now, where as soon as US troops land, enemy combatants have realistic expectations of being disappeared and tortured. Fighting to the death doesn't seem like as bad of an option.
Also, while the president may or may not be violating the strict terms of the Geneva Conventions as originally written down, the issue is more complicated than that. Apart from being an actual statute, Geneva Conventions have served as a standard of conduct for civilized nations in war, and as civilization and society has evolved, so has the standard.
What seems outrageous is that instead of leading the world in acting fair and treating prisoners well, the US is trying to roll back the clock on this progress.
They should have estimated a better webserver before their their site was on slashdot...
What you describe is called in the open source world forking. In the example you gave, Microsoft could definitely put out their own version of Java and bundle it. However, if Java were open source and licenced under the GPL, they would have to provide the source as well, so anyone could add their 'improvements' back to other forks.
In a GPL world, this argument just doesn't hold water.
I think one point that you, and many others, seem to be missing, is that many people no longer believe that record companies are due the revenues they recieve. Civil Society is a consensus reality; if people no longer believe that the record companies deserve money when they want to listen to music, they will not. And the people have spoken!
In the book, at first when they invented the life increasing technology (backups of your brain), lots of people were opposed to it and didn't take advantage of it. They tended not to outlive those that did take advantage of it. After a few years, everyone who had moral opposition to the technology was dead, and those who didn't have such moral quandries (and their kids) populated the earth.
I don't see how this situation is any different. Regardless of whether everyone genetically modifies thier children, or only some, the result is the same. In the future, everyone will be genetically modified.
Apparently people are willing to allow those with the guns to do it, and not realize its the first step to losing their own rights.
Apparently you don't realize that the only reason there is IP at all is that people with guns say so. Without the threat of Police / Jail / Force, why would anyone agree that someone else can OWN an IDEA, or a STORYBOOK, or a piece of DNA, and charge everyone else to use it. Intellectual property is the LAW, but that doesn't mean it's RIGHT, and it is not immoral to break an unjust law.
-------
I don't wantto be an old man anymore...
With this I agree.
The fact that millions of ordinary Americans engage in this theft is no excuse - ethically and legally, it is wrong.
With this I do not.
There is a complete disconnect between ethicality (right / wrong )and legality (can I be punished).
- action that is unethical is not necessarily illegal
- action that is illegal is not necessarily unethical
It is clearly against the law to copy songs. This topic needs no further discussion.The short term question is, is it unethical to break a law that you don't agree with?
If so, and I think the answer on inspection will be yes, then everyone is not acting unethically. It is only unethical to be a hipocrite.
The long term question is should the government continue to create Intellectual Property through law?
The only socially useful end result of all the legal wrangling over Napster, DSS, etc. is a new debate on this question.
I have yet to see a discussion where people can seperate these two issues in a lgoical way.
Depending upon the context and actual numbers involved, his assumptions are not necessarily wrong, and since no one is talking about real numbers here, it seems a little pretentious to describe him as completely incorrect! I would agree that an average small ICE ( like one used in an automobile ) is probably not as efficient as a mechanical engine than a power plant, if you measure the output of both engines at the output shaft. I would, however, bet money ( and here I have no statistics of my own :) that a small ICE, running in it's efficient ' sweet spot ' is more efficient at moving an automobile down the road than a power plant generating mechanical energy, driving a generator to produce electricity, distributing that electricity through a 'leaky' grid, converting it into potential chemical energy in the batteries, allowing the chem. reaction to convert it back into electricity, and then converting that electricity back into motive force. Even if you estimated the distribution grid losses at only 50% ( conservative ! ), add in the multiple conversions and you can't be far from the efficiency of an ICE ( in the area of 40% overall I think ?)
As for your SUV comment, from a study I did three years ago, your chances of survival in many types of automobile collision are related in a linear fashion to the ratio of the weight of your vehicle to the weight of the other vehicle. So, in a general sense, if you are in an accident, it IS safer to be in the larger vehicle, ala SUV / truck / 18 wheeler.
A good background on the electric car stuff is the book ' Natural Capitalism', which I believe was reviewed on slashdot before. It describes the electric car fallacies in great detail!
I don't think many will argue that the DMCA is a flawed and very unfair piece of legislation, and that for many different reasons it should be repealed / struck down. I also think that most would agree that the goal ( of the online community, at least ) in mind is to be able to share / trade information freely, without being monitored / jailed / oppressed / etc. So why are we considering trying to live within the tiny confines of a flawed system, when we should be trying to defeat the system itself? Live with the DMCA so that we can use it's relatively insignificant protections? I say, to hell with the DMCA, to hell with hundreds of years of copyright protection, to hell with intellectual property feudalism. Lets try and get down to the real root issues that people don't like, and solve the problem from the ground up. Trying to cobble together a compromise on top of a hundred years of irrelavant law may be impossible.
I think that these comments WRT us ( the enlightened internet community ) being afraid of them ( RIAA, the MPAA, the government, etc. ) are ridiculous in light of the greater issues at hand. If what we really want is to continue the status quo, have these huge organizations and bueracricies ( sp? ) running our lives and pulling on the puppet strings, then we should be careful not to piss them off too much while they relieve us of our rights slowly. If what we really want is to change the way things work in this society, enlighten or eliminate our buracricies ( sp? ), take control of our own affairs, and shake off the oppressive yolk of other men who wish to control our lives, we should stand up to them using whatever means we have! We may be defeated in court many times, napster may be shut down, and the next napster will be shut down, and the next, but the economic reality of the situation is that we as a people can no longer be controlled in all the same ways as before. The more they try and grasp and attack, the worse they will fair in the court of public opinion, and eventually public support will turn against them. This is one of the battles in the 'Information Revolution' that we are technologically destined to win, if we just suck it up and fight!
There are a lot of different ways to generating website revenue. Different strokes for different folks... Why not combine a few different options and let users choose which one they want? Example: If Slashdot can generate $.10 ( wild guess ) per user per week running ads, why not allow registered users to make a micropayment of $.10 or more ( to cover overhead, maybe $.15 ) and choose not to be shown ads. That way, whether you want to see ads or not, slashdot doesn't go broke. It wouldn't even have to be a 'micro' payment, really.. You could stick $10 into your slashdot account and watch it tick down $.20 / week, not seeing ads for a year. You could make it really fun, and tie the amount taken out every week to the ad rate that slashdot is charging, users could sell futures options for karma... ok, thats too much :)