But clearly, what you are suggesting, is not what is happening. Courts have not ruled on the matter and Congress has made clear what they don't approve of. You cannot make a perfect digital copy of something you time shifted and give that to someone else. It's copyright infringement.
Again, it's not as clear as you want it to be. Have you read Lessig's "Free Culture" (if not, you should you can download a free copy from his website).
But, if I miss an episode of "South Park", 'cause I had to work late, and I then download it and watch it, am I commiting a crime? What if no DVD version exists? Maybe I would pay a buck to download it legally, were it available.
Although technically this is "copyright infringments" - it doesn't feel wrong. Don't you agree?
The laws are perfectly enforceable, as we are seeing.
If so, why aren't the 6 million Napster users in jail? Or at least fined $150K per copy?
People have access to their fair use rights, and the artists are compensated.
I'm too happy to compensate the artists. That's why these days I buy most of my CDs directly from the artists.
Regarding downloading music, why is it that record companies pay tons of money to have songs played o n the radio, so I can hear for free. But when I download it from someone else (at no cost to the record company), they freak out!
There isn't a lot of pirating going on regarding Gone With the Wind.
Well, if copyright was 28 years the Beatles' catalog would be in public domain.
People are infringing on recent copyrights. That's just the fact!
Well, again in many cases this is not infrigment but fair use. If I tape "Aprentice" and then lend a tape to a friend, isn't that "fair use"?
Copyright was established to protect against commercial exploitation. Unfortunately today's technology makes it easier to copy anything digital (that's the nature of the beast).
But on the other hand the technology can give the copyright holder absolute control over the material (i.e. pay a quarter every time you hear a Beatle song).
I don't want to live in the pay-per-view/listen world, just because an old business model is dying and it's being proped up with unenforcable laws.
People aren't widescale copying Charlie Parker's recorded works. People are widescale copying yesterday's episode of Apprentice. That has nothing to do with who owns it, or whatever.
I copy Charlie Parker's recordings and I don't bother with Apprentice. Part of the larger problem is that a lot of works get locked up in the vaults of the their owners, because they have no commercial value and will be lost forever - even when there are people who are willing to put in the work to save them (eg. old celluoid movies that are deteriorating in the MPAA members vaults).
These people are privateers raping the public domain. Disney didn't do a Tarzan cartoon until the copyright expired on Kipling's book - but you try and use Mickey for something.
What you are talking about is building from someone's else work, which is entirely legal and very heavily done. That's fine. Ideas and "works" are not the same thing, and I suspect you know it.
Unfortunately these are getting blurred all the time. You must have heard about the case where the owners of "Gone with the Wind", sued the the writer of the parody "The Wind Done Gone".
There are poems of Robert Frost that were not published, because the copyright has been extended (this is what the Eldred case was about).
There is a documentary about the civil rights movement, called "Eyes on the Prize", which cannot be broadcast anymore, because there are segments of it that are protected...
[...] If you charged a person to see your work of art and then that person dutifully copied it to the last stroke of a brush, then we are all harmed in the long-run, because that creative person no longer has control of his work and he has very much less incentive to produce new creative works.
This is debatable. Many artist are copied. They don't mind at all - it's the artist who first created the distictive work that matters, not the copies. For example, Charlie Parker was an extremely innovative jazz saxophone player. After he recorded his works, many people copied them (and still do), yet that did not stop his creative urge at all.
Or, many people can write like Hemingway, but there was only one Hemingway. Try copying a Picasso painting and selling it for a million dollars.
The whole point of ideas is that they cannot be controlled by a single person, once passed on to another mind. In any case, the ideas or "works" become more valuable when more people are exposed to them.
I have nothing against copyrights. But in their current forms we have greedy corporation looting what should be public domain. For example, Charlie Parker's recordings (which were made 40 years ago) should be in public domain. He was an American artist of the highest caliber - everyone should have access to his works.
If copyright lasted 14 or 28 years I'd be happy. That's what copyrights were until the latter half of the 20th century.
The fundamental theory in play is that, as people, we have the right to control the product of our work and intellectual exertion. If I create something, then, because I created it, it is my right to decide what to do with that thing.
If you want total control over the product of your intellectual excertion, then do not tell anybody about your idea (or your song or novel). Then it will be safe.
The nature of ideas that they are not physical and once the idea spreads to other minds you cannot take it back (Maybe we should be charging you for polluting our minds with your ideas).
Copyrights are an artificial construct which is there to encourage people to publish the ideas that others can benefit from, in exchange for a limited time monopoly.
Current problem is that the copyright laws got out of whack and the copyright owners (not usually the idea's creators) just want to have total thought control over the idea they think they "own".
Let copyright last as long as patents (17 years). Why is it that if I invent a cure for cancer I get a patent for 17 years, but if I write a song about cancer it's "protected" for 150 years?
Seriously, though: I understand what they're doing and why they're doing it, but regardless of their intentions, it's still not legal in the least. And no court in this nation would support what they were doing if the copyright holders decided to persue litigation.
Are you saying that the copyright owner has the right to forbid who can see their creation?
I don't think this is the intention of copyrights.
It would be like a TV episode *IF* these fansubbers weren't sticking them on bittorrent and letting thousands upon thousands of people download them.
Some people have a lot of friends...:)
I fail to see what the issue is here. These people know what they're doing is illegal.
Illegal does not necessarily mean right. These actions could be interpreted as "fair use", especially if the translations are not available otherwise. The copyright owners want too much control.
It is not clear from the evidence that the makers would make more money without the fansubers...
While I cannot point to a particular project, Linux is used in other countries to conduct medical research that may not be profitable enough. Here is one example I found after a quick google: Brazilian Journal of Medical Science
Utimately, such research has the potential for saving a lot more lives, but giving tools to smart people who do not live in the rich countries.
I have been a professional programmer for 23 years.
Cool! I've been a programmer for 27 years. You have to keep learning new stuff to be employable. This is the best job security. I worked for large and small firms (including a dot-com that bombed). Currently I'm in a small sofware company. Here is the list of languages and O/S-es I worked with over the years:
1 year - COBOL, 360 Assembler OS/360
6 years - PASCAL, PDP-11 Assembler, RSX-11M
8 years - Modula-2, VAX/VMS, Ultrix
6 years - Eiffel, C, Solaris, Linux
6 years - Java, Web, Linux, Unix, Windows etc...
I have always shied away from management positions, other than being a technical leader or a mentor in a small group. I'm still writing code everyday...
The difference between P2P and Betamax software is that P2P is almost never used legally.
First of all you need to be more precise what you mean by P2P. TCP/IP is a peer-2-peer protocol and the Internet is therefore a large P2P network. Is not Internet used for some legal purposes?
Typical P2P apps (like Kazaa, Limewire, BitTorrent) are simply schemes to efficiently distribute files among a lot of computers. What the files contain is immaterial.
Are you trying to ban the idea of this kind of distribution?
As it turns out there are plently of perfectly legitimate uses for these kinds of applications (and more coming), besides distributing Linx ISOs.
OK. Let's stop calling these applications P2P. From now on, they are "global internet file system", with some search tools. Where anyone can join in. All they need to do is install a small GIFS app and designate a portion of their disk as global storage.
From that perspective, automation of source code is much easier with the source as XML than as a typical c-style syntax.
Huh!? What is "automation of source code"? Do you mean parsing? Any language based on a reasonable grammar is easy to parse (Pascal being one example).
But of course you could just use Lisp (which, by the way, has been in use longer Unix shell - despite what the author of the article says).
over 1/2 of the budget is due to social programs would you consider them caused by Democrats or Republicans? Or do you believe that we need to tax the rich more because your not rich? 38% just isn't enough?
Tax is the membership fee you pay to live in this country. If you use the services you should pay for them.
I think a lot of the infrastructure that has been build with taxpayer's money (eg. the Internet, the interstate highway system, Universities) is used by corporation to increase their profits.
The corporations should pay their due for use of these service, instead of getting a free ride.
After Social Security, the elderly can at least buy a cup of soup occassionally.
Not just the elderly. Social Security also helps people who become disabled and their dependents.
What will a 25 year old do, if he is hurt in a car crash and cannot work anymore?
To judge how advance a society is, just look how it is treating it's least powerful - the children and the elderly. As someone put it: "Social Security is not about making sure that YOU don't have to eat cat food when you retire. It's about making sure that the grandma living down the block from you does not".
first of all, we can observe that the earth goes around the sun. fact.
Untrue. Since there is no absolute frame of reference (see Theory of Relativity), we can pick the Earth as the center of the universe, and describe all the movement we see that way. This was the system before. Mathematically Copernican system is much simpler, therefore prefereable.
we can also observe that matter is made from atoms. we can even split them. fact
How do we observe that matter is made from atoms? I haven't seen any atoms directly. Only indirect experiments seem to indicate that they in fact exist. Dalton's Atomic theory of matter explained a lot chemistry, but at the time many thought of atoms as "theoretical constructs".
so, how are these anything like evolution?
You make observations that are explained by the Theory of evolution. Here are some of these:
Why do males have nipples?
Why are there ten species of zebra in Africa, but none in Australia?
Why are there mammals?
I'm reading a great book by Richard Dawkins "The Ancestor's Tale" which goes into these in great detail. I recomend it.
If it is the case why are they not asking for the same stickers to be stuck on EVERY textbook? A fair amount of what is accepted as 'scientific fact' for day to day purposes are is still a theory. And not just the natural sciences with its theories of evolution, relativity, black hole formation but also things like economics and geography textbooks need stickers on them
There is no such thing as absolute truth in science. Everything is a theory which is supported or refuted by observable evidence and repeatable experiments.
Here are some example of theories:
The Earth goes around the Sun
Matter is made from atoms (ever saw an atom?)
Electricity is movement of electrons (ever seen an electron?)
Evolution, as a theory, is as established as any of the above.
Three years is nothing. Nothing! Come back in 15-20 years of programming and then your opinion will be worth considering.
Hey, how about 28 years as a programmer. I still play with computers at home, despite the fact that I get to write a lot of code at work.
I've contributed code to a number of open source projects (last one was JBoss), I started and ran couple of open source projects. There is still some code I wrote for the Amiga floating around the Internet.
I've worked for big and small companies (including the requsite internet startup that went belly-up) and I still have fun coding.
Now it looks like my son (he's 17) is going to be a CS major in college. He's been coding since he was 10.
3.0 forget it, not worth my time because you shouldn't have been in college if you can't maintain a high-B low-A average.
One of the smartest programmers I know graduated with an GPA of 2.8. Why? He was at a demanding school and he took some tough courses (bio-chemistry, quantum mechanics, tons of physics and math), in addition to typical CS courses. One of his CS project courses was to build a parallel machine and develop write cool parallel programs.
Oh, yeah he was also on the football team and sang with the college acapella group.
This guy was rejected by Intel (even though the prof who taught circuit design recomended him) because of GPA, even though he passed all his technical interviews with flying colors.
When you look at the GPA you need to consider the context too.
On the other hand I had interviewed 4.0 Masters in CS who could not write a loop. Go figure!
For those who are currently computer programmers/engineers, would you say you really enjoy your job, or does it get extremely old and tedious after awhile?
I've been a programmer for nearly 30 years (ouch!). My first home computer was an Apple II. I have always programmed at home. If just to try some things that were not happening at work. For example, I've been playing with AOP lately.
If you enjoy doing something, why stop when at home?
Slashdot Mirror
Again, it's not as clear as you want it to be. Have you read Lessig's "Free Culture" (if not, you should you can download a free copy from his website).
But, if I miss an episode of "South Park", 'cause I had to work late, and I then download it and watch it, am I commiting a crime? What if no DVD version exists? Maybe I would pay a buck to download it legally, were it available.
Although technically this is "copyright infringments" - it doesn't feel wrong. Don't you agree?
The laws are perfectly enforceable, as we are seeing.
If so, why aren't the 6 million Napster users in jail? Or at least fined $150K per copy?
People have access to their fair use rights, and the artists are compensated.
I'm too happy to compensate the artists. That's why these days I buy most of my CDs directly from the artists.
Regarding downloading music, why is it that record companies pay tons of money to have songs played o n the radio, so I can hear for free. But when I download it from someone else (at no cost to the record company), they freak out!
Well, if copyright was 28 years the Beatles' catalog would be in public domain.
People are infringing on recent copyrights. That's just the fact!
Well, again in many cases this is not infrigment but fair use. If I tape "Aprentice" and then lend a tape to a friend, isn't that "fair use"?
Copyright was established to protect against commercial exploitation. Unfortunately today's technology makes it easier to copy anything digital (that's the nature of the beast).
But on the other hand the technology can give the copyright holder absolute control over the material (i.e. pay a quarter every time you hear a Beatle song).
I don't want to live in the pay-per-view/listen world, just because an old business model is dying and it's being proped up with unenforcable laws.
I copy Charlie Parker's recordings and I don't bother with Apprentice. Part of the larger problem is that a lot of works get locked up in the vaults of the their owners, because they have no commercial value and will be lost forever - even when there are people who are willing to put in the work to save them (eg. old celluoid movies that are deteriorating in the MPAA members vaults).
These people are privateers raping the public domain. Disney didn't do a Tarzan cartoon until the copyright expired on Kipling's book - but you try and use Mickey for something.
What you are talking about is building from someone's else work, which is entirely legal and very heavily done. That's fine. Ideas and "works" are not the same thing, and I suspect you know it.
Unfortunately these are getting blurred all the time. You must have heard about the case where the owners of "Gone with the Wind", sued the the writer of the parody "The Wind Done Gone".
There are poems of Robert Frost that were not published, because the copyright has been extended (this is what the Eldred case was about).
There is a documentary about the civil rights movement, called "Eyes on the Prize", which cannot be broadcast anymore, because there are segments of it that are protected...
And it goes on...
This is debatable. Many artist are copied. They don't mind at all - it's the artist who first created the distictive work that matters, not the copies. For example, Charlie Parker was an extremely innovative jazz saxophone player. After he recorded his works, many people copied them (and still do), yet that did not stop his creative urge at all.
Or, many people can write like Hemingway, but there was only one Hemingway. Try copying a Picasso painting and selling it for a million dollars.
The whole point of ideas is that they cannot be controlled by a single person, once passed on to another mind. In any case, the ideas or "works" become more valuable when more people are exposed to them.
I have nothing against copyrights. But in their current forms we have greedy corporation looting what should be public domain. For example, Charlie Parker's recordings (which were made 40 years ago) should be in public domain. He was an American artist of the highest caliber - everyone should have access to his works.
If copyright lasted 14 or 28 years I'd be happy. That's what copyrights were until the latter half of the 20th century.
If you want total control over the product of your intellectual excertion, then do not tell anybody about your idea (or your song or novel). Then it will be safe.
The nature of ideas that they are not physical and once the idea spreads to other minds you cannot take it back (Maybe we should be charging you for polluting our minds with your ideas).
Copyrights are an artificial construct which is there to encourage people to publish the ideas that others can benefit from, in exchange for a limited time monopoly.
Current problem is that the copyright laws got out of whack and the copyright owners (not usually the idea's creators) just want to have total thought control over the idea they think they "own".
Let copyright last as long as patents (17 years). Why is it that if I invent a cure for cancer I get a patent for 17 years, but if I write a song about cancer it's "protected" for 150 years?
It's much worse when a Pepsi employee tests positive for coke....
Are you saying that the copyright owner has the right to forbid who can see their creation?
I don't think this is the intention of copyrights.
Some people have a lot of friends... :)
I fail to see what the issue is here. These people know what they're doing is illegal.
Illegal does not necessarily mean right. These actions could be interpreted as "fair use", especially if the translations are not available otherwise. The copyright owners want too much control.
It is not clear from the evidence that the makers would make more money without the fansubers...
Utimately, such research has the potential for saving a lot more lives, but giving tools to smart people who do not live in the rich countries.
Cool! I've been a programmer for 27 years. You have to keep learning new stuff to be employable. This is the best job security. I worked for large and small firms (including a dot-com that bombed). Currently I'm in a small sofware company. Here is the list of languages and O/S-es I worked with over the years:
I have always shied away from management positions, other than being a technical leader or a mentor in a small group. I'm still writing code everyday...
First of all you need to be more precise what you mean by P2P. TCP/IP is a peer-2-peer protocol and the Internet is therefore a large P2P network. Is not Internet used for some legal purposes?
Typical P2P apps (like Kazaa, Limewire, BitTorrent) are simply schemes to efficiently distribute files among a lot of computers. What the files contain is immaterial.
Are you trying to ban the idea of this kind of distribution?
As it turns out there are plently of perfectly legitimate uses for these kinds of applications (and more coming), besides distributing Linx ISOs.
Here is one: Goverment Document Library
This is certainly NOT P2P.... ;->
Huh!? What is "automation of source code"? Do you mean parsing? Any language based on a reasonable grammar is easy to parse (Pascal being one example).
But of course you could just use Lisp (which, by the way, has been in use longer Unix shell - despite what the author of the article says).
Tax is the membership fee you pay to live in this country. If you use the services you should pay for them.
I think a lot of the infrastructure that has been build with taxpayer's money (eg. the Internet, the interstate highway system, Universities) is used by corporation to increase their profits. The corporations should pay their due for use of these service, instead of getting a free ride.
How is is then that we have a huge budget deficit due to Republicans, but under Democrats we had a surplus?
Not just the elderly. Social Security also helps people who become disabled and their dependents.
What will a 25 year old do, if he is hurt in a car crash and cannot work anymore?
To judge how advance a society is, just look how it is treating it's least powerful - the children and the elderly. As someone put it: "Social Security is not about making sure that YOU don't have to eat cat food when you retire. It's about making sure that the grandma living down the block from you does not".
What if your plan included a pension plan from Enron?
Untrue. Since there is no absolute frame of reference (see Theory of Relativity), we can pick the Earth as the center of the universe, and describe all the movement we see that way. This was the system before. Mathematically Copernican system is much simpler, therefore prefereable.
we can also observe that matter is made from atoms. we can even split them. fact
How do we observe that matter is made from atoms? I haven't seen any atoms directly. Only indirect experiments seem to indicate that they in fact exist. Dalton's Atomic theory of matter explained a lot chemistry, but at the time many thought of atoms as "theoretical constructs".
so, how are these anything like evolution?
You make observations that are explained by the Theory of evolution. Here are some of these:
Why do males have nipples?
Why are there ten species of zebra in Africa, but none in Australia?
Why are there mammals?
I'm reading a great book by Richard Dawkins "The Ancestor's Tale" which goes into these in great detail. I recomend it.
There is no such thing as absolute truth in science. Everything is a theory which is supported or refuted by observable evidence and repeatable experiments.
Here are some example of theories:
The Earth goes around the Sun
Matter is made from atoms (ever saw an atom?)
Electricity is movement of electrons (ever seen an electron?)
Evolution, as a theory, is as established as any of the above.
Hey, how about 28 years as a programmer. I still play with computers at home, despite the fact that I get to write a lot of code at work.
I've contributed code to a number of open source projects (last one was JBoss), I started and ran couple of open source projects. There is still some code I wrote for the Amiga floating around the Internet.
I've worked for big and small companies (including the requsite internet startup that went belly-up) and I still have fun coding.
Now it looks like my son (he's 17) is going to be a CS major in college. He's been coding since he was 10.
One of the smartest programmers I know graduated with an GPA of 2.8. Why? He was at a demanding school and he took some tough courses (bio-chemistry, quantum mechanics, tons of physics and math), in addition to typical CS courses. One of his CS project courses was to build a parallel machine and develop write cool parallel programs.
Oh, yeah he was also on the football team and sang with the college acapella group.
This guy was rejected by Intel (even though the prof who taught circuit design recomended him) because of GPA, even though he passed all his technical interviews with flying colors.
When you look at the GPA you need to consider the context too.
On the other hand I had interviewed 4.0 Masters in CS who could not write a loop. Go figure!
I've been a programmer for nearly 30 years (ouch!). My first home computer was an Apple II. I have always programmed at home. If just to try some things that were not happening at work. For example, I've been playing with AOP lately.
If you enjoy doing something, why stop when at home?
I still code at work every day...