They're using a shared resource (the 2.4GHz ISM frequency band) and by (inadvertently) offering something which they do not intend to provide, they "damage" that resource, because they make it impossible to provide public networks to which computers can automatically connect without endangering their owners by connecting to a looks-public-but-isn't network.
Careful mate, you'll pull a muscle stretching like that.
Configuring encryption isn't hard, [...]
It is when you don't know it's possible, and/or don't know how to do it.
[...] benefits the users because it protects their data from eavesdroppers, and allows others to unambiguously offer public network access.
You can unambiguously offer public network access now by either putting signs up or naming your WAP appropriately.
Get with the times: More than 2/3 of all wireless networks are encrypted, and those aren't all owned or managed by computer wizards.
Irrelevant. If the owner of the network is incompetent, that is not my fault or problem. If through their ignorance they mistakenly configured their equipment to advertise itself and provide network access to me then I've done nothing wrong by accepting their invitation.
Sure, as long as you don't define "taking advantage of other people's ignorance for my own selfish gain so I don't have to pay for something they are" as "nothing wrong". Which you may well do, but that just confirms my opinion that you're an arsehole with no respect for other people's property.
I'm sure you'd make a great used car real estate salesman with a withered conscience like that.
Those analogies aren't valid.
Certainly they are. There is an easily-accessible resource bought and paid for by others you want to use, but aren't prepared to pay for yourself, so you're _assuming_ you can because it's something you want.
There aren't really any real life situations where a car or a wallet is left intentionally for public use. There are actual situations where wifi is left for public use intentionally.
Which are _usually_ accompanied by indications said wifi is free. Assuming it is free is not reasonable.
Feel free to perform an experiment. Ask your neighbours whether or not they'd mind if you piggyback onto their pay TV, or telephone line, or electricity, gas and water supplies. That should give you a pretty good indication of how many people are prepared to have you piggyback onto their internet connections. Are you seriously going to try and argue a majority (or even a significant minority) of people will be happy to let you do that ?
How is putting up an unsecured Wi-Fi connection any different than putting up an unsecured website?
Exactly the same way walking up to a bar for a drink is different from going behind it to make your own.
The wireless signals often times go right into MY house. i.e. I don't have to be one someone else's property to connect to an AP
The radio waves from your cordless or callphone are probably being transmitted across half the neighbourhood, does that mean you have no problem with the government eavesdropping on them ?
Don't use them. Exercise some fucking restraint. It shouldn't take legislation for you to respect other people's property and privacy.
I highly doubt they notice or care - I don't download big files,* I don't do illegal stuff, I don't browse porn, etc. Why do I say they don't notice? Well, let's just say that in a Virtual Machine connected to the network and a member of the MSHOME workgroup can access all their shared docs, and their printers. I don't think this person knows much about the security.
Don't notice != don't care. You might not notice if the government is tapping all your phone calls and has a GPS transmitter installed into your car - does that mean you wouldn't have a problem with them doing it ?
But, yeah, if the Network operator has done absolutely nothing to indicate that a network is private, and my computer automatically says "Hello, can I join you and get an IP" and the AP says "Sure, here is all the information you need to be a member of this network and access the Internet!" then I consider it perfectly moral to use the network.
Then you're an arsehole. Doubly so because you almost certainly know that most (if not all) WAPs ship in such a configuration from the factory and a significant proportion of people have no concept securing one, let alone know how to do it.
How the hell else do you make it any more open when you do want people to be allowed to use it freely?!
You indicate something like "free wifi, use me".
If you saw a car in the street with unlocked doors and the key in the ignition, would you assume it was there for random people to take joyriding ? How about if you saw someone's wallet on the ground ? Is your assumption they left it there for you to spend the money yourself ?
I disagree. An unsecured WAP (with SSID broadcast enabled) is actually advertising that it is open for use.
No, it's "advertising" it exists. BIG difference.
If you ask for permission to connect, its DHCP server grants you permission to do so. Hey, the WAP's owner configured it that way, why should we second-guess intent? Hell, most people's laptops don't even ask their user: they just connect automatically to the strongest signal they can find. Who's responsible then?
You are. Even if your laptop does automatically connect, you don't have to subsequently use it and can immediately disconnect.
An unsecured WAP is much like above car, except that the car has a sign on it stating that the car is available for anyone to drive, anytime they wish. True, you didn't pay, but permission is granted to take it anyway.
No, it's not. Now, if there are posters up in the area saying "free wifi", or the name of the access point is something like "FREE_WIFI_USE_ME", then you might have an argument. But saying that a WAP you just happen to be able to connect to is open to your (ab)use is *exactly* like saying an unlocked car parked in the street with the keys in the ignition is there for you to take joyriding.
Or, if you'd like a non-car analogy, it's like saying someone who leaves their wallet sitting on the bar wants you to take it and spend all the money on hookers and blow.
The real tragedy here is that apparently it now takes legislation for arseholes like you to exercise some semblence of respect for other people's goods and chattels.
Am I a criminal for using the open wifi connection? Or was I merely using a publicly accessible wifi connection? The latter, judging from the posters all over the airport urging me to use the service.
Right. Using an advertised free service is the same thing as hooking into someone's unsecured wifi or wardriving the neighbourhood.
As an American, I want to say that it's not an American thing--it's an ignorance thing. Same with looser/loser and affect/effect.
And then/than ! How the hell does that happen ? I can see looser/loser and affect/effect, but then and than both sound different and have very different meanings.
The then/than mixup has actually replaced looser/loser and your/you're as my most annoying error, although that might be simply because I've become so used to people getting looser/loser and you're/you mixed up (in fact, I've actually hit the point how where seeing loser/looser and your/you're used _correctly_ grabs my attention more).
Also, SSDs are NOT expensive! A CF-to-IDE adapter costs $15, and a 2GB CF card costs about $30. Two gigabytes is more than enough to boot an OS and start a RAID. Don't waste your money on a 64GB CF card. The CF+RAID hybrid approach is the way to go.
I'm confused as to where the benefit is here. Given the extra people-time involved in your custom-build CF card setup, there's not going to be any cost-savings over just having the server ship from the factory preconfigured with two drives in RAID1 - and all the important data is on the "6TB RAID-6s", which I'm sure aren't SSD.
Amazingly, I think he answered your question before you even asked it when he said "I never have to worry about getting paged due to the inevitable mechanical failure of magnetic drives."
Yes, he does. All the *important* data on these systems is housed on "the 6TB RAID-6s on each server". I'm pretty sure they're not made out of CF drives.
Why, assuming that you have sufficient disk space (but since you are arguing for loads of ram, adding enough disk should not be an issue), would you insist on keeping data in ram, if the operating system can use the space to hold something that you are more likely to need.
Well the point is that if you *can't* keep all the stuff "you're likely to need" in RAM (ie: you're swapping (or paging, for the pedants)), you need more RAM.
With that in mind, I would very much like my OS to swap out any program that does not look like it will need to be in ram, if it means that more of the data I'm using can be in ram in return. So assuming that the algorithms used (in Windows - I know it is a stretch) are decent, you should indeed be able to avoid swapping by using enough ram - it might just be that the amount of ram you need is beyond even the large capacity of todays machines, and Windows might very well still insist on having _some_ swap, even if it should never be put to use.
All OSes these days will "pre-emptively" swap out "idle" RAM to disk, in case something loads up in the future that needs more RAM, to reduce the likelihood of thrashing. This, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. The badness happens when your system *must* swap because it simply doesn't have enough physical memory to keep everything you're working on in RAM - that's the point at which you need to go and get more physical RAM, and the point that most systems should be able to trivially reach today.
Defragmenting a drive that has many files with many folders on it after several weeks of use does make a difference. Try it. You might like it, Mikey.
I've been using Windows NT since 1996 and I've never seen any perceivable difference between a "fragmented" and "defragmented" drive outside of extreme examples and corner-case usage patterns.
This is indeed a mystery. Even back in the 1970's you could designate a device to use for the swap file and it was pre-extended. You even had the option to place it on the middle cylinders of a disk so it was, on average, faster to access.
That's because back in the 1970s getting enough real RAM to avoid swapping was difficult, not trivial.
If your machine is swapping, you need more RAM. Whether it's swapping to the inside, outside or middle of the disk completely and utterly misses the point that in typical use a modern machine simply shouldn't have any reason to swap.
Speaking of which, why does Windows still use a variable sized swap file?
So that when some rogue app chews up mountains of RAM, you don't hit a hard OS-out-memory situation.
I lock it down to 2x RAM or 4GB. Whichever is larger. I do not want fragmentation in the swap file. I'd prefer not to need one, but that's another story.
If your machine is swapping enough for this to be even the vaguest possibility of an actual problem, you need more RAM. From memory, Windows defaults the starting size of your swapfile to something like half the physical RAM in the machine. If you exceed - or even use a significant proportion of - this in anything except an extraordinary situation, it's almost a certainty you need more physical RAM.
And how about moving IE's temp files somewhere else? Okay, you can still set permissions on the folder, but get it out of the user's profile.
Huh ? Why wouldn't you put per-user temporary files in the user's space (quite possibly the only part of the entire system they can write to ?)
And I'm tired of seeing C:\WINDOWS\Temp
Temp directories do not belong in the OS directory.
Right. Because there's such a huge difference between/tmp and C:\Windows\Temp.
Yeah, I'm whining. But I spend 15 extra minutes just getting the directories and swap arranged correctly every time I set up someone's Windows machine.
Often I can increase my holding by 20% in a month this way, or pocket 20% of my holdings and wind up rebuying the same amount of my original shares. I love it when the market moves up and down. That is how to make money.
Doesn't capital gains tax (or whatever they might call it where you are) and brokerage fees wipe out most of the benefit to doing this ?
Thing is, I take every reasonable step I can to protect my children from predators. If these, "social networking" sites aren't willing to show the same level of commitment to this that I have, then my only alternative is to block access to those sites.
The chances of your child falling victim to a "predator" they met on Facebook (or MySpace, or anywhere else) is so small as to be basically irrelevant compared to the chances of them falling victim to a "predator" they met through you, their parent.
but that only works at home....doesn't it? What about everywhere else they go?
Next time you have all your family and friends over for a party, look around. If your child is going to be abused, there's something like and 80% chance it'll be by one of those people and closer to a 100% chance that it will happen at your (or one of their) home.
You say that if I grab a copy of a song/book/poem/knitting-pattern/MS Office 3000 Plus Plus and then resell it at the flea market that is wrong.
But if I give a free copy to my buddy, that's not. Even though in both cases I'm causing for someone to get a copy without compensating the original releaser for it when he *explicitly* provides the goods for money.
In one case someone is giving money for the product, but not to the creator. In the other, they are not.
If someone is prepared to pay for the product, then they should be paying the creator, so that person (or persons) derives a benefit from their efforts. By stepping in between you are effectively "stealing" that money the purchaser would have been prepared to give to the creator.
*That* is why there is a distinction. It is a similar distinction that makes, for example, sneaking into a concert "wrong", but downloading the same music "ok" (at least IMHO).
(Most people instinctively know this, even if they've never thought it through.)
The fact that we can now duplicate it with negligible effort opens up the potential for us to benefit from his work without compensating him.
Well, then, maybe the poor darling will have to repeat that performance multiple times to earn his keep. You know, go to work every day, like the rest of us poor schmucks not riding the copyright gravy train have to do.
People who have produced a copyrighted work are given an extraordinary privilege. They are able to recreate and sell that work an infinite number of times, for (effectively) and indefinite period of time, without having to put in any meaningful additional effort. No other creators of goods, or providers of services, are able to do this. You are asking why they should no longer be granted this incredibly generous gift. I ask why should they have it in the first place.
And whether you charge or not for the copy, the fraud is the same: obtaining a benefit without compensating the originator.
It's not "fraud" (or theft) because the creator suffers no loss. You are trying to overlay principles dealing with physical property or provision of services to a concept that is neither. This is the same mistake copyright makes and the same reason it is broken by design.
If you would like a non-music example of the same situation, consider this: Say a financial advisor charges $500/hr for their time (he's very good). He is meeting with a client in a restaurant, and you just happen to be sitting near them. During their two-hour dinner, you overhear some investment advice [0] and decide to gamble some money on it being right. It is, and you make a large sum of money. Have you "defrauded" the financial advisor of $1000 ?
(The point here is that you've benefited from some product or service that you would normally have had to pay for, yet the person providing that good or service has suffered no from you doing so. The other important point is that "not making money" and "losing money" are two very different things, despite numerous attempts to conflate them.)
[0] Alternatively, you have a photographic memory and catch a glimpse of a list of stocks and whether to buy or sell them.
Then perhaps fraud is not the best word. But how would you describe the act of benefiting from something that was made expressly available in return for money but was obtained without honoring the paying end of the bargain?
Cold harsh reality. Indeed, the ease with which one can do this - even involuntarily (got a photographic memory ? heard a tune on the radio and can't get it out of your head ?) - simply helps to indicate the stupidity of the whole system.
The reason the "crime" is "hard to pin down" is because copyright is such an arbitrary and artificial law. Unlike, say, the basic principles behind property law it has _zero_ basis in the real world. It is a made-up concept designed a few hundred years ago to manipulate markets into working with a good that has infinite supply.
and by your logic the drinking age should be lower as more people drink under the age of 18/19, speeding should be legal and marijuana should be legal since more people have smoked it.
The usual fallacious argument. I'm not a fan of the RIAA's *tactics*, but the fact that a whole lot of people break the law doesn't make it OK, [...]
Uh, yes, yes it does. In fact, if "a whole lot of people" break a law, that's prima facie evidence that the law is, in some way, flawed and should either be struck from the books or reimplemented.
[...] and that seems to be the crux of your argument.
The crux of your argument seems to be the law is unchanging, infallible and objective. Given that it is none of these things, I'd say your argument is baseless.
If you had the power, what would you change about copyright law?
* Make it an opt-in system like patents.
* Link the copyright term to the "popularity" of a work so that popular works go out of copyright sooner.
* Legalise non-profit copyright violations.
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They're using a shared resource (the 2.4GHz ISM frequency band) and by (inadvertently) offering something which they do not intend to provide, they "damage" that resource, because they make it impossible to provide public networks to which computers can automatically connect without endangering their owners by connecting to a looks-public-but-isn't network.
Careful mate, you'll pull a muscle stretching like that.
Configuring encryption isn't hard, [...]
It is when you don't know it's possible, and/or don't know how to do it.
[...] benefits the users because it protects their data from eavesdroppers, and allows others to unambiguously offer public network access.
You can unambiguously offer public network access now by either putting signs up or naming your WAP appropriately.
Get with the times: More than 2/3 of all wireless networks are encrypted, and those aren't all owned or managed by computer wizards.
Utterly irrelevant.
Irrelevant. If the owner of the network is incompetent, that is not my fault or problem. If through their ignorance they mistakenly configured their equipment to advertise itself and provide network access to me then I've done nothing wrong by accepting their invitation.
Sure, as long as you don't define "taking advantage of other people's ignorance for my own selfish gain so I don't have to pay for something they are" as "nothing wrong". Which you may well do, but that just confirms my opinion that you're an arsehole with no respect for other people's property.
I'm sure you'd make a great used car real estate salesman with a withered conscience like that.
Those analogies aren't valid.
Certainly they are. There is an easily-accessible resource bought and paid for by others you want to use, but aren't prepared to pay for yourself, so you're _assuming_ you can because it's something you want.
There aren't really any real life situations where a car or a wallet is left intentionally for public use. There are actual situations where wifi is left for public use intentionally.
Which are _usually_ accompanied by indications said wifi is free. Assuming it is free is not reasonable.
Feel free to perform an experiment. Ask your neighbours whether or not they'd mind if you piggyback onto their pay TV, or telephone line, or electricity, gas and water supplies. That should give you a pretty good indication of how many people are prepared to have you piggyback onto their internet connections. Are you seriously going to try and argue a majority (or even a significant minority) of people will be happy to let you do that ?
How is putting up an unsecured Wi-Fi connection any different than putting up an unsecured website?
Exactly the same way walking up to a bar for a drink is different from going behind it to make your own.
The wireless signals often times go right into MY house. i.e. I don't have to be one someone else's property to connect to an AP
The radio waves from your cordless or callphone are probably being transmitted across half the neighbourhood, does that mean you have no problem with the government eavesdropping on them ?
Don't use them. Exercise some fucking restraint. It shouldn't take legislation for you to respect other people's property and privacy.
I highly doubt they notice or care - I don't download big files,* I don't do illegal stuff, I don't browse porn, etc. Why do I say they don't notice? Well, let's just say that in a Virtual Machine connected to the network and a member of the MSHOME workgroup can access all their shared docs, and their printers. I don't think this person knows much about the security.
Don't notice != don't care. You might not notice if the government is tapping all your phone calls and has a GPS transmitter installed into your car - does that mean you wouldn't have a problem with them doing it ?
But, yeah, if the Network operator has done absolutely nothing to indicate that a network is private, and my computer automatically says "Hello, can I join you and get an IP" and the AP says "Sure, here is all the information you need to be a member of this network and access the Internet!" then I consider it perfectly moral to use the network.
Then you're an arsehole. Doubly so because you almost certainly know that most (if not all) WAPs ship in such a configuration from the factory and a significant proportion of people have no concept securing one, let alone know how to do it.
How the hell else do you make it any more open when you do want people to be allowed to use it freely?!
You indicate something like "free wifi, use me".
If you saw a car in the street with unlocked doors and the key in the ignition, would you assume it was there for random people to take joyriding ? How about if you saw someone's wallet on the ground ? Is your assumption they left it there for you to spend the money yourself ?
I disagree. An unsecured WAP (with SSID broadcast enabled) is actually advertising that it is open for use.
No, it's "advertising" it exists. BIG difference.
If you ask for permission to connect, its DHCP server grants you permission to do so. Hey, the WAP's owner configured it that way, why should we second-guess intent? Hell, most people's laptops don't even ask their user: they just connect automatically to the strongest signal they can find. Who's responsible then?
You are. Even if your laptop does automatically connect, you don't have to subsequently use it and can immediately disconnect.
An unsecured WAP is much like above car, except that the car has a sign on it stating that the car is available for anyone to drive, anytime they wish. True, you didn't pay, but permission is granted to take it anyway.
No, it's not. Now, if there are posters up in the area saying "free wifi", or the name of the access point is something like "FREE_WIFI_USE_ME", then you might have an argument. But saying that a WAP you just happen to be able to connect to is open to your (ab)use is *exactly* like saying an unlocked car parked in the street with the keys in the ignition is there for you to take joyriding.
Or, if you'd like a non-car analogy, it's like saying someone who leaves their wallet sitting on the bar wants you to take it and spend all the money on hookers and blow.
The real tragedy here is that apparently it now takes legislation for arseholes like you to exercise some semblence of respect for other people's goods and chattels.
Am I a criminal for using the open wifi connection? Or was I merely using a publicly accessible wifi connection? The latter, judging from the posters all over the airport urging me to use the service.
Right. Using an advertised free service is the same thing as hooking into someone's unsecured wifi or wardriving the neighbourhood.
As an American, I want to say that it's not an American thing--it's an ignorance thing. Same with looser/loser and affect/effect.
And then/than ! How the hell does that happen ? I can see looser/loser and affect/effect, but then and than both sound different and have very different meanings.
The then/than mixup has actually replaced looser/loser and your/you're as my most annoying error, although that might be simply because I've become so used to people getting looser/loser and you're/you mixed up (in fact, I've actually hit the point how where seeing loser/looser and your/you're used _correctly_ grabs my attention more).
Also, SSDs are NOT expensive! A CF-to-IDE adapter costs $15, and a 2GB CF card costs about $30. Two gigabytes is more than enough to boot an OS and start a RAID. Don't waste your money on a 64GB CF card. The CF+RAID hybrid approach is the way to go.
I'm confused as to where the benefit is here. Given the extra people-time involved in your custom-build CF card setup, there's not going to be any cost-savings over just having the server ship from the factory preconfigured with two drives in RAID1 - and all the important data is on the "6TB RAID-6s", which I'm sure aren't SSD.
Amazingly, I think he answered your question before you even asked it when he said "I never have to worry about getting paged due to the inevitable mechanical failure of magnetic drives."
Yes, he does. All the *important* data on these systems is housed on "the 6TB RAID-6s on each server". I'm pretty sure they're not made out of CF drives.
Why, assuming that you have sufficient disk space (but since you are arguing for loads of ram, adding enough disk should not be an issue), would you insist on keeping data in ram, if the operating system can use the space to hold something that you are more likely to need.
Well the point is that if you *can't* keep all the stuff "you're likely to need" in RAM (ie: you're swapping (or paging, for the pedants)), you need more RAM.
With that in mind, I would very much like my OS to swap out any program that does not look like it will need to be in ram, if it means that more of the data I'm using can be in ram in return. So assuming that the algorithms used (in Windows - I know it is a stretch) are decent, you should indeed be able to avoid swapping by using enough ram - it might just be that the amount of ram you need is beyond even the large capacity of todays machines, and Windows might very well still insist on having _some_ swap, even if it should never be put to use.
All OSes these days will "pre-emptively" swap out "idle" RAM to disk, in case something loads up in the future that needs more RAM, to reduce the likelihood of thrashing. This, in and of itself, is not a bad thing. The badness happens when your system *must* swap because it simply doesn't have enough physical memory to keep everything you're working on in RAM - that's the point at which you need to go and get more physical RAM, and the point that most systems should be able to trivially reach today.
Defragmenting a drive that has many files with many folders on it after several weeks of use does make a difference. Try it. You might like it, Mikey.
I've been using Windows NT since 1996 and I've never seen any perceivable difference between a "fragmented" and "defragmented" drive outside of extreme examples and corner-case usage patterns.
This is indeed a mystery. Even back in the 1970's you could designate a device to use for the swap file and it was pre-extended. You even had the option to place it on the middle cylinders of a disk so it was, on average, faster to access.
That's because back in the 1970s getting enough real RAM to avoid swapping was difficult, not trivial.
If your machine is swapping, you need more RAM. Whether it's swapping to the inside, outside or middle of the disk completely and utterly misses the point that in typical use a modern machine simply shouldn't have any reason to swap.
Speaking of which, why does Windows still use a variable sized swap file?
So that when some rogue app chews up mountains of RAM, you don't hit a hard OS-out-memory situation.
I lock it down to 2x RAM or 4GB. Whichever is larger. I do not want fragmentation in the swap file. I'd prefer not to need one, but that's another story.
If your machine is swapping enough for this to be even the vaguest possibility of an actual problem, you need more RAM. From memory, Windows defaults the starting size of your swapfile to something like half the physical RAM in the machine. If you exceed - or even use a significant proportion of - this in anything except an extraordinary situation, it's almost a certainty you need more physical RAM.
And how about moving IE's temp files somewhere else? Okay, you can still set permissions on the folder, but get it out of the user's profile.
Huh ? Why wouldn't you put per-user temporary files in the user's space (quite possibly the only part of the entire system they can write to ?)
And I'm tired of seeing C:\WINDOWS\Temp
Temp directories do not belong in the OS directory.
Right. Because there's such a huge difference between /tmp and C:\Windows\Temp.
Yeah, I'm whining. But I spend 15 extra minutes just getting the directories and swap arranged correctly every time I set up someone's Windows machine.
"In line with my OCD" != "correctly".
If you want 100% uptime, it's important to have back up power for the cooling as well as the server systems themselves.
If you want 100% uptime, it's important not to have all your servers in the same physical location.
Clinton? Scum of the Earth, and I wouldn't let him within 50 yards of a female relative; [...]
So... You're saying you don't believe any of your female relatives are capable of making their own decisions ?
So 5 million is 200K per year - a nice income but hardly enough to finance an out of control rock and roll lifestyle.
If you can't live _very_ comfortably on US$200k/yr, income you will earn regardless of where you live, you don't deserve the money.
Often I can increase my holding by 20% in a month this way, or pocket 20% of my holdings and wind up rebuying the same amount of my original shares. I love it when the market moves up and down. That is how to make money.
Doesn't capital gains tax (or whatever they might call it where you are) and brokerage fees wipe out most of the benefit to doing this ?
[...] (and XP is from most accounts, the same kernel as 2K) [...]
You shouldn't rely on Slashdot for technical information about Windows.
Thing is, I take every reasonable step I can to protect my children from predators. If these, "social networking" sites aren't willing to show the same level of commitment to this that I have, then my only alternative is to block access to those sites.
The chances of your child falling victim to a "predator" they met on Facebook (or MySpace, or anywhere else) is so small as to be basically irrelevant compared to the chances of them falling victim to a "predator" they met through you, their parent.
but that only works at home....doesn't it? What about everywhere else they go?
Next time you have all your family and friends over for a party, look around. If your child is going to be abused, there's something like and 80% chance it'll be by one of those people and closer to a 100% chance that it will happen at your (or one of their) home.
You say that if I grab a copy of a song/book/poem/knitting-pattern/MS Office 3000 Plus Plus and then resell it at the flea market that is wrong.
But if I give a free copy to my buddy, that's not. Even though in both cases I'm causing for someone to get a copy without compensating the original releaser for it when he *explicitly* provides the goods for money.
In one case someone is giving money for the product, but not to the creator. In the other, they are not.
If someone is prepared to pay for the product, then they should be paying the creator, so that person (or persons) derives a benefit from their efforts. By stepping in between you are effectively "stealing" that money the purchaser would have been prepared to give to the creator.
*That* is why there is a distinction. It is a similar distinction that makes, for example, sneaking into a concert "wrong", but downloading the same music "ok" (at least IMHO).
(Most people instinctively know this, even if they've never thought it through.)
The fact that we can now duplicate it with negligible effort opens up the potential for us to benefit from his work without compensating him.
Well, then, maybe the poor darling will have to repeat that performance multiple times to earn his keep. You know, go to work every day, like the rest of us poor schmucks not riding the copyright gravy train have to do.
People who have produced a copyrighted work are given an extraordinary privilege. They are able to recreate and sell that work an infinite number of times, for (effectively) and indefinite period of time, without having to put in any meaningful additional effort. No other creators of goods, or providers of services, are able to do this. You are asking why they should no longer be granted this incredibly generous gift. I ask why should they have it in the first place.
And whether you charge or not for the copy, the fraud is the same: obtaining a benefit without compensating the originator.
It's not "fraud" (or theft) because the creator suffers no loss. You are trying to overlay principles dealing with physical property or provision of services to a concept that is neither. This is the same mistake copyright makes and the same reason it is broken by design.
If you would like a non-music example of the same situation, consider this: Say a financial advisor charges $500/hr for their time (he's very good). He is meeting with a client in a restaurant, and you just happen to be sitting near them. During their two-hour dinner, you overhear some investment advice [0] and decide to gamble some money on it being right. It is, and you make a large sum of money. Have you "defrauded" the financial advisor of $1000 ?
(The point here is that you've benefited from some product or service that you would normally have had to pay for, yet the person providing that good or service has suffered no from you doing so. The other important point is that "not making money" and "losing money" are two very different things, despite numerous attempts to conflate them.)
[0] Alternatively, you have a photographic memory and catch a glimpse of a list of stocks and whether to buy or sell them.
Then perhaps fraud is not the best word. But how would you describe the act of benefiting from something that was made expressly available in return for money but was obtained without honoring the paying end of the bargain?
Cold harsh reality. Indeed, the ease with which one can do this - even involuntarily (got a photographic memory ? heard a tune on the radio and can't get it out of your head ?) - simply helps to indicate the stupidity of the whole system.
The reason the "crime" is "hard to pin down" is because copyright is such an arbitrary and artificial law. Unlike, say, the basic principles behind property law it has _zero_ basis in the real world. It is a made-up concept designed a few hundred years ago to manipulate markets into working with a good that has infinite supply.
and by your logic the drinking age should be lower as more people drink under the age of 18/19, speeding should be legal and marijuana should be legal since more people have smoked it.
Exactly. Did you have a point ?
The usual fallacious argument. I'm not a fan of the RIAA's *tactics*, but the fact that a whole lot of people break the law doesn't make it OK, [...]
Uh, yes, yes it does. In fact, if "a whole lot of people" break a law, that's prima facie evidence that the law is, in some way, flawed and should either be struck from the books or reimplemented.
[...] and that seems to be the crux of your argument.
The crux of your argument seems to be the law is unchanging, infallible and objective. Given that it is none of these things, I'd say your argument is baseless.
If you had the power, what would you change about copyright law?
* Make it an opt-in system like patents.
* Link the copyright term to the "popularity" of a work so that popular works go out of copyright sooner.
* Legalise non-profit copyright violations.