Someone who downloads and uses digital "intellectual property" (a term invented when they stopped making works of art) does not misappropriate one of the publisher's physical products. That product is still in a store ready to be purchased. However, the person is "leeching" the service that consuming the product is, without having paid the rights holders for that privilege.
The way things are going now there might be less of a penalty for someone who gets caught actually stealing CD/DVDs than downloading the "content"...
Violations of copyright are closer to taking a bus ride without paying the fare.
Even that analogy dosn't quite work. Since there is a marginal per passenger cost to the bus company. Whereas someone downloading "intellectual property" does not pass on any cost to the normal distribution channels.
Where the software companies are really loosing money is their continued investments in copy protection and in funding organizations such as the BSA. Copy protection will NEVER work in ANY form.
It's not like this hasn't happened before all sorts of elaborate copy protection was tried on computer games 20 years ago.
You cannot release data into the wild and expect it to be secure, EVER! Someone will always be able to reverse engineer the copy protection. Companies waste vasts amount of coding time trying to put in more secure copy protection that only gets hacked the day it's released into the wild! It's a senseless waste of time and they would make more profit of each coding project if they dropped copy protection from the code.
You even end up with people (and companies) buying software, but acually using the "pirate" version of the software.
The primary purpose of a corporation is the shield the owners from liability and responsibility.
The original concept idea was to encourage people to put money into business, because if it failed the owners would not be liable for any debts it left. Your liability was limited to however much you had put in.
Individuals working for a corporation are still responsible for any criminal offenses they commit or conspire to commit.
Even if the people involved are the owners their limited liability for debts was never intended as a shield for criminal behaviour.
The New York State legislature acutally did this. After 9/11 There was a 1/4 percent increase in the state's sales tax. I was shocked when a couple of years later when the tax went back down 1/4 percent.
It really dosn't say a lot for governments when people are shocked when things work sensibly!
Laws produced in response to particular catastrophic events are generally some of the worst legal constructs we have, and are almost always plagued with unintended consequences.
They may not actually be unintended. Since these events can be used as excuses to pass all sorts of things.
While to me this seems like it ought to be obvious (using the legal system to solve or react to a particular social problem is like using a Minuteman III to kill a fly),
Or possibly a cockroach, which has a reasonable change of surviving...
Congress too often falls into the trap of just "doing something" because they want to justify their paychecks,
Even to the point of passing legislation they havn't actually even bothered to read. Pity nobody has though to insert "anyone voting for this consents to be summarily executed" into one of these bills.
It'd be more like a company raised its prices because its suppliers were charging them more, then decided to keep them at that level when it discovered that the market would bear that price even after its suppliers' prices dropped again.
The oil companies have been doing this for a long time. If the price of oil goes up the price of oil products tends to go up quickly, but if the price goes down the excuse tends to be "the stuff your putting in your car is made from oil we bought a few months back"...
Society does. That's how the world works. The school only gets involved if there is a complaint (and I would imagine a number of complaints or a significant complaint). Hence, *society* external to the school decides on what is offensive. The school mediates.
Since the whatever happened outside school why should the school automatically have standing as mediator?
Again, I'm assuming there are rational people in charge at the school and care not about "Jimmy said the F-word on myspace!", but more serious issues like physical threats or mental abuse.
Rational people would tend to think that actual threats are something more appropriate to law enforcement.
The school's ability to discipline my child begins at the school door
Or possibly when they board a school bus
and ends at the end of an extracirricular activity. Anything else had better be directly related to the school and its operations. Hint: Reckless driving on the way to and from school is my problem, not the school's.
Probably a combination of your child's and yours. If your child is driving he or she will be expected to comply with all relevent traffic laws, but if they are obviously unable to drive competently people will want to know why you provided them with access to a car.
It is also vital for security: people need to think up ways these things can be done, or else it will be impossible to defend against them. For people to be effective security researchers, or detectives, or sysadmins, they need to spend years contemplating this sort of thing. Prohibiting kids from discussing it is merely going to ensure that the next generation will not include anybody who is suitable to work in that sort of industry.
Or even simply at the level of keeping burglars out of their homes and workplaces. Fiction involving crime (and crime solving) is very popular too, but most people who write such novels or plays are not criminals. Though they might well have all sorts of potentially suspicious notes as source material for their writing.
Such is the fatal flaw of zero tollerance policies. They are blanket policies without context.
Including potentially missing the context of the policy itself. IIRC the original idea was "zero tolerance" of corrupt police officers, which is a recognition of the concept of "high crime".
What constitutes "underage" is a variable. Or is the school trying to claim that not only do their rules apply to students outside the school grounds but also if the student were to travel to Canada, Mexico or even an "Indian Reservation".
You post illegal stuff online, its still free speech, but its the same as walking into a police station and shouting that you committed crime x, y and z.
Actually it's more like stating this on a note mixed with a whole set of other notes.
Because for many people schools aren't about education, they are about control. Obviously not everybody feels this way, but apparently there are enough that do for us to see these news stories every week. Companies, churches, and the government demonstrate exactly the same tendencies, but they are kept in check by adults who won't put up with that crap.
At least some of the time they won't. It also helps if the people getting the short end of the stick have an existing advocacy group.
This is a perversion of what schools should actually be focusing on. Why not focus on teaching students how to perform basic life skills, like manage credit, get a bank account, balance a checkbook, and spot shady deals when trying to buy a car?
The latter might end up being a transferable skill which also enabled students to spot when an authority figure is trying to tell them something not entirely true. Or, even worst, how to spot shady election promises:)
As was stated by the school district, but amazingly missing from the post, the school is not been seeking out the information.
Which would be a complete waste of resources.
They simply stated that if they posted something stupid, say, like pictures of themselves smoking, drinking, and doing drugs, that that information can be used against them per the Code of Conduct of the school district.
Since these examples involve breaking the law then the relevent people are law enforcement. Or does the school district want to set up what amount to "kangaroo courts"?
In other words, if the 'cool kids' piss-off / pick-on somebody, the pickee just might nark on them.
Or make up an accusation. Which is why proper criminal courts have standards of evidence.
Perhaps every kid in the school should be issued a copy of '1984', and the Declaration of Independence at the start of the next year.
Maybe they could get a "two for one" Orwell deal and toss in "Animal Farm" as well.
I'm sure that the school has the right to read students' public blogs,
Don't they have better things to do with their money. e.g. buying text books...
but I doubt that they have the legal authority to punnish them for saying silly things on them (unless they're talking about how to cheat on exams -- and even then...).
What would happen were the school to somehow get their hands on a student's diary?
Important context missing from summary: students have to submit to this as a pledge, and it's compulsory for all students wishing to participate in extra curricular activities.
Thus this could have the effect of disuading students from taking part in such activities. With the likes of sports teams the school can have a very big interest in which students can take part.
How do you justify marking up your "must see tv ads" for those crap shows that you slip between the good shows, if it can be proven that people watch the good shows on a completely different day, and don't watch the crap shows at all?
Even if these recordings skip the ads advertisers are still likely to be interested in these kind of figures...
"Some people still don't get Columbine. The lesson there is trying to suppress issues and make them go away quietly is exactly the wrong thing to do. It makes things worse. The great thing is that lots of people did learn the lesson and started to listen to kids who didn't think everything was just perfect in their schools.
This is a rather bigger issue than just schools in the US. There are plenty of places (including the USA) where it is virtually impossible for certain issues to be discussed. Even some where not beliving some offical version of events is against the law.
I was expelled from an Illinois public school for an online speech related issue as well. I set up a web (cgi) based proxy at home, and then informed students at school that it could be used to get around the school filter's censorship of the web.
I don't see the similarity here. You did something in school which was against the rules. Would you expect the school not to object if you flyposted noticeboards or set up a market stall on school grounds? Whereas in this case the student did something, perfectly legal, outside school which upset someone.
How would putting the candidates into the Big Brother house stop people being elected on ability to win Big Brother?
It makes in obvious that the thing really is a publicity contest. Also you get a wider range of candidates and to see them 24 hours a day away from "advisors".
General public review of legistlation is an interesting idea, it would probably fail on the other major flaw in democracy, which is that most people are stupid.
Sometimes stupid people are better at spotting nonsense than "smart" people.
The "War on (some) Terror" provides a good excuse.
Remember a while back, there was a/. story on reclassification of a bunch of documents that had been accessible to the public? Some of these were CIA documents going back to the Korean War. There is absolutely no justification for this, except we know this stuff and we don't want you to.
There's the possibility of embarrasment for people still involved in government. In some ways it's a bit like extending copyright terms on works which already exist.
Remember, that ENTIRE STORY had been redacted, and remained so until after a court forced the FBI to reveal what the page contained. Not only did the federal government spend American tax dollars collecting the story, they spent money, time, and legal resources depending their goal of keeping it secret.
Which also makes you wonder what else they might be up to, instead of doing their actual job.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone who downloads and uses digital "intellectual property" (a term invented when they stopped making works of art) does not misappropriate one of the publisher's physical products. That product is still in a store ready to be purchased. However, the person is "leeching" the service that consuming the product is, without having paid the rights holders for that privilege.
The way things are going now there might be less of a penalty for someone who gets caught actually stealing CD/DVDs than downloading the "content"...
Violations of copyright are closer to taking a bus ride without paying the fare.
Even that analogy dosn't quite work. Since there is a marginal per passenger cost to the bus company. Whereas someone downloading "intellectual property" does not pass on any cost to the normal distribution channels.
Where the software companies are really loosing money is their continued investments in copy protection and in funding organizations such as the BSA. Copy protection will NEVER work in ANY form.
It's not like this hasn't happened before all sorts of elaborate copy protection was tried on computer games 20 years ago.
You cannot release data into the wild and expect it to be secure, EVER! Someone will always be able to reverse engineer the copy protection. Companies waste vasts amount of coding time trying to put in more secure copy protection that only gets hacked the day it's released into the wild! It's a senseless waste of time and they would make more profit of each coding project if they dropped copy protection from the code.
You even end up with people (and companies) buying software, but acually using the "pirate" version of the software.
The primary purpose of a corporation is the shield the owners from liability and responsibility.
The original concept idea was to encourage people to put money into business, because if it failed the owners would not be liable for any debts it left. Your liability was limited to however much you had put in.
Individuals working for a corporation are still responsible for any criminal offenses they commit or conspire to commit.
Even if the people involved are the owners their limited liability for debts was never intended as a shield for criminal behaviour.
The New York State legislature acutally did this. After 9/11 There was a 1/4 percent increase in the state's sales tax. I was shocked when a couple of years later when the tax went back down 1/4 percent.
It really dosn't say a lot for governments when people are shocked when things work sensibly!
Laws produced in response to particular catastrophic events are generally some of the worst legal constructs we have, and are almost always plagued with unintended consequences.
They may not actually be unintended. Since these events can be used as excuses to pass all sorts of things.
While to me this seems like it ought to be obvious (using the legal system to solve or react to a particular social problem is like using a Minuteman III to kill a fly),
Or possibly a cockroach, which has a reasonable change of surviving...
Congress too often falls into the trap of just "doing something" because they want to justify their paychecks,
Even to the point of passing legislation they havn't actually even bothered to read. Pity nobody has though to insert "anyone voting for this consents to be summarily executed" into one of these bills.
It'd be more like a company raised its prices because its suppliers were charging them more, then decided to keep them at that level when it discovered that the market would bear that price even after its suppliers' prices dropped again.
The oil companies have been doing this for a long time. If the price of oil goes up the price of oil products tends to go up quickly, but if the price goes down the excuse tends to be "the stuff your putting in your car is made from oil we bought a few months back"...
Cuba was the only Spanish colony in the area that we didn't take over and declare a U.S. Territory, after the original war's end.
To "compensate" for that the US decided to do that to a neutral country in the Pacific...
So we have to go back, and make democracy safe from exploding cigars.
The US has been trying and failing for quite a while.
Society does. That's how the world works. The school only gets involved if there is a complaint (and I would imagine a number of complaints or a significant complaint). Hence, *society* external to the school decides on what is offensive. The school mediates.
Since the whatever happened outside school why should the school automatically have standing as mediator?
Again, I'm assuming there are rational people in charge at the school and care not about "Jimmy said the F-word on myspace!", but more serious issues like physical threats or mental abuse.
Rational people would tend to think that actual threats are something more appropriate to law enforcement.
The school's ability to discipline my child begins at the school door
Or possibly when they board a school bus
and ends at the end of an extracirricular activity. Anything else had better be directly related to the school and its operations. Hint: Reckless driving on the way to and from school is my problem, not the school's.
Probably a combination of your child's and yours. If your child is driving he or she will be expected to comply with all relevent traffic laws, but if they are obviously unable to drive competently people will want to know why you provided them with access to a car.
It is also vital for security: people need to think up ways these things can be done, or else it will be impossible to defend against them. For people to be effective security researchers, or detectives, or sysadmins, they need to spend years contemplating this sort of thing. Prohibiting kids from discussing it is merely going to ensure that the next generation will not include anybody who is suitable to work in that sort of industry.
Or even simply at the level of keeping burglars out of their homes and workplaces.
Fiction involving crime (and crime solving) is very popular too, but most people who write such novels or plays are not criminals. Though they might well have all sorts of potentially suspicious notes as source material for their writing.
Such is the fatal flaw of zero tollerance policies. They are blanket policies without context.
Including potentially missing the context of the policy itself. IIRC the original idea was "zero tolerance" of corrupt police officers, which is a recognition of the concept of "high crime".
Underage drinking is illegal.
What constitutes "underage" is a variable. Or is the school trying to claim that not only do their rules apply to students outside the school grounds but also if the student were to travel to Canada, Mexico or even an "Indian Reservation".
You post illegal stuff online, its still free speech, but its the same as walking into a police station and shouting that you committed crime x, y and z.
Actually it's more like stating this on a note mixed with a whole set of other notes.
Because for many people schools aren't about education, they are about control. Obviously not everybody feels this way, but apparently there are enough that do for us to see these news stories every week. Companies, churches, and the government demonstrate exactly the same tendencies, but they are kept in check by adults who won't put up with that crap.
At least some of the time they won't. It also helps if the people getting the short end of the stick have an existing advocacy group.
This is a perversion of what schools should actually be focusing on. Why not focus on teaching students how to perform basic life skills, like manage credit, get a bank account, balance a checkbook, and spot shady deals when trying to buy a car?
:)
The latter might end up being a transferable skill which also enabled students to spot when an authority figure is trying to tell them something not entirely true. Or, even worst, how to spot shady election promises
As was stated by the school district, but amazingly missing from the post, the school is not been seeking out the information.
Which would be a complete waste of resources.
They simply stated that if they posted something stupid, say, like pictures of themselves smoking, drinking, and doing drugs, that that information can be used against them per the Code of Conduct of the school district.
Since these examples involve breaking the law then the relevent people are law enforcement. Or does the school district want to set up what amount to "kangaroo courts"?
In other words, if the 'cool kids' piss-off / pick-on somebody, the pickee just might nark on them.
Or make up an accusation. Which is why proper criminal courts have standards of evidence.
Perhaps every kid in the school should be issued a copy of '1984', and the Declaration of Independence at the start of the next year.
Maybe they could get a "two for one" Orwell deal and toss in "Animal Farm" as well.
I'm sure that the school has the right to read students' public blogs,
Don't they have better things to do with their money. e.g. buying text books...
but I doubt that they have the legal authority to punnish them for saying silly things on them (unless they're talking about how to cheat on exams -- and even then...).
What would happen were the school to somehow get their hands on a student's diary?
Important context missing from summary: students have to submit to this as a pledge, and it's compulsory for all students wishing to participate in extra curricular activities.
Thus this could have the effect of disuading students from taking part in such activities. With the likes of sports teams the school can have a very big interest in which students can take part.
How do you justify marking up your "must see tv ads" for those crap shows that you slip between the good shows, if it can be proven that people watch the good shows on a completely different day, and don't watch the crap shows at all?
Even if these recordings skip the ads advertisers are still likely to be interested in these kind of figures...
"Some people still don't get Columbine. The lesson there is trying to suppress issues and make them go away quietly is exactly the wrong thing to do. It makes things worse. The great thing is that lots of people did learn the lesson and started to listen to kids who didn't think everything was just perfect in their schools.
This is a rather bigger issue than just schools in the US.
There are plenty of places (including the USA) where it is virtually impossible for certain issues to be discussed. Even some where not beliving some offical version of events is against the law.
I was expelled from an Illinois public school for an online speech related issue as well. I set up a web (cgi) based proxy at home, and then informed students at school that it could be used to get around the school filter's censorship of the web.
I don't see the similarity here. You did something in school which was against the rules. Would you expect the school not to object if you flyposted noticeboards or set up a market stall on school grounds?
Whereas in this case the student did something, perfectly legal, outside school which upset someone.
When I first saw the headline, I actually thought that they were going to edit it to make it better.
Or include extras and deleted scenes...
How would putting the candidates into the Big Brother house stop people being elected on ability to win Big Brother?
It makes in obvious that the thing really is a publicity contest. Also you get a wider range of candidates and to see them 24 hours a day away from "advisors".
General public review of legistlation is an interesting idea, it would probably fail on the other major flaw in democracy, which is that most people are stupid.
Sometimes stupid people are better at spotting nonsense than "smart" people.
And I do think it's worse now.
/. story on reclassification of a bunch of documents that had been accessible to the public? Some of these were CIA documents going back to the Korean War. There is absolutely no justification for this, except we know this stuff and we don't want you to.
The "War on (some) Terror" provides a good excuse.
Remember a while back, there was a
There's the possibility of embarrasment for people still involved in government. In some ways it's a bit like extending copyright terms on works which already exist.
Remember, that ENTIRE STORY had been redacted, and remained so until after a court forced the FBI to reveal what the page contained. Not only did the federal government spend American tax dollars collecting the story, they spent money, time, and legal resources depending their goal of keeping it secret.
Which also makes you wonder what else they might be up to, instead of doing their actual job.