It has only been in the past few hundred years that duplication of art has become easy. In the past, prevention of theft... or infringement, if you prefer... was simple
It might help if you understood the difference between theft and copyright infringement. Theft relates to taking something, the most common anti-theft approach with artwork is making it non portable. Both portable and non portable artwork dates from thge neolithic.
few people had the means to duplicate works... whether the limiting factor was a medium to duplicate it on, educational level, or financial. Now, all but the most poor can duplicate a work of art and distribute it worldwide.
Something which previously required skilled (and expensive) human labour can now be done by a machine. However it still requires human skill to create the original.
Less specifically, the world of 1000 A.D. and the world of today are vastly different places.
People from 1,000 years ago would probably question the sanity of the idea of copyright. The idea of restricting the use of technologies which enabled rapid copying and distribution of information would be laughable to peoples such as the Moors.
You're attempting to apply modern necessities to an ancient culture, and it just does not work. Using the same general logic, one might say that standards in food and medicine are worthless because obviously people could operate without them in the past.
Standards of food and medicine are hardly universal now. Nor are they modern ideas. Copyright, however, is something unique to recent history.
Attention all folks who are against copyright protection! There is something I would like you to do.
Please write a book that will become wildly popular.
How exactly do you do this?
Then publish that book and waive all copyright protections. It might take a year to write that book with no income coming in but that would be a small price to pay to make your point.
Poor people have written books which have become best sellers. One of the biggest problems they can encounter is getting published in the first place. For every JK Rowling there are probably uncounted authors who never get published at all.
Copyright is not good. Copyright is all fucked up and so is the patent system. Both of these systems have grown way, way out of control. The whole notion of intellectual property is bankrupt.
The third form of "IP, that of "trademarks" has also been broken.
While there may have been some merits to copyrights and patents in the nineteenth century, the original intentions of enhancing and growing the public domain has long since been lost.
Most critial the current way these are applied is actually getting in the way of innovation. Maybe what is needed is a "back to basics" approach.
Copyright does a whole lot more than "punish teenagers". Copyright is a good thing. There would be a lot fewer creative things for us to enjoy if copyright law didn't exist -- and don't pretend that there would be just as much good free stuff.
Actually we have little way of knowing what effect reducing, even abolishing, copyright would do. It isn't simply a case that the only alternative to the status quo is no copyright. Certainly it does appear to be the case that current copyright laws are actually harmful to the creativity they are ment to produce. Other alternatives include drastically shorter copyright terms, having to pay a fee to keep something in copyright, starting "the clock" at first publication, allowing "derived works", legally separating content and media...
The Attorney General was arrested today. According to the FBI, he is alleged to have donated to terrorists amounts the same size as filesharers ($0). A high-ranking official in the FBI was quoted as saying "Yeah, well, he donated as much as people he accused, and there's just this really nice feeling involved in arresting your boss."
Just hope noone asks "So when are you going to round up Congress?"
How can you become Attorney General without understanding law? Don't lawyers get disbarred for making legal statements like that which are blatantly false?
Lawyers may do. But this man is a politican, here telling lies appears to be part of the job description.
It doesn't matter if it can be used against the "enemy," e.g. Sony. Sony and their ilk will never be prosecuted under this kind of law, because they can 1) fight back and 2) provide large "donations" to those in power.
More to the point the fiction of a corporation being a "person" completly breaks down when it comes to criminal law. Whereas a real person can be held in custody awaiting trial and has to appear in court in person. A corporation can carry on "business as usual" even whilst their trial is pending or ongoing.
Remember - the law is a neutral weapon - much like a landmind.
Landmine victims are hardly a random group
It can be used against friend and foe alike.
Just because a law is neutral on paper dosn't mean it's application will be in any way neutral.
The proposed law adds a new weapon against someone who violate Linux' EULA - and now makes it a criminal action to even try to violate it.
Except that Linux dosn't have an EULA. Assuming you mean "copyright infringement" how will having criminal penalties help against the likes of SCO. Corporate "people" tend to have even less to fear from criminal law than civil law. When was the last time you saw the police sticking a corporation in the cells?
The lot of us who don't have a problem with driving 85mph on the freeway aren't forming groups to lobby congress to raise the speed limits and passing them dirty money.
Probably because most of these people actually have lives and don't have spare cash to throw around.
Please, go take a look at the picture of the guy who is promoting this. He's a chump. http://www.usdoj.gov/ag/aggonzalesbio.html
I mean, look at the website. It looks like it was designed by Judge Judy. Are you fucking kidding me? Is this a gameshow?
Maybe the MPAA and RIAA should appear on Judge Judy. At least they'd be providing entertainment in the process:)
Basically what they're saying is, "Anything you can get sued for, we can also put you in jail for." They're erasing the line between civil and criminal law. Where the hell does this end?
With an amount of blood proportional to the length of time it goes on for.
The technology available and the world itself were quite different when copyright was originally conceived and implemented,
The original idea of copyright was state control of what could (and could not) be printed. The idea that copyright would encourage publication is more recent. Just so happens that this was the popular view at the time of the US UDI.
Lack of copyright law makes sense to the greedy and lazy. Copyright law makes sense to those members of society who value creativity, art, and music.
In which case you wouldn't expect any such societies to have existed prior to the invention of copyright. i.e. societies which value creativity, art, music, etc should only exist in the last few hundred years if the existiance of copyright is essential. Whereas such societies can be found throughout history (and pre-history).
I hear a lot about how the system is "broken", and little to nothing about what should replace it, other than nonsense about how book authors should spend their time giving concerts or consulting. Or that, as in the dark ages, they waste their time wandering about seeking patrons for their works.
But you are quite happy with the public, including people yet to be born acting as your "patron".
The founding fathers recognized those facts, and as such provided means and incentives for them to do so.
They wanted copyright for a limited time and made it optional.
That's actually touching on the real issue, but I couldn't find any place where it was addressed more directly in the following posts. BitTorrent and related technologies have broken the copyright system, and no number of draconian legal bandaids are going to fix it.
More that they have shown that it is broken. The actual breakage has been happening for quite a while.
The central notion of copyright is that the act of making copies was difficult, and therefore served as a kind of chokepoint to control distribution and make sure someone got paid.
Making copies had been becoming easier for the last several decades. What is failing is the business model of the third party copier and distributer.
The copyright premise of difficult copying is totally broken. Staying with BitTorrent as an example, it was trival to distribute thousands of 75 MB copies of OpenOffice 2 in a few days. It could have been millions, and it would have made no difference from the usage perspective.
What has happened more recently is that distribution has become easier. With distance ceasing to become a major factor, of either time or cost. The way in which this affects the RIAA and the MPAA is that they have traditionally chopped up their markets by geography. Something which customers will no longer put up with.
Why bother worrying about that?? Just make friends with all parties that are likely to be elected.
You still need to be careful. Any politican who will take your money is also likely to be dishonest enough to not stay bought if it comes down to a choice between your cause and their neck.
If you need time to crack the hard drive YOU FUCKING TAKE THE HARD DRIVE!.
Even better you take a copy of the drive without them knowing you have done so.
Why do you need to hold the person for 90 days when you can simply take his hard drive and hold it for as long as you want. Look at the Scott Peterson case. They came and took his car, and pretty much emptied his house and held it for over a year while he was awaiting trial.
If you can arrest all of the people involved then this is likely to work. If the people you intend arresting are conspiring with others who you can't identify then arresting those you know about is the best way of tipping off the others.
See how easy that is. Arrest the guy, charge him with conspiracy to commit crimes, deny bail, get a warrant, hold him in jail, take all his stuff and take your time combing through it.
Unless you know all of the people who are conspiring arresting any of them is potentially a bad idea.
Unfortunately, for law enforcement etc, my entire home folder is now encrypted with AES128 encryption. Yep, all my email, all my documents, all my application preferences, even my entire MP3 music library (except that I went to lengths to not have this encrypted by symlinking it to somewhere else) is now AES128 encrypted. With a strong passphrase. It's really that easy.
One point about encryption is that you should encrypt everything. Otherwise you are saying to any evesdropper "A is important, B is trivial".
and it's crucial the original suspect isn't on the streets calling up all his buddies telling them to dump their data and run.
That the suspect is not doing the things they normally do is also communicating that something is up. The absense of "normal communication" can be just as effective as an "alarm signal".
Say you had a cell of truly bad guys,professional and dedicated bad guys,
Which is the kind of conspiracy theory those in authority like to push.
and the cops nab one of them. The other guys in the cell are going to notice that one of their compatriots is now missing.
How long is it going to take them to notice this.
They will assume he has been captured (they have no choice, they have to assume the worst because of the hard ball nature of the business they are in),
That this person is no longer answering his/her phone/emails in the usual way is confirmation that something is wrong. Police arriving at that person's house is an even bigger clue...
and they will immediately move locale and switch to some plan B.
Or they might use ad-hoc plan C, which is unknown to the absent member(s). Worst case senario is that the arrest actually triggers a terrorist attack. Far more useful than being able to hold suspects for X days would be better resourcing and training of CID officers...
Oh no, even better than that: Just because they suspect you maybe will.
Or because they need to increase the number of detentions to show they are "doing something". The other related problem is that such powers do not tend to get applied even handedly. As shown with the previous round of "anti-terror" internment, no control orders were placed against an anti-abortion group who put out a "press release" threatening to kill people.
You have software developers who seem not to be aware of the basic architecture of the platform they develop for.
They develop on single user standalone machines as "administrator". If you are lucky they might consider issues like "What should the program do if the registry keys it expects to be in HKLU are absent?" or "How to handle if %USERPROFILE%\Application Data\%PROGRAM% isn't there".
Slashdot Mirror
It has only been in the past few hundred years that duplication of art has become easy. In the past, prevention of theft... or infringement, if you prefer... was simple
It might help if you understood the difference between theft and copyright infringement. Theft relates to taking something, the most common anti-theft approach with artwork is making it non portable. Both portable and non portable artwork dates from thge neolithic.
few people had the means to duplicate works... whether the limiting factor was a medium to duplicate it on, educational level, or financial. Now, all but the most poor can duplicate a work of art and distribute it worldwide.
Something which previously required skilled (and expensive) human labour can now be done by a machine. However it still requires human skill to create the original.
Less specifically, the world of 1000 A.D. and the world of today are vastly different places.
People from 1,000 years ago would probably question the sanity of the idea of copyright. The idea of restricting the use of technologies which enabled rapid copying and distribution of information would be laughable to peoples such as the Moors.
You're attempting to apply modern necessities to an ancient culture, and it just does not work. Using the same general logic, one might say that standards in food and medicine are worthless because obviously people could operate without them in the past.
Standards of food and medicine are hardly universal now. Nor are they modern ideas. Copyright, however, is something unique to recent history.
You're confusing censorship and prosecution with copyright.
The original purpose of copyright was censorship. The concept wasn't invented for the US Constitution, you know...
Attention all folks who are against copyright protection! There is something I would like you to do.
Please write a book that will become wildly popular.
How exactly do you do this?
Then publish that book and waive all copyright protections. It might take a year to write that book with no income coming in but that would be a small price to pay to make your point.
Poor people have written books which have become best sellers. One of the biggest problems they can encounter is getting published in the first place. For every JK Rowling there are probably uncounted authors who never get published at all.
Copyright is not good. Copyright is all fucked up and so is the patent system. Both of these systems have grown way, way out of control. The whole notion of intellectual property is bankrupt.
The third form of "IP, that of "trademarks" has also been broken.
While there may have been some merits to copyrights and patents in the nineteenth century, the original intentions of enhancing and growing the public domain has long since been lost.
Most critial the current way these are applied is actually getting in the way of innovation.
Maybe what is needed is a "back to basics" approach.
Copyright does a whole lot more than "punish teenagers". Copyright is a good thing. There would be a lot fewer creative things for us to enjoy if copyright law didn't exist -- and don't pretend that there would be just as much good free stuff.
Actually we have little way of knowing what effect reducing, even abolishing, copyright would do. It isn't simply a case that the only alternative to the status quo is no copyright. Certainly it does appear to be the case that current copyright laws are actually harmful to the creativity they are ment to produce.
Other alternatives include drastically shorter copyright terms, having to pay a fee to keep something in copyright, starting "the clock" at first publication, allowing "derived works", legally separating content and media...
The Attorney General was arrested today. According to the FBI, he is alleged to have donated to terrorists amounts the same size as filesharers ($0). A high-ranking official in the FBI was quoted as saying "Yeah, well, he donated as much as people he accused, and there's just this really nice feeling involved in arresting your boss."
Just hope noone asks "So when are you going to round up Congress?"
How can you become Attorney General without understanding law? Don't lawyers get disbarred for making legal statements like that which are blatantly false?
Lawyers may do. But this man is a politican, here telling lies appears to be part of the job description.
It doesn't matter if it can be used against the "enemy," e.g. Sony. Sony and their ilk will never be prosecuted under this kind of law, because they can 1) fight back and 2) provide large "donations" to those in power.
More to the point the fiction of a corporation being a "person" completly breaks down when it comes to criminal law. Whereas a real person can be held in custody awaiting trial and has to appear in court in person. A corporation can carry on "business as usual" even whilst their trial is pending or ongoing.
Remember - the law is a neutral weapon - much like a landmind.
Landmine victims are hardly a random group
It can be used against friend and foe alike.
Just because a law is neutral on paper dosn't mean it's application will be in any way neutral.
The proposed law adds a new weapon against someone who violate Linux' EULA - and now makes it a criminal action to even try to violate it.
Except that Linux dosn't have an EULA.
Assuming you mean "copyright infringement" how will having criminal penalties help against the likes of SCO. Corporate "people" tend to have even less to fear from criminal law than civil law. When was the last time you saw the police sticking a corporation in the cells?
The lot of us who don't have a problem with driving 85mph on the freeway aren't forming groups to lobby congress to raise the speed limits and passing them dirty money.
:)
Probably because most of these people actually have lives and don't have spare cash to throw around.
Please, go take a look at the picture of the guy who is promoting this. He's a chump. http://www.usdoj.gov/ag/aggonzalesbio.html I mean, look at the website. It looks like it was designed by Judge Judy. Are you fucking kidding me? Is this a gameshow?
Maybe the MPAA and RIAA should appear on Judge Judy. At least they'd be providing entertainment in the process
Then our society will be divided into two classes: (1) those in jail, and (2) those who aren't in jail yet.
There is also class three. "Those who really should be in jail, but are more or less immune from winding up there".
Basically what they're saying is, "Anything you can get sued for, we can also put you in jail for." They're erasing the line between civil and criminal law. Where the hell does this end?
With an amount of blood proportional to the length of time it goes on for.
The technology available and the world itself were quite different when copyright was originally conceived and implemented,
The original idea of copyright was state control of what could (and could not) be printed.
The idea that copyright would encourage publication is more recent. Just so happens that this was the popular view at the time of the US UDI.
Lack of copyright law makes sense to the greedy and lazy. Copyright law makes sense to those members of society who value creativity, art, and music.
In which case you wouldn't expect any such societies to have existed prior to the invention of copyright. i.e. societies which value creativity, art, music, etc should only exist in the last few hundred years if the existiance of copyright is essential. Whereas such societies can be found throughout history (and pre-history).
I hear a lot about how the system is "broken", and little to nothing about what should replace it, other than nonsense about how book authors should spend their time giving concerts or consulting. Or that, as in the dark ages, they waste their time wandering about seeking patrons for their works.
But you are quite happy with the public, including people yet to be born acting as your "patron".
The founding fathers recognized those facts, and as such provided means and incentives for them to do so.
They wanted copyright for a limited time and made it optional.
That's actually touching on the real issue, but I couldn't find any place where it was addressed more directly in the following posts. BitTorrent and related technologies have broken the copyright system, and no number of draconian legal bandaids are going to fix it.
More that they have shown that it is broken. The actual breakage has been happening for quite a while.
The central notion of copyright is that the act of making copies was difficult, and therefore served as a kind of chokepoint to control distribution and make sure someone got paid.
Making copies had been becoming easier for the last several decades. What is failing is the business model of the third party copier and distributer.
The copyright premise of difficult copying is totally broken. Staying with BitTorrent as an example, it was trival to distribute thousands of 75 MB copies of OpenOffice 2 in a few days. It could have been millions, and it would have made no difference from the usage perspective.
What has happened more recently is that distribution has become easier. With distance ceasing to become a major factor, of either time or cost.
The way in which this affects the RIAA and the MPAA is that they have traditionally chopped up their markets by geography. Something which customers will no longer put up with.
I kind of think there must be something to this, because David-vs-Goliath cases always result in significant bad press for Goliath.
As well as giving "David" lots of free publicity. People who would never have even heard of this woman are now reading her website.
Not to mention their second opinion law firm:
Takeda, Monet, and Runne.
Or the people they contact whenever they need some construction work doing: Bodgit & Scarper Master Builders
Why bother worrying about that?? Just make friends with all parties that are likely to be elected.
You still need to be careful. Any politican who will take your money is also likely to be dishonest enough to not stay bought if it comes down to a choice between your cause and their neck.
If you need time to crack the hard drive YOU FUCKING TAKE THE HARD DRIVE!.
Even better you take a copy of the drive without them knowing you have done so.
Why do you need to hold the person for 90 days when you can simply take his hard drive and hold it for as long as you want. Look at the Scott Peterson case. They came and took his car, and pretty much emptied his house and held it for over a year while he was awaiting trial.
If you can arrest all of the people involved then this is likely to work. If the people you intend arresting are conspiring with others who you can't identify then arresting those you know about is the best way of tipping off the others.
See how easy that is. Arrest the guy, charge him with conspiracy to commit crimes, deny bail, get a warrant, hold him in jail, take all his stuff and take your time combing through it.
Unless you know all of the people who are conspiring arresting any of them is potentially a bad idea.
Unfortunately, for law enforcement etc, my entire home folder is now encrypted with AES128 encryption. Yep, all my email, all my documents, all my application preferences, even my entire MP3 music library (except that I went to lengths to not have this encrypted by symlinking it to somewhere else) is now AES128 encrypted. With a strong passphrase. It's really that easy.
One point about encryption is that you should encrypt everything. Otherwise you are saying to any evesdropper "A is important, B is trivial".
and it's crucial the original suspect isn't on the streets calling up all his buddies telling them to dump their data and run.
That the suspect is not doing the things they normally do is also communicating that something is up. The absense of "normal communication" can be just as effective as an "alarm signal".
Say you had a cell of truly bad guys,professional and dedicated bad guys,
Which is the kind of conspiracy theory those in authority like to push.
and the cops nab one of them. The other guys in the cell are going to notice that one of their compatriots is now missing.
How long is it going to take them to notice this.
They will assume he has been captured (they have no choice, they have to assume the worst because of the hard ball nature of the business they are in),
That this person is no longer answering his/her phone/emails in the usual way is confirmation that something is wrong. Police arriving at that person's house is an even bigger clue...
and they will immediately move locale and switch to some plan B.
Or they might use ad-hoc plan C, which is unknown to the absent member(s). Worst case senario is that the arrest actually triggers a terrorist attack.
Far more useful than being able to hold suspects for X days would be better resourcing and training of CID officers...
Oh no, even better than that: Just because they suspect you maybe will.
Or because they need to increase the number of detentions to show they are "doing something".
The other related problem is that such powers do not tend to get applied even handedly. As shown with the previous round of "anti-terror" internment, no control orders were placed against an anti-abortion group who put out a "press release" threatening to kill people.
You have software developers who seem not to be aware of the basic architecture of the platform they develop for.
They develop on single user standalone machines as "administrator". If you are lucky they might consider issues like "What should the program do if the registry keys it expects to be in HKLU are absent?" or "How to handle if %USERPROFILE%\Application Data\%PROGRAM% isn't there".