When you are doing "private performances" for anyone among the general public who is interested in seeing them, the argument that the performance is still "private" becomes pretty tenuous. This is an absurd abuse of a technicality in how the law happens to be worded
How the law is worded is crucially important. Otherwise, why bother?
The wording at issue is:
To perform... a work âoepubliclyâ meansâ" (1) to perform... it at a place open to the public or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered; or (2) to transmit or otherwise communicate a performance... of the work to a place specified by clause (1) or to the public, by means of any device or process, whether the members of the public capable of receiving the performance... receive it in the same place or in separate places and at the same time or at different times.
Aereo isn't performing at a place at all, so part one is out. This is aimed more at, for example, a bar that has a TV set, or a movie theater.
For part 2, their transmission isn't to the public, because they don't make one master transmission. Instead they make individualized transmissions to each customer, each a separate performance, from each customer's separate antenna or each customer's separate DVR'ed copy made from that separate antenna. The nature of the transmission recipient is important, because to ignore it would be to ignore the plain language of the statute that says "to transmit... to the public." The nature of the transmission is important, because to ignore that would be to ignore the plain language of the statute that says "a performance... of the work," which isn't the same thing as agglutinating all performances.
completely defies the intent behind it
Congress is of course free to change the law, if the courts have gotten it wrong. But the letter of the law controls, with intent only being instructive in the case of the letter being unclear. It's not particularly unclear here, it's just something that people hadn't really thought of before.
I sincerely hope the supreme court slaps this one down.
I sincerely hope the Supreme Court does a good job of interpreting the law. I don't want a particular side to win or lose, I want the law to be upheld, whatever it is. It's not for the Court to decide this as a matter of policy. Your comment betrays your partisanship, but you really ought to take that to Congress instead.
And now your disinterest in reading the opinion becomes clear; you've made up your mind and don't care about honestly looking at counter arguments and possibly revising your opinion.
It could be problematic if the supreme court agrees.... as a precedent, it could effectively spell the end of open source works that are still protected by copyright law... the argument being that if something is being made freely available and in the clear, anyone who can legally receive it is free to do whatever they want with it, including things that would otherwise be copyright infringement.
That's not the argument.
The argument is that in the US, copyright only prohibits certain things (most of which, you can find at 17 USC 106). The one which is relevant for Aereo is that public performances are protected by copyright, but private performances are not. By breaking apart their infrastructure as they have, Aereo claims that it is engaged in the business of private performances (because each user has their own private antenna, their own private copies of shows, all sent to them alone, not shared with anyone by Aereo).
This really has no effect on the GPL one way or another, as there are separate exclusive rights under section 106 for making and distributing copies, and making derivatives. Those are the things that tend to matter for GPL purposes.
Go read the previously linked-to opinion, please. Your misconceptions are not helping at all.
I don't look forward to the day that I have to pay a monthly fee to watch local news, or watch a Pay-Per-View Superbowl. That is essentially what you are suggesting
I am intrigued by your idea of being paid to watch the Superbowl, and would like to learn more.
FCC requires cable operators to rebroadcast local OTA stations, but they have to pay for that.
As I understand it, they're not required to carry them and pay. The broadcaster has a choice between required carriage for free, or optional carriage for pay. But non-local channels cannot be substituted for local ones; thus if a cable company won't pay a local broadcaster which is a network affiliate, and which demands to be paid, that network drops off of cable. We saw this earlier in the year with Time Warner Cable and CBS (and its affiliates).
if Aereo is rebroadcasting the signal, the fact that it's OTA doesn't change anything... it's copyright infringement, plain and simple
How then, do you explain three separate federal courts finding that Aereo is likely not infringing? If it was plain and simple, it seems unlikely that they'd miss it.
Take a look at the opinion from the Second Circuit that came out in the spring.You'll see that what it hinges on is not whether there was a transmission, but to whom Aereo's transmission was aimed.
Now they do, but they didn't originally. Cable TV appeared around 1950 or a little earlier. The law that obligates cable providers to pay broadcasters to carry their signal (unless the broadcaster demands to be carried, in which case it's free) is from 1992. If we were to wait until 2055 before making Aereo pay broadcasters, I bet Aereo would be okay with that.
This company has obviously been set up to exploit a supposed "loophole" in copyright law, without really understanding that copyright doesn't have "loopholes" since loopholes are designed to be self-defeating as copyright law is flexible based on the LEMON TEST (look it up) not some "fixed rules."
There is no common law federal copyright in the US for published works. This was established long, long ago. Copyright on published works can only arise through federal law, and statutes aren't all that flexible.
I'd agree that there aren't loopholes, but only in the sense that there are almost never loopholes in any law; what people perceive as loopholes are usually disconnects between their mental models of what the law ought to do and how it ought to work, and the reality of what the law actually does and how it really works. The things called loopholes are often deliberately designed features, and not just to help out clever bad actors. (Though there are some of those)
And the only Lemon test I know of is from Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971). It's a First Amendment establishment clause case which found that Pennsylvania's subsidies to secular teachers in religious schools violated the First Amendment. The test is basically as follows:
In order to avoid infringing on the First Amendment, the government must act for secular purposes, must not have the primary effect of either helping or harming religion, and must not become entangled in religious matters.
I'll be damned if I see how this is helpful in a copyright case, but maybe you'd like to explain it to us.
of course, this being a slashdot comment thread, as usual there will be a litany of people who misunderstand how copyright law is actually supposed to work.
Aereo has no right to profit from the significant money spent and effort made to deliver the broadcast signals in the first place. Not without compensation.
Why not? Merely because someone spends money and effort to do something doesn't mean that they're entitled to absolute control over it.
If I put a lot of money and effort into improving my house and the lot it sits on, that increases the value of neighboring properties to some extent. But I'm not entitled to a cut, when my neighbor sells his house for more than he would've gotten, had I not done anything.
Hell, you might as well say that the school in the state I grew up ought to get a share of the money I make now, far away in a different state, because I wouldn't have my current job had I never learned to read and write.
Bad analogy, since much (not all) of what McCarthy said turned out in fact to be true. The State Department WAS rife with people who were in fact Communist sympathizers or active Soviet agents.
Not really. McCarthy didn't have evidence or even a reasonable basis for making his claims. Playing the lottery and winning doesn't mean you can see into the future or are a whiz with statistics; claiming that there are communists in the State Department didn't mean he had even the tiniest bit of intelligence.
Plus, if he did know, it would've been grossly irresponsible to say so. Exposing known enemy spies and agents just means that they'll be replaced by others who you'll have to find all over again. The better tactic is to in some way turn the ones you know about so that you control what information they send back to your enemy.
And 'rife' is somewhat of an overstatement.
Frankly, McCarthy was a drunk bully. We'd all have been better off if he'd never been in politics at all. It's entirely proper to despise him and it's nice to see that so many do.
Well, Boston started out small and the two ways that it grew were 1) to fill in water areas, and 2) annexing surrounding towns.
So Boston Proper usually refers to the core of the city that either was part of the original settlement or at least wasn't part of some other town that got annexed and turned into a neighborhood. There's a good map here where you can see the outline of the Shawmut Peninsula shaded in, which is the original city, surrounded by made land, as well as surrounding towns and neighborhoods that used to be towns. Also that map is old; since it was made, the town of Hyde Park to the south was also annexed and became part of Boston. (Also not shown are massive sections of made land in East and South Boston for the airport and the seaport)
Anyway, Boston Proper isn't the same thing as Boston or Metro Boston.
Off to E-Bay I went and purchased an older, used Panasonic Toughbook. Not the latest, but ran all the software and rugged enough to stop small caliber weapons fire.
Did you ever put that to the test, or were you just assuming it was that tough?
"Boston State-House is the hub of the solar system. You couldn't pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar."
Bostonians have long been known for their provincialism, and why not? Everywhere else just isn't interesting, important, or worth going to.
Okay, but none of those quotes consist of me saying that copyrights are not protected by the law once they've been granted. Nor do any of them stand for the proposition that authors cannot attempt to exploit their copyrights for financial gain. (Whether they will do so successfully depends on the market; outright doesn't guarantee that anyone will want what they're selling) and until you brought it up by accusing me, I had not said that people could give away copies of copyrighted works without permission; which, as I said, is true, they generally aren't allowed to, though the law does provide some exceptions to that rule.
So far all I can tell is that you like to accuse me of things and that you can use the copy and paste commands. Put a real argument together if you want to continue this. Otherwise don't bother.
So once copyright is granted it IS protected by the law and if they decide to charge for it that is there legal right to and you do not have the right to give away someone else copyrighted works by law.
I never said otherwise. Although, I will point out first, that copyright law does permit people other than the copyright holder to give away copies without permission or payment under some circumstances. And second, that just because the law is this way at present doesn't mean we can't change the law to better suit our purposes.
I beg to differ. If you create an original work recorded on a tangible medium, it's automatically copyrighted in the USA.
Provided that it is a creative, copyrightable work, that's true, and I didn't say otherwise. What I said was that merely investing effort into creating a work isn't a justification for copyright. In Feist v. Rural, the case that finally killed off sweat of the brow in the US, it was argued (and the lower courts had agreed!) that compiling a completely non-creative telephone book deserved copyright because it was a lot of work to do. It was certainly original and fixed in a tangible medium of expression. But it lacked creativity, and that's what did it in.
As it turns out, whether it takes a lot of work or virtually none at all makes no difference. The work must be creative, original, of a copyrightable type, and fixed in a tangible medium; that's what merits a copyright.
But TV shows don't put on concerts. Movies don't put on concerts. Video games certainly don't.
But we don't have to have those things. And we don't have to have those things at the level we have them at now.
If my art were sculpting the moon, but this was only economically feasible for me to do if everyone in the world owed me hefty royalties forever, people would probably tell me to go do something else. Even if my work was really good.
If we tire of having copyright to the extent we have it now, or even at all, that's a valid choice. If it reduces the number of works created and published, then that may nevertheless be the best option, if those works would otherwise come at too high a price.
And big budgets and high production values are not mandatory. Shakespeare did his best stuff on a stage with a handful of actors doubling up on parts, costumes that were hand-me-down clothing, minimal props, and no sets.
Disrespecting copyright is harmful probably not necessarily to anyone explicitly, but is probably most directly harmful to copyright itself. Specifically, it depreciates the trust that content makers would place in copyright to protect their interests on works that they publish.
I agree, although I think that we ought not to treat copyright as a monolithic entity. We could amend copyright to allow at least some of what is currently seen by most people as non-objectionable piracy, such as natural persons, engaging in non-commercial infringement, while still preserving copyright in other respects, e.g. as to commercial infringement, which is less kindly looked upon by ordinary people. By tailoring what is and isn't protected according to our shared norms about copyright, we could preserve respect for it generally, while still allowing other behavior that if prohibited, would engender disrespect.
Of course, one might argue... if copyright were completely dissolved, there'd still be people who want to self-publish or would make works that could culturally enrich the society they live in without the protections of copyright. This is certainly true, but the logistical reality is that such people are not llikely to be the status quo for works of appreciable quality.
Shakespeare had no copyrights. Homer had no copyrights. Michaelangelo had no copyrights. Copyright cares about quantity not quality. The more works there are, the more quality works there are. But you can't just incentivize only quality works. If for no other reason than because it is subjective, and no one really wants the government making those sorts of decisions. God knows there's plenty of shit now. But we can ignore it.
If they were, in an age where people can pretty much self-publish already anyways, we would certainly see a very large amount of works being released where the author has actually explicitly surrendered all copyright claims, and the work is public domain.
No; that takes effort. No one is going to do that unless they really care about that.
Better to make copyright opt-in. Then only authors who really cared about having one would make the minimal but material effort to get one. The rest wouldn't bother and we would profit from their laziness. Since it would be their own decision (or lack thereof) it's totally unobjectionable.
So when you say:
The fact that even in the realm of entirely freely available content, the fact that content makers still choose to want to protect their interests
That's wrong. Most authors don't choose a damn thing, and they automatically get copyrights anyway.
a culture-starved society who must swim through an endless sea of self-published content rich with advertisements, spam, and cat-videos to find the works of quality that are out there.
We have that anyway. And culling slush piles into published works is the opposite of what copyright seeks. If anything, publishing everything indiscriminately is more in line with ideal copyright policy. (Think of all the time wasted by works that turn out to be good but which get rejected by publisher after publisher for years and only ever become known due to the doggedness of the author; we could skip all that!) Plus, plenty of bad works get published anyway. And there's not much agreement as to what's good and what's bad.
If curation is what you want, go pay a critic. But that has nothing to do with copyright.
People have to work to create these WORKS of music, art, programming, whatever the item may be. They deserve fair compensation for that work, as they have families, bills, things they have to pay to survive.
Well, that's not how copyright works now.
The idea that people deserve copyrights based solely on the fact that they put in effort into creating something is the sweat of the brow theory; it's unconstitutional in the US.
Further, copyrights don't guarantee fair compensation. In fact, even if everyone respected copyrights completely, most authors would still not be fairly compensated for their effort, because most works don't sell very well. The vast majority of them have no copyright related economic value. Of the few that do, the vast majority have relatively little. Of the few that have more than a little, the vast majority are just middling, and so on.
There's a reason why there's a stereotype about starving artists.
All copyright does is concentrate some of the revenue derived from the work toward the copyright holder. How much the work is worth depends on the public. The recent Lone Ranger movie was a flop. Disney made a crappy movie and doesn't deserve fair compensation for the hundreds of millions of dollars of effort they put into making it. They deserve to lose big time, and so they have.
Copyright is all about increasing the number of works which are created and published, and then limiting the public use of those works as little as possible, as briefly as possible. If a degree of protection which you feel is less than fair nevertheless produces the greatest public benefit, then that's what we ought to have. Helping authors is merely a side effect because they are, so far, unavoidably involved. But they're not a priority.
By definition, a monopoly does not exist anymore when multiple people engage in the same activity.
Oh, I don't know. AT&T had a monopoly over telephone services in the US for decades, but there were independent telephone companies, varying in size from GTE, which was fairly large, to very small operations which might have had as few as a couple of people serving rural communities of only a few hundred people. In practice, you can have a monopoly without extinguishing absolutely all other competition.
Further, you can have a monopoly which has been granted to you even if you face an enormous amount of competition, because according to the government granting the monopoly, only you have a right to do that business.
Which brings us to your other point:
I think you might also want to think very carefully about actual ownership and how it relates to representations of ideas. Specifically, you might want to think about the origin of the phrase "You only truly own what you can carry in both hands while running at full tilt."
You're half right. There are two kinds of property that can be owned. The first kind is the kind that you can personally defend from anyone who might try to take it from you. Running away with it is a perfectly valid form of this.
But since this wasn't good enough for most people -- and to be fair, it really isn't very good -- we organically developed the other kind. Which is the sort where additional people will cooperate with you to protect it, and will recognize your claim on it, in exchange for your doing the same for them.
The ability to own property boils down to a question of who uses the most force to hold control over it. Mutual defense is a good way to be able to draw upon a lot of force. This isn't a pretty way of doing things, but it works.
Copyrights aren't really property; they're propertyesque. But their existence completely hinges on enough people agreeing that they exist, agreeing on the pertinent rules, and helping to defend them. Pirates can have an effect on the conversation -- if everyone comes out as a pirate, we might agree to change the rules. But otherwise, the rules stay intact, and piracy is like trespass.
2) Theft deprives the victim of the object. Copyright infringement deprives the victim of the government-granted monopoly over their representations.
No it doesn't. The copyright holder still has the monopoly. It's just being infringed upon, like how a trespasser might interfere with the use of land, but not its actual ownership or the power to control it. Indeed, it's only when there is infringement that the copyright becomes useful, as a means to take legal action to stop the infringement.
No ships have been illegally seized, not a single cutlass has been brandished. There has been no disturbance of the lawful transfer of goods from one entity to another. No one is being held for ransom.
Here's what the Oxford English Dictionary has to say:
Piracy, n. 2. The unauthorized reproduction or use of an invention or work of another, as a book, recording, computer software, intellectual property, etc., esp. as constituting an infringement of patent or copyright; plagiarism; an instance of this.
[1654 J. Mennes Recreation for Ingenious Head-peeces clxxvi, All the wealth, Of wit and learning, not by stealth, Or Piracy, but purchase got.] 1700 E. Ward Journey to Hell ii. vii. 14 Piracy, Piracy, they cry'd aloud, What made you print my Copy, Sir, says one, You're a meer Knave, 'tis very basely done.
Note the dates of the examples. Copyright as we know it -- a right granted to authors to control the publication of their work -- didn't exist until 1710. The idea of 'piracy' having this meaning therefore predates copyright itself. Examples of this sense of 'pirate' go as far back as 1603 -- over a century earlier.
Of course, it was hyperbole for authors and the stationers to call it piracy when they were living in the golden age of the arr-matey type of piracy on the high seas. If they were trying to coin a word for it now that had equal impact, it would be either rape, terrorism, or genocide, I expect.
But having had to deal with this label for over four centuries, I say it's not a fight worth fighting. Better to just seize control of it and make it unobjectionable.
Er...last time I checked, space was much much colder than the ocean.
Check again. Space isn't cold per se. It's a vacuum up there. Which means that any heat that a ship generates, it cannot get rid of it through conduction or convection. That only leaves radiation, which is very inefficient.
What you want to do, generally, is to build the ship so that it will radiate more heat than it can possibly generate or than it can absorb from something else radiating heat. Then, whenever you're not getting enough waste heat through normal operations, you turn on heaters to generate more. If you didn't do this, your ship would accumulate more and more heat and would eventually destroy itself.
You may recall how the Apollo 13 astronauts wound up having to deal with an interior temperature of around 40 degrees by the end of their mission. That's because due to power shortages, they had to turn off most of their equipment (which gave off waste heat) and the heaters, but couldn't prevent the ship from radiating heat as it was designed to do.
A naval nuclear reactor is designed to dump heat into the ocean; in the absence of the ocean, it would quickly meltdown.
Slashdot Mirror
When you are doing "private performances" for anyone among the general public who is interested in seeing them, the argument that the performance is still "private" becomes pretty tenuous. This is an absurd abuse of a technicality in how the law happens to be worded
How the law is worded is crucially important. Otherwise, why bother?
The wording at issue is:
To perform ... a work âoepubliclyâ meansâ" ... it at a place open to the public or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered; or ... of the work to a place specified by clause (1) or to the public, by means of any device or process, whether the members of the public capable of receiving the performance ... receive it in the same place or in separate places and at the same time or at different times.
(1) to perform
(2) to transmit or otherwise communicate a performance
Aereo isn't performing at a place at all, so part one is out. This is aimed more at, for example, a bar that has a TV set, or a movie theater.
For part 2, their transmission isn't to the public, because they don't make one master transmission. Instead they make individualized transmissions to each customer, each a separate performance, from each customer's separate antenna or each customer's separate DVR'ed copy made from that separate antenna. The nature of the transmission recipient is important, because to ignore it would be to ignore the plain language of the statute that says "to transmit ... to the public." The nature of the transmission is important, because to ignore that would be to ignore the plain language of the statute that says "a performance ... of the work," which isn't the same thing as agglutinating all performances.
completely defies the intent behind it
Congress is of course free to change the law, if the courts have gotten it wrong. But the letter of the law controls, with intent only being instructive in the case of the letter being unclear. It's not particularly unclear here, it's just something that people hadn't really thought of before.
I sincerely hope the supreme court slaps this one down.
I sincerely hope the Supreme Court does a good job of interpreting the law. I don't want a particular side to win or lose, I want the law to be upheld, whatever it is. It's not for the Court to decide this as a matter of policy. Your comment betrays your partisanship, but you really ought to take that to Congress instead.
And now your disinterest in reading the opinion becomes clear; you've made up your mind and don't care about honestly looking at counter arguments and possibly revising your opinion.
It could be problematic if the supreme court agrees.... as a precedent, it could effectively spell the end of open source works that are still protected by copyright law... the argument being that if something is being made freely available and in the clear, anyone who can legally receive it is free to do whatever they want with it, including things that would otherwise be copyright infringement.
That's not the argument.
The argument is that in the US, copyright only prohibits certain things (most of which, you can find at 17 USC 106). The one which is relevant for Aereo is that public performances are protected by copyright, but private performances are not. By breaking apart their infrastructure as they have, Aereo claims that it is engaged in the business of private performances (because each user has their own private antenna, their own private copies of shows, all sent to them alone, not shared with anyone by Aereo).
This really has no effect on the GPL one way or another, as there are separate exclusive rights under section 106 for making and distributing copies, and making derivatives. Those are the things that tend to matter for GPL purposes.
Go read the previously linked-to opinion, please. Your misconceptions are not helping at all.
I don't look forward to the day that I have to pay a monthly fee to watch local news, or watch a Pay-Per-View Superbowl. That is essentially what you are suggesting
I am intrigued by your idea of being paid to watch the Superbowl, and would like to learn more.
FCC requires cable operators to rebroadcast local OTA stations, but they have to pay for that.
As I understand it, they're not required to carry them and pay. The broadcaster has a choice between required carriage for free, or optional carriage for pay. But non-local channels cannot be substituted for local ones; thus if a cable company won't pay a local broadcaster which is a network affiliate, and which demands to be paid, that network drops off of cable. We saw this earlier in the year with Time Warner Cable and CBS (and its affiliates).
if Aereo is rebroadcasting the signal, the fact that it's OTA doesn't change anything... it's copyright infringement, plain and simple
How then, do you explain three separate federal courts finding that Aereo is likely not infringing? If it was plain and simple, it seems unlikely that they'd miss it.
Take a look at the opinion from the Second Circuit that came out in the spring.You'll see that what it hinges on is not whether there was a transmission, but to whom Aereo's transmission was aimed.
Now they do, but they didn't originally. Cable TV appeared around 1950 or a little earlier. The law that obligates cable providers to pay broadcasters to carry their signal (unless the broadcaster demands to be carried, in which case it's free) is from 1992. If we were to wait until 2055 before making Aereo pay broadcasters, I bet Aereo would be okay with that.
This company has obviously been set up to exploit a supposed "loophole" in copyright law, without really understanding that copyright doesn't have "loopholes" since loopholes are designed to be self-defeating as copyright law is flexible based on the LEMON TEST (look it up) not some "fixed rules."
There is no common law federal copyright in the US for published works. This was established long, long ago. Copyright on published works can only arise through federal law, and statutes aren't all that flexible.
I'd agree that there aren't loopholes, but only in the sense that there are almost never loopholes in any law; what people perceive as loopholes are usually disconnects between their mental models of what the law ought to do and how it ought to work, and the reality of what the law actually does and how it really works. The things called loopholes are often deliberately designed features, and not just to help out clever bad actors. (Though there are some of those)
And the only Lemon test I know of is from Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971). It's a First Amendment establishment clause case which found that Pennsylvania's subsidies to secular teachers in religious schools violated the First Amendment. The test is basically as follows:
In order to avoid infringing on the First Amendment, the government must act for secular purposes, must not have the primary effect of either helping or harming religion, and must not become entangled in religious matters.
I'll be damned if I see how this is helpful in a copyright case, but maybe you'd like to explain it to us.
of course, this being a slashdot comment thread, as usual there will be a litany of people who misunderstand how copyright law is actually supposed to work.
You've proven this point very well, thanks.
Aereo has no right to profit from the significant money spent and effort made to deliver the broadcast signals in the first place. Not without compensation.
Why not? Merely because someone spends money and effort to do something doesn't mean that they're entitled to absolute control over it.
If I put a lot of money and effort into improving my house and the lot it sits on, that increases the value of neighboring properties to some extent. But I'm not entitled to a cut, when my neighbor sells his house for more than he would've gotten, had I not done anything.
Hell, you might as well say that the school in the state I grew up ought to get a share of the money I make now, far away in a different state, because I wouldn't have my current job had I never learned to read and write.
Things just don't work this way.
Bad analogy, since much (not all) of what McCarthy said turned out in fact to be true. The State Department WAS rife with people who were in fact Communist sympathizers or active Soviet agents.
Not really. McCarthy didn't have evidence or even a reasonable basis for making his claims. Playing the lottery and winning doesn't mean you can see into the future or are a whiz with statistics; claiming that there are communists in the State Department didn't mean he had even the tiniest bit of intelligence.
Plus, if he did know, it would've been grossly irresponsible to say so. Exposing known enemy spies and agents just means that they'll be replaced by others who you'll have to find all over again. The better tactic is to in some way turn the ones you know about so that you control what information they send back to your enemy.
And 'rife' is somewhat of an overstatement.
Frankly, McCarthy was a drunk bully. We'd all have been better off if he'd never been in politics at all. It's entirely proper to despise him and it's nice to see that so many do.
Well, Boston started out small and the two ways that it grew were 1) to fill in water areas, and 2) annexing surrounding towns.
So Boston Proper usually refers to the core of the city that either was part of the original settlement or at least wasn't part of some other town that got annexed and turned into a neighborhood. There's a good map here where you can see the outline of the Shawmut Peninsula shaded in, which is the original city, surrounded by made land, as well as surrounding towns and neighborhoods that used to be towns. Also that map is old; since it was made, the town of Hyde Park to the south was also annexed and became part of Boston. (Also not shown are massive sections of made land in East and South Boston for the airport and the seaport)
Anyway, Boston Proper isn't the same thing as Boston or Metro Boston.
Well as long as the video went something like this.
Off to E-Bay I went and purchased an older, used Panasonic Toughbook. Not the latest, but ran all the software and rugged enough to stop small caliber weapons fire.
Did you ever put that to the test, or were you just assuming it was that tough?
Yes, what does Apple know about magnetic quick-separation connectors for wired devices? Nothing, obviously.
(495/128 and the spoke roads...93, 2, 3, 90, etc are why Boston is referred to as "The Hub")
No they're not.
It's from Holmes' "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table":
"Boston State-House is the hub of the solar system. You couldn't pry that out of a Boston man if you had the tire of all creation straightened out for a crowbar."
Bostonians have long been known for their provincialism, and why not? Everywhere else just isn't interesting, important, or worth going to.
Are you in Boston Metro, or Boston City?
Or Boston proper?
Okay, but none of those quotes consist of me saying that copyrights are not protected by the law once they've been granted. Nor do any of them stand for the proposition that authors cannot attempt to exploit their copyrights for financial gain. (Whether they will do so successfully depends on the market; outright doesn't guarantee that anyone will want what they're selling) and until you brought it up by accusing me, I had not said that people could give away copies of copyrighted works without permission; which, as I said, is true, they generally aren't allowed to, though the law does provide some exceptions to that rule.
So far all I can tell is that you like to accuse me of things and that you can use the copy and paste commands. Put a real argument together if you want to continue this. Otherwise don't bother.
So once copyright is granted it IS protected by the law and if they decide to charge for it that is there legal right to and you do not have the right to give away someone else copyrighted works by law.
I never said otherwise. Although, I will point out first, that copyright law does permit people other than the copyright holder to give away copies without permission or payment under some circumstances. And second, that just because the law is this way at present doesn't mean we can't change the law to better suit our purposes.
I beg to differ. If you create an original work recorded on a tangible medium, it's automatically copyrighted in the USA.
Provided that it is a creative, copyrightable work, that's true, and I didn't say otherwise. What I said was that merely investing effort into creating a work isn't a justification for copyright. In Feist v. Rural, the case that finally killed off sweat of the brow in the US, it was argued (and the lower courts had agreed!) that compiling a completely non-creative telephone book deserved copyright because it was a lot of work to do. It was certainly original and fixed in a tangible medium of expression. But it lacked creativity, and that's what did it in.
As it turns out, whether it takes a lot of work or virtually none at all makes no difference. The work must be creative, original, of a copyrightable type, and fixed in a tangible medium; that's what merits a copyright.
But TV shows don't put on concerts. Movies don't put on concerts. Video games certainly don't.
But we don't have to have those things. And we don't have to have those things at the level we have them at now.
If my art were sculpting the moon, but this was only economically feasible for me to do if everyone in the world owed me hefty royalties forever, people would probably tell me to go do something else. Even if my work was really good.
If we tire of having copyright to the extent we have it now, or even at all, that's a valid choice. If it reduces the number of works created and published, then that may nevertheless be the best option, if those works would otherwise come at too high a price.
And big budgets and high production values are not mandatory. Shakespeare did his best stuff on a stage with a handful of actors doubling up on parts, costumes that were hand-me-down clothing, minimal props, and no sets.
Disrespecting copyright is harmful probably not necessarily to anyone explicitly, but is probably most directly harmful to copyright itself. Specifically, it depreciates the trust that content makers would place in copyright to protect their interests on works that they publish.
I agree, although I think that we ought not to treat copyright as a monolithic entity. We could amend copyright to allow at least some of what is currently seen by most people as non-objectionable piracy, such as natural persons, engaging in non-commercial infringement, while still preserving copyright in other respects, e.g. as to commercial infringement, which is less kindly looked upon by ordinary people. By tailoring what is and isn't protected according to our shared norms about copyright, we could preserve respect for it generally, while still allowing other behavior that if prohibited, would engender disrespect.
Of course, one might argue... if copyright were completely dissolved, there'd still be people who want to self-publish or would make works that could culturally enrich the society they live in without the protections of copyright. This is certainly true, but the logistical reality is that such people are not llikely to be the status quo for works of appreciable quality.
Shakespeare had no copyrights. Homer had no copyrights. Michaelangelo had no copyrights. Copyright cares about quantity not quality. The more works there are, the more quality works there are. But you can't just incentivize only quality works. If for no other reason than because it is subjective, and no one really wants the government making those sorts of decisions. God knows there's plenty of shit now. But we can ignore it.
If they were, in an age where people can pretty much self-publish already anyways, we would certainly see a very large amount of works being released where the author has actually explicitly surrendered all copyright claims, and the work is public domain.
No; that takes effort. No one is going to do that unless they really care about that.
Better to make copyright opt-in. Then only authors who really cared about having one would make the minimal but material effort to get one. The rest wouldn't bother and we would profit from their laziness. Since it would be their own decision (or lack thereof) it's totally unobjectionable.
So when you say:
The fact that even in the realm of entirely freely available content, the fact that content makers still choose to want to protect their interests
That's wrong. Most authors don't choose a damn thing, and they automatically get copyrights anyway.
a culture-starved society who must swim through an endless sea of self-published content rich with advertisements, spam, and cat-videos to find the works of quality that are out there.
We have that anyway. And culling slush piles into published works is the opposite of what copyright seeks. If anything, publishing everything indiscriminately is more in line with ideal copyright policy. (Think of all the time wasted by works that turn out to be good but which get rejected by publisher after publisher for years and only ever become known due to the doggedness of the author; we could skip all that!) Plus, plenty of bad works get published anyway. And there's not much agreement as to what's good and what's bad.
If curation is what you want, go pay a critic. But that has nothing to do with copyright.
People have to work to create these WORKS of music, art, programming, whatever the item may be. They deserve fair compensation for that work, as they have families, bills, things they have to pay to survive.
Well, that's not how copyright works now.
The idea that people deserve copyrights based solely on the fact that they put in effort into creating something is the sweat of the brow theory; it's unconstitutional in the US.
Further, copyrights don't guarantee fair compensation. In fact, even if everyone respected copyrights completely, most authors would still not be fairly compensated for their effort, because most works don't sell very well. The vast majority of them have no copyright related economic value. Of the few that do, the vast majority have relatively little. Of the few that have more than a little, the vast majority are just middling, and so on.
There's a reason why there's a stereotype about starving artists.
All copyright does is concentrate some of the revenue derived from the work toward the copyright holder. How much the work is worth depends on the public. The recent Lone Ranger movie was a flop. Disney made a crappy movie and doesn't deserve fair compensation for the hundreds of millions of dollars of effort they put into making it. They deserve to lose big time, and so they have.
Copyright is all about increasing the number of works which are created and published, and then limiting the public use of those works as little as possible, as briefly as possible. If a degree of protection which you feel is less than fair nevertheless produces the greatest public benefit, then that's what we ought to have. Helping authors is merely a side effect because they are, so far, unavoidably involved. But they're not a priority.
By definition, a monopoly does not exist anymore when multiple people engage in the same activity.
Oh, I don't know. AT&T had a monopoly over telephone services in the US for decades, but there were independent telephone companies, varying in size from GTE, which was fairly large, to very small operations which might have had as few as a couple of people serving rural communities of only a few hundred people. In practice, you can have a monopoly without extinguishing absolutely all other competition.
Further, you can have a monopoly which has been granted to you even if you face an enormous amount of competition, because according to the government granting the monopoly, only you have a right to do that business.
Which brings us to your other point:
I think you might also want to think very carefully about actual ownership and how it relates to representations of ideas. Specifically, you might want to think about the origin of the phrase "You only truly own what you can carry in both hands while running at full tilt."
You're half right. There are two kinds of property that can be owned. The first kind is the kind that you can personally defend from anyone who might try to take it from you. Running away with it is a perfectly valid form of this.
But since this wasn't good enough for most people -- and to be fair, it really isn't very good -- we organically developed the other kind. Which is the sort where additional people will cooperate with you to protect it, and will recognize your claim on it, in exchange for your doing the same for them.
The ability to own property boils down to a question of who uses the most force to hold control over it. Mutual defense is a good way to be able to draw upon a lot of force. This isn't a pretty way of doing things, but it works.
Copyrights aren't really property; they're propertyesque. But their existence completely hinges on enough people agreeing that they exist, agreeing on the pertinent rules, and helping to defend them. Pirates can have an effect on the conversation -- if everyone comes out as a pirate, we might agree to change the rules. But otherwise, the rules stay intact, and piracy is like trespass.
2) Theft deprives the victim of the object. Copyright infringement deprives the victim of the government-granted monopoly over their representations.
No it doesn't. The copyright holder still has the monopoly. It's just being infringed upon, like how a trespasser might interfere with the use of land, but not its actual ownership or the power to control it. Indeed, it's only when there is infringement that the copyright becomes useful, as a means to take legal action to stop the infringement.
Whatever this is, it is not "online piracy".
No ships have been illegally seized, not a single cutlass has been brandished. There has been no disturbance of the lawful transfer of goods from one entity to another. No one is being held for ransom.
Here's what the Oxford English Dictionary has to say:
Piracy, n. 2. The unauthorized reproduction or use of an invention or work of another, as a book, recording, computer software, intellectual property, etc., esp. as constituting an infringement of patent or copyright; plagiarism; an instance of this.
[1654 J. Mennes Recreation for Ingenious Head-peeces clxxvi, All the wealth, Of wit and learning, not by stealth, Or Piracy, but purchase got.]
1700 E. Ward Journey to Hell ii. vii. 14 Piracy, Piracy, they cry'd aloud, What made you print my Copy, Sir, says one, You're a meer Knave, 'tis very basely done.
Note the dates of the examples. Copyright as we know it -- a right granted to authors to control the publication of their work -- didn't exist until 1710. The idea of 'piracy' having this meaning therefore predates copyright itself. Examples of this sense of 'pirate' go as far back as 1603 -- over a century earlier.
Of course, it was hyperbole for authors and the stationers to call it piracy when they were living in the golden age of the arr-matey type of piracy on the high seas. If they were trying to coin a word for it now that had equal impact, it would be either rape, terrorism, or genocide, I expect.
But having had to deal with this label for over four centuries, I say it's not a fight worth fighting. Better to just seize control of it and make it unobjectionable.
Er...last time I checked, space was much much colder than the ocean.
Check again. Space isn't cold per se. It's a vacuum up there. Which means that any heat that a ship generates, it cannot get rid of it through conduction or convection. That only leaves radiation, which is very inefficient.
What you want to do, generally, is to build the ship so that it will radiate more heat than it can possibly generate or than it can absorb from something else radiating heat. Then, whenever you're not getting enough waste heat through normal operations, you turn on heaters to generate more. If you didn't do this, your ship would accumulate more and more heat and would eventually destroy itself.
You may recall how the Apollo 13 astronauts wound up having to deal with an interior temperature of around 40 degrees by the end of their mission. That's because due to power shortages, they had to turn off most of their equipment (which gave off waste heat) and the heaters, but couldn't prevent the ship from radiating heat as it was designed to do.
A naval nuclear reactor is designed to dump heat into the ocean; in the absence of the ocean, it would quickly meltdown.