Okay... do you understand the difference between a positive right and a natural right?
Free speech is a natural right. How would you reconcile it with your presupposed natural copyright? Remember, the former is inclusive of saying anything, so long as we're talking about it in its natural state. Only when we establish a government and grant to it willingly the ability to prohibit full natural exercise of that right can they both coexist, but this makes copyright (which is very inaptly named) a positive right.
When seen in the light of copyright's actual status as a positive right, you'll find that there's very little incentive for people to grant you a copyright for the reason you state - it's a quid *no* quo. As the people can do perfectly fine without a copyright at all, what they get out of it as opposed to the artist is of significant concern.
Nope. The Constitution demands that copyrights be assigned to the artist. There is work for hire, but that's somewhat different. (and there are those who are against that too. I'm ambivalent.)
At any rate, while artists like myself may have all kinds of different motivations that compel them to their art, Congress is empowered not to fulfill the desires of artists, but to assist society by establishing a copyright system. Where the two conflict, artists must choose between their motives and taking advantage of copyright. It is not without strings attached. An artist who does not with to further society through statutory means is free not to do so, but not free to also reap the rewards as though he had.
Where is the societal interest that must be present in permitting artists to withdraw their works after forcing us to protect them?
No, copyright law is entirely a construct based on the US Constitution. At least, within the US. Foreign copyright laws have no power within our borders, save that that we choose to grant them, founded on our own laws, and not on the foreign ones. (e.g. the UK could decide that copyrights are permanent, but it has no weight here.)
There is no such thing as international copyright, merely agreements between nations to grant domestic copyrights reciprocally.
Heck, foreign countries have screwy ideas about artists having natural copyrights - I wouldn't exalt them as a model. The US utilitarian system is way better in theory, we just need to keep in in balance. (and the foreigners are just as capable of losing the balance themselves - WIPO is international, after all)
But they have waived that right. For after all, when an artist receives a copyright, they are granted it by the government, under such terms as the government will grant it under.
If the government says that your options are:
*Protect your work by not publishing at all (meaning you can really _never_ share it or profit by it)
*Protect your work through some means other than copyright (meaning it's public domain, and people are free to reuse it if they can manage, AND that the government itself has an interest in assisting in that and can bring lots of resources to bear)
-or-
*Protect your work under the terms offered by the government and be happy for the opportunity.
There is debate as to how retroactive changes in the terms can be, but hey - Congress can arbitrarily revoke copyrights if it really wants to, so I'd expect they're plenty retroactive. (despite the hassles this has caused with term extensions)
Sheryl Crow will have to take the good along with the bad, if such a system were implemented; it's not her call to make.
I am a creative person, a professional artist, and I make ALL my money from my art. Although I think 3 years might be a little short, my proposal has been for 20 with a single 10 year extension, and a number of limitations elsewhere, that I can go into more detail on if you like. Your point is refuted.
As for the GPL, it's mostly making the best out of a bad situation. When copyrights are significantly deminished, the thinking is that the need for the GPL is likewise diminished.
Well, I'm not entirely certain how significant this would be in the case of a common law copyright. (where a work is never published and effectively does not exist)
However, in the case of published and copyrighted works, it's A-OK. Society directs the government as to the terms under which artists will recieve statutory copyrights. If this includes compulsory licensing, then it's STILL a better deal than publishing without a copyright at all. (for publishing permanently destroys common law copyright)
It's not even anything new. There are already compulsory licensing arrangements with regards to music.
As for the historical aspect, why on Earth would people bother permitting there to be grants of copyright if we weren't getting something out of it? We constitutionally require copyrights only to be granted where doing so promotes the progress of the arts, if they're to be granted at all. (they don't have to be) The granting of certain monopolistic rights by the government to a copyright holder is a quid pro quo. Since the author has no power to copyright and publish works independently of the government, it ends up being effectively one-sided. Me, I'm an artist, I think it's fine.
Another goal of any society is to improve itself. You want real freedom? Abolish copyrights altogether - they infringe on the freedom of the non-copyright holder in order to function.
Eminent domain is simply the civil power of government to sieze property, provided that the original owner is justly compensated. (with the amount of money determined by mutual agreement, or set by the courts) Property may also be siezed through exercise of police powers, but that's not immediately relevant.
At any rate, the government can take anything, at any time, for any purpose. It doesn't have to be important. It's most commonly associated with road widenings since people own property that abuts the road right-of-way. But it isn't exclusive to that by any means.
Well, until recently Carlos had been saying that she thought that the original tapes had degraded so much that it wouldn't be possible anyway. Evidently this has been solved, so maybe we will get one after all.
So it's a good thing that people don't go around calling their attorneys over the telephone without using scramblers, huh?
You can have an expectation of privacy without being actually private. This is where the word 'expectation' comes into play. It may be magnified through obfuscation, but whispering in a crowded courtroom works great all by itself.
Yeah, 'Wizards' is one of my favorite books on tech history. I wouldn't bother with Cringely too much. He's better at writing about the personalities of the players involved. He nailed Steve Jobs as probably being a sociopath, and Bill Gates as being a control freak of exceptional proportions.
If you want a good general history of early-mid microcomputing, try 'Fire in the Valley' to go along with 'Wizards.' Now I just need to find something good on minis other than 'Soul of a New Machine.' (it's okay, but there's more to life than Data General... boy is there)
UCLA and Stanford were the first two machines to be connected, and yeah, I believe they used leased lines. Although no one seems to remember who was doing it, the historic first message is remembered. The people at UCLA attempted to log into a computer at Stanford. Simultaneously they had placed a long-distance call to ensure that things were showing up at the other end. The conversation went basically like so (I'm writing this from memory, but I swear I am not making it up):
UCLA: (types 'L') We typed an L
Stanford: We got the L
U: (types 'O') We typed O
S: We got the O
U: (types 'G') We typed G -- oh wait, it crashed.
AARPNET? American Association for Retired Persons Network?
The ARPANET was _not_ intended for military purposes. Although the idea of a distributed communications network was suggested in a RAND study on the topic of war interrupting communications, the ARPANET was intended to network research facilities and help make efficient use of computer resources all around the country. (at a time when many programs could only be run on a single computer) I mean, come on. For years, the only installations on the thing were university computing centers.
Go read through the answers that the people actually involved with creating the ARPANET give to this question, and see how well the nuclear war myth holds up. Sheesh.
Hah! Unfortunately for you, I started working at the job I'm at in Seattle a few months prior to my move from Boston. Now I'm on the verge of quitting and moving back to the East Coast to go back to school. (only a few more days in fact) So not much need to interview, huh?
I've been to MS to meet with friends and neighbors that work there, but I've never interviewed there, and I've never even considered it. There's a surprisingly large number of people around here that don't like MS, I discovered.
I was thinking: Windows, WinCE, XBox, hardware, software, IE, and content, plus maybe one or two others if I missed anything. Of course my watchword for those bozos up the street (I live about a mile away from the Redmond campus) is "Microsoft delenda est.";)
Well the real crux of the matter is the Constitutionality of the laws in question more than jurisdiction, I think.
At any rate, you should not have to rely on your country being unwilling to extradite you. It is a matter of soverignty. If you start to arrest people for breaking laws when outside of the area in which those laws apply, you invite others to do the same to you, and you spoil everyone's sovereignty by expected undue outside influence.
This doesn't stop some countries from being so corrupt or intolerant that they'll arrest people for things they did whilst outside of their jurisdiction, but for the US to do so - that's not at all right. We're supposed to be better than that.
Of course they do. Imagine that it is illegal in Foosylvania to criticize the government there. Do I, an American citizen, not have the right to use the Internet to publish criticisms of the Foosylvanian government because it would break THEIR law? What a silly argument.
Elcomsoft exported their software out of Russia. Simultaneously someone imported their software into the US. If you're going to pursue a trafficker, it is the person who brought it into here - not the person who sent it out of there.
Not feasible. What happens when a judge or the Canadian Parliment decide to overturn some law, reinterpret it, or rewrite it? Boom - the measure is no longer legal, because it's a stupid piece of code. It can't keep up with the legal system on a minute-by-minute basis.
The thing to do is this:
Any copyrighted work may not have any protection measure whatsoever. However, infringing uses may be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Any work with any protection measure will be stripped of its copyright in all expressions of that work.
Any uncopyrighted work may have a protection measure, but all peoples of the world are invited to try their hand at breaking it, and disseminating the uncopyrighted work at will. The government will maintain a small office dedicated to coordinating exploits and assisting in them, and maybe even their intelligence apparatus might use them for practice.
Basically... self-help is not a good thing in the realm of copyrights or patents. How does it promote progress if the work is unusable?
Should you be allowed to profit from your work? Well of course. It's a rare bird that says you shouldn't. However, should my rights of free speech and press be infringed upon so that you can profit by being the only person permitted to exercise them for a particular work?
Copyright is a bargain. I am willing to voluntarily not exercise my God-given right to repeat or republish things, if the work in question is good enough, and if it promotes the continued progress of the arts and of human culture.
But not completely. I still want to be able to make copies for my personal use if I got the original legally. I still want to be able to sell the original. (but will destroy any copies I made) I still want to be able to use your works in certain, limited ways to promote the progress of the arts even further, perhaps by quoting it in book reviews, perhaps by xeroxing portions and using them in teaching. And above all, I want to, after you've had enough time to make your work pay for itself, stop this sacrifice, and be able to do whatever I want with the work through the end of time.
This seems fair enough, right? Particularly since you cannot demand that I, in this case, we, the people who give authority to the government, are being gracious to you. We don't HAVE to voluntarily surrender our rights, even for a moment. If it's worth our while, and if it's on our terms, then we're ameniable to it. But copyrights are a gift we grant, and not something you're entitled to just by being an author.
Unfortunately, even THIS isn't enough for the moneyed copyright interests, who want more and more and more, and think that they deserve it. If they keep it up, I think that there will sooner or later be a reckoning, and things will be set back to how they were.
Huh? If someone publishes a piece of text as a PDF, it can be copied precisely simply by someone just transcribing it off of the screen.
Written language is digital. Letters do not appear on a continuum, but are discrete - otherwise there would be something in between an A and a B that was a letter in itself.
If you're governed by someone, you have the right to bitch about it. Regardless of your voting history. It may be sad that you didn't do what you could about it, but you can bitch regardless.
There's nothing wrong with not voting - it too is a political statement. (although, me I like to vote)
Well, here in the states at any rate, the crown corporations that ran the colonies (e.g. the Massachusetts Bay Company) were transformed into actual representative governments. Between approximately the founding of the nation through the Gilded Age, Americans who knew what corporations were capable of kept them on a short leash.
Offhand I remember the North River Sugar Refining Corporation was dechartered in New York state in the late 19th century, and was one of the last decharterings, though the laws remain on the books. Previously, particularly prior to the Civil War, decharterings tended to be reserved for things like bridge, ferry and turnpike corporations, banks, liquor trusts, etc. More or less natural monopolies. (which is why the Santa Clara case that the SCOTUS screwed us over with involved railroads)
More often corporations just faded out of existance through planned decharterings. That is, they were regulated as to the amount of money that they were allowed to make, what they could own, how long they could last, what their specific purpose was, etc.
The idea is basically grounded in hierarchies of authority - a judicial doctrine known as quo warrento. The thought goes like so:
First, you have this master authority. It used to be the King, these days its the citizenry. They mete out some portion of authority to another body, in this case the state government. Given that corporations do not exist in nature, they're obviously, as you point out, artificial. The group gathering together to form the corporation is incapable of granting to themselves the limited liability, etc. that they crave. The best they can do are various types of partnerships.
So when the state issues a charter, it must do so pursuant to the will of the people who are permitting it (if they are at all) in the first place. So it goes from God to the people to the state to the corporation.
*But* it would be a truly odd state which was empowered by its people to undertake actions which were illegal or harmful to the populace. If the state cannot take such actions itself - and although I don't sit around reading state constitutions for fun, I bet they generally can't - then it has no authority to permit the corporations that it charters to do so either.
Thus, when a corporation does act in such a manner, the state has the option to simply dissolve it, or make its chartering conditional on the kinds of limits mentioned earlier, so that it can fulfill its purpose which is to the people.
I'm not saying that amoral entities don't have their value, just that when they're governed by moral entities, as we want our states to be, they can't be permitted to run amok without such a contradiction and authority being passed without permission.
The business environment of early America was quite different from today's... but there's no real reason for it to have changed. It's pretty likely that even back in the 1800's businesses were corrupting governments from their duties to their citizenry. Today, there are efforts to decharter Unocal, Philip Morris, and other corporations. People haven't realized this is possible for so long that it'll take a long time to bring it back to the forefront of memory, but hopefully it'll be doable.
What's meant by corporations' rightful place is as a servant to society. Until comparatively recently, corporations were not very common, and were formed for specific purposes, generally for short periods of time. A number of states were founded by colonists that had had a corporation chartered to assist them. Or if a community needed a bridge built that was outside of their means, they might permit a corporation to be chartered to build it, recoup their expenses for a little while with tolls, and then be dissolved.
Corporations were intended to last only as long as necessary, and only created when there weren't any other particularly viable methods of doing something, often due to economies of scale or natural monopolies. They absolutely had to act in the public interest. On occassions where a corporation did not, it was dissolved by the government, which is what had chartered it in the first place.
Most businesses however, were ordinary sole proprietorships or partnerships. It would've been nuts to want to incorporate a shop or a farm; it doesn't serve community interests.
Even today, these requirements have not lessened, though enforcement has just gone out the window. We definately need to bring it back.
(as for your opinion of torts, they still apply no matter what the nature of the organization, it's good that they do, and they're not a replacement for governmental oversight of business.)
This actually turns out to be an astoundingly bad idea. Basically, if there's one thing you really really need in a UI it's consistancy. Imagine driving down the road in a car with the gas and brake pedals reversed. You'd do okay for a couple blocks with some stops and starts, but the second a kid runs into the road, bam. Vehicular homicide.
This doesn't mean that there's anything inherently correct about the current system, just that you ought to have a damn good reason for change, and having changed, don't waffle.
When Alice changes from the lowest experience setting to the next one up, she'll have to relearn significant parts of the UI, and might as well be a novice. And this is going to happen again, the next time she ups it. By making people relearn these things all the time, you're really preventing them from forming useful habits and learning how the system can be used.
That's fair. I enjoy studying things that I can apply at my job, but it's a hobby; I'd do it regardless, and I'll do what I want. If my company wants me to learn something new in specific, then they have to pay me for it.
I don't take orders for free. That company probably didn't do work for clients for free. Why should they get a free ride from their employees?
Slashdot Mirror
Okay... do you understand the difference between a positive right and a natural right?
Free speech is a natural right. How would you reconcile it with your presupposed natural copyright? Remember, the former is inclusive of saying anything, so long as we're talking about it in its natural state. Only when we establish a government and grant to it willingly the ability to prohibit full natural exercise of that right can they both coexist, but this makes copyright (which is very inaptly named) a positive right.
When seen in the light of copyright's actual status as a positive right, you'll find that there's very little incentive for people to grant you a copyright for the reason you state - it's a quid *no* quo. As the people can do perfectly fine without a copyright at all, what they get out of it as opposed to the artist is of significant concern.
Nope. The Constitution demands that copyrights be assigned to the artist. There is work for hire, but that's somewhat different. (and there are those who are against that too. I'm ambivalent.)
At any rate, while artists like myself may have all kinds of different motivations that compel them to their art, Congress is empowered not to fulfill the desires of artists, but to assist society by establishing a copyright system. Where the two conflict, artists must choose between their motives and taking advantage of copyright. It is not without strings attached. An artist who does not with to further society through statutory means is free not to do so, but not free to also reap the rewards as though he had.
Where is the societal interest that must be present in permitting artists to withdraw their works after forcing us to protect them?
No, copyright law is entirely a construct based on the US Constitution. At least, within the US. Foreign copyright laws have no power within our borders, save that that we choose to grant them, founded on our own laws, and not on the foreign ones. (e.g. the UK could decide that copyrights are permanent, but it has no weight here.)
There is no such thing as international copyright, merely agreements between nations to grant domestic copyrights reciprocally.
Heck, foreign countries have screwy ideas about artists having natural copyrights - I wouldn't exalt them as a model. The US utilitarian system is way better in theory, we just need to keep in in balance. (and the foreigners are just as capable of losing the balance themselves - WIPO is international, after all)
But they have waived that right. For after all, when an artist receives a copyright, they are granted it by the government, under such terms as the government will grant it under.
If the government says that your options are:
*Protect your work by not publishing at all (meaning you can really _never_ share it or profit by it)
*Protect your work through some means other than copyright (meaning it's public domain, and people are free to reuse it if they can manage, AND that the government itself has an interest in assisting in that and can bring lots of resources to bear)
-or-
*Protect your work under the terms offered by the government and be happy for the opportunity.
There is debate as to how retroactive changes in the terms can be, but hey - Congress can arbitrarily revoke copyrights if it really wants to, so I'd expect they're plenty retroactive. (despite the hassles this has caused with term extensions)
Sheryl Crow will have to take the good along with the bad, if such a system were implemented; it's not her call to make.
I am a creative person, a professional artist, and I make ALL my money from my art. Although I think 3 years might be a little short, my proposal has been for 20 with a single 10 year extension, and a number of limitations elsewhere, that I can go into more detail on if you like. Your point is refuted.
As for the GPL, it's mostly making the best out of a bad situation. When copyrights are significantly deminished, the thinking is that the need for the GPL is likewise diminished.
Well, I'm not entirely certain how significant this would be in the case of a common law copyright. (where a work is never published and effectively does not exist)
However, in the case of published and copyrighted works, it's A-OK. Society directs the government as to the terms under which artists will recieve statutory copyrights. If this includes compulsory licensing, then it's STILL a better deal than publishing without a copyright at all. (for publishing permanently destroys common law copyright)
It's not even anything new. There are already compulsory licensing arrangements with regards to music.
As for the historical aspect, why on Earth would people bother permitting there to be grants of copyright if we weren't getting something out of it? We constitutionally require copyrights only to be granted where doing so promotes the progress of the arts, if they're to be granted at all. (they don't have to be) The granting of certain monopolistic rights by the government to a copyright holder is a quid pro quo. Since the author has no power to copyright and publish works independently of the government, it ends up being effectively one-sided. Me, I'm an artist, I think it's fine.
Another goal of any society is to improve itself. You want real freedom? Abolish copyrights altogether - they infringe on the freedom of the non-copyright holder in order to function.
Great public need? Heh.
Eminent domain is simply the civil power of government to sieze property, provided that the original owner is justly compensated. (with the amount of money determined by mutual agreement, or set by the courts) Property may also be siezed through exercise of police powers, but that's not immediately relevant.
At any rate, the government can take anything, at any time, for any purpose. It doesn't have to be important. It's most commonly associated with road widenings since people own property that abuts the road right-of-way. But it isn't exclusive to that by any means.
Well, until recently Carlos had been saying that she thought that the original tapes had degraded so much that it wouldn't be possible anyway. Evidently this has been solved, so maybe we will get one after all.
So it's a good thing that people don't go around calling their attorneys over the telephone without using scramblers, huh?
You can have an expectation of privacy without being actually private. This is where the word 'expectation' comes into play. It may be magnified through obfuscation, but whispering in a crowded courtroom works great all by itself.
I had thought that was Curran who said that. Do you have some citation for Jefferson?
Yeah, 'Wizards' is one of my favorite books on tech history. I wouldn't bother with Cringely too much. He's better at writing about the personalities of the players involved. He nailed Steve Jobs as probably being a sociopath, and Bill Gates as being a control freak of exceptional proportions.
If you want a good general history of early-mid microcomputing, try 'Fire in the Valley' to go along with 'Wizards.' Now I just need to find something good on minis other than 'Soul of a New Machine.' (it's okay, but there's more to life than Data General... boy is there)
UCLA and Stanford were the first two machines to be connected, and yeah, I believe they used leased lines. Although no one seems to remember who was doing it, the historic first message is remembered. The people at UCLA attempted to log into a computer at Stanford. Simultaneously they had placed a long-distance call to ensure that things were showing up at the other end. The conversation went basically like so (I'm writing this from memory, but I swear I am not making it up):
;)
UCLA: (types 'L') We typed an L
Stanford: We got the L
U: (types 'O') We typed O
S: We got the O
U: (types 'G') We typed G -- oh wait, it crashed.
This was probably an accurate omen
AARPNET? American Association for Retired Persons Network?
The ARPANET was _not_ intended for military purposes. Although the idea of a distributed communications network was suggested in a RAND study on the topic of war interrupting communications, the ARPANET was intended to network research facilities and help make efficient use of computer resources all around the country. (at a time when many programs could only be run on a single computer) I mean, come on. For years, the only installations on the thing were university computing centers.
Go read through the answers that the people actually involved with creating the ARPANET give to this question, and see how well the nuclear war myth holds up. Sheesh.
Hah! Unfortunately for you, I started working at the job I'm at in Seattle a few months prior to my move from Boston. Now I'm on the verge of quitting and moving back to the East Coast to go back to school. (only a few more days in fact) So not much need to interview, huh?
I've been to MS to meet with friends and neighbors that work there, but I've never interviewed there, and I've never even considered it. There's a surprisingly large number of people around here that don't like MS, I discovered.
I was thinking: Windows, WinCE, XBox, hardware, software, IE, and content, plus maybe one or two others if I missed anything. Of course my watchword for those bozos up the street (I live about a mile away from the Redmond campus) is "Microsoft delenda est." ;)
Well the real crux of the matter is the Constitutionality of the laws in question more than jurisdiction, I think.
At any rate, you should not have to rely on your country being unwilling to extradite you. It is a matter of soverignty. If you start to arrest people for breaking laws when outside of the area in which those laws apply, you invite others to do the same to you, and you spoil everyone's sovereignty by expected undue outside influence.
This doesn't stop some countries from being so corrupt or intolerant that they'll arrest people for things they did whilst outside of their jurisdiction, but for the US to do so - that's not at all right. We're supposed to be better than that.
Of course they do. Imagine that it is illegal in Foosylvania to criticize the government there. Do I, an American citizen, not have the right to use the Internet to publish criticisms of the Foosylvanian government because it would break THEIR law? What a silly argument.
Elcomsoft exported their software out of Russia. Simultaneously someone imported their software into the US. If you're going to pursue a trafficker, it is the person who brought it into here - not the person who sent it out of there.
Not feasible. What happens when a judge or the Canadian Parliment decide to overturn some law, reinterpret it, or rewrite it? Boom - the measure is no longer legal, because it's a stupid piece of code. It can't keep up with the legal system on a minute-by-minute basis.
The thing to do is this:
Any copyrighted work may not have any protection measure whatsoever. However, infringing uses may be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Any work with any protection measure will be stripped of its copyright in all expressions of that work.
Any uncopyrighted work may have a protection measure, but all peoples of the world are invited to try their hand at breaking it, and disseminating the uncopyrighted work at will. The government will maintain a small office dedicated to coordinating exploits and assisting in them, and maybe even their intelligence apparatus might use them for practice.
Basically... self-help is not a good thing in the realm of copyrights or patents. How does it promote progress if the work is unusable?
Should you be allowed to profit from your work? Well of course. It's a rare bird that says you shouldn't. However, should my rights of free speech and press be infringed upon so that you can profit by being the only person permitted to exercise them for a particular work?
Copyright is a bargain. I am willing to voluntarily not exercise my God-given right to repeat or republish things, if the work in question is good enough, and if it promotes the continued progress of the arts and of human culture.
But not completely. I still want to be able to make copies for my personal use if I got the original legally. I still want to be able to sell the original. (but will destroy any copies I made) I still want to be able to use your works in certain, limited ways to promote the progress of the arts even further, perhaps by quoting it in book reviews, perhaps by xeroxing portions and using them in teaching. And above all, I want to, after you've had enough time to make your work pay for itself, stop this sacrifice, and be able to do whatever I want with the work through the end of time.
This seems fair enough, right? Particularly since you cannot demand that I, in this case, we, the people who give authority to the government, are being gracious to you. We don't HAVE to voluntarily surrender our rights, even for a moment. If it's worth our while, and if it's on our terms, then we're ameniable to it. But copyrights are a gift we grant, and not something you're entitled to just by being an author.
Unfortunately, even THIS isn't enough for the moneyed copyright interests, who want more and more and more, and think that they deserve it. If they keep it up, I think that there will sooner or later be a reckoning, and things will be set back to how they were.
Huh? If someone publishes a piece of text as a PDF, it can be copied precisely simply by someone just transcribing it off of the screen.
Written language is digital. Letters do not appear on a continuum, but are discrete - otherwise there would be something in between an A and a B that was a letter in itself.
Digital copies are nothing new under the sun.
If you're governed by someone, you have the right to bitch about it. Regardless of your voting history. It may be sad that you didn't do what you could about it, but you can bitch regardless.
There's nothing wrong with not voting - it too is a political statement. (although, me I like to vote)
Well, here in the states at any rate, the crown corporations that ran the colonies (e.g. the Massachusetts Bay Company) were transformed into actual representative governments. Between approximately the founding of the nation through the Gilded Age, Americans who knew what corporations were capable of kept them on a short leash.
Offhand I remember the North River Sugar Refining Corporation was dechartered in New York state in the late 19th century, and was one of the last decharterings, though the laws remain on the books. Previously, particularly prior to the Civil War, decharterings tended to be reserved for things like bridge, ferry and turnpike corporations, banks, liquor trusts, etc. More or less natural monopolies. (which is why the Santa Clara case that the SCOTUS screwed us over with involved railroads)
More often corporations just faded out of existance through planned decharterings. That is, they were regulated as to the amount of money that they were allowed to make, what they could own, how long they could last, what their specific purpose was, etc.
The idea is basically grounded in hierarchies of authority - a judicial doctrine known as quo warrento. The thought goes like so:
First, you have this master authority. It used to be the King, these days its the citizenry. They mete out some portion of authority to another body, in this case the state government. Given that corporations do not exist in nature, they're obviously, as you point out, artificial. The group gathering together to form the corporation is incapable of granting to themselves the limited liability, etc. that they crave. The best they can do are various types of partnerships.
So when the state issues a charter, it must do so pursuant to the will of the people who are permitting it (if they are at all) in the first place. So it goes from God to the people to the state to the corporation.
*But* it would be a truly odd state which was empowered by its people to undertake actions which were illegal or harmful to the populace. If the state cannot take such actions itself - and although I don't sit around reading state constitutions for fun, I bet they generally can't - then it has no authority to permit the corporations that it charters to do so either.
Thus, when a corporation does act in such a manner, the state has the option to simply dissolve it, or make its chartering conditional on the kinds of limits mentioned earlier, so that it can fulfill its purpose which is to the people.
I'm not saying that amoral entities don't have their value, just that when they're governed by moral entities, as we want our states to be, they can't be permitted to run amok without such a contradiction and authority being passed without permission.
The business environment of early America was quite different from today's... but there's no real reason for it to have changed. It's pretty likely that even back in the 1800's businesses were corrupting governments from their duties to their citizenry. Today, there are efforts to decharter Unocal, Philip Morris, and other corporations. People haven't realized this is possible for so long that it'll take a long time to bring it back to the forefront of memory, but hopefully it'll be doable.
What's meant by corporations' rightful place is as a servant to society. Until comparatively recently, corporations were not very common, and were formed for specific purposes, generally for short periods of time. A number of states were founded by colonists that had had a corporation chartered to assist them. Or if a community needed a bridge built that was outside of their means, they might permit a corporation to be chartered to build it, recoup their expenses for a little while with tolls, and then be dissolved.
Corporations were intended to last only as long as necessary, and only created when there weren't any other particularly viable methods of doing something, often due to economies of scale or natural monopolies. They absolutely had to act in the public interest. On occassions where a corporation did not, it was dissolved by the government, which is what had chartered it in the first place.
Most businesses however, were ordinary sole proprietorships or partnerships. It would've been nuts to want to incorporate a shop or a farm; it doesn't serve community interests.
Even today, these requirements have not lessened, though enforcement has just gone out the window. We definately need to bring it back.
(as for your opinion of torts, they still apply no matter what the nature of the organization, it's good that they do, and they're not a replacement for governmental oversight of business.)
This actually turns out to be an astoundingly bad idea. Basically, if there's one thing you really really need in a UI it's consistancy. Imagine driving down the road in a car with the gas and brake pedals reversed. You'd do okay for a couple blocks with some stops and starts, but the second a kid runs into the road, bam. Vehicular homicide.
This doesn't mean that there's anything inherently correct about the current system, just that you ought to have a damn good reason for change, and having changed, don't waffle.
When Alice changes from the lowest experience setting to the next one up, she'll have to relearn significant parts of the UI, and might as well be a novice. And this is going to happen again, the next time she ups it. By making people relearn these things all the time, you're really preventing them from forming useful habits and learning how the system can be used.
That's fair. I enjoy studying things that I can apply at my job, but it's a hobby; I'd do it regardless, and I'll do what I want. If my company wants me to learn something new in specific, then they have to pay me for it.
I don't take orders for free. That company probably didn't do work for clients for free. Why should they get a free ride from their employees?