Oh please. Sen. Gorton is pretty well known as the Senator from Microsoft with _everyone_ I know that pays attention to politics in WA. Not that he's the only one. Remember Sen. Jackson? He was from Boeing.
While I don't think that MS buys off every judge in the state, they have an exceptional amount of influence in King County and WA in general. As for love, people love MS only because 1) they own stock 2) they work there. Can't say I can think of a whole lot of people who like 'em because of their 'quality' products, 'ethical' business practices or 'humble' attitudes.
I will grant you though that WA politics stink. I'd love nothing more than to run them all out of office at city, county and state levels and get some people in there who view themselves as civil _servants_. It would be a refreshing change.
No, but there should be possibility _of_ conflict. People in society simply are going to have differences of opinion. It's important for people to be able to voice their opinions rather than be told that they're wrong by some higher power (which, being human, is fallible)
Generally monocultures are not a good plan. Only granting freedom of speech to 'approved' groups would create a monoculture of thought. Am I defending what the KKK says? No. Am I defending their right to say it - the same right used by their opponents? Yes.
Censors operate on both sides of the 1 dimensional political spectrum, and for the same reason. They disagree with what the censored people say and think, and believe that the opinions are too dangerous for anyone to even be aware of. How can we oppose the KKK if we don't know what they do? Censorship is generally a very bad plan, and I do not believe that it is ultimately successful either. I would much rather let people think with the brains God gave them than attempt to do it myself.
well it's worth pointing out that fair uses of copyrighted materials _are_ copyright violations, they're just considered to be okay.
Yes Virginia, quoting another work is copyright infringement, but it's deemed more important than the copyright is, and so it's permissible.
Big media corporations would like nothing more than to wipe out fair use infringements. They've started with DMCA and UCITA. So it's important to be very careful when making statements like yours to avoid playing into their hands. Just think carefully is all.
Do realize that copyrights are directly opposed to the (arguably more important) freedom of speech. You are curtailing my freedom of speech when I want to say something you just said (which was copyrighted).
At any rate, copyrights are not inherent rights, they're plainly artificial and their purpose (at least in the US) is NOT for artists to control their work, nor for them to make money. The point is to encourage the creation of work which will, after a limited time being held by the artist, enter the public domain.
People don't _deserve_ compensation for copyrighted material. It's just an incentive to create more stuff. Copyrighted material is only truly valuable when it enters the public domain and can serve as the foundation for many other works, as well as being enjoyed independently. Copyrighted materials hinder the creation of new works.
They certainly do have the right to control their music as they please. They created it, they set the terms of it. It's the same as if you coded an app. You get to choose the license which gives or restricts the rights of the users.
Bzzt. Sorry, that's wrong, but thanks for playing.
IANAL, but IIRC, once a work has been published (which is a requirement for any significant copyright protection) the first sale doctrine applies. That is, the creator can control who _he_ sells it to. But there is nothing at all that permits him to further dictate who can buy or sell the work. Thus, anyone can listen to anything, and the artist has no say in the matter.
Creating a copy which is redistributed to others of a copyrighted work without a license is illegal, which is why radio stations need licenses. Napster can fall into the fair use provision of copyright law (for instance if you ran a Napster server and then used a Napster client on a different computer to transfer a file you made from a recording you owned to yourself) it depends on the circumstances. Napster can also be used to copy public domain music, which is quite legal, or to copy music which the copyright holder permits to be copied.
As for semantics, if you don't like how a word is used, it doesn't strike me as objectionable to try to resist or change it. Witness the people who complain about Hacker/Cracker. Or African-American/Black/Colored/Negro. No one's making you use his word (which is more explicit) and you can't make him use yours (which is vague and loaded)
Well Larson should note that he hasn't released new Far Sides in a fairly long time, and that many of the books were reprints of comics in other books. I don't buy the same thing twice 'cos the label is different.
But I'd buy a _new_, _good_ Far Side book in a heartbeat.
Set up a pair of groups to extract it. One agrees to the terms and knows what the license is.
The other does not agree, and never looks at the docs at all. But they keep making filters which they think are likely to strip the license. They make a metric crapload of them, present them to the 1st group and asks "Are any of these licenseless?"
A bit of grepping determines the answer, and voila - a copy of the docs w/o license.
;) (and if you think I'm a lawyer, I've got this bridge that's very affordable...)
That's all well and good, but this could also be considered dangerously close to cruel and unusual punishment - because even if you've served time and repaid your debt to society after being convicted of a crime, people are still likely to discriminate against you based entirely on the contents of the db and things you did years ago (imagine not being able to ever get a good job because you went out joyriding once at age 15).
Simply aggregating the data and making it so trivial to look through will have a chilling effect on how people behave in society. And it effectively extends your punishment for even minor crimes throughout your entire life, which is generally not appropriate.
There have already been documented cases of this sort of thing happening - it's even more of a nightmare than having bad credit reports, b/c at least there are laws that prevent bad items from staying on the report for more than 7 years (good items stay forever)
Additionally, what if there's an error. A huge percentage of credit reports contain errors that have significantly harmful effects on the people they concern, and these errors are nigh-impossible to correct because the errroneous data continues to propagate, rather like a virus. What if chkingg's file gets confused with chking's file? What error correction mechanisms are in place? How does it comply with court orders to seal records?
There are REAL DANGERS involved with massive databases. It's important to actually frickin' think about them ahead of time and carefully regulate them - how they're used, how they're compiled, corrected, time limits on the data, etc.
Oh please. You're confusing morality with religion. They are not the same thing, although frequently people's morals will rely on a religion for a foundation. This does not mean that everyone needs such a foundation.
For RMS to be a Christian would basically require a belief in a single god, the divinity of Jesus, etc. However, Jesus's preachings are generally still valid even if you decide that he was a regular human being. (which is IIRC what Muslims believe - that Jesus was a prophet, but not divine)
It is possible to be a good person and still be an atheist. You need not decide that the ONLY reason it's wrong to murder people for instance, is because God says so. It's wrong anyway.
People acting religiously have also been responsible for atrocities all throughout history. You can't blame the Crusades on the Reds. Or the Spanish Inquisition. Or human sacrifice. Or the acceptance of slavery for thousands of years. So religion is not necessarily moral.
And businesses and plain old greed have been responsible for plenty of horrible acts as well. Slavery, again. The Spanish Inquisition, again (you think that the money and property confiscated from Jews got dumped in the trash?) Child labor. Lack of safety equipment. Massive levels of pollution and inefficiencies in production. Grossly defective products. Infringements on the rights and freedoms of anyone smaller than they are - typically regular people. Businesses aren't lily-white at all.
RMS has a moral system that works for him. This is good. It's basically compatable with the society he's in, which is good. I don't have any problems with it myself, so I'm willing to say it's good. I'm sure his politics are subject to his morals, but that's also good.
I would much rather live in a society where everyone had well-developed morals, instead of one founded on religion or some political or economic philosophy.
If you have a better idea, please enlighten us. I'm sure we'll all bask in your wisdom.
But the password is stored only within your noggin. You'd have to reveal what it is. This is *much* more like testimony (particularly if your password is something like 'I killed Col. Mustard in the conservatory with the candlestick';) than a physical form of compulsion, like fingerprints or breath tests, or biometrics.
Of course, the police can only force you to talk in ways that don't comprimise yourself. AFAIK this is basically Name, Rank and Serial Number kind of stuff, and has a lot to do with determining other stuff (like are you drunk and slurring your speech) than it does testimony. Personally, if I end up getting arrested I'm smart enough to clam up until my lawyer arrives. When you're the suspect the cops are NEVER on your side.
Yes, another argument against relying totally on biometric passwords, folks.
I think I mentioned this, but Kevin Mitnick, everyone's favorite hacker, is currently in just this kind of situation right now. Though he's served his time, the government would like nothing more than to put him BACK in prision. So they're refusing to release the evidence they confiscated (hard disks in this case) until he tells them how to decrypt it so that they can look through it and try to get him again. Mitnick obviously isn't telling, he's stuck with the same judge that wouldn't let him use a telephone for fears that he could cause World War III, and it's a stalemate. Hopefully it'll go to the Supremes who will, one hopes, side with Mitnick on this one.
(I am well aware that Mitnick is scum - but he has a very valid point in this situation so I'm on his side)
Well, copyrights generally only kick in once something is published. If you spend 20 years writing the great Antarctian novel it only starts getting copyrighted once you publish it. I'm unaware of the protections that exist while something is actively under development, though this really isn't of any concern to me. Publishing is basically widescale distribution, so it's not really possible to skirt around the start date by claiming that despite selling copies of your work to the public you hadn't published yet.
But right now we have arbitrary dates. And any date other than 0 and forever is going to be arbitrary. It's merely important to decide (in the US anyway, where copyrights are totally artificial and exist for a specific purpose) what the least amount of time the copyright can exist which will still serve to motivate people to create stuff.
Notice that it has to be the LEAST amount of time. This is because the purpose (here in the US at least - copyrights vary in details as well as principle in various countries, when they even exist) is to get stuff into the public domain.
Copyrights, and the possibility of making money from your exclusive ability to distribute copies of the material* is the carrot. But it's not the point. It would be disasterous if all material were perpetually copyrighted. It would be impossible to stand on the shoulders of the people who came before you. Which is essential for progress in the arts and sciences. Just imagine if physicists couldn't discuss e=mc^2 without having to pay Einstein or his heirs. Clearly this would be bad.
* of course, copyrights to not extend to redistribution of the copies that were distributed by the copyright holder. So I can sell a used, copyrighted book. But I can't sell copies that I make of someone else's copyrighted book, even if the first copy was legal.
As for being unable to find a suitable use for some material until after the copyright expires, well, too bad. How would you determine when a suitable use has been found? How would you determine when to expire the copyright? There has to be one rule. I'm very sorry if your work isn't appreciated until after your death or whatever, but I can't see any other solution that wouldn't cause chaos.
No, you'r not depriving them of the material. You are, however, (for all practical purposes) depriving them of the ability to get compensation for work they did that you're benefitting from.
That's true. But as far as I can determine from looking through definitions (and the occassional jury instruction) on the net, theft includes depriving the owner of the property, which isn't the case. I agree that it should probably still be illegal, it's just not strictly theft. It's something similar.
But I sincerely doubt that we have copy protection because of this.
99.44% of the copy protection schemes _I've_ seen are aimed at casual people who don't realize that most copy protection infringes on the rights and fair use infringements that they have by virtue of owning a copy of a work. They tend to be ineffectual against anyone who's serious about copying it no matter what. Yet those are the sorts of people who ought to be stopped. The former group is, in my experience, rather sympathetic to the creator. However that doesn't mean that they should be unable to sell their copy of a work, or make a backup, or time/space-shift it, or other perfectly legal uses.
No, I think that many copyright holders who would engage in this sort of thing in this day and age are simply greedy. They're willing to take everything they can get, even if it is illegal &| unethical &| against the intent of copyright laws in the first place.
Please explain to me how exactly, without DeCSS, I am supposed to be able to access CSS-encrypted public domain materials? Yet many people who don't have any copyright at all still act as if they do. This sort of behavior is why we need a fundemental reformation of copyright law - so that legal users are not assaulted by overbearing copyright holders and illegal users can still be prosecuted.
You lose everything when you die. Does that mean you have no property at all?
Nope, it just means that you can't take it with you. With copyrights there's no practical way for someone to hold exclusive control over the material. Just the distribution of copies. As opposed to real property, where you control the thing, and can't lose control unless you lose the thing too. Unreal property is not exclusive.
I'm sorry to hear that you don't care about the US Constitution, if only because both my argument and the argument of the other side, in the US, are founded on the Constitution. There would not be copyrights or patents here without the power to grant them being in that document. And all laws which exercise that power (as very few specifics are mentioned in the Constitution - par for the course) must comply with it. If they don't, they're invalid, fair or not.
So it's really not possible to create a copyright law that's suitable for everyone. It's not widely recognized, AFAIK as a fundemental human right. In fact, I'd say the opposite is true. Throughout most of history works were created in the absence of copyright. The idea was absurd that you couldn't sing a song you heard someone else sing, just because they said so. Really, it still is - only when coupled with the incentive to create more material (this again is straight from the Constitution) is it at all justified. European laws are different from US laws, Taiwan has no such laws at all (and gets by okay) and I'm sure that they're different from laws in African countries or South American ones. YMMV.
As for fairness, I don't mind that someone wants to be able to reap the rewards of having created some new work. What I don't like is:
That if they can reap these rewards exclusively for a long time, there is little incentive to create anything new
That the creator thinks that his new work is more important than the great mass of public domain works, upon which his work is founded. You can't create art in a vacuum. It will inevitably refer to _something_. So the artist has taken advantage of unowned works. It's EXTREMELY fair, as well as the natural state of things, that eventually his work too shall be the foundation for the next generation of art, and that everyone shall be able to use and enjoy it.
In the US at any rate, copyrights and patents are pretty dissimiliar. And I know the differences between them. But you're missing the point I was making. Copyrights are not (here) constitutionally permitted to be granted to any trivial novelty. They're reserved only for those works that promote 'the progress of the useful arts and sciences.' This is why the phone book is not copyrighted. (though there have been efforts to change this recently - the sort of thing I am opposed to)
I merely proposed that we abandon the foolish law we currently have, in which everything is copyrighted automatically, and for a *very* long time, and return to the more sensible method of only permitting copyrights for those works which pay to have it registered. Clearly this money could be spent both to increase the efficiency of the Copyright Office and, if the government was not being typically boneheaded, used to commission works that would go immediately into the public domain (where they benefit everyone)
So generally, I'd at least like to return (more or less) to the state of affairs that we had in the US prior to the Copyright Act of 1976.
Still, to get back to patents for a moment - why is it that you don't object to the rather short lifespan of patents? Wouldn't you consider that to be unfair? Someone could spend years developing something only to have the patent run out in less time than it took to create. Well, given as how it's better in general (including for the inventor, who surely is relying on the past inventions of others and the disclosure required by the patent office) for patents to be quite short, I say it's plenty fair. I'd just like to apply similar principles to copyrights.
If you're looking for a real boondoggle, that would be trademarks. That's just a nightmare.
Which will pay for something like 15 minutes of the lawyer's time. Still a losing proposition. (heh - you could increase the financial impact on Dr. Dre merely by stalling for time, since you'll never be able to pay it anyway)
Honestly, as others have proposed, it's probably the RIAA using artists as puppets to obscure the fact that nearly all objection to Napster outside of bandwidth concerns is coming from the RIAA and the RIAA alone.
Well, as for me, I'd like to see copyrights expire (with no grandfather clauses, preferably) after 10 years, and no future extensions of copyright law permitted to apply retroactively.
If this means that MS releases old, public domain copies of Emacs, that's fine with me. I think that we'll all be better off.
As for not stealing, it's not. You are absolutely not depriving someone else of the copyrighted material. What you're doing is copying it. Think about why copyright should have that name. It's the right to copy (specifically the right to distribute copies)
And it's not property either. Property is tangible. It's a thing. Copyrighted material is not, although some particular expression of it - like _your_ copy of a book might be property, though the information in the book is not.
Copyrights are simply a limited-duration monopoly on the distribution of copies of that information. You obviously don't own it. You just control the distribution of copies of it. And that monopoly ends after a certain amount of time, which means that you lose your control. If it were property, none of this would be the case. And yet, it is the case.
I don't reject the _idea_ of copyrights per se. I do think that modern copyright law is blatantly unconstitutional and is in serious need of being reformed. IIRC the framers of the constitution came very close to never implementing copyright law at all, because of their fears of the sort of situation we have today. (in which they are perpetually and tight-fistedly held) And of course, copyrights are being granted to all kinds of things that don't promote the arts or useful sciences. They shouldn't be automatic - if you want a copyright, I think you ought to have to justify it, rather like how patents work, when examiners don't give them out willy-nilly either.
IANAL but they may be able to get you with contempt of court, and you may be required to do it under an injunction. Of course the results of decryption might be inadmissable. anyone know more about this one?
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Violence worked pretty well against the Cartheginians from what I've heard. Met any Cartheginians lately? No? Guess why....
Oh please. Sen. Gorton is pretty well known as the Senator from Microsoft with _everyone_ I know that pays attention to politics in WA. Not that he's the only one. Remember Sen. Jackson? He was from Boeing.
While I don't think that MS buys off every judge in the state, they have an exceptional amount of influence in King County and WA in general. As for love, people love MS only because 1) they own stock 2) they work there. Can't say I can think of a whole lot of people who like 'em because of their 'quality' products, 'ethical' business practices or 'humble' attitudes.
I will grant you though that WA politics stink. I'd love nothing more than to run them all out of office at city, county and state levels and get some people in there who view themselves as civil _servants_. It would be a refreshing change.
No, but there should be possibility _of_ conflict. People in society simply are going to have differences of opinion. It's important for people to be able to voice their opinions rather than be told that they're wrong by some higher power (which, being human, is fallible)
Generally monocultures are not a good plan. Only granting freedom of speech to 'approved' groups would create a monoculture of thought. Am I defending what the KKK says? No. Am I defending their right to say it - the same right used by their opponents? Yes.
Censors operate on both sides of the 1 dimensional political spectrum, and for the same reason. They disagree with what the censored people say and think, and believe that the opinions are too dangerous for anyone to even be aware of. How can we oppose the KKK if we don't know what they do? Censorship is generally a very bad plan, and I do not believe that it is ultimately successful either. I would much rather let people think with the brains God gave them than attempt to do it myself.
Yeah but that's basically negligence. Which strikes me as being slightly different.
;)
Besides you should talk, with all the fanfic on eyrie (good fanfic, I'll grant)
well it's worth pointing out that fair uses of copyrighted materials _are_ copyright violations, they're just considered to be okay.
Yes Virginia, quoting another work is copyright infringement, but it's deemed more important than the copyright is, and so it's permissible.
Big media corporations would like nothing more than to wipe out fair use infringements. They've started with DMCA and UCITA. So it's important to be very careful when making statements like yours to avoid playing into their hands. Just think carefully is all.
there is already prescedent for the legality of creating mp3s in the Rio case.
I actually caught them restting the channel once - on an Amiga - in Tallahassee, FL.
Do realize that copyrights are directly opposed to the (arguably more important) freedom of speech. You are curtailing my freedom of speech when I want to say something you just said (which was copyrighted).
At any rate, copyrights are not inherent rights, they're plainly artificial and their purpose (at least in the US) is NOT for artists to control their work, nor for them to make money. The point is to encourage the creation of work which will, after a limited time being held by the artist, enter the public domain.
People don't _deserve_ compensation for copyrighted material. It's just an incentive to create more stuff. Copyrighted material is only truly valuable when it enters the public domain and can serve as the foundation for many other works, as well as being enjoyed independently. Copyrighted materials hinder the creation of new works.
Bzzt. Sorry, that's wrong, but thanks for playing.
IANAL, but IIRC, once a work has been published (which is a requirement for any significant copyright protection) the first sale doctrine applies. That is, the creator can control who _he_ sells it to. But there is nothing at all that permits him to further dictate who can buy or sell the work. Thus, anyone can listen to anything, and the artist has no say in the matter.
Creating a copy which is redistributed to others of a copyrighted work without a license is illegal, which is why radio stations need licenses. Napster can fall into the fair use provision of copyright law (for instance if you ran a Napster server and then used a Napster client on a different computer to transfer a file you made from a recording you owned to yourself) it depends on the circumstances. Napster can also be used to copy public domain music, which is quite legal, or to copy music which the copyright holder permits to be copied.
As for semantics, if you don't like how a word is used, it doesn't strike me as objectionable to try to resist or change it. Witness the people who complain about Hacker/Cracker. Or African-American/Black/Colored/Negro. No one's making you use his word (which is more explicit) and you can't make him use yours (which is vague and loaded)
Well Larson should note that he hasn't released new Far Sides in a fairly long time, and that many of the books were reprints of comics in other books. I don't buy the same thing twice 'cos the label is different.
But I'd buy a _new_, _good_ Far Side book in a heartbeat.
No, it would be sensible. Hopefully they'll do it.
Clearly you haven't extracted it enough...
Set up a pair of groups to extract it. One agrees to the terms and knows what the license is.
The other does not agree, and never looks at the docs at all. But they keep making filters which they think are likely to strip the license. They make a metric crapload of them, present them to the 1st group and asks "Are any of these licenseless?"
A bit of grepping determines the answer, and voila - a copy of the docs w/o license.
;)
(and if you think I'm a lawyer, I've got this bridge that's very affordable...)
That's all well and good, but this could also be considered dangerously close to cruel and unusual punishment - because even if you've served time and repaid your debt to society after being convicted of a crime, people are still likely to discriminate against you based entirely on the contents of the db and things you did years ago (imagine not being able to ever get a good job because you went out joyriding once at age 15).
Simply aggregating the data and making it so trivial to look through will have a chilling effect on how people behave in society. And it effectively extends your punishment for even minor crimes throughout your entire life, which is generally not appropriate.
There have already been documented cases of this sort of thing happening - it's even more of a nightmare than having bad credit reports, b/c at least there are laws that prevent bad items from staying on the report for more than 7 years (good items stay forever)
Additionally, what if there's an error. A huge percentage of credit reports contain errors that have significantly harmful effects on the people they concern, and these errors are nigh-impossible to correct because the errroneous data continues to propagate, rather like a virus. What if chkingg's file gets confused with chking's file? What error correction mechanisms are in place? How does it comply with court orders to seal records?
There are REAL DANGERS involved with massive databases. It's important to actually frickin' think about them ahead of time and carefully regulate them - how they're used, how they're compiled, corrected, time limits on the data, etc.
I thought God was either 1 or 3, which makes him an int ;)
TerraServer has a lot of very out of date maps though. Very up to date satellite photos are still rather pricey. And let's not discuss video.
TS could get to be more useful, but it's not as useful as it should be....
Oh please. You're confusing morality with religion. They are not the same thing, although frequently people's morals will rely on a religion for a foundation. This does not mean that everyone needs such a foundation.
For RMS to be a Christian would basically require a belief in a single god, the divinity of Jesus, etc. However, Jesus's preachings are generally still valid even if you decide that he was a regular human being. (which is IIRC what Muslims believe - that Jesus was a prophet, but not divine)
It is possible to be a good person and still be an atheist. You need not decide that the ONLY reason it's wrong to murder people for instance, is because God says so. It's wrong anyway.
People acting religiously have also been responsible for atrocities all throughout history. You can't blame the Crusades on the Reds. Or the Spanish Inquisition. Or human sacrifice. Or the acceptance of slavery for thousands of years. So religion is not necessarily moral.
And businesses and plain old greed have been responsible for plenty of horrible acts as well. Slavery, again. The Spanish Inquisition, again (you think that the money and property confiscated from Jews got dumped in the trash?) Child labor. Lack of safety equipment. Massive levels of pollution and inefficiencies in production. Grossly defective products. Infringements on the rights and freedoms of anyone smaller than they are - typically regular people. Businesses aren't lily-white at all.
RMS has a moral system that works for him. This is good. It's basically compatable with the society he's in, which is good. I don't have any problems with it myself, so I'm willing to say it's good. I'm sure his politics are subject to his morals, but that's also good.
I would much rather live in a society where everyone had well-developed morals, instead of one founded on religion or some political or economic philosophy.
If you have a better idea, please enlighten us. I'm sure we'll all bask in your wisdom.
Would the SEC let them get away with that?
Actually, I always thought that the real problem with pirates was the gratuitous saying of 'Arrr'
but the boarding and killing sounds bad too
Bear in mind that the rights granted to a corporation by the government (which is a dumb idea anyway, imho) do come with strings attached.
But yes, we should definately change both of those things.
Yeah, but the ads would've been great. Women running away from Incubi, thanks entirely to the speeds they can achieve in the shoes...
But the password is stored only within your noggin. You'd have to reveal what it is. This is *much* more like testimony (particularly if your password is something like 'I killed Col. Mustard in the conservatory with the candlestick' ;) than a physical form of compulsion, like fingerprints or breath tests, or biometrics.
Of course, the police can only force you to talk in ways that don't comprimise yourself. AFAIK this is basically Name, Rank and Serial Number kind of stuff, and has a lot to do with determining other stuff (like are you drunk and slurring your speech) than it does testimony. Personally, if I end up getting arrested I'm smart enough to clam up until my lawyer arrives. When you're the suspect the cops are NEVER on your side.
Yes, another argument against relying totally on biometric passwords, folks.
I think I mentioned this, but Kevin Mitnick, everyone's favorite hacker, is currently in just this kind of situation right now. Though he's served his time, the government would like nothing more than to put him BACK in prision. So they're refusing to release the evidence they confiscated (hard disks in this case) until he tells them how to decrypt it so that they can look through it and try to get him again. Mitnick obviously isn't telling, he's stuck with the same judge that wouldn't let him use a telephone for fears that he could cause World War III, and it's a stalemate. Hopefully it'll go to the Supremes who will, one hopes, side with Mitnick on this one.
(I am well aware that Mitnick is scum - but he has a very valid point in this situation so I'm on his side)
But right now we have arbitrary dates. And any date other than 0 and forever is going to be arbitrary. It's merely important to decide (in the US anyway, where copyrights are totally artificial and exist for a specific purpose) what the least amount of time the copyright can exist which will still serve to motivate people to create stuff.
Notice that it has to be the LEAST amount of time. This is because the purpose (here in the US at least - copyrights vary in details as well as principle in various countries, when they even exist) is to get stuff into the public domain.
Copyrights, and the possibility of making money from your exclusive ability to distribute copies of the material* is the carrot. But it's not the point. It would be disasterous if all material were perpetually copyrighted. It would be impossible to stand on the shoulders of the people who came before you. Which is essential for progress in the arts and sciences. Just imagine if physicists couldn't discuss e=mc^2 without having to pay Einstein or his heirs. Clearly this would be bad.
* of course, copyrights to not extend to redistribution of the copies that were distributed by the copyright holder. So I can sell a used, copyrighted book. But I can't sell copies that I make of someone else's copyrighted book, even if the first copy was legal.
As for being unable to find a suitable use for some material until after the copyright expires, well, too bad. How would you determine when a suitable use has been found? How would you determine when to expire the copyright? There has to be one rule. I'm very sorry if your work isn't appreciated until after your death or whatever, but I can't see any other solution that wouldn't cause chaos.
No, you'r not depriving them of the material. You are, however, (for all practical purposes) depriving them of the ability to get compensation for work they did that you're benefitting from.
That's true. But as far as I can determine from looking through definitions (and the occassional jury instruction) on the net, theft includes depriving the owner of the property, which isn't the case. I agree that it should probably still be illegal, it's just not strictly theft. It's something similar.
But I sincerely doubt that we have copy protection because of this.
99.44% of the copy protection schemes _I've_ seen are aimed at casual people who don't realize that most copy protection infringes on the rights and fair use infringements that they have by virtue of owning a copy of a work. They tend to be ineffectual against anyone who's serious about copying it no matter what. Yet those are the sorts of people who ought to be stopped. The former group is, in my experience, rather sympathetic to the creator. However that doesn't mean that they should be unable to sell their copy of a work, or make a backup, or time/space-shift it, or other perfectly legal uses.
No, I think that many copyright holders who would engage in this sort of thing in this day and age are simply greedy. They're willing to take everything they can get, even if it is illegal &| unethical &| against the intent of copyright laws in the first place.
Please explain to me how exactly, without DeCSS, I am supposed to be able to access CSS-encrypted public domain materials? Yet many people who don't have any copyright at all still act as if they do. This sort of behavior is why we need a fundemental reformation of copyright law - so that legal users are not assaulted by overbearing copyright holders and illegal users can still be prosecuted.
You lose everything when you die. Does that mean you have no property at all?
Nope, it just means that you can't take it with you. With copyrights there's no practical way for someone to hold exclusive control over the material. Just the distribution of copies. As opposed to real property, where you control the thing, and can't lose control unless you lose the thing too. Unreal property is not exclusive.
I'm sorry to hear that you don't care about the US Constitution, if only because both my argument and the argument of the other side, in the US, are founded on the Constitution. There would not be copyrights or patents here without the power to grant them being in that document. And all laws which exercise that power (as very few specifics are mentioned in the Constitution - par for the course) must comply with it. If they don't, they're invalid, fair or not.
So it's really not possible to create a copyright law that's suitable for everyone. It's not widely recognized, AFAIK as a fundemental human right. In fact, I'd say the opposite is true. Throughout most of history works were created in the absence of copyright. The idea was absurd that you couldn't sing a song you heard someone else sing, just because they said so. Really, it still is - only when coupled with the incentive to create more material (this again is straight from the Constitution) is it at all justified. European laws are different from US laws, Taiwan has no such laws at all (and gets by okay) and I'm sure that they're different from laws in African countries or South American ones. YMMV.
As for fairness, I don't mind that someone wants to be able to reap the rewards of having created some new work. What I don't like is:
In the US at any rate, copyrights and patents are pretty dissimiliar. And I know the differences between them. But you're missing the point I was making. Copyrights are not (here) constitutionally permitted to be granted to any trivial novelty. They're reserved only for those works that promote 'the progress of the useful arts and sciences.' This is why the phone book is not copyrighted. (though there have been efforts to change this recently - the sort of thing I am opposed to)
I merely proposed that we abandon the foolish law we currently have, in which everything is copyrighted automatically, and for a *very* long time, and return to the more sensible method of only permitting copyrights for those works which pay to have it registered. Clearly this money could be spent both to increase the efficiency of the Copyright Office and, if the government was not being typically boneheaded, used to commission works that would go immediately into the public domain (where they benefit everyone)
So generally, I'd at least like to return (more or less) to the state of affairs that we had in the US prior to the Copyright Act of 1976.
Still, to get back to patents for a moment - why is it that you don't object to the rather short lifespan of patents? Wouldn't you consider that to be unfair? Someone could spend years developing something only to have the patent run out in less time than it took to create. Well, given as how it's better in general (including for the inventor, who surely is relying on the past inventions of others and the disclosure required by the patent office) for patents to be quite short, I say it's plenty fair. I'd just like to apply similar principles to copyrights.
If you're looking for a real boondoggle, that would be trademarks. That's just a nightmare.
Which will pay for something like 15 minutes of the lawyer's time. Still a losing proposition. (heh - you could increase the financial impact on Dr. Dre merely by stalling for time, since you'll never be able to pay it anyway)
Honestly, as others have proposed, it's probably the RIAA using artists as puppets to obscure the fact that nearly all objection to Napster outside of bandwidth concerns is coming from the RIAA and the RIAA alone.
Well, as for me, I'd like to see copyrights expire (with no grandfather clauses, preferably) after 10 years, and no future extensions of copyright law permitted to apply retroactively.
If this means that MS releases old, public domain copies of Emacs, that's fine with me. I think that we'll all be better off.
As for not stealing, it's not. You are absolutely not depriving someone else of the copyrighted material. What you're doing is copying it. Think about why copyright should have that name. It's the right to copy (specifically the right to distribute copies)
And it's not property either. Property is tangible. It's a thing. Copyrighted material is not, although some particular expression of it - like _your_ copy of a book might be property, though the information in the book is not.
Copyrights are simply a limited-duration monopoly on the distribution of copies of that information. You obviously don't own it. You just control the distribution of copies of it. And that monopoly ends after a certain amount of time, which means that you lose your control. If it were property, none of this would be the case. And yet, it is the case.
I don't reject the _idea_ of copyrights per se. I do think that modern copyright law is blatantly unconstitutional and is in serious need of being reformed. IIRC the framers of the constitution came very close to never implementing copyright law at all, because of their fears of the sort of situation we have today. (in which they are perpetually and tight-fistedly held) And of course, copyrights are being granted to all kinds of things that don't promote the arts or useful sciences. They shouldn't be automatic - if you want a copyright, I think you ought to have to justify it, rather like how patents work, when examiners don't give them out willy-nilly either.
IANAL but they may be able to get you with contempt of court, and you may be required to do it under an injunction. Of course the results of decryption might be inadmissable. anyone know more about this one?