RMS isn't specifically against DRM in so much as he's against the tivovization. That is, using GPL software, but not allowing it to run modified on the hardware.
Here's what I find ironic about this.
In the world without copyright that Stallman seems to want, the only way to make money on software would be to bundle it with proprietary hardware -- in other words, a Tivo-ization of the technology world.
So Stallman's solution is to prevent this by using the GPLv3: in other words, using the power of copyright (through the GPLv3 license) to achieve the ideals of his copyright-free world.
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, although definitely not one of Clancy's best, deals with a enviro-nut case group that wants to eradicate all human life on earth (except their own cult, of course).
Here's an enviro-nut case group that wants to eradicate all human life on Earth, including their own cult. (They don't want to do it violently, though -- they just want everyone on Earth to agree not to have children, and let nature take its course.)
If we came up with a pollution free product source that worked (e.g. the market will pay the poducers enough to produce) would the majority not want it?
I absolutely agree. Maybe one day technology will advance to the point where intellectual property restriction is unnecessary. But such technology does not exist today -- now, we have technology that allows for unprecedented ease of violating copyright, but which has failed to ensure that producers get compensated in any way; especially in unglamorous fields where, for example, one cannot get paid for "performances".
I'm not an advocate of intellectual property protection per se. I am an advocate of a world where creative people can enjoy some of the economic benefits of their creation, and thereby be professionally creative. If there is a better model I would be in favor of it. In an ideal world I would be able to consume information for free, and have the creators get paid somehow anyway.
I would not starve on locally produced products.
You would unless your local farmers are Amish. Farm machinery uses a hell of a lot of fuel.
Did you really just say the US is probably the most innovative society in the arts the world has ever produced? I think you are mistaking money with innovation.
I notice that you do not dispute my claims about science and technology. Briefly, Americans invented jazz and rock routinely win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival (incl. 2 of the past 4 years); and produced or hosted some of the world's greatest visual artists and architects, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Sol Lewitt, Dan Flavin, Daniel Libeskind, Frank Gehry, Richard Serra, and so on.
hint what do the oil/gas companies really think of pollution compared to the rest of us, they probably call it "untargetted by-products"
That analogy undermines your point. For one thing, the original poster claimed that pollution = IP, not that IP was an unwanted byproduct. If you think oil and gas are evil too, feel free to go a month without using them. (Hint: you will starve to death, because how do your groceries get to market?)
If you insist on being pedantic, my original statement applies to economically useful intellectual property. Everyone is a producer of various bodily fluids, does that make everyone a "manufacturer"?
Also, I neglected to mention in my original post that intellectual property does not prevent the free flow of ideas. I can read your post and write this reply in spite of whatever copyright restrictions you impose, and I am not even invoking my "fair use" rights to quote. Thank you for making my point for me.
Both deal with the obligations of an individual to respect the interests (if not legally the rights) of the rest of the world. Intellectual property is essentially the intellectual equivalent of pollution, a by-product of the creation of ideas that is frequently toxic to other ideas and inventions.
And yet the vast majority of "idea creators" (inventors, musicians, artists, etc) are in favour of intellectual property in some form.
And yet the United States, with some of the world's most restrictive intellectual property legislation, is probably the most innovative society in science, technology, and the arts, that the world has ever produced.
And yet without copyright, the GPL could not force downstream authors to release their source. Stallman's greatest contribution may have been to demonstrate the sheer power and flexibility of IP protection.
My anecdotal observation is that the people most cheesed off about intellectual property are primarily or entirely consumers of IP, and not producers. Nobody enjoys paying for things, but that's how the economy works.
I agree that current IP law needs reform. But to say that it is "pollution" is horseshit.
What is new is that the Web is about the only place most Americans, and others in certain countries, are able to get any actual news. We certainly can't get much factual (fact-checked) news from the Wash. Post, NY Times et al.
I find this comment funny in the context of the article. Look at any politically-oriented blog. They all spend half their time bitching about shitty, biased reporting in the "MSM", and the other half of their time breathlessly quoting whatever paper they just trashed, because that paper happened to write an article which flatters their prejudices.
I have graduate degrees and experience in engineering, and I have good managerial and interpersonal skills. I have often wondered what it would take to sit on the other side of the table, and what it is like to have plenty of funding, helping other people bring good ideas to market.
How did you get your job? Is it hard, easy, boring, fascinating, soul-destroying, fulfilling, all of the above?
I'm not trying to defend the British decision to invade China in order to sell narcotics.
I am saying that China's decision to close itself to trade, at a time when the West was advancing technologically by leaps and bounds, was short-sighted. It left China ill-prepared to deal with the inevitable military conficts that arose in the mid-19th century, just a hundred years after the height of the Qing dynasty's power.
And so are most efforts of protectionism short-sighted, trying to artificially maintain the status quo while the rest of the world advances beyond you.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Forget China -- the USA is certainly protectionist when it chooses to be, even towards nations with which it has free trade agreements (for example, towards Canada on softwood lumber).
As for "abject failure", the world's top 20 economies by per capita GDP are all free markets.
The irony is that China, fearing foreign influence, placed heavy restrictions on trade starting in the 18th century. As a direct result, they eventually fell so far behind the West that the British were able to capture Hong Kong by 1842, and had opened trading routes by force by the 1860s.
If the USA closes its borders to trade, China's size and emerging economic power will mean that America will be fucked eventually anway. You've got the choice of being a barista now, or a serf later.
"No chance" eh? I love how Slashdot commenters seem to know everything about the law. Nobody knows if this suit has a chance or not until it gets before a judge. Where's your law degree from, malsdavis?
At first glance, it looks like the plaintiffs are not wealthy people, so it's reasonable to think lawyers are likely working on contingency. If so, they don't get paid unless they either win or can force a settlement... which won't happen unless they think they have a reasonable case.
And it's fairly easy to construct an argument for the other side. In GTA, the player is encouraged to commit violent acts, and rewarded for it (e.g., by scoring points, moving on in the game, etc.). This is quite a bit different from a movie, in which the observer is passive and gains no reward for any simulated act. Indeed, in GTA the player is perfectly free to commit no crime, drive under the speed limit, walk only on the sidewalks, etc., but the game designers have been very careful to explicitly discourage that form of gameplay.
And it's interesting that you bring up gun manufacturers. Say Smith & Wesson distributed a copy of GTA with every handgun, in an envelope marked "Example uses of our product". If Rockstar was aware of this, it is very hard to believe that either S&W or Rockstar would escape liability for the resulting harm. Now say handguns and GTA were always sold in the same stores, in adjacent aisles -- probably the same story, because people would get the same idea as if they were distributed together. So a weaker argument would be that GTA, plus easy access to handguns, leads to Rockstar's responsibility for the ensuing consequences.
Not a bulletproof argument (pun intended), but would you bet your company that this argument would lose in court? If so, please tell me what comany you work for so I can divest my portfolio.
... we will stay lucky until we either get rid of all the nukes, or have something that can prevent accidents. And given that a decade of unprecedented peace and goodwill mong the nuclear-armed nations have not produced any will to eliminate nuclear weapons, I know which side I'm supporting.
You are the one making up this requirement that they be equal. That's totally bogus.
Pardon me? I'm not the one who said information, knowledge, and content were synonyms. I'm saying that different kinds of content convey markedly different amounts of information. I'm surprised that this would be a controversial statement.
That's why there is no difference between "knowledge" and "information" itself - the difference is in the context, the eye of the beholder determines what useful information can be extracted - but the bits are the same either way.
In the context of information theory, I disagree -- the study of information tells us nothing about meanings. Indeed, Shannon's information is independent of knowledge. The latest single from your favorite band conveys as much "information" as the equivalent amount of white noise.
Anyway, nice chatting with you, I have other things to attend to.
No. SOME people treat them differently. Those are the people mentally stuck in the 19th and 20th centuries. Everyone else naturally understands that there is no difference. Sites like youtube, googlevideo, etc all reflect that.
The original AC insisted that "information, knowledge, and 'content'" are the same. It's hard to see that there is as much "knowledge" being conveyed by music as by text; indeed, it is quite possible for music to be content-free as far as knowledge is concerned. Same goes, for example, for an executable file.
It's been a scarcity of bandwidth and the artificial laws prohibiting distribution and modification that have caused people to treat different forms of analog media differently in the digital world. Freed of those two constraints, people naturally revert to treating them identically - as evidenced by the vast pirate networks that make no such limiting distinctions.
You have chosen to ignore my point, which is that people do not gain knowledge from all information sources equally. People have not suddenly started to learn from listening to music as opposed to reading books, and it's hard to argue that they ever will, file sharing notwithstanding. Meanwhile, right now, in a world with copyright, there are relatively few pieces of knowledge that are cut off from you by copyright. The same is not true of "content" in the form of music, video, and so on.
If you really understood Shannon's complaints about the "bandwagon effect" you would have known that his criticisms of the popularization of information theory are not applicable in this context.
I am aware that I am applying Shannon's bandwagon observation beyond its original intended meaning, but his point is the same: to invoke information theory to describe how people consume information is to distort his theory beyond its intended application. Indeed, Shannon explicitly excluded the meaning of the information from his study. Thus, the original AC poster (you?) misunderstands information theory by claiming that we can conclude information, knowledge, and content are the same. Knowledge and content are the meaning of the information, and information theory says nothing about them.
Great. You are another nitwit who doesn't understand that information, knowledge and 'content' are all essentially synonyms for the bits that represent them in digital form. Go read up on information theory before trying to make such useless artificial distinctions.
The conclusion that information, knowledge, and content are all the same, simply because they are all represented digitally, is totally incorrect in practice because humans treat them differently. Copyrighted text is broadcast extensively over the internet by sites such as this one, at usually no cost to read. Copyrighted content in the form of, say, music or video, is much more tightly controlled.
As for information theory, go read "The Bandwagon" by Claude E. Shannon, IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, March 1956.
In my original post, I was using an example to illustrate that intellectual property protection does very little to interfere with the free exchange of knowledge. I was making no point at all with respect to the free exchange of content, which is not the same thing. I was trying to say that you can still gain as much knowledge from information protected by intellectual property as you can with information in the public domain, because the publisher's business model is based on the fact that s/he has knowledge to share with you.
Indeed, according to the short statement at the bottom of this page, "All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster." Thus, the material you are reading right now is both copyrighted and in a digital form, yet you are gaining knowledge from it. The same is true, for that matter, of virtually every page on the web. I conclude that, even with DRM, the "free exchange of knowledge" is in no particular danger from intellectual property protection.
The economic impact of intellectual property is comparable to communist-era state factories; one protected business form has just been replaced with another, both are more or less equivalent drains of inefficiency on the economy as a whole.
Do you have data to back up that rather sweeping statement? A more supportable view would be that the USA has both some of the world's strongest IP protections and one of the world's highest rates of investment in research, which is probably no coincidence.
Actually I found the answers incredibly enlightening. From reading the posts from jokers and yahoos on Slashdot who pretend to be lawyers (and then hide behind IANAL), you would think that the law on the subject is crystal clear. But, according to this guy, most of the legal theories have not been decided in case law, and anyone who tells you otherwise is talking out of their ass.
Slashdot Mirror
RMS isn't specifically against DRM in so much as he's against the tivovization. That is, using GPL software, but not allowing it to run modified on the hardware.
Here's what I find ironic about this.
In the world without copyright that Stallman seems to want, the only way to make money on software would be to bundle it with proprietary hardware -- in other words, a Tivo-ization of the technology world.
So Stallman's solution is to prevent this by using the GPLv3: in other words, using the power of copyright (through the GPLv3 license) to achieve the ideals of his copyright-free world.
watching videos from foreign shows is a great glimpse into another culture
Yes. Laughing at the weird customs of foreigners brings us together as a human family.
How about just a world with one of me (heterosexual male) and all women. A short but happy life....
When the gender ratio exceeds 3:1 mass situational homosexuality begins to kick in.
That's not a bug, that's a feature!
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, although definitely not one of Clancy's best, deals with a enviro-nut case group that wants to eradicate all human life on earth (except their own cult, of course).
Here's an enviro-nut case group that wants to eradicate all human life on Earth, including their own cult. (They don't want to do it violently, though -- they just want everyone on Earth to agree not to have children, and let nature take its course.)
Voluntary Human Extinction Movement
It could be a hoax website, but it's at least plausible.
If we came up with a pollution free product source that worked (e.g. the market will pay the poducers enough to produce) would the majority not want it?
I absolutely agree. Maybe one day technology will advance to the point where intellectual property restriction is unnecessary. But such technology does not exist today -- now, we have technology that allows for unprecedented ease of violating copyright, but which has failed to ensure that producers get compensated in any way; especially in unglamorous fields where, for example, one cannot get paid for "performances".
I'm not an advocate of intellectual property protection per se. I am an advocate of a world where creative people can enjoy some of the economic benefits of their creation, and thereby be professionally creative. If there is a better model I would be in favor of it. In an ideal world I would be able to consume information for free, and have the creators get paid somehow anyway.
I would not starve on locally produced products.
You would unless your local farmers are Amish. Farm machinery uses a hell of a lot of fuel.
They'll sell you all the bits you want -- all you have to do is accept DRM. Is DRM good for the environment?
Did you really just say the US is probably the most innovative society in the arts the world has ever produced? I think you are mistaking money with innovation.
I notice that you do not dispute my claims about science and technology. Briefly, Americans invented jazz and rock routinely win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival (incl. 2 of the past 4 years); and produced or hosted some of the world's greatest visual artists and architects, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Sol Lewitt, Dan Flavin, Daniel Libeskind, Frank Gehry, Richard Serra, and so on.
hint what do the oil/gas companies really think of pollution compared to the rest of us, they probably call it "untargetted by-products"
That analogy undermines your point. For one thing, the original poster claimed that pollution = IP, not that IP was an unwanted byproduct. If you think oil and gas are evil too, feel free to go a month without using them. (Hint: you will starve to death, because how do your groceries get to market?)
If you insist on being pedantic, my original statement applies to economically useful intellectual property. Everyone is a producer of various bodily fluids, does that make everyone a "manufacturer"?
Also, I neglected to mention in my original post that intellectual property does not prevent the free flow of ideas. I can read your post and write this reply in spite of whatever copyright restrictions you impose, and I am not even invoking my "fair use" rights to quote. Thank you for making my point for me.
Both deal with the obligations of an individual to respect the interests (if not legally the rights) of the rest of the world. Intellectual property is essentially the intellectual equivalent of pollution, a by-product of the creation of ideas that is frequently toxic to other ideas and inventions.
And yet the vast majority of "idea creators" (inventors, musicians, artists, etc) are in favour of intellectual property in some form.
And yet the United States, with some of the world's most restrictive intellectual property legislation, is probably the most innovative society in science, technology, and the arts, that the world has ever produced.
And yet without copyright, the GPL could not force downstream authors to release their source. Stallman's greatest contribution may have been to demonstrate the sheer power and flexibility of IP protection.
My anecdotal observation is that the people most cheesed off about intellectual property are primarily or entirely consumers of IP, and not producers. Nobody enjoys paying for things, but that's how the economy works.
I agree that current IP law needs reform. But to say that it is "pollution" is horseshit.
What is new is that the Web is about the only place most Americans, and others in certain countries, are able to get any actual news. We certainly can't get much factual (fact-checked) news from the Wash. Post, NY Times et al.
I find this comment funny in the context of the article. Look at any politically-oriented blog. They all spend half their time bitching about shitty, biased reporting in the "MSM", and the other half of their time breathlessly quoting whatever paper they just trashed, because that paper happened to write an article which flatters their prejudices.
I have graduate degrees and experience in engineering, and I have good managerial and interpersonal skills. I have often wondered what it would take to sit on the other side of the table, and what it is like to have plenty of funding, helping other people bring good ideas to market.
How did you get your job? Is it hard, easy, boring, fascinating, soul-destroying, fulfilling, all of the above?
I'm not trying to defend the British decision to invade China in order to sell narcotics.
I am saying that China's decision to close itself to trade, at a time when the West was advancing technologically by leaps and bounds, was short-sighted. It left China ill-prepared to deal with the inevitable military conficts that arose in the mid-19th century, just a hundred years after the height of the Qing dynasty's power.
And so are most efforts of protectionism short-sighted, trying to artificially maintain the status quo while the rest of the world advances beyond you.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Forget China -- the USA is certainly protectionist when it chooses to be, even towards nations with which it has free trade agreements (for example, towards Canada on softwood lumber). As for "abject failure", the world's top 20 economies by per capita GDP are all free markets.
The irony is that China, fearing foreign influence, placed heavy restrictions on trade starting in the 18th century. As a direct result, they eventually fell so far behind the West that the British were able to capture Hong Kong by 1842, and had opened trading routes by force by the 1860s.
If the USA closes its borders to trade, China's size and emerging economic power will mean that America will be fucked eventually anway. You've got the choice of being a barista now, or a serf later.
"No chance" eh? I love how Slashdot commenters seem to know everything about the law. Nobody knows if this suit has a chance or not until it gets before a judge. Where's your law degree from, malsdavis?
... which won't happen unless they think they have a reasonable case.
At first glance, it looks like the plaintiffs are not wealthy people, so it's reasonable to think lawyers are likely working on contingency. If so, they don't get paid unless they either win or can force a settlement
And it's fairly easy to construct an argument for the other side. In GTA, the player is encouraged to commit violent acts, and rewarded for it (e.g., by scoring points, moving on in the game, etc.). This is quite a bit different from a movie, in which the observer is passive and gains no reward for any simulated act. Indeed, in GTA the player is perfectly free to commit no crime, drive under the speed limit, walk only on the sidewalks, etc., but the game designers have been very careful to explicitly discourage that form of gameplay.
And it's interesting that you bring up gun manufacturers. Say Smith & Wesson distributed a copy of GTA with every handgun, in an envelope marked "Example uses of our product". If Rockstar was aware of this, it is very hard to believe that either S&W or Rockstar would escape liability for the resulting harm. Now say handguns and GTA were always sold in the same stores, in adjacent aisles -- probably the same story, because people would get the same idea as if they were distributed together. So a weaker argument would be that GTA, plus easy access to handguns, leads to Rockstar's responsibility for the ensuing consequences.
Not a bulletproof argument (pun intended), but would you bet your company that this argument would lose in court? If so, please tell me what comany you work for so I can divest my portfolio.
... we will stay lucky until we either get rid of all the nukes, or have something that can prevent accidents. And given that a decade of unprecedented peace and goodwill mong the nuclear-armed nations have not produced any will to eliminate nuclear weapons, I know which side I'm supporting.
If an emu defecates on your azaleas, do you run for President, or do you weep for all humanity?
You are the one making up this requirement that they be equal. That's totally bogus.
Pardon me? I'm not the one who said information, knowledge, and content were synonyms. I'm saying that different kinds of content convey markedly different amounts of information. I'm surprised that this would be a controversial statement.
That's why there is no difference between "knowledge" and "information" itself - the difference is in the context, the eye of the beholder determines what useful information can be extracted - but the bits are the same either way.
In the context of information theory, I disagree -- the study of information tells us nothing about meanings. Indeed, Shannon's information is independent of knowledge. The latest single from your favorite band conveys as much "information" as the equivalent amount of white noise.
Anyway, nice chatting with you, I have other things to attend to.
No. SOME people treat them differently. Those are the people mentally stuck in the 19th and 20th centuries. Everyone else naturally understands that there is no difference. Sites like youtube, googlevideo, etc all reflect that.
The original AC insisted that "information, knowledge, and 'content'" are the same. It's hard to see that there is as much "knowledge" being conveyed by music as by text; indeed, it is quite possible for music to be content-free as far as knowledge is concerned. Same goes, for example, for an executable file.
It's been a scarcity of bandwidth and the artificial laws prohibiting distribution and modification that have caused people to treat different forms of analog media differently in the digital world. Freed of those two constraints, people naturally revert to treating them identically - as evidenced by the vast pirate networks that make no such limiting distinctions.
You have chosen to ignore my point, which is that people do not gain knowledge from all information sources equally. People have not suddenly started to learn from listening to music as opposed to reading books, and it's hard to argue that they ever will, file sharing notwithstanding. Meanwhile, right now, in a world with copyright, there are relatively few pieces of knowledge that are cut off from you by copyright. The same is not true of "content" in the form of music, video, and so on.
If you really understood Shannon's complaints about the "bandwagon effect" you would have known that his criticisms of the popularization of information theory are not applicable in this context.
I am aware that I am applying Shannon's bandwagon observation beyond its original intended meaning, but his point is the same: to invoke information theory to describe how people consume information is to distort his theory beyond its intended application. Indeed, Shannon explicitly excluded the meaning of the information from his study. Thus, the original AC poster (you?) misunderstands information theory by claiming that we can conclude information, knowledge, and content are the same. Knowledge and content are the meaning of the information, and information theory says nothing about them.
Great. You are another nitwit who doesn't understand that information, knowledge and 'content' are all essentially synonyms for the bits that represent them in digital form. Go read up on information theory before trying to make such useless artificial distinctions.
The conclusion that information, knowledge, and content are all the same, simply because they are all represented digitally, is totally incorrect in practice because humans treat them differently. Copyrighted text is broadcast extensively over the internet by sites such as this one, at usually no cost to read. Copyrighted content in the form of, say, music or video, is much more tightly controlled.
As for information theory, go read "The Bandwagon" by Claude E. Shannon, IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, March 1956.
In my original post, I was using an example to illustrate that intellectual property protection does very little to interfere with the free exchange of knowledge. I was making no point at all with respect to the free exchange of content, which is not the same thing. I was trying to say that you can still gain as much knowledge from information protected by intellectual property as you can with information in the public domain, because the publisher's business model is based on the fact that s/he has knowledge to share with you.
Indeed, according to the short statement at the bottom of this page, "All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster." Thus, the material you are reading right now is both copyrighted and in a digital form, yet you are gaining knowledge from it. The same is true, for that matter, of virtually every page on the web. I conclude that, even with DRM, the "free exchange of knowledge" is in no particular danger from intellectual property protection.
The economic impact of intellectual property is comparable to communist-era state factories; one protected business form has just been replaced with another, both are more or less equivalent drains of inefficiency on the economy as a whole.
Do you have data to back up that rather sweeping statement? A more supportable view would be that the USA has both some of the world's strongest IP protections and one of the world's highest rates of investment in research, which is probably no coincidence.
Where did I mention software in my original post?
Linux is also copyrighted. It just happens to be distributed with a reasonably permissive license, but one that is enforced from time to time.
Not legal protectionism that conflicts with one of the most key elements of human nature -- the desire to share knowledge.
In what way does the copyright on a book prevent you from going to the library and learning all you want for free?
Actually I found the answers incredibly enlightening. From reading the posts from jokers and yahoos on Slashdot who pretend to be lawyers (and then hide behind IANAL), you would think that the law on the subject is crystal clear. But, according to this guy, most of the legal theories have not been decided in case law, and anyone who tells you otherwise is talking out of their ass.