Note that one of the standard methods to interface a memory card with a computer is to stick the memory card into an adapter that goes into the floppy drive.
The summary up there is a little harsh. He would have approved of the VCR if they got a royalty for each tape.
According to his outrageously inflated loss estimates, the royalty would have to be on the order of $20/tape (i.e. enough to kill the VCR industry dead and bury it at a crossroads with a stake through its heart). He's just trying to do damage control, and does not deserve your "fair due".
I think you need to remember what de Tocqueville once wrote, that "The people grow tired of a confusion whose end is not in sight."... If you lose the confidence of the American people, you face a terrifying problem.
Well, then, Jack, by your own words you might as well just give up already.
"I'm convinced that we made a very good movie, and I'm also convinced that the movie was promoted properly."
Maybe we could convince Berman that Nemesis was selected as the first boycott target to protest the various outrages committed by the MPAA. He'll believe it, becuase he's desperate believe any explanation whatsoever other than "I made a lousy movie".
The only catch is that the fiasco reduces his credibility with anybody else in the industry.
The window-breaking argument is perfectly valid in those cases in which the window-breaking results in participation in the economy (money-making) that would not happen otherwise. Not money-spending (that would happen either way.) Money-making.
This still leads to the absurd conclusion that people are somehow making progress by running around in circles (breaking and replacing windows). A clearer analogy might be paying half of the population to dig holes in the ground and the other half to fill them in again -- by your reasoning, the economy is somehow better off than if they just left the ground undisturbed, which is preposterous on its face.
The root of the fallacy is the supposition that work per se, as opposed to the product of work, has value. In your example, the artists who produce one work of art per year are generating the same value whether they produce that one work in an hour or whether it takes every waking moment for the entire year.
One way to ensure this happens might be to legally require that any copy protected works have an unprotected edition registered with a government escrow agent before they can be distributed.
Alternatively, a key for all works protected by a given system during a given year would be escrowed, and released the year of expiration.
Re:What the People In Charge don't mention,
on
Copyright Rumblings
·
· Score: 1
Except that if today people need to work 100 hours a year to finance their entertainment, then if entertainment were free those 100 hours of work would be instead 100 hours of leisure.
Nope; the argument applies in precisely the same way if people had to work an extra 100 hours to replace broken windows. The fallacy stands, and your position is still equivalent to the notion that hooligans who go around breaking windows are producing a net benefit to society.
your constitutional rights are not infringed by spam
I don't know what kind of Constitution they have where you live, but the one here in the US recognizes the concept of private property (e.g. the system resources stolen by spammers).
Spammers need a point of contact to collect the loot from the suckers, and as a practical matter that needs to be domestic (international postage and currency conversion would eat the profits, unless you pull off something like the Nigerian scam where the sucker loses a lot of money). If the spam operation is illegal, the authorities can close down the money contact point.
you could make some awful big trouble for a (relatively to the crime) innocent person
Multiply the number of spams by the time it takes to deal with them, and hasn't the spammer, in effect, taken a life? That puts a different spin on the "relatively innocent" argument.
Or is your analogy just a vain attempt to gain Karma?
I didn't make any analogy. I pointed out that the right to talk on the telephone and send e-mail are not absolute by pointing to one obvious exception (harassment), and gave a reason (property rights) why spam constitutes a different exception.
Charging a repeat spammer with harassment -- in addition to theft of services (inherent to all spamming) and cracking (if he gets the spam through by circumventing a filter) -- sounds good to me. However, spamming in and of itself needs to be recognized as theft of services, because a solution that only hits proven repeat offenders who ignore their own opt-outs is insufficient for reasons that have been, frankly, beaten to death on/.
Of cause if Microsoft changes the fileformat in Word or Excel in every version, you will need everyone in the office to run the same version and you can't buy Office 97 anymore.
IMO, government software-acquisition specs (at least for basics such as word processing, database management, etc) should include a requirement that the default (if not the required) file save format must be fully open. This cuts off the drive behind this sort of forced upgrade cycle and protects public access to government documents.
Ultimately, what it will take is filters good enough to block most of the existing crop of chicken-boners, backed by laws recognizing circumvention of the filters as a form of computer cracking. The latter would make it legally risky to develop, distribute, or use filter-busting tools (which have no conceivable legit use outside of filter-improvement research, for which a narrowly carved exception could be made).
Re:Why can't we have legal restrictions on spam?
on
Plan for Spam, Version 2
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Because the last thing we need in this country is the government telling us how and when we can send email or make a phone call.
In certain ways, the government does and should do precisely that. If I repeatedly call you at 4 AM to ask if your refrigerator is running or deliberately send you virus-laden e-mail, then you have every right to call upon the long arm of the law to slap down the harassment.
Spamming, being a violation of the recipient's property rights, falls into that category.
Re:Spam should be 100% legal
on
Spammers Busted
·
· Score: 1
Provided they use only their own resources (i.e. they do not tax other people's hardware and bandwidth)
In other news, it was proposed that murder be made legal if nobody got killed.
Your assertion that after a certain length of time the people will own a work is more like you build a house and 30 years later a bunch of strangers show up at the door saying that the house now belongs to everyone.
That would be no problem, if you went into the deal knowing that this would happen (as copyright holders know from the beginning that their copyrights are supposed to expire at such-and-such a date).
Actually, the intent of the proposed legislation you linked to would appear to be to close a loophole in the proposed legislation about a ballistic identifier database
I don't believe that this is the actual intent of the requirements, any more than I believe that voter literacy tests were born of a high-minded desire to prevent ignoramuses from setting public policy.
Assuming for the moment that the copyright on that stuff did run out and it entered into the public domain. Is there actually some sort of mechanism that would force Disney (or anyone) to actually release it?
Once something matures into the public domain, all it takes is one copy in the hands of someone who wishes to make it publicly known. Thus, it could only be prevented if all, not "most", of it has been "lost or thrown away".
The fact that some labels will go bankrupt if the price sinks to $5 proves that $5 is the wrong price.
Nonsense. By this reasoning, the tulipomania bubble prices of tulips were "right" and the normal pre- and post-bubble prices were "wrong", as evidenced by the fact that lots of people lost their shirts in the transition from the former to the latter.
The primary problem is the DNC is the *gov't* enforcing that right.
Enforcement is not a problem per se -- if it were, you couldn't call the police when someone refused to obey a NO SOLICITORS sign.
The dividing bright line between "No Solicitors" signs (OK, according to the court) and a permit requirement (not OK, according to the court) is that the former is a restriction placed by an individual upon his own property and the latter is a blanket restriction upon an entire jurisdiction placed by the government.
Another weakness I hadn't reflected on much is that it is somewhat unclear what statutory authorization the FCC and FTC, both of which have proposed lists, have to spend money on and enforce DNC lists. It may lie outside their mandate and require explicit authorization and appropriations from Congress.
Actually, this is the reason that the proposed DNC list is binding upon businesses but not upon charities -- the FTC's jurisdiction only covers the former.
I'm not working up arguments for the plaintiffs, just trying to predict from experience, so don't bother trying to argue with me.
I'm just working up arguments to use in public comments supporting the right to be left alone. Nothing personal.:-)
Believe it or not, there really is a right to pester people, at least briefly.
The issue is better framed in terms of property rights (i.e. to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, "I am paying for this telephone").
It hurts the economy by devoting captial to harassing people during dinner. Every person not paid to do this is a person who can be paid to do soemthing else - or just a slightly lower interest rate on credit cards so people can spend that money on other products.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of the points are valid, but shrinking the size of individual comics pages would make the word balloons utterly unreadable.
Note that one of the standard methods to interface a memory card with a computer is to stick the memory card into an adapter that goes into the floppy drive.
According to his outrageously inflated loss estimates, the royalty would have to be on the order of $20/tape (i.e. enough to kill the VCR industry dead and bury it at a crossroads with a stake through its heart). He's just trying to do damage control, and does not deserve your "fair due".
Well, then, Jack, by your own words you might as well just give up already.
Maybe we could convince Berman that Nemesis was selected as the first boycott target to protest the various outrages committed by the MPAA. He'll believe it, becuase he's desperate believe any explanation whatsoever other than "I made a lousy movie".
The only catch is that the fiasco reduces his credibility with anybody else in the industry.
This still leads to the absurd conclusion that people are somehow making progress by running around in circles (breaking and replacing windows). A clearer analogy might be paying half of the population to dig holes in the ground and the other half to fill them in again -- by your reasoning, the economy is somehow better off than if they just left the ground undisturbed, which is preposterous on its face.
The root of the fallacy is the supposition that work per se, as opposed to the product of work, has value. In your example, the artists who produce one work of art per year are generating the same value whether they produce that one work in an hour or whether it takes every waking moment for the entire year.
Alternatively, a key for all works protected by a given system during a given year would be escrowed, and released the year of expiration.
Nope; the argument applies in precisely the same way if people had to work an extra 100 hours to replace broken windows. The fallacy stands, and your position is still equivalent to the notion that hooligans who go around breaking windows are producing a net benefit to society.
The problem isn't the demand for royalties per se -- it's the demand for royalties over and above what over-the-air stations pay.
I don't know what kind of Constitution they have where you live, but the one here in the US recognizes the concept of private property (e.g. the system resources stolen by spammers).
Spammers need a point of contact to collect the loot from the suckers, and as a practical matter that needs to be domestic (international postage and currency conversion would eat the profits, unless you pull off something like the Nigerian scam where the sucker loses a lot of money). If the spam operation is illegal, the authorities can close down the money contact point.
Multiply the number of spams by the time it takes to deal with them, and hasn't the spammer, in effect, taken a life? That puts a different spin on the "relatively innocent" argument.
I didn't make any analogy. I pointed out that the right to talk on the telephone and send e-mail are not absolute by pointing to one obvious exception (harassment), and gave a reason (property rights) why spam constitutes a different exception.
Charging a repeat spammer with harassment -- in addition to theft of services (inherent to all spamming) and cracking (if he gets the spam through by circumventing a filter) -- sounds good to me. However, spamming in and of itself needs to be recognized as theft of services, because a solution that only hits proven repeat offenders who ignore their own opt-outs is insufficient for reasons that have been, frankly, beaten to death on /.
IMO, government software-acquisition specs (at least for basics such as word processing, database management, etc) should include a requirement that the default (if not the required) file save format must be fully open. This cuts off the drive behind this sort of forced upgrade cycle and protects public access to government documents.
Ultimately, what it will take is filters good enough to block most of the existing crop of chicken-boners, backed by laws recognizing circumvention of the filters as a form of computer cracking. The latter would make it legally risky to develop, distribute, or use filter-busting tools (which have no conceivable legit use outside of filter-improvement research, for which a narrowly carved exception could be made).
In certain ways, the government does and should do precisely that. If I repeatedly call you at 4 AM to ask if your refrigerator is running or deliberately send you virus-laden e-mail, then you have every right to call upon the long arm of the law to slap down the harassment.
Spamming, being a violation of the recipient's property rights, falls into that category.
In other news, it was proposed that murder be made legal if nobody got killed.
That would be no problem, if you went into the deal knowing that this would happen (as copyright holders know from the beginning that their copyrights are supposed to expire at such-and-such a date).
Yes. If you hang up a NO SOLICITORS sign and somebody knocks on your door to solicit you anyway, they're trespassing.
I don't believe that this is the actual intent of the requirements, any more than I believe that voter literacy tests were born of a high-minded desire to prevent ignoramuses from setting public policy.
Once something matures into the public domain, all it takes is one copy in the hands of someone who wishes to make it publicly known. Thus, it could only be prevented if all, not "most", of it has been "lost or thrown away".
Nonsense. By this reasoning, the tulipomania bubble prices of tulips were "right" and the normal pre- and post-bubble prices were "wrong", as evidenced by the fact that lots of people lost their shirts in the transition from the former to the latter.
Nope; my parents raised me to have some manners.
Enforcement is not a problem per se -- if it were, you couldn't call the police when someone refused to obey a NO SOLICITORS sign.
The dividing bright line between "No Solicitors" signs (OK, according to the court) and a permit requirement (not OK, according to the court) is that the former is a restriction placed by an individual upon his own property and the latter is a blanket restriction upon an entire jurisdiction placed by the government.
Another weakness I hadn't reflected on much is that it is somewhat unclear what statutory authorization the FCC and FTC, both of which have proposed lists, have to spend money on and enforce DNC lists. It may lie outside their mandate and require explicit authorization and appropriations from Congress.
Actually, this is the reason that the proposed DNC list is binding upon businesses but not upon charities -- the FTC's jurisdiction only covers the former.
I'm not working up arguments for the plaintiffs, just trying to predict from experience, so don't bother trying to argue with me.
I'm just working up arguments to use in public comments supporting the right to be left alone. Nothing personal. :-)
Believe it or not, there really is a right to pester people, at least briefly.
The issue is better framed in terms of property rights (i.e. to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, "I am paying for this telephone").
Precisely. This concept is more fully expounded in Bastiat's Fallacy of the Broken Window.