I'm guessing you got screwed out of an inheritance or something. You're really hostile to the idea of inheriting wealth.
You are advancing an irrelevant argument. A creator with a valuable copyright or patent can build up a financial nest egg which is passed on to his heirs (just like anyone else making a sufficiently good living).
a copyright is a possession, because it's transferrable under law
Actually, a copyright differs from natural possessions in that it is a creature of government.
There are several wrinkles to the issue. To describe a couple (one principled, one cynical) off the top of my head:
1. (the principled one) Many Republicans genuinely believe in the free market, which is not the same thing as corporate statism. Corporations that live off artificial government monopolies (e.g. indefinitely extended copyrights provided by coin-operated legislators) are "rent-seekers" (a term of art meaning someone who lives off such special privileges, not a landlord trying to get a tenant to pay his bill;-) ).
2. (the cynical one) Hollywood is a big money machine for the Democrats -- what do you think inspired Hollings (D-Disney) to introduce his ban on general-purpose computers?
the legal matter is: that is proprietary business information that is -not- available to the general public (yet), and those corporations have a right to protect that data.
OK, they have a right to protect that data -- and so they did, as a trade secret. The trade secret got leaked, and the businesses have grounds to take legal action against the leakers (if they can find them).
However, the question here is whether copyright law (either traditional copyright law, or the modern versions produced by coin-operated legislators) applies to this situation. The answer would appear to be "no", as this case pertains to a simple observation of fact rather than to a written or artistic work.
Actually, this sort of thing has more impact in the elective political arena than in the courtroom (where it might get dismissed as irrelevant to other DMCA cases). I'd love to see one of the clueful minority on the Hill cite this example and force a testilying Hollyweird lobbyist to defend it.
I find it incredible how overwhelmingly negative the reactions of the Slashdot crowd are regarding this product.
Well, then, you shouldn't believe the stereotype that/. readers never leave their computers. Sometimes, they go out and walk, and prefer to do so without being run off the sidewalk by some clown moving at sprint speed with 80 pounds of extra weight.
Making spamming illegal would work, even if the spammers themselves went offshore -- there has to be a domestic contact point for the money (anybody dumb enough to respond to spam isn't going to navigate the hoops of international transfer), and that contact can be shut down as the receiver of the fruits of a crime.
So, the legal issue is pretty simple once you understand it.
Indeed it is. An ISP is private property. The owner of the ISP has the right to exclude people from that property for pretty much any reason (with a few specific exceptions, such as laws against discrimination based on ethnicity, religion, etc). QED.
We would *love* to sue the people that have wrongly blocked us
Would you also love to pay the defendant's court costs plus punitive damanges for wasting the court's time with a frivolous lawsuit?
The goal of the blockers is to eliminate commercial use of the Internet.
If you don't want to be perceived as a cartooney spam apologists, you really need to avoid the tired old cartooney spam apologist cliches.
Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you, you slavish lapdog.
Since the Ben Franklin quote has been done to death, it's past time to introduce a new one:
If you love wealth more than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, depart from us in peace. We ask not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains rest lightly upon you and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.
--Samuel Adams
But really... if you aren't doing anything extremely wrong you've got nothing to hide.
Define "doing anything extremely wrong". In the FBI Files scandal, for example, the definition of "doing anything extremely wrong" was "being a political opponent of Bill and/or Hillary Clinton".
Fear of jail, fear of the death penalty, fear of hell, morality, social status. Not wanting to lose their wife, their husband, their children, their house, their car, their dog, their cat, etc.
All of which are obviously not applicable to the sort of people who create this particular threat.
If the IPs and networks are all registered in China, how do you track it (easily) to Joe Spammer in Florida?
If the spammer is trying to make money, he needs to identify a domestic contact point for the suckers to send it. Make spamming illegal, and the domestic contact point becomes implicated in a crime and can be shut down (POB closed by the postal inspector, credit card frozen, whatever) as soon as the spamming is proved.
The problem is with plausible deniability. If the spammer can claim that he "believed" the list of addresses he purchased & spammed were legitimately gathered, and if he's selling a real product (be it herbal viagra, porn, or bad real estate tips), then there isn't much accountability.
Nonsense. If some clown tries to defend himself from a fraud charge by claiming that he really believed his snake oil can cure cancer, he's going to get laughed out of court and into the clink. A claim to really believe that 5 million people "opted in" to recieve your junk has about the same level of plausibility.
I'm glad you agree with us that the suppression of theft in general, and theft of bandwidth in particular, is one of the (few) proper functions of government.
With Spam Assassin and other filtering packages we have the technology to take care of SPAM ourselves.
With door locks and handguns we have the technology to take care of burglars ourselves. That's no reason why it shouldn't be illegal.
You don't have to enforce every spam case to make an effect; just putting a few spammers in jail or fining them will change the behavior of many others.
Another advantage would be to get spammers' nuisance lawsuits easily dismissed (unless the judge is particularly dense), on the grounds that there is no legally enforceable right to do something that is illegal in general.
Let me preface my reply with the fact that I'm not trolling, and I'm not in the business (and I don't send out bulk emails).
You just caused me to have a flashback to Bill Clinton's "I did not have sex with that woman" speech. Please don't do that.
Try comparing this to bulk mailings
Yes, let's. Postal mail is sent at the sender's expense, and is thus limited by economic constraints. Spam e-mail is sent at the recipient's expense, and would thus grow to choke out all legitimate e-mail unless firmly suppressed.
The Colombian drug lords just want to provide for their kids too.
Colombian drug lords make a living by selling a real product to a customer. It is very unfair of you to insult them by equating them with parasites like Ms Betterly.
I am not sure this would be legal. And if it were, it would damage your credit history.
I assume that where the fake name and address comes in.
On a more serious note, it's a standard technique of scam artists to make sure that the victim is himself implicated before he realizes what's going on, so he won't call the cops. This idea turns the tables -- what's the clown going to do, complain to the cops, "This guy wrote me a bad check to pay for the phony penis enlarger I sold him"?
That said, writing bad checks is illegal and nobody should do it.
Please stick to the subject. What I said is that civil liberties protections are law enforcement. This is obviously true, inasmuch as any meaningful protections describe acts which the police may not do and penalties to be exacted upon police who go ahead and do them anyway.
It is rare for civil liberties to impede the police in illegitimate acts.
Your fallacy here is that you only count instances in which government agents actually violate the rights of citizens, while ignoring cases in which such crimes are deterred and prevented.
By this reasoning, it is rare for the laws against theft to impede people, since most people do not go around stealing things. However, the proper measure is to compare the situation as it exists to the situation that would exist if the laws against theft were repealed or fell into abeyance through utter lack of enforcement.
Politically motivated wiretaps and tax audits are more likely to be the acts of politicans than police, and are most likely to be prevented by the free press or the threat of exposure than by any civil liberties rules.
Again, are you seriously asserting that politicians would be no more likely to do this stuff if there weren't any laws against it?
Civil liberties in general impede law enforcement. Otherwise, we wouldn't need to enforce civil liberties against law enforcement, because they would have no desire or need to violate them.
There are two basic fallacies here. First, civil liberties protections are, by definition, law enforcement (they prevent the police from breaking the law). Second, police agencies acting outside the bounds of civil liberties protections tend to exhibit "desires and needs" which have no legitimate relationship to law enforcement (e.g. politically motivated wiretaps and tax audits).
However I'd never vote for a Libertarian President. We don't need THAT radical a change right away
True, but if the LP could get its act together enough for their Presidential candidate to pull 5% of the vote, it would trigger some changes at a manageable pace. (Yeah, yeah; while I'm wishing I'd like Microsoft to fix all its bugs and a supermodel to give me a full-body massage.)
Ahh, libertarians - republicans without the nasty issue of morality.
Actually, we just define morality differently (we define it as the basic "thou shalt not kill/steal/bear false witness" stuff; they drag in all sorts of baggage about pr0n/gambling/dancing).
Slashdot Mirror
You are advancing an irrelevant argument. A creator with a valuable copyright or patent can build up a financial nest egg which is passed on to his heirs (just like anyone else making a sufficiently good living).
a copyright is a possession, because it's transferrable under law
Actually, a copyright differs from natural possessions in that it is a creature of government.
1. (the principled one) Many Republicans genuinely believe in the free market, which is not the same thing as corporate statism. Corporations that live off artificial government monopolies (e.g. indefinitely extended copyrights provided by coin-operated legislators) are "rent-seekers" (a term of art meaning someone who lives off such special privileges, not a landlord trying to get a tenant to pay his bill ;-) ).
2. (the cynical one) Hollywood is a big money machine for the Democrats -- what do you think inspired Hollings (D-Disney) to introduce his ban on general-purpose computers?
OK, they have a right to protect that data -- and so they did, as a trade secret. The trade secret got leaked, and the businesses have grounds to take legal action against the leakers (if they can find them).
However, the question here is whether copyright law (either traditional copyright law, or the modern versions produced by coin-operated legislators) applies to this situation. The answer would appear to be "no", as this case pertains to a simple observation of fact rather than to a written or artistic work.
Actually, this sort of thing has more impact in the elective political arena than in the courtroom (where it might get dismissed as irrelevant to other DMCA cases). I'd love to see one of the clueful minority on the Hill cite this example and force a testilying Hollyweird lobbyist to defend it.
Well, then, you shouldn't believe the stereotype that /. readers never leave their computers. Sometimes, they go out and walk, and prefer to do so without being run off the sidewalk by some clown moving at sprint speed with 80 pounds of extra weight.
Making spamming illegal would work, even if the spammers themselves went offshore -- there has to be a domestic contact point for the money (anybody dumb enough to respond to spam isn't going to navigate the hoops of international transfer), and that contact can be shut down as the receiver of the fruits of a crime.
Indeed it is. An ISP is private property. The owner of the ISP has the right to exclude people from that property for pretty much any reason (with a few specific exceptions, such as laws against discrimination based on ethnicity, religion, etc). QED.
We would *love* to sue the people that have wrongly blocked us
Would you also love to pay the defendant's court costs plus punitive damanges for wasting the court's time with a frivolous lawsuit?
The goal of the blockers is to eliminate commercial use of the Internet.
If you don't want to be perceived as a cartooney spam apologists, you really need to avoid the tired old cartooney spam apologist cliches.
Yeah, and you take one thing from a store without paying for it and you can get arrested for shoplifting. Life just sucks sometimes.
Since the Ben Franklin quote has been done to death, it's past time to introduce a new one:
Define "doing anything extremely wrong". In the FBI Files scandal, for example, the definition of "doing anything extremely wrong" was "being a political opponent of Bill and/or Hillary Clinton".
All of which are obviously not applicable to the sort of people who create this particular threat.
Now that you've given us your custom definition of the word "spam", I'm curious -- how do you define the words "alone", "sex", and "is"?
If the spammer is trying to make money, he needs to identify a domestic contact point for the suckers to send it. Make spamming illegal, and the domestic contact point becomes implicated in a crime and can be shut down (POB closed by the postal inspector, credit card frozen, whatever) as soon as the spamming is proved.
Nonsense. If some clown tries to defend himself from a fraud charge by claiming that he really believed his snake oil can cure cancer, he's going to get laughed out of court and into the clink. A claim to really believe that 5 million people "opted in" to recieve your junk has about the same level of plausibility.
I'm glad you agree with us that the suppression of theft in general, and theft of bandwidth in particular, is one of the (few) proper functions of government.
With Spam Assassin and other filtering packages we have the technology to take care of SPAM ourselves.
With door locks and handguns we have the technology to take care of burglars ourselves. That's no reason why it shouldn't be illegal.
Another advantage would be to get spammers' nuisance lawsuits easily dismissed (unless the judge is particularly dense), on the grounds that there is no legally enforceable right to do something that is illegal in general.
You just caused me to have a flashback to Bill Clinton's "I did not have sex with that woman" speech. Please don't do that.
Try comparing this to bulk mailings
Yes, let's. Postal mail is sent at the sender's expense, and is thus limited by economic constraints. Spam e-mail is sent at the recipient's expense, and would thus grow to choke out all legitimate e-mail unless firmly suppressed.
There, that wasn't so difficult....
Colombian drug lords make a living by selling a real product to a customer. It is very unfair of you to insult them by equating them with parasites like Ms Betterly.
I assume that where the fake name and address comes in.
On a more serious note, it's a standard technique of scam artists to make sure that the victim is himself implicated before he realizes what's going on, so he won't call the cops. This idea turns the tables -- what's the clown going to do, complain to the cops, "This guy wrote me a bad check to pay for the phony penis enlarger I sold him"?
That said, writing bad checks is illegal and nobody should do it.
The "piracy" problem must be even worse than they're admitting....
Please stick to the subject. What I said is that civil liberties protections are law enforcement. This is obviously true, inasmuch as any meaningful protections describe acts which the police may not do and penalties to be exacted upon police who go ahead and do them anyway.
It is rare for civil liberties to impede the police in illegitimate acts.
Your fallacy here is that you only count instances in which government agents actually violate the rights of citizens, while ignoring cases in which such crimes are deterred and prevented.
By this reasoning, it is rare for the laws against theft to impede people, since most people do not go around stealing things. However, the proper measure is to compare the situation as it exists to the situation that would exist if the laws against theft were repealed or fell into abeyance through utter lack of enforcement.
Politically motivated wiretaps and tax audits are more likely to be the acts of politicans than police, and are most likely to be prevented by the free press or the threat of exposure than by any civil liberties rules.
Again, are you seriously asserting that politicians would be no more likely to do this stuff if there weren't any laws against it?
There are two basic fallacies here. First, civil liberties protections are, by definition, law enforcement (they prevent the police from breaking the law). Second, police agencies acting outside the bounds of civil liberties protections tend to exhibit "desires and needs" which have no legitimate relationship to law enforcement (e.g. politically motivated wiretaps and tax audits).
True, but if the LP could get its act together enough for their Presidential candidate to pull 5% of the vote, it would trigger some changes at a manageable pace. (Yeah, yeah; while I'm wishing I'd like Microsoft to fix all its bugs and a supermodel to give me a full-body massage.)
Actually, we just define morality differently (we define it as the basic "thou shalt not kill/steal/bear false witness" stuff; they drag in all sorts of baggage about pr0n/gambling/dancing).