Mainly, I thought the short was about how we repeat the same mistakes again and again and never seem to learn. With what is going on in the world at the moment, it's clear that we haven't learned a thing from history.
We've all learned well enough. We're just too lazy and comfortable to act on the lessons, and who can blame us?
"Man, I've been fragging on Quake III for seven hours straight while surfing for pr0n during the high ping times. Guess I need to go out to the backyard and plow up my wheat field to get my lazy ass back to nature."
Right. Sorry, but until my box grows a hand and gives me a bitch slap, my curvy ass is staying put abusing it.
I need to find an elderly blind gentleman with a lot of money lying around to let his "son" borrow from him. Then I can own AOL/Time Warner and oppress the lot of you all!
I myself even run the ex-Libertarian mailing list, but I would move there for one reason only. 20,000 geeks in a concentrated area would allow me to open up a successful anime shop - letting me make my hobby into my business!
So 'the public' owned the telephone, and just leased it to Alexander Bell?
In a sense, yes. No one, Bell included, can come to an idea completely on their own. There has to be knowledge, inspiration, and feedback from others to make ideas viable. Like it or not, a collective (oops, I said the c-word) is from where ideas originate, and where ideas eventually will go in an infinite loop we call "building knowledge".
However, human survival relies on private ownership of tangible resources (at least in this country), whereas ideas are not tangible resources that can be locked down, or else they're not resources. The Founders realized this as well, so they struck a compromise. Since knowledge cannot be privatized for human survival, the use of knowledge can be legally restricted (at least in theory). This is for the good of the creator to be able to create, not to profit. Ideas were originally held in common, and then an innovator would come along and build on an idea in the public domain (e.g. Bell making the telegraph better). That innovator would get a legal monopoly for a short period of time to get resources to get better ideas, and those old ideas would go back to the public domain eventually for the public good.
If ideas really were private property, then there could be no innovation and no progress if powerless individuals had to pay royalties to the original holders of ideas (or more accurately, the corporations that bought/seized them) for eternity.
When 'the public' thinks it has a right to the product of my effort, then they can try and pry it out of my mind. I'd rather keep it secret than give it to someone who demands it's his.
If you keep your idea secret, which you have every right to do, then the idea is useless to everyone, including yourself. It's your intellectual and moral obligation as an innovator and a human being to share your ideas to allow general knowledge and wisdom to progress, but it's also the public's obligation to give you a limited monopoly on that idea to innovate, so long as we live in a capitalistic economy.
The whole idea behind patents, copyright, etc. was to empower individual inventors, scholars, and other creative people for the public good. Instead, current IP law empowers corporate non-persons (who are only people on paper) for private advantage, totally turning the original concept on its head.
The real question now is, "Can IP as a concept be salvaged to protect powerless innovators, or has it been twisted and exploited to the point where we must get rid of it entirely?"
Is Sharman Networks oblidged to even show up to court in this country? If they refuse to even acknowledge a lawsuit or an injunction, does this mean that federal agents will be dispatched to Vanadu, Estonia, the Netherlands, and Australia? I think not.
If they say you're infringing copyright, Sharman, just ignore them.
The point is, if you don't like the law, that still doesn't entitle you to break it, and get away scot free.
Yep, Harriet Tubman should've been hanged from the gallows for running the Underground Railroad, as was the customary punishment. And if she complained, TOUGH! She knew what she was doing was illegal.
Now don't get me wrong - helping fugitive slaves and freely distributing software are two different things with two different inherent contexts. But your argument doesn't even have a contextual basis - it's a mindless repitition of state dogma.
The state and the corporations who back it aren't right or wrong. They just have more guns and propaganda than you do.;-)
But don't fool yourself that stealing music, software or patents is about community. That's about blatent "gimme gimme gimme for free".
One cannot steal music, software, or patents - only the physical devices on which these things reside. Hasn't the IP vs. physical property distinction been drilled in our heads on/. already?;-)
One also cannot justify robbing someone of just compensation for their work, but the trick is in defining what "just compensation" is. It's somewhere in a spectrum from the inherent joy one gets from producing creative works (the "gift economy" model) to getting potentially infinite monetary compensation for one unit of someone else's labor (the RIAA's dream). I'd personally like to see more/. posts productively addressing the "just compensation" issue.
That the Italian government interfered with data on a server in this country, and put their official insignia, without permission, on a U.S. website is just that - an invasion on our soil and an attack upon one of our most protected civil liberties. I shake with rage when I see this site and the blatant invasion of our soverignty.
Glad I'm not President, or else I would have bombed Rome upon first mention of this incident.
Frankly, I don't care. All of the abuses of copyright by the various industries has all but convinced me to advocate getting rid of the concept entirely.
If you want an income, don't make it through false scarcity. Make your money off of tangible property that really is scarce - theater seating, T-shirt sales, movie posters, and DVD discs that coincidentally have added features that "pirates" aren't trading. Making people pay for things that can be copied ad infinitum is not an efficient allocation of resources - and pretty immoral if you ask me.
My moral impulse says that it would be a horrible idea. My Machievellian side says it's a terrific idea - have them incur public backlash by dragging the neighborhood 14-year-old song-swapper before a judge and maybe get these insane laws overturned in the process.
My university is currently undergoing severe budget cuts right now. Tenured professors are having enough trouble as it is getting research dollars. Assistantships are being cut. My own department doesn't even know if it can admit any more graduate students this year. I have virtually no chance of getting grant funding to do this given the current conditions, so I stand by my statement that you have quoted.
But aside from that, unauthorized copying of copyrighted work is supposed to be allowed for research and educational purposes. That is part of the fair use doctrine, but the DMCA prevents that by default.
I hope you realize that most anime, due to Japan's much better laws, is completely free to copy and pass around.
A good point, but one that is becoming increasingly less applicable. U.S. distributors are buying the rights to anime at a far faster rate than they were even a couple of years ago. Much of the anime that is exceedingly popular - and thus gets more exposure to the anime fandom that I'm studying - is protected under U.S. copyright laws, including the DMCA, because they've been bought up by U.S. companies who want to cash in on their popularity.
What makes the situation even more perverse is that many companies buy the rights to an anime and then sit on them without releasing it. This makes fansubs illegal in this country, and leaves fans with no legal way of getting an anime until years later when they've moved on to another show. Theoretically they could buy the anime straight from Japan, but chances are extremely high that it won't be subtitled or dubbed.
Boucher believes that people should be allowed to circumvent technological protection for research...
What sort of research? That which shows the actual encryption schemes to be worthless (ala Edward Felton), or the type of research that requires circumvention so that work can be done?
In my case, my research as an academic partly relies on downloading anime from the Net since my topic concerns how anime fan subculture interprets it. This requires some circumventing of "anti-piracy" devices somewhere down the pike. I'm not intending to be thrifty through illegal activities. Rather, there is just no way I as a broke grad student can afford to even rent, let alone buy the anime without going into the hole to do a good research project. Hopefully, Boucher's amendment will cover cases such as mine as well as those the 1992 Fair Use Act intended to cover.
Hollings (a Democrat) faces re-election in 2004, perfect since it's also a Presidential election, and more people are bound to go to the polls than in an off-year race. Right now, South Carolina is having a gubanatorial race with a Democratic incumbent, Jim Hodges, so look for the front-runner on the Republican side (assuming they don't win) to try to take down Hodges in 2 years.
Slashdot Mirror
Mainly, I thought the short was about how we repeat the same mistakes again and again and never seem to learn. With what is going on in the world at the moment, it's clear that we haven't learned a thing from history.
We've all learned well enough. We're just too lazy and comfortable to act on the lessons, and who can blame us?
"Man, I've been fragging on Quake III for seven hours straight while surfing for pr0n during the high ping times. Guess I need to go out to the backyard and plow up my wheat field to get my lazy ass back to nature."
Right. Sorry, but until my box grows a hand and gives me a bitch slap, my curvy ass is staying put abusing it.
There are a quite a few Hollywood moguls who should become waiters. Maybe they would learn a little humility.
You would think they would be running their website on a server fast enough not to get /.-ed.
Here's where to send your comments/criticisms/death threats:
e .com
EMI Music
Consumer Relations
Im MediaPark 8a
D-50670 Köln
Fon 0221.4902.2557
Fax 0221.4902.124
info-emi@emimusic.de
www.emimusic.de
www.emiclassic.de
www.bluenot
Think your Commodore 64's pretty neat?
Put in a P3 and it'll be l33t!
I need to find an elderly blind gentleman with a lot of money lying around to let his "son" borrow from him. Then I can own AOL/Time Warner and oppress the lot of you all!
I myself even run the ex-Libertarian mailing list, but I would move there for one reason only. 20,000 geeks in a concentrated area would allow me to open up a successful anime shop - letting me make my hobby into my business!
I figured that Homer had a new business plan after compuglobalhypermeganet was sabatoged by Gates and his goons.
So 'the public' owned the telephone, and just leased it to Alexander Bell?
In a sense, yes. No one, Bell included, can come to an idea completely on their own. There has to be knowledge, inspiration, and feedback from others to make ideas viable. Like it or not, a collective (oops, I said the c-word) is from where ideas originate, and where ideas eventually will go in an infinite loop we call "building knowledge".
However, human survival relies on private ownership of tangible resources (at least in this country), whereas ideas are not tangible resources that can be locked down, or else they're not resources. The Founders realized this as well, so they struck a compromise. Since knowledge cannot be privatized for human survival, the use of knowledge can be legally restricted (at least in theory). This is for the good of the creator to be able to create, not to profit. Ideas were originally held in common, and then an innovator would come along and build on an idea in the public domain (e.g. Bell making the telegraph better). That innovator would get a legal monopoly for a short period of time to get resources to get better ideas, and those old ideas would go back to the public domain eventually for the public good.
If ideas really were private property, then there could be no innovation and no progress if powerless individuals had to pay royalties to the original holders of ideas (or more accurately, the corporations that bought/seized them) for eternity.
When 'the public' thinks it has a right to the product of my effort, then they can try and pry it out of my mind. I'd rather keep it secret than give it to someone who demands it's his.
If you keep your idea secret, which you have every right to do, then the idea is useless to everyone, including yourself. It's your intellectual and moral obligation as an innovator and a human being to share your ideas to allow general knowledge and wisdom to progress, but it's also the public's obligation to give you a limited monopoly on that idea to innovate, so long as we live in a capitalistic economy.
The whole idea behind patents, copyright, etc. was to empower individual inventors, scholars, and other creative people for the public good. Instead, current IP law empowers corporate non-persons (who are only people on paper) for private advantage, totally turning the original concept on its head.
The real question now is, "Can IP as a concept be salvaged to protect powerless innovators, or has it been twisted and exploited to the point where we must get rid of it entirely?"
Is Sharman Networks oblidged to even show up to court in this country? If they refuse to even acknowledge a lawsuit or an injunction, does this mean that federal agents will be dispatched to Vanadu, Estonia, the Netherlands, and Australia? I think not.
If they say you're infringing copyright, Sharman, just ignore them.
The point is, if you don't like the law, that still doesn't entitle you to break it, and get away scot free.
;-)
Yep, Harriet Tubman should've been hanged from the gallows for running the Underground Railroad, as was the customary punishment. And if she complained, TOUGH! She knew what she was doing was illegal.
Now don't get me wrong - helping fugitive slaves and freely distributing software are two different things with two different inherent contexts. But your argument doesn't even have a contextual basis - it's a mindless repitition of state dogma.
The state and the corporations who back it aren't right or wrong. They just have more guns and propaganda than you do.
But don't fool yourself that stealing music, software or patents is about community. That's about blatent "gimme gimme gimme for free".
/. already? ;-)
/. posts productively addressing the "just compensation" issue.
One cannot steal music, software, or patents - only the physical devices on which these things reside. Hasn't the IP vs. physical property distinction been drilled in our heads on
One also cannot justify robbing someone of just compensation for their work, but the trick is in defining what "just compensation" is. It's somewhere in a spectrum from the inherent joy one gets from producing creative works (the "gift economy" model) to getting potentially infinite monetary compensation for one unit of someone else's labor (the RIAA's dream). I'd personally like to see more
That the Italian government interfered with data on a server in this country, and put their official insignia, without permission, on a U.S. website is just that - an invasion on our soil and an attack upon one of our most protected civil liberties. I shake with rage when I see this site and the blatant invasion of our soverignty.
Glad I'm not President, or else I would have bombed Rome upon first mention of this incident.
Frankly, I don't care. All of the abuses of copyright by the various industries has all but convinced me to advocate getting rid of the concept entirely.
If you want an income, don't make it through false scarcity. Make your money off of tangible property that really is scarce - theater seating, T-shirt sales, movie posters, and DVD discs that coincidentally have added features that "pirates" aren't trading. Making people pay for things that can be copied ad infinitum is not an efficient allocation of resources - and pretty immoral if you ask me.
My moral impulse says that it would be a horrible idea. My Machievellian side says it's a terrific idea - have them incur public backlash by dragging the neighborhood 14-year-old song-swapper before a judge and maybe get these insane laws overturned in the process.
If copyrighted material were tangible property like computers, I might be convinced. Sorry, but you lose.
My university is currently undergoing severe budget cuts right now. Tenured professors are having enough trouble as it is getting research dollars. Assistantships are being cut. My own department doesn't even know if it can admit any more graduate students this year. I have virtually no chance of getting grant funding to do this given the current conditions, so I stand by my statement that you have quoted.
But aside from that, unauthorized copying of copyrighted work is supposed to be allowed for research and educational purposes. That is part of the fair use doctrine, but the DMCA prevents that by default.
I hope you realize that most anime, due to Japan's much better laws, is completely free to copy and pass around.
A good point, but one that is becoming increasingly less applicable. U.S. distributors are buying the rights to anime at a far faster rate than they were even a couple of years ago. Much of the anime that is exceedingly popular - and thus gets more exposure to the anime fandom that I'm studying - is protected under U.S. copyright laws, including the DMCA, because they've been bought up by U.S. companies who want to cash in on their popularity.
What makes the situation even more perverse is that many companies buy the rights to an anime and then sit on them without releasing it. This makes fansubs illegal in this country, and leaves fans with no legal way of getting an anime until years later when they've moved on to another show. Theoretically they could buy the anime straight from Japan, but chances are extremely high that it won't be subtitled or dubbed.
Friends Don't Let Friends Vote Democratic
Not to troll, but you do realize which party Boucher is from, right?
Boucher believes that people should be allowed to circumvent technological protection for research...
What sort of research? That which shows the actual encryption schemes to be worthless (ala Edward Felton), or the type of research that requires circumvention so that work can be done?
In my case, my research as an academic partly relies on downloading anime from the Net since my topic concerns how anime fan subculture interprets it. This requires some circumventing of "anti-piracy" devices somewhere down the pike. I'm not intending to be thrifty through illegal activities. Rather, there is just no way I as a broke grad student can afford to even rent, let alone buy the anime without going into the hole to do a good research project. Hopefully, Boucher's amendment will cover cases such as mine as well as those the 1992 Fair Use Act intended to cover.
You can't get it off the Google list, but you can get it from their cache of the copyright directive.
Actually, Stephen Limbaugh is the uncle of Rush, who also has a son, Stephen Limbaugh, Jr., who is the Chief Justice of the Missouri Supreme Court.
Just more evidence that conservatives are just as pro-big government as the liberals they chastize.
I meant to say, "take down Hollings in 2 years". I slap myself for not hitting the Preview button.
*slap* Ow.
Hollings (a Democrat) faces re-election in 2004, perfect since it's also a Presidential election, and more people are bound to go to the polls than in an off-year race. Right now, South Carolina is having a gubanatorial race with a Democratic incumbent, Jim Hodges, so look for the front-runner on the Republican side (assuming they don't win) to try to take down Hodges in 2 years.