Patent concerns similarity (provenance is irrelevant).
However, both are unethical and ineffective anachronisms long overdue for abolition.
Let overpaid lawyers count the angels on a pinhead. It is not something computer scientists should concern themselves with, especially when litigation causes 99% of harm well before any judges get anywhere near investigating the provenance of bits - deciding which side of bread best provides inspiration as to the 'correct' judicial interpretation as to how bits should properly be constrained.
Use the GPL. It's a legal device against litigation.
Using BrightNets is a coder's sophistry, not a lawyer's. A coder may as well wonder why there's so much legal difference between copying an MP3 file and streaming it, when there's marginal technical difference. Conversely, lawyer's won't be fazed by significant technical differences if the end result is the same - they'll sue you first and leave the questions to judges in subsequent decades.
You might as well create a distributed and co-operatively administered 'YouTube' host with anyone legally permitted to upload and download so long as the hosted works were only 'streamed' to the public and taken down upon request (DMCA).
My position is that copyright is unethical because it is unnatural, and a suspension of our inalienable right to liberty.
Your position appears to be that despite being unnatural copyright can be ethically co-opted as part of an artist's terms and conditions - the 'copyright as authorial right' position (espoused by Prof Lawrence Lessig and Creative Commons).
I am saying the ethical arguments are academic anyway, because copyright is ineffective precisely because it is unnatural.
In other words, the nature of information renders copyright ineffective. Don't complain to me, complain to nature.
The ethics of copyright have been argued over the years many times, without daunting those in its support, or preventing ever greater enforcement and retrospective extension of its term.
The ethical arguments are only once again interesting because copyright is no longer effective, and people are curious as to the best guides to what legislation may arise in its place - which plainly, cannot continue to suspend the public's liberty to share and build upon published works.
I benefit from the labour of the craftsman who made my chair everyday - without his permission, and without me needing to reward him further.
I benefit from the labour of coders who developed the GPL software I use everyday.
"Aha!" You say. "See. You have to admit that you need their permission."
Not by natural law however. Only copyright creates this peculiar privilege.
"Ah, but. You aren't copying your chair. If your chair was patented, you'd need permission to manufacture a reproduction"
Quite. Patent is an unnatural privilege. Naturally, we can do with our own property what we will, whether we buy it or make it. That someone else authored it or invented or discovered it is immaterial, except in our recognition of that truth.
Only patent says you can't make something someone else has patented - despite our natural right to do so. Only copyright says you can't copy something that someone else has authored - despite our natural right to do so.
The GPL undoes copyright (and tries to neutralise patent too as far as it can), restoring my right to copy and develop software in spite of its privilege to stop me.
This is all academic anyway.
The king may grant patents and institute privileges of copyright, and those few who enjoy such privileges may respect each others', but the king cannot prosecute the mass of his people who are not so privileged to coerce their respect. Some fool told them that all men were created equal.
So, either you believe King Canute can command the tides, or you do not. Whether it would be right or wrong is beside the point. The question is whether it is within his power to command his unwashed masses to enthrall themselves to his will.
He is put to the test and even now the salty brine is up to his neck. He pleads with you to believe he is impotent - despite your protestations that he merely need put a little more effort into his charismatic power of command.
Argue that he is supernaturally potent. It does not change the nature of the tide, nor render it subject.
I'm merely explaining why the tide ignores the king, to those who see that it does, and why the king should not command it even if he could.
Believe it or not but terms and conditions cannot supersede someone else's liberty, otherwise slavery would still be with us.
You could say "I will sell you this CD for $10 and will pay you $1 each year if I do not during that time obtain evidence that you have copied it" and a potential buyer could accept or reject your bargain's terms and conditions (without consequently surrendering their liberty).
You might persuade someone to surrender their liberty to you even so, but the law is also necessary to prevent citizens from alienating themselves from their rights, as part of its responsibility to protect those rights.
Unfortunately this idea that you can't surrender the right to copy will seem ludicrous to people who have grown up with the idea that the liberty to copy something is properly subject to the transferable privilege of the author (or their assigns) and none other. So, to them, it will not seem a surrender of one's liberty to relinquish the freedom to copy something. Of course, people always had the right - the state simply suspended its recognition in order to privilege the publisher.
It's quite a paradigm shift, and one that is well beyond my powers of persuasion. But then, this is not a matter that is driven by evangelism, but by the inexorable laws of nature.
Cultural constraint for corporations' commercial exploitation vs the public's natural cultural liberty restored by a public communications infrastructure beyond the state or publishers' control.
That's not a personal battle. It's war between the corporately funded state and its culturally emancipated citizens.
I'm just exploring solutions and damage limitation measures, e.g. embrace the GPL and start grokking the true nature of intellectual property before it's too late.
You can't use copyright law to demonstrate why copyright law is ethical - this would be lifting yourself up by your bootstraps.
If you want to argue the ethics of copyright law you have to base your arguments on something more fundamental, e.g. natural law.
Even superman would be hard put to fly around the planet prosecuting kids for putting his comic strip in the school photocopier for their friends.
Such a supernatural law is certainly attractive and lucrative to the likes of the Daily Planet, but then they are an immortal and psychopathic newsmedia corporation.
It is a shibbolethic answer to the question, i.e. there is no explanation.
It simply suggests that you won't need an explanation as to why copyright is unethical unless you need an explanation as to why slavery is unethical.
I've touched on the ethics of copyright and patent umpteen times on my blog, but here's a post that goes into some background on natural rights that might shed a tad more light: http://www.digitalproductions.co.uk/index.php?id=112
Rather than advertising, the niche I'm focusing on is facilitating bargains between artist and audience, given these two parties seem most interested in an exchange of art for money.
I started thinking along these lines when wondering how on earth one could enable members of the public to sell 3D art in a virtual world if it was completely decentralised (lawless wild-west): http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/article_display.php?category=14
I then proposed an auction mechanism whereby an audience could haggle with an artist and all arrive at an agreeable price (that all successful bidders would pay), sooner or later. http://www.digitalartauction.com/
Convinced I was on the right track, but not convinced I was best placed to take quidmusic forward, I decided to create an engine that would support all manner of sites that needed to enable trading between artist and audience, i.e. http://www.contingencymarket.com/ . This, being commission free, would then enable anyone to use it in support of their own site.
I'm now working on an even simpler site than quidmusic: 1p2u.com . It's in very early stages of development, but this will test/debug/demonstrate the contingencymarket. I'll then use it to replace the engine in quidmusic, and finally implement digitalartauction, and others.
We can bear in mind that since copying a DVD doesn't involve decryption, copying is a mere copyright infringement.
However, what is 'breaking CSS'?
If 'breaking' is decrypting then playing DVDs also decrypts them.
If you have a decryption device (DVD player) and an encrypted intellectual work (DVD) subject to copyright (and DMCA/EUCD) then the Finnish court must also rule that operating a DVD player is illegal.
You can't have it both ways. Well, unless you allow a copyright holder to usurp the law and say "Decryption and decryption equipment is only illegal when I say it's illegal, and 'breaking' is decryption that I say is illegal".
I completely agree with you. However, there is one point where the exchange of information may be naturally, and consequently ethically controlled and that is across the boundary of one's private domain. Having clear and effective control here also remains viable (without totalitarianism).
I am also developing software to facilitate such business models (that do not rely upon the unnatural privileges of copyright or patent).
Potentially having high market value, an intellectual work must be regarded as property in its own right. Among other things, this is because its value, whether utilitarian or aesthetic, can be appropriated by theft (irrespective of the possibility that any number of copies may remain with its possessor).
Despite crazy definitions to the contrary, thieves do not have uppermost in their minds the concept or intent of denying a legitimate owner the use of their property, but rather the concept and intent of seizing valuable/saleable property without payment (where the effort of theft is expected to be lower than the amount expected to be recovered through possession/use/benefit/exchange of the stolen property).
One cannot simply have a statutory penalty for violation of someone's privacy right. One must also consider the market value of the intellectual property so appropriated, and ideally the cost of its return/repossession.
The fundamental flaw in most people's notions of IP is not primarily that creation confers ownership (this tends to be coincident even with a first-comer idea), but that one should continue to own one's IP even after one has parted with it (sale or gift). But for this, the legitimate owner of a book cannot be stealing its author's property by making copies of their purchased book, unless one sustains the idea that the author owns all copies of their book even after they've sold them.
So it's quite possible to accept intellectual property as arising out of natural law, e.g. you write a book, you have absolute ownership and control over that book (even without the state's support, an individual can expect to protect it). Similarly with copies: you make a copy, you have absolute ownership and control over that copy. However, the author has no natural right to control what people do with the copies they purchase, e.g. making further copies or derivatives. Privileging the author to the contrary (for the publisher's benefit) is the unnatural misstep, the state's attachment of strings that nature did not.
Copyright is unnatural. All state granted monopolies are unnatural, patent included.
However, despite the unnatural privileges granted to its creators, intellectual property is nevertheless natural. The effective monopoly over access to one's private domain and control over the material and intellectual properties within it is also natural, and thus to be protected by the state.
Restore Everyone's Intellectual Property Rights - Abolish Copyright...A sheet of paper is material property. A poem is intellectual property. Aside from the practical issues arising from... to manufacture copies or derivatives of their own intellectual property unless they have obtained licence from the... to a publisher. Without copyright, purchasers of intellectual property enjoy the restoration of their natural right to... restoration of rights does not weaken respect for intellectual property, but strengthens it. There is still no right to... http://www.digitalproductions.co.uk/index.php?id=96 148 days ago
IP is Indeed Property..., copyright makes people think that all intellectual property is a pretence, even private intellectual property... because copyright is about pretending th
Copyleft doesn't really depend upon copyright, but upon public opprobrium.
If MS overtly publishes a derivative of an 'orphaned' GPL work, they will find it particularly difficult to sue anyone for copying it. Moreover, you don't really need their source code - given they'll not be able to sell copies, they'll only be able to sell the source (which they will also be unable to prosecute anyone for copying).
Copyleft is actually completely unaffected by whether copyright becomes stronger, weaker, or more expensive. Copyleft neutralises copyright and becomes independent from it, so it doesn't matter what happens to copyright, even abolition, authors who espouse the principles of copyleft software will remain unconstrained by copyright (free).
That after all is the point of copyleft, not to virally constrain deriving authors to some philosophical dogma, but to set authors free from the constraints of the 300 year old anachronism known as copyright.
The important thing is the artist gets to decide on costs, i.e. whether a marble floor is really necessary for their new studio, and whether they really need membership of a litigation service that fines and puts the frighteners on any of their unauthorised promoters (families with kids using bittorrent).
Don't forget that a lot of the costs the label creatively accounts for may often include hefty profits for the respective service providers (in one big happy family). What the popular artist ends up with is 'enough to keep them and their lawyers not too unhappy - on average'. The insufficiently popular artist ends up owing the label money.
If the label is squeaky clean then the independent artist would still turn to the label and take advantage of their competitively priced services (if the label ever decided it'd actually be worth even answering the phone to independent artists).
Option 1) A tiny percentage of your publisher's profits for life - if you live long enough for their 'costs' to be recouped.
Option 2) 100% of your self-publishing profit this year, maybe next.
Not only is the share of profits better, the costs are better (despite smaller sales). The costs in option 1 are colossal, whereas in 2 they are miniscule, especially given unconstrained promotion and reproduction to (hopefully virally) foster a far bigger market next year and a consequently bigger revenue.
So, it's pretty clear why traditional publishers are keen to educate the next generation of their client base as to how precious a thing an artist's copyright is, and how despicable it is to copy an artist's work.
There will be a stampede soon when everyone realises option 2 is not too good to be true...
See The Digital Art Auction, which describes such an auction. It focusses upon the case of an unlimited number of seats, but can just as easily be used for a finite ticket count.
1) Faster than light travel is not possible 2) Faster than light communication is possible 3) Therefore no alien wastes time flinging bags of animate gloop around the universe - there's simply no point. 4) Billions of alien civilisations have enough on their plate communicating with everyone else who's discovered FTL comms, and negotiating telepresent tourist visas. They aren't going to waste time sending messages in bottles to those few immature civs who still believe that FTL comms are impossible. 5) If you have FTL comms, radio comms are like smoke signals vs ethernet over optic fibre. 6) We won't join the conversation until we discover FTL comms, and then things will start getting hairy. Pandora's box will be a fart in comparison to the atomic bomb of umpteen zillion alien technologies to digest and with luck, control. 7) When we've figured out FTL comms, hopefully we'll be able to withstand the information blow back.
Imagine Europe hadn't discovered America. Imagine umpteen native Americans performing a coordinated smoke signalling effort to communicate with a hypothetical civilisation across the ocean. Imagine Europe happily nattering on mobile phones, completely oblivious to the insignificant impact a little smoke over America has to the sky over Europe.
Trust me, there's life out there, but it's not communicating as we know it.
I'm quite happy to believe in non-local signalling between signallers in the same reference frame, but not otherwise.
You don't need to break relativity.
Thus, you may well appear to communicate as if a telegram travelled faster than light, but that doesn't mean you can communicate back in time.
In other words two signallers at rest with respect to each other may signal non-locally no matter how far apart, but relativistic effects still apply when the signallers have a relative velocity.
Although, I fear you risk creating a Catch-22 situation.
Making patent enforcement more draconian and patents ever more far reaching is the mark of a sane, albeit subversive industry intent on destroying patent law, and the mark of a sane and responsible legislature who accede to their desires.
Therefore the greatest insanity, would be to observe a moratorium on changes to patent law, or even to tighten up on some of the definitions such as 'obvious' and 'novel'.
So, every step toward the preservation of patent law, every year that postpones its abolition, is in my opinion, a step in the direction of increased insanity.
So, I must disagree, and prefer steps toward sanity.
Let's not argue about whether the people have a right to bear arms, let's simply give out free AK47s with daily ammo rations, even to children, and eventually, those of us who survive will realise it was a bad idea.
Fortunately, unlike guns, copyright and patent can simply be abolished at a stroke - one doesn't have to conduct house-to-house searches with metal detectors.
Unfortunately, we haven't quite got to the stage where enough people are being hurt by patents that calls for abolition obtain much traction - yet...
Ahem, the GPL is about freedom for purchasers of GPL software.
If you have a legitimate copy (purchased or given to you) of GPL software, the GPL obliges the provision of the source code to you, and restores your freedom to develop and redistribute the software (subject to the GPL).
DRM is an inconvenience that pretty much anyone with a brain appreciates is counterproductive to all concerned.
By itself, DRM is an irritant. With DMCA, DRM lands you in prison or fines you millions of dollars.
DRM is an irritant. Copyright is a big problem (and should never have been permitted to apply in the digital domain). The DMCA is a bigger problem (law made by corporate sociopaths).
DRM is simply a logical fallacy.
Copyright/DMCA is the unethical weapon used against members of the public.
Slashdot Mirror
Putting it a little more plainly:
Copyright concerns provenance (similarity merely raises suspicion).
Patent concerns similarity (provenance is irrelevant).
However, both are unethical and ineffective anachronisms long overdue for abolition.
Let overpaid lawyers count the angels on a pinhead. It is not something computer scientists should concern themselves with, especially when litigation causes 99% of harm well before any judges get anywhere near investigating the provenance of bits - deciding which side of bread best provides inspiration as to the 'correct' judicial interpretation as to how bits should properly be constrained.
Use the GPL. It's a legal device against litigation.
Using BrightNets is a coder's sophistry, not a lawyer's. A coder may as well wonder why there's so much legal difference between copying an MP3 file and streaming it, when there's marginal technical difference. Conversely, lawyer's won't be fazed by significant technical differences if the end result is the same - they'll sue you first and leave the questions to judges in subsequent decades.
You might as well create a distributed and co-operatively administered 'YouTube' host with anyone legally permitted to upload and download so long as the hosted works were only 'streamed' to the public and taken down upon request (DMCA).
Lex Asinus Est.
France sure knows how to maintain its café society. Or, should I say cybercafé society?
My position is that copyright is unethical because it is unnatural, and a suspension of our inalienable right to liberty.
Your position appears to be that despite being unnatural copyright can be ethically co-opted as part of an artist's terms and conditions - the 'copyright as authorial right' position (espoused by Prof Lawrence Lessig and Creative Commons).
I am saying the ethical arguments are academic anyway, because copyright is ineffective precisely because it is unnatural.
In other words, the nature of information renders copyright ineffective. Don't complain to me, complain to nature.
The ethics of copyright have been argued over the years many times, without daunting those in its support, or preventing ever greater enforcement and retrospective extension of its term.
The ethical arguments are only once again interesting because copyright is no longer effective, and people are curious as to the best guides to what legislation may arise in its place - which plainly, cannot continue to suspend the public's liberty to share and build upon published works.
:)
I benefit from the labour of the craftsman who made my chair everyday - without his permission, and without me needing to reward him further.
I benefit from the labour of coders who developed the GPL software I use everyday.
"Aha!" You say. "See. You have to admit that you need their permission."
Not by natural law however. Only copyright creates this peculiar privilege.
"Ah, but. You aren't copying your chair. If your chair was patented, you'd need permission to manufacture a reproduction"
Quite. Patent is an unnatural privilege. Naturally, we can do with our own property what we will, whether we buy it or make it. That someone else authored it or invented or discovered it is immaterial, except in our recognition of that truth.
Only patent says you can't make something someone else has patented - despite our natural right to do so.
Only copyright says you can't copy something that someone else has authored - despite our natural right to do so.
The GPL undoes copyright (and tries to neutralise patent too as far as it can), restoring my right to copy and develop software in spite of its privilege to stop me.
This is all academic anyway.
The king may grant patents and institute privileges of copyright, and those few who enjoy such privileges may respect each others', but the king cannot prosecute the mass of his people who are not so privileged to coerce their respect. Some fool told them that all men were created equal.
So, either you believe King Canute can command the tides, or you do not. Whether it would be right or wrong is beside the point. The question is whether it is within his power to command his unwashed masses to enthrall themselves to his will.
He is put to the test and even now the salty brine is up to his neck. He pleads with you to believe he is impotent - despite your protestations that he merely need put a little more effort into his charismatic power of command.
Argue that he is supernaturally potent. It does not change the nature of the tide, nor render it subject.
I'm merely explaining why the tide ignores the king, to those who see that it does, and why the king should not command it even if he could.
Believe it or not but terms and conditions cannot supersede someone else's liberty, otherwise slavery would still be with us.
You could say "I will sell you this CD for $10 and will pay you $1 each year if I do not during that time obtain evidence that you have copied it" and a potential buyer could accept or reject your bargain's terms and conditions (without consequently surrendering their liberty).
You might persuade someone to surrender their liberty to you even so, but the law is also necessary to prevent citizens from alienating themselves from their rights, as part of its responsibility to protect those rights.
Unfortunately this idea that you can't surrender the right to copy will seem ludicrous to people who have grown up with the idea that the liberty to copy something is properly subject to the transferable privilege of the author (or their assigns) and none other. So, to them, it will not seem a surrender of one's liberty to relinquish the freedom to copy something. Of course, people always had the right - the state simply suspended its recognition in order to privilege the publisher.
It's quite a paradigm shift, and one that is well beyond my powers of persuasion. But then, this is not a matter that is driven by evangelism, but by the inexorable laws of nature.
Cultural constraint for corporations' commercial exploitation vs the public's natural cultural liberty restored by a public communications infrastructure beyond the state or publishers' control.
That's not a personal battle. It's war between the corporately funded state and its culturally emancipated citizens.
I'm just exploring solutions and damage limitation measures, e.g. embrace the GPL and start grokking the true nature of intellectual property before it's too late.
You can't use copyright law to demonstrate why copyright law is ethical - this would be lifting yourself up by your bootstraps.
;-)
If you want to argue the ethics of copyright law you have to base your arguments on something more fundamental, e.g. natural law.
Even superman would be hard put to fly around the planet prosecuting kids for putting his comic strip in the school photocopier for their friends.
Such a supernatural law is certainly attractive and lucrative to the likes of the Daily Planet, but then they are an immortal and psychopathic newsmedia corporation.
Ask yourself "What would Clark Kent do?"
It is a shibbolethic answer to the question, i.e. there is no explanation.
It simply suggests that you won't need an explanation as to why copyright is unethical unless you need an explanation as to why slavery is unethical.
I've touched on the ethics of copyright and patent umpteen times on my blog, but here's a post that goes into some background on natural rights that might shed a tad more light:
http://www.digitalproductions.co.uk/index.php?id=112
Steep slope?
I climbed that one last week just before breakfast:
http://www.digitalproductions.co.uk/index.php?id=119
There is 'innocent of infringement', and then there is 'innocent' as in having done no wrong (irrespective of what the law says).
Check out the law on copyright, and you'll find that is fundamentally unethical.
How is Copyright Fundamentally Unethical?
We are all innocent when it comes to sharing or building upon published works - with or without their copyright holders' permission.
"I will not accept the enslavement of my fellow man, nor any imposition upon his liberty, as reward for the publication of my art"
Rather than advertising, the niche I'm focusing on is facilitating bargains between artist and audience, given these two parties seem most interested in an exchange of art for money.
I started thinking along these lines when wondering how on earth one could enable members of the public to sell 3D art in a virtual world if it was completely decentralised (lawless wild-west):
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/article_display.php?category=14
I then proposed an auction mechanism whereby an audience could haggle with an artist and all arrive at an agreeable price (that all successful bidders would pay), sooner or later.
http://www.digitalartauction.com/
I then decided something simpler would be better: http://www.quidmusic.com/
Convinced I was on the right track, but not convinced I was best placed to take quidmusic forward, I decided to create an engine that would support all manner of sites that needed to enable trading between artist and audience, i.e. http://www.contingencymarket.com/ . This, being commission free, would then enable anyone to use it in support of their own site.
I'm now working on an even simpler site than quidmusic: 1p2u.com . It's in very early stages of development, but this will test/debug/demonstrate the contingencymarket. I'll then use it to replace the engine in quidmusic, and finally implement digitalartauction, and others.
We can bear in mind that since copying a DVD doesn't involve decryption, copying is a mere copyright infringement.
However, what is 'breaking CSS'?
If 'breaking' is decrypting then playing DVDs also decrypts them.
If you have a decryption device (DVD player) and an encrypted intellectual work (DVD) subject to copyright (and DMCA/EUCD) then the Finnish court must also rule that operating a DVD player is illegal.
You can't have it both ways. Well, unless you allow a copyright holder to usurp the law and say "Decryption and decryption equipment is only illegal when I say it's illegal, and 'breaking' is decryption that I say is illegal".
I completely agree with you. However, there is one point where the exchange of information may be naturally, and consequently ethically controlled and that is across the boundary of one's private domain. Having clear and effective control here also remains viable (without totalitarianism).
I am also developing software to facilitate such business models (that do not rely upon the unnatural privileges of copyright or patent).
Here's a recent post of mine on IP - excerpts of others follow below it.
...A sheet of paper is material property. A poem is intellectual property. Aside from the practical issues arising from ... to manufacture copies or derivatives of their own intellectual property unless they have obtained licence from the ... to a publisher. Without copyright, purchasers of intellectual property enjoy the restoration of their natural right to ... restoration of rights does not weaken respect for intellectual property, but strengthens it. There is still no right to ...
..., copyright makes people think that all intellectual property is a pretence, even private intellectual property ... because copyright is about pretending th
URL to first is: http://www.digitalproductions.co.uk/index.php?id=116
URL to rest is: http://www.digitalproductions.co.uk/?q=intellectual+property
Natural Intellectual Property Unnaturally Privileged
Potentially having high market value, an intellectual work must be regarded as property in its own right. Among other things, this is because its value, whether utilitarian or aesthetic, can be appropriated by theft (irrespective of the possibility that any number of copies may remain with its possessor).
Despite crazy definitions to the contrary, thieves do not have uppermost in their minds the concept or intent of denying a legitimate owner the use of their property, but rather the concept and intent of seizing valuable/saleable property without payment (where the effort of theft is expected to be lower than the amount expected to be recovered through possession/use/benefit/exchange of the stolen property).
One cannot simply have a statutory penalty for violation of someone's privacy right. One must also consider the market value of the intellectual property so appropriated, and ideally the cost of its return/repossession.
The fundamental flaw in most people's notions of IP is not primarily that creation confers ownership (this tends to be coincident even with a first-comer idea), but that one should continue to own one's IP even after one has parted with it (sale or gift). But for this, the legitimate owner of a book cannot be stealing its author's property by making copies of their purchased book, unless one sustains the idea that the author owns all copies of their book even after they've sold them.
So it's quite possible to accept intellectual property as arising out of natural law, e.g. you write a book, you have absolute ownership and control over that book (even without the state's support, an individual can expect to protect it). Similarly with copies: you make a copy, you have absolute ownership and control over that copy. However, the author has no natural right to control what people do with the copies they purchase, e.g. making further copies or derivatives. Privileging the author to the contrary (for the publisher's benefit) is the unnatural misstep, the state's attachment of strings that nature did not.
Copyright is unnatural. All state granted monopolies are unnatural, patent included.
However, despite the unnatural privileges granted to its creators, intellectual property is nevertheless natural. The effective monopoly over access to one's private domain and control over the material and intellectual properties within it is also natural, and thus to be protected by the state.
http://www.digitalproductions.co.uk/?q=intellectual+property
Restore Everyone's Intellectual Property Rights - Abolish Copyright
http://www.digitalproductions.co.uk/index.php?id=96 148 days ago
IP is Indeed Property
Copyleft doesn't really depend upon copyright, but upon public opprobrium.
If MS overtly publishes a derivative of an 'orphaned' GPL work, they will find it particularly difficult to sue anyone for copying it. Moreover, you don't really need their source code - given they'll not be able to sell copies, they'll only be able to sell the source (which they will also be unable to prosecute anyone for copying).
Copyleft is actually completely unaffected by whether copyright becomes stronger, weaker, or more expensive. Copyleft neutralises copyright and becomes independent from it, so it doesn't matter what happens to copyright, even abolition, authors who espouse the principles of copyleft software will remain unconstrained by copyright (free).
That after all is the point of copyleft, not to virally constrain deriving authors to some philosophical dogma, but to set authors free from the constraints of the 300 year old anachronism known as copyright.
The important thing is the artist gets to decide on costs, i.e. whether a marble floor is really necessary for their new studio, and whether they really need membership of a litigation service that fines and puts the frighteners on any of their unauthorised promoters (families with kids using bittorrent).
Don't forget that a lot of the costs the label creatively accounts for may often include hefty profits for the respective service providers (in one big happy family). What the popular artist ends up with is 'enough to keep them and their lawyers not too unhappy - on average'. The insufficiently popular artist ends up owing the label money.
If the label is squeaky clean then the independent artist would still turn to the label and take advantage of their competitively priced services (if the label ever decided it'd actually be worth even answering the phone to independent artists).
Let's see how many do.
The artist's choice:
Option 1) A tiny percentage of your publisher's profits for life - if you live long enough for their 'costs' to be recouped.
Option 2) 100% of your self-publishing profit this year, maybe next.
Not only is the share of profits better, the costs are better (despite smaller sales). The costs in option 1 are colossal, whereas in 2 they are miniscule, especially given unconstrained promotion and reproduction to (hopefully virally) foster a far bigger market next year and a consequently bigger revenue.
So, it's pretty clear why traditional publishers are keen to educate the next generation of their client base as to how precious a thing an artist's copyright is, and how despicable it is to copy an artist's work.
There will be a stampede soon when everyone realises option 2 is not too good to be true...
See The Digital Art Auction, which describes such an auction. It focusses upon the case of an unlimited number of seats, but can just as easily be used for a finite ticket count.
1) Faster than light travel is not possible
2) Faster than light communication is possible
3) Therefore no alien wastes time flinging bags of animate gloop around the universe - there's simply no point.
4) Billions of alien civilisations have enough on their plate communicating with everyone else who's discovered FTL comms, and negotiating telepresent tourist visas. They aren't going to waste time sending messages in bottles to those few immature civs who still believe that FTL comms are impossible.
5) If you have FTL comms, radio comms are like smoke signals vs ethernet over optic fibre.
6) We won't join the conversation until we discover FTL comms, and then things will start getting hairy. Pandora's box will be a fart in comparison to the atomic bomb of umpteen zillion alien technologies to digest and with luck, control.
7) When we've figured out FTL comms, hopefully we'll be able to withstand the information blow back.
Imagine Europe hadn't discovered America. Imagine umpteen native Americans performing a coordinated smoke signalling effort to communicate with a hypothetical civilisation across the ocean. Imagine Europe happily nattering on mobile phones, completely oblivious to the insignificant impact a little smoke over America has to the sky over Europe.
Trust me, there's life out there, but it's not communicating as we know it.
My suggested return vehicle would be a non-restitutable pogo stick.
:)
I figured this would be about 40 foot long for a human to survive a 120mph impact on Earth.
I don't know how fast Mach 1 is when landing on Mars, but if it's about 760mph then we'd be looking at a 250 foot pogo stick.
Whoosh
thud
SPROINGGG!
"Oooh, me back hurts!"
I'm quite happy to believe in non-local signalling between signallers in the same reference frame, but not otherwise.
You don't need to break relativity.
Thus, you may well appear to communicate as if a telegram travelled faster than light, but that doesn't mean you can communicate back in time.
In other words two signallers at rest with respect to each other may signal non-locally no matter how far apart, but relativistic effects still apply when the signallers have a relative velocity.
I like your thinking.
Although, I fear you risk creating a Catch-22 situation.
Making patent enforcement more draconian and patents ever more far reaching is the mark of a sane, albeit subversive industry intent on destroying patent law, and the mark of a sane and responsible legislature who accede to their desires.
Therefore the greatest insanity, would be to observe a moratorium on changes to patent law, or even to tighten up on some of the definitions such as 'obvious' and 'novel'.
So, every step toward the preservation of patent law, every year that postpones its abolition, is in my opinion, a step in the direction of increased insanity.
So, I must disagree, and prefer steps toward sanity.
Let's not argue about whether the people have a right to bear arms, let's simply give out free AK47s with daily ammo rations, even to children, and eventually, those of us who survive will realise it was a bad idea.
Fortunately, unlike guns, copyright and patent can simply be abolished at a stroke - one doesn't have to conduct house-to-house searches with metal detectors.
Unfortunately, we haven't quite got to the stage where enough people are being hurt by patents that calls for abolition obtain much traction - yet...
Ahem, the GPL is about freedom for purchasers of GPL software.
If you have a legitimate copy (purchased or given to you) of GPL software, the GPL obliges the provision of the source code to you, and restores your freedom to develop and redistribute the software (subject to the GPL).
There is probably only one DRM based online music service that can come close to claiming that DRM enabled its innovation:
http://www.weedshare.com/
...as Douglas Adams might have said.
DRM is an inconvenience that pretty much anyone with a brain appreciates is counterproductive to all concerned.
By itself, DRM is an irritant. With DMCA, DRM lands you in prison or fines you millions of dollars.
DRM is an irritant.
Copyright is a big problem (and should never have been permitted to apply in the digital domain).
The DMCA is a bigger problem (law made by corporate sociopaths).
DRM is simply a logical fallacy.
Copyright/DMCA is the unethical weapon used against members of the public.