OK, here's an ironic one: they posted a list of members of the British National Party.
Now, I don't agree with the BNP's politics, and therefore I don't vote for them, but I also don't support rules that are prejudiced against people purely on account of their membership of a certain political party. Such rules are, IMHO, far more dangerous to the democratic process than anything they are likely to prevent.
Wikileaks, supposedly proud of the way it helps the underdog to fight oppressive governments and the laws they use to silence dissent, outed an entire group of people, and cost several of them their jobs as a result.
If that's not a clear enough case, then let me provide a hypothetical example to go with it. Let's suppose that you, personally, have been wrongfully accused of committing a heinous crime. Your country, having regard for due process, requires you to attend a court case to determine your innocence or guilt.
Let us suppose that, mindful of the rule that one is innocent until proven guilty, the judge orders that your identity not be disclosed by the media until the case has concluded. However, anyone in open court can clearly see that you are there, and perhaps one of those people, knowing how heinous the crime you (might have) committed is, decides to post the case details, including your identity, on Wikileaks.
The following day, you get home from court to find an angry mob waiting outside your home, which has been extensively vandalised because obviously if you're in court then you did something wrong and you deserved it. Think this couldn't happen to you? Try looking up what happened to the paediatrician who looked a bit like a low-res photo of a suspected paedophile that was published in a British newspaper.
Sometimes, there are good reasons to keep things secret, and revealing those things publicly does real damage and has no redeeming value whatsoever. Were this not the case, there would be no need for classifications for official secrets, the law wouldn't allow confidentiality clauses in commercial agreements, people wouldn't care about privacy, no-one would have invented data protection laws... Any organisation that makes no attempt to distinguish legitimate cases where secrecy should be respected and repeats any information given to it no matter the implications is a danger to society, and I have no qualms whatsoever about squishing them with any laws and/or firearms that come to hand. That is, after all, no worse than the fate that such an organisation will inevitably inflict on someone innocent, sooner or later.
I'd have a lot more sympathy for Wikileaks if they hadn't hosted a whole load of stuff that really should have remained secret and for good reason.
If what they posted was embarrassing, censoring it would be one thing.
When what they post undermines national security or criminal investigations or is otherwise normally considered privileged information for good reasons, and furthermore they go out of their way to keep contributors (who may well have obtained the information illegally) anonymous, and on top of that you have connections to organisations like TPB that are pretty blatantly trying to get away with breaking the law, then it's no surprise that the authorities take steps to close them down. Frankly, I'm not so sure that is a bad thing. A responsible free press is one thing, but Wikileaks is something else.
The article states that in the UK these records can only be accessed under the RIPA act.
Sure, but take a look at all the people who can access the data under RIPA, and it includes all those low-level officials and local councils.
Whether or not the sysadmins you're concerned about are susceptible to bribery, we know for a fact that local councils have been using RIPA surveillance powers to fight such deadly threats as dog fouling, leaving a bin out for collection on the wrong day of the week, and registering a child to go to school.
Am I missing something here? I thought under the DMCA they could file a takedown notice, but the content provider could immediately file a counter-notice if it's legal?
There are two big problems with Adobe software: full licences are very expensive (particularly the upgrades) compared to good-enough competition, and a lot of the big name products now come with DRM that causes serious practical difficulties even without the ethical considerations that would offend a lot of people reading this.
Until you fix those things, your software is not a viable choice for many of us, so please keep your unsubtle advertising to yourself.
Unlike the crime infested US, there are no drug gangs or mafia in Europe
You're supposed to post that sort of thing on the first day of this month, not the sixth.
In any case, it's of far more concern that "legitimate" public bodies such as local councils and quangos will potentially be able to access this sort of information. That covers hundreds of thousands of people, many of them low-level staffers or those elected by only a few hundred people. There is an obvious case for allowing the police and intelligence services to access this kind of information, subject to powerful safeguards and judicial oversight, where it is necessary for the performance of their public duties. However, there is absolutely nothing that is done at the level of the hundreds of other organisations involved that justifies the kind of invasion of privacy covered by this sort of law.
We've seen a seemingless endless stream of abuses reported in the press recently, invoking draconian surveillance powers to cover the most trivial of suspected offences, and often against people who turned out to be entirely innocent anyway. This is not the behaviour of a people-serving government in a free country. It is staggering that this has been allowed to go through in its current form anyway.
I've found that regardless of the pace of development, many folks simply don't document their code, or do so poorly.
That's true. It's an unfortunate consequence of the fact that a lot of development groups have never really stopped to consider what effective documentation actually is.
I always find it odd that even though heavy, waterfall-model development processes have been well criticised today, a lot of places still view documentation as if each project must have a big, formal requirements spec, functional spec, design spec, various test specs, or whatever we choose to call the equivalent documents, all written in the proper order ahead of time, and with so much boilerplate that it takes more space than the useful content for smaller projects. If you look at the participants in the development process and their respective roles, the kinds of information that are actually useful to each participant, the people who can provide that information to their colleagues, and for how long each kind of information will remain relevant, then the waterfall-esque documentation chain looks about as anachronistic as the waterfall model itself.
Moreover, the trendy shops that like to use terms like "Agile" are almost as bad: there seems to be this strange view that the way to avoid having all of that heavyweight documentation is to have little more than a roadmap, a bug tracker, a textbook example of how not to write coding standards, and a documentation intranet generated from source code comments. Hey, don't mock the auto-generated intranet, it never gets out of date! Of course it doesn't, because it typically contains no original content.
Know of any software/music/movie makers successfully stop piracy of all their products? Its impossible.
Of course, but that's true of any crime. All we can ever do in most cases is provide a deterrent and punish those who break the rules.
Personally, I think the way to solve the current flawed implementation of copyright is to:
change the law to be realistic and transparently fair
penalise the rip-off merchants in Big Media when the adopt illegal practices such as price fixing
run a simple public awareness campaign
try to make complete rip-offs socially unacceptable.
I believe that most people are basically decent folks, and would understand and respect things like giving credit where it's due and not sharing one copy of something with everyone you know when you had to pay for it and they're not.
On the other hand, I doubt a typical consumer would find it reasonable that copying music from a CD they just bought onto their computer or iPod might be illegal, nor see how singing "Happy Birthday" in public can be a crime. Moreover, as a separate issue, at least the typical consumers I know have no sympathy with the major record labels and frequently see nothing morally wrong with ripping them off even if they know it's illegal, because they're not stupid and they know price gouging when they see it. This group will happily rip off Big Media's content, seeing it as balancing years of abusive pricing, but will always pay the little guy, support independent artists, and so on. In other words, there are two kinds of people who infringe copyrights here: those who don't know it's against the law (probably because the law is out of sync with popular perception) and those who know very well that it's illegal but it as morally justified. Of course, there is also a third group, who don't care who they rip off and want everything for free.
Things like drink-driving used to be commonplace, but faced with laws that were clearly reasonable and knowing the facts about how dangerous it was, most people came around to supporting the anti-drink-driving laws and the act itself has become socially unacceptable. It is going the same way with using mobile phones while driving today. If the Powers That Be were smart, they would restructure our intellectual property laws, particularly copyright and patents, and try to follow the same path: set a simple, reasonable, transparent framework that is consistent with public perceptions of fairness, and then police by consent. But I bet they're not that smart, and as you say, fighting the whole population is not a winning strategy.
While there have been court cases in some jurisdictions that considered the presence and contents of a robots.txt file to be significant, the protocol is not in itself legally binding in most places, so any arguments based on it are based on trust.
Google News and Google Search are two different services, which happen to come from the same provider. Using a dominant position in one market to gain an advantage you otherwise couldn't in a different market is anticompetitive behaviour and as such is illegal in most places.
If that business has trouble collecting funds for their product, well, thats their problem, and they need to fix it themselves, not go running to the government for help/protection.
Sorry, but I don't think you can just state that as if it's beyond question. Ripping off someone else's work is antisocial. We have laws to punish those who act antisocially, as a deterrent so that society can operate fairly and effectively. Your argument has neither a moral basis (unless you support repealing all laws) nor a legal one under the current framework (where copyright certainly is intended to provide a certain level of government-backed protection precisely so that there is an incentive for people to create and share their work).
How is Google making money on the news aggregation?
Well, firstly, that's a straw man: nothing either ethical or legal about this situation requires that the entity doing the ripping should be making a current profit from it.
Secondly, if you really think an organisation like Google does anything out of the kindness of its heart, you're kidding yourself. It may not be aiming to make a profit directly from each service it runs, but it sure as heck intends them all to be beneficial to its bottom line in the long run.
How terrible of them to provide a service whereby people can search the news and then click to read the original stories (and they give a reasonable amount of credit right there on the search page...).
Please stop and consider for a moment what sort of precedent that sets.
As food for thought on the relative value of the original headline/soundbite vs. the whole article, I refer you to well-known site slashdot.org, where people not reading the article (or even necessarily the whole summary) is a common criticism. I also refer you to pretty much every major news site in the UK, where you will see a headline/ticker of some sort at the top of each home page.
I think if the news aggregators want to rip what may be the major value of other sites, while adding little or no value of their own, then it shoud be incumbent on them to demonstrate that this is not harming the original source who did all the real work to find/research/verify the story. This is exactly the reason why sensible copyright laws don't give specific proportions of a work that may be used fairly ("up to 10%") but rather consider qualitative factors such as the nature of the use and the effect it will have on the copyright holder.
Because we, unlike our moron competitors, understand that these clips bring traffic to our site, which makes us money.
If you're a small site, that might be a fair argument, and presumably nothing would stop you from voluntarily sharing your content with Google.
On the other hand, given your claim to work for a particularly large paper, I have to be a bit sceptical. I happen to use the BBC News web site as my first news source of choice, and I don't need Google to tell me how to find them every day.
That being the case, I find it hard to believe that high-profile, high-traffic sites like the Beeb really get more benefit from occasional search hits via Google than a news aggregator would get from scraping all of the headlines from the originating site, and I find Google's argument here to be wishful thinking rather than based on any real merit.
Alas, I predict with some confidence that this Slashdot discussion will be full of people who think GMG are just upset about losing revenue, while paying no attention to ideas such as giving credit where its due and supporting the people who actually do the legwork to research news stories. I wonder if such people would rather live in a world where good quality, original news sources are only available to subscribers, and the aggregators are reduced to the level of Digg, Reddit, Slashdot and the like.
If words were not powerful enough for defamation to be a problem, then there would be no point in protecting freedom of speech in the first place.
Rights, like free speech, should be absolute, lest they slip away by inches.
The trouble with that argument is that rights that we might consider individually valuable can come into conflict.
Anonymous speech vs. integrity of reputation is a good example of this. Indeed, while people in these discussions are often quick to cite the First Amendment to the US Constitution, it is remarkable how few remember the Sixth. Neither, as written, seems to apply directly in this case, but if you look at the spirit of the law rather than the letter, there is a fundamental conflict.
the only difference is, is that it doesn't affects as many people since not too many import videos or go overseas
Region-locking affects millions of people every day, because it is a barrier to open competition in the markets and allows charging different rates for the same product via artificial means. Perhaps those in the US may be less aware of this because they tend to get things first/cheapest, but don't tell anyone from, say, Europe or Australia that.
Now, I'm not saying a company shouldn't be free to sell a product in one country at one price and in another country at another price. Sometimes, this may be justified, for example if the costs of manufacture/transportation are different in the two cases.
However, blocking someone who is willing to buy where the price is lower and deal with any extra logistics themselves has no ethical or legitimate commercial basis. It doesn't even have an economic argument like copyright, unless you believe in protectionism. So why should the law say that anyone who circumvents such provisions is wrong?
That if you're going to try to do something for legitimate purposes (surfing anonymously) then using a service that shows off about how it breaks/circumvents the law is not the way to keep a low profile.
The attitude of the guys behind the Pirate Bay makes it a matter of time before someone, somewhere gets them for something. When that happens, I imagine that the authorities will impose some draconian penalties on anyone they can reach who's connected with TPB to make an example of them. Likewise, if TPB make a point of not logging things themselves, then the various dubious national surveillance/monitoring programs will probably be invoked, and some ill-founded law based on whether you even visited a TPB server will make you guilty by default.
I'm not a great believer in absolute anonymity on-line anyway, but if you want to try to achieve it, using a high profile organisation that is public enemy #1 to several large, well-financed organisations is a pretty naive way to do it.
Not in most places, it's not. In most places, the first thing that happens when you turn up to vote is that you have to provide some form of identification.
How you choose to vote is not known, but the fact that you turned up is well recorded, and indeed necessary to prevent obvious forms of electoral fraud.
Thanks, idiot. Not everyone is in the US and able to watch the final series of BSG as it airs. I've spent all week avoiding spoilers on forums like Digg and Reddit, and you have to go and fuck it up for me in a completely irrelevant thread? You're lucky I already posted in this thread or I'd moderate you to oblivion.
As you cross the border the other way, is there a large sign saying, "Welcome to Colorado! Proud not to be the home of George W. Bush."? I think that would be funnier.
No. The problem is YOU GUYS KEEP VOTING ON THEM. By "them", I mean the two big parties.
Well, for one thing, no, I bet a lot of people here didn't vote for "them".
For another thing, we don't all live in the US, and in some countries there are more than two credible parties that attract a significant proportion of the vote.
But your argument doesn't refute my point anyway. It wouldn't matter if there were five major parties, or twenty. Someone is going to win and form the next administration, and if they then have no meaningful accountability for a period of several years, that's plenty of time to screw up significantly.
In such a context, it is little wonder that so many citizens don't bother to vote at all, or just vote for a high profile candidate who once said something the voter liked. The perception that the vote makes little difference is, it seems, pretty accurate in most places today, and as such voter apathy is perhaps the biggest hurdle of all to be overcome.
That being the case, don't you think giving people a more direct say on the major issues of the day might encourage public debate and greater participation in the political process? Here in the UK, for example, we had literally millions of people descending on our capital from all over the country to protest against a dubious war. Tens, sometimes hundreds, of thousands of people take the time to sign e-petitions on topical issues that they care about. There are clearly enough people who want to do more than just show up once every five years and tick a box next to someone's name and a party whose policies they may or may not choose to implement once elected.
If we could get those people to start standing up to be counted on more than general election day, and as a consequence get specific proposals onto voting forms written by people who care enough to get properly informed about a subject, then I believe we'd see voter turn-out go way up. I also believe that as a consequence, the big parties would get a well-deserved kick in the ass over policies they all insist on that have little popular support, and that is exactly what should happen. If the parties don't like it, if they think the public don't know enough to make a well-informed decision, if they think the popular opinion is clouded by propaganda, well, then it's up to them to make the case for why the public is wrong and should change its mind.
The problem seems to be that once elected, politicians are basically free to do as they wish for a whole term (typically 4–6 years) without any further accountability. That is long enough to get good things done, but also long enough to really screw up without being stopped. I think to fix this, fundamentally you have to have someone with the ability to intervene sooner, so there is ongoing accountability.
As food for thought, you could start with three levels of citizens' override of the government on big issues where it really matters:
Ensure that you have a permanent constitution covering basic principles, which requires a large majority of the public (with a minimum turn-out) to change.
Ensure that you have a secondary provision whereby a petition signed by a reasonably large number of citizens compels the government to hold a vote on wording proposed by that petition, with that wording becoming law if a majority vote passes it, and that law is not modifiable by the government alone for the remainder of their current term of election.
Ensure that you have a tertiary provision whereby a petition signed by a similarly large number of citizens can force an early election (to be called by the government in the normal way, but within six months of the petition being submitted).
To enforce these, provide:
A Supreme Court, High Court, Constitutional Court, or whatever you want to call it, which has the power to strike down laws which are in violation of (1) or (2) above or dictate the date of an election under (3) if the time allowed has expired.
A provision stating that judges on the senior court serve for a single, long term (say 10 years) by default, but must be approved by the public before taking office and may be removed in extreme cases in a similar manner to forcing the law change or early election.
A small governmental oversight force with similar powers to the police, but with authority to act only against public officials based on a public order of the senior court.
Who watches the watchers? Those last guys do, so if you conveniently ignore the constitution of your country or a vote by the people changing your pet law, ultimately you get led away in handcuffs on national TV. Since the higher court has no authority to legislate — neither itself, nor via playing politics with the government of the day since the laws it enforces are only ever created as a result of public votes — and the oversight force has no powers over anyone other than public officials, you have a powerful check on the authority of the government of the day, yet independently accountable to the people.
I imagine that such a system would result in lots of politicians spending the first few years trying to work out how to game it by threatening to take lots of things to public votes and clog the system, but after a little while they'd work out that if the other guys got elected six months ago and haven't done anything to really upset the public, they're just going to get elected again.
You can learn the syntax of a language that is similar to other languages you already know in a few days, sure. But understanding a new approach to programming (dynamic vs. static, procedural vs. OO vs. functional vs. whatever), understanding the idioms and subtleties of a language, and learning the details of the available libraries, takes months.
But knowing the language enough to fix bugs, implement algorithms, etc., should come to a good programmer in the matter of a week or two.
I've spent a substantial proportion of my career fixing the mess made by people who thought average programmers could be up to speed for that kind of work within a week or two, and another substantial proportion training those programmers afterwards until they were fit to operate autonomously, so I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with you on that one.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, here's an ironic one: they posted a list of members of the British National Party.
Now, I don't agree with the BNP's politics, and therefore I don't vote for them, but I also don't support rules that are prejudiced against people purely on account of their membership of a certain political party. Such rules are, IMHO, far more dangerous to the democratic process than anything they are likely to prevent.
Wikileaks, supposedly proud of the way it helps the underdog to fight oppressive governments and the laws they use to silence dissent, outed an entire group of people, and cost several of them their jobs as a result.
If that's not a clear enough case, then let me provide a hypothetical example to go with it. Let's suppose that you, personally, have been wrongfully accused of committing a heinous crime. Your country, having regard for due process, requires you to attend a court case to determine your innocence or guilt.
Let us suppose that, mindful of the rule that one is innocent until proven guilty, the judge orders that your identity not be disclosed by the media until the case has concluded. However, anyone in open court can clearly see that you are there, and perhaps one of those people, knowing how heinous the crime you (might have) committed is, decides to post the case details, including your identity, on Wikileaks.
The following day, you get home from court to find an angry mob waiting outside your home, which has been extensively vandalised because obviously if you're in court then you did something wrong and you deserved it. Think this couldn't happen to you? Try looking up what happened to the paediatrician who looked a bit like a low-res photo of a suspected paedophile that was published in a British newspaper.
Sometimes, there are good reasons to keep things secret, and revealing those things publicly does real damage and has no redeeming value whatsoever. Were this not the case, there would be no need for classifications for official secrets, the law wouldn't allow confidentiality clauses in commercial agreements, people wouldn't care about privacy, no-one would have invented data protection laws... Any organisation that makes no attempt to distinguish legitimate cases where secrecy should be respected and repeats any information given to it no matter the implications is a danger to society, and I have no qualms whatsoever about squishing them with any laws and/or firearms that come to hand. That is, after all, no worse than the fate that such an organisation will inevitably inflict on someone innocent, sooner or later.
I'd have a lot more sympathy for Wikileaks if they hadn't hosted a whole load of stuff that really should have remained secret and for good reason.
If what they posted was embarrassing, censoring it would be one thing.
When what they post undermines national security or criminal investigations or is otherwise normally considered privileged information for good reasons, and furthermore they go out of their way to keep contributors (who may well have obtained the information illegally) anonymous, and on top of that you have connections to organisations like TPB that are pretty blatantly trying to get away with breaking the law, then it's no surprise that the authorities take steps to close them down. Frankly, I'm not so sure that is a bad thing. A responsible free press is one thing, but Wikileaks is something else.
The article states that in the UK these records can only be accessed under the RIPA act.
Sure, but take a look at all the people who can access the data under RIPA, and it includes all those low-level officials and local councils.
Whether or not the sysadmins you're concerned about are susceptible to bribery, we know for a fact that local councils have been using RIPA surveillance powers to fight such deadly threats as dog fouling, leaving a bin out for collection on the wrong day of the week, and registering a child to go to school.
Am I missing something here? I thought under the DMCA they could file a takedown notice, but the content provider could immediately file a counter-notice if it's legal?
There are two big problems with Adobe software: full licences are very expensive (particularly the upgrades) compared to good-enough competition, and a lot of the big name products now come with DRM that causes serious practical difficulties even without the ethical considerations that would offend a lot of people reading this.
Until you fix those things, your software is not a viable choice for many of us, so please keep your unsubtle advertising to yourself.
Unlike the crime infested US, there are no drug gangs or mafia in Europe
You're supposed to post that sort of thing on the first day of this month, not the sixth.
In any case, it's of far more concern that "legitimate" public bodies such as local councils and quangos will potentially be able to access this sort of information. That covers hundreds of thousands of people, many of them low-level staffers or those elected by only a few hundred people. There is an obvious case for allowing the police and intelligence services to access this kind of information, subject to powerful safeguards and judicial oversight, where it is necessary for the performance of their public duties. However, there is absolutely nothing that is done at the level of the hundreds of other organisations involved that justifies the kind of invasion of privacy covered by this sort of law.
We've seen a seemingless endless stream of abuses reported in the press recently, invoking draconian surveillance powers to cover the most trivial of suspected offences, and often against people who turned out to be entirely innocent anyway. This is not the behaviour of a people-serving government in a free country. It is staggering that this has been allowed to go through in its current form anyway.
I've found that regardless of the pace of development, many folks simply don't document their code, or do so poorly.
That's true. It's an unfortunate consequence of the fact that a lot of development groups have never really stopped to consider what effective documentation actually is.
I always find it odd that even though heavy, waterfall-model development processes have been well criticised today, a lot of places still view documentation as if each project must have a big, formal requirements spec, functional spec, design spec, various test specs, or whatever we choose to call the equivalent documents, all written in the proper order ahead of time, and with so much boilerplate that it takes more space than the useful content for smaller projects. If you look at the participants in the development process and their respective roles, the kinds of information that are actually useful to each participant, the people who can provide that information to their colleagues, and for how long each kind of information will remain relevant, then the waterfall-esque documentation chain looks about as anachronistic as the waterfall model itself.
Moreover, the trendy shops that like to use terms like "Agile" are almost as bad: there seems to be this strange view that the way to avoid having all of that heavyweight documentation is to have little more than a roadmap, a bug tracker, a textbook example of how not to write coding standards, and a documentation intranet generated from source code comments. Hey, don't mock the auto-generated intranet, it never gets out of date! Of course it doesn't, because it typically contains no original content.
On the other hand, if there was no profit, it is not missing from the copyright holder either.
Erm... No. Sorry, but economics simply doesn't work with such over-simplified assumptions.
Oh, come on.
They'll have to pay me a lot more than $20 billion to put Vista on my desktop!
Know of any software/music/movie makers successfully stop piracy of all their products? Its impossible.
Of course, but that's true of any crime. All we can ever do in most cases is provide a deterrent and punish those who break the rules.
Personally, I think the way to solve the current flawed implementation of copyright is to:
I believe that most people are basically decent folks, and would understand and respect things like giving credit where it's due and not sharing one copy of something with everyone you know when you had to pay for it and they're not.
On the other hand, I doubt a typical consumer would find it reasonable that copying music from a CD they just bought onto their computer or iPod might be illegal, nor see how singing "Happy Birthday" in public can be a crime. Moreover, as a separate issue, at least the typical consumers I know have no sympathy with the major record labels and frequently see nothing morally wrong with ripping them off even if they know it's illegal, because they're not stupid and they know price gouging when they see it. This group will happily rip off Big Media's content, seeing it as balancing years of abusive pricing, but will always pay the little guy, support independent artists, and so on. In other words, there are two kinds of people who infringe copyrights here: those who don't know it's against the law (probably because the law is out of sync with popular perception) and those who know very well that it's illegal but it as morally justified. Of course, there is also a third group, who don't care who they rip off and want everything for free.
Things like drink-driving used to be commonplace, but faced with laws that were clearly reasonable and knowing the facts about how dangerous it was, most people came around to supporting the anti-drink-driving laws and the act itself has become socially unacceptable. It is going the same way with using mobile phones while driving today. If the Powers That Be were smart, they would restructure our intellectual property laws, particularly copyright and patents, and try to follow the same path: set a simple, reasonable, transparent framework that is consistent with public perceptions of fairness, and then police by consent. But I bet they're not that smart, and as you say, fighting the whole population is not a winning strategy.
once you put it on the internet, it is out there, and there is nothing you can do to stop it.
Apparently you are mistaken, or we wouldn't be having this conversation.
If that business has trouble collecting funds for their product, well, thats their problem, and they need to fix it themselves, not go running to the government for help/protection.
Sorry, but I don't think you can just state that as if it's beyond question. Ripping off someone else's work is antisocial. We have laws to punish those who act antisocially, as a deterrent so that society can operate fairly and effectively. Your argument has neither a moral basis (unless you support repealing all laws) nor a legal one under the current framework (where copyright certainly is intended to provide a certain level of government-backed protection precisely so that there is an incentive for people to create and share their work).
How is Google making money on the news aggregation?
Well, firstly, that's a straw man: nothing either ethical or legal about this situation requires that the entity doing the ripping should be making a current profit from it.
Secondly, if you really think an organisation like Google does anything out of the kindness of its heart, you're kidding yourself. It may not be aiming to make a profit directly from each service it runs, but it sure as heck intends them all to be beneficial to its bottom line in the long run.
How terrible of them to provide a service whereby people can search the news and then click to read the original stories (and they give a reasonable amount of credit right there on the search page...).
Please stop and consider for a moment what sort of precedent that sets.
As food for thought on the relative value of the original headline/soundbite vs. the whole article, I refer you to well-known site slashdot.org, where people not reading the article (or even necessarily the whole summary) is a common criticism. I also refer you to pretty much every major news site in the UK, where you will see a headline/ticker of some sort at the top of each home page.
I think if the news aggregators want to rip what may be the major value of other sites, while adding little or no value of their own, then it shoud be incumbent on them to demonstrate that this is not harming the original source who did all the real work to find/research/verify the story. This is exactly the reason why sensible copyright laws don't give specific proportions of a work that may be used fairly ("up to 10%") but rather consider qualitative factors such as the nature of the use and the effect it will have on the copyright holder.
Because we, unlike our moron competitors, understand that these clips bring traffic to our site, which makes us money.
If you're a small site, that might be a fair argument, and presumably nothing would stop you from voluntarily sharing your content with Google.
On the other hand, given your claim to work for a particularly large paper, I have to be a bit sceptical. I happen to use the BBC News web site as my first news source of choice, and I don't need Google to tell me how to find them every day.
That being the case, I find it hard to believe that high-profile, high-traffic sites like the Beeb really get more benefit from occasional search hits via Google than a news aggregator would get from scraping all of the headlines from the originating site, and I find Google's argument here to be wishful thinking rather than based on any real merit.
Alas, I predict with some confidence that this Slashdot discussion will be full of people who think GMG are just upset about losing revenue, while paying no attention to ideas such as giving credit where its due and supporting the people who actually do the legwork to research news stories. I wonder if such people would rather live in a world where good quality, original news sources are only available to subscribers, and the aggregators are reduced to the level of Digg, Reddit, Slashdot and the like.
Defamation is not a problem
If words were not powerful enough for defamation to be a problem, then there would be no point in protecting freedom of speech in the first place.
Rights, like free speech, should be absolute, lest they slip away by inches.
The trouble with that argument is that rights that we might consider individually valuable can come into conflict.
Anonymous speech vs. integrity of reputation is a good example of this. Indeed, while people in these discussions are often quick to cite the First Amendment to the US Constitution, it is remarkable how few remember the Sixth. Neither, as written, seems to apply directly in this case, but if you look at the spirit of the law rather than the letter, there is a fundamental conflict.
the only difference is, is that it doesn't affects as many people since not too many import videos or go overseas
Region-locking affects millions of people every day, because it is a barrier to open competition in the markets and allows charging different rates for the same product via artificial means. Perhaps those in the US may be less aware of this because they tend to get things first/cheapest, but don't tell anyone from, say, Europe or Australia that.
Now, I'm not saying a company shouldn't be free to sell a product in one country at one price and in another country at another price. Sometimes, this may be justified, for example if the costs of manufacture/transportation are different in the two cases.
However, blocking someone who is willing to buy where the price is lower and deal with any extra logistics themselves has no ethical or legitimate commercial basis. It doesn't even have an economic argument like copyright, unless you believe in protectionism. So why should the law say that anyone who circumvents such provisions is wrong?
I assume you tried to make a point. What was it?
That if you're going to try to do something for legitimate purposes (surfing anonymously) then using a service that shows off about how it breaks/circumvents the law is not the way to keep a low profile.
The attitude of the guys behind the Pirate Bay makes it a matter of time before someone, somewhere gets them for something. When that happens, I imagine that the authorities will impose some draconian penalties on anyone they can reach who's connected with TPB to make an example of them. Likewise, if TPB make a point of not logging things themselves, then the various dubious national surveillance/monitoring programs will probably be invoked, and some ill-founded law based on whether you even visited a TPB server will make you guilty by default.
I'm not a great believer in absolute anonymity on-line anyway, but if you want to try to achieve it, using a high profile organisation that is public enemy #1 to several large, well-financed organisations is a pretty naive way to do it.
Voting is anonymous for a reason
Not in most places, it's not. In most places, the first thing that happens when you turn up to vote is that you have to provide some form of identification.
How you choose to vote is not known, but the fact that you turned up is well recorded, and indeed necessary to prevent obvious forms of electoral fraud.
Yeah, and how's that working out for them?
Thanks, idiot. Not everyone is in the US and able to watch the final series of BSG as it airs. I've spent all week avoiding spoilers on forums like Digg and Reddit, and you have to go and fuck it up for me in a completely irrelevant thread? You're lucky I already posted in this thread or I'd moderate you to oblivion.
As you cross the border the other way, is there a large sign saying, "Welcome to Colorado! Proud not to be the home of George W. Bush."? I think that would be funnier.
No. The problem is YOU GUYS KEEP VOTING ON THEM. By "them", I mean the two big parties.
Well, for one thing, no, I bet a lot of people here didn't vote for "them".
For another thing, we don't all live in the US, and in some countries there are more than two credible parties that attract a significant proportion of the vote.
But your argument doesn't refute my point anyway. It wouldn't matter if there were five major parties, or twenty. Someone is going to win and form the next administration, and if they then have no meaningful accountability for a period of several years, that's plenty of time to screw up significantly.
In such a context, it is little wonder that so many citizens don't bother to vote at all, or just vote for a high profile candidate who once said something the voter liked. The perception that the vote makes little difference is, it seems, pretty accurate in most places today, and as such voter apathy is perhaps the biggest hurdle of all to be overcome.
That being the case, don't you think giving people a more direct say on the major issues of the day might encourage public debate and greater participation in the political process? Here in the UK, for example, we had literally millions of people descending on our capital from all over the country to protest against a dubious war. Tens, sometimes hundreds, of thousands of people take the time to sign e-petitions on topical issues that they care about. There are clearly enough people who want to do more than just show up once every five years and tick a box next to someone's name and a party whose policies they may or may not choose to implement once elected.
If we could get those people to start standing up to be counted on more than general election day, and as a consequence get specific proposals onto voting forms written by people who care enough to get properly informed about a subject, then I believe we'd see voter turn-out go way up. I also believe that as a consequence, the big parties would get a well-deserved kick in the ass over policies they all insist on that have little popular support, and that is exactly what should happen. If the parties don't like it, if they think the public don't know enough to make a well-informed decision, if they think the popular opinion is clouded by propaganda, well, then it's up to them to make the case for why the public is wrong and should change its mind.
And what do you propose we do?
The problem seems to be that once elected, politicians are basically free to do as they wish for a whole term (typically 4–6 years) without any further accountability. That is long enough to get good things done, but also long enough to really screw up without being stopped. I think to fix this, fundamentally you have to have someone with the ability to intervene sooner, so there is ongoing accountability.
As food for thought, you could start with three levels of citizens' override of the government on big issues where it really matters:
To enforce these, provide:
Who watches the watchers? Those last guys do, so if you conveniently ignore the constitution of your country or a vote by the people changing your pet law, ultimately you get led away in handcuffs on national TV. Since the higher court has no authority to legislate — neither itself, nor via playing politics with the government of the day since the laws it enforces are only ever created as a result of public votes — and the oversight force has no powers over anyone other than public officials, you have a powerful check on the authority of the government of the day, yet independently accountable to the people.
I imagine that such a system would result in lots of politicians spending the first few years trying to work out how to game it by threatening to take lots of things to public votes and clog the system, but after a little while they'd work out that if the other guys got elected six months ago and haven't done anything to really upset the public, they're just going to get elected again.
You can learn the syntax of a language that is similar to other languages you already know in a few days, sure. But understanding a new approach to programming (dynamic vs. static, procedural vs. OO vs. functional vs. whatever), understanding the idioms and subtleties of a language, and learning the details of the available libraries, takes months.
But knowing the language enough to fix bugs, implement algorithms, etc., should come to a good programmer in the matter of a week or two.
I've spent a substantial proportion of my career fixing the mess made by people who thought average programmers could be up to speed for that kind of work within a week or two, and another substantial proportion training those programmers afterwards until they were fit to operate autonomously, so I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with you on that one.