Well, I'm neither a lawyer nor an accountant, so I can't comment on any professional definition of "insider trading" that may exist, only the lay man's usage of the term. That said, I'd say your examples are all pretty clear, at least from an ethical/common sense perspective.
In (1), an aircraft crashing is clearly public information, and acting because you hear public information first isn't against the rules. (If it were, why would all the traders have news feeds running all the time?)
In (2), assuming an employee of a sufficiently high level to talk authoritatively about the corporation's financial situation is really that careless (yeah, right) and you don't know who they are, then I would imagine you're not guilty of insider trading but he's breaking all kinds of rules about disclosure. If you knew or could reasonably assume that the person really was an insider then this might constitute tipping, though.
In (3), again, the Apple insider is probably breaking all kinds of rules, but since you don't know that's who they are, you're no more at fault than if you decide you'll buy Apple shares if your local orchard has started dropping fruit in the morning (and about as likely to get rich quick).
In (4), ditto. You don't know whether a random anonymous post on Slashdot has any merit, so it makes no sense for the morality or legality of any action you take based on it to depend on who the poster is in real life.
Sorry, I agree that my previous statement does sound overly generic now that I read it again. I didn't mean that the hacker should have to pay for completely new, higher-spec systems to improve security more generally; clearly that is the company's responsibility and should have been done anyway. I just mean the costs incurred as a direct result of this particular breach: after any successful attack, the business is going to incur costs checking out their IT systems to make sure no backdoors have been planted, changing any passwords and such that might have been compromised and notifying relevant staff, and the like. I don't think it's unreasonable to charge the person who caused the mess for that work.
The judge's ruling seems pretty reasonable to me. What the hacker did was not insider trading, because he was not an insider, so the various regulations governming insider trading should have been found not to apply here.
Of course, as the judge also noted, that doesn't mean he broke any other laws. A fine equal to the profit he made on the options plus the original cost of buying them in the first place plus the cost of security work to ensure the systems are no longer vulnerable, combined with a jail sentence equal to what would have been handed down to an insider who made the same deal, seem like a fair punishment for the hacking to me.
I'm afraid you're not making your point(s) very clearly, so it's impossible to reply to whatever you're trying to argue directly. For example, you obviously see some connection between copyright, Microsoft's dominant position in the market, and use of open standards, but you're not articulating it well enough for me to understand how you think the three are connected and why you think it's a problem.
My first generic point in reply is that I can't see how you think it's justified to force someone to use open standards, when they are (and consistently have been) developing their products ahead of the rest of the market. There were no open standards in the relevant areas at the time those products were first made.
You seem to feel that this is somehow unjust, and that the first-mover advantage obtained by, in this case, Microsoft should be undermined by retrospectively crippling them artificially. That's the second point you've made that inherently demotivates anyone interested in leading the way and developing new features.
And IMHO you still over-rate the importance of the "format war". As I wrote before, the practical obstacles to moving are far less than many on Slashdot make out, if the business case is otherwise sound. I also challenge your assertion that "most man years that went into all competing office suites went into overcoming compatibility difficulties with MS Office". AFAICS, this is supported neither by the proportion of code in any of the OSS office suites nor even by anecdotal evidence from the developers of those suites, who typically write converters for several other file formats as part of their efforts.
If I published a new word processor tomorrow, with features and formatting options far beyond what are covered by the existing OpenDocument format, and I therefore created a format of my own to store the documents, would you prefer that my software could not be released until I had also provided a converter for OpenDocument? What if there were several publicly available but different formats? What if some of the options provided by my software could not be represented in some or all of those formats; would you expect me to invest my time and money working out how best to approximate the correct behaviour using an inferior standard? Why should any of this be my responsibility, and not that of those who want to promote their inferior protocol?
Anyway, we're going in circles now. If you can make a robust, coherent argument for why you believe everyone should be forced to use open standards, dealing with all the issues of economics, providing incentives for (real) innovation, the inherent difficulties in creating and administering open standards in the first place, and so on, then I'll try to respond with a similarly robust and coherent reply. But until then, I'm afraid I just don't understand what you're trying to say; you seem to be picking on Microsoft simply because they are winning (at least for today) and promoting open standards without really demonstrating how they would improve on the situation we have at the moment.
Right now, the majority of videogames are violent, whether that be shooting, punching, or stomping enemies.
I'd like to see your source for that. Last I heard, the best-selling game of all time is still The Sims, and in the top ten franchises of all time there's a good mix of genres including several non-violent ones. And of course, the most played computer games of all time are probably the simple puzzle games that come with Windows, popular mobile phones, and the like.
I'm sorry, but I just don't see how copyright is a problem here. Microsoft make a product, Office, to solve certain common problems. Their product is, arguably, the best in the world at solving those particular problems. People therefore buy it and use it. Microsoft are motivated to make such a product because copyright makes it likely that they will bring in a significant return on their investment, which is exactly what copyright is for.
Those people take a risk that they may have difficulties using their data as easily in future, but that is their choice. In practice, the risk has never been particularly great: freely available viewers are easy to obtain to read existing Office-format files; documents those people make themselves could just as well be distributed as PDFs or some similar, well-supported format; and the cycle time before new versions of Office file formats become common enough to worry about upgrades is measured in years and there's plenty of warning should business documents need to be migrated to another format. When you look at it that way, "locking in" is a rather emotive expression, isn't it?
Frankly, I think the whole document format incompatibility argument is just an over-rated sales pitch by people upset that if they want to compete with an established product, the onus is on them to provide the incentive for the market to switch. That includes providing sufficient migration support. Simply being free of copyright is not enough (and of course there's a substantial gap between free-as-in-FSF and free-as-in-of-copyright).
In any case, you can't be sociable when you're hosting the only game in town. While Microsoft are hardly the most innovative company in recent history, they're still infinitely ahead of all the OSS office suites that are almost universally substandard MS Office knock-offs, so Microsoft tend to be the first people to provide new features. On those counts, it's rather unfair to criticise them for not being "compatible"... with what? Do you really expect them to hold up their business, and their customers to hold up taking advantage of new features, until some minority interest groups who produce cheap imitations produce some sort of "standard" they expect everyone else to adhere to (pretty please)?
I think we might have to agree to disagree on this one, but let me leave you with one final thought: given that nothing stops the kind of altruism (or perhaps, acting out of enlightened self-interest) you describe from taking place today, and that the up-front costs of sticking with software like Windows and Microsoft Office are clearly much higher than those of buying Linux and OpenOffice, why has Linux on the desktop still not arrived? It's not as though CIOs at major league businesses haven't heard of the alternatives or explored the possibilities, so why is hardly anyone moving?
I'm only trying to exclude the guy who generally doesn't copy, but once got a mix tape from his girlfriend. Things like routinely pirating software, using a P2P network, or borrowing a friend's CD to make a copy are all included.
As for personal experience bias, take a look at some figures. The first hit I got for "worldwide iPod sales" is a Business Week article from 2004 that puts the global annual sales for such players at 17 million units. Unless you think annual distribution has increased by more than an order of magnitude in the interim, there is no way that everyone under 30 has an iPod or similar, even in first world places like the US, western Europe and Australia.
You obviously haven't had to deal with a lot of recent CS graduates have you? Some schools might offer good CS courses but the majority of grads I deal with know nothing more than buzzword garbage, and I am not alone in my views; I regularly hear associates complain that they can't get a CS person who knows their ass from an infinite loop.
Hmm... Claims of shortage of skilled labour... Can't find any CS grads who know their a**e from their elbow...
You don't by any chance work for a stingy company that doesn't want to pay the going rate for the skills it wants, do you?
You can easily enough test this for yourself. There are plenty of studies out there, commissioned by both sides of the copyright debate. Just go look at the figures, look up the population of the country in question (exclude the very young if you want), and divide them out. I have never seen any study that concludes that the majority of people share files on P2P, or routinely make illegal copies by other means either. Just to be clear, I'm not claiming that most people never infringe copyright at all; there are some obvious daft cases like whistling a tune in the public restroom or singing Happy Birthday at a child's party that IMHO should be covered by fair use but in some places they aren't. But if you're talking about wilful infringement on a significant scale, such as using a P2P network or routinely copying CDs for friends, it sounds like you'll be surprised at what you'll find.
Narrowing the demographic somewhat, I'd be jaw-droppingly astounded if the majority of people under 30 didn't have at least some "illegal" music on their iPod (or equivalent).
I think you're suffering from personal experience bias here. I'd be jaw-droppingly astounded if the majority of people under 30 even have an iPod (or equivalent). Even if they do, your conveniently narrowed demographic happens to cover by far the largest group of regular copyright infringers.
Games indeed have no OSS equivalent (Not that I find having them a good justification of copyrights, even if indeed copyrights are neccessary!)
Perhaps you personally don't enjoy games. That's fine, it's your choice. However, many people do: IIRC, the world market for video games is now bigger than the world market for movies.
Its important to understand that the existence of copyrighted software to perform a certain task is a huge disincentive for the market to summon the creation of any opensource equivalent of that task.
That's a very bold claim, and I'm afraid I'm not convinced by your argument in support of it. In particular:
If copyrights are abolished and OpenOffice is the only option, and has a problem that a business cannot handle, it will pay a software firm to fix it for them - which would make the result available for everyone else, as a side effect.
There are at least two dubious assumptions there. The first is that a business with a problem with such common software will not just put up with it in the expectation that someone else will fix it sooner or later. The second is that any business that does pay up its own hard-earned cash to get a fix will actually share it (which of course they are not required to do under something like the GPL, unless they are actually redistributing the product as a whole already).
Also, laws can be made to protect those who "leak" software improvements to the world (against losing their job, etc) as they are acting in the benefit of society as a whole.
But this argument fails on the same principle I've mentioned elsewhere in this discussion: leaking improvements that already exist may be in the short-term interests of society, but if you create a culture where that is the norm, you have to consider the long-term effects. Now we're back to asking why any business would spend a substantial amount of money on worthwhile improvements when they can just wait for some other sucker to spend the money and then enjoy the rewards for free.
if big media, with its deep pockets, political contributions, sponsored legislation, legions of lawyers, etc., can't enforce it, how do you expect some lonely artist to enforce it?
Exactly.
The point of a legal system is that no one person can ever protect themselves from all the nasty people who are out to screw them. The odds just aren't in their favour. Thus we invent a legal system with courts and police forces and legislatures that can act on behalf of anyone in society who is wronged.
If you reach a point where a few people are refusing to obey the laws that system creates, then the system must act against them to restore equity. The fact that it clearly does not do so effectively in the case of copyright infringement is exactly the problem here.
The principle of civil disobedience is that if a law is unjust and enough of the people refuse to comply, the system cannot cope and the balance of power once again reverts to the people. But what a lot of people on Slashdot fail to appreciate, often in their haste to justify their own illegal behaviour, is that the majority of people are not on-line file sharers. In fact, a substantial majority would not infringe copyright to any significant extent given reasonable fair use provisions (which, I agree with others, are necessary for copyright to be a fair bargain between society and its artists). Remember that next time someone tries to make out that we should all abandon copyright law because it is in some way democratic.
Thanks, but as someone who works for one of the largest businesses in the world, I'm well aware of the relative sizes. Big Media is plenty big enough to attract corporate investors, which is what matters here. (Actually, it doesn't really matter if they don't. What does matter is that the investors are given accurate information on which to base their investment decisions. If the law says that Big Media has value because of the copyright system, it is damaging not to enforce that law and thus to deprive investors of returns they could reasonably have expected. The expectation that investors can see accurate information on which to base their decisions is a far larger and more important economic principle than anything to do with Big Media and copyright.)
Incidentally, you'll sound more convincing about this whole subject if your comments on contemporary economic issues are even close to what everyone else says. You don't quite seem to understand what the various figures involved in the Northern Rock mess actually mean.
It seems to me Shakespeare, Mozart and the like did OK.
OK in what sense?
In terms of benefitting from their own work? Hardly. Shakespeare was ghost written; the real Shakespeare was illiterate and there are various theories about local aristocrats being the real playwright. Mozart's life was full of tragedy, he struggled to find work at several points, and his career was in decline at the time of his death.
In terms of audience? How many people really benefitted from the works of Shakespeare and Mozart during their lifetimes? There have probably been more plays/music written in the past year that reached the same number of people than everything the two greats you mentioned produced in their entire lifetimes, and they are arguably the most successful playwright and classical composer in history.
I don't have time to counter all of your arguments in detail, so I'm going to focus on the software one as the most relevant here.
Firstly, you are confusing "commercial" with closed-source (as many open-source products are commercial).
No, I'm not. Please note the part where I explicitly said "The amount of useful, high quality commercial software developed via copyright" (emphasis added).
About your claim about the quality, the only such package I know of such claim is Photoshop. Lets see some Free Software vs Closed Software comparisons from various times, and see if you can get a concensus about your quality statement:
Every time we have this discussion, some Open Source supporter posts a short list of the same few products.
Where are any OSS games that can compete with the likes of recent commercial, closed source titles like Crysis and Supreme Commander, or even classics like The Sims?
Where is the OSS document preparation software that really keeps up with any of the professional DTP packages, or even MS Office? (Please don't claim OpenOffice does this; I've got bored of countering that one, and anyone can go search my many previous posts on the subject.)
Where is the OSS for running a business? It's interesting that you chose to compare Thunderbird with Outlook Express, and not with Outlook, which has several fundamental advantages that Thunderbird still hasn't matched despite numerous requests over a period of many years, Exchange support being perhaps the most obvious. (What was that? OSS doesn't have anything that can do what Exchange does? Exactly.)
The cold, hard truth is that OSS has been somewhat successful in developing software of widespread interest to geeks: system software and communications tools, programming tools, multimedia content. It has produced inferior but somewhat useful alternatives for other common areas like office software. It is mostly hopeless when it comes to games and serious business applications. You might not like it, but those latter categories are important.
Even in the fields where OSS has done well, it's hardly the panacea some advocates make it out to be, which is kinda disappointing given the collective resources available to it. A lot of the blame for this falls on good old politics, which is what happens when you have a volunteer-led effort without the discipline that having management interested in what people actually want (i.e., what pays the bills) brings to a project.
I'd like to address one final point from your post:
People will not respect copyright, even if money went directly to the artists and creators. The reason is that imposing and policing laws on what citizens can copy in the privacy of their homes is simply an absurd price to pay for a dubiously-effective extra incentive for the creation of works.
What does the privacy of one's own home have to do with anything? I have never objected to the concept of fair use; on the contrary, I strongly support it. But the key word there is "fair". Making a back-up or compilation for your personal use when you already have a legitimate copy of a work is one thing. Distributing it to the whole world over P2P is another.
I suspect we would agree on some aspects of this debate, yes. Where we appear to disagree is that I don't assume copyright is only for Big Media businesses who specialise in screwing artists. I think another, more important role it plays is to protect the little, independent guy. I don't see how your ideas support these important contributors if they baasically assume IP ceases to exist.
Firstly, "aren't exactly hurting" is a rather unproven claim. Remember, those investing in Big Media companies typically include things like pension funds that you and I might be paying into. It's not just corporate executives who are potentially losing out here, it's everyday people whose indirect investments rely on the profits of such large businesses.
Secondly, copyright is perhaps more important for supporting the work of the little guy. Small businesses and independent artists rely on copyright for protection, and while Big Media might be able to absorb a few percent hit on profits as the cost of doing business, for the little guy it might very well be enough to put them out of business. That benefits no-one, but if we have a culture where copyright is not respected and people rip off the work of others without thought for the consequences, that's what can happen as a result.
You seem to try and imply that copyright, or more specifically, the collection of royalty payment for each copy, is the primary driver for the creation of content.
No. I suggest that it is one driver for the creation of content. Clearly other mechanisms from live performance to altruism also serve as effective motivators to varying degrees.
I have suggested before that the biggest single advantage of a copyright-style framework over any other method I've seen proposed is that it provides a credible mechanism for creators to make expensive works and each of many consumers to contribute a small share of the cost. In other words, it encourages the widest possible distribution of the works that take the most time and effort to produce, rather than charging higher amounts by making enjoyment of such works a scarce commodity (commissioned work, limited ticket sales at concerts, etc.).
If that is the case, how do you explain the masses of Free Software?
Free Software is a terrible example to use if you're trying to show a better way than copyright. The amount of useful, high quality commercial software developed via copyright absolutely dwarfs the amount of useful, high quality software developed under a Free Software model. Even flagship Free Software titles are often not as good as the commercial equivalents. And of course, this particular argument ignores the fact that commercial software development pays the rent for a large proportion of the people who contribute to Free Software in their spare time.
How do you explain the rich culture and works that were created before copyrights were even invented?
Again, this one is easy: far less work was produced, and far fewer people enjoyed it because it wasn't as widely available.
How do you explain the fact that publishers struggled to be the ones to get to publish the 9/11 Commission Report, even though they could not get a copyright on it, and even though any other publisher could publish it as well? How do you explain that this report made quite a buck for the publisher that published it anyhow?
Because even a thin margin is useful if someone else is paying for the original work to be done?
If indeed copyright drives quality content (which I believe it does not), is it really worth the extra laws that have to imposed on all citizens? Is it worth the trouble of policing information?
Copyright is no different to any other law. It should simply codify an accepted convention that informed people will respect without any need to police them, and provide a means for penalising the few who refuse to play by the same rules as everyone else. The fact that this is not the case today is indeed a damning indictment of the current copyright regime, which I believe is primarily down to poor public understanding of the economics involved and allowing the megacorp middlemen to have all the power when it should be the artists and the consumers who are the important groups. But fixing the ignore and the power imbalance are relatively easy, and do not require removing the entire copyright system.
Does it not occur to you that most laws can easily be broken?
I can drive my car at 90mph through the city centre until I drive into something and wreck it. I can pick up a kitchen knife, walk out into the street, and stab someone with it. I can walk over to my local park, sweet talk a five-year-old playing alone, and walk off with them. Does that mean I should do any of these things? Of course not, and I never would. I understand the consequences of those actions and why the law therefore prohibits them, and I respect those laws.
Attempting to legislate mass copyright infringement out of existence is naive, to be sure. You can't implement a purely technological solution for a social problem, either. Instead of all this running around wasting effort on that, governments should be pushing for an obviously fair IP framework, where the people who really create valuable work and help to share it are rewarded. The problem right now is that it's the big business middlemen who are getting most of that reward, and since the Internet basically makes them redundant so they no longer offer a useful service and they've been abusing the market through CD price fixing and such for years, the people perceive laws protecting those middlemen to be unreasonable and do not respect them.
I think if we switched to a system where copyright couldn't so trivially be permanently transferred to some random, faceless organisation, where the incentives meant that middlemen had to do something useful by getting a work shared more widely in order to make their money and that the real artists and authors and programmers and movie technicians had the leverage to take a fair share of the profits from their own labours, then the people at large would come to see copyright infringement as ripping off a fellow man and not some faceless megacorp and most people would respect the related laws accordingly.
But fundamentally, the law-makers seem to be moving in entirely the wrong direction here. It isn't even sensible to implement the proposed measures, because just by downloading obvious professional content such as music videos from YouTube, you might or might not be breaking the law and you have no way of knowing. If you visit a dodgy-looking web site full of MP3s of just-released tracks where you might reasonably assume the files are not being distributed with permission then that's one thing. However, YouTube actually has agreements with some of the major music labels these days that make downloading their videos perfectly legitimate; indeed some of them are uploaded by the labels themselves, presumably because they're starting to get it when it comes to the advertising benefits of file sharing. The proposed approach would basically stamp out this (credible, consumer-friendly and possibly quite profitable for the labels) new approach in favour of retaining the old megacorps vs. pirates battle. That can't possibly be the best way forward.
Let me say right off that I think the proposed measures are almost certainly the wrong way to address the piracy problem. However, that is not to say that piracy is not a problem and should not be dealt with in some more reasonable way. (If you're about to object to the term "piracy", please save your fingers and go read an etymological dictionary instead.)
It has in other places, your incredulity at that fact doesn't make it untrue though. Look at Canada, Spain, Germany etc.
You think measures like imposing a levy on all blank media (aka a tax on back-ups) are fairer?
Some are imposing a tax, others are investigating just completely legalising p2p. Yes, remember that democracy is about the interests of the population, not just IP "owners".
It doesn't even seem to occur to you that the IP framework in general might also be in the interests of the population. Sure, it's easy to say that the people want the content when someone has already made it, but you have to think about a sustainable policy. If you screw the content providers now, who will provide new content in future? You certainly aren't going to get as much or as high quality if you just rely on charity, as we've established robustly in many previous Slashdot discussions.
Irrelevant
If you start by taking the view that the law is irrelevant, you aren't going to convince many people that your intentions are anything but self-serving.
Many people both download and buy an awful lot of media. On average it has been found the "pirates" buy more media than other folks. Many use p2p as a way of sampling things before deciding. Some don't, but you also make the fallacious assumption that each download is a lost sale.
I'm afraid you're the one with the bad logic here, not the GP. The assumption is not that every download represents a lost sale, merely that some downloads represent lost sales. I don't see how you can credibly argue that this is not the case.
There is an interesting question about whether more of them ultimately generate additional sales. I suspect the jury is still out on that one, but in any case, it doesn't really matter. If that is the case then content providers who aggressively pursue infringing downloaders are shooting themselves in the foot and those who choose to allow downloading will ultimately win through market forces. Nothing in the copyright framework we have today prevents a copyright holder from permitting this. But right now, the law makes it their choice.
An awful lot of what's out there at the moment is lowest-common-denominator BULLSHIT. That's why it's failing.
If that's what it is, then why are so many people downloading it, when so few download "good" material? For a guy so concerned about the interests of the population, you sure don't know much about what the population seems to want.
What is this "fair"? It seems perfectly sustainable to me.
It seems to me that the problem with your argument is exactly that it is not sustainable. If you disagree, perhaps you could provide an argument — preferably one that isn't as hopelessly naive economically as most we see on Slashdot — about what will reliably motivate future content production and distribution on the same or larger scale as we have today and of the same or better quality than we see today?
And someone releases a product with the crypto built in and "mass casual" piracy is back on the air.
And the government declares such tools to be accessories to copyright infringement, starts fining anyone who appears to be using encrypted traffic for any purpose on the assumption that they are infringing someone's copyright, and now collective punishment catching many innocent people along the way and undermining tools with legitimate, legal uses is back on the air.
Re:You need to clarify your question
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Ethics In IT
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· Score: 1
That's true, and any remaining support for the whole mess surely evaporated when the high profile leak referenced by my sig occurred. Suddenly, both the general public and probably a few politicians suddenly realised what the rest of us have known all along: security in IT is an imperfect thing, and mistakes will inevitably be made.
My point was more that should the cards and database be rolled out according to the (current, official) plan, there would be a choice to be made, and those who have an informed view might very well object to the current laws because those laws conflict with the informed group's ethics.
Re:You need to clarify your question
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Ethics In IT
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· Score: 4, Insightful
To most people (I hope!) the law is an uncrossable line. A solid boundary of ethical and moral behaviour.
Confusing ethics and the law is a dangerous thing in itself.
To put things very simplistically, ethics is theory and the law is practice. Ideally, someone living a good, honest life according to fair, ethical principles would always find their behaviour falls within the law, but sometimes a bad law comes into conflict with those ethics. Whether someone chooses to obey the letter of the law or to follow their own ethics at that point says a lot about them.
To give a concrete, IT-related example that is relevant in my country today: the UK government is currently planning to introduce identity cards and the National Identity Register database. I know that some surveys in the past have found a majority of the sample population in favour of these measures. I also believe that introducing these measures is not in the interests of the people, and that the government policy would not be so widely supported if people understood the implications for access to personal information, security, reliability, and the like. I know that I am far from alone in these beliefs, because there are campaign groups with many thousands of people supporting them who express the same concerns. However, the law has already been passed to make these measures possible, though it was passed by a government for which only a small minority of the people actually voted; substantially more people voted for parties that oppose the scheme. So, when the government attempts to roll the ID cards and database out to the population, should I be a good little citizen and accept my fate, or should I join the radical law-breakers promising civil disobedience by refusing to participate? Are those who choose to follow their beliefs to the point of breaking a law they believe to be unjust really unethical, or are those who accept without challenge a dangerous law passed by an unrepresentative government the unethical ones?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'm neither a lawyer nor an accountant, so I can't comment on any professional definition of "insider trading" that may exist, only the lay man's usage of the term. That said, I'd say your examples are all pretty clear, at least from an ethical/common sense perspective.
In (1), an aircraft crashing is clearly public information, and acting because you hear public information first isn't against the rules. (If it were, why would all the traders have news feeds running all the time?)
In (2), assuming an employee of a sufficiently high level to talk authoritatively about the corporation's financial situation is really that careless (yeah, right) and you don't know who they are, then I would imagine you're not guilty of insider trading but he's breaking all kinds of rules about disclosure. If you knew or could reasonably assume that the person really was an insider then this might constitute tipping, though.
In (3), again, the Apple insider is probably breaking all kinds of rules, but since you don't know that's who they are, you're no more at fault than if you decide you'll buy Apple shares if your local orchard has started dropping fruit in the morning (and about as likely to get rich quick).
In (4), ditto. You don't know whether a random anonymous post on Slashdot has any merit, so it makes no sense for the morality or legality of any action you take based on it to depend on who the poster is in real life.
You mean like the Internet? ;-)
Sorry, I agree that my previous statement does sound overly generic now that I read it again. I didn't mean that the hacker should have to pay for completely new, higher-spec systems to improve security more generally; clearly that is the company's responsibility and should have been done anyway. I just mean the costs incurred as a direct result of this particular breach: after any successful attack, the business is going to incur costs checking out their IT systems to make sure no backdoors have been planted, changing any passwords and such that might have been compromised and notifying relevant staff, and the like. I don't think it's unreasonable to charge the person who caused the mess for that work.
Of course, as the judge also noted, that doesn't mean he broke any other laws.
Damn, hit Submit in mid-edit. Obviously I meant "...that doesn't mean he didn't break any other laws". Sorry.
The judge's ruling seems pretty reasonable to me. What the hacker did was not insider trading, because he was not an insider, so the various regulations governming insider trading should have been found not to apply here.
Of course, as the judge also noted, that doesn't mean he broke any other laws. A fine equal to the profit he made on the options plus the original cost of buying them in the first place plus the cost of security work to ensure the systems are no longer vulnerable, combined with a jail sentence equal to what would have been handed down to an insider who made the same deal, seem like a fair punishment for the hacking to me.
I'm afraid you're not making your point(s) very clearly, so it's impossible to reply to whatever you're trying to argue directly. For example, you obviously see some connection between copyright, Microsoft's dominant position in the market, and use of open standards, but you're not articulating it well enough for me to understand how you think the three are connected and why you think it's a problem.
My first generic point in reply is that I can't see how you think it's justified to force someone to use open standards, when they are (and consistently have been) developing their products ahead of the rest of the market. There were no open standards in the relevant areas at the time those products were first made.
You seem to feel that this is somehow unjust, and that the first-mover advantage obtained by, in this case, Microsoft should be undermined by retrospectively crippling them artificially. That's the second point you've made that inherently demotivates anyone interested in leading the way and developing new features.
And IMHO you still over-rate the importance of the "format war". As I wrote before, the practical obstacles to moving are far less than many on Slashdot make out, if the business case is otherwise sound. I also challenge your assertion that "most man years that went into all competing office suites went into overcoming compatibility difficulties with MS Office". AFAICS, this is supported neither by the proportion of code in any of the OSS office suites nor even by anecdotal evidence from the developers of those suites, who typically write converters for several other file formats as part of their efforts.
If I published a new word processor tomorrow, with features and formatting options far beyond what are covered by the existing OpenDocument format, and I therefore created a format of my own to store the documents, would you prefer that my software could not be released until I had also provided a converter for OpenDocument? What if there were several publicly available but different formats? What if some of the options provided by my software could not be represented in some or all of those formats; would you expect me to invest my time and money working out how best to approximate the correct behaviour using an inferior standard? Why should any of this be my responsibility, and not that of those who want to promote their inferior protocol?
Anyway, we're going in circles now. If you can make a robust, coherent argument for why you believe everyone should be forced to use open standards, dealing with all the issues of economics, providing incentives for (real) innovation, the inherent difficulties in creating and administering open standards in the first place, and so on, then I'll try to respond with a similarly robust and coherent reply. But until then, I'm afraid I just don't understand what you're trying to say; you seem to be picking on Microsoft simply because they are winning (at least for today) and promoting open standards without really demonstrating how they would improve on the situation we have at the moment.
Right now, the majority of videogames are violent, whether that be shooting, punching, or stomping enemies.
I'd like to see your source for that. Last I heard, the best-selling game of all time is still The Sims, and in the top ten franchises of all time there's a good mix of genres including several non-violent ones. And of course, the most played computer games of all time are probably the simple puzzle games that come with Windows, popular mobile phones, and the like.
I'm sorry, but I just don't see how copyright is a problem here. Microsoft make a product, Office, to solve certain common problems. Their product is, arguably, the best in the world at solving those particular problems. People therefore buy it and use it. Microsoft are motivated to make such a product because copyright makes it likely that they will bring in a significant return on their investment, which is exactly what copyright is for.
Those people take a risk that they may have difficulties using their data as easily in future, but that is their choice. In practice, the risk has never been particularly great: freely available viewers are easy to obtain to read existing Office-format files; documents those people make themselves could just as well be distributed as PDFs or some similar, well-supported format; and the cycle time before new versions of Office file formats become common enough to worry about upgrades is measured in years and there's plenty of warning should business documents need to be migrated to another format. When you look at it that way, "locking in" is a rather emotive expression, isn't it?
Frankly, I think the whole document format incompatibility argument is just an over-rated sales pitch by people upset that if they want to compete with an established product, the onus is on them to provide the incentive for the market to switch. That includes providing sufficient migration support. Simply being free of copyright is not enough (and of course there's a substantial gap between free-as-in-FSF and free-as-in-of-copyright).
In any case, you can't be sociable when you're hosting the only game in town. While Microsoft are hardly the most innovative company in recent history, they're still infinitely ahead of all the OSS office suites that are almost universally substandard MS Office knock-offs, so Microsoft tend to be the first people to provide new features. On those counts, it's rather unfair to criticise them for not being "compatible"... with what? Do you really expect them to hold up their business, and their customers to hold up taking advantage of new features, until some minority interest groups who produce cheap imitations produce some sort of "standard" they expect everyone else to adhere to (pretty please)?
I think we might have to agree to disagree on this one, but let me leave you with one final thought: given that nothing stops the kind of altruism (or perhaps, acting out of enlightened self-interest) you describe from taking place today, and that the up-front costs of sticking with software like Windows and Microsoft Office are clearly much higher than those of buying Linux and OpenOffice, why has Linux on the desktop still not arrived? It's not as though CIOs at major league businesses haven't heard of the alternatives or explored the possibilities, so why is hardly anyone moving?
I'm only trying to exclude the guy who generally doesn't copy, but once got a mix tape from his girlfriend. Things like routinely pirating software, using a P2P network, or borrowing a friend's CD to make a copy are all included.
As for personal experience bias, take a look at some figures. The first hit I got for "worldwide iPod sales" is a Business Week article from 2004 that puts the global annual sales for such players at 17 million units. Unless you think annual distribution has increased by more than an order of magnitude in the interim, there is no way that everyone under 30 has an iPod or similar, even in first world places like the US, western Europe and Australia.
You obviously haven't had to deal with a lot of recent CS graduates have you? Some schools might offer good CS courses but the majority of grads I deal with know nothing more than buzzword garbage, and I am not alone in my views; I regularly hear associates complain that they can't get a CS person who knows their ass from an infinite loop.
Hmm... Claims of shortage of skilled labour... Can't find any CS grads who know their a**e from their elbow...
You don't by any chance work for a stingy company that doesn't want to pay the going rate for the skills it wants, do you?
You can easily enough test this for yourself. There are plenty of studies out there, commissioned by both sides of the copyright debate. Just go look at the figures, look up the population of the country in question (exclude the very young if you want), and divide them out. I have never seen any study that concludes that the majority of people share files on P2P, or routinely make illegal copies by other means either. Just to be clear, I'm not claiming that most people never infringe copyright at all; there are some obvious daft cases like whistling a tune in the public restroom or singing Happy Birthday at a child's party that IMHO should be covered by fair use but in some places they aren't. But if you're talking about wilful infringement on a significant scale, such as using a P2P network or routinely copying CDs for friends, it sounds like you'll be surprised at what you'll find.
Narrowing the demographic somewhat, I'd be jaw-droppingly astounded if the majority of people under 30 didn't have at least some "illegal" music on their iPod (or equivalent).
I think you're suffering from personal experience bias here. I'd be jaw-droppingly astounded if the majority of people under 30 even have an iPod (or equivalent). Even if they do, your conveniently narrowed demographic happens to cover by far the largest group of regular copyright infringers.
Games indeed have no OSS equivalent (Not that I find having them a good justification of copyrights, even if indeed copyrights are neccessary!)
Perhaps you personally don't enjoy games. That's fine, it's your choice. However, many people do: IIRC, the world market for video games is now bigger than the world market for movies.
Its important to understand that the existence of copyrighted software to perform a certain task is a huge disincentive for the market to summon the creation of any opensource equivalent of that task.
That's a very bold claim, and I'm afraid I'm not convinced by your argument in support of it. In particular:
If copyrights are abolished and OpenOffice is the only option, and has a problem that a business cannot handle, it will pay a software firm to fix it for them - which would make the result available for everyone else, as a side effect.
There are at least two dubious assumptions there. The first is that a business with a problem with such common software will not just put up with it in the expectation that someone else will fix it sooner or later. The second is that any business that does pay up its own hard-earned cash to get a fix will actually share it (which of course they are not required to do under something like the GPL, unless they are actually redistributing the product as a whole already).
Also, laws can be made to protect those who "leak" software improvements to the world (against losing their job, etc) as they are acting in the benefit of society as a whole.
But this argument fails on the same principle I've mentioned elsewhere in this discussion: leaking improvements that already exist may be in the short-term interests of society, but if you create a culture where that is the norm, you have to consider the long-term effects. Now we're back to asking why any business would spend a substantial amount of money on worthwhile improvements when they can just wait for some other sucker to spend the money and then enjoy the rewards for free.
if big media, with its deep pockets, political contributions, sponsored legislation, legions of lawyers, etc., can't enforce it, how do you expect some lonely artist to enforce it?
Exactly.
The point of a legal system is that no one person can ever protect themselves from all the nasty people who are out to screw them. The odds just aren't in their favour. Thus we invent a legal system with courts and police forces and legislatures that can act on behalf of anyone in society who is wronged.
If you reach a point where a few people are refusing to obey the laws that system creates, then the system must act against them to restore equity. The fact that it clearly does not do so effectively in the case of copyright infringement is exactly the problem here.
The principle of civil disobedience is that if a law is unjust and enough of the people refuse to comply, the system cannot cope and the balance of power once again reverts to the people. But what a lot of people on Slashdot fail to appreciate, often in their haste to justify their own illegal behaviour, is that the majority of people are not on-line file sharers. In fact, a substantial majority would not infringe copyright to any significant extent given reasonable fair use provisions (which, I agree with others, are necessary for copyright to be a fair bargain between society and its artists). Remember that next time someone tries to make out that we should all abandon copyright law because it is in some way democratic.
Thanks, but as someone who works for one of the largest businesses in the world, I'm well aware of the relative sizes. Big Media is plenty big enough to attract corporate investors, which is what matters here. (Actually, it doesn't really matter if they don't. What does matter is that the investors are given accurate information on which to base their investment decisions. If the law says that Big Media has value because of the copyright system, it is damaging not to enforce that law and thus to deprive investors of returns they could reasonably have expected. The expectation that investors can see accurate information on which to base their decisions is a far larger and more important economic principle than anything to do with Big Media and copyright.)
Incidentally, you'll sound more convincing about this whole subject if your comments on contemporary economic issues are even close to what everyone else says. You don't quite seem to understand what the various figures involved in the Northern Rock mess actually mean.
It seems to me Shakespeare, Mozart and the like did OK.
OK in what sense?
In terms of benefitting from their own work? Hardly. Shakespeare was ghost written; the real Shakespeare was illiterate and there are various theories about local aristocrats being the real playwright. Mozart's life was full of tragedy, he struggled to find work at several points, and his career was in decline at the time of his death.
In terms of audience? How many people really benefitted from the works of Shakespeare and Mozart during their lifetimes? There have probably been more plays/music written in the past year that reached the same number of people than everything the two greats you mentioned produced in their entire lifetimes, and they are arguably the most successful playwright and classical composer in history.
I don't have time to counter all of your arguments in detail, so I'm going to focus on the software one as the most relevant here.
Firstly, you are confusing "commercial" with closed-source (as many open-source products are commercial).
No, I'm not. Please note the part where I explicitly said "The amount of useful, high quality commercial software developed via copyright" (emphasis added).
About your claim about the quality, the only such package I know of such claim is Photoshop. Lets see some Free Software vs Closed Software comparisons from various times, and see if you can get a concensus about your quality statement:
Every time we have this discussion, some Open Source supporter posts a short list of the same few products.
Where are any OSS games that can compete with the likes of recent commercial, closed source titles like Crysis and Supreme Commander, or even classics like The Sims?
Where is the OSS document preparation software that really keeps up with any of the professional DTP packages, or even MS Office? (Please don't claim OpenOffice does this; I've got bored of countering that one, and anyone can go search my many previous posts on the subject.)
Where is the OSS for running a business? It's interesting that you chose to compare Thunderbird with Outlook Express, and not with Outlook, which has several fundamental advantages that Thunderbird still hasn't matched despite numerous requests over a period of many years, Exchange support being perhaps the most obvious. (What was that? OSS doesn't have anything that can do what Exchange does? Exactly.)
The cold, hard truth is that OSS has been somewhat successful in developing software of widespread interest to geeks: system software and communications tools, programming tools, multimedia content. It has produced inferior but somewhat useful alternatives for other common areas like office software. It is mostly hopeless when it comes to games and serious business applications. You might not like it, but those latter categories are important.
Even in the fields where OSS has done well, it's hardly the panacea some advocates make it out to be, which is kinda disappointing given the collective resources available to it. A lot of the blame for this falls on good old politics, which is what happens when you have a volunteer-led effort without the discipline that having management interested in what people actually want (i.e., what pays the bills) brings to a project.
I'd like to address one final point from your post:
People will not respect copyright, even if money went directly to the artists and creators. The reason is that imposing and policing laws on what citizens can copy in the privacy of their homes is simply an absurd price to pay for a dubiously-effective extra incentive for the creation of works.
What does the privacy of one's own home have to do with anything? I have never objected to the concept of fair use; on the contrary, I strongly support it. But the key word there is "fair". Making a back-up or compilation for your personal use when you already have a legitimate copy of a work is one thing. Distributing it to the whole world over P2P is another.
I suspect we would agree on some aspects of this debate, yes. Where we appear to disagree is that I don't assume copyright is only for Big Media businesses who specialise in screwing artists. I think another, more important role it plays is to protect the little, independent guy. I don't see how your ideas support these important contributors if they baasically assume IP ceases to exist.
I think there are two flaws in your argument.
Firstly, "aren't exactly hurting" is a rather unproven claim. Remember, those investing in Big Media companies typically include things like pension funds that you and I might be paying into. It's not just corporate executives who are potentially losing out here, it's everyday people whose indirect investments rely on the profits of such large businesses.
Secondly, copyright is perhaps more important for supporting the work of the little guy. Small businesses and independent artists rely on copyright for protection, and while Big Media might be able to absorb a few percent hit on profits as the cost of doing business, for the little guy it might very well be enough to put them out of business. That benefits no-one, but if we have a culture where copyright is not respected and people rip off the work of others without thought for the consequences, that's what can happen as a result.
You seem to try and imply that copyright, or more specifically, the collection of royalty payment for each copy, is the primary driver for the creation of content.
No. I suggest that it is one driver for the creation of content. Clearly other mechanisms from live performance to altruism also serve as effective motivators to varying degrees.
I have suggested before that the biggest single advantage of a copyright-style framework over any other method I've seen proposed is that it provides a credible mechanism for creators to make expensive works and each of many consumers to contribute a small share of the cost. In other words, it encourages the widest possible distribution of the works that take the most time and effort to produce, rather than charging higher amounts by making enjoyment of such works a scarce commodity (commissioned work, limited ticket sales at concerts, etc.).
If that is the case, how do you explain the masses of Free Software?
Free Software is a terrible example to use if you're trying to show a better way than copyright. The amount of useful, high quality commercial software developed via copyright absolutely dwarfs the amount of useful, high quality software developed under a Free Software model. Even flagship Free Software titles are often not as good as the commercial equivalents. And of course, this particular argument ignores the fact that commercial software development pays the rent for a large proportion of the people who contribute to Free Software in their spare time.
How do you explain the rich culture and works that were created before copyrights were even invented?
Again, this one is easy: far less work was produced, and far fewer people enjoyed it because it wasn't as widely available.
How do you explain the fact that publishers struggled to be the ones to get to publish the 9/11 Commission Report, even though they could not get a copyright on it, and even though any other publisher could publish it as well? How do you explain that this report made quite a buck for the publisher that published it anyhow?
Because even a thin margin is useful if someone else is paying for the original work to be done?
If indeed copyright drives quality content (which I believe it does not), is it really worth the extra laws that have to imposed on all citizens? Is it worth the trouble of policing information?
Copyright is no different to any other law. It should simply codify an accepted convention that informed people will respect without any need to police them, and provide a means for penalising the few who refuse to play by the same rules as everyone else. The fact that this is not the case today is indeed a damning indictment of the current copyright regime, which I believe is primarily down to poor public understanding of the economics involved and allowing the megacorp middlemen to have all the power when it should be the artists and the consumers who are the important groups. But fixing the ignore and the power imbalance are relatively easy, and do not require removing the entire copyright system.
Does it not occur to you that most laws can easily be broken?
I can drive my car at 90mph through the city centre until I drive into something and wreck it. I can pick up a kitchen knife, walk out into the street, and stab someone with it. I can walk over to my local park, sweet talk a five-year-old playing alone, and walk off with them. Does that mean I should do any of these things? Of course not, and I never would. I understand the consequences of those actions and why the law therefore prohibits them, and I respect those laws.
Attempting to legislate mass copyright infringement out of existence is naive, to be sure. You can't implement a purely technological solution for a social problem, either. Instead of all this running around wasting effort on that, governments should be pushing for an obviously fair IP framework, where the people who really create valuable work and help to share it are rewarded. The problem right now is that it's the big business middlemen who are getting most of that reward, and since the Internet basically makes them redundant so they no longer offer a useful service and they've been abusing the market through CD price fixing and such for years, the people perceive laws protecting those middlemen to be unreasonable and do not respect them.
I think if we switched to a system where copyright couldn't so trivially be permanently transferred to some random, faceless organisation, where the incentives meant that middlemen had to do something useful by getting a work shared more widely in order to make their money and that the real artists and authors and programmers and movie technicians had the leverage to take a fair share of the profits from their own labours, then the people at large would come to see copyright infringement as ripping off a fellow man and not some faceless megacorp and most people would respect the related laws accordingly.
But fundamentally, the law-makers seem to be moving in entirely the wrong direction here. It isn't even sensible to implement the proposed measures, because just by downloading obvious professional content such as music videos from YouTube, you might or might not be breaking the law and you have no way of knowing. If you visit a dodgy-looking web site full of MP3s of just-released tracks where you might reasonably assume the files are not being distributed with permission then that's one thing. However, YouTube actually has agreements with some of the major music labels these days that make downloading their videos perfectly legitimate; indeed some of them are uploaded by the labels themselves, presumably because they're starting to get it when it comes to the advertising benefits of file sharing. The proposed approach would basically stamp out this (credible, consumer-friendly and possibly quite profitable for the labels) new approach in favour of retaining the old megacorps vs. pirates battle. That can't possibly be the best way forward.
Let me say right off that I think the proposed measures are almost certainly the wrong way to address the piracy problem. However, that is not to say that piracy is not a problem and should not be dealt with in some more reasonable way. (If you're about to object to the term "piracy", please save your fingers and go read an etymological dictionary instead.)
It has in other places, your incredulity at that fact doesn't make it untrue though. Look at Canada, Spain, Germany etc.
You think measures like imposing a levy on all blank media (aka a tax on back-ups) are fairer?
Some are imposing a tax, others are investigating just completely legalising p2p. Yes, remember that democracy is about the interests of the population, not just IP "owners".
It doesn't even seem to occur to you that the IP framework in general might also be in the interests of the population. Sure, it's easy to say that the people want the content when someone has already made it, but you have to think about a sustainable policy. If you screw the content providers now, who will provide new content in future? You certainly aren't going to get as much or as high quality if you just rely on charity, as we've established robustly in many previous Slashdot discussions.
Irrelevant
If you start by taking the view that the law is irrelevant, you aren't going to convince many people that your intentions are anything but self-serving.
Many people both download and buy an awful lot of media. On average it has been found the "pirates" buy more media than other folks. Many use p2p as a way of sampling things before deciding. Some don't, but you also make the fallacious assumption that each download is a lost sale.
I'm afraid you're the one with the bad logic here, not the GP. The assumption is not that every download represents a lost sale, merely that some downloads represent lost sales. I don't see how you can credibly argue that this is not the case.
There is an interesting question about whether more of them ultimately generate additional sales. I suspect the jury is still out on that one, but in any case, it doesn't really matter. If that is the case then content providers who aggressively pursue infringing downloaders are shooting themselves in the foot and those who choose to allow downloading will ultimately win through market forces. Nothing in the copyright framework we have today prevents a copyright holder from permitting this. But right now, the law makes it their choice.
An awful lot of what's out there at the moment is lowest-common-denominator BULLSHIT. That's why it's failing.
If that's what it is, then why are so many people downloading it, when so few download "good" material? For a guy so concerned about the interests of the population, you sure don't know much about what the population seems to want.
What is this "fair"? It seems perfectly sustainable to me.
It seems to me that the problem with your argument is exactly that it is not sustainable. If you disagree, perhaps you could provide an argument — preferably one that isn't as hopelessly naive economically as most we see on Slashdot — about what will reliably motivate future content production and distribution on the same or larger scale as we have today and of the same or better quality than we see today?
And someone releases a product with the crypto built in and "mass casual" piracy is back on the air.
And the government declares such tools to be accessories to copyright infringement, starts fining anyone who appears to be using encrypted traffic for any purpose on the assumption that they are infringing someone's copyright, and now collective punishment catching many innocent people along the way and undermining tools with legitimate, legal uses is back on the air.
That's true, and any remaining support for the whole mess surely evaporated when the high profile leak referenced by my sig occurred. Suddenly, both the general public and probably a few politicians suddenly realised what the rest of us have known all along: security in IT is an imperfect thing, and mistakes will inevitably be made.
My point was more that should the cards and database be rolled out according to the (current, official) plan, there would be a choice to be made, and those who have an informed view might very well object to the current laws because those laws conflict with the informed group's ethics.
To most people (I hope!) the law is an uncrossable line. A solid boundary of ethical and moral behaviour.
Confusing ethics and the law is a dangerous thing in itself.
To put things very simplistically, ethics is theory and the law is practice. Ideally, someone living a good, honest life according to fair, ethical principles would always find their behaviour falls within the law, but sometimes a bad law comes into conflict with those ethics. Whether someone chooses to obey the letter of the law or to follow their own ethics at that point says a lot about them.
To give a concrete, IT-related example that is relevant in my country today: the UK government is currently planning to introduce identity cards and the National Identity Register database. I know that some surveys in the past have found a majority of the sample population in favour of these measures. I also believe that introducing these measures is not in the interests of the people, and that the government policy would not be so widely supported if people understood the implications for access to personal information, security, reliability, and the like. I know that I am far from alone in these beliefs, because there are campaign groups with many thousands of people supporting them who express the same concerns. However, the law has already been passed to make these measures possible, though it was passed by a government for which only a small minority of the people actually voted; substantially more people voted for parties that oppose the scheme. So, when the government attempts to roll the ID cards and database out to the population, should I be a good little citizen and accept my fate, or should I join the radical law-breakers promising civil disobedience by refusing to participate? Are those who choose to follow their beliefs to the point of breaking a law they believe to be unjust really unethical, or are those who accept without challenge a dangerous law passed by an unrepresentative government the unethical ones?
It wasn't a PHB, it was a Marketing Pro®... :-)