I've addressed many of your points in detail in my further replies to you and others elsewhere in this thread. I'd just like to pick up on a couple of specifics here, because while I see where you're coming from, I think your factual basis is flaky in places.
I cite the Pressident's Cyber Security advisor!
I did ask for a serious source. How many of those advisers have there been now? How much of what they say really has any impact on the world, particularly the world outside the US?
You are absolutely right that there is nothing special about computing! When I play a vynal record on my record player the copyright holder has absolutely no rights over my record player! I can change and control it however I please!
Sure, but the guy supplying the record player isn't under any obligation to supply you with a machine to copy the record just so you can make a fair use backup, either.
Under the copyright bargain I have fair use rights.
No, you have a fair use defence. Please understand the difference.
They decided they wanted to sent it so you could view it on screen but not print it.
I have every right to re-write and re-compile my browser to manipulate and display it however I like.
Actually, I suspect that could be interpreted as deliberately circumventing copy-protection, and as such I don't think you have that legal right in the US any more.
The website designers have ZIP rights, except for copyright. The users have the right to do absolutely anything they like, so long as they do not commit copyright infringment.
Unless they agree to give up certain further rights in exchange for the content. I haven't seen the exact set-up in question here, but certainly things like NDAs fall into this category routinely. Consequently, the last statement in the parent post simply isn't true.
If your position is that the content owners would not publish to Google without copy+paste being disabled, you're not arguing the need for copyright. Rather, your argument is that this case is an example of the need for protections above and beyond copyright.
Fair enough; I phrased that poorly. I was intending to refer to the underlying principle: granting additional rights to the content provider may be a useful and indeed necessary step in achieving greater access to that content for society as a whole.
There is an interesting question of whether today's technology does call for changes to laws like copyright. We all accept, I think, that at present the law does not recognise much difference between how copyright applies to computers and how it applies to any other medium (DMCA et al notwithstanding). Copyright worked fine when copying a tape or a book took a lot of time and was never done -- could never be done -- in a passive, yet mass-producing, way.
Today, that's no longer the case, and in this respect the use of modern technology is different to what has gone before. Copying a tape using a double deck was never going to result in millions of copies from one original flying around the world. Today's P2P technology can do that inside a day, and allow copies to reach every Internet-connected PC on the planet inside a week.
If we accept the underlying principle of copyright, perhaps it has become necessary to review the rights accorded to content providers and how they can be enforced effectively in practice. Unfortunately, many industries are too busy trying to flog a dead horse and/or sue their own customers to consider the idea of advocating a genuine change in the law that is in keeping with the common good but still addresses their (IMHO genuine) grievances.
To me, freedom is more important than any perception (including my own) of what may be in "the greater good" or "the public interest".
As a general principle we agree on that; we all know (if we're paying attention) that what's advocated as being a good thing even though it restricts freedoms often isn't justified with hindsight.
However, I believe that a certain practicality is required here. I dislike speed limits, and feel that they're frequently abused by governments and shouldn't be. However, I accept that some limits (not necessarily the current ones!) may be necessary because while there are some highly trained drivers with experience of handling a vehicle at speed who could drive safely far in excess of our current limits, not everyone is (in particular, most people are not), and it only takes one person making a mistake to cause a fatal accident, close a road for hours inconveniencing thousands, or otherwise screw up many other people's lives. Similarly, I believe that if self-defence is the responsibility of the individual (as, realistically, it must be) then individuals should have the legal right to bear arms if they choose to do so. However, I draw the line at letting any member of the general public who wants to walk into the middle of a crowded city with the means to detonate a tactical nuke. The risk to society is simply too great.
In other words, I believe that freedoms should be restricted only where this is clearly necessary for the good of society, but I accept that in some cases, particularly the more extreme ones, such restrictions will be justified. I think we have too many laws, and too much meddling from many western governments, but that taking the non-restrictive argument to extremes, we revert to so-called natural law, and I don't believe that would be an improvement on today's state of affairs.
However the very point is that they have absolutely no right at all to prevent it.
Why not? It's their content. As far as I can see, your constitution says that if you copy material for fair use reasons, that is not a breach of copyright. It doesn't give you any right to the ability to make such copies. There is a key distinction between these two concepts.
NB: As stated before, I am not from the US, and for that matter nor am I a lawyer; I'm just a guy who read the words of your constitution and interpreted them. I apologise in advance if I've missed something significant here.
Does that mean I lose my right to do legal things?
In this case, no. You never had any automatic right to be able to do them in the first place. They simply aren't illegal if you find a way that you can.
But browsers are supposed to work for the user not the website designer.
Says who? The website designers are the ones who make the web, and who generate all the content. Giving it away is a courtesy, and users have absolutely zip rights unless they're giving up something in return.
Designers didn't pay for my machine, why should they have any right to control what I do with it.
Please read the 500 posts to this thread drilling rather large and obvious holes in this argument, starting with the first paragraph of my reply.:-)
They don't own that content completely and totally, they own copyright to that content.
And indeed this case is a perfect example of the need for copyright. If the people supplying the content Google is using didn't get certain guarantees about how it would be used, they wouldn't publish it at all. The number of people in thread who are so up themselves about their "rights" that they miss this rather obvious point is staggering. (I'm not saying cduffy is one of them.)
A website has found a way to use a normally provided interface to have normally prohibited results.
Rubbish. A website is using absolutely standard CSS to generate exactly the expected results, something no more prohibited than any other styling by CSS of any other web page in existence.
This has already been answered adequately -- cut/copy/save/print may indeed be reproduction but are not regulated by copyright when they're being done for a protected purpose. This includes purposes such as commentary or handouts for teaching classes [...]
Remember that while the "fair use" provisions mean it is not automatically illegal for you to make a copy for those reasons, they don't (AFAIK at least; I'm not from the US) oblige the copyright holder to give you any ability to do it, or indeed give you any automatic right to such a copy by any other means. Moreover, I assume that they can also be overridden by agreement, since NDAs are ubiquitous in this industry.
The second line of argument distills down to the idea that the user's computer should be acting as an agent of the user, not of the entity whose content it runs or displays. Taking away the user's control over their own property simply because it manipulates content covered by some 3rd party's copyrights is a cop-out [...]
That may be true, but unfortunately with freedom comes responsibility. In exchange for the freedom to drive my car on the road, I accept the responsibility that I must do so safely. In exchange for the freedom of speech, I accept the responsibility not to describe someone unfairly to their detriment. And in exchange for the freedom to copy material on a computer, I accept the responsibility to do so within the restrictions of copyright law.
Unfortunately, certain segments of society have proved beyond all doubt that their selfish desires outweigh that responsibility to them, and so they forfeit any moral rights and freedoms connected with that responsibility. Personally, I don't abuse that freedom, but where the illegal uses so clearly outweigh the legal ones, I accept (in spite of being basically liberal in my views) that for the greater good, the freedom may have to be curtailed, at least until a more universally agreeable solution can be found to the abuse problem. Unfortunately, such a reaction from content-generating industries, and its support from legal authorities, was an inevitable result of the wholesale abuse of electronic copying by large numbers of people.
The vulnerability is that the print function of my browser will stop working for the entire duration of the display of the google print page on my screen.
So they aren't offering you the content for printing purposes. They're up front about it, the fact that they're offering you the content at all is just their side of a bargain, and you must live up to yours. This is not an attack in any meaningful sense of the word.
If you treat this sort of thing as illegal, the exact same principles apply to any web sites you download that do anything (including simply displaying on your screen) that you arbitrarily decide you don't like. If visiting a web site with your browser, sending an HTTP request for the content, is no longer an invitation to supply that content, you just killed the Internet (for a start).
Even if you accept that and just won't accept the undesired use of perfectly valid CSS to prevent the printing, you would imply that any innovative use of web technology should not be allowed. That would be a shame, given that the only reason the web has reached the state it's in today is a chain of such unforeseen innovations.
Now for goodness' sake, please stop spouting this crap and thus reducing the emphasis on real attacks that can cause real harm. The Internet suffers with enough security problems, without blatant idiocy like this confusing the issue further.
This story seems to be about Google remotely disabling certain functionality of your computer (does that count as "gaining unauthorized access" or something else illegal ?)
I rather think you'd be laughed out of court, and rightly so. If you download a web page to your browser, and that page gets your browser to do something, then in the absence of laws to the contrary, you have explicitly requested it to be done and the consequences are your responsibility. If this is illegal, so is displaying an image on your screen in response to you visiting a web site with graphics, by exactly the same argument.
Um, why should I abide by Google's rules ?
Because that's your side of the bargain, in exchange for which they are letting you access their content. What is it about keeping your side of the deal that so many people in this thread find hard to understand? If you don't like it, don't accept the deal, don't visit Google's site, and don't use their content. You have no case, either legally or morally.
Unfortunately, that is the idea behind "trusted" computing. You no longer have full control over your own machine, you can only run applications "trusted" by those controlling the DRM.
I'm sorry, but as far as I can tell, that simply isn't true. Even the most draconian proposals for DRM that I've seen seriously advocated only limit your ability to access controlled content to "trusted" software. Nothing in them stopped you running whatever you want on your computer, as long as you accepted that if you weren't prepared to use verifiable softare, They(TM) weren't prepared to let you access their content at all. If anyone can cite a serious proposition from any source that goes beyond this to restrict you to running only "trusted" softare under all circumstances, I'd be interested to see it.
There's nothing inherently wrong with the idea of trusted computing I describe here, AFAICS. You don't get an automatic, blanket right to do whatever you want with content just because you can see it in any other field; computing is nothing special in this respect. What's wrong with keeping your side of the bargain, or if you don't like that side, not accepting the bargain in the first place?
It's not that hard to mess with a browser in this way. For example, to hide content when you print is a matter of some CSS2.
@media print { #content { display: none; } }
OK, I give in. Why can't you trivially override that with your local stylesheet (userContent.css) and using !important? Or can you, and it's just that most people won't know how?
I think we both agree that copyrights and patents... are there in order to get something beneficial... for society as a whole.
Indeed we do agree on that, certainly if we're talking about the original motivation and/or an argument for continuing to allow them. Moreover, I explicitly acknowledge that this works because (and only because) they grant legal rights to the individuals or organisations that generate the content. I'm not sure, from the posts so far, whether you'd agree with the extra part there. I also believe that, other things being equal, rights granted to all individuals by definition do benefit society, although of course with restrictive rights like copyright other things are not equal.
I accept that your argument is good, but I would counter that today's culture would not admit the same level of dedication to research without some sort of economic support.
Most of the individuals you mentioned were relatively privileged for their time. Several were academics, and financially supported anyway. Shakespeare wasn't very privileged; in fact, he was illiterate, and the plays attributed to him were probably written by a local minor noble according to some local researchers (he lived not far from here).
If we want to restrict major advances in art and culture only to those in research organisations like universities that are funded by government grants and to those with enough money from other sources to support themselves while doing their research, copyright is obsolete as you say. But if we want wide-scale "R&D", there has to be some sort of return on investment in a capitalist society such as ours, and right now, IPR are the means of securing that return. It's all a matter of scale.
The poll tax was repealed because the people simply refused to accept it and the civil disobedience that ensued caused chaos.
Of course. Then again, the same thousands of people all writing to the government officer responsible to make their case would probably have achieved a similar goal. After all, the wonderful thing about elections and politics is that not only do you get to choose who will be your leaders, you also get to choose who won't. Those who go up against the general population are unlikely to last long. [Casts sideways look at GWB and TB, smirks, and looks away]
As a society, we acknowledge the benefit of a legal system and policing by consent. Where that consent no longer holds with the general population in a democracy, the law must be changed, and even political/legal systems as corrupt or incompetent as those in the UK or the US recognise this, albeit too slowly at times.
Civil disobediance is justified as the last resort when the system fails, but going to that level otherwise simply diminishes the strength of the political and legal systems on which we rely. To this extent, the situation does indeed admit shades of grey, but it is not in our interests to let relatively benign things like "I want this music for free" to undermine the entire legal system!
The only reason for copyrights and patents is to promote the public good. They are privileges---not rights---granted by the state for the benefit of the public.
The same is true of every other law, and if you stop and think about it, that includes those laws recognising the right to ownership of physical property.
Copyright infringement is not the same as theft in legal terms, but in the grand scheme of things, the same supporting arguments apply for recognising legal copyright as for the legal right to ownership of physical property. (I'm not talking about details like 20 years vs. 30 years, nor am I equating the two concepts. Rather, I'm talking about the fundamental, underlying ideas, like granting rights to the individual for their personal benefit, when those rights encourage a benefit to society as a whole in return.)
I don't we'll ever agree on this because we disagree about the fundamentals. You believe in a "right to earn a living from intellectual property" and I don't.
You're putting words into his mouth, but assuming the above is true, society depends on the development of much intellectual property, so it's fortunate that the law sides with (your description of) his viewpoint.
There's a good review of this in dspeyer's/. journal.
Not really. Good reviews seek to be unbiased, to present both sides of an argument and to let the reader decide. dspeyer's journal is an opinion piece, and of course he's entitled to his opinion. Still, I really can't accept as an authority a piece that sets aside the entire field of economics in favour of a story about aliens in order to claim that copyright infringement has no consequences for the holder. I also note that most of the "moral case law" he cites is decades or even centuries out of sync with today's reality, and that what worked well then may not work now that copying is almost free and almost instant. IOWs, it was an interesting read, but I don't accept it as The Truth(TM) because it has failed to understand or address so many basic counters to its own arguments.
Really? Is it not covered by this: [snip excerpt from Copyright, Designs and Patents Act]
Unfortunately not. In the UK we have very little in the way of "fair use" rights. AFAIK, there is still no automatic right to make a genuine back-up copy of software/music/movies, for example, yet every computing pro I know would advocate a good back-up policy, and I've sent back four DVD box sets with a scratched disc in the last year alone.
Similarly, I know many people who burn mixed CDs from several sources so they can just let them play unattended. They pay for the originals as normal, and in the case of DJs they often pay hundreds or thousands of pounds in PPL fees for the legal right to play that music in public as well, yet technically they breach copyright by making the mix. This one really is a clear "no harm, no foul" situation (unlike making copies of someone else's media for personal use, where there is at least a case that harm is done). It is purely for the convenience of the person making the mix, and yet it is illegal. Go figure.
The sooner someone reviews the CDPA and so on with a view to giving the purchaser sensible rights, the better.
Once again they (BPI) are taking the easy "sue you" route, instead of going after the masses of scumbags who are pirating, duplicating and selling music at carboot sales, markets, seaside promenades and suchlike DAY IN DAY OUT.
Well, they're doing it as well as going after the aforementioned scumbags.
And, at the risk of introducing some facts into the discusion, I'm not sure the BPI are going to find lawsuits so easy here as the RIAA do. Remember that the UK legal system has a "loser pays" philosophy under normal circumstances. Suing someone for some sort of copyright infringement and losing could lead to extensive awards for costs and possibly counter-suits for damages against the industry, as well as setting a legal precedent that would effectively kill any future claims.
That all said, I believe you are missing the point when you talk about the monetary costs of the various activities. As I noted elsewhere in this thread, we measure the effects of crimes by the damage done to the victim, not the benefits to the perpetrator.
The GPL merely uses the flawed existing law in the best possible way to encourage Sharing. The GPL would not suffer if the copyright law were replaced by a Law to encourage Sharing.
Perhaps not, but society sure as hell would. There is still a lot more claiming that making everything GPL would benefit society than there is evidence to support that claim.
Slashdot Mirror
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... the land of the free. ;-)
I've addressed many of your points in detail in my further replies to you and others elsewhere in this thread. I'd just like to pick up on a couple of specifics here, because while I see where you're coming from, I think your factual basis is flaky in places.
I did ask for a serious source. How many of those advisers have there been now? How much of what they say really has any impact on the world, particularly the world outside the US?
Sure, but the guy supplying the record player isn't under any obligation to supply you with a machine to copy the record just so you can make a fair use backup, either.
No, you have a fair use defence. Please understand the difference.
They decided they wanted to sent it so you could view it on screen but not print it.
Actually, I suspect that could be interpreted as deliberately circumventing copy-protection, and as such I don't think you have that legal right in the US any more.
Unless they agree to give up certain further rights in exchange for the content. I haven't seen the exact set-up in question here, but certainly things like NDAs fall into this category routinely. Consequently, the last statement in the parent post simply isn't true.
Fair enough; I phrased that poorly. I was intending to refer to the underlying principle: granting additional rights to the content provider may be a useful and indeed necessary step in achieving greater access to that content for society as a whole.
There is an interesting question of whether today's technology does call for changes to laws like copyright. We all accept, I think, that at present the law does not recognise much difference between how copyright applies to computers and how it applies to any other medium (DMCA et al notwithstanding). Copyright worked fine when copying a tape or a book took a lot of time and was never done -- could never be done -- in a passive, yet mass-producing, way.
Today, that's no longer the case, and in this respect the use of modern technology is different to what has gone before. Copying a tape using a double deck was never going to result in millions of copies from one original flying around the world. Today's P2P technology can do that inside a day, and allow copies to reach every Internet-connected PC on the planet inside a week.
If we accept the underlying principle of copyright, perhaps it has become necessary to review the rights accorded to content providers and how they can be enforced effectively in practice. Unfortunately, many industries are too busy trying to flog a dead horse and/or sue their own customers to consider the idea of advocating a genuine change in the law that is in keeping with the common good but still addresses their (IMHO genuine) grievances.
As a general principle we agree on that; we all know (if we're paying attention) that what's advocated as being a good thing even though it restricts freedoms often isn't justified with hindsight.
However, I believe that a certain practicality is required here. I dislike speed limits, and feel that they're frequently abused by governments and shouldn't be. However, I accept that some limits (not necessarily the current ones!) may be necessary because while there are some highly trained drivers with experience of handling a vehicle at speed who could drive safely far in excess of our current limits, not everyone is (in particular, most people are not), and it only takes one person making a mistake to cause a fatal accident, close a road for hours inconveniencing thousands, or otherwise screw up many other people's lives. Similarly, I believe that if self-defence is the responsibility of the individual (as, realistically, it must be) then individuals should have the legal right to bear arms if they choose to do so. However, I draw the line at letting any member of the general public who wants to walk into the middle of a crowded city with the means to detonate a tactical nuke. The risk to society is simply too great.
In other words, I believe that freedoms should be restricted only where this is clearly necessary for the good of society, but I accept that in some cases, particularly the more extreme ones, such restrictions will be justified. I think we have too many laws, and too much meddling from many western governments, but that taking the non-restrictive argument to extremes, we revert to so-called natural law, and I don't believe that would be an improvement on today's state of affairs.
Why not? It's their content. As far as I can see, your constitution says that if you copy material for fair use reasons, that is not a breach of copyright. It doesn't give you any right to the ability to make such copies. There is a key distinction between these two concepts.
NB: As stated before, I am not from the US, and for that matter nor am I a lawyer; I'm just a guy who read the words of your constitution and interpreted them. I apologise in advance if I've missed something significant here.
In this case, no. You never had any automatic right to be able to do them in the first place. They simply aren't illegal if you find a way that you can.
Says who? The website designers are the ones who make the web, and who generate all the content. Giving it away is a courtesy, and users have absolutely zip rights unless they're giving up something in return.
Please read the 500 posts to this thread drilling rather large and obvious holes in this argument, starting with the first paragraph of my reply. :-)
And indeed this case is a perfect example of the need for copyright. If the people supplying the content Google is using didn't get certain guarantees about how it would be used, they wouldn't publish it at all. The number of people in thread who are so up themselves about their "rights" that they miss this rather obvious point is staggering. (I'm not saying cduffy is one of them.)
Rubbish. A website is using absolutely standard CSS to generate exactly the expected results, something no more prohibited than any other styling by CSS of any other web page in existence.
Remember that while the "fair use" provisions mean it is not automatically illegal for you to make a copy for those reasons, they don't (AFAIK at least; I'm not from the US) oblige the copyright holder to give you any ability to do it, or indeed give you any automatic right to such a copy by any other means. Moreover, I assume that they can also be overridden by agreement, since NDAs are ubiquitous in this industry.
That may be true, but unfortunately with freedom comes responsibility. In exchange for the freedom to drive my car on the road, I accept the responsibility that I must do so safely. In exchange for the freedom of speech, I accept the responsibility not to describe someone unfairly to their detriment. And in exchange for the freedom to copy material on a computer, I accept the responsibility to do so within the restrictions of copyright law.
Unfortunately, certain segments of society have proved beyond all doubt that their selfish desires outweigh that responsibility to them, and so they forfeit any moral rights and freedoms connected with that responsibility. Personally, I don't abuse that freedom, but where the illegal uses so clearly outweigh the legal ones, I accept (in spite of being basically liberal in my views) that for the greater good, the freedom may have to be curtailed, at least until a more universally agreeable solution can be found to the abuse problem. Unfortunately, such a reaction from content-generating industries, and its support from legal authorities, was an inevitable result of the wholesale abuse of electronic copying by large numbers of people.
So they aren't offering you the content for printing purposes. They're up front about it, the fact that they're offering you the content at all is just their side of a bargain, and you must live up to yours. This is not an attack in any meaningful sense of the word.
If you treat this sort of thing as illegal, the exact same principles apply to any web sites you download that do anything (including simply displaying on your screen) that you arbitrarily decide you don't like. If visiting a web site with your browser, sending an HTTP request for the content, is no longer an invitation to supply that content, you just killed the Internet (for a start).
Even if you accept that and just won't accept the undesired use of perfectly valid CSS to prevent the printing, you would imply that any innovative use of web technology should not be allowed. That would be a shame, given that the only reason the web has reached the state it's in today is a chain of such unforeseen innovations.
Now for goodness' sake, please stop spouting this crap and thus reducing the emphasis on real attacks that can cause real harm. The Internet suffers with enough security problems, without blatant idiocy like this confusing the issue further.
How? How does this compromise my data? How does it impede my ability to perform any other activities on my computer, in any way?
I rather think you'd be laughed out of court, and rightly so. If you download a web page to your browser, and that page gets your browser to do something, then in the absence of laws to the contrary, you have explicitly requested it to be done and the consequences are your responsibility. If this is illegal, so is displaying an image on your screen in response to you visiting a web site with graphics, by exactly the same argument.
Because that's your side of the bargain, in exchange for which they are letting you access their content. What is it about keeping your side of the deal that so many people in this thread find hard to understand? If you don't like it, don't accept the deal, don't visit Google's site, and don't use their content. You have no case, either legally or morally.
I'm sorry, but as far as I can tell, that simply isn't true. Even the most draconian proposals for DRM that I've seen seriously advocated only limit your ability to access controlled content to "trusted" software. Nothing in them stopped you running whatever you want on your computer, as long as you accepted that if you weren't prepared to use verifiable softare, They(TM) weren't prepared to let you access their content at all. If anyone can cite a serious proposition from any source that goes beyond this to restrict you to running only "trusted" softare under all circumstances, I'd be interested to see it.
There's nothing inherently wrong with the idea of trusted computing I describe here, AFAICS. You don't get an automatic, blanket right to do whatever you want with content just because you can see it in any other field; computing is nothing special in this respect. What's wrong with keeping your side of the bargain, or if you don't like that side, not accepting the bargain in the first place?
OK, I give in. Why can't you trivially override that with your local stylesheet (userContent.css) and using !important? Or can you, and it's just that most people won't know how?
Indeed we do agree on that, certainly if we're talking about the original motivation and/or an argument for continuing to allow them. Moreover, I explicitly acknowledge that this works because (and only because) they grant legal rights to the individuals or organisations that generate the content. I'm not sure, from the posts so far, whether you'd agree with the extra part there. I also believe that, other things being equal, rights granted to all individuals by definition do benefit society, although of course with restrictive rights like copyright other things are not equal.
I accept that your argument is good, but I would counter that today's culture would not admit the same level of dedication to research without some sort of economic support.
Most of the individuals you mentioned were relatively privileged for their time. Several were academics, and financially supported anyway. Shakespeare wasn't very privileged; in fact, he was illiterate, and the plays attributed to him were probably written by a local minor noble according to some local researchers (he lived not far from here).
If we want to restrict major advances in art and culture only to those in research organisations like universities that are funded by government grants and to those with enough money from other sources to support themselves while doing their research, copyright is obsolete as you say. But if we want wide-scale "R&D", there has to be some sort of return on investment in a capitalist society such as ours, and right now, IPR are the means of securing that return. It's all a matter of scale.
Of course. Then again, the same thousands of people all writing to the government officer responsible to make their case would probably have achieved a similar goal. After all, the wonderful thing about elections and politics is that not only do you get to choose who will be your leaders, you also get to choose who won't. Those who go up against the general population are unlikely to last long. [Casts sideways look at GWB and TB, smirks, and looks away]
As a society, we acknowledge the benefit of a legal system and policing by consent. Where that consent no longer holds with the general population in a democracy, the law must be changed, and even political/legal systems as corrupt or incompetent as those in the UK or the US recognise this, albeit too slowly at times.
Civil disobediance is justified as the last resort when the system fails, but going to that level otherwise simply diminishes the strength of the political and legal systems on which we rely. To this extent, the situation does indeed admit shades of grey, but it is not in our interests to let relatively benign things like "I want this music for free" to undermine the entire legal system!
The same is true of every other law, and if you stop and think about it, that includes those laws recognising the right to ownership of physical property.
Copyright infringement is not the same as theft in legal terms, but in the grand scheme of things, the same supporting arguments apply for recognising legal copyright as for the legal right to ownership of physical property. (I'm not talking about details like 20 years vs. 30 years, nor am I equating the two concepts. Rather, I'm talking about the fundamental, underlying ideas, like granting rights to the individual for their personal benefit, when those rights encourage a benefit to society as a whole in return.)
You're putting words into his mouth, but assuming the above is true, society depends on the development of much intellectual property, so it's fortunate that the law sides with (your description of) his viewpoint.
Not really. Good reviews seek to be unbiased, to present both sides of an argument and to let the reader decide. dspeyer's journal is an opinion piece, and of course he's entitled to his opinion. Still, I really can't accept as an authority a piece that sets aside the entire field of economics in favour of a story about aliens in order to claim that copyright infringement has no consequences for the holder. I also note that most of the "moral case law" he cites is decades or even centuries out of sync with today's reality, and that what worked well then may not work now that copying is almost free and almost instant. IOWs, it was an interesting read, but I don't accept it as The Truth(TM) because it has failed to understand or address so many basic counters to its own arguments.
Unfortunately not. In the UK we have very little in the way of "fair use" rights. AFAIK, there is still no automatic right to make a genuine back-up copy of software/music/movies, for example, yet every computing pro I know would advocate a good back-up policy, and I've sent back four DVD box sets with a scratched disc in the last year alone.
Similarly, I know many people who burn mixed CDs from several sources so they can just let them play unattended. They pay for the originals as normal, and in the case of DJs they often pay hundreds or thousands of pounds in PPL fees for the legal right to play that music in public as well, yet technically they breach copyright by making the mix. This one really is a clear "no harm, no foul" situation (unlike making copies of someone else's media for personal use, where there is at least a case that harm is done). It is purely for the convenience of the person making the mix, and yet it is illegal. Go figure.
The sooner someone reviews the CDPA and so on with a view to giving the purchaser sensible rights, the better.
Damn, there should be a (+1, Wishful thinking but had comedy value) mod... :-)
Well, they're doing it as well as going after the aforementioned scumbags.
And, at the risk of introducing some facts into the discusion, I'm not sure the BPI are going to find lawsuits so easy here as the RIAA do. Remember that the UK legal system has a "loser pays" philosophy under normal circumstances. Suing someone for some sort of copyright infringement and losing could lead to extensive awards for costs and possibly counter-suits for damages against the industry, as well as setting a legal precedent that would effectively kill any future claims.
That all said, I believe you are missing the point when you talk about the monetary costs of the various activities. As I noted elsewhere in this thread, we measure the effects of crimes by the damage done to the victim, not the benefits to the perpetrator.
The only rights you truly have are those for which you are prepared to die.
See, we can play this game all day, but unfortunately it won't make your original claim any more valid. :-)
<obligatory> What about content you don't own? <obligatory>
Perhaps not, but society sure as hell would. There is still a lot more claiming that making everything GPL would benefit society than there is evidence to support that claim.