To address your book analogy quickly first, the difference there is that in the case of a book, you've presumed acquired the right to have that book, by buying it, borrowing it from a library or otherwise. When you paid for it, you bought the right to keep it. So did the library when they bought their copy (and they can lend out the copy they bought, but not copy it again themselves and lend out multiple copies from one original). The whole issue isn't really directly comparable to pure information resources such as Usenet posts.
Anyway.... come on you are just playing devils [rria] advocate here! These are not presidents that most at/. really want to set at least in quite this way.
You don't see a problem with the idea that I invested my time to write something, offered it to the general public for free, and now someone else is taking my material, using it for to profit and restricting how it's accessible via their system, without giving me any compensation or, realistically, much chance to do a whole lot about it?
There's more to this than potential financial damages. At issue is whether I have the right to control copying of my information, the whole purpose of copyright. As anyone who's ever been involved in a GPL project can tell you, there are more reasons you might want to control the fruits of your labours and how they may be used than financial gain. As I've argued here many times before, you should have that right, because you invested the time and effort to produce the material. No-one who didn't has any right to claim that "information wants to be free" just so they can benefit from your work without offering anything in return, or use your work in a way that you do not like.
If information has no value, and good free alternative sources are always available, and all the other mantras of the "make it free" community are true, then they have no need to use your offering, do they? They can just use their own version, or find a free and equally good source elsewhere. Oh, but wait... They can't, can they?
BTW, my probs with Mozilla relate to how the page renders; it often draws the sidebar too wide, or forgets to draw the main column of text at all. A quick resize of the font fixes that, BTW, so the page is downloading properly but sometimes rendering incorrectly first time out.
Google didn't purchase your post: they purchased the database containing your post. There are intellectual property rights (often copyright) in a database or catalogue of information and these rights are quite separate from the information itself.
I appreciate the distinction you're making here, but aren't the rights to a database usually relevant in cases where the data itself is trivial, such as the phone directory you mentioned? Phone numbers aren't themselves subject to copyright. In this case, I fail to see how wrapping up my posts as part of a database would make them any more legal to copy than if they were copied as separate entities, and it is the morality and legality of that copy being made that I am questioning.
When you post to usenet, the sensible legal view has to be that the post remains your copyright but that you grant an implied license to anyone anywhere in the world to read or archive your post.
I challenge that "sensible legal view". When people post to Usenet, they typically expect posts to be distributed freely around the system for a short time period after the post is made, and then to expire. Archiving is a somewhat dicey proposition, since it was neither the original purpose of Usenet nor something provided for within its normal protocols, but you could possibly make a case for it on public interest grounds. I'm not sure what effect (or otherwise) I think the "x-no-archive" header should have here.
However, archiving for profit, selling on databases of others' copyrighted material for profit, restricting the access to the data by providing an interface to it but then banning certain uses under the ToS, and other practices employed by Deja/Google are much less clear. I'm afraid how I don't see that they are just distributing material copyrighted by others, without permission, for profit.
Are you really a lawyer, BTW? If so, what is your level of experience in this field? Is you assessment of the "sensible legal view" based on case law, statute law, or just professional opinion?
I keep getting all these whiney, "I'm a victim, you're a victim" comments posted in otherwise rational discussions. Any idea what the problem is?
Immaturity and/or denial mostly, I think. The mindset seems to be shifting from "Everything should be free!" through "I shouldn't have to pay for anything!" to "I shouldn't have to work for anything!". It appears those who disagree now have "overrated" opinions. But the dictionary is still the only place where "success" comes before "work", and sooner or later reality will bite...
I need a conversion chart or other explanation for this 2:2 and 2:1 stuff. My context work hasn't gleaned much, other than "2:2 is good".
In the UK, there are typically four grades you can get when passing an undergraduate honours degree (i.e., a typical university degree). In decreasing order of merit:
First class (1, a "first"): You're a rare genius or you work waaaaay too hard.:-)
Upper second class (2.1, a "two one"): You're decent with the material and made a decent effort.
Lower second class (2.2, a "two two"): You're not so good with the material but made a good effort, or possibly good with the material and either unlucky or adversely affected by something during the exams.
Third class (3, a "third"): You didn't try hard enough, you're doing the wrong subject, or something just went catastrophically wrong during the exams -- the latter does happen to some unfortunate souls.
The gaps in standard between first and 2.1 and between 2.2 and third are the widest, and the better universities go to some lengths to look at borderline cases and put them the right side of the line.
I don't know how useful a comparison that will be for those of you Stateside who think in terms of GPAs, so by another measure: generally speaking, "serious" employers will look for a 2.1 or above from a good university (perhaps top 10 or top 20 in a relevant subject).
"Elite" employers -- the big banks, management consultancy types, law firms, etc. -- will look for a first, often from one of a small number of very top universities. Then again, that's as much because of the kind of person who tends to get a first as the level of skill or knowledge they have. They're looking for high-flyers.
If you're going on to do a higher degree (masters, PhD, etc.) then you'll be wanting a first, or maybe a good 2.1, depending on subject. In some industries, IT-related ones for example, you'd be mad to do this as a career move, because the extra years of experience in industry are worth much more; you study more because you enjoy the subject and want to research, not to progress your career. In other industries, chemistry for one, anyone serious about their subject has a PhD before they go into industry. The latter subjects tend to be the ones with more industry funding, a higher proportion of people going on to higher degrees, and lower requirements for entry into such studies.
Him: "Can slashdot tell me what I need to get myself boostrapped and productive?"
You: "You know what you need punk? To bootstrap yourself and get to work!"
Sometimes the truth hurts.
This question is kinda like asking how you can reduce your weight and get a model figure, but without cutting out the cream cakes and sodas or taking up regular exercise. It cannot be done. You must simply decide that you want the fitness and physique more than the sodas and sloth, and do something about it.
Same here. You can try all sorts of remedies for it, medicinal, psychological or whatever, but at the end of the day, what's needed is a change of mindset, of philosophy. And there is only one person in the world who can make that change, and nothing in the world that can help him. You can do things to help, to make it a bit easier, but you have to make the big effort or those other things are just a waste of time.
Someone will just put them on Kazaa, and then the copyrights won't matter, just like everything else up there.
It's rather unlikely that anyone would, or could, put the whole of a Usenet archive onto Kazaa. It's even more unlikely that anyone would deliberately single out my own posts. If they did, it's even more unlikely still that those posts would get widely distributed, as most of what I have to say will appeal to a fairly small audience reading the specific newsgroups to which I post. And of course, I am perfectly entitled to use the same legislation as the RIAA and friends to sue anyone who is distributing my work if I really want to, though it's even more unlikely still that I'd bother.
Actually, if you are at all genuinely upset by this, Google lets you remove your postings from their archive.
Sure, if you jump through their hoops and do it for each of the thousands of posts you might have made that are stored in their archive.
This isn't really the point. Personally, I don't dramatically object to having my Usenet posts archived, since I don't post anything there I wouldn't want others to see in future. However, I do object to having my material sold for profit, or to having restrictions imposed on how it may be used by a commercial organisation that has copied it. Google is on shaky legal ground even having it, and their apparent heavy-handedness with the researcher in this case upsets me.
I agree that a lot of this is in your mind. It's like your outlook on life: if you want to be happy, decide that you will see the good things in people and that your glass will be half full, instead of criticising everyone and being pessimistic about every situation. No-one else can make that decision for you.
Lots and lots of people experience this sort of thing while at university. Yes, I did too. I was well known for the unusual hours I kept, and my lack of attendance at lectures where I wasn't convinced about the material and/or the presentation, something else I'm sure many here can relate to. But while I don't want to knock those with a genuine problem, most of the time it's just laziness if we're honest about it. Trying to pin something like laziness on a condition like ADD is a typical cop-out of someone lazy; several such conditions are themselves of dubious scientific validity and believed by many in the business simply to be people making excuses.
Of course, if the laziness is caused by a lack of motivation or a negative outlook, sometimes deciding you want to overcome it is a good start, but doesn't help much with actually overcoming it. Then I find breaking the task down to be helpful. If something seems overwhelming, it's probably because you're trying to jump in at the deep end.
For example, maybe you need to write a complicated piece of code that might wind up hundreds of lines long, and you know what you want it to do but aren't really clear in your mind about how you're going to do it. In that case, try just writing the pseudocode algorithm in comments in your function. If it's going to take several functions, that's OK, write pseudocode for the main one first and then the others as it becomes convenient. Don't worry about details at first, or following any rigorous structure, just figure out the main idea. You can always add more details later if they're helpful. Once you're basically happy with the pseudocode version, start hacking.
Similarly, if you're anything like me, you wind up building up household chores horribly. You know that putting that load of washing through will only take five minutes to put stuff in the machine and another five minutes to take it out again, but somehow it's all too much effort. When this sort of thing happens, I make a list of all the little things I need to do: clothes washing, washing up, hoovering, cleaning in the kitchen, cutting the grass, food shopping, filing bank statements, etc. Then I just pick the items off, one by one. I'll put the washing in, so I've got something started, then wash up or do the garden while it's going, and so on, making best use of the time. When you actually get down to it, you can do a lot of stuff in just a couple of hours, and most individual things only take a few minutes. As with the coding problem, it's just getting over the mental barrier that says it's too much hard work to get started, and (for me, at least) the way to do it is to break a big, unsurmountable problem down into little, manageable ones.
Somehow, finding the motivation to break the big problem down is never as hard as finding the motivation to just attack it without really knowing how. Then solving the little problems is much easier, and once I've started, I've got a plan and know what I need to do next, so I can keep going without losing concentration. I can write hundreds of lines of good code a day like this, or do every piece of housework there is in a single afternoon. Try it, maybe it'll work for you too.:-)
I would have thought you had bigger fish to fry than complain about something that happened 30 years ago [...]
We could point out the number of times he's been arrested/investigated in relation to his oil dealings, the amount of money he was in danger of paying in fines, and the way it all magically stopped when someone appointed by Bush Snr decided that there wasn't sufficient evidence to proceed instead if you like.:-)
Given that Google may well not have a legal leg to stand on making any sort of money out of using posts where copyright is owned by the poster (no, I don't buy the "you've given implicit agreement" arguments for a second, and I'm betting they don't want to risk their whole business finding out whether a court does either) there's an interesting "deal" to be made here.:-)
Technically, Google did not buy Deja, they just bought a bunch of data.
That's interesting... I'm pretty sure I never gave anyone permission to sell my thousands of copyrighted Usenet posts.
Now maybe somebody will notice the flaw in the "archives are great, you and your copyright can get stuffed" arguments. It's OK for Deja to sell my copyrighted material, and for Google to make it available but only under restrictive agreements? Not by me it's not.
I don't get how here in the UK we have a fair system, why does a dvd cost £17 to buy and the video of the same film cost £4 when it is cheaper to burn a dvd than assemble a video.
Why are you paying £17 for DVDs? Just about everywhere has 2-for-1 type offers on, and HMV has a sale on (or at least did last week) where you could pick up many "£20+" DVDs for £7. I have never paid more than £10 for a DVD movie in my life.
If the RIAA can design a nice way of me getting exposed, for free, to new music by new artists to suit my taste of music at a time that is convienient to me then I will stop using p2p in a flash till then sod off.
Um... Yes. That's the point of the "new business models" and "e-billing" and such mentioned in the article. Did you read it yet, BTW?
Better yet, convert to a language that doesn't have every wart from C plus some tumors of its own. Why settle for moving to a different piece of the swamp when you can climb onto dry land?
Because no-one's found dry land yet?:-)
(Yes, there exist languages that are technically superior to C++ and/or have stronger underlying programming models, but none of them yet has the critical mass of users and support, particularly libraries, that C++ has, without compromising some other way.)
I'm sure an assembly code monkey could do better than a c junkie, but I wouldn't know the rankings between the compiled code now-a-days as a desktop programmer.
Possibly, but he'd have to be a very good monkey. Many instruction sets and processor architectures are so complex now that writing things the "intuitive" way in assembler does not yield the optimal result. It takes a lot of specialist knowledge to get a good assembly implementation of non-trivial algorithms on such systems, and the best place for those specialists is... writing compilers. IOWs, Joe C Newbie may well get a better implementation of some common algorithm than the average assembler programmer, because Joe has John C Compiler on his side.
As for C against C++, right now, optimising compilers for C do better than for C++, and hence C is faster than C++-used-as-C, though the gap is closing as C++ optimising compilers catch up. OTOH, C++ has much more potential, principally because it supports higher level constructions like exceptions and polymorphism natively, and because templates are a tool for improving efficiency that C will never match. Overall, well-written C++ that uses the language's features effectively is already faster than similarly well-written C, and the gap is widening.
The paper does heavily advocate DRM, and points out the drawbacks of P2P.
However, it also advocates
new business models for content providers
investigating effective electronic payment alternatives to enable those models
fixing the problems consumers have with their personal data being passed around
fixing the problems consumers have with providers revoking rights inappropriately and other similar issues
codes of practice or other government-enforced regulatory controls on the media industries
the need to balance genuine rights of content providers with genuine rights of consumers, including legal fair use of the material such as the provision for a blind person to have a usable copy of material made for them or making personal copies
and several more relevant and important issues besides.
Read the article, people. It's biased, but it has a lot of good stuff in it too, and it's one of the more balanced proposal documents to come out of any government-related department so far. The number of knee-jerk "DRM ROOT OF ALL EVIL!" responses here is sad, and doesn't do justice to the original paper.
Heh... There was a programme on TV the other night that mentioned people from the UK moving to France. There's one area where the population is now 1/4 British, and guess what? House prices are going through the roof, farms are merging, "The English Shop" selling Heinz beans is in the town centre, and the French are more than a little upset about it. You can take the Brits out of Britain, but you can't take Britain out of the Brits, I guess.
But good luck on your quest for finding a better place. The country is better off without people who see only the bad things going on anyway.
Actually, they make it quite clear in the paper that while they feel DRM is an important part of the broadband equation, it is not the only part. They also consider things like micropayments, one of the better ideas for fixing the current on-line distribution problem, which is more than most of lobby groups seem to be doing. They explicitly say that new business models are required.
I suspect that if they actually promoted an effective micropayment infrastructure and a business model to go with it, this would do a lot more to advance the state of the Internet than just fixing P2P abuse. How many people would download from a legitimate source if they felt the price was fair, and it only took a couple of clicks to get the material they wanted? Probably most, I'm guessing, and so by implementing that they'd probably render the DRM mostly irrelevant anyway. How many people would find the time to self-publish quality content knowing that that effort was going to be rewarded?
This report is obviously biased in favour of the big companies, but it's not nearly as one-sided as many here are making out (presumably without reading it?).
And by the way, in the UK, the system isn't nearly as broken as in the US. CDs are overpriced, but DVDs and computer games are generally pretty fair. For example, I picked up two whole series of programmes a couple of weeks ago in genuine box sets for under £100, which comes out at well under £2/episode. I consider that a fair price, and paid accordingly. Deals where buying two or three DVDs at once brings the price of movies way down are also found in many shops.
The vast majority of members on the full list appear not to be in the content provision business. They're mostly infrastructure, broadband ISPs, government reps and the like.
Hate to break it to you guys, but the UK has no "broadband boom". The vast, vast majority of Internet users in the UK are still on dial-up. A couple of the really big ISPs now claim over a million broadband subscribers, but when you check the figures, they're including things like 128K cable modems in that -- the figures look at "always on" connections, not bandwidth per se. Real, genuine broadband (of the killer P2P calibre, for example) makes up single figures of percent of the UK Internet presence, and much of that is via universities linked to JANet.
Incidentally, I'd love to have broadband for its always-on nature, to play on-line games, and because in the last six months I've downloaded plenty of legitimate but large packages: Mozilla (three versions), OpenOffice, MySQL, Perl+Apache, MinGW, etc. These take forever on a modem, and require download management software just to protect you if the line drops after 75% of the download is complete. I have little interest in downloading music or movies.
I agree with you entirely that it's necessary to judge the system as a whole.
My problem is that right now, today, and any time for the foreseeable future, we do live in a capitalist society. Maybe some time in my lifetime an event will take place that is so momentous as to turn it into a "from each according to his ability, unto each according to his need" society. Maybe we'll abandon class, fix world poverty, bring down the old boy networks in government, cure cancer and visit Mars. I'd like to think so.
But until then, we have to live in the real world, and rightly or wrongly, the real world doesn't reward "just good intentions". If people like me don't defend our way of life, this is not going to lead to a socialist revolution. On the contrary, it's going to lead to a culture where few people can afford to produce the high quality products that require time, investment and genuine hard work. I don't want to live in that world, and I doubt any of the kids we're talking about do either.
I'm afraid I just can't see wanton copyright infringement as some sort of noble cause in a quest for a better society. To me, it's still just greedy and illegal, and I'd be surprised if even 1/10 of the people doing have given the slightest thought to the issues you raise.
There are a lot of people who only pirate that which they wouldn't buy even if they couldn't pirate it, usually due to unreasonably high prices.
But if you don't buy it, you have no right to use it. You couldn't claim any other product or service in the world without paying what's asked for it; if you don't pay, you don't get. You can't walk into a car dealership, tell them that Zonda is unreasonably highly priced, and just take it anyway. You can't walk into a lawyer's or financial adviser's office and demand they give you their expertise at $5/hr because their advertised rates aren't fair. Why should software be any different, just because it's technically possibly to rip it?
I'm not that angry really, but I find it offensive when people essentially put themselves above the law and then try to morally justify it as though ripping CDs over P2P is some sort of quest for freedom, justice and the American way. It's just breaking the law for personal benefit, guys. If you're going to be a crook, at least be an honest one.
I'm a professional software developer. As such, I see where copyright comes from and why it is necessary. My colleagues and I work very hard to produce a range of specialist mathematical products that are generally well regarded in their fields. It takes a lot of people a lot of hard work to design, implement and test the algorithms we use, the things that make our products as good as they are.
Now, we sell these products, sometimes in compiled form and sometimes with source code available, to get some return on that investment. We also provide ongoing support packages, which many of our customers pay for. In exchange, they get very fast bug fixes (often within 24 hours) and various other perks. We think we sell these things at a fair price, and apparently customers all over the world agree with us.
Now, if the "information wants to be free" crowd think that we should just give our work away, I want to know why. It took teams of very clever people years of work to design the main algorithms and techniques behind our products. This isn't knowledge that "already existed" and was just "discovered", it was designed and constructed by a process like any physical product. Given that all of these people have invested years of their time doing the research to get to this point, what right has some teenager across the pond (or some big corp, for that matter) to benefit from our work without compensating us for our efforts?
Obviously, this is a personal perspective on why copyright is a good thing, but it's one shared by a whole industry. Even free software (in the GPL sense) relies on copyright to keep it free (in the GPL sense). And yet here we have a whole generation of kids, at least in the Slashbot community, who think copyright is wrong, because they haven't stopped to think why it's there and where it comes from. All they see is that it is a threat to them copying other people's music and movies and games and Microsoft software, and thus they join in the "all information must be freed!" chant.
There are problems with the music and movie and software industries as they currently stand, particularly in the US. I don't deny that; indeed, I think it is essential that those problems be addressed. But the problems are because of abusive businesses practices, monopolistic tendencies and cartel-like behaviour. The principle of copyright is sound (even if the US government don't seem to understand it in practice), but if we let a whole generation of kids grow up against it without really even knowing why, then all hell will break loose when that generation are the ones making the rules. Thus I believe in a vigorous defence of the principle of copyright, and constantly try to steer people around to attacking the real problems (monopoly abuse, corrupt government selling out to the corps, etc.) rather than the nearest fall guy (copyright). It's not anger, it's simply the principle of doing the right thing for the right reason.
You need to do a course in basic economics. You are making crude, emotional arguments that do not scale. Fortunately, the people who make and enforce the laws in this area have more perspective.
Of course, if the information is omnipresent, you won't need to go and rip someone else's professionally designed software anyway, because you'll just be able to make something similar yourself with no effort, right? After all, information is universal, isn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for a thoughtful reply.
To address your book analogy quickly first, the difference there is that in the case of a book, you've presumed acquired the right to have that book, by buying it, borrowing it from a library or otherwise. When you paid for it, you bought the right to keep it. So did the library when they bought their copy (and they can lend out the copy they bought, but not copy it again themselves and lend out multiple copies from one original). The whole issue isn't really directly comparable to pure information resources such as Usenet posts.
You don't see a problem with the idea that I invested my time to write something, offered it to the general public for free, and now someone else is taking my material, using it for to profit and restricting how it's accessible via their system, without giving me any compensation or, realistically, much chance to do a whole lot about it?
There's more to this than potential financial damages. At issue is whether I have the right to control copying of my information, the whole purpose of copyright. As anyone who's ever been involved in a GPL project can tell you, there are more reasons you might want to control the fruits of your labours and how they may be used than financial gain. As I've argued here many times before, you should have that right, because you invested the time and effort to produce the material. No-one who didn't has any right to claim that "information wants to be free" just so they can benefit from your work without offering anything in return, or use your work in a way that you do not like.
If information has no value, and good free alternative sources are always available, and all the other mantras of the "make it free" community are true, then they have no need to use your offering, do they? They can just use their own version, or find a free and equally good source elsewhere. Oh, but wait... They can't, can they?
BTW, my probs with Mozilla relate to how the page renders; it often draws the sidebar too wide, or forgets to draw the main column of text at all. A quick resize of the font fixes that, BTW, so the page is downloading properly but sometimes rendering incorrectly first time out.
I appreciate the distinction you're making here, but aren't the rights to a database usually relevant in cases where the data itself is trivial, such as the phone directory you mentioned? Phone numbers aren't themselves subject to copyright. In this case, I fail to see how wrapping up my posts as part of a database would make them any more legal to copy than if they were copied as separate entities, and it is the morality and legality of that copy being made that I am questioning.
I challenge that "sensible legal view". When people post to Usenet, they typically expect posts to be distributed freely around the system for a short time period after the post is made, and then to expire. Archiving is a somewhat dicey proposition, since it was neither the original purpose of Usenet nor something provided for within its normal protocols, but you could possibly make a case for it on public interest grounds. I'm not sure what effect (or otherwise) I think the "x-no-archive" header should have here.
However, archiving for profit, selling on databases of others' copyrighted material for profit, restricting the access to the data by providing an interface to it but then banning certain uses under the ToS, and other practices employed by Deja/Google are much less clear. I'm afraid how I don't see that they are just distributing material copyrighted by others, without permission, for profit.
Are you really a lawyer, BTW? If so, what is your level of experience in this field? Is you assessment of the "sensible legal view" based on case law, statute law, or just professional opinion?
Immaturity and/or denial mostly, I think. The mindset seems to be shifting from "Everything should be free!" through "I shouldn't have to pay for anything!" to "I shouldn't have to work for anything!". It appears those who disagree now have "overrated" opinions. But the dictionary is still the only place where "success" comes before "work", and sooner or later reality will bite...
In the UK, there are typically four grades you can get when passing an undergraduate honours degree (i.e., a typical university degree). In decreasing order of merit:
The gaps in standard between first and 2.1 and between 2.2 and third are the widest, and the better universities go to some lengths to look at borderline cases and put them the right side of the line.
I don't know how useful a comparison that will be for those of you Stateside who think in terms of GPAs, so by another measure: generally speaking, "serious" employers will look for a 2.1 or above from a good university (perhaps top 10 or top 20 in a relevant subject).
"Elite" employers -- the big banks, management consultancy types, law firms, etc. -- will look for a first, often from one of a small number of very top universities. Then again, that's as much because of the kind of person who tends to get a first as the level of skill or knowledge they have. They're looking for high-flyers.
If you're going on to do a higher degree (masters, PhD, etc.) then you'll be wanting a first, or maybe a good 2.1, depending on subject. In some industries, IT-related ones for example, you'd be mad to do this as a career move, because the extra years of experience in industry are worth much more; you study more because you enjoy the subject and want to research, not to progress your career. In other industries, chemistry for one, anyone serious about their subject has a PhD before they go into industry. The latter subjects tend to be the ones with more industry funding, a higher proportion of people going on to higher degrees, and lower requirements for entry into such studies.
Sometimes the truth hurts.
This question is kinda like asking how you can reduce your weight and get a model figure, but without cutting out the cream cakes and sodas or taking up regular exercise. It cannot be done. You must simply decide that you want the fitness and physique more than the sodas and sloth, and do something about it.
Same here. You can try all sorts of remedies for it, medicinal, psychological or whatever, but at the end of the day, what's needed is a change of mindset, of philosophy. And there is only one person in the world who can make that change, and nothing in the world that can help him. You can do things to help, to make it a bit easier, but you have to make the big effort or those other things are just a waste of time.
It's rather unlikely that anyone would, or could, put the whole of a Usenet archive onto Kazaa. It's even more unlikely that anyone would deliberately single out my own posts. If they did, it's even more unlikely still that those posts would get widely distributed, as most of what I have to say will appeal to a fairly small audience reading the specific newsgroups to which I post. And of course, I am perfectly entitled to use the same legislation as the RIAA and friends to sue anyone who is distributing my work if I really want to, though it's even more unlikely still that I'd bother.
Sure, if you jump through their hoops and do it for each of the thousands of posts you might have made that are stored in their archive.
This isn't really the point. Personally, I don't dramatically object to having my Usenet posts archived, since I don't post anything there I wouldn't want others to see in future. However, I do object to having my material sold for profit, or to having restrictions imposed on how it may be used by a commercial organisation that has copied it. Google is on shaky legal ground even having it, and their apparent heavy-handedness with the researcher in this case upsets me.
I agree that a lot of this is in your mind. It's like your outlook on life: if you want to be happy, decide that you will see the good things in people and that your glass will be half full, instead of criticising everyone and being pessimistic about every situation. No-one else can make that decision for you.
Lots and lots of people experience this sort of thing while at university. Yes, I did too. I was well known for the unusual hours I kept, and my lack of attendance at lectures where I wasn't convinced about the material and/or the presentation, something else I'm sure many here can relate to. But while I don't want to knock those with a genuine problem, most of the time it's just laziness if we're honest about it. Trying to pin something like laziness on a condition like ADD is a typical cop-out of someone lazy; several such conditions are themselves of dubious scientific validity and believed by many in the business simply to be people making excuses.
Of course, if the laziness is caused by a lack of motivation or a negative outlook, sometimes deciding you want to overcome it is a good start, but doesn't help much with actually overcoming it. Then I find breaking the task down to be helpful. If something seems overwhelming, it's probably because you're trying to jump in at the deep end.
For example, maybe you need to write a complicated piece of code that might wind up hundreds of lines long, and you know what you want it to do but aren't really clear in your mind about how you're going to do it. In that case, try just writing the pseudocode algorithm in comments in your function. If it's going to take several functions, that's OK, write pseudocode for the main one first and then the others as it becomes convenient. Don't worry about details at first, or following any rigorous structure, just figure out the main idea. You can always add more details later if they're helpful. Once you're basically happy with the pseudocode version, start hacking.
Similarly, if you're anything like me, you wind up building up household chores horribly. You know that putting that load of washing through will only take five minutes to put stuff in the machine and another five minutes to take it out again, but somehow it's all too much effort. When this sort of thing happens, I make a list of all the little things I need to do: clothes washing, washing up, hoovering, cleaning in the kitchen, cutting the grass, food shopping, filing bank statements, etc. Then I just pick the items off, one by one. I'll put the washing in, so I've got something started, then wash up or do the garden while it's going, and so on, making best use of the time. When you actually get down to it, you can do a lot of stuff in just a couple of hours, and most individual things only take a few minutes. As with the coding problem, it's just getting over the mental barrier that says it's too much hard work to get started, and (for me, at least) the way to do it is to break a big, unsurmountable problem down into little, manageable ones.
Somehow, finding the motivation to break the big problem down is never as hard as finding the motivation to just attack it without really knowing how. Then solving the little problems is much easier, and once I've started, I've got a plan and know what I need to do next, so I can keep going without losing concentration. I can write hundreds of lines of good code a day like this, or do every piece of housework there is in a single afternoon. Try it, maybe it'll work for you too. :-)
We could point out the number of times he's been arrested/investigated in relation to his oil dealings, the amount of money he was in danger of paying in fines, and the way it all magically stopped when someone appointed by Bush Snr decided that there wasn't sufficient evidence to proceed instead if you like. :-)
Hey... Cunning thought... <ahem> DMCA... <ahem> subpoena... <ahem>
Given that Google may well not have a legal leg to stand on making any sort of money out of using posts where copyright is owned by the poster (no, I don't buy the "you've given implicit agreement" arguments for a second, and I'm betting they don't want to risk their whole business finding out whether a court does either) there's an interesting "deal" to be made here. :-)
That's interesting... I'm pretty sure I never gave anyone permission to sell my thousands of copyrighted Usenet posts.
Now maybe somebody will notice the flaw in the "archives are great, you and your copyright can get stuffed" arguments. It's OK for Deja to sell my copyrighted material, and for Google to make it available but only under restrictive agreements? Not by me it's not.
Why are you paying £17 for DVDs? Just about everywhere has 2-for-1 type offers on, and HMV has a sale on (or at least did last week) where you could pick up many "£20+" DVDs for £7. I have never paid more than £10 for a DVD movie in my life.
Um... Yes. That's the point of the "new business models" and "e-billing" and such mentioned in the article. Did you read it yet, BTW?
Satirical, but well paid nonetheless. ;-)
Because no-one's found dry land yet? :-)
(Yes, there exist languages that are technically superior to C++ and/or have stronger underlying programming models, but none of them yet has the critical mass of users and support, particularly libraries, that C++ has, without compromising some other way.)
Possibly, but he'd have to be a very good monkey. Many instruction sets and processor architectures are so complex now that writing things the "intuitive" way in assembler does not yield the optimal result. It takes a lot of specialist knowledge to get a good assembly implementation of non-trivial algorithms on such systems, and the best place for those specialists is... writing compilers. IOWs, Joe C Newbie may well get a better implementation of some common algorithm than the average assembler programmer, because Joe has John C Compiler on his side.
As for C against C++, right now, optimising compilers for C do better than for C++, and hence C is faster than C++-used-as-C, though the gap is closing as C++ optimising compilers catch up. OTOH, C++ has much more potential, principally because it supports higher level constructions like exceptions and polymorphism natively, and because templates are a tool for improving efficiency that C will never match. Overall, well-written C++ that uses the language's features effectively is already faster than similarly well-written C, and the gap is widening.
You know, if I honestly believed that most people were ripping content for the reasons you've given, I'd be much happier with them doing it.
Good luck to you in your quest to build a better world. You're going to need it, but don't let that stop you trying.
The paper does heavily advocate DRM, and points out the drawbacks of P2P.
However, it also advocates
and several more relevant and important issues besides.
Read the article, people. It's biased, but it has a lot of good stuff in it too, and it's one of the more balanced proposal documents to come out of any government-related department so far. The number of knee-jerk "DRM ROOT OF ALL EVIL!" responses here is sad, and doesn't do justice to the original paper.
Heh... There was a programme on TV the other night that mentioned people from the UK moving to France. There's one area where the population is now 1/4 British, and guess what? House prices are going through the roof, farms are merging, "The English Shop" selling Heinz beans is in the town centre, and the French are more than a little upset about it. You can take the Brits out of Britain, but you can't take Britain out of the Brits, I guess.
But good luck on your quest for finding a better place. The country is better off without people who see only the bad things going on anyway.
Actually, they make it quite clear in the paper that while they feel DRM is an important part of the broadband equation, it is not the only part. They also consider things like micropayments, one of the better ideas for fixing the current on-line distribution problem, which is more than most of lobby groups seem to be doing. They explicitly say that new business models are required.
I suspect that if they actually promoted an effective micropayment infrastructure and a business model to go with it, this would do a lot more to advance the state of the Internet than just fixing P2P abuse. How many people would download from a legitimate source if they felt the price was fair, and it only took a couple of clicks to get the material they wanted? Probably most, I'm guessing, and so by implementing that they'd probably render the DRM mostly irrelevant anyway. How many people would find the time to self-publish quality content knowing that that effort was going to be rewarded?
This report is obviously biased in favour of the big companies, but it's not nearly as one-sided as many here are making out (presumably without reading it?).
And by the way, in the UK, the system isn't nearly as broken as in the US. CDs are overpriced, but DVDs and computer games are generally pretty fair. For example, I picked up two whole series of programmes a couple of weeks ago in genuine box sets for under £100, which comes out at well under £2/episode. I consider that a fair price, and paid accordingly. Deals where buying two or three DVDs at once brings the price of movies way down are also found in many shops.
The vast majority of members on the full list appear not to be in the content provision business. They're mostly infrastructure, broadband ISPs, government reps and the like.
Hate to break it to you guys, but the UK has no "broadband boom". The vast, vast majority of Internet users in the UK are still on dial-up. A couple of the really big ISPs now claim over a million broadband subscribers, but when you check the figures, they're including things like 128K cable modems in that -- the figures look at "always on" connections, not bandwidth per se. Real, genuine broadband (of the killer P2P calibre, for example) makes up single figures of percent of the UK Internet presence, and much of that is via universities linked to JANet.
Incidentally, I'd love to have broadband for its always-on nature, to play on-line games, and because in the last six months I've downloaded plenty of legitimate but large packages: Mozilla (three versions), OpenOffice, MySQL, Perl+Apache, MinGW, etc. These take forever on a modem, and require download management software just to protect you if the line drops after 75% of the download is complete. I have little interest in downloading music or movies.
I agree with you entirely that it's necessary to judge the system as a whole.
My problem is that right now, today, and any time for the foreseeable future, we do live in a capitalist society. Maybe some time in my lifetime an event will take place that is so momentous as to turn it into a "from each according to his ability, unto each according to his need" society. Maybe we'll abandon class, fix world poverty, bring down the old boy networks in government, cure cancer and visit Mars. I'd like to think so.
But until then, we have to live in the real world, and rightly or wrongly, the real world doesn't reward "just good intentions". If people like me don't defend our way of life, this is not going to lead to a socialist revolution. On the contrary, it's going to lead to a culture where few people can afford to produce the high quality products that require time, investment and genuine hard work. I don't want to live in that world, and I doubt any of the kids we're talking about do either.
I'm afraid I just can't see wanton copyright infringement as some sort of noble cause in a quest for a better society. To me, it's still just greedy and illegal, and I'd be surprised if even 1/10 of the people doing have given the slightest thought to the issues you raise.
But if you don't buy it, you have no right to use it. You couldn't claim any other product or service in the world without paying what's asked for it; if you don't pay, you don't get. You can't walk into a car dealership, tell them that Zonda is unreasonably highly priced, and just take it anyway. You can't walk into a lawyer's or financial adviser's office and demand they give you their expertise at $5/hr because their advertised rates aren't fair. Why should software be any different, just because it's technically possibly to rip it?
I'm not that angry really, but I find it offensive when people essentially put themselves above the law and then try to morally justify it as though ripping CDs over P2P is some sort of quest for freedom, justice and the American way. It's just breaking the law for personal benefit, guys. If you're going to be a crook, at least be an honest one.
I'm a professional software developer. As such, I see where copyright comes from and why it is necessary. My colleagues and I work very hard to produce a range of specialist mathematical products that are generally well regarded in their fields. It takes a lot of people a lot of hard work to design, implement and test the algorithms we use, the things that make our products as good as they are.
Now, we sell these products, sometimes in compiled form and sometimes with source code available, to get some return on that investment. We also provide ongoing support packages, which many of our customers pay for. In exchange, they get very fast bug fixes (often within 24 hours) and various other perks. We think we sell these things at a fair price, and apparently customers all over the world agree with us.
Now, if the "information wants to be free" crowd think that we should just give our work away, I want to know why. It took teams of very clever people years of work to design the main algorithms and techniques behind our products. This isn't knowledge that "already existed" and was just "discovered", it was designed and constructed by a process like any physical product. Given that all of these people have invested years of their time doing the research to get to this point, what right has some teenager across the pond (or some big corp, for that matter) to benefit from our work without compensating us for our efforts?
Obviously, this is a personal perspective on why copyright is a good thing, but it's one shared by a whole industry. Even free software (in the GPL sense) relies on copyright to keep it free (in the GPL sense). And yet here we have a whole generation of kids, at least in the Slashbot community, who think copyright is wrong, because they haven't stopped to think why it's there and where it comes from. All they see is that it is a threat to them copying other people's music and movies and games and Microsoft software, and thus they join in the "all information must be freed!" chant.
There are problems with the music and movie and software industries as they currently stand, particularly in the US. I don't deny that; indeed, I think it is essential that those problems be addressed. But the problems are because of abusive businesses practices, monopolistic tendencies and cartel-like behaviour. The principle of copyright is sound (even if the US government don't seem to understand it in practice), but if we let a whole generation of kids grow up against it without really even knowing why, then all hell will break loose when that generation are the ones making the rules. Thus I believe in a vigorous defence of the principle of copyright, and constantly try to steer people around to attacking the real problems (monopoly abuse, corrupt government selling out to the corps, etc.) rather than the nearest fall guy (copyright). It's not anger, it's simply the principle of doing the right thing for the right reason.
You need to do a course in basic economics. You are making crude, emotional arguments that do not scale. Fortunately, the people who make and enforce the laws in this area have more perspective.
Of course, if the information is omnipresent, you won't need to go and rip someone else's professionally designed software anyway, because you'll just be able to make something similar yourself with no effort, right? After all, information is universal, isn't it?