Finally, a few hundred posts later, someone gets it!:-)
Your average ten year old is unlikely to care about any of Python, Perl, Java, PHP, VB, etc. etc. etc.
Your average ten year old want to have some fun. Let them play with a dead simple language that does funky graphics easily.
The best computer book I ever had when I was younger was a load of type-it-yourself games for BBC BASIC. (OK, that was too grown up, I only had an Electron, but that's not the point.:-)) I programmed space invaders and such out of the book, and then messed around changing things.
The next best thing was when my dad introduced me to Fractals. I didn't understand the maths much yet, but I could program what he showed me for that, and then make it look pretty. This was waaaaay before Fractint came along!:-)
Kids want to have fun. They want to draw pretty pictures, or make noises, or play games (graphical or otherwise -- good ol' text adventures and word games are cool too). They don't want to write the next database front end for a web app.
Did anyone think of POV-Ray, BTW? Lots of fun, simple to use, makes pretty pictures. Might be a bit frustrating if they're not up to the geometry yet, though. Maybe better for mid-teens, who'll understand enough about the camera and lights to see why their output is totally black the first time they run anything...
While I totally understand where your frustration comes from, not everywhere is like that.
Fortunately, it's a happy coincidence that a well-treated workforce is a more effective workforce. Keeping your staff sweet isn't just good manners, it's also good business. By cutting you down to only one week of leave, your employer has all but guaranteed a burnt-out workforce who will repeatedly take sickies within months, until they all quit because of the stress anyway. Even if they stick it out, they'll be out the door in a heartbeat when the market picks up.
The smart employer looks at ways to improve things for their staff as a priority. Happy staff are productive staff, and benefits follow. Some perks are effectively free if your working conditions don't prevent them: flexitime and pillow days come to mind. A few extra days of leave each year, or a $100 bonus to everyone in the product team when the release goes out, do cost, but they pay back many times over.
Although you seem to have had a particularly bad experience, there are smart employers in the world. The workforce owe it to themselves to go find the smart employers, so they can be more successful than the stupid ones, who will then go out of business, improving the overall smartness of management by evolution.:-)
Unless your work is very specialized, you are easily replaced.
One individual in a large team, maybe. A large team with thousands of man-hours invested in a given project? Not likely. The company could never replace the collective experience it lost, and even a replacement project team of the smartest hackers in the world would be hard pressed to catch up for months.
And, you would be replaced with cheaper labor too.
If there was cheaper labour around who could do the same job just as well, wouldn't the company already have hired them instead? I thought you had "at will" employment in the US?
On top of that, you will most likely take a pay cut in your next job
If this sort of stuff is happening, then (a) it's probably worth a mild pay cut to get out if necessary, and (b) within a few months you aren't likely to have much of a job where you are anyway.
I've seen this before. Typically, in companies that survive, a few good people leave, management wakes up to the fact that conditions are not acceptable to the workforce and those who remain get an improvement in pay and/or conditions that is enough for them to stay. If management doesn't wake up fast enough, too many good people go, and the project fails.
And if the entity took actions permitted by the contract (e.g., "adding, deleteing, removing, or copying files".. that quotes probably wrong, it's been awhile since I read the EULA) then you would be asking the court to punish the entity for acting in a way permitted by the "contract". They probably wouldn't be willing to do that.
I wouldn't be so quick to judge the courts everywhere. For example, if you crack into someone else's system in the UK, you're committing a crime under the Computer Misuse Act 1990. This makes separate provisions for unauthorised access to data, changing of data, etc.
Suppose Big Bad Software Inc. sell me some kit with an automatic update facility, and write into an EULA that I grant them permission to change files on my computer. Suppose they then use that automatic update facility to remove software supplied by one of their competitors instead.
I suspect that would be a hard thing to back up in court. They'd have to prove that the changes were authorised, for a start, and if the feature was marketed as an automatic update facility, I'd be interested to know whether a court would uphold the claim to be authorised just because of smallprint in the EULA, particularly if it's of the ninety-page-of-smallprint click-I-accept-on-install variety.
Thanks, I couldn't remember the legal term for the concept.
The catch is that it's nontrivial to prove that you didn't understand a contract which you signed.
That is certainly true. It's kinda hard to see how you could understand and consent to a contract by opening some shrinkwrap, when the text of that contract is within a box inside the shrinkwrap, though...
The funny part is stores in most of Europe can't display the VAT tax separately, because your government is afraid if you saw how much tax you paid every day on necessities, you'd rebel in 6 months.
Actually, most receipts today do show the tax figure.
Oh, and if you think we don't rebel when taxes get truly absurd, come visit next time a European country is up in arms over petrol taxes.:-)
Back in reality, Customs can and do stop parcels and insist you tell them what's in it. However, they ignore most of the stuff for private citizens and only go after the stuff for companies.
Unfortunately, that's not always the case. One of my friends found this out the hard way, when she ordered a whole load of cosmetics from a supplier in Australia, where they were selling considerably cheaper than the UK. She was told that what she was paying the supplier covered everything including charges for getting the stuff to the UK, but then got hit with an extra tax bill running to several figures when the stuff arrived.
Why does it matter if the ferrari company goes out of business?
In some ways, it doesn't, though obviously there are negative impacts for society when any business goes under: unemployment, investors losing out, etc. Moreover, if Ferrari goes under because someone else was making a cheap and inferior knock-off, then you have now caused a high quality product to become unavailable. None of this is desirable.
What is really needed is legislation that protects an end user's basic rights before an EULA is even drawn up - a law that states clearly that an EULA cannot revoke the very basic privileges available to all consumers (somehow software seems exempt, as vendors are able to drastically limit rights in coniving ways, such as hiding the EULA within the shrink wrap. Such under-handed techniques are not allowed in the sale of most other products).
In several Western countries, you cannot legally sign away your basic rights. It doesn't matter what the vendors put in a contract, EULA or any other document, how much you pay for it or what you have to sign. Those rights are yours, and a court will ignore any documentation that doesn't respect that.
This is why you find disclaimers in things like EULAs that if one part is found not to hold, the rest still does, etc. It's also why big businesses like Microsoft are terrified of a serious test case that might establish a precedent that EULAs have no legal weight because of the way they are set up. The net effect is that they rely on threats of legal action to get what the EULA would seek to secure for them, because it's the best chance they've got in most places and they know it.
This is not to say that you should flagrantly ignore things you know to be in an EULA unless you want to play dice with the courts. But you're pretty safe in ignoring any unreasonable conditions, because it's about a 110% certainty that they won't be legally enforceable anyway.
No, I'm not a lawyer, this isn't legal advice, and Slashdot is not the place for serious legal discussion. But use your common sense: no court is going to uphold something as manifestly unreasonable as a contract you supposedly agree to before you even have chance to read it. In fact, some places even have laws to the effect that if you can't reasonably be expected to understand a contract, you can't legally have entered into it. Not sure EULAs would fall within that, but it would be an interesting case...
The EVLA says "
4. Anything I make with my own computer is my property, and you cannot use if in any form."
Isn't restricting their use of conditional logic a little bit extreme?
It's a security drive. The well-known if programming construct is old-fashioned, and therefore a security risk. Instead, you are now required to do everything via polymorphism and virtual methods. That way the form doesn't matter, you see...
I help run a fairly large club (2,000 members) that has a publicity drive every 3-4 months, during which time we print something like 20,000 flyers, brochures, etc. in various formats. We also print quite a lot of lower volume things: tickets, certificates, etc.
We've investigated this area in some depth, and concluded that for the high volume stuff, it's much cheaper to use an external print shop if other practicalities permit. There are several around and they're quite competitive for the sort of business we could give them, so deals to reduce cost are quite plausible, and the service is generally pretty good. If you're printing thousands of pages, but not every day, I'd certainly recommend finding yourself a good local print shop to work with. (This is based in the UK, BTW; obviously YMMV elsewhere.)
For smaller volume work, using your own printer is much more cost effective, since you don't have the same level of overheads, and it's easier to tweak things if you need to. I guess this would be true of colour work as well, from what I've seen, but we only do B&W ourselves.
For really high volume work (thousands of pages per day) it can make sense to get your own serious kit and do everything in-house, but you're practically running your own print shop by that stage. Your requirements are similar to ours, though, so I'd guess this is overkill for you too.
Read the damn links. Everything you mention is covered, clearly and pretty unambiguously, in the two fairly short articles cited.
In summary, though, lots of current and ex-employees of Foundstone are backing up claims that the guys at the top had wholesale software piracy going on in-house. This partly came to light as a result of going after another company, started by one former employee and now including several more, that developed a product in the same industry in a time that, according to Foundstone guys, wasn't possible without stealing their vitally important trade secrets. Except that they forgot to say what those secrets were, the other company's product was much smaller scale than the mainstream corporate offering from Foundstone, and most of the info is likely to have been freely available or at least widely known in the business, and not trade secret at all anyway. As a result of this lot, the judge who initially forbade the other company from shipping their product lifted that injunction a month or so later on the basis that there was basically nothing but someone from Foundstone's say-so that anything was wrong.
Do you know how capitalism works? Capitalism is based on supply and demand, not price fixing. IF customers arent willing to pay more than $1000, this means Ferraris should cost $1000, PERIOD.
You don't know much about either capitalism or economics, do you? The market price is a function of the desires of both the vendor and the buyer. It's a compromise, an agreement of terms for mutual perceived benefit. It's not one-sided whatever-the-customer-says-goes any more than it should be one-sided whatever-the-vendor-says-goes. If either party is unhappy with a price then there is no deal. (This is not the same as "if either party is unhappy with the price, they are free to break the law and rip the other one off".)
The Ferrari company shouldnt be able to set the price to $100,000 and then sue anyone who builds their own Ferrari look alike and sells that.
If you built an inferior Ferrari lookalike and marketed it as a Ferrari, that would be damaging to Ferrari, whose efforts to develop a quality product have resulted in a valued brand name. If you did your own R&D, invested your own money in producing an original and attractive design, and then built a motor car of comparable specs, you can sell it for whatever you wish. But then, of course, you won't be able to sell it for $1000 any more than Ferrari could, because you, too, would have had to put something into developing it before you reaped the profits.
Ferrari have every right to offer their cars for sale at $100,000. If someone thinks that's a fair price, they can agree to buy one. If not, they're under no obligation. There is no price fixing there.
I didn't say anything about the terms "theft" or "piracy". I used the term "criminal", as in, "one who breaks the law". That is an unambigous word, both legally and in common usage, and is entirely appropriate in this context. Whether or not you agree that those are good laws does not change the fact that these people are breaking them.
You're attacking straw men, just like the original post to which I objected.
Far from me to compare IP law to what did the nazi during WW2, but...
...you're going to do it anyway? How surprising. Because making comparisons between wholesale abuse of basic human rights during one of the blackest periods of recent history and the abuse of intellectual property laws by complex monopolies resulting in prices for certain non-essential consumable items being higher than some people would like is obviously justified and a winning argument.
You have a moral responsibility to obey the laws of your country where they are reasonable, and to follow the law while seeking change where you think that they are not. Breaking the law would be justified in cases as unreasonable as the one you mentioned, but that's kinda in a different league.
And if you're so interested in the problems with IP right now, may I suggest that you start by considering whether the problem is the principle of intellectual property, or a combination of a government that doesn't represent the interests of its citizens, the demonstrated incompetence of the USPTO, and the unchecked abusive behaviour by a complex monopoly of big players in the recording industry effectively involved in a price fixing racket.
Or do you think that 1/6th of Americans, every single one of which is wealthy enough to own a computer, never buys CDs?
Ah, I see. It's OK to pay the prices asked for CDs, but only if you want to. That makes much more sense, then, being a position that supports neither the legal nor the liberal positions in this debate.
Calling something criminal is just a language trick, designed to end debate with an emotional statement.
No, calling them criminals is a statement of fact. In most democracies, we choose a government to represent our interests by making laws, and we follow those laws as a means of getting on with one another. If you break those laws, you are a criminal, and it's as simple as that. You may not agree with those laws, and there are means to advocate change if you disagree with them, but that doesn't change what words like "illegal" or "criminal" mean.
Responses like yours, attacking the words people use rather than the substance behind them, yet finishing with a random bout of name-calling, are the things soliciting emotional responses.
If a new band wants to give away some or all of their music, that is entirely up to them, and they have every right to do so as far as I'm concerned. If they're smart enough to use P2P or other technology to get their name known, get more gigs or whatever then good for them, they deserve the benefits they'll receive.
But on the flip side, you only have to know a few people who are professional musicians to see how much effort they put in. We're talking about the kind of people who play gigs in local clubs and bars for their basic income, and support that with sales of CDs and such where they play. Don't you think these guys, just trying to make a living, deserve a bit of credit for the effort they make?
And yet more than once in recent months, people I know personally who play in bands have found their own music ripped right off a CD someone's bought and shoved onto P2P. These aren't big bucks megacorps, they're family men trying to support wives and kids, or young people trying to save up to buy their first home. Tell me that P2P isn't hurting them.
No, I have no proof I can put in a post here that this is the case, and yes, you have to be wary of random anecdotes in a thread like this. But aside from being a shill for some megacorp -- and anyone who cares to check my posting history is likely to figure out the truth of that one pretty quickly -- what motivation would I have to make this up?
It always amazes me when posts like this actually sound like they really do believe what they're saying, that ideas and culture, yes, your very mind is a product that is bought and sold and that's the way it should be.
Nowhere in my post did I contend anything of the sort. I explained why it is, at present, the way your society works in the US.
Basically, it comes down to the fact that a few people over there are very vocal about their rights, constitutional or otherwise, but do more or less jack to defend them. The rest of you don't even care enough to express an opinion. Your electoral system became the laughing stock of the world the last time you elected a president, for more than one reason.
Money doesn't elect politicians, votes do. If your country collectively cared enough about the way it was being treated by big business to vote accordingly, you'd see a change. Until then, your collective laziness is the reason your rights are being trampled, and you have no-one to blame but yourselves.
I feel genuinely sorry for the small minority of you -- at least that is what it seems to be from my experience -- who genuinely do care about this sort of thing, and make an effort to change things. But until that small minority becomes a majority, things will stay screwed up.
The question is how often does this happen. It doesn't seem to be very much in the US at present, at least in the big cases. In the UK, in contrast, it's common for the losing party in a case to wind up paying costs for both sides. That's a great disincentive for the idiots with lots of money but no case, who'll sue anyway hoping to force a settlement because the defendants can't afford to risk fighting in court. Now if only we had punitive damages, so a sufficiently high court could fine a company all of its profits * 1.5 when it does something scummy in the interests of lining its pockets...
Slashdot Mirror
And, as I've now pointed out three times, that still doesn't mean legislation of the type advocated above is unlikely to help them.
Maybe not in an American court of law. But as you note yourself, this would not be the case in many other places.
Moreover, if this is true in the US, then the legislation proposed by the post to which I responded wouldn't help at all either.
Finally, a few hundred posts later, someone gets it! :-)
Your average ten year old is unlikely to care about any of Python, Perl, Java, PHP, VB, etc. etc. etc.
Your average ten year old want to have some fun. Let them play with a dead simple language that does funky graphics easily.
The best computer book I ever had when I was younger was a load of type-it-yourself games for BBC BASIC. (OK, that was too grown up, I only had an Electron, but that's not the point. :-)) I programmed space invaders and such out of the book, and then messed around changing things.
The next best thing was when my dad introduced me to Fractals. I didn't understand the maths much yet, but I could program what he showed me for that, and then make it look pretty. This was waaaaay before Fractint came along! :-)
Kids want to have fun. They want to draw pretty pictures, or make noises, or play games (graphical or otherwise -- good ol' text adventures and word games are cool too). They don't want to write the next database front end for a web app.
Did anyone think of POV-Ray, BTW? Lots of fun, simple to use, makes pretty pictures. Might be a bit frustrating if they're not up to the geometry yet, though. Maybe better for mid-teens, who'll understand enough about the camera and lights to see why their output is totally black the first time they run anything...
While I totally understand where your frustration comes from, not everywhere is like that.
Fortunately, it's a happy coincidence that a well-treated workforce is a more effective workforce. Keeping your staff sweet isn't just good manners, it's also good business. By cutting you down to only one week of leave, your employer has all but guaranteed a burnt-out workforce who will repeatedly take sickies within months, until they all quit because of the stress anyway. Even if they stick it out, they'll be out the door in a heartbeat when the market picks up.
The smart employer looks at ways to improve things for their staff as a priority. Happy staff are productive staff, and benefits follow. Some perks are effectively free if your working conditions don't prevent them: flexitime and pillow days come to mind. A few extra days of leave each year, or a $100 bonus to everyone in the product team when the release goes out, do cost, but they pay back many times over.
Although you seem to have had a particularly bad experience, there are smart employers in the world. The workforce owe it to themselves to go find the smart employers, so they can be more successful than the stupid ones, who will then go out of business, improving the overall smartness of management by evolution. :-)
One individual in a large team, maybe. A large team with thousands of man-hours invested in a given project? Not likely. The company could never replace the collective experience it lost, and even a replacement project team of the smartest hackers in the world would be hard pressed to catch up for months.
If there was cheaper labour around who could do the same job just as well, wouldn't the company already have hired them instead? I thought you had "at will" employment in the US?
If this sort of stuff is happening, then (a) it's probably worth a mild pay cut to get out if necessary, and (b) within a few months you aren't likely to have much of a job where you are anyway.
I've seen this before. Typically, in companies that survive, a few good people leave, management wakes up to the fact that conditions are not acceptable to the workforce and those who remain get an improvement in pay and/or conditions that is enough for them to stay. If management doesn't wake up fast enough, too many good people go, and the project fails.
Hundreds of comments, and not one early one with the obvious joke? How terribly disappointing... ;-)
I wouldn't be so quick to judge the courts everywhere. For example, if you crack into someone else's system in the UK, you're committing a crime under the Computer Misuse Act 1990. This makes separate provisions for unauthorised access to data, changing of data, etc.
Suppose Big Bad Software Inc. sell me some kit with an automatic update facility, and write into an EULA that I grant them permission to change files on my computer. Suppose they then use that automatic update facility to remove software supplied by one of their competitors instead.
I suspect that would be a hard thing to back up in court. They'd have to prove that the changes were authorised, for a start, and if the feature was marketed as an automatic update facility, I'd be interested to know whether a court would uphold the claim to be authorised just because of smallprint in the EULA, particularly if it's of the ninety-page-of-smallprint click-I-accept-on-install variety.
Thanks, I couldn't remember the legal term for the concept.
That is certainly true. It's kinda hard to see how you could understand and consent to a contract by opening some shrinkwrap, when the text of that contract is within a box inside the shrinkwrap, though...
Actually, most receipts today do show the tax figure.
Oh, and if you think we don't rebel when taxes get truly absurd, come visit next time a European country is up in arms over petrol taxes. :-)
Unfortunately, that's not always the case. One of my friends found this out the hard way, when she ordered a whole load of cosmetics from a supplier in Australia, where they were selling considerably cheaper than the UK. She was told that what she was paying the supplier covered everything including charges for getting the stuff to the UK, but then got hit with an extra tax bill running to several figures when the stuff arrived.
In some ways, it doesn't, though obviously there are negative impacts for society when any business goes under: unemployment, investors losing out, etc. Moreover, if Ferrari goes under because someone else was making a cheap and inferior knock-off, then you have now caused a high quality product to become unavailable. None of this is desirable.
In several Western countries, you cannot legally sign away your basic rights. It doesn't matter what the vendors put in a contract, EULA or any other document, how much you pay for it or what you have to sign. Those rights are yours, and a court will ignore any documentation that doesn't respect that.
This is why you find disclaimers in things like EULAs that if one part is found not to hold, the rest still does, etc. It's also why big businesses like Microsoft are terrified of a serious test case that might establish a precedent that EULAs have no legal weight because of the way they are set up. The net effect is that they rely on threats of legal action to get what the EULA would seek to secure for them, because it's the best chance they've got in most places and they know it.
This is not to say that you should flagrantly ignore things you know to be in an EULA unless you want to play dice with the courts. But you're pretty safe in ignoring any unreasonable conditions, because it's about a 110% certainty that they won't be legally enforceable anyway.
No, I'm not a lawyer, this isn't legal advice, and Slashdot is not the place for serious legal discussion. But use your common sense: no court is going to uphold something as manifestly unreasonable as a contract you supposedly agree to before you even have chance to read it. In fact, some places even have laws to the effect that if you can't reasonably be expected to understand a contract, you can't legally have entered into it. Not sure EULAs would fall within that, but it would be an interesting case...
It's a security drive. The well-known if programming construct is old-fashioned, and therefore a security risk. Instead, you are now required to do everything via polymorphism and virtual methods. That way the form doesn't matter, you see...
I help run a fairly large club (2,000 members) that has a publicity drive every 3-4 months, during which time we print something like 20,000 flyers, brochures, etc. in various formats. We also print quite a lot of lower volume things: tickets, certificates, etc.
We've investigated this area in some depth, and concluded that for the high volume stuff, it's much cheaper to use an external print shop if other practicalities permit. There are several around and they're quite competitive for the sort of business we could give them, so deals to reduce cost are quite plausible, and the service is generally pretty good. If you're printing thousands of pages, but not every day, I'd certainly recommend finding yourself a good local print shop to work with. (This is based in the UK, BTW; obviously YMMV elsewhere.)
For smaller volume work, using your own printer is much more cost effective, since you don't have the same level of overheads, and it's easier to tweak things if you need to. I guess this would be true of colour work as well, from what I've seen, but we only do B&W ourselves.
For really high volume work (thousands of pages per day) it can make sense to get your own serious kit and do everything in-house, but you're practically running your own print shop by that stage. Your requirements are similar to ours, though, so I'd guess this is overkill for you too.
Read the damn links. Everything you mention is covered, clearly and pretty unambiguously, in the two fairly short articles cited.
In summary, though, lots of current and ex-employees of Foundstone are backing up claims that the guys at the top had wholesale software piracy going on in-house. This partly came to light as a result of going after another company, started by one former employee and now including several more, that developed a product in the same industry in a time that, according to Foundstone guys, wasn't possible without stealing their vitally important trade secrets. Except that they forgot to say what those secrets were, the other company's product was much smaller scale than the mainstream corporate offering from Foundstone, and most of the info is likely to have been freely available or at least widely known in the business, and not trade secret at all anyway. As a result of this lot, the judge who initially forbade the other company from shipping their product lifted that injunction a month or so later on the basis that there was basically nothing but someone from Foundstone's say-so that anything was wrong.
Now go read the articles, please.
You don't know much about either capitalism or economics, do you? The market price is a function of the desires of both the vendor and the buyer. It's a compromise, an agreement of terms for mutual perceived benefit. It's not one-sided whatever-the-customer-says-goes any more than it should be one-sided whatever-the-vendor-says-goes. If either party is unhappy with a price then there is no deal. (This is not the same as "if either party is unhappy with the price, they are free to break the law and rip the other one off".)
If you built an inferior Ferrari lookalike and marketed it as a Ferrari, that would be damaging to Ferrari, whose efforts to develop a quality product have resulted in a valued brand name. If you did your own R&D, invested your own money in producing an original and attractive design, and then built a motor car of comparable specs, you can sell it for whatever you wish. But then, of course, you won't be able to sell it for $1000 any more than Ferrari could, because you, too, would have had to put something into developing it before you reaped the profits.
Ferrari have every right to offer their cars for sale at $100,000. If someone thinks that's a fair price, they can agree to buy one. If not, they're under no obligation. There is no price fixing there.
Well, whaddya know, so it does. You learn something new every day. :-)
"Don't verb nouns." -- William Safire
:-)
I didn't say anything about the terms "theft" or "piracy". I used the term "criminal", as in, "one who breaks the law". That is an unambigous word, both legally and in common usage, and is entirely appropriate in this context. Whether or not you agree that those are good laws does not change the fact that these people are breaking them.
You're attacking straw men, just like the original post to which I objected.
...you're going to do it anyway? How surprising. Because making comparisons between wholesale abuse of basic human rights during one of the blackest periods of recent history and the abuse of intellectual property laws by complex monopolies resulting in prices for certain non-essential consumable items being higher than some people would like is obviously justified and a winning argument.
You have a moral responsibility to obey the laws of your country where they are reasonable, and to follow the law while seeking change where you think that they are not. Breaking the law would be justified in cases as unreasonable as the one you mentioned, but that's kinda in a different league.
And if you're so interested in the problems with IP right now, may I suggest that you start by considering whether the problem is the principle of intellectual property, or a combination of a government that doesn't represent the interests of its citizens, the demonstrated incompetence of the USPTO, and the unchecked abusive behaviour by a complex monopoly of big players in the recording industry effectively involved in a price fixing racket.
Ah, I see. It's OK to pay the prices asked for CDs, but only if you want to. That makes much more sense, then, being a position that supports neither the legal nor the liberal positions in this debate.
No, calling them criminals is a statement of fact. In most democracies, we choose a government to represent our interests by making laws, and we follow those laws as a means of getting on with one another. If you break those laws, you are a criminal, and it's as simple as that. You may not agree with those laws, and there are means to advocate change if you disagree with them, but that doesn't change what words like "illegal" or "criminal" mean.
Responses like yours, attacking the words people use rather than the substance behind them, yet finishing with a random bout of name-calling, are the things soliciting emotional responses.
If a new band wants to give away some or all of their music, that is entirely up to them, and they have every right to do so as far as I'm concerned. If they're smart enough to use P2P or other technology to get their name known, get more gigs or whatever then good for them, they deserve the benefits they'll receive.
But on the flip side, you only have to know a few people who are professional musicians to see how much effort they put in. We're talking about the kind of people who play gigs in local clubs and bars for their basic income, and support that with sales of CDs and such where they play. Don't you think these guys, just trying to make a living, deserve a bit of credit for the effort they make?
And yet more than once in recent months, people I know personally who play in bands have found their own music ripped right off a CD someone's bought and shoved onto P2P. These aren't big bucks megacorps, they're family men trying to support wives and kids, or young people trying to save up to buy their first home. Tell me that P2P isn't hurting them.
No, I have no proof I can put in a post here that this is the case, and yes, you have to be wary of random anecdotes in a thread like this. But aside from being a shill for some megacorp -- and anyone who cares to check my posting history is likely to figure out the truth of that one pretty quickly -- what motivation would I have to make this up?
Nowhere in my post did I contend anything of the sort. I explained why it is, at present, the way your society works in the US.
Basically, it comes down to the fact that a few people over there are very vocal about their rights, constitutional or otherwise, but do more or less jack to defend them. The rest of you don't even care enough to express an opinion. Your electoral system became the laughing stock of the world the last time you elected a president, for more than one reason.
Money doesn't elect politicians, votes do. If your country collectively cared enough about the way it was being treated by big business to vote accordingly, you'd see a change. Until then, your collective laziness is the reason your rights are being trampled, and you have no-one to blame but yourselves.
I feel genuinely sorry for the small minority of you -- at least that is what it seems to be from my experience -- who genuinely do care about this sort of thing, and make an effort to change things. But until that small minority becomes a majority, things will stay screwed up.
The question is how often does this happen. It doesn't seem to be very much in the US at present, at least in the big cases. In the UK, in contrast, it's common for the losing party in a case to wind up paying costs for both sides. That's a great disincentive for the idiots with lots of money but no case, who'll sue anyway hoping to force a settlement because the defendants can't afford to risk fighting in court. Now if only we had punitive damages, so a sufficiently high court could fine a company all of its profits * 1.5 when it does something scummy in the interests of lining its pockets...