Your example number 4 is easily done in windows, at least it was in windows 95 (haven't used XP or ME or those things (except for trivial tasks at other peoples houses) since I discovered free software):
Just do the same thing as in example 1, and you'll be presented with a file list. Drag the files in that list to the archiving program. (Or you might have modified your right-click menu (with "send to", perhaps) so you can just right-click.
By
listening to these records, no matter how you obtain them, you are a customer of the record industry.
That would be a very scary world. I walk into a café and they have the latest pop song on - I'm all of a sudden a "customer" of the record industry, owing them something. When I read that taxi drivers in Finland need to pay royalties for the music their clients hear in the car, it scares me.
How long do the tentacles of ownership stretch?
The very principle of intellectual property is insidious in and of itself, since it's dealing with a lot more abstract concepts. We don't generally allow people to claim ownership of air, right? And the air isn't even copyable.
Information and knowledge, especially in digital form, can be copied at next to no cost. Having an economic system that negates, practically forbids, that very real advantage should be looked upon with great caution.
It's odd that people don't find these discussions more tiring. Every time a news story like this is posted, we don't get reactions to the story itself, rather people (of both positions in the question) start to discuss the validity of, or necessity for, a strong concept of intellectual property.
I think it's pretty scary that mere samizdat is yet again punished by deprivation of physical freedom - this time in a so-called "free country". The information - in this case music - does not appear to be something that's destructive or harmful, and reproduction of it has plenty of positive effects for most people, the only exception possibly being the record industry itself.
The Dvorak key layout isn't exactly "new", though. I use it and love it, but it's from the 1920s if I recall correctly.
It took me a day or so to learn to write with effort, slightly less than a month to learn to write comfortably. I learned "blind" and used it that way for a year and a half until I finally got a keyboard that I could label properly. I had problems relearning qwerty, though, but now (after a few years of dvorak use) I can use either qwerty and dvorak easily. I use dvorak on my own computers.
(Others have replied with valid points, here is another one:)
For extended quoting, say a few chapters or even pages, the invariant sections are a problem. Say I wanted to include a chapter from your book in a short anthology. I have to add like a gajillion pages honoring Martin Luther King.
Do me a favor and explain to me how preventing piracy with no effect to non-pirates makes ticket-buyers victims.
Re-read that sentence. You added a very strategical "no effect to" which I, as I've said, certainly don't agree with.
Even if we assume, just for arguments sake, that the distortion will be completely, 100% unnoticable with no ill effect to picture quality what so ever (which I don't.. remember what they promised about "copy-protected" audio CDs?), there are still other effects:
This stunt will be paid for by the ticket-buyers and thus make them victims in an economical sense.
And the trouble (ever so slight) it will cause to movie copiers will help to ensure that Hollywood can keep their prices high.
You're clearly activist.
If copying a few movies make me activist, so is most everyone I've ever met.
No, stop adding "so called." People who illegally film movies and distribute them on the net are movie pirates.
Do me a favor and explain to me why they're not.
I don't consider my non-use of the idiom relevant to the discussion, but since you asked: Copyright piracy as a term has not been applied to consumers and home tapers since recent years. It was previously used only for commercial "piracy" endeavors. That's part of why I don't use the term. The other reason is that the term is clearly ment to be a negative term. Why should I use a negative term for something I consider a productive and just action? You think illegal movie copying is a bad thing, so of course you're going to call them "pirates". Basically, your very choice of word serve to bring your point across, and I don't feel like taking up the practice. I don't feel like insulting myself and others with a negative term just to use a word that pleases you. You'll just have to cope an occasional "so called" from me.
The other two points had nothing to do with the discussion.
The other two points are examples of Hollywoods greed and ruthlessness, and they are reasons why I reacted so strongly against this.
Yes, the corporations are victims if their material is being illegally stolen.
Why do you equate copying with theft? The former is productive - you create a copy - while the second means someone literally taking something frome someone else. Equating the two just muddles the discussion at hand.
It's a given they would be more accessible if it wasn't illegal to rip them and distribute them.
Which was my point exactly - by preventing this redistribution, they make the movies a lot less accessible. If creating movies is a positive thing that society should reward - shouldn't we look equally negatively on those who try to make these movies less accessible? They're, for their own profit's sake, nullifying part of the benefit (even if it's mere entertainment) the movie provided in the first place.
As it stands, you have no legal or moral right to do
so
I can't speak of a legal right, since legal rights seems to be completely arbitrary and archaic these days, but I hold that I do have a moral right to. Sure, the movie companies have no obligation to provide me with copies, but they have no moral right to stop me from sharing.
How can a culture be enriched if nobody is making money off of what they work on?
Is this a serious question? Do you honestly believe that only profit-making endeavours is culturally enriching? That's simply incorrect.
It doesn't matter. You don't have a right to download a movie for free. Since you'll never grasp that simple concept of morality, you'll just have to learn to deal with it.
Care to explain why providing myself, at my own expense (
No, I'm not, since I'm not going to the cinema any more thanks to actions of the movie industry, this being but the latest. The victims are those who are paying for tickets, the perps are the execs in the movie industry.
I'm just a bystander.
Only one of three of those has anything to do with this article.
The other two are relevant to put the actions of both Hollywood on one hand and so called "pirates" on the other hand in context.
And pirates did add subliminal flicker indirectly with their actions. Stop playing victim.
That's preposterous. I hold that it's you that portray the movie corporations as "victims", and that they had absolutely no choice what so ever in adding this subliminal flicker.
A simple unnoticable flicker added to theater projections to stop illegal ripping isn't making anything less accessible.
If that ripping were neither illegal nor stopped, those movies would be a lot more accessible in a variety of ways. You could go to a theater (same as now), you could download them or you could get a copy on CD-R from a friend. The movie would achieve greater spread and thus make a bigger contribution to society, being seen by more people thus enriching the culture more.
What do you mean, "what you call pirates?" They're illegally filming movies to distribute them freely on the Internet. Clearly, you feel this is okay, so your moral basis is already severely skewed and shouldn't be taken seriously in a discussion.
Not only do I think that's okay, I think that's commendable behaviour from a moral (not legal) standpoint. You on the other hand were "just waiting" for a post like mine so you could criticize it for daring to question the reproduction monopoly that copyright law grants.
That is what movie piracy is. You've grown up with the convenience of the Internet for so long, your mind has grown accustomed to getting whatever you want, no matter the legality. Face facts and grow up.
I do feel that it's absurd that an archaic business regulation for the book printing industry is turned against the computer-using consumers. There was no Internet when copyright was invented.
I copied and pasted your text.
That appears to be a false statement. You might want to go back and check my original post and your reply.
You are clearly a movie pirate just pissed that your precious telesync rips won't be so easily obtained anymore. Deal.
I've watched telesync rips a grand total of two times. Whoop-de-do. I'll manage. I won't be going to theatres with this kind of distortion, though.
I percieve it as bizarre and pointless.
So was your quip about me trying to blindly justify my warez, which only were meant to make my arguments seem somehow less valid. That's why I wrote about not being able to justify copyright. I used a quote, relevant to that, and I attributed it (if someone wanted to read more).
Your objective, in fact, is to specifically rip them off of money by illegally obtaining their movies without paying for them.
No, that's just a hobby.:) Joking aside, my objective when it comes to movies is to watch them, alone or with friends, if I like them maybe give a copy away or two to people dear to me, and, if I want those who did that movie to make more movies, to support them by sending them money directly or indirectly. Now, many moviemakers these days are associated with the kind of investors/execs that I definitely don't want to support, since that money will go to junk like this flicker.
They have every right to do whatever they want with th
I've heard that theory and I just don't believe it to be correct. If I did not watch that occasional copied movie, they wouldn't not increase their sales one bit.
If they were aware of a massive boycott, they would just pour more money into advertising. I believe that they could sucker enough people into believing the hype for as long as it takes to kill the boycott.
On the other hand, I believe that the only way to get laws passed that fight the current prohibitive notions of copyright is if movie copying is accepted by the mainstream. Refusing to watch copied movies would just further their message that it's somehow immoral or unjust. You yourself use the term "stealing".
I'm not ashamed of the fact that I took the time to create a copy of a good movie to give to my sister, and if more people would accept the notion of copying and sharing we could change the law and reverse the draconian copyright hegemony. (If that's even possible. I believe that a majority of people today have no problem with copying/sharing, but the law still remains. Not very democratic.)
This "but they haven't lost anything" argument is a pantload, by the way. All it does is make it more expensive for everyone else.
They haven't lost anything compared to the alternative mentioned, which is a total boycott, a complete non-watching and avoidance of movie-watching.
Please don't take that comment out of context.
How can a lower demand - my not buying movie tickets - cause a higher price? Weren't we told that in a market system, low demands correlate to low prices?
Hollywood sets the price it thinks it can get away with regardless of my actions.
Though I doubt it will be that expensive, nobody is forcing you to buy cinema tickets, DVDs, and merchandise.
Not exactly forcing me, and I will avoid these products in the future, but there is significant pressure, both peer pressure and (especially) commercial pressure. Advertisements do aim to get me to want to consume, they're not just decorational or even in any way benevolent.
If you want somebody to blame, blame pirates.
Pirates didn't invent copyright. Pirates didn't add a subliminal flicker to the movies. Pirates didn't invent region codes.
Making a product worse, less accessible, just to be able to increase it's market price is in my opinion very immoral, and that's what I called economical sabotage.
Nice how that doesn't have anything to do with this discussion.
It is the basis of my argument and the very reason I posted in the first place. It is important to the discussion. Hollywood is making their products (the movies) less accessible (less copyable, less watchable) so that they can keep their prices high without fear that people will turn to the offerings of what you call pirates. I consider this counter-productive and unethical.
I didn't say you did.
You quoted "economonical sabotage" where I wrote "economical sabotage" in a sentence where you made a remark on my intelligence level, implying, I assume, that that level was low. Even if this was unintentional I wanted to defend myself.
Someone beginning a statement with "Robert Anton Wilson once claimed..." reaks of pretentiousness. Stick to the discussion at hand.
It was a slight diversion prompted by your accusation that my position on the topic was based in mere convenience and need for justification. I don't consider R.A. Wilson books very intellectual nor pretentious, and I apologize for the quotation if you percieve it as out of line.
Corporations make money. Their objective is to make money.
I'm aware of that. My objective, on the other hand, is not to defend and help those corporations to make the maximum amount of money. Why should it be? Why are you so eager to please these "corporate masters"? What do I have to gain by sitting quietly when corporations try to maximize their profits at the expense of society?
If people keep ripping them off, they will seek methods to ensure they don't.
And if corporations keep ripping people off, which is the far more common situation, there will be a backlash, which copying and p2p both are only parts of.
Stealing their content (which is what you would be doing) in no way helps anyone (except your cheap ass self).
It helps my cheap ass self, and my friends, while harming no one (or creating the exact same amount of harm as the avoid-them-alltogether-alternative). I don't consider it stealing either, since my definition of stealing still involves one person gaining what the other person actually lose. If I actually shoplift DVDs, it would be theft, since they would have one copy left for every copy I gain. If I copy movies, they still have all their copies. At a lower market price, possibly, since they might have less potential customers, but if they're concerned about that, why do they go through all kinds of hoops and campaign fundings to keep the current semi-capitalistic status quo?
I do watch a lot of non-american cinema (movies from Japan, India, Hong-Kong and Korea) which I would never have discovered without warez.
Someone once told me that he considered actions that helped the person performing them invalid. That only a total boycott of movies would be considered a meaningful protest.
Maybe a lot of people feel that way, and thus it's a valid argument that I will from time to time reconsider, but at the moment I think that a bunch of martyrs is no threat to the movie industry, while turning their own capitalistic system against them is. They want to control the market? Bring it on.
Please don't attribute to malice or ignorance what can be attributed to a different perspective.
Simply changing the projection method to make it more difficult for cameras to pick up is also somehow immoral. You blindly call it "distorting the image."
The article speaks about disruptive patterns. This won't be cheap nor easy, and who will pay for it? Most likely the people who buy cinema tickets, DVDs and merch - the consumers.
Without the monopoly on reproduction that the state grants with copyright, the market value of those movie tickets would be lower. The "industry" uses techniques that lower the use value - the value for society that the movies actually have - in various ways, just to increase the market value of their movie tickets and DVDs even further. (For example, they lower the transportability with region codes, they lower the copyability (which should be inherent in all digital media) with various technologies, and now they even lower the picture quality (if ever so slightly) with subliminal (according to the dictionary definition) patterns.
Making a product worse, less accessible, just to be able to increase it's market price is in my opinion very immoral, and that's what I called economical sabotage.
What really let me know your level of intelligence was when you called it "economonical sabotage."
I didn't misspell it. I don't call myself a spelling master in any way, and english is my second language, but please don't distort what I write to make my arguments appear less valid. (By the way, I didn't see a single counter-argument in your post. If you agree with me, why don't you say so instead of resort to unfriendliness?)
The fact is, you already use warez, and you needed your little exposition to help you justify it.
Yes, I use warez already, but I have no problems justify it. That copying and sharing movies considered wrong is a testimony to the pro-copyright hegemony that continues to surprise me.
Robert Anton Wilson once claimed that "what the thinker thinks, the prover proves", meaning that people will justify anything, but no matter how hard I think or try to "prove", I can't justify the way copyright looks today.
I'm surprised at the lengths some people will go to defend practices of the same corporations who would do almost anything to make a buck.
You can sit here and troll all you want, but its not that easy being an up and coming actor or director trying to make something for himself and if someone was stealing your work... your work of art that you created with your two hands... would you want people to steal that from you leaving you penniless?
Don't worry, I'll stay away from those thieving Hollywood executives. Thanks for your concern, though.
On a more serious note, I think it's a real problem that many lines of work - especially the more creative ones like movie-making or programming - encourage people to do harmful things like time-wasting commercial ads, sound-polluting copy "protection" and more.
I'm sick and tired of the movie industry abusing it's power like this. Not only do they have ogling agents and metal detectors, but now they're purposely distorting the image. (Ignoring the risk of epileptic seizures?) For those keeping score at home, that's yet another account of reducing the use value of the movie to increase it's trade value. (Others include regions and encryptions on DVD..)
I see this as economical sabotage as well as hugely egoistic. I'll be sticking to warez and indepentent cinema from now on, rather than risk funding even more of these pathetic stunts.
(This may seem a bit flamey, but well, "Fear leads to anger" and Hollywood is certainly scary enough for me now. Thanks.)
Maybe not so much for harddrive compression but for other purposes (maybe network-related).
Putting it on the PCI makes sense from a research perspective - later implementations may be in other places, say on the network card or the disc controller. Danger, but fun.
It probably took me less than eight minutes. Most likely I just didn't notice it until after a while.
I've got no problem with critical arguments, but you offered no arguments, you just tried to insult me. Most of my reply consisted of clarifying my point rather than debunking your, since I couldn't find your point.
Listen, if you're some code monkey working at MSFT or a similar company, I can understand why you get mad, just trying to protect yourself and your friends. That's understandable.
But just because I grew up watching Thundercats doesn't mean I don't know of the companies you talk about. Btw, IBM has released free software recently. Mitch of Lotus Agenda fame is in free software. Corel tried it, and so has Novell.
I can bring up examples from history even older than that - the most obvious example being RMS with Emacs in the seventies and gcc in the eighties.
Here are a bunch of facts: You all know nothing about law, business, or software.
I'm sorry, but that's not a fact since I've studied all three of those topics.
This meaningless post being modded a 4 is incontrivertable proof that most slashdot readers are mindless non-thinking knee-jerking sheep.
In case you didn't noticed, you're modded as a 0.
Oh, you meant my post? Do you care to elaborate what the problem is?
I think part of the reason it got modded up was that it was an early post, but also that it more or less explicitly says what, say, Microsoft never would want to hear - that the real issue with their "monopolistic" practices is about software freedom.
Sure, in my dream world it would be modded "-1 redundant" but judging from the replies we're clearly not there. We live in a world infested by as many Microsoft astroturfers as GNU zealots.
MS is a business that makes money for its stockholders and employees by selling software.
If that isn't like an alarm bell to you, I don't know what I can tell you.
Microsoft is a business that, by employing a government-granted (and by force upheld) monopoly on producing copies of it's software. They're purposely decreasing the use value of it's products (the otherwise inherent copy- and modifiability of software) just to increase the market value for them. They're increasing the short term monetary value by creating artificial scarcity through abuse of copyright.
That's something that makes me want to react against it.
Stay an employee (if you even have a job) don't even think about starting your own business.
Thanks for the tip. Were I to start my own business it would not be "selling software" as were it physical products. If it were at all software related, it would be something like writing custom software on a case-by-case basis, or using the street performer's protocol, or writing free software as added value to a hardware product.
Right. I'm sure there might be technical differences (is Media Player as hard to uninstall as the shell or the file manager?) but honestly I don't think that integration and bundling is inherently bad. The problem is non-free software.
The technicalities might have become worse over the years. The last Windows I tinkered with extensively was Windows 95, where I managed to replace everything (and then though "why bother?" and switched to GNU/Linux).
Slashdot Mirror
There's no RSA-copyrighted code in Waste. Please learn to differ between copyrights and patents.
Your example number 4 is easily done in windows, at least it was in windows 95 (haven't used XP or ME or those things (except for trivial tasks at other peoples houses) since I discovered free software):
Just do the same thing as in example 1, and you'll be presented with a file list. Drag the files in that list to the archiving program. (Or you might have modified your right-click menu (with "send to", perhaps) so you can just right-click.
It's more like the café is the customer, right?
Or maybe your perspective is correct.
I was aware of the practice so I usually shop at a café that only plays indie music.
That would be a very scary world. I walk into a café and they have the latest pop song on - I'm all of a sudden a "customer" of the record industry, owing them something. When I read that taxi drivers in Finland need to pay royalties for the music their clients hear in the car, it scares me.
How long do the tentacles of ownership stretch?
The very principle of intellectual property is insidious in and of itself, since it's dealing with a lot more abstract concepts. We don't generally allow people to claim ownership of air, right? And the air isn't even copyable.
Information and knowledge, especially in digital form, can be copied at next to no cost. Having an economic system that negates, practically forbids, that very real advantage should be looked upon with great caution.
It's odd that people don't find these discussions more tiring. Every time a news story like this is posted, we don't get reactions to the story itself, rather people (of both positions in the question) start to discuss the validity of, or necessity for, a strong concept of intellectual property.
I think it's pretty scary that mere samizdat is yet again punished by deprivation of physical freedom - this time in a so-called "free country". The information - in this case music - does not appear to be something that's destructive or harmful, and reproduction of it has plenty of positive effects for most people, the only exception possibly being the record industry itself.
The Dvorak key layout isn't exactly "new", though. I use it and love it, but it's from the 1920s if I recall correctly.
It took me a day or so to learn to write with effort, slightly less than a month to learn to write comfortably. I learned "blind" and used it that way for a year and a half until I finally got a keyboard that I could label properly. I had problems relearning qwerty, though, but now (after a few years of dvorak use) I can use either qwerty and dvorak easily. I use dvorak on my own computers.
The very thing you call property rights is arbitrary, as there are many different philosophies as what is property.
There are even some who twist the lockean provisio into some pro-intellectual-property argument. Sheesh.
(Others have replied with valid points, here is another one:)
For extended quoting, say a few chapters or even pages, the invariant sections are a problem. Say I wanted to include a chapter from your book in a short anthology. I have to add like a gajillion pages honoring Martin Luther King.
Earlier posts are generally modded higher than later posts. No crack needed.
Re-read that sentence. You added a very strategical "no effect to" which I, as I've said, certainly don't agree with.
Even if we assume, just for arguments sake, that the distortion will be completely, 100% unnoticable with no ill effect to picture quality what so ever (which I don't.. remember what they promised about "copy-protected" audio CDs?), there are still other effects:
This stunt will be paid for by the ticket-buyers and thus make them victims in an economical sense.
And the trouble (ever so slight) it will cause to movie copiers will help to ensure that Hollywood can keep their prices high.
If copying a few movies make me activist, so is most everyone I've ever met.
I don't consider my non-use of the idiom relevant to the discussion, but since you asked:
Copyright piracy as a term has not been applied to consumers and home tapers since recent years. It was previously used only for commercial "piracy" endeavors. That's part of why I don't use the term. The other reason is that the term is clearly ment to be a negative term. Why should I use a negative term for something I consider a productive and just action? You think illegal movie copying is a bad thing, so of course you're going to call them "pirates". Basically, your very choice of word serve to bring your point across, and I don't feel like taking up the practice. I don't feel like insulting myself and others with a negative term just to use a word that pleases you. You'll just have to cope an occasional "so called" from me.
The other two points are examples of Hollywoods greed and ruthlessness, and they are reasons why I reacted so strongly against this.
Why do you equate copying with theft? The former is productive - you create a copy - while the second means someone literally taking something frome someone else. Equating the two just muddles the discussion at hand.
Which was my point exactly - by preventing this redistribution, they make the movies a lot less accessible. If creating movies is a positive thing that society should reward - shouldn't we look equally negatively on those who try to make these movies less accessible? They're, for their own profit's sake, nullifying part of the benefit (even if it's mere entertainment) the movie provided in the first place.
I can't speak of a legal right, since legal rights
seems to be completely arbitrary and archaic these days, but I hold
that I do have a moral right to. Sure, the movie companies have no
obligation to provide me with copies, but they have no moral right to
stop me from sharing.
Is this a serious question? Do you honestly believe that only profit-making endeavours is culturally enriching? That's simply incorrect.
Care to explain why providing myself, at my own expense (
No, I'm not, since I'm not going to the cinema any more thanks to actions of the movie industry, this being but the latest. The victims are those who are paying for tickets, the perps are the execs in the movie industry.
I'm just a bystander.
The other two are relevant to put the actions of both Hollywood on one hand and so called "pirates" on the other hand in context.
That's preposterous. I hold that it's you that portray the movie corporations as "victims", and that they had absolutely no choice what so ever in adding this subliminal flicker.
If that ripping were neither illegal nor stopped, those movies would be a lot more accessible in a variety of ways. You could go to a theater (same as now), you could download them or you could get a copy on CD-R from a friend. The movie would achieve greater spread and thus make a bigger contribution to society, being seen by more people thus enriching the culture more.
Not only do I think that's okay, I think that's commendable behaviour from a moral (not legal) standpoint. You on the other hand were "just waiting" for a post like mine so you could criticize it for daring to question the reproduction monopoly that copyright law grants.
I do feel that it's absurd that an archaic business regulation for the book printing industry is turned against the computer-using consumers. There was no Internet when copyright was invented.
That appears to be a false statement. You might want to go back and check my original post and your reply.
I've watched telesync rips a grand total of two times. Whoop-de-do. I'll manage. I won't be going to theatres with this kind of distortion, though.
So was your quip about me trying to blindly justify my warez, which only were meant to make my arguments seem somehow less valid. That's why I wrote about not being able to justify copyright. I used a quote, relevant to that, and I attributed it (if someone wanted to read more).
No, that's just a hobby. :)
Joking aside, my objective when it comes to movies is to watch them, alone or with friends, if I like them maybe give a copy away or two to people dear to me, and, if I want those who did that movie to make more movies, to support them by sending them money directly or indirectly. Now, many moviemakers these days are associated with the kind of investors/execs that I definitely don't want to support, since that money will go to junk like this flicker.
I've heard that theory and I just don't believe it to be correct. If I did not watch that occasional copied movie, they wouldn't not increase their sales one bit.
If they were aware of a massive boycott, they would just pour more money into advertising. I believe that they could sucker enough people into believing the hype for as long as it takes to kill the boycott.
On the other hand, I believe that the only way to get laws passed that fight the current prohibitive notions of copyright is if movie copying is accepted by the mainstream. Refusing to watch copied movies would just further their message that it's somehow immoral or unjust. You yourself use the term "stealing".
I'm not ashamed of the fact that I took the time to create a copy of a good movie to give to my sister, and if more people would accept the notion of copying and sharing we could change the law and reverse the draconian copyright hegemony. (If that's even possible. I believe that a majority of people today have no problem with copying/sharing, but the law still remains. Not very democratic.)
They haven't lost anything compared to the alternative mentioned, which is a total boycott, a complete non-watching and avoidance of movie-watching.
Please don't take that comment out of context.
How can a lower demand - my not buying movie tickets - cause a higher price? Weren't we told that in a market system, low demands correlate to low prices?
Hollywood sets the price it thinks it can get away with regardless of my actions.
Not exactly forcing me, and I will avoid these products in the future, but there is significant pressure, both peer pressure and (especially) commercial pressure. Advertisements do aim to get me to want to consume, they're not just decorational or even in any way benevolent.
Pirates didn't invent copyright. Pirates didn't add a subliminal flicker to the movies. Pirates didn't invent region codes.
It is the basis of my argument and the very reason I posted in the first place. It is important to the discussion. Hollywood is making their products (the movies) less accessible (less copyable, less watchable) so that they can keep their prices high without fear that people will turn to the offerings of what you call pirates. I consider this counter-productive and unethical.
You quoted "economonical sabotage" where I wrote "economical sabotage" in a sentence where you made a remark on my intelligence level, implying, I assume, that that level was low. Even if this was unintentional I wanted to defend myself.
It was a slight diversion prompted by your accusation that my position on the topic was based in mere convenience and need for justification. I don't consider R.A. Wilson books very intellectual nor pretentious, and I apologize for the quotation if you percieve it as out of line.
I'm aware of that. My objective, on the other hand, is not to defend and help those corporations to make the maximum amount of money. Why should it be? Why are you so eager to please these "corporate masters"? What do I have to gain by sitting quietly when corporations try to maximize their profits at the expense of society?
And if corporations keep ripping people off, which is the far more common situation, there will be a backlash, which copying and p2p both are only parts of.
It helps my cheap ass self, and my friends, while harming no one (or creating the exact same amount of harm as the avoid-them-alltogether-alternative). I don't consider it stealing either, since my definition of stealing still involves one person gaining what the other person actually lose. If I actually shoplift DVDs, it would be theft, since they would have one copy left for every copy I gain. If I copy movies, they still have all their copies. At a lower market price, possibly, since they might have less potential customers, but if they're concerned about that, why do they go through all kinds of hoops and campaign fundings to keep the current semi-capitalistic status quo?
I do watch a lot of non-american cinema (movies from Japan, India, Hong-Kong and Korea) which I would never have discovered without warez.
Someone once told me that he considered actions that helped the person performing them invalid. That only a total boycott of movies would be considered a meaningful protest.
Maybe a lot of people feel that way, and thus it's a valid argument that I will from time to time reconsider, but at the moment I think that a bunch of martyrs is no threat to the movie industry, while turning their own capitalistic system against them is. They want to control the market? Bring it on.
The article speaks about disruptive patterns. This won't be cheap nor easy, and who will pay for it? Most likely the people who buy cinema tickets, DVDs and merch - the consumers.
Without the monopoly on reproduction that the state grants with copyright, the market value of those movie tickets would be lower. The "industry" uses techniques that lower the use value - the value for society that the movies actually have - in various ways, just to increase the market value of their movie tickets and DVDs even further. (For example, they lower the transportability with region codes, they lower the copyability (which should be inherent in all digital media) with various technologies, and now they even lower the picture quality (if ever so slightly) with subliminal (according to the dictionary definition) patterns.
Making a product worse, less accessible, just to be able to increase it's market price is in my opinion very immoral, and that's what I called economical sabotage.
I didn't misspell it. I don't call myself a spelling master in any way, and english is my second language, but please don't distort what I write to make my arguments appear less valid. (By the way, I didn't see a single counter-argument in your post. If you agree with me, why don't you say so instead of resort to unfriendliness?)
Yes, I use warez already, but I have no problems justify it. That copying and sharing movies considered wrong is a testimony to the pro-copyright hegemony that continues to surprise me.
Robert Anton Wilson once claimed that "what the thinker thinks, the prover proves", meaning that people will justify anything, but no matter how hard I think or try to "prove", I can't justify the way copyright looks today.
I'm surprised at the lengths some people will go to defend practices of the same corporations who would do almost anything to make a buck.
Don't worry, I'll stay away from those thieving Hollywood executives. Thanks for your concern, though.
On a more serious note, I think it's a real problem that many lines of work - especially the more creative ones like movie-making or programming - encourage people to do harmful things like time-wasting commercial ads, sound-polluting copy "protection" and more.
I'm sick and tired of the movie industry abusing it's power like
this. Not only do they have ogling agents and metal detectors, but now
they're purposely distorting the image. (Ignoring the risk of
epileptic seizures?) For those keeping score at home, that's yet
another account of reducing the use value of the movie to increase
it's trade value. (Others include regions and encryptions on DVD..)
I see this as economical sabotage as well as hugely egoistic. I'll be
sticking to warez and indepentent cinema from now on, rather than risk
funding even more of these pathetic stunts.
(This may seem a bit flamey, but well, "Fear leads to anger" and
Hollywood is certainly scary enough for me now. Thanks.)
This is non-free, it fails the "desert island" test and the "dissident test".
False. A license that forbids this is not considered open source nor free.
Maybe not so much for harddrive compression but for other purposes (maybe network-related).
Putting it on the PCI makes sense from a research perspective - later implementations may be in other places, say on the network card or the disc controller. Danger, but fun.
Try xpdf or gv for the pdf.
I usually use ppthtml for ppt-files but it's not perfect.
One of my friends has OpenOffice which usually deals pretty well with them.
It probably took me less than eight minutes. Most likely I just didn't notice it until after a while.
I've got no problem with critical arguments, but you offered no arguments, you just tried to insult me. Most of my reply consisted of clarifying my point rather than debunking your, since I couldn't find your point.
But just because I grew up watching Thundercats doesn't mean I don't know of the companies you talk about. Btw, IBM has released free software recently. Mitch of Lotus Agenda fame is in free software. Corel tried it, and so has Novell.
I can bring up examples from history even older than that - the most obvious example being RMS with Emacs in the seventies and gcc in the eighties.
I'm sorry, but that's not a fact since I've studied all three of those topics.
In case you didn't noticed, you're modded as a 0.
Oh, you meant my post? Do you care to elaborate what the problem is?
I think part of the reason it got modded up was that it was an early post, but also that it more or less explicitly says what, say, Microsoft never would want to hear - that the real issue with their "monopolistic" practices is about software freedom.
Sure, in my dream world it would be modded "-1 redundant" but judging from the replies we're clearly not there. We live in a world infested by as many Microsoft astroturfers as GNU zealots.
If that isn't like an alarm bell to you, I don't know what I can tell you.
Microsoft is a business that, by employing a government-granted (and by force upheld) monopoly on producing copies of it's software. They're purposely decreasing the use value of it's products (the otherwise inherent copy- and modifiability of software) just to increase the market value for them. They're increasing the short term monetary value by creating artificial scarcity through abuse of copyright.
That's something that makes me want to react against it.
Thanks for the tip. Were I to start my own business it would not be "selling software" as were it physical products. If it were at all software related, it would be something like writing custom software on a case-by-case basis, or using the street performer's protocol, or writing free software as added value to a hardware product.
Right. I'm sure there might be technical differences (is Media Player as hard to uninstall as the shell or the file manager?) but honestly I don't think that integration and bundling is inherently bad. The problem is non-free software.
The technicalities might have become worse over the years. The last Windows I tinkered with extensively was Windows 95, where I managed to replace everything (and then though "why bother?" and switched to GNU/Linux).