In a related story, the same judge today ruled that automobile manufacturers must install cameras and microphones in all automobiles sold in Brazil and monitor drivers and passengers for illegal behaviour such as ingestion of controlled substances and bank robbery. Several major auto manufacturers have already announced plans to stop sales of new autos in the country, and a spokesman for a used auto trade organization called the ruling "great news for the fight against crime in Brazil".
You are taking the Three Laws way too seriously. They have long been known to have serious problems, which your comments touch on. Asimov created them as a literary device, not as a serous proposal for programming AIs. Even if those laws were further developed to overcome some of their problems, they would not be some all-knowing magic genie that would prevent a robot from taking certain actions. For a highly complex human-like artificial organism to obey the laws, it would have to interpret them and make judgments about how they applied to its actions in context. And it would (to the point of the article) require motivation and (more difficult to prove) be capable of violating the law as humans do. If we want to create human-like creatures, and we are curious about how they would operate and/or need to operate, the first place to look is at ourselves.
The article says "for those caught a third time treatment is mandatory." If true, that means that the third 'offense' is essentially a crime. Mandatory treatment is a restriction of one's freedom of movement and behaviour imposed by a court in response to an act that one has committed. The fact that is it styled as 'treatment' does not make it objectively distinguishable from a sentence rendered by a criminal court.
It is not merely trite to point out that all food is organic. It cuts to the heart of the matter. In popular usage, "organic" has taken on its marketing/legal meaning, which varies from country to country, but usually includes a grab-bag of particular faddish details related to the growing of the produce, all of which have nothing at all to do with the dictionary meaning of "organic", and which for the most part have nothing to do with producing healthier plants (and in some cases even working against that). It would have been surprising to learn that individuals of the same species that meet these legal definitions would end up significantly differing in their makeup in ways that offer health benefits.
Modders, you don't get it. It's not Funny, it's Insightful. It offers a good analogous scenario, chosen to draw the reader out of his worldview into seeing in a different way.
Oh, but it is there. A movie is not a collection of independent still photos. The motion of objects relative to each other and to the camera between frames provides a wealth of depth information. By way of illustration, the next time you are a passenger in an automobile, cover one eye and observe the passing scenery, and you will notice that you are constructing a pretty good 3D model.
The only effective way to stop all this silliness will be to abolish copyright completely. I'm sure I'll get plenty of indignant replies from copyright holders, but the indignation they feel about the prospect of losing this immoral legal 'right' is like that felt by slaveholders about the proposed abolition of slavery.
Oh, really? Would you please cite the case? Mind you, I'm asking you to cite the case in which the Court declared use of the broadcast flag or any other kind of DRM to be illegal, not the Betamax case on which the Court supposedly based this later declaration. Or did you just post this as a test of how quickly misinformation can be modded up to 5, Informative?
At first glance one might think the country in question is Russia or Zimbabwe but the truth is, it's a democratic nation which is implementing this database.
Michel Pezet... had this to say... : 'The Edvige database has no place in a democracy.'
The last time I checked, both Russia and Zimbabwe were democracies. Unreservedly, unarguably democracies (though we might quibble over Zimbabwe after the latest election). Though some of us may disapprove of some of the policies enacted by their popularly elected governments, that is irrelevant. The quotations in the story demonstrate that the propaganda effort to confuse the concepts of democracy and freedom has been wildly successful (see 1984). One might have expected that when democracies violated the rights of their subjects, that would spark people to wake up and see the difference. But no, the false notion of "democracy == freedom" has been so deeply implanted as to become axiomatic, a religious article of faith that cannot be swayed by any evidence. Rather than opening peoples' eyes, the routine, expected behaviour of states that happen to use democracy to legitimize themselves only causes people to whine in disbelief.
One has to wonder whether Judge Harvey is allowing his natural desire as an academic to blaze a novel trail in the law to lead him to such a harmful decision, or he is a totalitarian who fully understands that eventually practically all news dissemination will be on the internet, and is calculatedly doing his part to set the precedents that will create the police state he desires.
You might want to explain to us how possessing the ideas you mention would be an advantageous trait.
And while you are at it, it might be interesting to your readers for you to divulge what religion are you believe yourself to be alluding to. Sounds a lot like first century CE gnosticism. Definitely not like Christianity, which, by the way, also has roughly a billion adherents.
[O]bviously this judge did not take Highschool economics 101 or use common sense. Hardly. You chose to rely on what could only have been the story writer's deliberate inflammatory mischaracterization of what Judge Hochberg wrote, rather than taking a moment to click on the link within that brazenly dishonest sentence and read what she actually wrote. I'll save you the mouse click: 'in no sense could "wage depression through the economic forces of supply and demand" rise to the level of justiciable injury'. As you can see, she did not at all suggest that she failed to see how an increased labor supply could result in wage depression. If anything, she took for granted this well-known fact that you castigate her for being unaware of.
In the absence of zoning laws, you would almost certainly have bought a house in a neighbourhood with restrictive covenants preventing the fish & chips bar, voluntarily entered into. And guess what? Those can actually be relied upon over time, unlike the zoning, which can be pulled out from under you as soon as the local developers and their cronies in city government find it in their interest. Or, without such covenants, you would have bought the property already discounted for the possibility of the fish & chips bar, with eyes wide open and consenting to allow a fish & chips bar.
The actions of Marlboro officials in this case is a good example of the ubiquitous abuse of "zoning" in the United States to tightly regulate behaviour that would otherwise be none of the State's business. Under the guise of protecting homeowners from the detrimental effect on the value of their real estate of smaller or denser housing, or commercial businesses, almost every municipality in the US not only categorizes each geographical region as being of a certain type of "zone" , but proceeds to enumerate a set of "uses" (behaviours as well as structures) that are allowed in each type of zone, and to forbid any "use" not listed. So, you want to stand on your head and whistle Dixie in the privacy of your own home? Let's check the list of approved "uses". Hmmm. Sorry, not listed. Let's say they don't like the otherwise perfectly legal sport of target shooting (or basketball). They can't get away with simply outlawing target shooting (or basketball) with a criminal law. So they just omit those "uses" from all of the zones in the city, and voila, target shooting (or basketball) is effectively outlawed, Constitution be damned, and the courts kowtow because it's just (awe and hushed tones) "zoning". In other words, we have a complete overthrow of the rule of law, operating under the guise of "zoning ordinances". The local strongmen decide for themselves what is disallowed, and the courts, which threw out the Constitution during the Progressive era, turn a blind eye. So if you find Ms. Wilderman's language ("Mr. Deeb was doing scientific research" and "This is not what we would consider to be a customary home occupation") a little strange, you have never entered the twilight zone that is "zoning".
There is no copying, no theft, no distribution, no anything. You buy software. You install it on one computer. You shouldn't be dragged into court for that.
"No copying, no theft, no distribution" -- okay, I'll grant you that. But "no anything"? Hardly. Read your own next sentence: "You install it on one computer". Here you yourself have instinctively given the nod to the legitimacy of license agreements that limit the use of the purchased copy of the software. Installing it on multiple computers of yours in your own home would no more constitute "copying", "theft" or "distribution" than installing it on one. So what is it that requires that it be installed on only one computer? The license agreement. If Apple has the right to insist that you agree to install your purchased copy on only one computer in consideration for allowing you to purchase it at a price that is lower than it otherwise would have been, why don't they also have the right to insist that you install it only on a Mac?
They can state everything in both units until doomsday, and it will never be more than a meaningless gesture. The average person utterly ignores and does not at all learn the metric units from this double-labeling. Only omission of the English units will do that, and then with amazing speed.
How did conservatives enter into this discussion? You offer not a shred of evidence that conservatives have had anything to do with the outrages you mention. Given that these crimes violate core principles of conservatism, you need to overcome a strong presumption that the individuals responsible are not conservatives at all. And your assertion that "all their core principles are right out of Mein Kampf" shows that either you are woefully unfamiliar with both Nazi ideology and conservatism, or you know better and are just a propagandist playing the Conservative=Nazi 'Big Lie' card.
But Anarcho-capitalists do not call for no societal rules. They (broad-brushing here) want to see natural law (toward which some have suggested English common law has evolved) or laws voluntarily consented to, and voluntary contracts, enforced by voluntary arrangements with security services and courts, rather than by a state. Whether such is possible, I am not addressing here.
Either you are an anarcho-capitalist who does not understand copyright law well enough to know that it is a creation of the state, or you do not understand anarcho-capitalism, and should learn a little more about it before you presume to wear the name.
Your analogy of the caveman lighting his stick from your fire was carefully crafted to take advantage of our natural sense that a trespass has occurred. To be more careful in constructing an analogy to copyright infringement, you should have had the other caveman simply observing from the next hill that you were able to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together, and then proceeding to find his own pair of sticks and rub them together. I think we can all agree that the only kind of obligation that might be created in the second caveman is a moral one to thank you profusely and offer you some reward to whatever extent he personally feels obligated. Not an enforceable obligation to give you some particular quantity of reward, giving you the right to bash his head in if he does not fulfill it.
Your analogy of embezzlement to copyright infringement is also defective, at least as you use it to counter "copying isn't theft, it's infringement" (which, by the way, you misstated, having your rhetorical opponent call copying "theft"). Embezzlement transfers the $50,000 (to use your example) from the possessor to the taker. It is a kind of stealing, even though the law technically classifies it as something other than "theft". Copying of information, no matter the quality or quantity, does not deprive the possessor of his copy. That is the point that people are making when they say something like "Copying isn't theft, it's infringement". They are not just saying that copying is a kind of stealing that is technically categorized under a different name. They are saying that it is not stealing at all.
To be fair, once we have a copyright law in place (assuming that we have a moral duty to obey it even though it is an unjust law), unauthorized copying of a work does infringe on a kind of property right: the copyright (read "copy right") itself, which is a monopoly over the authorization of copying the work. That monopoly right is the "intellectual property", not the work itself, despite extremely widespread misunderstanding, as seen in the postings on this story. Once we have created this kind of property via the copyright law, there is an element of something like stealing in the act of infringement. But keep in mind the fine distinction here: what is 'stolen' in infringement is not the work, but a fraction of the exclusive legal right to copy the work. So when people like me say "Copying isn't stealing", we are making a couple of points. One is that the infringer is not stealing the work, only infringing to some degree on the copyright. The second is that the copyright law should never have been passed, because copying is completely different than any kind of stealing, since nothing is stolen (taken) when something is copied. That's the beauty of copying; in the world of information, unlike the world of physical objects, you can see that I have something you would like to have, and you can acquire it without taking mine away. There can be only benefit. I should welcome your taking it. The only payment I should demand is the just pride that I can take in your feeling it worth copying.
It is not fair to confuse the state and its subjects. For all you know, the individuals you are accusing of hypocrisy may be ardent opponents of the improprieties of the state in whose territory they reside.
You might start with the U.S. Constitution, Article 1, section 8, the 8th paragraph: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Then read anything you can find on the history of U.S. copyright law. Wikipedia has this in their article "United States copyright law", under the heading "Scope of copyright law":
The purpose of copyright law is to stimulate the creation of as many works of art, literature, music, and other "works of authorship" as possible, in order to benefit the public. The United States recognizes no absolute, natural right in an author to prevent others from copying or otherwise exploiting his work. The copyright laws give authors limited property rights in their works, but for the ultimate purpose of benefiting the public by encouraging the creation and dissemination of more works.
Slashdot Mirror
In a related story, the same judge today ruled that automobile manufacturers must install cameras and microphones in all automobiles sold in Brazil and monitor drivers and passengers for illegal behaviour such as ingestion of controlled substances and bank robbery. Several major auto manufacturers have already announced plans to stop sales of new autos in the country, and a spokesman for a used auto trade organization called the ruling "great news for the fight against crime in Brazil".
You are taking the Three Laws way too seriously. They have long been known to have serious problems, which your comments touch on. Asimov created them as a literary device, not as a serous proposal for programming AIs. Even if those laws were further developed to overcome some of their problems, they would not be some all-knowing magic genie that would prevent a robot from taking certain actions. For a highly complex human-like artificial organism to obey the laws, it would have to interpret them and make judgments about how they applied to its actions in context. And it would (to the point of the article) require motivation and (more difficult to prove) be capable of violating the law as humans do. If we want to create human-like creatures, and we are curious about how they would operate and/or need to operate, the first place to look is at ourselves.
You have a curious notion of equality.
The article says "for those caught a third time treatment is mandatory." If true, that means that the third 'offense' is essentially a crime. Mandatory treatment is a restriction of one's freedom of movement and behaviour imposed by a court in response to an act that one has committed. The fact that is it styled as 'treatment' does not make it objectively distinguishable from a sentence rendered by a criminal court.
It is not merely trite to point out that all food is organic. It cuts to the heart of the matter. In popular usage, "organic" has taken on its marketing/legal meaning, which varies from country to country, but usually includes a grab-bag of particular faddish details related to the growing of the produce, all of which have nothing at all to do with the dictionary meaning of "organic", and which for the most part have nothing to do with producing healthier plants (and in some cases even working against that). It would have been surprising to learn that individuals of the same species that meet these legal definitions would end up significantly differing in their makeup in ways that offer health benefits.
Congrats, Slashdotter. You just used a carefully crafted wholesome-sounding phrase to camouflage an evil institution.
Modders, you don't get it. It's not Funny, it's Insightful. It offers a good analogous scenario, chosen to draw the reader out of his worldview into seeing in a different way.
Oh, but it is there. A movie is not a collection of independent still photos. The motion of objects relative to each other and to the camera between frames provides a wealth of depth information. By way of illustration, the next time you are a passenger in an automobile, cover one eye and observe the passing scenery, and you will notice that you are constructing a pretty good 3D model.
I know when I'm emailing my Korean friends, I always switch from the default black to black when I really want get their attention.
The only effective way to stop all this silliness will be to abolish copyright completely. I'm sure I'll get plenty of indignant replies from copyright holders, but the indignation they feel about the prospect of losing this immoral legal 'right' is like that felt by slaveholders about the proposed abolition of slavery.
Oh, really? Would you please cite the case? Mind you, I'm asking you to cite the case in which the Court declared use of the broadcast flag or any other kind of DRM to be illegal, not the Betamax case on which the Court supposedly based this later declaration. Or did you just post this as a test of how quickly misinformation can be modded up to 5, Informative?
At first glance one might think the country in question is Russia or Zimbabwe but the truth is, it's a democratic nation which is implementing this database.
Michel Pezet ... had this to say ... : 'The Edvige database has no place in a democracy.'
The last time I checked, both Russia and Zimbabwe were democracies. Unreservedly, unarguably democracies (though we might quibble over Zimbabwe after the latest election). Though some of us may disapprove of some of the policies enacted by their popularly elected governments, that is irrelevant. The quotations in the story demonstrate that the propaganda effort to confuse the concepts of democracy and freedom has been wildly successful (see 1984). One might have expected that when democracies violated the rights of their subjects, that would spark people to wake up and see the difference. But no, the false notion of "democracy == freedom" has been so deeply implanted as to become axiomatic, a religious article of faith that cannot be swayed by any evidence. Rather than opening peoples' eyes, the routine, expected behaviour of states that happen to use democracy to legitimize themselves only causes people to whine in disbelief.
One has to wonder whether Judge Harvey is allowing his natural desire as an academic to blaze a novel trail in the law to lead him to such a harmful decision, or he is a totalitarian who fully understands that eventually practically all news dissemination will be on the internet, and is calculatedly doing his part to set the precedents that will create the police state he desires.
You might want to explain to us how possessing the ideas you mention would be an advantageous trait.
And while you are at it, it might be interesting to your readers for you to divulge what religion are you believe yourself to be alluding to. Sounds a lot like first century CE gnosticism. Definitely not like Christianity, which, by the way, also has roughly a billion adherents.
[O]bviously this judge did not take Highschool economics 101 or use common sense.
Hardly. You chose to rely on what could only have been the story writer's deliberate inflammatory mischaracterization of what Judge Hochberg wrote, rather than taking a moment to click on the link within that brazenly dishonest sentence and read what she actually wrote. I'll save you the mouse click: 'in no sense could "wage depression through the economic forces of supply and demand" rise to the level of justiciable injury'. As you can see, she did not at all suggest that she failed to see how an increased labor supply could result in wage depression. If anything, she took for granted this well-known fact that you castigate her for being unaware of.
In the absence of zoning laws, you would almost certainly have bought a house in a neighbourhood with restrictive covenants preventing the fish & chips bar, voluntarily entered into. And guess what? Those can actually be relied upon over time, unlike the zoning, which can be pulled out from under you as soon as the local developers and their cronies in city government find it in their interest. Or, without such covenants, you would have bought the property already discounted for the possibility of the fish & chips bar, with eyes wide open and consenting to allow a fish & chips bar.
The actions of Marlboro officials in this case is a good example of the ubiquitous abuse of "zoning" in the United States to tightly regulate behaviour that would otherwise be none of the State's business. Under the guise of protecting homeowners from the detrimental effect on the value of their real estate of smaller or denser housing, or commercial businesses, almost every municipality in the US not only categorizes each geographical region as being of a certain type of "zone" , but proceeds to enumerate a set of "uses" (behaviours as well as structures) that are allowed in each type of zone, and to forbid any "use" not listed. So, you want to stand on your head and whistle Dixie in the privacy of your own home? Let's check the list of approved "uses". Hmmm. Sorry, not listed. Let's say they don't like the otherwise perfectly legal sport of target shooting (or basketball). They can't get away with simply outlawing target shooting (or basketball) with a criminal law. So they just omit those "uses" from all of the zones in the city, and voila, target shooting (or basketball) is effectively outlawed, Constitution be damned, and the courts kowtow because it's just (awe and hushed tones) "zoning". In other words, we have a complete overthrow of the rule of law, operating under the guise of "zoning ordinances". The local strongmen decide for themselves what is disallowed, and the courts, which threw out the Constitution during the Progressive era, turn a blind eye. So if you find Ms. Wilderman's language ("Mr. Deeb was doing scientific research" and "This is not what we would consider to be a customary home occupation") a little strange, you have never entered the twilight zone that is "zoning".
There is no copying, no theft, no distribution, no anything. You buy software. You install it on one computer. You shouldn't be dragged into court for that.
"No copying, no theft, no distribution" -- okay, I'll grant you that. But "no anything"? Hardly. Read your own next sentence: "You install it on one computer". Here you yourself have instinctively given the nod to the legitimacy of license agreements that limit the use of the purchased copy of the software. Installing it on multiple computers of yours in your own home would no more constitute "copying", "theft" or "distribution" than installing it on one. So what is it that requires that it be installed on only one computer? The license agreement. If Apple has the right to insist that you agree to install your purchased copy on only one computer in consideration for allowing you to purchase it at a price that is lower than it otherwise would have been, why don't they also have the right to insist that you install it only on a Mac?
They can state everything in both units until doomsday, and it will never be more than a meaningless gesture. The average person utterly ignores and does not at all learn the metric units from this double-labeling. Only omission of the English units will do that, and then with amazing speed.
How did conservatives enter into this discussion? You offer not a shred of evidence that conservatives have had anything to do with the outrages you mention. Given that these crimes violate core principles of conservatism, you need to overcome a strong presumption that the individuals responsible are not conservatives at all. And your assertion that "all their core principles are right out of Mein Kampf" shows that either you are woefully unfamiliar with both Nazi ideology and conservatism, or you know better and are just a propagandist playing the Conservative=Nazi 'Big Lie' card.
But Anarcho-capitalists do not call for no societal rules. They (broad-brushing here) want to see natural law (toward which some have suggested English common law has evolved) or laws voluntarily consented to, and voluntary contracts, enforced by voluntary arrangements with security services and courts, rather than by a state. Whether such is possible, I am not addressing here.
Either you are an anarcho-capitalist who does not understand copyright law well enough to know that it is a creation of the state, or you do not understand anarcho-capitalism, and should learn a little more about it before you presume to wear the name.
Your analogy of the caveman lighting his stick from your fire was carefully crafted to take advantage of our natural sense that a trespass has occurred. To be more careful in constructing an analogy to copyright infringement, you should have had the other caveman simply observing from the next hill that you were able to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together, and then proceeding to find his own pair of sticks and rub them together. I think we can all agree that the only kind of obligation that might be created in the second caveman is a moral one to thank you profusely and offer you some reward to whatever extent he personally feels obligated. Not an enforceable obligation to give you some particular quantity of reward, giving you the right to bash his head in if he does not fulfill it.
Your analogy of embezzlement to copyright infringement is also defective, at least as you use it to counter "copying isn't theft, it's infringement" (which, by the way, you misstated, having your rhetorical opponent call copying "theft"). Embezzlement transfers the $50,000 (to use your example) from the possessor to the taker. It is a kind of stealing, even though the law technically classifies it as something other than "theft". Copying of information, no matter the quality or quantity, does not deprive the possessor of his copy. That is the point that people are making when they say something like "Copying isn't theft, it's infringement". They are not just saying that copying is a kind of stealing that is technically categorized under a different name. They are saying that it is not stealing at all.
To be fair, once we have a copyright law in place (assuming that we have a moral duty to obey it even though it is an unjust law), unauthorized copying of a work does infringe on a kind of property right: the copyright (read "copy right") itself, which is a monopoly over the authorization of copying the work. That monopoly right is the "intellectual property", not the work itself, despite extremely widespread misunderstanding, as seen in the postings on this story. Once we have created this kind of property via the copyright law, there is an element of something like stealing in the act of infringement. But keep in mind the fine distinction here: what is 'stolen' in infringement is not the work, but a fraction of the exclusive legal right to copy the work. So when people like me say "Copying isn't stealing", we are making a couple of points. One is that the infringer is not stealing the work, only infringing to some degree on the copyright. The second is that the copyright law should never have been passed, because copying is completely different than any kind of stealing, since nothing is stolen (taken) when something is copied. That's the beauty of copying; in the world of information, unlike the world of physical objects, you can see that I have something you would like to have, and you can acquire it without taking mine away. There can be only benefit. I should welcome your taking it. The only payment I should demand is the just pride that I can take in your feeling it worth copying.
It is not fair to confuse the state and its subjects. For all you know, the individuals you are accusing of hypocrisy may be ardent opponents of the improprieties of the state in whose territory they reside.
You might start with the U.S. Constitution, Article 1, section 8, the 8th paragraph: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Then read anything you can find on the history of U.S. copyright law. Wikipedia has this in their article "United States copyright law", under the heading "Scope of copyright law":
The purpose of copyright law is to stimulate the creation of as many works of art, literature, music, and other "works of authorship" as possible, in order to benefit the public. The United States recognizes no absolute, natural right in an author to prevent others from copying or otherwise exploiting his work. The copyright laws give authors limited property rights in their works, but for the ultimate purpose of benefiting the public by encouraging the creation and dissemination of more works.