I hate to do this over and over again, but it it true that farmers are getting screwed over by the (ever increasing) coglomerates. If you live in a small farming community, you'd know.
There are a large percentage of factors, the main problem is that big coglomerates control too much of the market, allowing them to increase production or decrease production at their leisure.
The problem with big corporations is that they believe if they have the power, that they can exercise this power. For a person, he or she will exercise restraint due to fators such ethics and justice. Even tough corporations are lead by people, they tend to have a group mentality, hiding behind the corporate image that they set up.
ADM colluded to fix the price of corn syrup. That costed consumers bllions of dollars upwards. They got caught. How many events like that happen and are passed by?
Think of it this way. Who do you think would sell cheaper computers? IBM or the independant computer shop down the street?
Re:Unfortunately, your professor is an idiot.
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Natural Capitalism
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· Score: 1
Are you sure you want to get into a lenghty discussion on the difference between capital goods and capital? Do you really want to incite the full wraith of the Austrians?
If you have the proper equipement you can do it.. In fact if you have the porper equipement, you can pirate Jay Leno's chin and put a copy of it on yours. Then the NTSHA (Nighttime Talkshow Host Association) will sue the maker of said equipement, and they will have to spend a coffee night with the police in Belgium (where they operate out of)and some laywer from the US that doesn't speak french. Then the NTSHA will send out cease and desist letters to everyone with a overgrown chin.
Not that you'd want to do have a chin like that, but yeah, it's possible.
While I am not a student of law, I have done a little reading on some fundamental works in which the British, and thus American civil law system is based on.
The right to life (body and limb, whatever:) implies that no-one has control over your physcial being until you are proven not to deserve this natural right. This coupled with a variety of of other laws which concerned the morals and ethics of society made up natural law (as Judge Blackstone put it). Blackstone called it natural law because it was the law of god. The pursuit of substantial happiness is a right because it in essence allows the individual to pursue whatever he believes in, which implied religius freedom (IIRC).
Any other regulations such as traffic laws, commerce regulation and others fall into the realm of municipal law.
Of course, that was a few hundred years ago. Laws and their categorization changes, but the basic concept of promoting justice should not. I hope it keeps that way.
Really, I don't understand why some people are so much ingrained into intellectual property rights. IP laws such as copyright allows the author to extend a *reasonable* amount of control to published works, providing them with an incentive, and avioding such real theft such as *plagarism*.
Copyright is not a god given right. It is not comparible to the right to live or the right to pursue substantial happiness. Most copyright violations are not theft. Please check the definition of theft and stealing before you come to conclusions. Copyright violations that truely deprive the original author of monetary or other gain can be termed theft, but the term piracy is totally inappropriate and mostly propoganda by the BSA.
What I find most annoying is that both sides try to rationize their arguements with falacies. People try to apply their own "morals" on what's right and what's wrong that they lost the objective view on what copyright really is.
Copyright is a law, governing the publication of information. It grants the author limited rights, and grants the user/reader/consumer a set of right ans reasponsibilities. That's all. It's not about the "ownership of information". It's about the rights of who produced the information and who uses it.
It is really silly getting into a loaded philiosophical debate on what's morally correct or not. When you publish information, you lose control over it. If you want to "own" information, you don't publish it. In order to encourage publishing of information, copyright was concieved for the author to preserve *some* control over the work.
Now after a few hundred years it is so ingrained in our society that it is a god given right? Do we need to burn people who violated copyright at the state? I hope not.
If copyright as it stands now does not promote what is was supposed to do, don't you think it's time adapting it to this era? If they is no feasible way to coerce into preventing copyright violations, maybe it's time to propose a new system that promotes progress.
I feel sorry for you thinking that if you buy a software or a CD, or anything for intangible for that matter, it is like buying an actual physical product. You are not, it is not. When you buy software, you are not only buying a copy of the software on the distribution media and the hard work gone behind it, you are in essence signing a (mostly) binding contract, by accepting the licensing agreement, that allows you to use that software. That is which is most important.
I really don't know what you are trying to get across, I really don't. I never said anything about "free software"(tm) or commercial products. I don't know what gave you the impression of that.
What I did say, was that just because the law says it's a crimincal offense to replicate information in certain circumstances, does not mean that it *should* be a criminal offense. Not a word was said on whether replicating works digitally was right or wrong.
There are many ways to make money off a piece of work. If you so choose to limit its distribution, then go do it. If you chose to limit distribution, and charge a fee for each and every copy, don't go expecting that the law will always grant you unlimited rights as a author. Once your work is published, you will only have limited control over the work in question. It is the law, as you like to invoke.
Laws such as the DMCA is the problem in this case. It is acting if the right to protect one's published work is as natural as the right to breath, and the right to find substantial happiness. It is not and it should not be. All copyrights expire due to the fact that it was introduced for the public good, and by allowing the work to be retrieved in the public domain, it is where it does most good to everyone.
Hopefully the thread ends here, I don't like repeating myself anymore. Words such as "theft" and "piracy" are very strong, emotionally charged words. They should not be used to symbolize one type of copyright violation. If you understan the difference between natural law, and municipal law, you will understand what I mean.
I think you are getting to the point of resorting to silly (personal) tactics. Let me reiterate -
Calling the copying of "illegal" material pirating is very misleading, calling it theft is even more misleading. This has not happened until recently, when CDs and Packaged software came on the scene. One of the reasons is because of industry advocacy groups such as the BSA and the RIAA has spent millions on promoting that no copies can be made without permission in whatever circumstance whatsoever. If you don't believe me, read their literature!
Once a work is copyrighted, the author and the "user" will each have rights and responsibilities. If you made unauthorized copies of the work, you broke copyright law, you did not commit theft!
theft \Theft\, n. [OE. thefte, AS. [thorn]i['e]f[eth]e, [thorn][=y]f[eth]e, [thorn]e['o]f[eth]e. See Thief.] 1. (Law) The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny.
Note: To constitute theft there must be a taking without the owner's consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious; every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position; and it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief. See Larceny, and the Note under Robbery.
True theft in the intellectual property sense is when you take someone else's work and call it your own, depriving the author of credit. You cannot steal something without taking something away from someone. The "potential to earn money" argument in itself will not hold up in court (unless in specific circumstances).
Your previous post did not answer even one of my arguments, and you are implying that I don't stand for free speech? I am very disappointed indeed.
I'm sorry, but you have no idea what you are talking about. Photocopying money is fraud. Fraud is when you make a fake and sell it as something real.
I don't know how people can insist that they have a god given right to control the usage of everything they say, make and write. Is it some sort of control freak symptom?
You either publish your work or you don't. When you do publish your work, your control over your work naturally dimishes. Copyright is to extend that control with law for the benifit of society, so people can publish their work without fear of plagarism.
Maybe you can stop ranting and actually get to know what is at stake here before yapping. The BSA has put in millions of dollars in advocating the "software piracy" slogan every year.
At least they can take comfort in that there are actually people like you who buy into their propaganda.
I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but NFS is just a poor protocol in itself, and has nothing to do with the (itself poor) NFSv2 and the upcoming NFSv3 support in Linux.
NFSv3 was supposed to fix a lot of the outstanding issues with NFSv2, but it is no major rewrite of the protocol. There are issues with NFS in file locking and reliability across many implementations of NFS, so it's not just a linux problem.
In fact I use NFS at home and at work. Yes, it is a poor protocol, but the SMB servers have 'doze boxen to serve.:)
Breaking the law does not mean you did something morally worng. Speeding is a 3rd degree misdemeanor, but do you feel guilty speeding? Especially when they nab you on radar when your going only 10 above the limit?
The point is that laws are made by people to control the progression of society. Basic criminal statutes are here to protect the fabric of society, while areas such as copyright and patents were drawn up to shape the evolution of it.
I think it is wrong to take the stance that anything that breaks the law is wrong. There are some laws which are worth standing up for, and there are some that clearly does not serve justice or truth, only some corporation.
The DMCA is one of those dreaded laws. There is nothing morally wrong with sharing information, but there is when someone when tries to stop it to protect the continuation of an old business model that isn't viable in the era of the internet, I feel no pity for them.
It has happened before and it will happen again. When the VHS format was introduced, the industry overwhelmingly raised their voice against the new format, which they say will increase bootlegging and decrease the amount of crowds at cinemas. However, VHS sales are so good that some low budget productions are for VHS only.
Stealing a tangible object is theft, but copying a piece of published work is not theft or piracy. It maybe a violation of copyright and your license (which is a binding contract in some places), but it is not a depriving someone of their property, which is theft. In fact fair use laws expressly allow the use of copyrighted works in critiques, research and for teaching.
Does stealing someone's car for your own research equal thief? Yes! Does the schoolteacher down the street photocopying papers for a class discussion equal theft? No
The only why you can steal a piece of intellectual work is depriving the author of due credit. Plagiarism is the only true theft in intellectual property terms, because you are dening the author of the work due credit.
Yeah, we just need to extend the DMCA to cover those loopholes. We'll make those greedy pundits, academics and teachers pay up for all the millions of dollars of lost revenue over the years. That'll show them who's boss!
You comments distort the truth almost to the extreme. You claim that keiretsu are a failed economic model. In fact keiretsu isn't a failed economic model; it isn't a economic model at all.
The whole thing about the Japanese and the Americans in the late 70s and early 80s is that *America* was producing absolute crap, while the Japanese focused on quality, and sold them at low prices (with a little help from home of course).
The main problem is that domestic American products were substancially inferious to imported goods. Take automobiles for example. I wouldn't want to own let's say a 1986 Chrysler Laser. It just doesn't run as good as let's say a 1984 Toyota Corolla.
The last decade witnessed the largest turnaround in American manufacturing since the last world war. No longer does American companies settle for inferior products. Look at the cars that Chysler makes today and compare it to the junk it made 14 years ago. Lee Iccoa did make his mark by the emphasis on quality, and many American companies followed suit.
The problem with keirusu is not that it doesn't work, because it works and it works very well in both the short and long run. The problem with keirusu is the affect it has on the consumer markets.
Put it this way. Almost all keirusu would have a balance sheet firmly in the black. However, to achieve this and also achieve penetration pricing on significant breath of its product mix would require pricing the profit making products to include a very large profit margin to fund the products on promotion.
This is what Japan did, and still does. Sony sells products in America with higher quality (in regards to competing American brands), at relatively reasonable prices. However, at home, back in Japan, the CPI is much higher and subsequently, the Japanese pay more money on average to live, than let's say Americans.
Some American companies cried foul and took out their lawyers (typical American reaction) accusing Japanese firms of dumping. Most imported products however, do not sell below production costs, and dumping legislation is only a tactic domestic companies use to *protect* their market. In fact Americans do the same thing abroad.
The problem is that putting a strain on your own economy to expand operations in another economy works well if your own economy is very strong. However, as anyone who has taken econ101 knows, there is this nasty pest called the business cycle, and because of this things get very complicated. So complicated in fact that tiny changes in the economic climate in either the home or expansion economy can cause widespread havoc on the cash flow of large corporations, since it is the large corporations that tend to run into cash flow problems when economies turn sour. When not just one, but many operating markets turns sour due to volatile stock markets and the numerous problems in the finance sector (as with the just-passed Asian Economic Crisis), you can be pretty sure that back at home in Japan they really weren't happy campers. Couple this with the fact that the economy was already in a slump due to the severe stagnation of the European markets and the American economy then just on the brink of a comeback.
The problems that you tried to associate with keirusu is actually not their fault at all. In fact the problem is globalization. In fact it has happened more than 70 years before. When Wall street went down in the early 20th century, the impact was felt all over the world.
You can compare extensive global economic interdependancy to Microsoft Windows. Sure its great and it gets things done quite well, but there are many things added on only as an afterthought. Think of a virtually non-existance security system for a operating system that was designed for '95 and you get the idea.
This is not "theft" nor "pirating". Distributing unlicensed copies of IP is violating the copyright of copyright holder. This is all that these people are doing.
Intellectual property laws were designed to increase the dissemination of information (the reason why all copyrights expire a certain time after the author's death). Now we have people that will buy the likeliness of dead people, so they can continue the franchise and make a buck.
Copyright violations, as with other violations of contracts and licenses, should not be held under tort law. They should be held as breaches of contract. Copyright violations are criminalized due to the fact that there have been many lobbies for them. Guess why? To protect the interest of the individuals?
Corporate interests of course, and to that theme I question you on what happens when only a few large corporations dictate the supply of the "free market"?
Why, an oligopoly of course, but a cartel should be a more appropriate in this case.
Everything has flaws, but the gaping flaws in your beloved "free market" in the context of the music industry is so obvious. Please retake Econ 101.
The last thing we need debating on legislation is strong emotions. If you close you eyes, sure, you'll see what you want to see, but you're no different than being blind.
People often don't realise the problem until a major symptom shows up, and then it's too late.
That's why your doctor recomends you to have a full checkup every year. That's also the reason why your car needs a tuneup now and then.
I once had a Talon awd. There was a problem in which the differentials might lock up due to a leak while the car was running. Chrysler didn't offer me a factory recall until late 1998. There was a real threat that the wheels would lock up while it does 140 mph (which it does:)
If Chrysler sealed those hoods shut, I might not be here to tell you this story. After all, the factory recalls were way late.
This is the problem with your argument:
The "hackers" who did this deed did not break into anything. What they did was they found a flaw in the design. This flaw could be in any security mechanism. A padlock might have a flaw that would make it almost useless.
Tell me, did the person that found a flaw in the lock and publishes his method of comprimising the said design commit any immoral deed? Just because it caused the lock company to lose sales does not mean he did anything wrong, after all it is a flaw in the lock mechanism.
Using this flaw to break into something is a crime, but what is wrong with making companies responsible for design flaws? After all the engineering practice needs to publish their designs for rewiew for decades. People's lives depend on well built infrastructure. In this time and age, that means both physical and virtual infrastructure.
Before there was WinAMP there was MAPlay, before there was MPEG1 Layer3, there was maplay. I remembered using this gem while the author was trying to implement Layer3, since the original MAPlay for *nix included only Layer2 routines. I used it for a long time, since then it went down with the win95 partition it was on.
Well those were the good old days when a good MP2 three minute was 8 megs with joint stereo. Maybe there still one or two hanging around dormant in those CD-R archives, who knows.:)
Re:There's something beautiful about a book
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RMS On eBooks
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· Score: 1
Ink on paper has it's magic; it's foldable, has texture and above all, it produces high contrast in natural light.
Reading from a low resolution, backlit screen is still a strain on the eye, but a little better than reflective LCDs, those are the real killers. Until they can mass produce a flat panel with ink-on-paper properties, I'd never look at an ebook.
If they did, even then, I'd still prefer flipping through the pages with a "real book" in my hands, than to hold on to the cold, hard plastic anytime.
If people want to distribute warez and kiddie porn, they already have the perfect tools to do so, it's gnuTELLA. Freenet is mostly about distributing information. It for the people who want to publish their dissent for their government, but were not allowed to do so. It for people who was injusticed by forces, that if they expressed their opinions freely, whould certainly place their lives in danger. Remember anon.penet.fi? It can be used for illegal purposes, but mostly it was used for discussions that individuals required anonymity. People used it for all sorts of purposes, including but seeking psychological guidance and support. However, it only took one bad apple to ruin everything. Now if we only had a system that would allow this flow of information without having the limitation of having a centralized location, then...
You're using a false analogy here. Taxes is something that existed beyond the dawn of time, and would continue to exist whether you and I like it or not.
HOWEVER, that doesn't mean that the internet should be taxed. If anything, taxes would only mean the begining of more regulation. If we have a whole new economy, why don't we find whole new ways to pay for it? Freedom is more desirable than regulation, at least in many minds.
Also consider the fact, as you said, that the internet spans many states (nation-states I presume, not the ones in the US). How would a netwide taxation scheme be standardized and ratified by hundreds of nations, all realizing how powerful the net is, and all wanting a bigger piece of it. Would hard line tactics coming out from the US and it's allies make every nation conform, and if so at what price?
You have to understand that taxation is in a game of it's own. It's called (domestic and international) politics and it's about power, control and authority above anything. The reason the net is thriving today is that it makes political boundaries largely irrelevant, empowering the individual by freedom of information.
If we take any of that away, we would be one-step close closer to destroying the only way of uniting mankind.
Slashdot Mirror
You missed out one. Social progressive vs Social conservative.
I hate to do this over and over again, but it it true that farmers are getting screwed over by the (ever increasing) coglomerates. If you live in a small farming community, you'd know.
There are a large percentage of factors, the main problem is that big coglomerates control too much of the market, allowing them to increase production or decrease production at their leisure.
The problem with big corporations is that they believe if they have the power, that they can exercise this power. For a person, he or she will exercise restraint due to fators such ethics and justice. Even tough corporations are lead by people, they tend to have a group mentality, hiding behind the corporate image that they set up.
ADM colluded to fix the price of corn syrup. That costed consumers bllions of dollars upwards. They got caught. How many events like that happen and are passed by?
Think of it this way. Who do you think would sell cheaper computers? IBM or the independant computer shop down the street?
Are you sure you want to get into a lenghty discussion on the difference between capital goods and capital? Do you really want to incite the full wraith of the Austrians?
If you have the proper equipement you can do it.. In fact if you have the porper equipement, you can pirate Jay Leno's chin and put a copy of it on yours. Then the NTSHA (Nighttime Talkshow Host Association) will sue the maker of said equipement, and they will have to spend a coffee night with the police in Belgium (where they operate out of)and some laywer from the US that doesn't speak french. Then the NTSHA will send out cease and desist letters to everyone with a overgrown chin.
Not that you'd want to do have a chin like that, but yeah, it's possible.
Probably just the self-fulfilling prophecy of some "industry analyst".
Why was this moderated offtopic? We should be glad that Jason is back on his feet after that car accident
While I am not a student of law, I have done a little reading on some fundamental works in which the British, and thus American civil law system is based on.
:) implies that no-one has control over your physcial being until you are proven not to deserve this natural right. This coupled with a variety of of other laws which concerned the morals and ethics of society made up natural law (as Judge Blackstone put it). Blackstone called it natural law because it was the law of god. The pursuit of substantial happiness is a right because it in essence allows the individual to pursue whatever he believes in, which implied religius freedom (IIRC).
The right to life (body and limb, whatever
Any other regulations such as traffic laws, commerce regulation and others fall into the realm of municipal law.
Of course, that was a few hundred years ago. Laws and their categorization changes, but the basic concept of promoting justice should not. I hope it keeps that way.
Really, I don't understand why some people are so much ingrained into intellectual property rights. IP laws such as copyright allows the author to extend a *reasonable* amount of control to published works, providing them with an incentive, and avioding such real theft such as *plagarism*.
Copyright is not a god given right. It is not comparible to the right to live or the right to pursue substantial happiness. Most copyright violations are not theft. Please check the definition of theft and stealing before you come to conclusions. Copyright violations that truely deprive the original author of monetary or other gain can be termed theft, but the term piracy is totally inappropriate and mostly propoganda by the BSA.
What I find most annoying is that both sides try to rationize their arguements with falacies. People try to apply their own "morals" on what's right and what's wrong that they lost the objective view on what copyright really is.
Copyright is a law, governing the publication of information. It grants the author limited rights, and grants the user/reader/consumer a set of right ans reasponsibilities. That's all. It's not about the "ownership of information". It's about the rights of who produced the information and who uses it.
It is really silly getting into a loaded philiosophical debate on what's morally correct or not. When you publish information, you lose control over it. If you want to "own" information, you don't publish it. In order to encourage publishing of information, copyright was concieved for the author to preserve *some* control over the work.
Now after a few hundred years it is so ingrained in our society that it is a god given right? Do we need to burn people who violated copyright at the state? I hope not.
If copyright as it stands now does not promote what is was supposed to do, don't you think it's time adapting it to this era? If they is no feasible way to coerce into preventing copyright violations, maybe it's time to propose a new system that promotes progress.
I saw the preview of "Scary Movie" before MI2 went on, and I guess that preview was as enjoying as watching Cruise's one man show.
Especially when that girl does a Matrix in front of the masked boogey-man ala scream. That was hilarious.
Helix Code now use akamai, so it won't be a problem.
I feel sorry for you thinking that if you buy a software or a CD, or anything for intangible for that matter, it is like buying an actual physical product. You are not, it is not. When you buy software, you are not only buying a copy of the software on the distribution media and the hard work gone behind it, you are in essence signing a (mostly) binding contract, by accepting the licensing agreement, that allows you to use that software. That is which is most important.
I really don't know what you are trying to get across, I really don't. I never said anything about "free software"(tm) or commercial products. I don't know what gave you the impression of that.
What I did say, was that just because the law says it's a crimincal offense to replicate information in certain circumstances, does not mean that it *should* be a criminal offense. Not a word was said on whether replicating works digitally was right or wrong.
There are many ways to make money off a piece of work. If you so choose to limit its distribution, then go do it. If you chose to limit distribution, and charge a fee for each and every copy, don't go expecting that the law will always grant you unlimited rights as a author. Once your work is published, you will only have limited control over the work in question. It is the law, as you like to invoke.
Laws such as the DMCA is the problem in this case. It is acting if the right to protect one's published work is as natural as the right to breath, and the right to find substantial happiness. It is not and it should not be. All copyrights expire due to the fact that it was introduced for the public good, and by allowing the work to be retrieved in the public domain, it is where it does most good to everyone.
Hopefully the thread ends here, I don't like repeating myself anymore. Words such as "theft" and "piracy" are very strong, emotionally charged words. They should not be used to symbolize one type of copyright violation. If you understan the difference between natural law, and municipal law, you will understand what I mean.
I think you are getting to the point of resorting to silly (personal) tactics. Let me reiterate -
Calling the copying of "illegal" material pirating is very misleading, calling it theft is even more misleading. This has not happened until recently, when CDs and Packaged software came on the scene. One of the reasons is because of industry advocacy groups such as the BSA and the RIAA has spent millions on promoting that no copies can be made without permission in whatever circumstance whatsoever. If you don't believe me, read their literature!
Once a work is copyrighted, the author and the "user" will each have rights and responsibilities. If you made unauthorized copies of the work, you broke copyright law, you did not commit theft!
theft \Theft\, n. [OE. thefte, AS. [thorn]i['e]f[eth]e, [thorn][=y]f[eth]e, [thorn]e['o]f[eth]e. See Thief.] 1. (Law) The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same; larceny.
Note: To constitute theft there must be a taking without the owner's consent, and it must be unlawful or felonious; every part of the property stolen must be removed, however slightly, from its former position; and it must be, at least momentarily, in the complete possession of the thief. See Larceny, and the Note under Robbery.
Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.
True theft in the intellectual property sense is when you take someone else's work and call it your own, depriving the author of credit. You cannot steal something without taking something away from someone. The "potential to earn money" argument in itself will not hold up in court (unless in specific circumstances).
Your previous post did not answer even one of my arguments, and you are implying that I don't stand for free speech? I am very disappointed indeed.
I'm sorry, but you have no idea what you are talking about. Photocopying money is fraud. Fraud is when you make a fake and sell it as something real.
I don't know how people can insist that they have a god given right to control the usage of everything they say, make and write. Is it some sort of control freak symptom?
You either publish your work or you don't. When you do publish your work, your control over your work naturally dimishes. Copyright is to extend that control with law for the benifit of society, so people can publish their work without fear of plagarism.
Maybe you can stop ranting and actually get to know what is at stake here before yapping. The BSA has put in millions of dollars in advocating the "software piracy" slogan every year.
At least they can take comfort in that there are actually people like you who buy into their propaganda.
I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but NFS is just a poor protocol in itself, and has nothing to do with the (itself poor) NFSv2 and the upcoming NFSv3 support in Linux.
:)
NFSv3 was supposed to fix a lot of the outstanding issues with NFSv2, but it is no major rewrite of the protocol. There are issues with NFS in file locking and reliability across many implementations of NFS, so it's not just a linux problem.
In fact I use NFS at home and at work. Yes, it is a poor protocol, but the SMB servers have 'doze boxen to serve.
Breaking the law does not mean you did something morally worng. Speeding is a 3rd degree misdemeanor, but do you feel guilty speeding? Especially when they nab you on radar when your going only 10 above the limit?
The point is that laws are made by people to control the progression of society. Basic criminal statutes are here to protect the fabric of society, while areas such as copyright and patents were drawn up to shape the evolution of it.
I think it is wrong to take the stance that anything that breaks the law is wrong. There are some laws which are worth standing up for, and there are some that clearly does not serve justice or truth, only some corporation.
The DMCA is one of those dreaded laws. There is nothing morally wrong with sharing information, but there is when someone when tries to stop it to protect the continuation of an old business model that isn't viable in the era of the internet, I feel no pity for them.
It has happened before and it will happen again. When the VHS format was introduced, the industry overwhelmingly raised their voice against the new format, which they say will increase bootlegging and decrease the amount of crowds at cinemas. However, VHS sales are so good that some low budget productions are for VHS only.
Stealing a tangible object is theft, but copying a piece of published work is not theft or piracy. It maybe a violation of copyright and your license (which is a binding contract in some places), but it is not a depriving someone of their property, which is theft. In fact fair use laws expressly allow the use of copyrighted works in critiques, research and for teaching.
Does stealing someone's car for your own research equal thief? Yes! Does the schoolteacher down the street photocopying papers for a class discussion equal theft? No
The only why you can steal a piece of intellectual work is depriving the author of due credit. Plagiarism is the only true theft in intellectual property terms, because you are dening the author of the work due credit.
Yeah, we just need to extend the DMCA to cover those loopholes. We'll make those greedy pundits, academics and teachers pay up for all the millions of dollars of lost revenue over the years. That'll show them who's boss!
What you failed to mention, most "innovations" come from academics, not corporations.
You comments distort the truth almost to the extreme. You claim that keiretsu are a failed economic model. In fact keiretsu isn't a failed economic model; it isn't a economic model at all.
The whole thing about the Japanese and the Americans in the late 70s and early 80s is that *America* was producing absolute crap, while the Japanese focused on quality, and sold them at low prices (with a little help from home of course).
The main problem is that domestic American products were substancially inferious to imported goods. Take automobiles for example. I wouldn't want to own let's say a 1986 Chrysler Laser. It just doesn't run as good as let's say a 1984 Toyota Corolla.
The last decade witnessed the largest turnaround in American manufacturing since the last world war. No longer does American companies settle for inferior products. Look at the cars that Chysler makes today and compare it to the junk it made 14 years ago. Lee Iccoa did make his mark by the emphasis on quality, and many American companies followed suit.
The problem with keirusu is not that it doesn't work, because it works and it works very well in both the short and long run. The problem with keirusu is the affect it has on the consumer markets.
Put it this way. Almost all keirusu would have a balance sheet firmly in the black. However, to achieve this and also achieve penetration pricing on significant breath of its product mix would require pricing the profit making products to include a very large profit margin to fund the products on promotion.
This is what Japan did, and still does. Sony sells products in America with higher quality (in regards to competing American brands), at relatively reasonable prices. However, at home, back in Japan, the CPI is much higher and subsequently, the Japanese pay more money on average to live, than let's say Americans.
Some American companies cried foul and took out their lawyers (typical American reaction) accusing Japanese firms of dumping. Most imported products however, do not sell below production costs, and dumping legislation is only a tactic domestic companies use to *protect* their market. In fact Americans do the same thing abroad.
The problem is that putting a strain on your own economy to expand operations in another economy works well if your own economy is very strong. However, as anyone who has taken econ101 knows, there is this nasty pest called the business cycle, and because of this things get very complicated. So complicated in fact that tiny changes in the economic climate in either the home or expansion economy can cause widespread havoc on the cash flow of large corporations, since it is the large corporations that tend to run into cash flow problems when economies turn sour. When not just one, but many operating markets turns sour due to volatile stock markets and the numerous problems in the finance sector (as with the just-passed Asian Economic Crisis), you can be pretty sure that back at home in Japan they really weren't happy campers. Couple this with the fact that the economy was already in a slump due to the severe stagnation of the European markets and the American economy then just on the brink of a comeback.
The problems that you tried to associate with keirusu is actually not their fault at all. In fact the problem is globalization. In fact it has happened more than 70 years before. When Wall street went down in the early 20th century, the impact was felt all over the world.
You can compare extensive global economic interdependancy to Microsoft Windows. Sure its great and it gets things done quite well, but there are many things added on only as an afterthought. Think of a virtually non-existance security system for a operating system that was designed for '95 and you get the idea.
This is not "theft" nor "pirating". Distributing unlicensed copies of IP is violating the copyright of copyright holder. This is all that these people are doing.
Intellectual property laws were designed to increase the dissemination of information (the reason why all copyrights expire a certain time after the author's death). Now we have people that will buy the likeliness of dead people, so they can continue the franchise and make a buck.
Copyright violations, as with other violations of contracts and licenses, should not be held under tort law. They should be held as breaches of contract. Copyright violations are criminalized due to the fact that there have been many lobbies for them. Guess why? To protect the interest of the individuals?
Corporate interests of course, and to that theme I question you on what happens when only a few large corporations dictate the supply of the "free market"?
Why, an oligopoly of course, but a cartel should be a more appropriate in this case.
Everything has flaws, but the gaping flaws in your beloved "free market" in the context of the music industry is so obvious. Please retake Econ 101.
The last thing we need debating on legislation is strong emotions. If you close you eyes, sure, you'll see what you want to see, but you're no different than being blind.
It doesn't matter if you have one nuke or a hundred nukes, apart from the statistics of the aftermath.
Besides, France wouldn't care less if they had no more MS-Windows. Hell, the french would love it.
Check out the new chrome zone at mozillazine.org. The Sullivan chrome from Alphanumerica is an eye opener.
In response to your open source tidbits:
:)
People often don't realise the problem until a major symptom shows up, and then it's too late.
That's why your doctor recomends you to have a full checkup every year.
That's also the reason why your car needs a tuneup now and then.
I once had a Talon awd. There was a problem in which the differentials might lock up due to a leak while the car was running. Chrysler didn't offer me a factory recall until late 1998. There was a real threat that the wheels would lock up while it does 140 mph (which it does
If Chrysler sealed those hoods shut, I might not be here to tell you this story. After all, the factory recalls were way late.
This is the problem with your argument:
The "hackers" who did this deed did not break into anything. What they did was they found a flaw in the design. This flaw could be in any security mechanism. A padlock might have a flaw that would make it almost useless.
Tell me, did the person that found a flaw in the lock and publishes his method of comprimising the said design commit any immoral deed? Just because it caused the lock company to lose sales does not mean he did anything wrong, after all it is a flaw in the lock mechanism.
Using this flaw to break into something is a crime, but what is wrong with making companies responsible for design flaws? After all the engineering practice needs to publish their designs for rewiew for decades. People's lives depend on well built infrastructure. In this time and age, that means both physical and virtual infrastructure.
Before there was WinAMP there was MAPlay, before there was MPEG1 Layer3, there was maplay. I remembered using this gem while the author was trying to implement Layer3, since the original MAPlay for *nix included only Layer2 routines. I used it for a long time, since then it went down with the win95 partition it was on.
:)
Well those were the good old days when a good MP2 three minute was 8 megs with joint stereo. Maybe there still one or two hanging around dormant in those CD-R archives, who knows.
Ink on paper has it's magic; it's foldable, has texture and above all, it produces high contrast in natural light.
Reading from a low resolution, backlit screen is still a strain on the eye, but a little better than reflective LCDs, those are the real killers. Until they can mass produce a flat panel with ink-on-paper properties, I'd never look at an ebook.
If they did, even then, I'd still prefer flipping through the pages with a "real book" in my hands, than to hold on to the cold, hard plastic anytime.
If people want to distribute warez and kiddie porn, they already have the perfect tools to do so, it's gnuTELLA. Freenet is mostly about distributing information. It for the people who want to publish their dissent for their government, but were not allowed to do so. It for people who was injusticed by forces, that if they expressed their opinions freely, whould certainly place their lives in danger. Remember anon.penet.fi? It can be used for illegal purposes, but mostly it was used for discussions that individuals required anonymity. People used it for all sorts of purposes, including but seeking psychological guidance and support. However, it only took one bad apple to ruin everything. Now if we only had a system that would allow this flow of information without having the limitation of having a centralized location, then...
You're using a false analogy here. Taxes is something that existed beyond the dawn of time, and would continue to exist whether you and I like it or not.
HOWEVER, that doesn't mean that the internet should be taxed. If anything, taxes would only mean the begining of more regulation. If we have a whole new economy, why don't we find whole new ways to pay for it? Freedom is more desirable than regulation, at least in many minds.
Also consider the fact, as you said, that the internet spans many states (nation-states I presume, not the ones in the US). How would a netwide taxation scheme be standardized and ratified by hundreds of nations, all realizing how powerful the net is, and all wanting a bigger piece of it. Would hard line tactics coming out from the US and it's allies make every nation conform, and if so at what price?
You have to understand that taxation is in a game of it's own. It's called (domestic and international) politics and it's about power, control and authority above anything. The reason the net is thriving today is that it makes political boundaries largely irrelevant, empowering the individual by freedom of information.
If we take any of that away, we would be one-step close closer to destroying the only way of uniting mankind.