If you enjoy looking at a woman walking down the street, you should be paying for it. It's that simple. (the previous sentence contains sarcasm, parse it accordingly)
If you put that into a context that has anything to do with reality, you'd have to be talking about a situation where people offer a service for money. The only one that remotely matches what you suggest is a strip club. Now, try taking a digital video camera into a strip club with the intent of taping shows and placing them on the Internet...Guess what, they won't appreciate it.
So, music should be free, because the supply due to copying can be infinite. Of course, if anyone can get someone's music for free, how can music get paid for?
Right. It can't. And before you make any assinine claims that music should be free because it's a natural resource (how is it a 'natural resource' any more than anything YOU do and expect people to pay you for?), take a look at your pirated MP3 collection and tell me none of those files are ripped from CDs that were made in factories and mastered from studios that cost money to rent. Tell me that none of those intruments used on there cost money. Then tell me that ALL of the artists involved in all of your ripped songs would have gone to the trouble of dealing with a record label and spent time in that studio crafting a CD worth of professionally produced songs if they did not expect to get paid.
In other words, without people paying for your free tunes, you can't GET your free tunes. The way you collect pirated music is parasitic, relying on the money that paying customers shell out, because without them, you wouldn't HAVE 99% of the music on your hard drives and CR-Rs.
Either I'm missing something, or a lot of people are misreading this or only reading the FAQ.
Reading both the press and the (woefully sketchy) FAQ closely, I can't see where it says that every commercial communication or file standard to be used in France must be open to the public. It only says that it is not a crime to write software compatible with someone else's file format. Ie, writing deCSS would not be a crime, but Microsoft would not be obligated to disclose file format specifications, except to the French government, if and only if it sold software using those file formats to the French government.
As people here on Slashdot interpret the law, it sounds bad. As stated, however, the law sounds fine and intelligent to me. The only thing that could be better for French taxpayers would be to require the government to use only free software if quality free software exists for an application.
The French tradition of tolerating brutal, oppressive governments until they burgeon to the point of requiring bloody rebellion, then instituting some new government that gleefully tries to outdo its predecessor in gruesome abuse of power, is well known....Even if it is a much shorter tradition than the "Anglo-Saxon" one cited above. Many people are also familiar with the much longer Continental tradition of government veneration and cheerful lock-step obedience to officialdom. (This is not to say that Americans don't sometimes need to be slapped away from emulating this tradition themselves, despite your apparent conviction that the anglo-american legal tradition is one of anarchy.)
In France, whenever the State or the Government thinks it can pull a fast one on the people, the people rebel and promptly overthows the culprit. This does a far more effective job than the labyrinth of byzantine anglo-saxon "checks and balances" that merely insure that only seasoned special interest group lobbyists will be able to steer things their ways in the ensuing political quagmire.
Post-Revolution France, with a history of violence, colonialism, nationalistic aggression, and oppression that makes the U.S.A.'s bloody history look positively angelic in comparison, really doesn't strike me as great proof for the claim that the French system "promptly" tosses out bad governments. As for checks and balances, they may frustrate people attempting to totally rework the system of government or enforce their pet wishes of broad social change...but that's the point.
Even better, for the french, working for the State is not viewed as a bad thing; in fact, the State skims the best of the best in the schools, and offers free schooling in special schools that turn-out civil servants of exceptionnal ability, competence and talent. Recent French historry is peppered with thousands of such people of very humble extraction that rose to very influential positions, thanks to those State schools, and returned the favour with exceptionnal service to the State, for the benefit of the whole population, not just a few lucky shareholders.
In a pleasant fairy-land, the State acts solely to benefit the people, and not mostly to meet goals of higher-ups and enrich bureaucrats and officials. France doesn't count as a pleasant fairy-land. The French government merely tries to offer the most desirable jobs by using taxpayer money to make the positions particularly enticing.
And that's only legitimate: the taxpayers deserve the absolute very best people to work with their tax money.
No, taxpayers deserve the very best use of their tax money, which they are forcibly deprived of. Having "the absolute very best people" on government payrolls doesn't necessarily mean the taxpayers benefit at all - all francophobic joking aside, the French people don't deserve exquisitely talented and well-trained censors, commissars, secret police, assassins, and propagandists any more than the rest of us. Even assuming that all those government workers can be said to be honest (because, of course, dishonest people don't try to get attractive jobs) and none of them work in government functions that serve to oppress or impede the people (because France apparently doesn't have a government like any other in human history), it doesn't strike me as obviously just that taxpayers are forced to provide the copious funds necessary to make every government position more desirable than private-sector jobs where the funds come from people choosing to pay...
This systems insure that anybody that has the potential for exceptional service receives the training for it, not just the very few whose fathers can afford college, or those who are lucky enough to brownnose themselves a scholarship.
I have to wonder what system you're trying to contrast this with. The US government has many programs for subsidizing the advanced education of people willing to work for it. Further, it's terribly easy to get a college education in this country. Bone-average students willing to pony up wages from a menial job can get into community colleges in most of this country. If you want to get into a better school, you have to have money or show talent, yes (as said by someone who didn't know anyone to brown-nose, but managed to get scholarships and grants to go to college).
Of course the State has to stay in power!!! There is only one State, and it's disappearance means anarchy. But only something that is legitinate can assume statehood, and it is certainly not the unaccountable private corporations that are so aggressively vying for statehood can be legitimate.
You really just missed the point, there. It's not an issue of wanting the state to go away (personally, I wish I could believe that anarcho-capitalism would work, but I'll have to settle for minarchism), but about people realizing that the State has big (often overriding) priorities and goals that have nothing to do with fulfilling its duties to the people and contradict the freedoms and rights of the people.
You are incredibly blindfolded by the biggest anglo-saxon collective neurosis: the fear and distrust of the State. You are a perfect example of people being brainwashed by the continuous anti-State propaganda whose only purpose is to shrink the State so much that it will no longer stand in the way of big corporations who want to make the biggest amount of profit at the expense of everyone else.
Ah, yes, the "freedom and limited government are the tools of the corporate bastards keeping us down" theory. So much stronger and more plausible than the "government can be and has been damned dangerous before in the past, so let's keep it under control" theory, because, of course, proponents of limited government, who also oppose such things as corporate subsidies and government-instituted monopolies and sweetheart deals, are just the mindless tools of Big Money.
Now, if there is no more State to make laws that protects you against greedy corporations, what will you do when some corporation decides that it wants your own house?
If the corporation has such total power over me, it IS a State.:) I don't, and few people do, reject the idea that some government is necessary. Malicious corporations, groups, churches, families, and individuals do need to be restrained from infringing upon the rights of others. However, governments, being usually the repositories of the most weapons and the people willing to use them on other people on command, are inherently more difficult to restrain once they get too dangerous. (Which makes me wonder how you reconcile your love of bloody revolution with the desire to glorify and empower the state so that it can't be rebelled against.) Hence the desire to keep them limited.
(Incidentally, the only way a corporation can take my house against my will here is if the government wants it to do so and forecloses on my house. It's called "Eminent Domain" and happens too damn often. And before you protest that the corporation somehow bullies the government into this evil behavior, governments do the same thing all the time, here, when they want your land for something and you don't like the price they initially offer.)
You are entirely correct that this isn't a censorship issue. No one is barred from saying anything about the police, or reporting on them. Two things, though:
Is anyone else disturbed by the fact that there are "reporters" whose jobs apparently revolve around parroting police press releases? Disregarding sensationalism, there's the lack-of-independence issue. Police in this country are running around confiscating property without trial in drug cases,shooting unarmed civilians on the street and in botched "high-intensity" raids, and causing multicar fatal accidents in high-speed chases (or just on their way to a call), just to name the "legitimate" dangers they can pose to the rest of us. Journalists who rely so much on police sources for information on police activities disserve the public.
While it isn't a freedom-of-speech issue, this is a secrecy issue. If we really care about a government accountable to the people, government functions must be open except for narrowly defined circumstances where secrecy is justified. At the local police level, a very few select items of information(identities of rape victims or undercover officers, for instance) have been designated as worthwhile to conceal due to a demonstrable public interest. However, this hardly translates to justifying a blanket policy of silence on police department activities. The government takes taxes from us to fund the police, who obstensibly get to drive fast and carry guns in order to serve and protect us - we deserve to know what they're doing.
Well, where would you all the awful more-affluent people to live? It shouldn't be a difficult problem to solve...it's not like they're human beings who have every right to try to rent a place to live. And the people who own houses and rent them out don't have right to try to actually charge as much rent as someone is willing to pay them.
Attempts to fight off normal market interactions through rent controls or overt violence and intimidation (yeah, sure, such a movement would really stop at scratching up some SUVs if it got any momentum) only serve to disadvantage a community at a later time, as demand fades, property values plummet, and insurance rates rise in response to a poor rent market and perception of high criminality.
And, yes, this sort of xenophobic response is exactly like the reactions minorities get when they move into white neighborhoods. The hostility is always framed in a claim of the need for economic self-defense, and many people come to believe their rationalizations for it, but the hostility always originally comes from the strangeness of the newcomers. Mix in the envy of artistic types who currently aren't faring well in the marketplace for techies whose skills are in great demand, and there you go. Instant grass-roots outrage.
As for "Anti-dot-com"...Were there people who had such a reaction when businesses started including phone numbers in their ads?
No, all human creative endeavors are the works of individuals with rights and a definite need for food and shelter.
Those who say that no one has any rights to control one's own creative work or sell it as one chooses have never created anything anyone else would want. This even applies to folks like Stallman, who impose strict conditions (always include the source, frex) upon people who download their "free" intellectual property.
Well, I just realized something after reading through all of the posts below. MP3's do NOT steal money from artists and record labels, they prevent record companies and artists from making MORE money. It's just like clicking "NO" on the accpet license part of your brand new PC, and then installing Linux, you are merely denying Bill Gates/Microsoft from making money on something else that they have licensed.
Well, you just realized wrong. Someone who closes Linux over Windows is declining to pay for something they don't want to use. MP3 traders are declining to pay for something they very much want to use. They are stealing.
The implicit agreement is the price tag on the CD. The artist and everyone associated with the artist offers that music to you if you freely give them your money. To make the facile argument that ripping a CD and placing its contents for free download is somehow different from stealing a CD is absurd. It does not matter whether it is a physical object...it only has value because it contains data. And to claim that stealing a CD is wrong because it denies someone else the data on it is nonsensical if you accept that it's fine to make the data on it universally available - because it eliminates that denial.
And, you're completely apart from all reality if you think there's any way to pay artists for CDs while anyone can download their music for free.
If you're going to tell me that you have an P3 library, and that it has no music produced by professionals contained in it, only recordings of your friends singing around the fire...
...I'm just going to laugh.
There's not a damn thing wrong with someone devoting their life to producing music, or expecting that people freely pay them for that music. There's plenty wrong with freeloaders who let other people pay for the music.
If you're going to tell me that you have an MP3 library, and that it has no music produced by professionals contained in it, only recordings of your friends singing around the fire...
There's not a damn thing wrong with someone devoting their life to producing music, or expecting that people freely pay them for that music. There's plenty wrong with freeloaders who let other people pay for the music.
If you don't like Kid Rock, don't buy his CDs. Pirating someone's music and defending it by saying he somehow doesn't deserve to benefit from the music you enjoyed enough to DL is the rankest hypocrisy.
First, IMHO, its the artists that should be paid for the music, not the RIAA. They're the ones who are doing all the work, no?
No. The artists make the music. The labels handle the chores of production, distribution, and promotion of that music, at the very least. Very few successful artists have the know-how or inclination to handle all this themselves, which is why the labels exist in the first place.
And add to that that CDs have been at $14 for the last 15 years, far too long to reflect any real production costs but instead a cozy cartel.
Going by ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.t xt,that means you're bitching about the fact that the real retail cost of a CD has gone down by 37.5% (going by the January columns), or down to $8.76 in 1985 money.
You're also ignoring the fact that many outlets offer CDs as low as $11.99, which is equal to a whopping $7.50 in 1985 money.
And, most stunningly , you're ignoring the fact that CDs don't teleport from the factory into your hot little hands. They get shipped (which adds to the cost), they get distributed (and distributors don't do this for free), and they end up at retail stores (who don't don't do it for free, either).
The economic ignorance that abounds in a group of people like this who should have the education to know better is astounding.
Either you want to pay fairly or you don't get the music. The problem with the morality approach is that it's not mirrored anywhere else on the net. Why is eBay such a success? Dynamic pricing. It's happening everywhere.
Hold it right there. eBay is people agreeing to exchange money for goods and services. MP3 piracy is people distributing music against the wishes of the artist and publishing company. One is an agreement, the other is violation of the implicit agreement, "Hey, if you want to listen to my music, pay me some money."
It would be interesting to see proof of smaller name bands becoming popular due to Mp3 distribution. It would be a good demonstration to those who have doubts as to Mp3's power to make your band more popular.
Popularity is useless to a band. Sales are the issue. Sure, it sounds nice to imagine your music on millions of hard drives...until you realize only one guy has your music in his CD rack.
Example: The artists can always flood the pirate sites with music that is slightly highwer quality then your average rip, but has advertisments in the song (or in an attached HTML file),
Everyone just loves banner ads and such on web sites, now - they can only be MORE popular in your favorite songs! Oh, to be fair, this might work...until some misanthrope decides to code up an "MP3 ad-clipper" program to conserve bandwidth. Besides, MP3s already can encode at virtual CD quality...short of making the "artist's version" eight times slower to download, how are you going to make an improvement over that (to anyone but the most fetishistic audiophiles, who will get vinyl, anyway)?
Honestly though, I think the recording industry, in its current state, prefers bands that they can sell in a box. I don't think we'll see any more bands like the Dead coming from members of the RIAA. When I say "like the Dead" I'm refering to their consistant dedication to their music and fans, not the type of music.
So? I don't want a band that's "dedicated" to me or says it loves me; I want a band to make music I like to hear. Most people have that preference, as well.
Aside from some bands I actually bother to learn about, I know next to nothing about the people who made most of the music I own. Why? Because I paid for songs, not biographies or a pretended intimacy.
But yet, I don't assert that because X band has been lucky and struck it big or because they aren't "dedicated" to me that I can then enjoy their product without owing them recompense.
Get over the pretense! The underground MP3 trade has absolutely nothing to do with some revolution of "real, dedicated musicians" against "stupid manufactured pop music". The vast majority of MP3s traded are from the same CDs that are at the top of the charts (or were some time in the past). It's not about rejecting and hopefully destroying insipid, formulaic crap - it's about freeloading that very same insipid, formulaic crap! Further, if this ever really destroyed the Music Industry As We Know It, the MP3 trade would slowly taper off to a fragment of its former size as everyone collected the last few Christina Aguilera or New Kids on the Block tracks s/he didn't already have.
The rhetoric around MP3s is nothing but a defensive, self-serving sugar-coating of the simple truth - people want something for nothing, and this is an easy way to do it.
In simple terms: Musicians offer their work in exchange for pay. And you're welcome to disapprove of the channel they offer (money for CDs, in this case). However, if you disapprove , you should simply not subject yourself to their music...To then collect and enjoy their work without compensating them for the effort they went to in order to make that music is, franky, immoral and hypocritical.
In even simpler terms: Y'all essentially say, "I won't give you a dime for your stupid, bourgeois music! You won't survive in the New Music Industry because you make soul-less pop that only a record executive could love! Sorry, let me turn down that MP3 player looping your greatest hits CD in the background..."
Though, if musicians and their publishers don't deserve to get paid for their work, who pays for the cost of instruments, recording studio time, and all the costs of making songs?
Or are you going to tell me you're content to just listen to MP3s of bad recordings of garage bands with cheap instruments and horrible track mixing?
Face it, if you like your music lovingly produced and involving instruments more expensive than a pawnshop acoustic guitar, you're a parasite on the backs of people who pay for music. This is great for you, now, but when you get too many parasites like yourself relative to paying chumps, the whole thing will collapse.
First of all, copyright itself is international law. Ever hear of the Berne Convention?
Second, Katz is completely off-base. DMCA has nothing to do with what happened to iCrave-TV.
Third, let's just admit it. Napster is software for very transparently getting MP3s from various servers around the world, and trading them with people you're chatting with. In other words, for getting MP3s of songs off CDs you didn't pay for. This was illegal long before DMCA or MP3s. The trade of pirated MP3s has been illegal since it started, not recently made illegal.
And fourth, it's clear you've never created music, writing, or anything else as a living. I've yet to meet published writers, musicians, etc. who don't have a big problem with people enjoying and trading their works without them getting paid.
Re:Is Censorship/control ALWAYS bad?
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China and the MPA
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However, such development takes time, decades even. A population that has not yet reached that level of maturity is vulnerable throughout that entire time. That is why I feel that censorship is sometimes a necessary evil, a stopgap measure until the population has reached the maturity required. I do not advocate permanent censorship:) As an analogy, think of raising a child. Yes, you sink huge amounts of time and effort educating the child. However, neither do you allow the little tyke unrestricted freedom and access, because he might go walk on a freeway, stick his finger in an electric outlet or something of the sort. Are you not taking away his freedom? Are you not taking away his rights? Yes. But only for as long as necessary.
The adult people of Malaysia, who you deem unworthy of liberty, are not children. The government is not their parent. Its purpose is not to "guide" or "raise" them; its purpose is to serve them by protecting them and their rights. However, the myth of the need for a paternalistic government does serve one group well: that government. When the people of a nation come to view a government as their parent, they surrender their own adulthood and control of their destiny and give that power to the government. That this is a sick and sad thing shouldn't have to be explained.
Even tossing aside the question "If the people can't be trusted to make decisions, how do you trust a small minority of them to make those decisions for everyone else?", since you'll likely argue that people in Malaysia are ruled by a benevolent elite of the educated, I have to marvel at your naivete at believing that such censorship could be "temporary". No ruling class, whether nobility or bureaucracy, ever voluntarily gives up power over the people (whether this power is total or "just" censorship). Liberty is always seized by people the ruling class deem unworthy or unready for it. There is no unfree "education" period of a society that can lead to a free society - being ruled and controlled doesn't prepare one for self-governance. Having someone else choose what you may read and hear doesn't prepare you to handle a free market of ideas.
Human beings inherently possess several fundamental rights. Not "educated human beings", not "human beings who live in first-world countries", and not even "the Malaysians who are smart and rich enough to be ready for it" - it's "all human beings". (If your attitude had been more prevalent in the fledgling U.S.A. a poor nation of largely illiterate people, Americans wouldn't be as somewhat-free as they are.)
Further, I find it your pointing to Malaysian society being succeptible to rumors as a justification for censorship utterly ridiculous and offensive. Human beings in virtually every society are terribly gullible. Americans have many times fallen for rumors and pranks of the nature you described. Even our government, which in your theory should be smart enough to know better, since it should have the power to determine what is "truth" and what is "fiction", gets fooled or simply makes incorrect decisions. The city of Seattle completely cancelled all official New Years celebrations on the theory that Something Would Happen because some terrorists were arrested. Every other major city continued on with celebrations, and surprise, no terrorism in those places or Seattle. Frankly, the human race as a while is gullible and needs a good dose of skepticism. However, I don't trust the very human and very gullible people in the government to make that call for everyone else. Anyone who does is simply a fool.
Well, it's no less hypocritical and no different than the UN's current stance on the advocacy of drug-legalization:
But some drug warriors favor even more repressive measures. The most ominous proposal comes from the United Nations. The UN's International Narcotics Control Board's 1997 report called on member states to criminalize opposition to the war on drugs. Citing the 1988 UN Convention Against Illicit Trafficking in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, the INCB claimed that all governments are obligated to enact laws that prohibit "inciting" or "inducing" people to use illegal drugs. If such a vague restriction on freedom of expression were not odious enough, the INCB contends further that member governments are also obligated to ban speech that "shows illicit drug use in a favourable light" or any advocacy of "a change in the drug law."
This is from "Collateral Damage: The Wide-Ranging Consequences of America's Drug War" by Ted Galen Carpenter in a paper for the Cato Institute. The whole text can be found here.
Our media is definitely universally illiberal, but I think I use a different meaning of the word than you do.:)
It's rather safe to say, however, that the majority of the national media, and the dominant members of it in particular, are just a step or two more leftist and statist than the "center". Hardly enough to be very different, but enough to irritate those who disagree. The only major outlet that's more central and possibly a step from the mainstream to the right (and still statist) end of the spectrum is Fox and particularly the Fox News channel (which is just enough different from the slightly leftist mainstream of the news media to provoke worried "Does Fox News have a Conservative Agenda" articles)
What people forget is that self-interest often takes a backseat, at times, to one's own political and other beliefs, even for "horrible, evil, rich media executives". That's why you can see Ted Turner, who's gotten rich enough to be able to throw away a billion dollars into the black hole of the UN, mouth off on how "Christianity is the religion of losers", even at the threat to profits such an incredibly offensive and stupid statement represents. It's surprising, but a lot of executives don't have any particular reverence for the free market and are happy to entertain and even support the idea of increased government activity to support their pet social causes.
Nothing will inevitably lead to a freer society for the Chinese people. Even if the PRC government collapsed, something just as bad might pop up in its place. However, I think you both overestimate the material wealth of the bulk of the Chinese people and underestimate the propensity of human beings to push for freedom when they see the possibility of it and think they can get away with it. I expect that China will become a freer nation in my lifetime for the almost the same reasons the Soviet Union fell.
Of course, an alternate point to be made is that a free society doesn't necessarily require democracy. The American Revolution wasn't a social aberration but an intense example of a growing tradition of limited government and personal freedom that existed in England, which still had its king as a significant force in government. Theoretically, China could become a much freer nation, and possibly even a tolerable one to live in for a freedom nut like me, while still retaining absolute Communist party control of the central government.
Of course, by the time the government gets done formally acknowledging personal freedoms like private property, free markets, freedom of association and movement, free speech, etc, that Communist government will be even more of a meaningless, denatured Old Men's Club than it is now (just lacking the power-of-the-gun that the current one has) and will crumble under the first major scandal that crops up. And, of course, even though democracy isn't at all synonymous with personal freedom or even good government (hence the old "three wolves and a sheep voting on lunch" Twainism), democracy at least gives us some control of the government short of revolution, so it is the most preferable of systems.
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If you put that into a context that has anything to do with reality, you'd have to be talking about a situation where people offer a service for money. The only one that remotely matches what you suggest is a strip club. Now, try taking a digital video camera into a strip club with the intent of taping shows and placing them on the Internet...Guess what, they won't appreciate it.
So, music should be free, because the supply due to copying can be infinite. Of course, if anyone can get someone's music for free, how can music get paid for?
Right. It can't. And before you make any assinine claims that music should be free because it's a natural resource (how is it a 'natural resource' any more than anything YOU do and expect people to pay you for?), take a look at your pirated MP3 collection and tell me none of those files are ripped from CDs that were made in factories and mastered from studios that cost money to rent. Tell me that none of those intruments used on there cost money. Then tell me that ALL of the artists involved in all of your ripped songs would have gone to the trouble of dealing with a record label and spent time in that studio crafting a CD worth of professionally produced songs if they did not expect to get paid.
In other words, without people paying for your free tunes, you can't GET your free tunes. The way you collect pirated music is parasitic, relying on the money that paying customers shell out, because without them, you wouldn't HAVE 99% of the music on your hard drives and CR-Rs.
Either I'm missing something, or a lot of people are misreading this or only reading the FAQ.
Reading both the press and the (woefully sketchy) FAQ closely, I can't see where it says that every commercial communication or file standard to be used in France must be open to the public. It only says that it is not a crime to write software compatible with someone else's file format. Ie, writing deCSS would not be a crime, but Microsoft would not be obligated to disclose file format specifications, except to the French government, if and only if it sold software using those file formats to the French government.
As people here on Slashdot interpret the law, it sounds bad. As stated, however, the law sounds fine and intelligent to me. The only thing that could be better for French taxpayers would be to require the government to use only free software if quality free software exists for an application.
The French tradition of tolerating brutal, oppressive governments until they burgeon to the point of requiring bloody rebellion, then instituting some new government that gleefully tries to outdo its predecessor in gruesome abuse of power, is well known. ...Even if it is a much shorter tradition than the "Anglo-Saxon" one cited above. Many people are also familiar with the much longer Continental tradition of government veneration and cheerful lock-step obedience to officialdom. (This is not to say that Americans don't sometimes need to be slapped away from emulating this tradition themselves, despite your apparent conviction that the anglo-american legal tradition is one of anarchy.)
Post-Revolution France, with a history of violence, colonialism, nationalistic aggression, and oppression that makes the U.S.A.'s bloody history look positively angelic in comparison, really doesn't strike me as great proof for the claim that the French system "promptly" tosses out bad governments. As for checks and balances, they may frustrate people attempting to totally rework the system of government or enforce their pet wishes of broad social change...but that's the point.
In a pleasant fairy-land, the State acts solely to benefit the people, and not mostly to meet goals of higher-ups and enrich bureaucrats and officials. France doesn't count as a pleasant fairy-land. The French government merely tries to offer the most desirable jobs by using taxpayer money to make the positions particularly enticing.
No, taxpayers deserve the very best use of their tax money, which they are forcibly deprived of. Having "the absolute very best people" on government payrolls doesn't necessarily mean the taxpayers benefit at all - all francophobic joking aside, the French people don't deserve exquisitely talented and well-trained censors, commissars, secret police, assassins, and propagandists any more than the rest of us. Even assuming that all those government workers can be said to be honest (because, of course, dishonest people don't try to get attractive jobs) and none of them work in government functions that serve to oppress or impede the people (because France apparently doesn't have a government like any other in human history), it doesn't strike me as obviously just that taxpayers are forced to provide the copious funds necessary to make every government position more desirable than private-sector jobs where the funds come from people choosing to pay...
I have to wonder what system you're trying to contrast this with. The US government has many programs for subsidizing the advanced education of people willing to work for it. Further, it's terribly easy to get a college education in this country. Bone-average students willing to pony up wages from a menial job can get into community colleges in most of this country. If you want to get into a better school, you have to have money or show talent, yes (as said by someone who didn't know anyone to brown-nose, but managed to get scholarships and grants to go to college).
You really just missed the point, there. It's not an issue of wanting the state to go away (personally, I wish I could believe that anarcho-capitalism would work, but I'll have to settle for minarchism), but about people realizing that the State has big (often overriding) priorities and goals that have nothing to do with fulfilling its duties to the people and contradict the freedoms and rights of the people.
Ah, yes, the "freedom and limited government are the tools of the corporate bastards keeping us down" theory. So much stronger and more plausible than the "government can be and has been damned dangerous before in the past, so let's keep it under control" theory, because, of course, proponents of limited government, who also oppose such things as corporate subsidies and government-instituted monopolies and sweetheart deals, are just the mindless tools of Big Money.
If the corporation has such total power over me, it IS a State. :) I don't, and few people do, reject the idea that some government is necessary. Malicious corporations, groups, churches, families, and individuals do need to be restrained from infringing upon the rights of others. However, governments, being usually the repositories of the most weapons and the people willing to use them on other people on command, are inherently more difficult to restrain once they get too dangerous. (Which makes me wonder how you reconcile your love of bloody revolution with the desire to glorify and empower the state so that it can't be rebelled against.) Hence the desire to keep them limited.
(Incidentally, the only way a corporation can take my house against my will here is if the government wants it to do so and forecloses on my house. It's called "Eminent Domain" and happens too damn often. And before you protest that the corporation somehow bullies the government into this evil behavior, governments do the same thing all the time, here, when they want your land for something and you don't like the price they initially offer.)
You are entirely correct that this isn't a censorship issue. No one is barred from saying anything about the police, or reporting on them. Two things, though:
Well, where would you all the awful more-affluent people to live? It shouldn't be a difficult problem to solve...it's not like they're human beings who have every right to try to rent a place to live. And the people who own houses and rent them out don't have right to try to actually charge as much rent as someone is willing to pay them.
Attempts to fight off normal market interactions through rent controls or overt violence and intimidation (yeah, sure, such a movement would really stop at scratching up some SUVs if it got any momentum) only serve to disadvantage a community at a later time, as demand fades, property values plummet, and insurance rates rise in response to a poor rent market and perception of high criminality.
And, yes, this sort of xenophobic response is exactly like the reactions minorities get when they move into white neighborhoods. The hostility is always framed in a claim of the need for economic self-defense, and many people come to believe their rationalizations for it, but the hostility always originally comes from the strangeness of the newcomers. Mix in the envy of artistic types who currently aren't faring well in the marketplace for techies whose skills are in great demand, and there you go. Instant grass-roots outrage.
As for "Anti-dot-com"...Were there people who had such a reaction when businesses started including phone numbers in their ads?
No, all human creative endeavors are the works of individuals with rights and a definite need for food and shelter.
Those who say that no one has any rights to control one's own creative work or sell it as one chooses have never created anything anyone else would want. This even applies to folks like Stallman, who impose strict conditions (always include the source, frex) upon people who download their "free" intellectual property.
Well, you just realized wrong. Someone who closes Linux over Windows is declining to pay for something they don't want to use. MP3 traders are declining to pay for something they very much want to use. They are stealing.
The implicit agreement is the price tag on the CD. The artist and everyone associated with the artist offers that music to you if you freely give them your money. To make the facile argument that ripping a CD and placing its contents for free download is somehow different from stealing a CD is absurd. It does not matter whether it is a physical object...it only has value because it contains data. And to claim that stealing a CD is wrong because it denies someone else the data on it is nonsensical if you accept that it's fine to make the data on it universally available - because it eliminates that denial.
And, you're completely apart from all reality if you think there's any way to pay artists for CDs while anyone can download their music for free.
If you're going to tell me that you have an P3 library, and that it has no music produced by professionals contained in it, only recordings of your friends singing around the fire...
...I'm just going to laugh.
There's not a damn thing wrong with someone devoting their life to producing music, or expecting that people freely pay them for that music. There's plenty wrong with freeloaders who let other people pay for the music.
If you're going to tell me that you have an MP3 library, and that it has no music produced by professionals contained in it, only recordings of your friends singing around the fire...
There's not a damn thing wrong with someone devoting their life to producing music, or expecting that people freely pay them for that music. There's plenty wrong with freeloaders who let other people pay for the music.
If you don't like Kid Rock, don't buy his CDs. Pirating someone's music and defending it by saying he somehow doesn't deserve to benefit from the music you enjoyed enough to DL is the rankest hypocrisy.
No. The artists make the music. The labels handle the chores of production, distribution, and promotion of that music, at the very least. Very few successful artists have the know-how or inclination to handle all this themselves, which is why the labels exist in the first place.
Going by ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.t xt ,that means you're bitching about the fact that the real retail cost of a CD has gone down by 37.5% (going by the January columns), or down to $8.76 in 1985 money.
You're also ignoring the fact that many outlets offer CDs as low as $11.99, which is equal to a whopping $7.50 in 1985 money.
And, most stunningly , you're ignoring the fact that CDs don't teleport from the factory into your hot little hands. They get shipped (which adds to the cost), they get distributed (and distributors don't do this for free), and they end up at retail stores (who don't don't do it for free, either).
The economic ignorance that abounds in a group of people like this who should have the education to know better is astounding.
Hold it right there. eBay is people agreeing to exchange money for goods and services. MP3 piracy is people distributing music against the wishes of the artist and publishing company. One is an agreement, the other is violation of the implicit agreement, "Hey, if you want to listen to my music, pay me some money."
Popularity is useless to a band. Sales are the issue. Sure, it sounds nice to imagine your music on millions of hard drives...until you realize only one guy has your music in his CD rack.
Everyone just loves banner ads and such on web sites, now - they can only be MORE popular in your favorite songs! Oh, to be fair, this might work...until some misanthrope decides to code up an "MP3 ad-clipper" program to conserve bandwidth. Besides, MP3s already can encode at virtual CD quality...short of making the "artist's version" eight times slower to download, how are you going to make an improvement over that (to anyone but the most fetishistic audiophiles, who will get vinyl, anyway)?
So? I don't want a band that's "dedicated" to me or says it loves me; I want a band to make music I like to hear. Most people have that preference, as well.
Aside from some bands I actually bother to learn about, I know next to nothing about the people who made most of the music I own. Why? Because I paid for songs, not biographies or a pretended intimacy.
But yet, I don't assert that because X band has been lucky and struck it big or because they aren't "dedicated" to me that I can then enjoy their product without owing them recompense.
Get over the pretense! The underground MP3 trade has absolutely nothing to do with some revolution of "real, dedicated musicians" against "stupid manufactured pop music". The vast majority of MP3s traded are from the same CDs that are at the top of the charts (or were some time in the past). It's not about rejecting and hopefully destroying insipid, formulaic crap - it's about freeloading that very same insipid, formulaic crap! Further, if this ever really destroyed the Music Industry As We Know It, the MP3 trade would slowly taper off to a fragment of its former size as everyone collected the last few Christina Aguilera or New Kids on the Block tracks s/he didn't already have.
The rhetoric around MP3s is nothing but a defensive, self-serving sugar-coating of the simple truth - people want something for nothing, and this is an easy way to do it.
In simple terms: Musicians offer their work in exchange for pay. And you're welcome to disapprove of the channel they offer (money for CDs, in this case). However, if you disapprove , you should simply not subject yourself to their music...To then collect and enjoy their work without compensating them for the effort they went to in order to make that music is, franky, immoral and hypocritical.
In even simpler terms: Y'all essentially say, "I won't give you a dime for your stupid, bourgeois music! You won't survive in the New Music Industry because you make soul-less pop that only a record executive could love! Sorry, let me turn down that MP3 player looping your greatest hits CD in the background..."
And customers will do everything they can to get as much as they can for free. It is what they do.
It's called the free market, people, and it doesn't give you the moral high ground just because you want it.
Fair enough.
Though, if musicians and their publishers don't deserve to get paid for their work, who pays for the cost of instruments, recording studio time, and all the costs of making songs?
Or are you going to tell me you're content to just listen to MP3s of bad recordings of garage bands with cheap instruments and horrible track mixing?
Face it, if you like your music lovingly produced and involving instruments more expensive than a pawnshop acoustic guitar, you're a parasite on the backs of people who pay for music. This is great for you, now, but when you get too many parasites like yourself relative to paying chumps, the whole thing will collapse.
First of all, copyright itself is international law. Ever hear of the Berne Convention?
Second, Katz is completely off-base. DMCA has nothing to do with what happened to iCrave-TV.
Third, let's just admit it. Napster is software for very transparently getting MP3s from various servers around the world, and trading them with people you're chatting with. In other words, for getting MP3s of songs off CDs you didn't pay for. This was illegal long before DMCA or MP3s. The trade of pirated MP3s has been illegal since it started, not recently made illegal.
And fourth, it's clear you've never created music, writing, or anything else as a living. I've yet to meet published writers, musicians, etc. who don't have a big problem with people enjoying and trading their works without them getting paid.
The adult people of Malaysia, who you deem unworthy of liberty, are not children. The government is not their parent. Its purpose is not to "guide" or "raise" them; its purpose is to serve them by protecting them and their rights. However, the myth of the need for a paternalistic government does serve one group well: that government. When the people of a nation come to view a government as their parent, they surrender their own adulthood and control of their destiny and give that power to the government. That this is a sick and sad thing shouldn't have to be explained.
Even tossing aside the question "If the people can't be trusted to make decisions, how do you trust a small minority of them to make those decisions for everyone else?", since you'll likely argue that people in Malaysia are ruled by a benevolent elite of the educated, I have to marvel at your naivete at believing that such censorship could be "temporary". No ruling class, whether nobility or bureaucracy, ever voluntarily gives up power over the people (whether this power is total or "just" censorship). Liberty is always seized by people the ruling class deem unworthy or unready for it. There is no unfree "education" period of a society that can lead to a free society - being ruled and controlled doesn't prepare one for self-governance. Having someone else choose what you may read and hear doesn't prepare you to handle a free market of ideas.
Human beings inherently possess several fundamental rights. Not "educated human beings", not "human beings who live in first-world countries", and not even "the Malaysians who are smart and rich enough to be ready for it" - it's "all human beings". (If your attitude had been more prevalent in the fledgling U.S.A. a poor nation of largely illiterate people, Americans wouldn't be as somewhat-free as they are.)
Further, I find it your pointing to Malaysian society being succeptible to rumors as a justification for censorship utterly ridiculous and offensive. Human beings in virtually every society are terribly gullible. Americans have many times fallen for rumors and pranks of the nature you described. Even our government, which in your theory should be smart enough to know better, since it should have the power to determine what is "truth" and what is "fiction", gets fooled or simply makes incorrect decisions. The city of Seattle completely cancelled all official New Years celebrations on the theory that Something Would Happen because some terrorists were arrested. Every other major city continued on with celebrations, and surprise, no terrorism in those places or Seattle. Frankly, the human race as a while is gullible and needs a good dose of skepticism. However, I don't trust the very human and very gullible people in the government to make that call for everyone else. Anyone who does is simply a fool.
Well, it's no less hypocritical and no different than the UN's current stance on the advocacy of drug-legalization:
This is from "Collateral Damage: The Wide-Ranging Consequences of America's Drug War" by Ted Galen Carpenter in a paper for the Cato Institute. The whole text can be found here.
Our media is definitely universally illiberal, but I think I use a different meaning of the word than you do. :)
It's rather safe to say, however, that the majority of the national media, and the dominant members of it in particular, are just a step or two more leftist and statist than the "center". Hardly enough to be very different, but enough to irritate those who disagree. The only major outlet that's more central and possibly a step from the mainstream to the right (and still statist) end of the spectrum is Fox and particularly the Fox News channel (which is just enough different from the slightly leftist mainstream of the news media to provoke worried "Does Fox News have a Conservative Agenda" articles)
What people forget is that self-interest often takes a backseat, at times, to one's own political and other beliefs, even for "horrible, evil, rich media executives". That's why you can see Ted Turner, who's gotten rich enough to be able to throw away a billion dollars into the black hole of the UN, mouth off on how "Christianity is the religion of losers", even at the threat to profits such an incredibly offensive and stupid statement represents. It's surprising, but a lot of executives don't have any particular reverence for the free market and are happy to entertain and even support the idea of increased government activity to support their pet social causes.
Nothing will inevitably lead to a freer society for the Chinese people. Even if the PRC government collapsed, something just as bad might pop up in its place. However, I think you both overestimate the material wealth of the bulk of the Chinese people and underestimate the propensity of human beings to push for freedom when they see the possibility of it and think they can get away with it. I expect that China will become a freer nation in my lifetime for the almost the same reasons the Soviet Union fell.
Of course, an alternate point to be made is that a free society doesn't necessarily require democracy. The American Revolution wasn't a social aberration but an intense example of a growing tradition of limited government and personal freedom that existed in England, which still had its king as a significant force in government. Theoretically, China could become a much freer nation, and possibly even a tolerable one to live in for a freedom nut like me, while still retaining absolute Communist party control of the central government.
Of course, by the time the government gets done formally acknowledging personal freedoms like private property, free markets, freedom of association and movement, free speech, etc, that Communist government will be even more of a meaningless, denatured Old Men's Club than it is now (just lacking the power-of-the-gun that the current one has) and will crumble under the first major scandal that crops up. And, of course, even though democracy isn't at all synonymous with personal freedom or even good government (hence the old "three wolves and a sheep voting on lunch" Twainism), democracy at least gives us some control of the government short of revolution, so it is the most preferable of systems.