many other Slashdot users seem to be under a delusion that it's possible to write a song without being sued
It's not a delusion; it's reality, and it happens everyday. Perhaps they just don't care about vague legal possibilities.
I would write songs, but I'm afraid of being made an example of.
Perhaps you have an inflated opinion of your own importance, if you think of all the bands out there, they are going to pick you to make an example of (if, in fact, they care to make an example at all.)
It's the only way to run Debian unstable and keep up to date with the newest packages. It's always on, meaning I don't have to connect and get random disconnections while downloading stuff. I find it impossible to upload my scans to Distributed Proofreaders without broadband; I find it merely painful to work on stuff there (which involves downloading a full page, megapixel, B&W scan).
Where's the free music (not "pirated", but legitimate)?
What do you mean, where's the free music? Have you looked for it? A casual search around the web has found more bands then I can count. Beatallica, Machinae Supremacy, and Persone are just the ones that I have on my hard drive.
Where's the streaming movies?
Full movies? Not many. But the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has many shows and news clips in their archives; the IMDB has many trailers. I've frequently found a modem connection makes viewing these impossible, and often makes viewing large pictures (millions of scans of old books online, for one) more painful then it's worth.
E.g., I used to make backups of all the share/freeware I downloaded. Now I toss them when I'm done, because it would take me longer to find it in my disc catalog than to find the newest version on the net.
A bit off topic but . ..
I've actually searched the net for a program I used to use. I found a bug report, by me, with a listing of one of my directories with that file sitting in, where that file still sat on my hard drive.
France belives it is not opposing US interests, just that it believes it has a better idea of what those interests are.
France acts in France's best interests first, not the US's or Iraq's. Believe no country's lies to the countrary.
The US came to regret not taking French advice in Vietnam
One thing we came to regret that the French prevented Ho Chi Minh from talking to the US at the Versaille conferance at the end of WWI. We also came to regret that the French were so incompentent imperialists that there was a Vietnam war. France created the Vietnam problem.
I guess the difference is the concept of a "trade secret".
A trade secret is supposed to be something kept hidden; if you send a hundred thousand copies out, and someone manages to divine the secret recipe, you're out of luck.
You can look under the hood of the car, but you can't tell what equipment was used to make and test the parts,
I don't get the distinction. By reverse-engineering a binary, I can't tell what test infrastructure existed, or what debugger was used. By looking closely enough under the hood of a car, I can probably tell what type of drill was used, by looking at the scratches under a microscope.
Similarly, you can study the writing style, but you don't get access to the same editorial input the author had, nor his notes for the forthcoming next book in the series.
And I don't get access to the editorial input the programmer had, or his notes for this project or the next. I don't have access to the comments that were in the source code.
you potentially have access to a lot of trade secrets,
If someone finds your secret bean recipe, that's your problem. That's what patents are created for; so a reverse-engineer can't use your ideas.
and thus the ability to compete with someone based on his own work rather than yours
I don't have the ability to compete with them based on their work; copyright law protects that. I merely have the ability to study what they did and how they did it.
Let's look at GCC. Having the source means that you can find out what algorithms are being used, and you can study the garbarge collector and internal syntax. That doesn't atomatically give you the ability to compete with the GCC team, because it's still under copyright; it just gives you insight into how a compiler works. A disassembled GCC, sans comments, would give you even less ability to compete.
Of course, the programmers who created C didn't, because they created gets, which is unusuable unless a buffer overflow is part of the design
Bullshit. [...] YAW.
So there exist some rare situations where someone could possibly trust the other side enough to use gets, which most programmers wouldn't use and would gain you nothing over fgets, these situations being rare enough not to justify adding a function to the standard C library.
At best, there's a minor technical flaw in what I said; that hardly makes it bullshit or what I said all wrong. Plonk.
Companies have a right to sell software and to ban people from reverse engineering it.
Why? If I buy a car, I can dig around under the hood to my heart's content. If I buy a book, I can study the writing style. Why should software be any different, especially given that software interacts with other programs on my computer, and other systems on the net, in ways that can be important to know but are easily hidden from the use.
programming in c or c++ is not going to make sofware less secure if you KNOW WHAT THE "F" YOU ARE DOING.
Of course, the programmers who created C didn't, because they created gets, which is unusuable unless a buffer overflow is part of the design.
if a routine call is flawed...then write a new one that isnt
I bet you wouldn't mind if you were driving a car, and tried to put into the wrong gear, it blew up. There are so many buffer overflows that cause major security holes that could be fixed by using a different language. Good engineers build things that take into account human failability.
Re:Cairo? Bill Gates will be contacting them.
on
Xr Renamed to Cairo
·
· Score: 1
This is the code name for Windows NT.
Then we'll have to rename it to Butthead Astronomer, then.
You failed to mention that Iran was in danger of being taken over by communists...maybe things weren't so good for a while (though you wouldn't know it from hearing current Iranian exiles speak), but at least it kept the Russians out.
[...]the U.S. had a positive image with many Iranians. After helping to convince occupying Soviet forces to leave the country, [...] the American government was generally well regarded.
The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was owned by British interests and supported by the British government. In a grossly unequal colonial-style arrangement, the Iranians were not even allowed to examine the ledgers. As the dispute with the British intensified, the Iranians finally became determined to nationalize their country's oil industry. [...]
Although the Truman government had been sympathetic to Iran, [indicative of a Russian controlled government, of course - dvdeug] in 1953 the new Eisenhower administration accepted the British view that the Iranian regime had to go.
American and Israeli intelligence agents organized SAVAK, the Shah's personal secret security force. Before long, Iran developed into a full-blown police state complete with thousands of informers, censorship, arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, and widespread torture and assassination. [...] Aiming to terrorize an entire population, SAVAK repression was both extreme and widespread.
You failed to mention that Iran was in danger of being taken over by communists
A leader trying to take a oil industry, which had 80% of the profits going to Britain, under the control of Iran, does not a communist overtaking make.
Furthermore, it was not our decision to make. Iran was an autonomous democratic government; we don't have the right to kill elected leaders that make choices we disagree with.
maybe things weren't so good for a while (though you wouldn't know it from hearing current Iranian exiles speak),
I read a book not too long ago by a Iranian exile where she described the terrors her father felt under the secret police, how the army turned machine guns on protesting students. If you wouldn't know it from hearing current Iranian exiles speak, it's either because it's old history and you aren't asking questions about it, or you aren't listening.
Happy citizens don't revolt. Spontaneous, citizen-led, revolutions, like those in Eastern Europe recently, or the French or American revolutions of the late 18th century, happen because there is a cruel and unjust government.
at least it kept the Russians out.
I guess we should have sided with the Nazis, then; that would have kept the Russians out, too. It's not only Americans who have rights, who have lives; you can't just say "they suffered under a cruel dictatorship, but it kept their democratic leaders from even considering anything we didn't want."
Or government doesn't believe all the WMD and nuclear capability stuff any more than I do.
Iran, an oil and natural-gas rich country, is building a nuclear reactor, one step in building nuclear weapons. From another viewpoint, Pakistan, India, Israel and China, all close-by, have nukes; Chinese/Iran relations are shaky, US (the major nuclear power)/Iran relations have no formal relations and informally do a lot of stuff like this, and Israel/Iran relations are potentially explosive. In their shoes, I would be building nukes.
The soviet union had to be destroyed because it was a competing system, not because it was evil.
If the SU was not evil, why were East Germans so happy to be reunited with West Germany? Why did they have to put the Berlin wall up in the first place? If the SU was not evil, why did every government in Eastern Europe fall the instant they looked weak? They didn't come out to support their government; they came out in droves to topple it, in some of the greatest demostrations of mass democracy in history.
The US did a lot of things wrong in the Cold War, but there's no real question that the SU sacrified many innocent people and that the government was held in place by cruelty and power, not the will of the people.
maybe a few of them will learn that (1) we're not the Great Satan the ayatollahs told them about
Their parents told them that they had a nice democratic government before the US overthrew it and put in a government with a secret police the equal of almost any dictatorship's, in 1953. This action will confirm that. Great Satan, maybe not, but historically speaking not the friend of Iran's people.
You keep saying that you are interested in a "capitalistic" solution, yet your entire argument seems to be based on the communist principle of "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."
You yourself claim that these people will create no matter what. I'm arguing that good ones - as defined by the market - should have the economic freedom to do so without worrying about where their next meal is coming from.
arguing that the government should make stricter and stricter laws
I never claimed that.
You claim the only reason people create is to make money and...
No. But money gives people the ability to create instead of working at McDonalds. It also permits the mere existence of some art forms. Film: for a movie like Ben-Hur, there is no concievable way to get that many people to be filmed, that many sets to be created, and that much film all put together with some sort of creative continuity, without millions of dollars.
people (such as game designers, cooks, fashion designers, etc.) make money off of goods (games, food, clothing) which are not covered by IP
Clothing is covered by design patents; recipies and games are covered by copyright. (The abstract rules of a game are not, but the written rules and board and sometimes the pieces are.)
This is besides the point - writers and musicians don't make money off goods that aren't covered by IP, which are trivial to copy. To remove IP would be to practically remove those professions.
I have never seen IP laws successfully used to defend a company like SJG, but have seen several cases where they were successfully used to attack one.
I guess you missed the part where they stop White Wolf from using their eye in the pyramid logo.
Also, what happens if copyright gets elimenated? Every book Steve Jackson ever published gets put on www.gurpsbooks.com. People don't buy new GURPS books, instead settling for the PDF or something printed out at the game shop. Steve Jackson and crew take day jobs and stop devoting 10 hours a day to new GURPS books.
there is the risk that there may not be enough templates to copy,
Templates are cheap; Asimov always laughed at the people who called him up with ideas for him to write, expecting him to split the profits. The adaptation and creation are hard.
No, we have the creative material because we have a society rich enough for a large number of people to indulge in the near universal urge to create.
What's going to pay for a $150 million dollar movie, or even the team of animators for the Simpsons? Would we really have five Harry Potter novels if J.K. Rowling had to fight to feed her son? Would Asimov have written 500 books if he had to keep a job at Boston University that considered his science fiction to be inappropriate?
consider that there is a wealth of creativity even in areas not aforded "IP" status;
Give some specific examples, please. Whatever they are, they aren't big, expensive, polished productions.
I'm not sure where you were going with the wind-power thing.
You said
Do we have such a shortage of creative material that we need to make special laws to encourage people to create more?
Arguably the cause of some of that wealth of creative material is the IP laws. It's like arguing we don't need fossil fuels because we have a wealth of power; it's ignoring the source. It's at least begging the question of the debate.
Matt Groening (to choose just one of your examples) is paid by Fox because they make money off of advertizing.
Yes, because they are the only ones showing Simpsons. If everyone were, they wouldn't get paid.
By your logic, it should be illegal (or perhaps just immoral) to go to the bathroom during a comercial break.
There's always a line between your rights and theirs. You have the right to enjoy the smell of a coffee shop for free, but you don't have the right to go in and take coffee. Putting Simpsons episodes on the net is closer to the second, while going to the bathroom is closer to the first.
But the biggest problem with your examples is that they are far from "Joe Working Artist"
Dana Hill was in that list. If you look her up on IMDB (Dana Hill (I)), she's one of many actors who few have ever really heard of, but who supported herself all her life through various minor movies and TV. Steve Jackson (owner of Steve Jackson Games, and author of GURPS) could have been, as could many of the people who work for him. They, too, get by. There's a lot of people who make their life by IP.
I don't care about "Joe Working Artist". I care about getting good material. I've checked out free roleplaying material on the net. Only one or two compare to what $25 will usually buy you from several good game companies. If killing IP means that those companies go out of business, no amount of unedited sludge is going to make it up.
I also don't understand how you help "Joe Working Artist". Fine, he can make all the Star Trek fan fics he wants, but he can never get the fame from getting one published. And if he was writing original material, then he had no legal restrictions and all he's lost is any chance to get some money for what he does; instead of trying to become an author, he has to realize that he'll be guarding open holes the rest of his life.
we need brothels because without them no one would have sex.
If you want to get a hundred soliders in, get them laid, and get them out, you need a brothel. Likewise, you can tell stories for free, but if you want to watch people fight a ten story monster or cross space to meet aliens - which people obviously do, or they wouldn't spend the millions of they spend on it - you're going to need some system where they get paid, and it should probably be proportional to how many people are watching. IP is a working capitalistic way to do that.
Do we have such a shortage of creative material that we need to make special laws to encourage people to create more?
We have the creative material because of the laws. It's like asking if we have such a shortage of power that we need to use anything but wind power.
There is very little evidence that IP laws do anything other than enrich the promoters and gatekeepers that lobby for them in the first place.
Besides the millions of people - actors and other movie people, writers and editors, studio musicians - that make a living off IP.
Joe working artist is much more likely to be forced to pay than to be paid on the basis of IP law.
Joe Working Artist always has the option of not using others works and dumping his work out on Kazaa for free. Harrison Ford, Spielberg, Asimov, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, Dana Hill, John Williams, Matt Groening and many others have been very happy with the IP law. I'm sure everyone trading the Simpsons via Kazaa would be real happy to hear Fox cancel the Simpsons because the IP laws got repealed and they can't afford it anymore.
Some one comments that the IP laws have not kept up with technolgical and social change, and that they are now impeding the cultural goals they origonally served.
What was the original goal of IP laws? To encourage authors to create and distribute their work, instead of keeping it locked behind closed doors and non-disclosure agreements, not creating it at all. I fail to see how that has been elimentated; musicians and authors still need to eat.
(which would force the company to sell only the more expensive part, and everyone loses)
Which would force them to sell the expensive part at a more reasonable price. They're charging $400 for a product they can sell with a nice profit at $200. Why should that be encouraged?
It's the 21st century, surely we can produce materials that simply stands up to washing and drying without needing special attention?
All my laundry does. That's because I'm a nerd (not particularly proud of it, but it is what it is.) On the other hand, there are people out there who want to wear silk and angora sweaters and other substances besides denim and cotton, and don't particularly care that it has to be carefully washed.
Think again about your statements about what they can and cannot do. In fact they can detain while the police arrive.
Only if they have reason to believe you just stole something. They can't force you to stop you if you're doing the samething everyone else is - i.e. walking out of the store with merchandise you just paid for.
To be honest, I don't quite understand why it was ever such a big deal.
Because the Greeks didn't have calculus, and sums of infinite series are very tricky to deal with without it. It's not even obvious that a sum of positive infinite series might be finite until you've had the mathematical training. It wasn't until the start of this century that we got a real formal basis under calculus.
I reject the notion that my inaction would make me bear any sort of responsibility for someone else's criminal actions.
Shit happens, and that includes human shit. If your hard drive fails and you didn't back up, it's your problem no matter what incompentence happened at the hard drive manufacturer. If you leave your ports open and get rooted, it's your problem, no matter which scriptkiddy did it. Trying to shift the responsiblity around doesn't solve anything; it will happen, and you're the only person who can stop it who has a motive to do so.
if those kids can cast a spell to keep their faces dry in the rain, why can't they cast it on their whole bodies?
If you can connect a light bulb to the wall with plastic cord, why can't you connect it to the wall with a jump rope? You understand that it's not just a plastic cord and that metal is a conductor, but someone who wasn't born in a society that used electricity might find that completely arbitrary.
Slashdot Mirror
many other Slashdot users seem to be under a delusion that it's possible to write a song without being sued
It's not a delusion; it's reality, and it happens everyday. Perhaps they just don't care about vague legal possibilities.
I would write songs, but I'm afraid of being made an example of.
Perhaps you have an inflated opinion of your own importance, if you think of all the bands out there, they are going to pick you to make an example of (if, in fact, they care to make an example at all.)
Where's the content that requires it?
It's the only way to run Debian unstable and keep up to date with the newest packages. It's always on, meaning I don't have to connect and get random disconnections while downloading stuff. I find it impossible to upload my scans to Distributed Proofreaders without broadband; I find it merely painful to work on stuff there (which involves downloading a full page, megapixel, B&W scan).
Where's the free music (not "pirated", but legitimate)?
What do you mean, where's the free music? Have you looked for it? A casual search around the web has found more bands then I can count. Beatallica, Machinae Supremacy, and Persone are just the ones that I have on my hard drive.
Where's the streaming movies?
Full movies? Not many. But the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has many shows and news clips in their archives; the IMDB has many trailers. I've frequently found a modem connection makes viewing these impossible, and often makes viewing large pictures (millions of scans of old books online, for one) more painful then it's worth.
E.g., I used to make backups of all the share/freeware I downloaded. Now I toss them when I'm done, because it would take me longer to find it in my disc catalog than to find the newest version on the net.
.
A bit off topic but . .
I've actually searched the net for a program I used to use. I found a bug report, by me, with a listing of one of my directories with that file sitting in, where that file still sat on my hard drive.
I have no use for it. It poses no greater good,
Those arguments could (and probably were) made for electricity and phones, too. Who needs power tools and electric lights?
France belives it is not opposing US interests, just that it believes it has a better idea of what those interests are.
France acts in France's best interests first, not the US's or Iraq's. Believe no country's lies to the countrary.
The US came to regret not taking French advice in Vietnam
One thing we came to regret that the French prevented Ho Chi Minh from talking to the US at the Versaille conferance at the end of WWI. We also came to regret that the French were so incompentent imperialists that there was a Vietnam war. France created the Vietnam problem.
I guess the difference is the concept of a "trade secret".
A trade secret is supposed to be something kept hidden; if you send a hundred thousand copies out, and someone manages to divine the secret recipe, you're out of luck.
You can look under the hood of the car, but you can't tell what equipment was used to make and test the parts,
I don't get the distinction. By reverse-engineering a binary, I can't tell what test infrastructure existed, or what debugger was used. By looking closely enough under the hood of a car, I can probably tell what type of drill was used, by looking at the scratches under a microscope.
Similarly, you can study the writing style, but you don't get access to the same editorial input the author had, nor his notes for the forthcoming next book in the series.
And I don't get access to the editorial input the programmer had, or his notes for this project or the next. I don't have access to the comments that were in the source code.
you potentially have access to a lot of trade secrets,
If someone finds your secret bean recipe, that's your problem. That's what patents are created for; so a reverse-engineer can't use your ideas.
and thus the ability to compete with someone based on his own work rather than yours
I don't have the ability to compete with them based on their work; copyright law protects that. I merely have the ability to study what they did and how they did it.
Let's look at GCC. Having the source means that you can find out what algorithms are being used, and you can study the garbarge collector and internal syntax. That doesn't atomatically give you the ability to compete with the GCC team, because it's still under copyright; it just gives you insight into how a compiler works. A disassembled GCC, sans comments, would give you even less ability to compete.
Of course, the programmers who created C didn't, because they created gets, which is unusuable unless a buffer overflow is part of the design
Bullshit. [...] YAW.
So there exist some rare situations where someone could possibly trust the other side enough to use gets, which most programmers wouldn't use and would gain you nothing over fgets, these situations being rare enough not to justify adding a function to the standard C library.
At best, there's a minor technical flaw in what I said; that hardly makes it bullshit or what I said all wrong. Plonk.
Companies have a right to sell software and to ban people from reverse engineering it.
Why? If I buy a car, I can dig around under the hood to my heart's content. If I buy a book, I can study the writing style. Why should software be any different, especially given that software interacts with other programs on my computer, and other systems on the net, in ways that can be important to know but are easily hidden from the use.
programming in c or c++ is not going to make sofware less secure if you KNOW WHAT THE "F" YOU ARE DOING.
Of course, the programmers who created C didn't, because they created gets, which is unusuable unless a buffer overflow is part of the design.
if a routine call is flawed...then write a new one that isnt
I bet you wouldn't mind if you were driving a car, and tried to put into the wrong gear, it blew up. There are so many buffer overflows that cause major security holes that could be fixed by using a different language. Good engineers build things that take into account human failability.
This is the code name for Windows NT.
Then we'll have to rename it to Butthead Astronomer, then.
A few choice quotes from Foreign Policy in Focus: Foreign Policy in Focus: Iran and the Forgotten Anniversery
You failed to mention that Iran was in danger of being taken over by communists
A leader trying to take a oil industry, which had 80% of the profits going to Britain, under the control of Iran, does not a communist overtaking make.
Furthermore, it was not our decision to make. Iran was an autonomous democratic government; we don't have the right to kill elected leaders that make choices we disagree with.
maybe things weren't so good for a while (though you wouldn't know it from hearing current Iranian exiles speak),
I read a book not too long ago by a Iranian exile where she described the terrors her father felt under the secret police, how the army turned machine guns on protesting students. If you wouldn't know it from hearing current Iranian exiles speak, it's either because it's old history and you aren't asking questions about it, or you aren't listening.
Happy citizens don't revolt. Spontaneous, citizen-led, revolutions, like those in Eastern Europe recently, or the French or American revolutions of the late 18th century, happen because there is a cruel and unjust government.
at least it kept the Russians out.
I guess we should have sided with the Nazis, then; that would have kept the Russians out, too. It's not only Americans who have rights, who have lives; you can't just say "they suffered under a cruel dictatorship, but it kept their democratic leaders from even considering anything we didn't want."
Or government doesn't believe all the WMD and nuclear capability stuff any more than I do.
Iran, an oil and natural-gas rich country, is building a nuclear reactor, one step in building nuclear weapons. From another viewpoint, Pakistan, India, Israel and China, all close-by, have nukes; Chinese/Iran relations are shaky, US (the major nuclear power)/Iran relations have no formal relations and informally do a lot of stuff like this, and Israel/Iran relations are potentially explosive. In their shoes, I would be building nukes.
The soviet union had to be destroyed because it was a competing system, not because it was evil.
If the SU was not evil, why were East Germans so happy to be reunited with West Germany? Why did they have to put the Berlin wall up in the first place? If the SU was not evil, why did every government in Eastern Europe fall the instant they looked weak? They didn't come out to support their government; they came out in droves to topple it, in some of the greatest demostrations of mass democracy in history.
The US did a lot of things wrong in the Cold War, but there's no real question that the SU sacrified many innocent people and that the government was held in place by cruelty and power, not the will of the people.
maybe a few of them will learn that (1) we're not the Great Satan the ayatollahs told them about
Their parents told them that they had a nice democratic government before the US overthrew it and put in a government with a secret police the equal of almost any dictatorship's, in 1953. This action will confirm that. Great Satan, maybe not, but historically speaking not the friend of Iran's people.
You keep saying that you are interested in a "capitalistic" solution, yet your entire argument seems to be based on the communist principle of "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs."
You yourself claim that these people will create no matter what. I'm arguing that good ones - as defined by the market - should have the economic freedom to do so without worrying about where their next meal is coming from.
arguing that the government should make stricter and stricter laws
I never claimed that.
You claim the only reason people create is to make money and...
No. But money gives people the ability to create instead of working at McDonalds. It also permits the mere existence of some art forms. Film: for a movie like Ben-Hur, there is no concievable way to get that many people to be filmed, that many sets to be created, and that much film all put together with some sort of creative continuity, without millions of dollars.
people (such as game designers, cooks, fashion designers, etc.) make money off of goods (games, food, clothing) which are not covered by IP
Clothing is covered by design patents; recipies and games are covered by copyright. (The abstract rules of a game are not, but the written rules and board and sometimes the pieces are.)
This is besides the point - writers and musicians don't make money off goods that aren't covered by IP, which are trivial to copy. To remove IP would be to practically remove those professions.
I have never seen IP laws successfully used to defend a company like SJG, but have seen several cases where they were successfully used to attack one.
I guess you missed the part where they stop White Wolf from using their eye in the pyramid logo.
Also, what happens if copyright gets elimenated? Every book Steve Jackson ever published gets put on www.gurpsbooks.com. People don't buy new GURPS books, instead settling for the PDF or something printed out at the game shop. Steve Jackson and crew take day jobs and stop devoting 10 hours a day to new GURPS books.
there is the risk that there may not be enough templates to copy,
Templates are cheap; Asimov always laughed at the people who called him up with ideas for him to write, expecting him to split the profits. The adaptation and creation are hard.
No, we have the creative material because we have a society rich enough for a large number of people to indulge in the near universal urge to create.
What's going to pay for a $150 million dollar movie, or even the team of animators for the Simpsons? Would we really have five Harry Potter novels if J.K. Rowling had to fight to feed her son? Would Asimov have written 500 books if he had to keep a job at Boston University that considered his science fiction to be inappropriate?
consider that there is a wealth of creativity even in areas not aforded "IP" status;
Give some specific examples, please. Whatever they are, they aren't big, expensive, polished productions.
I'm not sure where you were going with the wind-power thing.
You said
Do we have such a shortage of creative material that we need to make special laws to encourage people to create more?
Arguably the cause of some of that wealth of creative material is the IP laws. It's like arguing we don't need fossil fuels because we have a wealth of power; it's ignoring the source. It's at least begging the question of the debate.
Matt Groening (to choose just one of your examples) is paid by Fox because they make money off of advertizing.
Yes, because they are the only ones showing Simpsons. If everyone were, they wouldn't get paid.
By your logic, it should be illegal (or perhaps just immoral) to go to the bathroom during a comercial break.
There's always a line between your rights and theirs. You have the right to enjoy the smell of a coffee shop for free, but you don't have the right to go in and take coffee. Putting Simpsons episodes on the net is closer to the second, while going to the bathroom is closer to the first.
But the biggest problem with your examples is that they are far from "Joe Working Artist"
Dana Hill was in that list. If you look her up on IMDB (Dana Hill (I)), she's one of many actors who few have ever really heard of, but who supported herself all her life through various minor movies and TV. Steve Jackson (owner of Steve Jackson Games, and author of GURPS) could have been, as could many of the people who work for him. They, too, get by. There's a lot of people who make their life by IP.
I don't care about "Joe Working Artist". I care about getting good material. I've checked out free roleplaying material on the net. Only one or two compare to what $25 will usually buy you from several good game companies. If killing IP means that those companies go out of business, no amount of unedited sludge is going to make it up.
I also don't understand how you help "Joe Working Artist". Fine, he can make all the Star Trek fan fics he wants, but he can never get the fame from getting one published. And if he was writing original material, then he had no legal restrictions and all he's lost is any chance to get some money for what he does; instead of trying to become an author, he has to realize that he'll be guarding open holes the rest of his life.
we need brothels because without them no one would have sex.
If you want to get a hundred soliders in, get them laid, and get them out, you need a brothel. Likewise, you can tell stories for free, but if you want to watch people fight a ten story monster or cross space to meet aliens - which people obviously do, or they wouldn't spend the millions of they spend on it - you're going to need some system where they get paid, and it should probably be proportional to how many people are watching. IP is a working capitalistic way to do that.
Do we have such a shortage of creative material that we need to make special laws to encourage people to create more?
We have the creative material because of the laws. It's like asking if we have such a shortage of power that we need to use anything but wind power.
There is very little evidence that IP laws do anything other than enrich the promoters and gatekeepers that lobby for them in the first place.
Besides the millions of people - actors and other movie people, writers and editors, studio musicians - that make a living off IP.
Joe working artist is much more likely to be forced to pay than to be paid on the basis of IP law.
Joe Working Artist always has the option of not using others works and dumping his work out on Kazaa for free. Harrison Ford, Spielberg, Asimov, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, Dana Hill, John Williams, Matt Groening and many others have been very happy with the IP law. I'm sure everyone trading the Simpsons via Kazaa would be real happy to hear Fox cancel the Simpsons because the IP laws got repealed and they can't afford it anymore.
Some one comments that the IP laws have not kept up with technolgical and social change, and that they are now impeding the cultural goals they origonally served.
What was the original goal of IP laws? To encourage authors to create and distribute their work, instead of keeping it locked behind closed doors and non-disclosure agreements, not creating it at all. I fail to see how that has been elimentated; musicians and authors still need to eat.
(which would force the company to sell only the more expensive part, and everyone loses)
Which would force them to sell the expensive part at a more reasonable price. They're charging $400 for a product they can sell with a nice profit at $200. Why should that be encouraged?
It's the 21st century, surely we can produce materials that simply stands up to washing and drying without needing special attention?
All my laundry does. That's because I'm a nerd (not particularly proud of it, but it is what it is.) On the other hand, there are people out there who want to wear silk and angora sweaters and other substances besides denim and cotton, and don't particularly care that it has to be carefully washed.
Think again about your statements about what they can and cannot do. In fact they can detain while the police arrive.
Only if they have reason to believe you just stole something. They can't force you to stop you if you're doing the samething everyone else is - i.e. walking out of the store with merchandise you just paid for.
To be honest, I don't quite understand why it was ever such a big deal.
Because the Greeks didn't have calculus, and sums of infinite series are very tricky to deal with without it. It's not even obvious that a sum of positive infinite series might be finite until you've had the mathematical training. It wasn't until the start of this century that we got a real formal basis under calculus.
I reject the notion that my inaction would make me bear any sort of responsibility for someone else's criminal actions.
Shit happens, and that includes human shit. If your hard drive fails and you didn't back up, it's your problem no matter what incompentence happened at the hard drive manufacturer. If you leave your ports open and get rooted, it's your problem, no matter which scriptkiddy did it. Trying to shift the responsiblity around doesn't solve anything; it will happen, and you're the only person who can stop it who has a motive to do so.
at the age of 70, would you be physically able to drive a car?
My grandmother could, without problem. Even at 75, she had no problem driving, she just didn't see a few too many red lights to still be driving.
if those kids can cast a spell to keep their faces dry in the rain, why can't they cast it on their whole bodies?
If you can connect a light bulb to the wall with plastic cord, why can't you connect it to the wall with a jump rope? You understand that it's not just a plastic cord and that metal is a conductor, but someone who wasn't born in a society that used electricity might find that completely arbitrary.