Your concept is flawed simply because you believe that you can beat Mother Nature. The randomness of Nature always beats the best efforts of the greatest minds. So, instead of swimming against the current, why not go with the flow?
You can communicate with like minded friends and the group will naturally grow. As it increases, so will its influence and its ability to crunch data. In the end, your group will be one of the groups to which people turn for authority, and the things you and your friends view as important will filter into society with greater frequency.
The situation you have described really is one where the more effort you put into the fight, the more you are destined to fail. Find the natural way, and it will magically work -- almost without effort.
How is this any different than the copyright witch trials that have been happening in the US? Yes, the RIAA has been asking for civil penalties so far, but they could just as easily add criminal infingement to their list of charges. It is in the copyright act, and there is real jail time attached to these things -- especially considering the volume and scale of Internet based distribution (which the law could never have anticipated).
In Digital Copyright (2001), Jessica Litman made the point that a room full of copyright lawyers often had trouble with determining what was legal and what was illegal on many copyright issues. By extension, she argued that ordinary people, who had not read the Title 17 or spent years in law school studying copyright would be unable to reasonably determine which activites were legal and which were not. She said the assumption that copyright is fair and makes sense meant that most people would unknowingly violate copyright law.
This sort of overlegislation has been a part of US law for quite some time now. It seems that everyone is a criminal according to these laws.
So, cynically speaking, what has changed? You mean we have one more law -- of many -- that makes us all criminals? So? It is already too late, is it not? We are all already criminals anyway, right?
I am not the most religious of people, but does this not sound eerily like Revelation? The dead of past ages coming to life is quite creepy.
On the ethics issue, who is going to raise this child? Real parents? Or a bunch of scientists? I would define a Neanderthal as a human, and that means the clone should have Rights like everyone else. What about people who are prejudiced? I mean, if racism is a tough thing to grow up with, what about speciism? A bunch of kids teasing him for being an "ape" could not be fun.
You have already got the right idea. There are lots of companies throwing out lots of computers every day. OEMs have "recycling" programs to remove those computers from the market (they are going to be your biggest problem). There are probably enough free computers around for every classroom in every inner city school. All that is needed is someone like you go around asking for the computers and helping to distribute them.
So, where is your website? Where is your PayPal account? How can other interested individuals get in contact with you?
Well, I suppose this should settle this issue for all of those people who call Free Software users "communists". If the communists are beating Free Software advocates, the Free Software advocates cannot very well be communists, can they?
I disagree with the concept of software patents, but maybe if governments and other organizations had to pay for the privelege of censoring speech, there would be fewer of them doing so. Also, this means that anyone developing Free Software that provides censoring features will think twice about it. Then again, Free Software that does not respect Free Speech can hardly be called "Free", can it?
Maybe it is just me, but I do not see how Congress is supposed to be passing bills or laws that give people back their Constitutionally guaranteed Rights. The Fourth Amendment protections are above the law, and the DHS is violating the Constitution -- the origin of all law in the US -- by practising these seizures. Why is a law necessary to prevent the DHS from violating the Father of All Law, the fundamental document without which the US could not claim to be a "Free Country"?
Maybe life uses those "junk DNA" sequences as experimental. The most radical changes could be included at the end of the strands, and those would cease to be copied first, killing only a few.
Eloquent as usual, Garwulf. You might try making a point.
Free speech means that you can express any idea you want. Copyright only applies to a specific implementation of an idea. You CANNOT copyright an idea.
Well, it would if it were not for the Berne Convention and automatic copyrights. If one had to apply for a copyright for a specific work and be granted a certificate, I would be in complete agreement with you, and in theory, that is how copyright is supposed to function.
Automatic copyrights, however, force all speech that is stored for any length of time in any "tangible" medium to become "works". So, everything you "say" on the net -- even on Skype -- is copyrighted and could be used to sue someone else for infringement. Please do not give me any arguments about how "nobody would do that". People always say that, and then somebody does it a generation later.
So, if I write an article saying that Gitmo is bad, you are free to write an article saying the same thing. The only time copyright would kick in is if your article is word for word what I have written.
You also have the right to make the claim in court either way, and the claim is unlikely to be dismissed unless the two are almost completely different. This would be costly for me, and large corporations with deep pockets can use this method to censor Free Speech by outspending their adversaries. If you do not believe this, consider the case of the "four file sharing students". The RIAA sued them for enabling file sharing when they each created search engines. In all four cases, they probably would have won in court, but none of them had the financial resources to go up against the RIAA.
And, for that matter, words MEAN things. "Free speech" means something, something very important I might add. It allows you to be free to express uncomfortable ideas, regardless of if it inconveniences the government. It is not a tool to be swung about because you want to copy music.
Who said I wanted to copy music? I am worried that if I sing a serenade to my girlfriend over Skype, it might somehow end up being a popular download and I might somehow have to pay royalties for a public performance. I do worry that if I use copyrighted image for my buddy icon, can be sued for distribution. I also worry that in the absence of multiple copies of everything, many works of value will be lost to the sands of time. I also worry about publishers demanding more than the market value for the works of their authors.
"Communism" means something too, by the way. It's a political system that is in direct opposition to the free market economy, one that involved taking rights and property away from people in the name of a greater good, and had an entire economy controlled by the state.
I think that was my point. I also think that ideas cannot be property and the idea that they should be made into property is an invasion of my mind and the realm of my Free Speech. Copyright is a form of state control. It is the state claiming a set of speech belongs exclusively to a person to control. That is communism as information is an inexhaustible resource. Two people cannot possess the same car at the same time. Two people cannot occupy the same space at the same time. But two people can know the same information at the same time, and two people can say the same thing at the same time.
If copyright were limited, as originally, to monetary transactions and monetary profit, I would have no problem with it. We both know this is no longer true. When copyright limits what books people have access to or keeps old, unprofitable films locked away in closets, it violates everyone's rights.
I know people who grew up under Communism - I don't think they'd be happy with the way y
Feel free to exclude that part if you like. I am not an "integrity of the work" advocate. As long as you get my point, you can substitute it with whatever historical struggle for Freedom you like:)
Copyrights are bad for society because they limit who can enjoy a work.
And this is precisely the problem. Copyright was created to limit who could profit from a work, and now it has been expanded to limiting people who will in no monetary way profit from the work. The intent of copyright at its inception was to increase the amount of information available to the Public. Now copyright is actually decreasing the amount of information -- massively.
Programmers deserve to get paid as well. You insist proprietary software should never exist and that level of fanaticism isn't based on logic. Proprietary and OSS both have their places.
I never said that programmers do not deserve to get paid. That leap of logic is one that has been fed to you by the copyright advocates. The existence of copyright is in no way the only means of compensation for programmers or artists or creators of any kind. Equating the existence of copyright with the existence of compensation is unimaginative at best and could well be classified as completely idiotic.
Programmers deserve to get paid, but they do not deserve to be granted monopolies -- especially over speech.
I often advocate for the use of OSS, but true freedom is allowing a developer to protect their works and profit from them, or give them openly as they choose to do so.
Once again, just because the developer is not granted a monopoly does not mean that the developer cannot profit from his work. Most people are paid to program by other people that retain the copyrights to the programs they wrote, anyway.
Programming is a service. Information is never a product. Information is speech. Get used to it.
"We're seeing developers and publishers blaming [communication] for all the ills of PC gaming"
I guess they miss those days when computers were isolated boxes, unable to communicate with the outside world. Speech is everyone's Right: That includes ALL information.
So, Linux would have been like, say, BSD? Or even slower, like Haiku? Honestly, BSD's glacial development over its relatively long history is case in point. RMS made Linux possible, and everything that is happening in software today is at the very least influenced by his ideas.
Oh, please! Why do people persist with this "Free Software is communism" garbage? It is really annoying and not very intelligent.
The primary gripe associated with communism is the necessary element of autocracy, either by a small elite or society in general. Basically, the individual sacrifices his rights to society and is coerced to do so ("The good of the many outweighs the good of the few." If you want to use Star Trek terminology). Society works as a unit to produce for all, and individuals do not have the choice to not participate.
Free Software on the other hand is a hack to compensate for something that should never have existed in the first place: proprietary software. There is no universal, natural, moral or other Right embodied in copyright. It is a revocable privilege, originally limited to commercial transactions and limited in duration. While Congress has the power to create it, Congress is not required to. If it is revoked, no one can seek compensation. It is subordinate to Natural Rights such as those embodied in the Bill of Rights.
Copyright was never intended to cover something like software. Software is not an artistic work (although some people manage to make it artistic). It is a functional work. As such, a monopoly incentive is unnecessary. Businesses will pay for software to be developed even if they cannot restrict its distribution by any legal means. People will write software because they want their computers to do things they cannot currently do. This will never change, and the monopoly privilege only inhibits these processes by forcing the constant reinvention of the wheel.
Copyright also restricts a natural and universal right necessary for every Free Society: Free Speech. Copyright makes certain speech controllable, which makes it NOT Free. Liberal Democracies are literally inconceivable in the absence of Free Speech. In the absence of copyright, however, few things in our current world -- except for millionaire record execs -- are inconceivable.
Monopolies are anti-capitalist. Monopolies, like copyright, are a relic of Feudal system that the Revolution of 1776, the one that everybody was celebrating yesterday, toppled. This is the autocratic system where monarchs got to say who could do business with whom and where and when. The establishment of the United States happened as a reaction to monopolies and other trade restrictions. Unless one claims the Authors of the Constitution of the United States were communists, nothing that is anti-monopoly, like Free Software, can be called "communist".
Therefore, the true communists are people who would treat information -- speech -- like property, people who use the term "Intellectual Property". These are the people who wish to assert Feudal monopoly privileges in order to gain an unfair market advantage and charge unreasonable fees for their services. This are people who want the state to enforce their predatory taxation on society. Bill Gates is precisely this sort of communist, and his attempts to bring 1984 to our desktops (no, I am not inclined to provide a list. There should be no shortage of evidence on the net for the curious) is precisely the opposite of Freedom and Free Software.
Communists are people who do not believe in Free Software.
It is more troubling that there is a culture of printing on dead trees with the explicit intent of making them obsolete before the ink dries to sell more of them.
I could not agree more. The real pirates are wearing suits and ties and collecting million dollar paychecks from poor students. Text book prices are absurd in the US, and no student should be accused of "piracy" for not participating in the publishing industry's monopolistic scam.
When I was in college, I could never understand how the required books could be so astronomically expensive. I always suspected there was something wrong, especially when they would come out with new editions almost every year making the books you just purchased "obsolete" even though the differences between two books were mostly if not entirely cosmetic. Fortunately or unfortunately, I did not learn the true causes of the problem until long after college. The text book publishers are literally guilty of decades of fraud and theft (and this is theft of real money, not fictitious "intellectual property"), and they have been abusing copyright consistently to support these criminal activities.
So, who can have sympathy for these publishers? I certainly do not, and if I were in college today, I would most likely annoy my professors to the brink of insanity with requests for free (of unreasonable restrictions) books.
Students should not even have to pay for books. The professors and schools should be responsible for providing the students with all the information they need to complete their courses at no additional charge. Student's already pay tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to schools for education. Why do they have to pay more for books? Also, why are the professors not recording and handing out video audio files of every lecture? Is this not what TAs are for?
Students should not have to pay for books. They are speech, and it is every student's or individual's right to have access to them.
Seriously, though, way back in the Stone Age when I attended the Olympics, things were a lot different. The volunteers were given unsold tickets for the events, and they basically had tickets for any event that was not sold out. I got to be friends with them and got a lot of free tickets.
So, what would stop somebody from using somebody else's ticket? Are they seriously thinking of carding everybody at the door to every event? That would have been impossible when I went. Just checking the tickets was almost too much for the volunteers. This is especially true since it is unlikely that the volunteer's tickets will contain that information and since the volunteers are the ones checking the tickets.
Then again, this is China we are talking about, so they could literally have hired everybody who will work the Games. That certainly was not possible in any of the previous host countries.
The really disturbing part of all this is not the tickets but the fact that the very same information has very probably already been shared with every corporate sponsor of the Games.
1 -- Do you acknowledge the legitimacy of intellectual property to begin with? That is, do you believe that intellectual property is a valid construct equivalent to physical property, or do you think it's illusory? If not, why?
I absolutely do not acknowledge the legitimacy of "intellectual property". I will further state that anyone who claims the existence of "intellectual property" is a thief who steals not only from me but from everyone in the world, as well. Ideas are not and cannot be property. This is quite simply because if I "take" or "get" an idea from you, you still have it. If I take your car from you, you do not have it.
If you are unaware of the eloquent statements of Jefferson, I suggest you look them up. He demonstrates quite clearly why ideas are different from physical objects. Further, I have a RIGHT to Free Speech. This means that if you say something, I have the RIGHT to repeat it. This right is necessary for all societies because if people cannot critisize the government, the government will abuse its power.
If you are truly an "anarcho-capitalist" as you claim, the concept of "intellectual property" is fundamentally at odds with your philosophy. You are basically saying that you lean towards anarchy in governance of the market, but then you claim that the government has the power to grant monopolies as the old European monarchies and autocracies were wont to do.
Finally, if you think that ideas should be property, where does it stop? How about the air that we breathe? Can we build fences around that and charge people for that, too? Would you suffocate someone for not paying you? Ideas are like the atmosphere: something we must all share, and something the absence or scarcity of which harms us all.
2 -- If so, how would you go about protecting the rights of intellectual property holders in a way that doesn't require unfair usage limitations or resort to predatory abuse of the tort system?
Acknowledging the legitimacy of "intellectual property" is precisely the abuse that you are talking about. Just as Freedom is abused by allowing some people to be enslaved, our Intellectual Freedom is abused by allowing some information to be "owned". Once these things are allowed the world is no longer Free. As the concept has already committed the abuse, it is not hard to see that *AAs are just a symptom of the affliction, a pustule that conceals a deeper and more serious infection.
Supporting "intellectual property" is both amoral and monarchist. Nobody can reaonably claim to believe in both Freedom and "intellectual property".
The question is whether enhancing a work without adding any creative information makes it a new work. Obviously, in the case under discussion, the film footage was all taken by NASA. All the Discovery Channel is doing is running it through a few computers. Can this be considered art? If I write a computer program that makes random art, can I claim copyright on the art that the computer creates? Certainly, the computer has no rights, but is a creator of a program entitled to copyright the program's output?
My program automagically turns Public Domain books into a collection of HTML documents. Am I entitled to copyright Public Domain works after they have been run through my program? I expended time and effort writing the program.
NASA gets the improved footage for their archives.
What does this mean? Is it not NASA's footage to begin with? Are you telling me that the Discovery Channel's people went back in time and refilmed the Apollo missions and created some sort of copyrighted work?
On top of this, the statement seems to imply that the Discovery Channel is being gracious by returning the footage to NASA. This is as if you borrow my shirt and imply that because you washed it, it is now yours and that you are doing me a favour by returning it to me.
It is nice to know the Discovery Channel is so gracious.:-/
While it's true that a lot of the ancient library was lost, much of it was not very good; a lot of the good stuff was saved.
Owning that you have not read the lost material, how are you in any position to judge whether it was "good" or not? All you have is the opinions of people whose materials did survive, and we all know from current politics and scholarly literature that there are many works that are improperly labelled as "bad" or "incorrect".
Further, just because a book is badly written or mostly wrong does not mean it does not contain good or useful ideas. Maybe the author was terrible but could inspire a genius to reach a new and ground-breaking mode of thinking.
Slashdot Mirror
Your concept is flawed simply because you believe that you can beat Mother Nature. The randomness of Nature always beats the best efforts of the greatest minds. So, instead of swimming against the current, why not go with the flow?
You can communicate with like minded friends and the group will naturally grow. As it increases, so will its influence and its ability to crunch data. In the end, your group will be one of the groups to which people turn for authority, and the things you and your friends view as important will filter into society with greater frequency.
The situation you have described really is one where the more effort you put into the fight, the more you are destined to fail. Find the natural way, and it will magically work -- almost without effort.
How is this any different than the copyright witch trials that have been happening in the US? Yes, the RIAA has been asking for civil penalties so far, but they could just as easily add criminal infingement to their list of charges. It is in the copyright act, and there is real jail time attached to these things -- especially considering the volume and scale of Internet based distribution (which the law could never have anticipated).
In Digital Copyright (2001), Jessica Litman made the point that a room full of copyright lawyers often had trouble with determining what was legal and what was illegal on many copyright issues. By extension, she argued that ordinary people, who had not read the Title 17 or spent years in law school studying copyright would be unable to reasonably determine which activites were legal and which were not. She said the assumption that copyright is fair and makes sense meant that most people would unknowingly violate copyright law.
This sort of overlegislation has been a part of US law for quite some time now. It seems that everyone is a criminal according to these laws.
So, cynically speaking, what has changed? You mean we have one more law -- of many -- that makes us all criminals? So? It is already too late, is it not? We are all already criminals anyway, right?
I am not the most religious of people, but does this not sound eerily like Revelation? The dead of past ages coming to life is quite creepy.
On the ethics issue, who is going to raise this child? Real parents? Or a bunch of scientists? I would define a Neanderthal as a human, and that means the clone should have Rights like everyone else. What about people who are prejudiced? I mean, if racism is a tough thing to grow up with, what about speciism ? A bunch of kids teasing him for being an "ape" could not be fun.
You have already got the right idea. There are lots of companies throwing out lots of computers every day. OEMs have "recycling" programs to remove those computers from the market (they are going to be your biggest problem). There are probably enough free computers around for every classroom in every inner city school. All that is needed is someone like you go around asking for the computers and helping to distribute them.
So, where is your website? Where is your PayPal account? How can other interested individuals get in contact with you?
Well, I suppose this should settle this issue for all of those people who call Free Software users "communists". If the communists are beating Free Software advocates, the Free Software advocates cannot very well be communists, can they?
CNN is broken: It does not work with Linux.
I disagree with the concept of software patents, but maybe if governments and other organizations had to pay for the privelege of censoring speech, there would be fewer of them doing so. Also, this means that anyone developing Free Software that provides censoring features will think twice about it. Then again, Free Software that does not respect Free Speech can hardly be called "Free", can it?
Maybe it is just me, but I do not see how Congress is supposed to be passing bills or laws that give people back their Constitutionally guaranteed Rights . The Fourth Amendment protections are above the law, and the DHS is violating the Constitution -- the origin of all law in the US -- by practising these seizures. Why is a law necessary to prevent the DHS from violating the Father of All Law, the fundamental document without which the US could not claim to be a "Free Country"?
Maybe life uses those "junk DNA" sequences as experimental. The most radical changes could be included at the end of the strands, and those would cease to be copied first, killing only a few.
Bullshit. That is just bullshit.
Eloquent as usual, Garwulf. You might try making a point.
Free speech means that you can express any idea you want. Copyright only applies to a specific implementation of an idea. You CANNOT copyright an idea.
Well, it would if it were not for the Berne Convention and automatic copyrights. If one had to apply for a copyright for a specific work and be granted a certificate, I would be in complete agreement with you, and in theory, that is how copyright is supposed to function.
Automatic copyrights, however, force all speech that is stored for any length of time in any "tangible" medium to become "works". So, everything you "say" on the net -- even on Skype -- is copyrighted and could be used to sue someone else for infringement. Please do not give me any arguments about how "nobody would do that". People always say that, and then somebody does it a generation later.
So, if I write an article saying that Gitmo is bad, you are free to write an article saying the same thing. The only time copyright would kick in is if your article is word for word what I have written.
You also have the right to make the claim in court either way, and the claim is unlikely to be dismissed unless the two are almost completely different. This would be costly for me, and large corporations with deep pockets can use this method to censor Free Speech by outspending their adversaries. If you do not believe this, consider the case of the "four file sharing students". The RIAA sued them for enabling file sharing when they each created search engines. In all four cases, they probably would have won in court, but none of them had the financial resources to go up against the RIAA.
And, for that matter, words MEAN things. "Free speech" means something, something very important I might add. It allows you to be free to express uncomfortable ideas, regardless of if it inconveniences the government. It is not a tool to be swung about because you want to copy music.
Who said I wanted to copy music? I am worried that if I sing a serenade to my girlfriend over Skype, it might somehow end up being a popular download and I might somehow have to pay royalties for a public performance. I do worry that if I use copyrighted image for my buddy icon, can be sued for distribution. I also worry that in the absence of multiple copies of everything, many works of value will be lost to the sands of time. I also worry about publishers demanding more than the market value for the works of their authors.
"Communism" means something too, by the way. It's a political system that is in direct opposition to the free market economy, one that involved taking rights and property away from people in the name of a greater good, and had an entire economy controlled by the state.
I think that was my point. I also think that ideas cannot be property and the idea that they should be made into property is an invasion of my mind and the realm of my Free Speech. Copyright is a form of state control. It is the state claiming a set of speech belongs exclusively to a person to control. That is communism as information is an inexhaustible resource. Two people cannot possess the same car at the same time. Two people cannot occupy the same space at the same time. But two people can know the same information at the same time, and two people can say the same thing at the same time.
If copyright were limited, as originally, to monetary transactions and monetary profit, I would have no problem with it. We both know this is no longer true. When copyright limits what books people have access to or keeps old, unprofitable films locked away in closets, it violates everyone's rights.
I know people who grew up under Communism - I don't think they'd be happy with the way y
Feel free to exclude that part if you like. I am not an "integrity of the work" advocate. As long as you get my point, you can substitute it with whatever historical struggle for Freedom you like :)
Copyrights are bad for society because they limit who can enjoy a work.
And this is precisely the problem. Copyright was created to limit who could profit from a work, and now it has been expanded to limiting people who will in no monetary way profit from the work. The intent of copyright at its inception was to increase the amount of information available to the Public. Now copyright is actually decreasing the amount of information -- massively.
Programmers deserve to get paid as well. You insist proprietary software should never exist and that level of fanaticism isn't based on logic. Proprietary and OSS both have their places.
I never said that programmers do not deserve to get paid. That leap of logic is one that has been fed to you by the copyright advocates. The existence of copyright is in no way the only means of compensation for programmers or artists or creators of any kind. Equating the existence of copyright with the existence of compensation is unimaginative at best and could well be classified as completely idiotic.
Programmers deserve to get paid, but they do not deserve to be granted monopolies -- especially over speech.
I often advocate for the use of OSS, but true freedom is allowing a developer to protect their works and profit from them, or give them openly as they choose to do so.
Once again, just because the developer is not granted a monopoly does not mean that the developer cannot profit from his work. Most people are paid to program by other people that retain the copyrights to the programs they wrote, anyway.
Programming is a service. Information is never a product. Information is speech. Get used to it.
s/piracy/communication/
s/pirates/speakers/
"We're seeing developers and publishers blaming [communication] for all the ills of PC gaming"
I guess they miss those days when computers were isolated boxes, unable to communicate with the outside world. Speech is everyone's Right: That includes ALL information.
So, Linux would have been like, say, BSD? Or even slower, like Haiku? Honestly, BSD's glacial development over its relatively long history is case in point. RMS made Linux possible, and everything that is happening in software today is at the very least influenced by his ideas.
Extremely well put.
All rights begin with our property rights
How very English of you. So, is your Right to Free Speech based on "property rights"?
Oh, please! Why do people persist with this "Free Software is communism" garbage? It is really annoying and not very intelligent.
The primary gripe associated with communism is the necessary element of autocracy, either by a small elite or society in general. Basically, the individual sacrifices his rights to society and is coerced to do so ("The good of the many outweighs the good of the few." If you want to use Star Trek terminology). Society works as a unit to produce for all, and individuals do not have the choice to not participate.
Free Software on the other hand is a hack to compensate for something that should never have existed in the first place: proprietary software. There is no universal, natural, moral or other Right embodied in copyright. It is a revocable privilege, originally limited to commercial transactions and limited in duration. While Congress has the power to create it, Congress is not required to. If it is revoked, no one can seek compensation. It is subordinate to Natural Rights such as those embodied in the Bill of Rights.
Copyright was never intended to cover something like software. Software is not an artistic work (although some people manage to make it artistic). It is a functional work. As such, a monopoly incentive is unnecessary. Businesses will pay for software to be developed even if they cannot restrict its distribution by any legal means. People will write software because they want their computers to do things they cannot currently do. This will never change, and the monopoly privilege only inhibits these processes by forcing the constant reinvention of the wheel.
Copyright also restricts a natural and universal right necessary for every Free Society: Free Speech. Copyright makes certain speech controllable, which makes it NOT Free. Liberal Democracies are literally inconceivable in the absence of Free Speech. In the absence of copyright, however, few things in our current world -- except for millionaire record execs -- are inconceivable.
Monopolies are anti-capitalist. Monopolies, like copyright, are a relic of Feudal system that the Revolution of 1776, the one that everybody was celebrating yesterday, toppled. This is the autocratic system where monarchs got to say who could do business with whom and where and when. The establishment of the United States happened as a reaction to monopolies and other trade restrictions. Unless one claims the Authors of the Constitution of the United States were communists, nothing that is anti-monopoly, like Free Software, can be called "communist".
Therefore, the true communists are people who would treat information -- speech -- like property, people who use the term "Intellectual Property". These are the people who wish to assert Feudal monopoly privileges in order to gain an unfair market advantage and charge unreasonable fees for their services. This are people who want the state to enforce their predatory taxation on society. Bill Gates is precisely this sort of communist, and his attempts to bring 1984 to our desktops (no, I am not inclined to provide a list. There should be no shortage of evidence on the net for the curious) is precisely the opposite of Freedom and Free Software.
Communists are people who do not believe in Free Software.
I could not agree more. The real pirates are wearing suits and ties and collecting million dollar paychecks from poor students. Text book prices are absurd in the US, and no student should be accused of "piracy" for not participating in the publishing industry's monopolistic scam.
When I was in college, I could never understand how the required books could be so astronomically expensive. I always suspected there was something wrong, especially when they would come out with new editions almost every year making the books you just purchased "obsolete" even though the differences between two books were mostly if not entirely cosmetic. Fortunately or unfortunately, I did not learn the true causes of the problem until long after college. The text book publishers are literally guilty of decades of fraud and theft (and this is theft of real money, not fictitious "intellectual property"), and they have been abusing copyright consistently to support these criminal activities.
So, who can have sympathy for these publishers? I certainly do not, and if I were in college today, I would most likely annoy my professors to the brink of insanity with requests for free (of unreasonable restrictions) books.
Students should not even have to pay for books. The professors and schools should be responsible for providing the students with all the information they need to complete their courses at no additional charge. Student's already pay tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to schools for education. Why do they have to pay more for books? Also, why are the professors not recording and handing out video audio files of every lecture? Is this not what TAs are for?
Students should not have to pay for books. They are speech, and it is every student's or individual's right to have access to them.
Is this not more like "Your Rights Offline"?
Seriously, though, way back in the Stone Age when I attended the Olympics, things were a lot different. The volunteers were given unsold tickets for the events, and they basically had tickets for any event that was not sold out. I got to be friends with them and got a lot of free tickets.
So, what would stop somebody from using somebody else's ticket? Are they seriously thinking of carding everybody at the door to every event? That would have been impossible when I went. Just checking the tickets was almost too much for the volunteers. This is especially true since it is unlikely that the volunteer's tickets will contain that information and since the volunteers are the ones checking the tickets.
Then again, this is China we are talking about, so they could literally have hired everybody who will work the Games. That certainly was not possible in any of the previous host countries.
The really disturbing part of all this is not the tickets but the fact that the very same information has very probably already been shared with every corporate sponsor of the Games.
Big Brother Is Watching Your Wallet!
I absolutely do not acknowledge the legitimacy of "intellectual property". I will further state that anyone who claims the existence of "intellectual property" is a thief who steals not only from me but from everyone in the world, as well. Ideas are not and cannot be property. This is quite simply because if I "take" or "get" an idea from you, you still have it. If I take your car from you, you do not have it.
If you are unaware of the eloquent statements of Jefferson, I suggest you look them up. He demonstrates quite clearly why ideas are different from physical objects. Further, I have a RIGHT to Free Speech. This means that if you say something, I have the RIGHT to repeat it. This right is necessary for all societies because if people cannot critisize the government, the government will abuse its power.
If you are truly an "anarcho-capitalist" as you claim, the concept of "intellectual property" is fundamentally at odds with your philosophy. You are basically saying that you lean towards anarchy in governance of the market, but then you claim that the government has the power to grant monopolies as the old European monarchies and autocracies were wont to do.
Finally, if you think that ideas should be property, where does it stop? How about the air that we breathe? Can we build fences around that and charge people for that, too? Would you suffocate someone for not paying you? Ideas are like the atmosphere: something we must all share, and something the absence or scarcity of which harms us all.
2 -- If so, how would you go about protecting the rights of intellectual property holders in a way that doesn't require unfair usage limitations or resort to predatory abuse of the tort system?Acknowledging the legitimacy of "intellectual property" is precisely the abuse that you are talking about. Just as Freedom is abused by allowing some people to be enslaved, our Intellectual Freedom is abused by allowing some information to be "owned". Once these things are allowed the world is no longer Free. As the concept has already committed the abuse, it is not hard to see that *AAs are just a symptom of the affliction, a pustule that conceals a deeper and more serious infection.
Supporting "intellectual property" is both amoral and monarchist. Nobody can reaonably claim to believe in both Freedom and "intellectual property".
The question is whether enhancing a work without adding any creative information makes it a new work. Obviously, in the case under discussion, the film footage was all taken by NASA. All the Discovery Channel is doing is running it through a few computers. Can this be considered art? If I write a computer program that makes random art, can I claim copyright on the art that the computer creates? Certainly, the computer has no rights, but is a creator of a program entitled to copyright the program's output?
My program automagically turns Public Domain books into a collection of HTML documents. Am I entitled to copyright Public Domain works after they have been run through my program? I expended time and effort writing the program.
So, derivatives of copyrighted works remain copyrighted, but derivatives of Public Domain works do not remain in the Public Domain.
I think the Public is getting ripped off.
What does this mean? Is it not NASA's footage to begin with? Are you telling me that the Discovery Channel's people went back in time and refilmed the Apollo missions and created some sort of copyrighted work?
On top of this, the statement seems to imply that the Discovery Channel is being gracious by returning the footage to NASA. This is as if you borrow my shirt and imply that because you washed it, it is now yours and that you are doing me a favour by returning it to me.
It is nice to know the Discovery Channel is so gracious. :-/
Owning that you have not read the lost material, how are you in any position to judge whether it was "good" or not? All you have is the opinions of people whose materials did survive, and we all know from current politics and scholarly literature that there are many works that are improperly labelled as "bad" or "incorrect".
Further, just because a book is badly written or mostly wrong does not mean it does not contain good or useful ideas. Maybe the author was terrible but could inspire a genius to reach a new and ground-breaking mode of thinking.
No one can judge the value of lost materials.