What you are saying is: Digital technology puts archiving in the hands of the individual, and there are several orders of magnitude more individuals than governments and philanthropic organizations combined. If even one individual's archives are preserved, the information is preserved for all of us.
I still do not understand why everything is left/right. Reality tends to be complicated and every story has a lot more aspects than left/right (even if you manage to define those two terms).
This is nearly what I was going to say. Who really cares about two arbitrary and meaningless (and historically malleable) categories like "conservative" and "liberal"? I mean, what is the difference between Coke and Pepsi, anyway? Are they not just two versions of the same thing? Finally, is breaking things into these categories not just playing into the hands of those who would wish to manipulate us -- making us argue over unimportant issues while the real decisions get made behind our backs?
What we need is a website that judges things such as an "advertising index" to tell us when someone is just using a reporter to push their product. Or a "factual index" to rate the credibility of the numbers involved. Or a "bias analysis" where users can post where they think something was misrepresented. What is the website really doing to help people with the complex system of manipulation that we today call "news"?
You play devil's advocate, for your opinion is neither moral nor would be beneficial to people.
Perhaps I was too hasty in judging your username. However, the suggestion that my position is immoral is incorrect. Society and artists got along without copyright for the last 10,000 years of civilization and before that for the 2 million years of human occupation of this planet. Copyright is neither necessary nor even provably beneficial to human creativity.
As if that were not enough, the internet has demonstrated time and time again that people can and will be very creative for non-fiduciary reasons. People spend hours composing garbage email messages for their friends to (not) read. Wikipedia has arguably created a resource more useful and of higher quality than the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In Japan, there is an entire genre of fiction composed on phones the authors of which had no intention to publish professionally until the publishers contacted them. In 2007, one of those books was the number one book of the year. We are talking about a book composed by a high school student that wanted to impress her friends (of course, it was her parents that were impressed in the end). People here on Slashdot spend hours writing posts on every subject available. Why? They do it because they can. Not for money -- which is the only thing copyright is about.
My position is neither immoral nor harmful (unless you happen to be one of those fat cat record industry execs cashing million dollar checks generated by artists working at McDonald's and Starbucks). In fact, defending copyright is immoral. Copyright is both an anti-free market monopoly and (as currently implemented) a constraint on Free Speech (how can speech be free if it is "owned"). Free Speech is necessary for both democracy and Freedom. Copyright is a prerequisite for neither. So, whose point of view is moral?
If you really have the "good of everyone in mind", you should consider changing your view. Copyright is a relic of feudalism. It is something that monarchs granted to their subjects (which is a polite word for slaves).
It could be considered property if we so wish. If you take a picnic you take the value of a picnic table and add it to your own by taking it from the owner. You could feasibly take a leg of the picnic table, and take a portion of that picnic table's worth.
My argument was about getting the idea of using a picnic table from you and buying my own -- not taking your picnic table. Copyrighted material is not property, so your argument is irrelevant. Even if I give in and argue this point, the reasoning is so flawed that its useless. Would you notice the leg was missing? Would the table even stand? Could I then balance my hamburgers on the leg? Or would someone have to sit on it? This is why information cannot be "property". These realspace arguments are irrational when applied to the inexhaustible resource of information (something that can be reproduced infinitely without reducing or degrading anybody else's supply). Even copyright is tied to copies. The reason for this is that tangible things can be regulated, and ideas cannot. If we start regulating ideas, welcome to 1984 and the Thought Police.
When you copy an artwork . .., you don't steal from the owner of the original copy, you steal from the copyright holder.
You cannot "steal" a copyrighted work. Stealing or theft requires that the owner be deprived of what he once had without his permission. Copying lacks that essential element of taking something away. If I make a million copies of something, all the other owners still have their copies and so has the copyright owner. When you buy a book, do you own it? Or does the copyright holder "own" it? If the copyright holder "owns" it, why can he no
You seriously have no clue, do you? They don't have to create anything. A retail outlet doesn't create anything, yet we have no trouble with them selling their goods. Why? Because they bought those goods. The other party made those goods out of raw materials, or bought materials, and the retail outlet bought the goods off them, and sold them.
The problem is: information is not a "good" or a "product". It is not a "thing". So, it cannot be analysed in the same manner as physical objects. Lessig's picnic table example is perfect for this. If I take your picnic table from your back yard, I am stealing. If I see you have a picnic table, like the idea, and go and buy one for my yard, what have I "stolen" then? I certainly got the idea from you, but I also have not taken anything from you.
This is exactly equivalent to what the RIAA have done. They've traded money (or in this case the potential for money) for the copyright and they've agreed to do all the hard work and bear all the risks. It's a valuable service, it's only utilised by the artist voluntarily, and it helps everyone have a their own customised piece of their culture.
It is only valuable if artists truly have an alternative. Before the internet, there really was none. It is entirely possible that this sort of blanket taxing on ISPs will return artists to the former situation -- just as with net radio where SoundExchange requires royalties to be collected for all songs regardless of whether the artist is a member or not. This sort of monopoly is unfair to both artists and "consumers" as it denies both the opportunity to exercise their Free Choice.
Not everyone wants an internet-based platform, especially those who can't or don't like to use computers and/or the internet.
This does not mean that internet style distribution should not be used. Phone services are now all packet switched, but most people have no idea. The same could be done with radio. Radio is supposed to go digital. Why not have radio stations stream MP3s or other cacheable data instead of whatever format they use? Why not have car radios that load streams off the internet when they are near wifi hotspots? Why does the radio user have to have any idea about the underlying architecture?
a) The artist is entitled initially to the work they create, which includes the sale of any of those entitlements
Correction: The artist is entitled initially to any money generated by the work they create. If they artist wants to "keep" his work, he can keep his work a secret. If he is going to give it to the public, it will no longer be exclusively his -- it will be a part of our culture.
c) The RIAA is not screwing you if you don't buy from them
If the ISPs start going for this proposal, no one will have a choice: Connecting to the internet will be "buying from them".
e) Calling the business model "outdated" is certainly no reason to breach copyright (and neither is repeating "come on" and "fuck that shit")
Correct enough. However, this "outdated business model" is the cause of copyright violating other more important rights like Free Speech. The increases in the scope and duration of copyright over the last century alone are reason enough to violate it. Following unreasonable laws helps to support arbitrary laws and dictatorial government administration. It is the responsibility of citizens in any Free Society to both question and refuse to obey unreasonable laws. Before the internet, copyright did not conflict significantly with the First Amendment. Now it does.
Are you doing your part? Or are you making it easier for governments and corporations to violate our rights in new and innovative ways?
Of course, this wont be a perfect system, especially if they are the one pushing it; the amount of the fee still has to be debated, and they obviously intend to keep the lion's share in that money. (Even if digital distribution specifically means that they are not needed in the loop anymore (okay, except for marketing; but that should be done through youtube and blogs now)).
Even if they do implement this system in some sort of ideal way, it still does not solve the caveat emptor problem. How can people who are sick of the RIAA and their tactics manage not to pay them?
Market controls only work when the buyers have a choice. Once again, the RIAA is trying to force people to pay. Their business model is based on government enforced extortion, and anybody who pays them is funding the record industry's theft from society and countless individuals who have been unfairly sued.
If the artists get paid, I am all for it. But I am in no way inclined to compensate a bunch of brainless MBA's who studied How to Rip Off Artists for Dummies in college.
Very well put. And to that, I must add the obligatory quote from TFA:
"When you're buying CDs for twelve dollars and selling them for ten like Wal-Mart, it makes the rest of us look like we're gouging the customer, when we're not," says Don Van Cleave, head of the Coalition for Independent Music Stores, a retail consortium.
That is just the point, is it not? They are gouging customers and have been for quite some time. Now, their days of collecting monopoly rents are coming to an end.
Children who steal should not be angry when they are told not to steal any more (yes, collecting monopoly rents is theft -- this is stealing real money from one's customers as opposed to the record industry's fantastical claims of "theft" of potential money by file sharers).
It is hypocrisy, but not because it contradicts MS's latest infamous quote (they did not write their software for the purpose of charity). It is hypocrisy because MS uses this as a sales tactic to gain more customers and market dominance.
"Charity" might as well be called "advertising" where MS is concerned.
Opera is the king of mobile browsers IMHO. IE, as expected, is marginal at best. On my Windows Mobile 6 phone, Opera cruises along.
To that I would add that this concept that the carriers are resisting the open web is crap. Maybe they are in the US, and I have seen something like that in Japan, but if Opera is any indication, they are not doing it at the software level. I have yet to see a smart phone with no web browser. Nokia's web browsers suck for sure, but that does not mean that they cannot access the web (it does mean they cannot access local files, though).
Opera is king of the mobile phone market, and the king is nearly ubiquitous. Web browsers are on nearly every device, so the carriers cannot be resisting that.
I thought I would be able to download a TXT file or a PDF of this book. Nope, no download. Instead I can browse it through the publisher's site, which is not only a bit slow, but also eye-straining. The images of the pages are so compressed it makes it unenjoyable to read.
I could not agree more. The headline should read: Neil Gaiman Book "American Gods"Locked UpOnline.
You are missing the point. You are arguing with me in a medium that is a fixed and tangible record of speech. While you probably have not stopped to consider it much, your "speech" online is all subject to copyright. Your post is copyrighted, and viewing it without your explicit permission is a technical violation of copyright as it stands on the books.
If we were in the same room having this conversation, this point would be null and void. But our speech here, on the internet, is cached and therefore subject to copyright. This has nothing to do with money. If you were to copy my entire post in a quote, there would be few courts that could not be led to believe that you copied an entire original work. In fact, almost everything you do on the web is a technical violation of someone or other's copyrights. Who cares about music and movies? If the *AA's get their way, we will have to pay them for permission to speak.
ATTN: oracle128 Your use of the phrase: Go ahead... Make my day! Has been debited from your Paypal account. Thank you for your contribution. Sincerely, MPAA Internet Collection Authority Making the World a More Rewarding Place for Artists Everywhere!
Well put. That was a nice summary, and I mostly agree. However, there are a couple small details that need clarification:
The Copyright Clause clearly requires Congress to have the power to restrict at least some speech, for it to have any meaning and effect at all. We must accept that meaning, for if that meaning were not intended then the Copyright Clause would never have been written at all.
This would be true if the Founding Fathers had considered publication to be equivalent to speech. However, the fact that they explicitly mentioned both in the phrases "or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;" in the First Amendment means that they considered them different. In other words, they would have considered repeating something one heard to be fine, but republishing a book verbatim and for profit would have been considered to be wrong.
The Founding Fathers most likely would have been shocked to hear of copyright concepts such as derivative works, public performance rights, or the automatic granting of copyrights. The idea that copyright could be used to stop people from singing would be mind blowing in 1776.
The internet has now eliminated the distinction between speech and the press. This could not have been predicted 300 years ago. In fact, it was barely predicted 20 years ago (and only then by a few geeks working on the technology). Restrictions on publication today mean something entirely different than they did just 10 years ago.
So, when you say "some speech", you should probably say "some freedom of the press" and realize that the Founding Fathers never anticipated the idea that publication and speech would become indistinguishable (they certainly would have been astounded by the internet and concepts such as chat rooms and emoticons). The fact that I claimed "file sharing" was "speech" in the grandparent post was shocking to some -- and these are Slashdot geeks alive in this very day and age we are talking about! Therefore, copyright needs to be re-evaluated in terms of its impact on Free Speech. The context has changed almost completely.
When copyright law was first written it did not expressly accommodate Fair Use.... the concept didn't exist yet. When the Supreme Court ran into the issue that copyright law technically prohibited some things it was constitutionally PROHIBITED from restricting, the court faced and uncomfortable position.
I was under the impression that Fair Use, at least the concept and not necessarily the term, was a part of the conceptual environment surrounding copyright and borrowed from English law and existed in Common Law since 1710 when copyright came into being. Fair Use was certainly a Common Law concept before the Supreme Court of the United States touched on it. Many have argued that it was codified in the 1976 law in order to limit it. But the problem of copyright versus Free Speech which has become more and more prominent over the last few decades has hardly been resolved by Fair Use as Fair Use has been increasingly attacked and restricted while the need for it has expanded. The internet, once again, is case in point for this. Merely viewing a web page is a technical violation of copyright.
Just because you say that monopolies are for kings doesn't make it so.
Ahhh, but can you give me an argument that aligns monopoly rights with laissez-faire capitalism? No, you cannot because by giving exclusive rights to one person, you take those rights from everyone else. This made sense when the monarchs of Europe wanted to take all of the English trade in East Asia and give it to one company. They were kings, and they could decide who traded and who did not. This concept is obsolete in economies which are not ruled by autocrats. Could the French government suddenly claim today that all trade with China was the right of one company and all competition would be stomped out?
How about this. There is a good reason that line is in the constitution, a document not long on meaningless phrases.
This is true enough. However, the authors of the Constitution could not have imagined a world where speech would include digital renderings of any art or speech that man could create. Further, they did not anticipate the Berne Convention which changed the copyright in several ways completely hostile to Free Speech such as automatic granting of copyright, derivative works, and public performance rights. All of these things would make the Founding Fathers turn in their graves.
It is in there because with no IP protection, people wouldn't create things With no means to move creations into the public domain, society couldn't build on past creations.
Well, that is what was supposed anyway, and it was the justification for the "copyright clause" in the Constitution. However, the internet has more than shown that people will expend millions of man hours creating nearly any information for no money at all. Money, very obviously, is neither the only nor the primary incentive to creation. Most people create because they want to impress their friends or make something cool. Some people create just because they are bored and they have nothing better to do with their free time. Are you getting paid to discuss this with me on Slashdot? Is anybody getting paid to discuss on Slashdot?
As to the second statement, if copyright perpetually keeps works out of the Public Domain, what is the point? We would obviously be better off without it.
IMO, pre Walt Disney copyright law did this fine. We had reasonable fair use (and did until very recently) protection, good lapse times and good incentives for the creative process.
It has gotten steadily worse since then.
I agree with you there, and I would be able to accept copyright terms as the law stood in the 1800's.
That does not mean that I believe for a MINUTE that your right to free speech somehow voids the laws meant to provide for the public interest.
Well, actually, it does. Free Speech is a Right (Natural, Universal, Inalienable, etcetera), whereas copy"right" is a temporary monopoly privilege. Free Speech is a necessary element for any Liberal Democracy. Copyright is a fringe benefit that is added outside the machinery of Freedom. Copyright was never intended or even claimed to trump Free Speech. Copyright lawyers are certainly afraid of any such comparison since such a comparison would inevitably end in copyright losing some or all of its legal force.
Oh, and congress CAN repeal the first amendment. They just need to draft another one.
Theoretically speaking, but they would have to have to pass another amendment repealing the First Amendment. They would have to pass it by a two thirds vote in both houses, convene a Constitutional Convention, and then have three fourths of the state legislatures or Constitutional Conventions ratify it.
Copyright, on the other hand, can be repealed with a simple majority in both houses and the president's signature. Which do you think is more fundamental to the Constitution?
Soo.......is there any room for compromise in that model? Any reason why, perhaps, the right to a limited monopoly on intellectual property comes BEFORE the right to free speech in the constitution?
There is nowhere in the Constitution where the "right" to a limited monopoly is granted. The Constitution gives Congress the power to enact such a law, but Congress is not required to do so. Further, it is just a law and therefore is neither as important nor as irrevocable as a Natural Right. Congress can repeal copyright at any time. Congress can never repeal the First Amendment.
Oh, and the order that items appear in the Constitution is not any indication of priority. Or are you arguing that the Executive Branch is more important than the Judicial branch because they made it into the Constitution earlier?
Monopoly rights are the domain of kings and other despots. If you like such things, why not sell yourself into slavery under some third world dictator?
Excellently put. Let me just add a little about why privacy is different than copyright:
If I shared the contents of your PC with the world, would that be OK?
That's a privacy issue. It's completely different.
The main difference between privacy and copyright is that copyrighted materials are not secrets. Copyright seeks to protect the materials after they have been published and disseminated to the public. Copyright does not and cannot influence information that is not shared publicly for profit or for free. Copyright does not restrict whether information can be shared. It restricts who is allowed to share that information.
Privacy is about protecting one's personal business from the outside world. Originally, this was just the government and neighbors. Now the scope has grown to include corporations and other malicious multinational entities. In other words, privacy is an opposite of copyright because no one seeks to share their private secrets while copyright would be meaningless in the absence of publication and dissemination.
Think of a video. One might film a video of an interesting story and sell or share it. It would make no sense to keep something like that locked up as the creator already knows the story and could easily just imagine it.
On the other hand, who would want to share a video of a secret love affair. The leak of such information would be devastating to both lovers.
Copyright proponents also often seek to violate privacy. DRM systems often include schemes which allow copyright holders to scan and sometimes even delete files on your computer from a remote location. Publishers also often compile lists of who reads what books and sell those lists for a profit (I hope you did not buy Catcher in the Rye from Amazon).
Can anyone still have any confusion about the difference between copyright and privacy?
I have a word for "file sharing": I call it "speech". I have the Right (as in God-given, inalienable, fundamental, and/or natural -- take your pick) to repeat any speech that enters my realm of experience from any source.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, I have the Right to repeat those thousand words.
If I hear a tune, I have the Right to sing it.
If I read a book, I have a Right to repeat any or all of the information in that book.
Before the internet became popular, copyright did not very significantly encroach upon the territory of Free Speech. Now, no one can reasonably claim that copyright does not restrict Free Speech and education. Obviously, Free Speech is more important than copyright, just as Democracy is more important than monopoly privileges.
Freedom means that we can hurt ourselves and make bad decisions, and we accept it because it's better for everyone in the end.
Absolutely correct -- except in those aspects of a Free Society that are necessary for all. Can the citizens of a Free Society vote to give up their Freedom? No, they can not. Just as a vote that gives up the Freedom of all cannot be allowed, citizens who willingly refuse to protect their privacy harm the Freedom of everyone.
There is no better example than the complicity of the general populace with respect to the absurd measures governments are currently imposing in airports. These searches violate the Fourth Amendment in multiple ways (i.e. no probable cause -- not even reasonable suspicion, no warrant, no specific person to be searched, and a nearly unlimited list of items to be searched for), but individuals who object are rare and punished severely (just as in totalitarian systems).
"If once the people become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, Judges and Governors, shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions."
-- Thomas Jefferson
It is the responsibility of every individual to watch the government. This is not a law. People cannot be coerced to do this by any authority. Any attempt at coercion would only result in tyranny. However, anyone who claims to believe in Freedom but makes no attempt to protect their privacy is a hypocrite, and every other individual has the right to speak freely and inform that individual of their hypocrisy.
"Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government."
-- Thomas Jefferson
Just as it is the duty of the individual to protect their privacy in a Free Society, it is the duty of the well-informed individual to enlighten the ignorant of their role in protecting everyone's Freedom.
I think the parent was talking about the threat of force, not its actual use. Further, political assassinations are totally useless. The government is like the mafia. If one person vacates his position, there are a hundred more criminals in line to take his place. And finally, such events give the government the power of sympathy and makes martyrs out of crooked politicians. Really, everything is to the advantage of the government if such an action is taken.
The States having independent militaries, on the other hand, would have an entirely different effect as no one wants to see another civil war. The threat is certainly more important than the the use of force.
It is difficult to decide where to draw the line as to which weapons to allow and forbid.
Since when does the Federal Government have the authority to make this decision at all? The point of the Second Amendment is that the States should decide. If people in one state want to ban weapons, fine. That is their prerogative. If the people of another state want to have no restrictions, that is also fine. This is why it is called the United States (countries), and not "America" (which happens to be a continent).
I cannot see how the Constitution allows the Federal Government any say in this whatsoever.
Now consumers are getting their wish, and the music industry will continue to crumble.
Can anyone honestly say they care what happens to the entire music industry after all the theft they are guilty of? I mean, they have stolen everyone's money by way of charging monopoly rents, swindled tens of thousands of people out of their hard earned life savings (and even called those settlements bargains), consistently claimed that their measly copyright claims are more important than the First Amendment in the US and Free Speech world wide, and even pressured colleges and phone companies to spy on the public.
Who in this world could be hypocritical enough to actually have sympathy for these people? If anything, people should be angry that the business executives that perpetrated all of these crimes will not spend time in prison for all the suffering and injustice they are responsible for.
Hopefully, the MPAA and its sponsors will suffer the same fate. My fingers are certainly crossed.
Knowing that the AT&T network was GSM, I bought a relative a nice GSM phone. After all the expense (including a two year contract where I purchased the phone), he did not end up using it. Why? Because AT&T refused to enable GPRS for his phone even when he called customer service.
So, yes, the network can use GSM, but do not get a phone with any features because AT&T will not let you use them.
Slashdot Mirror
What you are saying is: Digital technology puts archiving in the hands of the individual, and there are several orders of magnitude more individuals than governments and philanthropic organizations combined. If even one individual's archives are preserved, the information is preserved for all of us.
That is definitely a pleasant thought. :-)
Detroit auto manufacturers called this "planned obsolescence". I wonder what the book publishers call this.
Yeah, but if your books start to degrade, can you copy them with a single command?
That is okay. Los Angeles is "detrimental to public health [and] safety". This is just another reason to avoid that noxious cesspool.
It is too bad the PRO-IP act is not confined to a similarly avoidable geographical expanse.
This is nearly what I was going to say. Who really cares about two arbitrary and meaningless (and historically malleable) categories like "conservative" and "liberal"? I mean, what is the difference between Coke and Pepsi, anyway? Are they not just two versions of the same thing? Finally, is breaking things into these categories not just playing into the hands of those who would wish to manipulate us -- making us argue over unimportant issues while the real decisions get made behind our backs?
What we need is a website that judges things such as an "advertising index" to tell us when someone is just using a reporter to push their product. Or a "factual index" to rate the credibility of the numbers involved. Or a "bias analysis" where users can post where they think something was misrepresented. What is the website really doing to help people with the complex system of manipulation that we today call "news"?
Perhaps I was too hasty in judging your username. However, the suggestion that my position is immoral is incorrect. Society and artists got along without copyright for the last 10,000 years of civilization and before that for the 2 million years of human occupation of this planet. Copyright is neither necessary nor even provably beneficial to human creativity.
As if that were not enough, the internet has demonstrated time and time again that people can and will be very creative for non-fiduciary reasons. People spend hours composing garbage email messages for their friends to (not) read. Wikipedia has arguably created a resource more useful and of higher quality than the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In Japan, there is an entire genre of fiction composed on phones the authors of which had no intention to publish professionally until the publishers contacted them. In 2007, one of those books was the number one book of the year. We are talking about a book composed by a high school student that wanted to impress her friends (of course, it was her parents that were impressed in the end). People here on Slashdot spend hours writing posts on every subject available. Why? They do it because they can. Not for money -- which is the only thing copyright is about.
My position is neither immoral nor harmful (unless you happen to be one of those fat cat record industry execs cashing million dollar checks generated by artists working at McDonald's and Starbucks). In fact, defending copyright is immoral. Copyright is both an anti-free market monopoly and (as currently implemented) a constraint on Free Speech (how can speech be free if it is "owned"). Free Speech is necessary for both democracy and Freedom. Copyright is a prerequisite for neither. So, whose point of view is moral?
If you really have the "good of everyone in mind", you should consider changing your view. Copyright is a relic of feudalism. It is something that monarchs granted to their subjects (which is a polite word for slaves).
My argument was about getting the idea of using a picnic table from you and buying my own -- not taking your picnic table. Copyrighted material is not property, so your argument is irrelevant. Even if I give in and argue this point, the reasoning is so flawed that its useless. Would you notice the leg was missing? Would the table even stand? Could I then balance my hamburgers on the leg? Or would someone have to sit on it? This is why information cannot be "property". These realspace arguments are irrational when applied to the inexhaustible resource of information (something that can be reproduced infinitely without reducing or degrading anybody else's supply). Even copyright is tied to copies. The reason for this is that tangible things can be regulated, and ideas cannot. If we start regulating ideas, welcome to 1984 and the Thought Police.
You cannot "steal" a copyrighted work. Stealing or theft requires that the owner be deprived of what he once had without his permission. Copying lacks that essential element of taking something away. If I make a million copies of something, all the other owners still have their copies and so has the copyright owner. When you buy a book, do you own it? Or does the copyright holder "own" it? If the copyright holder "owns" it, why can he no
You play the Devil's advocate well. I will bite.
The problem is: information is not a "good" or a "product". It is not a "thing". So, it cannot be analysed in the same manner as physical objects. Lessig's picnic table example is perfect for this. If I take your picnic table from your back yard, I am stealing. If I see you have a picnic table, like the idea, and go and buy one for my yard, what have I "stolen" then? I certainly got the idea from you, but I also have not taken anything from you.
It is only valuable if artists truly have an alternative. Before the internet, there really was none. It is entirely possible that this sort of blanket taxing on ISPs will return artists to the former situation -- just as with net radio where SoundExchange requires royalties to be collected for all songs regardless of whether the artist is a member or not. This sort of monopoly is unfair to both artists and "consumers" as it denies both the opportunity to exercise their Free Choice.
This does not mean that internet style distribution should not be used. Phone services are now all packet switched, but most people have no idea. The same could be done with radio. Radio is supposed to go digital. Why not have radio stations stream MP3s or other cacheable data instead of whatever format they use? Why not have car radios that load streams off the internet when they are near wifi hotspots? Why does the radio user have to have any idea about the underlying architecture?
Correction: The artist is entitled initially to any money generated by the work they create. If they artist wants to "keep" his work, he can keep his work a secret. If he is going to give it to the public, it will no longer be exclusively his -- it will be a part of our culture.
If the ISPs start going for this proposal, no one will have a choice: Connecting to the internet will be "buying from them".
Correct enough. However, this "outdated business model" is the cause of copyright violating other more important rights like Free Speech. The increases in the scope and duration of copyright over the last century alone are reason enough to violate it. Following unreasonable laws helps to support arbitrary laws and dictatorial government administration. It is the responsibility of citizens in any Free Society to both question and refuse to obey unreasonable laws. Before the internet, copyright did not conflict significantly with the First Amendment. Now it does.
Are you doing your part? Or are you making it easier for governments and corporations to violate our rights in new and innovative ways?
Even if they do implement this system in some sort of ideal way, it still does not solve the caveat emptor problem. How can people who are sick of the RIAA and their tactics manage not to pay them?
Market controls only work when the buyers have a choice. Once again, the RIAA is trying to force people to pay. Their business model is based on government enforced extortion, and anybody who pays them is funding the record industry's theft from society and countless individuals who have been unfairly sued.
If the artists get paid, I am all for it. But I am in no way inclined to compensate a bunch of brainless MBA's who studied How to Rip Off Artists for Dummies in college.
Very well put. And to that, I must add the obligatory quote from TFA:
That is just the point, is it not? They are gouging customers and have been for quite some time. Now, their days of collecting monopoly rents are coming to an end.
Children who steal should not be angry when they are told not to steal any more (yes, collecting monopoly rents is theft -- this is stealing real money from one's customers as opposed to the record industry's fantastical claims of "theft" of potential money by file sharers).
It is hypocrisy, but not because it contradicts MS's latest infamous quote (they did not write their software for the purpose of charity). It is hypocrisy because MS uses this as a sales tactic to gain more customers and market dominance.
"Charity" might as well be called "advertising" where MS is concerned.
I have hated Apple since the mid-90's. There is no "some day" about it. Apple is every bit as proprietary and obnoxious as Microsoft.
Please do not mod this as flamebait: it is a legitimate opinion, and I am not saying it to start an argument.
To that I would add that this concept that the carriers are resisting the open web is crap. Maybe they are in the US, and I have seen something like that in Japan, but if Opera is any indication, they are not doing it at the software level. I have yet to see a smart phone with no web browser. Nokia's web browsers suck for sure, but that does not mean that they cannot access the web (it does mean they cannot access local files, though).
Opera is king of the mobile phone market, and the king is nearly ubiquitous. Web browsers are on nearly every device, so the carriers cannot be resisting that.
I could not agree more. The headline should read: Neil Gaiman Book "American Gods" Locked Up Online.
You are missing the point. You are arguing with me in a medium that is a fixed and tangible record of speech. While you probably have not stopped to consider it much, your "speech" online is all subject to copyright. Your post is copyrighted, and viewing it without your explicit permission is a technical violation of copyright as it stands on the books.
If we were in the same room having this conversation, this point would be null and void. But our speech here, on the internet, is cached and therefore subject to copyright. This has nothing to do with money. If you were to copy my entire post in a quote, there would be few courts that could not be led to believe that you copied an entire original work. In fact, almost everything you do on the web is a technical violation of someone or other's copyrights. Who cares about music and movies? If the *AA's get their way, we will have to pay them for permission to speak.
Well put. That was a nice summary, and I mostly agree. However, there are a couple small details that need clarification:
The Copyright Clause clearly requires Congress to have the power to restrict at least some speech, for it to have any meaning and effect at all. We must accept that meaning, for if that meaning were not intended then the Copyright Clause would never have been written at all.This would be true if the Founding Fathers had considered publication to be equivalent to speech. However, the fact that they explicitly mentioned both in the phrases "or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press;" in the First Amendment means that they considered them different. In other words, they would have considered repeating something one heard to be fine, but republishing a book verbatim and for profit would have been considered to be wrong.
The Founding Fathers most likely would have been shocked to hear of copyright concepts such as derivative works, public performance rights, or the automatic granting of copyrights. The idea that copyright could be used to stop people from singing would be mind blowing in 1776.
The internet has now eliminated the distinction between speech and the press. This could not have been predicted 300 years ago. In fact, it was barely predicted 20 years ago (and only then by a few geeks working on the technology). Restrictions on publication today mean something entirely different than they did just 10 years ago.
So, when you say "some speech", you should probably say "some freedom of the press" and realize that the Founding Fathers never anticipated the idea that publication and speech would become indistinguishable (they certainly would have been astounded by the internet and concepts such as chat rooms and emoticons). The fact that I claimed "file sharing" was "speech" in the grandparent post was shocking to some -- and these are Slashdot geeks alive in this very day and age we are talking about! Therefore, copyright needs to be re-evaluated in terms of its impact on Free Speech. The context has changed almost completely.
When copyright law was first written it did not expressly accommodate Fair Use.... the concept didn't exist yet. When the Supreme Court ran into the issue that copyright law technically prohibited some things it was constitutionally PROHIBITED from restricting, the court faced and uncomfortable position.I was under the impression that Fair Use, at least the concept and not necessarily the term, was a part of the conceptual environment surrounding copyright and borrowed from English law and existed in Common Law since 1710 when copyright came into being. Fair Use was certainly a Common Law concept before the Supreme Court of the United States touched on it. Many have argued that it was codified in the 1976 law in order to limit it. But the problem of copyright versus Free Speech which has become more and more prominent over the last few decades has hardly been resolved by Fair Use as Fair Use has been increasingly attacked and restricted while the need for it has expanded. The internet, once again, is case in point for this. Merely viewing a web page is a technical violation of copyright.
Just because you say that monopolies are for kings doesn't make it so.
Ahhh, but can you give me an argument that aligns monopoly rights with laissez-faire capitalism? No, you cannot because by giving exclusive rights to one person, you take those rights from everyone else. This made sense when the monarchs of Europe wanted to take all of the English trade in East Asia and give it to one company. They were kings, and they could decide who traded and who did not. This concept is obsolete in economies which are not ruled by autocrats. Could the French government suddenly claim today that all trade with China was the right of one company and all competition would be stomped out?
How about this. There is a good reason that line is in the constitution, a document not long on meaningless phrases.This is true enough. However, the authors of the Constitution could not have imagined a world where speech would include digital renderings of any art or speech that man could create. Further, they did not anticipate the Berne Convention which changed the copyright in several ways completely hostile to Free Speech such as automatic granting of copyright, derivative works, and public performance rights. All of these things would make the Founding Fathers turn in their graves.
It is in there because with no IP protection, people wouldn't create things With no means to move creations into the public domain, society couldn't build on past creations.Well, that is what was supposed anyway, and it was the justification for the "copyright clause" in the Constitution. However, the internet has more than shown that people will expend millions of man hours creating nearly any information for no money at all. Money, very obviously, is neither the only nor the primary incentive to creation. Most people create because they want to impress their friends or make something cool. Some people create just because they are bored and they have nothing better to do with their free time. Are you getting paid to discuss this with me on Slashdot? Is anybody getting paid to discuss on Slashdot?
As to the second statement, if copyright perpetually keeps works out of the Public Domain, what is the point? We would obviously be better off without it.
IMO, pre Walt Disney copyright law did this fine. We had reasonable fair use (and did until very recently) protection, good lapse times and good incentives for the creative process.It has gotten steadily worse since then.
I agree with you there, and I would be able to accept copyright terms as the law stood in the 1800's.
That does not mean that I believe for a MINUTE that your right to free speech somehow voids the laws meant to provide for the public interest.Well, actually, it does. Free Speech is a Right (Natural, Universal, Inalienable, etcetera), whereas copy"right" is a temporary monopoly privilege. Free Speech is a necessary element for any Liberal Democracy. Copyright is a fringe benefit that is added outside the machinery of Freedom. Copyright was never intended or even claimed to trump Free Speech. Copyright lawyers are certainly afraid of any such comparison since such a comparison would inevitably end in copyright losing some or all of its legal force.
Oh, and congress CAN repeal the first amendment. They just need to draft another one.Theoretically speaking, but they would have to have to pass another amendment repealing the First Amendment. They would have to pass it by a two thirds vote in both houses, convene a Constitutional Convention, and then have three fourths of the state legislatures or Constitutional Conventions ratify it.
Copyright, on the other hand, can be repealed with a simple majority in both houses and the president's signature. Which do you think is more fundamental to the Constitution?
There is nowhere in the Constitution where the "right" to a limited monopoly is granted. The Constitution gives Congress the power to enact such a law, but Congress is not required to do so. Further, it is just a law and therefore is neither as important nor as irrevocable as a Natural Right. Congress can repeal copyright at any time. Congress can never repeal the First Amendment.
Oh, and the order that items appear in the Constitution is not any indication of priority. Or are you arguing that the Executive Branch is more important than the Judicial branch because they made it into the Constitution earlier?
Monopoly rights are the domain of kings and other despots. If you like such things, why not sell yourself into slavery under some third world dictator?
Excellently put. Let me just add a little about why privacy is different than copyright:
The main difference between privacy and copyright is that copyrighted materials are not secrets. Copyright seeks to protect the materials after they have been published and disseminated to the public. Copyright does not and cannot influence information that is not shared publicly for profit or for free. Copyright does not restrict whether information can be shared. It restricts who is allowed to share that information.
Privacy is about protecting one's personal business from the outside world. Originally, this was just the government and neighbors. Now the scope has grown to include corporations and other malicious multinational entities. In other words, privacy is an opposite of copyright because no one seeks to share their private secrets while copyright would be meaningless in the absence of publication and dissemination.
Think of a video. One might film a video of an interesting story and sell or share it. It would make no sense to keep something like that locked up as the creator already knows the story and could easily just imagine it.
On the other hand, who would want to share a video of a secret love affair. The leak of such information would be devastating to both lovers.
Copyright proponents also often seek to violate privacy. DRM systems often include schemes which allow copyright holders to scan and sometimes even delete files on your computer from a remote location. Publishers also often compile lists of who reads what books and sell those lists for a profit (I hope you did not buy Catcher in the Rye from Amazon).
Can anyone still have any confusion about the difference between copyright and privacy?
I have a word for "file sharing": I call it "speech". I have the Right (as in God-given, inalienable, fundamental, and/or natural -- take your pick) to repeat any speech that enters my realm of experience from any source.
Before the internet became popular, copyright did not very significantly encroach upon the territory of Free Speech. Now, no one can reasonably claim that copyright does not restrict Free Speech and education. Obviously, Free Speech is more important than copyright, just as Democracy is more important than monopoly privileges.
File sharing is Free Speech.
Absolutely correct -- except in those aspects of a Free Society that are necessary for all. Can the citizens of a Free Society vote to give up their Freedom? No, they can not. Just as a vote that gives up the Freedom of all cannot be allowed, citizens who willingly refuse to protect their privacy harm the Freedom of everyone.
There is no better example than the complicity of the general populace with respect to the absurd measures governments are currently imposing in airports. These searches violate the Fourth Amendment in multiple ways (i.e. no probable cause -- not even reasonable suspicion, no warrant, no specific person to be searched, and a nearly unlimited list of items to be searched for), but individuals who object are rare and punished severely (just as in totalitarian systems).
It is the responsibility of every individual to watch the government. This is not a law. People cannot be coerced to do this by any authority. Any attempt at coercion would only result in tyranny. However, anyone who claims to believe in Freedom but makes no attempt to protect their privacy is a hypocrite, and every other individual has the right to speak freely and inform that individual of their hypocrisy.
Just as it is the duty of the individual to protect their privacy in a Free Society, it is the duty of the well-informed individual to enlighten the ignorant of their role in protecting everyone's Freedom.
But the definition of the term "effects" certainly is.
I think the parent was talking about the threat of force, not its actual use. Further, political assassinations are totally useless. The government is like the mafia. If one person vacates his position, there are a hundred more criminals in line to take his place. And finally, such events give the government the power of sympathy and makes martyrs out of crooked politicians. Really, everything is to the advantage of the government if such an action is taken.
The States having independent militaries, on the other hand, would have an entirely different effect as no one wants to see another civil war. The threat is certainly more important than the the use of force.
Since when does the Federal Government have the authority to make this decision at all? The point of the Second Amendment is that the States should decide. If people in one state want to ban weapons, fine. That is their prerogative. If the people of another state want to have no restrictions, that is also fine. This is why it is called the United States (countries), and not "America" (which happens to be a continent).
I cannot see how the Constitution allows the Federal Government any say in this whatsoever.
Can anyone honestly say they care what happens to the entire music industry after all the theft they are guilty of? I mean, they have stolen everyone's money by way of charging monopoly rents, swindled tens of thousands of people out of their hard earned life savings (and even called those settlements bargains), consistently claimed that their measly copyright claims are more important than the First Amendment in the US and Free Speech world wide, and even pressured colleges and phone companies to spy on the public.
Who in this world could be hypocritical enough to actually have sympathy for these people? If anything, people should be angry that the business executives that perpetrated all of these crimes will not spend time in prison for all the suffering and injustice they are responsible for.
Hopefully, the MPAA and its sponsors will suffer the same fate. My fingers are certainly crossed.
Knowing that the AT&T network was GSM, I bought a relative a nice GSM phone. After all the expense (including a two year contract where I purchased the phone), he did not end up using it. Why? Because AT&T refused to enable GPRS for his phone even when he called customer service.
So, yes, the network can use GSM, but do not get a phone with any features because AT&T will not let you use them.