I can't believe the stupidity of some of you. Why don't we switch over to C02 instead of helium for balloons? They would probably float much better than helium seeing that C02 is so light it all floats up to space damn near.
So if the weight of a gas alone determines its location in the atmosphere, why hasn't all the CO2 settled to the bottom of the atmosphere and suffocated us all?
You've absolutley no idea what an alien machine might prize so deciding it would be precision and efficiency is an enourmous assumption.
True. It was a suggestion made to set a scenario for a joke, and in order to create a scenario without any tangible information you have to make assumptions. Context is fascinating, isn't it?
Speaking of context, it appears you missed where I described other possible scenarios and wrote
...and that doesn't allow for completely alien responses I can't imagine (and I'm sure a machine intelligence from another planet would have a few of those).
I admit that I'm guessing, and that my guesses are from my limited perspective.
Even if it was true I've no idea how a species can be said to be precise, I think thats pretty much meaningless
Just like we have absolutely no idea what an alien machine might prize, we have no idea about its reasoning either. So by denying this as a possibility you're making an enormous assumption based on your limited perspective.
But is precision really meaningless? Some Earthly cultures put more value in precision than others...its hardly an accident that the vernier caliper was invented by an American engineer instead of a New Guinean subsistence farmer. Engineering is only one kind of precision, there are others if you apply some thought to the matter.
The fact is we are a pretty diverse bunch, and I'm inclined to believe that the cultural differences between humans and aliens would be much greater than humans and also humans. A cautionary tale of cultural difference: Australian aborigines have a tradition of shared property, and in the early days of European settlement this led to many being shot or imprisoned for stealing sheep. The concept of stealing was utterly alien and meaningless to the aborigines, the sheep were just standing around waiting to be eaten after all, and taking the odd one was no different to hunting 'roos, but this seemingly innocuous act carried severe consequences. "Of course", you say, "stealing is wrong"...the point is their culture didn't teach that, the closest they had to stealing was not sharing, so by their standards the Europeans were in the wrong. However, the matter was decided with firepower, which proves that not attempting to understand a concept that seems meaningless can be dangerous.
Now consider this: the word "aborigine" simply means "indigenous people". We, my friend, are the aborigines of Earth, and in all probability the technological and cultural gulf between us and a species capable of interstellar travel is likely to be much greater than Koori tribesmen and the Georgian English.
I think any alien observer would conclude that humans are in fact very efficient in the way they interact and make use of their environment.
Sorry, but you've again made exactly the same mistake you criticised me for by incorrectly assuming your idea of efficiency is universal. I'll take advantage of this to point out that logical consistency is another possible test of precision in a species;)
Termites interact far more efficiently than humans (could a team of humans remove 90% of a building's structure without engineering knowledge, blueprints, or complex language and still leave it standing? Termites can). As for efficient use of the environment, I can point to a lot of industrial practices, ruined farmland, denuded forests and landfills that could look like unthinking vandalism and profligate waste to something that doesn't live here (and does look that way to a lot of things that do, if the green movement is any indication. As I said, your idea of efficiency isn't universal).
For example, we burn our immensely useful but finite supply of hydrocarbons for energy, yet we live on a planet with huge quantities of silicon and ample sunlight (a big WTF right there if you're a life form that eats electricity, as a machine intelligence well might). In the process of extracting those
I did indeed mean it in jest. And to be honest, most of the nerds I know have more diverse social lives than the non-nerds, though their activities may not be the popular idea of fun. That just makes them more interesting to be around, IMO.
Why anyone would think that an advanced machine intelligence would need to compete with human beings for resources is beyond me.
Me too, since I wrote nothing about competing for resources.
What I did suggest was that machines would prize precision and efficiency; by that measure we barely qualify as an intelligent species. Individuals may be precise and efficient, but as a group we aren't, and a single machine intelligence with many nodes looking for intelligence that resembles itself may not even realise that individual intelligent entities can even exist in co-operative societies. It may see us the way we see termites: mindless vermin that need to be eradicated before they spread and do damage (bearing in mind that such a machine would probably be so wildly different to anything we know that we may not even recognise it as a machine or intelligent. We might have been digging bits of it up for years thinking we're extracting convenient mineral deposits, not knowing the pest control fleet is already on its way).
Or it might detect our technology, come to the conclusion that we're a strange biological simbiote, and eliminate us in order to artificially advance the evolution of it's own kind. Then again, it might decide that we are intelligent but too wildly unpredictable to attempt to live beside, and simply destroy us as a preventative measure.
So there's carelessness and self-preservation to consider, and that doesn't allow for completely alien responses I can't imagine (and I'm sure a machine intelligence from another planet would have a few of those). Then you get to resources, and I could imagine that if Earth is the most convenient source of something, the termite-monkey things living here aren't going to be considered competition.
I'm fairly certain that such an entity would tend toward an exponentially increasing rate of efficiency per computing unit. This implies exponentially diminishing reliance upon external energy inputs.
Efficiency is finite, and even if it could increase exponentially indefinitely you're assuming that a machine intelligence wouldn't want to expand at a greater rate. Besides that, you can't build physical objects without matter, and even if a machine intelligence had a way of communicating instantaneously over interstellar distances, large local processing clusters networked together would probably be the most efficient arrangement. So planets are still likely to be valuable as both a source of raw materials and real estate.
There's no reason to assume a machine intelligence is benign simply because its a machine. Our machines are, but they're not super-intelligent intergalactic computing clusters striving for survival, so an assumption about one based on the other is almost certain to be incorrect. As for machines being less distressing, having seen people freak out at Windows desktops I'm inclined to think that bug-eyed monsters would seem more "human" because of their imperfections. Either way, an extra-terrestrial intelligence of any kind would shake a lot of people's fundamental beliefs.
I'm fairly certain that the little green men, ticked off after years of being depicted as scrawny, bug-eyed, space-faring bobbleheads, will just come in rayguns blazing, but the machines, prizing efficiency and precision above our human failings, would probably arrive and play muzak with a pre-recorded voiceover telling us that our death is important, and would we please wait.
Is being blasted into your component molecules by unimaginably powerful energy beams really more distressing than being put on hold?
Sorry to post again (and apologies if you gleaned this from my last post), but I felt it necessary to emphasise that a breach of contract that hasn't been subject to a judicial decision is neither legal nor illegal, its Schrodinger's cat, waiting to have it's undetermined state resolved by external observation. In that regard it is technically correct to say someone can't legally decide to breach a contract, because if the breach was clearly legal it wouldn't be a breach, by definition. That does not automatically make it illegal, however; !A != B, if you see what I mean.
Unless you're masochistic enough to actually want to waste time in court, in the real world you treat contractual obligations as absolutes. As I keep saying, unlike you I do not have the luxury of this being an academic subject, and I phrase things correspondingly.
...anybody is free to violate the terms of a contract at any time they wish. Doing so opens them up to being sued for breach of the contract...
Exactly: one party to a contract cannot "legally authorise" themselves to act contrary to the agreement, only a court has that power if the other party is unwilling. In criticising my phrasing (which I will concede was terminologically imprecise), you proved my point; I hope this is a lesson in the danger of attempting to argue by splitting hairs.
So back to what you wrote initially, Lars can indeed breach the contract if he chooses, but he cannot "legally authorise" himself to do so. He can only legally do it with the agreement of the record company or, subsequent to litigation, with the consent of a court. The fact that you got that fundamentally wrong while being correct in this post indicates that you're not being logically consistent. Once again, please don't take this as an insult, its intended as constructive criticism intended to sharpen your thinking.
BTW, that's one reason I have a perfect record: I know how to draw people into disproving their own arguments;)
Actually, I suspect it's only a breach of contract. Signing an exclusive distribution licence doesn't invalidate your copyright, or transfer it to the other party.
Ah, a classic mistake that betrays people with no practical experience in the field. Its important to remember that the copyright on a work is separate to the rights to a specific recording (or, to use the legal terminology, a "fixed" embodiment of the work). For example, some of my works are assigned to Universal Music Publishing, but the recordings of those works were paid for and released by BMG; if you want to record your own version or use the music in a film you have to clear it with Universal, if you want to use my recordings on a compilation CD you have to seek approval from BMG* for use of the recordings and pay Universal the mechanicals (this arrangement is unusual, but it illustrates the point nicely).
If you wish to check the veracity of this, just look at the copyright warning printed on a CD: notice it says (c) [label], not (c) [artist]? Now you know how that's possible, and it is perfectly legal and correct. I generally avoid attempting to explain this nuance because nobody seems to be able to grasp the concept that copyright is layered, not a flat, single state system; the fact that you forced me to shows you're determined to understand it.
So with that in mind, this particular fixed embodiment of Metallica's works can only be reproduced at sole discretion of the recording company. If the RIAA's position is that downloading constitutes distribution then Lars has violated the rights to the fixed embodiments owned by the label, even though he isn't violating the copyright on the works themselves (which presumably still belongs to the band and it's members, though that isn't certain these days).
Is this absurd? Yes. Is it a real situation? That depends on whether the RIAA succeeds in proving it's argument. Does Lars realise you can't have your cake and eat it? Well, I'm not thinking he's a shining beacon of intellectual greatness...
Sure, Lars is contractually bound not to do anything that might constitute distributing his music without his label's permission, but he can legally violate that contract in order to authorise himself to download the music.
Hold on...how can someone authorise themselves to "legally violate" a contract? A contract is an agreement between two parties, and any action precluded by the contract isn't legal unless both parties amend the agreement; one signatory can't arbitrarily decide that they aren't going to abide by the terms.
That's the basic principle of contractual law, and please don't take this as an insult, but you've let yourself down on this point. As I said, you're obviously serious about analysing how the system works, and the last thing I want to do is discourage you. I honestly believe that we need more people who can effectively critique the existing system before we'll see change that will benefit everyone as much as possible. And hey, if you can cite references that prove me wrong on any of this we both learn something.
If a published author wants to download an illegal ebook of his work, all he has to do to avoid breaching his contract is to do it from a user in a country his publisher doesn't operate in
Rather than guess, I asked a publisher I know about this (which explains the late reply). Her response:
American anthologies I've sold stories to tend to ask for North American rights only. I think its only Years best collections that acquire world rights & pay more for the privilege [So you're half right - FT]. Current contracts are starting to ask for podcast and electronic rights also.
So publishers are aware of the potential of the internet as a global distribution medium instead of just a store front, and unsurprisingly are adjusting their contracts to suit. That means no general rule can be applied any more, and you have to know the specifics of each contract befor
An MP3 can easily be interpreted as a derived work from the original.
Oh, FFS, here we go again; no, it can't, and please stop repeating this ignorant nonsense. An MP3 is a container for a work, intended to reproduce the work as accurately as possible. It is no more a derivative work than the squiggly lines on an LP or the pits on a CD, which are also lossy compared to the master multitrack recording but are indisputably covered by copyright as case law amply demonstrates.
And speaking of case law, whenever copyright infringement is argued in court, the test applied is to the musical characteristics: chord progression, melody, lyrics, etcetera. If those characteristics remain unaltered and recognisable regardless of the amount of distortion, it does not qualify as a derivative work as defined by law, its merely a shitty reproduction.
Simple example: "Can't Touch This" is a derivative work, because it uses a riff from "Superfreak" with different lyrics and song structure. A heavily compressed copy of "Superfreak" is still a copy of "Superfreak", because it has the same lyrics, melody, chord progression, bass riff and arrangement. Get it now?
A good metric in general, but in this case the first page would consist of a zero, a decimal point, and lots of other zeros followed eventually by a significant digit.
If I want to read a whole lot of nothing I'll go to Digg...
Since Lars and the band perform the song(s) and probably have some rights to the song(s)
Precisely: some rights, but not all. Metallica signed an exclusive distribution contract which grants complete control over distribution of these particular recordings to their label, and since the copy produced by downloading wasn't authorised under the terms of that contract it is indeed a pirate copy (note that if he wanted to give away a physical CD, it would be taken from stock and billed to the band as a promotional expense). The fact that he co-wrote the music makes no difference, except that it might also be a breach of contract.
The same applies to published authors, BTW. That's pretty much what "published" means: your work in someone else's hands.
Photographers are slightly different, as its relatively rare for a photographer to sign an exclusive deal with a gallery that extends beyond the duration of an exhibition. In general, they retain all the rights to their work unless it was commissioned.
But please, let's not let common sense get in the way of people justifying not paying performers for their work.
Common sense and copyright are mutually exclusive. That's why so few people understand it.
(Disclosure: I'm a published songwriter/musician, formerly signed to Warner, BMG, Universal and a number of smaller labels, currently working in television production. I'm probably the last person who would try to justify not paying performers).
Slashdot Mirror
I can't believe the stupidity of some of you. Why don't we switch over to C02 instead of helium for balloons? They would probably float much better than helium seeing that C02 is so light it all floats up to space damn near.
So if the weight of a gas alone determines its location in the atmosphere, why hasn't all the CO2 settled to the bottom of the atmosphere and suffocated us all?
I'd also suggest watching this dissection and debate.
Many of these by-products of our industry and consumption are building up in water, air and most importantly (to me anyway) inside the human body.
So stop eating people.
You've absolutley no idea what an alien machine might prize so deciding it would be precision and efficiency is an enourmous assumption.
True. It was a suggestion made to set a scenario for a joke, and in order to create a scenario without any tangible information you have to make assumptions. Context is fascinating, isn't it?
Speaking of context, it appears you missed where I described other possible scenarios and wrote
I admit that I'm guessing, and that my guesses are from my limited perspective.
Even if it was true I've no idea how a species can be said to be precise, I think thats pretty much meaningless
Just like we have absolutely no idea what an alien machine might prize, we have no idea about its reasoning either. So by denying this as a possibility you're making an enormous assumption based on your limited perspective.
But is precision really meaningless? Some Earthly cultures put more value in precision than others...its hardly an accident that the vernier caliper was invented by an American engineer instead of a New Guinean subsistence farmer. Engineering is only one kind of precision, there are others if you apply some thought to the matter.
The fact is we are a pretty diverse bunch, and I'm inclined to believe that the cultural differences between humans and aliens would be much greater than humans and also humans. A cautionary tale of cultural difference: Australian aborigines have a tradition of shared property, and in the early days of European settlement this led to many being shot or imprisoned for stealing sheep. The concept of stealing was utterly alien and meaningless to the aborigines, the sheep were just standing around waiting to be eaten after all, and taking the odd one was no different to hunting 'roos, but this seemingly innocuous act carried severe consequences. "Of course", you say, "stealing is wrong"...the point is their culture didn't teach that, the closest they had to stealing was not sharing, so by their standards the Europeans were in the wrong. However, the matter was decided with firepower, which proves that not attempting to understand a concept that seems meaningless can be dangerous.
Now consider this: the word "aborigine" simply means "indigenous people". We, my friend, are the aborigines of Earth, and in all probability the technological and cultural gulf between us and a species capable of interstellar travel is likely to be much greater than Koori tribesmen and the Georgian English.
I think any alien observer would conclude that humans are in fact very efficient in the way they interact and make use of their environment.
Sorry, but you've again made exactly the same mistake you criticised me for by incorrectly assuming your idea of efficiency is universal. I'll take advantage of this to point out that logical consistency is another possible test of precision in a species ;)
Termites interact far more efficiently than humans (could a team of humans remove 90% of a building's structure without engineering knowledge, blueprints, or complex language and still leave it standing? Termites can). As for efficient use of the environment, I can point to a lot of industrial practices, ruined farmland, denuded forests and landfills that could look like unthinking vandalism and profligate waste to something that doesn't live here (and does look that way to a lot of things that do, if the green movement is any indication. As I said, your idea of efficiency isn't universal).
For example, we burn our immensely useful but finite supply of hydrocarbons for energy, yet we live on a planet with huge quantities of silicon and ample sunlight (a big WTF right there if you're a life form that eats electricity, as a machine intelligence well might). In the process of extracting those
And if you can amplify it, then maybe you could weaponise it
So the plan is to make soldiers heavier so they feel fat and too depressed to fight? Fiendish...
I wouldn't rule that out, but it would have ruined the gag.
Interesting link, BTW. I'll have to check that one out.
Well, that plan fails if the number of heads doesn't equal one.
What complete disintegration lacks in finesse, it makes up for in certainty.
I did indeed mean it in jest. And to be honest, most of the nerds I know have more diverse social lives than the non-nerds, though their activities may not be the popular idea of fun. That just makes them more interesting to be around, IMO.
Why anyone would think that an advanced machine intelligence would need to compete with human beings for resources is beyond me.
Me too, since I wrote nothing about competing for resources.
What I did suggest was that machines would prize precision and efficiency; by that measure we barely qualify as an intelligent species. Individuals may be precise and efficient, but as a group we aren't, and a single machine intelligence with many nodes looking for intelligence that resembles itself may not even realise that individual intelligent entities can even exist in co-operative societies. It may see us the way we see termites: mindless vermin that need to be eradicated before they spread and do damage (bearing in mind that such a machine would probably be so wildly different to anything we know that we may not even recognise it as a machine or intelligent. We might have been digging bits of it up for years thinking we're extracting convenient mineral deposits, not knowing the pest control fleet is already on its way).
Or it might detect our technology, come to the conclusion that we're a strange biological simbiote, and eliminate us in order to artificially advance the evolution of it's own kind. Then again, it might decide that we are intelligent but too wildly unpredictable to attempt to live beside, and simply destroy us as a preventative measure.
So there's carelessness and self-preservation to consider, and that doesn't allow for completely alien responses I can't imagine (and I'm sure a machine intelligence from another planet would have a few of those). Then you get to resources, and I could imagine that if Earth is the most convenient source of something, the termite-monkey things living here aren't going to be considered competition.
I'm fairly certain that such an entity would tend toward an exponentially increasing rate of efficiency per computing unit. This implies exponentially diminishing reliance upon external energy inputs.
Efficiency is finite, and even if it could increase exponentially indefinitely you're assuming that a machine intelligence wouldn't want to expand at a greater rate. Besides that, you can't build physical objects without matter, and even if a machine intelligence had a way of communicating instantaneously over interstellar distances, large local processing clusters networked together would probably be the most efficient arrangement. So planets are still likely to be valuable as both a source of raw materials and real estate.
There's no reason to assume a machine intelligence is benign simply because its a machine. Our machines are, but they're not super-intelligent intergalactic computing clusters striving for survival, so an assumption about one based on the other is almost certain to be incorrect. As for machines being less distressing, having seen people freak out at Windows desktops I'm inclined to think that bug-eyed monsters would seem more "human" because of their imperfections. Either way, an extra-terrestrial intelligence of any kind would shake a lot of people's fundamental beliefs.
. . . and his little green men were always platinum blond chicks
Maybe not men*, but some were definitely green.
*At least that we know of. I always had questions about why the young, naive Chekov was the navigator...
Second, even if they did, how in the world do you conclude that would be "less distressing"??
This is Slashdot, and you're wondering how someone decided that a machine would be easier to deal with than a living creature. Hmm...
I'm fairly certain that the little green men, ticked off after years of being depicted as scrawny, bug-eyed, space-faring bobbleheads, will just come in rayguns blazing, but the machines, prizing efficiency and precision above our human failings, would probably arrive and play muzak with a pre-recorded voiceover telling us that our death is important, and would we please wait.
Is being blasted into your component molecules by unimaginably powerful energy beams really more distressing than being put on hold?
Have you ever copied sheet music by hand? It's a pain in the ass.
You're doing it wrong.
And koalas aren't bears, cavys aren't pigs, cynomys aren't dogs, and that KFC you had last night wasn't chicken...
Sorry to post again (and apologies if you gleaned this from my last post), but I felt it necessary to emphasise that a breach of contract that hasn't been subject to a judicial decision is neither legal nor illegal, its Schrodinger's cat, waiting to have it's undetermined state resolved by external observation. In that regard it is technically correct to say someone can't legally decide to breach a contract, because if the breach was clearly legal it wouldn't be a breach, by definition. That does not automatically make it illegal, however; !A != B, if you see what I mean.
A contract is not absolute
Unless you're masochistic enough to actually want to waste time in court, in the real world you treat contractual obligations as absolutes. As I keep saying, unlike you I do not have the luxury of this being an academic subject, and I phrase things correspondingly.
...anybody is free to violate the terms of a contract at any time they wish. Doing so opens them up to being sued for breach of the contract...
Exactly: one party to a contract cannot "legally authorise" themselves to act contrary to the agreement, only a court has that power if the other party is unwilling. In criticising my phrasing (which I will concede was terminologically imprecise), you proved my point; I hope this is a lesson in the danger of attempting to argue by splitting hairs.
So back to what you wrote initially, Lars can indeed breach the contract if he chooses, but he cannot "legally authorise" himself to do so. He can only legally do it with the agreement of the record company or, subsequent to litigation, with the consent of a court. The fact that you got that fundamentally wrong while being correct in this post indicates that you're not being logically consistent. Once again, please don't take this as an insult, its intended as constructive criticism intended to sharpen your thinking.
BTW, that's one reason I have a perfect record: I know how to draw people into disproving their own arguments ;)
a building gets blown up.
Awesome! Do I get to choose which one?
I hate to break it to you, but sex isn't illegal. Those women have just been trying not to hurt your feelings.
Actually, I suspect it's only a breach of contract. Signing an exclusive distribution licence doesn't invalidate your copyright, or transfer it to the other party.
Ah, a classic mistake that betrays people with no practical experience in the field. Its important to remember that the copyright on a work is separate to the rights to a specific recording (or, to use the legal terminology, a "fixed" embodiment of the work). For example, some of my works are assigned to Universal Music Publishing, but the recordings of those works were paid for and released by BMG; if you want to record your own version or use the music in a film you have to clear it with Universal, if you want to use my recordings on a compilation CD you have to seek approval from BMG* for use of the recordings and pay Universal the mechanicals (this arrangement is unusual, but it illustrates the point nicely).
If you wish to check the veracity of this, just look at the copyright warning printed on a CD: notice it says (c) [label], not (c) [artist]? Now you know how that's possible, and it is perfectly legal and correct. I generally avoid attempting to explain this nuance because nobody seems to be able to grasp the concept that copyright is layered, not a flat, single state system; the fact that you forced me to shows you're determined to understand it.
So with that in mind, this particular fixed embodiment of Metallica's works can only be reproduced at sole discretion of the recording company. If the RIAA's position is that downloading constitutes distribution then Lars has violated the rights to the fixed embodiments owned by the label, even though he isn't violating the copyright on the works themselves (which presumably still belongs to the band and it's members, though that isn't certain these days).
Is this absurd? Yes. Is it a real situation? That depends on whether the RIAA succeeds in proving it's argument. Does Lars realise you can't have your cake and eat it? Well, I'm not thinking he's a shining beacon of intellectual greatness...
Sure, Lars is contractually bound not to do anything that might constitute distributing his music without his label's permission, but he can legally violate that contract in order to authorise himself to download the music.
Hold on...how can someone authorise themselves to "legally violate" a contract? A contract is an agreement between two parties, and any action precluded by the contract isn't legal unless both parties amend the agreement; one signatory can't arbitrarily decide that they aren't going to abide by the terms.
That's the basic principle of contractual law, and please don't take this as an insult, but you've let yourself down on this point. As I said, you're obviously serious about analysing how the system works, and the last thing I want to do is discourage you. I honestly believe that we need more people who can effectively critique the existing system before we'll see change that will benefit everyone as much as possible. And hey, if you can cite references that prove me wrong on any of this we both learn something.
If a published author wants to download an illegal ebook of his work, all he has to do to avoid breaching his contract is to do it from a user in a country his publisher doesn't operate in
Rather than guess, I asked a publisher I know about this (which explains the late reply). Her response:
So publishers are aware of the potential of the internet as a global distribution medium instead of just a store front, and unsurprisingly are adjusting their contracts to suit. That means no general rule can be applied any more, and you have to know the specifics of each contract befor
An MP3 can easily be interpreted as a derived work from the original.
Oh, FFS, here we go again; no, it can't, and please stop repeating this ignorant nonsense. An MP3 is a container for a work, intended to reproduce the work as accurately as possible. It is no more a derivative work than the squiggly lines on an LP or the pits on a CD, which are also lossy compared to the master multitrack recording but are indisputably covered by copyright as case law amply demonstrates.
And speaking of case law, whenever copyright infringement is argued in court, the test applied is to the musical characteristics: chord progression, melody, lyrics, etcetera. If those characteristics remain unaltered and recognisable regardless of the amount of distortion, it does not qualify as a derivative work as defined by law, its merely a shitty reproduction.
Simple example: "Can't Touch This" is a derivative work, because it uses a riff from "Superfreak" with different lyrics and song structure. A heavily compressed copy of "Superfreak" is still a copy of "Superfreak", because it has the same lyrics, melody, chord progression, bass riff and arrangement. Get it now?
A good metric in general, but in this case the first page would consist of a zero, a decimal point, and lots of other zeros followed eventually by a significant digit.
If I want to read a whole lot of nothing I'll go to Digg...
Actually the headline is technically correct.
Since Lars and the band perform the song(s) and probably have some rights to the song(s)
Precisely: some rights, but not all. Metallica signed an exclusive distribution contract which grants complete control over distribution of these particular recordings to their label, and since the copy produced by downloading wasn't authorised under the terms of that contract it is indeed a pirate copy (note that if he wanted to give away a physical CD, it would be taken from stock and billed to the band as a promotional expense). The fact that he co-wrote the music makes no difference, except that it might also be a breach of contract.
The same applies to published authors, BTW. That's pretty much what "published" means: your work in someone else's hands.
Photographers are slightly different, as its relatively rare for a photographer to sign an exclusive deal with a gallery that extends beyond the duration of an exhibition. In general, they retain all the rights to their work unless it was commissioned.
But please, let's not let common sense get in the way of people justifying not paying performers for their work.
Common sense and copyright are mutually exclusive. That's why so few people understand it.
(Disclosure: I'm a published songwriter/musician, formerly signed to Warner, BMG, Universal and a number of smaller labels, currently working in television production. I'm probably the last person who would try to justify not paying performers).
Water? That's a bit lame on the prank scale.
besides what do you expect them to do, walk up to your front door with a mega phone and annouce "PREPARE TO BE COVERTLY SEARCHED!!!!"?
That's what the NSW police call "subtlety".
... if you want your computer to be part-Cylon.
If it's not the "kill all humans" part, who wouldn't?
Though now that I think of it, by Friday that part will probably sound pretty good too...