It's even worse than that - we're in a situation where you get a slap on the wrist for stealing a loaf of bread, but if you made a copy of the bread from the recipe, without affecting the original loaf, then you get your hand chopped off.
Any band that replaces Peter Gabriel with Phil Collins as lead singer deserves to be relegated to obscurity, and I'm not sure it has anything to do with the loss of Collins as a drummer.
They didn't lose Collins as a drummer. And I'm not sure that Genesis could be described as being relegated to obscurity after Gabriel left;)
Indeed, and what's more, he didn't stop being their drummer (apart from on live tours, and even then he drummed during instrumentals).
Well, except for when he left in the mid-90s. And then Genesis did drop into obscurity (although it was probably more the loss of him as a vocalist, than a drummer).
I'm not sure that's a useful distinction - the reason we don't think of galleries as art is because the gallery isn't an intrinsic part of the artwork inside. You can take the art elsewhere, put different art in, or mix and match. Galleries also contain many different art pieces, that aren't meant to be considered as a whole.
If an artist hired a room, and filled it with art that was meant to be taken as a whole, there I think it would be meaningful to refer to the whole thing as the art piece, rather than trying to define it as "a thing with no artistic value that merely contains art".
Also there's potentially more to art that simply pasted in graphics - for example, storytelling. And even as far as graphics are concerned, the problem is that these days, much of the graphics is driven by the code (e.g., the 3D engine), so it isn't meaningful to distinguish between the game, and the graphics it displays.
Would you say a movie isn't art either, because it simply "contains" things that are art?
And even if you're right, this seems entirely pedantic. Okay, so a game itself isn't art, but it contains things that are art, thus the point still stands (e.g., the claim that censorship stifles art in games, or whatever claim is being made).
Agreed. The sad thing is that censorship of the things you list aren't even just the old examples, but people continue to try today - possession of sexual imagery in comics risks you being convicted for child porn, if a character merely appears under 18, in the US, and Australia, and soon in the UK (even though the age of consent is 16 here, the law will cover depictions of 17 year olds). We in the UK now have the BBFC which can censor material even for adults (set up in 1984, before it was just guidelines). Not to mention that some kinds of adult porn are now illegal to simply possess in the UK, and the police have decided to try again at prosecuting someone for writing a fictional story (the trial is due to start 29 June).
It's a paradox: I'd like to think that public attitudes on media are becoming more liberal, but it seems the laws being passed are becoming stricter.
The increase in the morally despicable content in video games is indicative of the morally corrupt of society
Citation needed? Most people don't think an increase in say murder mystery novels or films are indicitive of actual murders taking place. Conflating fiction with reality is the classic trick that pro-censorship people make.
In nearly every case of societal downfall (the Roman Empire is a good example of this), the morality of the failing society degraded as a precursor to the process.
If it's a good example, you can give me the citation for this too. What degrading morality? How did this cause the downfall of Rome? What fictional depictions causing this degrading morality?
I mean, I presume you're not claiming that all those barbarians only sacked Rome, because of some primitive equivalent of Civilization they played... (which is pretty much what pro-censorship people claim today).
Our society is heading, down this very same path at such a rate that the wise in these matters are alarmed.
In what way is morality degrading? If you were to really look at your history, you'd know that we've never had it so good.
So one comment, on one person's opinion, means that the only impression you'd get from reading Slashdot is there being "no possibility" of a win?
Why not just reply to that person's comment, if you really wanted to say "Ha I told you so" (which isn't very insightful to say so after the fact, unless you actually did predict it beforehand), instead of portraying Slashdot as a whole to be in the wrong?
Yes, you're very clever. You can explain how some random person who tried to make a prediction turned out to be wrong, by reading off the facts that we're now all aware of, given that it's happened.
If by "violent video games", you mean "violent fantasies of power and grandeur", your point changes.
If by "one thing" you mean "something completely different that just happens to share one word, that I'm going to substitute so I can make my point", your point changes. Yes.
Propaganda is bad, yes. But games (and films, pr0n, music etc - all the scapegoats that people love to blame) aren't in themselves propaganda. They could be, but the calls for censorship apply blanketly to all such media, based on whether it is violent or offensive, and not based on whether it is propaganda.
Moreover, even if everyone agrees propaganda is bad, typically people do not call for it to be criminalised. Indeed, we should ask why it is the usual suspects that get scapegoated by society, and not more problematic issues such as propaganda, political corruptness, organised religious preaching to children, etc?
Usually it's because the images end up being things like 30 year old album covers that are entirely legal. If they wanted to shut sites down, there'd actually have to faff about with red tape like having a fair trial.
Apologies if this post is messed up - it seems Slashdot is well and truely broken now, giving me a completely misformatted page, with a tiny textbox to type in...
Actually the point of statutory damages is precisely to be out of proportion to the actual damage
Well, there's out of proportion, then there's completely nonsensical. As pointed out above, these figures are more than the amount of money the RIAA makes on each song in total for a whole year. You are right that part of a problem is someone's ability to pay it back, but even if it was being done by Microsoft, the fine is completely out of scale.
If say you could only be fined twice the actual amount of damages, you could run a business infringing copyright if only half of the copyright owners didn't sue.
You could, but she didn't. I'm sure a ruling could take into account whether they were profiting or not - she clearly wasn't, so "could" happen is irrelevant. So yes, I agree that fines should take into account a person's ability to pay, but it should also take into account what profit they were making from it.
But even if someone was profiting - sure, your "twice" example is all very well, but we're talking about a factor of 80,000 (assuming $1 per mp3 sale cost). It's hard to believe that almost all copyright owners wouldn't sue - especially after a successful trial, the rest will quickly follow.
Sure, I'd be pissed off at jury service, but why take it out on the defendant? They don't want to be there either. You might just as well take it out on the prosecution - in fact, I'd argue even more so, as they're the ones bringing the damn case.
(And if I wanted to hear morons lying, I'd just read an RIAA press release...)
I like the way that we argue it's "theft" when we want it to sound bad, but we emphasise that it's "copying" when we want to make the effects sound worse. Which is it?
Like all RIAA defendants, she was offered the chance to settle for a few thousand. She refused and goaded the RIAA into taking her to court.
Yes, heaven forbid she "goad" the RIAA into wanting a fair trial. She should have taken up the RIAA's kind offer to only take her entire life savings, rather than demanding an actual trial. The cheek of it!
Now, put aside your views on copyright law and the "evil" the RIAA, was anything other than a pissed jury increasing the damages award ever likely to be the outcome of this case?
Why should a jury be pissed? And if I'm pissed, why should that mean I want one person to pay another person to pay millions for a handful of mp3s?
We need lighter Browsers that are more standard compliment then heavy ones adding new features that we don't need.
In that case, I damn well hope you use Opera, and haven't "gone back to" Firefox. You should check out their filesizes if you're going to talk about bloat.
What? There are other iPhone-like devices besides the iPhone? Surely this can't be true, I thought the iPhone was the only such device. Where can I read about these iPhone-like devices...</iPhone-fan>
(But yes, I entirely agree with you. It's a shame that a supposed tech site like Slashdot doesn't reflect the actual market share when it comes to its coverage of mobile phones.)
Opera don't make money from their desktop browser (at least not directly), so it's not too much of a problem.
As for the mobile market, it is being surpassed by iPhone.
Heh.
The Iphone is a niche player. A good phone sure, but there a 2 billion Java phones out there. It's not dominating the market, or even anywhere near close, no matter what some people seem to think. All the while that the Iphone is only a minority of the market, Opera have nothing to worry about. Even if it were to suddenly be true that their usage of the Opera Mobile and Mini browsers fell less to that of Safari on the Iphone, since they each run on different phones, this wouldn't be a result of competition from the Iphone, rather just that Opera aren't doing well in general.
(Of course, perhaps I misread you, and you mean in the sense of "It's doing so bad now that it is even being surpassed by iPhone", in which case fair enough, though I would still be curious to see hard evidence.)
See the arstechnica analysis of misleading statcounter results here
Wait - you plead that the stats are invalid, yet claim Opera's share is low based on some other stats? Right. There are many reasons why the stats for desktops are unreliable too, and in particular Opera is worse off: firstly it reuses cached content without resending requests to server, secondly, up until version 9, it defaulted to identifying as IE. Furthermore, I sometimes have to identify as IE even now, because of dumbass websites that block anything identifying as Opera.
Personally I don't care how many people use it - if that was what we should care about, then we'd all be using IE, right? Opera has served me fine long before it became trendy to switch from IE (it infuriates me when some Firefox-fan tries to get me to switch to his browser, as if it matters, when I was using "tabs" long before, when he was still struggling in IE), and has continued to offer me great features first. And it Just Works great out of the box. If they die, it'll be a shame as innovation will be gone, but that won't mean my Opera installation stops working.
Phone companies are the scum that are only slightly worse than the music industry.
Certain companies with certain phones may well be. My phone Just Works on tethering and other things without the need to jailbreak anything:) (I didn't even know it had a special name like "tethering" to be honest - I just thought it was something that worked as standard out of the box with any phone. There's nothing special about my phone, it's just a commonly available cheap bog-standard one.)
Of course, no doubt I'll be modded down too, as happens with any post that advocates a phone other than the precious Iphone.
Note to Apple-fanboy mod: just because you disagree, doesn't mean it should be modded down. If it's "redundant", point me to the post already stating this, not to mention the article that reports the Motorola V980 Shakes Up the Video Game Industry?
It's true that most parks have speed bumps - but the point is that I suspect many people find these annoying too. They simply accept them as a necessary evil, for those who might drive fast and cause an accident.
But installing bumps for the purpose of stealing energy? That'd be much more unpopular. The fact that Sainsbury hide this fact, and instead claim that it's "green energy", and falsely state that the car doesn't lose any inefficiency from the systems, suggest that they are well aware what customer reaction would be if they knew the truth.
Either that, or they also are just plain ignorant of basic scientific facts.
Imagine someone going into the store and picking up a grape everytime they went in. It's only one grape right, they won't miss it, and there's always grapes that go missing or rotten or dropped at the end. So surely they can't disapprove, and isn't this a revolutionary system to create grapes that would otherwise be wasted?
No, you'd be done for shoplifting. In fact, I remember when I worked there years ago, they explicitly warned us that even eating a single grape would be treated as theft.
There is perhaps some argument that these are basically a greener kind of speed bump - whether that is true depends on various factors, but it's plausible.
Even so, the level of scientific ignorance being portrayed by Sainsbury, and much of the media, is astonishing. We have the comparison to "First there was wind and solar energy", and claiming "a revolutionary invention which creates green energy every time a customer simply drives into the car park".
They do at least say "energy is captured which would otherwise be wasted", but the problem is that it's not true that that energy would be wasted if the car was simply driving along a normal road - whilst it's at least not showing fundamental ignorance of thermodynamics, it's still misleading to suggest that the customers are not losing any energy at all.
They claim "The system, pioneered for Sainsbury's by Peter Hughes of Highway Energy Systems, does not affect the car or fuel efficiency", which is impossible if this system is capturing any energy at all.
To be fair, they are upfront of saying that the supermarket will be powered by people - i.e., they're stealing it from their customers. Will they get paid for this power?
If they simply said they had a way to catch energy from speed bumps, and they would be installing these everywhere in their stores, that would be accurate. But given that speed bumps don't seem to be popular in the first place, I can see people might not like it if they were told the truth.
Heh yes - the amusing thing is that if this really was homeopathic, even proof of a negative effect would be revolutionary scientifically, and would ironically be good for homeopaths as suddenly they could legitimately claim that their tap water could have good effects too.
It won't happen though, as it's already been tested to be bogus, of course.
I think that makes sense though - whilst both tap water and mineral water are primarily water, there are still different chemicals in them. In the case of homeopathy, there isn't likely to even be a single atom of the original substance left in the water, and hence it really is indistinguishable from water, even on an atomic scale.
There is no basis for your analogy. It's just as reasonable to say that the programmer is the architect (the one who puts together the intellectual property), and the builder is analogous to the guy copying discs...
Meanwhile, the designer is the person who tells the architect what he wants, but doesn't actually implement it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's even worse than that - we're in a situation where you get a slap on the wrist for stealing a loaf of bread, but if you made a copy of the bread from the recipe, without affecting the original loaf, then you get your hand chopped off.
Any band that replaces Peter Gabriel with Phil Collins as lead singer deserves to be relegated to obscurity, and I'm not sure it has anything to do with the loss of Collins as a drummer.
They didn't lose Collins as a drummer. And I'm not sure that Genesis could be described as being relegated to obscurity after Gabriel left ;)
Indeed, and what's more, he didn't stop being their drummer (apart from on live tours, and even then he drummed during instrumentals).
Well, except for when he left in the mid-90s. And then Genesis did drop into obscurity (although it was probably more the loss of him as a vocalist, than a drummer).
I'm sorry, I thought I was reading Slashdot, but I appear to have stumbled onto the Daily Mail.
I'm not sure that's a useful distinction - the reason we don't think of galleries as art is because the gallery isn't an intrinsic part of the artwork inside. You can take the art elsewhere, put different art in, or mix and match. Galleries also contain many different art pieces, that aren't meant to be considered as a whole.
If an artist hired a room, and filled it with art that was meant to be taken as a whole, there I think it would be meaningful to refer to the whole thing as the art piece, rather than trying to define it as "a thing with no artistic value that merely contains art".
Also there's potentially more to art that simply pasted in graphics - for example, storytelling. And even as far as graphics are concerned, the problem is that these days, much of the graphics is driven by the code (e.g., the 3D engine), so it isn't meaningful to distinguish between the game, and the graphics it displays.
Would you say a movie isn't art either, because it simply "contains" things that are art?
And even if you're right, this seems entirely pedantic. Okay, so a game itself isn't art, but it contains things that are art, thus the point still stands (e.g., the claim that censorship stifles art in games, or whatever claim is being made).
Agreed. The sad thing is that censorship of the things you list aren't even just the old examples, but people continue to try today - possession of sexual imagery in comics risks you being convicted for child porn, if a character merely appears under 18, in the US, and Australia, and soon in the UK (even though the age of consent is 16 here, the law will cover depictions of 17 year olds). We in the UK now have the BBFC which can censor material even for adults (set up in 1984, before it was just guidelines). Not to mention that some kinds of adult porn are now illegal to simply possess in the UK, and the police have decided to try again at prosecuting someone for writing a fictional story (the trial is due to start 29 June).
It's a paradox: I'd like to think that public attitudes on media are becoming more liberal, but it seems the laws being passed are becoming stricter.
The increase in the morally despicable content in video games is indicative of the morally corrupt of society
Citation needed? Most people don't think an increase in say murder mystery novels or films are indicitive of actual murders taking place. Conflating fiction with reality is the classic trick that pro-censorship people make.
In nearly every case of societal downfall (the Roman Empire is a good example of this), the morality of the failing society degraded as a precursor to the process.
If it's a good example, you can give me the citation for this too. What degrading morality? How did this cause the downfall of Rome? What fictional depictions causing this degrading morality?
I mean, I presume you're not claiming that all those barbarians only sacked Rome, because of some primitive equivalent of Civilization they played... (which is pretty much what pro-censorship people claim today).
Our society is heading, down this very same path at such a rate that the wise in these matters are alarmed.
In what way is morality degrading? If you were to really look at your history, you'd know that we've never had it so good.
So one comment, on one person's opinion, means that the only impression you'd get from reading Slashdot is there being "no possibility" of a win?
Why not just reply to that person's comment, if you really wanted to say "Ha I told you so" (which isn't very insightful to say so after the fact, unless you actually did predict it beforehand), instead of portraying Slashdot as a whole to be in the wrong?
Yes, you're very clever. You can explain how some random person who tried to make a prediction turned out to be wrong, by reading off the facts that we're now all aware of, given that it's happened.
If by "violent video games", you mean "violent fantasies of power and grandeur", your point changes.
If by "one thing" you mean "something completely different that just happens to share one word, that I'm going to substitute so I can make my point", your point changes. Yes.
Propaganda is bad, yes. But games (and films, pr0n, music etc - all the scapegoats that people love to blame) aren't in themselves propaganda. They could be, but the calls for censorship apply blanketly to all such media, based on whether it is violent or offensive, and not based on whether it is propaganda.
Moreover, even if everyone agrees propaganda is bad, typically people do not call for it to be criminalised. Indeed, we should ask why it is the usual suspects that get scapegoated by society, and not more problematic issues such as propaganda, political corruptness, organised religious preaching to children, etc?
Indeed.
Usually it's because the images end up being things like 30 year old album covers that are entirely legal. If they wanted to shut sites down, there'd actually have to faff about with red tape like having a fair trial.
Apologies if this post is messed up - it seems Slashdot is well and truely broken now, giving me a completely misformatted page, with a tiny textbox to type in...
Actually the point of statutory damages is precisely to be out of proportion to the actual damage
Well, there's out of proportion, then there's completely nonsensical. As pointed out above, these figures are more than the amount of money the RIAA makes on each song in total for a whole year. You are right that part of a problem is someone's ability to pay it back, but even if it was being done by Microsoft, the fine is completely out of scale.
If say you could only be fined twice the actual amount of damages, you could run a business infringing copyright if only half of the copyright owners didn't sue.
You could, but she didn't. I'm sure a ruling could take into account whether they were profiting or not - she clearly wasn't, so "could" happen is irrelevant. So yes, I agree that fines should take into account a person's ability to pay, but it should also take into account what profit they were making from it.
But even if someone was profiting - sure, your "twice" example is all very well, but we're talking about a factor of 80,000 (assuming $1 per mp3 sale cost). It's hard to believe that almost all copyright owners wouldn't sue - especially after a successful trial, the rest will quickly follow.
Sure, I'd be pissed off at jury service, but why take it out on the defendant? They don't want to be there either. You might just as well take it out on the prosecution - in fact, I'd argue even more so, as they're the ones bringing the damn case.
(And if I wanted to hear morons lying, I'd just read an RIAA press release...)
I like the way that we argue it's "theft" when we want it to sound bad, but we emphasise that it's "copying" when we want to make the effects sound worse. Which is it?
Like all RIAA defendants, she was offered the chance to settle for a few thousand. She refused and goaded the RIAA into taking her to court.
Yes, heaven forbid she "goad" the RIAA into wanting a fair trial. She should have taken up the RIAA's kind offer to only take her entire life savings, rather than demanding an actual trial. The cheek of it!
Now, put aside your views on copyright law and the "evil" the RIAA, was anything other than a pissed jury increasing the damages award ever likely to be the outcome of this case?
Why should a jury be pissed? And if I'm pissed, why should that mean I want one person to pay another person to pay millions for a handful of mp3s?
If you read slashdot, you'd think that there would have been no possibility of RIAA winning because they are incompetent idiots without a clue.
Link to the Slashdot story where this was claimed, please?
Or are we just arguing against straw men to get easy karma today?
We need lighter Browsers that are more standard compliment then heavy ones adding new features that we don't need.
In that case, I damn well hope you use Opera, and haven't "gone back to" Firefox. You should check out their filesizes if you're going to talk about bloat.
What? There are other iPhone-like devices besides the iPhone? Surely this can't be true, I thought the iPhone was the only such device. Where can I read about these iPhone-like devices...</iPhone-fan>
(But yes, I entirely agree with you. It's a shame that a supposed tech site like Slashdot doesn't reflect the actual market share when it comes to its coverage of mobile phones.)
Opera don't make money from their desktop browser (at least not directly), so it's not too much of a problem.
As for the mobile market, it is being surpassed by iPhone.
Heh.
The Iphone is a niche player. A good phone sure, but there a 2 billion Java phones out there. It's not dominating the market, or even anywhere near close, no matter what some people seem to think. All the while that the Iphone is only a minority of the market, Opera have nothing to worry about. Even if it were to suddenly be true that their usage of the Opera Mobile and Mini browsers fell less to that of Safari on the Iphone, since they each run on different phones, this wouldn't be a result of competition from the Iphone, rather just that Opera aren't doing well in general.
(Of course, perhaps I misread you, and you mean in the sense of "It's doing so bad now that it is even being surpassed by iPhone", in which case fair enough, though I would still be curious to see hard evidence.)
See the arstechnica analysis of misleading statcounter results here
Wait - you plead that the stats are invalid, yet claim Opera's share is low based on some other stats? Right. There are many reasons why the stats for desktops are unreliable too, and in particular Opera is worse off: firstly it reuses cached content without resending requests to server, secondly, up until version 9, it defaulted to identifying as IE. Furthermore, I sometimes have to identify as IE even now, because of dumbass websites that block anything identifying as Opera.
Personally I don't care how many people use it - if that was what we should care about, then we'd all be using IE, right? Opera has served me fine long before it became trendy to switch from IE (it infuriates me when some Firefox-fan tries to get me to switch to his browser, as if it matters, when I was using "tabs" long before, when he was still struggling in IE), and has continued to offer me great features first. And it Just Works great out of the box. If they die, it'll be a shame as innovation will be gone, but that won't mean my Opera installation stops working.
Phone companies are the scum that are only slightly worse than the music industry.
Certain companies with certain phones may well be. My phone Just Works on tethering and other things without the need to jailbreak anything :) (I didn't even know it had a special name like "tethering" to be honest - I just thought it was something that worked as standard out of the box with any phone. There's nothing special about my phone, it's just a commonly available cheap bog-standard one.)
Ah, my prediction is correct:
Of course, no doubt I'll be modded down too, as happens with any post that advocates a phone other than the precious Iphone.
Note to Apple-fanboy mod: just because you disagree, doesn't mean it should be modded down. If it's "redundant", point me to the post already stating this, not to mention the article that reports the Motorola V980 Shakes Up the Video Game Industry?
It's not driving that's a problem.
It's true that most parks have speed bumps - but the point is that I suspect many people find these annoying too. They simply accept them as a necessary evil, for those who might drive fast and cause an accident.
But installing bumps for the purpose of stealing energy? That'd be much more unpopular. The fact that Sainsbury hide this fact, and instead claim that it's "green energy", and falsely state that the car doesn't lose any inefficiency from the systems, suggest that they are well aware what customer reaction would be if they knew the truth.
Either that, or they also are just plain ignorant of basic scientific facts.
Imagine someone going into the store and picking up a grape everytime they went in. It's only one grape right, they won't miss it, and there's always grapes that go missing or rotten or dropped at the end. So surely they can't disapprove, and isn't this a revolutionary system to create grapes that would otherwise be wasted?
No, you'd be done for shoplifting. In fact, I remember when I worked there years ago, they explicitly warned us that even eating a single grape would be treated as theft.
There is perhaps some argument that these are basically a greener kind of speed bump - whether that is true depends on various factors, but it's plausible.
Even so, the level of scientific ignorance being portrayed by Sainsbury, and much of the media, is astonishing. We have the comparison to "First there was wind and solar energy", and claiming "a revolutionary invention which creates green energy every time a customer simply drives into the car park".
They do at least say "energy is captured which would otherwise be wasted", but the problem is that it's not true that that energy would be wasted if the car was simply driving along a normal road - whilst it's at least not showing fundamental ignorance of thermodynamics, it's still misleading to suggest that the customers are not losing any energy at all.
They claim "The system, pioneered for Sainsbury's by Peter Hughes of Highway Energy Systems, does not affect the car or fuel efficiency", which is impossible if this system is capturing any energy at all.
To be fair, they are upfront of saying that the supermarket will be powered by people - i.e., they're stealing it from their customers. Will they get paid for this power?
If they simply said they had a way to catch energy from speed bumps, and they would be installing these everywhere in their stores, that would be accurate. But given that speed bumps don't seem to be popular in the first place, I can see people might not like it if they were told the truth.
Heh yes - the amusing thing is that if this really was homeopathic, even proof of a negative effect would be revolutionary scientifically, and would ironically be good for homeopaths as suddenly they could legitimately claim that their tap water could have good effects too.
It won't happen though, as it's already been tested to be bogus, of course.
I think that makes sense though - whilst both tap water and mineral water are primarily water, there are still different chemicals in them. In the case of homeopathy, there isn't likely to even be a single atom of the original substance left in the water, and hence it really is indistinguishable from water, even on an atomic scale.
There is no basis for your analogy. It's just as reasonable to say that the programmer is the architect (the one who puts together the intellectual property), and the builder is analogous to the guy copying discs...
Meanwhile, the designer is the person who tells the architect what he wants, but doesn't actually implement it.