Reading about a bank robber does not make you a thief.
And masturbating over a person's image without the person's consent does not make you a rapist.
I take your point that pornography has this difference, but it's not clear to me that this difference is relevant when considering what should be a criminal sex offence.
What if the character's purportedly sixteen but looks like she's fifteen? What if she's thirteen but looks like she's seventeen?
Not that it affects your point, which I agree with, but note that although the age of consent in the UK is 16, in 2003 the age for the purposes of child porn was raised to 18.
So you can have sex with a 16 year old, but soon, draw a cartoon of a sexy naked 17 year old, and it's prison for you...
Then let's ban depictions that glorify rape. They might be encouraging it....
Shh, don't give them ideas!
(That we should then ban depictions of rape, murder and violence was the example I used to give when discussing the idea of fake child porn - but now the UK Government is planning to ban fake images of sexual violence (see the "extreme porn" link in the summary)! I didn't mean them to take me seriously... I wonder how far down the list the Government will go?)
We're talking about child porn that tries to play games with legal loopholes about whether a child is actually harmed
The difference between whether a child is actually harmed, or no child is harmed, is a "loophole"?
Comparing South Park's creative and repetitive killing of the self-repairing Kenny to someone trying to portray a realistic scene of rape and torture is disingenuous at best.
Except the Government is proposing to extend the law to beyond realistic material - they specifically mention cartoons, which are not exactly realistic.
I agree with you that Hentai isn't a problem - the problem is that even if we agree that cartoons of baby raping should alone be a criminal offence, chances are any law would be broad enough to include any cartoon which might look under 18, hence covering a broader range of material.
You and I may know what Hentai is about, but all the police officer will see when your home is raided is a load of "sick perverted cartoons with children in".
I remember that when my Amiga started taking over 20 seconds, I'd get worried and start cleaning out the startup drawer. Now on Windows 2000 I'd be happy with 20 seconds!
Meanwhile, running AmigaOS 3.9 under emulation boots in about 11 seconds.
Yeah, noone has ever used a contact lens fluid container with a liquid explosive and a casio watch to set off a bomb on an airplane. Nor did they assemble it in the airplane lavatory. That is just crazy talk. It is clearly impossible.
Though there's the question of why liquids are only banned 12 years later, if this was known back then.
This bill is worrying, and mirrors a proposed law proposed in the UK where even possession of "obscene images" would be a criminal offence. Whether it's posted on the Internet, or kept on your hard drive. The penalty would be up to three years in prison.
Mediawatch-UK are fighting for the law to be extended to include a wider range of images (even those currently not considered obscene by UK law).
I agree - it's worrying that both in the media and in many of the comments on this thread, sex offender is equated with child abuser.
We have a similar situation over here in the UK, and soon here you'll be a sex offender for looking at images of consenting adults doing "naughty things" to each other...
True, but to be fair, many articles/posts promoting MacOS do so by saying something else (usually Windows) is bad;) ("Windows crashes, therefore MacOS is better!")
I agree - and this is particularly worrying in that they want to criminalise players. It's one thing to expect publishers to be aware of laws, but even if a player wishes to be law-abiding, how is he to know which games do or don't fall foul of the law? What about a home-made game someone makes and doesn't even publish? Censorship is too weak a word to describe this sort of thing.
This has parallels to a disturbing proposed law in the UK, where the Government plans to apply obscenity laws to possession, in that it will be a criminal offence to merely possess certain kinds of images it considers violent (even if the images are fake/simulated - and the burden of proof will be lower than for current obscenity laws, meaning that it would likely include things which are currently legal for publication).
It also has parallels in the way that polls and so on have been used to suggest that public opinion is greatly in favour of such laws. Really - they may be in favour on tighter regulation on publication, but to suggest prison sentences because someone owns a game or material that other people don't like the look of?
It isn't, if this is "sex offenders" and not "child abusers".
Laws are brought in "for the sake of the children", but cover a far wide variety of crimes, including even consensual and victimless crimes (and it's not just the US - see my sig for an example where soon looking at a picture will alone be a sex crime in the UK, even though the act itself was not a crime).
The quote I love is: "By tidying up a small part of the copyright law, we believe Gowers may well be opening the floodgates to uncontrolled and unstoppable private copying... as well as format to format."
Yes, heaven forbid that people be allowed to do these things!
The report suggests: * Not extended copyright length (as some have campaigned for). * Legalising copying for private use (between devices, or reencoding between formats - yes, it's sad that this has to be made legal, but it's still a step forward).
The "tougher regulation" appears to be for "people who sell pirate versions of music and films on the internet" and furthermore it is merely saying that penalties should "be brought in line with those who make hard copies".
Whilst many including myself are against tough penalties for file sharing, I'm not sure many people have a problem when it comes to those profitting from piracy?
Having said that, I am worried about the mention of "bootleggers" - I would worry if this covered those selling (often rare) live recordings which have never been published by the record companies; many of these would have been lost forever if it wasn't for bootlegging.
If the kids had stolen - by that I mean stolen, not committed copyright infringement - say CDs from a shop, what they also have only got a "talking to"?
Of course not. The police would be involved, and the decision is nothing to do with the CEO.
The bad guys just have to get your single email password, then they can send email from you to anyone. Much better to require a separate login/password for every different server you want to email....
Okay sure, I wouldn't be wanting to use this for important things like banking, but at the least it's great for commenting on random forums/blogs (which is how LiveJournal uses it), without having to go through the hassle of signing up for a new account everytime. If I want to email them, I don't have to sign up for an account on their email server - it's a pain that we have to do this on websites.
But some things aren't "verifiable"... like well-informed opinions, and theories... that need to be in encyclopedias.
You're confusing things - it's not the opinion or theory itself which must be verified, it's whether someone has that opinion, or that the theory has been proposed.
If someone famous said "Bush looks like a monkey", we wouldn't have to verify whether Bush looks like a monkey, because we wouldn't expect Wikipedia to state that as fact. What Wikipedia would say is "So-and-so said that Bush looks like a monkey", in which case, we just need verification that this is true.
Who's going to decide what the "outright lies" are? That might take an expert. If the subject is obscure, there might not *be* any experts.
That's why Wikipedia insists on verifiability, so you don't have the issue of people deciding whether it's true or not - you go to the published sources.
I agree to some degree - I don't like it when people criticise Wikipedia because there are loads of articles on some TV show they don't care about.
However, in my experience articles deleted for lack of notability have related problems such as being impossible to verify, or they suggest the subject is more important or well known than they actually are.
Cliffhangers does in fact have an article (although not quite that long). The problems are more when some random person decides they should have an article on themselves, or articles for a word they just made up, and so on. It's not obscure stuff that's the problem - it's stuff which is totally unimportant.
They might render a few light sources per scene, but generally there's a "base brightness" of objects that is independant of the lighting.
Yes but it's those "few light sources" which need the square roots - even with only one source, it has to be calculated at every vertex (or pixel).
Having said that, I'm not sure how this applies to Quake 3 - in that (a) I thought that used lightmaps not dynamic lighting (or it was an option?), and (b) didn't it use OpenGL (and hence would be done by the driver or the hardware)?
This is the Apple I like. When most other computer companies were making clones, Apple was doing R&D and making some nifty stuff.
Well to be fair, back in the 80s and early 90s there were a great many computer companies doing R&D, making nifty computer platforms that weren't PCs. Sadly they are all mostly gone though.
The alternative is using a search engine to find a good sampling of articles on the subject, seeing what facts are presented, seeing what the opposing opinions say about those facts, making a judgment as to the reliability of the facts on the table, and seeing which arguments best hold up considering those facts. *
While this takes time, it is of course way better than wikipedia,
I disagree it's any better - pages on the Internet can be written by anyone, so still suffer from the "anyone could have written it problem", and worse, mistakes cannot be corrected. I would say it's very hard to find a non-biased selection of articles on a search engine, and I find that Wikipedia does a far better job of this on average. Finding authoritative articles on the Internet tends to be hard - mostly you get news articles (which tend to be extremely biased and misleading), and random webpages which anyone could have written. If you are intelligent enough to see what facts are presented and make judgements, you can do this with Wikipedia.
If you are willing to invest that extra time, then you could click the discussion page (to see if there's any controversy on the article) or the history (to check it hasn't been vandalised in the last 5 minutes).
Granted, MOST of the time, they are mostly correct, but I would hate to think Wikipedia becomes a primary source for anything. If I was a teacher, I would definitely give the student a 10-minute rant, not just on the evils of Wikipedia, but on how to draw from multiple sources, how to think critically, and how to do research. I would also immediately fail any paper that didn't STATE THE REVISION of the Wikipedia article.
I hope you would give the same rant to anyone who only cited an encyclopedia, Wikipedia or not.
And since you know that you can cite particular versions of an article, I don't see the problem that articles can change. All sources can change, whether it's an update to the webpage or a new edition of a book.
Unless someone comes up with a hybrid compromise, I think so.
So should we extend copyright to infinity, now then? After all, people might use public domain material in adverts now. And why should Disney be allowed to rip off all those old fairy tales?
A compromise could be to allow a period of non-commercial use, or say creative commons licence as someone suggested, so it's not under the current strict control of copyright, but isn't public domain.
Or, as I say, trademark law could cover the issue of people misusing Mickey Mouse. I mean, why is it wrong if some jerk uses Mickey Mouse to advertise? I find most ads annoying whoever they use, plus there's the point that we already get this sort of thing anyway, where people or characters are used to advertise things (because they get permission, or they own the copyright themselves), and it's not anymore annoying than ads in general.
So maybe you should provide for your children's future by saving and investing your money, you know, like everyone else has to? I'm sorry to hear about your son, though that is not a copyright issue, that is something that anyone could have to deal with.
Under the proposed idea, you are guaranteed a minimum of 50 years, or longer if you live longer, where as anyone else has the problem that they die, and their income is over. Other people have to cope with "private schools and good colleges aren't cheap by any means", and they have to manage providing for their future children and maybe grandchildren, so I don't see why it's so hard for copyright holders to do the same, especially with a system that gives them a 50 year guaranteed advantage.
But there's a key difference: The paint job doesn't generate revenue on an ongoing basis, the way a successful musical recording does.
And why is that? Because of copyright law. If the law meant you had to continually pay a painter, then the paint job would continually generate revenue.
Slashdot Mirror
Reading about a bank robber does not make you a thief.
And masturbating over a person's image without the person's consent does not make you a rapist.
I take your point that pornography has this difference, but it's not clear to me that this difference is relevant when considering what should be a criminal sex offence.
What if the character's purportedly sixteen but looks like she's fifteen? What if she's thirteen but looks like she's seventeen?
Not that it affects your point, which I agree with, but note that although the age of consent in the UK is 16, in 2003 the age for the purposes of child porn was raised to 18.
So you can have sex with a 16 year old, but soon, draw a cartoon of a sexy naked 17 year old, and it's prison for you...
Then let's ban depictions that glorify rape. They might be encouraging it. ...
Shh, don't give them ideas!
(That we should then ban depictions of rape, murder and violence was the example I used to give when discussing the idea of fake child porn - but now the UK Government is planning to ban fake images of sexual violence (see the "extreme porn" link in the summary)! I didn't mean them to take me seriously... I wonder how far down the list the Government will go?)
We're talking about child porn that tries to play games with legal loopholes about whether a child is actually harmed
The difference between whether a child is actually harmed, or no child is harmed, is a "loophole"?
Comparing South Park's creative and repetitive killing of the self-repairing Kenny to someone trying to portray a realistic scene of rape and torture is disingenuous at best.
Except the Government is proposing to extend the law to beyond realistic material - they specifically mention cartoons, which are not exactly realistic.
I agree with you that Hentai isn't a problem - the problem is that even if we agree that cartoons of baby raping should alone be a criminal offence, chances are any law would be broad enough to include any cartoon which might look under 18, hence covering a broader range of material.
You and I may know what Hentai is about, but all the police officer will see when your home is raided is a load of "sick perverted cartoons with children in".
I remember that when my Amiga started taking over 20 seconds, I'd get worried and start cleaning out the startup drawer. Now on Windows 2000 I'd be happy with 20 seconds!
Meanwhile, running AmigaOS 3.9 under emulation boots in about 11 seconds.
Yeah, noone has ever used a contact lens fluid container with a liquid explosive and a casio watch to set off a bomb on an airplane. Nor did they assemble it in the airplane lavatory. That is just crazy talk. It is clearly impossible.
Though there's the question of why liquids are only banned 12 years later, if this was known back then.
This bill is worrying, and mirrors a proposed law proposed in the UK where even possession of "obscene images" would be a criminal offence. Whether it's posted on the Internet, or kept on your hard drive. The penalty would be up to three years in prison.
Mediawatch-UK are fighting for the law to be extended to include a wider range of images (even those currently not considered obscene by UK law).
Please see http://www.backlash-uk.org.uk/ for more details, or sign the petition in my sig.
I agree - it's worrying that both in the media and in many of the comments on this thread, sex offender is equated with child abuser.
We have a similar situation over here in the UK, and soon here you'll be a sex offender for looking at images of consenting adults doing "naughty things" to each other...
True, but to be fair, many articles/posts promoting MacOS do so by saying something else (usually Windows) is bad ;) ("Windows crashes, therefore MacOS is better!")
I agree - and this is particularly worrying in that they want to criminalise players. It's one thing to expect publishers to be aware of laws, but even if a player wishes to be law-abiding, how is he to know which games do or don't fall foul of the law? What about a home-made game someone makes and doesn't even publish? Censorship is too weak a word to describe this sort of thing.
This has parallels to a disturbing proposed law in the UK, where the Government plans to apply obscenity laws to possession, in that it will be a criminal offence to merely possess certain kinds of images it considers violent (even if the images are fake/simulated - and the burden of proof will be lower than for current obscenity laws, meaning that it would likely include things which are currently legal for publication).
It also has parallels in the way that polls and so on have been used to suggest that public opinion is greatly in favour of such laws. Really - they may be in favour on tighter regulation on publication, but to suggest prison sentences because someone owns a game or material that other people don't like the look of?
See my sig if you oppose this kind of thing...
It isn't, if this is "sex offenders" and not "child abusers".
Laws are brought in "for the sake of the children", but cover a far wide variety of crimes, including even consensual and victimless crimes (and it's not just the US - see my sig for an example where soon looking at a picture will alone be a sex crime in the UK, even though the act itself was not a crime).
The quote I love is: "By tidying up a small part of the copyright law, we believe Gowers may well be opening the floodgates to uncontrolled and unstoppable private copying ... as well as format to format."
Yes, heaven forbid that people be allowed to do these things!
The report suggests:
* Not extended copyright length (as some have campaigned for).
* Legalising copying for private use (between devices, or reencoding between formats - yes, it's sad that this has to be made legal, but it's still a step forward).
The "tougher regulation" appears to be for "people who sell pirate versions of music and films on the internet" and furthermore it is merely saying that penalties should "be brought in line with those who make hard copies".
Whilst many including myself are against tough penalties for file sharing, I'm not sure many people have a problem when it comes to those profitting from piracy?
Having said that, I am worried about the mention of "bootleggers" - I would worry if this covered those selling (often rare) live recordings which have never been published by the record companies; many of these would have been lost forever if it wasn't for bootlegging.
If the kids had stolen - by that I mean stolen, not committed copyright infringement - say CDs from a shop, what they also have only got a "talking to"?
Of course not. The police would be involved, and the decision is nothing to do with the CEO.
One email password to root them all!
...
The bad guys just have to get your single email password, then they can send email from you to anyone. Much better to require a separate login/password for every different server you want to email.
Okay sure, I wouldn't be wanting to use this for important things like banking, but at the least it's great for commenting on random forums/blogs (which is how LiveJournal uses it), without having to go through the hassle of signing up for a new account everytime. If I want to email them, I don't have to sign up for an account on their email server - it's a pain that we have to do this on websites.
But some things aren't "verifiable"... like well-informed opinions, and theories... that need to be in encyclopedias.
You're confusing things - it's not the opinion or theory itself which must be verified, it's whether someone has that opinion, or that the theory has been proposed.
If someone famous said "Bush looks like a monkey", we wouldn't have to verify whether Bush looks like a monkey, because we wouldn't expect Wikipedia to state that as fact. What Wikipedia would say is "So-and-so said that Bush looks like a monkey", in which case, we just need verification that this is true.
Who's going to decide what the "outright lies" are? That might take an expert. If the subject is obscure, there might not *be* any experts.
That's why Wikipedia insists on verifiability, so you don't have the issue of people deciding whether it's true or not - you go to the published sources.
I agree to some degree - I don't like it when people criticise Wikipedia because there are loads of articles on some TV show they don't care about.
However, in my experience articles deleted for lack of notability have related problems such as being impossible to verify, or they suggest the subject is more important or well known than they actually are.
Cliffhangers does in fact have an article (although not quite that long). The problems are more when some random person decides they should have an article on themselves, or articles for a word they just made up, and so on. It's not obscure stuff that's the problem - it's stuff which is totally unimportant.
They might render a few light sources per scene, but generally there's a "base brightness" of objects that is independant of the lighting.
Yes but it's those "few light sources" which need the square roots - even with only one source, it has to be calculated at every vertex (or pixel).
Having said that, I'm not sure how this applies to Quake 3 - in that (a) I thought that used lightmaps not dynamic lighting (or it was an option?), and (b) didn't it use OpenGL (and hence would be done by the driver or the hardware)?
This is the Apple I like. When most other computer companies were making clones, Apple was doing R&D and making some nifty stuff.
Well to be fair, back in the 80s and early 90s there were a great many computer companies doing R&D, making nifty computer platforms that weren't PCs. Sadly they are all mostly gone though.
The alternative is using a search engine to find a good sampling of articles on the subject, seeing what facts are presented, seeing what the opposing opinions say about those facts, making a judgment as to the reliability of the facts on the table, and seeing which arguments best hold up considering those facts. *
While this takes time, it is of course way better than wikipedia,
I disagree it's any better - pages on the Internet can be written by anyone, so still suffer from the "anyone could have written it problem", and worse, mistakes cannot be corrected. I would say it's very hard to find a non-biased selection of articles on a search engine, and I find that Wikipedia does a far better job of this on average. Finding authoritative articles on the Internet tends to be hard - mostly you get news articles (which tend to be extremely biased and misleading), and random webpages which anyone could have written. If you are intelligent enough to see what facts are presented and make judgements, you can do this with Wikipedia.
If you are willing to invest that extra time, then you could click the discussion page (to see if there's any controversy on the article) or the history (to check it hasn't been vandalised in the last 5 minutes).
Granted, MOST of the time, they are mostly correct, but I would hate to think Wikipedia becomes a primary source for anything. If I was a teacher, I would definitely give the student a 10-minute rant, not just on the evils of Wikipedia, but on how to draw from multiple sources, how to think critically, and how to do research. I would also immediately fail any paper that didn't STATE THE REVISION of the Wikipedia article.
I hope you would give the same rant to anyone who only cited an encyclopedia, Wikipedia or not.
And since you know that you can cite particular versions of an article, I don't see the problem that articles can change. All sources can change, whether it's an update to the webpage or a new edition of a book.
And one should observe the same two points for every other thing that you read or hear, of course.
Unless someone comes up with a hybrid compromise, I think so.
So should we extend copyright to infinity, now then? After all, people might use public domain material in adverts now. And why should Disney be allowed to rip off all those old fairy tales?
A compromise could be to allow a period of non-commercial use, or say creative commons licence as someone suggested, so it's not under the current strict control of copyright, but isn't public domain.
Or, as I say, trademark law could cover the issue of people misusing Mickey Mouse. I mean, why is it wrong if some jerk uses Mickey Mouse to advertise? I find most ads annoying whoever they use, plus there's the point that we already get this sort of thing anyway, where people or characters are used to advertise things (because they get permission, or they own the copyright themselves), and it's not anymore annoying than ads in general.
So maybe you should provide for your children's future by saving and investing your money, you know, like everyone else has to? I'm sorry to hear about your son, though that is not a copyright issue, that is something that anyone could have to deal with.
Under the proposed idea, you are guaranteed a minimum of 50 years, or longer if you live longer, where as anyone else has the problem that they die, and their income is over. Other people have to cope with "private schools and good colleges aren't cheap by any means", and they have to manage providing for their future children and maybe grandchildren, so I don't see why it's so hard for copyright holders to do the same, especially with a system that gives them a 50 year guaranteed advantage.
But there's a key difference: The paint job doesn't generate revenue on an ongoing basis, the way a successful musical recording does.
And why is that? Because of copyright law. If the law meant you had to continually pay a painter, then the paint job would continually generate revenue.