Three things mar what would be an otherwise great justification of the practice here.
The first is that there is a difference between distributing materials on the street, in broad daylight, knowing there's a good chance you'll be arrested, but doing it because it's the right thing to do, and sitting at your computer, while relatively anonymous, uploading and downloading files.
The difference is that in the one, you stand a good chance of being caught, and punished, and in that punishment, demonstrating how the system is out of whack. It's not doing the act itself that lends legitimacy to breaking a law, it's the publicizing of the act, the willingness to accept the punishment for it, and the demonstrating the foolishness of the law that lends legitimacy to breaking a law. So attempting to use the "moral crusader" defence really is inappropriate given the relatively anonymous nature of file-sharing, as the file-sharer is not "demonstrating" anything.
The second is that whie you are correct that the onus does lie on those who would create to justify the restriction. This has already been done in the form of the founders who created the restriction. They explicitly stated the reasons: in order to promote further development and creativity. Perhaps the details have gone awry in the length of time given and the methods of control that are being used, but the justification still remains, and that devaluing a creation makes it more difficult for a creator to continue creating.
The third is more of a subjective matter, in that it is simply rude to distribute another person's work against their wishes.
That all being said, thank you for the best defence I've yet seen.
Unfortunately, most people are simply not informed enough to really care.
So if you're doing something the ethical way, chances are you're having to pay more to produce the same product (after all, it's not like companies choose to be unethical if there's no cost benefit to doing so) which means that, since people generally don't care & don't have the knowledge to make informed decisions, your product is simply seen as a higher-priced alternative, and will likely go out of business. This means that the resources used in the business were basically wasted and could have been used more effectively.
The first step is to get people to think. Get them to realize that something might not be quite right in consumer-land. Once you've got a large enough groundswell of people doing that, then your ethical store ideas will have a better chance of flying. Of course, once you have people thinking, market pressure will force those companies doing unethical things to move to a more ethics controlled system.
Some odd side effects of this....he'll have to ensure that any of his children get a liscence to use the name, or they'll be watering down his trademark. Similarly, his mother & father & grand-parents, etc.
Of course, this is assuming that he's trademarking just his last name and not his first and last names.
Go to http://www.skotos.net and you can sign up for a year for $129.95 and save two bucks plus have access to a bunch of other RPG and strategy games, including The Eternal City (MUD), Underlight (another graphical MUD), and several strategy games.
Or you can just sign up on a monthly basis for $2 more than you'd pay for Meridian on its own.
For those who trust me but not links: 7) ELIGIBILITY: This sweepstakes is open only to legal residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia, 18 years of age or older at the time of entry who have access to a personal computer running Microsoft Windows 98 (or later version) operating system and Internet Access as of July 15, 2003. Void where prohibited by law. Employees of Microsoft Corporation and anyone working directly on Microsoft programs and their respective affiliates, parent companies, subsidiaries, promotion, advertising and promotional agencies and the immediate family members and persons living in the households of each are not eligible to enter.
So there you have it. US only, and only those with Windows 98 or later.
You say that "the supposed harmful effect of duplication is devaluation of the original." While you are correct that this is the direct result of duplication, it is not the harmful effect that copyright was intended to prevent.
The harmful effect was (and is) reducing the incentive to create. These days this lack of incentive can easily lead to an inability to create due to a lack of time and/or resources.
A large portion of the technology we use today stems directly from providing incentives (in the forms of limited monopolies) to create. You suggest you would refuse it today. Had the founders done so, the distinct possibility exists that even such transparent technologies as the GUI might not exist (or at very least not be widespread) today. It is even possible that Linux would not have existed, as Linus created it in part to avoid having to purchase an OS for his home system.
It's strange to consider this in today's society where infringement is so rampant, but artificial scarcity encourages innovation not only through those who own their creations, but through those who do not have access but desire the use. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention.
Has the balance swung too far? I feel likely so. Is the whole system wrong? I do not feel so - the gains society makes through encouraging new creation are larger than what society gains through simply duplicating the old.
If I create something, and allow others to freely distribute it, how does anyone know that someone two, three or more downloads removed from me actually has permission? Are they really going to follow the chain back all the way to me, so I can tell them that yes, that's fine, and could they please leave them alone?
If you told your lawyer you thought you had permission, then a good lawyer has to do exactly that, and see if they can find out.
Just hope that you're sued in California, so that you might be able to respond with a SLAPP for the costs of your defence.
You drive 55Mph on an American highway, you're not committing a crime. You drive 85Mph, and you are.
All that's changed is the speed. You can still be driving in a perfectly safe manner.
You share your music with one person, you're not committing a crime. You distribute it to the general public, you are. (and let's be honest, if you don't know the recipient, there's no real way you can call it sharing - it's distribution)
Of course, the reason for this is that the american people are way too cheap.
Most of the money politicians receive doesn't go into their pocket.. it goes into their campaigns. So if people would wise up, stop listening to the adverts, and actually spend the hour or so it takes to research a politician's stance, this problem wouldn't exist.
Does the constitution actually mention criminals at all? From what I gathered, the possession of arms is strictly linked to being able to serve in a military type capacity.
Let me add one more thought.. learn some stats before trying to make a statisical point. You're the one adding a correlation here where none has been shown.
Somehow you seem to think that a person using p2p is half as likely to take a vacation as the general population.
Here, let's break it down to real numbers. To make it easy, we'll assume a population of 200 people. Of those, half are p2p users.
Now, out of those 200, say 10% decide to go on holiday. So 20 people. Of those 20, how many are p2p users. Well, if we assume a fairly even distribution (ie, that people who share files are no more or less likely to go on vacation) then about half of those who go on vacation will be p2p users.
So let's work that out.. half of the 20 people is 10. Half of the total population of 200 is 100. 10 p2p users out of the 100 total p2p users go on holiday, which just happens to be 10%, exactly the same as the general population.
..the one reason I use Opera over anything else is specifically for it's new mail client.
M2 (as they're calling it) is considerably different from your standard mail client in that it doesn't use folders.
All your mail goes into one big box, and you can set up permanent filters/sort fields to pull out sets of the mail into views. The fun thing with views is that you can do all your standard set operations on them (includes, excludes, intersections and unions) and you can have the same mail visible in multiple views.
So I can put together all the mail on a specific project from developers and management that mentions deadlines. I set that as a view. Then I make a second view that gathers all the developer or Q/A mail on that project. I leave those in place, and any mail that comes in is automatically shown in both of those views if it fits, without having to do anything funky or wasteful like making a second copy of the mail.
Add to that specific searches and orderings (including properly threaded) within the views and it makes high volumes of email simple to handle.
It's a bit of a learning curve to get used to the idea that the mail doesn't actually go into the views and that it can show up in more than one place at once, but once you've got that, it's beautiful.
Hotmail seems to work just fine with Opera 7.11, heck it doesn't even give me that annoying "Please update your browser to IE6 to fully access the features on this site" anymore.
Once you get popular locally, you can... get it played on the radio.
Bzzt. Thanks for playing. Please try again, but look up some of the articles and information regarding ClearChannel before you do. You might, if you're lucky, get it played on some college station.
You won't get it played on any station with national distribution until it becomes so big through word of mouth that it doesn't matter anyway.
It's a chicken&egg situation, with the RIAA being the cocks that make it possible at the moment.
Every time your code sells another copy, you get paid for it. Or rather, your company does, and they pay you.
Now, if you write your own code, and you sell it to a company who resells it without getting some kind of royalty deal, that just implies you have no business sense.
Try to remember that use is different from distribution.
Ah.. I see then you feel the amount of time it takes to create a decent recipe is comparable to the amount of time it takes to create a decent piece of art or music.
Similarly, I expect you feel the time it takes to come up with a new scientific theory is about the same amount of time that it takes to find out a basic fact about the universe. Yet somehow, even though nobody claims ownership of these facts, we're still discovering new ones, so why should we bother paying researchers to actively hunt them down?
Damn, you're right.. it'd be great if some researchers, and some scientists, can manage to eat and pay bills by exercising their craft. However there are worse indignities than having a day job.
Get a clue. Putting to work as a car manufacturer might be beneficial to society in a small way, but by taking away time they'd otherwise use for creativity, we're harming to society in a much larger way.
Your arguement suggests that giving talented artists the free-time to create what they do is actually just a waste of their potential to be building fences or some such. Most people who think about it realize that it's actually the other way around.
Slashdot Mirror
So you're of the opinion that it is okay to steal from some people and not from others?
Who sets the dividing line?
Three things mar what would be an otherwise great justification of the practice here.
The first is that there is a difference between distributing materials on the street, in broad daylight, knowing there's a good chance you'll be arrested, but doing it because it's the right thing to do, and sitting at your computer, while relatively anonymous, uploading and downloading files.
The difference is that in the one, you stand a good chance of being caught, and punished, and in that punishment, demonstrating how the system is out of whack. It's not doing the act itself that lends legitimacy to breaking a law, it's the publicizing of the act, the willingness to accept the punishment for it, and the demonstrating the foolishness of the law that lends legitimacy to breaking a law. So attempting to use the "moral crusader" defence really is inappropriate given the relatively anonymous nature of file-sharing, as the file-sharer is not "demonstrating" anything.
The second is that whie you are correct that the onus does lie on those who would create to justify the restriction. This has already been done in the form of the founders who created the restriction. They explicitly stated the reasons: in order to promote further development and creativity. Perhaps the details have gone awry in the length of time given and the methods of control that are being used, but the justification still remains, and that devaluing a creation makes it more difficult for a creator to continue creating.
The third is more of a subjective matter, in that it is simply rude to distribute another person's work against their wishes.
That all being said, thank you for the best defence I've yet seen.
Unfortunately, most people are simply not informed enough to really care.
So if you're doing something the ethical way, chances are you're having to pay more to produce the same product (after all, it's not like companies choose to be unethical if there's no cost benefit to doing so) which means that, since people generally don't care & don't have the knowledge to make informed decisions, your product is simply seen as a higher-priced alternative, and will likely go out of business. This means that the resources used in the business were basically wasted and could have been used more effectively.
The first step is to get people to think. Get them to realize that something might not be quite right in consumer-land. Once you've got a large enough groundswell of people doing that, then your ethical store ideas will have a better chance of flying. Of course, once you have people thinking, market pressure will force those companies doing unethical things to move to a more ethics controlled system.
Some odd side effects of this.. ..he'll have to ensure that any of his children get a liscence to use the name, or they'll be watering down his trademark. Similarly, his mother & father & grand-parents, etc.
Of course, this is assuming that he's trademarking just his last name and not his first and last names.
Those'd be the pedants.
We often ask them (politely) if they wouldn't mind moving south for us.
Thanks for pointing it out though.
$10.95/month for Meridian 59 on its own.
Go to http://www.skotos.net and you can sign up for a year for $129.95 and save two bucks plus have access to a bunch of other RPG and strategy games, including The Eternal City (MUD), Underlight (another graphical MUD), and several strategy games.
Or you can just sign up on a monthly basis for $2 more than you'd pay for Meridian on its own.
Which you can check out here:l es.aspx
http://www2.msnmessenger-download.com/fastcash/ru
For those who trust me but not links:
7) ELIGIBILITY: This sweepstakes is open only to legal residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia, 18 years of age or older at the time of entry who have access to a personal computer running Microsoft Windows 98 (or later version) operating system and Internet Access as of July 15, 2003. Void where prohibited by law. Employees of Microsoft Corporation and anyone working directly on Microsoft programs and their respective affiliates, parent companies, subsidiaries, promotion, advertising and promotional agencies and the immediate family members and persons living in the households of each are not eligible to enter.
So there you have it. US only, and only those with Windows 98 or later.
They'll probably just have a snail-mail address you can send your info to.
Well.. given that the alternative is they read *everything* we say ala Carnivore.. I don't know.
..use irregular sized pieces of paper to begin with, and always put at least two different sized pieces through the shredder at once.
Watch the program get seriously screwed as it tries to put your 9x10 and 8x8 pieces of paper together into a coupld 8.5 x 11s.
You say that "the supposed harmful effect of duplication is devaluation of the original." While you are correct that this is the direct result of duplication, it is not the harmful effect that copyright was intended to prevent.
The harmful effect was (and is) reducing the incentive to create. These days this lack of incentive can easily lead to an inability to create due to a lack of time and/or resources.
A large portion of the technology we use today stems directly from providing incentives (in the forms of limited monopolies) to create. You suggest you would refuse it today. Had the founders done so, the distinct possibility exists that even such transparent technologies as the GUI might not exist (or at very least not be widespread) today. It is even possible that Linux would not have existed, as Linus created it in part to avoid having to purchase an OS for his home system.
It's strange to consider this in today's society where infringement is so rampant, but artificial scarcity encourages innovation not only through those who own their creations, but through those who do not have access but desire the use. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention.
Has the balance swung too far? I feel likely so. Is the whole system wrong? I do not feel so - the gains society makes through encouraging new creation are larger than what society gains through simply duplicating the old.
If I create something, and allow others to freely distribute it, how does anyone know that someone two, three or more downloads removed from me actually has permission? Are they really going to follow the chain back all the way to me, so I can tell them that yes, that's fine, and could they please leave them alone?
If you told your lawyer you thought you had permission, then a good lawyer has to do exactly that, and see if they can find out.
Just hope that you're sued in California, so that you might be able to respond with a SLAPP for the costs of your defence.
Actually, the difference is one of scale.
You drive 55Mph on an American highway, you're not committing a crime. You drive 85Mph, and you are.
All that's changed is the speed. You can still be driving in a perfectly safe manner.
You share your music with one person, you're not committing a crime. You distribute it to the general public, you are. (and let's be honest, if you don't know the recipient, there's no real way you can call it sharing - it's distribution)
Of course, the reason for this is that the american people are way too cheap.
Most of the money politicians receive doesn't go into their pocket.. it goes into their campaigns. So if people would wise up, stop listening to the adverts, and actually spend the hour or so it takes to research a politician's stance, this problem wouldn't exist.
Does the constitution actually mention criminals at all? From what I gathered, the possession of arms is strictly linked to being able to serve in a military type capacity.
And you seem to think that someone who doesn't have the money to buy something non-essential still deserves to have it.
If you don't have the resources to pay for what you want, you shouldn't get it. It's that simple.
I'm of a different opinion about things that you need, but nobody actually needs the latest album by some band.
Using the historical arguement?
Because there's already some history behind calling it theft. Do you really want to go that route?
Really, the most natural word for this new activity is "distributing" but that doesn't make the pirates feel all rosy inside.
Here's another point.. ..everybody gets up in arms about calling it theft when it's not.
If we want to be perfectly honest, let's stop calling it sharing -- it's not that either, it's distributing.
If you want to get really picky, it's making available for distribution.
Let me add one more thought.. learn some stats before trying to make a statisical point. You're the one adding a correlation here where none has been shown.
Somehow you seem to think that a person using p2p is half as likely to take a vacation as the general population.
Here, let's break it down to real numbers.
To make it easy, we'll assume a population of 200 people. Of those, half are p2p users.
Now, out of those 200, say 10% decide to go on holiday. So 20 people. Of those 20, how many are p2p users. Well, if we assume a fairly even distribution (ie, that people who share files are no more or less likely to go on vacation) then about half of those who go on vacation will be p2p users.
So let's work that out.. half of the 20 people is 10. Half of the total population of 200 is 100.
10 p2p users out of the 100 total p2p users go on holiday, which just happens to be 10%, exactly the same as the general population.
See, that wasn't so hard, was it?
..the one reason I use Opera over anything else is specifically for it's new mail client.
M2 (as they're calling it) is considerably different from your standard mail client in that it doesn't use folders.
All your mail goes into one big box, and you can set up permanent filters/sort fields to pull out sets of the mail into views. The fun thing with views is that you can do all your standard set operations on them (includes, excludes, intersections and unions) and you can have the same mail visible in multiple views.
So I can put together all the mail on a specific project from developers and management that mentions deadlines. I set that as a view. Then I make a second view that gathers all the developer or Q/A mail on that project. I leave those in place, and any mail that comes in is automatically shown in both of those views if it fits, without having to do anything funky or wasteful like making a second copy of the mail.
Add to that specific searches and orderings (including properly threaded) within the views and it makes high volumes of email simple to handle.
It's a bit of a learning curve to get used to the idea that the mail doesn't actually go into the views and that it can show up in more than one place at once, but once you've got that, it's beautiful.
Hotmail seems to work just fine with Opera 7.11, heck it doesn't even give me that annoying "Please update your browser to IE6 to fully access the features on this site" anymore.
Once you get popular locally, you can ... get it played on the radio.
Bzzt. Thanks for playing. Please try again, but look up some of the articles and information regarding ClearChannel before you do. You might, if you're lucky, get it played on some college station.
You won't get it played on any station with national distribution until it becomes so big through word of mouth that it doesn't matter anyway.
It's a chicken&egg situation, with the RIAA being the cocks that make it possible at the moment.
Sure you do.
Every time your code sells another copy, you get paid for it. Or rather, your company does, and they pay you.
Now, if you write your own code, and you sell it to a company who resells it without getting some kind of royalty deal, that just implies you have no business sense.
Try to remember that use is different from distribution.
Ah.. I see then you feel the amount of time it takes to create a decent recipe is comparable to the amount of time it takes to create a decent piece of art or music.
Similarly, I expect you feel the time it takes to come up with a new scientific theory is about the same amount of time that it takes to find out a basic fact about the universe. Yet somehow, even though nobody claims ownership of these facts, we're still discovering new ones, so why should we bother paying researchers to actively hunt them down?
Damn, you're right.. it'd be great if some researchers, and some scientists, can manage to eat and pay bills by exercising their craft. However there are worse indignities than having a day job.
Get a clue. Putting to work as a car manufacturer might be beneficial to society in a small way, but by taking away time they'd otherwise use for creativity, we're harming to society in a much larger way.
Your arguement suggests that giving talented artists the free-time to create what they do is actually just a waste of their potential to be building fences or some such. Most people who think about it realize that it's actually the other way around.
Do you blame the hackers, or do you blame the people who made the games without thinking about the hackers?