Talking about democracy, it certainly doesn't help when economically naive and poorly informed people start thinking its OK to break the laws underpinning a major area of the modern economy, and then reason this away with vague "no damage was done" type arguments. If you believe strongly that the law is wrong, campaign to have it changed, support organisations that do so with your time and/or money, or vote for someone who agrees with you if you can. Everyone whinges about Big Media lobbying, but ultimately, Big Media doesn't have a vote, and it's a lot smaller than The People.
This "obey, and work to change the law" argument gets the moral high ground, but it's just fucking stupid. Those methods won't work in this case. They are being tried, but they fail, and fail, and fail. Why do they fail? For the obvious reasons. The RIAA owns the law, and some of the legislators. They have better lobbyists. They control the media, quite literally. Doesn't matter that Big Media doesn't have a vote; they can certainly deliver quite a few. They have more money. And they have a stronger interest. The People, by and large, don't care.
Also, this was a civil trial. Far from being vague handwaving, "no damage was done" is a time-honored defense. The principle that if there is no damage there can be no tort has been part of law for centuries. The RIAA and other interested parties have managed to sidestep that in this case by purchasing laws provided for statutory damages, but that doesn't change the principle.
Hernando de Soto has pegged a lack of real property rights as the primary issue that prevents wealth from being created in the third world (agricultural economies). It follows that in economies (such as the US/Europe) which derive their wealth, more and more, from intellectual property, that the ability to protect those rights is ultimately to our benefit.
No, it does not follow. The differences between real property and IP have been hashed out over and over again; what holds for one does not necessarily hold for another.
Major relevant differences -- 1) Lack of exclusivity. One user of intellectual property does not interfere with another.
2) Less limited resource -- with few exceptions, no one is making more land. New IP is created all the time
And a difference in the systems protecting them 3) With real property, a whole system of rights-of-way has been developed to prevent my use of my real property from interfering with your use of your real property, even if my real property stands between yours and some shared resource you need. With IP, it's the opposite -- your patent on your invention can easily prevent me from implementing mine.
To nonchalantly alienate part of your site's user base because you can't be bothered to accommodate for them is bad planning and design.
Certainly not. If I'm alienating 0.5% of my user base by not accomodating them, and to accomodate them would double my costs (not an unreasonable number, considering you'd more than double _testing_ time of the website, having someone go through with a screen reader and make sure it all works), that's a reasonable trade-off.
Spending a few more dollars to adhere to law A is no different from spending money to adhere to law B (like SOX).
Great example. SOX sent companies private in droves to avoid the cost of compliance. Perhaps ADA compliance requirements will send brick-and-mortar companies running from the web.
And now you've got the government micromanaging website design.
Devil's advocate: Do people who grow old enough that the normal aging processes cause disability still have the disposable income to spend on luxury consumer products?
No, those who are still mentally able are spending all their money on health care, and/or demanding that they get everything free because they're old, infirm, and the AARP has a lot of lobbying power.
There must be a provision for transmitting to a non-stationary satellite; Iridium still exists. That's extremely low bandwidth, though, and was horrificly expensive to deploy.
Jim Bell was arrested for stalking an IRS agent, and sentenced to two consective 5 year terms. It's widely believed by those the government would term "the tinfoil-hat crowd" (read: realists) that his prosecution and sentencing was actually for "Assassination politics".
Nullification is meant as a last resort, when the other mechanisms for changing the law have broke down. That is not the case here.
It's not? ROTFL. The only party able to change the law is the RIAA itself; copyright laws are becoming worse, not better. The pro-copyright interests control the media and the legislature and the courts.
If this is the case, portions of the GPL may be unenforceable. The provisions that changes *MUST* be republished relies on copyright law, but the portions about how you choose to use it may be moot because you can refuse to accept the GPL and rely merely on the fair use statute of copyright.
There aren't any such provisions, so there's no problem. You can modify sources and produce binaries all day, not distribute them, and you're legally fine.
If you distribute the binaries, that's another question. Good luck showing that not only making a derivative of a copyrighted work, but distributing that derivative to all and sundry, is fair use.
It's pretty clear that a program compilation cannot produce an original work; it's a mechanical process. The only way copyrightable expression can get into the binary is from the sources or from the compiler. Either way, the work is derivative. It is possible that you can compile a public domain binary from a copyrightable source, but those cases are all oddities and don't affect the general case much. For instance, I could create a nicely commented "hello world" program with a copyrighted treatise on the history of "Hello World" programs in the comments, but the compilation of such would still be a "hello world" binary in which I certainly had no copyright.
While there may be an old precedent for prohibition of automating a manual process, both the patent office and the courts have been ignoring that precedent for "on the internet" and "on a computer" patents; if that precedent had been followed we wouldn't be in the situation we are in. So in effect patent law HAS been changed by this decision; that earlier precedent previously was not considered to cover "on a computer" patents.
Doesn't matter. Game's over, RIAA wins. This case will not be appealed, as the defendant lacks the resources. Most of the court system respects authority and has an inherent bias against the individual; the RIAA comes across as "authority". So there will be no setting aside of the verdict. I expect there will be a quiet reduction in damages unopposed by the RIAA, that's it.
It's like any other situation; the bad guys only have to win once, the good guys have to win every time. The RIAA just won once. Nobody else is going to challenge them. Just like no one has challenged the DMCA since the EFF abandoned the 2600 case. It's over. The copyright extremists won.
We can sit around in forums, yapping non-stop about how horrid the RIAA is, or we can really begin to take the fight to them.
I'm afraid our anonymous coward with violent tendencies has expressed the only way "we" can do that.
There's no legal methods they can't control. Leave bad ratings on YouTube? They can just hire shills to leave good ones. Fill the comments section with nasty comments? They'll get them removed by hook or by crook and file a SLAPP suit against those making the comments. Anything you can come up with, they have the resources to defeat.
Chances are if you make your own music, you're infringing some copyright; it's hard to avoid not to, considering all the copyrighted music people are exposed to every day. This won't get the RIAA after you, but watch out for the songwriter's and composers mafias.
A woman sitting in the wrong section of the bus and refusing to move when asked broke the law, got caught, and should pay the penalty.
A high school teacher teaching something specifically forbidden by law broke the law, got caught, and should pay the penalty.
Once you accept the law as your one and only basis for determining punishment, you have to accept it for Parks and Scopes as well as the people you don't like.
Don't automatically assume that a civil judgment will be discharged in bankruptcy. Filing for bankruptcy has become more difficult and the consequences more far-reaching. It is not an easy way out.
The original easy way out, a.k.a Chapter.45, is still available.
Slashdot Mirror
+1, Understated!
Of course I can. On the other hand, if you build a device I invented, my use of that invention is not impeded.
I can perhaps take the patent itself, by fraud. But I can't take the invention it describes. Which one is the IP is just a matter of terminology.
This "obey, and work to change the law" argument gets the moral high ground, but it's just fucking stupid. Those methods won't work in this case. They are being tried, but they fail, and fail, and fail. Why do they fail? For the obvious reasons. The RIAA owns the law, and some of the legislators. They have better lobbyists. They control the media, quite literally. Doesn't matter that Big Media doesn't have a vote; they can certainly deliver quite a few. They have more money. And they have a stronger interest. The People, by and large, don't care.
Also, this was a civil trial. Far from being vague handwaving, "no damage was done" is a time-honored defense. The principle that if there is no damage there can be no tort has been part of law for centuries. The RIAA and other interested parties have managed to sidestep that in this case by purchasing laws provided for statutory damages, but that doesn't change the principle.
That's like complaining that the Nobel Prize in medicine is biased towards genetics and biology and away from beads and rattles...
No, it does not follow. The differences between real property and IP have been hashed out over and over again; what holds for one does not necessarily hold for another.
Major relevant differences --
1) Lack of exclusivity. One user of intellectual property does not interfere with another.
2) Less limited resource -- with few exceptions, no one is making more land. New IP is created all the time
And a difference in the systems protecting them
3) With real property, a whole system of rights-of-way has been developed to prevent my use of my real property from interfering with your use of your real property, even if my real property stands between yours and some shared resource you need. With IP, it's the opposite -- your patent on your invention can easily prevent me from implementing mine.
Certainly not. If I'm alienating 0.5% of my user base by not accomodating them, and to accomodate them would double my costs (not an unreasonable number, considering you'd more than double _testing_ time of the website, having someone go through with a screen reader and make sure it all works), that's a reasonable trade-off.
Great example. SOX sent companies private in droves to avoid the cost of compliance. Perhaps ADA compliance requirements will send brick-and-mortar companies running from the web.
No, those who are still mentally able are spending all their money on health care, and/or demanding that they get everything free because they're old, infirm, and the AARP has a lot of lobbying power.
Jim Bell's sentencing: http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2001/08/46341
There must be a provision for transmitting to a non-stationary satellite; Iridium still exists. That's extremely low bandwidth, though, and was horrificly expensive to deploy.
Jim Bell was arrested for stalking an IRS agent, and sentenced to two consective 5 year terms. It's widely believed by those the government would term "the tinfoil-hat crowd" (read: realists) that his prosecution and sentencing was actually for "Assassination politics".
Satellite internet sucks because the speed of light is too low. I don't see anyone getting around that any time soon.
They can't force you to produce a record, but they can prevent you from producing a record without giving them all the proceeds.
The US dollar was a rip-off of the Spanish dollar.
Microsoft thinks it's at stage two.
There aren't any such provisions, so there's no problem. You can modify sources and produce binaries all day, not distribute them, and you're legally fine.
If you distribute the binaries, that's another question. Good luck showing that not only making a derivative of a copyrighted work, but distributing that derivative to all and sundry, is fair use.
It's pretty clear that a program compilation cannot produce an original work; it's a mechanical process. The only way copyrightable expression can get into the binary is from the sources or from the compiler. Either way, the work is derivative. It is possible that you can compile a public domain binary from a copyrightable source, but those cases are all oddities and don't affect the general case much. For instance, I could create a nicely commented "hello world" program with a copyrighted treatise on the history of "Hello World" programs in the comments, but the compilation of such would still be a "hello world" binary in which I certainly had no copyright.
While there may be an old precedent for prohibition of automating a manual process, both the patent office and the courts have been ignoring that precedent for "on the internet" and "on a computer" patents; if that precedent had been followed we wouldn't be in the situation we are in. So in effect patent law HAS been changed by this decision; that earlier precedent previously was not considered to cover "on a computer" patents.
Doesn't matter. Game's over, RIAA wins. This case will not be appealed, as the defendant lacks the resources. Most of the court system respects authority and has an inherent bias against the individual; the RIAA comes across as "authority". So there will be no setting aside of the verdict. I expect there will be a quiet reduction in damages unopposed by the RIAA, that's it.
It's like any other situation; the bad guys only have to win once, the good guys have to win every time. The RIAA just won once. Nobody else is going to challenge them. Just like no one has challenged the DMCA since the EFF abandoned the 2600 case. It's over. The copyright extremists won.
I'm afraid our anonymous coward with violent tendencies has expressed the only way "we" can do that.
There's no legal methods they can't control. Leave bad ratings on YouTube? They can just hire shills to leave good ones. Fill the comments section with nasty comments? They'll get them removed by hook or by crook and file a SLAPP suit against those making the comments. Anything you can come up with, they have the resources to defeat.
Chances are if you make your own music, you're infringing some copyright; it's hard to avoid not to, considering all the copyrighted music people are exposed to every day. This won't get the RIAA after you, but watch out for the songwriter's and composers mafias.
A woman sitting in the wrong section of the bus and refusing to move when asked broke the law, got caught, and should pay the penalty.
A high school teacher teaching something specifically forbidden by law broke the law, got caught, and should pay the penalty.
Once you accept the law as your one and only basis for determining punishment, you have to accept it for Parks and Scopes as well as the people you don't like.
The original easy way out, a.k.a Chapter
If the fear of goatse stops me from clicking on links, the terrorists have won.