You sound like you were a spoiled brat whose parents needed to give a serious attitude adjustment And you sound like a despicable control freak who doesn't understand that he has no right to control the life of another person. It's people like you who create both the horribly injust institutions that have plagued most if not all societies for recorded history, but also the mindless sheep who have been psychologically conditioned to bow to the will of anyone who has something to threaten them with. I don't care if it's your child, a person is a person, and while there might be some development line before which a Homo sapiens is not a proper person with all the rights that that entails, a teenager, despite their admitted immaturity, is definitely on the 'person' side of that line. For most of history people we still consider children ("teenagers") were often parents in their own right and full-fledged working members of society (not that I'm advocating a return to that state, just saying there's precedent that people of such age are just as much people as you and I). There are plenty of stupid and immature adults and we don't deny them their rights (any more than we do anyone else's), and there are plenty of brilliant and responsible teenagers; so unless you're prepared to advocate some sort of maturity test requirement for citizenship, don't even think of saying "they're too immature to know what's for their own good, and thus don't deserve the rights that only come with such responsibility; so I have every right to control their lives, and it's for their own benefit".
All your attitude will do is breed in the minds of your children the idea that might makes right, leading them in their adult lives to be subservient slaves to whoever holds any sort of power over them, and unaccountable dictators whenever they hold any sort of power over others. And yes, I would say that such descriptions fit most adults in most societies today (to varying degrees of course), and that that is precisely the root of the majority of sociological ills.
Alternatively, if your children are steadfast enough of mind to resist breaking under your threats and punishment, it could ingrain in them the idea that the world of full of malevolent assholes like you, a dog-eat-dog world where the only way to get by unscathed is to skillfully maneuver through social power hierarchies and amass as much control over other people as possible - in short, turning them into the very sociopaths you seem to fear them becoming. Or, if you and they both are lucky, they may recover from the psychological harm you inflict upon them once they move out on their own, and become fairly well-adjusted, independent individuals, though no doubt some sort of scarring will remain one way or another.
I'm not saying you can never say "no" to your kids. You don't have to give them everything they ask for; hell, you don't have to give them much of anything at all. You don't have to give them a computer period, or even let them use yours. All you have to give them is the same respect of rights you'd give any other person; which means that if you DO give them something (some property), it's theirs, and you should fuck off and not think they you can steal from them to punish them for doing things you don't approve of. Punish them for doing things that are genuinely wrong: stealing, hurting other people, that sort of thing. Beyond that, your only justified tool is education. Talk to them, reason with them, try to convince them that certain things are bad for them or impolite or what not, and if they don't listen, tough shit. Maybe you're wrong, maybe they're just stupid, either way the ball is in their court now, and even though they might go off and do some stupid shit, you violating their rights to try to deter them from that not only doesn't help anything, but is a worse offense than whatever they might do to "deserve" it.
I thought Doc Brown said things were supposed to get heavier in the future! Oh wait, sorry,. . . that was Marty McFly! If the defining standard of the kilogram gets lighter, then everything else will be measured as heavier by that standard. So yes, this is pretty heavy stuff we're dealing with.
2) That, as a matter of objective right, absolute, unqualified control of physical entities as property is a right
I'm not quite claiming this, though I will agree that my notion of property rights is very strong, but not absolute or unqualified. The limits, the qualifications, which I accept are precisely the ones that circumvent your claim that such a strong notion of private property rights contradicts itself: that whole "my right to swing my fist ends at your face" thing. Your 'absolute' control over your property extends only to the point that it affects other peoples' property. It is actually this exact limitation which makes private property, private property; the ability to exclude others from control. If everyone were to have merely the liberty right (that is to say, permission) to control their property however they saw fit, including affecting others' so-called property, then no one would have any claim rights to private property at all, for a claim right of one person just consists in others' obligations toward that person, and a prohibition is an obligation of a negation (an obligation to not do something), and permission is the negation of prohibition; so if everyone were permitted to do or not do anything, no one would be prohibited from doing or not doing anything, and equivalently no one would be obligated to do or not do anything, and no one would have any claim rights, i.e. no one would have any valid complaint that anyone was e.g. violating their private property.
So that is definitely not what I am claiming. I am claiming that people have permission to do whatever they want except things that they are forbidden from doing (that part's a simple tautology); that the only thing people are (ethically) forbidden from doing is acting upon another's property against the will of the property owner (counting the property owner's body as his own property, of course); and that the only things that can be property are actual, physical things, not intangible ideas, concepts, patterns, etc, which I hold do not actually "exist" in a proper ontological sense. As a logical consequence of this, people are forbidden from preventing me from dancing how I like, singing how I like, writing, drawing, or painting as I like, or directing my computer to to produce patterns of data on CDs and DVDs as I like, because those acts involve only my own property and others are not permitted to act upon that property against my will. As a consequence of THAT, enforcement of copyright law is ethically prohibited (though some damn piece of paper in Washington can say whatever it wants to), and so licenses hold no ethical weight, because they merely permit me to do, under certain conditions, things that I am already permitted to do under much broader conditions.
As a very tangental aside, you may think that this notion of private property makes me some kind of crazy extremist libertarian, but there are a lot of interesting logical consequences I've pulled out of this which run counter to the usual libertarian agenda. (In fact, most libertarians I've met seem to favor the notion of intellectual property rights, so I guess this is another one to add to the list).
1) If we generalize our premise "only things that exist (i.e. physical things) are property" to "ALL and only things that exist are property", then as private property is exclusive control of something, everything which is not private property, rather than being "unowned" as some would have it (being in a state such that no one has any claims rights to it, and thus anything goes), is public property, that is, something over which everyone has non-exclusive (i.e. inclusive) control. This allows for the validity of environmental control laws in terms other than "your smog is damaging my skyscraper" or "your toxic waste is corroding my yacht". People without such private property nevertheless have a claim to the public property that is the air and water, and thus have valid complaints directly about h
Did you read you EULA? The copy of Windows Vista you have is NOT your property. It belongs to Microsoft and they are just granting you a license to use it. Are you sure you did not give oncent? Maybe read it again. The COPYRIGHT of Windows Vista is Microsoft's "property" (as are various patents it implements and trademarks it displays, but those aren't really relevant here). That is, MS "owns" certain legal protections on duplicating and redistributing that pattern of information. The COPY, the actual instantiation of that software on your disk, is YOUR property, as are the disks themselves and all the rest of the hardware. There is no license required to use that copy you have however you see fit; the only restrictions automatically placed on you, which you would need a license to waive, are restrictions on copying.
But of course, in order to use software it needs to be copied into RAM. This is the historical legal justification for software EULAs. You can't put a EULA on a lawnmower to tell people what lawns they can mow with it; the doctrine of First Sale prevents that. You can't put a license on a DVD or CD telling people how they may use it, either; only how they may copy it. It's only that particular quirk of software that to use it you must copy it which supposedly makes EULAs valid, and AFAIK (though IANAL) that theory has been invalidated on the grounds that copying from disk to RAM inside your own computer for the purposes of software is fair use and necessary for the product to be merchantable as advertised.
So fuck EULAs. Your computer is your property and if Microsoft does anything to it against your wishes they should be held criminally liable.
The GPL, even according to Stallman, is a necessary evil. It exists primarily, not to assign freedom to software, but to prevent others from removing freedom from software. If copyright didn't apply to software at all, the GPL obviously would not be necessary. Thus his coining of the "copyleft" definition. Except that there's a way to put your software out there and make it as free as it would be in a copyright-free world right now, and it's not the GPL: release it to the public domain. BSD-style licenses come close to this. In a copyright-free world, someone *could* take a copy of freely released code, modify it, and distribute just binaries with no source, even for money. The GPL doesn't prevent others from "removing freedom" at all; it just withholds a different set of freedoms than the ones most licenses do.
Now, one can rationally argue that intellectual property shouldn't exist; that it is an undesirable social construct whereas at least some of the other existing forms of property are desirable social constructs. I am making an ethical claim, not a legal one; so yes, I am arguing more or less what you just said. I'm not saying that "society does not enforce these supposed rights and obligations in its laws", I'm saying "people do not in fact have such rights and obligations". I'm using "fact" here very loosely to avoid the whole metaethical discussion of whether ethical statements can be truth-bearers and what are their truth-makers; if anyone cares, I don't hold ethical facts to be reducible to physical facts, but neither am I a relativist. The closest label I've found for my position is "prescriptivist", though that's still not quite accurate. For the purposes of this discussion I am assuming only the position that some things are objectively right and some are objectively wrong, regardless of anyone's beliefs about them; construe "x is right/wrong" to mean whatever you like so long as it retains that objectivity.
So what I am asserting is that the only things people have an ethical right to exclude others from control of are actual, physical things; that only physical things can legitimately be property, and any claim to "own" something that is not a physical thing is a legal or social fiction, and nobody has any genuine ethical obligations to respect their supposed claim rights to their intangible "property". For example, I assert that if someone comes up with a dance routine, they cannot legitimately "own" that dance as an abstract pattern of movements, in the sense that they have no real ethical right to use (or direct the use of) force to control who may or may not move their body in such a fashion. That dancer owns his own body; other dancers own their bodies and may direct their motion as they see fit provided they don't do so in a fashion that acts upon another person or their property in a way that that other person dislikes (i.e. "the right to swing my fist ends at your face").
That same exact line of reasoning applied to more traditional forms of "intellectual property" lead to their abandonment as well. I own my own mouth and lungs, I can sing any song I want. If I own a microphone and a CD burner, I can record whatever I want with them, and give or sell the recordings to whoever I damn well please. If I own a photocopier and a book I can use those two things to make more books with the same exact words in them, and give them away or sell them to whoever I damn well please. Same thing with videos and cameras. Or plug the output from the player straight into the recorder and make even better copies. Or do it all in a computer and make perfect copies, and transmit them over the internet to anyone who requests them, for free. It's all my own property, who are you to tell me what I can or cannot do with it, so long as I'm not hurting you or your property? Oh, you claim to "own" the abstract pattern of 1s and 0s that are encoded in my datastreams, and that means you can tell me what I can or can't do with my stuff, who I can or cannot give or say certain things to? Hah.
In short, the notion of intellectual property explicitly contradicts the notion of physical property; and I think it's pretty clear the physical property is the more elementary of the two, so intellectual property has to go.
Plus, Halo has a different feel from a lot of other shooters. It's slower and less instantly deadly. It sounds minor, but it's not. It allows some friends of mine who get queasy easily to play with us. A lot of people who were turned off by Quake/Half-life uber-speedy take-3-steps-die gameplay really like Halo.
Does that make it worth all the hype? Well, probably not. But I've never really run into another shooter that plays quite like it (aside from Marathon, naturally...) Being an old-school Bungie fan myself (creator of the Eternal mod for Marathon, current admin of one of the two still-active Marathon forums, and former head honcho of the Myth section of Bungie.org), I was initially uber-hyped about Halo. Finally, Bungie was coming out with Marathon's spiritual successor (if not outright sequel), and they were gonna make the big time with a major hit game, simultaneously released on both Mac and Windows like the Myth games had been... ooh boy that was gonna be great!
Then the MS buyout happened. Halo became an Xbox title; the PC version took second fiddle, the Mac version more like seventh fiddle. I've never been much of a console gamer, and NEVER been a fan of Microsoft. So I pretty much gave up on Bungie. But, a friend of mine bought me an Xbox and Halo for my birthday, so I gave it a shot, had a good bit of fun. It's a nice game, feels a lot like a modern, polished version of Marathon, which is exactly what I had always wanted (though getting used to the console controls was a bit of a trick at first). Like you say, Marathon and Halo play VERY differently than other FPSs, and I've never much been into other FPSs for that reason. In Bungie games you move slower and, to me it seems, much more realistically. It's a much more relaxing, flowing feel to the combat, less hyperactive twitch reflex. (Obi-wan's "a more elegant weapon for a more civilized age" feels somehow appropriate here). It also has coop, which has always been my favorite gametype; combines the social interaction and teamwork of a multiplayer game with the progressive, task-oriented nature of single player games, with a bit of the ol' Legolas & Gimli kill-count competition going on. So to me, Halo was the best FPS yet, and I actually went out and bought Halo 2 with my own money (the game I've bought for the Xbox that was given to me) and enjoyed it even more, especially coop on Legendary. And now I plan to buy Halo 3, though I'll only be playing it on my friend's 360. Seems a fitting way to end my involvement with Bungie, and I want to see how the series ends.
But, imagine my surprise when I looked about in the general gaming chatter online, especially here on Slashdot, and find out that apparently the only people who like Halo are dumbass pothead jocks and frat boys who masturbate with Microsoft brand hand lotion while shoving giant vibrating Xbox controllers up each others asses. Or at least, that's the impression you'd get listening to all the shit that people talk about it on the Internet. Certainly a surprise to me, the intellectual geek who spent much of high school pouring over mythological and literary references hidden away in Marathon terminals.
No, Halo is not the be-all end-all of all video games. But it's not utter shit either. I particularly hate the criticism that it's "old hat" and offers nothing new in terms of gameplay, especially in comparison to mainsteam PC games, which I spent many years looking down upon for lagging in relation to Marathon. (Wow, that new game has a story? Friendly NPCs? Dual wielded and dual function weapons? Cooperative play? Yawn. Welcome to 1994). When the latest sci-fi movie comes out, do you say "oh bah, I've seen a sci-fi movie before, show me something new"? No? So why can't a new game just be a newer, more polished version of the same sort of game that you liked before, with some new settings to explore, some new characters to meet, and some new situations to be resolved?
It's the logical conclusion of the line of reasoning that consuming something that was produced in a criminal act makes you a criminal. If it doesn't apply to the other two examples I gave, it shouldn't apply to people looking at kiddy porn.
People who dump toxic wastes are criminals. People who employ slave labor are criminals. People who rape kids are criminals.
People who buy or otherwise consume things made by such criminals in the act of their crime are not - or at least, should not be considered - criminals. They may not be of the highest moral fiber, being that it's good, though not obligatory, to boycott producers who do bad things to produce their wares; but that doesn't mean they deserve jail time.
That may be true in a complete abstract notion, but it is not true in a legal sense. Patents, copyrights, trade secrets are intellectual property by definition.
I wasn't speaking of the law, but of facts, and of ethics. Even so, though IANAL, I'm pretty sure there's not actually any such legal concept as "intellectual property" either. There are laws restricting people from using certain information in certain ways unless they have special legal status in relation to that information - copyrights, patents, and trademarks - but AFAIK even according to the law you don't actually "own" anything (besides whatever physical thing you have the information recorded in). This is the basis of the whole "copyright infringement is not theft" that you hear in RIAA/MPAA threads here. You can't own information, so it can't be stolen; but you can have a government-granted monopoly on the duplication of that information, and that can be violated.
This is only true in a vacuum, If I write code that runs on Windows and Linux and t is designed to make interoperability possible within an application sphere, and microsoft takes my code, changes it (and keeps the changes private) so that it no longer functions with my original code, and then using their monopoly position and forces vendors to remove old APIs I used. Microsoft has effectively removed my ability to use my code. This happens all the time and GPL is a good protection of my freedom and the freedom of users to use my code.
While that is a crappy situation, it in no way removes your ability to use your code - it merely hinders the popularity of your code. If MS co-opts your API and puts out their own bastardized version that becomes hugely popular due to their power over OEMs and their giant marketing machine, while that sucks, all it's done is overshadow your API. You, and everyone else, are perfectly free to make use of your API just like they were before - only difference now is that the masses who are swayed by whatever MS does will ignore you and use MS's solution. And while that sucks, it's little different than any other case where a little guy gets overshadowed by someone more popular. No ones rights are being violated there.
Further, MS would not have their monopoly power, particularly their power over OEMs, in an "IP"-free world, because people would not be buying copies of software and licenses to use it from MS, they'd be paying MS (if they even existed) for the service of writing some new code (or rather, for a copy of some code which does not yet currently exist, requiring MS to make it), and probably for maintenance and support of that software. Once the new code is written, the purchaser (such as an OEM) could make use of that code - duplicate it, distribute it, print it out and burn it - all they wanted. MS couldn't crush competitors with patent lawsuits either. The only reason anybody would standardize on MS more than any other option would be is MS software was particularly useful. Which puts you, if you're a brilliant and talented programmer yourself, in a good position to compete with them on merits. May the best code win.
This is almost accurate, and what I demand in return for access to my code is a simple and clean share and share alike. If you don't like it, don't use my code.
Again, I'm not speaking of legal but rather ethical rights and obligations, so your "accurate" comment is a little odd, unless you just mean to disagree about what is or is not ethical. I know full well that what I said is not what the law says. I'm explicitly disagreeing with the law here.
Even with that said, you seem to have misunderstood me. I was saying that, while you may (ethically) say "I will give you a copy of this code I wrote if you give me a copy of such-and-such other code (creating it first if need be)", which is a simple trade, you may not (ethically) say "here, have a copy of some software, and its source code. You may not make copies of this for anyone else unless you also g
Sorry to ask, but why simply looking at images of children porn is usually seen as a problem? I'm all for sending to jail those who make such images, those who distribute them for profit, and those who pay for them, since all of these persons are directly or indirectly harming children. But just for looking? This is silly. Because those who look at them create a demand to produce them. So would you have all customers of companies who commit crimes in the production of their products sent to jail as well? If Joe Shmoe buys a pair of shoes that were made using slave labor, he's a criminal too, not just the slave drivers who sold the shoes?
What if I buy a car from a company that's been neglecting environmental regulations, dumping their wastes illegally or something? Am I a criminal then, too?
Then that is simple, he should use someone else' code. "Code" as some abstract universal entity does not exist to be owned. There are only instantiations of it, copies of it, and only those can be owned. There is no such thing as intellectual property.
You are free to do with your copy of any code as you choose; and others are equally free to do whatever they please with copies that are given to them. Someone else making "unauthorized" copies of their copy does not at all restrict what you can do with your copy. You don't have to give them a copy in the first place, and you're free to require something from them in exchange for a copy (say, some other code from them); but once they have a copy of it, it is theirs to do with as they please, and once they've given *you* what *you* demanded in exchange for it, they don't have to give anyone anything they don't want to.
That isn't anarchic, and it isn't anything that promotes an anarchic social model. It is, by contrast, extremely centralist and authoritarian. What do you expect from someone who professes to "defend freedom" and then participates in an institution that relies entirely upon state power - copyright - to support the cornerstone of his entire movement. Without copyright there could be no GPL. Without a state there could be no copyright. Thus the GPL requires the existence of a state to give it any power at all. With no state, you wouldn't have to be "licensed" to distribute anything, and so no terms of Stallman's license could possibly be binding.
Despite whatever he might claim, Stallman is in no way an anarchist. In fact, the whole GPL vs BSD debate reminds me an awful lot of early Marxist vs Anarchist confrontations... the GPL being analogous to the Marxists, not the Anarchists...
"Freedom" in Stallman's world is neither easy or convenient. Freedom in Stallman's world means something completely different than freedom in the real world. Stallman's aim is not "freedom" per se, however much he may have co-opted that word; his aim is the availability of code. This whole crusade of his started because he couldn't get the code for a broken printer driver. Now, in many ways, true freedom of software - the abolition of copyrights and patents - would greatly increase the availability of code, because there'd be little if any benefit to keeping it secret. So freedom is in many ways aligned with his interests. But using an the inherently un-free institution of copyright law to force people to make code available is not in line with freedom at all.
A note on my use of the word "force" there. Yes, the GPL is not truly force in a proper sense, as though Stallman was holding a gun to someone's head and saying "release the code or die!" But GPL'd software copyright holders *are* witholding a license to do something that should not require a license in the first place, which seems to me to be a kind of force, or at least the condoning of the use of force.
Imagine a hypothetical police state where a license is required to walk outdoors, and you were for some reason in a position to grant such licenses, but you were only willing to grant them on the stipulation that the walker pick up your dry cleaning while she's out. Say it's an Islamic state where women are not allowed outdoor without permission from their husbands, and you're the husband. Now, you're not really FORCING her to pick up your dry cleaning, as you're not forcing her to walk outdoors; however, the state is forcibly restricting her from doing something she ought to be permitted to do, namely walk outdoors, and you're condoning that use of force (dare I say participating in it even) when you could put a stop to it, unless she does something you want her to, namely pick up your dry cleaning.
So-called "free" licenses like the GPL are perfectly analogous to this. The state is forcing people not to do something that by all rights they ought to be permitted to do: share information freely. But the copyright holder of a piece of information is in a position to stop that use of force by licensing people to use "their" information. The GPL says "oh by all means share this information freely... so long as you also share that information." The copyright holder is not FORCING you per se to share that other information; they're just relying on the existence of state force to put them into a bargaining position, whereby they will stop the use of force you would otherwise face for your actions, so long as you do something that they want you to.
I don't know about you, but I don't consider that sort of situation "free" in any way.
For some strange reason in the caffeine-deprived early hours of the morning, reading the summary made me thing:
"They may take our code, but they will never take... our FREEDOOOOOOOM!!!!!!!"
On a slightly more flamebait note, hearing RMS and his ilk rant on and on about protecting people's "freedoms" while they continue to make use of the inherently un-free institution of copyright protection (upon which the GPL rests) is really starting to remind me of the perverted sense of "freedom" that socialists use to describe their desired form of government. Yes, an authoritarian state that tries to look out for everyone's welfare is better than an authoritarian state that just caters to the aristocracy; but as it's still authoritarian, calling it "free" is just deceitful, regardless of how nice it might be. Likewise, using copyright to ensure that code is widely distributed and easily available is better than using copyright to keep it locked up and secret, but it's still not free.
If you truly want you code to be free, release it to the public domain.
Liberal parties are called Liberal parties in Commonwealth countries because capitalism was originally a liberal ideology, as opposed to the state-controlled merchantilist economies that preceded it. These were not socialist, but probably what you'd consider even more "capitalist"; government supporting particular large corporations for the purposes of consolidating power in the hands of the ruling elite of the nation in question. Free market capitalism arose as a part of the general liberal movement against government authority; that sort of pro-market attitude which was classically called liberalism is today also known as (surprise) "classical liberalism" or, in the United States, libertarianism. Newer movements have since co-opted the name "liberal" for themselves, despite promoting often illiberal agendas, and labeled the older liberal movement (accurately) "conservative"; though in the US at least, large portions of those classically liberal conservatives have somehow become entangled with the sort of authoritarian conservatives that the original liberalism was rebelling against.
Liberal and Conservative are not antonyms. "Liberal" just means in favor of liberty, and its antonym is "authoritarian". "Conservative" just means in favor of the status quo, and its antonym is "progressive". When liberal democracies first started arising out of the mire of medieval monarchies and aristocracies, the liberals were progressive, because the status quo was highly authoritarian, and so authoritarians were rightly called conservative. Thus the terms "liberal" and "conservative" functioned like antonyms for a time; but only because the liberals happened to be the new guys (the progressives) and the conservatives (the establishment) happened to be authoritarian.
Eventually the progressive liberals mostly won out, but the societies they built still weren't satisfactory for everyone (viz. the pitfalls of so-called "actually existing capitalism", as opposed to the peaceful, voluntarist, competitive free markets that classical liberal authors dreamt of). So new movements, mainly socialism, continued to push for further change, in many ways changing back away from liberal ideals to more authoritarian ones, just intending to use that authority more benevolently. But the terminology didn't keep up with that. The people pushing for more authority (to be used benevolently) still call themselves "liberals". Further confusing the issue is that in addition to the liberals who are now conservative in comparison to socialists, there are still also the old elitist authoritarians who are even more conservative - though I guess a more apt term for them would be "regressive", as they want to change many things back to how they used to be long ago. Still adding further confusion to the issue, in America at least, is that the "progressive" socialists and the "regressive" old conservatives have made enough headway by now that the people who originally called themselves "conservatives" (now more often called "libertarians"), wanting to keep this country liberal as it was founded, are now in many ways progressive, or even regressive; wanting to change things from the now-authoritarian status quo, back to the liberal way things used to be. And all of this hides the issue that both libertarians and authoritarians can be subdivided on the issue of egalitarianism (though the split between the old aristocratic authoritarians and the new socialist authoritarians hints at this).
I find that the simplest way to clear up all the confusion is to stop all the talk about progressive or conservative, as those terms are entirely time-relative and imply different things now than they did a hundred years ago, and have even less in common with what they implied two or three hundred years ago, even though the words literally *mean* the same thing in all those times (i.e. someone who is in fact [not self-labeled] conservative now holds an ideology very different from someone who was in fact conservative 100 years ago, because the status quo now is very
The purpose of things like a Constitution in a constitutional republic is to protect the rights of the minority, since the majority very seldom has problems getting it's will reflected in policies and laws and enforcing them on the minority. The problem is that the constitution, by itself, cannot protect anything. The constitution is nothing but a piece of paper with some nice principles of government written on it. It is entirely dependent on there being enough people willing to uphold those principles to have any effect at all. All the constitution can do is guide and inspire; so if insufficient people are swayed by its words, it becomes utterly powerless.
In any society, not only the US, not even only democracies, the people get the government that the majority believes in. Even an absolute monarch has his power for the exact same reason that the US Constitution has its power: because enough people believe him to be the supreme law of the land. If people, as was often an issue in medieval Europe, believe the preaching of the Church to be the supreme law of the land, then the monarch's power is no longer absolute, and the Pope becomes the new high ruler (well, God does, with the Pope as his mouthpiece on Earth). Likewise, if enough people believe, or at least do not dispute, that the President may act beyond or even against the principles laid out in the Constitution, then the constitution loses power, and the President becomes our new King, regardless of what any words on paper may say.
Of course, none of this is to say that the majority is always RIGHT. In fact I'd suspect that they are most often wrong.* But right or wrong, the majority always wins: the government will have the powers that the majority believe it should have, and it will get away with whatever the majority will tolerate, and this will happen regardless of the official story society tells itself about what sort of government it has.
* (Rousseau had an interesting [and mathematically valid, though perhaps not sound] statistical argument that, assuming that the average person is at least slightly more likely to be right on an issue than wrong, then the larger the group you involve in the decision on that issue, the more likely it is that the group's decision will be correct. I'm fond of the observation that if you reverse that assumption**, and hold that the average person is even slightly less than 50% likely to be right, then the larger the group you ask, the higher the odds of that group being wrong, i.e. large groups of people are collectively stupider than any individual member).
** (Of course, which assumption you run with probably depends on whether or not you usually agree or disagree with the average person, i.e. whether or not you're a member of the majority yourself. If you are, you'll think the average person is more likely to be right than wrong, and this line of reasoning will simply confirm your opinion that the popular opinion is usually the right opinion; and if you're not a member of the majority, you'll probably hold the average person to be more likely wrong than right, so this argument will merely confirm for you that the ignorant masses are a bunch of dumbfucks).
Damn! I really hate people who have real arguments. Fsck! That has to be one of the funniest things anyone's ever said to me on Slashdot:-)
Well, maybe I was a bit wrong, though I still haven't decided, but just to save my honour, let me say that when I release my code under the GPL I am letting clear that I am distributing that code only for people who decided to abide to those terms To the extent that you own or otherwise legitimately control the servers that the code is distributed from, I suppose I support your rights to do so. That's somewhat like putting a pile of CDs with your code on a table in your front yard, with a sign posted at the end of the yard saying that permission is granted to enter the property and retrieve a CD provided that the entrant agree to such-and-such terms. You're granting someone permission to access your property (the server and connection, or the yard and CDs; not the code per se), but only on certain conditions. And that's fine with me; all I really object to is telling other people what they can or cannot do with their property, e.g. dictating the terms by which other people may distribute copies of things, even copies of your things.
However, these two issues become entangled with copyright-like terms of contract, because - without going on the long tangent into my rather novel theory of the ethics of contracts, which would also invalidate such contracts - the doctrine of First Sale, which is pretty well established in America at least, basically says (as I understand it) that you cannot use contracts to prohibit people from doing with their property as is otherwise legal. I cannot sell someone a lawnmower and stipulate what sorts of laws they may mow with it (though I can agree to only provide free service for lawnmowers which have not been used to mow certain sorts of laws, i.e. mowing the wrong lawn may void the warranty). So, by that reasoning you couldn't stipulate what people may do with the CDs in your yard or the files on your server once they have been given away; either that whole contract was invalid and they never had permission to enter your yard or access your server in the first place (in which case the crime is trespassing, or whatever the cyberspace equivalent is called, but not breach of contract); or, only those particular terms of it are invalid, and you just gave them a free CD with code on it (or a free download from your server) with which they can do whatever they please. Or could, if it weren't for copyright law, that is.
Freedom of expression applies to views and opinions, not on this case, because I have the right of property.
Freedom of expression is nothing but a subset of the fundamental right to liberty; I can say, write, print whatever I damn well please (those things being mere actions like any other, e.g. twiddling my thumbs or jumping rope) so long as I'm not infringing someone else's rights. (Copyright law supposedly creates such rights, if actual rights can really be created by government fiat like that, which I would dispute). Freedom of expression is in no way limited to "views and opinions"; it is my right to walk around singing "la dee da da" as much as it is my right to say George Bush sucks or that global warming is caused by decline in pirate populations. Unless, of course, "la dee da da" is copyrighted or trademarked, and such laws are actually worth the paper they're printed on.
And my claim follows directly from the notion of property rights. There is no such thing as "intellectual property", even in the law; the only things that can be property are real, physical things. (All other "property", e.g. copyright, spectrum leases, etc, are nothing but legal privledges; there is no thing that you actually own in such cases). So if you write some code, you have every right not to distribute it; that is, you don't have to expend the effort (however little these days) to produce a copy of the code, and even if you do, you own that copy and are under no obligation to give it to anyone else. However, once you give someone that copy - give them an object with that code on it, or transmit a signal encoding it to them - then it is now THEIR property and they may do whatever they please with it (including copying it, selling it, or giving it away), you have no right to tell them otherwise. No moral rights, that is; the law of course says otherwise.
Democracy is not at risk when you can't steal my code.
I'm concerned with liberty, not necessarily democracy. The two are not the same thing, and they can conflict; as in this case, where a (theoreticcally) democratically-elected government has passed laws infringing on peoples' liberty.
Further, making unauthorized copies of code you originally wrote isn't stealing anything from you. You still have your copies of the code, and even if someone were to start selling binary-only copies of it and not giving you a dime of the proceeds, you can still sell your copies too, or give them away for free; so if, like most FOSS projects, you're not actually charging money for your code, then people have no reason to buy it from the commercial vendor rather than download it free from you, and so suckers are merely being parted from their money. It sucks for the suckers, but that's the fault of their own ignorance, and it's not doing you any harm. Your code isn't any less free just because someone is only distributing compiled versions of it. It would only be less free if they somehow tried to prevent you or other people from distributing copies of the code.
But FOSS is not against copyright, in fact, there can't be FOSS without copyright, because without it FOSS would be eaten alive by stinking asses like those from showmypc.
I agree that FOSS (if by that you mean the GPL, as BSD-style licenses are quite different) is not against copyright, but rather relies on it; and that is my only complaint against it. A GPL license is better than a proprietary license, because it obliges people to do something good rather than prohibiting them from doing something harmless; and to that extent the GPL is a good thing. But it is still a license, and as such relies on the idea that people are de-facto prohibited from promulgating certain bits of information unless they are specifically licensed to do so, which means that despite whatever amount of good it might promote, it is doing so by unjust means. The only truly free license is a public domain license.
What gives you the right to tell someone to whom they can or cannot communicate some information they received from you?
If I teach you how to do something, is it fair, or right, for me to require that you offer to teach that skill to anyone you practice that skill for, or else you lose the right to practice that? If build a chair for you, and teach you how to build chairs like that, can I stipulate that any time you build a chair like that for someone you MUST offer to teach them how, or I'll sue?
GPL is just another form of copyright, and like all copyright it is an affront to the essential right to freedom of expression. If you don't want someone to make use of your code unless they're willing to share theirs, don't distribute your code except to people who've agreed to that.
Online negativity is less bad than in-person physical violence; so to the extent that those are the only two options, choosing the former over the latter "serves a valuable social function" as you say, i.e. it's a good thing.
But those aren't necessarily the only two options. Being rude online is still bad, it's just better than punching someone in the face. Better still would be doing neither.
As to the comparison with loss of rights etc, I didn't at all mean to compare them in importance or magnitude; that was just an example of something which is clearly true and bad, to clearly distinguish that just being true doesn't make something not bad. (i.e. "well that's the way things are" is no real excuse). On the scale of bad things, being rude on the internet is way down by the bottom, and I'm not tremendously concerned about it; at most I'm mildly annoyed sometimes. I just don't think "it's the internet" is an excuse for anything. Being rude is bad, online or not. It's not *very* bad either way, but it's still a little bad regardless of whether it's done via the internet or not.
Also, the people eroding our rights (and allowing others to do so) do so under the banner of "sacrificing our liberty is a better alternative that being killed by terrorists!", and so argue that it does in fact serve a social function. Which might or might not be the case, but even if it is, it ignores the possibility of NEITHER being killed by terrorists NOR sacrificing our liberties, which may be an option. Sacrificing our liberties may be better than being killed by terrorists (and lets grant for the sake of a argument that it is), but that does not make sacrificing our liberties not bad at all; it's just the least bad of two options. If those are really our only two options, then it's the best choice available. But do we really have no other options? Will we really all be doomed to be killed by terrorists if we don't sacrifice our liberties? A lot of people don't think that's so, and I'm inclined to agree with them.
Likewise, in the (far less important) case of being a jerk on the internet, if the only way you can refrain from punching people in the face is to be a jerk on the internet, then please, be a jerk on the internet. (And again, I'm not saying that you are). But if you can somehow refrain from punching people in the face AND refrain from being a jerk on the internet, then that would be even better. So, would you really start uncontrollably hurting people in person if you refrained from being an internet troll? I don't really know you well enough to say, but somehow I doubt it.
Oh, I'm not at all disputing that it *will* become that. It's already that. I'm talking only about whether or not that's acceptable.
Likewise, I fully expect that politics will continue to become more corrupt and that peoples rights will be further eroded as government power expands. But I don't just say "oh well that's politics for you, that's what it's for" and dismiss it like it's OK. I don't pretend there's much I can do about it, but that doesn't mean I accept it.
Same thing with assholes on the internet. What can I do about it? Not much. That doesn't make it right.
Saying that bad things are true (i.e. that bad things do in fact happen), or that they're destined to get worse, does not make them suddenly not bad. "Good" and "true" are completely orthogonal concepts.
when they invented the television, they thought it would be a great educaitonal tool yes, they really believed that what is tv really? Not a two-way communications medium, for one thing. TV is in a completely different category from phones, mail, and the internet. It's not possible be an asshole to someone over the TV; though you can show, on TV, someone being an asshole, it lacks that person-to-person link that makes it possible to really say dickish things to someone (rather than merely about someone) on TV.
when they invented the internet, they thought it would be a place for great minds to engage in a grand philosopher's lounge instead, we have "i can has cheezeburger?" lolcats I have no problem with lolcats, in fact I find them quite funny. As I said, I'm here mostly for fun; and when I hang out with friends in real life or online, I make all kinds of stupid, lewd and punny jokes, and laugh at the same from others. I don't mean to say that the internet is "serious business"; just that it is possible to be an asshole on the internet just like it is in real life, and no more acceptable than in real life either. (Of course, it's possible to do things to people IRL that you can't do online, things that physically affect people, and assholish things of that nature are far less acceptable than mere verbal assholishness anywhere). Within the confines of not being a dick, please, be as silly as possible, it's quite entertaining.
in other words, the behavior you despise me for, says less about the despicability of my behavior, and more about your lack of adaptation about what the internet is really for: asocial catharthis of rude obnoxious behavior, such that real life is more civil the internet's true purpose will be to become a mental dumping ground of the most useless, negative, shocking, and sickening thoughts. because to dump it here is harmless "The Internet" doesn't have a purpose. There's not an objective to it, something it's supposed to be used for. It's just a means of communication; what you do over it is entirely up to you, with no special freedoms or responsibilities beyond those in any other form of communication. That's my entire point. We here on Slashdot often bemoan people patenting the same old thing "...on the Internet" like it's somehow special and new, but it's not. You can't do something mundane and tack "on the Internet" on it to make it special; and neither can you do something rude or offensive and say "jeez its just the internet" to make it all OK. Being online or off is completely irrelevant.
this will make the real world a more sane, safe, nonviolent place in other words, trollish behavior has a purpose after all. you just have to see the larger picture and give up on the idealism;-) If verbally messing with people online keeps you from punching someone in the face, then yes, I'd rather you do that. Then again, if verbally messing with people in real life keeps you from punching someone in the face, that's just as good too. I suppose there's the fact that the people being messed with couldn't punch *you* in the face over the internet, and that'll make the world a little less violent for you. And it's sometimes easier to avoid unpleasant people online than in person. So yeah, if you really *have* to be an asshole somewhere, I'd rather it be in mere words on the internet; but that still doesn't mean being an asshole is OK. I'd rather you not be an ass at all.
I'm a huge internet troll, mainly because i know i couldn't get away that kind of behavior in the real world. my personality online and off are night and day. here i am loud angry and rude. in real life i am quite pleasant. for me, the internet represents catharsis: a mental taking out the trash that leaves me capable of not blowing my stack in the real world
in other words, my personality here is not only completely unlike my personality in real life, my personality here allows me to be someone else in real life. and i completely understand the boundaries
This attitude is precisely the reason I despise internet trolls. Not because of the whole signal-to-noise ratio thing; newbies posting stupid questions and other minor breaches of nettiquette accomplish roughly the same thing and I don't mind them at all. No, the reason I hate trolls is because they treat the internet like some kind of damned videogame and other people on it like NPCs at worst, other players to be "beaten" in the "game" at best. But despite the fact that you're accessing the internet through a keyboard and screen, it's not a damn game. And I don't mean that the internet should be a serious, demure place of pure business and scholarship either; I'm here to have fun more often than I'm here to do work. I just mean that the internet is less like baseball and more like a game of catch, less like the debate team and more like chatting in the living room with your friends. It's not a competition, you can't win at it, and so playing manipulative social games trying to get certain reactions out of certain people for fun (or "catharsis" as you say) is just as despicable as if you were to treat IRL conversations with your friends that way. (Granted, some people do the same thing in real life, and I'd consider them assholes too).
Do you assume a different persona and play social games when you converse over the phone? How about through postal mail, on the off chance that you actually write letters to people? Why is the internet any different? It's just another means of communication - one which, due to its breadth and efficiency, is if anything MORE like real life than the phone or mail.
The same thing applies to people who are dicks in the non-game aspects of online games, e.g. game chat. Yes, if you're playing a competitive game the objective is to blow up the other guy or what have you, and you shouldn't complain that people are being "mean" when they do so efficiently. At the same time, there's this little thing called good sportsmanship which has been pretty well established in real world competitive activities, and I see no reason why it applies any less online. So, just because someone is competing against you in something that actually IS a game on the internet, doesn't mean that when you communicate with them within the context of the game (but "out of character", if such a concept is relevant) you're free to be a dick, anymore than it's OK to shout demeaning insults at the other team in a real-world sport, or to gloat over your victory or throw a tantrum over your loss.
On the other hand, there is something to be said for people behaving differently in person and online. Someone may be more or less comfortable in one venue than in the other, and so censor certain parts of themselves where they're not comfortable expressing such traits. But then, that just gets back to what the person you're responding to was saying; some people reveal their "true personality" more online than they do in real life. If you might be inclined to be an asshole in person but don't feel that that's OK, so instead you're an asshole on the internet (which honestly I've never seen you be, here on Slashdot at least), then that means that somewhere in your "true personality", you're an asshole, and you just censor that in real life and let it out on the internet so it doesn't stay bottled up. Even if the actual personas you're adopting online are all fake and consciously so, just put on for the response that other people give
Freedom of religion and freedom of speech are as much socially-granted rights as fair use. (And happen to be damn good ones.) All three share the quality of being relatively new ideas in society, in the grand scheme of things. You might say we'd like to think that all three of these rights are vast improvements over how things used to work in historical times. I don't see the distinction you are trying to draw here at all.
By this line of reasoning, *all* rights are socially granted. And that's sort of correct, in one sense: the sense in which we in fact only enjoy the protections that our societies (mainly via their governments) afford us. But when people complain about their rights being neglected or violated by the government, they're certainly not claiming that the government is not affording them some protection that it affords them. That would be a plain contradiction. No, a right, properly construed in this sense (which I would consider the only proper sense), is some protection that *ought* to be afforded. So when people say that freedom of religion of freedom of speech are rights, they don't mean "people don't stop me from practicing my religion or speaking my mind", they mean "people ought not to stop me from practicing my religion or speaking my mind; if they were to do so, they would be doing something wrong".
So, if freedom of religion and speech are genuinely rights (as I'd say they are), then they are not historically recently developments that didn't exist until a little while ago; they are universal and eternal rights which have only recently been *recognized*. Compare the statement that "until early last century, space was absolute and Euclidean in nature, until Einstein made it curved and relative; but even back then, the Earth wasn't the center of the universe, and hadn't been for at least a few hundred years." Sounds absurd, right? The laws of physics didn't change - only our understanding of them did. Likewise, if something is ethically right or wrong, but people didn't recognize it as such until recently, that doesn't mean it only became right or wrong recently, just that we came to understand it to be right or wrong recently.
As this relates to copyright: Despite its name, exclusive copyright is not a right per se, but a restriction of other peoples rights (or, as the government is theoretically representative of the people and always acts by their consent *coughyeahright*, a voluntary waiver of those other peoples rights) to freedom of expression in limited circumstances (namely the repetition of expressions that others have made in a fixed medium) enacted for some ostensible social benefit. That is to say, copyright law restricts the right to copy (a subset of the right of expression, itself a subset of the general right to liberty) to a given party exclusively, "securing" that right to them alone, in the hopes that good things will come of this to all those who have lost/waived their right to copy. The right to fair use is in turn a subset of the right to copy (as it's the right to copy in certain circumstances) which is explicitly exempted from this restriction. Thus, "fair use" terminology in the law describes things which are explicitly recognized as still within your rights, as opposed to the broad category of copying in general which we have theoretically waived our rights to via our government.
To recap: - It is generally recognized that you have the right (i.e. you ought to be permitted) to do as you please, with some exceptions. - Not amongst those exceptions is the right to say what you please, which we thus retain, though that too has some exceptions. - Amongst those latter exceptions is the right to copy what you please, which we have theoretically waived, though again with some exceptions. - Amongst those exceptions is the right to copy what you please in certain limited ("fair use") circumstances, which we still retain.
Note again that is just what the law officially *recognizes* as our rights; that does not
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All your attitude will do is breed in the minds of your children the idea that might makes right, leading them in their adult lives to be subservient slaves to whoever holds any sort of power over them, and unaccountable dictators whenever they hold any sort of power over others. And yes, I would say that such descriptions fit most adults in most societies today (to varying degrees of course), and that that is precisely the root of the majority of sociological ills.
Alternatively, if your children are steadfast enough of mind to resist breaking under your threats and punishment, it could ingrain in them the idea that the world of full of malevolent assholes like you, a dog-eat-dog world where the only way to get by unscathed is to skillfully maneuver through social power hierarchies and amass as much control over other people as possible - in short, turning them into the very sociopaths you seem to fear them becoming. Or, if you and they both are lucky, they may recover from the psychological harm you inflict upon them once they move out on their own, and become fairly well-adjusted, independent individuals, though no doubt some sort of scarring will remain one way or another.
I'm not saying you can never say "no" to your kids. You don't have to give them everything they ask for; hell, you don't have to give them much of anything at all. You don't have to give them a computer period, or even let them use yours. All you have to give them is the same respect of rights you'd give any other person; which means that if you DO give them something (some property), it's theirs, and you should fuck off and not think they you can steal from them to punish them for doing things you don't approve of. Punish them for doing things that are genuinely wrong: stealing, hurting other people, that sort of thing. Beyond that, your only justified tool is education. Talk to them, reason with them, try to convince them that certain things are bad for them or impolite or what not, and if they don't listen, tough shit. Maybe you're wrong, maybe they're just stupid, either way the ball is in their court now, and even though they might go off and do some stupid shit, you violating their rights to try to deter them from that not only doesn't help anything, but is a worse offense than whatever they might do to "deserve" it.
2) That, as a matter of objective right, absolute, unqualified control of physical entities as property is a right
I'm not quite claiming this, though I will agree that my notion of property rights is very strong, but not absolute or unqualified. The limits, the qualifications, which I accept are precisely the ones that circumvent your claim that such a strong notion of private property rights contradicts itself: that whole "my right to swing my fist ends at your face" thing. Your 'absolute' control over your property extends only to the point that it affects other peoples' property. It is actually this exact limitation which makes private property, private property; the ability to exclude others from control. If everyone were to have merely the liberty right (that is to say, permission) to control their property however they saw fit, including affecting others' so-called property, then no one would have any claim rights to private property at all, for a claim right of one person just consists in others' obligations toward that person, and a prohibition is an obligation of a negation (an obligation to not do something), and permission is the negation of prohibition; so if everyone were permitted to do or not do anything, no one would be prohibited from doing or not doing anything, and equivalently no one would be obligated to do or not do anything, and no one would have any claim rights, i.e. no one would have any valid complaint that anyone was e.g. violating their private property.
So that is definitely not what I am claiming. I am claiming that people have permission to do whatever they want except things that they are forbidden from doing (that part's a simple tautology); that the only thing people are (ethically) forbidden from doing is acting upon another's property against the will of the property owner (counting the property owner's body as his own property, of course); and that the only things that can be property are actual, physical things, not intangible ideas, concepts, patterns, etc, which I hold do not actually "exist" in a proper ontological sense. As a logical consequence of this, people are forbidden from preventing me from dancing how I like, singing how I like, writing, drawing, or painting as I like, or directing my computer to to produce patterns of data on CDs and DVDs as I like, because those acts involve only my own property and others are not permitted to act upon that property against my will. As a consequence of THAT, enforcement of copyright law is ethically prohibited (though some damn piece of paper in Washington can say whatever it wants to), and so licenses hold no ethical weight, because they merely permit me to do, under certain conditions, things that I am already permitted to do under much broader conditions.
As a very tangental aside, you may think that this notion of private property makes me some kind of crazy extremist libertarian, but there are a lot of interesting logical consequences I've pulled out of this which run counter to the usual libertarian agenda. (In fact, most libertarians I've met seem to favor the notion of intellectual property rights, so I guess this is another one to add to the list).
1) If we generalize our premise "only things that exist (i.e. physical things) are property" to "ALL and only things that exist are property", then as private property is exclusive control of something, everything which is not private property, rather than being "unowned" as some would have it (being in a state such that no one has any claims rights to it, and thus anything goes), is public property, that is, something over which everyone has non-exclusive (i.e. inclusive) control. This allows for the validity of environmental control laws in terms other than "your smog is damaging my skyscraper" or "your toxic waste is corroding my yacht". People without such private property nevertheless have a claim to the public property that is the air and water, and thus have valid complaints directly about h
But of course, in order to use software it needs to be copied into RAM. This is the historical legal justification for software EULAs. You can't put a EULA on a lawnmower to tell people what lawns they can mow with it; the doctrine of First Sale prevents that. You can't put a license on a DVD or CD telling people how they may use it, either; only how they may copy it. It's only that particular quirk of software that to use it you must copy it which supposedly makes EULAs valid, and AFAIK (though IANAL) that theory has been invalidated on the grounds that copying from disk to RAM inside your own computer for the purposes of software is fair use and necessary for the product to be merchantable as advertised.
So fuck EULAs. Your computer is your property and if Microsoft does anything to it against your wishes they should be held criminally liable.
So what I am asserting is that the only things people have an ethical right to exclude others from control of are actual, physical things; that only physical things can legitimately be property, and any claim to "own" something that is not a physical thing is a legal or social fiction, and nobody has any genuine ethical obligations to respect their supposed claim rights to their intangible "property". For example, I assert that if someone comes up with a dance routine, they cannot legitimately "own" that dance as an abstract pattern of movements, in the sense that they have no real ethical right to use (or direct the use of) force to control who may or may not move their body in such a fashion. That dancer owns his own body; other dancers own their bodies and may direct their motion as they see fit provided they don't do so in a fashion that acts upon another person or their property in a way that that other person dislikes (i.e. "the right to swing my fist ends at your face").
That same exact line of reasoning applied to more traditional forms of "intellectual property" lead to their abandonment as well. I own my own mouth and lungs, I can sing any song I want. If I own a microphone and a CD burner, I can record whatever I want with them, and give or sell the recordings to whoever I damn well please. If I own a photocopier and a book I can use those two things to make more books with the same exact words in them, and give them away or sell them to whoever I damn well please. Same thing with videos and cameras. Or plug the output from the player straight into the recorder and make even better copies. Or do it all in a computer and make perfect copies, and transmit them over the internet to anyone who requests them, for free. It's all my own property, who are you to tell me what I can or cannot do with it, so long as I'm not hurting you or your property? Oh, you claim to "own" the abstract pattern of 1s and 0s that are encoded in my datastreams, and that means you can tell me what I can or can't do with my stuff, who I can or cannot give or say certain things to? Hah.
In short, the notion of intellectual property explicitly contradicts the notion of physical property; and I think it's pretty clear the physical property is the more elementary of the two, so intellectual property has to go.
Does that make it worth all the hype? Well, probably not. But I've never really run into another shooter that plays quite like it (aside from Marathon, naturally...) Being an old-school Bungie fan myself (creator of the Eternal mod for Marathon, current admin of one of the two still-active Marathon forums, and former head honcho of the Myth section of Bungie.org), I was initially uber-hyped about Halo. Finally, Bungie was coming out with Marathon's spiritual successor (if not outright sequel), and they were gonna make the big time with a major hit game, simultaneously released on both Mac and Windows like the Myth games had been... ooh boy that was gonna be great!
Then the MS buyout happened. Halo became an Xbox title; the PC version took second fiddle, the Mac version more like seventh fiddle. I've never been much of a console gamer, and NEVER been a fan of Microsoft. So I pretty much gave up on Bungie. But, a friend of mine bought me an Xbox and Halo for my birthday, so I gave it a shot, had a good bit of fun. It's a nice game, feels a lot like a modern, polished version of Marathon, which is exactly what I had always wanted (though getting used to the console controls was a bit of a trick at first). Like you say, Marathon and Halo play VERY differently than other FPSs, and I've never much been into other FPSs for that reason. In Bungie games you move slower and, to me it seems, much more realistically. It's a much more relaxing, flowing feel to the combat, less hyperactive twitch reflex. (Obi-wan's "a more elegant weapon for a more civilized age" feels somehow appropriate here). It also has coop, which has always been my favorite gametype; combines the social interaction and teamwork of a multiplayer game with the progressive, task-oriented nature of single player games, with a bit of the ol' Legolas & Gimli kill-count competition going on. So to me, Halo was the best FPS yet, and I actually went out and bought Halo 2 with my own money (the game I've bought for the Xbox that was given to me) and enjoyed it even more, especially coop on Legendary. And now I plan to buy Halo 3, though I'll only be playing it on my friend's 360. Seems a fitting way to end my involvement with Bungie, and I want to see how the series ends.
But, imagine my surprise when I looked about in the general gaming chatter online, especially here on Slashdot, and find out that apparently the only people who like Halo are dumbass pothead jocks and frat boys who masturbate with Microsoft brand hand lotion while shoving giant vibrating Xbox controllers up each others asses. Or at least, that's the impression you'd get listening to all the shit that people talk about it on the Internet. Certainly a surprise to me, the intellectual geek who spent much of high school pouring over mythological and literary references hidden away in Marathon terminals.
No, Halo is not the be-all end-all of all video games. But it's not utter shit either. I particularly hate the criticism that it's "old hat" and offers nothing new in terms of gameplay, especially in comparison to mainsteam PC games, which I spent many years looking down upon for lagging in relation to Marathon. (Wow, that new game has a story? Friendly NPCs? Dual wielded and dual function weapons? Cooperative play? Yawn. Welcome to 1994). When the latest sci-fi movie comes out, do you say "oh bah, I've seen a sci-fi movie before, show me something new"? No? So why can't a new game just be a newer, more polished version of the same sort of game that you liked before, with some new settings to explore, some new characters to meet, and some new situations to be resolved?
It's the logical conclusion of the line of reasoning that consuming something that was produced in a criminal act makes you a criminal. If it doesn't apply to the other two examples I gave, it shouldn't apply to people looking at kiddy porn.
People who dump toxic wastes are criminals. People who employ slave labor are criminals. People who rape kids are criminals.
People who buy or otherwise consume things made by such criminals in the act of their crime are not - or at least, should not be considered - criminals. They may not be of the highest moral fiber, being that it's good, though not obligatory, to boycott producers who do bad things to produce their wares; but that doesn't mean they deserve jail time.
That may be true in a complete abstract notion, but it is not true in a legal sense. Patents, copyrights, trade secrets are intellectual property by definition.
I wasn't speaking of the law, but of facts, and of ethics. Even so, though IANAL, I'm pretty sure there's not actually any such legal concept as "intellectual property" either. There are laws restricting people from using certain information in certain ways unless they have special legal status in relation to that information - copyrights, patents, and trademarks - but AFAIK even according to the law you don't actually "own" anything (besides whatever physical thing you have the information recorded in). This is the basis of the whole "copyright infringement is not theft" that you hear in RIAA/MPAA threads here. You can't own information, so it can't be stolen; but you can have a government-granted monopoly on the duplication of that information, and that can be violated.
This is only true in a vacuum, If I write code that runs on Windows and Linux and t is designed to make interoperability possible within an application sphere, and microsoft takes my code, changes it (and keeps the changes private) so that it no longer functions with my original code, and then using their monopoly position and forces vendors to remove old APIs I used. Microsoft has effectively removed my ability to use my code. This happens all the time and GPL is a good protection of my freedom and the freedom of users to use my code.
While that is a crappy situation, it in no way removes your ability to use your code - it merely hinders the popularity of your code. If MS co-opts your API and puts out their own bastardized version that becomes hugely popular due to their power over OEMs and their giant marketing machine, while that sucks, all it's done is overshadow your API. You, and everyone else, are perfectly free to make use of your API just like they were before - only difference now is that the masses who are swayed by whatever MS does will ignore you and use MS's solution. And while that sucks, it's little different than any other case where a little guy gets overshadowed by someone more popular. No ones rights are being violated there.
Further, MS would not have their monopoly power, particularly their power over OEMs, in an "IP"-free world, because people would not be buying copies of software and licenses to use it from MS, they'd be paying MS (if they even existed) for the service of writing some new code (or rather, for a copy of some code which does not yet currently exist, requiring MS to make it), and probably for maintenance and support of that software. Once the new code is written, the purchaser (such as an OEM) could make use of that code - duplicate it, distribute it, print it out and burn it - all they wanted. MS couldn't crush competitors with patent lawsuits either. The only reason anybody would standardize on MS more than any other option would be is MS software was particularly useful. Which puts you, if you're a brilliant and talented programmer yourself, in a good position to compete with them on merits. May the best code win.
This is almost accurate, and what I demand in return for access to my code is a simple and clean share and share alike. If you don't like it, don't use my code.
Again, I'm not speaking of legal but rather ethical rights and obligations, so your "accurate" comment is a little odd, unless you just mean to disagree about what is or is not ethical. I know full well that what I said is not what the law says. I'm explicitly disagreeing with the law here.
Even with that said, you seem to have misunderstood me. I was saying that, while you may (ethically) say "I will give you a copy of this code I wrote if you give me a copy of such-and-such other code (creating it first if need be)", which is a simple trade, you may not (ethically) say "here, have a copy of some software, and its source code. You may not make copies of this for anyone else unless you also g
What if I buy a car from a company that's been neglecting environmental regulations, dumping their wastes illegally or something? Am I a criminal then, too?
You are free to do with your copy of any code as you choose; and others are equally free to do whatever they please with copies that are given to them. Someone else making "unauthorized" copies of their copy does not at all restrict what you can do with your copy. You don't have to give them a copy in the first place, and you're free to require something from them in exchange for a copy (say, some other code from them); but once they have a copy of it, it is theirs to do with as they please, and once they've given *you* what *you* demanded in exchange for it, they don't have to give anyone anything they don't want to.
Despite whatever he might claim, Stallman is in no way an anarchist. In fact, the whole GPL vs BSD debate reminds me an awful lot of early Marxist vs Anarchist confrontations... the GPL being analogous to the Marxists, not the Anarchists...
A note on my use of the word "force" there. Yes, the GPL is not truly force in a proper sense, as though Stallman was holding a gun to someone's head and saying "release the code or die!" But GPL'd software copyright holders *are* witholding a license to do something that should not require a license in the first place, which seems to me to be a kind of force, or at least the condoning of the use of force.
Imagine a hypothetical police state where a license is required to walk outdoors, and you were for some reason in a position to grant such licenses, but you were only willing to grant them on the stipulation that the walker pick up your dry cleaning while she's out. Say it's an Islamic state where women are not allowed outdoor without permission from their husbands, and you're the husband. Now, you're not really FORCING her to pick up your dry cleaning, as you're not forcing her to walk outdoors; however, the state is forcibly restricting her from doing something she ought to be permitted to do, namely walk outdoors, and you're condoning that use of force (dare I say participating in it even) when you could put a stop to it, unless she does something you want her to, namely pick up your dry cleaning.
So-called "free" licenses like the GPL are perfectly analogous to this. The state is forcing people not to do something that by all rights they ought to be permitted to do: share information freely. But the copyright holder of a piece of information is in a position to stop that use of force by licensing people to use "their" information. The GPL says "oh by all means share this information freely... so long as you also share that information." The copyright holder is not FORCING you per se to share that other information; they're just relying on the existence of state force to put them into a bargaining position, whereby they will stop the use of force you would otherwise face for your actions, so long as you do something that they want you to.
I don't know about you, but I don't consider that sort of situation "free" in any way.
For some strange reason in the caffeine-deprived early hours of the morning, reading the summary made me thing:
"They may take our code, but they will never take... our FREEDOOOOOOOM!!!!!!!"
On a slightly more flamebait note, hearing RMS and his ilk rant on and on about protecting people's "freedoms" while they continue to make use of the inherently un-free institution of copyright protection (upon which the GPL rests) is really starting to remind me of the perverted sense of "freedom" that socialists use to describe their desired form of government. Yes, an authoritarian state that tries to look out for everyone's welfare is better than an authoritarian state that just caters to the aristocracy; but as it's still authoritarian, calling it "free" is just deceitful, regardless of how nice it might be. Likewise, using copyright to ensure that code is widely distributed and easily available is better than using copyright to keep it locked up and secret, but it's still not free.
If you truly want you code to be free, release it to the public domain.
Liberal parties are called Liberal parties in Commonwealth countries because capitalism was originally a liberal ideology, as opposed to the state-controlled merchantilist economies that preceded it. These were not socialist, but probably what you'd consider even more "capitalist"; government supporting particular large corporations for the purposes of consolidating power in the hands of the ruling elite of the nation in question. Free market capitalism arose as a part of the general liberal movement against government authority; that sort of pro-market attitude which was classically called liberalism is today also known as (surprise) "classical liberalism" or, in the United States, libertarianism. Newer movements have since co-opted the name "liberal" for themselves, despite promoting often illiberal agendas, and labeled the older liberal movement (accurately) "conservative"; though in the US at least, large portions of those classically liberal conservatives have somehow become entangled with the sort of authoritarian conservatives that the original liberalism was rebelling against.
Liberal and Conservative are not antonyms. "Liberal" just means in favor of liberty, and its antonym is "authoritarian". "Conservative" just means in favor of the status quo, and its antonym is "progressive". When liberal democracies first started arising out of the mire of medieval monarchies and aristocracies, the liberals were progressive, because the status quo was highly authoritarian, and so authoritarians were rightly called conservative. Thus the terms "liberal" and "conservative" functioned like antonyms for a time; but only because the liberals happened to be the new guys (the progressives) and the conservatives (the establishment) happened to be authoritarian.
Eventually the progressive liberals mostly won out, but the societies they built still weren't satisfactory for everyone (viz. the pitfalls of so-called "actually existing capitalism", as opposed to the peaceful, voluntarist, competitive free markets that classical liberal authors dreamt of). So new movements, mainly socialism, continued to push for further change, in many ways changing back away from liberal ideals to more authoritarian ones, just intending to use that authority more benevolently. But the terminology didn't keep up with that. The people pushing for more authority (to be used benevolently) still call themselves "liberals". Further confusing the issue is that in addition to the liberals who are now conservative in comparison to socialists, there are still also the old elitist authoritarians who are even more conservative - though I guess a more apt term for them would be "regressive", as they want to change many things back to how they used to be long ago. Still adding further confusion to the issue, in America at least, is that the "progressive" socialists and the "regressive" old conservatives have made enough headway by now that the people who originally called themselves "conservatives" (now more often called "libertarians"), wanting to keep this country liberal as it was founded, are now in many ways progressive, or even regressive; wanting to change things from the now-authoritarian status quo, back to the liberal way things used to be. And all of this hides the issue that both libertarians and authoritarians can be subdivided on the issue of egalitarianism (though the split between the old aristocratic authoritarians and the new socialist authoritarians hints at this).
I find that the simplest way to clear up all the confusion is to stop all the talk about progressive or conservative, as those terms are entirely time-relative and imply different things now than they did a hundred years ago, and have even less in common with what they implied two or three hundred years ago, even though the words literally *mean* the same thing in all those times (i.e. someone who is in fact [not self-labeled] conservative now holds an ideology very different from someone who was in fact conservative 100 years ago, because the status quo now is very
In any society, not only the US, not even only democracies, the people get the government that the majority believes in. Even an absolute monarch has his power for the exact same reason that the US Constitution has its power: because enough people believe him to be the supreme law of the land. If people, as was often an issue in medieval Europe, believe the preaching of the Church to be the supreme law of the land, then the monarch's power is no longer absolute, and the Pope becomes the new high ruler (well, God does, with the Pope as his mouthpiece on Earth). Likewise, if enough people believe, or at least do not dispute, that the President may act beyond or even against the principles laid out in the Constitution, then the constitution loses power, and the President becomes our new King, regardless of what any words on paper may say.
Of course, none of this is to say that the majority is always RIGHT. In fact I'd suspect that they are most often wrong.* But right or wrong, the majority always wins: the government will have the powers that the majority believe it should have, and it will get away with whatever the majority will tolerate, and this will happen regardless of the official story society tells itself about what sort of government it has.
* (Rousseau had an interesting [and mathematically valid, though perhaps not sound] statistical argument that, assuming that the average person is at least slightly more likely to be right on an issue than wrong, then the larger the group you involve in the decision on that issue, the more likely it is that the group's decision will be correct. I'm fond of the observation that if you reverse that assumption**, and hold that the average person is even slightly less than 50% likely to be right, then the larger the group you ask, the higher the odds of that group being wrong, i.e. large groups of people are collectively stupider than any individual member).
** (Of course, which assumption you run with probably depends on whether or not you usually agree or disagree with the average person, i.e. whether or not you're a member of the majority yourself. If you are, you'll think the average person is more likely to be right than wrong, and this line of reasoning will simply confirm your opinion that the popular opinion is usually the right opinion; and if you're not a member of the majority, you'll probably hold the average person to be more likely wrong than right, so this argument will merely confirm for you that the ignorant masses are a bunch of dumbfucks).
However, these two issues become entangled with copyright-like terms of contract, because - without going on the long tangent into my rather novel theory of the ethics of contracts, which would also invalidate such contracts - the doctrine of First Sale, which is pretty well established in America at least, basically says (as I understand it) that you cannot use contracts to prohibit people from doing with their property as is otherwise legal. I cannot sell someone a lawnmower and stipulate what sorts of laws they may mow with it (though I can agree to only provide free service for lawnmowers which have not been used to mow certain sorts of laws, i.e. mowing the wrong lawn may void the warranty). So, by that reasoning you couldn't stipulate what people may do with the CDs in your yard or the files on your server once they have been given away; either that whole contract was invalid and they never had permission to enter your yard or access your server in the first place (in which case the crime is trespassing, or whatever the cyberspace equivalent is called, but not breach of contract); or, only those particular terms of it are invalid, and you just gave them a free CD with code on it (or a free download from your server) with which they can do whatever they please. Or could, if it weren't for copyright law, that is.
Freedom of expression applies to views and opinions, not on this case, because I have the right of property.
Freedom of expression is nothing but a subset of the fundamental right to liberty; I can say, write, print whatever I damn well please (those things being mere actions like any other, e.g. twiddling my thumbs or jumping rope) so long as I'm not infringing someone else's rights. (Copyright law supposedly creates such rights, if actual rights can really be created by government fiat like that, which I would dispute). Freedom of expression is in no way limited to "views and opinions"; it is my right to walk around singing "la dee da da" as much as it is my right to say George Bush sucks or that global warming is caused by decline in pirate populations. Unless, of course, "la dee da da" is copyrighted or trademarked, and such laws are actually worth the paper they're printed on.
And my claim follows directly from the notion of property rights. There is no such thing as "intellectual property", even in the law; the only things that can be property are real, physical things. (All other "property", e.g. copyright, spectrum leases, etc, are nothing but legal privledges; there is no thing that you actually own in such cases). So if you write some code, you have every right not to distribute it; that is, you don't have to expend the effort (however little these days) to produce a copy of the code, and even if you do, you own that copy and are under no obligation to give it to anyone else. However, once you give someone that copy - give them an object with that code on it, or transmit a signal encoding it to them - then it is now THEIR property and they may do whatever they please with it (including copying it, selling it, or giving it away), you have no right to tell them otherwise. No moral rights, that is; the law of course says otherwise.
Democracy is not at risk when you can't steal my code.
I'm concerned with liberty, not necessarily democracy. The two are not the same thing, and they can conflict; as in this case, where a (theoreticcally) democratically-elected government has passed laws infringing on peoples' liberty.
Further, making unauthorized copies of code you originally wrote isn't stealing anything from you. You still have your copies of the code, and even if someone were to start selling binary-only copies of it and not giving you a dime of the proceeds, you can still sell your copies too, or give them away for free; so if, like most FOSS projects, you're not actually charging money for your code, then people have no reason to buy it from the commercial vendor rather than download it free from you, and so suckers are merely being parted from their money. It sucks for the suckers, but that's the fault of their own ignorance, and it's not doing you any harm. Your code isn't any less free just because someone is only distributing compiled versions of it. It would only be less free if they somehow tried to prevent you or other people from distributing copies of the code.
But FOSS is not against copyright, in fact, there can't be FOSS without copyright, because without it FOSS would be eaten alive by stinking asses like those from showmypc.
I agree that FOSS (if by that you mean the GPL, as BSD-style licenses are quite different) is not against copyright, but rather relies on it; and that is my only complaint against it. A GPL license is better than a proprietary license, because it obliges people to do something good rather than prohibiting them from doing something harmless; and to that extent the GPL is a good thing. But it is still a license, and as such relies on the idea that people are de-facto prohibited from promulgating certain bits of information unless they are specifically licensed to do so, which means that despite whatever amount of good it might promote, it is doing so by unjust means. The only truly free license is a public domain license.
Before, I go, a question for you:
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What gives you the right to tell someone to whom they can or cannot communicate some information they received from you?
If I teach you how to do something, is it fair, or right, for me to require that you offer to teach that skill to anyone you practice that skill for, or else you lose the right to practice that? If build a chair for you, and teach you how to build chairs like that, can I stipulate that any time you build a chair like that for someone you MUST offer to teach them how, or I'll sue?
GPL is just another form of copyright, and like all copyright it is an affront to the essential right to freedom of expression. If you don't want someone to make use of your code unless they're willing to share theirs, don't distribute your code except to people who've agreed to that.
I know I'm a jerk.
I just try not to be as much as possible, and don't use the internet as an excuse.
Online negativity is less bad than in-person physical violence; so to the extent that those are the only two options, choosing the former over the latter "serves a valuable social function" as you say, i.e. it's a good thing.
But those aren't necessarily the only two options. Being rude online is still bad, it's just better than punching someone in the face. Better still would be doing neither.
As to the comparison with loss of rights etc, I didn't at all mean to compare them in importance or magnitude; that was just an example of something which is clearly true and bad, to clearly distinguish that just being true doesn't make something not bad. (i.e. "well that's the way things are" is no real excuse). On the scale of bad things, being rude on the internet is way down by the bottom, and I'm not tremendously concerned about it; at most I'm mildly annoyed sometimes. I just don't think "it's the internet" is an excuse for anything. Being rude is bad, online or not. It's not *very* bad either way, but it's still a little bad regardless of whether it's done via the internet or not.
Also, the people eroding our rights (and allowing others to do so) do so under the banner of "sacrificing our liberty is a better alternative that being killed by terrorists!", and so argue that it does in fact serve a social function. Which might or might not be the case, but even if it is, it ignores the possibility of NEITHER being killed by terrorists NOR sacrificing our liberties, which may be an option. Sacrificing our liberties may be better than being killed by terrorists (and lets grant for the sake of a argument that it is), but that does not make sacrificing our liberties not bad at all; it's just the least bad of two options. If those are really our only two options, then it's the best choice available. But do we really have no other options? Will we really all be doomed to be killed by terrorists if we don't sacrifice our liberties? A lot of people don't think that's so, and I'm inclined to agree with them.
Likewise, in the (far less important) case of being a jerk on the internet, if the only way you can refrain from punching people in the face is to be a jerk on the internet, then please, be a jerk on the internet. (And again, I'm not saying that you are). But if you can somehow refrain from punching people in the face AND refrain from being a jerk on the internet, then that would be even better. So, would you really start uncontrollably hurting people in person if you refrained from being an internet troll? I don't really know you well enough to say, but somehow I doubt it.
Oh, I'm not at all disputing that it *will* become that. It's already that. I'm talking only about whether or not that's acceptable.
Likewise, I fully expect that politics will continue to become more corrupt and that peoples rights will be further eroded as government power expands. But I don't just say "oh well that's politics for you, that's what it's for" and dismiss it like it's OK. I don't pretend there's much I can do about it, but that doesn't mean I accept it.
Same thing with assholes on the internet. What can I do about it? Not much. That doesn't make it right.
Saying that bad things are true (i.e. that bad things do in fact happen), or that they're destined to get worse, does not make them suddenly not bad. "Good" and "true" are completely orthogonal concepts.
yes, they really believed that
what is tv really? Not a two-way communications medium, for one thing. TV is in a completely different category from phones, mail, and the internet. It's not possible be an asshole to someone over the TV; though you can show, on TV, someone being an asshole, it lacks that person-to-person link that makes it possible to really say dickish things to someone (rather than merely about someone) on TV. when they invented the internet, they thought it would be a place for great minds to engage in a grand philosopher's lounge
instead, we have "i can has cheezeburger?" lolcats I have no problem with lolcats, in fact I find them quite funny. As I said, I'm here mostly for fun; and when I hang out with friends in real life or online, I make all kinds of stupid, lewd and punny jokes, and laugh at the same from others. I don't mean to say that the internet is "serious business"; just that it is possible to be an asshole on the internet just like it is in real life, and no more acceptable than in real life either. (Of course, it's possible to do things to people IRL that you can't do online, things that physically affect people, and assholish things of that nature are far less acceptable than mere verbal assholishness anywhere). Within the confines of not being a dick, please, be as silly as possible, it's quite entertaining. in other words, the behavior you despise me for, says less about the despicability of my behavior, and more about your lack of adaptation about what the internet is really for:
asocial catharthis of rude obnoxious behavior, such that real life is more civil
the internet's true purpose will be to become a mental dumping ground of the most useless, negative, shocking, and sickening thoughts. because to dump it here is harmless "The Internet" doesn't have a purpose. There's not an objective to it, something it's supposed to be used for. It's just a means of communication; what you do over it is entirely up to you, with no special freedoms or responsibilities beyond those in any other form of communication. That's my entire point. We here on Slashdot often bemoan people patenting the same old thing "...on the Internet" like it's somehow special and new, but it's not. You can't do something mundane and tack "on the Internet" on it to make it special; and neither can you do something rude or offensive and say "jeez its just the internet" to make it all OK. Being online or off is completely irrelevant. this will make the real world a more sane, safe, nonviolent place
in other words, trollish behavior has a purpose after all. you just have to see the larger picture and give up on the idealism
I'm a huge internet troll, mainly because i know i couldn't get away that kind of behavior in the real world. my personality online and off are night and day. here i am loud angry and rude. in real life i am quite pleasant. for me, the internet represents catharsis: a mental taking out the trash that leaves me capable of not blowing my stack in the real world
in other words, my personality here is not only completely unlike my personality in real life, my personality here allows me to be someone else in real life. and i completely understand the boundaries
This attitude is precisely the reason I despise internet trolls. Not because of the whole signal-to-noise ratio thing; newbies posting stupid questions and other minor breaches of nettiquette accomplish roughly the same thing and I don't mind them at all. No, the reason I hate trolls is because they treat the internet like some kind of damned videogame and other people on it like NPCs at worst, other players to be "beaten" in the "game" at best. But despite the fact that you're accessing the internet through a keyboard and screen, it's not a damn game. And I don't mean that the internet should be a serious, demure place of pure business and scholarship either; I'm here to have fun more often than I'm here to do work. I just mean that the internet is less like baseball and more like a game of catch, less like the debate team and more like chatting in the living room with your friends. It's not a competition, you can't win at it, and so playing manipulative social games trying to get certain reactions out of certain people for fun (or "catharsis" as you say) is just as despicable as if you were to treat IRL conversations with your friends that way. (Granted, some people do the same thing in real life, and I'd consider them assholes too).
Do you assume a different persona and play social games when you converse over the phone? How about through postal mail, on the off chance that you actually write letters to people? Why is the internet any different? It's just another means of communication - one which, due to its breadth and efficiency, is if anything MORE like real life than the phone or mail.
The same thing applies to people who are dicks in the non-game aspects of online games, e.g. game chat. Yes, if you're playing a competitive game the objective is to blow up the other guy or what have you, and you shouldn't complain that people are being "mean" when they do so efficiently. At the same time, there's this little thing called good sportsmanship which has been pretty well established in real world competitive activities, and I see no reason why it applies any less online. So, just because someone is competing against you in something that actually IS a game on the internet, doesn't mean that when you communicate with them within the context of the game (but "out of character", if such a concept is relevant) you're free to be a dick, anymore than it's OK to shout demeaning insults at the other team in a real-world sport, or to gloat over your victory or throw a tantrum over your loss.
On the other hand, there is something to be said for people behaving differently in person and online. Someone may be more or less comfortable in one venue than in the other, and so censor certain parts of themselves where they're not comfortable expressing such traits. But then, that just gets back to what the person you're responding to was saying; some people reveal their "true personality" more online than they do in real life. If you might be inclined to be an asshole in person but don't feel that that's OK, so instead you're an asshole on the internet (which honestly I've never seen you be, here on Slashdot at least), then that means that somewhere in your "true personality", you're an asshole, and you just censor that in real life and let it out on the internet so it doesn't stay bottled up. Even if the actual personas you're adopting online are all fake and consciously so, just put on for the response that other people give
Freedom of religion and freedom of speech are as much socially-granted rights as fair use. (And happen to be damn good ones.) All three share the quality of being relatively new ideas in society, in the grand scheme of things. You might say we'd like to think that all three of these rights are vast improvements over how things used to work in historical times. I don't see the distinction you are trying to draw here at all.
By this line of reasoning, *all* rights are socially granted. And that's sort of correct, in one sense: the sense in which we in fact only enjoy the protections that our societies (mainly via their governments) afford us. But when people complain about their rights being neglected or violated by the government, they're certainly not claiming that the government is not affording them some protection that it affords them. That would be a plain contradiction. No, a right, properly construed in this sense (which I would consider the only proper sense), is some protection that *ought* to be afforded. So when people say that freedom of religion of freedom of speech are rights, they don't mean "people don't stop me from practicing my religion or speaking my mind", they mean "people ought not to stop me from practicing my religion or speaking my mind; if they were to do so, they would be doing something wrong".
So, if freedom of religion and speech are genuinely rights (as I'd say they are), then they are not historically recently developments that didn't exist until a little while ago; they are universal and eternal rights which have only recently been *recognized*. Compare the statement that "until early last century, space was absolute and Euclidean in nature, until Einstein made it curved and relative; but even back then, the Earth wasn't the center of the universe, and hadn't been for at least a few hundred years." Sounds absurd, right? The laws of physics didn't change - only our understanding of them did. Likewise, if something is ethically right or wrong, but people didn't recognize it as such until recently, that doesn't mean it only became right or wrong recently, just that we came to understand it to be right or wrong recently.
As this relates to copyright: Despite its name, exclusive copyright is not a right per se, but a restriction of other peoples rights (or, as the government is theoretically representative of the people and always acts by their consent *coughyeahright*, a voluntary waiver of those other peoples rights) to freedom of expression in limited circumstances (namely the repetition of expressions that others have made in a fixed medium) enacted for some ostensible social benefit. That is to say, copyright law restricts the right to copy (a subset of the right of expression, itself a subset of the general right to liberty) to a given party exclusively, "securing" that right to them alone, in the hopes that good things will come of this to all those who have lost/waived their right to copy. The right to fair use is in turn a subset of the right to copy (as it's the right to copy in certain circumstances) which is explicitly exempted from this restriction. Thus, "fair use" terminology in the law describes things which are explicitly recognized as still within your rights, as opposed to the broad category of copying in general which we have theoretically waived our rights to via our government.
To recap:
- It is generally recognized that you have the right (i.e. you ought to be permitted) to do as you please, with some exceptions.
- Not amongst those exceptions is the right to say what you please, which we thus retain, though that too has some exceptions.
- Amongst those latter exceptions is the right to copy what you please, which we have theoretically waived, though again with some exceptions.
- Amongst those exceptions is the right to copy what you please in certain limited ("fair use") circumstances, which we still retain.
Note again that is just what the law officially *recognizes* as our rights; that does not