I have two rebuttals to your main point (that money is made quickly).
First, I take a different philosophy from you. You say "It is foolish to design copyright policy around aberrations" as a reason why the exceptional cases of where a subject is viable shouldn't determine policy. I certainly understand where you are coming from, but at the same time I see the alternate approach, which would deny that author what I see as rightful income, as being unfair to the authors of those rare works. I don't want to punish them because other authors aren't as good. (This is an oversimplification, but I think a useful one.)
Second, even if I did take your approach, I think that a 3 year term would STILL be much too short. The reason is that I don't think what would happen is simply that the income after 3 years would mostly disappear; I think that the income IN the first 3 years would drop dramatically in most cases for the reasons I've said in my original post and a couple others.
They make the system unpredictable: author A could have a copyright that lasts fifty years, and author B could have a copyright that lasts one.
I don't see this as a big problem.
Actually I'd make a small modification, and say that even if the author dies in under 5 years it would still last that length.
I think the bigger problem would be that individual creations would last potentially a short time while corporate works would usually last their full term. That almost seems the opposite of how things should be, and might be enough of a reason for a fixed term.
(Another possible compromise between aspects combines a few ideas. Make terms relatively short, say 5-10 years, but renewable for the life of the author or for a set time for corporations. Make renewals require a small payment; few dollars. Or increase over time, though never over, say, $50 or $100.)
Software is instructions for your computer, much like a recipe is instructions for how to make food, instructions for your hands.
I could argue that books are nothing but instructions for your brain, just written in a machine language that is much, much richer than anything anyone has made for a computer.
It has long been held that, while you can copyright a book of recipes as a complete work, you can't actually hold copyright on the individual recipes themselves, as they constitute instructions on how to do something and NOT an actual creative work in and of themselves.
In my opinion, you're solving the discrepancy in the wrong direction; if anything, I think originial recipes SHOULD be subject to copyright.
I find the idea that computer software shouldn't be subject to something like copyright or patents absolutely untenable. I see no essential difference in the creative input required to write a piece of software and the creative input required to write, say, a novel. Read The Story of Mel; this story portrays him in a manner that would make his relation to software the same as Shakespeare's to literature.
Outside of that, there's just the fact that the same need that makes it necessary (IMO) to provide copyright protection to authors et. al. makes it necessary to provide protection to software. Without such protection, selling software becomes much harder. If current law DIDN'T provide protection for software, I'd say it should be changed.
I would argue that if software should fall under any law, it should be a new one... requiring full disclosure of what a peice fo software does to the consumer. That is, the source code. You should have the right to know, if you wish to know, what your computer is being told to do, and you should have the right to read it in a human intelligable form, and the right to change those instrucitons to fit your own needs.
Why?
If you're comparing software to recipes, food companies aren't required to include recipes on their packages; only ingredients, nutrition facts, etc.
I would favor a law that required disclosure of some aspects of what a program does, such as what network connections it initiates, what information is gathered, etc., but I don't think full disclosure of source code is at all appropriate. That's forcing a company to give away a trade secret.
It would be absurd to think that there should be a law against adding more sugar to your cake recipe, why do we not think it is absurd to do the moral equivalnet to the software recipe that someone has sold us?
Here I am in agreement. I do think that modifications to software should be allowed. (Distribution should be out unless you give up your copy in the first place.) I'm opposed to the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA for example.
That said, I don't think that companies should be obligated to make it easy for you to do so (i.e. provide you with source).
Look how many people see movies in theatres and pay $25+ for 2 people to get a single viewing. They can wait 3 months and buy the DVD for $15 or rent it for $3 (a savings of 88%). Yet millions of people still go to the theatre for most movies, and 10's of millions go for big hits.
And how does that invalidate my point?
I didn't say that I would stop going to movies in theatres, just that I would stop buying DVDs. My rentals might go up too even for the movies that I am really impatient for.
The other reply to you has a good point. I think a lot of the reason people go to theatres instead of waiting for rentals isn't impatience* but rather the fact that most of the time watching movies in theatres is a lot more fun than watching them at home. It's an excuse to get out of the house. Not many people have 30' TVs. Not many people have a couple dozen speakers. Not many people have space for 100 other people in the house to watch movies with.
(*With the exception of strongly-awaited movies like LOTR, the Star Wars prequels, etc.)
2 or 3 years is a long time for movies. To put the timescale in perspective, in 2003, we had the release of LotR: Return of the King, Seabiscuit, Pirates of the Carribean, and Finding Nemo. To save $3 on a rental, you think people would have waited until later this year to seem the for free?
I don't think they would have waited $3 on a rental. I *DO* think they would have spent $3 on a rental instead of spending $20 on BUYING the DVD though. I would expect rentals would go up actually.
First, life is just too short for that kind of waiting, and second you're 3 years behind the pop culture and current events references; you lose a lot of the enjoyment of the movie. In 2008, when we're rid of Bush, do you really thing the "Shock and Awe" and "If you're not with me you're against me" type quotes from Anakin in Revenge of the Sith will be timely and funny?
Oh no, what a pity. Because, you know, EVERYONE goes to see Star Wars for the political commentary.
As I said before, I don't think that a short copyright period would prevent people from SEEING things, I just think it would diminish the quantity PURCHASED substantially.
I have 46 movies on DVD. 27 of those were released more than 3 years before I purchased them. Most of the remainder I would not have bought if I would have been able to get them for free (or at least MUCH cheaper) in a couple years. There are a few movies that were really good in there that are an exception, such as LOTR, but the loss from my pretty modest collection alone would have been a couple hundred dollars.
I think a 2 or 3 year copyright is rediculously short.
If I could freely get any song or movie (and you can be sure that people would post online mirrors of DVDs and CDs) in just 3 years, I don't know if I'd every buy another one during the time of protection.
The situation with software is different because there are (sometimes) actual productivity gains from newer versions. But you can bet that I wouldn't buy the latest copy of Visual Studio unless I was doing something in C# that needed generics (2003 works well enough), wouldn't buy Office, wouldn't buy Photoshop (not that I have it now), etc. With a 2-3 year span, that's barely the release cycle. You think you see compatibility problems now? Wait until software companies REALLY have to force you to upgrade.
I *really* don't think I'm in the minority here. I'm perhaps a bit more patient than some would be with regards to the movies and music, but stuff that's more than 3 years old are still big movers in stores.
The original copyright term was 14 yr, renewable once. I personally think that this is about as short as you should get, and I like the idea of protection for the life of the author or an equivalent term for companies.
Dvorak is what's known in the industry as a "Yellow Journalist". Which is to say that he publishes sensationalist articles designed to elicit a reaction in his readership, despite having little to no facts to support his position.
Wait, I thought that (for the most part) was just "journalism" today.
Er...uh...well...maybe, because we're not, and the OP never said we should be. The OP was only listing his own preferred newsclient, and not insisting that anybody else in the world use it
No, the OP was disputing the statement that users would be unwilling to use a command-line mail client.
You know, that's a bunch of bull... users are capable of doing it if they weren't ignorant. 10 years ago when GUI mail readers barely existed, I knew dozens of fellow students that would telnet into a UNIX box and read their mail with pine or elm (and later mutt) without any problem at all.
Okay, what YOU say is a bunch of bull. 10 years ago you would have used Mosaic to browse the web. Maybe Netscape 1. You would have been using a 150 mHz (tops) computer from a dial up modem.
You were perfectly capable of dealing with all that. I suspect that you were quite satisfied at the time.
And yet, I bet that you're not sitting in front of a decade old machine now.
So why should we be stuck with a CLI-based mail client just because people are capable of using it? I use mutt from time to time (mostly to send mail, rarely to recieve), and I wouldn't at all trade Thunderbird or any modern client for it.
This is true. I think the calculations the controllers were checking were just additions of constant figures. (I think they were attitude conversions between command module and LEM orientations.) If so, you really wouldn't have wanted to use a slide rule. Depending on the kind you had, it might even be not possible.
I think Howard and/or Lovell commented on this on the DVD commentary, and said that it was to show what these people had to work with at the time. No doubt other calculations that were less visible but that still contributed to their return were done on slide rules.
Not necessarily. Under the commonly used system in the US, most punctuation goes inside quotation marks. However, in other countries this isn't the case, and it works "right", with the punctuation outside.
Okay, so that means someone at/. thinks it's funny. However, it DOESN'T mean that the author of the page takes it as a joke, and doesn't mean that people won't think that there are good arguments on it. It's perfectly reasonable to criticize it.
Re:It's the longest (in length)
on
Global Flyer Part 2
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"Longest" can also very easily mean in time. You always hear people talking about how "long" movies are, that someone's been around a company "longer" than another person, etc.
While 3rd world countries are missing from the WIPO signatories, so is most of Europe. Other countries like Brazil are also missing, despite providing copyright protection for software. Other countries, like Bangladesh, provide some protection. (In the case of Bangladesh, non-profit copying is not forbidden.)
And in case you like stats, about 22% of the Earth's population (1.415 billion) lives in one of the 58 countries that are party to the 1996 WIPO treaty. Add in a few other countries (such as most of the EU) that have similar laws and you're at 2.208 billion, over 34%. (And that would probably go up by another few hundred million if I had the patience and drive to continue investigating. I'm also not counting countries where laws provide "weak" protection, like Bangladesh.)
And India appears to have pretty strict copyright laws for software, so add another 1 billion to the total. That brings the number of people who live in a country where software copyright infringement is illegal to about 3.2 billion, or about half the Earth's population. (Remember, add more in there for the countries I didn't investigate.)
And, of course, having laws on the books forbidding piracy is a far cry from actually enforcing them, or not having a piracy problem.
Hyperbolic terms like piracy are a recent invention of holders of copyright, particularly for music or film, in order to deceive the public into a particular, and warped, line of thought.
No, they're NOT! Did you even read my post?
"Some dishonest Booksellers, called Land-Pirats, who make it their practise to steal Impressions of other mens Copies." -1668
"They..would suffer by this act of piracy, since it was likely to prove a very bad edition." -1771
"These Miscreants are a Set of Wretches we Authors call Pirates, who print any Book,..a soon as it appears.., in a smaller Volume, and sell it (as all other Thieves do stolen Goods) at a cheaper Rate." -1709
"He is charged with 'Literary Piracy', and an 'unprincipled suppression of the source from whence he drew his information'." -1808
The oldest use is over 300 years ago! How is that recent?
That was the point I was trying to make to the parent, of the other post I created. It appears that you also missed a comma in the above quote, I took the liberty of adding it.
I'm not 100% sure of this, but I think that a comma there is improper. At the very least there's no reason why it should be required.
The use of "piracy" in the context of copyright infringement is well established. In fact, this meaning has been around for about half the life of the word itself. The OED has dates to 1552 for pirate meaning the Blackbeard type and 1771 for copyright infringement. If you look at Pirate, the dates are 1387 and 1668 respectively -- there the latter definition has been around for almost 30 years MORE than the life of the word.
Saying that "piracy" isn't an appropriate term is complete bull, to the point of being an even more propagandaish argument than the RIAA et. al. using "steal" or "theft" in its place.
In most countries copying software is not a crime.
Source?
Near as I can tell, even if this isn't true, well over half the population of the world is in a country that provides software copyright protection. The distinction grows even more if you count the number of people with access to computers.
I for one am not thrilled about this. I assume this will be enabled by default, which opens the question of security.
Why do you assume this?
Microsoft takes a lot of flac for security things. They deserve a lot of it. But even MS is learning not to leave things open by default. Remember the whole RPC vulnerability? IIRC they turned that off by default in SP2.
Even in the first release of XP you had to explicily allow remote desktop connections, and had to okay all of the remote support requests. I don't remember any RD vulnerabilities.
If it is, how do me and my friend exchange keys and passwords? If we just use symmetric algorithms, anyone could get the file by over hearing me tell my friend the password. If it uses Asymmetric ones, how do we exchange keys
Via any of the methods that you EVER use to exchange keys.
For instance, use Diffie-Hellman to set up a symmetric key. Won't provide authentication so you're subject to a man-in-the-middle attack, but if you have reason to believe that you're in wireless range you might be able to get away without.
You have to compare not to the non-discounted price at the same store, but to the normal price at a non-shopping club store
With rebates often it works out that the rebates are cheaper though. I've seen some rebated stuff at stores that are far cheaper than any online price. They tend to be small things (a spindle of CD-Rs or similar), but occasionally you see a jackpot. I saw a 120 GB hard drive for I think around $50. Pricewatch puts a similar drive at $55. A similar drive from Segate (which was the sale item) is $67. The cheapest such item that has "retail" in the description is $98. Rebates on a 19" LCD put the price on par with online. (Both of these were during the discounts shortly after Christmas.) In both cases you don't have to worry about the product getting damaged in shipment, waiting for it to arrive, giving out CC number over the internet, etc.
Club cards are only useful if you can't chose to shop elsewhere.
Which often is the case. There are I think four places to do grocery shopping around here: Giant, Weis, Wegman's, and Wal-Mart. The first three are all shoppers' club stores, and there's no way I'd do more shopping at Wal-Mart than I have to.
(And I'd argue that it's right. Though, it might be better to make the civil and criminal trial simultaneous. Have two juries, one to decide each case. I don't know of MUCH difference in the rules of evidence, so I'd guess that when they do differ they could seclude the jury that shouldn't see the evidence.)
But they are also all rules that we (normal people, corps, private institutions, etc) have to abide by. It's everyone. If you're here, you're bound by these.
That depends how you look at it. I agree with you to the extent that Amendment I for instance says that everyone has to abide by the rule that Congress can't pass a law abridging freedom of speech. Now, most of us don't really have direct control (there are only 536 people who do, plus state governments which we'll convieniently ignore), but we have to abide by the rules.
Think about it. OF COURSE a corporation isn't bound by freedom of speech. Publications can choose what they publish, and have almost free reign of their choices. If a right-wing publication decides to only include letters supporting their position, that's the editors' choice. Same with a left-wing publication. There's no "you didn't publish my letter, that's an abridgement of freedom of speech" tort.
Now, all that said, the point is somewhat moot. We're talking about the RIAA suing people who have no commitment to them except through law, so if people are within their free speech rights, the RIAA can't do anything about it.
In other news, you can be legally innocent of a crime but still, somehow, civilly liable for it.
Wait, this is news?
Unless I'm misunderstanding you, this has been the status quo for *centuries*. There are TONS of things that you can be civilly liable for that aren't a crime. Going down a list of torts in a West book and picking out a few, abuse of process, libel/slander, intentional infliction of emotional distress, interference with contract relations, malicious prosecution, negligence, nuisance, breach of warranty, and contract disputes (which aren't torts)! In addition, there are several torts that have criminal counterparts -- assault, battery, wrongful death, false imprisionment, etc. -- and since they are civil actions, the burden of proof is much lower.
Slashdot Mirror
I have two rebuttals to your main point (that money is made quickly).
First, I take a different philosophy from you. You say "It is foolish to design copyright policy around aberrations" as a reason why the exceptional cases of where a subject is viable shouldn't determine policy. I certainly understand where you are coming from, but at the same time I see the alternate approach, which would deny that author what I see as rightful income, as being unfair to the authors of those rare works. I don't want to punish them because other authors aren't as good. (This is an oversimplification, but I think a useful one.)
Second, even if I did take your approach, I think that a 3 year term would STILL be much too short. The reason is that I don't think what would happen is simply that the income after 3 years would mostly disappear; I think that the income IN the first 3 years would drop dramatically in most cases for the reasons I've said in my original post and a couple others.
They make the system unpredictable: author A could have a copyright that lasts fifty years, and author B could have a copyright that lasts one.
I don't see this as a big problem.
Actually I'd make a small modification, and say that even if the author dies in under 5 years it would still last that length.
I think the bigger problem would be that individual creations would last potentially a short time while corporate works would usually last their full term. That almost seems the opposite of how things should be, and might be enough of a reason for a fixed term.
(Another possible compromise between aspects combines a few ideas. Make terms relatively short, say 5-10 years, but renewable for the life of the author or for a set time for corporations. Make renewals require a small payment; few dollars. Or increase over time, though never over, say, $50 or $100.)
Software is instructions for your computer, much like a recipe is instructions for how to make food, instructions for your hands.
I could argue that books are nothing but instructions for your brain, just written in a machine language that is much, much richer than anything anyone has made for a computer.
It has long been held that, while you can copyright a book of recipes as a complete work, you can't actually hold copyright on the individual recipes themselves, as they constitute instructions on how to do something and NOT an actual creative work in and of themselves.
In my opinion, you're solving the discrepancy in the wrong direction; if anything, I think originial recipes SHOULD be subject to copyright.
I find the idea that computer software shouldn't be subject to something like copyright or patents absolutely untenable. I see no essential difference in the creative input required to write a piece of software and the creative input required to write, say, a novel. Read The Story of Mel; this story portrays him in a manner that would make his relation to software the same as Shakespeare's to literature.
Outside of that, there's just the fact that the same need that makes it necessary (IMO) to provide copyright protection to authors et. al. makes it necessary to provide protection to software. Without such protection, selling software becomes much harder. If current law DIDN'T provide protection for software, I'd say it should be changed.
I would argue that if software should fall under any law, it should be a new one... requiring full disclosure of what a peice fo software does to the consumer. That is, the source code. You should have the right to know, if you wish to know, what your computer is being told to do, and you should have the right to read it in a human intelligable form, and the right to change those instrucitons to fit your own needs.
Why?
If you're comparing software to recipes, food companies aren't required to include recipes on their packages; only ingredients, nutrition facts, etc.
I would favor a law that required disclosure of some aspects of what a program does, such as what network connections it initiates, what information is gathered, etc., but I don't think full disclosure of source code is at all appropriate. That's forcing a company to give away a trade secret.
It would be absurd to think that there should be a law against adding more sugar to your cake recipe, why do we not think it is absurd to do the moral equivalnet to the software recipe that someone has sold us?
Here I am in agreement. I do think that modifications to software should be allowed. (Distribution should be out unless you give up your copy in the first place.) I'm opposed to the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA for example.
That said, I don't think that companies should be obligated to make it easy for you to do so (i.e. provide you with source).
Look how many people see movies in theatres and pay $25+ for 2 people to get a single viewing. They can wait 3 months and buy the DVD for $15 or rent it for $3 (a savings of 88%). Yet millions of people still go to the theatre for most movies, and 10's of millions go for big hits.
And how does that invalidate my point?
I didn't say that I would stop going to movies in theatres, just that I would stop buying DVDs. My rentals might go up too even for the movies that I am really impatient for.
The other reply to you has a good point. I think a lot of the reason people go to theatres instead of waiting for rentals isn't impatience* but rather the fact that most of the time watching movies in theatres is a lot more fun than watching them at home. It's an excuse to get out of the house. Not many people have 30' TVs. Not many people have a couple dozen speakers. Not many people have space for 100 other people in the house to watch movies with.
(*With the exception of strongly-awaited movies like LOTR, the Star Wars prequels, etc.)
2 or 3 years is a long time for movies. To put the timescale in perspective, in 2003, we had the release of LotR: Return of the King, Seabiscuit, Pirates of the Carribean, and Finding Nemo. To save $3 on a rental, you think people would have waited until later this year to seem the for free?
I don't think they would have waited $3 on a rental. I *DO* think they would have spent $3 on a rental instead of spending $20 on BUYING the DVD though. I would expect rentals would go up actually.
First, life is just too short for that kind of waiting, and second you're 3 years behind the pop culture and current events references; you lose a lot of the enjoyment of the movie. In 2008, when we're rid of Bush, do you really thing the "Shock and Awe" and "If you're not with me you're against me" type quotes from Anakin in Revenge of the Sith will be timely and funny?
Oh no, what a pity. Because, you know, EVERYONE goes to see Star Wars for the political commentary.
As I said before, I don't think that a short copyright period would prevent people from SEEING things, I just think it would diminish the quantity PURCHASED substantially.
I have 46 movies on DVD. 27 of those were released more than 3 years before I purchased them. Most of the remainder I would not have bought if I would have been able to get them for free (or at least MUCH cheaper) in a couple years. There are a few movies that were really good in there that are an exception, such as LOTR, but the loss from my pretty modest collection alone would have been a couple hundred dollars.
I think a 2 or 3 year copyright is rediculously short.
If I could freely get any song or movie (and you can be sure that people would post online mirrors of DVDs and CDs) in just 3 years, I don't know if I'd every buy another one during the time of protection.
The situation with software is different because there are (sometimes) actual productivity gains from newer versions. But you can bet that I wouldn't buy the latest copy of Visual Studio unless I was doing something in C# that needed generics (2003 works well enough), wouldn't buy Office, wouldn't buy Photoshop (not that I have it now), etc. With a 2-3 year span, that's barely the release cycle. You think you see compatibility problems now? Wait until software companies REALLY have to force you to upgrade.
I *really* don't think I'm in the minority here. I'm perhaps a bit more patient than some would be with regards to the movies and music, but stuff that's more than 3 years old are still big movers in stores.
The original copyright term was 14 yr, renewable once. I personally think that this is about as short as you should get, and I like the idea of protection for the life of the author or an equivalent term for companies.
Dvorak is what's known in the industry as a "Yellow Journalist". Which is to say that he publishes sensationalist articles designed to elicit a reaction in his readership, despite having little to no facts to support his position.
Wait, I thought that (for the most part) was just "journalism" today.
Why include "yellow" if it's redundant?
Er...uh...well...maybe, because we're not, and the OP never said we should be. The OP was only listing his own preferred newsclient, and not insisting that anybody else in the world use it
No, the OP was disputing the statement that users would be unwilling to use a command-line mail client.
You know, that's a bunch of bull... users are capable of doing it if they weren't ignorant. 10 years ago when GUI mail readers barely existed, I knew dozens of fellow students that would telnet into a UNIX box and read their mail with pine or elm (and later mutt) without any problem at all.
Okay, what YOU say is a bunch of bull. 10 years ago you would have used Mosaic to browse the web. Maybe Netscape 1. You would have been using a 150 mHz (tops) computer from a dial up modem.
You were perfectly capable of dealing with all that. I suspect that you were quite satisfied at the time.
And yet, I bet that you're not sitting in front of a decade old machine now.
So why should we be stuck with a CLI-based mail client just because people are capable of using it? I use mutt from time to time (mostly to send mail, rarely to recieve), and I wouldn't at all trade Thunderbird or any modern client for it.
This is true. I think the calculations the controllers were checking were just additions of constant figures. (I think they were attitude conversions between command module and LEM orientations.) If so, you really wouldn't have wanted to use a slide rule. Depending on the kind you had, it might even be not possible.
I think Howard and/or Lovell commented on this on the DVD commentary, and said that it was to show what these people had to work with at the time. No doubt other calculations that were less visible but that still contributed to their return were done on slide rules.
Not necessarily. Under the commonly used system in the US, most punctuation goes inside quotation marks. However, in other countries this isn't the case, and it works "right", with the punctuation outside.
Okay, so that means someone at /. thinks it's funny. However, it DOESN'T mean that the author of the page takes it as a joke, and doesn't mean that people won't think that there are good arguments on it. It's perfectly reasonable to criticize it.
"Longest" can also very easily mean in time. You always hear people talking about how "long" movies are, that someone's been around a company "longer" than another person, etc.
The disambiguation was completely necessary.
Mod (-1, Skin-Crawling Inducing)
While 3rd world countries are missing from the WIPO signatories, so is most of Europe. Other countries like Brazil are also missing, despite providing copyright protection for software. Other countries, like Bangladesh, provide some protection. (In the case of Bangladesh, non-profit copying is not forbidden.)
And in case you like stats, about 22% of the Earth's population (1.415 billion) lives in one of the 58 countries that are party to the 1996 WIPO treaty. Add in a few other countries (such as most of the EU) that have similar laws and you're at 2.208 billion, over 34%. (And that would probably go up by another few hundred million if I had the patience and drive to continue investigating. I'm also not counting countries where laws provide "weak" protection, like Bangladesh.)
And India appears to have pretty strict copyright laws for software, so add another 1 billion to the total. That brings the number of people who live in a country where software copyright infringement is illegal to about 3.2 billion, or about half the Earth's population. (Remember, add more in there for the countries I didn't investigate.)
And, of course, having laws on the books forbidding piracy is a far cry from actually enforcing them, or not having a piracy problem.
Hyperbolic terms like piracy are a recent invention of holders of copyright, particularly for music or film, in order to deceive the public into a particular, and warped, line of thought.
No, they're NOT! Did you even read my post?
"Some dishonest Booksellers, called Land-Pirats, who make it their practise to steal Impressions of other mens Copies."
-1668
"They..would suffer by this act of piracy, since it was likely to prove a very bad edition."
-1771
"These Miscreants are a Set of Wretches we Authors call Pirates, who print any Book,..a soon as it appears.., in a smaller Volume, and sell it (as all other Thieves do stolen Goods) at a cheaper Rate."
-1709
"He is charged with 'Literary Piracy', and an 'unprincipled suppression of the source from whence he drew his information'."
-1808
The oldest use is over 300 years ago! How is that recent?
A couple other comma errors:
That was the point I was trying to make to the parent, of the other post I created.
A comma there is DEFINITELY improper; you should remove it.
It appears that you also missed a comma in the above quote, I took the liberty of adding it.
A comma there is also definitely improper. You should replace it with a semicolon or period, or add an "and" or other similar word after the comma.
That was the point I was trying to make to the parent, of the other post I created. It appears that you also missed a comma in the above quote, I took the liberty of adding it.
I'm not 100% sure of this, but I think that a comma there is improper. At the very least there's no reason why it should be required.
Yes. It wasn't a criminal offense back then. Copyright was strictly a civil issue, like patent infringement is today.
So if it's not a crime, it's not wrong? That seems to be your argument...
The use of "piracy" in the context of copyright infringement is well established. In fact, this meaning has been around for about half the life of the word itself. The OED has dates to 1552 for pirate meaning the Blackbeard type and 1771 for copyright infringement. If you look at Pirate, the dates are 1387 and 1668 respectively -- there the latter definition has been around for almost 30 years MORE than the life of the word.
Saying that "piracy" isn't an appropriate term is complete bull, to the point of being an even more propagandaish argument than the RIAA et. al. using "steal" or "theft" in its place.
In most countries copying software is not a crime.
Source?
Near as I can tell, even if this isn't true, well over half the population of the world is in a country that provides software copyright protection. The distinction grows even more if you count the number of people with access to computers.
Judging by this post, I think it's too late
I for one am not thrilled about this. I assume this will be enabled by default, which opens the question of security.
Why do you assume this?
Microsoft takes a lot of flac for security things. They deserve a lot of it. But even MS is learning not to leave things open by default. Remember the whole RPC vulnerability? IIRC they turned that off by default in SP2.
Even in the first release of XP you had to explicily allow remote desktop connections, and had to okay all of the remote support requests. I don't remember any RD vulnerabilities.
If it is, how do me and my friend exchange keys and passwords? If we just use symmetric algorithms, anyone could get the file by over hearing me tell my friend the password. If it uses Asymmetric ones, how do we exchange keys
Via any of the methods that you EVER use to exchange keys.
For instance, use Diffie-Hellman to set up a symmetric key. Won't provide authentication so you're subject to a man-in-the-middle attack, but if you have reason to believe that you're in wireless range you might be able to get away without.
I'm not saying this is necessarily the case, but one could say because they like making progress.
You have to compare not to the non-discounted price at the same store, but to the normal price at a non-shopping club store
With rebates often it works out that the rebates are cheaper though. I've seen some rebated stuff at stores that are far cheaper than any online price. They tend to be small things (a spindle of CD-Rs or similar), but occasionally you see a jackpot. I saw a 120 GB hard drive for I think around $50. Pricewatch puts a similar drive at $55. A similar drive from Segate (which was the sale item) is $67. The cheapest such item that has "retail" in the description is $98. Rebates on a 19" LCD put the price on par with online. (Both of these were during the discounts shortly after Christmas.) In both cases you don't have to worry about the product getting damaged in shipment, waiting for it to arrive, giving out CC number over the internet, etc.
Club cards are only useful if you can't chose to shop elsewhere.
Which often is the case. There are I think four places to do grocery shopping around here: Giant, Weis, Wegman's, and Wal-Mart. The first three are all shoppers' club stores, and there's no way I'd do more shopping at Wal-Mart than I have to.
Ah. Still, I would bet that that's nothing new.
(And I'd argue that it's right. Though, it might be better to make the civil and criminal trial simultaneous. Have two juries, one to decide each case. I don't know of MUCH difference in the rules of evidence, so I'd guess that when they do differ they could seclude the jury that shouldn't see the evidence.)
But they are also all rules that we (normal people, corps, private institutions, etc) have to abide by. It's everyone. If you're here, you're bound by these.
That depends how you look at it. I agree with you to the extent that Amendment I for instance says that everyone has to abide by the rule that Congress can't pass a law abridging freedom of speech. Now, most of us don't really have direct control (there are only 536 people who do, plus state governments which we'll convieniently ignore), but we have to abide by the rules.
Think about it. OF COURSE a corporation isn't bound by freedom of speech. Publications can choose what they publish, and have almost free reign of their choices. If a right-wing publication decides to only include letters supporting their position, that's the editors' choice. Same with a left-wing publication. There's no "you didn't publish my letter, that's an abridgement of freedom of speech" tort.
Now, all that said, the point is somewhat moot. We're talking about the RIAA suing people who have no commitment to them except through law, so if people are within their free speech rights, the RIAA can't do anything about it.
In other news, you can be legally innocent of a crime but still, somehow, civilly liable for it.
Wait, this is news?
Unless I'm misunderstanding you, this has been the status quo for *centuries*. There are TONS of things that you can be civilly liable for that aren't a crime. Going down a list of torts in a West book and picking out a few, abuse of process, libel/slander, intentional infliction of emotional distress, interference with contract relations, malicious prosecution, negligence, nuisance, breach of warranty, and contract disputes (which aren't torts)! In addition, there are several torts that have criminal counterparts -- assault, battery, wrongful death, false imprisionment, etc. -- and since they are civil actions, the burden of proof is much lower.