I think I must be missing something in what you said -- your description of your "take" on copyright doesn't make much sense to me. "Whoever holds the original copyright can extend it by creating a derived work." So what are they copyrighting? The original work? The derived work? Both? You seem to be arguing that copyright should protect a set of works, and every time a creator puts another one into that set, the whole set is renewed. If this is what you mean, it seems to me that your stance is fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution's stance on copyright - "limited times," so that the public and newer creators can benefit as well as older creators.
If the original holder can continue to hold the copyright for a long period of time, no one else can create work based on the innovation of that work. This means that newer creators are limited in their material to draw from, and the public's access to the work is constrained by the restrictions that the creator wants to put on it.
The point of the original distribution monopoly is for a creator to have a reasonable amount of time to get the potential financial value out of a thing, making it easier to create because there's a potential financial reward. The ability to renew the copyright term once (which existed when the copyrights were 14 and then 28 years) is a helpful addition because if a work is still producing substantive value at the time of renewal, it has a large benefit for the creator at a fairly small detriment to the public.
But allowing the creator to keep the copyright forever by simply adding "derivative works" (note again that I'm working from what you seem to be saying, since I'm not sure what you're saying) keeps the public's access to work on the creator's terms. It works to the benefit of the copyright holders of old, lucrative copyrights at great expense to newer creators and the public -- something that the American copyright system was specifically NOT supposed to do.
I made a statement that's been construed to mean that I support immediate copyright expiration at death, which I don't.
Personally, if I were going to make a copyright system, I'd assign a copyright something like "remainder of author's life or thirty years, whichever is longer."
This covers the Tom Clancy situation and others like it, allows works created earlier to benefit the creator longer (this may or may not be fair, it just seems like a nice benefit for the creator if (s)he creates quickly), and keeps works from staying under copyright for ridiculous lengths of time. Right now, healthy 20-year-olds can create copyrighted works that will be under copyright for a good 130 years -- they'll live for a long time, and have the additional protection for nearly another person's lifespan. I don't think that having a (LIFE +) protection on copyrighted works is really enough of a benefit as it currently stands to justify the keeping of content out of the public domain for 130 years.
Having copyright for a fixed time is very different for having the monopoly for an indefinite time (life) plus a definite time (a number of years). Your argument supports fixed-length copyrights that allow the estate to benefit from copyrights created near the time of death, but it doesn't extend to justifying copyrights which have already produced most of their value long before the creator's death, but then persist afterwards.
Furthermore, I didn't make any argument about whether it's a bad thing for a person's estate to be provided for. I just said that providing them with the copyright (especially when the copyright is for a very long time, as it is at present) doesn't really serve the point of copyright. I may or may not be correct, but at least argue the point that I actually made, and not some other one.
You might want to remember that copyright terms were initially fixed (unrelated to the death of the creator) and quite short. I never suggested that all copyrights should be for the life of the author only, which is what you claim I suggested ("like taking away all the money somebody's made in the last 2-5 years prior to their death"). Additionally, that's a very poor argument, because something they create a year before they die may return 99% of all its potential economic value in a year. Copyright expiration at death (again, not something I support, just something you are arguing against) only has the potential to result in some loss in the cases that the copyrighted material matures in some particular timespan. Comparing it to the removal of money already made is completely misleading.
Intellectual property is not like real property. It is a monopoly on distribution secured for limited times. Intellectual property is not "being inherited" when the copyright persists after death.
Why is the monopoly granted? To promote the progress of science and useful arts. No promotion of science and useful arts would seem to result from a person who didn't create any progress in the first place controlling a copyright on someone else's work.
Thus, I don't see how the extension of copyright after its holder's death as belonging to the original intent of the distribution monopoly.
So the only reason we shouldn't support internet censorship of people we disagree with is that it's dumb and ineffective?
People should be able to read what they want, and they ought to have the right to present their views on a website.
Regardless of the fact that they and the ETA may have vaguely the same ultimate goal, Batasuna appears to be a party that believes in Basque independence, and not a terrorist organization itself. There is no reason to extend any issues with the ETA to them. At risk of making a controversial analogy, it's like lumping together people who are against abortion and people who kill abortion doctors.
I don't know what the Spanish government should do about the ETA, but I'm pretty sure that what they do shouldn't have anything to do with the legitimate desires of others in the Basque province to get their message out.
I believe you may be incorrect about the tickets being available at the same price. Southwest.com runs "internet specials" that are often cheaper than ordinary price. There may be other ways to get them, but it's certainly not as easy.
From the review:
All distros should come multimedia-ready, with everything configured to work right out of the box, with no extra downloading.
All of them? Even server-configuration distros? Even distros whose whole point is a minimal install?
Pretty silly reviewers.
You can set up a Linux system so that ordinary users can mount a CD-ROM. If Lindows is already set up to do so much autodetection, presumably it knows how to set permissions on drives so that they can be mounted by users.
Maybe it's not that easy to convince people that they need to have an additional protection before installing software, but I don't think it's out-of-reach difficult. Pop up a box during installation that explains that you need one password for every-day use, and one password for modifying your base sytem. Have people choose two passwords.
If people are always running as root, setting up multiple-user systems is going to be a mess, so this also avoids that problem. I think it would be a good investment of effort on Lindows' part.
I don't see the difference, except a nitpicky one of records, between amending a law so that the nasty parts of it are no longer in force and repealing it and passing a new law that says the same thing as the amended old law did.
Incidentally, the DMCA is not a law. It is the name of the act that became part of the law when it was passed. This isn't usually worth debating, but if you're being nitpicky about the repealing vs. amending, you ought to be nitpicky about acts or bills vs. laws.
It's extraordinarily easy to update Debian packages - you could have figured it out over the next three or four hours at most (not weeks) once it was installed, unless you had severe configuration problems. That's one of the cool things about Debian.
They are also working on getting sarge out on a shorter timespan than woody and working on a new installer (which I completely agree that they desperately need). So check back at some point.
The temperature of water drops drastically in five minutes, probably to close to the hot-but-not-dangerous temperature of 140 to 160 F. Haven't you ever burned your tongue on tea or coffee that five minutes later was only comfortably warm?
The question is less whether people will still get copies of music without paying for them and more of how many people will do it - whether it actually causes enough loss to make the selling less appealing. I don't think anyone really knows whether that would be the case or not. Even at current levels of "stealing" it's not particularly clear that it's ultimately harming.
A better capping method, which I think is technically feasible, is to start everyone at full speed, but gradually slow down the connection as they get to higher and higher levels of bandwidth usage.
This allows people who need to send a few large files around for projects or download large files from the web (e.g. Linux distro.iso files) to still be able to do that at full speed, but penalizes constant P2P users. Pretty reasonable.
It has nothing to do with rights. There is no such thing as "the right to make money," although lots of businesses would prefer to think that there is.
If the labels can come up with a viable business model, then they'll continue to exist. Otherwise, they'll fail. Sucks for the people employed by them, but it happens, and we have no obligation to stop it.
Yes - some CS classes have a policy that runs something like "you flake, you fail" -- if your group says, with evidence to back it up, that you didn't do your part of the job, you'll fail and they'll get a more forgiving assessment. It's a nice system, but unfortunately not a whole lot like the real world.
Re:Its the turning point
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To be honest the laws allow a bit too much.
To be honest? Don't you mean "To be honest, I think the laws allow a bit too much"?
I can say with confidence that most people I know buy more CDs once they're exposed to new music through file-sharing. Myself among them. And I'd probably buy even more if I wasn't getting ripped off and didn't know that the artists were probably getting ripped off either way, with prices getting closer and closer to $20 a CD but royalties still low.
One of the ways to change a law is to ignore it - often to ignore it rather flagrantly - and to take the consequences. It's called civil disobedience.
I don't think that's what they're doing, but you're wrong to assert that you "don't advocate ignoring laws you don't like."
He also assumes that people avoid buying CDs that they would otherwise buy because they can download the songs. The RIAA hasn't yet shown conclusively that this is true. And if you're not changing the number of CDs you buy, then you're not hurting the artists or the RIAA, and so it's hard to see how that's "theft" even if it is not legal.
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I think I must be missing something in what you said -- your description of your "take" on copyright doesn't make much sense to me. "Whoever holds the original copyright can extend it by creating a derived work." So what are they copyrighting? The original work? The derived work? Both? You seem to be arguing that copyright should protect a set of works, and every time a creator puts another one into that set, the whole set is renewed. If this is what you mean, it seems to me that your stance is fundamentally incompatible with the Constitution's stance on copyright - "limited times," so that the public and newer creators can benefit as well as older creators.
If the original holder can continue to hold the copyright for a long period of time, no one else can create work based on the innovation of that work. This means that newer creators are limited in their material to draw from, and the public's access to the work is constrained by the restrictions that the creator wants to put on it.
The point of the original distribution monopoly is for a creator to have a reasonable amount of time to get the potential financial value out of a thing, making it easier to create because there's a potential financial reward. The ability to renew the copyright term once (which existed when the copyrights were 14 and then 28 years) is a helpful addition because if a work is still producing substantive value at the time of renewal, it has a large benefit for the creator at a fairly small detriment to the public.
But allowing the creator to keep the copyright forever by simply adding "derivative works" (note again that I'm working from what you seem to be saying, since I'm not sure what you're saying) keeps the public's access to work on the creator's terms. It works to the benefit of the copyright holders of old, lucrative copyrights at great expense to newer creators and the public -- something that the American copyright system was specifically NOT supposed to do.
I made a statement that's been construed to mean that I support immediate copyright expiration at death, which I don't.
Personally, if I were going to make a copyright system, I'd assign a copyright something like "remainder of author's life or thirty years, whichever is longer."
This covers the Tom Clancy situation and others like it, allows works created earlier to benefit the creator longer (this may or may not be fair, it just seems like a nice benefit for the creator if (s)he creates quickly), and keeps works from staying under copyright for ridiculous lengths of time. Right now, healthy 20-year-olds can create copyrighted works that will be under copyright for a good 130 years -- they'll live for a long time, and have the additional protection for nearly another person's lifespan. I don't think that having a (LIFE +) protection on copyrighted works is really enough of a benefit as it currently stands to justify the keeping of content out of the public domain for 130 years.
Having copyright for a fixed time is very different for having the monopoly for an indefinite time (life) plus a definite time (a number of years). Your argument supports fixed-length copyrights that allow the estate to benefit from copyrights created near the time of death, but it doesn't extend to justifying copyrights which have already produced most of their value long before the creator's death, but then persist afterwards.
Furthermore, I didn't make any argument about whether it's a bad thing for a person's estate to be provided for. I just said that providing them with the copyright (especially when the copyright is for a very long time, as it is at present) doesn't really serve the point of copyright. I may or may not be correct, but at least argue the point that I actually made, and not some other one.
You might want to remember that copyright terms were initially fixed (unrelated to the death of the creator) and quite short. I never suggested that all copyrights should be for the life of the author only, which is what you claim I suggested ("like taking away all the money somebody's made in the last 2-5 years prior to their death"). Additionally, that's a very poor argument, because something they create a year before they die may return 99% of all its potential economic value in a year. Copyright expiration at death (again, not something I support, just something you are arguing against) only has the potential to result in some loss in the cases that the copyrighted material matures in some particular timespan. Comparing it to the removal of money already made is completely misleading.
Intellectual property is not like real property. It is a monopoly on distribution secured for limited times. Intellectual property is not "being inherited" when the copyright persists after death.
Why is the monopoly granted? To promote the progress of science and useful arts. No promotion of science and useful arts would seem to result from a person who didn't create any progress in the first place controlling a copyright on someone else's work.
Thus, I don't see how the extension of copyright after its holder's death as belonging to the original intent of the distribution monopoly.
Maybe you mean Netscape 4? Mozilla 4 is still long in the future.
So the only reason we shouldn't support internet censorship of people we disagree with is that it's dumb and ineffective?
People should be able to read what they want, and they ought to have the right to present their views on a website.
Regardless of the fact that they and the ETA may have vaguely the same ultimate goal, Batasuna appears to be a party that believes in Basque independence, and not a terrorist organization itself. There is no reason to extend any issues with the ETA to them. At risk of making a controversial analogy, it's like lumping together people who are against abortion and people who kill abortion doctors.
I don't know what the Spanish government should do about the ETA, but I'm pretty sure that what they do shouldn't have anything to do with the legitimate desires of others in the Basque province to get their message out.
I believe you may be incorrect about the tickets being available at the same price. Southwest.com runs "internet specials" that are often cheaper than ordinary price. There may be other ways to get them, but it's certainly not as easy.
From the review: All distros should come multimedia-ready, with everything configured to work right out of the box, with no extra downloading. All of them? Even server-configuration distros? Even distros whose whole point is a minimal install? Pretty silly reviewers.
Perhaps not everyone shares your agenda of wanting to produce a viable mass-market alternative to Microsoft Windows.
The original purpose of Linux, if I understand it properly, was to be an open-source UNIX, not a Windows-replacement.
So I'd say that the people who bash Lindows because they dislike it as a UNIX are entirely within the "cause."
You can set up a Linux system so that ordinary users can mount a CD-ROM. If Lindows is already set up to do so much autodetection, presumably it knows how to set permissions on drives so that they can be mounted by users.
Maybe it's not that easy to convince people that they need to have an additional protection before installing software, but I don't think it's out-of-reach difficult. Pop up a box during installation that explains that you need one password for every-day use, and one password for modifying your base sytem. Have people choose two passwords.
If people are always running as root, setting up multiple-user systems is going to be a mess, so this also avoids that problem. I think it would be a good investment of effort on Lindows' part.
I didn't say that they were working on a new-fashioned installer, just a new one. Hopefully it will be better both visually and practically.
I don't see the difference, except a nitpicky one of records, between amending a law so that the nasty parts of it are no longer in force and repealing it and passing a new law that says the same thing as the amended old law did.
Incidentally, the DMCA is not a law. It is the name of the act that became part of the law when it was passed. This isn't usually worth debating, but if you're being nitpicky about the repealing vs. amending, you ought to be nitpicky about acts or bills vs. laws.
It's extraordinarily easy to update Debian packages - you could have figured it out over the next three or four hours at most (not weeks) once it was installed, unless you had severe configuration problems. That's one of the cool things about Debian.
They are also working on getting sarge out on a shorter timespan than woody and working on a new installer (which I completely agree that they desperately need). So check back at some point.
Probably because no one is all that surprised that the Department of Commerce is clueless.
The temperature of water drops drastically in five minutes, probably to close to the hot-but-not-dangerous temperature of 140 to 160 F. Haven't you ever burned your tongue on tea or coffee that five minutes later was only comfortably warm?
You can't consume coffee that's at the boiling point of water without burning your mouth and throat severely (at least third-degree burns).
Hot water at 60 degrees C (~140 F) can cause skin burns in one second. The McDonald's coffee was around 180 degrees.
Check your facts; you don't know what you're talking about.
The question is less whether people will still get copies of music without paying for them and more of how many people will do it - whether it actually causes enough loss to make the selling less appealing. I don't think anyone really knows whether that would be the case or not. Even at current levels of "stealing" it's not particularly clear that it's ultimately harming.
A better capping method, which I think is technically feasible, is to start everyone at full speed, but gradually slow down the connection as they get to higher and higher levels of bandwidth usage.
.iso files) to still be able to do that at full speed, but penalizes constant P2P users. Pretty reasonable.
This allows people who need to send a few large files around for projects or download large files from the web (e.g. Linux distro
Does anyone find it ironic that someone posted a comment disclaiming the value of anonymity as an AC?
It has nothing to do with rights. There is no such thing as "the right to make money," although lots of businesses would prefer to think that there is.
If the labels can come up with a viable business model, then they'll continue to exist. Otherwise, they'll fail. Sucks for the people employed by them, but it happens, and we have no obligation to stop it.
Yes - some CS classes have a policy that runs something like "you flake, you fail" -- if your group says, with evidence to back it up, that you didn't do your part of the job, you'll fail and they'll get a more forgiving assessment. It's a nice system, but unfortunately not a whole lot like the real world.
To be honest? Don't you mean "To be honest, I think the laws allow a bit too much"?
I can say with confidence that most people I know buy more CDs once they're exposed to new music through file-sharing. Myself among them. And I'd probably buy even more if I wasn't getting ripped off and didn't know that the artists were probably getting ripped off either way, with prices getting closer and closer to $20 a CD but royalties still low.
One of the ways to change a law is to ignore it - often to ignore it rather flagrantly - and to take the consequences. It's called civil disobedience. I don't think that's what they're doing, but you're wrong to assert that you "don't advocate ignoring laws you don't like."
He also assumes that people avoid buying CDs that they would otherwise buy because they can download the songs. The RIAA hasn't yet shown conclusively that this is true. And if you're not changing the number of CDs you buy, then you're not hurting the artists or the RIAA, and so it's hard to see how that's "theft" even if it is not legal.