I struggled for a moment, trying to figure out how this story could be argued as "news for nerds", but the only real angle that I could come up with was that somebody used technology to do something. Most puzzling, there isn't a single mention of iPods, iPads, or any other iProduct. In desperation, I even read the linked article, but the only phrase of interest that I could find was a throwaway reference to "in this post-9/11 world", which is about ten years late. It did give me flashbacks to Slashdot in the early 2000s, however. Unfortunately, this also caused me to remember Jon Katz. This is unforgivable. On the other hand, I also remembered Junis, which sort of makes up for remembering Jon Katz.
As far as I can tell, this is just some guy grandstanding. It doesn't help that this is par for the course for the media, who love to stretch controversy and scandal for as long as they can drag out the story. No new details to report? Report that there's no new details. New details trickling in? Report that you've got some more facts, but you haven't yet written a story.... stay tuned for updates! Someone else jump the gun and write a story before all the details were available and verified? Report on that, and start a dialogue about journalistic ethics. You can drag this shit out for months, if you're good, even if you've got absolutely nothing to report. It reminds me of the utter bullshit that I would submit in 7th grade English classes. I think that I missed my true calling, as I am a master of the meaningless, bullshit essay.
Actually, that sounds kind of fun. Just imagine all of the screaming headlines, as every candidate has to retract everything he/she has ever said or done on the internet. It will turn this depressing, slow descent into fascism into a highly amusing circus. Sure, the country won't be any better off, but it will provide infinitely more amusement (at least, to those of us sardonic types who have a dark sense of humor).
Sadly, this is true. I've never had to explain myself to a cop, but I have been stopped by paranoid people, who are unnerved by the thought of some nerd with a digital camera wandering around town.
The lack of editorializing has left me confused on how I'm supposed to feel about this story. If only Timothy had posted this story, with some kind of snarky one-liner that clearly told me whether this was a good thing or bad thing!
Seriously, I've written a few posts critical of Google in the past year, as my own patience with them has waned. I've even been called an anti-Google shill. But I can not understand why I'm supposed to care about the minutiae of the inner workings of the behind-the-scenes operations of Google Wallet / Google Play.
According to Wikipedia, some progress has been made in this case, with over a dozen people arrested and charged. I'll grant that they have not been convicted, but most of them have only been arrested recently. We'll just have to see if anyone actually gets convicted, and, furthermore, how many of them turn out to be influential and powerful.
It is amazing to watch the very same people who in their youth were outraged when Al Gore led his crusade against music become the middle aged people who support a crusade against video games.
That wasn't Al Gore. That was Tipper Gore, his wife. Also, the PMRC advocated voluntary use of warning labels, rather than outright censorship. Frank Zappa didn't see any difference between the moral panic (some of the stuff targeted is hilarious in hindsight) and explicit, outright censorship, but I think the PMRC were mostly harmless, even if they were batshit crazy. If they'd pushed for anything beyond voluntary warning labels, I'd have cared about their hysterical antics more, but, really, I think it was just a lot of busywork for easily-offended baby boomers. I find it quite amusing that people got so worked up and outraged over both Twister Sister and some dumb warning labels. Overall, I'd say that we'd be better off without the reactionary, socially conservative groups like the PMRC, but I've always seen them as entertainment, rather than a danger. I don't need to watch sitcoms on television, when there are real-life clowns dancing for my amusement, in Congress.
Yes, other people are doing it, too. This is what every speeder says when he gets stopped by a cop. This is a simple fallacy, however. Just because other people are guilty of doing the same thing doesn't mean that you should face no repercussions. Is it fair to Apple that they've been singled out? No less so than it is that some random motorist was stopped by a cop for speeding, out of all those others who were also speeding. Is that cop is hypocrite if he doesn't pull over every single speeder on the road?
Hopefully, those fly-by-night companies that exploit illegal aliens will see their day in the spotlight, as well, but there's no reason to ignore Apple's business tactics, just because someone else might be guilty, as well.
IBM has plants in Albany, NY. They used to have more of them in New York, but they ended up getting shut down. Poughkeepsie and Binghamton, in particular, were hard hit.
It used to be that there were a few people left manufacturing in the USA, but IBM is pretty much it, now. First they went to Taiwan, and then the Taiwanese companies went to China. Pegatron, the former manufacturing division of Asus (now an independent supplier that sells to Asus), has 80% of their workforce in mainland China. While I'd like to believe that Pegatron treats their employees better than Foxconn, it's probably just not true. Have you seen the prices of Asus' hardware lately? Most of their stuff is amazingly competitive. Back in the mid-to-late 90s, Asus commanded a 50% to 100% premium over the competition. Nowadays, it's a $5 premium. On one hand, I'm glad that technology is so affordable, but I feel dirty even thinking about upgrading my PC. Everything is so cheap, but the prices are cheap because of virtual slave labor.
We can wring our hands and feel guilty, but nothing is really going to change unless we put serious pressure on these multinational corporations and their suppliers. The workers, too, are going to have to stand up to their fascist leaders, and I doubt that the poor and hungry Chinese workers much feel like it. Their country is going through a really difficult time, and I don't think there's any easy solution. The industrial revolution in America and Europe was a horrible period, and I doubt the Chinese will have any easier of a time. The best thing we can do is to keep up the pressure, so that the companies can't just ignore the workers.
In the mean time, if you're worried about the morality, you'll probably have to decide for yourself whether it's better to buy products made in a sweatshop and provide income for the workers... or to boycott the products and cause the sweatshops to not hire any desperate workers. Like everything else in life, there are no clear answers. Anyone who claims to have universal answers to morality is a con man.
Sharing copyrighted material is not illegal or immoral. Linux and Wikipedia are both copyrighted. If something is not copyrighted, it's public domain. Just because you have permission to distribute something doesn't mean that the author has renounced copyright.
Are you kidding? Didn't you read the Megaupload indictment? The Megaupload founders are alleged to have gone out of their way to encourage as much piracy as possible, including soliciting and uploading pirated content themselves. Now, whether they did or not will have to be decided in court. They are also alleged to have intentionally delayed and, in some cases, ignored DMCA take-down requests. If what the indictment says is true, the Megaupload guys are going to have a really, really tough time in court.
So, you get the content for free, if you're the original owner, but you need to buy it, if you're a second-hand owner? That's frustrating, but it's not as bad as it could be.
Anyway, my suggestion to them would be to have a market on their own website, where you can auction/sell activation codes to the games that you own. That way, they can track the second hand market, make it easier for people, and also perhaps make a tiny profit off of each sale (say, 5% or 10%). Also, this would make it very easy to trade/sell DLC. In fact, I should probably set up a third party website like this.
This is one of the reasons why people switched away from Altavista to Google. Granted, it's not the main reason, but it's one of the reasons.
I hate how over-helpful Google is. It seems like there's no way to do a simple search any more. It tries to correct my spelling, searches for what it thinks I meant, and mixes in results that don't even have my search terms in them! It's frustrating as hell. I'd switch to something else, but there really isn't anything that's any better.
It's gotten to the point that I put everything in quotes, with a plus sign, no matter what I search for. Otherwise, I end up getting completely irrelevant results. There needs to be an option in the advanced search options that says, "[x] I'm not an idiot".
At first, I thought to myself, "What?!" Then, when I thought about what you'd said, I realized that you may actually be correct. I'm not a hundred percent sure of the legality of some of their actions. For example, they're alleged to have flagrantly violated copyright. That's certainly bad for the site's reputation (and could indeed be used against them in an attempt to take down the site), but I seriously doubt that you'd be able to get any jail time out of it. The twist is that they (allegedly) knowingly paid uploaders who were violating copyright. At that point, it becomes a lot more murky. Since they were allegedly uploading pirated content themselves, as well as sharing links to pirated content, they can't really argue that they didn't know it was pirated. Second, they allegedly sat on DMCA take-down notices that weren't specifically coming from prominent USA-based megacorps. According to some of the evidence, the CEO repeatedly told people to drag their feet on compliance issues. He also repeatedly told them to not honor take-down requests that included a large amount of links. By doing these things, they violated the safe harbor provision of the DMCA. That's very, very bad for them, because that's what was shielding them from this kind of crackdown.
It shouldn't be that hard to put together a very strong case against them, assuming that the evidence is legit. Kim Dotcom looks the worst off, since he's not engaging in petty copyright violation. Instead, he's explicitly instructing his employees to bend U.S. law, arguably to the breaking break (depending on how you read those "don't honor the DMCA" memos). The others seem to have a much better chance, because most of them were just requesting shitty TV shows and music.
Of course, the main controversy is whether they're subject to U.S. law, but they were doing some pretty substantial business in the U.S. If I were them, I'd fight the extradition for all I was worth, because that's their best chance. Once they're in the U.S., it's going to be difficult to fight off a government eager to show its subservience to megacorps.
Your own link disproves almost everything you just said. Happy Birthday To You was not first published in 1858. I don't know where you got that idea. Absolutely nothing in the USA that was first published in 1858 is still under copyright. Happy Birthday To You was first copyrighted in 1935. The first publication seems to be 1933. Now, how exactly you manage to copyright a work for hire that's already been published seems a bit tricky. It looks as though the parent work (Good Morning To All, dating back to 1893), of which Happy Birthday To You was a clear derivative, might have technically fallen under the public domain, since copyright was never properly asserted (much like George Romero's Night of the Living Dead). Happy Birthday To You, the Ice Ice Baby of its day, changed a single note. As an unauthorized, derivative work which existed in prior form before being copyrighted, you'd think that Happy Birthday To You had more legal controversy, but it seems as though that's simply not the case.
Isn't the true history enough to condemn this song, rather than making up ridiculous claims, like that it was first published in 1858?
I never said it was no big deal. I'm saying that it's a bad law that will have negative repercussions. I'm a little tired of alleged Chicken Little antics, because every time it's mentioned, someone says that the economy will collapse, the internet will turn into cable TV, scientific debate will be silenced, etc. These are outrageous claims. They always depend on absolute worst case scenarios, but they're presented as irrefutable, immutable prophecies. If you pass SOPA, they will come to pass. What happens if SOPA passes, and they don't come to pass? You've blown your credibility. Climate change is a good example of this. There are some outspoken advocates who have made doom and gloom predictions that did not come to pass. In some cases, it's because they were working with incomplete data. Or the data changed. Or whatever. The problem is, people are only going to remember that an expert made a doomsday prediction that didn't come true. Even when you've got evidence to back up your claims, you need to be careful. Once you're perceived to have made incorrect predictions, your credibility is blown and the movement is hurt.
If the US blows it on this, that won't end in our destruction. But, it could very well put the US in decline. Other countries might seize the opportunity to lure away the best and brightest minds.
This is a very good message. This is something that I could get behind. It's still a bit more ideological than I'd probably put it, but it's true enough. Compare this to
Yes, we have nothing to hide from Big Brother, and yes life will go on even when the internet becomes an exclusively corporate and government domain. It's a good thing we have "sensible" people like you around to help us accept our fate.
Seriously? All (not most) user-submitted content on the internet will disappear. That means nobody on the entire internet will be able to post a photograph they took. Nobody on the internet will be able to upload a cute video of their pets. Nobody will be able to upload a short story they wrote. Do you think this is what SOPA will cause? With no exaggeration? Because as soon as one thought criminal uploads a single, unchallenged haiku to the internet, it becomes untrue. That brave, brave thought criminal... he has toppled the fascist empire with his humble haiku! According to this poster, Linux will be destroyed, because SOPA will make it impossible to host any open source code. Uhhh... no.
And yet his comment is at +5, and my comments are steadily getting modded down.
We'll see. I already said what I think will happen. My vision is substantially less apocalyptic, but it's still sufficiently negative that I think it's obvious where I stand. I get what you're saying. You're an optimist. You think this is the worst bill that could be passed. You don't see any reason to hold back. You're ready to bring out the big guns. Alright. I get that. I'm more of a pessimist, though, and I think that saving the predictions of doom and gloom for something worse than SOPA is a good idea. NDAA 2012 is my idea of a "doom and gloom" scenario. I'm much more worried about fascists carting me off in the middle of the night than I am of Sony blacklisting my hobbyist web site.
We'll see. I'm sure you'll figure out some way to salvage a way to be proven right, just like you've found a way to justify Slashdot's paranoia about RFID. You're arguing that the basic concept was proven correct ("Someone, somewhere will eventually track us with something"), while I'm arguing that Slashdot's Chicken Little antics made it that much easier for someone to actually track you. The more you scream, "The sky is falling!", the easier it becomes for people to tune you out, as the ravings of a kook. You're unwilling accept that Slashdot was raving about a non-issue, elevating it into a world-ending catastrophe that would plunge the world into fascism. Slashdot is doing the exact same thing again, now. Do you seriously think people will listen to you, when you say things like the internet will become "an exclusively corporate and government domain"? Where do you go from there? How do you express the danger of legislation that explicitly outlaws freedom of speech on the internet? Of course, you'll probably say that's exactly what SOPA does. In that case, all I can say is that when some piece of legislation eventually does pass, which revokes freedom of speech online, you'll have made its passage that much easier. Nobody will listen to me, because they've already learned to tune out that message, as fear-mongering. Doubtlessly, you'll hold up that legislation as a victory, saying that you were right all along, even as you pave the way for it to pass.
Unfortunately, this is incredibly common whenever Slashdot discusses something. Slashdot when into hysterics when they found out about Trusted Computing. Nowadays, most of them use locked-down cell phones and game consoles every day, without a single complaint, despite how that was going to destroy computing as we know it. When Slashdot heard about RFID, the entire website ground to a halt, as the paranoid conspiracy wing took over the submission queue. People were advising you to microwave your new clothes. Slashdot was advising people to microwave their new clothes. I am not making this up. According to Slashdot, the government was going to use RFID to track people (or, less commonly, corporations were going to track people, but that didn't sound ominous enough, so it was a minority conspiracy). I eventually stopped reading Slashdot for a few years, because it just got so crazy here.
Now, we've got SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA. Everyone knows these are bad laws. However, Slashdot has to go into hysterics yet again, making it that much more difficult to convince anyone that they truly are bad laws. When you've got one person over here saying, "SOPA is a bad law, because it will shift responsibility from users to site administrators", and you've got a whole crowd of geeks, frothing at the mouth, screaming, "SOPA WILL KILL THE INTERNET!!!!!!!!!11111", people will just tune out the rational person and write off everyone. This article is part of the problem. Instead of rationally and dispassionately explaining the issues, it starts screaming bloody murder, coming up with wildly improbable edge cases, in an effort to get people riled up and ready to protest. The examples that he uses are laughable, at best. They read like the sorts of wild conspiracy theories that usually come from anonymous users on Slashdot.
I think that I hate "push technology" more than the average Slashdotter, but, then again, we'd all say that. I'm that guy from The Onion who doesn't own a television. I can't stand the thought of the Internet turning into some kind of passive, non-interactive experience like TV, where everything is designed for the lowest common denominator, vetted by focus groups and censored for my benefit. However, there's a huge difference between YouTube turning into a promotional tool for major labels (yuck) and the economy imploding, the internet being RUINED FOREVER, and scientific progress being impeded. Will people fight as passionately if you tell them YouTube will get more boring? Will people fight as passionately if you tell them MegaUpload will start validating that all those 700MB.AVI files aren't Hollywood movies? Maybe not. But it's infinitely better to tell people the truth, rather than making up these ridiculous, exaggerated stories about the world ending. My God, you'd think that one stupid law could cause the end of human civilization. I'm sorry, but that's just not possible. If SOPA/PIPA/ACTA pass, the Internet will be a worse place. But it will not cause half the things that people are saying will happen, and I think the public knows this. They're not as stupid as the elitists at Slashdot think. It's like when those cops came to your school and told you that you that marijuana would turn you into a drug addict, living on the streets, sucking cock for a fix. You knew that was bullshit. Well, the public knows that you're spewing bullshit about SOPA, and they're going to tune you out, just like you tuned out that cop.
I feel lucky. We'll see if I'm right or not. Like anyone who likes gloating when he's been proven right, I'm usually cagey and wily enough to avoid making specific predictions, but it's just too tempting.
And, yeah, I guess I'm responding more to the general Slashdot attitude of "SOPA will kill the internet!!!!!" than I am responding to you, specifically. Sorry that you had to take the brunt of my long-winded rant. Plus, you make a very good point, in that the Internet could very well die. It's something that I didn't really consider, and I should have. You're right about that. A split Internet means that there's no unified Internet.
The internet isn't going to be ruined. The internet will change for the worse. There's a big difference.
Mostly-legitimate sites like YouTube and MegaUpload will arguably be hit the hardest. Their primary draw is the rampant copyright infringement. Users who upload original content will have to jump through hoops in order to validate that their content does not infringe anyone's copyright. There will probably be an initial month-long validation queue, which will eventually be streamlined down to a week-long wait. Some people will leave in protest, but most will just decry any dissent as "whining". In most likelihood, parody and other fair use exceptions will be suppressed, in the name of simplifying administrative duties. I predict the argument will go, "If we allow legitimate parodies through, then everyone will simply claim to be a subtle parody. Thus, our rule on no parodies, even if they are technically allowed, by law." In the end, YouTube will survive, but it will be nothing but insipid pet videos and hot, up-and-coming pop stars from major labels. Alternatives will pop up frequently on darknets, but none of the YouTube users will ever figure out how to access them. MegaUpload goes commercial, with no free accounts, in a move to pay for all the censorship that is required to clean up the site.
Quasi-legitimate sites, like 4chan, will either disappear or radically transform. My guess is that they'll all go underground. Anyone who can't figure out how to access them will be ridiculed as a lamer or noob. The government will swat at them, off and on, but nothing will ever really stick. A couple of them will simply move to European or Asian servers and abandon U.S. users. I have trouble imagining these sites going fully legit, but I guess stranger things have happened. In that case, full-time moderators would roam the boards, searching out any kind of copyright infringement and handing out frequent bans. After a while, the workload gets to be too much and the site closes down.
"Rogue" websites, such as piratebay, would be the first victims. They'll put up a token fight for a few months or years, but it won't go anywhere, and they'll all be forced to relocate to darknets or other various underground locales. Some will simply shrug and ignore the U.S. Again, the government will swat at them, and some of them will eventually be taken down, but new ones will simply pop up to replace them. Eventually, someone will be made an example of, with a 10-15 year prison sentence (if they're lucky). A show trial will briefly made the news, then be forgotten by all but the civil libertarians. A huge uproar on civil libertarian blogs will follow, along with further threads of "it's time for the ammo box!", but absolutely nothing will come of it, and they'll all stew in impotent anger. Slashdot follows every single fucking story with dogged perseverance, long after the mainstream media move on to other topics. In every single story, at least one person states, "If only you sheeple had voted for Ron Paul, none of this would have happened!", which becomes the newest Slashdot meme.
Controversial web sites, such as those espousing hate speech, expressing sympathy for terrorists (pro-Hamas or pro-Hezbollah), and right-wing militia groups will quickly be added to the lists. Most people won't miss them, but the civil libertarians will go berserk. A freedom of speech case will make it to the US Supreme Court, but nothing will come of it. In a 5-4 decision, the censorship will be upheld as constitutional. All the web sites move to European servers or darknets. The government halfheartedly swats at them off and on for the next ten years, until an example is made of someone, who probably ends up successfully fighting off the charges. It's hailed as a major win for civil libertarians, but nothing really changes, because nothing ever does. The government goes back to swatting halfheartedly at websites on darknets.
Sites like Flickr and Facebook, which generally depend on original conten
Slashdot Mirror
I struggled for a moment, trying to figure out how this story could be argued as "news for nerds", but the only real angle that I could come up with was that somebody used technology to do something. Most puzzling, there isn't a single mention of iPods, iPads, or any other iProduct. In desperation, I even read the linked article, but the only phrase of interest that I could find was a throwaway reference to "in this post-9/11 world", which is about ten years late. It did give me flashbacks to Slashdot in the early 2000s, however. Unfortunately, this also caused me to remember Jon Katz. This is unforgivable. On the other hand, I also remembered Junis, which sort of makes up for remembering Jon Katz.
As far as I can tell, this is just some guy grandstanding. It doesn't help that this is par for the course for the media, who love to stretch controversy and scandal for as long as they can drag out the story. No new details to report? Report that there's no new details. New details trickling in? Report that you've got some more facts, but you haven't yet written a story.... stay tuned for updates! Someone else jump the gun and write a story before all the details were available and verified? Report on that, and start a dialogue about journalistic ethics. You can drag this shit out for months, if you're good, even if you've got absolutely nothing to report. It reminds me of the utter bullshit that I would submit in 7th grade English classes. I think that I missed my true calling, as I am a master of the meaningless, bullshit essay.
...but not on Slashdot, which just rolled out a Flash-based feature.
Good God, man, don't mention host files... you'll summon apk.
Actually, that sounds kind of fun. Just imagine all of the screaming headlines, as every candidate has to retract everything he/she has ever said or done on the internet. It will turn this depressing, slow descent into fascism into a highly amusing circus. Sure, the country won't be any better off, but it will provide infinitely more amusement (at least, to those of us sardonic types who have a dark sense of humor).
Sadly, this is true. I've never had to explain myself to a cop, but I have been stopped by paranoid people, who are unnerved by the thought of some nerd with a digital camera wandering around town.
The lack of editorializing has left me confused on how I'm supposed to feel about this story. If only Timothy had posted this story, with some kind of snarky one-liner that clearly told me whether this was a good thing or bad thing!
Seriously, I've written a few posts critical of Google in the past year, as my own patience with them has waned. I've even been called an anti-Google shill. But I can not understand why I'm supposed to care about the minutiae of the inner workings of the behind-the-scenes operations of Google Wallet / Google Play.
According to Wikipedia, some progress has been made in this case, with over a dozen people arrested and charged. I'll grant that they have not been convicted, but most of them have only been arrested recently. We'll just have to see if anyone actually gets convicted, and, furthermore, how many of them turn out to be influential and powerful.
It is amazing to watch the very same people who in their youth were outraged when Al Gore led his crusade against music become the middle aged people who support a crusade against video games.
That wasn't Al Gore. That was Tipper Gore, his wife. Also, the PMRC advocated voluntary use of warning labels, rather than outright censorship. Frank Zappa didn't see any difference between the moral panic (some of the stuff targeted is hilarious in hindsight) and explicit, outright censorship, but I think the PMRC were mostly harmless, even if they were batshit crazy. If they'd pushed for anything beyond voluntary warning labels, I'd have cared about their hysterical antics more, but, really, I think it was just a lot of busywork for easily-offended baby boomers. I find it quite amusing that people got so worked up and outraged over both Twister Sister and some dumb warning labels. Overall, I'd say that we'd be better off without the reactionary, socially conservative groups like the PMRC, but I've always seen them as entertainment, rather than a danger. I don't need to watch sitcoms on television, when there are real-life clowns dancing for my amusement, in Congress.
Yes, other people are doing it, too. This is what every speeder says when he gets stopped by a cop. This is a simple fallacy, however. Just because other people are guilty of doing the same thing doesn't mean that you should face no repercussions. Is it fair to Apple that they've been singled out? No less so than it is that some random motorist was stopped by a cop for speeding, out of all those others who were also speeding. Is that cop is hypocrite if he doesn't pull over every single speeder on the road?
Hopefully, those fly-by-night companies that exploit illegal aliens will see their day in the spotlight, as well, but there's no reason to ignore Apple's business tactics, just because someone else might be guilty, as well.
IBM has plants in Albany, NY. They used to have more of them in New York, but they ended up getting shut down. Poughkeepsie and Binghamton, in particular, were hard hit.
It used to be that there were a few people left manufacturing in the USA, but IBM is pretty much it, now. First they went to Taiwan, and then the Taiwanese companies went to China. Pegatron, the former manufacturing division of Asus (now an independent supplier that sells to Asus), has 80% of their workforce in mainland China. While I'd like to believe that Pegatron treats their employees better than Foxconn, it's probably just not true. Have you seen the prices of Asus' hardware lately? Most of their stuff is amazingly competitive. Back in the mid-to-late 90s, Asus commanded a 50% to 100% premium over the competition. Nowadays, it's a $5 premium. On one hand, I'm glad that technology is so affordable, but I feel dirty even thinking about upgrading my PC. Everything is so cheap, but the prices are cheap because of virtual slave labor.
We can wring our hands and feel guilty, but nothing is really going to change unless we put serious pressure on these multinational corporations and their suppliers. The workers, too, are going to have to stand up to their fascist leaders, and I doubt that the poor and hungry Chinese workers much feel like it. Their country is going through a really difficult time, and I don't think there's any easy solution. The industrial revolution in America and Europe was a horrible period, and I doubt the Chinese will have any easier of a time. The best thing we can do is to keep up the pressure, so that the companies can't just ignore the workers.
In the mean time, if you're worried about the morality, you'll probably have to decide for yourself whether it's better to buy products made in a sweatshop and provide income for the workers... or to boycott the products and cause the sweatshops to not hire any desperate workers. Like everything else in life, there are no clear answers. Anyone who claims to have universal answers to morality is a con man.
Sharing copyrighted material is not illegal or immoral. Linux and Wikipedia are both copyrighted. If something is not copyrighted, it's public domain. Just because you have permission to distribute something doesn't mean that the author has renounced copyright.
Are you kidding? Didn't you read the Megaupload indictment? The Megaupload founders are alleged to have gone out of their way to encourage as much piracy as possible, including soliciting and uploading pirated content themselves. Now, whether they did or not will have to be decided in court. They are also alleged to have intentionally delayed and, in some cases, ignored DMCA take-down requests. If what the indictment says is true, the Megaupload guys are going to have a really, really tough time in court.
So, your entire argument is based around a logical fallacy?
Fuck off.
It's just a video game. I count six all-caps words in your rant. I think you need to learn to relax. Take up meditation or something.
such bastards really deserve piracy.
...or you could just not buy it.
Does he know the mayor of Boston?
So, you get the content for free, if you're the original owner, but you need to buy it, if you're a second-hand owner? That's frustrating, but it's not as bad as it could be.
Anyway, my suggestion to them would be to have a market on their own website, where you can auction/sell activation codes to the games that you own. That way, they can track the second hand market, make it easier for people, and also perhaps make a tiny profit off of each sale (say, 5% or 10%). Also, this would make it very easy to trade/sell DLC. In fact, I should probably set up a third party website like this.
She refused to leave. She was trespassing.
This is one of the reasons why people switched away from Altavista to Google. Granted, it's not the main reason, but it's one of the reasons.
I hate how over-helpful Google is. It seems like there's no way to do a simple search any more. It tries to correct my spelling, searches for what it thinks I meant, and mixes in results that don't even have my search terms in them! It's frustrating as hell. I'd switch to something else, but there really isn't anything that's any better.
It's gotten to the point that I put everything in quotes, with a plus sign, no matter what I search for. Otherwise, I end up getting completely irrelevant results. There needs to be an option in the advanced search options that says, "[x] I'm not an idiot".
At first, I thought to myself, "What?!" Then, when I thought about what you'd said, I realized that you may actually be correct. I'm not a hundred percent sure of the legality of some of their actions. For example, they're alleged to have flagrantly violated copyright. That's certainly bad for the site's reputation (and could indeed be used against them in an attempt to take down the site), but I seriously doubt that you'd be able to get any jail time out of it. The twist is that they (allegedly) knowingly paid uploaders who were violating copyright. At that point, it becomes a lot more murky. Since they were allegedly uploading pirated content themselves, as well as sharing links to pirated content, they can't really argue that they didn't know it was pirated. Second, they allegedly sat on DMCA take-down notices that weren't specifically coming from prominent USA-based megacorps. According to some of the evidence, the CEO repeatedly told people to drag their feet on compliance issues. He also repeatedly told them to not honor take-down requests that included a large amount of links. By doing these things, they violated the safe harbor provision of the DMCA. That's very, very bad for them, because that's what was shielding them from this kind of crackdown.
It shouldn't be that hard to put together a very strong case against them, assuming that the evidence is legit. Kim Dotcom looks the worst off, since he's not engaging in petty copyright violation. Instead, he's explicitly instructing his employees to bend U.S. law, arguably to the breaking break (depending on how you read those "don't honor the DMCA" memos). The others seem to have a much better chance, because most of them were just requesting shitty TV shows and music.
Of course, the main controversy is whether they're subject to U.S. law, but they were doing some pretty substantial business in the U.S. If I were them, I'd fight the extradition for all I was worth, because that's their best chance. Once they're in the U.S., it's going to be difficult to fight off a government eager to show its subservience to megacorps.
Your own link disproves almost everything you just said. Happy Birthday To You was not first published in 1858. I don't know where you got that idea. Absolutely nothing in the USA that was first published in 1858 is still under copyright. Happy Birthday To You was first copyrighted in 1935. The first publication seems to be 1933. Now, how exactly you manage to copyright a work for hire that's already been published seems a bit tricky. It looks as though the parent work (Good Morning To All, dating back to 1893), of which Happy Birthday To You was a clear derivative, might have technically fallen under the public domain, since copyright was never properly asserted (much like George Romero's Night of the Living Dead). Happy Birthday To You, the Ice Ice Baby of its day, changed a single note. As an unauthorized, derivative work which existed in prior form before being copyrighted, you'd think that Happy Birthday To You had more legal controversy, but it seems as though that's simply not the case.
Isn't the true history enough to condemn this song, rather than making up ridiculous claims, like that it was first published in 1858?
I never said it was no big deal. I'm saying that it's a bad law that will have negative repercussions. I'm a little tired of alleged Chicken Little antics, because every time it's mentioned, someone says that the economy will collapse, the internet will turn into cable TV, scientific debate will be silenced, etc. These are outrageous claims. They always depend on absolute worst case scenarios, but they're presented as irrefutable, immutable prophecies. If you pass SOPA, they will come to pass. What happens if SOPA passes, and they don't come to pass? You've blown your credibility. Climate change is a good example of this. There are some outspoken advocates who have made doom and gloom predictions that did not come to pass. In some cases, it's because they were working with incomplete data. Or the data changed. Or whatever. The problem is, people are only going to remember that an expert made a doomsday prediction that didn't come true. Even when you've got evidence to back up your claims, you need to be careful. Once you're perceived to have made incorrect predictions, your credibility is blown and the movement is hurt.
If the US blows it on this, that won't end in our destruction. But, it could very well put the US in decline. Other countries might seize the opportunity to lure away the best and brightest minds.
This is a very good message. This is something that I could get behind. It's still a bit more ideological than I'd probably put it, but it's true enough. Compare this to
Yes, we have nothing to hide from Big Brother, and yes life will go on even when the internet becomes an exclusively corporate and government domain. It's a good thing we have "sensible" people like you around to help us accept our fate.
Seriously? All (not most) user-submitted content on the internet will disappear. That means nobody on the entire internet will be able to post a photograph they took. Nobody on the internet will be able to upload a cute video of their pets. Nobody will be able to upload a short story they wrote. Do you think this is what SOPA will cause? With no exaggeration? Because as soon as one thought criminal uploads a single, unchallenged haiku to the internet, it becomes untrue. That brave, brave thought criminal... he has toppled the fascist empire with his humble haiku! According to this poster, Linux will be destroyed, because SOPA will make it impossible to host any open source code. Uhhh... no.
And yet his comment is at +5, and my comments are steadily getting modded down.
We'll see. I already said what I think will happen. My vision is substantially less apocalyptic, but it's still sufficiently negative that I think it's obvious where I stand. I get what you're saying. You're an optimist. You think this is the worst bill that could be passed. You don't see any reason to hold back. You're ready to bring out the big guns. Alright. I get that. I'm more of a pessimist, though, and I think that saving the predictions of doom and gloom for something worse than SOPA is a good idea. NDAA 2012 is my idea of a "doom and gloom" scenario. I'm much more worried about fascists carting me off in the middle of the night than I am of Sony blacklisting my hobbyist web site.
We'll see. I'm sure you'll figure out some way to salvage a way to be proven right, just like you've found a way to justify Slashdot's paranoia about RFID. You're arguing that the basic concept was proven correct ("Someone, somewhere will eventually track us with something"), while I'm arguing that Slashdot's Chicken Little antics made it that much easier for someone to actually track you. The more you scream, "The sky is falling!", the easier it becomes for people to tune you out, as the ravings of a kook. You're unwilling accept that Slashdot was raving about a non-issue, elevating it into a world-ending catastrophe that would plunge the world into fascism. Slashdot is doing the exact same thing again, now. Do you seriously think people will listen to you, when you say things like the internet will become "an exclusively corporate and government domain"? Where do you go from there? How do you express the danger of legislation that explicitly outlaws freedom of speech on the internet? Of course, you'll probably say that's exactly what SOPA does. In that case, all I can say is that when some piece of legislation eventually does pass, which revokes freedom of speech online, you'll have made its passage that much easier. Nobody will listen to me, because they've already learned to tune out that message, as fear-mongering. Doubtlessly, you'll hold up that legislation as a victory, saying that you were right all along, even as you pave the way for it to pass.
Unfortunately, this is incredibly common whenever Slashdot discusses something. Slashdot when into hysterics when they found out about Trusted Computing. Nowadays, most of them use locked-down cell phones and game consoles every day, without a single complaint, despite how that was going to destroy computing as we know it. When Slashdot heard about RFID, the entire website ground to a halt, as the paranoid conspiracy wing took over the submission queue. People were advising you to microwave your new clothes. Slashdot was advising people to microwave their new clothes. I am not making this up. According to Slashdot, the government was going to use RFID to track people (or, less commonly, corporations were going to track people, but that didn't sound ominous enough, so it was a minority conspiracy). I eventually stopped reading Slashdot for a few years, because it just got so crazy here.
Now, we've got SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA. Everyone knows these are bad laws. However, Slashdot has to go into hysterics yet again, making it that much more difficult to convince anyone that they truly are bad laws. When you've got one person over here saying, "SOPA is a bad law, because it will shift responsibility from users to site administrators", and you've got a whole crowd of geeks, frothing at the mouth, screaming, "SOPA WILL KILL THE INTERNET!!!!!!!!!11111", people will just tune out the rational person and write off everyone. This article is part of the problem. Instead of rationally and dispassionately explaining the issues, it starts screaming bloody murder, coming up with wildly improbable edge cases, in an effort to get people riled up and ready to protest. The examples that he uses are laughable, at best. They read like the sorts of wild conspiracy theories that usually come from anonymous users on Slashdot.
I think that I hate "push technology" more than the average Slashdotter, but, then again, we'd all say that. I'm that guy from The Onion who doesn't own a television. I can't stand the thought of the Internet turning into some kind of passive, non-interactive experience like TV, where everything is designed for the lowest common denominator, vetted by focus groups and censored for my benefit. However, there's a huge difference between YouTube turning into a promotional tool for major labels (yuck) and the economy imploding, the internet being RUINED FOREVER, and scientific progress being impeded. Will people fight as passionately if you tell them YouTube will get more boring? Will people fight as passionately if you tell them MegaUpload will start validating that all those 700MB .AVI files aren't Hollywood movies? Maybe not. But it's infinitely better to tell people the truth, rather than making up these ridiculous, exaggerated stories about the world ending. My God, you'd think that one stupid law could cause the end of human civilization. I'm sorry, but that's just not possible. If SOPA/PIPA/ACTA pass, the Internet will be a worse place. But it will not cause half the things that people are saying will happen, and I think the public knows this. They're not as stupid as the elitists at Slashdot think. It's like when those cops came to your school and told you that you that marijuana would turn you into a drug addict, living on the streets, sucking cock for a fix. You knew that was bullshit. Well, the public knows that you're spewing bullshit about SOPA, and they're going to tune you out, just like you tuned out that cop.
I feel lucky. We'll see if I'm right or not. Like anyone who likes gloating when he's been proven right, I'm usually cagey and wily enough to avoid making specific predictions, but it's just too tempting.
And, yeah, I guess I'm responding more to the general Slashdot attitude of "SOPA will kill the internet!!!!!" than I am responding to you, specifically. Sorry that you had to take the brunt of my long-winded rant. Plus, you make a very good point, in that the Internet could very well die. It's something that I didn't really consider, and I should have. You're right about that. A split Internet means that there's no unified Internet.
The internet isn't going to be ruined. The internet will change for the worse. There's a big difference.
Mostly-legitimate sites like YouTube and MegaUpload will arguably be hit the hardest. Their primary draw is the rampant copyright infringement. Users who upload original content will have to jump through hoops in order to validate that their content does not infringe anyone's copyright. There will probably be an initial month-long validation queue, which will eventually be streamlined down to a week-long wait. Some people will leave in protest, but most will just decry any dissent as "whining". In most likelihood, parody and other fair use exceptions will be suppressed, in the name of simplifying administrative duties. I predict the argument will go, "If we allow legitimate parodies through, then everyone will simply claim to be a subtle parody. Thus, our rule on no parodies, even if they are technically allowed, by law." In the end, YouTube will survive, but it will be nothing but insipid pet videos and hot, up-and-coming pop stars from major labels. Alternatives will pop up frequently on darknets, but none of the YouTube users will ever figure out how to access them. MegaUpload goes commercial, with no free accounts, in a move to pay for all the censorship that is required to clean up the site.
Quasi-legitimate sites, like 4chan, will either disappear or radically transform. My guess is that they'll all go underground. Anyone who can't figure out how to access them will be ridiculed as a lamer or noob. The government will swat at them, off and on, but nothing will ever really stick. A couple of them will simply move to European or Asian servers and abandon U.S. users. I have trouble imagining these sites going fully legit, but I guess stranger things have happened. In that case, full-time moderators would roam the boards, searching out any kind of copyright infringement and handing out frequent bans. After a while, the workload gets to be too much and the site closes down.
"Rogue" websites, such as piratebay, would be the first victims. They'll put up a token fight for a few months or years, but it won't go anywhere, and they'll all be forced to relocate to darknets or other various underground locales. Some will simply shrug and ignore the U.S. Again, the government will swat at them, and some of them will eventually be taken down, but new ones will simply pop up to replace them. Eventually, someone will be made an example of, with a 10-15 year prison sentence (if they're lucky). A show trial will briefly made the news, then be forgotten by all but the civil libertarians. A huge uproar on civil libertarian blogs will follow, along with further threads of "it's time for the ammo box!", but absolutely nothing will come of it, and they'll all stew in impotent anger. Slashdot follows every single fucking story with dogged perseverance, long after the mainstream media move on to other topics. In every single story, at least one person states, "If only you sheeple had voted for Ron Paul, none of this would have happened!", which becomes the newest Slashdot meme.
Controversial web sites, such as those espousing hate speech, expressing sympathy for terrorists (pro-Hamas or pro-Hezbollah), and right-wing militia groups will quickly be added to the lists. Most people won't miss them, but the civil libertarians will go berserk. A freedom of speech case will make it to the US Supreme Court, but nothing will come of it. In a 5-4 decision, the censorship will be upheld as constitutional. All the web sites move to European servers or darknets. The government halfheartedly swats at them off and on for the next ten years, until an example is made of someone, who probably ends up successfully fighting off the charges. It's hailed as a major win for civil libertarians, but nothing really changes, because nothing ever does. The government goes back to swatting halfheartedly at websites on darknets.
Sites like Flickr and Facebook, which generally depend on original conten