But it's not a Diktat. (Almost) every single track on iTunes is available through other methods, such as on CD, or various other webstores, for a variety of price and contract structures.
People get together, record some music, and offer it up under a contract. Maybe it's not even in writing, it's a "social contract" that is perhaps only said in passing: "Hey, dude, please don't hack around with the song download. That would be, like, rude, man. just enjoy the music. if you can't handle that, no worries, man, there's lots of music elsewhere. Just, like, don't be a jerk, okay?"
In the end, you are picking and choosing what agreements you want to offer and now throwing it under the blanket of "unenforceability". There are a lot of things that are unenforceable. Pretty much everything except, so far, things like the law of gravitation and most of the other laws of physics. Everything is pretty much fair game under the system you seem to propose. "I don't like the terms of the contract, besides it's not really enforceable anyway"; in other words "I can get away with breaking it, so why shouldn't I?"
The blather about the "ITMS Diktat" is a little silly. An Apple representative didn't come door to door, break it down, and force you to install their software, subscribe to any service, or click "I agree" to anything. Using fancy fascist-sounding words like "Diktat" doesn't make the ITMS some sort of essential monopoly that without it you would suffer.
If you don't like the terms of service; don't use the service. I don't see how that is hard to understand.
But feel free to have your cake and eat it to. I'm really not trying to judge anyone; going back to the beginning I should have said "This is my personal morality; your mileage may vary". There likely isn't an absolute to be found in the area of copyright law, because in the end all IP is a fiction of society. But it's a society that, like it or not, and apparently you do not, is founded on contract law and going what you agree to do. When people stop doing what they agree to do, the cycle breaks down.
Obviously you or a hundred thousand other people hacking around ITMS lame DRM doesn't hurt anything. And personally I couldn't give a shit about any of the artist's rights on ITMS. Most of them won't be largely effected in the long run by you or me or a hundred other tech geeks parading around with our FairPlayHackz version 7.5 or whatever, excercising our "fair use" rights.
It is indeed the principle of the thing; that people who produce a good or offer a service are doing it under the framework of a society and its laws; and those acting outside the society and its laws are, here, apparently, hoping to benefit from the goods or services in a manner counter to the framework under which it is offered.
There is a huge difference between civil disobedience and quietly hacking around "unenforceable" contract clauses. The former is laudable; the latter is laughable. Probably not as laughable as me, attempting in any manner to appeal to contract law and copyright as a potential good thing for the people in a venue such as Slashdot; but laughable nonetheless.
I'll admit being somewhat irrational when this topic comes up. Were it not for indentured servitude contracts (NOT the same as involuntary servitude!) I would not exist. Thus it would be moral suicide for me to object to it.
Amusingly enough, indentured servants count as a "whole person" in the Constitution for purposes of Representative count.
Yes, there were abuses of this system. But these were, really, involuntary servitudes and the contracts should have been annulled as void.
> So you're in support of the enforceability of indentured servitude? No wonder you're in favor of DRM.
Trying to equate slavery with indentured servitude is alone quite a stretch; trying to equate either of these with DRM is an absolutely crock of shit. The former two are absolutely matters of life and death, the latter (DRM) is an insignificant detail to a largely affectless area of human interaction.
Absolutely, 100% I should be able to offer my services as a well-treated, housed, fed, respected indentured servant for a limited term of service. In fact this is how almost every single modern military operates.
You will find that you will commit to some number of years of service (e.g., servitude) and that there are penalties for breaking this initial contract. If you feel you are mistreated or that the other side (e.g., the Air Force for example) is not living up to their part of the bargain, you go before a court, argue this, and have the contract annulled. It happens literally nearly every day.
Welcome to the real world, where there are bullets and pain, not just quibbles and bitching about whether you can play your iTunes on your Network Walkman.
Please: do not equate slavery with DRM. You insult yourself and the actual atrocities of real slavery, which still exists quite in a quiet proliferated fashion in our world. Women are kidnapped and sold into horrible sexual slavery. Political prisoners are sold as slave labor into desolate wastelands to mine and work as loggers. The world is a fucked up enough place without your demands that freely accepted terms of contract should be able to be willy-nilly ignored if you feel like it. You place far too high an importance on your "fair use" to listen to something that can be found for sale in the ITMS for $0.99 USD and not enough on the vast chain of consequence that wanton disregard for contracts would incur.
Um, no. We sign away all kinds of rights all the time. I do it on a weekly basis through NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreements) and other confidentiality waivers, which limit my "right" to free speech -- which actually is in the Constitution, unlike "fair use". Trying to equate "playing my music where I want, when I want!" with slavery is repugnant.
Also, my grandfather emigrated to this country (the United States; well, then it was the British Colonies) in the 18th century by paying for his passage from Germany via an indentured servitude contract. Which he did of his own free will, worked off the contract, and now 6 generations later, here I am. If you sign *yourself* into servitude, then no you don't have a moral ground to stand on if the other side of the contract is upheld, unless the contract should be voided for other reasons such as degrading treatment, or if you can plausibly say that you did not understand the contract.
What you can't do, ever, is sell others into servitude. Why? Because they are not yours to sell.
Contract law is the only moral law. When two parties freely, knowingly, and without coersion make an agreement, the sanctity of the agreement stands above nearly all else. This is, for example, how marriage works. (Disclaimer: I'm married.) You give up some of the "inalienable" rights to "liberty and pursuit of happiness" when you "forsake all others". You know what breaks a marriage contract? Either one of the sides violates its terms, or, "death parts you".
Freely formed contracts should be held above almost everything else. Without reliance on contracts, which existed before any government, society would break down entirely.
Once you've crossed into the land of "it's morally justified to break this contract for my own convenience" then you can break any contract at your convenience, and this is not a morally universally externalizable ethos.
The words "fair use" do not exist in the Constitution. They are not listed as "inalienable" anywhere I have looked. "Fair use" did not even appear in copyright law at all until 1976.
By the way, if you wish to get DMCA overturned, please do so. I and many others would like to see this happen. But for now it is the law and if you would like to pick and choose which laws apply to you and which do not, then I exhort you to do so publicly in a spirit of true civil disobedience and not privately in the hopes you won't get caught.
A car is different. I don't get asked to sign away constitutional rights such as fair use when buying a car.
Many of your car's systems are "protected" against your being able to service them yourselves through various patent and other laws. You require a government license to operate the vehicle on a public roadway. You require insurance to be allowed to drive it. There are all kinds of limitations on your car.
And there is no way Apple would really negotiate, so the contract remains a one-sided Diktat that I would feel morally free to break.
So if I don't think the government will "really" negotiate on those pesky limitations like having to be licensed and insured before driving the car, I should feel morally free to break it? Hell no. You should feel morally free to either (1) get the law changed or (2) not drive.
Bottom line is that you accepted an offer; and now you want to renege, and are blathering on about being "morally free" to do it. That's fine, that's your conscience, not mine. That doesn't change the fact you're wrong;]
(There is no moral justification unless you need to hear this song outside the stated agreement or suffer serious consequences. I fail to believe that there are any serious consequences for not listening to ANY single song on iTunes whatsoever. You are morally free to break a Diktat which *must* be broken. There is no reason other than indulgence and entertainment to break the iTunes agreement, and the sanctity of agreements is higher than the sanctity of consumeristic entertainment. If you need to break the iTunes agreement to save a life: by all means. Otherwise you're just saying that "contracts don't apply to me when I decide they don't apply to me" which is amoral.)
You said: "Let a mage use a sword at a penalty rather than not at all."
Which is why I said: "I don't see why they should be barred from picking it up, but a trained swordsman with strong arms should be a whole lot better at using it."
That doesn't change the fact that you SIGNED AWAY your fair use rights when you LICENSED the file you downloaded. You didn't BUY anything upon which to excercise your fair use. It sucks, but that is what you agreed to when you signed up for iTunes and clicked the "Accept" button on the license agreement.
If you don't like it, you don't have to use it.
I just don't understand people saying: "Gee, I don't like the terms to which I freely agreed. I will now proceed to break them."
It doesn't make sense. It just doesn't make sense.
Really, why shouldn't your magic user be able to pick up a sword?
There could be a few "logical" reasons and restrictions invented for a particular game: 1. if a mage casts a lightning spell while holding a sword or wearing plate armor, self-zap-death 2. the guild that trains advanced swordplay won't train a mage and there's only so much the mage can figure out simply by self-practice and observation 3. the sword is too heavy for the limp-wristed mage to swing effectively
I don't see why they should be barred from picking it up, but a trained swordsman with strong arms should be a whole lot better at using it, and there might be some downfall for certain activities when carrying several pounds of metal. (Magnetism or electricity-based magic for example. Or, say, swimming.)
Strangely, the term "Phonetic Alphabet" is generally used for things like spelling out words using other words, like saying your username is spelled "Delta Hotel Alpha Sierra..."
I don't understand. It's not a place of absolute freedom already since MySpace is disallowed. Why don't these folks who seem to have such a penny up their ass use whitelisting? Hell they could just sever the connection from each PC to the internet and have only approved content on local servers, updated by admins if they care so much.
any realistic game set in space consists of mostly this: space.
perhaps a sci-fi game doesn't have to be based on an interstellar sim? perhaps a sci-fi game could be more along the lines of deus ex, or, my personal favorite:
wtf? democrats? blaming democrats for lack of space funding? what a stupid and broad generalisation. maybe if we weren't spending billions on republican wars.
Slashdot Mirror
There are still, to my knowledge, many vendors that cell non-DRM CDs. Choose them. This I cannot encourage enough.
But it's not a Diktat. (Almost) every single track on iTunes is available through other methods, such as on CD, or various other webstores, for a variety of price and contract structures.
It is, indeed, the principle.
People get together, record some music, and offer it up under a contract. Maybe it's not even in writing, it's a "social contract" that is perhaps only said in passing: "Hey, dude, please don't hack around with the song download. That would be, like, rude, man. just enjoy the music. if you can't handle that, no worries, man, there's lots of music elsewhere. Just, like, don't be a jerk, okay?"
In the end, you are picking and choosing what agreements you want to offer and now throwing it under the blanket of "unenforceability". There are a lot of things that are unenforceable. Pretty much everything except, so far, things like the law of gravitation and most of the other laws of physics. Everything is pretty much fair game under the system you seem to propose. "I don't like the terms of the contract, besides it's not really enforceable anyway"; in other words "I can get away with breaking it, so why shouldn't I?"
The blather about the "ITMS Diktat" is a little silly. An Apple representative didn't come door to door, break it down, and force you to install their software, subscribe to any service, or click "I agree" to anything. Using fancy fascist-sounding words like "Diktat" doesn't make the ITMS some sort of essential monopoly that without it you would suffer.
If you don't like the terms of service; don't use the service. I don't see how that is hard to understand.
But feel free to have your cake and eat it to. I'm really not trying to judge anyone; going back to the beginning I should have said "This is my personal morality; your mileage may vary". There likely isn't an absolute to be found in the area of copyright law, because in the end all IP is a fiction of society. But it's a society that, like it or not, and apparently you do not, is founded on contract law and going what you agree to do. When people stop doing what they agree to do, the cycle breaks down.
Obviously you or a hundred thousand other people hacking around ITMS lame DRM doesn't hurt anything. And personally I couldn't give a shit about any of the artist's rights on ITMS. Most of them won't be largely effected in the long run by you or me or a hundred other tech geeks parading around with our FairPlayHackz version 7.5 or whatever, excercising our "fair use" rights.
It is indeed the principle of the thing; that people who produce a good or offer a service are doing it under the framework of a society and its laws; and those acting outside the society and its laws are, here, apparently, hoping to benefit from the goods or services in a manner counter to the framework under which it is offered.
There is a huge difference between civil disobedience and quietly hacking around "unenforceable" contract clauses. The former is laudable; the latter is laughable. Probably not as laughable as me, attempting in any manner to appeal to contract law and copyright as a potential good thing for the people in a venue such as Slashdot; but laughable nonetheless.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indentured_Servitude
I'll admit being somewhat irrational when this topic comes up. Were it not for indentured servitude contracts (NOT the same as involuntary servitude!) I would not exist. Thus it would be moral suicide for me to object to it.
Amusingly enough, indentured servants count as a "whole person" in the Constitution for purposes of Representative count.
Yes, there were abuses of this system. But these were, really, involuntary servitudes and the contracts should have been annulled as void.
> So you're in support of the enforceability of indentured servitude? No wonder you're in favor of DRM.
n
Trying to equate slavery with indentured servitude is alone quite a stretch; trying to equate either of these with DRM is an absolutely crock of shit. The former two are absolutely matters of life and death, the latter (DRM) is an insignificant detail to a largely affectless area of human interaction.
Absolutely, 100% I should be able to offer my services as a well-treated, housed, fed, respected indentured servant for a limited term of service. In fact this is how almost every single modern military operates.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Foreign_Legio
http://www.goarmy.com/
http://www.marines.com/
etc.
You will find that you will commit to some number of years of service (e.g., servitude) and that there are penalties for breaking this initial contract. If you feel you are mistreated or that the other side (e.g., the Air Force for example) is not living up to their part of the bargain, you go before a court, argue this, and have the contract annulled. It happens literally nearly every day.
Welcome to the real world, where there are bullets and pain, not just quibbles and bitching about whether you can play your iTunes on your Network Walkman.
Please: do not equate slavery with DRM. You insult yourself and the actual atrocities of real slavery, which still exists quite in a quiet proliferated fashion in our world. Women are kidnapped and sold into horrible sexual slavery. Political prisoners are sold as slave labor into desolate wastelands to mine and work as loggers. The world is a fucked up enough place without your demands that freely accepted terms of contract should be able to be willy-nilly ignored if you feel like it. You place far too high an importance on your "fair use" to listen to something that can be found for sale in the ITMS for $0.99 USD and not enough on the vast chain of consequence that wanton disregard for contracts would incur.
they could put out almost the exact same game from the user perspective, but keep the servers running and reduce lag and "this world is full" issues.
QoS. It's the new Bubble-Hearth.
Um, no. We sign away all kinds of rights all the time. I do it on a weekly basis through NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreements) and other confidentiality waivers, which limit my "right" to free speech -- which actually is in the Constitution, unlike "fair use". Trying to equate "playing my music where I want, when I want!" with slavery is repugnant.
Also, my grandfather emigrated to this country (the United States; well, then it was the British Colonies) in the 18th century by paying for his passage from Germany via an indentured servitude contract. Which he did of his own free will, worked off the contract, and now 6 generations later, here I am. If you sign *yourself* into servitude, then no you don't have a moral ground to stand on if the other side of the contract is upheld, unless the contract should be voided for other reasons such as degrading treatment, or if you can plausibly say that you did not understand the contract.
What you can't do, ever, is sell others into servitude. Why? Because they are not yours to sell.
Contract law is the only moral law. When two parties freely, knowingly, and without coersion make an agreement, the sanctity of the agreement stands above nearly all else. This is, for example, how marriage works. (Disclaimer: I'm married.) You give up some of the "inalienable" rights to "liberty and pursuit of happiness" when you "forsake all others". You know what breaks a marriage contract? Either one of the sides violates its terms, or, "death parts you".
Freely formed contracts should be held above almost everything else. Without reliance on contracts, which existed before any government, society would break down entirely.
Once you've crossed into the land of "it's morally justified to break this contract for my own convenience" then you can break any contract at your convenience, and this is not a morally universally externalizable ethos.
From the mouth of babes:
http://www.overclockers.com/tips907/
The words "fair use" do not exist in the Constitution. They are not listed as "inalienable" anywhere I have looked. "Fair use" did not even appear in copyright law at all until 1976.
By the way, if you wish to get DMCA overturned, please do so. I and many others would like to see this happen. But for now it is the law and if you would like to pick and choose which laws apply to you and which do not, then I exhort you to do so publicly in a spirit of true civil disobedience and not privately in the hopes you won't get caught.
A car is different. I don't get asked to sign away constitutional rights such as fair use when buying a car.
;]
Many of your car's systems are "protected" against your being able to service them yourselves through various patent and other laws. You require a government license to operate the vehicle on a public roadway. You require insurance to be allowed to drive it. There are all kinds of limitations on your car.
And there is no way Apple would really negotiate, so the contract remains a one-sided Diktat that I would feel morally free to break.
So if I don't think the government will "really" negotiate on those pesky limitations like having to be licensed and insured before driving the car, I should feel morally free to break it? Hell no. You should feel morally free to either (1) get the law changed or (2) not drive.
Bottom line is that you accepted an offer; and now you want to renege, and are blathering on about being "morally free" to do it. That's fine, that's your conscience, not mine. That doesn't change the fact you're wrong
(There is no moral justification unless you need to hear this song outside the stated agreement or suffer serious consequences. I fail to believe that there are any serious consequences for not listening to ANY single song on iTunes whatsoever. You are morally free to break a Diktat which *must* be broken. There is no reason other than indulgence and entertainment to break the iTunes agreement, and the sanctity of agreements is higher than the sanctity of consumeristic entertainment. If you need to break the iTunes agreement to save a life: by all means. Otherwise you're just saying that "contracts don't apply to me when I decide they don't apply to me" which is amoral.)
You said: "Let a mage use a sword at a penalty rather than not at all."
Which is why I said: "I don't see why they should be barred from picking it up, but a trained swordsman with strong arms should be a whole lot better at using it."
there's not much moral argument against breaking an agreement that's a take-it-or-leave it
certainly there is. if someone offers to sell me a car at price X, "take it or leave it" I can't take the deal then stop payments after a few months.
What opportunity did those who signed up have to negotiate those terms?
Apple has a contact page with plenty of nice e-mail, snail mail, and phone addresses.
That doesn't change the fact that you SIGNED AWAY your fair use rights when you LICENSED the file you downloaded. You didn't BUY anything upon which to excercise your fair use. It sucks, but that is what you agreed to when you signed up for iTunes and clicked the "Accept" button on the license agreement.
If you don't like it, you don't have to use it.
I just don't understand people saying: "Gee, I don't like the terms to which I freely agreed. I will now proceed to break them."
It doesn't make sense. It just doesn't make sense.
Really, why shouldn't your magic user be able to pick up a sword?
There could be a few "logical" reasons and restrictions invented for a particular game:
1. if a mage casts a lightning spell while holding a sword or wearing plate armor, self-zap-death
2. the guild that trains advanced swordplay won't train a mage and there's only so much the mage can figure out simply by self-practice and observation
3. the sword is too heavy for the limp-wristed mage to swing effectively
I don't see why they should be barred from picking it up, but a trained swordsman with strong arms should be a whole lot better at using it, and there might be some downfall for certain activities when carrying several pounds of metal. (Magnetism or electricity-based magic for example. Or, say, swimming.)
maybe we could get an Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet that's written solely with ASCII characters!
extended or basic?
http://www.lookuptables.com/
if we go to the 255 character extended ascii table, we have more than enough characters I think to represent it:
f
etc.
but even with 127 character ascii, it might be possible (with the 95 printable characters, of course):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII
What we really need is an International Phonetic Alphabet.
i c_Alphabet
..."
e t
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonet
Strangely, the term "Phonetic Alphabet" is generally used for things like spelling out words using other words, like saying your username is spelled "Delta Hotel Alpha Sierra
Example of one of those is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphab
Italian is fairly good in following your presumed desires; Finnish even better.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonology
As long as they apply (which, logically, they should) to internet harassment no new "policing of the Internet" or new laws are required.
please, bring me the Fallout MMO.
actually strike that.
bring me an MMO my wife would like to play that is also enjoyable for me to play. do that and i will bring the piles of money to the gaming table.
the earth orbits the sun? blasphemy!!
http://www.cabotia.com/stationary-earth.html
I would have guessed that someone with an IQ of 150 would know the difference between grunt and runt.
I don't understand. It's not a place of absolute freedom already since MySpace is disallowed. Why don't these folks who seem to have such a penny up their ass use whitelisting? Hell they could just sever the connection from each PC to the internet and have only approved content on local servers, updated by admins if they care so much.
oh god, not desktop banner ads again ... no no no ....
any realistic game set in space consists of mostly this: space.
perhaps a sci-fi game doesn't have to be based on an interstellar sim? perhaps a sci-fi game could be more along the lines of deus ex, or, my personal favorite:
Fallout.
wtf? democrats? blaming democrats for lack of space funding? what a stupid and broad generalisation. maybe if we weren't spending billions on republican wars.
v etaxchart/taxchart.html
http://www.warresisters.org/piechart.htm
http://nationalpriorities.org/auxiliary/interacti
http://www.federalbudget.com/
also, giving up screwing is a stupid thing to ask. birth control is your friend.
sweet.