Because the law provides for immoral recompense for unreasonable rights. Because he, out of greed, used the courts to extort money from a man who couldn't afford a defense.
It may have been rational, but it was still wrong.
I believe more and more as time goes by that the idea of copyright is fundamentally broken and that the world would be better off if it were abolished entirely. Perhaps a more ideal solution would be copyright reform, but if the options were abolishment or status quo, I'd vote for abolishment.
I honestly believe that the very notion of copyright is hypocritical, because it is truly impossible to create anything truly original--everything one can think of and create is partially based on and influenced by existing works and ideas. If an author is unwilling to credit and compensate those who influenced and inspired his ideas and works, then for him to require others who are influenced and inspired by his works to do so is simply hypocritical--and I have no sympathy for hypocrites. "Do as I say, not as I do" is basically evil.
The examples he gave are well-chosen. For the Obama poster, the only person in the world who should even have a shred of a right to complain is Obama himself, because it's his face. The idea that pressing a shutter button over and over again in a press conference entitles a photographer to have a say in how someone else's face is used in other works is absurd--it's purely based on greed. The same goes for the photo he used: that photo of Davis is, what, over 50 years old, and the photographer feels "violated"? The only person who should have any right to feel violated is Miles Davis, because it's his face--but he's dead! Maisel is simply full of greed, selfishness, and pride--none of which I have sympathy for. A real artist would be pleased to see his work so acclaimed that it was replicated and reused and built upon, seen by more and more people. Someday he will pass on as Davis did and as we all do, and then it will matter nothing. Eventually his photo and all copies of it will cease to exist as well, just like the whole world will, and then it will matter nothing. What will matter is how he treated other people during his life, and in this case, it was not well.
Maisel's lawyers should also be ashamed of their evil greed and bullying--but that's not news, is it?
I suspect that in 50-100 years we'll either have technically-enforced copyright laws or no copyrights at all. The alternative seems to be an ever-increasing number and complexity of laws, cases, and lawsuits, and the gradual grinding-to-a-halt of creativity--except, perhaps, by "authorized" corporations who have legal armies and enormous profits, who either negotiate blanket licenses or rely on MAD to prevent litigious apocalypse.
What is their rationale for including royalties to the RIAA? (You are talking about equipment and media sold in the USA, right?) I could record anything from lectures to birds chirping, and none of that would be related to the RIAA.
If it's "stealing" to view a web site without "viewing" the ads, then it's "stealing" to mute the TV during a commercial, or change the channel, or go to the bathroom. Same for the radio.
I have made no agreement with any web site owners to look at or download any content they may place in their pages. Site owners who make content freely-viewable do so at their own risk, without any guarantees.
Don't let the **AAs co-opt the meaning of "theft". Don't let them brainwash you.
Next thing you know, people will be saying that it's "stealing" to go to a site without CLICKING ads. Good grief. Grow a spine! Stand up to the idiocy!
A developer not serious enough about their code to test with new versions of the browser as they come out is not someone who should be developing add-ons.
False. Many add-ons are simple, e.g. UI-related ones, ones that can practically be considered "finished" once they reach a certain point. Such add-ons don't have bugs like security vulnerabilities and they don't need to be constantly updated. These are often made by someone in his spare time, and then, after "finishing" it, he gets a new job, or a school semester starts, etc, and then a few months later a new version of Firefox comes out and "breaks" his add-on, even though the only problem may be the version number check. Or maybe Firefox makes a "minor" API change that breaks many extensions without preserving backward-compatibility. Maybe the author even switches to another browser. Anyway, he has no interest or no time to update it anymore, so the add-on's users are stuck with annoying workarounds or a completely-broken extension--they can either upgrade Firefox and lose functionality they have come to rely on, or they can stick with the old version and be stuck with bugs and security holes.
The developer was plenty serious, created a great add-on, finished it, and moved on with life. Then Mozilla broke it.
I'm guessing you don't use much more than AdBlockPlus and NoScript, because you clearly haven't experienced this phenomenon for yourself. A user not serious enough about his browser to use more than the most popular, frequently-updated extensions is not someone who should be commenting about add-ons.
I think it can be said that the process is both physical and digital--as opposed to, say, a tape or record, which are both physical and analog.
"Every compact disc has millions and millions of pits, and there are tiny differences..."
What "tiny differences" are you referring to?
It is true that audio CDs don't use ECC as CD-ROMs do, however this doesn't necessarily mean that every rip from a clean disc in a good drive will end up with different results. Have you actually tested this hypothesis yourself, or are you guessing?
I can conceive of it just fine. It would be practically impossible for it to be completely comprehensive, but it wouldn't have to be 100% for it to be useful.
MusicDNS audio fingerprinting plus hashes of known encoded copies would make it quite simple. One of RIAA's lackeys could hook it into P2P and BT networks and automate the whole thing. It would simply be a matter of time, bandwidth, disk space, and the occasional prodding or tweaking by a human, none of which would be a problem for RIAA. Maybe they are already building their database now. Wouldn't surprise me. It'd probably come in handy in their P2P lawsuits.
My understanding, from listening to an in-depth episode of This American Life, is that the dollar is basically completely decoupled from gold. The Fed can literally create more money with a few mouse clicks (not paper money, but real bank balances).
You flatter Slashdot. I can see them now, using their bot hordes to slashdot Slashdot to be the first to see their latest crimes posted and comment on them before anyone else. Yeah....
The principle of not feeding trolls is context-sensitive. They aren't trolling Slashdot, they're trolling the world. Truth is the best weapon against them.
You must have been doing strange things or using a very poor-quality distro if "things kept breaking". Debian stable or an Ubuntu LTS release will work reliably for many years, and those are just two examples. I used Kubuntu Hardy 8.04 on my laptop for nearly three years before finally upgrading to Maverick and Natty, and it was far more reliable than any Windows installation. Things didn't suddenly break--it just kept working, even as I applied regular updates.
I don't mean that Linux distros are perfect. I, too, have been bitten by the stupid bug in Ubuntu in which, upon upgrading, NetworkManager "unmanaged" the eth0 device, requiring editing/etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf to fix it. I've filed or commented on the bug...it boggles my mind that it happened at all.
But I still honestly think the user experience is much smoother, reliable, safer, and plain better on a good Linux distro than on Windows.
As for drivers, the fact is that Linux has better hardware driver support than Windows. It's more frequently updated, and bugs are actually fixed--compared to Windows, where a vendor dumps a driver on a disc or a web site and may never update it again, and may be nearly impossible to contact about it (maybe you can talk to some screen-reading supportbot through a stupid support form on a web site, but Linux has bugzilla.kernel.org, among others). It's not even close to "laughably bad"--you're apparently ignorant or misinformed.
"Almost every feature I used either gone or mangled. It can no longer render windows properly, causes video playback to jump and freeze, and is now almost entirely unusable with my new video card."
No; no; and no. All the features from KWin 3 are there. It renders windows fine. Video playback is fine.
"I can't even use Linux anymore because no window manager works right with my ATI card, and even before that, were barely usable (older Nvidia) without glitches. How am I supposed to advocate that others use it if I can't?"
Sounds like a driver problem to me. My Radeon HD 4770 works fine with Kubuntu Natty. So does my NVIDIA 8400M laptop. I use KDE 4 and KWin and it's fine now, just like KDE 3.5 was--better, even.
"I think Linux needs a complete change in focus and methodology, or it is going to end up losing what little market share it has. It is time to stop trying to copy Apple UIs and time to start worrying about stability. This whole batch of project managers has failed us - we need mass forks of major projects."
1. Linux (the kernel--and yes, you need to be specific when advocating changes) is not what your complaint is about (unless it's a driver problem, in which case you should complain to ATI or spend a few bucks and get a slightly newer or different card that has decent drivers--the info you need is out there).
2. A complete change is not needed.
3. You are right about one thing: stability is the most important thing.
4. However, we do not need mass forks. Good grief, man, do you have any idea what that would mean? What are you going to do, clone every developer and install a brain implant so they will do your bidding? What do you even mean by, "This whole batch of project managers"? You're speaking in terms so broad and vague that your words are meaningless.
I'm afraid your vague anecdote is worthless and irrelevant. Either your video card is so old that it's just not supported anymore by current distributions, or it was too new at the time to have good support, or you happened to use a poorly-configured distro and didn't fix it or try a different one.
The fact is that hardware support and out-of-the-box configuration in Linux distros has never been better, and it works better and more simply than Windows in most cases. And the fact that you switched back to Windows simply lends credence to the suspicion that you didn't know what you were doing and didn't bother to find out.
The same is not (should not be) true for story submissions. Slashdot is not a common carrier. It's an online publication with an open comments feature. What you're describing is Digg.
If an "editor" is not able to correct spelling and grammar mistakes, he's not qualified to be an "editor." If he's not willing to, he's not qualified either.
The job of an "editor" on a site like this is to choose content suitable for the site's audience and present it in a clear, interesting way. This job includes (it should!) rewriting story submissions. Story submissions are not "letters to the editor" (or shouldn't be); they are pointers to interesting stories on other web sites--that's all they should be. The editors should take it from there.
Clearly the "editors" on Slashdot don't deserve the title--they're simply story-pickers. It takes about as much skill and thought as picking fruit off a tree does.
People do not come to Slashdot to read poorly-written summaries full of spelling and grammar mistakes linked to stories on scummy, ad-ridden web sites...oh, wait...
There's no excuse nor good reason for garbage. Whose side are you on, anyway?
Slashdot is not a book publishing company, it's a web site.
If an "editor" is not able to correct spelling and grammar mistakes, he's not qualified to be an "editor." If he's not willing to, he's not qualified either.
The job of an "editor" on a site like this is to choose content suitable for the site's audience and present it in a clear, interesting way. This job includes (it should!) rewriting story submissions. Story submissions are not "letters to the editor" (or shouldn't be); they are pointers to interesting stories on other web sites--that's all they should be. The editors should take it from there.
Clearly the "editors" on Slashdot don't deserve the title--they're simply story-pickers. It takes about as much skill and thought as picking fruit off a tree does.
I think that is unreasonable. Trying to keep something a secret is risky by definition. It makes perfect sense for a competing company to try to compete by duplicating their competitor's product. While it may be unethical, that doesn't mean it should be illegal. I think their recourse should be only to sue the employee with whom they had a contractual agreement. If they had no such agreement with a competing company, I say "tough cheese.". That's business. Try harder to keep your secrets or diversify so you don't go bankrupt if one of your secrets is found out. If you don't do that, that's just poor planning on your part, and you deserve to fail. Then your shareholders can sue YOU! Haha.
I'm sick of the legal system being used to coerce people and organizations and corporations by a bunch of whiners who want to rest on their laurels and let the government protect their marketshare. It's pathetic and disgusting. Real business tycoons of history would laugh at them and would beat them into the ground by doing real business. They need to grow up. They are becoming parasites on society.
Slashdot Mirror
You are the man. I'm glad I'm not the only one who sees it this way.
Because the law provides for immoral recompense for unreasonable rights. Because he, out of greed, used the courts to extort money from a man who couldn't afford a defense.
It may have been rational, but it was still wrong.
You know that the photographer must have been squealing with glee when he saw the opportunity to sue over it--not "violated" at all.
It's just greed. And greed is evil.
Let's leave the issue of the law aside for a moment and use sound moral judgment and common sense to decide how it ought to be.
Oh, wait...
I believe more and more as time goes by that the idea of copyright is fundamentally broken and that the world would be better off if it were abolished entirely. Perhaps a more ideal solution would be copyright reform, but if the options were abolishment or status quo, I'd vote for abolishment.
I honestly believe that the very notion of copyright is hypocritical, because it is truly impossible to create anything truly original--everything one can think of and create is partially based on and influenced by existing works and ideas. If an author is unwilling to credit and compensate those who influenced and inspired his ideas and works, then for him to require others who are influenced and inspired by his works to do so is simply hypocritical--and I have no sympathy for hypocrites. "Do as I say, not as I do" is basically evil.
The examples he gave are well-chosen. For the Obama poster, the only person in the world who should even have a shred of a right to complain is Obama himself, because it's his face. The idea that pressing a shutter button over and over again in a press conference entitles a photographer to have a say in how someone else's face is used in other works is absurd--it's purely based on greed. The same goes for the photo he used: that photo of Davis is, what, over 50 years old, and the photographer feels "violated"? The only person who should have any right to feel violated is Miles Davis, because it's his face--but he's dead! Maisel is simply full of greed, selfishness, and pride--none of which I have sympathy for. A real artist would be pleased to see his work so acclaimed that it was replicated and reused and built upon, seen by more and more people. Someday he will pass on as Davis did and as we all do, and then it will matter nothing. Eventually his photo and all copies of it will cease to exist as well, just like the whole world will, and then it will matter nothing. What will matter is how he treated other people during his life, and in this case, it was not well.
Maisel's lawyers should also be ashamed of their evil greed and bullying--but that's not news, is it?
I suspect that in 50-100 years we'll either have technically-enforced copyright laws or no copyrights at all. The alternative seems to be an ever-increasing number and complexity of laws, cases, and lawsuits, and the gradual grinding-to-a-halt of creativity--except, perhaps, by "authorized" corporations who have legal armies and enormous profits, who either negotiate blanket licenses or rely on MAD to prevent litigious apocalypse.
He didn't use is at all.
AYAA? (Are you an audiophile?)
What is their rationale for including royalties to the RIAA? (You are talking about equipment and media sold in the USA, right?) I could record anything from lectures to birds chirping, and none of that would be related to the RIAA.
Sounds like the way video compression works. Are you sure there isn't already a codec that does this?
If it's "stealing" to view a web site without "viewing" the ads, then it's "stealing" to mute the TV during a commercial, or change the channel, or go to the bathroom. Same for the radio.
I have made no agreement with any web site owners to look at or download any content they may place in their pages. Site owners who make content freely-viewable do so at their own risk, without any guarantees.
Don't let the **AAs co-opt the meaning of "theft". Don't let them brainwash you.
Next thing you know, people will be saying that it's "stealing" to go to a site without CLICKING ads. Good grief. Grow a spine! Stand up to the idiocy!
A developer not serious enough about their code to test with new versions of the browser as they come out is not someone who should be developing add-ons.
False. Many add-ons are simple, e.g. UI-related ones, ones that can practically be considered "finished" once they reach a certain point. Such add-ons don't have bugs like security vulnerabilities and they don't need to be constantly updated. These are often made by someone in his spare time, and then, after "finishing" it, he gets a new job, or a school semester starts, etc, and then a few months later a new version of Firefox comes out and "breaks" his add-on, even though the only problem may be the version number check. Or maybe Firefox makes a "minor" API change that breaks many extensions without preserving backward-compatibility. Maybe the author even switches to another browser. Anyway, he has no interest or no time to update it anymore, so the add-on's users are stuck with annoying workarounds or a completely-broken extension--they can either upgrade Firefox and lose functionality they have come to rely on, or they can stick with the old version and be stuck with bugs and security holes.
The developer was plenty serious, created a great add-on, finished it, and moved on with life. Then Mozilla broke it.
I'm guessing you don't use much more than AdBlockPlus and NoScript, because you clearly haven't experienced this phenomenon for yourself. A user not serious enough about his browser to use more than the most popular, frequently-updated extensions is not someone who should be commenting about add-ons.
Thanks for the correction.
Given that, it seems that a good rip of a good disc should always have the same data.
I think it can be said that the process is both physical and digital--as opposed to, say, a tape or record, which are both physical and analog.
"Every compact disc has millions and millions of pits, and there are tiny differences..."
What "tiny differences" are you referring to?
It is true that audio CDs don't use ECC as CD-ROMs do, however this doesn't necessarily mean that every rip from a clean disc in a good drive will end up with different results. Have you actually tested this hypothesis yourself, or are you guessing?
I can conceive of it just fine. It would be practically impossible for it to be completely comprehensive, but it wouldn't have to be 100% for it to be useful.
MusicDNS audio fingerprinting plus hashes of known encoded copies would make it quite simple. One of RIAA's lackeys could hook it into P2P and BT networks and automate the whole thing. It would simply be a matter of time, bandwidth, disk space, and the occasional prodding or tweaking by a human, none of which would be a problem for RIAA. Maybe they are already building their database now. Wouldn't surprise me. It'd probably come in handy in their P2P lawsuits.
"When you rip the cd, you will get a different hash each time."
Why?
The paper that money is printed on is made from cotton--hence, "paper money." Paper need not be made from wood pulp in order to be called "paper."
My understanding, from listening to an in-depth episode of This American Life, is that the dollar is basically completely decoupled from gold. The Fed can literally create more money with a few mouse clicks (not paper money, but real bank balances).
You flatter Slashdot. I can see them now, using their bot hordes to slashdot Slashdot to be the first to see their latest crimes posted and comment on them before anyone else. Yeah....
The principle of not feeding trolls is context-sensitive. They aren't trolling Slashdot, they're trolling the world. Truth is the best weapon against them.
You must have been doing strange things or using a very poor-quality distro if "things kept breaking". Debian stable or an Ubuntu LTS release will work reliably for many years, and those are just two examples. I used Kubuntu Hardy 8.04 on my laptop for nearly three years before finally upgrading to Maverick and Natty, and it was far more reliable than any Windows installation. Things didn't suddenly break--it just kept working, even as I applied regular updates.
I don't mean that Linux distros are perfect. I, too, have been bitten by the stupid bug in Ubuntu in which, upon upgrading, NetworkManager "unmanaged" the eth0 device, requiring editing /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf to fix it. I've filed or commented on the bug...it boggles my mind that it happened at all.
But I still honestly think the user experience is much smoother, reliable, safer, and plain better on a good Linux distro than on Windows.
As for drivers, the fact is that Linux has better hardware driver support than Windows. It's more frequently updated, and bugs are actually fixed--compared to Windows, where a vendor dumps a driver on a disc or a web site and may never update it again, and may be nearly impossible to contact about it (maybe you can talk to some screen-reading supportbot through a stupid support form on a web site, but Linux has bugzilla.kernel.org, among others). It's not even close to "laughably bad"--you're apparently ignorant or misinformed.
"Almost every feature I used either gone or mangled. It can no longer render windows properly, causes video playback to jump and freeze, and is now almost entirely unusable with my new video card."
No; no; and no. All the features from KWin 3 are there. It renders windows fine. Video playback is fine.
"I can't even use Linux anymore because no window manager works right with my ATI card, and even before that, were barely usable (older Nvidia) without glitches. How am I supposed to advocate that others use it if I can't?"
Sounds like a driver problem to me. My Radeon HD 4770 works fine with Kubuntu Natty. So does my NVIDIA 8400M laptop. I use KDE 4 and KWin and it's fine now, just like KDE 3.5 was--better, even.
"I think Linux needs a complete change in focus and methodology, or it is going to end up losing what little market share it has. It is time to stop trying to copy Apple UIs and time to start worrying about stability. This whole batch of project managers has failed us - we need mass forks of major projects."
1. Linux (the kernel--and yes, you need to be specific when advocating changes) is not what your complaint is about (unless it's a driver problem, in which case you should complain to ATI or spend a few bucks and get a slightly newer or different card that has decent drivers--the info you need is out there).
2. A complete change is not needed.
3. You are right about one thing: stability is the most important thing.
4. However, we do not need mass forks. Good grief, man, do you have any idea what that would mean? What are you going to do, clone every developer and install a brain implant so they will do your bidding? What do you even mean by, "This whole batch of project managers"? You're speaking in terms so broad and vague that your words are meaningless.
I'm afraid your vague anecdote is worthless and irrelevant. Either your video card is so old that it's just not supported anymore by current distributions, or it was too new at the time to have good support, or you happened to use a poorly-configured distro and didn't fix it or try a different one.
The fact is that hardware support and out-of-the-box configuration in Linux distros has never been better, and it works better and more simply than Windows in most cases. And the fact that you switched back to Windows simply lends credence to the suspicion that you didn't know what you were doing and didn't bother to find out.
The same is not (should not be) true for story submissions. Slashdot is not a common carrier. It's an online publication with an open comments feature. What you're describing is Digg.
If an "editor" is not able to correct spelling and grammar mistakes, he's not qualified to be an "editor." If he's not willing to, he's not qualified either.
The job of an "editor" on a site like this is to choose content suitable for the site's audience and present it in a clear, interesting way. This job includes (it should!) rewriting story submissions. Story submissions are not "letters to the editor" (or shouldn't be); they are pointers to interesting stories on other web sites--that's all they should be. The editors should take it from there.
Clearly the "editors" on Slashdot don't deserve the title--they're simply story-pickers. It takes about as much skill and thought as picking fruit off a tree does.
People do not come to Slashdot to read poorly-written summaries full of spelling and grammar mistakes linked to stories on scummy, ad-ridden web sites...oh, wait...
There's no excuse nor good reason for garbage. Whose side are you on, anyway?
Slashdot is not a book publishing company, it's a web site.
If an "editor" is not able to correct spelling and grammar mistakes, he's not qualified to be an "editor." If he's not willing to, he's not qualified either.
The job of an "editor" on a site like this is to choose content suitable for the site's audience and present it in a clear, interesting way. This job includes (it should!) rewriting story submissions. Story submissions are not "letters to the editor" (or shouldn't be); they are pointers to interesting stories on other web sites--that's all they should be. The editors should take it from there.
Clearly the "editors" on Slashdot don't deserve the title--they're simply story-pickers. It takes about as much skill and thought as picking fruit off a tree does.
I didn't condone any of those things. However, while bribes are immoral, in the private sector they ought to be legal.
Keeping secrets is risky business, and there should be no legal protection for doing so. Patents and copyrights are bad enough.
Ideas don't belong to anyone, they belong to everyone.
I think that is unreasonable. Trying to keep something a secret is risky by definition. It makes perfect sense for a competing company to try to compete by duplicating their competitor's product. While it may be unethical, that doesn't mean it should be illegal. I think their recourse should be only to sue the employee with whom they had a contractual agreement. If they had no such agreement with a competing company, I say "tough cheese.". That's business. Try harder to keep your secrets or diversify so you don't go bankrupt if one of your secrets is found out. If you don't do that, that's just poor planning on your part, and you deserve to fail. Then your shareholders can sue YOU! Haha.
I'm sick of the legal system being used to coerce people and organizations and corporations by a bunch of whiners who want to rest on their laurels and let the government protect their marketshare. It's pathetic and disgusting. Real business tycoons of history would laugh at them and would beat them into the ground by doing real business. They need to grow up. They are becoming parasites on society.