I find it amusing that this environmentalist has 4 electric cars to save the environment, but then owns a helicoptor, which probably burns more fuel in a day than a normal car burns in a year.
I'll take Windows95 over MacOS 9.2 for stability performance etc. I don't see how the Microsoft free jab applies here anyway since Apple is as bad as MS if not worse with their business practices.
I agree with you on the DMCA. Fair use says I should be able to make copies. Therefore, it shouldn't be illegal to break the encryption to do so. It's piracy that's illegal. Circumventing copy protection shouldn't be.
As far as DRM goes, if they get the all the software players and hardware players on board, there's no legal reason they can't release music under DRM. That should not involve the govt. either, however, i.e. they should NOT be able to get a law passed saying hardware vendors must support DRM. This gets back to my original point, which is that the govt. should not be involved.
Yeah, but they'll get it to the point where you need to mike your speakers to copy it, if they have their way. Or maybe they'll make you put a chip in your brain to decrypt it there.
The definition of free in the article quotes Stallman's definition of free. A part of Stallman's definition of Freedom is:
"The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2)." and
"The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this."
Does anyone else notice how the word freedom in these statements should be replaced with condition, i.e.:
"The condition that you must redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2)." and
"The freedom to improve the program, under the condition that you release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this."
This is a strange definition of freedom if you ask me. It means that an individual working on software derivatives for whatever purpose, must sacrifice his work "for the public good"; A very blatant socialist mentality which ultimately restricts the rights of an individual to personally benefit from his own labor. Now, this is all well and good when people volunteer to work anyway, and sacrifice their individual rights. Just don't expect companies to pay people to help develop this software, since the company cannot gain any value from the software mods, other than for actual internal use in the company. This will ultimately restrict the use of this FOSS software in the DoD in this case, if any software mods are necessary for classified applications, for instance. We've already seen companies like Apple and TiVo pass over linux for freeBSD, because BSD really is free, i.e. no GPL.
As far as Europe goes, I agree that they're way too liberal. Just thought I'd give them a break since they're always whining when the US is the only exxample provided.
As far as your second point, Americans are already both producers and consumers of technology. Recessions are a natural phenomena that are already curbed through government intervention. The govt. shouldn't start forcing people to pay for services they don't want to prop up companies that are failing, however. Even if we are behind in the consumption of broadband technology, we're still the leading producer of the technology (Cisco, JDSU, Lucent, Nortel, etc.), BTW.
Your analogy is flawed. A programmer is paid by a company, and therefore, sells his rights to his work for a weekly paycheck. On the other hand, if he markets and sells the software himself, he is entitled to sell his stuff without having it pirated. If you want an ethical reason, people work to produce music software, etc. They expect compensation for this work. If you pirate a copy, you are benefiting from someone elses labor without compensation. This is actually only a step away from making that person your slave, in that regard.
Actually, if the RIAA sold only crippled CDs, and they worked, they couldn't be pirated. Therefore, loss of sales because people stopped buying cds would be noticed as sales dropped and couldn't be attrbuted to piracy.
This isn't an issue for the govt. They have no say as to what format is adopted for a cd. The RIAA has the right to choose any format they like. Just because the law says you have a right to make personal copies, doesn't mean that the RIAA is forced to make it easy for you to do that. The govt. should stay out of it. It's not their concern as to what format a cd comes out in. We shouldn't want such govt. intervention. It erodes on everyones' rights, including those of RIAA members. Under the current system we can vote with our dollars by not buying crippled cds. That sends a very clear message to the RIAA.
No. Just because the law says you are entitled to copy for fair use does NOT mean that the RIAA is forced to make it easy for you to copy for fair use. You have no right to tell the RIAA in what format they must release their material. They have rights too. They have the right to prevent ALL copying. If you don't like it, you have the right to choose not to buy their stuff.
Information isn't free. It takes work to create information. This freedom of information concept is outrageous. If I write a book, and someone copies it and benfits from it, I deserve to negotiate the terms by which he makes a copy. Otherwise, he is treating me as a slave, who is obligated to work for his sake on his terms with no expectation of reward. If you think that's ethical, you may want to reconsider the basis of your ethics. Ethics are meant to promote freedom of individuals, not to benfit the public at large.
If you choose civil disobedience, you must accept the consequences of breaking the law. Thus, if you are fined or imprisoned, you must accept that fate. Only then can you hope that the so called injustice will cause people to change the law. I don't see any sympathy from law-abiding citizens, however, for a person fined for making illegal copies of cds.
"What doesn't makes sense is blocking ports before you actually use any bandwith. If you want to operate a server for a couple of days, just to learn how to do that, or to experiment something you wouldn't do on a production server, why shouldn't you do that on a ADSL conection?"
The broadband provider can charge whatever he wants for whatever service he decides to provide. Who are you that you think you can tell them how to do business. Maybe they don't want to take the effort to monitor bandwidth, and blocking ports is the simplest way for them to limit bandwisth.
Sun overcharges for everything. You pay double for everything from Sun, not pc hardware. And with Sun you're stuck with their crappy UltraSPARC, that's behind in performance. Sun is supporting x86 because they know that their market share is slipping, and soon they will not be able to sell hardware anymore. Therefore, they've decided to charge you $900/yr for software instead.
Given that there is only one machine that needs this touch screen driver, which was developed by MS, so is comapible with windows, it's probably pretty stable. When there are 100 clones of this machine, each with their own crappy drivers, those machines will like be less stable. Random drivers that crash windows are the most serious problem MS faces in making a stable system.
It seems like bluetooth is being used to circumvent the intent of a law, which is to ban people from talking on the phone while driving. The protocol used to get the info from your car shouldn't be an issue. If want to ban all cell phones, you should amend the law to include any wireless device for vocal communication. If, on the other hand, you find hands free devices acceptable, you should allow hands free cell phones as well as hands free bluetooth based communications devices.
If you civil disobedience as a means to protest laws you don't like, in this case copying copyrighted material as a means of expressing discontent with the RIAA, you must face any penalty of law that's imposed upon you. Then you hope others are outraged at how unjust the law is, and it gets changed. I don't think anyone will feel sorry for a person fined for having illegal copies of copyrighted material, at least not anyone in the govt.
I never claimed the cable companies had the right to use govt. legislation. The govt. should stay out of it. America and Europe are great places because of libertarian philosophies embodied in their govts. The last thing I want is taxpayers paying for IT that they're not using. If people are unwilling to pay $40 a month for broadband, they've made a free choice. If we're behind in IT because of it, so what? It's a choice made freely by members of a society, rather than having the govt. force them to pay for something they don't really want. That how free markets should work.
They block ports because people who use those ports tend to run servers that use a lot of bandwidth. Again, you can get business level service if you want to run a server. The alternative is to charge per packet. If they did that, there would be a whole new set of people complaining about that system. You can please everyone. Who says the govt. has the right answer. If you think they know how to run a business, just look at what happened to the Soviet Union, or look at the mess CA made out of electric power. There's no God-given right to broadband in the constitution. If you don't like what's offered, get a T1.
Yeah. That's why all the telcom carriers are going bankrupt. Our company sells 40Gb/s serdes sample chipset for thousands of dollars a pair. Telcom is extremely expensive.
Asking whether she won or lost is like sending a republican to debate at a democratic convention and having the democrats vote on who won. Give me a break. Although she's bringing up the practical aspects of what p2p does to their business, this isn't even the issue. The issue is whether it is legal for people to share copyrighted without the permission of the copyright holder. The answer is no. It's very simple. Even Janis Ian agrees that you need the permission of the copyright holder. The RIAA has the right to do business anyway they choose. Your only right is to refuse to do business with them if you don't like what they offer. You do NOT have the right to violate copyright just because you don't like the way they do business. It's as unethical as stealing cable, photocopying books, etc.
Free market is working well in the long distance arena. Even though there are only 3 or 4 major companies, prices for long distance are a lot cheaper than when there was just 1 company. Sure there are problems getting competition due to the large expense to run cable everywhere, plus govt. re tape. Getting the govt. involved is a bad idea, however, because they have no interest in making money for the company or making things fair for consumers. All they care about is getting votes, and they'll set the price at a level that gives them the best ratio of votes to political donations. I'd rather have the cable company figuring out a pricing scheme which allows them to make some money. At least that way some of the money gets used to improve the system to keep up with the competition. Once the govt. starts regulating, everthing will stagnate since there is no more incentive to innovate. No matter what you do in this case, you'll still get the same govt. regulated check from your consumer, so why bother making things better.
You have many choices. You could get a business level connection if you want to run servers. There are DSL, Cable, and Satellite providers. Broadband is not a monopoly. Govt. regulation is surest way to kill any incentive for new companies to get into the game. If you go the govt regulation route, you will end up with a monopoly that's just good enough to pass govt. regulations. There will be no incentive for anyone to improve this service since they can't then charge you more money for the improved service because the govt. controls the price. If you don't believe this, just look at CA power. No one built any new power plants even though the increase in demand over time was easily predicted. The reason was there wasn't any hope of making money in such an investment because the govt. controls the price to the end user. Now I have to listen to commercials telling me to conserve power because the govt. is too inept to regulate power effectively. This is no surprise since they only need to regulate well enough to avoid losing reelection. The last thing I want is to start hearing commercial encouraging people to conserve internet bandwidth because the govt. can't run that well either. A company must answer to a balance sheet, so your guaranteed much better service in a free market, which is the case in broadband. I'm sure in the Soviet Union they had lots of commercials telling people to conserve this and that for the good of society. In a capitalist society, companies should want you to buy more, not less of something.
I agree with everything you say. What I don't agree with is the author of the posted article wanting the govt. to step in and start regulating the cable company. I believe capitalism in this case will work out the best compromise for all parties as in the case of your automobile analogy.
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I find it amusing that this environmentalist has 4 electric cars to save the environment, but then owns a helicoptor, which probably burns more fuel in a day than a normal car burns in a year.
I'll take Windows95 over MacOS 9.2 for stability performance etc. I don't see how the Microsoft free jab applies here anyway since Apple is as bad as MS if not worse with their business practices.
I agree with you on the DMCA. Fair use says I should be able to make copies. Therefore, it shouldn't be illegal to break the encryption to do so. It's piracy that's illegal. Circumventing copy protection shouldn't be.
As far as DRM goes, if they get the all the software players and hardware players on board, there's no legal reason they can't release music under DRM. That should not involve the govt. either, however, i.e. they should NOT be able to get a law passed saying hardware vendors must support DRM. This gets back to my original point, which is that the govt. should not be involved.
Yeah, but they'll get it to the point where you need to mike your speakers to copy it, if they have their way. Or maybe they'll make you put a chip in your brain to decrypt it there.
The definition of free in the article quotes Stallman's definition of free. A part of Stallman's definition of Freedom is:
"The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2)." and
"The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this."
Does anyone else notice how the word freedom in these statements should be replaced with condition, i.e.:
"The condition that you must redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2)." and
"The freedom to improve the program, under the condition that you release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this."
This is a strange definition of freedom if you ask me. It means that an individual working on software derivatives for whatever purpose, must sacrifice his work "for the public good"; A very blatant socialist mentality which ultimately restricts the rights of an individual to personally benefit from his own labor. Now, this is all well and good when people volunteer to work anyway, and sacrifice their individual rights. Just don't expect companies to pay people to help develop this software, since the company cannot gain any value from the software mods, other than for actual internal use in the company. This will ultimately restrict the use of this FOSS software in the DoD in this case, if any software mods are necessary for classified applications, for instance. We've already seen companies like Apple and TiVo pass over linux for freeBSD, because BSD really is free, i.e. no GPL.
As far as Europe goes, I agree that they're way too liberal. Just thought I'd give them a break since they're always whining when the US is the only exxample provided.
As far as your second point, Americans are already both producers and consumers of technology. Recessions are a natural phenomena that are already curbed through government intervention. The govt. shouldn't start forcing people to pay for services they don't want to prop up companies that are failing, however. Even if we are behind in the consumption of broadband technology, we're still the leading producer of the technology (Cisco, JDSU, Lucent, Nortel, etc.), BTW.
Your analogy is flawed. A programmer is paid by a company, and therefore, sells his rights to his work for a weekly paycheck. On the other hand, if he markets and sells the software himself, he is entitled to sell his stuff without having it pirated. If you want an ethical reason, people work to produce music software, etc. They expect compensation for this work. If you pirate a copy, you are benefiting from someone elses labor without compensation. This is actually only a step away from making that person your slave, in that regard.
Actually, if the RIAA sold only crippled CDs, and they worked, they couldn't be pirated. Therefore, loss of sales because people stopped buying cds would be noticed as sales dropped and couldn't be attrbuted to piracy.
This isn't an issue for the govt. They have no say as to what format is adopted for a cd. The RIAA has the right to choose any format they like. Just because the law says you have a right to make personal copies, doesn't mean that the RIAA is forced to make it easy for you to do that. The govt. should stay out of it. It's not their concern as to what format a cd comes out in. We shouldn't want such govt. intervention. It erodes on everyones' rights, including those of RIAA members. Under the current system we can vote with our dollars by not buying crippled cds. That sends a very clear message to the RIAA.
No. Just because the law says you are entitled to copy for fair use does NOT mean that the RIAA is forced to make it easy for you to copy for fair use. You have no right to tell the RIAA in what format they must release their material. They have rights too. They have the right to prevent ALL copying. If you don't like it, you have the right to choose not to buy their stuff.
Because you are entitled to fair use of copyrighted material, does NOT mean that the RIAA is entitled to make it easy for you to copy their stuff.
Information isn't free. It takes work to create information. This freedom of information concept is outrageous. If I write a book, and someone copies it and benfits from it, I deserve to negotiate the terms by which he makes a copy. Otherwise, he is treating me as a slave, who is obligated to work for his sake on his terms with no expectation of reward. If you think that's ethical, you may want to reconsider the basis of your ethics. Ethics are meant to promote freedom of individuals, not to benfit the public at large.
If you choose civil disobedience, you must accept the consequences of breaking the law. Thus, if you are fined or imprisoned, you must accept that fate. Only then can you hope that the so called injustice will cause people to change the law. I don't see any sympathy from law-abiding citizens, however, for a person fined for making illegal copies of cds.
"What doesn't makes sense is blocking ports before you actually use any bandwith. If you want to operate a server for a couple of days, just to learn how to do that, or to experiment something you wouldn't do on a production server, why shouldn't you do that on a ADSL conection?"
The broadband provider can charge whatever he wants for whatever service he decides to provide. Who are you that you think you can tell them how to do business. Maybe they don't want to take the effort to monitor bandwidth, and blocking ports is the simplest way for them to limit bandwisth.
Sun overcharges for everything. You pay double for everything from Sun, not pc hardware. And with Sun you're stuck with their crappy UltraSPARC, that's behind in performance. Sun is supporting x86 because they know that their market share is slipping, and soon they will not be able to sell hardware anymore. Therefore, they've decided to charge you $900/yr for software instead.
Given that there is only one machine that needs this touch screen driver, which was developed by MS, so is comapible with windows, it's probably pretty stable. When there are 100 clones of this machine, each with their own crappy drivers, those machines will like be less stable. Random drivers that crash windows are the most serious problem MS faces in making a stable system.
It seems like bluetooth is being used to circumvent the intent of a law, which is to ban people from talking on the phone while driving. The protocol used to get the info from your car shouldn't be an issue. If want to ban all cell phones, you should amend the law to include any wireless device for vocal communication. If, on the other hand, you find hands free devices acceptable, you should allow hands free cell phones as well as hands free bluetooth based communications devices.
If you civil disobedience as a means to protest laws you don't like, in this case copying copyrighted material as a means of expressing discontent with the RIAA, you must face any penalty of law that's imposed upon you. Then you hope others are outraged at how unjust the law is, and it gets changed. I don't think anyone will feel sorry for a person fined for having illegal copies of copyrighted material, at least not anyone in the govt.
I never claimed the cable companies had the right to use govt. legislation. The govt. should stay out of it. America and Europe are great places because of libertarian philosophies embodied in their govts. The last thing I want is taxpayers paying for IT that they're not using. If people are unwilling to pay $40 a month for broadband, they've made a free choice. If we're behind in IT because of it, so what? It's a choice made freely by members of a society, rather than having the govt. force them to pay for something they don't really want. That how free markets should work.
They block ports because people who use those ports tend to run servers that use a lot of bandwidth. Again, you can get business level service if you want to run a server. The alternative is to charge per packet. If they did that, there would be a whole new set of people complaining about that system. You can please everyone. Who says the govt. has the right answer. If you think they know how to run a business, just look at what happened to the Soviet Union, or look at the mess CA made out of electric power. There's no God-given right to broadband in the constitution. If you don't like what's offered, get a T1.
Yeah. That's why all the telcom carriers are going bankrupt. Our company sells 40Gb/s serdes sample chipset for thousands of dollars a pair. Telcom is extremely expensive.
Asking whether she won or lost is like sending a republican to debate at a democratic convention and having the democrats vote on who won. Give me a break. Although she's bringing up the practical aspects of what p2p does to their business, this isn't even the issue. The issue is whether it is legal for people to share copyrighted without the permission of the copyright holder. The answer is no. It's very simple. Even Janis Ian agrees that you need the permission of the copyright holder. The RIAA has the right to do business anyway they choose. Your only right is to refuse to do business with them if you don't like what they offer. You do NOT have the right to violate copyright just because you don't like the way they do business. It's as unethical as stealing cable, photocopying books, etc.
Free market is working well in the long distance arena. Even though there are only 3 or 4 major companies, prices for long distance are a lot cheaper than when there was just 1 company. Sure there are problems getting competition due to the large expense to run cable everywhere, plus govt. re tape. Getting the govt. involved is a bad idea, however, because they have no interest in making money for the company or making things fair for consumers. All they care about is getting votes, and they'll set the price at a level that gives them the best ratio of votes to political donations. I'd rather have the cable company figuring out a pricing scheme which allows them to make some money. At least that way some of the money gets used to improve the system to keep up with the competition. Once the govt. starts regulating, everthing will stagnate since there is no more incentive to innovate. No matter what you do in this case, you'll still get the same govt. regulated check from your consumer, so why bother making things better.
You have many choices. You could get a business level connection if you want to run servers. There are DSL, Cable, and Satellite providers. Broadband is not a monopoly. Govt. regulation is surest way to kill any incentive for new companies to get into the game. If you go the govt regulation route, you will end up with a monopoly that's just good enough to pass govt. regulations. There will be no incentive for anyone to improve this service since they can't then charge you more money for the improved service because the govt. controls the price. If you don't believe this, just look at CA power. No one built any new power plants even though the increase in demand over time was easily predicted. The reason was there wasn't any hope of making money in such an investment because the govt. controls the price to the end user. Now I have to listen to commercials telling me to conserve power because the govt. is too inept to regulate power effectively. This is no surprise since they only need to regulate well enough to avoid losing reelection. The last thing I want is to start hearing commercial encouraging people to conserve internet bandwidth because the govt. can't run that well either. A company must answer to a balance sheet, so your guaranteed much better service in a free market, which is the case in broadband. I'm sure in the Soviet Union they had lots of commercials telling people to conserve this and that for the good of society. In a capitalist society, companies should want you to buy more, not less of something.
I agree with everything you say. What I don't agree with is the author of the posted article wanting the govt. to step in and start regulating the cable company. I believe capitalism in this case will work out the best compromise for all parties as in the case of your automobile analogy.