Regardless of the number of extensions, or whether or not they're prospective or retrospective, Lessig cannot prove that congress' pattern of extensions constitutes a perpetual copyright. Therefore, the congress' action is not unconstitutional. Given that the people in congress change every couple of years, you can't even pin the pattern of behavior on any particular person. How are you going to prove that the pattern of copyright extensions will go on indefinitely in the future?
There is no such entity as "the public", only a collection of individuals. If someone wants to own a copy of someone elses work because it inspires him, I don't think it's too much to ask that the person actually pay for the work. If for no other reason than out of respect for the person creating the inspirational work. People have a right to do what they want with their creations. The public has no right to them, except through a mutually agreed upon transaction. Lawyers like Lessig think the public automatically has a right to these works. This is a socialist notion which places infringes on the rights of an individual in favor of a group of people.
Although the Fountainhead stresses creative urge and integrity, Ayn Rand feels that one's creations are one's own, and that person has the right to charge whatever one want's for them. Once creates something for oneself, not society. Society doesn't have any right to claim it as its own. This was brought across much more clearly in Atlas Shrugged. Anyway, as far as copyrights, I mean copying works verbatim, as copyright. In my opinion, 3 notes doesn't amount to copyright, but is you sample someone's song for a rap song, for instance (which is popular these days), the copyright holder must give permission and terms for use.
I disagree with your statements about Ayn Rand's philosophy. She believes people should interact through trade, not force. Force is only used when confronted with force which threatens one's rights. Ayn Rand argues that people who promote socialism or fascism (Ayn Rand is not a Fascist)ARE motivated by power since in these systems, govt. controls peoples lives, taking away their freedom, even though these people may claim they are doing it for the benefit of others. Ayn Rand asks only for a govt. that protects the rights of individuals, both from criminals and from foreign invaders.
My arguement is that you can't claim Congress is trying to extend copyrights indefinitely simply because they have been extending the limited lifetime of copyrights. i.e. you haven't proven that a -> b, but merely speculated that they may be doing this. My opinion is that a copyright should exist forever, to be willed to whomever the copyright holder chooses, just as a business or a piece of property can be willed. A copyrighted work is a piece of property created by the author, and it's worth should be respected by the public, not exploited, making the author the slave to the public. However, the constitution authors don't feel this way, but they make no claim as to what limited is. Therefore, the court has no right to conclude that life+70 is unreasonable, or life+2000 is unreasonable. That is congress' job, not the supreme court's job. The supreme court cannot write the law, (despite what NJ and FL courts think).If you don't like what congress does, vote for new representation. Remember, lobbyists can give all the money they want, but they can't vote. Be careful when you talk about common sense and pattern matching. Logic is slightly more (although not much more)complicated than that.
It's called Montana. They majority there believe that the federal government should a) leave them alone b) do not take away their guns and c) lower their taxes. Pretty close to what FSP wants. That is, no democrats. However, the Republicans still outnumber the Libertarians, so they would still have their work cut out for them there.
"Xerox was offered by Steve Jobs the option to invest $1,000,000 in Apple before they went public in exchange for two visits to PARC to see the developments and talk to the developers of the Xerox Alto. Xerox gladly jumped at the chance and when Apple went public, the stock had split into 800,000 shares (from 100,000) and was worth 17.6 Million. If you ask me, that qualifies as compensation for what Xerox gave apple." I see nothing in this language that suggests the offer to buy apple stock (which is a risk, BTW, not guaranteed revenue) was conditioned on allowing Apple to use Xerox IP. I could care less about Aqua's CPU wating flashiness and don't think getting people to buy unix qualifies as innovation. You still haven't convinced me Apple has done much innovation, which is the point I was making. I never claimed using BSD was outside of Apple's right. It's just not what I consider innovative
.
Lessig's arguement is that a change in the law from life+50 to life+70 is unconstitutional because it represents a pattern by congress which makes a copyright, in effect, perpetual. As one justice pointed out, if this is true then the '76 chage from 28 years to life+50 is also unconstitutional, and should be stricken as well. Lessigs arguement is weak because a) two extensions by the congress over the span of more than a hundred years is a weak basis to establish a pattern of behavior and b) Lessig cannot prove that congress in the future will continue the pattern. On the other hand life+70 is a limited amout of time which is perfectly in line with the constitution.
Read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand sometime. It may give you some new perspective in what money represents, and its inprotance in the motivation of people to excel and succeed. Also, copyrights don't prevent you from builing on someone else's work. They only prevent you from copying a work verbatim. This is what Lessig wants people to be able to do, which he admits to in the transcript.
It's pretty tough to write if you're stuck working in a factory because the copyright on your last book ran out. Meanwhile, other people who had nothing to do with the creation of your book are taking advantage of your work for their profit. Why should the public get to profit off of an author's work, when he himself cannot.
I don't know where you get your facts, but Apple didn't pay Xerox a dime for their ideas. Also, if an employee moves from one company to another, he does not have the right to use the IP from the old company in the new company. Many patent suits are filed over this sort of thing. As for bringing unix to the masses, what's your point. It's not a very good claim to innovation. BTW, Apple code is not open source. They don't care about open source. They chose BSD over Linux in aprt because BSD has no GPL, so their not innovative in promoting open source either. Why you got modded up is just another example of slashdot moderator bias. There should be a notice
politically correct=2
It interesting that slashdotters, who are always complaining business are unwilling to adapt to changing technology (RIAA and MPAA, for instance), are completely against palladium, which is an emerging technology, and are doing everything they can to supress it. Aren't you guilty of the same crimes you accuse the RIAA and MPAA of, i.e. supressing technological development to hang on to an old computing model? And to top it off you're using a frivolous patent to fight your battle, which you are normally completely against, when it affects you in a negative way. If you're going to take a stance on something, at least be consistent in your arguements.
"Biddle insisted that the impetus behind Palladium was solely to secure digital entertainment content and that he knew of no way that it could be used for the enforcement of software licensing." Apparently this Biddle guy doesn't know very much. I think that's the key to the whole arguement, since MS knows that Palladium can be used for software licensing.
Greens patents are extremely frivolous. Despite what the MS marketing people say, the inventors of palladium know that software licensing is one of the most obvious features of palladium. People have been building software licensing program for CAD for years now. Sun provides a unique ID for its machines to enable software licensing, for instance (hostid). It's useful way to prevent software piracy, which is a major problem in countries like China, with 80% piracy rates on software. I don't see a reason to reject palladium as a means for software licensing since fair use doesn't apply to software. If you buy a coy of something, you're usually not allowed to install it on more than one machine.
Every industry has failures whose losses need to be covered by their successes. I know a guy at IBM who said he worked on seven projects over ten years, six of which didn't go anywhere. If there was no chance of failure, there would be no risk, and everyone would be investing. That's how the business world works. In the end, if the bottom line is red because of DVD sales being less profitable than movie ticket sales, they can always choose not to release on DVD. I'm not sure why the guy in the article is complaining, other than the worry of piracy, which will be a big issue as internet bandwidth increases.
I'm not sure what your definition of innovation is. Apple stole their windows concept from Xerox and borrowed their latest OS engine from BSD. Sounds no different than MS practices aside from the fact that MS at least can claim, for better or worse, that they write their own code.
All of it, since if you want a Mac, you can only buy it from Apple. It doesn't matter that they've switched to pc-like hardware. It's still a proprietary system.
What backtracking? The company owns the copyright and the employess get paid for their contribution, but do not own the copyright. The public has no stake and therefore no ownership in the company.
I see all these slashdot posts where someone is outraged about his rights being violated by the Patriot Act, security cameras in public places, the DMCA, etc., which may or may not be valid complaints. But then to turn around and tranmple over the rights of coprights holders seems somewhat hypocritical to me. We should be fighting for an amendment to make copyrighted material permanent property, not laws to make copyrighted material public property. It's a hell of a lot easier to argue that something someone wrote should be their permanent property, than it is to argue that a piece of real estate is yours forever, to will to your children when you die if you like. At least a book is a direct product of an author's work, whereas land was never created by anyone to begin with, but merely claimed by a person or govt. after finding it or taking it by force. Certainly property owners today work to purchase land, and therefore are entitled to it forever. Shouldn't the same rights be given to an author to keep his work forever. Why does the public feel they have the right to a persons work. Sounds like socialism to me.
Copyright protects a sequence of words or pictures, not original thought. Of course no thought is completely original, but a copyrighted work claims to have a unique, uncopied sequence of words expressing a thought. To avoid plagiarism, a person should footnote something that isn't an original thought, but is not criminally liable, unless the words are copied directly, beyond the limit of fair use. As far as grandchildren go, if I can will my house to my grandchildren, I should be able to will my copyrighted books to them, which seems more valuable to me than a house. Why does the public think they have the right to my work after I'm dead. I should be able to choose who gets it.
Interesting given that Ayn Rand would argue that roads should be privatized, as well as public utilities such as water and sewage. That way, taxpayers don't pay for these services, but the people who use them. It's socialists who are for public utilitiesThank you for furthering the cause you are preching against. As far as land ownership, sure no one can create land. The best we can do is have a govt. sell it to individuals at fair market value. Of course how govts. obtain land is not always ethical. As far as tax exemptions, corporations and rich people are unfairly taxed (tax brackets) and pay a much higher percentage of their income than the average person, in the US anyway.
The shareholders pay the people who create the copyrighted material. It's a voluntary exchange of work (shareholders have to work for the money to purchase shares), so the shareholders end up with the copyrighted material and the employees end up with their paychecks. Yes, IP can be bought and sold as long as the two parties agree upon a price. Trade is a fundamental function of people in a society. Only by allowing people to trade freely, do we guarantee their rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Great, so by downloading a now public domain work and burning a DVD, I've allowed everyone but the person (or his heirs) who created the copyrighted work to make some money. Is that what you want? Oh by the way, I already have most of the equipment I need for downloading and burning movies that I bought for completely different reasons. A computer and internet service has more than one use. I hope your not a business major, because you've totally oversimplified your arguement.
Slashdot Mirror
Regardless of the number of extensions, or whether or not they're prospective or retrospective, Lessig cannot prove that congress' pattern of extensions constitutes a perpetual copyright. Therefore, the congress' action is not unconstitutional. Given that the people in congress change every couple of years, you can't even pin the pattern of behavior on any particular person. How are you going to prove that the pattern of copyright extensions will go on indefinitely in the future?
There is no such entity as "the public", only a collection of individuals. If someone wants to own a copy of someone elses work because it inspires him, I don't think it's too much to ask that the person actually pay for the work. If for no other reason than out of respect for the person creating the inspirational work. People have a right to do what they want with their creations. The public has no right to them, except through a mutually agreed upon transaction. Lawyers like Lessig think the public automatically has a right to these works. This is a socialist notion which places infringes on the rights of an individual in favor of a group of people.
Although the Fountainhead stresses creative urge and integrity, Ayn Rand feels that one's creations are one's own, and that person has the right to charge whatever one want's for them. Once creates something for oneself, not society. Society doesn't have any right to claim it as its own. This was brought across much more clearly in Atlas Shrugged. Anyway, as far as copyrights, I mean copying works verbatim, as copyright. In my opinion, 3 notes doesn't amount to copyright, but is you sample someone's song for a rap song, for instance (which is popular these days), the copyright holder must give permission and terms for use.
I disagree with your statements about Ayn Rand's philosophy. She believes people should interact through trade, not force. Force is only used when confronted with force which threatens one's rights. Ayn Rand argues that people who promote socialism or fascism (Ayn Rand is not a Fascist)ARE motivated by power since in these systems, govt. controls peoples lives, taking away their freedom, even though these people may claim they are doing it for the benefit of others. Ayn Rand asks only for a govt. that protects the rights of individuals, both from criminals and from foreign invaders.
My arguement is that you can't claim Congress is trying to extend copyrights indefinitely simply because they have been extending the limited lifetime of copyrights. i.e. you haven't proven that a -> b, but merely speculated that they may be doing this. My opinion is that a copyright should exist forever, to be willed to whomever the copyright holder chooses, just as a business or a piece of property can be willed. A copyrighted work is a piece of property created by the author, and it's worth should be respected by the public, not exploited, making the author the slave to the public. However, the constitution authors don't feel this way, but they make no claim as to what limited is. Therefore, the court has no right to conclude that life+70 is unreasonable, or life+2000 is unreasonable. That is congress' job, not the supreme court's job. The supreme court cannot write the law, (despite what NJ and FL courts think).If you don't like what congress does, vote for new representation. Remember, lobbyists can give all the money they want, but they can't vote. Be careful when you talk about common sense and pattern matching. Logic is slightly more (although not much more)complicated than that.
It's called Montana. They majority there believe that the federal government should a) leave them alone b) do not take away their guns and c) lower their taxes. Pretty close to what FSP wants. That is, no democrats. However, the Republicans still outnumber the Libertarians, so they would still have their work cut out for them there.
"Xerox was offered by Steve Jobs the option to invest $1,000,000 in Apple before they went public in exchange for two visits to PARC to see the developments and talk to the developers of the Xerox Alto. Xerox gladly jumped at the chance and when Apple went public, the stock had split into 800,000 shares (from 100,000) and was worth 17.6 Million. If you ask me, that qualifies as compensation for what Xerox gave apple." I see nothing in this language that suggests the offer to buy apple stock (which is a risk, BTW, not guaranteed revenue) was conditioned on allowing Apple to use Xerox IP. I could care less about Aqua's CPU wating flashiness and don't think getting people to buy unix qualifies as innovation. You still haven't convinced me Apple has done much innovation, which is the point I was making. I never claimed using BSD was outside of Apple's right. It's just not what I consider innovative .
Lessig's arguement is that a change in the law from life+50 to life+70 is unconstitutional because it represents a pattern by congress which makes a copyright, in effect, perpetual. As one justice pointed out, if this is true then the '76 chage from 28 years to life+50 is also unconstitutional, and should be stricken as well. Lessigs arguement is weak because a) two extensions by the congress over the span of more than a hundred years is a weak basis to establish a pattern of behavior and b) Lessig cannot prove that congress in the future will continue the pattern. On the other hand life+70 is a limited amout of time which is perfectly in line with the constitution.
Read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand sometime. It may give you some new perspective in what money represents, and its inprotance in the motivation of people to excel and succeed. Also, copyrights don't prevent you from builing on someone else's work. They only prevent you from copying a work verbatim. This is what Lessig wants people to be able to do, which he admits to in the transcript.
It's pretty tough to write if you're stuck working in a factory because the copyright on your last book ran out. Meanwhile, other people who had nothing to do with the creation of your book are taking advantage of your work for their profit. Why should the public get to profit off of an author's work, when he himself cannot.
I don't know where you get your facts, but Apple didn't pay Xerox a dime for their ideas. Also, if an employee moves from one company to another, he does not have the right to use the IP from the old company in the new company. Many patent suits are filed over this sort of thing. As for bringing unix to the masses, what's your point. It's not a very good claim to innovation. BTW, Apple code is not open source. They don't care about open source. They chose BSD over Linux in aprt because BSD has no GPL, so their not innovative in promoting open source either. Why you got modded up is just another example of slashdot moderator bias. There should be a notice politically correct=2
It interesting that slashdotters, who are always complaining business are unwilling to adapt to changing technology (RIAA and MPAA, for instance), are completely against palladium, which is an emerging technology, and are doing everything they can to supress it. Aren't you guilty of the same crimes you accuse the RIAA and MPAA of, i.e. supressing technological development to hang on to an old computing model? And to top it off you're using a frivolous patent to fight your battle, which you are normally completely against, when it affects you in a negative way. If you're going to take a stance on something, at least be consistent in your arguements.
"Biddle insisted that the impetus behind Palladium was solely to secure digital entertainment content and that he knew of no way that it could be used for the enforcement of software licensing." Apparently this Biddle guy doesn't know very much. I think that's the key to the whole arguement, since MS knows that Palladium can be used for software licensing.
Greens patents are extremely frivolous. Despite what the MS marketing people say, the inventors of palladium know that software licensing is one of the most obvious features of palladium. People have been building software licensing program for CAD for years now. Sun provides a unique ID for its machines to enable software licensing, for instance (hostid). It's useful way to prevent software piracy, which is a major problem in countries like China, with 80% piracy rates on software. I don't see a reason to reject palladium as a means for software licensing since fair use doesn't apply to software. If you buy a coy of something, you're usually not allowed to install it on more than one machine.
Every industry has failures whose losses need to be covered by their successes. I know a guy at IBM who said he worked on seven projects over ten years, six of which didn't go anywhere. If there was no chance of failure, there would be no risk, and everyone would be investing. That's how the business world works. In the end, if the bottom line is red because of DVD sales being less profitable than movie ticket sales, they can always choose not to release on DVD. I'm not sure why the guy in the article is complaining, other than the worry of piracy, which will be a big issue as internet bandwidth increases.
Didn't the older versions of MacOS actually display a bomb on the screen when they crashed?
I'm not sure what your definition of innovation is. Apple stole their windows concept from Xerox and borrowed their latest OS engine from BSD. Sounds no different than MS practices aside from the fact that MS at least can claim, for better or worse, that they write their own code.
All of it, since if you want a Mac, you can only buy it from Apple. It doesn't matter that they've switched to pc-like hardware. It's still a proprietary system.
What backtracking? The company owns the copyright and the employess get paid for their contribution, but do not own the copyright. The public has no stake and therefore no ownership in the company.
That solution won't work for US listeners. They'll get the govt. to force ISPs to block the illegal content.
I see all these slashdot posts where someone is outraged about his rights being violated by the Patriot Act, security cameras in public places, the DMCA, etc., which may or may not be valid complaints. But then to turn around and tranmple over the rights of coprights holders seems somewhat hypocritical to me. We should be fighting for an amendment to make copyrighted material permanent property, not laws to make copyrighted material public property. It's a hell of a lot easier to argue that something someone wrote should be their permanent property, than it is to argue that a piece of real estate is yours forever, to will to your children when you die if you like. At least a book is a direct product of an author's work, whereas land was never created by anyone to begin with, but merely claimed by a person or govt. after finding it or taking it by force. Certainly property owners today work to purchase land, and therefore are entitled to it forever. Shouldn't the same rights be given to an author to keep his work forever. Why does the public feel they have the right to a persons work. Sounds like socialism to me.
Copyright protects a sequence of words or pictures, not original thought. Of course no thought is completely original, but a copyrighted work claims to have a unique, uncopied sequence of words expressing a thought. To avoid plagiarism, a person should footnote something that isn't an original thought, but is not criminally liable, unless the words are copied directly, beyond the limit of fair use. As far as grandchildren go, if I can will my house to my grandchildren, I should be able to will my copyrighted books to them, which seems more valuable to me than a house. Why does the public think they have the right to my work after I'm dead. I should be able to choose who gets it.
Interesting given that Ayn Rand would argue that roads should be privatized, as well as public utilities such as water and sewage. That way, taxpayers don't pay for these services, but the people who use them. It's socialists who are for public utilitiesThank you for furthering the cause you are preching against. As far as land ownership, sure no one can create land. The best we can do is have a govt. sell it to individuals at fair market value. Of course how govts. obtain land is not always ethical. As far as tax exemptions, corporations and rich people are unfairly taxed (tax brackets) and pay a much higher percentage of their income than the average person, in the US anyway.
The shareholders pay the people who create the copyrighted material. It's a voluntary exchange of work (shareholders have to work for the money to purchase shares), so the shareholders end up with the copyrighted material and the employees end up with their paychecks. Yes, IP can be bought and sold as long as the two parties agree upon a price. Trade is a fundamental function of people in a society. Only by allowing people to trade freely, do we guarantee their rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Great, so by downloading a now public domain work and burning a DVD, I've allowed everyone but the person (or his heirs) who created the copyrighted work to make some money. Is that what you want? Oh by the way, I already have most of the equipment I need for downloading and burning movies that I bought for completely different reasons. A computer and internet service has more than one use. I hope your not a business major, because you've totally oversimplified your arguement.