You are neglecting the fact that computers keep track of this, not humans. Any transactions that would have gone through with your own money could be easily respected. Anything more, bam!
All these emotional arguments (yours and the many others on this thread) about the legitimacy of using money that is not yours, that it was confusing, that it was April Fool's Day, finders keepers, etc. are ridiculous. I have had erroneous transactions that deposit money in my bank account that got reverted one or a few days later. I certainly did not consider it my money.
Imagine yourself at a hearing before a judge in a court of law and you are blabbering on about how you were confused at the extra $8,674 and decided you might as well spend it, or that you thought it was an April Fool's Day joke and decided to play along making "joke trades," or that since Zecco put the money in your account it's "too fucking bad, Dude the money's mine now." I'd hate to be your lawyer.
Clearly you are just putting forth an arbitrary opinion with no regard to whether it can be sustainably practiced in the real world on a large scale. Taking things merely because you have the ability to do so, expecting that anything besides "concerts, theaters, live performances in general" or "the way they used to do it before TVs and CD players" (gramophones and LPs are over 100 years old, BTW) is subject to confiscation of property (piracy, by another name), the utterly non-generalizable "sometimes you just have to give for no compensation other than gratitude," and of course the bombastic and insulting "artists shouldn't be in their field for fame or fortune. I don't really care if they are or not, but I certainly can't respect that position." At least you saved the best one for last.
Do you think that if there were a way for me to copy my labor endlessly for free, that I'd bother to go to work in the first place? I'd create entire organizations that ran on my free labor. It's an apples and oranges comparison here, since I'm blue-collar. My labor is exactly that.
It is not apples and oranges at all. Labor is labor. The means by which the product of the labor is distributed certainly influences the market price, but it is simpleminded to expect that below a certain distribution cost or ease of reproduction the creators should expect little or no compensation. An expensive creation such as a motion picture depends on a large number of people viewing it in a theater or buying or renting the DVD at a low price. The fact that the DVD can be easily reproduced or that it is possible to sneak into the theater and view the movie for free does not justify the illegal behavior nor does it render it morally, socially, or economically acceptable. You are simply trying to invent shallow reasons to justify illegal behavior that in effect steals income from people and organizations. The fact that the RIAA and many of its backers are corrupt crooks doesn't justify the behavior either.
I guess you can't see beyond the end of your nose far enough to see the corrosive consequences on the economy, on the value of labor, and on the support of intellectual property creation and distribution of condoning, generalizing, and scaling up piracy of copyrighted material and breach of licencing. You have to be told by adults wiser and more responsible than you, but of course you insist on not paying attention.
It would, in my eyes, seem to be more of a service than anything. By purchasing a legal copy of a movie online to download, I'm receiving nothing physical for what I payed for. It's not a good.
What do you mean "nothing physical"? Is it spiritual? Is it in some magical dimension? You don't think magnetic marks on a disk or voltage spikes on a wire are physical? Are you so obtuse that you can't distinguish between A) the service of providing you a medium with digital data of some kind, and 2) the actual digital data itself and the labor and investment that went into creating it? Can digital data spontaneously form into a movie or a song in such a way that all that is needed is the service to allow you to obtain a copy?
And murder is murder. And copyright violation is copyright violation, and is the same as murder about as much as it is the same as theft
Am I the only one astonished at the number of people on this thread who can't grasp something so clear and simple as copyright violation being a crime in the same way that theft, murder, fraud, perjury, breach of contract, etc. etc. are crimes? What's their to understand? How is copyright violation not a crime in the same way as theft is a crime?
Yes. By extension, if you go to a bookstore several times and rip out some of the pages of a book each time until you have stolen the entire book, then there's nothing wrong. The degree of deliberate self-delusion on this thread is mind boggling. Look at the repeated modding as off-topic of this post. It is off-topic to argue on a thread about copyright piracy that copyright piracy is illegal. No rational thought, not even a perfunctory nod to prevailing law. I want it, so it's OK to just take it without payment. Sad and amazing.
In other words, until it's free, we'll take it anyway. When it's free, it won't matter.
Why would a professional musician or a crew making a movie want to do so for nothing? How would they pay their expenses? Why do you think you have some kind of right to take it for nothing? Should people who make music, or video, or legitimate inventions, etc. simply not expect to receive any income for them? Should you not expect any income for your labor and investment in resources and materials? What does "when it's free, it won't matter" mean? Who will be making it for free and what will be their motivation? Are you pointing out some attractive and scalable new paradigm for labor and its compensation, or are you just making pointless noise?
Oh, so I guess he should be paying for music when it's playing at a mall. The radio station that's playing it should pay for it, the mall should pay for it, the store should pay for it, and every single ear it touches should pay for it, right? Right?
You are being deliberately childish and obtuse as well, and you know it. Those uses are legal in that the creators of the music have authorized this use. It is perfectly legal for you to listen to music in this manner. Stop making up bogus examples you know are irrelevant and deceitful.
There is another side to the coin, you know. You'd do well to not insist that others "grow up for Chrissakes" if they don't share your opinion. It makes you look like a child.
It is not an opinion. It is a fact. The music you listen to at the mall or on the radio is legally licensed. The music you pirate off a disk or download via file sharing without payment is not. You know this. There is no opinion here.
The other side is this: I bought the music. Why can't I do what I want with music that I own?
Again, you know perfectly well why. You did not buy "the music," you bought a recording of the music. There is a license associated with it as well as copyright law. You know this, and you can look on the packaging for the copyright indication or the Terms and Conditions set forth by the copyright owner. You can make any specious claims you want, but you know perfectly well that you are wrong and are simply making things up to justify your use of other peoples labor for free.
If I'm advertising the music by letting people hear it for free, I should be paid. Let me reiterate this: I should be paid for it. You have to pay any other entity to get advertising. That's why you strive so much for word of mouth, because you don't have to pay for it and it nets you profit. You don't sue your advertisers into oblivion.
Is your advertising work done for hire? Were you contracted do do it? Is it advertising or are you merely allowing others to obtain free copies? You are scraping the bottom of the barrel here. Word of mouth does not involve giving away copies of copyrighted work by non-owners. You know it. Stop making crap up. Nobody hired you to do any advertising.
But I guess I live in a fantasy world, because I feel that the first sale doctrine had it right. There's a huge difference between subscription and purchase, chief, and music is not a subscription. Considering that I don't sign anything when I buy music, I'm not bound to whatever conditions the artist has.
Wrong again. Good Lord, look at the fucking CD jewel case or the Terms and Conditions of the download site. Do you see the copyright indicator? You are bound by copyright law regardless of whether you made any additional contractual agreements. You are bound by any conditions the artist or distributor specify that are covered by copyright law. It is prevailing law and you are bound by it whether you like it or not, whether you understand it or not, and whether you are aware of it or not. This isn't rocket science. You can't just make shit up and expect the world to accept it. Ask a fucking lawyer. You definitely live in a fantasy world.
You are being deliberately childish or obtuse for the sake of argument and you know it full well. Are you claiming that there is nothing wrong with listening to a musical recording without compensating the individuals or organizations that created it even if they 1) have not authorized you to do so and 2) are explicitly requiring you to pay for purchasing a recording or a digital stream of the performance?
You are committing the mistake of over generalizing and trivializing the term "intellectual property." A recorded musical performance or the creation of a video is the direct distillation of labor, as is a patent on a new type of water pump or a new type of chemical to dye fabrics, for example. Your implicit claim that "intellectual property" lacks substance or is in some way not real or does not merit compensation for its use is indefensible.
Some people think animals don't feel pain? Damn. Where did pain come from then? At what stage in evolutionary history did neurological detection of heat or other physical damage begin? Are these people creationists? Do you need an 'eternal soul' to feel fire burn your flesh? Have they never stuck a crab or a lobster into a pot of boiling water, or are they just pretending to be stupid for the sake of argument?
Why do you insist on arguing something you know full well is irrelevant? Do you eat mp3 files or videos? Are they destroyed after you listen to or view them? You do understand that consuming music means listening to it and consuming video means watching it, right? Right?
People who violate copyrighted material are in a fantasy world. If someone creates something, music, software, video, whatever, they have a right to charge for it. You do not have a right to consume it in its totality (fair use exists for parts of it) if they do not explicitly allow you to by some kind of license. What part of that don't you understand? Who do you think you are to expect people to work at making things and accept that you can take whatever you want from them without permission and without compensation?
Morons think music should be free apparently because of the mere fact that they like to listen to it, usually accompanied by some sappy argument that music should be free because things of beauty should be free, and the human soul is free, blah blah blah. Another favorite is that since these days it is easy to copy, it can no longer be copyrighted and is thus free. I guess if you are skilled enough to enter people's homes at night and steal their silverware, it isn't really theirs to begin with, not to mention if it is really beautiful silverware and wants to be free. Truly arguments only a hopeless dumbshit could put forth.
If someone explicitly allows you to take something with GPL or a Creative Commons license, great! If they don't, you have to pay. It's someone's income, you idiot, regardless of whether the price is reasonable or controlled by a cartel or not. Grow the fuck up for Chrissake.
Why spend so much? Luckily, I don't care much about the GUI as long as it does the basics. I build my own boxes and put GNU/Linux on them and they work very well for much less money than any equally powerful alternative. I'll leave Apple to the fashionistas and people who need hand-holding.
I hope you are able to see that your two categories cover the vast majority of users worldwide. If most commercial games ran on Linux, practically all users would be included, there would be no significant justification to prefer Windows, and most of your argument would become academic.
Windows can't lay the claim to "it just works," because it doesn't any better than Linux, Mac OS, etc. It does a great job of being relatively autonomous, but it can be very flaky. And don't give us the "Windows 7 is [insert optimistic claims here]" arguments. Windows is twenty years old. If they are only just now producing a hassle-free version, your points are dubious at best. Everyone needs access to a geek to keep their systems running, regardless of hardware or OS. That's just the way things work. Maybe someday things will be different, but get a comfortable chair for the wait.
Wow. I guess I should stop using Linux on my desktop. My family should also stop. Of course, the company I work for should also stop rolling it out to people.
All praises to the corporate talking heads! We must bow down to their profound wisdom and mystical knowledge and tailor our lives to their needs and profitability!
Like I give a rat's ass what some corporate drone thinks. People who yet again claim that the desktop or the personal computer are dead, or that everything will be in the cloud, or that people mainly use computers for email and web browsing, or that everything we do at the desktop can be done on an iPhone, blah blah blah, are in a deep state of catatonia. The things we know as "desktops" today will certainly evolve, but to believe they will disappear is absurd.
I don't know if you are the person who thought up the notions of religion as a human logic bomb or a rootkit, but I must say I find them to be brilliant analogies. The mind as a hapless operating system utterly compromised but unable even to realize that it has a destructive parasite attached, let alone rid itself of it. Atheism, politics, religion, practically any ideology can be a trojan. It is, in its way, as beautiful in its elegance as it is horrifying in its consequences.
How refreshing! It's been quite a while since the last big claim where some tiny physical effect from someone's doctoral thesis or obscure scientific research was overblown far beyond physical reality, and projected to solve great social and economic problems, produce enormous wealth for its inventors, bring justice to the world, cure herpes, feed the hungry, blah blah blah.
The core issue is very simple to express. In the 19th century, a trend in english-speaking Christianity appeared that asserted that the Bible was factual and should be interpreted literally. That very simple single assertion on which Christian fundamentalism is based is the root cause of this and many other issues grouped together in the U.S. by the term "Culture Wars."
It is conceptually simple to understand, particularly for people who are not of an analytical bent. It does not require deep thought or incisive intelligence, it is by and large unambiguous, it results in absolute truths that can be used as rules and maxims, and concentrates all authority on the literal meaning of the scripture. This allows true believers to dismiss anything else out of hand, because the literal interpretation is held to be the literal word of God. That is the great appeal. Simple people need not worry about analysis, interpretation, consistency or anything else. Unfortunately, it is an illusion.
In practice there is as much ambiguity as before, absolute truths are difficult to pin down, consensus is difficult, and physical reality contradicts practically all attempts to assert literal truth of biblical claims. On top of this is the curious trait of religious fundamentalists in general to cling to their arbitrary beliefs even more strongly in the face of contradiction, as if, rather counterintuitively, that in itself confirmed their beliefs.
It's 2009. There's Java, Perl, PHP, Ruby, C#, and Tcl, to name just the main languages that can be used to write web software (I've even seen a page done in Cobol on a lark). Javascript is well established, as is Flash.
Silverlight comes along offering nothing new but plenty of obstacles and lock-out of end user browsers, requiring active download of a plug-in, and yet, there are bozos out there willing to commit paying customers and their websites to an endless, costly, non-standard nightmare in exchange for nothing! You can't make shit like that up, it's real.
Slashdot Mirror
All these emotional arguments (yours and the many others on this thread) about the legitimacy of using money that is not yours, that it was confusing, that it was April Fool's Day, finders keepers, etc. are ridiculous. I have had erroneous transactions that deposit money in my bank account that got reverted one or a few days later. I certainly did not consider it my money.
Imagine yourself at a hearing before a judge in a court of law and you are blabbering on about how you were confused at the extra $8,674 and decided you might as well spend it, or that you thought it was an April Fool's Day joke and decided to play along making "joke trades," or that since Zecco put the money in your account it's "too fucking bad, Dude the money's mine now." I'd hate to be your lawyer.
Yes. I'm chronically broke. I would notice just about any extra money.
Nice try. 8-)
Do you think that if there were a way for me to copy my labor endlessly for free, that I'd bother to go to work in the first place? I'd create entire organizations that ran on my free labor. It's an apples and oranges comparison here, since I'm blue-collar. My labor is exactly that.
It is not apples and oranges at all. Labor is labor. The means by which the product of the labor is distributed certainly influences the market price, but it is simpleminded to expect that below a certain distribution cost or ease of reproduction the creators should expect little or no compensation. An expensive creation such as a motion picture depends on a large number of people viewing it in a theater or buying or renting the DVD at a low price. The fact that the DVD can be easily reproduced or that it is possible to sneak into the theater and view the movie for free does not justify the illegal behavior nor does it render it morally, socially, or economically acceptable. You are simply trying to invent shallow reasons to justify illegal behavior that in effect steals income from people and organizations. The fact that the RIAA and many of its backers are corrupt crooks doesn't justify the behavior either.
I guess you can't see beyond the end of your nose far enough to see the corrosive consequences on the economy, on the value of labor, and on the support of intellectual property creation and distribution of condoning, generalizing, and scaling up piracy of copyrighted material and breach of licencing. You have to be told by adults wiser and more responsible than you, but of course you insist on not paying attention.
Dude, this is Slashdot. This is one of the holiest of holies: pretending that copyrighted material is free for the taking no matter what.
What do you mean "nothing physical"? Is it spiritual? Is it in some magical dimension? You don't think magnetic marks on a disk or voltage spikes on a wire are physical? Are you so obtuse that you can't distinguish between A) the service of providing you a medium with digital data of some kind, and 2) the actual digital data itself and the labor and investment that went into creating it? Can digital data spontaneously form into a movie or a song in such a way that all that is needed is the service to allow you to obtain a copy?
Am I the only one astonished at the number of people on this thread who can't grasp something so clear and simple as copyright violation being a crime in the same way that theft, murder, fraud, perjury, breach of contract, etc. etc. are crimes? What's their to understand? How is copyright violation not a crime in the same way as theft is a crime?
Yes. By extension, if you go to a bookstore several times and rip out some of the pages of a book each time until you have stolen the entire book, then there's nothing wrong. The degree of deliberate self-delusion on this thread is mind boggling. Look at the repeated modding as off-topic of this post. It is off-topic to argue on a thread about copyright piracy that copyright piracy is illegal. No rational thought, not even a perfunctory nod to prevailing law. I want it, so it's OK to just take it without payment. Sad and amazing.
Why would a professional musician or a crew making a movie want to do so for nothing? How would they pay their expenses? Why do you think you have some kind of right to take it for nothing? Should people who make music, or video, or legitimate inventions, etc. simply not expect to receive any income for them? Should you not expect any income for your labor and investment in resources and materials? What does "when it's free, it won't matter" mean? Who will be making it for free and what will be their motivation? Are you pointing out some attractive and scalable new paradigm for labor and its compensation, or are you just making pointless noise?
You are being deliberately childish and obtuse as well, and you know it. Those uses are legal in that the creators of the music have authorized this use. It is perfectly legal for you to listen to music in this manner. Stop making up bogus examples you know are irrelevant and deceitful.
There is another side to the coin, you know. You'd do well to not insist that others "grow up for Chrissakes" if they don't share your opinion. It makes you look like a child.
It is not an opinion. It is a fact. The music you listen to at the mall or on the radio is legally licensed. The music you pirate off a disk or download via file sharing without payment is not. You know this. There is no opinion here.
The other side is this: I bought the music. Why can't I do what I want with music that I own?
Again, you know perfectly well why. You did not buy "the music," you bought a recording of the music. There is a license associated with it as well as copyright law. You know this, and you can look on the packaging for the copyright indication or the Terms and Conditions set forth by the copyright owner. You can make any specious claims you want, but you know perfectly well that you are wrong and are simply making things up to justify your use of other peoples labor for free.
If I'm advertising the music by letting people hear it for free, I should be paid. Let me reiterate this: I should be paid for it. You have to pay any other entity to get advertising. That's why you strive so much for word of mouth, because you don't have to pay for it and it nets you profit. You don't sue your advertisers into oblivion.
Is your advertising work done for hire? Were you contracted do do it? Is it advertising or are you merely allowing others to obtain free copies? You are scraping the bottom of the barrel here. Word of mouth does not involve giving away copies of copyrighted work by non-owners. You know it. Stop making crap up. Nobody hired you to do any advertising.
But I guess I live in a fantasy world, because I feel that the first sale doctrine had it right. There's a huge difference between subscription and purchase, chief, and music is not a subscription. Considering that I don't sign anything when I buy music, I'm not bound to whatever conditions the artist has.
Wrong again. Good Lord, look at the fucking CD jewel case or the Terms and Conditions of the download site. Do you see the copyright indicator? You are bound by copyright law regardless of whether you made any additional contractual agreements. You are bound by any conditions the artist or distributor specify that are covered by copyright law. It is prevailing law and you are bound by it whether you like it or not, whether you understand it or not, and whether you are aware of it or not. This isn't rocket science. You can't just make shit up and expect the world to accept it. Ask a fucking lawyer. You definitely live in a fantasy world.
You are being deliberately childish or obtuse for the sake of argument and you know it full well. Are you claiming that there is nothing wrong with listening to a musical recording without compensating the individuals or organizations that created it even if they 1) have not authorized you to do so and 2) are explicitly requiring you to pay for purchasing a recording or a digital stream of the performance?
You are committing the mistake of over generalizing and trivializing the term "intellectual property." A recorded musical performance or the creation of a video is the direct distillation of labor, as is a patent on a new type of water pump or a new type of chemical to dye fabrics, for example. Your implicit claim that "intellectual property" lacks substance or is in some way not real or does not merit compensation for its use is indefensible.
Our species is hopeless. Hopeless.
JeeeZUS...
Morons think music should be free apparently because of the mere fact that they like to listen to it, usually accompanied by some sappy argument that music should be free because things of beauty should be free, and the human soul is free, blah blah blah. Another favorite is that since these days it is easy to copy, it can no longer be copyrighted and is thus free. I guess if you are skilled enough to enter people's homes at night and steal their silverware, it isn't really theirs to begin with, not to mention if it is really beautiful silverware and wants to be free. Truly arguments only a hopeless dumbshit could put forth.
If someone explicitly allows you to take something with GPL or a Creative Commons license, great! If they don't, you have to pay. It's someone's income, you idiot, regardless of whether the price is reasonable or controlled by a cartel or not. Grow the fuck up for Chrissake.
Why spend so much? Luckily, I don't care much about the GUI as long as it does the basics. I build my own boxes and put GNU/Linux on them and they work very well for much less money than any equally powerful alternative. I'll leave Apple to the fashionistas and people who need hand-holding.
Windows can't lay the claim to "it just works," because it doesn't any better than Linux, Mac OS, etc. It does a great job of being relatively autonomous, but it can be very flaky. And don't give us the "Windows 7 is [insert optimistic claims here]" arguments. Windows is twenty years old. If they are only just now producing a hassle-free version, your points are dubious at best. Everyone needs access to a geek to keep their systems running, regardless of hardware or OS. That's just the way things work. Maybe someday things will be different, but get a comfortable chair for the wait.
All praises to the corporate talking heads! We must bow down to their profound wisdom and mystical knowledge and tailor our lives to their needs and profitability!
Like I give a rat's ass what some corporate drone thinks. People who yet again claim that the desktop or the personal computer are dead, or that everything will be in the cloud, or that people mainly use computers for email and web browsing, or that everything we do at the desktop can be done on an iPhone, blah blah blah, are in a deep state of catatonia. The things we know as "desktops" today will certainly evolve, but to believe they will disappear is absurd.
I don't know if you are the person who thought up the notions of religion as a human logic bomb or a rootkit, but I must say I find them to be brilliant analogies. The mind as a hapless operating system utterly compromised but unable even to realize that it has a destructive parasite attached, let alone rid itself of it. Atheism, politics, religion, practically any ideology can be a trojan. It is, in its way, as beautiful in its elegance as it is horrifying in its consequences.
How refreshing! It's been quite a while since the last big claim where some tiny physical effect from someone's doctoral thesis or obscure scientific research was overblown far beyond physical reality, and projected to solve great social and economic problems, produce enormous wealth for its inventors, bring justice to the world, cure herpes, feed the hungry, blah blah blah.
Just out of curiosity, in what way is Richard Dawkins an idiot?
Just out of curiosity, how is Richard Dawkins an idiot?
It is conceptually simple to understand, particularly for people who are not of an analytical bent. It does not require deep thought or incisive intelligence, it is by and large unambiguous, it results in absolute truths that can be used as rules and maxims, and concentrates all authority on the literal meaning of the scripture. This allows true believers to dismiss anything else out of hand, because the literal interpretation is held to be the literal word of God. That is the great appeal. Simple people need not worry about analysis, interpretation, consistency or anything else. Unfortunately, it is an illusion.
In practice there is as much ambiguity as before, absolute truths are difficult to pin down, consensus is difficult, and physical reality contradicts practically all attempts to assert literal truth of biblical claims. On top of this is the curious trait of religious fundamentalists in general to cling to their arbitrary beliefs even more strongly in the face of contradiction, as if, rather counterintuitively, that in itself confirmed their beliefs.
Silverlight comes along offering nothing new but plenty of obstacles and lock-out of end user browsers, requiring active download of a plug-in, and yet, there are bozos out there willing to commit paying customers and their websites to an endless, costly, non-standard nightmare in exchange for nothing! You can't make shit like that up, it's real.