When my local Game store has a section for "PC games" and a section for "PC non-transferable licenses to temporarily play games at the rightsholders' sufferance" your argument will be more valid. In the meantime the vast majority of customers aren't going to be sufficiently aware of the issues until it's too late.
WTF? If you argument is with Gamestop not making this shit clear then boycott Gamestop until they do. If EA or whoever started putting big warnings on the box when a title was not available for resale then would you suddenly fall in to line like a good little consumer?
Bear in mind that some of us never sell used games, and have no interest in ever doing so. I buy all my games via Steam because I hate having to treat games like a physical product where it needs the CD in the drive. Just sell me a licence, lock it to my account and be done with it so I can throw the CD in the bin as soon as I get it home.
Some of us actually think that doing away with the second hand games market is no great loss as:
1) We never use it.
2) Cheaters can use it to resell games after they have been caught hacking online and banned. This gives them a way of minimising their loss after thy have been caught, I want their loss to be as great as possible.
So by removing the second hand games market I actually gain something overall.
Sad an AC had to nail it. I would just add this is also completely against one of the cornerstones of capitalism, and that is first sale. once you sell something that's fucking it, then its mine.
Talking about having it both ways, what about patches? When you buy a physical product, you are stuck with it. If they manufacturer realises a way they can improve it then you have to pay to buy an updated version with the improvements. With software, they generally release patches that people can download for free, surely first sale would mean you bought it as seen so they could charge you for any fixes?
Now i apologize if my language has offended anybody but this REALLY pisses me off. this is just big media trying to do an end run around rules that have been there for ages by trying to claim their IP crap is two things at the same time while being NEITHER ONE when it comes to responsibilities. Well fuck you cartels, i'll pirate also before i buy a single thing from this company!
Any excuse to be a thief I guess, I do not like the terms that come attached to that product so I will steal it is such a fucking lame excuse. Store detectives have been hearing this crap for years. You have some valid points in you argument but tacking this crap on the end completely undermines all of them as it makes many people think you are just making excuses to not have to pay for something. You can say that is not the case until you are blue in the face, I will never believe it unless you are actually willing to make sacrifices for your principles.
By making a sacrifice, however small it shows you are standing up for something you believe, refusing to make a sacrifice makes it sound like all you want to do is take and give nothing back.
Cue now several million children coming back with specious arguments about why this is not the case ans sounding like martyrs, but just remember that real martyrs gave up their own lives making the largest sacrifice possible. People who refuse to go without a computer game that has some dodgy licence attached are refusing to make the smallest sacrifice possible.
Always try to make yourself a truly invaluable part of the team anywhere you work who the boss could not even consider doing without, no matter your opinion of him or the company.
Translation: always try to make yourself unpromotable.
Generally people do not leapfrog over their boss so most people only get promoted when their boss leaves and he puts in a good word for them and effectively picks his own successor. Sometimes you may have companies with more than one dev team but generally in those cases their is an overall boss who manages them all, that is the guys who needs to find you invaluable.
By the way, have you even entered the job market yet? You have only been here a month and never posted anything longer than three lines.
Sounds like you haven't needed to interview for a while. So, good for you, I guess, but your lack of empathy is showing.
The trick is to never NEED to interview. Needing to interview implies you have no job when you attend the interview, the trick is to interview when you have a job but are looking for a better one. Then you want to interview but do not need to and you are the one with all the power as you can very much take it or leave it.
Interviewing when you are out of work is always much harder as the interviewer always has to ask themselves why you are not working. You might say you were made redundant but then unless the entire company failed the interviewers next question is going to be "Why did they make YOU redundant not someone else?". Always try to make yourself a truly invaluable part of the team anywhere you work who the boss could not even consider doing without, no matter your opinion of him or the company.
I know very well that almost all of them are overworked and underpaid. but they are more 'abusable' than native-born american citizens. we don't usually 'jump' when the bossman says; but overseas, they feel lucky to have ANY job. they ask 'how high' and bossman loves that shit.
If you are not jumping at the bossman's beck and call then you are the problem, not the people who do. The boss pays, so you do what your told, when your told and be thankful. Then one day when your the boss people have to do that for you.
I think they are going to hurt their sales of consoles also. If an out-of-warantee Xbox 720 breaks, some people will just buy a new one. If all of your old games won't work on it, then there is no point. Perhaps they will get theirs fixed instead. But if it is beyond repair, I think many people would write off that console and not buy another or any other games for it, and would probably steer clear of the next generation of that console also. You can only screw people over soo far before they get wise to it.
This is a trivially easy thing to solve. The games will be bound to a users account, not the console. Even on the 360 you have to sign in to play and have your progress recorded so most users have xbox live accounts already.
If my xbox died tomorrow I would buy a new one then just set the new one up to access my old account.
I've been wondering when/. would do a story on this. I've been using Iron as my secondary browser for when something doesn't work in Firefox. If you want more stable version of Chromium that protects your privacy better than Chrome Iron is a pretty good option.
Seriously, you should read the other guys post below who replied to this but he didn't quote his source.
Iron is just made by some sleazy german guy who can't understand code, he has just forked chrome to try and generate revenue. That is why he changes it to use his own extensions site laden with adverts instead of the default one as well.
This is probably the reason/. has never done a story on Iron before methinks. There are very reasonable issues with privacy and google, but Iron is hardly the solution.
Exactly. How does someone pirating a copy of PhotoShop that they can't afford harm Adobe in any way?
No idea, but that wasn't what I was saying.
I was saying that the world we live in is based on money. So people who create software should have the right to charge whatever price they choose for what they create. People who want to use it should either pay or do without. If some use it without paying that that is not fair to the people who do pay. Why should some people pay for something that is considered by all to be a luxury or business expense when others do not just because they have more money.
That is not how our capitalist system works, it works by giving the people who have more money to spend more privileges in life. This is what drives people to make more money.
A useful link [techdirt] to send to anyone defending or even ambivalent about SOPA. It's legislation designed by a lobby group to service their agenda, and damn any unforeseen consequences. If you think the RIAA and MPAA give a shit about the free speech and due process of *others* balanced against their desire to maximize profits, you've been asleep for the last twenty years.
Actually there is another group who stand to benefit enormously from both these bills: The legal services industry.
You can be damn sure the lawyers who drafted this crap are not worried about any "unforeseen consequences" as they have long since foreseen them and are looking forward to them as it generates them more business. Companies like Google and Facebook who have deep pockets but not very litigious will be forced to defend themselves from ever more lawsuits. That means more money spent on defence lawyers and that in turn benefits the whole legal industry as it pushes up demand.
These people are a decided minority; most people will pay if you let them and they can afford it
That was also my point. You pick the price of something based on how much your target market can afford to pay. I can afford to pay an amount that excludes a large number of people from being able to afford it.
Now you might say that you should always pick a price according to the poorest being able to afford it but that is not how capitalism works. This is why the argument against copyright should really be an argument against unregulated capitalism.
Copyright is designed to give authors a limited period to profit from their creation, after which it belongs to the public domain. It is ridiculous that someone can write a song consisting of three or four chords (which most songs are) or create a cartoon of a mouse and generate an income for a lifetime. Society has the right, even the duty to take ownership of the cultural expressions that define it.
Yes, but most of the popular works being copied are recent and would still be covered by copyright even in your much shorter term version.
The fact is that both sides of this argument has people that are full of crap. On one side are the producers organisations like the MPAA and such who are just lobbying for laws that would enable them to make more money. On the other side though are a large number of people who want to watch the latest movie or listen to what ever crap is in the charts but do not want to pay the amount the person who owns the copyright wants to charge. Neither side is in the right.
I have a good deal more sympathy for the people on the pirating and though. I used to run a very active gnutella node many years ago when I had no way of affording all the music and films I wanted to enjoy. The prices were (and still are) set according to appeal to people as I am now, ie - fairly affluent. As a poor student I hated seeing that every DVD I wanted to buy cost so much compared to my meagre loan.
I used this and many other excuses to justify my rampant piracy but now I look at it slightly differently, I now blame the high costs of these luxury items on the vast differential between the richest and poorest in our society. I now earn just short of £20 per hour yet the minimum wage in the area I live is about £5, the minimum for a student is closer to £3. True I have have far more outgoings but the reality is that if you are aiming a product at a young professional like me then you are going to pick a price that will exclude a great many people from being able to afford it.
It's also the same marketoids that get bonuses for sales that wouldn't have been possible if the coders hadn't put in huge amounts of unpaid overtime modifying production code to include ( non existent) features that the marketoids promised the customer without consulting the production team first.
They do not need to consult the production team, just the production team manager. It is him that knows if he can drive his development team to reach that goal. The boss of the development team is the guy who ultimately decides how much overtime to ask of his staff, not the guys in sales. Sometimes it is actually in the developers best interest to pull a bunch of overtime just so he gets paid at the end of the month, but a good boss never lets his staff know this unless he has to as it ruins morale.
Also quite often IT people are too rooted in getting something done the ideal way, even if it is only going to be a shortly lived project. Sometimes you just need to put a quote in for work that is based around the concept of "bodging it" just because that is what all your competitors are doing. The sales guys who meet the client have to decide in an instant whether the client is going to accept their "quality solution" pitch or whether they need to come back to you and say "throw that shit together any old way but get it done quick".
I have far more time for good sales guys who get results nowadays than I used to. Most developers I know cannot sell a product for shit as they get far too bogged down in details and the potential client just switches off and stops listening to the pitch. A decent sales guys has often already made the sale before he starts talking about actual product based purely on the initial patter he had with the client where he built a personal relationship with them.
Difference is you have a salary due to your marketing/sales department who generally don't have a SALARY.
IE: when they don't produce (income or work for you), they don't get paid.
So you're saying they can do their job without PC's, laptops and phones? By the same token, you could say that without me, they'd be out of work. This is why a company has - or should have - multiple departments, all working together.
I think what he was actually saying was that people in sales or marketing departments are much more likely to be on a pay scale that is much more performance related.
Nowadays I work in IT so have the standard "and any extra hours the business needs" clause in my contract. I do not mind this, as the boss very rarely uses it. I also have a basic wage that is reasonable, but no overtime pay.
I used to work in a sales department doing lead generation (ie - telesales). I got paid an absolute joke basic wage that was designed to be less than I needed to live on (my boss actually told me this). I also got a hefty bonus (50% of my basic weekly wage) every time I generated a lead that closed a deal when vistited by a travelling salesman I was booking appointments for. The result of this was that I needed 2 deals to close each week in order to have enough money to cover my expenses. If I got 3 in a week then I was very happy, most weeks I think got 1 or 2.
This is how most sales based roles work. If you get no results, you get very little or nothing in wages. Most guys in IT would run a mile from this sort of wage insecurity for any number of reasons. You have to be a very confident, out going individual to buy a house when you guaranteed basic wage would not cover your mortgage.
Non-existence of copyright would have numerous, complicated consequences beyond what we can speculate here. Your hypothetical scenario is naive and self-contradictory.
So you prefer the opposite, where the somebody simply chooses not to use your code at all and you still don't get access to any improvements?
Personally, I do not care either way. All the code I write is at work and I work for a closed source shop. On the odd occasion I write something in my own time so I own the copyright not my boss, I am quite happy to give it away into the public domain as well.
I was explaining some history of the GPL and why it came about, not entering into a discussion about which licence is better. Please do not take my post to be in any great praise for the GPL over the BSD license or true public domain as that is certainly not what I intended.
PS: Why do you focus so much on companies? GPL applies to everyone, whether they work for a company or not. I'm not a company, and several times GPL has prevented me from doing things I wanted to do.
Whenever I hear about blatant GPL violations they are almost always companies doing the violating to save a bit of cash.
well, without the copyright, you also wouldn't need the GPL, right? you would be free to decompile, copy, distribute whatever source you want. right? anything you release, anyone else could use.
decompile? Try looking at decompiled C++ code some time and making some functional changes. Making large functional changes to a piece of software purely by decompiling it from compiled binaries would be a nightmare. No decompiler I know of produces C code I would ever want to look at and be forced to work on.
It also shouldn't persist past the death of the copyright holder.
Nice idea in La La land, but here in the real world people often band together to create something together. In this case who had to die for the copyright to enter the public domain? All of them? Or any one of them?
So? If you get rid of copyright, the GPL would have no purpose anyway. Like, in a good way.
That is utter crap.
The purpose of the GPL is to try and force companies who use open source software in their products to make any additions they make for the benefit of their customers also available back to the open source community.
Without copyright law and the GPL my company could take an open source product and use it to build a closed source product that we never published the source code for. I could then simply protect our version of the source using an NDA that all staff had to sign before they came to work for me. I can then concentrate on porting any changes made to the open source version into our version but the open source version would not get access to any improvements we made.
The GPL is not about getting software for free, it is about developers always having the ability to edit source code of software they use. It came about because Richard Stallman was once denied access to the source code of a printer driver he wanted to modify to suit his labs peculiar need. He had no problem paying for the printer driver, he just needed to change it from way it was originally designed to work.
Without copyright law, companies would still be able to keep their source code hidden from everyone else by simply not ever letting it out the door.
Then maybe a copy is not a separate product (like a car). The movie industry seems to want to have it both ways: 1. Copying the movie is the same as stealing a car. 2. Lending a movie is in no way similar to lending a car. 3. Buying a movie is in no way similar to buying a car, as you own the car but not the movie.
The big difference is that if you buy a car, you get to drive round in it and it carries on being useful for many years. If you buy a movie then chances are you watch it once, realise it was dross then it sits on a shelf for an eternity until you get round to clearing out old crap. Even if it was the best move in the world you still can only sit through it so many times before utter boredom sets it just after the opening titles.
With a business model like this car analogies just don't cut it.
Since you can lend a DVD (but not copy it), how about a system that let's you lend a file:
This is an interesting idea but are you aware that the precedent for this would probably be the videos you used to borrow from the likes of blockbuster. In this case though the copies of the films that they had to buy in order to make them available for hire also cost them a shit load more upfront.
You can bet that even though this was hire not lend the movie studios would fail to see the difference and would charge more for any copy that had this mechanism built in. The truth is that all their lobbying about "losses" is really just about them lobbying to make the world work they way they want to make the most money. Just like Wall St always lobbies for less regulation and companies involved in environmental pollution always try and argue against things like the EPA existing.
The only reason P2P technology is mostly used for copyright infringement is because the big media companies sued the fuck out of anyone who wanted to create a P2P system whether it was used for a legitimate purpose or not. So a lot of people who were doing legitimate research into creating P2P technologies stopped.
Actually I think thats not the case.
If you look at previous big piracy enabling technologies you will see that they have always simply been adopted by pirates to fill a need.
BitTorrent is no different, it was originally designed to distribute large file like linux distributions without the need to put a vast load on central servers. It was and still is a way that people who download a linux distribution could help free software in a way that did not involve them writing a single line of code, they just donated a small part of their out going bandwidth to help other people download the same thing they were.
In the past though there was Gnutella. This may have actually been designed purely for piracy, I did not work for nullsoft at the time so I do not know for sure. It was certainly filling a pre-existing need though since Napster had only recently been jumped on by the music industry.
Before napster though there was still usenet, this was certainly not designed as a piracy enabling technology but it sure was adapted as that by a great many people. There was also FTP, in this case people went round looking for anonymous FTP sites with a badly secured folder where they could create a hidden subdirectory to fill up with Warez.
The point of all this is to say that whatever technology is used at a particular time is not really relevant. What is relevant is that there are an awful lot of people out there who are quite happy to obtains something without paying for it. While these people exist they will always find a way of doing so, the method they use is the only thing that changes but that is largely irrelevant. If BitTorrent never existed we would still be using Gnutella. If none of these existed we would just be exchanging dropbox accounts on mailing lists or something.
Trying to stop piracy by jumping on individual technologies is like trying to play whack-a-mole on a table with an infinite number of holes. The industry now seems to have realised this and is trying to spend more money on educating young people that "piracy is bad". This is far more likely to work on the next generation but that is far from guaranteed. My generation just got to see them as an ailing industry that refused to adapt as new technologies were created and so that will likely be our lasting memory.
You're right, right up to the point where you are 100% wrong.
The difference between Android running on a Phone and Ubuntu running on your Computer, is that with Ubuntu, you probably have ROOT control, even if you have to grant it to yourself *sudo", and type a password, to do it. On Android, you don't even have that ability... by default.
Actually, on at least one of my android devices I do have root permission just by doing some equivalent of sudo. That is the one I have reflashed with Cryanomod. It is still Android though.
But Oh, you were talking about the commercial devices produced by Motorola, HTC and the like? These companies have made a choice to close their devices and remove something that Android can easily do, but that is not Andoid, that is whoever produces the locked down device.
Easily defeated by a firewall like iptables, which can be easily installed from the market if you have root.
I am not so sure about that. In this case the actual exploit was using the built in web browser to talk to the internet so surely the only way you could block this with iptables is to block your phones default web browser from accessing the internet, surely that is not a great fix.
I was negotiating a mortgage a few years ago, and the bank happily was transitioning from faxes to email. So I sent them all the somewhat sensitive docs they requested, encrypted by hushmail/web. I sent them decryption instructions out of band.
The pretty simple decryption procedure baffled the hell out of them, at first. Then they figured out it was a great excuse to delay the loan. After a few weeks they came back saying they couldn't follow the hushmail retrieval procedure because they had no internet access.
Finally I just faxed everything.
The funny thing about this is that fax is about as secure as sending them via unencrypted email.
Any server that your unencrypted email goes through could theoretically snoop on the attached documents, but surely the same is true for a fax. Since your email most likely follows the same route between servers as any other traffic you can probably do a traceroute and see which servers would need to be compromised in order to snoop on your email and they are probably all owned seriously locked down by your ISP or their upstream provider.
If you are worried about your ISP snooping on you then fax is just as easy for them to listen in on and then send to a printer. In many ways it may be easier for to snoop on a fax just by attaching some extra wires in the junction box outside your house then doing the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
When my local Game store has a section for "PC games" and a section for "PC non-transferable licenses to temporarily play games at the rightsholders' sufferance" your argument will be more valid. In the meantime the vast majority of customers aren't going to be sufficiently aware of the issues until it's too late.
WTF? If you argument is with Gamestop not making this shit clear then boycott Gamestop until they do. If EA or whoever started putting big warnings on the box when a title was not available for resale then would you suddenly fall in to line like a good little consumer?
Bear in mind that some of us never sell used games, and have no interest in ever doing so. I buy all my games via Steam because I hate having to treat games like a physical product where it needs the CD in the drive. Just sell me a licence, lock it to my account and be done with it so I can throw the CD in the bin as soon as I get it home.
Some of us actually think that doing away with the second hand games market is no great loss as:
1) We never use it.
2) Cheaters can use it to resell games after they have been caught hacking online and banned. This gives them a way of minimising their loss after thy have been caught, I want their loss to be as great as possible.
So by removing the second hand games market I actually gain something overall.
Sad an AC had to nail it. I would just add this is also completely against one of the cornerstones of capitalism, and that is first sale. once you sell something that's fucking it, then its mine.
Talking about having it both ways, what about patches? When you buy a physical product, you are stuck with it. If they manufacturer realises a way they can improve it then you have to pay to buy an updated version with the improvements. With software, they generally release patches that people can download for free, surely first sale would mean you bought it as seen so they could charge you for any fixes?
Now i apologize if my language has offended anybody but this REALLY pisses me off. this is just big media trying to do an end run around rules that have been there for ages by trying to claim their IP crap is two things at the same time while being NEITHER ONE when it comes to responsibilities. Well fuck you cartels, i'll pirate also before i buy a single thing from this company!
Any excuse to be a thief I guess, I do not like the terms that come attached to that product so I will steal it is such a fucking lame excuse. Store detectives have been hearing this crap for years. You have some valid points in you argument but tacking this crap on the end completely undermines all of them as it makes many people think you are just making excuses to not have to pay for something. You can say that is not the case until you are blue in the face, I will never believe it unless you are actually willing to make sacrifices for your principles.
By making a sacrifice, however small it shows you are standing up for something you believe, refusing to make a sacrifice makes it sound like all you want to do is take and give nothing back.
Cue now several million children coming back with specious arguments about why this is not the case ans sounding like martyrs, but just remember that real martyrs gave up their own lives making the largest sacrifice possible. People who refuse to go without a computer game that has some dodgy licence attached are refusing to make the smallest sacrifice possible.
Always try to make yourself a truly invaluable part of the team anywhere you work who the boss could not even consider doing without, no matter your opinion of him or the company.
Translation: always try to make yourself unpromotable.
Generally people do not leapfrog over their boss so most people only get promoted when their boss leaves and he puts in a good word for them and effectively picks his own successor. Sometimes you may have companies with more than one dev team but generally in those cases their is an overall boss who manages them all, that is the guys who needs to find you invaluable.
By the way, have you even entered the job market yet? You have only been here a month and never posted anything longer than three lines.
Sounds like you haven't needed to interview for a while. So, good for you, I guess, but your lack of empathy is showing.
The trick is to never NEED to interview. Needing to interview implies you have no job when you attend the interview, the trick is to interview when you have a job but are looking for a better one. Then you want to interview but do not need to and you are the one with all the power as you can very much take it or leave it.
Interviewing when you are out of work is always much harder as the interviewer always has to ask themselves why you are not working. You might say you were made redundant but then unless the entire company failed the interviewers next question is going to be "Why did they make YOU redundant not someone else?". Always try to make yourself a truly invaluable part of the team anywhere you work who the boss could not even consider doing without, no matter your opinion of him or the company.
I know very well that almost all of them are overworked and underpaid. but they are more 'abusable' than native-born american citizens. we don't usually 'jump' when the bossman says; but overseas, they feel lucky to have ANY job. they ask 'how high' and bossman loves that shit.
If you are not jumping at the bossman's beck and call then you are the problem, not the people who do. The boss pays, so you do what your told, when your told and be thankful. Then one day when your the boss people have to do that for you.
I think they are going to hurt their sales of consoles also. If an out-of-warantee Xbox 720 breaks, some people will just buy a new one. If all of your old games won't work on it, then there is no point. Perhaps they will get theirs fixed instead. But if it is beyond repair, I think many people would write off that console and not buy another or any other games for it, and would probably steer clear of the next generation of that console also. You can only screw people over soo far before they get wise to it.
This is a trivially easy thing to solve. The games will be bound to a users account, not the console. Even on the 360 you have to sign in to play and have your progress recorded so most users have xbox live accounts already.
If my xbox died tomorrow I would buy a new one then just set the new one up to access my old account.
Iron is a known scam. If there is a reason to use Iron, it is not for its privacy related offerings. You're better off just using Chromium.
I particular like the fact that the guy who forked Chrome into Iron, only did so to generate loads of traffic to his home page and hence get a bit more adsense revenue in. http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2009/12/iron.html
I've been wondering when /. would do a story on this. I've been using Iron as my secondary browser for when something doesn't work in Firefox. If you want more stable version of Chromium that protects your privacy better than Chrome Iron is a pretty good option.
Seriously, you should read the other guys post below who replied to this but he didn't quote his source.
Iron is just made by some sleazy german guy who can't understand code, he has just forked chrome to try and generate revenue. That is why he changes it to use his own extensions site laden with adverts instead of the default one as well.
Here is a very informative link:
http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2009/12/iron.html
This is probably the reason /. has never done a story on Iron before methinks. There are very reasonable issues with privacy and google, but Iron is hardly the solution.
Exactly. How does someone pirating a copy of PhotoShop that they can't afford harm Adobe in any way?
No idea, but that wasn't what I was saying.
I was saying that the world we live in is based on money. So people who create software should have the right to charge whatever price they choose for what they create. People who want to use it should either pay or do without. If some use it without paying that that is not fair to the people who do pay. Why should some people pay for something that is considered by all to be a luxury or business expense when others do not just because they have more money.
That is not how our capitalist system works, it works by giving the people who have more money to spend more privileges in life. This is what drives people to make more money.
A useful link [techdirt] to send to anyone defending or even ambivalent about SOPA. It's legislation designed by a lobby group to service their agenda, and damn any unforeseen consequences. If you think the RIAA and MPAA give a shit about the free speech and due process of *others* balanced against their desire to maximize profits, you've been asleep for the last twenty years.
Actually there is another group who stand to benefit enormously from both these bills: The legal services industry.
You can be damn sure the lawyers who drafted this crap are not worried about any "unforeseen consequences" as they have long since foreseen them and are looking forward to them as it generates them more business. Companies like Google and Facebook who have deep pockets but not very litigious will be forced to defend themselves from ever more lawsuits. That means more money spent on defence lawyers and that in turn benefits the whole legal industry as it pushes up demand.
These people are a decided minority; most people will pay if you let them and they can afford it
That was also my point. You pick the price of something based on how much your target market can afford to pay. I can afford to pay an amount that excludes a large number of people from being able to afford it.
Now you might say that you should always pick a price according to the poorest being able to afford it but that is not how capitalism works. This is why the argument against copyright should really be an argument against unregulated capitalism.
Copyright is designed to give authors a limited period to profit from their creation, after which it belongs to the public domain. It is ridiculous that someone can write a song consisting of three or four chords (which most songs are) or create a cartoon of a mouse and generate an income for a lifetime. Society has the right, even the duty to take ownership of the cultural expressions that define it.
Yes, but most of the popular works being copied are recent and would still be covered by copyright even in your much shorter term version.
The fact is that both sides of this argument has people that are full of crap. On one side are the producers organisations like the MPAA and such who are just lobbying for laws that would enable them to make more money. On the other side though are a large number of people who want to watch the latest movie or listen to what ever crap is in the charts but do not want to pay the amount the person who owns the copyright wants to charge. Neither side is in the right.
I have a good deal more sympathy for the people on the pirating and though. I used to run a very active gnutella node many years ago when I had no way of affording all the music and films I wanted to enjoy. The prices were (and still are) set according to appeal to people as I am now, ie - fairly affluent. As a poor student I hated seeing that every DVD I wanted to buy cost so much compared to my meagre loan.
I used this and many other excuses to justify my rampant piracy but now I look at it slightly differently, I now blame the high costs of these luxury items on the vast differential between the richest and poorest in our society. I now earn just short of £20 per hour yet the minimum wage in the area I live is about £5, the minimum for a student is closer to £3. True I have have far more outgoings but the reality is that if you are aiming a product at a young professional like me then you are going to pick a price that will exclude a great many people from being able to afford it.
It's also the same marketoids that get bonuses for sales that wouldn't have been possible if the coders hadn't put in huge amounts of unpaid overtime modifying production code to include ( non existent) features that the marketoids promised the customer without consulting the production team first.
They do not need to consult the production team, just the production team manager. It is him that knows if he can drive his development team to reach that goal. The boss of the development team is the guy who ultimately decides how much overtime to ask of his staff, not the guys in sales. Sometimes it is actually in the developers best interest to pull a bunch of overtime just so he gets paid at the end of the month, but a good boss never lets his staff know this unless he has to as it ruins morale.
Also quite often IT people are too rooted in getting something done the ideal way, even if it is only going to be a shortly lived project. Sometimes you just need to put a quote in for work that is based around the concept of "bodging it" just because that is what all your competitors are doing. The sales guys who meet the client have to decide in an instant whether the client is going to accept their "quality solution" pitch or whether they need to come back to you and say "throw that shit together any old way but get it done quick".
I have far more time for good sales guys who get results nowadays than I used to. Most developers I know cannot sell a product for shit as they get far too bogged down in details and the potential client just switches off and stops listening to the pitch. A decent sales guys has often already made the sale before he starts talking about actual product based purely on the initial patter he had with the client where he built a personal relationship with them.
"3 times my salary"
Difference is you have a salary due to your marketing/sales department who generally don't have a SALARY.
IE: when they don't produce (income or work for you), they don't get paid.
So you're saying they can do their job without PC's, laptops and phones? By the same token, you could say that without me, they'd be out of work. This is why a company has - or should have - multiple departments, all working together.
I think what he was actually saying was that people in sales or marketing departments are much more likely to be on a pay scale that is much more performance related.
Nowadays I work in IT so have the standard "and any extra hours the business needs" clause in my contract. I do not mind this, as the boss very rarely uses it. I also have a basic wage that is reasonable, but no overtime pay.
I used to work in a sales department doing lead generation (ie - telesales). I got paid an absolute joke basic wage that was designed to be less than I needed to live on (my boss actually told me this). I also got a hefty bonus (50% of my basic weekly wage) every time I generated a lead that closed a deal when vistited by a travelling salesman I was booking appointments for. The result of this was that I needed 2 deals to close each week in order to have enough money to cover my expenses. If I got 3 in a week then I was very happy, most weeks I think got 1 or 2.
This is how most sales based roles work. If you get no results, you get very little or nothing in wages. Most guys in IT would run a mile from this sort of wage insecurity for any number of reasons. You have to be a very confident, out going individual to buy a house when you guaranteed basic wage would not cover your mortgage.
Non-existence of copyright would have numerous, complicated consequences beyond what we can speculate here. Your hypothetical scenario is naive and self-contradictory.
Yup, fair point.
So you prefer the opposite, where the somebody simply chooses not to use your code at all and you still don't get access to any improvements?
Personally, I do not care either way. All the code I write is at work and I work for a closed source shop. On the odd occasion I write something in my own time so I own the copyright not my boss, I am quite happy to give it away into the public domain as well.
I was explaining some history of the GPL and why it came about, not entering into a discussion about which licence is better. Please do not take my post to be in any great praise for the GPL over the BSD license or true public domain as that is certainly not what I intended.
PS: Why do you focus so much on companies? GPL applies to everyone, whether they work for a company or not. I'm not a company, and several times GPL has prevented me from doing things I wanted to do.
Whenever I hear about blatant GPL violations they are almost always companies doing the violating to save a bit of cash.
well, without the copyright, you also wouldn't need the GPL, right? you would be free to decompile, copy, distribute whatever source you want. right? anything you release, anyone else could use.
decompile? Try looking at decompiled C++ code some time and making some functional changes. Making large functional changes to a piece of software purely by decompiling it from compiled binaries would be a nightmare. No decompiler I know of produces C code I would ever want to look at and be forced to work on.
It also shouldn't persist past the death of the copyright holder.
Nice idea in La La land, but here in the real world people often band together to create something together. In this case who had to die for the copyright to enter the public domain? All of them? Or any one of them?
So? If you get rid of copyright, the GPL would have no purpose anyway. Like, in a good way.
That is utter crap.
The purpose of the GPL is to try and force companies who use open source software in their products to make any additions they make for the benefit of their customers also available back to the open source community.
Without copyright law and the GPL my company could take an open source product and use it to build a closed source product that we never published the source code for. I could then simply protect our version of the source using an NDA that all staff had to sign before they came to work for me. I can then concentrate on porting any changes made to the open source version into our version but the open source version would not get access to any improvements we made.
The GPL is not about getting software for free, it is about developers always having the ability to edit source code of software they use. It came about because Richard Stallman was once denied access to the source code of a printer driver he wanted to modify to suit his labs peculiar need. He had no problem paying for the printer driver, he just needed to change it from way it was originally designed to work.
Without copyright law, companies would still be able to keep their source code hidden from everyone else by simply not ever letting it out the door.
Then maybe a copy is not a separate product (like a car). The movie industry seems to want to have it both ways:
1. Copying the movie is the same as stealing a car.
2. Lending a movie is in no way similar to lending a car.
3. Buying a movie is in no way similar to buying a car, as you own the car but not the movie.
The big difference is that if you buy a car, you get to drive round in it and it carries on being useful for many years. If you buy a movie then chances are you watch it once, realise it was dross then it sits on a shelf for an eternity until you get round to clearing out old crap. Even if it was the best move in the world you still can only sit through it so many times before utter boredom sets it just after the opening titles.
With a business model like this car analogies just don't cut it.
Since you can lend a DVD (but not copy it), how about a system that let's you lend a file:
This is an interesting idea but are you aware that the precedent for this would probably be the videos you used to borrow from the likes of blockbuster. In this case though the copies of the films that they had to buy in order to make them available for hire also cost them a shit load more upfront.
You can bet that even though this was hire not lend the movie studios would fail to see the difference and would charge more for any copy that had this mechanism built in. The truth is that all their lobbying about "losses" is really just about them lobbying to make the world work they way they want to make the most money. Just like Wall St always lobbies for less regulation and companies involved in environmental pollution always try and argue against things like the EPA existing.
The only reason P2P technology is mostly used for copyright infringement is because the big media companies sued the fuck out of anyone who wanted to create a P2P system whether it was used for a legitimate purpose or not. So a lot of people who were doing legitimate research into creating P2P technologies stopped.
Actually I think thats not the case.
If you look at previous big piracy enabling technologies you will see that they have always simply been adopted by pirates to fill a need.
BitTorrent is no different, it was originally designed to distribute large file like linux distributions without the need to put a vast load on central servers. It was and still is a way that people who download a linux distribution could help free software in a way that did not involve them writing a single line of code, they just donated a small part of their out going bandwidth to help other people download the same thing they were.
In the past though there was Gnutella. This may have actually been designed purely for piracy, I did not work for nullsoft at the time so I do not know for sure. It was certainly filling a pre-existing need though since Napster had only recently been jumped on by the music industry.
Before napster though there was still usenet, this was certainly not designed as a piracy enabling technology but it sure was adapted as that by a great many people. There was also FTP, in this case people went round looking for anonymous FTP sites with a badly secured folder where they could create a hidden subdirectory to fill up with Warez.
The point of all this is to say that whatever technology is used at a particular time is not really relevant. What is relevant is that there are an awful lot of people out there who are quite happy to obtains something without paying for it. While these people exist they will always find a way of doing so, the method they use is the only thing that changes but that is largely irrelevant. If BitTorrent never existed we would still be using Gnutella. If none of these existed we would just be exchanging dropbox accounts on mailing lists or something.
Trying to stop piracy by jumping on individual technologies is like trying to play whack-a-mole on a table with an infinite number of holes. The industry now seems to have realised this and is trying to spend more money on educating young people that "piracy is bad". This is far more likely to work on the next generation but that is far from guaranteed. My generation just got to see them as an ailing industry that refused to adapt as new technologies were created and so that will likely be our lasting memory.
You're right, right up to the point where you are 100% wrong.
The difference between Android running on a Phone and Ubuntu running on your Computer, is that with Ubuntu, you probably have ROOT control, even if you have to grant it to yourself *sudo", and type a password, to do it. On Android, you don't even have that ability ... by default.
Actually, on at least one of my android devices I do have root permission just by doing some equivalent of sudo. That is the one I have reflashed with Cryanomod. It is still Android though.
But Oh, you were talking about the commercial devices produced by Motorola, HTC and the like? These companies have made a choice to close their devices and remove something that Android can easily do, but that is not Andoid, that is whoever produces the locked down device.
Easily defeated by a firewall like iptables, which can be easily installed from the market if you have root.
I am not so sure about that. In this case the actual exploit was using the built in web browser to talk to the internet so surely the only way you could block this with iptables is to block your phones default web browser from accessing the internet, surely that is not a great fix.
I was negotiating a mortgage a few years ago, and the bank happily was transitioning from faxes to email. So I sent them all the somewhat sensitive docs they requested, encrypted by hushmail/web. I sent them decryption instructions out of band.
The pretty simple decryption procedure baffled the hell out of them, at first. Then they figured out it was a great excuse to delay the loan. After a few weeks they came back saying they couldn't follow the hushmail retrieval procedure because they had no internet access.
Finally I just faxed everything.
The funny thing about this is that fax is about as secure as sending them via unencrypted email.
Any server that your unencrypted email goes through could theoretically snoop on the attached documents, but surely the same is true for a fax. Since your email most likely follows the same route between servers as any other traffic you can probably do a traceroute and see which servers would need to be compromised in order to snoop on your email and they are probably all owned seriously locked down by your ISP or their upstream provider.
If you are worried about your ISP snooping on you then fax is just as easy for them to listen in on and then send to a printer. In many ways it may be easier for to snoop on a fax just by attaching some extra wires in the junction box outside your house then doing the same thing.