steal 1 : to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as a habitual or regular practice
theft 1 : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it b : an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property
Stealing == Theft. There is no property that is taken in copyright infringement.
"Would you, or would you not, feel it is wrong to take code covered under the GPL and incorporate it into a closed-source product in violation of the license?"
Certainly. But it isn't stealing, its called commercial copyright infringement.
If simply depriving someone of value was stealing than Wal-mart steals from K-Mart every day as they grow and win potential sales.
While this may burn for K-Mart and we might sympathize few would argue that out-competing in and of itself is wrong.
What we are talking about here is not depriving anyone of value, even in a way that is not wrong. A music studio is deprived of no economic value when I download a song. You might argue that I devalue the song by downloading it, I would counter that the availability of the song for free download is a market reflection of the song's value.
"Any use of Bittorrent or any other P2P pretty much by definition "includes receipt, or expectation of receipt, of anything of value, including the receipt of other copyrighted works". It is also quite easy for offline non-commercial infringement to fall under that definition."
That may be true of P2P filesharing systems but not bittorrent since there is no other copyrighted work I get for being on a torrent. For that matter the tiny chunks that are uploaded in bittorrent may not even qualify for copyright.
"Problem is, $750 (minimum) for one movie or song is reasonable"
No, $20 (max) for one movie or $5 (max) for a song is reasonable for a civil case. Civil awards are supposed to be based on the damage, not fines to punish.
Or rather, it would be reasonable if The People hadn't already made clear that they don't support these copyright monopolies.
The legality of which is really questionable in my mind. They do this by calling it a 'civil' offense and as such they bypass normal criminal due process.
A traffic law is a law, and a fine is a punishment for breaking the law. That is a criminal not civil offense. I should be entitled to a real trial before a real judge and jury with an innocent until proven guilty and the burden should remain on the prosecution that I have commited said crime.
Thwarting due process because you want to make systematically ass raping the population en mass and use fines for trivial arbitrary offenses as a revenue stream is bogus.
"How much money would you need to spend to fill a 160GB iPod? Say 3MB per song, that is 15.000 songs or say some 1.500 albums at 10USD/EUR per piece is 15.000USD/EUR"
Something is screwy with this math. Lets see, 160GB ipod, 3MB songs, so 160000MB/3MB = 53,333 songs not 15. I'm really not sure how you determined that 15 songs was 1 1/2 albums but lets run with it. That is 5333 Albums (a few must have had extra songs) * $10 is $53,333. Quite a bit off from the $15 conclusion you came to!
I second this. Add the condition that it should come out 1-2 (it can vary with box office numbers) weeks after the film hits the first theaters so it matches availability with torrent sites.
I would gladly pay $5 per movie (even $10 for something like Avatar) and stop pirating movie content altogether.
The same for music, post complete discographies for old artists with eac/flac for $5-10 each and I'd be all over it. I'm not a big music listener but this weekend I downloaded about a dozen complete discographies in lossless flac encodings. I did this so I could set up a mega playlist and randomize. Basically a personal radio commercial free radio station that only plays stuff I like. That is $60-$120 from a guy who will never buy a CD.
Really, which movie are you watching on netflix that just hit torrent for the first time and was produced by a major theatre?
Exactly, there is nothing but old crap on Netflix. I supported them as long as I could stand it but after a couple years without finding anything new that I wanted to watch...
Blame the studios, blame Netflix, whatever, but Netflix has no selection, none of the new releases, gets what it does get after video stores, and is DRM laden.
A netflix type service, with no DRM, cross platform, and got all major studio content in HD 1 week after it hits the first theatres... I'd pay $20/month for unlimited play on that.
"So, using the legal system to go after people who are misusing their copyrighted works is abusing the legal system? What are they supposed to do? Give up making money at something they enjoy?"
Abusing your copyright in such a way as to cause tens of thousands of people (or tens of millions if we are talking about filesharing in general in the US) to invalidate your privilege of control could you don't have the right to turn around and argue with the people in their courts.
That is right, the filesharers ARE The People. As in, We the People. More people have voted against copyright as we know it than have voted for any political candidate in history.
The solution is not to sue tens of thousands of people if you want to reclaim any revenue you imagine might have been there but to change your business practice to reclaim these valuable potential customers. The other option is to write them off as the valuable advertising resource they are.
"We have changed from laborer society to a creative society."
Last I checked my desk is still made of wood and steel. Those things had to be produced. My floors need cleaned, my food prepared.
You are touting the reasons we are in an economic sinkhole as if they are 'embracing the future'.
Trading actual tangible production of real property with actual scarcity for imaginary property with artificial government enforced scarcity is fscking stupid to the power of 10.
There is a reason China produces and exports real goods to us and smiles and nods to our face while ignoring our IP to our half turned backs.
And don't even bother with statements about our currency not being fixed value. I understand perfectly well how a Harvard MBA wants to pretend our economy works. At the end of the day there are only so many cows to go around and our dollar and our economy can only obfuscate that fact for so long.
Identity theft isn't theft either. When i was a kid we had an unlimited summer pass for the local pool. Give them your name and they let you in.
At least five of my friends used my name to get in on a regular basis. That is identity "theft" and they certainly weren't stealing from me.
"And the fact is that it *does* deprive them of some future revenue"
Only if I would have paid for their content and supported them in the first place. The future revenue argument is bogus. It is no more valid than claiming radio plays or bootleg tapes rob artists of future revenue. Filesharing and radio play are free advertising.
Lawsuits like this are just a way to vent your frustration that you aren't making the profits you'd like from your content. They are also a way to grab free headlines, there is no such thing as bad publicity.
Rights are something you are born with. Don't confuse the word copyright with the limited privs that it grants.
The owners and the only ones with rights with regard to IP are The People. Tens of millions of The People engage in filesharing, thus informing you that the law isn't valid.
If the courts didn't see fit to lie to juries about their obligation and right to nullify unjust application of the law this distinction might be more clear to you.
Usually with copyrighted content like books, music, software, etc, the storeowners just report it unsold. They only pay for the copies they sell, the rest are destroyed and tossed in the bin at some point.
"so how is it an "abuse of the legal system" for them to sue people who willfully violated their copyright?"
If there are tens of thousands of people breaking it (and the numbers are tens of millions, not thousands) it is the law which is unjust, not those violating it.
That said, if tens of thousands of people are downloading this material rather than buying it then that is always going to be the fault of the copyright holder those were potential sales they failed to realize. Clogging the courts with your attempt to force those people to pay rather than adjusting your business process is clearly an abuse of the system.
Whether you have filed a thousand lawsuits or one lawsuit with a thousand defendants you are abusing the system. One person or entity is not entitled to that much public time.
I support oracle entirely in this. I just think they should re-license Open Solaris under the GPLv3 so the code that was previously opened can be used somewhere useful instead of being locked in an ever more stagnant academic experiment for bored geeks.
I used to work for Sony Electronics, or rather Sony Customer Information Service Center, a subsidiary of Sony Electronics, which in turn is (or was, they could have restructured) a subsidiary of Sony America, which was in turn a subsidiary of the Sony Corporation.
The divisions do indeed have their own executives but at the end of the day those lines were drawn for legal and tax reasons. The CISC most definitely did what it was told by Sony Electronics and Sony Electronics heeds the concerns of Sony Pictures and Sony Music on its gadgets when Sony America tells them to.
In fact, if there were no Sony Pictures or Sony Music, Sony Electronics would give DRM and copy protection mechanisms the finger since it would without question improve sales... At least that's what the CEO told me once at lunch.
By the way, the CEO's of these major branches are typically trusted individuals from the home corp in Japan.
That isn't a page about computer data. Thus it is irrelevant.
Assigning prefixes to all the BS marketing base 10 schemes out there for clarification adds a FUNCTIONAL benefit. Assigning the existing prefixes to base 10 units rather than base 2 breaks all existing documentation and software without adding any FUNCTIONAL benefit. Satisfying a pedantic desire for consistency does not improve function.
Other uses of SI prefixes are for calculations performed by humans and humans do math in base 10. In the computing world those prefixes refer to numbers to be calculated by computers, and computers do math in base 2. It makes more sense to use in the way that provides optimum function... in ALL circumstances.
"Yeah, I really hate when the tools are use daily are made more standardized and sensible."
For whom? Computers think in base 2, base 2 numbers are the most sensible system to work in here.
"I was RAGING the day I worked on my first motherboard that didn't require me to fiddle with jumpers"
Me too. It was years after those jumpers went away before the boards worked well enough as is to not need them. Of course, now you just work around those problems in other ways. Do you know how many hours of frustration fighting with OS automatic resource allocation and plug and play have cost me? Defining those things manually requires a brain, it requires curing ignorance, it also means that once you have those things it works, each time, every time. It means that you aren't screwed when the computer thinks it knows the answer but is wrong.
Let's just settle this and be done with it, with the i = base 2, without it base 10. Strike that, and reverse it and I'll be onboard. Use the new prefix with the i to refer to incorrect base 10 numbers and at the same time save existing documentation and instruction materials. Do that, and you'll have a convert.
Slashdot Mirror
MW says you are incorrect.
steal
1 : to take the property of another wrongfully and especially as a habitual or regular practice
theft
1 : the act of stealing; specifically : the felonious taking and removing of personal property with intent to deprive the rightful owner of it b : an unlawful taking (as by embezzlement or burglary) of property
Stealing == Theft. There is no property that is taken in copyright infringement.
"Would you, or would you not, feel it is wrong to take code covered under the GPL and incorporate it into a closed-source product in violation of the license?"
Certainly. But it isn't stealing, its called commercial copyright infringement.
If simply depriving someone of value was stealing than Wal-mart steals from K-Mart every day as they grow and win potential sales.
While this may burn for K-Mart and we might sympathize few would argue that out-competing in and of itself is wrong.
What we are talking about here is not depriving anyone of value, even in a way that is not wrong. A music studio is deprived of no economic value when I download a song. You might argue that I devalue the song by downloading it, I would counter that the availability of the song for free download is a market reflection of the song's value.
"Any use of Bittorrent or any other P2P pretty much by definition "includes receipt, or expectation of receipt, of anything of value, including the receipt of other copyrighted works". It is also quite easy for offline non-commercial infringement to fall under that definition."
That may be true of P2P filesharing systems but not bittorrent since there is no other copyrighted work I get for being on a torrent. For that matter the tiny chunks that are uploaded in bittorrent may not even qualify for copyright.
copyright infringement already is a crime in the US but nobody here is being prosecuted for it and it isn't likely anybody will be.
"Problem is, $750 (minimum) for one movie or song is reasonable"
No, $20 (max) for one movie or $5 (max) for a song is reasonable for a civil case. Civil awards are supposed to be based on the damage, not fines to punish.
Or rather, it would be reasonable if The People hadn't already made clear that they don't support these copyright monopolies.
The legality of which is really questionable in my mind. They do this by calling it a 'civil' offense and as such they bypass normal criminal due process.
A traffic law is a law, and a fine is a punishment for breaking the law. That is a criminal not civil offense. I should be entitled to a real trial before a real judge and jury with an innocent until proven guilty and the burden should remain on the prosecution that I have commited said crime.
Thwarting due process because you want to make systematically ass raping the population en mass and use fines for trivial arbitrary offenses as a revenue stream is bogus.
"I'm not defending what they are doing (or their outdated business model) but this piracy does cost them money."
And you base this on what? Which of those downloaders would have bought that movie if they hadn't pirated it?
How much did the studios gain in sales due to showings and word of mouth advertising from those downloads?
I'd be willing to bet the first of those numbers is a pretty tiny one and the second dramatically larger.
"and it does fall into the "distribution" category."
Not if you leech
"How much money would you need to spend to fill a 160GB iPod? Say 3MB per song, that is 15.000 songs or say some 1.500 albums at 10USD/EUR per piece is 15.000USD/EUR"
Something is screwy with this math. Lets see, 160GB ipod, 3MB songs, so 160000MB/3MB = 53,333 songs not 15. I'm really not sure how you determined that 15 songs was 1 1/2 albums but lets run with it. That is 5333 Albums (a few must have had extra songs) * $10 is $53,333. Quite a bit off from the $15 conclusion you came to!
No kidding and that bar gets higher every day. I went and saw Avatar 3D in the theater the other day and tickets ran about $20 each.
For that kind of money I expect an entire day at a full scale theme park with puke rides.
I second this. Add the condition that it should come out 1-2 (it can vary with box office numbers) weeks after the film hits the first theaters so it matches availability with torrent sites.
I would gladly pay $5 per movie (even $10 for something like Avatar) and stop pirating movie content altogether.
The same for music, post complete discographies for old artists with eac/flac for $5-10 each and I'd be all over it. I'm not a big music listener but this weekend I downloaded about a dozen complete discographies in lossless flac encodings. I did this so I could set up a mega playlist and randomize. Basically a personal radio commercial free radio station that only plays stuff I like. That is $60-$120 from a guy who will never buy a CD.
Really, which movie are you watching on netflix that just hit torrent for the first time and was produced by a major theatre?
Exactly, there is nothing but old crap on Netflix. I supported them as long as I could stand it but after a couple years without finding anything new that I wanted to watch...
Blame the studios, blame Netflix, whatever, but Netflix has no selection, none of the new releases, gets what it does get after video stores, and is DRM laden.
A netflix type service, with no DRM, cross platform, and got all major studio content in HD 1 week after it hits the first theatres... I'd pay $20/month for unlimited play on that.
You can keep your physical disc trade service.
On a side note. Indies aren't even indies anymore, the money is going in the same Hollywood pockets at the end of the day.
"So, using the legal system to go after people who are misusing their copyrighted works is abusing the legal system? What are they supposed to do? Give up making money at something they enjoy?"
Abusing your copyright in such a way as to cause tens of thousands of people (or tens of millions if we are talking about filesharing in general in the US) to invalidate your privilege of control could you don't have the right to turn around and argue with the people in their courts.
That is right, the filesharers ARE The People. As in, We the People. More people have voted against copyright as we know it than have voted for any political candidate in history.
The solution is not to sue tens of thousands of people if you want to reclaim any revenue you imagine might have been there but to change your business practice to reclaim these valuable potential customers. The other option is to write them off as the valuable advertising resource they are.
"We have changed from laborer society to a creative society."
Last I checked my desk is still made of wood and steel. Those things had to be produced. My floors need cleaned, my food prepared.
You are touting the reasons we are in an economic sinkhole as if they are 'embracing the future'.
Trading actual tangible production of real property with actual scarcity for imaginary property with artificial government enforced scarcity is fscking stupid to the power of 10.
There is a reason China produces and exports real goods to us and smiles and nods to our face while ignoring our IP to our half turned backs.
And don't even bother with statements about our currency not being fixed value. I understand perfectly well how a Harvard MBA wants to pretend our economy works. At the end of the day there are only so many cows to go around and our dollar and our economy can only obfuscate that fact for so long.
Identity theft isn't theft either. When i was a kid we had an unlimited summer pass for the local pool. Give them your name and they let you in.
At least five of my friends used my name to get in on a regular basis. That is identity "theft" and they certainly weren't stealing from me.
"And the fact is that it *does* deprive them of some future revenue"
Only if I would have paid for their content and supported them in the first place. The future revenue argument is bogus. It is no more valid than claiming radio plays or bootleg tapes rob artists of future revenue. Filesharing and radio play are free advertising.
Lawsuits like this are just a way to vent your frustration that you aren't making the profits you'd like from your content. They are also a way to grab free headlines, there is no such thing as bad publicity.
Rights are something you are born with. Don't confuse the word copyright with the limited privs that it grants.
The owners and the only ones with rights with regard to IP are The People. Tens of millions of The People engage in filesharing, thus informing you that the law isn't valid.
If the courts didn't see fit to lie to juries about their obligation and right to nullify unjust application of the law this distinction might be more clear to you.
Usually with copyrighted content like books, music, software, etc, the storeowners just report it unsold. They only pay for the copies they sell, the rest are destroyed and tossed in the bin at some point.
"so how is it an "abuse of the legal system" for them to sue people who willfully violated their copyright?"
If there are tens of thousands of people breaking it (and the numbers are tens of millions, not thousands) it is the law which is unjust, not those violating it.
That said, if tens of thousands of people are downloading this material rather than buying it then that is always going to be the fault of the copyright holder those were potential sales they failed to realize. Clogging the courts with your attempt to force those people to pay rather than adjusting your business process is clearly an abuse of the system.
Whether you have filed a thousand lawsuits or one lawsuit with a thousand defendants you are abusing the system. One person or entity is not entitled to that much public time.
I support oracle entirely in this. I just think they should re-license Open Solaris under the GPLv3 so the code that was previously opened can be used somewhere useful instead of being locked in an ever more stagnant academic experiment for bored geeks.
I used to work for Sony Electronics, or rather Sony Customer Information Service Center, a subsidiary of Sony Electronics, which in turn is (or was, they could have restructured) a subsidiary of Sony America, which was in turn a subsidiary of the Sony Corporation.
The divisions do indeed have their own executives but at the end of the day those lines were drawn for legal and tax reasons. The CISC most definitely did what it was told by Sony Electronics and Sony Electronics heeds the concerns of Sony Pictures and Sony Music on its gadgets when Sony America tells them to.
In fact, if there were no Sony Pictures or Sony Music, Sony Electronics would give DRM and copy protection mechanisms the finger since it would without question improve sales... At least that's what the CEO told me once at lunch.
By the way, the CEO's of these major branches are typically trusted individuals from the home corp in Japan.
Firmware updates aren't just to play the latest games, they also fix critical bugs in the firmware.
Games may not be important to massive clusters but critical bug fixes are.
That isn't a page about computer data. Thus it is irrelevant.
Assigning prefixes to all the BS marketing base 10 schemes out there for clarification adds a FUNCTIONAL benefit. Assigning the existing prefixes to base 10 units rather than base 2 breaks all existing documentation and software without adding any FUNCTIONAL benefit. Satisfying a pedantic desire for consistency does not improve function.
Other uses of SI prefixes are for calculations performed by humans and humans do math in base 10. In the computing world those prefixes refer to numbers to be calculated by computers, and computers do math in base 2. It makes more sense to use in the way that provides optimum function... in ALL circumstances.
"Yeah, I really hate when the tools are use daily are made more standardized and sensible."
For whom? Computers think in base 2, base 2 numbers are the most sensible system to work in here.
"I was RAGING the day I worked on my first motherboard that didn't require me to fiddle with jumpers"
Me too. It was years after those jumpers went away before the boards worked well enough as is to not need them. Of course, now you just work around those problems in other ways. Do you know how many hours of frustration fighting with OS automatic resource allocation and plug and play have cost me? Defining those things manually requires a brain, it requires curing ignorance, it also means that once you have those things it works, each time, every time. It means that you aren't screwed when the computer thinks it knows the answer but is wrong.
Let's just settle this and be done with it, with the i = base 2, without it base 10. Strike that, and reverse it and I'll be onboard. Use the new prefix with the i to refer to incorrect base 10 numbers and at the same time save existing documentation and instruction materials. Do that, and you'll have a convert.