Let the Lawyer-Fu begin. Somehow I think that no matter who is 'right' here, 50 states and the entire Federal government are going to win. At some point Congressmen have to consider the idea that just putting everyone at SCO in jail for some pretext would be easier than explaining to all of their constituents that they have to raise taxes again to pay for some jackass suing over a computer program.
Agent Smith:"That's right your Honor, after our thorough investigation we found that the code in question is nothing more than fiendishly hidden links to terrorist organizations and kiddy porn sites placed in the program by SCO."
By your own 'silver rule' I should feel justified removing your essential liberties and rights to free speech. Good thing someone thought idealism was practical once, huh?
Exactly, and if you think of the alternative pricing schemes that the RIAA wants to black and white the issue into (I download the song for free = not even 44 cents of revenue) then the whol issue becomes pretty clear. If the music industries entire catalog of music was at even 50 cents a song then even small business webcast would probably look viable again. If CDs cost 5 dollars then I might buy an album every once in a while instead of my current standing of having not bought a non-used CD since 1996. I don't think I've even been in a music chain store for a few years, they don't have anything in there that I think I'd find interesting and thanks to all the nice representation from the RIAA the concept makes me a little ill. In any case I probably won't be buying a cd at any cost anytime soon, if I can do my little bit to bankrupt the folks who bought my public domain away then I feel I'm doing my part for democracy.
Maybe a simple screen in the program would do actually - searching for things on any single user's computer would reveal 35% of things found on another's computer as non-revealed pointers. That would be an interesting way to shift the burden of proof at least, "We know he's filesharing, but which of the songs is he sharing?"
Maybe if I said something like this in my blink as you pass it Terms of Service in my Kazaa install: By installing this software I affirm and swear that I am not a member of, in pay of, or associated with in any fashion the recording industry, the RIAA, or any media outlet.... I am aware that by chosing to use this software I am using encrypted data streams.
Then slap people mining the users with DMCA violations?
Somehow I don't think that Gibson was imagining corporate black ops units gunning down 13 year olds for downloading the latest Avril Lavigne song though. We're not quite there yet thankfully, guess we'll see how interesting things get with a second term of Herr Bush almost surely coming...
In fact I think all children should be used for slave labor. They're hella cheap!
No no no, those children that cannot be dissuaded from dropping out of school must be eaten.
It's the only sane solution, after all if they're not going to go to school why should we burdern ourselves feeding them and taking care of them? Drop out? Only inbetween two slices of bread with a pickle!
Personally I think I could live without a hand easier than I could live with having my wages taken away for ever and ever to pay for my 50 billion dollar "I let people download Britney" RIAA lawsuit.
Sometimes I think the REAL solution to copyright law would be to simply make the entire thing non-transferable. Only the creator of the copyrighted work could own the thing, thus leaving the incentive for protection and push into the public domain the discretion of the artist themselves.
Copyrights exist to provide an incentive to push works into the public domain
What public domain? The same folks telling people that filesharing is causing the end of the world and imposing ludacris damage estimates on 22 yr olds in college have effectively legislated away the public domain. At this point I don't even know if we'd be allowed to play the national anthem without a licence if the same laws in place now were there when the thing was written.
I fully agree with this, but the way to do it isn't to go copying music everywhere,it's by creating distribution methods that do a legal end-run around the whole label and manufacturing infrastructure.
Which is what the public is having difficulties fighting against, since RIAA legal kung fu is superior to John Q's. The public doesn't have a millions of dollars in operating budget political machine wining and dining Congressmen who seem blissfully willing to sign away on laws that fundamentally change the orientation and intent of the law, we're not being represented in any meaningful way. Instead, rather than engage in a debate the lobby labels everyone as just 'whining thieves' or somesuch - how can you do a legal end around against that without getting on a soapbox and demanding that your constituency is heard?
I also believe that the interests of society (not just corporations) are served by the production of creative/intellectual works, and the production of such works (usually) requires financial compensation.
Society IS served by the creation of creative works, though I wonder what your basis of thought is that creation requires financial compensation. Open source projects and even millions of webpages prove that people have ideas and invest in them without any expectation of payment. I'm not even saying that people shouldn't be paid for creative works (that would be fairly counterproductive give what I do), just that the ransacking of the concept of copyright and the public domain serves no one. You can't protect people's right to create and simultaneously not recognize that the real purpose of copyright is separate from those individuals, it's a common resource owned by everyone no matter how many laws are perverted to make that not so.
That's like saying that we should lower prices to reduce shoplifting. Society has no interest in pandering to the whims of freeloaders and whiny slashdot kiddies.
But this is the essential issue: Society is all of us, not just corporations, and we empower the laws in the first place. Recognizing a large enough constituency is't 'pandering', it's being responsive to voters.
A subtle but important distinction you have missed here is that between an intellectual/creative work (an intangible object) and a copy of that work. Obviously, if it becomes easy to copy a work, the value of a copy goes down a long way.
If the distinction between a copy and the intangible concept of an idea were so succinct then copyright law would have never have worked. An idea and it's copy are always the same, even to the point where derivative inventions and made a nod of when the arguement can (and has been) made that all creative works are derivative. If the value of a copy has become essentially nil then what is the purpose of falsely propping up a higher value? And since there was obviously creative work done in prior times when there weren't such restrictive and draconion laws in place as protections as there are today, why should we tout our own system as better?
It is changing the supply and demand of copies of the artistic/intellectual works. This merely means that it's cheap to copy those works. It does not mean that the work itself is less valuable, and it does not mean that people will no longer be willing to pay for the right to enjoy the benefits of these works.
Thats right, and it follows that if people are obviously willing to pay for the right still but the corporate/legal entities are arguing that they're not that the true issue is one of distribution controls and pricing. Since the people grant the distribution control in the first place by granting copyright and the people are making a fairly clear case for lowering prices by their economic choices then I don't see what the problem is. Except that the government is being manipulated by wealthy 'corporate citizens' instead of their true constituencies.
Well, of course. "because I can" is never a morally just reason. However, it is you and not I who makes that argument (That because intellectual works can easily be copied, they should be) THere are a lot of laws that are easy to break, but that doesn't mean that those laws do not serve a useful purpose.
That is, of course, assuming that you agree that they're serving their useful purpose of moving creative works into the public domain. By the same token you might argue that laws preventing the picketing of hazardous waste sites serve useful purpose, when in fact they're more likely 'public good' laws lobbied by corporations that don't represent anything of the sort.
Technology makes creative and intellectual works more valuable, not less so, because the production of physical goods becomes increasingly automated, which means that more people spend more time doing "brain work".
Do you comprehend what Supply & Demand is all about? If I suddenly possess a machine that conjures candy bars from the ether for free, do all the other candy bars retain their value? More intellectual/creative works devalue each other, since there is a finite amount of money to spend upon each.
Technology is changing the dynamics of supply & demand more than anyone is "stealing music". Just because you can try to legislate artificial supply bottlenecks doesn't mean that you're right to do so.
The courts never make law, they only make decisions based upon the law. When something is clearly unconstitutional then they can remove the law as being illegal in the first place, but they can't make them from thin air. The only thing they do even resembling that is when they establish precedent in a ruling and outline a decision in way that makes it clear to Congress that any other way to phrase a law would be unconstitutional.
The idea of putting value on intellectual and creative works is far from obsolete. In fact, the trend over the last 100 years or so has been to place more value on such works, and the more modern the economy, the greater the likelihood that such work is recognised as valuable.
Horse carriages are far from valueless either, that doesn't change the fact that they aren't as intrinsically valuable now that technology has made them so. Your 'more modern' economy is simply changing faster than you seem to give it credit, and tomorrow's economy is one where the technological genie can't be put back in the bottle no matter what legislatures are bought and paid for.
If I didn't give you the right to make a living on it in the first place then the whole thing would be a non-issue. Copyright is a granted right, something understood by Thomas Jefferson and clearly not by yourself.
Just because someone wants to make a living by selling horse carriages doesn't mean that the government should protect them at the expense of the automobile.
What evidence and considerations they're allowed to use as the basis of their decisions are defined by legislatures though, at least in theory right? Even the Supreme Court finds itself limited in that way, when no clear Constitutional issue comes into play they're often forced to enforce whatever boneheaded laws Congress wants them too.
As I have told many clients, anybody can sue anybody, it doesn't mean they will win.
Right, because the determining factor in whether someone wins or not is who bought the law in the first place and who's funneling money where. Without corporate funding of the DMCA in the first place there wouldn't be any laws favoring corporations and slamming the public domain. Without Disney copyright extensions bought in Congress, the public domain would mean something.
You may represent your clients, but Congress isn't. They're representing the corporations on the logic that without the corporations we'd all somehow become paupers overnight.
Admittedly, though, I can't think of what those might be. Someone smarter than I will have to dream that up
That's making the rather scary presumption that there is anyone in Washington even smart enough to know that there is a problem. Smarts aren't what gets people elected, straight teeth and kissing ass with corporations is. Until those basics are addressed, don't expect anything brilliant from DC.
Given my rather sweeeeet gift with words, I expect to gross somewhere around a billion dollars by replying to this message. If Salshdot doesn't hand it over I guess I will have to take direct legal actions.
Slashdot Mirror
Let the Lawyer-Fu begin. Somehow I think that no matter who is 'right' here, 50 states and the entire Federal government are going to win. At some point Congressmen have to consider the idea that just putting everyone at SCO in jail for some pretext would be easier than explaining to all of their constituents that they have to raise taxes again to pay for some jackass suing over a computer program.
Agent Smith:"That's right your Honor, after our thorough investigation we found that the code in question is nothing more than fiendishly hidden links to terrorist organizations and kiddy porn sites placed in the program by SCO."
By your own 'silver rule' I should feel justified removing your essential liberties and rights to free speech. Good thing someone thought idealism was practical once, huh?
Exactly, and if you think of the alternative pricing schemes that the RIAA wants to black and white the issue into (I download the song for free = not even 44 cents of revenue) then the whol issue becomes pretty clear. If the music industries entire catalog of music was at even 50 cents a song then even small business webcast would probably look viable again. If CDs cost 5 dollars then I might buy an album every once in a while instead of my current standing of having not bought a non-used CD since 1996. I don't think I've even been in a music chain store for a few years, they don't have anything in there that I think I'd find interesting and thanks to all the nice representation from the RIAA the concept makes me a little ill. In any case I probably won't be buying a cd at any cost anytime soon, if I can do my little bit to bankrupt the folks who bought my public domain away then I feel I'm doing my part for democracy.
Maybe a simple screen in the program would do actually - searching for things on any single user's computer would reveal 35% of things found on another's computer as non-revealed pointers. That would be an interesting way to shift the burden of proof at least, "We know he's filesharing, but which of the songs is he sharing?"
Maybe if I said something like this in my blink as you pass it Terms of Service in my Kazaa install:
By installing this software I affirm and swear that I am not a member of, in pay of, or associated with in any fashion the recording industry, the RIAA, or any media outlet....
I am aware that by chosing to use this software I am using encrypted data streams.
Then slap people mining the users with DMCA violations?
Somehow I don't think that Gibson was imagining corporate black ops units gunning down 13 year olds for downloading the latest Avril Lavigne song though. We're not quite there yet thankfully, guess we'll see how interesting things get with a second term of Herr Bush almost surely coming...
It's the only sane solution, after all if they're not going to go to school why should we burdern ourselves feeding them and taking care of them? Drop out? Only inbetween two slices of bread with a pickle!
Personally I think I could live without a hand easier than I could live with having my wages taken away for ever and ever to pay for my 50 billion dollar "I let people download Britney" RIAA lawsuit.
Sometimes I think the REAL solution to copyright law would be to simply make the entire thing non-transferable. Only the creator of the copyrighted work could own the thing, thus leaving the incentive for protection and push into the public domain the discretion of the artist themselves.
Technology is changing the dynamics of supply & demand more than anyone is "stealing music". Just because you can try to legislate artificial supply bottlenecks doesn't mean that you're right to do so.
The courts never make law, they only make decisions based upon the law. When something is clearly unconstitutional then they can remove the law as being illegal in the first place, but they can't make them from thin air. The only thing they do even resembling that is when they establish precedent in a ruling and outline a decision in way that makes it clear to Congress that any other way to phrase a law would be unconstitutional.
If I didn't give you the right to make a living on it in the first place then the whole thing would be a non-issue. Copyright is a granted right, something understood by Thomas Jefferson and clearly not by yourself.
Just because someone wants to make a living by selling horse carriages doesn't mean that the government should protect them at the expense of the automobile.
What evidence and considerations they're allowed to use as the basis of their decisions are defined by legislatures though, at least in theory right? Even the Supreme Court finds itself limited in that way, when no clear Constitutional issue comes into play they're often forced to enforce whatever boneheaded laws Congress wants them too.
Given my rather sweeeeet gift with words, I expect to gross somewhere around a billion dollars by replying to this message. If Salshdot doesn't hand it over I guess I will have to take direct legal actions.
Thats if you have a legal team representing you to file the proper forms. It's great to see that law represents the man on the street, isn't it?
Stalin was pretty passionate about communism, and genuinely wanted to change the Soviet Union too. Off to the gulag with us...