Nonsense, they "activate" (what an Orwellian piece of newspeak that is) any time you do any sort of significant system change. And usually cause your software to die at the most inconvenient moment.
Make no mistake, DRM deliberately makes software fragile, which is a rather stupid thing to do.
---
DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
My point being, obviously, that activation may seem a little annoying, but some of these complaints about it really are a little overblown.
DRM is not a "little" annoying. It is a lot annoying and the complaints are not overblown. In a changing environment it makes the software fragile as hell, stops even the simplest operations like cloning or virtualization and makes you entirely dependent on what their definition of "legal" is, not yours.
The only people who think DRM is okay are marketing parasites and people who haven't been burned yet. I've been burned many times on everything from hot spares to dead software in the field to broken customer installations.
I was actually indifferent to DRM when I was young and foolish but I've learned my lesson now. DRM sucks, big time, and is one of the major causes of software failure.
---
DRM breaks ownership, the basis of capitalism and the free market.
So before modding me a troll, or flamebait, or calling me an MS fanboi or shill, please post some technical arguments as to why Linux is better.
The license is far better. The license is an important technical software characteristic, whatever closed source marketing zealots might like to claim.
And yes you are a shill for pretending the license is not important.
And that's leaving all the other technical advantages aside like the ability to second source, the ability to review the source, the ability modify to needs, to copy as needed. The list just goes on and on. Oh, and windows being "smoother"? That is a matter of opinion and familiarity.
I know, I know, everything on the Internet is a commodity now. But tell me - what happens when there is no one left to produce that commodity?
A news story anywhere in the world has somebody local who can report on it on the internet. A local blogger in other words. Like a newspaper stringer.
And guess what? People like to talk about their lives and will blog about it to the point of ridiculousness. For free. Many are crap but a fraction of those billions of people have something interesting to say. And that fraction is enough to keep most people entertained and informed for a lifetime. And aggregation and discussion sites find those people.
At some point the Slashdot crowd is going to have to face up to the fact that content producers need to get paid if they are going to continue producing.
At some point people like you are going to have to face up to the fact that what they produce is of little value, largely rehashed press releases and grossly overpaid, bad acting, that is being replaced by user generated content and other entertainment and information options.
it's easy to criticize the MPAA, but who is going to pay the millions of dollars to shoot a major movie if everyone simply copies content without paying for it?
Nobody I hope. Big budget movies and the corruption and huge numbers of middlemen and hangers on associated with them need to die. What hopefully will happen is that they become efficient, with no bloat, no million dollar SFX and with actual good acting on a reasonable salary, scripts with actual originality instead and with minimal marketing BS and reasonable prices. I'm looking forward to that day.
I have millions of web pages on wikipedia alone to entertain and inform me. Enough to last many lifetimes. Huge numbers of people with something interesting to say on every topic under the sun. All for free. The means of contacting like minded individuals on the most obscure topics. In seconds. Small entertainers all over the world making short films and browser games. Good fun. First class on-line university and other education courses all over the world. Right up to advanced graduate level. Travelogues and pictorials by travelers to every obscure place on earth. Fascinating. The list just goes on and on. It's not piracy that's killing big budget entertainment and news. It's cheaper competition. Much, much cheaper.
And that's ignoring all the real life options. Like hanging out with friends, walking the dog or joining a local sports club.
Bye bye.
---
I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
Those books are not yours. That's the fundamental thing. THAT PROPERTY IS NOT YOURS. If I am Joe author of a book, and Google scans it, I have every right to demand Google yank it back out. Convenience is not an excuse to violate civil rights.
You are engaging in circular reasoning. Ownership, by definition, is the right to control. Any ethical, not legal, argument based on "because they own it" is bogus.
The more interesting question is "Who owns it?". And given how ridiculous copyright and the copyright wars have become it's way past time for it to be fixed. I for one think it's insane that billions of people should be blocked, free speech should be blocked, and artificial scarcity should be enforced because a single individual is somehow "entitled" to an eternal revenue stream.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work. It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons. Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Only in the marketing industry's fevered imagination is advertising supported the same as free. Advertising has very real costs. Who do you think pays marketers salaries? You do via higher cost products. Not to mention the cost of attention and the cost of deceptive commercial propaganda.
---
"Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
An unobtrusive ad is a non-functioning ad. It is a non-sustainable business model.
---
"Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
For every successful OSS project, I'd say there are at least 10,000 pitiful ones, thanks to their management.
"For every successful closed source software project, I'd say there are at least 10,000 pitiful ones, thanks to their management."
Stop pretending failed internal projects that never see the light of day don't count. Open source is the same except visible. That's the whole point.
Whenever you see anybody replacing what should be the word "software" with the more selective words "open source software" or "closed source software" you can be sure you're dealing with somebody with an agenda, either a marketing parasite (the worst zealots of all) or a bigot who can't be bothered actually thinking.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
There is no objective definition of 'an idea'. PTO bureaucrats are just hand waving when they say two ideas are the same or different.
There's no objective definition of whether two colors are the same or different. "Ideas" are a far more fluid, ill-defined concept.
The PTO is dishonest when they claim they are objective; they keep claiming increasingly small and arbitrary differences between ideas means the idea is "new". Just bureaucrats and assorted other parasites empire building at the expense of the rest of society.
---
I own it therefore I get to decide what happens to it is a meaningless tautology. Ownership by definition is the right to control. The more interesting question is who owns it?
Capitalism means government stays out of the economy completely.
No, capitalism without government is warlordism, might makes right.
Government is about stopping all the negative ways that people can compete (e.g. protection rackets, deceptive advertising, monopoly market manipulation, dangerous products, externalities such as pollution, child/vulnerable exploitation, violent crime) while still allowing positive competition (e.g. better products, cheaper prices, honest advertising, no spamming).
That doesn't mean that business people are absolved of any ethical responsibility for not competing positively. Government is just a backstop to control the sociopaths.
Being a human institution democratic government (one person, one vote versus one dollar, one vote) makes mistakes all the time but it's the best we've got.
---
Anonymous company communication is unethical and can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.
I know exactly what risk is. You on the other hand appear to be confusing marketing brand names, which are only vaguely related to risk, with risk. An open, free market is, statistically, almost always going to be better than a closed, single source supplier with on-paper guarantees that are weasled out of because that maximizes profit at expense of the already locked-in customer. Been there, done that. This problem is particularly bad for software because of it's ill-defined and amorphous nature.
---
Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion. Anonymous commercial speech should be illegal.
The single biggest problem with FOSS is that there is no one to share the risks with.
Nonsense. With a proprietary vendor you have one vendor to "share the risk with". With open source you have anybody who can program the relevant package "to share the risk with". It's called multiple-sourcing and is an accepted business and government practice.
The problem for FOSS is not risk, it's the marketing parasites selling the proprietary packages crowding out the mindshare, to the detriment of large numbers of people.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
Often times things are far more obvious once you've seen them in work than they were before hand.
A lot of patent proponents like to push that myth. The reality is that an expert in the field is perfectly capable of assessing whether something is obvious or not with more, not less, information at their disposal. An expert doesn't mystically lose their intelligence or experience when told about something.
---
The patent system. The whole edifice is based on handwaving.
I guess it will forever remain a mystery to them why their nation isn't home to prosperous software & music industries
No mystery at all. Just doing what the US did historically did in similar circumstances. Current US copyright fanatics complaining about third world piracy are just hypocrites. China is a sovereign country and can create+implement whatever "intellectual property" law they please.
In any case China gets copies that cost the US almost nothing to produce and the US gets a large volume of amazingly cheap consumer products that cost China a lot of man hours to produce. The US is getting the better end of the deal.
Hardware encryption certainly has its advantages; but if you can't handle deploying software encryption now, I'm deeply skeptical of your ability to handle deploying hardware encryption.
Even more there's generally speaking no such thing as "hardware encryption", just software encryption running on different hardware platforms. There are some low level hardware encryption engines available but even those are typically dedicated one-chip computers.
In this case why on earth do I want my encryption software running on a very low end, inaccessible CPU in my hard drive with poor, probably buggy access and needlessly basic functionality instead of my high performance, flexible main CPU with full OS support and updates? The main CPU is usually waiting for the hard drive anyway.
"Hardware encryption", like a lot of "hardware x"'s such as "hardware RAID" and "hardware high level network cards", are typical of the creeping featureitis of developers not thinking clearly and not doing the numbers.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Oh, wonderful. Propaganda without numerical evidence being asserted for the zillionth time. Your scientific evidence for this practically neanderthal spam is?
Perhaps the benefit of allowing billions of people to share outweighs the dubious benefit of allowing very small numbers of people to profit. In a society of billions it is a statistical certainty that millions will want to create for reasons other than what the copyright monopoly gives and that may be a net win.
I get heartily sick of people in all areas of intellectual creation claiming without scientific evidence that such-and-such as true. Intellectual output now affects society to the tune of trillions of dollars and yet nobody is willing to engage in a serious large scale effort to scientifically and formally analyze what are the virtually infinite number of forms that intellectual creation right allocation might take, nor optimizing them for society at large.
We already choose not to protect many forms of intellectual work (e.g. deciding where to site a business, house plans, building methods, jokes or selling a particular selection of products) and yet we arbitrarily decide that certain other forms of intellectual work must be controlled. It's time government stepped back and started assigning property rights based on scientific, numerical evidence, showing benefit from government interfering in a citizen's business and not allowing pressure groups representing a very small minority of the population to dominate.
Grow up. Might as well say most families are socialist. Children do not contribute and yet they get all these free handouts where the parents will go to jail if they don't. Absolutely terrible.
Nobody has the right to tell anyone else what to do with the works they create
Faulty logic. Ownership, by definition, is the right to control something. Any ethical, not legal, argument saying "because they own it" is meaningless.
All he's suggesting is another, possibly appropriate, way to fine M$ by taking something of value (the monopoly a gift from society at large in the first place) away from them.
As an aside it is also not unreasonable to say that when patents and copyrights become de facto or de jure standards, just like trademarks and for much the same reasons, they should be lost. Monopolies (i.e. market failure) are unhealthy for exactly the same reason any centralized power is unhealthy and are an unfortunate byproduct of current unstable, winner-take-all intellectual property market structures (it's always going to be more efficient to create "IP" once and copy it n times than to create it m times and copy each n/m times) and we need to find ways of fixing that.
You're right that micropayments have a bad rap but that's more an accident of history than anything else. None achieved critical mass and none were realistic in their pricing expectations. Only google or M$ could pull it off now. In fact, thinking about it, maybe M$ should consider setting up a high quality, open, trivial to use micropayment system as a way of starving google of advertising income oxygen. Maybe extend their XBox setup. People make micropayments in real life for information like newspapers all the time, it just needs be presented well and have realistic income expectations ie. As an upper limit the equivalent of a newspaper's worth of content being worth a buck or two. I think many people would be happy to have a few dollars deducted from their credit card each month to avoid the dross. The problem is of course that there's so much free, reasonable content out there (e.g. wikipedia, planetmath, gutenberg, pbs, ted, ocw) it's hard to compete without manipulating people.
You know an ad isn't all that horrible,
Yes it is. My time and attention are worth something. Over a lifetime it's worth a lot. Since virtually all ad's are completely useless to the viewer all they're doing is pissing millions of lives away on crap. Me, I'd pay if I could to avoid it but often parasitic mass marketers make that practically impossible. One reason why astroturfers are scum is that they don't give the "viewer" the option to avoid them.
at least it tells you something about how they wished the product to be.
It's propaganda. It's almost always nothing more than emotional manipulation trying to make the viewer make an irrational decision and is actually worse than nothing. The world would be a much better place if more people were rational, with less impulse purchases and more decisions where alternatives are considered.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
The unrealistic expectations of content creators you mean? The ones who think it's reasonable that millions should be paid to a movie star or for a few hours recording or for a few months writing a book or for content that has been done a zillion times before (e.g. most computer games)?
Quite apart from the high fliers, media creation is currently horrendously inefficient with huge numbers of hangers on, everything from marketing parasites to distribution middlemen to "producers" and assorted other bureaucrats. Not to mention large numbers of creators who are not very creative at all. Many of these are going to lose their jobs and will have to do something which is really wealth creation rather than pretending.
And that's a good thing. I see no reason why I should be subsidizing them. Fact is millions of people like to create for no money at all and making billions of copies once something has been created is trivial. It's supply and demand and the people who think they should be able to manipulate the market to get a cut are being dragged kicking and screaming into the realization that they're simply not needed and not wanted.
People are happy to pay a reasonable amount for worthwhile content and do it all the time. The only people who have to worry about non-viability are the hanger's on and the creators who have unreasonable income expectations.
---
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
The obviousness test relies upon prior art. If somebody does something, and nobody can show that any part of it has been done before, then surely it's not obvious?
There are an infinite number of reasons why things are not done. To say that something is not done implies that something is not obvious is just one more example of PTO bogus logic.
---
The patent system. The whole edifice is based on handwaving.
Does the rule of inclusion elude you? Fraud is performed through lying, but lying does not necessarily imply fraud.
Does context elude you? This woman was attempting to deceive for personal gain. According to wikipedia, that's fraud in general.
A few people think that lying/fraud for personal gain is okay if they can get away with it. They're sociopaths and they're likely to get caught if they make a habit of it.
---
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Agreed that would seem the appropriate punishment but other posters have said she probably has a history and the police may be the only people allowed to touch her. In those circumstances maybe the school didn't have many options. Without more information hard to say.
Slashdot Mirror
You only activate it once,
Nonsense, they "activate" (what an Orwellian piece of newspeak that is) any time you do any sort of significant system change. And usually cause your software to die at the most inconvenient moment.
Make no mistake, DRM deliberately makes software fragile, which is a rather stupid thing to do.
---
DRM'ed content breaks the copyright bargain, the first sale doctrine and fair use provisions. It should not be possible to copyright DRM'ed content.
My point being, obviously, that activation may seem a little annoying, but some of these complaints about it really are a little overblown.
DRM is not a "little" annoying. It is a lot annoying and the complaints are not overblown. In a changing environment it makes the software fragile as hell, stops even the simplest operations like cloning or virtualization and makes you entirely dependent on what their definition of "legal" is, not yours.
The only people who think DRM is okay are marketing parasites and people who haven't been burned yet. I've been burned many times on everything from hot spares to dead software in the field to broken customer installations.
I was actually indifferent to DRM when I was young and foolish but I've learned my lesson now. DRM sucks, big time, and is one of the major causes of software failure.
---
DRM breaks ownership, the basis of capitalism and the free market.
So before modding me a troll, or flamebait, or calling me an MS fanboi or shill, please post some technical arguments as to why Linux is better.
The license is far better. The license is an important technical software characteristic, whatever closed source marketing zealots might like to claim.
And yes you are a shill for pretending the license is not important.
And that's leaving all the other technical advantages aside like the ability to second source, the ability to review the source, the ability modify to needs, to copy as needed. The list just goes on and on. Oh, and windows being "smoother"? That is a matter of opinion and familiarity.
---
Monopolies = Industrial feudalism
You're being naive if think it isn't marketers.
You think they're going to leave the marketing of a multi-million movie to chance? No way.
There's probably astroturfers here on slashdot as well. See if you can spot which posts have been written by these lowlifes.
there opinion needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
A whole truckload.
I hope it is worth it.
Yep, ignore the marketing drivel. Wait and see what people you trust think of it and ignore the propaganda.
---
An unobtrusive ad is a non-functional ad. It is a non-sustainable business model.
I know, I know, everything on the Internet is a commodity now. But tell me - what happens when there is no one left to produce that commodity?
A news story anywhere in the world has somebody local who can report on it on the internet. A local blogger in other words. Like a newspaper stringer.
And guess what? People like to talk about their lives and will blog about it to the point of ridiculousness. For free. Many are crap but a fraction of those billions of people have something interesting to say. And that fraction is enough to keep most people entertained and informed for a lifetime. And aggregation and discussion sites find those people.
At some point the Slashdot crowd is going to have to face up to the fact that content producers need to get paid if they are going to continue producing.
At some point people like you are going to have to face up to the fact that what they produce is of little value, largely rehashed press releases and grossly overpaid, bad acting, that is being replaced by user generated content and other entertainment and information options.
it's easy to criticize the MPAA, but who is going to pay the millions of dollars to shoot a major movie if everyone simply copies content without paying for it?
Nobody I hope. Big budget movies and the corruption and huge numbers of middlemen and hangers on associated with them need to die. What hopefully will happen is that they become efficient, with no bloat, no million dollar SFX and with actual good acting on a reasonable salary, scripts with actual originality instead and with minimal marketing BS and reasonable prices. I'm looking forward to that day.
I have millions of web pages on wikipedia alone to entertain and inform me. Enough to last many lifetimes. Huge numbers of people with something interesting to say on every topic under the sun. All for free. The means of contacting like minded individuals on the most obscure topics. In seconds. Small entertainers all over the world making short films and browser games. Good fun. First class on-line university and other education courses all over the world. Right up to advanced graduate level. Travelogues and pictorials by travelers to every obscure place on earth. Fascinating. The list just goes on and on. It's not piracy that's killing big budget entertainment and news. It's cheaper competition. Much, much cheaper.
And that's ignoring all the real life options. Like hanging out with friends, walking the dog or joining a local sports club.
Bye bye.
---
I'm not worried about the use of DRM. I'm worried about the abuse.
Those books are not yours. That's the fundamental thing. THAT PROPERTY IS NOT YOURS. If I am Joe author of a book, and Google scans it, I have every right to demand Google yank it back out. Convenience is not an excuse to violate civil rights.
You are engaging in circular reasoning. Ownership, by definition, is the right to control. Any ethical, not legal, argument based on "because they own it" is bogus.
The more interesting question is "Who owns it?". And given how ridiculous copyright and the copyright wars have become it's way past time for it to be fixed. I for one think it's insane that billions of people should be blocked, free speech should be blocked, and artificial scarcity should be enforced because a single individual is somehow "entitled" to an eternal revenue stream.
---
It's wrong that an intellectual property creator should not be rewarded for their work.
It's equally wrong that an IP creator should be rewarded too many times for the one piece of work, for exactly the same reasons.
Reform IP law and stop the M$/RIAA abuse.
Google isn't charging for access.
Only in the marketing industry's fevered imagination is advertising supported the same as free. Advertising has very real costs. Who do you think pays marketers salaries? You do via higher cost products. Not to mention the cost of attention and the cost of deceptive commercial propaganda.
---
"Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
Just make it small/low key and do more with it.
An unobtrusive ad is a non-functioning ad. It is a non-sustainable business model.
---
"Advertising supported" just means you're paying twice over, once in time to watch/avoid the ad and twice in the increased price of the product to pay for the ad.
For every successful OSS project, I'd say there are at least 10,000 pitiful ones, thanks to their management.
"For every successful closed source software project, I'd say there are at least 10,000 pitiful ones, thanks to their management."
Stop pretending failed internal projects that never see the light of day don't count. Open source is the same except visible. That's the whole point.
Whenever you see anybody replacing what should be the word "software" with the more selective words "open source software" or "closed source software" you can be sure you're dealing with somebody with an agenda, either a marketing parasite (the worst zealots of all) or a bigot who can't be bothered actually thinking.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
A patent is an implementation of an idea.
There is no objective definition of 'an idea'. PTO bureaucrats are just hand waving when they say two ideas are the same or different.
There's no objective definition of whether two colors are the same or different. "Ideas" are a far more fluid, ill-defined concept.
The PTO is dishonest when they claim they are objective; they keep claiming increasingly small and arbitrary differences between ideas means the idea is "new". Just bureaucrats and assorted other parasites empire building at the expense of the rest of society.
---
I own it therefore I get to decide what happens to it is a meaningless tautology. Ownership by definition is the right to control. The more interesting question is who owns it?
Capitalism means government stays out of the economy completely.
No, capitalism without government is warlordism, might makes right.
Government is about stopping all the negative ways that people can compete (e.g. protection rackets, deceptive advertising, monopoly market manipulation, dangerous products, externalities such as pollution, child/vulnerable exploitation, violent crime) while still allowing positive competition (e.g. better products, cheaper prices, honest advertising, no spamming).
That doesn't mean that business people are absolved of any ethical responsibility for not competing positively. Government is just a backstop to control the sociopaths.
Being a human institution democratic government (one person, one vote versus one dollar, one vote) makes mistakes all the time but it's the best we've got.
---
Anonymous company communication is unethical and can and should be highly illegal. Company legal structures require accountability.
Come back when you understand what "risk" means.
I know exactly what risk is. You on the other hand appear to be confusing marketing brand names, which are only vaguely related to risk, with risk. An open, free market is, statistically, almost always going to be better than a closed, single source supplier with on-paper guarantees that are weasled out of because that maximizes profit at expense of the already locked-in customer. Been there, done that. This problem is particularly bad for software because of it's ill-defined and amorphous nature.
---
Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion. Anonymous commercial speech should be illegal.
The single biggest problem with FOSS is that there is no one to share the risks with.
Nonsense. With a proprietary vendor you have one vendor to "share the risk with". With open source you have anybody who can program the relevant package "to share the risk with". It's called multiple-sourcing and is an accepted business and government practice.
The problem for FOSS is not risk, it's the marketing parasites selling the proprietary packages crowding out the mindshare, to the detriment of large numbers of people.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
Often times things are far more obvious once you've seen them in work than they were before hand.
A lot of patent proponents like to push that myth. The reality is that an expert in the field is perfectly capable of assessing whether something is obvious or not with more, not less, information at their disposal. An expert doesn't mystically lose their intelligence or experience when told about something.
---
The patent system. The whole edifice is based on handwaving.
I guess it will forever remain a mystery to them why their nation isn't home to prosperous software & music industries
No mystery at all. Just doing what the US did historically did in similar circumstances. Current US copyright fanatics complaining about third world piracy are just hypocrites. China is a sovereign country and can create+implement whatever "intellectual property" law they please.
In any case China gets copies that cost the US almost nothing to produce and the US gets a large volume of amazingly cheap consumer products that cost China a lot of man hours to produce. The US is getting the better end of the deal.
What a closed-minded view.
That's funny coming from a fanatic like you.
---
Like software, intellectual property law is a product of the mind, and can be anything we want it to be. Let's get it right.
Hardware encryption certainly has its advantages; but if you can't handle deploying software encryption now, I'm deeply skeptical of your ability to handle deploying hardware encryption.
Even more there's generally speaking no such thing as "hardware encryption", just software encryption running on different hardware platforms. There are some low level hardware encryption engines available but even those are typically dedicated one-chip computers.
In this case why on earth do I want my encryption software running on a very low end, inaccessible CPU in my hard drive with poor, probably buggy access and needlessly basic functionality instead of my high performance, flexible main CPU with full OS support and updates? The main CPU is usually waiting for the hard drive anyway.
"Hardware encryption", like a lot of "hardware x"'s such as "hardware RAID" and "hardware high level network cards", are typical of the creeping featureitis of developers not thinking clearly and not doing the numbers.
---
Don't be a programmer-bureaucrat; someone who substitutes marketing buzzwords and software bloat for verifiable improvements.
Copyright is good, and we need it.
Oh, wonderful. Propaganda without numerical evidence being asserted for the zillionth time. Your scientific evidence for this practically neanderthal spam is?
Perhaps the benefit of allowing billions of people to share outweighs the dubious benefit of allowing very small numbers of people to profit. In a society of billions it is a statistical certainty that millions will want to create for reasons other than what the copyright monopoly gives and that may be a net win.
I get heartily sick of people in all areas of intellectual creation claiming without scientific evidence that such-and-such as true. Intellectual output now affects society to the tune of trillions of dollars and yet nobody is willing to engage in a serious large scale effort to scientifically and formally analyze what are the virtually infinite number of forms that intellectual creation right allocation might take, nor optimizing them for society at large.
We already choose not to protect many forms of intellectual work (e.g. deciding where to site a business, house plans, building methods, jokes or selling a particular selection of products) and yet we arbitrarily decide that certain other forms of intellectual work must be controlled. It's time government stepped back and started assigning property rights based on scientific, numerical evidence, showing benefit from government interfering in a citizen's business and not allowing pressure groups representing a very small minority of the population to dominate.
---
You communist! Breathing shared air!
Grow up. Might as well say most families are socialist. Children do not contribute and yet they get all these free handouts where the parents will go to jail if they don't. Absolutely terrible.
Nobody has the right to tell anyone else what to do with the works they create
Faulty logic. Ownership, by definition, is the right to control something. Any ethical, not legal, argument saying "because they own it" is meaningless.
All he's suggesting is another, possibly appropriate, way to fine M$ by taking something of value (the monopoly a gift from society at large in the first place) away from them.
As an aside it is also not unreasonable to say that when patents and copyrights become de facto or de jure standards, just like trademarks and for much the same reasons, they should be lost. Monopolies (i.e. market failure) are unhealthy for exactly the same reason any centralized power is unhealthy and are an unfortunate byproduct of current unstable, winner-take-all intellectual property market structures (it's always going to be more efficient to create "IP" once and copy it n times than to create it m times and copy each n/m times) and we need to find ways of fixing that.
---
You communist! Breathing shared air!
You're right that micropayments have a bad rap but that's more an accident of history than anything else. None achieved critical mass and none were realistic in their pricing expectations. Only google or M$ could pull it off now. In fact, thinking about it, maybe M$ should consider setting up a high quality, open, trivial to use micropayment system as a way of starving google of advertising income oxygen. Maybe extend their XBox setup. People make micropayments in real life for information like newspapers all the time, it just needs be presented well and have realistic income expectations ie. As an upper limit the equivalent of a newspaper's worth of content being worth a buck or two. I think many people would be happy to have a few dollars deducted from their credit card each month to avoid the dross. The problem is of course that there's so much free, reasonable content out there (e.g. wikipedia, planetmath, gutenberg, pbs, ted, ocw) it's hard to compete without manipulating people.
You know an ad isn't all that horrible,
Yes it is. My time and attention are worth something. Over a lifetime it's worth a lot. Since virtually all ad's are completely useless to the viewer all they're doing is pissing millions of lives away on crap. Me, I'd pay if I could to avoid it but often parasitic mass marketers make that practically impossible. One reason why astroturfers are scum is that they don't give the "viewer" the option to avoid them.
at least it tells you something about how they wished the product to be.
It's propaganda. It's almost always nothing more than emotional manipulation trying to make the viewer make an irrational decision and is actually worse than nothing. The world would be a much better place if more people were rational, with less impulse purchases and more decisions where alternatives are considered.
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Throw in unrealistic expectations.
The unrealistic expectations of content creators you mean? The ones who think it's reasonable that millions should be paid to a movie star or for a few hours recording or for a few months writing a book or for content that has been done a zillion times before (e.g. most computer games)?
Quite apart from the high fliers, media creation is currently horrendously inefficient with huge numbers of hangers on, everything from marketing parasites to distribution middlemen to "producers" and assorted other bureaucrats. Not to mention large numbers of creators who are not very creative at all. Many of these are going to lose their jobs and will have to do something which is really wealth creation rather than pretending.
And that's a good thing. I see no reason why I should be subsidizing them. Fact is millions of people like to create for no money at all and making billions of copies once something has been created is trivial. It's supply and demand and the people who think they should be able to manipulate the market to get a cut are being dragged kicking and screaming into the realization that they're simply not needed and not wanted.
People are happy to pay a reasonable amount for worthwhile content and do it all the time. The only people who have to worry about non-viability are the hanger's on and the creators who have unreasonable income expectations.
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
The obviousness test relies upon prior art. If somebody does something, and nobody can show that any part of it has been done before, then surely it's not obvious?
There are an infinite number of reasons why things are not done. To say that something is not done implies that something is not obvious is just one more example of PTO bogus logic.
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The patent system. The whole edifice is based on handwaving.
Does the rule of inclusion elude you? Fraud is performed through lying, but lying does not necessarily imply fraud.
Does context elude you? This woman was attempting to deceive for personal gain. According to wikipedia, that's fraud in general.
A few people think that lying/fraud for personal gain is okay if they can get away with it. They're sociopaths and they're likely to get caught if they make a habit of it.
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Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
(detention, suspension, saturday school, etc)
Agreed that would seem the appropriate punishment but other posters have said she probably has a history and the police may be the only people allowed to touch her. In those circumstances maybe the school didn't have many options. Without more information hard to say.
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You communist! Breathing shared air!
Umm no it isnt "fraud is the crime or offense of deliberately deceiving another in order to damage them"
Wrong. At the time I write this wikipedia is saying "In the broadest sense, fraud is a deception made for personal gain ...".
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The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".