Government is one person, one vote. Companies are one dollar, one vote. Both have their place.
Majority parties steamroller minority parties for their own advantage all the time. Majority shareholders steamroller minority shareholders for their own advantage all the time.
You may think tyranny of the majority sucks but it is better than the only alternative, tyranny of a minority.
---
"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives." --Leo Tolstoy
It's a waste of bandwidth, but it's much more reliable.
With before and after checksumming there is no reason why this should be more reliable. This is just another example of M$'s lack of professionalism, that's all. Wasting enormous amounts of user bandwidth (and time!) because they can't be bothered doing it right.
---
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.
bingo, it doesn't make sense to consider the cost of ownership without also considering the benefit of ownership.
True. Pity vendors are typically quite dishonest in detailing what benefit their software provides. The amorphous nature of software means that vendors can and do lie like bandits.
Evaluate all aspects of any large software purchase, including intangibles and the long term, completely ignore vendor propaganda, and make your own decision.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
No, the example in the GP explicitly considers it and provides an example where the licensing costs wouldn't outweigh the OSS costs.
Yes, with a fabricated example that is nowhere near what whole of government would be considering. Typical example of vendor dishonesty.
I know you want the per seat licensing always to end the debate in favour of OSS, but life isn't that simple.
With a large organization and with all else being equal then yes it is that simple. Not hard to understand: fixed costs are always going to be cheaper than proportional costs once an organization gets large enough. And governments are huge.
Wishing doesn't make it true.
Doesn't make it untrue either.
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Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
So while OSS can be a cheaper solution, and can be a better solution, there is no guarantee it is. All the costs have to be evaluated and that includes things like "Does it do everything we need?" and "Is it easy for non-technical users to make use of?"
You completely ignore a critical factor: per seat licensing. Open source development/adaption costs are largely fixed and can be amortized over the organization.
Commercial software is almost always per-seat and/or annual licensed, and that includes the deceptive games vendors like to play with "site licensing". That AUD$500M cost will include a very large component of per seat licensing. When an organization gets beyond a certain size, and governments are huge, fixed costs are always going to be cheaper than proportional costs.
And that's not even including the intangible benefits of open source such as the ability to adapt to needs, to install as/when needed, no DRM fragility etc.
Vendors are extremely dishonest when it comes to software costs. Do your homework, ignore the extremely biased costs analysis vendors provide and make your own judgement for your own organization. Also keep in mind you can cooperate with other organizations to reduce per-seat costs even more.
There is no charge for support of issues with WGA.
Oh, so they're going to pay me for my time, attention and consequent damages?
Not to mention the fact that "support" (what a lie that is!) varies depending on what country you're in and the time of day/week/phase of the moon. Bunch of lowlifes.
It was evil because censorship is inherently immoral.
Americans have a thing about censorship but really, all countries censor, it's only a matter of degree. Whether it's military secrets, privacy concerns, protecting children from pornography, DRM, commercial-in-confidence or religious fundamentalism all organizations including government censor speech. To call it inherently immoral to censor is silly.
In any case fixating on speech, while somewhat important, is secondary to focusing on action. Actions speak louder than words.
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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.
... which allows considerable ads... Watch Chuck....
No point, the net value to the viewer is probably close to zero.
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"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.
You jest, but having a self-burying harpoon with cable and winch attached might actually be a useful option for a future mission, particularly if the harpoon has sensors.
---
Windows and closed source software. The US intelligence agencies back door to every network connected country and business on earth.
Yes, and someone who can't speak normally is stupid...
It has nothing to do with people with disabilities. Those are special cases and require special measures. Just like Hawking has his speech box. He would not be a competent physicist without some means of communication.
Sorry dude, but with that once sentence you just proven yourself to be very short-sighted and lost all your credibility.
It's called adhering to standards. If a programmer can't easily cope with standards as simple as basic indentation rules they're going to have no hope of adhering to more subtle coding standards like variable naming, modularisation and calling conventions.
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"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.
The variables are indented 8 spaces and the expressions indented 4 spaces. The expressions are too long to fit on the right of the "=" but they are very similar and lining them up makes that similarity clear, even though it breaks naive indentation rules.
A nice idea however nobody is using them, tab characters are not needed and they don't give enough control. I often break naive tab stop rules to allow better positioning of code or comments on the screen.
People are different and different people need different tab sizes to make the code optimally readable for them.
Any programmer who can't easily cope with any indention between 1 and 8, in other words whatever the the project coding standard is, is not competent.
Also, I've never had to search for a tab character, why are you searching for whitespace?
It's frequently used to search for the start or end of a word eg. " getBlah", avoiding "forgetBlah", or to search for the word at a start of a line with a regular expression e.g. "^ *the".
If math or if constructs are so complex they become unreadable, they probably should be split up in multiple statements. That's much better for understanding what happens that trying to mess with the layout of that single statement.
No, it's frequently much easier to read in a single statement. e.g. 2D matrix algebra, such as in graphics, can be formatted in a 2D grid that's much easier to visualize than something with intermediate temporary variable names that are immediately discarded. Less error prone too. Another example is 2D tabular data to initialize an array of records.
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Every new patent is a new law; another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the wider community.
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?
in fact, i noticed cameron ripped her off with the "every plant is a node in a giant neural network" idea in avatar.
Dozens, probably hundreds of stories have used this idea before and after Leguin. A lot of people don't realize just how many SF stories have been written. e.g. Amazing Stories magazine. There's not much new under the sun.
---
The patent system. The whole edifice is based on handwaving.
Pretending the choice is only one or the other is ridiculous.
True, but assuming copyright/patents/copyrights as currently implemented is the only legal possibility is also ridiculous. Just like any other intellectual creation the law, and DRM, are a product of the mind and can be anything we want it to be. I just wish people were debating it much more deeply than is currently the case. Just as a start there should be large scale scientific studies looking at the social and individual value or otherwise of every aspect of "intellectual property" law and DRM. They're worth trillions and yet so-called experts basically just handwave about what we should and should not be doing.
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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?
you want the best solution, or the open-source solution.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
H.264 just does beat it in several ways.
Not by much and not when you include the license. The license is an important technical characteristic of any piece of software, particularly when you want to make billions of copies of it.
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WGA. Guilty until proven innocent. For millions. Again and again.
It should be noted that at least half of the arguments you make are exactly identical to arguments I always make, save that they're arguments for using tabs instead of spaces.
Please explain.
The one that annoys me the most is how using spaces utterly messes up cursor movement.
Up/down/left/right arrow keys work just fine. With tab characters it's anybody's guess where the cursor will end up. Tab/backtab keys work just fine.
Ugh. Fixing the problem should be easy, but it's frequently a pain, as a quick find/replace macro to restore sanity to the file
Tab characters are not sane, they're a primitive hack. They don't handle indentation correctly. They don't handle formatting correctly. They don't handle any damn thing correctly.
all I know is whenever I find extraordinarily sloppy indenting, sure enough, it's the product of one of those sloppy space-indenters.
Not my experience. Tab character use is a mess, frequently replacing tabs with spaces and vice versa. Depending on the editor often with no visual indication about which is being used. And spaces between tab characters as a bonus. Thus making the "editor adjust indentation to suit me" silliness even more irritating. Tab characters don't work properly inside comments, including commented code, don't work well when aligning multiple line statements and tabular code and don't work well when you're doing global variable/code name changes. If a programmer can't easily work with whatever the coding standard indentation is, from 1 to 8 spaces, then they should go back to school. They're even worse than the programmers who know only one language. You're right that some programmers aren't careful about maintaining the correct indentation however programmers who use tab characters are even worse because they have another entire group of mistakes they can and do make.
Replacing all those spaces with tabs, making the code much easier to maintain, is one of the things I always do before recommitting the code.
Tab characters very definitely do not make code easier to maintain, if for no other reason they make ambiguous the physical layout and character representation of the code. Spaces are unambiguous.
No they shouldn't. Tab characters are nothing but an ancient and very primitive text compression scheme. They add zero value.
Tab characters have no defined meaning, are interpreted differently everywhere, usually can't be visually differentiated, break code WYSIWYG, mess up cursor movement, often mess up code alignment, sometimes mess up diff's, sometimes mess up file seeks, are the only ASCII character that requires a complex algorithm to display, interact badly with Unicode and are just a waste of time.
If you want your code pretty printed with a certain indentation then run it through a pretty printer. Trying to get tabs to do this for you is a hack that should've died years ago.
The first thing I usually do with any body of code I've been given to maintain is to remove all tabs and trailing spaces and if necessary run it through a pretty printer. I also configure my editor to not to insert tab characters and configure the tab key to indent as appropriate.
Please, just stop using tab characters. They make code harder to maintain and are a pain.
Actually thinking about it I can't see any reason why software algorithms should not be patentable while hardware algorithms
You're not thinking about it. Hardware and software are very different beasts. The fact that you automatically assume that they are the same and also assume that software patents will automatically lead to an advance in the state of the art is why you're not thinking.
You need to justify why the patent office should interfere in the citizen's business. It is not at all clear that blocking ~6,800,000,000 people from using an idea, particularly for software which is easily created and duplicated, so that one (1) person can have additional profit is a good idea and no amount of handwaving is going to change that simple fact.
Patents are a major burden on society. The onus is on you to show that they should be extended to new areas of technology, particularly since by historical accident there are already large areas of intellectual endeavour (e.g. book plots, housing plans, cooking recipes, shipping routes or business development) which are not interfered with by patents and copyright and get along just fine. Perhaps software should be treated like cooking recipes, not hardware trinkets. Perhaps a lot of hardware and drugs (hugely inefficient industry) should be as well.
Incidentally, the reason for the name calling is simple. Interference by the PTO in my daily livelihood when all I'm doing is minding my own business is scummy and I respond to such scum in kind.
And in the 21st century there's quite a lot of programmers who are so incompetent that they think that a command line is scary. It's just another programming/scripting language, and a useful one at that.
There's another reason: if copyrights ended on the death of an author, authors might somehow end up having lower lifespans than average.
Please stop repeating this canard. If copyrights expired on an authors death then the work enters the public domain. That means anybody can copy it and it has little financial value due to competition. What's the incentive to kill again?
Besides inheritance and business competition can both create incentives to kill but normal law handles that just fine. There is no reason why copyright should be treated any differently.
---
"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives." --Leo Tolstoy
Also, it reduces the incentive for movie producers to kill you so they can use your work for free.;)
This nonsense keeps getting repeated. If you kill somebody it's out of copyright and anybody can copy it - while it has cultural value it then has very low monetary value. No financial incentive.
Not to mention there's already financial incentives to kill business partner/competitors or for an inheritance. Why should copyright be treated differently?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes!
Government is one person, one vote. Companies are one dollar, one vote. Both have their place.
Majority parties steamroller minority parties for their own advantage all the time. Majority shareholders steamroller minority shareholders for their own advantage all the time.
You may think tyranny of the majority sucks but it is better than the only alternative, tyranny of a minority.
---
"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives." --Leo Tolstoy
It's a waste of bandwidth, but it's much more reliable.
With before and after checksumming there is no reason why this should be more reliable. This is just another example of M$'s lack of professionalism, that's all. Wasting enormous amounts of user bandwidth (and time!) because they can't be bothered doing it right.
---
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.
bingo, it doesn't make sense to consider the cost of ownership without also considering the benefit of ownership.
True. Pity vendors are typically quite dishonest in detailing what benefit their software provides. The amorphous nature of software means that vendors can and do lie like bandits.
Evaluate all aspects of any large software purchase, including intangibles and the long term, completely ignore vendor propaganda, and make your own decision.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
No, the example in the GP explicitly considers it and provides an example where the licensing costs wouldn't outweigh the OSS costs.
Yes, with a fabricated example that is nowhere near what whole of government would be considering. Typical example of vendor dishonesty.
I know you want the per seat licensing always to end the debate in favour of OSS, but life isn't that simple.
With a large organization and with all else being equal then yes it is that simple. Not hard to understand: fixed costs are always going to be cheaper than proportional costs once an organization gets large enough. And governments are huge.
Wishing doesn't make it true.
Doesn't make it untrue either.
---
Open source software is everything that closed source software is. Plus the source is available.
So while OSS can be a cheaper solution, and can be a better solution, there is no guarantee it is. All the costs have to be evaluated and that includes things like "Does it do everything we need?" and "Is it easy for non-technical users to make use of?"
You completely ignore a critical factor: per seat licensing. Open source development/adaption costs are largely fixed and can be amortized over the organization.
Commercial software is almost always per-seat and/or annual licensed, and that includes the deceptive games vendors like to play with "site licensing". That AUD$500M cost will include a very large component of per seat licensing. When an organization gets beyond a certain size, and governments are huge, fixed costs are always going to be cheaper than proportional costs.
And that's not even including the intangible benefits of open source such as the ability to adapt to needs, to install as/when needed, no DRM fragility etc.
Vendors are extremely dishonest when it comes to software costs. Do your homework, ignore the extremely biased costs analysis vendors provide and make your own judgement for your own organization. Also keep in mind you can cooperate with other organizations to reduce per-seat costs even more.
---
Adopt an astroturfer. Make their life hell.
There is no charge for support of issues with WGA.
Oh, so they're going to pay me for my time, attention and consequent damages?
Not to mention the fact that "support" (what a lie that is!) varies depending on what country you're in and the time of day/week/phase of the moon. Bunch of lowlifes.
---
DRM is the #1 cause of software failure today.
It was evil because censorship is inherently immoral.
Americans have a thing about censorship but really, all countries censor, it's only a matter of degree. Whether it's military secrets, privacy concerns, protecting children from pornography, DRM, commercial-in-confidence or religious fundamentalism all organizations including government censor speech. To call it inherently immoral to censor is silly.
In any case fixating on speech, while somewhat important, is secondary to focusing on action. Actions speak louder than words.
---
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.
The economic return of interstellar colonization is zero.
The economic return of life is zero. Pretty pointless expending all that energy to be worm food.
You need to remember what economic value is - anything that people value and are willing to pay money for.
And a lot of people think that extending humanity's reach is pretty damn valuable. You might not agree but different people have different values.
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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.
No point, the net value to the viewer is probably close to zero.
---
"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.
Then you can winch the Rover out.
You jest, but having a self-burying harpoon with cable and winch attached might actually be a useful option for a future mission, particularly if the harpoon has sensors.
---
Windows and closed source software. The US intelligence agencies back door to every network connected country and business on earth.
Yes, and someone who can't speak normally is stupid...
It has nothing to do with people with disabilities. Those are special cases and require special measures. Just like Hawking has his speech box. He would not be a competent physicist without some means of communication.
Sorry dude, but with that once sentence you just proven yourself to be very short-sighted and lost all your credibility.
It's called adhering to standards. If a programmer can't easily cope with standards as simple as basic indentation rules they're going to have no hope of adhering to more subtle coding standards like variable naming, modularisation and calling conventions.
---
"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.
Slashdot is messing up my formatting.
The x,y,z line up vertically. Should there be a tab character after the --?
The variables are indented 8 spaces and the expressions indented 4 spaces. The expressions are too long to fit on the right of the "=" but they are very similar and lining them up makes that similarity clear, even though it breaks naive indentation rules.
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Monopolies = Industrial feudalism
What you and parent want is elastic tabstops.
A nice idea however nobody is using them, tab characters are not needed and they don't give enough control. I often break naive tab stop rules to allow better positioning of code or comments on the screen.
People are different and different people need different tab sizes to make the code optimally readable for them.
Any programmer who can't easily cope with any indention between 1 and 8, in other words whatever the the project coding standard is, is not competent.
Also, I've never had to search for a tab character, why are you searching for whitespace?
It's frequently used to search for the start or end of a word eg. " getBlah", avoiding "forgetBlah", or to search for the word at a start of a line with a regular expression e.g. "^ *the".
If math or if constructs are so complex they become unreadable, they probably should be split up in multiple statements. That's much better for understanding what happens that trying to mess with the layout of that single statement.
No, it's frequently much easier to read in a single statement. e.g. 2D matrix algebra, such as in graphics, can be formatted in a 2D grid that's much easier to visualize than something with intermediate temporary variable names that are immediately discarded. Less error prone too. Another example is 2D tabular data to initialize an array of records.
---
Every new patent is a new law; another opportunity for a lawyer to make money at the expense of the wider community.
Do you realize how quickly JK Rowling and other authors would be murdered if that were the case?
This persistent meme needs to die. There may be other reasons for allowing copyright after death but this isn't one of them.
---
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?
in fact, i noticed cameron ripped her off with the "every plant is a node in a giant neural network" idea in avatar.
Dozens, probably hundreds of stories have used this idea before and after Leguin. A lot of people don't realize just how many SF stories have been written. e.g. Amazing Stories magazine. There's not much new under the sun.
---
The patent system. The whole edifice is based on handwaving.
Pretending the choice is only one or the other is ridiculous.
True, but assuming copyright/patents/copyrights as currently implemented is the only legal possibility is also ridiculous. Just like any other intellectual creation the law, and DRM, are a product of the mind and can be anything we want it to be. I just wish people were debating it much more deeply than is currently the case. Just as a start there should be large scale scientific studies looking at the social and individual value or otherwise of every aspect of "intellectual property" law and DRM. They're worth trillions and yet so-called experts basically just handwave about what we should and should not be doing.
---
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?
you want the best solution, or the open-source solution.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
H.264 just does beat it in several ways.
Not by much and not when you include the license. The license is an important technical characteristic of any piece of software, particularly when you want to make billions of copies of it.
---
WGA. Guilty until proven innocent. For millions. Again and again.
It should be noted that at least half of the arguments you make are exactly identical to arguments I always make, save that they're arguments for using tabs instead of spaces.
Please explain.
The one that annoys me the most is how using spaces utterly messes up cursor movement.
Up/down/left/right arrow keys work just fine. With tab characters it's anybody's guess where the cursor will end up. Tab/backtab keys work just fine.
Ugh. Fixing the problem should be easy, but it's frequently a pain, as a quick find/replace macro to restore sanity to the file
Tab characters are not sane, they're a primitive hack. They don't handle indentation correctly. They don't handle formatting correctly. They don't handle any damn thing correctly.
all I know is whenever I find extraordinarily sloppy indenting, sure enough, it's the product of one of those sloppy space-indenters.
Not my experience. Tab character use is a mess, frequently replacing tabs with spaces and vice versa. Depending on the editor often with no visual indication about which is being used. And spaces between tab characters as a bonus. Thus making the "editor adjust indentation to suit me" silliness even more irritating. Tab characters don't work properly inside comments, including commented code, don't work well when aligning multiple line statements and tabular code and don't work well when you're doing global variable/code name changes. If a programmer can't easily work with whatever the coding standard indentation is, from 1 to 8 spaces, then they should go back to school. They're even worse than the programmers who know only one language. You're right that some programmers aren't careful about maintaining the correct indentation however programmers who use tab characters are even worse because they have another entire group of mistakes they can and do make.
Replacing all those spaces with tabs, making the code much easier to maintain, is one of the things I always do before recommitting the code.
Tab characters very definitely do not make code easier to maintain, if for no other reason they make ambiguous the physical layout and character representation of the code. Spaces are unambiguous.
---
DRM. You don't control it means you don't own it.
*should* prefer tabs,
No they shouldn't. Tab characters are nothing but an ancient and very primitive text compression scheme. They add zero value.
Tab characters have no defined meaning, are interpreted differently everywhere, usually can't be visually differentiated, break code WYSIWYG, mess up cursor movement, often mess up code alignment, sometimes mess up diff's, sometimes mess up file seeks, are the only ASCII character that requires a complex algorithm to display, interact badly with Unicode and are just a waste of time.
If you want your code pretty printed with a certain indentation then run it through a pretty printer. Trying to get tabs to do this for you is a hack that should've died years ago.
The first thing I usually do with any body of code I've been given to maintain is to remove all tabs and trailing spaces and if necessary run it through a pretty printer. I also configure my editor to not to insert tab characters and configure the tab key to indent as appropriate.
Please, just stop using tab characters. They make code harder to maintain and are a pain.
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Monopolies = Industrial feudalism
They have every right to protect their business
If they competed ethically you might have a point. They don't.
Grow up, people, please..o.k., pretty please?
Time for you to grow up I think. Ethics trumps profit. Sociopaths like to claim otherwise but they are wrong.
---
DRM is the #1 cause of software failure today.
Actually thinking about it I can't see any reason why software algorithms should not be patentable while hardware algorithms
You're not thinking about it. Hardware and software are very different beasts. The fact that you automatically assume that they are the same and also assume that software patents will automatically lead to an advance in the state of the art is why you're not thinking.
You need to justify why the patent office should interfere in the citizen's business. It is not at all clear that blocking ~6,800,000,000 people from using an idea, particularly for software which is easily created and duplicated, so that one (1) person can have additional profit is a good idea and no amount of handwaving is going to change that simple fact.
Patents are a major burden on society. The onus is on you to show that they should be extended to new areas of technology, particularly since by historical accident there are already large areas of intellectual endeavour (e.g. book plots, housing plans, cooking recipes, shipping routes or business development) which are not interfered with by patents and copyright and get along just fine. Perhaps software should be treated like cooking recipes, not hardware trinkets. Perhaps a lot of hardware and drugs (hugely inefficient industry) should be as well.
Incidentally, the reason for the name calling is simple. Interference by the PTO in my daily livelihood when all I'm doing is minding my own business is scummy and I respond to such scum in kind.
---
Has the Least Patentable Unit reached zero yet?
These days, very few people have the funds to exclusively subsidize a musician or artist.
Not true. It's just not the custom, that's all. Methinks a few rich people could stand giving back to the community in this way.
---
Has the Least Patentable Unit reached zero yet?
But this is the 21st century.
And in the 21st century there's quite a lot of programmers who are so incompetent that they think that a command line is scary. It's just another programming/scripting language, and a useful one at that.
GUI's have their place. But so do command lines.
---
DRM is the #1 cause of software failure today.
There's another reason: if copyrights ended on the death of an author, authors might somehow end up having lower lifespans than average.
Please stop repeating this canard. If copyrights expired on an authors death then the work enters the public domain. That means anybody can copy it and it has little financial value due to competition. What's the incentive to kill again?
Besides inheritance and business competition can both create incentives to kill but normal law handles that just fine. There is no reason why copyright should be treated any differently.
---
"I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives." --Leo Tolstoy
Also, it reduces the incentive for movie producers to kill you so they can use your work for free. ;)
This nonsense keeps getting repeated. If you kill somebody it's out of copyright and anybody can copy it - while it has cultural value it then has very low monetary value. No financial incentive.
Not to mention there's already financial incentives to kill business partner/competitors or for an inheritance. Why should copyright be treated differently?
---
Who owns the copy?