Wow, I tried to see every argument you made, but there can be no expectation that I read all of that.
Attention deficit disorder? I read it all, and while there are some points I disagree with (like the list of 15 traits at the beginning) the rest was a fairly sound deconstruction of someone's argument.
As far as your not believing in copyright law, I coincidentally wrote a reply in another discussion before this one came up. A lot of that is still valid to this discussion. However, regardless of whether you believe in copyright or not, it shouldn't affect your judgment of the original post. We currently *do* have a thing called copyright. If you'd rather it didn't exist, I suggest you appeal to your elected officials to have it removed from the books.
Very few people will want the hassle of going back and forth to get the legitimate copy.
So if they don't go back, they simply get charged for their CD copy. Isn't the hassle of going to the store (or mailing it in, whatever) worth the great benefit you get from being able to freely sample whatever music interests you? Do people not visit libraries because of the hassle of having to lug books around?
All this will do is fail, and then the record companies will point at it and say "see, we told you sharing isn't advertising" and hold it up as proof that sharing is bad.
Well, if you can't make the concept of sharing work in a highly controlled manner where you can virtually eliminate all other factors, how can you possibly argue that sharing is good when there are absolutely no controls at all? Think about it.
Considering a reply to this post made me think of an interesting idea. Open up a music store, stocked full of great music. Allow people to come in and grab a CD with high quality MP3 files of anything they want. But here's the twist: run their credit card through for the purchase price, have them sign it, but keep it on file without putting the charge through (eg: a deposit). Also, make them sign a legally binding contract that:
(1) they can't share the music or they'll face huge financial penalties; (2) if they don't like the music, they have to send the CD back within 14 days; and (3) if they do like the music, come back to the store and exchange the CD for the full retail album.
Basically, if they send the CD back they don't get charged. But if they keep the CD or come in and exchange it for the real thing, their credit card purchase gets put through.
It'd be interesting if you could somehow watermark the MP3 so that it wouldn't alter the music quality but would insert a signature with that person's identifier. That way, if it is shared, they get faced with a huge lawsuit and massive fine for breach of the contract they signed.
Would this work? You'd need the participation of the copyright holders, naturally. But it would address the whole "sharing is advertising" thing.
Uhm, because they support trademarks, copyrights, patents amd suc, but disagree with the WIPO about them all falling under a common category that is not found in common law or the US constitution.
If someone's going to talk about abolishing intellectual property and they make no distinction, one has to assume that they don't know what is considered intellectual property in a legal sense. A trademark is something which is property. An individual or company can *own* it, and have exclusive use of it. And since it's not a physical good, it's *intellectual* property. And why do you refer to common law and the US constitution? Do you think those should be the only sources of legitimate laws governing commercial behavior? In that case, I hope you don't mind abusive monopolies, stock market scams, child labor, and many other things you'll not find in either of those sources.
When you boil it down, trademark is common sense. Let's say you're into woodworking and you build a unique line of furniture and call it "The Artifakt Collection" (actually, that sounds pretty cool!). Trademark law says that I can't come along, create products, and scam consumers by passing them off as being "The Artifakt Collection". Or let's say you go to the movie theater and they're showing "Star Wars III". So you pay your $10 or whatever for a ticket, sit down, and the movie is nothing but two hours of the goatse guy pulling his ass open. So trademark protects ordinary people from getting scammed. Nobody can legally call their product "Star Wars" without permission.
Copyright law is also common sense. Let's say you write a book and go to the trouble of getting it printed up so that it has a nice leather binding, beautiful full-color glossy illustrations, and wonderfully laid out text. It's such a good book you think most families would want to get one for themselves and their children to read together on a rainy day. You get thousands of copies printed up and put into stores, and this costs you $20 a copy to do... so you'll need to charge maybe $24.95 if all you want to do is just to recoup your costs. Wal-Mart comes along, sees your book, and rushes out to their suppliers, gives them a copy, and tells them to duplicate it. Because of Wal-Mart's extensive buying power, they're able to have a duplicate book, right down to the quality of leather binding and glossy pages, for only $10 a copy. So Wal-Mart puts the book on sale for $14.95 right next to your book which sells at $24.95. Wal-Mart fucked you over and you go bankrupt, but hey... it's only copyright law and you shouldn't have a right to defend your work, right?
Or I could go into an example about you being a musician, spending a year writing and recording a song, and a competing band does a digital rip of the song and releases the exact same binary image as their own. Hey, it's only copyright... not part of the US constitution, so who cares.
Now if people think that patents and copyright are bad, why not just say "abolish patents and copyright"? Lumping it all under the moniker intellectual property is either ignorant or intellectually dishonest.
While we're at it, what does the law say about geographical indications?
Read up on it. A geographical indication is there to protect consumers from fraud. Let's say I go to Mexico, find a supplier of cheap orange juice, and market under a fancy label calling it "Pure Premium Florida Orange Juice". Now if Florida is a geographical indication, I can't do that without being sued six ways to Sunday. Also, Champagne refers to the type of sparkling wine which comes from one place, the Champagne region of France. That means I can't take cheap bottles of white wine which cost $5, have them carbonated, and scam consumers by marketing it as Champagne. I *could* still legally sell that same cheap carbonated wine as sparkling wine, even going so far as to come up with a really slick label and marketing blurb and charging $30 a bottle, but I just can't legally pass it off as being Champagne.
So what do you figure. Should geographical indications expire as patents currently do?
As humous is a Greek dip made from chick peas, here would be a good start: Humous Recipe. If you need to post it, make sure it's in a waterproof container - I'll have some if you do eventually find the option.
While I don't mind a little garbanzo treat every now and again, I'd probably die before I could figure out how to post it.
I'm just pulling this out of my ass, but anyway... should be reasonably accurate.
The cost of everything you mentioned is amortized. Optic cable costs $X/meter to lay, especially if roads need to be dug up, or if it needs to be laid across the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean for example. Charging the first guy the billions of dollars it really cost so that everyone else can have it for the cost of ongoing maintenance isn't going to work very well.:) So the install cost, maintenance costs, repair costs, upgrade costs, etc. are all factored into the cost of bandwidth.
This is exactly how it works for long distance phone calls. If the phone company only charged you ten cents per kilowatt hour of electricity your call used up, they would be losing money because lines go down, service to remote parts of the country is effectively subsidized by the high density areas, new lines to new communities are constantly being installed, etc.
So in the case of bandwidth, factor in all of these things and then figure out how much you have to charge to pay for it all, have a bit left over in reserve, pay for all the related personnel (accounting, human resources, marketing...), have some for R&D, and don't forget to make a profit. Then divide that total $X figure by the total bandwidth the lines can carry. That gives you a cost per megabit which you can then sell to ISPs.
Now the ISP knows that typical websites don't use a steady flow of traffic, so charging them by average sustained transfer likely won't make a whole lot of sense. It's easier to charge per GB of traffic. So the ISP takes their cost per megabit and figures out how much traffic they're able to serve up from that connection. A 1 Mbps connection will serve up 321 GB per month (thanks Google!), so the ISP adds up the cost of the connection with their other associated costs and arrives at a cost per GB, which you pay.
That's trademark, not intellectual property. You could certainly copy all of their code and use it yourself, of course. You just can't use their names without their permission.
Thank you for making the point. And just what laws would those organizations invoke should I create a project called "Apache's GNU OpenOffice GNOME: Debian SourceForge edition"? I don't think they'd be so willing to give up their Intellectual Property when it doesn't suit them.
If you're going to go to all that trouble, why kill them at all? Simply slice down the middle, remove koala from skin, and put koala into an airtight plastic baggy. Seal the bag (don't forget to poke holes for the nose, mouth, and a few other orifices) and release back into the wild.
Now you have a valuable koala pelt which you can stuff for children's toys or sew into a wonderful evening coat. Plus, you didn't have to kill any animals in the process so animal activists will be pleased as well. Everybody wins!
Interesting. Encyclopedia.com says koalas *are* native to Australia. As does this site which claims they've been on Australia for some 25 million years. Got any more reliable sources?
How can you determine what kind of machine a TCP/IP packet is sent from? Is it not possible to spoof this also? Also, allowing anything but www/dns traffic does nothing for a denial of service attack which targets a website... sort of like the ultimate slashdotting.
Reminds me of the Triumph the Insult Comic Dog lampooning all the Star Wars nerds. As a guy in an admittedly impressive Darth Vader costume talks to him, Triumph looks at his breathing apparatus and asks "Which one of these buttons phones your parents to come pick you up?"
I think that Klingon bride is actually a guy. Later that night, in some cheap motel room, a groom will utter the ritual death cry as a part of him falls over dead, never again to arise.
'Suggest that she/he limit total "screen" time to an hour or, at most, two hours per day. If the child reacts severely, you might need to consult a mental health or pediatric professional.'
If the child reacts severely to a suggestion, perhaps it's an indication that you're a lousy parent with no control over your children. Sadly, the TV/PS2/XBOX-is-the-babysitter syndrome appears to be all too common these days.
Go go, George Bush: "President Bush has been pushing Congress to renew all of the Patriot Act before it expires next year, arguing that it is one of law enforcement's best tools in preventing another catastrophic terrorist attack."
Maybe I haven't been following too closely, but wasn't all the information already there before 9/11? Come to think of it, law enforcement's best tool to prevent crime is to lock everybody in their homes... oh, wait... where's the dele
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, I tried to see every argument you made, but there can be no expectation that I read all of that.
Attention deficit disorder? I read it all, and while there are some points I disagree with (like the list of 15 traits at the beginning) the rest was a fairly sound deconstruction of someone's argument.
As far as your not believing in copyright law, I coincidentally wrote a reply in another discussion before this one came up. A lot of that is still valid to this discussion. However, regardless of whether you believe in copyright or not, it shouldn't affect your judgment of the original post. We currently *do* have a thing called copyright. If you'd rather it didn't exist, I suggest you appeal to your elected officials to have it removed from the books.
Very few people will want the hassle of going back and forth to get the legitimate copy.
So if they don't go back, they simply get charged for their CD copy. Isn't the hassle of going to the store (or mailing it in, whatever) worth the great benefit you get from being able to freely sample whatever music interests you? Do people not visit libraries because of the hassle of having to lug books around?
All this will do is fail, and then the record companies will point at it and say "see, we told you sharing isn't advertising" and hold it up as proof that sharing is bad.
Well, if you can't make the concept of sharing work in a highly controlled manner where you can virtually eliminate all other factors, how can you possibly argue that sharing is good when there are absolutely no controls at all? Think about it.
Considering a reply to this post made me think of an interesting idea. Open up a music store, stocked full of great music. Allow people to come in and grab a CD with high quality MP3 files of anything they want. But here's the twist: run their credit card through for the purchase price, have them sign it, but keep it on file without putting the charge through (eg: a deposit). Also, make them sign a legally binding contract that:
(1) they can't share the music or they'll face huge financial penalties;
(2) if they don't like the music, they have to send the CD back within 14 days; and
(3) if they do like the music, come back to the store and exchange the CD for the full retail album.
Basically, if they send the CD back they don't get charged. But if they keep the CD or come in and exchange it for the real thing, their credit card purchase gets put through.
It'd be interesting if you could somehow watermark the MP3 so that it wouldn't alter the music quality but would insert a signature with that person's identifier. That way, if it is shared, they get faced with a huge lawsuit and massive fine for breach of the contract they signed.
Would this work? You'd need the participation of the copyright holders, naturally. But it would address the whole "sharing is advertising" thing.
Uhm, because they support trademarks, copyrights, patents amd suc, but disagree with the WIPO about them all falling under a common category that is not found in common law or the US constitution.
If someone's going to talk about abolishing intellectual property and they make no distinction, one has to assume that they don't know what is considered intellectual property in a legal sense. A trademark is something which is property. An individual or company can *own* it, and have exclusive use of it. And since it's not a physical good, it's *intellectual* property. And why do you refer to common law and the US constitution? Do you think those should be the only sources of legitimate laws governing commercial behavior? In that case, I hope you don't mind abusive monopolies, stock market scams, child labor, and many other things you'll not find in either of those sources.
When you boil it down, trademark is common sense. Let's say you're into woodworking and you build a unique line of furniture and call it "The Artifakt Collection" (actually, that sounds pretty cool!). Trademark law says that I can't come along, create products, and scam consumers by passing them off as being "The Artifakt Collection". Or let's say you go to the movie theater and they're showing "Star Wars III". So you pay your $10 or whatever for a ticket, sit down, and the movie is nothing but two hours of the goatse guy pulling his ass open. So trademark protects ordinary people from getting scammed. Nobody can legally call their product "Star Wars" without permission.
Copyright law is also common sense. Let's say you write a book and go to the trouble of getting it printed up so that it has a nice leather binding, beautiful full-color glossy illustrations, and wonderfully laid out text. It's such a good book you think most families would want to get one for themselves and their children to read together on a rainy day. You get thousands of copies printed up and put into stores, and this costs you $20 a copy to do... so you'll need to charge maybe $24.95 if all you want to do is just to recoup your costs. Wal-Mart comes along, sees your book, and rushes out to their suppliers, gives them a copy, and tells them to duplicate it. Because of Wal-Mart's extensive buying power, they're able to have a duplicate book, right down to the quality of leather binding and glossy pages, for only $10 a copy. So Wal-Mart puts the book on sale for $14.95 right next to your book which sells at $24.95. Wal-Mart fucked you over and you go bankrupt, but hey... it's only copyright law and you shouldn't have a right to defend your work, right?
Or I could go into an example about you being a musician, spending a year writing and recording a song, and a competing band does a digital rip of the song and releases the exact same binary image as their own. Hey, it's only copyright... not part of the US constitution, so who cares.
Now if people think that patents and copyright are bad, why not just say "abolish patents and copyright"? Lumping it all under the moniker intellectual property is either ignorant or intellectually dishonest.
While we're at it, what does the law say about geographical indications?
Read up on it. A geographical indication is there to protect consumers from fraud. Let's say I go to Mexico, find a supplier of cheap orange juice, and market under a fancy label calling it "Pure Premium Florida Orange Juice". Now if Florida is a geographical indication, I can't do that without being sued six ways to Sunday. Also, Champagne refers to the type of sparkling wine which comes from one place, the Champagne region of France. That means I can't take cheap bottles of white wine which cost $5, have them carbonated, and scam consumers by marketing it as Champagne. I *could* still legally sell that same cheap carbonated wine as sparkling wine, even going so far as to come up with a really slick label and marketing blurb and charging $30 a bottle, but I just can't legally pass it off as being Champagne.
So what do you figure. Should geographical indications expire as patents currently do?
As humous is a Greek dip made from chick peas, here would be a good start: Humous Recipe. If you need to post it, make sure it's in a waterproof container - I'll have some if you do eventually find the option.
While I don't mind a little garbanzo treat every now and again, I'd probably die before I could figure out how to post it.
High salary?! I thought Al Qaida was a non-profit organisation and its terrorist were unpaid volunteers.
They may not get paid much, but I hear the work's a real blast.
You forgot to add... "Won't somebody please think of the children?!?" Then you might have got the expected +5 Funny mod.
I'm just pulling this out of my ass, but anyway... should be reasonably accurate.
:) So the install cost, maintenance costs, repair costs, upgrade costs, etc. are all factored into the cost of bandwidth.
The cost of everything you mentioned is amortized. Optic cable costs $X/meter to lay, especially if roads need to be dug up, or if it needs to be laid across the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean for example. Charging the first guy the billions of dollars it really cost so that everyone else can have it for the cost of ongoing maintenance isn't going to work very well.
This is exactly how it works for long distance phone calls. If the phone company only charged you ten cents per kilowatt hour of electricity your call used up, they would be losing money because lines go down, service to remote parts of the country is effectively subsidized by the high density areas, new lines to new communities are constantly being installed, etc.
So in the case of bandwidth, factor in all of these things and then figure out how much you have to charge to pay for it all, have a bit left over in reserve, pay for all the related personnel (accounting, human resources, marketing...), have some for R&D, and don't forget to make a profit. Then divide that total $X figure by the total bandwidth the lines can carry. That gives you a cost per megabit which you can then sell to ISPs.
Now the ISP knows that typical websites don't use a steady flow of traffic, so charging them by average sustained transfer likely won't make a whole lot of sense. It's easier to charge per GB of traffic. So the ISP takes their cost per megabit and figures out how much traffic they're able to serve up from that connection. A 1 Mbps connection will serve up 321 GB per month (thanks Google!), so the ISP adds up the cost of the connection with their other associated costs and arrives at a cost per GB, which you pay.
Perhaps you should read what the World Intellectual Property Organization has to say about it. They list the following as intellectual property:
- patents
- trademarks
- industrial designs
- geographical indications
- copyright
So if an organization is in favor of abolishing intellectual property, why would they take offence if I used their trademark?Thank you for making the point. And just what laws would those organizations invoke should I create a project called "Apache's GNU OpenOffice GNOME: Debian SourceForge edition"? I don't think they'd be so willing to give up their Intellectual Property when it doesn't suit them.
If you're going to go to all that trouble, why kill them at all? Simply slice down the middle, remove koala from skin, and put koala into an airtight plastic baggy. Seal the bag (don't forget to poke holes for the nose, mouth, and a few other orifices) and release back into the wild.
Now you have a valuable koala pelt which you can stuff for children's toys or sew into a wonderful evening coat. Plus, you didn't have to kill any animals in the process so animal activists will be pleased as well. Everybody wins!
You can ignore my other post (though who knows what the mods will do). I incorrectly assumed "Kangaroo Island" is the nickname for Australia. My bad.
Interesting. Encyclopedia.com says koalas *are* native to Australia. As does this site which claims they've been on Australia for some 25 million years. Got any more reliable sources?
Located here, 6 page PDF file
"Developers! Developers! Develo..."
***cRuNcH***
REPTAR, it's RATPER spelled backwards!
(with apologies to TOBOR)
How can you determine what kind of machine a TCP/IP packet is sent from? Is it not possible to spoof this also? Also, allowing anything but www/dns traffic does nothing for a denial of service attack which targets a website... sort of like the ultimate slashdotting.
Yeah, but you could probably still use it if you posted from the planet Genesis.
Reminds me of the Triumph the Insult Comic Dog lampooning all the Star Wars nerds. As a guy in an admittedly impressive Darth Vader costume talks to him, Triumph looks at his breathing apparatus and asks "Which one of these buttons phones your parents to come pick you up?"
Hilarious video is here.
And risk the giant bright orb damaging my pasty white skin and burning its imprint onto my retina? Away with you, heathen!
I think that Klingon bride is actually a guy. Later that night, in some cheap motel room, a groom will utter the ritual death cry as a part of him falls over dead, never again to arise.
From the article:
'Suggest that she/he limit total "screen" time to an hour or, at most, two hours per day. If the child reacts severely, you might need to consult a mental health or pediatric professional.'
If the child reacts severely to a suggestion, perhaps it's an indication that you're a lousy parent with no control over your children. Sadly, the TV/PS2/XBOX-is-the-babysitter syndrome appears to be all too common these days.
Obviously, the irony of my statement escaped you.
Go go, George Bush: "President Bush has been pushing Congress to renew all of the Patriot Act before it expires next year, arguing that it is one of law enforcement's best tools in preventing another catastrophic terrorist attack."
Maybe I haven't been following too closely, but wasn't all the information already there before 9/11? Come to think of it, law enforcement's best tool to prevent crime is to lock everybody in their homes... oh, wait... where's the dele
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