Now I could have said something snide like "Why would you expect the American forces to recognize a British tank when the British can't do it themselves," or something else equally disrespectful to mock your insinuations regarding the U.S. military, but I'm not going to. It's certainly not fair to them.
I also don't think either of us is particularly qualified to comment on the difficulty of avoiding friendly fire incidents. It's embarrassing, regrettable, and hopefully preventable in the future.
While he is an American citizen, just for informational purposes, I'd like to point out that he is originally from Australia, and that his attainment of citizenship was part of some plan for his global media assets.
who also owns Fox News and is rarely described as a liberal.
I don't know why his political affiliation matters. It's not as if those with a 'liberal' ideology have any less bias.
They DID try to oust Saddam, and the freakin US told them to rise up and do so (Bush Sr. that is, in 1981). When they asked for help, the US turned their backs on them, after we promised to help them - and they were brutally slaughtered.
We had no U.N. mandate to enter Iraq and aid its citizens in overthrowing its Government. Do you really think if Bush had wanted to, and did so, that the same countries objecting to this war, wouldn't have objected then?
The Gulf War was considerably less popular domestically than this war. The Bush administration didn't have the political credit to usurp the authority of a U.N. effort and extend it into a liberation campaign. The administration chose to do the easy thing instead.
get f*cking informed. I am so sick of people who yammer on without a f*cking fact in their head.
Me too. Take some of your own advice.
The grandparent is a real piece of work, but things aren't really as simple as you'd like them to be.
Without Government, people have the freedom to attempt anything. Rights are a matter of freedoms defined by law. Given an oppressive State X that outlaws a given expression Y, you do not have the "right" to express Y, but you may or may not have the illegal 'freedom' to express Y.
No, they're demanding convenience. Radio and TV have been broadcasting free content for decades, yet profits continued.
Based upon the sales of products they no longer forsee as profitable unless they mitigate the effects of others violating their rights. Radio is seen as essentially advertising for the products they sell...which they see as being continually injured by their previous lack of obfuscating their content.
The reason piracy is so rampant right now is because there is no reasonably priced convenient alternative.
The reason piracy is so rampant, is because it's easy. They're going to continually obfuscate and legislate to combat the ease with which people can copy their products. It's really that simple. People aren't going to pay anything, if they can obtain the exact same thing for nothing. They're simply making that "cost of nothing" greater.
If the industry offered their entire back catalog as high quality MP3s for purchase online, they would make tons of money
What evidence do you have that they would "make tons of money?" Simply that you believe so? How much is "reasonable" anyway?
But they won't, citing piracy as the reason, which is circular because piracy has exploded to fill the DEMAND for digital convenience, which they're not providing.
Piracy "exploded" because the means of copying and distributing media became easy and cheap for the average person. It didn't grow to fill the need of convenience, it grew because it was cheaper than purchasing the product. Certainly that it's easy makes it all the "cheaper" for the average person.
Right now the recording industry is a bunch of scribes trying to force the world to not use the printing press. They are trying to retard progress so they can keep charging for their outdated, bloated distribution model.
What they're doing, is moving away from the lax system of trust that users have exploited so that they can retain control of their property. They're not luddites, though the media companies have had a continually luddite-like view of legitimate copying, they're simply attempting to increase the cost of violating their rights. They're preventing their own irrelevance through action. They'll continue to do so. Stop being naive to fit your ideological beliefs.
They will never prevent ripping, unless they outlaw all recording devices.
You don't even know what equilibrium is. I suggest in the future you should have something valuable to say before saying it. Frankly, you haven't had anything valuable thus far.
I'm not suggesting the granularity of their enforcement is fair. It doesn't matter if it's fair. I'm saying they produce these goods, have a lot of money, and the 99.999% of the people openly trading recent releases of all media are obtaining their wrath.
File-sharing networks having legitimate uses doesn't make the actions that precipated these events legitimate. The recording industry _is_ handling their absence of obscurity (what you refer to as a "loss of control.") That's what these actions are; them dealing by using laws and cryptography.
People are generally getting the impression that they're entitled to any sort of media they want, without cost, simply because of the wealth of some of the employees in the chain, and none of the media organizations are going to stand for it.
You push them, they push back. They have a lot of money and influence, and for the most part, the people violating their rights have little.
They're more than willing to lose you, if they can simply make it hard enough for the average person that they won't bother distributing media.
People are demanding music in a convenient, free form. They're not just buying music and converting it for their own use, they're distributing it illegally.
This brings forth these DRM non-CD-compatible "CDs."
That's just the beginning. They've got a serious advantage in terms of limiting your freedoms. These people aren't empowered, they're just riding off the laxness of the previous system.
People cannot hope to overpower the RIAA with their whining. They can, though, stop their part in spreading the culture of trading other people's property in violation of their rights.
Do I think they will? No. I think the RIAA will inevitably be pushed forward until its anti-piracy efforts reach some equilibrium with the cost of implementing them.
But if you want someone to blame, then be prepared to blame the stupid people that openly traded and attempted to profit on the trade of others' works. They're not victims, they're foolish antagonizers.
If you think the recording industry is making itself irrelevant, I think you're pretty deluded. Enjoy those DRM "CDs."
I do the same thing for convenience, but that is going to be (as is evident by the recording industry's actions) increasingly more difficult and perhaps of lower quality because of their desire to reduce the ease of others violating their rights with regard to their property. Those people using Kazaa, Gnutella, IRC, Usenet, etc to illegally copy media are taking actions that jeopardize your ability to exercise your fair use rights.
Doesn't that presuppose that Slashdot has at least a majority population that is "geek?"
If so then perhaps "geek" is synonymous with "often technically inept whiny teenagers and college students with grandiose opinions of their own self worth."
You need to drop from your moral high-horse for a moment; it's not going to get you overly far.
Companies responsible for producing media have large quantities of money and political influence, and they can wield it to far greater effect than your whining about fairness. It's that simple.
That is simply true. They are the more powerful force.
What they see, is a constantly growing trend of the youth of the U.S. and Europe freely replacing, in large quantities, the purchasing of media with the downloading of it off of the Internet and burning it to CDs and DVDs. If you don't think that generations being indoctorinated into the "It's ok to just download every piece of media" school of thought is "pushing them against the wall," then you're not very adept at thinking in particularly long terms.
They're going to do everything in their power to prevent and impede the easy distribution of their property. If that means stomping all over you, as long as it's done in a manner that isn't too inconvenient to enough people to harm sales, they're going to do it. You can bitch about it, and whine about it all you want, but they have the money and you have squat. Now if you want to preserve your rights you can either stop poking them in the eye with your Kazaa stick, or you can just watch everyone's freedoms with others' media evaporate.
They think long-term and not your boring terms "The CEO has severals nice homes." These companies are gigantic, employ very large quantities of people, and as with any business, always attempt to maximize the bottom line for investors.
You don't have to like it, for them to push you around. It's really time to accept that and to plan strategies accordingly.
I gather that you don't believe in inalienable rights
I do not believe in rights that are not granted by a matter of law. I don't believe the universe, or some deity bestows upon humanity any rights whatsoever. Freedoms are bestowed and protected by people. It matters very little to me what anyone believes the Constitution's freedoms come from.
People who have swung so far to the right that they have disowned the ideals of our country?
I'm sorry, how am I "to the right?" I have no conservative political association at all. I realize that rights are purely agreements of a society to protect, by force, certain freedoms for its inhabitants on the premise that they create a more stable and prosperous society, and suddenly I'm a conservative? That's fairly new to me.
What you are is a troll or a kook. You have no basis for concluding any of my political views.
Detached, raving, non-sensical ideologues like yourself are not, generally, responsible for much of anything in my experience. Go tag your political nonsense on to someone else's post.
You can't just yank something away that so many people have latched onto and not expect an uprising.
I don't know, and that is why I asked. I find it rather unlikely there was considerable basis for concluding that Linkin' Park, for example, is particularly popular in the "geek" demographic. Where "geek" itself isn't exactly a well-defined group of people to begin with.
What do you think of bands like Phish and (formerly) the Grateful Dead that have made a great living off of concerts and the lifestyle that surrounds them?
What do I think of their music or their business practices? I don't care for their music, but I don't really have any opinion regarding their business practices.
It really doesn't matter what I think, or what I think would be ideal. What matters is what is, and what will happen as a result of actions the consumer takes in regard to the people and organizations that actually produce these goods.
What is going to happen, is I'm just not going to buy those albums. I never cared much for most popular music anyways, but considering the 2 places that I listen to recorded music is in front of my computer and in my car, this is a big problem.
There isn't much for "popular" music I intend to buy, either, but that doesn't mean that if I just go and take it along with millions of others, the record industry is just going to let me.
But you're making the assumption that it's the file traders that are keeping me from purchasing the music that I want to buy.
No, I'm stating that the recording industry isn't going to let it continue to be as easy for you to illegally copy their music. You want someone to blame for the corrosion of your previous fair use rights, it's the people that abused the current lax system so openly. They practically flaunted it in their faces, and several companies have tried to make money off of the business of allowing others to violate copyright law. What did you expect to happen?
Personally I don't care what keeps you from buying music.
But if my right to copy to make a backup or a duplicate which I, and only I, will use is violated, I will not have a part in that.
Which may eventually mean you won't be buying music. You can equally blame the people flaunting their power over the "broken RIAA/MPAA business models" for the increasing encroachment, every step of the way, that you currently blame those businesses for.
Only they will suffer for that.
That remains to be seen. We're still at the very beginning of all of this. Who knows the lengths they will go to obfuscate their content? Who knows what laws they will pass to further gain leverage over businesses and individuals? Who knows what influence they'll use to get the DoJ kicking in your door with a warrant?
You can't just yank something away that so many people have latched onto and not expect an uprising.
And that is precisely what those people abusing file sharing networks believe. They believe they have the power, and can just take away the media industry's control of their property. Well those industries have a lot of money involved and great political influence, and for the most part all those kids on Kazaa have are their large mouths and their ideologies.
If you're worried so much about your fair use rights, maybe you, too, should tell those file trading college kids to stop ruining everything for you. They're pushing around a dragon that doesn't care if you're the one taking it gold or not.
hey don't have any inalienable rights to control what you do with recordings, it is given by law.
You don't have any inalienable rights either. All rights are provided as a matter of law. It matters rather little what Locke and those that shared his views believed to be their source.
Calling it "stealing" is subverting the language to fit your viewpoint, it implies there is more in common with downloading songs and shoplifting other than both being illegal. It is copyright infringement, nothing more.
I suggest you grow up. The person distributing and the person receiving copies of media without the permission of its owner are taking away their equally law-given right of control, and through which, compensation for their efforts.
It is illegal, but it doesn't always have to be, nor was it always so. For example, there is new economic theory that proposes copyright isn't necessary and sometimes harmful to artists and innovators. If this was accepted as common knowledge, copyright would eventually cease to exist. I'm not saying this is going to happen, but pointing out that copyright isn't some inalienable right.
And civilization could collapse and I could take your food and beat you to death with a stick. There goes your inalienable rights to life and property.
Your ideology is irrelevant, and I suggest you come back to Earth with the rest of us. It is illegal. Those people are benefiting without compensating the owners. The people with a vested interest in maintaining the right to control their intellectual property have large sums of money to use, and lose, and will take those steps that are economically viable to fight the illegal distribution of their property. You don't have to like it, but they're going to do whatever it takes. If they need to obfuscate their property, poison P2P networks, sue companies into oblivion, or pass draconian laws to push back the tide, they will. They're being pushed against the wall by the open illegal distribution of their property. They wouldn't need to waste their money on Congressmen and cryptography if there weren't petabytes of their work being downloaded without a second thought by the very markets that have sustained them. They're _going_ to make it as _expensive_ as possible for the average person to download their products freely because people _are_ making it more expensive for them not to. They don't care about where you place their rights in your fantasy food chain.
How many people have to go untaught or uncultured before it is considered harmful?
1. Reduce the ease with which one can copy the contents.
2. Force those that do, to do an analog copy.
3. Get people to accept DRM WMA for use with their computers.
It's not as if this one step is the only thing they're doing and planning on doing to reduce piracy. This just increases the barrier to entry. Most people have really shitty soundcards which will introduce hissing and ticking and all manner of other artifacts into the music. This a different loss of quality than a decently encoded mp3 provides.
Say, linkin park (I'm making an extrapolation. If you hate it, sorry.)
Apology accepted.
Just out of curiosity, what data are you extrapolating a "geek" like of Linkin' Park from?
Either way, I don't find it particularly dangerous for record labels to attempt to be compensated for their products. I think it's fairly natural for them to use increasingly more extreme measures of reducing the brazenly open distribution of their content.
I mean
really did you expect them to just bend over and take it?
The more people steal their products, the more they're going to do everything within their power to reduce the effectiveness for the average person to do so. Dangerous? Not particularly. The people that whittle away your fair use rights are the people that think they're the ones with the power, take whatever they want, and fail to understand that the music industry isn't just going to sit there and let them pick its bones.
If you want to find someone to be angry with download this program, do a search for some of Arista's artists, and then message all of the people distributing their work. Something like, "Hey Fuckhead, you're evaporating my fair use rights of copyrighted materials."
Your "I'm a writer, I'll do what I want" sword cuts both ways. People are going to criticize you as much as they want for misusing language. If you don't like it, don't read their criticisms. Haven't you created a wonderfully circular train of arrogance?
Well you can freely count me as another male clearly too insecure to let your usage pass. Catering to political correctness at the expense of correctness, and then utilizing ad hominem to rationalize it puts you in a wonderful light. Really.
I find that in general any monotonous physical task is sufficient for removing some of the barriers to thought. Going for a long walk, showering, chopping wood, sanding, rowing, etc. I do not find that the time of day in relation to the time I awake has any impact on this event, and that it mostly depends on mental isolation.
I suppose in theory one could suggest that a shower at work would provide an environment where employees could expose themselves both to isolation from their peers and to monotony, but I seem to think employers wouldn't think it particularly economical.
Did you fall our of the K5 tree with that USian stuff or what?
Regardless, you're just another person spouting anecdote as evidence of some unsubstantiated claim. Oh yes, someone on Slashdot told me they're an Elbonian programmer, and that their team is vastly superior to all of the programers of the U.S. Well, I'm glad we've settled this debate!
Given the general capacity for critical thinking and logic on Slashdot, I'd be unwilling to be responsible for dealing any of its denizens' work.
You have nothing but anecdote to back your claims. Both of your positions are equally worthless. You simply think that your anecdote is more significant, when it's not.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone has accidents.
Now I could have said something snide like "Why would you expect the American forces to recognize a British tank when the British can't do it themselves," or something else equally disrespectful to mock your insinuations regarding the U.S. military, but I'm not going to. It's certainly not fair to them.
I also don't think either of us is particularly qualified to comment on the difficulty of avoiding friendly fire incidents. It's embarrassing, regrettable, and hopefully preventable in the future.
Or for that matter those without it any more or less.
Excuse me for not properly finishing my post.
It's owned by an American, Rupert Murdoch
While he is an American citizen, just for informational purposes, I'd like to point out that he is originally from Australia, and that his attainment of citizenship was part of some plan for his global media assets.
who also owns Fox News and is rarely described as a liberal.
I don't know why his political affiliation matters. It's not as if those with a 'liberal' ideology have any less bias.
They DID try to oust Saddam, and the freakin US told them to rise up and do so (Bush Sr. that is, in 1981). When they asked for help, the US turned their backs on them, after we promised to help them - and they were brutally slaughtered.
We had no U.N. mandate to enter Iraq and aid its citizens in overthrowing its Government. Do you really think if Bush had wanted to, and did so, that the same countries objecting to this war, wouldn't have objected then?
The Gulf War was considerably less popular domestically than this war. The Bush administration didn't have the political credit to usurp the authority of a U.N. effort and extend it into a liberation campaign. The administration chose to do the easy thing instead.
get f*cking informed. I am so sick of people who yammer on without a f*cking fact in their head.
Me too. Take some of your own advice.
The grandparent is a real piece of work, but things aren't really as simple as you'd like them to be.
Without Government, people have the freedom to attempt anything. Rights are a matter of freedoms defined by law. Given an oppressive State X that outlaws a given expression Y, you do not have the "right" to express Y, but you may or may not have the illegal 'freedom' to express Y.
No, they're demanding convenience. Radio and TV have been broadcasting free content for decades, yet profits continued.
Based upon the sales of products they no longer forsee as profitable unless they mitigate the effects of others violating their rights. Radio is seen as essentially advertising for the products they sell...which they see as being continually injured by their previous lack of obfuscating their content.
The reason piracy is so rampant right now is because there is no reasonably priced convenient alternative.
The reason piracy is so rampant, is because it's easy. They're going to continually obfuscate and legislate to combat the ease with which people can copy their products. It's really that simple. People aren't going to pay anything, if they can obtain the exact same thing for nothing. They're simply making that "cost of nothing" greater.
If the industry offered their entire back catalog as high quality MP3s for purchase online, they would make tons of money
What evidence do you have that they would "make tons of money?" Simply that you believe so? How much is "reasonable" anyway?
But they won't, citing piracy as the reason, which is circular because piracy has exploded to fill the DEMAND for digital convenience, which they're not providing.
Piracy "exploded" because the means of copying and distributing media became easy and cheap for the average person. It didn't grow to fill the need of convenience, it grew because it was cheaper than purchasing the product. Certainly that it's easy makes it all the "cheaper" for the average person.
Right now the recording industry is a bunch of scribes trying to force the world to not use the printing press. They are trying to retard progress so they can keep charging for their outdated, bloated distribution model.
What they're doing, is moving away from the lax system of trust that users have exploited so that they can retain control of their property. They're not luddites, though the media companies have had a continually luddite-like view of legitimate copying, they're simply attempting to increase the cost of violating their rights. They're preventing their own irrelevance through action. They'll continue to do so. Stop being naive to fit your ideological beliefs.
They will never prevent ripping, unless they outlaw all recording devices.
You don't even know what equilibrium is. I suggest in the future you should have something valuable to say before saying it. Frankly, you haven't had anything valuable thus far.
Coward moderator. Your mod points are wholly powerless off of this site, and your fragile ideology are going to be stampeded in the real world.
I'm not suggesting the granularity of their enforcement is fair. It doesn't matter if it's fair. I'm saying they produce these goods, have a lot of money, and the 99.999% of the people openly trading recent releases of all media are obtaining their wrath.
File-sharing networks having legitimate uses doesn't make the actions that precipated these events legitimate. The recording industry _is_ handling their absence of obscurity (what you refer to as a "loss of control.") That's what these actions are; them dealing by using laws and cryptography.
People are generally getting the impression that they're entitled to any sort of media they want, without cost, simply because of the wealth of some of the employees in the chain, and none of the media organizations are going to stand for it.
You push them, they push back. They have a lot of money and influence, and for the most part, the people violating their rights have little.
They're more than willing to lose you, if they can simply make it hard enough for the average person that they won't bother distributing media.
People are demanding music in a convenient, free form. They're not just buying music and converting it for their own use, they're distributing it illegally.
This brings forth these DRM non-CD-compatible "CDs."
That's just the beginning. They've got a serious advantage in terms of limiting your freedoms. These people aren't empowered, they're just riding off the laxness of the previous system.
People cannot hope to overpower the RIAA with their whining. They can, though, stop their part in spreading the culture of trading other people's property in violation of their rights.
Do I think they will? No. I think the RIAA will inevitably be pushed forward until its anti-piracy efforts reach some equilibrium with the cost of implementing them.
But if you want someone to blame, then be prepared to blame the stupid people that openly traded and attempted to profit on the trade of others' works. They're not victims, they're foolish antagonizers.
If you think the recording industry is making itself irrelevant, I think you're pretty deluded. Enjoy those DRM "CDs."
I do the same thing for convenience, but that is going to be (as is evident by the recording industry's actions) increasingly more difficult and perhaps of lower quality because of their desire to reduce the ease of others violating their rights with regard to their property. Those people using Kazaa, Gnutella, IRC, Usenet, etc to illegally copy media are taking actions that jeopardize your ability to exercise your fair use rights.
Doesn't that presuppose that Slashdot has at least a majority population that is "geek?"
If so then perhaps "geek" is synonymous with "often technically inept whiny teenagers and college students with grandiose opinions of their own self worth."
You need to drop from your moral high-horse for a moment; it's not going to get you overly far.
Companies responsible for producing media have large quantities of money and political influence, and they can wield it to far greater effect than your whining about fairness. It's that simple.
That is simply true. They are the more powerful force.
What they see, is a constantly growing trend of the youth of the U.S. and Europe freely replacing, in large quantities, the purchasing of media with the downloading of it off of the Internet and burning it to CDs and DVDs. If you don't think that generations being indoctorinated into the "It's ok to just download every piece of media" school of thought is "pushing them against the wall," then you're not very adept at thinking in particularly long terms.
They're going to do everything in their power to prevent and impede the easy distribution of their property. If that means stomping all over you, as long as it's done in a manner that isn't too inconvenient to enough people to harm sales, they're going to do it. You can bitch about it, and whine about it all you want, but they have the money and you have squat. Now if you want to preserve your rights you can either stop poking them in the eye with your Kazaa stick, or you can just watch everyone's freedoms with others' media evaporate.
They think long-term and not your boring terms "The CEO has severals nice homes." These companies are gigantic, employ very large quantities of people, and as with any business, always attempt to maximize the bottom line for investors.
You don't have to like it, for them to push you around. It's really time to accept that and to plan strategies accordingly.
I gather that you don't believe in inalienable rights
I do not believe in rights that are not granted by a matter of law. I don't believe the universe, or some deity bestows upon humanity any rights whatsoever. Freedoms are bestowed and protected by people. It matters very little to me what anyone believes the Constitution's freedoms come from.
People who have swung so far to the right that they have disowned the ideals of our country?
I'm sorry, how am I "to the right?" I have no conservative political association at all. I realize that rights are purely agreements of a society to protect, by force, certain freedoms for its inhabitants on the premise that they create a more stable and prosperous society, and suddenly I'm a conservative? That's fairly new to me.
What you are is a troll or a kook. You have no basis for concluding any of my political views.
Detached, raving, non-sensical ideologues like yourself are not, generally, responsible for much of anything in my experience. Go tag your political nonsense on to someone else's post.
You can't just yank something away that so many people have latched onto and not expect an uprising.
I don't know, and that is why I asked. I find it rather unlikely there was considerable basis for concluding that Linkin' Park, for example, is particularly popular in the "geek" demographic. Where "geek" itself isn't exactly a well-defined group of people to begin with.
What do you think of bands like Phish and (formerly) the Grateful Dead that have made a great living off of concerts and the lifestyle that surrounds them?
What do I think of their music or their business practices? I don't care for their music, but I don't really have any opinion regarding their business practices.
It really doesn't matter what I think, or what I think would be ideal. What matters is what is, and what will happen as a result of actions the consumer takes in regard to the people and organizations that actually produce these goods.
What is going to happen, is I'm just not going to buy those albums. I never cared much for most popular music anyways, but considering the 2 places that I listen to recorded music is in front of my computer and in my car, this is a big problem.
There isn't much for "popular" music I intend to buy, either, but that doesn't mean that if I just go and take it along with millions of others, the record industry is just going to let me.
But you're making the assumption that it's the file traders that are keeping me from purchasing the music that I want to buy.
No, I'm stating that the recording industry isn't going to let it continue to be as easy for you to illegally copy their music. You want someone to blame for the corrosion of your previous fair use rights, it's the people that abused the current lax system so openly. They practically flaunted it in their faces, and several companies have tried to make money off of the business of allowing others to violate copyright law. What did you expect to happen?
Personally I don't care what keeps you from buying music.
But if my right to copy to make a backup or a duplicate which I, and only I, will use is violated, I will not have a part in that.
Which may eventually mean you won't be buying music. You can equally blame the people flaunting their power over the "broken RIAA/MPAA business models" for the increasing encroachment, every step of the way, that you currently blame those businesses for.
Only they will suffer for that.
That remains to be seen. We're still at the very beginning of all of this. Who knows the lengths they will go to obfuscate their content? Who knows what laws they will pass to further gain leverage over businesses and individuals? Who knows what influence they'll use to get the DoJ kicking in your door with a warrant?
You can't just yank something away that so many people have latched onto and not expect an uprising.
And that is precisely what those people abusing file sharing networks believe. They believe they have the power, and can just take away the media industry's control of their property. Well those industries have a lot of money involved and great political influence, and for the most part all those kids on Kazaa have are their large mouths and their ideologies.
If you're worried so much about your fair use rights, maybe you, too, should tell those file trading college kids to stop ruining everything for you. They're pushing around a dragon that doesn't care if you're the one taking it gold or not.
As opposed to blaming the rape victim for flaunting their sexuality?
hey don't have any inalienable rights to control what you do with recordings, it is given by law.
You don't have any inalienable rights either. All rights are provided as a matter of law. It matters rather little what Locke and those that shared his views believed to be their source.
Calling it "stealing" is subverting the language to fit your viewpoint, it implies there is more in common with downloading songs and shoplifting other than both being illegal. It is copyright infringement, nothing more.
I suggest you grow up. The person distributing and the person receiving copies of media without the permission of its owner are taking away their equally law-given right of control, and through which, compensation for their efforts.
It is illegal, but it doesn't always have to be, nor was it always so. For example, there is new economic theory that proposes copyright isn't necessary and sometimes harmful to artists and innovators. If this was accepted as common knowledge, copyright would eventually cease to exist. I'm not saying this is going to happen, but pointing out that copyright isn't some inalienable right.
And civilization could collapse and I could take your food and beat you to death with a stick. There goes your inalienable rights to life and property.
Your ideology is irrelevant, and I suggest you come back to Earth with the rest of us. It is illegal. Those people are benefiting without compensating the owners. The people with a vested interest in maintaining the right to control their intellectual property have large sums of money to use, and lose, and will take those steps that are economically viable to fight the illegal distribution of their property. You don't have to like it, but they're going to do whatever it takes. If they need to obfuscate their property, poison P2P networks, sue companies into oblivion, or pass draconian laws to push back the tide, they will. They're being pushed against the wall by the open illegal distribution of their property. They wouldn't need to waste their money on Congressmen and cryptography if there weren't petabytes of their work being downloaded without a second thought by the very markets that have sustained them. They're _going_ to make it as _expensive_ as possible for the average person to download their products freely because people _are_ making it more expensive for them not to. They don't care about where you place their rights in your fantasy food chain.
How many people have to go untaught or uncultured before it is considered harmful?
Intellectual honesty: 0
The point is to
1. Reduce the ease with which one can copy the contents.
2. Force those that do, to do an analog copy.
3. Get people to accept DRM WMA for use with their computers.
It's not as if this one step is the only thing they're doing and planning on doing to reduce piracy. This just increases the barrier to entry. Most people have really shitty soundcards which will introduce hissing and ticking and all manner of other artifacts into the music. This a different loss of quality than a decently encoded mp3 provides.
Say, linkin park (I'm making an extrapolation. If you hate it, sorry.)
Apology accepted.
Just out of curiosity, what data are you extrapolating a "geek" like of Linkin' Park from?
Either way, I don't find it particularly dangerous for record labels to attempt to be compensated for their products. I think it's fairly natural for them to use increasingly more extreme measures of reducing the brazenly open distribution of their content.
I mean really did you expect them to just bend over and take it?
The more people steal their products, the more they're going to do everything within their power to reduce the effectiveness for the average person to do so. Dangerous? Not particularly. The people that whittle away your fair use rights are the people that think they're the ones with the power, take whatever they want, and fail to understand that the music industry isn't just going to sit there and let them pick its bones.
If you want to find someone to be angry with download this program, do a search for some of Arista's artists, and then message all of the people distributing their work. Something like, "Hey Fuckhead, you're evaporating my fair use rights of copyrighted materials."
Your "I'm a writer, I'll do what I want" sword cuts both ways. People are going to criticize you as much as they want for misusing language. If you don't like it, don't read their criticisms. Haven't you created a wonderfully circular train of arrogance?
Well you can freely count me as another male clearly too insecure to let your usage pass. Catering to political correctness at the expense of correctness, and then utilizing ad hominem to rationalize it puts you in a wonderful light. Really.
I find that in general any monotonous physical task is sufficient for removing some of the barriers to thought. Going for a long walk, showering, chopping wood, sanding, rowing, etc.
I do not find that the time of day in relation to the time I awake has any impact on this event, and that it mostly depends on mental isolation.
I suppose in theory one could suggest that a shower at work would provide an environment where employees could expose themselves both to isolation from their peers and to monotony, but I seem to think employers wouldn't think it particularly economical.
Did you fall our of the K5 tree with that USian stuff or what?
Regardless, you're just another person spouting anecdote as evidence of some unsubstantiated claim. Oh yes, someone on Slashdot told me they're an Elbonian programmer, and that their team is vastly superior to all of the programers of the U.S. Well, I'm glad we've settled this debate!
Given the general capacity for critical thinking and logic on Slashdot, I'd be unwilling to be responsible for dealing any of its denizens' work.
You have nothing but anecdote to back your claims. Both of your positions are equally worthless. You simply think that your anecdote is more significant, when it's not.