Uh - you're kidding right? Stan Lee does nothing but hog almost all the glory all the time. Only occasionally will he give a nod to Kirby and Ditko.
And if you know about the "Marvel method" - that method for Lee was usually discussing (co-authoring) a story idea with Kirby or Ditko, having the artists fully flesh out the story, break down the panels, and approximate the dialogue, and then and only then would Lee actually dialogue and caption the book. In the main, it could easily be argued and generally proved that 90% of the creative work was done by the artists and not by Stan Lee.
Yeah, Lee is a creative genius - not. Stan Lee was merely the relative of the publisher. It's good to have friends in high places.
Conspiracy only used to apply to acts of treason. Under Nixon the law was broadened to catch a whole host of shit that wasn't against the law and therefore unenforceable before the change in the conspiracy laws.
We call it "Law Enforcement Growth Industry."
You make more crimes, you catch more criminals, you put more people in jail, you have a de facto slave work force via the federal system's Unicor labor force, you own privately held prisons that are then able to legally and unfairly compete with all other labor (including union), and therefore you are able to...Profit!
Welcome to the american Gulag. Welcome to a life behind bars. And believe me, they want skilled laborers that know electronics and computer tech.
Here take a nice big hit...and get caught holding the bag.
You get what you pay for - either in actual money or time spent doing the right things. Everything I must have is backed up. Everything that is not backed up I know I could lose. I have antivirus, antispyware, two kinds of firewalls, and I do all the things that make me the less interesting target for "malicious code."
People want hand-holding after they do everything wrong and skimp on precisely what they should not have skimped on. That's just life and the way people are.
One problem is the pretense of the $400-500 machine. That's not going to get you far plus you have to pay for some things that may be proprietary in the Windows world in particular: good backup tools and hardware. But you should pay for those things, implement sound safe computing protocols and then just be and surf happily.
Computers can save you time, but just like a horse or a car - they also need up front attention and care. Afterwards you must patch as necessary, even if you must hire someone to do it.
On my newest machine, I can restore the main hard drive in under 2 minutes. The worst case scenario is that I get some buggy shit happening and I then choose to waste a lot of time trying to figure out how to kill it because I like to figure shit out. I could spend hours working on something knowing full well that a real solution is two minutes away. Tried and true safety.
So making a mix CD, or even a non-profit copy of a whole CD is not really the end of the world. A lot of the theory here is predicated on the idea of commercial gain versus private use.
The bigger story here is clearly about commercial piracy, which provided the IP law in question has reasonable limits I won't argue against. At the same time I have to ask about the reasonableness of converting private civil matters into public criminal matters and at public expense besides. Well, you can guess where the rest of this goes...
Anyway, what you did was just to get over on your son for some reason. I don't see it as the reasonable act of a stable person. You had an agenda far beyond what the situation called for - what you should have done was reasonably discuss "fair use" with the child in question. But you don't really care about that do you?
It's clear you suffer from social dysfunction so calling you "psychotic" because of your blatant underlying psychosis would have been more accurate. Your perceived break with reality comes in the form of failing to understand the social underpinnings of sharing works of all kinds - as they are shared at the public library for example.
What we need is real campaign finance reform to effectively, once and for all, shut out the noise produced by corporations that should have have no standing before the law. Cut off the money supply, and your representatives in congress will come to you for money offering favors in return - and "favors" really just means "proper representation of their constituency."
There are two real issues here. One is: Why isn't this seen as protectionism? The right-wing nutjobs always whine about protectionism - except when it benefits one of their own. The other issue is: Why do we even allow corporate lobbies to exist? This is a country ideally for the people and by the people. Corporations are not people, they are fictions of law - another kind of protectionism against liability for debts.
The wiki article people keep pointing to also makes connections to outsourcing and a whole host of related issues that relate to bogus ideas of a free market. Clue to all: free markets are a myth sold to you to make someone's subsidy more palatable. So yes, the existence of free markets is a bold lie.
Can anyone show me a free market anywhere on earth?
Not in theory, mind you - where a lot of you libertarian/republican eggheads live - but in REALITY. Show me a real free market - where people live and die by the price of goods and services.
The moment any market is fed a subsidy by the government, it is not a free market - the system will have been gamed for the benefit of a few against the many. But - and this a BIG BUT - all countries have gamed their systems exactly this way and supposedly for the benefit of their people. And when such gamed systems work for large populations, I don't really have a problem with it. Example: I like throwing money at farmers (sadly, usually republican and pyscho Xtian assholes) because I think it is in the interest of national security to have an independent food supply - in my example the farmers gain a monetary benefit, while the rest of us gain something a little less tangible in the way of national security.
It is when the numbers of people benefitted by such a gamed system become so few that we may call this "looting" instead. I don't know that many of us are benefitted by the oil wars we fight such that the same or greater benefits could not be derived from some other energy source which might also have hidden benefits for the environment if they are cleaner energy sources.
So yeah, Bastiat is great. Really. But he also assumes facts not in evidence. And most of us have to live in the really real world.
But the scheme creates circumstances that would not otherwise exist but for the existence of the anti-copy protection scheme in the first place. These entertainment industries might as well figuratively leap out from behind a corner, stick their thumbs in their ears, and start waving "wugga wugga wugga" at the crackers of the world. I have the distinct impression that challenging crackers results in cracked anti-copy protection schemes.
What's worse is that even when hackers disagree with what crackers do, they might still agree with them from a political perspective, in terms of fair use, and in terms of the plain old usability of a given technology. Geeks love to play with shit without restrictions.
Plus the whole deal seems tightly bound to a hardware scheme that would seem to require all new stuff on the part of the consumer. And what of rentals? Will they be DRM free? That would be the lapse right there if they were.
I think the part we cannot underestimate is the endless stupidity of the entertainment industry - both in terms of the degree to which society wants or needs it, and to the degree that they think they can really lock up technology solutions.
The entertainment industry was ultimately a creation of the industrial revolution, and while the machines required to produce the necessary results remained expensive they owned their little place in the world. Now any asshole with a pc can pretty much emulate much of what the entertainment industry has done over the years - and I mean in terms of creating, mixing and editing, and so on. The means of creation have been made economically feasible for most people so inclined.
The playing field has been made equal for all players. Buh-bye entertainment industry...you will not be missed.
The life, liberty, and happiness (= property) quote is T. Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence (it actually has a slightly different title in the original). It seems perfectly reasonable to me to mention some other things that T. Jefferson might have said and thought about property rights. Do the words of men like Jefferson not form the basis of our political thought, despite their personal shortcomings? I'd say their words are foundational, but they must also be fully understood.
BTW, I would never quote those religious books you mention because (to paraphrase Thom. Paine) each of those religions "accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all." 'Nuff said.
As to the Articles of Confederation, they have been superceded have they not?
Anyway, next time try saying something of substance instead of this stuff that is in the way of an ad hominem attack.
And where did you, anon cow, make your points so well before? I reread the last time I posted my canned reply on Slashdot and read little of value from the opposition there.
Just because 200+ years ago you would have been my bitch-slave and I your owner, doesn't make you right and me therefore automagically wrong.
I honestly believe the idea of intellectual property rights will not survive much longer because ideas are not created in a vacuum. Ideas are an outgrowth of culture and of scoiety as a whole. Very occasionally some one individual seems to make a leap forward, but usually such people are of the precise line of work and of the precise turn of mind that make those seeming leaps possible.
Wow, what you don't know about the law is plenty. Just for starters, law is based on political and philosophical theory and is generally supposed to make some kind of sense. There are categories of acts that fall under criminal consideration (crimes against the public) and those that are in the way of disputes between persons - or civil matters (in which the public has no real interest).
The fact that federal laws exist wasting taxpayer monies on the enforcement of IP laws is nuts and generally predicated on that amusing old variant of the golden rule: "he who has the gold makes the rules." There is no theoretical basis for making civil issues criminal cases instead. This is sometimes referred to laughingly as "making a federal case out of something." Point being: that which is asserted as *SO IMPORTANT* is usually quite trivial instead.
Theoretically speaking, the U.S. congress has no legal basis for writing laws that convert civil issues into criminal ones. When you stop to think that violent crimes carry lighter penalties, it really starts to fall apart. In the U.S. the law is a whore and the many monied interests stand in a long train at the ready to give her a good reaming out - a vulgar but accurate discription to be sure.
It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.
Considering the exclusive right to invention as given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society, I know well the difficulty of drawing a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not. As a member of the patent board for several years, while the law authorized a board to grant or refuse patents, I saw with what slow progress a system of general rules could be matured.
----------------
Sorry folks, this is my canned response on this topic. Because yes, some of us really do not "get it." Thomas Jefferson is the man you are quoting, and you clearly do not understand the kinds of radical limits he placed upon IP rights. And right, the intent of the person quoted is of no consequence...
The fine is too weenie. They need to do for consumers what they do for the likes of the RIAA and MPAA - give consumers something with which they can beat spyware vendors into submission.
But that won't happen because they don't really give a shit about "consumers" as long as they continue to consume. When we consume we fulfill our political function.
Don't be an asshole shark72, this isn't a black or white kind of thing (in all the meanings of that phrase in this context).
Jefferson was simply saying that legal fictions have to be reasonable and have as their sole purpose the betterment of society. Many of us, like Lawrence Lessig, have been claiming that unreasonable extensions and the general abuse of IP rights (as in the case of criminalizing what should be a mere civil case) is generally making a nonsense of the original purposes of IP laws. Surprisingly, the original purpose of such laws is to serve a public good, not to make fat cats richer than they already happen to be.
Maybe you need to reread the preamble to the US Constitution to remind you what the law is supposed to be about. Try noticing the part about the "general welfare." As it occurs I didn't notice anything in the preamble about the US govt. sucking corporate cock or kissing ass to private interests.
It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.
Considering the exclusive right to invention as given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society, I know well the difficulty of drawing a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not. As a member of the patent board for several years, while the law authorized a board to grant or refuse patents, I saw with what slow progress a system of general rules could be matured.
> Tolkien was heavily influenced by the Mabinogion, the Beowulf and Old English fragments (Finnsburh etc), and the Norse Eddas; I see nothing in his works that draw heavily on Wagner of all people.
Yeah, tell me what I don't know. My oblique reference to the hoard was just shorthand for your list. And yes, I have read extensively the many works in old and middle English. But hey, you seem a little more feverish on the subject - so maybe you know or care more about it all than I do.
Let me ask you this: Why go on foot? Why not fly some giant eagles to Mount Doom and fling the ring in? Frankly, I don't recall the last sections of the book that well, but in the movie the eagles make short work of those dragons.
Fuck, it's all nonsense really.
The mythology is better and has more internal consistency. And I'm sorry, but I have tried several times to like Tolkien's work more than I do and failed. I don't come to works of fiction with the idea that I should have to scrutinize or learn invented languages and read appendices and so on - that's just bad writing. Everything I need to know should be in the body of the text.
I agree with you on one thing though: the old works are great: Beowulf, The Wanderer, The Dream of the Rood, etc. Good shit. Better than Tolkien.
Arwen's role was critically important and was rightly amplified in the films. Without his relationship with Arwen I find Aragorn a pretty flat character taken as a whole. Placing that relationship in an appendix was hardly a stroke of genius on Tolkien's part. Sorry, but failing to grasp this fundamental point is to fail to understand a primary motive for most human beings: the protection of our loved ones.
BTW, the books are hardly perfect. I personally find them poorly written (see above) and quite hard to get through. And no, it's not that I can't handle my literature (I have a degree in English) it's more that I well understand and know all of Tolkien's primary sources. Given the wealth of world mythology, of which Tolkien's work is part redaction and part recreation, I'll take the mythology myself.
"Das Rheingold" anyone?
Frankly, given the enormous amount of fantasy material out there before and after Tolkien, I am quite surprised that Tolkien is revered as highy as he is today. To me, it's pretty much all "ho hum." I find his use of lengthy appendices and created languages fatuous and self-congratulatory.
Tell your fucking story, Tolkien - don't make us hunt around for it.
Yeah, I wish I could be contrite about calling a bunch of thieves assholes but I guess I just can't feel that way about it. Thieves that would like to deny you the same chances they had when starting out, BTW.
You must have missed the point he made about freedom. Based on your comments, you value freedom not at all.
I don't want to go off-topic in this thread, but this is one of the things that I was going to say about the Opera v. Firebird portion of another thread today (I think others may have already made the point anyway). I value that Firebird is free. Opera is really great (although there are a few flaws I have found in it over time) but it is not free.
It really makes all the difference in the world. I can wait for Firebird to become as kick ass as Opera - it is very close already.
Frankly, there are very few instances where proprietary software beats free software, esp when it comes to desktop use. I am not saying none, I am saying few. But I also think there are many instances where free software beats proprietary software. And I think it's getting better for the free side of the equation all the time.
Do pay attention. Across the span of years assholes like Gates, Jobs, and Ellison will be mere blips on the radar of history. RMS will be considered one of the cornerstones of computer technology.
Far from being a crackpot, RMS stands for exactly what is needed in terms of free software. The steadfast nature of his resolve is with a view to all possible attacks from within and without the free software movement.
The things that RMS says are sort of like the Bill of Rights. People try to mess with it, to rewrite it, to mess with it in a thousand ways - and RMS has always been right on the first try.
It's a pity that more do not see that plainly. In my view, RMS sees things with startling clarity. He already sees what you have not even begun to anticipate.
I apologize for being cryptic, but it's one of those things that you either "get" or you just don't.
Fair enough. And it's good to keep things precise, no doubt.
I was trying to get at the idea that what one pays for one should be allowed to use without DRM fouling the use of it. To that extent, the IP holders are claiming the purchase is only for a license, under specific conditions, to use whatever it is you purchased.
Fair use would seem to contradict the claimed right to DRM a product.
Tom, let me help you because you seem a little lost...
Copyrights and Patents are legal fictions that we could all probably agree to if the limits of their reach were reasonable. 200 years after we started this game in motion, the reach of IP laws are no longer reasonable. In fact, what should be a straight up civil matter can be a criminal matter at this point, so pardon me and others if we think that's really fucked up.
Now let's understand the political roles being played out. The RIAA and the MPAA are the power and money. Our government mistakenly sides with power and money because it is run by politicians that need power and money to remain in office. In short, the members of our government find it pretty easy to ignore their constituency any time they choose to do so. Most members of said constituency don't understand what is going on - a sad but true fact. They don't understand that IP rights can only be expanded at the expense of the commons. The point is that there are real winners and real losers as IP rights are expanded unreasonably.
You have turned your nose up at the idea that "piracy" can be a noble act - but I would suggest that disobedience to unjust laws has always been noble. Does "taxation without representation" and a certain "tea party" ring any bells? How about a lone black woman riding on the front end of a bus?
What does the lone person, or minority, have as a weapon against power and money? They have civil disobedience, riots, violence, and revolution. Read back in your history books to discover that instances like the WTO riots are not a new thing.
Revolution is the people's way of righting egregious wrongs - so let's just hope it doesn't have to come to that. Because when people get violent, other people lose their heads because they were too greedy.
Now I wouldn't care to see a torrent of the Olsen Twins' latest because I'm with you on that score, but a torrent of "Steamboat Willie" - the first Mickey Mouse movie - now that would rock my world. Why? Because protecting the rights of the Disney corporation ad infinitum has become unreasonable and it is time for some of the works of Disney to enter the commons (or public domain). All good things come to an end, and that particular ride on the gravy train should have come to an end at this point in time.
Do you ever stop to think that Disney has built an empire on works in the public domain? The Disney co. has made a fortune on fairy tales that at some point were written down by somebody or other, like Charles Perrault http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Perrault , and whose work Disney didn't even have to pay for. Have you stopped to think that the same thing isn't possible to do with the rights of nearly anyone post 1922 or so?
That's right, thanks to the unreasonable expansion of IP rights many works are now protected from entry into the commons.
So basically what was good enough for Disney co. is too good for you. They won't be allowing that to happen again. You will have to scrimp and save and kowtow for everything you can never own or even use with confidence without a license. It's all going to belong to the corporations that can legally outmaneuver you at every turn.
So where does it all end?
Civil disobedience.
Riots.
Violence.
Revolution.
So let's all pray it doesn't have to come to that.
Reality check: All that being Libertarian means is that you are so out of touch that you think theory is more important than whether people live or die.
Capitalism has been undone. It falls apart under the weight of billions of mouths on earth that must be fed. Those with the capital become de facto nobility. Those without become de fecto serfs upon the land. Sounds just like the U.S. to me.
Interestingly, the only near solution to feeding the poor that has evolved and worked has been communism.
I'd say socialism was a decent compromise. And guess what? It's already intrinsicly part of our political system since the Great Depression.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh - you're kidding right? Stan Lee does nothing but hog almost all the glory all the time. Only occasionally will he give a nod to Kirby and Ditko.
And if you know about the "Marvel method" - that method for Lee was usually discussing (co-authoring) a story idea with Kirby or Ditko, having the artists fully flesh out the story, break down the panels, and approximate the dialogue, and then and only then would Lee actually dialogue and caption the book. In the main, it could easily be argued and generally proved that 90% of the creative work was done by the artists and not by Stan Lee.
Yeah, Lee is a creative genius - not. Stan Lee was merely the relative of the publisher. It's good to have friends in high places.
Conspiracy only used to apply to acts of treason. Under Nixon the law was broadened to catch a whole host of shit that wasn't against the law and therefore unenforceable before the change in the conspiracy laws.
We call it "Law Enforcement Growth Industry."
You make more crimes, you catch more criminals, you put more people in jail, you have a de facto slave work force via the federal system's Unicor labor force, you own privately held prisons that are then able to legally and unfairly compete with all other labor (including union), and therefore you are able to...Profit!
Welcome to the american Gulag. Welcome to a life behind bars. And believe me, they want skilled laborers that know electronics and computer tech.
Here take a nice big hit...and get caught holding the bag.
What - are you unable to speak aloud the name of your Sex Crime? Report to the Ministry of Love immediately!
Exactly.
You get what you pay for - either in actual money or time spent doing the right things. Everything I must have is backed up. Everything that is not backed up I know I could lose. I have antivirus, antispyware, two kinds of firewalls, and I do all the things that make me the less interesting target for "malicious code."
People want hand-holding after they do everything wrong and skimp on precisely what they should not have skimped on. That's just life and the way people are.
One problem is the pretense of the $400-500 machine. That's not going to get you far plus you have to pay for some things that may be proprietary in the Windows world in particular: good backup tools and hardware. But you should pay for those things, implement sound safe computing protocols and then just be and surf happily.
Computers can save you time, but just like a horse or a car - they also need up front attention and care. Afterwards you must patch as necessary, even if you must hire someone to do it.
On my newest machine, I can restore the main hard drive in under 2 minutes. The worst case scenario is that I get some buggy shit happening and I then choose to waste a lot of time trying to figure out how to kill it because I like to figure shit out. I could spend hours working on something knowing full well that a real solution is two minutes away. Tried and true safety.
Fair Use: http://www.nolo.com/lawcenter/ency/article.cfm/obj ectID/C3E49F67-1AA3-4293-9312FE5C119B5806
So making a mix CD, or even a non-profit copy of a whole CD is not really the end of the world. A lot of the theory here is predicated on the idea of commercial gain versus private use.
The bigger story here is clearly about commercial piracy, which provided the IP law in question has reasonable limits I won't argue against. At the same time I have to ask about the reasonableness of converting private civil matters into public criminal matters and at public expense besides. Well, you can guess where the rest of this goes...
Anyway, what you did was just to get over on your son for some reason. I don't see it as the reasonable act of a stable person. You had an agenda far beyond what the situation called for - what you should have done was reasonably discuss "fair use" with the child in question. But you don't really care about that do you?
Yeah, jerk was out of line.
It's clear you suffer from social dysfunction so calling you "psychotic" because of your blatant underlying psychosis would have been more accurate. Your perceived break with reality comes in the form of failing to understand the social underpinnings of sharing works of all kinds - as they are shared at the public library for example.
I pity your son.
What we need is real campaign finance reform to effectively, once and for all, shut out the noise produced by corporations that should have have no standing before the law. Cut off the money supply, and your representatives in congress will come to you for money offering favors in return - and "favors" really just means "proper representation of their constituency."
There are two real issues here. One is: Why isn't this seen as protectionism? The right-wing nutjobs always whine about protectionism - except when it benefits one of their own. The other issue is: Why do we even allow corporate lobbies to exist? This is a country ideally for the people and by the people. Corporations are not people, they are fictions of law - another kind of protectionism against liability for debts.
Exactly.
The wiki article people keep pointing to also makes connections to outsourcing and a whole host of related issues that relate to bogus ideas of a free market. Clue to all: free markets are a myth sold to you to make someone's subsidy more palatable. So yes, the existence of free markets is a bold lie.
Can anyone show me a free market anywhere on earth?
Not in theory, mind you - where a lot of you libertarian/republican eggheads live - but in REALITY. Show me a real free market - where people live and die by the price of goods and services.
The moment any market is fed a subsidy by the government, it is not a free market - the system will have been gamed for the benefit of a few against the many. But - and this a BIG BUT - all countries have gamed their systems exactly this way and supposedly for the benefit of their people. And when such gamed systems work for large populations, I don't really have a problem with it. Example: I like throwing money at farmers (sadly, usually republican and pyscho Xtian assholes) because I think it is in the interest of national security to have an independent food supply - in my example the farmers gain a monetary benefit, while the rest of us gain something a little less tangible in the way of national security.
It is when the numbers of people benefitted by such a gamed system become so few that we may call this "looting" instead. I don't know that many of us are benefitted by the oil wars we fight such that the same or greater benefits could not be derived from some other energy source which might also have hidden benefits for the environment if they are cleaner energy sources.
So yeah, Bastiat is great. Really. But he also assumes facts not in evidence. And most of us have to live in the really real world.
I agree with all of that.
But the scheme creates circumstances that would not otherwise exist but for the existence of the anti-copy protection scheme in the first place. These entertainment industries might as well figuratively leap out from behind a corner, stick their thumbs in their ears, and start waving "wugga wugga wugga" at the crackers of the world. I have the distinct impression that challenging crackers results in cracked anti-copy protection schemes.
What's worse is that even when hackers disagree with what crackers do, they might still agree with them from a political perspective, in terms of fair use, and in terms of the plain old usability of a given technology. Geeks love to play with shit without restrictions.
Plus the whole deal seems tightly bound to a hardware scheme that would seem to require all new stuff on the part of the consumer. And what of rentals? Will they be DRM free? That would be the lapse right there if they were.
I think the part we cannot underestimate is the endless stupidity of the entertainment industry - both in terms of the degree to which society wants or needs it, and to the degree that they think they can really lock up technology solutions.
The entertainment industry was ultimately a creation of the industrial revolution, and while the machines required to produce the necessary results remained expensive they owned their little place in the world. Now any asshole with a pc can pretty much emulate much of what the entertainment industry has done over the years - and I mean in terms of creating, mixing and editing, and so on. The means of creation have been made economically feasible for most people so inclined.
The playing field has been made equal for all players. Buh-bye entertainment industry...you will not be missed.
The life, liberty, and happiness (= property) quote is T. Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence (it actually has a slightly different title in the original). It seems perfectly reasonable to me to mention some other things that T. Jefferson might have said and thought about property rights. Do the words of men like Jefferson not form the basis of our political thought, despite their personal shortcomings? I'd say their words are foundational, but they must also be fully understood.
BTW, I would never quote those religious books you mention because (to paraphrase Thom. Paine) each of those religions "accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all." 'Nuff said.
As to the Articles of Confederation, they have been superceded have they not?
Anyway, next time try saying something of substance instead of this stuff that is in the way of an ad hominem attack.
And where did you, anon cow, make your points so well before? I reread the last time I posted my canned reply on Slashdot and read little of value from the opposition there.
Just because 200+ years ago you would have been my bitch-slave and I your owner, doesn't make you right and me therefore automagically wrong.
I honestly believe the idea of intellectual property rights will not survive much longer because ideas are not created in a vacuum. Ideas are an outgrowth of culture and of scoiety as a whole. Very occasionally some one individual seems to make a leap forward, but usually such people are of the precise line of work and of the precise turn of mind that make those seeming leaps possible.
Wow, what you don't know about the law is plenty. Just for starters, law is based on political and philosophical theory and is generally supposed to make some kind of sense. There are categories of acts that fall under criminal consideration (crimes against the public) and those that are in the way of disputes between persons - or civil matters (in which the public has no real interest).
The fact that federal laws exist wasting taxpayer monies on the enforcement of IP laws is nuts and generally predicated on that amusing old variant of the golden rule: "he who has the gold makes the rules." There is no theoretical basis for making civil issues criminal cases instead. This is sometimes referred to laughingly as "making a federal case out of something." Point being: that which is asserted as *SO IMPORTANT* is usually quite trivial instead.
Theoretically speaking, the U.S. congress has no legal basis for writing laws that convert civil issues into criminal ones. When you stop to think that violent crimes carry lighter penalties, it really starts to fall apart. In the U.S. the law is a whore and the many monied interests stand in a long train at the ready to give her a good reaming out - a vulgar but accurate discription to be sure.
Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson
/ v1ch16s25.html
13 Aug. 1813Writings 13:333--35
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents
It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.
Considering the exclusive right to invention as given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society, I know well the difficulty of drawing a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not. As a member of the patent board for several years, while the law authorized a board to grant or refuse patents, I saw with what slow progress a system of general rules could be matured.
----------------
Sorry folks, this is my canned response on this topic. Because yes, some of us really do not "get it." Thomas Jefferson is the man you are quoting, and you clearly do not understand the kinds of radical limits he placed upon IP rights. And right, the intent of the person quoted is of no consequence...
The fine is too weenie. They need to do for consumers what they do for the likes of the RIAA and MPAA - give consumers something with which they can beat spyware vendors into submission.
But that won't happen because they don't really give a shit about "consumers" as long as they continue to consume. When we consume we fulfill our political function.
Don't be an asshole shark72, this isn't a black or white kind of thing (in all the meanings of that phrase in this context).
Jefferson was simply saying that legal fictions have to be reasonable and have as their sole purpose the betterment of society. Many of us, like Lawrence Lessig, have been claiming that unreasonable extensions and the general abuse of IP rights (as in the case of criminalizing what should be a mere civil case) is generally making a nonsense of the original purposes of IP laws. Surprisingly, the original purpose of such laws is to serve a public good, not to make fat cats richer than they already happen to be.
Maybe you need to reread the preamble to the US Constitution to remind you what the law is supposed to be about. Try noticing the part about the "general welfare." As it occurs I didn't notice anything in the preamble about the US govt. sucking corporate cock or kissing ass to private interests.
Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson
/ v1ch16s25.html
13 Aug. 1813Writings 13:333--35
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents
It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices.
Considering the exclusive right to invention as given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society, I know well the difficulty of drawing a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not. As a member of the patent board for several years, while the law authorized a board to grant or refuse patents, I saw with what slow progress a system of general rules could be matured.
> Tolkien was heavily influenced by the Mabinogion, the Beowulf and Old English fragments (Finnsburh etc), and the Norse Eddas; I see nothing in his works that draw heavily on Wagner of all people.
Yeah, tell me what I don't know. My oblique reference to the hoard was just shorthand for your list. And yes, I have read extensively the many works in old and middle English. But hey, you seem a little more feverish on the subject - so maybe you know or care more about it all than I do.
Let me ask you this: Why go on foot? Why not fly some giant eagles to Mount Doom and fling the ring in? Frankly, I don't recall the last sections of the book that well, but in the movie the eagles make short work of those dragons.
Fuck, it's all nonsense really.
The mythology is better and has more internal consistency. And I'm sorry, but I have tried several times to like Tolkien's work more than I do and failed. I don't come to works of fiction with the idea that I should have to scrutinize or learn invented languages and read appendices and so on - that's just bad writing. Everything I need to know should be in the body of the text.
I agree with you on one thing though: the old works are great: Beowulf, The Wanderer, The Dream of the Rood, etc. Good shit. Better than Tolkien.
Arwen's role was critically important and was rightly amplified in the films. Without his relationship with Arwen I find Aragorn a pretty flat character taken as a whole. Placing that relationship in an appendix was hardly a stroke of genius on Tolkien's part. Sorry, but failing to grasp this fundamental point is to fail to understand a primary motive for most human beings: the protection of our loved ones.
BTW, the books are hardly perfect. I personally find them poorly written (see above) and quite hard to get through. And no, it's not that I can't handle my literature (I have a degree in English) it's more that I well understand and know all of Tolkien's primary sources. Given the wealth of world mythology, of which Tolkien's work is part redaction and part recreation, I'll take the mythology myself.
"Das Rheingold" anyone?
Frankly, given the enormous amount of fantasy material out there before and after Tolkien, I am quite surprised that Tolkien is revered as highy as he is today. To me, it's pretty much all "ho hum." I find his use of lengthy appendices and created languages fatuous and self-congratulatory.
Tell your fucking story, Tolkien - don't make us hunt around for it.
Free to use perhaps. Not free to be further developed or tinkered with. And that's what free means in the context of a discussion about RMS.
Yeah, I wish I could be contrite about calling a bunch of thieves assholes but I guess I just can't feel that way about it. Thieves that would like to deny you the same chances they had when starting out, BTW.
One man's IP is another man's piracy...
You must have missed the point he made about freedom. Based on your comments, you value freedom not at all.
I don't want to go off-topic in this thread, but this is one of the things that I was going to say about the Opera v. Firebird portion of another thread today (I think others may have already made the point anyway). I value that Firebird is free. Opera is really great (although there are a few flaws I have found in it over time) but it is not free.
It really makes all the difference in the world. I can wait for Firebird to become as kick ass as Opera - it is very close already.
Frankly, there are very few instances where proprietary software beats free software, esp when it comes to desktop use. I am not saying none, I am saying few. But I also think there are many instances where free software beats proprietary software. And I think it's getting better for the free side of the equation all the time.
I love RMS!!!
Do pay attention. Across the span of years assholes like Gates, Jobs, and Ellison will be mere blips on the radar of history. RMS will be considered one of the cornerstones of computer technology.
Far from being a crackpot, RMS stands for exactly what is needed in terms of free software. The steadfast nature of his resolve is with a view to all possible attacks from within and without the free software movement.
The things that RMS says are sort of like the Bill of Rights. People try to mess with it, to rewrite it, to mess with it in a thousand ways - and RMS has always been right on the first try.
It's a pity that more do not see that plainly. In my view, RMS sees things with startling clarity. He already sees what you have not even begun to anticipate.
I apologize for being cryptic, but it's one of those things that you either "get" or you just don't.
Fair enough. And it's good to keep things precise, no doubt.
I was trying to get at the idea that what one pays for one should be allowed to use without DRM fouling the use of it. To that extent, the IP holders are claiming the purchase is only for a license, under specific conditions, to use whatever it is you purchased.
Fair use would seem to contradict the claimed right to DRM a product.
Tom, let me help you because you seem a little lost...
Copyrights and Patents are legal fictions that we could all probably agree to if the limits of their reach were reasonable. 200 years after we started this game in motion, the reach of IP laws are no longer reasonable. In fact, what should be a straight up civil matter can be a criminal matter at this point, so pardon me and others if we think that's really fucked up.
Now let's understand the political roles being played out. The RIAA and the MPAA are the power and money. Our government mistakenly sides with power and money because it is run by politicians that need power and money to remain in office. In short, the members of our government find it pretty easy to ignore their constituency any time they choose to do so. Most members of said constituency don't understand what is going on - a sad but true fact. They don't understand that IP rights can only be expanded at the expense of the commons. The point is that there are real winners and real losers as IP rights are expanded unreasonably.
You have turned your nose up at the idea that "piracy" can be a noble act - but I would suggest that disobedience to unjust laws has always been noble. Does "taxation without representation" and a certain "tea party" ring any bells? How about a lone black woman riding on the front end of a bus?
What does the lone person, or minority, have as a weapon against power and money? They have civil disobedience, riots, violence, and revolution. Read back in your history books to discover that instances like the WTO riots are not a new thing.
Revolution is the people's way of righting egregious wrongs - so let's just hope it doesn't have to come to that. Because when people get violent, other people lose their heads because they were too greedy.
Now I wouldn't care to see a torrent of the Olsen Twins' latest because I'm with you on that score, but a torrent of "Steamboat Willie" - the first Mickey Mouse movie - now that would rock my world. Why? Because protecting the rights of the Disney corporation ad infinitum has become unreasonable and it is time for some of the works of Disney to enter the commons (or public domain). All good things come to an end, and that particular ride on the gravy train should have come to an end at this point in time.
Do you ever stop to think that Disney has built an empire on works in the public domain? The Disney co. has made a fortune on fairy tales that at some point were written down by somebody or other, like Charles Perrault http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Perrault , and whose work Disney didn't even have to pay for. Have you stopped to think that the same thing isn't possible to do with the rights of nearly anyone post 1922 or so?
That's right, thanks to the unreasonable expansion of IP rights many works are now protected from entry into the commons.
So basically what was good enough for Disney co. is too good for you. They won't be allowing that to happen again. You will have to scrimp and save and kowtow for everything you can never own or even use with confidence without a license. It's all going to belong to the corporations that can legally outmaneuver you at every turn.
So where does it all end?
Civil disobedience.
Riots.
Violence.
Revolution.
So let's all pray it doesn't have to come to that.
> I'm a libertarian, thank you very much.
Reality check: All that being Libertarian means is that you are so out of touch that you think theory is more important than whether people live or die.
Capitalism has been undone. It falls apart under the weight of billions of mouths on earth that must be fed. Those with the capital become de facto nobility. Those without become de fecto serfs upon the land. Sounds just like the U.S. to me.
Interestingly, the only near solution to feeding the poor that has evolved and worked has been communism.
I'd say socialism was a decent compromise. And guess what? It's already intrinsicly part of our political system since the Great Depression.