This so-called new Internet isn't about privacy as it is criminalizing bad behavior. So, you get to face charges when your machine gets a virus and now you have to prove that it really wasn't your fault.
Before I read this post I had no positive thoughts about the proposed big brother Internet whatsoever. But after reading the above . . . we'd quickly get rid of Windows in such a draconian legal climate wouldn't we? So an oppressive Internet would be good for us . . . aargh . . . Must... fight... cognitive... dissonance...
You're not purchasing the story in the book either, just the right to use a single copy of it. Just like the phone, you own the physical implementation of the copyrighted material, but only hold a license to use that copyrighted material, and do not own the copyrighted material itself.
You do not hold a license to the content of the book because you do not need one. You only need a license if you want to do something with the content that you are not permitted to do under copyright law but copyright law already lets you read it, write annotations into it, lend it to a friend and so on. This is based on old and quaint notions along the lines of "when the copyright holder voluntarily sells a copy of his work the purchaser may make reasonable use of that copy without any further ado".
1. Apple's profiting off BSD kernel (what is your favorite pejorative for Steve Jobs, given your love of Psystar above ?).
The BSD license which applies to said BSD kernel permits profiting explicitly.
Nevertheless, "The (...) assholes are trying to profit off of someone elses work" to repeat the phrase under debate.
Please explain, in the context of Apple using the BSD kernel, how profiting off of someone else's work is necessarily assholism and worthy of criticism in and of itself. I do not see it but perhaps you can enlighten me.
A world without copyright would merely result in the music and movie industry ending up resembling the current condition of email... that is, it would be so deluged with spam and commercials and advertising to the point that genuinely worthwhile works would be drowned out by the noise.
The noise doesn't matter. In a world without copyright there would be no shortage of net radios, blogs, rating websites, etc., to help you navigate the world of music. The major difference would be that instead of having to rely on payola-based radio stations to tell you what to listen to you would be able to find bloggers who actually/care/ about music to help you out.
But, yeah, you're probably right, what a terrible world that would be.
It is neither of those. The copyright to mein kampf and other Nazi works fell to the state of bavaria, which by copyright simply doesnt allow any copying of mein kampf and hasnt since the second world war.
If you want to read Norway's copyright law with malicious intent, Mein Kampf is automatically illegal here because "Even if the term of protection of copyright has expired, a literary, scientific or artistic work may not be made available to the public in a manner or in a context which is prejudicial to the author's literary, scientific or artistic reputation or individuality, or to the reputation or individuality of the work itself, or which may otherwise be considered harmful to general cultural interests." (para 48 of Norwegian copyright law) And it is easy to conclude that there is absolutely no way to make Mein Kampf available to the public that is not prejudicial to the author's reputation, on all three counts listed:-)
"We should maximize the sum of human happiness over time." But why?
"Do unto others as you'd have them do to you." But why?
"Let everyone do their own thing so long as it doesn't impinge on your own happiness." But why?
"Respect the sanctity of human life, from conception through to death." But why?
"Don't punish the innocent." But why?
Largely the reason is "this is what we have found necessary to produce a functional society". Variations without these tenets have been tried and they didn't work out too well in the long term. The question then becomes "why optimize our behaviour for producing societies" - well, history shows us we have a strong drive within us to form them so we might as well try to make a decent job of it.
"All men are created equal." Really? Why do you think that? ('self-evidence' isn't a very solid ground in an argument.)
The full text makes it clear: "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal (...)". It is worded as an axiom, because it/is/ an axiom. And as such it doesn't require proof, only acceptance.
Utilitarianism and humanism are just as arbitrary as disliking human cloning. Worse, actually, since they so often fool their adherents into thinking that the basis of their morality is rationality.
I am not sure what the alternative would be. Should we purposedly try to make dysfunctional societies because we want to rebel against "things that actually work well"? It seems to be part of the human nature to want to do things in an effective manner, why should we spend resources to fight this?
I disagree. The simple scheme is just to cover the 'uh-oh - I don't think it took my vote' case. The piece of paper with their number should not leave the polling station.
This requires you to keep the voters separate not only in the voting booth but also when moving from the booth to the functionary to cast the ballot. Which is just a matter of logistics I suppose, if a bit inconvenient to arrange. Also, if I understand the proposal correctly, it is undesirable that the functionary be allowed to learn what vote you cast as it, again, opens up for verifiable purchase of votes. This can presumably be kept under some sort of control though if a record is kept of which functionaries double-checked how many votes and perhaps even what those votes were (not who cast them though).
Suppose your voting paper had a unique random barcode generated at the time your ballot paper was printed. The machine takes the candidate number of your vote and adds it to the total. It also adds your candidate number to your barcode number, and puts that in a public database. The public database would contain a set of apparently random numbers. However, if you keep your ballot paper with the number, you or someone at the voting booth ought to be able to find the number that corresponded to your vote, and check that the machine correctly tallied it.
This would make it possible to purchase votes and have a receipt to check that the service was delivered. Or bully people for votes or whatever. It is generally considered an undesirable feature.
This is a crude proposal. There are probably much better ones out there. I bet ATM software doesn't put up with a 2% error rate.
An ATM doesn't have the onerous requirements that a voting process does: it doesn't need to not give receipts and it doesn't need to be ignorant about who is using it. This makes auditing very much easier. It is also not a disaster if someone tries to use it, fails to and walks away thinking they have received cash when they have not. Moreover, it is legal to get direct assistance in using an ATM if for whatever reason you can't figure out how.
But who says that people who couldn't handle the simple system mentioned above would actually wait for the card to come out? They would probably just leave the card in the machine.
There would need to be a lamp outside of each booth labeled "voting in progress" and one labeled "voting complete". Then there would need to be functionaries outside the booths ready to stop people who leave booths with the "voting in progress" light on and explain that they are not finished yet. Alternatively, a door with an automatic lock on it that wouldn't let you out unless you've collected your card but I don't see this being very popular, or safe.
In the real world we measure Words Per Minute by the number of words... we type in a minute. There's a lot of auxiliary words we use shorter than 5 characters.
I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I...
Nah, can't be bothered. It'll just have to remain a mystery.
Do you really want to attach Brittney Spears music to culture?
This much is clear. Something doesn't need to meet with your approval in order to be culture. Also, something doesn't have to be good culture (whatever that is) in order to be culture.
The laws are not unjust - they are fair - you just don't like them.
This has yet to be determined. If the reports we are hearing are correct and a majority of youth copy music in violation of the law then most likely the law is unjust.
I am pretty sure murderers don't like jail either - I guess we should say that murderers are just doing a little bit of civil disobedience?
I am sure you will have a great time reviving this little straw man the day that 51%+ of citizens think of it as routine to murder others.
You are not being denied life libery and happiness by being told you have to pay for someone elses efforts.
If you cannot listen to music because you would have to pay for it you are certainly denied the happiness that this would have brought you. More importantly, you are now being charged a monetary price to partake in a fundamental part of the culture of your society and this just isn't a very good idea.
On the otherhand you are denying somebody money by taking their efforts and not paying them for it.
You are probably not even doing that. Artist and recording associations have their hands in so many pockets throughout society you are most likely already paying to listen to their products every time you buy a blank CD, a beer at a bar, or just take the elevator at the mall - assuming you buy something (anything) in that mall.
If you want culture go to the museum or library.
You appear to have a very narrow view of what culture is. A hint: culture isn't just something that once was; it is occurring all around you now at this very moment.
I would think a law protecting websites from civil liability with such sites and encouraging them to permit them would do more for intelligence gathering than a dozen agents in the field could ever dream of doing.
The West apparently stopped doing intelligence work some time between 1991 and 2001. Your suggestion is therefore completely unworkable. Repost your idea in Mandarin, perhaps someone will actually pick it up:-)
No. Laptops that work well in full sunlight and are rugged and low power are not being built by anyone, and won't be. All these requirements require compromises that won't sell well in the first world.. and that's always the target audience. This is why trickle down economics doesn't work.
This is almost exactly wrong. The OLPC may have been the perfect fit for the requirements of the third world market, but that doesn't mean that commercial netbooks are useless there. In fact it will probably turn out, as is so often the case, that for the vast majority of use cases they will work perfectly well in that environment, at a much lower price point than the OLPC and with vastly more diverse models to choose from. This is how disruptive technologies work and aside from perfection-seekers they make life better for everyone involved.
The Bostom Tea Party is a clear example that civil disobedience both can be done covertly. It also involves made the statement involving a nonessential.
I wouldn't really call it very covert. First, the action itself was very high-profile and second, the disguise used was easily seen through. A bit like robbing banks wearing president masks. Personally, though, I would hesitate to call it civil disobedience so long as the identities of the perpetrators are not known. It's more along the lines of good old sabotage.
Given the topic, some general piece of advice: if you find great strength and comfort in patriotic tales of national unity and the purity of your nation's founders - don't go digging too deep into those tales:-)
That would not be civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is to willfully, and usually with great public fanfare, break a law in an attempt to showcase the unjustness of that law. Choosing not to take a bus is a customer choice, not civil disobedience.
You really should read the Wikipedia article or one of the contemporaneous accounts of the boycott. It began when Rosa Parks was arrested for for refusing to give up her seat in favor of a white person.
I was commenting on whether choosing not to take the bus was civil disobedience. In the absence of a law that makes it mandatory to take the bus, it is not. Taking the bus and insisting on sitting in wrong-colour seating would be civil disobedience if such segregation is supported by law but this is not the situation that I commented on.
When copyright is revoked and universal distribution of everything for free is the rule, there will be no more DRM.
Only free software will exist, because nobody will be able to charge anything for it anymore.
You are mistaken. It is perfectly possible to make good money charging for an item that can also be obtained for free. You just need to know your market and have a good idea of people's cutoff point between cost and convenience.
There's plenty of companies reaping huge profits from selling plain bottled water in towns and cities were you can get perfectly good water for free through your kitchen tap. It's just that stepping into that store over there and plonking down a buck for a bottle of water is/so much more convenient/ than walking for an hour to get home so you can get free water. (And, yeah, there are other reasons too.)
What enterprising software vendors need to figure out in a copyright-free environment is what conveniences people want online and then provide them with such. One obvious one is to ensure that the software you sell them has been rigorously virus-screened and is delivered via secure mechanisms so that they can worry less about the security aspect. Timely, secure delivery of relevant updates is another. Liability coverage may be important to some (e.g. if the software you deliver screws up their computer you're responsible for it). Cleverer minds than mine would be gunning for the $billions in this market, of course, so the list would go on and you'd need to "(Click to read the rest of this comment)".
A DVD or Bluray player, right out of the box, implements DRM. It doesn't need modification, because it comes pre-crippled. When the user buys a shiny disc and inserts it (and executes code from it, in the case of Bluray) nothing unexpectedly bad can happen. The player device is not damaged.
Not until they revoke your player's key. Then something bad happens.
Consider, for example, a fairly recent example of true civil disobedience to an unjust law - the Mongomery Bus Boycott (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgomery_Bus_Boycott). Those who wished to bring attention to the unjustness of the bus segregation rules did not ride the busses while paying nothing or only what they felt was a "fair" price; they simply refused to ride the busses.
That would not be civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is to willfully, and usually with great public fanfare, break a law in an attempt to showcase the unjustness of that law. Choosing not to take a bus is a customer choice, not civil disobedience.
Piracy as civil disobedience is mostly criticized not because piracy is illegal (if it were legal, it couldn't be civil disobedience) but because it's usually carried out covertly and that voids the whole point of engaging in civil disobedience. It's hard to showcase something you're keeping a secret after all. Civil disobedience is when you are saying "I am breaking this law, I dare you to arrest me for it and I am prepared to face the consequences for doing so". This is a very strong moral position that just cannot be reached through covert piracy.
And also the probability that someone will be interested in more than 60 years, which is really, really small. Smaller, in fact, than winning most lotteries, I would guess.
Indeed. Hence my guess that 150 years of copyright rather than 28 may raise the offered price from $130k to $150k as an example. On a tangent, current copyright legislation seems to me to encourage concerned citizens to murder any author who has just published an important work. This way, the work can start being used by the general public that much sooner. It's really a very perverse kind of law, making a public good out of the early death of important authors.
Exactly. Both the jungle as the city require constant attention. Otherwise you get eaten by a random animal or hit by a car.
Large predators are pretty rare and those that do skulk around will generally be skeptical at attacking something as large and unfamiliar as a human. They will tend to need to be rather desperate to even try. Paranoid prey animals are probably more dangerous but often occur in herds so are easy to spot and avoid. (Malevolent mother moose notwithstanding.) The real dangers of the jungle are those that I am not trained to spot anyway so I might as well not waste much effort in trying: poisonous critters, unsafe food, dangerous camping grounds, etc.
On cultivated land the worst that could happen to you is peeing on a electrified fence.
Cattle, on the other hand, are used to humans and don't necessarily think twice before deciding to shift their weight around.
I fail to see how having copyright extend 75 years past the death of the artist encourages said artist to produce anything either before or after they die.
The media conglomerate that buys the rights off of you will take the full 150 years (or whatever) of copyright into account when calculating the current value of the work and so may offer you $150k instead of $130k (with a shorter copyright duration) for you to sign over the rights. This may matter to you.
Slashdot Mirror
This so-called new Internet isn't about privacy as it is criminalizing bad behavior. So, you get to face charges when your machine gets a virus and now you have to prove that it really wasn't your fault.
Before I read this post I had no positive thoughts about the proposed big brother Internet whatsoever. But after reading the above . . . we'd quickly get rid of Windows in such a draconian legal climate wouldn't we? So an oppressive Internet would be good for us . . . aargh . . . Must ... fight ... cognitive ... dissonance ...
You're not purchasing the story in the book either, just the right to use a single copy of it. Just like the phone, you own the physical implementation of the copyrighted material, but only hold a license to use that copyrighted material, and do not own the copyrighted material itself.
You do not hold a license to the content of the book because you do not need one. You only need a license if you want to do something with the content that you are not permitted to do under copyright law but copyright law already lets you read it, write annotations into it, lend it to a friend and so on. This is based on old and quaint notions along the lines of "when the copyright holder voluntarily sells a copy of his work the purchaser may make reasonable use of that copy without any further ado".
1. Apple's profiting off BSD kernel (what is your favorite pejorative for Steve Jobs, given your love of Psystar above ?).
The BSD license which applies to said BSD kernel permits profiting explicitly.
Nevertheless, "The (...) assholes are trying to profit off of someone elses work" to repeat the phrase under debate.
Please explain, in the context of Apple using the BSD kernel, how profiting off of someone else's work is necessarily assholism and worthy of criticism in and of itself. I do not see it but perhaps you can enlighten me.
A world without copyright would merely result in the music and movie industry ending up resembling the current condition of email... that is, it would be so deluged with spam and commercials and advertising to the point that genuinely worthwhile works would be drowned out by the noise.
The noise doesn't matter. In a world without copyright there would be no shortage of net radios, blogs, rating websites, etc., to help you navigate the world of music. The major difference would be that instead of having to rely on payola-based radio stations to tell you what to listen to you would be able to find bloggers who actually /care/ about music to help you out.
But, yeah, you're probably right, what a terrible world that would be.
It is neither of those. The copyright to mein kampf and other Nazi works fell to the state of bavaria, which by copyright simply doesnt allow any copying of mein kampf and hasnt since the second world war.
If you want to read Norway's copyright law with malicious intent, Mein Kampf is automatically illegal here because "Even if the term of protection of copyright has expired, a literary, scientific or artistic work may not be made available to the public in a manner or in a context which is prejudicial to the author's literary, scientific or artistic reputation or individuality, or to the reputation or individuality of the work itself, or which may otherwise be considered harmful to general cultural interests." (para 48 of Norwegian copyright law) :-)
And it is easy to conclude that there is absolutely no way to make Mein Kampf available to the public that is not prejudicial to the author's reputation, on all three counts listed
"We should maximize the sum of human happiness over time." But why?
"Do unto others as you'd have them do to you." But why?
"Let everyone do their own thing so long as it doesn't impinge on your own happiness." But why?
"Respect the sanctity of human life, from conception through to death." But why?
"Don't punish the innocent." But why?
Largely the reason is "this is what we have found necessary to produce a functional society". Variations without these tenets have been tried and they didn't work out too well in the long term. The question then becomes "why optimize our behaviour for producing societies" - well, history shows us we have a strong drive within us to form them so we might as well try to make a decent job of it.
"All men are created equal." Really? Why do you think that? ('self-evidence' isn't a very solid ground in an argument.)
The full text makes it clear: "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal (...)". It is worded as an axiom, because it /is/ an axiom. And as such it doesn't require proof, only acceptance.
Utilitarianism and humanism are just as arbitrary as disliking human cloning. Worse, actually, since they so often fool their adherents into thinking that the basis of their morality is rationality.
I am not sure what the alternative would be. Should we purposedly try to make dysfunctional societies because we want to rebel against "things that actually work well"? It seems to be part of the human nature to want to do things in an effective manner, why should we spend resources to fight this?
I disagree. The simple scheme is just to cover the 'uh-oh - I don't think it took my vote' case. The piece of paper with their number should not leave the polling station.
This requires you to keep the voters separate not only in the voting booth but also when moving from the booth to the functionary to cast the ballot. Which is just a matter of logistics I suppose, if a bit inconvenient to arrange. Also, if I understand the proposal correctly, it is undesirable that the functionary be allowed to learn what vote you cast as it, again, opens up for verifiable purchase of votes. This can presumably be kept under some sort of control though if a record is kept of which functionaries double-checked how many votes and perhaps even what those votes were (not who cast them though).
Suppose your voting paper had a unique random barcode generated at the time your ballot paper was printed. The machine takes the candidate number of your vote and adds it to the total. It also adds your candidate number to your barcode number, and puts that in a public database. The public database would contain a set of apparently random numbers. However, if you keep your ballot paper with the number, you or someone at the voting booth ought to be able to find the number that corresponded to your vote, and check that the machine correctly tallied it.
This would make it possible to purchase votes and have a receipt to check that the service was delivered. Or bully people for votes or whatever. It is generally considered an undesirable feature.
This is a crude proposal. There are probably much better ones out there. I bet ATM software doesn't put up with a 2% error rate.
An ATM doesn't have the onerous requirements that a voting process does: it doesn't need to not give receipts and it doesn't need to be ignorant about who is using it. This makes auditing very much easier. It is also not a disaster if someone tries to use it, fails to and walks away thinking they have received cash when they have not. Moreover, it is legal to get direct assistance in using an ATM if for whatever reason you can't figure out how.
But who says that people who couldn't handle the simple system mentioned above would actually wait for the card to come out? They would probably just leave the card in the machine.
There would need to be a lamp outside of each booth labeled "voting in progress" and one labeled "voting complete". Then there would need to be functionaries outside the booths ready to stop people who leave booths with the "voting in progress" light on and explain that they are not finished yet.
Alternatively, a door with an automatic lock on it that wouldn't let you out unless you've collected your card but I don't see this being very popular, or safe.
In the real world we measure Words Per Minute by the number of words... we type in a minute. There's a lot of auxiliary words we use shorter than 5 characters.
I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I ...
Nah, can't be bothered. It'll just have to remain a mystery.
How are chorded systems like that for coding, when it's not just English you're typing?
The Sinclair ZX Spectrum had something like this. Its particular solution didn't exactly sweep the world off its feet it seems.
Do you really want to attach Brittney Spears music to culture?
This much is clear. Something doesn't need to meet with your approval in order to be culture. Also, something doesn't have to be good culture (whatever that is) in order to be culture.
The laws are not unjust - they are fair - you just don't like them.
This has yet to be determined. If the reports we are hearing are correct and a majority of youth copy music in violation of the law then most likely the law is unjust.
I am pretty sure murderers don't like jail either - I guess we should say that murderers are just doing a little bit of civil disobedience?
I am sure you will have a great time reviving this little straw man the day that 51%+ of citizens think of it as routine to murder others.
You are not being denied life libery and happiness by being told you have to pay for someone elses efforts.
If you cannot listen to music because you would have to pay for it you are certainly denied the happiness that this would have brought you. More importantly, you are now being charged a monetary price to partake in a fundamental part of the culture of your society and this just isn't a very good idea.
On the otherhand you are denying somebody money by taking their efforts and not paying them for it.
You are probably not even doing that. Artist and recording associations have their hands in so many pockets throughout society you are most likely already paying to listen to their products every time you buy a blank CD, a beer at a bar, or just take the elevator at the mall - assuming you buy something (anything) in that mall.
If you want culture go to the museum or library.
You appear to have a very narrow view of what culture is. A hint: culture isn't just something that once was; it is occurring all around you now at this very moment.
No I thought, "I understand QWERTY and even DVORAK keyboards, but why the hell would anyone want three E keys?"
Obviously you need e, E and €.
Isn't one Jobs enough? What have we done that we should have to put up with a /million/ of him??
I would think a law protecting websites from civil liability with such sites and encouraging them to permit them would do more for intelligence gathering than a dozen agents in the field could ever dream of doing.
The West apparently stopped doing intelligence work some time between 1991 and 2001. Your suggestion is therefore completely unworkable. Repost your idea in Mandarin, perhaps someone will actually pick it up :-)
No. Laptops that work well in full sunlight and are rugged and low power are not being built by anyone, and won't be. All these requirements require compromises that won't sell well in the first world.. and that's always the target audience. This is why trickle down economics doesn't work.
This is almost exactly wrong. The OLPC may have been the perfect fit for the requirements of the third world market, but that doesn't mean that commercial netbooks are useless there. In fact it will probably turn out, as is so often the case, that for the vast majority of use cases they will work perfectly well in that environment, at a much lower price point than the OLPC and with vastly more diverse models to choose from. This is how disruptive technologies work and aside from perfection-seekers they make life better for everyone involved.
The Bostom Tea Party is a clear example that civil disobedience both can be done covertly. It also involves made the statement involving a nonessential.
I wouldn't really call it very covert. First, the action itself was very high-profile and second, the disguise used was easily seen through. A bit like robbing banks wearing president masks.
Personally, though, I would hesitate to call it civil disobedience so long as the identities of the perpetrators are not known. It's more along the lines of good old sabotage.
Given the topic, some general piece of advice: if you find great strength and comfort in patriotic tales of national unity and the purity of your nation's founders - don't go digging too deep into those tales :-)
That would not be civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is to willfully, and usually with great public fanfare, break a law in an attempt to showcase the unjustness of that law. Choosing not to take a bus is a customer choice, not civil disobedience.
You really should read the Wikipedia article or one of the contemporaneous accounts of the boycott. It began when Rosa Parks was arrested for for refusing to give up her seat in favor of a white person.
I was commenting on whether choosing not to take the bus was civil disobedience. In the absence of a law that makes it mandatory to take the bus, it is not. Taking the bus and insisting on sitting in wrong-colour seating would be civil disobedience if such segregation is supported by law but this is not the situation that I commented on.
When copyright is revoked and universal distribution of everything for free is the rule, there will be no more DRM.
Only free software will exist, because nobody will be able to charge anything for it anymore.
You are mistaken. It is perfectly possible to make good money charging for an item that can also be obtained for free. You just need to know your market and have a good idea of people's cutoff point between cost and convenience.
There's plenty of companies reaping huge profits from selling plain bottled water in towns and cities were you can get perfectly good water for free through your kitchen tap. It's just that stepping into that store over there and plonking down a buck for a bottle of water is /so much more convenient/ than walking for an hour to get home so you can get free water. (And, yeah, there are other reasons too.)
What enterprising software vendors need to figure out in a copyright-free environment is what conveniences people want online and then provide them with such. One obvious one is to ensure that the software you sell them has been rigorously virus-screened and is delivered via secure mechanisms so that they can worry less about the security aspect. Timely, secure delivery of relevant updates is another. Liability coverage may be important to some (e.g. if the software you deliver screws up their computer you're responsible for it). Cleverer minds than mine would be gunning for the $billions in this market, of course, so the list would go on and you'd need to "(Click to read the rest of this comment)".
A DVD or Bluray player, right out of the box, implements DRM. It doesn't need modification, because it comes pre-crippled. When the user buys a shiny disc and inserts it (and executes code from it, in the case of Bluray) nothing unexpectedly bad can happen. The player device is not damaged.
Not until they revoke your player's key. Then something bad happens.
Consider, for example, a fairly recent example of true civil disobedience to an unjust law - the Mongomery Bus Boycott (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montgomery_Bus_Boycott). Those who wished to bring attention to the unjustness of the bus segregation rules did not ride the busses while paying nothing or only what they felt was a "fair" price; they simply refused to ride the busses.
That would not be civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is to willfully, and usually with great public fanfare, break a law in an attempt to showcase the unjustness of that law. Choosing not to take a bus is a customer choice, not civil disobedience.
Piracy as civil disobedience is mostly criticized not because piracy is illegal (if it were legal, it couldn't be civil disobedience) but because it's usually carried out covertly and that voids the whole point of engaging in civil disobedience. It's hard to showcase something you're keeping a secret after all. Civil disobedience is when you are saying "I am breaking this law, I dare you to arrest me for it and I am prepared to face the consequences for doing so". This is a very strong moral position that just cannot be reached through covert piracy.
Overt piracy could be civil disobedience.
And also the probability that someone will be interested in more than 60 years, which is really, really small. Smaller, in fact, than winning most lotteries, I would guess.
Indeed. Hence my guess that 150 years of copyright rather than 28 may raise the offered price from $130k to $150k as an example.
On a tangent, current copyright legislation seems to me to encourage concerned citizens to murder any author who has just published an important work. This way, the work can start being used by the general public that much sooner. It's really a very perverse kind of law, making a public good out of the early death of important authors.
Exactly. Both the jungle as the city require constant attention. Otherwise you get eaten by a random animal or hit by a car.
Large predators are pretty rare and those that do skulk around will generally be skeptical at attacking something as large and unfamiliar as a human. They will tend to need to be rather desperate to even try. Paranoid prey animals are probably more dangerous but often occur in herds so are easy to spot and avoid. (Malevolent mother moose notwithstanding.)
The real dangers of the jungle are those that I am not trained to spot anyway so I might as well not waste much effort in trying: poisonous critters, unsafe food, dangerous camping grounds, etc.
On cultivated land the worst that could happen to you is peeing on a electrified fence.
Cattle, on the other hand, are used to humans and don't necessarily think twice before deciding to shift their weight around.
Terrorists would never think of packaging high explosive in some other item, such as a laptop's battery pack.
Why would you package high explosives, in high explosives?
I fail to see how having copyright extend 75 years past the death of the artist encourages said artist to produce anything either before or after they die.
The media conglomerate that buys the rights off of you will take the full 150 years (or whatever) of copyright into account when calculating the current value of the work and so may offer you $150k instead of $130k (with a shorter copyright duration) for you to sign over the rights. This may matter to you.