Who said anything about selling it "without the CD it came on?" I said I purchased a copy of the music. I am entirely free to sell that copy howsoever I chose.
The CD is just a medium. If you are "entirely free to sell that copy howsoever [you] chose", then you can choose to sell the music without the CD....
Of course since the music does not belong to you and you have not actually bought anything but a piece of plastic and a limited license, you cannot sell the music in any format you wish, only as coupled to the physical object it came on, i.e. the CD. In case of digital downloads, you can't sell it at all since there is no physical medium to permanently attach the thing to.
But again, even this simple and obvious thing escapes you.
The same actually applies to digital-only copies as well. I can sell it just like "a chair or a car".
You gotta be kidding. Put up your MP3s on ebay and see how fast you end up in the slammer.
You are again replying to something I haven't said: you're talking about making a second copy
Not at all. Make an MP3 and then break your CD in half. Only one copy will exist then. Try selling it. Also every time your CD plays in your CD player a copy is made, processed and mathematical transforms applied to it until it is copied onto analog electrical signal driving the speakers. Then it is copied onto another medium, i.e. air particles, and transmitted to you. Multiple copies at each playback. You thief you.
There are lots of things that are yours but you are restricted in how you can sell it. Guns were already mentioned (which you accepted as it being possible to purchase) and medication is another.
Again, none of these are restrictions dealing with transfer of ownership from the seller. Which I already pointed out. Multiple times. Having a restriction on items you bought in order to say, further public safety, is not immediately synonymous with not having the ownership of the said items. Only if the person who "sold" you the stuff manages to somehow remain to be the owner, you run into this problem. If anything, one could argue, and some libertarians do, that in the case of all of these other "restricted" items, the government becomes part-owner of the things. But in none of these cases it is the original seller.
You are not restricted from selling a copy of a film or music by copyright law, however.
Yes you are. You are restricted to not re-selling the limited license to the film in any format other then what came on the original medium you licensed. That is because you never bought the actual film, only a restrictive license to a particular use of the film. Which is what I keep pointing out.
You've tried to turn the argument into a different one that you can dispute. Shame on you.
Not at all. It all goes to the "hideous logical contortions" of yours and is well in line with debunking of your repeated claims that you are "purchasing" music. Shame on you for trying to weasel out from under this so pathetically.
You have decided that it is necessary to pretend that you can't purchase a copy of a film or piece of music to support your argument and are now attempting to convince me that something I buy in perpetuity, that I can re-sell, that I can use without further payment forever and ever... is "renting" something.
The cognitive dissonance in your head must be frightening. I keep demonstrating over and over again that you never get to "purchase" music, only to license it for a very specific use, with a multitude of devastating examples... and you still pretend that somehow it all does not exist. And then keep whining about "fundamentalism". I am starting to suspect that there is something wrong with you which makes you subco
There isn't a voting audience out there cheering you on and marking you as the winner or me the loser. There's no way to determine that even if I did agree with you that majority opinion = factual accuracy. The only real measure by which we can measure who is losing, who is most emotionally upset in this debate (which is obviously what matters to you, not facts), is the degree to which someone is driven to make personal attacks. By which criteria you are obviously the one that is most upset by this dialogue.;)
You apparently live in some self-populated land of delusion whereby things like logic do not exist and all arguments can only be won or lost by a call-in poll of fans of a TV-show. In this Universe however there exist a way of losing an argument that involves you being shown to be spewing an illogical hypocritical idiocy, which I have demonstrated, who upon being shown this idiocy of his attempts to bray at high volume and in copious amounts in order to obscure the issue and redirect the conversation onto his personal feelings. "Emotionally upset"? Dude, you are a veritable comedy. The only emotion you are getting out of me is laughter.
So long as I keep refuting your points with logic, I meet my goals.:)
You wouldn't recognize logic if it had somehow acquired a mass of a hundred tons and proceeded to collide with your face resulting in loss of all your teeth. As to your goals, "attempting to weasel out of an embarrassing mess of your own making" is far more like it.
I said in my previous post that I gave a company money in exchange for a copy of a file, that I had purchased a copy. I have done so - that copy is mine.
Try selling it then, sans the CD it came on. Even once. If it is "yours", like any real private property, say a chair, or a car, you should be able to do it, no?
I haven't purchased a "limited licence" as you state. No licence agreement comes with the file. UK copyright law places restrictions on what I may do with it. That is something else.
The license is implicit in the copyright law. That is the whole point of these "restrictions". A real sale does not have any "restrictions" on post-sale use of any items sold in favour of the seller. Only a limited license does so. You will be unable to show any incident with real, non-"intellectual" "private property" (i.e. the physical kind) whereby an item sold has "restrictions" on its use by the customer in favour of the manufacturer. You might have agreed to further restrictions by means of some click-through EULA as is the case with software, but the core licensing element is "agreed to" by all recipients by the blanket means of copyright law. And that is incidentally one of the key arguments of the opponents of copyright, that this process violates the whole spirit of contractual agreements by denying someone the ability to not "sign" the contract, as copyright binds you even if you find the CD in the garbage dump.
If you think that all I have purchased when I buy a track off 7digital.com is a "limited licence", then where does this copy I have on my computer magically come from? Do you not think that I have purchased it? I assure you that receiving that file was a condition of my giving them money. How is that not purchasing?
The "copy" is the thing you rented, or more specifically were "licensed" to use for "personal enjoyment only" and with a host of other restrictions. Just like when you rent an apartment, you do not end up "purchasing" it at all, and yet the apartment is there for you to live in, as long as you pay rent. All you have "purchased" is the rental agreement.
If you buy a gun, is it not yours because the law forbids you to shoot someone with it. If you buy a car, is it not yours because the law forbids you to drive it wherever y
An ad hominem is where you attack the person, rather than their argument.
Sort of like your original "fundamentalists" and the "dinosaurs" bit, no? More projection.
... address what I say anyway since it simply states your opinion that someone who pays for a copy of a film, music or ebook is being swindled
No, that is not an "opinion". It is actually a conflict between the official position of MPAA, RIAA and the like and your own delusions which you defend so vehemently. You see, you are only granted a limited license to "use" the music when you give money to a music publisher. You never actually "purchase" it (unless you are a publisher or a distributor yourself, and even then what is being sold is "rights" to the music, not the music itself). I know that you are hopelessly confused, but perhaps you should look up the difference between these concepts before engaging in any discussion on the subject.
You don't back it up with any reasoning
Of course I do present sound and logical reasoning, it is no fault of mine however that it goes over your head so badly that it might as well have been in orbit.
Then in your third post to me, the one I'm replying to now, you again resort to ad hominems implying I am gullible or prone to excessive submissiveness to authority.
Actually, based on your never-ending, desperate whining, I must conclude that you are simply a petulant idiot who will cling to his losing argument ever more desperately all the while pretending that if he does not see his errors, no one else will. And, yes, that was an "ad hominem", one which you richly deserve.
You waste a lot of words simply accusing me of things and very little deconstructing what I say.
There is precious little to de-construct in your posts but your whining. All your posts, excluding the initial one to which I originally responded consist mainly of moaning about your poor wittle sensitive self being maligned by big brutish me.
I have previously petitioned my local MPs and MEPs on various issues of digital rights, was one of the founder members of the Open Rights Group, backing it with a significant amount of my own money (another counter to your accusations of my "boundless greed", incidentally), financially support WikiLeaks and have been photographed numerous times by the friendly UK police on various protest marches. I don't know what you require of someone to not be excessively submissive to authority - throwing bombs, maybe - but I think the odds are that if I qualify as excessively submissive, then you rank lower still.
All of which is in no way contradictory to being a submissive to some failed ideology. You keep beating your chest, keep protesting your virtues, but in the end you go on and support the "intellectual property" nonsense in all its ugly glory. You remind me of people who go to Communist Party meetings, attend rallies, partake in protests, sleep with the Communist Manifesto under their pillows and then run to the local mall to buy 20 pairs of brand-name, "latest fashion" clothes made by some conglomerate in Uganda in a factory where all the doors are chained and employees are on average 12 years old, because the dude in the TV ad said that there will be "free" CDs of some "pop star" with every sale. Poseur is the term.
I give money to someone. A file downloads in return. In what way have I not just purchased a copy of that file?
This is pointless. You not only have no clue about the distinctions between a "purchase" and a "limited license", you are apparently proud of your ignorance.
Money given in exchange for them giving me a copy of the file I want. If you have trouble with that, perhaps go and look up the word 'purchase' in a good dic
you resort to another ad hominem by saying that my arguments must result from being swindled by outside interests.
It is not an "ad hominem" argument if I merely point out that your own words demonstrate that you were swindled, utterly and completely. The word "purchase" in reference to "music" was a dead giveaway.
Or else that I am simply suffering from delayed greed because I hope to become a rich in intellectual property in the future.
That is just a possible explanation as to why you allow yourself to be swindled, but it does not change the fact that swindled you are, as evidenced by your own proud claim. Other possibilities involve gullibility, unquestioning submissiveness to authority etc.
Nowhere do you demonstrate that anything I have said is incorrect or back up your own arguments with anything other than repetition.
The conversation about greed is a mere side-show to the main topic of the ludicrous nature of "intellectual property" since the motivations of the peddlers and scammers do not actually impact the mechanics of the scam itself. As to demonstrations of your being incorrect, I only have to point to your own laughable admission that you are under a silly illusion that you are actually "purchasing" music.
Remember, it was you who accused us of "hideous logical contortions", while at the same time engaging in an utterly hideous logical contortion that would somehow associate the idea of "purchasing" with the idea of "music". Not only you demonstrate the depth of such contortions that one has to go to to "justify" the notion of "intellectual property", you failed to demonstrate even one instance in which us, that is those who see "intellectual property" as the scam it is, engage in such "hideous logical contortions". And then, in a time-honoured style of demagogues all over, you demand that it is your detractors who must prove you wrong, naturally ignoring the wee little fact that the onus of proof is on you, the maker of the original claim, not on those who question it.
And so not only did you fail to show these "hideous logical contortions" you accuse us of, you actually managed to engage in one yourself. And then amidst all of this anti-scientific illogic of yours, you have the arrogance to talk about us being "fundamentalists" who try to "rationalize" dinosaurs. Psychologists would call your activities "projection".
You're one of those people who think that all police officers need to do is shoot the gun/knife/whatever out of the criminal's hand, aren't you?
Apples and oranges. Compared to an F16, a 747 is a sluggish, huge, slow moving target. The 747 cockpit is near 30% size of the F16 itself. For a skilled combat pilot its like shooting the proverbial sitting duck, no matter what the terrorists would do to try to avoid being targeted, a 747 is simply not capable of any useful air combat manoeuvres and would simply come apart from g-forces if one were to attempt such.
As far as I know, an F-16 does not carry the firepower to vaporize the several tons of steel that is a Boeing 747
All they have to do is to hit the cockpit with the cannon (as to prevent further manoeuvres by the terrorists) and then the engines/wings until enough propulsion/flight surfaces are destroyed. That was always the standard procedure when fighters attacked much larger bomber planes. You do not actually have to destroy the thing in the air, only to make sure to start attacking when the large plane is heading in the direction you want it to go down at, and then the rest is momentum/gravity.
In what way have I demonstrated a "boundless greed" ? By purchasing music instead of pirating it, I have given up money, not made it.
The "argument" you made is usually made by those peddling "intellectual property", and thus demonstrably in thralls of unlimited avarice that has to be satisfied at all costs, even if it means loss of freedom to hundreds of millions of people and derailing the course of the entire civilization. But it seems that you have the dubious honour of being simply a hapless "mark" of the "intellectual property" scam artists, a "mark" so completely bamboozled that he actually thinks he is "purchasing" music! Quite a riot, that.
But then again, sociologists tell us that people who are susceptible to scams are so because the scam artists are able to get the victims to identify with the scammers, and to appeal to the "mark's" greed. And so usually the very people who defend the "intellectual property" most vocally, are seeing themselves as potential "artists", "inventors" and what-not, who stand to lose tremendously "in the future" should the "intellectual property" scam be somehow compromised. This is very similar psychology to that of a trailer-park dweller who vehemently opposes deep taxation of the top 1% of billionaires, because it would "hurt him when he becomes one" (not "if", naturally). Which is about to happen any minute now.... imminently... any minute now.... in 3.. 2...
so you choose to protect a tall building at the cost of flattening a neighborhood? missiles aint exactly subtle and all that mass that was an airliner now obeys gravity. (ie the target doesn't vaporize like in the movies)
You are assuming that if the plane was actually piloted by terrorists it would have been allowed anywhere near densely populated areas with two F16s on its tail. Secondly you assume that the plane could not have been disabled in such a way as to prevent further manoeuvring, as for example by targeting the cockpit, which combined with timing of the attack could have prevented it from altering course away from an impact zone in, say, the river. Having a plane operated by terrorists this close to Manhattan with F16s merely meekly following it was a dead giveway that there was no terror attack under way as otherwise the situation would have been "resolved" long before the people downtown got to even see the plane, unless of course the F16s were operated by clowns whose commanders were dunces.
Because shooting down a passenger jet is great for morale.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with morale. People were running around panicking in the buildings and on the ground, heedless of the fact that there was really no choice between disabling the plane and letting it impact some office tower. The F16s would have opened fire as soon as it became apparent that the plane is targeting buildings. And so the point is that all the freaking out and hysteria on the ground were utterly baseless.
Not only that, but one would think that two F16s would be more then enough to put an end to it if the plane was actually overrun with terrorists and heading for some tall building...
I believe it's up to you to demonstrate to us why it's logically inconsistent.
I have done so many times here on Slashdot. To make it short: the concept of "private property" can be applied only to objects with certain physical characteristics, like a unique location in the space-time continuum, for example, amongst many others. Which restricts the idea basically to physical objects. Thus, say, a chair, can be "owned" (i.e. controlled) by a person, transferred (with a corresponding loss of control by the original "owner") to another person, etc and so on. Information lacks these properties. We do not even know its true nature, but what we do know is directly contradictory to the idea of "private property". For example, an integer number "5" is a singular (i.e. there is only one of those in existence in the entire Universe) entity, but which lacks a specific space-time continuum coordinates, and which at the same time can be present in minds of billions of people, encoded with an infinite number of different encoding systems on an infinite number of media, etc and so on. The same applies to any sequence of integers. So to say that a series of numbers has an "owner" would imply that somehow a person can "control" the integer numbers, God-like, in whatever ethereal dimension they exist. Which is clearly not the case. Information cannot be simply so restricted by humans. Furthermore, its other properties (like an ability to propagate infinitely) present additional departures from the idea of "private property". Since information can be transmitted (i.e. patterns are replicated) rather then "moved" (as it is with physical objects) in order to "control" it one has to supervise all transfer of information in order to restrict the "owned" kind, in any form, which is what the MPAAs and the like are attempting, without regard of the type of information being transmitted as all channels can contain the "owned" patterns. In short the idea of "intellectual property" and "total surveillance" or "thought control" are synonymous from the point of view of theory of information. But then again, information can propagate without transmission. Two people at the other ends of the planet can independently discover that 2+2=4. The view of the "intelectual property" demagogues is that the second person doing so, without ever being aware of the first one, is then a "thief". I could go on, but this should give you a general idea.
I honestly can't think of a "fundamental property of information" that any IP violates.
Clearly you have not been giving it much thought.
Unless you include bogus properties like "information wants to be free", or phrase differently, "information must always be shared", or something like that.
These are illogical. But some people use these phrases because they, intuitively, feel that something is seriously wrong with the whole concept of "intellectual property". Their instincts are correct, but they simply have not looked at the problem in depth.
It's bullshit of course, because we are perfectly capable of stemming the flow of information by not passing it on.
No, it is nowhere that simple. This is the, patently and demonstrably incorrect, position of the "intellectual property" peddlers. The objective truth is that information can be "discovered" quite independently. In fact we do not know the true nature of information, as it appears to have a duality similar to that of, say, light, whereby at one time the light can be thought of as composed of discrete particles and at another time as a wave. Similarly, information can be "transmitted" and at some other times "discovered". And at the same time only one integer number 5 still exists in the Universe, thus making the idea of its "transmission" rather peculiar, giving to notions of multiple "impressions" or "representations" of the same uni
And this is why no one takes frothing-at-the-mouth imbeciles seriously.
As soon as you demonstrate how the "intellectual property" crap is logically consistent with the fundamental properties of information, and thus basic physical characteristics of the Universe, I will stop taking pea-brained, cretin AC's like you for the hypocritical abusers of the Slashdot moderation system they are, with nothing whatsoever to contribute to the discussion and only existing to leave their smelly turds behind all over Slashdot as "proof" of their worthless existence.
The cynical bastard appraisal runs something like - ideals don't pay the bills while money does and as soon as these starry eyed companies realize this, they turn "evil".
The cynical bastard would be at fault for lacking an ability for nuance. There is a whole scale of settings from "no money to pay bills but full of great hope" via "break even", followed by "making moderate profit", then onto "getting rich" all the way to "making a fucking blind killing". The problem with the cynical bastard's assessment is that the ultra-greed-overdrive kicks in usually somewhere between "making moderate profit" and "getting rich", not at the "no money to pay bills but full of great hope" stage - as that is when the company is usually "small and hungry".
If anything, the cynical bastards should muse about the propensity of money to corrupt the human soul.
You have a company willing to listen to the crazies on Slashdot and not put any DRM in their games. And what do people do? They go out and pirate the game in numbers that interfere with legitimate customers. And then you have the nerve to question the numbers they put out?
One has nothing to do with the other. One can put all the DRM on the planet in a game and then fib about the "piracy" rates to justify the costs to investors. One can decide to shift the whole business to online-delivered, phone-home activated "non DRM" as Stardock have done and then one can proceed to fabricate an "example" to "justify" such an unpopular change which is vehemently opposed by some customers. So the fact that one has DRM in the first place or is just on his way to put it in, or have none at all, bears no relationship on the desire to fabricate the piracy "numbers". In all cases there exist some motivations to do so.
Seriously, what is wrong with you? I am so sick of hearing the piracy deniers on here. You finally have a game company giving you what you want and you all still act like juvenile little pricks.
Err, Stardock was on its way to online-activated DRM "non DRM" solution long before this. Which was vocally opposed by some of its customers. Whom this "example" is possibly meant to "shut up". If being skeptical of corporate PR mumbo-jumbo, irrespective of what company it comes from or how genial and "hip" the CEO is, if demanding objective analysis and an ability to verify bold pronouncements of businessmen means to be "juvenile pricks" then many of us will wear the badge proudly.
How would you feel if your boss decided to do the same with your paycheck? Or are you trying to tell us that your work deserves compensation while the work of others does not?
No, actually we are telling you that the method you are using to get paid is fucked. We have nothing against artists and scientist getting rewarded, but we do become somewhat pissed off if they decide that they will kick us in our collective faces, violate our basic rights, corrupt our politicians to get them to write laws defying basic physics and generally and piss on our freedoms, all so that they (or more precisely their handlers, "distributors" and other parasites) can get filthy rich.
That seems a little hypocritical to me.
See above. There is no relationship between appreciating the artistic effort and rolling over to be trampled over by jackbooted jackasses only so they can get their greed satisfied by peddling cookie-cutter, assembly-line, mass manufactured "art". Thus no "hypocrisy" here.
Please explain that last part, because I can't see any logic in that statement.
Not only that, but he seems to be ignorant of the fact that government is a two-sided transaction: the voters pay taxes to finance the activities of the government they supposedly elected. The transaction becomes one-sided only if the government ceases to do the taxpayer's will. Thus the whole point of the exercise is to come up with a way to get the government to keep its side of the deal, which incidentally is the same problem as with, say, a plumber or a roofer one paid a deposit to, but made vastly more complex as they are multiple "customers" here, many with directly contradictory to each other's demands.
Your comments give me one word - see: bigotry. Yes, it applies for peoples' opinions on companies too.
Yes, yes, and it was us the deniers of Corporate Divinity, unbeliever heathen "bigots" who caused the banking meltdown too, whereby hundreds of the wealthiest and most respected corporations engaged in gambling on credit to the tune of trillions... but we are just dumb and "do not understand" the "sophistication of CEOs"! Surely!
I mean if billion dollar corporations with tens of thousands of employees and 100 floor sky-scrapers in Manhattan could engage in all kinds of such fun, a rinky-dinky game company just must be Angelically Pure As Driven Snow.... no?
From one source alone, I can see 4,348 have downloaded the game with 1,350 in the process of getting it. I'm certain if you wanted to spend the time getting, stats from various sources of the game, you can prove their numbers.
Those numbers are also unreliable. There are trackers out there reporting 200k peers for some idiotic C-grade 10 year old movies. A quick scan of the top aggregate sites shows total peers/seeds well below 10k. With an exception of some loony tracker reporting 20k peers to 44 seeds - which is a joke given a multitude of other trackers with sane ratios.
But if you're so certain they're full of shit, why don't you gather the numbers and prove them wrong?
Because the onus of proof is on those who make the original proclamation, not on the skeptics. That is a basic rule of scientific discovery. Also, showing the real numbers using the torrent trackers is impossible. Torrent sites frequently show bogus numbers (like that 20k above) or torrent tracker stats are routinely, purposefully poisoned by the likes of Media Defender. Just as you cannot trust Stardock's numbers, you also cannot trust the torrent trackers.
It's funny how when Google says they have a few million Gwhatever users, we don't get a bunch of posts in here saying they're making the numbers up
There are no such posts because these numbers are meaningless to anyone but possibly some shareholders of Google, who by the way would be idiots to believe them without verification.
You're trying to tell me that the CEO of Stardock is making up the number of connections to Stardock's servers, which is easy for them to measure.
No, what I am saying is that we have no way to tell if he is full of it. And so we should view his statements through the lens of that inability. Then if you add to this his previous statements and other possible explanations...
Sorry, but I'm going to need more then "he said it, it must be wrong!" to buy that. He's the only one in this conversation with the actual data to count.
I never said that he is wrong, I only said that we have no way to tell and that others with similar motivations were caught making implausible statements very much along the line of his. For example, some believe, with a good reason, that 100k "pirates" is not a plausible number given the popularity of these games. Very similar to the implausible multi-billion dollar "losses" of the music industry, of which we too have no method of verification.
What they did wrong is put a version check in on game startup. So all those pirate copies were hitting the servers. They're pretty open that they screwed that up. But it also wouldn't have been a real problem without the pirate traffic being five times more then the legitimate traffic.
Or some malicious ex-employee used a bot-net to bring them down or.... etc and so on. Look, "piracy" (even if we take the numbers at face value) is not the only, not even the most likely explanation.
If you're going to say that someone elses numbers are wrong when they're the only ones in a position to have the actual numbers, you need to back that up.
You got it precisely backwards. The onus of proof is on the person proclaiming their "numbers" as accurate, not on the skeptic that challenges them. My example illustrated that quite nicely, although it seems to have went over your head at orbital altitude.
Or at least, in an intelligent discussion you would. Here on the Internet it's a lot of "well piracy is okay because I'm a cheapskate, so I'm sure the person who knows the real count is lying!"
See above. What I demanded is precisely what any empiricist would do. I used logic and an established procedure for verification of data. What you demand is that we apply the "arguments" of the Creationists to everything, which goes something like "There are 27 and a half Angels on the end of a pin and it is up to you to prove me wrong! You cannot? Hah! It's only right that you Heathens would be so powerless against the Glory of my Divine Knowledge!!!"...
Well, if these guys really used to have a more lenient stance on DRM and have only moved towards stricter attitudes over time, you'd think there might be a reason for that.... If Stardock indeed used to have a lenient stance at least in the past, clearly they didn't have these motivations. If their opinion has changed, they've either picked up these ulterior motives over time (which, I suppose, is also a possibility), or they've actually come to believe that it's necessary due to the piracy figures.
Actually this is quite common. Small, hungry companies start out with the promise to be "different" and "gamer friendly" etc, some get successful and more successful they get, more money the owners see filling their bank accounts, greedier they get. Soon after the Ferraris and the yachts get purchased, the greed becomes a burning, unquenchable desire that soon is overshadowing everything. Paranoia sets in that some "thieves" are looking to take it all away, the government "goon" tax-men, the undeserving uppity employees, the "pirates" etc and so on.
Stardock is just a latest example of this.
If they believe in that themselves and also state it as the reason in public, they would seem to have less incentive to forge the figures than the big corps who also have completely different reasons for wanting to yell "omg pirates!111".
See above. Also, in this particular case, there are other possible motivations, such as a dispute with business partners over launch dates or a possible cover-up for a screwup with the multi-player servers that was discovered too late to fix before launch and Stardock was seeking excuses as to why they will not be operational and many other possibilities like simple incompetence...
Companies have a financial incentive to follow the facts where they lead. If piracy helps them or harms them - they benefit by accurately perceiving the situation. Pirates, on the other hand, are always biased towards legitimizing piracy.
Hahahahahahah! Snort!
Follow what?! Facts?! Wherever they lead?! Whatever it is you are smoking, it must be really strong!
But back here in the non-pharmaceutically-altered-reality however companies follow profits to wherever it takes to get more profits... but then again it is the sole purpose of companies. If lying, cheating and thieving will get you more profits, many, if not most, companies would perform a quick risk-to-profit computation and then if it came positive, engage in whatever the activity with no second thought whatsoever. For more information, see also under: Enron, WorldCom, AIG, etc etc etc.
Err, easy to measure by whom, exactly? Certainly not us, the audience of these proclamations. Why, by the same token, my toilet-bowl-based Cold Fusion reactor produces easy to measure 2MW of electricity... except it seems to stop working as soon as someone else than me or my employee researchers get into close proximity... but because it is easy to measure you will just have trust me on that one!
You're REALLY going to sit here and say that Stardock isn't capable of counting connections to their own servers, or that they made up a bunch of connection numbers randomly, while spending the entire Easter Weekend working overtime to try and get things working due to Gamestop breaking the street date?
Or perhaps they fucked up something and are now covering their butts by pointing fingers at their business partners and "pirates". There are other motivations possible here other then the one you are asked to sheepishly believe, you know...
Why don't you show me your numbers showing how his numbers are wrong? Oh wait, thats right. You're just making shit up to fit your little preconceived world view.
The stupidity of this statement can only be demonstrated by a demand for you to disclose your "numbers" showing that my "numbers" of UFO spaceships infecting my dog's anus are wrong... oh wait, that's right, you cannot...
Why, oh why is it that everyone is so gullible around here and just assumes that the data, as presented, has any relationship whatsoever to reality? Can any one of you verify this claim of hundreds of thousands of "pirates"?! Isn't the man telling you this a rather biased source, who has, based on his Stardock forums posts long since regretted not putting DRM in his stuff and has been increasingly draconian about the updates, activations, use of Impulse update software and what not? How is it that no one bothers to ask these questions before simply taking these dire proclamations at face value?
Do you guys start pulling your hair out and beating your chests in penitence every time some Sony or Warner announces that they "lost" 20 times the GDP of France to "piracy" last week?! Do you?
Because this wholly disinterested, neutral, completely uninvolved party has announced that their unverifiable "data" is a wholesome and complete "justification" for the change in their DRM policy... and in no way would that be a PR stunt designed to "explain" a pre-arranged change instigated by some executive or an external "consultant" in a "we were forced to, against our tearful wishes" style. No, not possible! Never!
Make sure to ignore some unkind skeptics amongst us who just might recall the equally scientific Multi-gazillion-bazillion-delusion-fever-zillion "losses" routinely announced by the likes of RIAA and MPAA...
Then the paranoid amongst us might point out that Stardock's Frogboy has been rather vocal about forcing his users to use the new "non-DRM-DRM" concoction of his, quite a bit before this fiasco... coincidences, pure coincidences!
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The CD is just a medium. If you are "entirely free to sell that copy howsoever [you] chose", then you can choose to sell the music without the CD....
Of course since the music does not belong to you and you have not actually bought anything but a piece of plastic and a limited license, you cannot sell the music in any format you wish, only as coupled to the physical object it came on, i.e. the CD. In case of digital downloads, you can't sell it at all since there is no physical medium to permanently attach the thing to.
But again, even this simple and obvious thing escapes you.
You gotta be kidding. Put up your MP3s on ebay and see how fast you end up in the slammer.
Not at all. Make an MP3 and then break your CD in half. Only one copy will exist then. Try selling it. Also every time your CD plays in your CD player a copy is made, processed and mathematical transforms applied to it until it is copied onto analog electrical signal driving the speakers. Then it is copied onto another medium, i.e. air particles, and transmitted to you. Multiple copies at each playback. You thief you.
Again, none of these are restrictions dealing with transfer of ownership from the seller. Which I already pointed out. Multiple times. Having a restriction on items you bought in order to say, further public safety, is not immediately synonymous with not having the ownership of the said items. Only if the person who "sold" you the stuff manages to somehow remain to be the owner, you run into this problem. If anything, one could argue, and some libertarians do, that in the case of all of these other "restricted" items, the government becomes part-owner of the things. But in none of these cases it is the original seller.
Yes you are. You are restricted to not re-selling the limited license to the film in any format other then what came on the original medium you licensed. That is because you never bought the actual film, only a restrictive license to a particular use of the film. Which is what I keep pointing out.
Not at all. It all goes to the "hideous logical contortions" of yours and is well in line with debunking of your repeated claims that you are "purchasing" music. Shame on you for trying to weasel out from under this so pathetically.
The cognitive dissonance in your head must be frightening. I keep demonstrating over and over again that you never get to "purchase" music, only to license it for a very specific use, with a multitude of devastating examples ... and you still pretend that somehow it all does not exist. And then keep whining about "fundamentalism". I am starting to suspect that there is something wrong with you which makes you subco
You apparently live in some self-populated land of delusion whereby things like logic do not exist and all arguments can only be won or lost by a call-in poll of fans of a TV-show. In this Universe however there exist a way of losing an argument that involves you being shown to be spewing an illogical hypocritical idiocy, which I have demonstrated, who upon being shown this idiocy of his attempts to bray at high volume and in copious amounts in order to obscure the issue and redirect the conversation onto his personal feelings. "Emotionally upset"? Dude, you are a veritable comedy. The only emotion you are getting out of me is laughter.
You wouldn't recognize logic if it had somehow acquired a mass of a hundred tons and proceeded to collide with your face resulting in loss of all your teeth. As to your goals, "attempting to weasel out of an embarrassing mess of your own making" is far more like it.
Try selling it then, sans the CD it came on. Even once. If it is "yours", like any real private property, say a chair, or a car, you should be able to do it, no?
The license is implicit in the copyright law. That is the whole point of these "restrictions". A real sale does not have any "restrictions" on post-sale use of any items sold in favour of the seller. Only a limited license does so. You will be unable to show any incident with real, non-"intellectual" "private property" (i.e. the physical kind) whereby an item sold has "restrictions" on its use by the customer in favour of the manufacturer. You might have agreed to further restrictions by means of some click-through EULA as is the case with software, but the core licensing element is "agreed to" by all recipients by the blanket means of copyright law. And that is incidentally one of the key arguments of the opponents of copyright, that this process violates the whole spirit of contractual agreements by denying someone the ability to not "sign" the contract, as copyright binds you even if you find the CD in the garbage dump.
The "copy" is the thing you rented, or more specifically were "licensed" to use for "personal enjoyment only" and with a host of other restrictions. Just like when you rent an apartment, you do not end up "purchasing" it at all, and yet the apartment is there for you to live in, as long as you pay rent. All you have "purchased" is the rental agreement.
Sort of like your original "fundamentalists" and the "dinosaurs" bit, no? More projection.
No, that is not an "opinion". It is actually a conflict between the official position of MPAA, RIAA and the like and your own delusions which you defend so vehemently. You see, you are only granted a limited license to "use" the music when you give money to a music publisher. You never actually "purchase" it (unless you are a publisher or a distributor yourself, and even then what is being sold is "rights" to the music, not the music itself). I know that you are hopelessly confused, but perhaps you should look up the difference between these concepts before engaging in any discussion on the subject.
Of course I do present sound and logical reasoning, it is no fault of mine however that it goes over your head so badly that it might as well have been in orbit.
Actually, based on your never-ending, desperate whining, I must conclude that you are simply a petulant idiot who will cling to his losing argument ever more desperately all the while pretending that if he does not see his errors, no one else will. And, yes, that was an "ad hominem", one which you richly deserve.
There is precious little to de-construct in your posts but your whining. All your posts, excluding the initial one to which I originally responded consist mainly of moaning about your poor wittle sensitive self being maligned by big brutish me.
All of which is in no way contradictory to being a submissive to some failed ideology. You keep beating your chest, keep protesting your virtues, but in the end you go on and support the "intellectual property" nonsense in all its ugly glory. You remind me of people who go to Communist Party meetings, attend rallies, partake in protests, sleep with the Communist Manifesto under their pillows and then run to the local mall to buy 20 pairs of brand-name, "latest fashion" clothes made by some conglomerate in Uganda in a factory where all the doors are chained and employees are on average 12 years old, because the dude in the TV ad said that there will be "free" CDs of some "pop star" with every sale. Poseur is the term.
This is pointless. You not only have no clue about the distinctions between a "purchase" and a "limited license", you are apparently proud of your ignorance.
It is not an "ad hominem" argument if I merely point out that your own words demonstrate that you were swindled, utterly and completely. The word "purchase" in reference to "music" was a dead giveaway.
That is just a possible explanation as to why you allow yourself to be swindled, but it does not change the fact that swindled you are, as evidenced by your own proud claim. Other possibilities involve gullibility, unquestioning submissiveness to authority etc.
The conversation about greed is a mere side-show to the main topic of the ludicrous nature of "intellectual property" since the motivations of the peddlers and scammers do not actually impact the mechanics of the scam itself. As to demonstrations of your being incorrect, I only have to point to your own laughable admission that you are under a silly illusion that you are actually "purchasing" music.
Remember, it was you who accused us of "hideous logical contortions", while at the same time engaging in an utterly hideous logical contortion that would somehow associate the idea of "purchasing" with the idea of "music". Not only you demonstrate the depth of such contortions that one has to go to to "justify" the notion of "intellectual property", you failed to demonstrate even one instance in which us, that is those who see "intellectual property" as the scam it is, engage in such "hideous logical contortions". And then, in a time-honoured style of demagogues all over, you demand that it is your detractors who must prove you wrong, naturally ignoring the wee little fact that the onus of proof is on you, the maker of the original claim, not on those who question it.
And so not only did you fail to show these "hideous logical contortions" you accuse us of, you actually managed to engage in one yourself. And then amidst all of this anti-scientific illogic of yours, you have the arrogance to talk about us being "fundamentalists" who try to "rationalize" dinosaurs. Psychologists would call your activities "projection".
Apples and oranges. Compared to an F16, a 747 is a sluggish, huge, slow moving target. The 747 cockpit is near 30% size of the F16 itself. For a skilled combat pilot its like shooting the proverbial sitting duck, no matter what the terrorists would do to try to avoid being targeted, a 747 is simply not capable of any useful air combat manoeuvres and would simply come apart from g-forces if one were to attempt such.
Your "analogy" is completely dishonest.
All they have to do is to hit the cockpit with the cannon (as to prevent further manoeuvres by the terrorists) and then the engines/wings until enough propulsion/flight surfaces are destroyed. That was always the standard procedure when fighters attacked much larger bomber planes. You do not actually have to destroy the thing in the air, only to make sure to start attacking when the large plane is heading in the direction you want it to go down at, and then the rest is momentum/gravity.
The "argument" you made is usually made by those peddling "intellectual property", and thus demonstrably in thralls of unlimited avarice that has to be satisfied at all costs, even if it means loss of freedom to hundreds of millions of people and derailing the course of the entire civilization. But it seems that you have the dubious honour of being simply a hapless "mark" of the "intellectual property" scam artists, a "mark" so completely bamboozled that he actually thinks he is "purchasing" music! Quite a riot, that.
But then again, sociologists tell us that people who are susceptible to scams are so because the scam artists are able to get the victims to identify with the scammers, and to appeal to the "mark's" greed. And so usually the very people who defend the "intellectual property" most vocally, are seeing themselves as potential "artists", "inventors" and what-not, who stand to lose tremendously "in the future" should the "intellectual property" scam be somehow compromised. This is very similar psychology to that of a trailer-park dweller who vehemently opposes deep taxation of the top 1% of billionaires, because it would "hurt him when he becomes one" (not "if", naturally). Which is about to happen any minute now .... imminently ... any minute now .... in 3 .. 2 ...
You are assuming that if the plane was actually piloted by terrorists it would have been allowed anywhere near densely populated areas with two F16s on its tail. Secondly you assume that the plane could not have been disabled in such a way as to prevent further manoeuvring, as for example by targeting the cockpit, which combined with timing of the attack could have prevented it from altering course away from an impact zone in, say, the river. Having a plane operated by terrorists this close to Manhattan with F16s merely meekly following it was a dead giveway that there was no terror attack under way as otherwise the situation would have been "resolved" long before the people downtown got to even see the plane, unless of course the F16s were operated by clowns whose commanders were dunces.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with morale. People were running around panicking in the buildings and on the ground, heedless of the fact that there was really no choice between disabling the plane and letting it impact some office tower. The F16s would have opened fire as soon as it became apparent that the plane is targeting buildings. And so the point is that all the freaking out and hysteria on the ground were utterly baseless.
Not only that, but one would think that two F16s would be more then enough to put an end to it if the plane was actually overrun with terrorists and heading for some tall building...
The thing is called "Wolfram Alpha", probably as in "Alpha and Omega".
Enough said.
Reminds of this Super Genius.
I have done so many times here on Slashdot. To make it short: the concept of "private property" can be applied only to objects with certain physical characteristics, like a unique location in the space-time continuum, for example, amongst many others. Which restricts the idea basically to physical objects. Thus, say, a chair, can be "owned" (i.e. controlled) by a person, transferred (with a corresponding loss of control by the original "owner") to another person, etc and so on. Information lacks these properties. We do not even know its true nature, but what we do know is directly contradictory to the idea of "private property". For example, an integer number "5" is a singular (i.e. there is only one of those in existence in the entire Universe) entity, but which lacks a specific space-time continuum coordinates, and which at the same time can be present in minds of billions of people, encoded with an infinite number of different encoding systems on an infinite number of media, etc and so on. The same applies to any sequence of integers. So to say that a series of numbers has an "owner" would imply that somehow a person can "control" the integer numbers, God-like, in whatever ethereal dimension they exist. Which is clearly not the case. Information cannot be simply so restricted by humans. Furthermore, its other properties (like an ability to propagate infinitely) present additional departures from the idea of "private property". Since information can be transmitted (i.e. patterns are replicated) rather then "moved" (as it is with physical objects) in order to "control" it one has to supervise all transfer of information in order to restrict the "owned" kind, in any form, which is what the MPAAs and the like are attempting, without regard of the type of information being transmitted as all channels can contain the "owned" patterns. In short the idea of "intellectual property" and "total surveillance" or "thought control" are synonymous from the point of view of theory of information. But then again, information can propagate without transmission. Two people at the other ends of the planet can independently discover that 2+2=4. The view of the "intelectual property" demagogues is that the second person doing so, without ever being aware of the first one, is then a "thief". I could go on, but this should give you a general idea.
Clearly you have not been giving it much thought.
These are illogical. But some people use these phrases because they, intuitively, feel that something is seriously wrong with the whole concept of "intellectual property". Their instincts are correct, but they simply have not looked at the problem in depth.
No, it is nowhere that simple. This is the, patently and demonstrably incorrect, position of the "intellectual property" peddlers. The objective truth is that information can be "discovered" quite independently. In fact we do not know the true nature of information, as it appears to have a duality similar to that of, say, light, whereby at one time the light can be thought of as composed of discrete particles and at another time as a wave. Similarly, information can be "transmitted" and at some other times "discovered". And at the same time only one integer number 5 still exists in the Universe, thus making the idea of its "transmission" rather peculiar, giving to notions of multiple "impressions" or "representations" of the same uni
As soon as you demonstrate how the "intellectual property" crap is logically consistent with the fundamental properties of information, and thus basic physical characteristics of the Universe, I will stop taking pea-brained, cretin AC's like you for the hypocritical abusers of the Slashdot moderation system they are, with nothing whatsoever to contribute to the discussion and only existing to leave their smelly turds behind all over Slashdot as "proof" of their worthless existence.
Until then however ...
The cynical bastard would be at fault for lacking an ability for nuance. There is a whole scale of settings from "no money to pay bills but full of great hope" via "break even", followed by "making moderate profit", then onto "getting rich" all the way to "making a fucking blind killing". The problem with the cynical bastard's assessment is that the ultra-greed-overdrive kicks in usually somewhere between "making moderate profit" and "getting rich", not at the "no money to pay bills but full of great hope" stage - as that is when the company is usually "small and hungry".
If anything, the cynical bastards should muse about the propensity of money to corrupt the human soul.
One has nothing to do with the other. One can put all the DRM on the planet in a game and then fib about the "piracy" rates to justify the costs to investors. One can decide to shift the whole business to online-delivered, phone-home activated "non DRM" as Stardock have done and then one can proceed to fabricate an "example" to "justify" such an unpopular change which is vehemently opposed by some customers. So the fact that one has DRM in the first place or is just on his way to put it in, or have none at all, bears no relationship on the desire to fabricate the piracy "numbers". In all cases there exist some motivations to do so.
Err, Stardock was on its way to online-activated DRM "non DRM" solution long before this. Which was vocally opposed by some of its customers. Whom this "example" is possibly meant to "shut up". If being skeptical of corporate PR mumbo-jumbo, irrespective of what company it comes from or how genial and "hip" the CEO is, if demanding objective analysis and an ability to verify bold pronouncements of businessmen means to be "juvenile pricks" then many of us will wear the badge proudly.
No, actually we are telling you that the method you are using to get paid is fucked. We have nothing against artists and scientist getting rewarded, but we do become somewhat pissed off if they decide that they will kick us in our collective faces, violate our basic rights, corrupt our politicians to get them to write laws defying basic physics and generally and piss on our freedoms, all so that they (or more precisely their handlers, "distributors" and other parasites) can get filthy rich.
See above. There is no relationship between appreciating the artistic effort and rolling over to be trampled over by jackbooted jackasses only so they can get their greed satisfied by peddling cookie-cutter, assembly-line, mass manufactured "art". Thus no "hypocrisy" here.
Not only that, but he seems to be ignorant of the fact that government is a two-sided transaction: the voters pay taxes to finance the activities of the government they supposedly elected. The transaction becomes one-sided only if the government ceases to do the taxpayer's will. Thus the whole point of the exercise is to come up with a way to get the government to keep its side of the deal, which incidentally is the same problem as with, say, a plumber or a roofer one paid a deposit to, but made vastly more complex as they are multiple "customers" here, many with directly contradictory to each other's demands.
Yes, yes, and it was us the deniers of Corporate Divinity, unbeliever heathen "bigots" who caused the banking meltdown too, whereby hundreds of the wealthiest and most respected corporations engaged in gambling on credit to the tune of trillions ... but we are just dumb and "do not understand" the "sophistication of CEOs"! Surely!
I mean if billion dollar corporations with tens of thousands of employees and 100 floor sky-scrapers in Manhattan could engage in all kinds of such fun, a rinky-dinky game company just must be Angelically Pure As Driven Snow .... no?
Those numbers are also unreliable. There are trackers out there reporting 200k peers for some idiotic C-grade 10 year old movies. A quick scan of the top aggregate sites shows total peers/seeds well below 10k. With an exception of some loony tracker reporting 20k peers to 44 seeds - which is a joke given a multitude of other trackers with sane ratios.
Because the onus of proof is on those who make the original proclamation, not on the skeptics. That is a basic rule of scientific discovery. Also, showing the real numbers using the torrent trackers is impossible. Torrent sites frequently show bogus numbers (like that 20k above) or torrent tracker stats are routinely, purposefully poisoned by the likes of Media Defender. Just as you cannot trust Stardock's numbers, you also cannot trust the torrent trackers.
There are no such posts because these numbers are meaningless to anyone but possibly some shareholders of Google, who by the way would be idiots to believe them without verification.
No, what I am saying is that we have no way to tell if he is full of it. And so we should view his statements through the lens of that inability. Then if you add to this his previous statements and other possible explanations ...
I never said that he is wrong, I only said that we have no way to tell and that others with similar motivations were caught making implausible statements very much along the line of his. For example, some believe, with a good reason, that 100k "pirates" is not a plausible number given the popularity of these games. Very similar to the implausible multi-billion dollar "losses" of the music industry, of which we too have no method of verification.
Or some malicious ex-employee used a bot-net to bring them down or .... etc and so on. Look, "piracy" (even if we take the numbers at face value) is not the only, not even the most likely explanation.
You got it precisely backwards. The onus of proof is on the person proclaiming their "numbers" as accurate, not on the skeptic that challenges them. My example illustrated that quite nicely, although it seems to have went over your head at orbital altitude.
See above. What I demanded is precisely what any empiricist would do. I used logic and an established procedure for verification of data. What you demand is that we apply the "arguments" of the Creationists to everything, which goes something like "There are 27 and a half Angels on the end of a pin and it is up to you to prove me wrong! You cannot? Hah! It's only right that you Heathens would be so powerless against the Glory of my Divine Knowledge!!!" ...
Actually this is quite common. Small, hungry companies start out with the promise to be "different" and "gamer friendly" etc, some get successful and more successful they get, more money the owners see filling their bank accounts, greedier they get. Soon after the Ferraris and the yachts get purchased, the greed becomes a burning, unquenchable desire that soon is overshadowing everything. Paranoia sets in that some "thieves" are looking to take it all away, the government "goon" tax-men, the undeserving uppity employees, the "pirates" etc and so on.
Stardock is just a latest example of this.
See above. Also, in this particular case, there are other possible motivations, such as a dispute with business partners over launch dates or a possible cover-up for a screwup with the multi-player servers that was discovered too late to fix before launch and Stardock was seeking excuses as to why they will not be operational and many other possibilities like simple incompetence ...
Hahahahahahah! Snort!
Follow what?! Facts?! Wherever they lead?! Whatever it is you are smoking, it must be really strong!
But back here in the non-pharmaceutically-altered-reality however companies follow profits to wherever it takes to get more profits ... but then again it is the sole purpose of companies. If lying, cheating and thieving will get you more profits, many, if not most, companies would perform a quick risk-to-profit computation and then if it came positive, engage in whatever the activity with no second thought whatsoever. For more information, see also under: Enron, WorldCom, AIG, etc etc etc.
Err, easy to measure by whom, exactly? Certainly not us, the audience of these proclamations. Why, by the same token, my toilet-bowl-based Cold Fusion reactor produces easy to measure 2MW of electricity ... except it seems to stop working as soon as someone else than me or my employee researchers get into close proximity ... but because it is easy to measure you will just have trust me on that one!
Or perhaps they fucked up something and are now covering their butts by pointing fingers at their business partners and "pirates". There are other motivations possible here other then the one you are asked to sheepishly believe, you know...
The stupidity of this statement can only be demonstrated by a demand for you to disclose your "numbers" showing that my "numbers" of UFO spaceships infecting my dog's anus are wrong ... oh wait, that's right, you cannot ...
Why, oh why is it that everyone is so gullible around here and just assumes that the data, as presented, has any relationship whatsoever to reality? Can any one of you verify this claim of hundreds of thousands of "pirates"?! Isn't the man telling you this a rather biased source, who has, based on his Stardock forums posts long since regretted not putting DRM in his stuff and has been increasingly draconian about the updates, activations, use of Impulse update software and what not? How is it that no one bothers to ask these questions before simply taking these dire proclamations at face value?
Do you guys start pulling your hair out and beating your chests in penitence every time some Sony or Warner announces that they "lost" 20 times the GDP of France to "piracy" last week?! Do you?
Because this wholly disinterested, neutral, completely uninvolved party has announced that their unverifiable "data" is a wholesome and complete "justification" for the change in their DRM policy... and in no way would that be a PR stunt designed to "explain" a pre-arranged change instigated by some executive or an external "consultant" in a "we were forced to, against our tearful wishes" style. No, not possible! Never!
Make sure to ignore some unkind skeptics amongst us who just might recall the equally scientific Multi-gazillion-bazillion-delusion-fever-zillion "losses" routinely announced by the likes of RIAA and MPAA ...
Then the paranoid amongst us might point out that Stardock's Frogboy has been rather vocal about forcing his users to use the new "non-DRM-DRM" concoction of his, quite a bit before this fiasco... coincidences, pure coincidences!