Somewhere you assume (like detractors of the GPL) that just because the creation is freely copyable, that the creator must be denied payment for it.
If a large number of people want Star Wars VII to be produced there's nothing stopping them pooling their resources to fund its production. The fact that the end result enters the public domain is irrelevant. The film is funded. The audience have their movie. Where's the harm?
I'm not tearing down the existing system. The existing system is disintegrating of its own accord in the face of the inevitable advent of instantaneous diffusion.
I'm suggesting that copyright should be abolished as a kindness to the citizens that are, and will be, singled out for punishment as an ineffective lesson to the rest of society.
Society isn't corrupt. Copyright is an anachronism on the Internet. It is the corporations' futile attempts to enforce it that is the true crime.
You cannot seriously believe that all art will come to an end.
No business model has a right to exist in an inherently unsuitable environment. Copyright was created in an era when only a few publishers existed, and was only to grant publishers the ability to protect a brief, exclusive monopoly over publication. It was not intended to permit multinational megacorps to bankrupt non-commercial citizens on the roll of a die.
Open Source and the Creative Commons are beginning to demonstrate that even when copying is expressly permitted, the creators are not necessarily denied reward for their labours.
The abolition of copyright will not see artists on one side of a chasm and willing consumers on the other, unable to do business with each other. That prospect comes from a lack of imagination.
The time should match the crime, certainly, but you have to admit that if a burglar breaks into your home, steals your PC, discovers your home movie collection of you and your loved one in the buff and then shares them all on Kazaa...
Now, should it matter whether or not you were going to publish them yourself at some point?
The issue is, some lowlife stole your IP and published it without your permission.
Perhaps you were never going to publish it? Perhaps you were going to sell it to some adult website? In both cases, you've lost valuable privacy, or valuable property.
In this case the burglar is a thief.
If you had publised your works, and then someone submitted them to Kazaa, well that's just a copyright infringement.
This distinction of pre/post-publication is also extremely important to the Open Source community.
If you and a team of coders are working on an OSS engine of some sort that you will be paid very handsomely to complete, you may have a contract with a client that is protected by you on the basis of "no money, no source code". If the client can simply pay a hacker to break into your systems, steal the code just before the contract is signed-off, then they don't need to pay you. Would you say that such theft was fine and dandy?
Of course, once the client hands over the money, the code is open anyway, but you don't want it leaked beforehand or bye-bye money.
SO, with the FMA (subset of FECA), a third party is now specifically permitted to distribute works that consist of the following kind of instructions:
"For Movie X perform the following: Play N seconds Pause N seconds Skip N seconds Blank screen etc. ".
Obviously, this is pretty much sufficient to produce any order-preserved subset of video.
However, given a set of several of these 'subset' works, and an implicit instruction to add the combined output on a video mixer, what you end up with is sufficient to create absolutely any re-ordering or intermingling of frame sequences.
Now, you may think that no one is going to go and buy 50 or so DVDs necessary to produce the final combined work. You'd be right. However, that's not the point.
The point is, the FMA now permits artists to legitmately distribute 'video subset programs' without committing copyright infringement. An artist just says here's a list of subset programs I've created - I call it my 'Adjunct' Album.
It'll be quite easy for the punter to locate the necessary movie ingredients via filesharing systems. Indeed, they probably just have to search for 'Adjunct' and they get the finished work. The FMA however, permits an artist to openly publish and take the credit for such works.
So, this permits video mashups - derivative works prohibited prior to FMA.
Although this law probably takes no account of how lax security may be in terms of allow unwitting would-be publishers getting hold of a pre-release work, it is morally laudable.
I'm all for abolishing copyright as applied to published works, but unpublished works are the only true 'intellectual property'.
If it's unpublished, it remains property. Once published, it belongs to the people and enters the public domain.
The archaic 'copyright incentive' was only a sweetener that granted a publication monopoly for a limited time. It's time that ended (at least on the Internet).
So, yes, if the IP is unpublished and under lock and key, then anyone who steals it and publishes it is a criminal of the first order. Although, someone who privately distributes something under NDA to 50,000 conference delegates does not really deserve as much damages as a movie company who has distributed a DVD to 50 reviewers.
Therefore, 'simply having 20,000 MP3 files on your computer' is legal, but having them on a shared mount on a public network isn't.
The courts have yet to decide on this.
At the moment the poor punter is happy to be persuaded and settle up.
If the courts decide that 'making available' does not constitute infringing distribution, then CRIA supposedly should collect more evidence of actual files being uploaded (to users other than just the CRIA's agents).
Notice how none of them define uploading as merely the act of advertising a file's existence on the server?
Nevertheless, people aren't being sued for uploading, but for offering to upload, i.e. 'making available'.
Canadian law doesn't protect anyone from being sued for doing anything, so that's a red herring.
The tragedy here isn't copyright infringement, it's that corporations can use threat of litigation to commit extortion on private individuals with which they have no contract or prior arrangement.
If you read the history books you'll find that copyright was intended to permit one publishing business to prosecute another. It was not intended to permit a large corporation to bankrupt a non-commercial individual.
Uploading is to push a file to another receptive computer that is acting as a subsequent distributor/file-server.
Downloading is to pull a file from such a server.
'Making availble' is the industry term for advertising a list of filenames with the implicit offer to collaborate with any requestor to manufacture a copy of any file on the requestor's computer.
So, simply having 20,000 MP3 files on your computer is not a copyright infringement - they could all be fair-use copies made from purchased CDs. They could even be virtual files that are created on demand from a CD jukebox.
However, people are being sued for OFFERING to provide copies of files.
The RIAA has never shown evidence in court that someone has participated in manufacturing a large number of copies of copyrighted files to a section of the public (without the copyrightholder's permission).
Everyone settles out of court - well as far as we know... maybe there's the occasional lawyer that RIAA apologises to "Oh, sorry your honour, we didn't realise Billy Bob was your son. Sorry to trouble you. Have a nice day."
I must admit, once upon a time when I was a Doom addict, I once drove home immediately after an intense evening session at the office (Argonaut). Trouble is, what with relying on walls to guide you, I drove like I could bounce off the kerbs instead of bothering to steer carefully. Blowing out a tyre on a kerb is a bit of a pain. So after that I made damn sure I allowed a fair bit of rest for the game dynamics to dissipate before driving.
There's no problem with commercial use really, because if anyone can sell something that has been produced from something that is free, then they have patently added value, and justly deserve remuneration for the value they've added.
If you believe they've added no value, then you don't buy it. No-one's forcing you to.
However, you don't have a right to someone else's work for free simply because you commissioned the original art upon which they based their derivative.
While it may well be wise to colonise the rest of the solar system to avoid extinction, it may not be necessary to send humans into space for exploration purposes......IF we develop an instantaneous communication technology.
This is because we could then explore space telepresently and vastly more economically.
Advertising is one of the few things that can't demonstrate a clear revenue stream.
BBC makes its money through eyeballs just like the dot com sites did, i.e. if they fail to convince people to watch BBC programmes, no more license fee - no more revenue.
Yes tons of commercials about other BBC TV & radio programmes, dramas, movies, DAB, charity events, BBC merchandise, TV licensing, BBC funded events, etc.
In the good old days, before the advent of interminable BBC commercials, you just had 2-5 second intros, e.g. "And now, Dr Who" - or 30 minutes of glorious test card (or if you were really lucky, 'closedown').
This is an ideal job for The Digital Art Auction! It's designed precisely for this purpose, i.e. enabling a large audience to collectively fund an expensive work such as a TV series.
Moreover it ensures that everyone pays the same price, and no-one pays who can't afford the price.
The short version is that we have to ultimately have a distributed atomic transaction on our objects. In other words, at some point the system of replica objects has to commit to the same state everywhere in the same pseudo-time and as close to possible in the same real-time. If things go wrong -- and there are many kinds of things that can go wrong in a highly distributed system of machines and networks of different speeds and reliability -- we have to make sure that when the dust clears either the entire new version got computed, committed to and labeled, or no part of that transaction happened at all (just like in a banking transaction, we can't have money being moved from one account to another be disturbed by any kind of error or crash. The source has to decrement and the destination has to increment, or neither)
NOoooooooooooo!!!
You're not dealing with bank accounts. You're dealing with reality - it only has to appear to be consistent.
The key idea in TeaTime is that the state of objects evolves through a distributed two-phase commit protocol. Behaviors of all objects that influence each other are first computed, contingent on completion of all dependent object behaviors, and then those behaviors are atomically committed. If the behaviors are not completed in time, all contingent calculations are undone by the individual objects.
There simply isn't enough time to ensure consistency across multiple nodes. Or rather, it's a combinatorial explosion problem and thus non-scalable. And don't tell me you can partition the world into neat little isolated chunks - reality is continuous.
Each node simply has to do the best it can, and live with the fact that it will not produce quite the same result as its neighbours. Hence why you need to distribute state and not events.
Keep on having strange, massive explosions at worrying times until eventually the media get bored about conjecturing whether they're nuclear or not and then one day you really do set off a nuclear bomb. And the media just goes "Yeah, whatever..."
The media is currently the biggest threat to global security. It encourages acts of terrorism (it simply can't help giving oxygen of publicity - until an atrocity is no longer newsworthy, and then more serious atrocities are invented to compensate), and also encourages tricks like this one of NK to deliberately make massive explosions unnewsworthy.
What's the solution? Maximise the ability for downtrodden minorities with grudges to vent their issues to large and relevant audiences - before they seek out 'oxygen of publicity' via other means.
It's better to communicate with the bitter and twisted BEFORE they attempt to communicate with you.
Slashdot Mirror
Somewhere you assume (like detractors of the GPL) that just because the creation is freely copyable, that the creator must be denied payment for it.
If a large number of people want Star Wars VII to be produced there's nothing stopping them pooling their resources to fund its production. The fact that the end result enters the public domain is irrelevant. The film is funded. The audience have their movie. Where's the harm?
I'm not tearing down the existing system. The existing system is disintegrating of its own accord in the face of the inevitable advent of instantaneous diffusion.
I'm suggesting that copyright should be abolished as a kindness to the citizens that are, and will be, singled out for punishment as an ineffective lesson to the rest of society.
Society isn't corrupt. Copyright is an anachronism on the Internet. It is the corporations' futile attempts to enforce it that is the true crime.
You cannot seriously believe that all art will come to an end.
No business model has a right to exist in an inherently unsuitable environment. Copyright was created in an era when only a few publishers existed, and was only to grant publishers the ability to protect a brief, exclusive monopoly over publication. It was not intended to permit multinational megacorps to bankrupt non-commercial citizens on the roll of a die.
Open Source and the Creative Commons are beginning to demonstrate that even when copying is expressly permitted, the creators are not necessarily denied reward for their labours.
The abolition of copyright will not see artists on one side of a chasm and willing consumers on the other, unable to do business with each other. That prospect comes from a lack of imagination.
If you ask me, the other 5900 BitTorrent users should come forward and say "I'M SPARTACUS!"
The time should match the crime, certainly, but you have to admit that if a burglar breaks into your home, steals your PC, discovers your home movie collection of you and your loved one in the buff and then shares them all on Kazaa...
Now, should it matter whether or not you were going to publish them yourself at some point?
The issue is, some lowlife stole your IP and published it without your permission.
Perhaps you were never going to publish it? Perhaps you were going to sell it to some adult website? In both cases, you've lost valuable privacy, or valuable property.
In this case the burglar is a thief.
If you had publised your works, and then someone submitted them to Kazaa, well that's just a copyright infringement.
This distinction of pre/post-publication is also extremely important to the Open Source community.
If you and a team of coders are working on an OSS engine of some sort that you will be paid very handsomely to complete, you may have a contract with a client that is protected by you on the basis of "no money, no source code". If the client can simply pay a hacker to break into your systems, steal the code just before the contract is signed-off, then they don't need to pay you. Would you say that such theft was fine and dandy?
Of course, once the client hands over the money, the code is open anyway, but you don't want it leaked beforehand or bye-bye money.
SO, with the FMA (subset of FECA), a third party is now specifically permitted to distribute works that consist of the following kind of instructions:
"For Movie X perform the following:
Play N seconds
Pause N seconds
Skip N seconds
Blank screen
etc.
".
Obviously, this is pretty much sufficient to produce any order-preserved subset of video.
However, given a set of several of these 'subset' works, and an implicit instruction to add the combined output on a video mixer, what you end up with is sufficient to create absolutely any re-ordering or intermingling of frame sequences.
Now, you may think that no one is going to go and buy 50 or so DVDs necessary to produce the final combined work. You'd be right. However, that's not the point.
The point is, the FMA now permits artists to legitmately distribute 'video subset programs' without committing copyright infringement. An artist just says here's a list of subset programs I've created - I call it my 'Adjunct' Album.
It'll be quite easy for the punter to locate the necessary movie ingredients via filesharing systems. Indeed, they probably just have to search for 'Adjunct' and they get the finished work. The FMA however, permits an artist to openly publish and take the credit for such works.
So, this permits video mashups - derivative works prohibited prior to FMA.
Although this law probably takes no account of how lax security may be in terms of allow unwitting would-be publishers getting hold of a pre-release work, it is morally laudable.
I'm all for abolishing copyright as applied to published works, but unpublished works are the only true 'intellectual property'.
If it's unpublished, it remains property. Once published, it belongs to the people and enters the public domain.
The archaic 'copyright incentive' was only a sweetener that granted a publication monopoly for a limited time. It's time that ended (at least on the Internet).
So, yes, if the IP is unpublished and under lock and key, then anyone who steals it and publishes it is a criminal of the first order. Although, someone who privately distributes something under NDA to 50,000 conference delegates does not really deserve as much damages as a movie company who has distributed a DVD to 50 reviewers.
Thanks for the definitions.
Notice how none of them define uploading as merely the act of advertising a file's existence on the server?
Nevertheless, people aren't being sued for uploading, but for offering to upload, i.e. 'making available'.
Canadian law doesn't protect anyone from being sued for doing anything, so that's a red herring.
The tragedy here isn't copyright infringement, it's that corporations can use threat of litigation to commit extortion on private individuals with which they have no contract or prior arrangement.
If you read the history books you'll find that copyright was intended to permit one publishing business to prosecute another. It was not intended to permit a large corporation to bankrupt a non-commercial individual.
Uploading is to push a file to another receptive computer that is acting as a subsequent distributor/file-server.
Downloading is to pull a file from such a server.
'Making availble' is the industry term for advertising a list of filenames with the implicit offer to collaborate with any requestor to manufacture a copy of any file on the requestor's computer.
So, simply having 20,000 MP3 files on your computer is not a copyright infringement - they could all be fair-use copies made from purchased CDs. They could even be virtual files that are created on demand from a CD jukebox.
However, people are being sued for OFFERING to provide copies of files.
The RIAA has never shown evidence in court that someone has participated in manufacturing a large number of copies of copyrighted files to a section of the public (without the copyrightholder's permission).
Everyone settles out of court - well as far as we know... maybe there's the occasional lawyer that RIAA apologises to "Oh, sorry your honour, we didn't realise Billy Bob was your son. Sorry to trouble you. Have a nice day."
That is hilarious TripMaster. =:))
I must admit, once upon a time when I was a Doom addict, I once drove home immediately after an intense evening session at the office (Argonaut). Trouble is, what with relying on walls to guide you, I drove like I could bounce off the kerbs instead of bothering to steer carefully. Blowing out a tyre on a kerb is a bit of a pain. So after that I made damn sure I allowed a fair bit of rest for the game dynamics to dissipate before driving.
No-one uploads.
File sharers simply advertise their willingness to participate with anyone in manufacturing a new copy of a file on the requestor's machine.
This act has never been tested in court as a copyright infringement.
But, hey, who can afford to take things that far?
There's no problem with commercial use really, because if anyone can sell something that has been produced from something that is free, then they have patently added value, and justly deserve remuneration for the value they've added.
If you believe they've added no value, then you don't buy it. No-one's forcing you to.
However, you don't have a right to someone else's work for free simply because you commissioned the original art upon which they based their derivative.
Since when did commissioned art automatically become forbidden to those who did not participate in its commissioning?
That is the thinking that comes from having a sesame seed as a brain (similar to a peanut brain, but when squashed has a nicer tasting oil extract).
So brain dead! So petty.
t tp%3A// www.sho.com/site/ptbs/home.do
Ooh, we can't let anyone outside the UK see it...
Well, the US was first:
UK and other non-US people can't look at this site:
http://www.sho.com/site/ptbs/
Boo hoo!
Unless of course you go via a proxy, e.g.:
http://www.the-cloak.com/Cloaked/+cfg=32/h
Won't these people ever learn???
The Internet is a bloody network, not a geographically located exhibition hall!
I really must pop down to the Nelson sometime soon...
While it may well be wise to colonise the rest of the solar system to avoid extinction, it may not be necessary to send humans into space for exploration purposes... ...IF we develop an instantaneous communication technology.
This is because we could then explore space telepresently and vastly more economically.
Advertising is one of the few things that can't demonstrate a clear revenue stream.
BBC makes its money through eyeballs just like the dot com sites did, i.e. if they fail to convince people to watch BBC programmes, no more license fee - no more revenue.
Yes tons of commercials about other BBC TV & radio programmes, dramas, movies, DAB, charity events, BBC merchandise, TV licensing, BBC funded events, etc.
In the good old days, before the advent of interminable BBC commercials, you just had 2-5 second intros, e.g. "And now, Dr Who" - or 30 minutes of glorious test card (or if you were really lucky, 'closedown').
This is an ideal job for The Digital Art Auction!
It's designed precisely for this purpose, i.e. enabling a large audience to collectively fund an expensive work such as a TV series.
Moreover it ensures that everyone pays the same price, and no-one pays who can't afford the price.
NOoooooooooooo!!!
You're not dealing with bank accounts. You're dealing with reality - it only has to appear to be consistent.
There simply isn't enough time to ensure consistency across multiple nodes. Or rather, it's a combinatorial explosion problem and thus non-scalable. And don't tell me you can partition the world into neat little isolated chunks - reality is continuous.
Each node simply has to do the best it can, and live with the fact that it will not produce quite the same result as its neighbours. Hence why you need to distribute state and not events.
Distributing events is too fragile.
They're still over-fixated on synchronisation.
Gotta distribute state man. It's the only way.
Your pipe dream is in progress:
http://p2pnet.net/story/2749
This explosion could be the result of a secret agent's successful mission to blow up an underground weapons facility or something like that eh?
Or perhaps the US dropped a bunker buster on an ammunitions dump?
It could be the old 'cry wolf' trick.
Keep on having strange, massive explosions at worrying times until eventually the media get bored about conjecturing whether they're nuclear or not and then one day you really do set off a nuclear bomb. And the media just goes "Yeah, whatever..."
The media is currently the biggest threat to global security. It encourages acts of terrorism (it simply can't help giving oxygen of publicity - until an atrocity is no longer newsworthy, and then more serious atrocities are invented to compensate), and also encourages tricks like this one of NK to deliberately make massive explosions unnewsworthy.
What's the solution? Maximise the ability for downtrodden minorities with grudges to vent their issues to large and relevant audiences - before they seek out 'oxygen of publicity' via other means.
It's better to communicate with the bitter and twisted BEFORE they attempt to communicate with you.
You could try this:
http://tinyurl.com/6x7nk
Get a very, very large number of people to confess to file sharing...