Just my Mark 1 eyeball based estimates, but these days, the average user is having to occasionally do things to at least the following file types: GIF, JPG, PNG, RA/RM, QT, MPG, MP3, PDF, WMA, WMV, AVI, MOV, and all the Office formats, including RTF. The average user IS clueless as to the differences in AVI that still require so many codecs, and doesn't know which of these formats can pass malicious code. They're probably not even real clear about which are Microsoft formats. Still, I get "The main office sent me a FOO training file, how do WE play it?" questions about once a week from middle management alone, and "This was attached to my e-mail, how do I view it?", more often than that (and yes, those are scary, scary words).
I'd say a slight majority of users play music and video. Photo editing, even simple cropping or red eye filters, is a minority thing as you say, but a lot of the users who do it are older. If anything, it's IM that seems to be focused on the high school to college user much more than photo editing. Then there are the files that 10% or less of users know anything about (DLLs), and the ones that seem to hover at about the 20% mark (TTF, PDB). What's saddest is that EXE and COM are down at the 20% mark or maybe lower.
Yes, but... (You knew that was coming, didn't you?)
When people equate copyright violation to theft, it isn't just a matter of logical definitions. It's a matter of LEGAL definitions. Congress defined copyright violations, not some moral source like the Koran or the Bible or a self aware individual's own rational judgement. Not Con-fu-Tze or Kant or Mill, the U. S. Congress. The words 'copyright violation' have no meaning whatsoever, they are but empty noise, a concept full of sound and fury, yet signifying nothing, if they don't mean what exactly what congress, as checked by the U. S. Supreme Court, has said they mean.
There are state laws about theft. Copyright law is federal only. Is congress now prohibiting the states from prosecuting some kinds of theft on behalf of their citizens?
There are still civil tort only violations of copyright, even under the new laws. Is there such a thing as non-criminal theft?
Copyright eventually lapses. Is there anything that it becomes legal to steal just because enough time has passed since it was made?
Ooops! Looks like the U. S. congress disagrees with you. Sad, to have referenced two very great minds and (I presume T. S.) Eliot, spoken with some eloquence, and yet produced only empty noise.
A bit simple, but fundamentally correct. To amplify: Most people who do have moral issues with not paying artists stop at the artist level. They could be a small percentage, or a big majority of listeners, but that doesn't matter to the industry execs. Some of the fans have thought it out enough to care about the studio technicians and paste up artists and such, but this is probably a lot less than half the total that cares at all. Only a very few honestly care in principle about the bean counters getting something for what they do.
Most of that few actually looked at how much of music's sale costs actually gets to the artists, and decided the bean counters ought to be more than satisfied with what they got already. Yeah, in principle, they are entitled to get compensated too, but in principle Mr. Oviously Guilty Guy is still entitled to a fair trial, now excuse me while I worry about a few thousand other things first until his lawyer at least makes a BIG mistake and not just a trivial one.
This is also why the industry's 'education' efforts don't help. If they are successful, they convince a percentage of the honest to agree, but that doesn't move the issue up out of 1,000th place on the list of things they agree to. There aren't any boy scouts completing the media's suggested activity and deciding this is more important than wildlife conservation or whatever. They may not 'pirate' personally, but they're not going to stand around after school urging everyone else not to pirate either.
Of course no one is going to volunteer to lose their job today, or at all. But why aren't they losing their jobs anyway? Why for one example, did some recording industry execs: 1. pick kinds of music that encouraged shoplifting (often with artists actually encouraging people to steal the music right on the album 2. see an economic hit when those types cost the retailers money and started being rejected because of physical theft increases, and 3. lie about it, claiming it was electronic 'theft' that was the problem, and 4. GET BELIEVED BY THE STOCKHOLDERS?
There's the same problem with widespread industy claims about unorganized individual piracy when the figures continually show most of the hit comes from organized operations bootlegging physical CDs and DVDs. I understand why people in the industry lie to keep their jobs, but why are so many investors falling for it? I'm really starting to think that the glamor of owning entertainment stocks has attracted all the mouthbreating morons who somehow still have money to invest, and those who are actually intelligent investors are staying away in droves.
Rocks sink and beachballs float because of differing densities, not differing masses. Here, we're looking at stars of different sizes and masses. There aren't some stars made mostly from silicates and iron oxides, while other stars are hollow plastic shells with slightly compressed air cores, or anything like that. A big red giant star may weigh 5x the mass of our sun, but be hundreds or thousands of times more voluminous, so the density as a whole object is actually much lower than a sun sized star.
Also, rocks sink in water. In a pool of mercury. both typical rocks and typical beachballs float. In vaccuum, near a gravitational source, everything that has mass is accelerated at the same rate, and densities really don't matter. Density affets falling objects if there's a drag, like there is falling through air. The space between stars is generally a near perfect vaccuum.
It's significant, because simple, standard physics explanations of sorting by density, type of material, or mass don't entirely explain this. Instead, there are probably other factors such as transfer of momentum between whole groups of stars, perhaps also to gas clouds or something, and maybe even modifying factors such as light pressure or angular momentum-linear momentum exchanges which are in turn affected by such unexpected things as the stars involved's relative surface areas or diameters.
The article talks about slingshot effects. Small stars can be slingshotted a lot faster by the same force that will only moderately accelerate large ones. This in turn means their orbit around the galactic core may even become a parabola or hyperbola, so that any given encounter sometimes becomes their last pass through the cluster. Larger stars get sped up and slowed down, but seldom by all that much, so they tend to keep returning to the cluster.
Sorting out which of these factors, and possibly others, are important and which are trivial is why the people studying this actually have to learn some math.
I'm getting tired of that phrase, IED. When you have to whip one up in 15 minutes from whatever's available under the kitchen sink, that's an "Improvised" Explosive Device. When they are being made from engineer's designs, by well trained technicians in industrially clean environments, they really aren't improvised anymore. Just because they are (probably) still being assembled in small batches rather than an actual assembly line process from a liscenced military armsmaker, doesn't mean the word improvised is still appropriate.
In fact, it's become a propaganda issue: The insergents are not supposed to be organized and trained enough to make professional grade explosives, even with many months to prepare. They have to still be making sloppy bombs that have a big chance of not going off, or going off prematurely, or else we face bigger challenges than when we started, and saying that is unpatriotic.
Do people really have an expectation of privacy while in a public area?
Yes. For example if you were walking around in public locations for a few hours, and I were to follow you the whole time, making notes about where you went, whom you talked to, what you bought, etc. you'ld probably feel your expectations of privacy were being violated, even though I had as much legal right of access to those locations as you did. Also, the original framers of the constitution aimed, in large part, to constrain government from exceeding the control of the people. Under the US system, if it is questionable at best for me, as a private citizen, to conduct public surveilance on you, then if I do it as an agent of government, it becomes even more dubious, and my requirements to show cause become greater, not less.
I'm not going to think about your second question - pervo!!!
In fact, precident for this is well established. Way before digital media, people tried to get around copyright law by distributing films divided by a new intermission, films that had a minute here and there trimmed, films where some wide angle shots were re-edited for close ups, audio tapes with one song missing from a whole album, etc. and claiming these weren't violations. The last such arguements got shot dowm by about 1955. The 1978 Berne treaty on copyrights has specific clauses where they define civil violations as including "either all, or any substantial part of" the item, probably just to reinforce this principle. I'm not sure about what''s actually spelled out in the 1998 treaty, but it references Berne enough that the details probably don't really matter.
Applying this would simply take a judge looking at these precedents and deciding that any part big enough to help another person get the whole work counted as a substantial part. With existing decisions against a group of infringers who duplicated each reel of a 10 real film in separate film labs in multiple countries, before shiping the reels individually into India, where they were finally put together, as precidents, that's likely to be a no-brainer for any half-way competent judge.
"I do not think that word means what you think it means." - Inego Montoya
Everything on YouTube has a copyright.* Since most of it was posted by the copyright holder, that holder has in effect given permission to distribute, so there is no infringement.
* even this is a maybe - there may just possibly be a few film clips so old their copyright's have expired.
How's this:
If you were to publicly advocate those things in person, 99% of the people listening would detest you, and many of them would act on it. By act on it, in some places, you would have about 30 seconds before you were looking at your left kidney on the sidewalk. Yes, in some places you could possibly expect to be protected by law, but there is no law that says all those people have to do business with you, and few would feel any obligation to treat you with more than the bare minimum of rights, again as defined by law, at best. I sure wouldn't if I knew you supported genocide. Pragmatically, YOU are argueing from evolutionary survival, not law, and if your actions threaten your survival, you gain no evolutionary benefits from knowing the law might protect you, unless you have an absolute assurance a cop will show up in time, and won't take the lynch mob's side. If it's all about evolutionary paths, dead and legally vindicated is still dead.
However, you are posting here on slashdot, a forum where you are protected by anonymity, and at least somewhat by dealing with rational and adult people (yeah, I know that last's a thin reed). So, to use your absolute terms, YOU have selected an environment with people YOU think are worth at least some respect for their ethical position on killing, compared to saying the same things publicly to the masses. Those people overwhelmingly disagree with the proposition. The 'absolute' and 'scientific' position you are in is that the very fact your debate opponents hold the counterposition is all that lets you take such a strongly pro killing position here, and it's your belief in their overall ethical rectitude that makes you trust this forum enough to openly state that position. Your doubt in that rectitude is enough to make you cautious, posting anonamously, but it is not enough to make you chose not to post at all, so YOU have already ceded that your opponent's ethics have at least a great deal of merit, if not quite absolute merit. Something that has to be stipulated as part of the discussion is an axiom. YOU are already reasoning from that axiom, so why not apply it to the question of genocide?
(In other words, I didn't prove you wrong, but you did yourself)
On a more minor note, in that last sentence, you're conflating logical truth and scientific truth. All science presumes the posibility of further experiment disproving an established hypothesis - in this sense, there are no absolute truths. So asking for an absolute ground that is also a scientific ground is like asking for a four sided triangle. No wonder nobody has given you one.
1. I've addressed this misconception in jb.hl.com's post. Your next to last sentence is simply irrelevant, as we weren't just talking about a specific method (P2P), but about one of the possible goals of that method (infringement). If you substitute the actual topic for your shift of topic, your next to last sentence is simply wrong. The industry is working hard at making your last one wrong too.
2. yes, economic crimes are still crimes. Copyright violation did not used to be a crime at all. Perjuring yourself under oath when testifying to congress has been a crime since the founding of our nation. If you're trying to say two wrongs don't make a right, I actually agree, although I don't agree that 'wrong' and 'criminal' are always synonymous. If you're applying those phrases about "less deserving" and such to one side only here, you're still missing the point.
3. You do recognize I took the parent post, and mirrored its arguement for the other side, don't you? That doesn't mean I meant every word of it, it just means I showed the flaws in the parent post by showing how easily the reverse arguement could be made using the exact same rhetoric. I bet you're simply scandalized by that nasty old Jonathan Swift the Irish Baby Eater, aren't you?
Yes, but copyright law as a whole now includes criminal violations. These are part of the federal code under title 17, and there were only civil penalties based portions in those same sections until the 1998 "Sonny Bono" act, the 1998 DCMA and the Artist's Rights and Theft Prevention Act of 2005 revision were passed.
The "ART Act", is targeted at preventing piracy of movies and software. It includes sentences of "imprisonment for up to three years for a first time offender, and up to six years for a repeat offender, in addition to any fines that may be levied under the U.S. Criminal Code for copyright infringement". The police certainly come into that.
These areas modified were all non-criminal copyright law for the first 200+ years since the US became a nation, and they are now part of criminal law, defining acts as felonies where before the same acts, and fundamentally similar ones from the pre-digital era, were torts only. Every bout of new copyright related law since has added new criminal classifications and penalties.
Worse, the RIAA lobbied to include "anti-piracy" regulations under the original PATRIOT act, and again under the proposed (and rejected) PATRIOT 2 extensions in 2004. Both these were most definitely criminal law. In fact, the RIAA has openly equated piracy with "economic terrorism", in testimony before the House trade committee, and in several cases after the first mention of this concept, left that word 'economic' off - certainly claiming to a law making body that piracy is terrorism is attempting to criminalize it. The RIAA also lobbied openly and repeatedly to get special legislation passed to make the government pay the cost of investigating civil violations under economic incentives acts, including the last NAFTA discussions, and this little gem:
The latest effort to escalate Hollywood's war on copyright violation is the "Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2006" (IPPA).
This bill, as currently proposed, doubles the authorized prison terms for existing copyright infringement, creates new offenses, and establishes an entire division of the FBI specifically to hunt down infringers. The projected budget for this division is $20 million a year.
No matter what the arguments are from either side, the bottom line is that lieing about the damages actually suffered is still wrong and shameful.
The fact is media producers are vastly overstating the damage they suffer, in an effort to steal limited police services from other, more deserving crime victims. There is no way that the Media apologists can get around it, so they resort so stuff like this, and downplay any statistics they don't like.
Wrong is wrong, even if this doesn't rank on the top of the list of evils in the world. Stop trying to justify this fraudulently illegal activity.
There is a period in human brain development where many, many neurons are pruned, and many glial cells diferentiate into neural tissues to help control the process and serve as a sort of safety net for mistakes in pruning. Those glial cells are probably ones that, before the pruning proper starts, actually progress down several intermediary steps while still looking superficially like any other glial cells. They may have significant interesting properties as a source of nerve cell replacement tissues. The sole, tiny little problem is the pruning process usually peaks well over a year after birth. Everything you have pointed out about fetal midbrain tissues seems to apply to these tissues as well, except we will have to substitute the word infant for fetus in a few places. It's a good thing your average 2 year old can't pass a turing test over a keyboard link.
Even worse, there some rather spectacular changes involving glial to neuron development in the human brain right about puberty...
Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan once suggested that we define human life as beginning when the fetus shows significant brain activity (which is still basically somewhat after the first trimester). This would, as Dr. Sagan pointed out, make the test for human life at the beginning match the definition most civilized nations have adopted at the other end, with irrevocable cessation of brain activity the standard for clinical death.
Does it make any difference to all these posters who are defining the politics of those opposed to midbrain tissue research here on Slashdot, that your definition of Religious Right, Far Right Wing, Bush loving, Scientifically Ignorant Neo-con fodder evidently now extends to include Carl Sagan?
Up through about 1970, there was a general rule of thumb, that you could not be sure of remaining within the law if you quoted more than 1/4 of a work under fair use. This was invoked re. purposes such as criticism or teaching that were themselves basic to fair use, and I personally heard it used by both legal departments and judges in copyright cases.
Since that time, it's dropped out of use. That's one way laws become draconian - unofficial guidelines that worked get dropped in favor of 'rigorous interpretations' that benefit only one party. All your examples are quite accurate under current law (to my admittedly limited knowledge - read my sig goldarnit). All of them are also enormously, almost mind-numbingly less than the old 1/4 guideline would imply they should be.
This happened at the start of the 'war on drugs', back in the first decades of the 20th century with the anti-opium laws - the laws included not too rigorous guidelines about some quite practical exceptions, such as doctor's perscriptions. Then the courts just started ultra-narrowly interpreting everything that wasn't spelled out in detail, saying for example that Doctors couldn't perscribe just to treat addiction itself, couldn't treat the pain from disease "X" because "X" wasn't painful enough, couldn't specialize in treating addiction, etc., and as it gathered momentum; 10,000 doctors lost their liscences or were actually jailed within the next few years.
According to some pretty reputable historians, you could add: the nation tried a costly experiment with prohibition of alcohol based on the opiate law model, we had Doctor shortages that lasted, in some once well served areas, for more than a generation, medical prices began their still ongoing rise at rates much faster than general inflation, and the average addict had virtually no chance of getting treatment rather than incarceration for the next 35-40 years, until we had to deal with a huge influx of addicted veterans from WW2 burn wards, and the general reluctance to just jail them forced a few changes on the system.
I don't know if an IP issue can screw the whole country up as bad as that did, but I'm pretty sure the current policies will do the maximum damage possible within their sphere. Personally, I think it will be blamed for at least a literary dark age, when we lost a lot of media before they became common culture.
1. You may well be right, in which case change my 80% estimate of the work involved to something lower as you see fit, but only one way. My point still stands the other way - the more it is hard to crack WGA for the purposes of making a counterfeit pass, the more it is positively trivial to go ahead and figure out how to make legitimate copies fail while you're at it. 2. If it really is that "virtually impossible" to make counterfeits pass, someone who fails at it may well decide to use what they have learned trying to do the reverse attack in compensation. If their motive is either money or spite, they can still succeed with the easier attack. 3. People sometimes get beaten after flashing loads of cash in cheap dives. People also sometimes get beaten after makeing disparaging comments about other people's mothers. So... What's it do to the overall chance of a beating if you enter the cheap dive and loudly announce you are carrying enough cash to buy everyone on the block's mother? Microsoft is giving lots of black hat types with lots of different motives an incentive to target this particular code, agreed?
For once, John has gotten it right, even making a more detailed prediction than just "it'll probably be hacked". There are two good reasons (from a black hat perspective) to crack WGA:
1. Make a bootleg copy look authentic. 2. Make an authentic copy look bootleg.
Figureing out how to do one means you have done at least 80-90% of the work to figure out the other. That's essentially twice the normal incentive to crack a Microsoft product. #1 has an obvious financial incentive, but #2 may have one too, if the cracker is willing to consider extortion or similar modes of funding. If the cracker is doing it just to spite MS and/or MS users, the same double whammy applies.
You'ld claim the losses on Schedule A, based on your honest recollection. In case your claim was challenged, I'd strongly advise you to print off a statement of bank account activity, canceled checks, or similar documentation that showed when amd how you had funded your losses, and to keep a year long gambling diary that records your wins and losses, locations, and dates. You should also keep non-winning lottery tickets, track tickets, inside casino ATM reciepts, or whatever else seems applicable, at least to the extent of your loss claimed. In an audit, you should expect the IRS to want more, often much more, than just your copy of a W2-G and your unsupported word.
(Yes I am a tax pro - this is not official advice, and I am not charging anyone for it. If this were official advice, I would go into some necessary detail and maybe advise something a little different, based on the person's specific tax situation. Please, all readers, treat this as a general hypothtical case only - I wouldn't even comment on it if it wasn't a relatively straight-forward, simple question. I'm afraid that's all the advice on this point I should ethically give, and if it generates any more questions I'll have to refuse to go further.)
Note too, if you don't have enough total expenses to itemize (you had to exceed a base of $5,000 per filing single or $10,000 Married, Filing Jointly, last year), then you still have to report gambling winnings even though you can't deduct losses. Large gambling winnings from legitimate casinos or state lotteries will result in the winner recieving a W2-G, which looks much like a regular W-2, but records gambling income. The government gets a copy of those too.
A W2-G should be generated for:
winnings of $1,200 or more from slot machines and bingo.
winnings of $1,500 or more from keno, minus the cost of the tickets.
winnings of $600 or more from horse or dog racing.
winnings of $600 or more from state lotteries.
winnings of $600 or more from poker tournaments.
(2004-2005 limits, subject to change)
W-2Gs are not required for typical wagers won from table games such as craps, blackjack, roulette, baccarat, etc., but there is other paper work (money laundering rules require cash transaction reports) which should happen if you engage in aggregate cash transactions of $10,000 or more in any one day. Note that your account puts you under that limit in all three cases you mention, but for your more hypothetical example, sometimes it is like they give you reciepts, as part of this bigger process, and that in turn would depend on the exact situation.
Cruise ships are notorious for not giving required paperwork, with some problems reported at Indian casinos. Vegas is generally immaculate about observing these rules.
I am a tax pro, and it must be turning me into a general purpose humorless bean counter, because I almost took this seriously. I was a good two sentences through explaining just how much trouble that arguement could draw with the IRS before I caught that it was tongue in cheek. Gyaaahhh! Kelz, please don't post anything like this between April 1st and April 15th!
Using a fictitious name or other information is essentially creating an alias. For a criminal already under probation, this would likely violate it, and might even result in an additional criminal charge. A nym isn't normally a criminal act, but for these guys, it is, under at least some state's laws, or even where this isn't the case, it will almost inevitably be an aggrevating circumstance if they do anything at all else. Plus a probation officer can impose some pretty extreme restrictions against normally non-criminal acts, such as visiting a close family member who happens to also have a record. For many of these predators, their probation began with a standardized list that already warned against using any alias whatsoever, even just normal ones such as signing a check with a nickname. So if the criminal gets caught, they are probably damned if they do, damned if they don't.
You seem to be missing a factor here - Your concept seems to be: People who want to get MP3 or other such forms of CDs they own, and have a computer can either download or rip their own. Ripping their own assures getting everything in your collection, with more reliable quality, and is faster, so why would anyone choose downloading? (Sorry if I'm putting words into your mouth here, that's genuinely not my intention, and I hope I'm summing your ideas up pretty accurately.)
Fair enough, but here's the other conditions - You're assuming CD ripping software is equally available with File Sharing software. That is, the prices are the same for similar utility, they are similarly easy to find (particularly by an internet search), and they are similarly easy to learn to use. For that matter, you're assuming a CD drive in the user's computer, although that's a safe assumption in 95% + of cases.
In my own case, I don't download where copyrighted materials are involved, but do download whole Linux ISOs and Usenet binaries (ones legitimately the IP of their poster) so I know something about the software. I had to get X-News for Usenet, as Outlook Express was just about completely useless for multipart binaries. X-News had a steep learning curve and was a very "non-windowsy" feeling program, which could drive many people towards burning if all they want is copies of their own stuff, but it was also free, and had exceptionally good online support pages. The first ripping software I owned was 29.95$ downloaded of the net without the company sending a physical disk copy unless I wanted to pay extra, and I had trouble with compatability with my CD drive of the time (The software incorrectly interpreted the read speeds reported by the drive, and would automatically kick down to read only at 1x speed). So for me, I could have downloaded the CD in 20-30 minutes, or ripped it in about 64. That was about 8 years ago, on a 98 box. The chief reason why I didn't go with downloading was I didn't want to encourage the uploaders who were, even then, breaking the law. I also decided that my public involvemnt in free software and such was a good reason to stay squeaky clean.
The ripping software also frequently popped up windows, chiefly relating to track naming. You had to stay in the room while it was ripping, just in case it hung up when you didn't answer one of the questions (although it did give you about 2 minutes most of the time). I ran across a couple of CDs it just wouldn't rip (Anyone know why Constance Demby's CDs were particularly reluctant to process?) I had to learn a lot about bit rates, including variable ones, and why K-Jofol v 0.31 didn't like them on playback. Eventually I had to move to something new for playback (Winamp, then at 1.04 or so).
Looking back, any of those issues could have made some people decide to skip ripping and try downloading instead. The longer times required to download meant a lot less if you could trust the process to run automatically, and couldn't trust ripping to do so. On older CD drives or PCs, differences in the amount of memory and such could make ripping a lot slower than a 5 minute process, as it is for many (but not nearly all) of us today. There was a time when most PCs could process data faster than most user's download pipes could deliver it, but those same systems couldn't keep up with running a ripping/compression algorythm at nearly maximum CD drive speeds.
There are plenty of people who would rather buy physical media for their software, and so go to staples or best buy and take whatever looks good, and so frequently learn a less than optimal solution. (Just think of all the people in red or blue shirts who would love to sell a copy of MS works on the assurance that Outlook does better downloading than OE, and that will fix the customer's problem - how many of them will steer the customer towards cheap 3rd party ripping software, let alone a free alternative?). There are plenty of people who stick with whatever the
Slashdot Mirror
"Quoting words from 1893 doesn't make a convincing argument"
Maybe, for sufficiently large values of 1983.
Just my Mark 1 eyeball based estimates, but these days, the average user is having to occasionally do things to at least the following file types: GIF, JPG, PNG, RA/RM, QT, MPG, MP3, PDF, WMA, WMV, AVI, MOV, and all the Office formats, including RTF. The average user IS clueless as to the differences in AVI that still require so many codecs, and doesn't know which of these formats can pass malicious code. They're probably not even real clear about which are Microsoft formats. Still, I get "The main office sent me a FOO training file, how do WE play it?" questions about once a week from middle management alone, and "This was attached to my e-mail, how do I view it?", more often than that (and yes, those are scary, scary words).
I'd say a slight majority of users play music and video. Photo editing, even simple cropping or red eye filters, is a minority thing as you say, but a lot of the users who do it are older. If anything, it's IM that seems to be focused on the high school to college user much more than photo editing. Then there are the files that 10% or less of users know anything about (DLLs), and the ones that seem to hover at about the 20% mark (TTF, PDB). What's saddest is that EXE and COM are down at the 20% mark or maybe lower.
Language isn't logic.
Yes, but...
(You knew that was coming, didn't you?)
When people equate copyright violation to theft, it isn't just a matter of logical definitions.
It's a matter of LEGAL definitions.
Congress defined copyright violations, not some moral source like the Koran or the Bible or a self aware individual's own rational judgement. Not Con-fu-Tze or Kant or Mill, the U. S. Congress. The words 'copyright violation' have no meaning whatsoever, they are but empty noise, a concept full of sound and fury, yet signifying nothing, if they don't mean what exactly what congress, as checked by the U. S. Supreme Court, has said they mean.
There are state laws about theft. Copyright law is federal only. Is congress now prohibiting the states from prosecuting some kinds of theft on behalf of their citizens?
There are still civil tort only violations of copyright, even under the new laws. Is there such a thing as non-criminal theft?
Copyright eventually lapses. Is there anything that it becomes legal to steal just because enough time has passed since it was made?
Ooops! Looks like the U. S. congress disagrees with you. Sad, to have referenced two very great minds and (I presume T. S.) Eliot, spoken with some eloquence, and yet produced only empty noise.
A bit simple, but fundamentally correct. To amplify:
Most people who do have moral issues with not paying artists stop at the artist level. They could be a small percentage, or a big majority of listeners, but that doesn't matter to the industry execs.
Some of the fans have thought it out enough to care about the studio technicians and paste up artists and such, but this is probably a lot less than half the total that cares at all.
Only a very few honestly care in principle about the bean counters getting something for what they do.
Most of that few actually looked at how much of music's sale costs actually gets to the artists, and decided the bean counters ought to be more than satisfied with what they got already. Yeah, in principle, they are entitled to get compensated too, but in principle Mr. Oviously Guilty Guy is still entitled to a fair trial, now excuse me while I worry about a few thousand other things first until his lawyer at least makes a BIG mistake and not just a trivial one.
This is also why the industry's 'education' efforts don't help. If they are successful, they convince a percentage of the honest to agree, but that doesn't move the issue up out of 1,000th place on the list of things they agree to. There aren't any boy scouts completing the media's suggested activity and deciding this is more important than wildlife conservation or whatever. They may not 'pirate' personally, but they're not going to stand around after school urging everyone else not to pirate either.
Of course no one is going to volunteer to lose their job today, or at all. But why aren't they losing their jobs anyway?
Why for one example, did some recording industry execs:
1. pick kinds of music that encouraged shoplifting (often with artists actually encouraging people to steal the music right on the album
2. see an economic hit when those types cost the retailers money and started being rejected because of physical theft increases, and
3. lie about it, claiming it was electronic 'theft' that was the problem, and
4. GET BELIEVED BY THE STOCKHOLDERS?
There's the same problem with widespread industy claims about unorganized individual piracy when the figures continually show most of the hit comes from organized operations bootlegging physical CDs and DVDs.
I understand why people in the industry lie to keep their jobs, but why are so many investors falling for it? I'm really starting to think that the glamor of owning entertainment stocks has attracted all the mouthbreating morons who somehow still have money to invest, and those who are actually intelligent investors are staying away in droves.
Rocks sink and beachballs float because of differing densities, not differing masses.
Here, we're looking at stars of different sizes and masses. There aren't some stars made mostly from silicates and iron oxides, while other stars are hollow plastic shells with slightly compressed air cores, or anything like that. A big red giant star may weigh 5x the mass of our sun, but be hundreds or thousands of times more voluminous, so the density as a whole object is actually much lower than a sun sized star.
Also, rocks sink in water. In a pool of mercury. both typical rocks and typical beachballs float. In vaccuum, near a gravitational source, everything that has mass is accelerated at the same rate, and densities really don't matter. Density affets falling objects if there's a drag, like there is falling through air. The space between stars is generally a near perfect vaccuum.
It's significant, because simple, standard physics explanations of sorting by density, type of material, or mass don't entirely explain this. Instead, there are probably other factors such as transfer of momentum between whole groups of stars, perhaps also to gas clouds or something, and maybe even modifying factors such as light pressure or angular momentum-linear momentum exchanges which are in turn affected by such unexpected things as the stars involved's relative surface areas or diameters.
The article talks about slingshot effects. Small stars can be slingshotted a lot faster by the same force that will only moderately accelerate large ones. This in turn means their orbit around the galactic core may even become a parabola or hyperbola, so that any given encounter sometimes becomes their last pass through the cluster. Larger stars get sped up and slowed down, but seldom by all that much, so they tend to keep returning to the cluster.
Sorting out which of these factors, and possibly others, are important and which are trivial is why the people studying this actually have to learn some math.
If it takes a white trash childhood to have a single handgun stashed away, I must have been raised by wolves.
I'm getting tired of that phrase, IED. When you have to whip one up in 15 minutes from whatever's available under the kitchen sink, that's an "Improvised" Explosive Device. When they are being made from engineer's designs, by well trained technicians in industrially clean environments, they really aren't improvised anymore. Just because they are (probably) still being assembled in small batches rather than an actual assembly line process from a liscenced military armsmaker, doesn't mean the word improvised is still appropriate.
In fact, it's become a propaganda issue: The insergents are not supposed to be organized and trained enough to make professional grade explosives, even with many months to prepare. They have to still be making sloppy bombs that have a big chance of not going off, or going off prematurely, or else we face bigger challenges than when we started, and saying that is unpatriotic.
Do people really have an expectation of privacy while in a public area?
Yes. For example if you were walking around in public locations for a few hours, and I were to follow you the whole time, making notes about where you went, whom you talked to, what you bought, etc. you'ld probably feel your expectations of privacy were being violated, even though I had as much legal right of access to those locations as you did.
Also, the original framers of the constitution aimed, in large part, to constrain government from exceeding the control of the people. Under the US system, if it is questionable at best for me, as a private citizen, to conduct public surveilance on you, then if I do it as an agent of government, it becomes even more dubious, and my requirements to show cause become greater, not less.
I'm not going to think about your second question - pervo!!!
In fact, precident for this is well established. Way before digital media, people tried to get around copyright law by distributing films divided by a new intermission, films that had a minute here and there trimmed, films where some wide angle shots were re-edited for close ups, audio tapes with one song missing from a whole album, etc. and claiming these weren't violations. The last such arguements got shot dowm by about 1955. The 1978 Berne treaty on copyrights has specific clauses where they define civil violations as including "either all, or any substantial part of" the item, probably just to reinforce this principle. I'm not sure about what''s actually spelled out in the 1998 treaty, but it references Berne enough that the details probably don't really matter.
Applying this would simply take a judge looking at these precedents and deciding that any part big enough to help another person get the whole work counted as a substantial part. With existing decisions against a group of infringers who duplicated each reel of a 10 real film in separate film labs in multiple countries, before shiping the reels individually into India, where they were finally put together, as precidents, that's likely to be a no-brainer for any half-way competent judge.
'infringes'
"I do not think that word means what you think it means." - Inego Montoya
Everything on YouTube has a copyright.* Since most of it was posted by the copyright holder, that holder has in effect given permission to distribute, so there is no infringement.
* even this is a maybe - there may just possibly be a few film clips so old their copyright's have expired.
How's this:
If you were to publicly advocate those things in person, 99% of the people listening would detest you, and many of them would act on it. By act on it, in some places, you would have about 30 seconds before you were looking at your left kidney on the sidewalk. Yes, in some places you could possibly expect to be protected by law, but there is no law that says all those people have to do business with you, and few would feel any obligation to treat you with more than the bare minimum of rights, again as defined by law, at best. I sure wouldn't if I knew you supported genocide. Pragmatically, YOU are argueing from evolutionary survival, not law, and if your actions threaten your survival, you gain no evolutionary benefits from knowing the law might protect you, unless you have an absolute assurance a cop will show up in time, and won't take the lynch mob's side. If it's all about evolutionary paths, dead and legally vindicated is still dead.
However, you are posting here on slashdot, a forum where you are protected by anonymity, and at least somewhat by dealing with rational and adult people (yeah, I know that last's a thin reed). So, to use your absolute terms, YOU have selected an environment with people YOU think are worth at least some respect for their ethical position on killing, compared to saying the same things publicly to the masses. Those people overwhelmingly disagree with the proposition. The 'absolute' and 'scientific' position you are in is that the very fact your debate opponents hold the counterposition is all that lets you take such a strongly pro killing position here, and it's your belief in their overall ethical rectitude that makes you trust this forum enough to openly state that position. Your doubt in that rectitude is enough to make you cautious, posting anonamously, but it is not enough to make you chose not to post at all, so YOU have already ceded that your opponent's ethics have at least a great deal of merit, if not quite absolute merit. Something that has to be stipulated as part of the discussion is an axiom. YOU are already reasoning from that axiom, so why not apply it to the question of genocide?
(In other words, I didn't prove you wrong, but you did yourself)
On a more minor note, in that last sentence, you're conflating logical truth and scientific truth. All science presumes the posibility of further experiment disproving an established hypothesis - in this sense, there are no absolute truths. So asking for an absolute ground that is also a scientific ground is like asking for a four sided triangle. No wonder nobody has given you one.
1. I've addressed this misconception in jb.hl.com's post. Your next to last sentence is simply irrelevant, as we weren't just talking about a specific method (P2P), but about one of the possible goals of that method (infringement). If you substitute the actual topic for your shift of topic, your next to last sentence is simply wrong. The industry is working hard at making your last one wrong too.
2. yes, economic crimes are still crimes. Copyright violation did not used to be a crime at all. Perjuring yourself under oath when testifying to congress has been a crime since the founding of our nation. If you're trying to say two wrongs don't make a right, I actually agree, although I don't agree that 'wrong' and 'criminal' are always synonymous. If you're applying those phrases about "less deserving" and such to one side only here, you're still missing the point.
3. You do recognize I took the parent post, and mirrored its arguement for the other side, don't you? That doesn't mean I meant every word of it, it just means I showed the flaws in the parent post by showing how easily the reverse arguement could be made using the exact same rhetoric. I bet you're simply scandalized by that nasty old Jonathan Swift the Irish Baby Eater, aren't you?
Yes, but copyright law as a whole now includes criminal violations. These are part of the federal code under title 17, and there were only civil penalties based portions in those same sections until the 1998 "Sonny Bono" act, the 1998 DCMA and the Artist's Rights and Theft Prevention Act of 2005 revision were passed.
The "ART Act", is targeted at preventing piracy of movies and software. It includes sentences of "imprisonment for up to three years for a first time offender, and up to six years for a repeat offender, in addition to any fines that may be levied under the U.S. Criminal Code for copyright infringement". The police certainly come into that.
These areas modified were all non-criminal copyright law for the first 200+ years since the US became a nation, and they are now part of criminal law, defining acts as felonies where before the same acts, and fundamentally similar ones from the pre-digital era, were torts only. Every bout of new copyright related law since has added new criminal classifications and penalties.
Worse, the RIAA lobbied to include "anti-piracy" regulations under the original PATRIOT act, and again under the proposed (and rejected) PATRIOT 2 extensions in 2004. Both these were most definitely criminal law. In fact, the RIAA has openly equated piracy with "economic terrorism", in testimony before the House trade committee, and in several cases after the first mention of this concept, left that word 'economic' off - certainly claiming to a law making body that piracy is terrorism is attempting to criminalize it. The RIAA also lobbied openly and repeatedly to get special legislation passed to make the government pay the cost of investigating civil violations under economic incentives acts, including the last NAFTA discussions, and this little gem:
The latest effort to escalate Hollywood's war on copyright violation is the "Intellectual Property Protection Act of 2006" (IPPA).
This bill, as currently proposed, doubles the authorized prison terms for existing copyright infringement, creates new offenses, and establishes an entire division of the FBI specifically
to hunt down infringers. The projected budget for this division is $20 million a year.
No matter what the arguments are from either side, the bottom line is that lieing about the damages actually suffered is still wrong and shameful.
The fact is media producers are vastly overstating the damage they suffer, in an effort to steal limited police services from other, more deserving crime victims. There is no way that the Media apologists can get around it, so they resort so stuff like this, and downplay any statistics they don't like.
Wrong is wrong, even if this doesn't rank on the top of the list of evils in the world. Stop trying to justify this fraudulently illegal activity.
There is a period in human brain development where many, many neurons are pruned, and many glial cells diferentiate into neural tissues to help control the process and serve as a sort of safety net for mistakes in pruning. Those glial cells are probably ones that, before the pruning proper starts, actually progress down several intermediary steps while still looking superficially like any other glial cells. They may have significant interesting properties as a source of nerve cell replacement tissues. The sole, tiny little problem is the pruning process usually peaks well over a year after birth. Everything you have pointed out about fetal midbrain tissues seems to apply to these tissues as well, except we will have to substitute the word infant for fetus in a few places. It's a good thing your average 2 year old can't pass a turing test over a keyboard link.
Even worse, there some rather spectacular changes involving glial to neuron development in the human brain right about puberty...
Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan once suggested that we define human life as beginning when the fetus shows significant brain activity (which is still basically somewhat after the first trimester). This would, as Dr. Sagan pointed out, make the test for human life at the beginning match the definition most civilized nations have adopted at the other end, with irrevocable cessation of brain activity the standard for clinical death.
Does it make any difference to all these posters who are defining the politics of those opposed to midbrain tissue research here on Slashdot, that your definition of Religious Right, Far Right Wing, Bush loving, Scientifically Ignorant Neo-con fodder evidently now extends to include Carl Sagan?
Naah, sombody always gets their skull crushed, somebody else gets their fingers broken, and so on...
Up through about 1970, there was a general rule of thumb, that you could not be sure of remaining within the law if you quoted more than 1/4 of a work under fair use. This was invoked re. purposes such as criticism or teaching that were themselves basic to fair use, and I personally heard it used by both legal departments and judges in copyright cases.
Since that time, it's dropped out of use. That's one way laws become draconian - unofficial guidelines that worked get dropped in favor of 'rigorous interpretations' that benefit only one party. All your examples are quite accurate under current law (to my admittedly limited knowledge - read my sig goldarnit). All of them are also enormously, almost mind-numbingly less than the old 1/4 guideline would imply they should be.
This happened at the start of the 'war on drugs', back in the first decades of the 20th century with the anti-opium laws - the laws included not too rigorous guidelines about some quite practical exceptions, such as doctor's perscriptions. Then the courts just started ultra-narrowly interpreting everything that wasn't spelled out in detail, saying for example that Doctors couldn't perscribe just to treat addiction itself, couldn't treat the pain from disease "X" because "X" wasn't painful enough, couldn't specialize in treating addiction, etc., and as it gathered momentum; 10,000 doctors lost their liscences or were actually jailed within the next few years.
According to some pretty reputable historians, you could add: the nation tried a costly experiment with prohibition of alcohol based on the opiate law model, we had Doctor shortages that lasted, in some once well served areas, for more than a generation, medical prices began their still ongoing rise at rates much faster than general inflation, and the average addict had virtually no chance of getting treatment rather than incarceration for the next 35-40 years, until we had to deal with a huge influx of addicted veterans from WW2 burn wards, and the general reluctance to just jail them forced a few changes on the system.
I don't know if an IP issue can screw the whole country up as bad as that did, but I'm pretty sure the current policies will do the maximum damage possible within their sphere. Personally, I think it will be blamed for at least a literary dark age, when we lost a lot of media before they became common culture.
No fire, but Clippy will change its name to "Drippy", with appropriate animation. (Ewwww!)
1. You may well be right, in which case change my 80% estimate of the work involved to something lower as you see fit, but only one way. My point still stands the other way - the more it is hard to crack WGA for the purposes of making a counterfeit pass, the more it is positively trivial to go ahead and figure out how to make legitimate copies fail while you're at it.
2. If it really is that "virtually impossible" to make counterfeits pass, someone who fails at it may well decide to use what they have learned trying to do the reverse attack in compensation. If their motive is either money or spite, they can still succeed with the easier attack.
3. People sometimes get beaten after flashing loads of cash in cheap dives. People also sometimes get beaten after makeing disparaging comments about other people's mothers. So... What's it do to the overall chance of a beating if you enter the cheap dive and loudly announce you are carrying enough cash to buy everyone on the block's mother? Microsoft is giving lots of black hat types with lots of different motives an incentive to target this particular code, agreed?
For once, John has gotten it right, even making a more detailed prediction than just "it'll probably be hacked". There are two good reasons (from a black hat perspective) to crack WGA:
1. Make a bootleg copy look authentic.
2. Make an authentic copy look bootleg.
Figureing out how to do one means you have done at least 80-90% of the work to figure out the other. That's essentially twice the normal incentive to crack a Microsoft product. #1 has an obvious financial incentive, but #2 may have one too, if the cracker is willing to consider extortion or similar modes of funding. If the cracker is doing it just to spite MS and/or MS users, the same double whammy applies.
You'ld claim the losses on Schedule A, based on your honest recollection. In case your claim was challenged, I'd strongly advise you to print off a statement of bank account activity, canceled checks, or similar documentation that showed when amd how you had funded your losses, and to keep a year long gambling diary that records your wins and losses, locations, and dates. You should also keep non-winning lottery tickets, track tickets, inside casino ATM reciepts, or whatever else seems applicable, at least to the extent of your loss claimed. In an audit, you should expect the IRS to want more, often much more, than just your copy of a W2-G and your unsupported word.
(Yes I am a tax pro - this is not official advice, and I am not charging anyone for it. If this were official advice, I would go into some necessary detail and maybe advise something a little different, based on the person's specific tax situation. Please, all readers, treat this as a general hypothtical case only - I wouldn't even comment on it if it wasn't a relatively straight-forward, simple question. I'm afraid that's all the advice on this point I should ethically give, and if it generates any more questions I'll have to refuse to go further.)
Note too, if you don't have enough total expenses to itemize (you had to exceed a base of $5,000 per filing single or $10,000 Married, Filing Jointly, last year), then you still have to report gambling winnings even though you can't deduct losses. Large gambling winnings from legitimate casinos or state lotteries will result in the winner recieving a W2-G, which looks much like a regular W-2, but records gambling income. The government gets a copy of those too.
A W2-G should be generated for:
winnings of $1,200 or more from slot machines and bingo.
winnings of $1,500 or more from keno, minus the cost of the tickets.
winnings of $600 or more from horse or dog racing.
winnings of $600 or more from state lotteries.
winnings of $600 or more from poker tournaments.
(2004-2005 limits, subject to change)
W-2Gs are not required for typical wagers won from table games such as craps, blackjack, roulette, baccarat, etc., but there is other paper work (money laundering rules require cash transaction reports) which should happen if you engage in aggregate cash transactions of $10,000 or more in any one day. Note that your account puts you under that limit in all three cases you mention, but for your more hypothetical example, sometimes it is like they give you reciepts, as part of this bigger process, and that in turn would depend on the exact situation.
Cruise ships are notorious for not giving required paperwork, with some problems reported at Indian casinos. Vegas is generally immaculate about observing these rules.
I am a tax pro, and it must be turning me into a general purpose humorless bean counter, because I almost took this seriously. I was a good two sentences through explaining just how much trouble that arguement could draw with the IRS before I caught that it was tongue in cheek. Gyaaahhh! Kelz, please don't post anything like this between April 1st and April 15th!
Using a fictitious name or other information is essentially creating an alias. For a criminal already under probation, this would likely violate it, and might even result in an additional criminal charge. A nym isn't normally a criminal act, but for these guys, it is, under at least some state's laws, or even where this isn't the case, it will almost inevitably be an aggrevating circumstance if they do anything at all else. Plus a probation officer can impose some pretty extreme restrictions against normally non-criminal acts, such as visiting a close family member who happens to also have a record. For many of these predators, their probation began with a standardized list that already warned against using any alias whatsoever, even just normal ones such as signing a check with a nickname. So if the criminal gets caught, they are probably damned if they do, damned if they don't.
You seem to be missing a factor here - Your concept seems to be: People who want to get MP3 or other such forms of CDs they own, and have a computer can either download or rip their own. Ripping their own assures getting everything in your collection, with more reliable quality, and is faster, so why would anyone choose downloading? (Sorry if I'm putting words into your mouth here, that's genuinely not my intention, and I hope I'm summing your ideas up pretty accurately.)
Fair enough, but here's the other conditions - You're assuming CD ripping software is equally available with File Sharing software. That is, the prices are the same for similar utility, they are similarly easy to find (particularly by an internet search), and they are similarly easy to learn to use. For that matter, you're assuming a CD drive in the user's computer, although that's a safe assumption in 95% + of cases.
In my own case, I don't download where copyrighted materials are involved, but do download whole Linux ISOs and Usenet binaries (ones legitimately the IP of their poster) so I know something about the software. I had to get X-News for Usenet, as Outlook Express was just about completely useless for multipart binaries. X-News had a steep learning curve and was a very "non-windowsy" feeling program, which could drive many people towards burning if all they want is copies of their own stuff, but it was also free, and had exceptionally good online support pages. The first ripping software I owned was 29.95$ downloaded of the net without the company sending a physical disk copy unless I wanted to pay extra, and I had trouble with compatability with my CD drive of the time (The software incorrectly interpreted the read speeds reported by the drive, and would automatically kick down to read only at 1x speed). So for me, I could have downloaded the CD in 20-30 minutes, or ripped it in about 64. That was about 8 years ago, on a 98 box. The chief reason why I didn't go with downloading was I didn't want to encourage the uploaders who were, even then, breaking the law. I also decided that my public involvemnt in free software and such was a good reason to stay squeaky clean.
The ripping software also frequently popped up windows, chiefly relating to track naming. You had to stay in the room while it was ripping, just in case it hung up when you didn't answer one of the questions (although it did give you about 2 minutes most of the time). I ran across a couple of CDs it just wouldn't rip (Anyone know why Constance Demby's CDs were particularly reluctant to process?) I had to learn a lot about bit rates, including variable ones, and why K-Jofol v 0.31 didn't like them on playback. Eventually I had to move to something new for playback (Winamp, then at 1.04 or so).
Looking back, any of those issues could have made some people decide to skip ripping and try downloading instead. The longer times required to download meant a lot less if you could trust the process to run automatically, and couldn't trust ripping to do so. On older CD drives or PCs, differences in the amount of memory and such could make ripping a lot slower than a 5 minute process, as it is for many (but not nearly all) of us today. There was a time when most PCs could process data faster than most user's download pipes could deliver it, but those same systems couldn't keep up with running a ripping/compression algorythm at nearly maximum CD drive speeds.
There are plenty of people who would rather buy physical media for their software, and so go to staples or best buy and take whatever looks good, and so frequently learn a less than optimal solution. (Just think of all the people in red or blue shirts who would love to sell a copy of MS works on the assurance that Outlook does better downloading than OE, and that will fix the customer's problem - how many of them will steer the customer towards cheap 3rd party ripping software, let alone a free alternative?). There are plenty of people who stick with whatever the