As noted, there's the legal stick -- suing, probably focusing on those offering the most with the highest bandwidth, as the big-time distributors are probably easier to track. They likely also want lots of attendant publicity, to scare those who are sitting on the fence into not starting.
They can also attack the P2P systems themselves through technological means, such as trying to flood the networks with bogus offerings (corrupted files, servers that drastically slow down during the download, etc) and perhaps sending numerous download requests to the big sharers to drive up their bandwidth costs -- although there's probably a line into DOS that they might not want to cross. They can attempt to make these networks inconvenient to use.
They could theoretically also attempt to reduce the incentive to download by offering alternative services or content that users might pay for, or dropping prices, but it's tricky to compete with "free". Perhaps offering a chance at concert tickets or backstage passes, or that sort of thing -- perks which cannot be trivially duplicated.
It's not merely the sticker price of the software that matters. There's also the cost of installation and retraining, and any possible downtime, plus the issues of compatibility with both past and future. If, for instance, OpenOffice isn't *extremely* compatible with existing documents and those you're likely to get from clients and so forth, you may well run into difficulties. If later on a new version of Office becomes popular, and the company receives document formats that OpenOffice can't read for a few months until they reverse-engineer it, you're screwed for that period.
(a) He planted seed from a crop which he either knew or ought to have known as Roundup-Ready, and
(b) This was NOT a case of seed blowing into a field, with the resulting plants tolerated but not further encouraged.
The 1997 crop was contaminated, and apparently the Court held that he noticed or should have noticed; however, he saved the seeds for planting his 1998 crop and willfully planted them rather than quickly removing such plants and not using the seed. Nor was the 1998 concentration consistent with what would have been expected from "an unsolicited 'blow-by'".
As for competition, there's some pretty significant distortion from governmental agricultural subsidies from the US and Europe. This has some negative consequences for those in other markets -- it's even harder for the poor farmer in a poor nation to compete than it otherwise would be, because even if he can produce enough to export it's hard to undercut a subsidized industrial-scale operation.
This was an Associated Press article, which is hardly an obscure bastion of IndyMedia. It's carried in such obscure media as, gosh, the "New York Times" -- perhaps you've heard of them?
It's not going to be breach of contract, but it would be likely willfully infringing on Monsanto's patent if it can be shown that the farmer was aware of the patent and the seed's nature, and hadn't been told by a patent attorney that the relevant patent(s) were invalid.
If you're *aware* that you're replanting Monsanto seed or product without contract, or maintain and later harvest after finding out, you should probably consult with a lawyer as to whether you're committing willful patent infringement.
If you have a need to keep long term backups -- for instance, you're concerned either about data corruption that only gets detected later, or you need to keep records for either data mining or in case of lawsuits -- you probably want a method that's cheaper per GB than hard drives.
Yes, for small quantities. I also have my doubts about Travan media and drives; my vacuum cleaner, for instance, has a lethal radius of at least a couple of feet in which it kills such drives (either by vibration or magnetic field? I don't know which, and not running a product testing lab with shelves of spare drives I'm not inclined to test more to find out.)
If I were building a new machine for personal use and wanting to back up more data, I might look at at a SCSI-based VXA-2 drive for the capacity, speed and hypothetical reliability -- still expensive, but less so than AIT / LTO / Mammoth / SDLT as far as I can tell.
If you're going to label control of information using such perjorative and inflammatory terms as oppressive, you should at least bother to pick a better example than DVDs or MP3s.
Frankly, nobody's oppressed if they can't get some "hot" song for free, and to suggest that it is screams of the dysfunctionality of consumer culture addicted to instant gratification. And as for information, well, I'm sure "The Matrix Revolutions" was *really* informative. Yippee. And damn, if it weren't for Sting singing "Fields of Gold", where would the world be?
However, perhaps you MIGHT have pointed out something worth objecting to such as the fact that laws themselves have been copyrighted. Given that this allows a situation in which the copyright holder can theoretically prevent anybody from even looking at the law unless they're obscenely wealthy, this would be far more worth starting a "revolution" over whatever passes for entertainment.
For a file sharer, it's actually quite different -- since it's not a remotely private activity if it's on a big open network such as KaZaA or relations thereof.
In other words, it's more like contacting a rental agency to ask who's renting one of their cars, when there are credible reports that somebody's been selling drugs or mooning people or whatever but all witnesses have is the license plate and model. The ISP can fairly insist that the BSA *show* that the IP/machine in question is actually distributing software, which shouldn't be too hard to do if it's doing so often enough that it got the BSA's attention. If the BSA shows that this downloading actually can occur, and the ISP sees this, it's rather dissimilar from the phone company case.
That's a problem with the court system, not the BSA or copyright infringement.
Your neighbor, if he's a bored attorney with nothing better to do, could make his neighborhood a pain to live in by filing papers against everybody in sight for no particular reason except perhaps to goad people into settling for small amounts. There are sanctions that can be used against frivolous lawsuits, but it's possible that they're underused.
This has absolutely -nothing- to do with presumption of innocence, which is only about what the court can do to you once you're there.
I'm inclined to think that court costs/legal fees (which can in cases be awarded, I think) should perhaps be awarded more often. If the BSA were penalized significantly for frivolous lawsuits (in addition to the PR hit), they'd have less incentive to do so.
It's not just maximization of profit when you're talking about non-material IP; it's the -existence- of profit. It's rather hard to sell something for above cost if somebody else can replicate it and distribute it at below your cost.
Now, for some domains where people are willing *and able* to provide their IP without a profit motive, perhaps because they're receiving satisfactory financial support from other directions, this may not matter much. Some software comes from non-profits, and that's even considering grant proposals as a possible financial motive.
However, have you heard of any non-profit collectives beating commercial pharmaceutical companies in any major area of research? Or of any non-profit producing a processor design on par with AMD or Intel's design? Or, for that matter, even doing the sheer volume of engineering, consultation and testing necessary for something like the Photoshop CS suite -- and, at least from a user's perspective, I might suggest that the Gimp hasn't even caught up with Paint Shop Pro? Take away the profit, and it's difficult if not impossible in some cases to accumulate the resources needed for some tasks, even if you're benevolent and self-sacrificial to have the motive.
And if it's the FBI that should be doing this, how many FBI agents do you think would have to be working on this -- and this alone -- full-time? Seems a waste of resources given that this isn't really a main goal of the FBI.
I don't think that the BSA should be able to -automatically- get names, but if it can be shown that they did provide reasonable probable cause (e.g. demonstrating the distribution of copyrighted material whose copyright belongs strictly to their memberships) to the ISP, and the ISP insists on fighting, it's not unreasonable to bill the ISP for the extra costs incurred -- and the other way around holds, too.
If somebody's tying up court time with frivolous allegations, or frivolously resisting a basically open-and-shut case, it makes sense to sanction them for it.
Feel free to vote them out if you think they're doing a bad job -- and to write them before or after doing so. It's votes that give them jobs, not money; campaign dollars are only useful if they get votes.
You're mixing up intelligence and merit. These are not necessarily the same. One might point to any number of people whose intelligence might be beyond dispute, but who might be properly disqualified from a list of best potential leaders for other failings. It would be implausible to suggest, for instance, that Osama bin Laden is an idiot; he clearly has some ability to inspire, as well as a highly developed knack for self-preservation beyond what is likely to be possessed by a fool.
Josef Stalin was also quite probably highly intelligent, given his rise to power and his ability to maintain it despite not only the Nazi threat to the Soviet state but also the enmity of numerous other factions within the Communist party and the surviving anti-Communists. He was certainly bright enough to reverse previous dogma when it seemed necessary to do so, such as reducing the influence of political commissars in the military; reinstating officer's shoulderboards as a symbol of their authority despite how this might contradict the goal of classlessness; and even rehabilitating some worthy commanders from the prison system, IIRC.
Bobby Fischer might also be highly intelligent. He's at least capable of having been one of the world's best chess players, and that's a domain in which the ability to plan ahead and a fanatical attention to detail and memorization works. He's also, from what I've read, possibly bi-polar, and definitely a radical Holocaust denier and a paranoid believer in wide-ranging Jewish conspiracies to get him.
In the hard science domains, perhaps; although some theories will still be very difficult to experimentally verify. It's difficult to run experiments involving the formation of planets, for instance, or the beginning of tool-use among a species, and other experiments may be technically and chronologically (it's tough to have ane experiment which needs a couple of centuries to run, for instance) feasible but sufficiently unethical as to be disallowed.
In the social sciences, less so. When it comes to debating the effects of the prevalance of concealed firearms on crime, for instance, one might have a perfectly valid statistical analysis -but- feature selection and how one encodes them will likely be open to attack.
In anything controversial such as many topics relating to history or public policy, even mere presentation of facts may be problematic, because the selection of particular facts may present a decidely unfair view of the topic. One could, for instance, fill an article on Germany by dwelling solely on the Nazi regime and its atrocities, but it wouldn't be very fair, as that's not exactly the sum total of their history, any more than it would be appropriate to present the United States government's interactions with others only by looking at, say, Hiroshima/Nagasaki; the massacre at Wounded Knee; and the gunboat diplomacy re: Panama. It also wouldn't be that accurate to dwell only on the more positive aspects such as the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, the mediation between the Sudanese government and the southern rebel forces, or the achievement of the Camp David Accords.
There's a problem here in that you can't realistically present -all- relevancies unless you don't mind presenting an unnavigable morass (and in a volume that might defy systematic examination), but neither can one necessarily pick an arbitrary mixture and have it be universally accepted as fair.
Step 3 would be the problem, as you have a chicken-and-egg issue of deciding who's expert enough to validly judge expertise... and even a solid consensus on accuracy or inaccuracy will not necessarily point to the right answer.
Compared to the Rape of Nanking, which wasn't exactly subtle -- it rather resembled how the conqueroring Mongols would make an example of cities which resisted, actually, and whose sheer scope and a city full of witnesses made it impossible to hide even if the Japanese had wanted to at the time?
Or compared to the MONUC rapes and prostitution in the Congo, where evidence includes videotapes of homemade child pornography featuring a MONUC employee, still photographs constituting child pornography, pregnancies by MONUC soldiers and staff documented by a group investigating the sex trade, MONUC employees investing in brothels... ?
There is the problem of determining the proper "balance".
For instance, I'm sure that if one solicited calls for 'balance' on Adolf Hitler, one could get LOTS of claims from his proponents suggesting all sorts of positives about him, blaming everybody but the Germans for the Second World War due to the Versaille Treaty, denying the Final Solution, attributing the Nazi defeat to Jewish Bolshevik traitors, or whatever. Personally, I'm inclined to think that any properly balanced view of him in terms of history should be profoundly negative... and fanatics will be inclined to frequently and loudly tilt the balance the other way.
In addition, the selection of facts -- even when true -- can be quite biased. A previous poster noted that an article on rape linked to the Abu Ghraib scandal. One might wonder if the same person who added that link would consent to linking an article about rampant sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers in the Congo, including the running of prostitution rings and the creation of child pornography involving rape, or perhaps listing articles on the French use of torture and extrajudicial execution during the war in Algiers in an article on torture or state terrorism. Somebody who has a bias specifically against the United States or its government, for instance, might constantly point to Abu Ghraib while ignoring far larger scandals.
Scientists can also be highly... off-centre. The Soviets some time ago heavily backed Lysenko's vaguely Lamarckian views as they were believed to match well with Marxist dogma. For a more modern mess, consider climatology; or the nature-nuture debate in a variety of topics, for that matter. Or the radical feminism of Luce Irigaray, who even argued that "e=Mc^{2}" was sexist... Even in domains where there may be no clear implication for something as highly charged as public policy, there may be virulently opposed schools of thought whose proponents may give short shrift towards the others.
Please cite your source for the 1%-owning-80% claim.
Not even "worldrevolution.org" (link, which was found by Googling for {"united states" wealth disparity} -- a deliberately biased search, obviously -- supports your contention, and it appears to be run by hard-core leftist peaceniks. Even these people claim that "the top 1% of households own almost 40% of the nation's wealth", and even the "top 10% of Americans own over 70% of nation's wealth".
Legitimacy and legality play an extremely limited role in international relations.
Do you consider the United States to be a rebellious possession of the British? Or the whole of China to be an insurrectionist nation that legitimately belongs to some long-lost Imperial heir, or a Manchu, or a KMT bureaucrat? Is the government of France still in rebellion against the monarchists? Should the government of Vietnam be forced to grant autonomy to the southern half? Should Panama be annexed back to Colombia? Should Australia's colonial descendants leave the country to the Aborigines? Should there be a new Caesar in Rome?
If you're really concerned about legality, you should probably be campaigning for reversion back to earlier times -- times before, say, the development of agriculture.
Is it too much to hope for that one sees more original games than an Arkanoid remake? Or that the blurbs would more fully describe gameplay, rather than describing a game's *music* as the star, or lauding its artwork?
Slashdot Mirror
As noted, there's the legal stick -- suing, probably focusing on those offering the most with the highest bandwidth, as the big-time distributors are probably easier to track. They likely also want lots of attendant publicity, to scare those who are sitting on the fence into not starting.
They can also attack the P2P systems themselves through technological means, such as trying to flood the networks with bogus offerings (corrupted files, servers that drastically slow down during the download, etc) and perhaps sending numerous download requests to the big sharers to drive up their bandwidth costs -- although there's probably a line into DOS that they might not want to cross. They can attempt to make these networks inconvenient to use.
They could theoretically also attempt to reduce the incentive to download by offering alternative services or content that users might pay for, or dropping prices, but it's tricky to compete with "free". Perhaps offering a chance at concert tickets or backstage passes, or that sort of thing -- perks which cannot be trivially duplicated.
It's not merely the sticker price of the software that matters. There's also the cost of installation and retraining, and any possible downtime, plus the issues of compatibility with both past and future. If, for instance, OpenOffice isn't *extremely* compatible with existing documents and those you're likely to get from clients and so forth, you may well run into difficulties. If later on a new version of Office becomes popular, and the company receives document formats that OpenOffice can't read for a few months until they reverse-engineer it, you're screwed for that period.
In Mr. Schmeiser's case, the court found that --
(a) He planted seed from a crop which he either knew or ought to have known as Roundup-Ready, and
(b) This was NOT a case of seed blowing into a field, with the resulting plants tolerated but not further encouraged.
The 1997 crop was contaminated, and apparently the Court held that he noticed or should have noticed; however, he saved the seeds for planting his 1998 crop and willfully planted them rather than quickly removing such plants and not using the seed. Nor was the 1998 concentration consistent with what would have been expected from "an unsolicited 'blow-by'".
As for competition, there's some pretty significant distortion from governmental agricultural subsidies from the US and Europe. This has some negative consequences for those in other markets -- it's even harder for the poor farmer in a poor nation to compete than it otherwise would be, because even if he can produce enough to export it's hard to undercut a subsidized industrial-scale operation.
This was an Associated Press article, which is hardly an obscure bastion of IndyMedia. It's carried in such obscure media as, gosh, the "New York Times" -- perhaps you've heard of them?
h -Pirates.html?oref=login
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Biotec
Perhaps you've blinded yourself to the continued existence of quality newspapers and listen solely to AlterNet and friends.
Specious argument; genetic codes have semantics beyond that of numbers with nothing attached to them.
Willful patent infringement.
It's not going to be breach of contract, but it would be likely willfully infringing on Monsanto's patent if it can be shown that the farmer was aware of the patent and the seed's nature, and hadn't been told by a patent attorney that the relevant patent(s) were invalid.
There's also no *right* to be able to use their seed on terms unacceptable to Monsanto. Don't like the terms, don't buy 'em.
If you're *aware* that you're replanting Monsanto seed or product without contract, or maintain and later harvest after finding out, you should probably consult with a lawyer as to whether you're committing willful patent infringement.
Depends what you're looking for.
If you have a need to keep long term backups -- for instance, you're concerned either about data corruption that only gets detected later, or you need to keep records for either data mining or in case of lawsuits -- you probably want a method that's cheaper per GB than hard drives.
Yes, for small quantities. I also have my doubts about Travan media and drives; my vacuum cleaner, for instance, has a lethal radius of at least a couple of feet in which it kills such drives (either by vibration or magnetic field? I don't know which, and not running a product testing lab with shelves of spare drives I'm not inclined to test more to find out.)
If I were building a new machine for personal use and wanting to back up more data, I might look at at a SCSI-based VXA-2 drive for the capacity, speed and hypothetical reliability -- still expensive, but less so than AIT / LTO / Mammoth / SDLT as far as I can tell.
If you're going to label control of information using such perjorative and inflammatory terms as oppressive, you should at least bother to pick a better example than DVDs or MP3s.
Frankly, nobody's oppressed if they can't get some "hot" song for free, and to suggest that it is screams of the dysfunctionality of consumer culture addicted to instant gratification. And as for information, well, I'm sure "The Matrix Revolutions" was *really* informative. Yippee. And damn, if it weren't for Sting singing "Fields of Gold", where would the world be?
However, perhaps you MIGHT have pointed out something worth objecting to such as the fact that laws themselves have been copyrighted. Given that this allows a situation in which the copyright holder can theoretically prevent anybody from even looking at the law unless they're obscenely wealthy, this would be far more worth starting a "revolution" over whatever passes for entertainment.
For a file sharer, it's actually quite different -- since it's not a remotely private activity if it's on a big open network such as KaZaA or relations thereof.
In other words, it's more like contacting a rental agency to ask who's renting one of their cars, when there are credible reports that somebody's been selling drugs or mooning people or whatever but all witnesses have is the license plate and model. The ISP can fairly insist that the BSA *show* that the IP/machine in question is actually distributing software, which shouldn't be too hard to do if it's doing so often enough that it got the BSA's attention. If the BSA shows that this downloading actually can occur, and the ISP sees this, it's rather dissimilar from the phone company case.
That's a problem with the court system, not the BSA or copyright infringement.
Your neighbor, if he's a bored attorney with nothing better to do, could make his neighborhood a pain to live in by filing papers against everybody in sight for no particular reason except perhaps to goad people into settling for small amounts. There are sanctions that can be used against frivolous lawsuits, but it's possible that they're underused.
This has absolutely -nothing- to do with presumption of innocence, which is only about what the court can do to you once you're there.
I'm inclined to think that court costs/legal fees (which can in cases be awarded, I think) should perhaps be awarded more often. If the BSA were penalized significantly for frivolous lawsuits (in addition to the PR hit), they'd have less incentive to do so.
It's not just maximization of profit when you're talking about non-material IP; it's the -existence- of profit. It's rather hard to sell something for above cost if somebody else can replicate it and distribute it at below your cost.
Now, for some domains where people are willing *and able* to provide their IP without a profit motive, perhaps because they're receiving satisfactory financial support from other directions, this may not matter much. Some software comes from non-profits, and that's even considering grant proposals as a possible financial motive.
However, have you heard of any non-profit collectives beating commercial pharmaceutical companies in any major area of research? Or of any non-profit producing a processor design on par with AMD or Intel's design? Or, for that matter, even doing the sheer volume of engineering, consultation and testing necessary for something like the Photoshop CS suite -- and, at least from a user's perspective, I might suggest that the Gimp hasn't even caught up with Paint Shop Pro? Take away the profit, and it's difficult if not impossible in some cases to accumulate the resources needed for some tasks, even if you're benevolent and self-sacrificial to have the motive.
The police in which jurisdiction?
And if it's the FBI that should be doing this, how many FBI agents do you think would have to be working on this -- and this alone -- full-time? Seems a waste of resources given that this isn't really a main goal of the FBI.
I don't think that the BSA should be able to -automatically- get names, but if it can be shown that they did provide reasonable probable cause (e.g. demonstrating the distribution of copyrighted material whose copyright belongs strictly to their memberships) to the ISP, and the ISP insists on fighting, it's not unreasonable to bill the ISP for the extra costs incurred -- and the other way around holds, too.
If somebody's tying up court time with frivolous allegations, or frivolously resisting a basically open-and-shut case, it makes sense to sanction them for it.
Feel free to vote them out if you think they're doing a bad job -- and to write them before or after doing so. It's votes that give them jobs, not money; campaign dollars are only useful if they get votes.
You're mixing up intelligence and merit. These are not necessarily the same. One might point to any number of people whose intelligence might be beyond dispute, but who might be properly disqualified from a list of best potential leaders for other failings. It would be implausible to suggest, for instance, that Osama bin Laden is an idiot; he clearly has some ability to inspire, as well as a highly developed knack for self-preservation beyond what is likely to be possessed by a fool.
Josef Stalin was also quite probably highly intelligent, given his rise to power and his ability to maintain it despite not only the Nazi threat to the Soviet state but also the enmity of numerous other factions within the Communist party and the surviving anti-Communists. He was certainly bright enough to reverse previous dogma when it seemed necessary to do so, such as reducing the influence of political commissars in the military; reinstating officer's shoulderboards as a symbol of their authority despite how this might contradict the goal of classlessness; and even rehabilitating some worthy commanders from the prison system, IIRC.
Bobby Fischer might also be highly intelligent. He's at least capable of having been one of the world's best chess players, and that's a domain in which the ability to plan ahead and a fanatical attention to detail and memorization works. He's also, from what I've read, possibly bi-polar, and definitely a radical Holocaust denier and a paranoid believer in wide-ranging Jewish conspiracies to get him.
In the hard science domains, perhaps; although some theories will still be very difficult to experimentally verify. It's difficult to run experiments involving the formation of planets, for instance, or the beginning of tool-use among a species, and other experiments may be technically and chronologically (it's tough to have ane experiment which needs a couple of centuries to run, for instance) feasible but sufficiently unethical as to be disallowed.
In the social sciences, less so. When it comes to debating the effects of the prevalance of concealed firearms on crime, for instance, one might have a perfectly valid statistical analysis -but- feature selection and how one encodes them will likely be open to attack.
In anything controversial such as many topics relating to history or public policy, even mere presentation of facts may be problematic, because the selection of particular facts may present a decidely unfair view of the topic. One could, for instance, fill an article on Germany by dwelling solely on the Nazi regime and its atrocities, but it wouldn't be very fair, as that's not exactly the sum total of their history, any more than it would be appropriate to present the United States government's interactions with others only by looking at, say, Hiroshima/Nagasaki; the massacre at Wounded Knee; and the gunboat diplomacy re: Panama. It also wouldn't be that accurate to dwell only on the more positive aspects such as the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, the mediation between the Sudanese government and the southern rebel forces, or the achievement of the Camp David Accords.
There's a problem here in that you can't realistically present -all- relevancies unless you don't mind presenting an unnavigable morass (and in a volume that might defy systematic examination), but neither can one necessarily pick an arbitrary mixture and have it be universally accepted as fair.
Step 3 would be the problem, as you have a chicken-and-egg issue of deciding who's expert enough to validly judge expertise... and even a solid consensus on accuracy or inaccuracy will not necessarily point to the right answer.
"Hands down the best documented case there is"?
Compared to the Rape of Nanking, which wasn't exactly subtle -- it rather resembled how the conqueroring Mongols would make an example of cities which resisted, actually, and whose sheer scope and a city full of witnesses made it impossible to hide even if the Japanese had wanted to at the time?
Or compared to the MONUC rapes and prostitution in the Congo, where evidence includes videotapes of homemade child pornography featuring a MONUC employee, still photographs constituting child pornography, pregnancies by MONUC soldiers and staff documented by a group investigating the sex trade, MONUC employees investing in brothels... ?
There is the problem of determining the proper "balance".
For instance, I'm sure that if one solicited calls for 'balance' on Adolf Hitler, one could get LOTS of claims from his proponents suggesting all sorts of positives about him, blaming everybody but the Germans for the Second World War due to the Versaille Treaty, denying the Final Solution, attributing the Nazi defeat to Jewish Bolshevik traitors, or whatever. Personally, I'm inclined to think that any properly balanced view of him in terms of history should be profoundly negative... and fanatics will be inclined to frequently and loudly tilt the balance the other way.
In addition, the selection of facts -- even when true -- can be quite biased. A previous poster noted that an article on rape linked to the Abu Ghraib scandal. One might wonder if the same person who added that link would consent to linking an article about rampant sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers in the Congo, including the running of prostitution rings and the creation of child pornography involving rape, or perhaps listing articles on the French use of torture and extrajudicial execution during the war in Algiers in an article on torture or state terrorism. Somebody who has a bias specifically against the United States or its government, for instance, might constantly point to Abu Ghraib while ignoring far larger scandals.
Scientists can also be highly... off-centre. The Soviets some time ago heavily backed Lysenko's vaguely Lamarckian views as they were believed to match well with Marxist dogma. For a more modern mess, consider climatology; or the nature-nuture debate in a variety of topics, for that matter. Or the radical feminism of Luce Irigaray, who even argued that "e=Mc^{2}" was sexist... Even in domains where there may be no clear implication for something as highly charged as public policy, there may be virulently opposed schools of thought whose proponents may give short shrift towards the others.
Please cite your source for the 1%-owning-80% claim.
Not even "worldrevolution.org" (link, which was found by Googling for {"united states" wealth disparity} -- a deliberately biased search, obviously -- supports your contention, and it appears to be run by hard-core leftist peaceniks. Even these people claim that "the top 1% of households own almost 40% of the nation's wealth", and even the "top 10% of Americans own over 70% of nation's wealth".
Legitimacy and legality play an extremely limited role in international relations.
Do you consider the United States to be a rebellious possession of the British? Or the whole of China to be an insurrectionist nation that legitimately belongs to some long-lost Imperial heir, or a Manchu, or a KMT bureaucrat? Is the government of France still in rebellion against the monarchists? Should the government of Vietnam be forced to grant autonomy to the southern half? Should Panama be annexed back to Colombia? Should Australia's colonial descendants leave the country to the Aborigines? Should there be a new Caesar in Rome?
If you're really concerned about legality, you should probably be campaigning for reversion back to earlier times -- times before, say, the development of agriculture.
Is it too much to hope for that one sees more original games than an Arkanoid remake? Or that the blurbs would more fully describe gameplay, rather than describing a game's *music* as the star, or lauding its artwork?