i'm glad i'm not an American if this sort of thing is acceptable there.
Why would not being an American stop you from being prosecuted? In this case, the crime was against a US politician. If Julian Assange teaches us nothing else, it's that the US government doesn't especially care about where you're from if you annoy it badly enough.
Problem: While many French enjoy snails, and many Scandinavians enjoy Lutefisk, almost no one else does.
Cultural likes of generally disgusting things seem to rise from a cultural familiarity originally born out of desperation.
Having eaten crickets, I'd describe them as vaguely meaty with a side of shredded sandpaper.
That unpleasant texture makes me think this story is a bit like encouraging using sand to increase the volume of food you're eating, and thus decrease the caloric intake.
Certainly, there are cultures who consume more sand in their food. It doesn't make sandy food equally valid, at least so far as tastiness goes.
If we're desperate enough, though, yeah, sandy food and insects will be on the menu. We'll probably even like it eventually.
You don't sacrifice one person's life for another... And that's the basic objection.
For the sake of argument, I'll accept the entirety of your post as you meant it.
Now, the embryo that was brought into existence through IVF will now either a) be thrown in the trash, possibly after dying a natural death in the freezer, never having developed beyond a few cells or b) be used for research that has the possibility of saving lives.
This is in no way comparable to abortion. This is directly comparable to using the organs of a person who is now brain dead, and will die shortly.
Most compassionate human beings want to help the living, not the soon-to-be-dead.
In the real world, that's the choice -- let them die a meaningless death, or have their lives mean something.
Sex for women is who will it be. Sex for men is when will it be. A big difference, no?
Yes. Thus the fact that the top end for women will have lots of prostitutes and porn stars, and the top end for men will have pick-up artists and celebrities.
I'm still not certain which of those groups are bigger.
Theoretically, yes, but the numbers for women should be higher at an earlier age, since there are more older men-younger women matches than older women-younger men.
That, and since we're talking median(rather than mean) when we say, "average", one woman having sex with 300 men would skew the median in a way that 300 women having sex with 300 men wouldn't.
That said, I don't know if one gender is especially more top heavy on sexual experiences than the other.
That was a splendid post, but I wanted to point one thing out:
We didn't make fun of him because he was stupid. We made fun of him because he was wrong.
We made fun of him because he was wrong and stupid.
The thing is, the speech sounded like it came directly from a lobbyist's press release. Okay, lots of speeches sound like that, but Stevens, in attempting to get the gist of the argument, changed things that no one who actually knew anything about the topic would ever say.
So, yes, he was wrong with what he was trying to say, as he was a mouthpiece for AT&T or some other company. He was stupid because he was speaking confidently from a position of obvious ignorance.
All this said, I was happy when Stevens lost his final campaign, but I find only sadness in his dying unnaturally. If he had lived longer, well, maybe he would have learned more about the internet and changed his position.
Regardless of where you stand on the matter, this case is a major win for a restrained judiciary that does not legislate from the bench.
Considering that the Supreme Court appears to legislate from the bench on every issue that liberals or conservatives actually care about, judicial restraint on a topic that neither group cares about is hardly a "major win".
Personally, I've grown to detest how copyright/trademark/patent cases play out, which is that the Supreme Court decides an individual case, and provides "guidance" that virtually assures that the common person will need a lawyer in order to claim any rights.
John Paul Stevens is an example of that. He was appointed by Gerald Ford and sold as a conservative. He is arguably the furthest Left of any Justice currently sitting on the Court.
He replaced William O Douglas, who created/discovered the constitutional right to privacy.
So, sure, Stevens is arguably as leftist as any justice currently sitting on the court, but compared to the guy he replaced he _is_ a conservative.
To force certain "standards of behavior" on a corporation
How about anti-trust law? How about workers' rights, such as requiring payment for certain people's overtime? Or requiring that businesses be run more safely, when they can find people willing to take the greater risk? How about the regulations that kick in once a business reaches a certain size?
I'm sure there's a reasonable argument you're almost making about how it's unreasonable to force corporations to also follow the same restrictions we put on government, but the government already restricts corporations in behavior that has nothing to do with "fundamental rights".
I also doubt your assertion that it's the case for all other private property, as, among other things, I'm not sure what fundamental right there is for the public to take money from you based on how valuable a piece of land and/or building is.
Most people agree that the original author should have control of his creation. For example, my sister was very upset that someone wrote a sequel to Gone With the Wind, because the original author didn't want a sequel to be written
This comment reminds me of the possibility of Matrix sequels, and the possibility of Star Wars prequels. We're glad they never happened, as the creator realized that they would be unable to capture the sheer genius of their previous works.
So, personally, I suppose I'm glad to have creators with such obvious ability to assess their own talent, but I'd sure like copyrights to be shorter so that we could get dozens of attempts at making sequels and prequels, where, since it wasn't made by the original creator, we could ignore the bad ones and promote the good ones, like with what has happened with Shakespearian knockoffs and new Sherlock Holmes adventures.
Kind of like asking $sexual_preference people if they would like to be cured? Or perhaps asking $skin_colour people if they would like to be cured?
How about asking if intersex people want to be cured? In that case, a large amount of intersex people already have that moral decision made for them, because certain parts of society can't imagine someone wanting to not be physically entirely male or female.
So, perhaps, rather than talking about "deaf culture" and "colorblind culture", we could talk about "intersex culture", and ask a group of people who already have the choice, or had the choice taken from them.
"problem" is identifying colour blindness as a defect that needs a cure
I'd like four functional arms, the ability to see in infrared and ultraviolet, and to correct some of God's design flaws(e.g., I'd like a back that's designed for standing.). Is that normal? Probably not, but why should someone else get to make the choice for me, if it were possible? Why should some group's interests mean I won't be allowed to switch my skin color or sexual orientation?
meet some baseline or be classified as defective.
I do agree that life would be a lot easier if society accepted different people more than it does.
do they adequately verify that these "girls" are actually human females?
You say that like it matters.
They're certainly not all attractive, 20-something genetic girls on the porn hotlines, so why would this be different? What matters is what you perceive, given that it's a pretend world regardless of how hot and sexy the worker is.
Anyway, I, for one, welcome aliens practicing their English and sexual skills by impersonating a porn human.
Somehow society thinks it's reasonable to let a 16-year-old drive a car. This decision will kill many of them. Many more than who will die from anything sex-related over their entire life. And I'd imagine that having someone you know and love die/get brain damage/be crippled is more of an emotional minefield than breakups or STIs.
So, sure, very few human societies have cavalier attitudes toward sex, but the whole car thing shows that it's not just about the actual risks.
Frankly, if you want a reasonable legal response to sex, taking naked photos wouldn't be a big deal, and teenagers would be prosecuted for sex-related crimes only if they neglected to get tested for STIs or didn't go on birth control beforehand(And condom usage would be mandatory, but I don't know how you'd prosecute for that).
Is that immoral? Possibly. I don't want the state to care about morality, I want the state to care about actual harm.
we will depend on the judgment of the "leaker" and of the Wikileaks editors. Personally, I'd prefer the government officials...
Okay, government officials covered up various embarrassing things, like photos of caskets filled with dead soldiers killed by government decisions. They also covered up the warrant-less wiretapping done by the phone companies.
That's the first two examples that come into my head. I'd also consider most of the Wikileaks info to be stuff that should have been made public, but wasn't because it makes the government look bad.
Now, on the side of info gotten from Wikileaks that caused the country actual harm... Well, okay, perhaps I'm just biased, but I can't immediately think of a single example(for leaks in general, I remember something about an embedded reporter giving out troop locations, though I'll admit I don't have any reason to think that caused actual harm, even if it was stupid.). Since you think the government is doing it right, and the leakers are doing it wrong, I would assume you could easily find, oh, half a dozen examples.
Not that I find any real flaw in your reasoning -- I just don't think the results agree with you.
Sometimes its for good national security reasons which in the long run protect the public.
Your argument makes sense so long as you fear others more than you fear the government.
After eight years where the Bush administration called virtually everything "national security", encouraged phone companies to spy on us without judicial oversight, and thought that the whole of the PATRIOT act was a good idea, we got the slightly-more-open Obama administration that somehow thinks that extreme secrecy is necessary when negotiating a copyright treaty.
Those things scare me significantly more than worrying about the stuff that Wikileaks has come up with.
Also, consider that Wikileaks only gets info that leakers give to them -- if some bit of data likely would cause the country great damage, I'd hope the person in possession of it would have the good sense not to leak it. Sure, some people in power will abuse their leaking-power occasionally, but most leakers don't reveal secrets for the hell of it.
A person intends to build a computer from scratch, and you say they should hand in their geek card because they want to get on with the building and using, rather than spending days acquiring hardware knowledge that will be completely outdated in a few months?
Come on, be serious -- yes, the OP is not a hardware geek, but saying a person who builds their own computer is not a geek is a bit like saying that a person who can only juggle three balls is not a juggler.
The thing is, we don't care about the people in Africa. At least not to the point of being willing to put them individually on welfare, so that they all have enough money to afford food, clothing, shelter, and a non-corrupted police force.
The life of a poor American/European/rich country-an is worth more than the life of one in a poor country. The grandparent post is merely arguing that helping a few of the poor isn't really worth it. You're arguing that helping a few of the poor is worth it.
The strength of his position is that research and development can make everyone richer, in a more permanent sense.
The strength of your position is that keeping people on welfare decreases the chance that they'll resort to crime. The other strength is that it just feels wrong to tell poor people that you don't care how destitute they are -- they're not getting money.
I Am Not A Lawyer, but theoretically a lawyer would understand that "copyright infringement" and "theft" are different things. Theft deprives someone of property(Yes, theft can have a broader meaning, but under that broader meaning murder is theft, too). Copyright infringement deprives someone from exercising their limited-term(and limited-scope) monopoly.
This doesn't mean that copyright infringement is okay; just that it's different in important ways when someone steals a CD rather than pirate the MP3s.
All that said, I think you missed the original poster's point, which is that "copyright is not theft", not that "copyright infringement is not theft".
Speaking as a Wisconsinite, I'd say that Russ Feingold both proves and disproves your statement. Disproves because he's still pretty poor for a senator, and obeys a higher ethical standard than is necessary(voluntary spending limits, voluntarily telling outside groups to not advertise for him, etc.). He proves it because he originally got elected because the other two candidates didn't take him seriously, and destroyed each other quite successfully through negative advertising. Then, when Feingold took a stand against soft money and his opponent didn't, he won an extremely close election.
He was the only one to vote against the original PATRIOT act, and he voted for John Ashcroft in Bush's cabinet because he figured a president should have the right to choose his advisors.
Sadly, while I could probably name 20+ senators without having to think terribly hard, I am unaware of any other politician who would be anywhere near those standards.
That said, given that Feingold(along with every other senator) dropped the ball on the DMCA, I have no great faith that he'll be all that helpful in at least making a stink about ACTA.
Weasel words defeated by a weak single piece of anecdotal evidence! Bam!
...and your anecdotal evidence said nothing about the PSP's(or even better, the PSP Go's) chance of winning versus the iPod. Personally, before I thought of the PSP as a reasonably strong competitor in the handheld gaming system field. The PSP Go seems like a wonderful competitor against the Zune. I suppose it might be ready to take on NGage, too.
The summary of the article mentioned that his previous work included overseeing a discredited study, and until now he had been overseeing a program that seems to not be doing terribly well.
This departure would seem a net positive.
Unless, of course, Timothy and fleaplus have led me astray with that summary of Steve Cook's nineteen years at NASA.
Legibility is no longer an issue so the scrutiny gets placed on other things.
I care about the amount of time it takes me to understand someone when I'm reading stuff on the internet -- if they can't be bothered/aren't able to make their point in an understandable way, I fail to see why I should bother deciphering it.
Beyond that, any usage that takes me out of the, "what do I think of their idea?" mode, and puts me into the, "what are they saying?" mode is a loss of time.
So, yes, the scrutiny is put on other things because legibility used to be the biggest obstacle to quickly communicating ideas, but now it's grammar and spelling.
That appears to be a reasonably balanced look at who/what was "responsible" for the budget being $1.2 trillion in the hole, rather than $800 billion to the good.
To save you the trouble of reading it, it's the economy, Bush 43, and then Obama, in that order. Bush messed the budget up and Obama is either making it worse or not fixing it.
Sure, Obama's stimulus package didn't help, but neither did Bush's tax cuts, drug benefit, spending on homeland security, or increase in military spending.
Copyrights have expired in the past. When that happened, copying became legal. At no point does stealing something become legal. There is also no "fair use" defense with theft.
Equating copyright infringement with theft ignores the fact that copyright law is there "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".
Slashdot Mirror
i'm glad i'm not an American if this sort of thing is acceptable there.
Why would not being an American stop you from being prosecuted? In this case, the crime was against a US politician. If Julian Assange teaches us nothing else, it's that the US government doesn't especially care about where you're from if you annoy it badly enough.
Problem: While many French enjoy snails, and many Scandinavians enjoy Lutefisk, almost no one else does.
Cultural likes of generally disgusting things seem to rise from a cultural familiarity originally born out of desperation.
Having eaten crickets, I'd describe them as vaguely meaty with a side of shredded sandpaper.
That unpleasant texture makes me think this story is a bit like encouraging using sand to increase the volume of food you're eating, and thus decrease the caloric intake.
Certainly, there are cultures who consume more sand in their food. It doesn't make sandy food equally valid, at least so far as tastiness goes.
If we're desperate enough, though, yeah, sandy food and insects will be on the menu. We'll probably even like it eventually.
You don't sacrifice one person's life for another ... And that's the basic objection.
For the sake of argument, I'll accept the entirety of your post as you meant it.
Now, the embryo that was brought into existence through IVF will now either a) be thrown in the trash, possibly after dying a natural death in the freezer, never having developed beyond a few cells or b) be used for research that has the possibility of saving lives.
This is in no way comparable to abortion. This is directly comparable to using the organs of a person who is now brain dead, and will die shortly.
Most compassionate human beings want to help the living, not the soon-to-be-dead.
In the real world, that's the choice -- let them die a meaningless death, or have their lives mean something.
Sex for women is who will it be. Sex for men is when will it be. A big difference, no?
Yes. Thus the fact that the top end for women will have lots of prostitutes and porn stars, and the top end for men will have pick-up artists and celebrities.
I'm still not certain which of those groups are bigger.
Theoretically, yes, but the numbers for women should be higher at an earlier age, since there are more older men-younger women matches than older women-younger men.
That, and since we're talking median(rather than mean) when we say, "average", one woman having sex with 300 men would skew the median in a way that 300 women having sex with 300 men wouldn't.
That said, I don't know if one gender is especially more top heavy on sexual experiences than the other.
That was a splendid post, but I wanted to point one thing out:
We didn't make fun of him because he was stupid. We made fun of him because he was wrong.
We made fun of him because he was wrong and stupid.
The thing is, the speech sounded like it came directly from a lobbyist's press release. Okay, lots of speeches sound like that, but Stevens, in attempting to get the gist of the argument, changed things that no one who actually knew anything about the topic would ever say.
So, yes, he was wrong with what he was trying to say, as he was a mouthpiece for AT&T or some other company. He was stupid because he was speaking confidently from a position of obvious ignorance.
All this said, I was happy when Stevens lost his final campaign, but I find only sadness in his dying unnaturally. If he had lived longer, well, maybe he would have learned more about the internet and changed his position.
Regardless of where you stand on the matter, this case is a major win for a restrained judiciary that does not legislate from the bench.
Considering that the Supreme Court appears to legislate from the bench on every issue that liberals or conservatives actually care about, judicial restraint on a topic that neither group cares about is hardly a "major win".
Personally, I've grown to detest how copyright/trademark/patent cases play out, which is that the Supreme Court decides an individual case, and provides "guidance" that virtually assures that the common person will need a lawyer in order to claim any rights.
John Paul Stevens is an example of that. He was appointed by Gerald Ford and sold as a conservative. He is arguably the furthest Left of any Justice currently sitting on the Court.
He replaced William O Douglas, who created/discovered the constitutional right to privacy.
So, sure, Stevens is arguably as leftist as any justice currently sitting on the court, but compared to the guy he replaced he _is_ a conservative.
To force certain "standards of behavior" on a corporation
How about anti-trust law? How about workers' rights, such as requiring payment for certain people's overtime? Or requiring that businesses be run more safely, when they can find people willing to take the greater risk? How about the regulations that kick in once a business reaches a certain size?
I'm sure there's a reasonable argument you're almost making about how it's unreasonable to force corporations to also follow the same restrictions we put on government, but the government already restricts corporations in behavior that has nothing to do with "fundamental rights".
I also doubt your assertion that it's the case for all other private property, as, among other things, I'm not sure what fundamental right there is for the public to take money from you based on how valuable a piece of land and/or building is.
Most people agree that the original author should have control of his creation. For example, my sister was very upset that someone wrote a sequel to Gone With the Wind, because the original author didn't want a sequel to be written
This comment reminds me of the possibility of Matrix sequels, and the possibility of Star Wars prequels. We're glad they never happened, as the creator realized that they would be unable to capture the sheer genius of their previous works.
So, personally, I suppose I'm glad to have creators with such obvious ability to assess their own talent, but I'd sure like copyrights to be shorter so that we could get dozens of attempts at making sequels and prequels, where, since it wasn't made by the original creator, we could ignore the bad ones and promote the good ones, like with what has happened with Shakespearian knockoffs and new Sherlock Holmes adventures.
Kind of like asking $sexual_preference people if they would like to be cured? Or perhaps asking $skin_colour people if they would like to be cured?
How about asking if intersex people want to be cured? In that case, a large amount of intersex people already have that moral decision made for them, because certain parts of society can't imagine someone wanting to not be physically entirely male or female. So, perhaps, rather than talking about "deaf culture" and "colorblind culture", we could talk about "intersex culture", and ask a group of people who already have the choice, or had the choice taken from them.
"problem" is identifying colour blindness as a defect that needs a cure
I'd like four functional arms, the ability to see in infrared and ultraviolet, and to correct some of God's design flaws(e.g., I'd like a back that's designed for standing.). Is that normal? Probably not, but why should someone else get to make the choice for me, if it were possible? Why should some group's interests mean I won't be allowed to switch my skin color or sexual orientation?
meet some baseline or be classified as defective.
I do agree that life would be a lot easier if society accepted different people more than it does.
do they adequately verify that these "girls" are actually human females?
You say that like it matters.
They're certainly not all attractive, 20-something genetic girls on the porn hotlines, so why would this be different? What matters is what you perceive, given that it's a pretend world regardless of how hot and sexy the worker is.
Anyway, I, for one, welcome aliens practicing their English and sexual skills by impersonating a porn human.
Somehow society thinks it's reasonable to let a 16-year-old drive a car. This decision will kill many of them. Many more than who will die from anything sex-related over their entire life. And I'd imagine that having someone you know and love die/get brain damage/be crippled is more of an emotional minefield than breakups or STIs.
So, sure, very few human societies have cavalier attitudes toward sex, but the whole car thing shows that it's not just about the actual risks.
Frankly, if you want a reasonable legal response to sex, taking naked photos wouldn't be a big deal, and teenagers would be prosecuted for sex-related crimes only if they neglected to get tested for STIs or didn't go on birth control beforehand(And condom usage would be mandatory, but I don't know how you'd prosecute for that).
Is that immoral? Possibly. I don't want the state to care about morality, I want the state to care about actual harm.
we will depend on the judgment of the "leaker" and of the Wikileaks editors. Personally, I'd prefer the government officials...
Okay, government officials covered up various embarrassing things, like photos of caskets filled with dead soldiers killed by government decisions. They also covered up the warrant-less wiretapping done by the phone companies.
That's the first two examples that come into my head. I'd also consider most of the Wikileaks info to be stuff that should have been made public, but wasn't because it makes the government look bad.
Now, on the side of info gotten from Wikileaks that caused the country actual harm... Well, okay, perhaps I'm just biased, but I can't immediately think of a single example(for leaks in general, I remember something about an embedded reporter giving out troop locations, though I'll admit I don't have any reason to think that caused actual harm, even if it was stupid.). Since you think the government is doing it right, and the leakers are doing it wrong, I would assume you could easily find, oh, half a dozen examples.
Not that I find any real flaw in your reasoning -- I just don't think the results agree with you.
Sometimes its for good national security reasons which in the long run protect the public.
Your argument makes sense so long as you fear others more than you fear the government.
After eight years where the Bush administration called virtually everything "national security", encouraged phone companies to spy on us without judicial oversight, and thought that the whole of the PATRIOT act was a good idea, we got the slightly-more-open Obama administration that somehow thinks that extreme secrecy is necessary when negotiating a copyright treaty.
Those things scare me significantly more than worrying about the stuff that Wikileaks has come up with.
Also, consider that Wikileaks only gets info that leakers give to them -- if some bit of data likely would cause the country great damage, I'd hope the person in possession of it would have the good sense not to leak it. Sure, some people in power will abuse their leaking-power occasionally, but most leakers don't reveal secrets for the hell of it.
A person intends to build a computer from scratch, and you say they should hand in their geek card because they want to get on with the building and using, rather than spending days acquiring hardware knowledge that will be completely outdated in a few months?
Come on, be serious -- yes, the OP is not a hardware geek, but saying a person who builds their own computer is not a geek is a bit like saying that a person who can only juggle three balls is not a juggler.
The poor will be with you always.
The thing is, we don't care about the people in Africa. At least not to the point of being willing to put them individually on welfare, so that they all have enough money to afford food, clothing, shelter, and a non-corrupted police force.
The life of a poor American/European/rich country-an is worth more than the life of one in a poor country. The grandparent post is merely arguing that helping a few of the poor isn't really worth it. You're arguing that helping a few of the poor is worth it.
The strength of his position is that research and development can make everyone richer, in a more permanent sense.
The strength of your position is that keeping people on welfare decreases the chance that they'll resort to crime. The other strength is that it just feels wrong to tell poor people that you don't care how destitute they are -- they're not getting money.
I Am Not A Lawyer, but theoretically a lawyer would understand that "copyright infringement" and "theft" are different things. Theft deprives someone of property(Yes, theft can have a broader meaning, but under that broader meaning murder is theft, too). Copyright infringement deprives someone from exercising their limited-term(and limited-scope) monopoly.
This doesn't mean that copyright infringement is okay; just that it's different in important ways when someone steals a CD rather than pirate the MP3s.
All that said, I think you missed the original poster's point, which is that "copyright is not theft", not that "copyright infringement is not theft".
Speaking as a Wisconsinite, I'd say that Russ Feingold both proves and disproves your statement. Disproves because he's still pretty poor for a senator, and obeys a higher ethical standard than is necessary(voluntary spending limits, voluntarily telling outside groups to not advertise for him, etc.). He proves it because he originally got elected because the other two candidates didn't take him seriously, and destroyed each other quite successfully through negative advertising. Then, when Feingold took a stand against soft money and his opponent didn't, he won an extremely close election.
He was the only one to vote against the original PATRIOT act, and he voted for John Ashcroft in Bush's cabinet because he figured a president should have the right to choose his advisors.
Sadly, while I could probably name 20+ senators without having to think terribly hard, I am unaware of any other politician who would be anywhere near those standards.
That said, given that Feingold(along with every other senator) dropped the ball on the DMCA, I have no great faith that he'll be all that helpful in at least making a stink about ACTA.
I watch NASCAR, too, and it's not safe to drive like that.
Weasel words defeated by a weak single piece of anecdotal evidence! Bam!
...and your anecdotal evidence said nothing about the PSP's(or even better, the PSP Go's) chance of winning versus the iPod. Personally, before I thought of the PSP as a reasonably strong competitor in the handheld gaming system field. The PSP Go seems like a wonderful competitor against the Zune. I suppose it might be ready to take on NGage, too.
The summary of the article mentioned that his previous work included overseeing a discredited study, and until now he had been overseeing a program that seems to not be doing terribly well.
This departure would seem a net positive.
Unless, of course, Timothy and fleaplus have led me astray with that summary of Steve Cook's nineteen years at NASA.
Legibility is no longer an issue so the scrutiny gets placed on other things.
I care about the amount of time it takes me to understand someone when I'm reading stuff on the internet -- if they can't be bothered/aren't able to make their point in an understandable way, I fail to see why I should bother deciphering it.
Beyond that, any usage that takes me out of the, "what do I think of their idea?" mode, and puts me into the, "what are they saying?" mode is a loss of time.
So, yes, the scrutiny is put on other things because legibility used to be the biggest obstacle to quickly communicating ideas, but now it's grammar and spelling.
Maybe that's just me. I hope not, though.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/business/economy/10leonhardt.html?_r=1
That appears to be a reasonably balanced look at who/what was "responsible" for the budget being $1.2 trillion in the hole, rather than $800 billion to the good.
To save you the trouble of reading it, it's the economy, Bush 43, and then Obama, in that order. Bush messed the budget up and Obama is either making it worse or not fixing it.
Sure, Obama's stimulus package didn't help, but neither did Bush's tax cuts, drug benefit, spending on homeland security, or increase in military spending.
Copyrights have expired in the past. When that happened, copying became legal. At no point does stealing something become legal. There is also no "fair use" defense with theft.
Equating copyright infringement with theft ignores the fact that copyright law is there "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".