why can't they just study the patches, and then rewrite them? Copyright problem solved. Unless you patent the patch, you can't stop this. And then, the patch wouldn't be GPL'ed either.
This isn't unethical either. Its one of the points of GPL that the source is available for all to study and learn from...
GPL 3 would stop the patent issue. Subject to testing in court. And subject to software patents being mostly US-specific. And subject to the code base moving forward enough under GPL3 to make backwards compatability with a GPL2 fork no longer trivial to preserve. But that's just an aside to an argument that will remain hypothetical forever anyway as I can't see any main MySQL branch moving to it.
The real issues are simply how much work would be involved in re-writing the code and whether your version was different enough that you could defend it as not being a disguised copy paste. I think the latter would never actually arise, but the former would be a nuisance. Not a showstopper - I think you're right this could be done, but it would be annoying and become more annoying as time went on and the forks grew further apart. Any Open Source features of significance that Oracle cares about are probably going to be quite large ones to re-implement. The big one would be the Falcon table type.
That's an interesting point of view. I saw things slightly differently, so say what you think of my take on it. I agree that Oracle might not actually care so very much that they got a free MySQL when they bought SUN. But in so far as they do pay attention things, I would think they'd steer people away from PostgreSQL toward MySQL rather than the other way around. My reasoning is that there is a clear and significant gap between MySQL and Oracle DB. MySQL is never going to draw many customers away from using Oracle DB, and mostly the other way around as well. But I see the gap between PostgreSQL and Oracle as being much smaller, both in the capabilities of the two databases and the easier time you have moving from one to the other (in either direction). I think that makes PostgreSQL more of a threat to the Oracle install base and thus something they would prefer to keep people away from. Using MySQL as a stalking horse makes more sense to me. Thoughts? Matches the real world or too conspiracy?
Give me a break. It leaves frustratingly long periods of blank looks while the actors sit there and stare at each other during the periods that formerly held the dialog.
Ohhhhhh! That's what was going on. I got the recentish Blade Runner: Final Cut on Blu-Ray. I liked it, I thought it was good though the female characters looked ridiculously made up. But I didn't get the reason for some of the really long pauses. The interview between Deckard and his police superior, where they're looking at the pictures of the replicants, has whole stretches where the superior is just gawping at Harrison Ford. I thought afterward that it might be a hint toward... well I don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen it. The same thing the origami unicorn is a hint to.
But I guess it was just a lot of missing dialogue.
I think Minority Report was maybe better. Not as visually impressive or philosophical, but a clever plot and some neat ideas.
Japan and South Korea have already found in favour of AMD and against Intel. The USA's Federeral Trade Committee began investigations last June at the request of AMD, but I don't know where they are with that investigation now.
This is the big selling point of McDonald's, you can have a hyper kid there and not feel guilty for disturbing the next table.
Of course they have to be - any kid you feed McDonald's food to on a regular basis is going to be hyper and ADD.;)
But on a related note, many parents hate the way McDonald's by-passes them and markets directly to their kids. I have friends who have had small children who barely set foot in a McDonald's until their seven year olds started begging to be taken there. There's something wrong with that. Oh yes - it's the manipulation of children to drive your business. >:(
Citation, please. (Bold text highlighted by me for clarity as to what I'm referring to.)
Preferably not from either "side" but from a reputable and verifiable source.
(In short: I don't believe you. Not one bit. Also, to be clear: The prosecution in the infamous court case at no time managed to present any evidence whatsoever of any profits being made at all, not to mention of any significance. So as I said. I don't believe you. But if you can produce some credible evidence, I might reconsider. Good luck.)
Well if you immediately rule out something from one "side" or the other, you're going to make it very difficult for yourself to find any figures at all. But rather than get into an argument with you on who it is acceptable to believe or not, the relevant point of the above is that it is expensive to run a setup as big as TPB. And in this case, TPB themselves will support my argument since their own defense in court stated that their running costs were something in the order of US$110,000p/a (your citation). If you're going to break even with those sorts of running costs, you need to be bringing in a sizable income which brings us back to my original point - not many people are going to be risking those sorts of sums of money when the law may shut them down at any minute. Which returns us to what I've been saying: small torrent sites, not big operations like TPB. I suspect we'll see the end of Mininova in its current form soon enough, though various micro-novas will pop up afterwards, I'm guessing.
I say that if someone is making software for profit that they should be liable for their code. This would protect the free software coders. Might give Linux a legitimate chance..
Sounds like a minefield. What about companies that make money from support, e.g. RedHat and others, but pay some people to contribute to projects. People earn a living coding on open source projects. Not so many, but some. I myself am being paid to develop software which is open source because my employer needs the changes, but I also feed them back to the community. Is my work for profit or not? What if I do consultancy work for people on that software? Should the model of paying company X for a copy of some software and getting some support with it be different to the model of downloading the software from company X and paying for some support with it. Maybe, but maybe not. How much of a difference that actually is in practice could vary quite a lot from OS project to OS project.
Yep. It's going to be very hard to get rid of all the torrent sites out there. But people like TPB were actually a very large and profitable group. If the profit can be taken out of running a big site, then you wont see many altruistic (for want of a better term) funding operations on that size. I'd guess that the most viable next step for people who want to organize a larger operation is to move it to a country that will support it. But this reduces both the pool of people that might do this and opens the site up to blocking internationally. The latter can obviously be routed around quite easily (though it may still limit things through adding extra inconvenience), but the former is more likely to be an issue I would think. The number of safe haven countries for dubious online activities is shrinking I think.
There are technological defensive measures that the pirates can take, keeping themselves anonymous, trackerless torrents, etc. This is a battle that can be won in a sense, but can it be won when the aim is to get a large mass of people to adopt these measures? The ante is definitely being upped.
For the world outside of Slashdot (where people argue the moral right to mooch), piracy has been popular because it is easy, free and seemingly without consequence. If any of those three can be eliminated, then piracy will drop sharply, I suspect.
There's a certain amount of justification for the crankiness, at least short-term. When a new capability comes along, whether that's 3D effects, computer animation in movies or whatever, that is all we get for a while. Other necessary ingredients to a good product go out of the window. It's only after the makers have finally got it out of their system that they start using things judiciously. Look at a film like the recent "Let the Right One In". Excellent special effects but used very sparingly to add to the creepiness of the film as needed. Whereas you look at a vampire film ten years ago and the same technology of morphing people's faces is used everywhere and the basis of what they sell the movie on.
I'm not much of a gamer, but I'd say that computer games have been stuck in this phase for a while, but maybe it's starting to end. Perhaps it has been prolonged because graphics cards keep getting better and better so quickly. If you can keep on wowing people with graphics year after year, then you don't need to stop and look at the other ingredients for a good game. But crankiness is also misplaced. There always will be good games even if the majority just depend on the latest technological gimmicks and sooner or later, the industry settles down and relegate these gimmicks to just being one tool of many. Just some thoughts.
Ooops! I completely failed to parse what you said and got +5 Insightful. You made a correct point and got modded down Troll. I am not comforted that my idiocy is has the support of the people. : (
You are saying it is possible to believe in A ("did not do enough") and again in A ("did too little") simultaneously?
No, the GP is saying it is possible to believe that A "did not do enough X" and that A "did too little Y" simultaneously. You need to brush up on your reading comprehension and be a little less insulting to people.
Haven't you ever seen "How to Get Ahead in Advertising?" Placebos are for beginners. The real experts first make you actually suffer a problem (ostensibly self-induced), then they start selling you the cure.
I suspect that's the tip of the iceberg. Accusations that US and UK spying agencies (through the Echelon project) were using their power for commercial espionage really began to flow in the 1990s. The European Parliament made a series of public allegations against the US in early 2000 stating that the NSA had intercepted conversations and data and passed it on to the US Commerce Department for use by American firms resulting "stolen sales". The Boeing V. Airbus that you noted is the most famous of these, but probably as large was AT&T using intercepted communications to get a half-share of an Indonesian trade contract which was initially going to NRC of Japan before the NSA got hold of the confidential details and passed them along. Lawsuits and procedings were actually filed in France, Italy and Belgium. Another instance was Raytheon getting hold of confidential information belonging to Thompson-CSF on a US$1.5bn dollar deal with Brazil for satellite imaging. Raytheon got the contract. Enercon - a German wind generator manufacturer - developed a major refinement on generating electricity. When they tried to patent it in the USA, an American corporation had beaten them to the punch. That's an especially interesting case since there were people inside the NSA that confirmed they'd spied on the German company and passed the necessary details on. Other accusations have been made by such companies as BMW and German security experts pegged costs to German industry at a minimum of US$10bn by just the year 2000.
All this apparently came straight from the top.
It's that sort of behaviour, regarded as betrayal by an ally in the European politicians,
I agree with much of what you say, but offer a refinement of one point (if you like):
The possibility that these people should do without something they can't afford doesn't occur to them - and indeed as you've seen, they get mighty pissed off at the merest suggestion that this be true.
What makes the above worse is not that people are stealing something they can't afford, but that they are stealing something they could afford. We could talk about wealth inequality, but those who pirate and those who choose to buy are in the same income brackets, so its moot.
How is the "if a physical object is stolen it's gone, if a digital object is copied it's still there" argument flawed? Certainly many people follow it to its illogical conclusion ("the digital object is still there, so no harm has been done"), but I would say that's a problem with the people drawing the conclusion, not with the basic argument.
You answered the question before I could! Perhaps I was too brief - the statement that when you copy a file the original is still there is correct. Of course! The argument that because this is so there is no harm done, is, as you point out, a faulty conclusion. We're probably in agreement. It's just hard to tell on the Internet because you don't expect it.;)
By that line of reasoning, there's also no difference between stealing a game and ignoring a game.
An interesting comeback.:) But the people who aren't interested in a game are the ones that ignore it. Those who are interested in the game enough to want it comprise the pool of people that buy or pirate it. And the group that buy it has a fairly small overlap with the group that pirate it (I don't believe all the "If I like it, I then go out and buy it" posts represent anything like a general case - certainly not many people I know). At any rate, if you check what I actually wrote, I said "stealing a game instead of paying for it." My line of reasoning is safe from comparisons with people who ignore a game.:)
No. One is deprivation of POTENTIAL financial gain which is only realized if the person would have bought the game in the absence of piracy. This is often not the case - you may download and play a game that you wouldn't be interested in paying for. Car theft deprives the owner of the use of the car. Its not even a subtle distinction and attempting to equate the two is intellectual dishonesty.
I said:
In that case, there isn't a difference between stealing a car and stealing a game instead of paying for it.
People are free to disagree with what I say, but please don't disagree with what what you thought I said.;)
Regarding your point, my opinion is that it is as dishonest for many of the piracy brigade here on Slashdot to say that piracy doesn't mean a definite lost sale and then argue as if that means no lost sales, as it is for the RIAA to argue that every downloaded copy is a lost sale to inflate their stated damages. Plainly piracy does cause financial harm to companies like Stardock. So I hope your charge of "intellectual dishonesty" was a general one and not directed at me.:)
If the person would have bought a copy if they couldn't download it, the company has lost the value of exactly one sale. If the person would not otherwise have bought it, the company has lost nothing.
This seems correct and certainly organizations like the RIAA have tried to argue that every download equates to one lost sale to boost the damages figure they claim for. But equally the number of people on Slashdot who vehemently argue that because x doesn't equal 100%, that it therefore equals is also annoying. The truth is, as it often is, somewhere in between. Which means that piracy hurts the profits of companies like Stardock (along with many others). The "If I stole a car argument it's gone argument..." is flawed and yet still very common on Slashdot. Am not in anyway disagreeing with your very reasonable post. I'm just emphasizing that my original post was about dishonesty still being dishonesty, whoever touts it.
Isn't the important aspect whether or not it results in financial harm to the person producing the product? In that case, there isn't a difference between stealing a car and stealing a game instead of paying for it.
Skipping over the abuse and the metaphors about smashing my teeth in, let's get to your argument.
Try selling it then, sans the CD it came on.
Who said anything about selling it "without the CD it came on?" I said I purchased a copy of the music. I am entirely free to sell that copy howsoever I chose. The same actually applies to digital-only copies as well. I can sell it just like "a chair or a car". You are again replying to something I haven't said: you're talking about making a second copy. This is restricted by law but doesn't affect your re-selling of property. Incidentally, the invention that a restriction on selling makes something not your property is wholely yours. There are lots of things that are yours but you are restricted in how you can sell it. Guns were already mentioned (which you accepted as it being possible to purchase) and medication is another. But regardless, even on your own terms you're incorrect: You are not restricted from selling a copy of a film or music by copyright law, however. You've tried to turn the argument into a different one that you can dispute. Shame on you.
was only a part of the response to your original abuse of all those whom you claimed are "fundamentalists" and engage in "hideous logical contortions", statements which you are still desperately attempting to avoid owning up to.
Nonsense. My words are right up there in the OP and I've repeated them since. I'm quite happy to liken your arguments to religious fundamentalists who argue with a pre-chosen conclusion and create evidence and contort logic to support that. Example: You have decided that it is necessary to pretend that you can't purchase a copy of a film or piece of music to support your argument and are now attempting to convince me that something I buy in perpetuity, that I can re-sell, that I can use without further payment forever and ever... is "renting" something.
You also shift arguments several times. For example, you earlier state that a file is an "abstract concept". An abstract concept has no existence outside of mental models. Look it up if need be. A file demonstrably does. But your response is "prove that binary numbers are physical". See - that's a mismatch of concepts. Like saying my credit card doesn't have numbers embossed on the front than can be seen and felt because "prove decimal numbers are physical." I've purchased a copy of a file. That's the exact wording that I've used all along. I paid money. I file appeared.
Things are the way I say they are because I keep proving it so. In fact the only one who claims that things are because some law says that they ought to be that way is you... You, on the other hand, keep falling back on your "Holy Scripture" of Copyright Law.
You don't prove anything. You just repeatedly state your opinion that an idea like "purchasing music" is laughable etc. (when I said "purchase a copy" anyway). That's not proof - that's just you saying something. Interspersed with petty attacks about reading comprehension and the boundless greed or stupidity of people who buy music.
Your second sentence doesn't quite make sense - you're responding to something I haven't said again. Did I talk about copyright law as being some sacred text? No. The post you originally replied to commented on the tortuous arguments some people in Slashdot used to justify their behaviour. You're again trying to build me up into this soulless 80's media mogul to discredit the arguer. You're starting to come across as incapable of arguing by any method other than demonising the person you are debating with.
but this takes the proverbial cake.
Presumably as it's a proverbial cake, that makes it abstract so I can't actually take it at all, just, you know, limited licence it from you.;):D
That's a very interesting take on the debate and I've not seen things presented in such a fashion before.:D
I've been considering whether your take on my position (I am not anti-copyright) describes me accurately. It's pretty close. I think the flaw in 'something can't be stopped therefore it must be moral' is pretty easy to identify. The position of "it is immoral to take without payment so it must be made impractical" is flawed. I don't believe that it should be made impractical at cost to more important things. For example, I am opposed to snooping on my Internet traffic as some proposed laws for dealing with copyright infringement allow. I am very in favour of watermarking which doesn't negatively affect legitimate users but can be used to both target those who infringe and establish a sense of ownership.
Chiefly, knowing that there are few methods that can be used to fight piracy that aren't ultimately more destructive in other ways, I mainly spend my effort in this area on taking apart the piss-poor logic people use on Slashdot to explain why it's morally wrong to charge for a piece of music or how music is "an abstract concept that can't be bought", etc.
Your post was pretty original to me, so your thoughts on this one?:)
Slashdot Mirror
GPL 3 would stop the patent issue. Subject to testing in court. And subject to software patents being mostly US-specific. And subject to the code base moving forward enough under GPL3 to make backwards compatability with a GPL2 fork no longer trivial to preserve. But that's just an aside to an argument that will remain hypothetical forever anyway as I can't see any main MySQL branch moving to it.
The real issues are simply how much work would be involved in re-writing the code and whether your version was different enough that you could defend it as not being a disguised copy paste. I think the latter would never actually arise, but the former would be a nuisance. Not a showstopper - I think you're right this could be done, but it would be annoying and become more annoying as time went on and the forks grew further apart. Any Open Source features of significance that Oracle cares about are probably going to be quite large ones to re-implement. The big one would be the Falcon table type.
That's an interesting point of view. I saw things slightly differently, so say what you think of my take on it. I agree that Oracle might not actually care so very much that they got a free MySQL when they bought SUN. But in so far as they do pay attention things, I would think they'd steer people away from PostgreSQL toward MySQL rather than the other way around. My reasoning is that there is a clear and significant gap between MySQL and Oracle DB. MySQL is never going to draw many customers away from using Oracle DB, and mostly the other way around as well. But I see the gap between PostgreSQL and Oracle as being much smaller, both in the capabilities of the two databases and the easier time you have moving from one to the other (in either direction). I think that makes PostgreSQL more of a threat to the Oracle install base and thus something they would prefer to keep people away from. Using MySQL as a stalking horse makes more sense to me. Thoughts? Matches the real world or too conspiracy?
I got a +5 funny post once.
When I was being serious.
href="http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126911.300-our-world-may-be-a-giant-hologram.html?full=true.
I just find it amusing how odd beliefs can line up with the latest scientific theories.
Ohhhhhh! That's what was going on. I got the recentish Blade Runner: Final Cut on Blu-Ray. I liked it, I thought it was good though the female characters looked ridiculously made up. But I didn't get the reason for some of the really long pauses. The interview between Deckard and his police superior, where they're looking at the pictures of the replicants, has whole stretches where the superior is just gawping at Harrison Ford. I thought afterward that it might be a hint toward... well I don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen it. The same thing the origami unicorn is a hint to.
But I guess it was just a lot of missing dialogue.
I think Minority Report was maybe better. Not as visually impressive or philosophical, but a clever plot and some neat ideas.
Japan and South Korea have already found in favour of AMD and against Intel. The USA's Federeral Trade Committee began investigations last June at the request of AMD, but I don't know where they are with that investigation now.
That... sounds painful. =:(
Of course they have to be - any kid you feed McDonald's food to on a regular basis is going to be hyper and ADD. ;)
But on a related note, many parents hate the way McDonald's by-passes them and markets directly to their kids. I have friends who have had small children who barely set foot in a McDonald's until their seven year olds started begging to be taken there. There's something wrong with that. Oh yes - it's the manipulation of children to drive your business. >:(
Well if you immediately rule out something from one "side" or the other, you're going to make it very difficult for yourself to find any figures at all. But rather than get into an argument with you on who it is acceptable to believe or not, the relevant point of the above is that it is expensive to run a setup as big as TPB. And in this case, TPB themselves will support my argument since their own defense in court stated that their running costs were something in the order of US$110,000p/a (your citation). If you're going to break even with those sorts of running costs, you need to be bringing in a sizable income which brings us back to my original point - not many people are going to be risking those sorts of sums of money when the law may shut them down at any minute. Which returns us to what I've been saying: small torrent sites, not big operations like TPB. I suspect we'll see the end of Mininova in its current form soon enough, though various micro-novas will pop up afterwards, I'm guessing.
Sounds like a minefield. What about companies that make money from support, e.g. RedHat and others, but pay some people to contribute to projects. People earn a living coding on open source projects. Not so many, but some. I myself am being paid to develop software which is open source because my employer needs the changes, but I also feed them back to the community. Is my work for profit or not? What if I do consultancy work for people on that software? Should the model of paying company X for a copy of some software and getting some support with it be different to the model of downloading the software from company X and paying for some support with it. Maybe, but maybe not. How much of a difference that actually is in practice could vary quite a lot from OS project to OS project.
A good analogy is like a map that lets you see a wider view of the terrain. A bad analogy is like the wrong sort of petrol in your car.
Yep. It's going to be very hard to get rid of all the torrent sites out there. But people like TPB were actually a very large and profitable group. If the profit can be taken out of running a big site, then you wont see many altruistic (for want of a better term) funding operations on that size. I'd guess that the most viable next step for people who want to organize a larger operation is to move it to a country that will support it. But this reduces both the pool of people that might do this and opens the site up to blocking internationally. The latter can obviously be routed around quite easily (though it may still limit things through adding extra inconvenience), but the former is more likely to be an issue I would think. The number of safe haven countries for dubious online activities is shrinking I think.
There are technological defensive measures that the pirates can take, keeping themselves anonymous, trackerless torrents, etc. This is a battle that can be won in a sense, but can it be won when the aim is to get a large mass of people to adopt these measures? The ante is definitely being upped.
For the world outside of Slashdot (where people argue the moral right to mooch), piracy has been popular because it is easy, free and seemingly without consequence. If any of those three can be eliminated, then piracy will drop sharply, I suspect.
There's a certain amount of justification for the crankiness, at least short-term. When a new capability comes along, whether that's 3D effects, computer animation in movies or whatever, that is all we get for a while. Other necessary ingredients to a good product go out of the window. It's only after the makers have finally got it out of their system that they start using things judiciously. Look at a film like the recent "Let the Right One In". Excellent special effects but used very sparingly to add to the creepiness of the film as needed. Whereas you look at a vampire film ten years ago and the same technology of morphing people's faces is used everywhere and the basis of what they sell the movie on.
I'm not much of a gamer, but I'd say that computer games have been stuck in this phase for a while, but maybe it's starting to end. Perhaps it has been prolonged because graphics cards keep getting better and better so quickly. If you can keep on wowing people with graphics year after year, then you don't need to stop and look at the other ingredients for a good game. But crankiness is also misplaced. There always will be good games even if the majority just depend on the latest technological gimmicks and sooner or later, the industry settles down and relegate these gimmicks to just being one tool of many. Just some thoughts.
Ooops! I completely failed to parse what you said and got +5 Insightful. You made a correct point and got modded down Troll. I am not comforted that my idiocy is has the support of the people. : (
No, the GP is saying it is possible to believe that A "did not do enough X" and that A "did too little Y" simultaneously. You need to brush up on your reading comprehension and be a little less insulting to people.
Haven't you ever seen "How to Get Ahead in Advertising?" Placebos are for beginners. The real experts first make you actually suffer a problem (ostensibly self-induced), then they start selling you the cure.
I suspect that's the tip of the iceberg. Accusations that US and UK spying agencies (through the Echelon project) were using their power for commercial espionage really began to flow in the 1990s. The European Parliament made a series of public allegations against the US in early 2000 stating that the NSA had intercepted conversations and data and passed it on to the US Commerce Department for use by American firms resulting "stolen sales". The Boeing V. Airbus that you noted is the most famous of these, but probably as large was AT&T using intercepted communications to get a half-share of an Indonesian trade contract which was initially going to NRC of Japan before the NSA got hold of the confidential details and passed them along. Lawsuits and procedings were actually filed in France, Italy and Belgium. Another instance was Raytheon getting hold of confidential information belonging to Thompson-CSF on a US$1.5bn dollar deal with Brazil for satellite imaging. Raytheon got the contract. Enercon - a German wind generator manufacturer - developed a major refinement on generating electricity. When they tried to patent it in the USA, an American corporation had beaten them to the punch. That's an especially interesting case since there were people inside the NSA that confirmed they'd spied on the German company and passed the necessary details on. Other accusations have been made by such companies as BMW and German security experts pegged costs to German industry at a minimum of US$10bn by just the year 2000.
All this apparently came straight from the top.
It's that sort of behaviour, regarded as betrayal by an ally in the European politicians,
I agree with much of what you say, but offer a refinement of one point (if you like):
What makes the above worse is not that people are stealing something they can't afford, but that they are stealing something they could afford. We could talk about wealth inequality, but those who pirate and those who choose to buy are in the same income brackets, so its moot.
You answered the question before I could! Perhaps I was too brief - the statement that when you copy a file the original is still there is correct. Of course! The argument that because this is so there is no harm done, is, as you point out, a faulty conclusion. We're probably in agreement. It's just hard to tell on the Internet because you don't expect it. ;)
An interesting comeback. :) But the people who aren't interested in a game are the ones that ignore it. Those who are interested in the game enough to want it comprise the pool of people that buy or pirate it. And the group that buy it has a fairly small overlap with the group that pirate it (I don't believe all the "If I like it, I then go out and buy it" posts represent anything like a general case - certainly not many people I know). At any rate, if you check what I actually wrote, I said "stealing a game instead of paying for it." My line of reasoning is safe from comparisons with people who ignore a game. :)
H.
I said:
People are free to disagree with what I say, but please don't disagree with what what you thought I said. ;)
:)
Regarding your point, my opinion is that it is as dishonest for many of the piracy brigade here on Slashdot to say that piracy doesn't mean a definite lost sale and then argue as if that means no lost sales, as it is for the RIAA to argue that every downloaded copy is a lost sale to inflate their stated damages. Plainly piracy does cause financial harm to companies like Stardock. So I hope your charge of "intellectual dishonesty" was a general one and not directed at me.
Regards,
H.
This seems correct and certainly organizations like the RIAA have tried to argue that every download equates to one lost sale to boost the damages figure they claim for. But equally the number of people on Slashdot who vehemently argue that because x doesn't equal 100%, that it therefore equals is also annoying. The truth is, as it often is, somewhere in between. Which means that piracy hurts the profits of companies like Stardock (along with many others). The "If I stole a car argument it's gone argument..." is flawed and yet still very common on Slashdot. Am not in anyway disagreeing with your very reasonable post. I'm just emphasizing that my original post was about dishonesty still being dishonesty, whoever touts it.
Isn't the important aspect whether or not it results in financial harm to the person producing the product? In that case, there isn't a difference between stealing a car and stealing a game instead of paying for it.
Skipping over the abuse and the metaphors about smashing my teeth in, let's get to your argument.
Who said anything about selling it "without the CD it came on?" I said I purchased a copy of the music. I am entirely free to sell that copy howsoever I chose. The same actually applies to digital-only copies as well. I can sell it just like "a chair or a car". You are again replying to something I haven't said: you're talking about making a second copy. This is restricted by law but doesn't affect your re-selling of property. Incidentally, the invention that a restriction on selling makes something not your property is wholely yours. There are lots of things that are yours but you are restricted in how you can sell it. Guns were already mentioned (which you accepted as it being possible to purchase) and medication is another. But regardless, even on your own terms you're incorrect: You are not restricted from selling a copy of a film or music by copyright law, however. You've tried to turn the argument into a different one that you can dispute. Shame on you.
Nonsense. My words are right up there in the OP and I've repeated them since. I'm quite happy to liken your arguments to religious fundamentalists who argue with a pre-chosen conclusion and create evidence and contort logic to support that. Example: You have decided that it is necessary to pretend that you can't purchase a copy of a film or piece of music to support your argument and are now attempting to convince me that something I buy in perpetuity, that I can re-sell, that I can use without further payment forever and ever... is "renting" something.
You also shift arguments several times. For example, you earlier state that a file is an "abstract concept". An abstract concept has no existence outside of mental models. Look it up if need be. A file demonstrably does. But your response is "prove that binary numbers are physical". See - that's a mismatch of concepts. Like saying my credit card doesn't have numbers embossed on the front than can be seen and felt because "prove decimal numbers are physical." I've purchased a copy of a file. That's the exact wording that I've used all along. I paid money. I file appeared.
You don't prove anything. You just repeatedly state your opinion that an idea like "purchasing music" is laughable etc. (when I said "purchase a copy" anyway). That's not proof - that's just you saying something. Interspersed with petty attacks about reading comprehension and the boundless greed or stupidity of people who buy music.
Your second sentence doesn't quite make sense - you're responding to something I haven't said again. Did I talk about copyright law as being some sacred text? No. The post you originally replied to commented on the tortuous arguments some people in Slashdot used to justify their behaviour. You're again trying to build me up into this soulless 80's media mogul to discredit the arguer. You're starting to come across as incapable of arguing by any method other than demonising the person you are debating with.
Presumably as it's a proverbial cake, that makes it abstract so I can't actually take it at all, just, you know, limited licence it from you. ;) :D
Regards,
H.
That's a very interesting take on the debate and I've not seen things presented in such a fashion before.
I've been considering whether your take on my position (I am not anti-copyright) describes me accurately. It's pretty close. I think the flaw in 'something can't be stopped therefore it must be moral' is pretty easy to identify. The position of "it is immoral to take without payment so it must be made impractical" is flawed. I don't believe that it should be made impractical at cost to more important things. For example, I am opposed to snooping on my Internet traffic as some proposed laws for dealing with copyright infringement allow. I am very in favour of watermarking which doesn't negatively affect legitimate users but can be used to both target those who infringe and establish a sense of ownership.
Chiefly, knowing that there are few methods that can be used to fight piracy that aren't ultimately more destructive in other ways, I mainly spend my effort in this area on taking apart the piss-poor logic people use on Slashdot to explain why it's morally wrong to charge for a piece of music or how music is "an abstract concept that can't be bought", etc.
Your post was pretty original to me, so your thoughts on this one?
Regards,
H.