do all of you people continue to wallow in the legal quicksand of whether a computer program has any legitimate uses at all? First, the net was designed to be P2P, not client-server, even though it works fine that way. Second, we must insure that the net stays P2P regardless of any corporate or gov't desires to dictate otherwise. Let's leave the question of legitimacy to the sholars, philosophers, and lawyers. Let that be their problem. It is up to us to make sure that anonymity and privacy are possible despite the legalities. I don't care if anyone says we don't have a right to those things. Let's just DO IT! We don't have to justify it to anybody. Make copyright law, censorship, prohibition, etc. impossible to enforce without banning and smashing every computer on the planet, and killing all the users. We should be doing what this guy is intending to do. This is the kind of spirit that we need. What we shouldn't be doing is begging the authorities to let us keep our tools just because we can show it has legitimate uses. We should be telling them that we will use our tools as we see fit , and we don't need their stinking permission. We are under no obligation to respect these kinds of laws that can be bought and sold like candy. I have this little obsession with a thing called equal protection. Any law or judgement that doesn't provide that is completely and absolutely invalid. With that in mind, How do you remotely disable or neutralize a gun without harming the operator? Electronic and most non-lethal weapons are easy to neutralize.
...looters, those who raid that wealth by force of law or intimidation.
force of law...you mean like copyright? intimidation...something like lawsuits? See scientology.
...the precedent being set shifts the burden of ethical behavior away from the looters and puts it squarely on the shoulders of the producers...
This depends on your point of view. Some might consider that the copyright holders are the looters. Most understand they they(copyright holders) do not want to halt piracy. They would lose significant market share if they did halt it. Some, like me, would also question just who is the criminal here. See payola, price fixing, etc.
...producers - who were acting ethically to begin with!
Excuse me? How ethical was it for them to run off to California to evade Edison's patents? Also I repeat, see payola, price fixing, etc. These people are everything BUT ethical.
The producers already recognize that the most profits would be made, short or long term, if the criminals could be made to stop committing crimes.
Hah! They should talk!
Try to focus on the fact that this talk about piracy and copyright infringement is a smokescreen to cover up the "producers" attempts to stamp out self publishing and distribution. They are simply trying to insure that they own and control all widely distributed works.
Oh c'mon. What's the rush? Where's the fire? Let's help make it faster and better. If it doesn't look viable, let's create something that is. The solution exists. It's up to us to discover it.
First, I still think the companies use piracy to increase market share in places where their prices are simply unaffordable. Those people will pay out the nose once the WTO or the World Bank blows in with easy credit. Instant and somewhat captive market. Remember it's about control. They don't want anything out there if they don't own it. Pirated or not.
Second, There's that little thing called featherbedding. Nepotism plays a part here. The owner's shyster lawyer brother-in-law is out of work at the moment, and the wife is telling him that he aint gettin' none if he doesn't help him out and give him a job. He better not forget his moronic, coke sniffing, two timing, back stabbing nephew for the advertising department either. Turns out ol' boy can bring in some serious money, eh? A few well placed bri...er..donations and, viola, the law is yours to write as you please. Beats the hell out actually spending money on R&D looking at new business models. Oh, I forgot that he has a thirteen year old daughter who shouldn't be allowed sing in the shower, much less a studio, screaming, "I wanna be star, daddy!!!" How could anyone possibly turn her down?
decentralised = good anonymous = good encrypted = good slow as hell = give it time trying to create a subculture = We prefer superculture, or supraculture, or ultraculture, or hyperculture. beyond the control of legalities = free of the legal quagmire.
You can start by taking what property they have, including their house(let the bastards stay in a SRO hotel), and then insure that they can keep 10%(and tax that) of what they make, giving the rest to the victims. Even though it won't amount to much. I don't want to give them free room and board at club fed, or feed the prison industry any more than it's already getting. Watching them grovel to their boss at McDonalds for the rest of their lives would be very satisfying. Tattoo their foreheads, whatever. Public humiliation is a truly effective deterrent. Prison is for dangerous people. There are many alternatives for the rest. This kind of sentencing isn't about justice. It's about money and revenge. It's that simple.
...Copyright law was designed to provide a short term benefit to content producers to encourage them to produce without detracting too much from the public good.
Sorry. That's just not so. Copyright law was designed to allow only authorized people to operate a printing press. This may appear to protect authors and whatnot(that's the spin they put on it anyway), but it's real intent has always been to insure that only "approved" people could publish and distribute their own work. The work against all P2P(and all uploading by individuals) is designed to do the same thing to stop self-distribution. We can't have subversives spreading their "poison" all over the world. Especially now that it's so easy. Hence the attempted lockdown of the internet. They may succeed as long as we remain tied to somebody's wire. This is why I constantly drone on about the necessity of developing true wireless internet(ad hoc style or P2P, a real distributed net in every sense and truly robust). Any two computers can be a micronet(Heh, remember them?), and anybody can join in on the fun. Only then will the net be truly free of control by those who shouldn't have it(gov't, corp.). It's not hard to see that products under IP protection suffer from complete stagnation until those protections expire. For example, the moment somebody makes a completely patent free computer(or ignores patent law and fixes Intel's umm...er...stuff), you will see speed increases that go way beyond Moore's law. It won't happen because of the potential for profit. It will happen because somebody or a group of "manybodies" will want a faster computer. The barriers created by IP are holding back progress. People motivated only by money to create something will never produce a product as good as one motivated by the need for the poduct. Those motivated by money are always in a rush to "get it out the door"(Do we need to mention names here?), and what comes out that door is usually garbage, and under IP law, nobody is allowed to fix it except that company. So now for the most part we are working with crap computers and crappy software, and most people are buying crappy music because that's all the publishers will let out.
Problem is none of those things are true.
Ooops! Are you disagreeing with your first paragraph? Or did you mean that none of those things are true today?
The majors are more interested in controlling the market than expanding it. They want to be the gatekeepers. Self distribution is the anti-christ to these people. They will vilify it anyway they can. They don't want to work in any kind of free market. They just want the whole market to themselves. The fact that they can as the government's proxy censor doesn't hurt either.
Actually a microphone picks up all sorts of noise that we naturally filter out. Take a DAT machine outside in the middle of nowhere, and record the "silence". You might be surprised at how noisy the planet really is. The mic picks up everything. So there is a chance that audio watermarking(such as a recording of Rosanne Barr singing the national anthem at real low level in the background) could possibly make the recording unusable, or at least really annoying.
So now we're counting electrons? How long before we start complaining about "electron" bloat. This appears to be the first device to address that. Enough of these massive, slow moving electrons. It's time we start looking into the pure energy components of an atom. Then we won't need these giant boxes we call computers to contain and control all those electrons.
You're right, kind of. Without copyright the GPL is unnecessary(thus useless I guess). GPL can best be described as defensive copyright to insure that software that uses GPL is also GPL'd. I would like to think that if GPL is discovered in proprietary software, that software simply becomes GPL'd, open to anybody that wants to use it. If they try to sue you for copyright infringement, you could show that they used GPL'd code and thus made their software GPL. Kind of a reverse SCO thing. It is here that we could find out if it holds up in court. I hope that this would be obvious to everybody.
People could "take" you code and do anything with it, not have to contribute back,...
This is where you are mistaken. Yes they can use code that you wrote, but without copyright they automatically have contributed back. They have no authority to prevent you from using, copying, selling/giving their software. Everything is in public domain. Our right to reverse engineer is restored if they try to keep secrets. There will be no infringement. Everybody will benefit. Except the greedy ones who want everything for themselves only. This too, should be obvious to everybody. I don't understand the difficulty in realizing this. The substance of your post comes up all the time on every thread about copyrights, with little if any talk of the scenario that I have described. The obvious solution is in front of us. Let's try it and see what happens.
It's not even about any moral crusade. That's just part of the smokescreen I'm trying to describe. A rock has better morals than most politicians or the people that vote for them. What's going on here is much more sinister. These people are after money and the power that comes with it. It's instictive or natural, and it shows that we are still living like animals. What makes it bad is that we know that we can stop, but we don't. We let the whole thing continue in hopes that we can get a piece of the action. We try to vote ourselves a little power over our neighbors. Nobody will accept being equal. We want everone else to be subservient. These are just tiny examples of the things we need to recognize about ourselves. When we do, and we stop the killing, then we can call ourselves human. Then the word sapiens will actually have meaning when applied to us. So far we're just using our so called intelligence to feed our animal insticts or what might be called "the desires of the flesh". You can boil every story about SCO, politicians, lawyers, copyright, everything in the YRO section down to these basic instincts, almost as if the stories themselves are off-topic when it comes to how we treat each other. They are themselves the smokescreen, diversion, distraction, etc., but they do show how horrible we can be. That is what I wish people would see.
In case you're interested, read the discussion that I'm still trying to maintain. I'm trying to find out what he thinks after his work passes into public domain. I'm not sure if he considers that to be theft. You and I both seem to understand that he's claiming some imaginary rights beyond what is provided by copyright.
It is a government granted monopoly.
This is what most pro-copyright people refuse to acknowledge. They don't understand the true natural rights never expire. They can only be taken away by force. Copyright is created by force...of law. It restricts natural rights. This is one reason I consider it invalid. The belief that it is designed "To promote the progress of science and useful arts" is mistaken. They believe that without copyright we would still be in the stone age. I believe that it's keeping us back. Just look at its history.
Read my other comments in this thread. You might find that I really don't care about the details of biblical violence. I'm more interested as to why people are yacking about that when the real subject is how distractions like violent video games are used to get people to ignore what's going on behind their backs, and how incredibly successful it is. I seem to be the only one trying to bring this to light to get all of you to re-focus. Evidently it didn't work.
-- FUD...What? Were you expecting something else? Don't blame me if the link craps out.
I going to commit the ultimate sin here on Slashdot...Reply to myself... After reading the responses to my original comment. I realized that nobody got it. Even I got fished in. I used the Bible as an example of violence, but what I'm really trying to talk about here is the power of distraction. The Bible comment proves how powerful it is. That's all everybody responded to. We have to remain focused and not be distracted by this stuff. Everybody here is talking about what makes kids violent, blah. blah, blah. We should be looking for the thing they(in this case the Governer of Illinois) are trying to distract us from. What are they trying to hide? They could be increasing your property tax by 100%, and you won't even know it because you are all concerned about "video game violence", until you see the bill. By then it's too late. The dirty deed was done, and the joke's on you. I'm trying to get you to focus on that. All sorts of horrible legislation is being signed into law, and what were we thinking of? "Malibu Stacy's new hat"! How can we ever expect to make things better if we're so easily drawn to bullshit? C'mon, pull yourselves together here.
Let's do our best to confuse(confound?) the enemy. Keep 'em distracted. Let's use the same FUD they use on us. It will be endless war until people grow up, but if war is what they want, that's precisely what they'll get. I'm not talking about a fighting war(yet). It will be an information(propaganda, misinformation) war. If our efforts are chaotic enough with no set patterns and proper discretion, they have no hope of winning without using their WMD's. I must maintain my hope. Otherwise life isn't worth living. If it's so hopeless, we may as well give it up now, disconnect our machines, and be reduced to playing solitare. I, for one, don't plan on letting anyone tell me what I can have on my disk, or who I can share with.
In the Bible, God himself tried to kill almost everything on the planet. He created plagues, locusts, fires, floods, etc. in an attempt to demonstrate the consequences of sinning. Needless to say, it had limited effect. I personally believe he gave up on this universe and went on to create another one. Hopefully with better results. Chances are we're in the beta version, with limited features. Besides I was just mentioning the violence and where you'll find it.
...do it with a mental capacity above that of a 7 year old.
I know that I have the mental capacity of at least that of a 13 year old.
Slashdot Mirror
do all of you people continue to wallow in the legal quicksand of whether a computer program has any legitimate uses at all? First, the net was designed to be P2P, not client-server, even though it works fine that way. Second, we must insure that the net stays P2P regardless of any corporate or gov't desires to dictate otherwise. Let's leave the question of legitimacy to the sholars, philosophers, and lawyers. Let that be their problem. It is up to us to make sure that anonymity and privacy are possible despite the legalities. I don't care if anyone says we don't have a right to those things. Let's just DO IT! We don't have to justify it to anybody. Make copyright law, censorship, prohibition, etc. impossible to enforce without banning and smashing every computer on the planet, and killing all the users. We should be doing what this guy is intending to do. This is the kind of spirit that we need. What we shouldn't be doing is begging the authorities to let us keep our tools just because we can show it has legitimate uses. We should be telling them that we will use our tools as we see fit , and we don't need their stinking permission. We are under no obligation to respect these kinds of laws that can be bought and sold like candy. I have this little obsession with a thing called equal protection. Any law or judgement that doesn't provide that is completely and absolutely invalid. With that in mind, How do you remotely disable or neutralize a gun without harming the operator? Electronic and most non-lethal weapons are easy to neutralize.
What is the outside world to make of that?
That the law is clearly for sale to the highest bidder?
My senses are telling me that we are letting criminals make the laws and run the show.
...looters, those who raid that wealth by force of law or intimidation.
...the precedent being set shifts the burden of ethical behavior away from the looters and puts it squarely on the shoulders of the producers...
...producers - who were acting ethically to begin with!
force of law...you mean like copyright?
intimidation...something like lawsuits? See scientology.
This depends on your point of view. Some might consider that the copyright holders are the looters. Most understand they they(copyright holders) do not want to halt piracy. They would lose significant market share if they did halt it. Some, like me, would also question just who is the criminal here. See payola, price fixing, etc.
Excuse me? How ethical was it for them to run off to California to evade Edison's patents? Also I repeat, see payola, price fixing, etc. These people are everything BUT ethical.
The producers already recognize that the most profits would be made, short or long term, if the criminals could be made to stop committing crimes.
Hah! They should talk!
Try to focus on the fact that this talk about piracy and copyright infringement is a smokescreen to cover up the "producers" attempts to stamp out self publishing and distribution. They are simply trying to insure that they own and control all widely distributed works.
A world without rules, and society are polar opposites.
Maybe so. A world without rulers just might work though.
Oh c'mon. What's the rush? Where's the fire? Let's help make it faster and better. If it doesn't look viable, let's create something that is. The solution exists. It's up to us to discover it.
If it's running UnixWare, our computers will start suing us.
for computers, copies, corporations, animals?, property...where do us humans fit in?
They removed the SCO code.
First, I still think the companies use piracy to increase market share in places where their prices are simply unaffordable. Those people will pay out the nose once the WTO or the World Bank blows in with easy credit. Instant and somewhat captive market. Remember it's about control. They don't want anything out there if they don't own it. Pirated or not.
Second, There's that little thing called featherbedding. Nepotism plays a part here. The owner's shyster lawyer brother-in-law is out of work at the moment, and the wife is telling him that he aint gettin' none if he doesn't help him out and give him a job. He better not forget his moronic, coke sniffing, two timing, back stabbing nephew for the advertising department either. Turns out ol' boy can bring in some serious money, eh? A few well placed bri...er..donations and, viola, the law is yours to write as you please. Beats the hell out actually spending money on R&D looking at new business models. Oh, I forgot that he has a thirteen year old daughter who shouldn't be allowed sing in the shower, much less a studio, screaming, "I wanna be star, daddy!!!" How could anyone possibly turn her down?
decentralised = good
anonymous = good
encrypted = good
slow as hell = give it time
trying to create a subculture = We prefer superculture, or supraculture, or ultraculture, or hyperculture.
beyond the control of legalities = free of the legal quagmire.
You can start by taking what property they have, including their house(let the bastards stay in a SRO hotel), and then insure that they can keep 10%(and tax that) of what they make, giving the rest to the victims. Even though it won't amount to much. I don't want to give them free room and board at club fed, or feed the prison industry any more than it's already getting. Watching them grovel to their boss at McDonalds for the rest of their lives would be very satisfying. Tattoo their foreheads, whatever. Public humiliation is a truly effective deterrent. Prison is for dangerous people. There are many alternatives for the rest. This kind of sentencing isn't about justice. It's about money and revenge. It's that simple.
...Copyright law was designed to provide a short term benefit to content producers to encourage them to produce without detracting too much from the public good.
Sorry. That's just not so. Copyright law was designed to allow only authorized people to operate a printing press. This may appear to protect authors and whatnot(that's the spin they put on it anyway), but it's real intent has always been to insure that only "approved" people could publish and distribute their own work. The work against all P2P(and all uploading by individuals) is designed to do the same thing to stop self-distribution. We can't have subversives spreading their "poison" all over the world. Especially now that it's so easy. Hence the attempted lockdown of the internet. They may succeed as long as we remain tied to somebody's wire. This is why I constantly drone on about the necessity of developing true wireless internet(ad hoc style or P2P, a real distributed net in every sense and truly robust). Any two computers can be a micronet(Heh, remember them?), and anybody can join in on the fun. Only then will the net be truly free of control by those who shouldn't have it(gov't, corp.). It's not hard to see that products under IP protection suffer from complete stagnation until those protections expire. For example, the moment somebody makes a completely patent free computer(or ignores patent law and fixes Intel's umm...er...stuff), you will see speed increases that go way beyond Moore's law. It won't happen because of the potential for profit. It will happen because somebody or a group of "manybodies" will want a faster computer. The barriers created by IP are holding back progress. People motivated only by money to create something will never produce a product as good as one motivated by the need for the poduct. Those motivated by money are always in a rush to "get it out the door"(Do we need to mention names here?), and what comes out that door is usually garbage, and under IP law, nobody is allowed to fix it except that company. So now for the most part we are working with crap computers and crappy software, and most people are buying crappy music because that's all the publishers will let out.
Problem is none of those things are true.
Ooops! Are you disagreeing with your first paragraph? Or did you mean that none of those things are true today?
The majors are more interested in controlling the market than expanding it. They want to be the gatekeepers. Self distribution is the anti-christ to these people. They will vilify it anyway they can. They don't want to work in any kind of free market. They just want the whole market to themselves. The fact that they can as the government's proxy censor doesn't hurt either.
Now, if they could only tilt it a little bit to look like Pisa's Tower..."
Nah. It would just be an 11 story Tilt-A-Whirl.
Not only that. Any band that records their concerts to CD to sell after the show has to pay a patent royalty to Clear Channel. Pretty sick, eh?
Actually a microphone picks up all sorts of noise that we naturally filter out. Take a DAT machine outside in the middle of nowhere, and record the "silence". You might be surprised at how noisy the planet really is. The mic picks up everything. So there is a chance that audio watermarking(such as a recording of Rosanne Barr singing the national anthem at real low level in the background) could possibly make the recording unusable, or at least really annoying.
So now we're counting electrons? How long before we start complaining about "electron" bloat. This appears to be the first device to address that. Enough of these massive, slow moving electrons. It's time we start looking into the pure energy components of an atom. Then we won't need these giant boxes we call computers to contain and control all those electrons.
You're right, kind of. Without copyright the GPL is unnecessary(thus useless I guess). GPL can best be described as defensive copyright to insure that software that uses GPL is also GPL'd. I would like to think that if GPL is discovered in proprietary software, that software simply becomes GPL'd, open to anybody that wants to use it. If they try to sue you for copyright infringement, you could show that they used GPL'd code and thus made their software GPL. Kind of a reverse SCO thing. It is here that we could find out if it holds up in court. I hope that this would be obvious to everybody.
People could "take" you code and do anything with it, not have to contribute back,...
This is where you are mistaken. Yes they can use code that you wrote, but without copyright they automatically have contributed back. They have no authority to prevent you from using, copying, selling/giving their software. Everything is in public domain. Our right to reverse engineer is restored if they try to keep secrets. There will be no infringement. Everybody will benefit. Except the greedy ones who want everything for themselves only. This too, should be obvious to everybody. I don't understand the difficulty in realizing this. The substance of your post comes up all the time on every thread about copyrights, with little if any talk of the scenario that I have described. The obvious solution is in front of us. Let's try it and see what happens.
vulnerable chink
You better not use those kinds of words in front of...what are they called?...L.A.(county) board of supervisers? over there in Los Angeles.
It's not even about any moral crusade. That's just part of the smokescreen I'm trying to describe. A rock has better morals than most politicians or the people that vote for them. What's going on here is much more sinister. These people are after money and the power that comes with it. It's instictive or natural, and it shows that we are still living like animals. What makes it bad is that we know that we can stop, but we don't. We let the whole thing continue in hopes that we can get a piece of the action. We try to vote ourselves a little power over our neighbors. Nobody will accept being equal. We want everone else to be subservient. These are just tiny examples of the things we need to recognize about ourselves. When we do, and we stop the killing, then we can call ourselves human. Then the word sapiens will actually have meaning when applied to us. So far we're just using our so called intelligence to feed our animal insticts or what might be called "the desires of the flesh". You can boil every story about SCO, politicians, lawyers, copyright, everything in the YRO section down to these basic instincts, almost as if the stories themselves are off-topic when it comes to how we treat each other. They are themselves the smokescreen, diversion, distraction, etc., but they do show how horrible we can be. That is what I wish people would see.
In case you're interested, read the discussion that I'm still trying to maintain. I'm trying to find out what he thinks after his work passes into public domain. I'm not sure if he considers that to be theft. You and I both seem to understand that he's claiming some imaginary rights beyond what is provided by copyright.
It is a government granted monopoly.
This is what most pro-copyright people refuse to acknowledge. They don't understand the true natural rights never expire. They can only be taken away by force. Copyright is created by force...of law. It restricts natural rights. This is one reason I consider it invalid. The belief that it is designed "To promote the progress of science and useful arts" is mistaken. They believe that without copyright we would still be in the stone age. I believe that it's keeping us back. Just look at its history.
Read my other comments in this thread. You might find that I really don't care about the details of biblical violence. I'm more interested as to why people are yacking about that when the real subject is how distractions like violent video games are used to get people to ignore what's going on behind their backs, and how incredibly successful it is. I seem to be the only one trying to bring this to light to get all of you to re-focus. Evidently it didn't work.
--
FUD...What? Were you expecting something else? Don't blame me if the link craps out.
I going to commit the ultimate sin here on Slashdot...Reply to myself... After reading the responses to my original comment. I realized that nobody got it. Even I got fished in. I used the Bible as an example of violence, but what I'm really trying to talk about here is the power of distraction. The Bible comment proves how powerful it is. That's all everybody responded to. We have to remain focused and not be distracted by this stuff. Everybody here is talking about what makes kids violent, blah. blah, blah. We should be looking for the thing they(in this case the Governer of Illinois) are trying to distract us from. What are they trying to hide? They could be increasing your property tax by 100%, and you won't even know it because you are all concerned about "video game violence", until you see the bill. By then it's too late. The dirty deed was done, and the joke's on you. I'm trying to get you to focus on that. All sorts of horrible legislation is being signed into law, and what were we thinking of? "Malibu Stacy's new hat"! How can we ever expect to make things better if we're so easily drawn to bullshit? C'mon, pull yourselves together here.
Let's do our best to confuse(confound?) the enemy. Keep 'em distracted. Let's use the same FUD they use on us. It will be endless war until people grow up, but if war is what they want, that's precisely what they'll get. I'm not talking about a fighting war(yet). It will be an information(propaganda, misinformation) war. If our efforts are chaotic enough with no set patterns and proper discretion, they have no hope of winning without using their WMD's. I must maintain my hope. Otherwise life isn't worth living. If it's so hopeless, we may as well give it up now, disconnect our machines, and be reduced to playing solitare. I, for one, don't plan on letting anyone tell me what I can have on my disk, or who I can share with.
In the Bible, God himself tried to kill almost everything on the planet. He created plagues, locusts, fires, floods, etc. in an attempt to demonstrate the consequences of sinning. Needless to say, it had limited effect. I personally believe he gave up on this universe and went on to create another one. Hopefully with better results. Chances are we're in the beta version, with limited features. Besides I was just mentioning the violence and where you'll find it.
...do it with a mental capacity above that of a 7 year old.
I know that I have the mental capacity of at least that of a 13 year old.