Sorry, I should have been more precise. When I meant "US law", I didn't mean merely the laws themselves. The inclusion of the word "jurisdiction" was to make clear that it wasn't sufficient that the act is illegal (copyright violates were already illegal in Australia). It's that those with a serious interest to enforce such laws (the US) can't arrest people in Australia, neither for downloading nor distributing.
Of course, they can try to push Australia to arrest and extradite their citizens to the US. Or, they can try to push Australia to enforce US interests within their own court system. But, neither of those are one time deals (ie, it isn't sufficient to threaten tariffs one time). Further, any deal that tried to make such actions provisional on lower tariffs would rather quickly turn into a constant conflict because companies in the US would never be happy with how much Australia would do.
So, we're left with the current system, where threats change the law in Australia, but little increased enforcement occurs. Clearly that's not enough to actually stop piracy because digital piracy can move incredibly swiftly (p2p makes it near instant). The only question, then, is whether those changes have made any significant change in piracy. Given the lack of evidence on just how much piracy there is in the first place, I'd say that's impossible to find out. Having said that, clearly a lot of piracy still occurs; so, such isn't effective by some standards.
... But starting around 1440, [people] began to [distribute creative and scientific works] on a scale previously unimagined....
Funny, btw, that you try to use the ineffectiveness of one law to justify a second law when the second law is as ineffective as the first law for the same reasons the first is ineffective: US law doesn't have international jurisdiction and the US government can't legaly monitor most internet traffic to catch most violaters.
As much as people may hate it, the companies can use all sorts of means to prevent you from accessing their copyrighted material in any unapproved manner, and there's nothing you can do about it.
That's not quite right. Before the DMCA came about, there was this beautiful concept known as "First Sale Doctrine". It arose as a result of book publishers trying to treat book sales as if they were licensing, thereby allowing them to stipulate the use of the sold books. But, then a court came along and recognized there was a fundamental right that comes before the law of copyright; and while the words were never spelled out in the Constitution, it was the case copyright was created to engage in control of copying only. Attempts by copyright holders to go beyond this, for whatever reason, would therefore be invalid because it went against the strict purpose outlined in the Constitution.
Copyright holders, however, aren't a one trick pony. And over the years, they tried to engage the law to grant them other powers, such as limiting the introduction of VCRs (because they'd interfere with the movie theater business model); or, to create a game player designed to only accept games if they included a trivial copyrighted work (to limit who could publish on the game player). In the end, the courts recognized that, again, copyright is there to cover copying, not as an excuse to maintain a business model or to create a monopoly of one's own design.
But, that all changed with the introduction of the DMCA. The DMCA is so carefully worded to seemingly allow all those exceptions one would expect in a valid copyright law. But, the DMCA was written to crush the economy that would allow for legal circumvention of "copy protection schemes". But, cases such as Sega v. Accolade have already shown that "copy protection schemes" are inherently legally circumventable even if such would seemingly violate copyright. The real problem is, the courts never went that further step as they did with "First Sale Doctrine": they didn't make illegal "copy protection" systems.
What does all this mean? Well, in short, obfuscation to access a copyrighted work are, on their face, legally dubious if not illegal. There simply hasn't been a court case involving the DMCA trying to push this idea to strike down the DMCA. The whole point of the clause in the Constitution that allows copyright was to unobfuscate and unhide the embodied ideas and techniques of artists and scientists, at the cost to the public of more limited use of those embodied ideas and techniques for a time. If copyright holders could legally obfuscate a work forever, then the public would receive nothing from copyright law. And clearly that's unconstitutional.
Of course, if all that fails, there's always going the more direct approach and having Congress undo copyright.
Perhaps our "leaders" should not have so much security. Might make them concentrate a little more on not having policies which ruin so many lives and drive people to want to murder them, eh?
John Hinckley shot Ronald Reagan because Hinckley was obsessed on Jodie Foster. Public figures, political or not, are lightning rods for every type of kook under the sun.
I'm sorry we don't live in the rosy, bunny filled universe you seem to desire, but that's the way things are.
Ah, that's such a great example, given that Ronald Reagan didn't have the Secret Service to protect him. Oh, wait, he did? Well, I guess then your example proves that in a system where there's government funded security for public figures, it's the "crazies" that end up pulling off an assassination attempt before those with political motives.
But, then, that makes sense. Physical security revolves around being able to "read" people. Sane people, with motives to kill the President, give off clear signals of their intent. Non-sane people, though, are harder to read. So, while you can catch some (maybe most) of the crazy people for being obviously questionable, at least some of the crazy people will pass through security just fine. Does that explain why a comedy group was able to pass through two checkpoints?
From the Libertarians that I have spoken with there seems to be a common thread of wanting to break things down into fundamental principles and having faith that there really are fundamental phenomena such as market forces that can control society for the best if they are allowed to operate unfettered.
I'd agree very strongly. But, I'd add that it's not just "nerds" who fall into this trap but society in general. And while some would point at market forces (or God) as the divine controller of all that is good, others would point out that government (as evil as it is) is there precisely to step in because they prefer their controller to be non-divine. The net fact, though, is that people rely on faith to function in such areas because the unknownedness of the area is so broad that it becomes difficult to function without using something to fill that void.
Having said all that, it's very disheartening to hear many nerds believe the free market is the answer to all problems. Wanting to claim memebership to nerdhood means wanting to respect those who are also nerds. But, most nerds seem to fall into the same trap of most people and don't actually educate themselves on the free market. In short, they take a bastardized definition (non-regulation of markets) and equate it with the Adam Smith version (a market of perfect information and rational actors). And while the latter could, at least hypothetically, manage to prevent incontinuities, the former fails horribly precisely because people many times aren't rational, and, more importantly, a lack of perfect information leaves one subject to the manipulation of others (intentionally or otherwise), drastically warping the market place.
Consider that, with perfect infromation, fraud would be impossible (you'd know if someone was trying to be deceptive because you'd know what was really being sold), bank runs would be impossible (people wouldn't have to rely on faith that their bank was solvent; they'd know), and monopolies like Microsoft couldn't exist (beyond the point that Microsoft is in the business of selling information (which, if everyone has perfect information becomes impossible), people would have the knowledge to thrawt lock-in and the knowledge of things like OEM deals to remove the possibility of Microsoft using price as coersion). It's for all these reasons I've turned more towards a quasi-libertarian stance over time, since nothing remotely like a free market really exists. The free market model is only useful as a guide to how things could be and to help when one believes one has enough information to act. Beyond that, other models have to come into play or one's only other option is to be "irrational".
A tongue in cheek retort: because the right hand carried out the action, but the left brain merely conspired to carry out the murder, it'd be conspiracy to murder instead of a murder charge.
American law does not apply in foreign jurisdictions.
Sort of. Imagine you were standing on the border between Mexico and America, your left side in America and your right in Mexico. With your right hand, you pull a trigger and shoot some Mexican on the Mexican side. At no point did the Mexican, bullet, or gun, happen on the American side of the border. Now, further imagine that you've paid off the authorities in Mexico so you could shoot said Mexican without punishment. The Mexican ends up dying. Should the US have jurisdiction to try you for murder?
Now consider a corporation, with many feet in many lands, and instead of committing murder, it engaged in conspiracy to murder and/or kidnap. If corporations (and companies) want to be people, why not hold them to the same standard for people who would try to stand in multiple jurisdiction to avoid punishment?
PS - Feel free to change the countries and the offenses if you want to change the analogy with others. Smoking pot seems a good example.
For linking to imply derivation, you would have to show that your copyrighted, expressive elements of your work ended up in my application. This must go beyond mere functional elements, and merely copying into the same protected memory space (but different address ranges) wouldn't in my view count.
Granted. But that's the difference between linking in 20 libraries "just because" versus one's code actually making use of those 20 libraries. The former, though, seems like a great way to effectively violate someone else's copyright by turning one's program into an archive of libraries. Given that software is functional, and the point of libraries is a repository of functionality, trying to go back to the idea of a "creative" standard seems somewhat humorous. But, I guess that comes down to the idea of whether one chose a library "because it was there" vs "because function X is really good at doing what it does, signifying a good bit of creativity/effort in its design". The fact that, in general, optimization of an optimal algorithm is as much a creative as a brute-force approach and that optimizations are the main reason to choose one library over another (beyond one library simply lacking certain functions; with functionality questionably a basis to claim copyright) just makes the whole situation more murky.
If I hypotethetically created a library win assembly with identical function access points, but entirely different internals, and it could be with the program with no further alterations, then it would seem to me that this would allow the works to be separable from a derivation perspective.
Right, but the thing is that that's hypothetical. Given the very nature of software, it's possible to fundamental alter the underlying library of almost any program and maintain the same functionality (although you might violate some patents along the way). I think a more realistic standard is to recognize just how common the underlying library is in the real world, not to draw on hypotheticals. From that standard, dynamically linking against glibc, which provides a posix-like standard, would be very different to dynamically linking against cube 3d's rendering engine library. It's hard to set the same standard for everything. Or, the fact that there's WINE and Windows helps making the Win32 API a standard and hence Win32 programs not derivative of Windows.
I think the fundamental problem is that the legislative branch really hasn't chimed in to determine things, leaving various circuit courts to make their own determinations. The AFC Test, as mentioned, is apparently not held equally by all courts. So, regional jurisdiction has a large part to play in what counts as a derivative work. But, even if the AFC Test were standrd, the main arguing point is the difference between functional code vs expressive code, when generally "good" code hackers work to express an idea by making optimally functional code (usually in minimizing use of space, time, or code space; but sometimes, it is in the form of making one segment of code do many, very different things). Ie, the more functional the code is, the more expressive it is (and vice versa).
Relying on the courts to sort out the legality of copyrighted things just doesn't seem the best way to encourage business in copyrighted works.
IANAL, either. And I don't think blog postings (at least, comments to blog postings) count as something one should be held reasponably accountable for...short of some reasonable reason to the contrary.
Copyright law seems to define derivative work as a work which involves the transformation of one copyrighted work into another. For example making a movie out of a book.
No. Derivative works include not only transformations of an existing work but also "sequals" to a work. Look, for example, at The Wind Done Gone and the struggle against the copyright holder of Gone With the Wind. Now, you might think that this is stupid, but commercial ventures are given a lot less leeway to further "develop" an existing work. And using the excuse that "it was designed precisely to be developed by others" doesn't work as an excuse. Look no further than greeting card companies and their copyrighting (and trademarking) of various characters for sublicensing.
If you filter out the lists of facts from the header file, if there is nothing significant left, it is not derivative.
You're missing the point. The problem doesn't come into effect because you're using the header file to a library. The problem is that you're linking against the library, and the library is copyrighted. As you point out, the program and the dynamic library become conjoined in the address space, in virtually the same way a static library would be (in fact, for gcc, the difference in compilation is usually as simple as "-shared" vs "-static"). The fact that you don't necessarily provide the dynamic library with your program doesn't sound like a reasonable excuse for the merging of the two separate works. In short, it's legally dubious (consider the pending case of companies trying to sell data to special DVD players to create family-friendly censored films) thanks to the vagueness of copyright law.
Think about it. Are all Windows programs derivative works of WIndows libraries? Could Microsoft litterally say "no more versions of Cygwin or MinGW" and use copyright law to force something like this? What about ODBC drivers?
Perhaps they are derivative works of Windows. But as I previously stated, in the software world, there's an often unstated assumption that such types of derivative works are "okay" (ie, you won't be sued over them). If Microsoft tried to suddenly change the framework of this situation, I'm not really sure what would happen.
Since there are no header files, this actually seems safer in Perl than in C.
Except for special defines, the header file is there to help convince the C compiler that what you're doing is "legal" according to the library/code that's being used. Ie, the real concern is the linking (usually), so I don't see Perl's method somehow alleviating that concern.
The cardinal rule of *business* in such things is that the license says what the licensor says it means unless and until it is worth going to court over.
This is the key point. OS makers are most often in the business of making money through selling their OS (or hardware joined to the OS). It's not their business to stiffle applications that would draw people to their OS (exception being, possibly, if those applications compete against applications the OS maker makes; but that's usually a different department). There's simply not enough court rulings to make clear how and in what way the merging of copyrighted codes is acceptable without running into derivative status. One can only hope that the courts rely less on technicality and more on accepted practices, given the otherwise chilling effect I'd imagine a technical decision would have.
Or, I can continue hoping that copyright is put to an end, precisely because a large part of the idea of copyright is to allow one person to profit for allowing others to expand up
The Native Americans suffered the worst of their indignities centuries ago. Palestinians who are in their 70's and 80's still have their house keys from their homes that they were forcibly removed from.
Yeah; good thing there was no genocide of Native Americans...oh wait. But, I guess if we just wait a few centuries, we can ignore how Palestinians were forcebly moved from their land?
The Native Americans are allowed to become full American citizens. Palestinians are denied citizenship by Israel.
"To illustrate this point further, note that after occupying the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israel could have annexed and integrated those territories into Israel by providing the Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. However, Israel did not do this and instead chose to treat the West Bank and Gaza as if they were part of Israel physically without providing the Palestinians in those territories with citizenship, political rights or civilian rule. Among the reasons Israel did not integrate the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza into Israel is because Israelis were afraid of a demographic problem. The Israelis feared that if they gave the Palestinians equality, political and civil rights that the Palestinians may one day out number the Israelis and vote Israel out of existence." -- Solving the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict. You know, that sounds virtually identical to Native American history. In any case, Native Americans weren't instantly granted American citizenship. I am interested, though. Is it that Palestinians can't get Israeli citizenship or "suspect terrorist" Palestinians can't? Because I'm pretty sure "suspect terrorist" Native Americans couldn't either.
Native Americans are offered economic autonomy, ie casinos and tax-free shopping, while Palestinians are suffering while Israel closes the borders and blocks commerce and electricity.
You mean like how Native Americans have the economic autonomy to grow hemp. Oh, right, they can't do that. It's funny how much lack of autonomy Native American "nations" really have.
But you are right, to an extent. The analogy is false because, unlike the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, the Native American conflict is "resolved"--ie, there is no more serious fighting going on. No matter how oppressive or unworkable Israeli's approach is to ending the conflict, I think one can give it 200 years to solve itself. At least, that's the case so long as the conflict is truly about land and isn't some sort of religious war; religious wars can last for eons.
In GPL terms, "distribution" within the company isn't considered distribution at all.
The GPL isn't the law, however. So, as much as the GPL might not "consider" it distribution, if the legal system in which the GPL is evaluated *does* consider it distribution, the company has to treat it like distribution. So, the better approach to the situation is for the GPL to include special provisions for distribution within a company. Anything else is merely commentary, not a method of resolving legal hurdles to overcome the concerns of possible copyright infringement.
But the dynamic linking argument seems dubius to me.
While I'd agree that dynamic linking is dubious, the general issue has more to do with just how dubious "derivative work" is. Unfortunately, copyright wasn't written with the consideration that one might substantially rely upon the work of another to allow for something to function. As a result, derivative work was cast as widely as possible to avoid the situation where someone might meld one's one work with someone else's merely as a means to justify effective piracy.
But then, one could point at dynamic linking as nothing more than saying "look at book X for further details". The problem is, when it comes to software, it's closer to "stop reading here, turn to page ## of book X, read a paragraph, then resume here". But at that point, you're effectively including another work in your own. Even if it *were* just like using book X more as a plot guide to what your "book" is about, your "book" ends up functioning as the continuation of a series, which under copyright falls under the scope of a derivative work.
In short, I think FSF's argument has legal merit. It's just not something anyone has pushed before because the effect of pushing it for anyone else (and possibly even for the FSF) would be to cripple a platform. Oh, and IANAL, either.
I think the discussion was more along the lines of "what if I have 20% GPL code, 50% AFL code, and 30% our code?" There wouldn't be any actual problems if US copyright was reasonable. Instead, making additional copies of something for the same "person" (be that an individual, family, or company) is legally dubious. While fair use makes it difficult to prosecute an individual or family for personal use, companies engaging in any commerce at advantage from the use of copyrighted works likely fall outside of fair use (and more importantly, companies tend to have more money to sue over). That means that distribution inside a company is likely treated the same as distribution outside a company. So, one has to reach license compatability between all code or risk being sued.
Of course, the same issue effectively comes up with *all* code that's included into a project; but, most proprietary libraries that one buys are written in a very "generous" fashion, allowing the mixing of almost any kind of code. And while there's almost certainly room for at least some GPL/AFL/etc projects to be contacted to allow a proprietary licensing of their code, it only takes one person with a substantial copyright claim to the code to break any potential deal.
In short, the real "issue" is that companies are used to being able to buy, with money, away any copyright issues. Having to buy, with following what they might consider bizarre, licensing agreements to continue and dealing with ways multiple licenses could conflict is a pretty large shift in how many businesses work, and some are certainly unwilling to make such a transition.
so when a little ray of light, like this story of universal failure on the front of limiting violent videogames breaks, then you should celebrate. don't be despondent
That's very much a romantic ideal, but I think you're missing an important point in this. To give you some idea, imagine the tale of the princess in distress who is constantly attacked by the baron who kills her*. The fact that the prince keeps swooping in and resurrecting her is heroic/romantic, using some property of her means of dead to counter it, but the idea that there should be no punishment upon the baron because only the murder wasn't lasting or murder itself isn't illegal in the realm only makes one feel that muder *should* be illegal. There comes a point at which the same action commited again and again to stop the freedom of others, even if it only lasts for a finite period of time, should be punished. To think otherwise means a belief that there should be no system of law, and if one wants a society, one should either rely upon the goodness of people to constantly save those that are murdered or live with the fact that murderers shall succeed without any consequence because "that's how it works".
So, yes, freedom should be guarded. But that doesn't mean you allow those that attempt and succeed for a time to kill freedoms to go unpunished.
*Perhaps you'd prefer kidnapping as the example instead of murder, though without a fear of death, you might only consider constant kidnappings as yet another acceptable inconvenience.
No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
If the existance of a file is part of the technological measure the effective control access to a work, then simply deleting that file is a violating of the DMCA. The fact that "no one would know or care" isn't really relevant. Now, let's imagine another example. Imagine I wrote a program that would only "release" a work to a file if it found that the Windows version was reported as 4.10. Now, WINE allows you to arbitrarily set the version. And Windows XP/Vista/etc contain a "Windows 95/98 emulation" mode, which can lie about the Windows version. So, both would be cimvention devices and illegal.
I think if it was changed from Ao to 18+ that would take away a lot of the inherent fear that AO titles have. It is less threatening and it says exactly what age group it is for.
You don't get it. People avoid X-rated movies because there is a stigmatism attached to X-rated movies. Changing X-rated labels to NC-17 rated labels didn't change things because society eventually accepted that R-rated movies could contain a lot of the things that, previously, only NC-17 rated movies could contain; this leaves the obvious point that NC-17 was left only for porn or porn-like movies.
The serious problem is, the difference between R and NC-17 rated movies can be as simple as camera angle or the amount of time devoted towards nudity. Neither of these are something that can be reasonably limited in a video game, so all nudity becomes X-rated. The only real answer to this is time: just as NC-17 films became R-rated, so too will "Ao" games become M games. Rockstar and others merely have to do what others have done in the past: reject the *volunteer* rating, and include a verbose disclaimer of their own (like Dawn of the Dead did). Sure, WalMart could reject Rockstar's "Ao" game, just as it can reject non-rated movies. But, in the end, WalMart's policy against Ao games has to do with the stigmatism of the Ao rating, so perhaps they would be willing to turn a blind eye. Of course, it's not likely to be in this console generation that the rating system changes.
First of all, these are not police, these are TSA officers.
So, does that mean I can ignore them? I mean, if they're not police, they're just regular citizens. The most they can do is talk to the airlines and ask that I not be allowed to board. On the other hand, that's a great basis for me to sue the airlines. I mean, I paid them for a service, and they're denying it. The only way out of that is, of course, to have TSA screening as a part of the contract. Or are you willing to admit that the TSA is a federal police force, and so they do have authority to arrest you or force a search upon you?
They work in airports, the article is about airports, and our discussion is about airports. It's not as if these people are walking around on every street, stopping and questioning whomever they please.
Well, that's good to know. You do realize that a lot of people at airports are there to see other people off, right? And given that airport security will screen family that's seeing someone off, I can only imagine that the TSA does as well. So, sure, the TSA isn't "out on every street". They are screening people who aren't flying, though.
Third, when you enter an airport, like it or not, you WILL be put under a greater level of scrutiny than in many other places. There aren't many other places where you're asked to discard you water bottle, take off your shoes, and have your bag X-rayed before you'll be let in.
In short, because the TSA is unreasonable in its security, we should expect more unreasonable security procedures and not complain about it. Yea, that's *totally* logical...
Finally, this appears to be a fairly new program, and the writer of TFA doesn't actually provide any instances of real people encountering problems with these officers.
Well, since it's a fairly new program, we'll just ignore the clear absurdity of it until it rears its ugly head. I mean, it's like if tomorrow there was made a law that every second born child under 12 should be executed on sighting. Since it'd be "a fairly new program" and there wouldn't instantly be "provide[d] any instances of real people encountering problems", we'll just have to wait until the body count grows to a large enough amount to start complaining. And even if the law gets overturned, if Congress kept passing new second-born-child-execution laws, carefully worded to be different yet do the same thing, after a while we'd just have to accept that that's how things are. I mean, it's not like they'd be killing adults or the first born. Irrational tradition beats Constitutionality or sanity.
I can't remember if I turned the stove off when I left for work this morning -- I'd better call my neighbor and ask him to set my house on fire!
I can't remember if I designed the stove to be on when the customer receives it -- I should warn consumers so they don't set their house on fire.*
I remember that I left my stove on, with oil soaked rags on the burner; but, the fire department--the only entity legally able to respond to the emergency (other than me, and I'm at work)--refuses to enter unless there's visible smoke, which I know won't happen until most of the house is burning. I should call my neighbor to secretly light the house on fire.**
I can't remember if I left the stove on when I left for work; I'll call my neighbor and have him turn it off.***
*This scenario best matches full disclosure. So long as I'm the only one involved (my house, my stove, etc), full disclosure innately exists (well, short of amnesia or some will transfering something to me).
**This scenario best matches your situation, but it's of course ludicrious. The neighbor can legal enter. The second situation is closer to having to rely on a vendor to fix a problem and "starting a fire" because the vendor will otherwise not respond. This falls into the area of "responsible disclosure".
***This is just the reasonable step that would likely happen. It's not like my neighbor is going to engage in arson or that the local fire department is going to reject my neighbor's statement of spotting a fire while in my house. At worst case, they'd end up calling me to confirm that I allowed the neighor in my house, enforcing the idea that they're a valid witness to the fire.
Taken to its logical conclusion, you must therefore assume the worst; that the black-hats know of far more bugs than you do. In fact, strictly speaking you assume they know every bug that exists in your software.
But that's a ridiculous assumption! It makes sense in the context of cryptography research, but you're turning it into a assertion that publicizing software vulnerabilities doesn't have any negative consequences, which is absurd. There *are* two genuine conflicting sides here and you can't just wave one of them away.
You're right, it is a ridiculous assumption. Now, consider this. By releasing information about a bug to the public, then you *know* black hats are aware of the bug. So, everyone involved can react as such without it being "ridiculous". Now, given that a user can completely nullify the effect of any bug by not using the software, they can use work arounds and patches to nullify most bugs, or they can continue to take a calculated risk by continuing to use software with bugs, this does rather nullify the "other side". Or, in short, the most reasonable position would seem to be to release as soon as possible bug information to as many people as possible. In any other situation, one is generally left to make widely innacurate assumptions (all code is buggy, and so you can't use any code; or, all code is safe, and you can continue to use it without any risk).
What do you mean by "work"? The point of laws, believe it or not, isn't to stop illegal activity; nor are police there to stop crimes. The point of laws is to punish those who commit certain acts. Now, this *might* have an effect on whether people continue the act or not. But at the point at which you think you can manipulate the common populace with a law, you've already loss. After all, living in a democracy, that common populace will either vote you out or stage an uprising if you suppress their ability to vote. The sad part of this, then, is that politicians try to target the "undesirables" and the defenseless; why else go after "the gays" and children?
Well, you seem to be technical right. But, I'd say your example falls very sharply into the "public is not always public" issue. I can't march into a public school classroom at any time to do whatever would otherwise be legal. Anything not officially sanctioned, and funded, by the government needs fees to pay employees to maintain the property outside of the expected norm.
Now, perhaps the "right thing" is to increase taxes instead of requiring every non-school function to pay for usage of the school. I think that might be the right idea, including for things like "public" sports teams.
Certainly, there shouldn't be punitive damages against religious organizations for trying to use a public space (and without further information, the fact that the religious organization covers the same material as an existing school organization isn't relevant--one likely couldn't truck in and use the public school to run a secondary football team, either, without paying for things like insurance). And I agree, that there have been instances were "anti-religious bigots" (more like, anti religious-association bigots) have worked to prevent a religious group "tanting" a public institution with what they see as a religious bias. I can understand they're desire to not fund religious groups they're not associated with (and this can hold true for other Christian groups). But, perhaps this instance is a step too far, trying to claim that simple access to public land is unreasonable "funding".
Stocks, bonds and cash are just convenient abstractions that directly map to real property.
Stock is an abstraction for ownership. Please explain how owning ".0002% of Apple, Inc" translates to "real property". Can I claim a paperclip from their office?
Are you serious? Shares in a company are simply a proxy for portions of that real entity. They are limited to a total sum of 1 of that company, the property they represent is rivalrous and excludable which is why the sum total of all shares in a company add up to 1 of that company.
This is disingenuous. For an example: http://finance.google.com/finance?fstype=bi&q=MSFT. If you'll note, for March 31, 2007, there is a listing of ~$64 billion in assets, ~$29 billion in liabilities, and ~$60 billion in common stock. Or, in other words, to pay out all common stock at the March 31, 2007 price would hypothetically have put them $25 billion in the hole (and this is after selling everything). Clearly the stock market allows a certain amount of overcommiting.
As for bonds, bonds offer the promise of money in the future. They don't map to "real property" as much as hypothetical future property/government backing of promised property. Look no further than the US's (and other countries, of course) history of selling treasury bonds to pay the debt of previous treasury bonds. If the government should collapse, the bonds will be non-redeemable. In short, there's no real property to collect upon.
Finally, cash no longer is gold backed. It is fiat. There is no guarantee that tomorrow you can exchange it for anything because there is no promise even by the maker of the money that it can be redeemed for anything, so it wouldn't even take a government collapse for money to be wortless.
Admittedly, most of my examples deal with the fact that abstractions don't mean anything without redeemability. And certainly, real property can become worthless in the same way that stocks, bonds, and cash can. However, even if steam locamotives become economically worthless, it doesn't mean you can't use it anymore.
>>>>>Now, how does selling a counterfeit under someone else's name fit in to your view of capitalism?
>>>>Pure, unfettered greed from pure, unfettered competition. I guess all those laissez-faire capitalists forgot about China, huh?
>>>Right, because capitalism = greed. There is nothing "capitalistic" about stealing. Your definition of "competition" apparently also includes illegal activity.
>>Can you explain what's been stolen here?
>... my rebuttal was against the idea that stealing and greed went hand-in-hand with capitalism...
Given the above context, it's clear that what was being discussed was fraud, not theft. The former is deception for economic gain. The latter is depriving the rightful owner of use of a good.
Btw, I'd say greed does go hand-in-hand with capitalism. That doesn't mean one is necessarily greedy while following capitalism. But in most situations where one isn't using capital to make more capital, one is considered under-productive. Meanwhile, full productivity leads to over production, which feeds materialism and greed. Greed, of course, is fed by any system that doesn't directly work to combat it; and the second humans no longer feel greed, we can all live in some sort of innate harmony without such mechanics in the system of economics. It just happens that perfect information is supposed to combat the effects of greed in the free market (and prevent fraud, btw); in capitalism, it's perfectly possible to hide information, which is the entire reason regulation had to be established to hinder practices like deception.
>>Basically you're offering your own interpretation of what counts as property -- one that many people take issue with -- and then saying that capitalism automatically makes it wrong to violate your definition. So what?
>It's not my personal interpretation of property; intellectual property has quite a bit of legal precedence.
It sounds like it is your personal interpretation of property; it's not *only* your personal interpreation of property. I can only retort that in 1850 in Georgia, there was quite a bit of legal precedence that people could be counted as property* (as slaves). That doesn't mean it fits under laissez-faire or capitalism.
*Note: This is meant as a clear analogy; it is not meant to trivialize the inhumanity of slavery.
>Regulation should not be defined to mean "anything which impacts the free market."
It doesn't matter what regulation "should" mean. The fact is, regulation has a meaning and it has been used by everyone else with that meaning throughout this discussion. If you want to argue a position with a different meaning of regulation with any hope of actual communication, you need to either upfront define your terms if they disagree with standard meaning or use a new, unique word, defining what *it* means. Stepping in later to redefine terms to fit your preconceptions and to try to make your argument right is, at best, incredibly disingenous and, at worst, a logical fallacy (no true scotsman).
"It is generally understood to be a doctrine that maintains that private initiative and production are best allowed to roam free, opposing economic interventionism and taxation by the state beyond that which is perceived to be necessary to maintain individual liberty, peace, security, and property rights."
Nowhere in that definition do I see "allow businesses to cheat, steal, or engage in other illicit activity."
Right, it doesn't say "allow" because it's a negating doctrine (like several of the Bill of Rights of the US), not an additive one. By that I mean, it assumes that everything is allowed except what is negated. In this case, what is negated are those things that'd infringe individual liberty, peace, security, and property rights. Now, does cloning equipment, even to an inferior standard, infringe any of those? No. Does intentionally using someone else's trademark? Not really (though it is rather scummy, IMO).
Really, if you *do* believe that what is being allowed should be cracked down on because it's not acceptable in laissez-faire economics, do so by pointing out how their activities infringe "maintain individual liberty, peace, security, and property rights". Just a small FYI, IP aren't really property rights. Pointing out that violating them is illegal is a non-sequitor since the whole point is arguing about what should be the law. If you accept that the government can redefine IP as within property rights, then you'd have to accept all forms of regulation because they can be redefined as part of property rights of the state (all raw resources coming from the land/sea which is the state's to sell out and lay perpetual contract/law to).
As far as I know, health insurance isn't supposed to be protecting against the risk of risk. You don't get health insurance to protect against the risk that you start smoking and have to deal with the likely consequence, you get health insurance to protect against the likely consequences of smoking (e.g. cancer).
Very true. Insurance is to help pay for medical bills, not to stop you from getting cancer.
The reason a healthy person should get health insurance is to protect against the risk that he will randomly become unhealthy (because once you have health problems, it's much harder to get insurance that covers them).
Um, no. Your first paragraph had it right. The reason a healthy person should have health insurance is to provide for medical expensives if they suffer an unhealthy situation, as one is unlikely to be able to pay out of pocket. You are right, though, that insurance isn't in the business of taking their permium payment to pay more expensive bills. Such isn't economical.
As such, nonrandom effects (choices) should not be protected against - doing so reduces any incentive to do what's best overall.
You remind me of the All-State commercial. "We give you a deduction on your deductable if you don't have accidents. It's our way of providing an incentive not to get in an accident." (paraphrasing) Who in their right mind *intends* to get in an accident or become sick, even if there is no financial burden? Cancer isn't a joy ride. Breaking several bones and risking death in an accident is a pretty large incentive to drive safe. And if it's not, then the person isn't being rational, so trying to butter them up with cash incentives or cash premium disincentives isn't likely to matter.
The point of insurance is to manage financial risk. Certainly choices determine risk, but minimizing risk means something inane like drinking specially formuated food (ie, something like grits) for all your life, minimizing exercise (any motion increases your risk of injury), and in general not living. Such sounds extreme, but it *is* the extreme that insurance companies strive for, to maximize profit. Perhaps, though, the fear of death will stop most people in most obviously life-threatening activities (smoking, even with its higher cancer rate, still takes an average of 20+ years to develop)--just like not everyone is on welfare because people desire a higher standard of living than welfare--and we can settle on insurance premiums that are reasonable for all people. Or, in short, not everything is driven by money, so stop fucking people over because of your greed for money; such only pushes people to be greedy for money like you are.
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Sorry, I should have been more precise. When I meant "US law", I didn't mean merely the laws themselves. The inclusion of the word "jurisdiction" was to make clear that it wasn't sufficient that the act is illegal (copyright violates were already illegal in Australia). It's that those with a serious interest to enforce such laws (the US) can't arrest people in Australia, neither for downloading nor distributing.
Of course, they can try to push Australia to arrest and extradite their citizens to the US. Or, they can try to push Australia to enforce US interests within their own court system. But, neither of those are one time deals (ie, it isn't sufficient to threaten tariffs one time). Further, any deal that tried to make such actions provisional on lower tariffs would rather quickly turn into a constant conflict because companies in the US would never be happy with how much Australia would do.
So, we're left with the current system, where threats change the law in Australia, but little increased enforcement occurs. Clearly that's not enough to actually stop piracy because digital piracy can move incredibly swiftly (p2p makes it near instant). The only question, then, is whether those changes have made any significant change in piracy. Given the lack of evidence on just how much piracy there is in the first place, I'd say that's impossible to find out. Having said that, clearly a lot of piracy still occurs; so, such isn't effective by some standards.
... But starting around 1440, [people] began to [distribute creative and scientific works] on a scale previously unimagined. ...
Funny, btw, that you try to use the ineffectiveness of one law to justify a second law when the second law is as ineffective as the first law for the same reasons the first is ineffective: US law doesn't have international jurisdiction and the US government can't legaly monitor most internet traffic to catch most violaters.
That's not quite right. Before the DMCA came about, there was this beautiful concept known as "First Sale Doctrine". It arose as a result of book publishers trying to treat book sales as if they were licensing, thereby allowing them to stipulate the use of the sold books. But, then a court came along and recognized there was a fundamental right that comes before the law of copyright; and while the words were never spelled out in the Constitution, it was the case copyright was created to engage in control of copying only. Attempts by copyright holders to go beyond this, for whatever reason, would therefore be invalid because it went against the strict purpose outlined in the Constitution.
Copyright holders, however, aren't a one trick pony. And over the years, they tried to engage the law to grant them other powers, such as limiting the introduction of VCRs (because they'd interfere with the movie theater business model); or, to create a game player designed to only accept games if they included a trivial copyrighted work (to limit who could publish on the game player). In the end, the courts recognized that, again, copyright is there to cover copying, not as an excuse to maintain a business model or to create a monopoly of one's own design.
But, that all changed with the introduction of the DMCA. The DMCA is so carefully worded to seemingly allow all those exceptions one would expect in a valid copyright law. But, the DMCA was written to crush the economy that would allow for legal circumvention of "copy protection schemes". But, cases such as Sega v. Accolade have already shown that "copy protection schemes" are inherently legally circumventable even if such would seemingly violate copyright. The real problem is, the courts never went that further step as they did with "First Sale Doctrine": they didn't make illegal "copy protection" systems.
What does all this mean? Well, in short, obfuscation to access a copyrighted work are, on their face, legally dubious if not illegal. There simply hasn't been a court case involving the DMCA trying to push this idea to strike down the DMCA. The whole point of the clause in the Constitution that allows copyright was to unobfuscate and unhide the embodied ideas and techniques of artists and scientists, at the cost to the public of more limited use of those embodied ideas and techniques for a time. If copyright holders could legally obfuscate a work forever, then the public would receive nothing from copyright law. And clearly that's unconstitutional.
Of course, if all that fails, there's always going the more direct approach and having Congress undo copyright.
Ah, that's such a great example, given that Ronald Reagan didn't have the Secret Service to protect him. Oh, wait, he did? Well, I guess then your example proves that in a system where there's government funded security for public figures, it's the "crazies" that end up pulling off an assassination attempt before those with political motives.
But, then, that makes sense. Physical security revolves around being able to "read" people. Sane people, with motives to kill the President, give off clear signals of their intent. Non-sane people, though, are harder to read. So, while you can catch some (maybe most) of the crazy people for being obviously questionable, at least some of the crazy people will pass through security just fine. Does that explain why a comedy group was able to pass through two checkpoints?
I'd agree very strongly. But, I'd add that it's not just "nerds" who fall into this trap but society in general. And while some would point at market forces (or God) as the divine controller of all that is good, others would point out that government (as evil as it is) is there precisely to step in because they prefer their controller to be non-divine. The net fact, though, is that people rely on faith to function in such areas because the unknownedness of the area is so broad that it becomes difficult to function without using something to fill that void.
Having said all that, it's very disheartening to hear many nerds believe the free market is the answer to all problems. Wanting to claim memebership to nerdhood means wanting to respect those who are also nerds. But, most nerds seem to fall into the same trap of most people and don't actually educate themselves on the free market. In short, they take a bastardized definition (non-regulation of markets) and equate it with the Adam Smith version (a market of perfect information and rational actors). And while the latter could, at least hypothetically, manage to prevent incontinuities, the former fails horribly precisely because people many times aren't rational, and, more importantly, a lack of perfect information leaves one subject to the manipulation of others (intentionally or otherwise), drastically warping the market place.
Consider that, with perfect infromation, fraud would be impossible (you'd know if someone was trying to be deceptive because you'd know what was really being sold), bank runs would be impossible (people wouldn't have to rely on faith that their bank was solvent; they'd know), and monopolies like Microsoft couldn't exist (beyond the point that Microsoft is in the business of selling information (which, if everyone has perfect information becomes impossible), people would have the knowledge to thrawt lock-in and the knowledge of things like OEM deals to remove the possibility of Microsoft using price as coersion). It's for all these reasons I've turned more towards a quasi-libertarian stance over time, since nothing remotely like a free market really exists. The free market model is only useful as a guide to how things could be and to help when one believes one has enough information to act. Beyond that, other models have to come into play or one's only other option is to be "irrational".
A tongue in cheek retort: because the right hand carried out the action, but the left brain merely conspired to carry out the murder, it'd be conspiracy to murder instead of a murder charge.
Sort of. Imagine you were standing on the border between Mexico and America, your left side in America and your right in Mexico. With your right hand, you pull a trigger and shoot some Mexican on the Mexican side. At no point did the Mexican, bullet, or gun, happen on the American side of the border. Now, further imagine that you've paid off the authorities in Mexico so you could shoot said Mexican without punishment. The Mexican ends up dying. Should the US have jurisdiction to try you for murder?
Now consider a corporation, with many feet in many lands, and instead of committing murder, it engaged in conspiracy to murder and/or kidnap. If corporations (and companies) want to be people, why not hold them to the same standard for people who would try to stand in multiple jurisdiction to avoid punishment?
PS - Feel free to change the countries and the offenses if you want to change the analogy with others. Smoking pot seems a good example.
Granted. But that's the difference between linking in 20 libraries "just because" versus one's code actually making use of those 20 libraries. The former, though, seems like a great way to effectively violate someone else's copyright by turning one's program into an archive of libraries. Given that software is functional, and the point of libraries is a repository of functionality, trying to go back to the idea of a "creative" standard seems somewhat humorous. But, I guess that comes down to the idea of whether one chose a library "because it was there" vs "because function X is really good at doing what it does, signifying a good bit of creativity/effort in its design". The fact that, in general, optimization of an optimal algorithm is as much a creative as a brute-force approach and that optimizations are the main reason to choose one library over another (beyond one library simply lacking certain functions; with functionality questionably a basis to claim copyright) just makes the whole situation more murky.
Right, but the thing is that that's hypothetical. Given the very nature of software, it's possible to fundamental alter the underlying library of almost any program and maintain the same functionality (although you might violate some patents along the way). I think a more realistic standard is to recognize just how common the underlying library is in the real world, not to draw on hypotheticals. From that standard, dynamically linking against glibc, which provides a posix-like standard, would be very different to dynamically linking against cube 3d's rendering engine library. It's hard to set the same standard for everything. Or, the fact that there's WINE and Windows helps making the Win32 API a standard and hence Win32 programs not derivative of Windows.
I think the fundamental problem is that the legislative branch really hasn't chimed in to determine things, leaving various circuit courts to make their own determinations. The AFC Test, as mentioned, is apparently not held equally by all courts. So, regional jurisdiction has a large part to play in what counts as a derivative work. But, even if the AFC Test were standrd, the main arguing point is the difference between functional code vs expressive code, when generally "good" code hackers work to express an idea by making optimally functional code (usually in minimizing use of space, time, or code space; but sometimes, it is in the form of making one segment of code do many, very different things). Ie, the more functional the code is, the more expressive it is (and vice versa).
Relying on the courts to sort out the legality of copyrighted things just doesn't seem the best way to encourage business in copyrighted works.
IANAL, either. And I don't think blog postings (at least, comments to blog postings) count as something one should be held reasponably accountable for...short of some reasonable reason to the contrary.
No. Derivative works include not only transformations of an existing work but also "sequals" to a work. Look, for example, at The Wind Done Gone and the struggle against the copyright holder of Gone With the Wind. Now, you might think that this is stupid, but commercial ventures are given a lot less leeway to further "develop" an existing work. And using the excuse that "it was designed precisely to be developed by others" doesn't work as an excuse. Look no further than greeting card companies and their copyrighting (and trademarking) of various characters for sublicensing.
You're missing the point. The problem doesn't come into effect because you're using the header file to a library. The problem is that you're linking against the library, and the library is copyrighted. As you point out, the program and the dynamic library become conjoined in the address space, in virtually the same way a static library would be (in fact, for gcc, the difference in compilation is usually as simple as "-shared" vs "-static"). The fact that you don't necessarily provide the dynamic library with your program doesn't sound like a reasonable excuse for the merging of the two separate works. In short, it's legally dubious (consider the pending case of companies trying to sell data to special DVD players to create family-friendly censored films) thanks to the vagueness of copyright law.
Perhaps they are derivative works of Windows. But as I previously stated, in the software world, there's an often unstated assumption that such types of derivative works are "okay" (ie, you won't be sued over them). If Microsoft tried to suddenly change the framework of this situation, I'm not really sure what would happen.
Except for special defines, the header file is there to help convince the C compiler that what you're doing is "legal" according to the library/code that's being used. Ie, the real concern is the linking (usually), so I don't see Perl's method somehow alleviating that concern.
This is the key point. OS makers are most often in the business of making money through selling their OS (or hardware joined to the OS). It's not their business to stiffle applications that would draw people to their OS (exception being, possibly, if those applications compete against applications the OS maker makes; but that's usually a different department). There's simply not enough court rulings to make clear how and in what way the merging of copyrighted codes is acceptable without running into derivative status. One can only hope that the courts rely less on technicality and more on accepted practices, given the otherwise chilling effect I'd imagine a technical decision would have.
Or, I can continue hoping that copyright is put to an end, precisely because a large part of the idea of copyright is to allow one person to profit for allowing others to expand up
Yeah; good thing there was no genocide of Native Americans...oh wait. But, I guess if we just wait a few centuries, we can ignore how Palestinians were forcebly moved from their land?
"To illustrate this point further, note that after occupying the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, Israel could have annexed and integrated those territories into Israel by providing the Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. However, Israel did not do this and instead chose to treat the West Bank and Gaza as if they were part of Israel physically without providing the Palestinians in those territories with citizenship, political rights or civilian rule. Among the reasons Israel did not integrate the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza into Israel is because Israelis were afraid of a demographic problem. The Israelis feared that if they gave the Palestinians equality, political and civil rights that the Palestinians may one day out number the Israelis and vote Israel out of existence." -- Solving the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict. You know, that sounds virtually identical to Native American history. In any case, Native Americans weren't instantly granted American citizenship. I am interested, though. Is it that Palestinians can't get Israeli citizenship or "suspect terrorist" Palestinians can't? Because I'm pretty sure "suspect terrorist" Native Americans couldn't either.
You mean like how Native Americans have the economic autonomy to grow hemp. Oh, right, they can't do that. It's funny how much lack of autonomy Native American "nations" really have.
But you are right, to an extent. The analogy is false because, unlike the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, the Native American conflict is "resolved"--ie, there is no more serious fighting going on. No matter how oppressive or unworkable Israeli's approach is to ending the conflict, I think one can give it 200 years to solve itself. At least, that's the case so long as the conflict is truly about land and isn't some sort of religious war; religious wars can last for eons.
The GPL isn't the law, however. So, as much as the GPL might not "consider" it distribution, if the legal system in which the GPL is evaluated *does* consider it distribution, the company has to treat it like distribution. So, the better approach to the situation is for the GPL to include special provisions for distribution within a company. Anything else is merely commentary, not a method of resolving legal hurdles to overcome the concerns of possible copyright infringement.
While I'd agree that dynamic linking is dubious, the general issue has more to do with just how dubious "derivative work" is. Unfortunately, copyright wasn't written with the consideration that one might substantially rely upon the work of another to allow for something to function. As a result, derivative work was cast as widely as possible to avoid the situation where someone might meld one's one work with someone else's merely as a means to justify effective piracy.
But then, one could point at dynamic linking as nothing more than saying "look at book X for further details". The problem is, when it comes to software, it's closer to "stop reading here, turn to page ## of book X, read a paragraph, then resume here". But at that point, you're effectively including another work in your own. Even if it *were* just like using book X more as a plot guide to what your "book" is about, your "book" ends up functioning as the continuation of a series, which under copyright falls under the scope of a derivative work.
In short, I think FSF's argument has legal merit. It's just not something anyone has pushed before because the effect of pushing it for anyone else (and possibly even for the FSF) would be to cripple a platform. Oh, and IANAL, either.
I think the discussion was more along the lines of "what if I have 20% GPL code, 50% AFL code, and 30% our code?" There wouldn't be any actual problems if US copyright was reasonable. Instead, making additional copies of something for the same "person" (be that an individual, family, or company) is legally dubious. While fair use makes it difficult to prosecute an individual or family for personal use, companies engaging in any commerce at advantage from the use of copyrighted works likely fall outside of fair use (and more importantly, companies tend to have more money to sue over). That means that distribution inside a company is likely treated the same as distribution outside a company. So, one has to reach license compatability between all code or risk being sued.
Of course, the same issue effectively comes up with *all* code that's included into a project; but, most proprietary libraries that one buys are written in a very "generous" fashion, allowing the mixing of almost any kind of code. And while there's almost certainly room for at least some GPL/AFL/etc projects to be contacted to allow a proprietary licensing of their code, it only takes one person with a substantial copyright claim to the code to break any potential deal.
In short, the real "issue" is that companies are used to being able to buy, with money, away any copyright issues. Having to buy, with following what they might consider bizarre, licensing agreements to continue and dealing with ways multiple licenses could conflict is a pretty large shift in how many businesses work, and some are certainly unwilling to make such a transition.
That's very much a romantic ideal, but I think you're missing an important point in this. To give you some idea, imagine the tale of the princess in distress who is constantly attacked by the baron who kills her*. The fact that the prince keeps swooping in and resurrecting her is heroic/romantic, using some property of her means of dead to counter it, but the idea that there should be no punishment upon the baron because only the murder wasn't lasting or murder itself isn't illegal in the realm only makes one feel that muder *should* be illegal. There comes a point at which the same action commited again and again to stop the freedom of others, even if it only lasts for a finite period of time, should be punished. To think otherwise means a belief that there should be no system of law, and if one wants a society, one should either rely upon the goodness of people to constantly save those that are murdered or live with the fact that murderers shall succeed without any consequence because "that's how it works".
So, yes, freedom should be guarded. But that doesn't mean you allow those that attempt and succeed for a time to kill freedoms to go unpunished.
*Perhaps you'd prefer kidnapping as the example instead of murder, though without a fear of death, you might only consider constant kidnappings as yet another acceptable inconvenience.
If the existance of a file is part of the technological measure the effective control access to a work, then simply deleting that file is a violating of the DMCA. The fact that "no one would know or care" isn't really relevant. Now, let's imagine another example. Imagine I wrote a program that would only "release" a work to a file if it found that the Windows version was reported as 4.10. Now, WINE allows you to arbitrarily set the version. And Windows XP/Vista/etc contain a "Windows 95/98 emulation" mode, which can lie about the Windows version. So, both would be cimvention devices and illegal.
You don't get it. People avoid X-rated movies because there is a stigmatism attached to X-rated movies. Changing X-rated labels to NC-17 rated labels didn't change things because society eventually accepted that R-rated movies could contain a lot of the things that, previously, only NC-17 rated movies could contain; this leaves the obvious point that NC-17 was left only for porn or porn-like movies.
The serious problem is, the difference between R and NC-17 rated movies can be as simple as camera angle or the amount of time devoted towards nudity. Neither of these are something that can be reasonably limited in a video game, so all nudity becomes X-rated. The only real answer to this is time: just as NC-17 films became R-rated, so too will "Ao" games become M games. Rockstar and others merely have to do what others have done in the past: reject the *volunteer* rating, and include a verbose disclaimer of their own (like Dawn of the Dead did). Sure, WalMart could reject Rockstar's "Ao" game, just as it can reject non-rated movies. But, in the end, WalMart's policy against Ao games has to do with the stigmatism of the Ao rating, so perhaps they would be willing to turn a blind eye. Of course, it's not likely to be in this console generation that the rating system changes.
So, does that mean I can ignore them? I mean, if they're not police, they're just regular citizens. The most they can do is talk to the airlines and ask that I not be allowed to board. On the other hand, that's a great basis for me to sue the airlines. I mean, I paid them for a service, and they're denying it. The only way out of that is, of course, to have TSA screening as a part of the contract. Or are you willing to admit that the TSA is a federal police force, and so they do have authority to arrest you or force a search upon you?
Well, that's good to know. You do realize that a lot of people at airports are there to see other people off, right? And given that airport security will screen family that's seeing someone off, I can only imagine that the TSA does as well. So, sure, the TSA isn't "out on every street". They are screening people who aren't flying, though.
In short, because the TSA is unreasonable in its security, we should expect more unreasonable security procedures and not complain about it. Yea, that's *totally* logical...
Well, since it's a fairly new program, we'll just ignore the clear absurdity of it until it rears its ugly head. I mean, it's like if tomorrow there was made a law that every second born child under 12 should be executed on sighting. Since it'd be "a fairly new program" and there wouldn't instantly be "provide[d] any instances of real people encountering problems", we'll just have to wait until the body count grows to a large enough amount to start complaining. And even if the law gets overturned, if Congress kept passing new second-born-child-execution laws, carefully worded to be different yet do the same thing, after a while we'd just have to accept that that's how things are. I mean, it's not like they'd be killing adults or the first born. Irrational tradition beats Constitutionality or sanity.
I can't remember if I designed the stove to be on when the customer receives it -- I should warn consumers so they don't set their house on fire.*
I remember that I left my stove on, with oil soaked rags on the burner; but, the fire department--the only entity legally able to respond to the emergency (other than me, and I'm at work)--refuses to enter unless there's visible smoke, which I know won't happen until most of the house is burning. I should call my neighbor to secretly light the house on fire.**
I can't remember if I left the stove on when I left for work; I'll call my neighbor and have him turn it off.***
*This scenario best matches full disclosure. So long as I'm the only one involved (my house, my stove, etc), full disclosure innately exists (well, short of amnesia or some will transfering something to me).
**This scenario best matches your situation, but it's of course ludicrious. The neighbor can legal enter. The second situation is closer to having to rely on a vendor to fix a problem and "starting a fire" because the vendor will otherwise not respond. This falls into the area of "responsible disclosure".
***This is just the reasonable step that would likely happen. It's not like my neighbor is going to engage in arson or that the local fire department is going to reject my neighbor's statement of spotting a fire while in my house. At worst case, they'd end up calling me to confirm that I allowed the neighor in my house, enforcing the idea that they're a valid witness to the fire.
You're right, it is a ridiculous assumption. Now, consider this. By releasing information about a bug to the public, then you *know* black hats are aware of the bug. So, everyone involved can react as such without it being "ridiculous". Now, given that a user can completely nullify the effect of any bug by not using the software, they can use work arounds and patches to nullify most bugs, or they can continue to take a calculated risk by continuing to use software with bugs, this does rather nullify the "other side". Or, in short, the most reasonable position would seem to be to release as soon as possible bug information to as many people as possible. In any other situation, one is generally left to make widely innacurate assumptions (all code is buggy, and so you can't use any code; or, all code is safe, and you can continue to use it without any risk).
What do you mean by "work"? The point of laws, believe it or not, isn't to stop illegal activity; nor are police there to stop crimes. The point of laws is to punish those who commit certain acts. Now, this *might* have an effect on whether people continue the act or not. But at the point at which you think you can manipulate the common populace with a law, you've already loss. After all, living in a democracy, that common populace will either vote you out or stage an uprising if you suppress their ability to vote. The sad part of this, then, is that politicians try to target the "undesirables" and the defenseless; why else go after "the gays" and children?
Well, you seem to be technical right. But, I'd say your example falls very sharply into the "public is not always public" issue. I can't march into a public school classroom at any time to do whatever would otherwise be legal. Anything not officially sanctioned, and funded, by the government needs fees to pay employees to maintain the property outside of the expected norm.
Now, perhaps the "right thing" is to increase taxes instead of requiring every non-school function to pay for usage of the school. I think that might be the right idea, including for things like "public" sports teams.
Certainly, there shouldn't be punitive damages against religious organizations for trying to use a public space (and without further information, the fact that the religious organization covers the same material as an existing school organization isn't relevant--one likely couldn't truck in and use the public school to run a secondary football team, either, without paying for things like insurance). And I agree, that there have been instances were "anti-religious bigots" (more like, anti religious-association bigots) have worked to prevent a religious group "tanting" a public institution with what they see as a religious bias. I can understand they're desire to not fund religious groups they're not associated with (and this can hold true for other Christian groups). But, perhaps this instance is a step too far, trying to claim that simple access to public land is unreasonable "funding".
This is disingenuous. For an example: http://finance.google.com/finance?fstype=bi&q=MSFT . If you'll note, for March 31, 2007, there is a listing of ~$64 billion in assets, ~$29 billion in liabilities, and ~$60 billion in common stock. Or, in other words, to pay out all common stock at the March 31, 2007 price would hypothetically have put them $25 billion in the hole (and this is after selling everything). Clearly the stock market allows a certain amount of overcommiting.
As for bonds, bonds offer the promise of money in the future. They don't map to "real property" as much as hypothetical future property/government backing of promised property. Look no further than the US's (and other countries, of course) history of selling treasury bonds to pay the debt of previous treasury bonds. If the government should collapse, the bonds will be non-redeemable. In short, there's no real property to collect upon.
Finally, cash no longer is gold backed. It is fiat. There is no guarantee that tomorrow you can exchange it for anything because there is no promise even by the maker of the money that it can be redeemed for anything, so it wouldn't even take a government collapse for money to be wortless.
Admittedly, most of my examples deal with the fact that abstractions don't mean anything without redeemability. And certainly, real property can become worthless in the same way that stocks, bonds, and cash can. However, even if steam locamotives become economically worthless, it doesn't mean you can't use it anymore.
>>>>>Now, how does selling a counterfeit under someone else's name fit in to your view of capitalism?
>>>>Pure, unfettered greed from pure, unfettered competition. I guess all those laissez-faire capitalists forgot about China, huh?
>>>Right, because capitalism = greed. There is nothing "capitalistic" about stealing. Your definition of "competition" apparently also includes illegal activity.
>>Can you explain what's been stolen here?
>... my rebuttal was against the idea that stealing and greed went hand-in-hand with capitalism ...
Given the above context, it's clear that what was being discussed was fraud, not theft. The former is deception for economic gain. The latter is depriving the rightful owner of use of a good.
Btw, I'd say greed does go hand-in-hand with capitalism. That doesn't mean one is necessarily greedy while following capitalism. But in most situations where one isn't using capital to make more capital, one is considered under-productive. Meanwhile, full productivity leads to over production, which feeds materialism and greed. Greed, of course, is fed by any system that doesn't directly work to combat it; and the second humans no longer feel greed, we can all live in some sort of innate harmony without such mechanics in the system of economics. It just happens that perfect information is supposed to combat the effects of greed in the free market (and prevent fraud, btw); in capitalism, it's perfectly possible to hide information, which is the entire reason regulation had to be established to hinder practices like deception.
>>Basically you're offering your own interpretation of what counts as property -- one that many people take issue with -- and then saying that capitalism automatically makes it wrong to violate your definition. So what?
>It's not my personal interpretation of property; intellectual property has quite a bit of legal precedence.
It sounds like it is your personal interpretation of property; it's not *only* your personal interpreation of property. I can only retort that in 1850 in Georgia, there was quite a bit of legal precedence that people could be counted as property* (as slaves). That doesn't mean it fits under laissez-faire or capitalism.
*Note: This is meant as a clear analogy; it is not meant to trivialize the inhumanity of slavery.
>Regulation should not be defined to mean "anything which impacts the free market."
It doesn't matter what regulation "should" mean. The fact is, regulation has a meaning and it has been used by everyone else with that meaning throughout this discussion. If you want to argue a position with a different meaning of regulation with any hope of actual communication, you need to either upfront define your terms if they disagree with standard meaning or use a new, unique word, defining what *it* means. Stepping in later to redefine terms to fit your preconceptions and to try to make your argument right is, at best, incredibly disingenous and, at worst, a logical fallacy (no true scotsman).
Right, it doesn't say "allow" because it's a negating doctrine (like several of the Bill of Rights of the US), not an additive one. By that I mean, it assumes that everything is allowed except what is negated. In this case, what is negated are those things that'd infringe individual liberty, peace, security, and property rights. Now, does cloning equipment, even to an inferior standard, infringe any of those? No. Does intentionally using someone else's trademark? Not really (though it is rather scummy, IMO).
Really, if you *do* believe that what is being allowed should be cracked down on because it's not acceptable in laissez-faire economics, do so by pointing out how their activities infringe "maintain individual liberty, peace, security, and property rights". Just a small FYI, IP aren't really property rights. Pointing out that violating them is illegal is a non-sequitor since the whole point is arguing about what should be the law. If you accept that the government can redefine IP as within property rights, then you'd have to accept all forms of regulation because they can be redefined as part of property rights of the state (all raw resources coming from the land/sea which is the state's to sell out and lay perpetual contract/law to).
Very true. Insurance is to help pay for medical bills, not to stop you from getting cancer.
Um, no. Your first paragraph had it right. The reason a healthy person should have health insurance is to provide for medical expensives if they suffer an unhealthy situation, as one is unlikely to be able to pay out of pocket. You are right, though, that insurance isn't in the business of taking their permium payment to pay more expensive bills. Such isn't economical.
You remind me of the All-State commercial. "We give you a deduction on your deductable if you don't have accidents. It's our way of providing an incentive not to get in an accident." (paraphrasing) Who in their right mind *intends* to get in an accident or become sick, even if there is no financial burden? Cancer isn't a joy ride. Breaking several bones and risking death in an accident is a pretty large incentive to drive safe. And if it's not, then the person isn't being rational, so trying to butter them up with cash incentives or cash premium disincentives isn't likely to matter.
The point of insurance is to manage financial risk. Certainly choices determine risk, but minimizing risk means something inane like drinking specially formuated food (ie, something like grits) for all your life, minimizing exercise (any motion increases your risk of injury), and in general not living. Such sounds extreme, but it *is* the extreme that insurance companies strive for, to maximize profit. Perhaps, though, the fear of death will stop most people in most obviously life-threatening activities (smoking, even with its higher cancer rate, still takes an average of 20+ years to develop)--just like not everyone is on welfare because people desire a higher standard of living than welfare--and we can settle on insurance premiums that are reasonable for all people. Or, in short, not everything is driven by money, so stop fucking people over because of your greed for money; such only pushes people to be greedy for money like you are.