On one hand you have the copyright holder's rights and on the other the computer user's rights. Whose rights are more important?
The "rights" that you compare here aren't the same kind though. One is the natural, god-given right for an author to control what information cannot be copied or transmitted by every digital device on the planet, while the other is nothing more than the rapacious whims of greedy computer owners who feel entitled to move bits from one part of their machine to another, willy-nilly.
It's not fair for troll to call me an asshole, though. D:
I tried paying, there were no payment options. I ask "how much for a copy of XYZ song in mp3 format?" and they said "you can't have that. How about a nice wma/DRM at a low bitrate instead?"
So I said "No, you don't understand,/. user Anonymous Cowardon said I had to try and pay for these files which happen to be mp3, high quality and well mastered. So how much will I have to pay for these?" and they said they would have to get back to me, but they never did.
So, I've met your criteria. I've "tried to pay for the files". IP holders won't let me. So now I have your blessing to just pirate them instead?:D
I believe you've hit the nail on the head so far as the unwinnable challenge of copyright, Mozzley.
We need to come up with alternatives to copyright, and I haven't seen a good proposal yet.
On this end of the equation however, I submit to you that "we" don't need to come up with anything.
Content producers (artists, musicians, videographers, entertainers) need to explore ways of making money that do not rely on copyright. This is of course more challenging while copyright law remains on the books: it's normally easier to gouge money from an audience whose freedoms are being abused, and it's much more difficult to produce legal content to begin with when all intellectual raw material under the sun is owned by a faceless bureaucracy of copyright owners with conflicting agendas.
I am one who believes the best final arrangement is one where copyright has been abolished, anyone can create works leveraging previous works with no bureaucracy, and canned media is recognized as a non-commodity; so money is made from direct effort (gigs, concerts, custom recording work), from related commodities (merchandising, printed books, prints, painted originals) and from services (impulse buys of otherwise freely available canned content being one example). Content producers already swim in a sea of viable revenue stream options that not only work in spite of copyright, but work better without the interfering influence of copyright.
Working towards such an arrangement will be complicated however by the sea of middlemen who posses power they never earned, and will use their influence to ensure that they can continue exacting ill gotten gains in perpetuity. Add to that any legitimate content producers who have built their castles on the shifting sands of copyright, whose power is being eroded by the fundamental nature of digital information.
While getting there will be complex, I believe the first step is education. Shine a light on what is obvious, and get people to consider that which we've been culturally brainwashed not to think about. Infinitely reproducible media is not a scarce commodity. No good comes from governmental or cultural oppression creating a false scarcity. Work from here as an axiom, and the knots just untie themselves.
I apologize if I've wasted your time thus far. It appears after all as though our view of the world and even our concept of how to apply "reason" in an argument are so dissimilar that we will not be able to agree on the matter of the merits of copyright vs. abolishment. I however won't call you a "whackjob" over this difference of opinion.
I believe you understand the material of my proposition, though you seem unwilling or incapable of discussing what consequences would actually arise. Specifically, you refuse to stray more than a single oversimplified step at a time out of the comfort zone of 20th century copyright model you have become accustomed to. You have made it clear that you are thrilled with the status quo, and deeply humbled by the depth and breadth of media produced today, which apparently would have been impossible unaided by the political power to force every citizen on Earth to sign the equivalent of an arbitrarily large number of convoluted non-disclosure agreements.
So I will agree to disagree on this specific point and leave you to your face full of oil. However, you have now taken the additional step of blaming all negative actions taken by our media industry squarely on downloaders. Apparently, your fair use rights and privacy are threatened by DRM and rootkits, and it's our fault even though we neither implemented this DRM nor coded the rootkits. You agree that innovation is being hampered in protocols such as HTML5, media storage such as blu-ray and transition such as P2P technology.. though the parties actually doing the hampering are innocent of wrongdoing, as Pirates have allegedly forced their hand.
This would be an example of our difference of view on entitlement. You are claiming that big media is entitled to encroach on their customer's property rights when the bottom line is at stake. Compulsory Trusted computing and global wiretapping are apparently justifiable evils when an artist's living (or more accurately, the bottom lines of companies who largely keep artists in financial bondage) are at stake. Damn you free-wheeling pirates for making such hard choices necessary!:P
Thus, I turn your criteria back on you good sir. If you wish me to stop "feeling entitled" to see and hear media which is already freely available to me, I demand that you provide evidence that what I watch on TV or listen to on my media player financially impacts content producers and furthermore that it hampers innovation. Allow me to clarify that corporate press releases where the **IA claims to lose $dice_roll billions of dollars per year are not evidence. Observing generic slumps in CD/DVD sales time correlated to the unquantified "rise in filesharing" are also several degrees of separation away from sane evidence. And the ship has sailed so far as thought experiments go as well, you who would ask Galileo to actually climb the tower of Pisa and measure that which is much easier to induce will be held to that same standard.
In fact, I am hard pressed imagining what form of evidence one could even present to support an argument as far fetched as this chestnut of yours. I happen to know the evidence doesn't exist because the premise is false; but still one ought to be able to imagine what form it would take were it hypothetically possible. The best idea I have would be this then: a single-blind experiment where I illicitly copy and listen to one song from a limited selection of artists you could establish a relationship with. Next, you measure which artist becomes impoverished (or at least financially burdened) by my free lunch and thus demonstrate the damage done by correctly guessing which song I've aurally pilfered. This is just a start, feel free to volunteer any alternate quantificational approaches you can craft.
Another point in your arguments that baffles me is that you no longer sound as though you are defending copyright as a mechanism to release work into the public domain. Your new
Your number 4 is exactly how performing artists make their money right now.
The irony that this model is already being (ab)used by copyright proponents is not lost on me of course.:3 It is also being used in more healthy fashion by many independent and foreign artists.
The lesson to be learned? Let us stop treating artificially scarce bits as a commodity.
I don't understand why you wouldn't wish that the enforcement of laws would include logic.
Logic has every reason to be used in the foundation of law. The word "plausable", on the other hand, is entirely subjective and you know it.
Would you prefer a summary judgement for or against free speech without any evaluation of the circumstances or facts?
If you pay a hooker to have sex with you is that protected speech?
Let me take this moment to solidify my position. I am in favor of recognizing the basic human right to share any and all information at one's disposal. I suppose this can be easily confused with "Free Speech" (even by me at times, my apologies) but the latter has become an embattled legal term with divergent meanings.
My meaning is a simple one, and exactly as stated. I believe it is injurious for society to practice any compulsory law indexed against the sharing of data. Period. If you hire a prostitute, you should be charged based on prostitution laws but not censorhip laws. If you scream "fire" in a crowded theater, you should be arrested for reckless endangerment (or similar), not because "fire" is some kind of a contraband idea to convey.
I view the idea of "protected speech" as equally injurious. The sharing of information is materially irrelevant to virtually all standard criminal activity, and thus ought simply be disentangled. Copyright happens to be a section of law I would prefer to see dissolved completely.
Besides, most stories were not passed on word-for-word. Haven't you ever played telephone?
On the other hand, many were. Just because kids are not conversant in sharing gossip with fidelity does not mean that generations of mankind were incapable of maintaining fairly rigorous oral tradition prior to widespread literacy.
You've also made this claim in the face of all the lawsuits started by the **AA in order to enforce copyright.
I know, and those are just the tip of the iceberg, right? You should see the millions of lawsuits they will file next month. Oh yeah.. they've tapered that activity down since it's both very expensive, and turning their customers against them.
You have quite a bit of evidence to present here.
Look, I am not trying to push a bill through congress, I am only providing information to people hoping some will pull their heads out of the sand.
For example, if I see you under your car pulling your oil filter out, but notice you haven't drained the pan first, I will warn you that you are approaching the task incorrectly. If you demand it, I will not however trot home and grab a copy of "changing oil for dummy's" for you, I will consider my warning good enough and walk away to let you enjoy your face full of oil.
Copyright is simply unenforceable. It is not even imperfectly enforceable. I can share a piece of media I have in my possession with absolute strangers if need be by emailing them an encrypted copy of the data. P2P isn't any easier to enforce than email, but that is more complex to illustrate here. The point is that the progression of hardship we face to continue to pirate is in inverse geometric progression to the hardship producers face to try and stop us.
Now before you launch into a tirade of other clever tricks law enforcement could use to track infringement, I would also like you to take a look at what is being done by this siege. Bit Torrent is a brilliant technology for dissiminating information. MP3 was the top audio encoding format in it's day. Both have had their names drug through the mud by copyright advocates because of the infringement they enable. They are simple, to the point, and they allow people to share media. Since most media people wish to share (apparently) is copyrighted, the technologies have suffered bad PR and the market has missed many opportunities to innovate: focusing instead on complicating the distribution of media solely to preserve vested IP interests.
Chase us into a hole and we'll use moderately complex means to continue to defy you. It is a siege we will win, but some like me will continue to call from our side saying "just give in already and quit scorching the earth in a futile attempt to insert your nose where it has no business being".
Gift culture? I must admit, I've never heard that term.
in order to institute change from something that is essentially working, you do have to provide at least some evidence that such a change won't backfire on us.
Again, I'm not instituting a change. Only asking that you perceive the fact that the change in question has already occurred, and that most of the consequences are simply playing themselves out very slowly. I am also not claiming that (certain) IP holders can expect to earn what they used to or more in the 21st century (that this "won't backfire" on them). Could you convince an early 1800's plantation owner that it was in his short term financial interest to voluntarily free his slaves? I guess if it's not in his short term interests it would't pass your criteria of being morally right either.
That should not prevent an activist from attempting to appeal to a slave-owner's long term interests, should they choose to gamble their words in the educational effort. Human rights (including the right to share your experiences with others, irregardless of overlapping commercial IP) are not a luxury. Thus, it is foolish to believe that advocates must submit to you a competing business
Look, I feel dirty getting involved in astor's little trolling thread here, but what do you mean in your post by "so it's ok for us to steal from them"? Ignoring your misuse of the word "steal", what would it mean for something to be "ok" or not, in this context? Are you hoping we will seek your blessing on the matter, astor?
Let's get one thing clear here: we are downloading the content. No amount of moral relativism will change how many people are capable of obtaining media freely online. As downloaders, we really aren't in a position where we need to justify ourselves to you. I for one post here as a courtesy to the/. community so that maybe they'll realize how much time they are wasting drawing lines in the sand that everybody just walks over. But you can only ever lead a horse to water.
I am against copyright though. I am amused when pro-copyright posters say everyone is in my camp, I think it feels lonely here!:D
I honestly don't understand the moderate viewpoint of copyright reform given that it's a paper tiger no matter how you dull the claws. What on God's Green Earth is the purpose in reforming a law which you have no hope of enforcing?
Why does everyone claim that media cannot be created in gift culture when we are already in gift culture today? I still see plenty of media being created.
There are no valid boundaries preventing anyone, anywhere in the world from getting any media they want for free (save some media you can't even pay to get). Whatever social stigma exists is rapidly eroding as more people realize they can tighten their belt and do not have to give up their cultural participation in the process.
Yet there are still millions who pay for media out of the kindness of their hearts. In some cases this is abetted by either laziness or not realizing what other options are available, but that is part of the beauty. Some people will pay for your content, even when it can be had for free. Copyright law has zero real impact upon this phenomenon, so do not misunderstand the forces at work.
Also, this describes the entire economic tide pool of artificial scarcity in todays world, and it is rapidly drying out. It will not dry out completely, but it has much dwindling left to do. Specifically, it cannot sustain most of the monster media conglomerates that swim stubbornly through it. There are no laws you can reformulate that will change these facts short of thorough fascism. Until you monitor all internet traffic, outlaw encryption and systematically search citizen's homes you cannot turn this tide.
Thus, I am terribly perplexed as to why my position is viewed as so extreme, even by you lot.:/ The world is changing. You can't blame the change on me, but media will be produced in unexplored ways. Not because I said it was a great idea, but because there really aren't any other choices. It is time you quit calling me names (like I care;3) and wasting time on powerless laws, and instead began exploring the landscape that actually surrounds you. There is money to be made in this brave new world, and it's really not my responsibility to tell you how simply because I'm among the first to admit that we are actually here.
Condemning all copyright laws as equally bad is not going to make them go away; they'll be with us for a long, long time.
I don't know. I am personally in favor of abolishing all copyright law simply because it is vestigial. It no longer applies and it is no longer enforceable. The pro-copyright pundits in this thread do hit the mark when they say "7 or 70? who cares?" they are correct. Someone will inevitably copy material when or even before it is publicly released, and others will inevitably desire a copy. None shall be able to prevent this trade without straightforward fascism.
The only power behind copyright law "staying with us for a long, long time" is in the money filched by copyright holders from the public. Stop their ability to fleece us and there will be no will left to keep these laws on the books. Copyright was an artifice from the start, and a bad idea that failed. It is somewhat more long lived than prohibition, but one day it will be just as distant of a memory. Even today it holds virtually no power, as essentially any user of the internet (anywhere in the world) has access to pirate (if they chose) from the lions share of copyrighted work ever published easily and with less likelihood of legal repercussion than of being struck by lightning. It cannot be any other way.
Who is foolish enough to respect rule of law when it in no way pays heed to common practice?
That sounds like an idea then. Just trick copyright holders into trying to ban libraries. Wave a red cape over the building I guess, I don't know. Once libraries are under fire perhaps we'll start to see some of this extreme resistance you promise.
That, or perhaps view the internet with a giant, digital library. Internet access appears to be one of the greatest draws in brick & mortar libraries these days anyway.. why hunt through stacks when you can get the data more easily via Google or Wikipedia?
No matter how you view it, content PUBLISHERS (the authors never make the money, somewhat in violation of that 27(2) I read awhile back) are not interested in cultural enrichment as long as there remains blood to squeeze from the stone.
You missed a question mark, and then answered your own question for us.
You are free to say anything you want and claim it as your own as long as it isn't something someone else said first and copyrighted.
"As long as" is a phrase which by it's very nature restricts available options. For example, Henry Ford was famous for quoting that you could get his Model T automobile in any color as long as that color is black.
I don't understand why you would wish concepts like "plausibility" to rest at the very foundations of law.
I contend that copying a complete work, no matter how large it is nor how little unique content I contribute, is a form of speech. How do you think stories survived before the printing press or even the written word? Retelling. In their entirety. Rich retelling to be sure, but that is lost and impossible in today's copyrighted, mass-produced industry.
Besides all of this, your central logic fails when you substitute "War and Peace" with "The Great Gatsby", vis a vis Andy Kaufman. (lawd, that man knew how to Rickroll;3)
College text book is definitely the wrong field to claim sainthood in. You get praise from students who won't actually pay for your book for another couple of decades as their student loans get worked down, or not at all if their wealthy parents foot the bill with no eye to the line items. When I went to college (this hasn't changed for the better since the nineties, has it?) course calls for you to buy a $100+ book and/or materials, either doesn't or barely uses it, and then it's not useful to you any more at the end of the semester. The bookstore refuses to buy it back since next semester requires a new edition with a handful of typo fixes and a new forward. For the same reason book trading is stymied because the new edition is paginated entirely differently so that your assignment "pp104-107" is suddenly 94-99.
College textbook publishers drown in the same lucre as prescription drug makers. You have a captive audience who are normally paying via deferred means (loans, insurance, same difference) so you inflate the prices 10x or more.
Also, about that guy scanning your work, he's nothing. Did you know I've seen your book available for free at the library, in HARDCOPY form? holy shit! You should talk to someone about the lost sales there. I mean who wants to read your thick text online or print it out on a zillion pages when it's right there at the campus stacks? D:
Hmm, I'm not GP but I'll answer your question with the first few things that come off the top of my head.
1: online services. WoW isn't hurting from people downloading the client for free, and you can't copyright infringe access to a service. This is also more fair, since the provider is providing something continually in return for the residual income.
2: Impulse delivery. You would be amazed, but there are tons of people who will pay token amounts to get your content even when it is also legally available for free (again, see WoW) if only because they are either too lazy or too luddite to figure out how to get a free copy off a friend or some arbitrary site. I make as much this way selling public domain virtual goods I create in Secondlife as my compatriots who sell their goods with locked down permissions do. This is a tiny retail experiment to be certain, but I'm losing no sales that I can tell and gaining popularity via free sharing. Another great (inadvertent) example here was Quake 1. People pirated it and held LAN parties, played online.. many of the people who wanted on board with such action at home simply bought copies. Piracy actually pushed sales in that case.
3: Advertisement-supported. Even if a lot of people use AdBlocker, 10 times more don't. Television and Radio survived 30+ years of VCR and Cassette-tape having consumers with this model, after all.
4: Digital product as advertisement. Record music. Disseminate it freely online. Encourage vendors to burn it to audio-CD to sell for their own margins (see point about impulse buys above). Create buzz. Hold concert which you charge for. Profit. Repeat. This is also a well-tested business model.
Add in any other business models you'd like that do not require pretending that large integers are scarce commodities or that swaths of data are arbitrarily contraband.
While it's true that these models alone probably will not support 300 million dollar blockbuster movies, there is no law of nature that says that those productions must continue to be economically viable. I would much prefer to live in a world where a million great stories are produced as B-rated movies than 2 or 3 as cinematic palaces. The industry must stop bloodying it's head against the landscape features that presently exist, and instead must find ways to use the new lay of the land to it's advantage and prosper.
It seems your theory is kind of flawed, because if their protection was indeed that good the thieves probably wouldn't have gotten the data they did.
I think your assumption that "the theives did get data" is premature. I am not seeing corroborative data anywhere.
Speaking of which, based upon analyzing the deleted video files on your primary partition, you should get the old lady a membership at the local gym or something.:P
This entire thread (parent post, grandparent, etc) boggles me considerably.
Pirating, or "bootlegging" as you label it here, is a natural and inexorable consequence of the freedom of information. As long as you allow users to transmit information to one another, some of them are bound to transmit information that you (as an obnoxious third party) would prefer they did not.
You cannot put this genie back in the bottle without the power of fascism. So who's tilting at windmills now?
In the twentieth century, media producers had some measure of control over who had the media because it was expensive to reproduce. Those who wished to copyright infringe also had to profit to cover their opportunity costs in the expensive process, and those who stayed below the radar had such little impact on the establishment that they could be ignored.
Today, everyone on the internet has limitless opportunity to obtain the media that you peddle for free from anyone else who has previously gotten their hands on it. Aggregately, this puts you out of the media peddling business, and you can't get back on that horse without pervading all global communication with your vitriol.
I feel terrible that you are losing so hard, but I blame you (copyright supporters) for digging your own hole. The ship is sinking, and the sooner you explore and mature new models for doing business the better.
I do not authorize anyone to read this post. Not even this warning disclaimer. Neither do I authorize/. to change it's licence. Therefor you, by your very definition, are stealing it by reading it right now. Even if you do not read it,/. has delivered a reply-notice into your email box which means you have acquired it. Ergo you have stolen it.
I have no idea if this has any direct moral or legal impact. Are you a bad person for stealing this post? Can I sue you? Who cares. I can however label you a hypocrite, since you are partaking in the very action you demonize.
In the 21st century information can no longer be commoditized. It's marginal value is truly zero.
Thus, why should an author be paid every time their publicly available information changes hands in the wide world? The author did not remake the item for every recipient. The author made one infinitely reproducible piece of media and then chose to release it into the wild, hoping to leverage copyright/censorship laws to force money out of the pockets of potential recipients.
For a brief time in human history, this almost made a reasonable business model. Media was expensive to produce and to distribute, so quality sources of media had to be treated like commodities in order to make it reliably to the public at all. Competing producers might wish to steal original work and undersell it, using the expense of distribution against the original authors.
Today however, distribution has zero marginal cost. If I had musical talent, I could record a song, upload it to my website or myspace page, and the world would have access to it instantly. Thus, there is no longer any justification to charge for a copy of a media product: it's value is zero since it can be copied and relayed to any point on the globe at virtually zero cost.
The barriers between artist and public are now gone, so the public should stop being charged toll. Modern media, from television shows to movies to songs, are woven directly into our culture via marketing, and then those facets of our culture are held hostage from us at the iTunes store.
The practice of carving up the sum of human experience and charging each other to travel across the boundaries encourages our population to save money by choosing not to experience new things. It is incalculably detrimental to our society and serves no purpose other than lining the pockets of those who already control the most IP.
This is why I not only oppose copyright but openly support Copyright Infringement. We should have the right to share media we are capable of playing ourselves. We should have the right to download media others choose to make available to us. Even if the media is top 40's crap, telling us to boycott the media is actually counterproductive. For better or worse, it is now a part of shared human experience and we thus have a right to experience it and even build from it. Remix it. Parody it.
And finally, let's be practical. You cannot abridge this right of ours without invading the privacy of every human and encroaching upon the sanctity of every home in the world. People can copy whatever digital material they posses, and without DRM aka malware, how can you stop them? People can transmit whatever information they wish to one another, and without introducing a mediator aka Big Brother into every flow of internet traffic, how can you prevent it?
While I'm not the original poster, allow me to express that I personally support neither commercial, RIAA style copyright nor the EFF's GPL copyright. I believe that no author ought to have control over what happens to information once it has become publicly available — be it to exact profit, or to attempt to lock people into certain ideological publishing models.
I submit that censorship is wrong, even when the EFF perpetrates it; and I call upon as many/.ers as will follow me to commit to opposing censorship and copyright in every form.
Hmm, I did. I use a clipboard manager application and I select-all/copy before I submit a form habitually. The clipboard manager automatically stores any new clipboard contents into a queue saved to disk.
It's just like habitual saving in a word processor. I do this because I've had plenty of server borks, browser crashes,/and/ computer crashes ruin posts I've spent time writing. So...
.. yeah, mostly, my concern over using a BIOS/OS would be whether or not I could install client side utilities (browser plugins perhaps?) to do things like clipboard management.
Bedford's law applies to a number represented in fixed point scientific notation, not counting the arithmetic sign of the number.
So binary 0.1 would be rendered 1 x 2^-1, and it would still start with a 1.
With numbers <0, you would ignore the sign and they would still start with a 1.
The only true binary counterexample is 0.
FWIW I do get the joke, no WHOOSH, but TFA is a joke. It should have been printed in the onion.
Following Benford's law is a natural result of any number series which approaches logarithmic uniformity, so no information can be derived from this "revelation" save what we already knew: prime numbers approach uniformity on a logarithmic scale. Put another way, arbitrarily chosen ranges of numbers contain a roughly "predictable" number of primes, and the larger range you choose the less force predictive error has on the outcome compared to the size of your range.
Thus it is inexorable that primes will follow Benford's law: in base 10, many more of them start with 1 than with other digits. The bias lies with the numbering system itself, not with the roughly even distribution of prime numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
On one hand you have the copyright holder's rights and on the other the computer user's rights. Whose rights are more important?
The "rights" that you compare here aren't the same kind though. One is the natural, god-given right for an author to control what information cannot be copied or transmitted by every digital device on the planet, while the other is nothing more than the rapacious whims of greedy computer owners who feel entitled to move bits from one part of their machine to another, willy-nilly.
It's not fair for troll to call me an asshole, though. D:
I tried paying, there were no payment options. I ask "how much for a copy of XYZ song in mp3 format?" and they said "you can't have that. How about a nice wma/DRM at a low bitrate instead?"
So I said "No, you don't understand, /. user Anonymous Cowardon said I had to try and pay for these files which happen to be mp3, high quality and well mastered. So how much will I have to pay for these?" and they said they would have to get back to me, but they never did.
So, I've met your criteria. I've "tried to pay for the files". IP holders won't let me. So now I have your blessing to just pirate them instead? :D
I believe you've hit the nail on the head so far as the unwinnable challenge of copyright, Mozzley.
We need to come up with alternatives to copyright, and I haven't seen a good proposal yet.
On this end of the equation however, I submit to you that "we" don't need to come up with anything.
Content producers (artists, musicians, videographers, entertainers) need to explore ways of making money that do not rely on copyright. This is of course more challenging while copyright law remains on the books: it's normally easier to gouge money from an audience whose freedoms are being abused, and it's much more difficult to produce legal content to begin with when all intellectual raw material under the sun is owned by a faceless bureaucracy of copyright owners with conflicting agendas.
I am one who believes the best final arrangement is one where copyright has been abolished, anyone can create works leveraging previous works with no bureaucracy, and canned media is recognized as a non-commodity; so money is made from direct effort (gigs, concerts, custom recording work), from related commodities (merchandising, printed books, prints, painted originals) and from services (impulse buys of otherwise freely available canned content being one example). Content producers already swim in a sea of viable revenue stream options that not only work in spite of copyright, but work better without the interfering influence of copyright.
Working towards such an arrangement will be complicated however by the sea of middlemen who posses power they never earned, and will use their influence to ensure that they can continue exacting ill gotten gains in perpetuity. Add to that any legitimate content producers who have built their castles on the shifting sands of copyright, whose power is being eroded by the fundamental nature of digital information.
While getting there will be complex, I believe the first step is education. Shine a light on what is obvious, and get people to consider that which we've been culturally brainwashed not to think about. Infinitely reproducible media is not a scarce commodity. No good comes from governmental or cultural oppression creating a false scarcity. Work from here as an axiom, and the knots just untie themselves.
((offtopic, to SomeJoel)): like the sig but it contains a typo FYI :3
I apologize if I've wasted your time thus far. It appears after all as though our view of the world and even our concept of how to apply "reason" in an argument are so dissimilar that we will not be able to agree on the matter of the merits of copyright vs. abolishment. I however won't call you a "whackjob" over this difference of opinion.
I believe you understand the material of my proposition, though you seem unwilling or incapable of discussing what consequences would actually arise. Specifically, you refuse to stray more than a single oversimplified step at a time out of the comfort zone of 20th century copyright model you have become accustomed to. You have made it clear that you are thrilled with the status quo, and deeply humbled by the depth and breadth of media produced today, which apparently would have been impossible unaided by the political power to force every citizen on Earth to sign the equivalent of an arbitrarily large number of convoluted non-disclosure agreements.
So I will agree to disagree on this specific point and leave you to your face full of oil. However, you have now taken the additional step of blaming all negative actions taken by our media industry squarely on downloaders. Apparently, your fair use rights and privacy are threatened by DRM and rootkits, and it's our fault even though we neither implemented this DRM nor coded the rootkits. You agree that innovation is being hampered in protocols such as HTML5, media storage such as blu-ray and transition such as P2P technology.. though the parties actually doing the hampering are innocent of wrongdoing, as Pirates have allegedly forced their hand.
This would be an example of our difference of view on entitlement. You are claiming that big media is entitled to encroach on their customer's property rights when the bottom line is at stake. Compulsory Trusted computing and global wiretapping are apparently justifiable evils when an artist's living (or more accurately, the bottom lines of companies who largely keep artists in financial bondage) are at stake. Damn you free-wheeling pirates for making such hard choices necessary! :P
Thus, I turn your criteria back on you good sir. If you wish me to stop "feeling entitled" to see and hear media which is already freely available to me, I demand that you provide evidence that what I watch on TV or listen to on my media player financially impacts content producers and furthermore that it hampers innovation. Allow me to clarify that corporate press releases where the **IA claims to lose $dice_roll billions of dollars per year are not evidence. Observing generic slumps in CD/DVD sales time correlated to the unquantified "rise in filesharing" are also several degrees of separation away from sane evidence. And the ship has sailed so far as thought experiments go as well, you who would ask Galileo to actually climb the tower of Pisa and measure that which is much easier to induce will be held to that same standard.
In fact, I am hard pressed imagining what form of evidence one could even present to support an argument as far fetched as this chestnut of yours. I happen to know the evidence doesn't exist because the premise is false; but still one ought to be able to imagine what form it would take were it hypothetically possible. The best idea I have would be this then: a single-blind experiment where I illicitly copy and listen to one song from a limited selection of artists you could establish a relationship with. Next, you measure which artist becomes impoverished (or at least financially burdened) by my free lunch and thus demonstrate the damage done by correctly guessing which song I've aurally pilfered. This is just a start, feel free to volunteer any alternate quantificational approaches you can craft.
Another point in your arguments that baffles me is that you no longer sound as though you are defending copyright as a mechanism to release work into the public domain. Your new
Your number 4 is exactly how performing artists make their money right now.
The irony that this model is already being (ab)used by copyright proponents is not lost on me of course. :3 It is also being used in more healthy fashion by many independent and foreign artists.
The lesson to be learned? Let us stop treating artificially scarce bits as a commodity.
I don't understand why you wouldn't wish that the enforcement of laws would include logic.
Logic has every reason to be used in the foundation of law. The word "plausable", on the other hand, is entirely subjective and you know it.
Would you prefer a summary judgement for or against free speech without any evaluation of the circumstances or facts?
If you pay a hooker to have sex with you is that protected speech?
Let me take this moment to solidify my position. I am in favor of recognizing the basic human right to share any and all information at one's disposal. I suppose this can be easily confused with "Free Speech" (even by me at times, my apologies) but the latter has become an embattled legal term with divergent meanings.
My meaning is a simple one, and exactly as stated. I believe it is injurious for society to practice any compulsory law indexed against the sharing of data. Period. If you hire a prostitute, you should be charged based on prostitution laws but not censorhip laws. If you scream "fire" in a crowded theater, you should be arrested for reckless endangerment (or similar), not because "fire" is some kind of a contraband idea to convey.
I view the idea of "protected speech" as equally injurious. The sharing of information is materially irrelevant to virtually all standard criminal activity, and thus ought simply be disentangled. Copyright happens to be a section of law I would prefer to see dissolved completely.
Besides, most stories were not passed on word-for-word. Haven't you ever played telephone?
On the other hand, many were. Just because kids are not conversant in sharing gossip with fidelity does not mean that generations of mankind were incapable of maintaining fairly rigorous oral tradition prior to widespread literacy.
You've also made this claim in the face of all the lawsuits started by the **AA in order to enforce copyright.
I know, and those are just the tip of the iceberg, right? You should see the millions of lawsuits they will file next month. Oh yeah.. they've tapered that activity down since it's both very expensive, and turning their customers against them.
You have quite a bit of evidence to present here.
Look, I am not trying to push a bill through congress, I am only providing information to people hoping some will pull their heads out of the sand.
For example, if I see you under your car pulling your oil filter out, but notice you haven't drained the pan first, I will warn you that you are approaching the task incorrectly. If you demand it, I will not however trot home and grab a copy of "changing oil for dummy's" for you, I will consider my warning good enough and walk away to let you enjoy your face full of oil.
Copyright is simply unenforceable. It is not even imperfectly enforceable. I can share a piece of media I have in my possession with absolute strangers if need be by emailing them an encrypted copy of the data. P2P isn't any easier to enforce than email, but that is more complex to illustrate here. The point is that the progression of hardship we face to continue to pirate is in inverse geometric progression to the hardship producers face to try and stop us.
Now before you launch into a tirade of other clever tricks law enforcement could use to track infringement, I would also like you to take a look at what is being done by this siege. Bit Torrent is a brilliant technology for dissiminating information. MP3 was the top audio encoding format in it's day. Both have had their names drug through the mud by copyright advocates because of the infringement they enable. They are simple, to the point, and they allow people to share media. Since most media people wish to share (apparently) is copyrighted, the technologies have suffered bad PR and the market has missed many opportunities to innovate: focusing instead on complicating the distribution of media solely to preserve vested IP interests.
Chase us into a hole and we'll use moderately complex means to continue to defy you. It is a siege we will win, but some like me will continue to call from our side saying "just give in already and quit scorching the earth in a futile attempt to insert your nose where it has no business being".
Gift culture? I must admit, I've never heard that term.
While I appreciate that you are willing to admit to things you aren't versed in, there is always Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_culture
in order to institute change from something that is essentially working, you do have to provide at least some evidence that such a change won't backfire on us.
Again, I'm not instituting a change. Only asking that you perceive the fact that the change in question has already occurred, and that most of the consequences are simply playing themselves out very slowly. I am also not claiming that (certain) IP holders can expect to earn what they used to or more in the 21st century (that this "won't backfire" on them). Could you convince an early 1800's plantation owner that it was in his short term financial interest to voluntarily free his slaves? I guess if it's not in his short term interests it would't pass your criteria of being morally right either.
That should not prevent an activist from attempting to appeal to a slave-owner's long term interests, should they choose to gamble their words in the educational effort. Human rights (including the right to share your experiences with others, irregardless of overlapping commercial IP) are not a luxury. Thus, it is foolish to believe that advocates must submit to you a competing business
Look, I feel dirty getting involved in astor's little trolling thread here, but what do you mean in your post by "so it's ok for us to steal from them"? Ignoring your misuse of the word "steal", what would it mean for something to be "ok" or not, in this context? Are you hoping we will seek your blessing on the matter, astor?
Let's get one thing clear here: we are downloading the content. No amount of moral relativism will change how many people are capable of obtaining media freely online. As downloaders, we really aren't in a position where we need to justify ourselves to you. I for one post here as a courtesy to the /. community so that maybe they'll realize how much time they are wasting drawing lines in the sand that everybody just walks over. But you can only ever lead a horse to water.
I am against copyright though. I am amused when pro-copyright posters say everyone is in my camp, I think it feels lonely here! :D
I honestly don't understand the moderate viewpoint of copyright reform given that it's a paper tiger no matter how you dull the claws. What on God's Green Earth is the purpose in reforming a law which you have no hope of enforcing?
Why does everyone claim that media cannot be created in gift culture when we are already in gift culture today? I still see plenty of media being created.
There are no valid boundaries preventing anyone, anywhere in the world from getting any media they want for free (save some media you can't even pay to get). Whatever social stigma exists is rapidly eroding as more people realize they can tighten their belt and do not have to give up their cultural participation in the process.
Yet there are still millions who pay for media out of the kindness of their hearts. In some cases this is abetted by either laziness or not realizing what other options are available, but that is part of the beauty. Some people will pay for your content, even when it can be had for free. Copyright law has zero real impact upon this phenomenon, so do not misunderstand the forces at work.
Also, this describes the entire economic tide pool of artificial scarcity in todays world, and it is rapidly drying out. It will not dry out completely, but it has much dwindling left to do. Specifically, it cannot sustain most of the monster media conglomerates that swim stubbornly through it. There are no laws you can reformulate that will change these facts short of thorough fascism. Until you monitor all internet traffic, outlaw encryption and systematically search citizen's homes you cannot turn this tide.
Thus, I am terribly perplexed as to why my position is viewed as so extreme, even by you lot. :/ The world is changing. You can't blame the change on me, but media will be produced in unexplored ways. Not because I said it was a great idea, but because there really aren't any other choices. It is time you quit calling me names (like I care ;3) and wasting time on powerless laws, and instead began exploring the landscape that actually surrounds you. There is money to be made in this brave new world, and it's really not my responsibility to tell you how simply because I'm among the first to admit that we are actually here.
Condemning all copyright laws as equally bad is not going to make them go away; they'll be with us for a long, long time.
I don't know. I am personally in favor of abolishing all copyright law simply because it is vestigial. It no longer applies and it is no longer enforceable. The pro-copyright pundits in this thread do hit the mark when they say "7 or 70? who cares?" they are correct. Someone will inevitably copy material when or even before it is publicly released, and others will inevitably desire a copy. None shall be able to prevent this trade without straightforward fascism.
The only power behind copyright law "staying with us for a long, long time" is in the money filched by copyright holders from the public. Stop their ability to fleece us and there will be no will left to keep these laws on the books. Copyright was an artifice from the start, and a bad idea that failed. It is somewhat more long lived than prohibition, but one day it will be just as distant of a memory. Even today it holds virtually no power, as essentially any user of the internet (anywhere in the world) has access to pirate (if they chose) from the lions share of copyrighted work ever published easily and with less likelihood of legal repercussion than of being struck by lightning. It cannot be any other way.
Who is foolish enough to respect rule of law when it in no way pays heed to common practice?
That sounds like an idea then. Just trick copyright holders into trying to ban libraries. Wave a red cape over the building I guess, I don't know. Once libraries are under fire perhaps we'll start to see some of this extreme resistance you promise.
That, or perhaps view the internet with a giant, digital library. Internet access appears to be one of the greatest draws in brick & mortar libraries these days anyway.. why hunt through stacks when you can get the data more easily via Google or Wikipedia?
No matter how you view it, content PUBLISHERS (the authors never make the money, somewhat in violation of that 27(2) I read awhile back) are not interested in cultural enrichment as long as there remains blood to squeeze from the stone.
The Constitution explicitly spells out when Presidential terms begin and end, and that can't be changed without an actual amendment.
Even the attempt would probably cause a civil war and/or military coup.
The constitution also spells out when copyright terms begin and end. That has been flouted. Now where is my war/coup? :P
How is speech restricted.
You missed a question mark, and then answered your own question for us.
You are free to say anything you want and claim it as your own as long as it isn't something someone else said first and copyrighted.
"As long as" is a phrase which by it's very nature restricts available options. For example, Henry Ford was famous for quoting that you could get his Model T automobile in any color as long as that color is black.
I don't understand why you would wish concepts like "plausibility" to rest at the very foundations of law.
I contend that copying a complete work, no matter how large it is nor how little unique content I contribute, is a form of speech. How do you think stories survived before the printing press or even the written word? Retelling. In their entirety. Rich retelling to be sure, but that is lost and impossible in today's copyrighted, mass-produced industry.
Besides all of this, your central logic fails when you substitute "War and Peace" with "The Great Gatsby", vis a vis Andy Kaufman. (lawd, that man knew how to Rickroll ;3)
College text book is definitely the wrong field to claim sainthood in. You get praise from students who won't actually pay for your book for another couple of decades as their student loans get worked down, or not at all if their wealthy parents foot the bill with no eye to the line items. When I went to college (this hasn't changed for the better since the nineties, has it?) course calls for you to buy a $100+ book and/or materials, either doesn't or barely uses it, and then it's not useful to you any more at the end of the semester. The bookstore refuses to buy it back since next semester requires a new edition with a handful of typo fixes and a new forward. For the same reason book trading is stymied because the new edition is paginated entirely differently so that your assignment "pp104-107" is suddenly 94-99.
College textbook publishers drown in the same lucre as prescription drug makers. You have a captive audience who are normally paying via deferred means (loans, insurance, same difference) so you inflate the prices 10x or more.
Also, about that guy scanning your work, he's nothing. Did you know I've seen your book available for free at the library, in HARDCOPY form? holy shit! You should talk to someone about the lost sales there. I mean who wants to read your thick text online or print it out on a zillion pages when it's right there at the campus stacks? D:
Hmm, I'm not GP but I'll answer your question with the first few things that come off the top of my head.
1: online services. WoW isn't hurting from people downloading the client for free, and you can't copyright infringe access to a service. This is also more fair, since the provider is providing something continually in return for the residual income.
2: Impulse delivery. You would be amazed, but there are tons of people who will pay token amounts to get your content even when it is also legally available for free (again, see WoW) if only because they are either too lazy or too luddite to figure out how to get a free copy off a friend or some arbitrary site. I make as much this way selling public domain virtual goods I create in Secondlife as my compatriots who sell their goods with locked down permissions do. This is a tiny retail experiment to be certain, but I'm losing no sales that I can tell and gaining popularity via free sharing. Another great (inadvertent) example here was Quake 1. People pirated it and held LAN parties, played online.. many of the people who wanted on board with such action at home simply bought copies. Piracy actually pushed sales in that case.
3: Advertisement-supported. Even if a lot of people use AdBlocker, 10 times more don't. Television and Radio survived 30+ years of VCR and Cassette-tape having consumers with this model, after all.
4: Digital product as advertisement. Record music. Disseminate it freely online. Encourage vendors to burn it to audio-CD to sell for their own margins (see point about impulse buys above). Create buzz. Hold concert which you charge for. Profit. Repeat. This is also a well-tested business model.
Add in any other business models you'd like that do not require pretending that large integers are scarce commodities or that swaths of data are arbitrarily contraband.
While it's true that these models alone probably will not support 300 million dollar blockbuster movies, there is no law of nature that says that those productions must continue to be economically viable. I would much prefer to live in a world where a million great stories are produced as B-rated movies than 2 or 3 as cinematic palaces. The industry must stop bloodying it's head against the landscape features that presently exist, and instead must find ways to use the new lay of the land to it's advantage and prosper.
It seems your theory is kind of flawed, because if their protection was indeed that good the thieves probably wouldn't have gotten the data they did.
I think your assumption that "the theives did get data" is premature. I am not seeing corroborative data anywhere.
Speaking of which, based upon analyzing the deleted video files on your primary partition, you should get the old lady a membership at the local gym or something. :P
win! :D
This entire thread (parent post, grandparent, etc) boggles me considerably.
Pirating, or "bootlegging" as you label it here, is a natural and inexorable consequence of the freedom of information. As long as you allow users to transmit information to one another, some of them are bound to transmit information that you (as an obnoxious third party) would prefer they did not.
You cannot put this genie back in the bottle without the power of fascism. So who's tilting at windmills now?
In the twentieth century, media producers had some measure of control over who had the media because it was expensive to reproduce. Those who wished to copyright infringe also had to profit to cover their opportunity costs in the expensive process, and those who stayed below the radar had such little impact on the establishment that they could be ignored.
Today, everyone on the internet has limitless opportunity to obtain the media that you peddle for free from anyone else who has previously gotten their hands on it. Aggregately, this puts you out of the media peddling business, and you can't get back on that horse without pervading all global communication with your vitriol.
I feel terrible that you are losing so hard, but I blame you (copyright supporters) for digging your own hole. The ship is sinking, and the sooner you explore and mature new models for doing business the better.
I do not authorize anyone to read this post. Not even this warning disclaimer. Neither do I authorize /. to change it's licence. Therefor you, by your very definition, are stealing it by reading it right now. Even if you do not read it, /. has delivered a reply-notice into your email box which means you have acquired it. Ergo you have stolen it.
I have no idea if this has any direct moral or legal impact. Are you a bad person for stealing this post? Can I sue you? Who cares. I can however label you a hypocrite, since you are partaking in the very action you demonize.
In the 21st century information can no longer be commoditized. It's marginal value is truly zero.
Thus, why should an author be paid every time their publicly available information changes hands in the wide world? The author did not remake the item for every recipient. The author made one infinitely reproducible piece of media and then chose to release it into the wild, hoping to leverage copyright/censorship laws to force money out of the pockets of potential recipients.
For a brief time in human history, this almost made a reasonable business model. Media was expensive to produce and to distribute, so quality sources of media had to be treated like commodities in order to make it reliably to the public at all. Competing producers might wish to steal original work and undersell it, using the expense of distribution against the original authors.
Today however, distribution has zero marginal cost. If I had musical talent, I could record a song, upload it to my website or myspace page, and the world would have access to it instantly. Thus, there is no longer any justification to charge for a copy of a media product: it's value is zero since it can be copied and relayed to any point on the globe at virtually zero cost.
The barriers between artist and public are now gone, so the public should stop being charged toll. Modern media, from television shows to movies to songs, are woven directly into our culture via marketing, and then those facets of our culture are held hostage from us at the iTunes store.
The practice of carving up the sum of human experience and charging each other to travel across the boundaries encourages our population to save money by choosing not to experience new things. It is incalculably detrimental to our society and serves no purpose other than lining the pockets of those who already control the most IP.
This is why I not only oppose copyright but openly support Copyright Infringement. We should have the right to share media we are capable of playing ourselves. We should have the right to download media others choose to make available to us. Even if the media is top 40's crap, telling us to boycott the media is actually counterproductive. For better or worse, it is now a part of shared human experience and we thus have a right to experience it and even build from it. Remix it. Parody it.
And finally, let's be practical. You cannot abridge this right of ours without invading the privacy of every human and encroaching upon the sanctity of every home in the world. People can copy whatever digital material they posses, and without DRM aka malware, how can you stop them? People can transmit whatever information they wish to one another, and without introducing a mediator aka Big Brother into every flow of internet traffic, how can you prevent it?
While I'm not the original poster, allow me to express that I personally support neither commercial, RIAA style copyright nor the EFF's GPL copyright. I believe that no author ought to have control over what happens to information once it has become publicly available — be it to exact profit, or to attempt to lock people into certain ideological publishing models.
I submit that censorship is wrong, even when the EFF perpetrates it; and I call upon as many /.ers as will follow me to commit to opposing censorship and copyright in every form.
Hmm, I did. I use a clipboard manager application and I select-all/copy before I submit a form habitually. The clipboard manager automatically stores any new clipboard contents into a queue saved to disk.
It's just like habitual saving in a word processor. I do this because I've had plenty of server borks, browser crashes, /and/ computer crashes ruin posts I've spent time writing. So...
.. yeah, mostly, my concern over using a BIOS/OS would be whether or not I could install client side utilities (browser plugins perhaps?) to do things like clipboard management.
Bedford's law applies to a number represented in fixed point scientific notation, not counting the arithmetic sign of the number.
So binary 0.1 would be rendered 1 x 2^-1, and it would still start with a 1.
With numbers <0, you would ignore the sign and they would still start with a 1.
The only true binary counterexample is 0.
FWIW I do get the joke, no WHOOSH, but TFA is a joke. It should have been printed in the onion.
Following Benford's law is a natural result of any number series which approaches logarithmic uniformity, so no information can be derived from this "revelation" save what we already knew: prime numbers approach uniformity on a logarithmic scale. Put another way, arbitrarily chosen ranges of numbers contain a roughly "predictable" number of primes, and the larger range you choose the less force predictive error has on the outcome compared to the size of your range.
Thus it is inexorable that primes will follow Benford's law: in base 10, many more of them start with 1 than with other digits. The bias lies with the numbering system itself, not with the roughly even distribution of prime numbers.