You've rationalized theft because you don't have the space to prove you paid for media that you've ripped. In my garage, there are several fat boxes of CDs that I've ripped. I have other MP3s that I've purchased, or that were CC-licensed. They sit on my fat hard disk, and I have a backup of them in case the hard drive dies.
I've released quite a body of work under CC myself, but much of my money makers are (actually were, as books on software have a short shelf-life) are merchandized under my copyright. I make a few dollars here and there.
If you buy my book used, the copyright's already been dealt with. If you make a copy of it, then you've stolen from me. Likewise, my book content, while likely just about worthless now, is still owned by me; I did the work, it was tough, well-received by critics, and was useful to an audience when published. Yet I still own the way the research was done, the findings, and the other elements of the books. To copy them verbatim is to steal them.
You have to make up in your own mind, the extent of your civility and morality. Rationalizing "bucking" the system is up to you. Changing it is also up to you... and whomever you can find to join in to make the way media is sold more tenable.
I loved Steal This Book. It was an eye-opener. At the end of the day, someone has to pay for most things. I think it was Heinlein who said TANSTAAFL. Ultimately, I think he's right.
I also hope for a future where we deal with copyrights; maybe that means that they won't exist.
As someone that makes royalties from copyrighted works, I don't hide behind the copyright, but the effort to make those works is real, involves much care and labor, and they are a product.
Calling them imaginary or intangible is a rationalization. Stealing is when you deny someone their just reward for goods or services rendered. My services were books, almost a dozen of them. Right now, they're largely worthless because the service of the content of the books has gone by. Nonetheless, I still own the copyrights, and they're still my effort; they can be justly compared to making a car that I rent out, keep serviced, until no one wants to rent them-- but I still own the car and its design.
The Canadians are somewhat visionary in some areas, copyright being one of them, but they haven't completed the ecosystem where artists, content creators, and others are rewarded monetarily and systematically.
The attempt to abstract tangible from intangible assets, however, is a rationalization on your part. You stole.
What you're saying is that you grew up, and so did others.
The ease of theft vs the value of content hadn't really existed in this way before. But copyright became mangled because of extensions to copyrights that probably shouldn't have been put into place. No matter; it's still not right to steal.
Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book is the pinnacle of counterculture methods to purloin things. Hackers also test locks. The difference between a pirate and a hacker isn't intention, it's actual deed.
The fact that you contritely contribute is the penance of your own doing. Others don't feel the same way, while still others have no compunction to stop grabbing everything from torrents and paying nothing for media. The ASCAP move is propaganda and doesn't address the real problems-- only the problem from the ASCAP point of view. They miss part of their ecosystem when they become myopic, and start feeding the discussion with FUD. The ends don't justify the means. .
While the damage produced is probably nominal, the number of people that gulp pirated content is fairly large, not an insignificant blip.
Yet ASCAP through this disinformation propaganda buy, intends to further muck up the reality of what's copyrighted, and other senses of content rights. This does no one any good and shoudn't be ignored.
As long as ASCAP, RIAA, and MPAA can buy off Congress, the Presidency, and to a lesser extent, the courts, there'll be no peace. Yes, thieves need to be curtailed, but not in the brutal ways inflicted on violators so far. It does make one wonder if there's no common sense left, yet ignoring the problem of content rights doesn't make it go away. My suggestion: donate to the EFF.
What stops people from using a fake name is courage, and the desire not to tell a lie.
Whatever side of the Prop 8 question you're on, you should be free to express your opinion, but shouldn't like about who you are when you do so. The courage of one's convictions says: sign. Other means of expression demand anonymity.
Gaming is ticklish, and has many vectors that have driven hardware as well as OS development. The PS3 has a lot of mindshare, but not necessarily huge sales numbers. Nintendo has an international following, but is brittle and often monolithic as a company.
The frontier overall isn't settled. What has happen is that in terms of mindshare and market cap, Microsoft has been dethroned. They play on many battlefields, and ostensibly, doggedly work in each one. Yet they're failing. Bing has had some innovation, but Microsoft fights Google and Apple in smartphones. Microsoft fights Google in cloud-based/host-based applications. Microsoft's cloud story is a half-decade late and still isn't being taken up to any real degree (forget their propaganda to the contrary; the numbers aren't real, IMHO).
Andy Grove said it when he posited that the challenge is two eyes and 24 hrs. Everyone fights for their share of this. Everyone. Today, we measure success in hit counts. Quality metrics are missing. Crowds make and break sites in a matter of days.
Yet Microsoft has lost the panache, the verve, the mindshare. They've behaved boorishly in so many litigations..... and have funded quixotish battles that have put bad tastes into the mouths of people that they should have been listening to.
Their PR machine is misguided and misused. We used to look for superlatives, now we're happy with "doesn't break so easily". Bah. Whatever happened to excellence?
No, private communications are supposed to be private. I don't put an access point so that the world, including Google, can hear it. It's nicely encrypted. But the data is mine, not yours, not theirs.
I don't broadcast it to the public, in the same way that my 5.8ghz phone is also encrypted. It's not designed for interception, only my convenience. I'm aghast that so many people are entirely willing to roll over for Google's obvious theft.
Not to be argumentative, but I believe I'm consistent. Viz:
-The population of Windows apps indeed is larger than Apple. The category of smartphone apps was barely created, then Apple hijacked it quite successfully. Windows Mobile is in the ditch.
-The XBox has its lunch eaten by the Wii, PS3, etc. It's still likely losing money; another Microsoft come-lately travesty
-There is no Microsoft equivalent content buying machine--oops I mean iPad/Kindle/etc.
-The Zune's market share is at best, trivial.
I'm not criticizing the quality of Microsoft's products; that's fodder for other discussions. Statistically, and fundamentally, Microsoft is now a follower, and a bad follower at that. They've lost the all-important give a crap.
Bill Gates, from the time he started porting BASIC to Altairs 8080s, has been building a monopoly enterprise that's had to settle in and out of court in most major jurisdictions in the world for bad behavior.
The defects within Windows are long and well-noted elsewhere, but the big fatality was user confidence, and the edge-of-your-seat anticipation of a new release.
That Gates aspired to kick IBM and their 'church of the mainframe' mentality wasn't a bad thing. Yet when he could have been a hero at so many turns, he turned out to be an also-ran with a big wallet, as though the big wallet cured everything.
Try re-reading his books. Then look at Microsoft's legal history. Look at all of the places that they're failing now:
- They're two years behind Apple in consumer operating systems, although Windows 7 can be praised for what it doesn't do: blow up
- They're three years behind Apple in smartphones
- Public cloud is built on Linux and BSD, with a dose of occasional Solaris.
- Game machines eat XBoxes for lunch
- Application development has been mightily derailed in favor of admittedly small stuff, but when you think about 220,000 Apple Store apps, it's tacit evidence of where many programmers live, not to mention SourceForge, and so on. Microsoft's developer efforts have been stanched, if not derailed.
- Oracle continues to make inroads into places that Microsoft needs to go....
But the most heinous problem is vision; Microsoft now consists of highly competitive and expensive teams that follow, not lead in their respective markets.
Gates was lucky that IBM didn't find Tim Patterson or Gordon Eubanks, else history would have found plentifully different tech millionaires.
And XP3, Vista, and 7 all fix the horrid architectural mistakes abetted by Allchin and Gates. Demoting users from root in Windows fixed a healthy chunk of their design problems.... all instigated by Gates and his 'wizards'.
Microsoft has lost mirth, magic, mind-share, and the 'oil well in the basement' of Office and Exchange will be toppled soon, too.
But none of this is news, nor is Gates exit. We simply don't care anymore. He's a statistical fluke billionaire, nothing more.
The word is "surprise" but I'm not a grammar nazi.
They posted that they had the data. They'd been gathering it for quite sometime, across many jurisdictions, meaning the software load had been made, and replicated as there are many vehicles involved in Google Earth.
They 'fessed up because to not do so would have compounded their irresponsibility. The entire action is but one of dozens of software mistakes made by Google, large and small. No, I don't work for Microsoft, Apple, or any one else. This is a part of a larger problem that Google has: irresponsibility, and the Microsoft/Apple-like way of believing that their brain power trumps common sense and regional, US, EU, and other law.
I'm not a lawyer. But such constant software mistake-making is a loose-and-fast attitude that gave the world the mind-numbingly bad components in Windows that in turn, led to a decade of scraping Windows clean of maggots. Google took a long time to answer the requests of surrendering that data, and answering the jurisdictions that were appalled (and rightly so) that Google had had the temerity to capture payloads to begin with.
So, no, it's not EXACTLY what happened. The 'gather data' phase lasted a long time, didn't it? Did no one see that the payloads were there? Is Google's QA so asleep-at-the-wheel that it wasn't discovered for such a long time? Because it came out in a blog, rather than in a release, Google blew the entire matter from a PR perspective, too.
And it is a mess. And calling the matter 'inadvertent' as the post declares, in my mind is disingenuous, and more fanboi-like and apologetic rather than a missive to attempt to assuage the damage and make sure it doesn't happen again.
Data would be THE problem. It's not theirs. It matters not what the user's choice of encryption is. The data is NOT Google's. It's gathering and use where I live is plainly illegal, no matter what its purpose.
Taking responsibility is the hallmark of maturity and character. Ensuring quality work is taking that responsibility. They knew; you can't gather that much data and NOT know.
You may find your mistake early, after gigabytes worth of data. Then you fix it before it becomes TB or PB of data. Right?
We're all allowed mistakes. Mistakes of this size from the uber-geeks of Google isn't a mistake. It's negligence..... not quite of BP's size, but just as shamelessly stupid.
Your ends-justifies-the-means concept holds no water.
My wifi access points are a matter of public knowledge. After all-- they're freaking radios. What's not public knowledge is anything after the location of it, and its authentication- if any.
The data that flows there is mine, and no one elses. The other MAC addresses associated with the AP are also my business, and no one else's. Differing jurisdictions have different views of the severity of the theft that their mindlessly-stupid shark-like gobbling did. I hope they suffer the higher of the common denominators of justice.
Any geek with stripes can strip the payloads after identifyng association attempt results, and their locus.
Just gulping the data, which is what they did-- perhaps terabytes of it-- isn't excusable.
There was once a TV show called F Troop. In the opener, they stripped all of the buttons and rank from two soldiers, an officer and an enlisted man, if memory serves. Google should have had by now, a similar such ceremony from their software QA director, and their lead systems engineer. Just WTF were they thinking? Let's have a merry little war drive with some of that open sauce software stuff? Egads. Accidental my ass.
Mod parent up-- he's right. With different light intensities, a couple of microns at arms' length isn't unreasonable. But wait, there's a reality distortion field....
XP was 'officially' released in October 2001, just after 9/11.... in NYC.
It's nine years old. For some, it kind of works-- with SP2 being the defining moment when user!=root. XP was the OS that motivated many to move to other platforms, however.
Wndows 7 works, mostly. The choices are many, including letting XP continue to live in a VM on your something-else. Choices are better now.
VCs need to make ROI with a fat R. IPOs are almost non-existent today because of the tighness of the markets.
IP makes a company ostensibly more valuable, but only if the IP makes money in and of itself, either as a production protection, or as a defense, or as part of a portfolio to go to war with.
Patents don't protect small companies or large ones. They're chess pieces on a board. If you remove them, then the general method of business in software and systems development would change dramatically, first with an outflow of investment, then a slow influx/re-introduction of investment. For a period of time, however, the nature of the systems business in general would be dramatically harmed, follwed by healing-- but not rapidly given the insanely tight investment market foreseen for the next several years. Innovation wouldn't suffer, but investments would be slimmer for a while.
Slashdot Mirror
To get the books published twenty years ago, publishers demanded that the work be copyrighted.
There is no copyright group, in my case.
I would extent patents to ten, copyrights to five.
You can say it as many times as you want, but it's still theft, and each use is stealing.
You've rationalized theft because you don't have the space to prove you paid for media that you've ripped. In my garage, there are several fat boxes of CDs that I've ripped. I have other MP3s that I've purchased, or that were CC-licensed. They sit on my fat hard disk, and I have a backup of them in case the hard drive dies.
I've released quite a body of work under CC myself, but much of my money makers are (actually were, as books on software have a short shelf-life) are merchandized under my copyright. I make a few dollars here and there.
If you buy my book used, the copyright's already been dealt with. If you make a copy of it, then you've stolen from me. Likewise, my book content, while likely just about worthless now, is still owned by me; I did the work, it was tough, well-received by critics, and was useful to an audience when published. Yet I still own the way the research was done, the findings, and the other elements of the books. To copy them verbatim is to steal them.
You have to make up in your own mind, the extent of your civility and morality. Rationalizing "bucking" the system is up to you. Changing it is also up to you... and whomever you can find to join in to make the way media is sold more tenable.
I loved Steal This Book. It was an eye-opener. At the end of the day, someone has to pay for most things. I think it was Heinlein who said TANSTAAFL. Ultimately, I think he's right.
I also hope for a future where we deal with copyrights; maybe that means that they won't exist.
As someone that makes royalties from copyrighted works, I don't hide behind the copyright, but the effort to make those works is real, involves much care and labor, and they are a product.
Calling them imaginary or intangible is a rationalization. Stealing is when you deny someone their just reward for goods or services rendered. My services were books, almost a dozen of them. Right now, they're largely worthless because the service of the content of the books has gone by. Nonetheless, I still own the copyrights, and they're still my effort; they can be justly compared to making a car that I rent out, keep serviced, until no one wants to rent them-- but I still own the car and its design.
The Canadians are somewhat visionary in some areas, copyright being one of them, but they haven't completed the ecosystem where artists, content creators, and others are rewarded monetarily and systematically.
The attempt to abstract tangible from intangible assets, however, is a rationalization on your part. You stole.
What you're saying is that you grew up, and so did others.
The ease of theft vs the value of content hadn't really existed in this way before. But copyright became mangled because of extensions to copyrights that probably shouldn't have been put into place. No matter; it's still not right to steal.
Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book is the pinnacle of counterculture methods to purloin things. Hackers also test locks. The difference between a pirate and a hacker isn't intention, it's actual deed.
The fact that you contritely contribute is the penance of your own doing. Others don't feel the same way, while still others have no compunction to stop grabbing everything from torrents and paying nothing for media. The ASCAP move is propaganda and doesn't address the real problems-- only the problem from the ASCAP point of view. They miss part of their ecosystem when they become myopic, and start feeding the discussion with FUD. The ends don't justify the means.
.
While the damage produced is probably nominal, the number of people that gulp pirated content is fairly large, not an insignificant blip.
Yet ASCAP through this disinformation propaganda buy, intends to further muck up the reality of what's copyrighted, and other senses of content rights. This does no one any good and shoudn't be ignored.
As long as ASCAP, RIAA, and MPAA can buy off Congress, the Presidency, and to a lesser extent, the courts, there'll be no peace. Yes, thieves need to be curtailed, but not in the brutal ways inflicted on violators so far. It does make one wonder if there's no common sense left, yet ignoring the problem of content rights doesn't make it go away. My suggestion: donate to the EFF.
What stops people from using a fake name is courage, and the desire not to tell a lie.
Whatever side of the Prop 8 question you're on, you should be free to express your opinion, but shouldn't like about who you are when you do so. The courage of one's convictions says: sign. Other means of expression demand anonymity.
Gaming is ticklish, and has many vectors that have driven hardware as well as OS development. The PS3 has a lot of mindshare, but not necessarily huge sales numbers. Nintendo has an international following, but is brittle and often monolithic as a company.
The frontier overall isn't settled. What has happen is that in terms of mindshare and market cap, Microsoft has been dethroned. They play on many battlefields, and ostensibly, doggedly work in each one. Yet they're failing. Bing has had some innovation, but Microsoft fights Google and Apple in smartphones. Microsoft fights Google in cloud-based/host-based applications. Microsoft's cloud story is a half-decade late and still isn't being taken up to any real degree (forget their propaganda to the contrary; the numbers aren't real, IMHO).
Andy Grove said it when he posited that the challenge is two eyes and 24 hrs. Everyone fights for their share of this. Everyone. Today, we measure success in hit counts. Quality metrics are missing. Crowds make and break sites in a matter of days.
Yet Microsoft has lost the panache, the verve, the mindshare. They've behaved boorishly in so many litigations..... and have funded quixotish battles that have put bad tastes into the mouths of people that they should have been listening to.
Their PR machine is misguided and misused. We used to look for superlatives, now we're happy with "doesn't break so easily". Bah. Whatever happened to excellence?
No, private communications are supposed to be private. I don't put an access point so that the world, including Google, can hear it. It's nicely encrypted. But the data is mine, not yours, not theirs.
I don't broadcast it to the public, in the same way that my 5.8ghz phone is also encrypted. It's not designed for interception, only my convenience. I'm aghast that so many people are entirely willing to roll over for Google's obvious theft.
Not to be argumentative, but I believe I'm consistent. Viz:
-The population of Windows apps indeed is larger than Apple. The category of smartphone apps was barely created, then Apple hijacked it quite successfully. Windows Mobile is in the ditch.
-The XBox has its lunch eaten by the Wii, PS3, etc. It's still likely losing money; another Microsoft come-lately travesty
-There is no Microsoft equivalent content buying machine--oops I mean iPad/Kindle/etc.
-The Zune's market share is at best, trivial.
I'm not criticizing the quality of Microsoft's products; that's fodder for other discussions. Statistically, and fundamentally, Microsoft is now a follower, and a bad follower at that. They've lost the all-important give a crap.
You damn him with faint praise.
Bill Gates, from the time he started porting BASIC to Altairs 8080s, has been building a monopoly enterprise that's had to settle in and out of court in most major jurisdictions in the world for bad behavior.
The defects within Windows are long and well-noted elsewhere, but the big fatality was user confidence, and the edge-of-your-seat anticipation of a new release.
That Gates aspired to kick IBM and their 'church of the mainframe' mentality wasn't a bad thing. Yet when he could have been a hero at so many turns, he turned out to be an also-ran with a big wallet, as though the big wallet cured everything.
Try re-reading his books. Then look at Microsoft's legal history. Look at all of the places that they're failing now:
- They're two years behind Apple in consumer operating systems, although Windows 7 can be praised for what it doesn't do: blow up
- They're three years behind Apple in smartphones
- Public cloud is built on Linux and BSD, with a dose of occasional Solaris.
- Game machines eat XBoxes for lunch
- Application development has been mightily derailed in favor of admittedly small stuff, but when you think about 220,000 Apple Store apps, it's tacit evidence of where many programmers live, not to mention SourceForge, and so on. Microsoft's developer efforts have been stanched, if not derailed.
- Oracle continues to make inroads into places that Microsoft needs to go....
But the most heinous problem is vision; Microsoft now consists of highly competitive and expensive teams that follow, not lead in their respective markets.
Gates was lucky that IBM didn't find Tim Patterson or Gordon Eubanks, else history would have found plentifully different tech millionaires.
And XP3, Vista, and 7 all fix the horrid architectural mistakes abetted by Allchin and Gates. Demoting users from root in Windows fixed a healthy chunk of their design problems.... all instigated by Gates and his 'wizards'.
Microsoft has lost mirth, magic, mind-share, and the 'oil well in the basement' of Office and Exchange will be toppled soon, too.
But none of this is news, nor is Gates exit. We simply don't care anymore. He's a statistical fluke billionaire, nothing more.
The word is "surprise" but I'm not a grammar nazi.
They posted that they had the data. They'd been gathering it for quite sometime, across many jurisdictions, meaning the software load had been made, and replicated as there are many vehicles involved in Google Earth.
They 'fessed up because to not do so would have compounded their irresponsibility. The entire action is but one of dozens of software mistakes made by Google, large and small. No, I don't work for Microsoft, Apple, or any one else. This is a part of a larger problem that Google has: irresponsibility, and the Microsoft/Apple-like way of believing that their brain power trumps common sense and regional, US, EU, and other law.
I'm not a lawyer. But such constant software mistake-making is a loose-and-fast attitude that gave the world the mind-numbingly bad components in Windows that in turn, led to a decade of scraping Windows clean of maggots. Google took a long time to answer the requests of surrendering that data, and answering the jurisdictions that were appalled (and rightly so) that Google had had the temerity to capture payloads to begin with.
So, no, it's not EXACTLY what happened. The 'gather data' phase lasted a long time, didn't it? Did no one see that the payloads were there? Is Google's QA so asleep-at-the-wheel that it wasn't discovered for such a long time? Because it came out in a blog, rather than in a release, Google blew the entire matter from a PR perspective, too.
And it is a mess. And calling the matter 'inadvertent' as the post declares, in my mind is disingenuous, and more fanboi-like and apologetic rather than a missive to attempt to assuage the damage and make sure it doesn't happen again.
Data would be THE problem. It's not theirs. It matters not what the user's choice of encryption is. The data is NOT Google's. It's gathering and use where I live is plainly illegal, no matter what its purpose.
Internal or external use makes no difference.
Ultimately, Google, top-down, is responsible.
Taking responsibility is the hallmark of maturity and character. Ensuring quality work is taking that responsibility. They knew; you can't gather that much data and NOT know.
You may find your mistake early, after gigabytes worth of data. Then you fix it before it becomes TB or PB of data. Right?
We're all allowed mistakes. Mistakes of this size from the uber-geeks of Google isn't a mistake. It's negligence..... not quite of BP's size, but just as shamelessly stupid.
Your ends-justifies-the-means concept holds no water.
My wifi access points are a matter of public knowledge. After all-- they're freaking radios. What's not public knowledge is anything after the location of it, and its authentication- if any.
The data that flows there is mine, and no one elses. The other MAC addresses associated with the AP are also my business, and no one else's. Differing jurisdictions have different views of the severity of the theft that their mindlessly-stupid shark-like gobbling did. I hope they suffer the higher of the common denominators of justice.
No. It was at best willful sloth.
Any geek with stripes can strip the payloads after identifyng association attempt results, and their locus.
Just gulping the data, which is what they did-- perhaps terabytes of it-- isn't excusable.
There was once a TV show called F Troop. In the opener, they stripped all of the buttons and rank from two soldiers, an officer and an enlisted man, if memory serves. Google should have had by now, a similar such ceremony from their software QA director, and their lead systems engineer. Just WTF were they thinking? Let's have a merry little war drive with some of that open sauce software stuff? Egads. Accidental my ass.
And maybe a fresnel lens would do the job.... seems to perhaps cure several of the ills cited.
Comparing 4Chan and Slashdot caused a reset in server 211. Now restoring from backups. Message #213323.
He had to have..... insanity isn't a defense in civil litigation.
All of my lost left sox.
Two bolts from my motorcycle.
The lost chord.
George Bush's dignity.
Several B-19s last seen headed towards Bermuda.
An iPhone 4G prototype.
Darl McBride's balls.
And I'm sure there's more.
Mod parent up-- he's right. With different light intensities, a couple of microns at arms' length isn't unreasonable. But wait, there's a reality distortion field....
XP was 'officially' released in October 2001, just after 9/11.... in NYC.
It's nine years old. For some, it kind of works-- with SP2 being the defining moment when user!=root. XP was the OS that motivated many to move to other platforms, however.
Wndows 7 works, mostly. The choices are many, including letting XP continue to live in a VM on your something-else. Choices are better now.
VCs need to make ROI with a fat R. IPOs are almost non-existent today because of the tighness of the markets.
IP makes a company ostensibly more valuable, but only if the IP makes money in and of itself, either as a production protection, or as a defense, or as part of a portfolio to go to war with.
Patents don't protect small companies or large ones. They're chess pieces on a board. If you remove them, then the general method of business in software and systems development would change dramatically, first with an outflow of investment, then a slow influx/re-introduction of investment. For a period of time, however, the nature of the systems business in general would be dramatically harmed, follwed by healing-- but not rapidly given the insanely tight investment market foreseen for the next several years. Innovation wouldn't suffer, but investments would be slimmer for a while.