And since you missed the point, it is about USA insisting that it can interfere with any country's sovereignty and sue in its courts, even foreigners for crimes that do not involve USA in any way. Which other major country does this? And if human rights are so important to you, why not uphold the basic human right of all : Life. Why did USA not allow Ray Davis to be prosecuted for what was clear murder then?
This is less about Justice or Human rights and more about power play. It is stupid to expect that any company can actually stand up to an all-powerful government. Take a look at your own paypal and yahoo and microsoft. And we are talking about an actual dictatorship in Egypt.
Well bingo! Apparently being a habitual offender does makes a BIG difference in courts as opposed to there being a rare first offense(I will skip the debate about "But everyone would do it, if they were powerful like us! Really! So that makes it okay to be a bully!"). If some US court clerk declared countries to be person too like corporations, you will find that as per the USA laws, repeat offenders are considered as a more serious threat to the world.
That, and no other country pretends that it owns the rest of the world and that its law apply to all of the world.
Well USA has been enforcing its laws, demands, fancies on other countries for plenty of time. As per new American vision, national sovereignty of other countries means zilch. American citizens can go and illegally spy in other countries, murder innocents and can get accorded diplomatic immunity after the fact and officially get away by throwing some cash around.
Even diplomatic immunity and Geneva convention is being abandoned. Torture is acceptable. Diplomats and their families can be strip-searched, arrested and humiliated if US thinks that there will be no retaliation. Here is just the latest example : http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/diplo_daughter_keyed_up_kgp3ZqKcEx9nVwPoD9g0aM
Apparently American murderers and rapists(check out Okinawa American base in Japan) can get away scott-free, while US authorities decide as per need, whether diplomatic immunity laws do or do not apply, irrespective of International laws and norms.
Mod me flamebait or troll, if you will. But USA has *always* had a superiority complex and believes even its murderers and rapists are sacrosanct. Even in rare cases, when they allowed prosecution, some kind of deal for a compromise has always been worked out. Only place where US chooses to comply to the international laws is where it feels there is a lot at risk or if it can get its ass royally kicked(i.e. in China for example, where USA military might means naught).
And yep, thanks to the internet and US-propelled globalisation, everyone has US assets or eventually will. Paypal happily freezes accounts of whoever the USA government does not likes. Everyone has a Visa or MasterCard these days. And with US based banks operating in almost all the countries, similar pressure can get eventually employed to force the foreign branches of say Citibank to freeze even accounts that are not in USA. It totally depends on whether or not, your government can stand up to the USA.
Are you being dense on purpose? The maid says that she had left the door propped open and Strauss closed it later, so the electronic records for the lock should corroborate her story. If the records show instead that the door was closed immediately after her entry, her story would not match up and will be proof that she is not being truthful. Simple enough.
Nobody and absolutely NOBODY is too big to sue. The bigger you are, the better target you make, IF there is actually a valid case/legal angle. Problem with this case is that RIAA tactics was seldom about the validity or legality of their case. They were just relying on intimidation tactics mostly, to make a quick example out of you, relying on their deep pockets versus your limited resources ensuring that you chose to quickly settle. In almost every single case where the very premises of their case was challenged in even a remotely competent manner, they chose to quickly drop the case.
So as far as RIAA is concerned, since their legal case is on shaky ground at best, and since Google is not short on resources(thus ruling out a quick settlement), a legal protracted case with Google is pure poison for them. If they lose the case, or even drop it, Google may actually go right after them to shut them down permanently. And Google has funds for lobbying as well, so that it can write out those economic terrorism laws that RIAA got passed. If you buy senators to pass laws, there is always the risk that your rival may buy them right back to repeal those same laws. And Google will have no recourse but to do it just to avoid being ever sued again.
The only way they could have gone after Google is if they had a clear and cut case. Which they don't.
Oh and the point here was not whether you are too big to sue. The point being made was whether you can still intimidate a big company the way you could intimidate a poor individual over a case that you know you might not clearly win.
Oh, you mean public parking lots outside those malls verify the owner credentials and do a quick check with the police everytime a vehicle gets parked there? I did not know that! Goodness golly me! You don't say?!
If I put up a notice saying "please do not park stolen vehicles here", I have effectively covered my ass! So nyah nyah!
Pretty much of what you said can be said to be the reasoning of all those virus-writers and DDOS folks. Knowing that a boat load of people have been affected by your work is not worth much in itself.
Knowing that a boat load of people actually appreciate and praise your work is a different ball game altogether.
Being rich does not equates defining the future of computing. There are lots of rich folks who have nothing whatsoever to do with computing. If you think Donald Trump is brilliant, more power to you!
I am not misinterpreting anything. You are stressing that only tangible assets are property. If I develop a new jet engine design, then as per you, I should give it away for free.
And then the strawman : "Fashion and porn industries are either unprotected or effectively unprotected by copyright law". Says who? Of course they are pretty much protected by copyright laws. Whatever gave you any idea to the contrary?
Are you arguing that because piracy exists we must give up on copyrights? Assuming that is your logic, should we do away with the police, doors and locks just because theft and murder will always happen?
The labour and effort in producing the particular configuration of data is what has to be compensated by the way. In your theft-happy cuckoo land, you fail to account for that. I never said that open-source companies do no make a profit. Redhat does. So does MySQL. They do so, by either keeping some of the IP secret and selling that as an enhanced product(both Redhat and MySQL do that) or to a lesser extent by using their additional knowledge/expertise to provide superior service. The latter has not been proved to be profitable on its own. Both Redhat and MySQL have been selling corporate/commercial versions of their products that have additional features. And they RELY on copyright law to prevent anyone from stealing their products. I dare you to open a website where you start distributing Redhat Advance Server or the commercial editions of MySQL to others, without their permission. See if you do not get shutdown and sued. Go on, I dare you.
People cannot make money without copyright. Opensource does not means there is no copyright involved, you moron!
And if folks do not share their ideas and findings with each other, then most of medical research would be downright impossible. Because if that professor in israel refuses to share his new technique of manipulating transporter proteins, you bloody well cannot do additional research based on it. And he will refuse to share his knowledge since some moron like you will deem it to be just "a mere configuration of scribbles on a piece of paper" and copy it without the other guy seeing a penny for all the materials and labour he put into getting his results. Welcome to trade secret hell. And since much of medical research industry cannot exist without copyrights, it bloody well should not exist at all, right? Moron.
Because the problem with your cuckooland world is that if folks have no financial incentive to share things, quite a few of them just won't. You will be provided only a fraction of service with maximum of restriction, just the way it was in your "good old days". People have never ever been able to make any profit without either copyright or trade secrets. And there are no other options. So perhaps you should just stop existing, since the real world seems to fail your expectations.
Courts only interpret and enforce laws. Use lobbying to change the laws and control their interpretation, and you circumvent the courts/judges entirely. No need to even buy the Judges. If a law is passed that holds the owners of an IP address is indeed responsible for activities carried using it, it is game over.
I read your "summary". Which was more or less a massacre of the article you linked to. And even that article was written by someone who doesn't have all his marbles, or half a clue about people and real world.
Problem with all the article in the crap is with one simple paragraph.
"In other words, it makes your creation part of the free market. It can be posted, recorded, shown, photograph, celebrated by one and all forever. Isn't this why you create in the first place? Isn't this what drove you to write, paint, photograph, sing, or whatever? You want to make a difference. You want credit for your work. This permits this."
I call bullshit! I can show you thousands of professional writers who expect to be PAID, in order to feed their family! The article simply points out the failings of the current system(and yes it is plenty broken) and uses it as an excuse to state that everyone should work for free and not expect to be paid. At which point I am curious and would like to know what *you* do for a living, since you are so much against anyone getting paid for their work.
Here is another clue. Why don't you go and think about why patent system came into existence in the first place? What were the benefits that it offered to argue for its adoption ? And what do you think folks did in order to profit/get paid for their innovation/work? Hint : They kept everything secret(Trade secrets). Which means no one else can look at your idea and improve upon it. Recipe for coca cola was kept secret for plenty of decades as a modern example, if albeit a useless one. It also means that inventors had to go to extreme measures and expenditures to make sure that trade secret were not stolen.
I would totally agree if you said that patents should last only for a reasonable time (3-10 years) and should never be transferable to companies/organisations and should expire when the innovater dies. And only the particular implementation of an idea should be patentable rather than the entire idea itself(which is getting murkier day by day).
A new work of fiction or a design for a new kind of jet engine/pump/whatever ARE limited resources. Only their creator had access to them initially and therefore it was limited to just one person. You are entirely entitled to think up your own design for the same purpose or write your own novel(without looking at and copying from the work of the other person). Until the creator agrees to share his work, the idea is however a limited resource, and the number of copies you can make are exactly zero. And under the copyright and patent systems, the creator is agreeing to share his idea only and only if you agree that his idea/software/configuration of word/words DOES NOT become your property. If you tried to do away with copyright completely, musicians will simply refuse to allow themselves to be recorded and would perform only under very restricted live performances. Which means you will have to revert to the old system where minstrels went around singing and you could not listen to a recorded copy at your leisure. You would have to pay a fee to invite them, and that too only if they were available. And when they died, their particular rendition would be lost too. Apparently this sounds good to you.
Because if I was a musician who relied on music as a living, without copyright, I am doomed. Anyone can simply make a recording of me singing and sell it, and become a competitor. If he was rich enough, his recordings may be even of higher quality than what I could afford. And to prevent that, I would have to spend time and effort making sure I was not being recorded. Even if I was giving away music for free and relying on charity or voluntary payments, that would still be impacted if someone just set up a duplicate website and started passing off my songs as his own. So copyright is needed after all. And what is music if not mere configuration of sounds?
What you have so far absolutely refused to answer is how doing away with copyright and patents will allow a so
I will assume you actually just pain stupid instead of a troll. Very well, if it is still not penetrated through, the main reason behind open source software is a simple one. You may wish to fix some core-level/kernel bug/code yourself, without waiting for the vendor to release an update. Want to extend that software to support additional custom functionality? There is generally no way except to pay a huge amount to the vendor for development or access to the API. Or say, you wish to import that specific additional format into the software... or wish to use some protocol other than those provided. You are out for a toss, if the vendor simply states "we do not plan to support that".
With open source, you at least have the choice to modify. They will not sue you for reverse-engineering their product. Do whatever you want with your copy, except starting to distribute the same to others in a proprietary manner. Because that clause ensures that companies like Microsoft etc. not just steal the work, and incorporate it in their products and charge for it.
The open-source developer may or may not be giving it all away for free. That is his choice. But under GPL you will at least get the source code. Which is more than what you would have got from Microsoft or Oracle.
But in your la-la land somehow, it is evillllllll for any programmer to expect to be paid for his work. Those programmers should simply starve along with their families and children, so that you can be allowed to steal their work and rebrand it and distribute it away for free.
You should have been born in the medieval ages. "Bah! It is just lots of meaning less empty words on paper. Why don't they do a honest job like other hardworking people! How dare they expect to be paid for just writing some words! It is just a bunch of scribblings dammit! Bloody snobby high-brow scholars!"
For you somehow, only the menial labor is worth anything. Only the tangible assets count as property. All the rest of the stuff should be for free. If I slog away on some computer for months to prepare an accounting software, you should just be allowed to steal it for free. Doubly so, if I was kind(stupid) enough to share the source code as well.
By that logic, I am only being rent the medium of that new Harry Potter novel, since you cannot "lease" "license" or "rent" words and sentences. So by your definition of maximum freedom, anyone and everyone should be allowed to mass-produce copies of the novel and sell them on eBay, without paying J.K. Rowling a penny. Right?
Because just because Rowling may be the other of the novel, the actual text is not a limited resource, and just because she is the author, she cannot tell you what to do with YOUR photocopy machine, or your PRINTER or your ebay account!
The license is used by opensource developers, who would like to share their work, without having competitors/proprietary software companies steal their work for free and reselling it as their own. i.e. I made something, and I am providing the source code for it, but I do not want to allow my competitor or some plain greedy person to just steal the same and rebrand it and make a profit off my work without my or the opensource community getting anything.
I don't see what alternatives you are suggesting to achieve the above goal. Your agenda seems to be "I do not like paying for stuff. I want to steal someone else's work for free. How DARE they let people see their source code and yet not allow us to steal their stuff and make a profit off it ! I hatesss their license!!! I hatess them forever!".
Quite a few opensource developers use the license because it serves their need. If you are the end-user, your only options are to not use any product that comes with this kind of license, and buy a proprietary one or simply code your own. Or to accept the license.
Which part of above is so hard for you to understand?
Argue all you want. But at least let us know the rationale behind your argument, if it is anything other than "Why can I not steal their work for free?"
Right... I fully agree that students should be encouraged to question and distrust everything they are taught in every single class, without being provided undeniable proof.
Teacher : World is round.
Student : Prove it!
Teacher : Folks have sailed around the world. That proves the world is round.
Student : I haven't sailed around it. How do *I* know? How do I know anyone has actually sailed around the world? Prove it!
Teacher : They took photos from satellites. Shows the world is round.
Student : I didn't take those photos! How do I know those photos are real? Prove it!
Teacher : Astronomical calculations prove that world has to be round.
Student : I don't understand this complicated maths. Prove it!
Teacher : Uh, this over here on the globe map is America.
Student : PROVE IT!
Or while we are at it
Teacher : George Washington was the first president.
Student : Prove it! How do I know that? Everyone who existed at that time is dead. How do I know you are not bullshitting? Is there any proof that this guy actually existed? I use photoshop too, so don't show me any photos and crap!
Teacher : USA has 50 states.
Student : Prove it!
Teacher : Everything is composed of atoms and molecules.
Student : Prove it! And don't show me any funny circles in an electron microscope. Why should I trust anything you show me? Those could be anything!
You will be surprised at how much of what we teach in school, is expected to be taken on basis of trust and faith. It is neither practical nor feasible to teach anything whatsoever to a student who is expected to question and distrust everything you say. GP is right. You make the student doubt everything you state, and it will become downright impossible to teach any science whatsoever in the classes. The only way the system works is by "proving" to the student that teacher is correct and trustworthy in most of the cases, and therefore asking him to trust the teachers even in the cases that cannot be demonstrated/proved in a class room.
Start teaching them bullshit like "Everything needs a creator and therefore God created everything!" and the next obvious question they will eventually ask is "If everything needs a creator, who created God?". If you answer with "Nobody created God", they will simply ask "then why does everything else need a creator either?" and eventually thinking you are not being completely honest with them, or worse, are actually stupid.
"Better" or not, it is a license. It specifies the terms and conditions of a contract. Terms and conditions are up to the creator of a product and need not be "better" or "nice". Don't like it? Don't use products that are under the license. Think you can do better? Write your own license and release your own software under your "better" license. Moron!
Well time for western companies to decide whether the savings from lower cost of production in China is worth the inevitable loss of IP that goes along as a cost of working with Chinese companies. And forget about any hopes of getting china to amend the laws. With the Chinese government actually framing laws that force you to give away your technology secrets to your local Chinese partner, IP theft is pretty much the national party apparently.
It may be far better for the governments to put more state funding into finding rare earth alternatives to break the Chinese monopoly on manufacturing/production. Cheap labour can be had even from India and other countries, where at least government is not itself on the IP theft scam.
So you think you can happily re-distribute your copy of Microsoft Office or Windows just because you are running YOUR copy of it on YOUR computer, irrespective of whatever the mircosoft EULA/terms & conditions say? Let us see you run a public online store selling that, if you actually believe your own argument.
What clarifying assumption? Can you legally distribute a Microsoft Office or Windows CD off your server *at all*, in the first place? I would love to see you try so publicly, without being taken down and possibly jailed. If that is enforceable, then why not GPL, do tell? If you find it so hard to comply with the terms and conditions accompanying a product, you are welcome not to use it and write your own.
Are you actually ANAL or you just love to set up strawmen?
All it means is that if xyz is licensed under GPL, you will HAVE to accept GPL to distribute or modify xyz in any way. If xyz is producing any reports/data/whatever, you may do whatever you wish with that. What is so hard to understand about the simple line that you posted? Where does what you copypasted talk about output at all?
And since you are apparently too dumb with even basic trolling, allow me to copy-paste the actual part about output of software.
"The output from running a covered work is covered by this License only if the output, given its content, constitutes a covered work."
P.S. Look up the meaning of the word "only" in the dictionary, dumbass!
Slashdot Mirror
And since you missed the point, it is about USA insisting that it can interfere with any country's sovereignty and sue in its courts, even foreigners for crimes that do not involve USA in any way. Which other major country does this? And if human rights are so important to you, why not uphold the basic human right of all : Life. Why did USA not allow Ray Davis to be prosecuted for what was clear murder then?
This is less about Justice or Human rights and more about power play. It is stupid to expect that any company can actually stand up to an all-powerful government. Take a look at your own paypal and yahoo and microsoft. And we are talking about an actual dictatorship in Egypt.
Well bingo! Apparently being a habitual offender does makes a BIG difference in courts as opposed to there being a rare first offense(I will skip the debate about "But everyone would do it, if they were powerful like us! Really! So that makes it okay to be a bully!"). If some US court clerk declared countries to be person too like corporations, you will find that as per the USA laws, repeat offenders are considered as a more serious threat to the world.
That, and no other country pretends that it owns the rest of the world and that its law apply to all of the world.
Well USA has been enforcing its laws, demands, fancies on other countries for plenty of time. As per new American vision, national sovereignty of other countries means zilch. American citizens can go and illegally spy in other countries, murder innocents and can get accorded diplomatic immunity after the fact and officially get away by throwing some cash around.
Even diplomatic immunity and Geneva convention is being abandoned. Torture is acceptable. Diplomats and their families can be strip-searched, arrested and humiliated if US thinks that there will be no retaliation. Here is just the latest example :
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/diplo_daughter_keyed_up_kgp3ZqKcEx9nVwPoD9g0aM
Apparently American murderers and rapists(check out Okinawa American base in Japan) can get away scott-free, while US authorities decide as per need, whether diplomatic immunity laws do or do not apply, irrespective of International laws and norms.
Mod me flamebait or troll, if you will. But USA has *always* had a superiority complex and believes even its murderers and rapists are sacrosanct. Even in rare cases, when they allowed prosecution, some kind of deal for a compromise has always been worked out. Only place where US chooses to comply to the international laws is where it feels there is a lot at risk or if it can get its ass royally kicked(i.e. in China for example, where USA military might means naught).
And yep, thanks to the internet and US-propelled globalisation, everyone has US assets or eventually will. Paypal happily freezes accounts of whoever the USA government does not likes. Everyone has a Visa or MasterCard these days. And with US based banks operating in almost all the countries, similar pressure can get eventually employed to force the foreign branches of say Citibank to freeze even accounts that are not in USA. It totally depends on whether or not, your government can stand up to the USA.
Are you being dense on purpose? The maid says that she had left the door propped open and Strauss closed it later, so the electronic records for the lock should corroborate her story. If the records show instead that the door was closed immediately after her entry, her story would not match up and will be proof that she is not being truthful. Simple enough.
Nobody and absolutely NOBODY is too big to sue. The bigger you are, the better target you make, IF there is actually a valid case/legal angle. Problem with this case is that RIAA tactics was seldom about the validity or legality of their case. They were just relying on intimidation tactics mostly, to make a quick example out of you, relying on their deep pockets versus your limited resources ensuring that you chose to quickly settle. In almost every single case where the very premises of their case was challenged in even a remotely competent manner, they chose to quickly drop the case.
So as far as RIAA is concerned, since their legal case is on shaky ground at best, and since Google is not short on resources(thus ruling out a quick settlement), a legal protracted case with Google is pure poison for them. If they lose the case, or even drop it, Google may actually go right after them to shut them down permanently. And Google has funds for lobbying as well, so that it can write out those economic terrorism laws that RIAA got passed. If you buy senators to pass laws, there is always the risk that your rival may buy them right back to repeal those same laws. And Google will have no recourse but to do it just to avoid being ever sued again.
The only way they could have gone after Google is if they had a clear and cut case. Which they don't.
Oh and the point here was not whether you are too big to sue. The point being made was whether you can still intimidate a big company the way you could intimidate a poor individual over a case that you know you might not clearly win.
Oh, you mean public parking lots outside those malls verify the owner credentials and do a quick check with the police everytime a vehicle gets parked there? I did not know that! Goodness golly me! You don't say?!
If I put up a notice saying "please do not park stolen vehicles here", I have effectively covered my ass! So nyah nyah!
At which point the 2nd person to login, just goes and changes the password("Just because I can do it").
You don't know people very well, do you?
Try setting up a simple login system with "change password" option anywhere on the net and share the link with the world.
So there are no public performances anymore? Whoooooooooooooosh!
Knowing that a boat load of people actually appreciate and praise your work is a different ball game altogether.
Being rich does not equates defining the future of computing. There are lots of rich folks who have nothing whatsoever to do with computing. If you think Donald Trump is brilliant, more power to you!
And then the strawman : "Fashion and porn industries are either unprotected or effectively unprotected by copyright law". Says who? Of course they are pretty much protected by copyright laws. Whatever gave you any idea to the contrary?
http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/porn_industry_lawyer_is_new_copyright_king_with_16700_lawsuit_filed/
Are you arguing that because piracy exists we must give up on copyrights? Assuming that is your logic, should we do away with the police, doors and locks just because theft and murder will always happen?
The labour and effort in producing the particular configuration of data is what has to be compensated by the way. In your theft-happy cuckoo land, you fail to account for that. I never said that open-source companies do no make a profit. Redhat does. So does MySQL. They do so, by either keeping some of the IP secret and selling that as an enhanced product(both Redhat and MySQL do that) or to a lesser extent by using their additional knowledge/expertise to provide superior service. The latter has not been proved to be profitable on its own. Both Redhat and MySQL have been selling corporate/commercial versions of their products that have additional features. And they RELY on copyright law to prevent anyone from stealing their products. I dare you to open a website where you start distributing Redhat Advance Server or the commercial editions of MySQL to others, without their permission. See if you do not get shutdown and sued. Go on, I dare you.
People cannot make money without copyright. Opensource does not means there is no copyright involved, you moron!
And if folks do not share their ideas and findings with each other, then most of medical research would be downright impossible. Because if that professor in israel refuses to share his new technique of manipulating transporter proteins, you bloody well cannot do additional research based on it. And he will refuse to share his knowledge since some moron like you will deem it to be just "a mere configuration of scribbles on a piece of paper" and copy it without the other guy seeing a penny for all the materials and labour he put into getting his results. Welcome to trade secret hell. And since much of medical research industry cannot exist without copyrights, it bloody well should not exist at all, right? Moron.
Because the problem with your cuckooland world is that if folks have no financial incentive to share things, quite a few of them just won't. You will be provided only a fraction of service with maximum of restriction, just the way it was in your "good old days". People have never ever been able to make any profit without either copyright or trade secrets. And there are no other options. So perhaps you should just stop existing, since the real world seems to fail your expectations.
Courts only interpret and enforce laws. Use lobbying to change the laws and control their interpretation, and you circumvent the courts/judges entirely. No need to even buy the Judges. If a law is passed that holds the owners of an IP address is indeed responsible for activities carried using it, it is game over.
Problem with all the article in the crap is with one simple paragraph.
"In other words, it makes your creation part of the free market. It can be posted, recorded, shown, photograph, celebrated by one and all forever. Isn't this why you create in the first place? Isn't this what drove you to write, paint, photograph, sing, or whatever? You want to make a difference. You want credit for your work. This permits this."
I call bullshit! I can show you thousands of professional writers who expect to be PAID, in order to feed their family! The article simply points out the failings of the current system(and yes it is plenty broken) and uses it as an excuse to state that everyone should work for free and not expect to be paid. At which point I am curious and would like to know what *you* do for a living, since you are so much against anyone getting paid for their work.
Here is another clue. Why don't you go and think about why patent system came into existence in the first place? What were the benefits that it offered to argue for its adoption ? And what do you think folks did in order to profit/get paid for their innovation/work? Hint : They kept everything secret(Trade secrets). Which means no one else can look at your idea and improve upon it. Recipe for coca cola was kept secret for plenty of decades as a modern example, if albeit a useless one. It also means that inventors had to go to extreme measures and expenditures to make sure that trade secret were not stolen.
I would totally agree if you said that patents should last only for a reasonable time (3-10 years) and should never be transferable to companies/organisations and should expire when the innovater dies. And only the particular implementation of an idea should be patentable rather than the entire idea itself(which is getting murkier day by day).
A new work of fiction or a design for a new kind of jet engine/pump/whatever ARE limited resources. Only their creator had access to them initially and therefore it was limited to just one person. You are entirely entitled to think up your own design for the same purpose or write your own novel(without looking at and copying from the work of the other person). Until the creator agrees to share his work, the idea is however a limited resource, and the number of copies you can make are exactly zero. And under the copyright and patent systems, the creator is agreeing to share his idea only and only if you agree that his idea/software/configuration of word/words DOES NOT become your property. If you tried to do away with copyright completely, musicians will simply refuse to allow themselves to be recorded and would perform only under very restricted live performances. Which means you will have to revert to the old system where minstrels went around singing and you could not listen to a recorded copy at your leisure. You would have to pay a fee to invite them, and that too only if they were available. And when they died, their particular rendition would be lost too. Apparently this sounds good to you.
Because if I was a musician who relied on music as a living, without copyright, I am doomed. Anyone can simply make a recording of me singing and sell it, and become a competitor. If he was rich enough, his recordings may be even of higher quality than what I could afford. And to prevent that, I would have to spend time and effort making sure I was not being recorded. Even if I was giving away music for free and relying on charity or voluntary payments, that would still be impacted if someone just set up a duplicate website and started passing off my songs as his own. So copyright is needed after all. And what is music if not mere configuration of sounds?
What you have so far absolutely refused to answer is how doing away with copyright and patents will allow a so
With open source, you at least have the choice to modify. They will not sue you for reverse-engineering their product. Do whatever you want with your copy, except starting to distribute the same to others in a proprietary manner. Because that clause ensures that companies like Microsoft etc. not just steal the work, and incorporate it in their products and charge for it.
The open-source developer may or may not be giving it all away for free. That is his choice. But under GPL you will at least get the source code. Which is more than what you would have got from Microsoft or Oracle.
But in your la-la land somehow, it is evillllllll for any programmer to expect to be paid for his work. Those programmers should simply starve along with their families and children, so that you can be allowed to steal their work and rebrand it and distribute it away for free.
You should have been born in the medieval ages. "Bah! It is just lots of meaning less empty words on paper. Why don't they do a honest job like other hardworking people! How dare they expect to be paid for just writing some words! It is just a bunch of scribblings dammit! Bloody snobby high-brow scholars!"
For you somehow, only the menial labor is worth anything. Only the tangible assets count as property. All the rest of the stuff should be for free. If I slog away on some computer for months to prepare an accounting software, you should just be allowed to steal it for free. Doubly so, if I was kind(stupid) enough to share the source code as well.
Because just because Rowling may be the other of the novel, the actual text is not a limited resource, and just because she is the author, she cannot tell you what to do with YOUR photocopy machine, or your PRINTER or your ebay account!
Yeah, right!
The license is used by opensource developers, who would like to share their work, without having competitors/proprietary software companies steal their work for free and reselling it as their own. i.e. I made something, and I am providing the source code for it, but I do not want to allow my competitor or some plain greedy person to just steal the same and rebrand it and make a profit off my work without my or the opensource community getting anything.
I don't see what alternatives you are suggesting to achieve the above goal. Your agenda seems to be "I do not like paying for stuff. I want to steal someone else's work for free. How DARE they let people see their source code and yet not allow us to steal their stuff and make a profit off it ! I hatesss their license!!! I hatess them forever!".
Quite a few opensource developers use the license because it serves their need. If you are the end-user, your only options are to not use any product that comes with this kind of license, and buy a proprietary one or simply code your own. Or to accept the license.
Which part of above is so hard for you to understand?
Argue all you want. But at least let us know the rationale behind your argument, if it is anything other than "Why can I not steal their work for free?"
Teacher : World is round.
Student : Prove it!
Teacher : Folks have sailed around the world. That proves the world is round.
Student : I haven't sailed around it. How do *I* know? How do I know anyone has actually sailed around the world? Prove it!
Teacher : They took photos from satellites. Shows the world is round.
Student : I didn't take those photos! How do I know those photos are real? Prove it!
Teacher : Astronomical calculations prove that world has to be round.
Student : I don't understand this complicated maths. Prove it!
Teacher : Uh, this over here on the globe map is America.
Student : PROVE IT!
Or while we are at it
Teacher : George Washington was the first president.
Student : Prove it! How do I know that? Everyone who existed at that time is dead. How do I know you are not bullshitting? Is there any proof that this guy actually existed? I use photoshop too, so don't show me any photos and crap!
Teacher : USA has 50 states.
Student : Prove it!
Teacher : Everything is composed of atoms and molecules.
Student : Prove it! And don't show me any funny circles in an electron microscope. Why should I trust anything you show me? Those could be anything!
You will be surprised at how much of what we teach in school, is expected to be taken on basis of trust and faith. It is neither practical nor feasible to teach anything whatsoever to a student who is expected to question and distrust everything you say. GP is right. You make the student doubt everything you state, and it will become downright impossible to teach any science whatsoever in the classes. The only way the system works is by "proving" to the student that teacher is correct and trustworthy in most of the cases, and therefore asking him to trust the teachers even in the cases that cannot be demonstrated/proved in a class room.
Start teaching them bullshit like "Everything needs a creator and therefore God created everything!" and the next obvious question they will eventually ask is "If everything needs a creator, who created God?". If you answer with "Nobody created God", they will simply ask "then why does everything else need a creator either?" and eventually thinking you are not being completely honest with them, or worse, are actually stupid.
So if you rent me your house, it becomes my property anyways, contract be damned? I can do anything with it, including selling it off to someone else?
"Better" or not, it is a license. It specifies the terms and conditions of a contract. Terms and conditions are up to the creator of a product and need not be "better" or "nice". Don't like it? Don't use products that are under the license. Think you can do better? Write your own license and release your own software under your "better" license. Moron!
It may be far better for the governments to put more state funding into finding rare earth alternatives to break the Chinese monopoly on manufacturing/production. Cheap labour can be had even from India and other countries, where at least government is not itself on the IP theft scam.
So you think you can happily re-distribute your copy of Microsoft Office or Windows just because you are running YOUR copy of it on YOUR computer, irrespective of whatever the mircosoft EULA/terms & conditions say? Let us see you run a public online store selling that, if you actually believe your own argument.
What clarifying assumption? Can you legally distribute a Microsoft Office or Windows CD off your server *at all*, in the first place? I would love to see you try so publicly, without being taken down and possibly jailed. If that is enforceable, then why not GPL, do tell? If you find it so hard to comply with the terms and conditions accompanying a product, you are welcome not to use it and write your own.
So if you add just one dummy line in the source code i.e. say System.out.println("pwned"), that should allow you to steal someone else's work?
All it means is that if xyz is licensed under GPL, you will HAVE to accept GPL to distribute or modify xyz in any way. If xyz is producing any reports/data/whatever, you may do whatever you wish with that. What is so hard to understand about the simple line that you posted? Where does what you copypasted talk about output at all? And since you are apparently too dumb with even basic trolling, allow me to copy-paste the actual part about output of software.
"The output from running a covered work is covered by this License only if the output, given its content, constitutes a covered work."
P.S. Look up the meaning of the word "only" in the dictionary, dumbass!