Yeah, sure, I liked the Internet much more when it was privately owned, before the federal government was involved at all. Back when... when was that again? Refresh my memory.
Thanks for sharing your super genius. I just want to say this: You're stupid.
See how that fails to be helpful? Telling people, "Shut up and let the grown-ups talk," unfortunately is often (as in this case) a tactic employed by people with childish temperaments.
Me? I like to talk about actual issues. I'm sure in many ways you're a very smart person who is stuck in some kind of an... angry state of mind. But maybe if you thought about things rather than using catch-phrases you don't really understand (i.e. "straw man"), you might understand the issues better.
Anyway, words do matter. How we talk about things matter. The terms we use often define the conversation, and if you study anything related to rhetoric, philosophy, politics, marketing, etc., you immediately come to realize that you can concede an entire argument by allowing the other side to control the words used.
Calling the copying of files "theft" already concedes a very important question which should not be conceded to the other side: that intellectual property is the same thing as physical property, and that the act of "copying" intellectual property therefore deprives others of enjoyment of the original in the same way that "taking" physical property does. If you concede that point, you lose the opportunity to talk about things like "fair use" or "public domain".
I understand if these topics are too subtle for you to grasp, but feel free to ask questions if you're struggling with an idea.
Star Trek asked all kinds of questions. Do we have a right to arm the locals to fight back against Klingon oppression?...
I agree, but I think Star Trek sometimes suffered from giving answers that were a little too pat. "Do we have a right to kill off the indigenous population so that we can mine the materials we need? " Well, it turns out the answer is "no". That's nice. "Is it acceptable for mixed races to fall in love?" The answer is "yes". Great.
I think it's the mark of much better writing when BSG makes the audience answer these questions with something like, "I want to say 'no', but I'm afraid I feel like I have to say 'yes'. Does that make me a horrible human being?" Maybe it's a matter of opinion, as well as what you're looking for out of a show.
Oh, so you just connect to your ISP, and nothing beyond. I see, your Internet is like one of those BBS from the 80s or something. Poor guy. I bet you wish you could access sites like Slashdot, that have fun news items and things.
PS- I'm someone "like the federal government" that would do anything to enact my "big-government dreams" of having functional infrastructure? Does that accusation even make sense? And also, you think the Internet just "_could_" cross state lines?
One of the more frustrating aspects of the show is that the characters very rarely grow a sufficiently large backbone to Do the Right Thing(TM). And then it's pretty much only because they're forced to do so.
So you're saying it's realistic?
A real individual like that would have carefully controlled the release of that information, being careful to spin it as something out of his control.
Now that seems unrealistic to me-- a world where people take on their problems, admit their mistakes (even with spin), and avoid having their past actions bite them in the ass.
I like that BSG *doesn't* necessarily wrap everything up in a neat little package. Everyone sees a problem, nobody can agree on what to do about it, time passes, nothing gets done, and then it ends up blowing up in everyone's face later down the line. Or not. Sometimes that stuff just passes by and never gets resolved. That sounds much more like the world we live in, rather than having some all-wise character give you a moral to the story at the end of each episode.
Oh, your connection doesn't? You have a magical connection that routes your traffic such that the traffic never leaves your state, and never traverses infrastructure that covers multiple states. What a wondrous magical Internet connection you must have!
So is this related to the "iPod killer" I keep hearing about? I keep hearing about the iPod killer being released-- I guess because our prison system is overflowing and they're paroling killers-- but I've been wondering why he's called the "iPod killer".
Er... building and/or overseeing the construction and maintenance of our national infrastructure is within the scope of the federal government's purpose. I don't hear anyone complaining about having an interstate highway system.
Also it makes me happy that he had a little something in there about building tech infrastructure. It was never one of his big campaign promises, and it never got a whole hell of a lot of press, but it seems to be persistently in the list of things that Obama is thinking about.
There's a lot to argue about, but if we can actually get a serious Internet rollout nation-wide (of the 20Mbps symmetric fiber variety rather than dialup or even DSL), that could be a very positive thing in the long term.
Interesting that they're both "rich men" suddenly, but I'd rather not beat a dead horse here.
Well we could just as easily make them both poor men, but then you might ask, "How poor is the guy really, if he owns a store?" The point was to get around another factor, which is that many people would probably make some kind of a bad argument that "Well, when you steal from the store, it's not really hurting anyone because the store has lots of money, but if I steal from my neighbor, he's just a guy who doesn't make lots of money."
The point is, it doesn't matter. Stealing from a store isn't any more moral than stealing from a person. When you steal from a store, you're taking the same amount of money out of *someone's* pocket, even though it might not seem like it.
Again, the legal niceties of licensing and infringement are lost on most people; "stealing" is easier to understand because it's something every one knows from when they were small children.
So you're agreeing that it's not theft, but saying that it's appropriate to use inaccurate language because most people are too stupid to understand that copyright infringement hurts people too. Is that right? So calling it "theft" is basically a "noble lie"?
Anyway, I never said, and I would not say, that there's nothing wrong with copyright infringement. Certainly the damages caused by copyright infringement vary from one situation to another (e.g. mass distribution of counterfeit copies for profit is worse than downloading something for personal use, and there are other levels in between), but with the exception of what people call "fair use", it's all morally wrong. However, being morally wrong doesn't make it "theft".
One of the things that I'm glad of (along with other things) is that the judge recognizes that it diminishes the incentive to buy a song after downloading, but it doesn't sound like he goes as far as to say that a downloader won't buy the song.
Yes, it's true that, once I have access to the song, there isn't much incentive to buy it. "Purchasing" it at that point becomes almost like making a "suggested donation" that's entirely voluntary. However, in spite of the diminished incentive, it doesn't necessarily follow that people won't do it.
So I think that's the first thing to recognize-- that just because I've downloaded something illegally doesn't necessarily mean that I won't buy it or haven't bought it. The next step is to recognize that, even if I've downloaded something without having bought it, it doesn't follow that I would have bought it were that download not available.
Put those two together, and it becomes clear that the number of downloads might bear very little relation to the number of lost sales.
Usually the store has bought the CD whether they manage to sell it, it sits on a shelf, or is stolen. The "artist" gets paid either way.
Morally, I don't think stealing a CD from a store owned by a rich man is any worse than stealing the same CD from the home owned by the same rich man. Or at least, I don't see why one would be considered more immoral than the other.
Either way, copyright infringement is very different in that it isn't theft. It's copyright infringement. When I steal a CD, someone has lost a CD. When I infringe on someone's copyright, the creative work gets copied without the copyright owner's permission.
The problem here is that, just because you don't have the authority to tell your boss to do something, that doesn't mean that you won't be held responsible. It's not fair, and it's not sensible, but it's true.
Unfortunately, a lot of people don't understand the problems that come from separating authority and responsibility.
The analogy that the RIAA wants you to think of is shoplifting, not B&E and burglary -- stealing from the store, not stealing from another buyer
What the hell do you think the difference is? Do you think that stealing from a person is much worse than stealing from a store? In both of those cases, it's theft, whereas copyright infringement is not theft.
the common English word "theft" covers a wide variety of activities, including copyright infringement
Begging the question. I think people are trying to change the English word "theft" to include copyright infringement, even though that's not included in the common connotation nor denotation.
lots of people steal from Shakespeare
That's really a bit of a metaphorical/poetic use. You could also say "that girl stole my heart," but it doesn't mean the girl is literally a thief.
Yes, it seems like they're drawing a couple suspect distinctions in this article. They talk about "light" as being very different from "radio" even though they're both EM radiation, and they talk about "using light" as very different from "using fiber optics", even though it's really just a difference of medium.
I don't really see it working out. We already use that portion of the EM spectrum for... you know... seeing. I guess you could claim that being easily blocked (e.g. by walls) is an advantage, but for most people in most circumstances, being able to pass through lots of materials would be a greater advantage. If you really want tighter security, then instead of relying on walls to block the signal, this technology could be improved by creating some sort of conduit that would go directly from one point to another. Like some kind of fibrous, wiry, cable-like structure between them. I'm sure that would be much better than fiber optics.
Well, no, I'd disagree there. After all, that's the real battleground here, isn't it?
I suppose it's the battleground, in that some people are specifically trying to tie the two together. There's a specific PR campaign to change terminology so that it will change people's perception.
However, when they began this campaign, they were basically starting from zero. I don't think most people started out thinking of copying files as a crime, but certain powers have really fought to have it labelled as "piracy" and "theft".
Even though they've made some headway, ask most people, "Is downloading a song from the internet the same thing as breaking into someone's house and stealing a CD?" I don't think many people will say "yes" unless they have some sort of political stake in pushing that PR.
Has this changed in the past few years? I don't go to BB as often as I used to, but whenever I used to go, their staff usually didn't know what they were talking about. Of course, it didn't matter much because you could never get anyone to help you there anyway.
To be honest, the benefits I see in going to a brick&mortar place is:
You can handle the merchandise- When I'm buying a TV, for example, specs only tell you so much. I want to actually see the picture side by side with other comparable TVs to get a subjective sense of the quality. When I'm buying a laptop, I also want to get a real sense for how big and heavy it is by picking it up. When I'm buying clothes, I may want to feel the fabric, since I can't get a true sense of texture from pictures. For some products, it really helps to see the thing in person before you buy.
You can get it that day- If I need something pretty urgently but I can wait a couple days, then I can pay extra for overnight shipping. However, there usually isn't any shipping option that gets it delivered in the next couple hours. If you need it now, brick&mortar is probably faster.
You have a physical place to return things- Maybe it's just me, but even if I'm willing to buy something online, I'll still prefer to have a physical place where I can return it if I have to. It's pretty frustrating when you get a defective item and the seller tries to stick you with the shipping charges of sending it back. There are also cases where online retailers will make the process for returning things much harder, even when they make buying things easy. They'll force you to bounce from one person to another and wait on hold for an hour or two, just to get an RMA number. And then you're just starting on the fun of tracking the progress of your return, waiting for a refund or replacement, hoping your case doesn't somehow get lost in the shuffle. For some reason, this hasn't happened to me as often in brick&mortars. Maybe people are just more averse to treating customers that way when they're in the store, possibly prepared to make a scene.
There may be other reasons, but those come to mind. Honestly, I can't think of many stores that I've been in where "service" was a selling point.
Well ok, maybe not "fully". What I really meant by the idea of "taking the RIAA's side fully" was believing that the RIAA is completely right to protect their copyrights by suing people who download/share MP3s online. Even if you believe that without a doubt in your mind, I still think it's a bit unreasonable to admit no distinction between "copyright infringement" and "theft".
Legally, they're distinct. In most people's minds, they're distinct. In the effect they have both for the victim and perpetrator of the crime, they're distinct.
As far as I can tell, people who refuse to acknowledge any kind of distinction between the two are being disingenuous.
Consider if you had spent a year creating a great program, perhaps something to make web browsing impervious to spybots. Then at the end of the year your employer shows you the door, and never pays you, but instead distributes your program for free over the net... It's called theft of labor.
It's called "theft of labor" because, in your example, we're assuming that the employer and the developer had some form of agreement that the employer later violated. Theft of labor, as far as I know, is used to describe situations where a person is deceived (or possibly forced) into doing work.
Therefore, if a musician records a work of his own accord, and without having entered into any agreement with that musician or deceiving him in any way, I copy his songs, then it's not called "theft of labor". It's called "copyright infringement".
Or, at least, it's called "copyright infringement" if the work has been copyrighted, I don't have any license to copy it, I am not exercising fair use, and the work has not been released to public domain. Otherwise, it's just legal copying.
I'm not saying that copyright infringement is right. I don't infringe on others' copyrights, and I don't condone others doing so. It just happens that the crime of copyright infringement is a different crime than theft.
Yes, it was Plato. Or perhaps it's worth noting: Socrates (the character) posited that idea in a dialog (i.e. possibly fictional conversation) written by Plato.
The idea was not so much that philosophers were charged with seeing reality and describing it to the masses. Rather, it was a description of certain kinds of difficulty with knowledge. He's describing how it's difficult to know what reality is, and that for all the problems with failing to know "the truth" about a thing, there are other sorts of problems faced by those who know.
There is commonly a lesson drawn from it, that the world that we know may not be the world as it is, but I don't think he had anything so literal and scientific as this in mind. The fact that this may be discoverable, provable, and explainable makes me think that something like this should be disqualified as the sort of "truth" that Socrates is referring to. It's a little too mundane.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, sure, I liked the Internet much more when it was privately owned, before the federal government was involved at all. Back when... when was that again? Refresh my memory.
I just want to say this. Stop arguing this point.
Thanks for sharing your super genius. I just want to say this: You're stupid.
See how that fails to be helpful? Telling people, "Shut up and let the grown-ups talk," unfortunately is often (as in this case) a tactic employed by people with childish temperaments.
Me? I like to talk about actual issues. I'm sure in many ways you're a very smart person who is stuck in some kind of an... angry state of mind. But maybe if you thought about things rather than using catch-phrases you don't really understand (i.e. "straw man"), you might understand the issues better.
Anyway, words do matter. How we talk about things matter. The terms we use often define the conversation, and if you study anything related to rhetoric, philosophy, politics, marketing, etc., you immediately come to realize that you can concede an entire argument by allowing the other side to control the words used.
Calling the copying of files "theft" already concedes a very important question which should not be conceded to the other side: that intellectual property is the same thing as physical property, and that the act of "copying" intellectual property therefore deprives others of enjoyment of the original in the same way that "taking" physical property does. If you concede that point, you lose the opportunity to talk about things like "fair use" or "public domain".
I understand if these topics are too subtle for you to grasp, but feel free to ask questions if you're struggling with an idea.
Star Trek asked all kinds of questions. Do we have a right to arm the locals to fight back against Klingon oppression?...
I agree, but I think Star Trek sometimes suffered from giving answers that were a little too pat. "Do we have a right to kill off the indigenous population so that we can mine the materials we need? " Well, it turns out the answer is "no". That's nice. "Is it acceptable for mixed races to fall in love?" The answer is "yes". Great.
I think it's the mark of much better writing when BSG makes the audience answer these questions with something like, "I want to say 'no', but I'm afraid I feel like I have to say 'yes'. Does that make me a horrible human being?" Maybe it's a matter of opinion, as well as what you're looking for out of a show.
Oh, so you just connect to your ISP, and nothing beyond. I see, your Internet is like one of those BBS from the 80s or something. Poor guy. I bet you wish you could access sites like Slashdot, that have fun news items and things.
PS- I'm someone "like the federal government" that would do anything to enact my "big-government dreams" of having functional infrastructure? Does that accusation even make sense? And also, you think the Internet just "_could_" cross state lines?
I think that might have been a joke, though perhaps not one of the "funny" variety.
One of the more frustrating aspects of the show is that the characters very rarely grow a sufficiently large backbone to Do the Right Thing(TM). And then it's pretty much only because they're forced to do so.
So you're saying it's realistic?
A real individual like that would have carefully controlled the release of that information, being careful to spin it as something out of his control.
Now that seems unrealistic to me-- a world where people take on their problems, admit their mistakes (even with spin), and avoid having their past actions bite them in the ass.
I like that BSG *doesn't* necessarily wrap everything up in a neat little package. Everyone sees a problem, nobody can agree on what to do about it, time passes, nothing gets done, and then it ends up blowing up in everyone's face later down the line. Or not. Sometimes that stuff just passes by and never gets resolved. That sounds much more like the world we live in, rather than having some all-wise character give you a moral to the story at the end of each episode.
Oh, your connection doesn't? You have a magical connection that routes your traffic such that the traffic never leaves your state, and never traverses infrastructure that covers multiple states. What a wondrous magical Internet connection you must have!
Right, because the Internet doesn't cross state lines.
So is this related to the "iPod killer" I keep hearing about? I keep hearing about the iPod killer being released-- I guess because our prison system is overflowing and they're paroling killers-- but I've been wondering why he's called the "iPod killer".
So he a sniper rifle with an iPod scope?
Er... building and/or overseeing the construction and maintenance of our national infrastructure is within the scope of the federal government's purpose. I don't hear anyone complaining about having an interstate highway system.
Also it makes me happy that he had a little something in there about building tech infrastructure. It was never one of his big campaign promises, and it never got a whole hell of a lot of press, but it seems to be persistently in the list of things that Obama is thinking about.
There's a lot to argue about, but if we can actually get a serious Internet rollout nation-wide (of the 20Mbps symmetric fiber variety rather than dialup or even DSL), that could be a very positive thing in the long term.
Interesting that they're both "rich men" suddenly, but I'd rather not beat a dead horse here.
Well we could just as easily make them both poor men, but then you might ask, "How poor is the guy really, if he owns a store?" The point was to get around another factor, which is that many people would probably make some kind of a bad argument that "Well, when you steal from the store, it's not really hurting anyone because the store has lots of money, but if I steal from my neighbor, he's just a guy who doesn't make lots of money."
The point is, it doesn't matter. Stealing from a store isn't any more moral than stealing from a person. When you steal from a store, you're taking the same amount of money out of *someone's* pocket, even though it might not seem like it.
Again, the legal niceties of licensing and infringement are lost on most people; "stealing" is easier to understand because it's something every one knows from when they were small children.
So you're agreeing that it's not theft, but saying that it's appropriate to use inaccurate language because most people are too stupid to understand that copyright infringement hurts people too. Is that right? So calling it "theft" is basically a "noble lie"?
Anyway, I never said, and I would not say, that there's nothing wrong with copyright infringement. Certainly the damages caused by copyright infringement vary from one situation to another (e.g. mass distribution of counterfeit copies for profit is worse than downloading something for personal use, and there are other levels in between), but with the exception of what people call "fair use", it's all morally wrong. However, being morally wrong doesn't make it "theft".
One of the things that I'm glad of (along with other things) is that the judge recognizes that it diminishes the incentive to buy a song after downloading, but it doesn't sound like he goes as far as to say that a downloader won't buy the song.
Yes, it's true that, once I have access to the song, there isn't much incentive to buy it. "Purchasing" it at that point becomes almost like making a "suggested donation" that's entirely voluntary. However, in spite of the diminished incentive, it doesn't necessarily follow that people won't do it.
So I think that's the first thing to recognize-- that just because I've downloaded something illegally doesn't necessarily mean that I won't buy it or haven't bought it. The next step is to recognize that, even if I've downloaded something without having bought it, it doesn't follow that I would have bought it were that download not available.
Put those two together, and it becomes clear that the number of downloads might bear very little relation to the number of lost sales.
Usually the store has bought the CD whether they manage to sell it, it sits on a shelf, or is stolen. The "artist" gets paid either way.
Morally, I don't think stealing a CD from a store owned by a rich man is any worse than stealing the same CD from the home owned by the same rich man. Or at least, I don't see why one would be considered more immoral than the other.
Either way, copyright infringement is very different in that it isn't theft. It's copyright infringement. When I steal a CD, someone has lost a CD. When I infringe on someone's copyright, the creative work gets copied without the copyright owner's permission.
The problem here is that, just because you don't have the authority to tell your boss to do something, that doesn't mean that you won't be held responsible. It's not fair, and it's not sensible, but it's true.
Unfortunately, a lot of people don't understand the problems that come from separating authority and responsibility.
That's a hilarious troll. I actually laughed out loud.
Now I think the only question is whether you can find a way to accuse me of supporting Hitler.
The analogy that the RIAA wants you to think of is shoplifting, not B&E and burglary -- stealing from the store, not stealing from another buyer
What the hell do you think the difference is? Do you think that stealing from a person is much worse than stealing from a store? In both of those cases, it's theft, whereas copyright infringement is not theft.
I don't think you know what a "straw man" is.
the common English word "theft" covers a wide variety of activities, including copyright infringement
Begging the question. I think people are trying to change the English word "theft" to include copyright infringement, even though that's not included in the common connotation nor denotation.
lots of people steal from Shakespeare
That's really a bit of a metaphorical/poetic use. You could also say "that girl stole my heart," but it doesn't mean the girl is literally a thief.
Yes, it seems like they're drawing a couple suspect distinctions in this article. They talk about "light" as being very different from "radio" even though they're both EM radiation, and they talk about "using light" as very different from "using fiber optics", even though it's really just a difference of medium.
I don't really see it working out. We already use that portion of the EM spectrum for... you know... seeing. I guess you could claim that being easily blocked (e.g. by walls) is an advantage, but for most people in most circumstances, being able to pass through lots of materials would be a greater advantage. If you really want tighter security, then instead of relying on walls to block the signal, this technology could be improved by creating some sort of conduit that would go directly from one point to another. Like some kind of fibrous, wiry, cable-like structure between them. I'm sure that would be much better than fiber optics.
Well, no, I'd disagree there. After all, that's the real battleground here, isn't it?
I suppose it's the battleground, in that some people are specifically trying to tie the two together. There's a specific PR campaign to change terminology so that it will change people's perception.
However, when they began this campaign, they were basically starting from zero. I don't think most people started out thinking of copying files as a crime, but certain powers have really fought to have it labelled as "piracy" and "theft".
Even though they've made some headway, ask most people, "Is downloading a song from the internet the same thing as breaking into someone's house and stealing a CD?" I don't think many people will say "yes" unless they have some sort of political stake in pushing that PR.
If BB can provide informed sales staff
Has this changed in the past few years? I don't go to BB as often as I used to, but whenever I used to go, their staff usually didn't know what they were talking about. Of course, it didn't matter much because you could never get anyone to help you there anyway.
To be honest, the benefits I see in going to a brick&mortar place is:
There may be other reasons, but those come to mind. Honestly, I can't think of many stores that I've been in where "service" was a selling point.
Well ok, maybe not "fully". What I really meant by the idea of "taking the RIAA's side fully" was believing that the RIAA is completely right to protect their copyrights by suing people who download/share MP3s online. Even if you believe that without a doubt in your mind, I still think it's a bit unreasonable to admit no distinction between "copyright infringement" and "theft".
Legally, they're distinct. In most people's minds, they're distinct. In the effect they have both for the victim and perpetrator of the crime, they're distinct.
As far as I can tell, people who refuse to acknowledge any kind of distinction between the two are being disingenuous.
Consider if you had spent a year creating a great program, perhaps something to make web browsing impervious to spybots. Then at the end of the year your employer shows you the door, and never pays you, but instead distributes your program for free over the net... It's called theft of labor.
It's called "theft of labor" because, in your example, we're assuming that the employer and the developer had some form of agreement that the employer later violated. Theft of labor, as far as I know, is used to describe situations where a person is deceived (or possibly forced) into doing work.
Therefore, if a musician records a work of his own accord, and without having entered into any agreement with that musician or deceiving him in any way, I copy his songs, then it's not called "theft of labor". It's called "copyright infringement".
Or, at least, it's called "copyright infringement" if the work has been copyrighted, I don't have any license to copy it, I am not exercising fair use, and the work has not been released to public domain. Otherwise, it's just legal copying.
I'm not saying that copyright infringement is right. I don't infringe on others' copyrights, and I don't condone others doing so. It just happens that the crime of copyright infringement is a different crime than theft.
Well it seems like the bigger point here is, "there is no 4th dimension." That makes me want to ask, "which dimension is the fake one?"
Yes, it was Plato. Or perhaps it's worth noting: Socrates (the character) posited that idea in a dialog (i.e. possibly fictional conversation) written by Plato.
The idea was not so much that philosophers were charged with seeing reality and describing it to the masses. Rather, it was a description of certain kinds of difficulty with knowledge. He's describing how it's difficult to know what reality is, and that for all the problems with failing to know "the truth" about a thing, there are other sorts of problems faced by those who know.
There is commonly a lesson drawn from it, that the world that we know may not be the world as it is, but I don't think he had anything so literal and scientific as this in mind. The fact that this may be discoverable, provable, and explainable makes me think that something like this should be disqualified as the sort of "truth" that Socrates is referring to. It's a little too mundane.