There are reasons for everything. I am not ambitious or arrogant enough to offer my theories on economic and political shifts that occurred a century ago. I am not indicting the Republicans or Democrats (and am in fact pretty sick of the partisan idiocy that leads people to criticize the other party for what their party was celebrated for doing). I am responding to the blatantly false assertions that the government is bigger, more powerful, etc than it was 50 or 100 years ago.
Although I am curious as to what Republican mercantilist policies you are referring to. When it comes to free market philosophy, Democrats like JFK are closer to contemporary Republicans than they contemporary Democrats. Or are you thinking of progressive Republicans like Theodore Roosevelt?
The sweeping executive powers of FDR dwarf anything fathomed by the current administration, and don't forget the massively high (at times around 1/3) portion of the GDP that was accounted for by government spending at points in the past. Not to mention the times when the top bracket income taxes were above 70%. Are you blaming Bush for the higher government revenue realized despite lower taxes?
If you want to bash Bush, fine. But don't do it for things that the progressive heroes of the past were far more guilty of.
Why don't you and the other slashbots stop being such drama queens?
Ah yes. I forgot that piece of the Republican party platform:
Take away the personal freedoms of citizens.
Give me a break. Both parties try to limit freedoms. Republicans do it in the name of protecting the population from the individual, whereas Democrats do it to protect individuals from themselves. Frankly, I prefer the former.
In other words, anyone who does something you don't like is a conservative?
Clinton is big on socialism -- that does not mean she (or any other Democrat/Socialist) won't take corporate political contributions. After all, that is how corporations survive socialist governments.
If the creations of you and your peers can be utilized by your employers competitors, how can you expect your employer to earn a normal rate of return, stay in business, and keep you employed? To simplify things a little: Which company would you invest in, the company that pays for its innovations, or the company that utilizes them for free?
Wouldn't those creative abilities of yours suddenly find themselves without funding? Would you be willing to solve this glitch by forgoing the lots of money you make and work for free?
Back to my original point, enough experiments have been tried in the past to rid people of property rights. The existence of technology to subvert property rights is not the reason for dismantling copyright laws, but it was the reason for their existence.
Don't you get to demand when and how other can gain access to your creations, or are you an indentured servant of some sort? Who dictates the terms under which you produce valuable goods/service? What if technology were created and laws pass that enabled others to duplicate and redistribute your creations to the public?
As a matter of fact, property and life are two of the most significant natural rights. Communism typically involves being robbed of individual property rights in order to better society.
There is a subtle difference. Bad business models can't and shouldn't be outlawed, but that doesn't mean there should be laws on the books specifically supporting poor business models.
If I invent wonderful technology that acts as a huge catalytic converter, sucks in smog from cities, processing it into clean air, then putting it back into the atmosphere, should I have the right to require random people from breathing the cleaner air they did not solicit or ask for?
The analogy isn't 100%, of course, and I don't want to get drawn into a discussion of this particular analogy, but my point is that legislation shouldn't be used to prop up poor business models.
When it comes to comparing homicide laws with copyright law -- any law is based on a lot of balances. Will an introduction of a law harm or help society as a whole? Does a law represent the predominant values of those within its jurisdiction? It's clear that laws against murder are a clear benifit to society, irrespective of the fact that killing people, even en masse is technically very easy.
It's not as clear that free distribution of material is harmful in the same way, in fact, we feel that restrictions on redistribution are more harmful to society as a whole than the redistribution itself, which we even feel is benificial.
I think this is where there is a fundamental misalignment between Pirate Party politics and "class liberal" society. Most Western nations (and many Eastern ones now) theoretically exist under the pretense that society is the sum of the individuals and that we help society by helping ourselves. Stripping individuals (by that I mean the many shareholders of firms that hold IP) of their property rights for the sake of bettering society is philosophically contradictory to classic liberalism.
There's a big difference between the tangible and the intangible. But please do try to inform yourself better before dismissing pirate idiology as a knee-jerk reaction.
We in the Swedish Pirate Party have a well-defined ideology based on reform of copyrights, patents and privacy. If you take a few minutes to read our declaration of principles (available from this page, look at the bottom of the page for a link to the file), you can see it's not just a loose cloud of concepts, it's in fact a cohesive argument for reform (not abolition) of copyright and patent laws to fit modern society.
And if anything is knee-jerk, it's comparing the Swedish Pirate Party or Norwegian Venstre to communists. The Pirate Party has no specific political direction. I am personally of a similar general conviction of the Norwegian Venstre party -- centre-right. But the leadership of the Pirate Party contains people from all sides of the political spectrum.
I admit my knowledge of your party's platform is lacking, but "reforming" copyright laws in order to rob people of legally obtained or created property is of a definite political direction.
And anyway, what we propose is a reduction of the term of copyright to around 5 or 20 years after production of the work, in contrast to 70 years after the death of the author as is today. We also want to clarify copyright to only cover *commercial* usage of a work. So the possible "harm" to copylefted free software, in my opinion, is also limited.
Imagine a piece of software that takes an individual 10 years to right compared to a small house that might take another individual 10 years to build. Both individuals invested a large portion of their lives in creating property, but why should the software developer be robbed of his ability to earn a return on his software, whereas the homeowner can hold his house for however long he wants and then sell it at a market rate?
The underlying problem with your proposed reforms is that they will injure and possibly eliminate entire commercial markets. It's easy to think
If a company creates something, they do have a certain right (in the liberal market economic sense) to do whatever the hell they want with it regardless of how poor their business model is. The opining of the Norwegian Pirate Party does not negate this. If you are going to argue that laws to protect copyright are outdated because technology to more easily subvert them has been invented, why not argue that the advent of the firearm should mark the end of murder laws?
These anti-IP arguments essentially break down to the same knee jerk pro-communism arguments that were very prominent 50 years ago. Socializing goods/services for the purposes of making them "free" to the people who want them has rarely demonstrated anything but disaster for those goods/services. Forcing companies to relinquish ownership of goods (even if technology has made them intangible) will have side effects that go far beyond sticking it to the very rich and getting stuff for free.
(And btw, if you don't like copyright laws, please don't complain the next time someone turns something licensed under the GPL into a closed source product.)
Then can you explain why companies holding intellectual property try to prevent its theft? They pay money to create something that can easily be copied, why should they not have exclusive rights on its distribution? Why should you have a right to such intellectual property for free? Just because you want it and claim that protecting it is as outdated as a horse whip?
It gets a lot fuzzier with computers though, especially when software, under some circumstances, can damage hardware. I would never expect home user technical support to give the consumer the benefit of the doubt that it didn't.
Interesting assumption that Wal-Mart's target demographic gives a shit about whether people on Slashdot call the retailer evil or not. Although by Slashdot standards, such a demographic is likely almost as evil as Wal-Mart itself.
Slashdot Mirror
There are reasons for everything. I am not ambitious or arrogant enough to offer my theories on economic and political shifts that occurred a century ago. I am not indicting the Republicans or Democrats (and am in fact pretty sick of the partisan idiocy that leads people to criticize the other party for what their party was celebrated for doing). I am responding to the blatantly false assertions that the government is bigger, more powerful, etc than it was 50 or 100 years ago.
Although I am curious as to what Republican mercantilist policies you are referring to. When it comes to free market philosophy, Democrats like JFK are closer to contemporary Republicans than they contemporary Democrats. Or are you thinking of progressive Republicans like Theodore Roosevelt?
Where do you get your data from?
The sweeping executive powers of FDR dwarf anything fathomed by the current administration, and don't forget the massively high (at times around 1/3) portion of the GDP that was accounted for by government spending at points in the past. Not to mention the times when the top bracket income taxes were above 70%. Are you blaming Bush for the higher government revenue realized despite lower taxes?
If you want to bash Bush, fine. But don't do it for things that the progressive heroes of the past were far more guilty of.
Why don't you and the other slashbots stop being such drama queens?
Ah yes. I forgot that piece of the Republican party platform:
Take away the personal freedoms of citizens.
Give me a break. Both parties try to limit freedoms. Republicans do it in the name of protecting the population from the individual, whereas Democrats do it to protect individuals from themselves. Frankly, I prefer the former.
In other words, anyone who does something you don't like is a conservative?
Clinton is big on socialism -- that does not mean she (or any other Democrat/Socialist) won't take corporate political contributions. After all, that is how corporations survive socialist governments.
If the creations of you and your peers can be utilized by your employers competitors, how can you expect your employer to earn a normal rate of return, stay in business, and keep you employed? To simplify things a little: Which company would you invest in, the company that pays for its innovations, or the company that utilizes them for free?
Wouldn't those creative abilities of yours suddenly find themselves without funding? Would you be willing to solve this glitch by forgoing the lots of money you make and work for free?
Back to my original point, enough experiments have been tried in the past to rid people of property rights. The existence of technology to subvert property rights is not the reason for dismantling copyright laws, but it was the reason for their existence.
Don't you get to demand when and how other can gain access to your creations, or are you an indentured servant of some sort? Who dictates the terms under which you produce valuable goods/service? What if technology were created and laws pass that enabled others to duplicate and redistribute your creations to the public?
I hope for your sake you never become ambitious enough to create something valuable that people are willing to pay for.
As a matter of fact, property and life are two of the most significant natural rights. Communism typically involves being robbed of individual property rights in order to better society.
I think this is where there is a fundamental misalignment between Pirate Party politics and "class liberal" society. Most Western nations (and many Eastern ones now) theoretically exist under the pretense that society is the sum of the individuals and that we help society by helping ourselves. Stripping individuals (by that I mean the many shareholders of firms that hold IP) of their property rights for the sake of bettering society is philosophically contradictory to classic liberalism.
I admit my knowledge of your party's platform is lacking, but "reforming" copyright laws in order to rob people of legally obtained or created property is of a definite political direction.
Imagine a piece of software that takes an individual 10 years to right compared to a small house that might take another individual 10 years to build. Both individuals invested a large portion of their lives in creating property, but why should the software developer be robbed of his ability to earn a return on his software, whereas the homeowner can hold his house for however long he wants and then sell it at a market rate?
The underlying problem with your proposed reforms is that they will injure and possibly eliminate entire commercial markets. It's easy to think
If a company creates something, they do have a certain right (in the liberal market economic sense) to do whatever the hell they want with it regardless of how poor their business model is. The opining of the Norwegian Pirate Party does not negate this. If you are going to argue that laws to protect copyright are outdated because technology to more easily subvert them has been invented, why not argue that the advent of the firearm should mark the end of murder laws?
These anti-IP arguments essentially break down to the same knee jerk pro-communism arguments that were very prominent 50 years ago. Socializing goods/services for the purposes of making them "free" to the people who want them has rarely demonstrated anything but disaster for those goods/services. Forcing companies to relinquish ownership of goods (even if technology has made them intangible) will have side effects that go far beyond sticking it to the very rich and getting stuff for free.
(And btw, if you don't like copyright laws, please don't complain the next time someone turns something licensed under the GPL into a closed source product.)
Then can you explain why companies holding intellectual property try to prevent its theft? They pay money to create something that can easily be copied, why should they not have exclusive rights on its distribution? Why should you have a right to such intellectual property for free? Just because you want it and claim that protecting it is as outdated as a horse whip?
I do.
It gets a lot fuzzier with computers though, especially when software, under some circumstances, can damage hardware. I would never expect home user technical support to give the consumer the benefit of the doubt that it didn't.
The FLSA does deal with a lot of this stuff.
Grow up.
A VB100 badge means little or nothing to these companies, much less their consumers.
Bullshit. France's reputation for being duplicitous (at least somewhat deservedly) predates the year 2002.
Or stop being a smartass: s/Commmunism/Terrorism/
s/anti-Americanism/Communism/
Interesting assumption that Wal-Mart's target demographic gives a shit about whether people on Slashdot call the retailer evil or not. Although by Slashdot standards, such a demographic is likely almost as evil as Wal-Mart itself.
If it was released on time, it would have already been two years late!
If it weren't for Carter's ineffectiveness, Bush would have never been elected.
Who's definitions are those, Karl Marx's?
Still better than Carter.