Why can't they all just exploit their employees to the max like everyone else.
You've touched on something profound there. For a libertarian-minded person to see a corporation taking an active stance on a civil rights issue is absolutely jarring to their world view. Corporations are supposed to be entirely rational actors that care only about the profit motive and always work to maximize efficiency and revenue. Alienating people by taking a controversial stance on an issue that doesn't even have anything to do with their business is, to them, insane. They don't know how to handle it.
They expect businesses to act just like you said, and it's shocking when they sometimes don't because it means maybe their simplistic view of human nature, that we are all ultimately motivated only be selfish self-interest, could be wrong. It also means the opposite thing could happen. Google or some other company could start advocating *against* individual liberties, civil rights, etc, just for the hell of it. Some people just want to watch the world burn. If they're already wealthy and powerful, capitalism has no inbuilt mechanism to stop them. But some people also want to watch the world prosper and see humanity thrive, and they don't care if they lose money making that happen.
What a complex creature man is. It makes the libertarians' heads spin!
And it probably cost about the same as a Mac (after adjusting for inflation), so it's not a "cheap" laptop.
And the new Thinkpads are pretty junky. The quality has dropped significantly since the division was broken off from IBM and sold to Lenovo. You can still find old IBM models running with no problems except maybe a weak battery, which is easily replaceable. In a decade I doubt there'll be as many Lenovo Thinkpads still going strong. They're even now abandoning all the design elements that set them apart like their fantastic keyboards. They're chasing after Apple's industrial design, but that's going to always be a losing proposition since they'll never do Apple-style design as well as Apple themselves.
I don't know about that. My MacBook Pro has lasted three years without any problems and will probably last three more. Since my computing needs are fairly simple I don't see much reason to upgrade just for better specs. I do plan on replacing the spinning drive with an SSD and maybe putting a large HDD where the optical drive currently is. So by buying a MacBook Pro instead of a "cheaper" laptop I probably saved money (and the environment) since it will have to be replaced less often. Other brands of laptops last a couple years at most. It's not unheard of for a Mac notebook to last 5+ years and still enjoy daily use by its owner. Making products that last as long as possible does more for the environment than any specific "green" manufacturing process.
This is still an unfortunate move and I am sad that all those iPads are going to end up in landfills because the battery only holds a charge for a set number of cycles and can't be easily replaced. By the time the battery finally stops holding a charge it'll be "too old" to repair, so people will just get a new tablet. It's not just Apple that does this. Almost all the tablets on the market today are sealed boxes.
NN is about preventing ISPs from picking winners and losers based on who pays them the most money. An ISP should not be allowed to auction off top tier data priority. If we allowed that it would quickly devolve into outright extortion. Comcast can tell Netflix, pay us $X/year or we're going to throttle your service so that all your subscribers can only see 480p video and we'll use that to sell our own service streaming video service that doesn't have such a "problem". Or they'll call Microsoft and say, pay us a fee or we'll start degrading Skype calls and push customers to our own VOIP service.
If you're against NN you probably think running a protection racket is just fine too.
That's not what's happening. They are just trying to trick people into thinking they are getting a good deal, something for free, when in reality you are paying too much for both services bundled together.
They want you to think that the internet costs $69, and then you get cable for free. That's rubbish. You're getting charged something like $40 and $30 for each service individually. They're just "bundled". So if I want to get rid of cable TV, I shouldn't have to keep paying for it. My bill should drop by $30.
Cheapest in my area (central coast California) is $3.85/gl and the California state average is $3.83/gl. Trending down, but still much higher than national average.
Overall, sustained higher prices will benefit the US in the long term. It's putting upward pressure on fuel economy so we're finally making progress catching up with the rest of the world. We have a long way to go still but it's improving. Electric cars are just starting to become viable for the American worker's commute, now price just needs to come down. They are still over twice the price of the ICE versions.
Forgive me for replying to my own post but I made a typo which completely changed the meaning of the last sentence. It should read,
No one is seriously discussing a possible future where selling your labor for money to live is not the norm, despite the fact that every year it becomes harder and harder to do so.
Aye, we all want low taxes, but those who have the most to potentially "lose" want low taxes most of all. They've figured out they can use a fraction of their wealth to lobby for protection of the rest of it.
And I only start to care about other people having more wealth than I when so many have so much more that it starts to cause problems in my society. Some inequality is doubtless necessary as a motivating factor, but we are so far beyond what is necessary. The cost of maintaining our current levels of inequality are great.
The last and most ironic victim might be capitalism itself, if inequity is allowed to persist too long at too high a level. Every business needs customers, and customers need to have money to spend. Think of the implications of every year there being less customers with less money to spend because too much wealth has accumulated at the top. The entire system eventually becomes too top heavy to stand, and collapses. We're probably still a fair ways off from that happening, but I believe we're closer than most people are willing to admit.
We are certainly close enough that we should be having serious discussions on what to do about it, what the future economy might look like. We're not even doing that. No one is seriously discussing a possible future where selling your labor for money to live is the norm, despite the fact that every year it becomes harder and harder to do so.
Economy be damned. We know how to fix it, we just choose to prioritize other things like tolerance for huge wealth inequality, low taxes, and lack of regulation.
Turning the issue around and looking at it from the other direction; it would be hard to make the case that our civilization would be worse off with more highly educated individuals, regardless of their "economic" usefulness. Man does not exist to serve the economy, the economy exists to serve man and enable the nobler pursuits of humanity beyond the daily struggle for mere existence.
The Stuxnet infected computers were "air gapped" meaning they had no connection to the outside internet. Many probably weren't even part of a network at all. They were infected by USB thumbdrives, and maybe a double agent who deliberately delivered the payload to the target machine.
I bought the type of mouthwash that my dentist told me to buy. He said to buy ACT, or a generic equivalent as long as the active ingredients were the same. I've never seen an ad for ACT anywhere. If I did I'd probably stop buying it. Now, maybe they advertised to my dentist and got him to recommend it, but I doubt it.
There are a lot of people like me who consider advertising to be an insult to our intelligence and free will. Advertising isn't meant to inform, it's meant to deceive in a way that goes right up to that line of lying -- but in theory not cross it. They often do cross the line into outright lies, and then our legal system has to kick in. It's a huge waste of human effort and time all around.
As often as I click on any other ad, which is never.
Advertising is offensive (the concept of advertising, irrespective of the content) to me and I go out of my way to block it and avoid it wherever and whenever possible.
Advertising is unwanted, and intended to mislead. It is especially obnoxious on a platform that costs a lot of money and has a small screen. Phones and plans are expensive and then on top of that you tell people they are going to see ads? They're not going to be happy. I especially hate efforts to spy on me in order to increase the effectiveness of ads that I don't want to see for products I don't want.
Moreover, I find *ALL* advertising to be annoying and unwanted, the more custom tailored it is to me the more offensive I find it. Also, advertising seems to operate under the assumption that people have money to spend. Tell me, how is an advertising based economy going to work when every year more and more people are unemployed? I don't care how targeted and relevant your ads are, people without jobs aren't going to buy your product/service.
The advertising economy is headed for a huge crash, and mobile is just an especially obvious example. It's a scam, top to bottom.
I find *ALL* advertising to be annoying and unwanted, the more custom tailored it is to me the more offensive I find it. Also, advertising seems to operate under the assumption that people have money to spend. Tell me, how is an advertising based economy going to work when every year more and more people are unemployed? I don't care how targeted and relevant your ads are, people without jobs aren't going to buy your product/service.
The advertising economy is headed for a huge crash. It's a scam, top to bottom.
It's also incredibly highly skilled, and most people are priced out of the education required to become doctors, even if they have the natural talent and desire to do the job. In the US there's even an open conspiracy to allow only a slow trickle of new doctors to be licensed so that prices for their services can be kept artificially high. A non-free education system is always going to misuse/squander some human talent.
Then there's the massive amount of man hours and intelligent people who go into law, a profession which does nothing but -- in theory -- enable the rest of the system to function. It's the overhead of civil society. Or at least it was meant to be just the overhead, but now is a self-serving end unto itself which creates more work for its own members where there need not be any.
Except that would go against the other parts of their own user agreement which says I retain rights to the photos I upload. They only have the right to share them with people I authorize based on my privacy settings and friends list.
As do I and many others. So my solution, which is increasingly becoming popular, is to eschew paid-services altogether. TV programs and movies are downloaded to my media center PC and are streamed to my TV or computers. All I want is for my ISP to sell me a fat pipe that I can pull unlimited bits through per month for a flat price. I'll handle the rest.
I don't need cable TV, I don't need Netflix, I don't need iTunes Store episodes. I just want unlimited bandwidth from my ISP, and general purpose hardware from whatever company is producing the best hardware for my needs -- that's usually Apple. I'll be interested in the Apple TV if they ever make it (not the set top box, the actual TV) but I'll be damned if I'll be using it as a method to purchase content from ITMS. I'll handle the acquisition of content myself, I just want a nice TV to watch it on that integrates will with my other devices on the network. Since most of those are Apple devices, it should work out well.
Luckily we live in an age where they have no power over the most important content distribution system ever created: the Internet. While they'll never agree to change the actual laws to something more suited to the technological reality of our day, the network of networks plods on indifferent to their temper tantrums and objections. The Pirate Bay et al will continue to exist, or something like it. The de facto situation is as I previously described. They still control the actual laws, but look at all the good that has done them. Have stronger copyright laws reduced the amount of sharing? Not a bit. In that way, this battle has already been won.
Let them have their laws (which amount to censorship and theft of culture from the public sphere by denying growth of the public domain), I'll happily ignore them and encourage everyone else to do same.
Time may come when my personal freedom becomes endangered by this stance, and then you'll find me with the other patriots taking up arms once again to overthrow a government no longer serving and accountable to the governed.
I don't have to provide a new system just because I point out that the current one is broken beyond repair, unethical, exploitative, and harmful to society.
I don't accept the legitimacy of "intellectual property" and I don't recognize copyright law (on a related topic, I also consider all forms of commercial advertising to be unethical). These concepts are against the natural order of the universe, and serve an immoral purpose of creating restrictions on the free flow of ideas, data, information, and culture where such restrictions do not naturally exist. You'll notice that this is not an argument from -- or an argument that even attempts to address -- economic issues. This is an ideological issue for me, and economic repercussions be damned.
I fully acknowledge that many works of art and culture would be impossible without our current system, and no such system exists to replace the current one that will produce everything we currently have; no more $400M movies. So be it. I'd rather such things not exist at all if they cannot be made ethically.
I'll leave off with a quote from Thomas Jefferson which explains my ethos,
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
If it's free, why not sign up for it and then cancel once the free offer period ends? Or do they want you sign a contract saying you get a year free and then agree to pay monthly for another year?
Many people are like you, and if there were easy and affordable ways to get access to content you'd probably choose that instead of downloading it for free.
But there exist also people in my camp. I don't accept the legitimacy of "intellectual property" and I don't recognize copyright law (on a related topic, I also consider all forms of commercial advertising to be unethical). These concepts are against the natural order of the universe, and serve an immoral purpose of creating restrictions on the free flow of ideas, data, information, and culture where such restrictions do not naturally exist. You'll notice that this is not an argument from -- or an argument that even attempts to address -- economic issues. This is an ideological issue for me, and economic repercussions be damned.
I fully acknowledge that many works of art and culture would be impossible without our current system, and no such system exists to replace the current one that will produce everything we currently have; no more $400M movies. So be it. I'd rather such things not exist at all if they cannot be made ethically.
I'll leave off with a quote from Thomas Jefferson,
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
Slashdot Mirror
Why can't they all just exploit their employees to the max like everyone else.
You've touched on something profound there. For a libertarian-minded person to see a corporation taking an active stance on a civil rights issue is absolutely jarring to their world view. Corporations are supposed to be entirely rational actors that care only about the profit motive and always work to maximize efficiency and revenue. Alienating people by taking a controversial stance on an issue that doesn't even have anything to do with their business is, to them, insane. They don't know how to handle it.
They expect businesses to act just like you said, and it's shocking when they sometimes don't because it means maybe their simplistic view of human nature, that we are all ultimately motivated only be selfish self-interest, could be wrong. It also means the opposite thing could happen. Google or some other company could start advocating *against* individual liberties, civil rights, etc, just for the hell of it. Some people just want to watch the world burn. If they're already wealthy and powerful, capitalism has no inbuilt mechanism to stop them. But some people also want to watch the world prosper and see humanity thrive, and they don't care if they lose money making that happen.
What a complex creature man is. It makes the libertarians' heads spin!
And it probably cost about the same as a Mac (after adjusting for inflation), so it's not a "cheap" laptop.
And the new Thinkpads are pretty junky. The quality has dropped significantly since the division was broken off from IBM and sold to Lenovo. You can still find old IBM models running with no problems except maybe a weak battery, which is easily replaceable. In a decade I doubt there'll be as many Lenovo Thinkpads still going strong. They're even now abandoning all the design elements that set them apart like their fantastic keyboards. They're chasing after Apple's industrial design, but that's going to always be a losing proposition since they'll never do Apple-style design as well as Apple themselves.
I don't know about that. My MacBook Pro has lasted three years without any problems and will probably last three more. Since my computing needs are fairly simple I don't see much reason to upgrade just for better specs. I do plan on replacing the spinning drive with an SSD and maybe putting a large HDD where the optical drive currently is. So by buying a MacBook Pro instead of a "cheaper" laptop I probably saved money (and the environment) since it will have to be replaced less often. Other brands of laptops last a couple years at most. It's not unheard of for a Mac notebook to last 5+ years and still enjoy daily use by its owner. Making products that last as long as possible does more for the environment than any specific "green" manufacturing process.
This is still an unfortunate move and I am sad that all those iPads are going to end up in landfills because the battery only holds a charge for a set number of cycles and can't be easily replaced. By the time the battery finally stops holding a charge it'll be "too old" to repair, so people will just get a new tablet. It's not just Apple that does this. Almost all the tablets on the market today are sealed boxes.
That analogy is just so bad, it hurts.
NN is about preventing ISPs from picking winners and losers based on who pays them the most money. An ISP should not be allowed to auction off top tier data priority. If we allowed that it would quickly devolve into outright extortion. Comcast can tell Netflix, pay us $X/year or we're going to throttle your service so that all your subscribers can only see 480p video and we'll use that to sell our own service streaming video service that doesn't have such a "problem". Or they'll call Microsoft and say, pay us a fee or we'll start degrading Skype calls and push customers to our own VOIP service.
If you're against NN you probably think running a protection racket is just fine too.
How can you make such a definitive statement like "b"? Do you have some secret knowledge the rest of the scientific community doesn't?
That's not what's happening. They are just trying to trick people into thinking they are getting a good deal, something for free, when in reality you are paying too much for both services bundled together.
They want you to think that the internet costs $69, and then you get cable for free. That's rubbish. You're getting charged something like $40 and $30 for each service individually. They're just "bundled". So if I want to get rid of cable TV, I shouldn't have to keep paying for it. My bill should drop by $30.
Cheapest in my area (central coast California) is $3.85/gl and the California state average is $3.83/gl. Trending down, but still much higher than national average.
Overall, sustained higher prices will benefit the US in the long term. It's putting upward pressure on fuel economy so we're finally making progress catching up with the rest of the world. We have a long way to go still but it's improving. Electric cars are just starting to become viable for the American worker's commute, now price just needs to come down. They are still over twice the price of the ICE versions.
They are not capitalists in any meaningful sense of the term.
Do your arms ever get tired moving that goalpost so much?
Cottoncandy Pony Unicorn Rainbowland
Whimsyshire, surely.
Forgive me for replying to my own post but I made a typo which completely changed the meaning of the last sentence. It should read,
No one is seriously discussing a possible future where selling your labor for money to live is not the norm, despite the fact that every year it becomes harder and harder to do so.
Aye, we all want low taxes, but those who have the most to potentially "lose" want low taxes most of all. They've figured out they can use a fraction of their wealth to lobby for protection of the rest of it.
And I only start to care about other people having more wealth than I when so many have so much more that it starts to cause problems in my society. Some inequality is doubtless necessary as a motivating factor, but we are so far beyond what is necessary. The cost of maintaining our current levels of inequality are great.
The last and most ironic victim might be capitalism itself, if inequity is allowed to persist too long at too high a level. Every business needs customers, and customers need to have money to spend. Think of the implications of every year there being less customers with less money to spend because too much wealth has accumulated at the top. The entire system eventually becomes too top heavy to stand, and collapses. We're probably still a fair ways off from that happening, but I believe we're closer than most people are willing to admit.
We are certainly close enough that we should be having serious discussions on what to do about it, what the future economy might look like. We're not even doing that. No one is seriously discussing a possible future where selling your labor for money to live is the norm, despite the fact that every year it becomes harder and harder to do so.
Economy be damned. We know how to fix it, we just choose to prioritize other things like tolerance for huge wealth inequality, low taxes, and lack of regulation.
Turning the issue around and looking at it from the other direction; it would be hard to make the case that our civilization would be worse off with more highly educated individuals, regardless of their "economic" usefulness. Man does not exist to serve the economy, the economy exists to serve man and enable the nobler pursuits of humanity beyond the daily struggle for mere existence.
The Stuxnet infected computers were "air gapped" meaning they had no connection to the outside internet. Many probably weren't even part of a network at all. They were infected by USB thumbdrives, and maybe a double agent who deliberately delivered the payload to the target machine.
I bought the type of mouthwash that my dentist told me to buy. He said to buy ACT, or a generic equivalent as long as the active ingredients were the same. I've never seen an ad for ACT anywhere. If I did I'd probably stop buying it. Now, maybe they advertised to my dentist and got him to recommend it, but I doubt it.
There are a lot of people like me who consider advertising to be an insult to our intelligence and free will. Advertising isn't meant to inform, it's meant to deceive in a way that goes right up to that line of lying -- but in theory not cross it. They often do cross the line into outright lies, and then our legal system has to kick in. It's a huge waste of human effort and time all around.
As often as I click on any other ad, which is never.
Advertising is offensive (the concept of advertising, irrespective of the content) to me and I go out of my way to block it and avoid it wherever and whenever possible.
Advertising is unwanted, and intended to mislead. It is especially obnoxious on a platform that costs a lot of money and has a small screen. Phones and plans are expensive and then on top of that you tell people they are going to see ads? They're not going to be happy. I especially hate efforts to spy on me in order to increase the effectiveness of ads that I don't want to see for products I don't want.
Moreover, I find *ALL* advertising to be annoying and unwanted, the more custom tailored it is to me the more offensive I find it. Also, advertising seems to operate under the assumption that people have money to spend. Tell me, how is an advertising based economy going to work when every year more and more people are unemployed? I don't care how targeted and relevant your ads are, people without jobs aren't going to buy your product/service.
The advertising economy is headed for a huge crash, and mobile is just an especially obvious example. It's a scam, top to bottom.
I find *ALL* advertising to be annoying and unwanted, the more custom tailored it is to me the more offensive I find it. Also, advertising seems to operate under the assumption that people have money to spend. Tell me, how is an advertising based economy going to work when every year more and more people are unemployed? I don't care how targeted and relevant your ads are, people without jobs aren't going to buy your product/service.
The advertising economy is headed for a huge crash. It's a scam, top to bottom.
It's also incredibly highly skilled, and most people are priced out of the education required to become doctors, even if they have the natural talent and desire to do the job. In the US there's even an open conspiracy to allow only a slow trickle of new doctors to be licensed so that prices for their services can be kept artificially high. A non-free education system is always going to misuse/squander some human talent.
Then there's the massive amount of man hours and intelligent people who go into law, a profession which does nothing but -- in theory -- enable the rest of the system to function. It's the overhead of civil society. Or at least it was meant to be just the overhead, but now is a self-serving end unto itself which creates more work for its own members where there need not be any.
Except that would go against the other parts of their own user agreement which says I retain rights to the photos I upload. They only have the right to share them with people I authorize based on my privacy settings and friends list.
As do I and many others. So my solution, which is increasingly becoming popular, is to eschew paid-services altogether. TV programs and movies are downloaded to my media center PC and are streamed to my TV or computers. All I want is for my ISP to sell me a fat pipe that I can pull unlimited bits through per month for a flat price. I'll handle the rest.
I don't need cable TV, I don't need Netflix, I don't need iTunes Store episodes. I just want unlimited bandwidth from my ISP, and general purpose hardware from whatever company is producing the best hardware for my needs -- that's usually Apple. I'll be interested in the Apple TV if they ever make it (not the set top box, the actual TV) but I'll be damned if I'll be using it as a method to purchase content from ITMS. I'll handle the acquisition of content myself, I just want a nice TV to watch it on that integrates will with my other devices on the network. Since most of those are Apple devices, it should work out well.
Luckily we live in an age where they have no power over the most important content distribution system ever created: the Internet. While they'll never agree to change the actual laws to something more suited to the technological reality of our day, the network of networks plods on indifferent to their temper tantrums and objections. The Pirate Bay et al will continue to exist, or something like it. The de facto situation is as I previously described. They still control the actual laws, but look at all the good that has done them. Have stronger copyright laws reduced the amount of sharing? Not a bit. In that way, this battle has already been won.
Let them have their laws (which amount to censorship and theft of culture from the public sphere by denying growth of the public domain), I'll happily ignore them and encourage everyone else to do same.
Time may come when my personal freedom becomes endangered by this stance, and then you'll find me with the other patriots taking up arms once again to overthrow a government no longer serving and accountable to the governed.
You're forgetting that having no system at all is an option; an option that I would suggest would be better than what we currently have.
I don't have to provide a new system just because I point out that the current one is broken beyond repair, unethical, exploitative, and harmful to society.
I don't accept the legitimacy of "intellectual property" and I don't recognize copyright law (on a related topic, I also consider all forms of commercial advertising to be unethical). These concepts are against the natural order of the universe, and serve an immoral purpose of creating restrictions on the free flow of ideas, data, information, and culture where such restrictions do not naturally exist. You'll notice that this is not an argument from -- or an argument that even attempts to address -- economic issues. This is an ideological issue for me, and economic repercussions be damned.
I fully acknowledge that many works of art and culture would be impossible without our current system, and no such system exists to replace the current one that will produce everything we currently have; no more $400M movies. So be it. I'd rather such things not exist at all if they cannot be made ethically.
I'll leave off with a quote from Thomas Jefferson which explains my ethos,
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."
If it's free, why not sign up for it and then cancel once the free offer period ends? Or do they want you sign a contract saying you get a year free and then agree to pay monthly for another year?
Many people are like you, and if there were easy and affordable ways to get access to content you'd probably choose that instead of downloading it for free.
But there exist also people in my camp. I don't accept the legitimacy of "intellectual property" and I don't recognize copyright law (on a related topic, I also consider all forms of commercial advertising to be unethical). These concepts are against the natural order of the universe, and serve an immoral purpose of creating restrictions on the free flow of ideas, data, information, and culture where such restrictions do not naturally exist. You'll notice that this is not an argument from -- or an argument that even attempts to address -- economic issues. This is an ideological issue for me, and economic repercussions be damned.
I fully acknowledge that many works of art and culture would be impossible without our current system, and no such system exists to replace the current one that will produce everything we currently have; no more $400M movies. So be it. I'd rather such things not exist at all if they cannot be made ethically.
I'll leave off with a quote from Thomas Jefferson,
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."