But copyright holders have a right to pursue their rights
Why? Where does that notion come from? The very existence of copyright is a choice by society, it is not supported by any natural law. In fact, as Thomas Jefferson figured out almost 200 years ago, ideas are fundamentally incompatible with the concept of ownership and private property. You have no right to control how your ideas are used, spread, or altered after they leave your own mind. The only way you can protect an idea from being spread is to keep it to yourself. Once it's out, you can't put it back, you can't take it away from people whom it has spread to. An "idea" can be an invention, a song, a novel, just about anything that is the product of human imagination or ingenuity (not in physical form).
"Intellectual property" is a fiction. It's a mass-delusion. It's a choice. It is not inevitable, it is not necessary, and it has not been an aspect of civilization for most of human history. We've accepted it because it was a useful compromise for a long time, but it is rapidly losing relevance and efficacy. As you can plainly see, attempts to maintain the entrenched system are leading to abuses of civil and privacy rights in the name of enforcing copyright law. It's no longer an enabling force for human creativity, it has become a threat to human freedom.
Having to write all of that software themselves may have set the barrier to entry too high for them to ever get started. Even a small increase in start up cost can be the difference between a product or service launching or never even being attempted.
This being a nerd oriented site I would think people would be smarter than this. You are spreading an untrue urban legend derived from a misunderstanding of how computer software works. Those layers were caused by Adobe's PDF software. An expert from Adobe confirmed as much.
I don't see how that's any different than a county/town banning strip clubs, bars, alcohol sales. Are you equally outraged when that happens? If not, you're displaying some cognitive dissidence that you should see to before preaching to others about moral clarity.
By reading this post you agree to give me exclusive rights to any patentable ideas you ever come up with, in perpetuity throughout the universe, and at any time in the past should time travel become possible.
I think YouTube audio is something like 64kbps highly compressed MP3 so it's even lower quality than even the worst torrents you'll find. Same with ripping from streams like Pandora or Spotify, it's usually radio quality. That used to be acceptable but today with lossless codecs and cheap storage in the terabytes there's no reason to put up with low bitrates.
Direct download sites (I like filestube which searches many of them from one place) are the best option if you are worried about getting caught using BitTorrent.
And I'm willing to pay exactly zero dollars for the handful of shows I want to see. I am more than satisfied with the BitTorrent model. It's over, the era of pay-content has ended for a huge chunk of en entire generation of potential customers. They're not going to start paying, ever.
Cable companies had a choice between taking a small hit to their profits or a large one and for some reason they chose the latter. Their shareholders should be outraged.
I assume you live in Iceland since you made that comment about the pepper spray. Try to imagine living in the USA. Most of our states are several times larger than your entire country (and most of Iceland is uninhabited). The largest city in Iceland has a bit over 100,000 people. And the entire country is a remote island! It's almost like it was purposefully created to be easy to control imports and how imported products are used once they get there. The Icelandic police could get rid of all guns in a few weeks by literally going to every house and looking for them.
This is not the same situation we face in the USA. We are a continental country with two massive borders. To our South is a country without a functioning government (with respect to internal security). Smuggling is rampant. Let's say we decided to ban guns and follow Europe in their social policy. What would happen?
-Many gun owning citizens would be angry, hide their guns, and probably become violent if the government tried to take them. -A black market for guns would be expanded (it already exists) -Smuggling of guns from Mexico and Canada would increase immensely and we can't realistically stop them all. -Citizens who give up their guns to follow the law will be unarmed, but their criminal attackers won't be.
In short, we'd be much worse off.
Why would being around a law-abiding citizen who has a gun scare you? Maybe it's because I grew up around guns and people who owned them but seeing a pistol on someone's belt doesn't bother me at all. It's just something you see sometimes. I'm only afraid of criminals with guns, and they tend to hide them until the crime starts so you never knew they had one anyway. I'd much rather bullets being flying both directions during a shootout, than just coming from the criminal who wants to kill as many people as possible. The lawful armed citizens only want to kill one person, the attacker.
The part where if guns were banned, there'd be a thriving black market for them and criminals would still be able to get their hands on guns. Banning guns will NEVER result in criminals not being able to buy them, not in the USA at least. Our nation is too big, borders too porous, and there are too many guns already here for a ban to work.
Devil's advocate would say that it also arms and protects any potential victims, regardless of their physical strength. An elderly woman with a gun, trained to use it proficiently, can bring down a muscular adult male attacker just as easily as any other person. Guns are, as they say, the great equalizer.
There's also a simple thought experiment: suppose an armed gunman breaks into your theater. Would you rather A) be unarmed, or B) have a concealed pistol.
The equation for gun violence plotted with gun ownership might not be linear or exponential. Maybe gun violence initially goes up sharply with ownership and then drops off if enough honest, law-abiding, citizens are armed.
Any sufficiently oppressive government could just ban excessive facial hair, defined as any amount of hair which interferes with your face being reliably scanned.
Many of us do find copyright law to be unconscionable. The ramifications are far wider than just "whether an author has control over their works". There are deep cultural and social harms done to individuals and society as a whole by copyright law existing and being enforced.
Too much wealth inequality (a specific, and common type with a majority of wealth concentrated in the top fraction of a percent) is unhealthy for a few reasons. First, it reduces demand because it reduces purchasing power from the masses (the people who make a "mass" market possible). Who buys more cell phones? One rich person who could buy up all the cellphones made if he wanted to, or millions of middle class workers each with enough money to buy 1 phone and the desire to have one. The wealthy citizen probably also has a desire for a phone, but he'll only buy one just like everyone else. He could easily buy a million phones, so why doesn't he? Because there's a limit to what a human needs. There is a limit to how much demand an individual can create. This is the opposite of what some other schools of thought say, which would have you believe that human demand for goods and services is effectively infinite. But that's not true in any meaningful way. Even if I was a complete phone nut--or lets use cars instead because it makes it more obvious--even if I was really into cars I can still only drive one car at a time. I might have a huge collection of cars to choose from but I can't use them all at the same time. And there'll be a ton of other products that I use, but don't really care about, so I'll only buy one and then I'll stop because that's all I'll ever need at a time. So that's why more wealth in the hands of a few people is bad for demand. And demand creates jobs, it's the only thing that does. Businesses expand and hire when they see that their current capacity isn't enough to meet the demands of the market. They see that untapped demand and seek to profit from it, which is what a business is supposed to do.
Now, as a Technocrat I have a whole bunch of other problems with that situation that I could talk about, how capitalism is doomed to fail through technological unemployment eroding the mass market's ability to function, but that's a different discussion.
Wealth inequality is also unhealthy in a social way, not directly related to the economy. Too much wealth inequality breeds resentment, disunity, anti-social behavior, anger, stress, and--when it gets bad enough--violence. If nothing is done to stop it and the situation gets bad enough heads literally start to roll. Even if you stave off outright revolution, those other things I mentioned aren't good for the physical or spiritual health of a nation's people.
I'll concede that a certain amount of inequality is necessary, even healthy and useful, but when taken to extremes or used punitively the results are almost always disastrous for everyone--even the people who rigged the game in their favor to get to the top fraction of a percent in society can still have their life snuffed out by a determined and angry mob with a guillotine, or one man with a high powered rifle. And for what? Was it not enough to make 10 times as much as everyone else? 100 times more wasn't enough? 1000? Was that cycle of oppression, poverty, blood and revolution worth it, just so one person could buy millions of cellphones?
Even if artists received NOTHING there would still be exactly zero danger of new music production coming to a stop. Humans are going to make art of all kinds as long as they exist and not being able to make money from it, even if that were the case, won't stop them. It might reduce the amount, quality, and scope of produced works but it will not cause the production of art to cease. And I'm not even convinced it would cause production to slow down at all. It's very likely we'd see more and better stuff being produced. I've seen more evidence to prove that point than the opposite one the RIAA/MPAA try to make.
To libertarians, or like minds who worship at the alter of the "free market", there are not different types of property. There is private property, which includes all matter/energy in the universe (once someone can claim it, usually by force or fiat, but that's OK as long as it wasn't already claimed by someone else. Actually even if was claimed by someone else it might still be OK if they were brown-skinned or "primitive" and not making use of it), and there is also theft of private property.
They can't get their heads around an idea unless you relate it to them in terms of private property. Music is just property like land or cars to be bought and sold on some sort of market. The idea that data is this ephemeral concept that exists outside of space and time and is therefore not wholly governed by physical law (and certainly not man-made or defined economic laws) doesn't fit into their world-view on any level. There's a fundamental difference in the metaphysical philosophy of libertarianism that makes this line of discussion an automatic impasse.
The GPL is sort of a hack of the Copyright System that attempts to make it work the way the creators of the GPL think copyright should have been set up to begin with. So yes, Copyright is "necessary" for the GPL to work, but only because Copyright came first and GPL built on it to try to "fix" copyright. Since tearing down the system and rebuilding it properly (according to their definition of "proper") wasn't an option, they chose instead to use Copyright against itself and created the GPL.
I don't think RMS would be against enforcement of Copyright laws as long as those laws fit his definition of fairness and justice, which is much different than most people's to be sure.
Almost every Mac user uses Mail.app, and anyone with an iOS device who uses it for e-mail does too, and anyone who works in an office probably uses MS Office including Outlook Mail.
So as long as they're not tampering with US Government property (mailboxes) you are allowed to run a competing mail services. The government went through the trouble of setting up and paying for all those mailboxes with taxes, so the government mail system gets exclusive use of them. Seems fair to me.
Which is why the physical infrastructure should be nationalized and leased by the government to private businesses who must then compete with each other. This would lower the barriers to entry and open up competition. And laying all that fiber will create a lot of jobs too.
Slashdot Mirror
Good riddance, I say.
Of course Assange parading around South America thumbing his nose at the US would also be widely celebrated by far the majority of South Americans.
And many of us here in the USA as well.
But copyright holders have a right to pursue their rights
Why? Where does that notion come from? The very existence of copyright is a choice by society, it is not supported by any natural law. In fact, as Thomas Jefferson figured out almost 200 years ago, ideas are fundamentally incompatible with the concept of ownership and private property. You have no right to control how your ideas are used, spread, or altered after they leave your own mind. The only way you can protect an idea from being spread is to keep it to yourself. Once it's out, you can't put it back, you can't take it away from people whom it has spread to. An "idea" can be an invention, a song, a novel, just about anything that is the product of human imagination or ingenuity (not in physical form).
"Intellectual property" is a fiction. It's a mass-delusion. It's a choice. It is not inevitable, it is not necessary, and it has not been an aspect of civilization for most of human history. We've accepted it because it was a useful compromise for a long time, but it is rapidly losing relevance and efficacy. As you can plainly see, attempts to maintain the entrenched system are leading to abuses of civil and privacy rights in the name of enforcing copyright law. It's no longer an enabling force for human creativity, it has become a threat to human freedom.
Having to write all of that software themselves may have set the barrier to entry too high for them to ever get started. Even a small increase in start up cost can be the difference between a product or service launching or never even being attempted.
This being a nerd oriented site I would think people would be smarter than this. You are spreading an untrue urban legend derived from a misunderstanding of how computer software works. Those layers were caused by Adobe's PDF software. An expert from Adobe confirmed as much.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/birthers/birthcertificate.asp
I don't see how that's any different than a county/town banning strip clubs, bars, alcohol sales. Are you equally outraged when that happens? If not, you're displaying some cognitive dissidence that you should see to before preaching to others about moral clarity.
Yeah, good luck enforcing that.
By reading this post you agree to give me exclusive rights to any patentable ideas you ever come up with, in perpetuity throughout the universe, and at any time in the past should time travel become possible.
America also refers to The United States of America. Sorry, you lost this one. Just try to accept it.
I think YouTube audio is something like 64kbps highly compressed MP3 so it's even lower quality than even the worst torrents you'll find. Same with ripping from streams like Pandora or Spotify, it's usually radio quality. That used to be acceptable but today with lossless codecs and cheap storage in the terabytes there's no reason to put up with low bitrates.
Direct download sites (I like filestube which searches many of them from one place) are the best option if you are worried about getting caught using BitTorrent.
And I'm willing to pay exactly zero dollars for the handful of shows I want to see. I am more than satisfied with the BitTorrent model. It's over, the era of pay-content has ended for a huge chunk of en entire generation of potential customers. They're not going to start paying, ever.
Cable companies had a choice between taking a small hit to their profits or a large one and for some reason they chose the latter. Their shareholders should be outraged.
My question stands: would you rather be armed or unarmed in that situation, all else considered?
I assume you live in Iceland since you made that comment about the pepper spray. Try to imagine living in the USA. Most of our states are several times larger than your entire country (and most of Iceland is uninhabited). The largest city in Iceland has a bit over 100,000 people. And the entire country is a remote island! It's almost like it was purposefully created to be easy to control imports and how imported products are used once they get there. The Icelandic police could get rid of all guns in a few weeks by literally going to every house and looking for them.
This is not the same situation we face in the USA. We are a continental country with two massive borders. To our South is a country without a functioning government (with respect to internal security). Smuggling is rampant. Let's say we decided to ban guns and follow Europe in their social policy. What would happen?
-Many gun owning citizens would be angry, hide their guns, and probably become violent if the government tried to take them.
-A black market for guns would be expanded (it already exists)
-Smuggling of guns from Mexico and Canada would increase immensely and we can't realistically stop them all.
-Citizens who give up their guns to follow the law will be unarmed, but their criminal attackers won't be.
In short, we'd be much worse off.
Why would being around a law-abiding citizen who has a gun scare you? Maybe it's because I grew up around guns and people who owned them but seeing a pistol on someone's belt doesn't bother me at all. It's just something you see sometimes. I'm only afraid of criminals with guns, and they tend to hide them until the crime starts so you never knew they had one anyway. I'd much rather bullets being flying both directions during a shootout, than just coming from the criminal who wants to kill as many people as possible. The lawful armed citizens only want to kill one person, the attacker.
The part where if guns were banned, there'd be a thriving black market for them and criminals would still be able to get their hands on guns. Banning guns will NEVER result in criminals not being able to buy them, not in the USA at least. Our nation is too big, borders too porous, and there are too many guns already here for a ban to work.
Devil's advocate would say that it also arms and protects any potential victims, regardless of their physical strength. An elderly woman with a gun, trained to use it proficiently, can bring down a muscular adult male attacker just as easily as any other person. Guns are, as they say, the great equalizer.
There's also a simple thought experiment: suppose an armed gunman breaks into your theater. Would you rather A) be unarmed, or B) have a concealed pistol.
The equation for gun violence plotted with gun ownership might not be linear or exponential. Maybe gun violence initially goes up sharply with ownership and then drops off if enough honest, law-abiding, citizens are armed.
Any sufficiently oppressive government could just ban excessive facial hair, defined as any amount of hair which interferes with your face being reliably scanned.
Many of us do find copyright law to be unconscionable. The ramifications are far wider than just "whether an author has control over their works". There are deep cultural and social harms done to individuals and society as a whole by copyright law existing and being enforced.
I'll take a stab at point 3.
Too much wealth inequality (a specific, and common type with a majority of wealth concentrated in the top fraction of a percent) is unhealthy for a few reasons. First, it reduces demand because it reduces purchasing power from the masses (the people who make a "mass" market possible). Who buys more cell phones? One rich person who could buy up all the cellphones made if he wanted to, or millions of middle class workers each with enough money to buy 1 phone and the desire to have one. The wealthy citizen probably also has a desire for a phone, but he'll only buy one just like everyone else. He could easily buy a million phones, so why doesn't he? Because there's a limit to what a human needs. There is a limit to how much demand an individual can create. This is the opposite of what some other schools of thought say, which would have you believe that human demand for goods and services is effectively infinite. But that's not true in any meaningful way. Even if I was a complete phone nut--or lets use cars instead because it makes it more obvious--even if I was really into cars I can still only drive one car at a time. I might have a huge collection of cars to choose from but I can't use them all at the same time. And there'll be a ton of other products that I use, but don't really care about, so I'll only buy one and then I'll stop because that's all I'll ever need at a time. So that's why more wealth in the hands of a few people is bad for demand. And demand creates jobs, it's the only thing that does. Businesses expand and hire when they see that their current capacity isn't enough to meet the demands of the market. They see that untapped demand and seek to profit from it, which is what a business is supposed to do.
Now, as a Technocrat I have a whole bunch of other problems with that situation that I could talk about, how capitalism is doomed to fail through technological unemployment eroding the mass market's ability to function, but that's a different discussion.
Wealth inequality is also unhealthy in a social way, not directly related to the economy. Too much wealth inequality breeds resentment, disunity, anti-social behavior, anger, stress, and--when it gets bad enough--violence. If nothing is done to stop it and the situation gets bad enough heads literally start to roll. Even if you stave off outright revolution, those other things I mentioned aren't good for the physical or spiritual health of a nation's people.
I'll concede that a certain amount of inequality is necessary, even healthy and useful, but when taken to extremes or used punitively the results are almost always disastrous for everyone--even the people who rigged the game in their favor to get to the top fraction of a percent in society can still have their life snuffed out by a determined and angry mob with a guillotine, or one man with a high powered rifle. And for what? Was it not enough to make 10 times as much as everyone else? 100 times more wasn't enough? 1000? Was that cycle of oppression, poverty, blood and revolution worth it, just so one person could buy millions of cellphones?
Maybe established artists could start taking on promising young start-ups as apprentices? It's worked for thousands of years in other industries.
Even if artists received NOTHING there would still be exactly zero danger of new music production coming to a stop. Humans are going to make art of all kinds as long as they exist and not being able to make money from it, even if that were the case, won't stop them. It might reduce the amount, quality, and scope of produced works but it will not cause the production of art to cease. And I'm not even convinced it would cause production to slow down at all. It's very likely we'd see more and better stuff being produced. I've seen more evidence to prove that point than the opposite one the RIAA/MPAA try to make.
To libertarians, or like minds who worship at the alter of the "free market", there are not different types of property. There is private property, which includes all matter/energy in the universe (once someone can claim it, usually by force or fiat, but that's OK as long as it wasn't already claimed by someone else. Actually even if was claimed by someone else it might still be OK if they were brown-skinned or "primitive" and not making use of it), and there is also theft of private property.
They can't get their heads around an idea unless you relate it to them in terms of private property. Music is just property like land or cars to be bought and sold on some sort of market. The idea that data is this ephemeral concept that exists outside of space and time and is therefore not wholly governed by physical law (and certainly not man-made or defined economic laws) doesn't fit into their world-view on any level. There's a fundamental difference in the metaphysical philosophy of libertarianism that makes this line of discussion an automatic impasse.
The GPL is sort of a hack of the Copyright System that attempts to make it work the way the creators of the GPL think copyright should have been set up to begin with. So yes, Copyright is "necessary" for the GPL to work, but only because Copyright came first and GPL built on it to try to "fix" copyright. Since tearing down the system and rebuilding it properly (according to their definition of "proper") wasn't an option, they chose instead to use Copyright against itself and created the GPL.
I don't think RMS would be against enforcement of Copyright laws as long as those laws fit his definition of fairness and justice, which is much different than most people's to be sure.
Almost every Mac user uses Mail.app, and anyone with an iOS device who uses it for e-mail does too, and anyone who works in an office probably uses MS Office including Outlook Mail.
So as long as they're not tampering with US Government property (mailboxes) you are allowed to run a competing mail services. The government went through the trouble of setting up and paying for all those mailboxes with taxes, so the government mail system gets exclusive use of them. Seems fair to me.
The difference is the USPS is a government sponsored monopoly where legally you cannot compete with them.
Are you forgetting about UPS, FedEx, DHL, and within large cities, numerous small courier services?
Which is why the physical infrastructure should be nationalized and leased by the government to private businesses who must then compete with each other. This would lower the barriers to entry and open up competition. And laying all that fiber will create a lot of jobs too.