Now you've changed your tune. You're not worried about people using resources without paying for it but rather about "copying" it.
Nope. When a library has a copy of a book, they have a copy of the book. Someone paid for that book. The author and/or his publisher sold it. Without permission from the copyright holder, the library does not get to run you off your own copy of the book, and it cannot spread the same copy around to a large, high-demand audience of lots of simultaneous readers without obtaining more simultaneous legit copies. Can you not see the difference between that (one book that's passed around, serially) and one person getting hold of an artist's new recording, and then just instantly spreading around a bit-for-bit copy of it with 100,000 anonymous "friends" who all consider themselves fans of the artist, but who are all too cheap to pay what the artist asks?
From your old post it sounded like you were saying it's me ripping off content since I enjoyed it without paying for each book.
Why? Was that book, sitting on the shelf, stolen? I'm guessing it was bought and donated to the library, or perhaps directly purchased by the library. The author gets paid.
you're now saying your arguement isn't that you don't want people to use content without paying for it but you don't want people to copy things
No, I'm saying that the copyright holder gets to say how (and for how much) her work is copied. Every other aspect of this discussion comes from there.
Who do you suppose is buying them? The wider spam-using "industry" is responsible for spreading around malware of every sort, links to sites that carry all sorts of toxic payloads, and encouragement to land on phishing sites set up expressly to steal sensitive personal information from people who will find their bank accounts drained or $10,000 in consumer electronics bought in their name.
When someone illegally raids a private database and sells that information to people who are, by the very act of sending bulk unsolicited mail (before we even talk about whether the message is itself fraud or the first step in a scam) is generally illegal. Feeling sorry for the people that seek out ways to support and do business with them through the sale of information that they have no right to sell... well, I've got to wonder what drives your perspective on this.
because for the most part, none of them have any idea what they're doing to other people's lives
Ah, never mind. You think you know everything despite not having done everything, so there's no point discussing it any further.
I cant imagine a real company allowing its data to be housed outside its control.
Guess what: a lot of real companies can't imagine trusting their most important data to only their in-house IT guys. Otherwise there wouldn't be successful companies that handle the outsourcing of hosted apps, backups, e-commerce, and so on. And there are. There are also plenty of companies that thought they had it all under control internally, and totally blew it.
Except for the fact that if he's set up some kind of corporation or even just left an automated email harvester and credit card charge system running in some closet somewhere, he most certainly can.
If the corporation he's running is the vehicle through which he's committing his crimes, that wouldn't still be operating anyway. If you mean that he might have accomplices that weren't caught, that's another matter - though it's usually pretty easy to follow the trail.
As for card harvesting, etc... he can't use money that he can't get to. Someone who's convicted of wire fraud, or bank fraud, or tax evasion, or any of the usual things that accompany these sorts of prosecutions, will have had every related bank account and transactional mechanism shut down or siezed. His ability to be oily and keep something operating outside of such scrutiny (absent unprosecuted partners) is hugely reduced by being in jail and unplugged.
Two years in jail for a non-violent crime? Two years of your life is a very long time.
And how many years can it take to recover from having your credit history trashed, from losing your sensitive job because you appear to be financially wreckless or in debt, or from having to rebuild your reputation when someone sends around child pr0n links/content or stock-pumping scams that appear to be coming from you?
If you performed a "violent crime" that resulted in more or less the same consequences (wrecking someone's house or career), that's somehow worse, for you, than some other action that results in the same thing, long-term? How about when the person doing it is doing it to thousands of people at the same time?
spending it in jail doesn't help society very much
Other than the whole "he can't do any more of it while he's in prison" aspect, right?
maybe your email address along with your crime made publicly known
Oh no! Not public disclosure of your e-mail address! That's really some pretty serious stuff you're talking, there. No one who steals information, spreads around fraudulant messages, and is willing to take YOUR money or credibility for their own use would ever... just change e-mail addresses. These people are beyond shame. Naming them publicly does nothing, but jail time completely prevents them from any of these activities while they're locked up.
Regardless, I still think we are too quick to just throw people in jail and forget about them.
Forget about them? We have to feed them, provide medical and legal care, and 24 months later (in the example cited), administer their release. I can't imagine that you're thinking someone doing a 24-month stint is somehow going to wind up there for years longer because someone forgot that their sentence was up. Please.
It sounds more like what you're really lobbying for is harsher sentences for violent criminals. Because you can't truly be thinking that life-wrecking scam artists that cost the world's economy untold billions in (choose your currency) and irretrievably lost time are the same as someone didn't renew their dog license, or was caught distilling their own grappa in the basement.
Another part of the problem is these people, from the feds on down, seem to be flying the security ship by the seat of their pants, and worrying about what's actually legal/illegal later - the old "Shoot 'em all, and let God sort 'em out" philosophy
You may have that a little backwards. I think that most of these people are deathly afraid of the parasitic lawyers (or grandstanding politicians) that will descend like a plague of locusts on whatever municipality's police department didn't stop an actual terrorist cell from publicly gathering intel they later used to blow up a bridge (or whatever else) with people on it. If someone actually does take out a bridge structure during morning rush hour, and it appears that perhaps it was done with the assistance of detailed structural images that were taken in plain view... do you really think that some 30%-earning lawyer won't talk a victim's relatives into trying to bankrupt the local PD (and personnel) that decided not to check/interfere with people seen doing just that? Of course it's silly... but so is the basis for many a ruinous lawsuit. I think there's as much CYA involved here as anything else.
And yet, here you are, still breathing. I guess you're waiting until you can take more out with you, or something? I know, it's getting more and more expensive to build underground lairs and doomsday devices and whatnot. But if you just step out in front of bus today, you can avoid all of those management and finance headaches, and still immediately cease being disgusted.
BTW, which nascent technology's 40-years-from-now problems are you accurately predicting today, and acting to correct? Just curious.
And if you treat your employees like criminals they're more likely to act like criminals.
I'm always a little perplexed by this sentiment. In a large operation with sensitive data involved, everyone who works there should be acutely aware of how important it is to keep things bolted down. Everyone's jobs depend on that being done properly. In a suitably large organization, everyone involved is also going to be aware that not every person out of a given thousand is going to be personally stable, financially 100%, without some poor ethics, etc. You're not treating all 1000 employees "like criminals" when you give the operation the tools it needs to not have to worry as much about whether a new hire or a disgruntled under-performer who didn't get a promotion can wreck the entire business for everyone that works there. Password changes aren't punishment. Watching the network for strange instances of large encrypted ZIP files being FTPed to an overseas IP address isn't punishment. Why should taking precautions against a known problem that has ruined plenty of businesses, careers, and retirements be considered a morale crusher?
You claim that the copyright's purpose is to create income after the creation of the work. I don't think so. The copyright's purpose is to make it possible to create further work
And they way it allows you to create further work is through the artist's ability to be collecting money after the fact of creating previous work. If you want a novelist to be able to live off his book sales while writing yet another book, by definition, you want him to be able to collect money for the sales of his previous (as in, written in the past) works. That's what copyright is all about: control over the right to make copies of an existing work. Period. As long as there is an audiece for yet more copies of a work, the person who has those rights will be able (if they choose) to derive whatever income might be possible from the sale of those new copies. The moment the last page of a novel is written, its production is in the past. If you cannot separate, across time, the act of creating something, and the act of transacting the sale of copies of that thing you've created, then you're proposing instead that all novelists should be performanc artists who charge people to watch them write. Personally, I'd rather pay for a DVD of a great film and enjoy the experience than try to arrange to spend several years watching it being made.
Imagine that artists are employed just like most of the people. Your job is writing a nice novel. You draw a salary and in X years time you give me the novel. That's it. You have been paid for your work. Sounds terrible, doesn't it?
Yes, it does. Who's paying? Who decides which artists are good enough to draw a salary? Should anyone that feels that they are a novelist be entitled to such a salary? Here's an idea: demonstrate, in the market, that you have the skills, talent, and ability to stick to the multi-year task of producing something like that, and then convince a publisher that it's worth them risking money (in exchange for them getting a piece of the action later) to write you an advance check. It's called investing. And most such investments are lost, because most people simply aren't talented, and most books (and every other creative activity) aren't actually good enough to delight enough people for the artist to actually make a living producing such work. But some of them are, and they risk everything (or someone else risks it for them, in a deal they both strike) to produce something they hope enough of us will buy. There's risk involved, and if you want to take the risk out of it (salaried novelists, working for who... Acme Novels? The Federal Ministry Of Culture?) then you'll get exactly the mediocrity you'd expect.
That's, however, exactly the way researchers, engineers and in fact employed artists (like the designers of your household gadgets and so on) work.
And how do you suppose the money is gathered in advance of those people actually producing anything in order to pay those people? Either through investment (risk), or because previous efforts, in the past, are now making money. If there's no expectation that the work you're doing might result in something that will result in sales, how can you convince your investors to part with the money you'll be using to pay your designers, your engineers, and your researchers? Or are you saying that all people who want to be designers, engineers, and researchers should draw government salaries fueled by tax dollars, and we'll just hope that at least some of them produce something useful, or beautiful? Nonsense. Let the market work it out. An engineer working on something large and complex draws a salary because, in practical terms, there's no way to produce a (for example) hybrid car drive train without lots of people workig on it. Just like the novelest who risks all of the time he's put into writing a novel that may not sell, the employer of that engineer is risking everything they put into supporting the engineer while he works
chances are that your opponents are actually creating something useful and give away for free
Chances are that they also hold down day jobs, and don't do that for free. They choose which activities to pursue at no charge. If they want to produce software free for use by others, that's the same choice that musician who freely distributes her work might make. But it's a choice. When someone does decide to sell their work (for a paycheck, or in a traditionals sales model, whatever), then the person who rips them off is indeed a parasite... the creator of the content has no influence over the person that finds a technical means by which to avoid doing honest business with them.
There are times I give away my work, too. But I choose to do so, for a variety of reasons. If you take advantage of what I'm giving away, we're all square. If you rip off that which I choose to sell, you're leeching.
I think the parasites are those who are making money *today* from the work of a person long dead by means of *monopolising* that person's
creation based on a law which supposed to provide incentive to the artist to create more
So, what about the person that's still alive, and produced something a year ago? Your logic seems to require that we make sure they don't make any money off of that work, either, even while they're alive. Why else would they create more if they can still pay for groceries with income generated by something they created a year ago? You're misunderstanding the purpose of copyright-type protections. It's specifically to allow for income to be generated after the fact of creation. It's to promote investment (in time, research, money, etc) in works that may only make financial sense over the long haul. You can't make back what it takes to create an opera, a novel, a video game, a studio recording after one performance or purchase. Some creators may only embark on projects if they're sure that the value of their life's work will benefit their family - and it may have taken an artist decades to reach the level of intellectual sophistication and creative mastery to produce that which they intend to last and sell to an audience for a long time to come. They may have spent a lifetime producing something that they intend to serve their family for their lifetimes.
You know, just like a family-owned business is valuable because of reputation and brand, even after the founder is gone. If the founder dies, and the family or partner has to give up the brand and business model (or give up claim to what made it special just because someone died), then much of what the creator created was worth less than he might have planned. It's a shame you can't imagine creating something of intrinsic and enduring value - upon which more can be built - that might be passed on to your family. The law you're complaining about isn't to encourage people to make more, it's to encourage people to make anything in the first place - with some assurance that it won't be immediately ripped off.
I don't know who gets the money when a John Lennon song is played
Why do you care? It was up to John Lennon (the guy that did the work!) to decide who should benefit from his work. You're just going to a lot of trouble to try to find a way to be able to lay claim to his work, and ignore his thoughts on the subject of his own work, because that will make you feel better about ripping off other people. If John Lennon had wanted you to have his work for free, or to allow other people to dive right in do whatever they might want with it, he could have done it with one stroke of a pen. He chose not to. I'm sure he'd be happy to know that you're second-guessing him, though, being so much wiser about his life's work, and his estimation of his family and heirs, than he was himself.
Then by your argument, the book and CD I borrowed from the library should be illegal as well
Why? The library owns it, and you're using it, and then you put back. Not you and 100 other people at the same time. If you ripped a copy of the CD and used some p2p service to serve it up to 1000 anonymous "friends" online, that would be different. You reading a book from the library isn't any different than you reading a book that I give or lend to you. The copyright isn't violated, because you're not making a copy.
Public libraries who take your (taxpayer's) money and buy these works and make it available to 100s of people should be even more infuriating to you. The public library where you don't have to pay for things you want.
Why? I have as much a vested interest in people reading and learning as I do in protecting the copyrights of authors. Those things are not in any way at odds with each other. I only care about the taxes that support a library when the funding is used in politicized, or idealogically slanted way. But then, I feel the same way about school funding or pretty much any other government spending. Sorry, but badly baiting me with a completely wrong analogy in an attempt to make yourself feel better about actually ripping off content... it's just not working.
You mean, one generation ago? His daughter, for example, is in the middle of building a museum around her Dad's works. She, for example, is very much alive, and very much enjoying the work her Dad did, and the proceeds from the business he started and passed along. Just like when a guy leaves any other business to his child... or are you the sort that says a store's brand name is something that the founder of that store shouldn't be able to leave to his kids? After all, good old Bob Smithsonovitch is dead, so "Bob Smithsonovitch's Sporting Goods," which stays in business because of its recognizable brand and reputation, is making money for Bob's decendents, rather than Dead Bob, right? So, are you advocating that the various creative works, concepts, business tactics that make Bob's legacy business what is should also be stripped from the kids he intended to leave it to (or people he chooses to sell it to, etc)?
You may not personally be able to grapple with it, but some people are actually inspired to create a business or a life's work specifically so that his family will have it to work with, and to grow.
Regardless, I'm a little amused by people who fixate so intensely on why people other than its creators and designated heirs should be able to make money off of knock-off Mickey Mouse merchandise, rather than those other people creating something of their own (to do with as they please - give away, or not). Well, parasites are as old as time, I suppose.
Have you got figures or an impartial source for that?
Which part? The part where hundreds of millions of consumers use the internet? OK, so maybe it's more like a billion+. Obviously there are well over 500 million just between the US and Europe, to say nothing of the exploding net-connected populations in India and Asia. Do you really need a specific number that's greater than 500,000,000 for my point to be somehow more valid?
As for the small fraction of content creators vs. consumers... give me damn break. I don't consider MySpace and Facebook to be pillars of creativity. But no matter how you want to test for it, ask yourself, honestly, how many people you know that professionally create music, film, text, etc... compared to how many people you know that merely consume the same. Again, the specific number is meaningless compared to the truth of the point.
It really sounds to me like this is just a continuing tune on the terrorist theme.
If you've dealt with a company that had an inside bad guy ship out a dumped database containing all of that company's customer's credit card numbers and personal data, you'd probably feel a little differently. Just like you'd probably feel differently if a family member had been on one of those trains in Madrid, or in a nightclub in Bali, or in one of those embassies in Africa, or in the WTC, or taking a flight that ended in a Pennsylvania field, or if you left your legs behind in a vegetable market because you're the wrong flavor of some religion. Insider IT damage doesn't usually result in bloody deaths, but it can bankrupt companies, ruin careers, destroy retirement accounts, and worse.
Out of curiosity, would you get on a plane run by an airline that advertised its total trust of all passengers, and thus an easier boarding process that doesn't involve security? Would you leave your wallet sitting on your cubicle desk at work? Would you care if your HR department left its doors (and files/data), including your personal info, wide open... and just trusted that no one in the company would ever mis-use it?
"...seek inspiration from the creative works of others..."
Is that what they call not paying what your favorite band is asking for their latest studio production these days? If the band just wants to inspire you, they can (and do) give it away. I'd like to be inspired with free subscriptions to the complete, hard work of the thousands of people that cause SciAm, the WSJ, the NYT, and others to exist, myself. Just for inspiration, mind you. No? Fascists! The MAN is controlling me!
If a filmaker wants you seek inspiration from her creative works, rather than pay for it as entertainment, she has all sorts of ways to make that work available without DRM, and without charging her audience. More likely, though, she hopes you will be inspired, but also that you'll actually pay what she's asking - so that she can eat, pay her production team, hire talent, invest in new projects, and inspire other creative people by doing things like giving them jobs with paychecks to work in the field, etc., rather than looking for a pirated copy of what she just spent three years and all of her investors' money making.
This notion that we're no longer in the good old days when a few nerdly saints had wide-reaching internet access and liberally swapped around material (read as, "physics white papers"), and that if we were all just sweet and nice, we could go back to those days... B.S.
You've got untold hundreds of millions of consumers (a microscopic fraction of which are inspiration-seeking creators) that don't see the 'net as The Glue Of Freedom, but as The Place Where I Don't Have To Pay For Things Cuz That's What My Friends Do And What Do You Mean Blank CDs Cost Money. Those that are looking to inspire and be inspired have all sorts of venues, and can and do swap their works with each other freely (AIB/S). Inspirers/ees aren't traveling in the same circles as the leeches.
Viacom telling YouTube to take down the stuff that Viacom produces and distributes isn't the same as The Man telling Professor Wonder-Visionary that he can't post video of himself standing in a bathtub reciting his Haiku for both of his fans/disciples. You can go to wonderful web sites like photo.net and see freely shared, posted, fantastic, inspiring work (complete with technical discussions!) that's there in exactly the spirit that the Beeb's guy says is going away. But you can't just go and run off with a copy of Annie Leibovitz's new collection of work because she's decided to earn money with it if the book is reviewed well enough to earn paying customers. If no one wants to pay what she's asking, then the book won't sell - but that doesn't make it reasonable to expect it to be therefore free if you just look hard enough for someone who's scanned it and put up on a web site someplace in the name of "internet freedom."
We're at *war* with people of a much more "legitimate" religion, with a MUCH longer heritage, for similar beliefs!
Oh, come on. If we were at "war" with Islam, I do believe things would take on a slightly different appearance, don't you? We probably wouldn't have just had a lenghty academic argument over whether or not a newly elected (Muslim) federal legislator should get to use Thomas Jefferson's old copy of the Koran while being sworn in, or have trade relations with all sorts of primarily Muslim countries. Similarly, I don't think Scientologists have dispatched loony suicidal types to kill thousands of people, or pump money, supplies, and deluded basket cases into operations that drive truck bombs into vegetable markets full of women and children (notably, other Muslims).
Don't confuse this with any sort of defense of Scientology (hah! not hardly), but rather a defense against the notion that we're at war with Islam, in its entirety. It's just not the case, at least in that broad of a context. We should be, though, as modern western cultures, completely horrified by our own smilig tolerance of a rapidly expanding theocratic movement that causes things like this to even be in the news. To even be an issue at all. Honestly... Sharia court establishments that talk in terms of putting people in jail because they want to stop being Muslims? There's no point being 100% tolerant of movements that consider tolerance to be a crime. But that's not the same as "being at war" with the religion, per se.
and that's a very scary thing, letting prospective employers know what I watch.
You mean, the Discovery network's new Tinfoil Hat Channel?
Which part of not-tied-to-personal-accounts are you not getting? Personally, I'm happy if the data they're aggregating delivers messages such as "80% of our viewers think your 'Head-On! Apply Directly To Your Forehead' pain reliever ads are the broadcast equivalent of gerbil vomit" to the people who buy, sell, and produce the ads.
Right, because never before have we confronted a case where one party is looking to make easy money off of another party's work without permission under the guise of being hip rebels. Puh-leeease.
When a scientist takes money to report a specific result, that's a bribe.
How about when a scientist is funded to point out the ways in which another (paid!) scientist's conclusions may be either wrong or taken in a politically-driven context that's all about fear? When a scientist is paid to challenge widely-held beliefs that happen to be peculiarly embraced by one end of the political spectrum, and used as leverage to push legislative agendas that are more about redistribution of income or other unrelated non-science-ish stuff, we usually call that... science. You should be delighted that scientists are being offered money to publicly challenge the conclusions of other scientists. If the challenge is weak, the other scientists' findings are strengthened. If the challenge prevails, then it was essential that it was done. What's not to like?
In the 2000 election recount, counties who already had these optical mark scanners where the ones that didn't have any problems.
My point was that there were plenty of people using things like the butterfly ballots that had NO problem mechanically dealing with the ballot, they just couldn't RTFM and put the mark next to the name the wanted. It just speaks to the poor cognitive skills involved. Touch screen makes that harder to do wrong... but then, people too dumb to handle ANY of the ballot methods in play probably shouldn't be choosing the people to run the city/county/state/country in which they live, either. Oh well.
Are you saying that the machines in questions actually makes such a paper trail?
No. I'm saying that if you don't like your (paper-trail-less) touch-screen machines, totally abandoning them for a fill-in-the-circle-and-scan system seems less useful than bolting on some print-out-paper-trail hardware on your existing fleet of touch screen platforms. And I think it matters because, as I noted, the touch screen systems help get you around the problems of parallax, or much of the confusion that landed Pat Buchannon so many votes in 2000.
I mean, we all know that Florida voters have a perfect track record of meaningfully, unambiguously, carefully, and thoughtfully placing a mark next to the right name. Yes, the scanner will kick out the badly marked ones... but I seem to recall they've been down that road before. What they hell is wrong with touch screen machines with a spit-out paper trail? Yeesh.
Your television could theoretically do things on your computer
Yes, but luckily all television-based computer use consists of intense leadership figures telling glamourously dressed nerd hotties sitting in front of obviously faked up Flash-animation-running workstations to, "Zoom in on the license plate reflection in the sequin on that crossdressing supermodel's dress and get me all information related to everyone who knows the person who last changed the oil in that terrorist's Land Rover by cross-checking the microtags in the oil against all known bank robbery plots in the same latitude."
...it only took a hours to blow up a LiteBrite but it took weeks to respond to a devastating hurricane?
This is insightful?
Would the "weeks" it took to respond to Katrina include the Coast Guard flying of people off of their rooftops the same day the storm blew through? Or are you thinking more about the days in advance of that hurricane that the mayor of that town and the governor of that state wasted in not actually evacuating the city's residents (you know, the ones not complying with the evacuation order) with their sitting-idle fleet of buses? Why talk about response to a major disaster when you can talk about the choice to live below sea level where hurricanes regularly hit, and then not leaving town when you're told to?
Doesn't matter. You're obviously a trolling twit. Or, you're serious, and also say completely non-non-sequitorish things like, "Isn't it funny that poor people get cancer when the NSA now has ways to back up petabytes of data in a drinking straw?"
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Now you've changed your tune. You're not worried about people using resources without paying for it but rather about "copying" it.
Nope. When a library has a copy of a book, they have a copy of the book. Someone paid for that book. The author and/or his publisher sold it. Without permission from the copyright holder, the library does not get to run you off your own copy of the book, and it cannot spread the same copy around to a large, high-demand audience of lots of simultaneous readers without obtaining more simultaneous legit copies. Can you not see the difference between that (one book that's passed around, serially) and one person getting hold of an artist's new recording, and then just instantly spreading around a bit-for-bit copy of it with 100,000 anonymous "friends" who all consider themselves fans of the artist, but who are all too cheap to pay what the artist asks?
From your old post it sounded like you were saying it's me ripping off content since I enjoyed it without paying for each book.
Why? Was that book, sitting on the shelf, stolen? I'm guessing it was bought and donated to the library, or perhaps directly purchased by the library. The author gets paid.
you're now saying your arguement isn't that you don't want people to use content without paying for it but you don't want people to copy things
No, I'm saying that the copyright holder gets to say how (and for how much) her work is copied. Every other aspect of this discussion comes from there.
selling e-mail addresses
Who do you suppose is buying them? The wider spam-using "industry" is responsible for spreading around malware of every sort, links to sites that carry all sorts of toxic payloads, and encouragement to land on phishing sites set up expressly to steal sensitive personal information from people who will find their bank accounts drained or $10,000 in consumer electronics bought in their name.
When someone illegally raids a private database and sells that information to people who are, by the very act of sending bulk unsolicited mail (before we even talk about whether the message is itself fraud or the first step in a scam) is generally illegal. Feeling sorry for the people that seek out ways to support and do business with them through the sale of information that they have no right to sell... well, I've got to wonder what drives your perspective on this.
because for the most part, none of them have any idea what they're doing to other people's lives
Ah, never mind. You think you know everything despite not having done everything, so there's no point discussing it any further.
I cant imagine a real company allowing its data to be housed outside its control.
Guess what: a lot of real companies can't imagine trusting their most important data to only their in-house IT guys. Otherwise there wouldn't be successful companies that handle the outsourcing of hosted apps, backups, e-commerce, and so on. And there are. There are also plenty of companies that thought they had it all under control internally, and totally blew it.
Except for the fact that if he's set up some kind of corporation or even just left an automated email harvester and credit card charge system running in some closet somewhere, he most certainly can.
If the corporation he's running is the vehicle through which he's committing his crimes, that wouldn't still be operating anyway. If you mean that he might have accomplices that weren't caught, that's another matter - though it's usually pretty easy to follow the trail.
As for card harvesting, etc... he can't use money that he can't get to. Someone who's convicted of wire fraud, or bank fraud, or tax evasion, or any of the usual things that accompany these sorts of prosecutions, will have had every related bank account and transactional mechanism shut down or siezed. His ability to be oily and keep something operating outside of such scrutiny (absent unprosecuted partners) is hugely reduced by being in jail and unplugged.
Two years in jail for a non-violent crime? Two years of your life is a very long time.
And how many years can it take to recover from having your credit history trashed, from losing your sensitive job because you appear to be financially wreckless or in debt, or from having to rebuild your reputation when someone sends around child pr0n links/content or stock-pumping scams that appear to be coming from you?
If you performed a "violent crime" that resulted in more or less the same consequences (wrecking someone's house or career), that's somehow worse, for you, than some other action that results in the same thing, long-term? How about when the person doing it is doing it to thousands of people at the same time?
spending it in jail doesn't help society very much
Other than the whole "he can't do any more of it while he's in prison" aspect, right?
maybe your email address along with your crime made publicly known
Oh no! Not public disclosure of your e-mail address! That's really some pretty serious stuff you're talking, there. No one who steals information, spreads around fraudulant messages, and is willing to take YOUR money or credibility for their own use would ever... just change e-mail addresses. These people are beyond shame. Naming them publicly does nothing, but jail time completely prevents them from any of these activities while they're locked up.
Regardless, I still think we are too quick to just throw people in jail and forget about them.
Forget about them? We have to feed them, provide medical and legal care, and 24 months later (in the example cited), administer their release. I can't imagine that you're thinking someone doing a 24-month stint is somehow going to wind up there for years longer because someone forgot that their sentence was up. Please.
It sounds more like what you're really lobbying for is harsher sentences for violent criminals. Because you can't truly be thinking that life-wrecking scam artists that cost the world's economy untold billions in (choose your currency) and irretrievably lost time are the same as someone didn't renew their dog license, or was caught distilling their own grappa in the basement.
Another part of the problem is these people, from the feds on down, seem to be flying the security ship by the seat of their pants, and worrying about what's actually legal/illegal later - the old "Shoot 'em all, and let God sort 'em out" philosophy
... do you really think that some 30%-earning lawyer won't talk a victim's relatives into trying to bankrupt the local PD (and personnel) that decided not to check/interfere with people seen doing just that? Of course it's silly ... but so is the basis for many a ruinous lawsuit. I think there's as much CYA involved here as anything else.
You may have that a little backwards. I think that most of these people are deathly afraid of the parasitic lawyers (or grandstanding politicians) that will descend like a plague of locusts on whatever municipality's police department didn't stop an actual terrorist cell from publicly gathering intel they later used to blow up a bridge (or whatever else) with people on it. If someone actually does take out a bridge structure during morning rush hour, and it appears that perhaps it was done with the assistance of detailed structural images that were taken in plain view
Humanity disgusts me
And yet, here you are, still breathing. I guess you're waiting until you can take more out with you, or something? I know, it's getting more and more expensive to build underground lairs and doomsday devices and whatnot. But if you just step out in front of bus today, you can avoid all of those management and finance headaches, and still immediately cease being disgusted.
BTW, which nascent technology's 40-years-from-now problems are you accurately predicting today, and acting to correct? Just curious.
And if you treat your employees like criminals they're more likely to act like criminals.
I'm always a little perplexed by this sentiment. In a large operation with sensitive data involved, everyone who works there should be acutely aware of how important it is to keep things bolted down. Everyone's jobs depend on that being done properly. In a suitably large organization, everyone involved is also going to be aware that not every person out of a given thousand is going to be personally stable, financially 100%, without some poor ethics, etc. You're not treating all 1000 employees "like criminals" when you give the operation the tools it needs to not have to worry as much about whether a new hire or a disgruntled under-performer who didn't get a promotion can wreck the entire business for everyone that works there. Password changes aren't punishment. Watching the network for strange instances of large encrypted ZIP files being FTPed to an overseas IP address isn't punishment. Why should taking precautions against a known problem that has ruined plenty of businesses, careers, and retirements be considered a morale crusher?
You claim that the copyright's purpose is to create income after the creation of the work. I don't think so. The copyright's purpose is to make it possible to create further work
And they way it allows you to create further work is through the artist's ability to be collecting money after the fact of creating previous work. If you want a novelist to be able to live off his book sales while writing yet another book, by definition, you want him to be able to collect money for the sales of his previous (as in, written in the past) works. That's what copyright is all about: control over the right to make copies of an existing work. Period. As long as there is an audiece for yet more copies of a work, the person who has those rights will be able (if they choose) to derive whatever income might be possible from the sale of those new copies. The moment the last page of a novel is written, its production is in the past. If you cannot separate, across time, the act of creating something, and the act of transacting the sale of copies of that thing you've created, then you're proposing instead that all novelists should be performanc artists who charge people to watch them write. Personally, I'd rather pay for a DVD of a great film and enjoy the experience than try to arrange to spend several years watching it being made.
Imagine that artists are employed just like most of the people. Your job is writing a nice novel. You draw a salary and in X years time you give me the novel. That's it. You have been paid for your work. Sounds terrible, doesn't it?
Yes, it does. Who's paying? Who decides which artists are good enough to draw a salary? Should anyone that feels that they are a novelist be entitled to such a salary? Here's an idea: demonstrate, in the market, that you have the skills, talent, and ability to stick to the multi-year task of producing something like that, and then convince a publisher that it's worth them risking money (in exchange for them getting a piece of the action later) to write you an advance check. It's called investing. And most such investments are lost, because most people simply aren't talented, and most books (and every other creative activity) aren't actually good enough to delight enough people for the artist to actually make a living producing such work. But some of them are, and they risk everything (or someone else risks it for them, in a deal they both strike) to produce something they hope enough of us will buy. There's risk involved, and if you want to take the risk out of it (salaried novelists, working for who... Acme Novels? The Federal Ministry Of Culture?) then you'll get exactly the mediocrity you'd expect.
That's, however, exactly the way researchers, engineers and in fact employed artists (like the designers of your household gadgets and so on) work.
And how do you suppose the money is gathered in advance of those people actually producing anything in order to pay those people? Either through investment (risk), or because previous efforts, in the past, are now making money. If there's no expectation that the work you're doing might result in something that will result in sales, how can you convince your investors to part with the money you'll be using to pay your designers, your engineers, and your researchers? Or are you saying that all people who want to be designers, engineers, and researchers should draw government salaries fueled by tax dollars, and we'll just hope that at least some of them produce something useful, or beautiful? Nonsense. Let the market work it out. An engineer working on something large and complex draws a salary because, in practical terms, there's no way to produce a (for example) hybrid car drive train without lots of people workig on it. Just like the novelest who risks all of the time he's put into writing a novel that may not sell, the employer of that engineer is risking everything they put into supporting the engineer while he works
chances are that your opponents are actually creating something useful and give away for free
Chances are that they also hold down day jobs, and don't do that for free. They choose which activities to pursue at no charge. If they want to produce software free for use by others, that's the same choice that musician who freely distributes her work might make. But it's a choice. When someone does decide to sell their work (for a paycheck, or in a traditionals sales model, whatever), then the person who rips them off is indeed a parasite... the creator of the content has no influence over the person that finds a technical means by which to avoid doing honest business with them.
There are times I give away my work, too. But I choose to do so, for a variety of reasons. If you take advantage of what I'm giving away, we're all square. If you rip off that which I choose to sell, you're leeching.
I think the parasites are those who are making money *today* from the work of a person long dead by means of *monopolising* that person's creation based on a law which supposed to provide incentive to the artist to create more
So, what about the person that's still alive, and produced something a year ago? Your logic seems to require that we make sure they don't make any money off of that work, either, even while they're alive. Why else would they create more if they can still pay for groceries with income generated by something they created a year ago? You're misunderstanding the purpose of copyright-type protections. It's specifically to allow for income to be generated after the fact of creation. It's to promote investment (in time, research, money, etc) in works that may only make financial sense over the long haul. You can't make back what it takes to create an opera, a novel, a video game, a studio recording after one performance or purchase. Some creators may only embark on projects if they're sure that the value of their life's work will benefit their family - and it may have taken an artist decades to reach the level of intellectual sophistication and creative mastery to produce that which they intend to last and sell to an audience for a long time to come. They may have spent a lifetime producing something that they intend to serve their family for their lifetimes.
You know, just like a family-owned business is valuable because of reputation and brand, even after the founder is gone. If the founder dies, and the family or partner has to give up the brand and business model (or give up claim to what made it special just because someone died), then much of what the creator created was worth less than he might have planned. It's a shame you can't imagine creating something of intrinsic and enduring value - upon which more can be built - that might be passed on to your family. The law you're complaining about isn't to encourage people to make more, it's to encourage people to make anything in the first place - with some assurance that it won't be immediately ripped off.
I don't know who gets the money when a John Lennon song is played
Why do you care? It was up to John Lennon (the guy that did the work!) to decide who should benefit from his work. You're just going to a lot of trouble to try to find a way to be able to lay claim to his work, and ignore his thoughts on the subject of his own work, because that will make you feel better about ripping off other people. If John Lennon had wanted you to have his work for free, or to allow other people to dive right in do whatever they might want with it, he could have done it with one stroke of a pen. He chose not to. I'm sure he'd be happy to know that you're second-guessing him, though, being so much wiser about his life's work, and his estimation of his family and heirs, than he was himself.
Then by your argument, the book and CD I borrowed from the library should be illegal as well
... it's just not working.
Why? The library owns it, and you're using it, and then you put back. Not you and 100 other people at the same time. If you ripped a copy of the CD and used some p2p service to serve it up to 1000 anonymous "friends" online, that would be different. You reading a book from the library isn't any different than you reading a book that I give or lend to you. The copyright isn't violated, because you're not making a copy.
Public libraries who take your (taxpayer's) money and buy these works and make it available to 100s of people should be even more infuriating to you. The public library where you don't have to pay for things you want.
Why? I have as much a vested interest in people reading and learning as I do in protecting the copyrights of authors. Those things are not in any way at odds with each other. I only care about the taxes that support a library when the funding is used in politicized, or idealogically slanted way. But then, I feel the same way about school funding or pretty much any other government spending. Sorry, but badly baiting me with a completely wrong analogy in an attempt to make yourself feel better about actually ripping off content
many generations ago
You mean, one generation ago? His daughter, for example, is in the middle of building a museum around her Dad's works. She, for example, is very much alive, and very much enjoying the work her Dad did, and the proceeds from the business he started and passed along. Just like when a guy leaves any other business to his child... or are you the sort that says a store's brand name is something that the founder of that store shouldn't be able to leave to his kids? After all, good old Bob Smithsonovitch is dead, so "Bob Smithsonovitch's Sporting Goods," which stays in business because of its recognizable brand and reputation, is making money for Bob's decendents, rather than Dead Bob, right? So, are you advocating that the various creative works, concepts, business tactics that make Bob's legacy business what is should also be stripped from the kids he intended to leave it to (or people he chooses to sell it to, etc)?
You may not personally be able to grapple with it, but some people are actually inspired to create a business or a life's work specifically so that his family will have it to work with, and to grow.
Regardless, I'm a little amused by people who fixate so intensely on why people other than its creators and designated heirs should be able to make money off of knock-off Mickey Mouse merchandise, rather than those other people creating something of their own (to do with as they please - give away, or not). Well, parasites are as old as time, I suppose.
Have you got figures or an impartial source for that?
Which part? The part where hundreds of millions of consumers use the internet? OK, so maybe it's more like a billion+. Obviously there are well over 500 million just between the US and Europe, to say nothing of the exploding net-connected populations in India and Asia. Do you really need a specific number that's greater than 500,000,000 for my point to be somehow more valid?
As for the small fraction of content creators vs. consumers... give me damn break. I don't consider MySpace and Facebook to be pillars of creativity. But no matter how you want to test for it, ask yourself, honestly, how many people you know that professionally create music, film, text, etc... compared to how many people you know that merely consume the same. Again, the specific number is meaningless compared to the truth of the point.
It really sounds to me like this is just a continuing tune on the terrorist theme.
If you've dealt with a company that had an inside bad guy ship out a dumped database containing all of that company's customer's credit card numbers and personal data, you'd probably feel a little differently. Just like you'd probably feel differently if a family member had been on one of those trains in Madrid, or in a nightclub in Bali, or in one of those embassies in Africa, or in the WTC, or taking a flight that ended in a Pennsylvania field, or if you left your legs behind in a vegetable market because you're the wrong flavor of some religion. Insider IT damage doesn't usually result in bloody deaths, but it can bankrupt companies, ruin careers, destroy retirement accounts, and worse.
Out of curiosity, would you get on a plane run by an airline that advertised its total trust of all passengers, and thus an easier boarding process that doesn't involve security? Would you leave your wallet sitting on your cubicle desk at work? Would you care if your HR department left its doors (and files/data), including your personal info, wide open... and just trusted that no one in the company would ever mis-use it?
"...seek inspiration from the creative works of others..."
Is that what they call not paying what your favorite band is asking for their latest studio production these days? If the band just wants to inspire you, they can (and do) give it away. I'd like to be inspired with free subscriptions to the complete, hard work of the thousands of people that cause SciAm, the WSJ, the NYT, and others to exist, myself. Just for inspiration, mind you. No? Fascists! The MAN is controlling me!
If a filmaker wants you seek inspiration from her creative works, rather than pay for it as entertainment, she has all sorts of ways to make that work available without DRM, and without charging her audience. More likely, though, she hopes you will be inspired, but also that you'll actually pay what she's asking - so that she can eat, pay her production team, hire talent, invest in new projects, and inspire other creative people by doing things like giving them jobs with paychecks to work in the field, etc., rather than looking for a pirated copy of what she just spent three years and all of her investors' money making.
This notion that we're no longer in the good old days when a few nerdly saints had wide-reaching internet access and liberally swapped around material (read as, "physics white papers"), and that if we were all just sweet and nice, we could go back to those days... B.S.
You've got untold hundreds of millions of consumers (a microscopic fraction of which are inspiration-seeking creators) that don't see the 'net as The Glue Of Freedom, but as The Place Where I Don't Have To Pay For Things Cuz That's What My Friends Do And What Do You Mean Blank CDs Cost Money. Those that are looking to inspire and be inspired have all sorts of venues, and can and do swap their works with each other freely (AIB/S). Inspirers/ees aren't traveling in the same circles as the leeches.
Viacom telling YouTube to take down the stuff that Viacom produces and distributes isn't the same as The Man telling Professor Wonder-Visionary that he can't post video of himself standing in a bathtub reciting his Haiku for both of his fans/disciples. You can go to wonderful web sites like photo.net and see freely shared, posted, fantastic, inspiring work (complete with technical discussions!) that's there in exactly the spirit that the Beeb's guy says is going away. But you can't just go and run off with a copy of Annie Leibovitz's new collection of work because she's decided to earn money with it if the book is reviewed well enough to earn paying customers. If no one wants to pay what she's asking, then the book won't sell - but that doesn't make it reasonable to expect it to be therefore free if you just look hard enough for someone who's scanned it and put up on a web site someplace in the name of "internet freedom."
We're at *war* with people of a much more "legitimate" religion, with a MUCH longer heritage, for similar beliefs!
... Sharia court establishments that talk in terms of putting people in jail because they want to stop being Muslims? There's no point being 100% tolerant of movements that consider tolerance to be a crime. But that's not the same as "being at war" with the religion, per se.
Oh, come on. If we were at "war" with Islam, I do believe things would take on a slightly different appearance, don't you? We probably wouldn't have just had a lenghty academic argument over whether or not a newly elected (Muslim) federal legislator should get to use Thomas Jefferson's old copy of the Koran while being sworn in, or have trade relations with all sorts of primarily Muslim countries. Similarly, I don't think Scientologists have dispatched loony suicidal types to kill thousands of people, or pump money, supplies, and deluded basket cases into operations that drive truck bombs into vegetable markets full of women and children (notably, other Muslims).
Don't confuse this with any sort of defense of Scientology (hah! not hardly), but rather a defense against the notion that we're at war with Islam, in its entirety. It's just not the case, at least in that broad of a context. We should be, though, as modern western cultures, completely horrified by our own smilig tolerance of a rapidly expanding theocratic movement that causes things like this to even be in the news. To even be an issue at all. Honestly
and that's a very scary thing, letting prospective employers know what I watch.
You mean, the Discovery network's new Tinfoil Hat Channel?
Which part of not-tied-to-personal-accounts are you not getting? Personally, I'm happy if the data they're aggregating delivers messages such as "80% of our viewers think your 'Head-On! Apply Directly To Your Forehead' pain reliever ads are the broadcast equivalent of gerbil vomit" to the people who buy, sell, and produce the ads.
Right, because never before have we confronted a case where one party is looking to make easy money off of another party's work without permission under the guise of being hip rebels. Puh-leeease.
When a scientist takes money to report a specific result, that's a bribe.
How about when a scientist is funded to point out the ways in which another (paid!) scientist's conclusions may be either wrong or taken in a politically-driven context that's all about fear? When a scientist is paid to challenge widely-held beliefs that happen to be peculiarly embraced by one end of the political spectrum, and used as leverage to push legislative agendas that are more about redistribution of income or other unrelated non-science-ish stuff, we usually call that... science. You should be delighted that scientists are being offered money to publicly challenge the conclusions of other scientists. If the challenge is weak, the other scientists' findings are strengthened. If the challenge prevails, then it was essential that it was done. What's not to like?
In the 2000 election recount, counties who already had these optical mark scanners where the ones that didn't have any problems.
My point was that there were plenty of people using things like the butterfly ballots that had NO problem mechanically dealing with the ballot, they just couldn't RTFM and put the mark next to the name the wanted. It just speaks to the poor cognitive skills involved. Touch screen makes that harder to do wrong... but then, people too dumb to handle ANY of the ballot methods in play probably shouldn't be choosing the people to run the city/county/state/country in which they live, either. Oh well.
Are you saying that the machines in questions actually makes such a paper trail?
No. I'm saying that if you don't like your (paper-trail-less) touch-screen machines, totally abandoning them for a fill-in-the-circle-and-scan system seems less useful than bolting on some print-out-paper-trail hardware on your existing fleet of touch screen platforms. And I think it matters because, as I noted, the touch screen systems help get you around the problems of parallax, or much of the confusion that landed Pat Buchannon so many votes in 2000.
I mean, we all know that Florida voters have a perfect track record of meaningfully, unambiguously, carefully, and thoughtfully placing a mark next to the right name. Yes, the scanner will kick out the badly marked ones... but I seem to recall they've been down that road before. What they hell is wrong with touch screen machines with a spit-out paper trail? Yeesh.
I guess that's better than a plain old regular half a percent.
Your television could theoretically do things on your computer
Yes, but luckily all television-based computer use consists of intense leadership figures telling glamourously dressed nerd hotties sitting in front of obviously faked up Flash-animation-running workstations to, "Zoom in on the license plate reflection in the sequin on that crossdressing supermodel's dress and get me all information related to everyone who knows the person who last changed the oil in that terrorist's Land Rover by cross-checking the microtags in the oil against all known bank robbery plots in the same latitude."
...it only took a hours to blow up a LiteBrite but it took weeks to respond to a devastating hurricane?
This is insightful?
Would the "weeks" it took to respond to Katrina include the Coast Guard flying of people off of their rooftops the same day the storm blew through? Or are you thinking more about the days in advance of that hurricane that the mayor of that town and the governor of that state wasted in not actually evacuating the city's residents (you know, the ones not complying with the evacuation order) with their sitting-idle fleet of buses? Why talk about response to a major disaster when you can talk about the choice to live below sea level where hurricanes regularly hit, and then not leaving town when you're told to?
Doesn't matter. You're obviously a trolling twit. Or, you're serious, and also say completely non-non-sequitorish things like, "Isn't it funny that poor people get cancer when the NSA now has ways to back up petabytes of data in a drinking straw?"