"The problem your "boycotts" have is that **AA will just point to any decline in sales as a result of piracy instead of them alienating the consumers, giving them another excuse for pursuing even worse laws. This will lead into further boycotts, which in turn will lead to... well you get the point."
I am interested to know where this cycle leads.. because I don't get your point at all.
The best I can gather is that you believe the RIAA has the legal power to impose any legislation it wants and therefore we the people should tremble in fear.
"If we refine "doing it again" as "getting convicted of doing it again", then some studies go as low as 3%. "
as opposed to what? being suspected of doing it again? If you have a problem with the doctrine of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, perhaps you should attack that principle itself. Your complaint applies to recidivism rates of ALL CRIMES, not merely sex offences.
"Now add the following fact:
"A three-year longitudinal study (Kilpatrick, Edmunds, and Seymour, 1992) of 4,008 adult women found that 84 percent of respondents who identified themselves as rape victims did not report the crime to authorities." In other words, the real rate of rape is about 6 times what is reported by adults. Unreported by children we could expect to be similar. Does this raise the real rate of recidivism? Almost certainly. How much? That takes a better statistician than I to calculate.
Then add the fact that some of the reported rapes ( both of adults and children ) are not prosecuted for lack of evidence 'beyond a reasonable doubt", and the real recidivism rates can only get higher.
"
all of which suggests that there are a great deal of criminals out there, who as far as we know are law abiding citizens. Maybe YOU are one of them? These arguments about unknown and unreported or unprosecuted crimes do not only apply to crimes convicted by people with prior convictions.
Plenty of crimes go unreported. assaults, uttering threats, vandalism, etc. Without comparing rates that other crimes go unreported, the figure on alleged unreported sex offences is rather nonindicative of the general level of threat to society of a reformed sex offender, vs a reformed thief, a reformed con-artist, a reformed pot-smoker, or a reformed copyright infringer and the baseline threat of a person who haven't been convicted of anything yet.
"I hate to be the bleeding-heart liberal here, but I can see this expanding quickly into Matrix-like farms of captive dogs (birds? cats? -whatever has the best performance/cost ratio I'd think) who are fed thousands of images a day to sort-for-food.
I can imagine these facilities as being very out-of-country and very sub-par in terms of quality of life. The truth is that neural nets are just better at some types of analysis than others, and animals are a really really cheap form of self-contained, self-ordering neural nets with zero development cost.
Lets hope (strong)AI research gets up to speed before we see fidonet take on a new sinister meaning."
Human beings in the 3rd world cost less than dogs.
"If someone uses your connection to view kiddie porn, the police will go after you. No change there... the defense of 'someone else was using my computer' has been used too often and they don't believe it any more."
What are you talking about? Why wouldn't they believe it, if it was true and the experts agreed with it? I guess they don't believe the old "I didn't do it" defense either.
"If you are insane enough to open your wifi then for gods sake setup a decent firewall and a proxy so you can log who's been viewing what, otherwise you could find yourself at the wrong end of the law. There is no change there, either.. this law changes nothing."
firstly: a law which changes nothing SHOULD NOT BE PASSED. It breeds contempt for the law.
secondly: There is nothing insane about having an open WIFI, anymore than it is insane to not build an enclosure around your lands. Yes.. someone might commit a crime on your lands. But they can commit a crime off your lands as well. The same requirement for reporting should apply to real property as electronic property.
This is just a lame attempt to get people to stop using open WIFI so more people must purchase internet service from an for profit ISP rather than share. It is also an attempt to get people used to the idea of being legally obligated by threat of being financially ruined, to snitch on their neighbors. First you start with a big boogie man, but then you extend it to shoplifting, loitering, vandalism, civil disobedience or protesting outside of the "free speech zones".
Open WIFI SHOULD be considered a common carrier. There is absolutely no sane justification not to extend common carrier status to it, except that certain groups want to eradicate the commons from existence in all the realms of real property, intellectual property and communications.
"You are being just as bad as the apathetic by taking on a cut and run mentality. I'm sure the founders of this country would hate you even more for being aware of the problems and not trying to get them solved. It's one thing to be ignorant of issues and quite another to know the issues and turn away."
How dare consumers act self interested in a free market society that rebelled against its lawful Monarch! What ever happened to brand loyalty? This kind of conduct is utterly disgraceful. The founding fathers would never condone turning your back on your masters and striking out on your own.
The obligation to be loyal to your sovereign is right there in the declaration of independence! oh.. wait.. oops.
"Heck, you wouldn't believe the background checks I went through for the FBI. In the end, while maybe not ideal for the potential employee, I find nothing significantly reprehensible about the process."
Of course you didnt. Firstly, you hadn't already been working there for 15 years. Secondly, most people who want to be cops *love* authority. They love to see it being exercised. They love to see the "bad guy" get "taken down". And "bad guy" includes people who smoke a joint or 2 now then and have never lifted a finger to hurt anyone in their life.
Did you notice you were applying for a job with the police?? That's what they do. take down bad guys, beat up protestors and direct traffic. wear body armour and sunglasses and carry big guns. hell.. and tase people for not obeying them fast enough.
Doesn't the FBI specifically want to hire people who see nothing wrong with slavish obedience to regulations with a disconnected conception of what the word 'freedom' means. (specifically it means the freedom to act without interference from other human beings). Don't Cops spend all day following orders, and complying with regulations. Is freedom of thought something they want to encourage. Some cops work in prisons.. can you believe that? who would EVER want to work in a prison???
You take it for granted that the government is doesn't need to respect civil liberties. You probably think the government Giveth and the government can taketh away. You think that is normal and necessary for any society to exist. I'll assume your motives are good. But such a police state was not the idea behind the founding of America. Try reading the declaration of independence.
But long story short... you weren't working for 15 years when your boss suddenly came in and saying "I no longer trust you because George Bush said so. Either you voluntarily waive your civil liberties, or else you lose your job, your home, your kids education, and start your entire life over again. Don't sweat it. It's voluntary".
human beings build relationships of trust. if the people you have been working with suddenly stop trusting you it feels like you are being punished. And if you did nothing wrong, it feels very humiliating and oppressive. maybe you see nothing wrong with humiliating and oppressing people. But then again.. what agency did you say you work for?
"To me, this sounds like the OP is a quite young programmer who is looking for a chance to lead a moral crusade rather than get the job done. In my experience I avoid taking on employees like that because they seem more focused on making sure everyone else follows their ethics than in doing a good job on the task at hand."
Thats the problem with hiring ethical employees. They always seem to think that ethics are rules to live your life by, even at work!
If you want to hire people with no scruples go ahead, but when they start stealing or embezzling from you, lying in their progress reports, and fudging their Q&A testing don't be surprised. You might encourage employees to put morality aside in favor of doing a "good job", but don't assume that they are only going to waive ethics when it favours their boss, its going to be in favour of themselves first and foremost; they'll screw you just like anyone else. It is also a sign that you are going to screw them over at every opportunity. So you can kiss employee moral (loyalty) goodbye.
"Yes. Consumption is what drives economies forward. "
So if there are 2 countries initially identical in all respects except Country-A had a law that required each citizen to buy $1000 diamond per year (to be smashed and burned in a kiln.. yes diamond burns), and Country-B required each citizen to pay $1000 to the infrastructure maintenance and improvement fund (which is then spent on maintenance and improvement of the nations infrastructure, including roads, electricity generation, distribution, R&D of new technology etc), which country would have driven its economy forward more in 20 years?
"The cost of conservation at a level that would make a real environmental impact (not just nibble away at the problem near the edges) would severely impact quality of life in every nation that attempted such measures."
Explain how a gas guzzling polluting car which burns $2000 of gas per quarter and make the sky yellow is a higher quality of life than driving a fuel efficient car which burns $500 of gas per quarter with a blue sky? How does a house with shitty insulation spending $2000 per year on heating and cooling and a yellow sky give me a better quality of life than a house with state of the art insulation spending $500 in heating and cooling per year with a blue sky?
And how many much will health insurance cost from breathing all that crap vs living in a clean environment? What about insurance against natural disasters which increase with global warming?
You can reduce pollution 2 ways: reducing consumption *OR* reducing WASTE.
"Activision and "The Romantics" agreed on a contract. For a sum of money based on a pre-agreed formula, the company was allowed to do a cover song for the game. "
A cover is not the same thing as deliberately contriving to fool the audience into thinking they are hearing the original band performing the song. If your cover sounds so much like the original band that a reasonable person would be confused and think that it is the original, then you are copying their likeness. This would be exasperated if you used cartoon avators in the videogame that actually LOOK LIKE the Romantics.
You can't dress up and mimic John Lennon, act like him, sound like him and dance like him and sell music, even if they are your own original songs. If you are trying to impersonate his likeness, and people hearing you would assume it was him, and might accidentally pay you money, thinking they are getting John Lennon songs, then you are using his likeness and could be sued by his estate. This doesn't change if you get a license to do a cover.
I am sure the court will be quit lenient and liberal in interpreting what is allowed in a cover. But as far as infringing a likeness... I am not sure there will be much leniency. Likeness rights are like trademarks. If there is evidence that Activision was attempting to exploit the likeness of the romantics then they possibly went too far in law.
Do you have a link for that? Isn't this is something McDonalds would have raised as a defense against the original suit. This sounds fishy. i read they appealed and had the damages reduced by something around 80%. But I've never heard that McDonalds had any justification for the temperature of its coffee. Specifically I read that it served it 20 degrees hotter than other coffee vendors in the area and that it had received something like 700 prior complaints of burns from the coffee.
I think you are confusing the police subpoenaing information that a known source has, with information the university does NOT have. The University does NOT know the identify of the alleged infringers. It knows the Dorm Room number where an alleged event occured, and it knows if the computer was a Mac or a PC. If the subpoena asks for an identity of an "alleged infringer", the University DOES NOT HAVE IT, and it is not permitted to simply do a half ass job and provide a room number in place of an identity which the university knows can't identify a specific person. It is obligated to provide what the subpoena requests: An Identity of the "alleged infringer" . To provide anything else would be obstruction of justice. A room number is not an identity.
The university is saying that in order to confirm the identity it would need to perform interviews and conduct forensic analysis of computers in the control of other parties. The university is saying it does NOT have the identity of the alleged infringers readily available. It is not obligated to CREATE documents that do not exist.
If you saw someone using a gun. And a subpoena says "disclose who was using the gun", you are simply providing information you have on hand. It is not an undue burden. But the university has no knowledge or documents which contain this information. It would be speculating. The fact that the university may have the power to launch an investigation does not equal an obligation for it to do so.
"But if you chose to place your work under, say, the Creative Commons, you've just told the world at large, "here, take it and use it as you wish, I don't want anything in return, I don't forbid anything, have fun with it." So please have the _decency_ then to not act enraged when someone does just that. You _had_ all the framework you needed to protect it in any other way, and you chose explicitly not to. People are doing exactly what you officially told them it's ok." "No, the problem isn't with laws vs morals, it's with idiot utopians " "pretty damn stupid".. "It's you who's too fucking stupid" ---most of your irrelevant rant deleted.
Except that is not what happened. Wikipedia is NOT published under creative commons. And wikipedia did NOT tell the world at large "here, take it and use it as you with, I con't want anything in return, and I don't forbid anything, have fun with it". Wikipedia lays out the conditions and they were violated.
So why don't you at least have the _decency_ to apologize to the editors of wikipedia for publicly accusing them of being indecent, fucking stupid idiot utopians.
"The end result of this, and I think we all know it, is that if the US was to ratify and abide by the treaty, large numbers of US (and non-US, for that matter) corporations would move their polluting industry to China. How, exactly, does this reduce global emissions?"
because there will be a huge political will to add carbon tariffs on imports from China. People generally want to put tariffs on chinese importa anyway. Ratifying kyoto would be just the justification to go ahead and do it. If the US is imposing carbon taxes (or the equivalent) on its businesses, then the rules of economic fairness (as advocated by national economic hero Adam Smith) is to put equalizing tariffs on chinese imports. This is one of the only cases that Adam Smith advocates that tariffs SHOULD BE used.
"I hope that both sides can be more capable of independent thought and not snipe at each other constantly, it is child-ish and something that I thought we could have outgrown by now."
it is normal for someone to try to whitewash their wrongs by claiming everyone else is also wrong. It is not a snipe to accuse someone who operates based on faith, that they are operating based on faith. Faith is not scientific and faith does not have explanatory power over nature. Constantly invoking the same divine forces, that superstitious people of the 11th century invoked to explain nature is also superstitious. If you want scientists to respect the value of your faith, all you need to do is demonstrate the power of it: perform miracles, and permit the miracle to be subjected to scientific scrutiny the same way that scientists will allow you to subject science to your prayers.
I think you'll find that the laws of physics, as revealed ONLY BY SCIENCE, are indifferent to your faith, and your faith is powerless to alter them. If the religious community had its way we would still be performing exorcisms and blood letting to try to cure disease. If you have so much faith, then stop visiting the doctor when you are sick. Visit a priest.
I'm sorry.. but this is what the evidence tells me, and if it hurts your feelings, there is nothing I can do.
I sometimes get the idea that the religious community would you prefer scientists simply lied to them in order to preserve their superstitions.
"On another note, Wolfram takes these tiny Turing machines as reason to not believe that people have souls, while I on the other hand take these to indicate that life must be designed, but that has to do more with the general properties of Turing machines rather than the size of them."
I on the other hand take these tiny Turing machines as reason to believe that the WMD are still hiding in Iraq and if we stay the course we'll eventually find them! but that has to do more with the general properties of Turing machines rather than the size of them.
"What it boils down to is that our legal system has an almost complete inability to deal with harmful things that also produce large amounts of money."...
"The fact of the matter is that we're soft. We no longer have the ability to say "We, the people do not care if you're making money providing porn to children. You are no longer allowed to do that because it is wrong"."
The fact of the matter is that this ruling has absolutely nothing to do with providing porn to children. this has to do with a requirement that porn performers regardless of their age were obligated to identify themselves to the government and be so identified in perpetuity. Even if you and your wife made some home video or naughty photos and never gave it to anyone else, you would be obligated to keep records and allow federal agents into your home without warrant to inspect those records on demand.
Maybe "we the people" should pay more attention to the actual court ruling before bitching about how bad the legal system is.
"Foreign intelligence outside of the US is NOT subject to court oversight of any kind."
US intelligence agents are subject to prosecution, imprisonment, possibly even death outside the united states according to the laws of the country they are operating in. There is no legal defense of "foreign spy" and people caught intercepting communications without lawful authorization (as defined by THEIR laws, not US laws) in other countries would be subject to prosecution whether or not they happen to be Americans. hell.. in some other countries they might just "disappear".
there is a little thing called "sovereignty". And most countries don't give a rats ass if George W. Bush personally authorized the intercept.. they want you to follow their own laws.
NEWS FLASH: The President of the United States is not LITERALLY the leader of the free world.
can you define that? there is no rule forcing Microsoft to spend its profits inside America.. to hire Americans... to help the people of America, or to give a rats ass about America. Microsoft is a transnational corporation. don't pretend companies are citizens of states. as a living human being citizen you are basically stuck here.. this is your home, your culture, your roots, your identity, (and likely the only place on earth you can't be deported FROM.. well.. until the Bush administration changes that law) so you have a vested interest in making America a beautiful place to live. corporations do NOT have that prerogative. America could explode for all they cared.
People have to look at each and every corporation with an extremely cynical eye.
"Lesser-known artists tend to benefit from the exposure they get through file-sharing, while established artists lose out (and in financial terms, their losses are greater than the increases felt by the others). This is pretty well-established by research to date."
ultimately the purpose of copyright law is not to financially reward authors, but to encourage authors to create. by your argument then, filesharing is accomplishing what copyright was intended to accomplish, but more effectively.
there are more lesser-known artists than established artists, and collectively the lesser known artists produce MORE art. Producing ART is the goal of copyright. Producing money is NOT.
there is no actual damage in copyright infringement once you realize the copyright itself is a legal fiction in the first place.
"pushing a bunch of socialistic measures like healthcare (which will sound good on the surface, but in practice will be a disaster; socialized healthcare might work great in small homogenous European countries, but mark my words, it'll be a total disaster if they try it here at the Federal level, with the way we do things in this country),"
damn homo countries. It's gotta be the American way or the highway. The highway to eternal damnation that is.
american healthcare isn't a disaster already? What do you call 46 million people without health insurance? Thats enough people to populate a couple moderate sized homo countries.
obviously ethnic cleansing and more government support for organized religion is the only solution.
"It depends on "fundamentally unjust", as long as laws are created and passed by a legally elected, democratic government then society supposedly had its say."
the issue of fundamental justice is not the same as the issue of democracy. fundamental justice is a reference to the principles of fairness, equity, giving of evidence, standards of proof, the requirement for guilty knowledge before someone may be punished, the requirement that laws be specific and comprehensible or else they are invalid. There is no principle of fundamental justice that a law must have been democratically created. the fundamental justness of a law rests on its language, not on the method used to dream it up. And many laws have been stricken as fundamentally unjust, notwithstanding having been passed legally by a democratically elected government.
"Fundamental human rights is one of them, but music downloads doesn't bring out a single fiber of it."
freedom of expression is a fundamental human right.
The issue here which pisses some people off, is whether it is fundamentally unjust to make someone "COMPENSATE" another party to the tune of 220,000 dollars without any consideration to how much harm was actually caused.
compensation without harm is fundamentally unjust.
it is a fundamental principle of justice that unless you harm someone they have no suit against you.
24 tracks of music is less than 2 CD's worth of music. The creators of the music would generally get about $5 for that. She made about $30 of profit if the price of the CD would be about $15 each. this is the extent of the harm to the copyright holders.
the compensation should be commensurate with that. You can label damages "Statutory" or whatever you like.. fundamental justice is blind to labels and is supposed to be FAIR. You know: the lady with the sword and the SCALE.
If a statute lays out "compensation" that has no actual connection to the harm, it is a fundamentally unjust statute. if the statute is vague on how to determine whether to use the low end or high end of the "compensation" scale. It is an unjust statute.
When will people learn that corporations do not have feelings? They are mandated to make profit, nothing more. And everything they do is for the purpose of maximizing shareholder equity. It is the law.
Stop pretending they have wants or desires other than profit, and then you wont be surprised when Nokia is only promoting open systems in order to make profit.
Slashdot Mirror
"The problem your "boycotts" have is that **AA will just point to any decline in sales as a result of piracy instead of them alienating the consumers, giving them another excuse for pursuing even worse laws. This will lead into further boycotts, which in turn will lead to... well you get the point."
I am interested to know where this cycle leads.. because I don't get your point at all.
The best I can gather is that you believe the RIAA has the legal power to impose any legislation it wants and therefore we the people should tremble in fear.
"If we refine "doing it again" as "getting convicted of doing it again", then some studies go as low as 3%. "
as opposed to what? being suspected of doing it again? If you have a problem with the doctrine of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, perhaps you should attack that principle itself. Your complaint applies to recidivism rates of ALL CRIMES, not merely sex offences.
"Now add the following fact:
"A three-year longitudinal study (Kilpatrick, Edmunds, and Seymour, 1992) of 4,008 adult women found that 84 percent of respondents who identified themselves as rape victims did not report the crime to authorities."
In other words, the real rate of rape is about 6 times what is reported by adults. Unreported by children we could expect to be similar. Does this raise the real rate of recidivism? Almost certainly. How much? That takes a better statistician than I to calculate.
Then add the fact that some of the reported rapes ( both of adults and children ) are not prosecuted for lack of evidence 'beyond a reasonable doubt", and the real recidivism rates can only get higher.
"
all of which suggests that there are a great deal of criminals out there, who as far as we know are law abiding citizens. Maybe YOU are one of them?
These arguments about unknown and unreported or unprosecuted crimes do not only apply to crimes convicted by people with prior convictions.
Plenty of crimes go unreported. assaults, uttering threats, vandalism, etc. Without comparing rates that other crimes go unreported, the figure on alleged unreported sex offences is rather nonindicative of the general level of threat to society of a reformed sex offender, vs a reformed thief, a reformed con-artist, a reformed pot-smoker, or a reformed copyright infringer and the baseline threat of a person who haven't been convicted of anything yet.
"I hate to be the bleeding-heart liberal here, but I can see this expanding quickly into Matrix-like farms of captive dogs (birds? cats? -whatever has the best performance/cost ratio I'd think) who are fed thousands of images a day to sort-for-food.
I can imagine these facilities as being very out-of-country and very sub-par in terms of quality of life. The truth is that neural nets are just better at some types of analysis than others, and animals are a really really cheap form of self-contained, self-ordering neural nets with zero development cost.
Lets hope (strong)AI research gets up to speed before we see fidonet take on a new sinister meaning."
Human beings in the 3rd world cost less than dogs.
"If someone uses your connection to view kiddie porn, the police will go after you. No change there... the defense of 'someone else was using my computer' has been used too often and they don't believe it any more."
What are you talking about? Why wouldn't they believe it, if it was true and the experts agreed with it? I guess they don't believe the old "I didn't do it" defense either.
"If you are insane enough to open your wifi then for gods sake setup a decent firewall and a proxy so you can log who's been viewing what, otherwise you could find yourself at the wrong end of the law. There is no change there, either.. this law changes nothing."
firstly: a law which changes nothing SHOULD NOT BE PASSED. It breeds contempt for the law.
secondly:
There is nothing insane about having an open WIFI, anymore than it is insane to not build an enclosure around your lands. Yes.. someone might commit a crime on your lands. But they can commit a crime off your lands as well. The same requirement for reporting should apply to real property as electronic property.
This is just a lame attempt to get people to stop using open WIFI so more people must purchase internet service from an for profit ISP rather than share. It is also an attempt to get people used to the idea of being legally obligated by threat of being financially ruined, to snitch on their neighbors. First you start with a big boogie man, but then you extend it to shoplifting, loitering, vandalism, civil disobedience or protesting outside of the "free speech zones".
Open WIFI SHOULD be considered a common carrier. There is absolutely no sane justification not to extend common carrier status to it, except that certain groups want to eradicate the commons from existence in all the realms of real property, intellectual property and communications.
"You are being just as bad as the apathetic by taking on a cut and run mentality. I'm sure the founders of this country would hate you even more for being aware of the problems and not trying to get them solved. It's one thing to be ignorant of issues and quite another to know the issues and turn away."
How dare consumers act self interested in a free market society that rebelled against its lawful Monarch! What ever happened to brand loyalty? This kind of conduct is utterly disgraceful. The founding fathers would never condone turning your back on your masters and striking out on your own.
The obligation to be loyal to your sovereign is right there in the declaration of independence! oh.. wait.. oops.
"Heck, you wouldn't believe the background checks I went through for the FBI. In the end, while maybe not ideal for the potential employee, I find nothing significantly reprehensible about the process."
Of course you didnt. Firstly, you hadn't already been working there for 15 years. Secondly, most people who want to be cops *love* authority. They love to see it being exercised. They love to see the "bad guy" get "taken down". And "bad guy" includes people who smoke a joint or 2 now then and have never lifted a finger to hurt anyone in their life.
Did you notice you were applying for a job with the police?? That's what they do. take down bad guys, beat up protestors and direct traffic. wear body armour and sunglasses and carry big guns. hell.. and tase people for not obeying them fast enough.
Doesn't the FBI specifically want to hire people who see nothing wrong with slavish obedience to regulations with a disconnected conception of what the word 'freedom' means. (specifically it means the freedom to act without interference from other human beings). Don't Cops spend all day following orders, and complying with regulations. Is freedom of thought something they want to encourage. Some cops work in prisons.. can you believe that? who would EVER want to work in a prison???
You take it for granted that the government is doesn't need to respect civil liberties. You probably think the government Giveth and the government can taketh away. You think that is normal and necessary for any society to exist. I'll assume your motives are good. But such a police state was not the idea behind the founding of America. Try reading the declaration of independence.
But long story short... you weren't working for 15 years when your boss suddenly came in and saying "I no longer trust you because George Bush said so. Either you voluntarily waive your civil liberties, or else you lose your job, your home, your kids education, and start your entire life over again. Don't sweat it. It's voluntary".
human beings build relationships of trust. if the people you have been working with suddenly stop trusting you it feels like you are being punished. And if you did nothing wrong, it feels very humiliating and oppressive. maybe you see nothing wrong with humiliating and oppressing people. But then again.. what agency did you say you work for?
"To me, this sounds like the OP is a quite young programmer who is looking for a chance to lead a moral crusade rather than get the job done. In my experience I avoid taking on employees like that because they seem more focused on making sure everyone else follows their ethics than in doing a good job on the task at hand."
Thats the problem with hiring ethical employees. They always seem to think that ethics are rules to live your life by, even at work!
If you want to hire people with no scruples go ahead, but when they start stealing or embezzling from you, lying in their progress reports, and fudging their Q&A testing don't be surprised. You might encourage employees to put morality aside in favor of doing a "good job", but don't assume that they are only going to waive ethics when it favours their boss, its going to be in favour of themselves first and foremost; they'll screw you just like anyone else. It is also a sign that you are going to screw them over at every opportunity. So you can kiss employee moral (loyalty) goodbye.
"I would benefit from the fact that enforcement of the GPL is ultimately toothless.
Please, do go on and tell me how, exactly, I'm wrong in this."
The GPL is a license, you do not ENFORCE licenses. GPL doesn't force anyone to do anything.
The only thing to enforce is copyright law which will force you to pay damages and perhaps serve jail time for criminal violation.
"Yes. Consumption is what drives economies forward. "
So if there are 2 countries initially identical in all respects except Country-A had a law that required each citizen to buy $1000 diamond per year (to be smashed and burned in a kiln.. yes diamond burns), and Country-B required each citizen to pay $1000 to the infrastructure maintenance and improvement fund (which is then spent on maintenance and improvement of the nations infrastructure, including roads, electricity generation, distribution, R&D of new technology etc), which country would have driven its economy forward more in 20 years?
"The cost of conservation at a level that would make a real environmental impact (not just nibble away at the problem near the edges) would severely impact quality of life in every nation that attempted such measures."
Explain how a gas guzzling polluting car which burns $2000 of gas per quarter and make the sky yellow is a higher quality of life than driving a fuel efficient car which burns $500 of gas per quarter with a blue sky? How does a house with shitty insulation spending $2000 per year on heating and cooling and a yellow sky give me a better quality of life than a house with state of the art insulation spending $500 in heating and cooling per year with a blue sky?
And how many much will health insurance cost from breathing all that crap vs living in a clean environment?
What about insurance against natural disasters which increase with global warming?
You can reduce pollution 2 ways: reducing consumption *OR* reducing WASTE.
Unlike stupid animals, human beings can optimize.
"Activision and "The Romantics" agreed on a contract. For a sum of money based on a pre-agreed formula, the company was allowed to do a cover song for the game. "
A cover is not the same thing as deliberately contriving to fool the audience into thinking they are hearing the original band performing the song. If your cover sounds so much like the original band that a reasonable person would be confused and think that it is the original, then you are copying their likeness. This would be exasperated if you used cartoon avators in the videogame that actually LOOK LIKE the Romantics.
You can't dress up and mimic John Lennon, act like him, sound like him and dance like him and sell music, even if they are your own original songs. If you are trying to impersonate his likeness, and people hearing you would assume it was him, and might accidentally pay you money, thinking they are getting John Lennon songs, then you are using his likeness and could be sued by his estate. This doesn't change if you get a license to do a cover.
I am sure the court will be quit lenient and liberal in interpreting what is allowed in a cover. But as far as infringing a likeness... I am not sure there will be much leniency. Likeness rights are like trademarks. If there is evidence that Activision was attempting to exploit the likeness of the romantics then they possibly went too far in law.
Do you have a link for that? Isn't this is something McDonalds would have raised as a defense against the original suit. This sounds fishy. i read they appealed and had the damages reduced by something around 80%. But I've never heard that McDonalds had any justification for the temperature of its coffee. Specifically I read that it served it 20 degrees hotter than other coffee vendors in the area and that it had received something like 700 prior complaints of burns from the coffee.
"I try to find a way to protest without affecting my life. "
People like you are the problem in the world.
I think you are confusing the police subpoenaing information that a known source has, with information the university does NOT have. The University does NOT know the identify of the alleged infringers. It knows the Dorm Room number where an alleged event occured, and it knows if the computer was a Mac or a PC. If the subpoena asks for an identity of an "alleged infringer", the University DOES NOT HAVE IT, and it is not permitted to simply do a half ass job and provide a room number in place of an identity which the university knows can't identify a specific person. It is obligated to provide what the subpoena requests: An Identity of the "alleged infringer" . To provide anything else would be obstruction of justice. A room number is not an identity.
The university is saying that in order to confirm the identity it would need to perform interviews and conduct forensic analysis of computers in the control of other parties. The university is saying it does NOT have the identity of the alleged infringers readily available. It is not obligated to CREATE documents that do not exist.
If you saw someone using a gun. And a subpoena says "disclose who was using the gun", you are simply providing information you have on hand. It is not an undue burden. But the university has no knowledge or documents which contain this information. It would be speculating. The fact that the university may have the power to launch an investigation does not equal an obligation for it to do so.
"But if you chose to place your work under, say, the Creative Commons, you've just told the world at large, "here, take it and use it as you wish, I don't want anything in return, I don't forbid anything, have fun with it." So please have the _decency_ then to not act enraged when someone does just that. You _had_ all the framework you needed to protect it in any other way, and you chose explicitly not to. People are doing exactly what you officially told them it's ok." "No, the problem isn't with laws vs morals, it's with idiot utopians " "pretty damn stupid" .. "It's you who's too fucking stupid" ---most of your irrelevant rant deleted.
Except that is not what happened. Wikipedia is NOT published under creative commons. And wikipedia did NOT tell the world at large "here, take it and use it as you with, I con't want anything in return, and I don't forbid anything, have fun with it". Wikipedia lays out the conditions and they were violated.
So why don't you at least have the _decency_ to apologize to the editors of wikipedia for publicly accusing them of being indecent, fucking stupid idiot utopians.
"The end result of this, and I think we all know it, is that if the US was to ratify and abide by the treaty, large numbers of US (and non-US, for that matter) corporations would move their polluting industry to China. How, exactly, does this reduce global emissions?"
because there will be a huge political will to add carbon tariffs on imports from China. People generally want to put tariffs on chinese importa anyway. Ratifying kyoto would be just the justification to go ahead and do it. If the US is imposing carbon taxes (or the equivalent) on its businesses, then the rules of economic fairness (as advocated by national economic hero Adam Smith) is to put equalizing tariffs on chinese imports. This is one of the only cases that Adam Smith advocates that tariffs SHOULD BE used.
An arrest does not constitute a criminal record. A criminal record is a record of criminal convictions.
remember the little bit about "innocent until proven guilty"?
"I hope that both sides can be more capable of independent thought and not snipe at each other constantly, it is child-ish and something that I thought we could have outgrown by now."
it is normal for someone to try to whitewash their wrongs by claiming everyone else is also wrong. It is not a snipe to accuse someone who operates based on faith, that they are operating based on faith. Faith is not scientific and faith does not have explanatory power over nature. Constantly invoking the same divine forces, that superstitious people of the 11th century invoked to explain nature is also superstitious. If you want scientists to respect the value of your faith, all you need to do is demonstrate the power of it: perform miracles, and permit the miracle to be subjected to scientific scrutiny the same way that scientists will allow you to subject science to your prayers.
I think you'll find that the laws of physics, as revealed ONLY BY SCIENCE, are indifferent to your faith, and your faith is powerless to alter them. If the religious community had its way we would still be performing exorcisms and blood letting to try to cure disease. If you have so much faith, then stop visiting the doctor when you are sick. Visit a priest.
I'm sorry.. but this is what the evidence tells me, and if it hurts your feelings, there is nothing I can do.
I sometimes get the idea that the religious community would you prefer scientists simply lied to them in order to preserve their superstitions.
who's being childish?
"On another note, Wolfram takes these tiny Turing machines as reason to not believe that people have souls, while I on the other hand take these to indicate that life must be designed, but that has to do more with the general properties of Turing machines rather than the size of them."
I on the other hand take these tiny Turing machines as reason to believe that the WMD are still hiding in Iraq and if we stay the course we'll eventually find them! but that has to do more with the general properties of Turing machines rather than the size of them.
"What it boils down to is that our legal system has an almost complete inability to deal with harmful things that also produce large amounts of money." ...
"The fact of the matter is that we're soft. We no longer have the ability to say "We, the people do not care if you're making money providing porn to children. You are no longer allowed to do that because it is wrong"."
The fact of the matter is that this ruling has absolutely nothing to do with providing porn to children. this has to do with a requirement that porn performers regardless of their age were obligated to identify themselves to the government and be so identified in perpetuity. Even if you and your wife made some home video or naughty photos and never gave it to anyone else, you would be obligated to keep records and allow federal agents into your home without warrant to inspect those records on demand.
Maybe "we the people" should pay more attention to the actual court ruling before bitching about how bad the legal system is.
"Foreign intelligence outside of the US is NOT subject to court oversight of any kind."
US intelligence agents are subject to prosecution, imprisonment, possibly even death outside the united states according to the laws of the country they are operating in. There is no legal defense of "foreign spy" and people caught intercepting communications without lawful authorization (as defined by THEIR laws, not US laws) in other countries would be subject to prosecution whether or not they happen to be Americans. hell.. in some other countries they might just "disappear".
there is a little thing called "sovereignty". And most countries don't give a rats ass if George W. Bush personally authorized the intercept.. they want you to follow their own laws.
NEWS FLASH: The President of the United States is not LITERALLY the leader of the free world.
"a United States company"
can you define that? there is no rule forcing Microsoft to spend its profits inside America.. to hire Americans... to help the people of America, or to give a rats ass about America. Microsoft is a transnational corporation. don't pretend companies are citizens of states. as a living human being citizen you are basically stuck here.. this is your home, your culture, your roots, your identity, (and likely the only place on earth you can't be deported FROM.. well.. until the Bush administration changes that law) so you have a vested interest in making America a beautiful place to live. corporations do NOT have that prerogative. America could explode for all they cared.
People have to look at each and every corporation with an extremely cynical eye.
"Lesser-known artists tend to benefit from the exposure they get through file-sharing, while established artists lose out (and in financial terms, their losses are greater than the increases felt by the others). This is pretty well-established by research to date."
ultimately the purpose of copyright law is not to financially reward authors, but to encourage authors to create. by your argument then, filesharing is accomplishing what copyright was intended to accomplish, but more effectively.
there are more lesser-known artists than established artists, and collectively the lesser known artists produce MORE art. Producing ART is the goal of copyright. Producing money is NOT.
there is no actual damage in copyright infringement once you realize the copyright itself is a legal fiction in the first place.
"pushing a bunch of socialistic measures like healthcare (which will sound good on the surface, but in practice will be a disaster; socialized healthcare might work great in small homogenous European countries, but mark my words, it'll be a total disaster if they try it here at the Federal level, with the way we do things in this country),"
damn homo countries. It's gotta be the American way or the highway. The highway to eternal damnation that is.
american healthcare isn't a disaster already? What do you call 46 million people without health insurance? Thats enough people to populate a couple moderate sized homo countries.
obviously ethnic cleansing and more government support for organized religion is the only solution.
"It depends on "fundamentally unjust", as long as laws are created and passed by a legally elected, democratic government then society supposedly had its say."
the issue of fundamental justice is not the same as the issue of democracy. fundamental justice is a reference to the principles of fairness, equity, giving of evidence, standards of proof, the requirement for guilty knowledge before someone may be punished, the requirement that laws be specific and comprehensible or else they are invalid. There is no principle of fundamental justice that a law must have been democratically created. the fundamental justness of a law rests on its language, not on the method used to dream it up. And many laws have been stricken as fundamentally unjust, notwithstanding having been passed legally by a democratically elected government.
"Fundamental human rights is one of them, but music downloads doesn't bring out a single fiber of it."
freedom of expression is a fundamental human right.
The issue here which pisses some people off, is whether it is fundamentally unjust to make someone "COMPENSATE" another party to the tune of 220,000 dollars without any consideration to how much harm was actually caused.
compensation without harm is fundamentally unjust.
it is a fundamental principle of justice that unless you harm someone they have no suit against you.
24 tracks of music is less than 2 CD's worth of music. The creators of the music would generally get about $5 for that. She made about $30 of profit if the price of the CD would be about $15 each. this is the extent of the harm to the copyright holders.
the compensation should be commensurate with that. You can label damages "Statutory" or whatever you like.. fundamental justice is blind to labels and is supposed to be FAIR. You know: the lady with the sword and the SCALE.
If a statute lays out "compensation" that has no actual connection to the harm, it is a fundamentally unjust statute. if the statute is vague on how to determine whether to use the low end or high end of the "compensation" scale. It is an unjust statute.
When will people learn that corporations do not have feelings? They are mandated to make profit, nothing more. And everything they do is for the purpose of maximizing shareholder equity. It is the law.
Stop pretending they have wants or desires other than profit, and then you wont be surprised when Nokia is only promoting open systems in order to make profit.