I hate this notion where ya can't do squat without some license from the government.
Live by the law, die by the law.
Copyright is purely a government-granted legal fiction. I would have thought that by the MAFIAA would have bought a law that says you don't need a PI license to collect evidence for cases regarding copyright infringement. Hell, I'm surprised they haven't bought a law that relaxes requirements regarding the chain of evidence for copyright infringement cases because they are just so hard to win otherwise...
speech -> influences minds -> minds choose -> compels the body to act
And as long as you do not accept that "minds choose" is the one and only arbiter of the final result, then you are a fascist.
You see, I said what the people [think], meaning society as a whole.
No you didn't and expecting your twisted logic I already pointed that out when I said: "You know full well that no one who thinks that possession of kiddie porn should be illegal thinks the porn is addressed to anyone in particular."
That is in fact precisely how the world works.
So, now your argument has devolved from "I am a true believer in free speech, even though I want to censor stuff that I don't like" to "well if society does it, it must be right." Seems like you've left out a step where you assert that society is even close to being principled.
Certain drugs are banned precisely because they alter the chemistry of the mind, and enable people to harm themselves or others... and when you think about it: altering the brain chemistry is all that an idea really does too.
Why is it that when I write "calories" you read "drugs?"
Look up influence in the dictionary some time. Face it. Using 'influence' is defined in terms of how it 'causes' others to change or make changes.
Are you for real? The dictionary says! the dictionary says! But unsurprisingly you failed to actually provide proof, probably because when you actually looked at real dictionary you saw that words have multiple meanings and your entire joke of an argument relies on taking the wrong meaning in the wrong context.
Your premise - ideas cause auctions. You will never find that in an authoritative dictionary. The best you can do is that ideas cause more ideas.
So now you are saying speech is only curtailed when its a threat?
Threats can exist without speech, as exemplified by point a gun at someone. Thus laws that restrict making threats do not restrict speech. If speech happens to accompany the threat, punishing someone for the threat is not a restriction of speech.
Oooo. A 'threat'. A site advocating and compelling its members to sexually abuse kids is a 'threat' too, to the children within 'reach' of the sites visitors.
Do fail to understand the difference between the verb threaten as in make a threat and the noun threat?
So kiddie porn, if the people perceive it to be a threat to cause harm, should be illegal. And we're right back where we started, and you obviously agree with me. I'm glad.
I perceive your posts to be a threat to myself and my freedoms, so off to jail with you.
It is not the perception that matters, it is the intent. If someone made some kiddie porn and then sent it to a kid, or a kid's parent along with the caption of "this is what I'm going to do to you" - that would be a threat. But only a doofus who has argued himself into a corner on slashdot would say they think random kiddie porn is a threat made toward anyone. You know full well that no one who thinks that possession of kiddie porn should be illegal thinks the porn is addressed to anyone in particular.
Your premise - ideas cause auctions. Totally antithetical to a free society. You might as well argue that food should be banned because the calories it provides are what enable people to kill and maim.
If you want to phrase it as 'society censors certain types of speech to prevent it from "influencing" people towards making a choice to do something society abhors' instead of 'society censors certain types of speech to prevent it from "causing" people to make a choice to do something society abhors'... well... to me that is pointless semantics.
Hey! You GOT it. You use the word influence as if it means "cause" and that's totally fucked up. They are two entirely different meanings but you insist in conflating the two.
So if you yell fire in a theatre. You didn't 'cause' a stampede that gets people trampled and killed.
I have waiting and waiting for you to run out of other excuses and finally end up at the end of the road which is "fire in a theater" Now that you are here, we can agree on one thing. You got here because every other defense of censorship you've tried were losers. I mean it would be utterly disingenuous to say that kiddie porn was the same thing as yelling fire and you aren't disingenuous, right? Good, I'm glad we can agree.
Now, here's why fire in a theater is not a free speech issue. It is because it is ALSO a threat, just like pointing a gun at someone is a threat. Based on previous posting history you will probably find it difficult to discriminate between the two, it might help if you keep in mind that pointing a gun at someone is not speech at all, thus the concept of a threat is distinct from speech.
I didn't say "most extreme of the fundamentalists" I just said fundamentalists. As in the majority of the people who live in the Bible-belt. Most of them are not "recently converted".
So? What you did say is that, "A fundamentalist christian didn't really choose to be one, not really, not in any meaningful sense. That is how they were raised." The fact that the most committed of the fundies are the recently converted proves that people do have a choice because they chose to convert. Furthermore to take your terribly bad example one step further down the road of fail - plenty of kids from fundie families break out of the 'influence' once they are adults with... wait for it... FREE WILL!
If you decide to haul off and take a swing at me, that's 'free will' right?
YES! ABSOFUCKINGLOUTELY YES!
And you know who agrees with me?
Ghandi.
Influence is one thing, action is entirely seperate. As long as you believe that anything more than one's own brain is responsible for one's actions, then you not only don't believe in free speech, you believe in fascism because that's the only logical way to run a society where people are not responsible for their actions.
PS to address your red herring - A fundamentalist christian didn't really choose to be one, not really, not in any meaningful sense. That is how they were raised.
You sure don't know many fundamentalists, do you? The most extreme of the fundamentalists are not the ones who were "raised that way" - its the recently converted.
Hate speech fosters hate crime; it recruits the disenfranchised, and gives them a target.
Censoring hate speech just gives it legitimacy in the eyes of the disenfranchised and reduces the opportunity for public repudiation. You can not stop people from thinking, but you can lend credibility to what they think and censorship is the exact kind of reinforcement that such 'bad thoughts' thrive on.
Your point? Speech causes physical action which causes harm.
Hate speech does not CAUSE physical action. The will of the individual is what causes physical action. You know personal responsibility, the right of self determination. Your argument is the equivalent of denying the existence of free will, probably the most singularly important concept on which any modern democracy is based.
That's why I chose it. Society en masse is quite comfortable with erring on the side of caution in that particular case, and I readily concede that it hasn't done nearly as much good as the effort taken would suggest. But the real question you have to answer is what real harm has been caused by it?
Yeah, and you would too if you had a clue. Like the suicide of Commodore David White or hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of children who were denied the opportunity for mental growth afforded by all those banned books that I originally cited.
Don't be such a pussy. You are the one who brought up this idea of 'emotional harm' if you are going to argue a countering opinion, then have the balls to do it justice instead of shrugging your shoulders and saying "not my idea" as soon as someone responds.
The authors of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights intended the phrase "free speech" to mean political speech, in order to ensure the proper functioning of a democratic government. They never intended it to provide a right for pedophiles to speak about their harmful sexual proclivities.
If that's true, why didn't they say that? Lets assume they were too lazy to add that one extra word, do you have any supporting evidence, like from the archives of Franklin's or Jefferson's letters, to validate your claim?
The implication of Zawinski's assertion is false. What matters is if it is cheaper for you to do it than it is for you to pay someone else to do it and any future modifications down the line since without source you never get the option to do it yourself.
Scientology might own the copyright to their works, but the Dutch supreme court ruled that copyright infringement can be acceptable if it is of interest of the general public. Of course, they have no jurisdiction in the US, but if the copyrighted material can be hosted in the Netherlands, it can be made accesible to anyone.
I don't know a thing about Dutch law, but in US law the first of 4 possible factors which determine if fair use applies is:
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
Which would seem to cover the situation you mentioned.
The right to free expression conflicts with the right to be free from harm. If your expression is causing harm then perhaps your expression should be curtailed.
No it does not, and to claim otherwise is to make a false analogy, just watch as you do it:
In other words, at some stage up around advocating the raping of children
You should rape children. GO! Do it now! You will really like it!
Harm is not caused by speech. Harm is caused by physical action. People like you who falsely claim to believe in freedom of expression are just conflating the two because, like all censorship, it is easier to identify and squelch speech about harmful actions than it is to identify and stop individuals who actually commit those actions and cause actual harm. You get the warm fuzzy of appearing to do something about a problem with high emotional content without all the cost of actually making a real difference.
By the way, bonus points for using "But think of the children!" as your example. I can't think of another meme that has been so widely abused to justify censorship with such little actual reduction in harm.
Of course, you can always argue that the fact that there was regulation that was removed led to the crisis. But you'd be wrong.
Or you could argue that the problem is the return of regulation just in time to socialize the losses. The money that was lost due to piss-poor loan underwriting ought to come from those who took the risk of investing in piss-poor underwriting.
Instead, just in the nick of time, our tax dollars jump in to save the day for the people who unwisely chose to invest in piss-poor underwriting.
This whole idea of "too large to let fail" is the unholy love-child of pro-business 'conservatives' and pro-command-and-control 'liberals.' Its like they took the worst characteristics of each group and decide that those were the ideals by which to run our current government.
Yeah, it's like defending free speech and having to stick up for Nazis and pedophiles. It's still a worthy cause in the abstract, but the specifics can take some of the wind out of your sails.
It shouldn't. Nobody wants to censor talk about mom and apple pie. The right of free speech only matters when it comes down to speech that somebody finds offensive. If you aren't willing to defend the freedom to speak about stuff you find offensive, then you didn't ever really believe in free speech to begin with.
However, your argument about the public domain fails for the most part, since most of the music and video that is pirated is recent: Roll back copyright to its original length, and the most pirated works would still be those that are copyrighted, and we'd still be in the same situation with the RIAA and MPAA member companies.
You miss the point. It isn't that copyright duration should be returned to the original length. It's that the MAFIAA broke the contract first and then continued to do it again and again over the years beginning long before the internet even existed. No reasonable person would expect one party to continue to adhere to the terms of a contract that the other won't and doesn't follow.
"I have a dream": Imagine, if you will, one day, agreed upon in advance, when *everyone*, all around the world, stops pirating for 24 hours.
The collective "Oh, shit" from the RIAA and MPAA members, and other such organizations worldwide, would be amazing, I bet.
Yeaaah... I bet not. Because "taking away the demand, for even just 24 hours" means the 'demand' returns immediately afterwards. No effective killing of anything, no scaring the daylights out of anyone. You sound kinda like those innumerates who think that boycotting all gas stations for 24 hours will have massive repercussions to the oil industry.
Not that anyone is even going to notice a score: 0 post by an AC down in the bowels of a thread a day after it fell off the front page of slashdot anyway.
Now that you mention spamming, that reminds me of another anti-customer move on their part. As part of my realization of how sucktastic Tigerdirect actually is, I did do business with them. But I own my own domain, so I used a personalized email address, like tceridregit@example.com, just for them. I too checked the no spam choice and was spammed anyway.
But I also found that they were 'renting' their spam list out because I got spam from a bank sent to the tceridregit address and I wrote back to the bank to tell them that spamming was terrible for their image, and especially unbecoming of a bank. The CIO of the bank actually wrote back and said that they were "testing the waters" of direct email marketing and that tigerdirect had assured him that the only people on the list had opted in for 3rd party spam. Since that was clearly not the case he had decided that he would not be making use of Tigerdirect's mail list.
I think that is the only time I've ever actually had a spammer apologize and then actually stop spamming. Of course Tigerdirect kept at it for a few more years, they may even still be doing it today since I eventually just gave up and routed tceridregit directly to null.
Name one case where a company paid into a GPL project and then themselves violated the license that very same project.
Tivo
Where do you get this stuff from? Are you living in some sort of alternate FUD-world? Tivo has neither violated the GPL nor been sued for it.
It did, huh? What software did IBM develop under a BSD style license?
Forgive me, I did not realize that software was all things beneath the sky. It did not occur to me that experience earned from alternate fields could POSSIBLY apply in the heavenly and untouchable field that is software programming. Before they programmed software before, no-one ever had to propagate a product into a saturated market.
Look, if you aren't even going to cite a concrete example, but instead go off on a silly little tirade how can you expect anyone to take you seriously? ESPECIALLY when you appear to be trying to co-opt the publication of specifications as being the equivalent of BSD style licensing and the antithesis of GPL licensing.
Honestly, I'm not surprised. Your initial contribution to this discussion was so reality-challenged that it was inevitable that you would end up wandering around in the weeds deliberately turning a blind eye to any and all didactic points.
That may be true, however as was mentioned previously, it also results in people funding a project, industrializing it; and then getting sued by the movement for improper use.
Bullshit. Pure bullshit. Name one case where a company paid into a GPL project and then themselves violated the license that very same project.
At least credit me with enough intelligence to know the difference. I was talking about the open-ness of the file format and it's attendant software
And just what in hell does that have to do with the difference between BSD licensed code and GPL licensed code? Either you are claiming it as some sort of victory for BSD licensing, or you are throwing it out as a red herring.
Now I may just be grousing about the movement; nevertheless, a more open mindset about how the software is used will allow it to spread faster. It worked for IBM.
It did, huh? What software did IBM develop under a BSD style license?
That may be true but it's also true that they are uncommonly popular. OpenSSH is pretty much THE ssh client, I hadn't even heard of other clients until somewhat recently, neither did I consider them valid. Simultaneously, Apache is pretty much the HTTP server, even OSX 10.3.x uses it. It's granted that there are fewer BSD licensed projects than GPL projects. However, while every Linux server will by definition run Linux; that's not a guarantee for other projects like Gnome, Kde, etc..
And so much for your original contention that projects NOT under the GPL are doing FAR better than most GPL projects.
While they may be hard up for cash, that has little to do with their license; since being GPL doesn't promote funding.
Baloney. GPL does precisely that by leveling the playing field. It means that if one company funds a GPL project they don't have to worry that some other company will take the fruits of that labor, add a couple of proprietary features and then use the first company's own investment to get a leg up on competing with them.
With what I've read and seen, I would contest the GPL superiority by virtue of Apache, OpenSSH and Mysql's popularity.
MySQL is GPL. Commercial sales of linux-based products are many orders of magnitude greater than any of your examples, including MySQL.
PDF and mp3 as well, despite the licenses on their own code and the closed nature of their licenses.
You seem to be confused, probably because you are waving a red herring. Are you talking about software or file formats? Because LAME was GPL and is now LGPL and there are plenty of GPL'd PDF reading and writing software out there too, like xpdf and evince for starters.
Where did they get us, and who is this "us" exactly?
The 'us' whom you think 'wants to be accepted.'
Yours is actually a good statement. If we were to give it up, I would point out that projects NOT under the GPL, like OpenSSH or Apache are doing FAR better than most GPL projects.
Lol. OpenSSH ala their parent OpenBSD was publicly begging for money just a year or two ago. I firmly believe, with only anecdotal proof and sound reasoning, that GPL licensed projects are used (and profitably too) orders of magnitude more than BSD-style licensed projects are.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate this notion where ya can't do squat without some license from the government.
Live by the law, die by the law.
Copyright is purely a government-granted legal fiction. I would have thought that by the MAFIAA would have bought a law that says you don't need a PI license to collect evidence for cases regarding copyright infringement. Hell, I'm surprised they haven't bought a law that relaxes requirements regarding the chain of evidence for copyright infringement cases because they are just so hard to win otherwise...
speech -> influences minds -> minds choose -> compels the body to act
And as long as you do not accept that "minds choose" is the one and only arbiter of the final result, then you are a fascist.
You see, I said what the people [think], meaning society as a whole.
No you didn't and expecting your twisted logic I already pointed that out when I said: "You know full well that no one who thinks that possession of kiddie porn should be illegal thinks the porn is addressed to anyone in particular."
That is in fact precisely how the world works.
So, now your argument has devolved from "I am a true believer in free speech, even though I want to censor stuff that I don't like" to "well if society does it, it must be right." Seems like you've left out a step where you assert that society is even close to being principled.
Certain drugs are banned precisely because they alter the chemistry of the mind, and enable people to harm themselves or others... and when you think about it: altering the brain chemistry is all that an idea really does too.
Why is it that when I write "calories" you read "drugs?"
ideas do not equal speech
Yeah, right.
Look up influence in the dictionary some time. Face it. Using 'influence' is defined in terms of how it 'causes' others to change or make changes.
Are you for real? The dictionary says! the dictionary says! But unsurprisingly you failed to actually provide proof, probably because when you actually looked at real dictionary you saw that words have multiple meanings and your entire joke of an argument relies on taking the wrong meaning in the wrong context.
Your premise - ideas cause auctions. You will never find that in an authoritative dictionary. The best you can do is that ideas cause more ideas.
So now you are saying speech is only curtailed when its a threat?
Threats can exist without speech, as exemplified by point a gun at someone. Thus laws that restrict making threats do not restrict speech. If speech happens to accompany the threat, punishing someone for the threat is not a restriction of speech.
Oooo. A 'threat'. A site advocating and compelling its members to sexually abuse kids is a 'threat' too, to the children within 'reach' of the sites visitors.
Do fail to understand the difference between the verb threaten as in make a threat and the noun threat?
So kiddie porn, if the people perceive it to be a threat to cause harm, should be illegal. And we're right back where we started, and you obviously agree with me. I'm glad.
I perceive your posts to be a threat to myself and my freedoms, so off to jail with you.
It is not the perception that matters, it is the intent. If someone made some kiddie porn and then sent it to a kid, or a kid's parent along with the caption of "this is what I'm going to do to you" - that would be a threat. But only a doofus who has argued himself into a corner on slashdot would say they think random kiddie porn is a threat made toward anyone. You know full well that no one who thinks that possession of kiddie porn should be illegal thinks the porn is addressed to anyone in particular.
Your premise - ideas cause auctions. Totally antithetical to a free society. You might as well argue that food should be banned because the calories it provides are what enable people to kill and maim.
Note that Microsoft got off on the anti-trust charges after the bushies came in.
It wasn't necessarily the bushies, it was that Microsoft figured out how to play the game and then played it better than even Enron.
So it may not be that Google has failed to pay off the appropriate parties, just that MS has paid the appropriate parties even more than Google did.
Hate to tell you this, but 2000 isn't the future anymore. We just got body cavity searches to buy a cup of coffee instead of jetpacks.
That would be Ubuntu 1984.
If you want to phrase it as 'society censors certain types of speech to prevent it from "influencing" people towards making a choice to do something society abhors' instead of 'society censors certain types of speech to prevent it from "causing" people to make a choice to do something society abhors'... well... to me that is pointless semantics.
Hey! You GOT it. You use the word influence as if it means "cause" and that's totally fucked up. They are two entirely different meanings but you insist in conflating the two.
So if you yell fire in a theatre. You didn't 'cause' a stampede that gets people trampled and killed.
I have waiting and waiting for you to run out of other excuses and finally end up at the end of the road which is "fire in a theater" Now that you are here, we can agree on one thing. You got here because every other defense of censorship you've tried were losers. I mean it would be utterly disingenuous to say that kiddie porn was the same thing as yelling fire and you aren't disingenuous, right? Good, I'm glad we can agree.
Now, here's why fire in a theater is not a free speech issue. It is because it is ALSO a threat, just like pointing a gun at someone is a threat. Based on previous posting history you will probably find it difficult to discriminate between the two, it might help if you keep in mind that pointing a gun at someone is not speech at all, thus the concept of a threat is distinct from speech.
I didn't say "most extreme of the fundamentalists" I just said fundamentalists. As in the majority of the people who live in the Bible-belt. Most of them are not "recently converted".
So? What you did say is that, "A fundamentalist christian didn't really choose to be one, not really, not in any meaningful sense. That is how they were raised." The fact that the most committed of the fundies are the recently converted proves that people do have a choice because they chose to convert. Furthermore to take your terribly bad example one step further down the road of fail - plenty of kids from fundie families break out of the 'influence' once they are adults with ... wait for it ... FREE WILL!
If you decide to haul off and take a swing at me, that's 'free will' right?
YES! ABSOFUCKINGLOUTELY YES!
And you know who agrees with me?
Ghandi.
Influence is one thing, action is entirely seperate. As long as you believe that anything more than one's own brain is responsible for one's actions, then you not only don't believe in free speech, you believe in fascism because that's the only logical way to run a society where people are not responsible for their actions.
PS to address your red herring - A fundamentalist christian didn't really choose to be one, not really, not in any meaningful sense. That is how they were raised.
You sure don't know many fundamentalists, do you? The most extreme of the fundamentalists are not the ones who were "raised that way" - its the recently converted.
Not all of us just randomly spout gibberish at a bunch of pixels on a screen in an effort to argue.
Dude, that's what you just did. Spouted random gibberish which you weren't prepared to back up with anything coherent.
Hate speech fosters hate crime; it recruits the disenfranchised, and gives them a target.
Censoring hate speech just gives it legitimacy in the eyes of the disenfranchised and reduces the opportunity for public repudiation. You can not stop people from thinking, but you can lend credibility to what they think and censorship is the exact kind of reinforcement that such 'bad thoughts' thrive on.
Your point? Speech causes physical action which causes harm.
Hate speech does not CAUSE physical action. The will of the individual is what causes physical action. You know personal responsibility, the right of self determination. Your argument is the equivalent of denying the existence of free will, probably the most singularly important concept on which any modern democracy is based.
That's why I chose it. Society en masse is quite comfortable with erring on the side of caution in that particular case, and I readily concede that it hasn't done nearly as much good as the effort taken would suggest. But the real question you have to answer is what real harm has been caused by it?
Yeah, and you would too if you had a clue. Like the suicide of Commodore David White or hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of children who were denied the opportunity for mental growth afforded by all those banned books that I originally cited.
Don't be such a pussy. You are the one who brought up this idea of 'emotional harm' if you are going to argue a countering opinion, then have the balls to do it justice instead of shrugging your shoulders and saying "not my idea" as soon as someone responds.
The authors of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights intended the phrase "free speech" to mean political speech, in order to ensure the proper functioning of a democratic government. They never intended it to provide a right for pedophiles to speak about their harmful sexual proclivities.
If that's true, why didn't they say that? Lets assume they were too lazy to add that one extra word, do you have any supporting evidence, like from the archives of Franklin's or Jefferson's letters, to validate your claim?
Only if your time is worth zero dollars.
So just like Open Source Software, then.
The implication of Zawinski's assertion is false.
What matters is if it is cheaper for you to do it than it is for you to pay someone else to do it and any future modifications down the line since without source you never get the option to do it yourself.
Scientology might own the copyright to their works, but the Dutch supreme court ruled that copyright infringement can be acceptable if it is of interest of the general public. Of course, they have no jurisdiction in the US, but if the copyrighted material can be hosted in the Netherlands, it can be made accesible to anyone.
I don't know a thing about Dutch law, but in US law the first of 4 possible factors which determine if fair use applies is:
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
Which would seem to cover the situation you mentioned.
The right to free expression conflicts with the right to be free from harm. If your expression is causing harm then perhaps your expression should be curtailed.
No it does not, and to claim otherwise is to make a false analogy, just watch as you do it:
In other words, at some stage up around advocating the raping of children
You should rape children. GO! Do it now! You will really like it!
Harm is not caused by speech. Harm is caused by physical action. People like you who falsely claim to believe in freedom of expression are just conflating the two because, like all censorship, it is easier to identify and squelch speech about harmful actions than it is to identify and stop individuals who actually commit those actions and cause actual harm. You get the warm fuzzy of appearing to do something about a problem with high emotional content without all the cost of actually making a real difference.
By the way, bonus points for using "But think of the children!" as your example. I can't think of another meme that has been so widely abused to justify censorship with such little actual reduction in harm.
Of course, you can always argue that the fact that there was regulation that was removed led to the crisis. But you'd be wrong.
Or you could argue that the problem is the return of regulation just in time to socialize the losses. The money that was lost due to piss-poor loan underwriting ought to come from those who took the risk of investing in piss-poor underwriting.
Instead, just in the nick of time, our tax dollars jump in to save the day for the people who unwisely chose to invest in piss-poor underwriting.
This whole idea of "too large to let fail" is the unholy love-child of pro-business 'conservatives' and pro-command-and-control 'liberals.' Its like they took the worst characteristics of each group and decide that those were the ideals by which to run our current government.
Yeah, it's like defending free speech and having to stick up for Nazis and pedophiles. It's still a worthy cause in the abstract, but the specifics can take some of the wind out of your sails.
It shouldn't. Nobody wants to censor talk about mom and apple pie. The right of free speech only matters when it comes down to speech that somebody finds offensive. If you aren't willing to defend the freedom to speak about stuff you find offensive, then you didn't ever really believe in free speech to begin with.
Yes, the Russians call the booster 'Soyuz' and the capsule 'Soyuz'.
Soyuz say.
It's always satisfying to fix a computer problem with a hammer, even though you are being very careful.
It's called percussive maintenance.
However, your argument about the public domain fails for the most part, since most of the music and video that is pirated is recent: Roll back copyright to its original length, and the most pirated works would still be those that are copyrighted, and we'd still be in the same situation with the RIAA and MPAA member companies.
You miss the point. It isn't that copyright duration should be returned to the original length. It's that the MAFIAA broke the contract first and then continued to do it again and again over the years beginning long before the internet even existed. No reasonable person would expect one party to continue to adhere to the terms of a contract that the other won't and doesn't follow.
"I have a dream": Imagine, if you will, one day, agreed upon in advance, when *everyone*, all around the world, stops pirating for 24 hours.
The collective "Oh, shit" from the RIAA and MPAA members, and other such organizations worldwide, would be amazing, I bet.
Yeaaah... I bet not. Because "taking away the demand, for even just 24 hours" means the 'demand' returns immediately afterwards. No effective killing of anything, no scaring the daylights out of anyone. You sound kinda like those innumerates who think that boycotting all gas stations for 24 hours will have massive repercussions to the oil industry.
Not that anyone is even going to notice a score: 0 post by an AC down in the bowels of a thread a day after it fell off the front page of slashdot anyway.
Now that you mention spamming, that reminds me of another anti-customer move on their part. As part of my realization of how sucktastic Tigerdirect actually is, I did do business with them. But I own my own domain, so I used a personalized email address, like tceridregit@example.com, just for them. I too checked the no spam choice and was spammed anyway.
But I also found that they were 'renting' their spam list out because I got spam from a bank sent to the tceridregit address and I wrote back to the bank to tell them that spamming was terrible for their image, and especially unbecoming of a bank. The CIO of the bank actually wrote back and said that they were "testing the waters" of direct email marketing and that tigerdirect had assured him that the only people on the list had opted in for 3rd party spam. Since that was clearly not the case he had decided that he would not be making use of Tigerdirect's mail list.
I think that is the only time I've ever actually had a spammer apologize and then actually stop spamming. Of course Tigerdirect kept at it for a few more years, they may even still be doing it today since I eventually just gave up and routed tceridregit directly to null.
THey do not overclock as easily as the dual cores, for a variety of reasons.
Name one case where a company paid into a GPL project and then themselves violated the license that very same project.
Tivo
Where do you get this stuff from? Are you living in some sort of alternate FUD-world?
Tivo has neither violated the GPL nor been sued for it.
It did, huh? What software did IBM develop under a BSD style license?
Forgive me, I did not realize that software was all things beneath the sky. It did not occur to me that experience earned from alternate fields could POSSIBLY apply in the heavenly and untouchable field that is software programming. Before they programmed software before, no-one ever had to propagate a product into a saturated market.
Look, if you aren't even going to cite a concrete example, but instead go off on a silly little tirade how can you expect anyone to take you seriously? ESPECIALLY when you appear to be trying to co-opt the publication of specifications as being the equivalent of BSD style licensing and the antithesis of GPL licensing.
Honestly, I'm not surprised. Your initial contribution to this discussion was so reality-challenged that it was inevitable that you would end up wandering around in the weeds deliberately turning a blind eye to any and all didactic points.
That may be true, however as was mentioned previously, it also results in people funding a project, industrializing it; and then getting sued by the movement for improper use.
Bullshit. Pure bullshit. Name one case where a company paid into a GPL project and then themselves violated the license that very same project.
At least credit me with enough intelligence to know the difference. I was talking about the open-ness of the file format and it's attendant software
And just what in hell does that have to do with the difference between BSD licensed code and GPL licensed code? Either you are claiming it as some sort of victory for BSD licensing, or you are throwing it out as a red herring.
Now I may just be grousing about the movement; nevertheless, a more open mindset about how the software is used will allow it to spread faster. It worked for IBM.
It did, huh? What software did IBM develop under a BSD style license?
That may be true but it's also true that they are uncommonly popular. OpenSSH is pretty much THE ssh client, I hadn't even heard of other clients until somewhat recently, neither did I consider them valid. Simultaneously, Apache is pretty much the HTTP server, even OSX 10.3.x uses it. It's granted that there are fewer BSD licensed projects than GPL projects. However, while every Linux server will by definition run Linux; that's not a guarantee for other projects like Gnome, Kde, etc..
And so much for your original contention that projects NOT under the GPL are doing FAR better than most GPL projects.
While they may be hard up for cash, that has little to do with their license; since being GPL doesn't promote funding.
Baloney. GPL does precisely that by leveling the playing field. It means that if one company funds a GPL project they don't have to worry that some other company will take the fruits of that labor, add a couple of proprietary features and then use the first company's own investment to get a leg up on competing with them.
With what I've read and seen, I would contest the GPL superiority by virtue of Apache, OpenSSH and Mysql's popularity.
MySQL is GPL. Commercial sales of linux-based products are many orders of magnitude greater than any of your examples, including MySQL.
PDF and mp3 as well, despite the licenses on their own code and the closed nature of their licenses.
You seem to be confused, probably because you are waving a red herring. Are you talking about software or file formats? Because LAME was GPL and is now LGPL and there are plenty of GPL'd PDF reading and writing software out there too, like xpdf and evince for starters.
Where did they get us, and who is this "us" exactly?
The 'us' whom you think 'wants to be accepted.'
Yours is actually a good statement. If we were to give it up, I would point out that projects NOT under the GPL, like OpenSSH or Apache are doing FAR better than most GPL projects.
Lol. OpenSSH ala their parent OpenBSD was publicly begging for money just a year or two ago. I firmly believe, with only anecdotal proof and sound reasoning, that GPL licensed projects are used (and profitably too) orders of magnitude more than BSD-style licensed projects are.