There is this thing called copyright law that works just fine without DRM. Photocopiers didn't kill the book publishers. Tape recorders didn't kill music industry. VCRs *multiplied* the profits of the movie industry, despite the fact that certain studios nearly had them outlawed.
You are wrong. Plain and simple.
All of your contrary examples, and any more that you can think up, are all based on fixing the copies in a physical medium. Cassette tapes, video tapes, photocopy paper, etc - all physical products that inherently limit the feasibility of wide-scale duplication.
Digital information combined with digital networks is a whole new beast, with no real analogue for comparisons. Whereas previous forms of copying all required a significant marginal cost per copy, the marginal cost of a digital copy is so small that it is effectively zero.
This difference in marginal costs makes copyright laws uneforceable. In the past, if you wanted to make a million bootleg copies it took significant resources - the cost of time and materials was such that relatively few people could do it, so the scale of infringement was small and law enforcement could concentrate their efforts on that small group of people and get a good "return" on the effort invested in cracking down on a bootleg operation. Even then, there was never a shortage of bootleggers.
But now, everybody and his brother can make a thousand copies of something for practically nothing. It is just not feasible to enforce the law in such a situation, the effort to bust a single bootlegger is now more than it was when bootlegging was concentrated in high-volume and high-visibility situations. It's almost impossible to catch someone who only makes a couple of thousand copies, and when you do catch him, 100 more people take his place. So your "return" on the effort of copyright enforcement is almost nil.
It is almost always a stupid idea to make analogies when talking about non-rivalrous and non-excludable goods like digital information, but I'm feeling stupid so here goes.
Back in the days before the printing press, if copyright had existed it would be like setting the national speed limit to 300mph. Basically a law with no effect because almost nobody has the ability to violate it.
After the printing press became widespread, copyright law was the equivalent of setting the national speed limit to about 150mph. A few very determined individuals could violate it, but they would sure stand out if they did and would be easy to catch if the cops were looking for violators.
With photocopiers and cassette recorders, the speed limit got down to around 100mph. Just about anyone can exceed 100mph, but few people do it because the effort is rarely worth the reward. Anyone who routinely exceeds 100mph will get busted pretty quick, but the casual violator usualy gets away without getting caught.
Now, with the internet, its like setting the speed limit down to 10mph. Anyone can easily exceed the limit, in fact it so easy to do so, that people naturally break the law without even thinking about it. It is just not possible for the cops to arrest everyone going faster than 10mph because (a) so many people do it, which means hardly anyone stands out from the crowd and (b)there is just not enough hours in the day to make a dent on the number of people breaking the law.
It's time for the law to change to reflect the changes in technology. We need to put that speed limit back up to at least 100mph, if not higher.
I honestly believe people should be more honest with themselves and their wallets. If something is worth buying, it's worth buying.
This will never happen on any sort of feasible scale. It isn't a matter of being "honest" (or as most people who take the same position you have, of being "moral") it is a simple matter of economics - rationale consumers will not pay for something they can get for free. That's not good or bad, honest or dishonest, it just basic economics.
A song is not released into the public domain, that term has its own legal definition and is totally seperate from what actually happens, which is that rights holders have their rights protected by law (just the same type of law that allows you to leave your car in a carpark with a reasonable expectation that it will remain there while you are away).
No it is not the same type of law. In fact, it is an entirely different section of US statutes.
Here's an apropos bumper sticker I saw recently: Copyright is not property, it is merely a temporarily loan from the public domain.
I have albums over 50 years old that I can still play,
Brief seque...
When those albums were published and sold to unsuspecting buyers, the terms of the agreement under which they were sold (i.e. copyright law) were such that by now the contents would have entered into the public domain and you would be free to make copies and share as many of them as you wished with all 4+ billion of your closest friends.
But, in the time since the album was purchased and the terms of the contract agreed to, the copyright cartel changed the terms and stole that music from you. In fact, by changing the terms of the contract under which all copyright material had been created, released and sold to included a longer duration they stole millions of creative works from the general population. I would even go so far as to say that it was the single largest theft ever in the history of the USA and unlikely to be eclipsed in dollar value any time soon (at least not until the next great thieving in about 10 years when they change the terms of copyright again).
Just something to think about next time a mafiaa apologist accuses people of stealing -- the kettle is far blacker than the pot.
All the jokes so far, at least the ones modded up have been about her being a woman. Big deal, chicks in space, it has been done before people. Won't someone think of the children? What we should be worried about are the terrorists! She's Iranian and we all know they are part of the axis of evil terror boogey-people, so:
Will the TSA make her take her shoes off before boarding the rocket?
At rocket school did she go to the how to pilot a rocket classes, but skipped the ones on landing?
Where was she when the Challenger blew up?
Did Osama promise her 72 male virgins in the afterlife?
Does she have ID? Terrorists never have ID, so that will keep the rocket safe.
She better not bring a water bottle on board, she might make a bomb out of water and blow up the space station.
You were the one that brought up the issue of picking it up off the sidewalk.
Yes I was, in order to illustrate that your absolutist claim was incorrect, you have now at least partially backtracked on that claim, so my point was validated.
I am not changing the topic, you are.
Holy crap, what are you 16 years old?
My point was that they signed a non-negotiable NDA. so it was something they should have known was there, and what the consequences were. So there's no reason to bitch when they get canned.
Your example did not show that. Your example shows that signing the NDA as a pre-condition to employment is non-negotiable, but says nothing about the requirements placed on Apple regarding enforcement. You will also note that I have never once said anything about the terminated employee's opinions, they are irrelevant to the analysis, so judging whether they have reason to bitch is also irrelevant.
for legal reasons, Apple probably felt that they did have to use the harshest form of consequence spelled out in the NDA, for the legal reasons I mentioned.
You keep using different words that all mean "had to." You are still just as fundamentally wrong as you were the first time. Apple does not probably feel that way, they absolutely do not feel that way. You seem to be mixing up the "defend it or lose it" requirements of trademark law with employment law. As I have already illustrated, it does not work that way.
There are times to be lenient,and there are times to show you mean business. When it comes to internal leaks, Apple has ALWAYS been hard-ass. Don't expect them to change now.
Again, not an internal leak (as you yourself just wrote "not granted access to those products pre-release"). These people did not in any way abuse the privileges of their employment at Apple to gain access to the software.
As for "creative professionals" being more important than mall employees and thus deserving of more sensible treatment -- that is exactly the kind of corporate rules are more important than the people attitude I say is counter-productive.
picking something off the sidewalk is a far cry from willingly downloading it
Just a second ago, you specifically said, "Where they got it doesn't matter. Now it does matter? Which is it?
An NDA is not negotiable unless you are a star talent, and there's no way these kids were star talents. If ya want the job ya sign the NDA. there's no dickering over the terms. I've had jobs where NDA's were required, and there was no opportunity to negotiate. You either signed or left the building.
You do realize that you are changing the topic to fit your rationalization? This is not about BEFORE the NDA is signed, this is about the consquences of violating the NDA. Those consequences are completely arbitrary and may range up to termination, but termination is not a requirement.
And yes, they can feel that there is ample reason to fire over an NDA violation. I didn't say they HAD too.
You did say they HAD too or else the NDA would be moot the next time it was violated. Here is exactly what you said:
If Apple doesn't fire these people, the next time Apple tried to do that, THOSE employees could go to court and use these cases as examples of how Apple had 'constructively changed' the terms of the NDA by this action.
I'll bet other Apple employees will agree.
So? I bet many other Apple employees disagree, its a big company with lots of diversity.
My point is very simple - Apple had no requirement to fire these people and on the face of it, the firings reflect a corporate attitude that the rules are more important than the work which is counter-productive.
I am sure I am biased, one of my first jobs out of college was for a 10 year-old "mature start-up" of about 1,000 people which had, as the first rule of the employee handbook, "We will not do something stupid just because it is a rule written down in this handbook." I always thought Apple wanted to be seen as a company with similar values, but these firings appear to be counter to anything like that.
The actual ThinkSecret web page includes a more complete quote from the fired employee:
All of us know that we violated our NDA and ethics policy. Therefore, because we had the character to tell the truth and to face the consequences of our actions, we were terminated," said one of the fired employees, who spoke with Think Secret on condition of anonymity. "My only question is, if we all lied and denied it would we still be working at Apple today? Even more so, is that the kind of person that Apple wants working for them?
That first part is of interest. They have apparently been fired for violating Apple's NDA and the corporate ethics policy. Last things first: Anyone who has been required to go to "Corporate Ethics Training" at a big US corp like Apple knows that the term Ethics has been redefined by corporate america. It is not about morality, or taking the ethically correct action. It is all about making sure your actions don't get the company sued, and if they do get sued, making sure they have lots of CYA to keep from losing in court and having to pay out mucho moola.
That's all there is to corporate ethics policies, nothing more and certainly nothing on which anyone should being using to judge a person's character.
As for violating Apple's NDA - sounds like they used bittorrent to get a copy of the software from someone else who had originally made it public. That means they did not themselves take an internal copy from Apple and redistribute that. They only did what any other person on the net was capable of - go to a public website like isohunt and use the public information to get into the public torrent for the files.
Because bittorrent makes you a redistributor as well as a simple downloader, I am sure they are technically in violation of Apple's NDA - but realistically their employment at Apple had nothing to do with their downloading of a copy.
Thirdly - Apple, or rather whatever uptight member of lower middle management who actually made the call to fire these guys, is cutting off their nose to spite their face. Any retailer should be ecstatic to have store employees as interested in their own products as these guys (kids?) are. How many times have you all gone to best buy, or compusa or circuit city, etc, etc and been told absolute bullshit by some ignorant "sales associate?" When you've got employees that are so into your own products that they hunt down pre-release versions on the internet just check out for themselves, you need to keep them around, not fire them for trivialities.
Last and probably least, but it made me chuckle, did anyone else notice the plagarism at VAR Business? Their link to the story at ThinkSecret includes an unnecessary "?www.reghardware.co.uk" in the URL, which is another computer news website. Looks like a violation of corporate ethics policy to me.
Remember how screwed the copyright cartel were when
1) Magazines and newspapers started republishing their print articles on the web 2) TV on DVD first took root and the fans wanted the original soundtracks
In both cases the boilerplate contracts that the copyright cartel had been using did not anticipate the changes in technology and the new mediums brought about. Thus they were in effect hoist by their own petard in having to negotiate new contracts for the use of old content and they were made to pay dearly - for example the initial pricing for SCTV was $90 msrp per 'season' because in large part of the music royalties).
So, I don't think it necessarily follows to say that because "no major label passed on nearly 45% of gross" for sales involving physical distribution, that they did not end up passing on 45% of gross for sales through digital distribution.
For example, my original post about breakage and returns was intended as a joke - but perhaps the labels had been relying on artificially inflated figures for breakage and returns of physical product to pad their take of the gross and the terms of their initial contracts with the artists made it such that they could not similarly pad digital their take of the gross from digital sales. So they altered their boilerplate such that any new or renewal contracts closed those loopholes with new overhead rates and now the artists are back to holding the short end of the stick again.
So, as you say, it is not knowable since the terms are usually kept secret, but I am saying that the logic you used to get to your conclusions that a net of 30 cents is bogus is not air-tight.
I have counseled or represented 20 to 25 defendants in these cases, of which approximately 10 are or have been in active litigation. I am as familiar as anyone in the country with the evidence, or lack of evidence, the RIAA has when it commences these cases. My blog is full of the litigation documents laying it all out for you. If you choose not to read them, you should at least respect the report of someone who has read all of them.
False appeal to authority.
1) 20-25 cases is a drop in the bucket of the 18,000 or so. What makes you confident that your sample is indicative of their evidence for even a large minority of such cases?
2) If you are so familiar with the evidence and have the documents that lay it all out, you could at least point them out. So far, the two you have pointed out were irrelevant. I count over 300 links on the (your?) info.riaalawsuits.us webpage, many of them to PDF documents making them that much more difficult to rapidly search. If that information you claim is really there, I shouldn't need to "respect the report" of someone who claims to have read them all, I could read the relevant ones myself. The disintermediation of the net is in large part about changing gatekeepers into editors.
'Since record companies have realized the popularity of iTunes and other sites, many reworked contracts to give artists less money per download. Andrews said while record companies once offered artists about 30 cents for each song sold, now musicians are earning less than a dime.'
Well, obviously when the record companies underestimated demand they also underestimated the rates of breakage and returns, so of course they would have to modify the artists' cut in order to better compensate the record companies for those costs.
Your suggestion that it's okay to sue people, even if you have no evidence that they infringed your copyrights, is troublesome to me.
Ok, time for some ground rules. Since I've already disproved your assertation about "no evidence" please stop using it, ok?
All the RIAA knows about people it sues is that they paid for an internet access account which the RIAA's investigator has traced to a particular dynamic ip address on a certain date and time at which the investigator took a screen shot of a shared files folder, and that in this shared files folder there were 9 or 10 copyrighted song files.
While your version of the RIAA's evidence fits the vague description in the linked article about Elektra v Barker, it is by no means the only version that would do so. Unless you are reading from additional documents that you have not provided, you have no basis to assume that your version is the version. It is just as likely, if not more so, that the RIAA's investigator downloaded in part or even a complete copy of the shared music. Doing so is neither difficult nor time-consuming and clearly shwos that the shared files are indeed copyrighted material and are indeed being distributed. That is what a reasonable person would expect given the information you have provided so far.
have to wonder why you would be willing to be so tolerant of behavior in which the RIAA, instead of investigating further, simply chooses to go ahead and sue innocent people.
Because that's not necessarily what is happening. You claim it, but you haven't shown it. Furthermore, if that is what is happening, all they have to do is modify their process of collecting evidence by only the smallest of measures and your whole point becomes moot.
I wonder how you would feel if you were forced to incur the expense of defending yourself in a federal lawsuit for something you didn't do. Perhaps you wouldn't take it so lightly.
How does that sort of emotional strawman have any relevance to the facts? You wouldn't be trying to pound the table now would you?
Sometimes the line isn't so fine. In these cases they are all based upon zero evidence of defendant having committed a copyright infringement.
Well, I read the articles on the other end of the links you provided and I don't really see your point, there is nothing there we haven't all heard a hundred times already here on slashdot. They have a lot more than "zero evidence" on which to base their suits. IP addresses certainly aren't 100% conclusive evidence - and we've all heard of the occasional well-publicisized case were they were wrong, but being civil suits they don't need the evidence to be 100% conclusive in order to win.
The lojack program seems to do the exact thing yours does, but then again, perhaps because it is "official", the police may take the information more seriously.
More likely, they have at least one person on staff who knows how to "speak cop," and thus knows how to get on their side of the thin blue line. So instead of seeing Absolute as a threat to their control, they are perceived as an ally whom the cops may call upon for a favor in the future.
The editors at Slashdot have unlimited moderation points and are responsible for about 3% of the moderation.
Citation?
It is acceptable for a lawyer to tell his client he has no case. If the client tells him file it anyway, the lawyer is not supposed to follow that order. He is supposed to refuse to put his name to it.
However the difference between "has no case" and "has almost no case, but you might get lucky" is extremely fine and in the case of the MAFIAA suits, there is plenty of distance to even the "almost no case" line.
The last thing people in developing nations need is you telling them that they can't have a job except at 10 bucks an hour, or that they can't work for more than 40 hours a week, or that it's only legal for companies to come in and provide them with a way of obtaining food, medicine, and education (i.e. money) if they also provide full health care, dental, and college tuition for the kids.
In this case it isn't about forcing other governments to adopt labor laws that prevent people from working or chase away factories to other less restrictive countries.
It is about forcing companies through guilt (aka bad PR), market pressure or even local American laws restricting entry into our market to those which follow standards that we as a society deem acceptable for us to condone by purchasing the end product.
I think very few people who are calling for better working conditions in the 3rd world factories of American corps have any expectation of making it possible for those employees to have enough free-time and money to play WoW at all. But on the flipside, they probably do expect that people and children in such factories are at least paid a living wage and not subject to practices known to cause health problems and such.
A 10 hour work-day for 6 days of the week is not terribly harsh, its better than some slashdotters get in the USA already.
Now, the question of theft of the original media is slightly more interesting. A thief obtains no legal title to stolen goods, so if ones original media were stolen, one might retain constructive possession of the originals.
Thus making the thief guilty of copyright infringement.
Probably the only situation in which both "sides" can agree that copyright infringment is also theft!
It is human nature to share stuff, especially when sharing it does not reduce its value to the sharer and can actually increase its value by giving the sharer greater status or encouraging the sharing of other knowledge in return. Human society is built on sharing knowledge. If we were not naturally inclined to share knowledge, we would never have progressed beyond the level of small nomadic family groups - the human equivalent of a pack of apes.
It's also no surprise that kids feel less comfortable sharing something that was not initially paid for - we all inherently understand that it takes work to create or discover new ideas. But we also inherently understand that the work (and thus the cost) is in the creating, not in copying. Under the current system of charging for each official copy, the simplest reconciliation of the two is to be sure that the lineage of the copy you receive includes at least one paid-for copy. It doesn't quite match up, but it is probably the closest that monst kids are going to get given all the other constraints on their lives.
I'm sure there are more than a few people just itching to condemn me for supporting thieves with no respect for copyright owners. Save it. This is slashdot, we've all heard it before a million times. This post is not about morality, it is about human nature for better or for worse.
"A report from the cable industry's research arm suggests that Cable-television operators require another round of multibillion-dollar network upgrades to keep up with rivals in the fast-growing high-speed Internet hookup business.
Do you hear that?
It's the sound of tens of thousands of dollars in new bribes starting the march to Congress to make sure that our taxes pay for these upgrades while the cablecos continue to act as if they own the infrastructure.
Why just tens of thousands? Congress is notoriously cheap the best government money can buy at the best prices too!
What is proof of music ownership? I can't find a good answer anywhere. Let's assume some random person is hauled into court allegedly for having music that he has not legitimately bought.
First Response:
Criminal court? He doesn't have to prove shit, innocent until proven guilty, right?
Civil court? The accuser still needs a preponderance of evidence. Just about anything from physical media, to a receipt, to testimony by a friend that he saw the guy make the purchase ought to be enough reduce the accuser to less than a preponderance.
Second Response:
If this is about one of the MAFIAA's "sue 'em all and let God sort it out" lawsuits then chances are it doesn't matter if he has legal ownership or not. Those suits are about distribution and not simply possesion of a copy.
No way I'm going to double-check and go dig through USC Title 17 on a Friday night while under the influence of tequila, but I don't think it's illegal to receive an unauthorized copy, just to make the copy or to distribute the copy. Feel free to dig through the spaghetti code on the other end of that link to find something that says otherwise.
PS, all typos and poor logic are the sole property of Padron's Resposada.
Hey, at least you are mostly paying attention and not making up as many bullshit strawmen to beat your chest about.
it doesn't help the new author with little or no fan base, the mid-tier author, or the unknown director or screenwriter
Just how do you think those people make any money now? They get the shaft all the time under the current system - just ask any unknown screenwriter, director or actor (all synonyms for waiter) or 'mid-tier' author (who alomst certainly holds down a regular day job, usually in academia). Nobody starting out and nobody doing a mediocre job gets paid very much, it really doesn't matter what industry they are in. You have to establish your credentials before you can convince anyone to give you the big bucks, a system based on assurance contracts would be no different.
Further, the model is not scalable or sustainable, in that many, many, many people would have to continually browse sites and directories of authors
Hardly. All they have to do is watch, listen to or read any of the FREE previous works and when they are done, they decide if they want more. If they do, they put down their money. If they don't want more it doesn't matter because the author has already been paid for the work he's already done and if not enough people think he's good enough to warrant another one, then that's the free market telling him to get a new job.
and agree to pay for something they're not going to get for a year or more, as opposed to browsing Amazon, seeing a product you'd like, paying a reasonable amount, and having it the very next day.
What good is money that sits in the bank? Might as well put it up to purchase something else, especially if it gets you something cool in the short term (like the exceptionally effective trinkets NPR and PBS give away during their fund-drives, oh please don't let that trigger a backslide into another 'donation' fixation again, alright?) or it earns interest sitting in that escrow account so that if the contract is not completed, you get more money back than you put in. (See the concept of a dominant assurance contract.)
BTW, go to your definitions and look up the free rider problem...
Don't get it do you? The free-rider is only the problem for copyright-based schemes. The work is already done and released, so the free-rider takes it for free and the creator does not see any compensation. Here, I'll say it again - free-riders are a primary reason why copyright does not work any more. If you can solve the free-rider problem for the copyright cartels, hollywood will make you their king.
So instead of trying to fight a losing battle against human nature, we need a system that harnesses the free-rider. Free redistribution does exactly that, the free-rider now becomes the engine of promotion for more paying work. Instead of 'stealing' he's now working for the creator by spreading advertising for the creator.
As to your own "denial of reality", bits are not just bits. If bits are all you want,
Oh puleaze. Grow up already. Your assinine fixation on terminology does not lead to any better understanding of the problem, in fact it prevents you from seeing the situation clearly. Just as "respect" doesn't earn a dime of ROI, neither are "content" bits any harder or more costly to duplicate than "random" bits.
Slashdot Mirror
You are wrong. Plain and simple.
All of your contrary examples, and any more that you can think up, are all based on fixing the copies in a physical medium. Cassette tapes, video tapes, photocopy paper, etc - all physical products that inherently limit the feasibility of wide-scale duplication.
Digital information combined with digital networks is a whole new beast, with no real analogue for comparisons. Whereas previous forms of copying all required a significant marginal cost per copy, the marginal cost of a digital copy is so small that it is effectively zero.
This difference in marginal costs makes copyright laws uneforceable. In the past, if you wanted to make a million bootleg copies it took significant resources - the cost of time and materials was such that relatively few people could do it, so the scale of infringement was small and law enforcement could concentrate their efforts on that small group of people and get a good "return" on the effort invested in cracking down on a bootleg operation. Even then, there was never a shortage of bootleggers.
But now, everybody and his brother can make a thousand copies of something for practically nothing. It is just not feasible to enforce the law in such a situation, the effort to bust a single bootlegger is now more than it was when bootlegging was concentrated in high-volume and high-visibility situations. It's almost impossible to catch someone who only makes a couple of thousand copies, and when you do catch him, 100 more people take his place. So your "return" on the effort of copyright enforcement is almost nil.
It is almost always a stupid idea to make analogies when talking about non-rivalrous and non-excludable goods like digital information, but I'm feeling stupid so here goes.
Back in the days before the printing press, if copyright had existed it would be like setting the national speed limit to 300mph. Basically a law with no effect because almost nobody has the ability to violate it.
After the printing press became widespread, copyright law was the equivalent of setting the national speed limit to about 150mph. A few very determined individuals could violate it, but they would sure stand out if they did and would be easy to catch if the cops were looking for violators.
With photocopiers and cassette recorders, the speed limit got down to around 100mph. Just about anyone can exceed 100mph, but few people do it because the effort is rarely worth the reward. Anyone who routinely exceeds 100mph will get busted pretty quick, but the casual violator usualy gets away without getting caught.
Now, with the internet, its like setting the speed limit down to 10mph. Anyone can easily exceed the limit, in fact it so easy to do so, that people naturally break the law without even thinking about it. It is just not possible for the cops to arrest everyone going faster than 10mph because (a) so many people do it, which means hardly anyone stands out from the crowd and (b)there is just not enough hours in the day to make a dent on the number of people breaking the law.
It's time for the law to change to reflect the changes in technology. We need to put that speed limit back up to at least 100mph, if not higher.
I honestly believe people should be more honest with themselves and their wallets. If something is worth buying, it's worth buying.
This will never happen on any sort of feasible scale. It isn't a matter of being "honest" (or as most people who take the same position you have, of being "moral") it is a simple matter of economics - rationale consumers will not pay for something they can get for free. That's not good or bad, honest or dishonest, it just basic economics.
A song is not released into the public domain, that term has its own legal definition and is totally seperate from what actually happens, which is that rights holders have their rights protected by law (just the same type of law that allows you to leave your car in a carpark with a reasonable expectation that it will remain there while you are away).
No it is not the same type of law. In fact, it is an entirely different section of US statutes.
Here's an apropos bumper sticker I saw recently: Copyright is not property, it is merely a temporarily loan from the public domain.
I have albums over 50 years old that I can still play,
Brief seque...
When those albums were published and sold to unsuspecting buyers, the terms of the agreement under which they were sold (i.e. copyright law) were such that by now the contents would have entered into the public domain and you would be free to make copies and share as many of them as you wished with all 4+ billion of your closest friends.
But, in the time since the album was purchased and the terms of the contract agreed to, the copyright cartel changed the terms and stole that music from you. In fact, by changing the terms of the contract under which all copyright material had been created, released and sold to included a longer duration they stole millions of creative works from the general population. I would even go so far as to say that it was the single largest theft ever in the history of the USA and unlikely to be eclipsed in dollar value any time soon (at least not until the next great thieving in about 10 years when they change the terms of copyright again).
Just something to think about next time a mafiaa apologist accuses people of stealing -- the kettle is far blacker than the pot.
You were the one that brought up the issue of picking it up off the sidewalk.
Yes I was, in order to illustrate that your absolutist claim was incorrect, you have now at least partially backtracked on that claim, so my point was validated.
I am not changing the topic, you are.
Holy crap, what are you 16 years old?
My point was that they signed a non-negotiable NDA. so it was something they should have known was there, and what the consequences were. So there's no reason to bitch when they get canned.
Your example did not show that. Your example shows that signing the NDA as a pre-condition to employment is non-negotiable, but says nothing about the requirements placed on Apple regarding enforcement. You will also note that I have never once said anything about the terminated employee's opinions, they are irrelevant to the analysis, so judging whether they have reason to bitch is also irrelevant.
for legal reasons, Apple probably felt that they did have to use the harshest form of consequence spelled out in the NDA, for the legal reasons I mentioned.
You keep using different words that all mean "had to." You are still just as fundamentally wrong as you were the first time. Apple does not probably feel that way, they absolutely do not feel that way. You seem to be mixing up the "defend it or lose it" requirements of trademark law with employment law. As I have already illustrated, it does not work that way.
There are times to be lenient,and there are times to show you mean business. When it comes to internal leaks, Apple has ALWAYS been hard-ass. Don't expect them to change now.
Again, not an internal leak (as you yourself just wrote "not granted access to those products pre-release"). These people did not in any way abuse the privileges of their employment at Apple to gain access to the software.
As for "creative professionals" being more important than mall employees and thus deserving of more sensible treatment -- that is exactly the kind of corporate rules are more important than the people attitude I say is counter-productive.
You do realize that you are changing the topic to fit your rationalization? This is not about BEFORE the NDA is signed, this is about the consquences of violating the NDA. Those consequences are completely arbitrary and may range up to termination, but termination is not a requirement.
You did say they HAD too or else the NDA would be moot the next time it was violated. Here is exactly what you said:
So? I bet many other Apple employees disagree, its a big company with lots of diversity.
My point is very simple - Apple had no requirement to fire these people and on the face of it, the firings reflect a corporate attitude that the rules are more important than the work which is counter-productive.
I am sure I am biased, one of my first jobs out of college was for a 10 year-old "mature start-up" of about 1,000 people which had, as the first rule of the employee handbook, "We will not do something stupid just because it is a rule written down in this handbook." I always thought Apple wanted to be seen as a company with similar values, but these firings appear to be counter to anything like that.
That's all there is to corporate ethics policies, nothing more and certainly nothing on which anyone should being using to judge a person's character.
As for violating Apple's NDA - sounds like they used bittorrent to get a copy of the software from someone else who had originally made it public. That means they did not themselves take an internal copy from Apple and redistribute that. They only did what any other person on the net was capable of - go to a public website like isohunt and use the public information to get into the public torrent for the files.
Because bittorrent makes you a redistributor as well as a simple downloader, I am sure they are technically in violation of Apple's NDA - but realistically their employment at Apple had nothing to do with their downloading of a copy.
Thirdly - Apple, or rather whatever uptight member of lower middle management who actually made the call to fire these guys, is cutting off their nose to spite their face. Any retailer should be ecstatic to have store employees as interested in their own products as these guys (kids?) are. How many times have you all gone to best buy, or compusa or circuit city, etc, etc and been told absolute bullshit by some ignorant "sales associate?" When you've got employees that are so into your own products that they hunt down pre-release versions on the internet just check out for themselves, you need to keep them around, not fire them for trivialities.
Last and probably least, but it made me chuckle, did anyone else notice the plagarism at VAR Business? Their link to the story at ThinkSecret includes an unnecessary "?www.reghardware.co.uk" in the URL, which is another computer news website. Looks like a violation of corporate ethics policy to me.
there is a TON of legacy stuff we still support, and continue to develop
Indeed, "ton" is the right adjective, I've never seen such a verbose language in my life.
Remember how screwed the copyright cartel were when
1) Magazines and newspapers started republishing their print articles on the web
2) TV on DVD first took root and the fans wanted the original soundtracks
In both cases the boilerplate contracts that the copyright cartel had been using did not anticipate the changes in technology and the new mediums brought about. Thus they were in effect hoist by their own petard in having to negotiate new contracts for the use of old content and they were made to pay dearly - for example the initial pricing for SCTV was $90 msrp per 'season' because in large part of the music royalties).
So, I don't think it necessarily follows to say that because "no major label passed on nearly 45% of gross" for sales involving physical distribution, that they did not end up passing on 45% of gross for sales through digital distribution.
For example, my original post about breakage and returns was intended as a joke - but perhaps the labels had been relying on artificially inflated figures for breakage and returns of physical product to pad their take of the gross and the terms of their initial contracts with the artists made it such that they could not similarly pad digital their take of the gross from digital sales. So they altered their boilerplate such that any new or renewal contracts closed those loopholes with new overhead rates and now the artists are back to holding the short end of the stick again.
So, as you say, it is not knowable since the terms are usually kept secret, but I am saying that the logic you used to get to your conclusions that a net of 30 cents is bogus is not air-tight.
False appeal to authority.
1) 20-25 cases is a drop in the bucket of the 18,000 or so. What makes you confident that your sample is indicative of their evidence for even a large minority of such cases?
2) If you are so familiar with the evidence and have the documents that lay it all out, you could at least point them out. So far, the two you have pointed out were irrelevant. I count over 300 links on the (your?) info.riaalawsuits.us webpage, many of them to PDF documents making them that much more difficult to rapidly search. If that information you claim is really there, I shouldn't need to "respect the report" of someone who claims to have read them all, I could read the relevant ones myself. The disintermediation of the net is in large part about changing gatekeepers into editors.
Your suggestion that it's okay to sue people, even if you have no evidence that they infringed your copyrights, is troublesome to me.
Ok, time for some ground rules. Since I've already disproved your assertation about " no evidence" please stop using it, ok?
All the RIAA knows about people it sues is that they paid for an internet access account which the RIAA's investigator has traced to a particular dynamic ip address on a certain date and time at which the investigator took a screen shot of a shared files folder, and that in this shared files folder there were 9 or 10 copyrighted song files.
While your version of the RIAA's evidence fits the vague description in the linked article about Elektra v Barker, it is by no means the only version that would do so. Unless you are reading from additional documents that you have not provided, you have no basis to assume that your version is the version. It is just as likely, if not more so, that the RIAA's investigator downloaded in part or even a complete copy of the shared music. Doing so is neither difficult nor time-consuming and clearly shwos that the shared files are indeed copyrighted material and are indeed being distributed. That is what a reasonable person would expect given the information you have provided so far.
have to wonder why you would be willing to be so tolerant of behavior in which the RIAA, instead of investigating further, simply chooses to go ahead and sue innocent people.
Because that's not necessarily what is happening. You claim it, but you haven't shown it. Furthermore, if that is what is happening, all they have to do is modify their process of collecting evidence by only the smallest of measures and your whole point becomes moot.
I wonder how you would feel if you were forced to incur the expense of defending yourself in a federal lawsuit for something you didn't do. Perhaps you wouldn't take it so lightly.
How does that sort of emotional strawman have any relevance to the facts? You wouldn't be trying to pound the table now would you?
Sometimes the line isn't so fine. In these cases they are all based upon zero evidence of defendant having committed a copyright infringement.
Well, I read the articles on the other end of the links you provided and I don't really see your point, there is nothing there we haven't all heard a hundred times already here on slashdot. They have a lot more than "zero evidence" on which to base their suits. IP addresses certainly aren't 100% conclusive evidence - and we've all heard of the occasional well-publicisized case were they were wrong, but being civil suits they don't need the evidence to be 100% conclusive in order to win.
The lojack program seems to do the exact thing yours does, but then again, perhaps because it is "official", the police may take the information more seriously.
More likely, they have at least one person on staff who knows how to "speak cop," and thus knows how to get on their side of the thin blue line. So instead of seeing Absolute as a threat to their control, they are perceived as an ally whom the cops may call upon for a favor in the future.
The editors at Slashdot have unlimited moderation points and are responsible for about 3% of the moderation.
Citation?
It is acceptable for a lawyer to tell his client he has no case. If the client tells him file it anyway, the lawyer is not supposed to follow that order. He is supposed to refuse to put his name to it.
However the difference between "has no case" and "has almost no case, but you might get lucky" is extremely fine and in the case of the MAFIAA suits, there is plenty of distance to even the "almost no case" line.
Lighten up man, it was a joke. The original post was full of enough twisted logic to begin with, I was just riffing off it.
The last thing people in developing nations need is you telling them that they can't have a job except at 10 bucks an hour, or that they can't work for more than 40 hours a week, or that it's only legal for companies to come in and provide them with a way of obtaining food, medicine, and education (i.e. money) if they also provide full health care, dental, and college tuition for the kids.
In this case it isn't about forcing other governments to adopt labor laws that prevent people from working or chase away factories to other less restrictive countries.
It is about forcing companies through guilt (aka bad PR), market pressure or even local American laws restricting entry into our market to those which follow standards that we as a society deem acceptable for us to condone by purchasing the end product.
I think very few people who are calling for better working conditions in the 3rd world factories of American corps have any expectation of making it possible for those employees to have enough free-time and money to play WoW at all. But on the flipside, they probably do expect that people and children in such factories are at least paid a living wage and not subject to practices known to cause health problems and such.
A 10 hour work-day for 6 days of the week is not terribly harsh, its better than some slashdotters get in the USA already.
Now, the question of theft of the original media is slightly more interesting. A thief obtains no legal title to stolen goods, so if ones original media were stolen, one might retain constructive possession of the originals.
Thus making the thief guilty of copyright infringement.
Probably the only situation in which both "sides" can agree that copyright infringment is also theft!
It is human nature to share stuff, especially when sharing it does not reduce its value to the sharer and can actually increase its value by giving the sharer greater status or encouraging the sharing of other knowledge in return. Human society is built on sharing knowledge. If we were not naturally inclined to share knowledge, we would never have progressed beyond the level of small nomadic family groups - the human equivalent of a pack of apes.
It's also no surprise that kids feel less comfortable sharing something that was not initially paid for - we all inherently understand that it takes work to create or discover new ideas. But we also inherently understand that the work (and thus the cost) is in the creating, not in copying. Under the current system of charging for each official copy, the simplest reconciliation of the two is to be sure that the lineage of the copy you receive includes at least one paid-for copy. It doesn't quite match up, but it is probably the closest that monst kids are going to get given all the other constraints on their lives.
I'm sure there are more than a few people just itching to condemn me for supporting thieves with no respect for copyright owners. Save it. This is slashdot, we've all heard it before a million times. This post is not about morality, it is about human nature for better or for worse.
"A report from the cable industry's research arm suggests that Cable-television operators require another round of multibillion-dollar network upgrades to keep up with rivals in the fast-growing high-speed Internet hookup business.
Do you hear that?
It's the sound of tens of thousands of dollars in new bribes starting the march to Congress to make sure that our taxes pay for these upgrades while the cablecos continue to act as if they own the infrastructure.
Why just tens of thousands? Congress is notoriously cheap the best government money can buy at the best prices too!
First Response:
Criminal court? He doesn't have to prove shit, innocent until proven guilty, right?
Civil court? The accuser still needs a preponderance of evidence. Just about anything from physical media, to a receipt, to testimony by a friend that he saw the guy make the purchase ought to be enough reduce the accuser to less than a preponderance.
Second Response:
If this is about one of the MAFIAA's "sue 'em all and let God sort it out" lawsuits then chances are it doesn't matter if he has legal ownership or not. Those suits are about distribution and not simply possesion of a copy.
No way I'm going to double-check and go dig through USC Title 17 on a Friday night while under the influence of tequila, but I don't think it's illegal to receive an unauthorized copy, just to make the copy or to distribute the copy. Feel free to dig through the spaghetti code on the other end of that link to find something that says otherwise.
PS, all typos and poor logic are the sole property of Padron's Resposada.
Hey, at least you are mostly paying attention and not making up as many bullshit strawmen to beat your chest about.
it doesn't help the new author with little or no fan base, the mid-tier author, or the unknown director or screenwriter
Just how do you think those people make any money now? They get the shaft all the time under the current system - just ask any unknown screenwriter, director or actor (all synonyms for waiter) or 'mid-tier' author (who alomst certainly holds down a regular day job, usually in academia). Nobody starting out and nobody doing a mediocre job gets paid very much, it really doesn't matter what industry they are in. You have to establish your credentials before you can convince anyone to give you the big bucks, a system based on assurance contracts would be no different.
Further, the model is not scalable or sustainable, in that many, many, many people would have to continually browse sites and directories of authors
Hardly. All they have to do is watch, listen to or read any of the FREE previous works and when they are done, they decide if they want more. If they do, they put down their money. If they don't want more it doesn't matter because the author has already been paid for the work he's already done and if not enough people think he's good enough to warrant another one, then that's the free market telling him to get a new job.
and agree to pay for something they're not going to get for a year or more, as opposed to browsing Amazon, seeing a product you'd like, paying a reasonable amount, and having it the very next day.
What good is money that sits in the bank? Might as well put it up to purchase something else, especially if it gets you something cool in the short term (like the exceptionally effective trinkets NPR and PBS give away during their fund-drives, oh please don't let that trigger a backslide into another 'donation' fixation again, alright?) or it earns interest sitting in that escrow account so that if the contract is not completed, you get more money back than you put in. (See the concept of a dominant assurance contract.)
BTW, go to your definitions and look up the free rider problem...
Don't get it do you? The free-rider is only the problem for copyright-based schemes. The work is already done and released, so the free-rider takes it for free and the creator does not see any compensation. Here, I'll say it again - free-riders are a primary reason why copyright does not work any more. If you can solve the free-rider problem for the copyright cartels, hollywood will make you their king.
So instead of trying to fight a losing battle against human nature, we need a system that harnesses the free-rider. Free redistribution does exactly that, the free-rider now becomes the engine of promotion for more paying work. Instead of 'stealing' he's now working for the creator by spreading advertising for the creator.
As to your own "denial of reality", bits are not just bits. If bits are all you want,
Oh puleaze. Grow up already. Your assinine fixation on terminology does not lead to any better understanding of the problem, in fact it prevents you from seeing the situation clearly. Just as "respect" doesn't earn a dime of ROI, neither are "content" bits any harder or more costly to duplicate than "random" bits.