I have an idea that will solve world hunger and eradicate disease. Contrary to what you say I believe this idea to be very scarce. It has taken me years of effort and heaps of money to formulate this idea. I really, really want to share this idea with you, but not unreasonably I don't believe I should have to shoulder all the cost of creating it on my own. I want paying, and until then it's going to remain my secret. The key word there is "secret". Once you tell it to someone who is not bound to keep the secret, it is published, and no longer has any scarcity value.
We have shown that socialism doesn't work with the nature of human beings as we are today. And having no IP is socialism.
No. Having no IP can be defended from a socialist standpoint, but that doesn't make it an inherently socialist stance. It can also be defended from, e.g., a neoliberal standpoint: IP laws are artificial monopolies created by government, and thus market distortions incompatible with the free market.
(If you intend to question that copyrights and patents are government-created monopolies, please consider researching your topic first. It's the neophyte IP-hugger's equivalent of the creationist claim that no-one's ever seen evolution happen.)
That said, the question is fundamentally uninteresting. The IP issue only interests me because of the increasingly draconian laws (and treaties) being put in place in futile attempts to protect copyright. No legal or technical proposal to date has any chance at all of stopping piracy at the individual-to-individual level, or even slowing it down significantly. They do, however, have the ability to seriously damage civil liberties and human rights. I'm not aware of any ideology in which this is a sane thing to do - unless, of course, the intention is to put the surveillance and filtering systems being erected to other uses.
Profits are up for cinema, DVDs, ringtones, etc., it's only the music industry which is currently suffering. The music industry, as a whole, is doing fine. The recording industry is only a small part of the music sector.
In the Imaginary Property field, if I take an idea from you, you still have it, so it you don't loose it. What you loose it the opportunity of making money from it, but that is a vastly different issue.
Correction: potentially lose. It has not been adequately demonstrated that losses due to copyright infringement outweigh the marketing advantage of increased exposure. (In other words, piracy leads to some lost sales, and also leads to some sales that would otherwise not happen; studies consistently indicate that these effects approximately cancel out.) This helps explain why most forms of publishing are in fact growth sectors despite the explosive growth of intertube ninjacy (the exceptionally customer-hostile recording industry being the major exception).
As for patents, there are numerous examples of infringements negatively impacting the holder of the alleged property right. These are consistently cases where large companies violate patents held by individual inventors, the very innovators patents supposedly protect.
The purported motivation of patents is to ensure that inventions are disclosed. However, this does not happen in practice, since the primary focus of patent law practice is to obfuscate patents to the greatest extent possible.
The more general argument against lifetime is that the value of a work should not be related to life expectancy; works by older or less healthy creators shouldn't be worth less than those made by the young and hale. In a life-term system, a publisher is less motivated to purchase a work from an author at death's door, since the reproduction monopoly is likely to become worthless soon.
Of course, this suggests fixed terms, rather than life-plus-N terms.
Value is not determined by the work put into something - that is the "Labor Theory of Value" fallacy at the heart of the Marxist Communism. And also at the heart of the reasoning of Adam Smith. Funny how people always choose the same labour theorist to hold up as a bad example, isn’t it?
The way to get a "blank" window in Cocoa is: NSWindow *window = [[NSWindow alloc] initWithContentRect:someRectangle styleMask:someFlags backing:NSBackingStoreBuffered defer:NO];
If you want to add a button to it, that's: NSButton *button = [[NSButton alloc] initWithFrame:someOtherRectangle];
[[window contentView] addSubview:button];
[button release];
It's a bit verbose, because it's *gasp* the low-level way of doing things. The mechanisms used to implement the high-level approach are generally exposed. The only difficulty is learning a small amount of syntax and a large amount of framework, but you get the latter on any new platform.
I'm wondering: did any of the legislators consult a single tech guy?
Given that the relevant legislation - Danish law, and the EU Infosoc directive - clearly state that ISPs do not commit copyright infringement by routing traffic, I think the legislators probably did consult tech persons. Given that the court ruling explicitly mentions that traffic to and from The Pirate Bay is itself not copyright infringement, the court probably did too, but didn't pay enough attention.
Criminalization of downloading of copyrighted works was one of the intentions of the mid-2005 reform of Swedish copyright law. To what extent this was actually achieved is somewhat unclear.
Would you like to try again, this time after reading what I actually said?
To recap: research in the subject has not established that copying for private use leads to lost sales. Without establishing this, basing arguments on the assumption that it is the case is either ignorant or disingenuous.
18% on over 150k. I think they can maybe afford to buy the DVDs don't you?
What makes you think they don't?
The idea that each pirated copy is a lost sale has no connection in reality. People download stuff instead of buying it. People download stuff they would not other wise have bought. However, people also buy stuff they've downloaded. People with large collections of legally purchased music and video tend to also download lots of content.
The balance between these effects is a matter for debate. The RIAA and MPAA want you to believe that every download is a lost sale. (The other day, the Swedish movie industry claimed that they lost $1 billion in profit -not gross sales -to piracy in Sweden in the past year, and that there were 600,000 Swedish pirates in that time. You do the math.) People who actually try to develop accurate measurements tend to end up finding that it more or less cancels out: on average, pirates buy as much entertainment as non-pirates in the same income bracket.
The Pirate Bay themselves claim that they are not breaking any laws. The prosecutor who is handling the case has claimed the same thing - a few months before the raid in 2006 he wrote a report where he said that running a BitTorrent tracker was not illegal under current Swedish law.
This is something of a myth. Having read the memo in question, what he actually said was that he doesn't see a significant chance of proving abetting/complicity (medhjälp) or "preparation" (förberedelse; collecting tools or information with the intent that they should be used in a crime, possibly by someone else) without a direct connection to a primary, i.e. someone being found guilty for copyright infringement using a torrent downloaded from The Pirate Bay. He also wrote that proving the latter was unfeasible under existing Swedish law.
Nevertheless, since the current TPB case does not involve a primary, and misconduct for a prosecutor to press charges in a case he doesn't feel he has a good chance of winning, the memo is certainly relevant.
Well, it's a "strange" system in that it's not like the one you're used to.:-) Legal concepts don't necessarily map directly between the two systems. It is indeed a criminal trial (brottmål) led by a public prosecutor (allmän åklagare), who is seeking criminal punishment, i.e. fines. At the same time, 17 plaintiffs (målsägande), represented by three separate teams, are pursuing damages.
Downloading copyrighted material is theft under the law.
No. Downloading copyrighted material without permission is copyright infringement under the law (for various values of "the" law, of course). They are (in Swedish law, as well as US law, and most if not all others) completely different and unrelated offences regulated by different laws, which are motivated by different concerns.
Helping people to do this is being an accessory to a crime.
This has not yet been established by a court (in Sweden). Or rather, it has not been established that this constitutes "helping" in a relevant sense.
Nobody has the legal right to download "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire" without paying the copyright holders for it.
Wrong. It is entirely possible for a copyright holder to grant a license of a work without receiving payment. There may also be contexts in which a license is not required. For instance, see Law 1960:729 (amended), 16 , paragraph 1, point 1. Wait, you're not familiar with Swedish copyright law? So why are you making categorical assertions about it?
A number of things about the raid are legally questionable. However, there's no requirement in Swedish law that evidence be obtained legally. Evidence is accepted at the judge's discretion.
Anyone spouting puerile caricatures of their opposition's position whilst simultaneously claiming moral and intellectual superiority is pretty much deserving of contempt as far as I'm concerned.
Yes. Funnily enough, that's how I feel about people who dismiss those making complex arguments based on the history and purpose of copyright, the free market model, and the balance between law enforcement and personal liberties as simply being freeloaders and/or Marxists. In actuality, the Pirate Party's arguments are primarily liberal (and not in the watered-down American sense of "generally lefty"). Consider the following quote:
Yet it is not obvious that such forced scarcity is the most effective way to stimulate the human creative process. I doubt whether there exists a single great work of literature which we would not possess had the author been unable to obtain an exclusive copyright for it...
This comes not from Marx, but from Friedrich Hayek in his book The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism.
It's great that Sweden is having this discussion, and of course the reality is that filesharing and P2P has to be defended. But it's a logical fallacy to respect someone purely because their profits rely on winning that argument.... Comparing yourself to Gandhi while staunchly defending your profits is distasteful. It reminds me of extreme right-wingers who likewise care little for the law, as long as their money and their self-righteousness can be safely defended using high minded platitudes.
What are these profits to which you refer? The interview subject, Rick Falkvinge, and the Pirate Party do not profit from file sharing. You may be confusing the Pirate Party with The Pirate Bay, which is entirely unrelated. Neither does it disregard the law; its purpose is to change the law, through legal means. This is in part to protect aspects of law (such as the right to private communication) and the respect for the rule of law, which relies on laws being supported by the people as a whole and at least somewhat practically enforceable.
If you have a problem with the last sentence, consider this: the exact same arguments were used to motivate the explicit exception in Swedish copyright law allowing copying of software for personal use, an exception which still stands.
Slashdot Mirror
I prefer this correlation study.
Credit: er, some guy on the tubes.
No. Having no IP can be defended from a socialist standpoint, but that doesn't make it an inherently socialist stance. It can also be defended from, e.g., a neoliberal standpoint: IP laws are artificial monopolies created by government, and thus market distortions incompatible with the free market.
(If you intend to question that copyrights and patents are government-created monopolies, please consider researching your topic first. It's the neophyte IP-hugger's equivalent of the creationist claim that no-one's ever seen evolution happen.)
That said, the question is fundamentally uninteresting. The IP issue only interests me because of the increasingly draconian laws (and treaties) being put in place in futile attempts to protect copyright. No legal or technical proposal to date has any chance at all of stopping piracy at the individual-to-individual level, or even slowing it down significantly. They do, however, have the ability to seriously damage civil liberties and human rights. I'm not aware of any ideology in which this is a sane thing to do - unless, of course, the intention is to put the surveillance and filtering systems being erected to other uses.
Correction: potentially lose. It has not been adequately demonstrated that losses due to copyright infringement outweigh the marketing advantage of increased exposure. (In other words, piracy leads to some lost sales, and also leads to some sales that would otherwise not happen; studies consistently indicate that these effects approximately cancel out.) This helps explain why most forms of publishing are in fact growth sectors despite the explosive growth of intertube ninjacy (the exceptionally customer-hostile recording industry being the major exception).
As for patents, there are numerous examples of infringements negatively impacting the holder of the alleged property right. These are consistently cases where large companies violate patents held by individual inventors, the very innovators patents supposedly protect.
The purpose of patents is to allow oligopolies to control markets.
The purported motivation of patents is to ensure that inventions are disclosed. However, this does not happen in practice, since the primary focus of patent law practice is to obfuscate patents to the greatest extent possible.
Of course, this suggests fixed terms, rather than life-plus-N terms.
RTF article from several years ago. :-)
The way to get a "blank" window in Cocoa is:
NSWindow *window = [[NSWindow alloc] initWithContentRect:someRectangle styleMask:someFlags backing:NSBackingStoreBuffered defer:NO];
If you want to add a button to it, that's:
NSButton *button = [[NSButton alloc] initWithFrame:someOtherRectangle];
[[window contentView] addSubview:button];
[button release];
It's a bit verbose, because it's *gasp* the low-level way of doing things. The mechanisms used to implement the high-level approach are generally exposed. The only difficulty is learning a small amount of syntax and a large amount of framework, but you get the latter on any new platform.
Criminalization of downloading of copyrighted works was one of the intentions of the mid-2005 reform of Swedish copyright law. To what extent this was actually achieved is somewhat unclear.
Would you like to try again, this time after reading what I actually said? To recap: research in the subject has not established that copying for private use leads to lost sales. Without establishing this, basing arguments on the assumption that it is the case is either ignorant or disingenuous.
What makes you think they don't?
The idea that each pirated copy is a lost sale has no connection in reality. People download stuff instead of buying it. People download stuff they would not other wise have bought. However, people also buy stuff they've downloaded. People with large collections of legally purchased music and video tend to also download lots of content.
The balance between these effects is a matter for debate. The RIAA and MPAA want you to believe that every download is a lost sale. (The other day, the Swedish movie industry claimed that they lost $1 billion in profit -not gross sales -to piracy in Sweden in the past year, and that there were 600,000 Swedish pirates in that time. You do the math.) People who actually try to develop accurate measurements tend to end up finding that it more or less cancels out: on average, pirates buy as much entertainment as non-pirates in the same income bracket.
Well, it's a "strange" system in that it's not like the one you're used to. :-) Legal concepts don't necessarily map directly between the two systems. It is indeed a criminal trial (brottmål) led by a public prosecutor (allmän åklagare), who is seeking criminal punishment, i.e. fines. At the same time, 17 plaintiffs (målsägande), represented by three separate teams, are pursuing damages.
A number of things about the raid are legally questionable. However, there's no requirement in Swedish law that evidence be obtained legally. Evidence is accepted at the judge's discretion.
"The last raid" is what lead to this indictment.
But will the reviewers find an inexplicable preponderance of counterclockwise screwy arguments?
Yes. Funnily enough, that's how I feel about people who dismiss those making complex arguments based on the history and purpose of copyright, the free market model, and the balance between law enforcement and personal liberties as simply being freeloaders and/or Marxists. In actuality, the Pirate Party's arguments are primarily liberal (and not in the watered-down American sense of "generally lefty"). Consider the following quote:
This comes not from Marx, but from Friedrich Hayek in his book The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism.
What are these profits to which you refer? The interview subject, Rick Falkvinge, and the Pirate Party do not profit from file sharing. You may be confusing the Pirate Party with The Pirate Bay, which is entirely unrelated. Neither does it disregard the law; its purpose is to change the law, through legal means. This is in part to protect aspects of law (such as the right to private communication) and the respect for the rule of law, which relies on laws being supported by the people as a whole and at least somewhat practically enforceable.
If you have a problem with the last sentence, consider this: the exact same arguments were used to motivate the explicit exception in Swedish copyright law allowing copying of software for personal use, an exception which still stands.