Paying for the CD is usually just enough to actually cover the cost of the media... a few $$ at most. It's hard to get folks to pay for tech support when it can be had for free everywhere else (newsgroups, web searches, etc.) It isn't like hardware tech support where you provide an actual service like if a HDD fails, someone will be waiting for you at the open of business the next day to replace it for you.
While that may be true for personal use, business use is a whole other story. Are you going to take a bunch of highly paid engineers and waste their time by having them go onto newsgroups instead of just getting support and getting the solution fast? Are you going to tell angry customers that your system is down, and if they could please wait till you google for the solution?
Don't think so. While doing that stuff may be fine for you if your linux box goes down, it doesn't work for businesses who need reliable, easy to maintain systems.
THere will be a market for support(regardless of whehter you paid for the software or not) for the forseeable future.
Yeah, everyone loves those touch tone menus on the phones for everything else.
Automation has improved the quality of life and service for call routing everywhere!
Nonsense.
Touch tones are not automation, they are just a different method of inputting information. Automation is going to be you speaking into the phone about your tech problem, and a computer guessing what you are speaking and figuring out the problem for most of the customers. There is still a long way to go, but saying that it will never happen is at best myopic and at worst naive. Hell, people are currently experimenting with systems that will write programs for you.
Read Timequake by Vonnegut, pay attention to aculturation(not sure on the spelling), the computer is making more humans obsolete every day, and the number is only going to grow. Whether or not that is a good or bad thing has yet to be seen. So far it is a good thing, but that doesn't mean that the day will come when capitalism starts to break down because nobody can sell their labor to anyone else.
Mr. Blitzer, I didn't know such an esteemed journalist as yourself frequented slashdot! When will Cowboy Neal get his own talk show on CNN? I mean come one, if Judy Woodruff can get one, clearly you have time for the Commander Taco Cowboy Neal Power Hour! You don't even have to put it on prime time, most geeks are awake at 4 am.
to put some money into automation, which is probably where most tech support is going to be in 10 years anyway. Outsourcing "hid" the costs for a while, but as the service levels fall(the service was probably initially good because only the best were doing it, once everyone else jumped on the bandwagon, then it started to fall) and costs increase, companies are going to look to new ways to save money, and it probably won't be by hiring Americans.
Depends, are her turn ons unwashed geeks with sucky grades who want to get into one of the best schools in the world?
If so then you are talking to a future MIT alumn, and possible plantiff in a sexual harassment suit:P
Well, in the US, there are quotas, but they don't seem to be as heavily enforced as they are in Germany.
When it comes to car insurance though, Europe and the US seem to be on the same page, esp. for younger people, car insurance is cheaper for females than it is for males. I guess this is actually based on statistical evidence that suggests that young female drivers are safer than young male drivers....
You never did answer my questions, all you did is attack a straw man.
You never did answer my question about where you work, something tells me you are invovlved in creating intellectual property for a living or work for a company that does so.
But fine, you are right, copyrights and patents are evil, and all scientific research should be free.
One last question, who exactly is going to pay for all this research? Last time I checked, scientists can't just sit in their room and do chemistry experiments. They need equipment, expensive equipment. They need food. Most scientists I know aren't willing to work for free.
Your comment about contributing to free software, well good for you. I support the free software movement, but I also feel that companies should be allowed to sell their ideas as well. Appearently I am an evil SOB for thinking that if a company makes an investment on a product, they should be entitled to a return.
If you really cared about thousands of people dying, why aren't you in Africa, volunteering at health clinics or schools(since you obviously know so much about science)? Or could it be you are just creating an elaborate ruse for why you should be allowed to download music/movies without rewarding the artist who created them.
Probably another example of using technical means to solve a social problem. Doesn't always work. First off, if you have a censored internet, how do you get information about these products to the masses, esp. when you have internet cafes that are policed by good ol' fashioned humans looking over your shoulder? If you are researching encryption, than you automatically made yourself stand out, and you need to know about encryption before you can use it. Plus, you always have the irrational fear instilled in people. Most people aren't as knowledgable about how computers really work as you are. They think that the government can monitor their traffic or set up traps. The government can distribute false information, leading people into a false sense of security.
Plus you still have the problem of disseminating information, esp. in places where not everyone has access to technical problems. The old Soviet tactic of turning neighboors against each other works very well. Even people who are willing to die for freedom are much less willing to sacrafice their whole family. You can print whatever you want on the internet, but if people don't want to or are too afraid to read it, then you have accomplished nothing.
Encryption is a nice tool, but it means very little compared to Stalin's techniques of keeping people in line.....
The only thing they are entitled to is either create or not create. If they wish to abuse the common knowledge of the civilization and claim parts of it as "theirs" I'd rather see them take their "contributions" and shove it.
Fine, never drive a car, because that car has patents. Never use modern medicine. Never watch another television program. Never read another copyrighted work. You talk big, but something tells me you aren't willing to "tell them to shove it" when it benefits you. What do you do for a living? Does your organization benefit from patents/copyrights? If it does, you better quit as a sign of protest. Open up your own laboratory and do copyright free research. I'm sure you will have no trouble finding investors.
Till then, you are all talk.
to see if they can market this as a consumer machine someday. As long as windows isn't bogged down by spyware, a $500 dell machine can browse the internet, play music, and have a document or 2 open in Word without slowing down considerably.
It's obvious they will be helpful in games(even if games don't take advantage of the dual core, having all your OS threads running seperately will help) and scientific computing, but it seems to me that small of an audience makes it harder and harder to rationalize spending big money on chip R&D. Now those markets will always have an unquenchable thirst for power, but most of the cost for chips I think would be fixed costs(R&D, fabs etc), thus you can only get cheap if you go in volume....
Oh wait, Longhorn...damn, nevermind the above post.
That would support the people that support copyrights. If he didn't copyright his work, then someone else could steal it, claim it, and copyright it. Then he'd have to follow someone else's copyright just to use his own code. He chose to be against copyrights by using them to protect his code, then freely releasing it. This prevents unscrupulous people from taking advantage of it, and gains him the same thing as if he didn't copyright it.
That is the EXACT point of copyrights. You people seem to be very confused about copyrights and payments. I can copyright a piece of art but put it on my website for all to see, no fees attatched. The reason I copyright it is so that nobody else can claim it is theirs. Same goes with the GPL. You copyright it so nobody else can. You created the code, so you can control how you want it distributed. In this case the GPL, which allows you and other people more freedom. Copyright does not imply charging money!!!!! It just says that the holder of the copyright is the ultimate authority in who can disseminate the works.
I didnt just use a correlation. I used a cause-effect link. It should be obvious that enabling wide spread education and flow of information would increase number of people able to create while restricting the same flow would reduce the pool of creators. It is called logic. Merely putting together two things that happened at the same time, does not estabilish cause-effect link as you would seem to think. Over 90% of serial killers drink milk. 100% drink water. According to you this should be evidence that milk and water lead to serial killing.
I said previously that the copyright system provides a way for people to protect their ideas from others and to benefit from those ideas. That is my logical conclusion, but I guess since it doesn't fit into your little world view, you will just make up reasons that I'm wrong, without offering any reasons, just twisting words that I didn't say into what you want me to say. Like I said before, go do a little research and come back to me with more than ideological drivel. You have shown time and time again that you don't even realize what copyrights are. You think you know, but you don't, and you refuse to open your mind.
And your so called "logic" just shows how ignorant you are of economics. Real economists don't use "logic" like you claim to be using. Your logic is nothing but ideology with a few selective facts that correlate with your ideology. Real economists are scientists, they observe and predict. Only economics is the least exact science there is. It's very hard to measure precisely the output of a country. It's almost impossible create controlled macroeconomic experiments, there are too many variables, none of which you have control over. Some use ideology as a guide, but you seem to be so caught up in your ideology, you don't even know what you are arguing against. You claiming your "logic" trumps years and years of economic research is just plain stupid. But then again, you seem to think that you know what people should be able to do with their ideas than the people that create them, so maybe I'm just dumb. Remember, Aristotle used logic to show that there are only 4 elements, discrediting Democratus who was the real pioneer of the atomic theory. I see, so shoveling coal in a mill is the only way someone could come to understand inner workings of machinery. Thousands of locomotive engineers, steam machine operators, repairmen, craftsmen, tradesmen etc etc all around that time all shoveled coal with no access to the workings of the machinery and none of them improved anything. It was the copyright holders who labored in their ivory towers. Right.
Um, guess what, I had a job as a programmer at a steel mill. I worked with a bunch of people who could tell you almost everything about running a coal mill. But guess what? They didn't learn by being a machine operator like you claim that people learned by, they went to college, and combined their education with practical experience to be the experts they are today. They don't work for free, and the systems they design shouldn't be given away for free because some guy who knows nothing about the business says they should. The guys out on the floor could service an engine no matter what problem it had, but they couldn't design one if their life depended on it. Your reverse engineering comment was purely the Ivory Tower thinking you so derrided. Plus, your shoveling coal comment made me chuckle, because it shows how out of touch you really are with the reality you claim to know so much about. First of all, nobody "shoves" coal in a steel mill anymore, the coke(baked coal) is measured and loaded into rail cars which are dumped into the coke oven. Next time you want to lecture me on something, please actually know more than I do, it just makes you look like a fool.
Guess what, a lot of those people who got educated during the progressive era(which wasn't till the early 20th century, when children were taken out of factories, well after the start of the industrial revolution) wen
Wow, you managed to contradict yourself TWICE in the same thread, I am pretty damn impressed. First you tried to counter my argument by saying that correlation does not imply casuation argument then proceeded to use another correlation does not imply causation argument. Then when I pointed out a flaw in your logic, you bust out a statement that manages to contradict your first statement. From the grandparent: When before your super-wealthy lord who happened to have science as a hobby could afford importing some obscure manuscript, now every poor jerk can go to public and free library and learn
Now you are claiming that the industrial revolution was in fact driven by the elites and not the "poor jerks" as you referred to them. Err.. those were not the one in the driving seat of the revolution. Besides even an illiterate mehcanically inclined person can come up with some improvements on a machine he operates. So mere contact with science is also an accelerant. Imagine what would happen if he could not learn from the workings of a machine, reverse "engineer" it so to speak... oh wait.
It is quite obvious you have never worked in a steel mill. I have, let me tell you, there is no way even a very smart person on the line could learn to reverse engineer a machine from working on it in the mill.
So far you have made a very persuasive arguments FOR copyrights, they protect people like you from fucking around with things they have no grasp of.
In other posts, it became quite clear that you don't realize what a copyright is. You seem to think that because someone can charge for a copyright, they must. You didn't even know that the GPL is a copyright. Yet you argue against them. Seriously, go learn a few things then come back when you are ready.
You are VERY confused about what copyright is. The GPL is a copyright, just not one that people sell their works. The GPL copyrights your work, but allows anyone to distribute and modify it, as long as they give credit to the original author, and it forces anyone who distributes a modification to open the source.
A copyright just says that others cannot take your work and give it to others without your permission. That is what the GPL is. The only difference from the copyrights you seem to be crusading against and the ones you embrace is that you don't think that people should be allowed to charge money for their copyright if they so choose. That is what copyrights are all about, control of your own creations. You seem to offer little evidence that scientists don't really create, you just say that they build upon what came before, which is true, but just as the people who came before them should be allowed to have copyrighted their works if they so choose, a group of scientists who discover a cure for HIV should be allowed to copyright it. How they use that copyright should be up to them, it is their work, not yours. I hope they would share their work with the rest of the world that is beneficial, but they don't have to. Copyright is about being in control of what you create.
If you were really against copyrights then you wouldn't go GPL, you would just release the source as is, with no license.
stupid not using preview button, the first sentence should have bueen, guess what, you just made a correlation implies causation argument as well, didn't you?
Um, guess what, you just did it, didn't you? If I made a correlation implies causation argument, you also just made a correlation implies causation argument, so I fail to see your point.
And also, most people could not read at the time of the industrial revolution, so again I fail to see your point.
What if the music people are downloading are a copy of an early studio session. Nobody is great right off the bat, and if that is the music that starts circulating around, then it can do irreversible damage to your band. For a lot of people(not the RIAA) copyright is as much about control over their own creations than it is about money.
Now, if you are an established group and someone uncovers the crap you made in your parent's garage, then it won't kill you, in fact probably the only people listening to it would be fans.
Care to back any of your ideological drivel, with oh I dunno, facts or figures or anything of the like?
Here is my little bit of facts: Copyrights have existed for about 300 years now, in that period more people have come out of poverty and the industrial output of the world has increased almost immeasurably. Copyright was even built into the constitution of the United States. Your myopic views somehow state that you know more than inventors. Why should I spend millions of dollars in researching something if you can come along the next day and take my research, make a competing product, and be able to sell it for less because you didn't have to do any research?
Why should a musician have to scrape by on part time jobs while writing the music they love so you can just copy it as you please and say that they don't deserve any royalties for it, because after all you know so much more than the creators of copyrights about what is good for them.
No system is perfect, and every system will have it's abuses, but you have failed to make even a rudimentary argument about why your system is better. Just a bunch of ideological dribble and nonsense conclusions.
No it's not. It's music, movies, books, art, science,... . It's our entire culture that large corporations want to own and commodify.
Um, guess what, the people that sold the corporations that copyright willingly did so. So appearently the people who actually create this culture don't care about it. If you don't like it, then instead of copying works of others, create something yourself. Guess what, the RIAA cannot stop you, as much as it would like to, from releasing your own music for all to share. So go ahead, you complain that corporations are owning our culture, take it back, create something yourself.
it's just musing for fucking crying out loud!!!
I love how people like this pretend to be big crusaders for the rights of the little man, but it's just fucking music. Take a step back, look at it, and realize, it is just fucking music!
Peoeple survived long before music was available for the masses at all, and something tells me you cna survive without music. If you don't like the tactics of the RIAA, don't buy their music, don't download their music. Somehting tells me it won't kill you or really affect your life in any drastic way.
There are much bigger issues out there, we don't need anyone pretending to be a hero by flaunting copyright law more than we need to find a way to cure world hunger, or solve the impending water and oil crises....
This will get mmodded as flamebait, but I don't care, I really think people need to take a step back and realize, "Hey, it's only fucking music, why are we getting this worked up over it?"
The real terrorist plot, get a machine hooked to broadband and execute the command:
ping slashdot.org
And leave it go, it will bring down the whole internet!
The goal is never really to defeat piracy, most sane people concede that it's impossible to defeat. What you want to do though is raise the bar high enough that most potential pirates buy the game instead of copying it. Having no copy protection would be just plain dumb, it will be beat, but Sony is hoping that it will be so difficult only a handful of skilled people will be able to do it, and they won't be able to mass produce anything that will allow laymen to pirate.
Slashdot Mirror
Paying for the CD is usually just enough to actually cover the cost of the media... a few $$ at most. It's hard to get folks to pay for tech support when it can be had for free everywhere else (newsgroups, web searches, etc.) It isn't like hardware tech support where you provide an actual service like if a HDD fails, someone will be waiting for you at the open of business the next day to replace it for you.
While that may be true for personal use, business use is a whole other story. Are you going to take a bunch of highly paid engineers and waste their time by having them go onto newsgroups instead of just getting support and getting the solution fast? Are you going to tell angry customers that your system is down, and if they could please wait till you google for the solution?
Don't think so. While doing that stuff may be fine for you if your linux box goes down, it doesn't work for businesses who need reliable, easy to maintain systems.
THere will be a market for support(regardless of whehter you paid for the software or not) for the forseeable future.
Yeah, everyone loves those touch tone menus on the phones for everything else. Automation has improved the quality of life and service for call routing everywhere! Nonsense.
Touch tones are not automation, they are just a different method of inputting information. Automation is going to be you speaking into the phone about your tech problem, and a computer guessing what you are speaking and figuring out the problem for most of the customers. There is still a long way to go, but saying that it will never happen is at best myopic and at worst naive. Hell, people are currently experimenting with systems that will write programs for you.
Read Timequake by Vonnegut, pay attention to aculturation(not sure on the spelling), the computer is making more humans obsolete every day, and the number is only going to grow. Whether or not that is a good or bad thing has yet to be seen. So far it is a good thing, but that doesn't mean that the day will come when capitalism starts to break down because nobody can sell their labor to anyone else.
Mr. Blitzer, I didn't know such an esteemed journalist as yourself frequented slashdot! When will Cowboy Neal get his own talk show on CNN? I mean come one, if Judy Woodruff can get one, clearly you have time for the Commander Taco Cowboy Neal Power Hour! You don't even have to put it on prime time, most geeks are awake at 4 am.
to put some money into automation, which is probably where most tech support is going to be in 10 years anyway. Outsourcing "hid" the costs for a while, but as the service levels fall(the service was probably initially good because only the best were doing it, once everyone else jumped on the bandwagon, then it started to fall) and costs increase, companies are going to look to new ways to save money, and it probably won't be by hiring Americans.
Depends, are her turn ons unwashed geeks with sucky grades who want to get into one of the best schools in the world? :P
If so then you are talking to a future MIT alumn, and possible plantiff in a sexual harassment suit
Well, in the US, there are quotas, but they don't seem to be as heavily enforced as they are in Germany.
When it comes to car insurance though, Europe and the US seem to be on the same page, esp. for younger people, car insurance is cheaper for females than it is for males. I guess this is actually based on statistical evidence that suggests that young female drivers are safer than young male drivers....
You never did answer my questions, all you did is attack a straw man.
You never did answer my question about where you work, something tells me you are invovlved in creating intellectual property for a living or work for a company that does so.
But fine, you are right, copyrights and patents are evil, and all scientific research should be free.
One last question, who exactly is going to pay for all this research? Last time I checked, scientists can't just sit in their room and do chemistry experiments. They need equipment, expensive equipment. They need food. Most scientists I know aren't willing to work for free.
Your comment about contributing to free software, well good for you. I support the free software movement, but I also feel that companies should be allowed to sell their ideas as well. Appearently I am an evil SOB for thinking that if a company makes an investment on a product, they should be entitled to a return.
If you really cared about thousands of people dying, why aren't you in Africa, volunteering at health clinics or schools(since you obviously know so much about science)? Or could it be you are just creating an elaborate ruse for why you should be allowed to download music/movies without rewarding the artist who created them.
Probably another example of using technical means to solve a social problem. Doesn't always work. First off, if you have a censored internet, how do you get information about these products to the masses, esp. when you have internet cafes that are policed by good ol' fashioned humans looking over your shoulder? If you are researching encryption, than you automatically made yourself stand out, and you need to know about encryption before you can use it. Plus, you always have the irrational fear instilled in people. Most people aren't as knowledgable about how computers really work as you are. They think that the government can monitor their traffic or set up traps. The government can distribute false information, leading people into a false sense of security.
Plus you still have the problem of disseminating information, esp. in places where not everyone has access to technical problems. The old Soviet tactic of turning neighboors against each other works very well. Even people who are willing to die for freedom are much less willing to sacrafice their whole family. You can print whatever you want on the internet, but if people don't want to or are too afraid to read it, then you have accomplished nothing.
Encryption is a nice tool, but it means very little compared to Stalin's techniques of keeping people in line.....
You can never go back to watching Saved By the Bell again(not necessarily a bad thing) because you are always expecting more from Elizabeth Berkley.
The only thing they are entitled to is either create or not create. If they wish to abuse the common knowledge of the civilization and claim parts of it as "theirs" I'd rather see them take their "contributions" and shove it.
Fine, never drive a car, because that car has patents. Never use modern medicine. Never watch another television program. Never read another copyrighted work. You talk big, but something tells me you aren't willing to "tell them to shove it" when it benefits you. What do you do for a living? Does your organization benefit from patents/copyrights? If it does, you better quit as a sign of protest. Open up your own laboratory and do copyright free research. I'm sure you will have no trouble finding investors.
Till then, you are all talk.
to see if they can market this as a consumer machine someday. As long as windows isn't bogged down by spyware, a $500 dell machine can browse the internet, play music, and have a document or 2 open in Word without slowing down considerably.
It's obvious they will be helpful in games(even if games don't take advantage of the dual core, having all your OS threads running seperately will help) and scientific computing, but it seems to me that small of an audience makes it harder and harder to rationalize spending big money on chip R&D. Now those markets will always have an unquenchable thirst for power, but most of the cost for chips I think would be fixed costs(R&D, fabs etc), thus you can only get cheap if you go in volume....
Oh wait, Longhorn...damn, nevermind the above post.
That would support the people that support copyrights. If he didn't copyright his work, then someone else could steal it, claim it, and copyright it. Then he'd have to follow someone else's copyright just to use his own code. He chose to be against copyrights by using them to protect his code, then freely releasing it. This prevents unscrupulous people from taking advantage of it, and gains him the same thing as if he didn't copyright it.
That is the EXACT point of copyrights. You people seem to be very confused about copyrights and payments. I can copyright a piece of art but put it on my website for all to see, no fees attatched. The reason I copyright it is so that nobody else can claim it is theirs. Same goes with the GPL. You copyright it so nobody else can. You created the code, so you can control how you want it distributed. In this case the GPL, which allows you and other people more freedom. Copyright does not imply charging money!!!!! It just says that the holder of the copyright is the ultimate authority in who can disseminate the works.
I didnt just use a correlation. I used a cause-effect link. It should be obvious that enabling wide spread education and flow of information would increase number of people able to create while restricting the same flow would reduce the pool of creators. It is called logic. Merely putting together two things that happened at the same time, does not estabilish cause-effect link as you would seem to think. Over 90% of serial killers drink milk. 100% drink water. According to you this should be evidence that milk and water lead to serial killing.
I said previously that the copyright system provides a way for people to protect their ideas from others and to benefit from those ideas. That is my logical conclusion, but I guess since it doesn't fit into your little world view, you will just make up reasons that I'm wrong, without offering any reasons, just twisting words that I didn't say into what you want me to say. Like I said before, go do a little research and come back to me with more than ideological drivel. You have shown time and time again that you don't even realize what copyrights are. You think you know, but you don't, and you refuse to open your mind.
And your so called "logic" just shows how ignorant you are of economics. Real economists don't use "logic" like you claim to be using. Your logic is nothing but ideology with a few selective facts that correlate with your ideology. Real economists are scientists, they observe and predict. Only economics is the least exact science there is. It's very hard to measure precisely the output of a country. It's almost impossible create controlled macroeconomic experiments, there are too many variables, none of which you have control over. Some use ideology as a guide, but you seem to be so caught up in your ideology, you don't even know what you are arguing against. You claiming your "logic" trumps years and years of economic research is just plain stupid. But then again, you seem to think that you know what people should be able to do with their ideas than the people that create them, so maybe I'm just dumb. Remember, Aristotle used logic to show that there are only 4 elements, discrediting Democratus who was the real pioneer of the atomic theory.
I see, so shoveling coal in a mill is the only way someone could come to understand inner workings of machinery. Thousands of locomotive engineers, steam machine operators, repairmen, craftsmen, tradesmen etc etc all around that time all shoveled coal with no access to the workings of the machinery and none of them improved anything. It was the copyright holders who labored in their ivory towers. Right.
Um, guess what, I had a job as a programmer at a steel mill. I worked with a bunch of people who could tell you almost everything about running a coal mill. But guess what? They didn't learn by being a machine operator like you claim that people learned by, they went to college, and combined their education with practical experience to be the experts they are today. They don't work for free, and the systems they design shouldn't be given away for free because some guy who knows nothing about the business says they should. The guys out on the floor could service an engine no matter what problem it had, but they couldn't design one if their life depended on it. Your reverse engineering comment was purely the Ivory Tower thinking you so derrided. Plus, your shoveling coal comment made me chuckle, because it shows how out of touch you really are with the reality you claim to know so much about. First of all, nobody "shoves" coal in a steel mill anymore, the coke(baked coal) is measured and loaded into rail cars which are dumped into the coke oven. Next time you want to lecture me on something, please actually know more than I do, it just makes you look like a fool.
Guess what, a lot of those people who got educated during the progressive era(which wasn't till the early 20th century, when children were taken out of factories, well after the start of the industrial revolution) wen
Wow, you managed to contradict yourself TWICE in the same thread, I am pretty damn impressed. First you tried to counter my argument by saying that correlation does not imply casuation argument then proceeded to use another correlation does not imply causation argument. Then when I pointed out a flaw in your logic, you bust out a statement that manages to contradict your first statement. From the grandparent:
When before your super-wealthy lord who happened to have science as a hobby could afford importing some obscure manuscript, now every poor jerk can go to public and free library and learn
Now you are claiming that the industrial revolution was in fact driven by the elites and not the "poor jerks" as you referred to them.
Err.. those were not the one in the driving seat of the revolution. Besides even an illiterate mehcanically inclined person can come up with some improvements on a machine he operates. So mere contact with science is also an accelerant. Imagine what would happen if he could not learn from the workings of a machine, reverse "engineer" it so to speak... oh wait.
It is quite obvious you have never worked in a steel mill. I have, let me tell you, there is no way even a very smart person on the line could learn to reverse engineer a machine from working on it in the mill.
So far you have made a very persuasive arguments FOR copyrights, they protect people like you from fucking around with things they have no grasp of.
In other posts, it became quite clear that you don't realize what a copyright is. You seem to think that because someone can charge for a copyright, they must. You didn't even know that the GPL is a copyright. Yet you argue against them. Seriously, go learn a few things then come back when you are ready.
You are VERY confused about what copyright is. The GPL is a copyright, just not one that people sell their works. The GPL copyrights your work, but allows anyone to distribute and modify it, as long as they give credit to the original author, and it forces anyone who distributes a modification to open the source.
A copyright just says that others cannot take your work and give it to others without your permission. That is what the GPL is. The only difference from the copyrights you seem to be crusading against and the ones you embrace is that you don't think that people should be allowed to charge money for their copyright if they so choose. That is what copyrights are all about, control of your own creations. You seem to offer little evidence that scientists don't really create, you just say that they build upon what came before, which is true, but just as the people who came before them should be allowed to have copyrighted their works if they so choose, a group of scientists who discover a cure for HIV should be allowed to copyright it. How they use that copyright should be up to them, it is their work, not yours. I hope they would share their work with the rest of the world that is beneficial, but they don't have to. Copyright is about being in control of what you create.
If you were really against copyrights then you wouldn't go GPL, you would just release the source as is, with no license.
stupid not using preview button, the first sentence should have bueen, guess what, you just made a correlation implies causation argument as well, didn't you?
Um, guess what, you just did it, didn't you? If I made a correlation implies causation argument, you also just made a correlation implies causation argument, so I fail to see your point.
And also, most people could not read at the time of the industrial revolution, so again I fail to see your point.
What if the music people are downloading are a copy of an early studio session. Nobody is great right off the bat, and if that is the music that starts circulating around, then it can do irreversible damage to your band. For a lot of people(not the RIAA) copyright is as much about control over their own creations than it is about money.
Now, if you are an established group and someone uncovers the crap you made in your parent's garage, then it won't kill you, in fact probably the only people listening to it would be fans.
Care to back any of your ideological drivel, with oh I dunno, facts or figures or anything of the like?
Here is my little bit of facts: Copyrights have existed for about 300 years now, in that period more people have come out of poverty and the industrial output of the world has increased almost immeasurably. Copyright was even built into the constitution of the United States. Your myopic views somehow state that you know more than inventors. Why should I spend millions of dollars in researching something if you can come along the next day and take my research, make a competing product, and be able to sell it for less because you didn't have to do any research?
Why should a musician have to scrape by on part time jobs while writing the music they love so you can just copy it as you please and say that they don't deserve any royalties for it, because after all you know so much more than the creators of copyrights about what is good for them.
No system is perfect, and every system will have it's abuses, but you have failed to make even a rudimentary argument about why your system is better. Just a bunch of ideological dribble and nonsense conclusions.
No it's not. It's music, movies, books, art, science, ... . It's our entire culture that large corporations want to own and commodify.
Um, guess what, the people that sold the corporations that copyright willingly did so. So appearently the people who actually create this culture don't care about it. If you don't like it, then instead of copying works of others, create something yourself. Guess what, the RIAA cannot stop you, as much as it would like to, from releasing your own music for all to share. So go ahead, you complain that corporations are owning our culture, take it back, create something yourself.
it's just musing for fucking crying out loud!!!
I love how people like this pretend to be big crusaders for the rights of the little man, but it's just fucking music. Take a step back, look at it, and realize, it is just fucking music!
Peoeple survived long before music was available for the masses at all, and something tells me you cna survive without music. If you don't like the tactics of the RIAA, don't buy their music, don't download their music. Somehting tells me it won't kill you or really affect your life in any drastic way.
There are much bigger issues out there, we don't need anyone pretending to be a hero by flaunting copyright law more than we need to find a way to cure world hunger, or solve the impending water and oil crises....
This will get mmodded as flamebait, but I don't care, I really think people need to take a step back and realize, "Hey, it's only fucking music, why are we getting this worked up over it?"
I can just see the police reports now:
Cause of death: missing }
The real terrorist plot, get a machine hooked to broadband and execute the command:
ping slashdot.org
And leave it go, it will bring down the whole internet!
Kids may want to watch that they don't piss off the wrong person on the internet.
In Japan a girl slit the throat of another girl over insulting comments made over the internet.
The goal is never really to defeat piracy, most sane people concede that it's impossible to defeat. What you want to do though is raise the bar high enough that most potential pirates buy the game instead of copying it. Having no copy protection would be just plain dumb, it will be beat, but Sony is hoping that it will be so difficult only a handful of skilled people will be able to do it, and they won't be able to mass produce anything that will allow laymen to pirate.