If that means stop buying music and movies developed by copyright freaks, while at the same time remaining legal and avoiding copying their music and movies illegally without approval, that's a good advice.
Even better would be to participate in the free culture and amateur artistic movements, where there is much more creativity every second than all big-name directors can provide in ten years time. Watch freely-given and free-licensed (Creative Commons etc) movies or music, share it, and most importantly than all use the licence's freedoms to remix it and create new movies or music, further empowering the free culture movement.
I didn't know six and a half billion of people live in a small Austrian municipality. It must be really all too crammed up there, probably worse than HK. But at least all enjoy living in the birthplace of a music composer.
I don't understand why universities need to provide students with their own computers and network access in an era where every kid has not one but two, three, four, ten, twelve, or thirty computers (depending on how nerdy they are!). Why not just ask the students to get their own laptop and their own, personal, 3G/HSPA cellular Internet connection with an ISP of their choice? After all, every student wants to have the latest netbook with GNU/Linux, and not the Windows-based desktops or weighty laptops with locked-down net access that universities may provide. An Acer Aspire One netbook with a 3G modem and a SIM card is what students need, paid by them or their parents.
For poor students, some programme of financial support could be employed that would enable the student to buy their own netbook and 3G connection, with the laptop and connection being the student's property, so that no law and nobody could force the university to play the police officer's role.
Universities must focus on what they do best, providing education, and not throw money at IT and other projects outside their competencies that only make tuition costs higher without satisfying students. Let's keep tuition costs down and let the individual students and their families choose whether they want to spend their own money on a netbook with 3G. Let's get the universities to spend money on real scientific equipment that the students can't get easily themselves, rather than on consumer devices that are so commonplace that most students see the university's computers as too old for their needs and prefer to have their own netbook/laptop anyway (while they still pay the inflated tuition, a good portion of which is because of the cost of IT nobody uses).
Students don't want university-provided email, they want lower tuition and their own email. They don't want university-provided computers, as they already have their own (those who don't and need one can receive financial support if a suitable programme is offered by the uni, which it should be offered). Students don't want high tuition as a result of the university's IT costs while they rarely really use this IT infrastructure, they want lower tuition and their own, personal IT infrastructure, which they probably already possess anyway. There is no need for university-provided WiFi at all as well, as 3G coverage is provided everywhere anyway, at least here in Europe, and many students anyway prefer to study at home and only visit the uni for exams or handouts so for them any uni-provided IT infrastructure is not used at all.
Nobody is going to donate millions of man-hours to write the software for the F-22 out of the goodness of their heart.
Lots of people get paid to write free software, and in fact free software is usually done with distributed development so no one but a core team donates too much but instead everyone donates a little (with a core team contributing a little more), but let's concentrate on whether writing software for the F-22 would require payment to make people motivated enough to do it.
I think there are lots of military geeks around who would love the opportunity to write software for their favourite fighter without monetary payment. I also think there are lots of patriotic people around who even without monetary payment would be happy to write software for the fighter which is going to protect their country in the next war.
Both acts (writing software for enjoyment and for protecting one's country) are acts of self-interest, the one is about playing and the other is about survival.
So, I see no possibility of being unable to find people to write software for F-22 without monetary payment. The question is not so much about whether such people can be found, but whether they can be found while other people receive monetary payment.
Psychology studies show that people compare their pay with the pay of others, and if they feel they take less than others they get angry or sad (after all, humans are greedy and want the maximum they can get, and if another human gets more they want to get the same). So, if some people receive payment for writing F-22 software but other people aren't, those who don't get paid may feel like stop contributing to the project. But if money did not exist, people would simply write the software with no second thought, because they would have nothing else to compare themselves with than other volunteers like themselves, therefore in their mind they would regard their contribution and their returns as within their understanding of justice.
So, lack of monetary payment is not itself a problem, but lack of monetary payment for some people while others get paid is what causes people to avoid volunteering, according to psychology studies (or at least that was what I learnt during my postgraduate management studies and readings of psychology papers), and this is why most companies don't allow salary differences to be known to their employees. Of course, it's not always clear-cut, because not everyone has the same psychological sensitivity to comparison with the pay of others (in fact some people will volunteer no matter what).
Where there is a necessity to write software, it will be written, whether with payment or not, whether as free or proprietary software, whether by the choice of those involved or by force. If there was no money around to pay for military aerospace software developers and there was a war, and if for any reason no one volunteered to write it, and if a state was willing to take any means to win the war, programmers would simply be drafted to write the software as part of their military duties, and death penalty would await those who would be too stupid to not cooperate (in fact many states in the past have used such measures to build military widgets). Therefore, certainly there is no need for proprietary software or payments to exist for the provision of necesssry software, as wherever there is a need it will be satisfied in any available way. It is just a question of what ways of writing software we are willing to accept or consider as a society and under what circumstances, and also a question of which ways are most compatible with the human nature and psychology.
Users do not refrain from using copyrighted works, regardless of the license.
Depends what you mean when you say user. I make a distinction between user and luser. Maybe you have lusers in mind. I talk about real users. It is illegal to use a copyrighted work without a licence, so users don't do that. To tell you an example, research how confused everyone was with djbdns before it was made public domain. You can learn more about the huge problems users face when confronted with licence-free software by reading this article.
People who either pirate or buy movies or music created by copyright freaks don't know what is a good movie or good music. There are many movies and music pieces around under free licences by amateurs who really love making movies and music and sharing it freely, and viewers or listeners remix freely. Plus, they are of much higher quality. The amateur scene has more creativity than a bunch of big name directors.
Yet it seems like people work ok with long telephone numbers. I fail to see how IP addresses would be worse than telephone numbers that everyone uses anyway.
Why is it that some people who are not as talented, obtain success? Are they smarter? Stronger? No. They're simply more evil.
Or maybe they are just plain children or animals that lack a properly built superego and who only know to act based on their impulse to extend their biological survival. Not really evil, only ignorant and immature, their thinking being dominated by the impulses of the id, but nevertheless equally dangerous and disturbing as what we would imagine as an "evil" person.
Sometimes it can hurt, though. A young person experiencing poverty can acquire the psychological drive to get rich (but also to commit suicide or give up etc so it's not clear-cut). A young person living in a rich family may never live the necessary experiences that create the psychological need for wealth accumulation (but also more easily absord the value system that assists in wealth accumulation and also make connections, so it's also not clear-cut).
I really wonder why they need a.de domain name at all, isn't the.org domain enough? But I also wonder why they should have any domain name at all. DNS relies on central servers not controlled by you, which is a bad thing because whoever controls these servers can influence you, and this is one of the reasons I dislike DNS. I see nothing wrong in setting up a non-DNS site with an IP address or multiple IP addresses as its address. That way your site is totally independent from the DNS system.
They should be giving away more and more free software: you don't want to be forgotten during economic hardship. You want to remain popular and your trademark being correlated in people's minds with "very useful free stuff". You also want everyone to visit your servers to download your free stuff. After you have built and sustained your popularity and fame, you can find lots of ways to cash in. But putting ads into the free stuff is not a good way as it would make the free stuff less useful.
If you need to program [...] [y]ou want [...] a fast CPU
I can program on netbooks (and PDAs) and I don't need a powerful CPU locally because I just ssh to the development servers as long as there is 3G/GPRS connectivity. Remember Sun's "the network is the computer"? I actually do not use a desktop computer at all, and if I need more local power the netbooks are augmented by more powerful laptops, but the fact is that 99% of the time the Intel Atom CPU is enough for cloud-based computing. Desktops are a thing of the past when you get accustomed to network-centric work.
I cannot comprehend why people continue programming in desktops nowadays. After all, gcc and emacs is the same whether it runs locally or accessed through ssh. It makes much more sense to move everything to the cloud, as long as the cloud is owned by you (ie your own dedicated servers in trusted datacentres). And there is no logic in using a desktop when you can get a lightweight netbook and go to a mountain and sit there programming in the clean air and close to the nature. It also helps you keep fit.
Anyone wanting to share freely simply chooses not to enforce their copyright
That's not the correct way to share: the law gives the author the ability to sue people who infringe on their copyright, and infringement is defined as lack of licence. Therefore, if one shares their creations with no licence attached, they can at any time change their mind and sue. Users know this, and are afraid to use copyrightable works that carry no explicit licence.
Judging by their insistence on stupid practices regarding receipts, I think this was expected, and other businesses doing similar things must take notice and stop frustating their customers.
My servers's time is set to UTC. My PDA reports time in UTC. Even my GNOME clock is set to UTC. I also have clocks for the local time and other timezones, but I find that it is mostly the UTC that I need. In fact, I could function perfectly well by using only UTC. When I want to know whether it's day or night, I either look around me if I am outside, or I look out of the window if I am inside, or use a world clock software which shows me a photo of the Earth with a shade wherever it's night. In fact, even while the local time clock is next to that software's icon, I find it much easier to just click there and see on my screen exactly where on earth it's night or day. Lately I am thinking of setting all of my clocks to UTC and getting rid of the local and other timezone clocks, as the same software can also tell me the exact time anywhere in the world, so I don't see much need for the non-UTC clocks.
I really cannot comprehend why people use local time and not UTC. We live on the Internet, and the only meaningful time for the Internet is the UTC. I would love to see everyone else using UTC and getting rid of timezones and DST. These are byproducts of the pre-networking era, but now in the age of globalisation and of the Internet we must work and communicate using a common language (English), a common time (UTC), and common units (metric system).
Some people want to keep copyright, and for them the copyright law is good. Some other people want to share, but for them there is no law that supports them. Public domain does not exist in all jurisdictions, and in these countries that it exists it is too vague how one can place something into the public domain, plus in some countries it is impossible to give away some rights such as moral rights or the right to get credit. The laws are made with copyright in mind, without contemplating the possibility of someone wanting to share freely.
In most jurisdictions copyright is assigned to the author by default when a work is created, even before publication. Thus, no one can copy legally without having a licence from the author. But writing and giving licences is not always easy: the author has to think about such things as disclaimers, etc. Today there are standard licences such as GPL that we can use, but it was not always so easy. Plus I see no reason why anyone should be forced to write or attach a licence in their words in order to escape from the evils of copyright. Licences such as GPL are good, but very soon we run into problems like being unable to share with people choosing a licence of the same spirit but with different words, such as CC-By-SA or even GFDL.
Recognising that there are two groups of people, one group wanting copyright and the other group wanting to share, and believing that a government must accomodate both groups, I think governments should maintain two sets of laws: copyright for the control freaks, and copyleft for the sharers.
With a copyleft legal framework, one could write some code or a book and just say Copyleft (CL) 2008. No licence required: the law will take care of that, and if the governments prepare their laws after an international meeting like the Berne Convention the laws will be compatible in all jurisdictions. This helps the sharers without doing any harm to existing or future copyright owners (except if you consider free competition a bad thing). Control freaks will still be able to say Copyright (CR) 2008 for their software or books etc to signal that their creation is to be treated with the copyright rather than the copyleft law.
If governments ever do that, there will probably be some fight between control freaks and sharers regarding what the default law will be. Currently copyright is applied automatically. If a copyleft law is added to the legal framework, will everything be considered copyrighted unless it has a Copyleft (CL) 2008 notice? Or should we consider copyleft the default law and only apply copyright to whatever has a Copyright (CR) 2008 notice? That will be a question in the case a copyleft law is introduced somewhere. Another question will be whether the copyleft law should be real copyleft as in GPL/GFDL or permissive non-copyleft as in ISCL/BSDL/X11L. We could perhaps have three legal frameworks: copyright, copyleft, and permissive.
The current laws make it very easy to keep control over one's creations. You don't have to write a licence to have copyright, but you do have to write (or choose) a licence to enjoy copyleft. And choosing a licence is not an easy task because of licence proliferation: there are many licences to choose from, with subtle but important differences, and for many of them if you make an initial choice it will be difficult to change the licence, especially for massive collaborative works with no copyright assignment.
who (beside teenagers) actually uses GSM or even 3G phones to access webpages here?
Professionals. It was them who first used GSM/3G. Teenagers discovered the technlogy much later. And professionals still are the most high-volume users of GSM/3G (talking about real professionals who have real tasks to do while travelling, not office clerks who just browse email etc).
LOL. But actually there was pr0n in the C64 era. later in the early PC era most BBSes were full of it. and yet people were still writing code in the early PC era. But later, as the command line was replaced by a GUI users became lusers. Maybe the best way to educate people about computers would be to ban GUIs.
Don't know if this is true, but let's seize the opportunity to discuss whether putting open source code on the web increases the risk to a developer of being held liable for its bugs. Not specifically for this case, but generally:
Some countries have strict liability laws, and it is possible to be held liable if any action of yours causes extreme problems, such as death of another person. Sometimes such laws are very broad and very strange. Would it be possible for an evil aggressor to attack open source developers by claiming that they, eg, downloaded their free code and put it into an aeroplane but a bug in the code caused a crash, killing people? (assuming the bug was not intentional, but that it was very silly and exceptionally gross)
The developer could say that the code had a no-warranty/no-guarantee notice, that it was a gift, that it did not establish a business relationship, that it was not a product but only an exercise of free speech, that the downloader/user should exercise their own due diligence and study the code for defects before using it, that they should have purchased a support/guarantee contract, that the code was written and shared online for personal enjoyment rather than for creating a useful product, etc. But would an impartial and competent court in a strict liability jurisdiction accept these defences? And what if the court was in a corrupt jurisdiction and the judge were bribed to side with the aggressor? Would it be possible for the court to condemn the developer by sufficiently stretching the strict liability law?
My take on the issue is, of course, that open source developers have absolutely no liability to anyone even under extreme circumstances, as nobody forces anyone to download open source code, and in most cases open source code is written primarily for the amusement of its developers. So, even if the military downloads an OS kernel and puts it into nuclear missiles, but a bug in the kernel then randomly fires the missiles causing a nuclear holocaust and the extinction of all the human race except the developer and the military general who used the source code, I personally would think that it was the general's fault of using the code and not the developer's for writing it. But I have no idea whether other people would think like me, especially in a court in a country with strange laws (and possibly corruption). Would it be possible to stretch the laws to pass the liability to the developer?
Or, to think about it in another domain, could an amateur radio operator be held liable for a homebrew that another person received from the amateur as a gift and that person used it to send signals to aliens who thanks to them discovered the Earth's position and came and conquered it?
Is there even a 0.0000000001% chance of a buggy but free widget's creator being held liable if someone else used the widget and its bugs caused havoc?
Slashdot Mirror
Stop buying music and movies.
If that means stop buying music and movies developed by copyright freaks, while at the same time remaining legal and avoiding copying their music and movies illegally without approval, that's a good advice.
Even better would be to participate in the free culture and amateur artistic movements, where there is much more creativity every second than all big-name directors can provide in ten years time. Watch freely-given and free-licensed (Creative Commons etc) movies or music, share it, and most importantly than all use the licence's freedoms to remix it and create new movies or music, further empowering the free culture movement.
We are living on dross
I didn't know six and a half billion of people live in a small Austrian municipality. It must be really all too crammed up there, probably worse than HK. But at least all enjoy living in the birthplace of a music composer.
I don't understand why universities need to provide students with their own computers and network access in an era where every kid has not one but two, three, four, ten, twelve, or thirty computers (depending on how nerdy they are!). Why not just ask the students to get their own laptop and their own, personal, 3G/HSPA cellular Internet connection with an ISP of their choice? After all, every student wants to have the latest netbook with GNU/Linux, and not the Windows-based desktops or weighty laptops with locked-down net access that universities may provide. An Acer Aspire One netbook with a 3G modem and a SIM card is what students need, paid by them or their parents.
For poor students, some programme of financial support could be employed that would enable the student to buy their own netbook and 3G connection, with the laptop and connection being the student's property, so that no law and nobody could force the university to play the police officer's role.
Universities must focus on what they do best, providing education, and not throw money at IT and other projects outside their competencies that only make tuition costs higher without satisfying students. Let's keep tuition costs down and let the individual students and their families choose whether they want to spend their own money on a netbook with 3G. Let's get the universities to spend money on real scientific equipment that the students can't get easily themselves, rather than on consumer devices that are so commonplace that most students see the university's computers as too old for their needs and prefer to have their own netbook/laptop anyway (while they still pay the inflated tuition, a good portion of which is because of the cost of IT nobody uses).
Students don't want university-provided email, they want lower tuition and their own email. They don't want university-provided computers, as they already have their own (those who don't and need one can receive financial support if a suitable programme is offered by the uni, which it should be offered). Students don't want high tuition as a result of the university's IT costs while they rarely really use this IT infrastructure, they want lower tuition and their own, personal IT infrastructure, which they probably already possess anyway. There is no need for university-provided WiFi at all as well, as 3G coverage is provided everywhere anyway, at least here in Europe, and many students anyway prefer to study at home and only visit the uni for exams or handouts so for them any uni-provided IT infrastructure is not used at all.
Nobody is going to donate millions of man-hours to write the software for the F-22 out of the goodness of their heart.
Lots of people get paid to write free software, and in fact free software is usually done with distributed development so no one but a core team donates too much but instead everyone donates a little (with a core team contributing a little more), but let's concentrate on whether writing software for the F-22 would require payment to make people motivated enough to do it.
I think there are lots of military geeks around who would love the opportunity to write software for their favourite fighter without monetary payment. I also think there are lots of patriotic people around who even without monetary payment would be happy to write software for the fighter which is going to protect their country in the next war.
Both acts (writing software for enjoyment and for protecting one's country) are acts of self-interest, the one is about playing and the other is about survival.
So, I see no possibility of being unable to find people to write software for F-22 without monetary payment. The question is not so much about whether such people can be found, but whether they can be found while other people receive monetary payment.
Psychology studies show that people compare their pay with the pay of others, and if they feel they take less than others they get angry or sad (after all, humans are greedy and want the maximum they can get, and if another human gets more they want to get the same). So, if some people receive payment for writing F-22 software but other people aren't, those who don't get paid may feel like stop contributing to the project. But if money did not exist, people would simply write the software with no second thought, because they would have nothing else to compare themselves with than other volunteers like themselves, therefore in their mind they would regard their contribution and their returns as within their understanding of justice.
So, lack of monetary payment is not itself a problem, but lack of monetary payment for some people while others get paid is what causes people to avoid volunteering, according to psychology studies (or at least that was what I learnt during my postgraduate management studies and readings of psychology papers), and this is why most companies don't allow salary differences to be known to their employees. Of course, it's not always clear-cut, because not everyone has the same psychological sensitivity to comparison with the pay of others (in fact some people will volunteer no matter what).
Where there is a necessity to write software, it will be written, whether with payment or not, whether as free or proprietary software, whether by the choice of those involved or by force. If there was no money around to pay for military aerospace software developers and there was a war, and if for any reason no one volunteered to write it, and if a state was willing to take any means to win the war, programmers would simply be drafted to write the software as part of their military duties, and death penalty would await those who would be too stupid to not cooperate (in fact many states in the past have used such measures to build military widgets). Therefore, certainly there is no need for proprietary software or payments to exist for the provision of necesssry software, as wherever there is a need it will be satisfied in any available way. It is just a question of what ways of writing software we are willing to accept or consider as a society and under what circumstances, and also a question of which ways are most compatible with the human nature and psychology.
Users do not refrain from using copyrighted works, regardless of the license.
Depends what you mean when you say user. I make a distinction between user and luser. Maybe you have lusers in mind. I talk about real users. It is illegal to use a copyrighted work without a licence, so users don't do that. To tell you an example, research how confused everyone was with djbdns before it was made public domain. You can learn more about the huge problems users face when confronted with licence-free software by reading this article.
People who either pirate or buy movies or music created by copyright freaks don't know what is a good movie or good music. There are many movies and music pieces around under free licences by amateurs who really love making movies and music and sharing it freely, and viewers or listeners remix freely. Plus, they are of much higher quality. The amateur scene has more creativity than a bunch of big name directors.
Let her try some university-level online short courses from the Open University (OU). This will also speed up her university admission.
Yet it seems like people work ok with long telephone numbers. I fail to see how IP addresses would be worse than telephone numbers that everyone uses anyway.
Why is it that some people who are not as talented, obtain success? Are they smarter? Stronger? No. They're simply more evil.
Or maybe they are just plain children or animals that lack a properly built superego and who only know to act based on their impulse to extend their biological survival. Not really evil, only ignorant and immature, their thinking being dominated by the impulses of the id, but nevertheless equally dangerous and disturbing as what we would imagine as an "evil" person.
Sometimes it can hurt, though. A young person experiencing poverty can acquire the psychological drive to get rich (but also to commit suicide or give up etc so it's not clear-cut). A young person living in a rich family may never live the necessary experiences that create the psychological need for wealth accumulation (but also more easily absord the value system that assists in wealth accumulation and also make connections, so it's also not clear-cut).
I really wonder why they need a .de domain name at all, isn't the .org domain enough? But I also wonder why they should have any domain name at all. DNS relies on central servers not controlled by you, which is a bad thing because whoever controls these servers can influence you, and this is one of the reasons I dislike DNS. I see nothing wrong in setting up a non-DNS site with an IP address or multiple IP addresses as its address. That way your site is totally independent from the DNS system.
They should be giving away more and more free software: you don't want to be forgotten during economic hardship. You want to remain popular and your trademark being correlated in people's minds with "very useful free stuff". You also want everyone to visit your servers to download your free stuff. After you have built and sustained your popularity and fame, you can find lots of ways to cash in. But putting ads into the free stuff is not a good way as it would make the free stuff less useful.
I think most people aren't especially bothered by the idea of having automated advertisements sitting next to what they're doing
I think there are lots of people who are bothered enough to install Iceweasel (Firefox) plugins to prevent such advertisements.
If you need to program [...] [y]ou want [...] a fast CPU
I can program on netbooks (and PDAs) and I don't need a powerful CPU locally because I just ssh to the development servers as long as there is 3G/GPRS connectivity. Remember Sun's "the network is the computer"? I actually do not use a desktop computer at all, and if I need more local power the netbooks are augmented by more powerful laptops, but the fact is that 99% of the time the Intel Atom CPU is enough for cloud-based computing. Desktops are a thing of the past when you get accustomed to network-centric work.
I cannot comprehend why people continue programming in desktops nowadays. After all, gcc and emacs is the same whether it runs locally or accessed through ssh. It makes much more sense to move everything to the cloud, as long as the cloud is owned by you (ie your own dedicated servers in trusted datacentres). And there is no logic in using a desktop when you can get a lightweight netbook and go to a mountain and sit there programming in the clean air and close to the nature. It also helps you keep fit.
Anyone wanting to share freely simply chooses not to enforce their copyright
That's not the correct way to share: the law gives the author the ability to sue people who infringe on their copyright, and infringement is defined as lack of licence. Therefore, if one shares their creations with no licence attached, they can at any time change their mind and sue. Users know this, and are afraid to use copyrightable works that carry no explicit licence.
I wonder how long it will take until we see laws making free/open-source software illegal or limited only to licensed programmers.
Judging by their insistence on stupid practices regarding receipts, I think this was expected, and other businesses doing similar things must take notice and stop frustating their customers.
for farmers
My plants don't give a fsck over what a fscking clock says. They only care about the sun. All this "DST is for farmers" thing is pure propaganda.
with some jobs DST means the difference between commuting to work with daylight without it
Change the fscking job's timetable. No DST. Problem solved. And much better to use UTC rather than local time, by the way (I use UTC).
My servers's time is set to UTC. My PDA reports time in UTC. Even my GNOME clock is set to UTC. I also have clocks for the local time and other timezones, but I find that it is mostly the UTC that I need. In fact, I could function perfectly well by using only UTC. When I want to know whether it's day or night, I either look around me if I am outside, or I look out of the window if I am inside, or use a world clock software which shows me a photo of the Earth with a shade wherever it's night. In fact, even while the local time clock is next to that software's icon, I find it much easier to just click there and see on my screen exactly where on earth it's night or day. Lately I am thinking of setting all of my clocks to UTC and getting rid of the local and other timezone clocks, as the same software can also tell me the exact time anywhere in the world, so I don't see much need for the non-UTC clocks.
I really cannot comprehend why people use local time and not UTC. We live on the Internet, and the only meaningful time for the Internet is the UTC. I would love to see everyone else using UTC and getting rid of timezones and DST. These are byproducts of the pre-networking era, but now in the age of globalisation and of the Internet we must work and communicate using a common language (English), a common time (UTC), and common units (metric system).
Some people want to keep copyright, and for them the copyright law is good. Some other people want to share, but for them there is no law that supports them. Public domain does not exist in all jurisdictions, and in these countries that it exists it is too vague how one can place something into the public domain, plus in some countries it is impossible to give away some rights such as moral rights or the right to get credit. The laws are made with copyright in mind, without contemplating the possibility of someone wanting to share freely.
In most jurisdictions copyright is assigned to the author by default when a work is created, even before publication. Thus, no one can copy legally without having a licence from the author. But writing and giving licences is not always easy: the author has to think about such things as disclaimers, etc. Today there are standard licences such as GPL that we can use, but it was not always so easy. Plus I see no reason why anyone should be forced to write or attach a licence in their words in order to escape from the evils of copyright. Licences such as GPL are good, but very soon we run into problems like being unable to share with people choosing a licence of the same spirit but with different words, such as CC-By-SA or even GFDL.
Recognising that there are two groups of people, one group wanting copyright and the other group wanting to share, and believing that a government must accomodate both groups, I think governments should maintain two sets of laws: copyright for the control freaks, and copyleft for the sharers.
With a copyleft legal framework, one could write some code or a book and just say Copyleft (CL) 2008. No licence required: the law will take care of that, and if the governments prepare their laws after an international meeting like the Berne Convention the laws will be compatible in all jurisdictions. This helps the sharers without doing any harm to existing or future copyright owners (except if you consider free competition a bad thing). Control freaks will still be able to say Copyright (CR) 2008 for their software or books etc to signal that their creation is to be treated with the copyright rather than the copyleft law.
If governments ever do that, there will probably be some fight between control freaks and sharers regarding what the default law will be. Currently copyright is applied automatically. If a copyleft law is added to the legal framework, will everything be considered copyrighted unless it has a Copyleft (CL) 2008 notice? Or should we consider copyleft the default law and only apply copyright to whatever has a Copyright (CR) 2008 notice? That will be a question in the case a copyleft law is introduced somewhere. Another question will be whether the copyleft law should be real copyleft as in GPL/GFDL or permissive non-copyleft as in ISCL/BSDL/X11L. We could perhaps have three legal frameworks: copyright, copyleft, and permissive.
The current laws make it very easy to keep control over one's creations. You don't have to write a licence to have copyright, but you do have to write (or choose) a licence to enjoy copyleft. And choosing a licence is not an easy task because of licence proliferation: there are many licences to choose from, with subtle but important differences, and for many of them if you make an initial choice it will be difficult to change the licence, especially for massive collaborative works with no copyright assignment.
who (beside teenagers) actually uses GSM or even 3G phones to access webpages here?
Professionals. It was them who first used GSM/3G. Teenagers discovered the technlogy much later. And professionals still are the most high-volume users of GSM/3G (talking about real professionals who have real tasks to do while travelling, not office clerks who just browse email etc).
You mean this game blaster?
incidentally, a photo of its box would be great to have on the wiki, if it would be possible to take one under a free licence.
LOL. But actually there was pr0n in the C64 era. later in the early PC era most BBSes were full of it. and yet people were still writing code in the early PC era. But later, as the command line was replaced by a GUI users became lusers. Maybe the best way to educate people about computers would be to ban GUIs.
Don't know if this is true, but let's seize the opportunity to discuss whether putting open source code on the web increases the risk to a developer of being held liable for its bugs. Not specifically for this case, but generally:
Some countries have strict liability laws, and it is possible to be held liable if any action of yours causes extreme problems, such as death of another person. Sometimes such laws are very broad and very strange. Would it be possible for an evil aggressor to attack open source developers by claiming that they, eg, downloaded their free code and put it into an aeroplane but a bug in the code caused a crash, killing people? (assuming the bug was not intentional, but that it was very silly and exceptionally gross)
The developer could say that the code had a no-warranty/no-guarantee notice, that it was a gift, that it did not establish a business relationship, that it was not a product but only an exercise of free speech, that the downloader/user should exercise their own due diligence and study the code for defects before using it, that they should have purchased a support/guarantee contract, that the code was written and shared online for personal enjoyment rather than for creating a useful product, etc. But would an impartial and competent court in a strict liability jurisdiction accept these defences? And what if the court was in a corrupt jurisdiction and the judge were bribed to side with the aggressor? Would it be possible for the court to condemn the developer by sufficiently stretching the strict liability law?
My take on the issue is, of course, that open source developers have absolutely no liability to anyone even under extreme circumstances, as nobody forces anyone to download open source code, and in most cases open source code is written primarily for the amusement of its developers. So, even if the military downloads an OS kernel and puts it into nuclear missiles, but a bug in the kernel then randomly fires the missiles causing a nuclear holocaust and the extinction of all the human race except the developer and the military general who used the source code, I personally would think that it was the general's fault of using the code and not the developer's for writing it. But I have no idea whether other people would think like me, especially in a court in a country with strange laws (and possibly corruption). Would it be possible to stretch the laws to pass the liability to the developer?
Or, to think about it in another domain, could an amateur radio operator be held liable for a homebrew that another person received from the amateur as a gift and that person used it to send signals to aliens who thanks to them discovered the Earth's position and came and conquered it?
Is there even a 0.0000000001% chance of a buggy but free widget's creator being held liable if someone else used the widget and its bugs caused havoc?