I have a hard time believing that chimps would be granted any rights in today's society, especially considering that roughly half of the population argues in favor of a woman's "right" to have her unborn child killed. If the rights of an unborn human child are so small that they may be outweighed by the convenience of the mother, I fail to see how a chimp's right to life would ever take precedence over the possible value of the medical research obtained.
For me, a chimp has a lot more qualities that make it deserving of protection than an embryo. A chimp has a brain and thoughts and feelings and experiences and interpersonal relations. An embryo has more qualities in common with wood than it does with humans. It is brainless, thoughtless, chunk of living cells. If I were to decide which is more deserving of rights, I'd definitely choose a chimp. For that matter, cows are more deserving of protection of their life than embryos. At least cows think and have emotions and care if you kill them.
If you can't convince society to respect human life, I doubt you'll be able to convince them that medical research should be halted so that chimps can be spared.
What do you mean by "convince?" I respect life, human or otherwise, that I find deserving of that respect, based upon the qualities I value and my own ethics. Some human life is worthy of protection and some is not. If a person is born without a brain or their brain dies, I have no problem with them being killed or used in experiments, so long as that is not inflicting emotional pain on still living relatives or the like. I can be convinced to support limited rights for chimps if it is demonstrated that they take responsibility for those rights and exercise those rights in a way that is acceptable to society. I don't see anyone ever convincing me that a mindless bundle of cells can take responsibility for anything. If you have a logical reason why you think embryos should have rights, lets hear it. But if by "convince" you mean you want me to change my mind because you say so without a logical reason or because of an illogical reason based on emotion or your irrational and unsupported beliefs, well that isn't convincing.
People (sadly) aren't interested in the moral arguments, and the arguments against giving animals rights are strong:
People shouldn't be interested in moral arguments, just ethical ones. Morality is subjective and has no place in a reasoned discussion.
Lastly, why would we grant rights to animals when we are taking them away from humans?
Interestingly, we're discussing law. Theoretically, all law should be about mitigating conflicting rights between individuals. Otherwise, it is simply a matter of personal choice and is not the place of government to interfere. For example, the role of government is to decide if my right to throw rocks supersedes or is superseded by your right to own and protect your car's windshield. It is not the place of the government to decide if my throwing of rock on my own property and which does not affect anyone else is "moral" or not.
Already the rights of animals have been recognized and the law mitigates the conflict of those rights. Laws against animal cruelty, for example, have held that an animal's right not to suffer horribly is more important than a person's right to torture said animal or own said animal. The proposed law is simply a new stratification granting more rights to a certain type of animal based upon the qualities of that animal.
Granted, we shouldn't ever intentionally inflict pain on living things, but then, how would we eat?
I believe the law has mostly ruled that we don't have the right to unnecessarily inflict pain on animals. We can kill them painlessly or relatively painlessly. Not that all pain is "wrong" simply that we need to be aware of it and not intentionally create more of it.
So as far as I'm concerned, it's very clear. We shouldn't be performing medical experiments or capturing or hunting chimps or destroying their habitat (more), but that's it. That's all they need. We just need to start respecting the other life forms on this planet, not dressing them up in suits and expecting them to be people. They won't be, don't want to be, and are just fine as they are.
The real question being debated here is not if chimps are humans, but if they are deserving of a given set of rights/protections. It is fine to say that we should respect life forms, but it is a matter of degrees and based upon qualities. If I'm hungry should I be able to kill a human and eat them? What about a chimp? What about a cow? What about a banana? What about yogurt? What quality of these life forms makes them deserving of legal protection from my hunger? What if I need an organ transplant to survive? What animal would not be acceptable to kill to preserve my own life even if it is not threatening me?
Personally, I consider all life to be similar in certain ways. I consider animals to be more akin to humans (or vice versus) than most people seem to assume. Animals have emotions and thoughts along the same lines as humans, but to differing degrees. To some degree their similarity to humans is considered as a criteria, but I think that fails if you look at it from a scientific perspective. Intelligence is a somewhat valid criteria, but I don't see it as the only one necessary for something to be deserving of "rights." Usually in my personal life I consider rights to be related directly to responsibility. Anything that takes responsibility, has the right to manage that responsibility, but must also deal with the consequences. When rights conflict, it is usually the responsibility portion of the equation that clarifies the situation.
No, you should be able to ride all Spanish public transportation in Germany. And indeed you can.
Sure, in the same way a person who bought a license to make a copy in Spain can exercise all of Spain's right to invalidate German law in Germany; which is to say none.
You keep saying that buying accross countries would be illegal yet I can think of at least two examples where this occurs within the EU. EMI sell an album in the UK they sell it in france there should be nothing preventing me getting the album from france its the same company.
Sure, EMI can do this. Apple can't because they aren't the rights holder. As for CDs, they are transferrable because each country signed a treaty to that affect, a treaty which covers only physical copies not the right to make a download.
The only legal issue here is when a small record company which only licenses for the country in which it distributes.
What you seem to be completely missing is that Apple does not have the rights you seem to be assigning to them. They're not the rights holder. You're not buying directly from EMI. Theoretically there is nothing stopping EMI from granting Apple the right to sell a download in both locations under the same license. In fact the EU commission long ago ordered the record companies to do just that. The record companies ignored them and the EU has done nothing about it.
But the little I've read on this sort of thing EU law is not on Apples[sic] side
The point I was making was not that Apple is not breaking the law. The point I was making is that the only choice Apple has to comply with both the law in each country and EU law is to not do business in the EU. Apple has no legal ability to do anything to remedy the situation. The record companies can solve it for a subset of the problem by offering a pan-european license. The EU can solve the problem by forcing them to do so, or better yet by passing a law that says and copyright license in any member automatically applies in all members (solving the issue for games, movies, books, etc. as well). Apple, on the other hand, is just a middle man caught between conflicting laws and a government that does not seem to care half the time when their orders are ignored.
To be fair, if you actually read the articles about this, the EU seems to be going after the record companies to force them to offer the licenses. While the spin here on Slashdot was about Apple, all the punitive measures mentioned by the EU were against the record companies, not Apple.
No, they have to respect both. If their business model is not possible without violating the law they can't run it.
In a perfect world that is great, but in the real world that means they just lost the market to MS's DRM scheme and the Windows monopoly gained another huge block and a way to lock-in people. Realistically, it makes a lot more sense for Apple to start operation along with all the other players, while trying to get the EU to fix the laws and while limiting their liability by breaking the law that is not directly breaking well established laws with a direct profit involved, opening them up to insanely large potential damages.
Also there's a good chance they could have sued their suppliers for price fixing to get the conflict resolved.
Price fixing is a criminal violation. It is up to the police to take them into court. Apple complained to the EU about the behavior, and the EU did nothing about it other than issue an edict which they never enforced. Apple suing the record cartels is a moronic idea. The court systems are too inefficient and it would have taken years, in the mean time of which they would have taken retaliatory measures and killed Apple's legal store entirely, not just in the EU, but also in the US. This is the RIAA we're taking about. They have never balked at directly breaking the law, then using the court system and campaign contributions to drag things out in court forever and then pay a small fine once the damage has been done. The fact that the EU did nothing about this know criminal organization's known price fixing is entirely the EU's fault, not Apple's.
The EU is not in the bussiness of imposing different copyrights in different countries. The labels are.
The EU is made up of member states. Each member has its own copyright law and does not have reciprocity with every other state to the degree needed to make a license issued in only one state valid in every other state. That is the EU's fault, not the record companies. It is the record companies' fault for exploiting this to create differential pricing, which is the only reason any of this makes any difference to the average person. If the record companies were not doing that, they would have no motivation to not issue pan-EU licenses.
Hopefully the EU will fix their laws and harmonize copyright by saying a copyright license within any member country also automatically applies in all other member countries. Otherwise, they're going to have to go through this all over again with the movie industry, the video game industry, the ebook industry and who knows what other copyright-based businesses.
Apple should've realized that just as country law supercedes contracts, EU law supercedes any national law.
But actually it doesn't. EU member countries are responsible for making sure their laws are in compliance with EU law. Until that happens, Apple has to respect the law of each country above policies of the EU. This is especially true when you look at conditional members of the EU, like the UK.
Apple says they can refuse to sell to that German customer because they'd like him to buy from the German store (that, presumably, has higher costs than it's French counterpart). The EU says they MUST sell those French iTunes to that German customer because of anti-trust.
No. Apple doesn't say they can refuse to sell to the German customer. They say to comply with German law they must refuse to sell to the German customer. The license Apple negotiated with the record company in France only gives them the right to copy that song within France, not across the border and into Germany. Since Apple has the credit card issue country and the billing address for that card which are both German, Apple has reason to believe the customer is in Germany and their providing them with a download under the Spanish license is blatant copyright violation. German law makes it illegal to publish a copy for download without the record company providing a license within Germany, which is not the license in question.
This whole problem stems from the EU's failure to harmonize copyright law within the EU, but their insistence that companies act as though they have. If the EU passed a law that said any copyright license within any EU member is automatically valid in all EU members, then this whole problem would vanish. Why the EU has decided instead to attack the helpless Apple and the greedy record industry is beyond me. After this will they then bring suit against the motion picture industry, then the e-book industry, etc? Fix your laws EU!
The EU also has strict regulations on the limitations you can put in licenses that aren't negotiated individually so it's neither impossible nor unthinkable that the EU could dictate that licenses valid for one member state must apply to all member states or be made available under the same conditions.
Yup, this would be called "harmonizing copyright" something the EU keeps talking about but has not yet gotten around to doing. All they need to do is pass a law that says copyright licenses in one EU member country also apply in all others, and the problem goes away. Instead they're trying to address one incidence of it and ignoring all the others.
IOW the labels would be just as liable for price fixing as Apple.
To be fair, the labels are the main focus of this lawsuit and all the penalties mentioned were against them, not Apple. The article summary spins it a little strangely and that may be misleading you.
Come to think of it, while their onboard computervoice mumbled some chinees, I never heard any of the other characters speak any chinese.
Huh? I don't remember a computer talking at all. Almost all the characters, even the proper ones, swear in chinese. Some people with too much time on their hands even translated it all and it was by no means a small Website.
Well, that's because they're alien characters! And there you were, complaining that you wanted something else than human drives and emotions!
Well, one of them is supposed to be human, and I find it hard to swallow that an alien race would act alien in a way that just happens to resemble shallow writing and bad acting on Earth:)
I think there we disgress the most. At least when it comes down to evaluating the value of a *SF*-show.
I'm not so keen on categorizing things into neat little bundles. I don't care if someone calls something fantasy or action or drama or sci-fi, so long as it is good. I appreciate the sci-fi elements, but by themselves they are not enough to make for an interesting story.
...though I bet we both like Bladerunner....
I love the movie and the book it is based upon. It was very well done on many levels.
I DID force myself to see every episode of firefly, though, even though I thought most were not very good. Can you say the same about Farscape?
I tried, but even drinking myself into a stupor was not enough to get me through more than about 6 of them.
Btw, unrelated; the 99bottlesofbeerinmyF...what does the 'F' stand for?:-)
I actually entered "99BottlesOfBeerInMyFridge" but slashdot truncated it:) Nice chatting with you.
IANAL, so I feel like I have to ask-- when you purchase something online, legally, where does the transaction take place? Like if I'm sitting in NYC and I buy a music track from a French store, is that purchase subject to French laws or American laws?
Both to some degree. Thus far court precedent has said that if you offer a download, then you have to abide by the laws where that download is downloaded to, provided you can reasonably be expected to know where that is. Since Apple is billing via credit card, they know both the credit card issuer's country and the billing address of the customer, so they cannot claim ignorance.
Let's imagine Apple is licensed to sell a song in Germany but isn't licensed to sell that track in France, not under any price. Now, someone in France buys that track in the German store. If that transaction is said to take place in France, then Apple is guilty of copyright infringement.
Right, and because Apple knows the CC info, they restrict downloads based upon that info so that the laws in the country where the content is downloaded to are followed (and where they are being paid from and have the greatest liability).
The reason I ask is that this problem keeps popping up again and again. This was the question about allofmp3.com: if the sale is legal according to Russian law but illegal according to American law, is it legal for Americans in America to buy the music from a Russian store in Russia.
Technically, no one was able to show how allofmp3.com was illegal, so instead they used political pressure to get the Russians to shut it down. Allofmp3.com won all their lawsuits that I ever read about.
If I want to buy music in the EU then Company A can't sell it to france for say 99p and then prohibit me from buying from their french store forcing me to buy it in the UK one at £1.29.
The problem here is that the law in the UK makes it illegal for Apple to sell you the copy they have a license for in France. Should they violate the EU law, the UK law or simply stop offering a service altogether?
I can goto france and buy a DVD bring it home and play it on my UK DVD player.
This isn't exactly the same thing, but the only reason you can to that is because both France and the UK are signatories to a treaty that specifically allows it. It does not allow transfer of rights to make a copy, just of physical copies.
The EU simply expects Apple to let me use the french store and the frenchies use the UK store, it doesn't expect EU members to be able to access non eu member stores.
Ahh, but the law in France and the UK is what makes that illegal, Apple is merely complying with the law because the EU has not yet harmonized copyright law among EU members.
I don't know about you but I think price fixing is bad, this is deliberate price fixing "because the record company's are forcing us" if thats the case I'd expect a anti trust case against the record companies next.
This suit is mainly against the record companies with all mention of fines against them. Apple is mentioned peripherally. The problem is the EU has not enforced their edict to the record companies. The EU can solve this whole problem with simple law. "Any copyright license that applies within one EU member automatically applies in all EU members." If they passed that law then Apple having a license in France would automatically mean Apple has that same license in the UK and this whole problem and the ability of the record companies to fix prices within the EU would be gone. I blame the EU for not doing that yet and I blame the record companies for fixing prices in the first place. Apple is pretty much the only one here who did not have a choice. I suppose they could have simply refused to do business in the EU until the EU fixed their laws, but by then they would have been driven out of the EU market by companies with fewer qualms about getting involved in the EU's mess.
No, they're allowing them to charge what they want whevever, but they can't stop someone in one country buying from another. This is the whole point of a common market.
The problem is EU law requires them to allow anyone to buy it, but each individual country's law makes that illegal. Apple doesn't own the copyright, it just sells copies licensed from the record companies. If the EU requires them to let a German download a song from the Spanish site, but German law makes it illegal for them to do so because the record company licensed them to sell in Spain under a given license and the license does not make the download legal in Germany, then any action Apple takes will violate one of these two laws.
That's Apple's problem.
The EU is suing Apple for breaking an EU law that directly conflicts with the license offered by the record company and with that country's law. You don't think it is a problem when every EU member has a law that contradicts an EU law?
Why? It's not the EU's business to work out arguments between Apple and record companies, but at the end of the day they have to follow the law.
It is 100% the EU's business to harmonize laws that conflict between differing EU nations and form a coherent standard. The fact that the EU has failed to harmonize copyright laws and failed to enforce their own edicts against the record companies, technically making it impossible to legally offer a muic download service anywhere in the EU, is certainly the EU's problem.
Only in the drug-addled minds of the RIAA's lawyers.
Ahh, but this has been held to be true by both EU and US courts. If I have an original copy of a song you sang and I pay you $5 for the right to make a copy of your song but you specify that right only applies in the US, I can transport that copy from the US to Poland legally. I cannot legally go to Poland and then make the copy from an original, because copyright law in Poland does not grant me the right to make a copy without your permission (which you have granted conditionally depending upon my location). It might be reasonable for the courts to rule any copyright agreement must not be restricted by location, but thus far that has not happened and there is little sign it will on a global scale. Thus the recording industry will use this as a tool for anti-competitive pricing schemes.
What is likely to be illegal here is the record company's action in issuing such restrictive licences. Under the single market, a licence good in one member state should be good in all.
Agreed, but the EU does not have any specific law regarding copyrights that requires this, which it almost certainly should. Also, many (most) of the licenses predate the existence of the EU. What happens with those? Finally, the original post was claiming Apple was culpable, but they are the only one in this whole situation with no real ability to do anything about it other than complain to the EU, which they did.
I imagine they're allowed to charge whatever they like wherever they like. They're just not allowed, if they do so, to claim that the cheap North Dakota licence is only valid in North Dakota, and so use the law to prevent Californian people buying it in preference to the expensive California licence.
The problem is every country in the EU has a law against copying copyrighted works without permission, thus it would be akin in your example to California having a law that forbids it, and someone in California trying to claim because they have a license that is legal according to North Dakota law, they can ignore the California law. That doesn't fly.
This is debatable. It is just as possible to argue that the copy takes place where the server is located.
I know there have been several court rulings that contradict this, and I don't know any to support your assertion. Thus far, the location where the download takes place has always been the location of the copy, according to both EU and US courts (as far as I know).
But there is nothing stopping that copy being made in France then transported anywhere within the EU.
This is true so long as it is stored on the same digital media and not copied to another, but has nothing to do with the legality of Apple offering the download service in the first place.
That the card is issued to Germany means very little about the location of the card holder. Also asking them for personal information which is not actually needed is likely to be against data protection laws which exist in the EU.
You don't understand. If Apple could take payments without incidentally knowing where the card was issued, no doubt they would to reduce their legal liability. The problem is, in order to accept payment via a credit card they have to know where the credit card is issued by, and thus they have the info to limit downloads. If, having this info, they don't then they are liable for being able to limit downloads to legal ones, and not doing so. Remember, this is civil law, not criminal. Apple could claim that the issuer of the card has nothing to do with the residence of the person using it, but if the courts disagreed, Apple would have just flushed billions down the toilet. That is an unacceptable risk to any business seeing as they run the music store at near break even in the first place.
If the licence sold in France is not valid in Germany, that is entirely the record company's doing.
It is the case that the license is only valid in one country. It is mostly the record company's fault, but also the EU's fault for not enforcing their edict that licenses be issued to all EU countries at once.
Hence this investigation into these companies, and Apple for contributory infringement of the EU citizens' rights.
Umm, contributory infringement of rights? I'm not sure what you mean by that and I don't think it has any meaning in a legal sense.
Actually, the International Copyright Treaty is what allows you to bring the CD from one country to the next.
Yes. Only the fact that the countries in question have signed this, guarantees this is legal.
The problem here is that while international law says the contracts Apple has can't enforce caluses that create a segmented global market, the contracts themselves do and if you break the terms, the labels will take their ball and go home.
As I understand it specifically EU law says that. If they don't enforce that all copyright licenses issues in the EU are issued to all EU members at once, instead of on a country by country basis as they have been, there is nothing Apple can to to comply with their laws and still offer a download service in any EU country.
I can travel to france, buy a french cd and bring it back to germany with me. Perfectly legal. I bought the cd in france under french copyright law.
Actually, that is only legal because of a treaty between the French and the Germans. Also, transporting a copy (CD) is completely different than transporting the right to make a copy (download license). It is akin to the difference between transporting a VCR and transporting a license to patents needed to manufacture VCRs. One is a physical commodity, while the other is a legal contract which includes a locality. If you take one thing away from this conversation, let it be that CDs are copies of a work, and covered by specific laws and downloads are a license to make a copy, which is treated completely different by EU laws.
I'm rather stupified at the reaction I got, though I probably should have know since this is slashdot, and you always have some irrational fanboys who think they have to make a point by turning a post into 'flamebait'.
Yeah, it makes me wonder how people like that got mod points in the first place. Disagreeing with someone does not mean they are trying to flamebait.
But then again, it has to remain a TV-show which is watchable and understandle for earth viewers, after all. I mean, say there's a TV-show where aliens are standing still the whole time and doing nothing but blink with his appendices that vaguely look like eyes. Maybe that is an expression of a total alien way of thinking, or the result of (to us) completely unknown drives and emotions...but hardly anyone would actually watch it.
I'd rather aliens were actually alien, or just not present. Having an alien just standing around is boring, but there would be nothing wrong with that so long as it was in the background and not the focus of the story at the time. You could have very interesting aliens that behaved in ways that we did not understand at all, randomly taking actions and making comments that did not really make any logical sense to a normal person, but which still might be entertaining to a viewer. Lacking that though, I prefer that Firefly did not include any aliens, rather than trying to make an alien that was so human as to be indistinguishable from a normal human with makeup on.
Similar concepts that explore the (essentially) human condition in novel ways are far between in Firefly, and even further away in GM.
Firefly explored some sci-fi concepts, but the focus was on the people and the story, which it really needs to be if you're going to have even halfway believable people, IMHO.
As for the 'cheesy'... I'm not sure what you mean, and I suspect this one is highly subjective.
By "cheesy" I mean dialogue, action, plots, characters, and behaviors that are simply too unbelievable for me to get past. For suspension of disbelief I'm willing to assume in some unknown way some character can have telekinetic power, even though I know how improbable it is. I can get past faster than light travel and I can get past sound in space if I have to. What I have trouble getting past is race after race that all speak English, and characters that act in ways that do not seem even close to what I understand of human nature. Actors who deliver lines so badly they don't even seem to be understanding the meaning of what they're saying and plots that are so strained and unbelievable. I accept that there will always be some of this, but when it is poured on so thickly that the story is so unbelievable I would not expect even a child to think it is possible, then I just can't stand it anymore. Suspension of disbelief will only take me so far, then a show is just stupid.
you describe it as prety... well... I mean, sure, the countryside can be pretty. But it's not about pretty, it's about creating an environment in which things are clearly out of the ordinary, where the surroundings add to an alien atmosphere.
I'm more interested in a believable and interesting atmosphere than an alien one. The environment we live in reflects human nature in many ways. Some utopian civilization or something where everything is always clean and orderly does not make sense. With Firefly the world was consistent and interesting. It makes sense that chinese could become a vulgar language, as french was during some periods of european colonization. It makes sense that there would be large corporate or business interests like the ones that are persistent in Firefly. I thought the idea of a agrarian and primitive society in conjunction with a high-tech one was more believable and interesting, not less.
Well, that's it for now.;-) I'm glad we could discuss our viewpoints in a civilised manner, instead of the many sneers I got from fanboys.
Yeah. There is plenty of room for differing tastes. Enjoy your sci-fi.
Alternatively, Apple will have to allow any consumer in any EU member country to shop from any of the EU country stores.
In, which case they are almost certainly breaking copyright law in the country of the downloader. Then it would be up the the recording industry companies to decide if they were going to try to sue Apple for infringement and bring the the whole anti-competitive thing into it, or ignore the infringement and hope most people don't catch on.
The principle is that if you live in an EU state you should be able to buy goods and services on sale in any other EU state and import them to your home state without restriction (save for certain limited exemptions for reasons of public morality etc).
So if I live in Spain, and can buy a pass that lets me ride all public transportation for 1 year at a flat rate, then I move to Germany, should I be able to ride all the German public transportation for the remainder of the year? Right now in the EU, the answer is "no." The right to ride all the trains in Spain is considered a different service from the right on ride all the busses in Germany. Keeping that in mind, if I'm in Spain and I buy the right to make a copy of a song, under EU law that does not grant me the right to make a copy of that song in Germany, because no EU law enforces copyright licensing as a global, EU service, rather than as a country by country service. Copyrights are regulated by treaties between the individual EU members, not by the EU commission as a whole.
So where does that leave us? Apple is probably violating the letter of certain EU competition laws by not letting a German citizen with a German credit card download a song when Apple only has a license to let them download it it Spain. At the same time, letting them download it would violate German copyright law, since it is illegal in Germany to make a copy of the song without the German recording industry body being paid. That means it is technically illegal to run any music download service in the EU, unless you can get the copyright holder to grant you a license for all of the EU, which they refuse to do.
I'd love to know who's been giving Apple their legal advice - I assume they're going to try to run an argument that they're providing a service rather than selling goods and therefore aren't caught in the single market rules - and will be very interested to see how this one turns out.
Actually, seeing as this is a conflict of laws in the EU and seeing as the EU has already ordered the record companies to offer pan-european licenses and seeing as Apple has repeatedly complained about noncompliance on the part of those record companies, I think Apple is going to walk on this one. If you read the statements made thus far by officials, it sounds like they're going after the record companies and Apple is listed in the case, but both as a victim and an unwilling accomplice to the anti-competative actions. Apple has no power here. They can shut down their service entirely or break at least one law by offering it. I believe the EU intends to force the record companies to comply, thereby allowing granting Apple a single license and making Apple's actions legal, while simplifying things greatly for everyone involved.
We've not had a good free movement of goods case for a while...
Let me stress again. This is not about a good, but about a license to use given intellectual property. Apple has bought the right to make a copy in a given country. That is non-transferrable to another country under current EU law.
On the other hand Apple would not be able to run the music shop if they hadn't agreed to operate in this way due to refusal from the record companies.
It is not only the record companies at fault here. The EU has not passed any law that requires copyrights to be licensed across the entire EU, instead of country by country. If you record a CD in Germany, EU law does not allow you to take it to France, a treaty between France and Germany does. If you buy the right to make a copy of a song in one country, nothing in EU law automatically grants you the right to make a copy of the song in a different country because under current EU law, those two rights are considered different services.
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I have a hard time believing that chimps would be granted any rights in today's society, especially considering that roughly half of the population argues in favor of a woman's "right" to have her unborn child killed. If the rights of an unborn human child are so small that they may be outweighed by the convenience of the mother, I fail to see how a chimp's right to life would ever take precedence over the possible value of the medical research obtained.
For me, a chimp has a lot more qualities that make it deserving of protection than an embryo. A chimp has a brain and thoughts and feelings and experiences and interpersonal relations. An embryo has more qualities in common with wood than it does with humans. It is brainless, thoughtless, chunk of living cells. If I were to decide which is more deserving of rights, I'd definitely choose a chimp. For that matter, cows are more deserving of protection of their life than embryos. At least cows think and have emotions and care if you kill them.
If you can't convince society to respect human life, I doubt you'll be able to convince them that medical research should be halted so that chimps can be spared.
What do you mean by "convince?" I respect life, human or otherwise, that I find deserving of that respect, based upon the qualities I value and my own ethics. Some human life is worthy of protection and some is not. If a person is born without a brain or their brain dies, I have no problem with them being killed or used in experiments, so long as that is not inflicting emotional pain on still living relatives or the like. I can be convinced to support limited rights for chimps if it is demonstrated that they take responsibility for those rights and exercise those rights in a way that is acceptable to society. I don't see anyone ever convincing me that a mindless bundle of cells can take responsibility for anything. If you have a logical reason why you think embryos should have rights, lets hear it. But if by "convince" you mean you want me to change my mind because you say so without a logical reason or because of an illogical reason based on emotion or your irrational and unsupported beliefs, well that isn't convincing.
People (sadly) aren't interested in the moral arguments, and the arguments against giving animals rights are strong:
People shouldn't be interested in moral arguments, just ethical ones. Morality is subjective and has no place in a reasoned discussion.
Lastly, why would we grant rights to animals when we are taking them away from humans?
Interestingly, we're discussing law. Theoretically, all law should be about mitigating conflicting rights between individuals. Otherwise, it is simply a matter of personal choice and is not the place of government to interfere. For example, the role of government is to decide if my right to throw rocks supersedes or is superseded by your right to own and protect your car's windshield. It is not the place of the government to decide if my throwing of rock on my own property and which does not affect anyone else is "moral" or not.
Already the rights of animals have been recognized and the law mitigates the conflict of those rights. Laws against animal cruelty, for example, have held that an animal's right not to suffer horribly is more important than a person's right to torture said animal or own said animal. The proposed law is simply a new stratification granting more rights to a certain type of animal based upon the qualities of that animal.
Granted, we shouldn't ever intentionally inflict pain on living things, but then, how would we eat?
I believe the law has mostly ruled that we don't have the right to unnecessarily inflict pain on animals. We can kill them painlessly or relatively painlessly. Not that all pain is "wrong" simply that we need to be aware of it and not intentionally create more of it.
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The real question being debated here is not if chimps are humans, but if they are deserving of a given set of rights/protections. It is fine to say that we should respect life forms, but it is a matter of degrees and based upon qualities. If I'm hungry should I be able to kill a human and eat them? What about a chimp? What about a cow? What about a banana? What about yogurt? What quality of these life forms makes them deserving of legal protection from my hunger? What if I need an organ transplant to survive? What animal would not be acceptable to kill to preserve my own life even if it is not threatening me?
Personally, I consider all life to be similar in certain ways. I consider animals to be more akin to humans (or vice versus) than most people seem to assume. Animals have emotions and thoughts along the same lines as humans, but to differing degrees. To some degree their similarity to humans is considered as a criteria, but I think that fails if you look at it from a scientific perspective. Intelligence is a somewhat valid criteria, but I don't see it as the only one necessary for something to be deserving of "rights." Usually in my personal life I consider rights to be related directly to responsibility. Anything that takes responsibility, has the right to manage that responsibility, but must also deal with the consequences. When rights conflict, it is usually the responsibility portion of the equation that clarifies the situation.
Sure, in the same way a person who bought a license to make a copy in Spain can exercise all of Spain's right to invalidate German law in Germany; which is to say none.
Sure, EMI can do this. Apple can't because they aren't the rights holder. As for CDs, they are transferrable because each country signed a treaty to that affect, a treaty which covers only physical copies not the right to make a download.
The only legal issue here is when a small record company which only licenses for the country in which it distributes.What you seem to be completely missing is that Apple does not have the rights you seem to be assigning to them. They're not the rights holder. You're not buying directly from EMI. Theoretically there is nothing stopping EMI from granting Apple the right to sell a download in both locations under the same license. In fact the EU commission long ago ordered the record companies to do just that. The record companies ignored them and the EU has done nothing about it.
But the little I've read on this sort of thing EU law is not on Apples[sic] sideThe point I was making was not that Apple is not breaking the law. The point I was making is that the only choice Apple has to comply with both the law in each country and EU law is to not do business in the EU. Apple has no legal ability to do anything to remedy the situation. The record companies can solve it for a subset of the problem by offering a pan-european license. The EU can solve the problem by forcing them to do so, or better yet by passing a law that says and copyright license in any member automatically applies in all members (solving the issue for games, movies, books, etc. as well). Apple, on the other hand, is just a middle man caught between conflicting laws and a government that does not seem to care half the time when their orders are ignored.
To be fair, if you actually read the articles about this, the EU seems to be going after the record companies to force them to offer the licenses. While the spin here on Slashdot was about Apple, all the punitive measures mentioned by the EU were against the record companies, not Apple.
In a perfect world that is great, but in the real world that means they just lost the market to MS's DRM scheme and the Windows monopoly gained another huge block and a way to lock-in people. Realistically, it makes a lot more sense for Apple to start operation along with all the other players, while trying to get the EU to fix the laws and while limiting their liability by breaking the law that is not directly breaking well established laws with a direct profit involved, opening them up to insanely large potential damages.
Also there's a good chance they could have sued their suppliers for price fixing to get the conflict resolved.Price fixing is a criminal violation. It is up to the police to take them into court. Apple complained to the EU about the behavior, and the EU did nothing about it other than issue an edict which they never enforced. Apple suing the record cartels is a moronic idea. The court systems are too inefficient and it would have taken years, in the mean time of which they would have taken retaliatory measures and killed Apple's legal store entirely, not just in the EU, but also in the US. This is the RIAA we're taking about. They have never balked at directly breaking the law, then using the court system and campaign contributions to drag things out in court forever and then pay a small fine once the damage has been done. The fact that the EU did nothing about this know criminal organization's known price fixing is entirely the EU's fault, not Apple's.
The EU is made up of member states. Each member has its own copyright law and does not have reciprocity with every other state to the degree needed to make a license issued in only one state valid in every other state. That is the EU's fault, not the record companies. It is the record companies' fault for exploiting this to create differential pricing, which is the only reason any of this makes any difference to the average person. If the record companies were not doing that, they would have no motivation to not issue pan-EU licenses.
Hopefully the EU will fix their laws and harmonize copyright by saying a copyright license within any member country also automatically applies in all other member countries. Otherwise, they're going to have to go through this all over again with the movie industry, the video game industry, the ebook industry and who knows what other copyright-based businesses.
But actually it doesn't. EU member countries are responsible for making sure their laws are in compliance with EU law. Until that happens, Apple has to respect the law of each country above policies of the EU. This is especially true when you look at conditional members of the EU, like the UK.
No. Apple doesn't say they can refuse to sell to the German customer. They say to comply with German law they must refuse to sell to the German customer. The license Apple negotiated with the record company in France only gives them the right to copy that song within France, not across the border and into Germany. Since Apple has the credit card issue country and the billing address for that card which are both German, Apple has reason to believe the customer is in Germany and their providing them with a download under the Spanish license is blatant copyright violation. German law makes it illegal to publish a copy for download without the record company providing a license within Germany, which is not the license in question.
This whole problem stems from the EU's failure to harmonize copyright law within the EU, but their insistence that companies act as though they have. If the EU passed a law that said any copyright license within any EU member is automatically valid in all EU members, then this whole problem would vanish. Why the EU has decided instead to attack the helpless Apple and the greedy record industry is beyond me. After this will they then bring suit against the motion picture industry, then the e-book industry, etc? Fix your laws EU!
Yup, this would be called "harmonizing copyright" something the EU keeps talking about but has not yet gotten around to doing. All they need to do is pass a law that says copyright licenses in one EU member country also apply in all others, and the problem goes away. Instead they're trying to address one incidence of it and ignoring all the others.
IOW the labels would be just as liable for price fixing as Apple.To be fair, the labels are the main focus of this lawsuit and all the penalties mentioned were against them, not Apple. The article summary spins it a little strangely and that may be misleading you.
Huh? I don't remember a computer talking at all. Almost all the characters, even the proper ones, swear in chinese. Some people with too much time on their hands even translated it all and it was by no means a small Website.
Well, that's because they're alien characters! And there you were, complaining that you wanted something else than human drives and emotions!Well, one of them is supposed to be human, and I find it hard to swallow that an alien race would act alien in a way that just happens to resemble shallow writing and bad acting on Earth :)
I think there we disgress the most. At least when it comes down to evaluating the value of a *SF*-show.I'm not so keen on categorizing things into neat little bundles. I don't care if someone calls something fantasy or action or drama or sci-fi, so long as it is good. I appreciate the sci-fi elements, but by themselves they are not enough to make for an interesting story.
...though I bet we both like Bladerunner....I love the movie and the book it is based upon. It was very well done on many levels.
I DID force myself to see every episode of firefly, though, even though I thought most were not very good. Can you say the same about Farscape?I tried, but even drinking myself into a stupor was not enough to get me through more than about 6 of them.
Btw, unrelated; the 99bottlesofbeerinmyF...what does the 'F' stand for?I actually entered "99BottlesOfBeerInMyFridge" but slashdot truncated it :) Nice chatting with you.
Both to some degree. Thus far court precedent has said that if you offer a download, then you have to abide by the laws where that download is downloaded to, provided you can reasonably be expected to know where that is. Since Apple is billing via credit card, they know both the credit card issuer's country and the billing address of the customer, so they cannot claim ignorance.
Let's imagine Apple is licensed to sell a song in Germany but isn't licensed to sell that track in France, not under any price. Now, someone in France buys that track in the German store. If that transaction is said to take place in France, then Apple is guilty of copyright infringement.Right, and because Apple knows the CC info, they restrict downloads based upon that info so that the laws in the country where the content is downloaded to are followed (and where they are being paid from and have the greatest liability).
The reason I ask is that this problem keeps popping up again and again. This was the question about allofmp3.com: if the sale is legal according to Russian law but illegal according to American law, is it legal for Americans in America to buy the music from a Russian store in Russia.Technically, no one was able to show how allofmp3.com was illegal, so instead they used political pressure to get the Russians to shut it down. Allofmp3.com won all their lawsuits that I ever read about.
The problem here is that the law in the UK makes it illegal for Apple to sell you the copy they have a license for in France. Should they violate the EU law, the UK law or simply stop offering a service altogether?
I can goto france and buy a DVD bring it home and play it on my UK DVD player.This isn't exactly the same thing, but the only reason you can to that is because both France and the UK are signatories to a treaty that specifically allows it. It does not allow transfer of rights to make a copy, just of physical copies.
The EU simply expects Apple to let me use the french store and the frenchies use the UK store, it doesn't expect EU members to be able to access non eu member stores.Ahh, but the law in France and the UK is what makes that illegal, Apple is merely complying with the law because the EU has not yet harmonized copyright law among EU members.
I don't know about you but I think price fixing is bad, this is deliberate price fixing "because the record company's are forcing us" if thats the case I'd expect a anti trust case against the record companies next.This suit is mainly against the record companies with all mention of fines against them. Apple is mentioned peripherally. The problem is the EU has not enforced their edict to the record companies. The EU can solve this whole problem with simple law. "Any copyright license that applies within one EU member automatically applies in all EU members." If they passed that law then Apple having a license in France would automatically mean Apple has that same license in the UK and this whole problem and the ability of the record companies to fix prices within the EU would be gone. I blame the EU for not doing that yet and I blame the record companies for fixing prices in the first place. Apple is pretty much the only one here who did not have a choice. I suppose they could have simply refused to do business in the EU until the EU fixed their laws, but by then they would have been driven out of the EU market by companies with fewer qualms about getting involved in the EU's mess.
If there were no federal copyright laws, but each state had its own copyright laws, the way the EU members do now, yes.
The problem is EU law requires them to allow anyone to buy it, but each individual country's law makes that illegal. Apple doesn't own the copyright, it just sells copies licensed from the record companies. If the EU requires them to let a German download a song from the Spanish site, but German law makes it illegal for them to do so because the record company licensed them to sell in Spain under a given license and the license does not make the download legal in Germany, then any action Apple takes will violate one of these two laws.
That's Apple's problem.The EU is suing Apple for breaking an EU law that directly conflicts with the license offered by the record company and with that country's law. You don't think it is a problem when every EU member has a law that contradicts an EU law?
Why? It's not the EU's business to work out arguments between Apple and record companies, but at the end of the day they have to follow the law.It is 100% the EU's business to harmonize laws that conflict between differing EU nations and form a coherent standard. The fact that the EU has failed to harmonize copyright laws and failed to enforce their own edicts against the record companies, technically making it impossible to legally offer a muic download service anywhere in the EU, is certainly the EU's problem.
Ahh, but this has been held to be true by both EU and US courts. If I have an original copy of a song you sang and I pay you $5 for the right to make a copy of your song but you specify that right only applies in the US, I can transport that copy from the US to Poland legally. I cannot legally go to Poland and then make the copy from an original, because copyright law in Poland does not grant me the right to make a copy without your permission (which you have granted conditionally depending upon my location). It might be reasonable for the courts to rule any copyright agreement must not be restricted by location, but thus far that has not happened and there is little sign it will on a global scale. Thus the recording industry will use this as a tool for anti-competitive pricing schemes.
Agreed, but the EU does not have any specific law regarding copyrights that requires this, which it almost certainly should. Also, many (most) of the licenses predate the existence of the EU. What happens with those? Finally, the original post was claiming Apple was culpable, but they are the only one in this whole situation with no real ability to do anything about it other than complain to the EU, which they did.
The problem is every country in the EU has a law against copying copyrighted works without permission, thus it would be akin in your example to California having a law that forbids it, and someone in California trying to claim because they have a license that is legal according to North Dakota law, they can ignore the California law. That doesn't fly.
I know there have been several court rulings that contradict this, and I don't know any to support your assertion. Thus far, the location where the download takes place has always been the location of the copy, according to both EU and US courts (as far as I know).
But there is nothing stopping that copy being made in France then transported anywhere within the EU.This is true so long as it is stored on the same digital media and not copied to another, but has nothing to do with the legality of Apple offering the download service in the first place.
That the card is issued to Germany means very little about the location of the card holder. Also asking them for personal information which is not actually needed is likely to be against data protection laws which exist in the EU.You don't understand. If Apple could take payments without incidentally knowing where the card was issued, no doubt they would to reduce their legal liability. The problem is, in order to accept payment via a credit card they have to know where the credit card is issued by, and thus they have the info to limit downloads. If, having this info, they don't then they are liable for being able to limit downloads to legal ones, and not doing so. Remember, this is civil law, not criminal. Apple could claim that the issuer of the card has nothing to do with the residence of the person using it, but if the courts disagreed, Apple would have just flushed billions down the toilet. That is an unacceptable risk to any business seeing as they run the music store at near break even in the first place.
It is the case that the license is only valid in one country. It is mostly the record company's fault, but also the EU's fault for not enforcing their edict that licenses be issued to all EU countries at once.
Hence this investigation into these companies, and Apple for contributory infringement of the EU citizens' rights.Umm, contributory infringement of rights? I'm not sure what you mean by that and I don't think it has any meaning in a legal sense.
Yes. Only the fact that the countries in question have signed this, guarantees this is legal.
The problem here is that while international law says the contracts Apple has can't enforce caluses that create a segmented global market, the contracts themselves do and if you break the terms, the labels will take their ball and go home.As I understand it specifically EU law says that. If they don't enforce that all copyright licenses issues in the EU are issued to all EU members at once, instead of on a country by country basis as they have been, there is nothing Apple can to to comply with their laws and still offer a download service in any EU country.
Actually, that is only legal because of a treaty between the French and the Germans. Also, transporting a copy (CD) is completely different than transporting the right to make a copy (download license). It is akin to the difference between transporting a VCR and transporting a license to patents needed to manufacture VCRs. One is a physical commodity, while the other is a legal contract which includes a locality. If you take one thing away from this conversation, let it be that CDs are copies of a work, and covered by specific laws and downloads are a license to make a copy, which is treated completely different by EU laws.
Yeah, it makes me wonder how people like that got mod points in the first place. Disagreeing with someone does not mean they are trying to flamebait.
But then again, it has to remain a TV-show which is watchable and understandle for earth viewers, after all. I mean, say there's a TV-show where aliens are standing still the whole time and doing nothing but blink with his appendices that vaguely look like eyes. Maybe that is an expression of a total alien way of thinking, or the result of (to us) completely unknown drives and emotions...but hardly anyone would actually watch it.I'd rather aliens were actually alien, or just not present. Having an alien just standing around is boring, but there would be nothing wrong with that so long as it was in the background and not the focus of the story at the time. You could have very interesting aliens that behaved in ways that we did not understand at all, randomly taking actions and making comments that did not really make any logical sense to a normal person, but which still might be entertaining to a viewer. Lacking that though, I prefer that Firefly did not include any aliens, rather than trying to make an alien that was so human as to be indistinguishable from a normal human with makeup on.
Similar concepts that explore the (essentially) human condition in novel ways are far between in Firefly, and even further away in GM.Firefly explored some sci-fi concepts, but the focus was on the people and the story, which it really needs to be if you're going to have even halfway believable people, IMHO.
As for the 'cheesy'... I'm not sure what you mean, and I suspect this one is highly subjective.By "cheesy" I mean dialogue, action, plots, characters, and behaviors that are simply too unbelievable for me to get past. For suspension of disbelief I'm willing to assume in some unknown way some character can have telekinetic power, even though I know how improbable it is. I can get past faster than light travel and I can get past sound in space if I have to. What I have trouble getting past is race after race that all speak English, and characters that act in ways that do not seem even close to what I understand of human nature. Actors who deliver lines so badly they don't even seem to be understanding the meaning of what they're saying and plots that are so strained and unbelievable. I accept that there will always be some of this, but when it is poured on so thickly that the story is so unbelievable I would not expect even a child to think it is possible, then I just can't stand it anymore. Suspension of disbelief will only take me so far, then a show is just stupid.
you describe it as prety... well... I mean, sure, the countryside can be pretty. But it's not about pretty, it's about creating an environment in which things are clearly out of the ordinary, where the surroundings add to an alien atmosphere.I'm more interested in a believable and interesting atmosphere than an alien one. The environment we live in reflects human nature in many ways. Some utopian civilization or something where everything is always clean and orderly does not make sense. With Firefly the world was consistent and interesting. It makes sense that chinese could become a vulgar language, as french was during some periods of european colonization. It makes sense that there would be large corporate or business interests like the ones that are persistent in Firefly. I thought the idea of a agrarian and primitive society in conjunction with a high-tech one was more believable and interesting, not less.
Well, that's it for now.Yeah. There is plenty of room for differing tastes. Enjoy your sci-fi.
In, which case they are almost certainly breaking copyright law in the country of the downloader. Then it would be up the the recording industry companies to decide if they were going to try to sue Apple for infringement and bring the the whole anti-competitive thing into it, or ignore the infringement and hope most people don't catch on.
So if I live in Spain, and can buy a pass that lets me ride all public transportation for 1 year at a flat rate, then I move to Germany, should I be able to ride all the German public transportation for the remainder of the year? Right now in the EU, the answer is "no." The right to ride all the trains in Spain is considered a different service from the right on ride all the busses in Germany. Keeping that in mind, if I'm in Spain and I buy the right to make a copy of a song, under EU law that does not grant me the right to make a copy of that song in Germany, because no EU law enforces copyright licensing as a global, EU service, rather than as a country by country service. Copyrights are regulated by treaties between the individual EU members, not by the EU commission as a whole.
So where does that leave us? Apple is probably violating the letter of certain EU competition laws by not letting a German citizen with a German credit card download a song when Apple only has a license to let them download it it Spain. At the same time, letting them download it would violate German copyright law, since it is illegal in Germany to make a copy of the song without the German recording industry body being paid. That means it is technically illegal to run any music download service in the EU, unless you can get the copyright holder to grant you a license for all of the EU, which they refuse to do.
I'd love to know who's been giving Apple their legal advice - I assume they're going to try to run an argument that they're providing a service rather than selling goods and therefore aren't caught in the single market rules - and will be very interested to see how this one turns out.Actually, seeing as this is a conflict of laws in the EU and seeing as the EU has already ordered the record companies to offer pan-european licenses and seeing as Apple has repeatedly complained about noncompliance on the part of those record companies, I think Apple is going to walk on this one. If you read the statements made thus far by officials, it sounds like they're going after the record companies and Apple is listed in the case, but both as a victim and an unwilling accomplice to the anti-competative actions. Apple has no power here. They can shut down their service entirely or break at least one law by offering it. I believe the EU intends to force the record companies to comply, thereby allowing granting Apple a single license and making Apple's actions legal, while simplifying things greatly for everyone involved.
We've not had a good free movement of goods case for a while...Let me stress again. This is not about a good, but about a license to use given intellectual property. Apple has bought the right to make a copy in a given country. That is non-transferrable to another country under current EU law.
It is not only the record companies at fault here. The EU has not passed any law that requires copyrights to be licensed across the entire EU, instead of country by country. If you record a CD in Germany, EU law does not allow you to take it to France, a treaty between France and Germany does. If you buy the right to make a copy of a song in one country, nothing in EU law automatically grants you the right to make a copy of the song in a different country because under current EU law, those two rights are considered different services.