Very nice but why stop there? Maybe we could copyright all numbers starting with zero through the astronomically large? After all, digital media is just a very large number when you look at it a certain way.
Read the article. The law doesn't work like that. Incidentally, it doesn't matter whether you think it should work some other way or come up with cute thought experiments car analogies that make it look inconsistent or silly or whatever. The law doesn't work like that.
But then, without copyright there is absolutely no need for the GPL.... Bear in mind that the GPL is a means to enjoy freedom...
I'm no expert on the GPL, but am I not correct in thinking that the GPL forces restrictions on developers in order to ensure freedoms for users? For example, the requirement that if I build and distribute something that uses GPL code, I must use the GPL on my code and distribute the source code with the binaries.
Without copyright and the GPL, there is absolutely no way to force me to distribute my source code. I can take an open source project, add to it to create something new, hide the source code in a vault and distribute only the binary. You will be able to copy it freely, but good luck modifying it. You, the user of my software, have lost freedom because there is no GPL to force me to provide you with that freedom.
It's actually much worse than that. Copyright and patents were originally designed to allow people to publish their ideas and still maintain rights to them. If there was no copyright the only way to protect your ideas would be to keep them secret. You can actually see this in Asia. Places like Korea have only had IP laws enforced for a decade or so. And most Korean companies will never, ever release their source code to anyone else - even people trying to debug it - because in Korea historically if you have the source code you can do whatever you wanted, i.e. make your own product based on it.
So if there was no copyright, or rather no way to take people to court for violating copyright, each company would keep a proprietary fork of GPL code and never, ever release that.
If I zip up MS Office, for instance, I've turned it into a very long number. Is it reasonable to allow companies to claim ownership of such numbers?
Read the link I posted earlier. Legally it depends on where the bits came from. No amount of compression and encryption will change that. Copying zipped or encryped MS Office, or for that matter the Linux kernel, doesn't magically make the copyright go away of the copyright owner lose their right to compel you to either follow the license or not use it.
Replying to my own post, but this IS just a sort of encryption - their main claim being because the data is encrypted, it's not copyright.
As has been pointed out below, the data transferred is not the thing copyrighted - it's what it represents. So it's an arduous and painful encryption, with high overhead, easy to crack and no plausible benefit. With some hand-wavy 'it annuls all badness from bad things' explanation.
Except that is probably bullshit to copyright lawyers
There's a great explanation of why in this essay, What Colour are your Bits. It's actually about another system based on the same sort of ideas.
The fallacy of Monolith is that it's playing fast and loose with Colour, attempting to use legal rules one moment and math rules another moment as convenient. When you have a copyrighted file at the start, that file clearly has the "covered by copyright" Colour, and you're not cleared for it, Citizen. When it's scrambled by Monolith, the claim is that the resulting file has no Colour - how could it have the copyright Colour? It's just random bits! Then when it's descrambled, it still can't have the copyright Colour because it came from public inputs. The problem is that there are two conflicting sets of rules there. Under the lawyer's rules, Colour is not a mathematical function of the bits that you can determine by examining the bits. It matters where the bits came from. The scrambled file still has the copyright Colour because it came from the copyrighted input file. It doesn't matter that it looks like, or maybe even is bit-for-bit identical with, some other file that you could get from a random number generator. It happens that you didn't get it from a random number generator. You got it from copyrighted material; it is copyrighted. The randomly-generated file, even if bit-for-bit identical, would have a different Colour. The Colour inherits through all scrambling and descrambling operations and you're distributing a copyrighted work, you Commie Mutant Traitor.
To a computer scientist, on the other hand, bits are bits are bits and it is absolutely fundamental that two identical chunks of bits cannot be distinguished. Colour does not exist. I've seen computer people claim (indeed, one did this to me just today in the very discussion that inspired this posting) that copyright law inescapably leads to nonsense conclusions like "If I own copyright on one thing, and copyright inherits through XOR, then I own copyright on everything because everything can be obtained from my one thing by XORing it with the right file." That sounds profound only if you're a Colour-blind computer scientist; it would be boring nonsense to a lawyer because lawyers are trained to believe in and use Colour, and it's obvious to a lawyer that the Colour doesn't magically bleed to the entire universe through the hypothetical random files that might be created some day. You could create the file randomly, but you didn't. Maybe you could create a file identical to the complete works of Shakespeare by XORing together two files of apparently random garbage. "Why, so can I, or so can any man;" but that doesn't mean that I am William Shakespeare.
The problem he wants to solve is how to make someone who's trying to bring up a quick mapquest page be able to do so without sitting there waiting and waiting, and eventually wondering whether there're five people on his subnet downloading the latest 18G celebrity midget porn video. If he solves that problem, then Comcast won't care about using more stupid methods of throttling our celebrity midget porn.
But what your comparison misses is what happened in the middle years of 2002-2004, when Netscape's share continued to decline, and IE usage hit 95%. It is from that point that Firefox has clawed back to bring IE's share back down to its 2000 level.
Yeah, but FF is not eradicating IE in the way that IE eradicated Nutscrape.
Well now I'm sorry I've been giving you a hard time, at least you're an equal opportunity hater. That, I can respect.
Actually I used to think the Daily Show was funny until they started to shill for Obama. Last time I watched it CNN kept showing a clip here where Obama does a cool put down of some media cretin
And Jon Stewart makes a funny face as if to say "owned".
But wait, he's supposed to be a satirist and yet Obama gets a completely free pass while his opponents, both Democrat and Republican, get savaged. You've got some guy who could be President in a few months. Satirists are supposed to be equal opportunity haters of politicians. Otherwise Stewart is just another shill. Funnier than the rabid losers at Fox*, but a shill nonetheless.
I think he's too embedded in the sick media world of soundbytes and the 24hour news cycle to be a good satirist. And much too partisan. In many ways he's not dissimilar to Fox.
* Actually I did see something funny on Fox. I was staying at a hotel in Singapore and I flipped between CNN and Fox as I worked. Fox were covering the Shiavo case - brain dead woman and they wanted to keep her 'alive'. Mostly it was talking heads outside the hospital. But every so often they interview someone and then play the interview over and over again. What was funny is that most of the people they interviewed said things that were completely disasterous for their Save Shiavo campaign so they couldn't reuse that interview.
E.g. they found some Doctor and they were trying to get him to say that Shiavo might recover. He kept saying she was braindead. He got more and more annoyed and eventually said in total exasperation "Look, if you look at her EEG it is a flat line". And they sort of ignored it and then ended the interview and went back to some well groomed but vapid reporter at the hospital with nothing to say. Even better they interviewed Governor Geb Bush and pointed out that legally he had powers to make Shiavo a ward of the state or something. The point of the interview was clearly to get him to say he'd do so. But right from the start you could see he'd decided not to do that, for reasons that were never clear. After a few minutes they asked him and he said "I do have those powers, but I'm not going to use them in this case". And the interviewer seemed to be totally lost at how to react.
It was great really, sort of like watching a propaganda channel except that most of the people they interviewed disagreed with the propaganda they were trying to spread. It reminded me of the awesome clips of Communist propaganda channels when Communism was collapsing in Easter Europe.
As Encyclopedia Dramatica is about the most sophomoric, unfunny web site I've ever seen, don't expect me to rush out and listen to some nobody that they happen to list.
It's your loss.
Let me know when good old Chris Morris has won three Peabody Awards and three Emmy Awards like Stephen has, and I might actually check him out. Just think, at this very minute, someone somewhere is watching the Colbert Report and laughing at people just like you.
You don't know anything about me. And forgive me for not giving a shit what mediocre products the US corporate media awards itself for. I'm clearly wasting my time here. Go on patting yourself on the back for being hip and edgy for consuming the latest hyped Viacom product.
Hmm, IE is doing about the same, Netscape/IE have lost about 17% of their market share (19.25% down to 15.87). Opera has gone from 0.13% to 0.79% and Safari has gone from nothing to 3.32%.
But here's the key thing, the total non IE share has stayed constant, the only change has really been people converting from Firefox to Safari, presumably as they bought Macs, since Safari has essentially no market share on Windows.
Secondly, the voting behavior of journalists may simply reflect that it's a job description mostly containing people whose job it is to understand how we are interconnected in this world and how to empathize with other people and tell their stories and determine what's true. And because of that they understand that even though the Democratic party has flaws, it's more aligned with the principle that we are stronger with collaboration, honestly, interdependence, education, and having genuine moral authority so we can work with our allies like in WWII... rather than obsession with domination, self-deception, naive arrogant independence, hating homos, xenophobia, punishment, and pre-emptive war, and fake moral authority that no one believes except for those who get their news from Fox and Friends.
Good job there, you're really kicking the shit out of your straw man. Hint 'domination, self-deception, naive arrogant independence, hating homos, xenophobia, punishment, and pre-emptive war, and fake moral authority' are not what conservatives believe in.
No, they will hire people who are likely to have a higher level of education. Plenty of studies have shown a correlation between education levels and political views where the more education a person has, the more liberal he/she tends to be.
So the truth about the "liberal media" is probably that the prevalence of liberal views is a secondary effect of hiring based on education levels, and not the result of an active effort to hire liberals.
So anyone who disagrees with you politically is either stupid or uneducated?
the really interesting bit is that *NEITHER* the democrats or the republicans are very far from what the rest of the world would consider 'ultra right wing' or 'conservative'. The fact that even here on./ people with an probably above average intelligence have swallowed that left/right bullshit hook line and sinker.
In any other country there would be a real left wing and something close to your democrats or republicans as right wing or ultra right wing.
By 'left wing' parties I meant the Democrats in the US, the Labour Party in the UK. If you have two electable parties one of which comes unions and one of which comes from employers it is natural to label the union one 'left wing'.
It's true that in the US and the UK both electable parties are now quite similar and the differences are mostly tribal - The Blair led Labour Party in particular has aggressively moved away from socialism and its roots in the union movement and toward the political centre. I suspect the majority of people vote for a party because their family and friends do and only turn out to vote if their preferred media can scare them that the bad guys winning will be a disaster.
But that makes the journalistic bias against the 'right wing' party even more silly. If you have two choices to run the system, hating one to the extent that you try to stop it ever winning just minimizes competition.
The fact is that liberals have control of the networks - I saw poll that showed essentially all journalists at CNN, ABC, CBS etc vote for the Democrats.
Uh, no it was that around 90% of journalists that make campaign contributions contribute to the Democrats. But the number of journalists making campaign contributions was around 10%.
Slashdot Mirror
This is sophistry and if you try to use these sorts of arguments in court you will most likely lose.
Very nice but why stop there? Maybe we could copyright all numbers starting with zero through the astronomically large? After all, digital media is just a very large number when you look at it a certain way.
Read the article. The law doesn't work like that. Incidentally, it doesn't matter whether you think it should work some other way or come up with cute thought experiments car analogies that make it look inconsistent or silly or whatever. The law doesn't work like that.
But then, without copyright there is absolutely no need for the GPL. ... Bear in mind that the GPL is a means to enjoy freedom...
I'm no expert on the GPL, but am I not correct in thinking that the GPL forces restrictions on developers in order to ensure freedoms for users? For example, the requirement that if I build and distribute something that uses GPL code, I must use the GPL on my code and distribute the source code with the binaries.
Without copyright and the GPL, there is absolutely no way to force me to distribute my source code. I can take an open source project, add to it to create something new, hide the source code in a vault and distribute only the binary. You will be able to copy it freely, but good luck modifying it. You, the user of my software, have lost freedom because there is no GPL to force me to provide you with that freedom.
It's actually much worse than that. Copyright and patents were originally designed to allow people to publish their ideas and still maintain rights to them. If there was no copyright the only way to protect your ideas would be to keep them secret. You can actually see this in Asia. Places like Korea have only had IP laws enforced for a decade or so. And most Korean companies will never, ever release their source code to anyone else - even people trying to debug it - because in Korea historically if you have the source code you can do whatever you wanted, i.e. make your own product based on it.
So if there was no copyright, or rather no way to take people to court for violating copyright, each company would keep a proprietary fork of GPL code and never, ever release that.
If I zip up MS Office, for instance, I've turned it into a very long number. Is it reasonable to allow companies to claim ownership of such numbers?
Read the link I posted earlier. Legally it depends on where the bits came from. No amount of compression and encryption will change that. Copying zipped or encryped MS Office, or for that matter the Linux kernel, doesn't magically make the copyright go away of the copyright owner lose their right to compel you to either follow the license or not use it.
Replying to my own post, but this IS just a sort of encryption - their main claim being because the data is encrypted, it's not copyright.
As has been pointed out below, the data transferred is not the thing copyrighted - it's what it represents. So it's an arduous and painful encryption, with high overhead, easy to crack and no plausible benefit. With some hand-wavy 'it annuls all badness from bad things' explanation.
Except that is probably bullshit to copyright lawyers
There's a great explanation of why in this essay, What Colour are your Bits. It's actually about another system based on the same sort of ideas.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lawpoli/colour/2004061001.php
The fallacy of Monolith is that it's playing fast and loose with Colour, attempting to use legal rules one moment and math rules another moment as convenient. When you have a copyrighted file at the start, that file clearly has the "covered by copyright" Colour, and you're not cleared for it, Citizen. When it's scrambled by Monolith, the claim is that the resulting file has no Colour - how could it have the copyright Colour? It's just random bits! Then when it's descrambled, it still can't have the copyright Colour because it came from public inputs. The problem is that there are two conflicting sets of rules there. Under the lawyer's rules, Colour is not a mathematical function of the bits that you can determine by examining the bits. It matters where the bits came from. The scrambled file still has the copyright Colour because it came from the copyrighted input file. It doesn't matter that it looks like, or maybe even is bit-for-bit identical with, some other file that you could get from a random number generator. It happens that you didn't get it from a random number generator. You got it from copyrighted material; it is copyrighted. The randomly-generated file, even if bit-for-bit identical, would have a different Colour. The Colour inherits through all scrambling and descrambling operations and you're distributing a copyrighted work, you Commie Mutant Traitor.
To a computer scientist, on the other hand, bits are bits are bits and it is absolutely fundamental that two identical chunks of bits cannot be distinguished. Colour does not exist. I've seen computer people claim (indeed, one did this to me just today in the very discussion that inspired this posting) that copyright law inescapably leads to nonsense conclusions like "If I own copyright on one thing, and copyright inherits through XOR, then I own copyright on everything because everything can be obtained from my one thing by XORing it with the right file." That sounds profound only if you're a Colour-blind computer scientist; it would be boring nonsense to a lawyer because lawyers are trained to believe in and use Colour, and it's obvious to a lawyer that the Colour doesn't magically bleed to the entire universe through the hypothetical random files that might be created some day. You could create the file randomly, but you didn't. Maybe you could create a file identical to the complete works of Shakespeare by XORing together two files of apparently random garbage. "Why, so can I, or so can any man;" but that doesn't mean that I am William Shakespeare.
Google
Umm, the culture that rebranded Microsoft as M$ isn't that popular.
Launch the starships from the Middle East whenever there's a big Islamic Terror attack.
I've got a copy of the one that celebrates the coming of the 'push' internet somewhere too.
That's better than the issue which celebrates the coming of plush.
The problem he wants to solve is how to make someone who's trying to bring up a quick mapquest page be able to do so without sitting there waiting and waiting, and eventually wondering whether there're five people on his subnet downloading the latest 18G celebrity midget porn video. If he solves that problem, then Comcast won't care about using more stupid methods of throttling our celebrity midget porn.
Your honour! Celebrity midget porn exhibit A
http://defamer.com/5019704/mini+me-sex-tape-conclusive-proof-that-our-civilization-is-doomed
But what your comparison misses is what happened in the middle years of 2002-2004, when Netscape's share continued to decline, and IE usage hit 95%. It is from that point that Firefox has clawed back to bring IE's share back down to its 2000 level.
Yeah, but FF is not eradicating IE in the way that IE eradicated Nutscrape.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Layout_engine_usage_share.svg
Well now I'm sorry I've been giving you a hard time, at least you're an equal opportunity hater. That, I can respect.
Actually I used to think the Daily Show was funny until they started to shill for Obama. Last time I watched it CNN kept showing a clip here where Obama does a cool put down of some media cretin
http://inkslwc.wordpress.com/2008/04/05/obama-slams-chris-matthews-and-cable-news-in-a-joke-during-an-interview/
And Jon Stewart makes a funny face as if to say "owned".
But wait, he's supposed to be a satirist and yet Obama gets a completely free pass while his opponents, both Democrat and Republican, get savaged. You've got some guy who could be President in a few months. Satirists are supposed to be equal opportunity haters of politicians. Otherwise Stewart is just another shill. Funnier than the rabid losers at Fox*, but a shill nonetheless.
I think he's too embedded in the sick media world of soundbytes and the 24hour news cycle to be a good satirist. And much too partisan. In many ways he's not dissimilar to Fox.
* Actually I did see something funny on Fox. I was staying at a hotel in Singapore and I flipped between CNN and Fox as I worked. Fox were covering the Shiavo case - brain dead woman and they wanted to keep her 'alive'. Mostly it was talking heads outside the hospital. But every so often they interview someone and then play the interview over and over again. What was funny is that most of the people they interviewed said things that were completely disasterous for their Save Shiavo campaign so they couldn't reuse that interview.
E.g. they found some Doctor and they were trying to get him to say that Shiavo might recover. He kept saying she was braindead. He got more and more annoyed and eventually said in total exasperation "Look, if you look at her EEG it is a flat line". And they sort of ignored it and then ended the interview and went back to some well groomed but vapid reporter at the hospital with nothing to say. Even better they interviewed Governor Geb Bush and pointed out that legally he had powers to make Shiavo a ward of the state or something. The point of the interview was clearly to get him to say he'd do so. But right from the start you could see he'd decided not to do that, for reasons that were never clear. After a few minutes they asked him and he said "I do have those powers, but I'm not going to use them in this case". And the interviewer seemed to be totally lost at how to react.
It was great really, sort of like watching a propaganda channel except that most of the people they interviewed disagreed with the propaganda they were trying to spread. It reminded me of the awesome clips of Communist propaganda channels when Communism was collapsing in Easter Europe.
They all annoy me.
As Encyclopedia Dramatica is about the most sophomoric, unfunny web site I've ever seen, don't expect me to rush out and listen to some nobody that they happen to list.
It's your loss.
Let me know when good old Chris Morris has won three Peabody Awards and three Emmy Awards like Stephen has, and I might actually check him out. Just think, at this very minute, someone somewhere is watching the Colbert Report and laughing at people just like you.
You don't know anything about me. And forgive me for not giving a shit what mediocre products the US corporate media awards itself for. I'm clearly wasting my time here. Go on patting yourself on the back for being hip and edgy for consuming the latest hyped Viacom product.
I'm a conservative and I didn't vote for Bush at all. Not all the world is the US you know.
Even worse look at this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Present_to_1999
Q1 - 2000
IE - 79.09%
Netscape - 19.25%
FF - not launched
Opera - 0.13%
Safari - not launched
Team IE has 79.09%, Team Netscape/FF have 19.25%, Opera has 0.13%
Q1 - 2008
IE - 78.80%
Netscape - 0.06%
FF - 15.87%
Opera - 0.79%
Safari - 3.32%
Hmm, IE is doing about the same, Netscape/IE have lost about 17% of their market share (19.25% down to 15.87). Opera has gone from 0.13% to 0.79% and Safari has gone from nothing to 3.32%.
But here's the key thing, the total non IE share has stayed constant, the only change has really been people converting from Firefox to Safari, presumably as they bought Macs, since Safari has essentially no market share on Windows.
Isn't upgrading your wife a little expensive?
You can run Wife 2.0 and Wife 3.0 beta at the same time if you're careful.
http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/Chris_Morris
Secondly, the voting behavior of journalists may simply reflect that it's a job description mostly containing people whose job it is to understand how we are interconnected in this world and how to empathize with other people and tell their stories and determine what's true. And because of that they understand that even though the Democratic party has flaws, it's more aligned with the principle that we are stronger with collaboration, honestly, interdependence, education, and having genuine moral authority so we can work with our allies like in WWII... rather than obsession with domination, self-deception, naive arrogant independence, hating homos, xenophobia, punishment, and pre-emptive war, and fake moral authority that no one believes except for those who get their news from Fox and Friends.
Good job there, you're really kicking the shit out of your straw man. Hint 'domination, self-deception, naive arrogant independence, hating homos, xenophobia, punishment, and pre-emptive war, and fake moral authority' are not what conservatives believe in.
Fox irritates me too.
Colbert is a partisan hack, pandering to smug fools like you. If want really subversive humour watch something by Chris Morris.
Wow. Just wow. You parrot the catchphrase of some idiot comic and you think you're better than the people who parrot catchphrases from Fox news.
No, they will hire people who are likely to have a higher level of education. Plenty of studies have shown a correlation between education levels and political views where the more education a person has, the more liberal he/she tends to be.
So the truth about the "liberal media" is probably that the prevalence of liberal views is a secondary effect of hiring based on education levels, and not the result of an active effort to hire liberals.
So anyone who disagrees with you politically is either stupid or uneducated?
If so, when is someone gonna slip this to our witless president?
Now if it can cure him then it really will cure anyone.
I thought the NeoCons were evil geniuses who had tricked the US into attacking Iraq to steal the oil and set up a police state back home.
the really interesting bit is that *NEITHER* the democrats or the republicans are very far from what the rest of the world would consider 'ultra right wing' or 'conservative'. The fact that even here on ./ people with an probably above average intelligence have swallowed that left/right bullshit hook line and sinker.
In any other country there would be a real left wing and something close to your democrats or republicans as right wing or ultra right wing.
By 'left wing' parties I meant the Democrats in the US, the Labour Party in the UK. If you have two electable parties one of which comes unions and one of which comes from employers it is natural to label the union one 'left wing'.
It's true that in the US and the UK both electable parties are now quite similar and the differences are mostly tribal - The Blair led Labour Party in particular has aggressively moved away from socialism and its roots in the union movement and toward the political centre. I suspect the majority of people vote for a party because their family and friends do and only turn out to vote if their preferred media can scare them that the bad guys winning will be a disaster.
But that makes the journalistic bias against the 'right wing' party even more silly. If you have two choices to run the system, hating one to the extent that you try to stop it ever winning just minimizes competition.
Uh, no it was that around 90% of journalists that make campaign contributions contribute to the Democrats. But the number of journalists making campaign contributions was around 10%.
http://www.mediaresearch.org/biasbasics/biasbasics3.asp
It's absurd to suggest that journalists don't overwhelmingly vote for left wing parties.