Yeah BSA regularly pays off the police. "Murder happened? Can't investigate citizen as I've got a more important copyright infringment warrant to serve..."
You can easily make sure that these works would be worth their money, by for example paying reputable people and establishing quality standards. It would still cost much less to hire people to write a book, than buy right from publishing companies and greedy millionares.
I'm not willing to get into a pissing match with you.
Well I'm sorry that you're thinking like that. You're not getting into a pissing match with anyone as we're not in one. You have replied to my post from a high stand, while ignoring my reasoning in my original post altogether and trying to lecture me with information that is quite easy to refute if you've got some time to write up a reply, which I did. You might feel like talking to a brick wall because you're not talking about the issue. As in, you're ignoring what others are saying and making faulty assumptions as to what they are saying.
I'll see arguments claiming that what was good in the 18th century is obviously what we need now (tell that to women and blacks)
I just want to stress that I never made such argument and bringing an argument up from another discussion with someone else is not entirely classy as it would seem that you're trying to disprove my viewpoint by binding it to objectionable arguments I didn't make. So you're not trying to take part in a pissing match eh?
or that all the effort and time that goes into art creates nothing but information.
You're using loaded terms, that is why you're mistaking physical art with copyrighted information or "intellectual property". Information is the song/music, representation is the recording and art is a quality information that is a beautiful song or music.
I wonder what your agenda actually is. Do you want reform, or are you actually just looking for some free music?
I'm just thinking. I want a system that is in sync with a few basic facts of life, like you know physical reality. The physical reality is not likely to change and it forces us to consider copyright obsolete in the context of a networked sharing of information. I want an artist to get paid for creating art, not for distributing it. If there is zero cost for distribution, then distribution should be free, as thats what the free market says. I'll gladly pay a reasonable sum to an artist for creating art, but it would be mostly useless if noone can truly enjoy it - thats where distribution and derivative works come in. It is limited, _bad_ and not truly art if you're not allowed to experience it and build upon it.
I'm the one here who has published books, and who has put his blood sweat, and tears into his work, and has made a point of understanding the Berne Convention.
I hope you don't make the mistake of thinking that I think you shouldn't be compensated for your hard work if you so desire. I am saying that you shouldn't be given a monopoly on your creation. You have to understand that monopoly does nothing more but restrict the positive effect of the work you've created (it also gives the opportunity of the owners of the monopoly to exploit that situation and gain more cash - which is NOT just, respectful and healthy at all). The topic of copyright interests me, I find the topic interesting and I find the current system in need of change.
Please note, I make my living from being paid to write code under the GPL license. This itself proves what I'm talking about in relation to getting paid for creating something and not profiting from a monopoly. I get paid to create something useful to someone and that someone doesn't have the power to restrict and monopolize the usefulness of the given code. The company can't say: let's not show this code to everyone so that everyone else who needs this kind of functionality has to do it themselves again. Yeah, that might be good for the short term interests of the company, but on medium and long term when everyone has to redo everything again, they lose - big time (this has to do with game theory, etc in general. It can be proven with solid maths. It boils down to the dilemma to cooperate or to take advantage of. If someone cooperates with others, they are doing ok. If someone takes advantage of people that are coop
Sheesh. Given that you reply to my post and claim it has wrong information in it, you post an uninformed and unintelligent reply posing from a lecture's standpoint. You admit you don't have the knowledge to lecture about it and do it anyway - talk about arrogance.
Just a few points I'm having trouble with from your post:
or the sake of this discussion, we'll call the copyrighted material "art" (it takes less time to type than "copyrighted material").
Yes, we can call copyrighted material art, but calling it abc would have been less misleading. What most people would consider art is not or only partly under copyright. The much much bigger issue here is content, which would be a stretch to call "art". I don't necessarily call source code or technical documentation or a fiction novel art.
Copyright covers two basic functions - the first is the right to distribute (hence "copy-right"), and the second is derivative works.
Also misleading. Copyright covers one basic thing: distribution. It basically says that you can only publish the copyrighted work or a derivative work given that you bear the copyright owner's permission for the original work. There is no inherent "second" here, the derivative part in copyright law isn't a separate right or means of control, its just included in the definition of the copyright's scope.
and you buy the printed book, I cannot tell you that you can only read it in the wee hours of the morning, or anything like that.
That is called unregulated use. To put it into perspective, there is the set of unregulated use. It has a subset, which is regulated - by copyright law, which also has a subset, called fair use.
The fact of the matter is that copyright law as it stands today, even under the Berne Convention, just hasn't been around long enough for us to know what the long term effects are.
What kind of dangerously addictive plant are you smoking? First, copyright law changed a lot (to the worse) in the centuries, especially in the last, but the changes in the last hundred years seem to consist of one thing: extending the time limit of copyright. It has a quite predictable and easily forseen effect: we lose culture. Yes, I actually have first hand information that a lot of the music from the 30-40-50s is lost, just because degradation of the recording material didn't magically stop just because law pushed the date of them falling into public domain out for another 20 or so years. That's just one example of the many. Think of all the derivative work we're missing out on! Heck! Mickey Mouse IS a derivative work!
What copyright law does here is protect the creator from basically having his/her own work used to compete against him/her, or from having that creator's work bastardized
That has never been the goal of copyright. NEVER. The stated goal of copyright is to increase innovation/culture. The way it currently tries to accomplish that is by handing out bonus stuff to the content creators, like control over distribution. It's up to the copyright owner's wish what he uses that control for. It can be used for those purposes as you cite.
One of the key arguments of the zealots against copyright is that all art is information - and that just isn't true.
I agree, that's not true. But that's not the point. Some art is copyrighted. But all copyrighted stuff is just information. It can't be anything else: it is not a physical object.
1. Information tends to be collected, and art is created.
You're using a different definition for information than I did. Information can be collected, but information is the copyrighted work itself. All copyrighted work is information, but not all information is copyrighted. Art is created, but the part under copyright is information. It is the sequence of sounds as information, not the soundwaves or bits that is
Freedom to create derivative works. Freedom to distribute. Freedom to use as you see fit. No copyright nonsense.
The good thing: it is inevitable that we deal away with copyright. Modern exchange of information demands it (read, networking in the sense of distributing information based on the network model, as opposed to the broadcast model). The information exchange is much more powerful than the copyright law, and it is only bound to get stronger as networking is more and more part of everyday life. The first signs are already apparent. We've got a company called Google who is most likely among the biggest copyright infringers on the world, operating freely. Why? Because Google provides an essential service. To index information, thus make information accessible. Furthermore not only it is an essential service, but it is _good_ for content creators aswell. The fundamental clash is this: copyright and networking is incompatible. Networking/nature is not aware of copyright and can't be made aware of, because copyright itself is a fuzzy, arbitary and ultimately conflicting view on information. Copyright is the 8 ton gorilla. Networking is the 8000 ton meteorite. Networking is simply so useful that we're not going to give it up and networking cannot be fixed to obey copyright law. Copyright is not only detrimental to an information society, it is not needed and ultimately incompatible with future technological advancement. Networking implies free flow of information and creating derivative works. So like it or not: copyright goes away.
The bad thing: it is likely to be a long, slow process and change is only going to come when the situation becomes really, really unworkable.
The outcome: content creators will get paid for creating the given work, but won't be given a tax and monopoly on distribution for x amount of time. This is how most people would expect to get paid for a job. After all, why is it that while creating and printing a book in the 18th century was much more expensive and longer, the copyright law guaranteed less benefits for the authors than it does now. We're simply rewarding content creators too much for too little work.
Of course you could argue that copyright provides incentive. But this is a false argument. The correct way to phrase that is: copyright provides income, which is the incentive. Now, you might argue that in the 18th century, copyright was the most straightforward way to provide that income to content creators, but today it ain't so. Again, our wonderful networking age obsoleted copyright on that field. It is now possible to setup a worldwide micropayment system on the internet (it is just a matter of time until someone implements it), to sponsor the creation of most works. Still, you could say, what about big budget movies? Well, what about them. There will be companies willing to finance the creation of the movie just like now (of course actors would be paid fixed sums of money as royalties won't exist) and they'd make profit not from the copyright fees coming from distributing the work, but from using the given content to sell their product. Tv stations already do this, they give away movies for no financial compensation so that you watch the advertisements their income is from. Just from now on, your movies ticket would pay for the experience you're given in the cinema, not the copyright fees. People would still go to the cinema, but cinemas would actually have to compete on the best viewing experience, not at what you're actually able to view.
It might sound strange, but from a certain viewpoint, advertisements have it right: they are the means, not the end. As in, they exist as means for companies to influence you, not because they want to make a profit on advertisements. The profit is indirect. If all content would be used like that commercially: to help sell a product (cinema seets, a book, etc), as in not as advertisement, but as a necessary component, then we wouldn't have to pay outrageous profits to media cartells, just what they des
Yeah ok. Please make the mistake of equating someone's stupid research project which is most likely totally unviable in a normal airport with totalitarian control.
Look, I'm privacy conscious as the next slashdotter, but this is just simply not an issue here. Who would trust a security system whose creator doesn't even know that dirty bombs doesn't exist in reality.
We're talking about a small airport! Possibly a few dozen people at best on a busy day. As a hungarian I'd preferred to have a better story posted about Hungary, but heh. Domestic flight is really small, given that the country isn't so large either. It is misleading to say that this airport is a major one, I don't think it is a terrorist target at all.
It's an arms race. Graylisting, higher MX spam traps, etc.
They all rely on the "we only have to be better than the neighbour's mailserver" principle. Until everyone starts doing it these things work and then new methods get invented to combat spam. Not that suprising, but saying no to this approach is basically silly. There is NO good way to eliminate spam, because stupid people exist. So people hack around the problem.
According to some, certain raving lunatics 80-90% profit on a product might, just might give a slight basis for those extremely premium features like, you know, actually having an operating system that is NOT artificially limited.
"Many years ago this was a thriving, happy planet - people,
cities shops, a normal world. Except that on the high streets of
these cities there were slightly more BSA offices than one might
have thought necessary. And slowly, insidiously, the numbers of
these BSA offices were increasing. It's a well known economic
phenomenon but tragic to see it in operation, for the more BSA
offices there were, the more arcane EULAS they had to make and the worse
and more unreadable they became. And the worse they were to read,
the more people had to agree to to keep themselves legal, and the more
the offices proliferated, until the whole economy of the place
passed what I believe is termed the EULA Event Horizon, and it
became no longer economically possible to build anything other
than BSA offices. Result - collapse, ruin and famine. Most of the
population died out. Those few who had the right kind of genetic
instability mutated into cavemen - you've seen one of them - who
cursed proprietary software, cursed the companies, and vowed that none should
use it again. Unhappy lot. Come, I must take you to the
Vortex."
Impose artificial limits, period. I'm not talking about limits on CPU usage or memory for the sake of system stability, but arbitary business decision born limits. When something starts doing this, it ceases to be an operating system.
Note the difference though between not having a feature and restricting the computer.
Actually, what you'll most likely find is that IceWeasel will be patched and pushed to the repository faster than Mozilla fixes it if it fixes it at all (Debian still maintains fixes for the 1.0.x branch).
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah BSA regularly pays off the police. "Murder happened? Can't investigate citizen as I've got a more important copyright infringment warrant to serve..."
You can easily make sure that these works would be worth their money, by for example paying reputable people and establishing quality standards. It would still cost much less to hire people to write a book, than buy right from publishing companies and greedy millionares.
Charles Darwin's work available online? The copyright expired so soon?
Well I'm sorry that you're thinking like that. You're not getting into a pissing match with anyone as we're not in one. You have replied to my post from a high stand, while ignoring my reasoning in my original post altogether and trying to lecture me with information that is quite easy to refute if you've got some time to write up a reply, which I did. You might feel like talking to a brick wall because you're not talking about the issue. As in, you're ignoring what others are saying and making faulty assumptions as to what they are saying.
I just want to stress that I never made such argument and bringing an argument up from another discussion with someone else is not entirely classy as it would seem that you're trying to disprove my viewpoint by binding it to objectionable arguments I didn't make. So you're not trying to take part in a pissing match eh?
You're using loaded terms, that is why you're mistaking physical art with copyrighted information or "intellectual property". Information is the song/music, representation is the recording and art is a quality information that is a beautiful song or music.
I'm just thinking. I want a system that is in sync with a few basic facts of life, like you know physical reality. The physical reality is not likely to change and it forces us to consider copyright obsolete in the context of a networked sharing of information. I want an artist to get paid for creating art, not for distributing it. If there is zero cost for distribution, then distribution should be free, as thats what the free market says. I'll gladly pay a reasonable sum to an artist for creating art, but it would be mostly useless if noone can truly enjoy it - thats where distribution and derivative works come in. It is limited, _bad_ and not truly art if you're not allowed to experience it and build upon it.
I hope you don't make the mistake of thinking that I think you shouldn't be compensated for your hard work if you so desire. I am saying that you shouldn't be given a monopoly on your creation. You have to understand that monopoly does nothing more but restrict the positive effect of the work you've created (it also gives the opportunity of the owners of the monopoly to exploit that situation and gain more cash - which is NOT just, respectful and healthy at all). The topic of copyright interests me, I find the topic interesting and I find the current system in need of change.
Please note, I make my living from being paid to write code under the GPL license. This itself proves what I'm talking about in relation to getting paid for creating something and not profiting from a monopoly. I get paid to create something useful to someone and that someone doesn't have the power to restrict and monopolize the usefulness of the given code. The company can't say: let's not show this code to everyone so that everyone else who needs this kind of functionality has to do it themselves again. Yeah, that might be good for the short term interests of the company, but on medium and long term when everyone has to redo everything again, they lose - big time (this has to do with game theory, etc in general. It can be proven with solid maths. It boils down to the dilemma to cooperate or to take advantage of. If someone cooperates with others, they are doing ok. If someone takes advantage of people that are coop
Just a few points I'm having trouble with from your post:
Yes, we can call copyrighted material art, but calling it abc would have been less misleading. What most people would consider art is not or only partly under copyright. The much much bigger issue here is content, which would be a stretch to call "art". I don't necessarily call source code or technical documentation or a fiction novel art.
Also misleading. Copyright covers one basic thing: distribution. It basically says that you can only publish the copyrighted work or a derivative work given that you bear the copyright owner's permission for the original work. There is no inherent "second" here, the derivative part in copyright law isn't a separate right or means of control, its just included in the definition of the copyright's scope.
That is called unregulated use. To put it into perspective, there is the set of unregulated use. It has a subset, which is regulated - by copyright law, which also has a subset, called fair use.
What kind of dangerously addictive plant are you smoking? First, copyright law changed a lot (to the worse) in the centuries, especially in the last, but the changes in the last hundred years seem to consist of one thing: extending the time limit of copyright. It has a quite predictable and easily forseen effect: we lose culture. Yes, I actually have first hand information that a lot of the music from the 30-40-50s is lost, just because degradation of the recording material didn't magically stop just because law pushed the date of them falling into public domain out for another 20 or so years. That's just one example of the many. Think of all the derivative work we're missing out on! Heck! Mickey Mouse IS a derivative work!
That has never been the goal of copyright. NEVER. The stated goal of copyright is to increase innovation/culture. The way it currently tries to accomplish that is by handing out bonus stuff to the content creators, like control over distribution. It's up to the copyright owner's wish what he uses that control for. It can be used for those purposes as you cite.
I agree, that's not true. But that's not the point. Some art is copyrighted. But all copyrighted stuff is just information. It can't be anything else: it is not a physical object.
You're using a different definition for information than I did. Information can be collected, but information is the copyrighted work itself. All copyrighted work is information, but not all information is copyrighted. Art is created, but the part under copyright is information. It is the sequence of sounds as information, not the soundwaves or bits that is
China would ban Fox News then. They have a lot to learn. Why ban it when you can use it for propaganda?
They're the ones to begin a lot of articles with "Rumor has it"...
Sorry dude. I actually live by my opinion. I get paid for writing (~ creating) GPL code.
Freedom to create derivative works. Freedom to distribute. Freedom to use as you see fit. No copyright nonsense.
The good thing: it is inevitable that we deal away with copyright. Modern exchange of information demands it (read, networking in the sense of distributing information based on the network model, as opposed to the broadcast model). The information exchange is much more powerful than the copyright law, and it is only bound to get stronger as networking is more and more part of everyday life. The first signs are already apparent. We've got a company called Google who is most likely among the biggest copyright infringers on the world, operating freely. Why? Because Google provides an essential service. To index information, thus make information accessible. Furthermore not only it is an essential service, but it is _good_ for content creators aswell. The fundamental clash is this: copyright and networking is incompatible. Networking/nature is not aware of copyright and can't be made aware of, because copyright itself is a fuzzy, arbitary and ultimately conflicting view on information. Copyright is the 8 ton gorilla. Networking is the 8000 ton meteorite. Networking is simply so useful that we're not going to give it up and networking cannot be fixed to obey copyright law. Copyright is not only detrimental to an information society, it is not needed and ultimately incompatible with future technological advancement. Networking implies free flow of information and creating derivative works. So like it or not: copyright goes away.
The bad thing: it is likely to be a long, slow process and change is only going to come when the situation becomes really, really unworkable.
The outcome: content creators will get paid for creating the given work, but won't be given a tax and monopoly on distribution for x amount of time. This is how most people would expect to get paid for a job. After all, why is it that while creating and printing a book in the 18th century was much more expensive and longer, the copyright law guaranteed less benefits for the authors than it does now. We're simply rewarding content creators too much for too little work.
Of course you could argue that copyright provides incentive. But this is a false argument. The correct way to phrase that is: copyright provides income, which is the incentive. Now, you might argue that in the 18th century, copyright was the most straightforward way to provide that income to content creators, but today it ain't so. Again, our wonderful networking age obsoleted copyright on that field. It is now possible to setup a worldwide micropayment system on the internet (it is just a matter of time until someone implements it), to sponsor the creation of most works. Still, you could say, what about big budget movies? Well, what about them. There will be companies willing to finance the creation of the movie just like now (of course actors would be paid fixed sums of money as royalties won't exist) and they'd make profit not from the copyright fees coming from distributing the work, but from using the given content to sell their product. Tv stations already do this, they give away movies for no financial compensation so that you watch the advertisements their income is from. Just from now on, your movies ticket would pay for the experience you're given in the cinema, not the copyright fees. People would still go to the cinema, but cinemas would actually have to compete on the best viewing experience, not at what you're actually able to view.
It might sound strange, but from a certain viewpoint, advertisements have it right: they are the means, not the end. As in, they exist as means for companies to influence you, not because they want to make a profit on advertisements. The profit is indirect. If all content would be used like that commercially: to help sell a product (cinema seets, a book, etc), as in not as advertisement, but as a necessary component, then we wouldn't have to pay outrageous profits to media cartells, just what they des
Because I'm not flying. Although I do travel a lot - by train. My country isn't a constant state of paranoia, like the USA seems to be...
Yeah ok. Please make the mistake of equating someone's stupid research project which is most likely totally unviable in a normal airport with totalitarian control.
Look, I'm privacy conscious as the next slashdotter, but this is just simply not an issue here. Who would trust a security system whose creator doesn't even know that dirty bombs doesn't exist in reality.
We're talking about a small airport! Possibly a few dozen people at best on a busy day. As a hungarian I'd preferred to have a better story posted about Hungary, but heh. Domestic flight is really small, given that the country isn't so large either. It is misleading to say that this airport is a major one, I don't think it is a terrorist target at all.
Good thing you didn't do it after all, then! ;)
Btw, Pinter's lecture can be read here in text. I just like to hear people talk, it conveys more meaning the way people emphasize things.
Some idiot marked Harold Pinter's lecture inappropriate aswell. I had to register on youtube just to be able to watch that video.
The video is highly critical of the USA, but I don't see anything inappropriate in it.
Let's also use these devices with the North Korean diplomacy!
That way you could also fuck up two regions of the world simultaneously.
It's an arms race. Graylisting, higher MX spam traps, etc.
They all rely on the "we only have to be better than the neighbour's mailserver" principle. Until everyone starts doing it these things work and then new methods get invented to combat spam. Not that suprising, but saying no to this approach is basically silly. There is NO good way to eliminate spam, because stupid people exist. So people hack around the problem.
According to some, certain raving lunatics 80-90% profit on a product might, just might give a slight basis for those extremely premium features like, you know, actually having an operating system that is NOT artificially limited.
Impose artificial limits, period. I'm not talking about limits on CPU usage or memory for the sake of system stability, but arbitary business decision born limits. When something starts doing this, it ceases to be an operating system.
Note the difference though between not having a feature and restricting the computer.
You obviously never used debian, since then you'd struggle to keep up what sid throws at you.
Your sig got truncated.
Actually, what you'll most likely find is that IceWeasel will be patched and pushed to the repository faster than Mozilla fixes it if it fixes it at all (Debian still maintains fixes for the 1.0.x branch).
Then based on what are they hiring?