Okay, but all you've done is say "charge for support and customization". I'd add a third category: training. But, the original commenter's argument still holds: you still need a product that needs support, customization, and/or training.
> Very few off-the-shelf software packages do exactly what the user needs without any customisation.
Nonsense. The majority of off-the-shelf software packages do not and should not need any significant customization, support, or training. I have lots of software and lots of games. Do you know the number of times I've had to get support, customization, or training for them? With the exception of reporting bugs (because I'm nice and I want them to improve their product) the answer is Never. Never in my thirty years of buying software.
The only time I've can remember needed help forums is when I'm developing software using a library and I can't get it to work, but that's me as a developer, not me as an end-user. In no cases have I actually paid anybody for that support.
I disagree with the "culture" and "restriction of our culture" ideas. If we have options: (A) where a piece of digital media (software, movie, etc) doesn't get created because there's no financial payback for the effort, or (B) a piece of digital media gets created but is under perpetual copyright and you have to pay for it. I'd pick (B) over (A). The fact that I'm willing to pay X dollars for it means that it is worth X dollars or more to me. For example, if I go to the movie theater and pay $10 for a movie I want to see, then everyone benefits (I benefit because by choosing to pay, I'm saying that the movie is worth more than $10; and the movie creator and theater benefit, as evidenced by the fact that they're willing to run a business providing me with the service).
I'm not arguing for perpetual copyright, by the way. I'm merely reacting against the idea that copyright should be seen as a restriction on "our culture" rather than being seen as a trade which benefits both parties (creator and viewer).
I support more fixed-length copyright lengths, rather than "life of the author". Why? Because life-spans can vary (what if we start living to 200?), and because I support allowing copyrighted works being used to support the widow and family of a creator if he has an untimely death. Afterall, if a guy is working for X years creating something while his family is sacrificing with him, waiting for the payoff at the end - but he dies before his work's publication - I support the use of copyright to support the family left behind. (Sort of like how a home builder who builds a house with the intention of selling it - if he dies before the sale happens to a homebuyer - I support the family getting control of the home in order to sell it and earn the money from the creation of the house.)
And don't forget that the self-driving cars project was a DARPA project. Google's current self-driving car project was done by hiring a bunch of guys involved in the DARPA project ("Google hired several veterans of DARPA challenge teams." - http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/thinking-tech/googles-self-driving-car/5445)
How is this confirmation of anything? 'A scientific review board agree with releasing the recipe for a nasty form of bird flu' [though they might be wrong and foolhardy] = confirmation of a larger, more general principle? First, I personally thought their language was surprisingly limited - they said there was no immediate threat from releasing the information (apparently, they haven't even tried to decide if there's a mid or long-term threat from releasing the data). And, second, the review board votes were split 12 versus 6. Unless you're going to argue that all review boards come to the correct decision whenever they have 18 members, then you can't even argue that they made the right decision. Let's say that the votes had gone the other way, would this disconfirm the principle of security through obscurity? Or would you decide that this is not disconfirmation of "security through obscurity", but just an instance of a review board making a wrong decision?
I believe sites that use Facebook-based comment systems have various ways to validate the Facebook account. (I assume this is done by facebook, not the site itself.) But, one test they use seems to be that they count the number of facebook friends you have. If you don't have any Facebook friends, they'll probably assume you're a fake account. This means you need to go and find some fake friends to go with your fake Facebook account. I believe this is also why I occasionally get facebook requests from fake-looking facebook profiles. I think it's spammers trying to increase their facebook-friend count so that they can spam sites.
I've never been a big fan of doing open source development work, and these numbers tell me I made the right choice. I never really understood why people are fans of doing open source work. I'm happy to use it, of course - not because I think it's better, but because it generally works well enough (though often not as well as paid programs), but it's big advantage is that it's free. I couldn't care less about being able to change the source code - it's often a pain in the ass to get projects to build in the first place.
Anyway, I did a little math and figured out that Microsoft brings in more revenue in 90 minutes (about $10 million in 90 minutes) than any of these projects bring in each year. How dismal. I also know of one pro-piracy advocate (who I won't do the favor of naming) who always argues that 'if people like your work, they'll donate because people want to support the projects they like!' - in other words, give away your work for free and people will spontaneously give you money so you don't lose anything by piracy or giving it away for free. These numbers paint a very different picture.
So, basically, you have to make software that's great enough to attract a whole bunch of people, but incomplete enough that they still want to pay you money to keep improving it. Sounds like walking a fine line to me, and you'd better make sure you're working on a product that has a fairly wide gap between "good enough to attract a large audience" and "complete enough that people stop paying you to customize/improve it".
> It doesn't need improving in any way, so what would you do to justify the money?
Because you did all the work to get it to a place where it can attract a large audience. That could take years of unpaid development work (and it's risky because it might never attract a large audience), but you want to tell developers "eat the cost!" Yeash - why do open source developers not understand the concept of initial development costs?
It depends on how long the bookie is holding onto the money. If the bookie is only holding onto the money for a day, then 1/6th of 1% is actually a good return for a single day. In contrast, if you're earning 10% per year on your money in the stock market, then you're earning about 1/37th of 1% per day.
Any loss would come from the loss of a potential sale, but as most [sic] file sharing either is done by people who would never pay for the stuff they download (no lost sale) or by people that buys the downloaded material later when it becomes available, there's usually no loss involved and thus no theft.
I'd actually argue that most filesharing is done by people who wouldn't pay for it and there's still a loss involved.
For example, let's imagine a thought experiment: if a company is selling 100,000 copies of some digital media product and then piracy comes along and now 1 million people are pirating it and only 50,000 copies are being sold. We could say that piracy halved the sales - causing a "loss" of 50,000 sales. However, since there are 1 million people pirating it, we could calculate that 95% of them (950,000/1,000,000) wouldn't have bought it. The fact that most of them wouldn't have bought it doesn't change the fact that it caused the sales to be cut in half. Heck, if piracy became the norm, and let's assume that all the sales disappeared (i.e. a loss of 100,000 sales) then we could still truthfully say that "90% of them wouldn't have bought it". My point being: even if you can truthfully say that most of them wouldn't have bought it doesn't mean that it doesn't produce lost sales.
(And just to head-off the "potential sales aren't real they're purely fictional" argument that someone might want to throw my way - if anyone believes that, then they should argue that copyright should never have existed in the first place and corporations should've always been allowed to print all the books they want and sell all the software they want and sell all the movies they can - because it only means a "potential" loss for the creators and corporations should be allowed to pocket all the money for themselves.)
> "First off all many Arab nations and people question the existence of Israel, that doesn't mean they want to nuke the entire country and kill all of its citizens, it just means they don't recognize Israel as a legitimate state. Kind of like the U.S. doesn't really recognize Palestine as a legitimate state."
Israel's neighbors have also invaded Israel several times.
From that perspective, the US non-recognition of Palestine is just a sticky diplomatic point for US conservatives, so people don't touch it. The Arab non-recognition of Israel is because they would like to wipe it off the face of the earth.
Of course, I'm not arguing that we should invade or bomb Iran. I'm just pointing out the reality of the situation.
Er, what? I wasn't going to jump into the conversation, but saying that the US has never come to anyone's aid seems kinda bizarre.
Off the top of my head:
World War I
World War II
Korean War (North Korea invaded South Korea)
Iraq, 1992 (when Saddam invaded Kuwait)
Somalia, 1993
Bosnia, 1995
The problem with networks like this is that you have two extremes:
You can have a small network with is secure, but it has very little content.
You can have a large network - which means more content available, but it has a higher chance of being infiltrated (because the more people are in it, the less likely it is to stay secure, and the more high-profile the network becomes).
The natural tendency will be to grow the network into something larger all the time. Afterall, if you want to play that new game that came out last month, somebody's going to have to add it to the network, and if it's just you and a couple friends, you probably won't have an inside source to get it.
If people keep coming up with these "solutions" to enable piracy, then maybe it's best to attack the problem from another angle: focus on the bug in pirates' moral programming that makes them believe that piracy is okay.
> "Even a decade ago, I could find just about anything I wanted online..."
Really? Because I think the internet kind of sucked a decade ago. Sites were slow. You couldn't find good maps. (Ha! I used to have a city map.) I still had a phone book. Yahoo was one of the best sites available. iTunes, YouTube, Spotify, Pandora didn't exist. Podcasts didn't exist. Neither did most blogs. I don't recall whether or not you could even leave comments a decade ago, but probably not. Wikipedia was launched only 11 years ago (I'm sure it was crappy with virtually no articles only a year after startup).
Your whole post looks like a knee-jerk attempt to prove your original assertion about the internet going downhill thanks to business.
> "If Hollywood and Madison Avenue, and even the government, doesn't like that - No problem, they can consider themselves not invited to my party"
The sad thing about your statement is that you don't seem to realize that you still want "hollywood's" stuff on the internet, you just want it free and without ads. If the internet really was about the "exchange of ideas" it wouldn't be about piracy. I'm sure Hollywood would be fine with that. The problem is that pirates a one-sided relationship: they want free stuff and they don't want the obligation to pay the people who made it for them.
In this article Zite CEO Mark Johnson explains how the startup mollified publishers (by presenting articles in 'Web view' mode rather than a stripped-down 'reader mode')
Just to be clear: what this means is that the news agencies' Advertisements were displayed, instead of stripping the information down to the article (without ads). The News agencies were right to send C&D letters to Zite, but with the new system, the news agencies had a chance to make revenue off of their own content.
The answer to the question "How did publishers learn to stop worrying and love zites aggregator?" is "Zite changed their system to be respectful towards the content producers and their need to make money from content they produced". (I just want to head off any comments by who want to jump on the narrative that publishers need to just need to look at things differently regarding, say, piracy.)
I see you finally mention the real reason right at the end. Game developers are far more concerned about evil consumers who resell their games than they are about pirates, because pirates would never have bought it in the first place.
100% of pirates would've never bought it in the first place? Nonsense. I know people who converted from being good paying customers to saying "why pay for anything when you can get it free [through piracy]?" If you could eliminate piracy, they would go back to paying because they want the stuff bad enough to pay for it if they have to (just like they used to do).
It's also factually incorrect to say that game developers are far more concerned about reselling of games than pirates. (Yeah, some game developers have complained about game reselling, but they're a minority and they're on game consoles - which are much more free of piracy than the PC. On the other hand, the game developers I know spend far more time talking about piracy and how to fight it than they are concerned about game reselling.)
The article seemed to avoid the question of where the servers were. Part of me wonders if they were intentionally avoiding mentioning if the servers or the entire organization was being run out of Maryland, and that's what gave the US jurisdiction in this case. Sorry, the article just looked a little suspicious for the lack of information which might inform the reader as to why Maryland might claim jurisdiction.
Also, as I always point out in these stories: the internet is global. This creates a number of problems for enforcing laws. It seems like in the long run there's only two options: countries either succeed in enforcing their own laws (against, say, gambling, copyright infringement, counterfeiting, child porn, slander, money laundering, drug trafficking, hiring hitmen, creating computer viruses, stealing/reselling credit card information, etc) or all countries must accept the aggregate of the most permissive laws of every country. For example, if one country decides piracy or child pornography is legal, then all countries have to suffer the consequences because everyone in the world will have instant access to it. I'm not the least bit surprised that this has caused tension in the global system.
As much as I would fear that voting would be won by short-sighted idiots who want a zero-year copyright, I am heartened by the fact that the large majority of Americans are in opposition to that kind of nonsense.
"A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 67% of Likely U.S. Voters agree that someone who downloads a movie online without paying for it is stealing from the company that made the film. Eighteen percent (18%) do not view this free downloading as theft. Fifteen percent (15%) are not sure."
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/january_2012/ 71_see_government_censorship_of_internet_as_ bigger_threat_than_illegal_downloading
(I had to put two spaces in the URL because Slashdot wouldn't allow long URLs like that.)
I disagree with the outcomes of both of your examples.
Regarding gay marriage: it would be legalized in some states and not legal in other states. The polls I've seen has approval of gay marriage somewhere around 50% in the US. Obviously, more liberal states would be higher than 50% and more conservative states would drop below 50%. In the longer term, more and more states would approval gay marriage because there's been a clear trend towards accepting gay marriage over time. Older Americans remain the most opposed and younger Americans are the most in favor - so you can see where this trend is going and what happens as new generations enter voting age and older voters die off. If I remember correctly, approval was something like 10% around 1980. That's a 40% increase in the past 30 years, which is another indicator of which way the trend is heading. (This is also why Republicans will eventually have to stop fighting gay marriage: they're losing the battle a little more each year.)
Regarding Joe from Juniper: the only reason Joe would be forced to surrender his land is if the other residents are voting purely from a position of selfish greed. I think most people would be a little more generous to their fellow residents. If Joe is seen as having unfairly acquired the land or is some kind of horrible Ebenezer Scrooge type person, then maybe I could see things going the other way.
Your line of thinking is common among those who haven't thought things through.
1) When you make a highly-desired commodity illegal, you create organized crime. Mafia bosses who have no qualms about sending your children home minus a few digits just to make a point wind up receiving tremendous economic power from people who want the item. This level of crime is far worse, and far harder for the police to protect against, than random muggings by petty junkies.
The fact of the matter is that junkies still need their drug and they probably aren't making enough money to pay for all their life's needs (including drugs, food, shelter, etc). Even if the drug is legal, it still puts junkies in a position to commit crimes - either because they decided to rob people for money or because the drug dealer pushes them into it.
2) You assume that once it becomes legal, demand will increase significantly. This is very fallacious. Most people who desire to use drugs already do so, whether it is legal or not. The only people who refrain from using drugs due to their legal status are precisely the sort of people who are responsible enough to keep their use under control. Furthermore, the current (illegal) users who are the type that would lose control and start mugging people to fuel the habit are already doing so. So, even if usage increases, crime does not increase.
Did you intentionally write "demand will increase significantly" instead of "demand will increase" because it would be easier for you to argue your point? Sorry, but it is well established that making stuff illegal does drive down consumption. It obviously doesn't drive it down to zero, but to say that legalization won't lead to increased use is fallacious. Saying, as you did, that legalization won't cause demand to "increase significantly" is debatable since you haven't established what "significantly" means, which could potentially give you some weasel room to claim you're right even if demand does increase.
It's also worth pointing out that humans are cultural creatures. You might say things like "Most people who desire to use drugs already do so, whether it is legal or not.", but people do what other people around them are doing. Funny, just yesterday, I was talking to a friend about how human behavior is quirky. One point he raised was a study involving a hotel that wanted hotel customers to reuse towels instead of getting new towels each day in their rooms. They tried different signs to encourage patrons to reuse towels. They figured out that if people assumed other people were getting new towels each day, that they would also get new towels. But, when they told people that most people reused their bathroom towels, then most of the patrons did the same. If something is illegal, most people are going to follow the law, but that can be overridden if people around you are doing the illegal thing (example: underage drinking or smoking pot). Having been in a variety of schools while growing up, I can absolutely tell you that the things that your friends are doing in school affect what you will do as well. It's fallacious to simply say people are doing what they'd do regardless of the situation.
The only people who refrain from using drugs due to their legal status are precisely the sort of people who are responsible enough to keep their use under control.
What nonsense. Drugs can change a person. There absolutely are people now who aren't doing drugs right now who, if they tried crack, could easily spiral into crime.
3) Once legal, it can be taxed to fund addiction clinics and other support services that users can now turn to without fear of legal punishment. So, that naturally helps to control the problem and further reduce crime.
So, you're saying that if we legalize it, then we can tax it, which will drive up the price of the drugs, which will make junkies more desperate to get money, which increases the incentive for them to commit crimes? That's a terrible strategy.
I didn't realize anyone thought that Anonymous was a legion of hackers. It's been previously reported that being part of Anonymous meant downloading DOS tools, so it should've already been clear that Anonymous wasn't a bunch of hackers. It seems to me that "legion of idiots" was just a gratuitous insult.
Copyright is STRICTLY for the benefit of society. If we didn't think it profited us, we'd just steal all of everyone's crap (and, in some cases, society would vastly benefit; anything having to do with music, not so much). Mark my words, industry: copyright means NOTHING if it's abused and it justifies my attitudes on the subject (y'all know what i mean)
I think you could say that LAWS exist strictly for the benefit of society. Subsequently, you could argue that if laws are abused then they mean nothing. Presumably, this would mean that if laws are abused (e.g. people are framed for crimes they didn't commit) or wrong (e.g. if you believe the death penalty for murder is wrong), then you are justified in ignoring/breaking them, right? But, does that mean "if anyone is wrongly framed" or "if anyone 'wrongly' gets the death penalty when they should get 20 years in prison" then does it follow that we are justified in disregarding all laws or specific laws (e.g. laws against murder)?
It just seems awfully convenient for pirates to jump from "this law is being abused" or "copyright is too long" (both of which are legitimate criticisms) to the other extreme and self-serving position of "copyright means NOTHING, we are justified in ignoring it".
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, but all you've done is say "charge for support and customization". I'd add a third category: training. But, the original commenter's argument still holds: you still need a product that needs support, customization, and/or training.
> Very few off-the-shelf software packages do exactly what the user needs without any customisation.
Nonsense. The majority of off-the-shelf software packages do not and should not need any significant customization, support, or training. I have lots of software and lots of games. Do you know the number of times I've had to get support, customization, or training for them? With the exception of reporting bugs (because I'm nice and I want them to improve their product) the answer is Never. Never in my thirty years of buying software.
The only time I've can remember needed help forums is when I'm developing software using a library and I can't get it to work, but that's me as a developer, not me as an end-user. In no cases have I actually paid anybody for that support.
I disagree with the "culture" and "restriction of our culture" ideas. If we have options: (A) where a piece of digital media (software, movie, etc) doesn't get created because there's no financial payback for the effort, or (B) a piece of digital media gets created but is under perpetual copyright and you have to pay for it. I'd pick (B) over (A). The fact that I'm willing to pay X dollars for it means that it is worth X dollars or more to me. For example, if I go to the movie theater and pay $10 for a movie I want to see, then everyone benefits (I benefit because by choosing to pay, I'm saying that the movie is worth more than $10; and the movie creator and theater benefit, as evidenced by the fact that they're willing to run a business providing me with the service).
I'm not arguing for perpetual copyright, by the way. I'm merely reacting against the idea that copyright should be seen as a restriction on "our culture" rather than being seen as a trade which benefits both parties (creator and viewer).
I support more fixed-length copyright lengths, rather than "life of the author". Why? Because life-spans can vary (what if we start living to 200?), and because I support allowing copyrighted works being used to support the widow and family of a creator if he has an untimely death. Afterall, if a guy is working for X years creating something while his family is sacrificing with him, waiting for the payoff at the end - but he dies before his work's publication - I support the use of copyright to support the family left behind. (Sort of like how a home builder who builds a house with the intention of selling it - if he dies before the sale happens to a homebuyer - I support the family getting control of the home in order to sell it and earn the money from the creation of the house.)
And don't forget that the self-driving cars project was a DARPA project. Google's current self-driving car project was done by hiring a bunch of guys involved in the DARPA project ("Google hired several veterans of DARPA challenge teams." - http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/thinking-tech/googles-self-driving-car/5445)
Indeed. No doubt you're selling nuclear secrets to North Korea and crazy doomsday cults at this very moment.
How is this confirmation of anything? 'A scientific review board agree with releasing the recipe for a nasty form of bird flu' [though they might be wrong and foolhardy] = confirmation of a larger, more general principle? First, I personally thought their language was surprisingly limited - they said there was no immediate threat from releasing the information (apparently, they haven't even tried to decide if there's a mid or long-term threat from releasing the data). And, second, the review board votes were split 12 versus 6. Unless you're going to argue that all review boards come to the correct decision whenever they have 18 members, then you can't even argue that they made the right decision. Let's say that the votes had gone the other way, would this disconfirm the principle of security through obscurity? Or would you decide that this is not disconfirmation of "security through obscurity", but just an instance of a review board making a wrong decision?
I believe sites that use Facebook-based comment systems have various ways to validate the Facebook account. (I assume this is done by facebook, not the site itself.) But, one test they use seems to be that they count the number of facebook friends you have. If you don't have any Facebook friends, they'll probably assume you're a fake account. This means you need to go and find some fake friends to go with your fake Facebook account. I believe this is also why I occasionally get facebook requests from fake-looking facebook profiles. I think it's spammers trying to increase their facebook-friend count so that they can spam sites.
I've never been a big fan of doing open source development work, and these numbers tell me I made the right choice. I never really understood why people are fans of doing open source work. I'm happy to use it, of course - not because I think it's better, but because it generally works well enough (though often not as well as paid programs), but it's big advantage is that it's free. I couldn't care less about being able to change the source code - it's often a pain in the ass to get projects to build in the first place.
Anyway, I did a little math and figured out that Microsoft brings in more revenue in 90 minutes (about $10 million in 90 minutes) than any of these projects bring in each year. How dismal. I also know of one pro-piracy advocate (who I won't do the favor of naming) who always argues that 'if people like your work, they'll donate because people want to support the projects they like!' - in other words, give away your work for free and people will spontaneously give you money so you don't lose anything by piracy or giving it away for free. These numbers paint a very different picture.
So, basically, you have to make software that's great enough to attract a whole bunch of people, but incomplete enough that they still want to pay you money to keep improving it. Sounds like walking a fine line to me, and you'd better make sure you're working on a product that has a fairly wide gap between "good enough to attract a large audience" and "complete enough that people stop paying you to customize/improve it".
> It doesn't need improving in any way, so what would you do to justify the money?
Because you did all the work to get it to a place where it can attract a large audience. That could take years of unpaid development work (and it's risky because it might never attract a large audience), but you want to tell developers "eat the cost!" Yeash - why do open source developers not understand the concept of initial development costs?
It depends on how long the bookie is holding onto the money. If the bookie is only holding onto the money for a day, then 1/6th of 1% is actually a good return for a single day. In contrast, if you're earning 10% per year on your money in the stock market, then you're earning about 1/37th of 1% per day.
No, it's not.
Any loss would come from the loss of a potential sale, but as most [sic] file sharing either is done by people who would never pay for the stuff they download (no lost sale) or by people that buys the downloaded material later when it becomes available, there's usually no loss involved and thus no theft.
I'd actually argue that most filesharing is done by people who wouldn't pay for it and there's still a loss involved.
For example, let's imagine a thought experiment: if a company is selling 100,000 copies of some digital media product and then piracy comes along and now 1 million people are pirating it and only 50,000 copies are being sold. We could say that piracy halved the sales - causing a "loss" of 50,000 sales. However, since there are 1 million people pirating it, we could calculate that 95% of them (950,000/1,000,000) wouldn't have bought it. The fact that most of them wouldn't have bought it doesn't change the fact that it caused the sales to be cut in half. Heck, if piracy became the norm, and let's assume that all the sales disappeared (i.e. a loss of 100,000 sales) then we could still truthfully say that "90% of them wouldn't have bought it". My point being: even if you can truthfully say that most of them wouldn't have bought it doesn't mean that it doesn't produce lost sales.
(And just to head-off the "potential sales aren't real they're purely fictional" argument that someone might want to throw my way - if anyone believes that, then they should argue that copyright should never have existed in the first place and corporations should've always been allowed to print all the books they want and sell all the software they want and sell all the movies they can - because it only means a "potential" loss for the creators and corporations should be allowed to pocket all the money for themselves.)
> "First off all many Arab nations and people question the existence of Israel, that doesn't mean they want to nuke the entire country and kill all of its citizens, it just means they don't recognize Israel as a legitimate state. Kind of like the U.S. doesn't really recognize Palestine as a legitimate state."
It should be mentioned that none of the countries in Western Europe recognize the Palestinian state, nor does Canada or Mexico.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_recognition_of_the_State_of_Palestine
Also, the Arab non-recognition of Israel is not like the US (or European or Canadian) non-recognition of Palestine.
For example: During the Clinton administration, the US offered the Palestinians $30 billion dollars in part of a deal to broker peace between Israel and Palestine. The US is going out of it's way to broker peace deals. http://www.deseretnews.com/article/776477/US-offered-30-billion-PLO-says.html
On the other hand, Iran's Khamenei said Israel is a "cancerous tumor that should be cut and will be cut" and "From now on, in any place, if any nation or any group confronts the Zionist regime, we will endorse and we will help. We have no fear expressing this," said Khamenei.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/9059179/Iran-We-will-help-cut-out-the-cancer-of-Israel.html
Israel's neighbors have also invaded Israel several times.
From that perspective, the US non-recognition of Palestine is just a sticky diplomatic point for US conservatives, so people don't touch it. The Arab non-recognition of Israel is because they would like to wipe it off the face of the earth.
Of course, I'm not arguing that we should invade or bomb Iran. I'm just pointing out the reality of the situation.
Er, what? I wasn't going to jump into the conversation, but saying that the US has never come to anyone's aid seems kinda bizarre.
Off the top of my head:
World War I
World War II
Korean War (North Korea invaded South Korea)
Iraq, 1992 (when Saddam invaded Kuwait)
Somalia, 1993
Bosnia, 1995
The problem with networks like this is that you have two extremes:
You can have a small network with is secure, but it has very little content.
You can have a large network - which means more content available, but it has a higher chance of being infiltrated (because the more people are in it, the less likely it is to stay secure, and the more high-profile the network becomes).
The natural tendency will be to grow the network into something larger all the time. Afterall, if you want to play that new game that came out last month, somebody's going to have to add it to the network, and if it's just you and a couple friends, you probably won't have an inside source to get it.
If people keep coming up with these "solutions" to enable piracy, then maybe it's best to attack the problem from another angle: focus on the bug in pirates' moral programming that makes them believe that piracy is okay.
> "Even a decade ago, I could find just about anything I wanted online..."
Really? Because I think the internet kind of sucked a decade ago. Sites were slow. You couldn't find good maps. (Ha! I used to have a city map.) I still had a phone book. Yahoo was one of the best sites available. iTunes, YouTube, Spotify, Pandora didn't exist. Podcasts didn't exist. Neither did most blogs. I don't recall whether or not you could even leave comments a decade ago, but probably not. Wikipedia was launched only 11 years ago (I'm sure it was crappy with virtually no articles only a year after startup).
Your whole post looks like a knee-jerk attempt to prove your original assertion about the internet going downhill thanks to business.
> "If Hollywood and Madison Avenue, and even the government, doesn't like that - No problem, they can consider themselves not invited to my party"
The sad thing about your statement is that you don't seem to realize that you still want "hollywood's" stuff on the internet, you just want it free and without ads. If the internet really was about the "exchange of ideas" it wouldn't be about piracy. I'm sure Hollywood would be fine with that. The problem is that pirates a one-sided relationship: they want free stuff and they don't want the obligation to pay the people who made it for them.
In this article Zite CEO Mark Johnson explains how the startup mollified publishers (by presenting articles in 'Web view' mode rather than a stripped-down 'reader mode')
Just to be clear: what this means is that the news agencies' Advertisements were displayed, instead of stripping the information down to the article (without ads). The News agencies were right to send C&D letters to Zite, but with the new system, the news agencies had a chance to make revenue off of their own content.
The answer to the question "How did publishers learn to stop worrying and love zites aggregator?" is "Zite changed their system to be respectful towards the content producers and their need to make money from content they produced". (I just want to head off any comments by who want to jump on the narrative that publishers need to just need to look at things differently regarding, say, piracy.)
I see you finally mention the real reason right at the end. Game developers are far more concerned about evil consumers who resell their games than they are about pirates, because pirates would never have bought it in the first place.
100% of pirates would've never bought it in the first place? Nonsense. I know people who converted from being good paying customers to saying "why pay for anything when you can get it free [through piracy]?" If you could eliminate piracy, they would go back to paying because they want the stuff bad enough to pay for it if they have to (just like they used to do).
It's also factually incorrect to say that game developers are far more concerned about reselling of games than pirates. (Yeah, some game developers have complained about game reselling, but they're a minority and they're on game consoles - which are much more free of piracy than the PC. On the other hand, the game developers I know spend far more time talking about piracy and how to fight it than they are concerned about game reselling.)
The article seemed to avoid the question of where the servers were. Part of me wonders if they were intentionally avoiding mentioning if the servers or the entire organization was being run out of Maryland, and that's what gave the US jurisdiction in this case. Sorry, the article just looked a little suspicious for the lack of information which might inform the reader as to why Maryland might claim jurisdiction.
Also, as I always point out in these stories: the internet is global. This creates a number of problems for enforcing laws. It seems like in the long run there's only two options: countries either succeed in enforcing their own laws (against, say, gambling, copyright infringement, counterfeiting, child porn, slander, money laundering, drug trafficking, hiring hitmen, creating computer viruses, stealing/reselling credit card information, etc) or all countries must accept the aggregate of the most permissive laws of every country. For example, if one country decides piracy or child pornography is legal, then all countries have to suffer the consequences because everyone in the world will have instant access to it. I'm not the least bit surprised that this has caused tension in the global system.
As much as I would fear that voting would be won by short-sighted idiots who want a zero-year copyright, I am heartened by the fact that the large majority of Americans are in opposition to that kind of nonsense.
"A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 67% of Likely U.S. Voters agree that someone who downloads a movie online without paying for it is stealing from the company that made the film. Eighteen percent (18%) do not view this free downloading as theft. Fifteen percent (15%) are not sure."
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/general_politics/january_2012/ 71_see_government_censorship_of_internet_as_ bigger_threat_than_illegal_downloading
(I had to put two spaces in the URL because Slashdot wouldn't allow long URLs like that.)
I disagree with the outcomes of both of your examples.
Regarding gay marriage: it would be legalized in some states and not legal in other states. The polls I've seen has approval of gay marriage somewhere around 50% in the US. Obviously, more liberal states would be higher than 50% and more conservative states would drop below 50%. In the longer term, more and more states would approval gay marriage because there's been a clear trend towards accepting gay marriage over time. Older Americans remain the most opposed and younger Americans are the most in favor - so you can see where this trend is going and what happens as new generations enter voting age and older voters die off. If I remember correctly, approval was something like 10% around 1980. That's a 40% increase in the past 30 years, which is another indicator of which way the trend is heading. (This is also why Republicans will eventually have to stop fighting gay marriage: they're losing the battle a little more each year.)
Article: For First Time, Majority of Americans Favor Legal Gay Marriage; Republicans and older Americans remain opposed (May 20, 2011)
http://www.gallup.com/poll/147662/first-time-majority-americans-favor-legal-gay-marriage.aspx
Regarding Joe from Juniper: the only reason Joe would be forced to surrender his land is if the other residents are voting purely from a position of selfish greed. I think most people would be a little more generous to their fellow residents. If Joe is seen as having unfairly acquired the land or is some kind of horrible Ebenezer Scrooge type person, then maybe I could see things going the other way.
Your line of thinking is common among those who haven't thought things through.
1) When you make a highly-desired commodity illegal, you create organized crime. Mafia bosses who have no qualms about sending your children home minus a few digits just to make a point wind up receiving tremendous economic power from people who want the item. This level of crime is far worse, and far harder for the police to protect against, than random muggings by petty junkies.
The fact of the matter is that junkies still need their drug and they probably aren't making enough money to pay for all their life's needs (including drugs, food, shelter, etc). Even if the drug is legal, it still puts junkies in a position to commit crimes - either because they decided to rob people for money or because the drug dealer pushes them into it.
2) You assume that once it becomes legal, demand will increase significantly. This is very fallacious. Most people who desire to use drugs already do so, whether it is legal or not. The only people who refrain from using drugs due to their legal status are precisely the sort of people who are responsible enough to keep their use under control. Furthermore, the current (illegal) users who are the type that would lose control and start mugging people to fuel the habit are already doing so. So, even if usage increases, crime does not increase.
Did you intentionally write "demand will increase significantly" instead of "demand will increase" because it would be easier for you to argue your point? Sorry, but it is well established that making stuff illegal does drive down consumption. It obviously doesn't drive it down to zero, but to say that legalization won't lead to increased use is fallacious. Saying, as you did, that legalization won't cause demand to "increase significantly" is debatable since you haven't established what "significantly" means, which could potentially give you some weasel room to claim you're right even if demand does increase.
It's also worth pointing out that humans are cultural creatures. You might say things like "Most people who desire to use drugs already do so, whether it is legal or not.", but people do what other people around them are doing. Funny, just yesterday, I was talking to a friend about how human behavior is quirky. One point he raised was a study involving a hotel that wanted hotel customers to reuse towels instead of getting new towels each day in their rooms. They tried different signs to encourage patrons to reuse towels. They figured out that if people assumed other people were getting new towels each day, that they would also get new towels. But, when they told people that most people reused their bathroom towels, then most of the patrons did the same. If something is illegal, most people are going to follow the law, but that can be overridden if people around you are doing the illegal thing (example: underage drinking or smoking pot). Having been in a variety of schools while growing up, I can absolutely tell you that the things that your friends are doing in school affect what you will do as well. It's fallacious to simply say people are doing what they'd do regardless of the situation.
The only people who refrain from using drugs due to their legal status are precisely the sort of people who are responsible enough to keep their use under control.
What nonsense. Drugs can change a person. There absolutely are people now who aren't doing drugs right now who, if they tried crack, could easily spiral into crime.
3) Once legal, it can be taxed to fund addiction clinics and other support services that users can now turn to without fear of legal punishment. So, that naturally helps to control the problem and further reduce crime.
So, you're saying that if we legalize it, then we can tax it, which will drive up the price of the drugs, which will make junkies more desperate to get money, which increases the incentive for them to commit crimes? That's a terrible strategy.
I didn't realize anyone thought that Anonymous was a legion of hackers. It's been previously reported that being part of Anonymous meant downloading DOS tools, so it should've already been clear that Anonymous wasn't a bunch of hackers. It seems to me that "legion of idiots" was just a gratuitous insult.
I think you could say that LAWS exist strictly for the benefit of society. Subsequently, you could argue that if laws are abused then they mean nothing. Presumably, this would mean that if laws are abused (e.g. people are framed for crimes they didn't commit) or wrong (e.g. if you believe the death penalty for murder is wrong), then you are justified in ignoring/breaking them, right? But, does that mean "if anyone is wrongly framed" or "if anyone 'wrongly' gets the death penalty when they should get 20 years in prison" then does it follow that we are justified in disregarding all laws or specific laws (e.g. laws against murder)?
It just seems awfully convenient for pirates to jump from "this law is being abused" or "copyright is too long" (both of which are legitimate criticisms) to the other extreme and self-serving position of "copyright means NOTHING, we are justified in ignoring it".