> "Nonsense, before mass communication was even possible, and before the printing press was invented, books were written, music was composed and paintings were painted, and mostly through philanthropy."
I said they can't get properly paid for their work. This doesn't mean they won't exist at all. Keep in mind that in the year 1450, there were a total of 100 books published *worldwide*. Only rich people with some thoughts on their mind that they wanted to write-down could get published. Music: well, people were getting paid for playing music (though most musicians and actors were terribly poor - it was a horrible profession to be in). Paintings were created because rich patrons were funding them. None of these are great systems. It kind of ridiculous to ask that creators work for free so you can get lots of cool stuff, and ridiculous to ask that rich people pay creators so you can gets lots of cool stuff. If you're the one benefiting, I really don't see the problem saying that you should be paying. Your alternative is asking creators to be the sacrificial sheep for society's benefit.
Personally, I hate this "artificial scarcity" idea that people throw around because it's such a one-sided understanding of the world. Yes, it would be better for society if everyone gave away everything digital for free. Yes, that would (in the short term) create the most benefit for society. But, it's the creators who end up getting screwed in the deal. It's asking creators to take a big hit in being able to survive so that society can benefit. That's asking creators to be martyrs for society; when society isn't willing to to the same back. In the longer term, it would drive lots of creators out of business. This would cause a decline in the money spent on any one particular product, and cause a decline in the number of products made each year. Society would then be worse off - complaining about the cheap stuff (in both senses of the word "cheap") they're getting from creators. So, if you prefer YouTube videos over Star Wars movies and if you prefer Flash Games over Starcraft, then you're going to love the world after "artificial scarcity" has been eliminated by copyright, forcing creators to beg for donations.
> "The art that copyright funds is mostly low-brow and unoriginal entertainment anyway, copyright provides little funding for high art because most consumers aren't sophisticated enough to enjoy it. The hedonistic and wasteful Hollywood blockbuster is dead, but it was a temporary anomaly of the times anyway. Movie theaters will survive, but their main selling point will be the big screen, and not the content. Software "licencing" will be replaced with SaaS and support contracts, or in the case of consumer electronics, funded by hardware manufacturers. Audio recording will be a secondary source of revenue for musicians, after their "meatspace" performances. That's way I see it anyway, irrespective of any attempts at moralisation or legislation"
So, what you're saying is that you will have gained very little by eliminating "artificial scarcity". You're saying that movies will be decimated (and that includes not only the "low brow" movies - as you call them - but all movies, including all the movies you enjoy). I don't want to watch most of the movies that are made, but I want to watch the movies that I want to watch. Under your system, those won't exist, either. I guess the pinnacle of movie-making in your world will be "made for TV movies". Remember how great those are? If you think movies are "low brow" now, you just wait. You can look forward to learning a whole new definition of "low brow".
> "Software "licencing" will be replaced with SaaS and support contracts"
No it won't. There's lots of software that exists today that can't exist under those systems. Single-player games being an obvious example.
I'd add that I see software moving into the cloud, where people *can''t* get it. It's essentially a technical means of enforcing
> "Higher-functioning animals including humans may horde to generate artificial scarcity to raise the overall value of their possession. But highest-functioning animals like humans are capable of doing so for no logical reason other than purely out of spite."
No, artificial scarcity is used because, otherwise, people can't get properly paid for their work. Under a perfect system, everyone would freely share everything digital and the creators of these digital works would be paid by donations from a charitable population so they can afford to live. We don't live in a world that charitable. As a result, we have to resort to things like taxes to pay for things like Medicare and Medicaid; we resort to copyright because the public isn't nearly as charitable as they'd like to believe they are. Artificial scarcity helps bring things back up to their proper valuation (and it can never increase it's value above it's proper valuation because people will simply not pay for it, which leads to a decline in the revenue generated).
By the way, what was his argument? That paying taxes and having that tax money go to charity (e.g. welfare) is "slavery"? (Talk about melodramatic - as if some guy earning six-figures is now compared to African-American slaves because he has to pay a few thousand dollars more in taxes.) Very little of anyone's tax dollars actually goes to welfare. Or maybe he meant things like Medicare and Medicade, which are a significant part of people's taxes. Of course, relying on people to give money (out of charity rather than via taxes) leads to a problem: people never donate anywhere close enough to actually cover the costs, which leads to destitution. Seriously, if you add up all the money Americans give to charity each year (around $300 billion) and compare it to the amount of money spent funding Medicare and medicaid (in the trillions), you'll find that all the charitable contributions a fraction of the money spent on Medicare and medicaid. So, perhaps we could say that "forcing people to pay for this stuff via taxes" is really a symptom of a different problem: "people's unwillingness to contribute enough of their own free will". Besides, people voted (directly or indirectly) for taxes to go to those programs. It's not like this was some decree by the king. So, the randians are left arguing that the will of the majority (who are also taxpayers) are stifling their freedom to not pay.
I don't believe that up-front funding works very well for media designed for the public. If software and movies were forced to get up-front funding, I see a large contraction in the markets for both of them - the result being that software developers and movie creators having a very difficult time staying in business, a large decline in the amount of money being spent developing the products, and a public which ends up being unhappy with the cheap (in both senses of the word) products being turned out by those industries. In short: everybody loses because up-front funding is such an inferior business model. So, your suggestion that we should get paid when we create something, but not when someone uses it ends up with everyone being unhappy in the long run.
I have to admit, I can't help but think of a statistic I heard recently. The statistic was that, in the year 1450, there were 100 new books published. Last year, there were over a million. Sure, there 20x as many people alive now than in 1450 (estimated at 350 million), but there are 10,000x as many books published. Writing books used to be a luxury only the rich could afford. By creating a system where authors could get compensated through sales, it makes the market much stronger.
As for "it works for physicists and mathematicians" - well, physicists and mathematicians aren't really making things for the mass market, so copyright isn't really an option. You get paid by grants or a corporation, who then make products which can be sold. But, digital media made for the general public isn't something that corporations or governments should want to fund since they can't earn any money from it either. It would be forcing those corporations or governments to act as charities. (Do you really think corporations or governments should be funding the development of a Star Wars movie or the latest Starcraft game, only to give it away to the public?) If you want to know what it's like to create stuff for the general public, like we do, then I suggest going out onto the street and getting the general public (I mean individuals, not businesses or governments) to pay you money for doing physics work.
And let's face it: the EFF has constantly sided with pirates on issue after issue. I suspect this is the EFF's way of helping pirates by frustrating any enforcement of copyright.
Your view of the EFF is rather twisted, they espouse freedom to do as you wish electronically without copyright infringement or the like, why should everyone else suffer because the pirates find these freedoms useful at times?
Actually, if you pay attention to the things the EFF is doing, they do side with pirates. In fact, Von Lohmann, the former main lawyer of the EFF wrote a manual on how pirate websites can continue to help people get pirated media and not be held liable in court. He advised them to setup their networks so that they can't control what goes on in it, and therefore, they can avoid legal liability. I find it terrible that they are teaching criminals how to continue aiding piracy, but avoid getting convicted by the law. There's plenty of examples like this. Also, Lessig and Doctorow (both EFF fellows) will say they support copyright, but they mean "copyright" only in the sense that you can't charge money for pirated media. Lessig seems to support free free piracy (as with the PirateBay), and Doctorow most definitely supports piracy. Doctorow even traveled to Sweden during the PirateBay trial to write articles in support of them. I can list another half-dozen cases where the EFF has sided with pirates. The fact of the matter is that the EFF argues that you can't really have freedom on the internet without the freedom to pirate. They talk about piracy as a "free speech" issue. That's not to say that everything the EFF does is bad or pro-piracy, I'm just saying that on the issue of piracy, they always side with the pirates against copyright and creators.
Oh, and one more:
(3) It's a security problem. With tools like Wireshark and FireSheep out there, I don't need someone looking at my webtraffic or taking over my identity. I won't access my email or facebook or my webserver while at the coffeeshop, either, for the same reason.
I won't do this because:
(1) I don't want a slow internet.
(2) I don't appreciate piracy. I write software for a living, and that means having people pay me for my software. Until you've been on the other side of the fence (i.e. the side of the people trying to earn a living from creating digital media, rather than existing purely in the group of people who benefit from free digital everything), you probably won't understand my viewpoint. And let's face it: the EFF has constantly sided with pirates on issue after issue. I suspect this is the EFF's way of helping pirates by frustrating any enforcement of copyright.
The go-to for libertarians is that the free market is always more efficient. Second, I can claim that I don't need roads or national defense. I can always move elsewhere if someone attacks the country, or I can just assume that free-markets will somehow take care of the problem more efficiently. And third, by saying things like "solid government always preceded the growth of wealth", you're not making an argument from the standpoint of "rights". Rather, you're making an argument from the standpoint of effects - which is the same argument used by everybody else for increased taxes. I could, for example, say that "a well educated populous always precedes the growth of wealth". Now, I've just come up with a justification for taxing everyone to pay for the education of the children (even if none of those children are your own). Of course, libertarians would balk at the idea of government power being used to take wealth from the population in order to accomplish goals (whatever they might be, even if it's education). They could very well cast this as "would it be okay if the police stopped your car and took $1000 out of your bank account because they think they know how to spend your money better than you do? It doesn't matter whether or not it's for a good cause, it's still theft!"
The goal of religions is to spread their message as far and wide as possible - which means not putting it under copyright. Of course, they also have a little thing called the "tithe" which brings in quite a bit more money than any copyright ever has. Even the relatively small Mormon church is close to surpassing the music sales of the RIAA. (The Mormon church reportedly had revenue of $4.7 billion/year back in 1991 - http://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/02/us/income-of-mormon-church-is-put-at-4.7-billion-a-year.html)
Under natural law, you typically only own that which is limited, in such a way you can control its use exclusively. But what about ideas? They aren't limited resources, anyone can create their own instance of an idea, an invention, a writing... http://mises.org/daily/5108/Ideas-Free-and-Unfree-A-Book-Commentary [mises.org]
My disdain for libertarians only seems to deepen the more I hear from them. This is the same website that promotes legalizing drunk driving (http://mises.org/daily/2343). Also, if this viewpoint were actually followed, it means everyone can sell anything - this isn't about free/web-based piracy, but it's about mega-corporations being allowed to print up all the books, movies, software, etc that they want and sell them. This is particularly an issue where the physical format is more valuable than the digital version. It also means movie theaters can show whatever they want without paying any movie production company. The reality is that libertarians don't really think about how their laws would actually impact society, they're completely wrapped up in their notions of "rights" with little appreciation for how they affect other people or society. I'd actually like to hear a libertarian explain why governments have a right to tax the public. I actually don't think they could do it. Even taxes collected for the purpose of national defense or roads aren't defensible within the libertarian framework.
And of course Obama, and any member of the ruling elite, wants more people in a technician role. Supply up; wages down. It's only a matter of time the middle class is eroded sufficiently that onshoring's time will come.
Heh, heh. Gee, that seems like an awfully politically biased statement to make. Assuming that you even could divine Obama's way of thinking (which seems to be a particular talent of right-wingers everywhere), I have to ask: Is Obama more a part of the "ruling elite" than any other president, or are you imaging that Republican Presidents came from and are always part of the middle class?
P.S. Here's a list of the net worth of every US president since Eisenhower:
Dwight David Eisenhower (1953-1961), $8 Million, Eisenhower had no inherited wealth. He served the majority of his career in the military and five years as president of Columbia. Ike owned a large farm near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1961-1963), Although he never inherited his father's fortune, the Kennedy family estate was worth nearly $1 billion dollars. Born into great wealth, Kennedy's wife was oil heiress. His Father was one of the wealthiest men in America, and was the first chairman of the SEC. Almost all of JFK's income and property came from trust shared with other family members.
Lyndon Baines Johnson (1963-1969), $98 Million, Johnson's father lost all of the family's money when LBJ was a boy. Over time, he accumulated 1,500 acres in Blanco County, Texas, which included his home, called the "Texas White House." He and his wife owned a radio and television station in Austin, TX, and had a variety of other moderate holdings, including livestock and private aircraft.
Richard Milhous Nixon (1969-1974), $15 Million, Nixon was born without any inheritance, and was a public servant for most of his life including a term as a Senator from California. "Tricky Dick" made significant sums from series of interviews with David Frost and book advances. He sold his New York townhouse to the Syrian ambassador to the U.S. and purchased a large home in Saddle River, NJ. At various times, Nixon also owned real estate in California and Florida.
Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr. (1974-1977), $7 Million, Ford had no inheritance, and he spent virtually his entire adult life in public service. Over the course of his lifetime, he owned properties in Michigan, Rancho Mirage, and Beaver Creek, Colorado. After he left the White House in 1976, he made nearly $1 million a year from book advances and from serving on the boards of several prominent American companies.
James Earl Carter, (1977-1981), $7 Million, Carter was the son of a prominent Georgia businessman. He was a peanut farmer for almost two decades. Carter left office deeply in debt, but made substantial sums from writing 14 books. Part of a family partnership that owns 2,500 acres in Georgia.
Ronald Wilson Reagan, (1981-1989), $13 Million, Reagan had no inheritance, but his first wife, an actress, had her own money. He was a movie and television actor for over two decades. "The Gipper" owned several pieces of real estate over his lifetime, including 688-acre property near Santa Barbara, California. Reagan was highly paid for his autobiography and as a GE spokesman.
George Herbert Walker Bush (1989-1993), $23 Million, Bush was the son of Prescott Bush, a Connecticut Senator and successful businessman. Aided by his friends in the financial community, he made a number of successful investments. One of his major assets is his home and 100+ acre estate in Kennebunkport, Maine.
William Jefferson Clinton (1993- 2001), $38 Million, Clinton was born with no inheritance, and he made little significant money during 20 plus years of public service. After his time in White House, however, he made a substantial income as an author and public speaker. Clinton received large advance from autobiography. His wife, the secretary of state, has also made mo
Maybe a real password that gives someone access to the device, and a fake password that gives partial access to the device (to make it look like the real password was given) and alerts HQ that the device has been captured - which allows them to feed false information to the device, turns on the camera and microphone so HQ can listen, and also consider rescuing the soldier(s).
I have to admit that seeing the stories on the Huffington post or Natural News doesn't inspire confidence, since those sites are plagued by bad medical information. (The Huffpo has anti-vaccinationists and homeopathy-promoters write articles.) But, I'll ignore that and just go to the data. The article they linked to looked preliminary and seemed to be hunting for any variations in the control vs experimental group. They took this as a potential effect of GMO food. Okay, more research would be needed to confirm those effects. First, if you look at a whole bunch of health measures, you're going to find a handful that will vary with statistical significance. Some of the figures shown in the article (Figures 6 and 7) looked random. It's also interesting that sometimes the effects were reversed for males and females, which makes me think these were just random variation. For example, in this article by Natural News (http://www.naturalnews.com/021784.html), "Male rats lost an average of 3.3 percent of their body weight, and their excretion of phosphorus and sodium decreased. Female rats gained an average of 3.7 percent of their body weight, while their triglyceride levels increased by 24 to 40 percent." The suggestion is that GMO affects male and female rats differently. Presumably, the slight variation in male vs female homones causes opposite effects. Maybe. Or maybe we're just seeing random variation. Certainly, if these results can be reproduced multiple times with larger samples, then it would be notable.
The jury's still out on aspartame, however it does give me an enormous headache if I consume any at all.
Well, okay. Some people have phenylketonuria, too, which is an inability to break down phenylalanine - a component of aspartame (among other things).
It's also a substance which does not exist in any significant quantity in food provided by nature, so your body may or may not be able to handle it.
To be fair, almost nothing we eat is actually natural. Bananas don't exist in nature. Almonds have toxic levels of cyanide in nature. Corn is basically inedible in nature. Tomatoes are unrecognizable. http://deforestationanditseffects.blogspot.com/2010/03/artificial-selection-in-plants-and.html Nature was never interested in creating safe, edible foods for us to eat. It's only through thousands of years of selective breeding that we can eat "natural" food. The main difference, of course, is that we have a longer track-record with "natural" foods, so they're obviously not super-toxic. If any of those natural foods had a mild toxicity, I'm pretty sure we couldn't figure it out without a big study to discover those effects.
> "High blood sugar causes your body damage. It will destroy capillaries in your extremities and retinas, making you blind and gangrenous. Sounds pretty toxic to me."
I assume you mean this happens through type-2 diabetes?
> "potential organ damage from GMO corn"
I agree with Microlith: do you have a source for that? Additionally, "GMO corn" is not one thing. Are you suggesting that some are dangerous (based on individual studies of different varieties of GMO corn) or that GMO corn is dangerous simply because GMO == "Frankenfood", which would be a silly accusation to make?
This is why enemies like zombies and Nazis are so popular in games - because they're unequivocally bad, and therefore, you shouldn't feel bad about shooting them. There are a few exceptions, of course: some games will let you do bad things and those games tend to be controversial (example: Grand Theft Auto and the Call of Duty scene where you're walking through a Russian airport killing civilians). Another common thing games and movies do is not showing you the face of the enemy - showing someone's face humanizes them, which makes killing them seem bad. Examples: Half-Life 2 soldiers have masks over their faces, storm troopers and a whole bunch of other Star Wars baddies have masks, Killzone enemies wear masks. In many cases, even Nazis wear masks (http://ui07.gamespot.com/806/returntocastlewolfenstein_2.jpg). In general, if you're supposed to like someone, they won't have a mask, and if they have a mask, they're probably bad.
(P.S. The Spy and Pyro in Team Fortess are always bad.)
> "A group of file-sharers in Sweden have requested that their religion, Kopimism, be officially recognized in Sweden."
I think they misspelled kleptoism.
Cool. I look forward to never paying you for what you do. Hey, people should do things they love. I'm doing you the favor by not paying you. Did I mention that money is the root of all evil? I'm saving your soul, too.
> "Intellectual property laws are incompatible with Libertarianism."
First, Ayn Rand supported intellectual property.
Second, Libertarians believe a lot of crazy things, so I don't think it's much of a criticism to say "libertarianism disagrees with it". Just the other day, I read an article by a libertarian arguing that drunk driving should be legalized. If you think I'm making that up, then here you go: http://mises.org/daily/2343
> "It isn't supposed to succeed. It's supposed to make a point that the system as it is is completely and utterly broken, and motivate change."
In what way does it do that? By pointing out the ridiculous exceptions we give to religion? Sorry, but this is more ridiculous than the "church of filet mingon" which was formed by prisoners in an attempt to force prison administrators to provide them with free steak. As for a commentary on Intellectual Property, I fail how it does anything at all.
Slashdot Mirror
No kidding. Before you know it, they'll make auto-insurance required by law, just like health insurance!
> "Nonsense, before mass communication was even possible, and before the printing press was invented, books were written, music was composed and paintings were painted, and mostly through philanthropy."
I said they can't get properly paid for their work. This doesn't mean they won't exist at all. Keep in mind that in the year 1450, there were a total of 100 books published *worldwide*. Only rich people with some thoughts on their mind that they wanted to write-down could get published. Music: well, people were getting paid for playing music (though most musicians and actors were terribly poor - it was a horrible profession to be in). Paintings were created because rich patrons were funding them. None of these are great systems. It kind of ridiculous to ask that creators work for free so you can get lots of cool stuff, and ridiculous to ask that rich people pay creators so you can gets lots of cool stuff. If you're the one benefiting, I really don't see the problem saying that you should be paying. Your alternative is asking creators to be the sacrificial sheep for society's benefit.
Personally, I hate this "artificial scarcity" idea that people throw around because it's such a one-sided understanding of the world. Yes, it would be better for society if everyone gave away everything digital for free. Yes, that would (in the short term) create the most benefit for society. But, it's the creators who end up getting screwed in the deal. It's asking creators to take a big hit in being able to survive so that society can benefit. That's asking creators to be martyrs for society; when society isn't willing to to the same back. In the longer term, it would drive lots of creators out of business. This would cause a decline in the money spent on any one particular product, and cause a decline in the number of products made each year. Society would then be worse off - complaining about the cheap stuff (in both senses of the word "cheap") they're getting from creators. So, if you prefer YouTube videos over Star Wars movies and if you prefer Flash Games over Starcraft, then you're going to love the world after "artificial scarcity" has been eliminated by copyright, forcing creators to beg for donations.
> "The art that copyright funds is mostly low-brow and unoriginal entertainment anyway, copyright provides little funding for high art because most consumers aren't sophisticated enough to enjoy it. The hedonistic and wasteful Hollywood blockbuster is dead, but it was a temporary anomaly of the times anyway. Movie theaters will survive, but their main selling point will be the big screen, and not the content. Software "licencing" will be replaced with SaaS and support contracts, or in the case of consumer electronics, funded by hardware manufacturers. Audio recording will be a secondary source of revenue for musicians, after their "meatspace" performances. That's way I see it anyway, irrespective of any attempts at moralisation or legislation"
So, what you're saying is that you will have gained very little by eliminating "artificial scarcity". You're saying that movies will be decimated (and that includes not only the "low brow" movies - as you call them - but all movies, including all the movies you enjoy). I don't want to watch most of the movies that are made, but I want to watch the movies that I want to watch. Under your system, those won't exist, either. I guess the pinnacle of movie-making in your world will be "made for TV movies". Remember how great those are? If you think movies are "low brow" now, you just wait. You can look forward to learning a whole new definition of "low brow".
> "Software "licencing" will be replaced with SaaS and support contracts"
No it won't. There's lots of software that exists today that can't exist under those systems. Single-player games being an obvious example.
I'd add that I see software moving into the cloud, where people *can''t* get it. It's essentially a technical means of enforcing
> "Higher-functioning animals including humans may horde to generate artificial scarcity to raise the overall value of their possession. But highest-functioning animals like humans are capable of doing so for no logical reason other than purely out of spite."
No, artificial scarcity is used because, otherwise, people can't get properly paid for their work. Under a perfect system, everyone would freely share everything digital and the creators of these digital works would be paid by donations from a charitable population so they can afford to live. We don't live in a world that charitable. As a result, we have to resort to things like taxes to pay for things like Medicare and Medicaid; we resort to copyright because the public isn't nearly as charitable as they'd like to believe they are. Artificial scarcity helps bring things back up to their proper valuation (and it can never increase it's value above it's proper valuation because people will simply not pay for it, which leads to a decline in the revenue generated).
By the way, what was his argument? That paying taxes and having that tax money go to charity (e.g. welfare) is "slavery"? (Talk about melodramatic - as if some guy earning six-figures is now compared to African-American slaves because he has to pay a few thousand dollars more in taxes.) Very little of anyone's tax dollars actually goes to welfare. Or maybe he meant things like Medicare and Medicade, which are a significant part of people's taxes. Of course, relying on people to give money (out of charity rather than via taxes) leads to a problem: people never donate anywhere close enough to actually cover the costs, which leads to destitution. Seriously, if you add up all the money Americans give to charity each year (around $300 billion) and compare it to the amount of money spent funding Medicare and medicaid (in the trillions), you'll find that all the charitable contributions a fraction of the money spent on Medicare and medicaid. So, perhaps we could say that "forcing people to pay for this stuff via taxes" is really a symptom of a different problem: "people's unwillingness to contribute enough of their own free will". Besides, people voted (directly or indirectly) for taxes to go to those programs. It's not like this was some decree by the king. So, the randians are left arguing that the will of the majority (who are also taxpayers) are stifling their freedom to not pay.
No, no. Randroids are willing to offer lots of helpful advice. Stuff like "Get a f*cking job ya bum".
Hat tip to chrome and IE for making this easier, but for those who don't already know, there is a way to delete flash cookies. Just click the "delete all sites" button after arriving at this webpage: http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager07.html
I don't believe that up-front funding works very well for media designed for the public. If software and movies were forced to get up-front funding, I see a large contraction in the markets for both of them - the result being that software developers and movie creators having a very difficult time staying in business, a large decline in the amount of money being spent developing the products, and a public which ends up being unhappy with the cheap (in both senses of the word) products being turned out by those industries. In short: everybody loses because up-front funding is such an inferior business model. So, your suggestion that we should get paid when we create something, but not when someone uses it ends up with everyone being unhappy in the long run.
I have to admit, I can't help but think of a statistic I heard recently. The statistic was that, in the year 1450, there were 100 new books published. Last year, there were over a million. Sure, there 20x as many people alive now than in 1450 (estimated at 350 million), but there are 10,000x as many books published. Writing books used to be a luxury only the rich could afford. By creating a system where authors could get compensated through sales, it makes the market much stronger.
As for "it works for physicists and mathematicians" - well, physicists and mathematicians aren't really making things for the mass market, so copyright isn't really an option. You get paid by grants or a corporation, who then make products which can be sold. But, digital media made for the general public isn't something that corporations or governments should want to fund since they can't earn any money from it either. It would be forcing those corporations or governments to act as charities. (Do you really think corporations or governments should be funding the development of a Star Wars movie or the latest Starcraft game, only to give it away to the public?) If you want to know what it's like to create stuff for the general public, like we do, then I suggest going out onto the street and getting the general public (I mean individuals, not businesses or governments) to pay you money for doing physics work.
Actually, if you pay attention to the things the EFF is doing, they do side with pirates. In fact, Von Lohmann, the former main lawyer of the EFF wrote a manual on how pirate websites can continue to help people get pirated media and not be held liable in court. He advised them to setup their networks so that they can't control what goes on in it, and therefore, they can avoid legal liability. I find it terrible that they are teaching criminals how to continue aiding piracy, but avoid getting convicted by the law. There's plenty of examples like this. Also, Lessig and Doctorow (both EFF fellows) will say they support copyright, but they mean "copyright" only in the sense that you can't charge money for pirated media. Lessig seems to support free free piracy (as with the PirateBay), and Doctorow most definitely supports piracy. Doctorow even traveled to Sweden during the PirateBay trial to write articles in support of them. I can list another half-dozen cases where the EFF has sided with pirates. The fact of the matter is that the EFF argues that you can't really have freedom on the internet without the freedom to pirate. They talk about piracy as a "free speech" issue. That's not to say that everything the EFF does is bad or pro-piracy, I'm just saying that on the issue of piracy, they always side with the pirates against copyright and creators.
Oh, and one more: (3) It's a security problem. With tools like Wireshark and FireSheep out there, I don't need someone looking at my webtraffic or taking over my identity. I won't access my email or facebook or my webserver while at the coffeeshop, either, for the same reason.
I won't do this because:
(1) I don't want a slow internet.
(2) I don't appreciate piracy. I write software for a living, and that means having people pay me for my software. Until you've been on the other side of the fence (i.e. the side of the people trying to earn a living from creating digital media, rather than existing purely in the group of people who benefit from free digital everything), you probably won't understand my viewpoint. And let's face it: the EFF has constantly sided with pirates on issue after issue. I suspect this is the EFF's way of helping pirates by frustrating any enforcement of copyright.
... because, God knows, the Chinese government is trustworthy.
The go-to for libertarians is that the free market is always more efficient. Second, I can claim that I don't need roads or national defense. I can always move elsewhere if someone attacks the country, or I can just assume that free-markets will somehow take care of the problem more efficiently. And third, by saying things like "solid government always preceded the growth of wealth", you're not making an argument from the standpoint of "rights". Rather, you're making an argument from the standpoint of effects - which is the same argument used by everybody else for increased taxes. I could, for example, say that "a well educated populous always precedes the growth of wealth". Now, I've just come up with a justification for taxing everyone to pay for the education of the children (even if none of those children are your own). Of course, libertarians would balk at the idea of government power being used to take wealth from the population in order to accomplish goals (whatever they might be, even if it's education). They could very well cast this as "would it be okay if the police stopped your car and took $1000 out of your bank account because they think they know how to spend your money better than you do? It doesn't matter whether or not it's for a good cause, it's still theft!"
The goal of religions is to spread their message as far and wide as possible - which means not putting it under copyright. Of course, they also have a little thing called the "tithe" which brings in quite a bit more money than any copyright ever has. Even the relatively small Mormon church is close to surpassing the music sales of the RIAA. (The Mormon church reportedly had revenue of $4.7 billion/year back in 1991 - http://www.nytimes.com/1991/07/02/us/income-of-mormon-church-is-put-at-4.7-billion-a-year.html)
My disdain for libertarians only seems to deepen the more I hear from them. This is the same website that promotes legalizing drunk driving (http://mises.org/daily/2343). Also, if this viewpoint were actually followed, it means everyone can sell anything - this isn't about free/web-based piracy, but it's about mega-corporations being allowed to print up all the books, movies, software, etc that they want and sell them. This is particularly an issue where the physical format is more valuable than the digital version. It also means movie theaters can show whatever they want without paying any movie production company. The reality is that libertarians don't really think about how their laws would actually impact society, they're completely wrapped up in their notions of "rights" with little appreciation for how they affect other people or society. I'd actually like to hear a libertarian explain why governments have a right to tax the public. I actually don't think they could do it. Even taxes collected for the purpose of national defense or roads aren't defensible within the libertarian framework.
Heh, heh. Gee, that seems like an awfully politically biased statement to make. Assuming that you even could divine Obama's way of thinking (which seems to be a particular talent of right-wingers everywhere), I have to ask: Is Obama more a part of the "ruling elite" than any other president, or are you imaging that Republican Presidents came from and are always part of the middle class?
P.S. Here's a list of the net worth of every US president since Eisenhower:
Maybe a real password that gives someone access to the device, and a fake password that gives partial access to the device (to make it look like the real password was given) and alerts HQ that the device has been captured - which allows them to feed false information to the device, turns on the camera and microphone so HQ can listen, and also consider rescuing the soldier(s).
Well, okay. Some people have phenylketonuria, too, which is an inability to break down phenylalanine - a component of aspartame (among other things).
To be fair, almost nothing we eat is actually natural. Bananas don't exist in nature. Almonds have toxic levels of cyanide in nature. Corn is basically inedible in nature. Tomatoes are unrecognizable. http://deforestationanditseffects.blogspot.com/2010/03/artificial-selection-in-plants-and.html Nature was never interested in creating safe, edible foods for us to eat. It's only through thousands of years of selective breeding that we can eat "natural" food. The main difference, of course, is that we have a longer track-record with "natural" foods, so they're obviously not super-toxic. If any of those natural foods had a mild toxicity, I'm pretty sure we couldn't figure it out without a big study to discover those effects.
> "High blood sugar causes your body damage. It will destroy capillaries in your extremities and retinas, making you blind and gangrenous. Sounds pretty toxic to me."
I assume you mean this happens through type-2 diabetes?
> "potential organ damage from GMO corn"
I agree with Microlith: do you have a source for that? Additionally, "GMO corn" is not one thing. Are you suggesting that some are dangerous (based on individual studies of different varieties of GMO corn) or that GMO corn is dangerous simply because GMO == "Frankenfood", which would be a silly accusation to make?
This is why enemies like zombies and Nazis are so popular in games - because they're unequivocally bad, and therefore, you shouldn't feel bad about shooting them. There are a few exceptions, of course: some games will let you do bad things and those games tend to be controversial (example: Grand Theft Auto and the Call of Duty scene where you're walking through a Russian airport killing civilians). Another common thing games and movies do is not showing you the face of the enemy - showing someone's face humanizes them, which makes killing them seem bad. Examples: Half-Life 2 soldiers have masks over their faces, storm troopers and a whole bunch of other Star Wars baddies have masks, Killzone enemies wear masks. In many cases, even Nazis wear masks (http://ui07.gamespot.com/806/returntocastlewolfenstein_2.jpg). In general, if you're supposed to like someone, they won't have a mask, and if they have a mask, they're probably bad.
(P.S. The Spy and Pyro in Team Fortess are always bad.)
> "A group of file-sharers in Sweden have requested that their religion, Kopimism, be officially recognized in Sweden."
I think they misspelled kleptoism.
What kind of fuel do you think they use in rockets?
Cool. I look forward to never paying you for what you do. Hey, people should do things they love. I'm doing you the favor by not paying you. Did I mention that money is the root of all evil? I'm saving your soul, too.
> "Intellectual property laws are incompatible with Libertarianism."
First, Ayn Rand supported intellectual property.
Second, Libertarians believe a lot of crazy things, so I don't think it's much of a criticism to say "libertarianism disagrees with it". Just the other day, I read an article by a libertarian arguing that drunk driving should be legalized. If you think I'm making that up, then here you go: http://mises.org/daily/2343
> "It isn't supposed to succeed. It's supposed to make a point that the system as it is is completely and utterly broken, and motivate change."
In what way does it do that? By pointing out the ridiculous exceptions we give to religion? Sorry, but this is more ridiculous than the "church of filet mingon" which was formed by prisoners in an attempt to force prison administrators to provide them with free steak. As for a commentary on Intellectual Property, I fail how it does anything at all.