Why, pray tell, do my "rights" require protection for 70 years after my death? Is some bag-man from the copyright cartel going to deliver a check to my gravesite? Or, are they going to spend it on crack-whores, congress-creeps, or just pocket it.? Doh
f I recall correctly, 17 years (+ 1 optional 17yr renewal) was how US copyrights were set up. Seems plenty fair to me. The first stuff I wrote came out when I was 33, if I die at 76, it will be over 100 years from the time it was published until it enters the public domain. Why!!?? That serves no real useful public purpose. It will serve me not at all.
Why should copyright be inheritable? Can't Johnny and Janie just grow up like everyone else and become useful members of society? Is it fair to them to set them up as useless, parasitic drones, as they will in effect, be being taken care of by the rest of society? It's hardly fair to the rest of us.
Finally, if we are going to consider copyright and other forms of "IP" to be just like real property, e.g. real estate, should it not be treated just like real property, and be taxable like my home? If inheritable, should it not be subject to an estate tax?
Nothing short of eternal copyright and unlimited damages has any chance of satisfying the copyright cartel... and even that may not be enough as their desires are limited only by their imaginations. Like two year olds they want the moon, the stars and... EVERYTHING. They think that they are divine.
So why bother investing in expensive and high risk research when you can just...
patent abstract concepts and processes, then sue the ass of anyone who creates and implements anything vaguely similar to them? or that a jury can be convinced is kinda sorta like them?
This whole thing has seemed overblown from the get go to me. I thought it had been cleared up a while back..obviously not. My guess is that he stepped on some politician's/power broker's toes somehow, and "they" are punishing him this way; it's a classic corrupt government gambit. Vindictive state and local politicos have a lot of ways to screw people who lack friends in high places. Wonder what the poor bastard did, refuse to help some honcho spy on or frame someone?.
A posting from today on NYCL's site indicates that the lead DOJ lawyer in this opinion has a media industry background. Evidently, he was a partner at a law firm that represented a music publisher's association.
Author to author, what would you propose? 20 years in prison? Significant enough? How about death? Still not enough? How about having the accused waterboarded to extract confessions, followed by months of really gruesome torture, then stoning them death? Maybe you'd just like to enslave them and use them as your personal chattel? Never mind, that's pretty close to what these "judgments" do.
Absurd bullcrap like this and the ongoing drive towards eternal copyright (why isn't 17 + 17 years enough?!) discredits copyright and, as someone further up observed, encourages a profound contempt for the law.
I'm an Amazon Prime member, but I won't stay one for long if Amazon starts giving in to extortionate demands like this one.
Agree. I like Amazon & have an Amazon Prime membership. That is toast, if Amazon is going to get all kissy-feeley with the creeps at FOX/Newscorp. Despite a lots of initial skepticism, I was getting progressively more interested in the Kindle. The 1984 debacle restored me to sanity. That Amazon would even consider a bullcrap demand like this puts the Kindle out into Inter-Galactic space for me--and there ain't no warp drives, Scotty.
You are right, this is about creating an atmosphere of fear. One suspects that it has been successful. I have to wonder if the RIAA realize that most people want nothing whatsoever to do with those they fear Could their success in creating fear have contributed to the decline in purchasing? [The vastly increased crappiness of their products is a whole 'nother story]
Microsoft's animated paperclip may be long dead...
Stop right there, mate. Wrong-o. He's alive and well on my box at work. Sleeps in the corner of the screen most of the time, like an old cat. Then when I shut down Word &/or Excel at the end of the day, he jumps on his bike & heads home. Clip's not hurtin' no one, why are people so hateful to him? Do you have any idea of how hard rumors like this are on Clippy's family?! Even if you hate him, won't you please think of his children?!!!
it is a fact that that Microsoft sued Tom-Tom. It is your belief that they had some passion for some [unspecified] Tom-Tom patents.
Assuming that you are 100% correct, I don't get a warm fuzzy felling about it. YMMV. Examining the same set of facts, it looks to me like a calculated act of cold brutality, an act that was certain to get an awful lot of attention. Nothing to sing "Koombaya" about that I can see. Were I guessing, I'd guess that Microsoft decided it was time to teach everyone a lesson, obviously, "Fear us!," That probably makes sense from their perspective, after all, Microsoft's savage destruction of Netscape (which had the gall to refuse to join Microsoft in an illegal partitioning of the browser market) is practically ancient history. Miscosoft will always be happy to offer linux, the BSDs et al. ropes, 'cuz they own the boss-end. Feel free to tie it around your neck and... whatever. Pardon me, if I don't join in the celebration, I gotta go look up the words to Koombaya. Can it be sung to "Siegfried's Death March from Goetterdaemmerung?
apps that really can run anywhere without a whole lot of extra work.
Write any app you want with any language you choose. Run it on anything you wish.... But if it is mono-based or has any mono-dependency whatsoever, it's not going to run on any hardware that I own. I avoid mono-apps and won't install any distro in which mono is a part of the default install. I'll believe mono is safe when I see Steve Ballmer, Richard Stallman, Steve Jobs, and Theo de Raadt singing "Koombaya" together on the same stage.
kws@frozenhell~$ man Ballmer+Stallman+Jobs+de_Raadt
kws@frozenhell~$ segfault... this system is going down permanently...now
Its time for her to fess up, quit trying to play the victim, and settle for a few thousand dollars.
It is too late to settle, she now owes them $1,920,000, and it is a legal debt which will be joyfully enforced by "our" courts of "justice" and the rest of "our" government. SInce she seems to have been guilty, some kind of fine is appropriate, like $750 per song, if that. This is ridiculous. She can kiss her life goodbye. Do two wrongs make a right these days?
Some enterprising lawyer needs to reopen the Sony rootkit case and pursue a judgment of... I dunno... say $1,920,000 (a random number, I assure you) each for every last one of the thousands of computers compromised by Sony. This award sets a great precedent for absurd jury awards. If that works, they should go after all of the other music and media companies that have root-kitted, or otherwise compromised peoples computers. Isn't what's good for the goose good for the ganders?. Seems fair enough to me. Don't bother to complain that the media cartels will be wiped out. Read my lips: I don't care. Go ahead and mod me down into hell, now, media sockpuppets. I don't care about that either.
And many happy returns!
on
Unix Turns 40
·
· Score: 1
Hope NYCL is correct about the RIAA motions failing. Should they succeed, it's like the prosecution calling the defense shots. How does she get a fair trial? Wouldn't something like this be more apropos to either a) trying to bring up something new after the trial has commenced, or b) an appeal situation? NYCL?
Care to demonstrate how demanding >$150K per downloaded song, when songs were $1.00 at Amazon etc. and which (IIRC) not even the RIAA claims to have been subsequently shared) is unselfish, or equitable, or even only a little greedy? Downloading is not right and the artists have a right to be compensated, but I fail to see how ruining someone's life is appropriate. As for the artists who support (either actively or by their silence) the RIAA campaign against their customers, may they share the fate of the music industry, which I personally hope is very bleak. Two wrongs != one right.
For a while, when the music industry seemed to have halted its wanton campaign of lawsuits, I started buying CDs again. Now I've stopped, despite the fact that I'd love to have the latest Melody Gardot release, or some of Lara Fabian's albums. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. It will take years to convince me to buy again. And NO, I don't download.
This is all supposed to be about teaching people a lesson. Success! However, I suspect that the lesson most people are learning is not the one Big Music intended to teach.
Bits & pieces of the Catalog of Womenor Eoiai have been around a long time for example. One edition of Hesiod includes the Catalog as well as Theogony and Works and Days. It would be interesting if the whole thing, which I gather to have been about 5000 lines of which we have perhaps 1000, could be reconstructed. Opening invocation (from Wikipedia):
Sing now of the tribe of women, sweet-voiced Olympian Muses,
daughters of aigis-bearing Zeus: those women who were the noblest,
and had sex with gods.
I can see the headlines: "Ancient Scandals Involving Gods and Mortal Women Exposed at Last!!!"
What would people say if this was done on their phone lines?
Why does anyone think its not done on our phone lines? Weren't the telcos just give retroactive immunity for this last year? Didn't the Feds prosecute and jail the only telco head who refused to co-operate?
They are boiling the frog slowly. At some point it will be said that "people who have nothing to hide" don't need curtains, later that they should not object to having cameras in every room in the house ( a la 1984). Then these things will be legally required and only criminals will object. Doesn't seem to matter whether its the Democri-fascists or the Republi-fascists. We've been sold out. Bye-bye, Constitution.
Quite well. It's a great motivator to get things done, when you realise that this life is the only one you have, and there's no pie-in-the-sky after life in which you can do things at your leisure.
Funny that the same is true for me. Those who say they know what lies in the house of death have never been there; and those who have gone... say nothing. (Someone else's observation, BTW, I can't remember whose).
to go away from among men, if there are gods, is not a thing to be afraid of, for the gods will not involve thee in evil; but if indeed they do not exist, or if they have no concern about human affairs, what is it to me to live in a universe devoid of gods or devoid of Providence? --Marcus Aurelius, "Book 2" #11 George Long's translation
Depends on whose God we are talking about. Mine cares about his/her creation, and helps when earnestly asked. A God who cares, choses to not be immune.
If RIAA discloses their super-secret methods, the terrorists win!
In what way are the RIAA, MPAA not terrorists? All this stuff is supposedly about scaring people into giving them what they want: $$$$$$$$$$$$$
Seriously, this Star Chamber stuff seems like a cause for great concern.(1) What's next the RIAA, MPAA, and BSA get to waterboard defendants? After all, it's supposedly not torture, and it seems like the natural progression of the corporate welfare state, that is a state dedicated solely to welfare of large corporations regardless of the effect on its citizens--at least on the "proles"
(1) Ironically, the original Star Chamber was set up "to ensure the fair enforcement of laws against prominent people, those so powerful that ordinary courts could never convict them of their crimes." Star Chamber. We may expect that the new Star Chambers will be set up for the opposite purpose: to insure the immunity of the powerful and oppress the rest of us. To paraphrase John W. Campbell, power does not corrupt, if it did, God would be the ultimate in corruption; immunity corrupts, and absolute immunity corrupts absolutely. Politicians and corporations are already virtually immune to meaningful sanctions, woe unto us if they are allowed to become absolutely immune.
Slashdot Mirror
Good questions. I havesome questions, too:
Why, pray tell, do my "rights" require protection for 70 years after my death? Is some bag-man from the copyright cartel going to deliver a check to my gravesite? Or, are they going to spend it on crack-whores, congress-creeps, or just pocket it.? Doh
f I recall correctly, 17 years (+ 1 optional 17yr renewal) was how US copyrights were set up. Seems plenty fair to me. The first stuff I wrote came out when I was 33, if I die at 76, it will be over 100 years from the time it was published until it enters the public domain. Why!!?? That serves no real useful public purpose. It will serve me not at all.
Why should copyright be inheritable? Can't Johnny and Janie just grow up like everyone else and become useful members of society? Is it fair to them to set them up as useless, parasitic drones, as they will in effect, be being taken care of by the rest of society? It's hardly fair to the rest of us.
Finally, if we are going to consider copyright and other forms of "IP" to be just like real property, e.g. real estate, should it not be treated just like real property, and be taxable like my home? If inheritable, should it not be subject to an estate tax?
Nothing short of eternal copyright and unlimited damages has any chance of satisfying the copyright cartel... and even that may not be enough as their desires are limited only by their imaginations. Like two year olds they want the moon, the stars and ... EVERYTHING. They think that they are divine.
So why bother investing in expensive and high risk research when you can just...
patent abstract concepts and processes, then sue the ass of anyone who creates and implements anything vaguely similar to them? or that a jury can be convinced is kinda sorta like them?
This whole thing has seemed overblown from the get go to me. I thought it had been cleared up a while back ..obviously not. My guess is that he stepped on some politician's/power broker's toes somehow, and "they" are punishing him this way; it's a classic corrupt government gambit. Vindictive state and local politicos have a lot of ways to screw people who lack friends in high places. Wonder what the poor bastard did, refuse to help some honcho spy on or frame someone?.
A posting from today on NYCL's site indicates that the lead DOJ lawyer in this opinion has a media industry background. Evidently, he was a partner at a law firm that represented a music publisher's association.
Author to author, what would you propose? 20 years in prison? Significant enough? How about death? Still not enough? How about having the accused waterboarded to extract confessions, followed by months of really gruesome torture, then stoning them death? Maybe you'd just like to enslave them and use them as your personal chattel? Never mind, that's pretty close to what these "judgments" do.
Absurd bullcrap like this and the ongoing drive towards eternal copyright (why isn't 17 + 17 years enough?!) discredits copyright and, as someone further up observed, encourages a profound contempt for the law.
Agree. I like Amazon & have an Amazon Prime membership. That is toast, if Amazon is going to get all kissy-feeley with the creeps at FOX/Newscorp. Despite a lots of initial skepticism, I was getting progressively more interested in the Kindle. The 1984 debacle restored me to sanity. That Amazon would even consider a bullcrap demand like this puts the Kindle out into Inter-Galactic space for me--and there ain't no warp drives, Scotty.
You are right, this is about creating an atmosphere of fear. One suspects that it has been successful. I have to wonder if the RIAA realize that most people want nothing whatsoever to do with those they fear Could their success in creating fear have contributed to the decline in purchasing? [The vastly increased crappiness of their products is a whole 'nother story]
Stop right there, mate. Wrong-o. He's alive and well on my box at work. Sleeps in the corner of the screen most of the time, like an old cat. Then when I shut down Word &/or Excel at the end of the day, he jumps on his bike & heads home. Clip's not hurtin' no one, why are people so hateful to him? Do you have any idea of how hard rumors like this are on Clippy's family?! Even if you hate him, won't you please think of his children?!!!
Add www.ap.org and hosted.ap.org to hosts file.
it is a fact that that Microsoft sued Tom-Tom. It is your belief that they had some passion for some [unspecified] Tom-Tom patents.
... whatever. Pardon me, if I don't join in the celebration, I gotta go look up the words to Koombaya. Can it be sung to "Siegfried's Death March from Goetterdaemmerung?
Assuming that you are 100% correct, I don't get a warm fuzzy felling about it. YMMV. Examining the same set of facts, it looks to me like a calculated act of cold brutality, an act that was certain to get an awful lot of attention. Nothing to sing "Koombaya" about that I can see. Were I guessing, I'd guess that Microsoft decided it was time to teach everyone a lesson, obviously, "Fear us!," That probably makes sense from their perspective, after all, Microsoft's savage destruction of Netscape (which had the gall to refuse to join Microsoft in an illegal partitioning of the browser market) is practically ancient history. Miscosoft will always be happy to offer linux, the BSDs et al. ropes, 'cuz they own the boss-end. Feel free to tie it around your neck and
Write any app you want with any language you choose. Run it on anything you wish.... But if it is mono-based or has any mono-dependency whatsoever, it's not going to run on any hardware that I own. I avoid mono-apps and won't install any distro in which mono is a part of the default install. I'll believe mono is safe when I see Steve Ballmer, Richard Stallman, Steve Jobs, and Theo de Raadt singing "Koombaya" together on the same stage.
... this system is going down permanently ...now
;-)
kws@frozenhell~$ man Ballmer+Stallman+Jobs+de_Raadt
kws@frozenhell~$ segfault
It is too late to settle, she now owes them $1,920,000, and it is a legal debt which will be joyfully enforced by "our" courts of "justice" and the rest of "our" government. SInce she seems to have been guilty, some kind of fine is appropriate, like $750 per song, if that. This is ridiculous. She can kiss her life goodbye. Do two wrongs make a right these days?
... I dunno ... say $1,920,000 (a random number, I assure you) each for every last one of the thousands of computers compromised by Sony. This award sets a great precedent for absurd jury awards. If that works, they should go after all of the other music and media companies that have root-kitted, or otherwise compromised peoples computers. Isn't what's good for the goose good for the ganders?. Seems fair enough to me. Don't bother to complain that the media cartels will be wiped out. Read my lips: I don't care. Go ahead and mod me down into hell, now, media sockpuppets. I don't care about that either.
Some enterprising lawyer needs to reopen the Sony rootkit case and pursue a judgment of
Bravo!
Hope NYCL is correct about the RIAA motions failing. Should they succeed, it's like the prosecution calling the defense shots. How does she get a fair trial? Wouldn't something like this be more apropos to either a) trying to bring up something new after the trial has commenced, or b) an appeal situation? NYCL?
Care to demonstrate how demanding >$150K per downloaded song, when songs were $1.00 at Amazon etc. and which (IIRC) not even the RIAA claims to have been subsequently shared) is unselfish, or equitable, or even only a little greedy? Downloading is not right and the artists have a right to be compensated, but I fail to see how ruining someone's life is appropriate. As for the artists who support (either actively or by their silence) the RIAA campaign against their customers, may they share the fate of the music industry, which I personally hope is very bleak. Two wrongs != one right.
For a while, when the music industry seemed to have halted its wanton campaign of lawsuits, I started buying CDs again. Now I've stopped, despite the fact that I'd love to have the latest Melody Gardot release, or some of Lara Fabian's albums. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. It will take years to convince me to buy again. And NO, I don't download.
This is all supposed to be about teaching people a lesson. Success! However, I suspect that the lesson most people are learning is not the one Big Music intended to teach.
The RIAA is exposed (again) as lying sacks of pig-shit. By next week the Congress will have been exposed (again) as gutless wimps/corporate whores.
I can see the headlines: "Ancient Scandals Involving Gods and Mortal Women Exposed at Last!!!"
Why does anyone think its not done on our phone lines? Weren't the telcos just give retroactive immunity for this last year? Didn't the Feds prosecute and jail the only telco head who refused to co-operate?
They are boiling the frog slowly. At some point it will be said that "people who have nothing to hide" don't need curtains, later that they should not object to having cameras in every room in the house ( a la 1984). Then these things will be legally required and only criminals will object. Doesn't seem to matter whether its the Democri-fascists or the Republi-fascists. We've been sold out. Bye-bye, Constitution.
Who do you suppose lobbied for and were given all those tax breaks and loopholes? Mom & Pop's Bike Repair? Wasn't me. How about you?
American media is not usually government owned though.
Actually, American government is media-owned: executive, legislature, and judiciary. Full Stop. End message.
Quite well. It's a great motivator to get things done, when you realise that this life is the only one you have, and there's no pie-in-the-sky after life in which you can do things at your leisure.
Funny that the same is true for me. Those who say they know what lies in the house of death have never been there; and those who have gone ... say nothing. (Someone else's observation, BTW, I can't remember whose).
YMMV ;-)
So, how is choosing to believe that God is a silly notion working out for you?
Depends on whose God we are talking about. Mine cares about his/her creation, and helps when earnestly asked. A God who cares, choses to not be immune.
If RIAA discloses their super-secret methods, the terrorists win!
In what way are the RIAA, MPAA not terrorists? All this stuff is supposedly about scaring people into giving them what they want: $$$$$$$$$$$$$
Seriously, this Star Chamber stuff seems like a cause for great concern.(1) What's next the RIAA, MPAA, and BSA get to waterboard defendants? After all, it's supposedly not torture, and it seems like the natural progression of the corporate welfare state, that is a state dedicated solely to welfare of large corporations regardless of the effect on its citizens--at least on the "proles"
(1) Ironically, the original Star Chamber was set up "to ensure the fair enforcement of laws against prominent people, those so powerful that ordinary courts could never convict them of their crimes." Star Chamber. We may expect that the new Star Chambers will be set up for the opposite purpose: to insure the immunity of the powerful and oppress the rest of us. To paraphrase John W. Campbell, power does not corrupt, if it did, God would be the ultimate in corruption; immunity corrupts, and absolute immunity corrupts absolutely. Politicians and corporations are already virtually immune to meaningful sanctions, woe unto us if they are allowed to become absolutely immune.