It says you can't "work around any technical limitations in the software". Don't know how exactly to interpret that, but I bet MS will do the interpreting for me.
Question: When you boot up the computer and don't have a connection going, WGA Validation fails, I guess? And pesters you? That'd be awesome, 'cause they could "upgrade" WGA to automatically redirect you to a place where you might be able to rent WiFi for $9.95 a day. Like they do in hotels, and I think Starbuck's.
"You kind of have to prove that they're as restrictive as handcuffs first for your remark to be valid. You guys are just anti-DRM because Slashdot runs constant headlines telling you to think that way..."
It's barely worth replying, but here you go
Things I'd like to do that I can't do with tunes locked up inside Apple's DRM.
1. Sample from them for use in my own songs.
2. Burn 'em to mix discs for friends.
3. Play them on free software mp3 players.
4. Copy them into a soundboard for use in my podcast.
5. Import them to Audacity (e.g. to correct Gould's ridiculous judgment about tempi)
6. Remove the DRM
...
Y'know what, I don't like this line anymore. I actually don't own an iPod or iTune or any of that stuff, so I could well be factually wrong about some of it. Instead let's look at
"...you don't come across any restrictions in normal use."
I choose not to let your or Apple define what is "normal". I want to not come across any restrictions at all; failing that, I'd like to not come across restrictions in legal use.
Oh, and I take offense to the accusation that I'm parroting/. propaganda. So I'm going to find someone else to talk to.
You're right about that. You're not going to argue ethics -- in the sense that you state what logically follows from certain ethical principles. No; you're just going to throw out ethical conclusions as though they're unquestionable when in fact they're hotly debated. You take the "public domain" to be an aberration -- or one of many options available. Wrong. The public domain is the natural habitat of ideas. Jefferson knew this. You have to back up the aberration of copyright with either a pragmatic or ethical argument.
"I also do not think that we should..."; "they should not be required..."; "all humans have a right to survive on their skills". these are ethical propositions that have to be supported with a theory of what is right and wrong. Sorry, but they are.
The last hilarious thing is: you insist you don't want to construct an ethical theory, but w/r/t the other line of reasoning -- the pragmatic one, viz: copyright stimulates science and art -- you agree with me almost perfectly. If "the effect of such change [a 5-10yr copyright] would be negligable on the music and game industries" then Why is the term 100+ years? Why is the State granting 20 times as much stimulus as is needed to achieve roughly the same result? Need a hint? okay:
M_____ Mouse
finally: A good read, explaining clearly the inferiority of the "property" metaphor to describe the nature of creative works.
If you didn't know, in Eldred v. Ashcroft the Supreme Court essentially denies this, saying that the Constitutions language about "Promoting Science and the Useful Arts" is not restrictive. Basically any copyright law Congress passes (and that execs from the "content industry" help them out quite a bit with) is presumed constitutional. Isn't that nice?
"Copyright, wether it be by institutional law or other form of enforcement (limitation of knowledge, or force for example) has been around as long as the ability to copy or forge artistic works has been easily accesible to the everyday citizen"
It's difficult to figure out what you mean here. Copyright as a set of laws restricting people from taking certain actions -- which is what it is -- has not been around very long. The ability to copy artistic works has been around for all of human history. Not even pen and paper is required to "copy", for example, a haiku.
"Without copyright protection we would be without most of the art that we have today"
That's not an ethical argument for copyright. I acknowledge that copyright was useful for a time; lots of great art was created that might not have been otherwise. That's a pragmatic argument. As I said, copyright "is a compromise of freedom intended to promote science and art" and it did exactly that for a time. Since it is a restriction of freedom, though, it must demonstrate its continuing cost-effectiveness.*
"Art through the years has change from a single solitary task, to works that require many people hundreds of thousands of man hours to create."
This is true only if you ignore all the cases where it is not true. Pynchon and Salinger presently create in completely isolated circumstances. And, thousands of years back, people were assembled in huge numbers to construct temples, statues, pyramids, etc. I am actually trying to think of a piece of art from this century that compares in scale with a Gothic cathedral...
"a painting, for example, can not be easily replicated with the same qualities except by someone who is also a painter of the same skill as the original.
"Many Things have changed throughout history and you should not look at something like art in isolation and instead look at it in a grander scope, such as including the technology of replication."
Can't quite find your point here. I define a question and try to answer it; if I'm supposed "look at it in a grander scope" I need to know why the new elements are pertinent to the question. The question here is "Is copyright a natural, moral right or a conventional compromise designed to benefit society in some way?"
If copying harms people in a tangible way, it violates their rights and should be forbidden. If it is a conventional compromise; its existence and nature are subject to adjustment/elimination if it stops providing the benefit.
Your last graf is a doozy. I'll do it in pieces:
"To bad copyright infringment does harm people by taking away their ability to survive in a capitalist society."
The world does not owe anyone a living. If copyright infringement kills people, it should be forbidden based on natural law. But if it impacts people's income, the burden is on them to do something else for a living, or settle for less income. The invention of the automobile took away the ability of lots of horse breeders to "survive" in a capitalist society.
"mass promotion, regardless of production, of art will be a thing of the past"
Except, of course, that it won't. Millions of artists are massively promoting themselves through the Internet, and reaching far more people than old-fashioned paper/poster ad campaigns ever could.
"Sure there will always be artist, such as people who create artistic works in there free time, but they will only be available to a small audiance due to the amount of resources needed to make people aware of the artistic work."
I find it hilarious that you and the exec from the MPAA feel perfectly comfortable telling John Perry Barlow why and in what circumstances people create art. Some do it to make money, some don't. Some that do use a system of patronage, some rely on copyright, some focus on the non-digitizable arts, or the non-digitizable aspects of an art (take music, which is digitizable, but which Barlow created quite profitably by focusing on live
Your posts are so full of basic spelling/english errors that I can barely read them. I will reply to your harebrained arguments tomorrow.
For now, I'll give you a hint: the discussion of art as art is different from the discussion of art as an activity subject to the jurisdiction of whatever political regimes are in place
"just because you can copy something that you should copy it"
But if you can copy (are capable of copying it), then it is allowed unless it harms someone else. This is what free society means.
Copyright does not come from a fundamental moral right to get $X for creating a song of quality Y. It is a compromise of freedom intended to promote science and art
"If those who support the copying of copyrighted materials have their way then art it self will soon be a thing of the past"
Do you understand how ironic and multi-layered your ignorance on this subject is? Copyright is a thing of the present, not of the past; it is a couple hundred years old. There has been art forever. What's fairly new is art as mass-commodity industry and -- yes -- a good many people wouldn't mind if that became a thing of the past.
If you are sending information on which people's lives depend over a wire that you do not control both ends and the middle of, you're going to lose some people. EOF.
It doesn't take long to see that IPI are a bunch of shills. I read some of their stuff awhile back... That said, it's not hypocrisy if you accept the fundamental category called "intellectual property". Defenses of **AA by such folk are just arguments for strong property rights, against "theft". Nothing to do with business models.
The fact that infringement isn't theft doesn't seem to matter much to 'em.
You said: "Why isn't it reasonable that if a company is making money by using someone else's resources- they should have to pay for it?"
and
"www.kadko.com"
So I went and ordered $4,000 worth of Polymeric Silazane Finish. Verizon (my ISP) will shortly be sending you a bill for, y'know, making money off of their network. Does that seem reasonable?
If I had to guess, it's a new sort of semi-vaporware thing they do. Any tech that gets a bit of buzz, they're more or less compelled to announce "we'll be doing that to, in fact we've got a product in the pipeline already." Never mind that their product is too little and too late. Windows users get a cozy feeling from not having to deal with (what they perceive as) "fringe" companies like EMC.
It started with firefox, as I remember it. They ignored it and figured it would go away, then had to shift gears just so it didn't appear that they were sitting around. Microsoft: on the cutting edge of a couple of years ago, as one magazine put it.
You are right; I think it was Coggeshal who said "PHP is forgiving, to a fault". But most of your examples are either going or gone. Recent versions of PHP and/or PHP in the hands of someone who thinks through the design a bit (templating engine instead of inlining, objects/patterns when they make sense) aren't "buggy" or even "bug-prone".
Oh... the word you're looking for is "minanimate" then. (rimshot)
Notice: The word "minanimate" was invented by me and is my intellectual property. Circumventing protection measures in order to unlawfully use the word "minanimate" violates federal criminal law and international treaties, and is punishable by a fine of up to me killing you.
As soon as someone releases a hackable version of the same thing, tolerable versions won't be far behind. Mine's going to look just like Catalina Sandino Moreno
"if you buy bags of pretzels wholesale then sell them at a lower price (or if they were cheap enough, give them away) to people outside the old Pretzel shop, you are indeed doing harm to the pretzel shop owner."
I find this point hilarious. The word for what I'm doing in this case is "undercutting" or -- to use a nicer term == "competing". Generally, this activity is allowed. It is true that competition harms a monopoly, in the sense that it breaks the monopoly and leads to "lost sales". This is the sort of absurdity you run into when you start with garbage premises, e.g.
-that art is business
-that ideas are property
-that copyright infringement is theft
You'll get off the "content industry's" cultural grid completely. Go to creative commons, legaltorrents, "etc. and build up your collection of DRM free music.
It's not that hard. In afternoon you can obtain 20-30 CDs' worth of music. Give it a listen. Any of it that floats your boat, let someone know.
Nothing would please the free culture movement more than to see "piracy" and RIAA record sales both plummet to zero. Now.
Slashdot Mirror
Question: When you boot up the computer and don't have a connection going, WGA Validation fails, I guess? And pesters you? That'd be awesome, 'cause they could "upgrade" WGA to automatically redirect you to a place where you might be able to rent WiFi for $9.95 a day. Like they do in hotels, and I think Starbuck's.
*MS stands for Mark Shuttleworth; if there is a God, this MS will pwn that other one.
It's barely worth replying, but here you go
Things I'd like to do that I can't do with tunes locked up inside Apple's DRM.
1. Sample from them for use in my own songs.
2. Burn 'em to mix discs for friends.
3. Play them on free software mp3 players.
4. Copy them into a soundboard for use in my podcast.
5. Import them to Audacity (e.g. to correct Gould's ridiculous judgment about tempi)
6. Remove the DRM
Y'know what, I don't like this line anymore. I actually don't own an iPod or iTune or any of that stuff, so I could well be factually wrong about some of it. Instead let's look at
"...you don't come across any restrictions in normal use."
I choose not to let your or Apple define what is "normal". I want to not come across any restrictions at all; failing that, I'd like to not come across restrictions in legal use.
Oh, and I take offense to the accusation that I'm parroting /. propaganda. So I'm going to find someone else to talk to.
You're right about that. You're not going to argue ethics -- in the sense that you state what logically follows from certain ethical principles. No; you're just going to throw out ethical conclusions as though they're unquestionable when in fact they're hotly debated. You take the "public domain" to be an aberration -- or one of many options available. Wrong. The public domain is the natural habitat of ideas. Jefferson knew this. You have to back up the aberration of copyright with either a pragmatic or ethical argument.
"I also do not think that we should..."; "they should not be required..."; "all humans have a right to survive on their skills". these are ethical propositions that have to be supported with a theory of what is right and wrong. Sorry, but they are.
The last hilarious thing is: you insist you don't want to construct an ethical theory, but w/r/t the other line of reasoning -- the pragmatic one, viz: copyright stimulates science and art -- you agree with me almost perfectly. If "the effect of such change [a 5-10yr copyright] would be negligable on the music and game industries" then Why is the term 100+ years? Why is the State granting 20 times as much stimulus as is needed to achieve roughly the same result? Need a hint? okay:
M_____ Mouse
finally: A good read, explaining clearly the inferiority of the "property" metaphor to describe the nature of creative works.
Would you like me to put you in the Loosest Set of Handcuffs ever invented? $18.95 today only.
If you didn't know, in Eldred v. Ashcroft the Supreme Court essentially denies this, saying that the Constitutions language about "Promoting Science and the Useful Arts" is not restrictive. Basically any copyright law Congress passes (and that execs from the "content industry" help them out quite a bit with) is presumed constitutional. Isn't that nice?
It's difficult to figure out what you mean here. Copyright as a set of laws restricting people from taking certain actions -- which is what it is -- has not been around very long. The ability to copy artistic works has been around for all of human history. Not even pen and paper is required to "copy", for example, a haiku.
"Without copyright protection we would be without most of the art that we have today"
That's not an ethical argument for copyright. I acknowledge that copyright was useful for a time; lots of great art was created that might not have been otherwise. That's a pragmatic argument. As I said, copyright "is a compromise of freedom intended to promote science and art" and it did exactly that for a time. Since it is a restriction of freedom, though, it must demonstrate its continuing cost-effectiveness.*
"Art through the years has change from a single solitary task, to works that require many people hundreds of thousands of man hours to create."
This is true only if you ignore all the cases where it is not true. Pynchon and Salinger presently create in completely isolated circumstances. And, thousands of years back, people were assembled in huge numbers to construct temples, statues, pyramids, etc. I am actually trying to think of a piece of art from this century that compares in scale with a Gothic cathedral...
"a painting, for example, can not be easily replicated with the same qualities except by someone who is also a painter of the same skill as the original.
"Many Things have changed throughout history and you should not look at something like art in isolation and instead look at it in a grander scope, such as including the technology of replication."
Can't quite find your point here. I define a question and try to answer it; if I'm supposed "look at it in a grander scope" I need to know why the new elements are pertinent to the question. The question here is "Is copyright a natural, moral right or a conventional compromise designed to benefit society in some way?"
If copying harms people in a tangible way, it violates their rights and should be forbidden. If it is a conventional compromise; its existence and nature are subject to adjustment/elimination if it stops providing the benefit.
Your last graf is a doozy. I'll do it in pieces:
"To bad copyright infringment does harm people by taking away their ability to survive in a capitalist society."
The world does not owe anyone a living. If copyright infringement kills people, it should be forbidden based on natural law. But if it impacts people's income, the burden is on them to do something else for a living, or settle for less income. The invention of the automobile took away the ability of lots of horse breeders to "survive" in a capitalist society.
"mass promotion, regardless of production, of art will be a thing of the past"
Except, of course, that it won't. Millions of artists are massively promoting themselves through the Internet, and reaching far more people than old-fashioned paper/poster ad campaigns ever could.
"Sure there will always be artist, such as people who create artistic works in there free time, but they will only be available to a small audiance due to the amount of resources needed to make people aware of the artistic work."
I find it hilarious that you and the exec from the MPAA feel perfectly comfortable telling John Perry Barlow why and in what circumstances people create art. Some do it to make money, some don't. Some that do use a system of patronage, some rely on copyright, some focus on the non-digitizable arts, or the non-digitizable aspects of an art (take music, which is digitizable, but which Barlow created quite profitably by focusing on live
For now, I'll give you a hint: the discussion of art as art is different from the discussion of art as an activity subject to the jurisdiction of whatever political regimes are in place
But if you can copy (are capable of copying it), then it is allowed unless it harms someone else. This is what free society means.
Copyright does not come from a fundamental moral right to get $X for creating a song of quality Y. It is a compromise of freedom intended to promote science and art
"If those who support the copying of copyrighted materials have their way then art it self will soon be a thing of the past"
Do you understand how ironic and multi-layered your ignorance on this subject is? Copyright is a thing of the present, not of the past; it is a couple hundred years old. There has been art forever. What's fairly new is art as mass-commodity industry and -- yes -- a good many people wouldn't mind if that became a thing of the past.
If you are sending information on which people's lives depend over a wire that you do not control both ends and the middle of, you're going to lose some people. EOF.
The fact that infringement isn't theft doesn't seem to matter much to 'em.
I'm still waiting for "solutionate" ... then, of course, "solutionation"
You said: "Why isn't it reasonable that if a company is making money by using someone else's resources- they should have to pay for it?"
and
"www.kadko.com"
So I went and ordered $4,000 worth of Polymeric Silazane Finish. Verizon (my ISP) will shortly be sending you a bill for, y'know, making money off of their network. Does that seem reasonable?
Posted this a sec ago but seems to have disappeared. Roll Call Vote Details
"hands out USB keys"?
"company, that"?
"I work"?
As soon as you used the term "provisionings" we all knew you worked for a Fortune 500 co. Do you "connectorize" stuff, too?
It started with firefox, as I remember it. They ignored it and figured it would go away, then had to shift gears just so it didn't appear that they were sitting around. Microsoft: on the cutting edge of a couple of years ago, as one magazine put it.
"Windows 2003 Server, in fact, led the popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux with nearly 20 percent more annual uptime."
You are right; I think it was Coggeshal who said "PHP is forgiving, to a fault". But most of your examples are either going or gone. Recent versions of PHP and/or PHP in the hands of someone who thinks through the design a bit (templating engine instead of inlining, objects/patterns when they make sense) aren't "buggy" or even "bug-prone".
perl6 is a mistake.
Notice: The word "minanimate" was invented by me and is my intellectual property. Circumventing protection measures in order to unlawfully use the word "minanimate" violates federal criminal law and international treaties, and is punishable by a fine of up to me killing you.
As soon as someone releases a hackable version of the same thing, tolerable versions won't be far behind. Mine's going to look just like Catalina Sandino Moreno
Mine's animate as all hell.
I find this point hilarious. The word for what I'm doing in this case is "undercutting" or -- to use a nicer term == "competing". Generally, this activity is allowed. It is true that competition harms a monopoly, in the sense that it breaks the monopoly and leads to "lost sales". This is the sort of absurdity you run into when you start with garbage premises, e.g.
-that art is business
-that ideas are property
-that copyright infringement is theft
and so on
It's not that hard. In afternoon you can obtain 20-30 CDs' worth of music. Give it a listen. Any of it that floats your boat, let someone know.
Nothing would please the free culture movement more than to see "piracy" and RIAA record sales both plummet to zero. Now.