That's not what I was saying - what I was trying to say is that those authors were willing to sue somebody based on plagiarism of a simple (but funny) visual concept, but they have probably used quite a few visual concepts in their own creative work that they either saw or read somewhere else, but they probably didn't go out of their way to credit or pay the sources for the inspiration.
So they are being hypocritical by insisting that they get paid for every recognizable visual concept that they happened to describe in their own novels, when they have probably similarly used quite a few concepts that they have seen or read into their own works.
What we need, in the face of this ongoing deluge of laws put forth by the distinguished lawyer-politicians of the world as they panic in the face of the ubiquitous spread of new technologies,
What we need in this ongoing deluge of laws is a concerted public and global effort to make those "distinguished" lawyer-politicians completely and utterly powerless. Allow them make laws until the cows come home, but make sure only most the basic, common-sense ones can be enforced.
After they get done screaming about the sky falling, and then realizing that everyone is ignoring them & getting on with their lives, then those lawyer-politicians can go do something useful like running a hotel or designing cars or something.
(Yeah, nice daydream - but I suspect nothing will happen until the current legislative framework collapses under its own weight. The U.S. legal system looks like a massive legacy COBOL system ready to collapse into a pile of contradictory & buggy spaghetti at any moment, and the rest of the world seems prepared to follow the U.S. over the cliff.)
You've got a really distorted view of intellectual & private property - I really hope you're just joking. Just in case you're not:
The recipient of intellectual "property" is expected, without basis in natural law, to contribute to the upkeep of the author by respecting his "rights" over the property now in posession of the recipient.
If it was _really_ a matter of charity, then the recipient would only be asked for a donation to help support the author. In the IP world though, the recipient is FORCED to follow the IP owner's terms if they don't want their ass sued off. _That_ situation is not a matter of charity - it's a matter of greed.
Also, the exchange of intellectual "property" is not a contract. Contracts imply tangible exchange of property, and equal control on the part of both parties. A copy of a work is naturally beyond the continued control of the original author. Once intellectual property has been exchanged, for the original author to claim control over copies has no basis in natural law.
This is about the only thing I can find to agree with you - and I can't figure out how you connect this with your other statements!
Exchange of property "rights" is no longer implied unless explicitly granted. When you buy a stick of gum, you haven't purchased the right to eat it unless specifically told. Purchasing a good or service doesn't grant the right to complain about it.
Now you're just getting weird. Buying a stick of gum DOES mean you have the right eat it - unless specifically prohibited by law or contract. And you don't even have to purchase a good or service to complain about it - as long as you're not lying about it, you can complain about anything you want.
human soldiers in a war are more alive than automatons.
After being forced to participate in a long grinding war, I suspect that many human soldiers are more like automatons than society would be comfortable with.
Dunno how dangerous "ionized" water is - certainly not as dangerous as letting the radiation hit the water in your body, and I believe that there are standard techniques for creating "deionized" water or bleeding off the extra charge from arriving beta particles.
As far as radiation goes, I believe you are talking about the radioactive particles from space that are left in the water after they have been slowed down, or perhaps the creation of deuterium & tritium from high-energy collisions? Again, I believe that the results are pretty low level - hydrogen & oxygen don't exactly fission into radioactive particles easily (unlike stuff like uranium).
I think the primary byproduct of the captured particles from space will probably be alpha (bare helium nuclei) and beta (high-energy electronics) particles, so you could probably harvest the resultant accumulated helium gas over time.
As far as gamma rays are concerned, I don't think they can fission hydrogen & oxygen atoms (unless you're talking energy levels high enough to reduce basic particles to quarks, in which case your spaceship/spacestation has bigger problems), so a thick enough wall of water with an inner wall of lead or something similarly dense should be enough to protect against almost anything. (I guess it would be a bad idea to have your water in direct contact with lead:-)
Of course, there's always the possibility of a neutrino blast (like when a star goes nova or supernova), but we don't really have any way of defending against that whether we are in a spaceship/station or on a planet.
Apparently you think the product of artists & such are SO much more valuable than people would be willing to pay for them in free market, that you think it's fine to give them more protection under the law than any other kind of craftsperson. Of course you can't justify _why_ their products are so much more valuable than anyone elses except through vague emotional appeals & attacks, but whatever...
Since you haven't gotten anything new or of substance to say, I've lost interest - you needn't bother replying, since I won't bother reading.
raises the amount of available luxuries due to the advantages in efficiencies of different countries.
That's pretty worthless if you have no job to buy anything. You'll end up like the poorest Russians just after the Soviet Union collapsed looking at the nice loaves of bread on the shelves & wishing you could afford one.
net increase in efficiency achieved by hiring cheaper foreign labor should cause more jobs to open up than were taken.
How do you figure that? I haven't heard of any inherent economic mechanism that causes new jobs to automatically open up in the old labor market when existing jobs are outsourced.
FWIW, as a fromer member of the armed forces I can say if it comes down to large scale civil insurrection where sending the [FBI|BATF|DEA] isn't enough, you'll likely find yourself standing next to a lot of the US military rather than in front of it.
That's actually one of the GOOD things about having a military which is drawn primarily from the general population. It doesn't go over too well when a tyrant wanna-be tells them to mow down their friends & family.
I think it's a pretty typical tactic for tyrant-wannabes to assemble a large elite police force, make sure they don't have too much contact with the general population, give them lots of privileges, and deliberately do things which make the general population hate them (which further isolates them from the general population).
Impossible. For China to succeed while paying lip service to IP laws, they need the "First World" countries to create IP.
Without IP laws, there would be no creation to begin with.
Total B.S.
People have been creating intellectual works like crazy throughout human history, all in the total absence of IP laws, and _without_ access to our humongous scientific/engineering knowledge & easy distribution of information.
The _only_ things that IP laws have done is permit a monied subset of society to try to retard & exploit cultural & scientific innovation & progress. Society would be MUCH better off without those parasites.
Yep. But we didn't allow Americans to steal from Americans did we?
Sure we did - rich Americans stole ideas from poor ones all the time, and often used the IP laws to do it.
You should go read up on French history before advocating the elimination of Copyright.
Do you have anything particular in mind? The entirety of French history is a bit much for me to automatically know what you are talking about.
Free markets work pretty well at efficiently allocating resources to meet societal demand, and when given enough time.
Unfortunately, complete laissez-faire capitalism has a bad positive feedback mechanism where people who more resources also have more ability to collect more resources, so you end up with the end result of a small number of rich people and a huge percentage of the population struggling to stay alive by feeding on the crumbs of the rich people.
For a good, healthy society you need some kind of neutral, non-single-human-controlled systemic-mechanism for (hear the rich people gasp in horror) wealth distribution - preferably back to the lowest rungs of the economic classes. (I prefer to think of this as bubble-up economics, the opposite of trickle-down economics.)
(Before the anti-welfare activists go apoplectic, I'll mention that I think it would be a BAD idea to hand the money out to everyone like the current welfare system - but there are quite a few other avenues to redistribute wealth without having the same bad effects.)
If you've got an economic system like that, then you'll have enough dynamic upward class mobility that the unfortunates at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder will have hope that they can climb higher, and you'll have a continual flow of new minds coming from below engaging with the economic engine.
Why is it that you are allowed to sell your bread, but I am apparently not allowed to sell my book?
Go ahead and sell your book, for whatever you can get for it. If you want to keep getting money, you'd better be prepared to sell more books, just like I would have to keep baking bread to keep getting paid for them.
I wouldn't expect to sell a piece of bread & then expect to get paid every time it changed hands, got eaten, used as fertilizer & turned back into grain. Only a greedy person would expect that.
Why can you steal and enjoy my book because you don't like my price, but I can't steal and enjoy your bread because I don't like your price?
Are you talking about stealing books, or copying them? Because it's not the same action, no matter how much you try to bend the language.
Why you so special that you are automatically entitled to the results of my work?
Sorry, first you have to explain why you think you're so special that you can override my private property rights.
If I buy that book from you, it becomes my property. In a normal market situation, that would be the end of it - I could do whatever I wanted with my private property, and it would be none of your damn business.
IP laws violate private property rights, pure and simple - and there had better be a better reason than "I deserve more money!" to justify overriding people's private property rights.
You buy a CD. The CD is your private property - you paid for the physical product, didn't sign a contract giving up your rights, etc. Without IP law, you would be free to make copies of the CD & give the copies to friends. With IP law, you can't. Therefore IP law is restricting your private property rights. That's one relevant example.
Patents: you spend all your time, skill & money developing a cool new product. You try and sell it - only to get your ass sued off by someone who managed to file some papers first. That's an example where you can't use your own property, labor & time to make a living - not because of anything you did, but because of what the law is letting someone else do to you.
"Bad business model" is such a ridiculous piece of terminology
What's so ridiculous about it? If you can't make a living in a free market even if you executed your business model perfectly, then it was a bad business model. Important clue: a free market doesn't include getting special laws passed to protect your bad business model.
But you see, without IP protection, you can't because they're right up with you the second you release something.
If somebody can take your idea & do it better than you can, so fast that you don't have a headstart - well, then either it wasn't much of an idea, or you weren't the best person to implement the idea. Either way, society wins.
Your problem is that you just can't conceive that society would get along perfectly fine without big media conglomerates & Hollywood being able to generate hundred-million dollar blockbusters. Society would do just FINE without that those companies, artists & other creators would find ways of making a living which wouldn't depend on companies like that, and the resultant entertainment would be a helluva lot more original, widespread, diverse & creative.
It's called property rights, and it's one of the most important elements of a capitalist economy.
Since IP laws function by overriding basic property rights related to REAL property (preventing people from doing whatever they want with their own real private property), I think you've got a major flaw in your viewpoint. As soon as you give a rational explanation how "ideas" qualify as any kind of real property, then you can argue from the viewpoint of property rights.
If you put your brainpower and effort into developing something, yet it gives you no competitive advantage (because everyone else could call it their own with no property rights, intellectual or otherwise)
That would be called: making a bad business decision. If you make enough of those, you deserve to go out of business. Most honest businesspeople wouldn't expect to get special laws passed that would support their bad business model though.
you'll have zero motiviation to develop something original:
There's _always_ incentive to do that - you want to stay ahead of the competition. The only change is that without IP laws if you want to KEEP ahead of the competition, then you'll have to KEEP innovating - you won't be able to sit on your laurels & litigate against your competition.
Because that someone else didn't put any resources into developing the idea, but you did.
Just because you did a lot of work/spent a lot of resources developing something doesn't mean you "deserve" to make money on it. If you can't sell it in a free market at a price people are willing to pay, then your "idea" wasn't worth all the effort/resources you put into it and your business model is broken. It's as simple as that.
Some people seem to think they should get special legal protection so that they can make a failed business model work though. I sure wish I was rich & powerful enough to get special laws to protect my stupid business ideas. I guess I have to settle for producing goods or services at a price that people are willing to pay.
I suppose I'm supposed to go around reading aloud the book I wrote in the hopes people will pay me for that. And of course, the entire cast of The Matrix will need to put on a play or three in order to get paid.
Just because YOU can't figure out a way for authors & entertainers to make a living doesn't mean that free market won't. It just means that you're not smart enough.
BS. The fact is that the "information wants to be free" crowd is nothing more than a bunch of cheap parasites who'd steal whatever it is that isn't locked down, and that they think they could get away with. They are, after all, "entitled" to it.
I believe that is the IP owners who are claiming they are "entitled" to more money than people would otherwise be willing to give them. Apparently, they're not willing to make a living by continually working for it - they want special laws that let them milk each creative work for much more than it was actually worth.
Information is not free. Information doesn't just magically appear out of thin air. Information takes time, talent, effort, and dollars to create. It requires an investment. Our constitution recognizes that fact.
The Constitution "recognizes" that the government should try to promote the Arts & Sciences for the general good of society. It doesn't say _anything_ about giving a free handout to artists "because they've got to work SOOOO hard", or letting big businesses get control over that kind of work & use IP laws to discourage innovation in our society.
And until food is free, housing is free, medicine is free, education is free, transportation is free, and so on, most information (books, movies, games, software, music) is NOT going to be free.
Gods, another ignorant who doesn't believe the world existed before "modern" society.
There has been music/performances/writing going on through recorded human history, WITHOUT IP protection, and in societies where all that food/housing/medicine/education/transporation/so on was MUCH harder to get than it is now.
Society doesn't _need_ IP laws for that stuff to happen. IP laws just get in the way of that kind of stuff happening. There would a LOT more distributed & diverse culture occuring if IP laws didn't exist.
Of course, rich people who want to build global media conglomerates to control a lot of that information might be annoyed, but I'm sure society can get along quite well without them.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not what I was saying - what I was trying to say is that those authors were willing to sue somebody based on plagiarism of a simple (but funny) visual concept, but they have probably used quite a few visual concepts in their own creative work that they either saw or read somewhere else, but they probably didn't go out of their way to credit or pay the sources for the inspiration.
So they are being hypocritical by insisting that they get paid for every recognizable visual concept that they happened to describe in their own novels, when they have probably similarly used quite a few concepts that they have seen or read into their own works.
More power to 'em, 'cause I'm sure they've never lifted any funny visual concepts from anyone else.
Bible, Christian mythology. Either way, they're stories. Not very good stories, but just stories.
Before you go dissing an ancient mythology, please prove the truth of your own. And if you can't, then keep your prejudices to yourself.
What we need in this ongoing deluge of laws is a concerted public and global effort to make those "distinguished" lawyer-politicians completely and utterly powerless. Allow them make laws until the cows come home, but make sure only most the basic, common-sense ones can be enforced.
After they get done screaming about the sky falling, and then realizing that everyone is ignoring them & getting on with their lives, then those lawyer-politicians can go do something useful like running a hotel or designing cars or something.
(Yeah, nice daydream - but I suspect nothing will happen until the current legislative framework collapses under its own weight. The U.S. legal system looks like a massive legacy COBOL system ready to collapse into a pile of contradictory & buggy spaghetti at any moment, and the rest of the world seems prepared to follow the U.S. over the cliff.)
You've got a really distorted view of intellectual & private property - I really hope you're just joking. Just in case you're not:
If it was _really_ a matter of charity, then the recipient would only be asked for a donation to help support the author. In the IP world though, the recipient is FORCED to follow the IP owner's terms if they don't want their ass sued off. _That_ situation is not a matter of charity - it's a matter of greed.
This is about the only thing I can find to agree with you - and I can't figure out how you connect this with your other statements!
Now you're just getting weird. Buying a stick of gum DOES mean you have the right eat it - unless specifically prohibited by law or contract. And you don't even have to purchase a good or service to complain about it - as long as you're not lying about it, you can complain about anything you want.
Whereas "intellectual property" is more concerned with forcing others to be selfish?
After being forced to participate in a long grinding war, I suspect that many human soldiers are more like automatons than society would be comfortable with.
Only of companies that sell software as a retail product.
For companies & individuals providing service for open source-based products, business is booming.
I wonder if they tried to beat any union organizers who were registered members of the NRA.
Ah, my petard is hoist by my lack of literal interpretation. Oh well...
Sounds like you worked too hard to get that result - typical for a college student.
For a typical C compiler, try a file containing:
Too easy.
Dunno how dangerous "ionized" water is - certainly not as dangerous as letting the radiation hit the water in your body, and I believe that there are standard techniques for creating "deionized" water or bleeding off the extra charge from arriving beta particles.
:-)
As far as radiation goes, I believe you are talking about the radioactive particles from space that are left in the water after they have been slowed down, or perhaps the creation of deuterium & tritium from high-energy collisions? Again, I believe that the results are pretty low level - hydrogen & oxygen don't exactly fission into radioactive particles easily (unlike stuff like uranium).
I think the primary byproduct of the captured particles from space will probably be alpha (bare helium nuclei) and beta (high-energy electronics) particles, so you could probably harvest the resultant accumulated helium gas over time.
As far as gamma rays are concerned, I don't think they can fission hydrogen & oxygen atoms (unless you're talking energy levels high enough to reduce basic particles to quarks, in which case your spaceship/spacestation has bigger problems), so a thick enough wall of water with an inner wall of lead or something similarly dense should be enough to protect against almost anything. (I guess it would be a bad idea to have your water in direct contact with lead
Of course, there's always the possibility of a neutrino blast (like when a star goes nova or supernova), but we don't really have any way of defending against that whether we are in a spaceship/station or on a planet.
Drums require too much technological sophistication. Try beating on a log with a big stick.
If you think we've got a population problem NOW, wait until we can stop aging & all sicknesses...
It might be a matter of species & planet survival to figure out how to become a space-going species _BEFORE_ we develop a cure for cancer...
Use your water storage as shielding?
Apparently you think the product of artists & such are SO much more valuable than people would be willing to pay for them in free market, that you think it's fine to give them more protection under the law than any other kind of craftsperson. Of course you can't justify _why_ their products are so much more valuable than anyone elses except through vague emotional appeals & attacks, but whatever...
Since you haven't gotten anything new or of substance to say, I've lost interest - you needn't bother replying, since I won't bother reading.
That's pretty worthless if you have no job to buy anything. You'll end up like the poorest Russians just after the Soviet Union collapsed looking at the nice loaves of bread on the shelves & wishing you could afford one.
How do you figure that? I haven't heard of any inherent economic mechanism that causes new jobs to automatically open up in the old labor market when existing jobs are outsourced.
That's actually one of the GOOD things about having a military which is drawn primarily from the general population. It doesn't go over too well when a tyrant wanna-be tells them to mow down their friends & family.
I think it's a pretty typical tactic for tyrant-wannabes to assemble a large elite police force, make sure they don't have too much contact with the general population, give them lots of privileges, and deliberately do things which make the general population hate them (which further isolates them from the general population).
Total B.S.
People have been creating intellectual works like crazy throughout human history, all in the total absence of IP laws, and _without_ access to our humongous scientific/engineering knowledge & easy distribution of information.
The _only_ things that IP laws have done is permit a monied subset of society to try to retard & exploit cultural & scientific innovation & progress. Society would be MUCH better off without those parasites.
Sure we did - rich Americans stole ideas from poor ones all the time, and often used the IP laws to do it.
Do you have anything particular in mind? The entirety of French history is a bit much for me to automatically know what you are talking about.
Free markets work pretty well at efficiently allocating resources to meet societal demand, and when given enough time.
Unfortunately, complete laissez-faire capitalism has a bad positive feedback mechanism where people who more resources also have more ability to collect more resources, so you end up with the end result of a small number of rich people and a huge percentage of the population struggling to stay alive by feeding on the crumbs of the rich people.
For a good, healthy society you need some kind of neutral, non-single-human-controlled systemic-mechanism for (hear the rich people gasp in horror) wealth distribution - preferably back to the lowest rungs of the economic classes. (I prefer to think of this as bubble-up economics, the opposite of trickle-down economics.)
(Before the anti-welfare activists go apoplectic, I'll mention that I think it would be a BAD idea to hand the money out to everyone like the current welfare system - but there are quite a few other avenues to redistribute wealth without having the same bad effects.)
If you've got an economic system like that, then you'll have enough dynamic upward class mobility that the unfortunates at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder will have hope that they can climb higher, and you'll have a continual flow of new minds coming from below engaging with the economic engine.
Go ahead and sell your book, for whatever you can get for it. If you want to keep getting money, you'd better be prepared to sell more books, just like I would have to keep baking bread to keep getting paid for them.
I wouldn't expect to sell a piece of bread & then expect to get paid every time it changed hands, got eaten, used as fertilizer & turned back into grain. Only a greedy person would expect that.
Are you talking about stealing books, or copying them? Because it's not the same action, no matter how much you try to bend the language.
Sorry, first you have to explain why you think you're so special that you can override my private property rights.
If I buy that book from you, it becomes my property. In a normal market situation, that would be the end of it - I could do whatever I wanted with my private property, and it would be none of your damn business.
IP laws violate private property rights, pure and simple - and there had better be a better reason than "I deserve more money!" to justify overriding people's private property rights.
You buy a CD. The CD is your private property - you paid for the physical product, didn't sign a contract giving up your rights, etc. Without IP law, you would be free to make copies of the CD & give the copies to friends. With IP law, you can't. Therefore IP law is restricting your private property rights. That's one relevant example.
Patents: you spend all your time, skill & money developing a cool new product. You try and sell it - only to get your ass sued off by someone who managed to file some papers first. That's an example where you can't use your own property, labor & time to make a living - not because of anything you did, but because of what the law is letting someone else do to you.
What's so ridiculous about it? If you can't make a living in a free market even if you executed your business model perfectly, then it was a bad business model. Important clue: a free market doesn't include getting special laws passed to protect your bad business model.
If somebody can take your idea & do it better than you can, so fast that you don't have a headstart - well, then either it wasn't much of an idea, or you weren't the best person to implement the idea. Either way, society wins.
Your problem is that you just can't conceive that society would get along perfectly fine without big media conglomerates & Hollywood being able to generate hundred-million dollar blockbusters. Society would do just FINE without that those companies, artists & other creators would find ways of making a living which wouldn't depend on companies like that, and the resultant entertainment would be a helluva lot more original, widespread, diverse & creative.
Since IP laws function by overriding basic property rights related to REAL property (preventing people from doing whatever they want with their own real private property), I think you've got a major flaw in your viewpoint. As soon as you give a rational explanation how "ideas" qualify as any kind of real property, then you can argue from the viewpoint of property rights.
That would be called: making a bad business decision. If you make enough of those, you deserve to go out of business. Most honest businesspeople wouldn't expect to get special laws passed that would support their bad business model though.
There's _always_ incentive to do that - you want to stay ahead of the competition. The only change is that without IP laws if you want to KEEP ahead of the competition, then you'll have to KEEP innovating - you won't be able to sit on your laurels & litigate against your competition.
Just because you did a lot of work/spent a lot of resources developing something doesn't mean you "deserve" to make money on it. If you can't sell it in a free market at a price people are willing to pay, then your "idea" wasn't worth all the effort/resources you put into it and your business model is broken. It's as simple as that.
Some people seem to think they should get special legal protection so that they can make a failed business model work though. I sure wish I was rich & powerful enough to get special laws to protect my stupid business ideas. I guess I have to settle for producing goods or services at a price that people are willing to pay.
Just because YOU can't figure out a way for authors & entertainers to make a living doesn't mean that free market won't. It just means that you're not smart enough.
I believe that is the IP owners who are claiming they are "entitled" to more money than people would otherwise be willing to give them. Apparently, they're not willing to make a living by continually working for it - they want special laws that let them milk each creative work for much more than it was actually worth.
The Constitution "recognizes" that the government should try to promote the Arts & Sciences for the general good of society. It doesn't say _anything_ about giving a free handout to artists "because they've got to work SOOOO hard", or letting big businesses get control over that kind of work & use IP laws to discourage innovation in our society.
Gods, another ignorant who doesn't believe the world existed before "modern" society.
There has been music/performances/writing going on through recorded human history, WITHOUT IP protection, and in societies where all that food/housing/medicine/education/transporation/so on was MUCH harder to get than it is now.
Society doesn't _need_ IP laws for that stuff to happen. IP laws just get in the way of that kind of stuff happening. There would a LOT more distributed & diverse culture occuring if IP laws didn't exist.
Of course, rich people who want to build global media conglomerates to control a lot of that information might be annoyed, but I'm sure society can get along quite well without them.