Whats with the right to do what you want with whatever you want all of a sudden?
Why should "intellectual property owners" have special privileges with regard to their products which allow them to override normal private property rights?
Does a cabinet maker get to control how people use the cabinets that the cabinetmaker has sold them? (I suppose he could always make them sign a contract, but I suspect he'd lose a lot of customers that way.)
Whether a right or a priviledge, it's codified in law.
So? It's still important to identify whether something is a right or privilege. If it's a right, then laws must be passed to curtail it. If it's a privilege, then laws must be passed to support it - and if such laws don't exist, then you don't get the privilege.
If you don't like it, get the law changed. Gather those who agree with you to lobby the lawmakers yourself.
I don't believe that the lawmakers will really listen to anyone seriously who doesn't approach them with lots of cash. I believe opponents of private property rights (i.e., intellectual property owners) have more cash than people who want to exercise their own private property rights, partly due to the unfair monopolies that those laws give them, and they use that cash to make sure that the people who make the laws are sympathetic to their interests, and NOT to the interests of common citizens who are interested in preserving their own property rights.
In other words, until the situation gets SO bad that there is a humongous public backlash & a great systemic change occurs, I truly believe it is an utterly useful & futile effort to approach any of the current lawmakers and expect them to do anything useful. They are bought and paid for, and any of their replacements will be bought and paid for.
Until that large-scale change occurs, all I intend to do is to avoid getting in trouble with the law, try and spread memes of private property rights, and to point out how hypocritical "intellectual property owner" proponents are whenever they chirp their little songs.
Once again "because of the selfish few sharers.." you did not answer my point about DRM.
Sure I did - I disagreed with your characterization of "selfish few sharers". They are not few, and they are not as selfish as the companies trying to impose DRM on the public. I do not agree that the people who are trying to exercise their private property rights are the cause of DRM - the people who are DIRECTLY responsible are people who, for the purposes of forcing people to give them money, want absolute control over the distribution of information to and from the public. THOSE are the people who are directly responsible for ramming DRM down the public's throat, and your attempt to cast blame elsewhere is irrelevant.
Because of the few who break the social contract by shareing DRM is being forced on all of us, removing our actual fair use rights.
When the law is bought & paid for by private interests who have no interest in the general well-being of society, it is no longer a social contract, and your attempt to paint DRM as a moral issue becomes irrelevant.
...I belive that once we buy a "performance" we should be able to sell or give away *our only copy* if we desire. DRM will restrict us from even doing that because it seeks to stop those who share.
*I* believe that I should have the right to do whatever I want with my own private property, except where it might cause harm to others. (No, I do not believe that "depriving someone of a potential sale" is classified as causing harm to others.) I do _not_ believe that allowing some arbitrary person who I have not signed a business contract with, control over my own private property, is morally defensible, nor has it been proven to be net socially beneficial. I do not see the reason for the existence of "intellectual property" laws except to satisfy the greed of people who don't want to compete in a free marketplace.
if you are being pressed for a password, your questioner will know if you lie: with a lie the password won't work.
Only if you're not using a multi-level encryption algorithm - the password you give them will work fine, but it won't be of the information that would incriminate you:-)
It might be able to project a decent-sized image directly into an eye (if you trust it enough:-)
Unless we get a decent breakthrough on energy storage though, I'm thinking that the primary limits on packing features into mobile devices will be the batteries.
If it is a Privilege, it is not yours to grant or take away.
If it is a privilege, that means that it is not a "right". And if it is not a right, then "intellectual property" owners don't deserve it - they have to earn it. And if I, and people who think like me, can convince enough people that the abuse of intellectual property laws is causing more harm than good, then that "privilege" WILL be revoked.
You are agreeing to the "privilege" when you buy copyrighted material.
I didn't sign a contract; I didn't agree to anything. I bought a piece of media, which becomes MY private property, and which I should be able do anything that I want to, as long as I don't use it to hurt anyone else.
But the laws currently say that if I make copies of my own private property (which are also my own private property), and then give them away to people (which is also something I should be able to do with my own private property), then someone who I did not sign a contract with can ask the government to have me arrested and/or have my assets seized.
Now if it were obvious to me that such a violation of my private property rights provided a large net benefit to society (and to myself as a member of society), then I would consider it a fair trade. At this point in time, I do not see this - I see many examples of greedy, parasitic companies & individuals who are abusing the intellectual property laws to force people to give them money that they would not deserve in a true free market system, and also to suppress any form of innovation that might interfere or compete with their parasitic actions.
I see no benefit to myself or to society to support such a system. I consider "intellectual property" laws to be harmful to society, and consider it a civic duty to try and discourage their use.
Because of the selfish few who obtain and "share" what is not theirs to "share" DRM is growing and being forced on all of us.
The "selfish few" (who are not so few) are really just exercising their own real, private property rights. The REAL selfish few are those people who believe that their right to "make money" overrides the actual real right to peoples' use of their own private property. They're the ones who have chosen to ram DRM down the throats of their so-called customers, backed up with the sledgehammer of government enforcement of "intellectual property" laws.
Their business model is completely propped up by government enforcement. If they had to compete in a REAL marketplace, making money in an deserved way by providing desired goods & services to their customer, then they wouldn't be nearly so arrogant.
The universe is expanding at an accelerating rate not because of some dark matter but because of the gravitational attraction of other universes in the local vicinity of our own.
myth itself that he did it with a circular configuration which they showed to be impossible.
Maybe they started with a circular configuration, but isn't it likely that they would've adjusted to maximize the focussed intensity of all of the reflections?
"Just make the beams cross, guys!"
"Wait a minute...didn't you say that would make every molecule of our bodies explode outward at the speed of light?
So programmers should only get paid for the first copy of the software they sell?
Programmers would get paid for the same reasons any normal worker gets paid: either you deliver a product (a system or program) or provide a service (fix somebody's system or provide programming support for a system).
That's called getting paid for working. The amount you get paid depends on how valuable your customer thinks the product or service is. The better product or service you provide, the more you get paid. Is this really such a hard concept to understand?
Despite its name, the ability to control the distribution of information is a PRIVILEGE - not a right. Society ALLOWS you to control distribution of your created works in the short term, with the expectation that this will encourage an overall increase of works usable by the public. If the system isn't providing the desired result, then there is no public-benefit reason why Society should keep allowing such a restriction of personal rights.
Try this on for size: if you can't get someone to pay you for your "product" without using force (including threats of legal action), then it's probably not "free market" and you'd better reevaluate your business model.
Another scenario: if two parties have something of value that each other wants (e.g., one has a product & the other has enough money), then they will willingly trade those things with each other & both parties end up happy. Why should a THIRD party be able to prevent such a transaction just because it involves something that they created a long time ago? That third party should've already gotten paid sufficienctly when they released that product to someone else.
Which is a great idea, if ideas never cost money to implement.
Yeah, using the law to force people to pay for something that they wouldn't think is fair is a GREAT way of propping up an unprofitable business model. I sure wish I could get laws passed to make people pay me for the privilege of breathing the same air I do.
Most honest, working people expect to get paid when they provide a desired good or service. They also expect that, if they want to keep getting payments, that they have to CONTINUE providing desired goods or services.
Only "intellectual property owners" think that they should have to put the effort to create something only once, then keep getting paid over and over for it everytime someone else makes a copy of it.
Do you accept that you would no longer be able to access any of the data on that hard drive, even though it was working perfectly, when the company who was "leasing" it to you went out of business or decided that it wasn't cost effective to keep providing support for that device?
If it wasn't for the problem of explaining how to configure firewalls to people, you'd think that iTunes would be a ready-made problem looking for a BitTorrent solution.
I think parents *should* be the final arbiter of every channel of information that their children receive.
If all parents were competent & rational, and actually gave a damn about preparing their children to become intelligent, thinking members of society, then I'd agree with you.
For those parents who seem intent on making their kids little programmed cult members, I think society would be a lot better off if those people weren't allowed to raise children at all.
us blue-staters would do better to realize that, relax a little, and remember that scientific thought hasn't been around very long so it will take time to spread.
The big problem with THAT attitude is, that "scientific thought" isn't by nature evangelistic. If you don't head people off before they descend into a permanent mindset of irrational beliefs, you will quickly find yourself outnumbered & overwhelmed by people who think that you should think the same way they do, and who are willing to use force to try and convince you of the error of your ways.
It is very important for the health of a society that the bulk of the population be fairly rational & used to exercising critical thinking. As long as this is true, the society will usually automatically deal with or adapt to aberrations like corruption, demagogues, bigotry & other similar poisonous memes. When a large section of the population is prone to believe whatever their "leaders" feed them without applying any critical thought to the content, then you've got a society which is about ready to undergo a thorough period of major turmoil.
Humans will look exactly as they do today 10,000 years from now assuming that we don't destroy our civilization and revert to roaming packs of scavengers.
Well, another possibility is that we can use our intelligence to take control of our own evolution (via genetic manipulation & cybernetics) and humans 10,000 years from now don't look so human anymore. In that case, there WOULD be intelligent design - but it would be OUR intelligence involved (with all the problems that entails:-), not some hypothetical omniscient being.
I'm sure the power companies' games with the electrical generators, and mucking around with the power transfers ("let's turn off Grandma's power!") had nothing to do with the skyrocketing electrical rates.
(Not that I'm disputing that California's mucking with supply & demand was half-assed, but there was _definitely_ corruption and/or hardball-business-tactics-at-the-expense-of-societ y going on with that industry!)
The way out of this, is to either forbid monopolies(as in, allow competition in), or minimize the monopoly.
Actually, if there was some societal mechanism to encourage competition (like good, cheap training & grants to get small entrepreneurs over the "barrier to entry" of a lot of fields, etc.), then the government could just stick to regulating stuff like preventing contracts from being too broadly exclusive. A setup like that should create enough competitive players to make sure that companies are honestly courting customers.
Seriously though, Bush may have his bad points, but Kerry would have ruined this country.
Gee, a President who would've thought about his actions instead of issuing policies based on kneejerk responses & crony advice, and a President who had actually commanded military groups in _real_ combat, instead of the current chickenhawk-laden administration. Yeah, sounds like someone who would've ruined the country.
Everyone is so quick to bash Bush's record without thinking about what Kerry would have done in each situation.
That's because most Kerry supporters _know_ that he would've made more intelligent decisions in just about every situation. Those decisions might not have been aggressive enough to make Kerry one of the "great" presidents, but compared to what Dubya's decisions have done to the infrastructure & rep of the U.S., _any_ competent non-"neo-con" would have brought us to a better world right now.
You can always allocate a big chunk of memory and write one byte to each page.
That would be caught by the limits on virtual memory usage. As I said, what resource are you thinking of that a decent system administrator couldn't limit to prevent a normal user from exhausting resources?
If I were Bill Gates, I would simply pull all of my product out of Europe and laugh at them. Due to the market penetration of Windows, the EU would come crawling back, begging for Windows marketing to be reinstated.
Why in the world would the EU find this to be a big problem? Unlike a "real" property (like oil), if Microsoft did something like that, the EU could simply make all Microsoft's products available as public domain. There'd be a lot of EU support vendors who could provide support too.
Companies who depend on intellectual property laws to support their business model must not, under any circumstances, piss off the legislators who write such laws - or they will find out exactly how ephemeral their business model is.
Microsoft doesn't have to sell anything in the EU if they don't want to. If MS shareholders have an issue with this, then they can take it up with the EU governments.
All Microsoft would have to do then is pull their products from Europe, and the EU would have a lot of problems from companies and consumers alike.
If Microsoft did something that drastic, the EU could simply declare ALL of Microsoft's products in the public domain. I'm sure a lot of 3rd party EU support vendors would be quite happy to provide support for EU companies who depend on Microsoft software.
Unlike companies which sell real physical products, companies which depend on "intellectual property" as a product will live or die by the legal framework supporting such property definitions. Such companies must not, under no circumstances, truly piss off the legislators, or they will find that their business model is fundamentally irrelevant to society.
I would be extremely wary of anyone who claims that their UNIX class operating system is immune to resource exhaustion from a local user.
Eh? Most modern UNIX systems let you put some hard limits on all the collective ways that users can consume resources, including # processes, disks space, real/virtual memory, cpu time, etc. Any administrator who is responsible for a multi-user system should have those set to "reasonable" values, and no individual user (except for the administrator of course) would be able to bring down the system.
What kind of resource are you thinking of that any user can exhaust which would stop the system (through resource exhaustion)? Log file messages?
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Why should "intellectual property owners" have special privileges with regard to their products which allow them to override normal private property rights?
Does a cabinet maker get to control how people use the cabinets that the cabinetmaker has sold them? (I suppose he could always make them sign a contract, but I suspect he'd lose a lot of customers that way.)
So? It's still important to identify whether something is a right or privilege. If it's a right, then laws must be passed to curtail it. If it's a privilege, then laws must be passed to support it - and if such laws don't exist, then you don't get the privilege.
I don't believe that the lawmakers will really listen to anyone seriously who doesn't approach them with lots of cash. I believe opponents of private property rights (i.e., intellectual property owners) have more cash than people who want to exercise their own private property rights, partly due to the unfair monopolies that those laws give them, and they use that cash to make sure that the people who make the laws are sympathetic to their interests, and NOT to the interests of common citizens who are interested in preserving their own property rights.
In other words, until the situation gets SO bad that there is a humongous public backlash & a great systemic change occurs, I truly believe it is an utterly useful & futile effort to approach any of the current lawmakers and expect them to do anything useful. They are bought and paid for, and any of their replacements will be bought and paid for.
Until that large-scale change occurs, all I intend to do is to avoid getting in trouble with the law, try and spread memes of private property rights, and to point out how hypocritical "intellectual property owner" proponents are whenever they chirp their little songs.
Sure I did - I disagreed with your characterization of "selfish few sharers". They are not few, and they are not as selfish as the companies trying to impose DRM on the public. I do not agree that the people who are trying to exercise their private property rights are the cause of DRM - the people who are DIRECTLY responsible are people who, for the purposes of forcing people to give them money, want absolute control over the distribution of information to and from the public. THOSE are the people who are directly responsible for ramming DRM down the public's throat, and your attempt to cast blame elsewhere is irrelevant.
When the law is bought & paid for by private interests who have no interest in the general well-being of society, it is no longer a social contract, and your attempt to paint DRM as a moral issue becomes irrelevant.
*I* believe that I should have the right to do whatever I want with my own private property, except where it might cause harm to others. (No, I do not believe that "depriving someone of a potential sale" is classified as causing harm to others.) I do _not_ believe that allowing some arbitrary person who I have not signed a business contract with, control over my own private property, is morally defensible, nor has it been proven to be net socially beneficial. I do not see the reason for the existence of "intellectual property" laws except to satisfy the greed of people who don't want to compete in a free marketplace.
Only if you're not using a multi-level encryption algorithm - the password you give them will work fine, but it won't be of the information that would incriminate you :-)
It might be able to project a decent-sized image directly into an eye (if you trust it enough :-)
Unless we get a decent breakthrough on energy storage though, I'm thinking that the primary limits on packing features into mobile devices will be the batteries.
Uh no, not really...
If it is a privilege, that means that it is not a "right". And if it is not a right, then "intellectual property" owners don't deserve it - they have to earn it. And if I, and people who think like me, can convince enough people that the abuse of intellectual property laws is causing more harm than good, then that "privilege" WILL be revoked.
I didn't sign a contract; I didn't agree to anything. I bought a piece of media, which becomes MY private property, and which I should be able do anything that I want to, as long as I don't use it to hurt anyone else.
But the laws currently say that if I make copies of my own private property (which are also my own private property), and then give them away to people (which is also something I should be able to do with my own private property), then someone who I did not sign a contract with can ask the government to have me arrested and/or have my assets seized.
Now if it were obvious to me that such a violation of my private property rights provided a large net benefit to society (and to myself as a member of society), then I would consider it a fair trade. At this point in time, I do not see this - I see many examples of greedy, parasitic companies & individuals who are abusing the intellectual property laws to force people to give them money that they would not deserve in a true free market system, and also to suppress any form of innovation that might interfere or compete with their parasitic actions.
I see no benefit to myself or to society to support such a system. I consider "intellectual property" laws to be harmful to society, and consider it a civic duty to try and discourage their use.
The "selfish few" (who are not so few) are really just exercising their own real, private property rights. The REAL selfish few are those people who believe that their right to "make money" overrides the actual real right to peoples' use of their own private property. They're the ones who have chosen to ram DRM down the throats of their so-called customers, backed up with the sledgehammer of government enforcement of "intellectual property" laws.
Their business model is completely propped up by government enforcement. If they had to compete in a REAL marketplace, making money in an deserved way by providing desired goods & services to their customer, then they wouldn't be nearly so arrogant.
So, basically, you pull a theory out of your butt & modify it to match some qualitative things you know about.
The big question is: what kind of experiment can you propose to distinguish your theory from the other competing theories?
Really? How do you know?
Programmers would get paid for the same reasons any normal worker gets paid: either you deliver a product (a system or program) or provide a service (fix somebody's system or provide programming support for a system).
That's called getting paid for working. The amount you get paid depends on how valuable your customer thinks the product or service is. The better product or service you provide, the more you get paid. Is this really such a hard concept to understand?
Despite its name, the ability to control the distribution of information is a PRIVILEGE - not a right. Society ALLOWS you to control distribution of your created works in the short term, with the expectation that this will encourage an overall increase of works usable by the public. If the system isn't providing the desired result, then there is no public-benefit reason why Society should keep allowing such a restriction of personal rights.
Try this on for size: if you can't get someone to pay you for your "product" without using force (including threats of legal action), then it's probably not "free market" and you'd better reevaluate your business model.
Another scenario: if two parties have something of value that each other wants (e.g., one has a product & the other has enough money), then they will willingly trade those things with each other & both parties end up happy. Why should a THIRD party be able to prevent such a transaction just because it involves something that they created a long time ago? That third party should've already gotten paid sufficienctly when they released that product to someone else.
Yeah, using the law to force people to pay for something that they wouldn't think is fair is a GREAT way of propping up an unprofitable business model. I sure wish I could get laws passed to make people pay me for the privilege of breathing the same air I do.
Most honest, working people expect to get paid when they provide a desired good or service. They also expect that, if they want to keep getting payments, that they have to CONTINUE providing desired goods or services.
Only "intellectual property owners" think that they should have to put the effort to create something only once, then keep getting paid over and over for it everytime someone else makes a copy of it.
Do you accept that you would no longer be able to access any of the data on that hard drive, even though it was working perfectly, when the company who was "leasing" it to you went out of business or decided that it wasn't cost effective to keep providing support for that device?
If it wasn't for the problem of explaining how to configure
firewalls to people, you'd think that iTunes would be a ready-made
problem looking for a BitTorrent solution.
If all parents were competent & rational, and actually gave a damn about preparing their children to become intelligent, thinking members of society, then I'd agree with you.
For those parents who seem intent on making their kids little programmed cult members, I think society would be a lot better off if those people weren't allowed to raise children at all.
The big problem with THAT attitude is, that "scientific thought" isn't by nature evangelistic. If you don't head people off before they descend into a permanent mindset of irrational beliefs, you will quickly find yourself outnumbered & overwhelmed by people who think that you should think the same way they do, and who are willing to use force to try and convince you of the error of your ways.
It is very important for the health of a society that the bulk of the population be fairly rational & used to exercising critical thinking. As long as this is true, the society will usually automatically deal with or adapt to aberrations like corruption, demagogues, bigotry & other similar poisonous memes. When a large section of the population is prone to believe whatever their "leaders" feed them without applying any critical thought to the content, then you've got a society which is about ready to undergo a thorough period of major turmoil.
Well, another possibility is that we can use our intelligence to take control of our own evolution (via genetic manipulation & cybernetics) and humans 10,000 years from now don't look so human anymore. In that case, there WOULD be intelligent design - but it would be OUR intelligence involved (with all the problems that entails :-), not some hypothetical omniscient being.
I'm sure the power companies' games with the electrical generators, and mucking around with the power transfers ("let's turn off Grandma's power!") had nothing to do with the skyrocketing electrical rates.
(Not that I'm disputing that California's mucking with supply & demand was half-assed, but there was _definitely_ corruption and/or hardball-business-tactics-at-the-expense-of-societ y going on with that industry!)
Actually, if there was some societal mechanism to encourage competition (like good, cheap training & grants to get small entrepreneurs over the "barrier to entry" of a lot of fields, etc.), then the government could just stick to regulating stuff like preventing contracts from being too broadly exclusive. A setup like that should create enough competitive players to make sure that companies are honestly courting customers.
Gee, a President who would've thought about his actions instead of issuing policies based on kneejerk responses & crony advice, and a President who had actually commanded military groups in _real_ combat, instead of the current chickenhawk-laden administration. Yeah, sounds like someone who would've ruined the country.
That's because most Kerry supporters _know_ that he would've made more intelligent decisions in just about every situation. Those decisions might not have been aggressive enough to make Kerry one of the "great" presidents, but compared to what Dubya's decisions have done to the infrastructure & rep of the U.S., _any_ competent non-"neo-con" would have brought us to a better world right now.
That would be caught by the limits on virtual memory usage. As I said, what resource are you thinking of that a decent system administrator couldn't limit to prevent a normal user from exhausting resources?
Why in the world would the EU find this to be a big problem? Unlike a "real" property (like oil), if Microsoft did something like that, the EU could simply make all Microsoft's products available as public domain. There'd be a lot of EU support vendors who could provide support too.
Companies who depend on intellectual property laws to support their business model must not, under any circumstances, piss off the legislators who write such laws - or they will find out exactly how ephemeral their business model is.
Microsoft doesn't have to sell anything in the EU if they don't want to. If MS shareholders have an issue with this, then they can take it up with the EU governments.
If Microsoft did something that drastic, the EU could simply declare ALL of Microsoft's products in the public domain. I'm sure a lot of 3rd party EU support vendors would be quite happy to provide support for EU companies who depend on Microsoft software.
Unlike companies which sell real physical products, companies which depend on "intellectual property" as a product will live or die by the legal framework supporting such property definitions. Such companies must not, under no circumstances, truly piss off the legislators, or they will find that their business model is fundamentally irrelevant to society.
Eh? Most modern UNIX systems let you put some hard limits on all the collective ways that users can consume resources, including # processes, disks space, real/virtual memory, cpu time, etc. Any administrator who is responsible for a multi-user system should have those set to "reasonable" values, and no individual user (except for the administrator of course) would be able to bring down the system.
What kind of resource are you thinking of that any user can exhaust which would stop the system (through resource exhaustion)? Log file messages?