Nothing is wrong with copyright per se; it does exactly what it is supposed to do: protect the artist from having his/her work stolen.
You are incorrect. Copyright (and other "intellectual property" laws) are supposed to encourage the production of creative works to be made available to the public. The main purpose of the copyright clause of the Constitution is _not_ so that a small portion of society can make money off a government-enforced monopoly on the distribution of information.
Without copyright, there is no incentive to capitalize on creative works.
I disagree. Without copyright, the "value" of the act of creation will simply be what somebody is willing to pay for the goods resulting from that creation, or for the product of a service requiring the act of creation. It might be more difficult for there to be megastars who earn millions of dollars after a little bit of work, but people will always pay money to see art, performances & listen to music.
As we are a capitalist society, I wouldn't bet on the overturning of any laws that support such a huge industry.
I agree with you that the US government won't let such a huge industry die - although I would point out in a _true_ capitalist society, even a huge industry would be left to the wolves if it turned out to be a dinosaur which provided nothing of interest to consumers. The only reason that such an industry still survives is because the government provides artificial support for it through legislation.
Anyone who thinks piracy is a victimless crime doesn't understand economics.
I think most people understand simple economics pretty well. Most people figure that people should get paid for providing goods or services. If the vendors charge too much, people won't buy the product/service. When the buyer receives goods, they own the goods - they can do whatever they want with them. Nice and simple - unlike laws trying to turn the distribution of information into "property".
People should get paid for providing goods or services. I don't see any reason why someone/a company should be paid over and over indefinitely for a single act of creation by anyone who touches the created work. If society (or an organization) wants to encourage creative thought, then it can subsidize such activity by the amount that it thinks such activity is worth.
After the election, you can go to a webpage and type in that number and it will tell you how that person voted. Thats allows the voter to veryify the results.
(sigh) Classic mistake naively implementing a "voting verification" system. You don't want a voter to be able to prove how they voted. If you do that, historically it has been proven that voters will be encouraged (either through positive - money, gifts, etc - or negative - intimidation, beatings, etc - feedback) to vote particular ways, instead of their conscience. Every voter has to have plausible deniability.
That's why real voting systems try to only verify that each ballot was from a unique voter, and that the reported counts of the election can be reconstructed from the individual ballots.
I always had fun sticking a pen into the superball before dropping it from a couple of stories up. When it hits the ground, the superball stays (or doesn't bounce very high) but transfers most of its energy to the pen. If it hits just right, you can catch the pen on its way back up.
I kept on wondering how high the pen would go if your superball was bowling-ball sized:)
As you stated, it's best to keep everyone away from direct line of fire of the impact site, since that pen comes blasting away incredibly fast (and occasionally in random directions).
Spamcop.net. They cost $30/year, but I can access them anywhere on the net (either by POP3 or Web mail, and through SSL).
They'll get email via POP3 from any of my other accounts, or you can forward your "normal" email addresses to them for filtering. You can choose whether or not to apply SpamAssassin and/or various RBLs as filters to your incoming mail. Plus a fair number of spammers filter out any spamcop destination email addresses, since it means they'll get reported to the abuse departments that much sooner.
Of course, you occasionally have to deal with a DDoS attack on the main servers, but it never caused me a significant problem.
You still have to use a local SMTP server for outgoing mail, but there's usually always something available from your ISP (and sometimes they require that you use their SMTP servers...).
I am an advocate of a law that says the loser in a tort must pay the winner's court costs.
I am an advocate that there should be a constitutional requirement that the government should pay for full free legal representation for _everyone_. Once the legislators figure out how much the bill will come to, they'll simplify the legal system so drastically that a 2-year old could defend him/herself.
Of course, all of the lawyers would have to find something productive to do instead of wasting hundreds of billions of dollars of society's money, but hey - no solution is perfect.
It's not going to end until people who want it to end organize their votes enough to vote out the "representatives" who keep facilitating this kind of attack.
real point that needs to be made here is that the GPL is *NOT* unlimited
Like I said, I'm not disagreeing with you - but the argument that SCO is making is that by not requiring charging any money for the product, and by not having any legal way of preventing somebody from distributing the product, the product has become public domain and the original copyright holder doesn't have the right anymore to put any further limitations on its distribution.
Like I said, I'm not disagreeing with your argument, I'm just trying to describe what I think SCO's argument is. You don't need to convince _me_ that you're right - you need to convince the judge (and jury?) hearing the case.
I'm not saying that I agree with their argument, I'm just trying to describe what I think their argument is.
From what I can tell, they think that you can't grant unlimited distribution rights with restrictions like insisting that the source code has to be available - according to them, if any license grants unlimited distribution rights, then the licensed work automatically becomes public domain, the owners of the work lose their copyrights, and any attempted restrictions on the distribution on the newly-public-domain-work are null and void.
I don't think they'll win with such an argument, but the U.S. Judicial system has been known to make some really anti-common-sense decisions, so I'm hoping the judge(s) in this case are competent.
A monopoly is a company that gets exclusive market rights from the government.
Ah...no. Sorry, you are incorrect. In the one direction, a company that gets exclusive market rights from the government is a monopoly - yes, that is true. In the other direction, a company needs only to have enough control over the market to be able to discourage any significant competition from forming. It is quite possible for a company to become a monopoly without any special rights granted by the government. Most of the laws regulating the behavior of legally-recognized monopolies were written because of the abuse of such control of various markets by those companies which had successfully achieved monopoly status (Standard Oil, various railroad companies, etc), without being granted any special status by the government.
Microsoft simply does not have the legal ability to force alternatives out of existence. They are not a legal monopoly.
You are incorrect in both statements. Yes they do, and they have been legally-recognized as a monopoly. They have also been found to perform acts which are illegal for a company that has established a monopoly. There were no confusion about these legal statements - only about the proposed action to remedy the situation.
As far as their ability to force alternatives out of existence, it would be quite simple for them to tell any company which was trying to use an alternative that they'd better stop or Microsoft will not license any of Microsoft's software to them (which would kill most companies), and if they still don't agree, then Microsoft could go to the vendors & customers of the offending company and threaten THEM of they don't stop doing business with the offending company. The _only_ reason that Microsoft can't do this is because of the laws against a legally-recognized monopoly doing this kind of thing.
In the end you both flounder, and no clear picture emerges.
Not really. If you're a good debater, than to a reasonable audience, the fanatic looks like a total moron. The only reason you might not feel like you won is because the _fanatic_ doesn't realize that they look like a total moron, and acts like _you're_ the total moron for not taking everything they say at face value.
In that kind of situation, you've just got to have confidence in your own arguments (after carefully making sure that they're based on good solid logic - don't want to be hypocritical, of course) and be able to ignore the emotional tactics being used by the fanatic. To them, if you look frustrated, that means they won - regardless of how the logic of the argument came out. It drives them nuts if you can be more confident about your argument than they are about theirs.
So... how is SCO going to destroy the GPL without destroying copyright itself in the bargain?
They want only bits of the GPL invalidated (the bits that annoy them) - in essence, they want to force anything GPLed to be completely public domain, with no "viral" distribution requirements. I'm pretty sure they would be unhappy with the results if the court ruled that the entire GPL was invalid & that any works distributed using it reverted to normal copyrights. (Of course, a lot of people would be annoyed in that situation.)
it isn't the patent clerks' job to scan the Internet and look for prior art
IANAPL, but the way I understand the situation, they ARE supposed to look at more than just the patent database - if they were able to do their jobs correctly, they should scan all of the literature which is "typically available to a practictioner of the art" for the field of invention that they are reviewing. All of that stuff represents "prior art", and by not including it in their acceptance decision, they are requiring that somebody in society pay unnecessarily to have their decision overturned. (Since it's the Patent Office which is getting a lot of that money, one might conclude that they have a conflict of interest.)
I have a feeling that, given their workload & the policies implemented by their higher-ups, the examiners have been effectively restricted to looking for prior art in the patent database - even though they shouldn't be.
One of the reasons why many people place more faith in open-source code-review & testing is because there is no way to control the distribution of the source code, therefore there is no easy way for any particular group of people to control who is doing the testing, in order to set up a conspiracy like you are describing.
Indeed, it would be much easier in the hierarchical command structure of a typical corporation for a small group of people in the right positions with the same agenda to control the development & information flows relating to a product to make sure that it was perceived how they wanted it to.
As far as "leadership pushing the company to be successful and you have a paid staff who are dependant on the company's success", I think you are either trolling and/or have a really rosy (and unrealistic) viewpoint of typical corporate goals. The company will be a success if they make money. A lot of companies have demonstrated that the highest profit margins are _not_ made by making the highest-quality equipment.
In addition, if the company (or somebody in the company) is offered a _lot_ of money to make sure their machines vote the way the buyer wants them to, then in a closed-development situation, there isn't any easy way for the users (the public) to check that something illegal isn't being performed.
Of course, in reality, just because the source code is open, doesn't mean that the machines will work as designed - there's nothing that would stop a crooked company from using something different in the voting machine than the so-called source code which they open to the public. For full auditing, _all_ the development for such machines, including all of the hardware, has to be open to poking & prodding by testers who have no connection to the company, and who have a desire to find any incorrect behavior of the machines.
As you have surmised, patents are considered valid (and enforceable) until they have been overturned in Federal court through the patent appeals process. As long as the patent holder can pay to keep the appeals process going, they can still litigate based on the patent. (The company I'm working for has encountered this issue recently.)
As the Japanese Admiral said after Pearl Harbor: "I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant, and filled him with a terrible resolve."
I think it was Yamamoto who said this, and the reason he said it because he was educated in the U.S. and had a pretty damn good idea of the potential industrial capacity (and natural resources) available to the U.S. From what I've read, he actually very strongly tried to discourage the Pearl Harbor attack (or any attack against the U.S. at all). Unfortunately, his superiors had a severely inflated idea of their own invincibility, and ordered him to attack anyway.
Require that all that money be given directly to decreasing class sizes (in other words, training & hiring more teachers). This will help employment, put money back into the economy, _and_ help train all our kids for the future, all in one shot.
I know a lot of teachers who would be satisfied with their current salary & benefits if they didn't have so many kids in their classes that the teachers burnout in just a few years (which results in poor teacher performance). Just having fewer kids per class (I think the recommended level was 12-15?) would allow people who might otherwise be considered "bad" teachers show that they are actually decent teachers (when their resources aren't too taxed).
You don't know what stress caused by frustration is, unless you've tried to teach a class with 15 ADHD kids. Many parents think they know what's better for schools than the teachers because they've managed to raise a couple of kids - those parents would probably be thrown in jail for abuse if they had to deal with the same shit that a lot of teachers do (not just the sheer # of kids, also including all the paperwork that the government bureaucrats force them to do).
Well, my impression is that a lot of techies and scientists like to apply logic & rationality to solving problems for the greater good, so they might be naturally inclined toward a political party which is supposedly "populist", or for the people. (Whether or not the Democratic leadership is honestly working for the general populace would probably be a good argument that their public relations people should pay close attention to.)
Also, as professionals whose standard of living is directly related to how hard they work, they probably feel a little closer to the "working-class" folks than someone who either inherited a lot of money or who got a lot of money through luck in business or some similar situation.
Of course, professionals like techies & scientists don't make the best followers - they're _trained_ to question things, debate, analyze things, etc. You can't really tell people like that what to do, and expect them to do it - you have to _persuade_ them that your viewpoint is the correct one, and that takes time & effort.
Flamebait on: By contrast, a lot of high-profile "conservatives" like to apply faith and demagoguery(sp?) to making themselves and people like themselves richer and more powerful. I doubt this is representative of members of the Republican Party as a whole, since I know a lot of self-professed Republicans who seem to be decent people, but for some reason they seem to be led around by the nose by those same conservative "leaders". Maybe that's why there's such an emphasis on "faith" - it makes it a lot easier for those conservative leaders when their followers have been conditioned to turn off their brains & blindly follow orders.
Ok, so all this really says, is that there are 40,000 people who know that information is collected continuously from the PCs, and of these people, millions of mp3s were deleted. This means NOTHING.
Yeah! If they _really_ want to collect valid information, they have to survey the drives of all of the people who _didn't_ volunteer to have their computers monitored - say, by sending out a virus/trojan/spyware which reports the contents of everybody's hard drives. They're working on getting a law passed which would make this legal for them, right?
What they should have done was come up with an inexpensive radar simulator device.
See, the problem with your logic, is that you're assuming that the point of traffic laws is to get people to slow down. If that were true, then your ideas would make a lot of sense.
Unfortunately, since most police departments receive part of their budget from the money they can pull in from traffic violation fines, they have become more interested in using traffic laws _to make money_. Your ideas would not help them do this.
People should be allowed to say whatever they want without any consequences.
Uhh...no. If a person thinks they can say whatever they want to say, then they have no right to try and stop anyone else from calling them a moron. Those are the "consequences" that they have to expect in a free speech environment.
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Dunno - watching giant robots getting raped doesn't really do it for me.
You are incorrect. Copyright (and other "intellectual property" laws) are supposed to encourage the production of creative works to be made available to the public. The main purpose of the copyright clause of the Constitution is _not_ so that a small portion of society can make money off a government-enforced monopoly on the distribution of information.
I disagree. Without copyright, the "value" of the act of creation will simply be what somebody is willing to pay for the goods resulting from that creation, or for the product of a service requiring the act of creation. It might be more difficult for there to be megastars who earn millions of dollars after a little bit of work, but people will always pay money to see art, performances & listen to music.
I agree with you that the US government won't let such a huge industry die - although I would point out in a _true_ capitalist society, even a huge industry would be left to the wolves if it turned out to be a dinosaur which provided nothing of interest to consumers. The only reason that such an industry still survives is because the government provides artificial support for it through legislation.
I think most people understand simple economics pretty well. Most people figure that people should get paid for providing goods or services. If the vendors charge too much, people won't buy the product/service. When the buyer receives goods, they own the goods - they can do whatever they want with them. Nice and simple - unlike laws trying to turn the distribution of information into "property".
People should get paid for providing goods or services. I don't see any reason why someone/a company should be paid over and over indefinitely for a single act of creation by anyone who touches the created work. If society (or an organization) wants to encourage creative thought, then it can subsidize such activity by the amount that it thinks such activity is worth.
The ISP just charges $20 at a time until they reach $20,000 or until they reach the card's limit :)
(sigh) Classic mistake naively implementing a "voting verification" system. You don't want a voter to be able to prove how they voted. If you do that, historically it has been proven that voters will be encouraged (either through positive - money, gifts, etc - or negative - intimidation, beatings, etc - feedback) to vote particular ways, instead of their conscience. Every voter has to have plausible deniability.
That's why real voting systems try to only verify that each ballot was from a unique voter, and that the reported counts of the election can be reconstructed from the individual ballots.
I always had fun sticking a pen into the superball before dropping it from a couple of stories up. When it hits the ground, the superball stays (or doesn't bounce very high) but transfers most of its energy to the pen. If it hits just right, you can catch the pen on its way back up.
:)
I kept on wondering how high the pen would go if your superball was bowling-ball sized
As you stated, it's best to keep everyone away from direct line of fire of the impact site, since that pen comes blasting away incredibly fast (and occasionally in random directions).
Spamcop.net. They cost $30/year, but I can access them anywhere on the net (either by POP3 or Web mail, and through SSL).
They'll get email via POP3 from any of my other accounts, or you can forward your "normal" email addresses to them for filtering. You can choose whether or not to apply SpamAssassin and/or various RBLs as filters to your incoming mail. Plus a fair number of spammers filter out any spamcop destination email addresses, since it means they'll get reported to the abuse departments that much sooner.
Of course, you occasionally have to deal with a DDoS attack on the main servers, but it never caused me a significant problem.
You still have to use a local SMTP server for outgoing mail, but there's usually always something available from your ISP (and sometimes they require that you use their SMTP servers...).
Linus's wife is probably a better bodyguard than most husky guys with radio tubes in their heads. And she's probably a lot more fun to be around, too.
Dunno how RMS will protect himself though.
I am an advocate that there should be a constitutional requirement that the government should pay for full free legal representation for _everyone_. Once the legislators figure out how much the bill will come to, they'll simplify the legal system so drastically that a 2-year old could defend him/herself.
Of course, all of the lawyers would have to find something productive to do instead of wasting hundreds of billions of dollars of society's money, but hey - no solution is perfect.
It's not going to end until people who want it to end organize their votes enough to vote out the "representatives" who keep facilitating this kind of attack.
Like I said, I'm not disagreeing with you - but the argument that SCO is making is that by not requiring charging any money for the product, and by not having any legal way of preventing somebody from distributing the product, the product has become public domain and the original copyright holder doesn't have the right anymore to put any further limitations on its distribution.
Like I said, I'm not disagreeing with your argument, I'm just trying to describe what I think SCO's argument is. You don't need to convince _me_ that you're right - you need to convince the judge (and jury?) hearing the case.
I'm not saying that I agree with their argument, I'm just trying to describe what I think their argument is.
From what I can tell, they think that you can't grant unlimited distribution rights with restrictions like insisting that the source code has to be available - according to them, if any license grants unlimited distribution rights, then the licensed work automatically becomes public domain, the owners of the work lose their copyrights, and any attempted restrictions on the distribution on the newly-public-domain-work are null and void.
I don't think they'll win with such an argument, but the U.S. Judicial system has been known to make some really anti-common-sense decisions, so I'm hoping the judge(s) in this case are competent.
Ah...no. Sorry, you are incorrect. In the one direction, a company that gets exclusive market rights from the government is a monopoly - yes, that is true. In the other direction, a company needs only to have enough control over the market to be able to discourage any significant competition from forming. It is quite possible for a company to become a monopoly without any special rights granted by the government. Most of the laws regulating the behavior of legally-recognized monopolies were written because of the abuse of such control of various markets by those companies which had successfully achieved monopoly status (Standard Oil, various railroad companies, etc), without being granted any special status by the government.
You are incorrect in both statements. Yes they do, and they have been legally-recognized as a monopoly. They have also been found to perform acts which are illegal for a company that has established a monopoly. There were no confusion about these legal statements - only about the proposed action to remedy the situation.
As far as their ability to force alternatives out of existence, it would be quite simple for them to tell any company which was trying to use an alternative that they'd better stop or Microsoft will not license any of Microsoft's software to them (which would kill most companies), and if they still don't agree, then Microsoft could go to the vendors & customers of the offending company and threaten THEM of they don't stop doing business with the offending company. The _only_ reason that Microsoft can't do this is because of the laws against a legally-recognized monopoly doing this kind of thing.
Not really. If you're a good debater, than to a reasonable audience, the fanatic looks like a total moron. The only reason you might not feel like you won is because the _fanatic_ doesn't realize that they look like a total moron, and acts like _you're_ the total moron for not taking everything they say at face value.
In that kind of situation, you've just got to have confidence in your own arguments (after carefully making sure that they're based on good solid logic - don't want to be hypocritical, of course) and be able to ignore the emotional tactics being used by the fanatic. To them, if you look frustrated, that means they won - regardless of how the logic of the argument came out. It drives them nuts if you can be more confident about your argument than they are about theirs.
They want only bits of the GPL invalidated (the bits that annoy them) - in essence, they want to force anything GPLed to be completely public domain, with no "viral" distribution requirements. I'm pretty sure they would be unhappy with the results if the court ruled that the entire GPL was invalid & that any works distributed using it reverted to normal copyrights. (Of course, a lot of people would be annoyed in that situation.)
IANAPL, but the way I understand the situation, they ARE supposed to look at more than just the patent database - if they were able to do their jobs correctly, they should scan all of the literature which is "typically available to a practictioner of the art" for the field of invention that they are reviewing. All of that stuff represents "prior art", and by not including it in their acceptance decision, they are requiring that somebody in society pay unnecessarily to have their decision overturned. (Since it's the Patent Office which is getting a lot of that money, one might conclude that they have a conflict of interest.)
I have a feeling that, given their workload & the policies implemented by their higher-ups, the examiners have been effectively restricted to looking for prior art in the patent database - even though they shouldn't be.
I don't agree with your reasoning.
One of the reasons why many people place more faith in open-source code-review & testing is because there is no way to control the distribution of the source code, therefore there is no easy way for any particular group of people to control who is doing the testing, in order to set up a conspiracy like you are describing.
Indeed, it would be much easier in the hierarchical command structure of a typical corporation for a small group of people in the right positions with the same agenda to control the development & information flows relating to a product to make sure that it was perceived how they wanted it to.
As far as "leadership pushing the company to be successful and you have a paid staff who are dependant on the company's success", I think you are either trolling and/or have a really rosy (and unrealistic) viewpoint of typical corporate goals. The company will be a success if they make money. A lot of companies have demonstrated that the highest profit margins are _not_ made by making the highest-quality equipment.
In addition, if the company (or somebody in the company) is offered a _lot_ of money to make sure their machines vote the way the buyer wants them to, then in a closed-development situation, there isn't any easy way for the users (the public) to check that something illegal isn't being performed.
Of course, in reality, just because the source code is open, doesn't mean that the machines will work as designed - there's nothing that would stop a crooked company from using something different in the voting machine than the so-called source code which they open to the public. For full auditing, _all_ the development for such machines, including all of the hardware, has to be open to poking & prodding by testers who have no connection to the company, and who have a desire to find any incorrect behavior of the machines.
As you have surmised, patents are considered valid (and enforceable) until they have been overturned in Federal court through the patent appeals process. As long as the patent holder can pay to keep the appeals process going, they can still litigate based on the patent. (The company I'm working for has encountered this issue recently.)
I think it was Yamamoto who said this, and the reason he said it because he was educated in the U.S. and had a pretty damn good idea of the potential industrial capacity (and natural resources) available to the U.S. From what I've read, he actually very strongly tried to discourage the Pearl Harbor attack (or any attack against the U.S. at all). Unfortunately, his superiors had a severely inflated idea of their own invincibility, and ordered him to attack anyway.
Require that all that money be given directly to decreasing class sizes (in other words, training & hiring more teachers). This will help employment, put money back into the economy, _and_ help train all our kids for the future, all in one shot.
I know a lot of teachers who would be satisfied with their current salary & benefits if they didn't have so many kids in their classes that the teachers burnout in just a few years (which results in poor teacher performance). Just having fewer kids per class (I think the recommended level was 12-15?) would allow people who might otherwise be considered "bad" teachers show that they are actually decent teachers (when their resources aren't too taxed).
You don't know what stress caused by frustration is, unless you've tried to teach a class with 15 ADHD kids. Many parents think they know what's better for schools than the teachers because they've managed to raise a couple of kids - those parents would probably be thrown in jail for abuse if they had to deal with the same shit that a lot of teachers do (not just the sheer # of kids, also including all the paperwork that the government bureaucrats force them to do).
Well, my impression is that a lot of techies and scientists like to apply logic & rationality to solving problems for the greater good, so they might be naturally inclined toward a political party which is supposedly "populist", or for the people. (Whether or not the Democratic leadership is honestly working for the general populace would probably be a good argument that their public relations people should pay close attention to.)
Also, as professionals whose standard of living is directly related to how hard they work, they probably feel a little closer to the "working-class" folks than someone who either inherited a lot of money or who got a lot of money through luck in business or some similar situation.
Of course, professionals like techies & scientists don't make the best followers - they're _trained_ to question things, debate, analyze things, etc. You can't really tell people like that what to do, and expect them to do it - you have to _persuade_ them that your viewpoint is the correct one, and that takes time & effort.
Flamebait on: By contrast, a lot of high-profile "conservatives" like to apply faith and demagoguery(sp?) to making themselves and people like themselves richer and more powerful. I doubt this is representative of members of the Republican Party as a whole, since I know a lot of self-professed Republicans who seem to be decent people, but for some reason they seem to be led around by the nose by those same conservative "leaders". Maybe that's why there's such an emphasis on "faith" - it makes it a lot easier for those conservative leaders when their followers have been conditioned to turn off their brains & blindly follow orders.
Yeah! If they _really_ want to collect valid information, they have to survey the drives of all of the people who _didn't_ volunteer to have their computers monitored - say, by sending out a virus/trojan/spyware which reports the contents of everybody's hard drives. They're working on getting a law passed which would make this legal for them, right?
See, the problem with your logic, is that you're assuming that the point of traffic laws is to get people to slow down. If that were true, then your ideas would make a lot of sense.
Unfortunately, since most police departments receive part of their budget from the money they can pull in from traffic violation fines, they have become more interested in using traffic laws _to make money_. Your ideas would not help them do this.
Uhh...no. If a person thinks they can say whatever they want to say, then they have no right to try and stop anyone else from calling them a moron. Those are the "consequences" that they have to expect in a free speech environment.
Except for the very last "egregious" episode - the translated title was pretty appropriate.