1. The purpose and character of use is clearly commercial, as it's an attempt to avoid spending money if your original copy is destroyed. "A penny saved is a penny earned," as Ben Franklin said.
In this context, "commercial" means that you're providing a good or service to another party with the intent of being compensated. You're using the term incorrectly, as referring to any action having to do with money.
Does that include the bit where the only reason that those ancients could afford to HAVE a democracy is because they had enough slaves to do all the grunt work for them? (Of course, the slaves didn't get to participate in the "democracy".)
I wouldn't mind a decent show in the Star Trek universe, but why is everyone so stuck on having the main characters in Starfleet? Even the guy up above who had a great idea about doing a short-story style of Star Trek ala Outer Limits limited his idea to "changing to different Federation bridges".
Screw Starfleet! I wanna merchant/smuggler/criminal Klingon/Romulan/whatever vessel, or even just a bunch of people who hitch rides all over the Star Trek universe. Maybe they'll have a mad-on for Starfleet due to bad experiences (or because they ARE criminals), and do their best to screw over Starfleet any chance they get.
The cast could be majorly disfunctional, unlike the goody-two-shoes Starfleet members, and major stories could be written about them getting themselves out of messes that they got themselves into. Instead of figuring out a good solution, their first response is to run like hell - and if they're cornered, they maim & destroy with lots of viciousness.
I have a mental image of a female Klingon "captain" who's drunk most of the time & regards the male members of the crew (of any race) as her personal harem (as they maneuver to avoid being left alone with her). (Maybe that's too much of a comedy...)
Prime Directive? When there's money to be made & peaceful civilizations to exploit? It is to laugh...
Open-book exams are another classic case-in-point. Students love them, because they think they're easy. Good educators know that the real skill isn't in transcribing from a book, but in knowing what to transcribe. Anyone can copy verbatim, but not everyone can copy the right stuff. A key trap for students at open-book exams is to turn up with every document that ever crossed their study desk during the course of the class. I always turned up with maybe the main textbook and one pad of notes. More often than not, I never opened either of them. Open-book exams are a classic trap for young players.
The undergraduate math classes I went through had open book (closed neighbor), take-home, unlimited time (but in one session, on the honor system) exams.
I gained an absolute hatred for those exams, 'cause the unlimited format was the signal that the instructor was going to put in problems which the textbook didn't even get CLOSE to touching, and which no one had talked about either in class or in study sessions (neither tangentially or especially not directly), and even when you figured out the "trick" to solving the problem, would take hours of grinding out symbolic manipulations by hand (with all the corresponding potential for making stupid little mistakes 3 hours back) to come up with an answer which you really had no way to sanity check.
My only consolation is that everybody else in the classes did about as badly as I did (except for the inevitable few "prodigies").
You're either thinking of patents, or how long copyrights USED to last. Copyrights now last 70+ years (courtesy of Disney's lobbyists). The only DVDs available then are going to be in museums.
Actually, it was a little worse than that - if I remember correctly, Rambus tinkered with the contents of their patents a little after attending the industry standards board, in order to make sure that the patent descriptions would cover the subjects brought up in the standards meeting.
As soon as you come up with a reason I would perform the service when there was no guarantee I'd be compensated, I will.
What do you mean? You'll get paid for services rendered, the value to be negotiated between payer & payee, just like any job.
Sure my "creations" could be done by others - but they're busy on other projects (say). Who is going to meet the need of my customer? It's in the best interest of my customer to have me working on "creations" rather than having to dig ditches during the day while making an enterprise-scale backend system as loving art at night.
I don't see what this has to do with intellectual property rights. You're getting paid for services rendered. I don't see where you think lack of intellectual property rights would affect this.
Your demand is a meaningless burden - we do live in a society that has intellectual property rights.
My "demand" is necessary to debate the societal value of intellectual property rights - what kind of value do they provide to society, versus what kind of cost do they impose on society. If you start with a society that does not have intellectual property rights, and give them a chance to do a cost/benefit analysis of adding intellectual property rights, then they can draw a conclusion about whether such rights will provide a net value to their society.
It would be more difficult to start with a society that does have intellectual property rights, and then theorize what would happen if you removed those rights (given that such a society is likely to have large "players" which have grown to depend on those rights for their survival).
Unless I'm responding to the Unabomber, I don't think either one of us imagines this will change.
Please, you don't have to be a nutcase to desire systemic improvements. And if enough people get pissed off, there WILL be change. And the more people who get pissed off before the change occurs, the more likely that change will be catastrophic rather than gradual.
Taking a step back from my Devil's Advocate stance, I don't actually disagree with the basic concept of intellectual property - encouraging the creation of new ideas for the long-term benefit of society by giving the creator some short-term control over the idea, with the promise that the idea will be released after a reasonable interval for use by the generic public. I just disagree with the DEGREE of absolute, practically-unlimited control which has been bought by special interests who would rather make money by manipulating the legal system & restraining the creativity of other people rather than make money by creating a regular flow of NEW ideas.
I'm willing to live & let live religions/cults, unless they happen to be heavily armed and likely to shoot me if I look at them sideways. In that case, I hope they get taken down fast, for my own safety.
If there is no intellectual property right, then why do my customers need to pay me for my creations?
That's a circular argument - the only reason you get paid for your "creations", even though you're not doing any work past the original creation, is BECAUSE an intellectual property "right" has been defined.
Try this one: assuming that there is no intellectual property "right", what kind of service can you provide to people that they will find of value so that they will pay you?
More than a service, intellectual property has value beyond a single use or function (generally). It has value on merit of its existence.
Your argument still presupposes the existence of intellectual property "rights". Because of intellectual property law, those things defined as intellectual property have value, and people have to pay you to use them. If the law didn't exist, then those things wouldn't have value to other people, and people wouldn't pay to use them. They'd pay you to CREATE them, but not just to use them (once the idea was out).
Come up with an argument for intellectual property rights, assuming that we are living in a society that doesn't already have them.
by what you are trying to argue, someone who write handwriting recognition software would be in a lot of trouble if that software was later used as the signature key for missile launches, etc.
Come on, you can't agree with what I said, and then turn around & claim that I'm saying something different.
It's all in the intent - using your example, if somebody wrote handwriting recognition software with the knowledge that it had a high probability of being used to launch missiles, then they've got responsibility for the results. If they write a general-purpose handwriting recognition system with the idea that they're going to sell a lot of pen-based computers, and then somebody coopts the system for use in launching missiles, then it's the person who coopted the system who made the decision to contribute to something lethal.
The IBM software is designed to identify & monitor people, and to apply some analysis to their behavior. The systems that it is being used in, are designed to be inobtrusive (wouldn't want to actually upset the customers by making it OBVIOUS that they're under surveillance all the time).
Whoever designed the system deliberately created something which can be used to unobtrusively identify, monitor & analyse the behavior of anybody that comes into its field of view, with the knowledge that this information will be used to restrain people's activities (e.g., catching shoplifters) and to try and improve their ability to manipulate people (e.g., targeted advertising).
While this is a far cry from something that was designed to kill people, it's certainly not as benevolent as a new kind of bread or a poster with a cartoon mascot on it. And since the people using it know that it wouldn't be popular, they do their best to keep their customers from knowing about it.
I figured it was something like that, but I'll continue the [loaded] questioning. Bear in mind that, as a programmer, I am aware that I am being paid for the "intellectual property" which I am generating, so I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the idea of getting paid for my creative work, but I tend to take the viewpoint that people should be paid for goods & services, not for things which have been assigned economic value through legal machinations.
You steal my car, I can buy another, but you take away my intellectual property rights and you've cut off my "car supply".
I'd question the value of a single "idea" which could be so easily copied. Why should society let you coast on the artificial value of a single "idea" (especially if it's a concept so simple that other people could easily use it)?
I'm a knowledge-worker. I've spent years getting the knowledge I have. It's kinda like the heart surgeon asked to justify the $100,000 fee for open heart surgery. His answer: "operating room, tools, support staff, billable time to operate - $10,000; knowing where to cut - $90,000."
I'd point out that the heart surgeon is providing a SERVICE, and is getting paid commensurate to the value of that service. In the context of intellectual property, a better example would be for someone to work out & document a better method for a particular kind of heart surgery, then expect all heart surgeons (or the hospitals or medical plan, whatever) to pay them money every time they use it.
As a "knowledge-worker", you get paid for the service that you can provide using whatever skills & knowledge you have gained during your training/experience. Why should you get paid for something you might've developed if someone else develops the same thing, probably without even consulting you or even knowing of your work, just because you came up with the idea first?
I reiterate the original premise of the intellectual property laws - they exist to benefit SOCIETY by giving special short-term benefits to creators. If the current incarnation of the intellectual property laws does not result in a net benefit to the society, then they should be revised to maximize the benefit to society, NOT to the creators. (The creators's benefit will be factored into the net benefit to the society.).
Common argument...to which I always respond: do you blame the guy who designed the door knobs on the gas chambers? No, clearly door knobs serve a much larger purpose and like all technology, door knobs can be abused.
Doorknobs vs. gas chambers? I'm waiting to hear what you think how the people who designed & built those gas chambers thought they were going to be used.
Same thing with bombs. You design something to do something, and it gets used in the manner you designed it to work - you've got a direct line of responsibility to the results.
Really? If you live in the United States, chances are you are using technology -- right now -- that came as a result of that research.
I would submit that the research necessary to build a nuclear power plant does NOT necessarily yield all of the information necessary to build a nuclear bomb. And if you design a nuclear power plant, you can be reasonably sure someone isn't going to drop it on a city to kill hundreds of thousands of people.
Although if you make a suitcase-sized nuclear power plant w/o the expectation that some nut might try and crack it open inside a populated area, you could probably be blamed for negligence if not intent.
Laws that are too much trouble to enforce either cease to be enforced or are repealed.
Or, if the general public doesn't protest too much, then the laws stick around forever and are selectively enforced by the authorities whenever they feel like.
Too bad there's nothing in the Constitution which says that laws which can't be enforced consistently will automatically expire.
Software development can be measured based on a large number of metrics. The fact that most people refuse to use software engineering practices that have been known for decades doesn't mean that the process is "immeasurable" it simply means our industry is full of people who'd rather subscribe to the myth that programming is an art instead of trying to make it an engineering discipline.
I'd like to take small issue with this statement - I'd claim that software engineering, like any sort of creative process (and often like many forms of engineering), *IS* an art. If it weren't, you could take your specs & automate a process which could grind out the perfect solution w/o human intervention.
However, many so-called "artists" have a false idea of exactly how much discipline goes into a truly good piece of art. They believe that a "creative" person can bring forth the perfect solution for any problem full-blown from the murky depths of their unconscious minds. They point to tiny single-person projects that they've completed as "proof" of that software development model. Then they run into software projects where the details are too large to fit into one person's mind, and/or there is more than one person working on the project.
_THAT'S_ where the discipline and all of the software development "techniques" and methodologies are required - to help us mere humans keep the overall information flows cohesive enough to be useful. But after the problems have been broken down small enough for individuals to completely mentally assimilate, I believe that the results at those steps are still creative in nature, and can be classified as "art".
Wow indeed. As has been repeatedly stated in essays about the GPL, if there were no such concept of private ownership of creative "property" (i.e., abstract ideas rather than something concrete), then THERE WOULD BE NO NEED FOR THE GPL. Licenses like the GPL exist to prevent entities from using the "ownership of creative property" laws to prevent the distribution of the ideas embodied in source code.
Granted, the situation with no intellectual property ownership would be more like everything having the BSD license.
What I don't understand is why people like you think that intellectual property ownership is the same thing as physical property ownership, and get just as fanatical over it as if someone had stolen a car from your driveway. "Intellectual property" is an abstract concept defined for the overall benefit of society, by lowering the risks associated with generating creative works to increase a potential economic payoff for the creators. There is no physical basis for "intellectual property".
Re:Read Flatland yourself,thanks to Project Gutenb
on
The New Flatland
·
· Score: 1
I remember hurting my brain trying to "imagine" infinitesimals...
Mao used Communism to better the life of HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of peasants.
He did? I thought Mao used Communism to force tens of millions of people from the cities into the countryside, where they died like flies. Oh yeah, and to consolidate the absolute power of him & his Communist cronies over the entire country.
Too bad that most of the major powers who label themselves "Communist" don't even remotely resemble the utopias envisioned in the texts where that label originated...
Never mind the cracks to defeat copy protection, I would imagine that people would be creating & downloading cracks just to disable the 2-minute long force-you-to-watch advertising sequence.
This is an excellent idea. I would also suggest the following: any funds generated by this copyright "tax" be earmarked for the support of the arts.
I think that it would still be a good idea that it be required that the original creator be determinable from any copied work, to prevent people from trying to pass a copy of somebody else's work as their own. (Perhaps with criminal fraud charges being applicable:)
Your design is meaningless. All that would happen is that a lot of people would sign copyright-protected stuff with either their own (if they're feeling nervy) or anonymous-generated PGP signatures, then tell Napster it was "ok" to share those files.
The only way that the RIAA can get what they want is if they or Napster personally authenticate every file and/or PGP signer before allowing the signed files to appear on the Napster directories. The RIAA isn't going to trust Napster to do it properly, and if the RIAA is making decisions about which files or people are okay to be shared or do sharing, you'd be a moron to think there's not going to be some kind of bias against non-RIAA interests.
The story I remember liking about some of the ancient Scandinavian legal systems, is that an entire tribe would get together annually and someone (the "keeper of the laws"?) would speak aloud, BY MEMORY, the entire set of laws for the tribe.
Anything that they couldn't remember, wasn't a law anymore. Needless to say, their laws tended to be quite a bit simpler & common sense than those of the US legal system.
Actually, with all the talk about the relative advantages & disadvantages of Freenet & the other P2P services, how 'bout a combo?
The way I understand Freenet, you can request files based on some calculated key values (hopefully unique for a given file's contents) and it will be sent to you through the Freenet network in some fashion which makes it anonymous to all of the nodes inbetween.
The current main difficulty with Freenet was associating search requests with those key values.
So how about a combo solution? Use normal P2P techniques (and normal search engines for that matter) to return key values based on search criteria. Then use the key value to download the file from Freenet.
By decoupling the searching mechanism from the download mechanism, then you can have all kinds of ways of searching without compromising the robustness & security of the download network.
Here's another idea for distributing search/key value pairs w/o compromising the identity of the people making those associations - use USENET (or a similar mass-distribution channel) with the anonymous mail-to-news gateways to distribute batches of search condition/key value pairs at a time.
I think the RIAA would use the same argument they used against Napster - you may not be directly violating the law, but you're deliberately trying to help people break it. And we all know how successful Napster was at defending itself.
Because ANYBODY can write like this. Lawyers as a group(1) seem to like unnecessarily complicated laws and strange ways of wording things so that it's necessary to pay them piles of money to keep from getting flung in jail and/or bankrupted by silly lawsuits. In addition, I think the jargon adds to their mystique, and therefore their perceived value.
My brother (who recently became a lawyer) said that he thought it was because that was the way they were taught to write in school (trying to use an ambiguous language to make unambiguous definitions about ambiguous situations), and in a horribly circular way, you HAD to write like that or other legal professionals wouldn't take your work seriously.
I've been reading a lot about refactoring lately - I'm wondering how much of these techniques could be applied to laws...
I've been thinking for a number of years (especially with those head-to-head driving games) that arcades would be a nifty place for networked games - but a GLOBAL network, not just inside a single arcade.
You could have arcades being part of a franchise, or you could have multiple arcades cooperating with each other, where all of the arcades are hooked together with fault-tolerant high-speed connections, and the games are set up so that you can choose to play anyone at any of the other arcade locations.
Throw in the opportunity for players to interact with each other (good time to brush up on your foreign language profanities), and some funky controllers which would be too expensive to buy for home use, and I think that a visit to the arcade would still be pretty enjoyable.
Of course, if the games DIDN'T cost $1/min, that would be even more enjoyable...
Slashdot Mirror
In this context, "commercial" means that you're providing a good or service to another party with the intent of being compensated. You're using the term incorrectly, as referring to any action having to do with money.
Does that include the bit where the only reason that those ancients could afford to HAVE a democracy is because they had enough slaves to do all the grunt work for them? (Of course, the slaves didn't get to participate in the "democracy".)
I wouldn't mind a decent show in the Star Trek universe, but why is everyone so stuck on having the main characters in Starfleet? Even the guy up above who had a great idea about doing a short-story style of Star Trek ala Outer Limits limited his idea to "changing to different Federation bridges".
Screw Starfleet! I wanna merchant/smuggler/criminal Klingon/Romulan/whatever vessel, or even just a bunch of people who hitch rides all over the Star Trek universe. Maybe they'll have a mad-on for Starfleet due to bad experiences (or because they ARE criminals), and do their best to screw over Starfleet any chance they get.
The cast could be majorly disfunctional, unlike the goody-two-shoes Starfleet members, and major stories could be written about them getting themselves out of messes that they got themselves into. Instead of figuring out a good solution, their first response is to run like hell - and if they're cornered, they maim & destroy with lots of viciousness.
I have a mental image of a female Klingon "captain" who's drunk most of the time & regards the male members of the crew (of any race) as her personal harem (as they maneuver to avoid being left alone with her). (Maybe that's too much of a comedy...)
Prime Directive? When there's money to be made & peaceful civilizations to exploit? It is to laugh...
The undergraduate math classes I went through had open book (closed neighbor), take-home, unlimited time (but in one session, on the honor system) exams.
I gained an absolute hatred for those exams, 'cause the unlimited format was the signal that the instructor was going to put in problems which the textbook didn't even get CLOSE to touching, and which no one had talked about either in class or in study sessions (neither tangentially or especially not directly), and even when you figured out the "trick" to solving the problem, would take hours of grinding out symbolic manipulations by hand (with all the corresponding potential for making stupid little mistakes 3 hours back) to come up with an answer which you really had no way to sanity check.
My only consolation is that everybody else in the classes did about as badly as I did (except for the inevitable few "prodigies").
You're either thinking of patents, or how long copyrights USED to last. Copyrights now last 70+ years (courtesy of Disney's lobbyists). The only DVDs available then are going to be in museums.
Actually, it was a little worse than that - if I remember correctly, Rambus tinkered with the contents of their patents a little after attending the industry standards board, in order to make sure that the patent descriptions would cover the subjects brought up in the standards meeting.
What do you mean? You'll get paid for services rendered, the value to be negotiated between payer & payee, just like any job.
I don't see what this has to do with intellectual property rights. You're getting paid for services rendered. I don't see where you think lack of intellectual property rights would affect this.
My "demand" is necessary to debate the societal value of intellectual property rights - what kind of value do they provide to society, versus what kind of cost do they impose on society. If you start with a society that does not have intellectual property rights, and give them a chance to do a cost/benefit analysis of adding intellectual property rights, then they can draw a conclusion about whether such rights will provide a net value to their society.
It would be more difficult to start with a society that does have intellectual property rights, and then theorize what would happen if you removed those rights (given that such a society is likely to have large "players" which have grown to depend on those rights for their survival).
Please, you don't have to be a nutcase to desire systemic improvements. And if enough people get pissed off, there WILL be change. And the more people who get pissed off before the change occurs, the more likely that change will be catastrophic rather than gradual.
Taking a step back from my Devil's Advocate stance, I don't actually disagree with the basic concept of intellectual property - encouraging the creation of new ideas for the long-term benefit of society by giving the creator some short-term control over the idea, with the promise that the idea will be released after a reasonable interval for use by the generic public. I just disagree with the DEGREE of absolute, practically-unlimited control which has been bought by special interests who would rather make money by manipulating the legal system & restraining the creativity of other people rather than make money by creating a regular flow of NEW ideas.
I'm willing to live & let live religions/cults, unless they happen to be heavily armed and likely to shoot me if I look at them sideways. In that case, I hope they get taken down fast, for my own safety.
That's a circular argument - the only reason you get paid for your "creations", even though you're not doing any work past the original creation, is BECAUSE an intellectual property "right" has been defined.
Try this one: assuming that there is no intellectual property "right", what kind of service can you provide to people that they will find of value so that they will pay you?
Your argument still presupposes the existence of intellectual property "rights". Because of intellectual property law, those things defined as intellectual property have value, and people have to pay you to use them. If the law didn't exist, then those things wouldn't have value to other people, and people wouldn't pay to use them. They'd pay you to CREATE them, but not just to use them (once the idea was out).
Come up with an argument for intellectual property rights, assuming that we are living in a society that doesn't already have them.
Come on, you can't agree with what I said, and then turn around & claim that I'm saying something different.
It's all in the intent - using your example, if somebody wrote handwriting recognition software with the knowledge that it had a high probability of being used to launch missiles, then they've got responsibility for the results. If they write a general-purpose handwriting recognition system with the idea that they're going to sell a lot of pen-based computers, and then somebody coopts the system for use in launching missiles, then it's the person who coopted the system who made the decision to contribute to something lethal.
The IBM software is designed to identify & monitor people, and to apply some analysis to their behavior. The systems that it is being used in, are designed to be inobtrusive (wouldn't want to actually upset the customers by making it OBVIOUS that they're under surveillance all the time).
Whoever designed the system deliberately created something which can be used to unobtrusively identify, monitor & analyse the behavior of anybody that comes into its field of view, with the knowledge that this information will be used to restrain people's activities (e.g., catching shoplifters) and to try and improve their ability to manipulate people (e.g., targeted advertising).
While this is a far cry from something that was designed to kill people, it's certainly not as benevolent as a new kind of bread or a poster with a cartoon mascot on it. And since the people using it know that it wouldn't be popular, they do their best to keep their customers from knowing about it.
I figured it was something like that, but I'll continue the [loaded] questioning. Bear in mind that, as a programmer, I am aware that I am being paid for the "intellectual property" which I am generating, so I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the idea of getting paid for my creative work, but I tend to take the viewpoint that people should be paid for goods & services, not for things which have been assigned economic value through legal machinations.
I'd question the value of a single "idea" which could be so easily copied. Why should society let you coast on the artificial value of a single "idea" (especially if it's a concept so simple that other people could easily use it)?
I'd point out that the heart surgeon is providing a SERVICE, and is getting paid commensurate to the value of that service. In the context of intellectual property, a better example would be for someone to work out & document a better method for a particular kind of heart surgery, then expect all heart surgeons (or the hospitals or medical plan, whatever) to pay them money every time they use it.
As a "knowledge-worker", you get paid for the service that you can provide using whatever skills & knowledge you have gained during your training/experience. Why should you get paid for something you might've developed if someone else develops the same thing, probably without even consulting you or even knowing of your work, just because you came up with the idea first?
I reiterate the original premise of the intellectual property laws - they exist to benefit SOCIETY by giving special short-term benefits to creators. If the current incarnation of the intellectual property laws does not result in a net benefit to the society, then they should be revised to maximize the benefit to society, NOT to the creators. (The creators's benefit will be factored into the net benefit to the society.).
Doorknobs vs. gas chambers? I'm waiting to hear what you think how the people who designed & built those gas chambers thought they were going to be used.
Same thing with bombs. You design something to do something, and it gets used in the manner you designed it to work - you've got a direct line of responsibility to the results.
I would submit that the research necessary to build a nuclear power plant does NOT necessarily yield all of the information necessary to build a nuclear bomb. And if you design a nuclear power plant, you can be reasonably sure someone isn't going to drop it on a city to kill hundreds of thousands of people.
Although if you make a suitcase-sized nuclear power plant w/o the expectation that some nut might try and crack it open inside a populated area, you could probably be blamed for negligence if not intent.
Or, if the general public doesn't protest too much, then the laws stick around forever and are selectively enforced by the authorities whenever they feel like.
Too bad there's nothing in the Constitution which says that laws which can't be enforced consistently will automatically expire.
I'd like to take small issue with this statement - I'd claim that software engineering, like any sort of creative process (and often like many forms of engineering), *IS* an art. If it weren't, you could take your specs & automate a process which could grind out the perfect solution w/o human intervention.
However, many so-called "artists" have a false idea of exactly how much discipline goes into a truly good piece of art. They believe that a "creative" person can bring forth the perfect solution for any problem full-blown from the murky depths of their unconscious minds. They point to tiny single-person projects that they've completed as "proof" of that software development model. Then they run into software projects where the details are too large to fit into one person's mind, and/or there is more than one person working on the project.
_THAT'S_ where the discipline and all of the software development "techniques" and methodologies are required - to help us mere humans keep the overall information flows cohesive enough to be useful. But after the problems have been broken down small enough for individuals to completely mentally assimilate, I believe that the results at those steps are still creative in nature, and can be classified as "art".
Wow indeed. As has been repeatedly stated in essays about the GPL, if there were no such concept of private ownership of creative "property" (i.e., abstract ideas rather than something concrete), then THERE WOULD BE NO NEED FOR THE GPL. Licenses like the GPL exist to prevent entities from using the "ownership of creative property" laws to prevent the distribution of the ideas embodied in source code.
Granted, the situation with no intellectual property ownership would be more like everything having the BSD license.
What I don't understand is why people like you think that intellectual property ownership is the same thing as physical property ownership, and get just as fanatical over it as if someone had stolen a car from your driveway. "Intellectual property" is an abstract concept defined for the overall benefit of society, by lowering the risks associated with generating creative works to increase a potential economic payoff for the creators. There is no physical basis for "intellectual property".
I remember hurting my brain trying to "imagine" infinitesimals...
He did? I thought Mao used Communism to force tens of millions of people from the cities into the countryside, where they died like flies. Oh yeah, and to consolidate the absolute power of him & his Communist cronies over the entire country.
Too bad that most of the major powers who label themselves "Communist" don't even remotely resemble the utopias envisioned in the texts where that label originated...
Never mind the cracks to defeat copy protection, I would imagine that people would be creating & downloading cracks just to disable the 2-minute long force-you-to-watch advertising sequence.
This is an excellent idea. I would also suggest the following: any funds generated by this copyright "tax" be earmarked for the support of the arts.
:)
I think that it would still be a good idea that it be required that the original creator be determinable from any copied work, to prevent people from trying to pass a copy of somebody else's work as their own. (Perhaps with criminal fraud charges being applicable
Your design is meaningless. All that would happen is that a lot of people would sign copyright-protected stuff with either their own (if they're feeling nervy) or anonymous-generated PGP signatures, then tell Napster it was "ok" to share those files.
The only way that the RIAA can get what they want is if they or Napster personally authenticate every file and/or PGP signer before allowing the signed files to appear on the Napster directories. The RIAA isn't going to trust Napster to do it properly, and if the RIAA is making decisions about which files or people are okay to be shared or do sharing, you'd be a moron to think there's not going to be some kind of bias against non-RIAA interests.
The story I remember liking about some of the ancient Scandinavian legal systems, is that an entire tribe would get together annually and someone (the "keeper of the laws"?) would speak aloud, BY MEMORY, the entire set of laws for the tribe.
Anything that they couldn't remember, wasn't a law anymore. Needless to say, their laws tended to be quite a bit simpler & common sense than those of the US legal system.
Actually, with all the talk about the relative advantages & disadvantages of Freenet & the other P2P services, how 'bout a combo?
The way I understand Freenet, you can request files based on some calculated key values (hopefully unique for a given file's contents) and it will be sent to you through the Freenet network in some fashion which makes it anonymous to all of the nodes inbetween.
The current main difficulty with Freenet was associating search requests with those key values.
So how about a combo solution? Use normal P2P techniques (and normal search engines for that matter) to return key values based on search criteria. Then use the key value to download the file from Freenet.
By decoupling the searching mechanism from the download mechanism, then you can have all kinds of ways of searching without compromising the robustness & security of the download network.
Here's another idea for distributing search/key value pairs w/o compromising the identity of the people making those associations - use USENET (or a similar mass-distribution channel) with the anonymous mail-to-news gateways to distribute batches of search condition/key value pairs at a time.
I think the RIAA would use the same argument they used against Napster - you may not be directly violating the law, but you're deliberately trying to help people break it. And we all know how successful Napster was at defending itself.
My brother (who recently became a lawyer) said that he thought it was because that was the way they were taught to write in school (trying to use an ambiguous language to make unambiguous definitions about ambiguous situations), and in a horribly circular way, you HAD to write like that or other legal professionals wouldn't take your work seriously.
I've been reading a lot about refactoring lately - I'm wondering how much of these techniques could be applied to laws...
I've been thinking for a number of years (especially with those head-to-head driving games) that arcades would be a nifty place for networked games - but a GLOBAL network, not just inside a single arcade.
You could have arcades being part of a franchise, or you could have multiple arcades cooperating with each other, where all of the arcades are hooked together with fault-tolerant high-speed connections, and the games are set up so that you can choose to play anyone at any of the other arcade locations.
Throw in the opportunity for players to interact with each other (good time to brush up on your foreign language profanities), and some funky controllers which would be too expensive to buy for home use, and I think that a visit to the arcade would still be pretty enjoyable.
Of course, if the games DIDN'T cost $1/min, that would be even more enjoyable...