This story only happens to involve Bitcoin. Bitcoin or not, this is Your Rights Online. The notion you could get raided just because of what you do with your own time and money is outrageous.
Speculators happen to be entrepreneurs, by placing their assets at risk. Speculators bet that there will be an increased, otherwise unanticipated demand for a good in the future. The difference is that, unlike the merchants, speculators don't have physical capital on the line.
Probably merchants see a growing community around it right now, and are willing to take some risk now, betting on the future value of the currency, in order to profit in the future. Which is exactly what an entrepreneur is.
Yes, I'm saying if you innovate a brand new invention, we should introduce competition and people should be allowed to copy and improve on it. Problem?
"Are you arguing that because piracy exists we must give up on copyrights?" Where in the world did you get this idea? And you claim you're not misinterpreting anything.
Again, you are in no position to say how catastrophically the economy would fail without copyright, we can't say how a free economy would work, otherwise it wouldn't be a free economy, would it? I can point to industries not protected, however, and all evidence shows we don't see this failure in actual industries not protected by intellectual property. You have yet to explain away pollsters, financial data, economic data, the entire fashion industry. It's common knowledge your design is up for copying, if it's fraud you're talking about, that's trademark law and that's something else entirely. I would challenge your point on the "Porn Industry Lawyer" not being representative of the industry at large, unlike the movie industry or music industry.
Apparently you have to use attacks like "cuckooland" and "moron," you fail. Unless you want to knock off the attacks, I'm done.
You keep managing to misinterpret or ignore my words, you've never explained how you arrived at "So if you rent me your house, it becomes my property anyways, contract be damned? I can do anything with it, including selling it off to someone else?"
Writers write to get paid because THAT'S WHAT THEY EXPECT FROM THE CURRENT SYSTEM. You imply that's the status quo is the correct thing to do, for no reason at all, except that a few people take it into consideration when deciding what to work on, but that's no reason at all. You're claiming that the ability to make money off of creating creative work would all go away, when you're in no position to say such a thing. Take the example from the article, the fashion and porn industries are either unprotected or effectively unprotected by copyright law, and yet those are profitable industries. OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE, where people voluntarily give up such protections, is profitable and yet according to your point, it shouldn't be. Data is uncopyrightable. It's 100% unprotected by patent or copyright. Yet large companies still take time and effort to gather and sell data. Rationalize that for me.
I don't have to answer how "people would make money" not only is it a non-sequitur, but people are already doing this in open source!
I own a hard drive. It arrived at my door zeroed out, I own 100% of it, fully paid for. Because I flipped a few bits downloading a song, I no longer own... what? The particular configuration of bits? It makes no sense when you consider scarcity.
If there's an industry that people really, honestly couldn't make profitable without copyright, then maybe it's a waste of time and energy and shouldn't exist anyways? Just because you can make a profit with a certain law, doesn't mean you should have that law, it ignores what else you could have been doing in the absence of the intervention.
Congratulations, you just made the argument against open source software. Would you be shocked to hear that open source, even public domain, is very profitable?
Yes, I understand the argument for copyright, I already refuted that position with the point that mere configurations of words are not limited resources, and as such cannot be owned. In particular, you're claiming that some third party's right to "own" a particular configuration of data trumps my right to be able to use MY OWN PROPERTY, that I can be threatened with legal action i.e. violence or the threat of it if I merely use MY property in an incorrect way. Who really is the owner, then? You're presenting some doomsday scenario without any basis or understanding of how such a system would work, despite the evidence showing it's plenty able to work. I linked to a nice summary in my first post, maybe you want to read that before making any more redundant points.
To be clear: People get to do what THEY please with THEIR property. You can decide to rent it out to someone else, maybe even with a contract specifying how long they're allowed to stay at minimum so long as they hold up their end of the contract (I surely wouldn't rent a house from someone without such a guarantee). Likewise, just because someone may be the author of software, the actual code isn't a limited resource, just because someone is the author doesn't imply they can tell me what to do with MY computer or MY server. And in case you were wondering, you cannot "lease" "license" or "rent" code, you can only rent the medium it comes on, for this reason I'm arguing for maximum freedom.
On the contrary, observation isn't your strong point is it? Movie theaters don't typically own their reels of film, the studios recycle the silver out of it for future use. But even so, I'm talking about the right to be able to choose who you do and do not get to sell to, sure, I might be able to copy the hard disk or scan the film, but so do the distribution studios in their ability to stop selling to such theaters. A contract stipulates that sure, the theater may own the film reel, but they don't have guaranteed rights to future films. That's what you usually use a contract for, to specify things that happen in the future.
That's what I call a straw man. Who ever said you would have to sign anything? Your point is exactly what I'm arguing against, you cannot tell people what they're allowed to do with their property, contract or not!
By stipulating what conditions I'm legally allowed to publicly post it, or in the case of the AGPL, even make it available or modify it for my own use. I mean, how backwards can RMS get, the GPL was a response to companies who had licenses saying you couldn't modify your own software (his words), and now there's a "Free software" license that claims exactly that.
Are you trying to be stupid? Output of software is not a derivative work of anything, and isn't copyrighted, it should go without saying by which I mean by that program.
Output of the software is not copyrighted to the software. Was that entire post seriously necessary to clarify that point? In any event, that doesn't make the GPL any better.
And I maintain copyright is only a force for evil, if you can tell me how I'm supposed to use MY software running on MY computer. Do you want to argue against that position or not?
Markets aren't just designated as "free" or "controlled" by some intrinsic property of what is being traded, it's how they're run.
The fact is that IPv4 addresses, by which I mean the ability to have an IP address that routes traffic to where you want it to route to, are economic resources. Economic means limited. They have a very real cost associated with them -- An IP in use by one person cannot be used by some other person. If you're not allowed to sell control of IPs when it's economical (which is typically blocks of IPs since you obviously can't economically route individual IPs), then you end up with people who very much value an IPv4 address, but are not able to buy it from someone, even from a person who could just as easily switch to an IPv6 address with no problem if they were offered a market price for it.
Without a market, there's no way to allocate resources to their most productive use. Without profit, there's no way to determine if you are creating wealth (taking scarce, valuable resources like IP space) and making it more valuable, or if you're actually taking scarce resources and making them less valuable (taking a loss).
In a free market, people who don't need an IPv4 address any more than they need an IPv6 address could sell their address space, thereby creating wealth -- Now you have two people who are happy instead of just one. This happens on the margin: Maybe the first block of addresses is worth $4/address to the owner, and someone else is willing to pay $100. But maybe the next block is worth $500/address to the owner, in which case an exchange would be bad. In a controlled market you have no way of calculating this information, except futile attempts by a third party ruling who can make a better use of them.
The IPv4 address space is scarce, and no rule or declaration or ideal will change that. Because there is a shortage, they are NOT free, and you can't call something "free" if you can't get one even if you wanted to, so by definition that means it's not free. IPv6 address space is also scarce, but there's no shortage -- the cost puts demand far below the supply.
Not only would a market help put the limited address space to more productive use but it would also accelerate adoption of IPv6 by reflecting the fact it is cheaper than IPv4, like it actually is in the real world.
It should go without saying when someone refers to owning an IP address, they technically mean the ability to use it and have traffic for that IP routed to them.
No, rule of law has always preceded the growth of wealth. The libertarian argument is that we don't need a government that also redistributes wealth arbitrarily and wastes resources prosecuting victimless crimes, among other things, to have rule of law. In the case of anarchocapitalism, the argument is that private companies can compete to protect you in your house and other places, the same way we have cooperating local, county, state, and federal police forces. In the case of classical liberalism and minarchism, the argument is we don't need all the taxes, we just need a common court system to uphold contracts, which easily pays for itself. As I imply, the difference between the numerous camps is differing opinion on how the free market would actually execute this, since, of course, we don't know what a free market would do.
Did you even read the article in question? It hardly glorifies drunk driving, it's an appeal that such laws should not be the business of the Federal government, but instead of the people who actually own the roads, and that there can only be a crime when there's an injured party (In the case of drunk driving, the injured party is the owner of the road, for trespassing, not the Federal government). And as if that has anything to do with the topic at hand.
It also means movie theaters can show whatever they want without paying any movie production company.
This doesn't follow, we have no clue how a free market would really work (otherwise it wouldn't be a free market, would it?), but the likely solution would be theaters still have to sign contracts to get shipped high-quality versions of the movie (on film reels or otherwise) if they want to be the first distributor. Which is in fact how it actually works (more or less).
Is that a mischaracterization of what the GPL does, restricting the rights of distributors and coders to propagate the work in question, even if THEY own it on THEIR computer?
Maybe you meant to make an argument, but I can't find it.
Maybe you misread my post but I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the next sentence which is completely false:
However, nothing other than this License grants you permission to propagate or modify any covered work.
I call BS, copyright law allows me to because the output of software is not copyrightable, not to mention natural law (whether or not the government wants to recognize it).
It's called a clarifying assumption. The license grants you the ability to legally redistribute it only if you meet certain conditions. There's no need for the semantic games here.
Simple, don't. Really. If I want to modify the source, and distribute a modified binary without the modified source, that's my right, because it's my code published on my server, an entirely different property from being the author of the software (That is to say, the author owns the program, but not my instance of the program by virtue of the fact I copied it.)
Which contradicts his very own GPL license, which makes it illegal to distribute software unless you comply with the demand you also distribute the source, and other restrictions. He even claims the author can require require distribution of the source even if you merely run the software, as in the AGPL (a term I think is unenforceable, I can run and modify the software without agreeing to the license regardless of what the license tries to say). Now I'm no fan of DRM and such but I can't imagine it would work without the looming threat of legal action under the DMCA and other copyright law.
Slashdot Mirror
This story only happens to involve Bitcoin. Bitcoin or not, this is Your Rights Online. The notion you could get raided just because of what you do with your own time and money is outrageous.
You can't just write a law saying "And this government service shall not drive up the price of commercial Internet." Markets don't work like that.
Stop playing stupid, there's a whole Wikipedia article on Entrepreneurs if you really want to see what it is.
Speculators happen to be entrepreneurs, by placing their assets at risk. Speculators bet that there will be an increased, otherwise unanticipated demand for a good in the future. The difference is that, unlike the merchants, speculators don't have physical capital on the line.
Probably merchants see a growing community around it right now, and are willing to take some risk now, betting on the future value of the currency, in order to profit in the future. Which is exactly what an entrepreneur is.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=fashion+copyright
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=database+copyright
Pollsters and data collection isn't protected by copyright.
Commercial versions of MySQL are not open source, I'm talking about real open source where any potential to sell as you describe is waved. Even then I clarified by saying INCLUDING PUBLIC DOMAIN http://lmgtfy.com/?q=sqlite+copyright
Yes, I'm saying if you innovate a brand new invention, we should introduce competition and people should be allowed to copy and improve on it. Problem?
"Are you arguing that because piracy exists we must give up on copyrights?" Where in the world did you get this idea? And you claim you're not misinterpreting anything.
Again, you are in no position to say how catastrophically the economy would fail without copyright, we can't say how a free economy would work, otherwise it wouldn't be a free economy, would it? I can point to industries not protected, however, and all evidence shows we don't see this failure in actual industries not protected by intellectual property. You have yet to explain away pollsters, financial data, economic data, the entire fashion industry. It's common knowledge your design is up for copying, if it's fraud you're talking about, that's trademark law and that's something else entirely. I would challenge your point on the "Porn Industry Lawyer" not being representative of the industry at large, unlike the movie industry or music industry.
Apparently you have to use attacks like "cuckooland" and "moron," you fail. Unless you want to knock off the attacks, I'm done.
You keep managing to misinterpret or ignore my words, you've never explained how you arrived at "So if you rent me your house, it becomes my property anyways, contract be damned? I can do anything with it, including selling it off to someone else?"
Writers write to get paid because THAT'S WHAT THEY EXPECT FROM THE CURRENT SYSTEM. You imply that's the status quo is the correct thing to do, for no reason at all, except that a few people take it into consideration when deciding what to work on, but that's no reason at all. You're claiming that the ability to make money off of creating creative work would all go away, when you're in no position to say such a thing. Take the example from the article, the fashion and porn industries are either unprotected or effectively unprotected by copyright law, and yet those are profitable industries. OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE, where people voluntarily give up such protections, is profitable and yet according to your point, it shouldn't be. Data is uncopyrightable. It's 100% unprotected by patent or copyright. Yet large companies still take time and effort to gather and sell data. Rationalize that for me.
I don't have to answer how "people would make money" not only is it a non-sequitur, but people are already doing this in open source!
I own a hard drive. It arrived at my door zeroed out, I own 100% of it, fully paid for. Because I flipped a few bits downloading a song, I no longer own... what? The particular configuration of bits? It makes no sense when you consider scarcity.
If there's an industry that people really, honestly couldn't make profitable without copyright, then maybe it's a waste of time and energy and shouldn't exist anyways? Just because you can make a profit with a certain law, doesn't mean you should have that law, it ignores what else you could have been doing in the absence of the intervention.
Congratulations, you just made the argument against open source software. Would you be shocked to hear that open source, even public domain, is very profitable?
Yes, I understand the argument for copyright, I already refuted that position with the point that mere configurations of words are not limited resources, and as such cannot be owned. In particular, you're claiming that some third party's right to "own" a particular configuration of data trumps my right to be able to use MY OWN PROPERTY, that I can be threatened with legal action i.e. violence or the threat of it if I merely use MY property in an incorrect way. Who really is the owner, then? You're presenting some doomsday scenario without any basis or understanding of how such a system would work, despite the evidence showing it's plenty able to work. I linked to a nice summary in my first post, maybe you want to read that before making any more redundant points.
Where'd you get that idea from?
To be clear: People get to do what THEY please with THEIR property. You can decide to rent it out to someone else, maybe even with a contract specifying how long they're allowed to stay at minimum so long as they hold up their end of the contract (I surely wouldn't rent a house from someone without such a guarantee). Likewise, just because someone may be the author of software, the actual code isn't a limited resource, just because someone is the author doesn't imply they can tell me what to do with MY computer or MY server. And in case you were wondering, you cannot "lease" "license" or "rent" code, you can only rent the medium it comes on, for this reason I'm arguing for maximum freedom.
On the contrary, observation isn't your strong point is it? Movie theaters don't typically own their reels of film, the studios recycle the silver out of it for future use. But even so, I'm talking about the right to be able to choose who you do and do not get to sell to, sure, I might be able to copy the hard disk or scan the film, but so do the distribution studios in their ability to stop selling to such theaters. A contract stipulates that sure, the theater may own the film reel, but they don't have guaranteed rights to future films. That's what you usually use a contract for, to specify things that happen in the future.
That's what I call a straw man. Who ever said you would have to sign anything? Your point is exactly what I'm arguing against, you cannot tell people what they're allowed to do with their property, contract or not!
By stipulating what conditions I'm legally allowed to publicly post it, or in the case of the AGPL, even make it available or modify it for my own use. I mean, how backwards can RMS get, the GPL was a response to companies who had licenses saying you couldn't modify your own software (his words), and now there's a "Free software" license that claims exactly that.
So I'm not even supposed to persuasively argue that because of its terms people should consider against using it? What kind of world have we come to?
Are you trying to be stupid? Output of software is not a derivative work of anything, and isn't copyrighted, it should go without saying by which I mean by that program.
Slashdot has covered this before, come on: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/07/30/2055221/How-Wolfram-Alphas-Copyright-Claims-Could-Change-Software
Output of the software is not copyrighted to the software. Was that entire post seriously necessary to clarify that point? In any event, that doesn't make the GPL any better.
And I maintain copyright is only a force for evil, if you can tell me how I'm supposed to use MY software running on MY computer. Do you want to argue against that position or not?
Markets aren't just designated as "free" or "controlled" by some intrinsic property of what is being traded, it's how they're run.
The fact is that IPv4 addresses, by which I mean the ability to have an IP address that routes traffic to where you want it to route to, are economic resources. Economic means limited. They have a very real cost associated with them -- An IP in use by one person cannot be used by some other person. If you're not allowed to sell control of IPs when it's economical (which is typically blocks of IPs since you obviously can't economically route individual IPs), then you end up with people who very much value an IPv4 address, but are not able to buy it from someone, even from a person who could just as easily switch to an IPv6 address with no problem if they were offered a market price for it.
Without a market, there's no way to allocate resources to their most productive use. Without profit, there's no way to determine if you are creating wealth (taking scarce, valuable resources like IP space) and making it more valuable, or if you're actually taking scarce resources and making them less valuable (taking a loss).
In a free market, people who don't need an IPv4 address any more than they need an IPv6 address could sell their address space, thereby creating wealth -- Now you have two people who are happy instead of just one. This happens on the margin: Maybe the first block of addresses is worth $4/address to the owner, and someone else is willing to pay $100. But maybe the next block is worth $500/address to the owner, in which case an exchange would be bad. In a controlled market you have no way of calculating this information, except futile attempts by a third party ruling who can make a better use of them.
The IPv4 address space is scarce, and no rule or declaration or ideal will change that. Because there is a shortage, they are NOT free, and you can't call something "free" if you can't get one even if you wanted to, so by definition that means it's not free. IPv6 address space is also scarce, but there's no shortage -- the cost puts demand far below the supply.
Not only would a market help put the limited address space to more productive use but it would also accelerate adoption of IPv6 by reflecting the fact it is cheaper than IPv4, like it actually is in the real world.
It should go without saying when someone refers to owning an IP address, they technically mean the ability to use it and have traffic for that IP routed to them.
No, rule of law has always preceded the growth of wealth. The libertarian argument is that we don't need a government that also redistributes wealth arbitrarily and wastes resources prosecuting victimless crimes, among other things, to have rule of law. In the case of anarchocapitalism, the argument is that private companies can compete to protect you in your house and other places, the same way we have cooperating local, county, state, and federal police forces. In the case of classical liberalism and minarchism, the argument is we don't need all the taxes, we just need a common court system to uphold contracts, which easily pays for itself. As I imply, the difference between the numerous camps is differing opinion on how the free market would actually execute this, since, of course, we don't know what a free market would do.
Did you even read the article in question? It hardly glorifies drunk driving, it's an appeal that such laws should not be the business of the Federal government, but instead of the people who actually own the roads, and that there can only be a crime when there's an injured party (In the case of drunk driving, the injured party is the owner of the road, for trespassing, not the Federal government). And as if that has anything to do with the topic at hand.
It also means movie theaters can show whatever they want without paying any movie production company.
This doesn't follow, we have no clue how a free market would really work (otherwise it wouldn't be a free market, would it?), but the likely solution would be theaters still have to sign contracts to get shipped high-quality versions of the movie (on film reels or otherwise) if they want to be the first distributor. Which is in fact how it actually works (more or less).
Is that a mischaracterization of what the GPL does, restricting the rights of distributors and coders to propagate the work in question, even if THEY own it on THEIR computer?
Maybe you meant to make an argument, but I can't find it.
Maybe you misread my post but I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the next sentence which is completely false:
However, nothing other than this License grants you permission to propagate or modify any covered work.
I call BS, copyright law allows me to because the output of software is not copyrightable, not to mention natural law (whether or not the government wants to recognize it).
It's called a clarifying assumption. The license grants you the ability to legally redistribute it only if you meet certain conditions. There's no need for the semantic games here.
Simple, don't. Really. If I want to modify the source, and distribute a modified binary without the modified source, that's my right, because it's my code published on my server, an entirely different property from being the author of the software (That is to say, the author owns the program, but not my instance of the program by virtue of the fact I copied it.)
Which contradicts his very own GPL license, which makes it illegal to distribute software unless you comply with the demand you also distribute the source, and other restrictions. He even claims the author can require require distribution of the source even if you merely run the software, as in the AGPL (a term I think is unenforceable, I can run and modify the software without agreeing to the license regardless of what the license tries to say). Now I'm no fan of DRM and such but I can't imagine it would work without the looming threat of legal action under the DMCA and other copyright law.