Someone on the target webpage asked how to disable SELinux. I don't really feel like making an account on that website, but you should edit/etc/sysconfig/selinux.
I intensely dislike the length of copyright, and I dislike many, many ways in which patents are applied to day.
Trademarks, however, are valueable in that they provide a unique way to identify a product or service. Without them, it's easy for someone else to trick consumers who want the original product or service.
I agree that some trademarks are badly abused to attempt to avoid copyright's time restrictions (loose as they are). Disney has trademarked Mickey Mouse in a number of positions such that they go after people using the Mouse even after the copyright on him expires (if it ever does). However, I think that the value of trademarks does outweigh the drawbacks of the occasional bit of abuse.
His essay is clearly overblown, with his ranting about patents on literary devices.
Yes, I agree. I posted that I do not think that his essay is well-written myself (even though I have enjoyed his professional writing in the past). Frankly, I've seen better arguments against patent abuse on Slashdot than the ones he provides. Most of what raised my hackles was simply how harshly you flamed him. Yes, his article is probably not perfect, but it's mass media. He's doing something that I consider important, which is raising public awareness of the extent of patent coverage. I am sure that others will come along and argue points that he raises.
All right, fair enough. I don't know -- and that's a good point. I remember Celera attempting to patent chunks of the human genome directly, and I simply grabbed a Celera patent related to a sequence of genes. I don't have any evidence that this particular one is indeed naturally occurring, and the patent I referenced is too new to have anything written about it.
Here's a better example -- example -- 5,693,473. This patent is on a naturally-occurring set of mutations that cause breast cancer.
It seriously made me wonder whether he reads Slashdot. The "I've patented this article" thing is pretty standard here.
However, Crichton is doing something good here. Most people that read the NYT do *not* read Slashdot. There are a lot of people here who are upset because they actually run into the engineering problems caused by the rapidly expanding scope of patents; FreeType not being able to render TrueType fonts with hinting information legally, OSS not being able to compress textures in a fashion compatible with hardware accelerators, valgrind being (temporarily?) removed from Red Hat, software not being able to compress GIFs, and so forth.
The typical NYT reader probably does not run into these issues, and does not realize that they represent a severe roadblock to engineers. This is an important step in raising public consciousness about what is going on. Once people are aware of the issue, more investigation and debate can occur.
Legislators don't do anything until there is public awareness of a problem. This is a necessary step.
Nevertheless 20 percent of the genome is now privately owned.
The genes themselves are not owned. A "product of nature" - a naturally occurring substance discovered in the wild - may not be patented per se. However, a method for extracting, isolating, and purifying a gene may be patentable. But keep in mind that patents only last for 20 years - so these patented methods will be publicly available for free in less than 20 years. And others are still free to find other methods of extraction.
Completely wrong. I'd like to refer you to one of Celera's patents, 7005286. This is very clearly a patent on not merely a sequence of genes, but a pattern that may match many genes. Here's claim 1:
1. An isolated nucleic acid molecule comprising a nucleotide sequence selected from the group consisting of:
(a) a transcript or cDNA sequence that encodes a polypeptide having an amino acid sequence comprising SEQ ID NO:2;
(b) SEQ ID NO:1;
(c) nueleotides 91-2187 of SEQ ID NO:1; and
(d) a nucleotide sequence that is completely complementary to the nucleotide sequence of (a), (b), or (c).
Interesting, eh?
Certainly Mr. Crichton can afford an introductory class in patent law. Hopefully he will be better informed the next time he publishes an essay. Because this type of uninformed nonsense passed off as fact is really annoying.
I agree with the sentiment, but I don't think that Mr. Crichton is the one who needs to be questioned.
First, Congress dislikes retroactively destroying intellectual property. This is only common sense -- it yanks the rug out from under investors and businesses.
The USPTO does not have strong limitations placed on it by Congress on exactly what is patentable, and has a huge amount of lobbyist pressure to make as many things as possible patentable.
In the case of genes, we've allowed people to grab ownership of a big chunk of the human genome (as Crichton points out in his essay). This is not a case of the genome not being sequenced -- the Human Genome Project was not locking up genes in IP, but Celera was. This was an attempt to conduct a landgrab on something valuable.
Of course, as you've pointed out, Celera's investors are going to be pretty pissed off (justifiably) if the USPTO let Celera think that it could patent existing genes and then proceeds to wipe away those patents.
The other issue is prescedent. Later people that come along and want to patent things are going to be very irritated if Celera is allowed to patent something, but they are not.
In the case of genes, I have no problem saying that the things are not patentable if they exist in nature. There are other ways to get the value out of them. Sequencing a particular chunk of genes is a rote activity, not a unique process that may not happen again anytime soon (like coming up with a new process, which is what patents are supposed to cover).
I'd like to see strong regulation coming from Congress specifically excluding some areas from patents. Among other areas, I'd like to see:
* Software patents made invalid. Patents do not work well in the software world -- they last far too long, do not account for the high difficulty of reverse engineering software, and "new methods" are constantly used by any software engineer.
* Business method patents made invalid. We've managed to develop many good business models over the years without the "benefit" of patents becoming involved. I don't see the reason to start now.
* Patents on pre-existing data made invalid. If you genetically engineer a new flower, there might be an arguable case for a patent. If you just take an existing flower and dump the data, it should not be patentable. Patents on this are an attempt to do an end-run around copyright law, which *specifically* exclude lists of data as copyrightable (to avoid exactly this sort of nonsense).
Going back to your criticism of Crichton, I'd say that yes, the article was probably not very well-written or convincing. Frankly, I've read better-supported arguments on Slashdot (though perhaps Crichton simply understands his readership better than I do). However, that does *not* mean that his argument is invalid. The fact that he chose an example that was "useless" is certainly not unreasonable, especially since it establishes prescedent (and in the past, this sort of thing has had enormous weight in determining what kind of patents can be granted).
Crichton is addressing a real issue. This patent will be followed by another and another. The longer we wait to do anything about it, the harder it will be, and the more investors will make decisions based on earlier patents.
I'd prefer to draw the line on the side of not restricting new development. That's the safe decision, and the one that's easier to change.
Nobody except Chiron managed either to isolate or sequence Hep-C desipite over ten years of hard work.
I don't even think that this is relevant to the validity of Crichtons argument, as I've said above, but even so, I don't think that your argument is complete. Chiron did not, as far as I can see, develop a new process. Patents protect processes. I might spend forty years doing something that isn't covered by patents, but that still doesn't mean it should be patentable. Besides, were there competitors even attempting to do this? The impression I got was similar to that of Celera -- some people trying to lock up in monopolies existing data by slightly beating someone else to the punch.
"Gambling" is a tax on those who don't understand the mathematics of statistics.
While I agree with you in the general case, I can think of hypothetical situations in which gambling is worthwhile -- where your valuation function becomes very non-linear. For example, suppose you were going to be shot in the head in twenty-four hours unless you could come up with one million dollars.
Games are not physiologically addictive -- they can be mentally addictive, however. It is possible to create a learned behavior pattern that is quite difficult to break.
Here's another good example of Blizzard imposing drudge work on players -- consider Diablo. Diablo is basically an extremely simplified version (and made real time) of the gratis and libre Angband.
Diablo relies mostly on forcing the player to click rapidly, and minimally on some strategy.
Angband has long had the Borg built in, a fully-automated AI that can play based on simple criteria for the player. The most advanced variant of Angband that I am aware of is ToME. ToME provides a system for recording and using macros that operate on designated objects (including by player-designated name). ToME provides a scheme for automatic pickup of items designated by a variety of criteria. ToME allows automated movement that is interrupted based on a number of player-specified criteria. ToME provides a scheme for automatically performing actions on objects -- such as "destroy all cursed long swords, but retain cursed Demonswords".
As a result, Diablo is basically a drawn-out sequence of forced drudge work, whereas in ToME, the player need only perform the work necessary for the strategy that he wants to conduct.
Granted, for the ToME approach to work, the game has to be sophisticated enough that automating the drudge work leaves plenty of entertaining game to play.
Blizzard has a long and rich history of creating games that rely on making players perform drudge work rapidly.
Starcraft, for example, introduced the limited build queues and limited selection group size specifically to increase the amount of drudge work in the game. The tasks added were simple and mindless, but because they forced the player to click the mouse and hit keys more quickly, Blizzard felt that the player was more excited. (Contrast this with, say, Total Annihilation -- which is currently being enhanced and cloned for Linux -- which allowed a player to automate essentially all of the drudge work and simply focus on high level strategy.)
Regrettably, the main goal of computers (eliminating drudge work) runs counter to this approach to game design. A number of people who want to use the computer for, well, its primary reason for existence, are going to chafe. These players may want to focus on the higher-level strategy and not simply engage in a clickfest. Blizzard feels that this conflicts with their game design, and will attempt to stop people from taking this approach.
Contrast this to, Stuart Cheshire's Bolo implementation. Numerous quite sophisticated bot programs were produced, ranging all the way from adding small automated features or recording a map of seen area all the way up to fully automated AIs that could be played against. Frankly, I thought that this was both cool and fun.
It all depends on the mentality of the game designer. Some people feel that drudge work is fun, some don't. Some players want a high level strategy game with action to watch, others want to be required to perform every click themselves.
As a matter of fact, I'll bet that by going to the fiction section of your local library and picking up some books containing fictional worlds with fictional laws, you can find all *sorts* of fictional laws that would be broken in our world if they were laws here.
Hell, Slashdot could run a story like this every five minutes and never run out of stories!
The reason people care is because the *AAs are trying to leverage negative public opinion of things that the public does *not* like -- like, say, pursesnatching -- to push their take on other things.
If the public doesn't like copyright infringement, then it's just fine to call the act "copyright infringement" and let popular support handle things.
The only reason not to do this is if you think you can't muster enough popular support for your position while calling something what it is.
So the *AAs steadfastly keep intentionally misusing the word "theft" to try to garner public support. That, to me, is a bit of an indictment of how little even *they* believe that the public wants to clobber copyright infringers.
You don't call someone who accidently killed someone while driving recklessly a "murderer". Don't call copyright infringement theft.
Now, copyright infringement *is* a civil offense (and can even be criminal in some cases). But one thing it certainly is not is theft. And people who are interested in honest, productive debate on the topic do not insist in injecting the word "theft" constantly into the discussion.
The example you gave is absurd. Nobody is "getting away with anything" by insisting on correct definitions.
It might do more to combat Chinese censorship than anything else if the current regime decides that maybe the Internet isn't *strictly* a propaganda tool aimed at overthrowing them.
The sad part is that a large number of slashdotters will convince themselves that this type of thing is good despite the fact that the site is very clearly engaged in theft.
Copyright infringement. If you're complaining about people playing mind games, you can at least have the decency to avoid doing the same thing yourself in the same sentence.
It costs $200 million to make some movies. If people stop paying to make the movies then that type of movie will not get made in the future.
This is the real issue. Not whether something is "right" or "wrong" -- those are just social norms that have been instilled in people -- but the pragmatic issues.
Currently, the fact that people pay to see movies allows the funding of the creation of said movies. If you endorse infringement, you need one of a couple of justifications:
(a) It's going to happen anyway -- in the presence of a worldwide system (the Internet) designed to cheaply replicate and distribute data, content funded on the predicate that duplication is hard and expensive cannot exist. That means an end is going to come to this funding system, at least for movies in the $200 million scale. Regardless of the methods used, social pressure to not infringe is not going to be effective. We will not be able to make movies that require $200 million in resources in the future -- movie prices will have to drop far enough that the convenience is worth the purchase. Future movies will have to be more thrift-oriented -- if this causes a drop in the enjoyment factor of movies, then that drop will occur. I know some people that dislike those "big budget action movies" that would probably fall into (a).
(b) Infringing movie usage does not damage movie sales. People will continue to go to theaters as the same level as before (well, sans the bite taken away by home theaters), but just spend a larger amount of time viewing movies, as they will infringe on some additional movies.
(c) Movies will continue to make as much money, but by using alternate approaches (like product placement or commercials) that are not affected by redistribution.
(d) Movies can be sold on a viable non-redistributable medium, but some type of DRM-enabled device will be used and this one will actually work.
Remember that, as technologies change, policies we use have adapted to fit the times. I'm quite certain that, in one form or another, the movie-making industry will be around in fifty years. The printing press, the cassette recorder, the VHS tape, home entertainment systems -- all have had significant impact on how content was provided, but content continued to be provided via one mechanism or another.
For example, the drive-in theater is pretty much dead today because of TVs and movie-playing systems at home. People rent tapes, which was a mechanism that really wasn't expected by anyone to make a lot of money at one point (and, in fact, was expected to kill the movie industry at one point).
It may be by simply instituting policy capable of fighting off all infringement; my personal guess is that the movie industry will instead morph and twist and adapt in one way or another. It may even be one that we haven't dreamed of yet. History supports this idea.
Less than 10 people in all of US history have been murdered by moronic anti-abortionists.
Hmm.
What about the Crusades? Those killed plenty of Jews and Arabs.
How about the long-running violence in Ireland? That's Christians killing Christians, Protestant against Catholic.
If you really want to find good bloodthirsty Christian-run killing, you're better off looking at the poorer nations. Rich, fat, happy people don't generally run around killing people. Indonesia's had plenty of killing on both halves. If you want something recent, try Nigeria.
The moral of the story? Religion is trouble, no matter what guise it comes in.
Actually, the fact that declaring war is not very popular has led to every armed conflict the US has been in since World War II not actually being a declared war.
"The people don't want war? Hmm...how about 'peacekeeping'?"
However, I'm pretty damn rigorous about using work Internet access for work. No personal email at work, no messaging client, no browsing news sites, nothing like that.
However, I still get incredibly pissed off when IT decides to try to regulate my behavior. Currently, the IT department where I work is the primary reason that I'd want to work somewhere else.
For example, they cut any TCP connections that run for longer than a certain amount of time. The justification was that some people were listening to Internet radio. This is really irritating when trying to download *all the CD images* for the current Fedora and having my connection constantly drops. They filter Web access (anything with "proxy" or "WINE" in the URL, for example) -- fun when I was writing a piece of software for Windows that needed to interoperate with proxies. They block outgoing SSH access. Frankly, it is absolutely not IT's balliwick to be stomping on employees who are goofing off. They can go to the employee's boss, and provide him with that information, but IT should never be in a position of trying to regulate employee behavior. That's the responsibility of that employee's superior.
It pisses the living hell out of the rest of us, who are treated with no trust (even aside from the direct impact of, for example, not having access to my addressbook and other data on my home computer from work).
Frankly, every IT person who has managed to wedge themselves in the position of regulating employee behavior has become an obstacle to getting things done rather than an asset to the company. I'd like to see nothing more than those people fired, yesterday.
You don't want someone at work who doesn't get anything done, who is "sending amusing flash/avi/mpeg between themselves, forwarding jokes someone outside sent to their gmail account (and they've cut-n-pasted them into work mail), etc."? Great. Let their managers fire the little unproductive bastards. But IT needs to stop trying to make themselves "second managers". They suck at it, and they deserve the dislike that comes back at them when they try it.
I wish that GIMP could be operated from the command line. At least currently, it is heavily tied to X for stuff like font rendering.
Which is kinda irritating, because I can think of a lot of times where I know exactly how to do something with GIMP, but just wish that I had an easy-to-use-as-a-backend system that could do the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone on the target webpage asked how to disable SELinux. I don't really feel like making an account on that website, but you should edit /etc/sysconfig/selinux.
I disagree.
I intensely dislike the length of copyright, and I dislike many, many ways in which patents are applied to day.
Trademarks, however, are valueable in that they provide a unique way to identify a product or service. Without them, it's easy for someone else to trick consumers who want the original product or service.
I agree that some trademarks are badly abused to attempt to avoid copyright's time restrictions (loose as they are). Disney has trademarked Mickey Mouse in a number of positions such that they go after people using the Mouse even after the copyright on him expires (if it ever does). However, I think that the value of trademarks does outweigh the drawbacks of the occasional bit of abuse.
His essay is clearly overblown, with his ranting about patents on literary devices.
Yes, I agree. I posted that I do not think that his essay is well-written myself (even though I have enjoyed his professional writing in the past). Frankly, I've seen better arguments against patent abuse on Slashdot than the ones he provides. Most of what raised my hackles was simply how harshly you flamed him. Yes, his article is probably not perfect, but it's mass media. He's doing something that I consider important, which is raising public awareness of the extent of patent coverage. I am sure that others will come along and argue points that he raises.
Or 5,346,998, a naturally occurring DNA sequence in Pentadiplandra brazzeana.
All right, fair enough. I don't know -- and that's a good point. I remember Celera attempting to patent chunks of the human genome directly, and I simply grabbed a Celera patent related to a sequence of genes. I don't have any evidence that this particular one is indeed naturally occurring, and the patent I referenced is too new to have anything written about it.
Here's a better example -- example -- 5,693,473. This patent is on a naturally-occurring set of mutations that cause breast cancer.
I think the problem is that FOSS tends to be by the developer, for the developer, and there are very few blind coders.
That being said, interactive fiction is one of the best game genres for the blind, and runs on mostly OSS.
Google is not a public forum
Even if it were, it still wouldn't matter. I can run a public forum and moderate it if I want.
If that weren't the case, you'd see an awful lot of lawsuits against Slashdot moderators that mod posts down.
It seriously made me wonder whether he reads Slashdot. The "I've patented this article" thing is pretty standard here.
However, Crichton is doing something good here. Most people that read the NYT do *not* read Slashdot. There are a lot of people here who are upset because they actually run into the engineering problems caused by the rapidly expanding scope of patents; FreeType not being able to render TrueType fonts with hinting information legally, OSS not being able to compress textures in a fashion compatible with hardware accelerators, valgrind being (temporarily?) removed from Red Hat, software not being able to compress GIFs, and so forth.
The typical NYT reader probably does not run into these issues, and does not realize that they represent a severe roadblock to engineers. This is an important step in raising public consciousness about what is going on. Once people are aware of the issue, more investigation and debate can occur.
Legislators don't do anything until there is public awareness of a problem. This is a necessary step.
3)
Nevertheless 20 percent of the genome is now privately owned.
The genes themselves are not owned. A "product of nature" - a naturally occurring substance discovered in the wild - may not be patented per se.
However, a method for extracting, isolating, and purifying a gene may be patentable. But keep in mind that patents only last for 20 years - so these patented methods will be publicly available for free in less than 20 years. And others are still free to find other methods of extraction.
Completely wrong. I'd like to refer you to one of Celera's patents, 7005286. This is very clearly a patent on not merely a sequence of genes, but a pattern that may match many genes. Here's claim 1:
1. An isolated nucleic acid molecule comprising a nucleotide sequence selected from the group consisting of:
(a) a transcript or cDNA sequence that encodes a polypeptide having an amino acid sequence comprising SEQ ID NO:2;
(b) SEQ ID NO:1;
(c) nueleotides 91-2187 of SEQ ID NO:1; and
(d) a nucleotide sequence that is completely complementary to the nucleotide sequence of (a), (b), or (c).
Interesting, eh?
Certainly Mr. Crichton can afford an introductory class in patent law.
Hopefully he will be better informed the next time he publishes an essay.
Because this type of uninformed nonsense passed off as fact is really annoying.
I agree with the sentiment, but I don't think that Mr. Crichton is the one who needs to be questioned.
We clearly have a couple of problems here.
First, Congress dislikes retroactively destroying intellectual property. This is only common sense -- it yanks the rug out from under investors and businesses.
The USPTO does not have strong limitations placed on it by Congress on exactly what is patentable, and has a huge amount of lobbyist pressure to make as many things as possible patentable.
In the case of genes, we've allowed people to grab ownership of a big chunk of the human genome (as Crichton points out in his essay). This is not a case of the genome not being sequenced -- the Human Genome Project was not locking up genes in IP, but Celera was. This was an attempt to conduct a landgrab on something valuable.
Of course, as you've pointed out, Celera's investors are going to be pretty pissed off (justifiably) if the USPTO let Celera think that it could patent existing genes and then proceeds to wipe away those patents.
The other issue is prescedent. Later people that come along and want to patent things are going to be very irritated if Celera is allowed to patent something, but they are not.
In the case of genes, I have no problem saying that the things are not patentable if they exist in nature. There are other ways to get the value out of them. Sequencing a particular chunk of genes is a rote activity, not a unique process that may not happen again anytime soon (like coming up with a new process, which is what patents are supposed to cover).
I'd like to see strong regulation coming from Congress specifically excluding some areas from patents. Among other areas, I'd like to see:
* Software patents made invalid. Patents do not work well in the software world -- they last far too long, do not account for the high difficulty of reverse engineering software, and "new methods" are constantly used by any software engineer.
* Business method patents made invalid. We've managed to develop many good business models over the years without the "benefit" of patents becoming involved. I don't see the reason to start now.
* Patents on pre-existing data made invalid. If you genetically engineer a new flower, there might be an arguable case for a patent. If you just take an existing flower and dump the data, it should not be patentable. Patents on this are an attempt to do an end-run around copyright law, which *specifically* exclude lists of data as copyrightable (to avoid exactly this sort of nonsense).
Going back to your criticism of Crichton, I'd say that yes, the article was probably not very well-written or convincing. Frankly, I've read better-supported arguments on Slashdot (though perhaps Crichton simply understands his readership better than I do). However, that does *not* mean that his argument is invalid. The fact that he chose an example that was "useless" is certainly not unreasonable, especially since it establishes prescedent (and in the past, this sort of thing has had enormous weight in determining what kind of patents can be granted).
Crichton is addressing a real issue. This patent will be followed by another and another. The longer we wait to do anything about it, the harder it will be, and the more investors will make decisions based on earlier patents.
I'd prefer to draw the line on the side of not restricting new development. That's the safe decision, and the one that's easier to change.
Nobody except Chiron managed either to isolate or sequence Hep-C desipite over ten years of hard work.
I don't even think that this is relevant to the validity of Crichtons argument, as I've said above, but even so, I don't think that your argument is complete. Chiron did not, as far as I can see, develop a new process. Patents protect processes. I might spend forty years doing something that isn't covered by patents, but that still doesn't mean it should be patentable. Besides, were there competitors even attempting to do this? The impression I got was similar to that of Celera -- some people trying to lock up in monopolies existing data by slightly beating someone else to the punch.
A major realignment in Congress? A major realignment to what? The chances of the Green Party or the Libertarian party don't seem that good.
If there was going to be a major realignment in government, it would have happened in 2004.
Most people in the US like what's going on right now. They're Christian, don't like gays, and are (relative to Slashdot) socially conservative.
"Gambling" is a tax on those who don't understand the mathematics of statistics.
While I agree with you in the general case, I can think of hypothetical situations in which gambling is worthwhile -- where your valuation function becomes very non-linear. For example, suppose you were going to be shot in the head in twenty-four hours unless you could come up with one million dollars.
Games are not physiologically addictive -- they can be mentally addictive, however. It is possible to create a learned behavior pattern that is quite difficult to break.
Here's another good example of Blizzard imposing drudge work on players -- consider Diablo. Diablo is basically an extremely simplified version (and made real time) of the gratis and libre Angband.
Diablo relies mostly on forcing the player to click rapidly, and minimally on some strategy.
Angband has long had the Borg built in, a fully-automated AI that can play based on simple criteria for the player. The most advanced variant of Angband that I am aware of is ToME. ToME provides a system for recording and using macros that operate on designated objects (including by player-designated name). ToME provides a scheme for automatic pickup of items designated by a variety of criteria. ToME allows automated movement that is interrupted based on a number of player-specified criteria. ToME provides a scheme for automatically performing actions on objects -- such as "destroy all cursed long swords, but retain cursed Demonswords".
As a result, Diablo is basically a drawn-out sequence of forced drudge work, whereas in ToME, the player need only perform the work necessary for the strategy that he wants to conduct.
Granted, for the ToME approach to work, the game has to be sophisticated enough that automating the drudge work leaves plenty of entertaining game to play.
Blizzard has a long and rich history of creating games that rely on making players perform drudge work rapidly.
Starcraft, for example, introduced the limited build queues and limited selection group size specifically to increase the amount of drudge work in the game. The tasks added were simple and mindless, but because they forced the player to click the mouse and hit keys more quickly, Blizzard felt that the player was more excited. (Contrast this with, say, Total Annihilation -- which is currently being enhanced and cloned for Linux -- which allowed a player to automate essentially all of the drudge work and simply focus on high level strategy.)
Regrettably, the main goal of computers (eliminating drudge work) runs counter to this approach to game design. A number of people who want to use the computer for, well, its primary reason for existence, are going to chafe. These players may want to focus on the higher-level strategy and not simply engage in a clickfest. Blizzard feels that this conflicts with their game design, and will attempt to stop people from taking this approach.
Contrast this to, Stuart Cheshire's Bolo implementation. Numerous quite sophisticated bot programs were produced, ranging all the way from adding small automated features or recording a map of seen area all the way up to fully automated AIs that could be played against. Frankly, I thought that this was both cool and fun.
It all depends on the mentality of the game designer. Some people feel that drudge work is fun, some don't. Some players want a high level strategy game with action to watch, others want to be required to perform every click themselves.
As a matter of fact, I'll bet that by going to the fiction section of your local library and picking up some books containing fictional worlds with fictional laws, you can find all *sorts* of fictional laws that would be broken in our world if they were laws here.
Hell, Slashdot could run a story like this every five minutes and never run out of stories!
The reason people care is because the *AAs are trying to leverage negative public opinion of things that the public does *not* like -- like, say, pursesnatching -- to push their take on other things.
If the public doesn't like copyright infringement, then it's just fine to call the act "copyright infringement" and let popular support handle things.
The only reason not to do this is if you think you can't muster enough popular support for your position while calling something what it is.
So the *AAs steadfastly keep intentionally misusing the word "theft" to try to garner public support. That, to me, is a bit of an indictment of how little even *they* believe that the public wants to clobber copyright infringers.
You don't call someone who accidently killed someone while driving recklessly a "murderer". Don't call copyright infringement theft.
Now, copyright infringement *is* a civil offense (and can even be criminal in some cases). But one thing it certainly is not is theft. And people who are interested in honest, productive debate on the topic do not insist in injecting the word "theft" constantly into the discussion.
The example you gave is absurd. Nobody is "getting away with anything" by insisting on correct definitions.
It might do more to combat Chinese censorship than anything else if the current regime decides that maybe the Internet isn't *strictly* a propaganda tool aimed at overthrowing them.
If the person then goes to the corner store and steals a CD, well, that's his problem, not yours.
He'd need to infringe on the CD's copyright, not steal it.
The sad part is that a large number of slashdotters will convince themselves that this type of thing is good despite the fact that the site is very clearly engaged in theft.
Copyright infringement. If you're complaining about people playing mind games, you can at least have the decency to avoid doing the same thing yourself in the same sentence.
It costs $200 million to make some movies. If people stop paying to make the movies then that type of movie will not get made in the future.
This is the real issue. Not whether something is "right" or "wrong" -- those are just social norms that have been instilled in people -- but the pragmatic issues.
Currently, the fact that people pay to see movies allows the funding of the creation of said movies. If you endorse infringement, you need one of a couple of justifications:
(a) It's going to happen anyway -- in the presence of a worldwide system (the Internet) designed to cheaply replicate and distribute data, content funded on the predicate that duplication is hard and expensive cannot exist. That means an end is going to come to this funding system, at least for movies in the $200 million scale. Regardless of the methods used, social pressure to not infringe is not going to be effective. We will not be able to make movies that require $200 million in resources in the future -- movie prices will have to drop far enough that the convenience is worth the purchase. Future movies will have to be more thrift-oriented -- if this causes a drop in the enjoyment factor of movies, then that drop will occur. I know some people that dislike those "big budget action movies" that would probably fall into (a).
(b) Infringing movie usage does not damage movie sales. People will continue to go to theaters as the same level as before (well, sans the bite taken away by home theaters), but just spend a larger amount of time viewing movies, as they will infringe on some additional movies.
(c) Movies will continue to make as much money, but by using alternate approaches (like product placement or commercials) that are not affected by redistribution.
(d) Movies can be sold on a viable non-redistributable medium, but some type of DRM-enabled device will be used and this one will actually work.
Remember that, as technologies change, policies we use have adapted to fit the times. I'm quite certain that, in one form or another, the movie-making industry will be around in fifty years. The printing press, the cassette recorder, the VHS tape, home entertainment systems -- all have had significant impact on how content was provided, but content continued to be provided via one mechanism or another.
For example, the drive-in theater is pretty much dead today because of TVs and movie-playing systems at home. People rent tapes, which was a mechanism that really wasn't expected by anyone to make a lot of money at one point (and, in fact, was expected to kill the movie industry at one point).
It may be by simply instituting policy capable of fighting off all infringement; my personal guess is that the movie industry will instead morph and twist and adapt in one way or another. It may even be one that we haven't dreamed of yet. History supports this idea.
Now the War on Drugs will *surely* be won in short order!
Less than 10 people in all of US history have been murdered by moronic anti-abortionists.
Hmm.
What about the Crusades? Those killed plenty of Jews and Arabs.
How about the long-running violence in Ireland? That's Christians killing Christians, Protestant against Catholic.
If you really want to find good bloodthirsty Christian-run killing, you're better off looking at the poorer nations. Rich, fat, happy people don't generally run around killing people. Indonesia's had plenty of killing on both halves. If you want something recent, try Nigeria.
The moral of the story? Religion is trouble, no matter what guise it comes in.
Actually, the fact that declaring war is not very popular has led to every armed conflict the US has been in since World War II not actually being a declared war.
"The people don't want war? Hmm...how about 'peacekeeping'?"
All this may be true.
However, I'm pretty damn rigorous about using work Internet access for work. No personal email at work, no messaging client, no browsing news sites, nothing like that.
However, I still get incredibly pissed off when IT decides to try to regulate my behavior. Currently, the IT department where I work is the primary reason that I'd want to work somewhere else.
For example, they cut any TCP connections that run for longer than a certain amount of time. The justification was that some people were listening to Internet radio. This is really irritating when trying to download *all the CD images* for the current Fedora and having my connection constantly drops. They filter Web access (anything with "proxy" or "WINE" in the URL, for example) -- fun when I was writing a piece of software for Windows that needed to interoperate with proxies. They block outgoing SSH access. Frankly, it is absolutely not IT's balliwick to be stomping on employees who are goofing off. They can go to the employee's boss, and provide him with that information, but IT should never be in a position of trying to regulate employee behavior. That's the responsibility of that employee's superior.
It pisses the living hell out of the rest of us, who are treated with no trust (even aside from the direct impact of, for example, not having access to my addressbook and other data on my home computer from work).
Frankly, every IT person who has managed to wedge themselves in the position of regulating employee behavior has become an obstacle to getting things done rather than an asset to the company. I'd like to see nothing more than those people fired, yesterday.
You don't want someone at work who doesn't get anything done, who is "sending amusing flash/avi/mpeg between themselves, forwarding jokes someone outside sent to their gmail account (and they've cut-n-pasted them into work mail), etc."? Great. Let their managers fire the little unproductive bastards. But IT needs to stop trying to make themselves "second managers". They suck at it, and they deserve the dislike that comes back at them when they try it.
I wish that GIMP could be operated from the command line. At least currently, it is heavily tied to X for stuff like font rendering.
Which is kinda irritating, because I can think of a lot of times where I know exactly how to do something with GIMP, but just wish that I had an easy-to-use-as-a-backend system that could do the same thing.