> Sure you are [taking something physical], you're taking the money you didn't pay me...
That's a convoluted way to argue that something has been taken from the creator, and is still wrong. The pirate starts with $5, takes it from himself so he has $0, then keeps it by not paying the creator and ends up with $5. The creator starts with $0 and ends with $0. The parent poster's argument still stands: Nothing is taken from the creator that he didn't have in the first place.
And the argument that there is something morally wrong in 'depriving a creator of income' is also appallingly bad. By this standard of 'theft' the following is true:
1. A person sells a second hand book. The author gets no money from this transaction even though the new owner benefits from the work. This is 'theft'
2. A person persuades a someone that a movie is rubbish. The movie studio get no money from the second person and is deprived of income. This is 'theft'
> Boring nitpicking. Stealing is just a shorthand way of saying you are taking something for free against the wishes of the rightful owner who has put a price on it.
Boring irrelevance. Calling it stealing or claiming that it is 'rightful', did nothing to address the parent poster's substantive point that there is scant legitmiate moral claim to be awarded the power to ration something that can exist in abundance. The public grants the legal conditions that pertain to copyright, and if the public's desire to encourage creative works through the restriction of non-commercial copying is no longer considered to be in their interests then sad day for copyright holders.
> The share of the profits that they get reflects the reality that it is not the quality of music that sells it but marketing that the label provides.
If the quality of music is truely as worthless as that implies then there is even less moral justification for charging for it, as it is all just some manipulative marketing exercise in turd polishing!
We're often hearing from businesses that we should trust them and consumers to make the right choices when it comes to buying their products, irrespective of how unheathy, privacy invading or otherwise insidious, so now that some business is complaining that some images of a distaster appear alongside their business in a search, well they can fuck off. Suddenly consumers CAN'T make the right choices now? You bizniz types can stop opposing reasonable legislation that doesn't require everyone to be an expert in everything to avoid being ripped off then I'll have some sympathy.
There are no statutory damages in the UK so they would have to prove actual damages, which would be in the region of the cost of a DVD since their evidence is only of one infringement. But that assumes the IP address is accepted as satisfactory. Moreover the leaked ACS law emails included advice to Crossley to this effect so the plan was never to take this stuff to court
Copyright has never been designed such that rights holders could dictate each and every use of a copyrighted work. For instance, publishers have never been allowed to prevent libraries lending their books, never been allowed to demand payment for the lending of their books, never been allowed to demand payment for sales of second hand copies of their books, never been allowed to demand payment for people being reading a book that was bought by somebody else and lent to them... and so on.
Only you can say whether those conditions amount to an evil government making choices that should be the publishers... or whatever. There are laws in existence now that forces the holder to allow such exemptions. There already are varying levels of protections based on the intended use of the work. It is impossible to make any sense of your statements on this matter.
As for the purpose of copyrights: This is a matter of history, and the facts can be checked. In the US, copyright only exists for the public benefit that is accrued through the promotion of the sciences and useful arts. I forget the exact terminology, but it's there in the Constitution if you don't know already. The point is that according to that document, copyright should only be granted when it promotes the benefit to the public by giving incentive to artists and authors. The extent to which copyright law fails in this regard, then the purpose is defeated. One such obvious example is extending copyright terms on works in the past. No artist or author can be further encouraged to contribute to a work he has already contributed! It's absurd!
Technology has changed the debate. The public used to be unable to make copies of books and other works easily without cost. Copyright originally had no affect on what the public could do in practice - they did not have a printing press. This has all changed, now to the point of reproduction costing nearly nothing. The real question is now how to encourage new contributions without unnecessarily imposing resistrictions on the public. It's a balance of rights, and always has been.
Feel free to explain why non-commercial copying should not be allowed, in light of the apparent fact that the considered opinions of the authors of the French copyright regime were to allow such copying, without redress to untenable over-generalisations such as those addressed above.
RE: "The question is, is a Paul McCartney song worth a $1 to you. If so, then pony up. Otherwise, don't listen to it."
No, the question is: What is the value of the work overall? Markets don't provide an answer to that question any better than a Joe Random's subjective assessment.
If you still don't understand, let me put it in terms even the typical mercantile-minded drone can understand: Copyright is a monopoly, monopolies misprice everything, the price of copyrighted material cannot be determined by a market. Moreover, the market clearing price of something which has a zero marginal cost is zero. Information no longer has to be packaged up in physical blocks, so the true market price of information is zero, just as Adam telling Joe a joke has no cost.
Perhaps with no laws against non-commercial copying a large number of authors will stop writing. Perhaps so. But people will still want to share their ideas with one another and will write them down. And without publishers making a pointless cut on an artificially created scarcity (i.e. via DRM and copyright) there will be no gatekeepers determining what can be published or not. A conservative should be appaulding this! Or is liberty and the individual enterprise only a concern in limited situations?
Using the market as a means to determine the value of information is becoming more and more untenable, both technologically and ethically. Using the market requires that the natural inclination to share information (i.e. to communicate) is fatuously characterised as "piracy", and can only work by sabotaging free market mechanisms with government-backed monopoly selling of artificially created scarcities.
But no! Apparently conservatives are all in favour of monopolies, against free markets determining price and in favour of BIG government in the form of law enforcement of non-commercial copyright infringement!
Copyright law was invented as a law preventing businesses profiting from the investments of other businesses. i.e. stopping one book publisher printing a cheaper copy of a book from another publisher, when the first publisher had paid the author and wished to recover that cost. Note that is what happens in free markets: competitors who can reduce costs emerge in competition to existing players. Copyright is something that kinda goes against "fundamental thing[s] about capitalism"
Anyway, as the public did not own the technology to copy books (printing presses), this was a law solely against commercial copying, and did not restrict the public in any way. Copyright law has been transformed from a solely commercial law into a law that is also against non-commercial copying by the public. Also, now as the technology to copy is now owned by the public, this law has to be maintained by restricting the public in ever greater measures, viz. DRM and DMCA. So, first ethical point: It restricts the public now they own the technology to copy for themselves, whereas it never used to. Second ethical point: Copyright law against non-commercial copying is an ethic that says helping your neighbour (e.g. by giving a copy of a useful program), or sharing with your friends is morally wrong. Something of an poor ethic.
But I do think you have a point, nonetheless. Certain kinds of task cannot easily be divided up and solved by communities. Movie making is an example. On the other hand, software making can be spread amongst a community that shares knowledge easily. That kind of organisation have none of the ethical problems discussed above. And we no longer have to theorise about whether free-software authors can get paid. They do. Right now. By companies who sell services based on free software.
The question is how can artists and authors be encouraged (i.e. paid) for their efforts, and the recording industry monumentally fails to pay musicians money. Most musicians end up nominally OWING money to record companies. Only a small minority of musicians actually receive money in royalities. Those who were successful enough to negiotiate a contract that works in their favour. The record industry maybe completely redundant now that $3000 of equipment can get you recorded reasonably well.
If there is a solution that allows non-commercial copying, whilst commercial copying and publishing has to be paid for... if there is a business model that could work with that then that is what I'd like to see. Maybe we have to give up big budget movies? *shrugs* Small budget movies and music making will continue even with non-commercial copying, since that is what happens already in other countries, like Nigeria and Brazil. And I, for one, wont miss the majority of the musak that comes from the industry-pushed mediocre hacklike poseurs.
Pleasure to speak to someone who doesn't just rely on invective!
I would rather see non-commercial copying legal whenever possible, but this does not have to be done by changing the law. Some musicians already allow non-commercial copying as a form of publicity for where they make money in live performance. In Brazil, musicians record their music, give it to the market sellers of CDs, people buy and listen to the CDs with 1000s of mp3s on them and later attend travelling stage shows where the same musicians perform. In Nigeria, they have a (low-quality) movie industry which relies on making its money from being the first to show a particular film. They don't bother to prosecute people who copy the movies.
And I favour the free-software model for software development. Again, no change of the law is necessary here. One thing about free software is that where a lot of freelance programming jobs are done as one-offs for a particular company, then that software is free/libre software according to the ethical dictates of the free software foundation... as long as the software source is provided along with the binary in exchange for payment. The FSF has pages and pages of stuff about this if you are interested. They also say quite a lot about copyright and patents too.
Changing the law may become a practical matter, of course, especially if the ISP-as-policemen model gets thrown out of the courts. But as an ethical matter, I do not favour the criminalisation of sharing or helping your neighbor or friend.
There are all sorts of options for the funding of research and the like. In the case of medical patents, it is often suggested that a funding body could provide grants for research it deems worthwhile. The obvious problem is that this gives too much power to the funding body which may be incompetent. But such bodies already exist alongside the patent model, which has the (IMO) worse faults of inefficiencies in monopoly supply of drugs. Such drugs are more expensive than they would be if the research money was merely recovered. The drugs industry spends about $30bn in research and $40bn in marketing. The same industry will happily spend money on researching copy-cat drugs that solve the problems that nearly-identical drugs from other firms make profitably. And the same industry requires a $30bn government subsidy in basic research in medicine that it could never make money from so it would never spend the money on that research in the first place. Meanwhile, third world countries cannot afford the drugs they make and are required by international monopoly-cartel-supporting WIPO treaties to not make generic equivalents in their own country. Such are the consequences of making knowledge a form of property.
In the case of rewarding software engineers, we don't have to theorise anymore, since there are free-software developers that get paid. In the case of musicians - the record companies don't do much to enrich most of them, and as you might know already, almost all musicians end up with no money from the record companies or in royalities but get some free publicity for a while. And it would seem that increasingly the record companies are becoming redundant as musicians can record their own music and distribute it themselves. Whether they do this as well as the record companies is in dispute but I personally would not mourn the loss of record-company-led publicity of the kind of mediocre poseurs they tend to favour.
In the case of books - some copyright is going to remain necessary, but the bounds of the law may be better served in many ways. Shorter terms, an end of term if a book is out of print for a given number of years - or an automatic reverting to the author instead of the publisher holding on to it indefintely. This sort of thing. It may also make sense to make text books modifiable and copyable, whereas not so for fiction.
Speaking of modifiable and copyable, when knowledge is made secret in a program, that knowledge is then doomed to be rediscovered many times over when it could have been made public the first time round. This must be a crazy way to run an economy, surely? How about the problem of making a CD ISO image in Windows? *laughs*
Movies and games are more difficult to decide since the business model here is lots of initial investment that is not easily spread amongst many contributors. However, that's a long way from saying non-commercial copying should not be legal because of it.
Copyrights are government-backed monolopies, so this is hardly letting the market decide. Indeed, the real market cost of information would be equal to the lowest marginal cost of distributing that information, which is zero. It was this "fault" of the market that inspired copyright law - other printing companies were saving on the cost of paying authors and printing the same information at a lower marginal cost. Copyright put an end to this natural operation of the market. So in the digital age where distributing information is costless, only a distorted market allows information to be charged for. So the market is a pure ideological irrelevance in these cirumstances. It's funny that those who are in favour of market solutions and usually hate government interference are so often in favour of massive and expensive arms of government designed to uphold monopolies!
Anyway... none of this solves the problem of how artists should be rewarded for their efforts, but it is interesting that a large proportion of authors of books and musicians are actually in favour of a much smaller copyright regime. It is almost totally the whine of failing publishers and media distributors (the current owners of copyrights) that are making the case you appear to favour.
Another amusing part of their position is that they want even longer copyright terms. Presumably this is so they can go back in time (using their secret time machine technology) and tell people in the 1920's that copyright terms will be much longer in the future so that authors will be encouraged to produce more work that would otherwise remain unwritten!
Could a memory stick have two partitions, such that a tiny FAT12 partition that auto-installed ext2 drivers on Windows boxes to make the larger ext2 partition available? (And hence avoid patent issues)?
I'm not totally sure on the practicality of that idea though?
BSD licences cause problems too, of a different nature of course, so it is difficult to discern any substance to your comment.
Has the GPL caused the problem, or did Microsoft cause the problem with their patent? I suppose it depends on what problem is being referred to here. Is the problem that a lawsuit has arisen? Or is the problem that people cannot do sensible and ethical things with their computer equipment? The GPL seems to cause difficulties using computers via legal troubles, whereas the BSD licence seems to cause difficulties using computers via the extortion that results from people using more popular versions of modified BSD code.
"Steal" would be a bad choice of word, that's all. However, as the links describe, Microsoft had engaged in the objectionable practice of taking the Kerberos code, making some changes that were deliberately difficult to implement by other people (by making them secret and encumbered with various legal requirements that were not present in the original BSD code). The point is that they benefitted from the work of other people - as the BSD licence allows them to - and then took advantage of this work to lock in people to the Microsoft version of Kerberos. So perhaps you'd like to address that point rather than focus on a poor word choice?
An option is something that is available for you to choose from. A program that can read your mind and so forth does not exist, as you say, so therefore it is not an option. Such a thing is not available, therefore it is not an option. That kind of availability is implicit in the idea of "option".
So to repeat, if there is only one option available and you think it is best (i.e. you approve of it) then that is far better than being faced with a multitude of options that you disfavour.
Roman Slave Master: "OK, slave scum. You have a choice. Carry that big rock, or two smaller ones."
One option which you totally approve of is better than a million options that all require you to make sacrifices. That's why business contracts that involve players that can exert more "influence" than others are unfair; the line is simple. Does this contract involve terms that require the less influential partner to make unnecessary sacrifices? The fact that a particular option may impart some benefit for those who take advantage of it does not necessarily prove that it is a fair option to choose. Requiring unnecessary sacrifices of others in these situations is probably a sign of greed.
The real error these Creationists and Religious people in general have is that they think there are particular issues that cannot be resolved and therefore the only solution is to have "faith" in one of the answers. This is an error that leads to compartmentalisation - believing in a set of things on incompatible grounds to everything else you believe in.
Compartmentalisation can be verified easily. Take an issue, for instance, "Does God exist?" then once you have answered the question, check: "Under what circumstances do I believe that something exists?" (You need to be specific.) You might answer: "everything that has a characteristic or property that cannot be witnessed by any living person does not exist" And that would be consistent with atheism, as almost all the properties of "God" cannot be witnessed or verified (e.g. omnipotence, his will, his form, etc) Such an answer is also consistent with the scientific method, but not with "faith".
Stupid answers might be:
"Everything that Fred tells me exists, I believe exist as well"
"Everything that is real, exists" (begs the question)
"Everything that has evidence that exists, does exists" (begs the question)
Basically, any reason you have for rejecting the existence of unicorns and living trees made of chocolate would also have to apply to God, so you must reject his existence in order to be consistent.
If patents were not necessary, why would anyone bother to shoulder the expense in light of the "free" alternatives?
One reason is so that a corporation can cross licence with other corporations. The idea is to protect yourself from "attack" from a patent holder who wants you to pay licence fees, by making counter claims of patent infringements that the other side is liable to pay royalities for. It also can be used in the same way to stop a patent holder from refusing to licence his idea.
The purpose of patents is to encourage innovation, and it fails to do this in the case of software patents. Ergo, they should be abolished for software.
That's it. No other point needs to be made. The reason they fail to encourage innovation is because the "small guy" who invents a brilliant idea will be incapable of creating a piece of software that both incorporates his brilliant idea and also does not infringe on 100's of other patents held by large corporations. Hence, the small guy would have to cross-licence and thus his monopoly over his idea is effectively nullified.
All the other arguments against software patents are the objectionable features of them. e.g.
- They are largely for obvious inventions.
- Software is covered by copyright and trademark law and implementations are secret so it's not easy to copy software ideas, it could take several years to re-implement a patented idea in another way. i.e. software patents are largely unnecessary.
- Lots of computer inventions become obsolete far sooner than the patent period, so the period could be shorter without affecting a business' ability to profit from it.
- It's too difficult to parse the current patents that might affect a software package that you intend to implement, and thus innovation for small businesses and individuals is effectively curtailed.
Conflict is a fact of existence. Not even human existence. Just being alive, you're in competition for limited resources, whether it's two elephants fighting over a waterhole, or two countries fighting over an oil field. That's the way it's always been, and that's the way it'll always be, until we find a magic way of creating unlimited resources.
This argument is: The only solution available to share a limited resource is to compete over it, such that what one person gains, another person loses.
Fortunately, our ancestors were able to see the benefit in cooperation such that one group's efforts in agriculture increased a limited resource, and allowed other groups to divert their efforts towards other goals such as defending land that surrounded a community or even artistic pursuits such as decorating clay jugs or making jewelry.
If people were ONLY able to compete and could ONLY deal with limited resources through competition then there would be no society; we would be fighting over scraps of food and concerning ourselves with petty might-is-right pecking orders.
The UK has stricter libel laws than the US. At the time of the McLibel case, legal aid (i.e. money given to help defend yourself in court) was not available for libel cases. A few years after the trial, the McLibel two went to the EU and got this changed so that legal aid is available. This helps a bit but the libel laws are still exploitable to the extent that those with money and power can effectively silence those who dare to criticise them, unless you have the time and resources to defend yourself.
I doubt very much that Greenpeace can say what it likes in the UK, as our libel laws require that if you are accused of libel then you must prove that what you are saying is true, rather than the other side prove that what you are saying is false.
Just like the RIAA cases here: Unless you have the time and resources to defend yourself, a powerful and wealthy institution can overstep what is fair and just.
I don't know much about the Greenpeace case you cited, but in the UK, there are some militant animal rights protestors who have managed to shut down legitimate laboratories by their dubious actions. So, yes, it can work both ways. However, these animal rights protestors have also overstepped legal boundaries (damage to property, intimidation, etc) but in different ways how the RIAA and McDonalds overstepped the legal boundaries. Neither kind of abuse should be tolerated.
If Greenpeace were not breaking the law then they have the right to say those things. Maybe you are saying that America needs more law to protect corporations by having greater libel laws, but if the UK experience is anything to go by then this will just amount to a form of censorship on the behest of large corporations.
Just like large corporations can bully people into doing its bidding by threatening law suits that few people can afford to defend against.
This is a lot like the McLibel case in the UK. McDonalds were using the UK Libel laws to shut up various media outlets including the BBC and some newspapers by threatening to sue if they published information that painted McDonalds in a bad light. All these organisations decided to not publish or broadcast the information. Then a volunteer organisation wrote a pamphlet about the things that McDonalds do wrong, and got sued. Two of the members of that organisation refused to settle out of court, and decided to defend themselves against the million dollar lawyers that McDonalds hired to take them to court.
What proceeded was the longest ever court case in British legal history and in the end the court agreed that indeed, McDonalds do, quote: "exploit children with their advertising, falsely advertise their food as nutritious, risk the health of their long-term regular customers, are "culpably responsible" for cruelty to animals reared for their products, are "strongly antipathetic" to unions and pay their workers low wages."
So not only can uninformed consumers not make a good choice, but when people try to inform consumers of FACTS, money-laden corporations can shut them up most of the time. So on the whole, markets don't work properly in these cases because no consumer can be adequately informed about absolutely every product that some corrupt corporation is selling.
Likewise with the RIAA Mafia, most people cannot afford to defend against them or have the money to inform the public of the other side of the story - i.e. how the damage that RIAA claims P2P causes is largely exagerrated.
It's only the free market fundamentalists that think markets are sacrosanct, and "informed" consumers can defeat corrupt organisations through consumer power, despite the wealth and power of some of the players involved. Unfortunately, there appears to be rather a lot of those in America. No wonder the Middle East thinks America's corrupt.
When someone pays to create a good, then it is only just that they should get paid when someone else benefits from it. This is clear in the case of a physical good which costs money for each unit made. However, for non-physical goods, for which there is a zero-marginal cost (each extra unit costs nothing), then nobody is losing... UNLESS the creator cannot make a reasonable profit somehow.
Whereas the media companies would like us to believe that each time a unit of their work is copied at no cost to them, is "theft", most people correctly see it otherwise.
However, yes the creator should still get a reward or else there is no incentive to create (at least for one section of the population) but the law should not be used as a way to enable businesses to survive with an inefficient distribution system. The law should only be used against those who make money from a work without permission, not used to pointlessly restrict non-commercial uses.
Businesses with different business models could make reasonable profits without having to rely on the law to unnecessarily restrict the public.
Authors do NOT have exclusive rights, by the way. You only have to think of libraries to see how that's not true. And then look at fair use rights. What authors/creators have are sometimes broad, but nonetheless restricted monopolies. Just one example: Radio stations do not have to pay performers royalities - only the composer. So if Madonna sings happy birthday and a radio station plays it, Madonna gets nothing and the composer of happy birthday gets a royality. Madonna does NOT have an exclusive right.
Slashdot Mirror
> Sure you are [taking something physical], you're taking the money you didn't pay me ...
That's a convoluted way to argue that something has been taken from the creator, and is still wrong. The pirate starts with $5, takes it from himself so he has $0, then keeps it by not paying the creator and ends up with $5. The creator starts with $0 and ends with $0. The parent poster's argument still stands: Nothing is taken from the creator that he didn't have in the first place.
And the argument that there is something morally wrong in 'depriving a creator of income' is also appallingly bad. By this standard of 'theft' the following is true:
1. A person sells a second hand book. The author gets no money from this transaction even though the new owner benefits from the work. This is 'theft'
2. A person persuades a someone that a movie is rubbish. The movie studio get no money from the second person and is deprived of income. This is 'theft'
> Boring nitpicking. Stealing is just a shorthand way of saying you are taking something for free against the wishes of the rightful owner who has put a price on it.
Boring irrelevance. Calling it stealing or claiming that it is 'rightful', did nothing to address the parent poster's substantive point that there is scant legitmiate moral claim to be awarded the power to ration something that can exist in abundance. The public grants the legal conditions that pertain to copyright, and if the public's desire to encourage creative works through the restriction of non-commercial copying is no longer considered to be in their interests then sad day for copyright holders.
> The share of the profits that they get reflects the reality that it is not the quality of music that sells it but marketing that the label provides.
If the quality of music is truely as worthless as that implies then there is even less moral justification for charging for it, as it is all just some manipulative marketing exercise in turd polishing!
We're often hearing from businesses that we should trust them and consumers to make the right choices when it comes to buying their products, irrespective of how unheathy, privacy invading or otherwise insidious, so now that some business is complaining that some images of a distaster appear alongside their business in a search, well they can fuck off. Suddenly consumers CAN'T make the right choices now? You bizniz types can stop opposing reasonable legislation that doesn't require everyone to be an expert in everything to avoid being ripped off then I'll have some sympathy.
There are no statutory damages in the UK so they would have to prove actual damages, which would be in the region of the cost of a DVD since their evidence is only of one infringement. But that assumes the IP address is accepted as satisfactory. Moreover the leaked ACS law emails included advice to Crossley to this effect so the plan was never to take this stuff to court
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2010/open-internet-enhances-our-freedom-of-speech/
Copyright has never been designed such that rights holders could dictate each and every use of a copyrighted work. For instance, publishers have never been allowed to prevent libraries lending their books, never been allowed to demand payment for the lending of their books, never been allowed to demand payment for sales of second hand copies of their books, never been allowed to demand payment for people being reading a book that was bought by somebody else and lent to them ... and so on.
... or whatever. There are laws in existence now that forces the holder to allow such exemptions. There already are varying levels of protections based on the intended use of the work. It is impossible to make any sense of your statements on this matter.
Only you can say whether those conditions amount to an evil government making choices that should be the publishers
As for the purpose of copyrights: This is a matter of history, and the facts can be checked. In the US, copyright only exists for the public benefit that is accrued through the promotion of the sciences and useful arts. I forget the exact terminology, but it's there in the Constitution if you don't know already. The point is that according to that document, copyright should only be granted when it promotes the benefit to the public by giving incentive to artists and authors. The extent to which copyright law fails in this regard, then the purpose is defeated. One such obvious example is extending copyright terms on works in the past. No artist or author can be further encouraged to contribute to a work he has already contributed! It's absurd!
Technology has changed the debate. The public used to be unable to make copies of books and other works easily without cost. Copyright originally had no affect on what the public could do in practice - they did not have a printing press. This has all changed, now to the point of reproduction costing nearly nothing. The real question is now how to encourage new contributions without unnecessarily imposing resistrictions on the public. It's a balance of rights, and always has been.
Feel free to explain why non-commercial copying should not be allowed, in light of the apparent fact that the considered opinions of the authors of the French copyright regime were to allow such copying, without redress to untenable over-generalisations such as those addressed above.
RE: "The question is, is a Paul McCartney song worth a $1 to you. If so, then pony up. Otherwise, don't listen to it."
No, the question is: What is the value of the work overall? Markets don't provide an answer to that question any better than a Joe Random's subjective assessment.
If you still don't understand, let me put it in terms even the typical mercantile-minded drone can understand: Copyright is a monopoly, monopolies misprice everything, the price of copyrighted material cannot be determined by a market. Moreover, the market clearing price of something which has a zero marginal cost is zero. Information no longer has to be packaged up in physical blocks, so the true market price of information is zero, just as Adam telling Joe a joke has no cost.
Perhaps with no laws against non-commercial copying a large number of authors will stop writing. Perhaps so. But people will still want to share their ideas with one another and will write them down. And without publishers making a pointless cut on an artificially created scarcity (i.e. via DRM and copyright) there will be no gatekeepers determining what can be published or not. A conservative should be appaulding this! Or is liberty and the individual enterprise only a concern in limited situations?
Using the market as a means to determine the value of information is becoming more and more untenable, both technologically and ethically. Using the market requires that the natural inclination to share information (i.e. to communicate) is fatuously characterised as "piracy", and can only work by sabotaging free market mechanisms with government-backed monopoly selling of artificially created scarcities.
But no! Apparently conservatives are all in favour of monopolies, against free markets determining price and in favour of BIG government in the form of law enforcement of non-commercial copyright infringement!
Copyright law was invented as a law preventing businesses profiting from the investments of other businesses. i.e. stopping one book publisher printing a cheaper copy of a book from another publisher, when the first publisher had paid the author and wished to recover that cost. Note that is what happens in free markets: competitors who can reduce costs emerge in competition to existing players. Copyright is something that kinda goes against "fundamental thing[s] about capitalism"
Anyway, as the public did not own the technology to copy books (printing presses), this was a law solely against commercial copying, and did not restrict the public in any way. Copyright law has been transformed from a solely commercial law into a law that is also against non-commercial copying by the public. Also, now as the technology to copy is now owned by the public, this law has to be maintained by restricting the public in ever greater measures, viz. DRM and DMCA. So, first ethical point: It restricts the public now they own the technology to copy for themselves, whereas it never used to. Second ethical point: Copyright law against non-commercial copying is an ethic that says helping your neighbour (e.g. by giving a copy of a useful program), or sharing with your friends is morally wrong. Something of an poor ethic.
But I do think you have a point, nonetheless. Certain kinds of task cannot easily be divided up and solved by communities. Movie making is an example. On the other hand, software making can be spread amongst a community that shares knowledge easily. That kind of organisation have none of the ethical problems discussed above. And we no longer have to theorise about whether free-software authors can get paid. They do. Right now. By companies who sell services based on free software.
The question is how can artists and authors be encouraged (i.e. paid) for their efforts, and the recording industry monumentally fails to pay musicians money. Most musicians end up nominally OWING money to record companies. Only a small minority of musicians actually receive money in royalities. Those who were successful enough to negiotiate a contract that works in their favour. The record industry maybe completely redundant now that $3000 of equipment can get you recorded reasonably well.
If there is a solution that allows non-commercial copying, whilst commercial copying and publishing has to be paid for... if there is a business model that could work with that then that is what I'd like to see. Maybe we have to give up big budget movies? *shrugs* Small budget movies and music making will continue even with non-commercial copying, since that is what happens already in other countries, like Nigeria and Brazil. And I, for one, wont miss the majority of the musak that comes from the industry-pushed mediocre hacklike poseurs.
Pleasure to speak to someone who doesn't just rely on invective!
I would rather see non-commercial copying legal whenever possible, but this does not have to be done by changing the law. Some musicians already allow non-commercial copying as a form of publicity for where they make money in live performance. In Brazil, musicians record their music, give it to the market sellers of CDs, people buy and listen to the CDs with 1000s of mp3s on them and later attend travelling stage shows where the same musicians perform. In Nigeria, they have a (low-quality) movie industry which relies on making its money from being the first to show a particular film. They don't bother to prosecute people who copy the movies.
And I favour the free-software model for software development. Again, no change of the law is necessary here. One thing about free software is that where a lot of freelance programming jobs are done as one-offs for a particular company, then that software is free/libre software according to the ethical dictates of the free software foundation... as long as the software source is provided along with the binary in exchange for payment. The FSF has pages and pages of stuff about this if you are interested. They also say quite a lot about copyright and patents too.
Changing the law may become a practical matter, of course, especially if the ISP-as-policemen model gets thrown out of the courts. But as an ethical matter, I do not favour the criminalisation of sharing or helping your neighbor or friend.
There are all sorts of options for the funding of research and the like. In the case of medical patents, it is often suggested that a funding body could provide grants for research it deems worthwhile. The obvious problem is that this gives too much power to the funding body which may be incompetent. But such bodies already exist alongside the patent model, which has the (IMO) worse faults of inefficiencies in monopoly supply of drugs. Such drugs are more expensive than they would be if the research money was merely recovered. The drugs industry spends about $30bn in research and $40bn in marketing. The same industry will happily spend money on researching copy-cat drugs that solve the problems that nearly-identical drugs from other firms make profitably. And the same industry requires a $30bn government subsidy in basic research in medicine that it could never make money from so it would never spend the money on that research in the first place. Meanwhile, third world countries cannot afford the drugs they make and are required by international monopoly-cartel-supporting WIPO treaties to not make generic equivalents in their own country. Such are the consequences of making knowledge a form of property.
In the case of rewarding software engineers, we don't have to theorise anymore, since there are free-software developers that get paid. In the case of musicians - the record companies don't do much to enrich most of them, and as you might know already, almost all musicians end up with no money from the record companies or in royalities but get some free publicity for a while. And it would seem that increasingly the record companies are becoming redundant as musicians can record their own music and distribute it themselves. Whether they do this as well as the record companies is in dispute but I personally would not mourn the loss of record-company-led publicity of the kind of mediocre poseurs they tend to favour.
In the case of books - some copyright is going to remain necessary, but the bounds of the law may be better served in many ways. Shorter terms, an end of term if a book is out of print for a given number of years - or an automatic reverting to the author instead of the publisher holding on to it indefintely. This sort of thing. It may also make sense to make text books modifiable and copyable, whereas not so for fiction.
Speaking of modifiable and copyable, when knowledge is made secret in a program, that knowledge is then doomed to be rediscovered many times over when it could have been made public the first time round. This must be a crazy way to run an economy, surely? How about the problem of making a CD ISO image in Windows? *laughs*
Movies and games are more difficult to decide since the business model here is lots of initial investment that is not easily spread amongst many contributors. However, that's a long way from saying non-commercial copying should not be legal because of it.
"Ideally the market should decide"
Copyrights are government-backed monolopies, so this is hardly letting the market decide. Indeed, the real market cost of information would be equal to the lowest marginal cost of distributing that information, which is zero. It was this "fault" of the market that inspired copyright law - other printing companies were saving on the cost of paying authors and printing the same information at a lower marginal cost. Copyright put an end to this natural operation of the market. So in the digital age where distributing information is costless, only a distorted market allows information to be charged for. So the market is a pure ideological irrelevance in these cirumstances. It's funny that those who are in favour of market solutions and usually hate government interference are so often in favour of massive and expensive arms of government designed to uphold monopolies!
Anyway... none of this solves the problem of how artists should be rewarded for their efforts, but it is interesting that a large proportion of authors of books and musicians are actually in favour of a much smaller copyright regime. It is almost totally the whine of failing publishers and media distributors (the current owners of copyrights) that are making the case you appear to favour.
Another amusing part of their position is that they want even longer copyright terms. Presumably this is so they can go back in time (using their secret time machine technology) and tell people in the 1920's that copyright terms will be much longer in the future so that authors will be encouraged to produce more work that would otherwise remain unwritten!
Could a memory stick have two partitions, such that a tiny FAT12 partition that auto-installed ext2 drivers on Windows boxes to make the larger ext2 partition available? (And hence avoid patent issues)? I'm not totally sure on the practicality of that idea though?
Your comment about GPL causing problems was nothing more than vague invective so there does not seem any grounds for complaint.
BSD licences cause problems too, of a different nature of course, so it is difficult to discern any substance to your comment. Has the GPL caused the problem, or did Microsoft cause the problem with their patent? I suppose it depends on what problem is being referred to here. Is the problem that a lawsuit has arisen? Or is the problem that people cannot do sensible and ethical things with their computer equipment? The GPL seems to cause difficulties using computers via legal troubles, whereas the BSD licence seems to cause difficulties using computers via the extortion that results from people using more popular versions of modified BSD code.
"Steal" would be a bad choice of word, that's all. However, as the links describe, Microsoft had engaged in the objectionable practice of taking the Kerberos code, making some changes that were deliberately difficult to implement by other people (by making them secret and encumbered with various legal requirements that were not present in the original BSD code). The point is that they benefitted from the work of other people - as the BSD licence allows them to - and then took advantage of this work to lock in people to the Microsoft version of Kerberos. So perhaps you'd like to address that point rather than focus on a poor word choice?
take an interest in other people's opinions instead by showing some curiosity. Post something helpful or constructive
An option is something that is available for you to choose from. A program that can read your mind and so forth does not exist, as you say, so therefore it is not an option. Such a thing is not available, therefore it is not an option. That kind of availability is implicit in the idea of "option".
So to repeat, if there is only one option available and you think it is best (i.e. you approve of it) then that is far better than being faced with a multitude of options that you disfavour.
Roman Slave Master: "OK, slave scum. You have a choice. Carry that big rock, or two smaller ones."
One option which you totally approve of is better than a million options that all require you to make sacrifices. That's why business contracts that involve players that can exert more "influence" than others are unfair; the line is simple. Does this contract involve terms that require the less influential partner to make unnecessary sacrifices? The fact that a particular option may impart some benefit for those who take advantage of it does not necessarily prove that it is a fair option to choose. Requiring unnecessary sacrifices of others in these situations is probably a sign of greed.
Compartmentalisation can be verified easily. Take an issue, for instance, "Does God exist?" then once you have answered the question, check: "Under what circumstances do I believe that something exists?" (You need to be specific.) You might answer: "everything that has a characteristic or property that cannot be witnessed by any living person does not exist" And that would be consistent with atheism, as almost all the properties of "God" cannot be witnessed or verified (e.g. omnipotence, his will, his form, etc) Such an answer is also consistent with the scientific method, but not with "faith".
Stupid answers might be:
"Everything that Fred tells me exists, I believe exist as well"
"Everything that is real, exists" (begs the question)
"Everything that has evidence that exists, does exists" (begs the question)
Basically, any reason you have for rejecting the existence of unicorns and living trees made of chocolate would also have to apply to God, so you must reject his existence in order to be consistent.
HTH
If patents were not necessary, why would anyone bother to shoulder the expense in light of the "free" alternatives?
One reason is so that a corporation can cross licence with other corporations. The idea is to protect yourself from "attack" from a patent holder who wants you to pay licence fees, by making counter claims of patent infringements that the other side is liable to pay royalities for. It also can be used in the same way to stop a patent holder from refusing to licence his idea.
The purpose of patents is to encourage innovation, and it fails to do this in the case of software patents. Ergo, they should be abolished for software.
That's it. No other point needs to be made. The reason they fail to encourage innovation is because the "small guy" who invents a brilliant idea will be incapable of creating a piece of software that both incorporates his brilliant idea and also does not infringe on 100's of other patents held by large corporations. Hence, the small guy would have to cross-licence and thus his monopoly over his idea is effectively nullified.
All the other arguments against software patents are the objectionable features of them. e.g.
- They are largely for obvious inventions.
- Software is covered by copyright and trademark law and implementations are secret so it's not easy to copy software ideas, it could take several years to re-implement a patented idea in another way. i.e. software patents are largely unnecessary.
- Lots of computer inventions become obsolete far sooner than the patent period, so the period could be shorter without affecting a business' ability to profit from it.
- It's too difficult to parse the current patents that might affect a software package that you intend to implement, and thus innovation for small businesses and individuals is effectively curtailed.
SEOT.
This argument is: The only solution available to share a limited resource is to compete over it, such that what one person gains, another person loses.
Fortunately, our ancestors were able to see the benefit in cooperation such that one group's efforts in agriculture increased a limited resource, and allowed other groups to divert their efforts towards other goals such as defending land that surrounded a community or even artistic pursuits such as decorating clay jugs or making jewelry.
If people were ONLY able to compete and could ONLY deal with limited resources through competition then there would be no society; we would be fighting over scraps of food and concerning ourselves with petty might-is-right pecking orders.
The UK has stricter libel laws than the US. At the time of the McLibel case, legal aid (i.e. money given to help defend yourself in court) was not available for libel cases. A few years after the trial, the McLibel two went to the EU and got this changed so that legal aid is available. This helps a bit but the libel laws are still exploitable to the extent that those with money and power can effectively silence those who dare to criticise them, unless you have the time and resources to defend yourself. I doubt very much that Greenpeace can say what it likes in the UK, as our libel laws require that if you are accused of libel then you must prove that what you are saying is true, rather than the other side prove that what you are saying is false. Just like the RIAA cases here: Unless you have the time and resources to defend yourself, a powerful and wealthy institution can overstep what is fair and just. I don't know much about the Greenpeace case you cited, but in the UK, there are some militant animal rights protestors who have managed to shut down legitimate laboratories by their dubious actions. So, yes, it can work both ways. However, these animal rights protestors have also overstepped legal boundaries (damage to property, intimidation, etc) but in different ways how the RIAA and McDonalds overstepped the legal boundaries. Neither kind of abuse should be tolerated. If Greenpeace were not breaking the law then they have the right to say those things. Maybe you are saying that America needs more law to protect corporations by having greater libel laws, but if the UK experience is anything to go by then this will just amount to a form of censorship on the behest of large corporations. Just like large corporations can bully people into doing its bidding by threatening law suits that few people can afford to defend against.
This is a lot like the McLibel case in the UK. McDonalds were using the UK Libel laws to shut up various media outlets including the BBC and some newspapers by threatening to sue if they published information that painted McDonalds in a bad light. All these organisations decided to not publish or broadcast the information. Then a volunteer organisation wrote a pamphlet about the things that McDonalds do wrong, and got sued. Two of the members of that organisation refused to settle out of court, and decided to defend themselves against the million dollar lawyers that McDonalds hired to take them to court.
e x.html
What proceeded was the longest ever court case in British legal history and in the end the court agreed that indeed, McDonalds do, quote: "exploit children with their advertising, falsely advertise their food as nutritious, risk the health of their long-term regular customers, are "culpably responsible" for cruelty to animals reared for their products, are "strongly antipathetic" to unions and pay their workers low wages."
From http://www.mcspotlight.org/case/trial/verdict/ind
So not only can uninformed consumers not make a good choice, but when people try to inform consumers of FACTS, money-laden corporations can shut them up most of the time. So on the whole, markets don't work properly in these cases because no consumer can be adequately informed about absolutely every product that some corrupt corporation is selling.
Likewise with the RIAA Mafia, most people cannot afford to defend against them or have the money to inform the public of the other side of the story - i.e. how the damage that RIAA claims P2P causes is largely exagerrated.
It's only the free market fundamentalists that think markets are sacrosanct, and "informed" consumers can defeat corrupt organisations through consumer power, despite the wealth and power of some of the players involved. Unfortunately, there appears to be rather a lot of those in America. No wonder the Middle East thinks America's corrupt.
Whereas the media companies would like us to believe that each time a unit of their work is copied at no cost to them, is "theft", most people correctly see it otherwise.
However, yes the creator should still get a reward or else there is no incentive to create (at least for one section of the population) but the law should not be used as a way to enable businesses to survive with an inefficient distribution system. The law should only be used against those who make money from a work without permission, not used to pointlessly restrict non-commercial uses.
Businesses with different business models could make reasonable profits without having to rely on the law to unnecessarily restrict the public.
Authors do NOT have exclusive rights, by the way. You only have to think of libraries to see how that's not true. And then look at fair use rights. What authors/creators have are sometimes broad, but nonetheless restricted monopolies. Just one example: Radio stations do not have to pay performers royalities - only the composer. So if Madonna sings happy birthday and a radio station plays it, Madonna gets nothing and the composer of happy birthday gets a royality. Madonna does NOT have an exclusive right.