Wrong. You _could_ vote on issues you want to vote on, ald let professional politicians vote on stuff you dont care or dont know about.
> Also, do you think general population is smart? Don't forget it were them who elected those politicians that don't have a clue in the first place.
So except that with direct democracy would enable the people to prevent unwanted laws, nothing substantial would change.
> but direct democracy is only going to result in widespread populism.
How is it different than representative democracy? It isnt. In a direct democracy the people would have a way to override purchased policitians, in a representative democracy they dont.
> We need to invent better mechanisms
I agree. But while we're waiting for them to be invented, I suggest we rely on direct democracy instead of representative democracy, I'm tired of special interests purchasing politicians and purchasing laws.
> Still can't work out how to solve the tyranny of the majority.
How does representative democracy solve the tyranny of the majority? It doesnt. Did representative democracy prevent Hitler? It didnt. Do we have any historic example of a direct democracy turning out fundamentally bad? We havent. Do we have historic examples of representative democracies turning out bad? We have.
I know I'm preaching to the choir again, but still. Your sentence sounded like a typical argument that direct democracy would somehow lead to problems we _dont_ already have.
> And politicians are qualified to vote on all issues how exactly?
Even if they're qualified on paper, theres no way to make sure they cant be bought by special interests. Just look at the copyright policy. You make just a few people able to vote on it, and peng, you have laws prosecuting millions of people for "thought theft". The same with the war on drugs, the "noble experiment" of prohibition, etc.
There are countless laws, almost always enacsted by special interests and then enforced against the broad majority, which very likely would not exist if anybody ever would let the people directly vote on them.
The point of direct democracy is not to have the average guy vote on any random technical stuff decision, it is to have knowledgeable, interested people be able to _prevent_ bad, unwanted laws. Checks and balances. Professional politicians are not impartial enough to have the last word on everything, there should be a way for the population to correct bad decisions, like preventing a war by referendum.
And what would be better? Having the self-procaimed "brilliant people's" votes weight more? Who would prevent then that those smart people tune the system in their favor and discriminate against the blind idiots?
> don't vote, simply because their vote does not matter.
Their vote absolutely matters, but they seem to be pissed that their vote doesnt matter _more_ than a blind idiot's vote. They seem to have a sense of entitlement that their one vote should weight as 100 blind idiot votes, so that the blind idiots cant outnumber them.
Because referendum opponents usually cite the high costs attached to paper based voting as the main reason against direct democracy.
Online voting would enable many, many more elections per year, and let people vote on more fine grained issues than just "a party to represent me for the next 4 years". Many representative positions could be abolished completely when people could directly vote on everything.
Paper based voting and represetative democracy are solutions from hundred of years ago. The fact that they were the best solutions back then does not imply that they still are the best solutions today or in future.
> there is a direct link between free users of file-hosting services and copyright infringement.
There is also a direct link between internet users and copyright infringement. There is also a direct link between prople exchanging information and copyright infringement. And so on.
Copyright is for-profit censorship. As soon as you have two people exchanging information, be it on the net, by pendrives, even exchanging books, as soon as you cut out the middlemen, it will probably be some kind of infringement.
The problem with this, what they call infringement is _normal human behavior_ that shouldnt be infringement in the first place. As soon as people get together, they exchange information. Declaring parts of this information exchange somebody elses "property" and trying to censor it by basically spying on every information exchange between two people, is censorship straight from the darkest surveillance state nightmares. The worst case scanario. It is basically north korea, but not with respect to "political information" but with respect to "proprietary information". Censorship is censorship, whatever paltry excuse you can come up with for it.
> Power is something government should have very little of.
Power is something both goverment _and_ private conglomerates should have very little off. If you have a too weak goverment, private special interests can grab too much power and become de facto goverments piggybacking on weak official goverments, so you get the same negative results for the population. The key is to cut power everywhere before it starts reaching critical, self-sustaining thresholds. And this only works if the people are powerful enough to cut both the goverment and special interests. It works only with a more direct democracy.
> When what you're doing is illegal people are often
Stuff is not simply "illegal" by itself. In a so called democracy, people allegedly far and wide agree that something should be illegal, because they think that it is wrong, and then it becomes illegal by law.
But freely sharing copyrighted stuff is today illegal although a majority of people doesnt really object to it and doesnt think that it _should_ be illegal. The really only reason why filesharing is illegal is not because of a societal consensus that it should be illegal, but because politicians make the policy together with a few stake holders behind closed doors under the exclusion of the public, because the policy will be enforced _against_ the public.
An influential few make the laws, the public is expected to simply STFU and obey. With respect to copyright policy and enforcement, the so called "democracy" here absolutely isn't working.
> So I don't get your point. Is that artificial constructs are bad and everything natural is good?
No, that artificial restrictions are good only when there is a overwhelming agreement that they are beneficial for everyone, especially for those subjecting themselves freely to those artificial restrictions. I dont think that such an agreement, that strict enforcement of for-profit censorship (copyright) on the internet is beneficial for all of us, exists today.
> Copyright is an artificial construct whereas communication is human nature.
According to the copyright creation myth, copyright came into existence when free men, who could freely talk and exchange every information freely with each other, agreed that it is better for everyone to allow creators to censor free information exchange of their works in exchange for creating those works and making those works available. That wide and far agreement between free men, that we have to tolerate a bit of culturally beneficial for-profit censorship then allegedly became a law. We (our ancestors) _agreed_ (and if you didnt get it by now, the emphasis is on the fucking agreement) to give up a part of out natural, god given right to freely communicate with each other (even if the content of this free communication is an Avatar Blue-ray) to encourage creators to create more works than they would do otherwise.
Our ancestors agreed to give up those rights, but maybe we today do not agree any more? What if we today think otherwise and want out god-given natural right back, that our ancestors sold for more books? I personally do not see that kind of far and wide agreement existing any more between free men. Today, only a tiny minority of influential stake-holders violently pushes it, and the majority of free men is merely subject to enforcement, without having a bloody chance in hell to be allowed to re-evaluate that 300 yr old agreement any more. (What do we learn from this btw: Never sell your fucking rights, moron, 300 yrs later you might regret it.)
> It really gets absurd in the cases where you have 100,000 lines of code that's your own but including 2 lines of GPL code means you have to give away your code as it's a derivative work.
It is really absurd when you want to take code somebody else has written with the intent to make it freely redistributable, and want to change its licence to make it not freely redistributable with the intent to be able to sue users who dare to redistribute what was once free code when you took it.
Works under the GPL are not intended to become everybody's free code library. They are specifically intended as an enrichment only for "is free, stays free" code. There is a philosophy of freedom attached to it. If you do not share this philosophy of freedom, the code is not available for you.
> If every law were taken to a referendum then we'd still be living in the dark ages.
Switzerland has had direct democracy for the last 150 years and is certainly not in the dark ages, it is working rather well. Thanks for the insult.
They do not take every law to a referendum, but the key is that they _can_ if they want. They can and they often do veto crazy laws. The ability to legally stop crazy laws without having to resort to fighting, protesting, boycotting, begging politicians, i.e. how "democracy" is obviously understood in the US, is the key.
For a law to be fair and just, it has to be accepted by a significant share of the population, i.e. it has to be democratically supported. When laws are simply forced from the top down by a few stake holders and then massively enforced against the population like in pre-democratic feudal middle ages, breaking a unjust law you can not democratically change is a fucking rebellion. A law does not automatically gain legitimacy just by being a "law", otherwise nobody would ever rebelled against feudalism. Feudalism also had "laws". Libya also had "laws" and you know how it ended. A law just being called a law means nothing.
A law gains legitimacy by the process how it is passed. It gains legitimacy by whether it is widely accepted as law. This crazy IP shit is neither. It was decided behind closed doors, by a few greedy sick fucks, and is then applied to millions with the sole intent to extract money from them and everybody knows this. Copyright in its todays form is as undemocratic and illegitimate as a law can get.
> help those of us who care about civil liberties fight against draconian laws
Come on, you fucking dont do anything. You dont attempt anything, you never ever accomplished anything. You know that you have no chance in hell to change this, so whats your plan? How are you gonna get big money out of and democracy into copyright legislation? How exactly do you "fight"?
> join us in our attempts to make copyright laws marginally sane
All you seemingly do is going around telling people not to break "the law", so basically youre part of the problem. You sound like big content, "dont break it, its the law, breaking it will make things worse for you". How is simply bowing down, obeying and not breaking an exploitive, undemocratic and unjust law going to automatically make the law more sane?
Change the election system in the US so you dont have to "fight" them any more, but can just vote them out of politics. Take the power politicians have to push abusive, bad laws. Bring in more direct democracy, so that lawmaking becomes more independent of the few bribeable, single points of failure (politicians). MPAA/RIAA are only able to influence laws because there are only so few politicians to bribe and because, after being bribed, nobody can stop them from introducing abusive laws.
In my view, Paul Graham got it completely wrong. It is not Hollywood that has to be fought, it is the undemocratic political system that has to go. Hollywood just abuses the buggy system because it is so easy to abuse (think Windows 98). After YC "kills Hollywood", simply somebody else will come up to bribe politicians and purchase laws because it is so effective. The system allows for rich people to literally purchase laws.
The cure is not to merely stop this one case of abuse, but to debug the system to prevent any further abuses. "Debug the system" in this case means introduce switzerland style direct democracy to make people able to bypass "professional" politicians and to directly veto abusive and unjust laws.
If the pirate parties are insignificant nationally, they'll also be insignificant internationally. Their internationality wont get them any say in either national or international politics. They have to get stable power in their own nations to make a change.
> It will sure divide their voterbase.
To make a change, you have to get big. A united voterbase wont help them to get there if it is not big enough.
> if they weren't just defenders of internet freedoms
They are not internet freedom defenders per se, they are rather pushing transparency and direct democracy. The focus on internet freedoms only results from their members voting so. But they cant vote for internet fredoms all the time, over and over again, once they agreed on internet freedoms they have to discuss and agree on other topics. Give them enough time and they'll cover everything, simply because theres nothing else for them to do.
How exactly? Your alleged "serious" copyright reform movements never achieved anything of significance. The Pirate Party has achieved siginificant visibility in Europe. They have seats in the European Parliament, in the Berlin parliament and will probably get seats in the German federal parliament next year. They have already forced major parties to seriously rethink their internet policies or risk losing the whole sub-30 generation.
> I'd even allow more. Movies do have a tendency to be hideously expensive and
Hideously expensive movies dont have to be made. Just made them cheap enough to be able to turn a profit within 7 years.
> But I'd still say that fifteen years should be a hard upper limit
I'm all for letting everybody vote on it in a referendum. In theory, copyright is supposed to be for the benefit of the people. Let the people decide directly which copyright duration maximizes their benefit. Content producers should not have a say in this at all other than in their individual refrerendum vote.
"some people like it" is not gonna win over any siginficant shares of the desktop market. It wont win anything, it will just annihilate Shuttleworths money and then die off in an epic fail manner. Canonical should be in it to win it, not to merely corner some tiny irrelevant niche within the already tiny 1% Linux desktop market share. Ubuntu was supposed to win over Windows/Mac users, not to scare away its current user base.
"some people like it" is just another way to say "almost everybody else hates it with a passion (but why should we care?)"
North Korea style mass surveillance, mass censorship and mass punishment in order to make sharing of "prohibited information" a life threatening activity.
> I feel like I'm living in a weird parallel universe.
That is a inevitable consequence of Linux growing and becoming commercially interesting and "mainstream". Now the hackers do not have a say more in how their product is going to work and look like, this is now the sole decision of the Mac using "design team". The devs now just implement a specification and thats it. They maybe dont even use the abomination themselves, they maybe hate it es much as their users, but they simply dont pull the strings any more. Who would have thought, that once the year of the Linux desktop actually arrives, we might start hating what it has become.
What is even more ironical, Gnome is still a core GNU project, while even the FSF is recommending GNUstep instead.
> Until everyone is on Google, nobody's going to Google
No, masses are irrelevant for success, G+ had to win those "leader" type of people who helped FB win, the high-influence college crowd, the trendsetters, the queen bees who basically get to decide what will used, the rest will simply have to passively follow like worker bees. FB was wildly successful long before everybodys aunt and grandma joined, because frankly, nobody cares about them. FB had the important (private) college crowd and thats all they wanted. The aunts and grandmas simply followed.
G+ made the fatal flaw in their strategy not to identify what made FB successful in the first place, getting high-value people on board first. They thought that an G+ account itself had enough worth to play the "invite only" gamble, but this was so wrong. The worth of an social netwrk account is not measured by features of the account itself, but by "which indispensable people are exclusively on there". Nobody indispensable was exclusively on G+, so G+ had no power to force the masses to abandon FB in order to not be cut off from their influential peers on G+.
Then Google made the next fatal flaw to massively fuck off early adopters, who _did_ bother to go where nobody has gone before and to make an account. The early adopters were people who were fed up with FB's privacy breaches and looked for a more moderate alternative. They were not just amazed b G+ features, they looked for a second, less intrusive home. And what did Google do to those terraformers, who were supposed to turn into evangelists and make G+ attractive to non-members? Google started threatening and deleting their accounts, forcing "real names", talking about an perverse "identity service" under which no anonymous thought will be allowed to be expressed. The attack against enthusiastic early adopters gave everybody a sense of things to come, that Google+ will not be better than FB in any imaginable way privacy wise, that their ego is already inflated so long before they have a large enough user base to justify it. There will be no second wave of early adopters, the news has already been spread that the new master is as ruthless and abusive as the current master, so theres no point in relocating.
By Googles own actions, it became clear that FB just isnt that bad as everybody thought before G+.
> Why do people ignore the laws against filesharing? Because they do not understand why they exist.
Wrong. We, the filesharing people perfectly know why they exist, thanks.
We ignore filesharing laws because the laws are bad. We ignore them because they know that the majority of our peers neither support nor obey those laws. Those laws do not reflect our natural democratic sense of right and wrong that should guide any lawmaking. We ignore them because the laws have not been decided in a democratic way, they have been created in pre-democratic times and since then enforced top down by a small, influential minority against a majority opposing those laws. The majority of us do not gain any benefits from copyright laws, we only have our natural right to exchange information with their peers artificially restricted for the financial benefit of the few. We ignore filesharing laws because we do not want our communication to be somebody elses "oil of the 21'st century".
In short, we ignore your laws because we, the people neither want them nor did we create them. It was you and your ilk who created them not for the benefit of us all, but solely for your own.
But finding out actually _how_ to get paid is your problem. If you cant, nobody owes you a working business model. You dont somehow _have_ to work as a creator. If nobody wants to voluntarily pay you for doing creative stuff, go flip burgers.
> your desire to get other people's valuable hard work for free
This is not about "getting free stuff", no matter how often you creators repeat it.
The unpleasent fact about life is that people like to exchange information with each other, i.e. information wants to be free. Creative works are bits of information. To enforce your current business model, you have to constantly monitor and log the internet habits of millions and millions of people, and you have to punish millions and millions of them for something they feel is not wrong: exchanging useful information with their peers. Nobody cares that you declared parts of this information your "property", this kind of property is an artificial construct and is not widely supported. Your business modes is _very_ unnatural, it is literaly a fierce for-profit censorship scheme, with a giant apparatus doing nothing else but prosecuting people for too freely talking to each other, it is like North Korea applied to music.
> is not only unfair, but it's ultimately self-destructive
This is not your decision. In a democracy, we should be able to vote what is fair / unfair / constructive / destructive. Copyright, as we know it, is perceived as a mightily destructive force by a majority of people, which has been able to survive that long because of lobbyism, govermental intransparency (like having ACTA declared a threat level national security) and a tight relationship with publishing houses.
Todays copyright is opposing to the will of the majority of people, and if this democracy thingie is even worth half of what its called, then by hell, we will get rid of today's copyright soon. The established party system is actively preventing any kind of change, but as long as we can get a new, young, fresh party in (sorry US, get rid of your system or you will soon look old), we will be working on it. And if suing people for a living is your money making scheme, dear creator, you should start looking for another job soon.
> then the year Windows 8 is released really will be the Year of the Linux desktop
Sadly, it wont. Why? You'll answer it yourself in a second:
> I do NOT want to deal with dumbass touch interfaces on a PC, whether that's Windows 8, iOS, or frakking Unity.
The traditional Linux desktops are already ruined, KDE3, Gnome2, all butchered, all gone. Theres only XFCE left, but thats too small, too hobbyist (its basically a one man show), too volatile. KDE4, Gnome3 and Unity are breathteakingly bad and laughably unusable compared to what we once had. Fuck that "designer driven" brave new shit.
Microsoft is finally commiting big-style seppuku, and theres no serious Linux contender to pick up the expected masses of castaways, because Linux desktops have been _already_ gutted. Thanks Apple.
> They want to appear on Google web searches, but they don't want to be aggregated on Google News.
Google News is not much different than a google search. It is search specialized on news, like code search is specialized on code and blog search is specialized on blogs. You search for a headline, you get a list of headlines. Then you pick the one you want to go to and google sends you to the newspaper site with the story. You can not read the story on google, google does not copy the story the newspapers have written.
What the newspapers want though, is Google not to send users to the searched-for news stories _directly_, but to the _homepages_ of the newspapers, to force the users to click themselves through newspaper ads before they reach the stories they wanted to read in the first place. They dont want google to work like a search engine, but like a recommendation i.e. advertisment engine. "You just searched for news on Milow? The Belgian Daily might have a story about him. Goto: belgiandaily.be". Google would be suicidal to ever give in to that sort of blackmailing, because not linking directly to stories the user searched for would render their news search engine useless.
Just imagine the general google search not deep linking to search results but always sending you to the respective homepages. This is exactly what those newspapers are trying to enforce.
Slashdot Mirror
> Under direct democracy, you would have to vote
Wrong. You _could_ vote on issues you want to vote on, ald let professional politicians vote on stuff you dont care or dont know about.
> Also, do you think general population is smart? Don't forget it were them who elected those politicians that don't have a clue in the first place.
So except that with direct democracy would enable the people to prevent unwanted laws, nothing substantial would change.
> but direct democracy is only going to result in widespread populism.
How is it different than representative democracy? It isnt. In a direct democracy the people would have a way to override purchased policitians, in a representative democracy they dont.
> We need to invent better mechanisms
I agree. But while we're waiting for them to be invented, I suggest we rely on direct democracy instead of representative democracy, I'm tired of special interests purchasing politicians and purchasing laws.
> Still can't work out how to solve the tyranny of the majority.
How does representative democracy solve the tyranny of the majority? It doesnt. Did representative democracy prevent Hitler? It didnt. Do we have any historic example of a direct democracy turning out fundamentally bad? We havent. Do we have historic examples of representative democracies turning out bad? We have.
I know I'm preaching to the choir again, but still. Your sentence sounded like a typical argument that direct democracy would somehow lead to problems we _dont_ already have.
> And politicians are qualified to vote on all issues how exactly?
Even if they're qualified on paper, theres no way to make sure they cant be bought by special interests. Just look at the copyright policy. You make just a few people able to vote on it, and peng, you have laws prosecuting millions of people for "thought theft". The same with the war on drugs, the "noble experiment" of prohibition, etc.
There are countless laws, almost always enacsted by special interests and then enforced against the broad majority, which very likely would not exist if anybody ever would let the people directly vote on them.
The point of direct democracy is not to have the average guy vote on any random technical stuff decision, it is to have knowledgeable, interested people be able to _prevent_ bad, unwanted laws. Checks and balances. Professional politicians are not impartial enough to have the last word on everything, there should be a way for the population to correct bad decisions, like preventing a war by referendum.
> It's the big flaw of the democratic system.
And what would be better? Having the self-procaimed "brilliant people's" votes weight more? Who would prevent then that those smart people tune the system in their favor and discriminate against the blind idiots?
> don't vote, simply because their vote does not matter.
Their vote absolutely matters, but they seem to be pissed that their vote doesnt matter _more_ than a blind idiot's vote. They seem to have a sense of entitlement that their one vote should weight as 100 blind idiot votes, so that the blind idiots cant outnumber them.
Because referendum opponents usually cite the high costs attached to paper based voting as the main reason against direct democracy.
Online voting would enable many, many more elections per year, and let people vote on more fine grained issues than just "a party to represent me for the next 4 years". Many representative positions could be abolished completely when people could directly vote on everything.
Paper based voting and represetative democracy are solutions from hundred of years ago. The fact that they were the best solutions back then does not imply that they still are the best solutions today or in future.
> there is a direct link between free users of file-hosting services and copyright infringement.
There is also a direct link between internet users and copyright infringement. There is also a direct link between prople exchanging information and copyright infringement. And so on.
Copyright is for-profit censorship. As soon as you have two people exchanging information, be it on the net, by pendrives, even exchanging books, as soon as you cut out the middlemen, it will probably be some kind of infringement.
The problem with this, what they call infringement is _normal human behavior_ that shouldnt be infringement in the first place. As soon as people get together, they exchange information. Declaring parts of this information exchange somebody elses "property" and trying to censor it by basically spying on every information exchange between two people, is censorship straight from the darkest surveillance state nightmares. The worst case scanario. It is basically north korea, but not with respect to "political information" but with respect to "proprietary information". Censorship is censorship, whatever paltry excuse you can come up with for it.
> Power is something government should have very little of.
Power is something both goverment _and_ private conglomerates should have very little off. If you have a too weak goverment, private special interests can grab too much power and become de facto goverments piggybacking on weak official goverments, so you get the same negative results for the population. The key is to cut power everywhere before it starts reaching critical, self-sustaining thresholds. And this only works if the people are powerful enough to cut both the goverment and special interests. It works only with a more direct democracy.
> When what you're doing is illegal people are often
Stuff is not simply "illegal" by itself. In a so called democracy, people allegedly far and wide agree that something should be illegal, because they think that it is wrong, and then it becomes illegal by law.
But freely sharing copyrighted stuff is today illegal although a majority of people doesnt really object to it and doesnt think that it _should_ be illegal. The really only reason why filesharing is illegal is not because of a societal consensus that it should be illegal, but because politicians make the policy together with a few stake holders behind closed doors under the exclusion of the public, because the policy will be enforced _against_ the public.
An influential few make the laws, the public is expected to simply STFU and obey. With respect to copyright policy and enforcement, the so called "democracy" here absolutely isn't working.
> So I don't get your point. Is that artificial constructs are bad and everything natural is good?
No, that artificial restrictions are good only when there is a overwhelming agreement that they are beneficial for everyone, especially for those subjecting themselves freely to those artificial restrictions. I dont think that such an agreement, that strict enforcement of for-profit censorship (copyright) on the internet is beneficial for all of us, exists today.
> Copyright is an artificial construct whereas communication is human nature.
According to the copyright creation myth, copyright came into existence when free men, who could freely talk and exchange every information freely with each other, agreed that it is better for everyone to allow creators to censor free information exchange of their works in exchange for creating those works and making those works available. That wide and far agreement between free men, that we have to tolerate a bit of culturally beneficial for-profit censorship then allegedly became a law. We (our ancestors) _agreed_ (and if you didnt get it by now, the emphasis is on the fucking agreement) to give up a part of out natural, god given right to freely communicate with each other (even if the content of this free communication is an Avatar Blue-ray) to encourage creators to create more works than they would do otherwise.
Our ancestors agreed to give up those rights, but maybe we today do not agree any more? What if we today think otherwise and want out god-given natural right back, that our ancestors sold for more books? I personally do not see that kind of far and wide agreement existing any more between free men. Today, only a tiny minority of influential stake-holders violently pushes it, and the majority of free men is merely subject to enforcement, without having a bloody chance in hell to be allowed to re-evaluate that 300 yr old agreement any more. (What do we learn from this btw: Never sell your fucking rights, moron, 300 yrs later you might regret it.)
> It really gets absurd in the cases where you have 100,000 lines of code that's your own but including 2 lines of GPL code means you have to give away your code as it's a derivative work.
It is really absurd when you want to take code somebody else has written with the intent to make it freely redistributable, and want to change its licence to make it not freely redistributable with the intent to be able to sue users who dare to redistribute what was once free code when you took it.
Works under the GPL are not intended to become everybody's free code library. They are specifically intended as an enrichment only for "is free, stays free" code. There is a philosophy of freedom attached to it. If you do not share this philosophy of freedom, the code is not available for you.
> If every law were taken to a referendum then we'd still be living in the dark ages.
Switzerland has had direct democracy for the last 150 years and is certainly not in the dark ages, it is working rather well. Thanks for the insult.
They do not take every law to a referendum, but the key is that they _can_ if they want. They can and they often do veto crazy laws. The ability to legally stop crazy laws without having to resort to fighting, protesting, boycotting, begging politicians, i.e. how "democracy" is obviously understood in the US, is the key.
> Breaking the law simply because
For a law to be fair and just, it has to be accepted by a significant share of the population, i.e. it has to be democratically supported. When laws are simply forced from the top down by a few stake holders and then massively enforced against the population like in pre-democratic feudal middle ages, breaking a unjust law you can not democratically change is a fucking rebellion. A law does not automatically gain legitimacy just by being a "law", otherwise nobody would ever rebelled against feudalism. Feudalism also had "laws". Libya also had "laws" and you know how it ended. A law just being called a law means nothing.
A law gains legitimacy by the process how it is passed. It gains legitimacy by whether it is widely accepted as law. This crazy IP shit is neither. It was decided behind closed doors, by a few greedy sick fucks, and is then applied to millions with the sole intent to extract money from them and everybody knows this. Copyright in its todays form is as undemocratic and illegitimate as a law can get.
> help those of us who care about civil liberties fight against draconian laws
Come on, you fucking dont do anything. You dont attempt anything, you never ever accomplished anything. You know that you have no chance in hell to change this, so whats your plan? How are you gonna get big money out of and democracy into copyright legislation? How exactly do you "fight"?
> join us in our attempts to make copyright laws marginally sane
All you seemingly do is going around telling people not to break "the law", so basically youre part of the problem. You sound like big content, "dont break it, its the law, breaking it will make things worse for you". How is simply bowing down, obeying and not breaking an exploitive, undemocratic and unjust law going to automatically make the law more sane?
> So, how can we help fight them?
Change the election system in the US so you dont have to "fight" them any more, but can just vote them out of politics. Take the power politicians have to push abusive, bad laws. Bring in more direct democracy, so that lawmaking becomes more independent of the few bribeable, single points of failure (politicians). MPAA/RIAA are only able to influence laws because there are only so few politicians to bribe and because, after being bribed, nobody can stop them from introducing abusive laws.
In my view, Paul Graham got it completely wrong. It is not Hollywood that has to be fought, it is the undemocratic political system that has to go. Hollywood just abuses the buggy system because it is so easy to abuse (think Windows 98). After YC "kills Hollywood", simply somebody else will come up to bribe politicians and purchase laws because it is so effective. The system allows for rich people to literally purchase laws.
The cure is not to merely stop this one case of abuse, but to debug the system to prevent any further abuses. "Debug the system" in this case means introduce switzerland style direct democracy to make people able to bypass "professional" politicians and to directly veto abusive and unjust laws.
If the pirate parties are insignificant nationally, they'll also be insignificant internationally. Their internationality wont get them any say in either national or international politics. They have to get stable power in their own nations to make a change.
> It will sure divide their voterbase.
To make a change, you have to get big. A united voterbase wont help them to get there if it is not big enough.
> if they weren't just defenders of internet freedoms
They are not internet freedom defenders per se, they are rather pushing transparency and direct democracy. The focus on internet freedoms only results from their members voting so. But they cant vote for internet fredoms all the time, over and over again, once they agreed on internet freedoms they have to discuss and agree on other topics. Give them enough time and they'll cover everything, simply because theres nothing else for them to do.
> only hurt copyright reform movements.
How exactly? Your alleged "serious" copyright reform movements never achieved anything of significance. The Pirate Party has achieved siginificant visibility in Europe. They have seats in the European Parliament, in the Berlin parliament and will probably get seats in the German federal parliament next year. They have already forced major parties to seriously rethink their internet policies or risk losing the whole sub-30 generation.
> I'd even allow more. Movies do have a tendency to be hideously expensive and
Hideously expensive movies dont have to be made. Just made them cheap enough to be able to turn a profit within 7 years.
> But I'd still say that fifteen years should be a hard upper limit
I'm all for letting everybody vote on it in a referendum. In theory, copyright is supposed to be for the benefit of the people. Let the people decide directly which copyright duration maximizes their benefit. Content producers should not have a say in this at all other than in their individual refrerendum vote.
> some people clearly like it
"some people like it" is not gonna win over any siginficant shares of the desktop market. It wont win anything, it will just annihilate Shuttleworths money and then die off in an epic fail manner. Canonical should be in it to win it, not to merely corner some tiny irrelevant niche within the already tiny 1% Linux desktop market share. Ubuntu was supposed to win over Windows/Mac users, not to scare away its current user base.
"some people like it" is just another way to say "almost everybody else hates it with a passion (but why should we care?)"
North Korea style mass surveillance, mass censorship and mass punishment in order to make sharing of "prohibited information" a life threatening activity.
> I feel like I'm living in a weird parallel universe.
That is a inevitable consequence of Linux growing and becoming commercially interesting and "mainstream". Now the hackers do not have a say more in how their product is going to work and look like, this is now the sole decision of the Mac using "design team". The devs now just implement a specification and thats it. They maybe dont even use the abomination themselves, they maybe hate it es much as their users, but they simply dont pull the strings any more. Who would have thought, that once the year of the Linux desktop actually arrives, we might start hating what it has become.
What is even more ironical, Gnome is still a core GNU project, while even the FSF is recommending GNUstep instead.
> Until everyone is on Google, nobody's going to Google
No, masses are irrelevant for success, G+ had to win those "leader" type of people who helped FB win, the high-influence college crowd, the trendsetters, the queen bees who basically get to decide what will used, the rest will simply have to passively follow like worker bees. FB was wildly successful long before everybodys aunt and grandma joined, because frankly, nobody cares about them. FB had the important (private) college crowd and thats all they wanted. The aunts and grandmas simply followed.
G+ made the fatal flaw in their strategy not to identify what made FB successful in the first place, getting high-value people on board first. They thought that an G+ account itself had enough worth to play the "invite only" gamble, but this was so wrong. The worth of an social netwrk account is not measured by features of the account itself, but by "which indispensable people are exclusively on there". Nobody indispensable was exclusively on G+, so G+ had no power to force the masses to abandon FB in order to not be cut off from their influential peers on G+.
Then Google made the next fatal flaw to massively fuck off early adopters, who _did_ bother to go where nobody has gone before and to make an account. The early adopters were people who were fed up with FB's privacy breaches and looked for a more moderate alternative. They were not just amazed b G+ features, they looked for a second, less intrusive home. And what did Google do to those terraformers, who were supposed to turn into evangelists and make G+ attractive to non-members? Google started threatening and deleting their accounts, forcing "real names", talking about an perverse "identity service" under which no anonymous thought will be allowed to be expressed. The attack against enthusiastic early adopters gave everybody a sense of things to come, that Google+ will not be better than FB in any imaginable way privacy wise, that their ego is already inflated so long before they have a large enough user base to justify it. There will be no second wave of early adopters, the news has already been spread that the new master is as ruthless and abusive as the current master, so theres no point in relocating.
By Googles own actions, it became clear that FB just isnt that bad as everybody thought before G+.
> Why do people ignore the laws against filesharing? Because they do not understand why they exist.
Wrong. We, the filesharing people perfectly know why they exist, thanks.
We ignore filesharing laws because the laws are bad. We ignore them because they know that the majority of our peers neither support nor obey those laws. Those laws do not reflect our natural democratic sense of right and wrong that should guide any lawmaking. We ignore them because the laws have not been decided in a democratic way, they have been created in pre-democratic times and since then enforced top down by a small, influential minority against a majority opposing those laws. The majority of us do not gain any benefits from copyright laws, we only have our natural right to exchange information with their peers artificially restricted for the financial benefit of the few. We ignore filesharing laws because we do not want our communication to be somebody elses "oil of the 21'st century".
In short, we ignore your laws because we, the people neither want them nor did we create them. It was you and your ilk who created them not for the benefit of us all, but solely for your own.
Dear creators,
> We deserve to get paid for our work
But finding out actually _how_ to get paid is your problem. If you cant, nobody owes you a working business model. You dont somehow _have_ to work as a creator. If nobody wants to voluntarily pay you for doing creative stuff, go flip burgers.
> your desire to get other people's valuable hard work for free
This is not about "getting free stuff", no matter how often you creators repeat it.
The unpleasent fact about life is that people like to exchange information with each other, i.e. information wants to be free. Creative works are bits of information. To enforce your current business model, you have to constantly monitor and log the internet habits of millions and millions of people, and you have to punish millions and millions of them for something they feel is not wrong: exchanging useful information with their peers. Nobody cares that you declared parts of this information your "property", this kind of property is an artificial construct and is not widely supported. Your business modes is _very_ unnatural, it is literaly a fierce for-profit censorship scheme, with a giant apparatus doing nothing else but prosecuting people for too freely talking to each other, it is like North Korea applied to music.
> is not only unfair, but it's ultimately self-destructive
This is not your decision. In a democracy, we should be able to vote what is fair / unfair / constructive / destructive. Copyright, as we know it, is perceived as a mightily destructive force by a majority of people, which has been able to survive that long because of lobbyism, govermental intransparency (like having ACTA declared a threat level national security) and a tight relationship with publishing houses.
Todays copyright is opposing to the will of the majority of people, and if this democracy thingie is even worth half of what its called, then by hell, we will get rid of today's copyright soon. The established party system is actively preventing any kind of change, but as long as we can get a new, young, fresh party in (sorry US, get rid of your system or you will soon look old), we will be working on it. And if suing people for a living is your money making scheme, dear creator, you should start looking for another job soon.
> then the year Windows 8 is released really will be the Year of the Linux desktop
Sadly, it wont. Why? You'll answer it yourself in a second:
> I do NOT want to deal with dumbass touch interfaces on a PC, whether that's Windows 8, iOS, or frakking Unity.
The traditional Linux desktops are already ruined, KDE3, Gnome2, all butchered, all gone. Theres only XFCE left, but thats too small, too hobbyist (its basically a one man show), too volatile. KDE4, Gnome3 and Unity are breathteakingly bad and laughably unusable compared to what we once had. Fuck that "designer driven" brave new shit.
Microsoft is finally commiting big-style seppuku, and theres no serious Linux contender to pick up the expected masses of castaways, because Linux desktops have been _already_ gutted. Thanks Apple.
> They want to appear on Google web searches, but they don't want to be aggregated on Google News.
Google News is not much different than a google search. It is search specialized on news, like code search is specialized on code and blog search is specialized on blogs. You search for a headline, you get a list of headlines. Then you pick the one you want to go to and google sends you to the newspaper site with the story. You can not read the story on google, google does not copy the story the newspapers have written.
What the newspapers want though, is Google not to send users to the searched-for news stories _directly_, but to the _homepages_ of the newspapers, to force the users to click themselves through newspaper ads before they reach the stories they wanted to read in the first place. They dont want google to work like a search engine, but like a recommendation i.e. advertisment engine. "You just searched for news on Milow? The Belgian Daily might have a story about him. Goto: belgiandaily.be". Google would be suicidal to ever give in to that sort of blackmailing, because not linking directly to stories the user searched for would render their news search engine useless.
Just imagine the general google search not deep linking to search results but always sending you to the respective homepages. This is exactly what those newspapers are trying to enforce.