Again, patents should not _at all_ be awarded for having ideas. Ideas are cheap. Everyone has ideas. Its the concrete implementation of a idea what makes it valuable to other people, because its basically its showing them "HOW TO", so rewarding implementation-producers with patents is a net win for society.
It becomes a net loss, however, when you dont reward them for producing smething of value, but, as you suggest, for merely being the first in producing something everybody else also can easily come up with, but just hasn't. By rewarding people merely for "being first" and not for hard work, you basically encourage an patent run where people put more effort in searching for patenting possibilities than putting in the work inventing great but hard stuff. You encourage canny lawyers instead of tinkerers and engineers. Which then again makes it even harder for the tinkerers and engineers to produce real, tangible stuff, because they have to route around all the obvious, but legally "protected" patent hurdles.
By encouraging patent trolling, i.e. "i patented this shit first, now pay me, mwahaha!", you also make investments in patent trolling more valuable, so more and more people will invest in trolling and less ans less in actually doing the work inventing stuff because of the obvious lesser returns. Its a vicious circle.
> The question is who gets to decide what a "real-world education" is. And it's not > government.
A "real-world education" would enable the children to be able to be in some kind valuable to other people in order to survive, when their parents arent around any more.
The reasoning for removing Romeikes kids from the school here was solely in order to prevent the whole rest of society from showing them that there is a life outside of religion, that there are children with other religions and (shock) children with no religion at all. It was to prevent questions like "Mommy, daddy, the other children in our class dont have to pray 10000 a day, why do we?".
It absolutely had nothing to do with any kind of education _quality_.
>> Except it isn't if you're removing your children from the society, culture and from >> knowledge they need to later live in and as a part of this society. > False.
Obviously religion doesnt trump children rights everywhere, since they otherwise wouldnt have to leave not only Germany, but basically whole of Europe.
> You are apparently, by your vile and ignorant words against religion, an atheist.
And you are apparanetly, by your vile and ignorant words against reason, a theist.
> What if you lived in a theistic nation, where government decided to force everyone to > follow a certain religion?
How exactly is that different from parents deciding to force all their children to follow their religion and in order to prevent real-world contamination, incarcerate them for life josef fritzl style?
> It does not get to decide if our kids are of a certain religion, or if they learn > Spanish, or if they learn about evolution or global warming.
But it decides if you try to prevent your kids to get a education they need to survive once they (shock) decide to leave your walled religion garden.
> There's no evidence that teaching your children to follow your religion screws them up > in any way.
Forcefully removing them from school, contacts other (different) kids, books, knowledge and so on _does_ screw them up.
>You're being competely irrational, and you're just making things up.
If I were making things up, the Romeikes would have been able to stay home, lock their kids up and threw the keys away. But they arent. So draw your conclusions.
> This is a fundamental human right: to raise your children as you see fit.
Except it isn't if you're removing your children from the society, culture and from knowledge they need to later live in and as a part of this society. You do not own your children. Their right to a real-world education trumps your right to pass your religion virus onto them, forcefully.
You can somewhat influence the way your children see the world, even in a religious way, but its in no way your right to fuck them up totally and completely alienate them from society on purpose in order to ensure that this society will later reject them so hard, that they even as grown ups will never be able to leave your religion because the have no other place to go.
They assume that artists selling the most are also being copied the most, so they get the greatest part. Or so they say, because the allocation weights are kept as business secrets, so nobody really knows how much artists really get. They simply get "something" and have to be fine with that.
Also (surprise, surprise) the private encashment companies keep a hefty processing fee for themselves.
As basically any other country, the Germans are simply too dumb and too comfortable to break out of the same media political party complex. The media supports the big parties politically, the big parties support the business models of the media. It sucks big time, but theres nothing you can do about it when the other 80 Million people dont care.
In order to do your job, you'd have to vote them out of office. But you cant vote them out because your system in practice allows only two parties. The US hasnt had a third party winning somwhere since more than 100 years. 300 Million citizens and only _two_ fscking parties to vote for, every god-forgotten country-so-small-you-cant-find-on-the-map from the Balcans would laugh its collective ass off about calling that "democracy".
Add to that the fact that, at least regarding copyright, the two US parties basically agreed to form a cartel (MAFIAA isnt called MAFIAA for nothing), and youre simply out of luck.
The only way to use the A-bomb is to kill civilans en masse. Theres no military use of an A-bomb without 99% civil casualties.
So, supposed we dont want Iran to be able to kill civilians en masse, why should we allow _anybody else_ to be able to kill civilians en masse? What is the precise reason the US/UK/ France/Russia _need_ to have an A-bomb but Iran doesnt?
> The violation of a click-through EULA/ToS is such a minor thing to most of these kids
Is is a minor thing to basically anybody not only to some "kids".
> that it never even occurs to them that what they're doing is "breaking the rules"
You shouldn't underestimate kids today.
They clearly know that they are breaking someones rules, but they do it deliberately because either they find the rules ridiculous or because (think pirate party) they think that such random rules should not exist nor apply for private use at all.
> we will be waiting a really, really, really long time.
So the most common sense solution you came up with is a wide scale copying prohibition including mass surveillance of everyone's communication in order to find out who's copying, and horrendous, life ruining example punishments of a few randomly picked up sharers in order to "teach the rest of 'em thieves"?
All that in order to get more games made. Whoa. I ask myself how far somebody like you has to go before he slowly beginns to realize that he completely lost it somwhere along the way.
Rights and laws usually originated from the people's cultural/natural sense of right and wrong. So what people at large thought was wrong (like stealing, killing each other) was somewhen cast into law as wrong, and what they thought was unobjectionble, wasnt. Thats how, in rough, this "democracy" was supposed to work.
Then "imaginary property" came into play. Sadly (only for the imaginary proprietors), since it isnt really a property in the physical property sense, it only works as a negation, i.e. you possess a bit of imaginary property not when you really possess something, but when everybody else _loses_ a right to do something. Since theres not only commercial businesses to get cash from, the imaginary proprietors conveniently extended their negation rights claims into everybody elses privacy, since, if i have to pay you money to solely for your allowance to do something in the privacy of my home, you win (and you win big, thats why a prominent proponent of imaginary property called it "the oil of 21st century").
So in order for this to work, practically everybody has to freely acknowledge those "imaginary rights" of a third party to disallow every of us a certain DIY item in order to be forced to pay them for the allowance. But unlike the most other agreements the society at large agreed upon as a basis of its functioning, which then subsequently were codified into specific laws, the society at large actually never agreed to collectively accept the concept of imaginary property as something beneficial for it. In contrary, the concept itself and the accompanying laws had always to be pushed "artificially", always from top down, by the minority profiting from them directly, going as far as making the whole law creation process a secret of allegedly national importance (ACTA).
So artificial = not based on a natural sense of right and wrong inherent to the majority of the people, but systematically designed by a system-gaming versed, profit-oriented minority.
>is James Madison, aka "Father of the Bill of Rights".
So you suppose the respectable "Father of the bill of rights" has codified into the US constitution a law that criminalizes literally millions and millions of otherwise righteous US citizens threathening every single one of them literally with life long bankruptcy if they refuse to abstain from information sharing with each other? Either you're wrong, or the father of the bill of rights was a lunatic. (I think I'd rather place my bet that you're just wrong.)
>I'd say you should pick your parallels better.
I'd say that anyone (be it the holy father of the bill or rights, even if rather unprobable in this case) who deliberately would fsck up the lives of millions of people, and threaten them with lifelong bankruptcy and in order to force them to abstain from DIY-something in order to create a artificial market for this DIY is indeed a lunatic on the scale of Lenin/Stalin/Mao, who all were similarily willing to destroy and mass punish millions of their own fellow countrymen in order to force them to accept a economy/business model.
>Pirates WANT the games, they just don't want to pay for them.
So judged by any free market standards, if nobody wants to pay, theres no market for the games. The only way to _create_ a market in a setting where naturally there would be no market, is to criminalize DIY copying so only one single state-approved monopolist (almost sounds like the Stalin/Lenin fella came up with this BS) is allowed to do the copying, although technically and naturally, everybody else equally could. So we ended up fiercely punishing and threatenig (with personal bankruptcy) millions of our own fsking people for their collective refusal to obey to an non-natural artificial scarcity system which requires them to abstain from sharing information bits with each other.
>So who is going to produce these multi-million dollar games when anyone can copyright and >distribute them without restriction?
If no one wants to pay for them, no one wants them produced. So if no one wants them to be produced... why should you produce them? (Kinda obvious, isn't it?)
>You do realize there have been more than a few games that have cost over $40M to produce.
They dont have to be produced if theres no market for them. (Kinda obvious, isn't it?)
> so you don't need the law to prevent people from duplicating your product.
How about stopping the production of the product until the people realize (all by themselves, with no censorship and mass punishment laws needed) that they really really really have to pay you to get it?
And by the way, the law absolutely doesnt prevent anybody to "duplicate" your product, it just fuck ups the lives (really badly) of the few poor fellas who happen to get caught. The silent majority just keeps copying because nobody, really nobody outside of the circles directly profiting from copying prohibition considers sharing, copying and passing on of culture even remotely wrong or illegal.
>The "even more so" is that reselling a game and buying used games is perfectly legal and >violates the rights of no one.
Copying games instead of buying them would also be perfectly legal and would not violate anybodys rights if such rights had not been artificially _created_ (in a undemocratic way, by a small minority which commonly calls it "the oil of the 21st century", against the will of a large, really large body of people, who it is also rather fiercely enforced against) just in order to create a market where otherwise would be none (or a much smaller one).
Thanks god we now have the Piratpartiet/Piratenpartei (the first legal representation of the internet itself, and the first generation of the "born digitals") we can vote for (and which we have successfully voted into the European parliament this summer) and reverse this ugly piece of corporate for-profit-censorship. Private, non commercial copying and sharing of culture and information will soon be perfectly legal again. Germany parliament is next, fall 2009.
The gap does not occur just because evolution or climate change are so hard to understand you have to be a life long scientist to understand them, no, the gap occurs because peoples brains are actively protecting their religion by refusing to believe those scientific results that contradict whats holy (aka untouchable, even by hard evidence) to them.
In several eastern european countries, or in east germany, you wont find especially many american-style religious people because communist regimes tried several decades long to get rid of organized religion after WW2 and they partly succeeded. Now, this clearly was against holy religious freedom blablabla, and religions are slowly comming back after the iron curtain disappeared, but it nonetheless rendered many people quite immune against organised religion's pseudo-sience bullshit.
The reason you'll find very few people there that are refusing evolution or earth warming isnt because many of them are scientifically educated, no, but simply because they werent religiously indoctrinated strong enough to refuse to accept scientific reality when it contradicts religious scriptures.
The only reason evolution is discussed in the US _at all_ is the strong grip of organised religion and its struggle to stay the major repository of knowledge about life. Religions lost the "sovereignty of interpretation" (what would be a better translation of "Deutungshoheit", someone?) of science to.... science, with evolution they're losing the Deutungshoheit on _life_ itself, knowing theres not much left for them to interpret. Even Darwin himself hesitated for freaking 20 years to publish his results about evolution of species because he knew that it would be the last, or one of the last nails in religion's coffin.
> Why does the HTML5 spec care what codecs are used?
You somehow missed the whole discussion, didnt you? If a spec shouldnt care in what way content is encoded it is trying to show, what _should_ it actually care about?
> Why doesn't it just provide a way to specify which codec the author used to encode the > media file, and let the browser prompt the user to get it if needed?
And where should a free browser get a patented and thus non-free codec from? Or did you actually mean that a free browser should serve as a sales vehicle for proprietary content codecs? Do you imagine what a mess the web would be if for example, browsers wouldnt have a few standardized image formats built in, and would ask you every time you go to a new site to purchase some other proprietary format the images on the site happen to be encoded in?
One basic codec you as a developer can rely on, that everyone has installed, is a good thing (tm). If you want better quality, better compression, whatever, you can always bog your user to install your proprietary pay-for stuff, but whats so fundamentally wrong with a free codec everybody can use, that so many sides are opposing it?
> The piratebay make it possible for people to rip me off and take a game that takes me 10 > hours a day a year to make... for free.
If you can not bring your current business model in line with the information-sharing-reality, stop it and go do something that cant be easily copied and reproduced at zero cost, with a tool anybody can afford.
> In short, it makes a mega-fuckton of ad money from other peoples work.
Proof other than your own claim?
> Explain to me again how thepiratebay earning money from ads whilst giving away my work > for free,
They arent giving your work for free, they built an content-agnostic infrastructure people can use to easily connect and share stuff. They may profit from those people, but so do their ISPs.
> Why does Slashdot constantly side with PirateBay?
Because many of us think private, non-commercial filesharing is not wrong, so it shouldnt be illegal, _regardless_ of the fact that authors of the shared stuff think otherwise.
> Don't you guys ever wonder why big-name developers like John Carmack don't post here > anymore?
Because they prefer to live in denial in their ivory tower and dont like to be constantly reminded by slashdot how real life out there looks like? (Oh irony.)
> that it is completely okay to rip people off and never pay them for their work.
Copying, sharing culture is _not_ wrong. Everybody not OK with the fact that free people fileshare freely should _STOP WORKING_ in a job where he hast to constantly bitch about filesharing. Or he can keep on, but has to come up with a business model other than "selling copies" because it's 2009, and everybody of us can manufacture their own copies themselves, we do not need any "official" copies any more, thank you. Adapt or fucking perish. We wont abstain from using new technology in order to make your business model still work like it did in the 50's.
> clicking and posting about how evil they think capitalism is.
We would not have to do this if you and your likes wouldnt keep clicking and posting about how evil you think a free culture is, and how harder the for-profit censorship called copyright should be.
> And Slashdotters love to make a big deal when a company "steals" GPL code.
So? You forget that the only point of comming up with the GPL was to "effectively remove copyright" in the GPLsphere. Although the GPL is enforced by copyright, the underlying goal of "free software" is to effectively destroy copyright.
> Apparently, piracy isn't theft and copyrights don't matter except when it benefits you.
When a company "steals" GPL code, it gets it out of copyright-free GPLsphere, so yes, from the point of view of the GPL, thats fundamentally bad.
Sharing is not stealing. You seem to still confuse those, but if it keeps you happy, go on.
However, the obscene amounts of motivation some people put into seeding for weeks or months do not in any way result from their hate of the copy manufacturing industry, but from their instinctive urge to help other people.
Sharing is caring, remember? A law prohibiting people helping each other (by sharing information) directly in order to make a third party be able to _charge_ for the same kind of "help" is fundamentally wrong. You will never get any meaningful amount of backing from the wide populace, i.e. your target group, if your only business model amounts to nothing more than trying to stop them sharing.
This line of argumentation including the word "piracy" in most cases just implies that filesharing is somehow wrong and has to be stopped by more surveillance, by more punishments, by less freedom.
> I merely said that it is tiresome and boring to blame lost sales due to piracy (music, > software, or otherwise) on a broken business model.
What you call "piracy" (in a purposefully villainizing manner, nice) is simply people sharing information on an computer network designed for efficient information sharing. Any business model solely based on a assumption that people in our day and age will simply and without some kind of gain abstain from using the computer network for what it's designed for, for the sole purpose of making the above mentioned, someone else's business model a success, is broken to the core.
How many money is in a certain type of business absolutely should not matter in deciding to run a wide-scale censorship and prohibition system like the copyright. Its like saying "Theres money in selling ice! Lets ban refrigerators!"
> and you act like it's an assault on your human rights to tell you to pay for it.
The checking of what I share with other people is an assault on my rights. Copyright is at its core incompatible with privacy. You cant have both installed at the same time. You either have your privacy without anybody snooping at you, which would mean nobody would ever find out you shared something with other people, or you have a copyright regime with mass surveillance and mass lawsuits so nobody ever dares to copy something because "the copyright czar is watching you". Its just like in China which is also filtering peoples networks for "unlawful" information, or north korea which banned internet alltogether in order to not have to do the monitoring work at all.
> No law is natural, all law exists merely because a bunch of people came together and > agreed to follow it while giving some people sticks to enforce it.
Which is the problem, since we the people as whole, never actually had any kind of say or influence at all regarding copyright laws. Since the beginning, they were just enforced from top down. In europe, they were installed at times when even saying "democracy" out loud would have brought you into jail and have simply never been changed since then because they never hit the people so hard as they do now. The fact that the pain was never strong enough to organize against the publisher's grip on the regimes worldwide does not in any way imply that the vast majority of the people, which such laws are enforced against in the practice, actually in any way "agreed" that sharing information is wrong and that they shoud collectively abstain from it.
> As opposed to having it hammered into their heads that something which is religious is > necessarily backwards and wrong?
Did neither say nor mean that.
> I find it interesting that one who condemns religions for their backwardness is himself so > intolerant of the beliefs of others.
Well, there always is a common-sense-threshold above which you cant take a belief serious any more. Having to change the name of an disease because it has the name of an ordinary animal in it which you're not allowed to pronounce just crosses this threshold for me.
Apart from that, there is no actual "belief" at all that a pig is bad in any certain way. People are usually just blindly unquestioningly obedient towards whatever their holy scriptures or holy führers tell them. They call it a belief but it isnt one. At least my arab friends never were able to tell me whats so wrong with pigs in islam and judaism. The only explanation they could come up with (one is a physicist, one a physician, so scientifically well educated people) was that its something their religion says and the only reason they would obey it is because not obeying small unimportant orders like the swine ban would weaken the religious jurisdiction at whole. Yawn. (So i think their so called "beliefs" are silly, but i dont tell them that in the face because i like them though and know that they dont _really_ believe that but are just loyal to their religious families, social circle and so on.)
> now the one we have isn't really satisfying for anyone.
What isn't satisfying is the monty-pythonian reasoning behind the renaming (the officials didnt come up first with a name) and the fact that its an respectable and serious scientific organisation that simply plays along ald lets dumb theocracies put pressure on worldwide policies.
Whats next then? Obligatory renaming AIDS in "gay flu"?
> ethnic reactions to 'swine,' for example among middle-eastern cultures who feel
Actually, they do not "feel" this at all, it has been force-hammered into their heads from early childhood, when they minds could not defend themselves, because several hundreds of years ago, their self-appointed religious founders had no refrigerators (but forgot to leave a "or any later version" in their GPLs.. err... holy scriptures).
So basically a secular, neutral, international health organisationen now forces a disease renaming onto the whole planet because a few backwards theocracies, who happen to have stuck themselves into a religion without a feasible upgrade path (hehehehehe), threaten to let their people die en masse in order to avoid pronouncing the word "swine" loudly. (I'm writing this, but still cant grasp that they rally mean this seriously. Jeez.)
> Enough with this stupid dumbass fucking argument.
So fucking stop using it, dumbass.
> What is wrong with making software and trying to sell it?
Nothing.
> What is wrong with a fierce filesharing prohibition and censorship in order to _force_ people into buying?
Everything.
> Please, shut the fuck up already.
No. Shutting up, giving up essential freedoms and knuckling under financial "interests" is what brought us the "intellectual property" regimes worldwide. Fuck that. No shutting up any more. See you this summer in the EU parliament. And this is just a beginning.
Slashdot Mirror
They sent out their minions to buy up Hubbard books in order to artificially push them into the charts.
Maybe the Pentagon is trying something similar here? ;)
Again, patents should not _at all_ be awarded for having ideas. Ideas are cheap. Everyone has ideas. Its the concrete implementation of a idea what makes it valuable to other people, because its basically its showing them "HOW TO", so rewarding implementation-producers with patents is a net win for society.
It becomes a net loss, however, when you dont reward them for producing smething of value, but, as you suggest, for merely being the first in producing something everybody else also can easily come up with, but just hasn't. By rewarding people merely for "being first" and not for hard work, you basically encourage an patent run where people put more effort in searching for patenting possibilities than putting in the work inventing great but hard stuff. You encourage canny lawyers instead of tinkerers and engineers. Which then again makes it even harder for the tinkerers and engineers to produce real, tangible stuff, because they have to route around all the obvious, but legally "protected" patent hurdles.
By encouraging patent trolling, i.e. "i patented this shit first, now pay me, mwahaha!", you also make investments in patent trolling more valuable, so more and more people will invest in trolling and less ans less in actually doing the work inventing stuff because of the obvious lesser returns. Its a vicious circle.
> The question is who gets to decide what a "real-world education" is. And it's not
> government.
A "real-world education" would enable the children to be able to be in some kind valuable to other people in order to survive, when their parents arent around any more.
The reasoning for removing Romeikes kids from the school here was solely in order to prevent the whole rest of society from showing them that there is a life outside of religion, that there are children with other religions and (shock) children with no religion at all. It was to prevent questions like "Mommy, daddy, the other children in our class dont have to pray 10000 a day, why do we?".
It absolutely had nothing to do with any kind of education _quality_.
>> Except it isn't if you're removing your children from the society, culture and from
>> knowledge they need to later live in and as a part of this society.
> False.
Obviously religion doesnt trump children rights everywhere, since they otherwise wouldnt have to leave not only Germany, but basically whole of Europe.
> You are apparently, by your vile and ignorant words against religion, an atheist.
And you are apparanetly, by your vile and ignorant words against reason, a theist.
> What if you lived in a theistic nation, where government decided to force everyone to
> follow a certain religion?
How exactly is that different from parents deciding to force all their children to follow their religion and in order to prevent real-world contamination, incarcerate them for life josef fritzl style?
> It does not get to decide if our kids are of a certain religion, or if they learn
> Spanish, or if they learn about evolution or global warming.
But it decides if you try to prevent your kids to get a education they need to survive once they (shock) decide to leave your walled religion garden.
> There's no evidence that teaching your children to follow your religion screws them up
> in any way.
Forcefully removing them from school, contacts other (different) kids, books, knowledge and so on _does_ screw them up.
>You're being competely irrational, and you're just making things up.
If I were making things up, the Romeikes would have been able to stay home, lock their kids up and threw the keys away. But they arent. So draw your conclusions.
> This is a fundamental human right: to raise your children as you see fit.
Except it isn't if you're removing your children from the society, culture and from knowledge they need to later live in and as a part of this society. You do not own your children. Their right to a real-world education trumps your right to pass your religion virus onto them, forcefully.
You can somewhat influence the way your children see the world, even in a religious way, but its in no way your right to fuck them up totally and completely alienate them from society on purpose in order to ensure that this society will later reject them so hard, that they even as grown ups will never be able to leave your religion because the have no other place to go.
They assume that artists selling the most are also being copied the most, so they get the greatest part. Or so they say, because the allocation weights are kept as business secrets, so nobody really knows how much artists really get. They simply get "something" and have to be fine with that.
Also (surprise, surprise) the private encashment companies keep a hefty processing fee for themselves.
As basically any other country, the Germans are simply too dumb and too comfortable to break out of the same media political party complex. The media supports the big parties politically, the big parties support the business models of the media. It sucks big time, but theres nothing you can do about it when the other 80 Million people dont care.
In order to do your job, you'd have to vote them out of office. But you cant vote them out because your system in practice allows only two parties. The US hasnt had a third party winning somwhere since more than 100 years. 300 Million citizens and only _two_ fscking parties to vote for, every god-forgotten country-so-small-you-cant-find-on-the-map from the Balcans would laugh its collective ass off about calling that "democracy".
Add to that the fact that, at least regarding copyright, the two US parties basically agreed to form a cartel (MAFIAA isnt called MAFIAA for nothing), and youre simply out of luck.
The only way to use the A-bomb is to kill civilans en masse. Theres no military use of an A-bomb without 99% civil casualties.
So, supposed we dont want Iran to be able to kill civilians en masse, why should we allow _anybody else_ to be able to kill civilians en masse? What is the precise reason the US/UK/ France/Russia _need_ to have an A-bomb but Iran doesnt?
> The violation of a click-through EULA/ToS is such a minor thing to most of these kids
Is is a minor thing to basically anybody not only to some "kids".
> that it never even occurs to them that what they're doing is "breaking the rules"
You shouldn't underestimate kids today.
They clearly know that they are breaking someones rules, but they do it deliberately because either they find the rules ridiculous or because (think pirate party) they think that such random rules should not exist nor apply for private use at all.
> we will be waiting a really, really, really long time.
So the most common sense solution you came up with is a wide scale copying prohibition including mass surveillance of everyone's communication in order to find out who's copying, and horrendous, life ruining example punishments of a few randomly picked up sharers in order to "teach the rest of 'em thieves"?
All that in order to get more games made. Whoa. I ask myself how far somebody like you has to go before he slowly beginns to realize that he completely lost it somwhere along the way.
> All "rights" are artificially created.
Rights and laws usually originated from the people's cultural/natural sense of right and wrong. So what people at large thought was wrong (like stealing, killing each other) was somewhen cast into law as wrong, and what they thought was unobjectionble, wasnt. Thats how, in rough, this "democracy" was supposed to work.
Then "imaginary property" came into play. Sadly (only for the imaginary proprietors), since it isnt really a property in the physical property sense, it only works as a negation, i.e. you possess a bit of imaginary property not when you really possess something, but when everybody else _loses_ a right to do something. Since theres not only commercial businesses to get cash from, the imaginary proprietors conveniently extended their negation rights claims into everybody elses privacy, since, if i have to pay you money to solely for your allowance to do something in the privacy of my home, you win (and you win big, thats why a prominent proponent of imaginary property called it "the oil of 21st century").
So in order for this to work, practically everybody has to freely acknowledge those "imaginary rights" of a third party to disallow every of us a certain DIY item in order to be forced to pay them for the allowance. But unlike the most other agreements the society at large agreed upon as a basis of its functioning, which then subsequently were codified into specific laws, the society at large actually never agreed to collectively accept the concept of imaginary property as something beneficial for it. In contrary, the concept itself and the accompanying laws had always to be pushed "artificially", always from top down, by the minority profiting from them directly, going as far as making the whole law creation process a secret of allegedly national importance (ACTA).
So artificial = not based on a natural sense of right and wrong inherent to the majority of the people, but systematically designed by a system-gaming versed, profit-oriented minority.
>is James Madison, aka "Father of the Bill of Rights".
So you suppose the respectable "Father of the bill of rights" has codified into the US constitution a law that criminalizes literally millions and millions of otherwise righteous US citizens threathening every single one of them literally with life long bankruptcy if they refuse to abstain from information sharing with each other? Either you're wrong, or the father of the bill of rights was a lunatic. (I think I'd rather place my bet that you're just wrong.)
>I'd say you should pick your parallels better.
I'd say that anyone (be it the holy father of the bill or rights, even if rather unprobable in this case) who deliberately would fsck up the lives of millions of people, and threaten them with lifelong bankruptcy and in order to force them to abstain from DIY-something in order to create a artificial market for this DIY is indeed a lunatic on the scale of Lenin/Stalin/Mao, who all were similarily willing to destroy and mass punish millions of their own fellow countrymen in order to force them to accept a economy/business model.
>Pirates WANT the games, they just don't want to pay for them.
So judged by any free market standards, if nobody wants to pay, theres no market for the games. The only way to _create_ a market in a setting where naturally there would be no market, is to criminalize DIY copying so only one single state-approved monopolist (almost sounds like the Stalin/Lenin fella came up with this BS) is allowed to do the copying, although technically and naturally, everybody else equally could. So we ended up fiercely punishing and threatenig (with personal bankruptcy) millions of our own fsking people for their collective refusal to obey to an non-natural artificial scarcity system which requires them to abstain from sharing information bits with each other.
>So who is going to produce these multi-million dollar games when anyone can copyright and
>distribute them without restriction?
If no one wants to pay for them, no one wants them produced. So if no one wants them to be produced... why should you produce them? (Kinda obvious, isn't it?)
>You do realize there have been more than a few games that have cost over $40M to produce.
They dont have to be produced if theres no market for them. (Kinda obvious, isn't it?)
> so you don't need the law to prevent people from duplicating your product.
How about stopping the production of the product until the people realize (all by themselves, with no censorship and mass punishment laws needed) that they really really really have to pay you to get it?
And by the way, the law absolutely doesnt prevent anybody to "duplicate" your product, it just fuck ups the lives (really badly) of the few poor fellas who happen to get caught. The silent majority just keeps copying because nobody, really nobody outside of the circles directly profiting from copying prohibition considers sharing, copying and passing on of culture even remotely wrong or illegal.
>The "even more so" is that reselling a game and buying used games is perfectly legal and
>violates the rights of no one.
Copying games instead of buying them would also be perfectly legal and would not violate anybodys rights if such rights had not been artificially _created_ (in a undemocratic way, by a small minority which commonly calls it "the oil of the 21st century", against the will of a large, really large body of people, who it is also rather fiercely enforced against) just in order to create a market where otherwise would be none (or a much smaller one).
Thanks god we now have the Piratpartiet/Piratenpartei (the first legal representation of the internet itself, and the first generation of the "born digitals") we can vote for (and which we have successfully voted into the European parliament this summer) and reverse this ugly piece of corporate for-profit-censorship. Private, non commercial copying and sharing of culture and information will soon be perfectly legal again. Germany parliament is next, fall 2009.
The gap does not occur just because evolution or climate change are so hard to understand you have to be a life long scientist to understand them, no, the gap occurs because peoples brains are actively protecting their religion by refusing to believe those scientific results that contradict whats holy (aka untouchable, even by hard evidence) to them.
In several eastern european countries, or in east germany, you wont find especially many american-style religious people because communist regimes tried several decades long to get rid of organized religion after WW2 and they partly succeeded. Now, this clearly was against holy religious freedom blablabla, and religions are slowly comming back after the iron curtain disappeared, but it nonetheless rendered many people quite immune against organised religion's pseudo-sience bullshit.
The reason you'll find very few people there that are refusing evolution or earth warming isnt because many of them are scientifically educated, no, but simply because they werent religiously indoctrinated strong enough to refuse to accept scientific reality when it contradicts religious scriptures.
The only reason evolution is discussed in the US _at all_ is the strong grip of organised religion and its struggle to stay the major repository of knowledge about life. Religions lost the "sovereignty of interpretation" (what would be a better translation of "Deutungshoheit", someone?) of science to.... science, with evolution they're losing the Deutungshoheit on _life_ itself, knowing theres not much left for them to interpret. Even Darwin himself hesitated for freaking 20 years to publish his results about evolution of species because he knew that it would be the last, or one of the last nails in religion's coffin.
> Why does the HTML5 spec care what codecs are used?
You somehow missed the whole discussion, didnt you? If a spec shouldnt care in what way content is encoded it is trying to show, what _should_ it actually care about?
> Why doesn't it just provide a way to specify which codec the author used to encode the
> media file, and let the browser prompt the user to get it if needed?
And where should a free browser get a patented and thus non-free codec from? Or did you actually mean that a free browser should serve as a sales vehicle for proprietary content codecs? Do you imagine what a mess the web would be if for example, browsers wouldnt have a few standardized image formats built in, and would ask you every time you go to a new site to purchase some other proprietary format the images on the site happen to be encoded in?
One basic codec you as a developer can rely on, that everyone has installed, is a good thing (tm). If you want better quality, better compression, whatever, you can always bog your user to install your proprietary pay-for stuff, but whats so fundamentally wrong with a free codec everybody can use, that so many sides are opposing it?
> The piratebay make it possible for people to rip me off and take a game that takes me 10
> hours a day a year to make... for free.
If you can not bring your current business model in line with the information-sharing-reality, stop it and go do something that cant be easily copied and reproduced at zero cost, with a tool anybody can afford.
> In short, it makes a mega-fuckton of ad money from other peoples work.
Proof other than your own claim?
> Explain to me again how thepiratebay earning money from ads whilst giving away my work
> for free,
They arent giving your work for free, they built an content-agnostic infrastructure people can use to easily connect and share stuff. They may profit from those people, but so do their ISPs.
> Why does Slashdot constantly side with PirateBay?
Because many of us think private, non-commercial filesharing is not wrong, so it shouldnt be illegal, _regardless_ of the fact that authors of the shared stuff think otherwise.
> Don't you guys ever wonder why big-name developers like John Carmack don't post here
> anymore?
Because they prefer to live in denial in their ivory tower and dont like to be constantly reminded by slashdot how real life out there looks like? (Oh irony.)
> that it is completely okay to rip people off and never pay them for their work.
Copying, sharing culture is _not_ wrong. Everybody not OK with the fact that free people fileshare freely should _STOP WORKING_ in a job where he hast to constantly bitch about filesharing. Or he can keep on, but has to come up with a business model other than "selling copies" because it's 2009, and everybody of us can manufacture their own copies themselves, we do not need any "official" copies any more, thank you. Adapt or fucking perish. We wont abstain from using new technology in order to make your business model still work like it did in the 50's.
> clicking and posting about how evil they think capitalism is.
We would not have to do this if you and your likes wouldnt keep clicking and posting about how evil you think a free culture is, and how harder the for-profit censorship called copyright should be.
> And Slashdotters love to make a big deal when a company "steals" GPL code.
So? You forget that the only point of comming up with the GPL was to "effectively remove copyright" in the GPLsphere. Although the GPL is enforced by copyright, the underlying goal of "free software" is to effectively destroy copyright.
> Apparently, piracy isn't theft and copyrights don't matter except when it benefits you.
When a company "steals" GPL code, it gets it out of copyright-free GPLsphere, so yes, from the point of view of the GPL, thats fundamentally bad.
Sharing is not stealing. You seem to still confuse those, but if it keeps you happy, go on.
However, the obscene amounts of motivation some people put into seeding for weeks or months do not in any way result from their hate of the copy manufacturing industry, but from their instinctive urge to help other people.
Sharing is caring, remember? A law prohibiting people helping each other (by sharing information) directly in order to make a third party be able to _charge_ for the same kind of "help" is fundamentally wrong. You will never get any meaningful amount of backing from the wide populace, i.e. your target group, if your only business model amounts to nothing more than trying to stop them sharing.
>I never said anything about taking away freedom,
This line of argumentation including the word "piracy" in most cases just implies that filesharing is somehow wrong and has to be stopped by more surveillance, by more punishments, by less freedom.
> I merely said that it is tiresome and boring to blame lost sales due to piracy (music,
> software, or otherwise) on a broken business model.
What you call "piracy" (in a purposefully villainizing manner, nice) is simply people sharing information on an computer network designed for efficient information sharing. Any business model solely based on a assumption that people in our day and age will simply and without some kind of gain abstain from using the computer network for what it's designed for, for the sole purpose of making the above mentioned, someone else's business model a success, is broken to the core.
> It takes a lot of work to get a game made
How many money is in a certain type of business absolutely should not matter in deciding to run a wide-scale censorship and prohibition system like the copyright. Its like saying "Theres money in selling ice! Lets ban refrigerators!"
> and you act like it's an assault on your human rights to tell you to pay for it.
The checking of what I share with other people is an assault on my rights. Copyright is at its core incompatible with privacy. You cant have both installed at the same time. You either have your privacy without anybody snooping at you, which would mean nobody would ever find out you shared something with other people, or you have a copyright regime with mass surveillance and mass lawsuits so nobody ever dares to copy something because "the copyright czar is watching you". Its just like in China which is also filtering peoples networks for "unlawful" information, or north korea which banned internet alltogether in order to not have to do the monitoring work at all.
> No law is natural, all law exists merely because a bunch of people came together and
> agreed to follow it while giving some people sticks to enforce it.
Which is the problem, since we the people as whole, never actually had any kind of say or influence at all regarding copyright laws. Since the beginning, they were just enforced from top down. In europe, they were installed at times when even saying "democracy" out loud would have brought you into jail and have simply never been changed since then because they never hit the people so hard as they do now. The fact that the pain was never strong enough to organize against the publisher's grip on the regimes worldwide does not in any way imply that the vast majority of the people, which such laws are enforced against in the practice, actually in any way "agreed" that sharing information is wrong and that they shoud collectively abstain from it.
> As opposed to having it hammered into their heads that something which is religious is
> necessarily backwards and wrong?
Did neither say nor mean that.
> I find it interesting that one who condemns religions for their backwardness is himself so
> intolerant of the beliefs of others.
Well, there always is a common-sense-threshold above which you cant take a belief serious any more. Having to change the name of an disease because it has the name of an ordinary animal in it which you're not allowed to pronounce just crosses this threshold for me.
Apart from that, there is no actual "belief" at all that a pig is bad in any certain way. People are usually just blindly unquestioningly obedient towards whatever their holy scriptures or holy führers tell them. They call it a belief but it isnt one. At least my arab friends never were able to tell me whats so wrong with pigs in islam and judaism. The only explanation they could come up with (one is a physicist, one a physician, so scientifically well educated people) was that its something their religion says and the only reason they would obey it is because not obeying small unimportant orders like the swine ban would weaken the religious jurisdiction at whole. Yawn. (So i think their so called "beliefs" are silly, but i dont tell them that in the face because i like them though and know that they dont _really_ believe that but are just loyal to their religious families, social circle and so on.)
> now the one we have isn't really satisfying for anyone.
What isn't satisfying is the monty-pythonian reasoning behind the renaming (the officials didnt come up first with a name) and the fact that its an respectable and serious scientific organisation that simply plays along ald lets dumb theocracies put pressure on worldwide policies.
Whats next then? Obligatory renaming AIDS in "gay flu"?
> ethnic reactions to 'swine,' for example among middle-eastern cultures who feel
Actually, they do not "feel" this at all, it has been force-hammered into their heads from early childhood, when they minds could not defend themselves, because several hundreds of years ago, their self-appointed religious founders had no refrigerators (but forgot to leave a "or any later version" in their GPLs.. err... holy scriptures).
So basically a secular, neutral, international health organisationen now forces a disease renaming onto the whole planet because a few backwards theocracies, who happen to have stuck themselves into a religion without a feasible upgrade path (hehehehehe), threaten to let their people die en masse in order to avoid pronouncing the word "swine" loudly. (I'm writing this, but still cant grasp that they rally mean this seriously. Jeez.)
> Enough with this stupid dumbass fucking argument.
So fucking stop using it, dumbass.
> What is wrong with making software and trying to sell it?
Nothing.
> What is wrong with a fierce filesharing prohibition and censorship in order to _force_ people into buying?
Everything.
> Please, shut the fuck up already.
No. Shutting up, giving up essential freedoms and knuckling under financial "interests" is what brought us the "intellectual property" regimes worldwide. Fuck that. No shutting up any more. See you this summer in the EU parliament. And this is just a beginning.