Well, tell that to our copyright overlords. We all got deprieved of our right to use modern technology and share information with other people in order to make a business model of copying an sellig copies sustainable in a age where everybody and their dog has copy machines.
> It came into being because the creative act itself was and is hard.
It came in order to prevent publishing houses print and sell from work of authors they didnt pay. Or to prevent publishing house A print books publishing house B paid the author for. Copyright was a law to regulate a _market_, not a law to prevent citizens to share information, sing songs and enjoy culture.
> Nice of you to equate allowing someone to profit from his work
I'm not against "allowing" someone to profit from his work. But it's his problem to work out how to profit from his work. I dont like laws prohibitiong free circulation of culture and information just in order to make someones business model work. The business model of making and selling copies of something is obsolete. It's sooo 50's. When we all do have copying machines at home, everybody should be free to use them. Why legislate them away and us back into the 50s when no one had them but just a chosen few? It just makes no sense to legislate technology away like its work of the devil. Not only it doesnt make sense, legislating technological progress (think of "star trek replicators for all") away also will not work in the long run, since its unnatural and just... a stupid thing to do.
> to ancient laws allowing a "lord" to rape women.
Both of them do not have a democratic background, have not been subject to democratic elections, do not reflect the sense of right and wrong of the democratic souvereign and are set up by a oligarchic minority in order to profit from the oppressed majority. Physical rape then, cultural and informational rape nowadays.
> Because so many people do not respect the rights of others, specifically the copy rights > of others.
They do not respect them, because they do not agree that anybody should have such unnatural rights in the first place.
Copyright stems from a time where only a few could fabricate copies of stuff. In order to regulate the copy fabricator market, the goverment decided to let the copy fabricators only fabricate copies of stuff they wrote/painted themselves. Fast forward 300 years, science fiction age: now everybody has miraculous machines capable of copying and storing everything the humankind ever wrote down. Everybody is able to access culture in amounts he can not even consume in a lifetime. But wait, no! The copy fabricators from once managed to enact laws which prohibit all that, since scarcity as it once existed makes them money and the science fiction age made their business model obsolete. In thousands, people who refuse to obey technology prohibition laws get branded as "pirates", get hunted down, sued, convicted and executed in gas chambers. Amazed by the successes of the copy fabricator industry, the ice deliverers from once announced plans to ban refrigerators in order to make the ice delivery business more lucrative like in the past.
> Copyright is a legal right granted by the government.
Ius Primae Noctis was also a fictitious legal, but like copyright, not democratically supported right granted and enforced by the goverment. (You do remember why William Braveheart Wallace started the rebellion, do you?)
> Making an unauthorized copy is a violation of the copyright holders rights.
Refusing to let a lord deflower your new-wed wife was also a violation of his primae noctis right. So what should the fine lord from 1280 have done in order to protect his rape rights given by the goverment? Force all weddable teenage girls to wear some kind of back-then DRM like chastity belts? I mean, all in all to fuck them agains their will was HIS LEGAL RIGHT, wasnt it?
Copyright in its current form is not much different than ius primae noctis. Its a right completely pulled out of someones ass in order to make them richer and to keep the masses from accessing culture. Both were enforced from top down, without any kind of a democratic process bringing them up or without actually reflecting the populations sense of right and wrong. Nobody considers sharing and copying wrong, but it nevertheless is enforced as if it were so. The reasons nobody respects the "copy right" in practice are more or less the same nobody would respect a ius primae noctis.
> Why did the Scientology cult get the status of a church there?
They didn't. Being a church isnt a kind of a legal status, so everybody can call himself a church. Even text editor users. To make it a legal title you first would have to define what a church is, and scientology then easily would change their business practices and methods to meet this new definition. In the end, you'd gain nothing.
Like in "Do as I say (use open source), but not as I do (use closed source drivers)"?
> but the driver for my network card
Get another card. Reward manufacturers supporting Open Source by supporting them.
> Trying to get rid of it will only restrict Linux adoption.
If you have to use closed source to just connect your Linux box to a network, then just fuck it and stay with Windows or buy a Mac. The whole point of GNU and Linux was to make a working _free_ system, not just to get you out of paying for a closed source one.
If all "open source supporters" had your attitude, free software wouldnt have survived the 90s.
So get another job, since your current one was made obsolete. Times change. Nobody needs your services any more.
> Just sayin'
Sayin' what? That we should make the world worse for anyone else by prohibiting technology use, so you can keep profiting from people depending on your obsolete manual job?
I dont remember he said he wanted it to be "his property".
> why are these people typically the kind that load up their internet pipe trying to get it?
Why shouldnt they?
> Real property is imaginary in many ways too. At most, it's a piece of paper that > declares something is yours.
The main feature of property is not that it requires a paper saying its yours but the fact that it is not copyable and above all, that it is scarce. Scarcity requires some kind of a rule to allocate goods since people would be fighting 24/7 to get more of them. They would be fighting since there is no practical way to get a physical good from someone without having to force him to give it to you. So according to you, the physical equivalent to copyright infringement would be to go to someones house, take his camera, and beat him up if he tries to prevent you.
Since the majority of the people does not like fighting, to avoid (or minimize significantly) permanent fighting most people agreed to have laws who protect them from the violent grabbers. The biggest part of the people does not object such laws since the majority of the are some kind of property owners not willing to fight permanently and the violent grabbers are a very miniscule minority.
You will have observed that with "imaginary property" it is not so. It 1. isnt scarce so you dont have to fight for your piece, 2. is easily (very easily) copyable without even letting the original owner know, and 3. you can just copy it instead of having to beat someone up to get it and then you both have it.
With "imaginary property" it is again completely different. It defines itself not from having something of value, like with usual property, but completely from exclusivity, i.e. from everybody else not having it. Its some kind of envy property, since its proprietor considers it practically worthless if not only he has it. Stupidly, the medium the imaginary property owners would like nobody else to have for their imaginary property concept to "work" is as easily copyable and widely available as for example air, so for having their imaginary property work, they would literally have to cut of millions of people off the air supply.
So here we have a very small minority of "rights owners" trying to _stop_ the very large majority of people from openly communicating with each other since by communication they can spread bits which those rights owners just declared their imaginary property without any kind ofagreement with the majority being censored. The people didnt like to be censored by for example Stalin or by the catholic church, so you also can easily imagine they do not want to be censored by self proclaimed "rights owners".
Imaginary property rights are thus tried to be imposed by a small majority on a great majority not by simply locking them out of some piece of land or something, but by actively censoring their communication, wide scale. For the imaginary property to work it is also required to actually punish those who dare to spread a piece of information to their peers. Since nowadays passing along information bits got pretty simple there seem to be so many of them, in fact too many for the imaginary rights owners to punish all of them, so very disproportional punishments had been introduced, which include ruining lifes of caught individuals as a deterrent of others to stop communicating and to accept somebody elses imaginary property on their gadgets and in their heads.
The reason why most people instinctively oppose imaginary property is that it is not, was not and never will be a widescale mutual agreement between eachother in order to stop fighting and violence, but that it practically exclusively relies on violence (punishments) to stop an entirely non violent act (communication, sharing, copying).
It actually does not "hurt" them in any way, it just removes the benefits they enjoyed until now.
> we might not yet fully understand why information should be free.
Information wants to be free, since information is communication. Any attempt to make information less free would mean to censor communication and invade peoples privacy. A complete copyright enforcement the way rights holders wet dream about would require a surveillance state not even Stalin & Co. managed to get together.
Information wants to be free for the same reason entropy so badly wants to increase on every possible occasion.
Bullshit. No one _has_ to listen to the pope. Especially in Africa, where probably most of the people even arent catholic.
But what I dont understand, why are people so often considering his views on condoms sooo influential in, for example, Africa? Obviously, the people spreading aids wont be all that catholic, since visiting aids ridden prostitutes, fucking their own daughters, aids-raping women from some competing tribe, and so on, is also against catholic morality, and also opposed by the pope. So what actual influence would it have if he, even without a real reason and pissing off all the wait-till-marriage-catholics in other countries, just changed his mind and recommended using condoms when you next time visit a prostitute or rape your daughter?
>The people who want to finance commercial stuff get commercial stuff. Those who want free >stuff get the free stuff.
The problem arises when people want the commercial stuff too without financing it and people like you try to stop them at getting it. 50 years ago, you might have had a case. It would have been easy to stop the distribution of illegaly pressed (and sold) copies of books or records. Today.... we have another situation. Certain people started to claim ownership of certain pieces of public information and want to stop other people at sharing this information. Stopping them means you have to find out that they are sharing this information, aka snooping. Additionally comes that you are not dealing with a few dozen, but literally millions and billions of people who share information because (or in spite) you dont want them to. Enforcing imaginary property rights requires large scale censorship, easy as that. Shutting down the pirate bay is like cutting millions off of people of the net or telephone. In fact, there is no other way to enforce imaginary rights without mass surveillance (who shares?), mass censorship (stop sharing!) and mass punishments (that'll teach you!). And what for? So you can get your "commercial-only beauties"?
>Its not like things HAVE to be commercial.
Its even less so that nazis can decide what kind of information I am "allowed" to share with other people because someone just decided to claim "ownership" of a piece of public information. Luddite ideas like this just won't work. Trying to stop people from communicating by force/threats/punishments is as futile (and nazi) as some weird churches trying to decide who you should have sex with, and to mandate that only "licenced" sex is allowed.
> Now however... take videogames. > Now take software development. (And so on...)
Your point could be summarized as this: I like commercial-only beauties and thus communication should be large-scale censored so I can get more commercial-only beauties. Instead of crying for nazi style censorship and punishments against "thought thieves", you should just let the people, other gamers decide with their wallets _if_ they want games to be developed or not. If you are a fan and readily pay to make future development possible, why should other people not be allowed to make such a decision for themselves? The same about music, movies and books. Why should you have to _force_ them to finance future game development although they dont care?
>lets keep copyright around a little while longer.
Just because you sez so? No. That's so stinking nazi style. Why dont just let the fans decide if they want to support future development? Or if you want some legal once-for-all decision, why not organze a referendum and let people (no god-like politicians, no publishing media lobbyists, no shit, just the actual souvereign, "we, the people") decide if they really want a "copyright" tightly enforced on each other and if they want such a large scale, mass censorship/punishemt scheme in order to sustain game development. How about that?
>you're currently paying way more to deal with the problem. $5 is a discount to you, and to >your friends.
So then how about abolishing prohibition completely for private, non-commercial copying? This would kinda solve the problem without taxing hundreds of thousands of people who never download music?
>it costs more to deal with a problem than to solve it.
The "problem" is self made. Copyright was never meant to criminalize millions and billions of people around the earth. It was meant to prohibit competing labels to sell a work, make money and not giving the author of the work any of this money. Today, the concept of a professional "publisher" and distributor is not needed any more, since the people can distribute data themselves. Technology beat horse-drawn carriages. Technology now beats manual distributors. The "problem", as you call it, of millions of people distributing files wouldnt be there if you had not started to prohibit them doing so. The sollution to this self made problem should just be to fucking stop trying to censor the peoples private, non-commercial communication on the net. You know, like the problem with enforcing alcohol prohibition in the US just silently "went away" the day the prohibition was abolished.
Copyright grew out of a small scale competition regulation law to a large scale international censorship law, affecting directly private technology use and private communication.
>Even if you never listen to any music anywhere, and you never pay anyone who does, the >country still improves by removing a problem.
You dont actually remove anything. Instead of a severely enforced copying prohibition, we would get another mandated levy for everybody. If you cant beat 'em, tax 'em! Now thats a step forward!
And by the way, theres no reason to artifically sustain an whole industry which refuses to adapt its freakishly outdated 1950's business model to 2008. If large music labels won't adapt, they should die off, like any other industry sector would (and did). Music itself wont die, as countless successfull indie labels, which massively profit from file sharing, show day by day. If the rigid major refuseniks die of for not adapting, why should _anyone_ care?
> TPB has no 'registered users'. There's no signup process and no accounts.
You're wrong. They have user accounts and a registration process. It can be used, among others, to place comments on torrent files, filter out porn, upload and delete you own torrents, and have a public list of torrents you uploaded as some kind of a credibility system to filter out fake uploaders.
And by working for free, they are stealing money from the professional artists. The more money a professional artist makes usually, the more are they stealing from him by taking part in this competiton. Hobbyist work should be strictly prohibited since it is, by its very nature, simply theft. And we aren't condoning theft, especially on a large scale like this, are we? Making music kills music, and a new copyright extension (prohibiting non-profit publications) should prevent that. Act now!
> but the man's done some good no matter how you slice it
He had to loot his customers first, ruin some competing companies, break the law, and so on. Its easy to give away money and act as generous philantrophist when you did not really "earn" it but kinda extorted it from somebody. Its blood money. Gates is not a philantrophist, he just made enough money to buy himself any image he'd like to have.
> Even Microsoft doesn't get to collect extra fees for commercial software development on > Windows.
They recoup it by collecting extra fees for using windows. (_Both_ from you and all users of your software.)
> GTK is much better suited for a general-purpose library on Linux than QT simply because it > allows you to develop "anything" using it.
The only difference is that GTK allows you to close code up and sue your users who share it with other people. Kinda weird for a "free software" library to faciliate proprietary lawsuits.
>However, I do have an objection to supporting their attempt to make QT central to Linux >software development.
They dont make it more "central" than any other toolkit out there.
From the point of view of a free software developer, LGPL and GPLv3 are both equally free. The differences come in only if you are a proprietary developer looking for ways to embrace, extend and close up somebody elses code. Thats really all there is to the additional "freedoms" you have with the LGPL. Freedom to make code unfree. A way to sue people who copy code closed up which once was free distributable.
No, this actually _is_ Jabber, while Googles AIM access isnt. Google just provides a client you can use to access AIM, but using AOL's oscar protocol. You cant use Google's AIM access with a client you choose, but here you can. The difference is that with google's approach of jsut implementing the (now old) oscar protocol, you will always have to have an actual AIM account to communicate with other AIM users. With AOL now using jabber, there is hope that they will open their servers for server2server communication, like google has done with their GTalk, so you will be able to contact aim/icq users without having an aim/icq account yourself. Like, you know, you can send email to aol users without having an aol email account yourself. Oh the beauty of open standards. I actually look forward to MSN (and/or yahoo) remaining the only ones in future _not_ using jabber as their backend, sitting in their little proprietary world and being step by step excluded from worldwide IM communication.
> As a whole, we've agreed that having a police force to stop people from doing a whole host > of things is a Good Idea.
Except that we have agreed on respecting each others tangible property, but havent done the same for the intangible, "intellectual" property. Copyright has not been yielded by a democratical process resulting in a broad concensus but was mandated from top and to be effective, it has to be enforced on millions and millions on people, who will never agree to respect it voluntarily. People not respecting IP are the majority, whereas people not respecting each others tangible property are really few in comparison and exceptions.
If we ever really had clarified the copyright problem, we wouldnt have the discussion we have right now and parents would be teaching their children "not to copy that floppy" as they for centuries have done teaching "not to steal".
> Interesting as well that he believes it is possible to have a fascist state without a > curtailment of civil liberties
A copyright enforced on a large scale in private, non-profit communication is precisely a curtailment of civil liberties. How should an effective enforcement of copyright even be possible without mass surveillance, mass censorship and mass lawsuits? It actually isn't.
> And composers? You know, the people who write the music but don't necessarily play it, or > don't play live.
They can keep collecting fees from the musicians that do play live. Collecting fees from a professional musician does not make millions and millions of people criminal by merely communication and exchanging information.
> And all the styles of music that simply don't work in a live performance, either for the > performer or the listener?
They are going to go the way of any other type of business "that simply don't work".
> So don't listen to it. What do you find difficult about this idea to grasp?
And I dont want laws that censor the private communication of millions and millions (or to be more realistic, billions) of people on earth, _regardless_ of what infomation they exchange and who claims to "own" that information, ok? This also shouldnt be all to hard to grasp. People dont care if you claim that you "own" a piece of information, since in practice, you simply dont, regardless of what a law says. You would have all those people to voluntarily abstain from using and sharing your file (with no benefit for them doing that) for you to really be able to claim to "own" it. Or, as you seem to prefer, you have to count on the state to enforce the abstaiment. Total enforcement of todays copyright laws necessary requires mass surveillance, mass censorship and mass lawsuits.
> if you don't pay to listen to my music, I stop making it and go earn a living some other way
You seem to overlook the reality. People do _not_ depend on profit-oriented music makers to get great music. Neither is the majority of the musicians in it for the money, so they will keep making it. Its just the case that currently, for-profit musicians are the most popular ones, because the copyright system enables them to make large profits, so industry can invest vast amounts in advertising them.
You obviously do not like the fact that you or your music wont be missed if you stop making it. I cant explain why otherwise you are so sure that people wont pay you for your music when state enforced copyrights disappear. Obviously the threat to get sued by you is atm far greater than the threat that you could stop making music. Since you seem more worried about losing customers than losing fans, one could reason that you dont have real fans at all, and thus, have the wrong job, and should get another one which better reflects your for-profit personality.
> To start a revolution you need the support of the masses.
Except that in reality, you actually don't.
> 'Piratpartiet' got 0,63 % of the national votes last election (2006).
Its the biggest success a young, freshly formed party with a extremely limited political program (covering practically _only_ copyrights and patents) ever got in Sweden, which even catapulted them into the top10. Inside of their target group, the "younger" generation, theyre already the 4th largest party in Sweden.
They only have to get "enough" MPs to make a point and to make other, larger parties dependent on those MPs in order to form majority goverments, so the copyright fascism topic can be brought into coalition talks.
> it seems obvious that there comes a point where diluting the development effort
This nonsense argument about dilluting effort gets repeated over and over. How exactly is it "obvious" that if I do something the way I think is the best, and work independently of the few "majors", I am dilluting the work of somebody else? Its called competition, and, as I least heard about it, it promotes diversity and is rather healthy for a ecosystem of any kind. There is no reason why there shouldnt be extreme diversity in the software landscape. You and your likes seem to suffer from some kind of software xenophobia. How exactly does some obscure source based distro you never heard of, make _you_ counterproductive? Using your reasoning Linux and the BSDs shouldnt even exist because theyre dilluting somebody else's windows based "development efforts".
You can charge for your work even when people are allowed to share files. See radiohead. No, what you want is a right to prevent some six billion people to share something you published until they pay you and you want the state (all of them) to punish everybody who shares it anyway. Your swedish counterparty (and not only they) obviously want to even to force ISPs to snoop on peoples private communication and report them if they share a information you "own", to ease the process of their punishment.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, tell that to our copyright overlords. We all got deprieved of our right to use modern technology and share information with other people in order to make a business model of copying an sellig copies sustainable in a age where everybody and their dog has copy machines.
> It came into being because the creative act itself was and is hard.
It came in order to prevent publishing houses print and sell from work of authors they didnt pay. Or to prevent publishing house A print books publishing house B paid the author for. Copyright was a law to regulate a _market_, not a law to prevent citizens to share information, sing songs and enjoy culture.
> Nice of you to equate allowing someone to profit from his work
I'm not against "allowing" someone to profit from his work. But it's his problem to work out how to profit from his work. I dont like laws prohibitiong free circulation of culture and information just in order to make someones business model work. The business model of making and selling copies of something is obsolete. It's sooo 50's. When we all do have copying machines at home, everybody should be free to use them. Why legislate them away and us back into the 50s when no one had them but just a chosen few? It just makes no sense to legislate technology away like its work of the devil. Not only it doesnt make sense, legislating technological progress (think of "star trek replicators for all") away also will not work in the long run, since its unnatural and just... a stupid thing to do.
> to ancient laws allowing a "lord" to rape women.
Both of them do not have a democratic background, have not been subject to democratic elections, do not reflect the sense of right and wrong of the democratic souvereign and are set up by a oligarchic minority in order to profit from the oppressed majority. Physical rape then, cultural and informational rape nowadays.
> Because so many people do not respect the rights of others, specifically the copy rights
> of others.
They do not respect them, because they do not agree that anybody should have such unnatural rights in the first place.
Copyright stems from a time where only a few could fabricate copies of stuff. In order to regulate the copy fabricator market, the goverment decided to let the copy fabricators only fabricate copies of stuff they wrote/painted themselves. Fast forward 300 years, science fiction age: now everybody has miraculous machines capable of copying and storing everything the humankind ever wrote down. Everybody is able to access culture in amounts he can not even consume in a lifetime. But wait, no! The copy fabricators from once managed to enact laws which prohibit all that, since scarcity as it once existed makes them money and the science fiction age made their business model obsolete. In thousands, people who refuse to obey technology prohibition laws get branded as "pirates", get hunted down, sued, convicted and executed in gas chambers. Amazed by the successes of the copy fabricator industry, the ice deliverers from once announced plans to ban refrigerators in order to make the ice delivery business more lucrative like in the past.
> Copyright is a legal right granted by the government.
Ius Primae Noctis was also a fictitious legal, but like copyright, not democratically supported right granted and enforced by the goverment. (You do remember why William Braveheart Wallace started the rebellion, do you?)
> Making an unauthorized copy is a violation of the copyright holders rights.
Refusing to let a lord deflower your new-wed wife was also a violation of his primae noctis right. So what should the fine lord from 1280 have done in order to protect his rape rights given by the goverment? Force all weddable teenage girls to wear some kind of back-then DRM like chastity belts? I mean, all in all to fuck them agains their will was HIS LEGAL RIGHT, wasnt it?
Copyright in its current form is not much different than ius primae noctis. Its a right completely pulled out of someones ass in order to make them richer and to keep the masses from accessing culture. Both were enforced from top down, without any kind of a democratic process bringing them up or without actually reflecting the populations sense of right and wrong. Nobody considers sharing and copying wrong, but it nevertheless is enforced as if it were so. The reasons nobody respects the "copy right" in practice are more or less the same nobody would respect a ius primae noctis.
> Why did the Scientology cult get the status of a church there?
They didn't. Being a church isnt a kind of a legal status, so everybody can call himself a church. Even text editor users. To make it a legal title you first would have to define what a church is, and scientology then easily would change their business practices and methods to meet this new definition. In the end, you'd gain nothing.
> I am an open source advocate
Like in "Do as I say (use open source), but not as I do (use closed source drivers)"?
> but the driver for my network card
Get another card. Reward manufacturers supporting Open Source by supporting them.
> Trying to get rid of it will only restrict Linux adoption.
If you have to use closed source to just connect your Linux box to a network, then just fuck it and stay with Windows or buy a Mac. The whole point of GNU and Linux was to make a working _free_ system, not just to get you out of paying for a closed source one.
If all "open source supporters" had your attitude, free software wouldnt have survived the 90s.
So get another job, since your current one was made obsolete. Times change. Nobody needs your services any more.
> Just sayin'
Sayin' what? That we should make the world worse for anyone else by prohibiting technology use, so you can keep profiting from people depending on your obsolete manual job?
> If it's imaginary, then why do you want it
I dont remember he said he wanted it to be "his property".
> why are these people typically the kind that load up their internet pipe trying to get it?
Why shouldnt they?
> Real property is imaginary in many ways too. At most, it's a piece of paper that
> declares something is yours.
The main feature of property is not that it requires a paper saying its yours but the fact that it is not copyable and above all, that it is scarce. Scarcity requires some kind of a rule to allocate goods since people would be fighting 24/7 to get more of them. They would be fighting since there is no practical way to get a physical good from someone without having to force him to give it to you. So according to you, the physical equivalent to copyright infringement would be to go to someones house, take his camera, and beat him up if he tries to prevent you.
Since the majority of the people does not like fighting, to avoid (or minimize significantly) permanent fighting most people agreed to have laws who protect them from the violent grabbers. The biggest part of the people does not object such laws since the majority of the are some kind of property owners not willing to fight permanently and the violent grabbers are a very miniscule minority.
You will have observed that with "imaginary property" it is not so. It 1. isnt scarce so you dont have to fight for your piece, 2. is easily (very easily) copyable without even letting the original owner know, and 3. you can just copy it instead of having to beat someone up to get it and then you both have it.
With "imaginary property" it is again completely different. It defines itself not from having something of value, like with usual property, but completely from exclusivity, i.e. from everybody else not having it. Its some kind of envy property, since its proprietor considers it practically worthless if not only he has it. Stupidly, the medium the imaginary property owners would like nobody else to have for their imaginary property concept to "work" is as easily copyable and widely available as for example air, so for having their imaginary property work, they would literally have to cut of millions of people off the air supply.
So here we have a very small minority of "rights owners" trying to _stop_ the very large majority of people from openly communicating with each other since by communication they can spread bits which those rights owners just declared their imaginary property without any kind ofagreement with the majority being censored. The people didnt like to be censored by for example Stalin or by the catholic church, so you also can easily imagine they do not want to be censored by self proclaimed "rights owners".
Imaginary property rights are thus tried to be imposed by a small majority on a great majority not by simply locking them out of some piece of land or something, but by actively censoring their communication, wide scale. For the imaginary property to work it is also required to actually punish those who dare to spread a piece of information to their peers. Since nowadays passing along information bits got pretty simple there seem to be so many of them, in fact too many for the imaginary rights owners to punish all of them, so very disproportional punishments had been introduced, which include ruining lifes of caught individuals as a deterrent of others to stop communicating and to accept somebody elses imaginary property on their gadgets and in their heads.
The reason why most people instinctively oppose imaginary property is that it is not, was not and never will be a widescale mutual agreement between eachother in order to stop fighting and violence, but that it practically exclusively relies on violence (punishments) to stop an entirely non violent act (communication, sharing, copying).
> maybe hurts few thousand?
It actually does not "hurt" them in any way, it just removes the benefits they enjoyed until now.
> we might not yet fully understand why information should be free.
Information wants to be free, since information is communication. Any attempt to make information less free would mean to censor communication and invade peoples privacy. A complete copyright enforcement the way rights holders wet dream about would require a surveillance state not even Stalin & Co. managed to get together.
Information wants to be free for the same reason entropy so badly wants to increase on every possible occasion.
Bullshit. No one _has_ to listen to the pope. Especially in Africa, where probably most of the people even arent catholic.
But what I dont understand, why are people so often considering his views on condoms sooo influential in, for example, Africa? Obviously, the people spreading aids wont be all that catholic, since visiting aids ridden prostitutes, fucking their own daughters, aids-raping women from some competing tribe, and so on, is also against catholic morality, and also opposed by the pope. So what actual influence would it have if he, even without a real reason and pissing off all the wait-till-marriage-catholics in other countries, just changed his mind and recommended using condoms when you next time visit a prostitute or rape your daughter?
>The people who want to finance commercial stuff get commercial stuff. Those who want free
>stuff get the free stuff.
The problem arises when people want the commercial stuff too without financing it and people like you try to stop them at getting it. 50 years ago, you might have had a case. It would have been easy to stop the distribution of illegaly pressed (and sold) copies of books or records. Today.... we have another situation. Certain people started to claim ownership of certain pieces of public information and want to stop other people at sharing this information. Stopping them means you have to find out that they are sharing this information, aka snooping. Additionally comes that you are not dealing with a few dozen, but literally millions and billions of people who share information because (or in spite) you dont want them to. Enforcing imaginary property rights requires large scale censorship, easy as that. Shutting down the pirate bay is like cutting millions off of people of the net or telephone. In fact, there is no other way to enforce imaginary rights without mass surveillance (who shares?), mass censorship (stop sharing!) and mass punishments (that'll teach you!). And what for? So you can get your "commercial-only beauties"?
>Its not like things HAVE to be commercial.
Its even less so that nazis can decide what kind of information I am "allowed" to share with other people because someone just decided to claim "ownership" of a piece of public information. Luddite ideas like this just won't work. Trying to stop people from communicating by force/threats/punishments is as futile (and nazi) as some weird churches trying to decide who you should have sex with, and to mandate that only "licenced" sex is allowed.
> Now however... take videogames.
> Now take software development. (And so on...)
Your point could be summarized as this: I like commercial-only beauties and thus communication should be large-scale censored so I can get more commercial-only beauties. Instead of crying for nazi style censorship and punishments against "thought thieves", you should just let the people, other gamers decide with their wallets _if_ they want games to be developed or not. If you are a fan and readily pay to make future development possible, why should other people not be allowed to make such a decision for themselves? The same about music, movies and books. Why should you have to _force_ them to finance future game development although they dont care?
>lets keep copyright around a little while longer.
Just because you sez so? No. That's so stinking nazi style. Why dont just let the fans decide if they want to support future development? Or if you want some legal once-for-all decision, why not organze a referendum and let people (no god-like politicians, no publishing media lobbyists, no shit, just the actual souvereign, "we, the people") decide if they really want a "copyright" tightly enforced on each other and if they want such a large scale, mass censorship/punishemt scheme in order to sustain game development. How about that?
>you're currently paying way more to deal with the problem. $5 is a discount to you, and to
>your friends.
So then how about abolishing prohibition completely for private, non-commercial copying? This would kinda solve the problem without taxing hundreds of thousands of people who never download music?
>it costs more to deal with a problem than to solve it.
The "problem" is self made. Copyright was never meant to criminalize millions and billions of people around the earth. It was meant to prohibit competing labels to sell a work, make money and not giving the author of the work any of this money. Today, the concept of a professional "publisher" and distributor is not needed any more, since the people can distribute data themselves. Technology beat horse-drawn carriages. Technology now beats manual distributors. The "problem", as you call it, of millions of people distributing files wouldnt be there if you had not started to prohibit them doing so. The sollution to this self made problem should just be to fucking stop trying to censor the peoples private, non-commercial communication on the net. You know, like the problem with enforcing alcohol prohibition in the US just silently "went away" the day the prohibition was abolished.
Copyright grew out of a small scale competition regulation law to a large scale international censorship law, affecting directly private technology use and private communication.
>Even if you never listen to any music anywhere, and you never pay anyone who does, the
>country still improves by removing a problem.
You dont actually remove anything. Instead of a severely enforced copying prohibition, we would get another mandated levy for everybody. If you cant beat 'em, tax 'em! Now thats a step forward!
And by the way, theres no reason to artifically sustain an whole industry which refuses to adapt its freakishly outdated 1950's business model to 2008. If large music labels won't adapt, they should die off, like any other industry sector would (and did). Music itself wont die, as countless successfull indie labels, which massively profit from file sharing, show day by day. If the rigid major refuseniks die of for not adapting, why should _anyone_ care?
> TPB has no 'registered users'. There's no signup process and no accounts.
You're wrong. They have user accounts and a registration process. It can be used, among others, to place comments on torrent files, filter out porn, upload and delete you own torrents, and have a public list of torrents you uploaded as some kind of a credibility system to filter out fake uploaders.
And by working for free, they are stealing money from the professional artists. The more money a professional artist makes usually, the more are they stealing from him by taking part in this competiton. Hobbyist work should be strictly prohibited since it is, by its very nature, simply theft. And we aren't condoning theft, especially on a large scale like this, are we? Making music kills music, and a new copyright extension (prohibiting non-profit publications) should prevent that. Act now!
> but the man's done some good no matter how you slice it
He had to loot his customers first, ruin some competing companies, break the law, and so on. Its easy to give away money and act as generous philantrophist when you did not really "earn" it but kinda extorted it from somebody. Its blood money. Gates is not a philantrophist, he just made enough money to buy himself any image he'd like to have.
> Even Microsoft doesn't get to collect extra fees for commercial software development on
> Windows.
They recoup it by collecting extra fees for using windows. (_Both_ from you and all users of your software.)
> GTK is much better suited for a general-purpose library on Linux than QT simply because it
> allows you to develop "anything" using it.
The only difference is that GTK allows you to close code up and sue your users who share it with other people. Kinda weird for a "free software" library to faciliate proprietary lawsuits.
>However, I do have an objection to supporting their attempt to make QT central to Linux
>software development.
They dont make it more "central" than any other toolkit out there.
From the point of view of a free software developer, LGPL and GPLv3 are both equally free. The differences come in only if you are a proprietary developer looking for ways to embrace, extend and close up somebody elses code. Thats really all there is to the additional "freedoms" you have with the LGPL. Freedom to make code unfree. A way to sue people who copy code closed up which once was free distributable.
No, this actually _is_ Jabber, while Googles AIM access isnt. Google just provides a client you can use to access AIM, but using AOL's oscar protocol. You cant use Google's AIM access with a client you choose, but here you can. The difference is that with google's approach of jsut implementing the (now old) oscar protocol, you will always have to have an actual AIM account to communicate with other AIM users. With AOL now using jabber, there is hope that they will open their servers for server2server communication, like google has done with their GTalk, so you will be able to contact aim/icq users without having an aim/icq account yourself. Like, you know, you can send email to aol users without having an aol email account yourself. Oh the beauty of open standards. I actually look forward to MSN (and/or yahoo) remaining the only ones in future _not_ using jabber as their backend, sitting in their little proprietary world and being step by step excluded from worldwide IM communication.
> As a whole, we've agreed that having a police force to stop people from doing a whole host
> of things is a Good Idea.
Except that we have agreed on respecting each others tangible property, but havent done the same for the intangible, "intellectual" property. Copyright has not been yielded by a democratical process resulting in a broad concensus but was mandated from top and to be effective, it has to be enforced on millions and millions on people, who will never agree to respect it voluntarily. People not respecting IP are the majority, whereas people not respecting each others tangible property are really few in comparison and exceptions.
If we ever really had clarified the copyright problem, we wouldnt have the discussion we have right now and parents would be teaching their children "not to copy that floppy" as they for centuries have done teaching "not to steal".
> Copying bits is just one more.
It isn't.
> Interesting as well that he believes it is possible to have a fascist state without a
> curtailment of civil liberties
A copyright enforced on a large scale in private, non-profit communication is precisely a curtailment of civil liberties. How should an effective enforcement of copyright even be possible without mass surveillance, mass censorship and mass lawsuits? It actually isn't.
> And composers? You know, the people who write the music but don't necessarily play it, or
> don't play live.
They can keep collecting fees from the musicians that do play live. Collecting fees from a professional musician does not make millions and millions of people criminal by merely communication and exchanging information.
> And all the styles of music that simply don't work in a live performance, either for the
> performer or the listener?
They are going to go the way of any other type of business "that simply don't work".
> So don't listen to it. What do you find difficult about this idea to grasp?
And I dont want laws that censor the private communication of millions and millions (or to be more realistic, billions) of people on earth, _regardless_ of what infomation they exchange and who claims to "own" that information, ok? This also shouldnt be all to hard to grasp. People dont care if you claim that you "own" a piece of information, since in practice, you simply dont, regardless of what a law says. You would have all those people to voluntarily abstain from using and sharing your file (with no benefit for them doing that) for you to really be able to claim to "own" it. Or, as you seem to prefer, you have to count on the state to enforce the abstaiment. Total enforcement of todays copyright laws necessary requires mass surveillance, mass censorship and mass lawsuits.
> if you don't pay to listen to my music, I stop making it and go earn a living some other way
You seem to overlook the reality. People do _not_ depend on profit-oriented music makers to get great music. Neither is the majority of the musicians in it for the money, so they will keep making it. Its just the case that currently, for-profit musicians are the most popular ones, because the copyright system enables them to make large profits, so industry can invest vast amounts in advertising them.
You obviously do not like the fact that you or your music wont be missed if you stop making it. I cant explain why otherwise you are so sure that people wont pay you for your music when state enforced copyrights disappear. Obviously the threat to get sued by you is atm far greater than the threat that you could stop making music. Since you seem more worried about losing customers than losing fans, one could reason that you dont have real fans at all, and thus, have the wrong job, and should get another one which better reflects your for-profit personality.
> To start a revolution you need the support of the masses.
Except that in reality, you actually don't.
> 'Piratpartiet' got 0,63 % of the national votes last election (2006).
Its the biggest success a young, freshly formed party with a extremely limited political program (covering practically _only_ copyrights and patents) ever got in Sweden, which even catapulted them into the top10. Inside of their target group, the "younger" generation, theyre already the 4th largest party in Sweden.
They only have to get "enough" MPs to make a point and to make other, larger parties dependent on those MPs in order to form majority goverments, so the copyright fascism topic can be brought into coalition talks.
> I keep on thinking, what about a situation where I can communicate some seemingly random
> bits
Your "what if" has already been implemented and running rather well: The "Owner Free File System". (http://wiki.offdev.org/Main_Page)
> it seems obvious that there comes a point where diluting the development effort
This nonsense argument about dilluting effort gets repeated over and over. How exactly is it "obvious" that if I do something the way I think is the best, and work independently of the few "majors", I am dilluting the work of somebody else? Its called competition, and, as I least heard about it, it promotes diversity and is rather healthy for a ecosystem of any kind. There is no reason why there shouldnt be extreme diversity in the software landscape. You and your likes seem to suffer from some kind of software xenophobia. How exactly does some obscure source based distro you never heard of, make _you_ counterproductive? Using your reasoning Linux and the BSDs shouldnt even exist because theyre dilluting somebody else's windows based "development efforts".
> if I want to charge money for my work
You can charge for your work even when people are allowed to share files. See radiohead. No, what you want is a right to prevent some six billion people to share something you published until they pay you and you want the state (all of them) to punish everybody who shares it anyway. Your swedish counterparty (and not only they) obviously want to even to force ISPs to snoop on peoples private communication and report them if they share a information you "own", to ease the process of their punishment.