There are people having a "moral principle" against having premartial sex. Or using condoms. Or walking around without a burqa. Or against cowardly avoiding military service. Would you agree to let them force their moral principles on your private life, like copyright forces your moral principles on their (and everybody elses) technology use and private communication?
> The whole "piracy is theft" campaign seems as empty as the "don't smoke pot" campaign.
To me it seems more of a "dont have premartial sex, because its a sin"-campaign. When i think about it, its more of a "having premartial sex is illegal and will be punished" campaign, since, like copyright, it applies to almost 100% of people, while smoking pot applies to a (imho) much smaller minority.
Copyright is not a "property". Its a explicit prohibition of doing something, which applies only to everybody else but the author. Its nothing you have, but something which everybody else doesnt have. When people agree to not penalize each other if they dare to exchange some public information in their private communication, you can not do so as if they are expropriating somebody, and think theyre "going to far". They simply dont want to censor each others technology use and private communication any more.
The author still has his "right to copy", but cant impose some ivory-tower communication restrictions on the remaining 6 billion people on this planet.
1. I dont know it was _ever_ really accepted by the wide public its enforced upon. There never was any kind of a democratic process that yielded and then adopted copyright. It was mandated by kings and emperors hundreds of years ago when most of the people probably didnt even know the word "democracy". Even the often cited Berne convention took place somewhen in the 19th century which you probably wouldnt call all that "democratic" by todays standards. And even if it were so, the copyright of the 19th century never affected the private communication and generally the privacy of every single man and woman as it does today. There is NO CANCE IN HELL that the public at large, in any country on this world, would agree that somebody should have a "right" to snoop my private communication in order to prevent me from exchanging information he "owns", with other people, since information exchange endangers his business model of selling "copies" of that same information.
All that is "democratic" to todays copyright is that the "intellectual property holders" never tried to suppress the public so much as they do today, so no one ever hat the motivation to fight it. Old copyright affected only competitive publishers and prevented them from sellig books without paying the writer. Modern copyright affects _everybody_ and effectively tries to prevent billions of people from communicating since direct communication makes the "middlemen" obsolete.
2. Its not a compromise, since it _massively_ penalizes the public (hundreds of years of thought control and communication censoring) to the benefit of the publishers.
> The only thing you CAN'T do is run it on a specific piece of hardware.
You cant do it on probably the only piece of hardware it runs on. Whats the point of a piece of software, if you cant run it on the hardware it is intended to run on? What if not only TiVo did this, but, well, _every single_ PC manufacturer out there? You would have free software everywhere, but couldnt run it anywhere. Well, you could run it, but only in the way the manufacturer intended to. What kind of "freedom" would that be? Isnt exactly that what MS does with it's "shared source"?
You seem to forget how the GPL evolved. It started with a printer driver RMS wanted to customize but was denied the source code. What would have helped him, if the manufacturer gave him the source code, when he, if tivoisation were common back then, wouldnt be able to run his customization to do his work? Appart to being able to study it, the code would be pretty much useless for what its primarily intended to. The freedom to "change and run" was one of the basic four GPL freedoms from the very beginnings, and is the same in relation to "run", as is "change and distribute" in relation to "distribute".
> the only thing standing between most people and doing something illegal is the effort?
Normally, there also would be their morals, their inner sense of right and wrong and/or their fellow citizens. Obviously, their morals, their sense of right and wrong and their fellow citizens tell them that its neither immoral nor wrong to copy a file for private, non-commercial use. No one, really no one will ever sanction private, non-commercial copying but the state and people trying to profit from copying prohibition. Their morals, their inner sense of right and wrong, their common sense and their fellow citizens rather tell them that censoring private, non commercial communication and prohibiting a natural flow of information between millions and billions of people on the globe, in order to make an rootedly unnatural concept profitable for a few at the expense of many and to allow those few to cash in for hundreds of years on something they made in their youth, is both lunatic, immoral and wrong. When your morals, your common sense, and all your fellow men tell you that strict enforcing of "copyrights" in private, non commercial communication (and making literally millions and billions of people worldwide criminals, and ruining the lives of the ones who get sued) is undemocratic, fascist shit, and only the corrupt state officials and the "copyright holders" (aka the people profiting from the prohibition) tell you that copying is a no-no, who, really, ask yourself, WHO are you going to listen to? What we see nowadays and what we will see in the future even more is that people will ask themselves such a question, reach an answer (one the prohibitors wont like), and act accordingly, if necessesary by ignoring any fascist law that tries to prevent them doing that.
If people dont want to watch something in cinema, they wont. They'll download it if theres no DVD to buy. Then the industry will lose both the cinema ticket and the dvd. FORCING people to do/buy something they dont want just isnt a working business option any more.
> internet policeman as a threat to civil liberties
I thought the only way to enforce "copyrights" was by attacking peoples privacy, wiretapping their communication with other people, logging their interner behavior, and so on? You cant have "civil liberties" and copyright at the same time in the same space. So obviously the one side has completely given up on peoples privacy and liberties for the benefits of the industry?
And by the way: Isnt france the weird country where they kinda decided to define cryptography = weapons, so if you had pgp on your computer, you could be charged for illegal weapon posession? "Civil liberties" my ass.
The majority of the Germans right now simply does not know what their goverment does. The percentage of privacy aware people is miniscule and mostly active on the net. Yes, there were demonstrations, and about 10000 people took part, but those 10000 were divided on whole 40 (!) cities, so there in average there were only 200-300 demonstrants per city. Not actually enough to make the public aware of the imminent loss of their privacy rights. TV channels were mostly not present at the demos because nobody from the demo organisators cared to inform them soon enough to appear there, or the 200-300 people were not considered important enough to report about.
The German people at large simply do not realize that their current politicians, although not openly sliding back into nazism, are paving the way for future Hitlers or Honeckers, by suggesting and finally implementing control and surveillance laws those two dictators from the past have probably been dreaming of. As I see this, the Germans do not much choice at selections, since the two largest political parties to tightly cooperate on spitting harsh surveillance laws on a monthly basis. Its like in the us, you can either vote for either the reps or the democrats, but cant prevent the DMCA. The Germans have the problem that they, as a people, are simply not keen enough on protesting and fighting for their rights so every now and then, a generation of nazi or nazi-like politicians arises, and just takes over the complete state/police/surveillance/propaganda/military mechanisms, knowing that the Germans as a people will be scared and not organized enough to protest or challenge the state and the goverment.
I personally do not see a way out of this. It just seems to be a part of the German mentality not to challenge the goverment beyond a certain point, so even everybody wants "Never again!", their system and mentality does not have the necessary mechanisms to protect them from their own goverment and make really really sure "Never again!" will stay.
Why should this be a wonderful idea? He is trying to force his daughter to respect copyrights and not to leave it up her choice. He is forcing his views on a debated subject on her and does not let her develop her own sense of balancing right and wrong and a way to think critically. Additionally, he doesnt even consider to tell her that things like fair use exist and that the way she plans to use it most probably falls under fair use. What he is teaching her is complete and total submission to copyright holders, forever. What a sad way to make your kids future brainless IP slaves. Could somebody please call up child welfare?
> competing tools are also improving at the same, or greater, rate.
Maybe they are, but they can not improve to no end, and will after a specific time go into maintenance mode where there is just nothing left to add, or the additions will be so exotic, that in most cases and for most users, they simply will not matter any more. (Office 2007 suffers a similar fate, where the application already is so mature, that MS obviously has nothing to change any more and has to "pretend" to innovate by reordering menus and changing colors.)
While the competing tools are in maintenance mode, the Gimp and other free software will in relation be catching up at a faster pace. The Gimp is today already much more than many people doing photography will ever need, and with each iteration there are even more of those people for whom the Gimp is "good enough". Once it has real support for CYMK, which is planned for the next version 2.6, a slew of new potential users will not have to rely exclusively on photoshop any more. As with many other OS apps, the development is slow, the features may be not on par with the commercial offerings, but its steadliy getting there, and the adoption rates are growing from day to day. The future may be long ahead, but its bright.
> But that's not true. They still have the freedom the original author gave them.
But only if they got the work _directly_ from the original author. In a worst case scanario the original author may have given up distributing his own work, and only proprietary middlemen left, so a new user has no way to obtain the original free code but only the proprietary modifications. It might be possible that someone will keep on distributing the original or modified code under the same free licence, but you have depend upon their good will. He doesnt even have to disappear, it suffices that users get proprietarized code from middlemen and do not know that there is equivalent free code out there. Either through distributory circumstances or by his own ignorance, this user suddendly would have to play by proprietary, profit maximizing rules for code that once was free and unencumbered. The GPL ensures that, if anybody is distributing the work at all, it will be under a free licence, and that the code will remain free as long as there is _any_ interest in it, not only proprietary.
> The fact that someone else has a copy doesn't detract from this ability.
The one who _denies_ someone else a right, isnt "playing nice", so shouldnt have gotten this right in the first place.
I doubt that providing an ability is the major imperative of the GPL. It does accomplish this, but I think only as a secondary effect. The primary one is to create, by locking out proprietary predators, some kind of a secure GPL subspace, where in effect you dont have to care about copyrights at all, since everyone else also uses the GPL. And the more this space grows, the less dependant its inhabitants are on the "outer space", and the less they have to care about some licencing and copyright bullshit and can breathe completely freely. The only reason they would have to get out of the GPL space from time to time is to prevent outside hyenas to grab code from the prescious GPL space and proprietarize it, making it unavailable to the inhabitants of the GPL space and any other people. A self defending ecosystem.
> don't think that the levy gives you any sort of moral justification to do so
But it does. Actually the sole fact that I'm only making copies of data and not taking anything away suffices as moral justification to do it.
Its the artists job to persuade their fans to give them enough money to being able to keep on working on their music. If they managed to do that, a model like radioheads could easily work, because everbody who wants them to keep on playing, will pay. I know I'd pay, if I would care for their music. If they do not manage to do that, it easily could be that people just dont care about them in the long turn, and that they actually have many consumers, but little fans, and actually mightily failed to build a fanbase and a following.
Its wrong to expect a low downloaders/payers ratio, because usually, every artist has many more consumers and casual listeners than fans. I dont see why this ratio should be different than for street musicians and their listener/payer ratio.
Further, I dont see what they would like to achieve with publishing those numbers. Proving that they actually have just so little real fans? Reasoning why they wont offer such web payment because of the "evil torrenters", who maybe dont even care for the web site at all? Or will they start suing the torrenters but keep the free downloads on the web page? What exactly?
I hope that Rediohead, the band, have realized that in this day and age they just CAN'T force people to pay, and instead of trying this by supporting mass lawsuits and scaring potential fans away, they have to work on building a loyal following by offering their music the way the fans want it, not the way some label manager wants it. They have to make the people WANT to pay. I actually right now WANT to pay, but wont, because I dont like their music at all. If all they count is how many downloaded without paying, instead of how many actually paid, i.e. if they care how many fans they theoretically could have instead of how many they actually have, they easily can stop making music completely. In the end, it will not count how many people downloeded without paying, but if many enough paid, for radiohead to be able to keep working on their music.
> don't believe for a second that the levy goes the bulk of the musicians whose work you > pirate.
Here in Germany actually a MUCHO greater percentage of the blank media levy goes to artists than they get from their record contracts. They certainly get more from me from the blank media levy, than they would get if i bought the original CDs.
I would rather say its because apparently the only people who can pay our political representatives enough for them to care about, are the ones that profit from the current artificial restriction. It needs a party even more wealthy than the creative industry, to pay (aka vote) our political representatives, if something is to change. Getting out rights back to copy random stuff without being tyrannized by copyright fascists is thus, obviously, as unlikely to happen as, for example, muslim women getting their rights to live as they like without being tyrannized by male Quran fascists. Both kinda seem to be a sort of a social/economic disease, which the the social/economic body in question just isn't able to get rid of itself without a large scale external emergency surgery.
>Sadly not, you have to either give the backup to the person you give the CD to with it, or >destroy it.
You... actually dont. Neither of the two. Its perfectly legit to make copies of a copyrighted work and give them to your gf, friends, relatives, co-workers and so on. Until you start spreading them in high numbers to random starangers, its considered for personal use, and thus falls under "fair use" and not distibution.
> using Microsoft's money to pay for the Linux purchases of your school's choice.
This isnt Microsofts money. This is the money Microsoft extorted from you and is now being forced to give back a tiny amount of this. Any cent that is not going to Microsoft (or even worse, to Apple), but to someone distributing Free Software is great, though.
> whatever your reasons are you have no right to break the law.
If the law is unjust, it's not only wrong, but your obligation to break it. If the world worked by your logic, the civilisation would have never developed past the slavery, monarchies, colonialism, and so on, because every of those steps required breaking some kind of then effective, but unjust law. If you didnt ignore, fight and break unjust laws, you wouldnt even live in the US but would be a massively exploited british colony. If you happen to be black, you would still be prohibited from learning something and would have the lagal status of a "thing", could be sold, bought and auctioned, and if youre a woman, youd be prohibited from voting, studying, appearing on streets without a burqa and so on.
FUCKING NOBODY who is not profiting from artificial, enforced scarcity, perceives either this judgement or the underlying copyright fascism as "just" or democratically approved, and without massive civil movements, there seems just to be no way to change the laws, because the persons in power simply "dont allow" the people to do it bacause they know that copyright, as we know it now, wouldnt survive a single night if people _really_ decided democratically about it.
> download a P2P client, and start downloading, then yes, it's considered stealing.
It isn't. You may consider this stealing, but your humble opinion isn't a measure for... anything.
That copying is stealing has hard been tried to get pushed through by people who try to profit on artificial scarcity, in order to somehow associate something they want to be perceived as wrong (copying) with something most people perceive as wrong (stealing). Their idea obviosly was to indoctrinate the copying masses through permanent, ceaseless, Josef Goebbels or 1984 like repetitions of a simple but grave idea that copying is somehow stealing (Copyingisstealingcopyingisstealingcopyingisstealingcopyingisstealing) so they would start to prosecute and denounce each other when caught copying something and save the copyright nazis alota work. But it obviously turned out that mass indoctrination isnt as easy as it seemed at first.
> What about the people that do get hurt by piracy?
They should get another job that isnt based on artificial scarcity. People tend to react highly allergically.... when someone first prohibits doing something, and enforces the prohibition through severe, disproportional penalties, and _then_ tries to cash in by allowing exceptions for a fee.
> artists and the authors. They are getting ripped off by... and the pirates.
They arent. The pirates, and by that you obviously mean every living person who ever used a computer, just do what their parents and the society teached them. To share with other people. Sharing is deeply human. Its been done for ever. If your only argument against sharing, communication, and altruistic information exchange is that it makes artificial scarcity not profitable enough for YOU.. then why do you wonder that nobody gives a f?
> However, you wouldn't need to go delete or rename files.
You would, when in the directory there already is a file with a name you wanted to give the new file. This happens all the time. Any other action than straight renaming of the old file in the save dialog would be a workaround and simply requiring 2-3 more clicks per incident to get your work done.
> but there is some rationale behind the design.
However, it does not allow (!) me to do something i want do, for the single reason that some interface designer decided it would be easier to grasp for computer illiterates.
It wasnt for nothing that Gnomes "human interface guidelines" were translated to "HIG Hitler!" for a long time, especially for this kind of arrogant smart-ass attitude, where familiar, previously existing features not only went away, but also the options to turn them back on disapperaed in order to forcefully "teach you their way".
> so government can selectively apply its silly anti-circumvention law to silence them > too.
Actually they can not.
They didnt make copyright infringement suddendly a criminal offense or something the state itself could misuse to silence the opposition. They made circumvention of copy protection schemes copyright infringement, like the DMCA did in the US for several years now.
> Normal population has nothing to fear at all from this: it's a purely political law, > that will be used for political purpuses only
The political purpose of this law is already served: To make the media industry able to sue and bully even more people. Apart from being corrupt and undemocratic, the law does not entitle the state to supress the people any more they have been able to do before.
So what? Being a dick or not, he has no way to decide if the content of the CD is legally obtained or not. And since he is most probably not the copyright holder of the music on the CD, he has no right to stop you from using it. Applying your logic he also at any given moment could ask you for a payment voucher for your pants, to go sure they are not shoplifted. (Or, I and i personally would like to get stopped for THAT, he could ask you where the CD with the sources is, if you happen to have a data CD with GPL'd binaries on it.)
How exactly does voting for several corrupt politicians you have _zero_ influence on, instaed of having one god emperor make the system a "democracy"? If I cant vote on factual issues directly, cant in any meaningful way influence my so called "representative" after I voted for him and he is in _no way_ obliged to not change his election pledges, then I just dont consider myself as a part of the demos also having a part of the kratos. A system does not begin to be a democracy the moment it starts to call itself one. Actually, the really significant "voting" (the one with your wallet, but only if its chock-full) seems always to begin after the "democratic elections", after the god emperors have been appointed for the next several years and ditched any influence by the demos.
So to give an answer to your question, we, the people, would be able do decide anything, if we would live in a democracy.
Slashdot Mirror
> I have a moral principle against it.
There are people having a "moral principle" against having premartial sex. Or using condoms. Or walking around without a burqa. Or against cowardly avoiding military service. Would you agree to let them force their moral principles on your private life, like copyright forces your moral principles on their (and everybody elses) technology use and private communication?
> The whole "piracy is theft" campaign seems as empty as the "don't smoke pot" campaign.
To me it seems more of a "dont have premartial sex, because its a sin"-campaign. When i think about it, its more of a "having premartial sex is illegal and will be punished" campaign, since, like copyright, it applies to almost 100% of people, while smoking pot applies to a (imho) much smaller minority.
> I think Sweden is going to far the other way.
Copyright is not a "property". Its a explicit prohibition of doing something, which applies only to everybody else but the author. Its nothing you have, but something which everybody else doesnt have. When people agree to not penalize each other if they dare to exchange some public information in their private communication, you can not do so as if they are expropriating somebody, and think theyre "going to far". They simply dont want to censor each others technology use and private communication any more.
The author still has his "right to copy", but cant impose some ivory-tower communication restrictions on the remaining 6 billion people on this planet.
> it was accepted as a compromise
1. I dont know it was _ever_ really accepted by the wide public its enforced upon. There never was any kind of a democratic process that yielded and then adopted copyright. It was mandated by kings and emperors hundreds of years ago when most of the people probably didnt even know the word "democracy". Even the often cited Berne convention took place somewhen in the 19th century which you probably wouldnt call all that "democratic" by todays standards. And even if it were so, the copyright of the 19th century never affected the private communication and generally the privacy of every single man and woman as it does today. There is NO CANCE IN HELL that the public at large, in any country on this world, would agree that somebody should have a "right" to snoop my private communication in order to prevent me from exchanging information he "owns", with other people, since information exchange endangers his business model of selling "copies" of that same information.
All that is "democratic" to todays copyright is that the "intellectual property holders" never tried to suppress the public so much as they do today, so no one ever hat the motivation to fight it. Old copyright affected only competitive publishers and prevented them from sellig books without paying the writer. Modern copyright affects _everybody_ and effectively tries to prevent billions of people from communicating since direct communication makes the "middlemen" obsolete.
2. Its not a compromise, since it _massively_ penalizes the public (hundreds of years of thought control and communication censoring) to the benefit of the publishers.
> The only thing you CAN'T do is run it on a specific piece of hardware.
You cant do it on probably the only piece of hardware it runs on. Whats the point of a piece of software, if you cant run it on the hardware it is intended to run on? What if not only TiVo did this, but, well, _every single_ PC manufacturer out there? You would have free software everywhere, but couldnt run it anywhere. Well, you could run it, but only in the way the manufacturer intended to. What kind of "freedom" would that be? Isnt exactly that what MS does with it's "shared source"?
You seem to forget how the GPL evolved. It started with a printer driver RMS wanted to customize but was denied the source code. What would have helped him, if the manufacturer gave him the source code, when he, if tivoisation were common back then, wouldnt be able to run his customization to do his work? Appart to being able to study it, the code would be pretty much useless for what its primarily intended to. The freedom to "change and run" was one of the basic four GPL freedoms from the very beginnings, and is the same in relation to "run", as is "change and distribute" in relation to "distribute".
> the only thing standing between most people and doing something illegal is the effort?
Normally, there also would be their morals, their inner sense of right and wrong and/or their fellow citizens. Obviously, their morals, their sense of right and wrong and their fellow citizens tell them that its neither immoral nor wrong to copy a file for private, non-commercial use. No one, really no one will ever sanction private, non-commercial copying but the state and people trying to profit from copying prohibition. Their morals, their inner sense of right and wrong, their common sense and their fellow citizens rather tell them that censoring private, non commercial communication and prohibiting a natural flow of information between millions and billions of people on the globe, in order to make an rootedly unnatural concept profitable for a few at the expense of many and to allow those few to cash in for hundreds of years on something they made in their youth, is both lunatic, immoral and wrong. When your morals, your common sense, and all your fellow men tell you that strict enforcing of "copyrights" in private, non commercial communication (and making literally millions and billions of people worldwide criminals, and ruining the lives of the ones who get sued) is undemocratic, fascist shit, and only the corrupt state officials and the "copyright holders" (aka the people profiting from the prohibition) tell you that copying is a no-no, who, really, ask yourself, WHO are you going to listen to? What we see nowadays and what we will see in the future even more is that people will ask themselves such a question, reach an answer (one the prohibitors wont like), and act accordingly, if necessesary by ignoring any fascist law that tries to prevent them doing that.
(damn, hit the send button too early):
>While this may be a great insight into crowd mentality and search preferences, it seems to
>be a "complete disaster as a traditional reference tool."
So, since we all agree that "traditional reference tools" are of such a great value, and do promote science and useful arts, we have to prevent modern technology making them and the librarians business model obsolete. Lets create a new kind of right, lets call it libraryright ©, to "protect" the librarys and librarians and their hard work from being cowardly stolen by people answering each others questions in direct P2P darknets. The LIAA (Library industry association of America) numbers losses for the US econony in the millions and lost jobs in the hundreds of thousands. Libraryright theft JUST MUST STOP! Wh o is with me?
>While this may be a great insight into crowd mentality and search preferences, it seems to
>be a "complete disaster as a traditional reference tool."
So, since we all agree that "traditional reference tools" are of such a great value, and do promote science and useful arts, we have to prevent modern technology making them and the librarians business model obsolete. Lets create a new kind of right, lets call it libraryright ©, to "protect" the librarys and librarians and their hard work from being cowardly stolen. Who is with me?
If people dont want to watch something in cinema, they wont. They'll download it if theres no DVD to buy. Then the industry will lose both the cinema ticket and the dvd. FORCING people to do/buy something they dont want just isnt a working business option any more.
> internet policeman as a threat to civil liberties
I thought the only way to enforce "copyrights" was by attacking peoples privacy, wiretapping their communication with other people, logging their interner behavior, and so on? You cant have "civil liberties" and copyright at the same time in the same space. So obviously the one side has completely given up on peoples privacy and liberties for the benefits of the industry?
And by the way: Isnt france the weird country where they kinda decided to define cryptography = weapons, so if you had pgp on your computer, you could be charged for illegal weapon posession? "Civil liberties" my ass.
The majority of the Germans right now simply does not know what their goverment does. The percentage of privacy aware people is miniscule and mostly active on the net. Yes, there were demonstrations, and about 10000 people took part, but those 10000 were divided on whole 40 (!) cities, so there in average there were only 200-300 demonstrants per city. Not actually enough to make the public aware of the imminent loss of their privacy rights. TV channels were mostly not present at the demos because nobody from the demo organisators cared to inform them soon enough to appear there, or the 200-300 people were not considered important enough to report about.
The German people at large simply do not realize that their current politicians, although not openly sliding back into nazism, are paving the way for future Hitlers or Honeckers, by suggesting and finally implementing control and surveillance laws those two dictators from the past have probably been dreaming of. As I see this, the Germans do not much choice at selections, since the two largest political parties to tightly cooperate on spitting harsh surveillance laws on a monthly basis. Its like in the us, you can either vote for either the reps or the democrats, but cant prevent the DMCA. The Germans have the problem that they, as a people, are simply not keen enough on protesting and fighting for their rights so every now and then, a generation of nazi or nazi-like politicians arises, and just takes over the complete state/police/surveillance/propaganda/military mechanisms, knowing that the Germans as a people will be scared and not organized enough to protest or challenge the state and the goverment.
I personally do not see a way out of this. It just seems to be a part of the German mentality not to challenge the goverment beyond a certain point, so even everybody wants "Never again!", their system and mentality does not have the necessary mechanisms to protect them from their own goverment and make really really sure "Never again!" will stay.
Why should this be a wonderful idea? He is trying to force his daughter to respect copyrights and not to leave it up her choice. He is forcing his views on a debated subject on her and does not let her develop her own sense of balancing right and wrong and a way to think critically. Additionally, he doesnt even consider to tell her that things like fair use exist and that the way she plans to use it most probably falls under fair use. What he is teaching her is complete and total submission to copyright holders, forever. What a sad way to make your kids future brainless IP slaves. Could somebody please call up child welfare?
> competing tools are also improving at the same, or greater, rate.
Maybe they are, but they can not improve to no end, and will after a specific time go into maintenance mode where there is just nothing left to add, or the additions will be so exotic, that in most cases and for most users, they simply will not matter any more. (Office 2007 suffers a similar fate, where the application already is so mature, that MS obviously has nothing to change any more and has to "pretend" to innovate by reordering menus and changing colors.)
While the competing tools are in maintenance mode, the Gimp and other free software will in relation be catching up at a faster pace. The Gimp is today already much more than many people doing photography will ever need, and with each iteration there are even more of those people for whom the Gimp is "good enough". Once it has real support for CYMK, which is planned for the next version 2.6, a slew of new potential users will not have to rely exclusively on photoshop any more. As with many other OS apps, the development is slow, the features may be not on par with the commercial offerings, but its steadliy getting there, and the adoption rates are growing from day to day. The future may be long ahead, but its bright.
> But that's not true. They still have the freedom the original author gave them.
But only if they got the work _directly_ from the original author. In a worst case scanario the original author may have given up distributing his own work, and only proprietary middlemen left, so a new user has no way to obtain the original free code but only the proprietary modifications. It might be possible that someone will keep on distributing the original or modified code under the same free licence, but you have depend upon their good will. He doesnt even have to disappear, it suffices that users get proprietarized code from middlemen and do not know that there is equivalent free code out there. Either through distributory circumstances or by his own ignorance, this user suddendly would have to play by proprietary, profit maximizing rules for code that once was free and unencumbered. The GPL ensures that, if anybody is distributing the work at all, it will be under a free licence, and that the code will remain free as long as there is _any_ interest in it, not only proprietary.
> The fact that someone else has a copy doesn't detract from this ability.
The one who _denies_ someone else a right, isnt "playing nice", so shouldnt have gotten this right in the first place.
I doubt that providing an ability is the major imperative of the GPL. It does accomplish this, but I think only as a secondary effect. The primary one is to create, by locking out proprietary predators, some kind of a secure GPL subspace, where in effect you dont have to care about copyrights at all, since everyone else also uses the GPL. And the more this space grows, the less dependant its inhabitants are on the "outer space", and the less they have to care about some licencing and copyright bullshit and can breathe completely freely. The only reason they would have to get out of the GPL space from time to time is to prevent outside hyenas to grab code from the prescious GPL space and proprietarize it, making it unavailable to the inhabitants of the GPL space and any other people. A self defending ecosystem.
> don't think that the levy gives you any sort of moral justification to do so
But it does. Actually the sole fact that I'm only making copies of data and not taking anything away suffices as moral justification to do it.
Its the artists job to persuade their fans to give them enough money to being able to keep on working on their music. If they managed to do that, a model like radioheads could easily work, because everbody who wants them to keep on playing, will pay. I know I'd pay, if I would care for their music. If they do not manage to do that, it easily could be that people just dont care about them in the long turn, and that they actually have many consumers, but little fans, and actually mightily failed to build a fanbase and a following.
Its wrong to expect a low downloaders/payers ratio, because usually, every artist has many more consumers and casual listeners than fans. I dont see why this ratio should be different than for street musicians and their listener/payer ratio.
Further, I dont see what they would like to achieve with publishing those numbers. Proving that they actually have just so little real fans? Reasoning why they wont offer such web payment because of the "evil torrenters", who maybe dont even care for the web site at all? Or will they start suing the torrenters but keep the free downloads on the web page? What exactly?
I hope that Rediohead, the band, have realized that in this day and age they just CAN'T force people to pay, and instead of trying this by supporting mass lawsuits and scaring potential fans away, they have to work on building a loyal following by offering their music the way the fans want it, not the way some label manager wants it. They have to make the people WANT to pay. I actually right now WANT to pay, but wont, because I dont like their music at all. If all they count is how many downloaded without paying, instead of how many actually paid, i.e. if they care how many fans they theoretically could have instead of how many they actually have, they easily can stop making music completely. In the end, it will not count how many people downloeded without paying, but if many enough paid, for radiohead to be able to keep working on their music.
> don't believe for a second that the levy goes the bulk of the musicians whose work you
> pirate.
Here in Germany actually a MUCHO greater percentage of the blank media levy goes to artists than they get from their record contracts. They certainly get more from me from the blank media levy, than they would get if i bought the original CDs.
I would rather say its because apparently the only people who can pay our political representatives enough for them to care about, are the ones that profit from the current artificial restriction. It needs a party even more wealthy than the creative industry, to pay (aka vote) our political representatives, if something is to change. Getting out rights back to copy random stuff without being tyrannized by copyright fascists is thus, obviously, as unlikely to happen as, for example, muslim women getting their rights to live as they like without being tyrannized by male Quran fascists. Both kinda seem to be a sort of a social/economic disease, which the the social/economic body in question just isn't able to get rid of itself without a large scale external emergency surgery.
>Sadly not, you have to either give the backup to the person you give the CD to with it, or
>destroy it.
You... actually dont. Neither of the two. Its perfectly legit to make copies of a copyrighted work and give them to your gf, friends, relatives, co-workers and so on. Until you start spreading them in high numbers to random starangers, its considered for personal use, and thus falls under "fair use" and not distibution.
> using Microsoft's money to pay for the Linux purchases of your school's choice.
This isnt Microsofts money. This is the money Microsoft extorted from you and is now being forced to give back a tiny amount of this. Any cent that is not going to Microsoft (or even worse, to Apple), but to someone distributing Free Software is great, though.
> Breaking copyright is wrong,
It isn't.
> whatever your reasons are you have no right to break the law.
If the law is unjust, it's not only wrong, but your obligation to break it. If the world worked by your logic, the civilisation would have never developed past the slavery, monarchies, colonialism, and so on, because every of those steps required breaking some kind of then effective, but unjust law. If you didnt ignore, fight and break unjust laws, you wouldnt even live in the US but would be a massively exploited british colony. If you happen to be black, you would still be prohibited from learning something and would have the lagal status of a "thing", could be sold, bought and auctioned, and if youre a woman, youd be prohibited from voting, studying, appearing on streets without a burqa and so on.
FUCKING NOBODY who is not profiting from artificial, enforced scarcity, perceives either this judgement or the underlying copyright fascism as "just" or democratically approved, and without massive civil movements, there seems just to be no way to change the laws, because the persons in power simply "dont allow" the people to do it bacause they know that copyright, as we know it now, wouldnt survive a single night if people _really_ decided democratically about it.
> download a P2P client, and start downloading, then yes, it's considered stealing.
It isn't. You may consider this stealing, but your humble opinion isn't a measure for... anything.
That copying is stealing has hard been tried to get pushed through by people who try to profit on artificial scarcity, in order to somehow associate something they want to be perceived as wrong (copying) with something most people perceive as wrong (stealing). Their idea obviosly was to indoctrinate the copying masses through permanent, ceaseless, Josef Goebbels or 1984 like repetitions of a simple but grave idea that copying is somehow stealing (Copyingisstealingcopyingisstealingcopyingisstealingcopyingisstealing) so they would start to prosecute and denounce each other when caught copying something and save the copyright nazis alota work. But it obviously turned out that mass indoctrination isnt as easy as it seemed at first.
> What about the people that do get hurt by piracy?
... and the pirates.
They should get another job that isnt based on artificial scarcity. People tend to react highly allergically.... when someone first prohibits doing something, and enforces the prohibition through severe, disproportional penalties, and _then_ tries to cash in by allowing exceptions for a fee.
> artists and the authors. They are getting ripped off by
They arent. The pirates, and by that you obviously mean every living person who ever used a computer, just do what their parents and the society teached them. To share with other people. Sharing is deeply human. Its been done for ever. If your only argument against sharing, communication, and altruistic information exchange is that it makes artificial scarcity not profitable enough for YOU.. then why do you wonder that nobody gives a f?
> However, you wouldn't need to go delete or rename files.
You would, when in the directory there already is a file with a name you wanted to give the new file. This happens all the time. Any other action than straight renaming of the old file in the save dialog would be a workaround and simply requiring 2-3 more clicks per incident to get your work done.
> but there is some rationale behind the design.
However, it does not allow (!) me to do something i want do, for the single reason that some interface designer decided it would be easier to grasp for computer illiterates.
It wasnt for nothing that Gnomes "human interface guidelines" were translated to "HIG Hitler!" for a long time, especially for this kind of arrogant smart-ass attitude, where familiar, previously existing features not only went away, but also the options to turn them back on disapperaed in order to forcefully "teach you their way".
> so government can selectively apply its silly anti-circumvention law to silence them
> too.
Actually they can not.
They didnt make copyright infringement suddendly a criminal offense or something the state itself could misuse to silence the opposition. They made circumvention of copy protection schemes copyright infringement, like the DMCA did in the US for several years now.
> Normal population has nothing to fear at all from this: it's a purely political law,
> that will be used for political purpuses only
The political purpose of this law is already served: To make the media industry able to sue and bully even more people. Apart from being corrupt and undemocratic, the law does not entitle the state to supress the people any more they have been able to do before.
So what? Being a dick or not, he has no way to decide if the content of the CD is legally obtained or not. And since he is most probably not the copyright holder of the music on the CD, he has no right to stop you from using it. Applying your logic he also at any given moment could ask you for a payment voucher for your pants, to go sure they are not shoplifted. (Or, I and i personally would like to get stopped for THAT, he could ask you where the CD with the sources is, if you happen to have a data CD with GPL'd binaries on it.)
How exactly does voting for several corrupt politicians you have _zero_ influence on, instaed of having one god emperor make the system a "democracy"? If I cant vote on factual issues directly, cant in any meaningful way influence my so called "representative" after I voted for him and he is in _no way_ obliged to not change his election pledges, then I just dont consider myself as a part of the demos also having a part of the kratos. A system does not begin to be a democracy the moment it starts to call itself one. Actually, the really significant "voting" (the one with your wallet, but only if its chock-full) seems always to begin after the "democratic elections", after the god emperors have been appointed for the next several years and ditched any influence by the demos.
So to give an answer to your question, we, the people, would be able do decide anything, if we would live in a democracy.