Of course you must buy all these Beatles songs again. Remember that your money will go straight to enforcing eternal copyright monopolies, censorship and surveillance of the Internet and, most importantly, promoting old stuff and make active musicians beggars.
Remember that copying is stealing! You don't want to steal from dead people, do you? They have so much use for their money and you can survive without loads of music and only listen to those 10-100 albums that you can afford.
The easy to say but hard to implement answer to that is of course that the users and the other moderators should somehow moderate the moderators. Some sort of elections give the moderators different weights.
I've failed to implement this for 5 years on my sites, I realize the problems involved.
These are of course very good ideas, but Wikipedia doesn't need them because they delete articles instead.
The deletion of articles has worked very well as a kind of filter. People have to fight to get their articles in, and that has improved quality, but now it's bad sides are starting to show:
1) The deletions scares people away. 2) The deletions makes the obsolete badly working rating system work, so the pressure to make a better rating system isn't there.
What we want is a Citizendium, Wikipedia and Crappypedia in one with seamless steps between them. It will not be easy to make such a thing, but it's possible if we accept some years of havoc between the no-deletion policy starts and a well working rating system is in place. But it has to be done, or a lot of work has to be done by competitors to Wikipedia to replace it and that will take even longer time and will probably fail because it's impossible for most good programmers to get world wide support for a cause like this. Wikipedia has the marketing headstart so it should be much easier for it.
In the wiki on Elftown (It's used mainly as a personal rather than encyclopedic wiki though) there is a crew moderated "informative" value that can be set on any article. Wikipedia should have the same.
Then the deletionists could simply set the importance of an article to 0, and then others who think it's important (or it has become important) could simply increase it. And people searching Wikipedia would find the unimportant article, but last in the list.
I could call it "sharing files while breaking government supported copy monopolies".
But the combination of "illegal" and "sharing" quite strongly suggest that the law is evil. It's like a law against helping the poor! Well, it's actually in fact a law against helping the poor people who can't afford to pay for their files.
So then we can call "illegal file sharing": "breaking monopolies by sharing data with the poor"
So about 6% of the USA's economy is flushed down the drain that is the US legal system.
It would be interesting to see a chart of how the legal costs have been raising (or falling) over time. Maybe it's not so scary as many of us think, or maybe it's worse.
USA should do as it did when it tried to go to the moon. Use some Germans! There was plenty of experience of wall-building in East Germany, so why not import some experts from there?
As a bonus, the wall will work just as well when the flow of people is starting to go in the other direction from the non-free USA to the freedom outside of it...
Generally the Berlin wall and the other border protections around East Germany is actually the only wall that somewhat worked. All other great walls have been mostly a waste of money compared to what they achieved. A mobile defense is the way to go, which in this case would be to make people in USA to follow the laws (or change them or a combination).
Nice that we have the freedom loving country of Denmark that stands up for the little people's right to ridicule Muslims! All people should have these right, unless, of course, they upset the people who have bought more politicians than the entire world's oil companies can afford. So ThePirateBay.org is still blocked by this "freedom loving" country.
So they want people to share freely instead of first buying the right to copy their files?
Good! I've had it with this generally stupid idea to sell something that costs nothing to copy, and record companies and iTunes do way more harm than they are doing good, so we're better off without them.
Arrr! *Boards a Spanish gold-ship, notes how much gold there is and draw a copy off the ship, says good-bye and goes home and makes my own replica of it*
"But there's no honor among thieves, as this thread demonstrates."
Definitely true! Apple and the studios have clearly showed that they don't care if they steal money and freedom from their customers, the public in general or each others.
Luckily this means that they soon kill off each other. iTunes and the record companies are simply obsolete and not needed anymore, so it's great that they get out of business and people have to learn how to share files instead of feeding the monopolists.
This is really humorous! You're making up different kinds of theories about what the "central problem" is.
The central problem is of course that censorship lovers keep believing that seeing porn is harmful.
It's a really sick idea to begin with and there is of course no scientific proof of that. On the opposite, it's quite clear that kids (and adults) who aren't allowed to do anything becomes irresponsible.
"if you do manage to share your files with everyone in the world, then only 1 copy of an album by your favourite band will ever be bought, and they won't have an incentive to release more albums"
Sorry, lying detected. Albums will be released to market tours (and other sales). You know that, so you're lying and therefore not worth listening to.
>"People close their accounts, and then they change their minds and want them reopened, and this way, we can restore their entire account."
I can confirm that it's very common on my social networking sites. About 1% to 10% of the people close their accounts for some hysterical reason like that they got into a fight with someone, they think they spend too much time there or blahabulkarumpa. As these users create loads of problems for the administrators and other users, I see no reason what so ever to help them destroy things.
With deleted accounts everywhere people will have messages from "deleted", there will be wiki-pages written by "deleted user", there will be postings written by "deleted user" and there will be images uploaded by "deleted user". Or those could be deleted too, and that would mess things up on a cataclysmic scale ("Sorry, no wiki-page about Dragons on Elftown because it was lastly written by someone who went mad.").
Of course we have morons who don't think that deleting everything from their account is enough and behaves badly to get banned instead. Then they try to get in again under a different name, but become quietly ignored as we don't want that kind of people.
Generally this information destroying serves no purpose. They just want to whine about that they are on a page that they can't control, but they still are on their work-site, on Facebook and on a disturbing Geocities page that they have forgotten the password to.
When there is a real issue like someone who is in danger of being tracked, then I'm happy to help out as the administrator. I've only had a handful of these cases over the last 5 years though.
Sorry, but I have grown up. I used to accept that there should be limits in how you privately can copy files, but with the development in technology and society it's just not possible for me to accept that anymore, and the benefits of free copying for non-commercial usage is simply too big to be tossed away.
You're also confusing copying files with using content creators work for selling. If someone downloads a movie it's OK, but showing it in a theatre and selling tickets to the public is something completely different.
Anyhow: The file-sharing will continue to grow and there is nothing you can do about it, except maybe make the growth slow down a little. But you can't win and you'll be remembered for being in the way. The file-sharers are greater in numbers and they are smarter thanks to that they have access to all the knowledge that other people simply can't afford to access. Wikipedia might be nice, but documentaries and training in using stolen software gives the file-sharers an edge.
It's not that easy! Any attempt to block the web-page http://thepiratebay.org/ will make users use a web-proxy. And there are thousands on web-proxies out there so they are impossible for any ISP to block unless they block everything that isn't accepted.
It's the trackers' IPs that can be blocked, but ThePirateBay can easily change these IPs. I'm not totally sure about the details of this though. I guess people have to download updated torrents.
In the end the outcome of this battle will be who of the ISP and ThePirateBay with friends have the most time to spend on filter or help users get around filters. I'm pretty sure that the pirates will win that. The ISPs could of course monitor their users instead and put them in jail. But not even in Denmark would that be politically possible.
The MagLev trains should of course run in vacuum tubes. That will make them extremely fast and energy efficient.
A general wrong thinking about maglevs is that it should be built for luxurious transportations for huge prices. That is economical madness. As the track is very expensive, you want to fill to 100% (and then you can charge extra for the peak hours) just like Ryanair and now other companies in different industries do.
Also the concept of "train" is bad. As it's vacuum, there is no reason to send train. You can have one wagon per passenger/group/shipment just like normal cars/trucks. And the "tuberoad" would of course be automatically routed, so when you enter where you're going, the system automatically allocate the way and then sends you off in 100 meter per second in a local transport net, into 1000 meters per second on the intercity tubes and then finally into another local net to your destination.
There should also be a smaller system just like this for packages. That is about a meter in diameter which would make it pretty easy to fill it with cargo. I'm not thinking so much about normal postal shippings, but along the line that these postal system should be competitive with piplines, railroads-transports and even ships for moving huge amounts of cargo very cheaply. One little maglev vacuum tube could transport as much as a couple of highways.
And with cheap transportations comes a huge economical boom.
Well, that just exemplifies that it's almost impossible and that all laws depend on how they are interpret.
Of course a theatre can put up a sign with "Be quiet or face risk of being thrown out or even fined.". And of course one can be accused of causing disturbance by shouting "FIRE!". And of course all that is totally OK if there really is a fire.
What a court have to do is to look at the intentions of the law. If it's obvious to society in general that slaves, women and children have no rights, then a court will judge according to that unless it's quite clear that the legislators meant something else.
So in this issue it's extremely important that you Danes speak up to change the definitions regarding file-sharing, privacy and censorship in Denmark, because a court will judge according to the standards of the current society. Some polls shows that about 70%-90% of the Internet users in Sweden think that sharing is OK, and that makes it totally impossible for a court to judge that sharing is stealing.
"Secondly the court does not make, only enforce law. "
No, that is wrong. The court interpret the law, and therefore partly define it.
The EU law says that the rights of copyright owners should be protected as long as it's not a privacy issue or way too unpractical (which would clearly allow file-sharing). But the Danish court read the law wrong. It has happened before, just look at the constitution that said that all men were equal, but children, slaves and women were obviously not "men".
Not much to worry about. Every time the information monopolists open their mouths, they loose more credibility. That is: As long as there are people who stand up and point out the errors in their arguments (let's pretend that they actually have any arguments...).
1) The Pirate Bay is widely used for distribution by the content makers themselves.
2) It's not illegal to share files with your friends. It's considered fair use. Internet makes it possible for us to have millions of friends, and no evil information monopoly mafia is allowed to put a limit of how many friends one can have.
3) Authors and musicians have no rights what so ever to filter communications between people. People have the right to share information and files with each other, so yes: It includes sharing stuff that someone has the publishing monopoly for.
4) Authors and musicians have a time limited (not so limited as it should) exclusive right to publish their work. "publish" is to show it in a movie theatre, print a book or sell CD. Putting up a torrent that people can find in a search isn't. It's "sharing", which is a nice thing that people should do more often!
* Ensure an open Internet. This means that universities, ISPs and companies have to censor the access to the Internet so that it can be ensured that we still can have an open Internet.
* Create a transparent and connected democracy. The government should have total access to all your Internet activities.
* Encourage a modern communications infrastructure. The companies who bribe me and my friends should get money from the government.
* Employ technology to solve our nation's most pressing problems. Spend government funding on DRM and Internet filtering.
* Improve America's competitiveness. Strike down hard on filesharing and make it easier to get patents so that an even bigger part of USA can focus on being in court.
So... I'm not impressed as that can mean anything.
Let me first say that this suggestion is much better than monitoring all our Internet activities so that we can't share with each other.
But I also have to point out that this means that normal people have to pay a tax that will mostly end up in the pockets of rich people who wrote or performed music some 10 years ago. Exactly how does that benefit society? If taxes are collected, it is much better spent on development and research.
As already written by professional musicians here in the previous comments, music will still be produced. Maybe even former rock stars will keep on recording music when they don't receive $4711 a minute for doing nothing.
Well, yes. But that is more like solving some of the problem a bad driver can cause. A really bad driver can always bring the system down.
As an example: I had a badly working USB mouse connected to my Linux-computer. Sometimes it hanged and sometimes it acted like a keyboard on drugs. A reload of the driver solved the hanging problem mostly, but it did hang the entire computer once. A working mouse solved the problem, but of course a good driver should have handles the badly working mouse better.
And yes: It worked just as bad under Windows, even though it never crashed, but so didn't my computer for years.
Yepp! We were there to crush the Roman empire. We were there to defeat the Spanish. And we crushed the feudal system, the British Empire, the Third Reich and the communists. Now we'll get the copyright monopolies too.
If they are nice, their heads will be gently cut off. Otherwise they will not be so lucky.
"Don't let a single driver bring down a system. This is just basic common sense."
I have never heard of such a system. And I don't think it's a good idea to restrict what drivers can do. Sometimes they have to lock the system to get real time performance and I can't see how one should be able to stop a driver from shutting down the system when that is one of the driver's functions.
The end line is that all the drivers used have to be good. The best way to do this is open source drivers as it makes it possible for others to check the driver if it's interfering with some other part of the system. Microsoft actually has no reason not to open source drivers today. They have sent code to the Chinese government, so why not to the open too?
Slashdot Mirror
Of course you must buy all these Beatles songs again. Remember that your money will go straight to enforcing eternal copyright monopolies, censorship and surveillance of the Internet and, most importantly, promoting old stuff and make active musicians beggars.
Remember that copying is stealing! You don't want to steal from dead people, do you? They have so much use for their money and you can survive without loads of music and only listen to those 10-100 albums that you can afford.
The easy to say but hard to implement answer to that is of course that the users and the other moderators should somehow moderate the moderators. Some sort of elections give the moderators different weights.
I've failed to implement this for 5 years on my sites, I realize the problems involved.
These are of course very good ideas, but Wikipedia doesn't need them because they delete articles instead.
The deletion of articles has worked very well as a kind of filter. People have to fight to get their articles in, and that has improved quality, but now it's bad sides are starting to show:
1) The deletions scares people away.
2) The deletions makes the obsolete badly working rating system work, so the pressure to make a better rating system isn't there.
What we want is a Citizendium, Wikipedia and Crappypedia in one with seamless steps between them. It will not be easy to make such a thing, but it's possible if we accept some years of havoc between the no-deletion policy starts and a well working rating system is in place. But it has to be done, or a lot of work has to be done by competitors to Wikipedia to replace it and that will take even longer time and will probably fail because it's impossible for most good programmers to get world wide support for a cause like this. Wikipedia has the marketing headstart so it should be much easier for it.
Then the deletionists could simply set the importance of an article to 0, and then others who think it's important (or it has become important) could simply increase it. And people searching Wikipedia would find the unimportant article, but last in the list.
I could call it "sharing files while breaking government supported copy monopolies".
But the combination of "illegal" and "sharing" quite strongly suggest that the law is evil. It's like a law against helping the poor! Well, it's actually in fact a law against helping the poor people who can't afford to pay for their files.
So then we can call "illegal file sharing": "breaking monopolies by sharing data with the poor"
Guess who will win :/
http://economie.moldova.org/stiri/eng/39281/ says
"The U.S. legal system imposes a cost of $865 billion a year on the
U.S. economy, or $9,800 a family"
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/print/us.html
says GDP (official exchange rate): $13.79 trillion (2007 est.)
So about 6% of the USA's economy is flushed down the drain that is the US legal system.
It would be interesting to see a chart of how the legal costs have been raising (or falling) over time. Maybe it's not so scary as many of us think, or maybe it's worse.
USA should do as it did when it tried to go to the moon. Use some Germans! There was plenty of experience of wall-building in East Germany, so why not import some experts from there?
As a bonus, the wall will work just as well when the flow of people is starting to go in the other direction from the non-free USA to the freedom outside of it...
Generally the Berlin wall and the other border protections around East Germany is actually the only wall that somewhat worked. All other great walls have been mostly a waste of money compared to what they achieved. A mobile defense is the way to go, which in this case would be to make people in USA to follow the laws (or change them or a combination).
Nice that we have the freedom loving country of Denmark that stands up for the little people's right to ridicule Muslims! All people should have these right, unless, of course, they upset the people who have bought more politicians than the entire world's oil companies can afford. So ThePirateBay.org is still blocked by this "freedom loving" country.
So they want people to share freely instead of first buying the right to copy their files?
Good! I've had it with this generally stupid idea to sell something that costs nothing to copy, and record companies and iTunes do way more harm than they are doing good, so we're better off without them.
Arrr!
*Boards a Spanish gold-ship, notes how much gold there is and draw a copy off the ship, says good-bye and goes home and makes my own replica of it*
"But there's no honor among thieves, as this thread demonstrates."
Definitely true! Apple and the studios have clearly showed that they don't care if they steal money and freedom from their customers, the public in general or each others.
Luckily this means that they soon kill off each other. iTunes and the record companies are simply obsolete and not needed anymore, so it's great that they get out of business and people have to learn how to share files instead of feeding the monopolists.
This is really humorous! You're making up different kinds of theories about what the "central problem" is.
The central problem is of course that censorship lovers keep believing that seeing porn is harmful.
It's a really sick idea to begin with and there is of course no scientific proof of that. On the opposite, it's quite clear that kids (and adults) who aren't allowed to do anything becomes irresponsible.
"if you do manage to share your files with everyone in the world, then only 1 copy of an album by your favourite band will ever be bought, and they won't have an incentive to release more albums"
Sorry, lying detected. Albums will be released to market tours (and other sales). You know that, so you're lying and therefore not worth listening to.
>"People close their accounts, and then they change their minds and want them reopened, and this way, we can restore their entire account."
I can confirm that it's very common on my social networking sites. About 1% to 10% of the people close their accounts for some hysterical reason like that they got into a fight with someone, they think they spend too much time there or blahabulkarumpa. As these users create loads of problems for the administrators and other users, I see no reason what so ever to help them destroy things.
With deleted accounts everywhere people will have messages from "deleted", there will be wiki-pages written by "deleted user", there will be postings written by "deleted user" and there will be images uploaded by "deleted user". Or those could be deleted too, and that would mess things up on a cataclysmic scale ("Sorry, no wiki-page about Dragons on Elftown because it was lastly written by someone who went mad.").
Of course we have morons who don't think that deleting everything from their account is enough and behaves badly to get banned instead. Then they try to get in again under a different name, but become quietly ignored as we don't want that kind of people.
Generally this information destroying serves no purpose. They just want to whine about that they are on a page that they can't control, but they still are on their work-site, on Facebook and on a disturbing Geocities page that they have forgotten the password to.
When there is a real issue like someone who is in danger of being tracked, then I'm happy to help out as the administrator. I've only had a handful of these cases over the last 5 years though.
Sorry, but I have grown up. I used to accept that there should be limits in how you privately can copy files, but with the development in technology and society it's just not possible for me to accept that anymore, and the benefits of free copying for non-commercial usage is simply too big to be tossed away.
You're also confusing copying files with using content creators work for selling. If someone downloads a movie it's OK, but showing it in a theatre and selling tickets to the public is something completely different.
Anyhow: The file-sharing will continue to grow and there is nothing you can do about it, except maybe make the growth slow down a little. But you can't win and you'll be remembered for being in the way. The file-sharers are greater in numbers and they are smarter thanks to that they have access to all the knowledge that other people simply can't afford to access. Wikipedia might be nice, but documentaries and training in using stolen software gives the file-sharers an edge.
It's not that easy! Any attempt to block the web-page http://thepiratebay.org/ will make users use a web-proxy. And there are thousands on web-proxies out there so they are impossible for any ISP to block unless they block everything that isn't accepted.
It's the trackers' IPs that can be blocked, but ThePirateBay can easily change these IPs. I'm not totally sure about the details of this though. I guess people have to download updated torrents.
In the end the outcome of this battle will be who of the ISP and ThePirateBay with friends have the most time to spend on filter or help users get around filters. I'm pretty sure that the pirates will win that. The ISPs could of course monitor their users instead and put them in jail. But not even in Denmark would that be politically possible.
The MagLev trains should of course run in vacuum tubes. That will make them extremely fast and energy efficient.
A general wrong thinking about maglevs is that it should be built for luxurious transportations for huge prices. That is economical madness. As the track is very expensive, you want to fill to 100% (and then you can charge extra for the peak hours) just like Ryanair and now other companies in different industries do.
Also the concept of "train" is bad. As it's vacuum, there is no reason to send train. You can have one wagon per passenger/group/shipment just like normal cars/trucks. And the "tuberoad" would of course be automatically routed, so when you enter where you're going, the system automatically allocate the way and then sends you off in 100 meter per second in a local transport net, into 1000 meters per second on the intercity tubes and then finally into another local net to your destination.
There should also be a smaller system just like this for packages. That is about a meter in diameter which would make it pretty easy to fill it with cargo. I'm not thinking so much about normal postal shippings, but along the line that these postal system should be competitive with piplines, railroads-transports and even ships for moving huge amounts of cargo very cheaply. One little maglev vacuum tube could transport as much as a couple of highways.
And with cheap transportations comes a huge economical boom.
Well, that just exemplifies that it's almost impossible and that all laws depend on how they are interpret.
Of course a theatre can put up a sign with "Be quiet or face risk of being thrown out or even fined.". And of course one can be accused of causing disturbance by shouting "FIRE!". And of course all that is totally OK if there really is a fire.
What a court have to do is to look at the intentions of the law. If it's obvious to society in general that slaves, women and children have no rights, then a court will judge according to that unless it's quite clear that the legislators meant something else.
So in this issue it's extremely important that you Danes speak up to change the definitions regarding file-sharing, privacy and censorship in Denmark, because a court will judge according to the standards of the current society. Some polls shows that about 70%-90% of the Internet users in Sweden think that sharing is OK, and that makes it totally impossible for a court to judge that sharing is stealing.
"Secondly the court does not make, only enforce law. "
No, that is wrong. The court interpret the law, and therefore partly define it.
The EU law says that the rights of copyright owners should be protected as long as it's not a privacy issue or way too unpractical (which would clearly allow file-sharing). But the Danish court read the law wrong. It has happened before, just look at the constitution that said that all men were equal, but children, slaves and women were obviously not "men".
Not much to worry about. Every time the information monopolists open their mouths, they loose more credibility. That is: As long as there are people who stand up and point out the errors in their arguments (let's pretend that they actually have any arguments...).
A few errors there:
1) The Pirate Bay is widely used for distribution by the content makers themselves.
2) It's not illegal to share files with your friends. It's considered fair use. Internet makes it possible for us to have millions of friends, and no evil information monopoly mafia is allowed to put a limit of how many friends one can have.
3) Authors and musicians have no rights what so ever to filter communications between people. People have the right to share information and files with each other, so yes: It includes sharing stuff that someone has the publishing monopoly for.
4) Authors and musicians have a time limited (not so limited as it should) exclusive right to publish their work. "publish" is to show it in a movie theatre, print a book or sell CD. Putting up a torrent that people can find in a search isn't. It's "sharing", which is a nice thing that people should do more often!
Seems to need some hypothetical translation:
* Ensure an open Internet.
This means that universities, ISPs and companies have to censor the access to the Internet so that it can be ensured that we still can have an open Internet.
* Create a transparent and connected democracy.
The government should have total access to all your Internet activities.
* Encourage a modern communications infrastructure.
The companies who bribe me and my friends should get money from the government.
* Employ technology to solve our nation's most pressing problems.
Spend government funding on DRM and Internet filtering.
* Improve America's competitiveness.
Strike down hard on filesharing and make it easier to get patents so that an even bigger part of USA can focus on being in court.
So... I'm not impressed as that can mean anything.
Let me first say that this suggestion is much better than monitoring all our Internet activities so that we can't share with each other.
But I also have to point out that this means that normal people have to pay a tax that will mostly end up in the pockets of rich people who wrote or performed music some 10 years ago. Exactly how does that benefit society? If taxes are collected, it is much better spent on development and research.
As already written by professional musicians here in the previous comments, music will still be produced. Maybe even former rock stars will keep on recording music when they don't receive $4711 a minute for doing nothing.
Well, yes. But that is more like solving some of the problem a bad driver can cause. A really bad driver can always bring the system down.
As an example: I had a badly working USB mouse connected to my Linux-computer. Sometimes it hanged and sometimes it acted like a keyboard on drugs. A reload of the driver solved the hanging problem mostly, but it did hang the entire computer once. A working mouse solved the problem, but of course a good driver should have handles the badly working mouse better.
And yes: It worked just as bad under Windows, even though it never crashed, but so didn't my computer for years.
Yepp! We were there to crush the Roman empire. We were there to defeat the Spanish. And we crushed the feudal system, the British Empire, the Third Reich and the communists. Now we'll get the copyright monopolies too.
If they are nice, their heads will be gently cut off. Otherwise they will not be so lucky.
"Don't let a single driver bring down a system. This is just basic common sense."
I have never heard of such a system. And I don't think it's a good idea to restrict what drivers can do. Sometimes they have to lock the system to get real time performance and I can't see how one should be able to stop a driver from shutting down the system when that is one of the driver's functions.
The end line is that all the drivers used have to be good. The best way to do this is open source drivers as it makes it possible for others to check the driver if it's interfering with some other part of the system. Microsoft actually has no reason not to open source drivers today. They have sent code to the Chinese government, so why not to the open too?