> So seeing that I am probably the only person that has this copyrighted material
Your case underlines the bizarre "logic" of modern copyright law. Since you own the media, it is perfectly legal for you to destroy the recordings, which would, of course, destroy the "property" of the rightsholders (since they are the only copy). One wonders how that weird edge case fits into the "you wouldn't steal" rhetoric.
On the other hand, it's totally illegal for you to distribute these recordings to anyone except the rightsholders themselves. So it is effectively illegal for you to preserve this work for future generations.
This is why I do not feel bad in the least to advise you to digitize the recordings and upload them to some filesharing site like RapidShare or MegaUpload in an anonymous way, and then publicize the sharing link on a web forum where there will be a lot of interested people (I'm sure there must be some web forums where WWI history buffs hang out). Much as I like creators to be able to get paid, I hate even more for culture and information to be lost.
I usually reserve that word for things which don't seem to have any possible scientific explanation. In this case, it's pretty obvious that a dog, which has a sense of smell which is something like two orders of magnitude more sensitive than a human's, could very well manage to detect infection by the odor of various metabolic products generated by bacteria. For the case of cancer, it's less obvious, but it could very well be that some cancers emit peculiar odors because of the mutations in their DNA.
> the people who insist on calling themselves "hardware hackers" who are > really "hardware tinkers" are causing a lot of confusion here
Words can have more than one meaning, different meanings in different contexts, and language constantly evolves. Live with it. It's stupid for old-timers to gripe that "hacker" has taken on a new negative meaning, but it is equally stupid to complain that the old meaning is confusing.
BTW, words also have connotations, and the connotation of "tinkerer" is very different than that of "hacker". If the continued use of "hacker" in this context bothers you too much, propose a new usage --- if it's catchy enough, maybe it'll catch on. But "tinkerer" won't (for the above reason).
If I don't believe the badge number on a police officer ID, why would I trust the phone number on it?
If they are fake they probably don't have access to the official database and will probably blindly confirm the ID of anyone calling in since they can't tell who is legit and who is fake. So test them first by asking to confirm some bogus information that you make up on the spot. If they won't confirm your own bogus info then they are probably legit.
You assume that the phone number isn't set up to authorize only that one badge (or a very small subset of fake badges). How often would someone who they approached know a real badge number by heart? If we assume the chance of that is small, all they have to do is reject all badge numbers they haven't issued as fake ones.
I admit that the idea is useful in other contexts. For example, if someone runs an emulated login GUI, they often only register the first UID/password combination which is entered, throw up some kind of error message, and then vamoose by suiciding their whole login session, because this minimizes the chance of being caught red-handed.
Is it true that Congress is going to change copyright to expire 75 years after cryogenic containment fails or the sun explodes, whichever happens later?
Not going to happen.
Politicians aren't stupid (about things like this), you know --- they can only do that once. In the "add twenty years every twenty years" scenario, the politicians end up earning a lot more.
My understanding of the theory of defeating polygraph tests is to do exactly the opposite. Without showing external signs, one tries to constantly think about extremely stressful life experiences, except when one is lying. This technique supposedly manages to "move up the baseline", so that the extra stress from lying isn't noticeable. (BTW, this could very well just be random bullshit I read about a long, long, time ago --- I claim no real experience here.)
In this case, it would seem to be even more trivial. Just make 10 different terrorist plans for 10 different cities, and choose the target randomly just before the attack. In that case, the test will never be able to attain a better than 10% accuracy, no matter how real the 100% result this research has uncovered actually is (the fact that it's 100% seems really, really suspicious to me --- is this perhaps, er, covered by a patent owned by some startup?).
OK, I really wouldn't care about the controversy about causation here (personally I'm agnostic about that), if only it would drive investment into developing technology which humanity is going to need eventually anyway.
Trying to solve the problem with a space sunshade would hopefully improve our ability to engineer large structures in space and improve the chances we might be able to survive there and eventually migrate to other parts of the solar system or even other solar systems. Better not to have all one's eggs in the same basket, eh?
Trying to attain a new relatively clean power source (some kind of fusion, preferably aneutronic) would probably improve our ability to survive in general, also, even if the greenhouse gases aren't the problem. Assuming it wouldn't make it trivial for Joe Normal to build extremely powerful and destructive weapons, of course.
The judge did not say it was okay, only that MGE failed to provide sufficient proof of damages (they tried to claim damages against the total revenue of the division and not just revenue related to servicing MGE UPS products)
And in a totally ironic turnaround, part of the judge's justification stripping MGE of the $4+M judgment was that "Texas courts have not adopted the RESTATEMENT (THIRD) OF UNFAIR COMPETITION in its entirety".
So MGE lost because of its forum shopping (in part). Priceless!
It's a scanned document with physical blacking out, unlike the last few failed PDF censorship attempts in which there were merely added black objects obscuring the undeleted original text.
Might still be able to get some information out with image processing, but I doubt we're going to get a lot. I'm off to give it a shot.
To prevent "premature unnecessary debate" --- gotta give them credit that at least they're not lying about their motivations, unlike using "national security" to keep ACTA negotiations secret.
You really didn't address anything I wrote about in my second post, so I'm a bit confused.
My post was about the big difference in the way copyright law relates to news stories and the way it relates to wholly creative works like, for example, a book which is totally fiction. Because copyright doesn't cover facts, the only protection which copyright gives a news story is protecting the way the facts are expressed. If a newspaper pays lots of money to send a reporter to a far-away and dangerous place and he works hard to gather lots of facts and then writes a story about these facts, I can write a new news report about these facts without worrying that I am breaking copyright law. OTOH, I am freeloading on the work of the newspaper and the reporter, which is why I said some people might find this morally wrong (especially if I don't disclose the source for the facts of my news story).
> People like to say that copying someone's work isn't depriving them of > anything because they still have the original.
There are lots of legal ways to use people's work which are still under copyright. Parody, fair use, etc. Do you believe all of these legal uses are morally wrong? Interesting.
BTW, one of the major reasons why people harp on "not depriving" is because the other side harps on "it's my property just like my car". Both are wrong.
As the first AC replied to you, there is no such limit, and the court looks at a lot of factors in order to decide if a use is fair use. One of these factors is if the reuser has invested sufficient creativity of his own in relation to the amount used.
It could be perfectly legal for tens of thousands of individuals to each choose a short time period out of a movie, and then invest the time and effort to analyze it and write commentary, thus making it possible to distribute 100% of the movie legally. Of course, it's never going to actually happen, because as time goes on it will be easier and easier to illegally distribute the movie without all of this rigamarole.
You are in effect taking someone's work and making money from it "ads" and depriving them of their money "ads" with out their permission.
But isn't just rewriting the news article also "taking someone's work"? Yet, somehow, it is perfectly legal. But possibly morally wrong, depending on one's outlook.
Yet another example to back up my post, which, by the way, was not restricting itself to the narrow subject of news/copy/paste, but was a general reply to knee-jerk pro-copyright rhetoric.
People need to understand that copyright violations are harmful and often mean the difference between someone getting a paycheck and not. Its not just billion dollar companies who are harmed. So if you pirate anything, I assume, unless you are complete hypocrite, you never accept a paycheck. Otherwise, you're working hard to deprive someone else of theirs - despite their hard work.
People need to understand that copyright violations are not always harmful and do not necessarily mean the difference between someone getting a paycheck and not. In fact, some of us both pirate and pay, it's just that copyright law is currently so f***ed up that we need to break the law to use the content that we pay for in the way we want to. Or it prevents us from obtaining content which doesn't generate income for anyone anyway. So if you pirate something, I assume, unless you are a complete hypocrite, you actually think about whether what you are doing is morally correct. Otherwise, if you automatically believe that merely because something is against the law it is morally wrong, you're showing a complete lack of imagination.
I disagree. Return copyright to sane lengths (perhaps 20 years) and make all noncommercial use noninfringing use, and make it only apply to tangible media (books, CDs, DVDs) and the problems all disappear.
I'd throw a big party to celebrate! Unfortunately, the point of my post wasn't that there cannot exist a near-optimal copyright law, it was that there is no driving mechanism in reality which would drive us to this outcome.
Ah, and I think you should consider adding a cap on the damages for commercial use of an orphaned work which is a fixed percentage of the profits or of the gross income, if the creator should somehow pop up again (assuming due diligence has been done by the reuser). Oh, and in that case the original creator cannot bar continued reuse by the reuser, his only rights are that he continues to get paid.
> because if they're written smartly they'll be indistinguishable from Informative +1
One could merely "string-out" the other side until one was convinced it was human, before actually answering / believing. This obviously will push AI further along as advertisers struggle to get more and more convincing bots. OTOH, that might not happen if a high enough percentage of the public just falls for it at the first iteration --- in that case, it would be more practical to transfer any real attempts at discourse off to a call center in India. Actually, I have the impression that a lot of customer support is done this way already (bot replies with standard quoting of FAQs which escalate to interacting with a real human after a few iterations).
I'm not sure if you're making fun of me via my later post that creative people are just building on the public domain, or you're deriding my use of the "sheeple" term, which I probably heard first on Slashdot, actually, if I remember correctly (even though it seems to have a much longer history --- see the Wikipedia entry).
Perhaps one could say I'm uninspiredly cribbing from the Slashdot group mind?
OK, OK, I admit it. It just didn't have the same "ring" after it was properly qualified. Your comment about nuclear weapons is justified. However, the reality of the situation is that there are so many layers of laws now that even if you tried hard you probably couldn't avoid breaking some of them. (See this post and the thread it's in.) So if you read my comment as meaning "break any law", you don't really need to qualify it.
<offtopic>(BTW, I've always admired your inspired Slashdot name).</offtopic>
What I was talking about is a decoy source release "leaked" from the company itself via a fake anonymous source that contains inefficient or misleading code which isn't the code being used to compile the binary release.
Ah, yes, I admit I didn't understand you there.
Your scenario in which we wait on anonymous sources to leak code is fraught with problems like these.
The only problem is the problem which you have already stated: we might not get the real source code. Yes that might be a problem, and I pointed out how not having copyright partially improves this situation.
The other "problems", however, are just in your mind --- if MegacorpX leaks out useful source code which isn't the "right" source code, it's still useful. Or not, and whoever vets the commits is responsible to figure that out. Just like now.
Anyway, the thing about copyright is that it protects things that aren't necessities. We're not entitled to movies and music. They're entertainment we are able to enjoy. Copyright's primary purpose is to make sure people make money from their work so that we have an economy, which is a benefit to society. If nobody pays anyone for their work, you won't have the amount and quality of art as before, and culture would suffer. It's common sense.
Somehow I think you lack imagination, and culture would survive quite well, even without copyright. Not that it's going to happen, anyway.
I never understood the complaint when Slugboat Willy was about to fall into public domain. We have a right to Mickey Mouse? Who cares about it? If Disney is still making money off of it, why shouldn't they still own it?
Now it's my turn to say "ugh". Corporations, unlike people, are virtually immortal. Your paragraph is something which could only have been dreamed up by someone who doesn't actually create any "culture", because the vast majority of the those who do create culture (the ones who aren't too full of themselves) will tell you that they are just recycling and revitalizing material from the public domain. You know, the public domain which no one would have if corporations could maintain copyright forever (by showing a profit of $1 even on things which no one is currently interested in and which they don't even sell --- make way for the new form of Hollywood accounting).
We live in a different era than when copyright was first created, an era in which media is far more pervasive and long-term than before, so it makes sense to extend copyrights to reflect today's media reality.
Actually, in our era, the term of copyright should be shortened because practically no works generate any significant income after 10 years. Didn't you listen to Andy Warhol (well, actually it's because the production of content is now so much more widespread that most older content just gets drowned in all the new stuff)? I think something like 15 years from publishing plus another 15 years if you pay to extend would be plenty.
Theft? You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
> How would you even know the anonymous leak was the real thing and not a decoy?
Code review, my boy, code review. How do we know any submitted patch to a GPL project is "the real thing"? This doesn't create any additional vulnerabilities which weren't already there.
> when the groups have the word "pirate" right in their names
When was the last time a political party with a name like "copyright reform party" succeeded? Using "pirate" is just good marketing and a droll way to turn the rhetoric of the pro-copyright side on its head. In fact, the Swedish Pirate Party got its name from the Piratbyran who got its name from humorously dropping the "anti" from the pro-copyright side's "AntiPiratbyran".
> You may be able to pirate the binaries, but you wouldn't have the > freedom of source code access that the GPL is supposed to protect.
Ah, but any anonymous leak of that source code would have no protection, either. (OK, not exactly, the leaker might still be liable for damages of revealing a trade secret. Might even be criminal. But the code itself would automatically become free of that protection after it's been leaked, a la, RC4.) Somehow, I think it might not be as bad as you paint it.
> You can't get rid of copyright completely and wouldn't want to. Without copyright, companies > could steal GPL code without consequence because the GPL is a copyright license > and is thus protected by copyright law.
Much as I like the availability of the GPL and other copy-left licenses, if you would give me a magic wand which would erase copyright, I would have a hard time deciding if I should use it. Face it, copyright can never really get fixed --- as in, optimally benefit society as opposed to large corporations --- because "society" doesn't help elect politicians since most of "society" are sheeple who vote for the politician with the biggest advertising budget (supplied in part by, guess who, large corporations) as opposed to voting for politicians who reform copyright laws.
Slashdot Mirror
> So seeing that I am probably the only person that has this copyrighted material
Your case underlines the bizarre "logic" of modern copyright law. Since you own the media, it is perfectly legal for you to destroy the recordings, which would, of course, destroy the "property" of the rightsholders (since they are the only copy). One wonders how that weird edge case fits into the "you wouldn't steal" rhetoric.
On the other hand, it's totally illegal for you to distribute these recordings to anyone except the rightsholders themselves. So it is effectively illegal for you to preserve this work for future generations.
This is why I do not feel bad in the least to advise you to digitize the recordings and upload them to some filesharing site like RapidShare or MegaUpload in an anonymous way, and then publicize the sharing link on a web forum where there will be a lot of interested people (I'm sure there must be some web forums where WWI history buffs hang out). Much as I like creators to be able to get paid, I hate even more for culture and information to be lost.
> mysteries.
I usually reserve that word for things which don't seem to have any possible scientific explanation. In this case, it's pretty obvious that a dog, which has a sense of smell which is something like two orders of magnitude more sensitive than a human's, could very well manage to detect infection by the odor of various metabolic products generated by bacteria. For the case of cancer, it's less obvious, but it could very well be that some cancers emit peculiar odors because of the mutations in their DNA.
> the people who insist on calling themselves "hardware hackers" who are
> really "hardware tinkers" are causing a lot of confusion here
Words can have more than one meaning, different meanings in different contexts, and language constantly evolves. Live with it. It's stupid for old-timers to gripe that "hacker" has taken on a new negative meaning, but it is equally stupid to complain that the old meaning is confusing.
BTW, words also have connotations, and the connotation of "tinkerer" is very different than that of "hacker". If the continued use of "hacker" in this context bothers you too much, propose a new usage --- if it's catchy enough, maybe it'll catch on. But "tinkerer" won't (for the above reason).
If I don't believe the badge number on a police officer ID, why would I trust the phone number on it?
If they are fake they probably don't have access to the official database and will probably blindly confirm the ID of anyone calling in since they can't tell who is legit and who is fake. So test them first by asking to confirm some bogus information that you make up on the spot. If they won't confirm your own bogus info then they are probably legit.
You assume that the phone number isn't set up to authorize only that one badge (or a very small subset of fake badges). How often would someone who they approached know a real badge number by heart? If we assume the chance of that is small, all they have to do is reject all badge numbers they haven't issued as fake ones.
I admit that the idea is useful in other contexts. For example, if someone runs an emulated login GUI, they often only register the first UID/password combination which is entered, throw up some kind of error message, and then vamoose by suiciding their whole login session, because this minimizes the chance of being caught red-handed.
Is it true that Congress is going to change copyright to expire 75 years after cryogenic containment fails or the sun explodes, whichever happens later?
Not going to happen.
Politicians aren't stupid (about things like this), you know --- they can only do that once. In the "add twenty years every twenty years" scenario, the politicians end up earning a lot more.
Are you the PrecambrianRabbit who's writing this thesis, per chance?
My understanding of the theory of defeating polygraph tests is to do exactly the opposite. Without showing external signs, one tries to constantly think about extremely stressful life experiences, except when one is lying. This technique supposedly manages to "move up the baseline", so that the extra stress from lying isn't noticeable. (BTW, this could very well just be random bullshit I read about a long, long, time ago --- I claim no real experience here.)
In this case, it would seem to be even more trivial. Just make 10 different terrorist plans for 10 different cities, and choose the target randomly just before the attack. In that case, the test will never be able to attain a better than 10% accuracy, no matter how real the 100% result this research has uncovered actually is (the fact that it's 100% seems really, really suspicious to me --- is this perhaps, er, covered by a patent owned by some startup?).
OK, I really wouldn't care about the controversy about causation here (personally I'm agnostic about that), if only it would drive investment into developing technology which humanity is going to need eventually anyway.
Trying to solve the problem with a space sunshade would hopefully improve our ability to engineer large structures in space and improve the chances we might be able to survive there and eventually migrate to other parts of the solar system or even other solar systems. Better not to have all one's eggs in the same basket, eh?
Trying to attain a new relatively clean power source (some kind of fusion, preferably aneutronic) would probably improve our ability to survive in general, also, even if the greenhouse gases aren't the problem. Assuming it wouldn't make it trivial for Joe Normal to build extremely powerful and destructive weapons, of course.
The judge did not say it was okay, only that MGE failed to provide sufficient proof of damages (they tried to claim damages against the total revenue of the division and not just revenue related to servicing MGE UPS products)
And in a totally ironic turnaround, part of the judge's justification stripping MGE of the $4+M judgment was that "Texas courts have not adopted the RESTATEMENT (THIRD) OF UNFAIR COMPETITION in its entirety".
So MGE lost because of its forum shopping (in part). Priceless!
It's a scanned document with physical blacking out, unlike the last few failed PDF censorship attempts in which there were merely added black objects obscuring the undeleted original text.
Might still be able to get some information out with image processing, but I doubt we're going to get a lot. I'm off to give it a shot.
To prevent "premature unnecessary debate" --- gotta give them credit that at least they're not lying about their motivations, unlike using "national security" to keep ACTA negotiations secret.
You really didn't address anything I wrote about in my second post, so I'm a bit confused.
My post was about the big difference in the way copyright law relates to news stories and the way it relates to wholly creative works like, for example, a book which is totally fiction. Because copyright doesn't cover facts, the only protection which copyright gives a news story is protecting the way the facts are expressed. If a newspaper pays lots of money to send a reporter to a far-away and dangerous place and he works hard to gather lots of facts and then writes a story about these facts, I can write a new news report about these facts without worrying that I am breaking copyright law. OTOH, I am freeloading on the work of the newspaper and the reporter, which is why I said some people might find this morally wrong (especially if I don't disclose the source for the facts of my news story).
> People like to say that copying someone's work isn't depriving them of
> anything because they still have the original.
There are lots of legal ways to use people's work which are still under copyright. Parody, fair use, etc. Do you believe all of these legal uses are morally wrong? Interesting.
BTW, one of the major reasons why people harp on "not depriving" is because the other side harps on "it's my property just like my car". Both are wrong.
As the first AC replied to you, there is no such limit, and the court looks at a lot of factors in order to decide if a use is fair use. One of these factors is if the reuser has invested sufficient creativity of his own in relation to the amount used.
It could be perfectly legal for tens of thousands of individuals to each choose a short time period out of a movie, and then invest the time and effort to analyze it and write commentary, thus making it possible to distribute 100% of the movie legally. Of course, it's never going to actually happen, because as time goes on it will be easier and easier to illegally distribute the movie without all of this rigamarole.
You are in effect taking someone's work and making money from it "ads" and depriving them of their money "ads" with out their permission.
But isn't just rewriting the news article also "taking someone's work"? Yet, somehow, it is perfectly legal. But possibly morally wrong, depending on one's outlook.
Yet another example to back up my post, which, by the way, was not restricting itself to the narrow subject of news/copy/paste, but was a general reply to knee-jerk pro-copyright rhetoric.
People need to understand that copyright violations are harmful and often mean the difference between someone getting a paycheck and not. Its not just billion dollar companies who are harmed. So if you pirate anything, I assume, unless you are complete hypocrite, you never accept a paycheck. Otherwise, you're working hard to deprive someone else of theirs - despite their hard work.
People need to understand that copyright violations are not always harmful and do not necessarily mean the difference between someone getting a paycheck and not. In fact, some of us both pirate and pay, it's just that copyright law is currently so f***ed up that we need to break the law to use the content that we pay for in the way we want to. Or it prevents us from obtaining content which doesn't generate income for anyone anyway. So if you pirate something, I assume, unless you are a complete hypocrite, you actually think about whether what you are doing is morally correct. Otherwise, if you automatically believe that merely because something is against the law it is morally wrong, you're showing a complete lack of imagination.
I disagree. Return copyright to sane lengths (perhaps 20 years) and make all noncommercial use noninfringing use, and make it only apply to tangible media (books, CDs, DVDs) and the problems all disappear.
I'd throw a big party to celebrate! Unfortunately, the point of my post wasn't that there cannot exist a near-optimal copyright law, it was that there is no driving mechanism in reality which would drive us to this outcome.
Ah, and I think you should consider adding a cap on the damages for commercial use of an orphaned work which is a fixed percentage of the profits or of the gross income, if the creator should somehow pop up again (assuming due diligence has been done by the reuser). Oh, and in that case the original creator cannot bar continued reuse by the reuser, his only rights are that he continues to get paid.
> because if they're written smartly they'll be indistinguishable from Informative +1
One could merely "string-out" the other side until one was convinced it was human, before actually answering / believing. This obviously will push AI further along as advertisers struggle to get more and more convincing bots. OTOH, that might not happen if a high enough percentage of the public just falls for it at the first iteration --- in that case, it would be more practical to transfer any real attempts at discourse off to a call center in India. Actually, I have the impression that a lot of customer support is done this way already (bot replies with standard quoting of FAQs which escalate to interacting with a real human after a few iterations).
I'm not sure if you're making fun of me via my later post that creative people are just building on the public domain, or you're deriding my use of the "sheeple" term, which I probably heard first on Slashdot, actually, if I remember correctly (even though it seems to have a much longer history --- see the Wikipedia entry).
Perhaps one could say I'm uninspiredly cribbing from the Slashdot group mind?
OK, OK, I admit it. It just didn't have the same "ring" after it was properly qualified. Your comment about nuclear weapons is justified. However, the reality of the situation is that there are so many layers of laws now that even if you tried hard you probably couldn't avoid breaking some of them. (See this post and the thread it's in.) So if you read my comment as meaning "break any law", you don't really need to qualify it.
<offtopic>(BTW, I've always admired your inspired Slashdot name).</offtopic>
What I was talking about is a decoy source release "leaked" from the company itself via a fake anonymous source that contains inefficient or misleading code which isn't the code being used to compile the binary release.
Ah, yes, I admit I didn't understand you there.
Your scenario in which we wait on anonymous sources to leak code is fraught with problems like these.
The only problem is the problem which you have already stated: we might not get the real source code. Yes that might be a problem, and I pointed out how not having copyright partially improves this situation.
The other "problems", however, are just in your mind --- if MegacorpX leaks out useful source code which isn't the "right" source code, it's still useful. Or not, and whoever vets the commits is responsible to figure that out. Just like now.
"Sheeple." Ugh.
Anyway, the thing about copyright is that it protects things that aren't necessities. We're not entitled to movies and music. They're entertainment we are able to enjoy. Copyright's primary purpose is to make sure people make money from their work so that we have an economy, which is a benefit to society. If nobody pays anyone for their work, you won't have the amount and quality of art as before, and culture would suffer. It's common sense.
Somehow I think you lack imagination, and culture would survive quite well, even without copyright. Not that it's going to happen, anyway.
I never understood the complaint when Slugboat Willy was about to fall into public domain. We have a right to Mickey Mouse? Who cares about it? If Disney is still making money off of it, why shouldn't they still own it?
Now it's my turn to say "ugh". Corporations, unlike people, are virtually immortal. Your paragraph is something which could only have been dreamed up by someone who doesn't actually create any "culture", because the vast majority of the those who do create culture (the ones who aren't too full of themselves) will tell you that they are just recycling and revitalizing material from the public domain. You know, the public domain which no one would have if corporations could maintain copyright forever (by showing a profit of $1 even on things which no one is currently interested in and which they don't even sell --- make way for the new form of Hollywood accounting).
We live in a different era than when copyright was first created, an era in which media is far more pervasive and long-term than before, so it makes sense to extend copyrights to reflect today's media reality.
Actually, in our era, the term of copyright should be shortened because practically no works generate any significant income after 10 years. Didn't you listen to Andy Warhol (well, actually it's because the production of content is now so much more widespread that most older content just gets drowned in all the new stuff)? I think something like 15 years from publishing plus another 15 years if you pay to extend would be plenty.
> a law that 100% guarantees source code access
No law guarantees anything.
> and legal options in cases of theft?
Theft? You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.
> How would you even know the anonymous leak was the real thing and not a decoy?
Code review, my boy, code review. How do we know any submitted patch to a GPL project is "the real thing"? This doesn't create any additional vulnerabilities which weren't already there.
> when the groups have the word "pirate" right in their names
When was the last time a political party with a name like "copyright reform party" succeeded? Using "pirate" is just good marketing and a droll way to turn the rhetoric of the pro-copyright side on its head. In fact, the Swedish Pirate Party got its name from the Piratbyran who got its name from humorously dropping the "anti" from the pro-copyright side's "AntiPiratbyran".
> You may be able to pirate the binaries, but you wouldn't have the
> freedom of source code access that the GPL is supposed to protect.
Ah, but any anonymous leak of that source code would have no protection, either. (OK, not exactly, the leaker might still be liable for damages of revealing a trade secret. Might even be criminal. But the code itself would automatically become free of that protection after it's been leaked, a la, RC4.) Somehow, I think it might not be as bad as you paint it.
> You can't get rid of copyright completely and wouldn't want to. Without copyright, companies
> could steal GPL code without consequence because the GPL is a copyright license
> and is thus protected by copyright law.
Much as I like the availability of the GPL and other copy-left licenses, if you would give me a magic wand which would erase copyright, I would have a hard time deciding if I should use it. Face it, copyright can never really get fixed --- as in, optimally benefit society as opposed to large corporations --- because "society" doesn't help elect politicians since most of "society" are sheeple who vote for the politician with the biggest advertising budget (supplied in part by, guess who, large corporations) as opposed to voting for politicians who reform copyright laws.