People with money are usually pretty conservative with it, they want to know they're getting something good for their money so they might not like it if you told them you wanted to try something out that you don't know will work.
I don't think so. Consider anyone else who provides a service: a barber, for example. Before you pay him to cut your hair, you have no idea how well he's going to do it. And yet this hasn't killed the market for haircutting, has it? You can get recommendations by word of mouth, you can look at examples of his past work, or you can just take the plunge and spend $10 to find out first-hand how good he is.
There was a time when paying up front was standard and there is a reason all the great artists died in poverty.
I don't think so. Copyright hasn't magically made it a cinch to earn big bucks; there are a lot more people in the world today, so the tip of the iceberg is proportionally bigger, but the vast majority still don't earn much. The web is full of horror stories from musicians who end up owing their labels, etc.
In any case this would greatly reduce the number of works being made. Copyright is a thin wrapper around the product "art" that allows it to be subject to the basic selection mechanisms present in capitalism.
As I pointed out above, the wrapper is unnecessary. Capitalism handles services just fine already.
Furthermore, the wrapper isn't exactly thin: look at all the invasive laws that it needs to support it. In order for artists to treat their work as discrete little manufactured packages, your computer, your DVD player, your ISP, your HDTV set, and your cable box/DVR all have to conspire against you. Entire classes of works are prevented from being made or pushed underground (e.g. mash-ups), while other works have to be modified (e.g. movies released on DVD with the original soundtracks cut out) or tied up in court (e.g. The Wind Done Gone).
Yes but you don't get paid for unwanted work with today's system either.
Right.. what happens under today's system is the opposite: you do work without knowing whether or not you'll get paid for it. You invest a ton of time up front, you get a loan from your publisher, and if there isn't as much demand for your work as you hoped, then you have to pay it back and you've wasted all that time.
But you SHOULD get paid when people clearly want your work (download it via P2P) and simply decide to be cheap and not pay for it.
How much should you get paid, exactly, when it's evident that people are unwilling to pay the price you're asking? The free market is the primary way we determine prices. You say "they're just being cheap", I say "the market has spoken and the optimal price is $0".
Great plan you got there. So who is going to make new movies, tv programs, books and vidoe games and operating systems then? Nobody, because you just removed their incentive.
I hate to burst your bubble, but copyright isn't the only way to provide an incentive for the creation of such works.
Think about it. What is a barber's incentive for cutting hair? Does he need a government-enforced monopoly on cutting hair in order to make a profit? No. He does a service and he gets paid for it. A customer comes into the barber shop and asks for a haircut; the barber cuts his hair; and then the customer leaves, and his business relationship with the barber is over. There's no law saying he can't show his new haircut to as many people as he wants, or cut his roommate's hair in the same style.
Authors, musicians, programmers, etc. can use the very same model. The fundamental thing today's artists (or at least their lobbyists) seem to have forgotten is you can get paid for your work with no hassle at all, as long as you wait until someone agrees to pay you before you start working.
Imagine this announcement going up on your favorite band's web site: "We know you've been waiting for our next album, and here's your chance to speed it up. It's going to cost us $20,000 in studio time and living expenses to record and produce the album, and we currently have $2000 of that. Click here to contribute to the production; we suggest $15 but you can send any amount. When the album is finished, we'll release it for everyone to download and share, absolutely free. We'd like to start work by January 1st, so if we haven't reached our goal by then, you'll get a refund and we'll ditch the project."
Who says other goods are more interchangeable? If you want a Ferrari a Fiat Panda isn't going to do it for you. If you want Kellog's Cornflakes Granola won't help you.
Well, I say they are, and I think most consumers would agree. You can buy more than one kind of corn flakes and more than one kind of sports car. The differences between a Ferrari and, say, a Lamborghini or a Viper are miniscule compared to the difference between one song and another.
But other than trademarks (which have virtually no effect on the availability of replacement products) and patents (which expire much sooner than copyright), there's nothing stopping you from building your own car identical to the Ferrari, or making your own corn flakes identical to Kellogg's. And if you buy a Ferrari, there's nothing stopping you from reselling it to someone else - try that with a file you've downloaded from iTMS!
[P2P] is obviously free and it doesn't take much effort to take a published work and put it on P2P while it does cost a lot to create said work and that money is only spent in the hope to see sales of the work bringing in more money.
Nobody's forcing them to spend that money, you know. There's a perfectly good way to create artistic works, and get paid for it, without the possibility of having your sales undermined by P2P users: get the money up front. Find an audience who's willing to pay for your services before you spend all that time and money writing something. If you'd rather do the work now and look for money later, pretending that a song is something you can manufacture and sell in discrete units like bicycles or cereal, then you're taking the risk that people will get it without paying, because all the laws in the world can't change the fact that a song is information and it's impossible to stop the spread of information.
Furthermore, just because you spent money "in the hope to see sales" doesn't mean you deserve to get paid. That was the original point of the turd polishing metaphor: you don't get paid just for doing work in our society, you get paid for doing work that people are willing to pay you for.
But hey, if you want to stick with the 19" CRT and keep telling yourself how much more "fun" you're having than the rest of us, knock yourself out!
"The rest of us"? Just how common do you think it is to own an HDTV set? I know exactly one person in real life who has one, and it's an old projection unit; every other widescreen TV I've ever seen has been in a business.
We are the rest of us, the people who don't want to shell out $1000+ for a television (OK, $600+ for a tiny one). I'm sure it'd be "fun" to have a high definition TV, but it's even more fun to have gas in your car and a roof over your head, you know?
They used to have an exemption for freeware (PC only - free handheld apps still needed to pay), but it looks like even that's gone now. Man, what a bunch of greedy assholes.
If there's a demand for polished turds, yes. But if The Market says "We want turds, but we don't want to pay for them" while the Turd Polisher #1 says "My turds are $3" then The Market needs to find Turd Polisher #2, who's giving them away for free, instead of subverting Turd Polisher #1's business... and let him instead realize that he's pricing himself out of the market.
This is, of course, exactly what file sharing enables. The Market says "we want 'Hit Me Baby One More Time', but we don't want to pay for it", while Britney and iTunes Music Store say "that song is $0.99". The Market finds P2P, which is giving the song away for free, and perhaps iTMS will realize that it's pricing itself out of the market.
Right?
Because unlike polished turds, one song is not interchangeable with another. If you want to hear "Hit Me Baby One More Time", but you don't want to pay the asking price, you aren't going to be satisfied with another song that has different lyrics and different music, even if it is free. It's not the same thing.
As far as subverting another's business, isn't Turd Polisher #2 already subverting #1's business in your example? TP #1 feels exactly the same impact when TP #2 gives away the same thing for free as Britney and Apple feel when P2P users give away the same song for free. #1 isn't losing any product, he's just losing the potential money he could've gotten if he were the only turd polisher in town--just as Britney isn't losing any product, she's just losing the potential money she could've gotten if she were the only source for copies of that song.
This is a great system because it means they can constantly have hamburger patties on the grill, knowing that if they don't get sold as burgers, they can be turned into chili (where they don't need to be as fresh). I'm guessing this is one of the reasons Wendy's is so damn fast.
Because, see, 64kbps is downright painful to listen to, while 128K is good enough to listen to and enjoy, but its limitations become readily apparant on high-end stereo systems (or good headphones).
And, just like "good headphones", very few people actually own the kind of high-end video equipment you need to appreciate HD movies, so there isn't much incentive to switch away from DVD. HDTV sets are still prohibitively expensive.
It looks like Authoring blocks CSS in the burner's firmware, but the media is physically able to hold a key (link, also see this PDF):
DVD-R General media ships with the area where the CSS information is stored pre-blocked by the manufacturer. While DVD-R Authoring discs are not blocked in this manner, the area is unconditionally prewritten with null data when a first recording session is performed on a disc by the only available DVD-R Authoring drive (Pioneer's DVR-S201). Indeed, DVD-R's inability to handle CSS information almost single-handedly rules out DVD-R's use as mastering media for DVD-Video in the studio entertainment space where most DVD-Videos to date have fit.
Tivo and the likes will simply revert to closed source software or stick with GPLv2.
If they want to develop their own proprietary software, more power to them. The point of making these changes to the GPL is to prevent them from making a profit out of pissing on the very freedoms the GPL stands for. Let them do their own damn development work if they aren't going to let us hack the hardware we bought.
Make no mistake, no serious hardware vendor is going to use the GPLv3 in it's current form. It simply places to much limits on what they can do with it...
Hardware vendors don't choose the license, open source developers do. The vendors can either loosen the restrictions on running modified software, stick with software that's distributed under a license that allows them to restrict mods, or develop their own, and any of those are fine with me.
Maybe you should take a look at that list and see how many of those people have suffered drug/alcohol related deaths (John Belushi, Chris Farley, Lane Staley, Kurt Cobain, Elvis Presley) or serious setbacks in their careers (Robert Downey Jr., Members of Aerosmith in the early 80's (luckily they turned it around)etc.).
I guess you forgot the point you were originally making. Let me remind you: it wasn't "drugs are bad" or "drugs can kill you" or "drugs will slow down your career". You were saying drug users wouldn't have the means to buy their drugs without turning to crime. I have disproved that claim by providing examples of drug users who managed to do just that - and those are just the famous ones.
I now imagine you sitting around in your parent's basement shooting up or smoking and trying desperately to justify it, but if that works for you, by all means carry on.
With such an overactive imagination, you must be a druggie yourself! FWIW, my parents live across town, my apartment doesn't have a basement, and I am gainfully employed in the IT field.
Under rule changes now in the works, commercial vendors could create protected DVDs on kiosks and in small custom runs. Individual consumers could legally record a variety of selected content. Both would require special blank DVD discs that will use the Content Scramble System (CSS) for encryption and will be compatible with the millions of existing DVD players in the marketplace today.
This isn't just a software change. See, the whole reason CSS is effective (to any extent) is that DVD burners and blank DVD media are designed to prevent you from writing CSS keys to a disc. The media comes with the key area pre-burned with zeros (or physically embossed, for RW discs) and the burners refuse to write there anyway. Even with the expensive DVD-R for Authoring format, you can't burn a CSS protected disc today, AFAICT.
I guess the question I have is... why should games NOT have such similar measures (I'm in favor of NO limitations to who can buy actually) while porn and movies do? And if you believe that games should be freely buyable, would you consider allowing porn and any rated movie to also be freely buyable? What about cigerettes and alcohol?
I do think games should be freely buyable - or at least, maintain the system of voluntary ratings that we have now. Movie ratings are also voluntary, by the way; there's no law in the US that says a theater can't let children into Terminator 3 or The Passion of the Christ.
Porn? Yes, I think the restrictions on selling porn should also be voluntary. Remember, pornography has never been shown to have a harmful effect on minors, even though people who are opposed love to call it "harmful" or "dangerous" or "inappropriate". The laws against it are based on nothing but gut feelings. Also, laws or no laws, horny teenagers will get their hands on porn.
Cigarettes and alcohol? Well, the fact that those substances are addictive complicates it a little, but I still have to say yes. The variety of drinking ages around the world shows that there is no One True Age when you're suddenly Ready To Drink, and the system we have today is ridiculous: kids are expected not to drink until they turn 21, when suddenly the floodgates open and they're free to buy whatever they want, even though they don't know a thing about alcohol's effects or their own tolerance (assuming they haven't been drinking illegally all that time). Wouldn't it be nice if they could learn to drink responsibly?
Think about this one for a while: An open-source e-voting system so everyone can verify there is nothing messing with the election, released under GPLv3 to make sure everyone and his dog can update the code on the voting hardware. Thats one example, but you could add lots of others, e.g. drive/fly by wire sytems etc.
Yup, so for cases like that, they shouldn't use GPL'd software. Run the voting machines on BSD, and save the GPL for cases where people with access to the hardware really should be able to modify the software, like TiVo.
Property is that which you physically and exclusively control, and have created or otherwise have a natural right to.
I disagree that you have a natural right to prevent someone else from having information.
It doesn't matter that you haven't destroyed your diary. The property was the secret, and you no longer have that secret.
You're confusing a thing with an attribute of a thing. Let's say I have a red mailbox, and you come by in the middle of the night and paint it blue. Have I "lost" my red mailbox? Have you stolen my red mailbox from me? Only if we're playing pointless semantic games. I still have the mailbox; it just isn't red anymore. If you polled a number of reasonable people, I don't think they'd agree that the red mailbox was stolen. You might argue "the property was the redness, and you no longer have that redness", but I don't think you'd find many reasonable people to agree with that either.
This buyer, could instead have burgled your house, taken a photo of your diary, and thereby STOLEN your secret.
Again, more semantic games. He's gained some knowledge; I've lost nothing. My own desire to keep some information hidden from the rest of the world is not property, and it doesn't deserve the same protections or moral status as property. Making me sad by sharing something I don't want shared is nothing like stealing my property.
Unfortunately, copyright makes people think that all intellectual property is a pretence, even private intellectual property. This is because copyright is about pretending that public intellectual property is still privately owned when it plainly isn't. So, don't throw the baby out with the bathwater when you ignore copyright.
I don't see a justification for "intellectual property" at all. Ideas and information are abstract concepts which can sometimes be embedded in property, but just like a color, a length, a weight, etc., they aren't property themselves (except in the OOP sense of the word).
Look, if you want it to be illegal for someone to break into your house and make copies of your diary, there's already a perfectly good law against breaking and entering. You could even pass a new law, making it illegal to share any information that was gained by breaking and entering, without having to classify that information as "intellectual property" and pretend it's "owned" by someone.
You're reclaiming the public's rightful ownership of published intellectual property, you are not also claiming ownership of people's private intellectual property - that's still theirs to keep or sell.
I don't believe there can be such a thing as "ownership" of ideas or information. You can't own the words in your diary any more than you can own the digits of pi or the number of hairs on your head. Ownership is a way to deal with scarcity by letting one person decide how a piece of scarce property may be used. It's unnecessary when we're dealing with something that can be shared freely without diminishing it or interfering with anyone else's use, and since ownership inherently limits the rights of everyone who isn't the owner, we shouldn't have ownership at all when it isn't necessary.
It is not the copy that is being stolen, but the private property. The property ceases to be private once a copy is removed from private possession - irrespective of whether any copy remains. Thus the theft causes loss from the owner - the owner has lost their private property, for it is now no longer private.
Er, OK... so I guess what you really mean is the privateness (privacy?) of the property is being stolen. The original author still has the property, but it isn't private anymore.
But even the privateness isn't really being stolen, I think. When you steal something, you gain it while its owner loses it. In order to steal the privateness of something, it would have to go from being someone else's private property to being your private property. However, when you make a copy of someone else's private work, it isn't private to anyone anymore. The privateness is simply destroyed. If you must draw an analogy to another crime, I think the most appropriate one would be vandalism.
If that wasn't clear, consider this analogy: you own a bunch of gold, which is valuable because of its scarcity. I discover a huge gold mine in my back yard, dig up the gold, and start selling it, which drives down the price of gold. Your valuable property is no longer as valuable as it was. But I haven't "stolen your valuable property", have I? You still have the property; I've simply made it less valuable. I haven't even stolen the value of it, because my gold isn't worth any more than yours.
The other issue is 'privacy'. If you privately create an intangible work, this has all the same aspects of property that a tangible work would have, say a basket. That private work remains yours alone until you give it or a copy to someone else (typically in an exchange).
All the same aspects? Not really. If you give away your basket, you won't have it anymore. If you give away [a copy of] your intangible work, however, you still have it. You have to go out of your way to stop having it, by deleting the original.
Thus, it is indeed possible to steal an unreleased work, whether intangible or not.
Only if you define stealing as "getting something without paying". I think a more sensible definition is "taking something away from its rightful owner".
Eh, I don't use Oggs anyway, just making a point. The only way the MediaMVP could really be useful to me is if I could encode my laptop's video and audio outputs as MPEG (or some other supported format) and stream it to the MVP in real time.
Well, with those small requirements, you can already do that with an S-Video cable from your video out on your video card...with wires. Or get MediaMVP and hook it up to an external wireless device of some sort for wireless.
A wired connection is unsatisfactory because I'd have to run two 12' cables across my floor to the couch, plug them in and out every time I set up the laptop, work the cables around people and furniture, etc.
The MediaMVP looks interesting, but it also looks like it's only good for a subset of things the laptop can play. Can't play Flash, YouTube/Google Video, Vorbis or AAC music, internet radio that requires a password...
My tech-savvy friends who can afford anything they want set up a huge HDTV with TiVo, cable, and DVD players--then sit in front of it with a laptop on their knees. They use Google and AIM while watching TV, but they keep their 2-foot and 10-foot gadgets separate.
That's exactly what I do. I'd love to be able to bring some of my computer media over to the TV, but I don't want to keep a noisy PC running all the time, I don't want to string a keyboard and mouse over to my coffee table, and I don't want to string cables from my stereo to the couch and have to plug in the laptop to use it on the big screen.
Actually, it'd be great if I could just use my TV and stereo as alternate display and sound devices for the laptop... wirelessly. Plug a little box into my entertainment center, then just use some control panel on the laptop to turn the TV into a secondary desktop, and drag a media player over to it.
Even if I could just do that with audio, it'd be a step forward. (I think Bluetooth could handle the audio, but (1) Bluetooth's range is kinda small, and (2) WiFi interferes with it, and my wireless router is right next to the TV.)
Why isn't this possible yet? Or is it, and I've just overlooked it?
And just to play devil's advocate: why does everyone revolt so badly when our work is not being credited? We collectively abuse lot's of other licenses, whether music, software etc.
Because taking credit for another person's work is fraud. It's as close as you can get to actually "stealing" information, taking it (or at least the credit for it) away from its author. Sharing music, on the other hand, doesn't involve deceiving anyone about the origins of the music, unless you're intentionally mislabeling the files. I believe deceiving someone about the authorship of a work is far, far worse than simply disregarding the author's wishes about how it may be distributed, and I believe a lot of slashdotters agree.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think so. Consider anyone else who provides a service: a barber, for example. Before you pay him to cut your hair, you have no idea how well he's going to do it. And yet this hasn't killed the market for haircutting, has it? You can get recommendations by word of mouth, you can look at examples of his past work, or you can just take the plunge and spend $10 to find out first-hand how good he is.
I don't think so. Copyright hasn't magically made it a cinch to earn big bucks; there are a lot more people in the world today, so the tip of the iceberg is proportionally bigger, but the vast majority still don't earn much. The web is full of horror stories from musicians who end up owing their labels, etc.
As I pointed out above, the wrapper is unnecessary. Capitalism handles services just fine already.
Furthermore, the wrapper isn't exactly thin: look at all the invasive laws that it needs to support it. In order for artists to treat their work as discrete little manufactured packages, your computer, your DVD player, your ISP, your HDTV set, and your cable box/DVR all have to conspire against you. Entire classes of works are prevented from being made or pushed underground (e.g. mash-ups), while other works have to be modified (e.g. movies released on DVD with the original soundtracks cut out) or tied up in court (e.g. The Wind Done Gone).
Right.. what happens under today's system is the opposite: you do work without knowing whether or not you'll get paid for it. You invest a ton of time up front, you get a loan from your publisher, and if there isn't as much demand for your work as you hoped, then you have to pay it back and you've wasted all that time.
How much should you get paid, exactly, when it's evident that people are unwilling to pay the price you're asking? The free market is the primary way we determine prices. You say "they're just being cheap", I say "the market has spoken and the optimal price is $0".
That isn't plastic, it's energon.
I hate to burst your bubble, but copyright isn't the only way to provide an incentive for the creation of such works.
Think about it. What is a barber's incentive for cutting hair? Does he need a government-enforced monopoly on cutting hair in order to make a profit? No. He does a service and he gets paid for it. A customer comes into the barber shop and asks for a haircut; the barber cuts his hair; and then the customer leaves, and his business relationship with the barber is over. There's no law saying he can't show his new haircut to as many people as he wants, or cut his roommate's hair in the same style.
Authors, musicians, programmers, etc. can use the very same model. The fundamental thing today's artists (or at least their lobbyists) seem to have forgotten is you can get paid for your work with no hassle at all, as long as you wait until someone agrees to pay you before you start working.
Imagine this announcement going up on your favorite band's web site: "We know you've been waiting for our next album, and here's your chance to speed it up. It's going to cost us $20,000 in studio time and living expenses to record and produce the album, and we currently have $2000 of that. Click here to contribute to the production; we suggest $15 but you can send any amount. When the album is finished, we'll release it for everyone to download and share, absolutely free. We'd like to start work by January 1st, so if we haven't reached our goal by then, you'll get a refund and we'll ditch the project."
Well, I say they are, and I think most consumers would agree. You can buy more than one kind of corn flakes and more than one kind of sports car. The differences between a Ferrari and, say, a Lamborghini or a Viper are miniscule compared to the difference between one song and another.
But other than trademarks (which have virtually no effect on the availability of replacement products) and patents (which expire much sooner than copyright), there's nothing stopping you from building your own car identical to the Ferrari, or making your own corn flakes identical to Kellogg's. And if you buy a Ferrari, there's nothing stopping you from reselling it to someone else - try that with a file you've downloaded from iTMS!
Nobody's forcing them to spend that money, you know. There's a perfectly good way to create artistic works, and get paid for it, without the possibility of having your sales undermined by P2P users: get the money up front. Find an audience who's willing to pay for your services before you spend all that time and money writing something. If you'd rather do the work now and look for money later, pretending that a song is something you can manufacture and sell in discrete units like bicycles or cereal, then you're taking the risk that people will get it without paying, because all the laws in the world can't change the fact that a song is information and it's impossible to stop the spread of information.
Furthermore, just because you spent money "in the hope to see sales" doesn't mean you deserve to get paid. That was the original point of the turd polishing metaphor: you don't get paid just for doing work in our society, you get paid for doing work that people are willing to pay you for.
"The rest of us"? Just how common do you think it is to own an HDTV set? I know exactly one person in real life who has one, and it's an old projection unit; every other widescreen TV I've ever seen has been in a business.
We are the rest of us, the people who don't want to shell out $1000+ for a television (OK, $600+ for a tiny one). I'm sure it'd be "fun" to have a high definition TV, but it's even more fun to have gas in your car and a roof over your head, you know?
They used to have an exemption for freeware (PC only - free handheld apps still needed to pay), but it looks like even that's gone now. Man, what a bunch of greedy assholes.
This is, of course, exactly what file sharing enables. The Market says "we want 'Hit Me Baby One More Time', but we don't want to pay for it", while Britney and iTunes Music Store say "that song is $0.99". The Market finds P2P, which is giving the song away for free, and perhaps iTMS will realize that it's pricing itself out of the market.
Right?
Because unlike polished turds, one song is not interchangeable with another. If you want to hear "Hit Me Baby One More Time", but you don't want to pay the asking price, you aren't going to be satisfied with another song that has different lyrics and different music, even if it is free. It's not the same thing.
As far as subverting another's business, isn't Turd Polisher #2 already subverting #1's business in your example? TP #1 feels exactly the same impact when TP #2 gives away the same thing for free as Britney and Apple feel when P2P users give away the same song for free. #1 isn't losing any product, he's just losing the potential money he could've gotten if he were the only turd polisher in town--just as Britney isn't losing any product, she's just losing the potential money she could've gotten if she were the only source for copies of that song.
AVI is no good for streaming. That's why Windows Media Video is encoded into an ASF container (typically renamed to
This is a great system because it means they can constantly have hamburger patties on the grill, knowing that if they don't get sold as burgers, they can be turned into chili (where they don't need to be as fresh). I'm guessing this is one of the reasons Wendy's is so damn fast.
And, just like "good headphones", very few people actually own the kind of high-end video equipment you need to appreciate HD movies, so there isn't much incentive to switch away from DVD. HDTV sets are still prohibitively expensive.
If they want to develop their own proprietary software, more power to them. The point of making these changes to the GPL is to prevent them from making a profit out of pissing on the very freedoms the GPL stands for. Let them do their own damn development work if they aren't going to let us hack the hardware we bought.
Hardware vendors don't choose the license, open source developers do. The vendors can either loosen the restrictions on running modified software, stick with software that's distributed under a license that allows them to restrict mods, or develop their own, and any of those are fine with me.
I guess you forgot the point you were originally making. Let me remind you: it wasn't "drugs are bad" or "drugs can kill you" or "drugs will slow down your career". You were saying drug users wouldn't have the means to buy their drugs without turning to crime. I have disproved that claim by providing examples of drug users who managed to do just that - and those are just the famous ones.
With such an overactive imagination, you must be a druggie yourself! FWIW, my parents live across town, my apartment doesn't have a basement, and I am gainfully employed in the IT field.
This isn't just a software change. See, the whole reason CSS is effective (to any extent) is that DVD burners and blank DVD media are designed to prevent you from writing CSS keys to a disc. The media comes with the key area pre-burned with zeros (or physically embossed, for RW discs) and the burners refuse to write there anyway. Even with the expensive DVD-R for Authoring format, you can't burn a CSS protected disc today, AFAICT.
In that case, see Wikipedia's list of people known to be addicted to opiates. They managed to hold jobs too.
Perhaps you've heard of Sigmund Freud, cocaine user? Carl Sagan, marijuana user? They managed to hold down jobs.
Furthermore, there are a lot of jobs that aren't very "demanding", so to speak. Even a crackhead or meth addict can work in a call center.
I do think games should be freely buyable - or at least, maintain the system of voluntary ratings that we have now. Movie ratings are also voluntary, by the way; there's no law in the US that says a theater can't let children into Terminator 3 or The Passion of the Christ.
Porn? Yes, I think the restrictions on selling porn should also be voluntary. Remember, pornography has never been shown to have a harmful effect on minors, even though people who are opposed love to call it "harmful" or "dangerous" or "inappropriate". The laws against it are based on nothing but gut feelings. Also, laws or no laws, horny teenagers will get their hands on porn.
Cigarettes and alcohol? Well, the fact that those substances are addictive complicates it a little, but I still have to say yes. The variety of drinking ages around the world shows that there is no One True Age when you're suddenly Ready To Drink, and the system we have today is ridiculous: kids are expected not to drink until they turn 21, when suddenly the floodgates open and they're free to buy whatever they want, even though they don't know a thing about alcohol's effects or their own tolerance (assuming they haven't been drinking illegally all that time). Wouldn't it be nice if they could learn to drink responsibly?
Yup, so for cases like that, they shouldn't use GPL'd software. Run the voting machines on BSD, and save the GPL for cases where people with access to the hardware really should be able to modify the software, like TiVo.
I disagree that you have a natural right to prevent someone else from having information.
You're confusing a thing with an attribute of a thing. Let's say I have a red mailbox, and you come by in the middle of the night and paint it blue. Have I "lost" my red mailbox? Have you stolen my red mailbox from me? Only if we're playing pointless semantic games. I still have the mailbox; it just isn't red anymore. If you polled a number of reasonable people, I don't think they'd agree that the red mailbox was stolen. You might argue "the property was the redness, and you no longer have that redness", but I don't think you'd find many reasonable people to agree with that either.
Again, more semantic games. He's gained some knowledge; I've lost nothing. My own desire to keep some information hidden from the rest of the world is not property, and it doesn't deserve the same protections or moral status as property. Making me sad by sharing something I don't want shared is nothing like stealing my property.
I don't see a justification for "intellectual property" at all. Ideas and information are abstract concepts which can sometimes be embedded in property, but just like a color, a length, a weight, etc., they aren't property themselves (except in the OOP sense of the word).
Look, if you want it to be illegal for someone to break into your house and make copies of your diary, there's already a perfectly good law against breaking and entering. You could even pass a new law, making it illegal to share any information that was gained by breaking and entering, without having to classify that information as "intellectual property" and pretend it's "owned" by someone.
I don't believe there can be such a thing as "ownership" of ideas or information. You can't own the words in your diary any more than you can own the digits of pi or the number of hairs on your head. Ownership is a way to deal with scarcity by letting one person decide how a piece of scarce property may be used. It's unnecessary when we're dealing with something that can be shared freely without diminishing it or interfering with anyone else's use, and since ownership inherently limits the rights of everyone who isn't the owner, we shouldn't have ownership at all when it isn't necessary.
Er, OK... so I guess what you really mean is the privateness (privacy?) of the property is being stolen. The original author still has the property, but it isn't private anymore.
But even the privateness isn't really being stolen, I think. When you steal something, you gain it while its owner loses it. In order to steal the privateness of something, it would have to go from being someone else's private property to being your private property. However, when you make a copy of someone else's private work, it isn't private to anyone anymore. The privateness is simply destroyed. If you must draw an analogy to another crime, I think the most appropriate one would be vandalism.
If that wasn't clear, consider this analogy: you own a bunch of gold, which is valuable because of its scarcity. I discover a huge gold mine in my back yard, dig up the gold, and start selling it, which drives down the price of gold. Your valuable property is no longer as valuable as it was. But I haven't "stolen your valuable property", have I? You still have the property; I've simply made it less valuable. I haven't even stolen the value of it, because my gold isn't worth any more than yours.
All the same aspects? Not really. If you give away your basket, you won't have it anymore. If you give away [a copy of] your intangible work, however, you still have it. You have to go out of your way to stop having it, by deleting the original.
Only if you define stealing as "getting something without paying". I think a more sensible definition is "taking something away from its rightful owner".
Eh, I don't use Oggs anyway, just making a point. The only way the MediaMVP could really be useful to me is if I could encode my laptop's video and audio outputs as MPEG (or some other supported format) and stream it to the MVP in real time.
A wired connection is unsatisfactory because I'd have to run two 12' cables across my floor to the couch, plug them in and out every time I set up the laptop, work the cables around people and furniture, etc.
The MediaMVP looks interesting, but it also looks like it's only good for a subset of things the laptop can play. Can't play Flash, YouTube/Google Video, Vorbis or AAC music, internet radio that requires a password...
That's exactly what I do. I'd love to be able to bring some of my computer media over to the TV, but I don't want to keep a noisy PC running all the time, I don't want to string a keyboard and mouse over to my coffee table, and I don't want to string cables from my stereo to the couch and have to plug in the laptop to use it on the big screen.
Actually, it'd be great if I could just use my TV and stereo as alternate display and sound devices for the laptop... wirelessly. Plug a little box into my entertainment center, then just use some control panel on the laptop to turn the TV into a secondary desktop, and drag a media player over to it.
Even if I could just do that with audio, it'd be a step forward. (I think Bluetooth could handle the audio, but (1) Bluetooth's range is kinda small, and (2) WiFi interferes with it, and my wireless router is right next to the TV.)
Why isn't this possible yet? Or is it, and I've just overlooked it?
Because taking credit for another person's work is fraud. It's as close as you can get to actually "stealing" information, taking it (or at least the credit for it) away from its author. Sharing music, on the other hand, doesn't involve deceiving anyone about the origins of the music, unless you're intentionally mislabeling the files. I believe deceiving someone about the authorship of a work is far, far worse than simply disregarding the author's wishes about how it may be distributed, and I believe a lot of slashdotters agree.