Do you really think there is no danger of an immature mind drawing the wrong conclusions from an onslaught of such media?
Not as long as that media is controlled with an analog stick or directional pad. Maybe someday we'll have the technology to put someone in a fully immersive video game without them ever knowing they're playing a game - then I'll be worried about people learning the wrong things from video games.
GTA is about playing as an antisocial psycopath. That's what makes it fun.
GTA is about completing missions that usually involve committing crimes. Anything more antisocial or psychopathic than that is up to the player.
GTA's morals, defined in terms of what is rewarding behavior within the game, are hardly something you'd want a kid to adopt.
The same can be said of Super Mario Bros. You wouldn't want a kid learning to eat magic mushrooms and stomp on turtles, would you? Yet that isn't a side effect of playing SMB, because everyone knows it's a game, not real life, and the same is true of GTA.
Tell me how a 12yo playing GTA couldn't possibly get the idea that being a gangster is cool.
He could realize that things don't work the same way in real life as they do in video games, like any 12 year old is capable of doing. It's no more likely than a kid watching Pirates of the Caribbean and deciding to become a pirate.
Actually, killing random people can be rewarding in game terms, because they tend to drop money and occasionally weapons on the ground.
And again, this is a natural consequence of the simulation. When someone is dead, he can no longer protect his possessions. This shouldn't come as a revelation to anyone old enough to turn on the PS2.
What elements of morality are these? I think you'd find ancient Aztecs had a very different idea of morality than we do today [...] Heck, think of the suicide bombers in the Middle East. [...] It's a very different set of morals over there.
Murder and rape are pretty much universally deprecated. Even in warrior cultures or among terrorists, there's a distinction drawn between killing "us" and killing "them". That distinction occurs in our own culture too; we just have a different definition of "them".
GTA hardly shows the true consequence of a life of crime. If it were, it would not be much fun. In real life, jail or death does not mean "lose $2000 and all your weapons". When you shoot someone in the head, you wouldn't expect an ambulance to show up 30 seconds later to revive them to full health. Your analogy is misleading.
It's true that no video game, including GTA, is entirely realistic in its portrayal of violence. But my point stands: just about every video game has some element of violence, but it's the more realistic ones like GTA and Mortal Kombat that draw anger. Even something as simple as showing blood when a character gets hurt can incite angry letters from parents - witness the substitution of sweat for blood in Mortal Kombat SNES, and more recently, the excision of blood from the version of GTA sold in France and Germany. Meanwhile, no one seems to worry about whether Mario jumping on turtles is going to make kids think it's OK to kill animals, or whether Super Smash Brothers will lead to fistfights.
Cartoons can help clearly distinguish reality from fantasy. Realistic depictions are more at risk of being interpreted literally.
Any child who knows cartoons and slapstick movies aren't real also knows video games aren't real.
Whereas the pool of blood when you dash a stranger's brains out on the curb in GTA attempts to emulate reality more closely, and rewards players for this behavior.
You haven't played GTA, have you? There is no reward for killing strangers; in fact, it attracts police attention. The pool of blood is simply depicting a natural consequence, and anyone who considers it a reward in itself is twisted to begin with.
It isn't like babies are born knowing that killing people is wrong. That is something taught by society. By exposing individuals to violent/racist/etc media, you're mixing the signals. A mature person can weigh this information in their mind appropriately, but what about the child who does not have enough information to weigh it against?
I disagree - certain elements of morality are inborn. That's why certain things have been outlawed by every government ever to come into power, because there's a universal sense that they're wrong.
I think you're mistaken. The Strokes, Interpol, Pavement, Thievery Corporation, The Decemberists, Elliott Smith, and Green Day are among the popular modern bands listed on their preview pages. (I'm not a member either.)
Now, would you be able to find Britney, Christina, Chingy, Fiddy, etc.? Probably not. But you can hear any of their songs for free anyway, just by turning on your radio and waiting up to 3 minutes for Clear Channel to replay it.
Does anyone here really believe that GTA can have no negative impact on a 13yo? Sorry, I just can't buy that. He may not go out on a killing spree, but the game certainly equates violence with humor...
So did the Three Stooges, Wile E. Coyote, and every other slapstick movie or cartoon ever made.
I find it interesting that the kind of violence people are most opposed to is the most realistic kind, the kind that actually shows the consequences. If Bugs Bunny drops an anvil on Elmer Fudd, and Elmer Fudd grows a big lump on top of his head, that's a harmless sight gag... but if Tommy Vercetti punches someone until they die, that's evil and must be kept away from the kiddies.
Which lesson would you rather have your kids learning? (1) Attacking someone can hurt them, make them bleed, send them to the hospital or morgue, and send you to jail, or (2) dropping heavy objects on someone else's head is funny but won't cause any serious injury?
The same reason people think minors grow nicotine-resistant organs and the ability to think critically about politics on the eve of their 18th birthday, and they magically obtain driving ability on the eve of their 16th birthday (except in some states, where something in the groundwater makes them incapable of driving at *night* until a couple years later)...
Which is that they're too lazy to stop and think about what it is they're trying to measure. They think "Gee, you really should be mature before you start drinking alcohol... 25? No, that seems too high. Let's call it 21." But they never ask themselves how to objectively measure whether someone is "mature" enough for drinking, smoking, voting, driving, or any of these other age-restricted activities. They may not even have a good idea of what maturity means in this context, just a vague idea that some people have it, some don't, and the ones who do are usually older than the ones who don't. They pick an arbitrary number and forget about anyone who might be unfairly excluded, because after all, they'll never have to be 15 or 17 or 20 years old again.
So if you're an employee who values privacy and wants to send a bit of private personal email once in a while on your personal web mail account (say, gmail), the only way to retain that privacy is to either do all that mail through a cell phone, or install an OS that the IT people don't have a keystroke logger for.
Or just use Character Map to type all your passwords and sensitive email messages. It's a pain, but definitely doable - when I was a kid, and my parents took away my keyboard, I used to use CharMap to chat on IRC.
If they made it any more lax, they couldn't exist. There are a few non-US music stores selling non-DRM'd music, but Apple have to operate from the US and so are stuck.
eMusic is a US site, and they sell popular music without DRM, right? Apple could do so (at least with some of their tracks) if they really wanted to.
The problem is they don't want to sell DRM-free tracks, they want to sell you an iPod.
You're describing AllOfMP3's model. They charge about 2 cents a megabyte, and they offer tracks in various DRM-free formats, so you can pay more for a bigger file (longer song, higher bitrate, or lossless compression) or less for a smaller one.
Of course a poem is a sequence of words etc. BUT they are also someone's unique expression of an idea. The words/colours/waveforms are not copyrightable - the expression of the idea is.
And that expression is itself an idea: the concept of stringing these words together in this particular order.
The fact is that when you copyright a song, you're copyrighting a waveform, and when you copyright a poem, you're copyrighting a sequence of words. You can't have a monopoly over the expression without also having a monopoly of the information used to express it.
it's funny that you are so against copyright. Without copyright, you would be out of a job. The people that are paying you to code would no longer need you.
Wrong. See, I have a business model that doesn't depend on being paid by everyone who uses my software. I get paid for my labor, and if my employer wants to give the resulting code out for free, it doesn't matter to me. I get paid for programming, not for distributing copies, because I'm a programmer, not a CD duplicator.
kind of like a bank expecting people not to rob them when they are inside? Or a grocery store not to expect people to leave without paying?
In those cases, the bank and grocery store have lost something. It really isn't that hard to grasp the difference between "lost something" and "lost nothing". If someone could walk into a grocery store and magically walk out with a copy of a shopping cart full of food, leaving the originals on the store shelf, there'd be nothing wrong with that.
You obviously haven't written anything worth paying for.
Great, low-budget-and-art-house-movies 'r us meets the Karaoke Generation... who is going to invest in making commercial blockbusters with no copyright?
Oh noes! Whatever will we do without commercial blockbusters?
Your comments about copyrighting an idea is twaddle. You can't copyright an idea. Period.
Information, idea.. are the concepts really that different? I'll call it "information" if that makes you feel better.. it's just more typing.
A poem is a sequence of words; a photograph is an arrangement of colors; a song is a long and intricate waveform (as filtered by the human aural processing abilities). They exist as concepts independent of any physical form they may be embedded in. They're not property, they're attributes of property, and they cannot be owned. No one has a right to prevent anyone else from arranging colors a certain way, just as no one has a right to prevent anyone else from using a certain size or shape.
That's right. Those hippies want you to think pot is safe, but a few kilos of marijuana could easily fall off a shelf and give you a concussion, especially if they're inside a lead box!
If her music is played on the radio, or you overhear it, there is no obligation to pay for it. The actual CD (this includes digital form), however, is expected to be paid for.
Anyone who still has that expectation must've been asleep for the past few decades. Have they never heard of Kazaa? Napster? Scour? CD burning? Home taping?
I'm sure they want everyone who listens to their music in digital form to pay for it, but they're fools if they seriously expect it to happen.
As for the people who download, they're not bound by any agreement just because the artist has a wish or expectation to get paid. If I'm walking downtown and I see a guy playing music with a guitar case full of change, I know he wants my money, but that doesn't obligate me to pay him, nor to plug my ears.
It has been repeatedly explained that obeying copyright laws encourages the production of RIAA-style music, and that you, as someone who enjoys copying the RIAA's music, are working to destroy something you enjoy. That's either evil or insane, depending on the exact circumstances.
Nope, because I (like many people) am capable of weighing two potential costs and benefits against each other. Free copying may discourage the production of the RIAA's music (though the available evidence doesn't seem to bear that out), but its other positive effects outweigh that. I'm willing to give up one thing I like in order to get another thing I like even better.
Well, you earlier said it was wrong to break a promise. Have you now changed your mind?
A promise made under duress is no promise at all. If someone points a gun at me and says "agree or you're dead", and I agree, I'm not morally bound by that. I didn't really have a choice; I wouldn't expect anyone else to choose death in that situation, regardless of how they actually felt, and they shouldn't expect me to do it either. If the threat is deportation (i.e. losing my job, home, friends, and family) instead of a gun, that's not much different.
Wrong again. I simply speak English well, and understand the meanings of four-letter words.
Uh huh. Too bad that definition of "evil" is nowhere in the dictionary. It's Kant's categorical imperative.
The subject was not the possibility of eliminating copyright law, but actually whether or not is it proper for you to disregard copyright laws that do exist.
Incidentally, I've heard that European phones can't send email. Here, every phone has its own email address (handy for those eBay alerts), and you can send SMS to an email address just as you would to a phone number.
well, then so is software, music, and movies. When they are released, there is a mutual understanding they will be paid for (if they are commerical of course).
Except there isn't. When Britney Spears puts out a new CD, she doesn't ask me first if I want to pay for it. She might hope that I will, but surely she knew many people listen to music without paying for it, and she decided to make it anyway. There's no agreement between an artist and the public like there is between an account holder and a bank.
Maybe you're completely ignorant, but if so, we can change that. Go to your nearest police station or district attorney, and ask him if obeying the laws of your country is a requirement for living in that country and being unarrested.
What do you think you're explaining here? That breaking laws can lead to arrest? Gee, what a revelation.
I never agreed to obey any laws. I am aware of the potential consequences for breaking laws, and I take those consequences into consideration when I decide whether or not to obey a particular law in a particular situation, but there's no agreement between me and anyone else that I'll do so.
There, now you have heard of the social contract. If you don't agree with it, leave your country and never return. Since you believe that "reneging agreements is immoral", you now think it is immoral to violate copyrights.
Nope. Sorry, you can't enter me into an agreement; only I can do that.
Of course, since you don't (yet) agree to the social contract, you also think it's right to never pay taxes, to sell cocaine and heroin, and many other things.
You just keep on missing the point, don't you? I say it's not always wrong to break the law, and you twist that into it's *never* wrong to break the law. That's called a strawman argument: I'm sure it's easier for you to argue against that than what I really said, but there comes a time when you have to grow up and start debating people on their actual arguments, and that time for you is now, grasshoppa.
OTOH, maybe you're just blinded by your own belief that it's *always* wrong to break any law. So let me ask you, do you think it's immoral to drive 5 MPH over the speed limit when it can be done safely? How about jaywalking? Drinking alcohol one hour before one's 21st birthday? Ripping tags off of mattresses?
Seriously, if a government agent came to your doorstep with a contract reading: "I agree to obey the laws of this country, or be subject to various penalties listed in national and regional law codes", and told you to sign it or be escorted to the border, would you from then on start believing the "social contract" exists?
Do you really think a contract signed under duress like that is worth anything?
I shouldn't be surprised to see someone who doesn't know what "evil" is
If you're calling copyright infringement "evil", you've obviously lost all perspective.
An action is "evil" if it is unsustainable for everyone to do it.
Congratulations, you've read Kant.
Habitually breaking copyright restriction cannot possibly be non-evil: either you don't care for RIAA music, in which case you wouldn't want to copy it, or you do enjoy it, which means you are freeloading on other people who honestly pay. If everyone were like that, nobody would pay, and the songs wouldn't get made.
Fallacy of the excluded middle. I enjoy RIAA music, but I also enjoy plenty of other music. If copyright were eliminated, even if none of the RIAA artists ever recorded another song again, the other benefits would still outweigh that drawback.
The legislators who write the recycling law are the ones to say where the money will come from. I believe property taxes are progressive (wealthier people tend to own more valuable property), so that's a possible option for states that don't have an income tax. Or it could be a federal program instead of working at the state level, since most computers are shipped across state lines anyway.
... it's not really a viable popular form of communication, and thus [SMS prices] are steep.
Are they really? I don't think so, but I have no basis for comparison. I pay $4.99 a month for 500 messages (1 cent each if I use them all); without that package, I'd pay 10 cents to send and 2 to receive.
The pricing issue I had in mind was that placing a voice call is usually cheaper than sending a text message, because most calling plans have voice minute allowances but not SMS allowances. If it's a choice between waiting a few minutes to make a (marginally) free call, or sending an SMS now for 10 cents, many people will opt to wait.
Also, the US is not the big SMS country. It hardly has GSM!
So what? GSM is just one of a few phone standards, and analog-only cell phones are rare these days. The other digital networks (CDMA, TDMA, iDEN) all support SMS nationwide.
It's true that SMS isn't yet as popular in the United States as it is overseas, but that has more to do with pricing and tradition than technology.
Do you really own the money in your bank account? it's just 1's and 0's stored on a database somewhere.
Of course I do.. I owned the money before I deposited it, and I deposited it in the bank with the mutual understanding that it would be paid back to me upon request. That obligation from the bank to me is part of my net worth.
If I transfer all your money (which is just data) to my account, would you consider that an actionable harm?
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Do you really think there is no danger of an immature mind drawing the wrong conclusions from an onslaught of such media?
Not as long as that media is controlled with an analog stick or directional pad. Maybe someday we'll have the technology to put someone in a fully immersive video game without them ever knowing they're playing a game - then I'll be worried about people learning the wrong things from video games.
GTA is about playing as an antisocial psycopath. That's what makes it fun.
GTA is about completing missions that usually involve committing crimes. Anything more antisocial or psychopathic than that is up to the player.
GTA's morals, defined in terms of what is rewarding behavior within the game, are hardly something you'd want a kid to adopt.
The same can be said of Super Mario Bros. You wouldn't want a kid learning to eat magic mushrooms and stomp on turtles, would you? Yet that isn't a side effect of playing SMB, because everyone knows it's a game, not real life, and the same is true of GTA.
Tell me how a 12yo playing GTA couldn't possibly get the idea that being a gangster is cool.
He could realize that things don't work the same way in real life as they do in video games, like any 12 year old is capable of doing. It's no more likely than a kid watching Pirates of the Caribbean and deciding to become a pirate.
Actually, killing random people can be rewarding in game terms, because they tend to drop money and occasionally weapons on the ground.
And again, this is a natural consequence of the simulation. When someone is dead, he can no longer protect his possessions. This shouldn't come as a revelation to anyone old enough to turn on the PS2.
What elements of morality are these? I think you'd find ancient Aztecs had a very different idea of morality than we do today [...] Heck, think of the suicide bombers in the Middle East. [...] It's a very different set of morals over there.
Murder and rape are pretty much universally deprecated. Even in warrior cultures or among terrorists, there's a distinction drawn between killing "us" and killing "them". That distinction occurs in our own culture too; we just have a different definition of "them".
GTA hardly shows the true consequence of a life of crime. If it were, it would not be much fun. In real life, jail or death does not mean "lose $2000 and all your weapons". When you shoot someone in the head, you wouldn't expect an ambulance to show up 30 seconds later to revive them to full health. Your analogy is misleading.
It's true that no video game, including GTA, is entirely realistic in its portrayal of violence. But my point stands: just about every video game has some element of violence, but it's the more realistic ones like GTA and Mortal Kombat that draw anger. Even something as simple as showing blood when a character gets hurt can incite angry letters from parents - witness the substitution of sweat for blood in Mortal Kombat SNES, and more recently, the excision of blood from the version of GTA sold in France and Germany. Meanwhile, no one seems to worry about whether Mario jumping on turtles is going to make kids think it's OK to kill animals, or whether Super Smash Brothers will lead to fistfights.
Cartoons can help clearly distinguish reality from fantasy. Realistic depictions are more at risk of being interpreted literally.
Any child who knows cartoons and slapstick movies aren't real also knows video games aren't real.
Whereas the pool of blood when you dash a stranger's brains out on the curb in GTA attempts to emulate reality more closely, and rewards players for this behavior.
You haven't played GTA, have you? There is no reward for killing strangers; in fact, it attracts police attention. The pool of blood is simply depicting a natural consequence, and anyone who considers it a reward in itself is twisted to begin with.
It isn't like babies are born knowing that killing people is wrong. That is something taught by society. By exposing individuals to violent/racist/etc media, you're mixing the signals. A mature person can weigh this information in their mind appropriately, but what about the child who does not have enough information to weigh it against?
I disagree - certain elements of morality are inborn. That's why certain things have been outlawed by every government ever to come into power, because there's a universal sense that they're wrong.
I think you're mistaken. The Strokes, Interpol, Pavement, Thievery Corporation, The Decemberists, Elliott Smith, and Green Day are among the popular modern bands listed on their preview pages. (I'm not a member either.)
Now, would you be able to find Britney, Christina, Chingy, Fiddy, etc.? Probably not. But you can hear any of their songs for free anyway, just by turning on your radio and waiting up to 3 minutes for Clear Channel to replay it.
Does anyone here really believe that GTA can have no negative impact on a 13yo? Sorry, I just can't buy that. He may not go out on a killing spree, but the game certainly equates violence with humor...
So did the Three Stooges, Wile E. Coyote, and every other slapstick movie or cartoon ever made.
I find it interesting that the kind of violence people are most opposed to is the most realistic kind, the kind that actually shows the consequences. If Bugs Bunny drops an anvil on Elmer Fudd, and Elmer Fudd grows a big lump on top of his head, that's a harmless sight gag... but if Tommy Vercetti punches someone until they die, that's evil and must be kept away from the kiddies.
Which lesson would you rather have your kids learning? (1) Attacking someone can hurt them, make them bleed, send them to the hospital or morgue, and send you to jail, or (2) dropping heavy objects on someone else's head is funny but won't cause any serious injury?
The same reason people think minors grow nicotine-resistant organs and the ability to think critically about politics on the eve of their 18th birthday, and they magically obtain driving ability on the eve of their 16th birthday (except in some states, where something in the groundwater makes them incapable of driving at *night* until a couple years later)...
Which is that they're too lazy to stop and think about what it is they're trying to measure. They think "Gee, you really should be mature before you start drinking alcohol... 25? No, that seems too high. Let's call it 21." But they never ask themselves how to objectively measure whether someone is "mature" enough for drinking, smoking, voting, driving, or any of these other age-restricted activities. They may not even have a good idea of what maturity means in this context, just a vague idea that some people have it, some don't, and the ones who do are usually older than the ones who don't. They pick an arbitrary number and forget about anyone who might be unfairly excluded, because after all, they'll never have to be 15 or 17 or 20 years old again.
So if you're an employee who values privacy and wants to send a bit of private personal email once in a while on your personal web mail account (say, gmail), the only way to retain that privacy is to either do all that mail through a cell phone, or install an OS that the IT people don't have a keystroke logger for.
Or just use Character Map to type all your passwords and sensitive email messages. It's a pain, but definitely doable - when I was a kid, and my parents took away my keyboard, I used to use CharMap to chat on IRC.
1GB? That's nothing. I bet Mr. Goatse could sneak a whole file server out of his office.
If they made it any more lax, they couldn't exist. There are a few non-US music stores selling non-DRM'd music, but Apple have to operate from the US and so are stuck.
eMusic is a US site, and they sell popular music without DRM, right? Apple could do so (at least with some of their tracks) if they really wanted to.
The problem is they don't want to sell DRM-free tracks, they want to sell you an iPod.
You're describing AllOfMP3's model. They charge about 2 cents a megabyte, and they offer tracks in various DRM-free formats, so you can pay more for a bigger file (longer song, higher bitrate, or lossless compression) or less for a smaller one.
Of course a poem is a sequence of words etc. BUT they are also someone's unique expression of an idea. The words/colours/waveforms are not copyrightable - the expression of the idea is.
And that expression is itself an idea: the concept of stringing these words together in this particular order.
The fact is that when you copyright a song, you're copyrighting a waveform, and when you copyright a poem, you're copyrighting a sequence of words. You can't have a monopoly over the expression without also having a monopoly of the information used to express it.
Maybe this is a bit too complicated for you...
You misspelled "contradictory".
it's funny that you are so against copyright. Without copyright, you would be out of a job. The people that are paying you to code would no longer need you.
Wrong. See, I have a business model that doesn't depend on being paid by everyone who uses my software. I get paid for my labor, and if my employer wants to give the resulting code out for free, it doesn't matter to me. I get paid for programming, not for distributing copies, because I'm a programmer, not a CD duplicator.
kind of like a bank expecting people not to rob them when they are inside? Or a grocery store not to expect people to leave without paying?
In those cases, the bank and grocery store have lost something. It really isn't that hard to grasp the difference between "lost something" and "lost nothing". If someone could walk into a grocery store and magically walk out with a copy of a shopping cart full of food, leaving the originals on the store shelf, there'd be nothing wrong with that.
You obviously haven't written anything worth paying for.
I think my employer would disagree.
Great, low-budget-and-art-house-movies 'r us meets the Karaoke Generation... who is going to invest in making commercial blockbusters with no copyright?
Oh noes! Whatever will we do without commercial blockbusters?
Your comments about copyrighting an idea is twaddle. You can't copyright an idea. Period.
Information, idea.. are the concepts really that different? I'll call it "information" if that makes you feel better.. it's just more typing.
A poem is a sequence of words; a photograph is an arrangement of colors; a song is a long and intricate waveform (as filtered by the human aural processing abilities). They exist as concepts independent of any physical form they may be embedded in. They're not property, they're attributes of property, and they cannot be owned. No one has a right to prevent anyone else from arranging colors a certain way, just as no one has a right to prevent anyone else from using a certain size or shape.
Drugs can potentially kill you.
That's right. Those hippies want you to think pot is safe, but a few kilos of marijuana could easily fall off a shelf and give you a concussion, especially if they're inside a lead box!
If her music is played on the radio, or you overhear it, there is no obligation to pay for it. The actual CD (this includes digital form), however, is expected to be paid for.
Anyone who still has that expectation must've been asleep for the past few decades. Have they never heard of Kazaa? Napster? Scour? CD burning? Home taping?
I'm sure they want everyone who listens to their music in digital form to pay for it, but they're fools if they seriously expect it to happen.
As for the people who download, they're not bound by any agreement just because the artist has a wish or expectation to get paid. If I'm walking downtown and I see a guy playing music with a guitar case full of change, I know he wants my money, but that doesn't obligate me to pay him, nor to plug my ears.
It has been repeatedly explained that obeying copyright laws encourages the production of RIAA-style music, and that you, as someone who enjoys copying the RIAA's music, are working to destroy something you enjoy. That's either evil or insane, depending on the exact circumstances.
Nope, because I (like many people) am capable of weighing two potential costs and benefits against each other. Free copying may discourage the production of the RIAA's music (though the available evidence doesn't seem to bear that out), but its other positive effects outweigh that. I'm willing to give up one thing I like in order to get another thing I like even better.
Well, you earlier said it was wrong to break a promise. Have you now changed your mind?
A promise made under duress is no promise at all. If someone points a gun at me and says "agree or you're dead", and I agree, I'm not morally bound by that. I didn't really have a choice; I wouldn't expect anyone else to choose death in that situation, regardless of how they actually felt, and they shouldn't expect me to do it either. If the threat is deportation (i.e. losing my job, home, friends, and family) instead of a gun, that's not much different.
Wrong again. I simply speak English well, and understand the meanings of four-letter words.
Uh huh. Too bad that definition of "evil" is nowhere in the dictionary. It's Kant's categorical imperative.
The subject was not the possibility of eliminating copyright law, but actually whether or not is it proper for you to disregard copyright laws that do exist.
Fair enough.
Incidentally, I've heard that European phones can't send email. Here, every phone has its own email address (handy for those eBay alerts), and you can send SMS to an email address just as you would to a phone number.
well, then so is software, music, and movies. When they are released, there is a mutual understanding they will be paid for (if they are commerical of course).
Except there isn't. When Britney Spears puts out a new CD, she doesn't ask me first if I want to pay for it. She might hope that I will, but surely she knew many people listen to music without paying for it, and she decided to make it anyway. There's no agreement between an artist and the public like there is between an account holder and a bank.
Maybe you're completely ignorant, but if so, we can change that. Go to your nearest police station or district attorney, and ask him if obeying the laws of your country is a requirement for living in that country and being unarrested.
What do you think you're explaining here? That breaking laws can lead to arrest? Gee, what a revelation.
I never agreed to obey any laws. I am aware of the potential consequences for breaking laws, and I take those consequences into consideration when I decide whether or not to obey a particular law in a particular situation, but there's no agreement between me and anyone else that I'll do so.
There, now you have heard of the social contract. If you don't agree with it, leave your country and never return. Since you believe that "reneging agreements is immoral", you now think it is immoral to violate copyrights.
Nope. Sorry, you can't enter me into an agreement; only I can do that.
Of course, since you don't (yet) agree to the social contract, you also think it's right to never pay taxes, to sell cocaine and heroin, and many other things.
You just keep on missing the point, don't you? I say it's not always wrong to break the law, and you twist that into it's *never* wrong to break the law. That's called a strawman argument: I'm sure it's easier for you to argue against that than what I really said, but there comes a time when you have to grow up and start debating people on their actual arguments, and that time for you is now, grasshoppa.
OTOH, maybe you're just blinded by your own belief that it's *always* wrong to break any law. So let me ask you, do you think it's immoral to drive 5 MPH over the speed limit when it can be done safely? How about jaywalking? Drinking alcohol one hour before one's 21st birthday? Ripping tags off of mattresses?
Seriously, if a government agent came to your doorstep with a contract reading: "I agree to obey the laws of this country, or be subject to various penalties listed in national and regional law codes", and told you to sign it or be escorted to the border, would you from then on start believing the "social contract" exists?
Do you really think a contract signed under duress like that is worth anything?
I shouldn't be surprised to see someone who doesn't know what "evil" is
If you're calling copyright infringement "evil", you've obviously lost all perspective.
An action is "evil" if it is unsustainable for everyone to do it.
Congratulations, you've read Kant.
Habitually breaking copyright restriction cannot possibly be non-evil: either you don't care for RIAA music, in which case you wouldn't want to copy it, or you do enjoy it, which means you are freeloading on other people who honestly pay. If everyone were like that, nobody would pay, and the songs wouldn't get made.
Fallacy of the excluded middle. I enjoy RIAA music, but I also enjoy plenty of other music. If copyright were eliminated, even if none of the RIAA artists ever recorded another song again, the other benefits would still outweigh that drawback.
The legislators who write the recycling law are the ones to say where the money will come from. I believe property taxes are progressive (wealthier people tend to own more valuable property), so that's a possible option for states that don't have an income tax. Or it could be a federal program instead of working at the state level, since most computers are shipped across state lines anyway.
... it's not really a viable popular form of communication, and thus [SMS prices] are steep.
Are they really? I don't think so, but I have no basis for comparison. I pay $4.99 a month for 500 messages (1 cent each if I use them all); without that package, I'd pay 10 cents to send and 2 to receive.
The pricing issue I had in mind was that placing a voice call is usually cheaper than sending a text message, because most calling plans have voice minute allowances but not SMS allowances. If it's a choice between waiting a few minutes to make a (marginally) free call, or sending an SMS now for 10 cents, many people will opt to wait.
Also, the US is not the big SMS country. It hardly has GSM!
So what? GSM is just one of a few phone standards, and analog-only cell phones are rare these days. The other digital networks (CDMA, TDMA, iDEN) all support SMS nationwide.
It's true that SMS isn't yet as popular in the United States as it is overseas, but that has more to do with pricing and tradition than technology.
Do you really own the money in your bank account? it's just 1's and 0's stored on a database somewhere.
;)
Of course I do.. I owned the money before I deposited it, and I deposited it in the bank with the mutual understanding that it would be paid back to me upon request. That obligation from the bank to me is part of my net worth.
If I transfer all your money (which is just data) to my account, would you consider that an actionable harm?
Not if you only transferred a copy.