Well, sort of. This is a document where Apple is arguing about changes to the DMCA and is not a statement of policy.
That doesn't make any sense. Apple wasn't arguing that the DMCA should be changed to make jailbreaking illegal; they were claiming that jailbreaking is illegal under the DMCA and under plain old copyright law.
A "statement of policy" would be meaningless here anyway. Legality isn't defined by a private company's policies, it's defined by the legislature and the courts.
If this is their sole/primary objection, I fault them in the same way I fault anyone who makes a big deal out of some minor thing.
It's a "minor thing" that in order to run certain programs on your phone, you have to do something that -- according to the phone manufacturer -- is against the law?
Of course, even if Apple's interpretation of the law is correct, the chances of any individual getting sued for this is vanishingly small. But you could say the same about P2P piracy. I wouldn't fault anyone for downloading a song from Amazon instead of The Pirate Bay because of the legal risk either, even though the risk is negligible.
That's overstating things a bit much, though.
Not really: Android and Windows Mobile phones are readily available.
Then maybe the better solution would be to not streetview map residential areas and stick to cities, because actually getting a street level view of where I should end up has crtainly saved my ass several times.
Businesses are pretty easy to find. They have signs. Homes, on the other hand, often have numbers that are unreadable (especially at night) or missing.
In my past life as a delivery driver, I sure would've appreciated something like Google Street View to get an idea of what the house looked like before leaving the restaurant. It's no fun creeping down a street at night, squinting and shining a flashlight out the window, trying to make out the house numbers.
Jailbreaking an iPhone constitutes copyright infringement and a DMCA violation, says Apple in comments filed with the Copyright Office as part of the 2009 DMCA triennial rulemaking. This marks the first formal public statement by Apple about its legal stance on iPhone jailbreaking. [...] Apple's copyright infringement claim starts with the observation that jailbroken iPhones depend on modified versions of Apple's bootloader and operating system software. [...] As for the DMCA violation, Apple casts its lot with the likes of laser printer makers and garage door opener companies who argue that the DMCA entitles them to block interoperability with anything that hasn't been approved in advance.
Apple's arguments here are probably bullshit, as the article notes. But I wouldn't fault anyone for skipping the iPhone because of this, when there are plenty of other phones that are designed to run arbitrary code and whose manufacturers won't call you a criminal for doing so.
Since we're on the topic of Steam, let's talk about that. Yes for the same price you can get the game on disk, but with the disk version do you get free updates forever? This is non-trivial; a huge part of the TF2 experience is the regular patches adding new content and tweaking the game.
If you buy a Valve game like TF2 on disc, then yes, you do get free updates forever. The disc only saves you from having to download the game in the first place: once it's installed, it's just like a copy from Steam. But, in the stores I've checked, you'll pay around 50% more for a boxed copy of The Orange Box than if you just downloaded it from Stream.
Spending money to avoid going bankrupt? What a crazy concept!
It's like when someone once told me I had to pay out of my own pocket for gas to drive to work -- not to mention paying for the car itself and regular maintenance! Ridiculous, right? I'm supposed to get paid for going to work, not pay for it!
He responded with some mumbo-jumbo about how the money I spend on transportation is an investment that will bring greater returns in the future, but by that time I had written him off as just another kooky liberal...
This sounds a lot like what Puzzle Pirates did with "doubloons": a second in-game currency, used to buy game badges (i.e. subscriptions), which you can purchase with real money or trade on a market for the main in-game currency (pieces of eight). Players with more money than time can buy doubloons and sell them for POE; players with more time than money can collect POE and trade for doubloons to extend their subscriptions.
Seems pretty obvious that, to follow your analogy, a specific character would be an "instance"...
No - the "instance" is the words on the page describing the character. The character itself is an abstract idea, a template that an author can use for writing those words and that is reproduced in the reader's mind when he reads them.
Going back to the OOP analogy: a class tells you the memory layout and capabilities of an object, but an instance is the actual memory that the object occupies; a character tells you what sort of things a fictional person is likely to do or say, but an expression is the actual words on the page describing his actions and dialogue. A specific character is still just a "subclass" until it's "instantiated" as words on the page.
Not necessarily. Take The Wind Done Gone, for instance: the characters from Gone with the Wind weren't trademarked, yet there was still a legal battle, and TWDG only survived because it was considered a parody.
But as soon as you start copying names, I don't think that's merely what we're talking about "ideas" here, that would count as expressions.
I disagree: I'd say it's patently obvious that a character is an idea, not an expression. The words the author used to describe that character are an expression, but the character itself is not -- the character's identity is independent of any particular set of words.
In general, characters can be copyrighted AFAIK
Right. This means that copyright applies to ideas as well, not just expressions.
"expression" is broader than simply "copying the exact book itself"
A little broader, but not very much.
If I read your book about a particular boy wizard and write my own book about the same boy wizard, that's not really any different than writing my own book about a different boy wizard, or a girl wizard, etc. I'm using your ideas, but not your expression -- your expression is the words you used to describe it.
That doesn't mean I can't copy your expression without copying your words verbatim: if I translate your book into Spanish, sentence by sentence, then my book is clearly a derivative of your expression, even though it contains none of the same words. But if I use my own words to write a book that deals with the same events, places, or people as yours, I don't see how that can reasonably be considered copying your expression.
Only in the sense that "student wizard" is an expression of the idea "wizard", which in turn is an expression of the idea "person", which in turn is an expression of the idea "character"... that is, only if you consider "expression" and "idea" to simply mean "subclass" and "superclass".
In an artistic sense, the words on the page are an expression, but the character described in those words is an idea. Star Wars is an expression of ideas about the Death Star, the Force, a young Jedi named Luke, etc. The frames that make up the movie are the expression; the things the movie is about are the ideas.
As an example, you can't copyright the idea of a school for wizards and/or witches, although you can copyright a specific story built around that idea.
This isn't as clear as it sounds. If you write a story about a school called Hogwarts for wizards one of whom is named Harry Potter, you can expect to get sued for infringement under the theory that your story is a derivative work of J.K. Rowling's -- even though you've only copied ideas, not expressions.
Not if that child had N times more survival chance than a relative who could have N children.
No, even then the mutation will die out quickly. It takes two to reproduce. If each individual can only have one child, then even if every child lives to reproduce, the population will still shrink by half with each generation.
Perhaps what you meant to say is that a mutation allowing individuals to have many children will also wipe itself out quickly if each child's chance of survival is too low.
Evolution doesn't really incentivize anything. It provides disincentives for exactly one thing: structures and behaviors that result in a higher likelihood of death before reproduction.
Don't forget number of offspring. A mutation that limited each parent to producing only one child in their lifetime would wipe itself out pretty quickly.
There's plenty of suing going on over things of this sort, pretty much on a daily basis. I recall a big boiler project where they're in the midst of a lawsuit because they didn't see the results they wanted.
How many of those lawsuits are successful when no results were promised?
The college I went to has billboards showing the successful people who went to the school. They're advertising and selling a career. When that doesn't happen, it's only natural that someone will step back and go "Wait a moment, I didn't get what I was sold!" and sue like this.
Sure -- and then it's only natural for them to lose the lawsuit, because they have no leg to stand on.
Certainly, one hopes that a university education will lead to better careers and higher income, but it's far from a given. Universities don't promise it, and reasonable students don't assume that just because they get a degree, they'll land a great job.
Also remember, in 1970 university cost 1/10th of what it does today(accounting for inflation). It's only natural for something so expensive to come with much greater expectations.
That's like saying I'm entitled to profit if I buy $100,000 worth of stock. It doesn't matter how much money I put into it: I knew beforehand that I could lose my investment.
If my company spent six figures on an investment that was supposed to pay for itself and we saw no returns, we'd be suing the organization that sold it to us. Why is an individual who spends six figures on an investment any different?
If you spent six figures on an investment that you assumed would pay for itself, and you saw no returns, you'd be out of luck. Investments are not guaranteed to turn a profit at all. Unless the company promised you a profit, you'd have nothing to sue over.
Likewise, unless the university promises you a job, you have nothing to sue over when your degree fails to land you a job.
If you're paying as much as a small house on tuition, it seems not that ridiculous to assume you're entitled to some sort of benefit.
The benefit you're entitled to is a university education. That's all. Just like when you buy stock, you're only entitled to the stock. You still have to face the risk that the stock (or education) won't turn into profits down the line.
I have suddenly realized you are a fucking moron. This is obvious now that you have said someone elses work, effort, speech is your to do with as you will because it is your speech.
You, on the other hand, seem to think my speech is yours to "do with as you will" if it happens to include a series of words that you spoke previously. I guess we're both fucking morons.
That was your logic now cough up the info or admit you are lying hypocrite.
I would like to see a demonstration of your copying technology before inviting you onto my property, as you seem like a hostile sort that might have nefarious intent.
I will gladly meet you at Riverfront Park in Spokane, Washington, where you can demonstrate your good faith and capability by creating a duplicate of the historic Looff Carrousel without disturbing or damaging the original or incurring any costs for any unwilling participants. You may invite members of the media and scientific community as well. Once you've demonstrated this, I'll gladly allow you onto my property where you can do the same to my possessions.
I have to wonder, though: if you really intend for this to be analogous to file sharing, why do you need my address at all? I don't need to know where Britney Spears lives (or even where she keeps the master tapes) in order to copy her works. If you can't copy my possessions from afar, without my knowledge, then perhaps it isn't as analogous as you think.
But, you would still be compensating the owner of the sandwich. You just wouldn't be paying what the owner wanted. No one is the worse off.
Incorrect. The owner of the sandwich is worse off if what I've paid him is less than the value he assigns to the sandwich. If I give him $3 for a sandwich he thinks is worth $5, he has a net loss of $2.
Apparently, you think it is OK to deprive someone of their legally granted rights. That, or you don't believe in legally granted rights. Which is it?
I believe it's OK to deprive someone of the "legally granted right" to censor my speech, since that right is illegitimate to begin with.
So, doing the right thing is not enough of a reason.
You're suggesting that "doing the right thing" means choosing lose-lose (or lose-breakeven) over win-lose? That's not "right", it's just foolish.
More proof you are an asshole. Do you think you deserve to have access to the song because it is available and that you should not have to pay for the privilege of being able to listen to it?
Essentially, yes. I deserve to have access to the song because someone is offering to give me access. I am not obligated to turn down his offer just because he isn't the person who wrote or recorded the song.
Do you think you have some right to it?
Only the same right that I have to listen to what anyone tells me on any other subject. For example, if someone offers to tell me the secret formula for making Coca-Cola, then I have the right to hear it from him. (If no one is willing to tell me the formula, then I'm out of luck; I don't have the right to force them to divulge it.)
Do you think you wants somehow negates the copyright owner's legal rights?
My human right to share knowledge and experiences with fellow humans trumps anyone's legal right to restrict what I'm allowed to say in order to make a buck for himself.
By definition, the copyright holder has the right to control the copying of the work. By making a copy without the copyright holder's permission, you have imposed your will on him and denied him his legally granted right to control the copying of his work
If I claim the right to control the airspace of Jupiter, then every meteorite that crashes into Jupiter is violating my rights. But it would be foolish to make this claim, because I can't possibly hope to enforce my wishes for a planet millions of miles away; if I believe I have that right, then I must have been conned by whoever sold it to me.
Private copying does not, in any real sense, pose any sort of imposition on the copyright holder. It doesn't require any extra work on his part, he doesn't gain or lose any money or goods, and in all likelihood he's completely unaware that anything has happened. He only misses an opportunity to censor someone -- an opportunity he didn't even know he had. If that's what you call imposing your will on someone, you're undermining the very concept of "will".
You have agreed that I have the right to impose your logic on you. Therefore, you are to give me everything you own for exactly US$1.00. Tell me where I can pick it up and I will bring you your US$1.00.
As you know, this is not my logic, it's a ridiculous strawman you've made up. I've already told you how you can apply my logic to my possessions: just like file sharing, it involves making copies without disturbing the originals. If you can find a way to do that, you can have copies of all my stuff, and you'll probably win the Nobel Prize as well.
Since when is MY WORK your speech? It is not YOUR SPEECH. Get that through your ignorant fucking skull.
The words that come out of my mouth when I'm speaking are my speech: you don't own them just because you wrote the same sequence of words earlier. If you restrict the expressions I'm allowed to say or the information I'm allowed to share, you're restricting my speech. Get that through your own ignorant fucking skull, sir.
I think it would fall in the same category as a EULA. Very, very few people will actually read a EULA before clicking I Agree, but it's still considered enforceable in court.
Like you're free to make your own sandwich, you're free to make your own music. If you want to listen to what the RIAA is peddling, you pay their price.
If I don't like what the deli is charging for a club sandwich, I can make my own: I'll use the same ingredients as the deli, arranged in the same order, and end up with a club sandwich that's substantially similar to what I could've bought from the deli. I am free to do that.
But if I want to make my own copy of "Hit Me Baby One More Time", and I end up with something substantially similar to the recording that Britney's label is selling, I'll get sued for infringement. It's like if the deli tried to claim ownership of all club sandwiches, not just the ones that the deli made themselves. So, how exactly am I "free to make [my] own music" to substitute for what the RIAA is selling?
Does that mean you would take the sandwich without paying or just paying what you thought was appropriate instead of the price put on by the owner?
By taking a sandwich, I would be depriving the rightful owner of that sandwich. Downloading a song, on the other hand, deprives no one of anything, especially if the alternative is not to listen to the song at all.
If a song is on sale for $1, which I think is too much, and I decide not to download it for free, no one benefits from that decision. I'm worse off because I'm not listening to the song (which I might value at 50 cents), and the artist and record label are exactly in the same place -- they're not getting my money either way. In fact, the artist might even consider himself worse off because that's one less person listening to his music. Rationally, there's no reason I should go without the song rather than downloading it for free, other than the negligible legal risk.
Are you going to impose upon the lawful owner of something the price you prefer instead of what he prefers simply because you don't agree? Shall we apply your logic to what YOU own?
What do you mean, "impose"? The copyright holder is not involved in private acts of copying. Nothing is imposed on him; he isn't even aware the transaction is going on.
And yes, please do apply this logic to what I own. If, for example, you have the ability to make an exact duplicate of my car, without my permission and without depriving me of its use for even an instant, leaving the fully functional original exactly where it is, then you have my permission to go right ahead and do that.
Actually, thanks to copyright law, I have that right. Or, did you forget about the law? Are you done making an ignorant ass out of yourself?
As we both know, millions of people feel that law is illegitimate and don't hesitate to break it. Go ahead, keep expecting people to restrict their own speech just to put money in your pocket; see how well that works out for you.
If $20 was too much to pay for the music, then you didn't really want the music anyway. Therefore, you should not make illegal copies of the music.
If he "didn't really want the music anyway", he wouldn't have made any copies. I won't pay $100 for a sandwich, but that doesn't mean I don't want one; it only means I value a sandwich at less than $100.
Oh, wait, that would mean acting like an adult and accepting that, just because you want something, you don't get to get it for free.
Are you enough of an adult to accept that just because you wrote a song, you don't get to stop other people from repeating it?
Actually, the health care reforms currently under debate in the US are nothing like the NHS. Doctors would remain private employees (unlike NHS doctors who work for the government), and you would still have a choice of private insurance (the public insurance plan would be an optional alternative).
No, sir, yours was the dumb-ass comment. You chose to bring up physical punishment when it was totally irrelevant to the thread.
Kids didn't use to be drugged up, if parents felt the need to increase motivation, they could do it in other ways. Were I in his shoes, I would have preferred my parents spanked me rather than drugged me.
So what? Again, why are we talking about hitting children at all? It's irrelevant. Omestes wouldn't have benefited from being hit by his parents any more than he benefited from being drugged -- possibly even less.
Were I in his shoes, I would've preferred my parents to have left me the hell alone, or taken me out of school, or bought me ice cream and taken me to Disneyland. All of those would be preferable to being hit, and at least equally likely to solve the problem.
Do you see now, Mr2001, how dumb your comment was?
Nope. What I see is a person who's so passionate about hitting children that he bursts into a thread to promote it even when it has no relevance.
Did he need being hit? Probably not, but did he need being drugged? Much less so.
Substituting violence for drugs would not have been an improvement. He didn't need either.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, sort of. This is a document where Apple is arguing about changes to the DMCA and is not a statement of policy.
That doesn't make any sense. Apple wasn't arguing that the DMCA should be changed to make jailbreaking illegal; they were claiming that jailbreaking is illegal under the DMCA and under plain old copyright law.
A "statement of policy" would be meaningless here anyway. Legality isn't defined by a private company's policies, it's defined by the legislature and the courts.
If this is their sole/primary objection, I fault them in the same way I fault anyone who makes a big deal out of some minor thing.
It's a "minor thing" that in order to run certain programs on your phone, you have to do something that -- according to the phone manufacturer -- is against the law?
Of course, even if Apple's interpretation of the law is correct, the chances of any individual getting sued for this is vanishingly small. But you could say the same about P2P piracy. I wouldn't fault anyone for downloading a song from Amazon instead of The Pirate Bay because of the legal risk either, even though the risk is negligible.
That's overstating things a bit much, though.
Not really: Android and Windows Mobile phones are readily available.
Then maybe the better solution would be to not streetview map residential areas and stick to cities, because actually getting a street level view of where I should end up has crtainly saved my ass several times.
Businesses are pretty easy to find. They have signs. Homes, on the other hand, often have numbers that are unreadable (especially at night) or missing.
In my past life as a delivery driver, I sure would've appreciated something like Google Street View to get an idea of what the house looked like before leaving the restaurant. It's no fun creeping down a street at night, squinting and shining a flashlight out the window, trying to make out the house numbers.
Citation?
Apple has claimed that Psystar's selling of OS X on non-Apple hardware is illegal. I don't recall them claiming jailbreaking is illegal.
Here you go.
Apple's arguments here are probably bullshit, as the article notes. But I wouldn't fault anyone for skipping the iPhone because of this, when there are plenty of other phones that are designed to run arbitrary code and whose manufacturers won't call you a criminal for doing so.
Then you buy an iPhone and you jailbreak it.
Since you did not do so, you have other reasons for not wanting an iPhone. But don't pretend they are technical because at the core they are not.
Perhaps they were legal -- Apple has claimed jailbreaking is against the law.
Since we're on the topic of Steam, let's talk about that. Yes for the same price you can get the game on disk, but with the disk version do you get free updates forever? This is non-trivial; a huge part of the TF2 experience is the regular patches adding new content and tweaking the game.
If you buy a Valve game like TF2 on disc, then yes, you do get free updates forever. The disc only saves you from having to download the game in the first place: once it's installed, it's just like a copy from Steam. But, in the stores I've checked, you'll pay around 50% more for a boxed copy of The Orange Box than if you just downloaded it from Stream.
Spending money to avoid going bankrupt? What a crazy concept!
It's like when someone once told me I had to pay out of my own pocket for gas to drive to work -- not to mention paying for the car itself and regular maintenance! Ridiculous, right? I'm supposed to get paid for going to work, not pay for it!
He responded with some mumbo-jumbo about how the money I spend on transportation is an investment that will bring greater returns in the future, but by that time I had written him off as just another kooky liberal...
True. I was referring to animals, since after all TFA is about animals.
This sounds a lot like what Puzzle Pirates did with "doubloons": a second in-game currency, used to buy game badges (i.e. subscriptions), which you can purchase with real money or trade on a market for the main in-game currency (pieces of eight). Players with more money than time can buy doubloons and sell them for POE; players with more time than money can collect POE and trade for doubloons to extend their subscriptions.
Seems pretty obvious that, to follow your analogy, a specific character would be an "instance"...
No - the "instance" is the words on the page describing the character. The character itself is an abstract idea, a template that an author can use for writing those words and that is reproduced in the reader's mind when he reads them.
Going back to the OOP analogy: a class tells you the memory layout and capabilities of an object, but an instance is the actual memory that the object occupies; a character tells you what sort of things a fictional person is likely to do or say, but an expression is the actual words on the page describing his actions and dialogue. A specific character is still just a "subclass" until it's "instantiated" as words on the page.
Not necessarily. Take The Wind Done Gone, for instance: the characters from Gone with the Wind weren't trademarked, yet there was still a legal battle, and TWDG only survived because it was considered a parody.
But as soon as you start copying names, I don't think that's merely what we're talking about "ideas" here, that would count as expressions.
I disagree: I'd say it's patently obvious that a character is an idea, not an expression. The words the author used to describe that character are an expression, but the character itself is not -- the character's identity is independent of any particular set of words.
In general, characters can be copyrighted AFAIK
Right. This means that copyright applies to ideas as well, not just expressions.
"expression" is broader than simply "copying the exact book itself"
A little broader, but not very much.
If I read your book about a particular boy wizard and write my own book about the same boy wizard, that's not really any different than writing my own book about a different boy wizard, or a girl wizard, etc. I'm using your ideas, but not your expression -- your expression is the words you used to describe it.
That doesn't mean I can't copy your expression without copying your words verbatim: if I translate your book into Spanish, sentence by sentence, then my book is clearly a derivative of your expression, even though it contains none of the same words. But if I use my own words to write a book that deals with the same events, places, or people as yours, I don't see how that can reasonably be considered copying your expression.
Only in the sense that "student wizard" is an expression of the idea "wizard", which in turn is an expression of the idea "person", which in turn is an expression of the idea "character"... that is, only if you consider "expression" and "idea" to simply mean "subclass" and "superclass".
In an artistic sense, the words on the page are an expression, but the character described in those words is an idea. Star Wars is an expression of ideas about the Death Star, the Force, a young Jedi named Luke, etc. The frames that make up the movie are the expression; the things the movie is about are the ideas.
As an example, you can't copyright the idea of a school for wizards and/or witches, although you can copyright a specific story built around that idea.
This isn't as clear as it sounds. If you write a story about a school called Hogwarts for wizards one of whom is named Harry Potter, you can expect to get sued for infringement under the theory that your story is a derivative work of J.K. Rowling's -- even though you've only copied ideas, not expressions.
Not if that child had N times more survival chance than a relative who could have N children.
No, even then the mutation will die out quickly. It takes two to reproduce. If each individual can only have one child, then even if every child lives to reproduce, the population will still shrink by half with each generation.
Perhaps what you meant to say is that a mutation allowing individuals to have many children will also wipe itself out quickly if each child's chance of survival is too low.
Evolution doesn't really incentivize anything. It provides disincentives for exactly one thing: structures and behaviors that result in a higher likelihood of death before reproduction.
Don't forget number of offspring. A mutation that limited each parent to producing only one child in their lifetime would wipe itself out pretty quickly.
I don't think you've ever worked in industry.
You think wrong, sir.
There's plenty of suing going on over things of this sort, pretty much on a daily basis. I recall a big boiler project where they're in the midst of a lawsuit because they didn't see the results they wanted.
How many of those lawsuits are successful when no results were promised?
The college I went to has billboards showing the successful people who went to the school. They're advertising and selling a career. When that doesn't happen, it's only natural that someone will step back and go "Wait a moment, I didn't get what I was sold!" and sue like this.
Sure -- and then it's only natural for them to lose the lawsuit, because they have no leg to stand on.
Certainly, one hopes that a university education will lead to better careers and higher income, but it's far from a given. Universities don't promise it, and reasonable students don't assume that just because they get a degree, they'll land a great job.
Also remember, in 1970 university cost 1/10th of what it does today(accounting for inflation). It's only natural for something so expensive to come with much greater expectations.
That's like saying I'm entitled to profit if I buy $100,000 worth of stock. It doesn't matter how much money I put into it: I knew beforehand that I could lose my investment.
If my company spent six figures on an investment that was supposed to pay for itself and we saw no returns, we'd be suing the organization that sold it to us. Why is an individual who spends six figures on an investment any different?
If you spent six figures on an investment that you assumed would pay for itself, and you saw no returns, you'd be out of luck. Investments are not guaranteed to turn a profit at all. Unless the company promised you a profit, you'd have nothing to sue over.
Likewise, unless the university promises you a job, you have nothing to sue over when your degree fails to land you a job.
If you're paying as much as a small house on tuition, it seems not that ridiculous to assume you're entitled to some sort of benefit.
The benefit you're entitled to is a university education. That's all. Just like when you buy stock, you're only entitled to the stock. You still have to face the risk that the stock (or education) won't turn into profits down the line.
I have suddenly realized you are a fucking moron. This is obvious now that you have said someone elses work, effort, speech is your to do with as you will because it is your speech.
You, on the other hand, seem to think my speech is yours to "do with as you will" if it happens to include a series of words that you spoke previously. I guess we're both fucking morons.
That was your logic now cough up the info or admit you are lying hypocrite.
I would like to see a demonstration of your copying technology before inviting you onto my property, as you seem like a hostile sort that might have nefarious intent.
I will gladly meet you at Riverfront Park in Spokane, Washington, where you can demonstrate your good faith and capability by creating a duplicate of the historic Looff Carrousel without disturbing or damaging the original or incurring any costs for any unwilling participants. You may invite members of the media and scientific community as well. Once you've demonstrated this, I'll gladly allow you onto my property where you can do the same to my possessions.
I have to wonder, though: if you really intend for this to be analogous to file sharing, why do you need my address at all? I don't need to know where Britney Spears lives (or even where she keeps the master tapes) in order to copy her works. If you can't copy my possessions from afar, without my knowledge, then perhaps it isn't as analogous as you think.
But, you would still be compensating the owner of the sandwich. You just wouldn't be paying what the owner wanted. No one is the worse off.
Incorrect. The owner of the sandwich is worse off if what I've paid him is less than the value he assigns to the sandwich. If I give him $3 for a sandwich he thinks is worth $5, he has a net loss of $2.
Apparently, you think it is OK to deprive someone of their legally granted rights. That, or you don't believe in legally granted rights. Which is it?
I believe it's OK to deprive someone of the "legally granted right" to censor my speech, since that right is illegitimate to begin with.
So, doing the right thing is not enough of a reason.
You're suggesting that "doing the right thing" means choosing lose-lose (or lose-breakeven) over win-lose? That's not "right", it's just foolish.
More proof you are an asshole. Do you think you deserve to have access to the song because it is available and that you should not have to pay for the privilege of being able to listen to it?
Essentially, yes. I deserve to have access to the song because someone is offering to give me access. I am not obligated to turn down his offer just because he isn't the person who wrote or recorded the song.
Do you think you have some right to it?
Only the same right that I have to listen to what anyone tells me on any other subject. For example, if someone offers to tell me the secret formula for making Coca-Cola, then I have the right to hear it from him. (If no one is willing to tell me the formula, then I'm out of luck; I don't have the right to force them to divulge it.)
Do you think you wants somehow negates the copyright owner's legal rights?
My human right to share knowledge and experiences with fellow humans trumps anyone's legal right to restrict what I'm allowed to say in order to make a buck for himself.
By definition, the copyright holder has the right to control the copying of the work. By making a copy without the copyright holder's permission, you have imposed your will on him and denied him his legally granted right to control the copying of his work
If I claim the right to control the airspace of Jupiter, then every meteorite that crashes into Jupiter is violating my rights. But it would be foolish to make this claim, because I can't possibly hope to enforce my wishes for a planet millions of miles away; if I believe I have that right, then I must have been conned by whoever sold it to me.
Private copying does not, in any real sense, pose any sort of imposition on the copyright holder. It doesn't require any extra work on his part, he doesn't gain or lose any money or goods, and in all likelihood he's completely unaware that anything has happened. He only misses an opportunity to censor someone -- an opportunity he didn't even know he had. If that's what you call imposing your will on someone, you're undermining the very concept of "will".
You have agreed that I have the right to impose your logic on you. Therefore, you are to give me everything you own for exactly US$1.00. Tell me where I can pick it up and I will bring you your US$1.00.
As you know, this is not my logic, it's a ridiculous strawman you've made up. I've already told you how you can apply my logic to my possessions: just like file sharing, it involves making copies without disturbing the originals. If you can find a way to do that, you can have copies of all my stuff, and you'll probably win the Nobel Prize as well.
Since when is MY WORK your speech? It is not YOUR SPEECH. Get that through your ignorant fucking skull.
The words that come out of my mouth when I'm speaking are my speech: you don't own them just because you wrote the same sequence of words earlier. If you restrict the expressions I'm allowed to say or the information I'm allowed to share, you're restricting my speech. Get that through your own ignorant fucking skull, sir.
I think it would fall in the same category as a EULA. Very, very few people will actually read a EULA before clicking I Agree, but it's still considered enforceable in court.
Not necessarily.
Like you're free to make your own sandwich, you're free to make your own music. If you want to listen to what the RIAA is peddling, you pay their price.
If I don't like what the deli is charging for a club sandwich, I can make my own: I'll use the same ingredients as the deli, arranged in the same order, and end up with a club sandwich that's substantially similar to what I could've bought from the deli. I am free to do that.
But if I want to make my own copy of "Hit Me Baby One More Time", and I end up with something substantially similar to the recording that Britney's label is selling, I'll get sued for infringement. It's like if the deli tried to claim ownership of all club sandwiches, not just the ones that the deli made themselves. So, how exactly am I "free to make [my] own music" to substitute for what the RIAA is selling?
Does that mean you would take the sandwich without paying or just paying what you thought was appropriate instead of the price put on by the owner?
By taking a sandwich, I would be depriving the rightful owner of that sandwich. Downloading a song, on the other hand, deprives no one of anything, especially if the alternative is not to listen to the song at all.
If a song is on sale for $1, which I think is too much, and I decide not to download it for free, no one benefits from that decision. I'm worse off because I'm not listening to the song (which I might value at 50 cents), and the artist and record label are exactly in the same place -- they're not getting my money either way. In fact, the artist might even consider himself worse off because that's one less person listening to his music. Rationally, there's no reason I should go without the song rather than downloading it for free, other than the negligible legal risk.
Are you going to impose upon the lawful owner of something the price you prefer instead of what he prefers simply because you don't agree? Shall we apply your logic to what YOU own?
What do you mean, "impose"? The copyright holder is not involved in private acts of copying. Nothing is imposed on him; he isn't even aware the transaction is going on.
And yes, please do apply this logic to what I own. If, for example, you have the ability to make an exact duplicate of my car, without my permission and without depriving me of its use for even an instant, leaving the fully functional original exactly where it is, then you have my permission to go right ahead and do that.
Actually, thanks to copyright law, I have that right. Or, did you forget about the law? Are you done making an ignorant ass out of yourself?
As we both know, millions of people feel that law is illegitimate and don't hesitate to break it. Go ahead, keep expecting people to restrict their own speech just to put money in your pocket; see how well that works out for you.
If $20 was too much to pay for the music, then you didn't really want the music anyway. Therefore, you should not make illegal copies of the music.
If he "didn't really want the music anyway", he wouldn't have made any copies. I won't pay $100 for a sandwich, but that doesn't mean I don't want one; it only means I value a sandwich at less than $100.
Oh, wait, that would mean acting like an adult and accepting that, just because you want something, you don't get to get it for free.
Are you enough of an adult to accept that just because you wrote a song, you don't get to stop other people from repeating it?
Actually, the health care reforms currently under debate in the US are nothing like the NHS. Doctors would remain private employees (unlike NHS doctors who work for the government), and you would still have a choice of private insurance (the public insurance plan would be an optional alternative).
- well now, that's a dumb-ass comment!
No, sir, yours was the dumb-ass comment. You chose to bring up physical punishment when it was totally irrelevant to the thread.
Kids didn't use to be drugged up, if parents felt the need to increase motivation, they could do it in other ways. Were I in his shoes, I would have preferred my parents spanked me rather than drugged me.
So what? Again, why are we talking about hitting children at all? It's irrelevant. Omestes wouldn't have benefited from being hit by his parents any more than he benefited from being drugged -- possibly even less.
Were I in his shoes, I would've preferred my parents to have left me the hell alone, or taken me out of school, or bought me ice cream and taken me to Disneyland. All of those would be preferable to being hit, and at least equally likely to solve the problem.
Do you see now, Mr2001, how dumb your comment was?
Nope. What I see is a person who's so passionate about hitting children that he bursts into a thread to promote it even when it has no relevance.
Did he need being hit? Probably not, but did he need being drugged? Much less so.
Substituting violence for drugs would not have been an improvement. He didn't need either.