What are you talking about? The product of their skill and talent is easily stolen/copied. That's like saying "DVD piracy isn't a problem, movie producers just have to concentrate on their talent and make better movies!". That's bullshit.
No, you seem to have misunderstood me.
The product of their labor is easily obtained for free, that's true. But the labor itself is not: no one can force them to write games against their will.
That means as long as people want new games to play, the developers hold the upper hand. They can charge whatever they want for the act of writing a new game, because they're the only ones who can do it.
In other words, to adapt, you need to stop thinking of game development as a manufacturing job, where you churn out objects that are sold, and start thinking of it as a service, where people hire you to do something. As long as you charge enough for the initial act of writing the game, it doesn't matter who gets a copy later (and of course it wouldn't have to be one single entity paying all the development costs).
Our society has ingrained into people that stealing is wrong
Yes, and for one simple reason: because when you steal something, the person you stole it from doesn't have it anymore.
The bad part of stealing isn't that you get something for free. It's that you make someone else poorer by doing it. If you take that part out of the equation, you might still be able to call it "stealing" in some sense of the word, but it's missing the one thing that makes real stealing objectionable.
The problem with your attitude is that it fails the "golden rule" - would my behavior still be OK if everybody did what I do?
In this case, I think the answer is yes.
Think about it: if everyone pirated games, what would happen? Developers would quickly realize that selling copies is no way to make money. But -- and this is a fallacy that nearly every copyright advocate seems to commit -- that doesn't mean they'd be left without a way to make money!
What it means is they'd have to focus on the thing they have that can't be copied: their skill and talent. In other words, their labor.
The unimaginative ones might decide that making games just isn't possible anymore, since they wouldn't be able to look past the business model they've been relying on for the past couple decades. But the ones who can adapt will choose another business model, based on selling the service of writing software rather than selling a disc in a box.
From our viewpoint here in the present, we can't know exactly what that future model would look like. We can, however, see that the fundamentals are all there: programming and game design skill is a scarce resource (unlike data), and it's one that people are already willing to pay for. We might need a novel system of middlemen to pick the wheat from the chaff, or a new payment model to allow millions of individual gamers to fund development rather than a handful of investors, but there's no reason to think selling copies is the only way to make money.
Agreed. I just don't think those equate to over-indulgence. Apple is the brand of "I'm better than you." or "I'm different than you."
Isn't that the same thing, considering that they invite their customers to show that they're better by buying a flashy, overpriced product? Surfing the web on a $2000 notebook is like taking your Ferrari to the grocery store. The point is to be seen with it and/or to feel good about owning such a thing. If it provided the same features at 1/2 or 1/4 the price, it'd cater to an entirely different market.
Over-indulgence STARTS at 10x the price, not a simple factor of two.
I'd say a factor of four is close enough. (Competing 15" notebooks start under $500.)
Apple doesn't want to be a brand of over-indulgence.
Haven't looked at their product lineup lately, have you? That's exactly what they are.
For example, there's clearly a big market for sub-$1000 15" notebooks - instead, Apple packs in a bunch of esoteric features that few people will ever use and charges $2000, getting by mostly on appearance and trendiness. (At best, you could argue that Apple products are analogous to high-end sports cars -- high specs at a high price -- but then you're making the same point: conspicuous consumption is what those are all about, too.)
The one thing that player-based upconverters could do (but IMO generally don't do) is take advantage of the fact that they know what's about to happen.
Even working one frame at a time, I think player-based upconverters can theoretically do a better job, since they have access to the compressed video. A TV sees each frame as a field of pixels, with no special insight as to how those pixels got there; a DVD player knows where the macroblock boundaries are and which sinusoidal patterns make up each block.
No, actually, what I said was correct. That's the opposite of wrong.
The women is not being charged with harassment. Or abuse. Or anything like that.
Yes, that's correct too. She's being charged under a law that may or may not apply, and will probably set a bad precedent if the case is successful. It's a shame there isn't a better law to charge her under.
But that doesn't change the fact that the case is against the person who committed the harassment -- not the web site. The GP's analogy to "the air that carried their words to your ears" was incorrect.
If someone harasses you IRL, who do you blame? The... air that carried their words to your ears?
No, you blame the person who's harassing you, which is exactly what's going on in this case. Like it says in your own quote, the case is against the woman whose harassment drove this girl to suicide, not the web site she used as a medium.
and a bad question at that: OSX doesn't check for any Apple hardware
Well, there's obviously some hardware difference between a Mac and a typical PC that prevents OS X from being installed and used on the latter. Maybe it's just EFI vs. BIOS. I'm not sure; if I were, I would've asked something more specific.
If you'd rather split hairs and complain about moderation than answer the question, that's fine: other people have already answered it.
But, in the final analysis, Apple are a hardware company. Their OS is a way of selling the hardware.
Their business model is their problem, not ours. If people like Apple's software but would rather buy hardware from someone else, they can adapt by becoming a software company. Or they can try to improve their hardware lineup, so no one will want to buy from a competitor.
But they seem to want it both ways. They want to tie the OS to their hardware, so people have to buy an Apple computer to run OS X, but they also want to sell OS upgrades, thus proving that the software has value all by itself that people are willing to pay for. That isn't going to fly unless they can ensure that everyone who buys a copy already owns a Mac: once they sell a copy of the OS, they have no control over where it gets installed.
Thanks for proving my point again. If only you could start thinking clearly about this.
Actually, by showing that you have no response to any of the issues raised in my post, just more empty rhetoric and personal attacks (and over a week late, no less), I think you've proved more here than I could ever have hoped to. Thanks a bunch!
You kids today don't know how good you have it. Why, back in my day, I paid ONE WHEELBARROW FULL OF GOLD, every week, for a 75 baud line that I shared with my two hundred employees, their families, and their in-laws.
Oh, and it was half duplex! Every time we were done sending and wanted to start receiving, we had to climb a ladder to the top of the building -- which was an 80 story skyscraper, mind you -- and switch the wires around. Even during a thunderstorm.
And mister, you better believe that when we finally got an MP3 downloaded, we cherished it. We didn't just cram it in an iPod Shuffle and forget about it like these hoodla do now.
Because cheap and crappy wins in the marketplace far more often than expensive and excellent (which is what Apple sells)?
As I said, there's room in the market for both of them. You can get an expensive and excellent PC if you want, or you can get a cheap and crappy one, or something in between. Competition in the PC market has resulted in more choices, not fewer.
Apple seems to have decided to focus on "expensive and excellent" (although some would call it "expensive and crammed full of features we don't need", but that's another story). If that's what people want, and if Apple really can do it better than anyone else, then they have nothing to fear.
On the other hand, if competitors can do "expensive and excellent" better than Apple can -- or if it turns out consumers don't really want that in the first place, and are only tolerating Apple's hardware lineup because nothing else runs OS X -- then Apple is in trouble. But why should we shed a tear over their fate? If they can't provide hardware that the market wants, then they should stick to developing software, and let their hardware division be replaced by a company that can serve the market a little better.
And as (for some reason), nobody has pointed out, allowing clone machines kills Apple's business, just like allowing PC clones eventually (though very, very slowly) undercut and killed the IBM PC business.
It killed IBM's PC business because personal computers were never IBM's strong point. Other companies were better at serving that market, and they took it over from IBM. That's too bad for IBM, but it's been great for the rest of us.
And yes, it would become a race to the bottom. All PC markets with intense competition seem to have turned out that way.
Well, no. You can still get a high-end, high quality PC if you want to spend the money to get it. But now you can also get a cheap but workable PC if that's all you need.
Competition has improved the market, and the only ones who've really lost have been the ones who couldn't compete. Why should Apple be afraid of competition unless they're worried that someone else will do a better job?
The real loser ends up being the legitimate customers. There is no Apple equivalent of WGA at this time, and I'd prefer there never is. If the courts decree that Apple may not tie the software to a specific piece of hardware, Apple will have to seek a technical solution.
No, they might choose to seek a technical solution, but they won't have to.
Other OS vendors get along just fine without tying their operating systems to particular hardware. They just charge enough for the OS to pay for the cost of developing it. Nothing's stopping Apple from doing the same thing.
What's the big deal with running OSX on non-Apple hardware, anyway?
Non-Apple hardware is cheaper. Just look at the prices in TFS: $620 gets you 3GB of memory, an nVidia GeForce 8600 CT video card and a 500GB hard drive. The only Mac you can get for that price is the Mini, which has 1 GB of memory, an 80 GB hard drive, and integrated graphics (and no room for expansion).
There is all kinds of products sold every day that have the software and hardware tied specifically together, but suddenly it's bad for Apple to do this?
It's bad when anyone does it. Apple is just the most visible offender.
They are peddling a solution, take it or leave it, vote with your wallet. But you have to take it or leave it in its entirety.
That's what Apple would like us to believe, but it's probably not true. They sell copies of OS X to people who don't own Macs. Once you own a copy, you can legally install and run it (see 17 USC 117), regardless of how any license agreement purports to restrict you.
It is hard to imagine a realistic situation in which using software that is lawfully in your possession would not be considered fair use by a court.
Indeed. I guess I misspoke; I didn't mean to say that you never have the right to make copies if you're not the "owner" of the copy. Fair use may certainly apply, although I'm not aware of any cases where fair use has been examined with regard to copying software in order to use it, so that's just speculation until a court has the chance to rule on it.
My point is just that we don't need to bother speculating about fair use when we already have a perfectly good statutory right to install and run software.
(Conversely, even if one literally and cleary owns a shiny metal disk with work on it, one does not necessarily have any rights at all to copy that work).
If the work is software, it seems pretty clear from 117 that you have the rights to make a backup copy and to copy the software into RAM in order to run it.
Not that I defend conscription or anything, but it's not living hell either.
On the contrary: it is living hell if you're forced into it.
You talk about how this stuff is no different from what goes on in the navy or the army. In case you haven't noticed, the United States has a volunteer military these days: people sign up to be subjected to all that, knowing what it is and believing it'll make them stronger. People who don't want to be subjected to it don't join the military.
Even in the past (or in other countries where people are still forced into the military), the proper response wouldn't have been "see? prison is no worse than the army!". Rather, it would've been "oh my god, the army is as bad as prison!"
2 minute showers?!? Living in dorms?!? Waiting to shit?!? That's outrageous!
Or maybe that's why it's called punishment - it's not supposed to be pleasant.
"Punishment" -- making someone's life unpleasant for unpleasantness's sake -- is not a legitimate goal of the justice system.
Locking someone up for a period of months or years is enough of a deterrent already. Telling him to wait till the end of the day to use the bathroom is just rubbing salt into the wound, poking a mad dog with a stick. Don't be surprised when he bites back.
Whether or not the software is sold or rented or otherwise, the EULA is usually firmly fixed in two principles of copyright law:
(a) the software as sold in the box is a recording of information in fixed media
(b) except as provided by statute and by fair use rights granted by the courts all rights to make copies of any nature -- including copying from the fixed shiny-disc media to an internal hard drive -- are retained by the owner of the copyright in the information
(b) is the one that undermines EULAs. You see, the right to make copies is provided by statute, specifically by 17 USC 117, which says "it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided... that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner".
In other words, if you buy a CD-ROM containing the software, you become an owner of a copy of that software (just like buying a book means you own a copy of that book). If you need to make further copies of the software in order to run it, e.g. copying it to your hard drive or into RAM, 17 USC 117 says that isn't an infringement.
That's why it matters whether software is "sold" or "licensed" or something else. If a copy of a program is sold to you, then you own that copy, and you have the right to make copies as needed to run it. If it's licensed, leased, or rented, then someone else still owns it, and you don't have that right.
There are two different "ownerships" at play: first, there is the owner of the shiny disc with the data on it. Second, there is the owner of the rights to make copies of that data. [...] Fair use may not always protect the second type of owner from making copies of information onto their hard disks [...] Moreover, fair use hinges on fairness, and making a profit (even an indirect one) from derivative work designed to interfere with the copyright licence is almost certainly not going to be accepted as a defence by any court.
Under 17 USC 117, the owner of the shiny disc automatically receives the right to make copies (in certain circumstances). Fair use and profit are irrelevant in that case, because those copies are specifically allowed by statute.
It [the iPhone] is, BY FAR, the most intuitive and easy-to-use-out-of-the-box phone I have ever used.
In that case, I'd recommend checking out some of the other phones that are out now. You might find that they're even more intuitive than the iPhone.
The LG Dare, for example, is one that I found much easier to type on than the iPhone, despite its smaller screen. It also has a button to navigate backward (I ended up having to go back up to the iPhone's top level menu far more than seemed necessary), and the screen rotates when you turn the phone in just about every mode, whereas the iPhone often forces you into either landscape or portrait depending on the mode.
Why, pray tell, does a thief get to violate the law and a murderer not ?
Where, pray tell, did I say either one of them gets to violate the law?
The question here is not whether someone who misuses P2P or less-lethal weaponry should be punished, but whether the misuses outweigh the legal uses -- that is, whether we're better or worse off on the whole as a result of having them.
In answering that question, it's important to look at the consequences of misuse (as well as the benefits of legal use). The consequences of misusing a weapon, i.e. injury or death, are obviously more severe than those of copying files illegally.
Why not a physical thief ? p2p certainly destroys value, as any sane person will agree, so it *does* do damage.
Actually, sane people often disagree on that issue, as any/. thread on the topic will illustrate, but that's beside the point. Even in the worst case scenario painted by the RIAA and MPAA, no one dies because of P2P.
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What are you talking about? The product of their skill and talent is easily stolen/copied. That's like saying "DVD piracy isn't a problem, movie producers just have to concentrate on their talent and make better movies!". That's bullshit.
No, you seem to have misunderstood me.
The product of their labor is easily obtained for free, that's true. But the labor itself is not: no one can force them to write games against their will.
That means as long as people want new games to play, the developers hold the upper hand. They can charge whatever they want for the act of writing a new game, because they're the only ones who can do it.
In other words, to adapt, you need to stop thinking of game development as a manufacturing job, where you churn out objects that are sold, and start thinking of it as a service, where people hire you to do something. As long as you charge enough for the initial act of writing the game, it doesn't matter who gets a copy later (and of course it wouldn't have to be one single entity paying all the development costs).
Our society has ingrained into people that stealing is wrong
Yes, and for one simple reason: because when you steal something, the person you stole it from doesn't have it anymore.
The bad part of stealing isn't that you get something for free. It's that you make someone else poorer by doing it. If you take that part out of the equation, you might still be able to call it "stealing" in some sense of the word, but it's missing the one thing that makes real stealing objectionable.
The problem with your attitude is that it fails the "golden rule" - would my behavior still be OK if everybody did what I do?
In this case, I think the answer is yes.
Think about it: if everyone pirated games, what would happen? Developers would quickly realize that selling copies is no way to make money. But -- and this is a fallacy that nearly every copyright advocate seems to commit -- that doesn't mean they'd be left without a way to make money!
What it means is they'd have to focus on the thing they have that can't be copied: their skill and talent. In other words, their labor.
The unimaginative ones might decide that making games just isn't possible anymore, since they wouldn't be able to look past the business model they've been relying on for the past couple decades. But the ones who can adapt will choose another business model, based on selling the service of writing software rather than selling a disc in a box.
From our viewpoint here in the present, we can't know exactly what that future model would look like. We can, however, see that the fundamentals are all there: programming and game design skill is a scarce resource (unlike data), and it's one that people are already willing to pay for. We might need a novel system of middlemen to pick the wheat from the chaff, or a new payment model to allow millions of individual gamers to fund development rather than a handful of investors, but there's no reason to think selling copies is the only way to make money.
Agreed. I just don't think those equate to over-indulgence. Apple is the brand of "I'm better than you." or "I'm different than you."
Isn't that the same thing, considering that they invite their customers to show that they're better by buying a flashy, overpriced product? Surfing the web on a $2000 notebook is like taking your Ferrari to the grocery store. The point is to be seen with it and/or to feel good about owning such a thing. If it provided the same features at 1/2 or 1/4 the price, it'd cater to an entirely different market.
Over-indulgence STARTS at 10x the price, not a simple factor of two.
I'd say a factor of four is close enough. (Competing 15" notebooks start under $500.)
Apple doesn't want to be a brand of over-indulgence.
Haven't looked at their product lineup lately, have you? That's exactly what they are.
For example, there's clearly a big market for sub-$1000 15" notebooks - instead, Apple packs in a bunch of esoteric features that few people will ever use and charges $2000, getting by mostly on appearance and trendiness. (At best, you could argue that Apple products are analogous to high-end sports cars -- high specs at a high price -- but then you're making the same point: conspicuous consumption is what those are all about, too.)
The one thing that player-based upconverters could do (but IMO generally don't do) is take advantage of the fact that they know what's about to happen.
Even working one frame at a time, I think player-based upconverters can theoretically do a better job, since they have access to the compressed video. A TV sees each frame as a field of pixels, with no special insight as to how those pixels got there; a DVD player knows where the macroblock boundaries are and which sinusoidal patterns make up each block.
I demand you take that back. My grandmother was a saint!
You're completely wrong and that's the issue.
No, actually, what I said was correct. That's the opposite of wrong.
The women is not being charged with harassment. Or abuse. Or anything like that.
Yes, that's correct too. She's being charged under a law that may or may not apply, and will probably set a bad precedent if the case is successful. It's a shame there isn't a better law to charge her under.
But that doesn't change the fact that the case is against the person who committed the harassment -- not the web site. The GP's analogy to "the air that carried their words to your ears" was incorrect.
If someone harasses you IRL, who do you blame? The... air that carried their words to your ears?
No, you blame the person who's harassing you, which is exactly what's going on in this case. Like it says in your own quote, the case is against the woman whose harassment drove this girl to suicide, not the web site she used as a medium.
and a bad question at that: OSX doesn't check for any Apple hardware
Well, there's obviously some hardware difference between a Mac and a typical PC that prevents OS X from being installed and used on the latter. Maybe it's just EFI vs. BIOS. I'm not sure; if I were, I would've asked something more specific.
If you'd rather split hairs and complain about moderation than answer the question, that's fine: other people have already answered it.
Does it emulate whatever Apple hardware OS X checks for, or will it still need a patched OS?
But, in the final analysis, Apple are a hardware company. Their OS is a way of selling the hardware.
Their business model is their problem, not ours. If people like Apple's software but would rather buy hardware from someone else, they can adapt by becoming a software company. Or they can try to improve their hardware lineup, so no one will want to buy from a competitor.
But they seem to want it both ways. They want to tie the OS to their hardware, so people have to buy an Apple computer to run OS X, but they also want to sell OS upgrades, thus proving that the software has value all by itself that people are willing to pay for. That isn't going to fly unless they can ensure that everyone who buys a copy already owns a Mac: once they sell a copy of the OS, they have no control over where it gets installed.
Thanks for proving my point again. If only you could start thinking clearly about this.
Actually, by showing that you have no response to any of the issues raised in my post, just more empty rhetoric and personal attacks (and over a week late, no less), I think you've proved more here than I could ever have hoped to. Thanks a bunch!
Yes, there is.
You kids today don't know how good you have it. Why, back in my day, I paid ONE WHEELBARROW FULL OF GOLD, every week, for a 75 baud line that I shared with my two hundred employees, their families, and their in-laws.
Oh, and it was half duplex! Every time we were done sending and wanted to start receiving, we had to climb a ladder to the top of the building -- which was an 80 story skyscraper, mind you -- and switch the wires around. Even during a thunderstorm.
And mister, you better believe that when we finally got an MP3 downloaded, we cherished it. We didn't just cram it in an iPod Shuffle and forget about it like these hoodla do now.
I believe Sirius only does that for one channel: "Sirius Hits 1", which you happened to be listening to.
Because cheap and crappy wins in the marketplace far more often than expensive and excellent (which is what Apple sells)?
As I said, there's room in the market for both of them. You can get an expensive and excellent PC if you want, or you can get a cheap and crappy one, or something in between. Competition in the PC market has resulted in more choices, not fewer.
Apple seems to have decided to focus on "expensive and excellent" (although some would call it "expensive and crammed full of features we don't need", but that's another story). If that's what people want, and if Apple really can do it better than anyone else, then they have nothing to fear.
On the other hand, if competitors can do "expensive and excellent" better than Apple can -- or if it turns out consumers don't really want that in the first place, and are only tolerating Apple's hardware lineup because nothing else runs OS X -- then Apple is in trouble. But why should we shed a tear over their fate? If they can't provide hardware that the market wants, then they should stick to developing software, and let their hardware division be replaced by a company that can serve the market a little better.
And as (for some reason), nobody has pointed out, allowing clone machines kills Apple's business, just like allowing PC clones eventually (though very, very slowly) undercut and killed the IBM PC business.
It killed IBM's PC business because personal computers were never IBM's strong point. Other companies were better at serving that market, and they took it over from IBM. That's too bad for IBM, but it's been great for the rest of us.
And yes, it would become a race to the bottom. All PC markets with intense competition seem to have turned out that way.
Well, no. You can still get a high-end, high quality PC if you want to spend the money to get it. But now you can also get a cheap but workable PC if that's all you need.
Competition has improved the market, and the only ones who've really lost have been the ones who couldn't compete. Why should Apple be afraid of competition unless they're worried that someone else will do a better job?
The real loser ends up being the legitimate customers. There is no Apple equivalent of WGA at this time, and I'd prefer there never is. If the courts decree that Apple may not tie the software to a specific piece of hardware, Apple will have to seek a technical solution.
No, they might choose to seek a technical solution, but they won't have to.
Other OS vendors get along just fine without tying their operating systems to particular hardware. They just charge enough for the OS to pay for the cost of developing it. Nothing's stopping Apple from doing the same thing.
What's the big deal with running OSX on non-Apple hardware, anyway?
Non-Apple hardware is cheaper. Just look at the prices in TFS: $620 gets you 3GB of memory, an nVidia GeForce 8600 CT video card and a 500GB hard drive. The only Mac you can get for that price is the Mini, which has 1 GB of memory, an 80 GB hard drive, and integrated graphics (and no room for expansion).
There is all kinds of products sold every day that have the software and hardware tied specifically together, but suddenly it's bad for Apple to do this?
It's bad when anyone does it. Apple is just the most visible offender.
They are peddling a solution, take it or leave it, vote with your wallet. But you have to take it or leave it in its entirety.
That's what Apple would like us to believe, but it's probably not true. They sell copies of OS X to people who don't own Macs. Once you own a copy, you can legally install and run it (see 17 USC 117), regardless of how any license agreement purports to restrict you.
It is hard to imagine a realistic situation in which using software that is lawfully in your possession would not be considered fair use by a court.
Indeed. I guess I misspoke; I didn't mean to say that you never have the right to make copies if you're not the "owner" of the copy. Fair use may certainly apply, although I'm not aware of any cases where fair use has been examined with regard to copying software in order to use it, so that's just speculation until a court has the chance to rule on it.
My point is just that we don't need to bother speculating about fair use when we already have a perfectly good statutory right to install and run software.
(Conversely, even if one literally and cleary owns a shiny metal disk with work on it, one does not necessarily have any rights at all to copy that work).
If the work is software, it seems pretty clear from 117 that you have the rights to make a backup copy and to copy the software into RAM in order to run it.
Not that I defend conscription or anything, but it's not living hell either.
On the contrary: it is living hell if you're forced into it.
You talk about how this stuff is no different from what goes on in the navy or the army. In case you haven't noticed, the United States has a volunteer military these days: people sign up to be subjected to all that, knowing what it is and believing it'll make them stronger. People who don't want to be subjected to it don't join the military.
Even in the past (or in other countries where people are still forced into the military), the proper response wouldn't have been "see? prison is no worse than the army!". Rather, it would've been "oh my god, the army is as bad as prison!"
2 minute showers?!? Living in dorms?!? Waiting to shit?!? That's outrageous!
Or maybe that's why it's called punishment - it's not supposed to be pleasant.
"Punishment" -- making someone's life unpleasant for unpleasantness's sake -- is not a legitimate goal of the justice system.
Locking someone up for a period of months or years is enough of a deterrent already. Telling him to wait till the end of the day to use the bathroom is just rubbing salt into the wound, poking a mad dog with a stick. Don't be surprised when he bites back.
Whether or not the software is sold or rented or otherwise, the EULA is usually firmly fixed in two principles of copyright law:
(a) the software as sold in the box is a recording of information in fixed media
(b) except as provided by statute and by fair use rights granted by the courts all rights to make copies of any nature -- including copying from the fixed shiny-disc media to an internal hard drive -- are retained by the owner of the copyright in the information
(b) is the one that undermines EULAs. You see, the right to make copies is provided by statute, specifically by 17 USC 117, which says "it is not an infringement for the owner of a copy of a computer program to make or authorize the making of another copy or adaptation of that computer program provided ... that such a new copy or adaptation is created as an essential step in the utilization of the computer program in conjunction with a machine and that it is used in no other manner".
In other words, if you buy a CD-ROM containing the software, you become an owner of a copy of that software (just like buying a book means you own a copy of that book). If you need to make further copies of the software in order to run it, e.g. copying it to your hard drive or into RAM, 17 USC 117 says that isn't an infringement.
That's why it matters whether software is "sold" or "licensed" or something else. If a copy of a program is sold to you, then you own that copy, and you have the right to make copies as needed to run it. If it's licensed, leased, or rented, then someone else still owns it, and you don't have that right.
There are two different "ownerships" at play: first, there is the owner of the shiny disc with the data on it. Second, there is the owner of the rights to make copies of that data. [...] Fair use may not always protect the second type of owner from making copies of information onto their hard disks [...] Moreover, fair use hinges on fairness, and making a profit (even an indirect one) from derivative work designed to interfere with the copyright licence is almost certainly not going to be accepted as a defence by any court.
Under 17 USC 117, the owner of the shiny disc automatically receives the right to make copies (in certain circumstances). Fair use and profit are irrelevant in that case, because those copies are specifically allowed by statute.
It [the iPhone] is, BY FAR, the most intuitive and easy-to-use-out-of-the-box phone I have ever used.
In that case, I'd recommend checking out some of the other phones that are out now. You might find that they're even more intuitive than the iPhone.
The LG Dare, for example, is one that I found much easier to type on than the iPhone, despite its smaller screen. It also has a button to navigate backward (I ended up having to go back up to the iPhone's top level menu far more than seemed necessary), and the screen rotates when you turn the phone in just about every mode, whereas the iPhone often forces you into either landscape or portrait depending on the mode.
Why, pray tell, does a thief get to violate the law and a murderer not ?
Where, pray tell, did I say either one of them gets to violate the law?
The question here is not whether someone who misuses P2P or less-lethal weaponry should be punished, but whether the misuses outweigh the legal uses -- that is, whether we're better or worse off on the whole as a result of having them.
In answering that question, it's important to look at the consequences of misuse (as well as the benefits of legal use). The consequences of misusing a weapon, i.e. injury or death, are obviously more severe than those of copying files illegally.
Why not a physical thief ? p2p certainly destroys value, as any sane person will agree, so it *does* do damage.
Actually, sane people often disagree on that issue, as any /. thread on the topic will illustrate, but that's beside the point. Even in the worst case scenario painted by the RIAA and MPAA, no one dies because of P2P.
That would be stupid, there is nothing you have to agree to when you upload to the app store. Better to know up front.
Look, you're the one who said the app store was just one of many possible distribution methods. You can't have it both ways.