the same group of people who enthusiastically defend peer-to-peer file-sharing because of its myriad legal uses condemn less-lethal weaponry because some (not all) police officers will use them unethically
Don't you think weaponry should be held to a higher standard of scrutiny than file sharing?
I mean, when P2P is misused, what's the worst that can happen? A copyright holder misses out on a few bucks that he may or may not have ever gotten anyway. He lives on to fight another day, and he can even sue the pirates for damages if he manages to track them them down.
If a police officer misuses "less-lethal" weaponry, however, someone ends up in the hospital -- or the morgue. His family might have some legal recourse, but that won't ease his suffering or bring him back from the dead.
After all anyone can do anything they want by jaibreaking anyway, so Apple could care less what you do outside the App Store.
Mm-hmm. What a strange coincidence it is, then, that these limitations are part of the SDK license rather than something you only have to agree to when you upload to the App Store, huh? Maybe Apple just overlooked that in their mad frenzy to hand out all this Freedom.
You act like you know what the law actually is, or understand what that portion of the contract means.
Yes, I do. It means exactly what it says. You, on the other hand, seem to think it means nothing at all: if they write something that sounds draconian and restrictive, they must not really mean it, because Apple can do no wrong!
It's not against the "Law" to develop these things, you cannot be arrested for it for example even if "The Man" funds out you are developing an app.
I didn't say it was a crime. It's a breach of contract; you could be sued, successfully, and face an injunction or other penalties enforced by the government. If you think you're still "free" to do it, you've got a pretty funny definition of freedom.
The on ly reasons they have restrictions in place are to placate phone companies so they do the minimum possible cost restrictions just to make the phone companies happy.
Really? Phone companies demanded that Apple make iPhone developers agree not to write interpreters or emulators, even though they already sell dozens of other handsets that can run such programs? You'd rather believe that than admit something bad about Apple?
No, otherwise Apple would not have Ad-Hoc or allow a developer to deploy to his own phone without going through an APple server (certainly practical for them to impose that if they wished).
Well, I don't think it would be practical - we've seen what happens when Apple's servers are overloaded. Imagine if they had to handle a request every time any iPhone developer clicked "build".
But anyway, surely you aren't suggesting they implemented ad-hoc distribution because they secretly want developers to violate their license...?
The way it is now developers have Freedom. Deployment in a closed store has zilch to do with Freedom in the FSF sense.
Again, deployment is beside the point: you can't legally develop applications Apple doesn't like. If you develop those applications, you're violating the SDK license. You only have as much "freedom" to do that as you do to download pirated movies, or drive over the speed limit: you can do it as long as you don't get caught, but most people wouldn't call that freedom. Freedom in the FSF sense certainly does require that you be able to exercise it without breaking any laws or contracts.
If you lived in a country with an oppressive government that outlawed, say, dancing, but they couldn't effectively enforce that law in all cases, would you tell everyone what a swell government it was since it gave you the "freedom" to dance behind locked doors in underground clubs that the secret police didn't know about? Or would you realize that you only had that freedom by accident (or because of limited government resources), and they'd strip it from you if it were practical to do so?
Come on. That doesn't mean it isn't possible. Those rules are simply guidelines for what Apple will accept in the App Store. It would be very easy to write an emulator or interpreter using the SDK, or do all kinds of things in fact.
Yes, but this is an example of Apple's opposition to "Freedom". Of course it's possible to do that, but Apple puts up legal and technical roadblocks because they don't want us to. They don't support it, they oppose it. You're hardly "free" to do something if you have to violate a contract to do it.
They forbid us to develop certain applications for the iPhone, to install their OS on commodity hardware, and to listen to many iTunes songs (the ones that are only available with DRM) and all iTunes videos on third-party devices. They can't enforce those rules all the time, but that doesn't mean they want us to break them.
They even use modest technical means to enforce those rules: DRM on media and PT_DENY_ATTACH to strengthen the DRM, hardware checks in OS X, and funneling users through the App Store (or limited ad-hoc licenses) to restrict the availability of iPhone apps. It's true that they haven't gone as far as some others have, so I guess we can at least be thankful that DRM isn't quite as tightly integrated into OS X as it is in Windows Vista, or that the iPhone isn't locked down quite as hard as some other phones. But that doesn't mean they're on our side.
1) If you have a developers license (which is only $99) you can create any code you like and run it as you wish on your own devices. So one path for software is people simply release source code that you compile and deploy on your device. You never HAVE to submit anything to the app store after all.
Sure... you just have to limit your audience to the people who are willing to pay for a developer's license and compile your software themselves. This is the same model that Microsoft uses for the XNA Creators Club.
2) There is also Ad Hoc distribution, where any developer can distribute compiled binaries for up to 100 different devices that come from you, not the app store. More limited but the other installers need not do any work.
Interesting, I hadn't heard of that before. But limiting it to 100 devices means it's severely hobbled. If you want to make a custom app for your coworkers or your WoW clan, this might work, but if you're developing an emulator or a Java VM, chances are there are more than 100 people who'll want it.
Of course, maybe that doesn't matter: it seems you were wrong when you said "you are still free to develop all those things, you just can't distribute some of them", because the SDK license still forbids you from developing emulators and interpreters no matter how you distribute them. It doesn't say you can't distribute them through the App Store, it says you can't develop them using the SDK.
None of that involves jailbreaking. But unlike modding an XBox to run XBMC, Jailbreaking does not remove any other functionality from your phone so to my mind it's equally valid as an option for development - it does not void your warranty, and is easily undone in case you need to take it in for service..
Actually, modding an Xbox doesn't remove functionality either (original games can still be played online, etc.), and it's also easily undone. So I guess the Xbox is just as open as the iPhone.
More open than that since any app developed can be run by at least some people Ad-Hoc without ever touching the app store. You can't do that with a console.
Er.. what? If I have a modded Xbox, I can download code from anywhere and run it. I don't need to go through Microsoft's store. OTOH, if I don't have a modded Xbox, I can only run the code Microsoft wants me to run.
Similarly, if I have a jailbroken iPhone, I can download code from anywhere and run it. But if I don't, I can only run the code Apple wants me to run.
What exactly is the distinction I'm not seeing?
Nor can you share console code that anyone on earth can run in a simulator so as to give you back code and feedback on how something works.
If there's an emulator for the console (like there is for the original Xbox), then I can.
Indeed, you could say the same about other phone platforms, like the notoriously locked-down BREW. You can develop BREW apps and run them on a simulator, and share them with anyone else who has the simulator. If you manage to mod your phone, you can even run them on real hardware, and share them with other people who have modded phones.
But, of course, no one is fooled into thinking BREW is an open platform, because for your app to reach an audience of any respectable size (i.e. people who don't want to void their warranty and/or break their service contract), it has to be approved by a central authority.
But Apple is trying to change that with itunes+, a non-DRM'ed format they sell.
Uh huh. They're trying so hard to get rid of DRM that they put special support in their OS to strengthen it (PT_DENY_ATTACH).
An open sourcing Darwin....
Ha! You realize the Darwin kernel isn't sufficient to run applications, right? Let me know when they stop suing people who try to make it possible to run OS X apps on non-Apple hardware.
You are still free to develop all those things, you just can't distribute some of them. You can always distribute via the Jailbreak mechanism.
So, in other words, it's as "open" as a game console. You can develop games for the Xbox and the Wii too, technically, even though no one will be able to run them without a modded console. Should we give Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo a big hand for their support of Freedom?
If you overlook the many examples of Frredom that Apple supports and has supported just to point out a few areas where they are more locked down, you'll never even find a company "pure" enough for you.
Apple offers countless examples in support of Freedom. They support Webkit, GCC, LLVM, a multitude of common open source apps like Apache, Bonjour, Squirrelfish, etc. etc. etc.
They also offer many examples in opposition to Freedom: DRM on iTunes music and video purchases (there's still no third-party way to play a movie or TV show from iTMS), vendor lock-in with their OS (and lawsuits against third parties who buy copies of OS X and install it on compatible hardware for resale), tight control over iPhone development (e.g. no emulators, no virtual machines, and no distribution except through Apple)...
On my planet, which we call Earth, young drivers are involved in a disproportionately high number of traffic accidents.
Note: I said "accidents per mile traveled".
Elderly drivers are also involved in a disproportionately high number of traffic accidents, relative to the amount of driving they do. They just don't spend as much time on the road as younger drivers. (Similarly, people who live farther from work pay more for insurance, because more time on the road means more opportunities for a wreck.)
they tend to be crappier drivers due to inexperience and a tendency to make stupid mistakes like driving way too fast, driving while drunk, driving while staring at their girlfriend's breasts, etc.
Well, inexperience is the big one, but of course inexperience can be remedied with more driving. Elderly drivers tend to be crappier due to physical and mental deterioration, and that doesn't go away.
Indeed. The average 15 year old has sharper vision and quicker reflexes than anyone who'll need this technology... yet which one of them is allowed to get a driver's license?
(Hint 1: it's not the one who's statistically likely to cause fewer accidents per mile traveled.)
(Hint 2: it's the one who's allowed to vote, because politicians wouldn't dare take his driving rights away.)
I just explained how what counts as "interference" depends on what you consider to be the relevant use.
Yes, but not all uses are worthy of equal consideration. For example, we can safely ignore hypothetical uses that nobody actually cares about, like your radio example. We can also adopt a sensible definition of "use" by excluding other people's reactions to your actions, like profiting, since you can't earn a profit until someone else decides to give you their money. (We can also ignore uses that involve force or fraud against other people, e.g. tattooing a poem on someone else's face against his will, but hopefully that goes without saying.)
(If people enjoyed blasting off radio waves with no intent to transmit information, for example, then there's no interference there either!)
If people enjoyed blasting off radio waves with no intent to transmit information, then this would be relevant. But they don't, so it isn't. Again, this is what happens when you think too abstractly: you ignore what people actually want in the real world, and obsess over hypothetical possibilities that no one is interested in.
Using someone's ideas certainly interferes with one *kind* of use for its creator
Only if you expand the concept of "use" to include other people's potential reactions to your actions. But then it's not really your use anymore, is it?
Offering a book for sale is a use of that book, and no one else's use of that book can prevent you from offering it for sale. Profiting from the book isn't, however, because it can only happen with someone else's cooperation. You can't make a profit unless someone chooses to give you their money, and you don't control their choices; what they do is not part of your use. Someone who declines to buy your book isn't interfering with your use, and neither is someone who offers the same book for sale at a lower price.
(Similarly, broadcasting a signal that can potentially be received is a use. Someone who prevents your signal from being receivable is interfering with that use. But someone who declines to listen to your transmission is not interfering with it, and neither is someone who broadcasts a more interesting signal so that no one listens to yours. Your use means your use, not theirs.)
Sorry dude, that last one wasn't a troll. That was someone responding to an original troll - you.
Unfortunately, he seems to have convinced the mods.
Frankly, I wish he were trolling, but what's scary is that he probably isn't. I know it's rare these days for people to acknowledge that anyone under 18 is a human being with rights, but he takes it a step beyond by admitting that he'd be willing to surgically tag his children like animals, even over their protests. An admission like that should inspire the same kind of outrage as expressing a desire to own slaves or commit war crimes.
Instead, he gets modded up, and I get modded down. What a thread.
You make my point for me: if there's a "general consensus" that the ideaspace is only useful if there's a possibility of people creating works that have copyright protection -- and there is
Actually, no, there isn't.
And by the way, we weren't talking about "the ideaspace", we were talking about individual pieces of information (copyrightable works). If you want to claim that an individual piece of information needs an owner, then you have to show that an individual piece of information can only be used effectively when someone is given exclusive rights to it.
The fact remains that one person using a sequence of words (or a song, or a movie, etc.) can't possibly interfere with anyone else using it; on the other hand, one person using a radio frequency can interfere with other people trying to use the same frequency. That's a key difference between radio licensing and copyright, and that's why ownership rights are justified in one case but not the other. You can try to ignore that difference, but that won't make it go away.
You are saying that you don't love your child enough to swallow your pride and do everything you can to work for their safe and speedy return?
No, what I'm saying is I wouldn't surgically implant homing beacons in their bodies, and certainly not against their will. I'd have to swallow more than just my pride in order to sink to that level; I'd have to swallow my conscience and my respect for the rights of other people.
Tell that to your kindapped and then murdered children when you are sitting their with your wife and crying over their grave, good job.
Wow. If you're really so frightened of the boogeyman that you'd sell your children's very humanity to keep him at bay, how did you ever make it in the Marines? Or is that what caused it?
seeing as you didn't see the whole bit about the conditions as to when I'd have consided doing so 'cause you're not wanting to read that much
Oh, I read it, but your conditions don't change a thing. It doesn't matter whether it's safe or legal: it's a barbaric affront to human decency in any case, and that's precisely why it isn't legal.
instead of doing the responsible thing and being the best parent you can be.
Someone who treats his kids like property, like animals, isn't a good parent at all. He's a monster.
I'd have my kids LoJacked if it could be safely removed (with minimal scar) at the age of 18, were legal, and could be proved to be safe. No questions asked and no they don't get a choice. [...] I've never talked to them like anything less than humans.
Stop right there. You might not let them know you think they're less than humans, but you made it loud and clear to us in the first few lines of your comment.
Kids aren't full grown adults and they shouldn't be treated as such.
They are, however, human beings and they should be treated as such.
You don't put a tracking chip in a human being. You put it in an animal. The kind of asshole who writes "I'd have my kids LoJacked" is just advertising what he really thinks of them.
Wrong: they both limit what patterns you can form your property into.
That's the danger of thinking too abstractly: it leads you to make absurd statements like that one. You might as well claim copyright is the same as laws against murder and cattle rustling because "they all limit what you can do".
And the point of writing a book is so that I can get a monopoly on the transmission of the informational content of the book. So?
Yes, so what? It doesn't matter what your intent was in writing the book. What matters is whether or not one person's use of the words in that book can interfere with anyone else's use of them.
Obviously, it can't, and so nobody needs to be granted ownership of them; no one needs to decide which conflicting uses to allow when there are no conflicts.
Furthermore, even if you want to insist that selling copies of the book for profit is a "use" that other people interfere with when they give away copies for free, the fact remains that those people aren't actually interfering with your use at all. They aren't preventing anyone from giving you money for a copy of that book; they're just offering a better deal. You're entitled to start a business, but if you want to have customers, you'll have to compete for them.
I don't care that you like to use radio waves for communication. I like to write books for profit. Why does wanting it get you the right?
It has nothing to do with "wanting it"; rather, it has to do with the general consensus that radio spectrum is only really useful when the transmitted signals can be received successfully -- that is, "using" a radio frequency means transmitting a signal which can be received (or receiving a signal which has been transmitted), so if there's too much interference, I can't "use" that frequency in any meaningful way.
Books, however, and the sequences of words within them, are not only (or even primarily) useful as a product to be sold. You can use the words in a book by reading it, or translating it, or writing a screenplay based on it, and in doing so you won't interfere with anyone else's use of those words.
The parallels between physical property rights and IP are too close to ignore
The parallels in the law are there because the law was crafted by people whose agenda was to force information into their preexisting concept of property.
The inherent parallels between property and information, however, are few and far between. Ownership of physical property comes from the fact that it can only be in one place at a time, and some uses interfere with others: if you want to drive this car to Los Angeles at the same time I'm driving it to New York, we can't both have our way, so someone has to decide which one of us gets to use it. That person is the owner.
Information doesn't need anyone to decide how it may be used, because everyone can use it at once, and no use can interfere with any other use. Therefore, any argument that information should be owned at all is going to have to start somewhere else: "even though no one needs to dictate how information can be used, we should still give them the right to do so because..."
To see the problem most clearly, look at rights to radio frequencies, which people generally view as justified. Like IP, this is no more than the right to form a particular pattern within a certain jurisdiction.
Er, no. Copyright is an exclusive right to share certain information (certain sets of facts) with other people. Radio spectrum is the right to transmit on a particular frequency within a particular physical area. One limits what you can say, the other limits where you can say it.
The "harms" of not having such rights depend purely on what you view as a harm. It's possible for infinite people to broadcast radio waves; that there is interference matters only if you want it to matter.
But interference always matters, because the point of radio communication is that the signals you transmit will eventually be received somewhere else and decoded. Interference prevents that from happening. Your use of a particular frequency can interfere with other people's use, whereas your use of a particular song can't possibly interfere with anyone else's use of that song.
That's why radio spectrum is fundamentally different from information: one is a scarce resource, the other is not.
You have everything physical, but you no longer have the opportunity to attempt to profit from your work by charging me for a copy of that work. That's not the same as depriving you access to a physical item, but it is at least a notional, potential loss. (Or rather, loss of potential)
As the other response pointed out, this is treading on pretty shaky ground.
First off, I do still have the opportunity to attempt to sell you a copy. Just because you have a copy doesn't mean you can't buy another -- it only means you won't want another. At least, probably not, but who knows: maybe you'll like it so much that you'll want to reward me by buying copies for all your friends.
Second, if we're going to start considering it a "loss of potential" whenever something happens to make a potential customer not want to buy something from me, then we'll have to start worrying about a lot of other actions.
What if someone reads a bad review, and it convinces them not to buy a copy from me? That's a loss of potential too. So, should we only allow positive reviews from now on?
What if someone spends their money on something else and doesn't have any left to buy my product? Say they had $60 budgeted and they decided to spend it on a few DVDs instead of buying a game from me. Doesn't that mean the existence of those DVDs has caused me to lose that potential revenue?
My point is that this "loss of potential" occurs all the time, and people are generally OK with it, because that potential revenue is really just money you wish you had. And no matter how hard you wish, it isn't yours until someone chooses to give it to you. No one is obligated to make your wish come true, and if it doesn't, you might be disappointed but you haven't really lost anything.
Hell, why do I even ask? I mean if you are back you still have everything you had before. So I don't even need your approval for that.
Incorrect. The space in my home is a scarce resource, and your use may conflict with mine.
Even if I'm not at home, I might still have plans for what I want done with my house: maybe I wanted to let someone else stay there, or maybe I just get really excited about the thought of my house being empty all weekend. Neither of those can happen if you're staying there instead. Since I'm the owner, I get to choose which of those conflicting uses are allowed to happen.
On the other hand, if you make a copy of my song/program/movie, you can do whatever you want with your copy, and it can't possibly conflict with what I want to do with my copy. There's no need for anyone to choose which of us gets to use that piece of information, because we can both use it without the risk of interfering with each other.
I think a point you are all missing is that you cannot buy a separate copy of OSX to install on a fresh machine. Apple ships OSX with a machine. Apple sells *upgrades* to OSX in a separate box.
Does the upgrade include all the files necessary to install the OS? Then it's all you need.
That makes any comment about the EULA irrelevant: copyright law applies and neither Psystar, nor anyone else, has a license to install OSX on a fresh box.
Under 17 USC 117, you don't need a license to copy software that you already own if the copying is an essential step in running it, so that would seem to cover installing an OS.
It's exactly the same law that allows the GPL and Open licenses to work.
Not really. Those licenses work by offering you a right you don't already have (distributing copies to other people, with or without modifications) in exchange for accepting their terms.
The only reason I can't use your car or house when you aren't using it is because of artificial laws saying I can't and granting you protection from such actions - whats the difference? I deprive you of something?
Yes, that's the difference. A pretty important one.
Why is that important?
Because if you take my car, I won't be able to use it. I will have been harmed by your actions. Harming people is bad.
On the other hand, if you copy my song/program/movie, I won't have been harmed: I'll still have everything I had before you made that copy. (I might wish you had given me some money for it, but that money was never mine anyway, no matter how hard I was wishing. I might be sad about that, but I won't have suffered any actual loss.)
Surely sharing is a good thing?
Sharing is usually a good thing, but not when someone is harmed in the process. Surely you already knew that?
Slashdot Mirror
the same group of people who enthusiastically defend peer-to-peer file-sharing because of its myriad legal uses condemn less-lethal weaponry because some (not all) police officers will use them unethically
Don't you think weaponry should be held to a higher standard of scrutiny than file sharing?
I mean, when P2P is misused, what's the worst that can happen? A copyright holder misses out on a few bucks that he may or may not have ever gotten anyway. He lives on to fight another day, and he can even sue the pirates for damages if he manages to track them them down.
If a police officer misuses "less-lethal" weaponry, however, someone ends up in the hospital -- or the morgue. His family might have some legal recourse, but that won't ease his suffering or bring him back from the dead.
After all anyone can do anything they want by jaibreaking anyway, so Apple could care less what you do outside the App Store.
Mm-hmm. What a strange coincidence it is, then, that these limitations are part of the SDK license rather than something you only have to agree to when you upload to the App Store, huh? Maybe Apple just overlooked that in their mad frenzy to hand out all this Freedom.
You act like you know what the law actually is, or understand what that portion of the contract means.
Yes, I do. It means exactly what it says. You, on the other hand, seem to think it means nothing at all: if they write something that sounds draconian and restrictive, they must not really mean it, because Apple can do no wrong!
It's not against the "Law" to develop these things, you cannot be arrested for it for example even if "The Man" funds out you are developing an app.
I didn't say it was a crime. It's a breach of contract; you could be sued, successfully, and face an injunction or other penalties enforced by the government. If you think you're still "free" to do it, you've got a pretty funny definition of freedom.
The on ly reasons they have restrictions in place are to placate phone companies so they do the minimum possible cost restrictions just to make the phone companies happy.
Really? Phone companies demanded that Apple make iPhone developers agree not to write interpreters or emulators, even though they already sell dozens of other handsets that can run such programs? You'd rather believe that than admit something bad about Apple?
No, otherwise Apple would not have Ad-Hoc or allow a developer to deploy to his own phone without going through an APple server (certainly practical for them to impose that if they wished).
Well, I don't think it would be practical - we've seen what happens when Apple's servers are overloaded. Imagine if they had to handle a request every time any iPhone developer clicked "build".
But anyway, surely you aren't suggesting they implemented ad-hoc distribution because they secretly want developers to violate their license...?
The way it is now developers have Freedom. Deployment in a closed store has zilch to do with Freedom in the FSF sense.
Again, deployment is beside the point: you can't legally develop applications Apple doesn't like. If you develop those applications, you're violating the SDK license. You only have as much "freedom" to do that as you do to download pirated movies, or drive over the speed limit: you can do it as long as you don't get caught, but most people wouldn't call that freedom. Freedom in the FSF sense certainly does require that you be able to exercise it without breaking any laws or contracts.
If you lived in a country with an oppressive government that outlawed, say, dancing, but they couldn't effectively enforce that law in all cases, would you tell everyone what a swell government it was since it gave you the "freedom" to dance behind locked doors in underground clubs that the secret police didn't know about? Or would you realize that you only had that freedom by accident (or because of limited government resources), and they'd strip it from you if it were practical to do so?
Come on. That doesn't mean it isn't possible. Those rules are simply guidelines for what Apple will accept in the App Store. It would be very easy to write an emulator or interpreter using the SDK, or do all kinds of things in fact.
Yes, but this is an example of Apple's opposition to "Freedom". Of course it's possible to do that, but Apple puts up legal and technical roadblocks because they don't want us to. They don't support it, they oppose it. You're hardly "free" to do something if you have to violate a contract to do it.
They forbid us to develop certain applications for the iPhone, to install their OS on commodity hardware, and to listen to many iTunes songs (the ones that are only available with DRM) and all iTunes videos on third-party devices. They can't enforce those rules all the time, but that doesn't mean they want us to break them.
They even use modest technical means to enforce those rules: DRM on media and PT_DENY_ATTACH to strengthen the DRM, hardware checks in OS X, and funneling users through the App Store (or limited ad-hoc licenses) to restrict the availability of iPhone apps. It's true that they haven't gone as far as some others have, so I guess we can at least be thankful that DRM isn't quite as tightly integrated into OS X as it is in Windows Vista, or that the iPhone isn't locked down quite as hard as some other phones. But that doesn't mean they're on our side.
1) If you have a developers license (which is only $99) you can create any code you like and run it as you wish on your own devices. So one path for software is people simply release source code that you compile and deploy on your device. You never HAVE to submit anything to the app store after all.
Sure... you just have to limit your audience to the people who are willing to pay for a developer's license and compile your software themselves. This is the same model that Microsoft uses for the XNA Creators Club.
2) There is also Ad Hoc distribution, where any developer can distribute compiled binaries for up to 100 different devices that come from you, not the app store. More limited but the other installers need not do any work.
Interesting, I hadn't heard of that before. But limiting it to 100 devices means it's severely hobbled. If you want to make a custom app for your coworkers or your WoW clan, this might work, but if you're developing an emulator or a Java VM, chances are there are more than 100 people who'll want it.
Of course, maybe that doesn't matter: it seems you were wrong when you said "you are still free to develop all those things, you just can't distribute some of them", because the SDK license still forbids you from developing emulators and interpreters no matter how you distribute them. It doesn't say you can't distribute them through the App Store, it says you can't develop them using the SDK.
None of that involves jailbreaking. But unlike modding an XBox to run XBMC, Jailbreaking does not remove any other functionality from your phone so to my mind it's equally valid as an option for development - it does not void your warranty, and is easily undone in case you need to take it in for service..
Actually, modding an Xbox doesn't remove functionality either (original games can still be played online, etc.), and it's also easily undone. So I guess the Xbox is just as open as the iPhone.
More open than that since any app developed can be run by at least some people Ad-Hoc without ever touching the app store. You can't do that with a console.
Er.. what? If I have a modded Xbox, I can download code from anywhere and run it. I don't need to go through Microsoft's store. OTOH, if I don't have a modded Xbox, I can only run the code Microsoft wants me to run.
Similarly, if I have a jailbroken iPhone, I can download code from anywhere and run it. But if I don't, I can only run the code Apple wants me to run.
What exactly is the distinction I'm not seeing?
Nor can you share console code that anyone on earth can run in a simulator so as to give you back code and feedback on how something works.
If there's an emulator for the console (like there is for the original Xbox), then I can.
Indeed, you could say the same about other phone platforms, like the notoriously locked-down BREW. You can develop BREW apps and run them on a simulator, and share them with anyone else who has the simulator. If you manage to mod your phone, you can even run them on real hardware, and share them with other people who have modded phones.
But, of course, no one is fooled into thinking BREW is an open platform, because for your app to reach an audience of any respectable size (i.e. people who don't want to void their warranty and/or break their service contract), it has to be approved by a central authority.
But Apple is trying to change that with itunes+, a non-DRM'ed format they sell.
Uh huh. They're trying so hard to get rid of DRM that they put special support in their OS to strengthen it (PT_DENY_ATTACH).
An open sourcing Darwin....
Ha! You realize the Darwin kernel isn't sufficient to run applications, right? Let me know when they stop suing people who try to make it possible to run OS X apps on non-Apple hardware.
You are still free to develop all those things, you just can't distribute some of them. You can always distribute via the Jailbreak mechanism.
So, in other words, it's as "open" as a game console. You can develop games for the Xbox and the Wii too, technically, even though no one will be able to run them without a modded console. Should we give Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo a big hand for their support of Freedom?
If you overlook the many examples of Frredom that Apple supports and has supported just to point out a few areas where they are more locked down, you'll never even find a company "pure" enough for you.
Hmm... IBM? Novell? Red Hat?
Apple offers countless examples in support of Freedom. They support Webkit, GCC, LLVM, a multitude of common open source apps like Apache, Bonjour, Squirrelfish, etc. etc. etc.
They also offer many examples in opposition to Freedom: DRM on iTunes music and video purchases (there's still no third-party way to play a movie or TV show from iTMS), vendor lock-in with their OS (and lawsuits against third parties who buy copies of OS X and install it on compatible hardware for resale), tight control over iPhone development (e.g. no emulators, no virtual machines, and no distribution except through Apple)...
On my planet, which we call Earth, young drivers are involved in a disproportionately high number of traffic accidents.
Note: I said "accidents per mile traveled".
Elderly drivers are also involved in a disproportionately high number of traffic accidents, relative to the amount of driving they do. They just don't spend as much time on the road as younger drivers. (Similarly, people who live farther from work pay more for insurance, because more time on the road means more opportunities for a wreck.)
they tend to be crappier drivers due to inexperience and a tendency to make stupid mistakes like driving way too fast, driving while drunk, driving while staring at their girlfriend's breasts, etc.
Well, inexperience is the big one, but of course inexperience can be remedied with more driving. Elderly drivers tend to be crappier due to physical and mental deterioration, and that doesn't go away.
Indeed. The average 15 year old has sharper vision and quicker reflexes than anyone who'll need this technology... yet which one of them is allowed to get a driver's license?
(Hint 1: it's not the one who's statistically likely to cause fewer accidents per mile traveled.)
(Hint 2: it's the one who's allowed to vote, because politicians wouldn't dare take his driving rights away.)
I just explained how what counts as "interference" depends on what you consider to be the relevant use.
Yes, but not all uses are worthy of equal consideration. For example, we can safely ignore hypothetical uses that nobody actually cares about, like your radio example. We can also adopt a sensible definition of "use" by excluding other people's reactions to your actions, like profiting, since you can't earn a profit until someone else decides to give you their money. (We can also ignore uses that involve force or fraud against other people, e.g. tattooing a poem on someone else's face against his will, but hopefully that goes without saying.)
(If people enjoyed blasting off radio waves with no intent to transmit information, for example, then there's no interference there either!)
If people enjoyed blasting off radio waves with no intent to transmit information, then this would be relevant. But they don't, so it isn't. Again, this is what happens when you think too abstractly: you ignore what people actually want in the real world, and obsess over hypothetical possibilities that no one is interested in.
Using someone's ideas certainly interferes with one *kind* of use for its creator
Only if you expand the concept of "use" to include other people's potential reactions to your actions. But then it's not really your use anymore, is it?
Offering a book for sale is a use of that book, and no one else's use of that book can prevent you from offering it for sale. Profiting from the book isn't, however, because it can only happen with someone else's cooperation. You can't make a profit unless someone chooses to give you their money, and you don't control their choices; what they do is not part of your use. Someone who declines to buy your book isn't interfering with your use, and neither is someone who offers the same book for sale at a lower price.
(Similarly, broadcasting a signal that can potentially be received is a use. Someone who prevents your signal from being receivable is interfering with that use. But someone who declines to listen to your transmission is not interfering with it, and neither is someone who broadcasts a more interesting signal so that no one listens to yours. Your use means your use, not theirs.)
Sorry dude, that last one wasn't a troll. That was someone responding to an original troll - you.
Unfortunately, he seems to have convinced the mods.
Frankly, I wish he were trolling, but what's scary is that he probably isn't. I know it's rare these days for people to acknowledge that anyone under 18 is a human being with rights, but he takes it a step beyond by admitting that he'd be willing to surgically tag his children like animals, even over their protests. An admission like that should inspire the same kind of outrage as expressing a desire to own slaves or commit war crimes.
Instead, he gets modded up, and I get modded down. What a thread.
You make my point for me: if there's a "general consensus" that the ideaspace is only useful if there's a possibility of people creating works that have copyright protection -- and there is
Actually, no, there isn't.
And by the way, we weren't talking about "the ideaspace", we were talking about individual pieces of information (copyrightable works). If you want to claim that an individual piece of information needs an owner, then you have to show that an individual piece of information can only be used effectively when someone is given exclusive rights to it.
The fact remains that one person using a sequence of words (or a song, or a movie, etc.) can't possibly interfere with anyone else using it; on the other hand, one person using a radio frequency can interfere with other people trying to use the same frequency. That's a key difference between radio licensing and copyright, and that's why ownership rights are justified in one case but not the other. You can try to ignore that difference, but that won't make it go away.
You are saying that you don't love your child enough to swallow your pride and do everything you can to work for their safe and speedy return?
No, what I'm saying is I wouldn't surgically implant homing beacons in their bodies, and certainly not against their will. I'd have to swallow more than just my pride in order to sink to that level; I'd have to swallow my conscience and my respect for the rights of other people.
Tell that to your kindapped and then murdered children when you are sitting their with your wife and crying over their grave, good job.
Wow. If you're really so frightened of the boogeyman that you'd sell your children's very humanity to keep him at bay, how did you ever make it in the Marines? Or is that what caused it?
seeing as you didn't see the whole bit about the conditions as to when I'd have consided doing so 'cause you're not wanting to read that much
Oh, I read it, but your conditions don't change a thing. It doesn't matter whether it's safe or legal: it's a barbaric affront to human decency in any case, and that's precisely why it isn't legal.
instead of doing the responsible thing and being the best parent you can be.
Someone who treats his kids like property, like animals, isn't a good parent at all. He's a monster.
I'd have my kids LoJacked if it could be safely removed (with minimal scar) at the age of 18, were legal, and could be proved to be safe. No questions asked and no they don't get a choice. [...] I've never talked to them like anything less than humans.
Stop right there. You might not let them know you think they're less than humans, but you made it loud and clear to us in the first few lines of your comment.
Kids aren't full grown adults and they shouldn't be treated as such.
They are, however, human beings and they should be treated as such.
You don't put a tracking chip in a human being. You put it in an animal. The kind of asshole who writes "I'd have my kids LoJacked" is just advertising what he really thinks of them.
Wrong: they both limit what patterns you can form your property into.
That's the danger of thinking too abstractly: it leads you to make absurd statements like that one. You might as well claim copyright is the same as laws against murder and cattle rustling because "they all limit what you can do".
And the point of writing a book is so that I can get a monopoly on the transmission of the informational content of the book. So?
Yes, so what? It doesn't matter what your intent was in writing the book. What matters is whether or not one person's use of the words in that book can interfere with anyone else's use of them.
Obviously, it can't, and so nobody needs to be granted ownership of them; no one needs to decide which conflicting uses to allow when there are no conflicts.
Furthermore, even if you want to insist that selling copies of the book for profit is a "use" that other people interfere with when they give away copies for free, the fact remains that those people aren't actually interfering with your use at all. They aren't preventing anyone from giving you money for a copy of that book; they're just offering a better deal. You're entitled to start a business, but if you want to have customers, you'll have to compete for them.
I don't care that you like to use radio waves for communication. I like to write books for profit. Why does wanting it get you the right?
It has nothing to do with "wanting it"; rather, it has to do with the general consensus that radio spectrum is only really useful when the transmitted signals can be received successfully -- that is, "using" a radio frequency means transmitting a signal which can be received (or receiving a signal which has been transmitted), so if there's too much interference, I can't "use" that frequency in any meaningful way.
Books, however, and the sequences of words within them, are not only (or even primarily) useful as a product to be sold. You can use the words in a book by reading it, or translating it, or writing a screenplay based on it, and in doing so you won't interfere with anyone else's use of those words.
The parallels between physical property rights and IP are too close to ignore
The parallels in the law are there because the law was crafted by people whose agenda was to force information into their preexisting concept of property.
The inherent parallels between property and information, however, are few and far between. Ownership of physical property comes from the fact that it can only be in one place at a time, and some uses interfere with others: if you want to drive this car to Los Angeles at the same time I'm driving it to New York, we can't both have our way, so someone has to decide which one of us gets to use it. That person is the owner.
Information doesn't need anyone to decide how it may be used, because everyone can use it at once, and no use can interfere with any other use. Therefore, any argument that information should be owned at all is going to have to start somewhere else: "even though no one needs to dictate how information can be used, we should still give them the right to do so because ..."
To see the problem most clearly, look at rights to radio frequencies, which people generally view as justified. Like IP, this is no more than the right to form a particular pattern within a certain jurisdiction.
Er, no. Copyright is an exclusive right to share certain information (certain sets of facts) with other people. Radio spectrum is the right to transmit on a particular frequency within a particular physical area. One limits what you can say, the other limits where you can say it.
The "harms" of not having such rights depend purely on what you view as a harm. It's possible for infinite people to broadcast radio waves; that there is interference matters only if you want it to matter.
But interference always matters, because the point of radio communication is that the signals you transmit will eventually be received somewhere else and decoded. Interference prevents that from happening. Your use of a particular frequency can interfere with other people's use, whereas your use of a particular song can't possibly interfere with anyone else's use of that song.
That's why radio spectrum is fundamentally different from information: one is a scarce resource, the other is not.
You have everything physical, but you no longer have the opportunity to attempt to profit from your work by charging me for a copy of that work. That's not the same as depriving you access to a physical item, but it is at least a notional, potential loss. (Or rather, loss of potential)
As the other response pointed out, this is treading on pretty shaky ground.
First off, I do still have the opportunity to attempt to sell you a copy. Just because you have a copy doesn't mean you can't buy another -- it only means you won't want another. At least, probably not, but who knows: maybe you'll like it so much that you'll want to reward me by buying copies for all your friends.
Second, if we're going to start considering it a "loss of potential" whenever something happens to make a potential customer not want to buy something from me, then we'll have to start worrying about a lot of other actions.
What if someone reads a bad review, and it convinces them not to buy a copy from me? That's a loss of potential too. So, should we only allow positive reviews from now on?
What if someone spends their money on something else and doesn't have any left to buy my product? Say they had $60 budgeted and they decided to spend it on a few DVDs instead of buying a game from me. Doesn't that mean the existence of those DVDs has caused me to lose that potential revenue?
My point is that this "loss of potential" occurs all the time, and people are generally OK with it, because that potential revenue is really just money you wish you had. And no matter how hard you wish, it isn't yours until someone chooses to give it to you. No one is obligated to make your wish come true, and if it doesn't, you might be disappointed but you haven't really lost anything.
Can I live in your home when you are on holiday?
Hell, why do I even ask? I mean if you are back you still have everything you had before. So I don't even need your approval for that.
Incorrect. The space in my home is a scarce resource, and your use may conflict with mine.
Even if I'm not at home, I might still have plans for what I want done with my house: maybe I wanted to let someone else stay there, or maybe I just get really excited about the thought of my house being empty all weekend. Neither of those can happen if you're staying there instead. Since I'm the owner, I get to choose which of those conflicting uses are allowed to happen.
On the other hand, if you make a copy of my song/program/movie, you can do whatever you want with your copy, and it can't possibly conflict with what I want to do with my copy. There's no need for anyone to choose which of us gets to use that piece of information, because we can both use it without the risk of interfering with each other.
but according to the gp, that someone is losing nothing since there is no physical property involved in this case.
Yes, that's correct. Plagiarism is wrong for reasons that have nothing to do with losing anything.
I think a point you are all missing is that you cannot buy a separate copy of OSX to install on a fresh machine. Apple ships OSX with a machine. Apple sells *upgrades* to OSX in a separate box.
Does the upgrade include all the files necessary to install the OS? Then it's all you need.
That makes any comment about the EULA irrelevant: copyright law applies and neither Psystar, nor anyone else, has a license to install OSX on a fresh box.
Under 17 USC 117, you don't need a license to copy software that you already own if the copying is an essential step in running it, so that would seem to cover installing an OS.
It's exactly the same law that allows the GPL and Open licenses to work.
Not really. Those licenses work by offering you a right you don't already have (distributing copies to other people, with or without modifications) in exchange for accepting their terms.
The only reason I can't use your car or house when you aren't using it is because of artificial laws saying I can't and granting you protection from such actions - whats the difference? I deprive you of something?
Yes, that's the difference. A pretty important one.
Why is that important?
Because if you take my car, I won't be able to use it. I will have been harmed by your actions. Harming people is bad.
On the other hand, if you copy my song/program/movie, I won't have been harmed: I'll still have everything I had before you made that copy. (I might wish you had given me some money for it, but that money was never mine anyway, no matter how hard I was wishing. I might be sad about that, but I won't have suffered any actual loss.)
Surely sharing is a good thing?
Sharing is usually a good thing, but not when someone is harmed in the process. Surely you already knew that?
No, plagiarism is fraud. That's what's bad about it: taking credit for someone else's work means you're lying to everyone who reads it.
What do you work for LG? [...] If you don't like Apple then don't use their products.
Exactly. Why do you think I recommended a competing product?