Children don't posses the ability to accurately reason. That's a common assertion, but there's no data to back it up. No one even seems to have a concrete idea of what it means to be "able to accurately reason" or "mature" or whatever phrase they use for it.
If I introduced you to someone, would you be able to determine whether or not they possessed the ability to accurately reason without asking about their age?
This is one reason why the age of consent is 18 in most places. If you mean consenting to sex (which "age of consent" usually refers to), then it's actually 16 or lower in most places, including most US states.
I don't believe it matters, because the basic premise of society stands: intellectual works have value, and that value is protectable. It is essential to the continued employment of most of the American workforce False. Copyright is not essential to any job except "copyright lawyer" and perhaps "DRM engineer". The American workforce can get paid for working rather than for making copies, and indeed that's the arrangement by which most Americans already do get paid.
There is no negative element to the verb take requiring that anyone give something up in order for you to acquire it. Well, in most people's minds, there is. And if you use that word, knowing full well that they'll interpret it in a way that isn't quite true, then you're taking advantage of your audience.
No, because you don't have a copyright on words. It's funny how every time I point out a flaw in your reasoning, you hide behind the current implementation of the law.
We're not talking about mere legality, remember? You're the one saying everyone deserves to own their work; are you now saying they only deserve to own their work if that work falls into the narrow categories protected by today's copyright laws?
If he publishes the book, people can use the information in that book. Yes, legally they can, but should they be able to? According to your logic, no, because that information is Marc Okrand's work and he gets to control it. Right?
That's flatly untrue. Newton and Edison didn't create facts, and any books they wrote would have enjoyed legal protection commensurate with their historical perspective. They worked to produce information. Calculus and the light bulb are as much a product of human effort as "...Baby One More Time". Why do you want to take Newton and Edison's work away from them without their consent?
The repetition of the expressive work is barred, because it's not your speech, it's not sharing of fact, and it has no impact on the spread of knowledge. You can write your own book on those facts and release it how you see fit. No, I can't. At some point, someone will decide that I've shared too many facts about the lyrics of that song, and they'll sue me for infringement.
If you think that's not the case, then I guess I've just found a loophole in copyright law, eh? Just hack your file sharing program to send each byte separately as a sentence like "The 1st byte of this file is 'd5'" and you can share all you want. If only it worked that way.
You're not prevented from saying the same thing. You're prevented from saying the same thing, in the same way, using the exact same words. What a ridiculous attempt at hair-splitting. If I can't use the same words, then I can't say the same thing - I can only say something else that happens to be about the same subject.
The act of taking does not itself require a corresponding act of removal; it's not a zero-sum definition. I think most people would disagree. If no one is deprived of the thing you "take", then you haven't really taken it; if anything, you've made it. For example, if you're holding a lit candle, you'd probably consider it strange if someone asked you how you took the flame.
Isn't CDMA inherently harder to eavesdrop on, though? Without knowing the codes that each handset is using, all you get is noise, and that's at a lower level than any encryption.
And if someone reprinted the Klingon dictionary, Okrand would be on top of it. The only reason to release a dictionary and grammatical guide is to spread that information. No, there's another reason: to make money. Okrand wants to sell books, just like musicians want to sell CDs.
Suppose that Marc Okrand declares, "Since I invented the Klingon language, you're only allowed to learn about it through me. If you want to know what a certain word means, I insist that you buy my book and look it up."
If he were to do that, then would you consider it "stealing" to translate Klingon words for someone without Mr. Okrand's permission? After all, that would be giving his work away for free, right?
You just named facts, observations, and information. None of that is copyrightable. But by your logic, it should be. People worked to produce that stuff, and as you said, "a person's work is his own and it is not for others to take without consent". Or do you only value the work of Britney and Bono, and to hell with Newton and Edison?
Besides, as I explain below, there's no real distinction between facts and copyrightable works.
Repeating the expressive work of others verbatim is NOT sharing information. It certainly is. There's a whole bunch of factual information about cultural phenomena that copyright makes it illegal to share.
For example, it's a fact that the first line of the song "Yesterday" is "Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away". There are millions of physical objects out there in the world where those words are represented, and telling someone about those words is fundamentally no different from telling them "the yellow button on an Xbox 360 controller is labeled Y".
It's also a fact that the second line is "Now it looks as though they're here to stay". And the line after that is "Oh, I believe in yesterday".
I could go on and tell you several more facts, but pretty soon I'd be infringing the Beatles' copyright - by sharing too many facts about that song and describing too many of the sensations that have been experienced by the millions of people who've heard it.
If you have a natural right to repeat anything you've seen/heard, you can't have a natural right to privacy, because there is no way from stopping someone from spreading that information. I haven't asserted a natural right to privacy. But a society that values privacy more than it values free speech can certainly distinguish between information that was meant to be kept secret, and information that was meant to be released to the public.
Your speech is protected; if it's not yours, it's of no fundamental concern to you. If it's coming out of my mouth, or my pen, then it's my speech.
others have an essential right to express themselves as they see fit, and that includes controlling the means of that expression if they so choose. If by "controlling the means of that expression" you mean preventing others from saying the same thing, then that's just absurd. It's like claiming that your right to practice your religion includes the right to be the only man on earth who practices it: there's no reason it has to be an exclusive right at all.
There is no creator of a language, and no one would add to a language for their own internal purposes. There can be. The Klingon language, for example, was (mostly? completely?) made up by Marc Okrand. But you'd have a hard time convincing anyone that they need Marc's permission to speak Klingon.
Such as? Information isn't what is protected; it isn't what is original. Such as calculus, the speed of light, the way to fold a paper airplane, the way to build a house, etc... not to mention everything that was written, drawn, sculpted, or recorded before the 1900s. These are all things that we freely use without anyone's permission, and no one bats an eye. Just because you put effort into developing some information doesn't mean you or your heirs get to prevent other people from using it.
Sharing of information is not at issue. You must be joking - that is exactly what's at issue!
Copyright says that if I have a book, I can't tell you what sequence of words is in it without getting someone else's permission, and if I have a song file on my hard drive, I can't tell you what sequence of bytes is in it without getting someone else's permission. That's a restriction on sharing information.
You cannot simultaneously have a natural right to control the distribution of the intellectual works of others while claiming a natural right to restrict access of the same. False generalization. You can indeed divide information into that which is public and that which is private, and treat them differently.
Absolutely. And the manner in which that value is recouped is in small doses spread over many years. That's a manner in which it may be recouped. Hardly the only one, or even the most sensible one.
This is all, however, a distraction from the original case which you've failed to make, which is to show that, taking all factors into consideration, you have any sort of entitlement or that the other party does not. You've failed to make the opposing case, so I guess we're even.
There is no extralegal right to bar trespassing, and there is no direct harm Stop right there: of course there's harm, and thus there's an extralegal right to bar it. Land is a limited resource. If you're standing on one square foot of my land, that's one square foot that I can't stand in, or park my car in, or pave over. You have deprived me of the use of that land.
It is not a silencing of voices. It's simply a protection of something society values. At the cost of destroying something else society values, namely freedom of speech.
The transgression, if you want to separate it from the law, is that a person's work is his own and it is not for others to take without consent. So, who gave you consent to use the English language? Did you make up words like "transgression" and "work" all by yourself, or did you take them from someone else without his consent?
The principle that "a person's work is his own and it is not for others to take without consent" is pure fiction, at least when applied to works which are composed of information. We use other people's work all the time, without obtaining their permission first, and no one bats an eye except when those works happen to be the kind that are sold on shiny plastic discs.
Once again, you're dropping the issue entirely. Individuals on Pirate Bay don't have any right to offer the work of others to you. You don't have a free speech right to the verbatim work of others. You mean the law doesn't recognize my right to speak the verbatim work of others. Aside from the law, I have exactly the same right to speak it as I do to give away a microwave: it's a voluntary transaction for everyone involved, so I have the right by default.
You don't have a right to co-opt someone else's work, waiting until their labor has produced it, and then take it as your own. The only way to "take it as your own" is to claim authorship, and I agree, no one has the right to lie about having written something that was actually written by someone else.
Some random person can't agree to give you something that isn't theirs to give, whether it's a microwave or a movie. But it is theirs to give; it's right there on their hard drive. Just like the microwave, they may not have designed or built it, but that doesn't mean they can't give it away.
It's simply not possible in a society valuing individual autonomy and privacy to argue that one has a right of any kind to the work or thoughts of others. What a bizarre thing to say. Of course it's possible, and in fact it's quite reasonable to argue that everyone has a right to share information.
Privacy doesn't even enter into it, because we're not talking about information that was meant to be kept secret. If you offer some information for sale to the public, giving it away to every stranger who shows up with money in his hand -- and especially if you give it to radio stations to be broadcast to millions of people who didn't even request it -- you can't claim that it's somehow still "private" after all that and expect to be taken seriously.
It would be possible if such works were without value, but because they unquestionably have value, there are boundaries to it. The value of a copy is approximately zero, since copies can be made for next to nothing. The true value is in the labor that went into producing the works in the first place.
Taking something without permission where permission is clearly required to do so is a transgression. Well, it's illegal, but if that's what you meant, you should've just written "you're being punished because you broke the law" and avoided getting into the reasoning behind the law.
Thus, I can only conclude that you weren't talking about mere legality, in which case I maintain that no transgression has been committed against anyone (in any but the most basic legal sense).
Quit trolling. Quit dishonestly accusing people of trolling just because they disagree with you.
First and foremost, the free section on Craigslist is a section where individuals with title are offering to transfer it to you for the low, low price of coming to pick it up. The Pirate Bay is a web site where individuals are offering to transfer files to me for an equally low price. "Title" is irrelevant here because we're not talking about mere legality.
Second, "taking the free one" isn't done without permission and contrary to the law, because they're offering it to you. Taking the free album off a torrent site isn't done without permission either: everyone else in the swarm is offering it to you. (Once again, "contrary to the law" is irrelevant here because we're not talking about mere legality.)
Now, you might point out that it's being done without the permission of someone else who isn't party to the transaction, namely the copyright holder. But that's true of the microwave too! Sears certainly didn't give me permission to get a free microwave somewhere else instead of buying one from them, and neither did any of the people selling free microwaves on eBay. Of course, their permission doesn't matter; they don't get to veto my craigslist transaction just because they'd like to sell me a microwave.
I contend that the copyright holder's permission doesn't matter either: they shouldn't get to veto my Pirate Bay transaction just because they'd like to sell me a copy. If I can find someone else who's willing to give me the product for free, whether it's a song or a microwave, I should be able to take them up on that offer.
It doesn't matter that the owner has more, even if there are infinitely many more. You aren't punished because someone has lost something; you're punished because you have committed a transgression against someone. But you haven't committed a transgression, because no one has lost anything. Losing something is where the transgression would come from, but that didn't happen, so there is no transgression at all.
It's something that is legitimately and legally for sale, which you acquired without paying for. You have stolen. Wrong. Look at the "free stuff" section on craigslist - it's full of stuff that is legitimately and legally for sale elsewhere. Instead of taking that free used microwave from someone who doesn't want it anymore, you could buy a used one from someone on eBay, or a new one from the store. By your logic, taking the free one is "stealing".
It is vitally important to be able to look at something from a step in removal; to say an action was either taken, or not taken, for whatever reason were given or not given. To remove yourself from the controversy of the times, and the long view of history. Its only then that you are able to decide for yourself, if something is right, or wrong. Luckily, our legal system doesn't take that view. If you're pressured into signing a contract under duress, the courts don't wait around for the detached historians of the future to decide whether it should be enforced or not: they conclude, just from the fact that you were pressured, that you can't be held responsible for this "choice" because you didn't really have a choice.
At some level of removal though, it doesn't matter why a person, or a country, does something. They either did something, or they didn't do something. They made a choice, for either good or bad, and for whatever reasons given; the choice was still made. It doesn't matter why you did it, doesn't matter what internal and external pressures were involved, doesn't matter if most of the people involved really wanted it. And at some other level of removal, there's no person, no country, no reason or logic - just a bunch of atoms bouncing around the universe. But that's not a very useful way to think about human ethics either, is it?
Patent laws? Well, the rest of the world seems hell bent on adopting American versions there of. Copyright? Same thing. If you want us to stop thinking we are world leaders, simply stop following. [...] you keep choosing America. Its your own damn fault. Er.. you think the people of those other countries are rising up and demanding to follow us into granting more power to copyright and patent holders?
You don't think, maybe, American corporations are pushing those countries down the same path they've already pushed the US down?
I don't know if you guys have heard about reality mining, but it's some pretty fascinating technology.
Apparently, out there in the so-called "real world" -- you know, the place where the lights are only on for half the day and the heat doesn't work at night -- there's stuff to be found. Valuable stuff like gold, silver, copper, coal, diamonds... and you can just dig a hole to get access to it.
Now you might be wondering why it's called "reality mining" and not "hole digging". Well, it's not quite as easy as I made it sound. You can't just dig any old place, you have to know where to look. And you can't just use a shovel; most of the time you need some heavy duty equipment. You have to sort through all the possible places to dig, filter that information, and somehow figure out which places are more likely to have the stuff you're looking for, and which approaches will work best to get it out. So it's kind of like data mining, but you're using it to get something in the real world.
It's fun, profitable, and best of all: you get to wear a hat with a light on it! Reality mining is the future, folks. Better get on the bandwagon while there's still room.
Whose copyright law says that [copies made as part of the normal course of operation of a piece of software (i.e. from disk to memory) aren't violations]? The United States.
Sorry, try again...
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:
(1) 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
OSS != Public Domain. Of course. What I'm saying is I'm willing to give up OSS in exchange for making everything (essentially) public domain. What I value about OSS is the freedom, not the source code.
Many people create code as a hobby and give it away, but are not generally prone to doing so *instead* of eating and paying the bills. Solution: hire those people to write code which they will then give away. This is already done in the OSS world.
Or perhaps I just plain don't want anyone to use my work for certain uses, period. [...] Suppose that you were a contentious objector who had created a component useful to game engines, such as an AI superclient and you did NOT want the military using it. I'm not impressed. Why should you be able to dictate how people will be able to use the code you've released?
If you want to maintain control over it, keep it to yourself. Once you release it, it's out of your hands. If you're so worried about the military using your code, maybe you just shouldn't write anything that they'll find useful. My software has been used by people I don't like, for purposes I don't approve of, but it's not my place to judge them. I'm a programmer, not a preacher.
So you know a professional artist? Have you ever asked them how they would feel if everything they created was always public domain by default? None of the ones I know (three pianists in the family) would be happy with that. Yeah, some of them would be unhappy. But you know what? Lots of people today aren't happy with copyright, and there are surely more of them than there are professional artists. If the purpose of the law were to maximize happiness, the file sharers would win by a landslide.
But the law isn't there to make people happy anyway, it's there to guarantee rights, and IMO the right to share information freely is more important than any alleged right to sell copies.
And I can't help but notice that you only distribute binaries of your IRC client and not source. I'll refrain from any cheesy demands that you release your source as there are many legitimate reasons not to do so, but I do find it interesting. May I ask if you use GPL code in your - free as in beer, but not free as in speech - closed source IRC client? Actually, it is open source. That isn't obvious from my crappy web site, but here's the SourceForge project page.
Re:The Borland "It's like a book" license c. 1980s
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UK Report Slams EULAs
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The more software they sold, and the more they tried to be like Microsoft, the worse the license got. The worse the software got, too.
I reinstalled Borland Developer Studio 2006 a couple weeks ago. Not only did I have to go to Borland's web site to request another license file (because typing the CD key into the installer isn't enough anymore, and the license file I used before was no longer valid), but BDS wouldn't even recognize that I'd given it a valid license until I downloaded a service pack and a dozen more post-service-pack updates. Delphi has always been fairly buggy, but BDS 2006 was absolute crap.
In this sense, [the GPL] is an agreement with END USERS. Among other things, it grants to the end user the permission to run the software. Since when do you need permission to run software that you've legally obtained? You can reject the GPL's terms and still keep using the software, as long as you don't distribute it.
WRONG! I suggest you go read up on GPL. It USES copyright as a device to keep software free. Look, I know how the GPL works and what it does. The only real difference between a world where all software is GPL'd, and a world where software is not covered by copyright or patents at all, is that in the first scenario, all the source code is provided for you. Without copyright, the software is still just as free in the sense that you can use, share, and fork it however you want -- you just might have to do some reverse engineering.
And it is not okay to incorporate it into closed source codebases. MIT and LGPL allow that, but not GPL. Of course. But I thought you were asking for my opinion, not asking me to interpret the GPL for you.
My opinion is that, in a world without copyright, it would be fine to incorporate open-source code into closed-source projects (as long as it were done without committing fraud). I don't think the GPL or Creative Commons licenses are fundamentally any more important than any other licenses. The freedoms that they're meant to protect are important, but we can get most of those freedoms anyway just by abolishing copyright.
Do you actually KNOW an artist? You can never actually created anything in your entire life have you? Yes and yes (one example is in my sig). That's two strikes, care to take another swing?
You avoided the question. What would you do with the CC licence case I described above? And would it be okay to use GPL code in a closed source codebase? Those questions were in a different comment. My response is over there (on preview, I see that you've responded there).
Which pretty much answers my question above. You sir, have a self serving concept of morality. No, just a rational one. Morality is about how your actions affect other people; in a world with no other people, it wouldn't make any sense to talk about morality. Therefore, Act A and Act B are morally equivalent if they have exactly the same effect on other people. And in this case, they do: the only difference between "I won't pay you for this or listen to it" and "I won't pay you for this but I'll listen to it anyway" is how it affects the person making the decision.
I'll call your bluff here. Not sure what you think I'm bluffing about, but bring it on.
Let's assume that the artist has chosen [...] the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. Do you have an obligation to follow the specifications of his chosen license? According to your statement above, you feel that you are free as a bird to use it for commercial purposes. Correct. As long as I don't take credit for someone else's work -- which would be fraud -- I believe there should be essentially no restrictions on how I use or distribute it.
What if he does not want derivative works? Then he should've kept his work to himself.
And who does he think he is anyway: Zeus, causing brand-new ideas to spring forth, fully formed, from his mind? Who on earth can honestly say his work isn't derivative of something else? If you're going to build upon the work of others, you have to expect that others will build upon your work too.
Suppose someone distributes code under GPL. GPL is a license with very strong terms. Suppose you find it inconvenient to have this code as GPL. Do you have a right to ignore the GPL license and incorporate this code into a closed source codebase? Yes. But then everyone else has the right to take your closed source application, share it freely with each other, reverse engineer it, distribute the decompiled source code, make derived works, and so on.
Here is the zinger... GPL only works because of copyright. If you did that, it would be a copyright violation. The GPL mainly serves to give back the freedoms that copyright takes away.
It does go a little bit beyond that, but I'm willing to give up guaranteed access to the original source code in exchange for all the other benefits of abolishing copyright. (RMS disagrees with me here, but oh well.)
Artists go through a lot of angst about having their work stolen and many have horror stories about not being paid for a commission or having someone use their work, unattributed and unremunerated. Not being paid for a commission = breach of contract. Having someone else use your work unattributed = fraud. You don't need copyright to protect yourself against either of those.
Please respect their rights as human beings before you make them collateral damage in your "moral"crusade. I do. I just don't believe that set of rights includes the "right" to veto other people's speech, or to extract a profit whenever someone else benefits from work that you did in the past.
Then again, in my cynicism, I believe that there is nothing moral about this crusade. That's fair enough - I feel the same way about your side. I believe copyright advocates, despite any public posturing about their "rights", are mostly motivated by greed, laziness, and the jealous desire to prevent others from enjoying anything if they (the advocates) don't get a cut of that enjoyment.
If people had a real, genuine moral problem with the way music and films were produced and distributed, they would boycott them. Boycotting also means NOT listening or watching. I have a moral problem with copyright, the idea that someone else should be given veto power over my freedom of speech in order to make a buck. I have no moral problem with films or music themselves.
They don't boycott the product of the MPAA and RIAA because they lack either the discipline to turn their backs on top-down pop culture or really, genuinely do want that product, but don't want to pay for it. It is a statement that you want what they make, but are unwilling to trade for it. So what? Thanks to the nature of information, it's possible to avoid trading for it without having to give anything up. The rights holder isn't getting paid either way, so why is it any better for consumers to go without (lose-lose) than to download and enjoy the work anyway (win-lose)? Giving it up only serves to punish themselves.
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If I introduced you to someone, would you be able to determine whether or not they possessed the ability to accurately reason without asking about their age? This is one reason why the age of consent is 18 in most places. If you mean consenting to sex (which "age of consent" usually refers to), then it's actually 16 or lower in most places, including most US states.
We're not talking about mere legality, remember? You're the one saying everyone deserves to own their work; are you now saying they only deserve to own their work if that work falls into the narrow categories protected by today's copyright laws? If he publishes the book, people can use the information in that book. Yes, legally they can, but should they be able to? According to your logic, no, because that information is Marc Okrand's work and he gets to control it. Right? That's flatly untrue. Newton and Edison didn't create facts, and any books they wrote would have enjoyed legal protection commensurate with their historical perspective. They worked to produce information. Calculus and the light bulb are as much a product of human effort as "...Baby One More Time". Why do you want to take Newton and Edison's work away from them without their consent? The repetition of the expressive work is barred, because it's not your speech, it's not sharing of fact, and it has no impact on the spread of knowledge. You can write your own book on those facts and release it how you see fit. No, I can't. At some point, someone will decide that I've shared too many facts about the lyrics of that song, and they'll sue me for infringement.
If you think that's not the case, then I guess I've just found a loophole in copyright law, eh? Just hack your file sharing program to send each byte separately as a sentence like "The 1st byte of this file is 'd5'" and you can share all you want. If only it worked that way. You're not prevented from saying the same thing. You're prevented from saying the same thing, in the same way, using the exact same words. What a ridiculous attempt at hair-splitting. If I can't use the same words, then I can't say the same thing - I can only say something else that happens to be about the same subject.
Isn't CDMA inherently harder to eavesdrop on, though? Without knowing the codes that each handset is using, all you get is noise, and that's at a lower level than any encryption.
Suppose that Marc Okrand declares, "Since I invented the Klingon language, you're only allowed to learn about it through me. If you want to know what a certain word means, I insist that you buy my book and look it up."
If he were to do that, then would you consider it "stealing" to translate Klingon words for someone without Mr. Okrand's permission? After all, that would be giving his work away for free, right? You just named facts, observations, and information. None of that is copyrightable. But by your logic, it should be. People worked to produce that stuff, and as you said, "a person's work is his own and it is not for others to take without consent". Or do you only value the work of Britney and Bono, and to hell with Newton and Edison?
Besides, as I explain below, there's no real distinction between facts and copyrightable works. Repeating the expressive work of others verbatim is NOT sharing information. It certainly is. There's a whole bunch of factual information about cultural phenomena that copyright makes it illegal to share.
For example, it's a fact that the first line of the song "Yesterday" is "Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away". There are millions of physical objects out there in the world where those words are represented, and telling someone about those words is fundamentally no different from telling them "the yellow button on an Xbox 360 controller is labeled Y".
It's also a fact that the second line is "Now it looks as though they're here to stay". And the line after that is "Oh, I believe in yesterday".
I could go on and tell you several more facts, but pretty soon I'd be infringing the Beatles' copyright - by sharing too many facts about that song and describing too many of the sensations that have been experienced by the millions of people who've heard it. If you have a natural right to repeat anything you've seen/heard, you can't have a natural right to privacy, because there is no way from stopping someone from spreading that information. I haven't asserted a natural right to privacy. But a society that values privacy more than it values free speech can certainly distinguish between information that was meant to be kept secret, and information that was meant to be released to the public. Your speech is protected; if it's not yours, it's of no fundamental concern to you. If it's coming out of my mouth, or my pen, then it's my speech. others have an essential right to express themselves as they see fit, and that includes controlling the means of that expression if they so choose. If by "controlling the means of that expression" you mean preventing others from saying the same thing, then that's just absurd. It's like claiming that your right to practice your religion includes the right to be the only man on earth who practices it: there's no reason it has to be an exclusive right at all.
Copyright says that if I have a book, I can't tell you what sequence of words is in it without getting someone else's permission, and if I have a song file on my hard drive, I can't tell you what sequence of bytes is in it without getting someone else's permission. That's a restriction on sharing information. You cannot simultaneously have a natural right to control the distribution of the intellectual works of others while claiming a natural right to restrict access of the same. False generalization. You can indeed divide information into that which is public and that which is private, and treat them differently. Absolutely. And the manner in which that value is recouped is in small doses spread over many years. That's a manner in which it may be recouped. Hardly the only one, or even the most sensible one. This is all, however, a distraction from the original case which you've failed to make, which is to show that, taking all factors into consideration, you have any sort of entitlement or that the other party does not. You've failed to make the opposing case, so I guess we're even. There is no extralegal right to bar trespassing, and there is no direct harm Stop right there: of course there's harm, and thus there's an extralegal right to bar it. Land is a limited resource. If you're standing on one square foot of my land, that's one square foot that I can't stand in, or park my car in, or pave over. You have deprived me of the use of that land. It is not a silencing of voices. It's simply a protection of something society values. At the cost of destroying something else society values, namely freedom of speech.
The principle that "a person's work is his own and it is not for others to take without consent" is pure fiction, at least when applied to works which are composed of information. We use other people's work all the time, without obtaining their permission first, and no one bats an eye except when those works happen to be the kind that are sold on shiny plastic discs. Once again, you're dropping the issue entirely. Individuals on Pirate Bay don't have any right to offer the work of others to you. You don't have a free speech right to the verbatim work of others. You mean the law doesn't recognize my right to speak the verbatim work of others. Aside from the law, I have exactly the same right to speak it as I do to give away a microwave: it's a voluntary transaction for everyone involved, so I have the right by default. You don't have a right to co-opt someone else's work, waiting until their labor has produced it, and then take it as your own. The only way to "take it as your own" is to claim authorship, and I agree, no one has the right to lie about having written something that was actually written by someone else. Some random person can't agree to give you something that isn't theirs to give, whether it's a microwave or a movie. But it is theirs to give; it's right there on their hard drive. Just like the microwave, they may not have designed or built it, but that doesn't mean they can't give it away. It's simply not possible in a society valuing individual autonomy and privacy to argue that one has a right of any kind to the work or thoughts of others. What a bizarre thing to say. Of course it's possible, and in fact it's quite reasonable to argue that everyone has a right to share information.
Privacy doesn't even enter into it, because we're not talking about information that was meant to be kept secret. If you offer some information for sale to the public, giving it away to every stranger who shows up with money in his hand -- and especially if you give it to radio stations to be broadcast to millions of people who didn't even request it -- you can't claim that it's somehow still "private" after all that and expect to be taken seriously. It would be possible if such works were without value, but because they unquestionably have value, there are boundaries to it. The value of a copy is approximately zero, since copies can be made for next to nothing. The true value is in the labor that went into producing the works in the first place.
Thus, I can only conclude that you weren't talking about mere legality, in which case I maintain that no transgression has been committed against anyone (in any but the most basic legal sense). Quit trolling. Quit dishonestly accusing people of trolling just because they disagree with you. First and foremost, the free section on Craigslist is a section where individuals with title are offering to transfer it to you for the low, low price of coming to pick it up. The Pirate Bay is a web site where individuals are offering to transfer files to me for an equally low price. "Title" is irrelevant here because we're not talking about mere legality. Second, "taking the free one" isn't done without permission and contrary to the law, because they're offering it to you. Taking the free album off a torrent site isn't done without permission either: everyone else in the swarm is offering it to you. (Once again, "contrary to the law" is irrelevant here because we're not talking about mere legality.)
Now, you might point out that it's being done without the permission of someone else who isn't party to the transaction, namely the copyright holder. But that's true of the microwave too! Sears certainly didn't give me permission to get a free microwave somewhere else instead of buying one from them, and neither did any of the people selling free microwaves on eBay. Of course, their permission doesn't matter; they don't get to veto my craigslist transaction just because they'd like to sell me a microwave.
I contend that the copyright holder's permission doesn't matter either: they shouldn't get to veto my Pirate Bay transaction just because they'd like to sell me a copy. If I can find someone else who's willing to give me the product for free, whether it's a song or a microwave, I should be able to take them up on that offer.
You don't think, maybe, American corporations are pushing those countries down the same path they've already pushed the US down?
I don't know if you guys have heard about reality mining, but it's some pretty fascinating technology.
Apparently, out there in the so-called "real world" -- you know, the place where the lights are only on for half the day and the heat doesn't work at night -- there's stuff to be found. Valuable stuff like gold, silver, copper, coal, diamonds... and you can just dig a hole to get access to it.
Now you might be wondering why it's called "reality mining" and not "hole digging". Well, it's not quite as easy as I made it sound. You can't just dig any old place, you have to know where to look. And you can't just use a shovel; most of the time you need some heavy duty equipment. You have to sort through all the possible places to dig, filter that information, and somehow figure out which places are more likely to have the stuff you're looking for, and which approaches will work best to get it out. So it's kind of like data mining, but you're using it to get something in the real world.
It's fun, profitable, and best of all: you get to wear a hat with a light on it! Reality mining is the future, folks. Better get on the bandwagon while there's still room.
(1) 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
If you want to maintain control over it, keep it to yourself. Once you release it, it's out of your hands. If you're so worried about the military using your code, maybe you just shouldn't write anything that they'll find useful. My software has been used by people I don't like, for purposes I don't approve of, but it's not my place to judge them. I'm a programmer, not a preacher. So you know a professional artist? Have you ever asked them how they would feel if everything they created was always public domain by default? None of the ones I know (three pianists in the family) would be happy with that. Yeah, some of them would be unhappy. But you know what? Lots of people today aren't happy with copyright, and there are surely more of them than there are professional artists. If the purpose of the law were to maximize happiness, the file sharers would win by a landslide.
But the law isn't there to make people happy anyway, it's there to guarantee rights, and IMO the right to share information freely is more important than any alleged right to sell copies. And I can't help but notice that you only distribute binaries of your IRC client and not source. I'll refrain from any cheesy demands that you release your source as there are many legitimate reasons not to do so, but I do find it interesting. May I ask if you use GPL code in your - free as in beer, but not free as in speech - closed source IRC client? Actually, it is open source. That isn't obvious from my crappy web site, but here's the SourceForge project page.
I reinstalled Borland Developer Studio 2006 a couple weeks ago. Not only did I have to go to Borland's web site to request another license file (because typing the CD key into the installer isn't enough anymore, and the license file I used before was no longer valid), but BDS wouldn't even recognize that I'd given it a valid license until I downloaded a service pack and a dozen more post-service-pack updates. Delphi has always been fairly buggy, but BDS 2006 was absolute crap.
I thought Underrated and Overrated didn't affect karma either. Or are they just not subject to metamod?
My opinion is that, in a world without copyright, it would be fine to incorporate open-source code into closed-source projects (as long as it were done without committing fraud). I don't think the GPL or Creative Commons licenses are fundamentally any more important than any other licenses. The freedoms that they're meant to protect are important, but we can get most of those freedoms anyway just by abolishing copyright. Do you actually KNOW an artist? You can never actually created anything in your entire life have you? Yes and yes (one example is in my sig). That's two strikes, care to take another swing?
And who does he think he is anyway: Zeus, causing brand-new ideas to spring forth, fully formed, from his mind? Who on earth can honestly say his work isn't derivative of something else? If you're going to build upon the work of others, you have to expect that others will build upon your work too. Suppose someone distributes code under GPL. GPL is a license with very strong terms. Suppose you find it inconvenient to have this code as GPL. Do you have a right to ignore the GPL license and incorporate this code into a closed source codebase? Yes. But then everyone else has the right to take your closed source application, share it freely with each other, reverse engineer it, distribute the decompiled source code, make derived works, and so on. Here is the zinger... GPL only works because of copyright. If you did that, it would be a copyright violation. The GPL mainly serves to give back the freedoms that copyright takes away.
It does go a little bit beyond that, but I'm willing to give up guaranteed access to the original source code in exchange for all the other benefits of abolishing copyright. (RMS disagrees with me here, but oh well.) Artists go through a lot of angst about having their work stolen and many have horror stories about not being paid for a commission or having someone use their work, unattributed and unremunerated. Not being paid for a commission = breach of contract. Having someone else use your work unattributed = fraud. You don't need copyright to protect yourself against either of those. Please respect their rights as human beings before you make them collateral damage in your "moral"crusade. I do. I just don't believe that set of rights includes the "right" to veto other people's speech, or to extract a profit whenever someone else benefits from work that you did in the past. Then again, in my cynicism, I believe that there is nothing moral about this crusade. That's fair enough - I feel the same way about your side. I believe copyright advocates, despite any public posturing about their "rights", are mostly motivated by greed, laziness, and the jealous desire to prevent others from enjoying anything if they (the advocates) don't get a cut of that enjoyment.