Fine, don't share. We'll reverse engineer or reinvent your much vaunted improvement, if we think it worthwhile. We'll probably even improve on it.
Ah, see you're cheating. Making improvements is not free. It costs time and/or money. Without copyright (and thus without the GPL sharing restriction), if you want to make the same improvements, you have to spend some time and/or money too. Meanwhile, while you are doing that, I'm selling my improved version for profit.
Without copyright and the GPL, I will make you spend the time/money to reinvent it. Yes, this is not great for a utopian, communist society where the benefit of improvements should be had by all immediately at zero cost, but it certainly works better in a capitalist society. If the improvements are good enough that people will buy my product over competitors' products even for 6 months, that's huge.
Now, maybe you're smarter than me so it will take you less time. And it certainly is easier to do something once someone else has done it first, even without source. But required sharing means it takes you no time and no money, so I gain no competitive advantage over you from making the improvements. Effectively, the GPL restricts me from gaining competitive advantage over you.
If you go back to the original article, Company A makes a router with Linux-based routing tools on it, under the GPL. Company B improves the software and wants to sell the improved version for profit. Company A says "no you can't do that, you have to give us the software fore free because of the GPL". Company A probably wants to include the improved software on a new version of the router, so that they can charge a premium for the new version. And sadly for Company B, Company A is in the right, because of the GPL and copyright. Company B invested time and money in its improved software, but (barring time for this thing to get through the courts) Company A is just going to take their improvement for zero time and zero money, and Company B is going to be out its initial investment.
I disagree completely, and this is my whole point. Without copyright, software authors would not be able to require sharing of derivative works. Someone could take a piece of software, make modifications to it, release it as a commercial product, and not release the changed source code. With copyright in place, the changes are required to be released. The GPL requires copyright enforcement in order to function as a license. What is so hard to understand about this?
Without copyright, entities could not copy publicly available software and "protect" it by slapping a copyright on it, and then take our work away from us by suing everyone for copyright infringement! That's the sort of thing the GPL is designed to stop.
Even with copyright, entities cannot do that, simply because the publicly-available software is already publicly available and would be considered prior art (or whatever the copyright equivalent is, I know "prior art" is a patent term). I don't understand why you think the GPL helps in this case.
And you shall not forbid sharing in a backhanded way either, by making an improvement that makes the original impractical, and then refusing to let anyone else have or make that same improvement, all while claiming that you are not stopping anyone from sharing, because the original is still available.
Ah, so that's what you're getting at. I don't understand your "makes the original impractical" phrase - please explain. But yes, the GPL forward-propagates its sharing requirement to derivative works, by means of copyright enforcement. Without copyright, the GPL can't do that. Amazingly, I think you just agreed with me.
Every move that strengthens copyright also strengthens copyleft.
Yes, you did just agree with me. The contrapositive of that is that every move that weakens copyright also weakens copyleft - specifically, if copyright were weakened as many on Slashdot call for, the GPL would be weakened and would lose its ability to require derivative works to be released for free.
You can do all that right now, with software released under the GPL. The GPL explicitly allows sales. All that is required is that you convey the changes to the public. You also seem to be unaware that in fact the GPL does NOT require that you share your changes.
Yes, anyone can do anything in isolation and not tell anyone about it. This is mostly true even of traditionally-copyrighted IP too, but it's uninteresting from an economic standpoint.
Read my original post again. It is clearly targeted at "information wants to be free" fanatics. They come out in droves on the piracy stories saying that once a musician releases a song, the information is "out there" and can't be locked down, and thus it should be able to be freely passed around. The GPL does not allow this with software either, as much as you or anyone else can argue that it does. Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software_licences#Restrictions if you still disagree with me.
I have written a ton of other posts arguing against the "pro-sharers" because I don't think that method works either. Here is a decent one that summarizes my views there: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1654748&cid=32246514
Another example. This clearly illustrates why the GPL is a legitimate restriction, and not a freedom.
A band writes and records a song. They release the song for free under the GPL. Ten years later, another band wants to cover that song. Their cover is a huge hit, but they are required to release their cover of the song for free due to restrictions in the GPL. They cannot profit from their added value because the GPL restricted them from doing so.
There are many more nuances here (live performances, the original band may gain in popularity, etc.), but I think that's a pretty good example.
...or any of infinitely many other acts that are impossible.
I don't think I need to address this, as your examples are clearly outside of the realm of this discussion. I am having a discussion about restrictions that a creator imposes on a piece of IP that he or she has created. I don't know what point you're trying to make with your examples.
It also seems you are trying to make us out as a bunch of hypocrites.
Yes, that is exactly what I am trying to do.
Your arguments are weak, as you should realize. You're playing word games.
I'm not playing word games.
Is it truly restriction to restrict what restrictions others may impose?
Yes.
Such wording is not a good way to capture the concept. It ignores the complementary and opposing nature of such rules. That which is a restriction to one so that another may enjoy the complementary freedom, and so that both are equal in the eyes of the law, should not be thought of as only a restriction, because it is more.
No. Just like the converse of a proof is not necessarily true, the converse of "restriction of a restriction" is not a freedom. The GPL restricts what a user can do with the software. He cannot take the software, make a modification to or a derivative work from it - potentially adding value - and protect that added value from being copied by competitors. Instead, he must release the new version to the world. Or not use the GPL software in the first place.
Look, my entire point is that the GPL requires copyright enforcement. Without copyright, the GPL is invalid and anyone can take the software someone has released, change it, and sell it.
As I've stated at least two other times in this thread, if you want to argue that the GPL's restriction ("you must share") is better than traditional copyright restrictions ("you must not share"), we can have that discussion. But that's a totally different discussion.
Let me use a couple examples to illustrate my point again.
A consistent position for someone to take on this issue is that they believe that both software and music should be in the public domain immediately upon distribution of the first copy. Many people on Slashdot have suggested that such a system is workable (monetarily, for the creator) if the software author/musician were paid before creating the work, on a commission.
Another consistent position is that both software and music should become public domain after, say, 4 years, but prior to 4 years they are allowed to be subject to whatever license or restrictions the author decides - such restrictions being "you must share", or "you must not share".
The position in question is: software should be subject to a restriction such as "you must share", but music is public domain. I don't understand why you think this is a consistent position. Please explain.
If people believe that information should be shared, it's perfectly consistent to support uses of copyright law that require sharing, while opposing uses of copyright law that don't require sharing.
If people believe that information must be shared, as the GPL requires, then they implicitly believe that information should be allowed to be restricted in how its used. You can't require sharing without also requiring restriction. Why is the must-share restriction better than the don't-share restriction? That's the inconsistency.
You're just arguing that sharing is better than not sharing. That's a perfectly legitimate argument to make, but it's also a completely different discussion. Consistency in copyright enforcement (or lack thereof) was the point of my original post.
The subject is copyright infringement. This thread is full of people who are in favor of strong copyright law when it comes to protecting GPL'd (and thus copyrighted) software from being used in a manner that violates the terms of the copyright. What I don't understand is where these people are when a story gets posted about copyrighted music being used in a manner that violates the musicians' copyrights. You can't have it both ways - if you support no copyright for musicians, you get no copyright for software. The same people on this thread should be over in the music piracy threads railing against people who torrent music and movies, because it's the same issue. But they never are, it's just me burning through all of my karma pointing out facts like this.
No. I've come across your argument or a variant of it every time I point out the above.
The problem is that even if an organization is pro-sharing, the way the GPL accomplishes that is by putting *restrictions* on what you can do with the information/software/etc. that they produce and release. If the pro-sharing groups believe it's okay for their group to restrict how someone uses their information by requiring distribution of source for derivative works (i.e. copyleft/GPL), they *have* to be okay with a different group restricting how someone uses their information by prohibiting redistribution or derivative works entirely without licensing/royalties (i.e. traditional copyright). They are all restrictions.
Now you might argue that one set of restrictions (copyleft/GPL) is better than another (copyright), or that copyleft/GPL would be unnecessary if there were no such thing as copyright in the first place.
To the first point, I will ask
To the second point I will argue that without copyright, everything looks like a BSD license or public - that is, a "here's the code, do whatever you want with it" license - so why don't people just use the BSD license? It's precisely because the authors of GPL software want to put restrictions on how people use their stuff.
Addressing the first point is another gigantic discussion, but the quick version goes something like this: if you don't pay people to do stuff, it won't get done once people have to start doing other things to pay the bills.
Folks, this is why we need to find a way to pay for true investigative journalism. This sort of thing is NOT going to be uncovered by crowdsourced reports or bloggers with (other, non-journalist) day jobs and bills to pay. Wikileaks relys on insiders having a motive for revealing information; there are merits to that method but it doesn't cover all cases.
Those of you complaining about how journalism is crap, this is an example of non-crap journalism.
I don't know a great way of funding journalism like this. The Associated Press is funded by member newspapers who use their stories in the local papers. No one is paying for the local papers because of Google News and the like, so if those papers go under, AP's funding is probably in some jeopardy over the next 5-10 years. I would be fine with paying the AP directly somehow, but I still don't see a means of making that work.
Yes, exactly. The producers get to control how their movie is distributed. Torrents are not one of the distribution methods they chose, so any torrent is by definition a violation of their exclusive distribution rights.
Please explain how this bill is NOT adapting to the changing needs of obtaining revenue for road maintenance.
It's double taxing current drivers which is fucking stupid.
I never said it wasn't. It is certainly double taxing current drivers: you have to pay a road maintenance tax AND a gasoline tax. What it's really doing is switching the gasoline tax from a road-maintenance tax to a don't-use-gasoline-anymore tax. I'm fully in support of that switch given that oil is running out.
So you're going to give me and everyone else the 30-50k to buy that all-electric vehicle so we don't get double taxed because of some asinine bill?
Yep. I'm going to give you a tax break that applies over the lifetime of owning and driving that all-electric vehicle: you don't EVER have to pay the gasoline tax.
The gasoline tax is not supposed to encourage people to drive fuel-efficient vehicles, it's supposed to pay for road construction and maintenance. Road wear and tear is not really related to how fuel-efficient your vehicle is, it's related to how heavy your vehicle is and how many miles you drive it on the roads.[1] Having more-fuel-efficient vehicles pay less road maintenance tax than a less-fuel-efficient-but-same-weight vehicle doesn't work.
Besides, at a given fuel efficiency, more driving == more tax, so the current gasoline tax discourages driving already.
[1] Small fuel-efficient vehicles like a Honda Insight or a Prius are generally lighter than a Hummer, so there is some correlation and causation between fuel-efficiency and how much wear-and-tear a vehicle causes (the correlation is that fuel-efficient cars tend to generally be smaller, causation is because being smaller and lighter in fact makes you more fuel-efficient anyway). But this is something a miles-traveled tax can account for - a factor based on vehicle weight times miles traveled. Fuel efficiency is still not the point of the gasoline (road-maintenance) tax.
That's exactly what this bill is proposing to do! All-electric vehicles are the future, but the roads will still need maintenance in that future, so this bill is adapting to that. Would you rather that we wait until roads and bridges start crumbling and falling down due to lack of funds to change the means of revenue generation which accounts for all-electric vehicles?
You're right, there's no mention of repealing the gasoline tax, so this would result in double taxation of gasoline-powered vehicles. But by double-taxing gasoline consumers, maybe that will shift the economics more in favor of all-electric vehicles (to avoid the double tax), which I'm pretty sure most people would say is a good thing. Two benefits from a single bill.
In that case, the compiler will already have reordered the instructions to fit Atom's microarchitecture.
Sort of. There's not much a compiler can do when you have a last-level (L2, L3) cache miss, which takes hundreds of clocks to service. Even an L1 miss hurts somewhat. OOO processors can execute other, independent instructions for which it has data available in registers or in the L1, and which are in the processor's OOO execution window. In-order processors can't do much. Atom does have some limited ability to hide cache miss latency via some bypassing around L1 misses, but not as much as true OOO.
And what is the benefit of out-of-order compared to simultaneous multithreading [wikipedia.org]?
SMT gets you throughput on multiple threads, for a cheaper area/power budget than just stamping another core down on the die. Obviously it's not as good as another real core, but for some applications that lightly load the processor, for example memory-bound or I/O-bound apps, it is pretty good. It does nothing for single-thread performance however; it can even hurt it single-thread IPC, in fact.
When IP can be reproduced and distributed at zero cost, ownership and property rights have little to no meaning. People who use the term "imaginary property" have been saying this for at least 10 years, especially on Slashdot.
Well, this is now content creators agreeing with them. "Imaginary property" advocates have been saying for years that IP rights holders are free to exercise their exclusive rights to that IP by not selling it to anyone, thus maintaining their exclusive copy of the IP. (Implied there is that no one will get to actually experience the IP, making it useless as a source of income). Well, this is them doing half of that. Because copyright (i.e. exclusive distribution rights) is impossible to enforce, they are simply going to stop distributing the IP in "here's a copy of it, please don't copy it again and give it away" form, which basically stopped working over 10 years ago. They are instead providing access to their IP behind these cloud-based services which, in addition to providing the content itself, provide added value in ways such as organizing the content and allowing access from many devices/places/times. For most people, the content plus the additional value offered by these services is enough to get them to subscribe (i.e. pay). This allows the IP creators to continue making money from their IP. By the way, this goes for software too: think Steam.
This is in opposition to the "imaginary property" advocates that maintain that all content should be free-as-in-beer because it doesn't cost any money to duplicate, damned be the (sometimes significant) creation costs. Most of them use free-as-in-freedom arguments like "I own this, I should be able to do what I want with it", or arguments such as "I hate the RIAA/MPAA so I'm screwing them." Personally, I hate the RIAA/MPAA as much as the next guy, but what I hate even more is justifying pirated content by saying "well I'm just screwing the RIAA/MPAA". Guess what? You're also screwing the content creator, whose work you apparently want enough to pirate.
The banks' reckless behavior led to a global economic downturn, the loss of millions of jobs, the decrease in wealth of millions of people's retirement savings, and we're still not out of the woods and probably won't be for some time. Are the banks paying restitution to all those people?
The interest rate on those bailout loans should have been astronomical in order to compensate for the damage done by the banks to the economy and to the average person, or they should have come with many many additional strings attached. But no, the interest rate wasn't high and there were almost no strings attached because the banks have bought their way (using those same ill-gotten profits of 2002-2007) into Congress and wrote nonexistent regulations. Both W and Obama are to blame for this major fuckup in the handling of the bailout.
I agree that the U.S. Government certainly avoided a super-catastrophe by bailing out the banks, but in doing so the Government (that is, the U.S. people) should have gained leverage, power, and money back from them in return for saving them. We got none of the above.
we are seeing the Justice Department agree with the idea that what is blocked and what isn't is a matter of contractual language between corporations, instead of the inherent right to a free internet.
And back in reality, I'm happy about this. Adding specific regulations and requirements to a merger of this sort is exactly how the DoJ is supposed to do its job. Just saying "the internet should be free and open" doesn't do crap - you need specific regulations on specific companies to make that happen.
Specifically with regards to this merger: without the merger there would be no need for requirements like this, because there is no conflict of interest between the content producer (NBC) and any one distributor. NBC would like to license its content to all distributors so as to maximize its own profit. Once a distributor (Comcast) buys the content producer, there's the conflict of interest (for example, the distributor wants to make NBC content available only on its distribution network so as to make subscribers who want to watch NBC shows have to come over to Comcast's distribution system), and there's the need for DoJ or FCC to intervene.
I see this as good news. Vague language about openness and neutrality is ripe for loopholes and other asshattery by the distributors and content producers. Specific regulations on them like this should have more teeth.
Copyright law isn't meant to provide revenue - it's meant to create innovation.
Well, sort of. Innovation is a second-order side effect of copyright. It is indeed the ultimate goal, but copyright law itself does not create innovation directly. (Goverment funding of organizations and individuals to produce public-domain innovations and new ideas *directly* would accomplish that.) Rather, copyright provides exclusive distribution rights for IP to a private entity. The first-order side effect of exclusive distribution rights is that someone can make money distributing it. The second-order side effect is that given the opportunity to make money, people will bother to do it in the first place, which is your ultimate goal of creating innovation.
The revenue of the Britannica actually counts against them - it's an additional cost that society pays in return for getting a good encyclopedia, compared to the Wikipedia model.
Britannica funded encyclopedia creation directly via revenue, by paying subject experts and editors for their time, and paying distributors and printers to produce the physical object. Wikipedia funds encyclopedia creation via donations of time from subject experts and editors, there is no physical object to make, and it funds distribution (i.e. hosting, bandwidth) via donations of money. Where do these subject experts, editors, and others get time or money to donate? Why, they have day jobs that give them money to buy food, housing, clothing, health care, etc. All Wikipedia has done is offload the funding for encyclopedia creation to these other companies that employ Wikipedia's experts, editors, and donators in other job functions.
Why do you think this is a superior means of funding encyclopedia creation? Well, obviously because it doesn't cost you, the encyclopedia consumer, any money, whereas the Britannica model did cost you something. But sustainable? When food, housing, clothing, and health care are free, then maybe.
TV may be one-sided, but in court the usual practice is for both sides to hire their own experts, where each expert presents that side's view and supporting research/evidence. At least it's common if both sides have competent lawyers and enough money. The judge or jury must then make a call on which they think is "more right". My point is that in actual court, it doesn't *have* to be completely one-sided.
Of course that only helps when you're in court over the issue at hand, not a tangential licensing issue. Mr. Cox can find all the expert witnesses he wants that say that the traffic lights need adjustment, but that doesn't help him if the charge is that he himself was unlicensed. It would only help if, say, he had been in an accident at that intersection and was trying to recover damages from the city for negligence regarding their traffic signals' timing or something. Then his expert would surely say that the traffic signals needed adjustment, while the city's expert would say they were fine, and it would be up to the jury to decide.
What motives the people in your group 2 to actually spend money on the exact same thing that they already got for free? Some answers that I can think of to that question include: 1) the item they got for free was of poor quality (bad rip, incomplete, too much audio compression, software doesn't work on their system, etc.), 2) they can't find the exact item they were looking for using the free service, 3) there are other value-adds that come with the paid service that they don't get from the free service, i.e. iTunes organizes music and syncs to their portable device easily, whereas free services are a pain to use, or maybe WoW only is fun if you play with other people which requires subscribing to Blizzard's service, or seeing a movie in theaters is a much better experience than on their home TV and sound system, 4) the price level for the good is low enough to be in the "don't give a shit" range, and finally 5) a sense of obligation or charity. Answers 1-3 are legitimate because they are paying for value-adds that the free service does not offer. Answer 4 really is answer 3 in disguise, where the reason they don't give a shit is really because it's easier to just buy the thing using iTunes and an hour of torrent-hunting and getting the song onto your device is not worth $0.99. This is where I suspect many music consumers fall nowadays. But that same principle would not apply to, say, software which costs more than $0.99, and where a half hour of torrent-hunting might save you $100. Answer 5 is purely donations. Maybe some people in your group really believe that if they personally don't pay for something, the creators are less likely to invest time and money in making another thing. But I have yet to see that as a widespread opinion.
If someone set up a donation-based music store or a donations-based WoW server, where the minimum donation was $0.00, I would be very interested to see what would happen. Maybe if you displayed everyone's donation level, community shame for donating $0 would cause people to actually pay for stuff, I dunno. But no one has done it because apparently no execs believe in donation-based economies either.
For example : I have downloaded Civ 3,4 & 5. I purchased a copy of Civ's 3 and 4 afterwards because I thoroughly enjoyed playing them.
I would argue that you are an anomaly in the P2P scene. I have no data on which to base this argument other than anecdotal evidence, however.
I regularly do the same with books, apps, etc. Good content gets rewarded by buying a hardcopy or making a donation, bad content gets nothing but my resentment for wasting my time.
You are arguing for a donation-based business model. It works for some things, but I don't believe it's scalable or practical for many types of content.
Your argument does not follow. With the availability of all content for $0 on P2P networks, that implies that no content is worth paying for. How does $0 content incentivize artists to make anything?
Slashdot Mirror
Fine, don't share. We'll reverse engineer or reinvent your much vaunted improvement, if we think it worthwhile. We'll probably even improve on it.
Ah, see you're cheating. Making improvements is not free. It costs time and/or money. Without copyright (and thus without the GPL sharing restriction), if you want to make the same improvements, you have to spend some time and/or money too. Meanwhile, while you are doing that, I'm selling my improved version for profit.
Without copyright and the GPL, I will make you spend the time/money to reinvent it. Yes, this is not great for a utopian, communist society where the benefit of improvements should be had by all immediately at zero cost, but it certainly works better in a capitalist society. If the improvements are good enough that people will buy my product over competitors' products even for 6 months, that's huge.
Now, maybe you're smarter than me so it will take you less time. And it certainly is easier to do something once someone else has done it first, even without source. But required sharing means it takes you no time and no money, so I gain no competitive advantage over you from making the improvements. Effectively, the GPL restricts me from gaining competitive advantage over you.
If you go back to the original article, Company A makes a router with Linux-based routing tools on it, under the GPL. Company B improves the software and wants to sell the improved version for profit. Company A says "no you can't do that, you have to give us the software fore free because of the GPL". Company A probably wants to include the improved software on a new version of the router, so that they can charge a premium for the new version. And sadly for Company B, Company A is in the right, because of the GPL and copyright. Company B invested time and money in its improved software, but (barring time for this thing to get through the courts) Company A is just going to take their improvement for zero time and zero money, and Company B is going to be out its initial investment.
But without copyright, the GPL is unnecessary.
I disagree completely, and this is my whole point. Without copyright, software authors would not be able to require sharing of derivative works. Someone could take a piece of software, make modifications to it, release it as a commercial product, and not release the changed source code. With copyright in place, the changes are required to be released. The GPL requires copyright enforcement in order to function as a license. What is so hard to understand about this?
Without copyright, entities could not copy publicly available software and "protect" it by slapping a copyright on it, and then take our work away from us by suing everyone for copyright infringement! That's the sort of thing the GPL is designed to stop.
Even with copyright, entities cannot do that, simply because the publicly-available software is already publicly available and would be considered prior art (or whatever the copyright equivalent is, I know "prior art" is a patent term). I don't understand why you think the GPL helps in this case.
And you shall not forbid sharing in a backhanded way either, by making an improvement that makes the original impractical, and then refusing to let anyone else have or make that same improvement, all while claiming that you are not stopping anyone from sharing, because the original is still available.
Ah, so that's what you're getting at. I don't understand your "makes the original impractical" phrase - please explain. But yes, the GPL forward-propagates its sharing requirement to derivative works, by means of copyright enforcement. Without copyright, the GPL can't do that. Amazingly, I think you just agreed with me.
Every move that strengthens copyright also strengthens copyleft.
Yes, you did just agree with me. The contrapositive of that is that every move that weakens copyright also weakens copyleft - specifically, if copyright were weakened as many on Slashdot call for, the GPL would be weakened and would lose its ability to require derivative works to be released for free.
You can do all that right now, with software released under the GPL. The GPL explicitly allows sales. All that is required is that you convey the changes to the public. You also seem to be unaware that in fact the GPL does NOT require that you share your changes.
Yes, anyone can do anything in isolation and not tell anyone about it. This is mostly true even of traditionally-copyrighted IP too, but it's uninteresting from an economic standpoint.
Read my original post again. It is clearly targeted at "information wants to be free" fanatics. They come out in droves on the piracy stories saying that once a musician releases a song, the information is "out there" and can't be locked down, and thus it should be able to be freely passed around. The GPL does not allow this with software either, as much as you or anyone else can argue that it does. Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software_licences#Restrictions if you still disagree with me.
I have written a ton of other posts arguing against the "pro-sharers" because I don't think that method works either. Here is a decent one that summarizes my views there: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1654748&cid=32246514
Another example. This clearly illustrates why the GPL is a legitimate restriction, and not a freedom.
A band writes and records a song. They release the song for free under the GPL. Ten years later, another band wants to cover that song. Their cover is a huge hit, but they are required to release their cover of the song for free due to restrictions in the GPL. They cannot profit from their added value because the GPL restricted them from doing so.
There are many more nuances here (live performances, the original band may gain in popularity, etc.), but I think that's a pretty good example.
...or any of infinitely many other acts that are impossible.
I don't think I need to address this, as your examples are clearly outside of the realm of this discussion. I am having a discussion about restrictions that a creator imposes on a piece of IP that he or she has created. I don't know what point you're trying to make with your examples.
It also seems you are trying to make us out as a bunch of hypocrites.
Yes, that is exactly what I am trying to do.
Your arguments are weak, as you should realize. You're playing word games.
I'm not playing word games.
Is it truly restriction to restrict what restrictions others may impose?
Yes.
Such wording is not a good way to capture the concept. It ignores the complementary and opposing nature of such rules. That which is a restriction to one so that another may enjoy the complementary freedom, and so that both are equal in the eyes of the law, should not be thought of as only a restriction, because it is more.
No. Just like the converse of a proof is not necessarily true, the converse of "restriction of a restriction" is not a freedom. The GPL restricts what a user can do with the software. He cannot take the software, make a modification to or a derivative work from it - potentially adding value - and protect that added value from being copied by competitors. Instead, he must release the new version to the world. Or not use the GPL software in the first place.
Look, my entire point is that the GPL requires copyright enforcement. Without copyright, the GPL is invalid and anyone can take the software someone has released, change it, and sell it.
As I've stated at least two other times in this thread, if you want to argue that the GPL's restriction ("you must share") is better than traditional copyright restrictions ("you must not share"), we can have that discussion. But that's a totally different discussion.
Let me use a couple examples to illustrate my point again.
A consistent position for someone to take on this issue is that they believe that both software and music should be in the public domain immediately upon distribution of the first copy. Many people on Slashdot have suggested that such a system is workable (monetarily, for the creator) if the software author/musician were paid before creating the work, on a commission.
Another consistent position is that both software and music should become public domain after, say, 4 years, but prior to 4 years they are allowed to be subject to whatever license or restrictions the author decides - such restrictions being "you must share", or "you must not share".
The position in question is: software should be subject to a restriction such as "you must share", but music is public domain. I don't understand why you think this is a consistent position. Please explain.
If people believe that information should be shared, it's perfectly consistent to support uses of copyright law that require sharing, while opposing uses of copyright law that don't require sharing.
If people believe that information must be shared, as the GPL requires, then they implicitly believe that information should be allowed to be restricted in how its used. You can't require sharing without also requiring restriction. Why is the must-share restriction better than the don't-share restriction? That's the inconsistency.
You're just arguing that sharing is better than not sharing. That's a perfectly legitimate argument to make, but it's also a completely different discussion. Consistency in copyright enforcement (or lack thereof) was the point of my original post.
The subject is copyright infringement. This thread is full of people who are in favor of strong copyright law when it comes to protecting GPL'd (and thus copyrighted) software from being used in a manner that violates the terms of the copyright. What I don't understand is where these people are when a story gets posted about copyrighted music being used in a manner that violates the musicians' copyrights. You can't have it both ways - if you support no copyright for musicians, you get no copyright for software. The same people on this thread should be over in the music piracy threads railing against people who torrent music and movies, because it's the same issue. But they never are, it's just me burning through all of my karma pointing out facts like this.
No. I've come across your argument or a variant of it every time I point out the above.
The problem is that even if an organization is pro-sharing, the way the GPL accomplishes that is by putting *restrictions* on what you can do with the information/software/etc. that they produce and release. If the pro-sharing groups believe it's okay for their group to restrict how someone uses their information by requiring distribution of source for derivative works (i.e. copyleft/GPL), they *have* to be okay with a different group restricting how someone uses their information by prohibiting redistribution or derivative works entirely without licensing/royalties (i.e. traditional copyright). They are all restrictions.
Now you might argue that one set of restrictions (copyleft/GPL) is better than another (copyright), or that copyleft/GPL would be unnecessary if there were no such thing as copyright in the first place.
To the first point, I will ask
To the second point I will argue that without copyright, everything looks like a BSD license or public - that is, a "here's the code, do whatever you want with it" license - so why don't people just use the BSD license? It's precisely because the authors of GPL software want to put restrictions on how people use their stuff.
Addressing the first point is another gigantic discussion, but the quick version goes something like this: if you don't pay people to do stuff, it won't get done once people have to start doing other things to pay the bills.
Since when has anyone on Slashdot wanted to enforce artificial restrictions on information, which, by definition, should be "free"?
The cognitive dissonance between this story and the countless (pro-)piracy stories is astounding.
Folks, this is why we need to find a way to pay for true investigative journalism. This sort of thing is NOT going to be uncovered by crowdsourced reports or bloggers with (other, non-journalist) day jobs and bills to pay. Wikileaks relys on insiders having a motive for revealing information; there are merits to that method but it doesn't cover all cases.
Those of you complaining about how journalism is crap, this is an example of non-crap journalism.
I don't know a great way of funding journalism like this. The Associated Press is funded by member newspapers who use their stories in the local papers. No one is paying for the local papers because of Google News and the like, so if those papers go under, AP's funding is probably in some jeopardy over the next 5-10 years. I would be fine with paying the AP directly somehow, but I still don't see a means of making that work.
Yes, exactly. The producers get to control how their movie is distributed. Torrents are not one of the distribution methods they chose, so any torrent is by definition a violation of their exclusive distribution rights.
No, it's doing precisely the opposite.
Please explain how this bill is NOT adapting to the changing needs of obtaining revenue for road maintenance.
It's double taxing current drivers which is fucking stupid.
I never said it wasn't. It is certainly double taxing current drivers: you have to pay a road maintenance tax AND a gasoline tax. What it's really doing is switching the gasoline tax from a road-maintenance tax to a don't-use-gasoline-anymore tax. I'm fully in support of that switch given that oil is running out.
So you're going to give me and everyone else the 30-50k to buy that all-electric vehicle so we don't get double taxed because of some asinine bill?
Yep. I'm going to give you a tax break that applies over the lifetime of owning and driving that all-electric vehicle: you don't EVER have to pay the gasoline tax.
The gasoline tax is not supposed to encourage people to drive fuel-efficient vehicles, it's supposed to pay for road construction and maintenance. Road wear and tear is not really related to how fuel-efficient your vehicle is, it's related to how heavy your vehicle is and how many miles you drive it on the roads.[1] Having more-fuel-efficient vehicles pay less road maintenance tax than a less-fuel-efficient-but-same-weight vehicle doesn't work.
Besides, at a given fuel efficiency, more driving == more tax, so the current gasoline tax discourages driving already.
[1] Small fuel-efficient vehicles like a Honda Insight or a Prius are generally lighter than a Hummer, so there is some correlation and causation between fuel-efficiency and how much wear-and-tear a vehicle causes (the correlation is that fuel-efficient cars tend to generally be smaller, causation is because being smaller and lighter in fact makes you more fuel-efficient anyway). But this is something a miles-traveled tax can account for - a factor based on vehicle weight times miles traveled. Fuel efficiency is still not the point of the gasoline (road-maintenance) tax.
That's exactly what this bill is proposing to do! All-electric vehicles are the future, but the roads will still need maintenance in that future, so this bill is adapting to that. Would you rather that we wait until roads and bridges start crumbling and falling down due to lack of funds to change the means of revenue generation which accounts for all-electric vehicles?
You're right, there's no mention of repealing the gasoline tax, so this would result in double taxation of gasoline-powered vehicles. But by double-taxing gasoline consumers, maybe that will shift the economics more in favor of all-electric vehicles (to avoid the double tax), which I'm pretty sure most people would say is a good thing. Two benefits from a single bill.
In that case, the compiler will already have reordered the instructions to fit Atom's microarchitecture.
Sort of. There's not much a compiler can do when you have a last-level (L2, L3) cache miss, which takes hundreds of clocks to service. Even an L1 miss hurts somewhat. OOO processors can execute other, independent instructions for which it has data available in registers or in the L1, and which are in the processor's OOO execution window. In-order processors can't do much. Atom does have some limited ability to hide cache miss latency via some bypassing around L1 misses, but not as much as true OOO.
And what is the benefit of out-of-order compared to simultaneous multithreading [wikipedia.org]?
SMT gets you throughput on multiple threads, for a cheaper area/power budget than just stamping another core down on the die. Obviously it's not as good as another real core, but for some applications that lightly load the processor, for example memory-bound or I/O-bound apps, it is pretty good. It does nothing for single-thread performance however; it can even hurt it single-thread IPC, in fact.
When IP can be reproduced and distributed at zero cost, ownership and property rights have little to no meaning. People who use the term "imaginary property" have been saying this for at least 10 years, especially on Slashdot.
Well, this is now content creators agreeing with them. "Imaginary property" advocates have been saying for years that IP rights holders are free to exercise their exclusive rights to that IP by not selling it to anyone, thus maintaining their exclusive copy of the IP. (Implied there is that no one will get to actually experience the IP, making it useless as a source of income). Well, this is them doing half of that. Because copyright (i.e. exclusive distribution rights) is impossible to enforce, they are simply going to stop distributing the IP in "here's a copy of it, please don't copy it again and give it away" form, which basically stopped working over 10 years ago. They are instead providing access to their IP behind these cloud-based services which, in addition to providing the content itself, provide added value in ways such as organizing the content and allowing access from many devices/places/times. For most people, the content plus the additional value offered by these services is enough to get them to subscribe (i.e. pay). This allows the IP creators to continue making money from their IP. By the way, this goes for software too: think Steam.
This is in opposition to the "imaginary property" advocates that maintain that all content should be free-as-in-beer because it doesn't cost any money to duplicate, damned be the (sometimes significant) creation costs. Most of them use free-as-in-freedom arguments like "I own this, I should be able to do what I want with it", or arguments such as "I hate the RIAA/MPAA so I'm screwing them." Personally, I hate the RIAA/MPAA as much as the next guy, but what I hate even more is justifying pirated content by saying "well I'm just screwing the RIAA/MPAA". Guess what? You're also screwing the content creator, whose work you apparently want enough to pirate.
I hope you don't actually believe that.
The banks' reckless behavior led to a global economic downturn, the loss of millions of jobs, the decrease in wealth of millions of people's retirement savings, and we're still not out of the woods and probably won't be for some time. Are the banks paying restitution to all those people?
The interest rate on those bailout loans should have been astronomical in order to compensate for the damage done by the banks to the economy and to the average person, or they should have come with many many additional strings attached. But no, the interest rate wasn't high and there were almost no strings attached because the banks have bought their way (using those same ill-gotten profits of 2002-2007) into Congress and wrote nonexistent regulations. Both W and Obama are to blame for this major fuckup in the handling of the bailout.
I agree that the U.S. Government certainly avoided a super-catastrophe by bailing out the banks, but in doing so the Government (that is, the U.S. people) should have gained leverage, power, and money back from them in return for saving them. We got none of the above.
we are seeing the Justice Department agree with the idea that what is blocked and what isn't is a matter of contractual language between corporations, instead of the inherent right to a free internet.
And back in reality, I'm happy about this. Adding specific regulations and requirements to a merger of this sort is exactly how the DoJ is supposed to do its job. Just saying "the internet should be free and open" doesn't do crap - you need specific regulations on specific companies to make that happen.
Specifically with regards to this merger: without the merger there would be no need for requirements like this, because there is no conflict of interest between the content producer (NBC) and any one distributor. NBC would like to license its content to all distributors so as to maximize its own profit. Once a distributor (Comcast) buys the content producer, there's the conflict of interest (for example, the distributor wants to make NBC content available only on its distribution network so as to make subscribers who want to watch NBC shows have to come over to Comcast's distribution system), and there's the need for DoJ or FCC to intervene.
I see this as good news. Vague language about openness and neutrality is ripe for loopholes and other asshattery by the distributors and content producers. Specific regulations on them like this should have more teeth.
Copyright law isn't meant to provide revenue - it's meant to create innovation.
Well, sort of. Innovation is a second-order side effect of copyright. It is indeed the ultimate goal, but copyright law itself does not create innovation directly. (Goverment funding of organizations and individuals to produce public-domain innovations and new ideas *directly* would accomplish that.) Rather, copyright provides exclusive distribution rights for IP to a private entity. The first-order side effect of exclusive distribution rights is that someone can make money distributing it. The second-order side effect is that given the opportunity to make money, people will bother to do it in the first place, which is your ultimate goal of creating innovation.
The revenue of the Britannica actually counts against them - it's an additional cost that society pays in return for getting a good encyclopedia, compared to the Wikipedia model.
Britannica funded encyclopedia creation directly via revenue, by paying subject experts and editors for their time, and paying distributors and printers to produce the physical object. Wikipedia funds encyclopedia creation via donations of time from subject experts and editors, there is no physical object to make, and it funds distribution (i.e. hosting, bandwidth) via donations of money. Where do these subject experts, editors, and others get time or money to donate? Why, they have day jobs that give them money to buy food, housing, clothing, health care, etc. All Wikipedia has done is offload the funding for encyclopedia creation to these other companies that employ Wikipedia's experts, editors, and donators in other job functions.
Why do you think this is a superior means of funding encyclopedia creation? Well, obviously because it doesn't cost you, the encyclopedia consumer, any money, whereas the Britannica model did cost you something. But sustainable? When food, housing, clothing, and health care are free, then maybe.
BitCoin credits? BitCoin credits are no good out here. I need something more real.
I don't have anything else...but BitCoin credits will do fine.
TV may be one-sided, but in court the usual practice is for both sides to hire their own experts, where each expert presents that side's view and supporting research/evidence. At least it's common if both sides have competent lawyers and enough money. The judge or jury must then make a call on which they think is "more right". My point is that in actual court, it doesn't *have* to be completely one-sided.
Of course that only helps when you're in court over the issue at hand, not a tangential licensing issue. Mr. Cox can find all the expert witnesses he wants that say that the traffic lights need adjustment, but that doesn't help him if the charge is that he himself was unlicensed. It would only help if, say, he had been in an accident at that intersection and was trying to recover damages from the city for negligence regarding their traffic signals' timing or something. Then his expert would surely say that the traffic signals needed adjustment, while the city's expert would say they were fine, and it would be up to the jury to decide.
The following Slashdot story contradicts your study and supports my point: Game Developer Asks To Hear From Pirates. Read the comments there.
What motives the people in your group 2 to actually spend money on the exact same thing that they already got for free? Some answers that I can think of to that question include: 1) the item they got for free was of poor quality (bad rip, incomplete, too much audio compression, software doesn't work on their system, etc.), 2) they can't find the exact item they were looking for using the free service, 3) there are other value-adds that come with the paid service that they don't get from the free service, i.e. iTunes organizes music and syncs to their portable device easily, whereas free services are a pain to use, or maybe WoW only is fun if you play with other people which requires subscribing to Blizzard's service, or seeing a movie in theaters is a much better experience than on their home TV and sound system, 4) the price level for the good is low enough to be in the "don't give a shit" range, and finally 5) a sense of obligation or charity. Answers 1-3 are legitimate because they are paying for value-adds that the free service does not offer. Answer 4 really is answer 3 in disguise, where the reason they don't give a shit is really because it's easier to just buy the thing using iTunes and an hour of torrent-hunting and getting the song onto your device is not worth $0.99. This is where I suspect many music consumers fall nowadays. But that same principle would not apply to, say, software which costs more than $0.99, and where a half hour of torrent-hunting might save you $100. Answer 5 is purely donations. Maybe some people in your group really believe that if they personally don't pay for something, the creators are less likely to invest time and money in making another thing. But I have yet to see that as a widespread opinion.
If someone set up a donation-based music store or a donations-based WoW server, where the minimum donation was $0.00, I would be very interested to see what would happen. Maybe if you displayed everyone's donation level, community shame for donating $0 would cause people to actually pay for stuff, I dunno. But no one has done it because apparently no execs believe in donation-based economies either.
See my other response here.
For example : I have downloaded Civ 3,4 & 5. I purchased a copy of Civ's 3 and 4 afterwards because I thoroughly enjoyed playing them.
I would argue that you are an anomaly in the P2P scene. I have no data on which to base this argument other than anecdotal evidence, however.
I regularly do the same with books, apps, etc. Good content gets rewarded by buying a hardcopy or making a donation, bad content gets nothing but my resentment for wasting my time.
You are arguing for a donation-based business model. It works for some things, but I don't believe it's scalable or practical for many types of content.
Your argument does not follow. With the availability of all content for $0 on P2P networks, that implies that no content is worth paying for. How does $0 content incentivize artists to make anything?