The crime wasn't committed on US soil, it was just committed against US interests. Everything he did was done on UK soil, it just was able to affect US computers because of all the signals going back and forth.
Whether a meaning of a word is in a dictionary or not is merely a measure of how common such usage of a word is, it's not a binding statement which everyone has to agree with. The use of the word "piracy" to refer to prohibited copying/copyright disobedience has always been intended not just to describe the action, but to convey the idea that it is morally equivalent to attacking ships, so if you don't think the two are equivalent, it is still illegitimate, it doesn't matter how many people have been suckered into using it incorrectly.
Anyone who cares primarily about "freedom and property rights" should support the abolition of copyright. There's no property involved of course, and abolishing copyright gives everybody lots of additional freedom (to copy stuff) without taking any freedom away from anybody.
I am truly glad OS X isn't open source. While I like a certain amount of customization, I really don't feel like spending 6 months fine tuning an OS installation, let alone a decade figuring out how to do such fine tuning.
And OS X being open source would mean that you would have to spend 6 months fine tuning it...why?
That's not a very good comparison. Latex isn't simply a non-graphical word processor, it's a far more powerful and versatile tool. I mean, word processors are (generally) literally incapable of producing the sort of formatted text output that I want because it's largely mathematical, but even if I was writing about more "conventional" subjects, I would want to use Latex, because it does all that repetitive typesetting for me, so I can concentrate on what I'm writing. Word processors have evolved from typewriters and it shows, they're not designed to exploit the full power of a computer.
As for the "patents are bad for innovation" argument : if you come up with a way to manufacture widgets that no one else has before, and that innovation has cost you a certain amount in development costs, should you not have the right to protect that investment?
You do have the right to protect that investment in any case. Nobody is proposing prohibiting the protection of investments. What you're talking about is stripping other people of the right to use an idea.
If your competition can just steal your methods,
Eh? Is anyone proposing that stealing methods, which would necessarily entail forcibly erasing your knowledge of those methods from your mind, should be explicitly legal or something?
Why do you patent authoritarians have such trouble describing things honestly? Is it because your arguments are so incredibly weak that they wouldn't survive if people understood what they really are?
then you would have no incentive to innovate.
Yeah, because no innovation ever happened at any point in history before patent systems were established.
I am not saying that there isn't a line here, or that the the line hasn't been jumped over by the US. patent office, but by and large patents do in fact encourge business investment into research that would otherwise not happen.
Your evidence of this? And remember, we are talking about removing people's freedom. You need really strong and convincing evidence of a huge, unambiguously beneficial end effect to propose such a thing. And certainly everything I've seen suggests precisely the opposite, it just ends up with a load of power being wielded by the already powerful few, and makes innovation far more difficult for the majority of less powerful people and companies, whilst creating artificial monopolies which remove much of the incentive to innovate from the monopoly-holder.
I haven't played any of the games in that comparison, but purely looking at the screenshots the 20 year old games generally look better. With many of those modern shots I can't see how you could possibly feel in control, you just can't see enough.
And yet, one vision of the future which could very reasonably be described as a worthy goal is a society in which, due to mechanisation, people never have to do work which they (really) do not want to do.
How we could transition into such a world without society crashing and burning, given the economic problems caused by lots of work "going away" is an interesting problem.
Actually, Federation against Copyright Disobedience would be better. Infringement suggests that copyright is actually a right; something which allows people to do something. Whereas it's actually a restriction; something which stops people from doing something, namely copying the thing except in certain circumstances.
It's just called a right because people are more likely to support it then, and the people behind this sort of information scarcity scheme need to mislead the public, as any honest description makes it too easy to work out that it's not actually in our best interests at all.
Funding from direct taxation gives politicians the opportunity to mess with that funding (to a far greater degree). You can't be independent from the government if you depend on them for your money.
So as many posts have pointed out, he's crazy, he's an idiot, etc. But if this is the case, then why does nobody ever point out where he's wrong? Where are the errors in logic or fact? Anyone?
If you own content that you are distributing or other wise have permission to publish it, the RIAA (et all) OBVIOUSLY DOESN'T CARE.
Actually, they do care, they think* that you should have no way of distributing it other than signing your life away to them. That's what this is all about. But since they don't have the legal power to stop you from doing that (yet), they're attacking something connected but different which they do have the (unjust) legal power to stop.
*This word is obviously not absolutely accurate, but I think it sums it up nicely.
If the Serial Experiments Lain PSX game isn't an example of art, I don't know what is. And then there are the better examples of interactive visual novels. The question which then arises being are these actually games?
Maybe what he's groping towards is the notion that one can sensibly define "game" and "art" to be mutually exclusive at a local level. Of course, in this situation it will always be possible to produce things which are part-game and part-art.
Every single television program, comic, book, musical group, et cetera has a "half-life" depending on its particular "valence." Once that half-life has been reached...well...you guys are reading this on Slashdot ergo I assume you are smart enough to get the science-to-entertainment metaphor I'm weaving here.
Unless you can completely reinvent yourself every few years, like Doctor Who.
The whole point of encryption is to make things difficult or impossible to read under certain circumstances. If you encrypt some files, then find that a random piece of hardware can't understand them, that's your fault.
Pursuit of economic interests is exactly what one would expect from a publically traded corporation (which has an obligation to maximize profit potential for its shareholders). Right, wrong, or indifferent, it is the law of the corporate jungle.
If I were a shareholder, I would expect nothing less from Apple, Google, or under the same circumstances.
Which is why it is the duty of we, the public, to intensely criticise any corporation when it does do something unethical, so that the ethical choice becomes the most profitable one.
You make this statement in such a way that it seams you actually believe it. Theft is any time that someone acquires property from someone without their permission. Intellectual property is something that someone has created that may not be a physical object, but still has some commercial value.
You make that statement in a way which seems to suggest that you think ideas are a form of property. The property system was invented to solve one very specific problem; physical objects can not generally be used by lots of people simultaneously, or often even consecutively. Applying notions designed to deal with property to things which do not have this restriction is stupid, it's trying to solve a problem which does not exist.
Or in this case, stealthily substituting a completely different set of concerns (the "right" to make profit), and hoping nobody will notice.
No, true communism has never been tried. When they introduced what they called "communism", Russia and China were not the industrialised plutocracies that communism is supposed to arise naturally in response to.
Slashdot Mirror
The crime wasn't committed on US soil, it was just committed against US interests. Everything he did was done on UK soil, it just was able to affect US computers because of all the signals going back and forth.
Whether a meaning of a word is in a dictionary or not is merely a measure of how common such usage of a word is, it's not a binding statement which everyone has to agree with. The use of the word "piracy" to refer to prohibited copying/copyright disobedience has always been intended not just to describe the action, but to convey the idea that it is morally equivalent to attacking ships, so if you don't think the two are equivalent, it is still illegitimate, it doesn't matter how many people have been suckered into using it incorrectly.
Anyone who cares primarily about "freedom and property rights" should support the abolition of copyright. There's no property involved of course, and abolishing copyright gives everybody lots of additional freedom (to copy stuff) without taking any freedom away from anybody.
And OS X being open source would mean that you would have to spend 6 months fine tuning it...why?
That's not a very good comparison. Latex isn't simply a non-graphical word processor, it's a far more powerful and versatile tool. I mean, word processors are (generally) literally incapable of producing the sort of formatted text output that I want because it's largely mathematical, but even if I was writing about more "conventional" subjects, I would want to use Latex, because it does all that repetitive typesetting for me, so I can concentrate on what I'm writing. Word processors have evolved from typewriters and it shows, they're not designed to exploit the full power of a computer.
You do have the right to protect that investment in any case. Nobody is proposing prohibiting the protection of investments. What you're talking about is stripping other people of the right to use an idea.
If your competition can just steal your methods,
Eh? Is anyone proposing that stealing methods, which would necessarily entail forcibly erasing your knowledge of those methods from your mind, should be explicitly legal or something?
Why do you patent authoritarians have such trouble describing things honestly? Is it because your arguments are so incredibly weak that they wouldn't survive if people understood what they really are?
then you would have no incentive to innovate.
Yeah, because no innovation ever happened at any point in history before patent systems were established.
I am not saying that there isn't a line here, or that the the line hasn't been jumped over by the US. patent office, but by and large patents do in fact encourge business investment into research that would otherwise not happen.
Your evidence of this? And remember, we are talking about removing people's freedom. You need really strong and convincing evidence of a huge, unambiguously beneficial end effect to propose such a thing. And certainly everything I've seen suggests precisely the opposite, it just ends up with a load of power being wielded by the already powerful few, and makes innovation far more difficult for the majority of less powerful people and companies, whilst creating artificial monopolies which remove much of the incentive to innovate from the monopoly-holder.
I haven't played any of the games in that comparison, but purely looking at the screenshots the 20 year old games generally look better. With many of those modern shots I can't see how you could possibly feel in control, you just can't see enough.
If you had a point worth making, you would be able to make it honestly, instead of using words like "theft".
Really? I've never found a lack of a mobile phone to be an inconvenience. Essential for what, exactly?
And yet, one vision of the future which could very reasonably be described as a worthy goal is a society in which, due to mechanisation, people never have to do work which they (really) do not want to do.
How we could transition into such a world without society crashing and burning, given the economic problems caused by lots of work "going away" is an interesting problem.
No, it gives them the [b]power[/b] to do so. Rights are about what you can do, not what everyone else can do.
AND stuff like The Sims or Civilization, pretty much anything not made by big companies, Solitaire...
Actually, Federation against Copyright Disobedience would be better. Infringement suggests that copyright is actually a right; something which allows people to do something. Whereas it's actually a restriction; something which stops people from doing something, namely copying the thing except in certain circumstances. It's just called a right because people are more likely to support it then, and the people behind this sort of information scarcity scheme need to mislead the public, as any honest description makes it too easy to work out that it's not actually in our best interests at all.
Funding from direct taxation gives politicians the opportunity to mess with that funding (to a far greater degree). You can't be independent from the government if you depend on them for your money.
So as many posts have pointed out, he's crazy, he's an idiot, etc. But if this is the case, then why does nobody ever point out where he's wrong? Where are the errors in logic or fact? Anyone?
Actually, they do care, they think* that you should have no way of distributing it other than signing your life away to them. That's what this is all about. But since they don't have the legal power to stop you from doing that (yet), they're attacking something connected but different which they do have the (unjust) legal power to stop.
*This word is obviously not absolutely accurate, but I think it sums it up nicely.
If the Serial Experiments Lain PSX game isn't an example of art, I don't know what is. And then there are the better examples of interactive visual novels. The question which then arises being are these actually games? Maybe what he's groping towards is the notion that one can sensibly define "game" and "art" to be mutually exclusive at a local level. Of course, in this situation it will always be possible to produce things which are part-game and part-art.
The vast majority of American science fiction. American, British and Japanese science fiction are three very different things (I like the latter two).
Unless you can completely reinvent yourself every few years, like Doctor Who.
The whole point of encryption is to make things difficult or impossible to read under certain circumstances. If you encrypt some files, then find that a random piece of hardware can't understand them, that's your fault.
If I were a shareholder, I would expect nothing less from Apple, Google, or under the same circumstances.
Which is why it is the duty of we, the public, to intensely criticise any corporation when it does do something unethical, so that the ethical choice becomes the most profitable one.
Actually, it's 10 kelvins. Kelvins are like metres or seconds, that's the idea.
You make that statement in a way which seems to suggest that you think ideas are a form of property. The property system was invented to solve one very specific problem; physical objects can not generally be used by lots of people simultaneously, or often even consecutively. Applying notions designed to deal with property to things which do not have this restriction is stupid, it's trying to solve a problem which does not exist.
Or in this case, stealthily substituting a completely different set of concerns (the "right" to make profit), and hoping nobody will notice.
No, true communism has never been tried. When they introduced what they called "communism", Russia and China were not the industrialised plutocracies that communism is supposed to arise naturally in response to.
Free speech as property rights? That's silly, the purpose of property rights is to allocate scarce resources.