CD left on my desk; unbeknownst to me someone borrows and copies it - regardless of any actions or charges I might bring against the borrower, I haven't breached a simple contract to the effect of "don't redistribute"
In that case, the party "borrowing" it presumably did so without your permission. It's certainly possible to construct legislation that controls such obvious moral loopholes (of the nature that the typical slashdotter is always looking for...;-) The effect of such a scenario is that your friend is liable if they take the item without your permission, and you are liable if you grant them permission in a way that violated your terms and conditions.
What if the court ruled the contract null and void? The recipient still has the creative work...
Yep. The onus would be upon the licensor to write contracts carefully, so that the contract is not
rejected in its entirety like this.
But this is already an issue that has been addressed in both writing contracts and more to the point, in writing EULAs.
Gosh. I don't remember signing a license agreement when I bought a CD.
No, because the government implicitly signed it for you (copyright).
What I'm arguing is that the right to limit distribution of creative works is natural and follows from the right to form contracts. Hence it is wrong to say that you have the right to arbitrarily "share" "information". You have no such right, and the author has every right to limit distribution.
The issue is, if I can get my hands on the work from somewhere (can you say eMule?) I'm not violating the natural rights of anyone else.
But you only obtained the material because someone else breached the contract. If you are knowingly a party to such a breach of contract, you are a co-conspirator in this violation of the authors rights (to make the material available conditionally).
In other words, I simply don't buy the "leaked copyright" argument. In fact I think there are already examples where you can or can't be protected from leaks. For example this is already an issue with trade secrets / NDAs. If someone leaks
an NDA to a third party, it seems reasonable that the author should be able to seek an injunction
to prevent the third party publicising the material (even though the third party didn't sign the NDA)
The mere fact that someone has recorded a creative work on their dime does not give them a natural right to control what I do with it
It gives them a right to only make their work available to you conditionally. You do not have a natural right to receive the
work. They may choose not to release it to you.
If they do make their work to you under certain terms and conditions, they have a right to expect that those terms and conditions be honored. When those terms and conditions are not honored, they have a "natural" right to seek compensation for any damage that may have resulted from this dishonest conduct.
how have I in any way a relationship (contractual or otherwise) with Britney Spears?
You could be the recipient of material that is made available to you conditionally.
And the fact that you later bring up shrink-wrap licensing wraps up this insane line of reasoning nicely. Shrink-wrap licensing is a myth! It's a non-binding one-way contract
Not sure what you mean. In the example we're discussing, there's no reason that the terms of agreement couldn't be made available up-front.
You might think so, but however you try to slice it, the fact remains that Metallica were enthusiastic supporters of bootlegging. The Napster scene was never about bootlegging (something that dedicated fans did), it was always about justifying getting something for nothing.
But it's making available stuff that people would mostly either [a] buy anyway, or [b] not pay for at all.
I don't agree with [b]. I think if people were forced to choose between not having the music to listen to, and paying up, they'd pay up. The rhetoric one hears from the pirates is that they are forced to pirate, as though going without is not an option. If going without is indeed as painful as they make it out to be, then parting with some cash would no doubt be less painful (even for someone as cheap as the typical slashdotter)
P2P is not "wholesale piracy".
Certain implementaitons of it (like Napster) are.
Napster was a high profile commercial operation,
whose main claim to fame was illegitimate distribution of copyrighted works,
much like a piracy operation.
Sure, access to the "intellectual property of others" isn't guaranteed by your constitution or laws - rather, the whole concept of "intellectual property" is established therein. There is no natural right to control the use of one's ideas!
Creative works are not ideas. Patents are the closest thing to controlling ideas that are legally recognised.
There IS a natural right to make binding contractual agreements, hence it follows that there is also the right to license software/music under a contractual model.
Contracts are a natural right, and I happen to believe that even without the copyright system, contracts and shrink-wrap licensing could serve almost exactly the same purpose (indeed, copyright has largely been superceded by licensing as far as software is concerned)
and Maiden had come across as sympathetic people who wanted to share their music with the world rather than greedy Lars Ulrich clones.
Nonsense. Metallica supported bootlegging. They
didn't support the sort of wholesale piracy and screwing musicians that is lauded by slashdot pond-scum
If you ask me, the people are undervalued and the songs overvalued.
If you value the people so much, may I suggest that you ask that your paychecks be deposited directly to some sort of 9/11 fund ? How much money have you given to 9/11 victims ?
The surviviors of each victim of the 9/11 attacks are entitled to around 1.4 million dollars compensation. So we have set a value on each life
No we haven't. Intentionally killing someone is not just a civil offense. You can't buy your way out of it. As far as the law is concerned, there is no amount of money is legally considered to make right the wrong of a life lost. The 9/11 compensation is not supposed to undo the harm of the life lost. No fund can do that. It is merely supposed to address financial hardships that arise from the crisis.
The fact that our laws place a much higher value on these pirated songs is morally repugnant.
What's morally repugnant is the demagoguery that the advocates of the pirates will stoop to.
This fifteen year old is accused of illegally distributing music and faces a fine of up to 165,000,000 dollars.
How on earth did the myopic moderating morons give this an "insightful" ? There's a huge difference between "facing" a fine and actually paying it. It's intellectually dishonest to claim that a comparison between a fine one person "faced" should be compared to a fine that another was actually asked to pay.
I think there are probably a lot of people who share your views. I'm a.edu user, and we're migrating our university machines to debian. Next distro on my home machine will also be debian. I started using RH about the same time as you (RH4.1 up to 7.3... never upgraded to 8.0) and avoided Debian for similar reasons. But moved to debian for similar reasons. It's not just about the money, it's about their new release management policies.
Or something like that. If people only ever used operators for their namesake operations there wouldn't be a problem but how often have you seen
code where + is overloaded to do all sorts of different operations depending on the STATE of what gets passed to it, never mind
the actual types that get passed.
Yes, of course programmers can make bad choices. But forcing someone to provide a name instead of an operator does not prevent this -- the developer
could still choose a lousy function name if they wanted to. Disallowing operator overloading because someone might abuse it is like requiring all function names to contain 10 or more characters, because someone might choose an incomprehensible name.
If your music is of high enough quality, then people will pay you to make it.
Unless their access to the music is in some way tied to whether or not they pay, they have little incentive to do so. This is why any system that lets
the free riders sneak in the back door (as, unsurprisingly, nearly all systems advocated by slashbots do) will ultimately fail.
Except I don't think he is a professor. He's just some boneheaded IT manager. Of the faculty I know who are involved in software development, an overwhelming number of them are Linux fans and target Linux.
Free, yes. Easy? No way. I have tried excercising everyday for about 1/2 hour, and only lost about 5 pounds.
How long were you doing this for ? And at what burn rate ? you're not going to lose 5lb in one week. Sorry. On the other hand, 1lb a week is perfectly feasible, and if you keep that up for a year, you can lose a lot of weight. 40min/day at 750 cal/hr is enough to drop 1lb/week. If you're not doing 750cal/hr or close to it, you aren't
working hard enough.
Plus, jogging can be boring as hell,
Whine whine whine. Find something that you enjoy.
Running isn't that good for fatties anyway. Try a bicycle, an aerobics class or whatever suits you.
I just sucked it up and used the stationary bike.
As far as eating less, your body knows very well that your intake is less than it wants, and not only cranks up the cravings to high heaven, but also lowers your metabalism to compensate, negating the effects.
You need to drop calories very low for this to happen. The leading cause of this sort of thing is
diets that are overly restrictive. The trick is
to maintain a modest caloric deficit and focus on the long term.
And, diet food tastes like cardboard.
Ouch! Dieting has absolutely nothing to do with eating so-called "diet food". A lot of diet food is garbage. It's more important to reduce caloric intake. This can be done by eating more food that
is sparse in macronutrients and rich in dietary fibre, such as fruit and veggies. Fruit and veggies are the best "diet foods" out there.
You're saying that if I implemented a native compiler for (say) Python, then suddenly Python would only be suitable for experts, and productivity would plummet?
Well, no, for two reasons:
Because they would still have the option of using the interpreter and the IPython shell for rapid development/prototyping, without the compile cycle,
and
You can slap a compiler on the language, but it would still retain the characteristics enjoyed by most interpreted languages, the most important one being dynamic typing. Actually, everything is conveniently dynamic in a language like python -- you can
generate code at runtime and execute it, you can
define functions on the fly, etc.
You can talk about java being "primarily interpreted", and you're right in that it
has a virtual machine, you'd even be right to claim that it is more dynamic than C++, but it still doesn't have an interactive shell interpreter, it is a strongly typed language like C++, and it comes with a lot of the syntactic overhead that comes with a strongly typed language, and you need to go through the compilation
cycle, like you do with compiled languages.
I don't know a hell of a lot about C++, but from what I've seen, I hate it.
Then shut up until you do know something about it.
There are multiple books written which may as well all be titled "How not to shoot yourself in the foot with C++", more books of this type than I have seen for any other language.
C++ is a big language. There are a lot of books.
Perhaps you should read some of them.
And ever tried reading someone else's C++ code?
Yep.
The language makes so many things implicit that understading the code can be pretty challenging compared to understanding an equivalent C program
Especially if you don't know C++. Likewise, Chinese is worse than English because I can't read Chinese.
but when you're trying to _read_ the code, it makes for trouble
It is a mistake that even book authors like Steve Heller make (Link)
I thought Heller's "mistake" was defensible even if you don't agree with it. Heller's goal was to provide a string class that would be usable and not too confusing for beginners. I don't think there is any
perfect solution to the problem he was trying to solve.
What I don't buy is propaganda stating that C++ can be a productive tool for non-experts if only you avoid pointers and use the STL.
What propoganda ? Who is saying this ? I haven't heard AT&T saying this, or Bjarne, or anyone else.
You're fighting a straw man. If you want a productive tool for non-experts, forget C++, forget java, forget C, forget any compiled language. Non-experts will do much better with an
interpreted language, and even if it's 200 times as slow, it will be worth it for the programmer time it saves.
Abandoning C++ for C? On which planet?
On planet gnu, as far as I recall the gnu coding
standards recommends any project be written in C
The word abandoning implies they're moving away from C++. My argument would be that they never moved towards it. In fact, with the rise of the KDE project, if anything, C++ has become more popular with free software authors over the last 10 years.
I bought Stroustrup's book years ago (printed in 1993), so it doesn't cover latest language features. Am I supposed to by his book each time C++ standard advances ?
The ARM was not the standard, and is not. That book was published before the standard became available.
The PDF of the spec is available for
As for "every time the standard advances"... it has only "advanced" once -- in 1998 when the first standard came out. I think there will probably be a new standard within 10 years of 1998, and you
will probably have to spend a whopping $20 or so on that too.
So in some sense I'm an OOP programmer. But in another sense I'm not. I'm not writing my code this way because I want to work with objects - I do it because this is the only way I know to treat a polymorphic function as a first class object in C++. Really I'm a functional programmer forced to use C++. It seems to me that many of Bjarne's remarks are way off the mark for programmers like me. We have to define classes for every damn little thing!
The class does have an invariant: the member datum
a remains constant throughout the object lifetime. On the other hand, if a could be changed arbitrarily, you may as well make it a struct, and indeed, a lot of the small classes used in functional programming idioms don't have invariants, and hence you can implement them as structs, not classes. Also, this sort of class is a good example of a "free standing class" -- that is, you're probably not going to derive anything from it. I think your example is not only consistent with what he's talking about, but the more generic style of programming is a direction that is widely recognised in the C++ community as being appropriate/valid.
Now downloading and making-available-for-distribution would not be a crime, and catching the guilty one would be a problem of finding out who first altered the copyright notice....?
This would only work if you could convince a judge or jury that you really believed the copyright notice was genuine. A long shot argument, especially if this were a widespread problem.
Slashdot Mirror
In that case, the party "borrowing" it presumably did so without your permission. It's certainly possible to construct legislation that controls such obvious moral loopholes (of the nature that the typical slashdotter is always looking for ... ;-) The effect of such a scenario is that your friend is liable if they take the item without your permission, and you are liable if you grant them permission in a way that violated your terms and conditions.
What if the court ruled the contract null and void? The recipient still has the creative work...
Yep. The onus would be upon the licensor to write contracts carefully, so that the contract is not rejected in its entirety like this. But this is already an issue that has been addressed in both writing contracts and more to the point, in writing EULAs.
Convenient. Low risk of getting caught.
Well there you go making the levy on the CD argument (that I disagree with by the way). Maybe not all blank CDs are used to rip off artists.
What's worse, downloading the CD or shoplifting it from the store?
Shoplifting. Because you're more likely to get caught.
No, because the government implicitly signed it for you (copyright).
What I'm arguing is that the right to limit distribution of creative works is natural and follows from the right to form contracts. Hence it is wrong to say that you have the right to arbitrarily "share" "information". You have no such right, and the author has every right to limit distribution.
But you only obtained the material because someone else breached the contract. If you are knowingly a party to such a breach of contract, you are a co-conspirator in this violation of the authors rights (to make the material available conditionally).
In other words, I simply don't buy the "leaked copyright" argument. In fact I think there are already examples where you can or can't be protected from leaks. For example this is already an issue with trade secrets / NDAs. If someone leaks an NDA to a third party, it seems reasonable that the author should be able to seek an injunction to prevent the third party publicising the material (even though the third party didn't sign the NDA)
It gives them a right to only make their work available to you conditionally. You do not have a natural right to receive the work. They may choose not to release it to you. If they do make their work to you under certain terms and conditions, they have a right to expect that those terms and conditions be honored. When those terms and conditions are not honored, they have a "natural" right to seek compensation for any damage that may have resulted from this dishonest conduct.
how have I in any way a relationship (contractual or otherwise) with Britney Spears?
You could be the recipient of material that is made available to you conditionally.
And the fact that you later bring up shrink-wrap licensing wraps up this insane line of reasoning nicely. Shrink-wrap licensing is a myth! It's a non-binding one-way contract
Not sure what you mean. In the example we're discussing, there's no reason that the terms of agreement couldn't be made available up-front.
You might think so, but however you try to slice it, the fact remains that Metallica were enthusiastic supporters of bootlegging. The Napster scene was never about bootlegging (something that dedicated fans did), it was always about justifying getting something for nothing.
But it's making available stuff that people would mostly either [a] buy anyway, or [b] not pay for at all.
I don't agree with [b]. I think if people were forced to choose between not having the music to listen to, and paying up, they'd pay up. The rhetoric one hears from the pirates is that they are forced to pirate, as though going without is not an option. If going without is indeed as painful as they make it out to be, then parting with some cash would no doubt be less painful (even for someone as cheap as the typical slashdotter)
P2P is not "wholesale piracy".
Certain implementaitons of it (like Napster) are. Napster was a high profile commercial operation, whose main claim to fame was illegitimate distribution of copyrighted works, much like a piracy operation.
Creative works are not ideas. Patents are the closest thing to controlling ideas that are legally recognised.
There IS a natural right to make binding contractual agreements, hence it follows that there is also the right to license software/music under a contractual model.
Contracts are a natural right, and I happen to believe that even without the copyright system, contracts and shrink-wrap licensing could serve almost exactly the same purpose (indeed, copyright has largely been superceded by licensing as far as software is concerned)
Nonsense. Metallica supported bootlegging. They didn't support the sort of wholesale piracy and screwing musicians that is lauded by slashdot pond-scum
This is simply not correct, as I've explained.
If you value the people so much, may I suggest that you ask that your paychecks be deposited directly to some sort of 9/11 fund ? How much money have you given to 9/11 victims ?
No we haven't. Intentionally killing someone is not just a civil offense. You can't buy your way out of it. As far as the law is concerned, there is no amount of money is legally considered to make right the wrong of a life lost. The 9/11 compensation is not supposed to undo the harm of the life lost. No fund can do that. It is merely supposed to address financial hardships that arise from the crisis.
The fact that our laws place a much higher value on these pirated songs is morally repugnant.
What's morally repugnant is the demagoguery that the advocates of the pirates will stoop to.
How on earth did the myopic moderating morons give this an "insightful" ? There's a huge difference between "facing" a fine and actually paying it. It's intellectually dishonest to claim that a comparison between a fine one person "faced" should be compared to a fine that another was actually asked to pay.
Yes, of course programmers can make bad choices. But forcing someone to provide a name instead of an operator does not prevent this -- the developer could still choose a lousy function name if they wanted to. Disallowing operator overloading because someone might abuse it is like requiring all function names to contain 10 or more characters, because someone might choose an incomprehensible name.
Unless their access to the music is in some way tied to whether or not they pay, they have little incentive to do so. This is why any system that lets the free riders sneak in the back door (as, unsurprisingly, nearly all systems advocated by slashbots do) will ultimately fail.
Except I don't think he is a professor. He's just some boneheaded IT manager. Of the faculty I know who are involved in software development, an overwhelming number of them are Linux fans and target Linux.
How long were you doing this for ? And at what burn rate ? you're not going to lose 5lb in one week. Sorry. On the other hand, 1lb a week is perfectly feasible, and if you keep that up for a year, you can lose a lot of weight. 40min/day at 750 cal/hr is enough to drop 1lb/week. If you're not doing 750cal/hr or close to it, you aren't working hard enough.
Plus, jogging can be boring as hell,
Whine whine whine. Find something that you enjoy. Running isn't that good for fatties anyway. Try a bicycle, an aerobics class or whatever suits you. I just sucked it up and used the stationary bike.
As far as eating less, your body knows very well that your intake is less than it wants, and not only cranks up the cravings to high heaven, but also lowers your metabalism to compensate, negating the effects.
You need to drop calories very low for this to happen. The leading cause of this sort of thing is diets that are overly restrictive. The trick is to maintain a modest caloric deficit and focus on the long term.
And, diet food tastes like cardboard.
Ouch! Dieting has absolutely nothing to do with eating so-called "diet food". A lot of diet food is garbage. It's more important to reduce caloric intake. This can be done by eating more food that is sparse in macronutrients and rich in dietary fibre, such as fruit and veggies. Fruit and veggies are the best "diet foods" out there.
Well, no, for two reasons:
You can talk about java being "primarily interpreted", and you're right in that it has a virtual machine, you'd even be right to claim that it is more dynamic than C++, but it still doesn't have an interactive shell interpreter, it is a strongly typed language like C++, and it comes with a lot of the syntactic overhead that comes with a strongly typed language, and you need to go through the compilation cycle, like you do with compiled languages.
Then shut up until you do know something about it.
There are multiple books written which may as well all be titled "How not to shoot yourself in the foot with C++", more books of this type than I have seen for any other language.
C++ is a big language. There are a lot of books. Perhaps you should read some of them.
And ever tried reading someone else's C++ code?
Yep.
The language makes so many things implicit that understading the code can be pretty challenging compared to understanding an equivalent C program
Especially if you don't know C++. Likewise, Chinese is worse than English because I can't read Chinese.
but when you're trying to _read_ the code, it makes for trouble
Only if you don't understand the language.
Just my experience,
Which, by your own admission, is minimal.
I thought Heller's "mistake" was defensible even if you don't agree with it. Heller's goal was to provide a string class that would be usable and not too confusing for beginners. I don't think there is any perfect solution to the problem he was trying to solve.
What propoganda ? Who is saying this ? I haven't heard AT&T saying this, or Bjarne, or anyone else. You're fighting a straw man. If you want a productive tool for non-experts, forget C++, forget java, forget C, forget any compiled language. Non-experts will do much better with an interpreted language, and even if it's 200 times as slow, it will be worth it for the programmer time it saves.
On planet gnu, as far as I recall the gnu coding standards recommends any project be written in C
The word abandoning implies they're moving away from C++. My argument would be that they never moved towards it. In fact, with the rise of the KDE project, if anything, C++ has become more popular with free software authors over the last 10 years.
The ARM was not the standard, and is not. That book was published before the standard became available.
The PDF of the spec is available for As for "every time the standard advances" ... it has only "advanced" once -- in 1998 when the first standard came out. I think there will probably be a new standard within 10 years of 1998, and you
will probably have to spend a whopping $20 or so on that too.
The class does have an invariant: the member datum a remains constant throughout the object lifetime. On the other hand, if a could be changed arbitrarily, you may as well make it a struct, and indeed, a lot of the small classes used in functional programming idioms don't have invariants, and hence you can implement them as structs, not classes. Also, this sort of class is a good example of a "free standing class" -- that is, you're probably not going to derive anything from it. I think your example is not only consistent with what he's talking about, but the more generic style of programming is a direction that is widely recognised in the C++ community as being appropriate/valid.
This would only work if you could convince a judge or jury that you really believed the copyright notice was genuine. A long shot argument, especially if this were a widespread problem.