Copyright reduces the standard of living in a very simple way: It prevents everyone from having every piece of art they desire.
Coopyright itself doesn't, just the current implimentation. If noncommercial distribution was legal, you could still get the art if someone who had it was willing to give you a copy. IMO copyright should only cover commercial copying.
The only ones who are against fil sharing are the corporates. Almost all independant artists and many non-independants are all for file sharing, they realize that file sharing gets their work out there and actually earns them money.
It also hurts our economy.
The other responses to this answer it well, I believe.
I'm guessing you're an Apple guy, MS products do look butt-ugly next to Apple products, but they're better looking than Linux. But how it looks doesn't really matter to me, I want it to do what I want it to do without my jumping through hoops. Rather, the OS should jump through hoops for me, and Linux fills the bill.
I'd probably have a Mac if they weren't so expensive, but since they are, a PC running Linux works for me.
too bad the BAC of people who do cause accidents shows you to be full of it.
[citation needed]
why don't you just man up and admit that you feel that you are entitled to get drunk and put everyone elses lives at risk for no other reason than your own self-serving importance.
I never drink farther than walking distance from home. There are five bars I can walk to, why would I want to drive?
People need Word in the same way other people need Emacs or Vim. It is their preferred tool for the job.
Then it's not a matter of "need" at all. If one is willing to give up all of the advantages Linux has over Windows so they can run a particular word processor (which IMO isn't very smart; a word processor is a word processor and there's not much difference between any of them), more power to them.
Honestly, do you really like that? That is somehow a sore point for me because I used to love Amarok, until version 1.3
It never mattered one way or another until people saw it and said "wow, cool". It's actually a (very minor) selling point for Linux.
What about goverment paid them from tax-payers money?
Then you'll have talented people who can't get paid for their work at all, while government insiders' talentless cronies get big chunks of taxpayer cash. It's unworkable.
Rather, simply reduce the term back to a reasonable time frame, maybe 20 years, and make any noncommercial use non-infringing. That would legalize file sharing while preventing commercial publishers from exploiting artists.
The concept of copyright isn't what's wrong, it's the current implimentation.
I once read of a turing test that had two humans, one the judge, one a control at a terminal, and the AI computer. The judge was to decide which was himan and which was computer. The judge just sat there and didn't do anything. Before long, one of the terminals printed "is anybody there?" The judge laughed, pointed, and said "that's the human!"
MY proposal is that we treat them the same way we do other creative types: Programmers, engineers. Give the authors an hourly wage upfront.
That's how it works already, at least with music. Phonorecords are "works for hire" under US copyright law. The only way to retain your copyright is to self-publish.
How many programmers would MS hire if computer manufacturers could just slap Windows and Office on a computer without paying MS? Those programs, just like music, are covered under copyright. Engineering solutions are often if not usually covered by patents -- again, held by big corporations.
The problems with copyright are a) they last WAY too damned long and b) noncommercial copying is deemed infringing. Fix these two glaring obscenities and copyright would work just fine.
Remember that there was no copyright when Beethoven or Bach did their work.
There were also no ways of recording music. They were paid by rich people to write music, and only the rich got to hear it. Having only the rich have access to art is good for society??
Shakespeare had no protection. Let me ask you, would we all be better off with Shakespeares works locked firmly behind copyright?
Yes, even with today's rediculous copyright lengths, his work woud still be in the public domain. With reasonable copyright lengths, how could copyright hinder society?
Wiping out copyright isn't the answer, reforming it so that only commercial copying is infringing, and bring it back to no more than 20 years.
Vastly expanding the National endowment for the arts. Lets trying getting the funds directly to the artists, get the money grubbing middlemen out of the picture.
You'd replace one set of middlemen with another. The internet has made gatekeepers obsolete, and you would go back to that?
Did you even fucking READ the comment he was responding to? The GGP said he thought anyone with any amount of alcohol in his system whatever should not drive, and that's just plain retarded. In most places the limit is.08, and.08 is NOT drunk. At.08 a person is NOT going to "crash through your front door, or hits your parked car, or runs into your kid on the side walk, or hits an electrical box in front of your house."
In the context that your comment is in, I have no idea how you got modded to 5. Must be a lot of MADD members with mod points today...
Want to know why drunk driving is so endemic in the United States? most bars in the US are in towns and suburbs where they are not served by public transit, AND, the are required to have parking spots for all their customers.
Then explain Springfield, IL. You can't throw a beer bottle in this town without hitting a bar with it; there are at least five within staggering distance from my house. Yet folks here still get plastered and drive.
I notice almost none of ye suggested an alternate method for authors to get paid for their books, songs, movies. MY proposal is that we treat them the same way we do other creative types: Programmers, engineers. Give the authors an hourly wage upfront.
Who's going to pay them the wage, and without the author having a copyright, why would a publisher pay them the wage, and once the first publisher published, what would keep all the other publishers from also publishing that work?
Programmers' work is protected by copyright and sometimes patents, engineers' work is protected by patents, or there would be very little programming or engineering done.
Copyright itself isn't a bad idea, but its current implimentation is. For one thing, the length. There's no reason whatever for Jimi Hendrix music to not be in the public domain -- he's dead, and there's no way to entice him to make any more music. Twenty years isn't unreasonable.
Having such a concept as noncommercial infringement is also a bad idea. Emailing you a copy of a movie should not be illegal and nobody should be able to sue me for it, but if I charge you for a copy of the movie someone else made, you've given me the money that they should have gotten.
Copyright is bad for society. It hurts our economy. It hurts our standard of living
You make those statements as if they were self-evident; they're not. You're going to have to explain how it hurts our economy and standard of living.
...and unjustly puts large amounts of money into the pockets of middlemen who are barely more than thieves themselves.
Copyright law doesn't put money in the hands of middlemen, private contracts do. These days, most artists need no middlemen, unlike pre-computer.internet times when publishers actually were good for society -- there would be no books or recorded music if there were no publishers, but that's changed.
Artists don't need monetary incentive to create great works, they need food and shelter and the tools of the trade.
If I didn't have to work for a living, my book would have been in hardcover years ago. If I had a publisher who gave advances, I'd have a lot more time to write and get the cover art finished.
Shakespeare didn't create his great works because he was trying to become rich and famous, he did it because he loved his work.
And people paid him to write those plays.
Van Gogh was a lunatic.
Yes, he was, but his total inability to sell any of his paintings caused him to commit suicide at a fairly young age. He didn't paint for the sake of painting and the love of art, he painted to sell paintings, but nobody was buying.
There is a vast and varied pool of independent artists, some of whom are as talented as today's top artists. The only reason you don't know who they are is because those very same middlemen spend most of the artists money to advertise the few works they choose, and ignore the rest.
That's because the rest aren't their clients.
Look, say my book became viral. Publishers would be beating down my door trying to get me to sign a contract so they could publish it, and I would profit from it, and have a lot more incentive to write another one. But if there were no copyright, they'd just make tons of money on it and I wouldn't get a dime -- the middlemen you hate would get everything, I would get nothing. This is your idea of fair?
I give my book away for free, and encourage everyone else to do the same, but I'd be pissed if you benefitted financially from my work while I got nothing.
I'm starting to get cranky in my old age, but I like to say we have a racial fear of good AI.
I'm no spring chicken myslef, but it isn't good AI that I fear, it's idiots actually believing a computer can think. By the time my daughter gets to my age, there may be a law giving machines rights. Which would be insanely stupid, since bot-style AI isn't intelligence; the only intelligence is the programmer's. There are a lot of facts in the Encyclopedia Britannica, but nobody would argue that a book is intelligent, just the book's authors. People somehow anthropomorphise computers, making wikipedia sentient in their minds.
I don't fear AI, I fear what the fools and idiots who don't understand computers (many, many here at slashdot who've read way too much SF) and think a machine will ever be sentient.
If we do create a sentient machine, it wil be chemical, not electronic. Logic gates are nothing like neurons and synapses.
Lying isn't in and of itself bad. Like everything else, context matters. If you claim that Joe is a drug dealer and he's not, he can sue you and he would be right in doing so; you have harmed him. You have done wrong.
If grandma asks "did you steal that cookie?" and you lie and say "no" that's also wrong.
But if your wife asks "is my ass too big," woe to both of you if you answer truthfully. If your daughter asks "how do you like the picture I drew, daddy?" and you truthfully answer "sorry, honey, it's pretty bad" you have done harm to a child, which makes that truth far worse than most lies.
Even the Muslim/Jewish/Christian bible doesn't say "do not lie," it says "do not slander" (thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.)
Pretty sure the article was auto-generated by a buzzwordifier
I see you've never read a real research paper. You're likely to see the word "enumerate" fifteen times in a single paragraph without once seeing the word "count".
It looks more to me like he cut and pasted from the paper.
The comment right above yours explains it. Stop trying for fisrt post and actually do a little reading and you might actually learn something.
Unfortunately, none of them were so blatantly named after Linux as the one in this story.
*sigh*... you kids hate reading, don't you? It's not named after Linux, it's named for the ancient Chinese god Pan Gu, the creator of the world through the separation of yin (earth) from yang (sky). And it doesn't even sound like "penguin", do you have dyslexia or something?
I know some folks think it's against the rules, but next time read the fucking article and stop wasting our time with worthless comments.
You don't come here often, do you, AC? When I was 8 I had a larger vocabulary than most adults, and I'd guess most slashdotters were in similar situations.
Granted that the clause in question has been abused many times, but in this case it fits. The movie is made in California for showing in every state in the union. That makes it interstate commerce. Your grocery store sells goods from all over the country (and workd). That automatically makes it interstate commmerce. Barbershop? Do you have a tourist industry in your state? Then it's interstate commerce.
For example Congress has zero authority to force me to replace the stairs into my office with a ramp (only the Maryland legislature can do that).
That depends. Do you sell your wares or services to people outside your state, or buy your supplies from an out of state supplier? If so, they can make you put a ramp in.
Now, using the commerce clause to outlaw pot, that's a REAL stretch. I mean, how can they consider growing a plant in your back yard for your own personal consumption in any way "commerce", let alone interstate commerce?
You just did, thank you for saving me from yet another useless slide show. An even better way to downmod an article is in the firehose before it gets posted.
No, but watching stereoscopic movies can cause headaches caused by eyestrain. Stereoscopic vision isn't the brain's only clue to depth. The eye's focus is another way the eye tells the brain how far away something is. So with a "3D" movie, focus tells the brain that the object on the TV is eight feet away, while stereoscopy tells the brain that the object is two feet away. So your fucusing muscles are fighting your paralell movement muscles, which is what causes the headaches.
You don't have that problem with real 3-D (normal world) or even holograms.
Then why are 90% of crimes unsolved? No, most criminals who get caught are dumb. Look how long Madoff got away with his multibillion dollar Ponzi scheme.
They're definitely better and cheaper than carrying around a backpack full of books.
So is a notebook, and will read ebooks just fine. The one I have is about the size of a single textbook and weighs a lot less than one. Plus, it will do a lot more than just display text.
I agree companies take things a bit too far at times but like a wise man once said "It's a crime to let a sucker hang on to his money." I feel no worse for people being "exploited" by these companies than I do the banks that gambled on them.
A wise man? No, that's only the wisdom of a theif. I'll bet you were rooting for Madoff when he was on trial.
You know who says "It's a crime to let a sucker hang on to his money"? Con artists. I only hope that you'll be suckered by one, you'll change your tune when you are. Theivery is theivery whether or not the theivery is legal.
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright reduces the standard of living in a very simple way: It prevents everyone from having every piece of art they desire.
Coopyright itself doesn't, just the current implimentation. If noncommercial distribution was legal, you could still get the art if someone who had it was willing to give you a copy. IMO copyright should only cover commercial copying.
The only ones who are against fil sharing are the corporates. Almost all independant artists and many non-independants are all for file sharing, they realize that file sharing gets their work out there and actually earns them money.
It also hurts our economy.
The other responses to this answer it well, I believe.
I'm guessing you're an Apple guy, MS products do look butt-ugly next to Apple products, but they're better looking than Linux. But how it looks doesn't really matter to me, I want it to do what I want it to do without my jumping through hoops. Rather, the OS should jump through hoops for me, and Linux fills the bill.
I'd probably have a Mac if they weren't so expensive, but since they are, a PC running Linux works for me.
too bad the BAC of people who do cause accidents shows you to be full of it.
[citation needed]
why don't you just man up and admit that you feel that you are entitled to get drunk and put everyone elses lives at risk for no other reason than your own self-serving importance.
I never drink farther than walking distance from home. There are five bars I can walk to, why would I want to drive?
People need Word in the same way other people need Emacs or Vim. It is their preferred tool for the job.
Then it's not a matter of "need" at all. If one is willing to give up all of the advantages Linux has over Windows so they can run a particular word processor (which IMO isn't very smart; a word processor is a word processor and there's not much difference between any of them), more power to them.
Honestly, do you really like that? That is somehow a sore point for me because I used to love Amarok, until version 1.3
It never mattered one way or another until people saw it and said "wow, cool". It's actually a (very minor) selling point for Linux.
What about goverment paid them from tax-payers money?
Then you'll have talented people who can't get paid for their work at all, while government insiders' talentless cronies get big chunks of taxpayer cash. It's unworkable.
Rather, simply reduce the term back to a reasonable time frame, maybe 20 years, and make any noncommercial use non-infringing. That would legalize file sharing while preventing commercial publishers from exploiting artists.
The concept of copyright isn't what's wrong, it's the current implimentation.
I once read of a turing test that had two humans, one the judge, one a control at a terminal, and the AI computer. The judge was to decide which was himan and which was computer. The judge just sat there and didn't do anything. Before long, one of the terminals printed "is anybody there?" The judge laughed, pointed, and said "that's the human!"
I'll start drilling your mom...
Hi, Eugene!
MY proposal is that we treat them the same way we do other creative types: Programmers, engineers. Give the authors an hourly wage upfront.
That's how it works already, at least with music. Phonorecords are "works for hire" under US copyright law. The only way to retain your copyright is to self-publish.
How many programmers would MS hire if computer manufacturers could just slap Windows and Office on a computer without paying MS? Those programs, just like music, are covered under copyright. Engineering solutions are often if not usually covered by patents -- again, held by big corporations.
The problems with copyright are a) they last WAY too damned long and b) noncommercial copying is deemed infringing. Fix these two glaring obscenities and copyright would work just fine.
Remember that there was no copyright when Beethoven or Bach did their work.
There were also no ways of recording music. They were paid by rich people to write music, and only the rich got to hear it. Having only the rich have access to art is good for society??
Shakespeare had no protection. Let me ask you, would we all be better off with Shakespeares works locked firmly behind copyright?
Yes, even with today's rediculous copyright lengths, his work woud still be in the public domain. With reasonable copyright lengths, how could copyright hinder society?
Wiping out copyright isn't the answer, reforming it so that only commercial copying is infringing, and bring it back to no more than 20 years.
Vastly expanding the National endowment for the arts. Lets trying getting the funds directly to the artists, get the money grubbing middlemen out of the picture.
You'd replace one set of middlemen with another. The internet has made gatekeepers obsolete, and you would go back to that?
Did you even fucking READ the comment he was responding to? The GGP said he thought anyone with any amount of alcohol in his system whatever should not drive, and that's just plain retarded. In most places the limit is .08, and .08 is NOT drunk. At .08 a person is NOT going to "crash through your front door, or hits your parked car, or runs into your kid on the side walk, or hits an electrical box in front of your house."
In the context that your comment is in, I have no idea how you got modded to 5. Must be a lot of MADD members with mod points today...
Want to know why drunk driving is so endemic in the United States? most bars in the US are in towns and suburbs where they are not served by public transit, AND, the are required to have parking spots for all their customers.
Then explain Springfield, IL. You can't throw a beer bottle in this town without hitting a bar with it; there are at least five within staggering distance from my house. Yet folks here still get plastered and drive.
I notice almost none of ye suggested an alternate method for authors to get paid for their books, songs, movies. MY proposal is that we treat them the same way we do other creative types: Programmers, engineers. Give the authors an hourly wage upfront.
Who's going to pay them the wage, and without the author having a copyright, why would a publisher pay them the wage, and once the first publisher published, what would keep all the other publishers from also publishing that work?
Programmers' work is protected by copyright and sometimes patents, engineers' work is protected by patents, or there would be very little programming or engineering done.
Copyright itself isn't a bad idea, but its current implimentation is. For one thing, the length. There's no reason whatever for Jimi Hendrix music to not be in the public domain -- he's dead, and there's no way to entice him to make any more music. Twenty years isn't unreasonable.
Having such a concept as noncommercial infringement is also a bad idea. Emailing you a copy of a movie should not be illegal and nobody should be able to sue me for it, but if I charge you for a copy of the movie someone else made, you've given me the money that they should have gotten.
Copyright is bad for society. It hurts our economy. It hurts our standard of living
You make those statements as if they were self-evident; they're not. You're going to have to explain how it hurts our economy and standard of living.
Copyright law doesn't put money in the hands of middlemen, private contracts do. These days, most artists need no middlemen, unlike pre-computer.internet times when publishers actually were good for society -- there would be no books or recorded music if there were no publishers, but that's changed.
Artists don't need monetary incentive to create great works, they need food and shelter and the tools of the trade.
If I didn't have to work for a living, my book would have been in hardcover years ago. If I had a publisher who gave advances, I'd have a lot more time to write and get the cover art finished.
Shakespeare didn't create his great works because he was trying to become rich and famous, he did it because he loved his work.
And people paid him to write those plays.
Van Gogh was a lunatic.
Yes, he was, but his total inability to sell any of his paintings caused him to commit suicide at a fairly young age. He didn't paint for the sake of painting and the love of art, he painted to sell paintings, but nobody was buying.
There is a vast and varied pool of independent artists, some of whom are as talented as today's top artists. The only reason you don't know who they are is because those very same middlemen spend most of the artists money to advertise the few works they choose, and ignore the rest.
That's because the rest aren't their clients.
Look, say my book became viral. Publishers would be beating down my door trying to get me to sign a contract so they could publish it, and I would profit from it, and have a lot more incentive to write another one. But if there were no copyright, they'd just make tons of money on it and I wouldn't get a dime -- the middlemen you hate would get everything, I would get nothing. This is your idea of fair?
I give my book away for free, and encourage everyone else to do the same, but I'd be pissed if you benefitted financially from my work while I got nothing.
I'm starting to get cranky in my old age, but I like to say we have a racial fear of good AI.
I'm no spring chicken myslef, but it isn't good AI that I fear, it's idiots actually believing a computer can think. By the time my daughter gets to my age, there may be a law giving machines rights. Which would be insanely stupid, since bot-style AI isn't intelligence; the only intelligence is the programmer's. There are a lot of facts in the Encyclopedia Britannica, but nobody would argue that a book is intelligent, just the book's authors. People somehow anthropomorphise computers, making wikipedia sentient in their minds.
I don't fear AI, I fear what the fools and idiots who don't understand computers (many, many here at slashdot who've read way too much SF) and think a machine will ever be sentient.
If we do create a sentient machine, it wil be chemical, not electronic. Logic gates are nothing like neurons and synapses.
Lying isn't in and of itself bad. Like everything else, context matters. If you claim that Joe is a drug dealer and he's not, he can sue you and he would be right in doing so; you have harmed him. You have done wrong.
If grandma asks "did you steal that cookie?" and you lie and say "no" that's also wrong.
But if your wife asks "is my ass too big," woe to both of you if you answer truthfully. If your daughter asks "how do you like the picture I drew, daddy?" and you truthfully answer "sorry, honey, it's pretty bad" you have done harm to a child, which makes that truth far worse than most lies.
Even the Muslim/Jewish/Christian bible doesn't say "do not lie," it says "do not slander" (thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.)
Pretty sure the article was auto-generated by a buzzwordifier
I see you've never read a real research paper. You're likely to see the word "enumerate" fifteen times in a single paragraph without once seeing the word "count".
It looks more to me like he cut and pasted from the paper.
They're for aliterates and illiterates, but the ones pushing for them are the people running the sites geting all the ad revenue.
How could they possibly know that?
The comment right above yours explains it. Stop trying for fisrt post and actually do a little reading and you might actually learn something.
Unfortunately, none of them were so blatantly named after Linux as the one in this story.
*sigh*... you kids hate reading, don't you? It's not named after Linux, it's named for the ancient Chinese god Pan Gu, the creator of the world through the separation of yin (earth) from yang (sky). And it doesn't even sound like "penguin", do you have dyslexia or something?
I know some folks think it's against the rules, but next time read the fucking article and stop wasting our time with worthless comments.
You don't come here often, do you, AC? When I was 8 I had a larger vocabulary than most adults, and I'd guess most slashdotters were in similar situations.
It says AMONG the states. Not inside a state.
Granted that the clause in question has been abused many times, but in this case it fits. The movie is made in California for showing in every state in the union. That makes it interstate commerce. Your grocery store sells goods from all over the country (and workd). That automatically makes it interstate commmerce. Barbershop? Do you have a tourist industry in your state? Then it's interstate commerce.
For example Congress has zero authority to force me to replace the stairs into my office with a ramp (only the Maryland legislature can do that).
That depends. Do you sell your wares or services to people outside your state, or buy your supplies from an out of state supplier? If so, they can make you put a ramp in.
Now, using the commerce clause to outlaw pot, that's a REAL stretch. I mean, how can they consider growing a plant in your back yard for your own personal consumption in any way "commerce", let alone interstate commerce?
How do I mod article -1?
You just did, thank you for saving me from yet another useless slide show. An even better way to downmod an article is in the firehose before it gets posted.
seeing depth can bring on migraines?
No, but watching stereoscopic movies can cause headaches caused by eyestrain. Stereoscopic vision isn't the brain's only clue to depth. The eye's focus is another way the eye tells the brain how far away something is. So with a "3D" movie, focus tells the brain that the object on the TV is eight feet away, while stereoscopy tells the brain that the object is two feet away. So your fucusing muscles are fighting your paralell movement muscles, which is what causes the headaches.
You don't have that problem with real 3-D (normal world) or even holograms.
most criminals are dumb.
Then why are 90% of crimes unsolved? No, most criminals who get caught are dumb. Look how long Madoff got away with his multibillion dollar Ponzi scheme.
They're not dumb, they just have no morals.
They're definitely better and cheaper than carrying around a backpack full of books.
So is a notebook, and will read ebooks just fine. The one I have is about the size of a single textbook and weighs a lot less than one. Plus, it will do a lot more than just display text.
I agree companies take things a bit too far at times but like a wise man once said "It's a crime to let a sucker hang on to his money." I feel no worse for people being "exploited" by these companies than I do the banks that gambled on them.
A wise man? No, that's only the wisdom of a theif. I'll bet you were rooting for Madoff when he was on trial.
You know who says "It's a crime to let a sucker hang on to his money"? Con artists. I only hope that you'll be suckered by one, you'll change your tune when you are. Theivery is theivery whether or not the theivery is legal.