You made the claim that Pepsi and Coca Cola have undisputed property rights over their recipes. I never limited it to recipes. A trade secret, furthermore, is a property right. So are patents, non-disclosure agreements, copyrights, trademarks, service marks, and whatever other creative ways the two companies may use to protect their product.
You are free to extract the recipe from their product if you have the right equipment. That's the way it should be. Agreed, but what does that have to do with anything? You've wandered off the reservation.
Again, I strongly opposed making a food analogy. The fact that you are fixated on it simply goes to show an attempt to derail the substance. The issue at hand isn't about recipes. The argument stands on the grounds of the current issue. These asshats DO have undisputed property rights and they ARE entitled to exclude them.
You ask "where a recipe has been enforced as intellectual property" but in the very same post, you admit protection by trade secret--i.e. intellectual property. There are also confidentiality agreements, patents, trademarks, service marks, and yes, even copyrights to the product "Pepsi" (or Coke, or RC).
What is it exactly that you need me to provide a case to support? What conclusion are you hoping to draw by harping on protection of a recipe, which is immaterial both to the structure of the law and to the relevant facts of the current discussion?
To wit, you've admitted that I'm correct with the condition of recognized rights. Because these people (the labels) do hold undisputed property rights, according to even your rubric, the argument stands and there's nothing to gain by chasing your detours.
Mirage *is* a derivative work and a new version of the work! It is tantamount to selling prints of a painting--it's a new version of the same work. A derivative work must be a new version of the work, and that case further demonstrates that requirement.
Don't confuse fair use with derivative works -- they're not mutually exclusive. No one said otherwise.
Factor 1: the use was commercial, for entertainment purposes, and not particularly transformative. This factor presupposes an infringing use. Use of commentary for commercial or entertainment purposes does not negate a fair use defense. You've also left out the core factors:
Factor 5: The work was referenced in a context of discussion and commentary. Factor 6: The commercial value of Viacom's work is in the criticism, mockery, and discussion of the work, not in the broadcast of the work itself. (In fact, it arguably increased the commercial value of the referenced work--which is part of why commentary and criticism are protected by the law). Factor 7: The "entire work" is brief. Limiting quotations is generally held to be a more relevant factor on works of length--a television commercial spot, for example, does not have to be reduced to a 3-second clip to comply with fair use, particularly since the amount of work is not the dominant factor in criticism and commentary defenses.
If only wishing made it so. Every court I've been to begs to differ, as do the facts and the laws pertinent to the issue. Your lack of substance shows you know it.
You can't make a compilation from a single work. You can't make a derivative work by making what is clearly commentary and criticism of the work simply because it includes a clip of the work. A derivative work has to be a new version of the work. These TV people have not integrated their work into the video. Copyright law does not say that the author is the only person allowed to talk about their work.
The use of the clip is prima facie infringement, but only because it's been reproduced and not because it's derivative. There is no interaction between the work and the commentary. A news story is not a derivative work.
I agree that Viacom's use is a fair use question -- I just answer that question in the negative. What does that even mean? This contradicts what you've just said. Viacom has a valid fair use defense to their use of the original clip. The poster has a much weaker case for posting the Viacom clip in conjunction with his blog, and no case for putting it on YouTube. If he hosted the clip on his own server, things would be a bit different.
It's not a derivative work. They've not replaced faces with dead celebrities or anything. It's commentary and humorous mockery of a work. That's like saying a news clip with a video is a derivative work of the video displayed. No court has ever said that, grasshopper.
This is actually a fair use issue. Real Fair Use, not "personal copying is fair use" (which it's not--it's noninfringing use, but far be it for Slashdot to be able to make the distinction). You want it for yourselves but want to take it away from Viacom because they're an asshole corporation. It doesn't work like that. 17 USC 107.
Except that myself and other "misinformed" people include every court on the face of the earth and everyone who's ever been to law school and paid attention.
It's funny that you chose this example, because recipes are an example of something that doesn't have copyright protection and a perfect example of what happens when you don't give companies a monopoly over an idea... you get competition. The issue isn't copyright protection specifically--that's why I urged the parent not to go down that road with the milk example. It's funny that you didn't raise the same objection with someone who's making a point you agree with. Funny, but unsurprising.
PepsiCo and Coca-Cola DO have "monopolies" over their formulae, methods, and recipes. Competition among colas is a result. If you'd exercised your brain, you'd see that I even specifically said you were free to magically reproduce and distribute cola. You're free to design and build a car and magically give away copies of that, too. You don't own property rights to the specific product. The person who owns the copy or iteration you "magically copied" doesn't have property rights against you, unless you took that copy from him without permission. The person who owns the product has undisputed property rights under the law.
If it was found that RC has similar ingredients, it wouldn't be a copy, now would it? The same can be said for music. Mandy Moore can't be upset because you illegally downloaded a Jessica Simpson song. I sure as hell couldn't tell the difference. You don't own the song on the CD you've bought. You don't. No authority has ever said that you do. The owner reserves all property rights not conveyed. This is a fundamental element of law.
You and a few other misinformed people are the only ones who don't seem to know that.
It's stealing. You are taking something you do not have a legal right to take. You are interfering with someone else's property rights. You're not depriving anyone of goods, you're depriving someone of their legal right to profit. You're taking what it is not yours to take and asserting ownership over that which you do not own. Plain definition, that's stealing. Stealing != theft.
You're NOT free to give away Pepsi or Coke. You're free to give away cola. If you use the same recipe and formula, you're in trouble. If you clone someone's car (say it's a Toyota Camry), that someone isn't the person who has any legal rights against you. Toyota does. Toyota is the only company allowed to make or distribute Toyota Camrys.
No, it's not like milk at all. If you're going to go there, and I don't think you should, it's more like Coke or Pepsi.
Your magic, free Pepsi machine is knowingly interfering with the undisputed property rights of Pepsi. Pepsico holds the exclusive rights to make Pepsi. Coca-Cola holds the exclusive rights to make Coke. You do not have the right to give away more Coke or Pepsi than you purchased. If you bought a bottle and magically made more, congratulations, but you can't give away or sell even a single drop more than that one bottle of soda.
The rest is true about the RIAA and their greed and general worthlessness. But you're skipping the part where you consider that what you're offering for free isn't yours to offer. You can make something similar (as long as it's not derivative) and give that away for free. You can record a cover of a song and give that away without worrying about the RIAA (you may need permission from other entities). You can't give away something that has commercial value and is owned by someone else.
I'd suggest a more careful exploration of what exactly you own when you buy something, then. It's not as simple as you make it seem. It's just been such a long time that all of the caveats and clashes have been resolved. Go back five or six centuries, and you'd see the same indignance about purchasing something in this newfangled thing called a "market."
It's no longer controversial, so unless you've been to law school, odds are you've never really looked at it. Something isn't necessarily simple just because you take it for granted to be.
There are lots of things you don't own when you buy them. Even something as simple as a pencil has more than one owner. This doesn't usually matter, though, because the owners generally steer clear of each other's rights. When the parties are forced by practicality to snuggle up closer is where you have problems. 200 years from now, most of what's controversial today will have been settled and something else will be outrageous to the future Slashdot.
Perhaps you could cite the relevant portion of the copyright laws? You're not following case law from the right perspective. Copyright law is a limitation on the property rights of the owner (in the traditional sense, the author/artist, but in the modern sense more typically an agent thereof). It does not specify the only rights of the owner any more than other property laws specify your only rights.
The owner retains all ownership rights not conveyed willingly (or by force of law). This is inherent and inseparable to the concept of ownership in the law. What you must demonstrate, as the consumer, is where you achieved such a right which is presumed to be held by the creator, as with all things. Any first year law textbook would set you up with the appropriate legal theory.
anti-"IP" on the basis of natural law Property, regardless of kind, is not based in natural law. No property right in any fully-developed legal system is natural. What you are mistakenly following is the idea of ancient Roman law (whose naturalistic foundation was on possession of things not owned). I'd be happy to discuss this framework in greater depth. The other 'natural law' source is Thomas Aquinas, who said that he who labours over a thing has a natural right to that thing. This does not apply in the case of purchases, but only to real property (which is that where restitution can be achieved) and to products of the person. Real property != personal property != intellectual property. You're against the term because you've been well-indoctrinated on the "IP is not property" bandwagon. This exists only outside the legal community. What you should be saying is that "IP is not chattel" and that's true but of course irrelevant. Property is the right to exclude. Tangibility is not a requisite and has never been one.
copyright was intended as a priviledge and not a property right from a Constitutional point-of-view. Again, you're on the wrong side of the coin. Copyright was specifically mentioned by the Framers precisely because they wanted to protect the rights of their class. See Beard. Copyright is and always has been a property right since the days of the letters patent five centuries ago, nearly as old as legal property rights themselves. Philosophy aside, all surviving Western legal systems are post-Renaissance in construction.
Congress created copyrights and patents and can repeal them at will, but eliminating real property rights would require at least a Constitutional amendment. Congress did not create copyrights. They did not create patents. They certainly cannot repeal them at will any more than they can take your real property (though real property has always been distinguished as a special case). Real property != personal property != chattel. This is something you're fundamentally not getting because it's not discussed often. People outside the law think they know and people within the law actually do know, so the lines of communication are narrow. Most lawyers don't even fully enter the field, so I certainly don't mean this as a slight to you. I certainly wouldn't be able to talk about the ins and outs of family law, for example.
Also, are there any differences between your use of "commercial access" and your former use of the unqualified term "access" The only potential difference would be if you wrongfully interpreted the first use of "access" to be a universal. I can't view the context from the reply-page, but it falls back on the owner of the code not giving you any rights to the code with your purchase. You have a license to use of the output of the code, but no license to use the code itself, and certainly no ownership rights of any kind to the code, which would be required to support your conclusion.
That is an entirely correct elucidation up until "The DMCA's primary influence is thus to curtail people's ability to communicate their own discoveries and to distribute their own property."
Indeed, if you created something completely on your own for the product without tampering with the property of others, you would not be barred from distributing it. However, copyright law bars you from the distribution of derivative works. It also bars you from commercial access to property which you are not given property rights--i.e. the code protected by a a technological measure as defined.
If it is your own discovery and your own property, it does not infringe. You are not permitted to profit from or interfere with the owner's right to profit from (which is not strictly limited to money--giving it away does not get you off the hook) their work to which you have no property rights except use. If you need to access the code to figure something out for your personal purposes, you can do that. You can't share that with others, and you have never been able to. The result would be a civil action. The DMCA simply changes the consequences.
Again, there is no single ownership condition in the law for anything more complex than a piece of fruit (and even there, there can be competing ownership rights). You don't suddenly own everything that touches on or is contained within a product.
So, you own what about the DVD player? Be specific. Do you own the software that runs the player? No. Do you own any service or trade marks associated with the player? No. Do you own rights to the design of the player? No. Are you a party to binding licenses that may be in place regarding components? Of course not. The DMCA prevents your access to the code, which you do not own and have not been granted a license to. It protects the rights of the owner of that property right, and that person is not you (it's a separate issue whether the owner should actually be so picky about enforcing those rights, but there's no question of entitlement).
If you want to write your own code to the hardware that ignores whatever bullshit anti-skip flag the industry has created, have at it. You don't have any rights to their software, though. Buying the player doesn't transfer that right.
The DMCA doesn't specify what you can do with anything that belongs to you. You can still destroy it, modify the hardware, replace the software, sell it, lend it, paint it, take it out for lobster, or name it Susan.
That is patently untrue. The Act ensures that the property rights of the owners are preserved. What property right have you lost? Where did you gain such a property right? You have failed to address the issue. The DMCA protects property rights. What in it was a legal property right of the consumer prior to the Act? It's not a good act, and it proscribes plausible enforceability where it has not been customary and in that way is problematic, but it does not change property right assignment.
Further, I'm not sure when "so-called 'intellectual property'" became a thing. It's certainly not within the legal community. Do you say "so-called property"? Property has never been legally confined to tangible goods. Property in law is the legal right to exclusion--it is not coreferential to any item. Just as a license is not the same as a license agreement, property is not the same as the goods or chattel.
It's not exclusively your own private property. Property at its simplest is simply the legal right to exclude others. A sale and corresponding purchase doesn't make you the owner or holder of all property rights, and in fact it's a specific and narrow set of property rights. The rightsholder (i.e. the author or his agent) reserves all rights not conveyed.
So the question of who "owns" a given product is not as simple as it first would intuitively seem. It's pretty rare that ANY sale of ANY property is done in toto. More to the point, though, it's not your private property that is being restricted; instead the property of others is being protected by law. It's fair to say that your scope of use is limited by law, but that is an inevitable consequence of your not owning all the rights.
If you can demonstrate a situation in which you have lost a property right, it would be easier to see your comment as valid. Slashdot groupthink aside, what is the legal theory of ownership where you've been deprived of anything? How did you achieve that property right in the first place?
You bought the DVD. What do you own? What does it mean to "own" a DVD? What ownership rights are afforded you by the law? I hear this lame-ass defense on Slashdot all the time, but it's always from people who don't fundamentally understand the way ownership works under the law.
You've got certain ownership rights; the rightsholder retains most of them. Copyright is a guarantee of rights to the author and by extension to society at large. There is no single 'ownership' condition in the law. Like property, it's a bundle of separate rights and authorities. Your use of the content *is* undeniably and manifestly a license under the law--a grant of the right of use. Just because, in common parlance, you don't like the word "license" (and don't understand its legal implications) doesn't change a thing.
You "own" certain rights conferred to you by an originating party. The only thing you "own" in the property sense is the disc itself. You don't own the film, nor the right to reproduce generally. That right is reserved to the author or his agent. You have been granted usage rights and certain limited reproduction rights.
Yeah, it is the same thing as them tracking flights and trains and public buses. These aren't private vehicles, and they're already tracked with an inefficient radio-and-report based system. It's one thing if they're tracking your private movements with your private property. It's quite another if they're tracking their own property, which is to be used how they see fit.
Again, if you're in a public but concealed place of high sensitivity, it's probably best that you are monitored. It's not an invasion of privacy--you don't have any such expectation. If you're in a bank, you're damn sure going to be on camera. In the course of my job, I often go into secured areas, where I'm also sure to be tracked. It's not an invasion of my privacy to do so. I don't have privacy rights to or on the property of others. If I get shot or stabbed in a cab, that camera is likely the only piece of evidence that can provide a lead. There aren't witnesses, and there's likely no forensic evidence.
If your job puts you in the company of strangers and outside the immediate reach of law enforcement or emergency services, wouldn't you WANT a camera?
Bank tellers and bus drivers already have cameras. At some point you have to give law enforcement the tools they need to get things done, and deal with the violations and misuses as they occur. It always amazes me that a technology which adds convenience and improves service won't be backed by a large group of Slashdotters because it can potentially be abused. Everything ever invented has the possibility of being abused. You deal with the abuse, you don't shut out the technology altogether. Remember that you're the pot next time you call someone a luddite kettle.
You shouldn't feel awkward doing anything you describe, camera or not. People have honest to god jobs to do, and there's too much information and too little manpower for someone to sit around making fun of you. All they have to do to accomplish that is sit at the next table at a restaurant. I mean, come on. Next time you complain that the criminal justice system can't get its job done because prosecution couldn't make a case, remember things like this.
It's really much more simple than all of Slashdot wants to make it out. Separate your feelings from the matter for just one moment. We have laws, tested, valid laws, which state that party X is entitled to payment for each copy of product Y. It doesn't matter that the copy costs a marginal amount to make or that it would have been left sitting on the proverbial shelf otherwise.
It is a lost sale because it is a unit conveyed without payment. They were entitled to that money under the law.
That is a different thing than saying that they wouldn't have made all of that money absent the unlawful action. It's true, but it's not the issue on the table. Slashdot fails to apply this logic regularly--failure to gain a thing is not the same as loss of a thing. That is not the dispute, despite everyone's best efforts to make it so. The issue is that the owners are entitled to payment for these actions. They are owed whatever the market rate is for those misappropriated songs/movies/whatever.
The money owed would be less if fewer people pirated music. The amount would be lower if it excluded people who wouldn't have made the purchase in any case--but you don't ever make that distinction in the real world. Whether you have no money or billions of dollars has zero impact on the violation you've committed (it does, on the other hand, have a great deal to do with the sentencing and the quality of your legal defense).
Re:Thanks for removing all doubts.
on
Manhattan 1984
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Fools like you don't realize that each baby step takes society in the same direction. Utter bullshit. "Each baby step" toward a police state requires two components: collection of data and legitimized use of that data for unwarranted intrusion. This only satisfies one of the two conditions--the other half has to be filled by conspiracy theory.
It is completely asinine to ascribe the existence of such data (of which there is already a wealth in a wide number of non-governmental hands) to the paranoia-induced "inevitability" of using that information against law-abiding citizens.
It's just like abstinence-only nutjobs. It's the only absolute way (except it's not absolute, either), but it is not practical, desirable, or justifiable. Shutting down services is not the answer. Transparency and accountability is the answer, and responding to offenses such as those undertaken by the government. You're attacking the wrong end of the issue.
Also: the subway doesn't track you, nor does the bookstore. Use cash.
Divorce lawyers use ETC records to prove (or disprove) that someone has LIED UNDER OATH. They're not being released willy-nilly to lawyers in advance to use as leverage, unless you have evidence to the contrary. More importantly, such methods are standard procedure. Take away the ETC transponder, and the lawyers would get your location from a subpoena, be it through a credit card bill, talking to a bar owner who would recognize your picture, or getting a confession from an accomplice.
Frankly, if there's a system in place that systematically and impartially answer a question of fact in a court of law where subpoenas have already been issued, that's a good thing. You want to complain about the legal system being slow and arbitrary? Here's something to speed it up. If you're claiming you were at the office, but a credit card charge and your toll tag reading indicates you weren't, then that's just the chip in the ice that leads to your losing. If you're stupid enough to have an affair, to lie about it in court, and to neglect such obvious details as these, you got what you're due.
It'd be a different story if lawyers were scanning the records looking for affairs to solicit clients for divorce cases. But it's not. Using this information to support your innocence (or guilt) during a legal proceeding is perfectly reasonable. That is, after all, more or less what subpoenas and warrants are all about. So instead, it's just more paranoid crap.
You also don't understand that it's not the fact that we aren't invisible that annoys us, but the fact that we are being logged, tagged, tracked. Who holds this information, who buys it? A problem solved entirely by transparency. You can't stop shady, secret deals, which is why there are strict laws (if somewhat lax enforcement) about possession and use of such data. Don't give me the "nothing to hide" bullshit counter-argument about "them" not having a "right" to your data. No one ever said they have an intrinsic right to personal information--but this is not private information. Period.
Where you go in public is absolutely not private data. Whether there's a photo of your car at a toll plaza in Manhattan or in San Francisco is completely irrelevant to any cause you might have. There is no sense of privacy on public roads, and certainly a Manhattan toll plaza is no more an erosion of your privacy than anything else. You're already "logged and tracked" by a number of systems. To think that anyone is going to go through the effort of collating all those data sources to get a comprehensive picture of you is simply paranoid.
The reason the whole system is half-assed is because of absurd people like you. Instead of trying to stop a toll booth from going up (ooooh, scary), why not instead demand that any time someone accesses your data, that that access is also "logged and tracked" so you can see who did it? Like a credit report, your "traffic report" would be available to you, or your medical report.
This stuff is creepy, if you have enough brains to think about the implications. No, it isn't. It's just plain paranoid. If you're fired from your job without just cause, there's a little thing called wrongful termination. If they can make a legitimate case that you are incompetent, then that's why you were fired.
But for those who think that their masters are benevolent, or for those who find the distinction between border crossing and intra-city drives beyond them, there's always your ostrich approach. There is no distinction. They are arbitrary traffic control points. This has nothing to do with identification via passports, which is a sovereignty and citizenship issue and not relevant here. This is about vehicle tracking, which is identical at, say, the Canadian border and at the bridge toll plaza.
The bottom line is that you disagree with society's decision that law enforcement should be able to collect from toll violators. You don't like that there is a service available that lets you use an ETC transponder instead of carrying coins and cash in your car (in exchange for which an electronic record is formed). You don't like that using a card means that someone has to know what you bought (and where and when). You don't like that in order to have the best possible medical care, that means a medical history has to be collected and shared with the people who are treating you. Well, tough shit. In order to make use of most any service, you have to give up some information.
Don't like toll plazas taking photos of your car? Use the subway. Don't like the library keeping track of which of its books you've taken from them? Buy them. Or just dig a hole in the ground and live in it without interacting with society. Who cares. But don't try to drag society down with you because of your paranoid delusions.
Parent is not off-topic. Knowing how to use words when making your case is most certainly relevant information. Using words improperly does a great disservice to an otherwise strong post. Correcting misconceptions (particularly "mute point" which many, many people say) allows people to be taken seriously. If you said this at a symposium or panel, you'd hear giggles throughout the room.
Slashdot Mirror
Again, I strongly opposed making a food analogy. The fact that you are fixated on it simply goes to show an attempt to derail the substance. The issue at hand isn't about recipes. The argument stands on the grounds of the current issue. These asshats DO have undisputed property rights and they ARE entitled to exclude them.
You ask "where a recipe has been enforced as intellectual property" but in the very same post, you admit protection by trade secret--i.e. intellectual property. There are also confidentiality agreements, patents, trademarks, service marks, and yes, even copyrights to the product "Pepsi" (or Coke, or RC).
What is it exactly that you need me to provide a case to support? What conclusion are you hoping to draw by harping on protection of a recipe, which is immaterial both to the structure of the law and to the relevant facts of the current discussion?
To wit, you've admitted that I'm correct with the condition of recognized rights. Because these people (the labels) do hold undisputed property rights, according to even your rubric, the argument stands and there's nothing to gain by chasing your detours.
Factor 5: The work was referenced in a context of discussion and commentary.
Factor 6: The commercial value of Viacom's work is in the criticism, mockery, and discussion of the work, not in the broadcast of the work itself. (In fact, it arguably increased the commercial value of the referenced work--which is part of why commentary and criticism are protected by the law).
Factor 7: The "entire work" is brief. Limiting quotations is generally held to be a more relevant factor on works of length--a television commercial spot, for example, does not have to be reduced to a 3-second clip to comply with fair use, particularly since the amount of work is not the dominant factor in criticism and commentary defenses.
If only wishing made it so. Every court I've been to begs to differ, as do the facts and the laws pertinent to the issue. Your lack of substance shows you know it.
The use of the clip is prima facie infringement, but only because it's been reproduced and not because it's derivative. There is no interaction between the work and the commentary. A news story is not a derivative work. I agree that Viacom's use is a fair use question -- I just answer that question in the negative. What does that even mean? This contradicts what you've just said. Viacom has a valid fair use defense to their use of the original clip. The poster has a much weaker case for posting the Viacom clip in conjunction with his blog, and no case for putting it on YouTube. If he hosted the clip on his own server, things would be a bit different.
It's not a derivative work. They've not replaced faces with dead celebrities or anything. It's commentary and humorous mockery of a work. That's like saying a news clip with a video is a derivative work of the video displayed. No court has ever said that, grasshopper.
This is actually a fair use issue. Real Fair Use, not "personal copying is fair use" (which it's not--it's noninfringing use, but far be it for Slashdot to be able to make the distinction). You want it for yourselves but want to take it away from Viacom because they're an asshole corporation. It doesn't work like that. 17 USC 107.
PepsiCo and Coca-Cola DO have "monopolies" over their formulae, methods, and recipes. Competition among colas is a result. If you'd exercised your brain, you'd see that I even specifically said you were free to magically reproduce and distribute cola. You're free to design and build a car and magically give away copies of that, too. You don't own property rights to the specific product. The person who owns the copy or iteration you "magically copied" doesn't have property rights against you, unless you took that copy from him without permission. The person who owns the product has undisputed property rights under the law.
If it was found that RC has similar ingredients, it wouldn't be a copy, now would it? The same can be said for music. Mandy Moore can't be upset because you illegally downloaded a Jessica Simpson song. I sure as hell couldn't tell the difference. You don't own the song on the CD you've bought. You don't. No authority has ever said that you do. The owner reserves all property rights not conveyed. This is a fundamental element of law.
You and a few other misinformed people are the only ones who don't seem to know that.
Who said it was theft?
It's stealing. You are taking something you do not have a legal right to take. You are interfering with someone else's property rights. You're not depriving anyone of goods, you're depriving someone of their legal right to profit. You're taking what it is not yours to take and asserting ownership over that which you do not own. Plain definition, that's stealing. Stealing != theft.
You're NOT free to give away Pepsi or Coke. You're free to give away cola. If you use the same recipe and formula, you're in trouble. If you clone someone's car (say it's a Toyota Camry), that someone isn't the person who has any legal rights against you. Toyota does. Toyota is the only company allowed to make or distribute Toyota Camrys.
No, I mean the "it is *a* defense" comment.
It was a bit of linguistic humor on the poster's part. As in, it's a defense, but not necesssarily a good one or a successful one.
No, it's not like milk at all. If you're going to go there, and I don't think you should, it's more like Coke or Pepsi.
Your magic, free Pepsi machine is knowingly interfering with the undisputed property rights of Pepsi. Pepsico holds the exclusive rights to make Pepsi. Coca-Cola holds the exclusive rights to make Coke. You do not have the right to give away more Coke or Pepsi than you purchased. If you bought a bottle and magically made more, congratulations, but you can't give away or sell even a single drop more than that one bottle of soda.
The rest is true about the RIAA and their greed and general worthlessness. But you're skipping the part where you consider that what you're offering for free isn't yours to offer. You can make something similar (as long as it's not derivative) and give that away for free. You can record a cover of a song and give that away without worrying about the RIAA (you may need permission from other entities). You can't give away something that has commercial value and is owned by someone else.
Can you explain how parent is a troll? I'm really asking.
I'd suggest a more careful exploration of what exactly you own when you buy something, then. It's not as simple as you make it seem. It's just been such a long time that all of the caveats and clashes have been resolved. Go back five or six centuries, and you'd see the same indignance about purchasing something in this newfangled thing called a "market."
It's no longer controversial, so unless you've been to law school, odds are you've never really looked at it. Something isn't necessarily simple just because you take it for granted to be.
There are lots of things you don't own when you buy them. Even something as simple as a pencil has more than one owner. This doesn't usually matter, though, because the owners generally steer clear of each other's rights. When the parties are forced by practicality to snuggle up closer is where you have problems. 200 years from now, most of what's controversial today will have been settled and something else will be outrageous to the future Slashdot.
The owner retains all ownership rights not conveyed willingly (or by force of law). This is inherent and inseparable to the concept of ownership in the law. What you must demonstrate, as the consumer, is where you achieved such a right which is presumed to be held by the creator, as with all things. Any first year law textbook would set you up with the appropriate legal theory. anti-"IP" on the basis of natural law Property, regardless of kind, is not based in natural law. No property right in any fully-developed legal system is natural. What you are mistakenly following is the idea of ancient Roman law (whose naturalistic foundation was on possession of things not owned). I'd be happy to discuss this framework in greater depth. The other 'natural law' source is Thomas Aquinas, who said that he who labours over a thing has a natural right to that thing. This does not apply in the case of purchases, but only to real property (which is that where restitution can be achieved) and to products of the person. Real property != personal property != intellectual property. You're against the term because you've been well-indoctrinated on the "IP is not property" bandwagon. This exists only outside the legal community. What you should be saying is that "IP is not chattel" and that's true but of course irrelevant. Property is the right to exclude. Tangibility is not a requisite and has never been one. copyright was intended as a priviledge and not a property right from a Constitutional point-of-view. Again, you're on the wrong side of the coin. Copyright was specifically mentioned by the Framers precisely because they wanted to protect the rights of their class. See Beard. Copyright is and always has been a property right since the days of the letters patent five centuries ago, nearly as old as legal property rights themselves. Philosophy aside, all surviving Western legal systems are post-Renaissance in construction. Congress created copyrights and patents and can repeal them at will, but eliminating real property rights would require at least a Constitutional amendment. Congress did not create copyrights. They did not create patents. They certainly cannot repeal them at will any more than they can take your real property (though real property has always been distinguished as a special case). Real property != personal property != chattel. This is something you're fundamentally not getting because it's not discussed often. People outside the law think they know and people within the law actually do know, so the lines of communication are narrow. Most lawyers don't even fully enter the field, so I certainly don't mean this as a slight to you. I certainly wouldn't be able to talk about the ins and outs of family law, for example. Also, are there any differences between your use of "commercial access" and your former use of the unqualified term "access" The only potential difference would be if you wrongfully interpreted the first use of "access" to be a universal. I can't view the context from the reply-page, but it falls back on the owner of the code not giving you any rights to the code with your purchase. You have a license to use of the output of the code, but no license to use the code itself, and certainly no ownership rights of any kind to the code, which would be required to support your conclusion.
That is an entirely correct elucidation up until "The DMCA's primary influence is thus to curtail people's ability to communicate their own discoveries and to distribute their own property."
Indeed, if you created something completely on your own for the product without tampering with the property of others, you would not be barred from distributing it. However, copyright law bars you from the distribution of derivative works. It also bars you from commercial access to property which you are not given property rights--i.e. the code protected by a a technological measure as defined.
If it is your own discovery and your own property, it does not infringe. You are not permitted to profit from or interfere with the owner's right to profit from (which is not strictly limited to money--giving it away does not get you off the hook) their work to which you have no property rights except use. If you need to access the code to figure something out for your personal purposes, you can do that. You can't share that with others, and you have never been able to. The result would be a civil action. The DMCA simply changes the consequences.
Again, there is no single ownership condition in the law for anything more complex than a piece of fruit (and even there, there can be competing ownership rights). You don't suddenly own everything that touches on or is contained within a product.
So, you own what about the DVD player? Be specific. Do you own the software that runs the player? No. Do you own any service or trade marks associated with the player? No. Do you own rights to the design of the player? No. Are you a party to binding licenses that may be in place regarding components? Of course not. The DMCA prevents your access to the code, which you do not own and have not been granted a license to. It protects the rights of the owner of that property right, and that person is not you (it's a separate issue whether the owner should actually be so picky about enforcing those rights, but there's no question of entitlement).
If you want to write your own code to the hardware that ignores whatever bullshit anti-skip flag the industry has created, have at it. You don't have any rights to their software, though. Buying the player doesn't transfer that right.
The DMCA doesn't specify what you can do with anything that belongs to you. You can still destroy it, modify the hardware, replace the software, sell it, lend it, paint it, take it out for lobster, or name it Susan.
That is patently untrue. The Act ensures that the property rights of the owners are preserved. What property right have you lost? Where did you gain such a property right? You have failed to address the issue. The DMCA protects property rights. What in it was a legal property right of the consumer prior to the Act? It's not a good act, and it proscribes plausible enforceability where it has not been customary and in that way is problematic, but it does not change property right assignment.
Further, I'm not sure when "so-called 'intellectual property'" became a thing. It's certainly not within the legal community. Do you say "so-called property"? Property has never been legally confined to tangible goods. Property in law is the legal right to exclusion--it is not coreferential to any item. Just as a license is not the same as a license agreement, property is not the same as the goods or chattel.
It's not exclusively your own private property. Property at its simplest is simply the legal right to exclude others. A sale and corresponding purchase doesn't make you the owner or holder of all property rights, and in fact it's a specific and narrow set of property rights. The rightsholder (i.e. the author or his agent) reserves all rights not conveyed.
So the question of who "owns" a given product is not as simple as it first would intuitively seem. It's pretty rare that ANY sale of ANY property is done in toto. More to the point, though, it's not your private property that is being restricted; instead the property of others is being protected by law. It's fair to say that your scope of use is limited by law, but that is an inevitable consequence of your not owning all the rights.
If you can demonstrate a situation in which you have lost a property right, it would be easier to see your comment as valid. Slashdot groupthink aside, what is the legal theory of ownership where you've been deprived of anything? How did you achieve that property right in the first place?
You bought the DVD. What do you own? What does it mean to "own" a DVD? What ownership rights are afforded you by the law? I hear this lame-ass defense on Slashdot all the time, but it's always from people who don't fundamentally understand the way ownership works under the law.
You've got certain ownership rights; the rightsholder retains most of them. Copyright is a guarantee of rights to the author and by extension to society at large. There is no single 'ownership' condition in the law. Like property, it's a bundle of separate rights and authorities. Your use of the content *is* undeniably and manifestly a license under the law--a grant of the right of use. Just because, in common parlance, you don't like the word "license" (and don't understand its legal implications) doesn't change a thing.
You "own" certain rights conferred to you by an originating party. The only thing you "own" in the property sense is the disc itself. You don't own the film, nor the right to reproduce generally. That right is reserved to the author or his agent. You have been granted usage rights and certain limited reproduction rights.
Demonstrate otherwise.
Yeah, it is the same thing as them tracking flights and trains and public buses. These aren't private vehicles, and they're already tracked with an inefficient radio-and-report based system. It's one thing if they're tracking your private movements with your private property. It's quite another if they're tracking their own property, which is to be used how they see fit.
Again, if you're in a public but concealed place of high sensitivity, it's probably best that you are monitored. It's not an invasion of privacy--you don't have any such expectation. If you're in a bank, you're damn sure going to be on camera. In the course of my job, I often go into secured areas, where I'm also sure to be tracked. It's not an invasion of my privacy to do so. I don't have privacy rights to or on the property of others. If I get shot or stabbed in a cab, that camera is likely the only piece of evidence that can provide a lead. There aren't witnesses, and there's likely no forensic evidence.
If your job puts you in the company of strangers and outside the immediate reach of law enforcement or emergency services, wouldn't you WANT a camera?
Bank tellers and bus drivers already have cameras. At some point you have to give law enforcement the tools they need to get things done, and deal with the violations and misuses as they occur. It always amazes me that a technology which adds convenience and improves service won't be backed by a large group of Slashdotters because it can potentially be abused. Everything ever invented has the possibility of being abused. You deal with the abuse, you don't shut out the technology altogether. Remember that you're the pot next time you call someone a luddite kettle.
You shouldn't feel awkward doing anything you describe, camera or not. People have honest to god jobs to do, and there's too much information and too little manpower for someone to sit around making fun of you. All they have to do to accomplish that is sit at the next table at a restaurant. I mean, come on. Next time you complain that the criminal justice system can't get its job done because prosecution couldn't make a case, remember things like this.
It's really much more simple than all of Slashdot wants to make it out. Separate your feelings from the matter for just one moment. We have laws, tested, valid laws, which state that party X is entitled to payment for each copy of product Y. It doesn't matter that the copy costs a marginal amount to make or that it would have been left sitting on the proverbial shelf otherwise.
It is a lost sale because it is a unit conveyed without payment. They were entitled to that money under the law.
That is a different thing than saying that they wouldn't have made all of that money absent the unlawful action. It's true, but it's not the issue on the table. Slashdot fails to apply this logic regularly--failure to gain a thing is not the same as loss of a thing. That is not the dispute, despite everyone's best efforts to make it so. The issue is that the owners are entitled to payment for these actions. They are owed whatever the market rate is for those misappropriated songs/movies/whatever.
The money owed would be less if fewer people pirated music. The amount would be lower if it excluded people who wouldn't have made the purchase in any case--but you don't ever make that distinction in the real world. Whether you have no money or billions of dollars has zero impact on the violation you've committed (it does, on the other hand, have a great deal to do with the sentencing and the quality of your legal defense).
It is completely asinine to ascribe the existence of such data (of which there is already a wealth in a wide number of non-governmental hands) to the paranoia-induced "inevitability" of using that information against law-abiding citizens.
It's just like abstinence-only nutjobs. It's the only absolute way (except it's not absolute, either), but it is not practical, desirable, or justifiable. Shutting down services is not the answer. Transparency and accountability is the answer, and responding to offenses such as those undertaken by the government. You're attacking the wrong end of the issue.
Also: the subway doesn't track you, nor does the bookstore. Use cash.
Divorce lawyers use ETC records to prove (or disprove) that someone has LIED UNDER OATH. They're not being released willy-nilly to lawyers in advance to use as leverage, unless you have evidence to the contrary. More importantly, such methods are standard procedure. Take away the ETC transponder, and the lawyers would get your location from a subpoena, be it through a credit card bill, talking to a bar owner who would recognize your picture, or getting a confession from an accomplice.
Frankly, if there's a system in place that systematically and impartially answer a question of fact in a court of law where subpoenas have already been issued, that's a good thing. You want to complain about the legal system being slow and arbitrary? Here's something to speed it up. If you're claiming you were at the office, but a credit card charge and your toll tag reading indicates you weren't, then that's just the chip in the ice that leads to your losing. If you're stupid enough to have an affair, to lie about it in court, and to neglect such obvious details as these, you got what you're due.
It'd be a different story if lawyers were scanning the records looking for affairs to solicit clients for divorce cases. But it's not. Using this information to support your innocence (or guilt) during a legal proceeding is perfectly reasonable. That is, after all, more or less what subpoenas and warrants are all about. So instead, it's just more paranoid crap.
Where you go in public is absolutely not private data. Whether there's a photo of your car at a toll plaza in Manhattan or in San Francisco is completely irrelevant to any cause you might have. There is no sense of privacy on public roads, and certainly a Manhattan toll plaza is no more an erosion of your privacy than anything else. You're already "logged and tracked" by a number of systems. To think that anyone is going to go through the effort of collating all those data sources to get a comprehensive picture of you is simply paranoid.
The reason the whole system is half-assed is because of absurd people like you. Instead of trying to stop a toll booth from going up (ooooh, scary), why not instead demand that any time someone accesses your data, that that access is also "logged and tracked" so you can see who did it? Like a credit report, your "traffic report" would be available to you, or your medical report. This stuff is creepy, if you have enough brains to think about the implications. No, it isn't. It's just plain paranoid. If you're fired from your job without just cause, there's a little thing called wrongful termination. If they can make a legitimate case that you are incompetent, then that's why you were fired. But for those who think that their masters are benevolent, or for those who find the distinction between border crossing and intra-city drives beyond them, there's always your ostrich approach. There is no distinction. They are arbitrary traffic control points. This has nothing to do with identification via passports, which is a sovereignty and citizenship issue and not relevant here. This is about vehicle tracking, which is identical at, say, the Canadian border and at the bridge toll plaza.
The bottom line is that you disagree with society's decision that law enforcement should be able to collect from toll violators. You don't like that there is a service available that lets you use an ETC transponder instead of carrying coins and cash in your car (in exchange for which an electronic record is formed). You don't like that using a card means that someone has to know what you bought (and where and when). You don't like that in order to have the best possible medical care, that means a medical history has to be collected and shared with the people who are treating you. Well, tough shit. In order to make use of most any service, you have to give up some information.
Don't like toll plazas taking photos of your car? Use the subway. Don't like the library keeping track of which of its books you've taken from them? Buy them. Or just dig a hole in the ground and live in it without interacting with society. Who cares. But don't try to drag society down with you because of your paranoid delusions.
Parent is not off-topic. Knowing how to use words when making your case is most certainly relevant information. Using words improperly does a great disservice to an otherwise strong post. Correcting misconceptions (particularly "mute point" which many, many people say) allows people to be taken seriously. If you said this at a symposium or panel, you'd hear giggles throughout the room.