Personally, when I get home I'm going to download every single one of those utilities, even the ones I never used, and burn them to disc. Heck, I might create a mirror where people can download the regular 120kB version instead of Microsofts 45MB version.
Who it DOES hurt are the artists. The right to be compensated for lyric publication is one of the few ways a songwriter can make money off their work without the RIAA taking a bite.
In theory, I agree with you.
In practice, that reasoning taken to its logical conclusion means that the whole of artistic creation that is ever copyrighted or licensed in any way becomes inaccessible to the very people it is intended to reach: average joe consumer who just wants something to listen to and sing along with while housecleaning.
If the process of doing something that should be VERY simple (eg buy song - like the lyrics - look them up and memorize them for singing along) is too arduous, people will simply cut out all the steps altogether. At first, it will just be the lyrics part. But as the music has less value for them, they'll also stop caring whether they have the music, either.
Yes, the purpose of copyright is ensure that creators are given and opportunity to benefit from their work, but copyrights have a limited term for a reason: the true purpose of copyright is to make sure that the whole of human history can benefit from what a culture is capable of producing.
By inventing things like DRM to provide copy controls; by suing the pants of people who share 1 MP3 (or whose kids do); by locking down all access to copyrighted material, you effectively eliminate the value of creation in the first place - cultural value that transcends profit and temporary promises of reward.
A culture without art is a culture without heart, and that is exactly what the *AA's of the world are turning the world into. And for what? "Revenue"? The future of mankind's appreciation of art is dependent on some temporary organization's profit margin?
That is not a future I am willing to purchase at the price of lyrics on a website - or *whatever* gateway anyone tries to use to assert control over art that destroys that art's value.
I know you're joking.. I just wanted to say your post reminded me of the old European surfdoms where nobles would 'own' 2-300 surfs and everything the surfs did was designed to increase the wealth of the nobleman, and the best the surfs could ever hope for was to work INSIDE the house instead of outside in the fields.
This is the same way most executives look at consumers nowadays: the purpose of our existence is to BUY THEIR STUFF and MAKE THEM RICH - and the best we can ever hope for is a comfortable 401k to retire on and maybe a nice house. And if we should ever DARE to step outside the role of 'good little consumer', we get imprisoned, sued, or accused of being a terrorist.
Land of the free, indeed. And it's not just the US going this direction, either - it is the whole of the world.
Song discovered: Hate Me by Blue October. Method of discovery: Heard the song on the radio, typed lyrics into Google. Purchase: Bought the entire album on iTunes AND bought the CD (accident.. but.. now I have two copies!) Price: $9.90
Song discovered: Untitled by Simple Plan Method of discovery: Heard the song on the radio, typed lyrics into Google. Purchase: Bought the song on iTunes Price: $0.99
Song discovered: Animal I Have Become by Three Days Grace Method of discovery: Heard the song on the radio, typed lyrics into Google. Purchase: Have not yet purchased the song, but it's on my list for my next purchase (sometime this week) Price: $0.99
Total amount spent: $12
Amount I would have spent if lyrics were not freely available: $0
Right, I see the argument now. Freely available lyrics are killing the music industry by destroying sales. Yep, here's your evidence folks, lyrics available on the internet result in fewer music purchases.
I have done this THREE TIMES already this week. Two of those songs, I have already purchased. When I heard "Hate Me" by Blue October on the radio, I liked the band so much that I bought the CD.
If I were not able to go online and look up the lyrics to the songs I liked, I would not have made any of those purchases. That's $12 the industry would be out.
Multiply that by the number of people who do the same thing I do ever year, and the RIAA and music publishers should really be asking themselves if its better for their bottom line to get a couple million in lyrics licenses, or a few hundred million in music sales.
But then, it stopped being about profit a long time ago. What they want is pure and absolute control over everything, no matter how much it impacts their bottom line.
How do they expect us to sing (or maybe they don't want us to sing since we're not a licensed performer) a song if we can't understand the words or if the lyrics are not given to us?
Don't you understand? It's ILLEGAL for you to sing the song in ANY form, even humming it to yourself in the shower, peppering in the words you know now and then. And you're going to jail for it too, because you're KILLING the music industry!
I think the parent poster was referring more to Gates' $30 billion+ that currently exists as Microsoft stock - whose value most definitely is tied to Microsoft assets.
so too there are absolute moral laws. I believe that the Creator God who made everything is capable of also communicating to us what we need to know in order to fulfill His purposes.
It is this arrogance I was attempting to speak against.
There is no way to either prove nor disprove His being.
I fully agree. And that is the best counterargument to ever saying objective morality (based on any religious grounds) exists.
Most people who disbelieve what is written in this book have never really read it for themselves. They go by what OTHERS have said or written about it.
Well, then I suppose it's a good thing I'm not most people. I have read the Bible in its entirety - several times. I understand it better probably than you do, because I understand where every section of it came from, who it was written by, and the historical context in which it was written.
I was once a devout Christian, but I, unlike most, do not require a philosophy to lead me by the nose - I prefer to discover the truth of the universe myself. It has been that process of questioning, wondering, learning, that has lead me to where I am now.
If not, then millions of people have lived and died throughout the centuries for a preposterous lie.
1. This would be true even if Jesus lived. Killing and dying to enforce your beliefs right and those of others, wrong, is never acceptable.
2. You're beginning to get the point. A preposterous lie? Not necessarily. Religion has its place in a culture; I will not dismiss its value. It is a simple, functional way to establish moral and ethical codes of conduct. That has always been its purpose. Our culture has bastardized that purpose to create the most efficient killing machine ever known to our species:
You DO know what causes aging in humans, right? The shortening of telomeres on our chromosomes, caused by errors in copying.. you got it.. proteins. You DO know what causes those errors, right? You got it... more proteins (and some free radicals and other toxins here and there, toxins which are becoming increasingly common I might add).
Look, people have been obese since the beginning
No, no they haven't. Obesity for our ancestors meant death, because an obese human can't hunt, can't run, can't carry on a strenuous physical existence. Obesity is only possible when food is not only not scarce, but with huge surpluses. Humans didn't begin to generate surplus food until about 10,000 years ago - LONG after our evolution created us to adapt to food shortages.
Your experience demonstrates what everyone in this thread (and in fact anyone who tries to do these kinds of studies) seems to miss:
Not all humans have the same dietary requirements, and not all humans respond to the same diet the same way.
The different cultures of humans lived different lifestyles for a sufficiently long time that their digestive systems changed to accomodate their food source. This isn't really an evolutionary step because these humans are still 100% compatible with all other humans, but it IS a slight modification in those humans chosen for breeding - the ones best able to digest the available food.
Eskimos do very well on a diet consisting solely of fatty meats, while some South American cultures have a very difficult time digesting any kind of meat.
Food preference and response to diet is a very culturally/geographically defined issue and alot of scientists already know this; it just hasn't really made its way into common knowledge yet.
Ok, that's great! Now if (when) my notions of morality are different or even opposed to yours, then who decides? Is it the majority? Is it the one with the biggest gun? Is it, like some have posted here, God? If so, how can we know who of the many voices that claim to speak for God is the one to listen to?
It is this part to which I will reply, because the rest of it seems to be gibberish that doesn't have anything to do with the topic at hand.
The part that is silly to me is that you ask this question as though it were some great conundrum, gone unanswered through the history of Men and impossible to answer but through great philosophical effort due to the great apparent contradiction of it all.
Nothing of the sort need be true.
I once believed that objective morality existed, and spent quite a great amount of time attempting to discover such a morality out of the world of man, taking pieces both from religious morality and from pure philosophic thought. But I could never resolve the contradiction that says "Is his God right? Or is that God right?" I could never resolve the contradiction because I assumed only one could be right.
One thing I've learned is that if you run into a contradiction, question your premises. You'll invariable find that one of them is wrong, if you have the intellectual fortitude to honestly examine your own beliefs.
You assume, as does everyone in our culture, that there is one right way to live. Oh, you leave room for 'diversity', you know, people who have a different skin color, speak a different language, eat different foods for breakfast and maybe even do things on a different day of the week, but you all hold one thing in common: You believe everyone lives (or should live) by the same basic laws.
For 1000 centuries, the species of man lived by 10,000 different codes of life, all different in their vision and way of life, and how they chose to make a living. Some tribes conceptualized the world as existing without ownership of any sort, and so have no pronouns for words like "I", "Me", and "You". You can't even begin to imagine what the world looks like to people like that - and they are supposed to live by the same rules you do?
It is said that a sign of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting to have a different outcome. For 12,000 years, our culture has attempted to enforce the "one right way to live" philosophy on every culture it has encountered. Those who were too weak to fight, were assimilated (yes, in the Borg sense). Those who chose to fight, were destroyed. And you see all around you now, in a world always on the verge of war, the result of that philosophy: 10,000 disparate cultures all forced to live in very close quarters, distrustful of one another yet incapable of breaking free and living the way they want to live, instead forced to live by the same rules as those they would never dream of calling 'brother.'
Never has that one right way ever answered "Who decides morality?" because that one right way prohibits such an answer from ever working.
You did not fully grasp my meaning when I said "You do." You thought I meant you, isolated, alone, without regard to the community around you, or those who raised you, or those you live and work with every day.
Moral and ethical law, government, and making a living, all work much better in small groups - groups we disdainfully call 'tribes' as though a 'tribe' were somehow less evolved. In small groups, the question of 'who decides morality?' becomes irrelevant - the group is small enough that everyone agrees. If you don't, you either a) leave the group, b) were never part of the group to begin with, or c) you die because you refuse to help that group make a living the way THEY CHOOSE to.
To summarize: You assume everyone has to live by the same rules, that morality is absolute and must be determined for everyone, everywhere, by some absolute standard that cannot be define
Legislators and courts decide what is illegal, but WHO decides what is wrong or immoral?
That you even ask that question is precisely why so much of the world gets away with what it does (I am not blaming you, or accusing you, simply using the question as a jumping off point).
The answer is: you do. The world is what you make of it, with your choices, your actions, your intentions, your dreams, and your vision (no, not your eyeballs, but how you view the world).
Too many people forget that were born with the capacity to think and that unlike the other animals, thinking is a requirement of our survival - not to obtain food and shelter, but to build societies. Ethics and morality aren't the purview of philosophers and hermits, they are the practical application, every day, of what works to build a culture and what doesn't.
In many localities, you do NOT pay fair market value for those services, you pay what the local government's pricing cap says you pay. This is because most governments DO consider electricity, water, telephone, etc. a 'right', or at least, a necessity of living that should not be subject to the whims of corporate income statements.
The internet has ALREADY been subsidized and is currently being sold to you at a massive profit. There is no need to play corporate whipping boy for companies that give their CEO's $1-$2 million in salary and $2 million+ in bonuses.
In the case of the internet, in alot of ways it IS becoming a necessity, and should be regarded with the same protective gaze that electricity, water, and gas are. But the case for its protection is stronger than that: it is the greatest medium in history for the dissemination of information and the way to give voice to millions who were once forced to go unheard.
I do not think such an important responsibility should be left in the hands of those who have the power to silence the world if they feel their profits are not where they should be.
Aside from many consumers only having one or two options, if one ISP decides to implement throttling, the rest will simply jump on the bandwagon as soon as possible. Then, having a choice will be irrelevant, since they'll all be doing it.
Copyright is a specific temporary restriction in your property rights, when those restrictions lapse, then every aspect of that property is yours.
Introduce DRM, and what is supposed to be a temporary restriction (ok.. 50-70 years but still temporary) now becomes 100% permanent, for all of purpetuity, until the Sun explodes and destroys the earth.
I don't mean to mention this to start up a conversation on DRM, but geez.. at least with an expiring copyright, you can hope to outlive the copyright.. with DRM, you never will.
He doesn't need to provide the source code to these things, only a copy of the GPL, which is probably on there SEVERAL times with the OSS software on the disc.
Even Firefox doesn't include the source code in a distribution. You have to go looking for it. The GPL doesn't say you have to spread the source everytime you distribute the program, only that you have to make it available should someone want it.
Because, with vista, they stand to make a killing in selling new machines to people who, quite frankly, don't need to (and wouldn't) replace their 2 year old 1.6ghz box with something that is a wee bit faster and has a fancier video card.
Well, yeah. That's one of the 'among other reasons' I was talking about. It's unfortunate.
It's really not even close to conspiracy-theory material to say that the release of Vista is primarily to drive the sales of new hardware. In fact, that's been a widely known effect of Windows releases over the past ~10 years since Windows 95 was released.
Which really doesn't speak well for the operating system, although, I can't complain about the better hardware.. ack. How to resolve that conundrum. Did we really need an awful operating system in order to get better hardware [sooner]?
Unfortunately, we're going to see the inevitable result of 90%+ market share: Even if nobody wants to use Vista, everybody will, because Microsoft has the monopoly power to force it on everyone.
What I don't understand is why all the big computer makers don't say "Up yours, Microsoft" and just start throwing a nice RedHat or Ubuntu installation on their new machines. It would even make the customers' purchase price lower because they don't have to tack on the $100 license fee.
Unfortunately, it is of course not that simple, both because users are firmly entrenched in their familiar Windows apps, and because the major computer makers probably have agreements to put Windows on their new machines until the year 2780, among other reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, when I get home I'm going to download every single one of those utilities, even the ones I never used, and burn them to disc. Heck, I might create a mirror where people can download the regular 120kB version instead of Microsofts 45MB version.
In practice, that reasoning taken to its logical conclusion means that the whole of artistic creation that is ever copyrighted or licensed in any way becomes inaccessible to the very people it is intended to reach: average joe consumer who just wants something to listen to and sing along with while housecleaning.
If the process of doing something that should be VERY simple (eg buy song - like the lyrics - look them up and memorize them for singing along) is too arduous, people will simply cut out all the steps altogether. At first, it will just be the lyrics part. But as the music has less value for them, they'll also stop caring whether they have the music, either.
Yes, the purpose of copyright is ensure that creators are given and opportunity to benefit from their work, but copyrights have a limited term for a reason: the true purpose of copyright is to make sure that the whole of human history can benefit from what a culture is capable of producing.
By inventing things like DRM to provide copy controls; by suing the pants of people who share 1 MP3 (or whose kids do); by locking down all access to copyrighted material, you effectively eliminate the value of creation in the first place - cultural value that transcends profit and temporary promises of reward.
A culture without art is a culture without heart, and that is exactly what the *AA's of the world are turning the world into. And for what? "Revenue"? The future of mankind's appreciation of art is dependent on some temporary organization's profit margin?
That is not a future I am willing to purchase at the price of lyrics on a website - or *whatever* gateway anyone tries to use to assert control over art that destroys that art's value.
I know you're joking.. I just wanted to say your post reminded me of the old European surfdoms where nobles would 'own' 2-300 surfs and everything the surfs did was designed to increase the wealth of the nobleman, and the best the surfs could ever hope for was to work INSIDE the house instead of outside in the fields.
This is the same way most executives look at consumers nowadays: the purpose of our existence is to BUY THEIR STUFF and MAKE THEM RICH - and the best we can ever hope for is a comfortable 401k to retire on and maybe a nice house. And if we should ever DARE to step outside the role of 'good little consumer', we get imprisoned, sued, or accused of being a terrorist.
Land of the free, indeed. And it's not just the US going this direction, either - it is the whole of the world.
Hmm... one of the root passwords to the Constitution IS "children", so that might actually work!
Muhahaha..
I certainly would, in a quick second - if it were free.
I will not pay for lyrics. I will pay for the song if I like the lyrics (or the audio itself - some lyrics are retarded but the music is still good..)
Because, you know, your friend liking the lyrics and buying the song would be a copyright violation.
Uhh.. what?!?!
[/RIAA]
Song discovered: Hate Me by Blue October.
Method of discovery: Heard the song on the radio, typed lyrics into Google.
Purchase: Bought the entire album on iTunes AND bought the CD (accident.. but.. now I have two copies!)
Price: $9.90
Song discovered: Untitled by Simple Plan
Method of discovery: Heard the song on the radio, typed lyrics into Google.
Purchase: Bought the song on iTunes
Price: $0.99
Song discovered: Animal I Have Become by Three Days Grace
Method of discovery: Heard the song on the radio, typed lyrics into Google.
Purchase: Have not yet purchased the song, but it's on my list for my next purchase (sometime this week)
Price: $0.99
Total amount spent: $12
Amount I would have spent if lyrics were not freely available: $0
Right, I see the argument now. Freely available lyrics are killing the music industry by destroying sales. Yep, here's your evidence folks, lyrics available on the internet result in fewer music purchases.
Oh, wait...
I have done this THREE TIMES already this week. Two of those songs, I have already purchased. When I heard "Hate Me" by Blue October on the radio, I liked the band so much that I bought the CD.
If I were not able to go online and look up the lyrics to the songs I liked, I would not have made any of those purchases. That's $12 the industry would be out.
Multiply that by the number of people who do the same thing I do ever year, and the RIAA and music publishers should really be asking themselves if its better for their bottom line to get a couple million in lyrics licenses, or a few hundred million in music sales.
But then, it stopped being about profit a long time ago. What they want is pure and absolute control over everything, no matter how much it impacts their bottom line.
I think the parent poster was referring more to Gates' $30 billion+ that currently exists as Microsoft stock - whose value most definitely is tied to Microsoft assets.
It is this arrogance I was attempting to speak against.
I fully agree. And that is the best counterargument to ever saying objective morality (based on any religious grounds) exists.
Well, then I suppose it's a good thing I'm not most people. I have read the Bible in its entirety - several times. I understand it better probably than you do, because I understand where every section of it came from, who it was written by, and the historical context in which it was written.
I was once a devout Christian, but I, unlike most, do not require a philosophy to lead me by the nose - I prefer to discover the truth of the universe myself. It has been that process of questioning, wondering, learning, that has lead me to where I am now.
1. This would be true even if Jesus lived. Killing and dying to enforce your beliefs right and those of others, wrong, is never acceptable.
2. You're beginning to get the point. A preposterous lie? Not necessarily. Religion has its place in a culture; I will not dismiss its value. It is a simple, functional way to establish moral and ethical codes of conduct. That has always been its purpose. Our culture has bastardized that purpose to create the most efficient killing machine ever known to our species:
Doctrine.
No, no they haven't. Obesity for our ancestors meant death, because an obese human can't hunt, can't run, can't carry on a strenuous physical existence. Obesity is only possible when food is not only not scarce, but with huge surpluses. Humans didn't begin to generate surplus food until about 10,000 years ago - LONG after our evolution created us to adapt to food shortages.
Your experience demonstrates what everyone in this thread (and in fact anyone who tries to do these kinds of studies) seems to miss:
Not all humans have the same dietary requirements, and not all humans respond to the same diet the same way.
The different cultures of humans lived different lifestyles for a sufficiently long time that their digestive systems changed to accomodate their food source. This isn't really an evolutionary step because these humans are still 100% compatible with all other humans, but it IS a slight modification in those humans chosen for breeding - the ones best able to digest the available food.
Eskimos do very well on a diet consisting solely of fatty meats, while some South American cultures have a very difficult time digesting any kind of meat.
Food preference and response to diet is a very culturally/geographically defined issue and alot of scientists already know this; it just hasn't really made its way into common knowledge yet.
It is this part to which I will reply, because the rest of it seems to be gibberish that doesn't have anything to do with the topic at hand.
The part that is silly to me is that you ask this question as though it were some great conundrum, gone unanswered through the history of Men and impossible to answer but through great philosophical effort due to the great apparent contradiction of it all.
Nothing of the sort need be true.
I once believed that objective morality existed, and spent quite a great amount of time attempting to discover such a morality out of the world of man, taking pieces both from religious morality and from pure philosophic thought. But I could never resolve the contradiction that says "Is his God right? Or is that God right?" I could never resolve the contradiction because I assumed only one could be right.
One thing I've learned is that if you run into a contradiction, question your premises. You'll invariable find that one of them is wrong, if you have the intellectual fortitude to honestly examine your own beliefs.
You assume, as does everyone in our culture, that there is one right way to live. Oh, you leave room for 'diversity', you know, people who have a different skin color, speak a different language, eat different foods for breakfast and maybe even do things on a different day of the week, but you all hold one thing in common: You believe everyone lives (or should live) by the same basic laws.
For 1000 centuries, the species of man lived by 10,000 different codes of life, all different in their vision and way of life, and how they chose to make a living. Some tribes conceptualized the world as existing without ownership of any sort, and so have no pronouns for words like "I", "Me", and "You". You can't even begin to imagine what the world looks like to people like that - and they are supposed to live by the same rules you do?
It is said that a sign of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting to have a different outcome. For 12,000 years, our culture has attempted to enforce the "one right way to live" philosophy on every culture it has encountered. Those who were too weak to fight, were assimilated (yes, in the Borg sense). Those who chose to fight, were destroyed. And you see all around you now, in a world always on the verge of war, the result of that philosophy: 10,000 disparate cultures all forced to live in very close quarters, distrustful of one another yet incapable of breaking free and living the way they want to live, instead forced to live by the same rules as those they would never dream of calling 'brother.'
Never has that one right way ever answered "Who decides morality?" because that one right way prohibits such an answer from ever working.
You did not fully grasp my meaning when I said "You do." You thought I meant you, isolated, alone, without regard to the community around you, or those who raised you, or those you live and work with every day.
Moral and ethical law, government, and making a living, all work much better in small groups - groups we disdainfully call 'tribes' as though a 'tribe' were somehow less evolved. In small groups, the question of 'who decides morality?' becomes irrelevant - the group is small enough that everyone agrees. If you don't, you either a) leave the group, b) were never part of the group to begin with, or c) you die because you refuse to help that group make a living the way THEY CHOOSE to.
To summarize:
You assume everyone has to live by the same rules, that morality is absolute and must be determined for everyone, everywhere, by some absolute standard that cannot be define
If I didn't know better, that section would read like it was straight out of 1984.
And THAT is scary.
The answer is: you do. The world is what you make of it, with your choices, your actions, your intentions, your dreams, and your vision (no, not your eyeballs, but how you view the world).
Too many people forget that were born with the capacity to think and that unlike the other animals, thinking is a requirement of our survival - not to obtain food and shelter, but to build societies. Ethics and morality aren't the purview of philosophers and hermits, they are the practical application, every day, of what works to build a culture and what doesn't.
In many localities, you do NOT pay fair market value for those services, you pay what the local government's pricing cap says you pay. This is because most governments DO consider electricity, water, telephone, etc. a 'right', or at least, a necessity of living that should not be subject to the whims of corporate income statements.
The internet has ALREADY been subsidized and is currently being sold to you at a massive profit. There is no need to play corporate whipping boy for companies that give their CEO's $1-$2 million in salary and $2 million+ in bonuses.
In the case of the internet, in alot of ways it IS becoming a necessity, and should be regarded with the same protective gaze that electricity, water, and gas are. But the case for its protection is stronger than that: it is the greatest medium in history for the dissemination of information and the way to give voice to millions who were once forced to go unheard.
I do not think such an important responsibility should be left in the hands of those who have the power to silence the world if they feel their profits are not where they should be.
We just need to give the internet the slick, smooth veneer of the 1980's!
[cue music]
da da DA DA da da da DA DA DA..
[/Futurama]
Aside from many consumers only having one or two options, if one ISP decides to implement throttling, the rest will simply jump on the bandwagon as soon as possible. Then, having a choice will be irrelevant, since they'll all be doing it.
I don't mean to mention this to start up a conversation on DRM, but geez.. at least with an expiring copyright, you can hope to outlive the copyright.. with DRM, you never will.
He doesn't need to provide the source code to these things, only a copy of the GPL, which is probably on there SEVERAL times with the OSS software on the disc.
Even Firefox doesn't include the source code in a distribution. You have to go looking for it. The GPL doesn't say you have to spread the source everytime you distribute the program, only that you have to make it available should someone want it.
It's really not even close to conspiracy-theory material to say that the release of Vista is primarily to drive the sales of new hardware. In fact, that's been a widely known effect of Windows releases over the past ~10 years since Windows 95 was released.
Which really doesn't speak well for the operating system, although, I can't complain about the better hardware.. ack. How to resolve that conundrum. Did we really need an awful operating system in order to get better hardware [sooner]?
Unfortunately, we're going to see the inevitable result of 90%+ market share: Even if nobody wants to use Vista, everybody will, because Microsoft has the monopoly power to force it on everyone.
What I don't understand is why all the big computer makers don't say "Up yours, Microsoft" and just start throwing a nice RedHat or Ubuntu installation on their new machines. It would even make the customers' purchase price lower because they don't have to tack on the $100 license fee.
Unfortunately, it is of course not that simple, both because users are firmly entrenched in their familiar Windows apps, and because the major computer makers probably have agreements to put Windows on their new machines until the year 2780, among other reasons.