"That being said, tower PCs will ALWAYS have a place in the enthusiast and hobbyist markets."
Or in professional markets, business markets, and so forth. People who need high performance systems and who are willing to sacrifice mobility will continue to buy tower PCs and workstations. Even mainframes remain in use by the very customers they were originally intended for: large institutions with large computing needs.
Now, consumers may abandon tower PCs, which is another story entirely.
Apple could try to claim a DMCA violation; I do not know whether this would stand up in court, but the threat might be sufficient to scare vendors away.
No more out of the bottle than the hackintosh community. Apple will just sue vendors who allow people to bypass the license, and all that will be left are a tiny group of committed hackers who will be small enough for Apple to ignore, hopefully. Really, most people in the free software and open source software communities are staying away from Apple because of their hostility, and businesses will not want to risk a lawsuit from Apple.
By suing hyperviser vendors who release software that does not explicitly check for Apple hardware? Such a thing would not exactly be out of character for Apple...
There is a broader issue here though: he did not actively do anything to the network. For him to be guilty here means that it now becomes a criminal offense to disappear for a few weeks if you happen to work in an organization that did not have the foresight to have a backup admin. Irresponsible, yes, and someone who does such a thing should certainly lose their job, but for it to become a criminal matter is an entirely different issue.
Except that the number of people who even understand the issue here is relatively small, compared to the number of people who will just buy a PS4 and a new Sony TV because they are new, shiny, and cool.
You might have missed the point about "possible future sales that might help pay for something" not being something people are entitled to? Really, the fact that something costs money which may not be recuperated by its creator has nothing to do with "theft."
"Copyrights are not mandatory in the constitution; property rights are.
-- Please provide a link to back this up. No offense, but I am not going to take your word for it. The content created is the property of individual creators. You copying it, without their permission is taking from them. Until I see case links, you have no counter point."
The text authorizes Congress to create a copyright system; it does not mandate that copyrights be created. Property rights, on the other other hand, are mandatory:
Note that property rights are assumed -- no law had to be passed establishing property rights, the constitution simply assumes that the citizens have the right to their property and restricts the government's ability to deprive the citizens of that right.
"Please, you really think that this conversation is about content that is years and years old? You are skewing the argument."
The argument is about whether or not copyrights are a form of property rights, and hence whether or not copyright infringement is a form of theft. Any difference between copyrights and property rights is relevant, including the fact that copyrights have a mandatory expiration.
"Unless that design is of a certain age, your previous argument, that design is worth money to that architect. Did you purchase those designs from a architect?"
None of which has anything to do with the fact that there is no infringement of your property rights when someone builds a copy of your house. As you point out, the house may be old enough that its design is in the public domain, yet the person who owns the house still has property rights over it. Again, this is a question of whether or not copyrights are a form of property rights, so let's try to stay on topic.
"We are not talking about the government, please stay on topic."
We are talking about whether or not copyrights are a form of property rights, and any difference between copyrights and property rights is relevant, including the fact that the government can own property.
How is that relevant? Copyright law is not and has never been property law (in the USA). Here are a few key differences:
Copyrights are not mandatory in the constitution; property rights are.
If copyrights are implemented, the constitution mandates that they be valid for a limited time only; property rights are perpetual, assuming the property can be perpetually maintained (by the owner and whoever inherits or comes to own the property).
Copyrights are about the right to copy something; there is nothing in property law that governs a person's ability to replicate your property (i.e. if I like the way your house looks, I can build a copy of it on my land, and I have not violated your property rights).
Property can be owned by the government; all government works are automatically in the public domain (no copyrights).
"He fully expected the sale to anyone that WATCHED that movie."
Then he was delusional and never really understood copyrights. First of all, copyright law does not grant you control over who gets to view your work, it only grants you a limited measure of control over who is allowed to make copies of your work. Second, copyrights do not grant or guarantee a right to sell, nor does it guarantee that a copyright holder will ever see monetary gain from the copyright.
Your argument is tantamount to claiming that reselling books is theft, because the copyright holder did not gain a second sale. Selling a used book is legal, ethical, and desirable for society, and there is a long history of book sharing and reselling.
"In some (not all) cases the content owner is deprived of a sale."
Except that it is really impossible to prove such a thing. If we are willing to set aside the fact that the sale never really existed (how can you be deprived of something that does not exist), there are a lot of confounding factors. The downloader might have decided to go out to a store to buy the media, had it not been available for download, and then seen something better to spend money on, and not purchase the media. Or, perhaps the downloader never even had the money to spend on the media, and the sale never even had a chance of happening. Or perhaps the media was not even available to purchase, and the copyright holder did not feel like spending the money on making further copies.
Even if we ignore all of the above, there is a new problem with declare "deprivation of sales" to be a form of theft. Maybe my business attracts more customers than your business -- does that now make me a thief, because I am depriving you of the sales you would have had if I had not been in business? What if I go around telling people not to buy your products -- is that thievery too?
This is the problem with trying to claim that imaginary things like "potential sales" can be "stolen." In general, "stealing" something that is intangible, whether it is some sort of media, or potential sales, or an idea, or whatever else, is illogical. The term "theft" is only used by people who want "copyright" to be considered the equivalent of "real estate," which it was never intended to be.
You are lying to yourself. Copying something is not the same as stealing it; there is a fundamental difference, in that theft involves depriving someone else of the thing that is stolen, whereas copying creates more of whatever that thing is. Please, the copyright lobbyists' propaganda is bad enough, we don't need non-lobbyists to start spreading it.
Did I say it was the right thing to do? I said it was the necessary thing to do, given what the courts, lawyers, and politicians have demonstrated. When doing the right thing, and protecting the private data of thousands of people, results in incarceration, then "doing the right thing" is off the table.
They are still used in a number of specialized machines, even some are still being produced. Sometimes, there is just no push to update something -- floppies work, the task the machines perform is not limited by the use of floppy disks, and there is no need for larger storage. I still see systems running DOS here and there -- systems that simply would not benefit from something else, typically systems that only need to run a single program at a time.
Ultimately, that would mean nothing. Even if SCO somehow prevailed here and received the copyrights, its case against IBM is still baseless, and whatever few customers they might still have are probably in the process of migrating to a system supported by a more stable company.
There are so many laws on the books, though, that all the police would have to do is watch someone for a few hours and they are more likely than not to break a law of some sort. Most people cannot claim to know what is or is not legal with any real certainty anymore, so all the police would have to do is select a few poorly known but easy to break laws and just sit around watching and waiting.
I think the lesson to be learned here is to demand legal statements from people that absolve you of responsibility for their stupidity. "You want these passwords? First give me something I can bring to court, so that when you screw up, you cannot try to blame me." The courts have shown that these are the sorts of measures we must take -- not to try to prevent the damage from being done, but to prevent the idiots who cause problems from passing the responsibility off to us.
More often than not, proprietary software licenses absolve the vendor from any guarantees in situations where the software likely to fail (or likely to fail with catastrophic results). Really, if you want a guarantee, you need to find a company that specializes in high reliability systems, and for most people, the cost of contracting with such a company is too great and not justified by their needs.
With a company like Red Hat, you pay for a sort of guarantee -- you get to call them and ask for help whenever you want, or if you pay enough, they'll leave someone at your place of business to manage the systems. The guarantee you get is that within 24 hours, they will fix a problem or give you some sort of workaround, which is not quite the same as the sort of guarantee you seem to want, but it is apparently good enough for a lot of companies (and it is not all that different from any other vendor).
The unfortunate reality of the English language is that "free" has two very different meanings. You are thinking of the "no cost" meaning, which is not what the Free Software Foundation is about -- the other meaning, "freedom," is what is more important. You should have freedoms with your software, particularly the freedom to use and modify that software, and also the freedom to study and share the software (how one can modify with studying is a mystery to me). Sharing is where people always get angry, since it means that people may be able to obtain the software at no cost -- but the benefits outweigh the potential losses here.
Personally, I choose to use the word "libre" to describe GPL (or similarly licensed) software, to help reduce the confusion. There is no confusing "libre" with some other term, and people who are unfamiliar with the word will generally ask for clarification (rather than assuming a specific meaning). Those who neglect to ask for clarification are generally the people who do not care about the issue at all; this is still better than someone who does not care about the issue and just assumes that I want to get my software at no cost.
Actually, movie and music companies make a lot of money selling usage rights, to each other and to advertisers. Whenever you hear a well known song in a movie, the studio that produced the movie had to pay some music company for the rights to use the song like that. Likewise with commercials, or MacDonald's using movie characters for kids meal toys, and so forth. "Consumables" are not the be-all and end-all of music and movies.
Apple has a history of bullying journalists; they probably want to scare everyone with a, "Do not discuss our upcoming products if you enjoy your status as a free person" threat.
Slashdot Mirror
"That being said, tower PCs will ALWAYS have a place in the enthusiast and hobbyist markets."
Or in professional markets, business markets, and so forth. People who need high performance systems and who are willing to sacrifice mobility will continue to buy tower PCs and workstations. Even mainframes remain in use by the very customers they were originally intended for: large institutions with large computing needs.
Now, consumers may abandon tower PCs, which is another story entirely.
Apple could try to claim a DMCA violation; I do not know whether this would stand up in court, but the threat might be sufficient to scare vendors away.
No more out of the bottle than the hackintosh community. Apple will just sue vendors who allow people to bypass the license, and all that will be left are a tiny group of committed hackers who will be small enough for Apple to ignore, hopefully. Really, most people in the free software and open source software communities are staying away from Apple because of their hostility, and businesses will not want to risk a lawsuit from Apple.
By suing hyperviser vendors who release software that does not explicitly check for Apple hardware? Such a thing would not exactly be out of character for Apple...
Which is nothing more than peer review for a security system -- they are performing a security evaluation by looking for exploits.
What is your theory then?
There is a broader issue here though: he did not actively do anything to the network. For him to be guilty here means that it now becomes a criminal offense to disappear for a few weeks if you happen to work in an organization that did not have the foresight to have a backup admin. Irresponsible, yes, and someone who does such a thing should certainly lose their job, but for it to become a criminal matter is an entirely different issue.
Except that the number of people who even understand the issue here is relatively small, compared to the number of people who will just buy a PS4 and a new Sony TV because they are new, shiny, and cool.
You might have missed the point about "possible future sales that might help pay for something" not being something people are entitled to? Really, the fact that something costs money which may not be recuperated by its creator has nothing to do with "theft."
"Copyrights are not mandatory in the constitution; property rights are. -- Please provide a link to back this up. No offense, but I am not going to take your word for it. The content created is the property of individual creators. You copying it, without their permission is taking from them. Until I see case links, you have no counter point."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_copyright_law
The text authorizes Congress to create a copyright system; it does not mandate that copyrights be created. Property rights, on the other other hand, are mandatory:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
Note that property rights are assumed -- no law had to be passed establishing property rights, the constitution simply assumes that the citizens have the right to their property and restricts the government's ability to deprive the citizens of that right.
"Please, you really think that this conversation is about content that is years and years old? You are skewing the argument."
The argument is about whether or not copyrights are a form of property rights, and hence whether or not copyright infringement is a form of theft. Any difference between copyrights and property rights is relevant, including the fact that copyrights have a mandatory expiration.
"Unless that design is of a certain age, your previous argument, that design is worth money to that architect. Did you purchase those designs from a architect?"
None of which has anything to do with the fact that there is no infringement of your property rights when someone builds a copy of your house. As you point out, the house may be old enough that its design is in the public domain, yet the person who owns the house still has property rights over it. Again, this is a question of whether or not copyrights are a form of property rights, so let's try to stay on topic.
"We are not talking about the government, please stay on topic."
We are talking about whether or not copyrights are a form of property rights, and any difference between copyrights and property rights is relevant, including the fact that the government can own property.
Now, remind me, how is copying a form of theft?
"He fully expected the sale to anyone that WATCHED that movie."
Then he was delusional and never really understood copyrights. First of all, copyright law does not grant you control over who gets to view your work, it only grants you a limited measure of control over who is allowed to make copies of your work. Second, copyrights do not grant or guarantee a right to sell, nor does it guarantee that a copyright holder will ever see monetary gain from the copyright.
Your argument is tantamount to claiming that reselling books is theft, because the copyright holder did not gain a second sale. Selling a used book is legal, ethical, and desirable for society, and there is a long history of book sharing and reselling.
"In some (not all) cases the content owner is deprived of a sale."
Except that it is really impossible to prove such a thing. If we are willing to set aside the fact that the sale never really existed (how can you be deprived of something that does not exist), there are a lot of confounding factors. The downloader might have decided to go out to a store to buy the media, had it not been available for download, and then seen something better to spend money on, and not purchase the media. Or, perhaps the downloader never even had the money to spend on the media, and the sale never even had a chance of happening. Or perhaps the media was not even available to purchase, and the copyright holder did not feel like spending the money on making further copies.
Even if we ignore all of the above, there is a new problem with declare "deprivation of sales" to be a form of theft. Maybe my business attracts more customers than your business -- does that now make me a thief, because I am depriving you of the sales you would have had if I had not been in business? What if I go around telling people not to buy your products -- is that thievery too?
This is the problem with trying to claim that imaginary things like "potential sales" can be "stolen." In general, "stealing" something that is intangible, whether it is some sort of media, or potential sales, or an idea, or whatever else, is illogical. The term "theft" is only used by people who want "copyright" to be considered the equivalent of "real estate," which it was never intended to be.
You are lying to yourself. Copying something is not the same as stealing it; there is a fundamental difference, in that theft involves depriving someone else of the thing that is stolen, whereas copying creates more of whatever that thing is. Please, the copyright lobbyists' propaganda is bad enough, we don't need non-lobbyists to start spreading it.
Did I say it was the right thing to do? I said it was the necessary thing to do, given what the courts, lawyers, and politicians have demonstrated. When doing the right thing, and protecting the private data of thousands of people, results in incarceration, then "doing the right thing" is off the table.
They are still used in a number of specialized machines, even some are still being produced. Sometimes, there is just no push to update something -- floppies work, the task the machines perform is not limited by the use of floppy disks, and there is no need for larger storage. I still see systems running DOS here and there -- systems that simply would not benefit from something else, typically systems that only need to run a single program at a time.
Ultimately, that would mean nothing. Even if SCO somehow prevailed here and received the copyrights, its case against IBM is still baseless, and whatever few customers they might still have are probably in the process of migrating to a system supported by a more stable company.
There are so many laws on the books, though, that all the police would have to do is watch someone for a few hours and they are more likely than not to break a law of some sort. Most people cannot claim to know what is or is not legal with any real certainty anymore, so all the police would have to do is select a few poorly known but easy to break laws and just sit around watching and waiting.
Land of the free indeed.
I think the lesson to be learned here is to demand legal statements from people that absolve you of responsibility for their stupidity. "You want these passwords? First give me something I can bring to court, so that when you screw up, you cannot try to blame me." The courts have shown that these are the sorts of measures we must take -- not to try to prevent the damage from being done, but to prevent the idiots who cause problems from passing the responsibility off to us.
More often than not, proprietary software licenses absolve the vendor from any guarantees in situations where the software likely to fail (or likely to fail with catastrophic results). Really, if you want a guarantee, you need to find a company that specializes in high reliability systems, and for most people, the cost of contracting with such a company is too great and not justified by their needs.
With a company like Red Hat, you pay for a sort of guarantee -- you get to call them and ask for help whenever you want, or if you pay enough, they'll leave someone at your place of business to manage the systems. The guarantee you get is that within 24 hours, they will fix a problem or give you some sort of workaround, which is not quite the same as the sort of guarantee you seem to want, but it is apparently good enough for a lot of companies (and it is not all that different from any other vendor).
The unfortunate reality of the English language is that "free" has two very different meanings. You are thinking of the "no cost" meaning, which is not what the Free Software Foundation is about -- the other meaning, "freedom," is what is more important. You should have freedoms with your software, particularly the freedom to use and modify that software, and also the freedom to study and share the software (how one can modify with studying is a mystery to me). Sharing is where people always get angry, since it means that people may be able to obtain the software at no cost -- but the benefits outweigh the potential losses here.
Personally, I choose to use the word "libre" to describe GPL (or similarly licensed) software, to help reduce the confusion. There is no confusing "libre" with some other term, and people who are unfamiliar with the word will generally ask for clarification (rather than assuming a specific meaning). Those who neglect to ask for clarification are generally the people who do not care about the issue at all; this is still better than someone who does not care about the issue and just assumes that I want to get my software at no cost.
Actually, movie and music companies make a lot of money selling usage rights, to each other and to advertisers. Whenever you hear a well known song in a movie, the studio that produced the movie had to pay some music company for the rights to use the song like that. Likewise with commercials, or MacDonald's using movie characters for kids meal toys, and so forth. "Consumables" are not the be-all and end-all of music and movies.
Apple has a history of bullying journalists; they probably want to scare everyone with a, "Do not discuss our upcoming products if you enjoy your status as a free person" threat.
The phone was not stolen, it was left unprotected and unattended -- and it was returned to Apple without delay when they asked for it back.