Please don't tell me you're going to equate art with ideas. It's a weak connection at best, and copyright law reflects that. That's why you can only copyright art, not the idea you thought up in the shower. Morality, for example, cannot be copyrighted. Get a clue, and post again later.
That's the spirit! Truly emancipate yourselves from purveyors of restricted media! It's not exactly smart to be constantly pissing them off, while remaining dependent on them for cultural sustenance.
Isn't "terrorist" the new "communist?" It's the new boogey-man word designed to scare everyone into complacency while we cower in our homes and allow things like warrantless wire-tapping to occur.
Yeah, but "terrorist" is in heated competition with "police-state" as this generation's paranoia button.
In the real free market, of which the Internet seems to be an excellent example, distribution at cost ($0) is a natural result of a maturity within the market.
For distribution only. If only production were as cheap, then the market would be pretty much at peak maturity, and we wouldn't need the **AA business model at all. No piracy, no purchase, nothing. The whole thing could be handled by the public, and there'd be no detriment to the cultural contributions. Until then, or until someone comes up with and puts into practise an alternative business model, we're stuck with the **AA's one.
While I appreciate that America believes shared culture is a commodity, I disagree. I think it is a basic human right, and if your shared culture includes 'Alien III' and 'Pushing Daisies', there is a moral imperative (as it is part of our shared culture, not simply a commodity) for society to ensure that it is available to you.
I don't know if it's a basic human right, but sure. I at least agree that access to culture is highly desirable, and shared (read: free?) access would be even better. It's just we don't have a way of making our culture both sustainable and free yet. We could just say, fuck it, it's free from now on, but then future generations would be sorely lacking in what you just described as a "basic human right".
As for your subtle ad hominem insinuation
It's not an ad hominem attack. It's a perfectly relevant argument against the "it's not worth anything" argument. All the law, the **AA, and any other copyright holder who reserves his rights, is expecting is that you honour the copyrights. There's no mandate to buy the media, just honour the copyrights. If it's not worth the amount they ask for it, then you don't have to buy it. But if you don't buy it, you can't expect to have it anyway. That's all I meant. If you have survived without buying **AA's works, or even other copyrighted works as well, then more power to you (although, if the latter were true, I wouldn't know what software you're using to post on/.).
Reality isn't black and white, my friend. And it doesn't have shades of gray either, that would be thinking in 1-D. Reality comes in COLORS. Some nice, some ugly. And there are many viewpoints.
Yeah, as a matter of fact, I actually agree. So for example, I probably can't just label a certain group sheep and create an artificial dichotomy between those who I guess can think, and those who I guess that they can't. Now that I think about it, people's views generally are largely based upon the views of others. Every step of their reasoning, in retrospect, seems to be heavily guided by their perception of morality, which comes from external influences.
As an example, I know several people, myself included, who are highly suspicious of unsupervised vigilante justice, especially when carrying out that justice without proper precautions can lead to large gains by the executor of that justice. The RIAA and the moral-crusader pirates are a good example. You don't seem to have any problem with people executing unsupervised vigilante justice against the RIAA and reaping the rewards. I guess that's just a product of our differing moral influences then, huh?
It's not that I don't agree with you, but, quite frankly, your analogy sucks. That's what comcast should be doing: continuing to ignore the murderer in the back, rather than driving slower in response.
Fight. Preferably not physically, but campaign to make firearms legal to the general population. I'd personally prefer if they weren't, and would hope that within a generation or two the fear would quiet down to a dull roar, but if that's what you need to feel safe (even potentially at others' expense), then that'd be an acceptable compromise.
And you are missing the point of the free market, a principle under which the music is distributed, many democratic nations' economies function, and is protected jealously under law. If you don't want it, you don't have to pay for it, but you also don't get to have it. This seems like common sense to me, but it seems to be getting rarer and rarer. If it's just "propagandistic garbage", then surely you can live without it, right?
Just to clarify, you also have to ignore what they produce if you want them to go away, not just their threats, because many of them are far from idle.
Sure and they do, they have, and they will continue to. How many amendments do we have?
So what's the point? Why can't we just rely on the legal system? It takes time to pass laws, and it sufficiently retards change. Why do we need a constitution telling us what laws to pass, unless the laws are (and always will be) essential for the running of a democracy?
If I do not have the ability to defend my life, I have no other rights.
Sure you can, you just need a license to carry. The gun would become your responsibility and your right to use your gun would be revoked if you were malicious or negligent in your usage and care of your gun. The process would hopefully be trouble enough to weed out those who are less committed to defending themselves, to reduce the number of guns out there (so eventually there would be less demand for them), but to allow for people who fear for their safety, or who could use it as a tool, to put the effort in and get their own gun. Unfortunately, it simply won't work because of the volume of arms floating around if applied with any realistic time-frame.
There's a difference between retarding rate of change and blocking certain changes. Fast-changing governments are inefficient and unstable, but so are governments literally incapable of listening to their people. We're fine for now, because we are running into problems (that need to be overcome) that were predicted by the founding fathers, but it's inevitable that things will change whether our society likes it or not.
As an example, the second amendment protects every citizen's right to bear arms. That was a fair call back in the late 16th century, when power was unstable, and people were more accountable for their votes. It was a necessary protection to ensure that people felt secure in using their due influence on the government. Nowadays, there's very little need for it, now that the country is large and its people largely anonymous parts of a huge crowd. Politicians and zealots alike are no longer capable of threatening the public, and most of the people live in the cities, where there isn't much call for a gun, except for protection against other guns. The right to bear arms is only relevant today because it has continued to be granted for so long, that now any potential criminal can get their hands on one. Any attempts to institute gun control are now not only futile (because pro-gun spokesmen can claim it as a constitutional right), but detrimental as well, despite what it does for the murder rate.
You should never make any long term decisions in a crisis. People are horrible at it and tend to be highly irrational at such times. Look how badly we have done after 9/11. How much worse would we have done with a more fluid government system?
We never meant to make any long term decisions, just to institute some temporary measures to destroy the roots of terrorism. The fact that their term lengthened should really be covered under the "keep democracy running smoothly" part that I said the constitution should stick to.
Defensive tactics are not advised. If they come for the file-sharing users now, what makes you think they will not come for the encryption users later?
After going on a rant about how civil disobedience was essentially a way to justify breaking the law, as well as a way to circumvent the needs of the majority in order to institute change that benefits you personally, a wise old slashdotter informed me that the noble art of civil disobedience wasn't always like that.
He said that civil disobedience wasn't about breaking the law and running, but about breaking the law openly, and facing the consequences. It was for laws (or lack thereof) that were so important to them, that facing the punishment was worth the crime being available to them and future generations. Although I didn't agree with copyright infringement, I was forced to agree that true civil disobedience was indeed a noble act.
So, I agree with the parent. Stop running and face up to these people who are chasing you. Deal with them, or forever be running, and legally ruining whatever technology you touch. If you truly want change, you have to be prepared to pay for it.
That's one reason why I personally don't respect parts of the constitution. If there's a majority in the future, then, well, there is a majority. If you do anything else, you will piss a majority of people off. It seems kinda funny because the constitution was designed with the people (read: the majority of people at the time) in mind. But their influence couldn't stay in their own times when it was relevant, it had to spread to times where their wants become increasingly irrelevant. There are new majorities now with new needs and wants, and they can speak for themselves if they want. The constitution should really just stick to making sure they can speak for themselves, and that those in power listen.
The fact is, the distribution chains of the data thieves, the pirates, the "underground", are more complete than legitimate commercial enterprises.
I wouldn't give it more cred than it deserves. Pirates, by definition, can't provide anything that legitimate businesses can't provide, because legitimate businesses' work is all they trade in.
Sure, Luxembourg has wealthy citizens. It's a small, but well-run country. Amassing wealth for over 200 million people over such large distances is no mean feat. And sure, some of the practices of the US are also jeopardising that feat, but that doesn't make the underlying strategy invalid. Perhaps rather than just pointing out in the current system, we could point out how to solve them? It doesn't take Ron Paul to do that.
All because you Americans seemed to think you could elect a moron to head your country and not pay the consequences.
Your prejudiced, borderline racist profiling of me has failed miserably. Even if I were American, I certainly wouldn't have voted for Bush.
Re:Ethically speaking
on
Ethics In IT
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· Score: 4, Funny
If I knew how to break into your house, then told you that I was able to but won't tell you how unless you paid up a fee?
I'm sure that you'd easily come up with a lot of reasons why it isn't cool.
Only if there was an implied threat with the offer of information. If someone did that to me, and somehow managed not to imply some kind of threat, then I would consider money fair exchange to make a positive difference to my house's security.
Hey wait, isn't that what my local security firm does?
Re:What about the CONTRIBUTIONS?
on
Has Ron Paul Quit?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I've personally heard nothing but hype about Ron Paul and I still think he's a wackjob. You may call it propaganda if you wish, ut I'm fairly sure that, in the long run, his principles applied as he wants them to be, would make the economy more fragile, and would lower quality of life. The US government is a little too pro-business for some people's liking, but (you have to hand it to them) it has produced the world's wealthiest nation, the biggest superpower, and a stable economy. Ron Paul, despite his noble intentions, would be jeopardising all of that, mostly over some kind of libertarian paranoia. That's what I call a wackjob.
The people have as much control as they want to have. Blaming evil "Big Business" and "Rich People" is just a cop out; a way to justify personal inaction. If we were to demand what we claim these powerful parties are taking from us, we will get it. They simply can't resist it, because all their power comes from us. At any time, you may stand up and tell your fellow man what you want, why you want it, and why you think he should want it too. Once you accept that the system is set up to help you, not to hinder you, then you can actually start making a difference.
Still, it's going to be hard to convince the average, relatively wealthy, contented middle-class citizen that he should be outraged at how he's being mistreated...
If it's a truly free market, then there is no artificially imposed scarcity of commodities. If the market is free, then anyone can copy and sell the book. The solution for the author then, is to take his ball and go home. Perhaps the public is fine with that, however, if the price he demanded was too high.
The market doesn't have to be truly free in order to work in "true free market fashion". In fact, often it works better when it's tempered with a little regulation (e.g. antitrust, etc). A free market regulated with copyrights is perfectly able to decide if a book is overpriced. A purely free market would be less capable, due to consumers' short-sightedness.
When an author is willing to create a work for free, we should be willing to allow him to do so. Such an author is already ignoring copyright. An opt out system means that the author who doesn't care about copyright also doesn't care about not having a copyright, and so the public is saddled with the cost of giving him something he doesn't want.
Let's not twist this too much. The author has a choice to make for himself on how much of his copyright he wants to reserve. If some authors don't want their copyrights, they can easily deny them. It's really no burden at all for those who don't want the copyrights to their works.
This way works. Your way doesn't work, as is seen by how few public domain dedications there have been since 1978. It's demonstrable; you really can't argue with it.
Just try and stop me;)
Firstly, although I don't have any statistics (and neither do you), in my day-to-day Internet browsing, I have seen many free(dom) videos, books, essays, or just plain web pages. There's plenty of PD works out there that have been dedicated over the past few years, just not publicly.
Secondly, it's not nearly enough just to compare raw numbers of works dedicated. Doing so assumes the three lymerics I wrote and dedicated to the PD are worth the same as, say, the Lord of the Rings trilogy. A far better measurement would weight each work in terms of popularity, so that my lymerics would barely compare to the cultural contribution of Lord of the Rings.
Thirdly, "copyright" and "public domain" are deceptive, especially in this day and age. There's plenty of copyrighted material given away legitimately for free, often with redistribution freedoms attached. Assuming hypothetically that it were possible, would we really consider the dedication of a piece of software previously under a BSD-style license to the public domain to be a full copyright-to-public-domain dedication?
The opt-in method really only targets those sitting on the fence. They'll more than likely be giving away their product for free, and they probably haven't spent an enormous amount of time on their work (or else they'd probably feel the need to be reimbursed for their time). Any influx of works into the public domain probably would've been given away for free anyway (admittedly, just from a single source), and are statistically less likely to be accomplished or popular works.
Wrong. First, there would be far, far fewer copyrighted works, since authors don't care about copyrights for most of their works.
I think you're exaggerating. The entertainment industry produces a staggering amount of content, all of which you can bet your bottom dollar they will copyright. Not just that, but they will separately copyright many components, and re-releases. We would have to have copyrights on each special feature of every (re-)release of every DVD. We would have to have copyright on each arrangement of every piece of music. Every minor release of software would also be copyrighted (imagine what that'd be like with all the anti-virus products, or Windows). What about every live performance of every song? There are huge numbers of copyrights that we don't typically count.
Slashdot Mirror
Please don't tell me you're going to equate art with ideas. It's a weak connection at best, and copyright law reflects that. That's why you can only copyright art, not the idea you thought up in the shower. Morality, for example, cannot be copyrighted. Get a clue, and post again later.
That's the spirit! Truly emancipate yourselves from purveyors of restricted media! It's not exactly smart to be constantly pissing them off, while remaining dependent on them for cultural sustenance.
The parent failed to complain about the potential censorship, so therefore, you guys censored his opinion! Crafty!
As an example, I know several people, myself included, who are highly suspicious of unsupervised vigilante justice, especially when carrying out that justice without proper precautions can lead to large gains by the executor of that justice. The RIAA and the moral-crusader pirates are a good example. You don't seem to have any problem with people executing unsupervised vigilante justice against the RIAA and reaping the rewards. I guess that's just a product of our differing moral influences then, huh?
It's not that I don't agree with you, but, quite frankly, your analogy sucks. That's what comcast should be doing: continuing to ignore the murderer in the back, rather than driving slower in response.
Fight. Preferably not physically, but campaign to make firearms legal to the general population. I'd personally prefer if they weren't, and would hope that within a generation or two the fear would quiet down to a dull roar, but if that's what you need to feel safe (even potentially at others' expense), then that'd be an acceptable compromise.
And you are missing the point of the free market, a principle under which the music is distributed, many democratic nations' economies function, and is protected jealously under law. If you don't want it, you don't have to pay for it, but you also don't get to have it. This seems like common sense to me, but it seems to be getting rarer and rarer. If it's just "propagandistic garbage", then surely you can live without it, right?
Just to clarify, you also have to ignore what they produce if you want them to go away, not just their threats, because many of them are far from idle.
You should add "redundant" to your sig. I've been burned with that one a few times.
;)
Go ahead mods, mod me offtopic: I deserve it
As an example, the second amendment protects every citizen's right to bear arms. That was a fair call back in the late 16th century, when power was unstable, and people were more accountable for their votes. It was a necessary protection to ensure that people felt secure in using their due influence on the government. Nowadays, there's very little need for it, now that the country is large and its people largely anonymous parts of a huge crowd. Politicians and zealots alike are no longer capable of threatening the public, and most of the people live in the cities, where there isn't much call for a gun, except for protection against other guns. The right to bear arms is only relevant today because it has continued to be granted for so long, that now any potential criminal can get their hands on one. Any attempts to institute gun control are now not only futile (because pro-gun spokesmen can claim it as a constitutional right), but detrimental as well, despite what it does for the murder rate.We never meant to make any long term decisions, just to institute some temporary measures to destroy the roots of terrorism. The fact that their term lengthened should really be covered under the "keep democracy running smoothly" part that I said the constitution should stick to.
He said that civil disobedience wasn't about breaking the law and running, but about breaking the law openly, and facing the consequences. It was for laws (or lack thereof) that were so important to them, that facing the punishment was worth the crime being available to them and future generations. Although I didn't agree with copyright infringement, I was forced to agree that true civil disobedience was indeed a noble act.
So, I agree with the parent. Stop running and face up to these people who are chasing you. Deal with them, or forever be running, and legally ruining whatever technology you touch. If you truly want change, you have to be prepared to pay for it.
That's one reason why I personally don't respect parts of the constitution. If there's a majority in the future, then, well, there is a majority. If you do anything else, you will piss a majority of people off. It seems kinda funny because the constitution was designed with the people (read: the majority of people at the time) in mind. But their influence couldn't stay in their own times when it was relevant, it had to spread to times where their wants become increasingly irrelevant. There are new majorities now with new needs and wants, and they can speak for themselves if they want. The constitution should really just stick to making sure they can speak for themselves, and that those in power listen.
"I'm Will Wright, bitch!"
Hey wait, isn't that what my local security firm does?
Is it... is it connected yet?
No it doesn't.
I've personally heard nothing but hype about Ron Paul and I still think he's a wackjob. You may call it propaganda if you wish, ut I'm fairly sure that, in the long run, his principles applied as he wants them to be, would make the economy more fragile, and would lower quality of life. The US government is a little too pro-business for some people's liking, but (you have to hand it to them) it has produced the world's wealthiest nation, the biggest superpower, and a stable economy. Ron Paul, despite his noble intentions, would be jeopardising all of that, mostly over some kind of libertarian paranoia. That's what I call a wackjob.
The people have as much control as they want to have. Blaming evil "Big Business" and "Rich People" is just a cop out; a way to justify personal inaction. If we were to demand what we claim these powerful parties are taking from us, we will get it. They simply can't resist it, because all their power comes from us. At any time, you may stand up and tell your fellow man what you want, why you want it, and why you think he should want it too. Once you accept that the system is set up to help you, not to hinder you, then you can actually start making a difference.
Still, it's going to be hard to convince the average, relatively wealthy, contented middle-class citizen that he should be outraged at how he's being mistreated...
The market doesn't have to be truly free in order to work in "true free market fashion". In fact, often it works better when it's tempered with a little regulation (e.g. antitrust, etc). A free market regulated with copyrights is perfectly able to decide if a book is overpriced. A purely free market would be less capable, due to consumers' short-sightedness.
Let's not twist this too much. The author has a choice to make for himself on how much of his copyright he wants to reserve. If some authors don't want their copyrights, they can easily deny them. It's really no burden at all for those who don't want the copyrights to their works.
Just try and stop me ;)
Firstly, although I don't have any statistics (and neither do you), in my day-to-day Internet browsing, I have seen many free(dom) videos, books, essays, or just plain web pages. There's plenty of PD works out there that have been dedicated over the past few years, just not publicly.
Secondly, it's not nearly enough just to compare raw numbers of works dedicated. Doing so assumes the three lymerics I wrote and dedicated to the PD are worth the same as, say, the Lord of the Rings trilogy. A far better measurement would weight each work in terms of popularity, so that my lymerics would barely compare to the cultural contribution of Lord of the Rings.
Thirdly, "copyright" and "public domain" are deceptive, especially in this day and age. There's plenty of copyrighted material given away legitimately for free, often with redistribution freedoms attached. Assuming hypothetically that it were possible, would we really consider the dedication of a piece of software previously under a BSD-style license to the public domain to be a full copyright-to-public-domain dedication?
The opt-in method really only targets those sitting on the fence. They'll more than likely be giving away their product for free, and they probably haven't spent an enormous amount of time on their work (or else they'd probably feel the need to be reimbursed for their time). Any influx of works into the public domain probably would've been given away for free anyway (admittedly, just from a single source), and are statistically less likely to be accomplished or popular works.
I think you're exaggerating. The entertainment industry produces a staggering amount of content, all of which you can bet your bottom dollar they will copyright. Not just that, but they will separately copyright many components, and re-releases. We would have to have copyrights on each special feature of every (re-)release of every DVD. We would have to have copyright on each arrangement of every piece of music. Every minor release of software would also be copyrighted (imagine what that'd be like with all the anti-virus products, or Windows). What about every live performance of every song? There are huge numbers of copyrights that we don't typically count.