If they're considering OOXML on equal terms with ODF, then that shows they're clearly biased towards MS.
I read that, knee-jerked, and thought "you really are biased against MS, aren't you?" I read on and saw you didn't actually do anything to correct that reaction. You really think that the simple act of comparing the MS standard to the ODF on equal terms shows a bias towards MS? If ODF were truly superior, a comparison on equal terms would come up with similar results to a biased one. I think you missed the point of the "equal" bit, which is funny because you emphasised it.
I'm sorry, but it just isn't possible to be a supporter of Free software and also endorse closed, proprietary standards.
Was it possible to be a commie and to support freedom?
It's a blatant move by MS (using covertly-paid henchmen) to fracture the open-source community.
Proof? Evidence? How do you know that the GNOME isn't doing what the article summary suggested, and actually considering the format on equal terms with ODF?
Just great. McCarthian politics within software. "Oh, you don't like ODF? Why not? Your sounding like a closed-standard sympathiser and a Microsoft lackey!"
the word "sometimes", which you seem to conviniently gloss over.
The words were "often" and "typically", and I didn't gloss over them. They suggest that in most cases, they will uphold political power, so therefore, I'm most probably right. You seemed to conveniently gloss over the meaning of the paragraph.
If he's a cop pretending to not be a cop, he's keeeping the fact that he's a cop secret. He's secret police.
But, as I also said, he doesn't carry the same stigma of the secret police tag. He's not out there to maintain power, and consequently he won't nor should be seen in the same light as typical secret police.
If I write a book, why should I continue to get profits from it 50 years later?
Plus however long you live for, don't forget. It's 50 years (or 75 in certain countries) after the artist's death. It truly is insane. At this rate, we may as well just grant infinite copyrights, because it seems everyone has been blinded by the concept of ownership of works.
In fact, I'd wager that 98% of works out there don't take in any significant money after 40 years. However, big corporations want to a) milk that remaining 2% for all they are worth and b) want to hold on to the 98% just in case something in there is worth something.
Those two percent would have made them a lot of money in the first 40 years, and now they are a part of the culture. The artists and the labels really owe it to the people to put it in public domain. All the others, well, most of their value is gone, so you might as well give it back after 40 years anyway.
You have the concept of "backwards"... um... backwards. Backward evolution means that you become less adapted to your surroundings, and are less likely to survive. It doesn't aim for some lofty ideal of perfection, where anorexia will kill you, and all our survival mechanisms are aesthetically pleasing.
What is it going to take before all consumers simply say "enough of this hassle, no more music purchases?"
It'll take more lawsuits against the common man. Without that, people aren't going to notice or care. It seems that the effect of attempting to set precedent here is to allow the RIAA to pick off whoever they like. If they happen to suspect someone is sharing files, they make a case, try it and it fails, they can always pull this one out of their asses, saying "you have mp3s, cough up some cash".
Anyone who knows me knows I'm decidedly pro-copyright. However, all too often, there comes a story like this that makes you wish copyright had better representatives.
I simply cannot see how it benefits me to let my government grant big companies a monopoly on what is rapidly becoming our common, shared culture.
Oh really? I never had any trouble. Let me explain:
Information can be shared infinitely, which is usually great. However, it means information has no scarcity, which in turn means no real money can be made naturally from it. Why would anyone buy it when they can get it for free of the internet? More importantly, if there's no money to be made, why would people bother creating it? Many people are happy to devote what little of their spare time to make menial projects, but distribution is difficult without fame.
Enter copyrights! All it does is give the artists ownership rights over the information they created. It doesn't tell them what to do, or how to do it, it just says, "if you want to, you can decide who gets your work and for what price for a limited amount of time, before it's fed back into the culture". It's beautiful in that it has all the creative works of a copyright-less society plus added works created because of copyrights! It's purely an improvement in our culture, unless you happen to be of the opinion that more choice in artistic works is bad.
Unfortunately, some people don't quite respect the ingeniousness of copyrights and the importance of what it does, and prefer instead to take their own copy of the creative works for free. It contributes nothing back into the culture pool, and discourages other people from doing so. In fact, it's a uniquely twisted economic problem, where an industry competes with, and could possibly muzzle out, its own supplier, eventually self-destructing. Copyright and guilt of not paying artists are currently the only thing preventing that.
Naturally, the people who copy illegally are punished, and because copyright infringement is a civil issue, it's left to the copyright owners to prosecute. Unfortunately, because copying is so attractively convenient and cheap in the short term, it's grown quite popular, and consequently the people who actually uphold copyright law are turned into the bad guys. It makes a twisted sense, because copyright delivers on its promise to deliver more culture far before the consumers deliver their end of the bargain: the payment. The debt collector has always been vilified. It's a shame because if people actually held up their end of the social contract, there wouldn't be a problem. The worst part is that copyright becomes the scapegoat, and a very vocal minority seems to be in favour of throwing out the baby with bathwater in order to get the debt collector (how's that for a mixed metaphor?).
So in conclusion, copyright provides more choice, and gives everyone a much richer culture, as well as economic benefits. The problem is that despite being a well-rounded legal principle, certain bickering is ruining its reputation. I hope that cleaned some things up for you.
Right now, the pirated product is of higher worth than the purchased product.
If only it were that simple. The worth of, shall we say, the "piracy industry" is completely tethered to its suppliers: the artists and publishers. If the superior pirated wins out, and the legitimate media industries lose money and slow production, they too will also experience a similar loss in value. Even more unfortunately, the "piracy industry" will only experience this loss a significant time after the copyright holders, after the damage has been done. It's a rare economic problem. It's not exactly that often that you have a business that can compete and completely undercut its own supplier.
But I guess you already figured that out. My point is more to ask how we deal with it. You say the **AA has taken the wrong approach, using fear to rule their IP domain, but I don't really see a superior approach. You say they should start looking at how to make their product more attractive, but that's very difficult. In theory, if it were legal, you'd be able to get any artistic work you want from a thriving P2P network. How would the **AA compete? What can they possibly offer that competes with a comprehensive collection of art at negligible cost?
They could, at significant initial expense to them, undercut their own prices in an attempt to compete with pirates, but there are problems. The pirated copies will always be cheaper and simpler to acquire (no stores, online or otherwise, no logging in, no credit cards, etc, etc). And they're really the only group who has the size to weather such a downsize. How will smaller labels cope? How do we know piracy won't increase rapidly once they fold? These are all questions that haven't yet a serious positive answer.
There's also talk about a change in business model, but so far, all we have are theoretical suggestions, and Radiohead, a band with a lot of fame and money releasing a single album that a third of people downloaded for free. Copyright, as a business model, is beautifully competitive, only affecting works their creator chooses it to affect. Any business model can be tried out in parallel and can compete in fair and even terms. Like I said, we have had one isolated example of an alternative business model working, and although its success is encouraging, we can't yet judge it's worthiness in the long term against another tried and true system that's been working full-time for years.
For now the best advice is, if you don't like the system of fear, don't buy their stuff, and sure as hell, don't pirate it. You won't be accused of being a pirate by any videos or leaflets, and there will be nothing to fear from them.
In this country, we have laws to secure freedom.
Not really. In practice, many laws work out that way, but that isn't why laws are made. The general philosophy is that free people will benefit society, and there are many laws out there that are to guarantee freedom, but they all do so by restricting the freedom of someone else. When you kill someone, you have a freedom restricted by law. Not everything translates neatly into more freedom. Another example, apart from copyright law, is contract law. Both parties could be free to do whatever they like after signing a contract, but we restrict their freedom to break their contract because we know some things would never get done. It's for the public good.
Seems to me that consumers are a larger portion of the public than record labels and movie studios. Seems to me that there's a larger "public benefit" to giving the stuff away if we have to.
Consumers are indeed a larger group than record labels and movie studios, but there isn't some us-versus-them dichotomy between them. The copyright industries provide us with entertainment and economic benefits. If we give away stuff for free, we'll certainly lose the latter, and eventually lose the former. The **AA know this, business people know this, and the commo
The **AA considers ANY copying, even copying that has time and again been considered FAIR USE, to be "theft."
Yeah, I do understand that. I also understand the law (or at least its current interpretation of it) contradicts that. I believe that ripping CDs was explicitly legally sanctioned a few months back. I think the **AA knows they aren't going to get what they want. They just want to make sure they aren't screwed over by an unwillingness to prosecute piracy.
Your emphasis is crap. I only highlighted the last sentence because it concisely wraps up the paragraph and states directly why you were wrong. The rest of the paragraph supported it. You however, have highlighted words and half sentences taken out of context, in a fruitless attempt to prove me wrong, and a not quite so fruitless attempt to prove that I'm "often" and "typically" right.
But let's think about this for a second. "Secret Police" is the wrong term because it does imply that it helps maintain power, rather than actually executing justice. Undercover police are the other way around. Using "Secret Police" gives the wrong impression.
Because the President's "approval rating" is less than 30% and Congress' is even lower than his. If Congress and the President represesented us, their approval ratings would be above 50%.
OK, fair enough. They are currently due for a change. Talk to me after the next elections, and we'll see then.
Why people are so addicted to this crazy bastard is quite beyond me.
He's a product of passion without broader perspective. He's a good reason why you should probably consult people who don't agree with you before attempting to institute change.
Secret police (sometimes political police) are a police organization which operates in secrecy to maintain national security against internal threats to the state. Secret police forces are typically associated with totalitarian regimes, as they are often used to maintain the political power of the state rather than uphold the rule of law.
(Emphasis mine)
Oh, I guess you're wrong then.
Perhaps one day my descendants will again have a representative government, rather than the one party plutocracy it has become.
How do you know their unrepresentative? How do you know you're not making the same mistake that so many before you have made, in assuming democracy is broken because it doesn't represent your view on $RANDOM_ISSUE?
Stop pirating! It's an easy way around the bill, around the **AA nightmare, around the corporate lobbyists, etc. Just stop doing it, and everyone will calm down a bit. If you hate the **AA so much, why don't you just boycott them? And if you really like their work, why not just cough up some cash for it? Surely that's better than this legislative circus.
As a side note, I'd like to point out that the title is incredibly biased and inaccurate. They imply that by copying a piece of media is illegal. It isn't, only copying the content on it in certain circumstances is illegal. The media is completely interchangeable and optional. It should be "Copy that movie, lose your computer" or something like that. It at least wouldn't be woefully inaccurate.
Wow! Just wow! I mean, I can do a mental interpreter, but you're saying you can actually compile your code mentally? You must have done decades of mental training!
Have you considered changing your profession from programmer to jedi? You could probably give Yoda a run for his money.
It's nothing to do with the extremes. It's to do with the fact that one extreme is ignoring the law and just going ahead with their plans. The other extreme is right to prosecute them, and try to curb that behaviour. We can ignore or respond to the **AA on equal terms, but if we ignore students who pirate, they get exactly what they want at the detriment of everyone else.
They continue to claim that artists are getting hurt when they arent, only their profits are.
They are, aren't they? Wouldn't you be hurt if your job security was threatened? The more the record industry loses, the less generous they can afford to be in other areas, including artist signings, bonuses, and CD prices. Everyone loses except the pirates (who don't get caught).
BTW, why was my post flamebait anyway? The illusion of empiricism and fairness in the moderation system is becoming simply laughable.
Actually, the popularity of a law is its/very basis/ for legitimacy, at least in a democratic society.
Agreed. One would hope though that the smarter people would make compelling arguments, and the even smarter people tear those arguments to shreds, and the smarter still people... etc, etc. That's the way the fairytale works. Unfortunately, it's relatively easy to make beneficial laws that infringe on perceived rights look bad in an age of sound bites and slogans. How are you meant to explain the subtle brilliance of allowing the artist power over the fruits of his mind without resorting to slogans, exaggerations, or cheap, emotive imagery? How are you supposed to communicate the voluminous fallacies that the phrase "information wants to be free" contains in a single slogan? It's pretty tough.
Not that I'm complaining mind. Democracy is usually a pretty damn good way of sorting out our issues. It just has its weaknesses, and short-sightedness and emotional appeals happen to be among them.
If the numbers went down, the MAFIAA will claim that their anti-piracy efforts are working. This means that not only will those anti-piracy efforts not go away, but people are much more likely to take them seriously with their next claim.
I predict that it would take a year or two of piracy falling before the **AA would start backing down. After that, I would expect more and more DRM-free downloads to become available, but I would doubt the DMCA would be redacted. We would certainly see less CBDTPAs being pushed through. We've become more savvy to the problem of piracy, and unfortunately, we will never go back to our blissful naivety again now that the damage has been done, but I think we can be a little less trigger-happy.
If the numbers didn't go down, the MAFIAA will claim that piracy is rampant, and use that as an excuse to do even more DRM, and get even more laws passed for them.
Yup, which is why I say, for the love of god, STOP PIRATING!
If the numbers went down, I claim that this proves that piracy isn't as much of a threat to their profits as they thought, and therefore, DRM should end.
It means they're succeeding in their campaign against piracy. The DRM's their choice, but if piracy essentially ended, it won't seem so beneficial.
If the numbers didn't go down, I claim that this proves that people are so sick and tired of the MAFIAA's bullshit on their legitimate products that they're willing to turn to piracy.
Why did they pirate, and not just boycott them? If you can't answer that satisfactorily, trust me, they will construe it as greed on the consumers' part.
Here's my trump card, though: If we really can't tell who's right, the default position should be consumer freedom.
Pretty weak trump. We have laws for one purpose: to restrict freedom for public benefit. That really can't be used as a trump card against a law, because if followed through, it could be used as a trump card on any law.
No, I'm pretty sure the GP was right. It's not exactly helpful having people grow up thinking they have some right to something they didn't buy, create, or acquire legally for free. Also, it's not helpful to have a large group of people with little to no understanding of economics take an economics law into their own hands.
Artists get the benefits in the form of increased sales down the road and financial security, while the RIAA essentially weathers the piracy for them. They put their capital on the line to fight piracy, they own the copyrights, the artist has and continues to be paid, why shouldn't the RIAA take the money?
Slashdot Mirror
Just great. McCarthian politics within software. "Oh, you don't like ODF? Why not? Your sounding like a closed-standard sympathiser and a Microsoft lackey!"
Yeah, that's right. You trolls can find your own study, your own set of scientific rules, your own system of logic. Quit polluting ours!
What? No not me! I'm no troll! I love evolving at 100x normal rate! I love it! Don't kick me out, I can change!
You have the concept of "backwards"... um... backwards. Backward evolution means that you become less adapted to your surroundings, and are less likely to survive. It doesn't aim for some lofty ideal of perfection, where anorexia will kill you, and all our survival mechanisms are aesthetically pleasing.
Anyone who knows me knows I'm decidedly pro-copyright. However, all too often, there comes a story like this that makes you wish copyright had better representatives.
Information can be shared infinitely, which is usually great. However, it means information has no scarcity, which in turn means no real money can be made naturally from it. Why would anyone buy it when they can get it for free of the internet? More importantly, if there's no money to be made, why would people bother creating it? Many people are happy to devote what little of their spare time to make menial projects, but distribution is difficult without fame.
Enter copyrights! All it does is give the artists ownership rights over the information they created. It doesn't tell them what to do, or how to do it, it just says, "if you want to, you can decide who gets your work and for what price for a limited amount of time, before it's fed back into the culture". It's beautiful in that it has all the creative works of a copyright-less society plus added works created because of copyrights! It's purely an improvement in our culture, unless you happen to be of the opinion that more choice in artistic works is bad.
Unfortunately, some people don't quite respect the ingeniousness of copyrights and the importance of what it does, and prefer instead to take their own copy of the creative works for free. It contributes nothing back into the culture pool, and discourages other people from doing so. In fact, it's a uniquely twisted economic problem, where an industry competes with, and could possibly muzzle out, its own supplier, eventually self-destructing. Copyright and guilt of not paying artists are currently the only thing preventing that.
Naturally, the people who copy illegally are punished, and because copyright infringement is a civil issue, it's left to the copyright owners to prosecute. Unfortunately, because copying is so attractively convenient and cheap in the short term, it's grown quite popular, and consequently the people who actually uphold copyright law are turned into the bad guys. It makes a twisted sense, because copyright delivers on its promise to deliver more culture far before the consumers deliver their end of the bargain: the payment. The debt collector has always been vilified. It's a shame because if people actually held up their end of the social contract, there wouldn't be a problem. The worst part is that copyright becomes the scapegoat, and a very vocal minority seems to be in favour of throwing out the baby with bathwater in order to get the debt collector (how's that for a mixed metaphor?).
So in conclusion, copyright provides more choice, and gives everyone a much richer culture, as well as economic benefits. The problem is that despite being a well-rounded legal principle, certain bickering is ruining its reputation. I hope that cleaned some things up for you.
If only it were that simple. The worth of, shall we say, the "piracy industry" is completely tethered to its suppliers: the artists and publishers. If the superior pirated wins out, and the legitimate media industries lose money and slow production, they too will also experience a similar loss in value. Even more unfortunately, the "piracy industry" will only experience this loss a significant time after the copyright holders, after the damage has been done. It's a rare economic problem. It's not exactly that often that you have a business that can compete and completely undercut its own supplier.
But I guess you already figured that out. My point is more to ask how we deal with it. You say the **AA has taken the wrong approach, using fear to rule their IP domain, but I don't really see a superior approach. You say they should start looking at how to make their product more attractive, but that's very difficult. In theory, if it were legal, you'd be able to get any artistic work you want from a thriving P2P network. How would the **AA compete? What can they possibly offer that competes with a comprehensive collection of art at negligible cost?
They could, at significant initial expense to them, undercut their own prices in an attempt to compete with pirates, but there are problems. The pirated copies will always be cheaper and simpler to acquire (no stores, online or otherwise, no logging in, no credit cards, etc, etc). And they're really the only group who has the size to weather such a downsize. How will smaller labels cope? How do we know piracy won't increase rapidly once they fold? These are all questions that haven't yet a serious positive answer.
There's also talk about a change in business model, but so far, all we have are theoretical suggestions, and Radiohead, a band with a lot of fame and money releasing a single album that a third of people downloaded for free. Copyright, as a business model, is beautifully competitive, only affecting works their creator chooses it to affect. Any business model can be tried out in parallel and can compete in fair and even terms. Like I said, we have had one isolated example of an alternative business model working, and although its success is encouraging, we can't yet judge it's worthiness in the long term against another tried and true system that's been working full-time for years.
For now the best advice is, if you don't like the system of fear, don't buy their stuff, and sure as hell, don't pirate it. You won't be accused of being a pirate by any videos or leaflets, and there will be nothing to fear from them.
Not really. In practice, many laws work out that way, but that isn't why laws are made. The general philosophy is that free people will benefit society, and there are many laws out there that are to guarantee freedom, but they all do so by restricting the freedom of someone else. When you kill someone, you have a freedom restricted by law. Not everything translates neatly into more freedom. Another example, apart from copyright law, is contract law. Both parties could be free to do whatever they like after signing a contract, but we restrict their freedom to break their contract because we know some things would never get done. It's for the public good.
Consumers are indeed a larger group than record labels and movie studios, but there isn't some us-versus-them dichotomy between them. The copyright industries provide us with entertainment and economic benefits. If we give away stuff for free, we'll certainly lose the latter, and eventually lose the former. The **AA know this, business people know this, and the commo
Yeah, and I'm sick of schools that teach kids they are better than Americans! All this cultural bigotry has to stop!
But let's think about this for a second. "Secret Police" is the wrong term because it does imply that it helps maintain power, rather than actually executing justice. Undercover police are the other way around. Using "Secret Police" gives the wrong impression.OK, fair enough. They are currently due for a change. Talk to me after the next elections, and we'll see then.
And moderators believe that the grandparent deserves -1 flamebait and the parent deserves +1 insightful. It is indeed a crazy, mixed-up world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_Police (Emphasis mine)
Oh, I guess you're wrong then.How do you know their unrepresentative? How do you know you're not making the same mistake that so many before you have made, in assuming democracy is broken because it doesn't represent your view on $RANDOM_ISSUE?
Stop pirating! It's an easy way around the bill, around the **AA nightmare, around the corporate lobbyists, etc. Just stop doing it, and everyone will calm down a bit. If you hate the **AA so much, why don't you just boycott them? And if you really like their work, why not just cough up some cash for it? Surely that's better than this legislative circus.
As a side note, I'd like to point out that the title is incredibly biased and inaccurate. They imply that by copying a piece of media is illegal. It isn't, only copying the content on it in certain circumstances is illegal. The media is completely interchangeable and optional. It should be "Copy that movie, lose your computer" or something like that. It at least wouldn't be woefully inaccurate.
Wow! Just wow! I mean, I can do a mental interpreter, but you're saying you can actually compile your code mentally? You must have done decades of mental training!
Have you considered changing your profession from programmer to jedi? You could probably give Yoda a run for his money.
It's nothing to do with the extremes. It's to do with the fact that one extreme is ignoring the law and just going ahead with their plans. The other extreme is right to prosecute them, and try to curb that behaviour. We can ignore or respond to the **AA on equal terms, but if we ignore students who pirate, they get exactly what they want at the detriment of everyone else.
BTW, why was my post flamebait anyway? The illusion of empiricism and fairness in the moderation system is becoming simply laughable.
Not that I'm complaining mind. Democracy is usually a pretty damn good way of sorting out our issues. It just has its weaknesses, and short-sightedness and emotional appeals happen to be among them.
No, I'm pretty sure the GP was right. It's not exactly helpful having people grow up thinking they have some right to something they didn't buy, create, or acquire legally for free. Also, it's not helpful to have a large group of people with little to no understanding of economics take an economics law into their own hands.
Artists get the benefits in the form of increased sales down the road and financial security, while the RIAA essentially weathers the piracy for them. They put their capital on the line to fight piracy, they own the copyrights, the artist has and continues to be paid, why shouldn't the RIAA take the money?