The terms of these copyrights were carefully chosen to give the creator enough time to make some money, but not so long that they could simply stop creating and sit back and live of an afternoon's work they put in fifty years before in a recording studio.
I challenge you to produce something in an afternoon that will allow you to live exclusively off said work for 50 years. That, or stop trivialising the creative process.
While I don't think anyone's been delusional about it, this is proof that government officials are in the pocket of corporations, or at least have some ulterior motive for acting in their interests.
I'm always a little disturbed about what passes for proof of this proposition these days. The whole case against them is heaps upon heaps of here-say, conspiracy theories, and opinions borne of ignorance or a lack of perspective when viewing the facts.
For example, your "proof" here could more easily and sensibly be explained by the government wanting to protect entertainment, due to the fact that the vast majority of their constituents actually like entertainment. Republicans and Democrats are far too smart to jeopardise their position with the people by following something like that.
That's not to necessarily say your theories aren't true, though.
I can imagine that you're getting pretty sick of people generalising slashdot into a single opinion, right?
I can imagine because I'm in a similar predicament. I'm getting sick of people saying the same damn thing every time someone notices one opinion is more popular than another on slashdot, or someone addresses a group of people with said popular opinion.
Hands up anyone here who believes that, out of all the opinions we actively discuss, there exists one that everyone here shares and nobody opposes?
The position of no copyright simply serves to alienate people. Sure there are reasons against copyright as it is now, but most people are somewhere between "coping with it"and "enjoying it" (or, at least, what it has provided us). No copyright, on the other hand, is an extreme viewpoint that is trivially easy to poke holes in. Copyright supporters, such as myself, barely have to lift a finger in order to generate scepticism and doubt over the "everything will be somehow fine" mentality that prevails over copyright abolition, which is a shame, because middle ground and reform is exactly what would be best for copyright.
As it stands, pro-copyright lobbyists can stand up at a public venue and call you all liars, and get away with it. Tell me I am wrong please.
When are these companies going to give up with BR?
If I had to guess, I would say when it stops being profitable.
The time for BD to fail is ending. HDTV sets are becoming increasingly popular, and the price of both players and discs are dropping. Demand is only going to increase.
Well, maybe you will consider participating in the moderation system (God knows it needs some variation), but other than that, it's not at all constructive.
Me? I've quit playing the moderation game and opted out of moderation long ago.
If you want to make the moderation system better, you might consider contributing.
If/. wasn't so poorly programmed, I suppose that might exempt my posts from moderation. Something like 'judge not and be not judged'?
Sure, that could work. But, of course, you would have to start at -1 in case you started posting links to goatse or attack sites in all your posts, but at least there would be no chance of you being modded up!
Since when has Slashdot trumpeted fascism? Now we're cheering outlawing things because they're offensive?
Wow, you're the second guy today who has presented the "everyone on Slashdot" fallacy.
He didn't say "everyone on Slashdot". He noticed, quite rightly, that a majority of people here are not particularly pro-fascism. He then questioned the reason behind the apparent evidence against the trend he noticed. That's not the fallacy you're referring to.
Do I hear the pitter-patter of the Slashdot groupthink? And to think that some people think you have to be an authority figure or a corporation in order to brainwash people...
That's the point. They don't own it. Because there is no such thing as intellectual property. Because it's as stupid as saying you own a thought. How could you own a thought? As soon as you tell someone that thought, he owns it too. And there is nothing you can do about that. If you do not tell it to anyone, you can't even prove that you have that thought at all. (Oh, and if then someone else comes up with it, he can claim he was the inventor.)
It all depends on the definition of property. As you pointed out, it makes little sense to define it as simply a person who had that thought at some time or another. Then, as soon as anyone has contact with that piece of property, then they will own it as well, which gives the property no power. It's like, if I loaned you my car, then it suddenly becomes your property as well, free to loan it out to whoever you want. It makes no sense to define it in that way. Thus, we must make intellectual (and physical) property less transferable than the items themselves, i.e. there must be a distinction between possession and property.
But, as you pointed out, we need to be able to tell our property to someone else, but again, make the distinction between them having the idea, and them owning the idea. There are (probably) a few ways we could do this, but essentially, we use the same metric we use for anything to which we start applying property: finders keepers. The first person to have the idea (with some caveats) gets ownership over it.
That, however, poses its own problems. How can we prove person A had an idea before person B? We can't. This, however, turns out not to be much of a problem, because the value of of IP is derived from public distribution. The obvious solution (but is it a correct solution?) to the problem then becomes to grant ownership to whoever publicly displays their idea first.
Again, this potentially causes problems. Person B may have gone through the same thought processes as person A, and some people believe that, as such, person B has just as much right as person A to the idea. Also, there's the problem of what to do when someone decides to take something obvious, something people have collectively discovered and used well before one person took ownership. As one person told me, "you can't own the number 5". It would be like one person in a village declaring that he owned the village well, despite the fact he put no more effort into it than the next man.
Now, from here, we can go in two viable directions. We could either say "tough cookies", and stick to the "finders keepers" policy, making an exception for things already in common use (the "public domain", as I will now call it), or we can do something a little more radical, and allow multiple, independent parties to own the same idea.
The first direction has some advantages, including the fact that it would encourage the publication of ideas, that it preserves extremely efficient and verifiable metric for determining ownership (aside from determining what is public domain), and also that it keeps in line with physical property (which makes it easier to understand and accept among ordinary people). It has the disadvantage of being seen as unfair by many (though, this is a common side effect of new applications of the concept of property), and the concept of public domain requires the courts to decide, which is inefficient and costly.
Before I go into the advantages/disadvantages of the second direction, I'd like to first elaborate on how it would work. Surely this direction doesn't distinguish between possession and property, right? Well, not necessarily. The concept of copying then becomes important. Under the first direction, copying owned ideas is automatically bad, since n
I think what you are trying to get at is that ideas can be shared without incurring physical cost (something that isn't true with tangible property). Which is precisely why intellectual property rights must exist for a short period of time.
Intellectual property, much more so than physical property, builds upon previous "ideas", which means we need to make sure that "ideas" aren't owned for too long. Also, intellectual property is more durable than physical property (since it will last as long as someone remembers it), so it makes it especially important to impose restrictions.
How about my right to fucking run a game on a new computer when I purchase it? Or my right to fucking play a movie on a computer as well as on a Playstation?
That's not a right. You get exactly what you buy; just make sure you're buying want you want.
Or my fucking right to not be put in jail for 8 years like I'd murdered someone when I share a song with a friend?
You'd be hard-pressed to find a court in the world who would jail you for 8 years for sharing a single song with a single friend, given that it could even be considered fair use. More often, it's when you start anonymously many songs to many, many people that the big damages and harsh penalties kick in.
Or my fucking right to lend someone a music CD I'd bought?
That's fair use, which is not under contention here.
Or my fucking right to not have every action on the internet monitored like I was molesting little children for lunch?
Come on. You don't seriously believe that copyright holders are watching your every action on the internet, right? They're mostly hanging around file-sharing networks, where anyone is allowed to share files (except copyright holders apparently; they ruin the party). It's where 99% of the damage happens. What businessman, in his right mind, would outlay the money required for monitoring "every action on the internet" to clean up 1% (or less) of piracy? I call FUD.
Question: Is it considered incest if two siblings have sex with another person in a threesome (given they don't give each other... attention)? If so, is it considered incest if two siblings are naked in the same frame?
Or, possibly, the slashdot editors are playing passive-aggressive with the corporate overlord's demands that slashdot become more like a social networking site, and less like a news aggregator with comments. I think this has been hinted at by Rob & Jamie in the past.
I think that wouldn't be so bad, provided it's done tastefully. You could still have the news and comments, but you could also have the social element running concurrently. Hell, they could even make it possible to opt out of the social networking part, and have a news-only account.
It'd be nice to have the ability to talk to like-minded people, not just in the context of a specific topic specified by the article.
Absolutely. Saying things like that could eventually become an erosion on our freedom of speech, and I think I speak for all of us here when I say that I want such phrasing to be illegal.
You also have to remember that copyright reform is not a popular position amongst voters, even though I doubt most would object to some conservative tweaks, like reasonable term lengths. It would be a little unusual for a seasoned party like the Democrats to radically differ from popular positions on... well... anything.
Ignorance more freely begets confidence... than does knowledge.
I think you're on the right track. I think that knowledge begets wisdom, which begets caution. In the process of gaining rigorous knowledge, most people's horizons are inevitably challenged, and their intuition is inevitably proved fallible. This is a facet of wisdom, if ancient pop philosopher Aristotle is to be believed.
And Fizzl's comment is pretty damn funny after hearing about ignorance from atheists.:)
No, no, you don't understand. The university is a private business. They are under no obligation to produce evidence for their business practices. Hell, they are under no obligation to use evidence when deciding their business practices. If they believe, evidence based or not, that attendance produces better graduates and furthers the university's reputation, then they have the right to institute the policy. The most we can do is decide not to study there.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it does keep the bastards honest... ;)
I challenge you to produce something in an afternoon that will allow you to live exclusively off said work for 50 years. That, or stop trivialising the creative process.
I'm always a little disturbed about what passes for proof of this proposition these days. The whole case against them is heaps upon heaps of here-say, conspiracy theories, and opinions borne of ignorance or a lack of perspective when viewing the facts.
For example, your "proof" here could more easily and sensibly be explained by the government wanting to protect entertainment, due to the fact that the vast majority of their constituents actually like entertainment. Republicans and Democrats are far too smart to jeopardise their position with the people by following something like that.
That's not to necessarily say your theories aren't true, though.
I can imagine that you're getting pretty sick of people generalising slashdot into a single opinion, right?
I can imagine because I'm in a similar predicament. I'm getting sick of people saying the same damn thing every time someone notices one opinion is more popular than another on slashdot, or someone addresses a group of people with said popular opinion.
Hands up anyone here who believes that, out of all the opinions we actively discuss, there exists one that everyone here shares and nobody opposes?
You are most definitely wrong.
The position of no copyright simply serves to alienate people. Sure there are reasons against copyright as it is now, but most people are somewhere between "coping with it"and "enjoying it" (or, at least, what it has provided us). No copyright, on the other hand, is an extreme viewpoint that is trivially easy to poke holes in. Copyright supporters, such as myself, barely have to lift a finger in order to generate scepticism and doubt over the "everything will be somehow fine" mentality that prevails over copyright abolition, which is a shame, because middle ground and reform is exactly what would be best for copyright.
As it stands, pro-copyright lobbyists can stand up at a public venue and call you all liars, and get away with it. Tell me I am wrong please.
If I had to guess, I would say when it stops being profitable.
The time for BD to fail is ending. HDTV sets are becoming increasingly popular, and the price of both players and discs are dropping. Demand is only going to increase.
That must be the funniest two-character post in the history of Slashdot.
Not in the slightest. ;)
Well, maybe you will consider participating in the moderation system (God knows it needs some variation), but other than that, it's not at all constructive.
Lighten up! It's just Slashdot.
I prefer this, more informative metric:
D = -e^(i*pi + ln(d')))
Doesn't work for worthless, or negatively valued degrees though.
If you want to make the moderation system better, you might consider contributing.
Sure, that could work. But, of course, you would have to start at -1 in case you started posting links to goatse or attack sites in all your posts, but at least there would be no chance of you being modded up!
+1 Insightful
He didn't say "everyone on Slashdot". He noticed, quite rightly, that a majority of people here are not particularly pro-fascism. He then questioned the reason behind the apparent evidence against the trend he noticed. That's not the fallacy you're referring to.
Do I hear the pitter-patter of the Slashdot groupthink? And to think that some people think you have to be an authority figure or a corporation in order to brainwash people...
It all depends on the definition of property. As you pointed out, it makes little sense to define it as simply a person who had that thought at some time or another. Then, as soon as anyone has contact with that piece of property, then they will own it as well, which gives the property no power. It's like, if I loaned you my car, then it suddenly becomes your property as well, free to loan it out to whoever you want. It makes no sense to define it in that way. Thus, we must make intellectual (and physical) property less transferable than the items themselves, i.e. there must be a distinction between possession and property.
But, as you pointed out, we need to be able to tell our property to someone else, but again, make the distinction between them having the idea, and them owning the idea. There are (probably) a few ways we could do this, but essentially, we use the same metric we use for anything to which we start applying property: finders keepers. The first person to have the idea (with some caveats) gets ownership over it.
That, however, poses its own problems. How can we prove person A had an idea before person B? We can't. This, however, turns out not to be much of a problem, because the value of of IP is derived from public distribution. The obvious solution (but is it a correct solution?) to the problem then becomes to grant ownership to whoever publicly displays their idea first.
Again, this potentially causes problems. Person B may have gone through the same thought processes as person A, and some people believe that, as such, person B has just as much right as person A to the idea. Also, there's the problem of what to do when someone decides to take something obvious, something people have collectively discovered and used well before one person took ownership. As one person told me, "you can't own the number 5". It would be like one person in a village declaring that he owned the village well, despite the fact he put no more effort into it than the next man.
Now, from here, we can go in two viable directions. We could either say "tough cookies", and stick to the "finders keepers" policy, making an exception for things already in common use (the "public domain", as I will now call it), or we can do something a little more radical, and allow multiple, independent parties to own the same idea.
The first direction has some advantages, including the fact that it would encourage the publication of ideas, that it preserves extremely efficient and verifiable metric for determining ownership (aside from determining what is public domain), and also that it keeps in line with physical property (which makes it easier to understand and accept among ordinary people). It has the disadvantage of being seen as unfair by many (though, this is a common side effect of new applications of the concept of property), and the concept of public domain requires the courts to decide, which is inefficient and costly.
Before I go into the advantages/disadvantages of the second direction, I'd like to first elaborate on how it would work. Surely this direction doesn't distinguish between possession and property, right? Well, not necessarily. The concept of copying then becomes important. Under the first direction, copying owned ideas is automatically bad, since n
Excellent post; I just wanted to add something:
Intellectual property, much more so than physical property, builds upon previous "ideas", which means we need to make sure that "ideas" aren't owned for too long. Also, intellectual property is more durable than physical property (since it will last as long as someone remembers it), so it makes it especially important to impose restrictions.
That's not a right. You get exactly what you buy; just make sure you're buying want you want.
You'd be hard-pressed to find a court in the world who would jail you for 8 years for sharing a single song with a single friend, given that it could even be considered fair use. More often, it's when you start anonymously many songs to many, many people that the big damages and harsh penalties kick in.
That's fair use, which is not under contention here.
Come on. You don't seriously believe that copyright holders are watching your every action on the internet, right? They're mostly hanging around file-sharing networks, where anyone is allowed to share files (except copyright holders apparently; they ruin the party). It's where 99% of the damage happens. What businessman, in his right mind, would outlay the money required for monitoring "every action on the internet" to clean up 1% (or less) of piracy? I call FUD.
You'd be surprised how little scientific basis matters in day-to-day life.
Question: Is it considered incest if two siblings have sex with another person in a threesome (given they don't give each other... attention)? If so, is it considered incest if two siblings are naked in the same frame?
I think that wouldn't be so bad, provided it's done tastefully. You could still have the news and comments, but you could also have the social element running concurrently. Hell, they could even make it possible to opt out of the social networking part, and have a news-only account.
It'd be nice to have the ability to talk to like-minded people, not just in the context of a specific topic specified by the article.
Absolutely. Saying things like that could eventually become an erosion on our freedom of speech, and I think I speak for all of us here when I say that I want such phrasing to be illegal.
Oh god, it's started already!
You also have to remember that copyright reform is not a popular position amongst voters, even though I doubt most would object to some conservative tweaks, like reasonable term lengths. It would be a little unusual for a seasoned party like the Democrats to radically differ from popular positions on... well... anything.
But personality politics are so "in" these days!
FTFY.
I think you're on the right track. I think that knowledge begets wisdom, which begets caution. In the process of gaining rigorous knowledge, most people's horizons are inevitably challenged, and their intuition is inevitably proved fallible. This is a facet of wisdom, if ancient pop philosopher Aristotle is to be believed.
And Fizzl's comment is pretty damn funny after hearing about ignorance from atheists. :)
;)
No, no, you don't understand. The university is a private business. They are under no obligation to produce evidence for their business practices. Hell, they are under no obligation to use evidence when deciding their business practices. If they believe, evidence based or not, that attendance produces better graduates and furthers the university's reputation, then they have the right to institute the policy. The most we can do is decide not to study there.