The idea of getting a lawyer is the best advice that anyone can give.
I concur. You should get yourself a lawyer.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice. You should consult a qualified professional as to whether or not this advice should be followed in full or in part. The previous statement applies recursively and infinitely. I, nor anyone affiliated with me, including, but not limited to, my employers and my lawyers, accept any responsibility for any damages caused directly or indirectly from following my advice.
Uhh, if the only reason you think intelligent design is not a valid theory is because you haven't looked at it as a valid "side" of the argument, then you have completely missed the point. The point is that intelligent design does not meet the requirements of a scientific theory. However, we can only get to that stage once all sides are considered.
It's the average corporation's sociopathic assessment of crime: if the opportunity costs outweigh the benefits, then they don't do it. Otherwise, they go for it. Software piracy may be a small offence compared with illegal dumping, but it can potentially be extremely costly for the amount of money it saves. Look at the RIAA for crying out loud.
...and everybody else apart from the artists and publishers are happy, until a few years down the track when music/movie proliferation goes down and prices come up:(
Why do you presuppose that anonymous sharing is only used for entertainment of the buyable kind?
Read carefully: he didn't. He "presupposed" that people are looking for entertainment (as you did). He was suggesting that instead of finding free entertainment from anonymous sharing (legal or illegal, if that's what you're getting at), you could get a job and pay for some other entertainment. I'm afraid you are the one who presupposed (and lost).
Or what if you're trading video footage and documents which the government wants hushed up?
Then you would persevere, even if it was a lot of work? I believe it was a suggestion, not a legal mandate.
... that as soon as someone dares to post something other than the usual expressions of paranoia and criticism, other less free-minded individuals accuse him of sheep mentality, or drinking the kool aid? Someone else has to see the irony in that!
I can't speak for anyone else (nor can you, BTW), but if the sentence was this:
"Engadget reports Apple has readied a blacklisting system which allows the company to remotely disable applications on your Mac desktop."
then I would be similarly suspicious. If it had been something like this:
"Engadget reports Microsoft has readied a blacklisting system which allows the company to remotely disable applications on your Zune Phone (or whatever it'll be called)."
then I would be a lot less suspicious. It makes a certain amount of sense to lock down a platform this way. MS and Apple have already relinquished control over their PC platforms, but not yet the iPhone. It has the advantage of making it more secure and potentially more user-friendly. There are good reasons why Apple or Microsoft would do this with a platform they own and control. Not so with a Windows/OSX computer that people have come to expect to be less user-friendly, less secure, and less controlled.
Besides, doesn't Microsoft distribute a "Malicious Software Removal Tool" via Windows update? How is that any different?
But, but but this is electronic media! It involves computers and intarwebs and a series of tubes and electrons and stuff, you're supposed to abandon all logic and common sense and instantly enter into Dummy Mode whenever that's the case!
Oh gee, how ironic. Can't you show some independent thought and actually try to follow the logic? Dummy mode seems exactly to be what you are stuck on now that the intarwebs has been mentioned.
The 2000% penalty comes from the fact that:
a) this particular offence is extremely common and widespread and b) is more damaging that most people realise
I'll give you the chance to follow that logic yourself and jolt yourself out of this intellectual laziness (unless, of course, it's just plain intellectual limitation).
Until then, there is no compelling reason to do so.
Well, the studios have promised not to use the image constraint token four another three and a half years. That's right, they gave you their word. I'm sure you can trust them.;)
I don't understand why you've been moded Offtopic because you are clearly Ontopic.
Clearly.
Well, I guess there is room to interpret him as off-topic if you don't take the popular heresay about politicians as fact, but it's such a tiny loophole, and nobody really goes against the groupthink... right? Right?
Given the number of phishing sites out there, it could be argued that every additional slap to the face that a user would have to get through in order to get to a phishing site (known phishing site, self-signed SSL, acknowledge that you are a fucking retard for bypassing the last two warnings, etc.) may be worth it.
That makes perfect sense, except, when it comes to things we don't like here on slashdot, we don't allow half measures. If it doesn't 100% eliminate phishing, then all it does is piss off legitimate users, while providing no additional security benefit.
Oh yeah? Well I believe that 2+2=5, and if you believe otherwise, then you're a whiny bitch. Behold my powers of rhetoric!
Seriously though, the whole business strategy as we know it is not geared towards sharing connections. There's nothing wrong with a business that doesn't require you to sign away your right to share your connection, but it will invariably cost more as people actually take them up on the offer, and their raw sales go down. As it stands, people actually sharing their connections when they're not supposed to just ends up with all the paying customers paying slightly more to hedge losses.
You already have to be someone like Britney Spears to make a comfortable living being an artist!
Although a cute statement, with a little truth behind it, it actually isn't accurate at all.
Whilst I don't doubt piracy is reducing the industry's total takings, I think piracy helps disperse what is taken much more widely. People rarely fork out the extorinate price of a CD on a band they've never heard of before. If you can get that album for free though then you are far more likely to discover you like "unknown band X's" music.
Piracy may just have a small place in what you would consider an optimal system, but we can't really afford to legitimise it. We, as music fans, would suffer a lot more from legitimised piracy than anything we could lose from wiping out piracy completely.
Besides, I actually reject the notion that piracy is needed to help propagate new music. Labels don't need piracy, because they have marketing, and can distribute samples of their music freely around the media. Indie artists can always use P2P without it actually being piracy, because they sanctioned it. By cracking down on piracy, but not so hard that we eliminate P2P sharing, everyone ends up getting more or less the best of both worlds. The person who misses out is the person who likes label music, but isn't prepared to pay for it, but his satisfaction would come at the expense of everyone else's.
I actually would like to see copyright infringement become a low-level crime. It would separate the rich and powerful from the legal system, would provide real disincentives to copyright infringement, and it would lend accountability to the whole process. Gone would be the days when the RIAA had to rely on their threat tactics, because it's no longer happening on their time and money, and tax-payers could be reimbursed by a small cut of the repayments. The biggest costs would be incurred at the beginning, but as copyright infringement becomes less popular, the costs will decrease, and we may even see economic benefits from there on out.
Music piracy doesn't prevent music being made, it just stops people making large amounts of money directly from music sales.
Music piracy also "just" stops people from making small amounts of money directly (or indirectly) if they didn't already have a large fanbase. You would have to be, oh I don't know, Britney Spears in order to make a comfortable living off being an "artist" in an environment of unrestricted piracy. Oh, and you'd probably have to start making a lot less records, and doing a lot more live stuff, so that people feel the need to pay the money to come to the show, rather than stay at home on their sucking up their endless supply of free media and instant gratification.
Just because people on/. want a bright future for media sharing, doesn't mean it's at all possible. Honestly, I don't know where people get it from. Formerly poor artists suddenly getting a break from people having total, anonymous power to break their financial futures? And those same anonymous overlords have plenty to gain from abusing their power? I would laugh if they weren't so serious about it.
As much as I support copyright, and even though you've marked me as a "foe", I wanted to say, even if we don't see eye to eye, your heart is in the right place, and I hope you do really well.
When only a miniscule amount of the revenue generated ends up with the intended recipient the purpose is obviously something else.
Sorry to ask you to explain the so called obvious, but why? What does copyright's purpose have to do with that? Copyright wasn't intended to make publishers money (because of people, flying f**k, remember?). If people are making money from it, good for them! I don't see how that affects the purpose of copyrights.
it becomes part of the incentive, not to create 'new works', but to repeat formulaic successes.
Ah, but formulaic successes wouldn't sell if they didn't have something to add. I think this whole "formulaic" BS is stupid anyway. It's a matter of tastes. Genres, styles, and tastes are allowed to have common elements spanning them. That's what defines them. Some have more spanning features, some have less, it's all just a matter of preference. The revenue comes after the fact.
Nowadays, when you type a movie you think is new into IMDB you're as likely as not to notice it's a remake of the 90's version which was a remake of a french 70's version which was a remake of a 30's
I was talking about truly incremental works. For example, if someone wanted to release the original Star Wars with an added home-made scene (not just the scene, the whole movie), then that would probably be sufficiently incremental. Now that I know that you were talking about remakes, I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that copyright in no way hinders incremental "improvements" on works.
However, as copyright protects not only the artists input into the production, but everything from there on, you get mass resources tagged on afterwards.
Yah, nowadays (with signed artists only), we have multiple "artists" contributing to a single work. Mostly the people you see/hear (again, predominantly with signed artists) are not the only contributors. I don't see why that's so bad. It's not like it's muzzling out other art forms.
In an ideal system, take the fixed amount of spending available from consumers. Divide that over, and distribute to the artists available.
Now take the same fixed amount and take away 90% that disappears in production, marketing and distribution. Take the remaining 10% and distribute to the artists. Combine that with the fact that the artists that in this case no longer get paid get drowned out by the financing of the lowest common denominator.
Making money from art is a hard business. The only reason why such deals exist is because there's a good chance that these deals are the best that the artist will get. If not (like, say if you were Radiohead or NIN), then you can do it alone.
Apart from the fact that it's not particularly rich, the fact is large parts of it appears to have existed before copyright
Not particularly rich? Are you joking? It's extremely rich. Don't be fooled by the ads on TV, our culture is not just made up of Hollywood and Pop. There are ridiculously many styles and art-forms that populate our culture. Do just a little digging, and you'll find more variety than you will ever get to experience in a lifetime. The 20th century saw an explosion in new-age styles, and art really diversified. It became a lot more than it was back without copyright, where art creation was relegated to a handful of styles. I'm not saying it was bad, it's just that we have seen a lot more diversity recently. This came from a number of factors, and copyright was one of them.
But besides that, can you imagine how much richer the culture would be if the money to a large extent actually went to the artists? Ten times the current input, at worst
If only it could work that way. Hey wait! Weren't you arguing that there were no positive benefits of copyright a second ago?
I'm not an artist. Not any artist releasing to the public, that is (let alone commercially).
You artists wouldn't even HAVE those 'rights' if the public didn't accept the trade of giving you those very very temporary rights in exchange for unlimited usage and 100% removal of the artists 'rights' 17 years after the copyright was filed.
And you wouldn't have anything resembling a significant culture. Stop pretending like artists owe you something. It was a fair trade.
It wasn't the public that keeps going back on this deal. It's the artists stealing from us, either stealing our property owed to us in return for their limited copyright, or they are stealing your non-copyright protected works from the public. You can't have it both ways.
Copyright was a law, sanctioned by the public. So was all its extensions. They are both part of the same device, both sanctioned by the public. It is you can't have it both ways.
stop making art for money and go into another line of work
The old saying "Be careful what you wish for" comes to mind...
Slashdot Mirror
Rather slugglishly, I'm afraid.
Yeah, that is, until they become unelectable and American media giants have no more use for them. Then, they are out of sponsors and out of a job.
I concur. You should get yourself a lawyer.
DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice. You should consult a qualified professional as to whether or not this advice should be followed in full or in part. The previous statement applies recursively and infinitely. I, nor anyone affiliated with me, including, but not limited to, my employers and my lawyers, accept any responsibility for any damages caused directly or indirectly from following my advice.
Brave bees help track down a serial killer! Find out more about these adorable heroic bees in the news at 11 o'clock tonight!
Uhh, if the only reason you think intelligent design is not a valid theory is because you haven't looked at it as a valid "side" of the argument, then you have completely missed the point. The point is that intelligent design does not meet the requirements of a scientific theory. However, we can only get to that stage once all sides are considered.
Ah! Keeping it in mint condition, I see.
It's the average corporation's sociopathic assessment of crime: if the opportunity costs outweigh the benefits, then they don't do it. Otherwise, they go for it. Software piracy may be a small offence compared with illegal dumping, but it can potentially be extremely costly for the amount of money it saves. Look at the RIAA for crying out loud.
Fixed that for you.
Read carefully: he didn't. He "presupposed" that people are looking for entertainment (as you did). He was suggesting that instead of finding free entertainment from anonymous sharing (legal or illegal, if that's what you're getting at), you could get a job and pay for some other entertainment. I'm afraid you are the one who presupposed (and lost).
Then you would persevere, even if it was a lot of work? I believe it was a suggestion, not a legal mandate.
... that as soon as someone dares to post something other than the usual expressions of paranoia and criticism, other less free-minded individuals accuse him of sheep mentality, or drinking the kool aid? Someone else has to see the irony in that!
I can't speak for anyone else (nor can you, BTW), but if the sentence was this:
"Engadget reports Apple has readied a blacklisting system which allows the company to remotely disable applications on your Mac desktop."
then I would be similarly suspicious. If it had been something like this:
"Engadget reports Microsoft has readied a blacklisting system which allows the company to remotely disable applications on your Zune Phone (or whatever it'll be called)."
then I would be a lot less suspicious. It makes a certain amount of sense to lock down a platform this way. MS and Apple have already relinquished control over their PC platforms, but not yet the iPhone. It has the advantage of making it more secure and potentially more user-friendly. There are good reasons why Apple or Microsoft would do this with a platform they own and control. Not so with a Windows/OSX computer that people have come to expect to be less user-friendly, less secure, and less controlled.
Besides, doesn't Microsoft distribute a "Malicious Software Removal Tool" via Windows update? How is that any different?
... and their critics are all fair and rational! *cough* *cough* cough*
Oh gee, how ironic. Can't you show some independent thought and actually try to follow the logic? Dummy mode seems exactly to be what you are stuck on now that the intarwebs has been mentioned.
The 2000% penalty comes from the fact that:
a) this particular offence is extremely common and widespread and
b) is more damaging that most people realise
I'll give you the chance to follow that logic yourself and jolt yourself out of this intellectual laziness (unless, of course, it's just plain intellectual limitation).
Fallacy of accident?
Well, the studios have promised not to use the image constraint token four another three and a half years. That's right, they gave you their word. I'm sure you can trust them. ;)
Clearly.
Well, I guess there is room to interpret him as off-topic if you don't take the popular heresay about politicians as fact, but it's such a tiny loophole, and nobody really goes against the groupthink... right? Right?
That makes perfect sense, except, when it comes to things we don't like here on slashdot, we don't allow half measures. If it doesn't 100% eliminate phishing, then all it does is piss off legitimate users, while providing no additional security benefit.
Oh yeah? Well I believe that 2+2=5, and if you believe otherwise, then you're a whiny bitch. Behold my powers of rhetoric!
Seriously though, the whole business strategy as we know it is not geared towards sharing connections. There's nothing wrong with a business that doesn't require you to sign away your right to share your connection, but it will invariably cost more as people actually take them up on the offer, and their raw sales go down. As it stands, people actually sharing their connections when they're not supposed to just ends up with all the paying customers paying slightly more to hedge losses.
Although a cute statement, with a little truth behind it, it actually isn't accurate at all.
Piracy may just have a small place in what you would consider an optimal system, but we can't really afford to legitimise it. We, as music fans, would suffer a lot more from legitimised piracy than anything we could lose from wiping out piracy completely.
Besides, I actually reject the notion that piracy is needed to help propagate new music. Labels don't need piracy, because they have marketing, and can distribute samples of their music freely around the media. Indie artists can always use P2P without it actually being piracy, because they sanctioned it. By cracking down on piracy, but not so hard that we eliminate P2P sharing, everyone ends up getting more or less the best of both worlds. The person who misses out is the person who likes label music, but isn't prepared to pay for it, but his satisfaction would come at the expense of everyone else's.
I actually would like to see copyright infringement become a low-level crime. It would separate the rich and powerful from the legal system, would provide real disincentives to copyright infringement, and it would lend accountability to the whole process. Gone would be the days when the RIAA had to rely on their threat tactics, because it's no longer happening on their time and money, and tax-payers could be reimbursed by a small cut of the repayments. The biggest costs would be incurred at the beginning, but as copyright infringement becomes less popular, the costs will decrease, and we may even see economic benefits from there on out.
Music piracy also "just" stops people from making small amounts of money directly (or indirectly) if they didn't already have a large fanbase. You would have to be, oh I don't know, Britney Spears in order to make a comfortable living off being an "artist" in an environment of unrestricted piracy. Oh, and you'd probably have to start making a lot less records, and doing a lot more live stuff, so that people feel the need to pay the money to come to the show, rather than stay at home on their sucking up their endless supply of free media and instant gratification.
Just because people on /. want a bright future for media sharing, doesn't mean it's at all possible. Honestly, I don't know where people get it from. Formerly poor artists suddenly getting a break from people having total, anonymous power to break their financial futures? And those same anonymous overlords have plenty to gain from abusing their power? I would laugh if they weren't so serious about it.
As much as I support copyright, and even though you've marked me as a "foe", I wanted to say, even if we don't see eye to eye, your heart is in the right place, and I hope you do really well.
Your foe, TVF.
And? What happened?
Sorry to ask you to explain the so called obvious, but why? What does copyright's purpose have to do with that? Copyright wasn't intended to make publishers money (because of people, flying f**k, remember?). If people are making money from it, good for them! I don't see how that affects the purpose of copyrights.
Ah, but formulaic successes wouldn't sell if they didn't have something to add. I think this whole "formulaic" BS is stupid anyway. It's a matter of tastes. Genres, styles, and tastes are allowed to have common elements spanning them. That's what defines them. Some have more spanning features, some have less, it's all just a matter of preference. The revenue comes after the fact.
I was talking about truly incremental works. For example, if someone wanted to release the original Star Wars with an added home-made scene (not just the scene, the whole movie), then that would probably be sufficiently incremental. Now that I know that you were talking about remakes, I can say, without a shadow of a doubt, that copyright in no way hinders incremental "improvements" on works.
Yah, nowadays (with signed artists only), we have multiple "artists" contributing to a single work. Mostly the people you see/hear (again, predominantly with signed artists) are not the only contributors. I don't see why that's so bad. It's not like it's muzzling out other art forms.
Making money from art is a hard business. The only reason why such deals exist is because there's a good chance that these deals are the best that the artist will get. If not (like, say if you were Radiohead or NIN), then you can do it alone.
Not particularly rich? Are you joking? It's extremely rich. Don't be fooled by the ads on TV, our culture is not just made up of Hollywood and Pop. There are ridiculously many styles and art-forms that populate our culture. Do just a little digging, and you'll find more variety than you will ever get to experience in a lifetime. The 20th century saw an explosion in new-age styles, and art really diversified. It became a lot more than it was back without copyright, where art creation was relegated to a handful of styles. I'm not saying it was bad, it's just that we have seen a lot more diversity recently. This came from a number of factors, and copyright was one of them.
If only it could work that way. Hey wait! Weren't you arguing that there were no positive benefits of copyright a second ago?
I'm not an artist. Not any artist releasing to the public, that is (let alone commercially).
And you wouldn't have anything resembling a significant culture. Stop pretending like artists owe you something. It was a fair trade.
Copyright was a law, sanctioned by the public. So was all its extensions. They are both part of the same device, both sanctioned by the public. It is you can't have it both ways.
The old saying "Be careful what you wish for" comes to mind...
If they don't already...
Sorry, sorry. I'm just mean and cranky today :(