This is guaranteed to work almost as good as the Evil Bit, an extra field in IPv4 headers where senders of packets indicate malicious intent, so that people administering firewalls can discard such packets if desired.
(The problem in the first place was that the people wiretapping didn't give a shit about rules, etiquette, and being decent. More rules and etiquette aren't the solution to that problem.)
It's not misleading in the slightest to call it non-copied for the simple reason that it was not a copy, and that the copyright monopoly only covers direct copies, nothing else.
Yes, they used similar inspiration and similar techniques. But that is specifically not covered by the copyright monopoly, which has always been about protecting a specific expression of a creative idea, and never the idea itself.
Yes, the images are arguably similar. But there is absolutely no merit whatsoever to the claim that one would be a copy of the other, thus violating the copyright monopoly. What the judge has done here is to set a precedent that states that the monopoly does not just cover the creative work, but extends to a general creative idea, which completely shatters the traditional notion that the copyright monopoly only covers a specific expression of an idea, and never the idea itself.
So what’s the big deal, then? In this case, they sought to recreate the image and took a similar one. Why is that not a violation of the copyright monopoly?
Because that’s exactly how you do it if you don’t want to pay a license fee on the original terms. You create a similar work yourself, entirely by yourself, and compete. It’s the whole damned idea.
Actually, the copyright monopoly is a balance between the public's interest in availability of culture, and the SAME public's interest in having new culture created.
Individuals and creators and the copyright industry are not stakeholders in that balance, but beneficiaries of the monopoly (just like Blackwater Security or whatever their name is this week is a beneficiary of United States foreign policy, without that meaning that they get a seat at the drafting table).
Although, I prefer the swarm as an organization rather than a hierarchical structure, so "stand behind a leader" isn't really what happens when I work. When I "lead", in quotes, I say out loud that I'm going to do something to accomplish a goal, and that others are welcome to follow me in that action if they like. Usually, a couple of hundred or thousand do.
Othertimes, other people in the swarm -- or the group as a whole -- decides on a course of action that I take part in.
I don't command military style. (Despite holding officer's rank in the Swedish Army, for trivia.)
"Useful Arts" actually refers to patentable handicraft; the consitution's motivation for the patent monopolies. This is the same word as you see in "artisan".
"Progress of Science" refers to knowledge subject to the copyright monopolies.
The GPL is intentionally written to match the strength of the copyright monopoly. If the copyright monopoly strengthens, so does the GPL. If it weakens, so does the GPL, too.
In the case of an abolished copyright monopoly, the GPL is also effectively abolished, but this is by its original design.
In the reality where I live, GNU/Linux and Wikipedia have been proven to exist despite explicitly renouncing the copyright monopoly and encouraging copying.
Also, I have not been the leader of the Swedish Pirate Party for a bit over a year. I am its founder and I led it for its first five years. Anna Troberg is the current leader of the Swedish Pirate Party.
The original source of this message is the column on Techdirt named It is time to stop pretending to endorse the copyright monopoly. The ITWorld reporter (the first link in the story) muddles the message to some degree, and also introduces heavy bias into the story (see the headers over the comments section, for instance).
The original message is that yes, the copyright monopoly (or four/five monopolies) are ridiculous, but we should stop pretending to support them all while criticizing the draconian laws that are de facto needed to sustain them. IT World muddles this to that we should stop "following" the copyright monopoly laws. That is a different message (which I might have said too, but not in this particular article).
There are very good reasons for that name, the most obvious being that a party with the same platform by any other name had remained an unseen web page.
Don't miss out on Member of European Parliament Christian Engström's suggestion for a religious version of the Beginning for this religion.
Short version:
1. There was chaos and soup. 2. Somebody in the soup learned to copy. Thus was Life. 3. Having learned to copy, they built magnificent things. 4. We honor the beginning by copying and building magnificent things.
Hello, Slashdot. I had intended to update this article tomorrow with a more detailed analysis, but given that it's now Slashdot Top Story, I posted the followup immediately. For your convenience:
What this does is say that:
One, no court may impose an ISP with an order to filter, in particular not because of enforcement of copyright monopolies;
Two, such filtering is a reduction of fundamental rights, so
Three, if laws are written requiring an ISP filter or block the internet, such laws must conform to very strict criteria that are applied to laws limiting fundamental rights. They must be effective, they must be proportionate, and they must be defensible in a democratic society. While this sounds like political wishywashing, it has some very specific meanings. It is useful to compare to what laws have been written to prevent terrorism: these laws are held to that standard, which the copyright industry wants badly to supersede. The Attorney General also goes into detail how such laws must be transparent and predictable.
What this does not say is that:
Four, no censorship must ever take place.
Five, no ISP may choose to limit what they present as "The Internet".
In conclusion:
Six, it has been the modus operandi of the copyright industry to threaten ISPs with "block to our wishes or we'll take you to court". This has been their standard operating procedure for the past couple of years, in order to establish enough precendents to get them written into law. Today's verdict, or potential verdict, gives those ISPs the power to say "go play on the highway, parasites, we have an order from the highest possible court saying no court can force us to do that. We care more about our customers than about obsolete irrelevants".
Seven, this is the highest court in Europe, referring to the (equivalent of) Constitution of Europe. Thus, there are no courts and no laws that can supersede this. No EU Directive can change this (potential) verdict. The way forward for the copyright industry appears permanently blocked; I hold it as absolutely improbable that they'll get paragraphs in the referred European Charter of Human Rights that put the copyright monopoly before the sanctity of correspondence, of personal data, and freedom of information.
There. Do I get karma for posting from my own blog when it is TFA?
As an official in the Swedish Pirate Party, I can only wish our Canadian brothers and sisters a heartily welcome up onto the barricades, and the best of winds.
At about 20 points in the national information infrastructure network, all traffic is spliced off and fed into the Försvarets Radioanstalt (FRA) agency. These points are placed as to catch all traffic entering and leaving the Swedish borders, but will catch much - if not most - domestic traffic too, for technical routing reasons. Electronic traffic, in particular, always takes the scenic route.
This affects all Internet traffic and all telephony traffic, meaning web surfing, e-mail, phone, and fax are affected, to mention but a few.
The FRA will scan all traffic in real time according to about 250,000 search criteria. The traffic that matches will be automatically saved for manual intelligence analysis. This obviously takes a lot of computing power. We don't know the exact extent of FRA's computing power, but we do know that they have the world's fifth most powerful computer, in competition mostly with nuclear physics labs.
"Customers" that will be able to place requests for searches include all authorities (all some 500 of them including Department of Transportation, Department of Agriculture, etc., but notably the police, secret service and customs).
The political administration may order (not request, but order) a political wiretapping to catch communications they are interested in.
Major businesses will also get access to the wiretapping grid, but will have to go through an authority.
The bill specifically allows for singling out Swedish people for specific wiretapping, although only under certain qualifiers.
The mandate for the agency's own intelligence gathering is broadened from "external military threats" to "external threats", which are exemplified as international crime; trafficking in drugs, weapons, or people; migration movements; religious or cultural conflicts; environmental imbalances and threats; raw materials shortages; and currency speculation. More examples are listed.
The European Commission recently had a public consultation about this. I'm surprised not more understand the issues involved - my response deals with just a few of them:
(the first few lines is a preamble in Swedish, followed by the actual letter in English.)
In short, this does not deal with copyrights and culture anymore. It deals with the cost to society of enforcing today's copyright. That cost involves the abolition of the messenger immunity, freedom of the press, and private communications as a concept.
No right exists in a vacuum - there is always a cost to society of enforcing that right. Without a proper cost-to-benefit analysis, no informed decision can be made.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, of course!
This is guaranteed to work almost as good as the Evil Bit, an extra field in IPv4 headers where senders of packets indicate malicious intent, so that people administering firewalls can discard such packets if desired.
(The problem in the first place was that the people wiretapping didn't give a shit about rules, etiquette, and being decent. More rules and etiquette aren't the solution to that problem.)
Rick
It's not misleading in the slightest to call it non-copied for the simple reason that it was not a copy, and that the copyright monopoly only covers direct copies, nothing else.
Yes, they used similar inspiration and similar techniques. But that is specifically not covered by the copyright monopoly, which has always been about protecting a specific expression of a creative idea, and never the idea itself.
For more, see this article on Falkvinge on Infopolicy.
Yes, the images are arguably similar. But there is absolutely no merit whatsoever to the claim that one would be a copy of the other, thus violating the copyright monopoly. What the judge has done here is to set a precedent that states that the monopoly does not just cover the creative work, but extends to a general creative idea, which completely shatters the traditional notion that the copyright monopoly only covers a specific expression of an idea, and never the idea itself.
So what’s the big deal, then? In this case, they sought to recreate the image and took a similar one. Why is that not a violation of the copyright monopoly?
Because that’s exactly how you do it if you don’t want to pay a license fee on the original terms. You create a similar work yourself, entirely by yourself, and compete. It’s the whole damned idea.
Article by Falkvinge on this verdict.
Actually, the copyright monopoly is a balance between the public's interest in availability of culture, and the SAME public's interest in having new culture created.
Individuals and creators and the copyright industry are not stakeholders in that balance, but beneficiaries of the monopoly (just like Blackwater Security or whatever their name is this week is a beneficiary of United States foreign policy, without that meaning that they get a seat at the drafting table).
Thank you, good sir. Those are very kind words.
Although, I prefer the swarm as an organization rather than a hierarchical structure, so "stand behind a leader" isn't really what happens when I work. When I "lead", in quotes, I say out loud that I'm going to do something to accomplish a goal, and that others are welcome to follow me in that action if they like. Usually, a couple of hundred or thousand do.
Othertimes, other people in the swarm -- or the group as a whole -- decides on a course of action that I take part in.
I don't command military style. (Despite holding officer's rank in the Swedish Army, for trivia.)
Cheers,
Rick
"Useful Arts" actually refers to patentable handicraft; the consitution's motivation for the patent monopolies. This is the same word as you see in "artisan".
"Progress of Science" refers to knowledge subject to the copyright monopolies.
The GPL is intentionally written to match the strength of the copyright monopoly. If the copyright monopoly strengthens, so does the GPL. If it weakens, so does the GPL, too.
In the case of an abolished copyright monopoly, the GPL is also effectively abolished, but this is by its original design.
Right you are, sir.
In the reality where I live, GNU/Linux and Wikipedia have been proven to exist despite explicitly renouncing the copyright monopoly and encouraging copying.
Also, I have not been the leader of the Swedish Pirate Party for a bit over a year. I am its founder and I led it for its first five years. Anna Troberg is the current leader of the Swedish Pirate Party.
Cheers,
Rick
Use the second link.
The original source of this message is the column on Techdirt named It is time to stop pretending to endorse the copyright monopoly. The ITWorld reporter (the first link in the story) muddles the message to some degree, and also introduces heavy bias into the story (see the headers over the comments section, for instance).
The original message is that yes, the copyright monopoly (or four/five monopolies) are ridiculous, but we should stop pretending to support them all while criticizing the draconian laws that are de facto needed to sustain them. IT World muddles this to that we should stop "following" the copyright monopoly laws. That is a different message (which I might have said too, but not in this particular article).
The purposes of the copyright monpoly vary between legislations, so there is not "one" purpose.
In the United States, it is "to promote the progress and the useful arts", nothing more, nothing less. That is a direct quote from the constitution.
That isn't an "of course" at all. The correlation might as well be the complete opposite of what you assert.
There are very good reasons for that name, the most obvious being that a party with the same platform by any other name had remained an unseen web page.
For more, check the article "Why the name Pirate Party?" here: http://falkvinge.net/2011/02/20/why-the-name-pirate-party/
Yeah.
OR, you could check the actual data from the election researchers where the Pirate Party has had successes, which shows a different picture.
Don't miss out on Member of European Parliament Christian Engström's suggestion for a religious version of the Beginning for this religion.
Short version:
1. There was chaos and soup.
2. Somebody in the soup learned to copy. Thus was Life.
3. Having learned to copy, they built magnificent things.
4. We honor the beginning by copying and building magnificent things.
Not bad, I think.
THIS should have been a day for mod points. Magnitudes of mod points.
Ignore. I'm stressed out and missed that the headline reversed the meaning... gah. Slashdot stress.
Gah. Point five is wrong. Should read: Any ISP may voluntarily limit what they choose to call "The Internet".
Hello, Slashdot. I had intended to update this article tomorrow with a more detailed analysis, but given that it's now Slashdot Top Story, I posted the followup immediately. For your convenience:
What this does is say that:
One, no court may impose an ISP with an order to filter, in particular not because of enforcement of copyright monopolies;
Two, such filtering is a reduction of fundamental rights, so
Three, if laws are written requiring an ISP filter or block the internet, such laws must conform to very strict criteria that are applied to laws limiting fundamental rights. They must be effective, they must be proportionate, and they must be defensible in a democratic society. While this sounds like political wishywashing, it has some very specific meanings. It is useful to compare to what laws have been written to prevent terrorism: these laws are held to that standard, which the copyright industry wants badly to supersede. The Attorney General also goes into detail how such laws must be transparent and predictable.
What this does not say is that:
Four, no censorship must ever take place.
Five, no ISP may choose to limit what they present as "The Internet".
In conclusion:
Six, it has been the modus operandi of the copyright industry to threaten ISPs with "block to our wishes or we'll take you to court". This has been their standard operating procedure for the past couple of years, in order to establish enough precendents to get them written into law. Today's verdict, or potential verdict, gives those ISPs the power to say "go play on the highway, parasites, we have an order from the highest possible court saying no court can force us to do that. We care more about our customers than about obsolete irrelevants".
Seven, this is the highest court in Europe, referring to the (equivalent of) Constitution of Europe. Thus, there are no courts and no laws that can supersede this. No EU Directive can change this (potential) verdict. The way forward for the copyright industry appears permanently blocked; I hold it as absolutely improbable that they'll get paragraphs in the referred European Charter of Human Rights that put the copyright monopoly before the sanctity of correspondence, of personal data, and freedom of information.
There. Do I get karma for posting from my own blog when it is TFA?
Oh, and yay - my server is holding. *celebrate*
If we had called ourselves any of those names, this story wouldn't have been here.
As an official in the Swedish Pirate Party, I can only wish our Canadian brothers and sisters a heartily welcome up onto the barricades, and the best of winds.
We are changing the world together.
The ninja parties are there. They just aren't visible in the polls.
More on the Ubiquitous Wiretapping Bill
Swedish NSA to monitor all phones, Internet
Excerpt from first link:
The bill's name is en anpassad försvarsunderrättelseverksamhet , translating roughly to a better adapted military intelligence gathering. Key points of the bill:
The European Commission recently had a public consultation about this. I'm surprised not more understand the issues involved - my response deals with just a few of them:
Response to Commission from Pirate Party leader
(the first few lines is a preamble in Swedish, followed by the actual letter in English.)
In short, this does not deal with copyrights and culture anymore. It deals with the cost to society of enforcing today's copyright. That cost involves the abolition of the messenger immunity, freedom of the press, and private communications as a concept.
No right exists in a vacuum - there is always a cost to society of enforcing that right. Without a proper cost-to-benefit analysis, no informed decision can be made.