The Pro-Market (faction of the Republican) Party speaks!
It comes to me as no surprise that Republicans are speaking up on behalf of copyright reform of the sorts most of us who frequent Techdirt have been calling for. There has always been a pro-market faction in the Republican party -- as distinct from the pro-business faction. If you don't understand the difference, read Luigi Zingales' book A Capitalism for the People. What is surprising is that the pro-market faction carried the day in a body that represents the entire House GOP caucus.
Maybe the GOP will actually become the pro-market party.
Secular Fasting (a.k.a. Meatless Monday) vs. Christian Fasting (Wednesdays and Fridays and....)
In the Orthodox Church, we are bidden to fast on almost every Wednesday and Friday, throughout the 40 day Nativity Fast, the 50 day Great Lent, the variable length Apostles' Fast, and the 15 day Dormition Fast. Fasting consists not in not eating (though there are periods when the strictly observant do that for a day or a few days running) but in eating less than usual and abstaining from all products of vertebrates (meat, milk, eggs, though on certain days fish is permitted), from olive oil (some say all cooking oils) and from wine (and strong drink, some hold beer counts, some don't).
I and my coreligionists jolly well aren't going to go meatless on the Mondays when Holy Mother Church allows us to eat meat just because the USDA or some pack of officious we-know-what's-good-for-you health nuts or "save the planet" do-gooders tells us we should eat less meat for the health and environmental benefits. I invite anyone who thinks people in general should eat less meat to join us on our schedule of not eating meat, from which they will gain more of the same benefits advertised for meatless Mondays (albeit without the alliteration -- of course, "Lunes sin carnes", "lundi sans vivande",... don't alliterate).
The notion that the company having an annual document shredding period called "shred days" or "shredding days" is any proof of wrongdoing is absolute nonsense. It is common practice in many organizations (witness as example, Kansas State University where I am employed) to have periodic "shred days" (called just that in our case) to encourage the timely destruction of confidential records for which the statutory requirement for maintenance has lapsed (e.g. in the university circumstance 6 year old final exams) or for which there was no statutory requirement for maintenance (e.g., again in our case, last semesters' homework papers students didn't claim, but which are still confidential records under FERPA). Surely in the corporate world there are lots of analogous documents which folks idly keep in their files, and for which annual shred days are entirely appropriate and indicate no connivance against potential litigants.
It may well be in the present case the documents that shouldn't have been shredded were reduced to confetti during the prior annual shredding days, but the shredding days themselves is neither here nor there as a point of fact, and hardly indicative of malicious intent on the company's part.
Naturally in any online forum, some nitwit will try to make a moral equivalency between Christianity and Islam to drag the discussion away from the topic at hand to launch attacks on his or her own crabbed view of Christianity.
Have you lost sight of the fact that the producer of the trailer is a Copt, as are the vast majority of Christians in Egypt? Since the seventh century Copts have had to live with persecution by Muslims, sometimes the persecution-lite of paying the jizya, not being able to build churches or fix their churches, having their testimony in courts count for less than the testimony of a Muslim, not being able to answer insults no matter how puerile hurled at them by any Muslim, sometimes the full-on persecution of rape, murder and pillage.
Apparently the producer of the trailer (I, too, doubt there's a full film) is a bit of a low-life, but low-life or not, I can hardly blame him for giving back a bit of the sneering and abuse his ancestors (and perhaps he, if he emigrated here from Egypt) endured now that he has the freedom America offers. The opening, the Coptic family hiding from Muslim fanatics while the police stand by doing nothing, is a representation of a reality of life in Egypt even before the Muslim Brotherhood took over.
Oh, but no, he's a Christian, and according to you because some Christians misbehave in defiance of the basic teachings of their faith and bomb abortion clinics; or because Christians (like everyone else, religious or not) want to see their concept of right and wrong codified in law; or maybe because in defiance of the teachings of Jesus, Christians fought wars of religion almost as bloody as the wars between the Sunnis and the Shi'ite back in the day; or because Christians launched a series of defensive wars called "the Crusades", or [fill in the rest of the list of standard post-"Enlightement" complaints against Christianity here] he should shut up. And, what's more the poster to whom you replied, who drew a valid distinction between the reaction of Christians and Muslims to insults to their respective faiths has no argument because he's drawing a distinction in favor of those awful Christians.
I'm not so sure the fact that Ebersman not being on his way to a job making license plates (i.e. not being prosecuted for fraud) is any evidence of lack of wrong-doing in the representations made in the Facebook IPO. After all, no one has been prosecuted for representing collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) full of sub-prime mortgages as AAA-rated investment instruments.
The Obama Administration, using its very flexible notion of seeing that the laws of the United States be faithfully executed, doesn't seem to feel like prosecuting financial wrong-doing. There is strong evidence of this in comparative rates of prosecutions for financial crimes between the Obama, Bush and Clinton administrations, even assuming the underlying rate of exposed financial wrong-doing is constant. When the amount of apparent wrong-doing involved in the 2008 financial crisis is considered, the prosecution rate should have skyrocketed after Obama came in, but instead it collapsed.
It is also possible that the regulatory regimes in place make legal certain behaviors on the part of those selling financial instruments which morally constitute fraud and need to be changed in the interests of investors and the proper functioning of the markets.
Suppose a rock group with the view that the age-long notion of marriage ought not be changed by either courts or religious groups to allow "same sex unions", or some other view disfavored by both Americas' political elites and liberal protestants, barged into the National Cathedral in Washington, uninvited, and performed a raucous prayer, calling on the Virgin Mary to rebuke both the Episcopal Church and the Obama Administration, accompanied by amplified guitars and a confederate who filmed the whole thing to post on YouTube. Anyone care to guess what charges our government would come up with against them and the likely sentence?
Bingo! The preeminent journal in my area of mathematics is now a peer reviewed free online journal that provides LaTeX style files so all the papers end up beautifully typeset in a uniform style, the main service scholarly journals provided back in the old days. The very small cost of running the thing is paid by a Canadian university that maintains a print copy of the journal in its library and hosts the server that maintains the online version. (I'd be happier if it had mirror sites based on a few other continents, but that would triple the donated cost required to keep it up and running.)
Oh, cut it out with the "corporations are people" schtick. The majority in Citizens United did not base the decision on the notion of rights of a corporation as a juridical person, but on the rights of the shareholders, employees and managers as natural persons: their rights codified under the First Amendment are not abrogated by having banded together for a commercial purpose. It just leveled the playing field with labor unions whom no one seems to think should not be able to engage in political speech, even though they,too, are juridical and not natural persons.
Actually it is equally obnoxious for corporate managers to use corporate (ultimately shareholder) resources to engage in political speech without a vote of the shareholders to establish a corporate position, and for union bosses to use union (ultimately worker) resources to engage in political speech without a vote of the rank-and-file to establish a union position.
The free speech rights of corporations are derivative from those of the shareholders, just as those of unions are derivative from those of the members. I suspect fixing both problems in one go, by enacting a law requiring that all political "speech" be approved by majority vote of the shareholders (for joint-stock corporations) or members (for membership-corporations like labor unions) would pass judicial review just fine.
Re: Teaching requires more than just knowing the subject matter
Classroom management I'll give you, though that's only really necessary because the courts have made real discipline in schools nearly impossible to impose and most folks can't keep order by charisma alone, but learning styles? There is no empirical basis for any meaningful instructional improvements based on "learning styles". Everyone learns best by doing, better by both seeing and hearing, and least well by only seeing or hearing. Brain development? Give me a break. I've taught ed majors (or "pre-service teachers" if you want the PC phrase), and the 85% of them who picked the major because it was the easiest on campus will forget whatever facts they memorized about brain development for the final before the start of the next term.
Most of American "teacher education" is indoctrination in Dewey, Vygotsky, "look-say" or "whole language" in place of phonics, the notion that self-esteem is a virtue (it's a vice -- read St. John Cassian or try teaching self-esteem-riden college students if you want to see why), and the latest baleful enthusiasm in math education, and is almost assuredly harmful to pedagogy.
Techdirt is a great bastion of good sense for folks of all political persuasions who see the downside of state-granted monopolies (patents and copyrights) now passed off as "property" rights with the incessant use of the phrase "intellectual property" by those pursuing monopoly rents.
A similar problem exists with state-granted oligopolies, such as the right to produce "qualified teachers" granted to colleges of education, or licensing requirements for virtually any category of jobs (be it physicians, dieticians, school teachers, plumbers, or interior decorators). The state restriction on supply stifles competition and innovation, and encourages rent-seeking behavior on the part of its beneficiaries.
In some cases, physicians, and perhaps dieticians (provided this isn't extended to trying to suppress diet testimonials by ordinary folks) and plumbers working in the context of new construction, the up-side in terms of quality control out-weights the downside. (Though arguably the state restriction on competition ought come with state regulation in the public interest of rates such professions can charge, by analogy to what is done with state grants of utility monopolies.)
In the case of K-12 teachers, I see no up-side. American higher education functions without state-imposed oligopolies being granted to Ph.D.-granting departments to produce "qualified professors", and is the envy of the world, esp. in mathematics and science. American K-12 education labors under such oligopolies and lags the entire developed world, esp. in mathematics and science.
Pirate it, see if you like it, then buy when you find it?
Yup. As Neil Young observed, "Piracy is the new radio." When the RIAA (and MPAA and academic publishers and . . . ) understand that and adapt their business models things will be good for the consumer and in the long run for "content industries". Unfortunately they all seem intent on making the "problem" of "piracy", which if it's not "the new radio" is really a black market in the face of state-created artificial scarcities, rather than "theft", worse by trying to defend their old business models with state power.
Great letter. The only criticism is that they (and we) should not be using the rent-seekers' phrase "intellectual property". Words matter. "Copyrights and patents" isn't that many more characters to type (and in some cases "copyright" suffices), and we should not cede the rhetorical ground that state-granted monopolies (even state-granted monopolies that succeed in some salutary purpose) constitute "property".
According to your "reasoning" there was no English literature before the Law of Queen Anne, Albrecht Durer didn't make a living selling prints, and Mozilla Firefox doesn't exist.
You can't really expect any business whose business model depends on artificial scarcity created by government intervention (in the form of monopoly grants called "copyrights" and "patents") to wholeheartedly oppose these measures. Microsoft is only doing this so as not to alienate customers: they, like Hollywood, the recording industry and dead-tree publishers, have failed to adopt the CwF + RtB business model and remain a lawsuit factory.
Such businesses would rather infringe civil liberties and destroy the internet than succumb to the law of supply and demand that naturally drives the cost of any good which can be produced in arbitrary quantity at near zero marginal cost (which includes not just digitized text, audio, images, and video, but software) inexorably toward zero. But that law exists and SOPA, PIPA or any other bill of that ilk will not repeal it.
"Piracy" is not theft (since copyrights and patents aren't actually property -- if they were they'd be of infinite duration as actual property doesn't suddenly become public simply by virtue of the passage of time, and copying does not deprive those who had a copy of their copy as theft of property does), but the inevitable black market (in copies of digital goods) created by government intervention in the economy.
Do it: I'd suggest a blackout of six-hours world-wide, 24 hours to the U.S. and a week to all .gov and .mil users, with a single page explaining the reason and issues at hand formatted so most browsers will display the entire message w/o scrolling.
I'm not sure the status of true threat doctrine in the Court of Appeals circuit in which Stout, WI is located, but regardless of whether the standard is based on a reasonable speaker, a reasonable hearer (or in this case reader) to whom the speech (or writing) is addressed, or a reasonable hearer (or reader) to whom the speech (or writing) is not addressed, in no case does either poster meet the notion of a true threat. No reasonable person could conceivably believe that a poster asserting that someone (most obviously the fictional character depicted, but possibly the occupant of the office) will only kill in self-defense or that fascism is associated with beatings and killings constitute threats to anyone.
It is only in the American context that the harmful effects of the present copyright regime contain any irony. After all, the Constitutional basis for American copyright and patent law is provided by
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
The way Congress has behaved since they passed the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act", one would think the clause read "To impede the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for indefinitely extendible Times to Commercial Interests and estates the exclusive Right to the Writings and Discoveries of Authors and Inventors."
In America the harmful effects are ironic, since they provide an argument for the unconstitutionality of the law. In Europe, it's just crony capitalism as usual.
Yes, the people have the right to opt out when the government changes the terms of the deal. Unfortunately, the only effective way of doing this is called a revolution (or if the people in a region want to opt out, secession, which tends to involve a war of independence).
Anyone care to go to the barricades (literally) to undo copyright maximalism?
I think this is for me the last straw. The corruption of copyright and patent law that began with the adoption of the name "intellectual property" for what had always been recognized as state-granted monopolies, and continued with the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act", and the issuance of patents on algorithms and business plans is now complete.
"Piracy" and willful patent and copyright infringement are now legitimate acts of civil disobedience against tyranny.
I'd come closer and closer to feeling that, but this really takes the proverbial cake.
Hoist the Jolly Roger in cyberspace and on the workroom floor until we go back to the terms of the Law of Queen Anne and the Statue on Monopolies of 1624! Everything else beyond that is fascist, crony-capitalist tyranny.
On the post: House Republicans: Copyright Law Destroys Markets; It's Time For Real Reform
The Pro-Market (faction of the Republican) Party speaks!
Maybe the GOP will actually become the pro-market party.
On the post: DailyDirt: Serious Food Regulations That Don't Sound So Serious...
Secular Fasting (a.k.a. Meatless Monday) vs. Christian Fasting (Wednesdays and Fridays and....)
I and my coreligionists jolly well aren't going to go meatless on the Mondays when Holy Mother Church allows us to eat meat just because the USDA or some pack of officious we-know-what's-good-for-you health nuts or "save the planet" do-gooders tells us we should eat less meat for the health and environmental benefits. I invite anyone who thinks people in general should eat less meat to join us on our schedule of not eating meat, from which they will gain more of the same benefits advertised for meatless Mondays (albeit without the alliteration -- of course, "Lunes sin carnes", "lundi sans vivande",... don't alliterate).
On the post: DRAM Patent Holder Rambus Called Out (Again) For Shredding Evidence
Annual Shred Days
It may well be in the present case the documents that shouldn't have been shredded were reduced to confetti during the prior annual shredding days, but the shredding days themselves is neither here nor there as a point of fact, and hardly indicative of malicious intent on the company's part.
On the post: YouTube Restricts Access To Anti-Islam Movie Trailer In Egypt And Libya
Re: Re: Dhimmitude
Have you lost sight of the fact that the producer of the trailer is a Copt, as are the vast majority of Christians in Egypt? Since the seventh century Copts have had to live with persecution by Muslims, sometimes the persecution-lite of paying the jizya, not being able to build churches or fix their churches, having their testimony in courts count for less than the testimony of a Muslim, not being able to answer insults no matter how puerile hurled at them by any Muslim, sometimes the full-on persecution of rape, murder and pillage.
Apparently the producer of the trailer (I, too, doubt there's a full film) is a bit of a low-life, but low-life or not, I can hardly blame him for giving back a bit of the sneering and abuse his ancestors (and perhaps he, if he emigrated here from Egypt) endured now that he has the freedom America offers. The opening, the Coptic family hiding from Muslim fanatics while the police stand by doing nothing, is a representation of a reality of life in Egypt even before the Muslim Brotherhood took over.
Oh, but no, he's a Christian, and according to you because some Christians misbehave in defiance of the basic teachings of their faith and bomb abortion clinics; or because Christians (like everyone else, religious or not) want to see their concept of right and wrong codified in law; or maybe because in defiance of the teachings of Jesus, Christians fought wars of religion almost as bloody as the wars between the Sunnis and the Shi'ite back in the day; or because Christians launched a series of defensive wars called "the Crusades", or [fill in the rest of the list of standard post-"Enlightement" complaints against Christianity here] he should shut up. And, what's more the poster to whom you replied, who drew a valid distinction between the reaction of Christians and Muslims to insults to their respective faiths has no argument because he's drawing a distinction in favor of those awful Christians.
On the post: Can Someone Explain Why Facebook's CFO Should Be Fired For Getting An Awesome Deal?
Re: making license plates
The Obama Administration, using its very flexible notion of seeing that the laws of the United States be faithfully executed, doesn't seem to feel like prosecuting financial wrong-doing. There is strong evidence of this in comparative rates of prosecutions for financial crimes between the Obama, Bush and Clinton administrations, even assuming the underlying rate of exposed financial wrong-doing is constant. When the amount of apparent wrong-doing involved in the 2008 financial crisis is considered, the prosecution rate should have skyrocketed after Obama came in, but instead it collapsed.
It is also possible that the regulatory regimes in place make legal certain behaviors on the part of those selling financial instruments which morally constitute fraud and need to be changed in the interests of investors and the proper functioning of the markets.
On the post: Garry Kasparov Was Arrested Outside Of Pussy Riot Courthouse
A thought experiment
On the post: UK Plans To Make All Government-Funded Research Free To The Public Immediately Upon Publication
On the post: James Watson, Co-Discoverer Of DNA's Structure, Says 'Patenting Human Genes Was Lunacy'
Re: no ownership of people
Actually it is equally obnoxious for corporate managers to use corporate (ultimately shareholder) resources to engage in political speech without a vote of the shareholders to establish a corporate position, and for union bosses to use union (ultimately worker) resources to engage in political speech without a vote of the rank-and-file to establish a union position.
The free speech rights of corporations are derivative from those of the shareholders, just as those of unions are derivative from those of the members. I suspect fixing both problems in one go, by enacting a law requiring that all political "speech" be approved by majority vote of the shareholders (for joint-stock corporations) or members (for membership-corporations like labor unions) would pass judicial review just fine.
On the post: A Broken System: Einstein Wouldn't Have Been 'Qualified' To Teach High School Physics
Re: Teaching requires more than just knowing the subject matter
Most of American "teacher education" is indoctrination in Dewey, Vygotsky, "look-say" or "whole language" in place of phonics, the notion that self-esteem is a virtue (it's a vice -- read St. John Cassian or try teaching self-esteem-riden college students if you want to see why), and the latest baleful enthusiasm in math education, and is almost assuredly harmful to pedagogy.
On the post: A Broken System: Einstein Wouldn't Have Been 'Qualified' To Teach High School Physics
Monopolies and Oligopolies granted by the state
A similar problem exists with state-granted oligopolies, such as the right to produce "qualified teachers" granted to colleges of education, or licensing requirements for virtually any category of jobs (be it physicians, dieticians, school teachers, plumbers, or interior decorators). The state restriction on supply stifles competition and innovation, and encourages rent-seeking behavior on the part of its beneficiaries.
In some cases, physicians, and perhaps dieticians (provided this isn't extended to trying to suppress diet testimonials by ordinary folks) and plumbers working in the context of new construction, the up-side in terms of quality control out-weights the downside. (Though arguably the state restriction on competition ought come with state regulation in the public interest of rates such professions can charge, by analogy to what is done with state grants of utility monopolies.)
In the case of K-12 teachers, I see no up-side. American higher education functions without state-imposed oligopolies being granted to Ph.D.-granting departments to produce "qualified professors", and is the envy of the world, esp. in mathematics and science. American K-12 education labors under such oligopolies and lags the entire developed world, esp. in mathematics and science.
On the post: If Major Labels Are All About Helping Artists, Why Do We Keep Seeing Artists Calling Out Their Labels For Screwing Them?
Re: Re:
Yup. As Neil Young observed, "Piracy is the new radio." When the RIAA (and MPAA and academic publishers and . . . ) understand that and adapt their business models things will be good for the consumer and in the long run for "content industries". Unfortunately they all seem intent on making the "problem" of "piracy", which if it's not "the new radio" is really a black market in the face of state-created artificial scarcities, rather than "theft", worse by trying to defend their old business models with state power.
On the post: 70 Groups Tell Congress To Put The Brakes On Any Further Efforts To Expand Intellectual Property
A small criticism
On the post: The Norwegian Music-Streaming Experience Shows Why Tough Anti-Piracy Laws Are Unnecessary
Re: Anti-Piracy laws unnecessary?
On the post: Microsoft Finally Makes It Official That It Opposes SOPA.... As Written
MS, Supply and Demand and SOPA
Such businesses would rather infringe civil liberties and destroy the internet than succumb to the law of supply and demand that naturally drives the cost of any good which can be produced in arbitrary quantity at near zero marginal cost (which includes not just digitized text, audio, images, and video, but software) inexorably toward zero. But that law exists and SOPA, PIPA or any other bill of that ilk will not repeal it.
"Piracy" is not theft (since copyrights and patents aren't actually property -- if they were they'd be of infinite duration as actual property doesn't suddenly become public simply by virtue of the passage of time, and copying does not deprive those who had a copy of their copy as theft of property does), but the inevitable black market (in copies of digital goods) created by government intervention in the economy.
On the post: Wikipedia Considers Blackout To Protest SOPA
Do it
On the post: The Annotated Version Of Viacom's Employees Begging The Gov't To Censor The Internet To Save SpongeBob
Saving SpongeBog. . . NOT!
On the post: University Police & Administration Freak Out Over Nathan Fillion Firefly Poster; Censor, Threaten Professor
True thread doctrine
On the post: How Copyright Extension Is Harming Classical Music
irony, or lack thereof
It is only in the American context that the harmful effects of the present copyright regime contain any irony. After all, the Constitutional basis for American copyright and patent law is provided by
Article I, Section 8, Clause 8: To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
The way Congress has behaved since they passed the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act", one would think the clause read "To impede the Progress of Science and the useful Arts, by securing for indefinitely extendible Times to Commercial Interests and estates the exclusive Right to the Writings and Discoveries of Authors and Inventors."
In America the harmful effects are ironic, since they provide an argument for the unconstitutionality of the law. In Europe, it's just crony capitalism as usual.
On the post: Shouldn't Unilateral Retroactive Copyright Extension Mean Copyright Is Void?
Opting out when terms change
Anyone care to go to the barricades (literally) to undo copyright maximalism?
On the post: Supreme Court Says It's Still Inducement Even If You Proactively Took Steps To Make Sure You Weren't Infringing
Last Straw
"Piracy" and willful patent and copyright infringement are now legitimate acts of civil disobedience against tyranny.
I'd come closer and closer to feeling that, but this really takes the proverbial cake.
Hoist the Jolly Roger in cyberspace and on the workroom floor until we go back to the terms of the Law of Queen Anne and the Statue on Monopolies of 1624! Everything else beyond that is fascist, crony-capitalist tyranny.
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