In relation to the article before this one, I would actually say that the attempts to stop piracy are actually more delusional than the attempts to stop drug use through criminalisation. And even more delusional than the fucking war on prostitution, for goodness sake. And pardon the pun.
For one thing, some files with a pattern of 1s and 0s WILL be legal while other files with that same pattern of 1s and 0s will not. And unlike weed, which is called weed for the precise reason that it grows everywhere and is hard to get rid of, pirated files practically grow on trees.
Never mind the fact that some artists authorise file-sharing while others do not. Never mind that all Japanese visitors of deviantArt, fanfiction.net, tumblr, etc have technically violated piracy laws. Never mind that the Japanese state now has warrant to watch over not just torrents, but emails, file lockers, USBs sticks on the street, public WiFis, etc in their pathetic self-righteous, self-pitying Luddite utopia.
It is by no means an exaggeration to say that the futile war on drugs is still a thousand times more successful than the war on piracy, yet as the internet becomes much more faster, much more proliferated with more global users and much more anonymous in the near future, only copyright seems to think flogging it with a dead horse will do the world any good.
"The US right now regarding to people from the middle east, are acting Germany did with the jews during the Nazi era, with the news they they basically say that every mosque is a terrorist group, and every muslim must have a bomb under their beard."
Well technically if you think property trumps everything, you are inclined to say that it trumps even the economy. So you can expect this kind of behaviour from those who insist that the entire world, along with soverign democracies with their own economic and property systems, be within the boundaries of their fences.
I won't delve into patents too much: the short answer is we need a full-blown socialist perspective applied to patents, as scientific research is something everybody ought to be participants in.
But copyright is always going to lead to irony and hypocrisy as long as it forces creators to back away if what they wish to bring are derivative works. As well as insisting on being the exception to the rule that it is impossible to forbid the expression of opinions without falling into corruption, deliberate or not.
Re: The basic FACT is that grifter Aereo is stealing content.
You are going to be getting a lot of this as technology increases ten-fold over the next few decades. You may as well get over it and stop being so utopian about copyright.
The only thing the Luddites ARE right about is how there can be temporary unemployment effects as a result of workers having to learn new trades.
And I posted this comment to go with:
"So don’t blame technology for persistent unemployment."
Tell that to the bloody MPAA. Copyright philosophy is one of the greatest unspoken Luddisms in economics. It makes the utopian claim that a service with a free-rider problem is in need of property distortion into goods instead, as if second-hand copies somehow do not create a free-rider problem. Assurance contracts, the real answer to the creator's free-rider problem, suffers from no kind of Luddism whatsoever because it treats the property correctly as a service, not goods. In fact, IndieGoGo and Kickstarter can cheer for joy when the internet becomes 10,000 times faster and more anonymous as it allows more virtual "tickets" to be booked much faster, while the deluded "pirate hunters" with their negativity towards any kind of communications technology can only throw a Luddite tantrum at such a technological advancement.
A) Reasonable trademark protection. The kind that allows a person or company to prove that a product is really theirs through a unique signature. Not "brand protection" (I can walk on the street and yell "Coca Cola are corporate oligarchs!" and ruin the "image" of their brand) or generic signatures (if an "X" shape would not be considered satisfactory for a contract signature then why should Disney be allowed to get away with three black circles? But what WOULD qualify is the words "Walt Disney" with their unique font, along with possibly the fairy tale castle background).
This would mean that derivative works would be distinguished from originals, attribution would have to be given in order to stop defamation and plagiarism, and this trademark value alone would be enough of an "artificial" value to give quality assurance to the works and help tackle the free-rider problem (but the main economic model for this job is B) below) and allow all "knock-offs" or "pirated copies" to go out of business due to their lack of value, unless they themselves can add something valuable of their own through their own fruits of labour such as retelling The Lord Of The Rings or remixing music.
B) Assurance contracts. This is a brute-force response to the "free-rider" problem in its purest form. Make all interested parties pay simultaneously in order for the works to exist at all, giving "pirates" a hand of responsibility for the content's creation that copyright cannot do. We have plenty of evidence that this works already: tickets work, cable subscriptions work, pre-orders work (did you hear that Rockstar supposedly recuperated all the GTA V production costs from pre-orders alone?), so sure enough this trend gives a strong indication that crowdfunding can stand on its feet without the need for copyright. It is just a case of how long it takes to become mainstream. "Want an advanced copy of GTA V before anyone else? Put your pre-order money in our crowdfunding pot!"
Put these two elements together based on their evidence so far and you have a pretty freaking stable economic system. Don't listen to this unfalsifiable nonsense of "but copyright is the only way it'll all work!"
Well that is certainly a reasonable explanation, or part of a reasonable explanation, as to why there is such a public relations problem between the U.S./ U.K. states and the citizens.
But just because these states have taken opportunistic chances to hack into tech lines does not mean that Syria must be left alone to burn to the ground. Two wrongs are not better than one.
Russia with its arming of Assad, advocating of homophobia back home, and outright KGB bullying ranging from the murder of Litvinenko to oppressing Bill Browder through the U.K. libel tourism industry, is also a state with very slippery slopes of its own. This is not exactly a state with a mentality of keeping its tyranny under legal secrecy with a few tech corporations - it is very much out in the open with its thuggery, and is giving Assad a lot of power through weaponry and U.N veto power.
I really do not care what the public relations are like here back home. My MPs who more or less voted on using no means of force whatsoever are nothing short of cowards who are too afraid to tell a huge wave of conspiratorial, right-wing-in-left-wing-clothing isolationists that they are all on the wrong side of history. Well I am not.
These chemical weapons, that were highly likely to have been employed by Assad who threatened to use them eighteen months ago, were aimed at rebel areas. And unless you really want to go full-conspiritard and say the rebels set this up as a false flag (or be like George Galloway and say they came straight from Israel themselves), you have to give Assad, already under a lot of pressure from the Arab-Spring resistance, a bit of skepticism. And I cannot figure out this mentality: IF the rebels used those weapons, which is very unlikely, why would that change anybody's opinion that chemical weapons should not be tolerated? Just aim the punishment at the rebels AS WELL AS Assad, and you will be free of hypocrisy. I won't accept anything short of a secular, democratic state and I will not stop calling to fight for just that until it comes about.
It is rather contemptible that only two years after the civil war started, with 100,000 already dead, that the "anti"-war folk (who are just so peaceful and love to quote the Spanish-defending Orwell left, right and centre) are just NOW taking enough notice to rally a rabble about how the Syrians should just be left to kill each other even more so than they are now, because it is "none of our business". Not even a U.N. no-fly-zone. Not even refugee safe havens. I hear that most notorious bankers often make a big deal about how they should not pay tax to help those who need it most because "homeless people are none of their business" as well. It is very anti-Left indeed.
AND indeed, much silence on Russia's arming of Assad, a dictator who has already oppressed Lebanon and given shelter to war criminals. The "anti"-war "Left" are quite ready to say, quite rightly, that it is despicable when the U.S. arms dictators and turns a blind eye to their oppression, so why can they not aim that same level of fury at Russia?
Pointing out hypocrisy does not mean you have answered serious moral questions. If a politician were to get up on stage and say that global warming must be resisted, but one heckler were to stand up and shout to him "but YOU drive a car to work when it is only ten minutes away!" the heckler has proven that the politician is a hypocrite, but not that needless carbon burning is right.
I hear this rhetoric all the time and it is just completely and utterly empty. "Why do you go after Assad and not the Saudi oligarchy?" "Why do you take out Saddam Hussein and not Robert Mugabe?" "Why do you want to save Afghanistan from the Taliban but not Palestine from the Zionists?" "Why do you pick on Slobodan Milosevic instead of the Burmese military junta?" "Why do you..." Yeah, I am pretty sure I HAVE made these kinds of arguments in my sleep. They are not exactly that big of an accomplishment. Any idiot can do it. But here is what takes bravery: putting your foot down and saying that if a state is hypocritical then by definition it must be right half the time, and we need to emphasise the right half. Trust me, these dictators and thugs that get a free-ride from the U.S. right now? We will get round to them as well. Totalitarianism is the explicit enemy and will always be so.
Re: Re: Re: GOOD NEWS! "Safe harbors" not for pirates!
Your Luddite mentality bores me and is too predictable.
Copyright is a utopia. It makes it impossible for the creator to enforce.
The only thing you can do is bring all the materialistically interested parties to your table and have them commit to an assurance contract. I would like to hear why you do not think crowdfunding cannot solve the free-rider problem, while my waiting to give money to a third-party with no relation to the artist for a 2nd hand copy of content at a lower value CAN solve the free-rider problem.
Never mind that copyright essentially allows the copyright holder to dictate the inflation rates of the content he is printing (just as the government is the only one allowed to print authorised money and therefore control the value of said money through its inflation rates) therefore screwing over the value of consumers (and possibly even creating bad economic bubbles). Crowdfunding avoids all this nonsense as well.
When your philosophy represses technology and mine embraces it, I can claim to be on the right side of history. And there are many derivative artists who have intellectual property rights, too.
Re: Re: Re: While some pirate apologitst are still insisting that copyright
I personally think Mike is too nice with respect to copyright, and should be calling for its outright abolition.
Then again, I also do not happen to care what his exact stance is. You do not need to even hold any such position in order to know what a LIE is e.g. copyright maximalism. Knowing the truth can be hard at times, but knowing a lie is easy.
And I see copyright as a utopian, Luddite fallacy. Sure, it might allow artists to hit back at the free-rider problem and profit, but that does not mean it is the only way to hit back at the free-rider problem and profit.
Copyright is and always will be unstable as it makes the assumption that communications technology will not advance in the future. But an assurance contract perspective survives regardless of technological advancements. The crowdfunding only gets better with this technology. Copyright does not.
When the NSA, with all its malware spreading, corporation colluding, secretive spying, encryption cracking, ISP collaborating, and this last bit is key, DRM hijacking, REJECTS your calls for a Luddite utopia, your philosophy is dead.
There is such a thing as a tipping point, and I think the NSA rejecting the chance to enforce copyright while it abuses every privacy moral out there tells you everything. It means it's over.
And who is to say that the internet will stay the way it is now? What if in 20 or 30 years' time the internet is ten thousand times faster and ten thousand times more anonymous? What, dear copyright believers, will you do then? Apart from bellowing your self-pitying Luddism left, right and centre?
I know what I will do as a radical crowdfunding supporter: rejoice at that ten-thousand-fold increase's power to reap in much more crowdfunds much faster. Not a hint of Luddism exists in my philosophy.
Well from what I witnessed as a teenager during 9/11 and the shift to fighting dictators instead of supporting them, the U.S. at no point claimed that other democracies were not allowed to join in. So "self-appointed policeman" does not seem to hold weight.
I see this as multilateral. "A" policeman implies there can only be one. But I do not believe that. The U.K. for instance was brave enough to defy all public opinion and do the right thing in March 2003 even if they did join in with the U.S. in committing stupid exaggerations and distortions about WMD. But there has never been a war, just or unjust, where politicians have NOT made war-time exaggerations such as this, so I really consider the WMD "lie" a frivolous issue.
But the fact that they joined in shows that the moral issue is not as unilateral as it seems or has to be.
But you still do not address my point. If I were a Hutu or Tutsi living in Rwanda, would I have not been entitled to claim that the rest of the world standing by idly was a great deal of oppression on their part? Would I have not been entitled to say that NOT pulling the trigger felt like a callous iron fist?
And if I were an Iraqi-Kurd, or an Iraqi Shia or Sunni, would I have not been entitled to claim that something had to have been done about the fact that there was no international law Saddam Hussein did not break?
On the post: Once Again, If Copyright Enforcement Doesn't Improve The Bottom Line, What's The Point?
For one thing, some files with a pattern of 1s and 0s WILL be legal while other files with that same pattern of 1s and 0s will not. And unlike weed, which is called weed for the precise reason that it grows everywhere and is hard to get rid of, pirated files practically grow on trees.
Never mind the fact that some artists authorise file-sharing while others do not. Never mind that all Japanese visitors of deviantArt, fanfiction.net, tumblr, etc have technically violated piracy laws. Never mind that the Japanese state now has warrant to watch over not just torrents, but emails, file lockers, USBs sticks on the street, public WiFis, etc in their pathetic self-righteous, self-pitying Luddite utopia.
It is by no means an exaggeration to say that the futile war on drugs is still a thousand times more successful than the war on piracy, yet as the internet becomes much more faster, much more proliferated with more global users and much more anonymous in the near future, only copyright seems to think flogging it with a dead horse will do the world any good.
On the post: Technologists To NSA Review Group: Don't Forget About The Interests Of Non-US Persons
Re:
...
Read what you just wrote. Seriously. Read it.
On the post: US Ambassador To The UN Says WIPO Too Biased Against IP Holders
I won't delve into patents too much: the short answer is we need a full-blown socialist perspective applied to patents, as scientific research is something everybody ought to be participants in.
But copyright is always going to lead to irony and hypocrisy as long as it forces creators to back away if what they wish to bring are derivative works. As well as insisting on being the exception to the rule that it is impossible to forbid the expression of opinions without falling into corruption, deliberate or not.
On the post: Comcast's CEO: As Long As I Keep Saying Aereo Is Illegal, Sooner Or Later Someone Will Believe Me, Right?
Re: The basic FACT is that grifter Aereo is stealing content.
On the post: Comcast's CEO: As Long As I Keep Saying Aereo Is Illegal, Sooner Or Later Someone Will Believe Me, Right?
For your interest:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/09/30/technology_isn_t_taking_all_of_our_jobs. html
The only thing the Luddites ARE right about is how there can be temporary unemployment effects as a result of workers having to learn new trades.
And I posted this comment to go with:
"So don’t blame technology for persistent unemployment."
Tell that to the bloody MPAA. Copyright philosophy is one of the greatest unspoken Luddisms in economics. It makes the utopian claim that a service with a free-rider problem is in need of property distortion into goods instead, as if second-hand copies somehow do not create a free-rider problem. Assurance contracts, the real answer to the creator's free-rider problem, suffers from no kind of Luddism whatsoever because it treats the property correctly as a service, not goods. In fact, IndieGoGo and Kickstarter can cheer for joy when the internet becomes 10,000 times faster and more anonymous as it allows more virtual "tickets" to be booked much faster, while the deluded "pirate hunters" with their negativity towards any kind of communications technology can only throw a Luddite tantrum at such a technological advancement.
On the post: Yes, It's Fair Use To Mashup Charlie Brown And The Smiths
On the post: And, Right On Time, Here Comes The Blame Video Games Train For The Navy Yard Shooter
Re: Re:
Yes they are raging libertarians, but I do not mind that.
On the post: And, Right On Time, Here Comes The Blame Video Games Train For The Navy Yard Shooter
On the post: What The Continuous Flourishing Of New Cocktails Can Teach Us About Intellectual Property
A) Reasonable trademark protection. The kind that allows a person or company to prove that a product is really theirs through a unique signature. Not "brand protection" (I can walk on the street and yell "Coca Cola are corporate oligarchs!" and ruin the "image" of their brand) or generic signatures (if an "X" shape would not be considered satisfactory for a contract signature then why should Disney be allowed to get away with three black circles? But what WOULD qualify is the words "Walt Disney" with their unique font, along with possibly the fairy tale castle background).
This would mean that derivative works would be distinguished from originals, attribution would have to be given in order to stop defamation and plagiarism, and this trademark value alone would be enough of an "artificial" value to give quality assurance to the works and help tackle the free-rider problem (but the main economic model for this job is B) below) and allow all "knock-offs" or "pirated copies" to go out of business due to their lack of value, unless they themselves can add something valuable of their own through their own fruits of labour such as retelling The Lord Of The Rings or remixing music.
B) Assurance contracts. This is a brute-force response to the "free-rider" problem in its purest form. Make all interested parties pay simultaneously in order for the works to exist at all, giving "pirates" a hand of responsibility for the content's creation that copyright cannot do. We have plenty of evidence that this works already: tickets work, cable subscriptions work, pre-orders work (did you hear that Rockstar supposedly recuperated all the GTA V production costs from pre-orders alone?), so sure enough this trend gives a strong indication that crowdfunding can stand on its feet without the need for copyright. It is just a case of how long it takes to become mainstream. "Want an advanced copy of GTA V before anyone else? Put your pre-order money in our crowdfunding pot!"
Put these two elements together based on their evidence so far and you have a pretty freaking stable economic system. Don't listen to this unfalsifiable nonsense of "but copyright is the only way it'll all work!"
On the post: Label Sues Spotify Because Some Of Its Users Create Playlists Of Authorized Music In The Same Order It Did
Re: You need to invent a word for "what copyright is turned into"!
I do believe you mean "what copyright IS".
On the post: NSA Overreach May Have Contributed To UK's Unwillingness To Help With Syria
But just because these states have taken opportunistic chances to hack into tech lines does not mean that Syria must be left alone to burn to the ground. Two wrongs are not better than one.
Russia with its arming of Assad, advocating of homophobia back home, and outright KGB bullying ranging from the murder of Litvinenko to oppressing Bill Browder through the U.K. libel tourism industry, is also a state with very slippery slopes of its own. This is not exactly a state with a mentality of keeping its tyranny under legal secrecy with a few tech corporations - it is very much out in the open with its thuggery, and is giving Assad a lot of power through weaponry and U.N veto power.
I really do not care what the public relations are like here back home. My MPs who more or less voted on using no means of force whatsoever are nothing short of cowards who are too afraid to tell a huge wave of conspiratorial, right-wing-in-left-wing-clothing isolationists that they are all on the wrong side of history. Well I am not.
These chemical weapons, that were highly likely to have been employed by Assad who threatened to use them eighteen months ago, were aimed at rebel areas. And unless you really want to go full-conspiritard and say the rebels set this up as a false flag (or be like George Galloway and say they came straight from Israel themselves), you have to give Assad, already under a lot of pressure from the Arab-Spring resistance, a bit of skepticism. And I cannot figure out this mentality: IF the rebels used those weapons, which is very unlikely, why would that change anybody's opinion that chemical weapons should not be tolerated? Just aim the punishment at the rebels AS WELL AS Assad, and you will be free of hypocrisy. I won't accept anything short of a secular, democratic state and I will not stop calling to fight for just that until it comes about.
It is rather contemptible that only two years after the civil war started, with 100,000 already dead, that the "anti"-war folk (who are just so peaceful and love to quote the Spanish-defending Orwell left, right and centre) are just NOW taking enough notice to rally a rabble about how the Syrians should just be left to kill each other even more so than they are now, because it is "none of our business". Not even a U.N. no-fly-zone. Not even refugee safe havens. I hear that most notorious bankers often make a big deal about how they should not pay tax to help those who need it most because "homeless people are none of their business" as well. It is very anti-Left indeed.
AND indeed, much silence on Russia's arming of Assad, a dictator who has already oppressed Lebanon and given shelter to war criminals. The "anti"-war "Left" are quite ready to say, quite rightly, that it is despicable when the U.S. arms dictators and turns a blind eye to their oppression, so why can they not aim that same level of fury at Russia?
Pointing out hypocrisy does not mean you have answered serious moral questions. If a politician were to get up on stage and say that global warming must be resisted, but one heckler were to stand up and shout to him "but YOU drive a car to work when it is only ten minutes away!" the heckler has proven that the politician is a hypocrite, but not that needless carbon burning is right.
I hear this rhetoric all the time and it is just completely and utterly empty. "Why do you go after Assad and not the Saudi oligarchy?" "Why do you take out Saddam Hussein and not Robert Mugabe?" "Why do you want to save Afghanistan from the Taliban but not Palestine from the Zionists?" "Why do you pick on Slobodan Milosevic instead of the Burmese military junta?" "Why do you..." Yeah, I am pretty sure I HAVE made these kinds of arguments in my sleep. They are not exactly that big of an accomplishment. Any idiot can do it. But here is what takes bravery: putting your foot down and saying that if a state is hypocritical then by definition it must be right half the time, and we need to emphasise the right half. Trust me, these dictators and thugs that get a free-ride from the U.S. right now? We will get round to them as well. Totalitarianism is the explicit enemy and will always be so.
On the post: Bad News: Court Says Cyberlocker & Its Owner Can Be Liable For Copyright Infringement
Re: Re: Re: GOOD NEWS! "Safe harbors" not for pirates!
Copyright is a utopia. It makes it impossible for the creator to enforce.
The only thing you can do is bring all the materialistically interested parties to your table and have them commit to an assurance contract. I would like to hear why you do not think crowdfunding cannot solve the free-rider problem, while my waiting to give money to a third-party with no relation to the artist for a 2nd hand copy of content at a lower value CAN solve the free-rider problem.
Never mind that copyright essentially allows the copyright holder to dictate the inflation rates of the content he is printing (just as the government is the only one allowed to print authorised money and therefore control the value of said money through its inflation rates) therefore screwing over the value of consumers (and possibly even creating bad economic bubbles). Crowdfunding avoids all this nonsense as well.
When your philosophy represses technology and mine embraces it, I can claim to be on the right side of history. And there are many derivative artists who have intellectual property rights, too.
On the post: Massive Overblocking Hits Hundreds Of UK Sites
Re:
But we can TOTALLY stop pirated porn... right?!?
On the post: Massive Overblocking Hits Hundreds Of UK Sites
On the post: Prenda Lawyer Would Like Future Documents Sealed Because Techdirt Commenters Said Mean Stuff About Him
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQojgdfUAe0
On the post: More Copyright Censorship: 'Straight Pride' Group Uses DMCA To Take Down Their Own Responses To Reporter
Re: Re: Re: While some pirate apologitst are still insisting that copyright
Then again, I also do not happen to care what his exact stance is. You do not need to even hold any such position in order to know what a LIE is e.g. copyright maximalism. Knowing the truth can be hard at times, but knowing a lie is easy.
And I see copyright as a utopian, Luddite fallacy. Sure, it might allow artists to hit back at the free-rider problem and profit, but that does not mean it is the only way to hit back at the free-rider problem and profit.
Copyright is and always will be unstable as it makes the assumption that communications technology will not advance in the future. But an assurance contract perspective survives regardless of technological advancements. The crowdfunding only gets better with this technology. Copyright does not.
On the post: Time Warner CEO Says Having Game Of Thrones As 'Most Pirated' Is 'Better Than An Emmy'
Re: Re:
On the post: Other Government Agencies Wanted Access To NSA Surveillance Data For Other Investigations... Including Copyright Infringement
When the NSA, with all its malware spreading, corporation colluding, secretive spying, encryption cracking, ISP collaborating, and this last bit is key, DRM hijacking, REJECTS your calls for a Luddite utopia, your philosophy is dead.
There is such a thing as a tipping point, and I think the NSA rejecting the chance to enforce copyright while it abuses every privacy moral out there tells you everything. It means it's over.
And who is to say that the internet will stay the way it is now? What if in 20 or 30 years' time the internet is ten thousand times faster and ten thousand times more anonymous? What, dear copyright believers, will you do then? Apart from bellowing your self-pitying Luddism left, right and centre?
I know what I will do as a radical crowdfunding supporter: rejoice at that ten-thousand-fold increase's power to reap in much more crowdfunds much faster. Not a hint of Luddism exists in my philosophy.
On the post: Saudi Arabian Court Sentences Blogger To 7 Years, 600 Lashes Under Cybercrime Law
Re: Re: Re:
I see this as multilateral. "A" policeman implies there can only be one. But I do not believe that. The U.K. for instance was brave enough to defy all public opinion and do the right thing in March 2003 even if they did join in with the U.S. in committing stupid exaggerations and distortions about WMD. But there has never been a war, just or unjust, where politicians have NOT made war-time exaggerations such as this, so I really consider the WMD "lie" a frivolous issue.
But the fact that they joined in shows that the moral issue is not as unilateral as it seems or has to be.
On the post: Saudi Arabian Court Sentences Blogger To 7 Years, 600 Lashes Under Cybercrime Law
Re: Re: Re:
And if I were an Iraqi-Kurd, or an Iraqi Shia or Sunni, would I have not been entitled to claim that something had to have been done about the fact that there was no international law Saddam Hussein did not break?
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