While I would say that there is the other issue of the over-perscription of antibiotics for mundane sicknesses (or inappropriate sicknesses that antibiotics do nothing to help such as colds and flu) that can cause the breeding of superbugs, generally speaking if you prevent people carrying out R and D due to patents you are taking a massive risk.
The patent system needs to be socialised - tax people who wish to copy inventions instead of allowing the inventors to discriminate who gets a patent licence based on price or other nonsense. And give the taxes straight to the inventors. It also means less chance of them trying to cheat the system and extend patent terms on false premises.
There is no avoiding the fact that scientific development is a social issue, so you may as well embrace it in a Socialist direction. Patents are just indirect taxation where the money does not touch the vaults of the government. While Libertarians may argue that is a good thing, it would seem pretty easy to avoid corruption by giving the taxed and those receiving the tax receipts to allow the money to be followed.
As long as all of humanity can benefit from scientific research, it deserves to be a human right, strongly suggesting a Socialist imperative.
By the way, I wonder how long YouTube can go before it has to start charging in order to cover its server costs. 72 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute. It's hard to imagine that even Google can afford to run so much storage...
I also cannot help but notice that file sharing is the most powerful storage outsourcing system in the world. Every computer connected to it basically acts as a server.
What we sometimes forget in the digital age is that we do not have an infinite storage capacity on our hard drives at home. Sometimes we need to stream in order to see stuff, or even delete stuff on our hard drives to make room. Therefore the issue of who you pay for in order to get extra storage has to come into play somewhere.
I reckon streaming-for-hire and storage-for-hire is where people can benefit most from all of this. I would pay for services that allow me to watch stuff without having to download them.
Reading 1984 was part of the process that got me to change my mind and support the fight against both Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
I cannot help but notice that your rhetoric about always being at war with Eurasia has so far not applied to the wars Al Qaeda want to fight, never mind the wars Saddam Hussein started against Iran and Kuwait (over wanting private control over all oil around him, funnily enough). Osama Bin Laden was not anti-Empire but PRO-Empire, wanting to restore the Caliphate on every non-believer in the world. That was not the mindset of a comrade's struggle, but a religious theocrat who would happily take the so-called great Capitalistic oppression for himself instead of fighting against it. And that would be the least-strongest of his brutal weapons.
Considering how George Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War against General Franco, knowing fine well that there was only one side he could have been on, I find it hard to believe how he could have said that the threat of Theocracy should be left alone to rot the world, never mind making a moral equivalence with Baathist fascism and Western democracy. He took a bullet trying to defend Spain from fascism. So that is the mindset you are dealing with whenever you cite Orwell. He of all people said quite clearly that it is common sense to see that pacifism is a lost cause.
And I have given an explanation of what I think about the "war on terror" in another post below.
I cannot believe this has been rated as insightful.
Are you seriously comparing the act of chasing down victimless criminals who have done nothing more than either consume substances into their own bodies or the equivalent of borrowing multimedia from a friend with the act of defending nations from fascistic movements that intend to annex their sovereignty and bring people back to the stone age?
Perhaps you are right. Maybe winning a war on "terror", assuming the word is not a stupid way of describing it, in the final sense is not possible since humanity is overrated and will continue to spawn more fascistic movements... but I shall happily keep on fighting it nonetheless. If fighting against theocratic movements that wish to impose a 1984 scenario on everything they touch is not worth it, what is?
The slippery slope of big power applies both ways.
I know I am going to whip up a storm by posting this and I feel like it is probably futile to change minds on the matter, but TechDirt is due for some disagreement from me and so I shall deliver it here.
First, let me point out that "War on Terror" is indeed a stupid phrase to give to what is going on in the world right now. I prefer to call it a "War against Islamic Theocracy" or at the very least a "War against fascism". It is very typical of memes to either greatly overstate a threat such as "War against all Communism" as well as greatly understate a threat such as "War on Terror".
Religion breeds fascists by its very nature of a dictatorial God in its midsts. In Bosnia, many Muslims were slaughtered and put into concentration camps due to some Christian monsters from Serbia and Croatia. For a long, long while nobody was doing anything about it and journalists were struggling to get into the hot spots in Bosnia to see what was going on. Nobody in the U.S. was initially concerned, never mind the U.N.'s and NATO's denial of what needed to be done in order to correct the situation. No, it was not a possible "quagmire like Vietnam" situation - in Vietnam the aggressors were the United States and Vietnam was not in a position to harm anyone. Here, Bosnia was the victim and was also not in a position to harm anyone. The answer was morally simple, and putting heads in the sand cost many unnecessary lives.
I have to conclude here that if nothing were ever done to help Bosnia by the superpowers, I would have seen the inaction as a form of imperialism. It has to be the case that you cannot trust a super-power government if it allows these kinds of genocidal actions to happen while it stands by idly. Indeed, I don't think any reasonable person can say that nothing should be done to help Rwanda or Darfur. Yet, nobody is willing to apply this moral principle to a country that may have all the military might in the world. If you have the chance to stop people from getting killed, you have to take it in order to have any moral credibility.
In Psychology, this principle is called the "bystander effect" - when people on the street come across somebody who is bleeding to death or is under attack by a thug, you would be surprised that there are circumstances that cause these bystanders to differ responsibility to someone else to "call the police". When everybody thinks like this, nobody calls the police. And indeed sometimes they won't do anything to help at all. But the moral answer here is so simple that everybody sees this Psychological phenomenon as a horrible stain on humanity, and it must be overcome.
In regards to 9/11 - an attack on everything that religion does not possess: secluarism, freedom of women and gays and racial minorities and other religious minorities, freedom of speech, science, scepticism, liberty, everything that defines our dignity - one has to say that it cannot be a "response" to the crimes of the U.S. Especially when Al Qaeda are more than happy to support the U.S. when it arms Indonesia to commit genocide against East Timor, among others. If these deluded thugs really were fighting for the "rights of the oppressed", why are they attacking innocent civilians using innocent civilians? Why are they willing to ally with the Taliban who do nothing BUT oppress the vulnerable and try to repress humanity into a dangerous dark age? What did Denmark do to deserve to have its economy temporarily wrecked in 2005/06? Have its press publish a few cartoons? This is Denmark we are talking about - not in a position to harm anyone, very honourably gives some of its budget to help the Palestinians, did not invade Vietnam... Don't make me laugh. I am not an idiot. This Al Qaeda movement needs to be called by its rightful name: theocratic fascism.
And yes, we have a duty to fight it.
We have no disagreements about how the Patriot Act invades privacy. Neither about James Madison's warning about concentrating too much power in few spaces: the Cold War atrocities committed by the United States, ranging from Vietnam to Chile to East Timor to Cyprus to Nicaragua to many more (indeed including the U.S.'s collusion with Saddam Hussein) is proof that he was right. I also have no disagreement as to how the Military Industrial Complex can provide those higher-ups with great profit as a result of the need for bullets and guns... but what you cannot say is that their profiteering is a good enough excuse to let totalitarian fascists commit human rights abuses in the world.
There is such a thing as calling a super-power an imperialist power if it fails to use its power for moral ends by sitting around and letting it happen. If you see that, you see that the slope of power is much more slippery than you think.
Nope,
nope,
nope
and nope - also, the science classroom issue is a straw man since it has nothing to do with free speech (the First Amendment forbids religious nonsense being taught in science in the same way it forbids alchemy being taught in science, or Flat Earth theories, or witchcraft: religion does not get a free pass to waste teachers' time in science class and neither does anything else so stupid).
And on the contrary, the more I am insulted by speech the less I want to censor it. This goes as far as things even as vile as Holocaust denial. We still benefit from the speech because we end up knowing who our enemies are, where they are located and what their mentalities consist off.
Allowing offensive speech to flow also means we are educated to the evils of the world - hearing about a Holocaust denying scumbag just makes us that more primed to helping to fight much more serious anti-Semitism in other countries that consists of violence and oppression - countries that no doubt have many more censorship laws than the United States.
If there is a spread of hatred occurring within my community, I have a right to know about it. And the government has no right to keep me ignorant of it.
Why is it that you hardly hear of ARTISTS calling for copyright extensions? Why is it always companies, nowadays?
When I hear of labels who give artists mere pennies for downloads, use their work without the artists' permission (even when the morals of the copyright mantra they chant over and over insist that artists must get final say on their own fucking work and not some free-riding, leeching third party who did nothing to participate in the creative process), and then ask for copyright extensions supposedly in the name of "defending artists' rights", I find that profoundly insulting.
On the last tour, my mates they couldn't get in
I'd open up the back door but they'd get run out again
At every hotel, we was met by the law
Come for the party, come to make sure
Ohh, oh, ohh, have we done something wrong?
Ohh, oh, ohh, complete control, even over this song
You're my guitar hero!!
They said we'd be artistically free
When we signed that bit of paper
They meant let's make a lotsa money
And worry about it later
Ohh, oh, ohh, I'll never understand
Ohh, oh, ohh, complete control, let me see your other hand
I don't trust you, why should you trust me?
—Huh?
All over news, spread fast
They're dirty, they're filthy
They ain't a gonna last
(Total) This is Joe Public speaking
(C-O-N, Control)
I'm controlled in the body
I'm controlled in the mind
(Total) This is punk rockers
(C-O-N, Control)
We're controlled in the price
Of the hard drugs we must have to find
Total C-O-N, Control
Total (Parent! Control!)
C-O-N, Control
We've gotta ??????
(C-O-N, Control)
That means you
I kick it, I fight it, I gotta get up at it
(C-O-N, Control)
I gotta kick it
Paywalls remind me of the U.S.-Mexico border fence that only covers some of the border, can be climbed over, dug under, or just ripped apart to walk straight through. A waste of people's time.
Services Are Not Goods. There Is No Point In Pretending.
Here’s an afterthought on this issue:
If copyright law supposedly follows the laws of economics like everything else, explain the following. I buy a DVD, and get the movie experience. What I paid for, right? Now, imagine I bought 500 copies of the same DVD. If it really did follow "property" logic, I would get 500 times the movie experience... right? No. I can only really watch one DVD at a time 500 times in order to get what I paid for... and I can do that just as easily with the one copy.
Never mind the price fluctuations with second hand reselling - I would definitely wait until a DVD dipped down to £5 on ebay instead of £15. Does that mean I have stolen £10 from the artist? Not even! Apparently I steal the full £15 since not even the £5 touches the wallets of the artists. I pay and somehow still steal. Does that mean I am somehow still in the wrong?
All of this is what happens when you pretend that services are goods ala intellectual property - you end up having to rationalise a lot of this stuff. There is actually a term for it in linguistics: "nominalisation". The word means describing a process or action as if it were a tangible object (words like love, hate, success, fear, race, sprint etc) and is a very natural human thing to do. Another way of putting it is treating a verb like a noun. This is why copyright law transcends a lot of economic principles - services (verbs) behave as goods (nouns). We need to start treating the economics of creativity as services again, which is why I keep on pointing to crowdfunding websites because what they give people the chance to pay for is the process of creativity.
And here is another philosophical point. Imagine I buy a DVD and make a backup copy (for backup only, no reselling of the DVD after, genuine legitimate backup). Now, imagine a burglar were to break into my house and steal the genuine DVD and run off with it... but the computer containing my backup copy is too heavy for him to steal. According to the rules of intellectual property, I would have to delete that backup copy! Otherwise I'd be the one stealing. Let me repeat that, because of its insanity: I am the one being robbed yet I am the one who is the thief. And in theory, the same logic would apply if I broke the original DVD in half by accident, or lost it. You can end up paying for the service of creativity, but have no equity protection because the economics operate around treating the service as goods. Someone, person A, can pay £5 to watch a pre-owned DVD 500 times and another person, B, can pay £15 for a new DVD but may never get what he arguably truly paid for if he loses the DVD immediately after viewing it once due to theft. Person A would be paying for £ (5/500) a viewing: a penny per view to someone other than the artist. While person B has literally paid £15 to the artist for a single viewing.
This is insanity. It can only really make sense if you stop treating it like goods and start treating it like services as it should be, and have people pay for refundable crowdfunding tickets. That way they will definitely get what they pay for.
What makes you think an illegal copy has to be made in order for 2 people to get the benefits from 1 disc?
I play a game. I finish it. Friend borrows it. He finishes it. We pass it between us whenever one of us wants to play. Not a single copyright law broken whatsoever. The only factor is that they both could not play at the same time (I wonder if I see an impending destruction of 2/3/4 player games in the future on this basis?), but that is a small sacrifice in order to have multiple people experiencing the content on one disc while only one person has paid. And no, we are not in the wrong for doing this. It also means that anyone who follows the copyright law can commit the same supposed level of "theft" as a pirate. Cool, huh? I guess you don't have to break the copyright laws in order to "steal" from artists.
But of course, this ugly practice needs to be stamped out, doesn't it? It's not the copyright law that is the problem, heaven forbid! It is the practice of free trade! THAT is what needs stamping out! Gonna paraphrase Tim Minchin here: you can't help but wonder when companies doing this sort of thing finally die, they can ask the immortal question "...who's the world going to revolve around now?"
If I were a megalomaniacal control-freak of a corporation head, and I saw that my profits could be reduced by 50% as a result of 2 people sharing a disc, or even 80% by 5 people sharing a disc, I would rationalise that as really being free-trade's problem, instead of a problem with depending too much on copyright law. Behaviours like this are not just inevitable, but predictable.
I am still uneasy about Steam. They refuse second hand trading of PC games and have recently announced trying a console that will no doubt also be digital only and restrict second hand trading.
What this really is now is a war between open platforms and closed platforms. Public domain destruction... Open Source software destruction... now second-hand media destruction... ALL of it is actively encouraged by the existence of copyright law.
This is why I keep emphasising the seriousness of crowdfunding websites: powerful incentives with no need for closed systems. Kickstarter... IndieGoGo... They are the people that are the true heroes in all of this: providing blatant, fuck-you-in-your-face disproof of copyright as a means of obtaining incentives. And when the discussion about copyright gets even bigger, many more people will cite them as what people can turn to for profit.
Contemptible remark. A fucking contemptible disregard for basic property rights.
I need to ask people like you, is there anything that is NOT justified in your endless pursuit of stupidity?
I mean, I find it hard to see how you could not support Microsoft's admission patent on Kinect - you know, the one that scans how many people are watching the T.V.
Or maybe perhaps hire secret police to stop the second-hand trading of books with one another.
I mean this is the only reason why they haven't moved forward - they are long overdue new consoles now.
I wonder how long it will be before it is a legal requirement to bolt your consoles to the floor so you cannot swap consoles to play games. Oh wait, never mind. IP binding solves that problem already.
I get the feeling that Sony and Microsoft are waiting for the retail gaming sector to die due to digital downloads before they release their next generation consoles that will be digital only. That way they can destroy second hand gaming forever.
On the post: World Economic Forum Warns That Patents Are Making Us Lose The Race Against Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria
The patent system needs to be socialised - tax people who wish to copy inventions instead of allowing the inventors to discriminate who gets a patent licence based on price or other nonsense. And give the taxes straight to the inventors. It also means less chance of them trying to cheat the system and extend patent terms on false premises.
There is no avoiding the fact that scientific development is a social issue, so you may as well embrace it in a Socialist direction. Patents are just indirect taxation where the money does not touch the vaults of the government. While Libertarians may argue that is a good thing, it would seem pretty easy to avoid corruption by giving the taxed and those receiving the tax receipts to allow the money to be followed.
As long as all of humanity can benefit from scientific research, it deserves to be a human right, strongly suggesting a Socialist imperative.
On the post: Yet Another Study: 'Cracking Down' On Piracy Not Effective
Re: Re:
On the post: Yet Another Study: 'Cracking Down' On Piracy Not Effective
Re:
What we sometimes forget in the digital age is that we do not have an infinite storage capacity on our hard drives at home. Sometimes we need to stream in order to see stuff, or even delete stuff on our hard drives to make room. Therefore the issue of who you pay for in order to get extra storage has to come into play somewhere.
I reckon streaming-for-hire and storage-for-hire is where people can benefit most from all of this. I would pay for services that allow me to watch stuff without having to download them.
On the post: There Is No End In Sight For The Self-Perpetuating 'War On Terror'
Re: Re: Re:
I cannot help but notice that your rhetoric about always being at war with Eurasia has so far not applied to the wars Al Qaeda want to fight, never mind the wars Saddam Hussein started against Iran and Kuwait (over wanting private control over all oil around him, funnily enough). Osama Bin Laden was not anti-Empire but PRO-Empire, wanting to restore the Caliphate on every non-believer in the world. That was not the mindset of a comrade's struggle, but a religious theocrat who would happily take the so-called great Capitalistic oppression for himself instead of fighting against it. And that would be the least-strongest of his brutal weapons.
Considering how George Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War against General Franco, knowing fine well that there was only one side he could have been on, I find it hard to believe how he could have said that the threat of Theocracy should be left alone to rot the world, never mind making a moral equivalence with Baathist fascism and Western democracy. He took a bullet trying to defend Spain from fascism. So that is the mindset you are dealing with whenever you cite Orwell. He of all people said quite clearly that it is common sense to see that pacifism is a lost cause.
And I have given an explanation of what I think about the "war on terror" in another post below.
On the post: There Is No End In Sight For The Self-Perpetuating 'War On Terror'
Re:
Are you seriously comparing the act of chasing down victimless criminals who have done nothing more than either consume substances into their own bodies or the equivalent of borrowing multimedia from a friend with the act of defending nations from fascistic movements that intend to annex their sovereignty and bring people back to the stone age?
Perhaps you are right. Maybe winning a war on "terror", assuming the word is not a stupid way of describing it, in the final sense is not possible since humanity is overrated and will continue to spawn more fascistic movements... but I shall happily keep on fighting it nonetheless. If fighting against theocratic movements that wish to impose a 1984 scenario on everything they touch is not worth it, what is?
On the post: Lionsgate Censors Remix Video That The Copyright Office Itself Used As An Example Of Fair Use
"We will take your remixes and flood them with ads, while giving you nothing in return. If you don't agree, we'll see you in court."
You know what... fuck them.
On the post: There Is No End In Sight For The Self-Perpetuating 'War On Terror'
The slippery slope of big power applies both ways.
First, let me point out that "War on Terror" is indeed a stupid phrase to give to what is going on in the world right now. I prefer to call it a "War against Islamic Theocracy" or at the very least a "War against fascism". It is very typical of memes to either greatly overstate a threat such as "War against all Communism" as well as greatly understate a threat such as "War on Terror".
Religion breeds fascists by its very nature of a dictatorial God in its midsts. In Bosnia, many Muslims were slaughtered and put into concentration camps due to some Christian monsters from Serbia and Croatia. For a long, long while nobody was doing anything about it and journalists were struggling to get into the hot spots in Bosnia to see what was going on. Nobody in the U.S. was initially concerned, never mind the U.N.'s and NATO's denial of what needed to be done in order to correct the situation. No, it was not a possible "quagmire like Vietnam" situation - in Vietnam the aggressors were the United States and Vietnam was not in a position to harm anyone. Here, Bosnia was the victim and was also not in a position to harm anyone. The answer was morally simple, and putting heads in the sand cost many unnecessary lives.
I have to conclude here that if nothing were ever done to help Bosnia by the superpowers, I would have seen the inaction as a form of imperialism. It has to be the case that you cannot trust a super-power government if it allows these kinds of genocidal actions to happen while it stands by idly. Indeed, I don't think any reasonable person can say that nothing should be done to help Rwanda or Darfur. Yet, nobody is willing to apply this moral principle to a country that may have all the military might in the world. If you have the chance to stop people from getting killed, you have to take it in order to have any moral credibility.
In Psychology, this principle is called the "bystander effect" - when people on the street come across somebody who is bleeding to death or is under attack by a thug, you would be surprised that there are circumstances that cause these bystanders to differ responsibility to someone else to "call the police". When everybody thinks like this, nobody calls the police. And indeed sometimes they won't do anything to help at all. But the moral answer here is so simple that everybody sees this Psychological phenomenon as a horrible stain on humanity, and it must be overcome.
In regards to 9/11 - an attack on everything that religion does not possess: secluarism, freedom of women and gays and racial minorities and other religious minorities, freedom of speech, science, scepticism, liberty, everything that defines our dignity - one has to say that it cannot be a "response" to the crimes of the U.S. Especially when Al Qaeda are more than happy to support the U.S. when it arms Indonesia to commit genocide against East Timor, among others. If these deluded thugs really were fighting for the "rights of the oppressed", why are they attacking innocent civilians using innocent civilians? Why are they willing to ally with the Taliban who do nothing BUT oppress the vulnerable and try to repress humanity into a dangerous dark age? What did Denmark do to deserve to have its economy temporarily wrecked in 2005/06? Have its press publish a few cartoons? This is Denmark we are talking about - not in a position to harm anyone, very honourably gives some of its budget to help the Palestinians, did not invade Vietnam... Don't make me laugh. I am not an idiot. This Al Qaeda movement needs to be called by its rightful name: theocratic fascism.
And yes, we have a duty to fight it.
We have no disagreements about how the Patriot Act invades privacy. Neither about James Madison's warning about concentrating too much power in few spaces: the Cold War atrocities committed by the United States, ranging from Vietnam to Chile to East Timor to Cyprus to Nicaragua to many more (indeed including the U.S.'s collusion with Saddam Hussein) is proof that he was right. I also have no disagreement as to how the Military Industrial Complex can provide those higher-ups with great profit as a result of the need for bullets and guns... but what you cannot say is that their profiteering is a good enough excuse to let totalitarian fascists commit human rights abuses in the world.
There is such a thing as calling a super-power an imperialist power if it fails to use its power for moral ends by sitting around and letting it happen. If you see that, you see that the slope of power is much more slippery than you think.
On the post: Journalists Cheering On Censorship Is A Form Of Hate Speech
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: "Too Far" - they always say that.
On the post: DailyDirt: Big Money, Small Change
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5UT04p5f7U
On the post: Journalists Cheering On Censorship Is A Form Of Hate Speech
Re: Re: "Too Far" - they always say that.
nope,
nope
and nope - also, the science classroom issue is a straw man since it has nothing to do with free speech (the First Amendment forbids religious nonsense being taught in science in the same way it forbids alchemy being taught in science, or Flat Earth theories, or witchcraft: religion does not get a free pass to waste teachers' time in science class and neither does anything else so stupid).
And on the contrary, the more I am insulted by speech the less I want to censor it. This goes as far as things even as vile as Holocaust denial. We still benefit from the speech because we end up knowing who our enemies are, where they are located and what their mentalities consist off.
Allowing offensive speech to flow also means we are educated to the evils of the world - hearing about a Holocaust denying scumbag just makes us that more primed to helping to fight much more serious anti-Semitism in other countries that consists of violence and oppression - countries that no doubt have many more censorship laws than the United States.
If there is a spread of hatred occurring within my community, I have a right to know about it. And the government has no right to keep me ignorant of it.
On the post: Journalists Cheering On Censorship Is A Form Of Hate Speech
"Too Far" - they always say that.
What about the Danish Cartoons? Nope.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Theo Van Gogh? Nope.
South Park? Nope.
There will never be someone good enough to tell me what I can and cannot read. And there never will be.
On the post: Australia Says 'Let's Update Copyright For The Digital Economy;' Legacy Industries Say 'Let's Pretend It's Still 1968'
When I hear of labels who give artists mere pennies for downloads, use their work without the artists' permission (even when the morals of the copyright mantra they chant over and over insist that artists must get final say on their own fucking work and not some free-riding, leeching third party who did nothing to participate in the creative process), and then ask for copyright extensions supposedly in the name of "defending artists' rights", I find that profoundly insulting.
On the post: Sony Issues The 'Bob Dylan Copyright Collection Volume' Solely To Extend Copyright On Dylan's Work
Ohhhh Ohhhh OHHHHHH!
They said release 'Remote Control'
But we didn't want it on the label
They said, "Fly to Amsterdam"
The people laughed, but the press went mad
Ohh, oh, ohh, someone's really smart
Ohh, oh, ohh, complete control, that's a laugh
On the last tour, my mates they couldn't get in
I'd open up the back door but they'd get run out again
At every hotel, we was met by the law
Come for the party, come to make sure
Ohh, oh, ohh, have we done something wrong?
Ohh, oh, ohh, complete control, even over this song
You're my guitar hero!!
They said we'd be artistically free
When we signed that bit of paper
They meant let's make a lotsa money
And worry about it later
Ohh, oh, ohh, I'll never understand
Ohh, oh, ohh, complete control, let me see your other hand
I don't trust you, why should you trust me?
—Huh?
All over news, spread fast
They're dirty, they're filthy
They ain't a gonna last
(Total) This is Joe Public speaking
(C-O-N, Control)
I'm controlled in the body
I'm controlled in the mind
(Total) This is punk rockers
(C-O-N, Control)
We're controlled in the price
Of the hard drugs we must have to find
Total C-O-N, Control
Total (Parent! Control!)
C-O-N, Control
We've gotta ??????
(C-O-N, Control)
That means you
I kick it, I fight it, I gotta get up at it
(C-O-N, Control)
I gotta kick it
On the post: Odd Logic: If You Value Your Readers, You Should Make Them Pay
On the post: Sony Patent Application Takes On Used Game Sales, Piracy With Embedded RFID Chips In Game Discs
Services Are Not Goods. There Is No Point In Pretending.
If copyright law supposedly follows the laws of economics like everything else, explain the following. I buy a DVD, and get the movie experience. What I paid for, right? Now, imagine I bought 500 copies of the same DVD. If it really did follow "property" logic, I would get 500 times the movie experience... right? No. I can only really watch one DVD at a time 500 times in order to get what I paid for... and I can do that just as easily with the one copy.
Never mind the price fluctuations with second hand reselling - I would definitely wait until a DVD dipped down to £5 on ebay instead of £15. Does that mean I have stolen £10 from the artist? Not even! Apparently I steal the full £15 since not even the £5 touches the wallets of the artists. I pay and somehow still steal. Does that mean I am somehow still in the wrong?
All of this is what happens when you pretend that services are goods ala intellectual property - you end up having to rationalise a lot of this stuff. There is actually a term for it in linguistics: "nominalisation". The word means describing a process or action as if it were a tangible object (words like love, hate, success, fear, race, sprint etc) and is a very natural human thing to do. Another way of putting it is treating a verb like a noun. This is why copyright law transcends a lot of economic principles - services (verbs) behave as goods (nouns). We need to start treating the economics of creativity as services again, which is why I keep on pointing to crowdfunding websites because what they give people the chance to pay for is the process of creativity.
And here is another philosophical point. Imagine I buy a DVD and make a backup copy (for backup only, no reselling of the DVD after, genuine legitimate backup). Now, imagine a burglar were to break into my house and steal the genuine DVD and run off with it... but the computer containing my backup copy is too heavy for him to steal. According to the rules of intellectual property, I would have to delete that backup copy! Otherwise I'd be the one stealing. Let me repeat that, because of its insanity: I am the one being robbed yet I am the one who is the thief. And in theory, the same logic would apply if I broke the original DVD in half by accident, or lost it. You can end up paying for the service of creativity, but have no equity protection because the economics operate around treating the service as goods. Someone, person A, can pay £5 to watch a pre-owned DVD 500 times and another person, B, can pay £15 for a new DVD but may never get what he arguably truly paid for if he loses the DVD immediately after viewing it once due to theft. Person A would be paying for £ (5/500) a viewing: a penny per view to someone other than the artist. While person B has literally paid £15 to the artist for a single viewing.
This is insanity. It can only really make sense if you stop treating it like goods and start treating it like services as it should be, and have people pay for refundable crowdfunding tickets. That way they will definitely get what they pay for.
On the post: Sony Patent Application Takes On Used Game Sales, Piracy With Embedded RFID Chips In Game Discs
Re: Re: Re:
I play a game. I finish it. Friend borrows it. He finishes it. We pass it between us whenever one of us wants to play. Not a single copyright law broken whatsoever. The only factor is that they both could not play at the same time (I wonder if I see an impending destruction of 2/3/4 player games in the future on this basis?), but that is a small sacrifice in order to have multiple people experiencing the content on one disc while only one person has paid. And no, we are not in the wrong for doing this. It also means that anyone who follows the copyright law can commit the same supposed level of "theft" as a pirate. Cool, huh? I guess you don't have to break the copyright laws in order to "steal" from artists.
But of course, this ugly practice needs to be stamped out, doesn't it? It's not the copyright law that is the problem, heaven forbid! It is the practice of free trade! THAT is what needs stamping out! Gonna paraphrase Tim Minchin here: you can't help but wonder when companies doing this sort of thing finally die, they can ask the immortal question "...who's the world going to revolve around now?"
If I were a megalomaniacal control-freak of a corporation head, and I saw that my profits could be reduced by 50% as a result of 2 people sharing a disc, or even 80% by 5 people sharing a disc, I would rationalise that as really being free-trade's problem, instead of a problem with depending too much on copyright law. Behaviours like this are not just inevitable, but predictable.
On the post: Sony Patent Application Takes On Used Game Sales, Piracy With Embedded RFID Chips In Game Discs
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What this really is now is a war between open platforms and closed platforms. Public domain destruction... Open Source software destruction... now second-hand media destruction... ALL of it is actively encouraged by the existence of copyright law.
This is why I keep emphasising the seriousness of crowdfunding websites: powerful incentives with no need for closed systems. Kickstarter... IndieGoGo... They are the people that are the true heroes in all of this: providing blatant, fuck-you-in-your-face disproof of copyright as a means of obtaining incentives. And when the discussion about copyright gets even bigger, many more people will cite them as what people can turn to for profit.
On the post: Sony Patent Application Takes On Used Game Sales, Piracy With Embedded RFID Chips In Game Discs
Re:
Okay. I think it is safe to say that you have just given the game away for everybody in your position.
Take a well-deserved this:
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........../'/.../..../......./¨¯\
........('(...´...´.... ¯~/'...')
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..........''...\.......... _.·´
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Contemptible remark. A fucking contemptible disregard for basic property rights.
I need to ask people like you, is there anything that is NOT justified in your endless pursuit of stupidity?
I mean, I find it hard to see how you could not support Microsoft's admission patent on Kinect - you know, the one that scans how many people are watching the T.V.
Or maybe perhaps hire secret police to stop the second-hand trading of books with one another.
What a pathetic disgrace.
On the post: Sony Patent Application Takes On Used Game Sales, Piracy With Embedded RFID Chips In Game Discs
Re:
I wonder how long it will be before it is a legal requirement to bolt your consoles to the floor so you cannot swap consoles to play games. Oh wait, never mind. IP binding solves that problem already.
On the post: Sony Patent Application Takes On Used Game Sales, Piracy With Embedded RFID Chips In Game Discs
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