Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 26 Feb 2013 @ 7:06am
Re: Re:
hopefully as this move starts actually eroding Australia economy (and other economies elsewhere) the patent systems will actually be put under scrutiny and review...
To be hoped for surely... but the cynic in me says the much more likely outcome is that the problem will be "dealt with" using a sticking-plaster-over-sucking-chest-wound type law specifically aimed at junk patents that ultimately makes things worse instead of better.
Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 21 Feb 2013 @ 5:18am
Not so much...
Universal's assertions in court were based not on any good faith belief in their truth, but on the mistaken belief that it could use the courts to turn a profit.
Sadly, the word "mistaken" has little or no place in that sentence. I strongly suspect universal's belief comes from every other time they and others like them do get to use copyright law exactly this way.
And indeed why shouldn't they think they can use copyright law any way they please? They paid for it and wrote most of it after all...
Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 19 Feb 2013 @ 12:42pm
Re: Re: Re: Re:
Have you tried Mega? Truthfully it's not all that great.
Which is ironic if you think about it. Imagine how luke-warm (and cheap) a legitimate service would have to be to beat it hands down if it met the basic criteria of flexibility, usability and reasonable pricing.
If they spent even a 1/4 of the money they spend tilting at windmills on providing a service instead they'd be a lot more effective against "piracy" and make money at the same time.
Instead they go for the "throw money at the problem with no return" route every time... *le sigh*
Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 11 Feb 2013 @ 2:40pm
Re: Re: Mike..Love you man, but...
but since it is 93% of the customers at the services they are again completely missing the biggest part of the critics, those filesharing or going without!
Yeah, this kind of statistical dishonesty always bugs the hell out of me. Techncally correct perhaps, but carefully completely not to the point you're trying to aim it at while sounding good.
Reminds me of a famous ad for catfood from when I was young. The tag line (after they ammended it following complaints if I recall correctly) was "8 out of 10 owners who expressed a preference said their cats preferred it." The implicit is "cats love this stuff", but what it really means is "Most people we asked (and we probably only asked our on mailing list who buy the stuff anyway), said 'the mangy fleabag will eat anything that's not nailed down' and out of the rest 8 out of 10 were pretty sure the cat didn't run when fed the stuff." Yeah ringing endoresement.
Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 11 Feb 2013 @ 10:40am
Re: Re: Re:
There are still some huge holes in your argument... here's a few of them:
But I don't think much of an argument can be made for the notion that less enforcement would not affect the current rate of infringement
Only if you look in isolation. The whole point is that you shouldn't. Take exactly the same money currently spent on "the war in copyright theft" (including all the billions of tax dollars they con the goverments into stumping over if you want to go to town) and spend that same amount on providing a real alternative service and normalising the prices of legitimate services to what the public would reasonably pay. Then it's highly likely that not only would infringement go down, but profits would also go up. This is the point after all.
So granted the store is out the price it paid for the stolen merchandise, not any potential profit.
True enough, but you're being pedantic. The point is that the shoplifting argument still doesn't fit - a shop is out real money and time and effort from shop lifting, a copied file means the "shop" is out nothing real.
How many people would subscribe to Netflix of $8/mo. if they could get the identical (or better) service for free?
People can get better service for free - depending what your criteria is for "better". Netflix is convenient, and is safe to use (ie virus free), which makes many people pay for it. Piracy already offers better quality than Netflix and more choice than Netflix is more flexible than Netflix and is already free.
Note I haven't mentioned legitimacy once. You're looking at the argument the wrong way round: How many people would use an unknown, fractured, potentially virused service for free if they could get a full-HD, anything you want available on any device any time service from Netflix for even £10 a month?
Stopping the rabid and pointless quest to "stop piracy" by being more and more draconian in the oooo generously 0.001% of infringement you actually catch doesn't have to mean making it legal. All else being equal the legitimacy of the service will have an effect, but I would contend that it has an effect little different without enforcement as with because no matter how draconian the enforcement it's still falls in the "it happens to other people like hurricanes" category in most people's consideration. Either way the quality of the service will have more effect than the legitimacy.
As far as it goes, Netflix is an OK service though personally the enforced low quality and limited new stuff of such services annoys me, and I am sure that at least as many people subscribe to it and still pirate the stuff it doesn't have available that they want as those users who only use legitimate sources.
Netflix's problem as far as I can see, and the reason they don't make a bigger dent in "piracy", is not their own service but the limitations and vastly overinflated fees demanded by the content providers. Enforcement has nothing to do with it otherwise the people paying for Netflix and other legitimate services like it while still "pirating" are clearly not choosing free over paid.
Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 11 Feb 2013 @ 9:43am
Friendly nation...
I guess the US doesn't like visitors much. I for one won't be going back and spending my tourist dollars there until they stop being so f**king stupid and pretend to be a free country again.
If the rest of the world is really lucky the US will tank their own economy and fail to recover. Sure that'll f*ck up the rest of the world for a while too, but even that and afterwards China being the world's leading economy and super power would be better at this stage.
Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 9 Feb 2013 @ 11:45am
Lies, I tell you, LIES!!!
They note that the main goal is to be transparent in seeing if they can make back the €4,311 they spent making the album itself
But.. wait.... what???? I've been reliably informed that you can't possibly make an album for less than, like, $200,000!!!! A record label said that I an' I believed them, so these guys must be totally lying and just tying to cover up their abject failure to be "real" musicians.
Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 9 Feb 2013 @ 11:04am
Re: Re: Re: Re: Good Discussion So Far - overall
There's a fundamental disconnect between tangible and intangible, and how that relates to property rights in general
I'd say contentious and non-contentious rather, but yes. The major difference of copyright from other rights that work in somewhat similar ways is that you can infringe the "right" without changing anything that the "rightsholder" has, except in an entirely imaginary way (i.e. the potential loss of imaginary money).
Maybe I'm just not thinking broad enough, but I can't think of another "right" that acts in that way. I'll admit I'm struggling to think of an analogy or example, but to me an "intangible" right leaves open the possibility of a right being infringed with direct effect on the rightsholder.
Either way "property or not property" is a red herring - copyright is copyright and has similarities to other types of right, but differences also and should be dealt with on its own terms.
Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 9 Feb 2013 @ 9:29am
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Interesting
Why doesn't Mike, who purports to want his articles to be in the public domain, not do so simple of a thing?
Because secretly Mike Masnick loves every single aspect of copyright. All the articles pointing out how broken, illogical and out of touch withy reality copyright, all the public debates he attends presenting arguments against copyright... it's all a cunning smoke screen.
In reality, his alter-ego Copyright Man (tm) is Chris Dodd's best friend and flies around the country with his x-ray vision looking into people's houses and tracking down evil copyright infringers and setting fire to them with his heat vision (his one point of dissagreement with Chris Dodd as it turns out, who thinks this is not severe or invasive enough).
Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 8 Feb 2013 @ 5:28am
Re: A general copyright response
Really the whole argument and in to some extent this article is pretty much completely irrelevant. The reason to debunk arguments made like "copyright is like a contract" or "copyright is like property" is that they are most often used as an excuse to justify even more restrictions.
How about we start the argument "copyright is like copyright" and recognise it for what it is;
Vastly over long in term
vastly over-restrictive of other people's rights
horribly biased towards those with the most money
horriby biased towards middlemen, especially large middle men, rather than creators or consumers
horribly out of date and utterly un-related to modern society
pointlessly and without any sense of balance to reality overly harse in penalising minor offenses.
apparantly largely inneffective at its stated purpose
very bad for education and culture in its current form
and think about ways that might be fair and reasonable for everyone instead of about an irrelevant argument about what it's like?
This guy makes salient points and all you people do is insult him and censor his posts.
Rarely. And even on the rare occasions that that is true his technique is identical:
1/ Spam the same opinion over every post that even vaguely relates to his talking points. (usually this will be a pedantic and often irrelevant semantic or legal point, though it's true sometimes it has relevance but after a while it becomes hard to maintain the will to tell)
2/ Ignore and/or insult anyone that attempts a debate of the "facts" he has stated, usually the salient points of rebuttal being to restate in a subtly different way exactly the same thing he said before whether relevant to what the person said or not.
3/ Include as often as possible personal insults to Mike Masnick, who presumably kicked his puppy at some point in the past, and challenge him to "debate" his chosen talking points.
4/ If Mike Masnick is daft enough to engage, respond with "but you didn't answer why won't you admit I'm right" and variations there-on to everything he says.
Observation of a repeated occurence is not insult and trying to discourage spam is not censorship, especially when the "censorship" is removable with a single click of the mouse.
Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 7 Feb 2013 @ 12:21pm
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
The answer is that they are defined to be and are treated as property rights.
No, that's your answer not the answer.
You regularly prove yourself uninterested in anything that might disturb your unyielding assersion that this is "correct", but that doesn't mean there are not many other answers at least 1/2 of which are likely rather more "correct" than yours whether you ignore them or not.
However, on the off-chance that a chink of the outside world might occasionally intrude on the perfect world in your head, I will say the answer is not binary no matter how much you try to conflate the 2 things.
Not an Electronic Rodent (profile), 7 Feb 2013 @ 11:11am
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
God that gets dull. You conflate ideas and spout the same total rubbish over and over again as if that makes it true. You endlessly pick at irrelevant and pedantic semantic differences of a single word and either run away from the point any time someone comes near one or find a reason to spout the same rubbish yet another time ad-nauseam. All the while screaming how Mike knows nothing because he won't debate you when even a 4-year-old can see that you're not interested in debate, right or wrong or even working and not working. You're just intersted in getting what you want, "winning" (whatever that looks like to you), and avoiding the chance of having to pay attention to anyone's opinions or prejudices but your own unyielding ones.
My undying wish is that Techdirt will add the ability to collapse threads so I can easily skip anything with your irrelevant spam in it. My hope is that Dante was right about what comes next for you.
On the post: Chinese Junk Patents Flood Into Australia, Allowing Chinese Companies To Strategically Block Innovation
Re: Re:
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Dark Helmet's Favorite Posts Of The Week 4: This Time, It's Personal
Re: Re:
On the post: Historical Hypocrisy: Donkey Kong, King Kong, & The Public Domain
Not so much...
And indeed why shouldn't they think they can use copyright law any way they please? They paid for it and wrote most of it after all...
On the post: HADOPI May Be Succeeding -- In Driving French Customers To Dotcom's Mega
Re: Re: Re: Re:
If they spent even a 1/4 of the money they spend tilting at windmills on providing a service instead they'd be a lot more effective against "piracy" and make money at the same time.
Instead they go for the "throw money at the problem with no return" route every time... *le sigh*
On the post: Lies, Damn Lies And Statistics: How The BPI Cherry Picks Its Averages To Pretend File Sharers Spend Less
It has to be in this comment thread somewhere
On the post: Lies, Damn Lies And Statistics: How The BPI Cherry Picks Its Averages To Pretend File Sharers Spend Less
Re: Re: Mike..Love you man, but...
Reminds me of a famous ad for catfood from when I was young. The tag line (after they ammended it following complaints if I recall correctly) was "8 out of 10 owners who expressed a preference said their cats preferred it." The implicit is "cats love this stuff", but what it really means is "Most people we asked (and we probably only asked our on mailing list who buy the stuff anyway), said 'the mangy fleabag will eat anything that's not nailed down' and out of the rest 8 out of 10 were pretty sure the cat didn't run when fed the stuff." Yeah ringing endoresement.
On the post: Copyright Boss: 'It's Great Mechanics Now Need To Know About Copyright'
Re: In other words: What is great is making things worse and thus drawing attention to the problem!
On the post: Three Strikes May Decrease File Sharing, But If Sales Keep Dropping, Who Cares?
Re: Re: Re:
Only if you look in isolation. The whole point is that you shouldn't. Take exactly the same money currently spent on "the war in copyright theft" (including all the billions of tax dollars they con the goverments into stumping over if you want to go to town) and spend that same amount on providing a real alternative service and normalising the prices of legitimate services to what the public would reasonably pay. Then it's highly likely that not only would infringement go down, but profits would also go up. This is the point after all.
True enough, but you're being pedantic. The point is that the shoplifting argument still doesn't fit - a shop is out real money and time and effort from shop lifting, a copied file means the "shop" is out nothing real.
People can get better service for free - depending what your criteria is for "better". Netflix is convenient, and is safe to use (ie virus free), which makes many people pay for it. Piracy already offers better quality than Netflix and more choice than Netflix is more flexible than Netflix and is already free.
Note I haven't mentioned legitimacy once. You're looking at the argument the wrong way round: How many people would use an unknown, fractured, potentially virused service for free if they could get a full-HD, anything you want available on any device any time service from Netflix for even £10 a month?
Stopping the rabid and pointless quest to "stop piracy" by being more and more draconian in the oooo generously 0.001% of infringement you actually catch doesn't have to mean making it legal. All else being equal the legitimacy of the service will have an effect, but I would contend that it has an effect little different without enforcement as with because no matter how draconian the enforcement it's still falls in the "it happens to other people like hurricanes" category in most people's consideration. Either way the quality of the service will have more effect than the legitimacy.
As far as it goes, Netflix is an OK service though personally the enforced low quality and limited new stuff of such services annoys me, and I am sure that at least as many people subscribe to it and still pirate the stuff it doesn't have available that they want as those users who only use legitimate sources.
Netflix's problem as far as I can see, and the reason they don't make a bigger dent in "piracy", is not their own service but the limitations and vastly overinflated fees demanded by the content providers. Enforcement has nothing to do with it otherwise the people paying for Netflix and other legitimate services like it while still "pirating" are clearly not choosing free over paid.
On the post: Homeland Security: Not Searching Your Laptop Doesn't Benefit Your Civil Liberties, So We Can Do It
Friendly nation...
If the rest of the world is really lucky the US will tank their own economy and fail to recover. Sure that'll f*ck up the rest of the world for a while too, but even that and afterwards China being the world's leading economy and super power would be better at this stage.
On the post: Connecting With Fans In Unique Ways: Band Sets Up Treasure Hunt To Find Fan-Submitted Sounds In New Album
Lies, I tell you, LIES!!!
On the post: No, Copyright Is Not Like A Contract
Re: Re: Re: Re: Good Discussion So Far - overall
Maybe I'm just not thinking broad enough, but I can't think of another "right" that acts in that way. I'll admit I'm struggling to think of an analogy or example, but to me an "intangible" right leaves open the possibility of a right being infringed with direct effect on the rightsholder.
Either way "property or not property" is a red herring - copyright is copyright and has similarities to other types of right, but differences also and should be dealt with on its own terms.
On the post: Copyright Explained Musically
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Interesting
In reality, his alter-ego Copyright Man (tm) is Chris Dodd's best friend and flies around the country with his x-ray vision looking into people's houses and tracking down evil copyright infringers and setting fire to them with his heat vision (his one point of dissagreement with Chris Dodd as it turns out, who thinks this is not severe or invasive enough).
On the post: No, Copyright Is Not Like A Contract
Re: A general copyright response
How about we start the argument "copyright is like copyright" and recognise it for what it is;
Vastly over long in term
vastly over-restrictive of other people's rights
horribly biased towards those with the most money
horriby biased towards middlemen, especially large middle men, rather than creators or consumers
horribly out of date and utterly un-related to modern society
pointlessly and without any sense of balance to reality overly harse in penalising minor offenses.
apparantly largely inneffective at its stated purpose
very bad for education and culture in its current form
and think about ways that might be fair and reasonable for everyone instead of about an irrelevant argument about what it's like?
On the post: No, Copyright Is Not Like A Contract
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
1/ Spam the same opinion over every post that even vaguely relates to his talking points. (usually this will be a pedantic and often irrelevant semantic or legal point, though it's true sometimes it has relevance but after a while it becomes hard to maintain the will to tell)
2/ Ignore and/or insult anyone that attempts a debate of the "facts" he has stated, usually the salient points of rebuttal being to restate in a subtly different way exactly the same thing he said before whether relevant to what the person said or not.
3/ Include as often as possible personal insults to Mike Masnick, who presumably kicked his puppy at some point in the past, and challenge him to "debate" his chosen talking points.
4/ If Mike Masnick is daft enough to engage, respond with "but you didn't answer why won't you admit I'm right" and variations there-on to everything he says.
Observation of a repeated occurence is not insult and trying to discourage spam is not censorship, especially when the "censorship" is removable with a single click of the mouse.
On the post: No, Copyright Is Not Like A Contract
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: No, Copyright Is Not Like A Contract
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: No, Copyright Is Not Like A Contract
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
You regularly prove yourself uninterested in anything that might disturb your unyielding assersion that this is "correct", but that doesn't mean there are not many other answers at least 1/2 of which are likely rather more "correct" than yours whether you ignore them or not.
However, on the off-chance that a chink of the outside world might occasionally intrude on the perfect world in your head, I will say the answer is not binary no matter how much you try to conflate the 2 things.
On the post: No, Copyright Is Not Like A Contract
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
My undying wish is that Techdirt will add the ability to collapse threads so I can easily skip anything with your irrelevant spam in it. My hope is that Dante was right about what comes next for you.
/rant
On the post: Harper's Magazine Publisher Shakes Verbal Fist At Google; Romanticizes Own Profession; Quotes Teletubbies
Re:
o o
l
\_/
Indeed...
Next >>