Re: Canon challenge.. any submissions from people here?

On 24 apr, 12:31, Alienjones <Alienjo...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
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sobriquet wrote:

| On 24 apr, 04:39, "Frank ess" <fr...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

|> Nice try; no cigar.
|>
|> --
|> Frank ess
|
| The government is a mere extension of corporations (who pay for the
| government), so you can't expect the government to be concerned with
| individual rights (like the right to share information or even human
| rights in general).
| You can criminalize or demonize people all you like, but you can't
| hold back technological developments.
| Copyright is less and less of a feasible concept. In a few years
| devices like ipods with practically unlimited memory and network
| connectivity will be as ubiquitous as mobile phones and how exactly do
| you propose to prevent people from exchanging information, if you
| can't even do it right now with millions of people exchanging stuff
| online relatively unimpeded?
| Information doesn't become worthless by allowing it to be exchanged
| freely. It's just that it is no longer possible to express its value
| in monetary terms.
| Economic laws of supply and demand determine the price of things and
| in case of digital information, the supply is infinite (once you have
| a single copy, you can reproduce it indefinitely at no extra costs).
| Compare it to diamonds that are valuable because they are rare. If you
| could duplicate diamonds as easily as you can duplicate a software
| package like CS3, their value would drop to zero, because if there is
| an infinite supply, that means the price goes to zero. But that
| doesn't mean that diamonds are suddenly no longer useful for all sorts
| of purposes. So it's still valuable in that respect, but it's just no
| longer possible to express this value in monetary terms (because that
| requires an aspect of rarity).
| Apart from that, copyright is not the only possible way to provide a
| financial incentive to people who create things. Alternatively, we
| could tax the online exchange information, statistically monitor the
| items being exchanged and distribute some or all of the taxes
| accordingly to people who provide fresh and original material. In
| practice this is already being done with a levy on blank media to
| compensate for copyright infringement. So it's not that I think
| artists don't deserve to be rewarded for their efforts, it's just that
| I think we must strive towards a fair way to do it that actually works
| in practice and is compatible with modern technology.

You rather quaint and romantic attempt to justify your beliefs is
entertaining but founded on a totally wrong foundation... That communism
can produce productivity.

No. The foundation is that economic laws determine the price of
things, not tradition. Once we invent universal duplication devices,
we can abolish money as a universal substitute for things (perhaps we
can retain it for services) and that would render the whole discussion
of communism vs capitalism moot.
We have universal duplication devices right now and they are called
computers. But so far they only work for digital information and not
for physical commodities.


I will stop taking photographs for a living if people can copy them
instead of buy them. To stop people like you from taking my endeavorers
and destroying my business, there exists copyright, patents and
trademarks. The foundation of enterprise that encourages invention.

Before ever any of your romantic notions could have a hope in hell of
succeeding, you first will need to present people like me with an
alternative income source.

I've done that.. the alternative is taxing the online exchange of
information.
They already do that (in the form of a levy on blank media).


I do not like the growth of large corporation who manage to measure the
exact amount of money they can get away with charging for their goods
but I respect their right to do it. This is where your attempt to
justify anarchy and the destruction of civilization as we know it today
is fundamentally flawed.

How do you ensure there is a balance then between economically
powerful corporations and individual people where their rights or
interests conflict?
You can't rely on the government for that, because they are biased
towards corporations who can wield way more economic power to
influence government policy.


I have no idea how you derive your income. I'll wager however that the
people who invented the CPU in the PC you are using to try to promote no
protection for them, are getting a royalty payment every time you
replace it.

The notion that a CPU or DRAM or any of the plethora of inventions - all
protected by copyright or patent - needed to build a computer would
exist if the inventors could not profit from them is absurd.

We might soon enter an age where people design their own pc and other
electronics on their home computer. But currently, computers are
produced and distributed in a centralized fashion, because they
require heavy machinery to produce them. Hence patents work in that
situation, because they can prevent unfair competition from people who
try to make a buck by producing commodities like computers in a
centralized fashion unfairly using technological know-how from the
competition.
Have you ever seen people who share illegal copies of computers or
other commodities on bittorrent sites?
Although I'm against patents, I think you can still justify those,
because they apply to physical commodities (like computers or other
devices) that can not be reproduced so easily as software and
distributed in a decentralized fashion for noncommercial purposes
online.

That's why I'm restricting this discussion to copyright as it applies
to digital information (as opposed to physical commodities) that can
be duplicated indefinitely without further costs and consequently be
shared freely online.


I strongly suggest that before ever you attempt to justify your opinion
that there should be no copyright, you should question and explore the
alternative. I certainly won't work for food alone. Linux is  probably
the best example of why open source doesn't work.

Why use linux when you can just as easily use windows for free?
Well there are reasons, like linux being easier to tinker with (given
that you have the source code available), but I prefer to use windows
and all the applications that can be downloaded for free on p2p
(copyright is irrelevant, except for a bit of a hassle with
keygenerators).


Without patented and copyrighted goods and code (Linus Torvold owns the
patent to the core of Linux) The software would not exist. Even it's
existence came from taking someone else's patented idea and altering it.
Something which today, wouldn't be allowed. It demonstrates too, how
little incentive there has been in nearly 15 years for it to become
usable, compares to Microsoft OS.

People still pay several hundred dollars for Windows instead use the
free Linux. Why? Because there is no incentive to support what you
didn't get paid for.

Linux is supported by a community and I think open source software is
a good idea. But personally, though I have used linux in the past, I'm
happy to ignore copyrights and use pirated copies of commercial
software instead, because those are indeed more polished and refined
and tend to be somewhat in the lead with respect to implementing new
features. But that is probably primarily because companies like micro
$oft are criminal organizations that have been convicted repeatedly
for abusing their economic power. So just because they produce nice
software, that doesn't imply they go about their business in an
ethical way.
Oh and 'nice' software doesn't really apply to windows of course
(which is a piece of *** actually) but more to applications like
photoshop that are available for windows.
But the issue at stake here is not commercial vs open source software.
The issue is copyright and it applies to both. I'm against copyright
as it applies to open source software that imposes restrictions on its
use just the same (like not being allowed to modify it and re-
distributing it as closed source software).
Not that I think it would be a good idea to modify open source
software and re-distribute it as closed software, but because I'm
fundamentally opposed to the idea of ownership of information and the
consequential restrictions those owners are supposed to be allowed to
impose on its use.


- --

from Douglas,
If my PGP key is missing, the
post is a forgery. Ignore it.
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