Infringement 'Detrimental To the Public Health, Safety' 348
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors has declared that copyright infringement 'substantially interferes with the interest of the public in the quality of life and community peace, lawful commerce in the county, property values, and is detrimental to the public health, safety, and welfare of the county's citizens, its businesses and its visitors.' You might laugh, but that means they can close up a property for up to one year for violations of the anti-infringement ordinance [PDF] and the owner can be fined $1,000 for each infringing work produced on site. Not to mention the penalties in the PRO-IP Act, which just sailed through the House."
So what's it gonna take... (Score:5, Insightful)
I imagine all but a few of the candidates are squarely in the camp of the MPAA/RIAA if they are aware of copyright issues at all.
But more Americans use filesharing than will vote in the election - or at least I know that more shared files in 2003, when I found the figures, than voted for George Bush in 2000.
That's funny (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This always happens (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So what's it gonna take... (Score:1, Insightful)
for the most part every bit of the bitching i see that goes on here about copyright deals with this society's entertainment values. just where in the world do you rate a bootleg copy of ironman in relations to anyones right to a decent life outside of the threat of harm or oppression from the government?
i can't believe this kind of shit is still coming out of people's mouths after how politicized slashdot has become. it's truely pathetic.
None? (Score:1, Insightful)
sure, it's LA County (Score:1, Insightful)
Now, whether Los Angeles County should dictate public policy to the rest of the country, which isn't as dependent on copyright, is another issue entirely.
Re:The blade cuts both ways (Score:2, Insightful)
I would like to note that the Submitter is "I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property". If that's the case, Mr. Submitter, then the GPL should be thrown out too.
Re:This always happens (Score:5, Insightful)
While your statement makes for a nice soundbite, it's vastly far from true. There are plenty of countries, including the US, that have extended political power to formerly disenfranchised groups.
Re:This always happens (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:So what's it gonna take... (Score:5, Insightful)
The real issue that we face is that IP issues are simply boring to the average voter. Most people don't own patents and don't feel that copyright law affects them in any way. They are much more interested in what J. Wright blabbers on about than about issues that have an effect on the economy; such as IP laws.
(And yes, I think voters are morons. disclaimer - I've lived in Germany for a few years and have developed the same opinion of the average German voter. It seems that people are just stupid.)
Your best bet is an advertising campaign to raise awareness of the issues. Until that happens, we are in the wilderness dude.
Re:So what's it gonna take... (Score:5, Insightful)
All that "I promise lower taxes, more money, better education, this and that" are all LIES. I don't care if the President is Jesus Christ himself, unless he has Congress to propose legislation he can't approve it.
Now, if you really want to blame this on somebody, I hear your congressmen takes letters. Mine does, but he ignores them.
Copywrong (Score:4, Insightful)
As much as I want artists to be fairly compensated, I strongly disagree with the application of copyright law. Litigation never solved anything in this world, it only creates more hatred for one another. It goes against the very purpose of law by promoting and supporting inequality, which is directly detrimental to the health and safety of everyone.
Re:The blade cuts both ways (Score:3, Insightful)
The GPL is a license that enforces "copyright" for the explicit purpose of fitting in to the current legal system. Were copyright to be greatly reformed or abolished completely, you're completely right that the GPL would immediately become as worthless as every other license, BUT it also wouldn't be necessary anymore.
True, the landscape would look very different, and the real "forced openness" that the GPL gives would be gone as well (unless that was framed in the new copyright laws, but I can NEVER imagine that happening!), but don't for a moment think that GPL advocates actually like copyright. The GPL exists in the realm of copyright because it has to in order to be legally enforceable, NOT because anyone thinks it really belongs there.
Re:So what's it gonna take... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's been evident for a long time that it can't be stopped. Any attempt to lock stuff down that people don't like immediately produces workarounds. I'd argue the opposite: I think the public interest is served by the availability of information. Whether or not people have to engage in one to one market transactions to fund its creation is a secondary issue. No matter how many times the contrary is repeated, information is not property in the same way that a car is. Making the rules for it the same ignores this obvious fact.
My guess is that a lot of politicians welcome the money because they know that they'll never be able to do anything about it, so they'll stay cool with the public. Look at how many politicians take money from anti-abortion groups in full knowledge that they can rant and rave about abortion, but the law is unlikely to change.
Re:This always happens (Score:5, Insightful)
The constitution is supposed to allow us to fix the government without it coming to that, but it doesn't seem to be working. So what changes do we need to make to the constitution to make it work? Not that the congress will allow us a convention to fix it.
We have a president who doesn't care what the constitution says at all. We have 2 out of 3 presidential candidates who voted to cede the decision to declare war from the congress to the president. How that isn't even an issue still boggles my mind. Even if you thought going into Iraq was a good idea you shouldn't have voted for that bill. But I digress. We're likely going to hand over the presidency to someone who has already proven they can't uphold the constitution.
You only think it's about entertainment. (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what's so insidious about the current copyright reign of terror. It's not about AC/DC, it's about freedom of press and without that you and I will never learn of those other serious abuses you are talking about. Real families have already been thrown out of their homes and stripped of their life savings on the flimsiest of evidence about sharing RIAA crap that both of us can agree is trivial. If it's so trivial, why submit to such massive punishment? Don't be fooled, though, this is all about control of public knowledge, opinion and culture. It includes control of entertainment but it's also about domestic spying and neutralization of political opposition such as yourself.
War on drugs all over again (Score:3, Insightful)
It scares that there maybe those who actually believe these things they say about "copyright infringement". As if (US) American prisons aren't full enough, I predict the government building new ones for to hold the dam pirates. Colonial attacks against real pirates only barely succeeded, and being a sea fearing pirate takes energy. Copyright infringement takes much less energy.
And on a side note, could you guys "pirating" via cameras in theatres just stop it? At least out of respect for art in general. There is currently no good way to duplicate a movie via cam, the quality is terrible. If people can't wait for it to come out dvd let them buy a ticket to the nearest theatre.
Re:This always happens (Score:3, Insightful)
Mind if I ask where you've been the last 25 years or so?
The only time a politician listens to anybody these days is when that somebody is handing them a nice fat check for their campaign warchest. The 'citizens' they listen to are the corporations that fund them getting back into office again. Have you looked at some of the hairbrained laws coming out of Washington these days? Pro-IP was written by RIAA itself, not just a legal terrorist organisation, but a PAC (Political Action Committee for the uninformed), a high powered lobby. Lobbyists are campaign contributors through their PACs. While the telco bill getting telcos out of a jackpot for illegally handing over data to the government might or might not have been written by the telcos themselves, it sure as hell benefits them, and they contribute heavily to both sides of the aisle.
A politician wants back into office to play statesman again? You better believe he'll throw as much bias towards his contributors as he thinks he can get away with, just about to the point of flat out stupidity. Hey, who cares, there's an election coming, and those checks can just as easily go to the other guy...
Re:This always happens (Score:5, Insightful)
Claiming that government just serves some arbitrary elite makes for great teenage "down with the man!" soundbites, but it doesn't account for the fact that there are movements in both directions. Nor does it account for the fact that a lot of it is a matter of perception: It's easy to view a silent majority that you disagree with as a special interest; it's vastly easier than admitting that democracy works both ways.
Re:So what's it gonna take... (Score:5, Insightful)
america: most popular tv news network: FOX [wikipedia.org]
uk: most popular news paper The sun [wikipedia.org]
just look up thier most popular news network/paper and you'll realise how fscked you are.
The problem is that idiots are very easy for big corporations to guide, and while they cant agree on everything, they sure as hell like copyright & IP.
Re:So what's it gonna take... (Score:4, Insightful)
just where in the world do you rate a bootleg copy of ironman in relations to anyones right to a decent life outside of the threat of harm or oppression from the government?
i can't believe this is still coming out of people's mouths after how politicized slashdot has become. it's truely pathetic.
Re:So what's it gonna take... (Score:3, Insightful)
Iraq & Afganistan
International respect for America
The economy
It was congress that fucked up the privacy, its only congress that can fuck up the laws.
But hey im not from america so im not 100% sure this is the case?
Re:This always happens (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So what's it gonna take... (Score:1, Insightful)
The polarity of American politics right vs left.
FOX represents the right while NBC, CBS, and CNN represent the left.
So with the right you have no choice and with the left you have a choice. No wonder they are the most watched cable news channel.
Re:So what's it gonna take... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This always happens (Score:5, Insightful)
Couldn't agree more. I've been saying that for years, though not quite as elegantly.
I believe that in this society, the only effective way to vote is with ones wallet.
Vote wisely.
Can you blame them? (Score:3, Insightful)
Vote != power (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So what's it gonna take... (Score:3, Insightful)
You have confused the concept of "rights" and "obligations".
Just because people have the right to affordable food doesn't mean that anyone has the obligation to provide it.
To force supermarkets to lower their prices infringes on their right to charge whatever they feel like for products (what the free market will bear).
So what people are really talking about when they say "people ought to have the right to (fill in the blank", they really mean that they want to take away someone else's right(s) and place an obligation on them to do something they otherwise would choose not to do.
That doesn't sound very democratic to me, more like socialism.
Re:So what's it gonna take... (Score:5, Insightful)
There, fixed that for you. :)
Re:This always happens (Score:5, Insightful)
Back then, only landed white men got the vote for a government that served the interests of those landed white men.
Then it all changed: women and minorities also got to vote for a government that served the interests of the landed white men.
Viva la Revolucion!
Re:This always happens (Score:2, Insightful)
Indeed, we live in plutocracies, and the USA is the most blatant example of one, where not just extremely rich and influential people decide, but the whole state is ran by corporations like Monsanto or the mafiaa, world-renowned for their disrespect for human life and well-being and their lack of morality and honesty.
Re:So what's it gonna take... (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah right (Score:3, Insightful)
"It's only for going after terrorists, pedophiles and drug dealers. Common people have nothing to fear. Trust us." Seriously people, why do you keep gobbling on this bullshit?
Re:So what's it gonna take... (Score:1, Insightful)
This is the "dark side" of moderation. If you're interested in your karma, you're going to be tempted to post things that everyone agrees with, which doesn't do much for free discourse.
Meta-moderation is almost worse, you won't get mod points unless you can prove once again that your opinion on a wide variety of topics fits in with everyone else's ideas.
Because of this, you could make a good argument that Slashdot is, by design, nothing BUT a huge groupthink experiment.
Re:So what's it gonna take... (Score:4, Insightful)
Interestingly people call on democracy also when they do not understand what it really means. People can democratically decide to do things that result in human rights violation and destruction of whole countries e.g. Saarland has decided once to join third Reich in such a way (plebiscite on 13 Jan 1935) although people knew there is an politically and racially oppressive regime at power (I am sure there are many other examples) so democracy is not the only thing that we need to live well.
Re:So what's it gonna take... (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no way, enough ignorant people will admit their deficiency and support implementation of such such education system in a democratic way.
There is no way, in a republic, politicians will support public education because it is not a popular position among ignorant people.
There is no way, in Capitalist economy businesses will support public education, because it will decrease their control over consumers.
The only way to do it, is for smart people to manipulate powerful elite and its decadent culture into forcing education onto the masses. When the next generation of people will get an idea WTF they are doing and talking about, maybe they will find a use for democracy, socialism, market, or whatever other things that are now touted to be important for the welfare of mankind. But until then, long live oppression.
Seriously, long live oppression, the only way to get rid of oppression.
Re:So what's it gonna take... (Score:3, Insightful)
Get this through your head, the DMCA makes it an offense for you to tell other people how to circumvent DRM. Now while DRM is being touted as a way to ensure copyright holders are compensated, it could just as well be used to spy on what political dissidents are doing. Sony made their CDs take over the customers computers. Microsoft has DRM which send Microsoft information about what you do with your computer. THE DMCA PROHIBITS YOU FROM TELLING PEOPLE HOW TO PREVENT THIS. Think about that for a second. The US today has legislation which effectively makes it an offense to tell others how to prevent companies from spying on you. Is that a non-issue to you?
This is not merely a matter about ac-dc albums or home copying of musics. This is a matter of what people who have power, either by law or through de-facto market position, are allowed to do in order to controll what you do with information, and how much information they are allowed to gather about you.
I don't give a fuck about pages like The Pirate Bay because I never use them, but I find it outright scary that the US government can simply tell our politicians to confiscate an entire ISPs servers based on what essentially boils down to "we don't like that these people are telling others where to find copyrighted material".
Hey, if you are concerned about people being sick or starving. Consider what happens when McDonalds start using DRM to prevent documents that detail the concentration of harmful compounds in them from leaking. The DMCA makes it illegal for whistle blowers to circumvent such a protection scheme, so the mere fact that they had made an attempt at it means you are technically risking jail time if you reveal a company's dark secret.
Can yous ee the problem now?
Re:So what's it gonna take... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This always happens (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This always happens (Score:3, Insightful)
Which had huge, world-changing consequences such as a recession that followed it, all sorts of military actions that are still being played out at vast cost to all of those involved in them, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
"Yeah, they shocked the world, but if it hadn't been for the mass sensationalism and rabid irrational fear that followed we wouldn't find ourselves in the situation we're in right now."
What precisely is there about mass sensationalism and rabid irrational fear leading to new laws that place new restrictions on the rights of every individual in many countries, make life for travellers far more miserable than was the case beforehand, and causes wars that have cost many thousands of lives which fails to meet your definition of a huge world-changing event that was precipitated by a handful of people (i.e. 19 of them)?
"Everything that followed was not caused by them, they were merely a convenient excuse."
Read the quote I was replying to, because it didn't mention causes. The phrase used was "something completely unexpected happening to show that a handful of individuals can make a huge difference in a world-changing way." The attacks on the Twin Towers and Pentagon were unexpected by at least the vast majority of people; they were perpetrated by 19 individuals; and they did make a huge difference in a world-changing way, because the world post-911 is vastly different from the one that existed before it in many ways.
And in the mean time (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So what's it gonna take... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want a full review, check out http://www.iprcommission.org/home.html
People, such as the grandparent, need to stop simply associating copyright infringement with downloading movies for free and see the real damage IP laws and regulations do to millions of lives throughout the world.
Re:So what's it gonna take... (Score:5, Insightful)
But today there are people going to sleep hungry, and sleeping in the streets, and constitutional rights are being trampled. One could argue that our politicians and governments do too much to protect IP, and not enough to address these very real problems -- that by electing officials that agree that too much is spent on enforcing copyright and not enough on social ills is we could attempt to set that balance right.
Slashdot discussions may have become too politicized for some of us, but this topic is not a good example of that, since it is about politics and government. I think your comment's (Anonymous) parent got modded flamebait because it started with: "are you fucking kidding me? i tell you what assfuck". Sometimes a reader will stop right there without considering the remainder of one's well-thought-out argument.Re:So what's it gonna take... (Score:3, Insightful)
That scares the hell out of me. Any time a a politican talks about "intellectual pooperty reform" the copyright length is even longer and fair use rights are further eroded.
I've looked at the other two candidates
You mean Wayne Allyn Root [lp.org] and Cynthia McKinney [gp.org]? Don't you mean three? The Republicans are running some guy or another, too, you know
Obama talks about rewriting intellectual property, writes some dream bill, only to have it obliterated in Congress due equally to his lack of commitment and Congress's general distaste for effective legislation
He's been Senator for a while now, why hasn't he introduced this legislation? That is, after all, what Congress does. The President merely vetos it or signs it into law and runs the bureaucracy. Don't look to Obama or any other mainstream candidate to push for meaningful reform of anything, unless it benefits the corporations that pay for their election campaigns.
Re:So what's it gonna take... (Score:3, Insightful)
So how long have they been trying to get people to stop smoking marijuana now? They haven't given up yet, have they?
I think the public interest is served by the availability of information.
Which is why they fight availability of information. In the US, the public interest is always trumped by business interests. We are a plutocracy, our religion is mammon worship, our god is the almighty greenback and our church is called "the bank". Any talk of intellectual pooperty reform or universal health care that doesn't involve insurance companies is sacrelige and will be dealt with harshly.
Controlling information (Score:4, Insightful)
Intellectual property = information.
It does not matter how much anyone would like it to be a physical property, be it you or me or the RIAA / MPAA. If it can be represented in a digital form, it is information.
The purpose of a computer is to copy and transform information.
The purpose of the Internet is to copy and transform information on a global scale.
Like it or not, the biggest change in civilization the last 20 years have been about moving digital information. Computers does not differ between types of information, they just move (copy) a huge number of ones and zeros from one place to another. The Internet is basically a colossal copyright infringement machine.
I worry a lot about "Intellectual Property". I can understand their worried and justified claims on the content industry, but no matter how you twist and turn this it boils down to "controlling information".
There is no difference between different kinds of information. If intellectual property could be controlled, all information could be controlled. This includes any information any government would declare "illegal".
If anyone could control who copies a Hollywood blockbuster, they could also control who copies other information that makes the government look bad. Like a video of police brutality or any violation of human rights.
Controlling information
Re:So what's it gonna take... (Score:5, Insightful)
If the argument that incentives for the production of music wouldn't exist without imaginary property interference were true (which they aren't), then musicians would find it more profitable to become farmers, increasing the supply of food, decreasing the price of food, and leading to less starving people.
The government ethanol subsidies are a perfect example of interference in the free market that mimics the effect of copyright and patent. Shortages of other productions result in higher prices for other things. People devote scarce resources to producing things the free and voluntary actions of consumers and producers show are less worthwhile production activities as evidenced by economic supply and demand.
So we have a flood of people trying to make a living as artists, producing crap, copying the hell out of each other's ideas anyway, and sitting on their asses collecting government interference subsidized welfare.
The broken window fallacy applies perfectly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window [wikipedia.org]
Re:So what's it gonna take... (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, that's half right. Promoting an unpopular opinion in good faith is not trolling. On the other hand, using an unpopular opinion to anger and insult is quite nearly the definition of trolling.
Rephrasing the more-than-slightly-invective parent was fine; the micro-rant about trolling was a bit trollish itself.
In short, trolling isn't so much about what is said, but is far more about how it is said.
Don't forget NPR (Score:3, Insightful)
At this point, NPR is pretty far to the right as well. Just how far was driven home to me the other day when they were talking about Berry Goldwater, and the comment was made that his views were "pretty consistently liberal by todays standards." There was a round of hearty agreement from the panel and no one seemed to recognize the significance of what they were saying.
If Barry Goldwater looks like a leftist to you, you have passed the rumble strips and are now driving off the shoulder to the right.
--MarkusQ
P.S. And I'd have to agree with some of the posters on adjacent threads: there is no "left" in American politics at present, and apart from a few blogs and a couple of low power AM radio stations, very little "left" left in the media.
Re:So what's it gonna take... (Score:3, Insightful)
Schools involve transportation costs. Will private schools be located to minimize transportation costs for students in lower income neighborhoods? I think not.