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Before I Can Fix This Tractor, We Have to Fix Copyright Law

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Re: Before I Can Fix This Tractor, We Have to Fix Copyright Law

#191

Post by steamer25 »

marknutter wrote: post #182
steamer25 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. To expound a bit... There is a perspective/philosophy* in which humans under anarchic/natural-law are born with 100% rights. E.g., if you were washed ashore with a number of ship-wreck-mates on an otherwise uninhabited island, there'd be nothing to stop you from implementing works copyrighted in other lands. Further, there'd be nothing to stop you from violating the terms of any contract or even murdering any…

> Further, there'd be nothing to stop you from violating the terms of any contract or even murdering anyone--you'd have unlimited rights. There being nothing to stop you doesn't mean it's not a violation of an inalienable right or that I didn't have that right to begin with. The widely held belief is that freedom from murder is a right regardless of whether or not an institution is established to protect it. I believ…

I didn't make it very clear in the parent comment but I don't consider murder to be an inalienable right either. My point was that it could be considered an 'alienable' right, if that makes any sense. I.e., because we ourselves don't want to be murdered and because we want to participate in civilization, we assent to limits on individual liberties--namely those in which individuals would infringe upon the rights of others.

As I think about it now, I would say that our inalienable human rights are derived from the fact that we exist self-aware with the desire and general capacity to assert our rights. I.e., to whatever end or purpose, we wouldn't have those abilities absent some reason. If you're alive, you want to live and you're not hurting anybody else; who's to say that you should be denied that life? If anyone, it's just some other guy who's opinion isn't actually any more important than your own. One might say it should all be self-evident :) .

At any rate, I think we're largely saying the same things.

Re: Before I Can Fix This Tractor, We Have to Fix Copyright Law

#192

Post by fnordfnordfnord »

marknutter wrote: post #190
fnordfnordfnord wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>An unalienable right can exist without being granted (that's the definition, in fact), and it exists whether or not something is in place to protect it. Would you mind naming an example? >They are not mutually inclusive. I have a feeling that this may devolve into an argument over trivia, but I hope not.

The right of freedom from murder. I will grant you that rights in-and-of themselves are abstract and somewhat arbitrary in the grand scheme of things, but they are common enough from society to society that patterns start to emerge and one can start to identify what could be considered to be a universally agreed upon inalienable right. All I'm stating is that my right to live free from murder exists whether or not so…

>The right of freedom from murder.

How are you going to enforce that right after it's been violated?

>It seems that you're trying to argue that freedom from murder is a positive right, in that it necessitates that someone else provide you protection from harm.

I wouldn't say necessitates, but I would predict a lot more murdering absent the expectation of reprisal from your tribe or government.

> And as such, because universal inaction would be just as good as any active protection by a government

It would be better since governments murder people too, and since because universal inaction is universal. So sign me up! We can get started right away. I promise I won't murder you if you'll promise not to murder me. Deal?

Re: Before I Can Fix This Tractor, We Have to Fix Copyright Law

#193

Post by Ao7bei3s »

Riseed wrote: post #179
Ao7bei3s wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sealand, really? Who'd want to live like that? And how'd you finance it?

Someone wants to live like that, or it wouldn't exist.

A single caretaker. Not even the self-proclaimed regent lives there. Yours is hardly a convincing argument.

Re: Before I Can Fix This Tractor, We Have to Fix Copyright Law

#194

Post by ddingus »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #157
mindslight wrote: post #2

If copyright law actually respected a balance between creators and the public, anything under digital restriction technology would be ineligible for it, since there's clearly no intention of adding to the public domain after the period is up. Of course we know it doesn't. Anyone with half a brain knew the DMCA was a bad idea when it was being "debated". Now it's accepted because we've grown accustomed to workarounds.…

> If copyright law actually respected a balance between creators and the public Even talking about a "balance" suggests that we should acknowledge some inherent right of copyright holders for its own sake, rather than just as a means to an end. We shouldn't. We simply have a tradeoff between two desires of the public: getting more works produced, and getting those works into the public domain (to allow reuse/remixing…

Because Disney.

They drew from the works of The Brothers Grimm, and once established, refused to contribute their own works back in like kind.

Re: Before I Can Fix This Tractor, We Have to Fix Copyright Law

#195

Post by Lawtonfogle »

marknutter wrote: post #182
steamer25 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. To expound a bit... There is a perspective/philosophy* in which humans under anarchic/natural-law are born with 100% rights. E.g., if you were washed ashore with a number of ship-wreck-mates on an otherwise uninhabited island, there'd be nothing to stop you from implementing works copyrighted in other lands. Further, there'd be nothing to stop you from violating the terms of any contract or even murdering any…

> Further, there'd be nothing to stop you from violating the terms of any contract or even murdering anyone--you'd have unlimited rights. There being nothing to stop you doesn't mean it's not a violation of an inalienable right or that I didn't have that right to begin with. The widely held belief is that freedom from murder is a right regardless of whether or not an institution is established to protect it. I believ…

>There being nothing to stop you doesn't mean it's not a violation of an inalienable right or that I didn't have that right to begin with.

If there is no difference between the inalienable right existing or not existing, then it is a matter of faith to if they exist at all.

Re: Before I Can Fix This Tractor, We Have to Fix Copyright Law

#196

Post by oneJob »

Grishnakh wrote: post #184
oneJob wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Re: VHS, granting that I was speaking in superlatives and that VHS might be one of one of multiple primary influences, here is a quote from an industry insider stating the same idea [1]. Re: AC/DC, DC was financially viable. You might notice that we still make use of DC, where it does much close quarter nut kicking. DC was financially uncompetitive over distance, but not because of magic finance. It was uncompetitive…

DC was not "financially viable" at all. DC was completely unworkable because you had to have a power plant on every city block! It was impossible to transmit DC power over any distance because the losses over the wire were too great. You could use a higher voltage to mitigate that, but then you have high voltage entering peoples' homes and a greater potential for fire, plus it's harder to make devices (light bulbs, h…

That's exactly what happened. Initially DC was the only option because Mr. Edison personally bankrolled the first electric grids which required building power plants per section of the grid. Additionally, DC was replacing engine based industrialized factories, which indeed had on premise steam or coal engines, and so installing a power plant for just that factory would have made perfect sense. At the time particular time, granted very soon after, AC was not viable. Saying "not at all" is a bit global of a statement considering it contradicts history.

Re: Before I Can Fix This Tractor, We Have to Fix Copyright Law

#197

Post by Grishnakh »

oneJob wrote: post #196
Grishnakh wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DC was not "financially viable" at all. DC was completely unworkable because you had to have a power plant on every city block! It was impossible to transmit DC power over any distance because the losses over the wire were too great. You could use a higher voltage to mitigate that, but then you have high voltage entering peoples' homes and a greater potential for fire, plus it's harder to make devices (light bulbs, h…

That's exactly what happened. Initially DC was the only option because Mr. Edison personally bankrolled the first electric grids which required building power plants per section of the grid. Additionally, DC was replacing engine based industrialized factories, which indeed had on premise steam or coal engines, and so installing a power plant for just that factory would have made perfect sense. At the time particular…

Ok, granted, compared to on-premise steam or coal engines or waterwheels, Edison's crappy DC was viable.

AC wasn't viable at that time because it hadn't been invented and deployed yet. It wasn't intuitively obvious and it took a brilliant Serbian electrical engineer to invent it (or rather, the machines to implement it; AC was theorized before Tesla) before it became viable.

However, as a competitor to AC power systems spanning whole cities and interconnected in a nationwide grid, DC wasn't even remotely viable.

Re: Before I Can Fix This Tractor, We Have to Fix Copyright Law

#198

Post by geofft »

rubberstamp wrote: post #91
simoncion wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's a very different thing from voting for pre-selected candidates whom you've never met and don't interact with, and then crossing your fingers. I'm a bit sick right now, thus either my math or my formulas might be off. I welcome any corrections. :) So. Copyright policy is decided at the Federal level. The people in charge of setting that policy are elected members of Congress. Let's assume that you can declare…

all the more reasons why there should be a structure to not let our representatives make all the decisions for us. I'm sure we all had times when our representative is not actually representing our interests. think tank mode: what if the current system is restructured in a way so that we will let them take decisions for us. But when we don't agree with his/her view point we can readily bypass it if the majority wants…

California has statewide referendums, which are generally pretty awful: state law is (for better or worse) pretty complex, and referendums never handle that complexity well. If successful, they'll impose some requirement without much regard for existing law in the area, and certainly without any regard for future laws. They're heavily lobbied, perhaps more so than regular laws, because easy appeals to regular people's sense of how government probably works are effective, regardless of the accuracy. Referendums can't be overturned except with another referendum. And you can fairly easily have conflicting referendums, which has given rise to court cases about which one prevails.

Here's the Economist complaining about it in 2009: http://www.economist.com/node/13649050 I can anecdotally confirm that my reaction to most of the referendums, a few years later, was "How should I know?"

This is not to say that such an approach won't work. You just need some mechanism for managing complexity. That could involve trusted organizations that like-minded people delegate these decisions to (sort of a cross between lobbying/activism organizations and political parties), which could work very well or could just turn out like an actually corporate version of the current party system. You could alternatively try to limit the inherent complexity of governing, but that seems very experimental.

Re: Before I Can Fix This Tractor, We Have to Fix Copyright Law

#199

Post by oneJob »

Grishnakh wrote: post #197
oneJob wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what happened. Initially DC was the only option because Mr. Edison personally bankrolled the first electric grids which required building power plants per section of the grid. Additionally, DC was replacing engine based industrialized factories, which indeed had on premise steam or coal engines, and so installing a power plant for just that factory would have made perfect sense. At the time particular…

Ok, granted, compared to on-premise steam or coal engines or waterwheels, Edison's crappy DC was viable. AC wasn't viable at that time because it hadn't been invented and deployed yet. It wasn't intuitively obvious and it took a brilliant Serbian electrical engineer to invent it (or rather, the machines to implement it; AC was theorized before Tesla) before it became viable. However, as a competitor to AC power syste…

How can something be compared as a competitor to spmething else that hasn't even been invented yet? It's difficult arguing the point when you keep regressing back to historically impossible what-ifs.
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