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Wikimedia removes the Diary of Anne Frank due to copyright law

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Re: Wikimedia removes the Diary of Anne Frank due to copyright law

#81

Post by chaostree »

Buttons840 wrote: post #44
scotty79 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Politicians don't get educated. They get bought. Do you have as much money as copyright industry? No? Then, no, you can't have your sensible laws. You'll have theirs. The only action you can take is to ignore those unenforcible.

Seems like this is the real problem we should use technology to solve. How can we make it more expensive to buy politicians?

There are two questions I would be asking:

1) How can we build more resilient technologies so that copyright law becomes irrelevant? (And note that we already have some candidates - like IPFS)

2) What technologies do we need so that we do not need politicians? For example, is it possible to create nation-states that are small (think hundreds of thousands of people) and allow people to create their own easily?

Re: Wikimedia removes the Diary of Anne Frank due to copyright law

#84

Post by TeMPOraL »

dijit wrote: post #80
TeMPOraL wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no non-dumb politicians; dumbness is a feature of this occupation much more than of particular people involved.

Only a power hungry moron would actively seek the responsibility they hold. I fight off being a manager, I can't imagine being in any kind of leadership position over an entire county/state or country.

It's not leadership and responsibilities per se that are the problem, it's the structure that grew around it. People who get to the top are not random, they're preselected to be malleable, to be puppets of various established interests. You don't get anywhere near real power if your peers think you can't be controlled by them.

Re: Wikimedia removes the Diary of Anne Frank due to copyright law

#85

Post by [deleted] »

webkike wrote: post #71
azernik wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, they get threatened with loss of their seats. Which is accomplished by educating the population. It's a lot more gratifying to live in this conspiratorial world where a romanticized resistance against our corporate overlords is the only way, but it's not a useful mental model for actually succeeding at anything.

The fact of the matter is we've always lived in a 50/50 conspiracy world. Sure, its never as bad as the worst extreme we can think of, but its always half as bad. Not even Stalin's dictatorship, which is what 1984 is based on, was as bad as 1984.

[deleted]

Re: Wikimedia removes the Diary of Anne Frank due to copyright law

#86

Post by bobwaycott »

webkike wrote: post #71
azernik wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, they get threatened with loss of their seats. Which is accomplished by educating the population. It's a lot more gratifying to live in this conspiratorial world where a romanticized resistance against our corporate overlords is the only way, but it's not a useful mental model for actually succeeding at anything.

The fact of the matter is we've always lived in a 50/50 conspiracy world. Sure, its never as bad as the worst extreme we can think of, but its always half as bad. Not even Stalin's dictatorship, which is what 1984 is based on, was as bad as 1984.

1984 was not based on Stalin's dictatorship. There seems to be a common misconception among too many people who've heard this parroted, erroneously assuming that because Orwell was strongly wary of, and frequently wrote about, totalitarianism, this must mean he was writing about Stalin specifically. He was not. In fact, 1984 was written just as much about the UK and USA as it was totalitarian fascism and Stalinism. This is borne out in his letters. 1984 was focused on what Orwell believed might happen to the world if the atomic showdown was inconclusive (a rough paraphrase of one of his remarks in a letter). It was written as a tale of what would happen when the West—specifically the UK and USA—would find themselves challenged and take the attractive slide away from democratically operated [socialist] society toward strengthening and worshipping millionaires and "petty fuhrers", leading to outright totalitarianism that offered stability, predictability, and controlled externalities, all of which would provide simpler, thoughtless, controlled selves.

For more directly from Orwell in one of his letters considered to foreshadow 1984's thesis, see here:

https://books.google.com/books?id=WXGbfAHYecwC&pg=PA232&lpg=...

Re: Wikimedia removes the Diary of Anne Frank due to copyright law

#88

Post by vacri »

Nutmog wrote: post #64
vacri wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, the jurisdiction in the article, which party is that?

If you can't find one with a specific policy on that issue, then aren't there any parties aiming to reform the 2-party bias of the electoral system so that minority voices can be heard at all?

Well, in real terms, voting for a party that isn't democrat or republican in the US is a waste of time. The idea that eventually there'd be enough of a groundswell of support that another party would even become competitive? It just isn't going to happen with the way the US electoral system works. The Lib Dems in the UK have been fighting a similar fight for decades and still have little-to-no representation despite consistently getting 20%ish of the vote.

And in any case of all the reasons to vote for a party that is going to govern everything, intellectual property law is not at the top of the list. It's certainly not going to be the issue to bring voters out in enough numbers to make the major parties sweat.

Re: Wikimedia removes the Diary of Anne Frank due to copyright law

#89

Post by pbhjpbhj »

dijit wrote: post #80
TeMPOraL wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no non-dumb politicians; dumbness is a feature of this occupation much more than of particular people involved.

Only a power hungry moron would actively seek the responsibility they hold. I fight off being a manager, I can't imagine being in any kind of leadership position over an entire county/state or country.

Politicians in a representative democracy are supposed primarily to be servants of their electoral region aren't they ...

Just like a proper manager of people isn't over those people. A manager should - IMO - be just another part of a team, a person/people who coordinates and facilitates the work of others.

Re: Wikimedia removes the Diary of Anne Frank due to copyright law

#90

Post by pbhjpbhj »

icebraining wrote: post #74
noonespecial wrote: post #11

Just like that silly explanation of the width of railroad tracks starting with the width of a roman horse's ass, the question of "why can't I read the Diary of Anne Frank" starts with "so there was this cartoon for little kids in the '20's called Mickey Mouse..." We reach this ridiculous situation by serious people taking a series of thoughtful actions a tiny bit at a time. But serious and thoughtful actions only add…

Was it really bit by bit? In most of the world, the Berne convention - signed in 1886 - implemented a copyright length of author's life + 50 years. This was a massive leap for most countries. Even in the US, the people behind the Sonny Bono Act (aka Mickey Mouse Protection Act) proposed indefinite copyright - MPAA's Jack Valenti actually suggested "forever less one day" to avoid the Constitutional restriction! The li…

The contract of copyright is that you'll make works freely available in return for a time-limited monopoly enforced by the people, the demos, through the state.

A perpetual copyright would not be a copyright, there's no reason for the people to support it. If you could pass such an act I think it would show your regime to be something other than a democracy.

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