That's a pretty silly perspective on it - would you hold that source code and an executable program hold the same information, except that one has been made better by a compiler so is worth more?!

Sheet music and recordings serve far different purposes. Similarly, your block of wood is worth far more than a table to someone who wants to build a bookshelf.

That sloganeering makes no sense at all. In service to owners of earlier works, perhaps -- which includes their actual authors, in many cases -- but I get to experience the use proceeds of my own work, rather than getting compensated only for the time I spend creating it as a day-laborer.

Wouldn't you like to go back to the days when there wasn't?! You'd be in service to royalty, of course...

It's not your culture, any more than the subway you pay to ride is your subway, or the sidewalks you walk on are your sidewalks.

You seem to be unable to differentiate between creation and labor.

And medical equipment does not permit you to practice medicine by itself, either -- so does that mean an autoclave and a saucepan should cost the same?

What are we to do? Shame copyright infringers, loudly, vehemently, and publicly.

"If you created a magnanimous work of art, that work of art belonged to the human kind. "

Um, no. Few created a "magnanimous work of art" -- they were funded by patronage, i.e., the government.

Gee, Coward, from where I sit, that's your fault, for failing to take the responsibility of teaching your kid that people make a living off the selling of those copies, and that to give it to his friends would be cheating those people, and you don't want to be a cheater, do you? (And bringing the point home, perhaps, by telling him if he named up to five of those friends, you'd buy them copies and let him give them to them as birthday presents...)

Since the Napster "solution" is exactly what DOESN'T work for artists like Brown, your point is ridiculous. (Or, in terms you'd understand, go fuck YOURSELF.)

The entire "free software/content/etc." argument is predicated on the notion that we should all be laborers, compensated only for our time spent creating, and not for the enjoyment of that creation.

There's a name for that system: patronage. Luckily, it went out of favor centuries ago.

Darl.

I do. Call me back when you've done better.

Did you READ the story? The proposed law does not allow GOVERNMENTS to restrict sales to online retailers that have brick-and-mortar shops. It allows SUPPLIERS to allow their goods to be sold only by online retailers who have brick-and-mortar stores.

Since suppliers should be free to control who sells their products in any way they choose that does not violate protected-class laws, they should be free to do so. Hell, they should be free to allow their products only to be sold by companies whose names start with an S, or stores on the odd-numbered side of the street.

Eisenhower was not a conservative -- certainly not by modern standards. Nor was Nixon. Both of them would be moderate-to-liberal Republicans -- to the left of the rightmost Democrats -- today. (And believers in the humane policies you damn as "income redistribution," as well.)

It's interesting how you retroactively adopt them to make a point.

Wow - how many inaccuracies can you pack into one comment?!

Xen itself - including not just the hypervisor but the kernel code needed for dom0 and for paravirtualized domU - is GPL licensed, and always has been. What Citrix (NOT Cisco) recently open-sourced was the control stack used in he commercial XenServer. There has always been an open-source control stack -- it has been possible to run a Xen system entirely using GPL licensed code. The only change in October 2009 was to make the management APIs compatible between the commercial and open-source offerings.

(And the "owned by Citrix" part is open to debate too. XenSource -- a company -- was bought by Citrix -- not Xen -- a code base. The licensing status of the code is the same as it ever was. Its direction is driven by an advisory board that includes representatives of Citrix and lots of other companies.)