That's why I said "in theory" ;)

Anyway, that's a very pessimistic view, but you know what? If that really happens, I don't give a toss. Until writers and musicians keep siding with their corporate overlords for the sake of a quick buck, they deserve to suffer. The public is quite happy to keep consuming repetitive shit like "Harry Potter 457: Trapped in the Hospice"; it's the makers and creators that will suffer, as they'll struggle to come up with "totally original" material. Coincidentally, that's the same class of people who regularly side with the likes of Disney (the late Sonny Bono, Paul McCartney, Metallica, etc etc etc) because they can't see beyond their own greed.

Until authors stand up for what is *really* in their long-term interest, things will keep getting worse... but it's not my problem.

No, he's right: 1928 (publication date) + 28 + 67 = 2023 (when Steamboat Willie will eventually be free, in theory).

The 67 years extension was allowed because Disney renewed that copyright when the law was changed, in 1976. You can bet they were first in line: they almost certainly paid for the law themselves.

(Besides, some people think SW is, in fact, already in PD for different reasons.)

It was pulled when they released the War Logs, because they expected an inevitable surge of traffic (and DDOSes), much like press sites do with huge-hyper-massive-net-straining breaking news.

After that, they were overwhelmed by the effort required to publish these cables, and putting back the minor stuff got a very low priority. Plus, their profile is no so high that a vanilla mediawiki would crumble in a few days, so you need something better and safer.

Wikileaks is a very small org, it's clear they're struggling to manage their workload.

Davenport-Lyons was the legal firm who started this racket, which was then relaunched under ACS:Law; Gallant-Macmillan was the third entity to try it.
Only the first group of evildoers has been obliterated; the second has been damaged, but it's still in the game; the third one is still cranking out letters, although in a fairly restrained manner (in this case, it's really their customer who is pushing hard). And, eventual enforcement of the Digital Economy Bill, currently expected for late January 2011, will probably open the floodgates to hordes of copycats.

There's still a long way to go for the legal situation around UK filesharing to get back to anything resembling sanity.

They are now compulsory in Manchester, England, and I believe other UK airports will soon introduce them.
Oh, and there's no alternative pat-down procedure here... because when the Queen tells you to do something, you'll better do as you're f*cking told.

QFT. Perl and Python are as fast as, or even faster than, Java.

TBH, this seemed just like a slashvertisement for Go.

Yeah, that's what I thought as well.

At best, this will chill the air in the Open Handset Alliance. Google is quite happy to get all credit for Android when it all goes well (to the point of even trying their hands at controlling the full stack, with the Nexus-One), but as soon as things get sticky they point their fingers to partners? not nice.

At worst, it will make manufacturers think again about betting the farm on Android (which, before this trial, looked like a complete no-brainer: it's the only modern mobile-oriented, feature-complete, production-ready OS not controlled by another hardware manufacturer you probably compete with).

I personally think this "kitchen sync" approach at listing defenses smacks a bit of Chewbacca, and won't make Google any friends.

Keep waiting. The only thing LibDems got out of this government is the referendum on Alternative Vote, which they'll lose anyway (if we assume that it will actually be held at all, which is far from certain). Everything else is (and forever will be) hardcore Tory policy.

My bet is on LibDems losing hard at the next round of general elections, at least in all those (southern) areas where they present themselves as the only opposition to the Tories. Should the government survive that, I bet they'll get less than 5% at the following General Election. Watch the Yellow Party disappear.

This. Newspapers are notorious for crappy sites, implemented 10+ years ago on top of expensive proprietary tools based on the use of table elements and "liberal" abuse of SGML properties. Even the much-admired BBC site is kept together by a hodgepodge of 15-year-old code, which is known to inflict brain damage after webdevs are repeatedly exposed to it.
These are big CDN customers, and they will jump on any opportunity to optimize without rewriting their legacy systems.

Bollocks. CMSes built by OSS communities in the last 10 years (e.g. Wordpress) are invariably much, MUCH better at generating html than 99% of proprietary solutions.

That clause was a clear shot at people trying to get away from paying for Qt. Without the clause, one could basically develop commercial applications without paying for Qt licenses, then cough up only when caught, claiming previous development followed the open-source license and "just so happens nobody asked us for the source code".

Trolltech used to depend entirely on revenue coming from Qt licenses, so obviously they wanted to minimize this sort of loopholes.

yeah but their margins are thin and getting thinner by the day. They currently rely on third-world consumers not being able to afford Android or Apple phones, but cheap 'droids are less than a year away...

Ouch. I didn't think Nokia would ever muster the balls to kill off Symbian (which was clearly the only logical move after the iPhone ate its lunch, even more so after Android started making inroads). I guess the majority of those 1800 redundancies will be Symbian geeks, to be replaced by Linux ninjas working on MeeGo (here's hope).

It's a shame it took so long for them to understand. They should have ditched Symbian right after the N97 disaster, pushing hard on shipping great Maemo products. Instead, Maemo was the unloved stepchild and was basically ditched for Moblin, losing another year of development... They are at least two years behind Android and need to catch up fast, to have a chance to stay relevant in the next decade. That MeeGo phone has to come out in Q12011 and blow Android out of the waters. Anything less than that, and they're toast.

Between this, the Piratebay farce and the victories for far-right parties, it's now clear that Sweden is not the "neutral" political paradise it once was.

It's a shame that the current crop of politicians haven't got the guts to stand up the bullies of the world; their predecessors worked hard and bravely during the Cold War, risking total annihilation, and I'm sure they'd be ashamed to know that their spineless children are frightened by their own shadows.

Of course yes. This is exactly what happens in most impoverished countries, by the way. If the only way to survive for a good part of the population is to steal and to rob, then stealing and robbing become commonplace and the population's own intolerance towards these acts naturally diminishes, or even results in anti-hero figures (see Jamaican gansters, for example). At that point, people in charge often concentrate on stopping the crimes rather than addressing the cause of it (i.e. scarcity of alternatives to survive), and the country falls even further in a downward spiral.

Does that remind us of something? :)

Er, no. It results in me enjoying IP that otherwise I wouldn't have had a chance to. If I don't have the money to go see a movie then I don't pay for the movie, and somebody doesn't get paid (a percentage of the original sum). So hey, in both cases (me copying or me not going) have the same effect on the producer. Should we then be forced by law to go to the movies, because otherwise "somebody will not get paid"?

Even if I did, it might not be economic value, and it might not coincide with what the producer wants me to pay; hence, in different circumstances the deal simply wouldn't have happened, so the producer wouldn't have gained any of "my value" anyway.

Not really. Look at the record profits being posted recently by entertainment industries.

The product has NOT been devalued. The distribution chain has been devalued; which is why music stores are closing, but record companies are making more money than ever before.

Except that you aren't. They still have their music, their artists (hell, even *more* artists and *cheaper* than ever before, thanks to reality shows), their tours, their merchandising, their advertisement deals, their followers ready to depart from cash... etc etc. This is what they're telling their shareholders, by publishing record profits, so I guess that's what they believe.

IP owners are not being "harmed"; IP resellers are suffering, yes, because they've been made technologically redundant.

Either that, or you didn't read a lot of stuff published on economics. Which I guess is the most likely option, here.

Or maybe you'd look for another job?
You know, that's what happens IRL, when you care to join the adult population.

Let me preamble this by pointing out how infantile and ad-hominem your response is. You do your cause a disservice.

"Theft" means I deprive you of an object; "illegal duplication" doesn't deprive you of the duplicated object. Whatever "moral standard" you're appealing to, it simply doesn't apply here.

I'm sure you already know this, since you feel you are well-versed in the circumstances of this debate, but nonetheless you keep pushing regurgitated talking points, decorated with profanities. That doesn't reflect well on you, you know.

Galileo wasn't condemned by the people or by any "moral value"; he wasn't despised or burnt at the stakes. He was condemned by a (relatively small) organization with an interest in maintaining a certain set of assumptions about the world in order not to lose power. So again, your point is moot.

if not all movie copies are lost sales, therefore 1 copy != 1 lost sale, which is what the parent post says. Some downloads are lost sales? Maybe. Unfortunately, there's no proof of that, so it looks like you're basing your assumptions on pure faith. Hello, Believer in the Holy Crusade for the Enrichment of Entertainment Enterprises.

if being "serious" means attacking the messenger rather than the argument and using a lot of cussing, then I guess you're right. If it means knowing what he's talking about, then I'm afraid the definition of "serious person" might apply to him rather than to you. The definition of "troll" seems better suited to you, at the moment.

That seems to imply a confused definition of value, and it looks like you're the only one holding it here. The concept of "Economic value", which is what the OP (I think) was referring to, is indeed flexible and subjective. I'm perfectly free to assign an economic value of 0$ to "all the work that has been done to produce the movie"; movie producers would disagree, and we *might* end up haggling until we reach a "market value". then again, we might not: I could just tell the producer to go away and not buy his overpriced goods.

You see, this is what entertainment executives don't get: all of a sudden, the distribution price of their goods went down to 0$. Distribution price is the most obvious parameter on which a buyer can base his evaluation (because he doesn't know anything about the production cost), and has been such since markets were "invented". This means that the common man now "naturally" values their goods at 0$, and it's the trader's own job to persuade him that the good has, in fact, a higher value. They don't want to do that, unfortunately. A distribution price of 0$ is a fantastic opportunity for all sort of new economic tricks, but clearly entertainment moguls aren't interested in finding them out, i.e. in doing their job.

The house is a physical item, that only one person can own at any given time. A digital copy is a virtual item, that can be duplicated to infinity.
If you can perfectly copy my house for $1, i don't see why you should pay me; indeed, I would say "more power to you!"

"Whatever, it doesn't matter, you're just WRONG". Great reasoning there.

So making a copy == murdering someone? You live in a very strange world.

It's just unbelievable that one can think that he should be restricted from using free technology to increase his knowledge, which doesn't harm anyone and doesn't cost anything to the physical world, because of... because of what, exactly?

(i don't think I've ever responded to a more rambling comment, and this being Slashdot is really somehting. thank you, kind sir.)