it is not.

"debts" are any kind of monetary obligation, not only loans. When you buy anything from anyone, you create an obligation to sell, and incur in a debt for the price of the object or service purchased.

There is no additional requirement whatsoever, no requirement of record, interest, promise, manifestation of will, nothing. that can all be implicit, and is the base of contemporary civil law.

"debts" basically mean "any monetary obligation" and that includes pretty much everything, so this whole thread is completely nonsensical.

That only occurs in gnome. the kde keyboard switcher works perfectly in maverick.

Not only have there been prosecutions, but these cases are HUGE in modern criminal law academia, as they touched on fundamental questions of criminal responsibility and legality. They were fundamental in setting the bases of the contemporary discussion about human rights and the criminal persecution of state sponsored acts.

In very simple terms, the problem in terms of criminal theory is that these people committed acts that were not typified as crimes under the legal systems that was in force when they were committed, so their prosecution _and conviction_ had a tremendous impact in the modern understanding of the legality principle, which is a fundamental concept in any criminal law system, and in criminal law theory.

You have a crucial point that you fail to see: those two forms of IP are already distinguished in legal institutions: copyright and patents. the problem, is that both legal institutions are being extended out of control... but the difference is there, and we only need to adjust one (patents) and abolish the other.

But independently of that particular solution, the fact that technological development makes some particular form of social institution or enterprise obsolete is not the problem. If the invention of the wheel made some forms of transportation obsolete, considerations about the preservation or future or pre-wheel forms of transportation should not be valid arguments in discussions about development and deployment of the wheel.

In other words....it doesn't matter. The problem right now is not how are we going to secure that there are incentives for people to invent stuff, but that the mechanisms that we do have in place, that were never created with that intention but also work as incentive structures, are becoming unacceptable threats to the public interest and freedom.

First we need to stop the escalation into police states that the extension of these mechanisms is bringing about, THEN we should let the people that are trying to make money inventing stuff work out how they are going to actually make any.

In other words: the "technological development" argument is moot. it is not going to happen, period. So don't use it to respond to my complaints about my lost freedoms, because i'm being monitored, censored, persecuted, fined and incarcerated NOW, and you want me to worry about the potential profit problem of some corporation in some undefined future. get your priorities right.

As a subsidiary argument, you can reconsider the reasons that were argued in its time for the implementation of IP protection. it was never "let's secure a revenue stream for the author", it was much more a thing of "let's secure the integrity of the produced media for the future, by preventing unauthorized sub-par copies to be made and distributed". That line of thought rests, however, on the direct correlation between cheap copy and low quality copy that digital media makes obsolete.

<quote><p>Open Source is better than all commercial software!!!</p></quote>

Specifically because with open source software, you are able to *see* what is being sent. So yes, obviously it should generate less outrage.

[quote]apt-get remove "package_name" could do it all for you automagically[/quote]

even if that's not easy enough, Ubuntu has a very easy to use graphical package-manager that can do it for you, to the same effect. Checking your email on any OS is harder than installing/removing packages in ubuntu (and most modern linux distros, for that matter)

the law does not say legitimate, it says legal. if it is not forbidden explicitly by other laws in the country, it can not be prevented by reference to this law.

no. the law doesn't say "legitimate", it says legal, as in "not forbidden by any other law of the nation".

The spanish original does not use the word "legitimate", it uses the word "legal", as in "not explicitly forbidden by any other laws of the nation".

there is absolutely no possibility whatsoever of becoming even barely acquainted with anything remotely related with any field of modern philosophy without not only hearing of, but knowing who is, and hopefully directly reading, kant.

and he is called Immanuel.

you are expecting people to behave rationally when it suits your anti-labour argument that workers are going to under perform in order to avoid paying training, but assume that they won't behave rationally when considering mikechant's reasonable argument of why your rational underperforming workers shouldn't do it.

looks like a true scotsman to me, ergo, fallacious. you loose the argument.

NEXT!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Alesia