That sounds like a fair outlook on things, keep in mind the word "piracy" is pretty heavily abused. When I say it, I really just mean "disobeying copyright law" (note, I did misuse the term in my last post; I don't actually encourage people to pirate my wares given that I licence them CC0 so there is no copyright to infringe upon.. slip of the tongue :S)

As evidenced by my own vocabulary error, you can work with public domain or copyleft content and get some of the benefits of cultural liberty without infringing upon copyright, and you can encourage people to use copyleft instruments to avoid the negative ramifications of copyright. I see that you approve of these, as I do also.

But to be clear I do additionally champion the direct infringement of copyrighted works because I do personally believe that copyright law is foundationally immoral.. not to mention gapingly unenforceable in the face of today's technology and globally connected marketplace.

"Intellectual Property" literally means owning ideas, and ideas exist only as irremovable components of the minds of people who have learned them. Thus IP directly means owning the thoughts of other people, and controlling who can express those parts of themselves and who cannot.

Laying claim over other's minds is as bad an incentive to create art as laying claim over other's bodies is to process cotton. Sure, it drives your profits up immensely, but only on the backs of others. On the one hand there are countless ways to make money from art without first censoring the entire planet. On the other hand, it is literally not my concern how art gets funded. I simply want the freedom to share my thoughts, and if every selfish artist in the world simply stopped all their creativity for want of funds as a result I would still see the tradeoff as an enormous gain. Hell I can produce my own art and I will when I'm bored enough. Would I become the last artist in the world? How would people not outbid each other to hear me hum off key if nobody else is even doing it?

I create art, and having to vet clearance against other people's copyright makes that job technically impossible — if practically only very difficult. I guarantee every new piece of art infringes someone's copyright, it's just that you hope whoever you step on in the crowded sea of toes never notices. That is a terrible game of Russian Roulette to even pretend to play.

When we craft (or modernize) law we compare the law against certain maxims, and one such popular yardstick is that possession is nine tenths of the law. Directly, I possess everything in my mind, and I possess every megabyte of information on the hardware I physically own from mp3 players to computers to media center. That makes it my prerogative should I choose to share that data with another person, or should another person choose to share similar data with me.

Intruding within that well established and strategically easy to defend personal property arrangement to add complicated enforcement of Intellectual Property rights from people all over the planet is realistically absurd. No one has the capacity to prevent my sharing that information; Nobody could afford to even make an attempt. You'd have more luck trying to enforce a law that no wild birds may fly greater than 50 feet from the ground, and all violating birds will somehow be ticketed and fined.

It's a stretch to imagine a law so ineffective and ignored with such volume could have any impact on commercial artwork to begin with. Every piece of digital information is being shared freely somewhere right now, yet art continues to be made and Youtube accepts more than 24 hours of video uploads per minute. Movies continue to be produced and shown in theaters around the world, though I know the MPAA wishes they were making more, but who doesn't want more profit? Independent movies and games are on the rise (which is actually MPAA's only valid concern). I bought a Minecraft account a couple of weeks back, the author of which made over 2 million USD the weekend I bought in. I could have pirated it, but I felt that funding that project was a good use of my money (instead of throwing it into big media's wishing well) and apparently I was not alone.

With or without copyright, we'll still have money to spend on art and art will flourish more wherever we direct our cash to. At the end of the day, Copyright is pretty bad at funding art and very good at impeding it. It puts money into the hands of cartels who make money by limiting the proliferation and creation of artwork. Copyright allows industry to make money via artificial scarcity, which can only happen when the product is actually forced to be scarce.

So that's a treatment about why I personally disobey copyright law and encourage others to do so as well. Copyright is no law at all and does not deserve our respect nor observance. I don't mind if you continue to disagree and you don't have to explain your point of view, but I felt like it was a good opportunity for me to clarify my own. :3

Hi there AC and Successful Troll, how's it going? This is a hell of a thread you've got here. Congraturation!

Your (yes I know it's plagiarized) post here reminds me a lot of Jonathon Swift's Modest Proposal. Just a nit pick, it is just a touch whinier and less smooth and deadly, but you know if the original you've carped needs some spackle us Pirates won't despise you for adding a little bit of effort to make it a mashup, especially if it's more effective. Nonetheless this was plenty effective, people falling over themselves talking about karma whoring and all manner of silliness. God damn. :D

In any event, I agree about (checks figures) 80% with your strawman here. I pirate. I don't give a damn who's going out of business because of that. It is, in fact, easier for me. If it weren't I might not. I guess I don't have your strawman's dissonance about that. I don't feel guilty and don't look to /. for other voices to ease my guilt. I am confident that my position is right, and enjoy describing how, if for no other reason than it's fairly counter-intuitive and I'm proud of it. And I like pontificating. :D

So if you're strawman (or, borrowed strawman) would like it's guilt eased, I'll be happy to post here about how what it's doing is perfectly moral, because if I read your post correctly what it is allegedly doing is perfectly moral and it should continue to allegedly do that. It's like I've just read Karl Marx make up a "Mr Capitalist" strawman who feels guilty about being selfish or about putting inefficient competitors out of business. It just sounds so awesome that I want to root for the puppet no matter how much the puppeteer might dislike him. :3

For the other 20%, it's mostly mild misunderstandings. The GPL, for example, I am simply against. I want to see it fail along with all other copyright instruments. I publish all of my work as CC0 as it is the closest effective approximation to ridding my work of all copyright entirely. If people wish to hide their ideas in closed source then I won't stop them. If other people wish to reverse engineer those ideas, then I won't stop them either. If I write open source code and someone wants to "steal" it away into their closed source bundle, then I encourage them to do so. Freedom, flexibility, and good publicity will always triumph over paranoia and restrictions and I'm overjoyed at every opportunity to demonstrate that in practice.

Otherwise your puppet laments over misguided concerns of the puppeteer, saying "even though none of my rights are violated" and "even though this spells doom for my favorite ad-run site" and confusing the people who manage slashdot with it's commenters. I am a commenter, and my views probably don't reflect the views of the site owners. Slashdot might sue people for stealing their content, but I would not in their stead. I do believe that preventing me from obtaining or retransmitting publicly available information is harming my rights. I do believe that retransmitting data authored by someone else does not actually harm their rights. Your puppet may or may not agree with me, but it sounds like it would at least sleep easier if it choose to agree with me. Believing in True Things tends to make sleep easier, and I recommend that to anyone.

So by all means bring your puppet back to ask any other questions it's feeling guilt about and I'll be here all week, eh? Fictional and needlessly angstful as it may be, the world would be better off if more people behaved precisely that way.

Wait, when did Rupert Murdoch get a slashdot account?

Hi! I'm a pro-pirate abolitionist, and.. uh .. I'm sorry I'm not understanding your question here. :D

I have purchased some things which I have pirated. Not many, some. That's just a whim away from "none" and patently different than "all".

If it were somehow magically impossible to pirate, I would have bought a larger number of the things I did pirate, but I still would not have bought "all".

In short, even though I am an abolitionist, I think I must be honest in saying that if you ignore the social aspect the capability of piracy does inexorably decrease the volume of sales of canned digital media. It does not drop it to zero, it does not drop it anywhere near as much as media claims, but it does reduce the sales volume for canned digital media. I am not upset because I think canned digital media sales are overinflated just as canned tuna sales would be overinflated if there were no other food available.

In some cases the social aspect of piracy does overturn this sales drop and lead to a sales increase. For example, I sell virtual products in second life and outsell all of my direct competitors for virtually no other reason than baldly encouraging people to pirate my products. That piracy becomes advertisement which raises product awareness and PR and thus sales. That may not work in every market, but it cannot work without the social aspect which didn't sound like it was part of your analysis.

So I can't tell if you're anti-piracy or pro-piracy (because your post is ambiguous) but in case you are pro-piracy, I just want to make sure you're measuring the right metrics. misinformed allies are always more dangerous than a well informed opposition. :S

Amen, brother. :D

I guess the problem is too many people conflate "law" with "morality". They just lack the brainpower to realize there is a difference. A policy being law does not guarantee the policy is moral. Does not guarantee that following that policy and every consequence of doing so will profit the community more than defying that policy and every consequence of that will.

Knowing that law fails to be congruent with justice does not mean that you and I agree on every thing, so do not think I am saying you actually endorse my cause, but it so happens that I believe that copyright is completely immoral and that infringing upon copyright varies from amoral to very positively moral. Ideas cannot be owned save by the person who entertains the idea, no more than a person's flesh can be owned by any other person. Any idea (from narrative to song to art to design) which you share with another person, you instill in them their unique understanding of your idea and you no longer own what they now understand. You cannot force them to keep your idea a secret, save by lien of some other arrangement you have with them, without doing them and the community at large the same harm as you would by claiming ownership over their bodies entire, for the mind is a component of the body.

This is the basic reason that abolitionists draw so many parallels between contemporary copyright and 18th century slavery. It is not because of the shock value, it is not because of the broad consensus against slavery today, it is because the comparison is apt. Cotton farmers once claimed property rights over the bodies of their slaves and whinged that cotton could not be farmed or processed elsewise, and media producers today claim property rights over our minds and whinge that art cannot be produced elsewise. It is true that the magnitude of injustice was greater in the elder case, but the form of injustice is congruent, and it is equally unacceptable at any magnitude. Reducing the number of slaves a plantation owner abuses from one thousand to one does not transform his case into one that is acceptable, and neither would reducing the manner of slavery from direct physical abuse to indirect thought enforcement.

Equally apt is the comparison of complaints that some commodity cannot be created without the abuse. A century and a half after slavery was entirely divorced from cotton production I am not only wearing a cotton shirt but impoverished people the world over who cannot afford food are also wearing cotton shirts. Now media producers claim that if they cannot control my freedom to redistribute or re-incorporate their work that they cannot produce media any more.

Put simply, if cotton stopped existing without slavery I would wear wool or nylon or any of a number of materials. If media stops existing without copyright, I would rather hum to myself than give up my right to hum in public. The arts are about people expressing themselves and sharing those expressions amongst their culture. Copyright does not enable art, it prevents it. If you can't express your ideas unless you pull down full time wages as compensation for doing so, then you're ideas literally aren't worth expressing. That's what "worth" means. I'm not being compensated to argue my case here, but I still do. It's worth my time to do so. If I got paid as well, then that's a double KO. But my ideas have to stand on their own or they're literally not worth the funding -- Especially not worth gimping the rights of others to continue spreading your word.

Bah, screw what people think the word Conservative or Republican means. Both words have been successfully poached by religious anti-progressive warmongers to mean "religious, anti-progressive warmongers".

It's time for self-identified "true conservatives" to toss the word out and chose another one, or they will never be properly understood by their peers. Once you've done that please clarify where you stand on each polarizing issue too, since I don't see a lot of people agreeing on anything. You're for smaller government and lower taxes, that sounds clear enough. Are you pro-capitalism? Some guy up-thread said no. Are you pro-war? pro-religion? anti-progress? (I think that is the dictionary definition of "conservative", right?) pro-guns? pro-censorship? anti-gay-marriage? anti-marijuana? pro-prison-expansion? I mean, the gamut is pretty wide for divergent ideas here.

You are assuming "the problem" is the two-party system. While the Two Party system is Bad, I do not believe a Three or Ten party system would put a dent in the real problem.

The real problem, and the reason I don't vote, is because my vote doesn't count. Neither does yours. There is no hyperbole at all to the supposition that our votes are just drops in the bucket, in fact that analogy is quite conservative. It would be quite a large bucket to hold anything on the scale of one hundred million drops. Dividing those drops into 3 or 10 gargantuan buckets won't change that trouble one iota.

The real problem is that we're being divided into buckets at all. The real problem is the Representative aspect of our Representative Democracy. We're not voting on issues, we're voting on a tiny cast of people and they in turn reliably ignore the reasons we voted for them to begin with. If we had a deferal democracy instead of representative, then I would not only vote, I would campaign.

I'm sorry but, Capitalists do not "indulge their natural selfish urges by definition". Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned and operated for a private profit. Maximizing private profit does not imply indulging selfish urges. Any kind of urge is too primordial to succeed in spearheading as complex a campaign as maximizing private profit; you require planning and discipline to properly acheive that goal. Anything more foolish and you will fail and be replaced.

It is presumed by Capitalist doctrine that the most successful strategies for pursuit of private profit will also profit and enrich the community as a whole, and that this will occur with greater efficacy than every other competing resource allocation method we have thus far explored. It's certainly more effective than government controlled or centralized resource allocation, as the massive calculations required to determine the fair price of goods in various markets and various municipalities must be decentralized and pushed to the edges of the network.

Even if you take that supposition as a given, it's still not relevant to the O'Donnell debate. She was trying to argue in favor of public schools (funded by the government .. not sure which level of government, but let's assume federal funding is involved until someone corrects me ;3) espousing Christian doctrine, which would represent Congressional law made to fund the establishment of religion.

Saying that religion can influence government is pretty meaningless. Of course religious people can vote and religions get to lobby so long as anyone with an agenda is allowed to lobby, however that in turn cannot lead to laws favoring any religion so long as we have a superior law preventing it.

Quick, name over 100 artists (I'm not even that mean, just name one ;D) who do live solely on the proceeds from selling their art, and then describe how they leverage copyright law (without also going bankrupt) to successfully prevent anyone who chooses to from releasing their entire catalog on TPB which would, according to you, end their career in a nanosecond.

Is the book valueless? No. Is a specific copy of the book in PDF format valueless? Yes. Why? Backups cost nothing and if you have a backup losing the live copy also costs nothing. QED

If abolishing copyright "destroys the value of human labor on a massive scale" then it must have already been destroyed before you got here. Anyone who wishes to pirate any content from games to video to music already does. You ask if consumers could get the content for free why don't they, why ask me? They already can get the content for free. Why don't they? Simple convenience, gaybabe. It's worth a buck per track for most people to just hook their iCrap to the apple store and press "get". They are, as they should be, literally paying for the convenient distribution. Otherwise, song prices would vary quite a lot more depending upon popularity.

Artificial scarcity is by definition a global economic detriment. Anyone who purpotrates it doesn't give a damn about the economy or about actually scarce resources, they just want to profit from other people's injury.

I'm sorry, resisting what hackel wants is not what makes them dinosaurs. Resisting what the market wants is what makes them dinosaurs. The market is waning for broadcast, timeslotted, shut-up-and-eat-your-spam programming now that new technology allows time shifting and format shifting. That's what people want, what they'll spend their time on and what they'll pay to have. Why do we need a "try before you buy" of something we don't want to buy? Oh wait, it's not about what we want. It's about what you want. You still want us (eg, everyone else) to bleed in order to finance your pork barrel programming. I remember this conversation! We're still weeping for the impending demise of the $300 million blockbuster. :D

Wasn't the point recently discussed that the shows are not products, our eyeballs are? We don't show demand, the advertisers do? We're not being sold cheese it's just baiting the mousetrap. How is sneaking the cheese off the mousetrap the "worst thing that we can do, yes worse than walking into the trap" when most every natural food source was paved over long ago by the powers that be?

When you find independant programming that you like, rejoice! Involve yourself in the communities. Buy the merchandise. Support the cause! But to this date, there's not a lot of independant material to choose from. In any event, "not watching" material just because it's commercial and someone is hoping to extort you is precisely as disingenuous as deciding you must plug your ears when walking past a street musician you have no intention of tipping. You'd better close your eyes too, or you might see an expensively produced billboard advertisement for a product you don't intend to purchase. You can't keep "showing demand" for things you don't like, or you'll be waist deep in street musicians! Except .. oh yeah. You can't quantify non-transactional demand for creative work. The Media industry completely fabricates their piracy loss figures already (amount of $ we wish we made minus amount we made = ....), those numbers won't go down if you cross your heart and close your eyes to their content. So if we're already freely painted as pirates, even if you have payed for christ sakes, then why urge us to decline the spoils?

Except, sorry, I keep forgetting that VFB isn't here to negotiate an intellectual accord. His very nickname belies his preoccupation with discord, and his sig clarifies his belief that any argument can be won with persistence and repetitive use of a "NO, U!" image macro. ;3

Yeah but it doesn't actually need to explode. Just use a subsystem not directly controlled by the CPU which remotely bricks the device (blows a fuse to the power relay, whatev) when it receives the appropriate RF code on the appropriate band. Lose access to your coms? Detect coms from the satellite which infer it's talking to someone who isn't you, encrypted channel or no? Either send the kill code to brick it, or broadcast a blanket message to whomever might have it that you'll brick it unless they pay you a ransom. *shrug*

Incorrect; when the Pepper's Ghost illusion is done properly (with a live, offstage ghost and props) the effect is completely stereographic. If you move your POV then your line of sight to any given point on the reflective surface changes, that line of sight reflects into a new part of the reflected room offstage in perfect step with the parts of the main stage. So your left and right eyes see stereovision, continue to do so if you tilt your head, and you can get up and walk about in the designated audience area to look around "virtual" objects to your heart's content.

I don't actually see how Pepper's Ghost could be altered to suit projectors or computer generated imagery at all. Unless the audience is somehow forced to view the stage from a given angle, or unless the live actors always approach the translucency directly to interact. *shrug*