I think part of the problem here is the ridiculous situation the USA got itself into with regard to lobbying.

Shrill screeching from an established industry about how they're about to be destroyed (and with them all those jobs) has a tendency to convert into tax breaks, improved legal protection, even whole brand new restrictions on trade that favour the incumbent players.

So, as you say, the cooler heads prevail and behind the scenes are perfectly aware of the market conditions and how to cope with them, and the shrieking for help is a deliberate, cynical tactic.

Interesting reply.

'People like me' have the opinion that arguments from authority are a logical fallacy. That's it.

Believe it or not, you can support someone's right to have their research considered without necessarily agreeing with their research or being 'anti-science'. In fact I would think that the definition of being 'anti-science' is refusing to consider some research because of the credentials of the author.

Just calm down, take a deep breath, accept that we don't know everything about everything and that there's no need to get into a frothing rage about someone trying to do some research. If his research is wrong, then I'm sure someone will point it out soon enough. If it's right, then we've gained more knowledge and that's a good thing.

He was awarded his PhD in the same year that he published his paper on Special Relativity, previous to that he'd had a single peer-reviewed paper published (4 years earlier).

So yes, no credentials to speak of. He was definitely not an established figure in the field for such groundbreaking work, and not even employed in academia or doing grant-based research.

Arguments from authority are a logical fallacy. Comparing Watts to Einstein is irrelevant. However, saying that someone is not qualified to have an opinion or publish a paper worth looking at because they're not an established figure in the field is as wrong for Watts as it was for Einstein.

Patent clerk. No credentials. 'nuff said

Not only for the idea that a serious company lets a masturbating-and-throwing-poo grinning idiot loose in their sensitive vitals, but also because it draws so many parallels with other resilient systems.

Allergies cured by parasitical worms? Chaos Monkey Effect - you need something attacking your defences for your system to stay healthy

Ecosystem that relies on bushfires to clear old vegetation? Chaos Monkey Effect

Something almost Zen about not only turning an attacker's violence against them, but deliberately introducing new attackers so your system is strengthened by them.

Well done chaps, carry on.

Can't be arsed to spend the time or energy arguing any more.
I've done the research, I'm still watching the blogs and journals, but I'm done with the discussions. It's become too polarised, it seems there's no longer a sane middle ground that says 'I don't think we know this as well as we think we do'. And I'm as guilty as most of taking a side and arguing it, instead of admitting my ignorance and being objective.

So, from now on I'm just going to vote for and donate to the people who seem to be making sense, and wait for the thermometers and tide gauges to tell us who was right and who was wrong.

I'm pretty sure, however, that we're not going to drown or burn, and neither are we going to be herded into green work camps by a new UN World Government. The truth, as always, will be somewhere in between.

oh here we go again... another slashdot discussion ends up in yank partisan bickering.

Please, for the love of all things shiny, stop. Just stop. Both your political parties are exactly the same, and no-one in the rest of the world gives a toss.

IP laws do not provide 'protection' for anyone, they just provide the grounds for a court case.

Because court cases are generally won by the side with the best lawyers, unless they're complete idiots as in TFA, laws generally favour corporations rather than consumers, and larger corporations rather than smaller ones.

This, obviously, is a generalisation and there are always counter-examples of the little guy winning. But if IP laws can be said to protect anyone, then they generally protect the rich against the poor.

and damn... I got into the morality argument again. I hate that. The portrayal of this whole issue as a moral issue and not a business issue is a move by the content industry to attempt to preserve their broken business model.

Ah but markets force people to change their business models all the time. They call them 'market forces' for a reason. Markets change as a result of technological changes. The market for recorded music was created by technological change (vinyl records) and is being destroyed by technological change (digital music). Market forces are not immoral, but they will force people in the market to change their business models, even against their wishes.

OK, so we're there, basically. You're agreeing that there is nothing inherently immoral in sharing music (or any content), the immorality is that someone, somewhere, way back up the chain broke an agreement that they had with a licensee of the original artist, and that makes any sharing of that content immoral.

There's one small but obvious flaw with this...the music doesn't come with an attached licence. I don't know if a track I'm downloading is immoral or not. I don't know if the artist whose music I'm listening to has agreed to this use of their content or not, so I don't know whether downloading the track is a moral or immoral action. Nor, as a consumer, can I be expected to know this. I could make the blanket assumption that copying any music is immoral, but that's not a valid assumption when there are musicians who are experimenting with new business models and who want me to share their music (as you've pointed out, this is probably the future of music). I could purchase all my music from music stores, but again that would rule out new business models that involve sharing which I'd like to encourage. I file my music by genre not by licence conditions.

Incidentally this isn't a new problem in the music industry. There have been cases where unscrupulous record distributors have made compilation albums of music without the agreement of the original artists. The purchasers of those albums are obviously acting in good faith, and yet are recipients of illegal, immoral music that they should immediately return to the store for a refund if they knew. Except, of course, that they don't know and can't be expected to know.

Obviously if I purchased some music and there's an explicit agreement that I have signed/clicked on with that purchase that says 'don't copy this' then I'm breaking a rule by copying it, and I'd agree probably breaking a moral code. But there's a wide range of activity here... am I allowed to format-shift my music, is that breaking the 'no copying' rule? I'm obviously allowed to lend my CD's to friends, so can I format-shift my CD's and lend the subsequent mp3's to friends? If I lend my CD to a friend and they then copy it, am I breaking the agreement I made with the artist, or is my friend who didn't make any agreement?

To take a real-life example again... I move in with a girl. We merge music collections like we merge everything else in our lives. We buy music together and format-shift the resulting tracks to our mp3 players. Then we split up because sometimes these things just don't work out, and amongst the endless hassle of splitting apart the joint life we created, we each take a copy of the entire mp3 collection that we bought. I'd argue that attempting to make us go through a process of identifying each track's original licence conditions to determine whether that music track can be shared or if we need to have an argument about who gets to keep it is pointless, futile, and if your business depends on that happening then your business is broken. And no, I don't think this is the moral equivalent of firebombing a Mcdonald's, and any attempt by the music industry to portray the two actions as morally equivalent is just plain wrong.

Let's invert this and see what it looks like from the other side, just to try and shift some attitudes here ;)

I have a thing. I can copy this thing for no cost and give it to you, so then we both have a thing. I lose nothing in this transaction, nothing at all. You gain happiness from this transaction, at no cost to me. Surely it is immoral for me to refuse to copy my thing for you, to give you happiness at no cost to me?

Note that this is *not* like the old recording industry, where if I have a physical copy of a record, then giving it to you for free deprives me of my physical copy so I am perfectly entitled to keep hold of my copy. But in this situation, surely depriving you of your free copy of my thing is an immoral action?

If my livelihood depends on you not getting a copy of my thing for free, then the only immorality is to do with depriving me of my livelihood. But that's where this stops being about morals and starts being about business models. Because if I change my business model then your behaviour stops depriving me of my livelihood and stops being something I consider immoral and starts being something I consider good.

Let's provide a concrete example... I routinely visit Penny Arcade's* website and view their comics for free. They don't consider this immoral, because they've worked out their business model so that they make a living from people like me visiting their site. But I am enjoying their content for free. I could copy their comics to my hard drive and send them to my friends, and they wouldn't consider that immoral. This *behaviour* is not immoral. And yet this exact behaviour is what you consider so extremely immoral when applied to downloading a copy of (for example) The Beatles' music. The difference between the two is not that my behaviour is moral for one and immoral for another, but that the business model for Penny Arcade is different from the business model for The Beatles. If The Beatles changed their business model so that they profited from the free exchange of their music, then my exact same behaviour would suddenly become 'moral'.
This is why this whole problem is not about the morality of customer behaviour, but about the effectiveness of business models in a digital world because it's the business model that determines the 'morality' of the behaviour. This is also why setting up the behaviour as being intrinsically moral or immoral is a straw man.

* forgive my not finding a music example, but content is content and it's very late at night here. Replace each comic with a streaming audio track and the business model is the same

Again, it's not about morals or ethics, and framing the argument as a moral choice *is* a straw man. This is a business we're talking about, not an ethics convention.

The common practice of the market, whether you like that or not, whether the creator of content likes that or not, is that musical tracks are freely available for no cost. That's maybe not an ideal situation for people to create content in, but it does accurately describe reality. You can say that that's 'immoral' all you want, but that's irrelevant to the facts of the market as it operates.

Need and entitlement also have nothing to do with it. The bare facts of the situation is that everyone (including the lady in the original article) lives in a world where copied music is the norm, where constantly trading music with friends and family, even with strangers on the internet, is socially normal behaviour. Trying to change this by labelling it as 'immoral' behaviour is pointless and specious. Maybe it could have been changed way back in the 80's, maybe if the original CD format had some kind of encryption protocol, but not now.

Content creators must adapt to the market, same as any other business, rather than try and force the market to adapt to their wishes. It's pretty simple, lots of people are doing it successfully, it just involves a change in thought processes where mp3's of the music are not 'worth' anything, where you want people to copy your songs and share them with their friends, because the more popular your music is, the easier it is to sell concert tickets/t-shirts/donations/whatever your business model is. In this world, with this business model and attitude, suddenly copying and sharing music becomes a good thing, everyone becomes happy, and the world is a better place.

Depends on the skillset that you include in 'developer'. I know I suck at interface design, but I'm clearly a developer and I've been doing that successfully for 25+ years so I can't be that bad at it. I am colourblind which doesn't help things though ;)

There are people out there who specialise in interface design. In an ideal world we'd get them to design all our interfaces. Just like in an ideal world the customer would be able to describe their requirements accurately and completely, and not change them during the development project... ...sorry, had to take a breather there, nearly died laughing. Or crying, one of the two.

Except that this isn't about 'rights', this is about a business model.

If your business model is to produce music files and sell them, in this marketplace where the vast bulk of music files are not paid for, then you're an idiot and the market will quickly drive you bankrupt. This isn't about morals, or ethics, but simple business sense.
The old business model of producing recordings of music and selling them is broken. It was enabled by the technology to record music, and it has been broken by the technology to share music. It was a viable business model for about a century, but now it's gone and musicians will need to either revert to the pre-recording-industry model of performing for a fee, or find a new viable business model.
Attempting to make the old business model work in this new marketplace is never going to work, even if God Himself decrees that anyone who shares a file is going straight to Hell.

To rephrase your straw man argument:
If a musician says "I have created this song, how do I make money from it?" then there are an infinite number of scenarios. Creating an easily-shareable mp3 of the song, and then putting it on the Internet where such things are effectively worthless, and then trying to insist that everyone who copies it owes you $1 seems to me to be one of the least-effective methods of making money from it.

Partly because developers can be really bad at designing web applications too. We tend to think of how the site is constructed, not how it's used, and design nice, orderly, awkward, unfriendly interfaces.