It's a pretty common cause for law suits actually and is known as reverse-engineering. It touches on exactly what we are talking about here. You seem to believe that the inherent value of something is exclusively associated with the cost of the material, but of course it's not. Let me give you some examples. Dirt doesn't have any value to most people, but if someone creates pottery from it that people deem valuble, then it becomes a commodity that can be sold. The difference between the dirt and the pottery is the labor and the skill of the creator, that is what creates value. Similarly with a book, what creates it's value is not the paper or the ink but the narrative, it's what makes you pick one book over another or even an empty notebook.
Sure you can, first you measure the parts then you manufacture identical parts and assemble a car that is a copy of mine. I wouldn't have any issues with this, but you would violate similar laws and the car manufacturer might sue you if you went on producing and selling that car.
Physical property is not different, your argument is: "it is" (in italic). But just to show you that a similar argument can be made that includes physical property I leave this Rousseau quote here.
"The first man who had fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody"
You can copy my car if you want, if you steal my novel I don't have it anymore. But seriously, why do you think that physical things costs money at all? Is this an inherent property of something being physical, or is the cost related to salaries payed for processing and production? If everyone worked for free, nothing would cost money. Are you unable to think outside of those bounds? I'm not arguing for this mind you, but the decision to protect property or the notion of property as such, is arbitrary and a human convention at the core.
As I said copying is only one part of copyright. If you spend a year in production and spending a large amount of money in the process. You should be the owner of the product, or anyone could just make a copy and sell it at a heavy discount with no associated costs of production.
The interesting thing is that the same argument can in fact be made for property. How can you claim to own something at all? It's related to labor, having spent x amount of time working to buy something.
It's not only about copying and sharing, but also who has the right to sell and distribute. If you create software, you are copyright owner of that software, which means I can not take it, sell it and take credit for it. I don't think I get to control what other people do with information, but you should have the right to control what others do with your work.
GPL is good, since it's up to the author to chose if he/she want's to license it under the terms of the license. It's the authors role of a copyright owner that makes this possible. Forcing everyone to share their work seems like a bigger violation than copyright. Lastly, a GPL license wouldn't be possible to enforce without copyright, or the concept of a copyright owner.
Absolutely, and this is my point as well. If you read the post I responded to it should be clear I think. That is, if you believe in the theoretical basis of the law, then the internet does not change that fact.
It's society's responsibility to enforce the laws, this isn't a discussion about internet per se, it's not excluded from the laws of the society. Other phenomenons are also thriving on the internet like credit card frauds. By your logic this isn't society's responsibility either, we simply have to accept the current state and adapt.
It's a strawman argument, since there are two components here. First, it's hard to make a living as a writer, perhaps your just not good enough or only appeal to a small part of the population. Secondly your right to get paid for your work. The second part doesn't go away simply because making a living as a writer is hard.
It's a basic right, if you spend a year writing a book, you are the one who have the rights to sell it and thus make money from your work. Same with software, a GPL license would be worthless without copyright.
Is it only me who find it funny that the name is allthatiswrong given how many factual errors there are in there. :) Can't quite make up mind if the author is trolling or if he have just failed to read up on the topic he tries to school us in.
I found the discussion about domain experts interesting, as if there is no domains within CS. Wouldn't domain expertise in networks, machine learning, DSP, data bases, operating systems etc. be of any value.
I sometimes use a wrapper around mv that moves the folder to trash. Guess it's not that portable but it could be replaced by moving to /tmp or something instead perhaps.
Are you referring to the article linked here? It doesn't mention censorship once. Which is good since this has nothing to do with censorship, that is my point and why it's a cheap rhetoric trick. And then comparing it to China, well all I can say is, does Godwin's law apply to public statements?
Censorship is even more inflammatory IMO, it's not mentioned but the headline suggests it. It's a pretty cheap rhetoric if this is what he actually said, it's like saying that the U.S is like China in regards to Copyright if it's not blocked.
Wouldn't it be possible to deny any scripts that looked like that? I know that it must obviously be legal Javascript, but if it's formatted like one blob of text, deny. This might be a too naive approach to work, I'm mostly raising the question out of curiosity, is it possible to spot obfuscation programmatically.
Your first point is related to patents, not copyright, moreover patents doesn't exist in art. You can for example make a painting of a duck, which get's me inspired to make a painting of a duck with a hat, that is perfectly fine.
So you think that taking for example Microsoft Word, re-package it in a new box call it "Awsome word 2011" and re-sell it at half price should be ok? Without any cost associated with the production what so ever, that would be possible. You can still invent a new distribution plattform, look at amazon for example, you just have to pitch it to the owner whose products you are going to sell, and of course pay them, that is how all trade works. How can selling someone elses work, make a profit, and not paying them be morally justified?
Regarding China, the point is that the effect on foreign relations could be similar in regards to copyright.
Yeah but if company A spends x million in production budget, how is it fair for company B to sell the product without paying company A? Or perhaps A isn't a company but an author or software developer.
My point was that this isn't creating a boost in an economy because while B makes money, A loses money. How about these startups creating something of value them selves, that they can then sell?
Well you are wrong, because you are arguing about patents on which we agree. Copyright is not related in any way, patents is the "protection of ideas" which is especially unfit in the field of software. Let me explain.
Let's say you are creating software project. You are then automatically protected by the copyright law, this means that you are the one who decides on how your work should be distributed and copied. Let's say you now decide to open source the project, as the copyright owner you can then license the software under the terms in for example GPL or BSD etc. Without this basic right that license would be worth nothing, and some one could simply take it, re-package it and take credit for it.
Related to this article, a weakened copyright law could just as well be harmful to local economy since foreign companies may just chose to not make business there, like some companies treat for example China.