What’s up, Henry? You’re almost civil.

On the ‘celebrities’ – http://www.p2pnet.net/story/14704 (that still applies – look at the number of visitors for most of them). And they often provoke interesting discussion.

The guy who runs TorrentFreak is a friend and gets quoted here from time to time. His bailiwick is Torrents.

http://www.questioncopyright.org? New to me, but I’ll check it out. However, Ray Beckerman, Lory Lybeck, Jordan Glass, John Hermann, et al, are where discussions on copyright are at for me.

“This site sucks worse every time I come here,” you said of p2pnet recently [http://www.p2pnet.net/story/15565 ] and I responded, “But he doesn’t just burst into flame. He also offers constructive criticism.”

I wasn’t, of course, being serious Now, though, I am. Thanks for the criticism. There’s enough crap flying around already. Neither of us needs to add to it.

Cheers!

If making available is bad, it is small stuff compared to the greatest copyright infringement threat. It is the “save as” option in web browsers and all sorts of programs, mostly used through the mouse aNd of course the operating system and the computers themselve, all of whom are also guilty of making available.

It is estimated that daylY 100 million computer users, while browsing the web use “save as” an average of 1.5 times to copy the contetbs of web pages we writers write, without our authorization.

That adds up to 150,000,000 copyright infringements per day or 720,000,000 per year. And this has been going on for many years. The worst part is that copyright organizations and lawyers have ignored this. The american Copyright Office has never expressed an opinion on the matter. Neither has any legislator. This is very serious.

We writers thereby propose that “save as” be banned and that we writers be compensated by everyone that sell computers, mouses, operting systems and software with “save as” feature. After all all we writers do not expressly authorize “save as” copying and that is not ok.

Let this be a warning, “save as” is a threat to the livelyhood of writers and is costing the economy the loss of millions of jobs as shown by recent recession like economy end employment statistics. Thank God (or Bush) there is a war on Iraq that is creating millions of military and armament industry jobs.

Urgently we need to put an end to “making available” and “save as”, worldwide. And a reminder to politicians out there, we writers could easily control 100% of the votes in all countries of the world if we put our keyboard and mouse to work on it, so take us seriosly.
RV

Also glad to see that there’s actually some good articles here now. (No more bullshit about “civet cat crap cofee” or whatever other stupid shit Jon was on about.)

Still, i’d urge everybody to go over to the following sites for a far more lucid and detailed examination of the pros/cons/issues of copyrights/patents/”intellectual property” law in general:

http://www.questioncopyright.org
http://www.torrentfreak.com

Those two sites — unlike this one — don’t feature “celebrity gossip”, for one. Additionally, they don’t compare the RIAA to the mafia (which, shitty as the RIAA is, is just a disingenuous comparison). Jon Newton has, for some unguessable reason, amassed himself quite a little following here, but the vast majority of that fan-base is completely unjustified.

Jon: You could do a hell of a lot more for “the cause” by, for example, giving people a more in-depth primer about copyright law and how it’s metstitized into it’s current form, or putting up info on how to publish under “Creative Commons” licenses, or about all the “netlabels” that are out there putting up huge amounts of TRULY indie (independent) music FOR FREE — NOT just siphoning off of the RIAA’s product-base.

True, you DO feature occasional articles about Linux, but…..too much celebrity gossip, and WAY too much “heartstring-tugging” crap instead of substantive discussion or info.

So that person we imagine would be some concerned citizen wishing to help out the RIAA and report themselves for unauthorized file sharing. That person wouldn’t be the sharpest tool in the shed would they? And how could you trust the word of someone who would knowingly do something illegal to show that someone else has done something illegal?

Which in fact is what the RIAA does however. It’s a bit like someone going to the police to report that they bought drugs from a person and wishes to dob them in. Not very smart, or believable. Not that there’s anything wrong with file sharing.

I believe that the US army should conduct military operations against the headquarter at the RIAA, MPA the extortion center and the world head quarters of the 4 major labels. None of these are US company.

We are paying federal taxes for something.

I am waiting but I will not be waiting too long.

We don’t need these parasites.

Look, it’s not about right or wrong, it’s about making us as much bloody profit as possible out of YOU, okay? BTW Wrecking some poor saps life with extortion letters is just the icing on the cake and is great fun to watch!

You morons just get back in those record shops and BUY BUY BUY ok? (Full price, not the unprofitable budget crap.)

I knew the Court system would eventually have to start siding with the real victims and the writing is on the wall for this madness to cease and desist.

I don’t care how many overpaid lawyers you have, when this kind of decision is made, they are stumped and get their teeth kicked in, and rightly so.

Copyrights (my history is a bit hazy on this) were originally instituted to permit monopolistic control for 14 years. Over time, individuals amassed more and more copyrights, and those began to be organized into trade associations, conglomerates, corporate entities etc. To protect their copyrights they hired lawyers. This began to cost a lot of money. Since these organizations last longer and require a much more constant and predictable source of income they decided to ask their friends in government for extensions to the duration of copyrights. These copyrights began to lost longer and longer, now works rarely ever become accessible to the public. Since they have managed to extend a government MANDATED AND PROTECTED monopoly far far far far beyond what was originally expected, how far should they be able to push the legal system, since these works now never seem to manage to enter into the public trust? Personally, I think they’ve pushed damn hard enough, and now it’s time for everyone else to push back.

/soapbox off

P.S. I thought this relevant:

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute. — Ayn Rand

Is it really purely about money? or is it power as well? or just spite?

http://government.zdnet.com/?p=3782

There, I just LINKED to another site!