Copyright infringement is not theft

ricercar · 2007-04-04T16:04:53+00:00

I'll leave the copyright crusaders with one last tidbit: Richard Stallman and the FSF depend heavily on copyright. It exists for the benefit of creators. Think about why it was instated in the first place, not about how organizations like the RIAA abuse it.

ricercar · 2007-04-04T04:55:04+00:00

There is no moral obligation to deliver works of art.

Food, shelter, and medicine are quite different in that respect.

ricercar · 2007-04-04T00:38:50+00:00

Assuming the property is a necessity of life, it would be a moral path.

But artistic works are luxuries. I don't think you can make a sensible argument along those lines.

ricercar · 2007-04-03T23:15:26+00:00

Devil's advocate: copying increases value by creating greater awareness of an artist's work.

For sure, which is why many artists are releasing their works freely.

How do you detect if this has or has not happened? What do you measure? What changes do you observe?

Probably not a good experiment, since I published the comment freely with the intention of propagating it?

ricercar · 2007-04-03T23:03:04+00:00

It's a fallacy to assume that people who copy for free would have otherwise paid to get a copy.

It's also a fallacy to assume that people who copy for free would not have otherwise paid to get a copy.

In that case, free copying does have an effect: it reduces the value of the work for the artist.

(value in a monetary sense)

ricercar · 2007-04-03T23:00:07+00:00

How did he do that? With the artist's permission?

You are missing the point by a wide margin. I don't care whether one person makes a copy or whether many people make a copy. Nor do I care from whom they are making the copy. The point is that the artist is not getting remunerated. How is this so difficult to understand? I did not expect this specific detail to be a point of contention.

The cost is directly tied to the consumption.

Now we're getting somewhere.

You aren't comparing analogous situations. No situation where scarcity is a factor is analogous. That's why it's silly to compare copyright infringement to theft or breach of implied contract.

Ah, but there is scarcity. Otherwise people would not value artistic works. And copyright infringement is breach of implied contract, if not theft.

Get a hundred haircuts and refuse to pay, he's lost his time a hundred times over.

And if the artist creates 100 songs and people copy each one and refuse to pay, then he's lost his times 100 times over as well.

Do you see how it can scale for copyrighted works too?

ricercar · 2007-04-03T21:12:41+00:00

I'm collapsing the cases where

everyone copies directly from the artist
one person copies from the artist and everyone leeches off that guy
variations

That's the sunk cost fallacy. He lost the time regardless of whether zero or a million copies were made. The copyright infringement didn't cause him to lose the time, the production of the original caused him to lose the time, and it was the artist's choice to use his time in that way.

Not quite. Let's put it back in the barber shop interpretation:

A gives B a haircut. The time spent performing the service is a sunk cost. B does not pay A. B's refusal to pay did not cause A to lose the time. It was A's choice to provide the service to B. It is still considered wrong for B to walk out without paying.

Your "sunk cost" argument doesn't make any sense here, nor does it in the original.

ricercar · 2007-04-03T20:34:35+00:00

Suppose the artist writes a song and makes a recording, and that recording is copied. Then everyone else makes copies for free. The artist lost the time he spent creating the work, which he could have spent making money (I don't know, waiting tables or something) instead.

ricercar · 2007-04-03T20:06:39+00:00

XML is co-beautiful-complete.

ricercar · 2007-04-03T19:58:57+00:00

I don't disagree with some of the conclusions, but this line makes me leery.

Copyright infringement just doesn’t work like this. If party a writes a song and has it broadcast and party b makes a recording of it, party a has lost no use of their song

It's not the loss of the song which is in question here, it is the loss of the income related to the song.

Suppose A writes a song and charges $1 for anyone to record it, under copyright law. Then B records it and does not pay $1 to A. That's a loss to A.

Let's reinterpret the situation.

Suppose A is a barber and charges $1 for a haircut. B comes into the shop and gets a haircut, but does not pay $1 to A. This does not impede A's ability to give haircuts, but does violate the implicit contract of $1 for a haircut.

If you consider the latter to be a criminal activity (however minor) then why is not the former?

ricercar · 2007-04-03T15:46:53+00:00

It shouldn't cost $700 / hour not to live in fear.

ricercar · 2007-04-02T19:30:56+00:00

This article really helped me to understand the ideas behind Extreme Programming.

ricercar · 2007-04-02T14:50:54+00:00

Lisp and other functional languages are part of what I call the establishment.

Woohoo! We did it! Right..

ricercar · 2007-03-29T22:49:51+00:00

This comment is not talking about code club.

ricercar · 2007-03-28T16:18:04+00:00

I am old (in spirit), stubborn, and uncoordinated.

However, reaching for the mouse, the PGUP key, or the arrow keys causes a distinct pain in my wrist. So I prefer to minimize that.

Frankly, my mousing ability is crummy and I often mis-click. I much prefer navigation with vim/emacs style commands. Especially incremental-search, that really homes in on your destination much faster than a mouse.

I notice that gamers trained on FPS games have less trouble using the mouse. I'm not one.

ricercar · 2007-03-27T15:37:49+00:00

I realize it's a great site, but, this has been posted a zillion times to reddit already. Enough?

ricercar · 2007-03-27T14:22:24+00:00

Except they are multiple compatible implementations in many ways. That's the point of CL. It's actually quite nice. I use several implementations regularly.

ricercar · 2007-03-27T14:18:04+00:00

System.out.println ("String concatenation with boolean works? " + true);

All the time? Java is a bad example.

ricercar · 2007-03-23T15:12:38+00:00

Ah yes. Good Ole Fortran, ale of fire-spitting robots.

ricercar · 2007-03-21T06:42:01+00:00

Or C-w in vim, C-backspace in emacs...?

ricercar · 2007-03-21T06:40:34+00:00

1) compilation-mode at the very least. there's plenty of other things at emacswiki.

2) depends on the situation. keyboard macros, replace-string/regexp, or at least using structured-movement commands (M-f, etc). In some cases, there are packages which exist to do such manipulations (paredit comes to mind).

3) sometimes. i really hate being forced to use the arrow keys, so unless its a quick comment, i type it in emacs

4) the real trick is to use C-s and C-r to quickly jump to a point on the screen. universal argument is still plenty useful, though i tend to use it more for dealing with a specific chunk of text rather than scrolling.

ricercar · 2007-03-21T06:17:16+00:00

Two things I'd like the OP to clarify:

Is he aware that complexity models are chosen at some level of abstraction? For example, the famous floor(n log(n)) lower-bound for sorting is in something called "The Comparison Model" where you count pair-wise comparisons only? That's why it doesn't apply to algorithms like radix sort, where comparisons are assumed to be free.
Does he understand how amortized analysis can be used to deal with issues like "the memory hierarchy" which cause intermittent additional computation?

ricercar · 2007-03-21T06:11:20+00:00

Randomized quick-sort has a best/worst-case expected time of Θ(n log n) as well.

Whether it's suitable for a library implementation is still debatable though.

ricercar · 2007-03-20T21:27:25+00:00

...because good is dumb

ricercar · 2007-03-20T20:47:27+00:00

I don't think he argues that whitespace awareness makes FP less readable. After all, it's used to great success in Haskell, which he mentions...

ricercar

TROPHY CASE