Too bad there are no real world examples to back this up for you.
That is not true. There are several musicians, at minimum. It's also
worth noting that for quite a while the Grateful Dead encouraged home
taping and private copying, and made the bulk of their money from
concerts but also got plenty from CD sales.
You are the one who started with the name calling.
Not true.
But, you have to admit, I do pretty good for someone who doesn't
use a spell checker (haven't bothered to hook it up to vi yet).
Well ... vi ... that explains a lot ...
Explain to me how this business model works for Red Hat? Have you ever
used their software? I just told you, they charge $300 per seat for
a standard Workstation license! If you don't pay this, then you are
*not* abiding by their business model!
That includes a support contract. You can also just use Fedora Core
and other open source stuff for free. You can build a system identical
to and totally interoperable with one built using their Workstation
license without paying a red cent and just not get bundled support.
Oh, I agree with this. Congress should have to spend half the year
renewing old laws. Those that don't get renewed fall off the books
after, say, a decade, because they are apparently not important.
It wouldn't be half the year, except maybe the first year because so
much legislative cruft and deadwood has been permitted to accumulate.
Subsequently there's be a much smaller corpus of mostly-sensible law
to sift through, and only the fifth that's over four years old (given
a five year deadline).
Oh, wow, you consider making illegal copies of software and other
media "civil disobedience"!
I consider nonviolent and non-property-crime but technically illegal
acts, where one does not agree with the law, to be civil disobedience
more or less by definition. (Remove the first pair of restrictions and
it is just "rioting"; bring on the tear gas grenades!)
I agree with your position on machinery. You buy something, like a
video game console, and the DMCA says you can not modify it to run,
say, Linux. It is illegal to circumvent the manufacturer's measures
that have been put in place to use the game console in a way other than
how it was intended. That is absurd.
Don't you see that this logically extends to any telling me what I can
and cannot do with my machine and the bits and bytes stored on it?
At the same time, I think the manufacturers should be allowed to make
their hardware as difficult to circumvent as they can (which they are
already allowed to do). But yea, the user should be able to hack it
as much as they want.
Why not extend this? Software authors are free to try using technical
measures to make copying difficult, but there's no legal crutch for
them to fall back on. They gain a short-term monopoly if it holds up
for a while before being cracked or reverse engineered or their
authentication server spoofed or whatever. But there's no state-
granted monopoly. Smells like free enterprise -- isn't it refreshing!
Users can choose to not use software with licenses they don't agree with.
No they can't! There is often no acceptable-license substitute for a
given piece of software which is completely substitutable for the
original.
[insult deleted]
Funny thing is, he isn't the zealot you are, and he isn't making his
money off Linux. He makes his living off a real job.
Starting the Linux ball rolling proved his bonafides. Another way
writing software can pay off even if it does not do so by the selling
of copies and restricting of other people making copies.
Have you ever read what Linus has actually written regarding copyright?
You might be a little surprised.
Probably views it as a necessary evil; I'm increasingly convinced that
it is not necessary, though it certainly is evil.
The GPL does use it to ensure source code is made available for
derivative works; I'm not aware of any other quasi-good use for it.
But hopefully lining my pockets!
At everyone else's expense. Even though you could provide it for a
fraction of that price and still turn a profit. What a greedy SOB you
are. I guess your shareholders require you to be. But the law should
be a restraining, not an enabling, factor of such greed. There is
supposed to be an inherent tension between market forces + regulation
-- PRO-COMPETITIVE regulation -- and the corporate desire for obscene
profits, such that the corporations turn profits but have razor-thin
margins and people can have a thing even if they have barely enough
money to cover the incremental costs of making one more of it and
shipping it to them, so long as they do have at least that amount.
