Once upon a time I became convinced I wanted to create the first 100% virtual bank of my country.
Not having the faintest idea of how to do such a thing I set out to at least collect a roadmap of the paperwork needed to do that, so I could glean some knowledge in the process.
Ended up consulting with a lawyer and gathering a grand total of 1700 distinct bits of paperwork I needed to fill and complete as a random person. Every one of those things would have to be accompanied by documentation, most of which had to be presented in person at least back then. Would have taken me about 5 years if I managed to file a paper a day every day. To this day I still have no idea how on earth do banks just pop up one day.
No font in Google fonts does, for instance. At least from their own little demonstrator. There is https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-emoji Noto Emoji which can render the flags but you need to build it yourself
According to the article the State discovered, way late, that the kind of ties he had with China were not of the kind they assumed guilt of and heavily publicized when they went to destroy his professional life, but instead of the kind people have when they are born elsewhere.
When they did find out about this, they instead tried to make him admit to some other non criminal kind of ties to justify their ruining of his life, and when that failed they simply bailed out.
What people don’t realize is that a prosecutor is like any other job - pressure from the boss to deliver, long hours, “sunk cost fallacy” and all the other crap you see in big corporates.
Not to excuse the behavior, but more highlighting what contributes to it.
Once a prosecutor thinks he has a case against you, you’re pretty fucked to be honest because it rare for them to ever admit fault or back down.
I don't know how the senate is set up in the US, but prossecutors are supposed to decide freely. The "boss" is in the worst case just another layer in the prossecution, that's not just a job but an institution.
The general attourney from Germany denied the NSA case because he found no evidence. He's also bound by orders from the justice department ("weisungsgebunden")
Unless they have like a country-wide e-mail address or some kind of HN-exclusive PA system, I don't think this figure of speech really means much other than a childish retort that does not really further dialogue.
The validity of treaties signed under duress on the other hand I think really deserves some questioning.
> The validity of treaties signed under duress on the other hand I think really deserves some questioning.
Historically, a huge number of treaties have been signed under some degree of duress – most peace treaties are only made when one side is clearly winning, but extracting concessions (however painful) from the losing side is more in the winning side's interests than the risk and expense (in blood and treasure) of continuing the war to a complete military victory.
If one took seriously the idea that treaties signed under duress are invalid, the national borders of Europe and North America (among other places) would have to be very different.
They aren't Automatically Awesome Tools Of Civility either.
An entire world war was fought as a direct consequence of one said peace treaty. Nazis wouldn't have been able to gather that much support if the Treaty of Versailles hadn't been specifically designed to aggravate the germans.
If torturing you into selling your assets makes the transaction worth questioning, why would we not question it when whole countries do this to each other?
No doubt some treaties are bad treaties, in that they make the world a worse place. But whether a treaty is good or bad and whether it is legally valid or invalid are two separate questions.
The problem with "questioning transactions" is that if you happen to own any real estate, almost certainly it is land which was stolen from somebody at some point (from indigenous people, or by some invading army, or by some greedy feudal warlord, or whatever). You want to open that can of worms for other people, but do you want to open it for yourself?
Oh my. I just looked, and it turns out in the US there is apparently no such thing as voiding a sale due to it being forced, only 'fraud' understood as misrepresenting the value of the property or the origins of the money haha
So, here's the issue. In other countries, especially over here in South America, this kinds of transactions are heavily frowned upon, and criminal acts resulting in a sale are regularly cited as reasons for voiding some sale or another. This is a bit of a worldview issue, we're not used to thinking about inflicting misery on others as a legit business strategy.
I'm not in the US, I'm in Australia. My wife & I, we own a house. If you trace back the legal chain of title, eventually it originates in a land grant issued by the colonial Governor of New South Wales in the name of the British monarch – and the British monarch's claim of ownership is based on Captain James Cook claiming the east coast of Australia in 1770 in the name of King George III. But, it wasn't unoccupied land – the indigenous peoples lived here, and they saw the land as theirs. In some other places (such as New Zealand or parts of North America), the British negotiated treaties with the indigenous inhabitants to acquire land from them – the fairness of those treaties is often contested, and the British having acquired the land often ignored and violated the other provisions of the treaty – but, in Australia, there were never any treaties with the indigenous peoples, the British saw them as too uncivilised for that, the British Empire just moved in and took over. So, if legal title based on theft is invalid, and our own legal title ultimately originates in the British Empire's theft of land from the indigenous – does it follow that my wife & I don't actually own this house (or at least not the land it is built on), even though we've paid several hundred thousand dollars for it?
Wherever you are in South America, isn't it the same story? The Europeans (the Spanish or Portuguese or whoever) moved in, stole the land from the indigenous peoples, then divided it up and gave or sold it to European colonists, and it has been on-sold and repeatedly subdivided since – so if land titles founded on theft are invalid, land titles where you are must be just as invalid as those over here.
Different legal systems codify different mores differently.
In Argentina and Chile, mapuche people to this day continue to legally challenge the ownership of land that they claim is theirs even after hundreds of years of having lost it to the genocide of their people -and dozens of others- as part of the creation of our nations.
In Uruguay, where I now live, this is very rarely still the case, mostly because the people who would have a right to challenge those lands ownership were very thoroughly murdered and their descendents have long been stripped of that right.
We're just not ok with brutalizing people as a business strategy. Like I said, it's a cultural thing.
A good compromise for this kinds of things is usually dual licensing:
- If you're big enough to make real money and you need my attention then pay me this much please
- If you're some rando with a toy project, then we have a github issue tracker
A project this size and age should always have a lawyer at hand just in case, and they should be able to walk the maintainers through the process of dual-licensing everything.
What you suggest is not really dual licensing though. It's a source-available license with a free tier.
Dual licensing means that there are two licenses that the user can choose from at their discretion. This is why GPL may work together with a commercial license but not MIT, as businesses have reasons to avoid GPL.
I understood the parent post to suggest dual licensing where the commercial license also gives you paid support. I.e. if you expect support pay up by buying a commercial license. Though I see no reason to conflate the two things. I would suggest in this case not even having a public issue tracker, and make your open source offering a take it or leave it proposition.
It sounds like otrahuevada is describing the same thing, doesnt it? Choose a commercial license if you want support, or the open source license if you don’t. That is how I understood it.
What otrahuevada is describing is a situation in which the software developer determines under what terms a particular user may use the software, not a situation where the user makes this choice. Only the latter situation is (can be) dual licensing. The difference may seem subtle, but it's actually huge.
There was a discussion about this with someone else just yesterday. I'll find the link.
One thing I've always wondered is, who cleans this things? Is normal, run of the mill cleaning personnel expected to be careful enough to not accidentally toss something out alignment, or is there some kind of Nuclear Plant Grade Cleaning industry I never heard about?
There are dedicated staff for cleaning, and they do an amazing job, not a speck of dust or grime anywhere people routinely go (for good reason). Where I worked they even had special titles: NPSA, nuclear plant service attendant.
The only real difference is that there's also a decommissioning aspect. Typically any consumables that get used in a nuclear environment get collected, put in a barrel and then sent off to a warehouse for later disposal (generally unspecified...). A lot of "nuclear waste" is lightly contaminated PPE.
If there's one scenario where I'd dread autocomplete-based/chorded typing is when coding or writing on a terminal. My coding usually comes _after_ some consideration about I want to write, and having to tack an additional "let's proofread what the software thought was close enough" step on top of that would make it seriously annoying. I already have an expansion plugin on my editor that allows me to insert potentially massive amounts of boilerplate for me if I happen to need to, and I already trust it.
Recipes can be protected under copyright law if they are accompanied by “substantial literary expression.” This expression can be an explanation or detailed directions, which is likely why food and recipe bloggers often share stories and personal anecdotes alongside a recipe’s ingredients.
So besides SEO, there's this thing where the recipe itself is basically defenseless against someone stealing it and calling it theirs but the sum of the fluff around it plus the recipe on the other hand can be copyrighted and enjoys all the protections afforded to these kinds of things. So, if say, Jamie Oliver likes your recipe and puts it in a book passing it as his, you can now legally tell him to stop doing that because of said fluff.
Even if the description of the recipe is sufficiently creative and copyrightable, the copyright will not cover the recipe’s ingredient list, the underlying process for making the dish, or the resulting dish itself, which are all facts. It will only protect the expression of those facts. That means that someone can express the recipe in a different way — with different expression — and not infringe the recipe creator’s copyright.
So they can still put your recipe in a Jamie Oliver cookbook, they just have to put it in their own words as opposed to copy pasting it verbatim.
I don't think that's the case. He'd only get in trouble if he reproduced the "substantial literary expression." The actual list of ingredients and step-by-step procedure aren't copyrightable.
Strikes me as an obviously improvable thing, as long as we're as a species capable of reining in the market forces at play.
But then again, we as a community don't seem to able to stop a couple hundred maladaptive nerds from using downvotes as a "me no likey" button, so there's that.
> as long as we're as a species capable of reining in the market forces at play.
A better phrase would be “reining in the perverse incentives at play” as government is just as prone to give in to perverse incentives or regulatory capture that promote waste.
The purpose of DRM is ultimately asserting the will of a couple corporate ghouls over your use of the thing they basically cheated you into renting.
Which wouldn't even be a thing if intellectual property rights, which are at the core of the whole debate, were untransferable and only endured for the lifetime of the creator.
If anyone were able to lobby those simple, clear changes into law, the effects of that would probably be Earth-altering.
What do you mean by “cheated you into renting”? That sounds like you’re suggesting you’re being forced to spend money against your will without your knowledge or consent?
I also don’t understand your suggestion for fixing copyright law. What constitutes a ‘creator’ in the case of a company that makes something? (Same question for a band, or any group of multiple people.) How would you handle accidental death? What about a company acquisition? How do you define ‘untransferable’? Are you saying it should be okay for a company creator to hold the copyright forever as long as the company is in business, but individual people can’t give or sell copyrights? That would be a boon for Disney and very bad for individual artists. It doesn’t seem like your suggestion is prepared to deal with the realities and complexities of business and life…
Sorry to be a bummer, but I make my living creating copyright protected material. DRM protects me and my livelihood.
Yes, I often cut deals with the people you refer to as "corporate ghouls". While I often lament the terms, they aren't horrible. In the end, I make enough money to avoid searching for a job with other corporations trading in material goods.
I would feel differently about the system if it weren't performing relatively well for most people. You say these ghouls "cheated" you into "renting" things. I'm not disputing the various philosophical sophistries that people use to complain about artificial scarcity etc. I just know that this evening, I"ll be able to get a nice movie that cost millions of dollars to make and spend only a few dollars to watch it in my living room. That only works when piracy doesn't.
Your use of scare quotes on plain self-evident terms kinda makes me think this is going to be entirely pointless, but here goes nothing.
Do you understand that your being more or less content with the results of a deal does not have a bearing on how good, or decent, or moral, the system overarching that deal is?
Tons of people seem more or less into Nestlé products despite their long track record of profiting from slavery, do you believe that being the case makes agricultural slavery a good thing?
On your last statement, how exactly do you think not paying for a thing you wouldn't pay for anyway prevents that thing from existing? Like, if I torrent "Superheroes in Body Gloves 27" instead of, you know, ignoring it, then a time travelling ghost will materialize in the set and kidnap the directors? Or how would that work
FWIW, it seems like the parent comment was just quoting you, not using scare quotes. I didn’t find your use of the words particularly self-evident, it might be worth patiently explaining what you meant rather than attacking.
Parent’s valid and legitimate point is that if nobody pays for the content then it’s not a viable business model and it won’t get made in the first place. You can’t pirate a movie that doesn’t exist.
At least according to their own accounting, movies lose otherwise hilarious amounts of money all the time and they seem to still exist somehow.
"Piracy", which in reality is probably better called "online jaywalking" as it, too, is a made up faux-pas created so as to allow a couple soulless drones to make more money, hasn't to date represented an obstacle to content creation, they still happily churn products all the time, so I don't see any reason to think it will become an existential threat to the studio suits any time soon.
And maybe it should. Which is kind of core to the whole debate; is it actually good to anyone in any way to have a business based around forbidding free access to easily duplicable cultural products? Should such a thing even be allowed to thrive?
Easily duplicable cultural products? You’re suggesting that you should be able to take something someone else made because it’s easy to do? It would be easy to steal your computer from you — should that make it legal for me to do so? You think movies should become historic cultural relics with free access to all whenever they are popular? If your wish came true, how exactly would the movie’s creation get funded in the first place? Movies often costs tens to hundreds of millions to produce, and they only take on that level of risk because of the financial return of people who pay to watch them. How do you think that would work if movies were free to everyone?
Do you have a job? Do you work for a company that makes money? Would you be okay with the product you’re working on being taken for free by people who insist they shouldn’t have to pay for it?
Your language feels really very hyperbolic to me. There are many real people with real jobs trying to make livings, even if the corporations they work for are greedy. DRM can indeed be shitty and it often oversteps copyright, but we can ignore DRM here because the argument you’re actually making is one against respecting copyright law and against respecting artists.
> is it actually good to anyone in any way to have a business based around forbidding free access to easily duplicable cultural products? Should such a thing even be allowed to thrive?
Yes. The answer is yes, without question. This has been debated by scholars and lawmakers and artists and business people for hundreds of years, and we have a compendium of laws that protect the people who make content precisely because it does, in fact, do them some good.
See Chesterton’s Fence: you don’t get to nuke the existing system until you actually understand why it’s there and how it got there. If you believe it serves zero people but still manages to exist, that means that your belief is wrong and you need to do some research.
The biggest problem with your argument is you’re blindly focused on the execs and profits of only the very largest media conglomerates, and you’re ignoring not only the tens of thousands of artists they employ, but you’re also ignoring all smaller businesses that aren’t making enormous profits and can’t afford to give away their content for free.
> movies lose otherwise hilarious amounts of money all the time and they seem to still exist somehow.
The amount of money someone makes is not any of your business, and it does not justify stealing the things they make without their permission. Copyright law can and does apply even to works that don’t cost money, and it also applies equally when someone’s enjoying handsome profits. You are not legally invited to copy anything based on someone else’s income.
Studios sometimes do lose money on movies and they survive because they make multiple movies. Studios also sometimes report misleading sales figures. I’ve worked in films and games as an artist, and watched studios do “creative accounting”. Reports of losses don’t prove anything, and don’t justify breaking copyright law.
> Easily duplicable cultural products? You’re suggesting that you should be able to take something someone else made because it’s easy to do?
No, I'm not. What's more, that's an easily disprovable lie: My duplicating of a file does not somehow delete the original. My downloading of this page hasn't done anything to your post.
> Movies often costs tens to hundreds of millions to produce, and they only take on that level of risk because of the financial return of people who pay to watch them.
Financial return that, according to themselves, is at best terrible? And that you, too, keep mentioning, despite loudly proclaiming they are of noone's interest?
> Do you have a job? Do you work for a company that makes money? Would you be okay with the product you’re working on being taken for free by people who insist they shouldn’t have to pay for it?
My job does not rely on handing copies of our product's binaries to people if they pinky promise they'll only use it in a way we approve of though. And if we, too rented garbled copies of it with time-limited access to the ungarbling machinery, we probably should disclose that beforehand so that prospective customers don't end up feeling like they've been defrauded.
> you’re also ignoring all smaller businesses that aren’t making enormous profits but can’t afford to give away their content for free
I'm not asking anyone to give anything away for free. And in any case the fact that the gatekeeping-culture-industrial-complex also exploits other smaller creators could easily also be considered problematic in and by itself.
> The amount of money someone makes is not any of your business
Oh but it is, specifically when they make it into a battle cry to invade my privacy and impede my agency in a deeply dumb search of unapproved copies of whatever they feel like claiming to own.
The argument that you’re not stealing something physical is an old, tired, immature, and naive narrative that seems willfully ignorant of the reality that copyright law is protecting the consumption of copies, it’s about protecting the initial investment and the business model, not the cost of production of individual copies. You actually are hurting the artists by consuming a copy without their permission, because the transaction they’ve offered is to trade your viewing of the movie for a small amount of money. The word “stealing” is defined to include taking something without permission, and does not depend on whether they get deprived of the thing you take.
You’ve made several snarky and strawman replies about money, but ignored the actual point I made; the fact that copyright laws do not depend or discriminate based on profits. This is a fact, not a debate. Your opinion about any given studio’s claimed losses is completely irrelevant to the question of whether you should be allowed to break the law.
> My job does not rely on handing copies of our product’s binaries to people if they pinky promise they’ll only use it in a way we approve of though.
Yes it does. You’re wrong. Does your product’s use come with a EULA? Does your company have any security? Does your product get paid for? Are you putting your code in the public domain? If you write code, your code is covered by copyright law, and you have both legal and technical mechanisms in place to protect people from taking your code and your product for themselves without your company’s permission. You are doing the same things as DRM, you’re being hypocritical.
> I'm not asking anyone to give anything away for free.
Then I’ve gotten the wrong impression, please clarify what you mean. You’ve argued above that you (and everyone) should be able to watch movies for free because they’re easy to duplicate and they are cultural assets. What are you asking for then?
> The argument that you’re not stealing something physical is an old, tired, immature, and naive narrative
And yet here you are, claiming that "pirating" something is somehow bad.
Look, I think our disagreement comes down to definitions. So, let's clarify some things.
For me,
"A thing" is an entity that is capable of being described as "being". For instance, your phone, a bottle, a trip, a word, love, inertia.
"Good" is a desirable quality of "A thing" that by being attached to it adds to its value.
"Bad" on the other hand is an undesirable quality of "A thing", which detracts from it.
"Control" is the ability to do with a thing whatever I want,
"Selling" "A thing" is relinquishing "Control" over it for money,
"Buying" "A thing" is receiving "Control" of a thing in exchange of money
"Renting" "A thing" on the other hand is relinquishing "some" control of that thing for some time in exchange of money.
"Promising" something is agreeing to do that thing; doing the thing that was agreed upon is generally considered "Good".
"Cheating" is "Promising" "A thing" and then doing a different one, which is "Bad"
"Copying" "A thing" is creating "A thing" that is fundamentally interchangeable for "Another Thing"
Given this definitions, it naturally arises that Cheating people into thinking they Bought Things when you only Rented those Things to them is Bad. Which is the entirety of my point.
For you on the other hand all of those terms ostensibly appear to mean "whatever lets me sleep at night" and it seems that this gap is bothering you a lot.
I also see you seem to be conflating your opinion on things with their legality and their moral qualities, which are three entirely disconnected things. It is legal in some countries to kill perceived deviants in a kind of ritual show. Would you call that good? Does that being "legal" make it any better?
Your definitions don’t agree with the dictionary at all. It’s relevant to this discussion and important that you can sell and buy services for which you may or may not have control. I really can’t abide with crappy incorrect definitions you’ve made up on the spot that don’t agree with the ways all other people use these words. Your list of definitions here also isn’t helping clarify anything other than you’re giving me the impression that you didn’t read the actual transaction text before you paid for some online movies?
Yes, I do agree that pirating something is somehow bad. I don’t see the point you’re trying to make by quoting me. You’re going to have to state it rather than expect I can read your mind.
I don’t agree with your snarky summary of my position. What you’ve demonstrated here is that you 1) didn’t listen to and/or didn’t understand what I said but believe you do, 2) don’t understand copyright law, why it exists and what shapes it, and 3) what the boundaries and distinctions are between copyright law and DRM.
Instead of being vague, can you give some specific examples of movies you paid for where the language used in the actual transaction said you were purchasing a copy of the movie, but it ended up being a rental? I’m not aware of any streaming service that uses either of those words, but it seems like you might have expectations that are outside of what the thing being offered was. Please give an example of how you were cheated by linking to the product.
We can agree on what words mean, as long as you don’t make up your own definitions. I do agree it’s a waste of time if you can’t use something even remotely close to the agreed-upon definitions in the dictionary.
Here are some definitions that seem more reasonable:
DRM for software or games (which is what I assume you're talking about) is hardly comparable with DRM for movies/tv shows, they serve a very different purpose. It's basically impossible to prevent users from copying video files so it has basically no effect on piracy rates or rather it can only increase due to the horrible UX.
Not having the faintest idea of how to do such a thing I set out to at least collect a roadmap of the paperwork needed to do that, so I could glean some knowledge in the process.
Ended up consulting with a lawyer and gathering a grand total of 1700 distinct bits of paperwork I needed to fill and complete as a random person. Every one of those things would have to be accompanied by documentation, most of which had to be presented in person at least back then. Would have taken me about 5 years if I managed to file a paper a day every day. To this day I still have no idea how on earth do banks just pop up one day.