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[yyler]

WHY IN THE NAME OF GOD'S FUCK ARE YOU ARGUING WITH A FUCKING LAWYER

WHY

[Cyan Prime]

Thad is a lawyer?

[yyler]

PACOBIRD IS A LAW LIBRARIAN I DONT KNOW WHY YOU ARE CHALLENGING HIM

[Cyan Prime]

GET A PIECE OF PAPER

MAKE LAWS THAT ARE WRONG

[TA]

Because being a law librarian does not by any means imply that you can't be profoundly, terribly wrong about something.  It is supposed to act against someone completely misstating the law to back up an unsupportable claim, though.

[Rico]

A general observation: Common geek sentiment seems to be that if the law or penalty isn't 'fair' that there must be a loophole or defense. Further, popular media dramatizes the courtroom by suggesting that most laws are not (relatively) simple and that most cases don't have a pretty cut and dry connect-the-dots conclusion. Neither of these are accurate.

[Mongrel]

What's that old Terry Pratchett quote about cops? I'm probably misquoting horribly, but it goes:

When you see a woman holding a knife over her dead husband in her kitchen bawling 'he shouldn't ort've said that about our Ron!', sure one in a hundred times, it's actually a grand conspiracy where nothing is as it seems. But the other ninety-nine times it's exactly what it looks like.

[Mongrel]

Interesting follow-up on the i4i/Microsoft Word business.

[Pacobird]

Question for TA: If intellectual property rights had not been explicitly enshrined in the Constitution, do you think the United States, at either the federal or state level, would still have drafted laws to protect them?  Why or why not?

For the record, this is not an attempt to rhetorically trap anybody or anything.  I am honestly curious as to 1) why somebody who did not consider copyright infringement morally equivalent to stealing would support IP rights at all, and 2) if they in fact do not support IP rights, what their justification/alternative might be.

My stance is simple and not at all based on the letter of the law: I support DRM because I think copyright infringement is, on a moral level, stealing.  Someone put the sweat of his brow into the creation of something that we all agree belongs to them in some way, and the infringer comes and takes it without permission or actual (though perhaps imagined) entitlement.  My mentioning of any letter of the law at all has only been to call attention to the spirit of our cultural prohibition on stealing, and to draw moral parallels.  You all may disagree, but I have yet to see an argument as to why, and I find it telling that whenever someone who is pro-Copyright draws that simple moral parallel, the response is inevitably technical hair-splitting between "theft" and "infringement", which is ultimately a questionable distinction since both are quite illegal anyway.

(bonus fun fact, appropos of nothing: Anglo-American Common Law does not include IP infringement under the definition of theft because the British Parliament passed statutory protection of Copyrights about 20 years after the invention of the printing press.  No judge ever said IP infringement was theft because there was never any need for them to.)

[Saturn]

I'll support DRM when it stops causing more trouble to the PEOPLE THAT PAID FOR SOMETHING THAN THE PIRATES.

This will probably never happen.

[JDigital]

You're preaching to the choir, of course.

DRM puts your usage rights in the hands of a third party, meaning it's only as trustworthy as the company who issues it. Some companies have the upside-down idea that you can monetize DRM by imposing restrictions on rights, without seeming to realize that this decreases the value drastically.

[Royal☭]

DRM is also a company's way of saying you don't own that thing you just bought.  You just spent $15 on a CD, not the music.  You just spent $50 on a DVD, not the game.

[Mongrel]

DRM is also a company's way of saying you don't own that thing you just bought.  You just spent $15 on a CD, not the music.  You just spent $50 on a DVD, not the game.

Precisely. Don't ever let someone blur the distinction between 'data' and 'idea'.

[JDigital]

That's been the case for a while: you buy a copy of the software and a license to use it. What DRM adds is that it gives the company control over how you use it. They can use that to limit you in unreasonable ways for their own benefit.

[Mongrel]

Quick, somebody hide this thread before Kazz necro's the Steam thread.

[Rico]

DRM is also a company's way of saying you don't own that thing you just bought.  You just spent $15 on a CD, not the music.  You just spent $50 on a DVD, not the game.

I wonder if this has ever not been the case (ignoring, for a moment, DRM which specifically fucks with the right of first sale).  The idea that buying a record somehow entitles you to rights over the music within or to somehow download it all if you're a big fattie and sit on it and break it is very, very new—and I don't think simply because the technology which enables it is new. 

[TA]

That's been the case for a while: you buy a copy of the software and a license to use it. What DRM adds is that it gives the company control over how you use it. They can use that to limit you in unreasonable ways for their own benefit.

See the Steam thread.  Short version: You don't need a license to use it.  Unless you're making new copies and selling them, or renting the copy you have, you can do whatever you like with your copy, including reselling it.  It's called the first-sale doctrine, and has been recognized law at the Supreme Court level for more than a hundred years.

[Pacobird]

Agreed, but if that's your beef the real problem here is not the enforcement of IP rights at all; it is the continued validity of EULAs.  After all, there's nothing stopping anybody from contracting away their rights of first sale, but it is problematic if they do not realize they are doing it.

[TA]

If sacrificing the right of first sale is that easy, what exactly makes you think the right won't just immediately vanish?  It's been known to happen.

[Pacobird]

I'm not sure what you're asking here.  Are you suggesting that people shouldn't be allowed to contract away legal rights with other private parties for material gain (excepting, of course, unconscionability, which I consider EULAs to be)?  Nobody is "sacrificing" anything.  The doctrine of first sale itself does not come under attack simply because you clicked "I Accept" on the Terms and Conditions screen.

At any rate, yellow-dog contracts were terrible, too, but for wildly different reasons than EULAs.  When I am faced with the choice of signing away my right of first sale and watching my family starve to death on the street, I'll let you know.  In the meantime, my objection to EULAs is that they necessarily deny the opportunity for arms-length negotiation between the parties, regardless of relative power or sophistication.