Posted on 04/05/2004 3:53:42 PM PDT by Jim Robinson
Edited on 05/27/2014 11:31:00 AM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
"Have your views and opinions changed since you were in high school? I know mine sure have."
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Just read your post Born Conservative, LOL, and wondering aloud, doesn't your FR name differ from what you just said?
Don't care to debate; just an observation. :-)
Oh you mean like the proper economical way the government's no call list legislation should have been done? You have to specifically call to put your name and phone number on the list for the telemarketers to call you - would have taken a solitary person with a phone a steno pad and pencil to do it. Sadly the one original steno pad would have probably carried the person through a 35 year career.
There are some conservatives who are on the wrong side of the freedom of the internet (those trying to shut down file sharing etc.)
However, I have been more and more surprised just how many conservatives ARE on the right side.
Honestly, this seems to be coming mostly from the left.
Perhaps we could add a link to bugmenot.com on the main page or on the posting page?
If they do not want us to post their material, we can post links (they can't sue us for posting links) at least. If their sites require free registration, we can simply link to Bugmenot.com so people can login to see the work on their sites without having to register.
If they want to push us around, we can push back.
And I do not believe it would be illegal of us to post a link to that site for Freepers to use. The site does nothing illegal by posting logins to free websites.
I think it's time for us to contact Rupert Murdoch, and ask him for a little help... loan us a few lawyers and some free press support, to take the "harpies" down a few notches.
He's a maverick.
His associates planned and executed the brilliant fox news network plan...
They might have some useful angles of approach for us.
Anybody talk to Roger Ailes? Mark Levin (for an estimate of what a useful case might cost us all in round dollars?)
Ultimately Jim, a warrior, just may not have the heart for another confrontation at this time... I would understand that. but sticking it to the bad guys? would indeed be "priceless."
I am a supporter and upholder of intellectual property rights. Those who create and distribute content should be able to profit from their efforts. That is fair and it encourages creativity. I understand there are issues to debate, but there are some bottom lines here.
There were people in my software company who were fired for sharing other company's properties out over the Internet, and rightly so.
Let me clarify. You can still be conservative, and have a change in viewpoint from one point in your life to another. When I was a teenager in the late 1970's, 2nd amendment issues meant nothing to me. Yet today, I hold them to be very important. Teenagers are very impressionable, and oftentimes easily swayed in one direction or another. I look back now at some of the things I learned in high school, and one thing that sticks out is our history lessons. I distinctly remember passages from some of our history books stating that America is "imperialistic". Back then, that didn't mean much to me. Today, I find it offensive that a text book would contain such biased information that is presented as fact. My parents, although essentially conservative, were basically a-political, so political issues were rarely discussed in our house. Besides, back then I didn't have access to Free Republic. On the surface, your observation is valid. Hopefully, this will help to clarify my previous statement.
You might feel differently if it was YOUR information -- especially if you made your living creating intellectual property.
The fact that there are scumbag lawyers who abuse the fair use provision of copyright law does not mean that it's right to go to the other extreme.
There are concepts such as "baby" and "bathwater" to keep in mind.
But let's take your logic and run with it and see where it takes us.
* The fact that someone leaves his front door unlocked means that it's OK for me to enter his house and take whatever I like.
* The fact that someone leaves his keys in his car means that it's OK for me to take it for a drive.
* The fact that a farmer doesn't fence in his field means that it's OK for me to go and pick his tomatoes, corn, and so forth, and take it without paying him.
Well, we could keep on going in that direction, but frankly I don't really like where it's taking us.
So I'll conclude by saying that the fact that it's easy for someone to steal something does not mean that it's right for them to steal it.
No real conservative would advocate a "right" to "share" something that doesn't belong to them in the first place.
"Sharing" something that you don't own is commonly known as "fencing stolen property", and receiving it, well, the definition is obvious. ;)
Did you think the public had a right to see Hillary Rodham's thesis from Wellesley college when she ran for Senate? Many on this site did.
And I resent this commercial site getting and archiving my child's intellectual property for free...But the public school system MANDATES my child's term papers be submitted to this company.
Have you complained to your school and school board? Do other parents agree with you? In the end, what your local public school does is a local issue.
As I teacher I know there are other methods of detecting plagiarism that don't require use of outside sites, but do require more effort (and a bit of technical savvy) by the teacher.
I don't think anyone is threatening lawsuits for something properly cited.
I have personally had students cut entire Encarta articles, paste them into a Word document, retitle them, and submit the articles as their own work.
There is a difference, and if students are old enough to use the internet as a source for their reports, they are old enough to know that cutting and pasting the article is wrong.
You'll notice that my first post on this thread questions why this is. It actually seems prejudicial to FR in my opinion, because I know that LibertyPost, for instance, posts full text articles with a "free use" disclaimer at the end of each, and apparently has never been targeted by the copyright nazis. Of course, LP may not get enough readers for anyone to care.
Yes, I do think the writer of a college thesis is (or should be) held more responsible for what they write than is (or should be) the fourteen year old who is just learning what a "term paper" is (and who is just learning how to use footnotes to cite excerpts).
As far as I'm concerned, any child who is old enough to do research and write about it is old enough to learn that copying word for word is wrong. Yes, it takes a little longer to teach them to cite properly and that changing just one word is still plagiarism, but 14 year olds are certainly old enough to know that cutting and pasting is wrong.
As far as opinions go, however, I'm not sure I'd want to be held accountable now for what I thought and believed in my teens or even early 20s, because I'm sure I was much more liberal at that time.
As for complaining to the School Board - no luck there. (Are you surprised to learn they are overwhelmingly democrats?)
Any other like-minded parents? Particularly if you frame it as a privacy issue? School boards respond better to vocal groups than to one vocal parent, in my experience.
Many of those I've known have been polical animals, not educators, and either in it because of some perceived wrong their child has suffered at some point or because they like the power and recognition. They often seem to be driven by emotion rather than logic, and may not be well educated at all themselves. Of course, that's where I've lived, your experiences may differ.
"Besides, back then I didn't have access to Free Republic"
Hey, that was my point, LOL. Just a josh, ok? No one is born one way or the other.
*Smile*
And once again, I repeat my original point, evidently lost on you:
So I'll conclude by saying that the fact that it's easy for someone to steal something does not mean that it's right for them to steal it.
By your logic, if book publishers didn't want people to run off photocopies and/or scan and upload copies of their books, they should print on medium gray paper, with text printed with a slightly darker shade of medium gray ink.
This is something that computer game publisers did about 20 years ago -- with various key codes that had to be looked up each time the program was run.
It was nearly impossible to read the codes, but, it was something that could be done in order to run the game. (I was never a "gamer", but a friend's son showed me his game and sheet).
But, I could not imagine trying to read an entire book printed in that manner. And, common sense tells us that no one would other publishing books like that.
If printed book piracy ever reached a point that something like that had to be done to thward piracy, then the outcome would be certain: publishers would stop printing books, and go into some other line of work that was not subject to rampant theft.
And so would authors.
And as for the pirates?
Well, they'd be TSOL, with nothing left to steal.
That's how it works in the real world, after all.
You open a fruit stand in a rough neighborhood, and every day you get ripped off. Well, one of two things is gonna happen, sure as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west.
Either something is gonna happen to the SOBs who rip you off, or, you're gonna pull up your stakes and move out of that neighborhood.
In the real world, any desirable resource that is subject to theft at a nontrivial level -- that cannot be protected against theft without destroying the market itself (i.e., if I put cyanide my my tomatoes, no one will steal them -- or buy them!), then the market will collapse, and the thieves will have nothing left to steal.
In the olden days, something vaguely similar was called "the tragedy of the commons." I say "vaguely" because "the commons" were indeed "common". Nowadays, it would be "the tragedy of my back 40", with a bunch of neoanarcons (tm) crying out, "He didn't put up a big enough fence to stop us, so it's OK for us to graze our cattle on his back 40! And besides, HE didn't grow the grass, NATURE grows the grass!"
The IP bandits love to argue that "better locks" are the solution -- and then, when "better locks" are implemented (i.e., DRM), they scream bloody murder.
What hypocrites!
But, I digress...
It is troubling, very troubling, to find such advocacy promulgated on a "conservative" venue.
When even "conservatives" yield to the temptation to steal anything that's not nailed down -- rationalizing that "if they didn't want to 'share' it, they'd have used bigger, better nails" (even as the "conservatives" cast about for "bigger, better prybars", then we're screwed.
Anarchy is at the gates.
Added bloomberg.com to the excerpt and link only list.
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