dissident

I've been on the other side of the hivemind many times here and on reddit, and I can assure you, I encourage opinions that I may even disagree with or doubt. The last people I would sympathize with are the stubborn, dogmatic kind that refuse to listen to other perspectives.

RT is not an opinion or a perspective, they are a source that lacks credibility. It is not that their opinions are "wrong" to me, or that I disagree with them, it is that they fabricate, sensationalize and mislead people. As is the case with this article and many more.

Those are not characteristics of a debate in which all participants and opinions are given a fair shot -- you know, the ones dissidents fight for.

By the way, this is a private website, not a public space, and I have no problem with Hacker News outright banning whatever they want. Especially if it means I have to read less made-up crap. And if they end up banning legitimate sources, I can go elsewhere. Or if they're like reddit and refuse to police themselves -- letting the community's cynical attitude pervade the entire website's content, skewing the news and making it an unreliable representation of current events -- I can go somewhere else too.

You might have a hard-on for calling me a hypocrite, but really you're just making yourself look like an ass.

I'm really surprised Russia Today links are even allowed here.

The best evidence of the usefulness of PG's post are replies like yours which (hilariously) cannot refute his points. Too many people are blindly devoted to the idea of copyright. He's not exactly preaching to the choir.

Please, refer me to an RIAA lawyer who can justify copyright in 2012.

Yes, the restrictions of the GPL would be moot if there were no copyright.

Treating source code as intellectual property is exactly what spawned GPL in the first place, as it is a "hack" that exploits the nature of software licensing.

Can you reiterate your point?

I'm only aware of laws that dictate the effort put into obtaining private information, not the knowledge or dissemination of it. I can't steal your phone and grab the picture, but if you give it to me under no certain terms, I can do what I want. Where is this mystical protection you speak of?

> You could always give performances and charge for those!

So, software as a service? It appears we've been heading that way for a while.

> Joking aside, I think that IP is and should remain a messy compromise. There are no easy answers. Were it to cease to exist completely, it would reduce the incentives for producers, and thus consumers would be worse off too because they would have less software, books, movies and music to enjoy.

I'm not sure we'd see less content, but less financially motivated content. Keep in mind, copyright is not the only way to subsidize content creation.

New music genres and artists are giving away their music online today -- and not just some of them. I'd say most new electronic music winds up on Soundcloud from the artists themselves. RIAA has a choke-hold on Pop music and that's it, but given the nature of Pop music, that's unsurprising.

It would be impractical to expect artists to give away their content with nothing in return... so create a business model that relies on payment before you produce the content rather than after you share it.

Copyright will die a slow and painful death, whether or not it is a compromise by today's standards. What are you going to do when I can put every HD movie ever created on my hard-disk? Enforcement isn't a gradient, it either largely works or largely doesn't.

It would appear there's more to the story than I was aware.

Certainly administrative subpoenas that are not based on a grand jury hearing would be susceptible to appeal?

> It requires a provider to turn over to the government without a warrant:

It does not require that a provider turn that over to the government without a warrant. It mandates that only the government can have access to it.

Providers still have the liberty of not complying with government requests for assistance, in which case a warrant would be necessary to obtain the information.

We can argue over whether providers will cooperate or not in practice, but it does not require providers to do anything but keep the information.

Where's the reasoning for this? Frequently starting over is a problem, but code refactoring can have immense benefits. Discovering a different framework or language may suit your work better, for instance.

Monkeypiling on top of old work is really advice out of the 90's.

These articles with a bunch of three word sentences and zero justification are becoming annoying.

> The economic benefit they provide to content creators is the financing to be able to create the content in the first place

Music, video games, application/software development are all areas where this is completely false -- very minimal financing is required for any of this and we already see a growing, open media landscape as a result of it. You seem to forget the capitalistic tendency for market potential to dictate the cost of services as well.

That is to say, Hollywood movie budgets are extremely over-inflated because of the monopolistic business models that guarantee them capital they do not require to finance the creation of content in the first place. Actors, directors and writers do not require millions of dollars to write or produce this content anymore. A market for its production -- or at the very least a social imperative -- would exist regardless of this artificial establishment.

Walk through this with me:

* it costs nothing to distribute the content anymore (in stark contrast with even a decade ago)

* it costs very little to create most content, and where it does costs a lot, it's mostly because of copyright's existence

* it costs nothing to market the content anymore. Social media is in a dominating role.

Copyright depended on all of these factors being completely opposite. It depended on some cost for creation, or more broadly, some quantifiable scarcity. It depended on a publisher -- an intermediary -- to connect the consumer with the creator. It eventually depended on advertising and extremely competitive marketing as well.

The realities of 21st century communication and technology simply are not compatible. Financing the production of works by selling the right to copy it is absurd in this economic climate. It made sense when publishing was a capital-intensive and narrow industry, but it now forms the basis by which many people communicate today.

Instead, works should be financed by the public interest in its creation. Nobody has to pay more than they want for their "copy" of the "intellectual property", the artist is subsidized as much as they transparently request, and perhaps an arbiter is compensated under contract.

Regardless, it is unenforceable and ultimately counter-productive to support copyright, just about anything could be better.

Long read but good work.

I think this is more of an open letter to content publishers; content creators haven't had any trouble solving the problems that you explained.

Content has been moving copyleft (or at the very least, to more liberal licensing) every day because of the competitive advantages in emerging markets, but where copyright still holds a strong presence, the debate will not center around the consumer's point of view (unfortunately).

It is better to frame this debate around "content creators" and whether they are truly benefiting from the artificial scarcity which supports Hollywood's business model. And thus it is important to mention that this is not the content creators doing, but the backwards thinking of very powerful copyright holders, who pass very little of their economic benefits to artists compared to other mediums.

I highly doubt he was being serious when he was "fear mongering". In context it was likely him using the TSA's logic against the scanners.

Remember, this guy has been fighting long before this vulnerability was publicly known.

It sounds like Linode's user system is different from their server management system. They probably have some administration tools for resetting VPS passwords, but don't have access to sensitive user details.