merc

@merc@sh.itjust.works

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merc,

Nope, just a massively overcrowded office building. The ventilation system could barely keep up. But, management made it clear to us that the reason for the open office layout was to encourage collaboration and foster creativity!

merc,

That looks quiet and positively spacious compared to the last open office environment I did time in.

Imagine that same space but 4 people between the column and the window instead of just 2. Then make the space 3x as long. Then reduce the space between the backs of the chairs by 50%.

Even though everyone in the space was doing individual programming / sysadmin work, the space was extremely loud just from a few spontaneous conversations between people working on the same thing together. Everyone wore headphones nearly all the time, only taking them off if they needed to talk / shout to the people near them about something. Often, if you needed to talk with someone sitting 4 desks away, the easiest way to do it was over IM.

merc,

This makes me wonder what would happen if you took the content off some celebrity-focused website like say TMZ but changed the formatting to make it look like New York Times articles.

Like, the “gravitas” of the NY Times politics section with content like “Guess Whose Shirtless Selfie!”

merc,

k

merc,

Git is a DVCS. GitHub is a place where DVCS repositories are hosted. There are many other places where DVCS repositories can be hosted, but GitHub is the most famous one… Porn is a type of content. PornHub is a place where porn is hosted. There are many other places where porn can be hosted, but PornHub is the most famous one. It’s a pretty good analogy.

merc,

A key difference:

If you rely too much on PornHub, you’re never going to get fucked.

If you rely too much on GitHub, you’re eventually going to get fucked.

merc,

Sure… and you could pass around porn on thumb drives. But, having a central website where you can browse public repos and clone the interesting ones is a pretty key part of Open Source / Free Software development.

merc,

What part of that statement suggests that the artist no longer has the original art? As stated, no theft occurred.

merc,

Freelancers may be upset if they’re mistreated, but that doesn’t mean they get to declare they were murdered, or that they were raped, or any other crime that didn’t occur. Theft has a specific definition, and fraud is not the same thing as theft.

merc,

That’s just one element of theft.

merc,

Yes, which is not theft. It’s not murder either. Nor is it blasphemy. It’s just copyright infringement.

merc,

Same with copyright theft

Is this when you steal someone’s copyright and collect licensing fees posing as the legitimate copyright holder?

They didn’t steal from you directly

Or indirectly.

still caused harm.

Maybe, maybe not. But no theft occurred.

merc,

Nah, no need to go to laws, just use a dictionary.

merc,

Copyright infringement isn’t theft, that’s the main point. It’s breaking a rule that the government created giving people a temporary (now extremely long term, but temporary) right to control the spread of ideas. Whether or not you approve of that law is beside the point. The point being, theft is as old as the ten commandments, if not older. Copyright is a new thing that’s only a few centuries old.

merc,

I’m all in favour of people being pedantic, especially in the case of laws.

If you are using the term theft colloquially

I’m not, “theft” is misused all the time. It’s something that the copyright cartels encourage because they get to pretend that copyright infringement is theft. It’s not. We should push back and say theft has to meet certain conditions, and copyright infringement isn’t theft. Nor is “wage theft”, which is a form of fraud.

By buying into the colloquial definition of “theft” and expanding the scope to be any time someone is inconvenienced, you give the copyright cartels power to make people think copyright infringement is as bad as actual real theft, when it’s clearly not.

merc,

Who cares? The point is, it’s not theft. The person who had the art still has the art, so it’s not theft.

merc,

The entire definition matters. There’s already a term for “copyright infringement” it’s “copyright infringement”. Pretending it’s theft is just a trick the copyright cartels are using to try to make it seem like a serious crime that has existed for millennia instead of a relatively new rule imposed in the last few centuries by the government, then made ridiculous by the entertainment cartel.

merc,

Wage theft isn’t theft, it’s fraud.

merc,

you have stolen my labour

No, that’s not theft. That’s fraud.

merc,

Theft isn’t specific to property, you can steal services too.

You can’t really “steal” services, even though they sometimes call it that. You can access services without authorization, but you’re not stealing anything. You can access services you don’t have authorization to access and then disrupt people who are authorized to use those services. But, again, not stealing. Just disruption.

Stealing deprives a person of something, copyright infringement and unauthorized access to services don’t.

merc, (edited )

If it’s theft, it’s theft. If it’s fraud, it’s fraud. It could be either. But “wage theft” is not copyright infringement, which is not theft.

Here’s what California’s Department of Industrial Relations says:

Wage theft is a form of fraud

www.dir.ca.gov/fraud_prevention/Wage-Theft.htm

merc,

decide to limit the definition of the word.

To what it actually means? Sure.

merc,

you’re stealing our potential revenue

Which is ridiculous. It’s like suing someone for tapping you on the shoulder while you’re deep in thought, claiming that you almost came up with a great invention but their interference meant you lost your train of thought. Therefore, by tapping you on the shoulder, they owe you millions of dollars of lost potential revenue from that invention.

In addition, you have to consider whether they’re morally justified in receiving that revenue. Say someone manages to bribe the government so that they get paid $1 every time someone says “shazam”. If you say “shazam” and don’t pay them, they lose $1 in potential revenue. But, is this potential revenue that they are morally justified in collecting? Copyright law is just as ridiculous as “shazam” law. In both cases the government came up with a rule that allows someone to collect revenue simply because the government says so.

IMO the entertainment industry has ridiculously warped copyright. It used to be that copyright was a 14 year term, renewable for another 14 years if the author was alive. Under that rule, Forrest Gump would just have had its copyright expire. That seems pretty reasonable. It cost them $55 million to produce, and it brought in $678 million, it’s probably mostly done making money for them. Time for their rights to expire, right? Nope, they get to keep their monopoly until 2114. It’s fucking ludicrous.

Copyright is supposed to be a balance between what’s good for people creating something, and the general public. The creator is given a short-term monopoly as an incentive to create, that’s how they benefit. The public benefits because after a short time that creation becomes public. The alternative is no copyright, where creators need to be paid up-front by someone like a patron, and what they create becomes public immediately. The patronage system is responsible for all kinds of magnificent art like most classical music, the ceiling of the Sistine chapel, etc. The argument for copyright is that the patronage system wasn’t good enough, and the public could benefit even more by allowing a short monopoly for the creator. But, with the lobbying of the entertainment cartel, the public benefit is far worse. You now still effectively have the patronage system controlling what art gets made (the entertainment cartel), they then also keep that art from the public for more than a century.

So, yeah. Fuck copyright.

merc,

Not really, theft is theft. Fraud is fraud. Just because something feels like theft doesn’t make it theft.

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