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!”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
MacOS is still Unix under the hood, and has been since they adapted NeXTSTEP.
Maybe it’s just because I’m fundamentally more of a console user than a windowing-system user, but to me a Unix-based OS is always going to be a winner compared to Windows.
But, if you want to laugh at OSes, laugh at classic MacOS, where everything would grind to a halt if you clicked and held the mouse button.
Yeah, apparently you need to know the origin of the word to know how to pluralize it.
One octopus, two octopuses. But you can also say “octopodes” because the elements used to create the word are originally Greek (okto for 8, pous for foot), and that’s how Greek words get pluralized. But, although it was based on Greek elements it was never used in Ancient Greek. It was a modern Latin word, created in the 1700s as a scientific term using those Greek elements. As a Latin word, the “us” ending should be pluralized with “i”, so “octopi” (which is one of the oldest known pluralizations of the word). But, it’s an English word, and the proper way to pluralize an English word ending in “us” is to tack on “es”.
So, you can go with “octopodes”, “octopi” or “octopuses” and have an argument why any of them is correct.
For Unix, since it’s a word created in English, it’s probably “unixes”. To claim it’s “unices” you’d have to pretend that “unix” is a Latin word, which it isn’t, and never was, but “ix” is a common declension pattern in Latin, and an uncommon ending in English, so it’s fun to pretend it’s a Latin word and doesn’t get pluralized normally.
Yeah, I don’t get that. Bicycling requires strength and endurance. It exposes you to the elements. Why is sitting in a cushy car something some people think as being more macho? Is it that you’re in control of a heavier and more powerful machine?
Propagandists love this simple trick (lemmy.world)
the main differences!! (lemmy.world)
this is just a meme, I know that everyone is different and not all GNOME or KDE users are like that!!
If purchasing isn’t owning, then piracy isn’t stealing (fosstodon.org)
I am ashamed that I hadn’t reasoned this through given all the rubbish digital services have pulled with “purchases” being lies.
Yeah, very sorry that this app is Windows only, would love to switch to Mac (feddit.de)
Stolen from Deltachat
Programmer tries to explain binary search to the police (startrek.website)