Austin Z. wrote:
Nah. It’s a bikeshed to the nuclear power plant of intellectual
property discussions in general.
Probably closer to “ICBM, and I’m not afraid to use it!”, rather than
power plant…
–
Phillip “CynicalRyan” Gawlowski
Rule of Open-Source Programming #9:
Give me refactoring or give me death!
On 3/23/07, Giles B. [email protected] wrote:
The first edition of Programming Ruby is available free, extremely
good, very popular, and easy to find. The Sams book isn’t free, is
obviously hard to find, and very probably sucks. Stealing Sams when
you can get Programming Ruby for free is like holding up a liquor
store when you already have a great job.
Actually, reviews of the Sams book that I’ve seen have been uniformly
enthusisatic.
martin
On Mar 22, 3:37 pm, “Martin DeMello” [email protected] wrote:
martin
Back when it first came out I used the Sams book and found it to be a
great intro to Ruby. Even after moving on to The Ruby Way, Programming
Ruby, and others I still look back on the Sams book as an effective
intro. A lot of the other languages that Sams books cover fall into
that realm too. Without exhaustive technical details the Sams Teach
Yourself Ruby book splits up the basic syntax and concepts into easy
to digest portions.
On Mar 22, 2007, at 1:42 PM, Chad P. wrote:
In the US, you can end up in criminal court for activities related
to infringement, but not for the infringement itself.
IANAL, but I believe that is not the case, at least on a Federal level:
Prior to 1997, it was illegal to crime to commit copyright
infringement for commercial or financial gain. The 1997 No
Electronic Theft Act makes it illegal to willfully infringe a
copyright (over a fairly minimal threshold) without commercial
advantage or financial gain. Possible penalties include fines and
jail time.
Details here:
http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/17-18red.htm
Again, I am not a lawyer.
-faisal
-http://www.sapphiresteel.com/The-Little-Book-Of-Ruby
-http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/ruby
you can download it from http://www.pdfchm.com
where you have to create an account then you can download it
On Fri, Mar 23, 2007 at 03:36:35AM +0900, Austin Z. wrote:
Because programmers thrive on exact language, and exact meanings of
terms, maybe? ESR has written some interesting stuff about that.Nah. It’s a bikeshed to the nuclear power plant of intellectual
property discussions in general.
Speaking solely for myself here . . .
Since I have an (admittedly non-mainstream) interpretation of the ethics
of “intellectual property” (note scare-quotes) that is decidedly not on
the side of counting it as “theft”, I find that simply distinguishing
between theft and copyright infringement is the best compromise I can
generally come up with between ignoring the subject because it’s
off-topic and refusing to let a bit of FUD go unchallenged. I don’t
like to let such FUD go unchallenged, of course, because unchallenged it
becomes a meme, and propagates. Not my idea of fun.
On Fri, Mar 23, 2007 at 03:18:40AM +0900, Kyle S. wrote:
OK guys, stop jumping down my throat for using the common term for
something.Legally is it theft? Maybe not, but commonly it is referred to as such.
He did ask for something illicit, knowing full well it was illegal.
Why was the use of one word in a response diverting all focus from the
original intent of the post?
I think the problem is that by using the term “theft” you’re assuming
not only an inaccurate premise, but also an ethical premise that many
people aren’t prepared to stipulate. It’s like calling a nice juicy
steak “murder”; many people who like juicy steaks would argue with that.
I, for one dispute the notion that there’s anything ethically sacred
about copyright law. Copyright is, by definition and according to the
letters of some of the men who provided for it in the US Constitution, a
temporary monopoly granted and enforced by governmental fiat, not a
natural right. That’s why copyright is infringed, not violated or
stolen.
I still wouldn’t go around passing out illegal copies of books, of
course. There are other reasons to avoid such behaviors than the
strictly ethical, such as professional integrity, et alii.
On Fri, Mar 23, 2007 at 03:30:19AM +0900, Phillip G. wrote:
theft in any case (loss of revenue, for example, and I know stuff like
that doesn’t translate into automatic loss of revenue!).
This is where my objection to the notion starts to stray into the area
of economic policy and larger political issues.
Assuming someone has a right to revenues, or at least a right to deny
revenues to others due to some kind of creative imprimatur, combines
aspects of fascism and socialism (both of which I find particularly
odious). I’m more of a free market capitalist – you don’t have a right
to a revenue stream. You only have a right to pursue revenue. If you
fail to get it, the fact you have a crappy business model is not my
fault.
Still, I placed the IANAL, disclaimer, and I’m expressing difficult
stuff in layman’s terms, from a layman’s perspective to boot.
IANAL, either. So it goes.
On Fri, Mar 23, 2007 at 03:40:26AM +0900, Alex Y. wrote:
My take is that the disapproval was taken as read, and didn’t need any
further embellishment. Besides, the nuances of international copyright
law are far more interesting than a crude breach of community etiquette
I tend to agree with that statement.
Yep, this was one of the scarier points. Making DRM illegal to
circumvent, stepping on the Fair Use doctrine, but not doing it
clearly. This was used to jail a Russian who allegedly broke Adobe’s
eBook DRM scheme.
On Fri, Mar 23, 2007 at 08:27:04AM +0900, Faisal N Jawdat wrote:
advantage or financial gain. Possible penalties include fines and
jail time.Details here:
http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/17-18red.htm
Again, I am not a lawyer.
Alas, I don’t have time to read that right now. I’ll get to it later.
For now, I’ll just stipulate that your statement is correct as
presented, and say “Wow, I wasn’t aware of that bit. Thank you for the
information.”
On 3/23/07, Chad P. [email protected] wrote:
off-topic and refusing to let a bit of FUD go unchallenged. I don’t
like to let such FUD go unchallenged, of course, because unchallenged it
becomes a meme, and propagates. Not my idea of fun.
I note your scare quotes. They’re a bit of a silly thing to put in
because the United States and other jurisdictions have defined
intellectual property. We can disagree with the implementations as
they stand, and I think that most modern computer scientists disagree
with the current implementations. HOWEVER, I think that “theft” is
still an appropriate word as relates to illicit e-books. You are
depriving an author of a sale to which they would otherwise be
entitled and are therefore denying them income to which they are
entitled.
Like it or not, we must have some legal regime for protecting the
intellectual work and output of people whose skills are best suited
that direction. That’s why there’s three different regimes
(expressions : copyright, inventions : patents, and brands :
trademarks) although all three regimes have been badly stretched
beyond what is reasonable and rational into things which provide
effectively perpetual monopolies without sufficient benefit to society
in return. It’s the lack of benefit to society which is the problem
here with the current definitions, not the existence of the regimes
for protecting the intellectual work and output.
-austin
On Mar 23, 2:00 am, Chad P. [email protected] wrote:
original intent of the post?
the side of counting it as “theft”, I find that simply distinguishing
- Show quoted text -
The original book mentioned, along with quite a few other books are
available on line via Safari Books Online
http://safari.informit.com/0672322528
There are also several, shorter-than-book-length PDFs available
including:
and the second edition of Hal F.'s book is available as a PDF:
http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=91-9780768666304-0
In full disclosure, I both program a bit in Ruby, and am employed by
the company that publishes the above mentioned titles. But hey, I
read them. And I managed not to stand on my copyright soap box and
mention what happens to authors when…
Cheers,
John Wait
On Fri, Mar 23, 2007 at 08:16:01PM +0900, John J. wrote:
Yep, this was one of the scarier points. Making DRM illegal to
circumvent, stepping on the Fair Use doctrine, but not doing it
clearly. This was used to jail a Russian who allegedly broke Adobe’s
eBook DRM scheme.
Actually, I intended to allude to that event in my previous comments,
and my understanding of that event was that it was precipitated by
cracking Adobe’s DRM scheme, not by infringement of copyright. So,
though it appears you’re right about copyright being directly punishable
as a criminal act, I don’t think that was an example of that. Please
let me know if you have information to the contrary, as (being on
vacation and typing this from a hotel room) I really don’t have time to
do my own Google research right now.
On 3/23/07, Austin Z. [email protected] wrote:
I note your scare quotes. They’re a bit of a silly thing to put in
because the United States and other jurisdictions have defined
intellectual property.
They have defined copyright, trademarks, patents, and some places a
variant kind of design protection. “Intellectual property” is a
mismash made over these very different granted limited monopolies.
We can disagree with the implementations as
they stand, and I think that most modern computer scientists disagree
with the current implementations. HOWEVER, I think that “theft” is
still an appropriate word as relates to illicit e-books. You are
depriving an author of a sale to which they would otherwise be
entitled and are therefore denying them income to which they are
entitled.
HOWEVER; I still think “theft” is an appropriate word as relates to
nonsense postings. You are depriving a reader of his time and mental
resources which they would otherwise e entitled and are therefore
denying them the opportunity to make income which they would otherwise
have.
No, didn’t think we felt that shoe fit, either.
The point is that the copying does NOT deprive the author of anything.
In fact, copying MAY lead to higher direct income.
There are six cases here:
(1) Do not download and do not buy
(2) Do not download and do buy
(3) Download and buy, would buy without download
(4) Download and buy, would not buy without download
(5) Download and do not buy, would buy without downloaded
(6) Download and do not buy, would not buy without download
Classifying all cases from (3) to (6) as “theft” tend to result in
muddled thinking, including the assumption that there’s always lost
revenue. This is not true. Loss of revenue hinges on (5) being
greater than (4). The rest of the cases is a red herring; they make
no difference to revenue, and just create more value in society by
making the work available to more people (or available in a new form.)
Both the statistical and the anecdotal evidence I have seen indicate
that (4) is in fact larger than (5) for aggregate copying/purchasing,
with the statistics covering music, and the anecdotal evidence
covering music, movies, and self development books.
Like it or not, we must have some legal regime for protecting the
intellectual work and output of people whose skills are best suited
that direction.
Like it or not, we must have guilds to protect against unlicensed
production of beads.
Like it or not, we must have protection for the buggy whip
manufacturers.
Like it or not, we must have slaves working the cotton fields.
There’s no must in either of that. It is a choice of laws, a choice
where society pays with a set of restrictions covering the activities
for some (or many people) to further other activities, and where
change in technology change the payoffs for various groups. We may
choose to keep protection, or we may choose not to, and this will give
different payoffs for different groups in society, leading to
different activity. We are heavily invested in the present form, so
changes will be expensive. It is difficult to say whether a different
set of restrictions would be better for society as a whole or not.
However, there is no “must” about it. We managed to live well
without these restrictions, and I have not seen anybody that have
shown in any convincing way that we wouldn’t be doing reasonably well
without them today. If you’ve got simulation results or research
results that show otherwise, I’d be very interested in seeing them.
'cause I don’t know of any proper research (simulations or similar)
that says much at all here, just a bunch of people taking it for
granted that we “have to have”.
Eivind.
On Fri, Mar 23, 2007 at 09:17:13PM +0900, Austin Z. wrote:
generally come up with between ignoring the subject because it’s
depriving an author of a sale to which they would otherwise be
entitled and are therefore denying them income to which they are
entitled.
The term “intellectual property” is more marketing than legalistic
terminology. It is used to encompass patent, copyright, and trademark
laws, which actually relate to three very distinct bodies of law. The
term is misleading, arbitrary in its scope, and not helpful in
presenting a realistic view of what these laws entail. Thus, scare
quotes.
It’s amusing to me that you’re willing to stipulate, or have even
confirmed for yourself (I don’t know if you have), that the US legal
system at least does not in any way connect copyright infringement with
theft – and yet, you continue to assume that “reasonable” means “will
consider copyright infringement to be theft”. It’s not. It’s not
legally theft, it’s not theoretically theft – it’s just popularly
misunderstood by certain lay person demographics to be theft, or
theft-like.
It’s not an appropriate term, because it’s inaccurate, and ignores an
important element of theft (directly depriving the victim of the
rightful possession of a measurable thing subject to natural scarcity).
The author is not “entitled” to a sale: if you don’t want to buy it,
you don’t have to. I’m not depriving him of a sale if I receive a copy
for free: doing so in no way prevents me from purchasing, and the sale
is not something he possessed anyway. All I am doing is, arguably,
reducing the likelihood of generating some small portion of revenue in
some statistically measured fashion, maybe, in accordance with his
chosen business model.
. . . or maybe increasing it.
On the other hand, his business model is predicated upon the assumption
that such behavior running counter to his business model will be
prevented by men with guns.
for protecting the intellectual work and output.
I reject your thesis here, because you fail to support it substantively.
You make a claim about benefit to society and what one must or must not
do, and provide no backing for it in evidence or logical necessity.
Just as a point of curiosity for a very slow moving nube, is
http://www.ruby-doc.org/ a good site for finding online free (and not
infringed!) ruby info sources? I’m a little wary of unrecommended sites
Thanks,
Gary Williams
Gary Williams wrote:
Just as a point of curiosity for a very slow moving nube, is
http://www.ruby-doc.org/ a good site for finding online free (and not
infringed!) ruby info sources?
I run ruby-doc.org. To the best of my knowledge, everything hosted on
that site is there with the permission of the owners.
–
James B.
“I was born not knowing and have had only a little
time to change that here and there.”
On Mar 23, 2007, at 10:00 AM, Chad P. wrote:
The author is not “entitled” to a sale: if you don’t want to buy it,
you don’t have to. I’m not depriving him of a sale if I receive a
copy
for free: doing so in no way prevents me from purchasing, and the sale
is not something he possessed anyway. All I am doing is, arguably,
reducing the likelihood of generating some small portion of revenue in
some statistically measured fashion, maybe, in accordance with his
chosen business model.
I believe you are conflating two separate arguments to try to justify
your point.
No the author is not entitled to a sale.
However, the author is entitled, if they so wish, to ask for
payment when someone takes possession of their book.
Copyright is the basis of the open source movement: it is the claim
of copyright that allows the owner to insist on a particular license:
“I own the copyright, and I’ll grant you a license under the
following terms.”
Respect for copyright is an essential part of what we all do.
Similarly, the copyright owner of a book has the right to set the
terms under which you use that work.
So, the correct phrasing of your initial sentence would be “I can’t
be forced to buy something.” But, if the author has made it a
condition that you do buy it before using it, then you really
should buy it before using it.
Earlier, you said you were in favor of free markets. Most economists
believe that property rights is one of the key underpinnings of such
a system: if you have no property rights, you can’t transfer that
capital, and you can’t use it as collateral when raising funds. de
Soto has a great book on the subject, explaining why weak property
rights cause great inefficiencies in developing economies.
Using copyrighted works and ignoring the terms of use is probably not
theft. But that doesn’t make it morally right.
Regards
Dave T.
On 3/22/07, Kyle S. [email protected] wrote:
OK guys, stop jumping down my throat for using the common term for something.
Legally is it theft? Maybe not, but commonly it is referred to as such.
He did ask for something illicit, knowing full well it was illegal.
Why was the use of one word in a response diverting all focus from the
original intent of the post?
C’mon Kyle, how do you read his intent out of the post, or that he
knew full well that it was illegal.
I for one gave, and give him the benefit of the doubt. It’ pretty
clear that English is not his native language, and even if it is,
there’s nothing in the post where he said that he wanted it for free.
Now if he’d started out saying that he couldn’t find it on warez, that
would be a horse of another color.
–
Rick DeNatale
My blog on Ruby
http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/
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