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Ok Baron. (Hey, it's ironic your nick considering your vehment opposition to the practice of feudalism. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif )
So basically instead of coming up with wacked out methods of compensaiton, or reinventing our whole economic system, and in the process causing more serious problems then we are fixing, the solution is simple. Eliminate the practice of selling the actual copyright of any material. This includes any sort of backdoor methods such as performance contracts or the like. The current system where the corporations act as owner and distributor of the product must cease. The Author of the material must own the rights to the product and the corporations will be their employees contracted for the purpose of marketing and distribution, instead of the artist being the employee (slave really) of the corporation. Limit the length of the copyright of any sort of information to something more reasonable and realistic. This would vary depending on the type of material. Longer for books, shorter for software, music and movies somewhere in the middle. During the term of the copyright the artist would control the distribution and sale of the material and receive whatever compensation for it that can be determined through the natural market process of supply and demand. They would likely need to contract with various distributors or marketers, all of whom should receive compensation for their services from the author, but the author/artist would retain the copyrights to it. Any aunathorized duplication of the material during the copyright period would have stiff penalties. Of course if the author/artist decides to do so he can waive some or all of those penalties, but he shuld retain the right to have them enforced as strictly as they wish, including financial and possible criminal proceedings, depending on the type and severity of the incident. This would NOT be limited to copies made and distributed for profit but extend also to copies made to avoid payment for the material, unless the author decides to allow such copies to be made. Once the copyright period ends the material becomes public domain and can be freely copied and distributed by anyone. At that point anyone that can succesfully market the product in such a way that there is a demand for it will be entitled to the compensation with no requirement to pay the orignal author. I see two problems with this idea. One, what happens on the death of the author? Does the product become public domain or can the copyright be transfered to his heirs until the term expires? Secondly, what about an author who writes a book and then wants to use the same characters in a later book? Does the copyright on those characters run from the Last book in the series or the first? Can any joe blow go off and start writing Honor Harrington books once the term expires on the original book, even thogh the author is still producing novels with her in it? Geoschmo [ July 16, 2003, 16:10: Message edited by: geoschmo ] |
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Also, you could allow corporations to "buy out" an authors copyright so that they could distibute the product freely themselves, but doing so should not transfer the copyright to them. It should transfer the work into the public domain early, so that in effect anyone would be free to market and distribute it. This could make sense as a business model considering the limited lifespan of most of these types of things. The author could get a big check at once instead of waiting for royalties over the term of the copyright and no hassles with inforcing the copyright. The corporation gets a head start on production and distribution over any competitiors, and should have the advantage in the market as theirs would be the "official Version". But they would still have to produce a quality product as they would be subject to market competition. Geoschmo [ July 16, 2003, 16:20: Message edited by: geoschmo ] |
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Geoschmo |
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I like your proposal because the original author is compensated and he may keep his copyright if that is important to him - but then he runs the risk of losing some profits to piracy. I still see a problem with corporate-produced content which does not 'belong' to the people who did the real creative work, but I like your idea. Edit : Aaaron gives SE4 away for free, then makes you his partner and charges a subscription to access PBW. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon12.gif [ July 16, 2003, 16:40: Message edited by: Erax ] |
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Corporations were not designed to produce knowledge anyway. They are designed to give the business owner some limited protection of his personal assets in case of a business failure. They are not supposed to function as virtual persons in every way, and allowing them to do so is dangerous for a lot of reasons. So if a corporate employee produces some marketable information, ie software, the employee should retain the copyright. But some equitable arangment should be created which compensates the copropration. Since the work itself would not have been possible without the support the author received while creating the work. But the rights should be retain by the person or persons mostly responsible with the act of creation. For something like windows I guess that would be the team of writers involved in the process. Quote:
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I think 5 years is a good time limit for everything ( for non commerical use )
And 20 years for commerical use of everything. Where commerical use means some one somewhere is making money off it. And if a project was funded by governement at all grants then it is automaticly placed in the public domain. The public domain is a good thing and all of society benifits from it. Companies still make money off public domain. Ever buy a book that was written before 1923 ... Its all public domain. There is a lot of music available in the public domain as well. Now for the concept of trademarking and patienting ideas and concepts.... I think that this should not be allowed.... Society does not benifit one bit from that. Imagine if someone patiented the idea of a vechile that moves on tracks in the 1820's.... With todays laws... Innovation and copyrights and patients travel down two seperate roads in opposite directions... |
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Tesco, I think the idea is that you can't patent the idea for a train, but you can patent a specific type of train locamotive, or at least some parts of it that are unique and your own design. You can't patent a steam engine after all. Patenting has benifits to soceity in that it encourages research and inovation, which can have some pretty substantial up front costs. But like copyright it can be taken to non-productive extremes.
I don't have a problem with you 5 year, 20 year terms. I think that is probably a bit long for software, but it would probably work for books. But I do have a question about what is commercial and what is non-commercial. If my friend buys a copy of SE4 and I burn a copy so I don't have to pay for it, is that a commercial or non commercial use? Geoschmo [ July 16, 2003, 18:42: Message edited by: geoschmo ] |
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Patents were created to allow inventors to benefit from the fruit of their creative work, while allowing their knowledge to be released to the public. Scientific knowledge must be shared to benefit society as a whole, but those who provide such knowledge must be compensated for it. Otherwise they would use their knowledge for themselves only, creating a series of technology-based secret societies.
So how is this different from books or music ? Well, entertainment content has no value unless it is shared, it can't really be hoarded for one's own benefit. As for trademarks, they embody the 'brand value' that a name holds. If you market anything at all with the name 'Star Wars' on it, you know it will attract millions of fans, some of which may actually buy the product. The brand name adds value to your product, and you must compensate Lucasfilm for it. Now I know very little about actual trademark legislation, other than that they have no expiration date. However, I feel they should work like mining rights : if you don't exploit them over a given period of time, you lose them. |
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geo you can patient the idea for a train.... There are companies that just patient ideas and only ideas. Major corp's push this all the time.
You no longer have to beat someone to producing a product people like and purchase. You just have to beat the company who builds it by only coming up with a concept and prooving it in court.... That is it. And the copy would fall under non commerical use. Commerical use would be for another company / person to use the code and sell it for profit... |
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From the perspective of the author of the work what is the difference if another company makes a million copies and sells them without compensating him, or if a million people all make one copy without compensating him. Either way that is one million copies he doesn't get paid for. As to your other point I will plead ignorance. I have never heard of a company patenting an idea the way you are describing it. In fact to my knokwledge you have to have some sort of diagram to get a patent. How do you diagram an idea? Geoschmo |
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I entirely agree that it would be a big help to restore copyrights to 5-20 year limits.
However, it doesn't really address piracy before that period is up. It would help in the case of things like business applications software. I actually prefer 5-year old Versions of MS Office, for example, because it lacks the overblown crud and unwanted features. Of course, existing megacorps will fight this tooth and nail, since it will make many of their products even less appealing than they currently are. There are certain things which technology has made trivial and easy, which society's obsolete conceptions are keeping us from using. The longer humans take to realize this, the more sad we are. Some people seem to take capitalism as a moral principle, but for some things, thanks to technology, it wouldn't really need to be relevant any more except through the oppression of corporations and governments. Is it really a good thing for most of the population to feel that they must spend most of their time and energy doing work that they don't enjoy, or face homelessness and hunger (not to mention reduced access to entertainment media) even if there is plenty for everyone, even if thanks to technology, only the people who enjoy working in construction and food production do so? Is it good that when technology makes certain professions unneeded, that the corporations get all the benefits, while the obsolete workers get nothing but a sudden need to find new careers, or go homeless? Some people seem to think that my idea for compensating digital content creators is unrealistic. Under the current system, many people develop computer games for corporations. For a major title, most of the money goes to Wal-Death and other chain retail stores, some goes to other vendors, the publisher makes or loses depending on how well the mass market responded, and the actual developers generally get a small slice. If games were distributed essentially for free over the net, then most of the money the public pays to the retail/distribution/publisher etc engines doesn't exist. If the public paid an agency for the right to all media in a catalog (which ideally, would be most/all media, in my opinion), much less would be needed to support the same amount of content. Some have objected to the idea of paying for unwanted or disapproved content, but it seems like they've missed (dismissed?) the part about people being able to indicate which works and creators they appreciate (equally, they could say which ones they disapprove), and this would determine the amount of compensation. This is not an abandonment of free enterprise, but a further liberation of enterprise and artistry from the yoke of megacorporations and the threat of starvation for struggling artists. PvK |
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Pvk, how do you determine who qualifies as an artist/author able to receive the "stipend" you talked about? What's to stop everyone form declaring themselves an artist and getting a free check even if they produce nothing worthwhile?
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In the other case, no one thought the work was worth the price, but a million people thought it was interesting enough to copy. Seems like a big difference to me. You patent an idea by having a moronic patent office. There are all sorts of patented ideas, including for many computer algorithms which are quite easy to independently develop without any foreknowledge, but would be against patent law to use if you did. E.g. I believe I have seen the patent for Huffman encoding, which is essentially the extremely basic idea that you could store something like: abcEEEeEEEeEEEeEEEeEEEeEEEeEEEeEEEeEEEeEEEeEEEe as: abc(10xEEEe) Oh boy, let's reward the sleezes who thought of a clever but fundamental idea (or whose employees did) and then decided to get the goverment to let only them use it. PvK |
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I'm not sure I have a nice rational argument with which to confront your ideas, PvK, but they sound far to socialist to me. Establishing this central agency... well... sometimes such things are necessary, but it's to be avoided as much as possible.
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I think I agree with Tesco. If he is saying that after five years you can freely copy it as long as you don't sell it, but before five years you aren't allowed to copy it. I think that is reasonable. Five years is a LONG time for software. But Pvk if I understand you correctly, you are advocating changing the law so that there is no recrimination whatsoever for copying the software at any time as long as it's not being sold. If it wasn't agasist the law to make a copy of software why would anyone ever buy it? Even great software that you love and would pay for if you had to. You'd be stupid to pay for it if you could get it free wouldn't you? Just because copying is easy and stopping it is hard doesn't mean it's ok and we shouldn't try. Basically all software would be shareware. And how often do shareware authors make any money? Of course a few have made some. Aaron did himself with SE3. But not enough to do this full time. Geoschmo |
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Capitalism, what a concept. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif [ July 16, 2003, 21:03: Message edited by: geoschmo ] |
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Capitalism, what a concept. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon7.gif </font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">You're just ignoring the points and the topic. There are many reasons. Two are: 1) Like your previous suggestion, your solution doesn't address unauthorized copying. My system authorizes all copying. Your system retains incentive to copy without paying, but technology makes such copying trivial and costless (except to the creator who loses compensation). Nonetheless, your suggestion works to a limited extent, as evidenced by Shrapnel. 2) Your suggestion doesn't include how to eliminate the current megacorporate leeches which dominate the industry. PvK |
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Copyright of characters vs. stories...
That is something of a problem. A trademark is traditionally something used to identify a business to its customers. Mickey Mouse is a trademark because he's the 'face' of Disney. The other characters invented by Disney are not necessarily trademarks. Donald Duck, Scrooge McDuck, Goofy, Pluto, etc... Control freaks like Walt Disney, Inc. are obviously not going to be pleased with losing control of even minor characters. But then corporations are often not pleased that they have competition at all, witness Microsoft and the 'pay me for every machine you ship' license on DOS and Windows. The public has to get off its collective arse and make Congress understand that copyright has gone to far. There's no other solution to the problem. A reasonable limit on copyright duration is just going to have to be sufficient. Give people the time to get some decent benefits from what they invent, and then have a firm end of copyright. I advocate 21 years myself. This is the traditional length of a 'generation' even though we've lowered the voting age to 18 recently. (That was because of the complaints during the Vietnam War that 18 year-olds were old enough to die in war but not old enough to vote, remember.) Anyway, 21 years after a book, song, movie is released you've got a whole new generation of people who have grown up with it. It's just 'part of the world' for them. They can't remember a time when it wasn't around. So, it's time to let it go. Yes, corporations 'owning' patents and copyrights is a problem. It's the source of the current warping of the law, actually. Because of the direct links of stock value to the compensation of top officers of the corporation suits have an incentive to try every trick they can come up with to increase the bottom line for their corporate monster^H^H^H^H^H^H^ master. You do know that almost all employment contracts include the right of the employer to all creations of the employee on the job, and sometimes even on their own time? Many people don't realize what they are signing, but those contracts really do say that the company owns everything you do. This is something else that needs to be stopped by Congress -- i.e. the general public has to get off their arse. A real solution to the 'making a living' problem for artists of all stripes would be to set legal limits for the percentage of price for a copyrighted work that a corporate 'distributor' could take. Thus guaranteeing the 'original creator' a certain portion of his earnings. As it is now for example, most contemporary record labels don't pay 'their artists' a red cent in royalties. They have structured the contracts in (frankly illegal) ways that guarantee them all the profits and the artists get all the charges, resulting in the artists owing the corporations money. Most acts only make money on tour. A few actually do own at least a share in their own labels (Anni di Franco, Loreena McKennit, Metallica) and actually get some of the corporate profits. (Hint: If you buy the CD of your favorite artist directly from them AT THE CONCERT they get the share that normally goes to the retail outlet. This is orders of magnitude more than they would normally get. Don't buy the CD at the store. Wait. Go to see them on tour and buy it directly from them. This doesn't solve the corporate greed problem, but it helps the artists.) The most evil, slimey, disgusting trick of all is the 'work for hire' clause in those contracts. According to current copyright law a 'performance' cannot be a work for hire. Yet they have had this clause defining all songs/albums as 'works for hire' in their contracts for decades. If the artist notices they get the glad-hander reply 'but that's not valid so it doesn't mean anything'... yes, but all the time they have been lobbying to CHANGE THE LAW. They nearly got it passed a few years ago (it was an amendment or 'rider' on the 1998 copyright extension as I recall). Those b*st*rd suits have been plotting to rob 'their artists' once and for all even while they are whining before congress about how this 'piracy' hurts 'their artists'. How many of the complainers (ahem, Lars from Metallica?) even know this? It was just barely kicked out of the bill before it was finalized. [ July 16, 2003, 21:32: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ] |
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What about a tax rate of 0.1% per employee?
Don't hire more than 1000 employees, or you're in trouble. Encourage small, friendly mom & pop home businesses. |
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The current hassles that SCO/Caldera is causing with Linux are in this same Category. They had complete turnover of management and the new staff decided that they couldn't make money the legit way and their best chance to get some money out of the corpse of the business was to start suing people. The plan seems to be that either they extort money from IBM by lawsuit or they scare IBM into buying them out before they completely crash and get sued by the shareholders. [ July 16, 2003, 21:31: Message edited by: Baron Munchausen ] |
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2) You must not have read it then. I said that corporations should not be able to own copyrights. I said that artists/authors should control the distribution and recive the compensation for their production. What else do you want, beside the right to copy freely any software you feel like jsut because you can? |
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The idea I've proposed could be implemented as a private corporate business model too, but it's a bit less efficient, because you can't completely avoid the copy problem and the media base is less widespread. For example, MegaMedia Corp can announce a subscription for full access to all the media it "owns", for a yearly fee of only say, $20. If they can control access and make it cheap and convenient to distribute to Subscribers, then probably practically everyone interested will Subscribe. That's better than the current system, because people get much more content for less, and they don't have to worry about purchasing each title. Copying may be controlled simply by the low price - if it's so cheap and easy to get everything legitimately, then would-be "thieves" won't bother, or will be controlled by peer pressure. "You stole it? You didn't just Subscribe? It's only $20 and I did it - what a lamer!" The thing is, corporations by their current nature, want to maximize profit, and don't care about society's benefit unless it helps their bottom line, and so they'll probably figure they should shoot for a higher cost, pushing the line where people will want to copy it. Within the capitalist model, it gets back to the point others have made, that piracy is essentially competition for corporations. Essentially, corporations want to squeeze as much as they can out of their products, even if it means violating the nature of the media, and buying the legal and political influence to impose their will. They may be paranoid and naive to some degree here - they might actually make more money if they just lowered their prices and made simple network distribution. However, I still prefer the promise of a non-corporate system (executed by conscientious Swedes, of course http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif ) with a charter not to maximize its own profits, but to support the creation of the best media and make it available to everyone. For one thing, even if the corporate model changes so that they offer all their media for a cheap flat price, they're still going to only give as little as they can to the people who actually make the media. PvK |
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Just don't make it a government thing that you have to join and have no alternatives to and I would hapily support it. Geoschmo |
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I think a better alternative would be simply to make all these types of contracts illegal. The artist/author should retain complete control of the rights to their work. They should be allowed to enter into agreements with a publisher/distributor/marketer, but have the legal right to recind the agreement at ANY TIME and go somewhere else. An artist could negotiate a deal like this now, and some of the well established stars do. But new artists don't get deals like this because they need the company at first more then the company needs them. Because of this unequal position the company can make unreasonable demands and if the artist doesn't like it they can go back to stocking shelves at the A&P and the company will just find another artist that will sign on the dotted line. If all these type deals were illegal the company would lose that leverage. They would be forced to actually work for the artist instead of the other way around. Not setting price limits would allow a new artist to get their foot in the door easier. They could take a pittance at first to gain access to the marketing, distribution channels. They would be taking the risk on their own talent that they think they have. It's the definition of entrepreneurism. Then once they become established they would be free to renegotiate their deal at any time. Geoschmo |
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The problem with anti-piracy laws is that they're obsolete and unenforceable. Or if you can enforce them, it is with very invasive stuff that forces you to surveil the public, and/or make all your computers look for copyright codes and refuse to copy data that has them. That's scary stuff, which a megacorp near you is working on. Suppose you're playing Space Empires X, empire creation, and you can choose whether you want your people to have free access to all their own media or not, as a society. Which empire is going to have better research and happiness Ratings? The one where the average citizen can only afford to access 0.01% of the media? PvK |
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Both the Baron's and Geo's ideas below sound like they'd be great steps in the right direction, to me. They don't really address piracy, though, just other corporate abuses.
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I think a better alternative would be simply to make all these types of contracts illegal. The artist/author should retain complete control of the rights to their work. They should be allowed to enter into agreements with a publisher/distributor/marketer, but have the legal right to recind the agreement at ANY TIME and go somewhere else. An artist could negotiate a deal like this now, and some of the well established stars do. But new artists don't get deals like this because they need the company at first more then the company needs them. Because of this unequal position the company can make unreasonable demands and if the artist doesn't like it they can go back to stocking shelves at the A&P and the company will just find another artist that will sign on the dotted line. If all these type deals were illegal the company would lose that leverage. They would be forced to actually work for the artist instead of the other way around. Not setting price limits would allow a new artist to get their foot in the door easier. They could take a pittance at first to gain access to the marketing, distribution channels. They would be taking the risk on their own talent that they think they have. It's the definition of entrepreneurism. Then once they become established they would be free to renegotiate their deal at any time. Geoschmo</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif"> |
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[quote]Originally posted by PvK:
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Geoschmo |
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Sounds like motivating your public with threats and surveillance to me. I think you will end up generating a revolutionary faction. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/icons/icon10.gif
BTW, my personal policy is to buy games I respect enough to want (which ends up being a short list), though I often shop around, wait for price drops, and/or buy used. PvK |
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In a sense this is a straw man issue. The real issue, as most people have realized judging by the direction in which the discussion has moved, is the issue of intellectual property, i.e. patents, trademarks, copyrights and such. Products simply don't need EULAs to be protected from unauthorized copying. However, in cases where the EULA purports to specify ways in which the product may be used, , or to specify that the product can't be decompiled or analyzed to see how it works, or to restrict the right of the buyer to re-sell the product, then it's on doubtful legal grounds. [ July 17, 2003, 00:18: Message edited by: deccan ] |
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The Economist is known for being a bastion of liberal free entreprise and is considered pro-business. But for the past few months, The Economist has taken a decidedly skeptical attitude towards the issue of intellectual property. Here are some excerpts:
Markets for ideas http://www.economist.com/displaystor...tory_id=574263 Excerpt: POPULAR discussion about intellectual-property rights is bedevilled by a recurring confusion. Few people any longer insist that “property is theft”, as Proudhon claimed. The centrality of property rights in a well-ordered market economy is so much taken for granted that the idea has seeped below the level of mainstream consciousness. So when owners of intellectual property say they are being robbed—as the record companies said they were, by Napster, or as big pharmaceutical companies say they are, by producers of cheap drugs in poor countries—one’s instinct is to see things their way. Property comes in many forms, one supposes, but whatever form it takes, stealing it must be wrong. Not so fast. The urge to possess may be a basic human instinct, but the legal idea of property—and what, precisely, this complicated notion entails—is a human invention, developed down the years (and still being revised) to serve economic and social goals. The law on intellectual property, in particular, is everywhere both comparatively new and in flux. This is not a question of black and white, of right or wrong, as rich-country owners of intellectual property insist. It is a matter of striking a balance—and it is possible that owners are getting too much of a good deal. Patently absurd? http://www.economist.com/displaystor...tory_id=662374 Excerpt: Innovation does not happen by accident. It takes long hours and a great deal of investment—often many millions of dollars. By conferring a monopoly to exploit a particular technology for a fixed period of time (increased recently in America from 17 to 20 years to bring it into line with Europe), patents create incentives for investors to put money into risky new ideas. But monopolies create problems of their own. Firms or individuals holding patents must register and defend them, risking potentially crippling lawsuits. Those without patents must license them, or engage in inefficient and anti-competitive alliances. Economists have tussled for decades over ways to balance these costs and benefits. That debate is now taking a fresh turn. Growing numbers of economists are unearthing evidence that America’s patent regime is out of step with precisely those values it was designed to promote. Some believe that, in certain industries, strengthening intellectual-property protection accomplishes nothing positive. Others think that it may actually do some harm. If these economists are correct, patent-holders themselves may soon start clamouring for weaker, and not stronger, protection. “Everything under the sun made by man is patentable,” asserted the American Supreme Court in a landmark decision in 1980 that left inventors scrambling to stake out their places in the sun. Between 1982 and 1992, the number of patents issued each year in America doubled from 55,000 to almost 110,000. “We are the patent office, not the rejection office,” said Bruce Lehman, the PTO’s commissioner at the time.Computers led the patent surge, with the number of related patents tripling between 1982 and 1992. Semiconductor patents increased fivefold over the same period (see chart). As a result, Carl Shapiro, an economist at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, says that computing, semiconductor and information-technology firms now encounter a “thicket” of patents that constrain their inventiveness. This phenomenon has been dubbed the “Tragedy of the Anti-Commons”—in contrast to the classic “Tragedy of the Commons” that described how free resources such as fresh air and clean water could be over-used and destroyed by selfish agents. Here, the opposite occurs: when lots of property owners have to grant permission before a resource can be used, the result is that the resource tends to be chronically under-used. “In the case of patents,” says Mr Shapiro, “innovation is stifled.” Do firms become more innovative when they increase their patenting activity? Studies of the most patent-conscious business of all—the semiconductor industry—suggest they do not. Rosemarie Ziedonis at Wharton Business School in Pennsylvania and Bronwyn Hall at Haas found that investment in R&D (a reasonable proxy for innovation) did not substantially increase during the industry’s most feverish period of patenting. Instead, semiconductor firms simply squeezed more patents out of each dollar they spent on R&D. From 1982 to 1992, the chip makers doubled their output of patents from 0.3 to 0.6 for every million dollars of R&D. That was at a time when the patent yield in other industries had barely budged. |
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There are heaps and heaps of books written on the subject of morality in particular and value theory in general, so any summarized description of the issue is clearly lacking in many ways. However, one thing that is clearly unresolved is that there are deep, logical problems with the concept of "absolute morality". This article is a good description: On the Nature of Morality http://hem.passagen.se/nicb/morality.htm Note in particular these excerpts: "... by objective morality is meant a moral view which claims that there exists a morality which is external to human beings. Much like the existence of a law of gravity, there is a moral law which exists independently of any conscious being. Hence, morality is not a human fabrication - it merely awaits to be detected. In contrast, subjective morality denotes the view that moral views are nothing but human opinions, the origin of which is biological, social, and psychological. Without conscious beings, there would be no such thing as morality. Furthermore, on the subjective view, it is not possible to deem a moral opinion "true" or "false" - since such assessments require some objective standard against which to assess." "... it is important to distinguish subjective morality from moral relativism, which claims that moral views differ between different contexts or cultures, and from moral nihilism, which states that there is no morality or that morality does not matter. One possible implication of moral relativism, which is quite often wrongly inferred as being contained in the general class of subjective meta-ethics, is the view that moral statements can only be considered applicable in the context in which they are uttered." I can't really comment further on Geo's position without knowing more specifics about his beliefs, but I do hope that he realizes that he won't be able to convince anyone of the rightness of the beliefs without advancing some logical argument in its support rather than relying on some subjective, personal moral intuition. Furthermore, Geo, don't you think it would be good to know that your beliefs are right because they are grounded in reason rather than simply because you have an unassailable confidence in your intuition that they are right? |
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Geoschmo [ July 17, 2003, 02:23: Message edited by: geoschmo ] |
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Why are you so concerned with what I do Jack?
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Re: Philosophical Quandry: Piracy
Tesco - good point.
[ July 22, 2003, 01:15: Message edited by: Jack Simth ] |
Re: Philosophical Quandry: Piracy
Mr. Smith Mr. Fryon
Please take this off line. Mr. Smith. I apologize if I offend you here. For it is not my intent. I believe opinion such as that should not be written in the forum but sent in pm or private email. The overall messesage can be delivered without the harsh words or direct one word insults. I believe that your message would not miss the words from think to and. |
Re: Philosophical Quandry: Piracy
Tesco - You are right, of course. Fyron, check PM.
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Re: Philosophical Quandry: Piracy
Quote:
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Re: Philosophical Quandry: Piracy
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Re: Philosophical Quandry: Piracy
That's a great article, and very on-topic to this and the Copyright thread we've had here recently.
PvK |
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