Life In 19x19

uPWarrior wrote:So you don't want people to copy your work,

I want people to respect the law as much as I do. It is a fundament of human civilisation that all live under law instead of anarchy. In particular, I want people to respect copyright law applied to my work as much as I respect it applied to everybody else's work.

but you shamelessly

Applying the valid (copyright) law is not shamelessly but civilised.

and INTEGRALLY copy that of others?

As said before, fair use (citation of reasonably small parts) allows knowledge of mankind to evolve. Distinguish between fair use of parts and paste and copy of whole works!

hyperpape wrote:what exactly is my property right that is violated when someone compromises my computer?

In Germany, there is also the Grundrecht (basic right) auf (to) Vertraulichkeit (confidentiality) und Integrität (integrity) informationstechnischer (informational-technical) Systeme, which pretty recently the federal constitutional court has derived from basic constitutional rights of the individual citizen.

Zombie wrote:The presence of a firewall or a password lock

Security means help but are not required.

Koroviev wrote:If I had a pound for every time I've seen a self-appointed forum superstar get in a huff after being criticised and dramatically anounce their departure from online life, I would have enough money to buy some go books instead of pirating them all.

You sure got that right. In a different forum, ten percent of a super drama queen's posts were tear-streaked departure speeches, which departure would then last about a day or at most two. Here at L19 (no offense John) the prima donna found something more interesting to do with his life, and capitalized on the opportunity to wreak a grand dramatic finale. I don't doubt his expertise, nor the quality of his contributions, but I've been around the drama block a few times and this is pretty typical.

Moderators earn their pay, preventing the disgruntled superstar from spam-trashing the forum for weeks on end, which I've also seen happen, regrettably.

First, check the facts. John Fairbairn has added far more value to the Go community, both through his translations, books and the GoGoD Encyclopaedia than any of the kiddie critics who have annoyed him. In addition, he has spent considerable time and effort trying to improve the knowledge and debate on this and other fora, all for the love of Go. What has annoyed him more than anything is that it seems to be accepted by growing numbers of posters here that piracy, of books, programs and databases (in effect, theft of other people's work) is the norm. We who do the work should just allow it to happen and find some other way to recoup our costs. But the book market is so minimal at the best of times that there will be no physical books produced to steal; the database market is even smaller and our only hope is that we get enough to cover costs. Both John and I have subsidised the business for almost 20 years, because we both love the game.

So some sarcastic critic will cue the violins and call us drama queens appealing for sympathy. I need none of it; what I would like to see is the generality of the Go playing community, the ones I see at the US and European Congresses, making it plain that theft and piracy is not acceptable in any form and definitely should not be encouraged on this forum.

Best wishes.

RobertJasiek wrote:As said before, fair use (citation of reasonably small parts)

You are saying that copying entire game records is "reasonably small parts"?
Approximately what percentage of the game record is not included in the database?

I just want to show you that your moral higher ground is not that higher.

TMark wrote:John Fairbairn has added far more value to the Go community, both through his translations, books and the GoGoD Encyclopaedia than all of the kiddie critics who have annoyed him together.

Changed it a little bit.

His departure is our loss.

TMark wrote:John Fairbairn has added far more value to the Go community, both through his translations, books and the GoGoD Encyclopaedia than any of the kiddie critics who have annoyed him.

This is a big understatement (especially useful is, e.g., his introduction of dynamic perception of concepts to the West) but it has no relevance for the database copyright question. Relevant for the GoGoD database are his and your extraordinary time and effort invested in it.

uPWarrior wrote:You are saying that copying entire game records is "reasonably small parts"?

For the third time: I am saying that a single game's move sequence is (outside Japan) not copyright-protected.

I just want to show you that your moral higher ground is not that higher.

Read and understand all I wrote earlier in this thread.

Zombie wrote:His basic point is that you set the computer to accept data, which is akin to putting a book on display. Someone reads it, done is done, kind of. If you read it really to the letter and assume pure greed (without malicious intent as such), there's not much of an argument to be made if you want to be really anal about it.
The presence of a firewall or a password lock or whatever would obviously be a different matter entirely, that's a very clear statement of "you are not allowed to do this".

I understand, but I don't think this makes any difference. If you leave your front door unlocked, does this give someone the right to enter your house? I think not. The implication seems to be that by allowing your computer to receive information and respond to it, that you have implicitly agreed to allow someone to gain access to your computer by use of these means. But this misses the mark. If you found a lost laptop in public, do you automatically have the right to snoop through the owner's files if he did not bother to set a password, or if you're good at cracking passwords? No. How is doing so remotely any different? While the owner may have set up the computer to communicate over a network, this is only agreeing to share very specific information, not the general contents of the computer. This is analogous to arguing that you have the right to enter a house by picking the lock simply because it has uncovered windows, and therefore, some of the information is set up to be "shared" with the outside. Again I will stress the point that goods, be they scarce or non-scarce, can be owned as individual copies (thus they cannot be trespassed against), but no one can hold a monopoly right over the idea of the good.

Balance wrote:Piracy is a political movement. The Pirate Party received 7.13% of the total Swedish votes in the 2009 European Parliament elections.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party_(Sweden)

I don't think the forum should take a political stance one way or another, nor help people break the current laws.
However, if the forum continues to allow political discussions, then people will have to accept that some have opinions contrary to their own.

This is of course only my personal opinion.

Intellectual property is a political movement. It has its origin in censorship. The Licensing Act of 1662 was, like earlier acts, intended to suppress the publishing of "seditious material" or anything else the government disapproved of. It placed the Stationers' Company in charge of a monopoly over printing, which kept any other company from printing copies of a particular text once it was accepted by Stationers', but it also charged them with assuring censorship. The act was very unpopular among authors, who were at the mercy of the company, and because of this the Act was not renewed in 1694. The Stationers' Company continued to advocate for the return of their monopoly powers, but their efforts were unsuccessful. They therefore decided to change their strategy, by trying to convince Parliament and the public that licensing was good for authors. This effort culminated in the Statute of Anne, which granted copyrights to authors, not for their benefit, but to restrict competition between publishing houses.

nagano wrote:

Zombie wrote:His basic point is that you set the computer to accept data, which is akin to putting a book on display. Someone reads it, done is done, kind of. If you read it really to the letter and assume pure greed (without malicious intent as such), there's not much of an argument to be made if you want to be really anal about it.
The presence of a firewall or a password lock or whatever would obviously be a different matter entirely, that's a very clear statement of "you are not allowed to do this".

I understand, but I don't think this makes any difference. If you leave your front door unlocked, does this give someone the right to enter your house? I think not.

Agreed this far. Neither locking your door nor installing a password on your computer changes your rights on a strict libertarian understanding.

The implication seems to be that by allowing your computer to receive information and respond to it, that you have implicitly agreed to allow someone to gain access to your computer by use of these means. But this misses the mark. If you found a lost laptop in public, do you automatically have the right to snoop through the owner's files if he did not bother to set a password, or if you're good at cracking passwords? No. How is doing so remotely any different? While the owner may have set up the computer to communicate over a network, this is only agreeing to share very specific information, not the general contents of the computer.

Exactly what information are you agreeing to share? And how is that agreement established? In the actual world, they're established by case law and precedent. But neither of those explanations are available to you.

This is analogous to arguing that you have the right to enter a house by picking the lock simply because it has uncovered windows, and therefore, some of the information is set up to be "shared" with the outside. Again I will stress the point that goods, be they scarce or non-scarce, can be owned as individual copies (thus they cannot be trespassed against), but no one can hold a monopoly right over the idea of the good.

This is the disanalogy I see. My house is my own. By default, you cannot do anything to it. If you are a handyman, I might give you a narrowly circumscribed right to make a specific modification, which is demarcated from other things you might do by the physical characteristics of what you are doing ("open this door, not that door..."). When you connect your computer to a network, it communicates by a simple protocol (or couple of protocols) which all reduce to a model of sending information or messages from one computer to another. Arguing that computer hacking is a crime requires you to effectively say that some messages are ok, but not others. I doubt such a distinction can be rationalized in terms of property rights. It comes down to much mushier things, like privacy, trade secrets, and simple utility.

My understanding is that you can't hack my computer and say oh well you set it up to receive messages anyway and you can't make a distinction between different types of messages", for the same reason that I can't spray poison at you and say "when you are breathing, you accept chemicals from the air anyway and you can't make a distinction between different types of chemicals."

hyperpape wrote:

nagano wrote:The implication seems to be that by allowing your computer to receive information and respond to it, that you have implicitly agreed to allow someone to gain access to your computer by use of these means. But this misses the mark. If you found a lost laptop in public, do you automatically have the right to snoop through the owner's files if he did not bother to set a password, or if you're good at cracking passwords? No. How is doing so remotely any different? While the owner may have set up the computer to communicate over a network, this is only agreeing to share very specific information, not the general contents of the computer.

Exactly what information are you agreeing to share? And how is that agreement established? In the actual world, they're established by case law and precedent. But neither of those explanations are available to you.

This is analogous to arguing that you have the right to enter a house by picking the lock simply because it has uncovered windows, and therefore, some of the information is set up to be "shared" with the outside. Again I will stress the point that goods, be they scarce or non-scarce, can be owned as individual copies (thus they cannot be trespassed against), but no one can hold a monopoly right over the idea of the good.

This is the disanalogy I see. My house is my own. By default, you cannot do anything to it. If you are a handyman, I might give you a narrowly circumscribed right to make a specific modification, which is demarcated from other things you might do by the physical characteristics of what you are doing ("open this door, not that door..."). When you connect your computer to a network, it communicates by a simple protocol (or couple of protocols) which all reduce to a model of sending information or messages from one computer to another. Arguing that computer hacking is a crime requires you to effectively say that some messages are ok, but not others. I doubt such a distinction can be rationalized in terms of property rights. It comes down to much mushier things, like privacy, trade secrets, and simple utility.

I disagree, and think that Nagano's analogy is excellent. The house/handyman issue can be reduced in the same way that you reduce connecting a computer to a network to sending messages. What is a door anyway besides being the way to get in and out of a house? Whether the ownership of ideas is as simple as property rights or mushier, to me it boils down to a question of common decency. It's not decent to take what's on somebody else's computer without asking, and it's not decent to mass produce someone else's work without their permission. How to regulate it is a matter for professional muddlers.

Balance wrote:It should be observed by everybody that not only libertarians question Intellectual Property. Other people fight it as a part of a general struggle against capitalism. Some people claim to do it out of religious fervor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missionary_Church_of_Kopimism

Definitely. I am a bit sour on it (though not completely against it) on grounds of economic efficiency. I'm just trying to lead Nagano down a rabbit hole.