Privateering usually meant the state’s navy issued the ship and demanded a substantial share of the prize leading to creative accounting at sea. It was a deal taken typically by naval officers who might otherwise be tempted to desert when going on the account is offering better prizes and career options. (Desertion to piracy was a big problem in the Queen’s Navee.)
A letter of marque means you can find safe port at colonies of the issuing state so long as you are attacking its enemies (usually Spanish vessels during the Golden Age).
Piracy is midnight oyster and clam harvesting without a license to break the oyster cartel, making restaurant oysters and clams more available and cheaper to customers.
It is from this grand tradition along the US West Coast that the notion of media piracy rose, and much like the Golden Age of Piracy robbing the Spanish Silver Train, piracy is associated with snatching ill-gotten gains from those who don’t deserve it, sometimes benefiting communities that do. (YMMV).
Media Piracy is copyright infringement, which is totally not stealing.
The US Supreme Court taking content out of the public domain so that it can be reserved for private use isn’t stealing either, but it causes more harm than piracy.
We also get little conversation about how copyright extensions and patent trilling robs the public use of public-domain content, especially when the Mouse is lobbying the federal government to extend rights further.
It took France about a century before they went full Republic. I’d give the folks in Iran some latitude.
Note that the hijab thing was the last straw, and they’re still going without functional infrastructure.
I suspect the molotovs will resume flyong shortly. They are already on a short fuse.
It’s part of how I remember id est versus exempli gratia
The problem is noted by Karl Marx, the capitalist inevitably captures the government and its regulating departments so that the body of laws will be revised in their favor. Remember that the point of copyright laws in the Constitution of the United States, to promote science and the useful arts was killed when IP was extended. Every year that someone owns an idea is year that the rest of us does not.
I don’t know the solution, but corruption of the temporary monopoly was inevitable.
I assume UBI. Already quality of product is not cultivated by the current publishing system. People who get their books published do so by affording a good agent with connections, which rules out the black kid using a manual typewriter her brother rebuilt.
Maybe capitalism doesn’t work, except for the richest capitalists?
Most IP owners didn’t create what they have, but bought it off someone else. I have little pity for rich people.
I’d say society is better off with no IP related temporary monopoly than the system we have. There are enough instances where creators die penniless and publishers make all the profits to suggest there already is no financial incentive for an inventor to invent. Like Goodyear, they do it more as a hobby or in the interest of society.
Maybe if we had social safety nets so everyone not rich wasn’t desperate, we might be able to have a robust innovation sector that was less focused on using law to screw competitors and consumers.
Billions typically paid for by government subsidy, id est taxpayers. I’m not sure what the justification is for private IP rights when the capital is socialized.
Heh. During the Trump administration when all the Republican elected officials we’re shouting Free Speech In Social Media because Trump was getting factchecked on Twitter, we fantasized about a state-serves social media platform that would be as free-speechy as the state legally allowed.
Not that it would be useful except to point at it and say if you don’t moderate your platform, it’ll turn into this!
I expected some poor bureaucrat would have to clear all the CSAM but the furry-futa porn would remain, as would all the advertisements for penis pills and Nigerian princes. The hate speech would stay up but get tracked until someone got radicalized by it.
Is there a community exclusively for users with strange names? And if so, how is qualifying strangeness determined?
Related to this topic is Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem, Mike Masnick observes that it’s impossible to do content moderation at scale well (that is without both malicious content slipping through while false positives get taken down).
A more humorous version of the same notion is found on Masnick’s proposed Twitter content moderation speedrun. Note that Musk not only failed to not trip over all these steps, but also found new ones to trip over, and now Twitter is… well what Twitter is today.
Having recently migrated from Reddit (and kept up with commercial social media hacks) I’m used to Nothing To See Here! We totally didn’t store your personal information in plaintext for hackers to snatch. Oh and maybe please change your passwords. All Part Of The Show!
So, by comparison, the response here is downright heartwarming.
I only gave awards after getting ones that gave me points to give awards, and then gave them either to sad posts or when someone said to someone else, I wish I had an award to give you so take this emoji! (🎖️) so I’d cover for them, as that was appropriate.
This is to say, I suck at awards protocol, and will write fancy comments whether I’m getting awards or not.
Property is theft. <Bolshevik chorus swells>