Falkvinge

No, I said that it doesn't matter whether an entity aiding noncommercial filesharing is itself commercial (like The Pirate Bay might be; just having ads does not make an entity commercial).

The analogy with the postal service made earlier was actually quite apt.

Cheers, Rick

> I especially find interesting the proposal to use R&D for the pharmaceutical industry from the Government. I just don't know how practical that is. It would need serious commitment and serious investment from Governments to do that.

You're quite right in this analysis - especially with your followup about this being the most applicable where healthcare is also paid by the government.

In Europe, 83% of the pharma revenue - on average - comes from taxpayer money, mostly through drug subsidies. Yet, only 15% of their revenue total is used for R&D (and another 30% of the total is used for manufacturing), according to the pharma industry's own numbers.

So if we pay all of those 30 percent units for manufacturing from the tax coffers, another 15 percent units is needed to bring research on par. That takes us to 45 percent units - but we're paying for 83 percent units today. We can afford to double the research and still save a significant chunk of taxpayer money.

This doesn't even begin to take into account that 70% of today's new pharmaceuticals are so-called copycat drugs with no other purpose than to circumvent another company's patent monopoly. If we assume that these resources will be spent researching new drugs instead, as nothing is patent-encumbered, we have tripled the research just in forcing drugs to be generic, before taking actual increases or decreases in research funds into account.

The loser here is the pharma industry's "marketing" account, which has been overly well-fed with taxpayer money.

Cheers, Rick

TPB may or may not be commercial, and it doesn't matter in the slightest here, as they're aiding a noncommercial and therefore legal sharing of knowledge and culture. Aiding that would always be legal under this proposal.

Somebody making money off of aiding a legal noncommercial sharing doesn't make the original sharing commercial and illegal. Again, compare dating.

And if you can make money off of people wanting to share culture and knowledge, all the better for you.

This isn't ridiculous at all. To use a parallel, you can commercially facilitate non-commercial dating as much as you like, and many websites make a killing out of doing so. If they were to facilitate commercial dating (prostitution), it would be a different matter, and that would be illegal in most places.

But as long as the main activity is legal, then of course it's also legal to commercially aid somebody in doing so. Entire industries are built on that fundamental logic.

Cheers, Rick

> There's a very important reason only documentation of sex crimes against minors is banned -- there isn't a big market for watching videos of murders.

Ahem.

Fox News, CNN, al-Jazeera, BBC, ...

The market for videos of murders (wartime or criminal) is IMMENSE.

Thank you for this additional information about specifics of the United States. The described case with accidentally recording and realizing you accidentally recorded still makes you culpable under the "knowingly", though.

Cheers, Rick

Thank you for addressing me personally and wishing my premature death. However, I have no intention of obliging you in this particular matter.

Cheers and enjoy the Sunday night, Rick

Headlines, unfortunately, need to catch people's attention. That's their job.

Not exactly - in this case, a person on Twitter found a two-year-old article showing that this particular judge was corrupt in copyright monopoly cases. There is nothing denoting how "official" the conclusion is, not inherently in the expression.

As I write in the comments - once you've corrupted yourself as an official to the level of the 2010 case, you cannot UN-corrupt yourself in the eyes of the public. It is of paramount importance for the credibility of the judicial impartiality that there's not even a credible BELIEF of a bias, which is clearly present in this case.

just like the previous international waves like the green movement and that silly workers' party

Also worth noting: the Austrian pirate party entered the polls at 7% with a sonic boom on April 7.

I wonder why the photo says "Nerz Attends". His name is Sebastian Nerz. My guess is that somebody chose the first two words from a random sentence (i.e. "Nerz attends the general assembly") and tagged the photo with that as a name.

I use OpenShot and an old copy of After Effects (version 6.5) that works under WINE.

About breakeven for the time being, but I also learned a scary lot about how trading works in the process.

The VM is an old Windows XP that I bought (legitimately!) for $10 as a Microsoft employee. Perhaps it was $15. Thereabouts, anyway.

This madman, and Pingdom (tools.pingdom.com) says the page loads in 2.5 seconds, clocking it in at about the median of pages. I load it it in 4-5 seconds even on my _Android_. What rig are you using that could conceivably make it 6 times slower than an Android pad?

Thank you for this little gem. I have added it as an update.

It was intended as "whatever you call them" rhetoric.

Go to any consumer electronics store and try to buy a computer not running any code from one of these two companies.

Yes, if you're a sysadmin, getting naked iron is no problem. But you're gonna have code from these running on your network, as it stands today.