Nicely done, PD music + New words = New song

The only counter argument I see is that it's derivative, which would be an issue, excepting that it's so clearly parody -- which would also make it new copyright protected work, as parody is protected speech, at least in the US.

>> ^bmacs27:
Can you point to the specific passage you are referring to that suggests that there is an inverse correlation between dollars spent enforcing copyright, and profitability? (I assume that to be your assertion).

My basic assertions are two

1. Nobody has provided any evidence that shows an inverse correlation between "piracy" and profit for the industry.
   
2. Nobody has provided any evidence that shows an inverse correlation between number of "piracy" lawsuits and number of "pirates".
   

Furthermore, the opposite correlations have been shown to exist for at least the first case, and the second seems almost completely decoupled.

I am not asserting that the RI/MPAA does not waste their money alienating their customers. Only that when they do that they don't have an evidence based economic reason for doing so.

I object to the industries "common sense" observation that they "must" be losing money ( when they are making the same or better money than prevailing trends would project at less expense ) being taken as a given without the slightest concern for facts.

If you search for "Could the industry as a whole be gaining" that's near the beginning of the details I'm referring to. Lessig cuts them a lot of slack, but the basic facts he lays out don't conform to the industry narrative I am disputing.

Full disclosure: my annual purchasing of music and movies went from ~$100 to ~$500 the year I started file sharing, and then from ~$500 to $0 the year the MPAA served me with papers, and I stopped file sharing. I'm biased, but I have been following this whole thing very closely, and I know they made money off me sharing, and they lost money by stopping me.

>> ^bmacs27:

@dgandhi
I can almost guarantee you that the copyrights that have had more spent on enforcement have been more profitable. Just as I can guarantee you that the ones that have been more profitable have probably also been more pirated. You only asked for a correlation man.
The fact is, no convincing evidence has been presented either way.


While nobody here has presented such evidence in this thread, I have claimed that I have seen it, and nobody has made a counter claim of facts , if you want the details of these facts, you can read/listen_to/search ( legally & for free ) Prof Lessig's creative commons licensed book on the issue : http://www.manybooks.net/titles/lessiglother04free_culture.html

I would like to see you debunk his work, or even back up your "almost guarantee" of correlation with facts instead of conjecture.

>> ^bmacs27:

What they're probably acting on is the positive correlation between dollars spent enforcing copyright, and profit per publication. Does that suffice for you?

I don't buy that either, the data on litigation shows that it cost more than it brings in.

If you could show that litigation produces less pirating, again the data a few years ago showed the inverse correlation, then you might have something, but I want to see the data.

The entire MP/RIAA PR campaign against "piracy" is based on their claim that they are loosing money, which has not only not been demonstrated, but in fact appears to be the opposite of what is happening.

Copyright has become a broken social convention, because the copyright conglomerates have sought to extend it indefinitely, and to use strong arm tactics and dishonesty to enforce their power grab.

I'm in favor of a sane copyright system, but if we don't have one I can't really blame anybody for ignoring it.

>> ^Psychologic:

>> ^heropsycho:

And of course people are going to be less likely to buy something when they can get it for free.

Okay, I keep hearing this " big problem, people don't buy ". Can either of you back this up?

The facts the last time I checked were exactly the opposite, file sharing correlates with more purchasing. nobody is loosing money, they are just loosing control.

Until somebody can at least show an inverse correlation in ( profit/publication ):( files pirated ) I'm calling bullshit, the only problem with intellectual property in "western society" is that the public domain has been raided by infinite copyright terms.

>> ^ghark:

The thing I didn't understand is why the lawyer didn't really answer why it wasn't a class action lawsuit. he mentioned that it would benefit everyone, but wouldn't the suit be more powerful if more people were involved? Or is that not possible for this type of lawsuit?


My understanding is that Chris, as a person potentially covered by the act is bringing a criminal charge against the administration for infringing on his constitutional rights. Class action cases are general ( always? ) civil court cases, and seek damages. Seeking a constitutional ruling and a stay, is more wide reaching than seeking damages or protections for a single class.

Poe suggests that this might be real, I'm too tickled by the possibility that this is all one crazy performance piece, to accept that.

I could be depressed by how lame this is, or I can be overjoyed by how hard she is pwning the fundies.

I fully acknowledge that I may very well be wrong, but since the truth, in this case is both un-verifiable, and completely irrelevant to anything else, I prefer to accept that this is all a brilliantly executed satire.

Umm.... Not a fight?

>> ^shinyblurry:

A mind created and designed it, therefore a mind is involved, therefore it is an invalid example..


So, by this argument, if we live in a deist universe, in which the universe was created but the creator pays it no mind, then abiogenesis and evolution by natural selection are completely plausible. That's an interesting position, it does not really help you here.

>> ^shinyblurry:

Abiogenesis is unproven because there is no evidence, it is just metaphysics. It's your faith that it is true. It is not the only coherent explanation, it is just the explanation that you have to believe because you have ruled out an intelligent designer apriori.

You seem to not understand the meaning of apriori. A few hundred years ago everybody in the western world, at least claimed to, believe the creation myth of genesis. We got to here from there, don't pretend your ideology has not had a chance, you were in charge of the game, we called your bluff, you just had nothing in your hand, you still don't.

Evolving molecules exist, they came into being at some point after it was possible for them to exist in this universe. The only non-magic hypotheses we have are based on a naturalistic model where these molecules are generated by a series of non-evolving processes. The gaps in the chemical record are very much like the gaps in the fossil record used to be, we have not filled them all, but neither have we found one that can not be crossed, and no reason to think they will not be filled.

>> ^shinyblurry:
Here is the hypothesis


The ID position is stated there in four parts, the last three follow from common decent, and the first one is either false, like all Behe's examples, or undemonstrated. It is mathematically possible that there is irreducible complexity somewhere, just as with faeries and unicorns, absence of evidence is not evidence of existence.

All the Discovery Institute links were painful in their fail. DI is a propaganda organization, only one of their links discusses any scientific discovery, and it actually makes no ID claims. The rest of the articles either make no claim, or have been shown to be false. If Well's article is going to be your flagship falsifiable ID position, fine, but you should probably know it's already been falsified here .

>> ^shinyblurry:

There is obviously a concrete difference since life doesn't come from non-life, and has never once been observed doing so. You have everything in the world to prove here.

This is your premise, and your conclusion, draw the line, and I will show you something on either side that confounds your "distinction". If you can't define the problem, I can't show it's flaws. Refusing to define your terms may get you by in theology, we are talking chemistry here, chemistry does not "work in mysterious ways".

>> ^shinyblurry:

if our mental processes are just chemical reactions, then there is no reason to believe anything is true. If our mental states have their origin in non-rational causes, rationality can't be trusted. You can't know if the rationality we have from evolutionary processes is discerning the truth of the world or not.

Ontology can't help you here, gods, since the can intervene, make it more difficult to make truth claims, not easier.

>> ^shinyblurry:

The reason it is labeled magic is because there is no proof.

There is no proof of anything. There is evidence of RNA/DNA metabolism, there is evidence of general chemical probability, there is no evidence for irreducible complexity, or anticipatory design in any non lab built genome. You can scream about nonexistent, and unneeded proof all day, science follows the evidence.

>> ^shinyblurry:
What I insist is that you substantiate your claims, which you have failed to do.

I have claimed that there are methods to synthesize information that do not require the interaction of a mind. I have provided an example of one such system.

You object, but without either asserting that the simulation is a mind, or that it does not synthesize information, but instead you make some vague assertion about how it's instead not an example.

>> ^shinyblurry:
Abiogenesis is purely metaphysics and unproven.

Abiogenesis is, like all real knowledge, unproven. None the less it is, at present, the only coherent explanation for what can be demonstrated to exist.

There is no ID hypothesis, Behe came the closest to actually trying, and any competent high school biology student could pick his little charade to pieces in a few hours with a half decent encyclopedia.

Given two possibilities, one being unlikely, and the other being false, I'll go with unlikely.

>> ^shinyblurry:
So you acknowledge that information is trivially synthesized, by
non-minds? That's the opposite of your original claim. Is that a
retraction?

No, see above.


You said, and I quote: "if you already have DNA, you can certainly expect a cell to form."

Do you mean that DNA must already have the information required to do so? because lots of DNA does not, otherwise are you asserting that DNA is somehow "mind", which you claim would be required for that information to come into being?

>> ^shinyblurry:


The distinction between "life" and "non-life" does not exist.

So there is no difference between you and a rock? I can admit I see similarities, heart wise..:)

Let's see some evidence for your claim that there is no difference between life and non-life.


I am arguing not that there are no differences in the world, but that there is no concrete distinction between life and chemistry. You can assume there is, you can assert there is, but until you can demonstrate that there is I have nothing to disprove.

You can't disprove unicorns, I can't disprove the life boundary, and we have no reason to believe either exists.

>> ^shinyblurry:
It's not false. This is your pathway to DNA: RNA - (MAGIC) - DNA This is your pathway to RNA: ROCKS - (MAGIC) - RNA Just because you can get RNA to self-replicate doesn't automatically mean it is either likely or plausible this could happen.

Please consider this image: http://en.citizendium.org/images/thumb/f/f6/RNA_base_vs_DNA_base.jpg/350px-RNA_base_vs_DNA_base.jpg

The bottom right hydroxyl group is the only difference between RNA and DNA, to suggest that molecules can't lose parts, is to argue that the universe is not as it observably is.

Since the step you clearly label (MAGIC) in the RNA-> DNA path is so obviously trivial, why should anybody believe that the other step you label (MAGIC) is any more complex?

>> ^shinyblurry:
It is an effort to empirically detect whether the "apparent" design in nature, which biologists acknowledge, is actual design. It is only useless to you because you have ruled out design apriori, which is just simply ignorant.

Perhaps an "effort", but not a method, or a hypothesis. ID makes no predictions, it simply tries to find arguments to prop up a baseless assumption, that is the opposite of science.

If any ID proponent, or any theologian for that matter, can demonstrate even one example of anything true that their ideology can reliably tell us that we don't already know I will admit that it has predictive power, and that it could qualify as a hypothesis, and then eventually a theory. I'm betting you can't find one.

>> ^shinyblurry:
Let's start over because you're just going all over the place


No, lets not. I provided counter evidence to one absurd baseless assertion of yours , that "information" only comes from "minds", you have not provided any basis on which to defend your original position.

Your "this is going badly, let's start over" tactic is cute, don't get me wrong, but you insist that your ideological position be taken seriously, and I intend to do so, until it lies in tattered shreds on the floor.

>> ^shinyblurry:


This is the point: Your entire example is irrelevent. Yeah, you can generate all sorts of stuff when a system is already in place, when you have a preprogrammed design that itself generates designs. If you already have wheels and a chassis, you can build a boxcar pretty easily. Boxcars are inevitable at this point.


So you acknowledge that information is trivially synthesized, by non-minds? That's the opposite of your original claim. Is that a retraction?

So now you accept that once you have atoms, gravity, time, electromagnetism, you inevitably have the possibility of self replicating molecular systems, and therefor "life"? You seem to have decided that life is a magical barrier, but this distinction is false. The distinction between "life" and "non-life" does not exist.

You acknowledge that once a mechanism for inheritance exists the rest is inevitable, I agree, you simply lack the sense of scale on which the universe operates, which makes the preceding step entirely plausible.

>> ^shinyblurry:
You have to have proteins to create DNA and you have to have DNA to create proteins.


This is simply false. RNA codes for proteins, but RNA requires no proteins for it's own replication, it is entirely plausible, arguably likely, that once you have RNA, DNA would get a chance to compete.

>> ^shinyblurry:

Science has attempted to solve this problem by saying that RNA molecules evolved from the soup, yet there is no logical pathway for this to happen, because natural selection and mutation cannot account for it.


You assume that the argument is Random -> RNA -> DNA, but it is not. There are many simpler organic self replicators that, in the absence of an RNA ecosystem, would be able to prime the pump, by converting simple molecules into those more likely to contribute to spontaneous RNA synthesis, very much in the same way that cells work by creating conditions where the high concentration of particular ingredients allows proteins to replicate DNA, which proteins would not be able to do in the wild.

>> ^shinyblurry:

The problems are far too vast to overcome, and experiment has yieled no conclusive results. So, my point stands, that intelligent design is a better explanation for the complex coded information in DNA, which naturalistic processes cannot account for.


ID is not even a postulation, much less a hypothesis, it provides no information, illuminates nothing, it is theology dressed up in the garb of science. It's only science if it reliably predicts things, ID fails at this basic task, because, like all theology, it is useless.

>> ^shinyblurry:

I haven't conflated anything. You've simply misconstrued everything I've said because of your belief that RNA is simple, or could spontaneously evolve.


Really? You thought that putting those two words together like that would convince me that you are taking anybody else seriously?

>> ^shinyblurry:

You think your simulation demonstrates the creation of information which could lead to a system that creates cellular life.


No, Please re-read your claim, and my response. You claimed that Information comes Only from minds, I provide counter evidence, you assert that I was claiming something else. I claim that you are not listening, you provide evidence.

>> ^shinyblurry:

such a system could never generate RNA of cellular life.


We have such a system, it's called the universe, and in it we find RNA. The universe does generate RNA, you and I are not in dispute on this point, only on the mechanism of that generation.

>> ^shinyblurry:
Even if it could generate RNA, to evolve the correct sequences of RNA nucleotides to form even one protein would be impossible to achieve even over billions of years, let alone enough proteins to create a cell. Even if it could generate RNA, to evolve the correct sequences of RNA nucleotides to form even one protein would be impossible to achieve even over billions of years, let alone enough proteins to create a cell.


That claim makes no sense.

To assert that something takes a particular amount of time requires a context of how wide spread the attempt is.

As an example I can not build a rocket to put people on the moon, this is impossible, I will not live long enough... None the less a large number of people, working in concert, with worse technology that we have access to did accomplish this task, it's possibility is a matter of scale.

In order to make an anthropic argument, I only need life to have happened once in all the space and time of the entire universe. Now I realize that you are just talking out your ass, that you have no numbers to back up your claims of probability, that your are simply making an argument from incredulity, but if you decide to try and cover your ass with some numbers realize we have about 100B years and 10⁸⁰ atoms to work with.

>> ^shinyblurry:

There is no experiment which has demonstrated that RNA can spontaneously evolve and be capable of creating life, now or ever. There is also no experiment which shows life evolving from non-living matter.


There again with the nonsense phrase, trying to really hit it home that you really have no clue what you are arguing against?

RNA is a molecule, it's not magic, it does nothing but what chemistry would expect of it, and still, it generates information through mutation/selection. This is, again, evidence against your absurd initial position which your argument from incredulity can not address. Even if you question the source of the molecule, the mechanism is the same, RNA is not a god antenna, it's a molecule, that synthesizes information through a simple, well understood, physical process.

>> ^shinyblurry:

The information is what designed and built the simulation, and its structure generates different arrangements of that information based on certain preprogrammed variables which do not change. You are not making anything truly new, rather you are just shuffling things around.


And neither has anybody, and you never have, and I never will. We are all bounded by our universe, we can not create or destroy, only move and arrange. There is, as far as we can tell, never anything new, and to say that that is true of the simulation provides no information about how it may be different from the physical universe in which we live, it is only one more way in which it is similar.

>> ^shinyblurry:

Such a simulation could never evolve on its own outside of programming.


Do you not get the concept of simulation? Nobody has claimed that the simulation is "real" only that it mimics, in a predictive way, certain aspects of the physical universe. Specifically it illustrates the compounding result of mutation/combination/selection, which is to synthesize information about the environment in a manner coded to best deal with that environment, a process, which you assert can not happen.

>> ^shinyblurry:

Just as DNA could never evolve on its own. The digital information it contains transcends its medium, just as a story transcends the paper and ink it is written on. Information only comes from minds, and that is what DNA code points to.


Your comparison is poor, paper and ink don't create words, DNA does. Understanding the information may require a "mind", whatever that means, but the information effecting and shaped by the physical world only requires mutation/selection, and we had that on this planet for billions of years before anybody realized there was any information in the system at all.

>> ^shinyblurry:

You're just illustrating my point. That program was designed and coded by a mind. It is the coded digital information which makes it possible.


So you are claiming that the designs are placed in the simulation by the programmer, that they are deceiving you when they claim that the car is designed by genetic selection?

There is information in the simulation, the information is in the physics and the randomly generated track, just as in our universe the physical constraints create conditions that privilege certain patterns in both chemistry and behavior. Since the only non-random input to the system is physics based on our own, are you claiming that physics is a "mind" ?

>> ^shinyblurry:

It is the same story for DNA, and there isn't any naturalistic explanation for where the digital information came from; rather we know that information comes from minds, just if we see a message written in the sand we know a mind was behind it.


Here you conflate the data with the structure, you miss the basic fact that there are many, not terribly complex, chemicals that self replicate. You seem to be unaware that RNA ( referenced in your little puff piece apologetics video) is both self sorting and self replicating, requiring effectively no external mechanism to enable the creation of a system which synthesis information in the same manner as the simulation I linked.

Again you refuse to have a serious conversation, as you will not even address my points, you claim things without evidence, and then "support" them with hyperbole. If you are not claiming that physics is a mind, then you have not even bothered to comprehend the most basic explanation of that you claim to be arguing against, you are instead arguing against your own fever dream strawman, and not addressing any of us at all.

If you intend to navel gaze, please use your navel, the internet consist mostly of real people, Poe's law suggests you may even be one of them, so please at least attempt to seriously interact with us.

>> ^shinyblurry:

Take DNA, for instance. DNA is a complex coded language which contains grammar, syntax, phoenetics, etc There is no naturalistic explanation that can account for it; DNA is information, and information only comes from minds.


You claim that mutation/selection can't account for information, please run this http://boxcar2d.com/ for a few hours and explain where the resulting vehicles design comes from.

This shows, to anybody willing to watch, that the process popularized by Darwin addresses both your concerns. This is well established, has not been seriously challenged.

Please refrain from trying to make Scientific claims unless you spend the time to become scientifically literate.