I mostly agree. On the other hand, the US was settled by religious extremists who were not welcome in Great Britain because their religion differed from the state religion.

They wisely saw that if the state established a religion, then a religion like theirs could be labelled as heretic. The result of that is that there is (or at least used to be) a separation of church and state in the US.

Maybe it does.

I still don’t understand why countries that are being bullied by the US, and having their trade deals unilaterally ripped up, still insist on respecting US copyrights and listening to takedown demands from US companies.

Just start treating it like the US treats pot in most places, decriminalize it, stop enforcing the law.

When the US was a new country, one of the first things it did was stop respecting copyrights on British books.

For a full century between 1790 and 1891 the only copyrights that applied in the US were ones by authors who were residents or citizens of the USA.

I think it makes perfect sense to protest the USA by refusing to honour US copyrights.

Guy who controls the cops and has absolute immunity for any crime he commits according to the Supreme Court commits another crime.

Yes people make creative things, but they don’t make games that requires a game studio and give them away for free

They used to, they called it shareware. It could happen again.

Look, if my personally ignoring copyrights for certain things causes certain media companies to go bankrupt and causes a whole re-think of how the creative economy should work, I think that’s a good thing. I don’t think my choices are that powerful, but we can always hope.

Of course you understand that people made creative things before copyright existed. You understand that that happened when the copyright term was 14 years. You understand that it happened before Warner Bros. Discovery existed.

You understand that it is possible for a company to make games without requiring a 120 year copyright term, right?

Right. Copyright is supposed to be for the good of the population. In order to encourage people to create things, they’re given a short monopoly on it after which it enters the public domain. The original copyright term was 14 years, I think.

The new setup is absurd. The public doesn’t benefit for more than a century, at which point the copyrighted item is probably of next to no value.

And, like you said, the artist rarely benefits. Writers are probably the ones who come the closest to benefitting. They only have to pay their agent a cut, their publisher, then, finally Amazon. With advances, etc. you have to wonder how much they get paid for each additional book sold. Musicians basically don’t make anything anymore, with the bullshit that Spotify (partially owned by the record companies) does. And then movies, TV, and other video stuff, the amount that creators get is massively watered down, and that’s after the “Hollywood accounting” makes profits from even successful things disappear.

I really don’t respect copyright anymore because it doesn’t benefit me (a member of the public) nor does it benefit the artist. It’s just a tool to hand money to certain entertainment conglomerates.

“give it back” means “seed to at least a ratio of 1.0”

There are a few authors and musicians who do things like that, selling things DRM-free on their own site. But, the US “content” industry is a handful of mega companies who are doing everything possible to maximize copyright so they can lock up and control as much stuff as possible.

Piracy has never been stealing.

When you steal something, the real issue is that the other person is deprived of some tangible item they used to have.

When you “pirate”, you’re merely violating a copyright. The government granted someone a monopoly on the expression of an idea, and you’re not respecting the government’s decision on that item’s exclusivity.

The answer is guillotines. Make the rich scared enough about losing their lives and they’ll voluntarily surrender some of their power. The trick is to scare the rich without the rest of the death and chaos that were part of the French Revolution.

And there is anger at being ignored

Hey now, being ignored is the Gen X identity, millennials don’t get to steal that!

But seriously, although the whole “generation names” stuff is BS, people are influenced by what things are like when they were growing up. People who had access to the Internet when they were kids are naturally going to see the world differently than those who didn’t.

It has also been a consistent fact that older voters vote more. So, as “Millennials” get older, they’ll probably vote more, like every group does.

The real question is whether those votes will matter. I’m not going to claim that there’s no difference between democrats and republicans. But, in the past the democrats and republicans that won their primaries were both heavily constrained in what they were allowed to do after taking office by powerful special interest groups. So, a democrat might be more likely to vote for something like more federal funding for the arts, and a republican might be more likely to vote for something like more tax cuts (without lowering spending of course), neither one would likely vote for an increase in the minimum wage because the people who fund their campaigns don’t want that to be considered.

This time, it could actually be different. There’s enough anger out there that people who aren’t owned by the wealthy are surviving the primary process. Some “traditional” democrats are either finding their courage, or are getting scared of what might happen to them if they don’t stand for the things their constituents care about.

Capitalism isn’t the problem, it’s wealth inequality. Do you think things were better back under the Manorialism system? No capitalism there, but the rich owned vast manors and the poor who worked their lands were born there and had to work that land for their entire lives.

All capitalism did was to give a shred of social mobility where none existed before.

That’s not a real name, however Go-fast boat is a real term that people use.

That’s not a real name, however Go-fast boat is a real term that people use.

That’s not a real name, however Go-fast boat is a real term that people use.

oof

Even before Trump border control officers already had way too much power.

I worked for a company that considered the US border only second to the Chinese border in terms of a risk to confidential information. If you went to China, you had to sign out a special laptop that was wiped clean of anything confidential. Going to the US, you were allowed to take your own work laptop, but they had special briefings detailing what to do in various situations to try to keep the company’s data confidential while complying with the warrantless searches at the border.

What it comes down to is who cares. In this case, the general public doesn’t care. The TSA / Homeland Security wants to be seen to be doing everything possible. At first it was about terrorism, then it became about child sex abuse imagery that apparently people were going to take across the border, unencrypted on their work laptops. So, the boundaries of what was reasonable to search for just kept getting expanded. A few civil rights orgs. and people who cared about privacy tried to push back, but even though they cared a lot about this issue, the general public didn’t care, so Homeland Security got even more rights to search.

IMO it’s the same reason why the US is essentially the only country that does citizenship-based taxation rather than residency-based taxation. The vast majority of citizens don’t care because they never work outside the US. The government cares because it’s free money, and sometimes they get to take money from mildly rich people who try to evade US taxes by moving to a tax haven. But, the vast majority of people who have to deal with these taxes are low and middle-income people who have dual citizenship and live in Canada, or are Americans who took a job overseas. They all hate having to file these taxes, and think they’re completely unfair, but it’s just too small a group for the government to care about.