“The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We’ve removed an ally of al Qaeda.” - George W. Bush, 1 May 2003
I suppose that’s not a controversial statement either, then. After all, a man in power said it.
shrug Never claimed I did. Never asked for the thread to be reopened, either.
Again, never claimed I did. I’m merely pointing out one instance of moderator rudeness.
Naturally. It is the Pit, after all, and while I outgrew flame wars long before I ever discovered the SDMB, I know many people still haven’t. I just find it amusing that others are getting so much more emotional about my thread than I am.
Oh dear. There go my dreams of being a message board celebrity. :rolleyes:
Very well: substitute your favorite quote from Rumsfeld, Rice, or Powell. Statements don’t become uncontroversial whenever someone who was appointed to office repeats them.
Mr. Dudas isn’t some appointed shmoe to be waved away as “controversial” simply because you don’t agree with him. He has several years of experience in the field of intellectual property and copyright law, including six as Counsel to the Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property, and Staff Director and Deputy General Counsel for the House Committee on the Judiciary. That’s where he guided the enactment of major patent, trademark and copyright policy such as the 1999 American Inventors Protection Act and the passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The statement is what’s controversial, and it remains controversial whether or not I agree with it, because there are thousands of other people out there who dispute it.
I’m not surprised that someone who helped pass the DMCA believes copyright infringement is equivalent to stealing. He can have whatever opinions he wants, but we must remember that they’re just that: opinions.
Well, when a user starts a Pit thread to lodge a complaint and the response tends more toward derision than sympathy, I feel it useful to make certain the user has an opportunity to become fully aware of the various aspects of social interplay involved.
Of course, you evidently don’t share my deep and abiding respect for adult education.
Actually, I posted in the Pit because this is where comments on moderator actions are supposed to go. But hey, I can’t blame you for coming in with your cute little insults - when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right?
Surprisingly enough, given our vociferous flamewar/debates on this topic in the past, I agree with aspects of Mr2001’s position (and in other news, the Pope announces he is a Hindu).
Copyright infringement is not theft, in the legal sense of the latter term. Theft is a different crime, with different penalties etc. I will defend (and have in the past defended against Mr2001) the proposition that copyright infringement and theft are functional and moral equivalents, but that is a different question. Arguing that copyright infringement is theft just gives anti-copyright fanatics the opportunity to prevaricate on the meaning of the latter term.
I don’t think Muffin’s cites contradict the position just stated. The court in both cited cases was speaking metaphorically only.
Accepting that position, Mr2001’s OP makes a certain kind of sense. Reading it literally, Dex’s statement about theft is incorrect and, to a complete anti-copyright fanatic, provocative.
There’s a sliding scale here. We would all be agreeing with this OP if the subject was a similar moderator comment that evinced a strong right/left position on politics. However, if a moderator made a comment that was highly provocative to persons who are outraged by the prospect of those who put their milk in their tea before the hot water instead of the other way around, none of us would bother.
Mr2001, your problem is that you don’t realise how close to the latter end of the scale you are.
Huh… my calendar says August, but clearly it’s already April.
Fair enough. After spending enough time on other forums with like-minded individuals, it’s easy for me to forget just how few people care enough about this issue to see the connection between Dex’s comment and past debates, and that even fewer of them are on my side.
I would’ve thought the general principle “if this is provocative, then a moderator shouldn’t post it immediately before closing a thread” would get more traction, which is why I drew an analogy in the OP to a hypothetical comment we could all agree was provocative. Judging from the responses so far, though, it seems there are only a handful of people who even agree with that much.
Oh, for God’s sake. The idea that copyright infringement is not theft is controversial in exactly the sameway that Young Earth Creationism or the Apollo Hoax are controversial. Sure, there’re thousands of people who believe both of those to be absolutely true, but that doesn’t mean that any reasonably intelligent person has pretend that there’s a shred of truth to either of them.
No, those are essentially factual matters: the world was either created 6000 years ago or it wasn’t, and man either landed on the moon or he didn’t. Equating copyright infringement with theft, OTOH, is a moral or ethical opinion that may be at odds with legal fact. On one side, we have the metaphorical use of the word “theft” in a few documents and statements from government official; on the other, we have for example Dowling v. United States (1985):
As far as “any reasonably intelligent person” goes, there are many ways to accurately describe Richard Stallman and Lawrence Lessig, but unintelligent isn’t one of them.
