Posts by Kyle Matthews
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And when a party proposes policies with the primary aim of enriching its supporters at the expense of the majority of New Zealanders or of future generations, that's not something we should politiely look the other way on.
See, I doubt 'primary aim' there. That might be a side effect (in the opinion of some people) of what the National Party plans to do, but it's not their primary aim.
Most of them believe that lower taxes are good for the economy and society as a whole, both now and in the future. They're not all trying to make themselves rich and recover handouts from the poor. Largely they believe the rhetoric that comes out of their mouths. It's a much better debate for society is the other side recognises that.
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But: run it through the MMP calculator and see the results: Nat 52, Lab 48, Greens 11, Maori 4-7, ACT 4, Progs and UF 1 each. Its a three-way coalition either way, with the Maori Party as kingmakers (and ACT as the other partner in their menage a trois).
Really depends on the size of the overhang.
If Maori get all 7 seats, but only enough list vote for 1 of them, it's 126 MPs in the house, and you need 64 to form a government (the progressive will possibly also cause an overhang?).
That's National, Maori, Act, _and_ UF.
Or Labour, Greens, Maori (and progressive most likely).
It gets even more complicated if NZ First get in through Tauranga. That'd be 3 or 4 seats, at least one of which would come off Labour, and one off National. Be like herding cats, dogs, and whales together to try and form a government.
But seriously
Yeah, to point out the obvious, my comment wasn't serious.
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Just because you want copyright to be a property right, doesn't mean it is. History, society and the law are against you on this.
To push Mark's example above about copy rights descending from the crown. That's true of many other rights, including licenses to produce certain things, and property rights. All land used to be owned by the Crown and was granted to people in return for certain things (taxes, service on the lord's land). It was only inheritable with the consent of the crown - and the crown tended to take a whack out of all property when it was inherited.
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Oh, and just for something completely different, a citizen journalist captures the bigotry and knuckle-dragging stupidity of punters at a Sarah Palin campaign rally
So many arguments for a quick intelligence/current affairs test before you are allowed to vote.
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Firstly, I endorse this YouYube clip.
Do I detect the dulcet tones of Grant Robertson?
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If you can steal it, then it's physical.
No, things don't need to be physical to be stolen, a quick google will give you some examples: eg. Intellectual property is still property.
It would seem capitalist to mug someone and take their wallet, but we don't because as a society we have decided we don't like that sort of thing.
Well that's misrepresenting capitalism. Capitalism requires a free market, not people mugging each other.
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Ideas aren't, as it takes no resources to copy them. Tell me a story and we now both hold the story
Those two sentences don't propertly relate. Telling you a story isn't a breach of copyright. Copying the story is. Copyright is about me telling you the story, and limiting what you can do with it without my permission.
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So, copyright should be used to prevent people telling the stories how they want?
Copyright doesn't prevent people telling the stories that they want. It means that they need to get the agreement of the copyright holder. That's not the same thing.
That might involve paying the copyright holder. It might also mean coming to some agreement with the copyright holder about what you're doing to do. They might even get veto over the final product.
But it's very possible, LOTR movies got made, I enjoyed them, and the copyright holder of the film rights got paid some money from my movie tickets.
What it sounds like you're saying is that someone should be able to create one thing, and live off that forever. That works in almost no other space.
Lots of people invent something and then live off it forever, or could if they wanted to. Various patented products have done that for people quite often. If there's nothing wrong with that for an object based on a good idea, then I can't see why there should be something wrong with that for a story based on a good idea.
Can you handle it? Can you make copies out of nothing? In peoples' heads? Can you draw a line around it that everyone can see?
Hmm. You can steal something which isn't physical. You can steal information from a company, or the identity of a person. Both are illegal, and neither is protected for only X years from its creation.
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A great example of this is is that Romeo and Juliet move that came out 10 or 15 years ago. All the original lines, but applied to a modern situation. Were Shakespeare's plays tied up in copyright, society loses out because they can't do that.
That's not necessarily the case.
J R R Tolkein's work has obviously just been redone and come to the big screen. Newline cinema had to work with the copyright holder (Tolkien sold movie rights in the 1960s) to get the rights.
Copyright doesn't prevent other people publishing the work, it just requires that you do it with the agreement of the copyright holder.
Tolkien was quite picky about adaptions of his work. Wikipedia states that he expressly forbade that Disney ever be given rights over any of his work. That wish possibly won't be respected once his work falls out of copyright, Disney could both use his work for whatever they want, and do so without compensating his estate at all.
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You can talk about copyright being property till you are blue in the face - it won't change the fact that, under that same law, it is not property.
Laws come from somewhere - typically principles, but not always. Arguing that copyright isn't property just because the law says it isn't, doesn't really make sense in the context of this discussion.
Given that a lot of people have argued that the law should be changed (in various ways), if copyright isn't the same as property rights, then I'd be much more interested if you stepped back before the law and say why copy rights are different. That's a much more useful discussion.
Currently your argument is about as useful as "sodomy is illegal, so gay people having sex should be arrested".