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PepperFritz said:
Psychegram: I'm curious as to why have you not answered any of the questions I posed to you in this thread, and instead simply continued with long-winded rationalizations and justifications for your behaviour that have little bearing on the issues under discussion?

PepperFritz,

I am not wanting to take away from the main theme of this thread, but your quote above just keeps coming back to me. I think you are out of line here. I am seeing a very subjective message in your post, as it seems to be very personal in nature. It is as if 'you' are miffed that Psychegram has not responded to you directly. You also made a reference to his ignoring 'your' points posted in the STO Economy thread. Again, it seems very personal, very subjective, very much like 'listen to me'.
 
gwb1995 said:
PepperFritz said:
Psychegram: I'm curious as to why have you not answered any of the questions I posed to you in this thread, and instead simply continued with long-winded rationalizations and justifications for your behaviour that have little bearing on the issues under discussion?

PepperFritz,

I am not wanting to take away from the main theme of this thread, but your quote above just keeps coming back to me. I think you are out of line here. I am seeing a very subjective message in your post, as it seems to be very personal in nature. It is as if 'you' are miffed that Psychegram has not responded to you directly. You also made a reference to his ignoring 'your' points posted in the STO Economy thread. Again, it seems very personal, very subjective, very much like 'listen to me'.

I don't see it that way at all. PepperFritz's questions to Psychegram in this threads had been very relevant, albeit not very pleasing. The fact that psychegram ignored them tells a lot about his willingness to face the truth, to Work on himself. PepperFritz's reference to the other thread was just to highlight that it had been a pattern instead of an isolated occurrence.

I'm also curious why you jump to his defence at this point, when he is getting a mirror about himself. Your post is doing more damage for psychegram's learning (if he still cares to learn) than you can imagine.
 
gwb1995 said:
I am not wanting to take away from the main theme of this thread, but your quote above just keeps coming back to me. I think you are out of line here. I am seeing a very subjective message in your post, as it seems to be very personal in nature. It is as if 'you' are miffed that Psychegram has not responded to you directly. You also made a reference to his ignoring 'your' points posted in the STO Economy thread. Again, it seems very personal, very subjective, very much like 'listen to me'.

Hi gwb: The questions I posed to psychegram in this thread have a very specific purpose. If she were to attempt to answer them, she might begin to see how inconsistently and illogically she applies the "principles" she believes are behind her behaviour, helping her to see that they are really just rationalizing self-justifications that she applies to situations that benefit her personally. I do not see her ignoring those questions as a "slight" to myself, but as a manipulative avoidance of having to acknowledge those illogical inconsistencies.

Also, as anart has also pointed out, there is a serious misconception on Psychgram's part evident in both this thread and the previous thread, about what she perceives to be the STO-leaning nature of this world, which allows her to believe that she herself is STO in nature and is practicing STO behaviour in her "free downloading" activities. This is a serious error on her part in her reading of the material associated with this forum, and will only continue to confuse her posts. The fact that she has a pattern of "skipping over" and not addressing any comments/questions that may help her see her misconceptions is both disturbing and counter-productive to the purpose of this forum. As Bobo08 points out, it represents a pattern of behaviour that needs to be addressed.

Hope that clarifies my "motivations" somewhat.
 
gwb1995 said:
PepperFritz,

I am not wanting to take away from the main theme of this thread, but your quote above just keeps coming back to me. I think you are out of line here. I am seeing a very subjective message in your post, as it seems to be very personal in nature. It is as if 'you' are miffed that Psychegram has not responded to you directly. You also made a reference to his ignoring 'your' points posted in the STO Economy thread. Again, it seems very personal, very subjective, very much like 'listen to me'.

Hi gwb, you may want to consider that your 'be nice' program has been activated. It does not serve the 'real' part of a person to allow them to sleep soundly when the world is on fire. Making a person more comfortable in their illusions is antithetical to waking them up - which is what this forum is here to do.

That does not mean being 'mean and nasty' to a person - but it does mean shocking them if necessary in an attempt to allow them to 'See' themselves. If they cannot, then there is no need to waste any more time and energy on them. If they can, in those moments of shocks, 'See' themselves in even the smallest of ways, then that person may have a chance to 'get out alive'.
 
Pepperfritz:

I didn't respond (yet) to the Economics post because I didn't have time - I didn't go near a computer all weekend - not because I was ignoring it. I haven't even read it until today, and (again, when I have time, possibly today but probably tomorrow) I will respond.

anart:

Pepperfritz was right, my 'I must be right!' program was fully activated. It's possibly one of my greatest flaws, and you were doing me a service in holding up the mirror, and helping me to look at something from an unaccustomed perspective. You were quite effective in this: I was unable to sleep last night, and just tossed and turned while the things you wrote (and my own at least partially automatic responses) went around in my head. I went through a gauntlet of emotional responses, and in the end I learned something about projecting my own traits onto the actions of others. It was quite illuminating and for that I thank you.

I'd like to state, for the record, that I don't consider myself to be STO. I know that, until the transition comes, reaching STO candidate status is about the best I can aim for. I'm also all too aware of how bad the situation is on the big blue marble - from a theoretical perspective at least - and I know full well things are going to get much worse before they get better. The contact potential difference has to build up sufficiently before the transition can be made, and until it does things will worsen; but, the potential will build up enough within a few years, yes? My statement about 'heading in an STO direction' referred to the idea that, when the Earth transitions to 4th density, it will do so as STO, ie the ultimate direction, not the proximate one.

The C's referred to networking as a 4th density STO concept that was being expressed due to the proximity of the Wave, if I remember correctly. So that had me thinking that other refracted concepts might well appear as the Wave draws nearer: unavoidably corrupted by expression in an STS world, yes, but still of an ultimately STO origin. I then thought that, perhaps mistakenly, file-sharing networks might be an example of this.

p.s. Do I really come off as that self-important?

p.p.s. It's 'he', actually. Just out of curiosity, is 'she' the default pronoun here? And if so, why?
 
I happened upon this post by Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing, which is relevant to this thread about copyright. I thought I'd reproduce it here to add to the discussion.

Why I Copyfight

Why does all this copyright reform stuff matter, anyway? What's at stake?

Everything.

Until a very short time ago, copyright was an industrial regulation. If you fell under copyright's domain, it meant that you were using a piece of extraordinary industrial apparatus — a printing press, a motion-picture camera, a record press. The cost of this apparatus was significant, so adding a couple hundred bucks for the services of a skilled copyright attorney to the deal wasn't much of a hardship. It merely tacked a couple percentage points of overhead onto the cost of doing business.

When non-industrial entities (e.g., people, schools, church groups, etc.) interacted with copyrighted works, they did things that copyright law didn't have anything to say about: they read books, they listened to music, they sang around the piano or went to the movies. They discussed this stuff. They sang it in the shower. Retold it (with variations) to the kids at bedtime. Quoted it. Painted murals for the kids' room based on it.

Then came the early days of the copyfight: the analog period, when VCRs, double-cassette-decks, photocopiers, and other proto-copying technology came along. Now it was possible to do things that rose to the realm of copyright's regulated activities (copying, performing, displaying, adapting) with stuff lying around the house. Dealer rooms at cons sometimes sported crudely bound fanfic "novels," teenagers courted each other with mix tapes, you could bring some HBO over to the neighbors' on VHS cassette and have a movie party.

And yet, there was comparatively little danger in this process. Although these activities were of dubious legality (certainly, the big rightsholder groups considered them technological suitcase nukes, comparing the VCR to the Boston Strangler and promising that "home taping is killing music"), the cost of enforcement was very high. Publishers and record labels and studios couldn't watch what you did at home and work and parties and cons, not without an expensive network of paid snitches whose salaries would exceed any losses they were experiencing.

Enter the Internet and the personal computer. These two technologies represent a perfect storm for bringing ordinary peoples' ordinary activity into the realm of copyright: every household has the apparatus to commit mass acts of infringement (the PC) and those infringements take place over a public conduit (the Internet) that can be cheaply monitored, allowing for low-cost enforcement against ordinary people by the thousand.

What's more, Internet transactions are more apt to commit a copyright offense than their offline equivalents. That's because every transaction on the Internet involves copies. The Internet is a system for efficiently making copies between computers. Whereas a conversation in your kitchen involves mere perturbations of air by noise, the same conversation on the net involves making thousands of copies. Every time you press a key, the keypress is copied several times on your computer, then copied into your modem, then copied onto a series of routers, thence (often) to a server, which may make hundreds of copies both ephemeral and long-term, and then to the other party(ies) to the conversation, where dozens more copies might be made.

Copyright law valorizes copying as a rare and noteworthy event. On the Internet, copying is automatic, massive, instantaneous, free, and constant. Clip a Dilbert cartoon and stick it on your office door and you're not violating copyright. Take a picture of your office door and put it on your homepage so that the same co-workers can see it, and you've violated copyright law, and since copyright law treats copying as such a rarified activity, it assesses penalties that run to the hundreds of thousands of dollars for each act of infringement.

There's a word for all the stuff we do with creative works — all the conversing, retelling, singing, acting out, drawing, and thinking: we call it culture.

Culture's old. It's older than copyright.

The existence of culture is why copyright is valuable. The fact that we have a bottomless appetite for songs to sing together, for stories to share, for art to see and add to our visual vocabulary is the reason that people will pay money for these things.

Let me say that again: the reason copyright exists is because culture creates a market for creative works. If there was no market for creative works, there'd be no reason to care about copyright.

Content isn't king: culture is. The reason we go to the movies is to have something to talk about. If I sent you to a desert island and told you to choose between your records and your friends, you'd be a sociopath if you chose the music.

Culture's imperative is to share information: culture is shared information. Science fiction readers know this: the guy across from you on the subway with a gaudy SF novel in his hands is part of your group. You two have almost certainly read some of the same books, you've got some shared cultural referents, some things to talk about.

When you hear a song you love, you play it for the people in your tribe. When you read a book you love, you shove it into the hands of your friends to encourage them to read it too. When you see a great show, you get your friends to watch it too — or you seek out the people who've already watched it and strike up a conversation with them.

So the natural inclination of anyone who is struck by a piece of creative work is to share it. And since "sharing" on the Internet is the same as "copying," this puts you square in copyright's crosshairs. Everyone copies. Dan Glickman, the ex-Congressman who now heads up the Motion Picture Association of America (as pure a copyright maximalist as you could hope to meet) admitted to copying Kirby Dick's documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated (a scorching critique of the MPAA's rating system) but excused it because the copy was "in [his] vault." To pretend that you do not copy is to adopt the twisted hypocrisy of the Victorians who swore that they never, ever masturbated. Everyone knows that they themselves are lying, and a large number of us know that everyone else is lying too.

But copyright's problem is that most of the copyists cheerfully admit that they copy. The majority of American Internet users engage in infringing file-sharing. If file-sharing were stamped out tomorrow, they'd swap the same files — and more — by trading hard drives, or thumb drives, or memory cards (and more data would change hands, albeit more slowly).

Copyists either know that they infringe but don't care, or they believe that the law can't possible criminalize what they're doing and assume that it punishes more egregious forms of copying, such as selling pirate DVDs in the street. In fact, copyright law penalizes selling DVDs at a much lower level than sharing the same movies over the Internet for free, and the risk of buying one of these DVDs is much lower (thanks to the high costs of enforcement against people making transactions in the real world) than the risk of downloading them online.

Indeed, copyists are busily building an elaborate ethos of what can and can't be shared, and with whom, and under what circumstances. They join private sharing circles, argue norms among themselves, and in word and deed create a plethora of "para-copyrights" that reflect a cultural understanding of what they're meant to be doing.

The tragedy is that these para-copyrights have almost nothing in common with actual copyright law. No matter how hard you adhere to them, you're probably breaking the law — so if you're in making anime music videos (videos for pop music made by cleverly splicing together clips of anime movies — google for "amv" to see examples), you can abide by all the rules of your group about not showing them to outsiders and only using certain sources for music and video, but you're still committing millions of dollars' worth of infringement every time you sit down to your keyboard.

It's not surprising that para-copyright and copyright don't have much to say to one another. After all, copyright regulates what giant companies do with each other. Para-copyright regulates what individuals do with each other in a cultural settings. Why be surprised that these rulesets are so disjointed?

It's entirely possible that there's a detente to be reached between the copyists and the copyright holders: a set of rules that only try to encompass "culture" and not "industry." But the only way to bring copyists to the table is to stop insisting that all unauthorized copying is theft and a crime and wrong. People who know that copying is simple, good, and beneficial hear that and assume that you're either talking nonsense or that you're talking about someone else.

Because if copying on the Internet were ended tomorrow, it would be the end of culture on the Internet too. YouTube would vanish without its storehouse of infringing clips; LiveJournal would be dead without all those interesting little user-icons and those fascinating pastebombs from books, news-stories and blogs; Flickr would dry up and blow away without all those photos of copyrighted, trademarked and otherwise protected objects, works, and scenes.

These conversations are why we want the things we're conversing about. Fanfic is written by people who love books. YouTube clips are made by people who want you to watch the shows they're taken from and discuss them. LJ icons demonstrate affinity for works.

If culture loses the copyright wars, the reason for copyright dies with it.
 
psychegram said:
anart:
Pepperfritz was right, my 'I must be right!' program was fully activated. It's possibly one of my greatest flaws, and you were doing me a service in holding up the mirror, and helping me to look at something from an unaccustomed perspective. You were quite effective in this: I was unable to sleep last night, and just tossed and turned while the things you wrote (and my own at least partially automatic responses) went around in my head. I went through a gauntlet of emotional responses, and in the end I learned something about projecting my own traits onto the actions of others. It was quite illuminating and for that I thank you.

That's a good sign.

pg said:
p.s. Do I really come off as that self-important?

Pretty much.  However  - it is likely only when you are 'in confluence' - when you are so identified with what ever program is running (in this case 'being right') that your real self has no voice at all.  Your false personality runs the show - and your false personality is quite self-important - this is pretty much how it works with everyone.

It's not the end of the world - it is an enormous opportunity for you, if you can begin to battle this aspect of your predator - but do not underestimate the power of self-importance.  It's one of the biggies.

pg said:
p.p.s. It's 'he', actually. Just out of curiosity, is 'she' the default pronoun here? And if so, why?

Well, I knew it was 'he'.  Pepperfritz uses 'she' and I actually find it quite refreshing when people use a default pronoun of she - it usually brings out interesting reactions - from the 'he's, that is.   ;)
 
Hello Anart, Bobo08, and Pepperfritz,

It was not my intention to support psychegram in my post to Pepperfritz. That is why I thought I had expressed that with my statement about not wanting to take anything away from the thread. I know see that I did a poor job in communicating. From reading the thread I could see that psychegram was being show the mirror, and understood why. However, when I read Pepperfritz post, all I could see was a very subjective statement, and that is what I pointed out.

Please help me here. If Pepperfritz's post was made in another thread, where there was not a situation, such as this one going on, would it viewed as subjective? If not then what am I missing here? If yes, then what can I do to learn to see the difference? I am still reading the statements as subjective. I don't think I am running any 'be nice' program or the other alternative program of 'being mean'. I could definitely be wrong, so please help me to understand. I am here to learn, so any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

gwb
 
gwb1995 said:
If yes, then what can I do to learn to see the difference? 

You could read what was written as it is - objectively -  without your own emotional input.

This is, however, no small task, especially when one is used to the thinking with their emotions - with the intellect usurping energy from the emotional center. 

Short of that, you could trust in the network enough to understand that when someone steps over the line, they WILL be called on it.

It is most important for you to understand that simply stating that you had no intention to 'take anything away from the thread' is not enough when you have, in fact, done exactly that due to not seeing things as they actually are.
 
anart said:
pg said:
p.s. Do I really come off as that self-important?

Pretty much. However - it is likely only when you are 'in confluence' - when you are so identified with what ever program is running (in this case 'being right') that your real self has no voice at all. Your false personality runs the show - and your false personality is quite self-important - this is pretty much how it works with everyone.

It's not the end of the world - it is an enormous opportunity for you, if you can begin to battle this aspect of your predator - but do not underestimate the power of self-importance. It's one of the biggies.

Just when I thought I'd learned to not take myself seriously :-[ (I used to teach English in Japan, which involved a lot of dancing around and singing silly songs with six-year-olds....) All jesting aside, I will set to work on this.
anart said:
pg said:
p.p.s. It's 'he', actually. Just out of curiosity, is 'she' the default pronoun here? And if so, why?

Well, I knew it was 'he'. Pepperfritz uses 'she' and I actually find it quite refreshing when people use a default pronoun of she - it usually brings out interesting reactions - from the 'he's, that is. ;)

That's interesting. I like that convention, actually: it's quite jarring, having people assume you're female. I may adopt it myself ;)

Pinkerton said:
Thanks for posting that. Doctorow's been one of my heroes for a long time. Not just because of his views on copyright; he's a fantastic SF/slipstream writer, too.
 
Pinkerton said:
I happened upon this post by Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing, which is relevant to this thread about copyright. I thought I'd reproduce it here to add to the discussion.

Thanks Pinkerton,
I think he is really explaining things clearly and his success proves that it is possible to share without having to protect your copyright at all costs (aka suing people for nothing).

Funnily enough I recently did a commissioned work to illustrate his success in e-books...synchronicities.

More of his works and other things here _http://craphound.com/
 
gwb1995 said:
I am still reading the statements as subjective. I don't think I am running any 'be nice' program or the other alternative program of 'being mean'. I could definitely be wrong, so please help me to understand.

It is not enough to say "I read it as subjective" without also providing the objective observations that lead you to that conclusion. That implies that you are communicating only a *feeling", and not an objective analysis of what is being said, by whom, and to whom. It would be good exercise for you to explain to us in detail what causes you to read my post as "subjective" in nature. Are there specific words, or a tone that you perceive? What aspects of my post strike you as "non-objective"? What is it you think that I am not seeing, or mis-reading from PG's posts? Please be specific.
 
Cory Doctorow said:
The existence of culture is why copyright is valuable. The fact that we have a bottomless appetite for songs to sing together, for stories to share, for art to see and add to our visual vocabulary is the reason that people will pay money for these things.

Let me say that again: the reason copyright exists is because culture creates a market for creative works. If there was no market for creative works, there'd be no reason to care about copyright.

Content isn't king: culture is. The reason we go to the movies is to have something to talk about. If I sent you to a desert island and told you to choose between your records and your friends, you'd be a sociopath if you chose the music.

Culture's imperative is to share information: culture is shared information. Science fiction readers know this: the guy across from you on the subway with a gaudy SF novel in his hands is part of your group. You two have almost certainly read some of the same books, you've got some shared cultural referents, some things to talk about.

When you hear a song you love, you play it for the people in your tribe. When you read a book you love, you shove it into the hands of your friends to encourage them to read it too. When you see a great show, you get your friends to watch it too — or you seek out the people who've already watched it and strike up a conversation with them.

So the natural inclination of anyone who is struck by a piece of creative work is to share it.

That certainly is an interesting way of looking at it. The problem is that what most people end up paying for is corporate sponsored anti-culture, and the true artists, intellectuals and seers that have the ability to develop true culture, that goes beyond A influences, end up living lives of struggle and obscurity constantly threatened by the powers that are determined to keep us ignorant and helpless.

It's not just a question of supporting them financially either. It's also a question of making sure they have enough resources to disseminate their material to a wider audience, so that more people can benefit from it.
 
Miss Isness said:
The problem is that what most people end up paying for is corporate sponsored anti-culture, and the true artists, intellectuals and seers that have the ability to develop true culture, that goes beyond A influences, end up living lives of struggle and obscurity constantly threatened by the powers that are determined to keep us ignorant and helpless.

That's why I think they might not care about downloads as much as they want us to believe, they are quite happy if you keep swallowing the same dose of propaganda either way.

It's more about control and power (and making money out of it of course.).
They cannot control all the information on the internet, hence the need to criminalize it for our safety and to keep the economy (the one that is swallowing itself raw) going...
You might risk to download something that might open your mind a bit too much for them osit.

The problem is, imho, that it is hard to reconcile a true sharing spirit with the realities of the STS world.

Miss Isness said:
It's not just a question of supporting them financially either. It's also a question of making sure they have enough resources to disseminate their material to a wider audience, so that more people can benefit from it.

I think the internet is really a boon for all independant artists all categories included.
There is where you can build opportunities where you would not have before.
Of course the amount of noise is quite high (unconscious pun intended).
My two cents.
 
Tigersoap said:
That's why I think they might not care about downloads as much as they want us to believe, they are quite happy if you keep swallowing the same dose of propaganda either way.

...

You might risk to download something that might open your mind a bit too much for them osit.

It really is all about control of culture. An informal straw poll I've conducted amongst friends and acquaintances over the last several months (ever since I started looking at it that way) revealed that, back when Napster was first hitting the internet, no one used it to download mainstream music, at least not primarily. The focus for almost everyone I've asked was on finding music by obscure artists that was simply impossible to come by any other way. Just prior to Napster's appearance, Clear Channel had completed its consolidation of the American radio networks, and corporate America began shoving pop in the Britney Spears/Backstreet Boys mold down America's throat: saccharine music emptied of any political or moral message. Music often gives a foreshadowing of later cultural movements, and it must have been thought that, if the music could be wholly controlled, it would prove an invaluable way of controlling the people. Those who'd planned this must have been enraged when file-sharing grew in popularity, for it's allowed the culture to slip its bonds, even if only ever so slightly.
 
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