Technically unlimited, but with an exponentially increasing annual registration fee.

Exactly. I don’t have a problem with artists profiting from their work. I don’t have a problem with their temporary exclusivity. The problem I have is when they never intend for that work to belong to the people; when they think they can maintain control over an idea long after it has become “culture”.

For the problem you mention, I would suggest that any studio who has been offered the work during the five year period owes royalties for a 5-year period after the studio publishes the work, even if it has since entered the public domain. Something along those lines would likely become a standard clause between the screenwriter’s guild and the studios, and doesn’t necessarily need to be enacted in law.

I wouldn’t be opposed to a longer period for some major works. Start with a standard, 5-year period from the time of original publication, then allow an extended copyright registration with an exponentially increasing annual fee. A few additional years would likely be affordable. The fifth, possibly. The sixth, only for the most profitable franchises, and the seventh being a large fraction of the national GDP. If James Cameron wants to pay for the entire military establishment through the proceeds of Avatar III, he can get one more year of protection.

I don’t really care to fight about what the original intent of copyright is,

Then you can get bent.

Art and invention benefit the whole of humanity. A work whose sole beneficiary is its creator does not qualify as art or invention, and deserves no protection.

The purpose of copyright is to promote science and the useful arts. The purpose is to get art and inventions into the public domain. The purpose is not “to get artists paid”. Getting them paid for their works and discoveries is the method by which copyright achieves its purpose. It is not the purpose itself.

If they are only interested in keeping their works proprietary; if they are uninterested in pushing them into the public domain, they are not achieving the purpose for which copyright exists. They do not qualify for copyright protection. They can get bent.

Neither of those options is particularly appealing to me. I’d look at building a more respectable file server, with 4 or more SATA ports. I’d have a relatively tiny SSD to host the OS, and any number of HDDs in some variety of RAID array

SSDs are fast; HDDs are slow. I would not want my operating system hosted on an HDD if there is any way to avoid it. An external USB drive would have slow file operations to and from that drive; an internal HDD would slow the entire system.

The scenario you describe actually demonstrates my point. Where anonymity is “illegal”, the only entity you can trust to protect your privacy is you.

That fact does not change when anonymity is “legal”. That fact does not change even when anonymity is mandated. Even if it is a criminal act for me to make a record of who is accessing my service, that is only a legal restriction. It is not a technical restriction. You can’t know whether I am abiding by such a law at the time you are accessing my service. A law mandating anonymity doesn’t actually protect your anonymity; it just gives you the illusion that your anonymity is being protected.

The relevant difference between your scenario and reality is that in your scenario, nobody is blatantly lying about whether your privacy is under attack: it most certainly is.

The inherent flaw is thinking that “privacy” is something that the courts are capable of providing. They aren’t. The most that government/courts could possibly do is make it illegal to generally and indiscriminately retain IP address records. But that only protects you from law-abiding privacy invaders; it does nothing to protect you from criminals who would use that information nefariously.

When you take adequate and appropriate steps to secure your privacy, it doesn’t actually matter what the courts have to say about “privacy”.

The potential of an unhatched egg means that the egg can’t be accurately described as belonging to the offspring, until the offspring actually exists.

The proto-chicken egg does become a chicken egg, but not until a chicken exists. While the egg that will eventually become a chicken egg does exist before the chicken, it is not a chicken egg until the chicken exists. Until there is a chicken, it is just the egg of a proto-chicken.

We are discussing which came first, the chicken or the chicken egg. The answer cannot be the egg. The answer can be “neither”. The answer can the “the chicken”, if by “before”, we mean that the status of the egg is dependent on the existence of the chicken.

you define a chicken egg as an egg that came from a chicken, then if you have a dozen of eggs you cannot know whether they’re chicken eggs or whatever eggs unless you know specifically a chicken laid them

Correct, but that is information that can be known, whether it is actually known or not. When you eat a bird egg, you can know what bird it came from. You cannot know what bird it would have become, specifically because you prevented it from ever becoming that bird.

You could speculate that it could have become a new species, based on the genetics within the egg. But, even if you didn’t eat it, it could have failed to mature for any number of reasons. It might have become a new species of bird; it might have become a rotten egg.

The aphorism “Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched” specifically warns us against considering the future possibilities of the egg.

The act of giving it a name is irrelevant.

The distinction between “chicken” and “egg” is biologically irrelevant: they both refer to the same organism. The terms are descriptive, not prescriptive. The organism will progress the same way, regardless of what we decide to say about it.

The chicken/egg argument is purely one of semantics. “Giving it a name” isn’t just relevant to the discussion, it is the only factor relevant to the discussion.

The way you would have us describe the egg prevents us from accurately and consistently defining an egg. An egg laid by a chicken could mature into a new species, and by your arguments, should be described as an egg of that new species.

This creates a linguistic uncertainty in any case where the egg’s potential is not and cannot be known. Is there a Shicken egg among the dozen you bought? A Blargleblat egg? Do you have the eggs of a dozen new evolutions with a common chicken ancestor? You cannot say with certainty.

However, if we describe the egg as the product of the creature that laid it, we have no such uncertainty. If we describe it as the possession of the offspring within it, we have no such uncertainty. The uncertainty only arises when we try to define it by an unknowable condition that may or may not occur.

My bad, I was making a different point with that analogy, and I had moved on some time ago. The app I’m using makes it difficult to read back up the thread.

I think we are making similar arguments. I would say that the egg Amy hatched from is the first “chicken’s egg”, but it is only the first chicken’s egg because it belongs to Amy, and it did not exist until chicken-Amy existed, which was some time well after the egg was laid.

Sorry, I’m getting distracted with real life right now.

Amy is a proto-chicken. Her offspring, Brenda, is the first creature containing the mutation that distinguishes chickens from proto-chickens. Brenda is the first chicken.

Amy’s egg couldn’t be a chicken egg because there was no such thing as a chicken when she laid it. There would be no such thing as a chicken until Brenda existed, at which time the egg that would become Brenda also became a chicken egg.

The chicken egg could not have come first. The first chicken egg was laid by something that was not quite a chicken, but it didn’t become a chicken egg until it had developed into a chicken.

it didn’t somehow cease to have been an egg just because it doesn’t hatch.

Correct. But, it was an egg laid by a proto-chicken; it is a proto-chicken egg.

Our proto-chicken couple also laid an egg that would have become a “Shicken”, if I hadn’t eaten it first. But, because there was never a “Shicken”, there could never be a “Shicken” egg; the egg was only a proto-chicken egg.

So, it doesn’t become a Chicken’s egg until Brenda has come into existence. Brenda being the chicken. The chicken has to exist for the egg to become a Chicken’s egg.

The first chicken egg is the egg that Brenda hatched from, but it didn’t become a chicken egg until Brenda was a chicken and not just a (proto-chicken) egg.

That’s about where I got to as well. A proto-chicken’s egg that contains the genetic code for a chicken doesn’t become a chicken egg if I eat it first. At best, the creature has to have become a chicken before the surrounding egg can be described as a chicken egg, which means that the chicken has to come first (or simultaneously). The egg cannot come first.

There is no question as to the biology. The first egg that would hatch a chicken was laid by a proto-chicken. The genetic mutation that delineated chicken from proto-chicken first existed in that egg.

By your argument, the status of the egg is dependent on what it contains.

Suppose that proto-chicken pair laid an egg. And instead of it hatching into a chicken, I ate it. This egg never became a chicken; it was only an egg. It couldn’t be a chicken egg, because it never contained a chicken. It could only be a proto-chicken egg.

The egg that the chicken hatched from only became a chicken egg once there was a chicken inside it. The chicken egg, therefore, could not precede the chicken.

I agree, and I’ve made the same argument. It’s perfectly valid, Unless the egg belongs to the creature who laid it, instead of the creature that hatched from it.

If the egg in question is a “proto-chicken’s egg” because it was laid by a proto-chicken, then the chicken would have come before the chicken egg.

Amy is a chicken. Amy lays an egg. Brenda is a chicken. Brenda hatched from the egg Amy laid. The egg in question is clearly a chicken’s egg, but is it Amy’s egg, or Brenda’s egg?

Is a “chicken egg” an egg laid by a chicken, or an egg that will hatch into a chicken?