This is a lovely idea in theory, and I wholeheartedly support it.
In the real world, however,
1) ordinary users (i.e. the people in other companies who might want to use our company FTP site) are probably not going to have any programs installed that can talk to SFTP/SCP etc., and are not going to want to bother their IT department with it 'cos it'll probably take about 6 months to get any software approved and the project will be a dim and distant memory by then.
2) these same users, even if they had the software, are going to be blocked from the vast majority of other methods of sharing information with us (including conventional FTP on a different port) by overly-draconian internet filtering policies, probably mandated by the same people in the IT dept. that insist that all their FTP/SFTP/etc. sites are locked down and secured with all types of encryption and on a strange port.
Sadly, there are few practical alternatives to lowest-common-denominator FTP access for communicating with a lot of companies.
That is true, but even if it is the case that the date that counts is the US publication date and the foreign publication date simply has to be disclosed, my (limited) understanding of the argument in the complaint is that they didn't disclose the foreign publication date at all. This would mean that they would be alleging that the copyright registration was fraudulent in any event.
That said, from my reading of the complaint, the arguments substantially depend on the idea that it is this initial (foreign) publication date that counts. This leads to two possibilities: a) the lawyers representing Mr. Shirokov are idiots, or b) it's the April date that counts. I am prepared to give Mssrs Booth and Sweet of Booth and Sweet LLP the benefit of the doubt in the absence of any evidence to the contrary...
Of course, as mentioned in my previous post, IANAL, and I would welcome any contrary evidence:).
45.
An application for a registration of copyright in a published work requires a statement of
the date of first publication; the nation of first publication should also be given.
Specifically, under the Copyright Office’s guidelines an application covering a work first
published outside the United States should state the date of first publication there, and
should be accompanied by a copy or phonorecord of the foreign edition as first
published.
IANAL, but whoever wrote the motion is, and they seem to think that it's the date of first publication of any (presumably Berne) treaty country that counts.
I don't know if it will help you, as you and your user's needs may be quite different to mine, but this is the set-up I use for a small company that I do part-time IT stuff for. It works pretty well for them so it might work pretty well for your lot too:
This is for a small co. of about 12-15 engineers, (depending on how many part-timers your count). They do lots of computational modelling, so lots of storage space and CPU is needed. This sounds like it might be a bit similar to your needs (if you're going to do anything interesting with that large collection of videos & multimedia)
They have one "main" file server for project work. It's a white box PC from the local shop and has a couple of TB of hard drives in it. It runs ubuntu server with samba (like all the other servers in this co.). It has needed work about twice in the last 4 years.
They have a couple of old Dell workstations which are too slow to do engineering on now. One runs an external-facing FTP server (it could probably run a small website if needed, too) and one runs an internal wiki and a few other similar tools. I could probably move some of the internal stuff into the main file server, but we had the old machines kicking around, and it's useful to be able to fix stuff without breaking the whole network for the whole company at the same time.
We have a modelling file server, which is a big Supermicro rack server. It's a 4 or 5U box, because they have an open-plan office and nowhere to put the rack, so the rack-mount servers have to be very big (for what they are), so they can be quiet. This has space for 8 hard drives so you can pack it out with largish drives and there will be enough space for all but the most data-hungry organisations. It's expensive compared to the white-box PC, but if you really need the extra space, it can be difficult to find an off-the-shelf machine with space for more than 6 hard drives (and it's a lot easier to replace one if one fails, too).
We have a backup file server. This uses rsync to mirror the (newer) contents of the other two servers, so that if one of them falls over, we don't have a bunch of engineers sitting around while I get the train into the office, work out what's wrong, get the right part, fix it, etc. It also compresses the important (non-replacable) data every week so that someone can copy it to an external drive and take it off-site. Much cheaper than the internet connection that we would need to mirror a week's work in reasonable time over the internet.
All of the computers are cheap white-boxes from the local shop running windows XP or 7 with various versions of MS Office (whatever was current when the machine was bought). No-one seems to have any problem with the fact that the boss uses XP and office 97 while the new guy uses Win 7 and office 2010, and I have better things to do than make an issue out of it. We keep track of whose license is who's on the wiki. Most machines also have OpenOffice, but there is general user resistance to that concept.
We have a couple of PCs for doing number crunching. They sit in the corner and run VNC servers. If people need to crunch numbers they use them, otherwise they use their own cheap workstations.
In summary: buy off-the-shelf PCs for the users. So long as they have windows, office, anti-virus, etc. they'll get on with what they need by themselves. The hassle of getting people to use linux or OpenOffice is not worth the 250 pounds we pay to MS per computer. An off-the-shelf workstation or server with some extra HDs and some version of linux makes a perfectly adequate file server. Use sneakernet for backups.
As I say, your situation may be completely different, but I hope mine might give you some ideas.
While OpenFOAM is certainly really powerful, it is short of a GUI* (except for results-visualisation), and might therefore be less than ideal. That said, it is simple enough to use with a walkthrough, and the fact that the interface is basically composed of text files should make it easier for students to get back on track if they go wrong (this is a big problem, for example, with teaching CFX). If the main focus of the work is going to be running an essentially pre-built model (which the students then rebuild and run) and looking at the results then it will be more than capable. It is also easy to investigate the effects of changing discretisation methods, solution schemes and the like. If you want it to be easy for students to perform tasks such as changing the angle of the aerofoil relative to the mesh, change the mesh resolution, etc. it may be less ideal as this will involve lots of messing around on the command line (and in text editors).
* In fact, there is a GUI available from symscape.com, but this costs money (albeit not a lot). (no affiliation, I've never used this software and can't speak for its quality)
Now, I'm not saying that anything in your post is either wrong or right, but I feel I have to point out that if your best reference for a science story is the Daily Mail, then this is an argument that you are not going to win.
Totally useless and a mere inconvenience for the die-hard file swappers. New sharing sites will pop up faster than I can say "First Post!" and new protocols to circumvent those blocks will have arrived by the time the mods have moderated "First Post" down to -1.
True as this undoubtedly is, I think this is the wrong attitude to take. Simply saying, "OK, Mr. Government, if you want to block bits of the internet go ahead, we'll just work round you." gives the impression that they have the right and justification to censor bits of the internet at will and it's up to us to work round that.
While the sort of people who read slashdot are able to circumvent this kind of thing, does that make it right to censor the internet for the rest of the less technically savvy population?
Despite the very real risk of being whooshed, I'll bite.
You are supposed to make music because you like to do it, not as a full-time job.
Stallman is that you? Are you serious?
Artists don't have a right to make money from their art, it just happened to work well.
WTF? So Michaelangelo should have done the Sistine Chapel for free? Da Vinci shouldn't have taken that commission for the Mona Lisa? Mozart should never have taken that court job or done those popular operas?
Being fair to the GP post, I think you are perhaps reading a little more into it than is there... It's fair enough to say that artists don't have a right to make money from their art. They don't have this right now, and never have had it. The fact is, if the art is good, people will pay for it. If not, they won't. Copyright is neither here nor there. Indeed I'm not sure that any of the examples you cite enjoyed any significant copyright protection on their work.
The multi-millionaires rock stars didn't exist before the invention of disc records and probably won't exist after that.
Go and have a look at some of the musicians, opera singers, composers and the like (who didn't drink it all away) from previous centuries and realise what a piece of muppetry you are saying.
I rarely use dvd subtitles. I'm talking about Substation Alpha, Advanced Substation Alpha, or even SubRip - the main softsubs used in anime. The support is horrid on linux.
To be fair, up-to-date versions of mplayer have quite adequate support for ssa and ass subtitles. I don't think it handles all the karaoke bits, drawing extensions, masking stuff etc. (if you're trying to use those as softsubs you need your head examined anyway), but it's quite adequate for day-to-day use.
It is slightly unfortunate that most distros don't have the support for ssa/ass compiled into mplayer. I've yet to work out why (perhaps there's some patent or copyright claim) but meh... it's not like any other OS supports this sort of stuff out of the box either.
I though most worthwhile anime stuff you got on the internet was hard-subbed anyway... oh well.
Where are our lawyers, on the whole*, when our own country's government violates sacred human rights?
Which "sacred human rights" you're talking about that the government is violating (which I presume to mean "is violating unconstitutionally")?
The constitution, albeit a fine document, is not the be-all and end-all of human rights; not least because it is somewhat limited in the people to whom it applies. While I will freely admit that the US gov. has a positively sparkling human rights record compared to some, I note that the country is still not party to, for example, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights among others.
Apologies for being somewhat OT here, but the difference between human rights law in general and the US constitution is an important one and I think it important not to blur the difference.
If an author, say Douglas Adams (rip), spends a couple of years on a book, your equation does not work. That is because it is based on an investment of time, and you need a return for that. Creating value after that, for instance based on your popularity, is nice, but not economically related to the investment needed for the addition of value to the initial product. Also his audience, and book readers in general, might be less inclined to purchase services after the free copy.
Do we want a culture based on the commercial return on t-shirts and such? Would Adams have written the books? I for one prefer having given him some monetary units for his product, than obtain it for free, then see if I like him and toss him some coins like he's some kind of beggar. While I'm aware that your argument may well hold for some people, Douglas Adams is a _really_ bad example in this case. Indeed, he's a fine example of the counterargument:
Douglas Adams (DA) is paid by the BBC to write a radio series. This is given away, for free, by the BBC, over the airwaves (I don't think that there was a radio license by the time Hitch-hiker's was broadcast). DA chose then to add value to the original product (the radio series) by: writing sequels, adapting it as a book, adapting it as a TV show etc., cashing in on its (and his) popularity.
Now clearly, in this proposed new world of content distribution, different ways of cashing in would have to be chosen, but the principle still holds. DA would have written the work regardless, as it was initially paid for by a corporation that wanted the content. How he then chose to cash in on his success was then simply a product of the time.
This is not to say that this will hold for every author--public service broadcasters can't be expected to employ every content creator--but DA is a fine example of exactly how you can make money by giving stuff away for free.
Re:Does he realize what he'd have to do on corrupt
on
Lessig For Congress?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
A large part of the problem with corruption is the red tape that the corrupt can hide behind. What we need is a sort of "root" user for one or two agencies that can essentially violate any law or policy inside the government, short of the constitution itself, to root out corruption. Yes. That's what's needed. The Spanish Inquisition. Capital idea.
AS for the rugbyforpansies tag...nice try. It seems like every English rugby player who tries to make it in the NFL usually ends up in the strong safety position. Too small to play linebacker, too slow to play defensive back, and absolutely no individual skills (other than smashing into other humans). Perhaps American Football is rubygforpansies, but funny how many ex-rugbyers are third on the depth charts and playing on kick coverage. Forgive my ignorance here, as I know little of American Football, but as I understand it your argument is this: American Football is not rugby for pansies because the only rugby players that play American Football are pansies... I struggle to comprehend the point you are trying to make.
Note: I shall not take a view on the pansiness of American Football myself as, in my opinion, if you play either sport you are a) not a pansy and b) need your head examined.
1. The copyright must be registered At present, every blog post, every comment on Slashdot, every image I use in my site design, receives copyright protection automatically. You've just destroyed that. Oh, and Creative Commons with it. And made the public domain a much larger space, thereby removing the problem that CC was supposed to solve.
2. An actual person must be named (just like with patents) Just destroyed any right to privacy. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that if someone wants to make money from, say, a copyright, they should be identifiable (or have an identifiable agent) as the author of that work.
3. Death of the registered person means death of the copyright (you can't encourage dead people to make new works no matter how hard you try) So if I work hard building - let's say - boats, and one day I drop dead of a heart attack, my children inherit the boats and can sell them. But if I work hard designing boats, my kids starve? No. Because you worked hard designing boats, you earned money which you can now pass on to your children. Equally, the boat-builder earned boats which he can pass on to his children. Whether you invest in boats or money, so long as it exists and is transferable, the only reason your children should starve is if you neglect to provide for them.
4. At time of registration a term can be chosen, and an appropriate fee paid. Since copyright is currently extended to millions of creations every single day, this is completely untenable.
5. A reasonable number of extensions (say, three) are permitted, provided a new fee is paid. And this too. However, since in this utopian system copyright would only be extended to a fraction of the number of works, this is entirely tenable (if depressingly beauraucratic)
6. A set of standard royalties for a common class of work (say, songs) should be decided, and made available to anyone who cares to pay the standard rate. And let's do the same for cars! Okay, Ferrari, Rolls Royce, Mercedes: All your cars now cost $20,000. Yeah. This is just price-fixing. Don't do this. What would be useful would be a set of standard licenses which Joe Bloggs could just pick off the shelf for their work and fill in the blanks (e.g. how much money they want) (like CC).
7. Willful royalty evasion justifies reasonable punitive damages (say, 3 times the standard royalty), nothing else does. Levied by whom, and payable to whom? Currently, copyright infringement is in miost cases a civil matter, requiring the rights holder to bring suit. If you are legislating penalties, are you saying that this is now a criminal offense? Who will police it, and how? Well, paid by the infringer, to the copyright holder, by order of a civil court should the holder sue the infringer. Like most cases for damages, punitive or otherwise. (I would guess)
8. Indoctrinated fair use should be ratified by international treaty and be recognized as a means to end a complaint pre-trial. I'm not sure what "indoctrinated fair use" is even supposed to mean. No, I don't know what "indoctrinated fair use" is either, but if you take out the word "indoctrinated" then it makes perfect sense and is a worthwhile idea.
As far as I can see all the ideas here (except 6) would be really good. I'm just somewhat depressed about the fact that I don't believe that any of them will see the light of day in my lifetime.
In other news, bioscientists at the university of Leicester have developed a new species of grass. It promises to be at least two times greener than comparable varieties in the US.
Sorry, but your car analogy (on Slashdot?! Who'd'a thunk it...) is completely wrong. If you *sell* me your car, I can do as I damn well please with it and there's not a damn thing you can say or do about it. If you *license* me the car, then you have control. And when your licensing terms suck, I'll go elsewhere.
Thanks for confusing the issue, though (and somehow getting moderated insightful...sigh).
Actually, the car analogy seems to be quite accurate. The idea is that copyright isn't necessary if your force all your customers, as one of the terms of the sale, to agree not to copy the work. You're still selling the car, but part of the price you pay for the car is agreeing to the contract (to drive it only on even dates, or whatever). If you agree to that contract, then you have to abide by it, regardless of who owns the car.
I suspect, thankfully, that if anyone tried such a scheme most people would go elsewhere although, given the number of people who go out and buy DRMed music (for example) I may be being naïve...
Thankfully its those "huge logistical and bureaucratic issues" which mean that this stands about as much chance of happening as the NHS does of getting a working computerised record system or any UK government IT project has of coming in at under 200% of the original budget.
Normally I'm not a fan of government incompetence, but in the remote possibility that they take this seriously (rather than correctly realising that its just some old judge who wants some press attention), I'm prepared to make an exception for this.
Contrary to popular belief, engineers (by and large) are not idiots. I think it could also be argued that we have a better feel for what bridges are likely (or unlikely) to collapse than the PR dept. One of the key engineering skills is the successful communication of ideas, and I have yet to see an example of a qualified engineer being mis-understood by the press (except where it was willfully done in order to get a story).
Let me put a fanciful, but illustrative, counterexample: Fred Engineer from NHTSA may want to talk to the New York Times and use some intra-agency jargon like "in our latest survey, 99% of the bridges in the country got a designation of 'likely to collapse'." It turns out that 'likely to collapse' is an agency term measuring whether there is a greater than 50% probability of it collapsing tomorrow. But he can't tell the press because he's not allowed. The next day, a large number of bridges fall over. (Cue mass hysteria). Fred Engineer is fired. Many die.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a lovely idea in theory, and I wholeheartedly support it.
In the real world, however,
1) ordinary users (i.e. the people in other companies who might want to use our company FTP site) are probably not going to have any programs installed that can talk to SFTP/SCP etc., and are not going to want to bother their IT department with it 'cos it'll probably take about 6 months to get any software approved and the project will be a dim and distant memory by then.
2) these same users, even if they had the software, are going to be blocked from the vast majority of other methods of sharing information with us (including conventional FTP on a different port) by overly-draconian internet filtering policies, probably mandated by the same people in the IT dept. that insist that all their FTP/SFTP/etc. sites are locked down and secured with all types of encryption and on a strange port.
Sadly, there are few practical alternatives to lowest-common-denominator FTP access for communicating with a lot of companies.
That is true, but even if it is the case that the date that counts is the US publication date and the foreign publication date simply has to be disclosed, my (limited) understanding of the argument in the complaint is that they didn't disclose the foreign publication date at all. This would mean that they would be alleging that the copyright registration was fraudulent in any event.
:).
That said, from my reading of the complaint, the arguments substantially depend on the idea that it is this initial (foreign) publication date that counts. This leads to two possibilities: a) the lawyers representing Mr. Shirokov are idiots, or b) it's the April date that counts. I am prepared to give Mssrs Booth and Sweet of Booth and Sweet LLP the benefit of the doubt in the absence of any evidence to the contrary...
Of course, as mentioned in my previous post, IANAL, and I would welcome any contrary evidence
IANAL, but whoever wrote the motion is, and they seem to think that it's the date of first publication of any (presumably Berne) treaty country that counts.
This is for a small co. of about 12-15 engineers, (depending on how many part-timers your count). They do lots of computational modelling, so lots of storage space and CPU is needed. This sounds like it might be a bit similar to your needs (if you're going to do anything interesting with that large collection of videos & multimedia)
They have one "main" file server for project work. It's a white box PC from the local shop and has a couple of TB of hard drives in it. It runs ubuntu server with samba (like all the other servers in this co.). It has needed work about twice in the last 4 years.
They have a couple of old Dell workstations which are too slow to do engineering on now. One runs an external-facing FTP server (it could probably run a small website if needed, too) and one runs an internal wiki and a few other similar tools. I could probably move some of the internal stuff into the main file server, but we had the old machines kicking around, and it's useful to be able to fix stuff without breaking the whole network for the whole company at the same time.
We have a modelling file server, which is a big Supermicro rack server. It's a 4 or 5U box, because they have an open-plan office and nowhere to put the rack, so the rack-mount servers have to be very big (for what they are), so they can be quiet. This has space for 8 hard drives so you can pack it out with largish drives and there will be enough space for all but the most data-hungry organisations. It's expensive compared to the white-box PC, but if you really need the extra space, it can be difficult to find an off-the-shelf machine with space for more than 6 hard drives (and it's a lot easier to replace one if one fails, too).
We have a backup file server. This uses rsync to mirror the (newer) contents of the other two servers, so that if one of them falls over, we don't have a bunch of engineers sitting around while I get the train into the office, work out what's wrong, get the right part, fix it, etc. It also compresses the important (non-replacable) data every week so that someone can copy it to an external drive and take it off-site. Much cheaper than the internet connection that we would need to mirror a week's work in reasonable time over the internet.
All of the computers are cheap white-boxes from the local shop running windows XP or 7 with various versions of MS Office (whatever was current when the machine was bought). No-one seems to have any problem with the fact that the boss uses XP and office 97 while the new guy uses Win 7 and office 2010, and I have better things to do than make an issue out of it. We keep track of whose license is who's on the wiki. Most machines also have OpenOffice, but there is general user resistance to that concept.
We have a couple of PCs for doing number crunching. They sit in the corner and run VNC servers. If people need to crunch numbers they use them, otherwise they use their own cheap workstations.
In summary: buy off-the-shelf PCs for the users. So long as they have windows, office, anti-virus, etc. they'll get on with what they need by themselves. The hassle of getting people to use linux or OpenOffice is not worth the 250 pounds we pay to MS per computer. An off-the-shelf workstation or server with some extra HDs and some version of linux makes a perfectly adequate file server. Use sneakernet for backups.
As I say, your situation may be completely different, but I hope mine might give you some ideas.
While OpenFOAM is certainly really powerful, it is short of a GUI* (except for results-visualisation), and might therefore be less than ideal. That said, it is simple enough to use with a walkthrough, and the fact that the interface is basically composed of text files should make it easier for students to get back on track if they go wrong (this is a big problem, for example, with teaching CFX). If the main focus of the work is going to be running an essentially pre-built model (which the students then rebuild and run) and looking at the results then it will be more than capable. It is also easy to investigate the effects of changing discretisation methods, solution schemes and the like. If you want it to be easy for students to perform tasks such as changing the angle of the aerofoil relative to the mesh, change the mesh resolution, etc. it may be less ideal as this will involve lots of messing around on the command line (and in text editors).
* In fact, there is a GUI available from symscape.com, but this costs money (albeit not a lot). (no affiliation, I've never used this software and can't speak for its quality)
So you don't believe the IPCC's scientists then ?
Mini Ice age predicted, with 30 years of global cooling at least, co2 effect on climate grossly overblown, models in agreement with co2-climate link wrong.
Now, I'm not saying that anything in your post is either wrong or right, but I feel I have to point out that if your best reference for a science story is the Daily Mail, then this is an argument that you are not going to win.
What other products come with a legal document stating that, if you so choose, you can return a single component for a refund?
Totally useless and a mere inconvenience for the die-hard file swappers. New sharing sites will pop up faster than I can say "First Post!" and new protocols to circumvent those blocks will have arrived by the time the mods have moderated "First Post" down to -1.
True as this undoubtedly is, I think this is the wrong attitude to take. Simply saying, "OK, Mr. Government, if you want to block bits of the internet go ahead, we'll just work round you." gives the impression that they have the right and justification to censor bits of the internet at will and it's up to us to work round that.
While the sort of people who read slashdot are able to circumvent this kind of thing, does that make it right to censor the internet for the rest of the less technically savvy population?
the insidious scenario of walking into a cafe, buying a coffee and then (legally) using the cafe's wi-fi
This is the first (and I hope the last) time I have heard such a scenario described as "insidious".
Despite the very real risk of being whooshed, I'll bite.
You are supposed to make music because you like to do it, not as a full-time job.
Stallman is that you? Are you serious?
Artists don't have a right to make money from their art, it just happened to work well.
WTF? So Michaelangelo should have done the Sistine Chapel for free? Da Vinci shouldn't have taken that commission for the Mona Lisa? Mozart should never have taken that court job or done those popular operas?
Being fair to the GP post, I think you are perhaps reading a little more into it than is there... It's fair enough to say that artists don't have a right to make money from their art. They don't have this right now, and never have had it. The fact is, if the art is good, people will pay for it. If not, they won't. Copyright is neither here nor there. Indeed I'm not sure that any of the examples you cite enjoyed any significant copyright protection on their work.
The multi-millionaires rock stars didn't exist before the invention of disc records and probably won't exist after that. Go and have a look at some of the musicians, opera singers, composers and the like (who didn't drink it all away) from previous centuries and realise what a piece of muppetry you are saying.
Quite.
If you can imagine it, there's some government out to stop it being on the internet.
Really? I would argue that of the millions of videos on the net that I think need to be at a higher quality, very few of them are on YouTube.
Personally, I find the quality of videos on YouTube to be abysmal.
"Will this help?" I ask myself...
To be fair, up-to-date versions of mplayer have quite adequate support for ssa and ass subtitles. I don't think it handles all the karaoke bits, drawing extensions, masking stuff etc. (if you're trying to use those as softsubs you need your head examined anyway), but it's quite adequate for day-to-day use.
It is slightly unfortunate that most distros don't have the support for ssa/ass compiled into mplayer. I've yet to work out why (perhaps there's some patent or copyright claim) but meh... it's not like any other OS supports this sort of stuff out of the box either.
I though most worthwhile anime stuff you got on the internet was hard-subbed anyway... oh well.
Which "sacred human rights" you're talking about that the government is violating (which I presume to mean "is violating unconstitutionally")?
The constitution, albeit a fine document, is not the be-all and end-all of human rights; not least because it is somewhat limited in the people to whom it applies. While I will freely admit that the US gov. has a positively sparkling human rights record compared to some, I note that the country is still not party to, for example, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights among others.
Apologies for being somewhat OT here, but the difference between human rights law in general and the US constitution is an important one and I think it important not to blur the difference.
Do we want a culture based on the commercial return on t-shirts and such? Would Adams have written the books? I for one prefer having given him some monetary units for his product, than obtain it for free, then see if I like him and toss him some coins like he's some kind of beggar.
While I'm aware that your argument may well hold for some people, Douglas Adams is a _really_ bad example in this case. Indeed, he's a fine example of the counterargument:
Douglas Adams (DA) is paid by the BBC to write a radio series. This is given away, for free, by the BBC, over the airwaves (I don't think that there was a radio license by the time Hitch-hiker's was broadcast). DA chose then to add value to the original product (the radio series) by: writing sequels, adapting it as a book, adapting it as a TV show etc., cashing in on its (and his) popularity.
Now clearly, in this proposed new world of content distribution, different ways of cashing in would have to be chosen, but the principle still holds. DA would have written the work regardless, as it was initially paid for by a corporation that wanted the content. How he then chose to cash in on his success was then simply a product of the time.
This is not to say that this will hold for every author--public service broadcasters can't be expected to employ every content creator--but DA is a fine example of exactly how you can make money by giving stuff away for free.
Note: I shall not take a view on the pansiness of American Football myself as, in my opinion, if you play either sport you are a) not a pansy and b) need your head examined.
As far as I can see all the ideas here (except 6) would be really good. I'm just somewhat depressed about the fact that I don't believe that any of them will see the light of day in my lifetime.
Do we assign this to malice or stupidity?
Given the RIAA's highly sensible business practices, I think their stupidity is the only sensible assumption in this matter.
In other news, bioscientists at the university of Leicester have developed a new species of grass. It promises to be at least two times greener than comparable varieties in the US.
Thanks for confusing the issue, though (and somehow getting moderated insightful...sigh).
Actually, the car analogy seems to be quite accurate. The idea is that copyright isn't necessary if your force all your customers, as one of the terms of the sale, to agree not to copy the work. You're still selling the car, but part of the price you pay for the car is agreeing to the contract (to drive it only on even dates, or whatever). If you agree to that contract, then you have to abide by it, regardless of who owns the car.
I suspect, thankfully, that if anyone tried such a scheme most people would go elsewhere although, given the number of people who go out and buy DRMed music (for example) I may be being naïve...
Thankfully its those "huge logistical and bureaucratic issues" which mean that this stands about as much chance of happening as the NHS does of getting a working computerised record system or any UK government IT project has of coming in at under 200% of the original budget. Normally I'm not a fan of government incompetence, but in the remote possibility that they take this seriously (rather than correctly realising that its just some old judge who wants some press attention), I'm prepared to make an exception for this.
Contrary to popular belief, engineers (by and large) are not idiots. I think it could also be argued that we have a better feel for what bridges are likely (or unlikely) to collapse than the PR dept. One of the key engineering skills is the successful communication of ideas, and I have yet to see an example of a qualified engineer being mis-understood by the press (except where it was willfully done in order to get a story).
Let me put a fanciful, but illustrative, counterexample: Fred Engineer from NHTSA may want to talk to the New York Times and use some intra-agency jargon like "in our latest survey, 99% of the bridges in the country got a designation of 'likely to collapse'." It turns out that 'likely to collapse' is an agency term measuring whether there is a greater than 50% probability of it collapsing tomorrow. But he can't tell the press because he's not allowed. The next day, a large number of bridges fall over. (Cue mass hysteria). Fred Engineer is fired. Many die.