Besides, Canada is the 51st State... I thought everyone knew that, and for all you Canucks in the viewing audience that's a goddamn JOKE and I just don't want to hear it.
OK, I know you're joking and all, but here's why it'll never happen. Given that even far right-wing politicians here support universal health care, the reason Canada will never get statehood, (no matter what happens with quebec separatism) because the GOP will never allow a new state to join the union that will be guaranteed to send two democrats to the senate, forever, or at least until the heat death of the universe.
Sorry, but show me a man who questions the concepts of property, and I'll show you a man who wants a piece of what I've worked hard for.
Oh, so, nothing exists that can't be bought and sold? How 'bout votes or babies? Current free-market ideology aside, there are in fact lots of things that exist that are not anybody's property, and we mostly agree that that's for the best.
Can't we search for a better business model without going batshit insane over the cliff at the Left side of the political spectrum?
Look, it's not about left-vs-right. Let me give you the essence of the problem. Generally in economics, something has value if it has both utility and scarcity. So how do we assign determine the value of something when the marginal cost of production approaches zero? I'm not happy with a producer charging me the same price as what a CD went for in the 90's, but I don't think the Radiohead approach of "pay whatever you like" is viable for the majority of cases either.
Answer that and you're up for a Nobel for economics.
How many of you file sharers in this forum have produced creative works and released it from copyright? Do you walk the walk or are you just whining?
And people like you who think that the only thing at issue here is people wanting to get stuff for free.
Sure, I'll freely admit that I prefer our current 'wild west' situation where I can download last night's episode of "the wire" instead of having to order HBO from my cable company. But that's just the tip of the iceberg here.
What file-sharing advocates like me or Falkvinge are talking about is much bigger questions like, "what is the nature of ownership of IP?", or "what is an appropriate level of renumeration for producers of creative works?" and "How should we make sure producers continue to get paid?"
You sound like somebody who supports the status quo on copyright, so let me ask you this one: Given that traditional economic theory generally assumes something has value if it has utility and scarcity, how do we make sense of the economics of selling a product where the marginal production cost approaches zero? How does something with effectively no scarcity have value at all?
Yes but why as an artist don't I have to right to control my work?
Because you don't. Giving artists "control of their work" was never the intention of copyright law. In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest that the only real purpose of copyright law when originally written was to keep publishers from ripping off authors/artists.
And this part can't be over-stressed: It was originally an industrial regulation, something that only restricted your actions if you voluntarily decided to get into the "book publishing" or "music publishing" business. But in an age of networked computers, it restricts the freedoms of basically each and every bloody citizen.
Which is why I've come around to the viewpoint of "time to throw the baby out with the bathwater" on copyright. When the baby's stone cold dead in the bathwater and starting to stink and draw flies, it's ok to throw it out with the bathwater.
First of all, let me say "here, here", to causality's comment about how you can't legislate morality.
But what occurs to me is, what's the non-online/pre-internet version of this story? I understand that these were pictures delivered to the school administration anonymously by somebody, presumably someone who wasn't their friend.
Imagine if some unknown person followed a group of high school students around (or hired a private investigator to do the same) and took pictures of them engaged in questionable activities? (Assume for the sake of this discussion that all these activities happened in public spaces, therefore no "expectation of privacy" on the part of students)
Would that be OK?
It seems like a lot of people have no problem with the school administration taking disciplinary action against students for activities they engage in outside of school hours off of school property. To those people I say, what if the school had hired private detectives to follow students around, and, say, got pictures of them in a bar consuming alcohol? Would that be ok, or would it be more like a police state?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but at least on US soil, this is basically zero? Certainly zero fatalities, right?
I may have missed a case or two, but either way, terrorism is nowhere near as dangerous as say, driving, right?
Even if you live in Israel, a state that most would agree certainly does have a terrorism problem, you're still 10X more likely to die in a car accident than a terrorist attack.
And, anyway, the US government is currently doing exactly what al-queda et. al. want in Iraq, so there's no reason for terrorists to use limited resources in a wasteful way.
My prediction that I've been making since 2004 or so is, if the US starts making serious noise about getting out of Iraq, THEN we'll see another terror attack on US soil.
Used as an involuntary jab to fight the idiotic 'war on drugs' it is a clear violation of civil and cognitive liberty
I basically agree with you, especially on the "cognitive liberty" front. But speaking as somebody who's gone through probably a dozen attempts at quitting smoking in the past 3 or 4 years, relapsing every time, I figure if an ex-addict who just got out of rehab wants this vaccine to prevent relapse, I can't see denying it to them.
That said, I'd agree to that scenario if and only if we can be confident that they're doing it of their own free will, that is to say, I'd want to see legislation saying that you can't make taking this vaccine a condition of employment, or parole, or being released on bail, or getting custody of your kids, or anything else.
I wouldn't deny this to an addict who's trying to stay clean, but if and only if they ask for it, loudly, with no coercion by either the carrot or the stick.
From what I understand about drug addiction and attempts to kick the habit, you won't just "lose interest", you'll be going through living hell for quite a while - your body is looking for something you're not giving it, it's going to be pretty mad at you
That's not the idea.
The idea scenario is, you're a coke addict. You go through 30 days of rehab, you're clean, and want to stay clean. When you get out, you're tempted, but no longer _physiologically_ addicted.
Say you're at a party, you think to yourself, "I've been good, I deserve this, just this once! Besides, this is a special occasion, it's my birthday/anniversary/sister's wedding/day that ends in y", and you decide to snort a couple lines.
The trials done at Columbia with 10 college students with no plans to quit the drug may not really give you much information about the behavior of addicts, as far as whether or not dedicated addicts will seek another drug or not.
This is, incidentally, my #1 annoyance about drug policy discussions - people who don't draw a distinction between casual, recreational users and those who are actually addicted to the drug in question.
For those who don't know, when the lead character was made bio-chemically incapable of getting high on either cocaine or amphetamines, he sought out an exotic synthetic with similar effects.
Look, it's easy to indulge in one's "fair world" bias and blame the victim of various scams for being stupid, but it's not a real useful way to look at the situation.
Like joining a cult, nobody gets up one morning and says "I think I'll be taken in by a pyramid scheme scam today".
People have been taken by scams usually because the scammers are often very, very, good at what they do. Not that some people aren't painfully stupid, or even worse, stupid and _greedy_, but the reason victims of fraud look so stupid is hindsight bias. Once you know that "offer X" was a scam, of course it looks like the victim was an idiot.
Hello, um, economics of bringing a new product to market?
The crux of his argument seems to be thus: Most new and innovative products (iPhone for example) come out of closed source shops/companies/organizations, therefore closed shop is more likely to produce innovative products.
When you find me an open-source organization that has the resources of Apple to throw at an open source version of an iPhone, gimme a call. But until then, the economics of the situation makes comparisons between what apple or HTC or "fill-in-the-blank-company-who just-produced-an-innovative-project" and what open source types do is an apples to oranges comparison.
Saying "because most products that are innovative come from closed source shops therefore closed shops are by definition more innovative" is like saying that men are smarter than women because Newton, Darwin, Gauss, and Einstein were all male.
Just because something has always been a certain way in the past, does not mean that it is necessarily so, by definition. It just means that, up to this point, that it's been that way.
Yeah, option A, extend constitutional protections that exist in most western democracies to cover not just "the state shall/shall not do X" to cover interactions between private citizens, and corporations and citizens.
Let's face it: When the founding fathers of the US constitution were getting things together, there were no such thing as "corporations" as we know them now.
The unlimited duration charter was done by processes of courts and lawyers in the late 1800's in most jurisdictions, the turning point at which the modern corporation began as we know it.
So, we really shouldn't fault the framers (or the authors of constitutions/charters of rights in other countries) for not foreseeing interactions between citizens and entities that didn't exist at the time.
In my opinion this corrects the balance of rights in the correct order (Most important to least):
Society -> Individuals -> Corporations
The way it is in the US now is:
Corporations -> Society -> Individuals
You're absolutely right. Of course, the good news is, the measures by which corporations gained power were done by courts and lawyers, and they can be un-done by the same measures. After all, it's not like our rules governing corporations (and giving them the right to make political donations, or own property, etc) are in the constitution or something.
First of all, salaried employee is not "always on the clock". At my last salaried position (I'm an independent contractor now, thank god) I had working hours defined as 8:30 - 5:00 pm, and anything above and beyond that was overtime.
Now, that aside, let's look at this as a question of fairness. I hire you to do job X. I'm going to pay you for working something like ~8 hours a day. During those hours, I can make certain rules, as an employer. Dress, conduct, all that sorta thing is fair game for me to dictate rules for my employees.
But why in god's name, tell me, do I get to have a say over what my employees do when I'm not paying them?
People know who works for who, and so my employees' actions reflect on the company. I have to protect the image of my company. Firing someone for having a drunken binge and then gloating about it online reflects poorly on the professionalism of my company, and therefore could result in a loss of revenue, and that could result in a stock holder lawsuit. So you see, even if I didn't want to, I have no choice other than to constantly monitor the actions of my employees and reprimand them when they're actions run counter to the company's interest.
Let me see if I can use your free-market, bottom-line-is-all-that-matters, logic in another scenario: Imagine I'm interviewing a potential employee. Candidate is a woman. She's late 20's, wearing a wedding ring. If she decides, in a year or two, to have a baby, take a year or two off on maternity leave, maybe leave the workforce entirely to become a stay-at-home-mom, that would be a cost to the company, right? Replacing her, training her replacement, etc.
So by the logic of your "even if I didn't want to, I have no choice other than to constantly monitor the actions of my employees and reprimand them when they're actions run counter to the company's interest", I should be screening my employees to see if they plan on starting a family, right? Maybe I'd be better off just not hiring women at all, I guess?
What if I have a large client who just plain doesn't like black people? Should I refuse to hire anybody who isn't white out of fear of losing a client?
See any flaws in arguments from economic determinism yet?
I agree that "conflicts of interests" as mentioned above do have a right to be known to employers. However, when does this stop becoming an genuine effort to root out the so-called "stripper teacher," and become an threadbare excuse to fire someone for lack of conformity?
There's an easy test - the term for it (up here in Canada, at least) is bona fide job requirement.
i.e., discrimination against the disabled is wrong, can't refuse to hire a guy in a wheelchair, unless the job he's applying for is "firefighter". Being able to go up and down stairs is a "bona fide job requirement".
Now, I'll concede that there could be some scenarios where your off-the-clock personal conduct could constitute a bona fide job requirement, (some examples that come to mind are, having a clean criminal record to be a cop or bank loan officer), they are very much the exception, not the rule.
For the most part, this stuff is exactly what you're talking about. Notice that the case TFA is talking about is in the school system, one of the most conformity-conscious places conceivable to work. Some employers are tyrants, (my experience is that the chance that your boss or hr director is a tyrant varies directly with the number of people who work there...) and they'd like to use "any means necessary" to keep the rabble in line.
Look, as my employer, you buy my time, during whatever timeframe we agree constitutes "working hours".
You want control over my conduct during the times when you're not paying me? Fuck off. I see that as no different than asking me to do unpaid overtime. You buy my labor, not my soul.
Offtopic, but a friend of mine in law school had an assignment on the topic of bona fide job requirements involving a hypothetical, post-surgery, male-to-female transsexual, who was applying for a job as a rape crisis center counselor. The question was, if the job requirement includes "being a woman", (presumably on the grounds that women who just went through the trauma of rape prefer to have a female counselor) can you fire and/or refuse to hire the post-op male-to-female transsexual?
Also know that when you go out on your own, you deserve all of the glory, credit, blame, and defeat.
Y'know, I read The Fountainhead too, I just saw it as a poorly-written paean to narcissism. Knowingly or not, it seems to have struck some deep chord with you. That's too bad. It's a stunted, solipsistic world-view.
This whole discussion reminds me of the quote I saw somewhere that went something like "libertarians are just slave-owners who want police protection from their slaves."
Right or wrong, if my client says that they don't like my employee, I take that very seriously. Accidents and general human error are acceptable in moderation. Disregard for my business -- even during off-hours -- is completely unacceptable.
I know exactly what you mean. I run a company, and one one of my biggest clients, probably 85% of our revenue, well, he just plain doesn't like jews. So there were a couple of jewish employees that had their religion listed on their facebook profiles, so I really had to let them go. After all, it's just business.
Sarcasm aside, you do see my point, right?
You don't deserve squat -- that's why you get nothing but money for your time. You work is appreciated, but the intelectual property isn't yours, and the risk wasn't yours, and the value-rewards won't be yours.
OK, that's all fine and well and good. But if I'm your employee, by that same philosophy, you get to have control over what I do while I'm at work, and that's it.
My employer doesn't like something that I said online? (or, anywhere else, for that matter) Well, all you bought was my time, not my soul.
If you want to have a say over my conduct when I'm not at work, and off the clock, well, either make a case for it being a bona fide job requirement to "do or not do activity X" (examples like the convicted fraudster applying for a job as a loan officer, or the cop with a criminal record) in my off hours, or go pound sand.
You only pay me for my time, which is entirely fair and correct, but you only get to have control over my conduct during those hours when I'm "on the clock". Anything else is none of your business.
If you do something in public in your own time, it can and will affect your employment and is of concern to your employer. No bank wants an employee that's a convicted fraudster. No school wants teachers who are porn stars. No police force wants an ex-con as an officer. The issue isn't whether you conduct these activities in your own time or not, or if the Internet was used. The issue is that you're in a trusted position, and that your employer may have the right to terminate your employment if they perceive a conflict of interest, or if something you've done or are doing in your spare time means you can't effectively do your job.
Um, no, actually.
The things you're talking about here with the ex-con cop or the convicted fraudster applying for a job at a bank fall under the term bona fide occupation requirements.
So, you can't legally refuse to hire a guy in a wheelchair, unless he's applying for a job as a firefighter, where you could quite sensibly claim that the ability to go up a flight of stairs is a bona fide job requirement. However, unless somebody wants to make the claim that "not being photographed drinking what could be alcohol" is a bona fide job requirement for a student teacher, then we're talking about something entirely different in the Stacy Snyder case. Let's not confuse "bona fide job requirement" with "asshat boss who thinks that by signing an employment contract, he owns his employee's body, mind, and soul."
Same applies to the fraudster applying at the bank - a clean criminal record check is a bona fide job requirement.
The fact that there can be a case made, in some circumstances, that your private, "off the clock" behavior can constitute a bona fide job requirement does not give employers a blank check to stick their nose into the off hours behavior of their employees.
Are we really suppose to have sympathy for morons who don't know what they put on the net is public?
No, but we ought to have sympathy for people unfortunate enough to work for employers who think that an employment contract turns employees into serfs and gives the employer the right to dictate off-hours conduct upon pain of dismissal.
Look, there was a time, when there were no particular laws against sexual harassment, or discrimination on the basis of a disability, for example. And back then, there were always status quo defenders saying "well, if she didn't want her boss to hit on her, what was she doing wearing that skirt to work?" to a woman being sexually harassed. Times change.
No, but you should find an employer that's willing to let you chase your dream without having to hide it from them. Next time you change jobs, I'd be up front about being a comedian, and about some of your work being offensive, and let them know that it won't come into your work life. If they don't hire you, keep trying till you find someone that will. You may lose some good opportunities, but at least you won't live in fear of losing your job.
No, you shouldn't have to do that. You're an employee, contracted to do X tasks during Y hours. If your boss wanted to include other restrictions on your conduct, they should've specified that upon hiring, and compensated you adequately for it.
Another way of looking at this sort of scenario is employers who all of a sudden want to add to their contractual relationship with their employees without compensation. Your boss deciding "OK, you can't put anything on facebook that might embarrass the company", after contracts have been signed and everything is really no different from your boss all of a sudden deciding that you have to work an extra 10 hours a week with no additional pay.
Let me say it again, folks. You're accepting a job, not joining a cult. You're selling your labor, not your soul.
Whether by legislation or by employees just flat-out refusing to work for this sort of employer, we need to smash down this attitude that some employers have that they can treat you like a serf.
That your employer ought to have no say whatsoever about what you do outside work, unless they can demonstrate a bona fide job requirement that you be of "good conduct" (whatever that means...) while not on the clock.
Seriously, I sell my labor, not my soul when I take a job. You're taking a job, not joining a cult. Who gives a fuck if your "morality" is in line with your employers? If I decide to have a roman orgy, complete with transvestites and farm animals, on the weekend, as long as it doesn't interfere with my performance at work, it ought to be none of my employer's business.
This is, on a side note, the reason why workplace drug testing is so objectionable. If I'm an airline pilot or a bus driver, you can test me for impairment/intoxication while I'm on the job, or you can make a requirement like the pilot's rule-of-thumb of "12 hours between bottle and throttle", but testing to see if I smoked a joint on the weekend? Go fuck yourself.
It seems like there's always a lot of employers out there who want to treat their employees like serfs. Sorry, it's a simple contractual relationship between me and my employer. I will do such-and-such tasks between the hours of 9 and 5 (or whatever the contract stipulates), but my boss doesn't get a say in anything else in my life.
OK, so, for the sake of the argument, let's suppose that the off-the-clock, rowdy-drunken-behavior-of-employees-posted-on-facebook has a negative impact on the employer. (Imagine a conservative town with a lot of word-of mouth business or something, use your imagination)
So then what we're talking about here is two conflicting rights: Right to freedom of speech vs economic rights/well being of employer.
Does anybody really want to make the case that some employer's bottom line is more important than freedom of speech?
The real problem is, when most western democracies were writing constitutions, the modern "corporation" as we know it didn't exist. So people like the US founding fathers didn't see the need to enshrine protection against oppression by corporations in the constitution.
So most constitutions don't have much to say about interactions between you and your employer, they tend to address interactions between you and your government.
We either need to (A) update this or (b) kneecap the power of modern corporations (more sensible solution).
Laws, in a democracy, are supposed to be made by governments that are of the people and for the people.
I'm annoyed at this article for the underlying assumption that copyright infringement = theft, while offering absolutely nothing to back up that assertion.
The reason that people don't see non-commercial private infringement as immoral or wrong is that, not only is it not "wrong" or "immoral", it's not even an ethical/moral issue. It's at best an economic issue, or an administrative issue.
Copyright has been broken ever since it's been applied to the behavior of individual citizens. Copyright law wasn't originally concerned with the actions of private citizens, it was concerned with the actions of publishers.
then you probably should have been more careful with 1) signing forms without reading them, and
I'm so sick and tired of people playing this 'blame the victim' game. As if it's fair for companies to ask you to sign ten pages of six-point text and buried in the midst of it is clauses giving them permission to rape your dog and sell your firstborn into slavery.
I don't know about your jurisdiction, or how it works in the jurisdiction of the guy with the drive, but in Canada, the courts have figured out that nobody reads these agreements, and they've found that you can only fall back on the "it's in your contract" bullshit if it's reasonable to assume that a person would've agreed to the actual terms, had they read them.
So it doesn't matter what's in the contract. You don't have to read them. The contract needs to be basically 'fair' in the eyes of the court to be enforceable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilden_Rent-A-Car_Co._v._Clendenning
OK, fair enough, FDA and drugs is an argument for _regulation_, not specifically an argument for government regulation. A hypothetical impartial certifying body of any sort would do.
However, I'm not sure the analogy holds from vaccines to virtualization.
First of all, most companies that do servers make money off supporting them, so even though virtualization means selling less hardware, you've got a revenue stream from service/maintenance.
Secondly, there's lots of competition from other players. Like you say, if you don't sell a client on virtualization, somebody else will. I'm not sure that you can say the same thing about the biotech industry. Barriers to entry are much higher to start a pharmaceutical manufacturer than to start a company that sells servers.
Finally, the magnitude of "revenue lost due to selling less servers due to virtualization" compared to "revenue lost if nobody needed anti-retroviral drug cocktails anymore due to vaccines" can't really be compared. And on a long-term perspective, virtualization will not ever take us to a point where people don't need new servers. But development of an effective HIV vaccine will eventually reduce demand for anti-retroviral drugs to zero.
That all aside, here's the problem with free market theories in health care: You can't decide to 'go without'.
The way free markets are supposed to work is, I offer something to you for sale in the marketplace. You evaluate based on price, quality, etc. If you believe that the price is too high, you decide not to buy it. Either get an alternative product/service, or do without.
But when you're in a car accident or get shot and need surgery, you can neither shop around nor can you 'do without'.
This kind of throws a monkey wrench into how free markets are supposed to work.
And this is of course, without even discussing the fact that the USA is unique in the developed world in seeing health care as a commodity. Every other industrialized country in the world puts health care in the same category as police/fire services, roads, public sanitation, national defense, etc.
It's something you get, irrespective of your income, willingness, or ability to pay. (Note that I'm talking medically necessary procedures only, and what exactly is "medically necessary" is open to debate) Speaking as somebody living in Canada, the idea of having to pay a bill for going to my doctor or going to the hospital is as alien as watching 'star trek'. Pop into a doctor's office or hospital waiting room in Canada and ask people "how much this gonna set you back" and you'll get a sea of blank faces.
So, in the American system, you got 2 million people employed full-time to deny claims, you got the most expensive health care system in the world, per capita, and you've got worse health-care outcomes than Canada or the UK or Sweden or France.
I don't get it. How can you any American support the status quo? What, you just love insurance companies that much or something?
Like it or not, people are downloading and sharing against copyright all over. And there's no reason to support that.
Ok, if there's a law that a large portion of the citizenry seems unwilling to obey, should we try and change the behavior of those people breaking the law or should we try to change the law?
Or, to put it another way, do you really think the genie will go back in the bottle?
I don't think that, short of a mandated-by-law trusted computing scenario, (and, let's face it, will TC really be "unbreakable"? History suggests that's doubtful) you can ever stop piracy. Sooner we admit that the better.
Now, before a lot of people start saying "well, if enough people commit murder should that be legal too?". The analogy you're looking for is not with crimes like murder or rape but with artifical, imposed-by-government crimes like prohibition.
In a democracy, the basis of legitimacy of laws or governments should be a mandate from the people. While I don't trust polls very much, and I don't have any hard numbers, but I'd be willing to bet that most people don't see non-commercial copyright violations as much of a problem. I'm not even sure you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that private non-commercial copyright violations is costing anybody any money.
Not unless you accept the RIAA/MPAA voodoo accounting that every single copyright violation = one lost sale.
Much in the same theme as the essay on "The Market for Lemons", there's a number of fundamental problems with attempting to apply free-market solutions for health care. First of all, without something like the FDA, placebo effect means that there's essentially no way to tell snake oil from antibiotics. So you need a minimal level of regulation.
The assumption of the free market is that if you don't like what you get from vendor A, you can shop around to vendor B or C or D.
But when you get shot or injured in a traffic accident, it's not like you're going to haggle with the paramedics on price. You need to go to the hospital, or you die.
So since buyers can't just decide to "do without" lifesaving surgery (or any other medical treatment), then there's no reduction of demand as prices increase.
Finally, take the example of an HIV vaccine. Now, granted, some researchers suspect that it may be flat out impossible. But if you look at the economics of the situation, what society as a whole needs is a vaccine. But what drug producers need is a steady revenue stream. A one off solution like a vaccine has a very low profit margin, especially compared to taking a couple dozen pills every day for the rest of a patient's life. So there's very little incentive to put R & D into a vaccine. (arguably, there's even an incentive to prevent others from working on one, but I'm not wearing my conspiracy theory hat today...)
These examples are not exceptional 'edge cases'. These sorts of problems are common in many marketplaces, and may not be solvable problems. So let's be very, very, careful when we talk about free markets and heath care.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, I know you're joking and all, but here's why it'll never happen. Given that even far right-wing politicians here support universal health care, the reason Canada will never get statehood, (no matter what happens with quebec separatism) because the GOP will never allow a new state to join the union that will be guaranteed to send two democrats to the senate, forever, or at least until the heat death of the universe.
(same thing goes for PR as well...)
Oh, so, nothing exists that can't be bought and sold? How 'bout votes or babies? Current free-market ideology aside, there are in fact lots of things that exist that are not anybody's property, and we mostly agree that that's for the best.
Look, it's not about left-vs-right. Let me give you the essence of the problem. Generally in economics, something has value if it has both utility and scarcity. So how do we assign determine the value of something when the marginal cost of production approaches zero? I'm not happy with a producer charging me the same price as what a CD went for in the 90's, but I don't think the Radiohead approach of "pay whatever you like" is viable for the majority of cases either.
Answer that and you're up for a Nobel for economics.
And people like you who think that the only thing at issue here is people wanting to get stuff for free.
Sure, I'll freely admit that I prefer our current 'wild west' situation where I can download last night's episode of "the wire" instead of having to order HBO from my cable company. But that's just the tip of the iceberg here.
What file-sharing advocates like me or Falkvinge are talking about is much bigger questions like, "what is the nature of ownership of IP?", or "what is an appropriate level of renumeration for producers of creative works?" and "How should we make sure producers continue to get paid?"
You sound like somebody who supports the status quo on copyright, so let me ask you this one: Given that traditional economic theory generally assumes something has value if it has utility and scarcity, how do we make sense of the economics of selling a product where the marginal production cost approaches zero? How does something with effectively no scarcity have value at all?
Because you don't. Giving artists "control of their work" was never the intention of copyright law. In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest that the only real purpose of copyright law when originally written was to keep publishers from ripping off authors/artists.
And this part can't be over-stressed: It was originally an industrial regulation, something that only restricted your actions if you voluntarily decided to get into the "book publishing" or "music publishing" business. But in an age of networked computers, it restricts the freedoms of basically each and every bloody citizen.
Which is why I've come around to the viewpoint of "time to throw the baby out with the bathwater" on copyright. When the baby's stone cold dead in the bathwater and starting to stink and draw flies, it's ok to throw it out with the bathwater.
First of all, let me say "here, here", to causality's comment about how you can't legislate morality.
But what occurs to me is, what's the non-online/pre-internet version of this story? I understand that these were pictures delivered to the school administration anonymously by somebody, presumably someone who wasn't their friend.
Imagine if some unknown person followed a group of high school students around (or hired a private investigator to do the same) and took pictures of them engaged in questionable activities? (Assume for the sake of this discussion that all these activities happened in public spaces, therefore no "expectation of privacy" on the part of students)
Would that be OK?
It seems like a lot of people have no problem with the school administration taking disciplinary action against students for activities they engage in outside of school hours off of school property. To those people I say, what if the school had hired private detectives to follow students around, and, say, got pictures of them in a bar consuming alcohol? Would that be ok, or would it be more like a police state?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but at least on US soil, this is basically zero? Certainly zero fatalities, right?
I may have missed a case or two, but either way, terrorism is nowhere near as dangerous as say, driving, right?
Even if you live in Israel, a state that most would agree certainly does have a terrorism problem, you're still 10X more likely to die in a car accident than a terrorist attack.
And, anyway, the US government is currently doing exactly what al-queda et. al. want in Iraq, so there's no reason for terrorists to use limited resources in a wasteful way.
My prediction that I've been making since 2004 or so is, if the US starts making serious noise about getting out of Iraq, THEN we'll see another terror attack on US soil.
That's not the idea.
The idea scenario is, you're a coke addict. You go through 30 days of rehab, you're clean, and want to stay clean. When you get out, you're tempted, but no longer _physiologically_ addicted.
Say you're at a party, you think to yourself, "I've been good, I deserve this, just this once! Besides, this is a special occasion, it's my birthday/anniversary/sister's wedding/day that ends in y", and you decide to snort a couple lines.
You snort some, no effect. No relapse.
The trials done at Columbia with 10 college students with no plans to quit the drug may not really give you much information about the behavior of addicts, as far as whether or not dedicated addicts will seek another drug or not.
This is, incidentally, my #1 annoyance about drug policy discussions - people who don't draw a distinction between casual, recreational users and those who are actually addicted to the drug in question.
And geez, this is slashdot, how long will it take for somebody to mention this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer
For those who don't know, when the lead character was made bio-chemically incapable of getting high on either cocaine or amphetamines, he sought out an exotic synthetic with similar effects.
Look, it's easy to indulge in one's "fair world" bias and blame the victim of various scams for being stupid, but it's not a real useful way to look at the situation.
Like joining a cult, nobody gets up one morning and says "I think I'll be taken in by a pyramid scheme scam today".
People have been taken by scams usually because the scammers are often very, very, good at what they do. Not that some people aren't painfully stupid, or even worse, stupid and _greedy_, but the reason victims of fraud look so stupid is hindsight bias. Once you know that "offer X" was a scam, of course it looks like the victim was an idiot.
Hello, um, economics of bringing a new product to market?
The crux of his argument seems to be thus: Most new and innovative products (iPhone for example) come out of closed source shops/companies/organizations, therefore closed shop is more likely to produce innovative products.
When you find me an open-source organization that has the resources of Apple to throw at an open source version of an iPhone, gimme a call. But until then, the economics of the situation makes comparisons between what apple or HTC or "fill-in-the-blank-company-who just-produced-an-innovative-project" and what open source types do is an apples to oranges comparison.
Saying "because most products that are innovative come from closed source shops therefore closed shops are by definition more innovative" is like saying that men are smarter than women because Newton, Darwin, Gauss, and Einstein were all male.
Just because something has always been a certain way in the past, does not mean that it is necessarily so, by definition. It just means that, up to this point, that it's been that way.
Let's face it: When the founding fathers of the US constitution were getting things together, there were no such thing as "corporations" as we know them now.
The unlimited duration charter was done by processes of courts and lawyers in the late 1800's in most jurisdictions, the turning point at which the modern corporation began as we know it.
So, we really shouldn't fault the framers (or the authors of constitutions/charters of rights in other countries) for not foreseeing interactions between citizens and entities that didn't exist at the time.
You're absolutely right. Of course, the good news is, the measures by which corporations gained power were done by courts and lawyers, and they can be un-done by the same measures. After all, it's not like our rules governing corporations (and giving them the right to make political donations, or own property, etc) are in the constitution or something.
Now, that aside, let's look at this as a question of fairness. I hire you to do job X. I'm going to pay you for working something like ~8 hours a day. During those hours, I can make certain rules, as an employer. Dress, conduct, all that sorta thing is fair game for me to dictate rules for my employees.
But why in god's name, tell me, do I get to have a say over what my employees do when I'm not paying them?
Let me see if I can use your free-market, bottom-line-is-all-that-matters, logic in another scenario: Imagine I'm interviewing a potential employee. Candidate is a woman. She's late 20's, wearing a wedding ring. If she decides, in a year or two, to have a baby, take a year or two off on maternity leave, maybe leave the workforce entirely to become a stay-at-home-mom, that would be a cost to the company, right? Replacing her, training her replacement, etc.
So by the logic of your "even if I didn't want to, I have no choice other than to constantly monitor the actions of my employees and reprimand them when they're actions run counter to the company's interest", I should be screening my employees to see if they plan on starting a family, right? Maybe I'd be better off just not hiring women at all, I guess?
What if I have a large client who just plain doesn't like black people? Should I refuse to hire anybody who isn't white out of fear of losing a client?
See any flaws in arguments from economic determinism yet?
There's an easy test - the term for it (up here in Canada, at least) is bona fide job requirement.
i.e., discrimination against the disabled is wrong, can't refuse to hire a guy in a wheelchair, unless the job he's applying for is "firefighter". Being able to go up and down stairs is a "bona fide job requirement".
Now, I'll concede that there could be some scenarios where your off-the-clock personal conduct could constitute a bona fide job requirement, (some examples that come to mind are, having a clean criminal record to be a cop or bank loan officer), they are very much the exception, not the rule.
For the most part, this stuff is exactly what you're talking about. Notice that the case TFA is talking about is in the school system, one of the most conformity-conscious places conceivable to work. Some employers are tyrants, (my experience is that the chance that your boss or hr director is a tyrant varies directly with the number of people who work there...) and they'd like to use "any means necessary" to keep the rabble in line.
Look, as my employer, you buy my time, during whatever timeframe we agree constitutes "working hours".
You want control over my conduct during the times when you're not paying me? Fuck off. I see that as no different than asking me to do unpaid overtime. You buy my labor, not my soul.
Offtopic, but a friend of mine in law school had an assignment on the topic of bona fide job requirements involving a hypothetical, post-surgery, male-to-female transsexual, who was applying for a job as a rape crisis center counselor. The question was, if the job requirement includes "being a woman", (presumably on the grounds that women who just went through the trauma of rape prefer to have a female counselor) can you fire and/or refuse to hire the post-op male-to-female transsexual?
This whole discussion reminds me of the quote I saw somewhere that went something like "libertarians are just slave-owners who want police protection from their slaves."
I know exactly what you mean. I run a company, and one one of my biggest clients, probably 85% of our revenue, well, he just plain doesn't like jews. So there were a couple of jewish employees that had their religion listed on their facebook profiles, so I really had to let them go. After all, it's just business. Sarcasm aside, you do see my point, right? OK, that's all fine and well and good. But if I'm your employee, by that same philosophy, you get to have control over what I do while I'm at work, and that's it.
My employer doesn't like something that I said online? (or, anywhere else, for that matter) Well, all you bought was my time, not my soul.
If you want to have a say over my conduct when I'm not at work, and off the clock, well, either make a case for it being a bona fide job requirement to "do or not do activity X" (examples like the convicted fraudster applying for a job as a loan officer, or the cop with a criminal record) in my off hours, or go pound sand. You only pay me for my time, which is entirely fair and correct, but you only get to have control over my conduct during those hours when I'm "on the clock". Anything else is none of your business.
Um, no, actually.
The things you're talking about here with the ex-con cop or the convicted fraudster applying for a job at a bank fall under the term bona fide occupation requirements.
So, you can't legally refuse to hire a guy in a wheelchair, unless he's applying for a job as a firefighter, where you could quite sensibly claim that the ability to go up a flight of stairs is a bona fide job requirement. However, unless somebody wants to make the claim that "not being photographed drinking what could be alcohol" is a bona fide job requirement for a student teacher, then we're talking about something entirely different in the Stacy Snyder case. Let's not confuse "bona fide job requirement" with "asshat boss who thinks that by signing an employment contract, he owns his employee's body, mind, and soul."
Same applies to the fraudster applying at the bank - a clean criminal record check is a bona fide job requirement. The fact that there can be a case made, in some circumstances, that your private, "off the clock" behavior can constitute a bona fide job requirement does not give employers a blank check to stick their nose into the off hours behavior of their employees. No, but we ought to have sympathy for people unfortunate enough to work for employers who think that an employment contract turns employees into serfs and gives the employer the right to dictate off-hours conduct upon pain of dismissal. Look, there was a time, when there were no particular laws against sexual harassment, or discrimination on the basis of a disability, for example. And back then, there were always status quo defenders saying "well, if she didn't want her boss to hit on her, what was she doing wearing that skirt to work?" to a woman being sexually harassed. Times change.
Another way of looking at this sort of scenario is employers who all of a sudden want to add to their contractual relationship with their employees without compensation. Your boss deciding "OK, you can't put anything on facebook that might embarrass the company", after contracts have been signed and everything is really no different from your boss all of a sudden deciding that you have to work an extra 10 hours a week with no additional pay.
Let me say it again, folks. You're accepting a job, not joining a cult. You're selling your labor, not your soul.
Whether by legislation or by employees just flat-out refusing to work for this sort of employer, we need to smash down this attitude that some employers have that they can treat you like a serf.
That your employer ought to have no say whatsoever about what you do outside work, unless they can demonstrate a bona fide job requirement that you be of "good conduct" (whatever that means...) while not on the clock.
Seriously, I sell my labor, not my soul when I take a job. You're taking a job, not joining a cult. Who gives a fuck if your "morality" is in line with your employers? If I decide to have a roman orgy, complete with transvestites and farm animals, on the weekend, as long as it doesn't interfere with my performance at work, it ought to be none of my employer's business.
This is, on a side note, the reason why workplace drug testing is so objectionable. If I'm an airline pilot or a bus driver, you can test me for impairment/intoxication while I'm on the job, or you can make a requirement like the pilot's rule-of-thumb of "12 hours between bottle and throttle", but testing to see if I smoked a joint on the weekend? Go fuck yourself.
It seems like there's always a lot of employers out there who want to treat their employees like serfs. Sorry, it's a simple contractual relationship between me and my employer. I will do such-and-such tasks between the hours of 9 and 5 (or whatever the contract stipulates), but my boss doesn't get a say in anything else in my life.
OK, so, for the sake of the argument, let's suppose that the off-the-clock, rowdy-drunken-behavior-of-employees-posted-on-facebook has a negative impact on the employer. (Imagine a conservative town with a lot of word-of mouth business or something, use your imagination)
So then what we're talking about here is two conflicting rights: Right to freedom of speech vs economic rights/well being of employer.
Does anybody really want to make the case that some employer's bottom line is more important than freedom of speech?
The real problem is, when most western democracies were writing constitutions, the modern "corporation" as we know it didn't exist. So people like the US founding fathers didn't see the need to enshrine protection against oppression by corporations in the constitution.
So most constitutions don't have much to say about interactions between you and your employer, they tend to address interactions between you and your government.
We either need to (A) update this or (b) kneecap the power of modern corporations (more sensible solution).
It's about time somebody made this point.
Laws, in a democracy, are supposed to be made by governments that are of the people and for the people.
I'm annoyed at this article for the underlying assumption that copyright infringement = theft, while offering absolutely nothing to back up that assertion.
The reason that people don't see non-commercial private infringement as immoral or wrong is that, not only is it not "wrong" or "immoral", it's not even an ethical/moral issue. It's at best an economic issue, or an administrative issue.
Copyright has been broken ever since it's been applied to the behavior of individual citizens. Copyright law wasn't originally concerned with the actions of private citizens, it was concerned with the actions of publishers.
OK, fair enough, FDA and drugs is an argument for _regulation_, not specifically an argument for government regulation. A hypothetical impartial certifying body of any sort would do.
However, I'm not sure the analogy holds from vaccines to virtualization.
First of all, most companies that do servers make money off supporting them, so even though virtualization means selling less hardware, you've got a revenue stream from service/maintenance.
Secondly, there's lots of competition from other players. Like you say, if you don't sell a client on virtualization, somebody else will. I'm not sure that you can say the same thing about the biotech industry. Barriers to entry are much higher to start a pharmaceutical manufacturer than to start a company that sells servers.
Finally, the magnitude of "revenue lost due to selling less servers due to virtualization" compared to "revenue lost if nobody needed anti-retroviral drug cocktails anymore due to vaccines" can't really be compared. And on a long-term perspective, virtualization will not ever take us to a point where people don't need new servers. But development of an effective HIV vaccine will eventually reduce demand for anti-retroviral drugs to zero.
That all aside, here's the problem with free market theories in health care: You can't decide to 'go without'.
The way free markets are supposed to work is, I offer something to you for sale in the marketplace. You evaluate based on price, quality, etc. If you believe that the price is too high, you decide not to buy it. Either get an alternative product/service, or do without.
But when you're in a car accident or get shot and need surgery, you can neither shop around nor can you 'do without'.
This kind of throws a monkey wrench into how free markets are supposed to work.
And this is of course, without even discussing the fact that the USA is unique in the developed world in seeing health care as a commodity. Every other industrialized country in the world puts health care in the same category as police/fire services, roads, public sanitation, national defense, etc.
It's something you get, irrespective of your income, willingness, or ability to pay. (Note that I'm talking medically necessary procedures only, and what exactly is "medically necessary" is open to debate) Speaking as somebody living in Canada, the idea of having to pay a bill for going to my doctor or going to the hospital is as alien as watching 'star trek'. Pop into a doctor's office or hospital waiting room in Canada and ask people "how much this gonna set you back" and you'll get a sea of blank faces.
So, in the American system, you got 2 million people employed full-time to deny claims, you got the most expensive health care system in the world, per capita, and you've got worse health-care outcomes than Canada or the UK or Sweden or France.
I don't get it. How can you any American support the status quo? What, you just love insurance companies that much or something?
Now, before a lot of people start saying "well, if enough people commit murder should that be legal too?". The analogy you're looking for is not with crimes like murder or rape but with artifical, imposed-by-government crimes like prohibition.
In a democracy, the basis of legitimacy of laws or governments should be a mandate from the people. While I don't trust polls very much, and I don't have any hard numbers, but I'd be willing to bet that most people don't see non-commercial copyright violations as much of a problem. I'm not even sure you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that private non-commercial copyright violations is costing anybody any money.
Not unless you accept the RIAA/MPAA voodoo accounting that every single copyright violation = one lost sale.
Much in the same theme as the essay on "The Market for Lemons", there's a number of fundamental problems with attempting to apply free-market solutions for health care. First of all, without something like the FDA, placebo effect means that there's essentially no way to tell snake oil from antibiotics. So you need a minimal level of regulation.
The assumption of the free market is that if you don't like what you get from vendor A, you can shop around to vendor B or C or D.
But when you get shot or injured in a traffic accident, it's not like you're going to haggle with the paramedics on price. You need to go to the hospital, or you die.
So since buyers can't just decide to "do without" lifesaving surgery (or any other medical treatment), then there's no reduction of demand as prices increase.
Finally, take the example of an HIV vaccine. Now, granted, some researchers suspect that it may be flat out impossible. But if you look at the economics of the situation, what society as a whole needs is a vaccine. But what drug producers need is a steady revenue stream. A one off solution like a vaccine has a very low profit margin, especially compared to taking a couple dozen pills every day for the rest of a patient's life. So there's very little incentive to put R & D into a vaccine. (arguably, there's even an incentive to prevent others from working on one, but I'm not wearing my conspiracy theory hat today...)
These examples are not exceptional 'edge cases'. These sorts of problems are common in many marketplaces, and may not be solvable problems. So let's be very, very, careful when we talk about free markets and heath care.