Not true. You can get response data if you spoof an IP address and provide source routing information in the packet, assuming that the routers between you and the destination don't block the source-routed traffic.
And even if the routers do block source routing, somebody with appropriate levels of access could send a RIP or BGP routing change and hijack your IP number temporarily, all with little to no logging.
IP addresses are an identity in much the same way that a postal address is an identity. Many people are at the same postal address, and somebody who knows what he/she is doing can submit a change of address form and get your mail. In other words, an IP number is very much not an identity in any practical sense of the word.
You as a person, can not be photographed without your consent.
In what country? At least in the U.S., if you're in a public place, you have no expectation of privacy, and thus no legal right to it.
Now there are limits to how such a photo can be used (e.g. not in an advertisement), but that would be the case for any photo taken under any circumstances (with or without permission to take the photograph) in the absence of permission to use it for that purpose.
Nothing deals with multipath perfectly, so if the signal is marginal already, it can be enough to break things.
Also, all those reflections can fool the phone and/or towers into switching towers in cases where they might have not needed to if they had waited a few seconds. There's nothing that causes call drops quite as quickly or reliably as a failed tower handoff (when the new tower realizes it no longer has a free slot for the phone that just left that tower two minutes earlier).
Not true. They do not collect for music under which an existing license agreement exists. That means that CC-licensed music does not require any payment through Sound Exchange. If the author is a member, it falls under this clause:
SoundExchange membership is on a nonexclusive basis. This means that you are free to direct license a webcaster or other digital music service provider in addition to our representation of your catalog.
Creative Commons licensing constitutes a direct license, provided that the webcaster meets the terms of that license. For nonmembers, it just falls outside their scope entirely.
Same goes for public domain music if both the work and the recording are in the public domain. However, most of the time, the recordings themselves are still under copyright, and for web broadcasting, that means that the artists get some portion of royalties. (This has historically not been the case for over-the-air broadcast, IIRC.)
In areas of low population density, their towers don't reach far enough, so there are huge areas with no signal at all.
In areas of high population density, their towers don't have enough frequency slots or time slots to handle the number of simultaneous users (and the added multipath problems caused by mostly-concrete high-rise structures make things worse).
Both problems are real problems. The problem with the U.S. is not that the density is too high or too low, but that the density has too large a standard deviation.
More to the point, continuous speed cannot be faster than the fastest instantaneous speed. Therefore, if the continuous speed over five seconds is 50 MPH, you can safely assume that at some point, the car must have been going at least 50 MPH.
If that's true, then every ticket should be thrown out.
First, if your precision is subject to more than 100 milliseconds of variation in accuracy, you should be showing the time stamp in tenths of a second or whole seconds, not single milliseconds. That's first-year high school science class.
Second, if the hardware really has that much slop, it is terribly designed. If they screwed up something as simple as basic photo acquisition, how can anyone possibly trust that they did a better job when designing something as relatively complex as a radar speed sensor?
So either you're wrong and the time stamps are sufficient cause for throwing out the citation, or you're right and the time stamps are sufficient cause for throwing out every citation.
It's not the people designing it that are the problem. It's the greedy local town government who is pressuring them to give out more tickets so that they can bring in more revenue. They're the ones who decide what is or is not sufficient proof for giving a ticket. And that's why we need laws at the state (or ideally, federal) level to regulate these things.
Actually, this is an incorrect assumption. Speeding prevents auto accidents.
Yeah, in some cases, it does. Like when you speed to avoid that car that's flying at you from a too-short on-ramp.
But I assume you meant that speed limits prevent auto accidents. Statistics show otherwise. They may reduce the number of fatal accidents, but as far as the sheer number of accidents, it's pretty much a wash, with very rare exceptions (e.g. school zones).
Yes, if it is a digital image, it is added later—a few microseconds later. It occurs when the data is compressed to RAM, not when the shot is recorded to flash (potentially several seconds later).
Regardless, there would have to be over a tenth of a second variation in the amount of time it takes the camera to generate the JPEG and EXIF data for the image for this to be plausible. There's just absolutely no possibility that such a huge variation between shots is possible with any hardware built in the last thirty years.
No, it doesn't. As we've pointed out, that information is recorded the instant the photo is taken. Don't believe me? Take four photos to keep your camera busy, then swap lenses while it is writing the first one out to flash. I guarantee that it will write the correct lens information for all four photos.
The EXIF data is filled in when the image is encoded, not when the photo is written out. There should not be much jitter at all in those time stamps, and certainly not two or three hundred milliseconds worth of jitter, which is what would have been necessary in this case.
The photos are just to prove his vehicle was on that road AT the time the radar clocked it.
Except that it doesn't do that. It proves that his vehicle was on that road at the time the radar clocked something. That something:
might be in the other lane or might have changed lanes when the radar detector went off.
might be traveling in the opposite direction (depending on whether their radar knows the difference between positive and negative speeds—most of the radar signs I've seen don't appear to, anecdotally)
might have been an aircraft flying overhead (not joking—I remember reading about some fairly slow car getting mis-clocked at something like 150 MPH, though I can't find the citation at the moment; the ticket was thrown out....)
might have simply had a significantly larger radar profile than you—radar tends to return the speed of the largest object, but that's no guarantee.
In short, radar is remarkably fallible, even ignoring calibration issues. Thus, the photos must at least corroborate the radar information within a reasonable margin of error, or else there is a good chance that the radar result was bogus. That's why they provide two pictures in the first place—to corroborate the radar's determination of speed.
First, these are typically not off-the-shelf cameras. Heck, many of the speed cameras and red light cameras out there are film, not CCD-based at all, in which case the time stamps are very much burned into the photos themselves.
And even if they are added in after the fact, there is no good reason to take a time stamp to when the camera starts writing the image to flash rather than when the exposure is taken. In fact, doing so would be remarkably absurd, as when you shoot several RAW photos in a row, the time stamps could be off by as much as twenty or thirty seconds. No camera manufacturer in its right mind would do this.
But just to prove beyond reasonable doubt that you're wrong, I just shot two RAW images on my Canon DSLR about a tenth of a second apart. Both are time stamped in the same second, despite the fact that it took somewhere around ten seconds to write both photos. If the time stamps had been added when the photos were written to the flash card, there would have been a discrepancy of several seconds. There was not.
What you failed to do was videotape the process and show the GPS unit showing yourself going under the speed limit a few dozen times and getting flagged anyway.
Actually, it's not hard at all. You just place two cameras fifty feet apart and measure the position of the leading edge in two photos taken a fraction of a second apart. You can then compute the speed fairly precisely, assuming you know the exact positions of the two cameras and the exact time delay.
The problem with speed calculations is that it depends on the assumption that your clock is precisely accurate, in much the same way that Radar depends on calibration. For a ticket to be issued, it should be necessary to have at least two corroborating pieces of evidence.
Ideally, a speeding ticket should require an actual human witness as well. Why? Because if speeding in an area doesn't present a high enough risk to be worth putting an officer out there to patrol it, one could reasonably argue that the limit is not providing a significant safety benefit, and therefore, should not even be legally enforceable in the first place.
I don't think that's right. A time stamp on disk might be placed in the image as it gets written out, but that's only accurate with 1 second granularity anyway, making those time stamps useless. This is talking about a time stamp that contains much more precise time stamping information, likely burned into the (possibly non-digital) image by physical hardware in the camera, which almost certainly means that it is generated at the same time the picture is generated.
If it is being burned into the image after the fact, then the camera vendor is being dumb, particularly since the whole purpose of those photos is to prove that an infraction really occurred, and burning in the time stamps after the photo is taken is basically tampering with evidence.
On the flip side, most of the movies I buy are over five years old. I don't buy first-run movies; I wait for the price drop after a few years until they're in the $4.99 bin. In effect, that means that I would never spend money for entertainment. That means that five years is too short.
Also, there's no real incentive to buy or rent a movie or watch it in a theater if you know that just five years of delayed gratification will get you a legal download copy for free.
I'm not saying 28 years isn't too long, mind you. I mainly threw that out because it's an easy one to argue, having been the standard for so many years. I could easily see 10 + 10, or even 5 + 5 + 5 + 5 (with increasing fees for every renewal). I could also see individual copyrights being a lot longer than corporate copyrights because an individual has less ability to distribute and profit from their creations than a big corporation does.
I could also see copyright terms be dependent upon the viability of the content. A movie is still enjoyable after twenty years (if it's good). A book, likewise. A computer game, by contrast, probably won't even run unless you can dig up ancient hardware to do so.
More than that, I could see software having a much shorter copyright term under the premise that, unlike books and movies, software continues to evolve after its initial release. New versions could continue to be under copyright as old versions fall out of copyright. This would require that software companies continue to actually improve their products in a substantial way, which would produce an increase in innovation.
Either way, we agree that life plus 70 years is way, way, way too long, but zero is too short.:-)
Most bands, especially the small ones, do not make any significant profits on recordings.
Hah. You mean most signed bands don't make any significant profits on recordings. However, if there are no record labels, there won't be any signed bands, which makes that an irrelevant point.
Most unsigned bands pay out of their own pockets to rent a studio, pay out of their own pockets to sell CDs, and then sell the CDs at their shows at a price designed to make them some profit. It may not be a huge profit, but they do profit from it. Even a couple of thousand dollars per run of CDs can pay the rent for a few months.
So sure, they're largely promotional, but that doesn't mean they can afford to give them away for free, and that's basically what you're asking them to do. Even if the distribution cost is zero (online), the studio time still costs money, and a decent engineer still costs money.
And most unsigned bands don't have concerts. They have shows. Some of the more popular bands get a cut of the door, depending on venue. Many bands, however, just get a flat fee per set.
Not to mention how many school music programs derive nonzero income from sales of recordings of their concerts. Don't forget them, either.
Hope you enjoy paying a few tens of millions of dollars for that laptop. Because if people can't continue making money off of designing them, that's what it is going to cost you to hire engineers to design and build one for you. The only reason you can afford any consumer goods is that the designer was able to distribute the staggering R&D over millions of consumers. Without that, stagnation is the least of your worries.
Why would a chef ever come up with a new recipe? Surely if he came up with a good one then McDonalds would just steal it and include it in their own chain and lock that chef out.
McDonalds would, assuming they could make it for under a dollar in a production line in the back of a fast food restaurant with three or four people in the back. For anything that is more complex than that or costs more than that, they wouldn't. And that's why people are willing to pay more for good food. It requires time and effort to create. Also, unlike entertainment, you generally can't do without food, and you can't copy food. Someone has to pick the vegetables, kill the animals, mix it all together, and serve it up.
The same goes for a hair style. You can't copy a hair style for free. A human being has to take the time to do it manually.
So in effect, without copyright, the only things of value would be things that require manual labor to create. And that is why, at least until such time as we have replicators and hair-cutting robots, your argument is fundamentally without merit.
If I like a work and I share it, more people will come to a gig or an exhibit the artists get more because the venue benefits and everyone can sell more merchandise, be it a t-shirt, book or print. The economics only break down for those at the top end.
That works to a very limited degree for music. On the other hand, what about all those people who might have bought a CD after the show, but won't now because they can download it for free? That translates to less money even for the people at the very bottom of the food chain. And remember that most artists aren't in a position to demand a higher cut of the door from the club that they perform in to make up for that loss of revenue. They're entirely at the mercy of the club owner. Sorry, but your "solution" doesn't work very well at all.
And it doesn't work at all for pretty much any other form of content creation, either. If there's no copyright to serve as a legal incentive to pay for those (and remember that by pay, I'm not just talking about you as a consumer, but also TV networks paying the creator for the right to air the show), then there's no reason that the people who produce the programming should ever expect to get paid a penny.
Similarly, if there's no copyright to require an online content distributor to pay them, there's no reason that they should expect money (even if that online distributor is making money by distributing it. And there's no legal transfer of a right, so there's nothing to sell on PayPal (and they aren't 501(c)(3) nonprofits, so donations are also probably out).
And it doesn't work for computer software unless you can find yourself a job working for a company that needs custom software. Admittedly, after all the software companies go out of business, there will be a greater number of companies that need custom software, but that doesn't inherently mean that the same number of jobs will appear. Also, any standardization of software, file formats, etc. is likely to fly right out the window because there will be ten thousand individuals doing the work instead of one company.
Basically, there's only one solution besides copyright that might work, and that is a patronage system in which the government pays people to create music, art, movies, literature, etc. proportional to their download rate. However, that takes us right back to the mess we have now with Audio CD-R funds that get disproportionately paid to major artists on major labels because there's no good way to globally measure what actually gets burned, downloaded, etc. without the potential for fraud by someone trying to inflate their own statistics.
Worse, even if we could set up such a system and find ways to eliminate the fraud problem, the people on the right would immediately decry such a system as socialism. They would be wrong, of course, but they seem to call every other government payout program "socialism", so I see no reason they wouldn't do the same for this. The people who make the big bucks would then find ways to buy back copyright, but in a more limited way that benefits them while leaving the little guy screwed.
It all comes down to that pesky difference between theory and practice....
I disagree, not because people will not produce, but because without copyright, there will be nothing to produce that has any inherent value other than food. Everything else can always be made by somebody else cheaper, and to some extent, even food can....
The problem is not that patents and copyright are inherently bad. The problem is that copyright should be 14 years with the option to extend for another 14. After you've created something, you should be able to make money on it for a limited period of time, and then it should go into the public domain while people still care about it enough to preserve it. And patent duration should depend on the field. For slow-moving fields, it might be twenty years. For high-tech fields, it should be more like three. And for individual inventors working independently, the duration should be longer than for patents-for-hire.
If we had no copyrights, there would be no incentive to create movies or TV shows because anyone could get a copy of it and air it for free or post it for free, and then there would be no revenue. Zero. That might be great for theater troupes, but it's crap for anyone trying to do any other sort of acting.
And don't think for one minute that you could make it up with advertising. If anyone can make it available for free, why would anyone watch an ad-laden copy? Why would anyone pay the creator a thing if they don't have to? Ask any shareware author how many people pay them. You'd be surprised. It's remarkably close to nobody.
It would also be pretty rough for musicians, because now they would have to live on revenue from live shows. That's great for acts that bring in a lot of people. It means that the people at the bottom, though—the singer-songwriters and small garage bands of the world—would not be able to use recordings to supplement the pittance that they get from club owners.
So in practice, the lack of copyrights would really screw over an awful lot of good people trying to make an honest living. Basically, you would be reducing every actor, every musician, every computer programmer, every artist to begging for change from people who themselves will likely have no source of income. In effect, the only thing of value will be food, but unfortunately there won't be anyone who can afford to buy it.
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Not true. You can get response data if you spoof an IP address and provide source routing information in the packet, assuming that the routers between you and the destination don't block the source-routed traffic.
And even if the routers do block source routing, somebody with appropriate levels of access could send a RIP or BGP routing change and hijack your IP number temporarily, all with little to no logging.
IP addresses are an identity in much the same way that a postal address is an identity. Many people are at the same postal address, and somebody who knows what he/she is doing can submit a change of address form and get your mail. In other words, an IP number is very much not an identity in any practical sense of the word.
In what country? At least in the U.S., if you're in a public place, you have no expectation of privacy, and thus no legal right to it.
Now there are limits to how such a photo can be used (e.g. not in an advertisement), but that would be the case for any photo taken under any circumstances (with or without permission to take the photograph) in the absence of permission to use it for that purpose.
Nothing deals with multipath perfectly, so if the signal is marginal already, it can be enough to break things.
Also, all those reflections can fool the phone and/or towers into switching towers in cases where they might have not needed to if they had waited a few seconds. There's nothing that causes call drops quite as quickly or reliably as a failed tower handoff (when the new tower realizes it no longer has a free slot for the phone that just left that tower two minutes earlier).
Not true. They do not collect for music under which an existing license agreement exists. That means that CC-licensed music does not require any payment through Sound Exchange. If the author is a member, it falls under this clause:
Creative Commons licensing constitutes a direct license, provided that the webcaster meets the terms of that license. For nonmembers, it just falls outside their scope entirely.
Same goes for public domain music if both the work and the recording are in the public domain. However, most of the time, the recordings themselves are still under copyright, and for web broadcasting, that means that the artists get some portion of royalties. (This has historically not been the case for over-the-air broadcast, IIRC.)
Steve Jobs is a Democrat. Just saying.
Two different problems.
In areas of low population density, their towers don't reach far enough, so there are huge areas with no signal at all.
In areas of high population density, their towers don't have enough frequency slots or time slots to handle the number of simultaneous users (and the added multipath problems caused by mostly-concrete high-rise structures make things worse).
Both problems are real problems. The problem with the U.S. is not that the density is too high or too low, but that the density has too large a standard deviation.
More to the point, continuous speed cannot be faster than the fastest instantaneous speed. Therefore, if the continuous speed over five seconds is 50 MPH, you can safely assume that at some point, the car must have been going at least 50 MPH.
If that's true, then every ticket should be thrown out.
First, if your precision is subject to more than 100 milliseconds of variation in accuracy, you should be showing the time stamp in tenths of a second or whole seconds, not single milliseconds. That's first-year high school science class.
Second, if the hardware really has that much slop, it is terribly designed. If they screwed up something as simple as basic photo acquisition, how can anyone possibly trust that they did a better job when designing something as relatively complex as a radar speed sensor?
So either you're wrong and the time stamps are sufficient cause for throwing out the citation, or you're right and the time stamps are sufficient cause for throwing out every citation.
It's not the people designing it that are the problem. It's the greedy local town government who is pressuring them to give out more tickets so that they can bring in more revenue. They're the ones who decide what is or is not sufficient proof for giving a ticket. And that's why we need laws at the state (or ideally, federal) level to regulate these things.
Yeah, in some cases, it does. Like when you speed to avoid that car that's flying at you from a too-short on-ramp.
But I assume you meant that speed limits prevent auto accidents. Statistics show otherwise. They may reduce the number of fatal accidents, but as far as the sheer number of accidents, it's pretty much a wash, with very rare exceptions (e.g. school zones).
Yes, if it is a digital image, it is added later—a few microseconds later. It occurs when the data is compressed to RAM, not when the shot is recorded to flash (potentially several seconds later).
Regardless, there would have to be over a tenth of a second variation in the amount of time it takes the camera to generate the JPEG and EXIF data for the image for this to be plausible. There's just absolutely no possibility that such a huge variation between shots is possible with any hardware built in the last thirty years.
No, it doesn't. As we've pointed out, that information is recorded the instant the photo is taken. Don't believe me? Take four photos to keep your camera busy, then swap lenses while it is writing the first one out to flash. I guarantee that it will write the correct lens information for all four photos.
The EXIF data is filled in when the image is encoded, not when the photo is written out. There should not be much jitter at all in those time stamps, and certainly not two or three hundred milliseconds worth of jitter, which is what would have been necessary in this case.
Except that it doesn't do that. It proves that his vehicle was on that road at the time the radar clocked something. That something:
In short, radar is remarkably fallible, even ignoring calibration issues. Thus, the photos must at least corroborate the radar information within a reasonable margin of error, or else there is a good chance that the radar result was bogus. That's why they provide two pictures in the first place—to corroborate the radar's determination of speed.
First, these are typically not off-the-shelf cameras. Heck, many of the speed cameras and red light cameras out there are film, not CCD-based at all, in which case the time stamps are very much burned into the photos themselves.
And even if they are added in after the fact, there is no good reason to take a time stamp to when the camera starts writing the image to flash rather than when the exposure is taken. In fact, doing so would be remarkably absurd, as when you shoot several RAW photos in a row, the time stamps could be off by as much as twenty or thirty seconds. No camera manufacturer in its right mind would do this.
But just to prove beyond reasonable doubt that you're wrong, I just shot two RAW images on my Canon DSLR about a tenth of a second apart. Both are time stamped in the same second, despite the fact that it took somewhere around ten seconds to write both photos. If the time stamps had been added when the photos were written to the flash card, there would have been a discrepancy of several seconds. There was not.
What you failed to do was videotape the process and show the GPS unit showing yourself going under the speed limit a few dozen times and getting flagged anyway.
Actually, it's not hard at all. You just place two cameras fifty feet apart and measure the position of the leading edge in two photos taken a fraction of a second apart. You can then compute the speed fairly precisely, assuming you know the exact positions of the two cameras and the exact time delay.
The problem with speed calculations is that it depends on the assumption that your clock is precisely accurate, in much the same way that Radar depends on calibration. For a ticket to be issued, it should be necessary to have at least two corroborating pieces of evidence.
Ideally, a speeding ticket should require an actual human witness as well. Why? Because if speeding in an area doesn't present a high enough risk to be worth putting an officer out there to patrol it, one could reasonably argue that the limit is not providing a significant safety benefit, and therefore, should not even be legally enforceable in the first place.
I don't think that's right. A time stamp on disk might be placed in the image as it gets written out, but that's only accurate with 1 second granularity anyway, making those time stamps useless. This is talking about a time stamp that contains much more precise time stamping information, likely burned into the (possibly non-digital) image by physical hardware in the camera, which almost certainly means that it is generated at the same time the picture is generated.
If it is being burned into the image after the fact, then the camera vendor is being dumb, particularly since the whole purpose of those photos is to prove that an infraction really occurred, and burning in the time stamps after the photo is taken is basically tampering with evidence.
On the flip side, most of the movies I buy are over five years old. I don't buy first-run movies; I wait for the price drop after a few years until they're in the $4.99 bin. In effect, that means that I would never spend money for entertainment. That means that five years is too short.
Also, there's no real incentive to buy or rent a movie or watch it in a theater if you know that just five years of delayed gratification will get you a legal download copy for free.
I'm not saying 28 years isn't too long, mind you. I mainly threw that out because it's an easy one to argue, having been the standard for so many years. I could easily see 10 + 10, or even 5 + 5 + 5 + 5 (with increasing fees for every renewal). I could also see individual copyrights being a lot longer than corporate copyrights because an individual has less ability to distribute and profit from their creations than a big corporation does.
I could also see copyright terms be dependent upon the viability of the content. A movie is still enjoyable after twenty years (if it's good). A book, likewise. A computer game, by contrast, probably won't even run unless you can dig up ancient hardware to do so.
More than that, I could see software having a much shorter copyright term under the premise that, unlike books and movies, software continues to evolve after its initial release. New versions could continue to be under copyright as old versions fall out of copyright. This would require that software companies continue to actually improve their products in a substantial way, which would produce an increase in innovation.
Either way, we agree that life plus 70 years is way, way, way too long, but zero is too short. :-)
Hah. You mean most signed bands don't make any significant profits on recordings. However, if there are no record labels, there won't be any signed bands, which makes that an irrelevant point.
Most unsigned bands pay out of their own pockets to rent a studio, pay out of their own pockets to sell CDs, and then sell the CDs at their shows at a price designed to make them some profit. It may not be a huge profit, but they do profit from it. Even a couple of thousand dollars per run of CDs can pay the rent for a few months.
So sure, they're largely promotional, but that doesn't mean they can afford to give them away for free, and that's basically what you're asking them to do. Even if the distribution cost is zero (online), the studio time still costs money, and a decent engineer still costs money.
And most unsigned bands don't have concerts. They have shows. Some of the more popular bands get a cut of the door, depending on venue. Many bands, however, just get a flat fee per set.
Not to mention how many school music programs derive nonzero income from sales of recordings of their concerts. Don't forget them, either.
Hope you enjoy paying a few tens of millions of dollars for that laptop. Because if people can't continue making money off of designing them, that's what it is going to cost you to hire engineers to design and build one for you. The only reason you can afford any consumer goods is that the designer was able to distribute the staggering R&D over millions of consumers. Without that, stagnation is the least of your worries.
McDonalds would, assuming they could make it for under a dollar in a production line in the back of a fast food restaurant with three or four people in the back. For anything that is more complex than that or costs more than that, they wouldn't. And that's why people are willing to pay more for good food. It requires time and effort to create. Also, unlike entertainment, you generally can't do without food, and you can't copy food. Someone has to pick the vegetables, kill the animals, mix it all together, and serve it up.
The same goes for a hair style. You can't copy a hair style for free. A human being has to take the time to do it manually.
So in effect, without copyright, the only things of value would be things that require manual labor to create. And that is why, at least until such time as we have replicators and hair-cutting robots, your argument is fundamentally without merit.
That works to a very limited degree for music. On the other hand, what about all those people who might have bought a CD after the show, but won't now because they can download it for free? That translates to less money even for the people at the very bottom of the food chain. And remember that most artists aren't in a position to demand a higher cut of the door from the club that they perform in to make up for that loss of revenue. They're entirely at the mercy of the club owner. Sorry, but your "solution" doesn't work very well at all.
And it doesn't work at all for pretty much any other form of content creation, either. If there's no copyright to serve as a legal incentive to pay for those (and remember that by pay, I'm not just talking about you as a consumer, but also TV networks paying the creator for the right to air the show), then there's no reason that the people who produce the programming should ever expect to get paid a penny.
Similarly, if there's no copyright to require an online content distributor to pay them, there's no reason that they should expect money (even if that online distributor is making money by distributing it. And there's no legal transfer of a right, so there's nothing to sell on PayPal (and they aren't 501(c)(3) nonprofits, so donations are also probably out).
And it doesn't work for computer software unless you can find yourself a job working for a company that needs custom software. Admittedly, after all the software companies go out of business, there will be a greater number of companies that need custom software, but that doesn't inherently mean that the same number of jobs will appear. Also, any standardization of software, file formats, etc. is likely to fly right out the window because there will be ten thousand individuals doing the work instead of one company.
Basically, there's only one solution besides copyright that might work, and that is a patronage system in which the government pays people to create music, art, movies, literature, etc. proportional to their download rate. However, that takes us right back to the mess we have now with Audio CD-R funds that get disproportionately paid to major artists on major labels because there's no good way to globally measure what actually gets burned, downloaded, etc. without the potential for fraud by someone trying to inflate their own statistics.
Worse, even if we could set up such a system and find ways to eliminate the fraud problem, the people on the right would immediately decry such a system as socialism. They would be wrong, of course, but they seem to call every other government payout program "socialism", so I see no reason they wouldn't do the same for this. The people who make the big bucks would then find ways to buy back copyright, but in a more limited way that benefits them while leaving the little guy screwed.
It all comes down to that pesky difference between theory and practice....
I disagree, not because people will not produce, but because without copyright, there will be nothing to produce that has any inherent value other than food. Everything else can always be made by somebody else cheaper, and to some extent, even food can....
The problem is not that patents and copyright are inherently bad. The problem is that copyright should be 14 years with the option to extend for another 14. After you've created something, you should be able to make money on it for a limited period of time, and then it should go into the public domain while people still care about it enough to preserve it. And patent duration should depend on the field. For slow-moving fields, it might be twenty years. For high-tech fields, it should be more like three. And for individual inventors working independently, the duration should be longer than for patents-for-hire.
If we had no copyrights, there would be no incentive to create movies or TV shows because anyone could get a copy of it and air it for free or post it for free, and then there would be no revenue. Zero. That might be great for theater troupes, but it's crap for anyone trying to do any other sort of acting.
And don't think for one minute that you could make it up with advertising. If anyone can make it available for free, why would anyone watch an ad-laden copy? Why would anyone pay the creator a thing if they don't have to? Ask any shareware author how many people pay them. You'd be surprised. It's remarkably close to nobody.
It would also be pretty rough for musicians, because now they would have to live on revenue from live shows. That's great for acts that bring in a lot of people. It means that the people at the bottom, though—the singer-songwriters and small garage bands of the world—would not be able to use recordings to supplement the pittance that they get from club owners.
So in practice, the lack of copyrights would really screw over an awful lot of good people trying to make an honest living. Basically, you would be reducing every actor, every musician, every computer programmer, every artist to begging for change from people who themselves will likely have no source of income. In effect, the only thing of value will be food, but unfortunately there won't be anyone who can afford to buy it.
The joke is that having cheap, ubiquitous 3D scanners is a critical first step to being able to copy a car.