OpenOffice is LGPL not GPL -- they could build from the OpenOffice codebase, write their own wrappers, keeping just that under the LGPL. They would not need to release any Microsoft Office code.
The question is whether Microsoft is going to really support ODF or just give lip-service token support. For example, how fast are bugs in the ODF support going to be fixed? Remember how Micorsoft "supported" Java with their non-compliant, buggy implementation? Considering that they have an open source codebase to work from, which wasn't true of Java at the time, they don't have much of an excuse to write a buggy implementation.
There's a very thin line between anecdotal evidence and obviousness. Statistics don't play a part in that when they confirm what practitioners already know from their experience in the field.
It sounds like the problem you are describing is not one with your knowledge, but your personal frustration with your bosses who don't trust you at your word that employing technology X,Y, or Z will reap benefits. Bosses who will continue to waste your time until statistics and studies are conducted which will likely happen after we're already swimming in the sea of obviousness.
You need new bosses. Projecting your frustration upon the OP is misleading.
Have you tried using IM with other developers who are more interested in developing than goofing off? In lieu of the mystical statistics compiled by God which you are requesting, we have a forum where people can share their own experiences from which a pattern can be devised. It's not ideal but it's better than nothing -- which internet are you from?
It's entirely possible to reach zero productivity by just gossiping on the telephone too.
Yes there is the potential for some productivity loss to non-work chatter - but "hello" and "goodbye" are two common social extravagances which are taken for granted as a cost of productively using the telephone.
I wonder if future generations will view the equivalency easier than those who grew up without IM?
I was highly skeptical of IM in a work environment, but I recently contributed to an OSS project which is conducted almost 100% over IM and I was converted.
So I'd recommend that skeptics actually try IM with other serious-minded developers.
...and an internet fan-base, I guess that explains why I haven't been able to find a $2-3 replacement clicky keyboard in a charity shop over the last few years.
Sometimes internet, you really suck.
The idea of using Facebook, MySpace, and Digg as instruments of government is, in some ways, breathtakingly foolish. Reading the content on Digg - full of conspiracy theories, slander, and bigotry - seems reminiscent of the chants of a mob, not the (theoretically desired) reasoned vox populi. Well yes, it would be breathtakingly foolish to suggest that these immature technologies would be used, in their raw form, to create meaningful input for governance.
That is not at question however - these technologies are a low-level protocol which will require some higher-level (as of yet undeveloped?) protocol to become meaningful and coherent.
are we perhaps seeing an organized campaign(s) manipulating Web 2.0 sites for their own purposes? With anonymity of site users, who can tell? It's a good argument against trusting anonymous sources, but even Wikipedia with Wikiscanner allows a certain amount of accountability. The problem appears to be tracing back rumour/FUD/misinformation to its source and a relatively (more objective than subjective) trustworthy mechanism to evaluate sources over time.
Social Media sites dramatically lower the costs of individual citizens involvement in the political process. That's a Good Thing. Yet if we don't anticipate and accept the manipulation of those sites by external agencies and those with far too much time on their hands, we're bloody damn fools. Agreed - social networking is still pretty darnyoung as a technology concept though, I predict that by the end of this year we'll start seeing more ways in which we can detect and thwart the devious plot of Company X, Campaign Y or Astroturf Org Z. FWIW, I'm working on one now, and I don't expect that I'm alone.
Opportunity Missed..
on
Happy Pi Day
·
· Score: 3, Funny
To post this story at 1:59pm, or 12 hours earlier depending upon which clock you prefer.
I wasn't being completely serious, but I meant it in the broad case - absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Now, I'm not running around accusing people of things, I'm just saying. I get it:-) Mostly though, I chose your post to respond to because it gave me the opportunity to poke more fun at the lame petty antics of the Wikilete. Considering that dude does read and participate here, it has a good chance of hitting the target, whether or not it has any influence towards getting him to act with more maturity is less certain.
the Wikipedia elite seem to be so inept in keeping secret their devious plots. How do you know? I mean, for all you know, they're actually really adept at keeping their devious plots secret. I mean, I doubt it, but for all we know, they've covered up hundreds of other scandals, and it's only these few that trickle to our ears. Oh, for sure.. and I handily highlighted the weasel word I left in there. But if they are so practiced at covering up hundreds of (presumably worse) scandals, then why are the ones which leak out just kinda reek of lame rather than being sinister?
Admittedly this could underscore be the true deviousness of their plot, but if I controlled the database of one of the worlds most used reference resources, I could think up countless plans which easily didn't involve me looking lame to the rest of the world.
You make a good point, but WTF does this have with Web2.0? AFAIK Wikipedia doesn't use AJAX (thank god), and I can even read it just fine with Javascript turned off. From this definition of Web2.0:
"O'Reilly provided examples of companies or products that embody these principles in his description of his four levels in the hierarchy of Web 2.0-ness. Level-3 applications, the most "Web 2.0"-oriented, only exist on the Internet, deriving their effectiveness from the inter-human connections and from the network effects that Web 2.0 makes possible, and growing in effectiveness in proportion as people make more use of them. O'Reilly gave as examples eBay, Craigslist, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Skype, dodgeball and AdSense."
Now you know where your "donations" to the "wikimedia foundation" went... while you were suckered into giving him free labor. Over the last year Wikipedia has, quite easily, saved me (or more specifically, my clients) hundreds if not thousands of dollars in time because it is a valuable reference resource for science and technology.
I couldn't care less if they go all high-school on each others personal accounts, or whether political biases are enforced through some "admin" abuses - those pages are not those which I find useful.
The most interesting thing about Wikipedia is that it could be founded by a hypocritical douche, but still remain a valuable repository of information. That in itself is enough to convince me that Web2.0 isn't just an empty phrase, not least because it is the legacy of Wikimedia and collaborative knowledge gathering which makes accounts of such douchiness hard to suppress.
That, and the fact that the Wikipedia elite seem to be so inept in keeping secret their devious plots.
why can't you compile it? I haven't looked at the RQMs but I'm guessing they are all freely available from MSDN? I don't run Windows. It can't be described as "freely available" if I need to buy an OS and invest the man hour to install it, before I can compile it.
As a research tool aimed at people actually looking into OS and compiler development this is a useful tool. For sure it might be. This is why I am on this thread actively soliciting opinions of it from people who, seemingly, can't say why it is so useful.
If you're not interested don't just flame MS because you think that all code should be open for re use. Agreed. There are a lot of better, more specific, reasons to flame MS. However, I don't think I was at this particular moment in time.
It is free (as in beer) it just isn't free to be re used and re sold in commercial tools. So, say you were kind enough to create a binary image for me which I could use in a virtual machine and put it on your website.. if you run something as innocuous as Adsense, then you are redistributing it commercially and can expect a call from an army of angry MS lawyers.
No part of that is free, hence the !free title of this thread.
MS have spent many many (expensive) man hours developing all this and I for one think it's a good thing to have the code and the thoughts in the open. Nope - if you read their license, you'll see that it claims that there "might be" patents in there, but they are not stipulated and there is no patent protection clause.
Thoughts in the open is a good thing(tm). Unfortunately Singularity is not an example of this.
Forget the ideology. What I want to know is, has anybody here installed it/used it and what are their opinions? Why don't you, uh, have a clue and download it yourself and look at it?
Its 60MB compressed and compiles in 40 seconds. Don't be lame.
It's a research project, focusing on designing reliable, dependable, secure and low-overhead systems. You get code - written in C++, IA-32 assembly and Sing#. I don't want to be lame. But I can't compile it, and I don't want to have to install a toy OS just to play with Singularity. What are your opinions of it, other than anyone who doesn't already run windows is lame?
I believe that an economy of micro-transactions (a scaled up AdSense, if you will) based upon copyrights on any and all user created content and funded through advertising, would be a more compelling future than one where content was placed in the public domain unless copyright was explicitly sought by the author. Furthermore I believe that this would be a greater good to the public in general, than allowing the free market to act, well freely, upon a public domain much larger than we have today with opt-out copyright.
There are a few nit-picky points I could argue, but I think by and large we have covered this issue. Note that I state what I believe, because I'm not entirely sure we have the tools available to draw this to a conclusion which isn't tainted by belief. Unless you'd accept something like an artificial life simulation using the properties of emergence to model the various actors involved?
I would like to thank you for your time - as I've certainly found it a very interesting debate - and if you wish I can respond in full to your last post rather than my attempt above to distill it down to what I see as our main differences as philosophy.
...The accused - The reason is explained in a note, it's because the "voice" of Leonardo Domenici site charge to the first citizen and his junta some measures and decisions, so it says... Huh? Sure language translation is kinda cool, but it seems a cruel waste of binary to put it through such contortions when the resulting morass is so incomprehensible.
You would search for "tennis shoes", and get not only the Wikipedia page on tennis shoes, but dozens or more copies of that page which 3rd parties had lifted verbatim from Wikipedia, and put on their own domain with various revenue-generating adverts. This made it more difficult to search because the results set was so muddied.
Well, no, actually. If they're lifting the content verbatim, then it's the same no matter where I go. Plus, of course, if I search for "tennis shoes" it isn't as though Google is going to give me the Wikipedia entry and nothing else whatsoever.
Incorrect on both counts:
The content was lifted verbatim on a particular date, but not updated. Any errors or subsequent updates to that page in Wikipedia would not be present in the masquerading copies.
These various older revisions of the Wikipedia entry flooded to the top of the results set, as the revenue scrapers tried various tricks to increase their search ranking. Trying to find content which was not related to a particular historical revision of that subjects Wikipedia page was made more difficult as the people making advertising revenue from the confusion had significant financial motivation and no restriction.
But we are moving towards a society where increasingly the general public holds more and more copyright
No, the general public never holds copyrights, unless you want to construe the public domain in that fashion. (I see no point in doing so, myself)
Copyrights are always held by one, or a few, against the whole populace. Now, it's not one small bloc of people and businesses that comprise the majority of the copyright holders, but so what? How does this matter? Especially since merely holding a copyright is no assurance of any success at all. The financial success is still highly concentrated, and copyright has no effect on that.
"But we are moving towards a society where increasingly the general public holds more and more copyright - the ratio of content creators to the general public approaches 1:1 with every blog created, every forum post submitted, every facebook account started."
I thank you for pointing out my lazy use of language. Agreed - the general public (as a single entity) does not hold copyright, however almost every member of the general public who has performed one of the activities I requoted above, does now hold copyright.
Not only that, but they hold copyright on ventures which profit from their contribution.
Automatic copyright not having an assurance of success is not a reason to disregard it.
The important thing is that if an author isn't willing to take even a modest gamble on his work, ab initio, then I am not willing to give him a copyright. All he needs to do is properly register. It's not hard. If he doesn't care to, then I'm not going to do it for him, especially since I -- and the rest of the public -- benefit from his inattention.
This is like arguing that if I buy a plot of land, anyone who finds a nugget of gold in it can not only keep that nugget.. but call in a gold nugget extraction company and keep everything for themselves before I even finish my breakfast. Yet if I had invested $1 in an "All potential gold nuggets (which may or may not exist) on my land belong to me" sign, this couldn't happen. All IP has a finite financial resource potential which in the vast majority of cases cannot be determined with any degree of accuracy at the outset.
The primary beneficiaries towards individual inattention to rights are never some amorphous general public, but specific entities who leech for their personal gain.
Surely then, if advertising revenue is being generated, then an argument could be made that to maximize the benefit to the general public their share of that revenue should be protected?
It cannot be equal as it becomes a one to many relationship - one creator, multiple opportunistic reposters. Exclusive control is irrelevant when income from advertising revenue would go to the first reposter who got it linked to slashdot/digg/whatever. This would be a mess, with zero-cost and zero-risk to repost other peoples public domain content, the internet would be awash with people racing to cash in.
No, it is equal. There is nothing that prevents the creator from getting those links to his work from multiple sites, rather than some reposter. Indeed, if anything, the creator has a first-to-market advantage, since he is the first person to know of the work and where he's put it.
The very case I am arguing for is the case where revenue is unexpected (such as a viral video which takes off), such that the creator would never go to the trouble of obtaining copyright if a separate registration/fee process was required. Content of this nature (e.g. the Chocolate Rain kid) has unpredictable chances of success to the creator, less so to individuals who would inevitably make it their profession to leech/promote/link other peoples work. The content creator would thus be disenfranchised if their works automatically entered the public domain.
This would be rather like the folks who used to repost Wikipedia pages and grab advertising revenue, except it would be harder to mitigate as Wikipedia being a single source was easy to promote in search ranking. I don't want to go back to an internet which looks like that - until Google tweaked their algorithm it was hard to find non-Wikipedia related search results.
And the problem with that was?
You would search for "tennis shoes", and get not only the Wikipedia page on tennis shoes, but dozens or more copies of that page which 3rd parties had lifted verbatim from Wikipedia, and put on their own domain with various revenue-generating adverts. This made it more difficult to search because the results set was so muddied.
Since your words are in the public domain, all that revenue would go to me, rather than a split based on how many quoted characters of yours were included if you had retained copyright.
No. First, because your typical award of that nature really has nothing to do with copyright anyway. E.g. the Nobel for literature goes to the author, not whoever holds the copyright, if there even is a copyright. No one is interested in giving prizes for creation to someone other than the creator. Second, your use of my words, even if they were copyrighted, would pretty certainly be a fair use, and not infringing, so I couldn't even make a realistic claim on a share of the purse.
I've not only lost nothing, I never had a chance to gain.
Well, you took my silly example but disregarded the revenue-distribution crux of it and made up one of your own. Maybe we can agree on a more general point - that sometimes popular content is unpredictable at the time of its creation?
Someone somewhere would have seen the rising interest and snapped up the ad revenue - these leeches would turn it into a profession. You haven't made the case as to why or how this would benefit a) content creators, b) the general public.
A) I don't care whether or not creators benefit. Copyright isn't meant to help them. It's like asking how a dairy cow benefits from the sale of milk. Copyright is meant to benefit the public, and in order to accomplish that, some incidental benefit might happen to be conferred on authors. But it should always be as little private benefit as possible, for as great a public benefit as possible, and it's always secondary; a means, not an end.
B) The general public always benefits when copies of the same work -- which are commodities -- can be acquired from multiple sources that are in competition, thus reducing the cost to the public down to about the marginal cost of the copi
That's not squatting, really, since the squatters don't adversely possess the works; that is, they aren't trying to wrest exclusive control from the creator, but are merely using it equally. It cannot be equal as it becomes a one to many relationship - one creator, multiple opportunistic reposters. Exclusive control is irrelevant when income from advertising revenue would go to the first reposter who got it linked to slashdot/digg/whatever. This would be a mess, with zero-cost and zero-risk to repost other peoples public domain content, the internet would be awash with people racing to cash in.
This would be rather like the folks who used to repost Wikipedia pages and grab advertising revenue, except it would be harder to mitigate as Wikipedia being a single source was easy to promote in search ranking. I don't want to go back to an internet which looks like that - until Google tweaked their algorithm it was hard to find non-Wikipedia related search results.
And if you do have these reposts, then so what? If it mattered to the authors, they would get copyrights. It's not as though this would be a secret. Probably it won't matter. Consider, for example, your/. posts -- it's not as though you'd be harmed if they were copied. It's not as though you'd lose anything. And the decision as to whether to get a copyright or not would be up to you. You'd have to opt-in, rather than getting one automatically, is all. Well, say this post wins the $10 million dollar annual Slashdot 'Best Post' prize. Since your words are in the public domain, all that revenue would go to me, rather than a split based on how many quoted characters of yours were included if you had retained copyright. True - you've lost nothing, you've not been harmed.. but it is equally true that you would have benefited (however unlikely it might have seemed at the time) if you had copyright on your posts.
The same would go for the Chocolate Rain kid. Someone somewhere would have seen the rising interest and snapped up the ad revenue - these leeches would turn it into a profession. You haven't made the case as to why or how this would benefit a) content creators, b) the general public.
I just want to separate out people who don't care about copyrights (particularly people who don't care and thus wouldn't bother to dedicate their works to the public domain, since they'd have to care to do so) from people who do. A fee of a dollar would be sufficient. It's akin to copays with health care. They're not a substantial form of revenue, but they discourage wastefulness. What wastefulness? With automatic copyright you have a youtube full of videos for which assumed copyright goes to the user who uploaded them. This copyright is assumed, and can safely remain so, until a challenge claim is made. It provides a simple mechanism for the little guy to benefit from their automatic copyright at no cost. This seems efficient to me, not wasteful.
Or do you mean that material which is copyrighted, and not being currently used, should be in the public domain.. as not to waste the potential for another to use it freely?
Could we not achieve the same ends by modifying copyright to allow for mashing/inclusion/remixing with correct attribution, and with the option to appeal to an independent body to determine what the revenue split should be in case of disagreement? Could all be online, no one loses their rights, and creativity and innovation are still properly rewarded.
This would be almost as wrong as leasing an operating system to IBM for a large amount of money, then buying the previously leased operating system from a third party for a much smaller amount of money. Or maybe it would just be good business sense. No, it would make it almost impossible for user-generated content to ever gain funding or recognition, thus serving the exclusive desires of the **AA crowd. That doesn't reek of good business sense, except in the extremely short term.
If user-generated content was automatically placed in the public domain if a registration/fee process was not followed.. then you'd essentially generate a market of content-squatters - you'd have a multitude of people reposting other peoples popular content with no attribution to the original author.
From my perspective this is worse than, say, downloading an episode of Lost from thepiratebay because the content market today is a very few to many relationship - the many can easily resolve back to the few and it is only the few who can afford to protect their copyright identity.
I'm interested in a flatter entertainment market, and that can only come around when the Chocolate Rain kid can compete on equal ground with the established media players, based upon a quality metric of (taste nonewithstanding) end-user views, or similar.
I use youtube as an example only because it:
Has proved that it can track popular content.
Has mechanisms for dealing with copyright infringement.
Is able to distribute advertising revenue to fund both grassroots and established media entities.
In this context, I think how well copyright worked in or before 1978 is quite irrelevant. How better to work in the public favour by giving them more of what they want, rather than which tidbits boardroom executives decide to toss? We are in the process of building a future where we won't have networks which fans of canceled shows can bombard with their nuts, but we can only do that if the little guy is able to retain copyright and thus compete on an equal footing.
The copyright proposal you advocate will only create a barrier to entry and thus prevent this from occurring.
Slashdot Mirror
OpenOffice is LGPL not GPL -- they could build from the OpenOffice codebase, write their own wrappers, keeping just that under the LGPL. They would not need to release any Microsoft Office code.
I thought OpenOffice was under the LGPL, not the GPL?
It's a cruel and senseless waste of binary.
Ah, but what level of skepticism is healthy? Too little and you get the titanic, too much and you never reach the moon.
It sounds like the problem you are describing is not one with your knowledge, but your personal frustration with your bosses who don't trust you at your word that employing technology X,Y, or Z will reap benefits. Bosses who will continue to waste your time until statistics and studies are conducted which will likely happen after we're already swimming in the sea of obviousness.
You need new bosses. Projecting your frustration upon the OP is misleading.
Have you tried using IM with other developers who are more interested in developing than goofing off?
In lieu of the mystical statistics compiled by God which you are requesting, we have a forum where people can share their own experiences from which a pattern can be devised.
It's not ideal but it's better than nothing -- which internet are you from?
It's entirely possible to reach zero productivity by just gossiping on the telephone too. Yes there is the potential for some productivity loss to non-work chatter - but "hello" and "goodbye" are two common social extravagances which are taken for granted as a cost of productively using the telephone. I wonder if future generations will view the equivalency easier than those who grew up without IM? I was highly skeptical of IM in a work environment, but I recently contributed to an OSS project which is conducted almost 100% over IM and I was converted. So I'd recommend that skeptics actually try IM with other serious-minded developers.
...and an internet fan-base, I guess that explains why I haven't been able to find a $2-3 replacement clicky keyboard in a charity shop over the last few years. Sometimes internet, you really suck.
That is not at question however - these technologies are a low-level protocol which will require some higher-level (as of yet undeveloped?) protocol to become meaningful and coherent.
are we perhaps seeing an organized campaign(s) manipulating Web 2.0 sites for their own purposes? With anonymity of site users, who can tell? It's a good argument against trusting anonymous sources, but even Wikipedia with Wikiscanner allows a certain amount of accountability. The problem appears to be tracing back rumour/FUD/misinformation to its source and a relatively (more objective than subjective) trustworthy mechanism to evaluate sources over time. Social Media sites dramatically lower the costs of individual citizens involvement in the political process. That's a Good Thing. Yet if we don't anticipate and accept the manipulation of those sites by external agencies and those with far too much time on their hands, we're bloody damn fools. Agreed - social networking is still pretty darn young as a technology concept though, I predict that by the end of this year we'll start seeing more ways in which we can detect and thwart the devious plot of Company X, Campaign Y or Astroturf Org Z. FWIW, I'm working on one now, and I don't expect that I'm alone.To post this story at 1:59pm, or 12 hours earlier depending upon which clock you prefer.
Admittedly this could underscore be the true deviousness of their plot, but if I controlled the database of one of the worlds most used reference resources, I could think up countless plans which easily didn't involve me looking lame to the rest of the world.
"O'Reilly provided examples of companies or products that embody these principles in his description of his four levels in the hierarchy of Web 2.0-ness. Level-3 applications, the most "Web 2.0"-oriented, only exist on the Internet, deriving their effectiveness from the inter-human connections and from the network effects that Web 2.0 makes possible, and growing in effectiveness in proportion as people make more use of them. O'Reilly gave as examples eBay, Craigslist, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Skype, dodgeball and AdSense."
And no, I didn't just edit that in.
I couldn't care less if they go all high-school on each others personal accounts, or whether political biases are enforced through some "admin" abuses - those pages are not those which I find useful.
That, and the fact that the Wikipedia elite seem to be so inept in keeping secret their devious plots.
No part of that is free, hence the !free title of this thread.
MS have spent many many (expensive) man hours developing all this and I for one think it's a good thing to have the code and the thoughts in the open. Nope - if you read their license, you'll see that it claims that there "might be" patents in there, but they are not stipulated and there is no patent protection clause.Thoughts in the open is a good thing(tm). Unfortunately Singularity is not an example of this.
There are a few nit-picky points I could argue, but I think by and large we have covered this issue. Note that I state what I believe, because I'm not entirely sure we have the tools available to draw this to a conclusion which isn't tainted by belief. Unless you'd accept something like an artificial life simulation using the properties of emergence to model the various actors involved?
I would like to thank you for your time - as I've certainly found it a very interesting debate - and if you wish I can respond in full to your last post rather than my attempt above to distill it down to what I see as our main differences as philosophy.
...The accused - The reason is explained in a note, it's because the "voice" of Leonardo Domenici site charge to the first citizen and his junta some measures and decisions, so it says... Huh? Sure language translation is kinda cool, but it seems a cruel waste of binary to put it through such contortions when the resulting morass is so incomprehensible.You would search for "tennis shoes", and get not only the Wikipedia page on tennis shoes, but dozens or more copies of that page which 3rd parties had lifted verbatim from Wikipedia, and put on their own domain with various revenue-generating adverts. This made it more difficult to search because the results set was so muddied.
Well, no, actually. If they're lifting the content verbatim, then it's the same no matter where I go. Plus, of course, if I search for "tennis shoes" it isn't as though Google is going to give me the Wikipedia entry and nothing else whatsoever.
Incorrect on both counts:
But we are moving towards a society where increasingly the general public holds more and more copyright
No, the general public never holds copyrights, unless you want to construe the public domain in that fashion. (I see no point in doing so, myself) Copyrights are always held by one, or a few, against the whole populace. Now, it's not one small bloc of people and businesses that comprise the majority of the copyright holders, but so what? How does this matter? Especially since merely holding a copyright is no assurance of any success at all. The financial success is still highly concentrated, and copyright has no effect on that.
"But we are moving towards a society where increasingly the general public holds more and more copyright - the ratio of content creators to the general public approaches 1:1 with every blog created, every forum post submitted, every facebook account started."
I thank you for pointing out my lazy use of language. Agreed - the general public (as a single entity) does not hold copyright, however almost every member of the general public who has performed one of the activities I requoted above, does now hold copyright.
Not only that, but they hold copyright on ventures which profit from their contribution.
Automatic copyright not having an assurance of success is not a reason to disregard it.
The important thing is that if an author isn't willing to take even a modest gamble on his work, ab initio, then I am not willing to give him a copyright. All he needs to do is properly register. It's not hard. If he doesn't care to, then I'm not going to do it for him, especially since I -- and the rest of the public -- benefit from his inattention.
This is like arguing that if I buy a plot of land, anyone who finds a nugget of gold in it can not only keep that nugget.. but call in a gold nugget extraction company and keep everything for themselves before I even finish my breakfast. Yet if I had invested $1 in an "All potential gold nuggets (which may or may not exist) on my land belong to me" sign, this couldn't happen. All IP has a finite financial resource potential which in the vast majority of cases cannot be determined with any degree of accuracy at the outset.
The primary beneficiaries towards individual inattention to rights are never some amorphous general public, but specific entities who leech for their personal gain.
Surely then, if advertising revenue is being generated, then an argument could be made that to maximize the benefit to the general public their share of that revenue should be protected?
No, such an argument would be nonsense. If the
It cannot be equal as it becomes a one to many relationship - one creator, multiple opportunistic reposters. Exclusive control is irrelevant when income from advertising revenue would go to the first reposter who got it linked to slashdot/digg/whatever. This would be a mess, with zero-cost and zero-risk to repost other peoples public domain content, the internet would be awash with people racing to cash in.
No, it is equal. There is nothing that prevents the creator from getting those links to his work from multiple sites, rather than some reposter. Indeed, if anything, the creator has a first-to-market advantage, since he is the first person to know of the work and where he's put it.
The very case I am arguing for is the case where revenue is unexpected (such as a viral video which takes off), such that the creator would never go to the trouble of obtaining copyright if a separate registration/fee process was required. Content of this nature (e.g. the Chocolate Rain kid) has unpredictable chances of success to the creator, less so to individuals who would inevitably make it their profession to leech/promote/link other peoples work. The content creator would thus be disenfranchised if their works automatically entered the public domain.
This would be rather like the folks who used to repost Wikipedia pages and grab advertising revenue, except it would be harder to mitigate as Wikipedia being a single source was easy to promote in search ranking. I don't want to go back to an internet which looks like that - until Google tweaked their algorithm it was hard to find non-Wikipedia related search results.
And the problem with that was?
You would search for "tennis shoes", and get not only the Wikipedia page on tennis shoes, but dozens or more copies of that page which 3rd parties had lifted verbatim from Wikipedia, and put on their own domain with various revenue-generating adverts. This made it more difficult to search because the results set was so muddied.
Since your words are in the public domain, all that revenue would go to me, rather than a split based on how many quoted characters of yours were included if you had retained copyright.
No. First, because your typical award of that nature really has nothing to do with copyright anyway. E.g. the Nobel for literature goes to the author, not whoever holds the copyright, if there even is a copyright. No one is interested in giving prizes for creation to someone other than the creator. Second, your use of my words, even if they were copyrighted, would pretty certainly be a fair use, and not infringing, so I couldn't even make a realistic claim on a share of the purse. I've not only lost nothing, I never had a chance to gain.
Well, you took my silly example but disregarded the revenue-distribution crux of it and made up one of your own. Maybe we can agree on a more general point - that sometimes popular content is unpredictable at the time of its creation?
Someone somewhere would have seen the rising interest and snapped up the ad revenue - these leeches would turn it into a profession. You haven't made the case as to why or how this would benefit a) content creators, b) the general public.
A) I don't care whether or not creators benefit. Copyright isn't meant to help them. It's like asking how a dairy cow benefits from the sale of milk. Copyright is meant to benefit the public, and in order to accomplish that, some incidental benefit might happen to be conferred on authors. But it should always be as little private benefit as possible, for as great a public benefit as possible, and it's always secondary; a means, not an end. B) The general public always benefits when copies of the same work -- which are commodities -- can be acquired from multiple sources that are in competition, thus reducing the cost to the public down to about the marginal cost of the copi
This would be rather like the folks who used to repost Wikipedia pages and grab advertising revenue, except it would be harder to mitigate as Wikipedia being a single source was easy to promote in search ranking. I don't want to go back to an internet which looks like that - until Google tweaked their algorithm it was hard to find non-Wikipedia related search results.
And if you do have these reposts, then so what? If it mattered to the authors, they would get copyrights. It's not as though this would be a secret. Probably it won't matter. Consider, for example, yourThe same would go for the Chocolate Rain kid. Someone somewhere would have seen the rising interest and snapped up the ad revenue - these leeches would turn it into a profession. You haven't made the case as to why or how this would benefit a) content creators, b) the general public.
I just want to separate out people who don't care about copyrights (particularly people who don't care and thus wouldn't bother to dedicate their works to the public domain, since they'd have to care to do so) from people who do. A fee of a dollar would be sufficient. It's akin to copays with health care. They're not a substantial form of revenue, but they discourage wastefulness. What wastefulness? With automatic copyright you have a youtube full of videos for which assumed copyright goes to the user who uploaded them. This copyright is assumed, and can safely remain so, until a challenge claim is made. It provides a simple mechanism for the little guy to benefit from their automatic copyright at no cost. This seems efficient to me, not wasteful.Or do you mean that material which is copyrighted, and not being currently used, should be in the public domain.. as not to waste the potential for another to use it freely?
Could we not achieve the same ends by modifying copyright to allow for mashing/inclusion/remixing with correct attribution, and with the option to appeal to an independent body to determine what the revenue split should be in case of disagreement? Could all be online, no one loses their rights, and creativity and innovation are still properly rewarded.
From my perspective this is worse than, say, downloading an episode of Lost from thepiratebay because the content market today is a very few to many relationship - the many can easily resolve back to the few and it is only the few who can afford to protect their copyright identity.
I'm interested in a flatter entertainment market, and that can only come around when the Chocolate Rain kid can compete on equal ground with the established media players, based upon a quality metric of (taste nonewithstanding) end-user views, or similar.
I use youtube as an example only because it:
- Has proved that it can track popular content.
- Has mechanisms for dealing with copyright infringement.
- Is able to distribute advertising revenue to fund both grassroots and established media entities.
In this context, I think how well copyright worked in or before 1978 is quite irrelevant. How better to work in the public favour by giving them more of what they want, rather than which tidbits boardroom executives decide to toss? We are in the process of building a future where we won't have networks which fans of canceled shows can bombard with their nuts, but we can only do that if the little guy is able to retain copyright and thus compete on an equal footing.The copyright proposal you advocate will only create a barrier to entry and thus prevent this from occurring.