There is a simple fact: Humans create things even when there is no profit motive at all. The act of creation, the act of searching and discovery is IN AND OF ITSELF rewarding.
Disagree - the act of creation is not what we naturally do. Take away the need to create and most humans become indolent, bored, demotivated and generally listless. Rich-kid syndrome - spoilt children of extremely wealthy parents generally tend to either become ambitious money-driven overachievers or narcissists.
My point isn't about creation per se. Modern economics distributes scarce resources to the development of the goods people are willing to pay the most for - in other words the goods that will add the most to their lives. If, as you suggest, you decouple the demand and supply side of the equation, people still create, but they do it for the pleasure of creating rather than for the benefit it will bring others - hence, development grinds to a halt whilst everyone begins to believe they're the next Picasso. I don't want to live in your utopia - they probably have yet to discover the steam engine there.
Yes, authors should get paid. That does NOT mean that they have ANY right to stop a person from sharing with others.
So why would anyone ever sell more than a single copy to some generous libertarian who then puts that song on Napster/Gnutella/Freenet?
If you hand your friend *your copy* of new kids on the block, then that's an exchange. If you hand your friend *a copy of your album* then that's theft. The market used to put up with a certain amount of revenue loss through unauthorised copyright because it wasn't too severe - but with the advent of file exchange over the internet, the economic model is beginning to break and pundits of utopian impracticalities such as yourself are great at bashing the existing model but hopeless at suggesting a workable alternative.
Now you and I aren't going to agree, but whether you think it's morally corrupt or not is what's really besides the point, because the law that underpins society doesn't agree with you either, and thankfully I can expect future artists to continue creating music because somehow, someone will ensure that they continue to be rewarded by society for the output they produce. Whether that's through a significant evolution in the economic model behind the production of music or by stopping free-riders such as yourself, I don't care, but it certainly won't be through the blanket removal of intellectual property rights.
In the end, all ethical argumentation aside, the practical outcome of your argument is that you want to have it all, and pick the bits you choose to pay for, and you're "fundamentally opposed" to any law that removes your right to distribute the fruit of other people's labour without ensuring they enjoy the benefits that would accrue to them otherwise. It doesn't matter if what underpins that argument is a moral value, because from the point of view of the person who spent six months in a studio recording the album, and from the point of view of people that actually paid for it, their efforts and their cash is subsidising your enjoyment, and you've not had to give anything back - the fact that it's unenforceable is no justification - the moral problem is, why should some people pay because they're honest and not have the benefit of a system that forces everyone else to make the choice between paying and having the product, or not paying and therefore not getting to have their own copy of the music.
As a person who find the ideas of libertarian socialism
I assume you meant you find them appealing - they are. Most "pure form" ideas have an instinctive appeal to them, whereas real world economics are messy, difficult and require constant management. In the world we live in, we have to find a constant compromise between letting the system do it's allocation of resources thing, and spend time correcting examples of market failure. What is and isn't market failure (and therefore what constitutes legitimate government intervention) is a constant source of disagreement.
Economic incentive, while nice, isn't what drives a person to create.
I think where you and I fundamentally disagree is in the area of human motivation.
People like to create certain things out of the pleasure of exercising their skills in certain areas, but - for example - AZT (anti-HIV drug) would probably never have been created were it not for a very very big potential pot of gold at the end of the AIDS-cure rainbow.
I don't believe things would "take longer" to create in a world without competition over scarce resources - the harshness of the system means that it you need to create in order to survive - if you don't add value in some way, you will end up living off the fruit of other people's labour. Luckily, you don't have to have wonderful original ideas, all you really have to do is participate in the society that creates all the things we enjoy and that is contribution enough for the system to give something back.
In a world without intellectual property rights, there is no process or method that is restricted in it's use, so nobody can have process-driven economies over their competition. This reduces the production of most goods to a commodity market - fantastic for the consumer because all prices immediately drop to the marginal cost of production, but useless from a business or development point of view because there is no way of "winning" and therefore no reason to play the game in the first place. And no argument for capital investment unless you're the government because you'll never make more than break-even revenues.
So I suppose where I stand is...
1. I think intellectual property rights are not a moral decision, they are an economic neccesity regardless of what moral attributes are attached to them.
2. I don't understand what you find so morally offensive about a person being rewarded for their hard work. The only area I would agree with you is if you were talking about the duration of the copyrights or the granting of copyrights over work that is on the very limit of being attributable to a discovery or creation, such as the patenting of a gene.
Yep - seems to me that, blinded by technology, the NZ government has accepted a non-argument from Vodafone to pay them a fortune in return for developing a capability they already had.
I see your point (which I don't agree with), but it raises more questions in my mind than it answers because nothing you say defends the point.
It's a principle of economics that dates back to the time of Adam Smith that competition for resource (usually money) accelerates development. This is not only economic development, but everything from the creation of new forms of art to the generation of life-enhancing technologies. This is a principle that is supported by every economic theory with a couple of interesting exceptions (Communism, for example, where competition is bad, and the government tells you what you should be doing with your time and how much you should be getting paid for it through a central planning authority).
This system is based largely on the principle of incentivisation. In general (with a couple of exceptions), if there is no economic incentive to do something, it either doesn't get done, or it doesn't get done well.
The classification of all intellectual property rights as undefendable makes a mockery of the effort that was put into creating the intellectual or artistic work that brought about the intellectual property in the first place. It does this by taking away all forms of recognition for that work other than the pride and contentment of a job well done, which doesn't put much in the way of food on the table.
The classic example is the pharmaceutical industry - it takes hundreds of millions of dollars to create a new drug. Once this drug is discovered and created, it can be copied easily because after all it's just a mix of certain compounds. The only reason the hundreds of millions were spent to develop the drug in the first place was in the expectation of the ability to sell it exclusively for a certain period and therefore recoup the cost and some profit to pay the hundreds of scientists and researchers that developed it. Without intellectual property rights, there would be no economic justification for the existence of pharmaceutical companies. My problem with your blanket argument is that you offer no way of overcoming problems such as these, you just state that intellectual property rights are an "evil" because this is what you "believe". That's fine, but reason with me then... show me how it would work.
Intellectual property takes just as much effort to create as a fridge or a motorcycle - why shouldn't people be able to reap the market-defined economic benefit of their hard work?
If this were the case, why would they work hard in the first place?
That the fundamental principles of copyright are right or wrong is not a moral point - it's a matter of economic incentivization - people do not develop or create things that bring no economic return to them. To develop an artist like Britney Spears costs money - marketing, recording, people to write the songs, bands to play the backing tracks (all of whom have spent years learning their instruments). These people don't do it for the pleasure of the art alone.
You *can* steal services. If I create a service that you have to pay for, and you take it without paying, then you have stolen.
I think that this distinction of whether or not you deprive the victim of the use of their good is rubbish. You're depriving the victim of the cash value of the good you now possess, which you ought to have tranferred to them when you obtained the service/data, then you *stole*. Copying is just trying to make it seem less bad.
If you were to purchase some research data from AC Nielsen or Gallup and then refuse to pay, is that stealing of copying? After all, they still have their copy of the data...
The Napster case is interesting because if it goes too far, the future of communications networks will be affected by the destruction of the file-sharing and peer-to-peer applications that are developing now. The theft of music, regardless of whether the artist still has their copy of the song, is theft - pure and simple. You took something created by someone else without agreeing and paying a price for it - prices in a free market are NOT set unilaterally. If you thought it was too expensive, then write your own music and compete with them by selling it cheaper.
Maybe the business model at Peoplesound, among others, is a good one? What do you think? Either way, it's better than those artists that have actually made it getting ripped off...
They let you download a selection of songs from an artist, and if you like what you hear, you can buy the rest. They are like a record label, but because their cost structure is more frugal and less mass-market, they can afford to sign more artists, so the entry barrier is lower. If the artist really does make it, (s)he'll probably jump to a bigger label, but Peoplesound will get knock-on effects due to the artist getting "discovered" there.
Until one day, it'll get bought out by a major record label in an attempt to diversify up and down their supply chain - and the founding members of the company will make a killing... but hey - we're not there yet.....
You're undoubtedly right - but (and I have no proof of this) I bet many people on Slashdot are against legal attacks on Napster, against legal attacks on the people that use Napster, and in their heart of hearts believe that all music should be free and artists should be paid in accordance with what consumers are willing to pay *after* they have obtained the music.
Of course there's no way I can prove that's what they think (they being that subset of Slashdot users that may conform to this point of view), and "they" would probably disagree that this is their point of view, but when you add all the most vocal arguments on Slashdot up - you're left with a pretty big error term.
So we have a 3 variable model - Napster, music swappers and artists/record companies. The current climate makes it impossible to control the flow of resources among these three points. So Napster users decide they want more money for less cash, and they unilaterally change the balance of wealth between themselves and the artists. That's not the way it's supposed to work - there's supposed to be a balancing mechanism in which the artist can say, "If you're not willing to pay my price, then you can't have my music". But Napster has taken that legal right away from them - or if not the right itself, then the ability to enforce it.
I'd love to have lots of music for free, just as I'd love to have a Porsche Boxter in exchange for my Peugeot, but that's not the market value of the goods I want, so I can't have it at that price. Too bad. If I choose to steal the Porsche Boxter and leave my Peugeot in its place, arguing that in fact that's all they deserve because I don't attach the same value to their time or their design ability as they do, then I've broken the law, and I shouldn't be surprised when someone comes knocking with a warrant for my arrest.
Under a compulsory license, a Web site would have to make a royalty payment to the music labels for each song or album sold. The fees would be set by either Congress or the U.S. Copyright Office, which is a division of the Library of Congress.
If the US congress are creating a compulsory license, under which websites are given the right to sell songs and pay a royalty set by Congress, do you think it is feasible that this law will somehow exclude songs that are not published by US companies?
Once a law like this were passed, the websites would have a license to sell songs regardless of whether or not the copyright owner wanted them to - and the copyright owner would have to take whatever payment the Congress has legislated is the appropriate amount of payment for this generic commodity, "a song" (regardless of how good or bad, common or rare).
My point is that a law based on this principle is unworkable. My second point regarding the US meddling in other countries' politics is not unreal, nor is it a troll, nor is it new - from an economic point of view, the effects of US domestic legislation very much like the one they are proposing here has quantifiable, often detrimental, long-term effects on markets in Europe.
The European is deciding what he/she should pay for the European song published by the European company. He/She is doing so by deciding to purchasing the song from the US company.
That is not my understanding of the article : the US congress would decide how much a single license for a song is worth when purchased over the internet regardless of where the song was from, so long as the internet site in question came under US jurisdiction. I don't see how you would legislate such that this was legal only if the artist or publishing company was American - it would be as hard to enforce as the control of individuals using Napster.
Just because you don't understand my point, disagree with me or can't handle my cynical point of view of US foreign affairs doesn't make me a troll.
That's very offensive. It's a bit like saying... hmm... I can't actually think of a single example that isn't so offensive I'm unwilling to type it.
If you find all Belgians identical, and all of them as bad as those described in the article, then frankly, the sooner you're gone the better. In my experience, people react - to a large extent - to your expectations, and with expectations like those, you're hardly going to be drawing out the best in people.
I apologise for this thread becoming off-topic and I'll stop posting now - it's just very difficult to not respond to insults based on nationality when that nationality happens to be yours.
The latest election created a landslide victory for the liberal party for the first time on over 40 years. Admittedly Belgium is not a country that is quick to change its underlying bureaucratic processes, and there is a lot of in-fighting between the north, the south and Brussels, but hopefully the change of government that occurred a while back should cause some movement in the geopolitical deadlock, and this should clear out some of the stale air in the system.
As I said - the White Marches were a strong example of how Belgium as a nation is addressing this, and the landslide victory for the opposition was another. But it's worth bearing in mind that this is a country that is very slow to embrace political change.
Just to make this post relevant, insofar as the actions of the Belgian police are concerned in this particular incident, I've no objections. If they want to arrest Napster users who have pirated music, then they are arresting people who have broken the law.
I have always been for Napster winning the court case because of the wider legal implications of outlawing the sharing of files over the internet. The sticking point has always been: "How do you stop millions of people stealing millions of songs without damaging this medium of exchange?" - this as a case study proves that you can actually go after the people pirating the songs and make an impression. Good. Screw 'em. They stole, they got caught, tough shit.
I like your analogy of life as monopoly. It's a powerful metaphor, but like the simplest economic models it falls down because of all the implicit assumptions made within it.
In life, we don't count matter as the only thing worth striving for - it is not the absolute measure of success that money is in monopoly.
In life, when we have more money than anyone else, many (most?) of us give some away, because we gain a feeling of well-being out of that act.
Attention, friendship, acceptance, validation and respect are just 5 examples of non-exhaustible "commodities" (I avoided love because it's too obvious).
The amount of matter in the universe makes it relatively theoretical to talk about "all matter being consumed", and matter isn't ever consumed (as far as I know) - it is merely converted into another form of energy, but the total amount of matter remains constant. We might say "all matter is in use at any given time", but that is merely to say that we have reached the pinnacle of efficiency, rather than the limit of our existence.
The same applies in economics - money circulates - it is not consumed and it is not owned - it is merely a medium of exchange - in a way, it is the lowest common denominator by which all other things are divisible. The number of different goods and services available in the world means that no one person can be capable of doing them all. One person could own them all (Rupert Murdoch? Bill Gates?) but you assumed only a limited number of actors - if we have millions of people, who cares what the head honcho does or owns, we still all need to buy stuff off each other (or him, but made by each other) and therefore commerce lives on, because the head honcho will need to employ people to make things in his factories, run his business and fix his machines.
Agreed, but in principle, given the facts in the article, it would be possible for a new product to come and take a previously used name just because that name was not used commercially.
Whilst in this case the name was in use before the "free" project decided to use it, in general, this problem would exist if a trademark is not recognised as such until commercial use is made of the name.
Seems to me that if you created a product first, gave it away free under a certain name, and then someone else comes along and creates a similar product that capitalises on the reputation of yours, and then makes money off it - you ought to be in line for some compensation, seeing as you created the brand equity that's partially driving the sales.
Either that or you should have the right to insist that they don't use a name whose meaning is mainly derived from a product created by you.
But isn't this the problem? - in reality, artists that don't sell millions of albums have their albums selling at a premium in the long term, and without the benefit of a marketing-driven "price boost" at the release date, because they need to make their returns off a smaller base of (usually) more loyal followers, and they don't have the mindless lemmings that buy into the marketing and think Britney is fantastic.
No system set in place by Congress is ever going to be able to match a price-setting mechanism that adapts to demand and responds to the popularity of each individual album/single. Despite the flaws inherent in the current system, it's a far better solution than any blanket price (or margin) imposed.
Furthermore, this is Congress potentially legislating over what a European should pay for a European song published by a European company, just because a US website decided to sell it - ahem... I have lots of respect for the US government (on friday nights at the end of a number of beers) but it can keep its grubby hands out of European (or other) pricing mechanisms, thank you very much; we can do without the guidance of those elected by individuals incapable of reading a ballot form...
With all due respect and commisseration to the people involved in the website you referenced, I find it a tall order to label the link "Belgian Ways" when in fact it is a story involving only a few individuals.
How does something like this make legitimate and honest policemen and policewomen in Belgium feel? But you didn't even limit it to that, you labelled it "Belgian Ways", implying this somehow reflects Belgium as a nation or Belgians as a people. You shouldn't label the many with the acts of the few, it's shortsighted, narrowminded and offensive.
For what its worth, at the end of the Dutroux scandal, which was due more to incompetence than corruption in my opinion, Belgium was in uproar about the state of its own police and gendarmerie, and this a primary reason for the "White Marches", which were - in terms of the percentage of the population - some of the largest national demonstrations witnessed in Europe since the second world war.
So its economics - things rise or fall to the cash amount required to reflect its underlying value. Its because people like you (and me) find music so vital that the price rises, because if it's vital, then the people that create it are vital too - and they are rewarded accordingly.
You can disagree about the distribution of wealth that goes on behind it, but the price is just what people are willing to pay for it. If you didn't get as much out of it as you lost in wealth obtaining it, you wouldn't go out and buy it - the system works.
Of course then we get the likes of the record companies that use the returns on Sting to pay for the marketing on N-Sync, and that gets my goat, because it's using the returns made on people with a little taste to cross-subsidise the development of higher-return teeny-bopper artists. But is even that so bad? The existence of Britney doesn't prevent the next genuinely good artist from making it, and what the Internet should do is provide a way for that artist to make it with or without the studios, rather that ripping off the studios by draining them of their revenues from their self-manufactured cash-generators. After all, Britney is *the most* downloaded MP3, and she is pure product, designed, painted and manufactured by the industry, and extremely profitable.
The technology should foster more artists, but as long as we attach value to good music (and bad music), then that value is going to be reflected in the price, and thats the way is ought to be.
That having been said, yes, it pisses me off too that I have to pay loads for each CD, especially since I'm in the UK. But I still pay it.
The distinction between hacker and cracker has nothing to do with the skill involved. IT's based on the motivation and the result. Someone who does damage, who steals services (be it TV, telephone or something else) or who steals information is a cracker.
Crackers are not always script kiddies
Hackers are never script kiddies
Hackers are not Crackers
Hackers have my respect. The hacking involved in duping an entire community of crackers (no matter how intelligent they are) for long enough to build a program in their machines, little piece by little piece, then pull the trigger, whilst having the flair and style to leave the message "GAMEOVER" in the first 8 bytes of the code is fantastic, and the credit goes to directv.
Of course, since I pay for services and end up subsidising people who think they've a right to the same services for free because they happen to have the skills necessary to steal them probably makes me a little biased.
anyone who reverse-engineers the system, or distributes cracking software (even for legit reasons) will be taken to court.
Yes, but the case won't be tested on this particular hardware - the DVD case will set the precedent, and this will simply follow it - unless a reason can be found to argue compellingly that there is a significant difference between the two cases.
Seems to me they're deliberately avoiding the point of the whole issue, they being the courts as well as the paper.
The point of the issue as I see it (contradictions and argumentation more than welcome!) is that the information regarding which domain names are up for grabs should be public knowledge, otherwise it becomes restricted data that can only be used by Register.Com for marketing purposes, creating a form of "lock in" effect which enables them to aggressively market their own customers whilst preventing others from doing so in as targeted a way. Is this anti-competitive?
The argument about the cost to the company of the use of their server, and these numbers hovering around 2%, are irrelevant - if they want to remove the load, all they have to do is provide a table with the expiry dates of the registrations, which is the information people like verio want.
Should this information be private? Are these registration companies entitled to use their status to hoard this information and therefore erode the competitiveness of the market they inhabit.
I don't know the answer to these questions, but it pisses me off that the judge in question has dodged the issue.
On the face of it, you've got to hand it to them. When they designed that butterfly keyboard that unfolded, I wanted one - just so I could open and close the computer again and again.
This is probably appropriate for a very large market - for example I often take notes whilst interviewing people - it's rude to type during a meeting (perhaps that's a culture thing, but then you should be sensitive to it), so I write quick notes and type up minutes afterwards. This would be very very useful in my case, and many others I can think of.
On the other hand, it's not necessary, just useful - the current way works too. And if this thing gets overtaken by something else within 9 months, it's going to miss my company's refresh cycle on PCs, and it will pass us by. Also, it suffers from the fact that it's newness classifies it as a gadget in the minds of those who have budgets, and so maybe it won't sell quite so well as a consequence.
I don't think I'll get one, either personally or through my work, but I like the fact that IBM push the ideas envelope and make things like this - not bad for a monolithic blue-chip.
She said "No", but since I'd forgotten to set the default to "Yes", I assumed that she would have said "Yes" had I answered for her. Since I didn't give her the chance to let me answer for her, I assumed that had I given her the chance, that's the way she would have gone. Yr'honor'sir.
Slashdot Mirror
Disagree - the act of creation is not what we naturally do. Take away the need to create and most humans become indolent, bored, demotivated and generally listless. Rich-kid syndrome - spoilt children of extremely wealthy parents generally tend to either become ambitious money-driven overachievers or narcissists.
My point isn't about creation per se. Modern economics distributes scarce resources to the development of the goods people are willing to pay the most for - in other words the goods that will add the most to their lives. If, as you suggest, you decouple the demand and supply side of the equation, people still create, but they do it for the pleasure of creating rather than for the benefit it will bring others - hence, development grinds to a halt whilst everyone begins to believe they're the next Picasso. I don't want to live in your utopia - they probably have yet to discover the steam engine there.
Yes, authors should get paid. That does NOT mean that they have ANY right to stop a person from sharing with others.
So why would anyone ever sell more than a single copy to some generous libertarian who then puts that song on Napster/Gnutella/Freenet?
If you hand your friend *your copy* of new kids on the block, then that's an exchange. If you hand your friend *a copy of your album* then that's theft. The market used to put up with a certain amount of revenue loss through unauthorised copyright because it wasn't too severe - but with the advent of file exchange over the internet, the economic model is beginning to break and pundits of utopian impracticalities such as yourself are great at bashing the existing model but hopeless at suggesting a workable alternative.
Now you and I aren't going to agree, but whether you think it's morally corrupt or not is what's really besides the point, because the law that underpins society doesn't agree with you either, and thankfully I can expect future artists to continue creating music because somehow, someone will ensure that they continue to be rewarded by society for the output they produce. Whether that's through a significant evolution in the economic model behind the production of music or by stopping free-riders such as yourself, I don't care, but it certainly won't be through the blanket removal of intellectual property rights.
In the end, all ethical argumentation aside, the practical outcome of your argument is that you want to have it all, and pick the bits you choose to pay for, and you're "fundamentally opposed" to any law that removes your right to distribute the fruit of other people's labour without ensuring they enjoy the benefits that would accrue to them otherwise. It doesn't matter if what underpins that argument is a moral value, because from the point of view of the person who spent six months in a studio recording the album, and from the point of view of people that actually paid for it, their efforts and their cash is subsidising your enjoyment, and you've not had to give anything back - the fact that it's unenforceable is no justification - the moral problem is, why should some people pay because they're honest and not have the benefit of a system that forces everyone else to make the choice between paying and having the product, or not paying and therefore not getting to have their own copy of the music.
I assume you meant you find them appealing - they are. Most "pure form" ideas have an instinctive appeal to them, whereas real world economics are messy, difficult and require constant management. In the world we live in, we have to find a constant compromise between letting the system do it's allocation of resources thing, and spend time correcting examples of market failure. What is and isn't market failure (and therefore what constitutes legitimate government intervention) is a constant source of disagreement.
Economic incentive, while nice, isn't what drives a person to create.
I think where you and I fundamentally disagree is in the area of human motivation.
People like to create certain things out of the pleasure of exercising their skills in certain areas, but - for example - AZT (anti-HIV drug) would probably never have been created were it not for a very very big potential pot of gold at the end of the AIDS-cure rainbow.
I don't believe things would "take longer" to create in a world without competition over scarce resources - the harshness of the system means that it you need to create in order to survive - if you don't add value in some way, you will end up living off the fruit of other people's labour. Luckily, you don't have to have wonderful original ideas, all you really have to do is participate in the society that creates all the things we enjoy and that is contribution enough for the system to give something back.
In a world without intellectual property rights, there is no process or method that is restricted in it's use, so nobody can have process-driven economies over their competition. This reduces the production of most goods to a commodity market - fantastic for the consumer because all prices immediately drop to the marginal cost of production, but useless from a business or development point of view because there is no way of "winning" and therefore no reason to play the game in the first place. And no argument for capital investment unless you're the government because you'll never make more than break-even revenues.
So I suppose where I stand is...
1. I think intellectual property rights are not a moral decision, they are an economic neccesity regardless of what moral attributes are attached to them.
2. I don't understand what you find so morally offensive about a person being rewarded for their hard work. The only area I would agree with you is if you were talking about the duration of the copyrights or the granting of copyrights over work that is on the very limit of being attributable to a discovery or creation, such as the patenting of a gene.
Fantastic!
It's a principle of economics that dates back to the time of Adam Smith that competition for resource (usually money) accelerates development. This is not only economic development, but everything from the creation of new forms of art to the generation of life-enhancing technologies. This is a principle that is supported by every economic theory with a couple of interesting exceptions (Communism, for example, where competition is bad, and the government tells you what you should be doing with your time and how much you should be getting paid for it through a central planning authority).
This system is based largely on the principle of incentivisation. In general (with a couple of exceptions), if there is no economic incentive to do something, it either doesn't get done, or it doesn't get done well.
The classification of all intellectual property rights as undefendable makes a mockery of the effort that was put into creating the intellectual or artistic work that brought about the intellectual property in the first place. It does this by taking away all forms of recognition for that work other than the pride and contentment of a job well done, which doesn't put much in the way of food on the table.
The classic example is the pharmaceutical industry - it takes hundreds of millions of dollars to create a new drug. Once this drug is discovered and created, it can be copied easily because after all it's just a mix of certain compounds. The only reason the hundreds of millions were spent to develop the drug in the first place was in the expectation of the ability to sell it exclusively for a certain period and therefore recoup the cost and some profit to pay the hundreds of scientists and researchers that developed it. Without intellectual property rights, there would be no economic justification for the existence of pharmaceutical companies. My problem with your blanket argument is that you offer no way of overcoming problems such as these, you just state that intellectual property rights are an "evil" because this is what you "believe". That's fine, but reason with me then... show me how it would work.
Intellectual property takes just as much effort to create as a fridge or a motorcycle - why shouldn't people be able to reap the market-defined economic benefit of their hard work?
If this were the case, why would they work hard in the first place?
That the fundamental principles of copyright are right or wrong is not a moral point - it's a matter of economic incentivization - people do not develop or create things that bring no economic return to them. To develop an artist like Britney Spears costs money - marketing, recording, people to write the songs, bands to play the backing tracks (all of whom have spent years learning their instruments). These people don't do it for the pleasure of the art alone.
I think that this distinction of whether or not you deprive the victim of the use of their good is rubbish. You're depriving the victim of the cash value of the good you now possess, which you ought to have tranferred to them when you obtained the service/data, then you *stole*. Copying is just trying to make it seem less bad.
If you were to purchase some research data from AC Nielsen or Gallup and then refuse to pay, is that stealing of copying? After all, they still have their copy of the data...
The Napster case is interesting because if it goes too far, the future of communications networks will be affected by the destruction of the file-sharing and peer-to-peer applications that are developing now. The theft of music, regardless of whether the artist still has their copy of the song, is theft - pure and simple. You took something created by someone else without agreeing and paying a price for it - prices in a free market are NOT set unilaterally. If you thought it was too expensive, then write your own music and compete with them by selling it cheaper.
They let you download a selection of songs from an artist, and if you like what you hear, you can buy the rest. They are like a record label, but because their cost structure is more frugal and less mass-market, they can afford to sign more artists, so the entry barrier is lower. If the artist really does make it, (s)he'll probably jump to a bigger label, but Peoplesound will get knock-on effects due to the artist getting "discovered" there.
Until one day, it'll get bought out by a major record label in an attempt to diversify up and down their supply chain - and the founding members of the company will make a killing... but hey - we're not there yet.....
Of course there's no way I can prove that's what they think (they being that subset of Slashdot users that may conform to this point of view), and "they" would probably disagree that this is their point of view, but when you add all the most vocal arguments on Slashdot up - you're left with a pretty big error term.
So we have a 3 variable model - Napster, music swappers and artists/record companies. The current climate makes it impossible to control the flow of resources among these three points. So Napster users decide they want more money for less cash, and they unilaterally change the balance of wealth between themselves and the artists. That's not the way it's supposed to work - there's supposed to be a balancing mechanism in which the artist can say, "If you're not willing to pay my price, then you can't have my music". But Napster has taken that legal right away from them - or if not the right itself, then the ability to enforce it.
I'd love to have lots of music for free, just as I'd love to have a Porsche Boxter in exchange for my Peugeot, but that's not the market value of the goods I want, so I can't have it at that price. Too bad. If I choose to steal the Porsche Boxter and leave my Peugeot in its place, arguing that in fact that's all they deserve because I don't attach the same value to their time or their design ability as they do, then I've broken the law, and I shouldn't be surprised when someone comes knocking with a warrant for my arrest.
It's going to be a real pain having to spell all the song names backwards... Or having to ROT13 the whole file just to transmit/receive it...
If the US congress are creating a compulsory license, under which websites are given the right to sell songs and pay a royalty set by Congress, do you think it is feasible that this law will somehow exclude songs that are not published by US companies?
Once a law like this were passed, the websites would have a license to sell songs regardless of whether or not the copyright owner wanted them to - and the copyright owner would have to take whatever payment the Congress has legislated is the appropriate amount of payment for this generic commodity, "a song" (regardless of how good or bad, common or rare).
My point is that a law based on this principle is unworkable. My second point regarding the US meddling in other countries' politics is not unreal, nor is it a troll, nor is it new - from an economic point of view, the effects of US domestic legislation very much like the one they are proposing here has quantifiable, often detrimental, long-term effects on markets in Europe.
The European is deciding what he/she should pay for the European song published by the European company. He/She is doing so by deciding to purchasing the song from the US company.
That is not my understanding of the article : the US congress would decide how much a single license for a song is worth when purchased over the internet regardless of where the song was from, so long as the internet site in question came under US jurisdiction. I don't see how you would legislate such that this was legal only if the artist or publishing company was American - it would be as hard to enforce as the control of individuals using Napster.
Just because you don't understand my point, disagree with me or can't handle my cynical point of view of US foreign affairs doesn't make me a troll.
If you find all Belgians identical, and all of them as bad as those described in the article, then frankly, the sooner you're gone the better. In my experience, people react - to a large extent - to your expectations, and with expectations like those, you're hardly going to be drawing out the best in people.
I apologise for this thread becoming off-topic and I'll stop posting now - it's just very difficult to not respond to insults based on nationality when that nationality happens to be yours.
As I said - the White Marches were a strong example of how Belgium as a nation is addressing this, and the landslide victory for the opposition was another. But it's worth bearing in mind that this is a country that is very slow to embrace political change.
Just to make this post relevant, insofar as the actions of the Belgian police are concerned in this particular incident, I've no objections. If they want to arrest Napster users who have pirated music, then they are arresting people who have broken the law.
I have always been for Napster winning the court case because of the wider legal implications of outlawing the sharing of files over the internet. The sticking point has always been: "How do you stop millions of people stealing millions of songs without damaging this medium of exchange?" - this as a case study proves that you can actually go after the people pirating the songs and make an impression. Good. Screw 'em. They stole, they got caught, tough shit.
In life, we don't count matter as the only thing worth striving for - it is not the absolute measure of success that money is in monopoly.
In life, when we have more money than anyone else, many (most?) of us give some away, because we gain a feeling of well-being out of that act.
Attention, friendship, acceptance, validation and respect are just 5 examples of non-exhaustible "commodities" (I avoided love because it's too obvious).
The amount of matter in the universe makes it relatively theoretical to talk about "all matter being consumed", and matter isn't ever consumed (as far as I know) - it is merely converted into another form of energy, but the total amount of matter remains constant. We might say "all matter is in use at any given time", but that is merely to say that we have reached the pinnacle of efficiency, rather than the limit of our existence.
The same applies in economics - money circulates - it is not consumed and it is not owned - it is merely a medium of exchange - in a way, it is the lowest common denominator by which all other things are divisible. The number of different goods and services available in the world means that no one person can be capable of doing them all. One person could own them all (Rupert Murdoch? Bill Gates?) but you assumed only a limited number of actors - if we have millions of people, who cares what the head honcho does or owns, we still all need to buy stuff off each other (or him, but made by each other) and therefore commerce lives on, because the head honcho will need to employ people to make things in his factories, run his business and fix his machines.
I'll stop now - I'm rambling...
Whilst in this case the name was in use before the "free" project decided to use it, in general, this problem would exist if a trademark is not recognised as such until commercial use is made of the name.
Either that or you should have the right to insist that they don't use a name whose meaning is mainly derived from a product created by you.
But isn't this the problem? - in reality, artists that don't sell millions of albums have their albums selling at a premium in the long term, and without the benefit of a marketing-driven "price boost" at the release date, because they need to make their returns off a smaller base of (usually) more loyal followers, and they don't have the mindless lemmings that buy into the marketing and think Britney is fantastic.
No system set in place by Congress is ever going to be able to match a price-setting mechanism that adapts to demand and responds to the popularity of each individual album/single. Despite the flaws inherent in the current system, it's a far better solution than any blanket price (or margin) imposed.
Furthermore, this is Congress potentially legislating over what a European should pay for a European song published by a European company, just because a US website decided to sell it - ahem... I have lots of respect for the US government (on friday nights at the end of a number of beers) but it can keep its grubby hands out of European (or other) pricing mechanisms, thank you very much; we can do without the guidance of those elected by individuals incapable of reading a ballot form...
Sounds like its time to go to Freenet.
How does something like this make legitimate and honest policemen and policewomen in Belgium feel? But you didn't even limit it to that, you labelled it "Belgian Ways", implying this somehow reflects Belgium as a nation or Belgians as a people. You shouldn't label the many with the acts of the few, it's shortsighted, narrowminded and offensive.
For what its worth, at the end of the Dutroux scandal, which was due more to incompetence than corruption in my opinion, Belgium was in uproar about the state of its own police and gendarmerie, and this a primary reason for the "White Marches", which were - in terms of the percentage of the population - some of the largest national demonstrations witnessed in Europe since the second world war.
And yes, I'm Belgian.
What was the capital investment in the creation of word principle?
You can disagree about the distribution of wealth that goes on behind it, but the price is just what people are willing to pay for it. If you didn't get as much out of it as you lost in wealth obtaining it, you wouldn't go out and buy it - the system works.
Of course then we get the likes of the record companies that use the returns on Sting to pay for the marketing on N-Sync, and that gets my goat, because it's using the returns made on people with a little taste to cross-subsidise the development of higher-return teeny-bopper artists. But is even that so bad? The existence of Britney doesn't prevent the next genuinely good artist from making it, and what the Internet should do is provide a way for that artist to make it with or without the studios, rather that ripping off the studios by draining them of their revenues from their self-manufactured cash-generators. After all, Britney is *the most* downloaded MP3, and she is pure product, designed, painted and manufactured by the industry, and extremely profitable.
The technology should foster more artists, but as long as we attach value to good music (and bad music), then that value is going to be reflected in the price, and thats the way is ought to be.
That having been said, yes, it pisses me off too that I have to pay loads for each CD, especially since I'm in the UK. But I still pay it.
Crackers are not always script kiddies
Hackers are never script kiddies
Hackers are not Crackers
Hackers have my respect. The hacking involved in duping an entire community of crackers (no matter how intelligent they are) for long enough to build a program in their machines, little piece by little piece, then pull the trigger, whilst having the flair and style to leave the message "GAMEOVER" in the first 8 bytes of the code is fantastic, and the credit goes to directv.
Of course, since I pay for services and end up subsidising people who think they've a right to the same services for free because they happen to have the skills necessary to steal them probably makes me a little biased.
Yes, but the case won't be tested on this particular hardware - the DVD case will set the precedent, and this will simply follow it - unless a reason can be found to argue compellingly that there is a significant difference between the two cases.
The point of the issue as I see it (contradictions and argumentation more than welcome!) is that the information regarding which domain names are up for grabs should be public knowledge, otherwise it becomes restricted data that can only be used by Register.Com for marketing purposes, creating a form of "lock in" effect which enables them to aggressively market their own customers whilst preventing others from doing so in as targeted a way. Is this anti-competitive?
The argument about the cost to the company of the use of their server, and these numbers hovering around 2%, are irrelevant - if they want to remove the load, all they have to do is provide a table with the expiry dates of the registrations, which is the information people like verio want.
Should this information be private? Are these registration companies entitled to use their status to hoard this information and therefore erode the competitiveness of the market they inhabit.
I don't know the answer to these questions, but it pisses me off that the judge in question has dodged the issue.
This is probably appropriate for a very large market - for example I often take notes whilst interviewing people - it's rude to type during a meeting (perhaps that's a culture thing, but then you should be sensitive to it), so I write quick notes and type up minutes afterwards. This would be very very useful in my case, and many others I can think of.
On the other hand, it's not necessary, just useful - the current way works too. And if this thing gets overtaken by something else within 9 months, it's going to miss my company's refresh cycle on PCs, and it will pass us by. Also, it suffers from the fact that it's newness classifies it as a gadget in the minds of those who have budgets, and so maybe it won't sell quite so well as a consequence.
I don't think I'll get one, either personally or through my work, but I like the fact that IBM push the ideas envelope and make things like this - not bad for a monolithic blue-chip.
She said "No", but since I'd forgotten to set the default to "Yes", I assumed that she would have said "Yes" had I answered for her. Since I didn't give her the chance to let me answer for her, I assumed that had I given her the chance, that's the way she would have gone. Yr'honor'sir.
If we let you have your wicked way with it, it's going develop diabetes, and then where will we be?