However, Internet Explorer is a part of the operating system in that it is a constituent component of the platform API expected to exist for applications. Removal of those components will break scores of applications.
I recently had to use a site where IE6 was recommended, and it turned out to use an old "interactive presentation" Adobe app that broke if you had IE7 installed on the system. Even if you used a different browser to access the site, you still had to uninstall IE7, because the associated Adobe software would look for the IE code and try to use it (I think it used HTML container code for its dialog boxes) and that code must have changed under IE7 (probably when IE7 added tabs).
It took a whole afternoon to work out the list of things I had to do to my system (installing, downloading, updating, de-updating) to get that sodding thing to work. Funny thing was, a few weeks later I absent-mindedly tried accessing the same site from someone's Linux Eee PC, and it ran straight away, without having to install or tinker with a thing. Go figure.
FWIW, my site currently reports about ~45% for both IE and FF (with IE currently fractionally ahead), ~5% for Safari, and ~5% for everyone else. That's for a small site, with a "sciencey" bias.
So the ratio seems to depend on the sorts of people that a site attracts. On SlashDot, FF is going to be ahead of IE -- when I got SlashDotted some months back, the ratio shot over in favour of FF. For some "computery" sites, FF users may also be regarded as potentially "higher value" visitors than IE users.
I guess that there may still be some in-house corporate sites that require IE, but since some of those sites don't work under Vista, and the future of XP is uncertain, "IE-only" isn't such a safe option any more. What if your corporation wants to equip a few people with netbooks? You can still buy netbooks with XP preinstalled, but if you'd believed MS a few months back, netbooks would be Linux-only by now.
No, the earlier poster is right, as far as theory is concerned, Einstein's "Cosmological Constant" and "Dark Energy" perform different functions.
Einstein invented his "repulsive" effect to explain why the universe was static, and neither expanding or contracting. Unfortunately for Einstein, Hubble's redshift observations a few years later indicated that the "static" property of the universe that Einstein's CC had been invented to reproduce within GR, wasn't correct.
Dark energy was invented to explain why, when we take an expanding universe model decribed with general relativity, and try to compare it with reality, the numbers still don't appear to match up with the theory.
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Einstein's Cosmological Constant was an attempt to force GR to produce a wrong answer that Einstein (at that time) happened to think was a mathematically elegant one. The system seemed to describe a universe that would have to be expanding or contracting, and Einstein said... "Well we know that THAT has to be wrong, so to make things nice and static, I'll write in an additional term for a necessary effect that I've just made up, that would exactly cancel the large-scale effect of gravity... "
The motivation, function, and results for the two hypothesised effects are different. Both effects are repulsive, and both of them are essentially "made up" as accounting fudges without any deeper physical or philosophical justification, to force a theory that generates one result to generate a different result that we like better, but that's about all they have in common.
They're really different animals. Dark energy isn't an effect designed to explain why the universe is static. However, if you're inventing an arbitrary effect to bring your theory into line with experiment, the awkwardness of admitting that you're basically making stuff up to force the answer you want is reduced if you can claim some "provenance" for the idea, and present your "new" effect as if it's a logical historical development of an earlier idea by a Famous Physicist. That adds an air of legitimacy.
But if we think that the DE idea is any good, then the idea that DE is a historical extension of Einstein's CC is phoney. Einstein's CC is dead and buried. The only way that DE might turn out to be able to claim descent would be if DE turns out to be a rotten idea too, in which case we could say that there's a common theme running through both bad ideas.:)
But if the Dark Energy idea is good, then it's really not "bringing back Einstein's cosmological constant in revised form".
That timescale may not take into account the additional effects of the expansion on local rates of timeflow. You can have an extended version of the Hartle-Hawking bubble in which there's a larger conservation law between massenergy and spacetime, and the local rate of timeflow goes towards infinity as the background massenergy density goes towards zero (think of this as the inverse of the gravitational time dilation efect).
In that sort of model, the Hubble redshift is only proportional to the expansion ratio as a first approximation (whose range is roughly analogous to the range within the elastic limit of a spring).
There then becomes an upper limit to the possible size of the universe, that corresponds to the total (finite) massenergy contained within it. As we approach that limit, things unravel. The resulting increase in atomic instability can then be expressed as an effect of decreased nominal inertial mass due to the reduced background field strength (nuclear stability is a function of inertia).
But a decrease in local inertia also corresponds to an increase in the local rate of timeflow. The absolute end of the universe then represents a point in time where the nominal rate of timeflow is infinite (although, by then, there's nothing left to measure it with), so the period at which the universe nominally ends, measured in "insider-time", is in the infinitely far future. Okay, so its not quite infinitely far away, because the last proton evaporates at a finite time, but the timescale is effectively infinite to most intents and purposes, as far as we're concerned.
The advantage of this form of time-scaling is that it tidies up the Hartle-Hawking model - it allows the "equator" of the H-H bubble to represent the apparent end of the universe for insiders, and to be totally smooth. This removes the messiness that we'd otherwise tend to get when the bubble reaches its maximum size and parts of it start to contract. Contraction implies reversed entropic timeflow, so the HH bubble has a problem in that an observer living through the expansion-contraction region might see some mightily strange things going on. Some regions might be seen to be ageing in opposite directions to others. But if the interior rate of timeflow goes to infinity at the equator (as the angle of "proper" time approaches the angle of axial time, and its angle with the radial time-parameter 'a' tends to 90 degrees), then interior detail is totally erased at the equator, and the apparent inconsistencies with observerspace physics disappear... you can never survive a transition past the equator, and the event-meshes of each hemisphere are isolated from each other by the equatorial evaporation zone.
The expansion and contraction phases of the bubble then both effectively belong to two separate universes, both of which think they're expanding, and both with opposite senses of proper time. The equatorial evaporation zone keeps both sets of causalities isolated, and prevents nasty messy phase transitions where the two "worlds" collide.
If we look at the geometry of one hemisphere of the extended H-H bubble model, and we use axial time as our reference, or we take a tangent to a given zone and extend that zone's local sense of proper time as as a straight line to give us our time-reference for the rest of the bubble, then what we end up with is a description that seems to describe a "Big Rip" at a definite, finite time. Our projection tells us that the universe contents speed up and start to "fizz and whizz" at an increasing rate before finally disappearing altogether. But to physics performed inside that universe, things aren't hotting up, they're cooling down -- instead of matter mysteriously evaporating after few billion years, it's decaying more conventionally over rather vaster timescales.
Newton's ongoing isolation may have been partly influenced by the reactions of the peer group to his early work on light. At the time, some influential people reckoned that light came in three or five or seven distinct colours. Newton disagreed, and said that it came in an infinite continuous range of colours. Newton was slapped down. Newton explained that he'd actually done the experiment (with prisms, splitting and recombining light), and, yes, everyday white light really was a mixtures of an arbitrarily-high number of discrete components. The colours caused by a prism were already in the light, the prism was simply separating them out. If you removed a colour, then recombined the light, then split it again, that colour was still missing.
Newton's critics responded that Newton couldn't possibly have gotten that result, and that as well as being stupid, he was therefore also a liar and a scientific fraud. They also claimed to have tried and failed to replicate Newton's result.
Newton's reaction to this professional nicety was to decide to have nothing more to do with these shits, and he wrote to a friend that he was giving up research on natural philosophy (so that he wouldn't have to deal with these people any more). He then spent the next years working on biblical chronology, until Halley and co coaxed him back. The result was Principia and Opticks.
I'm not saying he wasn't smart, he was, but how much faster would his work have arrived had he been working in a group the whole time?
Einstein initially tried to work in a group. After he got his qualification, he supposedly applied to every university in Europe. Nobody would have him.
Einstein blamed his inability to get a post on rotten references from his teachers, who had complained that he was too lazy to amount to anything, and refused to be "told" things by his elders and betters. When he questioned their facts or didn't bother turning up to their lectures, they probably regarded it as an personal affront.
That's how he ended up working as a patent clerk in 1905. He figured that as a scientist, he was unemployable.
Things changed after the publication of his 1905 papers, but he still wasn't able to go full time as a researcher until he got offered a f/t position in 1909. 'Til then, he was still working part-time at the patent office.
Yeah, but the Pythagoreans (as a group) were psychologically incapable of accepting the idea of an irrational number, because the concept of an irrational number was incompatible with their basic team assumptions.
So when one of their team looked at the problem of root[2], and realised that the solution wasn't expressable as the ratio of any two integers, the Pythagoreans didn't thank the guy for pointing out that their basic assumptions had been wrong and give him an award -- they decided that the guy has committed the mathematical equivalent of treason, and had him killed as a heretic.
Hippasus.
The group approach is great for incremental research and "brute force" attacks on a problem, but when the solution to a problem requires a change to the initial assumptions of a subject, the body of certainty that the team represents can be a barrier to the acceptance of the correct solution. Hippasus' (important, correct) discovery was rejected by his research colleagues because it disagreed with how they'd been taught to see the world.
("Rejected" is putting it mildly. They drowned him. Pythagoas himself is supposed to have authorised Hippasus' execution)
Most breakthroughs come from standing on the shoulders of giants. Before you can get taller than the giant by standing on his shoulders, first you have to climb up there.
Naaah, first you shoot the giant in the ankles, then when they fall down you shoot them in the head. Then you step onto the DB's shoulders. Easy. No difficult climbing involved.
For achieving greater heights, repeat, using more giants (ideally, try to get them to fall across each other).
And then they realize they don't know enough about their field to actually make breakthroughs. ShieldW0lf is a loony.:-(
Pauli once commented that he'd reached a point in his life where he'd never be able to discover anything else new, because he now "knew too much". One of the notable things about Einstein was how deplorably bad his physics general knowledge was in some areas. So Einstein did a few things that a better-trained physicist would have "known" were wrong, but which turned out to work.
One of the biggest breakthroughs of the last few decades has been whe whole carbon buckyballs/buckytubes thing. Now, when I was a kid doing chemistry, and we were told that it'd been proved that carbon could only exist in one of three allotropes, one of my classmates put up their hand and asked whether that was actually true. The teacher then proceded to devote some time to chewing the kid out in front of the class, saying how clever people had devoted their lives to carbon chemistry, and had collectively written multi-volume works that took up whole walls, and of all this accumulated store of knowledge, NOTHING was more certain than the fact that carbon only came in three forms - if someone wanted to question something as basic as THAT, then they had no business taking a chemistry class.
Well, my "ignorant" classmate turned out to be right to ask the question. But (unsurprisingly, after his experience) he never went into chemistry. His sort clearly wasn't wanted.
There are two main types of breakthroughs - the "incremental" ones that you make by having better technology and tools and methods at your disposal, to tackle problems that couldn't previously be solved, and the "discontinuous" breakthroughs that happen when you realise that previous approaches have been wrong, or that a new paradgm is required.
"Big Science", with big industrialised research teams and big tools, tends to be quite good at the first sort of breakthroughs. For the second type of breakthrough... not so much.
I don't get it either. Why anyone in the consumer space would want to use XP over Vista is beyond me at this point.
XP is reasonably reliable, it's a known OS, and for a lot of people, its faster, runs better on restricted hardware, runs more windows apps and is compatible with more Windows hardware. These are all desirable things for an OS.
Admittedly, the "compatibility" thing isn't as much of an issue as it once was (as Vista support gets better and XP support for new hardware starts to drop off), but for a lot of consumers, they really don't give a damn about the OS, what they want is applications. The OS is simply a platform that lets them run those applications, hopefully with the additional hardware of their choice.
Support's also an issue. Enough people have XP, that if something goes wrong on an XP machine, you probably know someone who knows how to fix it. On Vista, not so much. I was in a PC place a few weeks ago when a lady came in and asked who she could hire to get her laptop's email account working, and the guy started writing down a list fo people, then paused, realised that she had Vista, and told her he didn't know anyone who could help. Apparently some Windows comms/workflow/email apps simply don't run under Vista.
Now, I accept that XP has some serious omissions, for instance the default backup facilities suck. But we've had time to work out workarounds to those problems (for instance, I invested in a copy of the Acronis stuff for the disc management and system restore stuff that XP doesn't do), so those problems are known and fixable.
As a consumer, I don't want to spend time learning the quirks and workarounds of a new OS, just to be able to run the same apps, unless there's something additional in it for me, and with Vista, its not entirely clear what that compelling new selling point would be. I don't need or want semitransparent windows, I just want an OS that gets the hell out of the way and lets me run my software and hardware and access my files... and maybe also plays media well, as a bonus.
Actually, I think that this decision by Microsoft demonstrates that "stupid people" and "those who have some knowledge about computers" are not always mutually-exclusive categories.
Unless we choose not to include MS in "those who have some knowledge about computers".
The Gower Report recommends that consumers should explicitly have the right to transfer material between formats (eg CD to MP3) for their own use, as "fair usage".
Another crazy oversight in the old UK legislation that looks like it's finally going to be fixed is an explicit exemption for archival work and some academic work, and it looks like they're going to be trying to implement some sort of workaround for "orphan works", too. About time.
Some British Libraries currently have archival problems, because they're expected to follow the exact letter of the law, and UK law didn't have an explicit clause to allow the copying of materials for preservation purposes.
US law is supposed to be better in this regard, I think.
Prior to 1 January 1996, the UK's general copyright term was life of the author plus 50 years. The extension to life of the author plus 70 years was introduced by The Duration of Copyright and Rights in Performances Regulations 1995 (SI 1995/3297); which had the effect of making EU Council Directive No. 93/98/EEC, created to harmonise the duration of copyright across the European Economic Area, law in the UK.
Basically, for standard copyrights, the maximum length in any EU country was D+70, so the EU directive that said that material considered copyrighted in any EU country should be considered copyrighted in all of them, meant that UK law had to go up to D+70, too. This was implemented in the UK way back in in 1996, so the copyright extension that people here have been screaming blue murder about actually happened over ten years ago. Past tense. I wish that more people had complained and kicked up a fuss about it at the time, but I'm afraid that you're all ten years too late. The time to write to your MP was about fifteen years ago. Doing it now will just confirm your MP's dark suspicions that their electorate doesn't really understand this stuff.
What the thread is supposed to be about is the separate branch of copyright law concerning the fees that companies are supposed to pay for the commercial use of specific audio recordings. The UK rules on that say that this obligation to pay for the commercial use of a recording ceases once the recording is fifty years old.
This means that ageing UK musicians who played on some of the classic tracks of the 1960's and who've been getting (dwindling) royalties from record companies for those tracks ever since, based on the "recording payments" rule (rather than on the songwriter's copyright) will see their income from those songs cease as each song passes the fifty-year limit.
I think that we pay copyright fees to the estates of dead artists for a while... but not for seventy years.
I think it'd be wrong if copyright payments stopped immediately on death, it'd mean that if an artist died young, their spouse and kids might be left penniless while the record company and the rest of the industry continues to make mega-money out of their work. Without controls, it'd also mean that corporations could nick and rework people's work inappropriately as soon as they died.
I'm not sure that I like the idea that record companies get to make more money out of their catalogues the earlier their artists die.
Perhaps there could be some sort of formula that ensures that record companies keep paying for a guaranteed amount of time regardless of what happens, but if the artist dies, any payments after a certain number of years (if a high threshold's been exceeded) go into some sort of fund (perhaps to help eldery musicians who are down on their luck, something like that).
Copyright itself is only an artificial construct designed to provide an incentive for the initial creation, after all, and it's supposed to provide rights for the rest of society just as much as the creator.
No, that wasn't the original reason why we decided that we needed IP laws.
The problem wasn't that people weren't creating. When Europe started getting technology, people were creating like crazy. They were researching, inventing, writing books and poetry and music like there was no tomorrow. Some folk have trouble understanding this, but creative people will tend to create (given the opportunity) even when there's no profit motive.
That wasn't the problem.
The problem was that a lot of those people weren't then sharing their creations. They had no proper incentive to. The development of the printing press meant that if you wrote a book, and you lent an early manuscript to someone, they could have it spirited across the channel and copied, and a few weeks later you'd hear about a rotten copy of your unfinished book full of typos and unauthorised changes being sold across Europe with your name on (or someone else's). This even happened to Isaac Newton, he lent a copy of something to the monarch, they lent it to a friend, and the damned thing got pirated. After that, Newton never showed any of his stuff to anyone if he could help it, until it was actually in print, and English science suffered as a result.
If you were a composer (and you didn't have an "installed" position), you usually had to make your money from commissions from wealthy patrons who wanted the first public performance of their commissioned work. So what you'd do between times was to write loads and loads of material, so that when the commission came along, you'd pull something out of your trunk, and tweek it, and present it as if you'd just written it from scratch. But you'd have a stock of music that you'd never play to anyone, in case it got "borrowed" before you'd had a chance to use it yourself.
But the thing that motivated people to bring in the new laws wasn't music or literature but technology. People were inventing useful things, but keeping them secret, and this was reckoned to be having a horrible effect on the economy.
Suppose that you'd spent ten years developing some magical gadget (say, a steam engine) that would double the productivity of a factory. You might then put the thing into production, in the hope of getting one installed in every factory in the country. That would be good.
But without some form of IP law, what would tend to happen would be that you'd produce and sell one engine, your competitors would get hold of it and strip it apart, and take mouldings, and then they'd sell copies of your engine to the rest of the country, cheaper (because they didn't have your initial R&D costs to make back). So you'd sell a couple of machines and go bust. Maybe some of the copies would be faulty and blow up and kill people, and people would blame you.
Now, by your argument, this wouldn't matter: the machine would have been be invented, and circulated, and society would benefit from its widespread introduction, even if the original inventor ended up penniless and distraught. The greater good would be served.
Snag is, our hypothetical inventor would tend not to be a complete idiot, and would tend to be able to anticipate being ripped off. If not, he'd probably learn pretty quick when he saw the same thing happening to other people. So instead of putting the machine into full production, he might decide that his best chance of making money out of the thing was to team up with a single factory owner, and install machines in that one factory, and make that factory more profitable than all the other machineless competitors, in exchange for a share of the profits. So instead of the earlier country-wide industrial revolution, we'd have a single factory with the machine, with nobody else in the country allowed to look at it or
I've already paid those performers for their work by giving them the copyright term they've already had. If their work was any good, they've already had all that time to make money from it. The only reason I offered to do this (through my government) was so there would be an incentive for them to create it, and now it's created. Why on earth should copyright be extended on existing works?
The business model's changed, and its still changing. As we move away from the monolithic record companies running everything, and move towards more fragmented small-scale sales and marketing across the internet and across social networks, there's more emphasis on building large catalogues of work where each work might have comparatively small sales, but where those sales will (hopefully) persist for a long time.
With online electronic sales, records no longer go out of production, and there's not such an obvious cutoff. Instead of records being obvious all-or-nothing hits or misses, we're now into the realm of the "long tail". You can already see this happening in book production, where university publishers with huge back catalogues are moving that inventory to electronic print on demand, with the idea being that even with obscure titles that are decades old, the cumulative effects of marginal sales on lots of titles, over decades, adds up and can generate a significant revenue stream.
So, increasingly, it's about the long tail. And for songwriters, their extremely generous death-plus-seventy protection means that they're sorted. But for the people who actually sing and play on those recordings, a fifty-year cutoff kinda damages the new business model. If their new income plan is longer-term, rather than being based on getting big hits and banking the money and retiring, then the fifty-year cutoff cuts into the "tail" and makes the whole thing rather less worth the risk.
If artists can't afford to live on the existing copyright monopolies offered by society, they should find another source of income. If society decides that the quality or quantity of new creative works isn't good enough in a way that extending copyright terms might help, then perhaps governments should consider extending copyright.
I think that perhaps the reason why recording artists didn't originally get assigned the same protection as everyone else was maybe because in the early C20th, people perhaps didn't see a decades-old recordings as being worth much. Tracks were constantly being rerecorded and re-rerecorded, and older recordings were being dropped. if you were a singer, and there was a particular song that people liked, you might re-record it every ten years of so, and the musicians would get a steady stream of repeat work. There was a lot of "churn" in the system, and if a song was a hit, the version that people would be listening to in five years time wouldn't be the same version they were listening to now.
If you were a sax player, you'd get constant work from all the recordings and rerecordings, and you might reckon that you didn't need a pension plan, because you'd still be playing sax when you were eighty, perhaps even rerecording a lot of the same songs.
But when the big bands and crooners gave way to more individualistic pop music and arrangements, the game changed. Bing Crosby sang "White Christmas" in two or three movies and probably recorded it god knows how many times: The Beatles only recorded the White Album once. Pink Floyd's fans didn't clamour for them to go back into the studio in 1990 and re-record a more "up to date" version of "Dark Side of the Moon", complete with Acid House beats or whaever else had become fashionable since.
We left the age of the Disposable Recording, and entered the age of The Definitive Recording, where a hit song might only ever be released by the original artist, and where people who liked the track increasingly wanted the original, not an updated Cliff Richard cover v
The problem is that they make the choice to do this, but then years later whine about it, and demand the system to be retroactively changed.
I don't see why you seem to find this so offensive. They're not "demanding", they're asking. They're not in a position to make "demands", because there's no "or else". AFAIK, they're not asking for extra money "retroactively", they're asking that the rules on expiry dates be changed, so that recordings that are currently still generating an income for the industry continue to pay a proportion of that income to the people who created them (as they currently are). They're asking for a future expiry to be delayed. Its only a "retroactive" request in the sense that the whole payments system is retroactive. They didn't negotiate the current expiry limits... those were set by government as law, so they can't be accused of trying to wriggle out of a previous agreement.
When a system is perceived as being unfair, and people whine about it, then if society feels that they have a point, and if changing the systems is easy and doesn't cost too much (and the rules are being rewritten anyway) then rules can change.
Which is no better than someone choosing to be employed, and then 50 years later whining that he should get more money.
That happens.
Right, and copyright extensions mean that the employer will unfairly get control over material that someone else wrote for longer.
Remember, we're talking about performance payments here, not the "usual" copyrights.
Does the employee retroactively get a pay increase? Of course not.
If the company's doing especially well, the employee can try to regotiate a pay increase.
If you strongly feel that numbers in your contract are unfair, and your colleagues all feel the same, and the business genuinely can't get by without all of you, and the extra money is there then yes, you're in a strong position to renegotiate those numbers. Your also in a strong position if the general perception is that you're being treated unfairly, and if this makes it more difficult for the company to hire new people of the calibre they want.
But you tend not to get that improvement in conditions without asking.
What you're less likely to be able to get is a retrospective structural change in rights and conditions. Fow a "waged" programmer to decide that they don't like their pay deal and start asking for royalties on their old work instead... that's about as likely to be received sympathetically as a failed musician deciding that their career has been a bit of a mistake, and asking society to take ownership of all their (unpopular) songs, and switch them retrospectively to a salary.
Ain't gonna happen. Incompatible systems. You can sometimes renegotiate changes retrospectively within a given system, but you don't normally get to retrospectively change between totally different systems.
Why is it that the recording rights must be increased and not that other rights not reduced?
I'd like to see both happen. Death plus seventy for standard copyrights is too long, and a flat fifty years for professional recordings is too short.
... this extension is a reduction in EVERYONE'S rights apart from the owner of the right being extended.
Oh, come on, exactly what right are you losing here? Unless you actually sell music yourself, you're not likely to be affected. The material that we're talking about is overwhelmingly going to be under conventional copyright anyway, so you normally wouldn't be able to get any of the material for free anyway unless the composer died in the Nineteenth Century or earlier. Stuff written in the 1960s is usually going to be covered by conventional copyright until the mid-to-late C21st (in some cases the C22nd!), by which time this extension to the old recordings will have lapsed anyway.
Do the math.
Turn it about and it's a reduction in a few people's rights and an increase in almost the entire world's rights.
But what wonderful advantage would the world's population get from screwing this small number of people over for a comapratively small amount of money? Songwriter copyrights are far longer, and those are usually what're keeping recordings out of the public domain, not recording royalties. If iTunes stop paying the musicians who performed on tracks, the tracks won't go PD, or get cheaper... they're still going to be copyright, and iTunes will simply keep what would otherwise have been the performers' share of the money.
Unless you buy a lot of budget reissues of old recordings of traditional folk music or classical music, I don't see how you're likely to be affected... and if you do buy a lot of old recordings of out-of-copyright music, you'll tend to find that the more mercenary record companies will slap a brand new recording date on the CD to take into account the remastering and cleanup work they did.
There are two main types of professional musician, just as there are two main types of professional programmer.
There are the guys who are employees, and who work "to order".. those programmers are the equivalent of session musicians, they get paid by the hour, or by the month.
Then there's the other guys who want to retain the rights to their work, and forgo wages and pensions and job security, and start their own companies, because they want to innovate and have control over what they produce. That's typically what bands do - they aren't employees of the record companies, they're self-employed, perhaps with a clutch of management company contracts, and perhaps a record company loan advance.
If you're a programmer that works for salary, then you've already done the equivalent of a musician selling out and charging an hourly rate for doing jingles or children's parties or corporate videos. You've become an employee, and the arguments in this thread don't apply to you.
The people we're talking about in this thread are people who've never sold or bargained away the rights to their work... and have realised that society is about to take those rights away regardless. And there's nothing they can do about it other than kick up a big stink and perhaps write to their MP and try to get the law changed. And that's what some of them have done.
No, you misunderstood the story.
Standard UK copyright (which is probably what you're thinking of) used to be death plus fifty... but that's already been extended to death plus seventy. THAT twenty-year extension happened years ago (the article title is misleading).
What we're talking about here isn't the copyright to the song, it's the additional rights attached to a specific recording of a song. If a singer spends their career doing cover versions, when their records sell, they don't make anything out of the song copyrights... that money goes to the writers... what the singer gets their money from is the rights to the recording of the song.
And those rights elapse under a different timescale, currently 50 years in the UK. So if an old blues singer had her heyday in the 1950's, and you buy her album, the record company probably aren't giving her any of the money.
Well, if the Eee's version of Linux is unusually, er, "non-optimal", then that's a shame, because for most people who've been encouraged to take a risk and buy a non-MS netbook, I'm guessing that that's probably what they've ended up with.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I really hope that Oz does specify a non-MS OS, and I hope that it's a resounding success. I also definitely think they should go with Ooo rather than MSO, and that the "non-MS Office" decision should be an easy choice. It probably also helps that MS isn't an Ozzie company, and that Australians tend to like to think of themselves as pretty independent, self-reliant people. Going with Linux would tie in nicely with that.
But if they end up chickening out and going with XP after all, I can kinda understand that, too. Maybe it'll depend on how risk-averse they're feeling, and how desperate MS are not to "lose" Australia. It'd be great to have an English-speaking country standardising on open-source software, though.
No, this is about the rights relating to audio recordings. For some reason that nobody seems to be able to explain, if you write a song, you get royalties for death+70 years, but if you record a guitar solo, or a lead vocal, your right to royalties for that recording expires after fifty years.
Nobody seems to know why, and some of the musicians concerned are quite pissed off to find that the standard copyright periods don't apply to them.
Yes, they probably should have known. But the 50-year expiry on recordings was a legal anomaly, legal advice in the industry was notoriously bad, and the mismatch between songwriter protection and performer protection doesn't seem to be fair.
I guess there's also an argument that removing all performer rights on old recordings too soon artificially undercuts the market for new recordings. It's difficult to decide what amounts to "too soon", but 1960s music isn't exactly obsolete.
The military is traditionally exempt from normal copyright laws. And since we're dealing with text, I'm not sure that strictly functional computer code counts as a "literary work".
You could try patenting it, but the codes that you'd have been cracking would be "prior art", and if anything, your code might be classified as an attempt to circumvent a protection system... then again, the military context would probably give you an exemption from prosecution, and in any case, German intellectual property rights tended to get "nixed" in the US and UK after the war.
There might be a potential loophole, though in that although the Allied forces wiped Nazi Germany's IP rights, I'm not sure whether this was also done within Germany itself, so the people who wrote EU IP law might have accidentally left open the possibility that since all states signing up to the international IP laws have to regard anything copyrighted in any member state as automatically also being copyright in all the others... that the old wiped Nazi copyrights might be inadvertently back in effect. Dunno.
And since copyrights on work produced to order for institutions doesn't tend to expire in the same way as work produced by individuals, your hypothetical WW2 code might actually be owned by... hm. That could be embarrassing.
Eventually, someone's going to launch a test case for something like this, and its going to be a real car crash.
Slashdot Mirror
However, Internet Explorer is a part of the operating system in that it is a constituent component of the platform API expected to exist for applications. Removal of those components will break scores of applications.
I recently had to use a site where IE6 was recommended, and it turned out to use an old "interactive presentation" Adobe app that broke if you had IE7 installed on the system. Even if you used a different browser to access the site, you still had to uninstall IE7, because the associated Adobe software would look for the IE code and try to use it (I think it used HTML container code for its dialog boxes) and that code must have changed under IE7 (probably when IE7 added tabs).
It took a whole afternoon to work out the list of things I had to do to my system (installing, downloading, updating, de-updating) to get that sodding thing to work. Funny thing was, a few weeks later I absent-mindedly tried accessing the same site from someone's Linux Eee PC, and it ran straight away, without having to install or tinker with a thing. Go figure.
So the ratio seems to depend on the sorts of people that a site attracts. On SlashDot, FF is going to be ahead of IE -- when I got SlashDotted some months back, the ratio shot over in favour of FF. For some "computery" sites, FF users may also be regarded as potentially "higher value" visitors than IE users.
I guess that there may still be some in-house corporate sites that require IE, but since some of those sites don't work under Vista, and the future of XP is uncertain, "IE-only" isn't such a safe option any more. What if your corporation wants to equip a few people with netbooks? You can still buy netbooks with XP preinstalled, but if you'd believed MS a few months back, netbooks would be Linux-only by now.
Einstein invented his "repulsive" effect to explain why the universe was static, and neither expanding or contracting. Unfortunately for Einstein, Hubble's redshift observations a few years later indicated that the "static" property of the universe that Einstein's CC had been invented to reproduce within GR, wasn't correct.
Dark energy was invented to explain why, when we take an expanding universe model decribed with general relativity, and try to compare it with reality, the numbers still don't appear to match up with the theory.
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Einstein's Cosmological Constant was an attempt to force GR to produce a wrong answer that Einstein (at that time) happened to think was a mathematically elegant one. The system seemed to describe a universe that would have to be expanding or contracting, and Einstein said ... "Well we know that THAT has to be wrong, so to make things nice and static, I'll write in an additional term for a necessary effect that I've just made up, that would exactly cancel the large-scale effect of gravity ... "
The motivation, function, and results for the two hypothesised effects are different. Both effects are repulsive, and both of them are essentially "made up" as accounting fudges without any deeper physical or philosophical justification, to force a theory that generates one result to generate a different result that we like better, but that's about all they have in common.
They're really different animals. Dark energy isn't an effect designed to explain why the universe is static. However, if you're inventing an arbitrary effect to bring your theory into line with experiment, the awkwardness of admitting that you're basically making stuff up to force the answer you want is reduced if you can claim some "provenance" for the idea, and present your "new" effect as if it's a logical historical development of an earlier idea by a Famous Physicist. That adds an air of legitimacy.
But if we think that the DE idea is any good, then the idea that DE is a historical extension of Einstein's CC is phoney. Einstein's CC is dead and buried. The only way that DE might turn out to be able to claim descent would be if DE turns out to be a rotten idea too, in which case we could say that there's a common theme running through both bad ideas. :)
But if the Dark Energy idea is good, then it's really not "bringing back Einstein's cosmological constant in revised form".
In that sort of model, the Hubble redshift is only proportional to the expansion ratio as a first approximation (whose range is roughly analogous to the range within the elastic limit of a spring).
There then becomes an upper limit to the possible size of the universe, that corresponds to the total (finite) massenergy contained within it. As we approach that limit, things unravel. The resulting increase in atomic instability can then be expressed as an effect of decreased nominal inertial mass due to the reduced background field strength (nuclear stability is a function of inertia).
But a decrease in local inertia also corresponds to an increase in the local rate of timeflow. The absolute end of the universe then represents a point in time where the nominal rate of timeflow is infinite (although, by then, there's nothing left to measure it with), so the period at which the universe nominally ends, measured in "insider-time", is in the infinitely far future. Okay, so its not quite infinitely far away, because the last proton evaporates at a finite time, but the timescale is effectively infinite to most intents and purposes, as far as we're concerned.
The advantage of this form of time-scaling is that it tidies up the Hartle-Hawking model - it allows the "equator" of the H-H bubble to represent the apparent end of the universe for insiders, and to be totally smooth. This removes the messiness that we'd otherwise tend to get when the bubble reaches its maximum size and parts of it start to contract. Contraction implies reversed entropic timeflow, so the HH bubble has a problem in that an observer living through the expansion-contraction region might see some mightily strange things going on. Some regions might be seen to be ageing in opposite directions to others. But if the interior rate of timeflow goes to infinity at the equator (as the angle of "proper" time approaches the angle of axial time, and its angle with the radial time-parameter 'a' tends to 90 degrees), then interior detail is totally erased at the equator, and the apparent inconsistencies with observerspace physics disappear ... you can never survive a transition past the equator, and the event-meshes of each hemisphere are isolated from each other by the equatorial evaporation zone.
The expansion and contraction phases of the bubble then both effectively belong to two separate universes, both of which think they're expanding, and both with opposite senses of proper time. The equatorial evaporation zone keeps both sets of causalities isolated, and prevents nasty messy phase transitions where the two "worlds" collide.
If we look at the geometry of one hemisphere of the extended H-H bubble model, and we use axial time as our reference, or we take a tangent to a given zone and extend that zone's local sense of proper time as as a straight line to give us our time-reference for the rest of the bubble, then what we end up with is a description that seems to describe a "Big Rip" at a definite, finite time. Our projection tells us that the universe contents speed up and start to "fizz and whizz" at an increasing rate before finally disappearing altogether. But to physics performed inside that universe, things aren't hotting up, they're cooling down -- instead of matter mysteriously evaporating after few billion years, it's decaying more conventionally over rather vaster timescales.
Cosmological timescales and reference systems
The thing one has to be careful o
Newton's reaction to this professional nicety was to decide to have nothing more to do with these shits, and he wrote to a friend that he was giving up research on natural philosophy (so that he wouldn't have to deal with these people any more). He then spent the next years working on biblical chronology, until Halley and co coaxed him back. The result was Principia and Opticks.
I'm not saying he wasn't smart, he was, but how much faster would his work have arrived had he been working in a group the whole time?
Einstein initially tried to work in a group. After he got his qualification, he supposedly applied to every university in Europe. Nobody would have him.
Einstein blamed his inability to get a post on rotten references from his teachers, who had complained that he was too lazy to amount to anything, and refused to be "told" things by his elders and betters. When he questioned their facts or didn't bother turning up to their lectures, they probably regarded it as an personal affront.
That's how he ended up working as a patent clerk in 1905. He figured that as a scientist, he was unemployable.
Things changed after the publication of his 1905 papers, but he still wasn't able to go full time as a researcher until he got offered a f/t position in 1909. 'Til then, he was still working part-time at the patent office.
So when one of their team looked at the problem of root[2], and realised that the solution wasn't expressable as the ratio of any two integers, the Pythagoreans didn't thank the guy for pointing out that their basic assumptions had been wrong and give him an award -- they decided that the guy has committed the mathematical equivalent of treason, and had him killed as a heretic.
Hippasus.
The group approach is great for incremental research and "brute force" attacks on a problem, but when the solution to a problem requires a change to the initial assumptions of a subject, the body of certainty that the team represents can be a barrier to the acceptance of the correct solution. Hippasus' (important, correct) discovery was rejected by his research colleagues because it disagreed with how they'd been taught to see the world.
("Rejected" is putting it mildly. They drowned him. Pythagoas himself is supposed to have authorised Hippasus' execution)
Most breakthroughs come from standing on the shoulders of giants. Before you can get taller than the giant by standing on his shoulders, first you have to climb up there.
Naaah, first you shoot the giant in the ankles, then when they fall down you shoot them in the head. Then you step onto the DB's shoulders. Easy. No difficult climbing involved.
For achieving greater heights, repeat, using more giants (ideally, try to get them to fall across each other).
And then they realize they don't know enough about their field to actually make breakthroughs. ShieldW0lf is a loony. :-(
Pauli once commented that he'd reached a point in his life where he'd never be able to discover anything else new, because he now "knew too much". One of the notable things about Einstein was how deplorably bad his physics general knowledge was in some areas. So Einstein did a few things that a better-trained physicist would have "known" were wrong, but which turned out to work.
One of the biggest breakthroughs of the last few decades has been whe whole carbon buckyballs/buckytubes thing. Now, when I was a kid doing chemistry, and we were told that it'd been proved that carbon could only exist in one of three allotropes, one of my classmates put up their hand and asked whether that was actually true. The teacher then proceded to devote some time to chewing the kid out in front of the class, saying how clever people had devoted their lives to carbon chemistry, and had collectively written multi-volume works that took up whole walls, and of all this accumulated store of knowledge, NOTHING was more certain than the fact that carbon only came in three forms - if someone wanted to question something as basic as THAT, then they had no business taking a chemistry class.
Well, my "ignorant" classmate turned out to be right to ask the question. But (unsurprisingly, after his experience) he never went into chemistry. His sort clearly wasn't wanted.
There are two main types of breakthroughs - the "incremental" ones that you make by having better technology and tools and methods at your disposal, to tackle problems that couldn't previously be solved, and the "discontinuous" breakthroughs that happen when you realise that previous approaches have been wrong, or that a new paradgm is required.
"Big Science", with big industrialised research teams and big tools, tends to be quite good at the first sort of breakthroughs. For the second type of breakthrough ... not so much.
I don't get it either. Why anyone in the consumer space would want to use XP over Vista is beyond me at this point.
XP is reasonably reliable, it's a known OS, and for a lot of people, its faster, runs better on restricted hardware, runs more windows apps and is compatible with more Windows hardware. These are all desirable things for an OS. Admittedly, the "compatibility" thing isn't as much of an issue as it once was (as Vista support gets better and XP support for new hardware starts to drop off), but for a lot of consumers, they really don't give a damn about the OS, what they want is applications. The OS is simply a platform that lets them run those applications, hopefully with the additional hardware of their choice.
Support's also an issue. Enough people have XP, that if something goes wrong on an XP machine, you probably know someone who knows how to fix it. On Vista, not so much. I was in a PC place a few weeks ago when a lady came in and asked who she could hire to get her laptop's email account working, and the guy started writing down a list fo people, then paused, realised that she had Vista, and told her he didn't know anyone who could help. Apparently some Windows comms/workflow/email apps simply don't run under Vista.
Now, I accept that XP has some serious omissions, for instance the default backup facilities suck. But we've had time to work out workarounds to those problems (for instance, I invested in a copy of the Acronis stuff for the disc management and system restore stuff that XP doesn't do), so those problems are known and fixable.
As a consumer, I don't want to spend time learning the quirks and workarounds of a new OS, just to be able to run the same apps, unless there's something additional in it for me, and with Vista, its not entirely clear what that compelling new selling point would be. I don't need or want semitransparent windows, I just want an OS that gets the hell out of the way and lets me run my software and hardware and access my files ... and maybe also plays media well, as a bonus.
Unless we choose not to include MS in "those who have some knowledge about computers".
Another crazy oversight in the old UK legislation that looks like it's finally going to be fixed is an explicit exemption for archival work and some academic work, and it looks like they're going to be trying to implement some sort of workaround for "orphan works", too. About time.
Some British Libraries currently have archival problems, because they're expected to follow the exact letter of the law, and UK law didn't have an explicit clause to allow the copying of materials for preservation purposes.
US law is supposed to be better in this regard, I think.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_Kingdom:
Basically, for standard copyrights, the maximum length in any EU country was D+70, so the EU directive that said that material considered copyrighted in any EU country should be considered copyrighted in all of them, meant that UK law had to go up to D+70, too. This was implemented in the UK way back in in 1996, so the copyright extension that people here have been screaming blue murder about actually happened over ten years ago. Past tense. I wish that more people had complained and kicked up a fuss about it at the time, but I'm afraid that you're all ten years too late. The time to write to your MP was about fifteen years ago. Doing it now will just confirm your MP's dark suspicions that their electorate doesn't really understand this stuff.
What the thread is supposed to be about is the separate branch of copyright law concerning the fees that companies are supposed to pay for the commercial use of specific audio recordings. The UK rules on that say that this obligation to pay for the commercial use of a recording ceases once the recording is fifty years old.
This means that ageing UK musicians who played on some of the classic tracks of the 1960's and who've been getting (dwindling) royalties from record companies for those tracks ever since, based on the "recording payments" rule (rather than on the songwriter's copyright) will see their income from those songs cease as each song passes the fifty-year limit.
I think it'd be wrong if copyright payments stopped immediately on death, it'd mean that if an artist died young, their spouse and kids might be left penniless while the record company and the rest of the industry continues to make mega-money out of their work. Without controls, it'd also mean that corporations could nick and rework people's work inappropriately as soon as they died.
I'm not sure that I like the idea that record companies get to make more money out of their catalogues the earlier their artists die. Perhaps there could be some sort of formula that ensures that record companies keep paying for a guaranteed amount of time regardless of what happens, but if the artist dies, any payments after a certain number of years (if a high threshold's been exceeded) go into some sort of fund (perhaps to help eldery musicians who are down on their luck, something like that).
Copyright itself is only an artificial construct designed to provide an incentive for the initial creation, after all, and it's supposed to provide rights for the rest of society just as much as the creator.
No, that wasn't the original reason why we decided that we needed IP laws.
The problem wasn't that people weren't creating. When Europe started getting technology, people were creating like crazy. They were researching, inventing, writing books and poetry and music like there was no tomorrow. Some folk have trouble understanding this, but creative people will tend to create (given the opportunity) even when there's no profit motive.
That wasn't the problem.
The problem was that a lot of those people weren't then sharing their creations. They had no proper incentive to. The development of the printing press meant that if you wrote a book, and you lent an early manuscript to someone, they could have it spirited across the channel and copied, and a few weeks later you'd hear about a rotten copy of your unfinished book full of typos and unauthorised changes being sold across Europe with your name on (or someone else's). This even happened to Isaac Newton, he lent a copy of something to the monarch, they lent it to a friend, and the damned thing got pirated. After that, Newton never showed any of his stuff to anyone if he could help it, until it was actually in print, and English science suffered as a result.
If you were a composer (and you didn't have an "installed" position), you usually had to make your money from commissions from wealthy patrons who wanted the first public performance of their commissioned work. So what you'd do between times was to write loads and loads of material, so that when the commission came along, you'd pull something out of your trunk, and tweek it, and present it as if you'd just written it from scratch. But you'd have a stock of music that you'd never play to anyone, in case it got "borrowed" before you'd had a chance to use it yourself.
But the thing that motivated people to bring in the new laws wasn't music or literature but technology. People were inventing useful things, but keeping them secret, and this was reckoned to be having a horrible effect on the economy. Suppose that you'd spent ten years developing some magical gadget (say, a steam engine) that would double the productivity of a factory. You might then put the thing into production, in the hope of getting one installed in every factory in the country. That would be good.
But without some form of IP law, what would tend to happen would be that you'd produce and sell one engine, your competitors would get hold of it and strip it apart, and take mouldings, and then they'd sell copies of your engine to the rest of the country, cheaper (because they didn't have your initial R&D costs to make back). So you'd sell a couple of machines and go bust. Maybe some of the copies would be faulty and blow up and kill people, and people would blame you.
Now, by your argument, this wouldn't matter: the machine would have been be invented, and circulated, and society would benefit from its widespread introduction, even if the original inventor ended up penniless and distraught. The greater good would be served.
Snag is, our hypothetical inventor would tend not to be a complete idiot, and would tend to be able to anticipate being ripped off. If not, he'd probably learn pretty quick when he saw the same thing happening to other people. So instead of putting the machine into full production, he might decide that his best chance of making money out of the thing was to team up with a single factory owner, and install machines in that one factory, and make that factory more profitable than all the other machineless competitors, in exchange for a share of the profits. So instead of the earlier country-wide industrial revolution, we'd have a single factory with the machine, with nobody else in the country allowed to look at it or
I've already paid those performers for their work by giving them the copyright term they've already had. If their work was any good, they've already had all that time to make money from it. The only reason I offered to do this (through my government) was so there would be an incentive for them to create it, and now it's created. Why on earth should copyright be extended on existing works?
The business model's changed, and its still changing. As we move away from the monolithic record companies running everything, and move towards more fragmented small-scale sales and marketing across the internet and across social networks, there's more emphasis on building large catalogues of work where each work might have comparatively small sales, but where those sales will (hopefully) persist for a long time.
With online electronic sales, records no longer go out of production, and there's not such an obvious cutoff. Instead of records being obvious all-or-nothing hits or misses, we're now into the realm of the "long tail". You can already see this happening in book production, where university publishers with huge back catalogues are moving that inventory to electronic print on demand, with the idea being that even with obscure titles that are decades old, the cumulative effects of marginal sales on lots of titles, over decades, adds up and can generate a significant revenue stream.
So, increasingly, it's about the long tail. And for songwriters, their extremely generous death-plus-seventy protection means that they're sorted. But for the people who actually sing and play on those recordings, a fifty-year cutoff kinda damages the new business model. If their new income plan is longer-term, rather than being based on getting big hits and banking the money and retiring, then the fifty-year cutoff cuts into the "tail" and makes the whole thing rather less worth the risk.
If artists can't afford to live on the existing copyright monopolies offered by society, they should find another source of income. If society decides that the quality or quantity of new creative works isn't good enough in a way that extending copyright terms might help, then perhaps governments should consider extending copyright.
I think that perhaps the reason why recording artists didn't originally get assigned the same protection as everyone else was maybe because in the early C20th, people perhaps didn't see a decades-old recordings as being worth much. Tracks were constantly being rerecorded and re-rerecorded, and older recordings were being dropped. if you were a singer, and there was a particular song that people liked, you might re-record it every ten years of so, and the musicians would get a steady stream of repeat work. There was a lot of "churn" in the system, and if a song was a hit, the version that people would be listening to in five years time wouldn't be the same version they were listening to now.
If you were a sax player, you'd get constant work from all the recordings and rerecordings, and you might reckon that you didn't need a pension plan, because you'd still be playing sax when you were eighty, perhaps even rerecording a lot of the same songs.
But when the big bands and crooners gave way to more individualistic pop music and arrangements, the game changed. Bing Crosby sang "White Christmas" in two or three movies and probably recorded it god knows how many times: The Beatles only recorded the White Album once. Pink Floyd's fans didn't clamour for them to go back into the studio in 1990 and re-record a more "up to date" version of "Dark Side of the Moon", complete with Acid House beats or whaever else had become fashionable since.
We left the age of the Disposable Recording, and entered the age of The Definitive Recording, where a hit song might only ever be released by the original artist, and where people who liked the track increasingly wanted the original, not an updated Cliff Richard cover v
I don't see why you seem to find this so offensive. They're not "demanding", they're asking. They're not in a position to make "demands", because there's no "or else". AFAIK, they're not asking for extra money "retroactively", they're asking that the rules on expiry dates be changed, so that recordings that are currently still generating an income for the industry continue to pay a proportion of that income to the people who created them (as they currently are). They're asking for a future expiry to be delayed. Its only a "retroactive" request in the sense that the whole payments system is retroactive. They didn't negotiate the current expiry limits ... those were set by government as law, so they can't be accused of trying to wriggle out of a previous agreement.
When a system is perceived as being unfair, and people whine about it, then if society feels that they have a point, and if changing the systems is easy and doesn't cost too much (and the rules are being rewritten anyway) then rules can change.
That happens.
Remember, we're talking about performance payments here, not the "usual" copyrights.
If the company's doing especially well, the employee can try to regotiate a pay increase.
If you strongly feel that numbers in your contract are unfair, and your colleagues all feel the same, and the business genuinely can't get by without all of you, and the extra money is there then yes, you're in a strong position to renegotiate those numbers. Your also in a strong position if the general perception is that you're being treated unfairly, and if this makes it more difficult for the company to hire new people of the calibre they want.
But you tend not to get that improvement in conditions without asking.
What you're less likely to be able to get is a retrospective structural change in rights and conditions. Fow a "waged" programmer to decide that they don't like their pay deal and start asking for royalties on their old work instead ... that's about as likely to be received sympathetically as a failed musician deciding that their career has been a bit of a mistake, and asking society to take ownership of all their (unpopular) songs, and switch them retrospectively to a salary.
Ain't gonna happen. Incompatible systems. You can sometimes renegotiate changes retrospectively within a given system, but you don't normally get to retrospectively change between totally different systems.
I'd like to see both happen. Death plus seventy for standard copyrights is too long, and a flat fifty years for professional recordings is too short.
Oh, come on, exactly what right are you losing here? Unless you actually sell music yourself, you're not likely to be affected. The material that we're talking about is overwhelmingly going to be under conventional copyright anyway, so you normally wouldn't be able to get any of the material for free anyway unless the composer died in the Nineteenth Century or earlier. Stuff written in the 1960s is usually going to be covered by conventional copyright until the mid-to-late C21st (in some cases the C22nd!), by which time this extension to the old recordings will have lapsed anyway.
Do the math.
But what wonderful advantage would the world's population get from screwing this small number of people over for a comapratively small amount of money? Songwriter copyrights are far longer, and those are usually what're keeping recordings out of the public domain, not recording royalties. If iTunes stop paying the musicians who performed on tracks, the tracks won't go PD, or get cheaper ... they're still going to be copyright, and iTunes will simply keep what would otherwise have been the performers' share of the money.
Unless you buy a lot of budget reissues of old recordings of traditional folk music or classical music, I don't see how you're likely to be affected ... and if you do buy a lot of old recordings of out-of-copyright music, you'll tend to find that the more mercenary record companies will slap a brand new recording date on the CD to take into account the remastering and cleanup work they did.
There are the guys who are employees, and who work "to order" .. those programmers are the equivalent of session musicians, they get paid by the hour, or by the month.
Then there's the other guys who want to retain the rights to their work, and forgo wages and pensions and job security, and start their own companies, because they want to innovate and have control over what they produce. That's typically what bands do - they aren't employees of the record companies, they're self-employed, perhaps with a clutch of management company contracts, and perhaps a record company loan advance.
If you're a programmer that works for salary, then you've already done the equivalent of a musician selling out and charging an hourly rate for doing jingles or children's parties or corporate videos. You've become an employee, and the arguments in this thread don't apply to you.
The people we're talking about in this thread are people who've never sold or bargained away the rights to their work ... and have realised that society is about to take those rights away regardless. And there's nothing they can do about it other than kick up a big stink and perhaps write to their MP and try to get the law changed. And that's what some of them have done.
What we're talking about here isn't the copyright to the song, it's the additional rights attached to a specific recording of a song. If a singer spends their career doing cover versions, when their records sell, they don't make anything out of the song copyrights ... that money goes to the writers ... what the singer gets their money from is the rights to the recording of the song.
And those rights elapse under a different timescale, currently 50 years in the UK. So if an old blues singer had her heyday in the 1950's, and you buy her album, the record company probably aren't giving her any of the money.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I really hope that Oz does specify a non-MS OS, and I hope that it's a resounding success. I also definitely think they should go with Ooo rather than MSO, and that the "non-MS Office" decision should be an easy choice. It probably also helps that MS isn't an Ozzie company, and that Australians tend to like to think of themselves as pretty independent, self-reliant people. Going with Linux would tie in nicely with that.
But if they end up chickening out and going with XP after all, I can kinda understand that, too. Maybe it'll depend on how risk-averse they're feeling, and how desperate MS are not to "lose" Australia. It'd be great to have an English-speaking country standardising on open-source software, though.
Nobody seems to know why, and some of the musicians concerned are quite pissed off to find that the standard copyright periods don't apply to them.
Some (older) musicians have been making a stink about this for some years now.
I guess there's also an argument that removing all performer rights on old recordings too soon artificially undercuts the market for new recordings. It's difficult to decide what amounts to "too soon", but 1960s music isn't exactly obsolete.
You could try patenting it, but the codes that you'd have been cracking would be "prior art", and if anything, your code might be classified as an attempt to circumvent a protection system ... then again, the military context would probably give you an exemption from prosecution, and in any case, German intellectual property rights tended to get "nixed" in the US and UK after the war.
There might be a potential loophole, though in that although the Allied forces wiped Nazi Germany's IP rights, I'm not sure whether this was also done within Germany itself, so the people who wrote EU IP law might have accidentally left open the possibility that since all states signing up to the international IP laws have to regard anything copyrighted in any member state as automatically also being copyright in all the others ... that the old wiped Nazi copyrights might be inadvertently back in effect. Dunno.
And since copyrights on work produced to order for institutions doesn't tend to expire in the same way as work produced by individuals, your hypothetical WW2 code might actually be owned by ... hm. That could be embarrassing.
Eventually, someone's going to launch a test case for something like this, and its going to be a real car crash.