They aren't integrating it into windows like with the xbox's OS though, and they're certainly not marketing it. They're too busy talking about how you can do magic with "the cloud"!
I guess "educational software" was the answer. Doesn't seem like educational software with kinect controls has a huge demand though, educational software alone is a pretty small niche, and I don't see how gesture controls would help that much. The more gesture-based you make it, the more it becomes a game and the less it becomes a learning tool. It just seems like you can get all the same learning with a mouse interface, and children aren't exactly afraid to use a mouse. If anything, the whole wii movement controls was more of a hit with adults and elderly and non-gamers.
Thats all I can say. If they're seriously doing this, and it has nothing to do with him, then all artistic integrity is gone, and this is an obvious media whoring.
Even with their own products. Its embarrassing that they took so long to realize the potential for this, and even then hackers beat them at it by years. Then there's the other 3rd party companies who ALSO beat them to market, and with cheaper products. Microsoft's innovation is staggering.
So wait, its more expensive? And there's going to be less games that use it. (see: none) Few if any will buy it, so nobody will waste time developing AAA games that use it, so nobody will buy it, so nobody will develop for it...
So without mainstream games, who is this supposed to appeal to? The very hackers who already got it working, because they wanted it? Whoops.
So, they're guessing people will buy it so that they can make voice commands to their computer like with the xbox? (which only works so-so)
But if that is the case, why not just add that software capability to Windows?! They can use existing microphones and webcams, gestures aren't as important since you HAVE A MOUSE that works perfectly well.
Absolute failure in marketing. I can't believe MS hasn't gone bankrupt yet, nobody likes their products. Zune sucks, Windows Live sucks, Windows Phone sucks...
Oh yeah, thats right. They make their money by suing android manufacturers and by abusing their OS monopoly (7 should have been a patch to Vista, not a "new" OS to purchase, and they have completely ignored gaming on Windows, and fail to innovate. Year after year the only new features to Windows are features that have been in OSX for a few years).
INB4 "obvious MS bashing" Maybe they deserve some ridicule.
If Harry Potter came on a DVD that only let you watch the last scene the first time you watched it, but still cost as much as your DVD of starwars that will survive as long as the disc is not damaged, you'd be upset too.
Stephen Colbert said it best, “If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it.”
The absolutely craziest part is now they're trying to call Gingrich out on his ridiculous hypocrisy, and HE TAKES THE HIGH GROUND. He began the debate with (In response to "would you like to respond to allegations...") "No. But I will." To which the audience went NUTS. Then he spent his time (In usual politician fashion) completely ignoring the issue and misdirecting by using ad hominem attacks against his other candidates.
This is the man who spearheaded the investigation into Bill Clinton's Lewinsky scandal. To later claim "the media is ruining the ability to govern" when they ask YOU about YOUR affairs....
It blows my mind that he even has the balls to get up there and act like that. He must have absolutely no conscience whatsoever.
Don't forget that he left his second wife when she got multiple sclerosis, after asking her for an open marriage to continue the affair he'd been having with his now third wife.
And SOMEHOW this man stands for the conservative values groups, and they vote for him.
Its the most blatantly hypocritical thing I've seen in politics yet, and its disgusting.
Every platform game was copying from Mario and the other pioneers. Asteroids copied SpaceWar. RTS games copied Dune.
Hell, I remember when FPS games were called doom-clones. And they *really* were. There's no denying doom's influence. Some games paid money to licence the engine from Id, but many others merely built their own versions.
Did that mean Id should have a right to sue every video game company? No. And did they try? NO. Id was totally cool with it. They were just glad to have been so successful, and they were totally cool with it.
Duke Nukem 3D's Build Engine is pretty much a direct knockoff of Doom. Did Id sue 3DRealms? No, I'm pretty sure they were on good terms.
This is part of game development.
You make the best game you can. Somebody makes a better game, you don't try to sue them. You try to do better.
The way I interpreted it was, he was trying to avoid Luke following in Anakin's footsteps. So he made up the story that his father was this great jedi who was killed by Vader. Yeah, it was a bit of a retcon, but hey, in the original draft Darth Vader was Grand Moff Tarkin, so whatever. (Also, he probably should have seen coming that this was going to inspire him to dedicate his life to slaying Vader, thus putting him up to join the dark side just as much, but I guess that was Obi-wan's plan)
Yeah, Obi-wan (and especially the droids, given the unnecessary insert they got in I, II, and III) seem to kinda fail to remember some important stuff.
But that one could just be that Obi-wan hadn't considered that the female daughter of Anakin could also grow to be a powerful jedi to balance the force. Sexism on Obi-wan's part, maybe?
It wasn't part of the prophecy that Anakin's children would be powerful and would be able to confront him; the prophecy didn't have to do with someone's children or Anakin in particular at all. It could be anybody. After all, they thought it was Anakin himself originally. So with Anakin proven not to be the savior, it could be anybody. Their best candidate was Luke, he seemed to be a powerful natural jedi like his father, so it seemed obvious he would be the one. With him gone, the search is more or less back to 0, it could be any child.
Yeah, I can come up with about 2,000 plot holes between I and III, but IV, V, and VI the problems seem pretty minor, fixable certainly with a little lee-way. I was curious though if you'd found some glaring problem I hadn't yet:)
Just IMAGINE if Disney hadn't lobbied nonstop to get patent law extended time and again. Star Wars would be in the public licence, and all manner of aspiring directors could make their own episodes set in the universe. Creativity could flourish in the land of the free...
Except that once you become rich, you use your power to make sure nobody else does the same thing. Disney profited on public works when they were getting started and had a hard enough time just doing the animation. Now others can't use their stories to do the same?
What about IV is impossible to reconcile with V? I'm just curious, not trying to say you're wrong. Did you mean the 4th and 5th movies made? (I and II ?)
Don't compare copyright infringement to theft. It isn't. This wouldn't be stealing a car, this would be building a car in your back yard by looking at my car and stealing the engineering design instead of doing the math and designing a car from scratch yourself. The engineer misses out on a possible sale and his tiny percentage of the profits, but you're not taking anything from anyone, and if you wouldn't have purchased one in the first place, then you haven't even taken away a sale.
So you too need to come up with a better argument.
I didn't say it proved they weren't doing anything illegal. I was merely saying that THAT detail in of itself, that the CEO is profiting, is not in ANY way evidence of wrongdoing. By that logic, you could find every successful business in America guilty. (well... they might be.)
Uh... Is it just me, or did they not think of the obvious? While you're together, you share your password. As soon as you break up, log in and change your passwords to something new that you haven't told that person. Problem solved? Was there even a problem?
I know, I know, TFA was more about the "dangers" of letting your significant other know all your secrets. I reject this too, I don't have any secrets. My friends and family can ask anything and I'll give an honest answer. 99% of the problems in this world come from people trying to defend their own ego and self-image, when you should really just accept that you are who you are and that is fine, people make mistakes, and we are each the result of our environments.
Its not like it was advertised "here's the legal $10 lugaru, and here's the $1 knockoff lugaru you shouldn't download because it was pirated"
They sat next to each other in the app store, looking very similar. They both described the same game, with slightly different icon art. (but both the art being taken from the same game, just different places, they both seemed entirely legitimate).
TONS of people bought the $1 version thinking it was a sale, or a mistake on the owner's part, or just not caring enough to investigate the issue.
I absolutely agree that business' should live or die based on the free market. I absolutely agree they shouldn't be bailed out, and we as a society shouldn't pick up the tab for failing businesses. Not just we shouldn't have to, but we shouldn't even do it at all, because the results are disastrous. If you reward failure, you change the survival heuristic and we will tend towards worse and worse. Agreed.
But like I said,
"If all citizens were very intelligent, even-tempered, open-minded, and had lots of free time to look up everything, I'd totally agree with you.
But they don't. "
Louis CK is already famous. He has lots of money from working with the existing system, so he was able to self-finance this experiment. He wasn't going to starve if it failed.
What if people just didn't hear about it enough? What if he couldn't afford the web hosting? What if.. a million other possible scenarios.
Consider Lugaru on iPhone. It was released open source, and somebody took the source, went against the licence rules, and put it up on the iTunes store for $1 instead of $10. So it started selling more than the legal version did.
Because the owner of Lugaru had an open-source contract restricting commercial use, he was able to file with Apple and got the knockoff taken down from the store, eventually. But Apple was a huge pain in the ass, and almost ignored him because he was indie. They only finally complied with him because he had a legal right, and he could sue otherwise.
But Apple represents a free market company! If they handled this internally, and the owner of Lugaru was able to just declare the licence, then we don't need a government anywhere involved!
But what if Apple hadn't caved? What if they only relented because their lawyers realized they would lose in court?
What if a company put out a product like the Kindle, and then started releasing everybody else's books for free on their Kindle product. What do you do? You go to the company, they say sorry, but this is how we're doing our business. You can't even somehow try to compete, because the ONLY version available on that product is their copy. You can't do anything but try to peddle your book yourself, while sales of the e-book version push the Kindle device worldwide. You're indie, so maybe everybody ignores you. Maybe somebody listens, and you get Consumer Reports to say "boo to the Kindle", does that stop people?
You seem to say yourself, that whoever offers the most value to the consumer wins. The consumer does what is best for the consumer.
But people do not know what is best for themselves, we are not omnipotent after all, and we can't always plan for the long run. Buying the Kindle device is cheaper since you don't have to pay for books, so the consumers all flock to it. Then the writers all get different jobs since their books aren't selling, so now there aren't any good books on the Kindle device because they don't have anything to copy. New writers get hired to churn out replacements and the entire industry suffers. Art suffers.
You argue that people would volunteer the money. That works for things online, but how are people going to know that I wrote this book if the book is being sold halfway across the planet and I don't even know that my own book is being stolen? And if I find out, how do I inform all these people?
So you agreed that GPL would not exist without copyrights. Yes, THAT WAS MY POINT. There's no GPL. So there's no open-source. Now, could you please consider that?
Up until this point, I thought you were a very well-spoken man with some very valid libertarian views.
But those links you just sent me to changed my mind somewhat. In the first, you argue that copyright is wrong because... people can ignore laws. Also, the US Government does a lot of bad stuff.
Uh, agreed, but how does that have anything to do with copyright? It doesn't. You're arguing for banning of government and the ending of all law. Thats rather extreme, I know lots of complete anarchists as well (sorry, I know anarchy is a loaded word these days, trust me I don't consider it to just be rioting in the streets, I'll give the idea some merit) but regardless we are arguing about changing COPYRIGHT law, in the EXISTING government. You want to start advocating absolutely no government, fine, but that is a completely different discussion. You're coming out of nowhere here, and your logic does not follow.
Then on the second one, you also get very extreme and make the argument that ANY copyright INEVITABLY MUST become INFINITE COPYRIGHT. I completely reject this argument, and you haven't provided anything to support it other than that YOU FEEL THAT WAY. Well, sure, thats a possibility, and I'm really sorry you feel that way, but you are treating these as verifiable, proven facts, when they are instead YOUR INKLING.
I like that joke too, Not sure if it was Churchill, I've heard it attributed to lots of people. But not sure at ALL what that joke has to do with anything.
You chastise someone else for making the slippery slope argument, but that was YOUR ENTIRE ARGUMENT as well.
In my VERY FIRST post I presented the option : what if copyright were restricted to the original term (30 years?).
What if Eldred v. Ashcroft had gone the other way, and SCOTUS had gone with Breyer's dissention that it allowed for indefinite copyright which was unconstitutional?
There are some fairly good arguments there, but I reject that you would have no legal recourse in the current system. Even if you couldn't afford lawyers and they have a trained team of attack dogs from Harvard Law, if you've got an original draft and damning information, some lawyer is going to be willing to go at them with you for a chance at a percentage of the profits.
Regardless, You still haven't answered my first question: What about Open-Source? It needs copyright law to be enforceable.
And, I predicted your argument about having a neutral agency (see what I said about a possible Consumer Reports) and offered counterarguments. Please read and refute them.
only some of what you say in the other link applies to what I said. Other places, I considered those responses and provided potential flaws already.
I agree with a lot you said, but I feel like with books and certain digital works that it would be too easy for another company to copy and produce the product (with a work like a book, you can buy one copy, and then scan all the text, and start making copies yourself. It isn't like a hot dog company where in order to steal your hot dogs, I'd have to buy them and then sell them, so you still win. Or I have to steal them, in which case it is theft. This isn't theft, people REALLY need to stop saying that, but there is a reason why we protect against copyright infringement. It should only apply to commercial use, fair use needs to be GREATLY reinforced to apply to a great many more things. Anything nonprofit should be exempt from copyright infringement.)
Definitely, Piracy is a problem with perceived market value not matching the ONLY price you can get a product for. Here in the west, we don't believe in haggling, which is a huge failure of the business model. Somebody paying you $40 is better than paying you $0, so really you should get past your $50 sticker price if they don't have that much. With older products, trying to make a profit margin, it wasn't quite the same. But with digital products, your price is entirely in R&D, and there's practically 0 manufacturing and distribution cost, so it costs you nothing to sell at a lower price to additional customers.
Valve's Gabe Newell is saying the same thing, Russia always has lots of videogame pirates and everybody says its a huge problem, you should just ignore Russia. But its BECAUSE they ignore Russia, as soon as Valve started releasing games localized to Russia on the same day they release the other versions, BOOM, Russian sales of their games exploded, and continue to be over 3x what the market says they should be. They tried those huge steam sales, and WHAM, games sold like CRAZY. Ends up if you charge a reasonable price, FAR more gamers will be able to afford your product, and you'll end up making tons more money in the long run. They've been doing sale after sale after sale since then, and they STILL can't believe how much the games on sale are selling. Every possible metric valve has used has been WAY off, so they're completely reformulating the business strategy of video games right now.
But again, what do you say to what I said about open-source? You can't have an open-source copyright licence if there's no copyright. Somebody can steal your work, add to it, and then sell his work, WITHOUT giving you credit and WITHOUT publishing his source code. He profits from you, but nobody can profit from him. Open-source REQUIRES copyright law.
And Louis CK was able to sell direct because his fans know him, they trust him, and they would rather work through him.
What about an author who hasn't been published before? He works out an agreement with a publisher, they sell his book...
And some other publisher who is very well known copies the book and prints it themselves, undercutting the first publisher. By mass production and by having leagues of people who trust them, they are able to sell other people's books more than those people themselves. And if it isn't a well known author, then people won't think about "hm, maybe I should go check out this guy's web site and see if I can buy it direct?", maybe they'll go for convenience and buy whichever version is at Wal-Mart. Hell, there's nothing saying that the ripoff version even has to include his name if there's no copyright law, so they can totally attribute it to themselves, and people shopping would see the book and have literally NO idea that it was somebody else's work, and that they're not helping that person.
If all citizens were very intelligent, even-tempered, open-minded, and had lots of free time to look up everything, I'd totally agree with you.
But they don't. So we need some protection for authors. We really do. I'd like to hear your thoughts.
The only way I can see around government copyright protections is some kind of Consumer Repo
Thanks slashdot for taking action and joining the blackout./. is now frozen and this will be the only news story of the day.
Several of us were wondering why/. wouldn't join in, since the community is so overwhelmingly against SOPA and PIPA.
The argument that anybody on/. would already know about it is pretty fair, but still. This is Serious.
I agree we should abolish patents. They're state-sponsored monopolies and in the modern world are given out regularly for things that are obvious and should not be patent-able. Its an arms race, and creativity loses. As soon as European developers went on the record saying "I would love to serve America, but given the law over there, I will have to refuse to sell to the United States." When it costs nearly nothing to distribute your product (virutal) and you still turn down sales, something is VERY, very wrong. We're crippling ourselves.
However, I'm not sure we should completely abolish copyright. Open source permissive licences require copyright, in reality, to work. Without copyright, you don't need open source licences as much, but at the same time, you can't require that other people who modify your software also release theirs open source. People are free to use you software and modify it and sell it but keep it closed-source. That is a concern. Also, artists could easily be ripped off. People would start selling books they didn't write, even though I absolutely HATE patents, I feel like works should be protected.
The solution is not to abandon copyright, but reform it. It should be limited to the original term (30 years?) only, and extensions SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED. As the dissenting voice on the supreme court case said (who was it? Ginsberg?) allowing extensions to the copyright again and again effectively allows for an infinite copyright, which was directly banned in the original law. That is the problem we have now, is the infinite copyright that lobbyists have bought themselves. Disney just keeps throwing money at congress to protect them. Ironic since all of Disney's early works took advantage of public works! Also, disgusting.
As they said, the idea that an artist would make a work purely because his children's children could profit from it is beyond insane. Artists should be protected to create and profit from their ideas, but only for their lifetimes at most. Their wealth can pass to their children, but not the copyright.
The difference is that patents, especially software patents, are over logic and math and science; things innate to our world, that anyone could discover. Artistic works are unique and created by the artist, one in infinity, and it is very likely that had the artist not made that work, NOBODY would have ever made that work. Similar, yes, but not the same. On the other hand, patents would generally be discovered by someone else, INEVITABLY. Its just a matter of time and resources and demand, or possibly just luck. That luck shouldn't be rewarded with a monopoly. But a single author should be rewarded with protection for their unique work.
"Learn to code, get a job" is misleading. But the idea that the everyman should have a basic understand of at least what programming IS and some of the basics of how it works and how it does what it does can be very beneficial, being so surrounded by software. Its unrealistic for everybody to write their own shell scripts, but we can at least teach people enough so they aren't totally in the dark. Then they'll have more patience with us when they run into a bug, instead of wondering why programming "takes so darn long, since all it is is just typing."
Also, in my defense, I didn't say the internet would go down in flames. I said they were ruining it. And they are, they're taking all the fun parts (last vestige of free speech) away.
Slashdot Mirror
They aren't integrating it into windows like with the xbox's OS though, and they're certainly not marketing it. They're too busy talking about how you can do magic with "the cloud"!
I guess "educational software" was the answer. Doesn't seem like educational software with kinect controls has a huge demand though, educational software alone is a pretty small niche, and I don't see how gesture controls would help that much. The more gesture-based you make it, the more it becomes a game and the less it becomes a learning tool. It just seems like you can get all the same learning with a mouse interface, and children aren't exactly afraid to use a mouse. If anything, the whole wii movement controls was more of a hit with adults and elderly and non-gamers.
inresponse2 doesn't have the same ring. :p
You're seriously going to pass judgement on someone for how they look? In this day and age? ON SLASHDOT? Come onnnnn.
Thats all I can say. If they're seriously doing this, and it has nothing to do with him, then all artistic integrity is gone, and this is an obvious media whoring.
Sucks to be a writer, I guess.
Even with their own products. Its embarrassing that they took so long to realize the potential for this, and even then hackers beat them at it by years. Then there's the other 3rd party companies who ALSO beat them to market, and with cheaper products. Microsoft's innovation is staggering.
So wait, its more expensive? And there's going to be less games that use it. (see: none) Few if any will buy it, so nobody will waste time developing AAA games that use it, so nobody will buy it, so nobody will develop for it...
So without mainstream games, who is this supposed to appeal to? The very hackers who already got it working, because they wanted it? Whoops.
So, they're guessing people will buy it so that they can make voice commands to their computer like with the xbox? (which only works so-so)
But if that is the case, why not just add that software capability to Windows?! They can use existing microphones and webcams, gestures aren't as important since you HAVE A MOUSE that works perfectly well.
Absolute failure in marketing. I can't believe MS hasn't gone bankrupt yet, nobody likes their products. Zune sucks, Windows Live sucks, Windows Phone sucks... Oh yeah, thats right. They make their money by suing android manufacturers and by abusing their OS monopoly (7 should have been a patch to Vista, not a "new" OS to purchase, and they have completely ignored gaming on Windows, and fail to innovate. Year after year the only new features to Windows are features that have been in OSX for a few years).
INB4 "obvious MS bashing" Maybe they deserve some ridicule.
If Harry Potter came on a DVD that only let you watch the last scene the first time you watched it, but still cost as much as your DVD of starwars that will survive as long as the disc is not damaged, you'd be upset too.
Stephen Colbert said it best, “If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn't help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we've got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don't want to do it.”
The absolutely craziest part is now they're trying to call Gingrich out on his ridiculous hypocrisy, and HE TAKES THE HIGH GROUND. He began the debate with (In response to "would you like to respond to allegations...") "No. But I will." To which the audience went NUTS. Then he spent his time (In usual politician fashion) completely ignoring the issue and misdirecting by using ad hominem attacks against his other candidates.
This is the man who spearheaded the investigation into Bill Clinton's Lewinsky scandal. To later claim "the media is ruining the ability to govern" when they ask YOU about YOUR affairs....
It blows my mind that he even has the balls to get up there and act like that. He must have absolutely no conscience whatsoever.
Don't forget that he left his second wife when she got multiple sclerosis, after asking her for an open marriage to continue the affair he'd been having with his now third wife.
And SOMEHOW this man stands for the conservative values groups, and they vote for him.
Its the most blatantly hypocritical thing I've seen in politics yet, and its disgusting.
Every platform game was copying from Mario and the other pioneers. Asteroids copied SpaceWar. RTS games copied Dune.
Hell, I remember when FPS games were called doom-clones. And they *really* were. There's no denying doom's influence. Some games paid money to licence the engine from Id, but many others merely built their own versions.
Did that mean Id should have a right to sue every video game company? No. And did they try? NO. Id was totally cool with it. They were just glad to have been so successful, and they were totally cool with it.
Duke Nukem 3D's Build Engine is pretty much a direct knockoff of Doom. Did Id sue 3DRealms? No, I'm pretty sure they were on good terms.
This is part of game development.
You make the best game you can. Somebody makes a better game, you don't try to sue them. You try to do better.
The way I interpreted it was, he was trying to avoid Luke following in Anakin's footsteps. So he made up the story that his father was this great jedi who was killed by Vader. Yeah, it was a bit of a retcon, but hey, in the original draft Darth Vader was Grand Moff Tarkin, so whatever. (Also, he probably should have seen coming that this was going to inspire him to dedicate his life to slaying Vader, thus putting him up to join the dark side just as much, but I guess that was Obi-wan's plan)
:)
Yeah, Obi-wan (and especially the droids, given the unnecessary insert they got in I, II, and III) seem to kinda fail to remember some important stuff.
But that one could just be that Obi-wan hadn't considered that the female daughter of Anakin could also grow to be a powerful jedi to balance the force. Sexism on Obi-wan's part, maybe?
It wasn't part of the prophecy that Anakin's children would be powerful and would be able to confront him; the prophecy didn't have to do with someone's children or Anakin in particular at all. It could be anybody. After all, they thought it was Anakin himself originally. So with Anakin proven not to be the savior, it could be anybody. Their best candidate was Luke, he seemed to be a powerful natural jedi like his father, so it seemed obvious he would be the one. With him gone, the search is more or less back to 0, it could be any child.
Yeah, I can come up with about 2,000 plot holes between I and III, but IV, V, and VI the problems seem pretty minor, fixable certainly with a little lee-way. I was curious though if you'd found some glaring problem I hadn't yet
Just IMAGINE if Disney hadn't lobbied nonstop to get patent law extended time and again. Star Wars would be in the public licence, and all manner of aspiring directors could make their own episodes set in the universe. Creativity could flourish in the land of the free...
Except that once you become rich, you use your power to make sure nobody else does the same thing. Disney profited on public works when they were getting started and had a hard enough time just doing the animation. Now others can't use their stories to do the same?
The word is Hypocrisy.
What about IV is impossible to reconcile with V? I'm just curious, not trying to say you're wrong. Did you mean the 4th and 5th movies made? (I and II ?)
Don't compare copyright infringement to theft. It isn't. This wouldn't be stealing a car, this would be building a car in your back yard by looking at my car and stealing the engineering design instead of doing the math and designing a car from scratch yourself. The engineer misses out on a possible sale and his tiny percentage of the profits, but you're not taking anything from anyone, and if you wouldn't have purchased one in the first place, then you haven't even taken away a sale.
So you too need to come up with a better argument.
I didn't say it proved they weren't doing anything illegal. I was merely saying that THAT detail in of itself, that the CEO is profiting, is not in ANY way evidence of wrongdoing. By that logic, you could find every successful business in America guilty. (well... they might be.)
It's not like MegaUpload was some kind of charity ... CEO seemed to be making money hand-over-fist.
All that proves is that MegaUpload was providing value to people.
Is this a test, Sir?
Uh... Is it just me, or did they not think of the obvious? While you're together, you share your password. As soon as you break up, log in and change your passwords to something new that you haven't told that person. Problem solved? Was there even a problem?
I know, I know, TFA was more about the "dangers" of letting your significant other know all your secrets. I reject this too, I don't have any secrets. My friends and family can ask anything and I'll give an honest answer. 99% of the problems in this world come from people trying to defend their own ego and self-image, when you should really just accept that you are who you are and that is fine, people make mistakes, and we are each the result of our environments.
Its not like it was advertised "here's the legal $10 lugaru, and here's the $1 knockoff lugaru you shouldn't download because it was pirated"
They sat next to each other in the app store, looking very similar. They both described the same game, with slightly different icon art. (but both the art being taken from the same game, just different places, they both seemed entirely legitimate).
TONS of people bought the $1 version thinking it was a sale, or a mistake on the owner's part, or just not caring enough to investigate the issue.
I absolutely agree that business' should live or die based on the free market. I absolutely agree they shouldn't be bailed out, and we as a society shouldn't pick up the tab for failing businesses. Not just we shouldn't have to, but we shouldn't even do it at all, because the results are disastrous. If you reward failure, you change the survival heuristic and we will tend towards worse and worse. Agreed.
But like I said, "If all citizens were very intelligent, even-tempered, open-minded, and had lots of free time to look up everything, I'd totally agree with you. But they don't. "
Louis CK is already famous. He has lots of money from working with the existing system, so he was able to self-finance this experiment. He wasn't going to starve if it failed.
What if people just didn't hear about it enough? What if he couldn't afford the web hosting? What if.. a million other possible scenarios.
Consider Lugaru on iPhone. It was released open source, and somebody took the source, went against the licence rules, and put it up on the iTunes store for $1 instead of $10. So it started selling more than the legal version did.
Because the owner of Lugaru had an open-source contract restricting commercial use, he was able to file with Apple and got the knockoff taken down from the store, eventually. But Apple was a huge pain in the ass, and almost ignored him because he was indie. They only finally complied with him because he had a legal right, and he could sue otherwise.
But Apple represents a free market company! If they handled this internally, and the owner of Lugaru was able to just declare the licence, then we don't need a government anywhere involved!
But what if Apple hadn't caved? What if they only relented because their lawyers realized they would lose in court?
What if a company put out a product like the Kindle, and then started releasing everybody else's books for free on their Kindle product. What do you do? You go to the company, they say sorry, but this is how we're doing our business. You can't even somehow try to compete, because the ONLY version available on that product is their copy. You can't do anything but try to peddle your book yourself, while sales of the e-book version push the Kindle device worldwide. You're indie, so maybe everybody ignores you. Maybe somebody listens, and you get Consumer Reports to say "boo to the Kindle", does that stop people?
You seem to say yourself, that whoever offers the most value to the consumer wins. The consumer does what is best for the consumer.
But people do not know what is best for themselves, we are not omnipotent after all, and we can't always plan for the long run. Buying the Kindle device is cheaper since you don't have to pay for books, so the consumers all flock to it. Then the writers all get different jobs since their books aren't selling, so now there aren't any good books on the Kindle device because they don't have anything to copy. New writers get hired to churn out replacements and the entire industry suffers. Art suffers.
You argue that people would volunteer the money. That works for things online, but how are people going to know that I wrote this book if the book is being sold halfway across the planet and I don't even know that my own book is being stolen? And if I find out, how do I inform all these people?
So you agreed that GPL would not exist without copyrights. Yes, THAT WAS MY POINT. There's no GPL. So there's no open-source. Now, could you please consider that?
Up until this point, I thought you were a very well-spoken man with some very valid libertarian views.
But those links you just sent me to changed my mind somewhat. In the first, you argue that copyright is wrong because... people can ignore laws. Also, the US Government does a lot of bad stuff.
Uh, agreed, but how does that have anything to do with copyright? It doesn't. You're arguing for banning of government and the ending of all law. Thats rather extreme, I know lots of complete anarchists as well (sorry, I know anarchy is a loaded word these days, trust me I don't consider it to just be rioting in the streets, I'll give the idea some merit) but regardless we are arguing about changing COPYRIGHT law, in the EXISTING government. You want to start advocating absolutely no government, fine, but that is a completely different discussion. You're coming out of nowhere here, and your logic does not follow.
Then on the second one, you also get very extreme and make the argument that ANY copyright INEVITABLY MUST become INFINITE COPYRIGHT. I completely reject this argument, and you haven't provided anything to support it other than that YOU FEEL THAT WAY. Well, sure, thats a possibility, and I'm really sorry you feel that way, but you are treating these as verifiable, proven facts, when they are instead YOUR INKLING.
I like that joke too, Not sure if it was Churchill, I've heard it attributed to lots of people. But not sure at ALL what that joke has to do with anything.
You chastise someone else for making the slippery slope argument, but that was YOUR ENTIRE ARGUMENT as well.
In my VERY FIRST post I presented the option : what if copyright were restricted to the original term (30 years?).
What if Eldred v. Ashcroft had gone the other way, and SCOTUS had gone with Breyer's dissention that it allowed for indefinite copyright which was unconstitutional?
There are some fairly good arguments there, but I reject that you would have no legal recourse in the current system. Even if you couldn't afford lawyers and they have a trained team of attack dogs from Harvard Law, if you've got an original draft and damning information, some lawyer is going to be willing to go at them with you for a chance at a percentage of the profits.
Regardless, You still haven't answered my first question: What about Open-Source? It needs copyright law to be enforceable.
And, I predicted your argument about having a neutral agency (see what I said about a possible Consumer Reports) and offered counterarguments. Please read and refute them. only some of what you say in the other link applies to what I said. Other places, I considered those responses and provided potential flaws already.
I agree with a lot you said, but I feel like with books and certain digital works that it would be too easy for another company to copy and produce the product (with a work like a book, you can buy one copy, and then scan all the text, and start making copies yourself. It isn't like a hot dog company where in order to steal your hot dogs, I'd have to buy them and then sell them, so you still win. Or I have to steal them, in which case it is theft. This isn't theft, people REALLY need to stop saying that, but there is a reason why we protect against copyright infringement. It should only apply to commercial use, fair use needs to be GREATLY reinforced to apply to a great many more things. Anything nonprofit should be exempt from copyright infringement.)
Definitely, Piracy is a problem with perceived market value not matching the ONLY price you can get a product for. Here in the west, we don't believe in haggling, which is a huge failure of the business model. Somebody paying you $40 is better than paying you $0, so really you should get past your $50 sticker price if they don't have that much. With older products, trying to make a profit margin, it wasn't quite the same. But with digital products, your price is entirely in R&D, and there's practically 0 manufacturing and distribution cost, so it costs you nothing to sell at a lower price to additional customers.
Valve's Gabe Newell is saying the same thing, Russia always has lots of videogame pirates and everybody says its a huge problem, you should just ignore Russia. But its BECAUSE they ignore Russia, as soon as Valve started releasing games localized to Russia on the same day they release the other versions, BOOM, Russian sales of their games exploded, and continue to be over 3x what the market says they should be. They tried those huge steam sales, and WHAM, games sold like CRAZY. Ends up if you charge a reasonable price, FAR more gamers will be able to afford your product, and you'll end up making tons more money in the long run. They've been doing sale after sale after sale since then, and they STILL can't believe how much the games on sale are selling. Every possible metric valve has used has been WAY off, so they're completely reformulating the business strategy of video games right now.
But again, what do you say to what I said about open-source? You can't have an open-source copyright licence if there's no copyright. Somebody can steal your work, add to it, and then sell his work, WITHOUT giving you credit and WITHOUT publishing his source code. He profits from you, but nobody can profit from him. Open-source REQUIRES copyright law.
And Louis CK was able to sell direct because his fans know him, they trust him, and they would rather work through him.
What about an author who hasn't been published before? He works out an agreement with a publisher, they sell his book... And some other publisher who is very well known copies the book and prints it themselves, undercutting the first publisher. By mass production and by having leagues of people who trust them, they are able to sell other people's books more than those people themselves. And if it isn't a well known author, then people won't think about "hm, maybe I should go check out this guy's web site and see if I can buy it direct?", maybe they'll go for convenience and buy whichever version is at Wal-Mart. Hell, there's nothing saying that the ripoff version even has to include his name if there's no copyright law, so they can totally attribute it to themselves, and people shopping would see the book and have literally NO idea that it was somebody else's work, and that they're not helping that person.
If all citizens were very intelligent, even-tempered, open-minded, and had lots of free time to look up everything, I'd totally agree with you.
But they don't. So we need some protection for authors. We really do. I'd like to hear your thoughts.
The only way I can see around government copyright protections is some kind of Consumer Repo
Thanks slashdot for taking action and joining the blackout. /. is now frozen and this will be the only news story of the day.
/. wouldn't join in, since the community is so overwhelmingly against SOPA and PIPA. /. would already know about it is pretty fair, but still. This is Serious.
Several of us were wondering why
The argument that anybody on
I agree we should abolish patents. They're state-sponsored monopolies and in the modern world are given out regularly for things that are obvious and should not be patent-able. Its an arms race, and creativity loses. As soon as European developers went on the record saying "I would love to serve America, but given the law over there, I will have to refuse to sell to the United States." When it costs nearly nothing to distribute your product (virutal) and you still turn down sales, something is VERY, very wrong. We're crippling ourselves.
However, I'm not sure we should completely abolish copyright. Open source permissive licences require copyright, in reality, to work. Without copyright, you don't need open source licences as much, but at the same time, you can't require that other people who modify your software also release theirs open source. People are free to use you software and modify it and sell it but keep it closed-source. That is a concern. Also, artists could easily be ripped off. People would start selling books they didn't write, even though I absolutely HATE patents, I feel like works should be protected.
The solution is not to abandon copyright, but reform it. It should be limited to the original term (30 years?) only, and extensions SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED. As the dissenting voice on the supreme court case said (who was it? Ginsberg?) allowing extensions to the copyright again and again effectively allows for an infinite copyright, which was directly banned in the original law. That is the problem we have now, is the infinite copyright that lobbyists have bought themselves. Disney just keeps throwing money at congress to protect them. Ironic since all of Disney's early works took advantage of public works! Also, disgusting. As they said, the idea that an artist would make a work purely because his children's children could profit from it is beyond insane. Artists should be protected to create and profit from their ideas, but only for their lifetimes at most. Their wealth can pass to their children, but not the copyright.
The difference is that patents, especially software patents, are over logic and math and science; things innate to our world, that anyone could discover. Artistic works are unique and created by the artist, one in infinity, and it is very likely that had the artist not made that work, NOBODY would have ever made that work. Similar, yes, but not the same. On the other hand, patents would generally be discovered by someone else, INEVITABLY. Its just a matter of time and resources and demand, or possibly just luck. That luck shouldn't be rewarded with a monopoly. But a single author should be rewarded with protection for their unique work.
"Learn to code, get a job" is misleading. But the idea that the everyman should have a basic understand of at least what programming IS and some of the basics of how it works and how it does what it does can be very beneficial, being so surrounded by software. Its unrealistic for everybody to write their own shell scripts, but we can at least teach people enough so they aren't totally in the dark. Then they'll have more patience with us when they run into a bug, instead of wondering why programming "takes so darn long, since all it is is just typing."
Also, in my defense, I didn't say the internet would go down in flames. I said they were ruining it. And they are, they're taking all the fun parts (last vestige of free speech) away.