The Economist this week has an excellent article on the moral ground, or rather lack-there-of, for intellectual property. Unfortunately, it's on the pay section of their website.
The gist of the article goes something like this:
Tangible property is "rivalrous in consumption" -- if I eat a sandwich, you can't. If you eat it, I can't.
Intellectual property is not "rivalrous in consumption". If I listen to a song, you can also listen to it, and so can everyone else. The same goes for watching movies, sharing ideas, et cetra.
Furthermore, consider a hypothetical static economy (nothing new is produced). Property rights for tangibles in this situation, in economic terms, insure efficient distribution of the static amount of real goods. Expensive items go to valuable uses. Intellectual property rights do no such good in this situation. Jill can use a particular song for a valuble purpose (as a national anthem(?) for lack of a better example), while John can listen to the same song to get jazzed about doing some house-cleaning. Neither Jill's nor John's use of the same song takes any value away from the other, nor prevents anyone else from 'consuming' the same song.
Of course, we live in a dynamic economy. New things are made (and the new is often preferred just for being new). In such a dynamic economy, intellectual property right provide the impetus for someone, anyone, to produce new intellectual property at all. Of course, consuming intellecutal property still does not harm, or remove any value, for other would-be-consumer of the same intelluctual property.
Thus, the value to society of intellectual property law is to strike a balance in encouraging the producers of intellectual property on the one hand, and not robbing the consumers of intellectual property blind on the other.
In music, an economist might argue, the balance had already gone too far to the producers (the recording industry). Thus the amazingly fast growth of Napster, aka file-swapping, (remember how fast even non-techies took to Napster?) -- retail music was simply priced much too high, and the applicable terms of copyright were (are still) to much in favor of the producers (RIAA).
The question is, does the same situation hold for movies? I think the absurd amounts of money flowing around Hollywood make the answer obvious. Of course it is not a crime to be, or to get, rich. However, radically skewed wealth often indicates unstable (unjustified?) "bubbles" created by periods of massive change, or by out-of-kilter (or outright unjust) laws. Witness the Industrial Revolution, the Robber Barons, Bill Gates/Larry Ellison, etc. (mostly as examples of the former case).
My first thought after reading Jeremy's comment is that all the other 'PDC stuff'/Domain stuff can already be done when your 'domain controllers' are all Unix/Samba boxen.
Replication? LDAP, NIS, etc.
Failover? again, there's already several ways to fail over apps between Unix boxen - just look at Samba as another app (albiet with it's own needs regarding fail-over
and?...
Besides playing nice with existing Windows domain-controllers (Primary, Backup, and 2000-native) - what other benefits will Samba bring when it can take care of these issues?
Consider this: when was the last time you heard of a MacOS-emulator for Windows? To be clear, I think FreeBSD is wonderfull. The point is that the collective BSD's have already lost the battle of 'network effects'. Linux has not only a much larger community of individual developers and users, it also has IBM and SGI contributing to the kernel now. Going back to the initial topic - this (Big Corp. porting Linux to thier Big Hardware) will seems like on obvious eventuality in the (near?) future. Yes, Linux & GNU (GNU/Linux anyone?) are becoming the 'Standard Unix'. Consider: - Linix ABI as emerging standard: witness FreeBSD running Linux binaries - GNU/Free Software as a standard 'environment'. How many people use a Sun box 'as is' out of the box? The _first_ thing I do is load up bash,tcsh,gnu-fileutils (I love 'df -h'), etc. - The Linux kernel as a standard. Small embedded hardware to, soon(?), IBM 'BigIron'. - The Linux OS (colloquial sense -- GNU/Linux for the literal minded) as a 'standard'? The battle rages on... p.s. Why? I say GPL and Linus' true achievment of establishing a _very_ open development process/community. Real Hackers(TM) and BigBlue rub elbows (well, patches)! Who'd have thought.
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Not true - CLiki is writtin in Common Lisp. See here: http://www.cliki.net/CLiki
The Economist this week has an excellent article on the moral ground, or rather lack-there-of, for intellectual property. Unfortunately, it's on the pay section of their website.
The gist of the article goes something like this:
Furthermore, consider a hypothetical static economy (nothing new is produced). Property rights for tangibles in this situation, in economic terms, insure efficient distribution of the static amount of real goods. Expensive items go to valuable uses. Intellectual property rights do no such good in this situation. Jill can use a particular song for a valuble purpose (as a national anthem(?) for lack of a better example), while John can listen to the same song to get jazzed about doing some house-cleaning. Neither Jill's nor John's use of the same song takes any value away from the other, nor prevents anyone else from 'consuming' the same song.
Of course, we live in a dynamic economy. New things are made (and the new is often preferred just for being new). In such a dynamic economy, intellectual property right provide the impetus for someone, anyone, to produce new intellectual property at all. Of course, consuming intellecutal property still does not harm, or remove any value, for other would-be-consumer of the same intelluctual property.
Thus, the value to society of intellectual property law is to strike a balance in encouraging the producers of intellectual property on the one hand, and not robbing the consumers of intellectual property blind on the other.
In music, an economist might argue, the balance had already gone too far to the producers (the recording industry). Thus the amazingly fast growth of Napster, aka file-swapping, (remember how fast even non-techies took to Napster?) -- retail music was simply priced much too high, and the applicable terms of copyright were (are still) to much in favor of the producers (RIAA).
The question is, does the same situation hold for movies? I think the absurd amounts of money flowing around Hollywood make the answer obvious. Of course it is not a crime to be, or to get, rich. However, radically skewed wealth often indicates unstable (unjustified?) "bubbles" created by periods of massive change, or by out-of-kilter (or outright unjust) laws. Witness the Industrial Revolution, the Robber Barons, Bill Gates/Larry Ellison, etc. (mostly as examples of the former case).
My first thought after reading Jeremy's comment is that all the other 'PDC stuff'/Domain stuff can already be done when your 'domain controllers' are all Unix/Samba boxen.
Besides playing nice with existing Windows domain-controllers (Primary, Backup, and 2000-native) - what other benefits will Samba bring when it can take care of these issues?
Consider this: when was the last time you heard of a MacOS-emulator for Windows? To be clear, I think FreeBSD is wonderfull. The point is that the collective BSD's have already lost the battle of 'network effects'. Linux has not only a much larger community of individual developers and users, it also has IBM and SGI contributing to the kernel now. Going back to the initial topic - this (Big Corp. porting Linux to thier Big Hardware) will seems like on obvious eventuality in the (near?) future. Yes, Linux & GNU (GNU/Linux anyone?) are becoming the 'Standard Unix'. Consider: - Linix ABI as emerging standard: witness FreeBSD running Linux binaries - GNU/Free Software as a standard 'environment'. How many people use a Sun box 'as is' out of the box? The _first_ thing I do is load up bash,tcsh,gnu-fileutils (I love 'df -h'), etc. - The Linux kernel as a standard. Small embedded hardware to, soon(?), IBM 'BigIron'. - The Linux OS (colloquial sense -- GNU/Linux for the literal minded) as a 'standard'? The battle rages on... p.s. Why? I say GPL and Linus' true achievment of establishing a _very_ open development process/community. Real Hackers(TM) and BigBlue rub elbows (well, patches)! Who'd have thought.