Interesting point about the big 3 automakers. I must admit I'm not the biggest fan of traditional economics, but there is this theory of Monopolistic Competition that speaks to how companies may influence consumers / dictate prices when they face limited competition. In addition to the big 3, it seems like it has some relevance to this situation with media content providers, whom also seem to be facing a deluge of new competition.
Basically, the idea is that when there's a lot of competition, you do what the consumer wants at the price the consumer is willing to pay, or you go out of business, but when you face little competition, you have leeway to dictate terms to the consumer. Obviously, if you're a company making a transition from the latter to the former scenario, you might experience discomfort.
>This is like going back to the old days when great works of art were only made by artists with wealthy patrons.
I suspect that being canonized as a great work of art probably also had something to do with those wealthy patrons. Thinking of record companies, maybe not much has changed... But that's neither here nor there.
>This means that you would have to charge an exorbitant amount for that first copy.
Speaking within the software realm, make your product not tied to your redistributable. MMOs, games hosted on servers, software as a service, selling support for software or expertise, etc. are all examples of how to deal with this. And yeah, custom software has always been expensive.
There's not an easy answer in every situation. That's why, at least as far as I can see, the people who can figure out how to monitize difficult products will be the people making money.
But, hey, you don't have to agree with me. I'm not making the rules here; the crowd is. If your product is infinitely redistributable, chances are you're not getting paid. Its probably better to just accept reality & deal with it. All I think we've seen so far is that fighting the digital masses on this is a losing battle. My only real point is that the battle is probably also unnecessary.
You are not paid because you work hard. Hard work has no inherent financial reward.You are paid because you have something that other people want that is scarce. If what you produce is infinitely redistributable, then you can expect to get paid only for the first copy.
Don't worry, though, you can keep your job as a programmer. I'm in the same boat you are, and I'm not scared. For whatever business you're in, you just need to create your program such that it doesn't depend on people not copying your distributable. Just assume they will, and move on. It's up to you to work out a business model that works in the environment you're in. _That_ is what you get paid for.
I don't think anything has changed in terms of people's values. If people around here are looking for a bloodbath, they're looking for it against people (and lumbering corporations) who are resisting change, resting finding new ways to do business, and ultimately resisting progress.
I guess this might stop piracy, if firms get better at distribution and DRM faster than pirates get better at distribution and cracking. Actually, it sounds like an interesting economics problem if you take financial incentive into account, but I digress..
I think its worth noting that society doesn't really need to stop piracy either way. Artists can still make money by playing shows. Video game manufacturers can host portions of their games online. Given enough time, anybody can come up with a business model that doesn't depend on copyright.
That mother nature actually manages to keep each one of the billions of 2-meter strands of DNA in a person's body untangled is a little beyond me. I mean, I've got a couple degrees, and I still routinely spend 20 minutes at a time untangling guitar chords. And I don't even want to think about the mess that lives under my computer desks... Not to mention, have you ever been on a sailboat? Mother of god!
Nyah, I think most people here are operating at a finer level of granularity than you are. They're differentiating between types of educations, some of which are much better than others. Trust me, there's no shortage of educated people on/. A lot of these posts are more like a treatise on exercise written by a fitness instructor who knows the difference between a good and bad fitness program.
Well, not exactly. Apparently American kids do not spend enough time on core subjects to compete internationally on standardized tests, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
My wife went through the Taiwanese educational system, and she deeply regrets having started to late (college) trying to be a dancer. She spent the years that one best acquires a sense of rhythmic coordination and muscle control (the language-learning years) cramming for tests. Not coincidentally, have you ever tried to listen to Asian pop music or watch 'the average' Asian movie or TV series? Of course, there is the occasional exception, but the overall quality of creative and artistic products is _much_ lower, and even the good stuff is usually an adaptation of something that originated in the West. Maybe 20 years ago one could blame this copycat-ism on economic disparities between the West and East, but not anymore. Western-ness isn't t nearly as fashionable as it used to be. Western kids learn how to paint, play instruments, dance, etc at the only age when people are really well suited to learn these subjects.
Anybody who has ever had a professional job should probably be aware that one learns roughly 80% of the skills one needs on the job. Yet the time learning these skills pales in comparison to the amount of time spent learning the other 20%: the 'foundation' skills that one acquires via the educational system. This is a terribly inefficient system.
Things are the way they are because HR departments need a filtering mechanism, since they don't have the time to interview everybody, and educators have the incentive to say that more education is required, since their paycheck is directly related to the amount of time that everyone spends in school. Societally, its a match made in hell.
If we, as a society, were really concerned with efficiency, we'd spend 20% of our educational time learning the foundation skills for our profession of choice, and 80% of our time learning (and producing) on-the-job as an apprentice. Instead, for the last century or two in Western countries, since people aren't starving at nearly the rates they used to be, we've become a lot more concerned with satiety than efficiency.
All this hubbub about standardized tests is really fairly meaningless unless one can extrapolate their results into overall economic performance. As presented in the economist article you listed, all we know is that Western kids have fallen behind on the acquisition of a set of more-or-less useless skills. When you say "compete at the global level," one ought to ask, "Compete at what? Taking standardized tests? Who wants to be good at that?"
The 'real' case? Can you think of a time when what you're describing actually happened?
Why would you assume that this wouldn't happen?
Because the illicit Disney gangbang you're describing _has_ happened, over, and over, and over again,, with virtually no effect. I'll admit that, in my travels through the internet, I've seen Ariel and Pocahontas doing things to eachother that one really can't describe in polite company, but seeing this type of thing doesn't affect my decision of whether or not I'd take my kids to Disneyland one iota. Disney's lobbying for copyright, however, which I have yet to be convinced really helps consumers or artists at all, does affect that decision.
I'd venture to say you've been sold a lame argument. The concept of suck-by-association is tenuous, and probably wouldn't affect the sales of a quality product or business much at all. I might agree with you on the point that counterfeit is damaging and should be prevented. But counterfeit is conceptually a lot more similar to plagiarism than a notion of illegal reproduction, so copyright law is not the right avenue.
I'm not quite sure what you think qualifies as 'morally bankrupt', but here's how I'd illustrate the term:
Inspiring generations of musicians (and other professionals) to toil for free in some faint hope of rockstar-scale success is morally bankrupt.
Crowding out a cornucopia of music, and an entire economy of middle-class musicians, is morally bankrupt.
Conning people into thinking it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce a produce a professional-sounding album when it really only costs a couple thousand, at most, is morally bankrupt.
Convincing musicians that they should live off recordings, rather than performance, is morally bankrupt.
Subjugating art, expression, and creativity in the name of selling impressionable children on fad after fad, is morally bankrupt.
Leveraging the legal system at taxpayers expense in a hopeless attempt to keep a depricated business model working is morally bankrupt.
Lying to people that somehow the most fundimental law of economics we have, that price = demand / supply, does not apply, as if somehow even gravity could be driven off by a marketing campaign, is morally bankrupt.
Capitalizing on ignorance to charge both producers and consumers for a middleman service that can be had entirely for free is morally bankrupt.
Trying to sell people into acting against their own self interest is morally bankrupt.
Spying on people is morally bankrupt.
Propagandizing is morally bankrupt.
Brain-washing people is morally bankrupt.
Telling me I can't twiddle the bits on my own harddrive any way I see fit is morally bankrupt.
But record companies don't care about being morally bankrupt; They're just in business to make money.
And after all that, if you really think there's still some reason that record companies should exist, and moreover deserve some portion of your income or mine, I'd love to hear it.
This got modded insightful? Look, I've got no beef with asserting that many corporations treat their customers like idiots, but "Capitalist" is a theoretical orientation, not an organizational structure. And if the word your looking for is "corporation", then you've confused correlation with causation: A corporation is just a model of funding your business. Large companies require more complex funding operations so they tend to be corporations. Generally, only very large companies can get away with screwing their customers. There is nothing about screwing people that is inherent to corporations, unless you're a Marxist.
So you're about 9 years old? And you don't understand the concept of analogy. So let me spell it out for you: The law is exactly what the people say it should be. And your idea of copyright suggests that the people will make laws which sacrifice the good of the many for the good of the few. That doesn't happen in a d-e-m-o-c-r-a-c-y unless corruption is involved.
As regards to money being given willingly, I have billions upon billions of financial transactions daily, as well as the entire field of economics on my side. What have you got on yours? Looks like a couple incoherent sentences written by a misguided middleschooler who theorizes that the world is populated entirely by sociopaths.
You and your ilk
Honestly? Who talks like that? I'm done with you. Shut up and go do your homework.
if you want these companies and their policies destroyed, why is it better to download than to not use their products at all?
Personally, I think individuals who want to see these companies destroyed are reacting to these companies trying to criminalize and demonize rational behavior. Of course, these individuals still want the product, but that's kind of a separate issue. Here's the rub: the product (a copy of the movie) isn't the company's product anymore, it's the product of the consumer; they make it themselves. If, for example, movie companies were in the practice of selling original reels of film as collectors items, I expect that the price would have changed very little with the advent of the internet....well, that's one way of looking at things, at least... Here's another I like even better:
Nobody is more skeptical of traditional economics than myself, but it does have something of note to say in this instance: The price in exchange equals demand over supply. If supply is infinite (as it is in this case), then price is zero.
At this point, perhaps you say, this stuff isn't produced for free! People invest time and money making digital products, and they deserve to be paid for their efforts! This is especially true if a large number of people benefit from the fruits of their labor! If you don't pay, you're stealing! Unfortunately, that's not how life works. Cost of production has no bearing on price in exchange. Societal value doesn't have any bearing on revenue either. Just watch Youtube try to turn a profit, in spite of all of the people who enjoy it daily. Supply and demand are the only things that matter. How bad do you really expect someone to feel about stealing something of which there is an infinite supply? So here's where copyright comes in. Somebody thought, "well, we've got to solve this infinite supply problem. Perhaps we can legislate so that only a few people can make copies, then the supply is limited again." But that solution is not workable because:
1. It requires the entire populace to sit down and agree to something. And,
2. It requires the many sacrifice for the good of the few.
So, after all that jabber, the short answer I have to offer you is: People are (according to traditional economics) just being rational in not feeling like they need to pay for a self-manufactured copy of a work. And people really only want these large corporations off of their backs because said corporations are fighting a pitched battle against rationality.
Oh my. I can see you've been brainwashed. Let me explain: Up to this point, my entire life has been dedicated to being musician and a producer of software. I produce nothing physical. When I am gone, the only things that will be left behind to prove my existence will be my ideas. But at at no point am I under the illusion that my ideas are property, that I have the sole right to disseminate my ideas, or especially that my ideas have inherent monetary value.
The idea of copyright in a democracy is analogous to walking into a crowded room, with people carrying on vibrant conversations, on a topic which you introduced, and shouting at the top of your lungs, "Hey everybody! Shut up! Stop doing this thing that you're doing that benefits you, and instead let me be the bottleneck for distribution of this idea, at sole benefit to me personally. That's right, sacrifice the common good for my own personal benefit. And while you're at it, if you don't, please flagellate yourself. Also please beat anyone you see doing otherwise. Impose this situation on yourselves. After all, this is _my_ idea you're talking about." If you actually did this, you'd expect to be run out of the room.
So how do poor artists like myself make a living? Its like I said, its up to you to figure it out. I am not so naive or egotistical as to think that the crowd will sacrifice itself for me, or that my work-- my ideas have monetary value in isolation. There is no intellectual property. You have no rights to your ideas once they are communicated. The value of your work is the money people give you willingly for it. People willingly give money in exchange all the time. If people aren't willing to give you money for what you're offering, its no one's problem but your own. If you believe otherwise, you are either intellectually lazy or a crook. Which are you?
You're confused. Just because people would prefer everything to be free does not mean that nobody wants to pay for anything. Technically speaking, every time you engage in a mutually beneficial exchange transaction, you 'want' to pay. Although you lament narrowing your options, you wind up with something that you value more highly than those little green pieces of paper.
That whole 'mutually beneficial' thing is the key. The reason for the transaction being 'mutually beneficial' has to be legitimate. I have too many apples, you have too many oranges, so we trade. That's legitimate. I pay for a car instead of stealing it just because it's worth _that_ much to me to not live in anarchy. Still legitimate. I pay for the software because if I don't, you'll sic the government on me? Not legitimate. Not in a democracy, at least. It ultimately won't work.
Your job, as an author, intellectual, and general member of society is to make people want to pay for what you have to offer. Don't expect the legal system to do this for you. That's not what the legal system is for.
If you want to sell ideas, you'd better spend some time thinking up a way to get people to want to give you money for them. Copyright is going away because it was not originally intended for this purpose, and doesn't suit it well.
Your business model is nobody's responsibility but your own. You come up with it. You make it work. There's no magic formula. If there were, basic economics says that it would be arbitraged away.
In short, this is a question that you need to answer for yourself. If someone else answers it for you, then they'll be the one making money.
I attended his talk at UT Austin last week. He opened by talking about the ethics of only using free (open source, free to copy and modify) software, went on to spend most of his time railing against copyright, and finished with a seemingly reasonable, though half-assed compromise solution on copyright.
It was interesting, but also clear that he hasn't quite unraveled a few key issues in his own mind, or felt like it would be too difficult to explain things in the time allotted. Mainly, his choice to immediately make a moral argument left him on weaker ground than he ought to be, especially because he seems to have put himself at odds with fairly basic economics.
Of course, most products we buy don't come shrink-wrapped with their engineering schematics. Nor should they, as this would be inefficient. However, in an unfettered economy, free of monopolies and government interference, cheap, reliable, open-source, freely modifyable, interoperable products produced by transparent companies should dominate, because these qualities are those favored by consumers. There should be no need for a moral stance.
All the trouble arises from the government doing the opposite of what it should be doing: 1. Providing copyright as an aid to specific industries. This is mucking with a complex adaptive system (the economy) and as such is a recipe for failure. 2. Not busting monopolies, which do stifle innovation and profit at the expense of society.
Both of these problems are an extension of having a government that has obviously been captured by special interests. Traditionally, societies have waited until their children are starving before making an issue of that particular problem. And with today's technology, that day may not come for a long, long time.
Whether or not filesharing hurts or helps unsigned artists or indie labels does not change the following fundamental point:
_The Legal System Does Not Exist To Make Your Broken Business Model Work_
This is equally true for small and large record labels. If you run a business, it is your responsibility alone to make people *want* to give you money. If you were really using your head, you'd be advertising on TPB by now.
Certainly it's reasonable to ask the government to clamp down on this in the United States
No. No it is not.
It is not the government's role to make Nintendo's business model work. Nor is it the role of the government to make any other individual business or industry's business model work. The government is not prescient, and lacks both the knowledge and the resources to do those kinds of things effectively.
The role of the government is to do things that facilitate all businesses. This includes things like assuring contracts will be upheld and there is an effective system of transportation to move goods.
Copyright and patent are both incentives that have been offered to encourage creativity throughout the economy. Lets get this straight: There are no indelible rights to the ownership of one's ideas or intellectual creations. Under no circumstances is copying the same thing as stealing. This is implicitly obvious, even to a child, and only swindlers and the brainwashed assert that they are the same. Copyright and patent are economic perks that have been offered to creators in the past and are now much abused. For example:
Record companies, whose business is to sell an obviated product (the record), now seek to leverage IP law to stay in business.
Patent trolling businesses which exist not to produce (as was the intent of the law), but to skim profits form companies that do, have emerged. Many artists, who are supposed to be spurred by copyright law, instead produce less work and expect enormous profitability due to copyright.
The point is that these laws bring more trouble than good to 'the people'. Since 'the people' are supposed to be responsible for the laws in the first place, copyright and patent should be going away. Also of note is that plagiarism and copyright are conceptually separate, but have been legally convoluted. Perhaps we might experiment by replacing them with some law that curtails plagiarism only, as this is would probably benefit all businesses.
In short, litigating and lobbying one's way to profitability is not acceptable under any circumstance. As a business, you must make people want to give you money.
Somebody decided to offer these products and services, and one way or another, some other people decided to buy them.
Of course, we could (and do) make regulations that proscribe certain products and services... but our track record in doing this demonstrates less than stellar results. i.e. A lot of the stranger derivatives exist solely to circumvent regulation.
I think, very generally, 'the economy' adapts and optimizes against any regulations that are imposed on it. And unfortunately, the more effective regulation is, the more inefficiency it creates.
So before anybody proposes how the system should be manually 'tweaked', they have the burden of proving that an economy can be effectively regulated -at all- over the long term.
I have no idea how your son is, but for me, the jump was when I figured that I might be able to make something I was interested in by coding. Actually, I think this happened to me several times, first with logo when I was about 6, then text games in basic, hacking bbs'es, and later on OO, higher level languages to produce games, lower level languages to write drivers, etc.
Agewise, I'm a little in-between with regards to your post: I'm in university, but old enough to have used a bbs. Sometimes I wonder how I would have gotten interested in many aspects of development, seeing as there's a lot more layers of abstraction to dig down through than there used to be. Its not like you can just drop some inline assembly into your c program and start writing graphics drivers anymore. In many coding applications, learning curve to producing something 'professional' looking is considerably longer than it used to be, and I'd imagine that this would be the biggest challenge to motivation.
One immediate upside I can think of, though, is that a lot of games now come with development toolkits, and working with these can involve playing with fairly advanced scripting languages. Try Neverwinter Nights, perhaps. This might be a place to start if your son is into games.
Or maybe he's into websites, or maybe he's into business concepts, or maybe he's into visual effects, or math, or whatever. The point is that he'll start teaching himself if he thinks coding can help him accomplish something he's interested in.
We fetishize coding & languages because we want to solve problems & work efficiently, but coding will probably always be a means to an ends... So far as I know there are no art galleries hanging up beautiful segments of code on the walls. So if you start geeking out on the advantages of linux, shell scripts, OO, GOF patterns, pointers, automatic garbage collection, this language vs. that, etc., there's a good shot you'll lose him.
If he thinks coding will help him create something cool, he'll learn to code. Once he starts this process, then he'll come to you for information when he needs it, and you'll have a lot to offer. At that point you should give him only enough information so that he doesn't get stuck, and generally figures things out by himself.
Eh? Not sure I get your comment. Chen Shui Bian was not running in the most recent election. He reached the limit of his term. The outcome wasn't really in question, either. Everyone's been expecting Ma Ying Jeou to be the next president for quite some time.
regardless...
What's at stake here is America's strategy in East Asia. Taiwan is key, but the main issue is Japan, not Taiwan. Japan's key territories are Korea and Taiwan... these were Japan's holdings prior to WWII (plus a good chunk of China, and some Islands in the North that Russia claims). You'll note that America has gone through a good deal of trouble to ensure the 'amicability' of Korea and Taiwan to Japan.
America ensures Taiwan and Korea are friendly, and in return Japan lets America have Okinawa and doesn't militarize. That's the implicit contract.
Taiwan's geographic position basically makes it Cuba to either China or Japan. IMHO, everybody would be better off if Taiwan was independent, and basically a Switzerland. Obviously, the political climate in China makes this position untenable anytime in the near future.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting point about the big 3 automakers. I must admit I'm not the biggest fan of traditional economics, but there is this theory of Monopolistic Competition that speaks to how companies may influence consumers / dictate prices when they face limited competition. In addition to the big 3, it seems like it has some relevance to this situation with media content providers, whom also seem to be facing a deluge of new competition.
Basically, the idea is that when there's a lot of competition, you do what the consumer wants at the price the consumer is willing to pay, or you go out of business, but when you face little competition, you have leeway to dictate terms to the consumer. Obviously, if you're a company making a transition from the latter to the former scenario, you might experience discomfort.
>This is like going back to the old days when great works of art were only made by artists with wealthy patrons.
I suspect that being canonized as a great work of art probably also had something to do with those wealthy patrons. Thinking of record companies, maybe not much has changed... But that's neither here nor there.
>This means that you would have to charge an exorbitant amount for that first copy.
Speaking within the software realm, make your product not tied to your redistributable. MMOs, games hosted on servers, software as a service, selling support for software or expertise, etc. are all examples of how to deal with this. And yeah, custom software has always been expensive.
There's not an easy answer in every situation. That's why, at least as far as I can see, the people who can figure out how to monitize difficult products will be the people making money.
But, hey, you don't have to agree with me. I'm not making the rules here; the crowd is. If your product is infinitely redistributable, chances are you're not getting paid. Its probably better to just accept reality & deal with it. All I think we've seen so far is that fighting the digital masses on this is a losing battle. My only real point is that the battle is probably also unnecessary.
You are not paid because you work hard. Hard work has no inherent financial reward.You are paid because you have something that other people want that is scarce. If what you produce is infinitely redistributable, then you can expect to get paid only for the first copy.
Don't worry, though, you can keep your job as a programmer. I'm in the same boat you are, and I'm not scared. For whatever business you're in, you just need to create your program such that it doesn't depend on people not copying your distributable. Just assume they will, and move on. It's up to you to work out a business model that works in the environment you're in. _That_ is what you get paid for.
I don't think anything has changed in terms of people's values. If people around here are looking for a bloodbath, they're looking for it against people (and lumbering corporations) who are resisting change, resting finding new ways to do business, and ultimately resisting progress.
I guess this might stop piracy, if firms get better at distribution and DRM faster than pirates get better at distribution and cracking. Actually, it sounds like an interesting economics problem if you take financial incentive into account, but I digress..
I think its worth noting that society doesn't really need to stop piracy either way. Artists can still make money by playing shows. Video game manufacturers can host portions of their games online. Given enough time, anybody can come up with a business model that doesn't depend on copyright.
That mother nature actually manages to keep each one of the billions of 2-meter strands of DNA in a person's body untangled is a little beyond me. I mean, I've got a couple degrees, and I still routinely spend 20 minutes at a time untangling guitar chords. And I don't even want to think about the mess that lives under my computer desks... Not to mention, have you ever been on a sailboat? Mother of god!
Nyah, I think most people here are operating at a finer level of granularity than you are. They're differentiating between types of educations, some of which are much better than others. Trust me, there's no shortage of educated people on /. A lot of these posts are more like a treatise on exercise written by a fitness instructor who knows the difference between a good and bad fitness program.
Well, not exactly. Apparently American kids do not spend enough time on core subjects to compete internationally on standardized tests, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
My wife went through the Taiwanese educational system, and she deeply regrets having started to late (college) trying to be a dancer. She spent the years that one best acquires a sense of rhythmic coordination and muscle control (the language-learning years) cramming for tests. Not coincidentally, have you ever tried to listen to Asian pop music or watch 'the average' Asian movie or TV series? Of course, there is the occasional exception, but the overall quality of creative and artistic products is _much_ lower, and even the good stuff is usually an adaptation of something that originated in the West. Maybe 20 years ago one could blame this copycat-ism on economic disparities between the West and East, but not anymore. Western-ness isn't t nearly as fashionable as it used to be. Western kids learn how to paint, play instruments, dance, etc at the only age when people are really well suited to learn these subjects.
Anybody who has ever had a professional job should probably be aware that one learns roughly 80% of the skills one needs on the job. Yet the time learning these skills pales in comparison to the amount of time spent learning the other 20%: the 'foundation' skills that one acquires via the educational system. This is a terribly inefficient system.
Things are the way they are because HR departments need a filtering mechanism, since they don't have the time to interview everybody, and educators have the incentive to say that more education is required, since their paycheck is directly related to the amount of time that everyone spends in school. Societally, its a match made in hell.
If we, as a society, were really concerned with efficiency, we'd spend 20% of our educational time learning the foundation skills for our profession of choice, and 80% of our time learning (and producing) on-the-job as an apprentice. Instead, for the last century or two in Western countries, since people aren't starving at nearly the rates they used to be, we've become a lot more concerned with satiety than efficiency.
All this hubbub about standardized tests is really fairly meaningless unless one can extrapolate their results into overall economic performance. As presented in the economist article you listed, all we know is that Western kids have fallen behind on the acquisition of a set of more-or-less useless skills. When you say "compete at the global level," one ought to ask, "Compete at what? Taking standardized tests? Who wants to be good at that?"
The 'real' case? Can you think of a time when what you're describing actually happened?
Why would you assume that this wouldn't happen?
Because the illicit Disney gangbang you're describing _has_ happened, over, and over, and over again,, with virtually no effect. I'll admit that, in my travels through the internet, I've seen Ariel and Pocahontas doing things to eachother that one really can't describe in polite company, but seeing this type of thing doesn't affect my decision of whether or not I'd take my kids to Disneyland one iota. Disney's lobbying for copyright, however, which I have yet to be convinced really helps consumers or artists at all, does affect that decision.
I'd venture to say you've been sold a lame argument. The concept of suck-by-association is tenuous, and probably wouldn't affect the sales of a quality product or business much at all. I might agree with you on the point that counterfeit is damaging and should be prevented. But counterfeit is conceptually a lot more similar to plagiarism than a notion of illegal reproduction, so copyright law is not the right avenue.
But record companies don't care about being morally bankrupt; They're just in business to make money.
And after all that, if you really think there's still some reason that record companies should exist, and moreover deserve some portion of your income or mine, I'd love to hear it.
I, for one, am disappointed that a whole treasure trove of languages was ignored by this study.
This got modded insightful? Look, I've got no beef with asserting that many corporations treat their customers like idiots, but "Capitalist" is a theoretical orientation, not an organizational structure. And if the word your looking for is "corporation", then you've confused correlation with causation: A corporation is just a model of funding your business. Large companies require more complex funding operations so they tend to be corporations. Generally, only very large companies can get away with screwing their customers. There is nothing about screwing people that is inherent to corporations, unless you're a Marxist.
democrasy
So you're about 9 years old? And you don't understand the concept of analogy. So let me spell it out for you: The law is exactly what the people say it should be. And your idea of copyright suggests that the people will make laws which sacrifice the good of the many for the good of the few. That doesn't happen in a d-e-m-o-c-r-a-c-y unless corruption is involved.
As regards to money being given willingly, I have billions upon billions of financial transactions daily, as well as the entire field of economics on my side. What have you got on yours? Looks like a couple incoherent sentences written by a misguided middleschooler who theorizes that the world is populated entirely by sociopaths.
You and your ilk
Honestly? Who talks like that? I'm done with you. Shut up and go do your homework.
if you want these companies and their policies destroyed, why is it better to download than to not use their products at all?
Personally, I think individuals who want to see these companies destroyed are reacting to these companies trying to criminalize and demonize rational behavior. Of course, these individuals still want the product, but that's kind of a separate issue. Here's the rub: the product (a copy of the movie) isn't the company's product anymore, it's the product of the consumer; they make it themselves. If, for example, movie companies were in the practice of selling original reels of film as collectors items, I expect that the price would have changed very little with the advent of the internet. ...well, that's one way of looking at things, at least... Here's another I like even better:
Nobody is more skeptical of traditional economics than myself, but it does have something of note to say in this instance: The price in exchange equals demand over supply. If supply is infinite (as it is in this case), then price is zero.
At this point, perhaps you say, this stuff isn't produced for free! People invest time and money making digital products, and they deserve to be paid for their efforts! This is especially true if a large number of people benefit from the fruits of their labor! If you don't pay, you're stealing! Unfortunately, that's not how life works. Cost of production has no bearing on price in exchange. Societal value doesn't have any bearing on revenue either. Just watch Youtube try to turn a profit, in spite of all of the people who enjoy it daily. Supply and demand are the only things that matter. How bad do you really expect someone to feel about stealing something of which there is an infinite supply? So here's where copyright comes in. Somebody thought, "well, we've got to solve this infinite supply problem. Perhaps we can legislate so that only a few people can make copies, then the supply is limited again." But that solution is not workable because:
1. It requires the entire populace to sit down and agree to something. And,
2. It requires the many sacrifice for the good of the few.
So, after all that jabber, the short answer I have to offer you is: People are (according to traditional economics) just being rational in not feeling like they need to pay for a self-manufactured copy of a work. And people really only want these large corporations off of their backs because said corporations are fighting a pitched battle against rationality.
19th century textile workers probably didn't have a lot of nice things to say about the power loom, either.
If its false, say why. Otherwise, you are at least the former.
Oh my. I can see you've been brainwashed. Let me explain: Up to this point, my entire life has been dedicated to being musician and a producer of software. I produce nothing physical. When I am gone, the only things that will be left behind to prove my existence will be my ideas. But at at no point am I under the illusion that my ideas are property, that I have the sole right to disseminate my ideas, or especially that my ideas have inherent monetary value.
The idea of copyright in a democracy is analogous to walking into a crowded room, with people carrying on vibrant conversations, on a topic which you introduced, and shouting at the top of your lungs, "Hey everybody! Shut up! Stop doing this thing that you're doing that benefits you, and instead let me be the bottleneck for distribution of this idea, at sole benefit to me personally. That's right, sacrifice the common good for my own personal benefit. And while you're at it, if you don't, please flagellate yourself. Also please beat anyone you see doing otherwise. Impose this situation on yourselves. After all, this is _my_ idea you're talking about." If you actually did this, you'd expect to be run out of the room.
So how do poor artists like myself make a living? Its like I said, its up to you to figure it out. I am not so naive or egotistical as to think that the crowd will sacrifice itself for me, or that my work-- my ideas have monetary value in isolation. There is no intellectual property. You have no rights to your ideas once they are communicated. The value of your work is the money people give you willingly for it. People willingly give money in exchange all the time. If people aren't willing to give you money for what you're offering, its no one's problem but your own. If you believe otherwise, you are either intellectually lazy or a crook. Which are you?
You're confused. Just because people would prefer everything to be free does not mean that nobody wants to pay for anything. Technically speaking, every time you engage in a mutually beneficial exchange transaction, you 'want' to pay. Although you lament narrowing your options, you wind up with something that you value more highly than those little green pieces of paper.
That whole 'mutually beneficial' thing is the key. The reason for the transaction being 'mutually beneficial' has to be legitimate. I have too many apples, you have too many oranges, so we trade. That's legitimate. I pay for a car instead of stealing it just because it's worth _that_ much to me to not live in anarchy. Still legitimate. I pay for the software because if I don't, you'll sic the government on me? Not legitimate. Not in a democracy, at least. It ultimately won't work.
Your job, as an author, intellectual, and general member of society is to make people want to pay for what you have to offer. Don't expect the legal system to do this for you. That's not what the legal system is for. If you want to sell ideas, you'd better spend some time thinking up a way to get people to want to give you money for them. Copyright is going away because it was not originally intended for this purpose, and doesn't suit it well. Your business model is nobody's responsibility but your own. You come up with it. You make it work. There's no magic formula. If there were, basic economics says that it would be arbitraged away.
In short, this is a question that you need to answer for yourself. If someone else answers it for you, then they'll be the one making money.
I attended his talk at UT Austin last week. He opened by talking about the ethics of only using free (open source, free to copy and modify) software, went on to spend most of his time railing against copyright, and finished with a seemingly reasonable, though half-assed compromise solution on copyright.
It was interesting, but also clear that he hasn't quite unraveled a few key issues in his own mind, or felt like it would be too difficult to explain things in the time allotted. Mainly, his choice to immediately make a moral argument left him on weaker ground than he ought to be, especially because he seems to have put himself at odds with fairly basic economics.
Of course, most products we buy don't come shrink-wrapped with their engineering schematics. Nor should they, as this would be inefficient. However, in an unfettered economy, free of monopolies and government interference, cheap, reliable, open-source, freely modifyable, interoperable products produced by transparent companies should dominate, because these qualities are those favored by consumers. There should be no need for a moral stance.
All the trouble arises from the government doing the opposite of what it should be doing: 1. Providing copyright as an aid to specific industries. This is mucking with a complex adaptive system (the economy) and as such is a recipe for failure. 2. Not busting monopolies, which do stifle innovation and profit at the expense of society.
Both of these problems are an extension of having a government that has obviously been captured by special interests. Traditionally, societies have waited until their children are starving before making an issue of that particular problem. And with today's technology, that day may not come for a long, long time.
Whether or not filesharing hurts or helps unsigned artists or indie labels does not change the following fundamental point:
_The Legal System Does Not Exist To Make Your Broken Business Model Work_
This is equally true for small and large record labels. If you run a business, it is your responsibility alone to make people *want* to give you money. If you were really using your head, you'd be advertising on TPB by now.
Certainly it's reasonable to ask the government to clamp down on this in the United States
No. No it is not.
It is not the government's role to make Nintendo's business model work. Nor is it the role of the government to make any other individual business or industry's business model work. The government is not prescient, and lacks both the knowledge and the resources to do those kinds of things effectively.
The role of the government is to do things that facilitate all businesses. This includes things like assuring contracts will be upheld and there is an effective system of transportation to move goods.
Copyright and patent are both incentives that have been offered to encourage creativity throughout the economy. Lets get this straight: There are no indelible rights to the ownership of one's ideas or intellectual creations. Under no circumstances is copying the same thing as stealing. This is implicitly obvious, even to a child, and only swindlers and the brainwashed assert that they are the same. Copyright and patent are economic perks that have been offered to creators in the past and are now much abused. For example:
Record companies, whose business is to sell an obviated product (the record), now seek to leverage IP law to stay in business.
Patent trolling businesses which exist not to produce (as was the intent of the law), but to skim profits form companies that do, have emerged.
Many artists, who are supposed to be spurred by copyright law, instead produce less work and expect enormous profitability due to copyright.
The point is that these laws bring more trouble than good to 'the people'. Since 'the people' are supposed to be responsible for the laws in the first place, copyright and patent should be going away. Also of note is that plagiarism and copyright are conceptually separate, but have been legally convoluted. Perhaps we might experiment by replacing them with some law that curtails plagiarism only, as this is would probably benefit all businesses.
In short, litigating and lobbying one's way to profitability is not acceptable under any circumstance. As a business, you must make people want to give you money.
Somebody decided to offer these products and services, and one way or another, some other people decided to buy them.
Of course, we could (and do) make regulations that proscribe certain products and services... but our track record in doing this demonstrates less than stellar results. i.e. A lot of the stranger derivatives exist solely to circumvent regulation.
I think, very generally, 'the economy' adapts and optimizes against any regulations that are imposed on it. And unfortunately, the more effective regulation is, the more inefficiency it creates.
So before anybody proposes how the system should be manually 'tweaked', they have the burden of proving that an economy can be effectively regulated -at all- over the long term.
This is probably just wishful thinking, but I wonder if enough slashdotters sent an email here: mailto://nbcolympicsfeedback@nbcuni.com
...perhaps this story might get a TV spot.
I have no idea how your son is, but for me, the jump was when I figured that I might be able to make something I was interested in by coding. Actually, I think this happened to me several times, first with logo when I was about 6, then text games in basic, hacking bbs'es, and later on OO, higher level languages to produce games, lower level languages to write drivers, etc.
Agewise, I'm a little in-between with regards to your post: I'm in university, but old enough to have used a bbs. Sometimes I wonder how I would have gotten interested in many aspects of development, seeing as there's a lot more layers of abstraction to dig down through than there used to be. Its not like you can just drop some inline assembly into your c program and start writing graphics drivers anymore. In many coding applications, learning curve to producing something 'professional' looking is considerably longer than it used to be, and I'd imagine that this would be the biggest challenge to motivation.
One immediate upside I can think of, though, is that a lot of games now come with development toolkits, and working with these can involve playing with fairly advanced scripting languages. Try Neverwinter Nights, perhaps. This might be a place to start if your son is into games.
Or maybe he's into websites, or maybe he's into business concepts, or maybe he's into visual effects, or math, or whatever. The point is that he'll start teaching himself if he thinks coding can help him accomplish something he's interested in.
We fetishize coding & languages because we want to solve problems & work efficiently, but coding will probably always be a means to an ends... So far as I know there are no art galleries hanging up beautiful segments of code on the walls. So if you start geeking out on the advantages of linux, shell scripts, OO, GOF patterns, pointers, automatic garbage collection, this language vs. that, etc., there's a good shot you'll lose him.
If he thinks coding will help him create something cool, he'll learn to code. Once he starts this process, then he'll come to you for information when he needs it, and you'll have a lot to offer. At that point you should give him only enough information so that he doesn't get stuck, and generally figures things out by himself.
Eh? Not sure I get your comment. Chen Shui Bian was not running in the most recent election. He reached the limit of his term. The outcome wasn't really in question, either. Everyone's been expecting Ma Ying Jeou to be the next president for quite some time.
regardless...
What's at stake here is America's strategy in East Asia. Taiwan is key, but the main issue is Japan, not Taiwan. Japan's key territories are Korea and Taiwan... these were Japan's holdings prior to WWII (plus a good chunk of China, and some Islands in the North that Russia claims). You'll note that America has gone through a good deal of trouble to ensure the 'amicability' of Korea and Taiwan to Japan.
America ensures Taiwan and Korea are friendly, and in return Japan lets America have Okinawa and doesn't militarize. That's the implicit contract.
Taiwan's geographic position basically makes it Cuba to either China or Japan. IMHO, everybody would be better off if Taiwan was independent, and basically a Switzerland. Obviously, the political climate in China makes this position untenable anytime in the near future.