I'm not saying that people don't do this. But the level of content that people are used to can't be sustained for free.
Everyone says "remember when... the web was free of advertising, and it was great". But people don't remember that it was *new*, not great. Yes, someone would write a great article or two and post them on their.edu site. But they'd never continue to do this for long. So you'd have 2 great articles out there but it would never have more than 2 articles there.
People are used to having great content for free. When I first started my site, I used to get e-mails like "Wow! This is great stuff. I can't believe I found this. I'm going to tell all my friends". (the site is http://www.hockeydb.com)
Now I get e-mails that say "your site is good, but why don't you have the boxscore of every single NHL game ever?". Or "why don't you show the players' jerseys?". Or "so-and-so was just traded yesterday -- why don't you show that?". "Why don't you have pictures of the players?"
There is definitely a tone shift in the e-mails. People are no longer grateful, they are demanding.
My server costs $200/month at the CPU/bandwidth level I consume. I buy some syndicated content which costs me over $1000/year. So right there, that's $3400 in costs without factoring in the 20-30 hours a week I spend maintaining and updating the site, and answering e-mail (which takes a long time when you get 30-40 e-mails a day).
I've also found that doing something that others find cool for free is fun -- but only for a few months, and when people are still appreciative. I've found that if I'm making some money to do those things, it's fun for a lot longer.
Why do you think "free" sites get abandoned after a few months? Because after a few months, you find other things to do if it's just a hobby.
Do you like free (not supported by ads) sites? Go to Geocities and browse the sites there. I just picked one on Hockey Fights. When was it last updated? 2/15. That's "last year" in internet time.
Most of the sites are "under construction". Remember that? That's code for "I'm not updating this too often".
That's the future of a web with no revenue. Which may be OK for some people, but for the most part it will change from a daily encyclopedia to a bi-yearly encyclopedia.
What high-quality, frequently updated site are you paying for out-of-your-pocket to provide to the web for free? Can you write some code for me for free too? Oh yeah, I'll need that code by next Monday, maybe you can work over the weekend to do it.
Hmmm. I thought so. When you can put your money where your mouth is, I'll take you seriously.
Problem is, you need to specifically ask for the non-compete before accepting the job (and leaving your previous job).
In the past, I've been made an offer from a company and accepted. Then on my first day they hand me this form to sign, and if I don't sign it they will let me go. At that point my options are limited.
I've also been in a situation where my company came up with a new non-compete and said "we're not holding a gun to your head, but if you don't sign this we won't be employing you anymore.". Again, not much choice.
The only defense is, upon receiving an offer, to ask for a copy of the employment agreement. Then use that to negotiate or base your decision to work. Don't let them spring it on you once you've already burned your bridges.
John Gilmore lumps too many things into one rant. What he is calling for will never be implemented, but his criticism is definitely justified.
People who use the "information wants to be free, create a utopia of information" argument won't win. People deserve to be paid for their creative works, and anything that contributes to the mass dissemination of content without the consent of the copyright holder should rightfully be stopped.
However, access to digital content shouldn't be completely controlled by the copyright holders just because they can do it, and the circumvention of these controls shouldn't be illegal.
That's where Fair Use comes in. Fair Use protects someone from time-shifting a TV program or video. It protects someone from quoting a passage of a book to make a point or to write a review. It allows you to make a tape of a CD and give it to your friend (but not to your 100,000 other Napster friends). Basically, it allows us to do petty things with the content that won't hinder the sale of the content.
John Gilmore is right on some things though -- there are plenty of copyright holders out there whose mentality is "if you read my book twice, you should pay me twice". Those people are the antithesis of the Napster crowd, and should likewise rightfully be stopped too.
I think that this copyright control may be happening in response to the Napster crowd. In order to stop their content from being distributed everywhere for free, they lock it down so no one can get to it, and they make laws making the cracking of their restrictions a crime.
Can there be a happy medium? I don't know. If the material is available for digital copying, then Napsters will pop up and everyone will be breaking copyright. To stop that from happening the publishers break fair use. How can you balance the two? I don't know.
I think you may be remembering things wrong. Back when the web first started, yes, there was free content, but it wasn't updated regularly. If you updated things once a month your content was considered "fresh".
Now people demand daily, even hourly updates.
It's easy to update a site once a month; it's hard to do so many times a day (unless you have unmoderated user-generated content).
If you want to see sites the way they were in the pre-advertising internet days, cruise through some GeoCities pages. But don't bother going back to any of those pages for another month -- the content won't change until then.
One more point; in the old days, bandwidth wasn't as expensive as it is today. I could get an "unlimited" server for $20/month. Unlimited isn't possible now, and with so many people on the net who can possibly see your stuff, if you have a semi-popular site your server costs can be $400+ a month. I don't think that many people would run a site that costs them $400+ a month without getting something back in return.
People always look at this issue as though the problem is that the corporations are holding onto a bunch of IP tightly, and that without copyright this IP would be free.
They fail to realize that without copyright law, if you produced IP, a corporation would be free to sell this without royalty payments whatsoever. They just wouldn't be able to do it exclusively.
If Brian Wilson wrote a great new song called "Good Vibrations", Sunkist would be able to use it to advertise their product for free.
If you wrote "Hunt for Red October", Random House could sell a million copies and not pay you a penny.
You can argue that you are free to sell these things yourself, but you don't have the resources that a large corporation does. They will always be able to outproduce, outpromote, and undercut you.
I live in Massachusetts. When I was in the voting booth at 6pm, I already knew the outcome of the state because it's so heavily Democratic. Therefore my vote didn't count for a single thing regardless of who I voted for.
The lesson here is that your votes only count in close elections at the state level, or elections where no polls have been taken ahead of time so you don't know where the state stands. It's really a poor process.
Ralph
What does insurance do? It protects you from unknown risk. The insurers do their best to try and beat the system by making more from your premiums than they have to pay out in losses.
Let's scale it down a bit. An insurance company insures 10 cars. The known odds of 1 of those cars getting into an accident in a year is 10%. So the insurance company charges everybody 15% of the cost of an accident for insurance, and the person who gets into the accident "wins" because he pays less in insurance than he gets in payout. Everyone else loses because they paid more than they used. But they got peace of mind since they couldn't afford 100% of an accident.
But the insurance company isn't happy with their extra 50% that they make on the deal. So they try and tell everybody "in order to be fair we're going to figure out who is truly more likely to have an accident and charge him more money and everyone else will get charged less." So they figure out that 1 of their 10 has a speeding ticket, and that makes them 5% more likely to get into an accident. So they reduce everyone else by 0.1%, increase that guy by 10% and pocket the difference. They make more money.
But imagine if they had perfect knowledge. They know exactly who is going to get into an accident. If they have this knowledge, then the only way for them to stay in business is if they don't let the information out -- otherwise if I know I'm not going to get into an accident, why should I have insurance? And if they charge the guy who is going to get into an accident a lot of money, they can't charge him more than the cost of the accident would cost them, so no one can pay their overhead. The insurance company would wind up insuring no one.
Translating this example to health insurance is harder, but the theory is the same. If I am shown that I don't have a genetic disposition to get horrific diseases, then why should I get anything but the most basic insurance? And if I am shown to have a genetic disposition to get horrific diseases that will surely bankrupt me either by high premiums or high medical bills, then why should I pay the insurance companies' overhead along with my medical bills?
"Perfect information that everyone knows" is a road they don't want to go down. I predict the insurance companies will fight to keep this type of information away from the consumer so that only they know the outcome of the game.
The existence of a shortage depends on how you define your needs. The companies are defining their positions in such a way that very few people can meet the requirements.
With the emergence of the "internet economy" and shortened development times, then yes, there is a shortage of workers with precise skills. A company will decide "they need to develop this kind of application using this kind of technology". They realize that no one in their organization has ever done it before, so they try and hire someone who has tremendous experience in the technology they are going to implement. This experience can usually be found at a discount in H1-B visa employees who are looking to improve their way of life by coming to the US, usually at wages less than what a US-based expert would cost.
However, the companies forget that there are capable people in their own organization who could achieve the same results with added training and a little faith from their employer. They offer the excuse that those (typically older) workers are "untrainable in new technology", or they say "why should we pay these well-paid workers the same high salary when they don't have any experience in the new technology". Those are valid points if people are machines, but they don't take the employer/employee relationship into account.
I worked at a consulting company that had a Y2K team that was raking in the revenue. They kept these people employed at reasonable salaries because they promised to retrain them once Y2K was over. 1-2 months after the end of the Y2K projects, those people were laid off; the company said "sorry, we can't bill your skills out and it would cost us too much to retrain you (suckers!)"
Is it right to treat workers as disposible? How soon before we fill up the human landfills? Why not practice a little labor recycling?
My impression (IANAL) is that trademark law comes into play for *commerce only*.
You couldn't get into trademark trouble for showing the idealab! logo and saying "This is the idealab! logo -- they are a screwed up company". You are not trying to pass yourself off as them. You are not trying to steal their business by using their logo. You are not trying to make it look like they endorse you. That's the end of the tradmark area.
As for copyright, you can apply fair use to their argument that you're violating their copyright.
Well, I've been looking for a cheap barcode scanner for a while. I've been meaning to create a database of grocery stores/food prices for a while, and it would be a lot easier for me to scan my grocery prices in with a barcode scanner then by just typing the UPC labels.
But that's about the only good reason for a scanner -- scanning items that you scan repeatedly and that you consume regularly. The applications would all have to center around groceries. How about an automated grocery list?
I disagree with this. What if the instructions with every light bulb said "please discard this bulb after 2 weeks and buy another", but the light bulb really lasts for months? Would you suggest that we should all follow the company's rules on light bulbs so that the company can make extra money?
What if the side of the light bulb box said "by opening this box you agree to dispose of this bulb at the end of a two week period"? Would that make it "illegal" to get the maximum life out of a light bulb?
Pricing a "perishable" product isn't quite what the airlines have in mind when they price differently to different people.
I've heard it explained like this:
Let's say all seats on an airline are $200. You have 10 people (business travellers, for example) who are willing to pay $400 for a ticket. You have 20 people who are willing to pay $100 for a ticket. By pricing your tickets at a fixed price, you cheat yourself out of a total of $2000 from the people willing to pay $400 a ticket, and you don't sell any tickets to the $100 people so you lose another $2000. You only get $2000 revenue for your flight.
If you have variable pricing, and can identify the customers' pricing limits ahead of time, you can make the optimal amount of money. You charge the $400 people $400 and the $100 people $100. You make $4000 from the $400 people and $2000 from the $100 people. So you get $8000 from your flight rather than only $2000 with the fixed prices.
I'm not sure if it's fair or ethical, but it sure does make sense. Instead of charging a fixed price for your product so that some people will pay less than they expect and others won't pay at all, you charge a variable price based on what you think people are willing to pay. Just don't give the people who are willing to pay more access to the cheaper prices.
I've thought of pricing advertising for my web site that way; if I have ad space avaialble, and I know that one company will get a lot more benefit out of an ad than another, I'd charge that company more for their ad. They'll be happy with their benefit and that will allow me to sell to the other company and still get some revenue.
From a seller's point of view, it makes a lot of sense. From a buyer's point of view, it is a horrible thing -- it's like finding out that the person working next to you is making 40% more than you are. You were happy with your salary until you found that out!
Intersting how this article shows the evolution from current TV advertising to a world that is exactly like internet banner advertising. Yet their proposed solution -- highly targetted ads -- draws absolutely no outrage.
As I read the article I saw all the same arguments that people make about banner ads: No one reads them, 99% of them are ignored, if people block them then advertising will work its way into content in a subtle but insidious way, etc. Banner-blocking proponents like to argue that internet advertising is not like TV advertising. Well, it sounds like TV advertising is going to evolve to be exactly like banner ads.
The article crowed about how TiVO could precisely target people based on their likes, lifestyles, and medical conditions. Sending a Preparation H commercial to someone who has hemorrhoids sounds like an incredible invasion of privacy, much more than anything that any banner network is contemplating. Why is there no reaction to this?.
It says that the price that people will pay to watch TV in the future will be that they have to give up information about themselves to the networks who will sell this to advertisers.M
This is far worse than what ad networks are doing -- ad networks are using aggregated information to send users advertising that they may be interested in. And people are so freaked out by this that they are writing banner-blocking software, calling for legislation, etc.
If anyone should be complaining about these TV devices, it should be the privacy advocates. Are you guys out there? Where's the outrage?
I don't think all the difference is in the level of pricing -- it's in the measurability of the pricing. If people can easily measure how much they're using, they'll cut back.
People are aware of how long they are on the phone because they get charged by the minute. A minute is something that people can relate to.
People get charged by the kilowatt for running electrical appliances. There's no good way to tell how much each appliance costs per minute.
It is true that if the payments are small enough, people won't cut back. But it also depends on the total usage, etc. If your local phone bill added up to $300/month, even if you were getting charged $0.001 per minute, you'd cut back too.
I think people would pay micropayment of $20-40 a month to access quality sites, but the level of traffic would certainly go down. Advertising is much better because you can surf all you want and you don't have to pay anything.
I thought that the judge's decision was for Napster to block all copyrighted songs from their network, and when they replied that it would be technically infeasible to do this, the judge told them that was the position they put themselves in. I think that Napster has to comply with the judge's ruling, and the only technical way they can do this because of their architecture is to shut down.
The RIAA didn't request to shut down Napster. They wanted to stop it from being used to distribute copyrighted songs.
I don't think it's technically legal to tape songs off the radio. So your argument breaks down because you're trying to prove that one activity is legal on the back of an illegal activity.
Radio taping isn't enforced because of technical problems with propogating taped songs -- you can't make perfect copies of copies of copies. If you could, and people were doing it like they are using Napster, it would be similarly pursued by the RIAA (if they could figure out how to do it).
If the customer state gets the tax, why not just enforce their use tax?
That is what they would be doing -- but they would force companies to enforce the use tax, which is more complex than enforcing a uniform sales tax.
If you buy a VCR from the internet, you're supposed to remit a use tax to your state -- if it applies. No one does. The government can't figure out what everyone in the state is buying through the mail.
What the government wants is make the companies collect the tax from you, and then remit the money to the state. This wouldn't be so hard on businesses if the tax codes were the same from state to state -- but state codes vary from state to state, county to county, and city to city.
Imagine if such a law goes into effect. You're a small business selling on eBay. Someone from Kalamazoo Michigan buys an item from you. You have to figure out:
If your item is taxable in Kalamazoo. Some items are taxable at different rates, like clothing, which is taxable if it is more expensive than a certain price in some states. Not everything is taxable in each state.
How much the tax rate is, including state, county, and city.
At the end of the year, how much to pay to each state, county, and city. The postage to all these entities would kill you alone!
Of course, there are companies out there who claim they will make their life easier on you -- they will collect the tax and remit it for you. But don't be fooled into thinking that this will be cheap -- they will probably add 3-5% onto every transaction to cover their costs. So you'd be taxed by a company that is collecting your taxes!
Ralph http://www.hockeydb.com
I think this is how they claim it's infringement
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I'm not backing the argument, I'm just trying to understand it. Even though a work is published for free, that doesn't give you the right to re-write and republish it. I suppose that's what they were claiming people were doing to their web sites. It would be like taking a story and re-writing it switching all the men to women and all the women to men -- on the fly. In a way, you're republishing that work in its entirety, and you're also altering it. I'm not sure how the parody fits in -- I always thought you could parody freely but someone got their Elian Gonzalez parody site taken down by the AP when that was clearly parody. On the other hand, this would seem to also apply to tools that filter dirty words from web sites or even usenet postings. Since they're altering the original document they fit into the same ballpark. Ralph
This is an extremely subtle but very important issue: Can a "Terms and Conditions clause" supersede things like fair use or the concept that facts cannot be copyrighted?
For example, can a web site that publishes the official daily average temperature in Tucson have a clause that says "by using this site you agree not to use any of the data herein for any purpose"?
Can an online book have a clause that says "No part of this book may be used in any way, including reviews of the work"?
Both of these events are legal under copyright law, but can a contract make these actions in violation of the contract?
I'm becoming more and more convinced that the only reason people are passionately against the DCMA (and seemingly copyright in general) is that it was sponsored by corporations rather than individuals.
The perceived problem the DCMA is trying to fix is the prevention of individuals from stealing copyrighted works from corporations.
However, this bill, and copyright in general also protects corporations from stealing copyrighted works from individuals.
If record companies were taking independent MP3's, pressing them onto CD's, and selling them without getting permission or giving royalties, people would be squarely behind the DCMA.
People would not be claiming that any abstract work (like a song, or a computer program) is public domain and that the concept of copyright should not exist.
I'm in a very awkward position on this issue, and would like to figure out just where I stand!
I run a web site called hockeydb.com. On the site I archive historical hockey statistics. Not just NHL, minor leagues too -- you can look up any pro hockey player ever on the site. I hate to sound like I'm bragging, but there is nothing else like it that I'm aware of for any sport.
I compiled nearly all the data myself by searching out and purchasing many volumes of books with hockey statistics in them. It's not as easy as it sounds -- there's no central place to find this stuff.
I spent 5 years building the collection, and thousands and thousands of hours typing in the data, fixing mistakes, standardizing names, etc. I've developed a custom computer program to maintain the data which was a non-trivial cost.
One part of me would feel very bad if the data suddenly became open source. I spent so much time on it, why would it be fair if ESPN or some company just grabbed it and decided to sell it? It would surely make my data worthless if everyone had it.
[on a side note, I know there is no legal protection on it now, although such databases aren't quite 'open source' yet].
On the other hand, I'm dependent on several entities for current compiled statistical data. One of those entities is a company called Howe Sportsdata, another is the NHL via the Elias Sports Bureau.
Howe is contracted by the minor hockey leagues to compile their statistics. The teams fax their game sheets to Howe, and Howe adds up the numbers and publishes official stats. The leagues pay Howe a good sum of money to do this, but it's cheaper than if they did it themselves.
If databases become copyrightable, then Howe -- as the compiler of the data -- could claim copyright on all the numbers. Or perhaps the leagues could claim copyright.
[I've heard that the NBA is trying to claim copyright on their statistics so that they can license them instead of publish them for free.]
It would be literally impossible to compile the information by hand because the data is only in Howe's (or the teams') possession. You couldn't even duplicate their effort because only the official scorer (there's only one per game) knows the true "facts".
So what is my position? I don't know -- it tears me up every time I think about it! I heavily lean towards no copyrights because it would sew up such data beyond belief and no one would benefit.
What is the true philosophy behind open source? Create something so that companies with many more resources than you can exploit your labor? Does the fact that something new was created somehow right that wrong? Is there a middle ground here?
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I'm not saying that people don't do this. But the level of content that people are used to can't be sustained for free.
.edu site. But they'd never continue to do this for long. So you'd have 2 great articles out there but it would never have more than 2 articles there.
Everyone says "remember when... the web was free of advertising, and it was great". But people don't remember that it was *new*, not great. Yes, someone would write a great article or two and post them on their
People are used to having great content for free. When I first started my site, I used to get e-mails like "Wow! This is great stuff. I can't believe I found this. I'm going to tell all my friends". (the site is http://www.hockeydb.com)
Now I get e-mails that say "your site is good, but why don't you have the boxscore of every single NHL game ever?". Or "why don't you show the players' jerseys?". Or "so-and-so was just traded yesterday -- why don't you show that?". "Why don't you have pictures of the players?"
There is definitely a tone shift in the e-mails. People are no longer grateful, they are demanding.
My server costs $200/month at the CPU/bandwidth level I consume. I buy some syndicated content which costs me over $1000/year. So right there, that's $3400 in costs without factoring in the 20-30 hours a week I spend maintaining and updating the site, and answering e-mail (which takes a long time when you get 30-40 e-mails a day).
I've also found that doing something that others find cool for free is fun -- but only for a few months, and when people are still appreciative. I've found that if I'm making some money to do those things, it's fun for a lot longer.
Why do you think "free" sites get abandoned after a few months? Because after a few months, you find other things to do if it's just a hobby.
Do you like free (not supported by ads) sites? Go to Geocities and browse the sites there. I just picked one on Hockey Fights. When was it last updated? 2/15. That's "last year" in internet time.
Most of the sites are "under construction". Remember that? That's code for "I'm not updating this too often".
That's the future of a web with no revenue. Which may be OK for some people, but for the most part it will change from a daily encyclopedia to a bi-yearly encyclopedia.
Ralph
Hey Jeremy --
What high-quality, frequently updated site are you paying for out-of-your-pocket to provide to the web for free? Can you write some code for me for free too? Oh yeah, I'll need that code by next Monday, maybe you can work over the weekend to do it.
Hmmm. I thought so. When you can put your money where your mouth is, I'll take you seriously.
Ralph
Problem is, you need to specifically ask for the non-compete before accepting the job (and leaving your previous job).
In the past, I've been made an offer from a company and accepted. Then on my first day they hand me this form to sign, and if I don't sign it they will let me go. At that point my options are limited.
I've also been in a situation where my company came up with a new non-compete and said "we're not holding a gun to your head, but if you don't sign this we won't be employing you anymore.". Again, not much choice.
The only defense is, upon receiving an offer, to ask for a copy of the employment agreement. Then use that to negotiate or base your decision to work. Don't let them spring it on you once you've already burned your bridges.
Ralph
John Gilmore lumps too many things into one rant. What he is calling for will never be implemented, but his criticism is definitely justified.
People who use the "information wants to be free, create a utopia of information" argument won't win. People deserve to be paid for their creative works, and anything that contributes to the mass dissemination of content without the consent of the copyright holder should rightfully be stopped.
However, access to digital content shouldn't be completely controlled by the copyright holders just because they can do it, and the circumvention of these controls shouldn't be illegal.
That's where Fair Use comes in. Fair Use protects someone from time-shifting a TV program or video. It protects someone from quoting a passage of a book to make a point or to write a review. It allows you to make a tape of a CD and give it to your friend (but not to your 100,000 other Napster friends). Basically, it allows us to do petty things with the content that won't hinder the sale of the content.
John Gilmore is right on some things though -- there are plenty of copyright holders out there whose mentality is "if you read my book twice, you should pay me twice". Those people are the antithesis of the Napster crowd, and should likewise rightfully be stopped too.
I think that this copyright control may be happening in response to the Napster crowd. In order to stop their content from being distributed everywhere for free, they lock it down so no one can get to it, and they make laws making the cracking of their restrictions a crime.
Can there be a happy medium? I don't know. If the material is available for digital copying, then Napsters will pop up and everyone will be breaking copyright. To stop that from happening the publishers break fair use. How can you balance the two? I don't know.
Ralph
I think you may be remembering things wrong. Back when the web first started, yes, there was free content, but it wasn't updated regularly. If you updated things once a month your content was considered "fresh".
Now people demand daily, even hourly updates.
It's easy to update a site once a month; it's hard to do so many times a day (unless you have unmoderated user-generated content).
If you want to see sites the way they were in the pre-advertising internet days, cruise through some GeoCities pages. But don't bother going back to any of those pages for another month -- the content won't change until then.
One more point; in the old days, bandwidth wasn't as expensive as it is today. I could get an "unlimited" server for $20/month. Unlimited isn't possible now, and with so many people on the net who can possibly see your stuff, if you have a semi-popular site your server costs can be $400+ a month. I don't think that many people would run a site that costs them $400+ a month without getting something back in return.
Ralph
People always look at this issue as though the problem is that the corporations are holding onto a bunch of IP tightly, and that without copyright this IP would be free.
They fail to realize that without copyright law, if you produced IP, a corporation would be free to sell this without royalty payments whatsoever. They just wouldn't be able to do it exclusively.
If Brian Wilson wrote a great new song called "Good Vibrations", Sunkist would be able to use it to advertise their product for free.
If you wrote "Hunt for Red October", Random House could sell a million copies and not pay you a penny.
You can argue that you are free to sell these things yourself, but you don't have the resources that a large corporation does. They will always be able to outproduce, outpromote, and undercut you.
Ralph
I live in Massachusetts. When I was in the voting booth at 6pm, I already knew the outcome of the state because it's so heavily Democratic. Therefore my vote didn't count for a single thing regardless of who I voted for. The lesson here is that your votes only count in close elections at the state level, or elections where no polls have been taken ahead of time so you don't know where the state stands. It's really a poor process. Ralph
What does insurance do? It protects you from unknown risk. The insurers do their best to try and beat the system by making more from your premiums than they have to pay out in losses.
Let's scale it down a bit. An insurance company insures 10 cars. The known odds of 1 of those cars getting into an accident in a year is 10%. So the insurance company charges everybody 15% of the cost of an accident for insurance, and the person who gets into the accident "wins" because he pays less in insurance than he gets in payout. Everyone else loses because they paid more than they used. But they got peace of mind since they couldn't afford 100% of an accident.
But the insurance company isn't happy with their extra 50% that they make on the deal. So they try and tell everybody "in order to be fair we're going to figure out who is truly more likely to have an accident and charge him more money and everyone else will get charged less." So they figure out that 1 of their 10 has a speeding ticket, and that makes them 5% more likely to get into an accident. So they reduce everyone else by 0.1%, increase that guy by 10% and pocket the difference. They make more money.
But imagine if they had perfect knowledge. They know exactly who is going to get into an accident. If they have this knowledge, then the only way for them to stay in business is if they don't let the information out -- otherwise if I know I'm not going to get into an accident, why should I have insurance? And if they charge the guy who is going to get into an accident a lot of money, they can't charge him more than the cost of the accident would cost them, so no one can pay their overhead. The insurance company would wind up insuring no one.
Translating this example to health insurance is harder, but the theory is the same. If I am shown that I don't have a genetic disposition to get horrific diseases, then why should I get anything but the most basic insurance? And if I am shown to have a genetic disposition to get horrific diseases that will surely bankrupt me either by high premiums or high medical bills, then why should I pay the insurance companies' overhead along with my medical bills?
"Perfect information that everyone knows" is a road they don't want to go down. I predict the insurance companies will fight to keep this type of information away from the consumer so that only they know the outcome of the game.
Ralph
I think that DC may have hit on something here.
1. Put out a lame device that's easy to take apart.
2. Record all such instances of "violations of IP".
3. Allow the "damages" to accrue.
4. Sue the IP violators for millions.
5. Patent the process and license it to other companies.
They will be more profitable than most dot.com's
Ralph
The existence of a shortage depends on how you define your needs. The companies are defining their positions in such a way that very few people can meet the requirements.
With the emergence of the "internet economy" and shortened development times, then yes, there is a shortage of workers with precise skills. A company will decide "they need to develop this kind of application using this kind of technology". They realize that no one in their organization has ever done it before, so they try and hire someone who has tremendous experience in the technology they are going to implement. This experience can usually be found at a discount in H1-B visa employees who are looking to improve their way of life by coming to the US, usually at wages less than what a US-based expert would cost.
However, the companies forget that there are capable people in their own organization who could achieve the same results with added training and a little faith from their employer. They offer the excuse that those (typically older) workers are "untrainable in new technology", or they say "why should we pay these well-paid workers the same high salary when they don't have any experience in the new technology". Those are valid points if people are machines, but they don't take the employer/employee relationship into account.
I worked at a consulting company that had a Y2K team that was raking in the revenue. They kept these people employed at reasonable salaries because they promised to retrain them once Y2K was over. 1-2 months after the end of the Y2K projects, those people were laid off; the company said "sorry, we can't bill your skills out and it would cost us too much to retrain you (suckers!)"
Is it right to treat workers as disposible? How soon before we fill up the human landfills? Why not practice a little labor recycling?
Ralph
My impression (IANAL) is that trademark law comes into play for *commerce only*.
You couldn't get into trademark trouble for showing the idealab! logo and saying "This is the idealab! logo -- they are a screwed up company". You are not trying to pass yourself off as them. You are not trying to steal their business by using their logo. You are not trying to make it look like they endorse you. That's the end of the tradmark area.
As for copyright, you can apply fair use to their argument that you're violating their copyright.
Ralph
Well, I've been looking for a cheap barcode scanner for a while. I've been meaning to create a database of grocery stores/food prices for a while, and it would be a lot easier for me to scan my grocery prices in with a barcode scanner then by just typing the UPC labels.
But that's about the only good reason for a scanner -- scanning items that you scan repeatedly and that you consume regularly. The applications would all have to center around groceries. How about an automated grocery list?
Ralph
I disagree with this. What if the instructions with every light bulb said "please discard this bulb after 2 weeks and buy another", but the light bulb really lasts for months? Would you suggest that we should all follow the company's rules on light bulbs so that the company can make extra money?
What if the side of the light bulb box said "by opening this box you agree to dispose of this bulb at the end of a two week period"? Would that make it "illegal" to get the maximum life out of a light bulb?
Ralph
Pricing a "perishable" product isn't quite what the airlines have in mind when they price differently to different people.
I've heard it explained like this:
Let's say all seats on an airline are $200. You have 10 people (business travellers, for example) who are willing to pay $400 for a ticket. You have 20 people who are willing to pay $100 for a ticket. By pricing your tickets at a fixed price, you cheat yourself out of a total of $2000 from the people willing to pay $400 a ticket, and you don't sell any tickets to the $100 people so you lose another $2000. You only get $2000 revenue for your flight.
If you have variable pricing, and can identify the customers' pricing limits ahead of time, you can make the optimal amount of money. You charge the $400 people $400 and the $100 people $100. You make $4000 from the $400 people and $2000 from the $100 people. So you get $8000 from your flight rather than only $2000 with the fixed prices.
I'm not sure if it's fair or ethical, but it sure does make sense. Instead of charging a fixed price for your product so that some people will pay less than they expect and others won't pay at all, you charge a variable price based on what you think people are willing to pay. Just don't give the people who are willing to pay more access to the cheaper prices.
I've thought of pricing advertising for my web site that way; if I have ad space avaialble, and I know that one company will get a lot more benefit out of an ad than another, I'd charge that company more for their ad. They'll be happy with their benefit and that will allow me to sell to the other company and still get some revenue.
From a seller's point of view, it makes a lot of sense. From a buyer's point of view, it is a horrible thing -- it's like finding out that the person working next to you is making 40% more than you are. You were happy with your salary until you found that out!
Ralph
As I read the article I saw all the same arguments that people make about banner ads: No one reads them, 99% of them are ignored, if people block them then advertising will work its way into content in a subtle but insidious way, etc. Banner-blocking proponents like to argue that internet advertising is not like TV advertising. Well, it sounds like TV advertising is going to evolve to be exactly like banner ads.
The article crowed about how TiVO could precisely target people based on their likes, lifestyles, and medical conditions. Sending a Preparation H commercial to someone who has hemorrhoids sounds like an incredible invasion of privacy, much more than anything that any banner network is contemplating. Why is there no reaction to this?.
It says that the price that people will pay to watch TV in the future will be that they have to give up information about themselves to the networks who will sell this to advertisers.M
This is far worse than what ad networks are doing -- ad networks are using aggregated information to send users advertising that they may be interested in. And people are so freaked out by this that they are writing banner-blocking software, calling for legislation, etc.
If anyone should be complaining about these TV devices, it should be the privacy advocates. Are you guys out there? Where's the outrage?
Ralph
I don't think all the difference is in the level of pricing -- it's in the measurability of the pricing. If people can easily measure how much they're using, they'll cut back.
People are aware of how long they are on the phone because they get charged by the minute. A minute is something that people can relate to.
People get charged by the kilowatt for running electrical appliances. There's no good way to tell how much each appliance costs per minute.
It is true that if the payments are small enough, people won't cut back. But it also depends on the total usage, etc. If your local phone bill added up to $300/month, even if you were getting charged $0.001 per minute, you'd cut back too.
I think people would pay micropayment of $20-40 a month to access quality sites, but the level of traffic would certainly go down. Advertising is much better because you can surf all you want and you don't have to pay anything.
Ralph
I thought that the judge's decision was for Napster to block all copyrighted songs from their network, and when they replied that it would be technically infeasible to do this, the judge told them that was the position they put themselves in. I think that Napster has to comply with the judge's ruling, and the only technical way they can do this because of their architecture is to shut down.
The RIAA didn't request to shut down Napster. They wanted to stop it from being used to distribute copyrighted songs.
Ralph
I don't think it's technically legal to tape songs off the radio. So your argument breaks down because you're trying to prove that one activity is legal on the back of an illegal activity.
Radio taping isn't enforced because of technical problems with propogating taped songs -- you can't make perfect copies of copies of copies. If you could, and people were doing it like they are using Napster, it would be similarly pursued by the RIAA (if they could figure out how to do it).
Ralph
That is what they would be doing -- but they would force companies to enforce the use tax, which is more complex than enforcing a uniform sales tax.
If you buy a VCR from the internet, you're supposed to remit a use tax to your state -- if it applies. No one does. The government can't figure out what everyone in the state is buying through the mail.
What the government wants is make the companies collect the tax from you, and then remit the money to the state. This wouldn't be so hard on businesses if the tax codes were the same from state to state -- but state codes vary from state to state, county to county, and city to city.
Imagine if such a law goes into effect. You're a small business selling on eBay. Someone from Kalamazoo Michigan buys an item from you. You have to figure out:
- If your item is taxable in Kalamazoo. Some items are taxable at different rates, like clothing, which is taxable if it is more expensive than a certain price in some states. Not everything is taxable in each state.
- How much the tax rate is, including state, county, and city.
- At the end of the year, how much to pay to each state, county, and city. The postage to all these entities would kill you alone!
Of course, there are companies out there who claim they will make their life easier on you -- they will collect the tax and remit it for you. But don't be fooled into thinking that this will be cheap -- they will probably add 3-5% onto every transaction to cover their costs. So you'd be taxed by a company that is collecting your taxes!Ralph
http://www.hockeydb.com
I'm not backing the argument, I'm just trying to understand it. Even though a work is published for free, that doesn't give you the right to re-write and republish it. I suppose that's what they were claiming people were doing to their web sites. It would be like taking a story and re-writing it switching all the men to women and all the women to men -- on the fly. In a way, you're republishing that work in its entirety, and you're also altering it. I'm not sure how the parody fits in -- I always thought you could parody freely but someone got their Elian Gonzalez parody site taken down by the AP when that was clearly parody. On the other hand, this would seem to also apply to tools that filter dirty words from web sites or even usenet postings. Since they're altering the original document they fit into the same ballpark. Ralph
For example, can a web site that publishes the official daily average temperature in Tucson have a clause that says "by using this site you agree not to use any of the data herein for any purpose"?
Can an online book have a clause that says "No part of this book may be used in any way, including reviews of the work"?
Both of these events are legal under copyright law, but can a contract make these actions in violation of the contract?
Ralph
http://www.hockeydb.com
The perceived problem the DCMA is trying to fix is the prevention of individuals from stealing copyrighted works from corporations.
However, this bill, and copyright in general also protects corporations from stealing copyrighted works from individuals.
If record companies were taking independent MP3's, pressing them onto CD's, and selling them without getting permission or giving royalties, people would be squarely behind the DCMA.
People would not be claiming that any abstract work (like a song, or a computer program) is public domain and that the concept of copyright should not exist.
Ralph Slate
http://www.hockeydb.com
I'm in a very awkward position on this issue, and would like to figure out just where I stand!
I run a web site called hockeydb.com. On the site I archive historical hockey statistics. Not just NHL, minor leagues too -- you can look up any pro hockey player ever on the site. I hate to sound like I'm bragging, but there is nothing else like it that I'm aware of for any sport.
I compiled nearly all the data myself by searching out and purchasing many volumes of books with hockey statistics in them. It's not as easy as it sounds -- there's no central place to find this stuff.
I spent 5 years building the collection, and thousands and thousands of hours typing in the data, fixing mistakes, standardizing names, etc. I've developed a custom computer program to maintain the data which was a non-trivial cost.
One part of me would feel very bad if the data suddenly became open source. I spent so much time on it, why would it be fair if ESPN or some company just grabbed it and decided to sell it? It would surely make my data worthless if everyone had it.
[on a side note, I know there is no legal protection on it now, although such databases aren't quite 'open source' yet].
On the other hand, I'm dependent on several entities for current compiled statistical data. One of those entities is a company called Howe Sportsdata, another is the NHL via the Elias Sports Bureau.
Howe is contracted by the minor hockey leagues to compile their statistics. The teams fax their game sheets to Howe, and Howe adds up the numbers and publishes official stats. The leagues pay Howe a good sum of money to do this, but it's cheaper than if they did it themselves.
If databases become copyrightable, then Howe -- as the compiler of the data -- could claim copyright on all the numbers. Or perhaps the leagues could claim copyright.
[I've heard that the NBA is trying to claim copyright on their statistics so that they can license them instead of publish them for free.]
It would be literally impossible to compile the information by hand because the data is only in Howe's (or the teams') possession. You couldn't even duplicate their effort because only the official scorer (there's only one per game) knows the true "facts".
So what is my position? I don't know -- it tears me up every time I think about it! I heavily lean towards no copyrights because it would sew up such data beyond belief and no one would benefit.
What is the true philosophy behind open source? Create something so that companies with many more resources than you can exploit your labor? Does the fact that something new was created somehow right that wrong? Is there a middle ground here?
Ralph Slate
http://www.hockeydb.com