I don't see a flaw with this in a BETA -- they don't know how many things people will pay for, or what price to make them, but its a good time to find out.
Beta today is not Beta 10 years ago. Today services that people depend on, such as gMail are beta. People use OSS beta software all the time, beta has become the new "1.0" release. Today, most "1.0" releases are equivalent to a "1.01" release.
Profitable as in financial profitability currently, but might I remind you that Yahoo had to lay off 7% of their employees recently. That isn't a mark of a profitable company, or one that will be profitable a year or two into the future.
Honestly, why is MS trying to get Yahoo? Yahoo is everything you would find in a dying company, a loss of public interest and a loss of revenue. Sure, MS could say that they owned a large portion of the search market, but what does that get them? Just about everyone is heading to Google and no doubt MS would manage to mess up Yahoo enough to make their few loyal searchers go elsewhere.
That would be true if we had sane judges, a sane president and a sane congress that actually knew anything about computers. But we don't, so that's how we get such messed up laws the the DMCA. Of course people are worried about it after seeing how the DMCA turned out.
Should we then just buy one copy and pirate from there? What about the work of the publisher (proof-reading, editing, promoting), does it deserve any payments?
Yes, when the book is in print but this book is out of print meaning that any profit just goes to the store that is selling the used book.
BTW, I don't remember any contracts stating that the author receives no royalties after the book is out of print, and more prints are made.
But this book is out of print. Meaning, there are no more prints and the book will not be reprinted in the foreseeable future.
There is, however, an ethical question about whether you should enable the persons who created a "pirated" e-book to enjoy financial or psychological rewards for their un-ethical behavior.
Oh yes, because having them lose bandwidth is going to be financial and psychological rewards for it! I mean, the average/.er isn't going to click on ads and most have some sort of ad-blocking enabled and it isn't like I pay TPB $.99 for every song and e-book I pirate. So I don't see how that is a benefit to the pirates.
That might make sense with some formats, but how exactly am I going to take a physical book and turn it into an e-book? Its trivial to take a tape and turn it into an MP3, take a tape and burn it to CD, take a CD and write it to tape, but you can't just stick a book in a magical converter and it change to an e-book.
The right thing to do is to get it in your non-preferred form and deal with the inconvenience of not having access to a "modern" format. The author was the original copyright holder and he or she probably assigned the copyright to a publisher. Whomever holds the copyright gets to control distribution of the work. If the copyright holder doesn't want to distribute in electronic form, it is their choice to make.
Did you even read the summery before you started trolling? The book is out of print, yes the copyrights still are with the publisher/author but with a used book neither of them are making a cent . So really, downloading the unofficial e-book is not going to harm the copyright holders at all. So really, whats the harm? Oh sure you are a bad person for breaking all the copyright crap that the USSA has created, but use some common sense, if it isn't hurting anyone it isn't stealing, if you extend the same logic to physical duplicators of things it would be a crime to duplicate your friend's new car.
How would copyrights even really apply to this situation? The book is making no money, and is out of print. And are you going to sue for something that you aren't losing any money on? I think not...
Depends. If the DRM isn't cracked soon enough eventually the DRM servers will go dead and the book ends up effectively going out of print. If the DRM is cracked or the book is DRM free then no because there can easily be new copies made. Now, these new copies might not exactly give the author any profit but it will effectively keep the book in print.
If all they offer the Model-T is in black, then you get to liking black or you do without. You don't steal one because it's not your "preferred method".
That is one of the worst analogies even my/. standards. A more logical one would be, you want a model T in blue and there is an infinite stock of blue model Ts that never run out, however Ford doesn't get any revenue from these blue model Ts and you want to support Ford. However, Ford is bankrupt and the only way you can get the original model T is through third party sellers that you don't really want to support because you want a blue one.
There are two reasons stealing is wrong, A) someone doesn't get revenue from it and B) that person loses something. Pirating in this case doesn't affect A) because the original author doesn't get revenue from it either way, and B) there is an infinite supply of e-books that can never run out even if you download 435435436564575494390543905843905840 copies of it.
Well yes, but it also makes sense for a large necessary site like Google and Yahoo to have multiple locations in case of fire, floods, power outages, etc. As for MS they need to have a lot of bandwidth to be able to put out all the patch tuesday updates and I remember an article on MyDoom that when it targeted MS it showed no more of an increase of bandwidth than on an average update day.
Seriously. Who cares? This is about an ethical question, which most of us care about rather than "is this illegal". Like most sane people they want the money they spend on the book to go to the author and to read it in an electronic format.
Perhaps in the USA and parts of Europe Google has around 90%, but there is a very popular Chinese search engine that is what most of the people use in China to surf the censored web and I'm sure that in some parts of Europe there are more popular search engines unknown to the rest of us.
Honestly, I'm surprised the United States hasn't declared Google (and other major internet pieces) a national security asset and moved to place it under government protection.
Because it is hard to bring down Google. Google, MS, Yahoo, Apple, and a few other sites could withstand a heavy DDoS attack even by the full force of a major botnet. On the other hand, I'm sure that even the US government's sites would fail when under that much attack. Not only that but the said websites are all rather smart and won't leave open anything for crackers to exploit.
So what is the big deal? Google censors some things, don't like it? Go to one of the thousands of other search engines. The thing about search engines is there is almost no learning curve and its incredibly easy to switch, want to use Yahoo? Just type in Yahoo rather than Google. Replace Yahoo for whatever search engine you want. If people really think that Google's censorship policies are bad for the internet the internet will switch to another search engine or create their own. The internet evolves fast, 10 years ago we didn't use Google we used other search engines, 10 years from now we probably won't use Google, we will use something else. Can't wait 10 years? Just go to a different search engine. Seriously, censorship is bad but this is the internet, not the government-regulated airspace, there is no FCC, it is global.
And to your solution I have another, if the kid really feels that way, there is an easy way: suicide. If they felt that it was best not to have existed they can kill themselves. But honestly, I don't see any sky-high suicide rates for mentally impaired people, dying people or people with health conditions.
All i have to do to disprove this statement is cite an example of a government that has not.
No, you have to find a company that has not. Not a government. And let me make a clarification, I mean an abusive monopoly that most people pay (or affects an industry in a negative way). Not just some monopoly that makes some small product that only has a niche audience.
Now answer me, what is wrong with my understanding of the term "natural monopoly" when applied to say, a telephone company? Or a power or water company?
Because a power or water company isn't really natural, its allowed and encouraged by the government. To say that it is natural is to say that if there was a world devoid of any government that was free-market that there would only be one of it when the society was at the height of its power. And I would argue that there would be surely more than one phone company and in large cities more than one power and water companies in the theoretical society above.
Corporations will generally screw over any person or entity, government or otherwise, to make a profit and protect any revenue stream. There is a strong case that deregulation would only fuel things like the financial crisis in the USA at the moment.
Yes, but lets just take one example, Microsoft. What keeps MS having a monopoly? Patents and (strong) copyrights (the government would naturally stop me from pirating an entire copy of Windows and selling it, but piracy for personal use would be non-legally enforceable, nor would copying small parts of the OS so long as it was clean-room), something that a deregulated economy would not have.
For example, Linux would no longer have the restrictions of the MP3 and DVD issue, DRM (so the all iPods would be usable), would have greater freedom in the WINE project and virtual machines to run Windows programs, etc. So the cheapest and best product in the end wins.
Lets take another example, Nintendo back in the '80s and '90s. Yes, Nintendo could still regulate official game developers to so many games per year, but they could not regulate unoffical game developers leading to cheaper NES systems and games. Again, the cheapest and the best wins.
First fix the mindset of corporate CEO's who care not for the people working in the company who are not directly related or the end customer. They seem to exist to screw companies over and run with large payouts when all the problems that get swept under the carpet eventually emerge.
Yes, but again, with deregulation, the companies with bad CEOs would end up quickly failing, thus eliminating the problems of CEOs screwing the companies over, you get a bad CEO, your company fails, you go to work at one of the two other companies that sprung up in its place.
I don't think so. You made the claim, the burden of proof rests on you.
And I just gave three examples.
Natural Monopolies arise wherever a company can provide infrastructure to a captive audience. That has nothing to do with the government, unless the government is actively encouraging it or trying to stop it. Prove me wrong.
That would not be a natural monopoly. A natural monopoly would be if McDonalds was the only place that sold hamburgers not because they owned copyrights or patents to hamburgers but no one else wanted to sell hamburgers. What we have in your case is the "natural monopolies" that only one or two companies can do because they received government funding (or permission) either in the past or in the present. Which would be the ISPs who got the phone lines (the needed infrastructure) when the government was handing out money left and right to phone companies to give phone service to everywhere in the country.
The software patent system actively encourages monopolies to form in its current form. It allows any business currently to patent something that they will never use only to put a hold onto the market. It also encourages patent trolls from preventing innovation by suing successful manufacturers of software or hardware once they become successful because of it. Just look at the numerous/. stories of Nintendo, Sony and MS being sued because of patent trolling by companies that have not, nor will make game controllers, yet they sue Nintendo, Sony or MS (or settle out of court for high sums of money) and thus help them have a monopoly because a smaller company would either be sued out of existence, be forced to withdraw a successful product, or rework it and no doubt be attacked by another patent troll. If Nintendo, Sony or MS had as much capital as a successful start up business and each had their current-gen system I doubt that any would end up surviving.
Show me one that has not been (in the USA at least). Microsoft? The government regulates patents and copyrights which MS uses to have an (unfair) advantage against competition. AT&T? The government gave funding to provide for telephone lines to "modernize" the USA, along with patents. Just about every ISP today? The government provided funding/permission for lines.
Hasn't anyone noticed that the more government controls the economy the more monopolies get formed? And still we press for more regulation do overthrow the government-created monopolies. Seriously, deregulate the economy and make it monopoly free.
So lets see video games have been available and around for 30-40 years. And so how many "violent" acts have been caused by video games? Very few. How many injuries have been caused by video games? Very few. I think people better ask your parents how they spent time as a child/teenager and you will find that many of them shot themselves/others in BB gun fights, played with M-80s and other high-powered fireworks, played violent games of "cops and robbers", and most of them probably got hurt doing such things. On the other hand even if I kill every virtual living thing in Manhunt or GTA nothing really happens except the kid might become obese possibly. Today kids are much, much, safer playing even the most violent video games today then playing games 40-50 years ago.
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I don't see a flaw with this in a BETA -- they don't know how many things people will pay for, or what price to make them, but its a good time to find out.
Beta today is not Beta 10 years ago. Today services that people depend on, such as gMail are beta. People use OSS beta software all the time, beta has become the new "1.0" release. Today, most "1.0" releases are equivalent to a "1.01" release.
Profitable as in financial profitability currently, but might I remind you that Yahoo had to lay off 7% of their employees recently. That isn't a mark of a profitable company, or one that will be profitable a year or two into the future.
Honestly, why is MS trying to get Yahoo? Yahoo is everything you would find in a dying company, a loss of public interest and a loss of revenue. Sure, MS could say that they owned a large portion of the search market, but what does that get them? Just about everyone is heading to Google and no doubt MS would manage to mess up Yahoo enough to make their few loyal searchers go elsewhere.
That would be true if we had sane judges, a sane president and a sane congress that actually knew anything about computers. But we don't, so that's how we get such messed up laws the the DMCA. Of course people are worried about it after seeing how the DMCA turned out.
Wrong as in, most people believe it to be something that you should not do.
Nobody ever got sued for recollecting, as far as I know.
Unless its with music, then the RIAA can sue you. Because isn't that the exact same thing as a band doing a cover of song?
Should we then just buy one copy and pirate from there? What about the work of the publisher (proof-reading, editing, promoting), does it deserve any payments?
Yes, when the book is in print but this book is out of print meaning that any profit just goes to the store that is selling the used book.
BTW, I don't remember any contracts stating that the author receives no royalties after the book is out of print, and more prints are made.
But this book is out of print. Meaning, there are no more prints and the book will not be reprinted in the foreseeable future.
There is, however, an ethical question about whether you should enable the persons who created a "pirated" e-book to enjoy financial or psychological rewards for their un-ethical behavior.
Oh yes, because having them lose bandwidth is going to be financial and psychological rewards for it! I mean, the average /.er isn't going to click on ads and most have some sort of ad-blocking enabled and it isn't like I pay TPB $.99 for every song and e-book I pirate. So I don't see how that is a benefit to the pirates.
That might make sense with some formats, but how exactly am I going to take a physical book and turn it into an e-book? Its trivial to take a tape and turn it into an MP3, take a tape and burn it to CD, take a CD and write it to tape, but you can't just stick a book in a magical converter and it change to an e-book.
The right thing to do is to get it in your non-preferred form and deal with the inconvenience of not having access to a "modern" format. The author was the original copyright holder and he or she probably assigned the copyright to a publisher. Whomever holds the copyright gets to control distribution of the work. If the copyright holder doesn't want to distribute in electronic form, it is their choice to make.
Did you even read the summery before you started trolling? The book is out of print, yes the copyrights still are with the publisher/author but with a used book neither of them are making a cent . So really, downloading the unofficial e-book is not going to harm the copyright holders at all. So really, whats the harm? Oh sure you are a bad person for breaking all the copyright crap that the USSA has created, but use some common sense, if it isn't hurting anyone it isn't stealing, if you extend the same logic to physical duplicators of things it would be a crime to duplicate your friend's new car.
How would copyrights even really apply to this situation? The book is making no money, and is out of print. And are you going to sue for something that you aren't losing any money on? I think not...
so do e-books actually go out of print?
Depends. If the DRM isn't cracked soon enough eventually the DRM servers will go dead and the book ends up effectively going out of print. If the DRM is cracked or the book is DRM free then no because there can easily be new copies made. Now, these new copies might not exactly give the author any profit but it will effectively keep the book in print.
If all they offer the Model-T is in black, then you get to liking black or you do without. You don't steal one because it's not your "preferred method".
That is one of the worst analogies even my /. standards. A more logical one would be, you want a model T in blue and there is an infinite stock of blue model Ts that never run out, however Ford doesn't get any revenue from these blue model Ts and you want to support Ford. However, Ford is bankrupt and the only way you can get the original model T is through third party sellers that you don't really want to support because you want a blue one.
There are two reasons stealing is wrong, A) someone doesn't get revenue from it and B) that person loses something. Pirating in this case doesn't affect A) because the original author doesn't get revenue from it either way, and B) there is an infinite supply of e-books that can never run out even if you download 435435436564575494390543905843905840 copies of it.
Well yes, but it also makes sense for a large necessary site like Google and Yahoo to have multiple locations in case of fire, floods, power outages, etc. As for MS they need to have a lot of bandwidth to be able to put out all the patch tuesday updates and I remember an article on MyDoom that when it targeted MS it showed no more of an increase of bandwidth than on an average update day.
Seriously. Who cares? This is about an ethical question, which most of us care about rather than "is this illegal". Like most sane people they want the money they spend on the book to go to the author and to read it in an electronic format.
Perhaps in the USA and parts of Europe Google has around 90%, but there is a very popular Chinese search engine that is what most of the people use in China to surf the censored web and I'm sure that in some parts of Europe there are more popular search engines unknown to the rest of us.
Honestly, I'm surprised the United States hasn't declared Google (and other major internet pieces) a national security asset and moved to place it under government protection.
Because it is hard to bring down Google. Google, MS, Yahoo, Apple, and a few other sites could withstand a heavy DDoS attack even by the full force of a major botnet. On the other hand, I'm sure that even the US government's sites would fail when under that much attack. Not only that but the said websites are all rather smart and won't leave open anything for crackers to exploit.
So what is the big deal? Google censors some things, don't like it? Go to one of the thousands of other search engines. The thing about search engines is there is almost no learning curve and its incredibly easy to switch, want to use Yahoo? Just type in Yahoo rather than Google. Replace Yahoo for whatever search engine you want. If people really think that Google's censorship policies are bad for the internet the internet will switch to another search engine or create their own. The internet evolves fast, 10 years ago we didn't use Google we used other search engines, 10 years from now we probably won't use Google, we will use something else. Can't wait 10 years? Just go to a different search engine. Seriously, censorship is bad but this is the internet, not the government-regulated airspace, there is no FCC, it is global.
And to your solution I have another, if the kid really feels that way, there is an easy way: suicide. If they felt that it was best not to have existed they can kill themselves. But honestly, I don't see any sky-high suicide rates for mentally impaired people, dying people or people with health conditions.
All i have to do to disprove this statement is cite an example of a government that has not.
No, you have to find a company that has not. Not a government. And let me make a clarification, I mean an abusive monopoly that most people pay (or affects an industry in a negative way). Not just some monopoly that makes some small product that only has a niche audience.
Now answer me, what is wrong with my understanding of the term "natural monopoly" when applied to say, a telephone company? Or a power or water company?
Because a power or water company isn't really natural, its allowed and encouraged by the government. To say that it is natural is to say that if there was a world devoid of any government that was free-market that there would only be one of it when the society was at the height of its power. And I would argue that there would be surely more than one phone company and in large cities more than one power and water companies in the theoretical society above.
Corporations will generally screw over any person or entity, government or otherwise, to make a profit and protect any revenue stream. There is a strong case that deregulation would only fuel things like the financial crisis in the USA at the moment.
Yes, but lets just take one example, Microsoft. What keeps MS having a monopoly? Patents and (strong) copyrights (the government would naturally stop me from pirating an entire copy of Windows and selling it, but piracy for personal use would be non-legally enforceable, nor would copying small parts of the OS so long as it was clean-room), something that a deregulated economy would not have.
For example, Linux would no longer have the restrictions of the MP3 and DVD issue, DRM (so the all iPods would be usable), would have greater freedom in the WINE project and virtual machines to run Windows programs, etc. So the cheapest and best product in the end wins.
Lets take another example, Nintendo back in the '80s and '90s. Yes, Nintendo could still regulate official game developers to so many games per year, but they could not regulate unoffical game developers leading to cheaper NES systems and games. Again, the cheapest and the best wins.
First fix the mindset of corporate CEO's who care not for the people working in the company who are not directly related or the end customer. They seem to exist to screw companies over and run with large payouts when all the problems that get swept under the carpet eventually emerge.
Yes, but again, with deregulation, the companies with bad CEOs would end up quickly failing, thus eliminating the problems of CEOs screwing the companies over, you get a bad CEO, your company fails, you go to work at one of the two other companies that sprung up in its place.
I don't think so. You made the claim, the burden of proof rests on you.
And I just gave three examples.
Natural Monopolies arise wherever a company can provide infrastructure to a captive audience. That has nothing to do with the government, unless the government is actively encouraging it or trying to stop it. Prove me wrong.
That would not be a natural monopoly. A natural monopoly would be if McDonalds was the only place that sold hamburgers not because they owned copyrights or patents to hamburgers but no one else wanted to sell hamburgers. What we have in your case is the "natural monopolies" that only one or two companies can do because they received government funding (or permission) either in the past or in the present. Which would be the ISPs who got the phone lines (the needed infrastructure) when the government was handing out money left and right to phone companies to give phone service to everywhere in the country.
/. stories of Nintendo, Sony and MS being sued because of patent trolling by companies that have not, nor will make game controllers, yet they sue Nintendo, Sony or MS (or settle out of court for high sums of money) and thus help them have a monopoly because a smaller company would either be sued out of existence, be forced to withdraw a successful product, or rework it and no doubt be attacked by another patent troll. If Nintendo, Sony or MS had as much capital as a successful start up business and each had their current-gen system I doubt that any would end up surviving.
The software patent system actively encourages monopolies to form in its current form. It allows any business currently to patent something that they will never use only to put a hold onto the market. It also encourages patent trolls from preventing innovation by suing successful manufacturers of software or hardware once they become successful because of it. Just look at the numerous
Show me one that has not been (in the USA at least). Microsoft? The government regulates patents and copyrights which MS uses to have an (unfair) advantage against competition. AT&T? The government gave funding to provide for telephone lines to "modernize" the USA, along with patents. Just about every ISP today? The government provided funding/permission for lines.
Hasn't anyone noticed that the more government controls the economy the more monopolies get formed? And still we press for more regulation do overthrow the government-created monopolies. Seriously, deregulate the economy and make it monopoly free.
So lets see video games have been available and around for 30-40 years. And so how many "violent" acts have been caused by video games? Very few. How many injuries have been caused by video games? Very few. I think people better ask your parents how they spent time as a child/teenager and you will find that many of them shot themselves/others in BB gun fights, played with M-80s and other high-powered fireworks, played violent games of "cops and robbers", and most of them probably got hurt doing such things. On the other hand even if I kill every virtual living thing in Manhunt or GTA nothing really happens except the kid might become obese possibly. Today kids are much, much, safer playing even the most violent video games today then playing games 40-50 years ago.