I believe it's a similar situation in most Common Law jurisdictions.
Except the US, Canada, the UK, and Ireland? I mean I suppose I could be wrong about Canada, the UK, and Ireland, but I know enough people from all three to believe I'm not. Are there any other Common Law Jurisdictions?
Actually, Alabama is getting better. We can have high gravity beer now. I'm still not sure what threat the old laws against high gravity beer were designed to thwart, but apparently they no longer need thwarting.
You are over complicating this. They are not going to subject every computer that comes into the country to forensic analysis. Mac or Linux command line: "tar -czvf archive.tgz ~/porndir;rm -rf ~/porndir" or if you use Windows just use the built-in compression system. Better yet, put all your porn in your Dropbox or other cloud storage. Then when they ask if you any porn on your laptop you can honestly answer "no". Of course there was... and there will be again ten minutes after you get to your hotel room... but right now there is honestly no porn. A national firewall is clearly not going to block popular cloud storage providers.
I think you're being harsh. I'm hardly a Microsoft fanboi. If anything the more typical charge against me would be Apple fanboi, but I own computers with MacOS, Windows 7, and Ubuntu as their primary OS; and use all three pretty extensively.
UAC is still annoying to the point that I disable it completely.
It's much improved over Vista ("You have moved the mouse Cancel or Allow?"). At this point it's no more annoying than Unbuntu or OSX prompting for a user password before installing software. In some ways it's less annoying, since you don't actually have to type your password, though it's also slightly less secure. On the annoying scale I'd place UAC at "Slightly annoying, and no worse than any other current OS".
It still takes me longer to accomplish the same tasks.
Since you don't give any details here, all I can say is it seems like a work flow issue. Yeah, they moved some stuff around. Finding it all can occasionally be a pain, but generally once I do find it I usually have to admit that it's in a more logical place. Just because we've memorized hundreds of idiosyncratic locations for stuff over 15 years of Windows use, doesn't mean those thing were actually in logical places.
Aero is nice, but still a pale imitation of Compiz/Kwin.
True, but it's a huge improvement over the previous iterations of Windows. You can't say "Windows 7 isn't as nice as Windows XP, because Aero isn't as good as Compiz." in the line of Windows upgrades Aero is a huge improvement. Especially now that it no longer devours resources like a five year old with free candy.
DirectX 11 has been completely ignored by the game industry.
Also true, but largely because so many people are still on XP. Which was Vista's fault, not Windows 7. Give it a few years and things will switch. Though personally I wish the industry would take a page out of Blizzard's book and use OpenGL to ensure easy simultaneous Mac and PC (and theoretically even Linux) releases.
Once Microsoft's latest release claims it can now support patching without reboots, but literally every patch Tuesday since the first beta have still required reboots.
Really? I've also been running it since Beta, and I've noticed no such thing. I'd say about once a month or so at most. Linux and OSX require reboots for patches nearly as often. No OS can patch the kernel (and have the patch actually take effect) without a reboot.
I run Windows 7 because it is the latest release, but I wouldn't say I have nothing but praise for it.
I think OP did say "almost". Windows 7 isn't perfect by any means, but I have to say that it's the first version of Windows in a long time that I'd say was no worse than any of the competition. I still prefer Linux or OSX, but largely for reason of personal opinion and how I personally do things rather than inherent flaws in the current version of Windows.
I am fairly certain that it is still the case that theaters rent the disks that they play movies from, so archiving remain impossible. I know that's how they used to do it. The old movies reels were serial numbered, then rented to individual theaters. If you didn't send the reel back at the end of the run you better have a really good reason why. That's what I'm talking about. You can't play something you don't physically have, no matter what rights you hold to the content. The laws that govern the physical property that is the reel of film or the laser disk are distinct from the laws that govern the intellectual property which may or may not be contained on those reels or disks.
Apparently the early 3Gs had very badly placed internal antennas. My wife has a 3G, and when she was in Boston recently she and a friend were amused to notice that they had the same phone. He was less amused to discover that she was getting 5 bars and he was getting 1. A little online research showed that her phone was a later model, from after they did a minor (but important apparently) redesign on the antenna.
I'd be amazed if people used that much data just on their phone, but remember that tethered phones are just routers for laptops. Sprint is actually advertising this as a feature for their new 4G Android phone. You pay an extra $10 a month for unlimited 4G data, and then another $30 on top of that for a service that lets you use the phone as a WAP. Bam, your phone is now the Internet hub for your home. Since you can connect up to 4 computers to that service I'd imagine you can expect people to download A LOT more than 5GB across such a setup.
Personally I think you'd be nuts to use that kind of setup (it essentially required your cell phone to in the house, and turned on for anyone to have Internet access), but Sprint seems to think someone wants it. I guess if the 4G service is reliable in your area, and you don't have anybody who might want to use the Internet when you're not personally at home it might be a way to save a few bucks. It might also be useful for some mobile setups like blood mobiles or portable stores that want to process credit cards.
But again, depending on your carrier if they catch you they'll charge you out the wazoo. The only thing really stopping Apple from implementing tethering in the US (3.0 had the feature built in) was AT&T. Technically nearly all the carriers forbid tethering without paying for the service, but it's harder to enforce on other phones. Basically, you're not supposed to tether phones unless you pay for the service (or your carrier is on of the few that allows it by default). The single source nature of the iPhone allows stricter enforcement of this rule on it than on other phones
Look, it's fairly simple. We're talking about two different things. We have copyright and personal property rights. Let's say that I, all by myself, make a movie. I'll call it "My Movie", because I'm creative that way. I'm old school, so My Movie was filmed and edited analog. At the end of the day, I have movie, which is Intellectual Property. I copyright it, and because of the valiant effort of people like you (and for that matter, me; I don't disagree in general with shortening copyright, I just think this is a silly argument for why) my copyright last ten years. I also have a physical piece of property, the master of My Movie. In ten years time, my copyright is up on My Movie. Anyone who has a copy can show it all they want, or use pieces of it for stock footage, whatever they want.
Except no one has a copy. For the release of My Movie, I rented the film reels to theaters, and at the end of the run they sent them all back to me. I only really needed the master, so I destroyed them (I recycled the film though, because I'm a good person). In the end the movie didn't do to well in the theaters (even my mom didn't like it. *cry*) so I never released the anticipated DVD. Now the only copy left is my master. Quite frankly I'm a bit embarrassed by the whole thing so you can't have the master. The master is my personal property. It's a real, physical thing.
That's essentially what happened with these old movies. The studios owned the masters. They rented (not sold, rented, it avoids the Doctrine of First Sale) the copies to the theaters, who showed the movies and sent them back after the run. When a movie stopped being profitable, the extra copies were slowly destroyed until only a few archival copies (or maybe only one) were left. Since this was before DVDs or VHS, that's it. A few copies which (irregardless of copyright) are the physical property of the studios. You can't make them give up those copies, it's not an IP issue, they own the physical media.
Bringing Avatar up only muddies the water. The fate of these old movies will never be the fate of Avatar. Millions of copies will be sold, and regardless of the copyright issues, all of those copies are covered by the Doctrine of First Sale. Meaning they can be resold, kept forever, or used as really inefficient Frisbees.
So what all this means is; copyright reform would not have saved those old movies. Copyright reform is not needed to save new movies from the same fate. This entire thread is completely ancillary to copyright reform.
It's not that copyright reform isn't needed (it is), it's not that these old movies being lost isn't a tragedy (it is, at least in the cases of the good ones:-)). It's that the two topics have little to do with one and other
I guess it depends on your definition of "evil". From the point of view of some people, what courgarlife.com advertises is evil, therefore not advertising it is not doing evil. According to others censorship is evil, so by censoring the ads, they ARE doing evil. This is the problem with basing your business model around a nebulous concept like "evil"
I find your sig ironic. You talk about the philosophical incoherence of copyright law, then you post this... thing.
You do not need to make money to make art. It is, however, a fact of history that nearly all great art was made by someone being paid to do it. I can virtually guarantee that, unless you can find the "Boise Museum of Amateur Art", 95% or greater of the art in any museum in the world was created by someone who was either paid to make it or who sold it. The simple fact of the matter is that a professional artist can afford to spend more time on their art. They therefore have more practice (likely translating at least loosely to greater skill), and a larger body of work (more chances that something they do will be truly great).
You don't need an ancillary DVD market to support crap movies. Yes Avatar made Bazillions in the theaters. Did you actually read my post? I'm not worried about the big studios. They'll be fine. Avatar will continue to be made. The problem range is in the middle. Medium budget movies released by small and midsized production houses usually don't make money until they hit DVD. They're also where the vast majority of the "art" in movie making lives. That's the reason they're often called "art house" flicks. Don't get me wrong, I love a big budget super-hero film as much as the next guy... but I'm well aware that Iron Man 2 isn't going to be included in a "great movies of the early 21st century" compilation 100 years from now.
I think I covered that most musicians are the least of our worries, despite what the RIAA claims. Musicians, you're right, will generally continue to make money the way they always have. One of the advantages of being among the oldest arts known to mankind is that there's lots of business models to chose from. Digital musicians create some issues, somehow I don't think people will get off on the thrill of watching some guy mix tracks on his Mac, but so far they're a fairly small and niche form of artist.
Having "artists" make money "direct" works fine for traditional arts. Musicians, painters, etc, as I've covered ad nauseum, these guys will be fine. A lone painter, or a band of five guys can do their work and sell it or not sell it, no problem. They have few upfront costs. Movies and video games are a completely different matter. Why do you think the distribution and creation mechanisms are so closely tied together for game and movie houses? It's because these forms are art cost a LOT to make, but very little to distribute. This created a situation where the only way that the creator can make their costs back, let alone make money, is selling individual copies and hoping that they sell enough of them to make up the production cost.
In short, you keep coming back to musicians. Yes, they're artists, yes, they can make money without the big studios. I get that. I never said otherwise (in fact I specifically address it). Your arguments is long on optimism, but short on any real solution to the problem (other than for musicians). You accuse of failing to think the issue through, but don't seem to have even read my post (at any rate you don't respond to any of the points other than the first two.)
This is a completely valid argument for the shortening of copyrights. I agree completely. I never said that copyright shouldn't be shortened, I agree with that stance and you have delivered one of the few valid arguments I've seen so far in this thread as to why. My point is that we need more arguments like this, and fewer arguments like those about movies rotting in vaults or Blues music that will never be released. Your argument is related exclusively to how you could have used the rights to a game to be released publicly. Finding a copy of the actual game is not the problem, you'd just like the right to re-release or play the copy you have.
The movies and songs that are being lamented in posts above this one were lost mainly because of the physical ownership of the original media they were recorded on. The problem is only tangentially related to copyright. Some few of them may have been saved if someone could have legally copied them (though I don't exactly know how); but the main problem is some studio owns the physical media the movies/songs are recorded onto, and won't make copies for sale (or allows the originals to degenerate past the point of usefulness).
But as I state other places, the expiration of copyright is no incentive for the studios to release the original media after 7 years (or 14 years, or whatever). The original negatives are the physical property of the studio, who will continue to leave them in vaults until they degrade. I understand that if copyright expires after x years, then it will become legal to make a copy after x years. that doesn't mean you'll get an original to make a copy from. That doesn't keep the studios from developing ever more convoluted DRM schemes to make sure that the copy they sell you is only playable in the manner they approve of. ro from simply not selling home playable copies of it appears they can't control distribution.
My point here is that OP's comment is essentially an apples to oranges comparison. Those old movies he laments the loss of weren't lost because of copyright law. They were lost because the studios owned the original copies, and did not maintain them or make additional originals when they started to fade. Since it was essentially impossible to make copies from the second generation copies distributed to the movie theaters, and since those second gen copies had to be sent back to the studio when the run was over (thanks to completely separate legal agreement having little to do with copyright), copyright has virtually nothing to do with their loss. Had the copyright on those works expired in 7 years, 14 years, or 1 year it wouldn't have mattered. The studio retained ownership of all physical copies of the movie, and would have done exactly the same thin with them.
By contrast, no recent movie (or recently remastered movie) will ever be lost this way. The Studio now distribute copies that the consumer owns (physically, if not in rights to the content). The market for DVDs is such that even the worst excuses for cinema produced in the last 15-20 years have hundreds of thousands of near perfect copies wandering around. This despite the fact that copyright laws are if anything tighter now than they were.
tl;dr: It was the studio's physical ownership of media to play old movies that caused them to be lost, not the illegality of copying them. New movies will never be lost this way, despite much tighter controls on copying; simply because there are so many physical copies.
Again, I agree in principle that Copyright law needs updating, but this particular argument doesn't hold much water.
The Mona Lisa and David were both commissioned works. The artists made plenty money off of them (Leonardo da Vinci particularity lived quite well on his work), but the patron who commissioned them had sole ownership and provenance over the items. Much of da Vinci and Michelangelo's work is lost to us simply because the patrons never released it, and it was eventually destroyed or rotted away.
This system was no better than the current copyright system and arguably worse. At least now everyone has an opportunity to hear or see the art at reasonable cost. Also, these pieces are both what I call "old art". Not old in age (people are still producing it now), old in media. Its very value is in its unique, unreproducible, nature. The piece itself is valuable... I could photo copy the Mona Lisa all day and it still would just be a photocopy of the Mona Lisa. New art (as in new media art) is often perfectly reproducible in limitless quantities. Its value is in playing it, watching it, or otherwise experiencing it.
As to the Steam Engine, well, from the article you linked:
"Boulton and Watt's practice was to help mine-owners and other customers to build engines, supplying men to erect them and some specialised parts. However, they mainly profited from their patent by charging a licence fee to the engine owners" (emphasis mine, spelling errors theirs:-))
It was patented.
I'll give you plumbing to some extent, but would like to point out that the concept itself was more on the order of a government public works project (such things often produce useful public domain IP even today). Many of the specific, useful, pieces that make up what we moderns call "plumbing" were patented at one point or another.
This is the big problem with a lot of Intellectual Property reform arguments. The people making them often give poorly reasoned or incorrect points to support their arguments. If I can poke holes in your argument, trivially, and I'm generally on your side (I agree that IP laws need reform), what about someone who disagrees with you and is willing to spend lots of money for research and clever lawyers?
None of that was ever free. You paid for the radio and television by listening to or watching the advertisements. You may not have noticed, but nearly as much effort is going into stripping ads out of content as is going into stripping DRM. Advertising as a revenue stream may not be dead, but it has proven to adapt poorly to digital media. In anything other than streams, it is trivially easy to remove, and people do so all the time. So that avenue is essentially dead.
Mozart made money by being sponsored by rich people. Of course this meant that his music was available nearly exclusively to the rich people that sponsored him. So if you like we can go back to a patronage system. Expect not to get to hear much music.
The biggest problem though, isn't related to either of these things. It's related to nature of much of what we consider "art" now. Let's take a movie. Let's make it a low budget movie. It costs, say, $5 million to make. So, someone, somewhere has to come up with $5 million dollars up front. That's not chump change even for a wealthy person, certainly not for a starving young director trying to get his movie made. The art of a movie is IN the movie. It's not a filmed play, you can't perform it live to make money that way. We've already determined that advertising is not a great way to make money these days. How are you going to make make money on your movie?
Movie theaters are the obvious answer, but most movies (with the exception of the Avatars and Iron Mans of the world) don't actually make money until they release to DVD. The upfront costs are too high, and the returns from theaters too low. The irony here is that the people most hurt by the loss of DVD sales would not be the huge blockbusters that rake in enough to pay for themselves in the first two weeks after release. It will be the small independent films that only really make money over time.
The problem is essentially this: Much of what we consider "art" now has a very high up front cost, but virtually no distribution cost. It exists in a digital realm. It cost a lot to make, but can be copied infinitely and perfectly. This is as opposed to the old system where up front cost were generally minimal (paints and canvas, a guitar and some sheet paper, whatever), and the value was in the single unreproducible product. Music and theater (plays and such, not movies) were similar, but the value was in the experience (which was again unreproducible, even with if you could reproduce the actual melody or recite lines of the play).
We have to figure out how things like movies, video games, and digital art or music can make money in a post copyright world. The problem is not musicians or painters (despite what the RIAA screams), we have a model for them. It worked in the past and continues to work for thousands, if not millions, of small time "gig" bands and gallery artists. The problem is these guys.
If copyright disappears, that kind of art will suffer. It may disappear. Not immediately, not entirely, but slowly and mostly in the middle tier where most of the best "art" is. The smallest, least professional guys will still do it for love (and we can have yet another game where penguins shoot things, or race things, or are shot by things. Yay.), and the biggest guys will still make gobs of money by surrounding their crap with so many layers of DRM that it won't matter whether they technically "own" the rights to the IP, because you're never going to get it to do anything they don't want it to. So you'll probably still have the crap and the soulless corporate shiny.
Note that I say "we". I've seen it posted many times here on/. that it's not our job to figure out how to replace the media company's failed business model. I say I'm not really all that worried about the big media companies. If copyright disappears, they'll wail and cry, then encrypt their stuff tighter than a spider wraps its dinner and continue to make gobs of money (sure it'll probably be breakable..
My point is that this option already exists, and the studio don't do it. You aren't bound by your own copyrights. If George Lucas woke up tomorrow and said, "You know, I think I've milked this Star Wars stuff long enough... I'm going to relinquish my copyrights into the public domain, and release the archival copies of all six movies." He could do that. It wouldn't even be hard or expensive. Literally all he has to do is send a notarized letter to the Copyright Office and let them know that he's relinquished his rights to the movies and characters. The process of physical distribution of the actual archival copies would be more difficult to be honest.
The studios already have the "choice", they chose not to exercise it. In the event of the copyright expiring, there is no reason to expect that they will change their minds. Granted Lucas is still making money off Star Wars, so he's not likely to give up the rights voluntarily; but plenty of movies exist that studios retain the rights to for no reason other than, "it's theirs and they don't want to give it up."
After certain point in a court case, money ceases to matter. As long as you can afford the best lawyers available, you have "enough" money. Since many good lawyers will likely work pro bono for a political party they believe in (vs. a random ISP), and the Pirate party can likely call in a fair good amount of money for defense, it's not likely to matter if the studios can pull in more. When Apple and Microsoft go to court, no one talks about who has more money to spend on the case. They both have more than enough. When Microsoft and Bob Smith go to court, the differences in resources are a serious factor.
I think the story here is that a political party (however small and fringe) has taken up hosting for them. Given the political views of the Pirate Party, they are unlikely to cave under legal pressure. Given that they have at least some number of representatives in the EU Parliament, and many of the Parliaments of member states, they have some influences over law and justice.
None of which will prevent them from having their pants sued off, but it may help them out a bit when it inevitably happens.
Well, if the copyright term was shorter, the copy in the vault may not have degraded by the time copyright expired. And then you could release that vault copy into the wild.
But they won't. The studio still owns the physical archival copy. It's physical property, not IP. They can still chose (for the exact same reasons that they currently chose) not to release theie archival copies into the wild. You're talking about apples and oranges here. If the studios were nice people who wanted to contribute to the IP of the world, they would simply give up their copyrights and release the archival films after a set amount of time. They don't. What makes you think that eliminating copyright will casue them to suddenly become nice people who release their physical copies once they are no longer covered by IP?
GP (and me) are still not sure how shortening the length of copyright will save this art. If you eliminate copyright completely, you could argue that the free flow of information will allow many recordings to be made and thus minimize loss, but that's not what was advocated in the post above. In that post a shortening of copyright to approximately 7 years (9 year? How long are patents again?) was advocated. 7 years is MORE than enough time for the same things that currently destroy old art to still destroy it.
Let's assume for instance that copyright lasts 7 years. Let's also assume that Iron Man 2 is art worth saving, and that it has original negatives (rather than being entirely digital in it's original, which I suspect it is). The movie is released, and thanks to its seven year protection, no one can copy it (we're also assuming a million fan boys won't find various ways to copy it illegally). After a suitable couple month run, the negatives are mastered onto some new uncopyable (but fast degrading) media and sold for a few more months. After that the negative are stuck into the same vault mentioned above. The studio still owns the physical negatives forever. They can make copies of them forever, or let them sit in a vault and degrade to uselessness.
The main thing that caused the destruction of those old movies and music wasn't copyright law, it was the inherent fragility of the media that the items were recorded onto, combined with the imperfect nature of the copying process, and the inability for consumers to recopy (or in the case of VHS and cassette tapes to recopy beyond a few generations). Iron Man 2 will likely never meet the fate of some old movies, simply because, regardless of copyright laws, the studios will sell million of near perfect copies to anyone that wants one. The purchasers will then (legally or illegally) be able to make further copies if they choose. This is true of any movie made since the dawn of the DVD, essentially. Also of any song recorded since the dawn of CDs and (especially) MP3s.
This doesn't change the fact that copyright laws need serious revision, I agree completely. I just don't see what one has to do with the other. Those Chicago blues songs won't "never be heard again" only because of copyright laws (though those don't help), but because studios own the original media they were recorded on and don't want to release the recordings. Most likely, in a world without copyright, the studios would still own that media, and still not want to release recordings.
Bah. Browser crash causes double post. There's an irony to this happening on a thread all about using a stateless protocol to perform stateful functions.:-)
It is when the choice is put into the hands of monkeys with darts. That's the problem he's pointing out. Most small companies don't hire seasoned developers unless they specialize in software development. They get whoever they can for cheap, or, at best, they get what their limited experience tells them is the best person. They hire:
1) Kids fresh out of college who know theory but have worked with very little in practice.
2) People with no actual formal computer training who simply "know about computers" and and will work for what a real developer (or even a kid fresh out of college) would consider shit. But which beats what the guy was making selling tires.
3) People with experience, but in the wrong things: I'm a very senior sys admin type. My resume looks very fancy and technical. I'm sure I could convince some mom and pop to hire me as a web dev, especially if I was willing to take a pay cut (say I lost my job and needed something now). Could I build a web site? Sure. Could I make it functional? Absolutely. Would you want to come behind me and maintain it? I'd like to think so, but reality is I'm not an experienced web developer. I'm likely to make bad choices, especially in the beginning. Especially if mom and pop are breathing down my neck because they hired me to make them a web site dammit. It's been a week, where is the damn thing already?
I'm not saying you're wrong of course. More choices is a good thing in theory. For the expert, it's nearly always a good thing. This doesn't change the reality of the situation though... most people aren't experts. Even the ones working in the field. Sit an inexperienced kid, an enthusiastic amateur, or a sys admin who needed a job in front of the current embarrassment of choices, and we're all likely to make bad choices. Probably for the best of reasons. Then we're going to go get new jobs, and the next kid/amateur/sys admin is going to make new bad choices and pile them on top of the old bad choices with a little duct tape and some Gorilla Glue.
It's a thorny problem. Fewer choices is bad, but the current situation isn't great either. Luckily I'm a sys admin, so you developer guys figure it out:-P
It is when the choice is put into the hands of monkeys with darts. That's the problem he's pointing out. Most small companies don't hire seasoned developers unless they specialize in software development. They get whoever they can for cheap, or, at best, they get what their limited experience tells them is the best person. They hire:
1) Kids fresh out of college who know theory but have worked with very little.
2) People with no actual formal computer training who simply "know about computers" and and will work for what a real developer (or even a kid fresh out of college) would consider shit. But which beats what the guy was making selling tires.
3) People with experience, but in the wrong things. I'm a very senior sys admin type. My resume looks very fancy and technical. I'm sure I could convince some mom and pop to hire me as a web dev, especially if I was willing to take a pay cut (say I lost my job and needed something now). Could I build a web site? Sure. Could I make it functional? Absolutely. Would you want to come behind me and maintain it? I'd like to think so, but reality is I'm not an experienced web developer. I'm likely to make bad choices, especially in the beginning. Especially if mom and pop are breathing down my neck because they hired me to make them a web site dammit. It's been a week, where is the damn thing already?
I'm not saying you're wrong of course. More choices is a good thing in theory. For the expert, it's nearly always a good thing. This doesn't change the reality of the situation though... most people aren't experts. Even the ones working in the field. Sit an inexperienced kid, an enthusiastic amateur, or a sys admin who needed a job (now) in front of the current embarrassment of choices, and we're all likely to make bad choices. Probably for the best of reasons. Then we're going to go get new jobs, and the next kid/amateur/sys admin is going to make new bad choices and pile them on top of the old bad choices with a little duct tape and some Gorilla Glue.
It's a thorny problem. Fewer choices is bad, but the current situation isn't great either. Luckily I'm a sys admin, so you developer guys figure it out:-P
I think you're missing the point. Adobe is making the statement that they think you should be able the experience the whole web regardless of what computer platform you chose. What they mean is that they they think you should be able to experience the "whole web" assuming you use one of the platforms that they consider it financially viable to support.
Are Irix or HPUX (or Amiga, or NeXT, or whatever) popular platforms? No, but they are platforms people can choose to use that cannot experience the so called "whole web" simply because Adobe neither makes a client for them, nor produces open documentation sufficient to allow a truly compatible open source client. Can you make Flash work on PCBSD? Sure, but not because Adobe has released a client. Not because Adobe has released documentation to make an open client possible, but because some clever people have figured out how to make PCBSD compatible with Linux binaries.
I don't really particularity care whether there are or are not clients for some of these obscure platforms (well, I do care about the long promised and hardly obscure Linux 64 bit client that's *still* in alpha), I don't use most of them. I'm pointing out the hypocrisy of jumping up and down screaming about the open web in an effort to convince someone to allow your closed client to work on their closed platform. Apple engaged in similar hypocrisy first, granted (though at least the open standards they talked about really were open, even if the device isn't. And open standards was only one pier of their argument), but that doesn't mean Adobe gets a free pass.
I'd be mildly shocked if there were 800 million smart phones in existence right now.... That would imply nearly 10% of the population of the planet has a smart phone.
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I believe it's a similar situation in most Common Law jurisdictions.
Except the US, Canada, the UK, and Ireland? I mean I suppose I could be wrong about Canada, the UK, and Ireland, but I know enough people from all three to believe I'm not. Are there any other Common Law Jurisdictions?
Actually, Alabama is getting better. We can have high gravity beer now. I'm still not sure what threat the old laws against high gravity beer were designed to thwart, but apparently they no longer need thwarting.
You are over complicating this. They are not going to subject every computer that comes into the country to forensic analysis. Mac or Linux command line: "tar -czvf archive.tgz ~/porndir;rm -rf ~/porndir" or if you use Windows just use the built-in compression system. Better yet, put all your porn in your Dropbox or other cloud storage. Then when they ask if you any porn on your laptop you can honestly answer "no". Of course there was... and there will be again ten minutes after you get to your hotel room... but right now there is honestly no porn. A national firewall is clearly not going to block popular cloud storage providers.
I think you're being harsh. I'm hardly a Microsoft fanboi. If anything the more typical charge against me would be Apple fanboi, but I own computers with MacOS, Windows 7, and Ubuntu as their primary OS; and use all three pretty extensively.
UAC is still annoying to the point that I disable it completely.
It's much improved over Vista ("You have moved the mouse Cancel or Allow?"). At this point it's no more annoying than Unbuntu or OSX prompting for a user password before installing software. In some ways it's less annoying, since you don't actually have to type your password, though it's also slightly less secure. On the annoying scale I'd place UAC at "Slightly annoying, and no worse than any other current OS".
It still takes me longer to accomplish the same tasks.
Since you don't give any details here, all I can say is it seems like a work flow issue. Yeah, they moved some stuff around. Finding it all can occasionally be a pain, but generally once I do find it I usually have to admit that it's in a more logical place. Just because we've memorized hundreds of idiosyncratic locations for stuff over 15 years of Windows use, doesn't mean those thing were actually in logical places.
Aero is nice, but still a pale imitation of Compiz/Kwin.
True, but it's a huge improvement over the previous iterations of Windows. You can't say "Windows 7 isn't as nice as Windows XP, because Aero isn't as good as Compiz." in the line of Windows upgrades Aero is a huge improvement. Especially now that it no longer devours resources like a five year old with free candy.
DirectX 11 has been completely ignored by the game industry.
Also true, but largely because so many people are still on XP. Which was Vista's fault, not Windows 7. Give it a few years and things will switch. Though personally I wish the industry would take a page out of Blizzard's book and use OpenGL to ensure easy simultaneous Mac and PC (and theoretically even Linux) releases.
Once Microsoft's latest release claims it can now support patching without reboots, but literally every patch Tuesday since the first beta have still required reboots.
Really? I've also been running it since Beta, and I've noticed no such thing. I'd say about once a month or so at most. Linux and OSX require reboots for patches nearly as often. No OS can patch the kernel (and have the patch actually take effect) without a reboot.
I run Windows 7 because it is the latest release, but I wouldn't say I have nothing but praise for it.
I think OP did say "almost". Windows 7 isn't perfect by any means, but I have to say that it's the first version of Windows in a long time that I'd say was no worse than any of the competition. I still prefer Linux or OSX, but largely for reason of personal opinion and how I personally do things rather than inherent flaws in the current version of Windows.
I am fairly certain that it is still the case that theaters rent the disks that they play movies from, so archiving remain impossible. I know that's how they used to do it. The old movies reels were serial numbered, then rented to individual theaters. If you didn't send the reel back at the end of the run you better have a really good reason why. That's what I'm talking about. You can't play something you don't physically have, no matter what rights you hold to the content. The laws that govern the physical property that is the reel of film or the laser disk are distinct from the laws that govern the intellectual property which may or may not be contained on those reels or disks.
Apparently the early 3Gs had very badly placed internal antennas. My wife has a 3G, and when she was in Boston recently she and a friend were amused to notice that they had the same phone. He was less amused to discover that she was getting 5 bars and he was getting 1. A little online research showed that her phone was a later model, from after they did a minor (but important apparently) redesign on the antenna.
I'd be amazed if people used that much data just on their phone, but remember that tethered phones are just routers for laptops. Sprint is actually advertising this as a feature for their new 4G Android phone. You pay an extra $10 a month for unlimited 4G data, and then another $30 on top of that for a service that lets you use the phone as a WAP. Bam, your phone is now the Internet hub for your home. Since you can connect up to 4 computers to that service I'd imagine you can expect people to download A LOT more than 5GB across such a setup.
Personally I think you'd be nuts to use that kind of setup (it essentially required your cell phone to in the house, and turned on for anyone to have Internet access), but Sprint seems to think someone wants it. I guess if the 4G service is reliable in your area, and you don't have anybody who might want to use the Internet when you're not personally at home it might be a way to save a few bucks. It might also be useful for some mobile setups like blood mobiles or portable stores that want to process credit cards.
But again, depending on your carrier if they catch you they'll charge you out the wazoo. The only thing really stopping Apple from implementing tethering in the US (3.0 had the feature built in) was AT&T. Technically nearly all the carriers forbid tethering without paying for the service, but it's harder to enforce on other phones. Basically, you're not supposed to tether phones unless you pay for the service (or your carrier is on of the few that allows it by default). The single source nature of the iPhone allows stricter enforcement of this rule on it than on other phones
Look, it's fairly simple. We're talking about two different things. We have copyright and personal property rights. Let's say that I, all by myself, make a movie. I'll call it "My Movie", because I'm creative that way. I'm old school, so My Movie was filmed and edited analog. At the end of the day, I have movie, which is Intellectual Property. I copyright it, and because of the valiant effort of people like you (and for that matter, me; I don't disagree in general with shortening copyright, I just think this is a silly argument for why) my copyright last ten years. I also have a physical piece of property, the master of My Movie. In ten years time, my copyright is up on My Movie. Anyone who has a copy can show it all they want, or use pieces of it for stock footage, whatever they want.
Except no one has a copy. For the release of My Movie, I rented the film reels to theaters, and at the end of the run they sent them all back to me. I only really needed the master, so I destroyed them (I recycled the film though, because I'm a good person). In the end the movie didn't do to well in the theaters (even my mom didn't like it. *cry*) so I never released the anticipated DVD. Now the only copy left is my master. Quite frankly I'm a bit embarrassed by the whole thing so you can't have the master. The master is my personal property. It's a real, physical thing.
That's essentially what happened with these old movies. The studios owned the masters. They rented (not sold, rented, it avoids the Doctrine of First Sale) the copies to the theaters, who showed the movies and sent them back after the run. When a movie stopped being profitable, the extra copies were slowly destroyed until only a few archival copies (or maybe only one) were left. Since this was before DVDs or VHS, that's it. A few copies which (irregardless of copyright) are the physical property of the studios. You can't make them give up those copies, it's not an IP issue, they own the physical media.
Bringing Avatar up only muddies the water. The fate of these old movies will never be the fate of Avatar. Millions of copies will be sold, and regardless of the copyright issues, all of those copies are covered by the Doctrine of First Sale. Meaning they can be resold, kept forever, or used as really inefficient Frisbees.
So what all this means is; copyright reform would not have saved those old movies. Copyright reform is not needed to save new movies from the same fate. This entire thread is completely ancillary to copyright reform.
It's not that copyright reform isn't needed (it is), it's not that these old movies being lost isn't a tragedy (it is, at least in the cases of the good ones :-)). It's that the two topics have little to do with one and other
I guess it depends on your definition of "evil". From the point of view of some people, what courgarlife.com advertises is evil, therefore not advertising it is not doing evil. According to others censorship is evil, so by censoring the ads, they ARE doing evil. This is the problem with basing your business model around a nebulous concept like "evil"
I find your sig ironic. You talk about the philosophical incoherence of copyright law, then you post this... thing.
You do not need to make money to make art. It is, however, a fact of history that nearly all great art was made by someone being paid to do it. I can virtually guarantee that, unless you can find the "Boise Museum of Amateur Art", 95% or greater of the art in any museum in the world was created by someone who was either paid to make it or who sold it. The simple fact of the matter is that a professional artist can afford to spend more time on their art. They therefore have more practice (likely translating at least loosely to greater skill), and a larger body of work (more chances that something they do will be truly great).
You don't need an ancillary DVD market to support crap movies. Yes Avatar made Bazillions in the theaters. Did you actually read my post? I'm not worried about the big studios. They'll be fine. Avatar will continue to be made. The problem range is in the middle. Medium budget movies released by small and midsized production houses usually don't make money until they hit DVD. They're also where the vast majority of the "art" in movie making lives. That's the reason they're often called "art house" flicks. Don't get me wrong, I love a big budget super-hero film as much as the next guy... but I'm well aware that Iron Man 2 isn't going to be included in a "great movies of the early 21st century" compilation 100 years from now.
I think I covered that most musicians are the least of our worries, despite what the RIAA claims. Musicians, you're right, will generally continue to make money the way they always have. One of the advantages of being among the oldest arts known to mankind is that there's lots of business models to chose from. Digital musicians create some issues, somehow I don't think people will get off on the thrill of watching some guy mix tracks on his Mac, but so far they're a fairly small and niche form of artist.
Having "artists" make money "direct" works fine for traditional arts. Musicians, painters, etc, as I've covered ad nauseum, these guys will be fine. A lone painter, or a band of five guys can do their work and sell it or not sell it, no problem. They have few upfront costs. Movies and video games are a completely different matter. Why do you think the distribution and creation mechanisms are so closely tied together for game and movie houses? It's because these forms are art cost a LOT to make, but very little to distribute. This created a situation where the only way that the creator can make their costs back, let alone make money, is selling individual copies and hoping that they sell enough of them to make up the production cost.
In short, you keep coming back to musicians. Yes, they're artists, yes, they can make money without the big studios. I get that. I never said otherwise (in fact I specifically address it). Your arguments is long on optimism, but short on any real solution to the problem (other than for musicians). You accuse of failing to think the issue through, but don't seem to have even read my post (at any rate you don't respond to any of the points other than the first two.)
This is a completely valid argument for the shortening of copyrights. I agree completely. I never said that copyright shouldn't be shortened, I agree with that stance and you have delivered one of the few valid arguments I've seen so far in this thread as to why. My point is that we need more arguments like this, and fewer arguments like those about movies rotting in vaults or Blues music that will never be released. Your argument is related exclusively to how you could have used the rights to a game to be released publicly. Finding a copy of the actual game is not the problem, you'd just like the right to re-release or play the copy you have.
The movies and songs that are being lamented in posts above this one were lost mainly because of the physical ownership of the original media they were recorded on. The problem is only tangentially related to copyright. Some few of them may have been saved if someone could have legally copied them (though I don't exactly know how); but the main problem is some studio owns the physical media the movies/songs are recorded onto, and won't make copies for sale (or allows the originals to degenerate past the point of usefulness).
But as I state other places, the expiration of copyright is no incentive for the studios to release the original media after 7 years (or 14 years, or whatever). The original negatives are the physical property of the studio, who will continue to leave them in vaults until they degrade. I understand that if copyright expires after x years, then it will become legal to make a copy after x years. that doesn't mean you'll get an original to make a copy from. That doesn't keep the studios from developing ever more convoluted DRM schemes to make sure that the copy they sell you is only playable in the manner they approve of. ro from simply not selling home playable copies of it appears they can't control distribution.
My point here is that OP's comment is essentially an apples to oranges comparison. Those old movies he laments the loss of weren't lost because of copyright law. They were lost because the studios owned the original copies, and did not maintain them or make additional originals when they started to fade. Since it was essentially impossible to make copies from the second generation copies distributed to the movie theaters, and since those second gen copies had to be sent back to the studio when the run was over (thanks to completely separate legal agreement having little to do with copyright), copyright has virtually nothing to do with their loss. Had the copyright on those works expired in 7 years, 14 years, or 1 year it wouldn't have mattered. The studio retained ownership of all physical copies of the movie, and would have done exactly the same thin with them.
By contrast, no recent movie (or recently remastered movie) will ever be lost this way. The Studio now distribute copies that the consumer owns (physically, if not in rights to the content). The market for DVDs is such that even the worst excuses for cinema produced in the last 15-20 years have hundreds of thousands of near perfect copies wandering around. This despite the fact that copyright laws are if anything tighter now than they were.
tl;dr: It was the studio's physical ownership of media to play old movies that caused them to be lost, not the illegality of copying them. New movies will never be lost this way, despite much tighter controls on copying; simply because there are so many physical copies.
Again, I agree in principle that Copyright law needs updating, but this particular argument doesn't hold much water.
Your examples... well frankly they kind of suck.
The Mona Lisa and David were both commissioned works. The artists made plenty money off of them (Leonardo da Vinci particularity lived quite well on his work), but the patron who commissioned them had sole ownership and provenance over the items. Much of da Vinci and Michelangelo's work is lost to us simply because the patrons never released it, and it was eventually destroyed or rotted away.
This system was no better than the current copyright system and arguably worse. At least now everyone has an opportunity to hear or see the art at reasonable cost. Also, these pieces are both what I call "old art". Not old in age (people are still producing it now), old in media. Its very value is in its unique, unreproducible, nature. The piece itself is valuable... I could photo copy the Mona Lisa all day and it still would just be a photocopy of the Mona Lisa. New art (as in new media art) is often perfectly reproducible in limitless quantities. Its value is in playing it, watching it, or otherwise experiencing it.
As to the Steam Engine, well, from the article you linked:
"Boulton and Watt's practice was to help mine-owners and other customers to build engines, supplying men to erect them and some specialised parts. However, they mainly profited from their patent by charging a licence fee to the engine owners" (emphasis mine, spelling errors theirs :-))
It was patented.
I'll give you plumbing to some extent, but would like to point out that the concept itself was more on the order of a government public works project (such things often produce useful public domain IP even today). Many of the specific, useful, pieces that make up what we moderns call "plumbing" were patented at one point or another.
This is the big problem with a lot of Intellectual Property reform arguments. The people making them often give poorly reasoned or incorrect points to support their arguments. If I can poke holes in your argument, trivially, and I'm generally on your side (I agree that IP laws need reform), what about someone who disagrees with you and is willing to spend lots of money for research and clever lawyers?
None of that was ever free. You paid for the radio and television by listening to or watching the advertisements. You may not have noticed, but nearly as much effort is going into stripping ads out of content as is going into stripping DRM. Advertising as a revenue stream may not be dead, but it has proven to adapt poorly to digital media. In anything other than streams, it is trivially easy to remove, and people do so all the time. So that avenue is essentially dead.
Mozart made money by being sponsored by rich people. Of course this meant that his music was available nearly exclusively to the rich people that sponsored him. So if you like we can go back to a patronage system. Expect not to get to hear much music.
The biggest problem though, isn't related to either of these things. It's related to nature of much of what we consider "art" now. Let's take a movie. Let's make it a low budget movie. It costs, say, $5 million to make. So, someone, somewhere has to come up with $5 million dollars up front. That's not chump change even for a wealthy person, certainly not for a starving young director trying to get his movie made. The art of a movie is IN the movie. It's not a filmed play, you can't perform it live to make money that way. We've already determined that advertising is not a great way to make money these days. How are you going to make make money on your movie?
Movie theaters are the obvious answer, but most movies (with the exception of the Avatars and Iron Mans of the world) don't actually make money until they release to DVD. The upfront costs are too high, and the returns from theaters too low. The irony here is that the people most hurt by the loss of DVD sales would not be the huge blockbusters that rake in enough to pay for themselves in the first two weeks after release. It will be the small independent films that only really make money over time.
The problem is essentially this: Much of what we consider "art" now has a very high up front cost, but virtually no distribution cost. It exists in a digital realm. It cost a lot to make, but can be copied infinitely and perfectly. This is as opposed to the old system where up front cost were generally minimal (paints and canvas, a guitar and some sheet paper, whatever), and the value was in the single unreproducible product. Music and theater (plays and such, not movies) were similar, but the value was in the experience (which was again unreproducible, even with if you could reproduce the actual melody or recite lines of the play).
We have to figure out how things like movies, video games, and digital art or music can make money in a post copyright world. The problem is not musicians or painters (despite what the RIAA screams), we have a model for them. It worked in the past and continues to work for thousands, if not millions, of small time "gig" bands and gallery artists. The problem is these guys.
If copyright disappears, that kind of art will suffer. It may disappear. Not immediately, not entirely, but slowly and mostly in the middle tier where most of the best "art" is. The smallest, least professional guys will still do it for love (and we can have yet another game where penguins shoot things, or race things, or are shot by things. Yay.), and the biggest guys will still make gobs of money by surrounding their crap with so many layers of DRM that it won't matter whether they technically "own" the rights to the IP, because you're never going to get it to do anything they don't want it to. So you'll probably still have the crap and the soulless corporate shiny.
Note that I say "we". I've seen it posted many times here on /. that it's not our job to figure out how to replace the media company's failed business model. I say I'm not really all that worried about the big media companies. If copyright disappears, they'll wail and cry, then encrypt their stuff tighter than a spider wraps its dinner and continue to make gobs of money (sure it'll probably be breakable..
My point is that this option already exists, and the studio don't do it. You aren't bound by your own copyrights. If George Lucas woke up tomorrow and said, "You know, I think I've milked this Star Wars stuff long enough... I'm going to relinquish my copyrights into the public domain, and release the archival copies of all six movies." He could do that. It wouldn't even be hard or expensive. Literally all he has to do is send a notarized letter to the Copyright Office and let them know that he's relinquished his rights to the movies and characters. The process of physical distribution of the actual archival copies would be more difficult to be honest.
The studios already have the "choice", they chose not to exercise it. In the event of the copyright expiring, there is no reason to expect that they will change their minds. Granted Lucas is still making money off Star Wars, so he's not likely to give up the rights voluntarily; but plenty of movies exist that studios retain the rights to for no reason other than, "it's theirs and they don't want to give it up."
After certain point in a court case, money ceases to matter. As long as you can afford the best lawyers available, you have "enough" money. Since many good lawyers will likely work pro bono for a political party they believe in (vs. a random ISP), and the Pirate party can likely call in a fair good amount of money for defense, it's not likely to matter if the studios can pull in more. When Apple and Microsoft go to court, no one talks about who has more money to spend on the case. They both have more than enough. When Microsoft and Bob Smith go to court, the differences in resources are a serious factor.
I think the story here is that a political party (however small and fringe) has taken up hosting for them. Given the political views of the Pirate Party, they are unlikely to cave under legal pressure. Given that they have at least some number of representatives in the EU Parliament, and many of the Parliaments of member states, they have some influences over law and justice.
None of which will prevent them from having their pants sued off, but it may help them out a bit when it inevitably happens.
Well, if the copyright term was shorter, the copy in the vault may not have degraded by the time copyright expired. And then you could release that vault copy into the wild.
But they won't. The studio still owns the physical archival copy. It's physical property, not IP. They can still chose (for the exact same reasons that they currently chose) not to release theie archival copies into the wild. You're talking about apples and oranges here. If the studios were nice people who wanted to contribute to the IP of the world, they would simply give up their copyrights and release the archival films after a set amount of time. They don't. What makes you think that eliminating copyright will casue them to suddenly become nice people who release their physical copies once they are no longer covered by IP?
GP (and me) are still not sure how shortening the length of copyright will save this art. If you eliminate copyright completely, you could argue that the free flow of information will allow many recordings to be made and thus minimize loss, but that's not what was advocated in the post above. In that post a shortening of copyright to approximately 7 years (9 year? How long are patents again?) was advocated. 7 years is MORE than enough time for the same things that currently destroy old art to still destroy it.
Let's assume for instance that copyright lasts 7 years. Let's also assume that Iron Man 2 is art worth saving, and that it has original negatives (rather than being entirely digital in it's original, which I suspect it is). The movie is released, and thanks to its seven year protection, no one can copy it (we're also assuming a million fan boys won't find various ways to copy it illegally). After a suitable couple month run, the negatives are mastered onto some new uncopyable (but fast degrading) media and sold for a few more months. After that the negative are stuck into the same vault mentioned above. The studio still owns the physical negatives forever. They can make copies of them forever, or let them sit in a vault and degrade to uselessness.
The main thing that caused the destruction of those old movies and music wasn't copyright law, it was the inherent fragility of the media that the items were recorded onto, combined with the imperfect nature of the copying process, and the inability for consumers to recopy (or in the case of VHS and cassette tapes to recopy beyond a few generations). Iron Man 2 will likely never meet the fate of some old movies, simply because, regardless of copyright laws, the studios will sell million of near perfect copies to anyone that wants one. The purchasers will then (legally or illegally) be able to make further copies if they choose. This is true of any movie made since the dawn of the DVD, essentially. Also of any song recorded since the dawn of CDs and (especially) MP3s.
This doesn't change the fact that copyright laws need serious revision, I agree completely. I just don't see what one has to do with the other. Those Chicago blues songs won't "never be heard again" only because of copyright laws (though those don't help), but because studios own the original media they were recorded on and don't want to release the recordings. Most likely, in a world without copyright, the studios would still own that media, and still not want to release recordings.
Bah. Browser crash causes double post. There's an irony to this happening on a thread all about using a stateless protocol to perform stateful functions. :-)
It is when the choice is put into the hands of monkeys with darts. That's the problem he's pointing out. Most small companies don't hire seasoned developers unless they specialize in software development. They get whoever they can for cheap, or, at best, they get what their limited experience tells them is the best person. They hire:
1) Kids fresh out of college who know theory but have worked with very little in practice.
2) People with no actual formal computer training who simply "know about computers" and and will work for what a real developer (or even a kid fresh out of college) would consider shit. But which beats what the guy was making selling tires.
3) People with experience, but in the wrong things: I'm a very senior sys admin type. My resume looks very fancy and technical. I'm sure I could convince some mom and pop to hire me as a web dev, especially if I was willing to take a pay cut (say I lost my job and needed something now). Could I build a web site? Sure. Could I make it functional? Absolutely. Would you want to come behind me and maintain it? I'd like to think so, but reality is I'm not an experienced web developer. I'm likely to make bad choices, especially in the beginning. Especially if mom and pop are breathing down my neck because they hired me to make them a web site dammit. It's been a week, where is the damn thing already?
I'm not saying you're wrong of course. More choices is a good thing in theory. For the expert, it's nearly always a good thing. This doesn't change the reality of the situation though... most people aren't experts. Even the ones working in the field. Sit an inexperienced kid, an enthusiastic amateur, or a sys admin who needed a job in front of the current embarrassment of choices, and we're all likely to make bad choices. Probably for the best of reasons. Then we're going to go get new jobs, and the next kid/amateur/sys admin is going to make new bad choices and pile them on top of the old bad choices with a little duct tape and some Gorilla Glue.
It's a thorny problem. Fewer choices is bad, but the current situation isn't great either. Luckily I'm a sys admin, so you developer guys figure it out :-P
It is when the choice is put into the hands of monkeys with darts. That's the problem he's pointing out. Most small companies don't hire seasoned developers unless they specialize in software development. They get whoever they can for cheap, or, at best, they get what their limited experience tells them is the best person. They hire:
1) Kids fresh out of college who know theory but have worked with very little.
2) People with no actual formal computer training who simply "know about computers" and and will work for what a real developer (or even a kid fresh out of college) would consider shit. But which beats what the guy was making selling tires.
3) People with experience, but in the wrong things. I'm a very senior sys admin type. My resume looks very fancy and technical. I'm sure I could convince some mom and pop to hire me as a web dev, especially if I was willing to take a pay cut (say I lost my job and needed something now). Could I build a web site? Sure. Could I make it functional? Absolutely. Would you want to come behind me and maintain it? I'd like to think so, but reality is I'm not an experienced web developer. I'm likely to make bad choices, especially in the beginning. Especially if mom and pop are breathing down my neck because they hired me to make them a web site dammit. It's been a week, where is the damn thing already?
I'm not saying you're wrong of course. More choices is a good thing in theory. For the expert, it's nearly always a good thing. This doesn't change the reality of the situation though... most people aren't experts. Even the ones working in the field. Sit an inexperienced kid, an enthusiastic amateur, or a sys admin who needed a job (now) in front of the current embarrassment of choices, and we're all likely to make bad choices. Probably for the best of reasons. Then we're going to go get new jobs, and the next kid/amateur/sys admin is going to make new bad choices and pile them on top of the old bad choices with a little duct tape and some Gorilla Glue.
It's a thorny problem. Fewer choices is bad, but the current situation isn't great either. Luckily I'm a sys admin, so you developer guys figure it out :-P
I think you're missing the point. Adobe is making the statement that they think you should be able the experience the whole web regardless of what computer platform you chose. What they mean is that they they think you should be able to experience the "whole web" assuming you use one of the platforms that they consider it financially viable to support.
Are Irix or HPUX (or Amiga, or NeXT, or whatever) popular platforms? No, but they are platforms people can choose to use that cannot experience the so called "whole web" simply because Adobe neither makes a client for them, nor produces open documentation sufficient to allow a truly compatible open source client. Can you make Flash work on PCBSD? Sure, but not because Adobe has released a client. Not because Adobe has released documentation to make an open client possible, but because some clever people have figured out how to make PCBSD compatible with Linux binaries.
I don't really particularity care whether there are or are not clients for some of these obscure platforms (well, I do care about the long promised and hardly obscure Linux 64 bit client that's *still* in alpha), I don't use most of them. I'm pointing out the hypocrisy of jumping up and down screaming about the open web in an effort to convince someone to allow your closed client to work on their closed platform. Apple engaged in similar hypocrisy first, granted (though at least the open standards they talked about really were open, even if the device isn't. And open standards was only one pier of their argument), but that doesn't mean Adobe gets a free pass.
I'd be mildly shocked if there were 800 million smart phones in existence right now.... That would imply nearly 10% of the population of the planet has a smart phone.