Yes, iiNet won and the studios lost. Now here's the reaction from the studos' media representative (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-04-20/iinet-wins-download-case/3962442):
---- AFACT [*] managing director Neil Gane said the group would lobby for changes to copyright laws following the decision.
"Now that we have taken this issue to the highest court in the land, it is time for government to act," Mr Gane said.
"The Government has always maintained that content is the key driver of digital economic growth. I'm sure the Government would not want copyright infringement to continue unabated across Australian networks, especially with the National Broadband Network soon to be rolled out." ----
[*] AFACT is the Australian equivalent of the RIAA/MPAA, or rather, as some Wikileaks memos have shown, they are the Australian arm of the RIAA/MPAA, the control directly coming from the States.
So, the copyright industry's attitude is that "if what we demand is unlawful, we will lobby/bribe/force the government to change the law to our favour". Knowing the Australian parliament, probably they will succeed in a reasonably short time.
I'm with you on this one. I personally would be all for scrapping patents all together and quite possibly copyright as well.
The mouse on its own had little effect. The big deal was the GUI, the concept of windows. Had the mouse not been invented, some other form of pointer device would have (light pen was used already), and evolution would have led to the mouse sooner or later. Interestingly, the GUI as a concept was not patented and it allowed a very nice competition: from the mid 80-s everybody had their own windowing system (Amiga, Macintosh, Atari all had a GUI in '85, even the C64 had GEOS, Windows 1.0 came out and, of course, there was X). Then came the patents and litigation, from the XOR-cursor to the trashcan icon, petty little games for market share.
The more I read about the history of patents and copyright, the more I am convinced that they are not helpful. Among others, Dr Luigi Palombi's book, Gene Patents is a very interesting read. The first half of the book is about the fairly detailed history of patents and the politics behind every legislative change regarding to the patent law of individual countries. It's fascinating, and there's one thing which is obvious: it has never been the inventor what the patent system was all about. It was market control, through and through. Killing the competition, not to further innovation.
"Xerox PARC *DID NOT* invent the mouse. Engelbart did it also at SRI."
Um, Telefunken had a mouse with a ball before Engelbart had his with the wheels. That is, the German mouse was already like the (mechanical) mice we have today. See http://www.oldmouse.com/mouse/misc/telefunken.shtml
> Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who said "Israel should be wiped off the map"
Except that he didn't say that. Western news agencies said that he had said that, due to being morons who could not hire someone who could translate from the Persian and then copying a sensationalist headline from each other.
"I know that there are some readers that would ask, why does Kemp not have a PhD? The truth is reader, I did not want to waste years trying to convince others of my ideas, or doing research for someone else, when my own personal research required that same enormous time."
According to his autobio, he has a Masters in electronics from Tuskegee University and he had all sorts of jobs at all sorts of companies from radar systems designer at Raytheon to webdesigner at Disney. The company list is impressive, NASA JPL, Hughes, Northrop.
This book must be the culmination of this process:
"Then, in the fall of 1989, I was led by the Holy Spirit within, to drop out of school for six months; thus I locked myself in a room and studied only physics and the Bible. And for a total of two years all I did was study physics and the Bible."
We *do* have a Pirate Party Australia, www.pirateparty.org.au which a registered political party. It can not contest the 2010 elections (due to timing issues) but it exists.
"Australian society [...] the majority of people well educated"
Um, you are kidding, right?
The majority of Australians are shamefully undereducated. There are severe problems with basic literacy skills among university entrants (including the true-blue Aussie, Anglo-Saxon whites). Australia is a country where 'academic' or 'intellectual' are derogative terms. The prominent social consensus is that academic elitism is to be persecuted by every means (of course, elitism is most welcome in sports). Arts are mostly a fringe interest of the "latte drinking lefties" and being an "artsy-fartsy" puts you into that group automatically. There are suburbs in Sydney with not a single bookstore or library.
We might be well-educated compared to some (but by no means all) third/second world countries and possibly one particular first world country but we're a far cry from most European countries.
"If you nullify software patents, then you call into question all that is hardware patents, because there is NOTHING that can be done in software, that can't be done in hardware."
You say that anything that can be done is SW can be done in HW too. Yes, that's true. On the other hand, if there are things that you can do in HW that you can not do in SW, then that means that unpatentability in SW still leaves a part of HW to be subject to patent.
A new way of doping the Si is a HW process that has no equivalent SW solution. It's not a mathematical abstraction, it's applying chemistry and physics in a novel way. So nullifying SW patents have absolutely nothing to do with it. If the Si doping is too low level, you can start coming up on the HW scale and at every level you will find HW solutions that have no SW equivalent. You can compile SW into gates (and you can realise any logic circuit as SW), but anything to do with how you create gates, how you (physically) connect them and so on are things that has no equivalent in SW.
"That's not what he said. I suggest you read his stuff. Obscurity is an aspect of security."
I *did* read his stuff. He says that one can argue that using obscurity increases your security because it is an other step that your adversary has to overcome. However, if you keep reading, he shows that the above argument has many problems. In the last paragraph of his famous 2002 article he says:
"Kerckhoffs' Principle generalizes to the following design guideline: minimize the number of secrets in your security system. To the extent that you can accomplish that, you increase the robustness of your security. To the extent you can't, you increase its fragility."
In the same article he points out cases where keeping algorithms secret has a place. Not because it increases your security, for it does not. But keeping the algorithm secret might have benefits *other than cryptographic security* that outweigh the cryptographic security benefits of publishing the algorithm. One of his examples is missile guidance systems. The benefits of publishing your algorithms is nil, but it would give information to your enemies, which has zero or negative benefit. So you keep it secret. However, that does *NOT* make your guidance system more secure. You must assume that the enemy does know the algorithm. If without that assumption your system is vulnerable, then it is flawed. You use obscurity so that you inconvenience the enemy, not because you believe that that makes the system safe.
So, yes, he said that. Security by obscurity does not work. Obscurity is not part of security. Obscurity is a different concept, which may or may not be beneficial for your overall goal, but it is not beneficial for your security. As I mentioned, I read his stuff and it's there.
Senator Conroy is a religious nutjob with an agenda. He wants his net filter with a secret blacklist assembled by an organisation that is appointed by politicans and over which the public has no control whatsoever. Obtaining the blacklist would be a criminal issue.
He would go to bed with anyone who would further his vision of total control. Since that's the vision of the copyright industry as well, albeit from a profit motive rather than megalomania, they are natural allies for him.
Unfortunately, he's not the only one. In every party (with the possible exception of the Pirate Party of Australia) we have a healthy dose of these moral pillars of society, who want to dictate how and what we should see, hear and think - that's the nature of politicians.
The only time a politician is willing to let his/her power to slide is when the pitchfork is already in his/her chest. Which, in the case of a 'her' should be well bosomed, because according to our opposition leader, an other religious nutcase, small boobs encite paedophylia (well, in case of models anyway).
So, let's save the children, fight terrorism and most importantly, let's privatise legistlating, so that finally market forces would enter and bring efficiency to the so-far uncharted territory of law and order business.
"I was taught "it's" is always a contraction for "it is" and otherwise you should use its, so its fairly easy to know which to use once you know the rule."
"making it far more efficient than your ordinary electric motor"
Um, electric motors are 90%+ efficient, so how much is "far more"?
The actual details in the linked blog are a tad hazy and possibly even incorrect. The article says that because of the mechanical change the resistance of the crystal is changed, therefore the heat generated by the DC current changes. Then it makes a rather large hop, or more like a giant leap, and says that thus one side heats up and the other cools down. Unfortunately, this is not true for resistive heat, which is always positive (i.e. warming, not cooling). There's nothing in the blog article that would explain the cooling down of one side of the crystal.
So the actual operating principle of this thingummy is not explained at the linked page and a cursory Google for '"heat engine" piezo NXP' revealed nothing usable. I guess we have to wait until a scientific explanation becomes useful and *then* we can start arguing about how much better or worse this technology is than any other existing technology.
"And how many Hollywood blockbusters with $100 million budgets did that produce?"
Um, are you aware that Hollywood is in fact in California because the film industry moved there to avoid paying the license fees for Edison? Those great protectors of "intellectual output" have billions of dollars only because they were bloody leeches, pirates, if you like, and used someone else's "intellecual output" for free? (Not to mention that Edison himself was blatantly stealing other people's "intellectual output" and patenting it under his name...)
Are you also aware that the copyright in its first incarnation was *not* protecting the artists? It was protecting the printer houses in England and had absolutely nothing to do with the advancements of the arts.
By the way, I believe the furtherment of the arts would get a significant boost by the sheer elimination of maybe 99% of those $100M+ Hollywood blockbusters.
"Because through copyright, many people who benefit from a work can each contribute a small amount of the total cost of producing it, making it a commercially viable project for the creator."
Is that so? Walt Disney created a cartoon mouse. So how does the fact that Disney, Inc. owns the copyright on the Mickey Mouse keyring exactly helps Walther Disney's rotten corpse to contribute and to make it a viable project today?
"You've noticed that very few FOSS projects are even in the same league as their commercial, copyright-supported competitors, right?"
Well, I believe that most of the fabric that those evil pirates use to steal the intellectual property of those starving Hollywood studios is FOSS. There are a few very high quality commercial programs and there are a few very high quality FOSS programs. Then there's an enormous amount of crap FOSS and and equal amount of equally crap commercial code. The difference is that crap FOSS remains there and the few bits that are worth using in other projects is available. Crap commercial code just dies and doesn't have a trace.
Copyright has never been intended to protect the artist or further the art. It was intended to protect the investors' investment in the artist. Most of the time copyright is not owned by the artist, it is owned by a corporate entity that has only one art in mind: the art of making money. The artist is only interesting for the corporate entity as long as they can use his/her output to make more money. If (s)he creates the greatest piece of art ever created but it's not low-brow enough to be appealing to the mass market (see Hollywood blockbusters), the artist can drop dead.
When a taxpayer funded research group wants to publish, they *pay* (from your tax dollars) the publisher of the journal for the publication of their results (that were, again, paid by your tax dollars) and then they sign the copyright over to the publisher. Thus a private entity, with nothing to do with research, obtained the exclusive right to results of a publicly founded process *and* they were paid from the public purse to do so... Clever scheme. Copyright is the way!
No wonder corporations are a helluva lot more pro copyright than artists themselves.
Quick question, though: I have a box full of old VHS tapes. Can I go to a DVD store and exchange them, for the nominal cost of the polycarbonate disc, to DVDs? After all, I have already paid the license fee on them, haven't I. For some strange reason the local DVD store looked at me when I tried it as if I was a mental retard. I don't understand it, really. I have a copy, I just want to exchange it to an other copy of better quality, offering the cost of the material. I would not believe in my wildest dream that the entertainment industry, the greatest protectors of intellectual property would try to make me pay for the same license multiple times? I mean, that would be, like, stealing, right?
Police in Australia just have been empowered to secretly enter a suspect's home *and* secretly enter to anybody's home is that helps them in observing the suspect. So basically they can get into your house, sniff around and go, and if you accidentally find out, they can tell you that they were looking at John Doe who looked very suspicious, but later turned out that he was not a terrorist miniaturised by space aliens, but a terracotta garden gnome. Sorry about the inconvenience, and if you could give all the bugs we planted in your house, that'd be great, in these economic times every penny counts...
"The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power." [Roosevelt]
No. Economy is not artificial scarcity. I pay you to polish my shoes. Where's the scarcity? Nowhere. Whether a resource is scarce or not (among other factors) determines the price people are willing to pay for it. Here's where copyright law comes into the picture.
If you want to sell me a bicycle for $10,000, chances are I'm not going to buy it. However, if you manage to pay the politicians so that they ban cars, aeroplanes and the back of domesticated animals as means of transportation, then you form a cartel with the other bicycle manufacturers and decide that a bycicle will cost at least $10,000 *and* that anybody who attempts to make a copy of your bycicle will be burned alive in the next festive autodafe, then you managed to put yourself into the shoes of the copyright industry.
Copyright is nothing more than a limited term artificial monopoly to distort the market to the benefit of the creator in the hope that that would be an incentive for the creator to create more, for the (and here's the important part, listen very carefully!) benefit of *society*. Today copyright is pretty much unlimited, thus has nothing to do with the creator (when someone is dead for almost a century, it's hardly reasonable to expect them to come up with their Magnum Opus). Furthermore, it is very questionable whether the RIAA/MPAA controlling the music and film industry is actually beneficial to society. Most Hollywood films are definiteley mentally damaging to society, IMHO.
Nevertheless, the important points are that 1) Copyright is for the benefit of the people and not for the creator or the middleman and 2) Copyright is not a law of nature but a law of men, that we, the people, created because we felt that at the time it was in our benefit. When we feel that it does not serve our collective purpose any more, we can repeal it. That's the theory, anyway...
Using the classic example, the horse buggy makers could not sue the automotive industry for loss of potential income. Indeed, chances are that if the automobil had not been invented, they would have had more income. Unfortunately (for them), the automobile was indeed invented. Tough.
Please do not forget that you have a right to create a business venture but there is no inherent right to make a profit. If you can sell your wares to the people at a price they are willing to pay and you can still make a profit, good on you. If you can't, well, bad luck. You can't really go around with a machine gun shooting everyone who's not willing to buy your stuff for the price you set.
When you buy a lottery ticket, there's a huge potential income. Have you tried to sue your state lottery agency for their wrong choice of numbers causing you not to realise your $57 million jackpot potential income?
"Theaters, cheaper theaters, PPV, DVD, NetFlix, Redbox, cable, bargin bins, broadcast television (with ads). All are efforts to "find a happy medium" and a price point people are willing to pay."
And now there's a new one: $30/month for broadband and all the movies/music you want. So it seems that it all goes according to plan. What's the fuss?
> Didn't anyone ever wonder why the RIAA never went after someone who has enough money to actually defend himself in court?
For the same reason the local mob does not try to get protection money from the pub that's a den for soldiers of fortune on a holiday between two missions somewhere in Africa... Or, for the same reason the schoolyard bully is not picking on that kid who's been on the school's boxing team for a few years.
Yes, you can do that. So what? Just because *you* can use free code and if you ar so clever that you can make something that people want, you get your money. Until someone implements your idea (what your program does, not *how* it does it), releases the source and then you are dead in the water, because everybody else is going to improve *his* program, while you stand alone with your secrets.
That is called competition, which is a Good Thing. Copyright, on the other hand, is a (government granted) monopoly, which is a Bad Thing.
Copyright does not eliminate trade secrets (that is what you were talking about), copyright is on top of trade secrets. If copyright would be no more, you could try to fall back to trade secrets - that's fine. We'd still be *much* better off without copyright (and patents, for that matter).
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, iiNet won and the studios lost. Now here's the reaction from the studos' media representative (http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-04-20/iinet-wins-download-case/3962442):
----
AFACT [*] managing director Neil Gane said the group would lobby for changes to copyright laws following the decision.
"Now that we have taken this issue to the highest court in the land, it is time for government to act," Mr Gane said.
"The Government has always maintained that content is the key driver of digital economic growth. I'm sure the Government would not want copyright infringement to continue unabated across Australian networks, especially with the National Broadband Network soon to be rolled out."
----
[*] AFACT is the Australian equivalent of the RIAA/MPAA, or rather, as some Wikileaks memos have shown, they are the Australian arm of the RIAA/MPAA, the control directly coming from the States.
So, the copyright industry's attitude is that "if what we demand is unlawful, we will lobby/bribe/force the government to change the law to our favour". Knowing the Australian parliament, probably they will succeed in a reasonably short time.
I'm with you on this one. I personally would be all for scrapping patents all together and quite possibly copyright as well.
The mouse on its own had little effect. The big deal was the GUI, the concept of windows. Had the mouse not been invented, some other form of pointer device would have (light pen was used already), and evolution would have led to the mouse sooner or later. Interestingly, the GUI as a concept was not patented and it allowed a very nice competition: from the mid 80-s everybody had their own windowing system (Amiga, Macintosh, Atari all had a GUI in '85, even the C64 had GEOS, Windows 1.0 came out and, of course, there was X). Then came the patents and litigation, from the XOR-cursor to the trashcan icon, petty little games for market share.
The more I read about the history of patents and copyright, the more I am convinced that they are not helpful. Among others, Dr Luigi Palombi's book, Gene Patents is a very interesting read. The first half of the book is about the fairly detailed history of patents and the politics behind every legislative change regarding to the patent law of individual countries. It's fascinating, and there's one thing which is obvious: it has never been the inventor what the patent system was all about. It was market control, through and through. Killing the competition, not to further innovation.
"Xerox PARC *DID NOT* invent the mouse. Engelbart did it also at SRI."
Um, Telefunken had a mouse with a ball before Engelbart had his with the wheels. That is, the German mouse was already like the (mechanical) mice we have today. See http://www.oldmouse.com/mouse/misc/telefunken.shtml
> Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who said "Israel should be wiped off the map"
Except that he didn't say that. Western news agencies said that he had said that, due to being morons who could not hire someone who could translate from the Persian and then copying a sensationalist headline from each other.
> And who is Robert Louis Kemp anyway?
You can find his autobio at http://www.superprincipia.com/About_The_Author.htm
> Where is his PhD from?
He doesn't have any. As he says:
"I know that there are some readers that would ask, why does Kemp not have a PhD? The truth is reader, I did not want to waste years trying to convince others of my ideas, or doing research for someone else, when my own personal research required that same enormous time."
According to his autobio, he has a Masters in electronics from Tuskegee University and he had all sorts of jobs at all sorts of companies from radar systems designer at Raytheon to webdesigner at Disney. The company list is impressive, NASA JPL, Hughes, Northrop.
This book must be the culmination of this process:
"Then, in the fall of 1989, I was led by the Holy Spirit within, to drop out of school for six months; thus I locked myself in a room and studied only physics and the Bible. And for a total of two years all I did was study physics and the Bible."
"the motive to hurt the RIAA trumps the motive to simply enrich the culture"
Hurting the RIAA, MPAA et al *does* enrich the culture.
Well, the LDP is not our Pirate Party.
We *do* have a Pirate Party Australia, www.pirateparty.org.au which a registered political party.
It can not contest the 2010 elections (due to timing issues) but it exists.
"Australian society [...] the majority of people well educated"
Um, you are kidding, right?
The majority of Australians are shamefully undereducated. There are severe problems with basic literacy skills among university entrants (including the true-blue Aussie, Anglo-Saxon whites). Australia is a country where 'academic' or 'intellectual' are derogative terms. The prominent social consensus is that academic elitism is to be persecuted by every means (of course, elitism is most welcome in sports). Arts are mostly a fringe interest of the "latte drinking lefties" and being an "artsy-fartsy" puts you into that group automatically. There are suburbs in Sydney with not a single bookstore or library.
We might be well-educated compared to some (but by no means all) third/second world countries and possibly one particular first world country but we're a far cry from most European countries.
"If you nullify software patents, then you call into question all that is hardware patents, because there is NOTHING that can be done in software, that can't be done in hardware."
You say that anything that can be done is SW can be done in HW too. Yes, that's true. On the other hand, if there are things that you can do in HW that you can not do in SW, then that means that unpatentability in SW still leaves a part of HW to be subject to patent.
A new way of doping the Si is a HW process that has no equivalent SW solution. It's not a mathematical abstraction, it's applying chemistry and physics in a novel way. So nullifying SW patents have absolutely nothing to do with it. If the Si doping is too low level, you can start coming up on the HW scale and at every level you will find HW solutions that have no SW equivalent. You can compile SW into
gates (and you can realise any logic circuit as SW), but anything to do with how you create gates, how you (physically) connect them and so on are things that has no equivalent in SW.
"That's not what he said. I suggest you read his stuff. Obscurity is an aspect of security."
I *did* read his stuff. He says that one can argue that using obscurity increases your security because it is an other step that your adversary has to overcome. However, if you keep reading, he shows that the above argument has many problems. In the last paragraph of his famous 2002 article he says:
"Kerckhoffs' Principle generalizes to the following design guideline: minimize the number of secrets in your security system. To the extent that you can accomplish that, you increase the robustness of your security. To the extent you can't, you increase its fragility."
In the same article he points out cases where keeping algorithms secret has a place. Not because it increases your security, for it does not. But keeping the algorithm secret might have benefits *other than cryptographic security* that outweigh the cryptographic security benefits of publishing the algorithm. One of his examples is missile guidance systems. The benefits of publishing your algorithms is nil, but it would give information to your enemies, which has zero or negative benefit. So you keep it secret. However, that does *NOT* make your guidance system more secure. You must assume that the enemy does know the algorithm. If without that assumption your system is vulnerable, then it is flawed. You use obscurity so that you inconvenience the enemy, not because you believe that that makes the system safe.
So, yes, he said that. Security by obscurity does not work. Obscurity is not part of security. Obscurity is a different concept, which may or may not be beneficial for your overall goal, but it is not beneficial for your security. As I mentioned, I read his stuff and it's there.
"theft raises the possibility that attackers could analyze the code to find new exploits to take advantage of in the future"
As Bruce Schenier said, security through obscurity does not work...
Senator Conroy is a religious nutjob with an agenda.
He wants his net filter with a secret blacklist assembled by an organisation that is appointed by politicans and over which the public has no control whatsoever. Obtaining the blacklist would be a criminal issue.
He would go to bed with anyone who would further his vision of total control. Since that's the vision of the copyright industry as well, albeit from a profit motive rather than megalomania, they are natural allies for him.
Unfortunately, he's not the only one. In every party (with the possible exception of the Pirate Party of Australia) we have a healthy dose of these moral pillars of society, who want to dictate how and what we should see, hear and think - that's the nature of politicians.
The only time a politician is willing to let his/her power to slide is when the pitchfork is already in his/her chest. Which, in the case of a 'her' should be well bosomed, because according to our opposition leader, an other religious nutcase, small boobs encite paedophylia (well, in case of models anyway).
So, let's save the children, fight terrorism and most importantly, let's privatise legistlating, so that finally market forces would enter and bring efficiency to the so-far uncharted territory of law and order business.
"I was taught "it's" is always a contraction for "it is" and otherwise you should use its, so its fairly easy to know which to use once you know the rule."
Ironic, isn't it?
"making it far more efficient than your ordinary electric motor"
Um, electric motors are 90%+ efficient, so how much is "far more"?
The actual details in the linked blog are a tad hazy and possibly even incorrect.
The article says that because of the mechanical change the resistance of the crystal is changed, therefore the heat generated by the DC current changes. Then it makes a rather large hop, or more like a giant leap, and says that thus one side heats up and the other cools down. Unfortunately, this is not true for resistive heat, which is always positive (i.e. warming, not cooling). There's nothing in the blog article that would explain the cooling down of one side of the crystal.
So the actual operating principle of this thingummy is not explained at the linked page and a cursory Google for '"heat engine" piezo NXP' revealed nothing usable. I guess we have to wait until a scientific explanation becomes useful and *then* we can start arguing about how much better or worse this technology is than any other existing technology.
"And how many Hollywood blockbusters with $100 million budgets did that produce?"
Um, are you aware that Hollywood is in fact in California because the film industry moved there to avoid paying the license fees for Edison? Those great protectors of "intellectual output" have billions of dollars only because they were bloody leeches, pirates, if you like, and used someone else's "intellecual output" for free? (Not to mention that Edison himself was blatantly stealing other people's "intellectual output" and patenting it under his name...)
Are you also aware that the copyright in its first incarnation was *not* protecting the artists? It was protecting the printer houses in England and had absolutely nothing to do with the advancements of the arts.
By the way, I believe the furtherment of the arts would get a significant boost by the sheer elimination of maybe 99% of those $100M+ Hollywood blockbusters.
"Because through copyright, many people who benefit from a work can each contribute a small amount of the total cost of producing it, making it a commercially viable project for the creator."
Is that so? Walt Disney created a cartoon mouse. So how does the fact that Disney, Inc. owns the copyright on the Mickey Mouse keyring exactly helps Walther Disney's rotten corpse to contribute and to make it a viable project today?
"You've noticed that very few FOSS projects are even in the same league as their commercial, copyright-supported competitors, right?"
Well, I believe that most of the fabric that those evil pirates use to steal the intellectual property of those starving Hollywood studios is FOSS. There are a few very high quality commercial programs and there are a few very high quality FOSS programs. Then there's an enormous amount of crap FOSS and and equal amount of equally crap commercial code. The difference is that crap FOSS remains there and the few bits that are worth using in other projects is available. Crap commercial code just dies and doesn't have a trace.
Copyright has never been intended to protect the artist or further the art. It was intended to protect the investors' investment in the artist. Most of the time copyright is not owned by the artist, it is owned by a corporate entity that has only one art in mind: the art of making money. The artist is only interesting for the corporate entity as long as they can use his/her output to make more money. If (s)he creates the greatest piece of art ever created but it's not low-brow enough to be appealing to the mass market (see Hollywood blockbusters), the artist can drop dead.
When a taxpayer funded research group wants to publish, they *pay* (from your tax dollars) the publisher of the journal for the publication of their results (that were, again, paid by your tax dollars) and then they sign the copyright over to the publisher. Thus a private entity, with nothing to do with research, obtained the exclusive right to results of a publicly founded process *and* they were paid from the public purse to do so... Clever scheme. Copyright is the way!
No wonder corporations are a helluva lot more pro copyright than artists themselves.
Quick question, though: I have a box full of old VHS tapes. Can I go to a DVD store and exchange them, for the nominal cost of the polycarbonate disc, to DVDs? After all, I have already paid the license fee on them, haven't I. For some strange reason the local DVD store looked at me when I tried it as if I was a mental retard. I don't understand it, really. I have a copy, I just want to exchange it to an other copy of better quality, offering the cost of the material. I would not believe in my wildest dream that the entertainment industry, the greatest protectors of intellectual property would try to make me pay for the same license multiple times? I mean, that would be, like, stealing, right?
Police in Australia just have been empowered to secretly enter a suspect's home *and* secretly enter to anybody's home is that helps them in observing the suspect. So basically they can get into your house, sniff around and go, and if you accidentally find out, they can tell you that they were looking at John Doe who looked very suspicious, but later turned out that he was not a terrorist miniaturised by space aliens, but a terracotta garden gnome. Sorry about the inconvenience, and if you could give all the bugs we planted in your house, that'd be great, in these economic times every penny counts...
"The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power."
[Roosevelt]
That guy must have known something...
Um, he was talking about "marginal cost". Look it up. It contains both the production cost and the reproduction cost.
No. Economy is not artificial scarcity. I pay you to polish my shoes. Where's the scarcity? Nowhere. Whether a resource is scarce or not (among other factors) determines the price people are willing to pay for it. Here's where copyright law comes into the picture.
If you want to sell me a bicycle for $10,000, chances are I'm not going to buy it. However, if you manage to pay the politicians so that they ban cars, aeroplanes and the back of domesticated animals as means of transportation, then you form a cartel with the other bicycle manufacturers and decide that a bycicle will cost at least $10,000 *and* that anybody who attempts to make a copy of your bycicle will be burned alive in the next festive autodafe, then you managed to put yourself into the shoes of the copyright industry.
Copyright is nothing more than a limited term artificial monopoly to distort the market to the benefit of the creator in the hope that that would be an incentive for the creator to create more, for the (and here's the important part, listen very carefully!) benefit of *society*. Today copyright is pretty much unlimited, thus has nothing to do with the creator (when someone is dead for almost a century, it's hardly reasonable to expect them to come up with their Magnum Opus). Furthermore, it is very questionable whether the RIAA/MPAA controlling the music and film industry is actually beneficial to society. Most Hollywood films are definiteley mentally damaging to society, IMHO.
Nevertheless, the important points are that 1) Copyright is for the benefit of the people and not for the creator or the middleman and 2) Copyright is not a law of nature but a law of men, that we, the people, created because we felt that at the time it was in our benefit. When we feel that it does not serve our collective purpose any more, we can repeal it. That's the theory, anyway...
"there is a loss of potential income."
The key word is "potential".
Using the classic example, the horse buggy makers could not sue the automotive industry for loss of potential income. Indeed, chances are that if the automobil had not been invented, they would have had more income. Unfortunately (for them), the automobile was indeed invented. Tough.
Please do not forget that you have a right to create a business venture but there is no inherent right to make a profit. If you can sell your wares to the people at a price they are willing to pay and you can still make a profit, good on you. If you can't, well, bad luck. You can't really go around with a machine gun shooting everyone who's not willing to buy your stuff for the price you set.
When you buy a lottery ticket, there's a huge potential income. Have you tried to sue your state lottery agency for their wrong choice of numbers causing you not to realise your $57 million jackpot potential income?
"Theaters, cheaper theaters, PPV, DVD, NetFlix, Redbox, cable, bargin bins, broadcast television (with ads). All are efforts to "find a happy medium" and a price point people are willing to pay."
And now there's a new one: $30/month for broadband and all the movies/music you want. So it seems that it all goes according to plan. What's the fuss?
"with a third category of "foreign films hacked to ribbons by American studios" also applicable."
Why would you want to watch the Americanised version if you could see the original?
"to see that the demand side of the equation is preserved so that the engine of the free market can still operate."
I thought we were talking about copyright, an artificial monopoly arrangement, a concept that's kind of orthogonal to the "free market".
> Didn't anyone ever wonder why the RIAA never went after someone who has enough money to actually defend himself in court?
For the same reason the local mob does not try to get protection money from the pub that's a den for soldiers of fortune on a holiday between two missions somewhere in Africa... Or, for the same reason the schoolyard bully is not picking on that kid who's been on the school's boxing team for a few years.
Yes, you can do that. So what? Just because *you* can use free code and if you ar so clever that you can make something that people want, you get your money. Until someone implements your idea (what your program does, not *how* it does it), releases the source and then you are dead in the water, because everybody else is going to improve *his* program, while you stand alone with your secrets.
That is called competition, which is a Good Thing. Copyright, on the other hand, is a (government granted) monopoly, which is a Bad Thing.
Copyright does not eliminate trade secrets (that is what you were talking about), copyright is on top of trade secrets. If copyright would be no more, you could try to fall back to trade secrets - that's fine. We'd still be *much* better off without copyright (and patents, for that matter).