> Some of us actually WANT to pay the musicians, composers, lyricists, songwriters, > engineers, producers and other creative and hard working individuals behind our > most valued form of entertainment.
I'm with you. But I do *not* want to pay, for example, a purely business organisation that spends millions and millions of dollars on lobbying and lawsuits and whatnot to allow them to pay pittance (if that) to the artists (as much as the run-of-the-mill entertainment music can be called art...) and protect themselves from competition to maintain their high pricing and access limiting practice. Ah, yes, they also maintain *their* own extra high income, of course, for this valuable service.
> I don't get it. Why can't they just make available a program that strips > their DRM from the music files, and let their subscribers download and use > said program?
DMCA, maybe? The content is not theirs and if their deal with the music mill is such that they must DRM, then such a program would be a full-fledged open violation of the DMCA, not to mention that it is THEFT, PIRACY, TERRORISM and you have to THINK OF THE INNOCENT CHILDREN!
OK, so if the US has the right to deny any legal protection under US law to people who are not US citizens, it would just be fair other nations to do otherwise. So if say I kidnap a US tourist to have a casual torture session on him, that should be OK because he's not protected under Australian law?
You see, the problem with your argument is that the law of the land tells *you*, the citizen, what you can not do. Habeas corpus limits what the judicary system (people who *are* US citizens) can do with a person, regardless of the citizenship status of that person. You can not torture an animal, does it matter if your dog is a US citizen? You can not kill a person, is it generally true or foreign nationals are not subject to this law? If not, on which side? Can they kill people in the US? Can they be freely killed in the US, with no reason whatsoever?
By the way, completely irrelevant, but I'm curious: what does it exactly mean that the US is "the greatest nation on earth"? Is it the largest country? No. The most populous? No. The most educated? You must be kidding. The highest standard of living? Not at all. Most civil liberties and freedom of press/speech? Nope. Least crime? No way. Most democratic? Don't make me laugh. Largest GDP? That must be it! In which case, of course, the fourth greates nation on earth is the People's Republic of China...
Charts have been useless for any serious work since always. With every beta test that Sun ran on the StarOffice variants detailed reports of missing chart features have been submitted to them. Nothing happened throughout quite a few revisions.
A lot of work went into eye-candy like all those toolbars that pop up and disappear, which is extremely annoying when you just move the cursor through the document and your view jumps up and down as the toolbars came into existence and disappear, but many reported bugs and actual usability issues remained unresolved. I haven't updated for a while: I did beta testing of StartOffice and tried OOo every now and then and decided that it was actually better to use the old stuff, most of the problems were not fixed. GUI changes were plenty but I don't really care how the dialog box looks like, I am much more interested in the dialog being a non-modal context aware box rather than the usual modal boxes with themable icons.
There was an ApplixWare suite a long time ago. It was quite limited compared to OOo, however, they created a user interface that was quite friendly, non-modal dialogs all around, tri-state checkbox (yes, no, inherit) on all hierarchical features, ultra-flexible numbering scheme (OOo's outline numbering is a pain in the neck) and so on. Not to mention a very powerful and flexible chart (although sometimes you needed some creativity to work with it) and an absolute seamless intergation of the tools to each other. It wasn't perfect, had bugs, missing features etc. but it was quite flexible (when you got the gist of it). Unfortunately, it was also closed source, proprietary code and AFAIK it became abandonware when Applix switched from the multi-platform office suite to Windows-only business software service mode maybe 4-5 years ago. Still, a lot could be learnt from the way they did the user interface, for example. They did not copy MS Word, they created an application. IMHO, at least on the user interface and flexibility front, they fared far better than OOo.
The interesting bit is that if the RIAA manages to get paid for ringtones without even pretending to give a single cent back to the artist, how are they going to run their 'ringtone privacy makes artists starve, think about the artists, the future of culture depends on your vigilance' campaign?
The whole ringtone thing is just daylight robbery anyway. Don't know about the rest of the world and not really interested in general (my mobile can play any MP3 for ringtone and it's set to normal telephone ring anyway), but here in Oz AFAIK a ringtone costs you something along the AU $5 mark. Considering that the same song from the Net (legit) costs you something like US $1 (~AU $1.20)...
People throw around the word fascist when they see something charactersitically fascist. For example, when the 'state' trumps anything 'civil'. When the individual does not matter any more. When the state and the corporate world become intimately intertwined.
Fascism is *not* summary executions, torture, rape and pillage. Fascism is an ideology which values not human beings but abstact constructs such as the state, glory, heroism, nation and whatnot.
However, fascism, since it states that the individual is nothing, tends to constantly evaporate any civil liberties still remaining and of course more and more strictly dictate what the citizenry can (or must) do. Keeping people in fear is a very efficient way to achieve the above. Now you can use all sorts of things to plant fear in people, starting from the 24/7 propaganda about the dangers of an imminent nukular ter'ist attack, through the black car with people in dark leather coats at your doorstep at 3 in the morning, to the less subtle police SWAT raids on your home, to publicly executing innocent people on the Underground, up all to the more extrame cases of child rotissery you mentioned.
Nevertheless, those are just methods from which a fascist state can choose from. Torture is not an indication of fascism; torture happens where fascism is not involved and fascism can be instated without any sort of torture. A state which marches on the way of taking away individual rights while empowering the state/corporate elite *is* fascist, whether it does summary executions on the spot or not.
>... I have to wonder just how powerful the laser has to be.
Well, you can do a back-of-the-envelope calc easily. The mass of the ship is, let's say, about 10 tons or 1E4 kg. You want a 1g acceleration, or about 10 m/s^2 all the way. Assuming a laser with 500nm wavelength a photon leaving will give you an impulse of h/lambda, that is, 6.6E-34 / 5E-7 ~ 1E-27 kg*m/s. Your craft needs to get 1E5 kg*m/s impulse per second to maintain its acceleration, which is then roughly 1E32 photons per second. An 500nm photon has the energy of h * c / lambda, 6.6E-34 * 3E8 / 5E-7 that is ~ 4E-19 J. Thus, all together you need about 4E13 Watts of power, if you have a 100% efficient laser. Now that's about 40TW. Considering that the US produces 4TWh electricity in a year and that a year is about 8760 hours long, you need a power source that is approximately 90 thousand times as powerful as all the power stations of the US put together and it has to fit snugly in your 10 ton rocket, including the fuel. The latter is not as bad as it sounds: if you generate the power by 100% efficient matter-antimatter annihilation the required 40TW power output only needs about a quarter of a gram of each per second, so for a 1-week trip, which is roughly 600,000 seconds, you can get away with about 150kg of each.
So, unless I did a gross miscalculation (entirely plausible) the 1-week Mars flight seems to be a bit out of the realm of reality yet.
I wouldn't generalise that much. On the Yes vote (with comments) you will find Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Portugal, Greece and Singapore. Neither of them are poor and corrupt East-European or African countries...
The problem is, if you do not publish, you don't get grants. At least in Australia, that's how it works. When you apply for a research grant, you have to state how many articles have you published in what journal and if you were first author, senior (last) author or just an in-between. The journal is also important, the Mooville Bovine Health Weekly is somewhat less worthy than an article in Nature, for example.
The publishers are very well aware of that, that's why they can demand money and rights from you when they publish *your* results. They can also keep readership up with some trickery. For example, if you have a big international science organisation with loads of members that runs a journal but the journal just gets a tad expensive for a lot of members, then you can make journal subscription be free for members and increase the membership fee by the journal cost (yes, it's from real life, not a hypothetical example).
So, quite often submitting your article to a particular journal is not really up to you, it's a necessity if you want to work on your stuff next year too. You could put all your results onto a webserver instead of paying a journal to publish it. While that would help the scientific community it would definitely be bad for your budget, for chances are, you won't have one next year...
Of course, probably depending on your discipline things might vary, the above is certainly true to (publicly funded) biomed science.
> Amateurs and Academics have produced some great stuff, but not in the same quantity and not as > rapidly as profitable industry.
Are you sure? Basic science, being extremely risky, is still done mostly by academia. They come up with the groundbreaking stuff and commercial science turns it into practical use. Solid state physics and quantum mechanics were a prerequisite for the semiconductor explosion and while there was loads of for-profit science involved in making chips, all was based on works of academics, from Planck, Einstein, Schrodinger, Heisenberg and Bohr, to Bloch, Dirac, Bragg and Debye, just to name a few.
As per the arts, music, operas, ballets, plays and books from the classical (and pre-classical) artists are still in vogue, centuries after their creation. Now that's amateur art. I don't think that most of what is churned out by the industry will stand the test of time, nor do I think that most of it is art as such. It's entertainment, with some accidental artistic content, if so happens, created by artisans rather than artists.
> Except for one small flaw in your comparison. Petrol isn't a legal monopoly, like copyright is. > Copyright by it's very nature puts it into the "common interest" category. So there already is > an implied "banding together".
Um, why? If I own the copyright to art piece X and you own the copyright to art piece Y, why exactly should we band together? Why would you want to be involved if I have a problem with a copyright violator? Copyright is just a law that guaranteed monopoly to both of us but it doesn't mean that we're not competitors: we're both after the money of the people. It may not be obvious for music but if you look at the paparazzi scene, they are after selling the rights of their pictures and they're very agressively compete for space in tabloids. No banding together. Copyright does not band companies more than the FAA rules band together airlines.
> > "Copyright and patent law was created in the interest of advancing arts and science, > > *not* in the interest of guaranteeing corporate profit margins." > > And of course there's two favorite slashmemes in the above. One the believe (unproven) that having > copyright over something guarentees any kind of profit. And two that advancing the arts and science > is exclusive of making a profit.
I do not think I said that copyright guarantees profit. I said, and correct me if I'm wrong, that those laws were created in order to advance the arts and sciences. You can read the relevant documents and you will find the above in them. Those laws were intended to provide a financial incentive to the artists/scientists to create by providing a temporary monopoly on the copying (art) or economic exploitation (science) of their creations. I do not think that copyright guarantees any profit to any individual artist but I *do* believe that at the corporate level one can establish a scheme that *does* guarantee profit for the corporation. As you may have guessed, I assert that such a scheme is not helping the arts and sciences, it is an explitation of both the copyright law and the artists/scientists themselves.
Furthermore, I never said that advancing the arts and sciences is exclusive of making profit. I said that the laws were created to advance the arts and sciences and not to guarantee profit. Therefore, if you happen to make profit while the arts and sciences are advancing, that's fine. When you, however, establish a scheme where you try to modify and exploit the law in a way that doesn't do squat for the arts and sciences but guarantees your profit, then I say you abuse the law. For example, I do not think that the extension of the copyright to longer and longer terms advanced much of the artistic output of Walter Disney, considering that he's been dead for a long time; nora ny other cartoonists who could not draw a mouse similar to Mickey. On the other hand it guaranteed a nice profit for the Walt Disney Corporation over each and every Mickey Mouse T-shirt, keyring, pencil case, soft drink bottle, schoolbag pencil sharpener and whatever else sold, even if primary school kids do not even watch Mickey&Minnie cartoons any more. Furthermore, I don't think that a lot of stuff produced by the music and film industry (note the term) is art at all and as per advancing, well...
> The "advancing the arts and science" meme (and the implication of copyright length) also fails the reality test.
That meme is actually part of the documents of the relevant legal framework, AFAIK...
> If I make the *assumption* (the other is that there isn't any copyright and that's another topic for tomorrow) > that Queen Anne terms are acceptable?
Yes, they are. Especially the part which grants the copyright to the author and NOT the printer. I.e. specifically the artist and explicitely not the publisher. Copyright became a sellable item much later, and the need for discriminating between copying rights and moral rights of a work arose. That's where it started to turn nasty, I
> The bottom line is that it's okay for people/corporations to band together to protect their interests.
Is it? I thought that if all petrol stations in a country decided that they band together and *all* of them slap a 500% margin over the petrol you buy would not be OK. It would definitely protect *their* interests, wouldn't it?
Copyright and patent law was created in the interest of advancing arts and science, *not* in the interest of guaranteeing corporate profit margins.
Not really. It is capitalism at its best. It is the ultimate free market for you: you can buy and sell anything. Including votes, influence, laws, people, wars, whatever. Everything is for sale and goes to the highest bidder. The name of the game is making money, anything goes, it's up to the market to put value on anything and everything. There are no limits, if you can get away with it and it turns a profit, it's OK. If doing it results in a hefty fine from some pesky government institution but you make more than the fine (i.e. you make a profit), it's OK to do it. Ethics, moral, common good and all that are just ideologies, they have no cash value and thus are irrelevant.
If a bombmaking company can pursue the government to start a war and consequently buy huge amounts of bombs from the taxes they collect, it is not an -ism, but a business model. If a software company can force their way and create a standard that only they can satisfy and subsequently pursue the government to mandate that standard, well, it is a business model again, nothing more.
A communist state did not herd all the money to keep it, they redistributed it(*). You know, universal free healthcare and education, full employment, guaranteed pensions, cheap housing, subsidised culture and arts and all that. Problem was, they were very inefficient in making money. Microsoft is very efficient in making money and they do not redistribute it, they keep it for themselves and/or use it to make even more money. You can say a lot about Microsoft but they have nothing to do with communism. They are quintessential capitalism, lock, stock and barrel.
(*) The people who were more equal than the others got their loot of course, but that was just petty theft, not an institution.
Ah, I forgot: in a grant application budget you can (and should, these days) have an item for "publication cost". I.e., the money you expect to pay for publishing your results.
Check out IOVS, supposedly the most respected (i.e. loads of real paid ads...) journal in ophthalmic research. Quite a handful of medical and/or biomed research journals make you pay. A lot.
I don't know *why* they are not a member (yet), but according to the WTO's website (look for the list of members) Russia is not a member. Maybe they themselves do not want to rush it - Doha collapsed, they may not want the US IP regime, Putin is not too simpathetical to multinationals, he may want to keep trade barriers, I really don't know. But the fact remains as fact, as long as you can believe the WTO's own list of members.
> I admire the chutzpa of the complaint about "undue government intervention". > Research federally funded, peer-review carried out by publicly funded academics, > but commercial publishers would first copyright articles sent to them for free,
FREE? But it is not free! The scientists PAY money to the publisher for an article to be published! It is by no means free. Certain journals make you pay a couple of thousand dollars for publication, plus extra for images plus a lot more extra for colour images. Mind you, as the author of the article you can usually download the PDF form of the article (i.e. the same file you sent them + journal name and page number on the bottom) for free. Forget about a free copy of the journal itself, that's a very much outdated concept - buy the paper, if you want it, like everybody else. You are not the copyright holder, after all.
For what it's worth, some scientific journals put a disclaimer in a footnote on the first page of each article. The footnote states that since the athors of the article paid for the publication of their results, in the legal sense the whole article should be considered as paid advertisement. No kidding.
What did he copy? As far as I understood, he 1) deleted files that allowed him to 2) produce coupons that were *different* from any other coupons (for the SW itself guarantees that they are unique). He did not copy anything whatsoever by 1) or 2).
You can argue that printing funny money with serial numbers different from that of any note in circulation is still a crime, even if you didn't copy the money exactly - and you are right. But he did not print funny money, he printed genuine real money on the one and only official Treasury printer. He found a way to trick the software to print more coupons that he was eligible for. Like if you can trick (kick) a coke machine to give you two bottles for the price of one.
It is still a crime. However, I don't think it is copyright violation. He got more than what he paid for, but he did not copy anyting.
> Individuals simply do not have the right to expose secret programs even if they do not like them.
Rather, they have a responsibility to expose secret programs that are clearly against the law of the land. It is not exposing the secret program that is unlawful, it is the secret program itself is what is unlawful. It is your duty as a citizen to expose *any* unlawful or illegal activity you came to know.
By the way, as we all know, a government has any power over us only because *we* decided that we give them that power in exchange of their *serving* us. If we don't like what they do, we can strip them from their power. The idea that it is the other way around, that is, that the 'state', the entity that exists only in a legal sense is the important bit and we individuals, existing in the very real living sense, are mere servants of the state is most prominently spelled out in Mussolini's original definition of fascism. Even though the same idea is sometimes used successfully in populist acts (e.g. "...not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country..."), generally speaking, fascism (and oppressive dictatures in general) is usually considered, by and large, a sort of a bad thing.
When the state has a right to make people disappear/being tortured/executed because they are so-called enemies of the state, or specifically they are (by the state's assertion, no proof needed) terrorist (Bush), imperialist agents (Stalin), jews/kommunists/gipsies/etc (Hitler) then it is reasonably safe to assume that you are not talking about a democratic country.
You may have heard of Tranai, a place where they Found the Way. There a potential killer can be shot dead by any government officer without any further ado. Now there must obviously be a safeguard in place so that government officials don't shoot at innocent people. The solution is simple: any person shot dead by a government official is (well, was), by definition, a potential killer. The US seems to be heading that way, with one important exception: on Tranai the people can go to Citizens' Voting Booths at any time and press buttons to express their like/dislike of any government official. If an official is mostly disliked, his (it's always a he on Tranai) contract is then immediately and very permanently terminated by means of the powerful explosive charge implanted in their 'government official' medal that they have to wear at all times. Now that bit is apparently not that popular in your leadership circles.
(By the way, Tranai is a short story by Robert Sheckley.)
> Which brings me to my ultimate point: what happens if their > information proves to be faulty, and the console is found > chipless. Is the owner compensated for bother? Wear and tear? > Damage? Loss of warranty after the console has just been opened?
No, but they definitely will *not* be shot dead behind their house!
Slashdot Mirror
> ... officially added to its collection examples of the first two
> programmable calculators, the TI-58 and TI-59.
Hm. The HP-65 came out in '74, the TI-58 and TI-57 in '77.
I had a TI-57 but I also had a programmable calculator one before that, a NatSemi Scientific-PR, which was a '75 machine, AFAIK.
The TI-58 and 59 are *not* the first programmable calculators by a long shot.
> The Russians who are in a far more corrupt nation then we are
Are you sure?
> Some of us actually WANT to pay the musicians, composers, lyricists, songwriters,
> engineers, producers and other creative and hard working individuals behind our
> most valued form of entertainment.
I'm with you. But I do *not* want to pay, for example, a purely business organisation that spends millions and millions of dollars on lobbying and lawsuits and whatnot to allow them to pay pittance (if that) to the artists (as much as the run-of-the-mill entertainment music can be called art...) and protect themselves from competition to maintain their high pricing and access limiting practice. Ah, yes, they also maintain *their* own extra high income, of course, for this valuable service.
> I don't get it. Why can't they just make available a program that strips
> their DRM from the music files, and let their subscribers download and use
> said program?
DMCA, maybe? The content is not theirs and if their deal with the music mill is such that they must DRM, then such a program would be a full-fledged open violation of the DMCA, not to mention that it is THEFT, PIRACY, TERRORISM and you have to THINK OF THE INNOCENT CHILDREN!
OK, so if the US has the right to deny any legal protection under US law to people who are not US citizens, it would just be fair other nations to do otherwise. So if say I kidnap a US tourist to have a casual torture session on him, that should be OK because he's not protected under Australian law?
You see, the problem with your argument is that the law of the land tells *you*, the citizen, what you can not do. Habeas corpus limits what the judicary system (people who *are* US citizens) can do with a person, regardless of the citizenship status of that person. You can not torture an animal, does it matter if your dog is a US citizen? You can not kill a person, is it generally true or foreign nationals are not subject to this law? If not, on which side? Can they kill people in the US? Can they be freely killed in the US, with no reason whatsoever?
By the way, completely irrelevant, but I'm curious: what does it exactly mean that the US is "the greatest nation on earth"? Is it the largest country? No. The most populous? No. The most educated? You must be kidding. The highest standard of living? Not at all. Most civil liberties and freedom of press/speech? Nope. Least crime? No way. Most democratic? Don't make me laugh. Largest GDP? That must be it! In which case, of course, the fourth greates nation on earth is the People's Republic of China...
Charts have been useless for any serious work since always. With every beta test that Sun ran on the StarOffice variants detailed reports of missing chart features have been submitted to them. Nothing happened throughout quite a few revisions.
A lot of work went into eye-candy like all those toolbars that pop up and disappear, which is extremely annoying when you just move the cursor through the document and your view jumps up and down as the toolbars came into existence and disappear, but many reported bugs and actual usability issues remained unresolved. I haven't updated for a while: I did beta testing of StartOffice and tried OOo every now and then and decided that it was actually better to use the old stuff, most of the problems were not fixed. GUI changes were plenty but I don't really care how the dialog box looks like, I am much more interested in the dialog being a non-modal context aware box rather than the usual modal boxes with themable icons.
There was an ApplixWare suite a long time ago. It was quite limited compared to OOo, however, they created a user interface that was quite friendly, non-modal dialogs all around, tri-state checkbox (yes, no, inherit) on all hierarchical features, ultra-flexible numbering scheme (OOo's outline numbering is a pain in the neck) and so on. Not to mention a very powerful and flexible chart (although sometimes you needed some creativity to work with it) and an absolute seamless intergation of the tools to each other. It wasn't perfect, had bugs, missing features etc. but it was quite flexible (when you got the gist of it). Unfortunately, it was also closed source, proprietary code and AFAIK it became abandonware when Applix switched from the multi-platform office suite to Windows-only business software service mode maybe 4-5 years ago. Still, a lot could be learnt from the way they did the user interface, for example. They did not copy MS Word, they created an application. IMHO, at least on the user interface and flexibility front, they fared far better than OOo.
The interesting bit is that if the RIAA manages to get paid for ringtones without even pretending to give a single cent back to the artist, how are they going to run their 'ringtone privacy makes artists starve, think about the artists, the future of culture depends on your vigilance' campaign?
The whole ringtone thing is just daylight robbery anyway. Don't know about the rest of the world and not really interested in general (my mobile can play any MP3 for ringtone and it's set to normal telephone ring anyway), but here in Oz AFAIK a ringtone costs you something along the AU $5 mark. Considering that the same song from the Net (legit) costs you something like US $1 (~AU $1.20)...
People throw around the word fascist when they see something charactersitically fascist. For example, when the 'state' trumps anything 'civil'. When the individual does not matter any more. When the state and the corporate world become intimately intertwined.
Fascism is *not* summary executions, torture, rape and pillage. Fascism is an ideology which values not human beings but abstact constructs such as the state, glory, heroism, nation and whatnot.
However, fascism, since it states that the individual is nothing, tends to constantly evaporate any civil liberties still remaining and of course more and more strictly dictate what the citizenry can (or must) do. Keeping people in fear is a very efficient way to achieve the above. Now you can use all sorts of things to plant fear in people, starting from the 24/7 propaganda about the dangers of an imminent nukular ter'ist attack, through the black car with people in dark leather coats at your doorstep at 3 in the morning, to the less subtle police SWAT raids on your home, to publicly executing innocent people on the Underground, up all to the more extrame cases of child rotissery you mentioned.
Nevertheless, those are just methods from which a fascist state can choose from. Torture is not an indication of fascism; torture happens where fascism is not involved and fascism can be instated without any sort of torture. A state which marches on the way of taking away individual rights while empowering the state/corporate elite *is* fascist, whether it does summary executions on the spot or not.
> ... I have to wonder just how powerful the laser has to be.
Well, you can do a back-of-the-envelope calc easily. The mass of the ship is, let's say, about 10 tons or 1E4 kg. You want a 1g acceleration, or about 10 m/s^2 all the way. Assuming a laser with 500nm wavelength a photon leaving will give you an impulse of h/lambda, that is, 6.6E-34 / 5E-7 ~ 1E-27 kg*m/s. Your craft needs to get 1E5 kg*m/s impulse per second to maintain its acceleration, which is then roughly 1E32 photons per second. An 500nm photon has the energy of h * c / lambda, 6.6E-34 * 3E8 / 5E-7 that is ~ 4E-19 J. Thus, all together you need about 4E13 Watts of power, if you have a 100% efficient laser. Now that's about 40TW. Considering that the US produces 4TWh electricity in a year and that a year is about 8760 hours long, you need a power source that is approximately 90 thousand times as powerful as all the power stations of the US put together and it has to fit snugly in your 10 ton rocket, including the fuel. The latter is not as bad as it sounds: if you generate the power by 100% efficient matter-antimatter annihilation the required 40TW power output only needs about a quarter of a gram of each per second, so for a 1-week trip, which is roughly 600,000 seconds, you can get away with about 150kg of each.
So, unless I did a gross miscalculation (entirely plausible) the 1-week Mars flight seems to be a bit out of the realm of reality yet.
The post I replied to said "...apart from the US..."
Whether the US is a banana republic these days or not is an entirely different question...
I wouldn't generalise that much.
On the Yes vote (with comments) you will find Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Portugal, Greece and Singapore. Neither of them are poor and corrupt East-European or African countries...
The problem is, if you do not publish, you don't get grants. At least in Australia, that's how it works. When you apply for a research grant, you have to state how many articles have you published in what journal and if you were first author, senior (last) author or just an in-between. The journal is also important, the Mooville Bovine Health Weekly is somewhat less worthy than an article in Nature, for example.
The publishers are very well aware of that, that's why they can demand money and rights from you when they publish *your* results. They can also keep readership up with some trickery. For example, if you have a big international science organisation with loads of members that runs a journal but the journal just gets a tad expensive for a lot of members, then you can make journal subscription be free for members and increase the membership fee by the journal cost (yes, it's from real life, not a hypothetical example).
So, quite often submitting your article to a particular journal is not really up to you, it's a necessity if you want to work on your stuff next year too. You could put all your results onto a webserver instead of paying a journal to publish it. While that would help the scientific community it would definitely be bad for your budget, for chances are, you won't have one next year...
Of course, probably depending on your discipline things might vary, the above is certainly true to (publicly funded) biomed science.
> Amateurs and Academics have produced some great stuff, but not in the same quantity and not as
> rapidly as profitable industry.
Are you sure? Basic science, being extremely risky, is still done mostly by academia. They come up with the groundbreaking stuff and commercial science turns it into practical use. Solid state physics and quantum mechanics were a prerequisite for the semiconductor explosion and while there was loads of for-profit science involved in making chips, all was based on works of academics, from Planck, Einstein, Schrodinger, Heisenberg and Bohr, to Bloch, Dirac, Bragg and Debye, just to name a few.
As per the arts, music, operas, ballets, plays and books from the classical (and pre-classical) artists are still in vogue, centuries after their creation. Now that's amateur art. I don't think that most of what is churned out by the industry will stand the test of time, nor do I think that most of it is art as such. It's entertainment, with some accidental artistic content, if so happens, created by artisans rather than artists.
> Except for one small flaw in your comparison. Petrol isn't a legal monopoly, like copyright is.
> Copyright by it's very nature puts it into the "common interest" category. So there already is
> an implied "banding together".
Um, why? If I own the copyright to art piece X and you own the copyright to art piece Y, why exactly should we band together? Why would you want to be involved if I have a problem with a copyright violator? Copyright is just a law that guaranteed monopoly to both of us but it doesn't mean that we're not competitors: we're both after the money of the people. It may not be obvious for music but if you look at the paparazzi scene, they are after selling the rights of their pictures and they're very agressively compete for space in tabloids. No banding together. Copyright does not band companies more than the FAA rules band together airlines.
> > "Copyright and patent law was created in the interest of advancing arts and science,
> > *not* in the interest of guaranteeing corporate profit margins."
>
> And of course there's two favorite slashmemes in the above. One the believe (unproven) that having
> copyright over something guarentees any kind of profit. And two that advancing the arts and science
> is exclusive of making a profit.
I do not think I said that copyright guarantees profit. I said, and correct me if I'm wrong, that those laws were created in order to advance the arts and sciences. You can read the relevant documents and you will find the above in them. Those laws were intended to provide a financial incentive to the artists/scientists to create by providing a temporary monopoly on the copying (art) or economic exploitation (science) of their creations. I do not think that copyright guarantees any profit to any individual artist but I *do* believe that at the corporate level one can establish a scheme that *does* guarantee profit for the corporation. As you may have guessed, I assert that such a scheme is not helping the arts and sciences, it is an explitation of both the copyright law and the artists/scientists themselves.
Furthermore, I never said that advancing the arts and sciences is exclusive of making profit. I said that the laws were created to advance the arts and sciences and not to guarantee profit. Therefore, if you happen to make profit while the arts and sciences are advancing, that's fine. When you, however, establish a scheme where you try to modify and exploit the law in a way that doesn't do squat for the arts and sciences but guarantees your profit, then I say you abuse the law. For example, I do not think that the extension of the copyright to longer and longer terms advanced much of the artistic output of Walter Disney, considering that he's been dead for a long time; nora ny other cartoonists who could not draw a mouse similar to Mickey. On the other hand it guaranteed a nice profit for the Walt Disney Corporation over each and every Mickey Mouse T-shirt, keyring, pencil case, soft drink bottle, schoolbag pencil sharpener and whatever else sold, even if primary school kids do not even watch Mickey&Minnie cartoons any more. Furthermore, I don't think that a lot of stuff produced by the music and film industry (note the term) is art at all and as per advancing, well...
> The "advancing the arts and science" meme (and the implication of copyright length) also fails the reality test.
That meme is actually part of the documents of the relevant legal framework, AFAIK...
> If I make the *assumption* (the other is that there isn't any copyright and that's another topic for tomorrow)
> that Queen Anne terms are acceptable?
Yes, they are. Especially the part which grants the copyright to the author and NOT the printer. I.e. specifically the artist and explicitely not the publisher. Copyright became a sellable item much later, and the need for discriminating between copying rights and moral rights of a work arose. That's where it started to turn nasty, I
> The bottom line is that it's okay for people/corporations to band together to protect their interests.
Is it? I thought that if all petrol stations in a country decided that they band together and *all* of them slap a 500% margin over the petrol you buy would not be OK. It would definitely protect *their* interests, wouldn't it?
Copyright and patent law was created in the interest of advancing arts and science, *not* in the interest of guaranteeing corporate profit margins.
Not really. It is capitalism at its best. It is the ultimate free market for you: you can buy and sell anything. Including votes, influence, laws, people, wars, whatever. Everything is for sale and goes to the highest bidder. The name of the game is making money, anything goes, it's up to the market to put value on anything and everything. There are no limits, if you can get away with it and it turns a profit, it's OK. If doing it results in a hefty fine from some pesky government institution but you make more than the fine (i.e. you make a profit), it's OK to do it. Ethics, moral, common good and all that are just ideologies, they have no cash value and thus are irrelevant.
If a bombmaking company can pursue the government to start a war and consequently buy huge amounts of bombs from the taxes they collect, it is not an -ism, but a business model. If a software company can force their way and create a standard that only they can satisfy and subsequently pursue the government to mandate that standard, well, it is a business model again, nothing more.
A communist state did not herd all the money to keep it, they redistributed it(*). You know, universal free healthcare and education, full employment, guaranteed pensions, cheap housing, subsidised culture and arts and all that. Problem was, they were very inefficient in making money. Microsoft is very efficient in making money and they do not redistribute it, they keep it for themselves and/or use it to make even more money. You can say a lot about Microsoft but they have nothing to do with communism. They are quintessential capitalism, lock, stock and barrel.
(*) The people who were more equal than the others got their loot of course, but that was just petty theft, not an institution.
Ah, I forgot: in a grant application budget you can (and should, these days) have an item for "publication cost". I.e., the money you expect to pay for publishing your results.
Check out IOVS, supposedly the most respected (i.e. loads of real paid ads...) journal in ophthalmic research. Quite a handful of medical and/or biomed research journals make you pay. A lot.
I don't know *why* they are not a member (yet), but according to the WTO's website (look for the list of members) Russia is not a member. Maybe they themselves do not want to rush it - Doha collapsed, they may not want the US IP regime, Putin is not too simpathetical to multinationals, he may want to keep trade barriers, I really don't know. But the fact remains as fact, as long as you can believe the WTO's own list of members.
> I admire the chutzpa of the complaint about "undue government intervention".
> Research federally funded, peer-review carried out by publicly funded academics,
> but commercial publishers would first copyright articles sent to them for free,
FREE? But it is not free! The scientists PAY money to the publisher for an article to be published! It is by no means free. Certain journals make you pay a couple of thousand dollars for publication, plus extra for images plus a lot more extra for colour images. Mind you, as the author of the article you can usually download the PDF form of the article (i.e. the same file you sent them + journal name and page number on the bottom) for free. Forget about a free copy of the journal itself, that's a very much outdated concept - buy the paper, if you want it, like everybody else. You are not the copyright holder, after all.
For what it's worth, some scientific journals put a disclaimer in a footnote on the first page of each article. The footnote states that since the athors of the article paid for the publication of their results, in the legal sense the whole article should be considered as paid advertisement. No kidding.
> Considering that Russia is now part of WTO
i e_e.htm for details.
In what sense? They are *not* a WTO member (yet). They have an accession status, that has not changed much in the past few years. Take a look at http://www.wto.org/english/thewto_e/acc_e/a1_russ
What did he copy? As far as I understood, he 1) deleted files that allowed him to 2) produce coupons that were *different* from any other coupons (for the SW itself guarantees that they are unique). He did not copy anything whatsoever by 1) or 2).
You can argue that printing funny money with serial numbers different from that of any note in circulation is still a crime, even if you didn't copy the money exactly - and you are right. But he did not print funny money, he printed genuine real money on the one and only official Treasury printer. He found a way to trick the software to print more coupons that he was eligible for. Like if you can trick (kick) a coke machine to give you two bottles for the price of one.
It is still a crime. However, I don't think it is copyright violation. He got more than what he paid for, but he did not copy anyting.
> Individuals simply do not have the right to expose secret programs even if they do not like them.
Rather, they have a responsibility to expose secret programs that are clearly against the law of the land. It is not exposing the secret program that is unlawful, it is the secret program itself is what is unlawful. It is your duty as a citizen to expose *any* unlawful or illegal activity you came to know.
By the way, as we all know, a government has any power over us only because *we* decided that we give them that power in exchange of their *serving* us. If we don't like what they do, we can strip them from their power. The idea that it is the other way around, that is, that the 'state', the entity that exists only in a legal sense is the important bit and we individuals, existing in the very real living sense, are mere servants of the state is most prominently spelled out in Mussolini's original definition of fascism. Even though the same idea is sometimes used successfully in populist acts (e.g. "...not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country..."), generally speaking, fascism (and oppressive dictatures in general) is usually considered, by and large, a sort of a bad thing.
When the state has a right to make people disappear/being tortured/executed because they are so-called enemies of the state, or specifically they are (by the state's assertion, no proof needed) terrorist (Bush), imperialist agents (Stalin), jews/kommunists/gipsies/etc (Hitler) then it is reasonably safe to assume that you are not talking about a democratic country.
You may have heard of Tranai, a place where they Found the Way. There a potential killer can be shot dead by any government officer without any further ado. Now there must obviously be a safeguard in place so that government officials don't shoot at innocent people. The solution is simple: any person shot dead by a government official is (well, was), by definition, a potential killer. The US seems to be heading that way, with one important exception: on Tranai the people can go to Citizens' Voting Booths at any time and press buttons to express their like/dislike of any government official. If an official is mostly disliked, his (it's always a he on Tranai) contract is then immediately and very permanently terminated by means of the powerful explosive charge implanted in their 'government official' medal that they have to wear at all times. Now that bit is apparently not that popular in your leadership circles.
(By the way, Tranai is a short story by Robert Sheckley.)
Let's give it some more food:
> If I invent product X, who are you, or the government to dictate the
> terms under which I profit from my invention?
Exactly. I invented product Modchip, who are you, or the government to dictate the terms under which I profit from my Modchip?
> Which brings me to my ultimate point: what happens if their
> information proves to be faulty, and the console is found
> chipless. Is the owner compensated for bother? Wear and tear?
> Damage? Loss of warranty after the console has just been opened?
No, but they definitely will *not* be shot dead behind their house!