The PC wasn't particularly open or standard when it came out. It was incompatible at a binary level with the Apple ][, the TRS-80, S-100 bus + CP/M OS machines, and other common microcomputers of the day.
The PC rode to success on IBM's mainframe dominance and the adage "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." The fact that it was possible to clone the PC was a side effect of a short time-to-market, and the failure of IBM to realize what letting Microsoft sell DOS elsewhere would really mean.
Once clones started going strong, IBM tried to take the PC platform proprietary again. IBM tried to switch PC expansion slots from the ISA bus to the Microchannel bus -- which would have let them use Microchannel patents to impose royalty taxes on all other PC makers. IBM also planned to replace DOS with OS/2.
What needs to be done is a clarification on just what exactly copyright is. As near as I can tell, this is what it should be: authors and inventors shall be rewarded with a monopoly on the sale and distribution of their respective works. Infringement of copyright then becomes a theft of market.
You are confusing the means (optional, limited monopolies) with the ends (maximizing the public benefit).
If enough citizens wanted to legalize the old, uncrippled Napster, and put enough pressure on Congress to do it, a law to do that would be perfectly legitimate. If people wanted to keep the old Napster illegal, believing it to be harmful to the long-term public interest, that would be OK too.
As Jefferson wrote with respect to the other type of monopoly granted under Article I, Section 8:
Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from [inventions], as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body.
You analogy is flawed. Instead of attacking it I'll just just point out that if fair use applied to digital media (which it should), you could make as many copies as you please and distribute them for free, legally.
1. Fair Use does apply to digital media, even though there are both unConstitutional laws (*cough* DMCA *cough*) and copy prevention mechanisms to try to keep us from exercising it.
2. Fair Use does not mean that you can distribute unlimited numbers of copies of anything, without regards to context. The Supreme Court has said that non-commercial use is presumptively Fair -- not that it is always Fair. Also, since then, the Congress has pushed through the N.E.T. Act to make it illegal to distribute large numbers of infringing copies where distribution is not done for commercial advantage.
Stating that something is illegal does not make it so, either.
In the United States, the First Sale Doctrine covers most kinds of copyrighted works. It basically says that once a copyright holder sells or transfers a copy of a work, they have no rights to control further distribution of that copy. Just like when an auto dealer sells you a car, the dealer has no further right to control the resale or transfer of that car.
The music and software industries managed to get Congress to dent the First Sale Doctrine a little, so that it is illegal to commercially rent phonorecords (LPs, CDs, tapes, etc.) or software (other than video games) without the copyright holders' permission.
The scenarios outlined in the 1976 Copyright Act are only illustrative, not exhaustive.
In the Betamax case, the Supreme Court ruled that timeshifting is legal Fair Use, and that all non-commercial use is presumptively Fair [Use]. That is not to say that all such use is Fair Use, but it means that copyright holders must show a court, to the court's satisfaction, why a use should not be presumed Fair. In contrast, a commercial infringement case starts off with the presumption that unauthorized use is infringing.
The story says that the rats have been on the island for a century.
Then it says that the exterminators killed 100 to 300 rats.
Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't a rat population given 100 years to grow without interference from humans number a lot more than 100 to 300 individuals by now? Or are they saying that the rat population was already held in check at 100 to 300 by the carrying capacity of the ecosystem?
After the rats, how about some pigeons (also known as the "gutter bird" and the "winged rat," according to Kent Brockman)?
Your real name wouldn't happen to be Tom Lehrer, would it?
Re:DeCSS has a legit. purpose when copyright expir
on
More Details on the CBDTPA
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Under the Supreme Court ruling in the Betamax decision, DeCSS would be legal for the same reason that VCRs are. That is, a claim of contributory copyright infringement cannot be used to tax or ban a technology that has a significant legitimate use. For VCRs, timeshifting was one such use. For DeCSS, inclusion of short movie clips or stills in multimedia movie reviews could well be such a use. (DeCSS was also supposedly an intermediate test step in producing a Linux-based DVD player, an application that most assuredly would satisfy the Supreme Court test.)
However, the anti-circumvention provisions in the DMCA seem expressly designed for the purpose of banning any lawful access or copying that the monopoly holder decides to interfere with. Thus, DeCSS is illegal - that is, until the courts get around to declaring the DMCA itself illegal (unConstitutional) on the grounds of conflicts with the First Amendment or the copyright clause (Article I, Section 8).
Re:You are absolutely wrong
on
SSSCA Hearing
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· Score: 1
You are absolutely right, and you can see this in the progression from the Betamax decision to the AHRA to the DMCA to the SSSCA.
Betamax decision: Supreme Court ruled against studios, said they had no right to ban a technology (the VCR) with a signficant legitimate use, even if it could also be used for infringement.
AHRA: Recording industry complained about DAT (maybe threatened a multi-billion lawsuit, too). Complaints and/or lawsuits should have been dismissed out of hand, based on ruling in Betamax case. Instead, Congress gave the record companies copy protection and digital audio recorder tax and digital audio media tax to make them go away and leave home recording alone.
AHRA explicitly exempted computers and professional digital audio recorders, and was supposed to put an end to recording industry attacks on technology. Years later, the RIAA sued Diamond under the AHRA (and lost) in an attempt to block MP3 players. The record companies put restrictions into DVD-Audio, Super Audio CD, and pseudo-"CDs" that went far beyond the ones called for by the framework of the AHRA. And now the SSSCA is here to finish off the computer exemption.
DMCA: Congress mandated MacroVision, using SCMS as the precedent for affirmative copy protection. They also put in an Orwellian anti-circumvention provision that outlaws circumvention even when the underlying copying is legal.
(Jack Valenti, the guy who compared VCRs to the Boston Stranger, said that outlawing circumvention only in cases of infringement would not be "acceptable". That is like saying that private car ownership is not "acceptable" to banks because cars could be used for aiding bank robberies. But Clinton and the Congress apparently listened to Valenti rather than to more sane voices like those of Representative Boucher.)
There were lots of words to the effect of how the Internet would be safe for selling music and movies if only the DMCA was passed.
The DMCA does contain language to the effect that -- with the exception of MacroVision -- it does NOT require affirmative recognition of copy protection systems. This was supposed to be the "bright spot".
After the DMCA passes, it got used against people who were involved with making DVD player applications for Linux, against a security researcher at Princeton University doing research that is supposedly protected under the DMCA itself, and against a visiting Russian programmer.
NO legal sources of downloadable major movies appeared on the Internet -- surprise, surprise. (Even were the movies unprotected, legal, high-quality, and free, it would be too much hassle for most people to download them. Movies are BIG.)
The only major label services that appeared were so crippled that nobody in their right mind would pay to use them. The Dixie Chicks and/or their manager, upon discovering the rates the record companies intended to pay for online music, complained that the record labels were not any better than Napster.
SSSCA: Mandatory "technological protection" up the wazoo, supposedly in the name of providing the same benefits that the DMCA was going to provide. Effectively eliminates the computer exemption of the AHRA and the "no requirement for devices to support copy protection other than SCMS/Macrovision" part of the DMCA. Makes NO provisions at all for the public's rights and consumer rights - not even the "this doesn't affect Fair Use" figleaf that you find in the DMCA.
Apple products aren't completely free of restrictions.
Macs featuring the DVD-ROM, Combo, and SuperDrive optical drives have the full range of DVD Forum restrictions people have come to know and to dislike.
The iPod will only auto-sync to one Mac at a time -- you can't use the auto-sync to transfer tunes from one Mac to another.
Copyrights are a form of government intervention in a free market. So are things like DMCA and UCITA that try to change the rules of the game such that a vendor can use the appearance of a sale, and yet retain a huge amount of control over the sold item without obtaining signed, informed, pre-sale agreement from the buyer.
If you are against government intervention as a matter of principle, you should logically be against copyright (or for minimally-restrictive copyrights), against the DMCA, against the SSSCA, against UCITA, and against the enforceability of non-signed "license agreements."
Favoring no government action to curb the most flagrant abuses is essentially a way of saying that you want the government to intervene in the market, but only as long as it sides against the public and against normal free trade.
[quote]
As bandwidth grows, and storage increases, no technology, with the possible exception of hardware protections (I for one think that widespread use of hardware protection would lead to an underground hardware market), copyright will not be able to survive.
[/quote]
Where noncommercial use is concerned, this may well be true -- especially if the copyright industries keep pushing this fallacious idea that legal protection alone is no good, and that only technologically-enforced corporate facism (which is what the SSSCA amounts to) can save the day. The American public isn't going to keep putting up with that forever.
But even if there were no copyright restrictions against noncommercial copying, commercial copyright (the ability to prevent competition, or to collect royalties from competitors) would be a very valuable incentive for the simple reason that many people prefer the convenience and packaging of prerecorded products. Cracking down on commercial infringers does not pose anywhere near the difficulty or the threat to our civil liberties that building a electronic police state to monitor and control everybody does.
For this reason, I conclude that commercial copyright is a useful concept in the broadband era, regardless of what you think about the viability of non-commercial copyright.
Producers often incorrectly mastered early CDs using recordings that had equalization adjustments for LPs. This, rather than flaws in CD technology, may have been responsible for many of the early "lack of warmth" complaints.
From what I've read, the pay version of Napster will feature copy-protected files that you can't burn to a CD-R without paying extra fees on top of the subscription fees.
I never used the free version of Napster, due to its questionable legal status. I might have been interested in a fully-above-board pay version of Napster with non-copy-protected files, but if they insist on using "secure" files, they can forget it.
Any technology that can reproduce an audio signal is vulnerable to the threat of in-band watermarks (SDMI, DVD-Audio) or notches (CopyCode). While the bulletin board posts that I have seen suggest that SACD producers are not using audible watermarking yet, that could change overnight.
The SACD "digital" watermarking scheme is interesting in that it is the only scheme out there that appears to pose any deterrent to commercial pirates. SACD watermarks are tied to properties of the pressing plants, so the "copy all the bits with professional gear" attack that works so well against DVD fails miserably against SACD.
Unfortunately, Sony's implementation seems to rule out home recording to SACD. When a SACD player sees a watermark mismatch, it refuses to play the disc. If Sony was really interested in putting a dent in commercial piracy, without targeting the Fair Use rights of home users, they could design SACD players so that the decks would play unverified discs, and at the same time light up indicators that say in effect, "this is not a genuine prerecorded SACD". People who saw such an indicator come on when playing a store-bought disc would have a strong self-interest in returning the counterfeit, while those who were playing home-made SACD compilations or LP -> SACD recordings could exercise judgement and ignore the indicator.
RMS has stated that he would prefer the abolition of all copyright, but in the absence of that, GPL is a way of turning copyright against its own (negative) purpose.
Ironically, the GPL provides the public with more protection than "public domain from day 1" would. While the copyright on a GPLed piece of code lasts, people who redistribute the binary form of the code are obligated to also pass on the source code or a pointer to the source code. Someone who takes a public domain work, modifies it or not, and redistributes it is under no obligation to help the recipient obtain the source code.
Libraries do not pay royalties when they lend out books, nor should they. The books, once purchased, are the libraries' property, and the copyright law (First Sale doctrine) explicitly states that after a sale, the copyright holder does not have the right to control the further distribution of a particular copy. (The record companies and software companies got a special exception for commercial rental carved out of the First Sale doctrine, but even in the case of CDs, public libraries have the right to lend them without permission or royalties.)
I might have been willing to pay a subscription fee for unlimited access to legal, high-quality, non-copy-protected downloads from a central server.
But I have absolutely no interest in paying for low-quality copy-protected files. Or in paying for copy-protected DVD-Audio discs, Super Audio CDs, SDMI-watermarked CDs, and CDs into which vendors have introduced defects meant to break CD recorders and computer CD-ROMs.
And I pay for my music. If the proposed service doesn't appeal to me, I can't imagine that it has any appeal to the Napster users whose #1 priority was getting commercial hits for free.
There is no fucking way that one guy (girl?) could write a c-compiler from scratch in a couple of days.
Particularly one whose optimizer is any good.
Maybe you could get the syntactic analyzer generated in two days with a lot of caffeine, no sleep, and lex/yacc. That still leaves semantic analysis (more than two days; take it from someone who's been there) and code generation. Writing a working code generator from scratch in two days would be a miracle; writing a highly optimizing one from scratch would be flat out impossible.
You raise a good point. Why can't a regular copyright statement (or public domain statement) do the job, and why do we need an "(o)" symbol that's cute, but that may have no legal standing?
First, let me say that the proposed EFF license is solving the wrong problem. They're going for something that's a complete parallel to the GPL, down to free commercial use. This is not going to attract established artists, given the differences between software and music, and the differences in how software developers and musicians get paid. You can make a living from GPLed software -- it is not clear that you can make a living from GPLed music.
If the EFF wants to get into the license writing business, they should go for a license that combines free non-commercial use ("don't fight potential customers - you never win") and narrowly tailored open business models for various commercial uses. For instance, "anyone may license this song for commercial distribution on CD upon payment of applicable royalties", or "broadcasters may play this song for free." Such a hybrid model has the advantage that it preserves the artist's income from commercial use and can provide a measure of protection against unwanted uses of recordings (e.g., for advertising). Making publishing non-exclusive (or less exclusive than it is today) would prevent the big record companies from standing in the way of progress (online sales of individual tracks; custom CD kiosks; multi-album DVDs) and make it harder for any one company to, by its own actions, keep an album out of print.
And they should drop the (o).
I do have some issues with your philosophical arguments.
You're committing the classic fallacy of the excluded middle. Either authors must have absolute control over works, or society must ensure that they have no control over works. But it doesn't work that way. The Founding Fathers made the decision that authors do not have property rights to their works, but that Congress can grant them exclusive (monopoly) rights for limited times as a means of promoting goals that are of benefit to society. This is not an intellectually dishonest position, but it is one that you dismiss by claiming that the only choices are either RMS's preference (i.e., no copyrights) or the unConstitutional, absolute copyrights that would likely be the preference of the copyright maximalists.
As for Free Speech, there is inherent tension between copyright monopolies and the First Amendment. This is accomodated in two ways: first by the Constitutional requirement that the (optional) copyright laws be a means of promoting the progress of the Arts and Sciences; second by provisions such as Fair Use that limit the aspects of the monopoly that could most seriously interfere with First Amendment rights. The Congress has broad authority in formulating copyright laws -- but not authority to grant copyrights for unlimited times, not authority to place private interests before public interests, and not authority to disregard the interaction with the First Amendment.
You are also equating a license that is written to work with contract and copyright law (the GPL) with so-called "licenses" whose goal is to bypass basic requirements for contract formation and create a "contract" where none exists.
Maybe you don't boycott, but I do. Any major-label CD with a copyright date of 2000 or later is an automatic no-buy, not because I use Napster (I don't), but because I don't care for SDMI and other such nonsense.
I have only made exceptions to this rule twice (where artists have released MP3s or kept their own copyrights). As a result, the major labels have lost many CD sales that would have been theirs for the taking -- if only they had been interested in serving customers rather than in treating them like criminals.
1. This is exactly what we do for Shakespeare, the Bible, and anything else old enough to have fallen into the public domain.
2. As long as you've got commercial copyright laws to prevent someone from profiting on an counterfeit copy of your book, I don't think you need to worry too much about non-commercial Internet copying. Even if you put the book out in unprotected electronic form, paper books are much more convenient to read than computer screens, and most people who are interested in the book would buy for this reason alone.
As RMS put it in one of his documents, money is a token representing property. If you make a counterfeit $20 bill, you are in effect shaving a small amount off the value of all the legitimate bills in circulation -- taking existing property from existing owners. If you copy a CD or a book, there is now one more copy of that work in the world, but you have not deprived people who already have the same work of their ability to enjoy it.
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The PC wasn't particularly open or standard when it came out. It was incompatible at a binary level with the Apple ][, the TRS-80, S-100 bus + CP/M OS machines, and other common microcomputers of the day.
The PC rode to success on IBM's mainframe dominance and the adage "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." The fact that it was possible to clone the PC was a side effect of a short time-to-market, and the failure of IBM to realize what letting Microsoft sell DOS elsewhere would really mean.
Once clones started going strong, IBM tried to take the PC platform proprietary again. IBM tried to switch PC expansion slots from the ISA bus to the Microchannel bus -- which would have let them use Microchannel patents to impose royalty taxes on all other PC makers. IBM also planned to replace DOS with OS/2.
The Daleks ran the Dalek Operating System (DOS), a descendant of the Quick-and-dirty Dalek Operating System (QDOS).
You didn't really think that the dominance of DOS was a result of Bill Gates' master plan, did you?
If enough citizens wanted to legalize the old, uncrippled Napster, and put enough pressure on Congress to do it, a law to do that would be perfectly legitimate. If people wanted to keep the old Napster illegal, believing it to be harmful to the long-term public interest, that would be OK too.
As Jefferson wrote with respect to the other type of monopoly granted under Article I, Section 8:
1. Fair Use does apply to digital media, even though there are both unConstitutional laws (*cough* DMCA *cough*) and copy prevention mechanisms to try to keep us from exercising it.
2. Fair Use does not mean that you can distribute unlimited numbers of copies of anything, without regards to context. The Supreme Court has said that non-commercial use is presumptively Fair -- not that it is always Fair. Also, since then, the Congress has pushed through the N.E.T. Act to make it illegal to distribute large numbers of infringing copies where distribution is not done for commercial advantage.
Stating that something is illegal does not make it so, either.
In the United States, the First Sale Doctrine covers most kinds of copyrighted works. It basically says that once a copyright holder sells or transfers a copy of a work, they have no rights to control further distribution of that copy. Just like when an auto dealer sells you a car, the dealer has no further right to control the resale or transfer of that car.
The music and software industries managed to get Congress to dent the First Sale Doctrine a little, so that it is illegal to commercially rent phonorecords (LPs, CDs, tapes, etc.) or software (other than video games) without the copyright holders' permission.
Other than that, I think it still stands.
In the Betamax case, the Supreme Court ruled that timeshifting is legal Fair Use, and that all non-commercial use is presumptively Fair [Use]. That is not to say that all such use is Fair Use, but it means that copyright holders must show a court, to the court's satisfaction, why a use should not be presumed Fair. In contrast, a commercial infringement case starts off with the presumption that unauthorized use is infringing.
Then it says that the exterminators killed 100 to 300 rats.
Maybe I'm missing something, but wouldn't a rat population given 100 years to grow without interference from humans number a lot more than 100 to 300 individuals by now? Or are they saying that the rat population was already held in check at 100 to 300 by the carrying capacity of the ecosystem?
Under the Supreme Court ruling in the Betamax decision, DeCSS would be legal for the same reason that VCRs are. That is, a claim of contributory copyright infringement cannot be used to tax or ban a technology that has a significant legitimate use. For VCRs, timeshifting was one such use. For DeCSS, inclusion of short movie clips or stills in multimedia movie reviews could well be such a use. (DeCSS was also supposedly an intermediate test step in producing a Linux-based DVD player, an application that most assuredly would satisfy the Supreme Court test.)
However, the anti-circumvention provisions in the DMCA seem expressly designed for the purpose of banning any lawful access or copying that the monopoly holder decides to interfere with. Thus, DeCSS is illegal - that is, until the courts get around to declaring the DMCA itself illegal (unConstitutional) on the grounds of conflicts with the First Amendment or the copyright clause (Article I, Section 8).
You are absolutely right, and you can see this in the progression from the Betamax decision to the AHRA to the DMCA to the SSSCA.
Betamax decision: Supreme Court ruled against studios, said they had no right to ban a technology (the VCR) with a signficant legitimate use, even if it could also be used for infringement.
AHRA: Recording industry complained about DAT (maybe threatened a multi-billion lawsuit, too). Complaints and/or lawsuits should have been dismissed out of hand, based on ruling in Betamax case. Instead, Congress gave the record companies copy protection and digital audio recorder tax and digital audio media tax to make them go away and leave home recording alone.
AHRA explicitly exempted computers and professional digital audio recorders, and was supposed to put an end to recording industry attacks on technology. Years later, the RIAA sued Diamond under the AHRA (and lost) in an attempt to block MP3 players. The record companies put restrictions into DVD-Audio, Super Audio CD, and pseudo-"CDs" that went far beyond the ones called for by the framework of the AHRA. And now the SSSCA is here to finish off the computer exemption.
DMCA: Congress mandated MacroVision, using SCMS as the precedent for affirmative copy protection. They also put in an Orwellian anti-circumvention provision that outlaws circumvention even when the underlying copying is legal.
(Jack Valenti, the guy who compared VCRs to the Boston Stranger, said that outlawing circumvention only in cases of infringement would not be "acceptable". That is like saying that private car ownership is not "acceptable" to banks because cars could be used for aiding bank robberies. But Clinton and the Congress apparently listened to Valenti rather than to more sane voices like those of Representative Boucher.)
There were lots of words to the effect of how the Internet would be safe for selling music and movies if only the DMCA was passed.
The DMCA does contain language to the effect that -- with the exception of MacroVision -- it does NOT require affirmative recognition of copy protection systems. This was supposed to be the "bright spot".
After the DMCA passes, it got used against people who were involved with making DVD player applications for Linux, against a security researcher at Princeton University doing research that is supposedly protected under the DMCA itself, and against a visiting Russian programmer.
NO legal sources of downloadable major movies appeared on the Internet -- surprise, surprise. (Even were the movies unprotected, legal, high-quality, and free, it would be too much hassle for most people to download them. Movies are BIG.)
The only major label services that appeared were so crippled that nobody in their right mind would pay to use them. The Dixie Chicks and/or their manager, upon discovering the rates the record companies intended to pay for online music, complained that the record labels were not any better than Napster.
SSSCA: Mandatory "technological protection" up the wazoo, supposedly in the name of providing the same benefits that the DMCA was going to provide. Effectively eliminates the computer exemption of the AHRA and the "no requirement for devices to support copy protection other than SCMS/Macrovision" part of the DMCA. Makes NO provisions at all for the public's rights and consumer rights - not even the "this doesn't affect Fair Use" figleaf that you find in the DMCA.
Apple products aren't completely free of restrictions.
Macs featuring the DVD-ROM, Combo, and SuperDrive optical drives have the full range of DVD Forum restrictions people have come to know and to dislike.
The iPod will only auto-sync to one Mac at a time -- you can't use the auto-sync to transfer tunes from one Mac to another.
Copyrights are a form of government intervention in a free market. So are things like DMCA and UCITA that try to change the rules of the game such that a vendor can use the appearance of a sale, and yet retain a huge amount of control over the sold item without obtaining signed, informed, pre-sale agreement from the buyer.
If you are against government intervention as a matter of principle, you should logically be against copyright (or for minimally-restrictive copyrights), against the DMCA, against the SSSCA, against UCITA, and against the enforceability of non-signed "license agreements."
Favoring no government action to curb the most flagrant abuses is essentially a way of saying that you want the government to intervene in the market, but only as long as it sides against the public and against normal free trade.
[quote]
As bandwidth grows, and storage increases, no technology, with the possible exception of hardware protections (I for one think that widespread use of hardware protection would lead to an underground hardware market), copyright will not be able to survive.
[/quote]
Where noncommercial use is concerned, this may well be true -- especially if the copyright industries keep pushing this fallacious idea that legal protection alone is no good, and that only technologically-enforced corporate facism (which is what the SSSCA amounts to) can save the day. The American public isn't going to keep putting up with that forever.
But even if there were no copyright restrictions against noncommercial copying, commercial copyright (the ability to prevent competition, or to collect royalties from competitors) would be a very valuable incentive for the simple reason that many people prefer the convenience and packaging of prerecorded products. Cracking down on commercial infringers does not pose anywhere near the difficulty or the threat to our civil liberties that building a electronic police state to monitor and control everybody does.
For this reason, I conclude that commercial copyright is a useful concept in the broadband era, regardless of what you think about the viability of non-commercial copyright.
Producers often incorrectly mastered early CDs using recordings that had equalization adjustments for LPs. This, rather than flaws in CD technology, may have been responsible for many of the early "lack of warmth" complaints.
I never used the free version of Napster, due to its questionable legal status. I might have been interested in a fully-above-board pay version of Napster with non-copy-protected files, but if they insist on using "secure" files, they can forget it.
The SACD "digital" watermarking scheme is interesting in that it is the only scheme out there that appears to pose any deterrent to commercial pirates. SACD watermarks are tied to properties of the pressing plants, so the "copy all the bits with professional gear" attack that works so well against DVD fails miserably against SACD.
Unfortunately, Sony's implementation seems to rule out home recording to SACD. When a SACD player sees a watermark mismatch, it refuses to play the disc. If Sony was really interested in putting a dent in commercial piracy, without targeting the Fair Use rights of home users, they could design SACD players so that the decks would play unverified discs, and at the same time light up indicators that say in effect, "this is not a genuine prerecorded SACD". People who saw such an indicator come on when playing a store-bought disc would have a strong self-interest in returning the counterfeit, while those who were playing home-made SACD compilations or LP -> SACD recordings could exercise judgement and ignore the indicator.
Ironically, the GPL provides the public with more protection than "public domain from day 1" would. While the copyright on a GPLed piece of code lasts, people who redistribute the binary form of the code are obligated to also pass on the source code or a pointer to the source code. Someone who takes a public domain work, modifies it or not, and redistributes it is under no obligation to help the recipient obtain the source code.
Libraries do not pay royalties when they lend out books, nor should they. The books, once purchased, are the libraries' property, and the copyright law (First Sale doctrine) explicitly states that after a sale, the copyright holder does not have the right to control the further distribution of a particular copy. (The record companies and software companies got a special exception for commercial rental carved out of the First Sale doctrine, but even in the case of CDs, public libraries have the right to lend them without permission or royalties.)
I might have been willing to pay a subscription fee for unlimited access to legal, high-quality, non-copy-protected downloads from a central server.
But I have absolutely no interest in paying for low-quality copy-protected files. Or in paying for copy-protected DVD-Audio discs, Super Audio CDs, SDMI-watermarked CDs, and CDs into which vendors have introduced defects meant to break CD recorders and computer CD-ROMs.
And I pay for my music. If the proposed service doesn't appeal to me, I can't imagine that it has any appeal to the Napster users whose #1 priority was getting commercial hits for free.
Particularly one whose optimizer is any good.
Maybe you could get the syntactic analyzer generated in two days with a lot of caffeine, no sleep, and lex/yacc. That still leaves semantic analysis (more than two days; take it from someone who's been there) and code generation. Writing a working code generator from scratch in two days would be a miracle; writing a highly optimizing one from scratch would be flat out impossible.
First, let me say that the proposed EFF license is solving the wrong problem. They're going for something that's a complete parallel to the GPL, down to free commercial use. This is not going to attract established artists, given the differences between software and music, and the differences in how software developers and musicians get paid. You can make a living from GPLed software -- it is not clear that you can make a living from GPLed music.
If the EFF wants to get into the license writing business, they should go for a license that combines free non-commercial use ("don't fight potential customers - you never win") and narrowly tailored open business models for various commercial uses. For instance, "anyone may license this song for commercial distribution on CD upon payment of applicable royalties", or "broadcasters may play this song for free." Such a hybrid model has the advantage that it preserves the artist's income from commercial use and can provide a measure of protection against unwanted uses of recordings (e.g., for advertising). Making publishing non-exclusive (or less exclusive than it is today) would prevent the big record companies from standing in the way of progress (online sales of individual tracks; custom CD kiosks; multi-album DVDs) and make it harder for any one company to, by its own actions, keep an album out of print.
And they should drop the (o).
I do have some issues with your philosophical arguments.
You're committing the classic fallacy of the excluded middle. Either authors must have absolute control over works, or society must ensure that they have no control over works. But it doesn't work that way. The Founding Fathers made the decision that authors do not have property rights to their works, but that Congress can grant them exclusive (monopoly) rights for limited times as a means of promoting goals that are of benefit to society. This is not an intellectually dishonest position, but it is one that you dismiss by claiming that the only choices are either RMS's preference (i.e., no copyrights) or the unConstitutional, absolute copyrights that would likely be the preference of the copyright maximalists.
As for Free Speech, there is inherent tension between copyright monopolies and the First Amendment. This is accomodated in two ways: first by the Constitutional requirement that the (optional) copyright laws be a means of promoting the progress of the Arts and Sciences; second by provisions such as Fair Use that limit the aspects of the monopoly that could most seriously interfere with First Amendment rights. The Congress has broad authority in formulating copyright laws -- but not authority to grant copyrights for unlimited times, not authority to place private interests before public interests, and not authority to disregard the interaction with the First Amendment.
You are also equating a license that is written to work with contract and copyright law (the GPL) with so-called "licenses" whose goal is to bypass basic requirements for contract formation and create a "contract" where none exists.
Cassette sales are down (no big surprise there, and you can hardly blame Napster).
Album sales are up.
I have only made exceptions to this rule twice (where artists have released MP3s or kept their own copyrights). As a result, the major labels have lost many CD sales that would have been theirs for the taking -- if only they had been interested in serving customers rather than in treating them like criminals.
2. As long as you've got commercial copyright laws to prevent someone from profiting on an counterfeit copy of your book, I don't think you need to worry too much about non-commercial Internet copying. Even if you put the book out in unprotected electronic form, paper books are much more convenient to read than computer screens, and most people who are interested in the book would buy for this reason alone.
As RMS put it in one of his documents, money is a token representing property. If you make a counterfeit $20 bill, you are in effect shaving a small amount off the value of all the legitimate bills in circulation -- taking existing property from existing owners. If you copy a CD or a book, there is now one more copy of that work in the world, but you have not deprived people who already have the same work of their ability to enjoy it.