I hate to say this, but the US is in deep troubble at least for the next 2-8 years. With fiat money, way over extended housing debt, heavy bond debt, an account deficit of 7%, and now the carry trade unwinding behind 100's of trillions (with a T) in derivatives contracts - it won't be long before all freakin satanic hell breaks loose in US financial markets.
The bad news, is that I don't think there is anything that can stop an economic collapse, the good news is that I think after the collapse the US has the highest potential of any country in the world for a spectacular recovery assuming that people don't panic and impose all sorts of controls that take away economic freedoms.
(PS, those people who have written off gold and silver as barbaric immature monitary systems are going to be in for a very rude awakening, he he)
Terrorists can't gain military strategic advantage, so they attempt to gain advantage by exploiting media hype.
The media has an incentive to hype things, because it gets paid by the "number of eyeballs" value rather than by the service value of the news.
However the media would have no incentive to focus their resources toward grabbing eyeballs if competitors could copy their productions, because their effort would result in more up front costs without a competitive benefit.
Therefore if copyrights were scrapped, the media would be forced to neutralize hype, maximize services, and greatly increase the costs that terrorists must pay to communicate their message.
.... That said, I think we also need to recognize that the stuff we love takes time, energy, money, and highly skilled and talented people to create, that they do so on a risk/reward basis, and that most of them need to pay the rent just like we do.
Nonsense, the question isn't wether creators will be compensated, the question is wether incentive will center arround information related controlls or information related services. For chrissake, give a freaking concert or something, don't microregulate how everyone on the planet uses information at their disposal. speaking of extremisim? What the hell, everyone else on the planet makes money without a personal government backed distribution monopoly.
Lawrence Lessig is awesome. If you don't know anything about him (or even if you do), I highly recommend watching his last talk given in 2002. You can hear him and see his slides here. Even if you're not into legal things like copyright (like me) his speech is fascinating and compelling.
No he's not. I don't know much about him and I dont need to other than the fact that his solution is not to get rid of copyrights but to make them "nicer". While this sounds "reasonable", the media industry has simply used him to pasify and tease us with unrealistic solutions while they go for total information controll. Historically the same thing happened with the people who wanted a compromise between the free states and the slave states, their insistence on a nicer form of slavery instead of abolition simply sidesteped the issue and delayed justice and prolonged pain for millions of people and in the end made those who wanted a compromise usless and irrelavent parasites.
So please let me explain the ugly truth: this is an all or nothing game. Either the copyright lords are going to control how we use information, or they aren't. Sorry charlie, there is no nice way out there is no happy middle ground. Get used to it, wake up and smell the hummis, pull your head out, quit being stupid! All or nothing. Sony, the RIAA, and MPAA seem to understand this perfectly well, their actions are obvious, they plan on it, they act on it, they clearly understand it, so why don't we?
They lay their cables on public property, with the consent of the government, on the condition that they provide a public service to all people equally... and now they're being ALLOWED to violate that? How can Congress justify that? Obviously they're is getting some cheddar for it, but don't they usually PRETEND they aren't?
First off, there is an assumption here that the government is entitled to control public resources by default, and regulate people who use them by implication. That's a huge assumption and it's not true.
Second off, there is the assumption here that telcos are doing some evil deed that needs to be stopped. That is also a huge assumption. They financed the lines, not Google. If Google thinks they have a better plan, then lay some phone lines and do it. God only knows Google has the money.
Third off, there is the assumption that market forces on their own are "untrustworthy" to stop such scheems. Nonsense. After Compaq reverse engineered the IBM bios and freed the x86 architecture, did we need the government to step in and forbid IBM from making the IBM PS/2 to try and bypass the open x86 interface. Hell no, the IBM PS/2 was a flop and they lost a billion dollars as the market told them to go to hell. Same here. I would love nothing more than to see the telcos try this and have their ass kicked in the marketplace to only be come eternally irrelavent.
Then again, maybe the telco's know this, so this is just a reverse psycology play for the phone co's to get the government to regulate them into doing something that they could never do on their own.
Fourth off, there is no understanding here of how monopolies work, only a herd mentality. The rail road regulations didn't stop the abuses of the railroad barrons, they only just raised the regulatory costs of getting into the rail business which consolidated their power. It is not a cooncidence that the passanger rail business in the USA is stagnent to this day.
In sum, net neutrality is anything but "neutral" and it just plain sucks.
After all, they FUD all their competitors, why not their customers. Fear monger them to give up freedom over their information so DRM signed installs can "protect" them from all those nasty evil viruses.
But with lower range frequencies it is easier to calculate out the source from the overlaping rf waves. Sorta like if two people throw rocks in a pond, you can figure out the first rocks wave pattern by subtracting out the interference of the 2nd rocks wave pattern. Also, if the low end spectrum is that valuable - then locking it into old rf that uses the spectrum inefficently makes no sense, but is exactly what happens when government agencies regulate it and protect rf entrenched monopolies. Finally, even when using old RF technology, there is plenty of natural incentive not to create any more than the minimal amount of interference - because that interference makes both sources un-useable. I don't know about the EU, but in the US the existence of the FCC has far more to do with things like regulating Janet Jacksons wardrobe malfunction than allocating limited spectrum resources for the public benefit.
You can't have a market, till you also have a scarcity. Here the scarcity is not in spectrum, but in technology that can distinguish spectrum. Physics wise, spectrum is no different than light and very similar to sound. If a EU tried to create a market of certain colors that people could trade or own a monopoly on, would we see this as a healthy market or even just? FYI, the spectrum market is not about free markets, but maintaining RF control. This is just a way of getting 3rd partys to have "skin in the game" to keep the system proped up.
The fact is that we are post industrial revolution, and are just starting to be post information age which means that people should be more than able to take care of themselves with only a few hours of work per week. The reason that is not so is because we are having our freedoms nickeled and dimed away almost as fast as human productivity increases. Not to mention all the sosial systems in place that reward lazyness, and all the financial banking systems in place that reward overindebetedness by loaning new money into circulation faster than people's productivity increases the currency's value.
The real issue here has nothing to do with the performance and capabilities of the cell processor. The real issue is, can I make a copy, contract out my own fab, and make it without anyone elses permission. If I can, then it will be successfull, if I can't then it is just another proprietary technology that won't give the end user any real advantage over the long term - and thus no real reason to switch from more commoditized technologies.
The thing that made silicon valley was neither money nor nerds. In fact, when it started out it didn't have much of either. The thing that really made silicon valley was Non Proprietary Technology. That is what made it. That is All that made it. The rest followed naturally.
The regulatory environment in California (back then), the free market economy (back then), and engineers that were willing to walk out the door and not put up with the corporate overloards that got greedy and tried to fence off the technology they developed from the rest of the world. All combined to create a technology meca free from proprietary controll.
The truth is that any geography and any nation that is willing to embrace liberty, and throw off the proprietary crap attitude will have what it takes to succede. Chances are that they won't though, because when most of them look at thechnology they look at the means (tech and money) as the end in itself, when the end in itself is really liberty and independence from controll, be it political, financial, or technological.
Open source is about way more than free software. It is about the fact that the service and support value of software is becoming more valuable than the commodity value of software as society enters the information age. The falure to accept that is either deciving, a set up, or just a plin falure to understand the future of the industry. Perhaps it's just denial, a refusal to see outside the Microsoft box.
Uh, excuse me, but I thought you might like to be informed that if they already have a Linux box then they don't need to install software to discover the utility of free software.
Actually, I wouldn't be supprised if that is what's driving this. They need to lock down their boxes to make sure that their employees don't discover the utility of free software (like firefox). How in the world will they convince customers to use IE when they can't even convince their own employees? How in the world will they be able to expect big brother corporate overloards to impose microsoft drm^H^H^H "solutions" on every box, when they can't even control boxes on their own network? In the end we should learn a lesson from this. Just as proprietary software requires an environment of coercion and control to survive internally, it is also required to survive in society at large as well.
I don't think most people understand how evil patnets really are. While we have all herd the theory of how patents supossedly help small inventors, and how pharma R&D would supposedly never happen without patents, what we never hear are things like how African nations were sued in the world court for trying to make generic AIDS medications - locking out millions who were dying. We never see story about the millions of inventors who are locked out of using inventions cause of legal and royality costs, we never hear about how most of these inventions were natural progressions that were likely to be invented anyhow, what about RIM vs blackberry, what about one click. People keep eating the rotten fruit, but refuse to admit that the tree is rotten.
We can see all the evil that happened when the industrial revolution forced the commoditisation of the labor force and the violent death of the US plantation system. Patents are also a false property right, and when they become commoditized - breaking free will likely cost the lives of billions!
Please, this is not a troll. I renember reading that back in the 70's, somebody got a bunch of companies together to try and buy an unused Atlas rocket from the government and form a private space program - NASA killed it. Do I even need to mention the cost and problems with the space shuttle, or the meter to feet conversion disaster of the mars mission, or the lenzing error on the hubble telescope. The simple truth is that by being there, they make it so that nobody else in private enterprise wants to act. For chrissake, why did a private millionaire space tourists need to go to Russia? Why did the X-prize happen without NASA at all? The writing has been on the wall for a long time, the future of space is here and it is not NASA.
Killing NASA will not kill the geniuses who work at NASA, all it will do is shut down the bureauocrats while the talent finds ways to be applied thru the rest of the private market.
... but I don't really think that was the theory the Iraq war was launched on.
It should be. The bottom line is that the internet and the information age are exposing US cluture to the rest of the world in a big way. It is difficult for even the US government to deal with the internet, but I think that many don't understand that for Islamic countries like Iran, Saudi, and Egypt - it is a complete and absolute culture shock. Countries like Iran and radical sects just didn't decide to lash out at us one day because we were jerks (even though the US gov hasn't been a saint). They lashed out at us because to them, their culture and belief systems are under seige by the western world. The unrestricted free flow of ideas and information is very very threatening to the power of the overloards in these cultures.
So the solution IMHO is to saturate these cultures with such an unyielding and unrelenting free flow of information, that those countering give up in exhaustion. In Iraq the information battle shouldn't be fought with the enemy, but by making sure people in Iraq have unrestricted and uninhibited information access. In addtion, contrary to popular belief, the copyright system contributes to terrorisim. A copyright media system rewards hype over substance, and creates an idea refuge for terrorists to exploit with campaigns of terror that get whipped up out of controll by media hype. By removing copyright controlls (which is the US way of controlling information), you also remove the hype that they exploit.
I read three tomes by Robert A. Caro on Lyndon Johnson. At some point in time electricity company was forced to sell electricity at a lower rate, which the company strongly opposed to. The government won, and later the company had to admit that they made much more profit.
I agree that tired traffic is not on their best interest, but in a normal market when big companies can't act in their own best interest, small companies and alternatives fill in the void. We don't need the government acting in the best interest of mega corps while the little guys linger. And if people can't muster up enough energy to create viable alternatives, that is likely a far more compelling arguemnt that the problem isn't that bad, or that regulations are stiffling, than it is that the gov needs to micro-controll large companies for the sake of the social good.
I don't think people understand what they're asking for. If the gov has the power to microcontroll the big guys, then they by default have 10 times the power to mess with us and the small guys.
Many companies hoard pools of patents without ever having the intent of suing people, but only using them as self defense if they get sued. All and all, this limits the power of the defenders just as much as the patent trolls, but doesn't solve the fundamental problem with patents. If 10 million people own patents, and everybody uses those patents, then each person get's the value of one patent, but has to pay the license of 10 million patents. On the other hand, if there were no patents, then each inventor would loose royalities over one patent, but gain the value of 10 million patents. It is stupid to treat petnets like they have the natural limits of physical property. Patents simply won't work in a world of 5 billion people where everybody is nickeling, diming, and suing each other to death. That is, except to reward big large giants at the expense of killing off small innovators.
Please, we all know the standard copyright "party line", we've had it shoved down our throat for years, it's be impossible not to know it.
You feel that way because you own no original works. You are almost certainly not an inventor of the property to which you refer (meaning you have no investment in it's invention) which is why you feel so cavalier about copying.
Actually I do, I invent a lot, and get paid a lot to invent. Copyrights and patents probably benefit me more than most people, just like beating people up wit baseball bats will benefit doctors more than most people. Do you invent? All inventors and creators know that the best innovators are the best coppiers (or they are liars). IMHO, this is just a way of attacking the source to avoid dealing with the facts.
However, your point is a distraction. At the core, the argument is not about taking a copy -- it's about stealing an invention and competing with the inventor.
No, your point is a distraction. The fact is that is someone copies something I create, then that immediately give's me a competitive advantage, a reputation advantage, and a fisrt mover advantage. Does it give me a monopoly on distribution? No, but so what that's not a right. There are plenty of ways to generate revenue with out a monopoly, the rest of the world does it, why can't you?
Why prohibit competiting with the original inventor? It's like this:
1) You work for several days/months/years to discover/invent a product, incurring great expense (time, money, etc.) along the way.
2) You offer your product for sale.
3) I offer your product for sale, at a much lower price (after all, my research and development costs were zero!)
4) Because my product is lower priced, "my" product sells well but you go out of business.
Now, are you feeling inspired to go invent the next great product?
That's an interesting theory, but in practice no one is an island, and neither is any invention. A creator gets a lot more value out of being able to freely copy and apply everyone elses creations then he would get out controlling everyone regarding his creations.
You see, it's about rewarding innovation and preserving the value of original works.
Don't patronize me, it's about the fact property doesn't exist to incentivise, it exists to allocate limited resources justly. While just properties create strong incentives, that doesn't mean that coerced incentives make just properties. When you impose copy controlls and call it a property it makes it so that the market centers arround information controll, where otherwise it would center arround information services. The whole reward/incentive thing is a red herring, because there are incentives either way. It's not about incentive, it's about what type of behavior gets rewarded. Information controlls reward bullies, information services reward helpers - don't believe me, just look at the RIAA vs mp3.com, or RedHat vs Microsoft, and so on.....
Obviously we should dissolve society so we'll stop having these "some system" arguments. Make it a free for all. My property rights is what I take out of your head with my club. Same with you. Much better than anything "some system" can come up with.
Obviously, rights exist inspite of systems not because of them. Obviously, there is a big difference between taking physical property which deprives the owner of the original and copying which doesn't. "Free for all"? for copyright monopolies, sure.
Easy to give when what you have is "borrowed" from others.
You mean "coppied", and since the greatest innovators are and always will be the greatest copiers - that's ok. But if you want me to return a copy of my copy to you, that will be fine too.
Sounds good. I'll take copies of your credit cards, birth certificate, passport, driver's license, etc.
You can probably get all those from companies who sell them anyhow, the problem isn't people having them, the problem is poorly designed security and people using them fradulently.
There are lots of other rights and protections in the US constitution that the Congress hates just as much, but didn't grow out of contoroll like copyrights did precicely because copyrights *are* fundamentally flawed. You can't tell people that they have this God given right to controll how others use information at their disposal, and then expcet them to not try and secure this "right". The only way that the copyright system can keep going is if it is constantly expanding it's powers into other peoples lives. It seems the RIAA and the MPAA understamd very clearly that this is an all or nothing game, so why can't we?
You're saying because some people abuse property rights nobody should have them?
You're saying that becuase some system calls something a property right, that it is. Please give me your address so I can have bubba pick you up pounce you in and deliver you to me as a slave property.
Please give me your home address. I think your right ot own property is "fairly stupid" and I should be free to take your stuff. Give me that freedom you hateful bastard!!!
Please feel free. You can take a *copy* of any property of mine that you see.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to say this, but the US is in deep troubble at least for the next 2-8 years. With fiat money, way over extended housing debt, heavy bond debt, an account deficit of 7%, and now the carry trade unwinding behind 100's of trillions (with a T) in derivatives contracts - it won't be long before all freakin satanic hell breaks loose in US financial markets.
The bad news, is that I don't think there is anything that can stop an economic collapse, the good news is that I think after the collapse the US has the highest potential of any country in the world for a spectacular recovery assuming that people don't panic and impose all sorts of controls that take away economic freedoms.
(PS, those people who have written off gold and silver as barbaric immature monitary systems are going to be in for a very rude awakening, he he)
Terrorists can't gain military strategic advantage, so they attempt to gain advantage by exploiting media hype.
The media has an incentive to hype things, because it gets paid by the "number of eyeballs" value rather than by the service value of the news.
However the media would have no incentive to focus their resources toward grabbing eyeballs if competitors could copy their productions, because their effort would result in more up front costs without a competitive benefit.
Therefore if copyrights were scrapped, the media would be forced to neutralize hype, maximize services, and greatly increase the costs that terrorists must pay to communicate their message.
In sum, copyrights promote terrorisim.
Nonsense, the question isn't wether creators will be compensated, the question is wether incentive will center arround information related controlls or information related services. For chrissake, give a freaking concert or something, don't microregulate how everyone on the planet uses information at their disposal. speaking of extremisim? What the hell, everyone else on the planet makes money without a personal government backed distribution monopoly.
No he's not. I don't know much about him and I dont need to other than the fact that his solution is not to get rid of copyrights but to make them "nicer". While this sounds "reasonable", the media industry has simply used him to pasify and tease us with unrealistic solutions while they go for total information controll. Historically the same thing happened with the people who wanted a compromise between the free states and the slave states, their insistence on a nicer form of slavery instead of abolition simply sidesteped the issue and delayed justice and prolonged pain for millions of people and in the end made those who wanted a compromise usless and irrelavent parasites.
So please let me explain the ugly truth: this is an all or nothing game. Either the copyright lords are going to control how we use information, or they aren't. Sorry charlie, there is no nice way out there is no happy middle ground. Get used to it, wake up and smell the hummis, pull your head out, quit being stupid! All or nothing. Sony, the RIAA, and MPAA seem to understand this perfectly well, their actions are obvious, they plan on it, they act on it, they clearly understand it, so why don't we?
First off, there is an assumption here that the government is entitled to control public resources by default, and regulate people who use them by implication. That's a huge assumption and it's not true.
Second off, there is the assumption here that telcos are doing some evil deed that needs to be stopped. That is also a huge assumption. They financed the lines, not Google. If Google thinks they have a better plan, then lay some phone lines and do it. God only knows Google has the money.
Third off, there is the assumption that market forces on their own are "untrustworthy" to stop such scheems. Nonsense. After Compaq reverse engineered the IBM bios and freed the x86 architecture, did we need the government to step in and forbid IBM from making the IBM PS/2 to try and bypass the open x86 interface. Hell no, the IBM PS/2 was a flop and they lost a billion dollars as the market told them to go to hell. Same here. I would love nothing more than to see the telcos try this and have their ass kicked in the marketplace to only be come eternally irrelavent.
Then again, maybe the telco's know this, so this is just a reverse psycology play for the phone co's to get the government to regulate them into doing something that they could never do on their own.
Fourth off, there is no understanding here of how monopolies work, only a herd mentality. The rail road regulations didn't stop the abuses of the railroad barrons, they only just raised the regulatory costs of getting into the rail business which consolidated their power. It is not a cooncidence that the passanger rail business in the USA is stagnent to this day.
In sum, net neutrality is anything but "neutral" and it just plain sucks.
After all, they FUD all their competitors, why not their customers. Fear monger them to give up freedom over their information so DRM signed installs can "protect" them from all those nasty evil viruses.
But with lower range frequencies it is easier to calculate out the source from the overlaping rf waves. Sorta like if two people throw rocks in a pond, you can figure out the first rocks wave pattern by subtracting out the interference of the 2nd rocks wave pattern. Also, if the low end spectrum is that valuable - then locking it into old rf that uses the spectrum inefficently makes no sense, but is exactly what happens when government agencies regulate it and protect rf entrenched monopolies. Finally, even when using old RF technology, there is plenty of natural incentive not to create any more than the minimal amount of interference - because that interference makes both sources un-useable. I don't know about the EU, but in the US the existence of the FCC has far more to do with things like regulating Janet Jacksons wardrobe malfunction than allocating limited spectrum resources for the public benefit.
You can't have a market, till you also have a scarcity. Here the scarcity is not in spectrum, but in technology that can distinguish spectrum.
Physics wise, spectrum is no different than light and very similar to sound. If a EU tried to create a market of certain colors that people could trade or own a monopoly on, would we see this as a healthy market or even just? FYI, the spectrum market is not about free markets, but maintaining RF control. This is just a way of getting 3rd partys to have "skin in the game" to keep the system proped up.
The fact is that we are post industrial revolution, and are just starting to be post information age which means that people should be more than able to take care of themselves with only a few hours of work per week. The reason that is not so is because we are having our freedoms nickeled and dimed away almost as fast as human productivity increases. Not to mention all the sosial systems in place that reward lazyness, and all the financial banking systems in place that reward overindebetedness by loaning new money into circulation faster than people's productivity increases the currency's value.
The real issue here has nothing to do with the performance and capabilities of the cell processor. The real issue is, can I make a copy, contract out my own fab, and make it without anyone elses permission. If I can, then it will be successfull, if I can't then it is just another proprietary technology that won't give the end user any real advantage over the long term - and thus no real reason to switch from more commoditized technologies.
The thing that made silicon valley was neither money nor nerds. In fact, when it started out it didn't have much of either. The thing that really made silicon valley was Non Proprietary Technology. That is what made it. That is All that made it. The rest followed naturally.
The regulatory environment in California (back then), the free market economy (back then), and engineers that were willing to walk out the door and not put up with the corporate overloards that got greedy and tried to fence off the technology they developed from the rest of the world. All combined to create a technology meca free from proprietary controll.
The truth is that any geography and any nation that is willing to embrace liberty, and throw off the proprietary crap attitude will have what it takes to succede. Chances are that they won't though, because when most of them look at thechnology they look at the means (tech and money) as the end in itself, when the end in itself is really liberty and independence from controll, be it political, financial, or technological.
Open source is about way more than free software. It is about the fact that the service and support value of software is becoming more valuable than the commodity value of software as society enters the information age. The falure to accept that is either deciving, a set up, or just a plin falure to understand the future of the industry. Perhaps it's just denial, a refusal to see outside the Microsoft box.
Uh, excuse me, but I thought you might like to be informed that if they already have a Linux box then they don't need to install software to discover the utility of free software.
And someone gave you an 'insightful'. Geez.
How petty.
they'll probably just install linux instead :-O
Actually, I wouldn't be supprised if that is what's driving this. They need to lock down their boxes to make sure that their employees don't discover the utility of free software (like firefox). How in the world will they convince customers to use IE when they can't even convince their own employees? How in the world will they be able to expect big brother corporate overloards to impose microsoft drm^H^H^H "solutions" on every box, when they can't even control boxes on their own network? In the end we should learn a lesson from this. Just as proprietary software requires an environment of coercion and control to survive internally, it is also required to survive in society at large as well.
I don't think most people understand how evil patnets really are. While we have all herd the theory of how patents supossedly help small inventors, and how pharma R&D would supposedly never happen without patents, what we never hear are things like how African nations were sued in the world court for trying to make generic AIDS medications - locking out millions who were dying. We never see story about the millions of inventors who are locked out of using inventions cause of legal and royality costs, we never hear about how most of these inventions were natural progressions that were likely to be invented anyhow, what about RIM vs blackberry, what about one click. People keep eating the rotten fruit, but refuse to admit that the tree is rotten.
We can see all the evil that happened when the industrial revolution forced the commoditisation of the labor force and the violent death of the US plantation system. Patents are also a false property right, and when they become commoditized - breaking free will likely cost the lives of billions!
Please, this is not a troll. I renember reading that back in the 70's, somebody got a bunch of companies together to try and buy an unused Atlas rocket from the government and form a private space program - NASA killed it. Do I even need to mention the cost and problems with the space shuttle, or the meter to feet conversion disaster of the mars mission, or the lenzing error on the hubble telescope. The simple truth is that by being there, they make it so that nobody else in private enterprise wants to act. For chrissake, why did a private millionaire space tourists need to go to Russia? Why did the X-prize happen without NASA at all? The writing has been on the wall for a long time, the future of space is here and it is not NASA.
Killing NASA will not kill the geniuses who work at NASA, all it will do is shut down the bureauocrats while the talent finds ways to be applied thru the rest of the private market.
In all fairness, they did it first. The RIAA was the one going arround saying illegal copying helps support underground terrorist orgs.
It should be. The bottom line is that the internet and the information age are exposing US cluture to the rest of the world in a big way. It is difficult for even the US government to deal with the internet, but I think that many don't understand that for Islamic countries like Iran, Saudi, and Egypt - it is a complete and absolute culture shock. Countries like Iran and radical sects just didn't decide to lash out at us one day because we were jerks (even though the US gov hasn't been a saint). They lashed out at us because to them, their culture and belief systems are under seige by the western world. The unrestricted free flow of ideas and information is very very threatening to the power of the overloards in these cultures.
So the solution IMHO is to saturate these cultures with such an unyielding and unrelenting free flow of information, that those countering give up in exhaustion. In Iraq the information battle shouldn't be fought with the enemy, but by making sure people in Iraq have unrestricted and uninhibited information access. In addtion, contrary to popular belief, the copyright system contributes to terrorisim. A copyright media system rewards hype over substance, and creates an idea refuge for terrorists to exploit with campaigns of terror that get whipped up out of controll by media hype. By removing copyright controlls (which is the US way of controlling information), you also remove the hype that they exploit.
I read three tomes by Robert A. Caro on Lyndon Johnson. At some point in time electricity company was forced to sell electricity at a lower rate, which the company strongly opposed to. The government won, and later the company had to admit that they made much more profit.
I agree that tired traffic is not on their best interest, but in a normal market when big companies can't act in their own best interest, small companies and alternatives fill in the void. We don't need the government acting in the best interest of mega corps while the little guys linger. And if people can't muster up enough energy to create viable alternatives, that is likely a far more compelling arguemnt that the problem isn't that bad, or that regulations are stiffling, than it is that the gov needs to micro-controll large companies for the sake of the social good.
I don't think people understand what they're asking for. If the gov has the power to microcontroll the big guys, then they by default have 10 times the power to mess with us and the small guys.
Many companies hoard pools of patents without ever having the intent of suing people, but only using them as self defense if they get sued. All and all, this limits the power of the defenders just as much as the patent trolls, but doesn't solve the fundamental problem with patents. If 10 million people own patents, and everybody uses those patents, then each person get's the value of one patent, but has to pay the license of 10 million patents. On the other hand, if there were no patents, then each inventor would loose royalities over one patent, but gain the value of 10 million patents. It is stupid to treat petnets like they have the natural limits of physical property. Patents simply won't work in a world of 5 billion people where everybody is nickeling, diming, and suing each other to death. That is, except to reward big large giants at the expense of killing off small innovators.
Please, we all know the standard copyright "party line", we've had it shoved down our throat for years, it's be impossible not to know it.
You feel that way because you own no original works. You are almost certainly not an inventor of the property to which you refer (meaning you have no investment in it's invention) which is why you feel so cavalier about copying.
Actually I do, I invent a lot, and get paid a lot to invent. Copyrights and patents probably benefit me more than most people, just like beating people up wit baseball bats will benefit doctors more than most people. Do you invent? All inventors and creators know that the best innovators are the best coppiers (or they are liars). IMHO, this is just a way of attacking the source to avoid dealing with the facts.
However, your point is a distraction. At the core, the argument is not about taking a copy -- it's about stealing an invention and competing with the inventor.
No, your point is a distraction. The fact is that is someone copies something I create, then that immediately give's me a competitive advantage, a reputation advantage, and a fisrt mover advantage. Does it give me a monopoly on distribution? No, but so what that's not a right. There are plenty of ways to generate revenue with out a monopoly, the rest of the world does it, why can't you?
Why prohibit competiting with the original inventor? It's like this: 1) You work for several days/months/years to discover/invent a product, incurring great expense (time, money, etc.) along the way. 2) You offer your product for sale. 3) I offer your product for sale, at a much lower price (after all, my research and development costs were zero!) 4) Because my product is lower priced, "my" product sells well but you go out of business. Now, are you feeling inspired to go invent the next great product?
That's an interesting theory, but in practice no one is an island, and neither is any invention. A creator gets a lot more value out of being able to freely copy and apply everyone elses creations then he would get out controlling everyone regarding his creations.
You see, it's about rewarding innovation and preserving the value of original works.
Don't patronize me, it's about the fact property doesn't exist to incentivise, it exists to allocate limited resources justly. While just properties create strong incentives, that doesn't mean that coerced incentives make just properties. When you impose copy controlls and call it a property it makes it so that the market centers arround information controll, where otherwise it would center arround information services. The whole reward/incentive thing is a red herring, because there are incentives either way. It's not about incentive, it's about what type of behavior gets rewarded. Information controlls reward bullies, information services reward helpers - don't believe me, just look at the RIAA vs mp3.com, or RedHat vs Microsoft, and so on.....
Obviously we should dissolve society so we'll stop having these "some system" arguments. Make it a free for all. My property rights is what I take out of your head with my club. Same with you. Much better than anything "some system" can come up with.
Obviously, rights exist inspite of systems not because of them. Obviously, there is a big difference between taking physical property which deprives the owner of the original and copying which doesn't. "Free for all"? for copyright monopolies, sure.
Easy to give when what you have is "borrowed" from others.
You mean "coppied", and since the greatest innovators are and always will be the greatest copiers - that's ok. But if you want me to return a copy of my copy to you, that will be fine too.
Sounds good. I'll take copies of your credit cards, birth certificate, passport, driver's license, etc.
You can probably get all those from companies who sell them anyhow, the problem isn't people having them, the problem is poorly designed security and people using them fradulently.
There are lots of other rights and protections in the US constitution that the Congress hates just as much, but didn't grow out of contoroll like copyrights did precicely because copyrights *are* fundamentally flawed. You can't tell people that they have this God given right to controll how others use information at their disposal, and then expcet them to not try and secure this "right". The only way that the copyright system can keep going is if it is constantly expanding it's powers into other peoples lives. It seems the RIAA and the MPAA understamd very clearly that this is an all or nothing game, so why can't we?
You're saying because some people abuse property rights nobody should have them?
You're saying that becuase some system calls something a property right, that it is. Please give me your address so I can have bubba pick you up pounce you in and deliver you to me as a slave property.
Please give me your home address. I think your right ot own property is "fairly stupid" and I should be free to take your stuff. Give me that freedom you hateful bastard!!!
Please feel free. You can take a *copy* of any property of mine that you see.