Patents and copyrights are really the anti-christ of free markets. They have nothing to do with freedom, and especially nothing to do with respect of property rights. From the outside, it simply amazes me to see time and time again how people treat them as if they were real property rights. It is almost as if I was living in an 1850's throwback, trying to prove that slavery was anti free market - "what's amater don't you believe in property rights? Don't you believe in the wealth and prosperity of American commerce? They have no incentive without it!" Those are the kind of arguments I get.
One researcher, 100 researchers, no diff... it's a big freakin world out there,
get it.
Even when they fuck up 40 times before finding something that works. Sure, maybe someone else could have thought it up too. Prove it!
Well well well, excuse me, but you're the one that favors imposing these massive restrictions on what kind of discoveries people can immitate based on faith that being
without patnets will never produce innovation, and that there is no motive or incentive
otherwise. Bullshit, you prove it, you're the one that wants to impose these loony restrictions - the burden of proof is on you! Hell the entire renissance happened
without a patnet and the first 100 years of the industrial revolution.... oh agony
to those poor starving inventors of the steam engine who only stopped innovating and competing after the law implemented patents.
He he, yeah poor starving researcher, without a patnet he might be forced to use his world renound status to go on the lecture circuit and $100,000 per speech. After all, we all know - they're only motivated by the money. After all, we all know that it would have never been discovered anyhow. After all, we all know it's always a one man effort without help from collaberation and cooperation that patents hinder. And those million who end up dead cuase of patent enforcement, oh well that's just R&D costs.....
FYI, patents are a personal monopoly granted by the government, not a natural law property right. They are not anything like regular property that has natural physical limits in supply and demand and no expiration date. Properties are about controlling limited resources, not about controlling people. They are not a valad property right any more than slaves on the plantation in 1850, and considering all the people they kill by locking out cures for diseases, and life saving innovations that were likely to happen in natural progression of things anyhow, they are agruably worse.
The most crazy part is that people say they promote R&D when patents really kill it. Patnets skew R&D so that researchers don't collaberate, and so that cheap inexpensive pratical cures to diseases are shuned and even attacked.
Seriously, if you steal my car I think I would be very violated and deprived of my transportation, but if you make a copy of it - hell have 10! The notion that copying and immitation is a form of stealing is bullshit morality, and the people who impose it are really the ones who are immoral.
First off, I don't blame the hyppies, I blame the oil industry who spent billions to make sure nuclear wouldn't be a comeptitive threat. The hyppies were just willing to go along with those who were being paid to lead the crowd,
Second off, I have an aunt who is involved with the project to disarm and downsizing the russian nuclear arsenal that has been going on since the end of the cold war. The russians are way on the way to retooling of their nuclear industry for energy production. They are building floating reatcors for India (it was even on slashdot), they are building or participating in building at least 20 nucelar reactors in China, not to mention Iran which has been in the news lately, and not to mention their home nuclear industry. Over the past decade uranium has gone up 10 times faster than other commodities, look up the 5 year stock chart for uranium miner: CCJ and compaire it to the NASDAQ or DOW.
An $11 pellet of standard 5% uranium the size of my thumb has the same energy of 3 barels of oil. Anyone who's been to the pump lately knows oil isn't even close.
Also, Iran has no problem trying to build one, what they have a problem with is trying to build a breeder reactor that is used to refine uranium. That's a lot different than just regular nuclear power.
Nuclear is taking off bigtime, even in the states. It is not government freebies that are driving it. It's obvious to anyone who looks.
It's already been proven that nuclear is the safest form of power time and time again, even without all these new cool designs.
It's already been proven that nuclear is the most environmentally safe power time and time again.
It's already been proven that nuclear is the cheapest if irrational regulations are left off.
It's already been proven that nuclear releases LESS radioactivity into the environment than other forms of major energy production like residue isotopes in coal.
If these haven't convinced people to embrace nuclear power, than nothing will. In my opinion, the best solution is to generate nuclear power in international waters at sea free from bureauocracy, taxes, and regulation - and sell hydrogen generated thru electrolosys back to the mainland. After all, the enxt generation of freedom is going to be at sea anyhow - so minus well make that the next frontier and make energy profites while at it too.
The problem is that society is entering the information age, but society has two models of what kind of age that should be. In one model, all information must be controlled like "intellectual ptoperty" and leveraged for unlimited growth and profit. In the other, all information should flow without restrictions, and money should be made from collaberation, services, customisation, and general things that use information to create value.
These are inherently and fundamentally incompatable. An anti-thesis to each other, and while you can't contoroll information with force - you can certainly attempt to bully, threaten, decieve, and sue - and this is exactly what is happening.
So the suits that are happening now, I'm sure are just barely scratching the surface - as companies on the "intellectual property" side start to loose real money, and real market share, and loose out technology wise to the "freedom is free markets" side. You can be sure they will almost certainly freak, and "pull a SCO" across every industry and every sector.
Also, as a note, a parrallel situation is also happening in the financial markets where industries and government are trying to controll and manipulate information on value and money for unlmited growth and profit too. This is about to explode as well.
So watch out, and go offshore if you can, becasue all freakin hell is about to break loose.
Thus, society would be denied the opportunity to purchase my artistically significant mud pies.
I cut this out because I think it gets to the meat of the issue here. In a way this statement makes my point because it touches on how copyrights distort the marketplace. Without copyrights, the media wouldn't be inclined to push so much hype, and their relative value would be less. Meanwhile, authors of techncal books (for example) would likely gain quite a reputation even if they didn't get any royality at all, and make up more than the difference in consutling and services. Artits might do more live concerts, or paint for pay (actually people making the big money from copyrights you always hear about is almost always the exception anyhow).
Because most knowledge and information relates to services that have value to society, society would not loose out on the production of usefull information, and creators would not loose out on money (contrary to popular belief). Of course some people would loose, like hollywood, but in all fairness they are overvalued anyhow.
You're forgetting that if the author isn't protected from theft, he/she will be less inclined to produce the culture that's being "stolen." Creation takes work and that work needs to be compensated otherwise it'll cease. Slavery arises when a man is required to work for nothing which from the jist of your post, is exactly what you think creators should be paid. After all, it costs them nothing to duplicate their work so why pay them?
It's not the protection from theft that's evil, it's the theft itself that's evil.
Theft is not defined by what one gains, but what one looses. The author still has his original copy. Now perhaps his publisher looses a monopoly over market share, than again, perhaps Ford loses monopoly over market share when Toyota enters the market. Perhaps Ford doesn't even have an incentive to make cars unless they have a monopoly over market share. But the taking away Ford's market share certainly doesn't make them a slave. Well the same is true with copyrights, if it costs nothing to "duplicate their work", then that is a compelling reason for them to redirect their resources to something else that has more value for society like live concerts, services, consulting, or whatever.
About slavery, the 1850's was a classic example of what happens when people take bogus property rights to their logical conclusion. Property rights are not a right to controll other people, but rather to controll limited resources. Society doesn't owe people personal monopolies, and for copyrights in the information age - shouldn't. If a creator is smart enough to impart their knowledge to usefull creations then they should certinly be smart enough to capitalize off of it without microregulating how everyone else in the world uses information at their disposal in the information age.
If I spend a year of my life developing something, why don't I have the right to control, on some level, how it can be used?
If I don't, why would I develop anything when it would be perfectly legal for a corporation to take it and sell it as their own?
That's not a fair example though. Maybe you sepnd your whole life working your fingers to the aching bone making mud pies too, that does not mean society owes you any sort of privelage. In fact it would be good that they wouldn't, because that would make it so that if you wanted wealth - you would engage in activites that offered more value to society vs forcing every one else to comply to "your mud pie terms". Well the same is true with copyrights, information has far more of a service value than a commodity value, so copyrights really get in the way of providing value to society.
Also, copyrights in practice are far more effective at controlling you than at controlling corporations. So if you had the right to copy things that corporations did, it would benefit you from them far more than them from you.
The substance of what you said has an implied presumption that when something is coppied, distributed, or even sold without the creators permission, then the creator/publishor is in some way violated. While I understand that's the theory, and we have all been spoonfeed that that is an "intellectual property" right, the reality is quite different.
While protected rights, naturally lead to incentives - protected incentives do not naturally lead to rights. Perhaps somebody feels violated when you freely copy, then again perhaps plantation masters feel violated if you steal, oops I mean free, slaves from the plantation. That is what I mean. Property and incentive are not an ends in themselves, to be just they need to derive from the real world - like the fact that not everybody can use the same resources at the same time, but with information they can!
Copyrights are particualrly evil because they have the effect of stealing away our culture and giving it to hollywood. They also have an effect, that to secure them, you need to microregulate the internet and everybody that uses it. They have an effect that leads to anti-trust behavior in large software companies, and tend to make the information itself more valuable then the people who provide the services. The cost of having them in the information age is simply too high and they can not survive the information age any more than micro-controll of the labor market (slavery) could survive the industrial revolution.
While I am sure there are risks to nano technology, I think the real force driving all this "concern" is plan and simple greed.
Nano technology is what's called a "disruptive" technology. That means that it will enable people to do things for pennies on the dollar that used to cost billions. Because of this it threatens what is called "barriers to entry" for many large corporations. According to business 101, the most profitable businesses have high barriers to entry that help keep competitors out and lock profits in.
The only problem is that when a company can't compete off of it's "natural" barriers to entry, then it's only option is to compete off of "regulatory" barriers to entry. Hence the strong incentives and financial pressure to make sure nano technology is a super overregulated industry before it even exits the starting gate.
So now all the other "concerns" about nano technology that keep poping up should be far more clear.
What it is really about is that a lot of the technologies used for space can also be used for military dominance. (like ICBM's) China and India know this, and so have engaged in a strong space program. The US knows this too, and so is getting back in the game to keep dominance over China.
Except that the united states started going through its industrial revolution in the late 1700s, and didn't abolish slavery until the late 1850s. Plus the whole bit where the rise of the factories just replaced legal slavery with debt slavery...
The pressure started in the 1700's, but it really came to a head in the 1850's after a speculative stock market crash involving beting on the future of industrial technology (sound familiar). And legal slavery is nothing like "debt slavery", as you call it - but funny you should mention that because currency is a type of information that stores value and relative transaction costs - and it's debt based manipulation by governments also can not survive the information age. That is very very very bad news for the debt overloaded US and the dollar as a future currency. Don't be supprised if the economy goes to hell shortly.
During the mid-90's Hong Kong produced over 300 features per year and had a yearly income of more than a bilion HK dollars. In 2004 the produced only 64 features because rampant piracy prevents studios from making money on film.
That's not a fair example though because the copyright system distortes the industry to begin with. For example, the money that went into those 236 features that weren't produced could have very arguably been redirected toward creating online content on the internet, or online services that provided 10 times more value to society.
A better example would be how UNIX was completely falling apart untill the GPL which nutralizes the copyright threat - mobilized behind GNU/Linux and has created the market uptake greater than the internet or the home PC combined.
Another example would be how IBM lost it's big patnet suit over the IBM compatable PC and shortly after such PC's completely took over the market place and created hundreds of billions of dollars worth of wealth that never existed before. Infact, better engineered competitor systems never really took off at all.
TCP vs Novell and Token Ring, the integreated circiut, and with countless pieces of software. A compaire and contrast battle has played out time and time again inspite of the predictions of the pro copyright and patent crowd. In almost every case, the most proprietary technology has lost out in the marketplace every time.
There are plenty of examples of this sort if you take the time to do the research.
All the examples I have seen come from the perspective "will hollywood make more money if the rules change" and not from the perspective "will this create more wealth and value in society". Things like the PC, TCP/IP, and Linux create value that directly influences peoples wealth and prosperity. Things like movies, are just entertainment - sure that plays a role, but not one to justify microregulating the internet to brow beat copyrights down everyones throat.
Quite right, if you take "production" to mean "copying". Unfortunately, this isn't production, it is simply distribution. The actual production of content still requires labour, which is (and will remain) a scarce resource.
I think that's the whole point of the information age though. The true model for success in the information age centers arround value added serivces, support, customisation, branding like google, live concerts, etc... - and not arround controlling distrubution. The latter gets in the way of the former, even though it is the former where there is more money to be made overall.
The way I see it is that they are the ones that want to coerce and impose these massive restrictions and impositions on what we can copy and immitate. The burden of proof is on them. Systems exist to serve people, not the status quo. The burden of proof really is on them at all times.
Prove that you should have freedom of speech? You'd be a fool to try because that would presuppose that I have the right to take it away under certain curcunstances to begin with.
Anyone who wants to understand false "property rights" only has to open up a history book and read about the 1850's. Just as the slave plantation system had to die for society to enter the industrial revolution, the copyright content controll systems need to die in order for society to enter the information age. And as other technologies make it easier to repliacte discoveries, patents will eventually need to die too.
Yes, slavery. They called it a property right, they screamed there was no incentive without it, they said it was responsible for great wealth and prosperity of American business and commerce. And it was all bunk, even though it was geniuses that were saying it.
Well the same is true with copyrights and patents. Anyone with an IQ over 20 can easially see that they are not anything like any other kind of incentive or free market property right. And most people with an IQ over 80 can see that inspite of the theory, that is is far more the exception that copyrights or patents help the small time creator than it is the rule.
In fact copyrights and patents are not only bunk, they are often pure evil. Like how copyrights have ripped apart american culture and replaced it with hollywood and ruined the persuit of knowledge in student text book industry, or like how thousands of patnets are sat on and not used for anything but to lock out competitors. Or how disputes and lawsuits in the world court involving AIDS patents arguably caused over a million people to be dead from AIDS in Africa who wouldn't have been otherwise. And now, for copyrights, they pratically want to shut down the internet and microregulate every technology chip maker in the US. Well I say F**k em, on the internet copyrights are dead and they don't even deserve the token support they are getting.
My point about the steel industry was relative to the time. And this...
it's because there was no profit motive for ANYBODY involved, except the owners in the government who grew rich by oppressing & mistreating their workers...
You answered your own question right there. There is always a profit motive, but government interference shifts it. Like with copyrights. There are no natural limits in supply and demand of information, so when government microregulates and creates some artifically then it has unnatural consequences like Microsoft and Hollywood - instead of centering profit arround services and value. In a copyright system, it would be natural for few little people to get rewarded as it centers arround monopoly and controll over distribution - oh hey, lookie what happened.
As far as free markets, you still don't get it, you don't succede by positioning yourself in a market when it's at it's peak. You succede by positioning yourself when it's emerging. And how could IBM or anyone else know that Linux was a real market and not a hippy movement, because free markets are about freedom first, markets second, when peoples have freedoms then they tend to use those in new and innovative ways to look out for their best interest and create markets. How funny, lookie what happeneed.
I thinkie you have the horsie before the carragie here problem. Property rights don't exist to incentivize people, property rights exist to deal with the fact that not everybody can controll the same things at the same time. The stability and justince in that system leads to an ownership incentive - but creating "(intellectual?) properties" out of thin air for the sake of property does not lead to stability and justice. The plantation system of 1850 had the same problem with slavery... what's the matter, don't you believe in property rights... don't you believe in the greatness and prosperity of American enterprise! Bullshit, free markets are about freedom first, profit second. Just because a bunch of cronies wine about something being a property right, doesn't mean that it is.
Re:Not so sure about this - I stil "don't get it"
on
What is Ruby on Rails?
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· Score: 0, Troll
Pontification. Ruby is a joy to work with. Get your hands dirty before making worthless posts.
No. This is exactly what I mean... how arrogant. There are a zillion languages out there. I don't want to sepnd all my time learning languages and frameworks, I already know dozens, I wnat to spend my time doing things. So far, it just looks like antoher layer, even after glossing over their "why use ruby", it still looks like another layer. In fact, the url likned to looked more like high level propaganda with sparse documentation with lots of quotes like "Rails is the most well thought-out web development framework I've ever used". Let me be the judge of that, please. If they're right, they have nothing to proove.
Ok, here's my understanding, please correct me (in simple non "high level" language for us pleons) if I am wrong. I'm am still happy to admit that I "don't get it"
My understanding is, you get these underlying languages that are complicated and messy, not intuitive, and have a bunch of unstandardized characteristics (or DOM's), and so much object orientation that the user has no clue as to how to grind down to the details. So to fix that, we add a layer on top of that called "ruby on rails" that hides the mess that you would otherwise be required to deal with. (or am I totally clueless here?)
Well anyhow, if so, wouldn't it just be better just to have the underlying language to be more imperitave and intuitive and standardized to begin with? No matter what kind of app you write, people always eventually half to start understanding the low levels to make things tick. It seems to me that much of the times these "innovations" allow people quickly and cleanly write things that have already been done, but for the real world - utility often requires imperitive and intuitive access to a low level to make new things work. It seems Ruby would just complicate that by adding another layer to go thru.
...In free markets, merit & usefulness matters -- if your software is good, then it will be used. If your software is a pile of crap hacked together by a kid that doesn't know what he's doing, then even if it's free crap... it's still crap.
You don't understand freedom. For example, in the old USSR they had steel mills that were for more advanced and far more larger then their western counterparts. They were superior by every measure, the russian space program also. But the reality was that they were useless because the western industries could adapt and change and grow to finance new ventures where the USSR couldn't. Linux was a free piece of crap in 93, now it's a high end enterprise system used by IBM, hp, and sun. People who figured that out in the mid 90's and held themselves accountable to Linux did very nicely and have far more utility in the marketplace than their competitors now.
....all of them have their merits, but NONE of them were chosen primarily based on cost.....
This also shows you don't get it. Free here has nothing to do with free as in cost. Hell I could charge $1000 for my Linux distro if I wanted to. Free has to do with freedom to copy and manipulate without liability. That freedom creates an accountability and growth stream that does for services what the industrial revolution did for production in a way that is unmanagable with colsed software. Nobody wants technology that stagnates as the rest of the world advances, free software guarantees that it is not pre-destined by forces outside your control.
The first way to tell that this is BS is to see if Microsoft is willing to guarantee Linux won't be sued for software patent infringement like IBM did. The fact is they won't and they don't want to. The deal here is that Microsoft has figured out that they can't beat Linux head on in the marketplace, so now they are trying to co-opt it. Watch out for the bullshit monster chasing after you and trying to give you a big fat kiss! I'm sure this is just the beginning.
Do not fall for it at all. Free software is inherently better than proprietary software because it is first of all free, and then and only then is it often better for technical or usage reasons. In free markets, freedom maters. None of the fundamentals have changed, you are what you hold yourself accountable to.
Japan got hit pretty hard in the 90's. But I think this will be far worse. The US has a lot more global investment, and foriegners who dump can do so without loosing the home they live in as well. I think it will get very ugly once people start cutting their loses and start moving their money into unleveraged commodities. Last year real-estate is SD went up 18% or so percent, this year it went up 2% with the decline starting in may (or so?). If things continue at their current rate, people will start to notice problems this next month or so, they will start to feel serious pain by christmas, and they will be in absolute panic by March 2006. The stock market, bond market, and dollar could be in serious troubble long before then and the fed will be able to do nothing about it because monitary policy usually takes 6 or more months to filter thru the economy.
IMHO, the real problem will not be the real-estate squeese, but the derivatives squeese that it's hooked to. The total notational value of derivative contracts is reported to be over 270 trillion dollars. All of that will become a liability if the shit hits the fan and would likely cause almost every financial institution acoss the globe to go under. If you start to hear about big derivative clearing problems in the news, panic like hell. It will make the great depression look like a birthday party.
Because of the things you said, hard real-estate crashes happen less often, but when they do happen - they hapen in a very harmfull way. There are some very omnious signs. Housing is starting to taper off, so banks are less willing to refi - making housing a lot less liquid than it used to be. Also, the national savings rate has been below zero lately - the lowest ever. This is also an omnious sign. 2/3'd of economic activity is from consumer spending which has also taken a sharp drop lately. There is a big threat that over leveraged housing will reduce comsumer spending which will lead to more layoffs and cutbacks which will lead to more overleveraged housing which will snowball when things start to crash.
The amount of low/defered/variable interest loans is another omnious sign. 1/3 of purchases in the last few years are investment homes, 2nd homes, or vacation homes that could easially tank the market if dumped. I think too many people see housing as no risk, I think they are in or a very harsh supprise. Also inflation is on the horizon. Usually that is good for housing because inflation relieves debt, but this time there is a lot of overseas wage pressure that will keep pay down and people are maxed out on debt, so inflation will raise prices before it relieves debt - squeesing people even more, and creating even more deflation. This is a classic symptom of stagflation, very very very bad for housing debt and the economy.
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Patents and copyrights are really the anti-christ of free markets. They have nothing to do with freedom, and especially nothing to do with respect of property rights. From the outside, it simply amazes me to see time and time again how people treat them as if they were real property rights. It is almost as if I was living in an 1850's throwback, trying to prove that slavery was anti free market - "what's amater don't you believe in property rights? Don't you believe in the wealth and prosperity of American commerce? They have no incentive without it!" Those are the kind of arguments I get.
One researcher, 100 researchers, no diff ... it's a big freakin world out there,
get it.
Even when they fuck up 40 times before finding something that works. Sure, maybe someone else could have thought it up too. Prove it!
Well well well, excuse me, but you're the one that favors imposing these massive restrictions on what kind of discoveries people can immitate based on faith that being without patnets will never produce innovation, and that there is no motive or incentive otherwise. Bullshit, you prove it, you're the one that wants to impose these loony restrictions - the burden of proof is on you! Hell the entire renissance happened without a patnet and the first 100 years of the industrial revolution .... oh agony
to those poor starving inventors of the steam engine who only stopped innovating and competing after the law implemented patents.
He he, yeah poor starving researcher, without a patnet he might be forced to use his world renound status to go on the lecture circuit and $100,000 per speech. After all, we all know - they're only motivated by the money. After all, we all know that it would have never been discovered anyhow. After all, we all know it's always a one man effort without help from collaberation and cooperation that patents hinder. And those million who end up dead cuase of patent enforcement, oh well that's just R&D costs.....
FYI, patents are a personal monopoly granted by the government, not a natural law property right. They are not anything like regular property that has natural physical limits in supply and demand and no expiration date. Properties are about controlling limited resources, not about controlling people. They are not a valad property right any more than slaves on the plantation in 1850, and considering all the people they kill by locking out cures for diseases, and life saving innovations that were likely to happen in natural progression of things anyhow, they are agruably worse.
The most crazy part is that people say they promote R&D when patents really kill it. Patnets skew R&D so that researchers don't collaberate, and so that cheap inexpensive pratical cures to diseases are shuned and even attacked.
Seriously, if you steal my car I think I would be very violated and deprived of my transportation, but if you make a copy of it - hell have 10! The notion that copying and immitation is a form of stealing is bullshit morality, and the people who impose it are really the ones who are immoral.
First off, I don't blame the hyppies, I blame the oil industry who spent billions to make sure nuclear wouldn't be a comeptitive threat. The hyppies were just willing to go along with those who were being paid to lead the crowd,
Second off, I have an aunt who is involved with the project to disarm and downsizing the russian nuclear arsenal that has been going on since the end of the cold war. The russians are way on the way to retooling of their nuclear industry for energy production. They are building floating reatcors for India (it was even on slashdot), they are building or participating in building at least 20 nucelar reactors in China, not to mention Iran which has been in the news lately, and not to mention their home nuclear industry. Over the past decade uranium has gone up 10 times faster than other commodities, look up the 5 year stock chart for uranium miner: CCJ and compaire it to the NASDAQ or DOW.
An $11 pellet of standard 5% uranium the size of my thumb has the same energy of 3 barels of oil. Anyone who's been to the pump lately knows oil isn't even close.
Also, Iran has no problem trying to build one, what they have a problem with is trying to build a breeder reactor that is used to refine uranium. That's a lot different than just regular nuclear power.
Nuclear is taking off bigtime, even in the states. It is not government freebies that are driving it. It's obvious to anyone who looks.
It's already been proven that nuclear is the safest form of power time and time again, even without all these new cool designs.
It's already been proven that nuclear is the most environmentally safe power time and time again.
It's already been proven that nuclear is the cheapest if irrational regulations are left off.
It's already been proven that nuclear releases LESS radioactivity into the environment than other forms of major energy production like residue isotopes in coal.
If these haven't convinced people to embrace nuclear power, than nothing will. In my opinion, the best solution is to generate nuclear power in international waters at sea free from bureauocracy, taxes, and regulation - and sell hydrogen generated thru electrolosys back to the mainland. After all, the enxt generation of freedom is going to be at sea anyhow - so minus well make that the next frontier and make energy profites while at it too.
The problem is that society is entering the information age, but society has two models of what kind of age that should be. In one model, all information must be controlled like "intellectual ptoperty" and leveraged for unlimited growth and profit. In the other, all information should flow without restrictions, and money should be made from collaberation, services, customisation, and general things that use information to create value.
These are inherently and fundamentally incompatable. An anti-thesis to each other, and while you can't contoroll information with force - you can certainly attempt to bully, threaten, decieve, and sue - and this is exactly what is happening.
So the suits that are happening now, I'm sure are just barely scratching the surface - as companies on the "intellectual property" side start to loose real money, and real market share, and loose out technology wise to the "freedom is free markets" side. You can be sure they will almost certainly freak, and "pull a SCO" across every industry and every sector.
Also, as a note, a parrallel situation is also happening in the financial markets where industries and government are trying to controll and manipulate information on value and money for unlmited growth and profit too. This is about to explode as well.
So watch out, and go offshore if you can, becasue all freakin hell is about to break loose.
Thus, society would be denied the opportunity to purchase my artistically significant mud pies.
I cut this out because I think it gets to the meat of the issue here. In a way this statement makes my point because it touches on how copyrights distort the marketplace. Without copyrights, the media wouldn't be inclined to push so much hype, and their relative value would be less. Meanwhile, authors of techncal books (for example) would likely gain quite a reputation even if they didn't get any royality at all, and make up more than the difference in consutling and services. Artits might do more live concerts, or paint for pay (actually people making the big money from copyrights you always hear about is almost always the exception anyhow).
Because most knowledge and information relates to services that have value to society, society would not loose out on the production of usefull information, and creators would not loose out on money (contrary to popular belief). Of course some people would loose, like hollywood, but in all fairness they are overvalued anyhow.
You're forgetting that if the author isn't protected from theft, he/she will be less inclined to produce the culture that's being "stolen." Creation takes work and that work needs to be compensated otherwise it'll cease. Slavery arises when a man is required to work for nothing which from the jist of your post, is exactly what you think creators should be paid. After all, it costs them nothing to duplicate their work so why pay them?
It's not the protection from theft that's evil, it's the theft itself that's evil.
Theft is not defined by what one gains, but what one looses. The author still has his original copy. Now perhaps his publisher looses a monopoly over market share, than again, perhaps Ford loses monopoly over market share when Toyota enters the market. Perhaps Ford doesn't even have an incentive to make cars unless they have a monopoly over market share. But the taking away Ford's market share certainly doesn't make them a slave. Well the same is true with copyrights, if it costs nothing to "duplicate their work", then that is a compelling reason for them to redirect their resources to something else that has more value for society like live concerts, services, consulting, or whatever.
About slavery, the 1850's was a classic example of what happens when people take bogus property rights to their logical conclusion. Property rights are not a right to controll other people, but rather to controll limited resources. Society doesn't owe people personal monopolies, and for copyrights in the information age - shouldn't. If a creator is smart enough to impart their knowledge to usefull creations then they should certinly be smart enough to capitalize off of it without microregulating how everyone else in the world uses information at their disposal in the information age.
If I spend a year of my life developing something, why don't I have the right to control, on some level, how it can be used?
If I don't, why would I develop anything when it would be perfectly legal for a corporation to take it and sell it as their own?
That's not a fair example though. Maybe you sepnd your whole life working your fingers to the aching bone making mud pies too, that does not mean society owes you any sort of privelage. In fact it would be good that they wouldn't, because that would make it so that if you wanted wealth - you would engage in activites that offered more value to society vs forcing every one else to comply to "your mud pie terms". Well the same is true with copyrights, information has far more of a service value than a commodity value, so copyrights really get in the way of providing value to society.
Also, copyrights in practice are far more effective at controlling you than at controlling corporations. So if you had the right to copy things that corporations did, it would benefit you from them far more than them from you.
The substance of what you said has an implied presumption that when something is coppied, distributed, or even sold without the creators permission, then the creator/publishor is in some way violated. While I understand that's the theory, and we have all been spoonfeed that that is an "intellectual property" right, the reality is quite different.
While protected rights, naturally lead to incentives - protected incentives do not naturally lead to rights. Perhaps somebody feels violated when you freely copy, then again perhaps plantation masters feel violated if you steal, oops I mean free, slaves from the plantation. That is what I mean. Property and incentive are not an ends in themselves, to be just they need to derive from the real world - like the fact that not everybody can use the same resources at the same time, but with information they can!
Copyrights are particualrly evil because they have the effect of stealing away our culture and giving it to hollywood. They also have an effect, that to secure them, you need to microregulate the internet and everybody that uses it. They have an effect that leads to anti-trust behavior in large software companies, and tend to make the information itself more valuable then the people who provide the services. The cost of having them in the information age is simply too high and they can not survive the information age any more than micro-controll of the labor market (slavery) could survive the industrial revolution.
While I am sure there are risks to nano technology, I think the real force driving all this "concern" is plan and simple greed.
Nano technology is what's called a "disruptive" technology. That means that it will enable people to do things for pennies on the dollar that used to cost billions. Because of this it threatens what is called "barriers to entry" for many large corporations. According to business 101, the most profitable businesses have high barriers to entry that help keep competitors out and lock profits in.
The only problem is that when a company can't compete off of it's "natural" barriers to entry, then it's only option is to compete off of "regulatory" barriers to entry. Hence the strong incentives and financial pressure to make sure nano technology is a super overregulated industry before it even exits the starting gate.
So now all the other "concerns" about nano technology that keep poping up should be far more clear.
What it is really about is that a lot of the technologies used for space can also be used for military dominance. (like ICBM's) China and India know this, and so have engaged in a strong space program. The US knows this too, and so is getting back in the game to keep dominance over China.
Except that the united states started going through its industrial revolution in the late 1700s, and didn't abolish slavery until the late 1850s. Plus the whole bit where the rise of the factories just replaced legal slavery with debt slavery...
The pressure started in the 1700's, but it really came to a head in the 1850's after a speculative stock market crash involving beting on the future of industrial technology (sound familiar). And legal slavery is nothing like "debt slavery", as you call it - but funny you should mention that because currency is a type of information that stores value and relative transaction costs - and it's debt based manipulation by governments also can not survive the information age. That is very very very bad news for the debt overloaded US and the dollar as a future currency. Don't be supprised if the economy goes to hell shortly.
During the mid-90's Hong Kong produced over 300 features per year and had a yearly income of more than a bilion HK dollars. In 2004 the produced only 64 features because rampant piracy prevents studios from making money on film.
That's not a fair example though because the copyright system distortes the industry to begin with. For example, the money that went into those 236 features that weren't produced could have very arguably been redirected toward creating online content on the internet, or online services that provided 10 times more value to society.
A better example would be how UNIX was completely falling apart untill the GPL which nutralizes the copyright threat - mobilized behind GNU/Linux and has created the market uptake greater than the internet or the home PC combined.
Another example would be how IBM lost it's big patnet suit over the IBM compatable PC and shortly after such PC's completely took over the market place and created hundreds of billions of dollars worth of wealth that never existed before. Infact, better engineered competitor systems never really took off at all.
TCP vs Novell and Token Ring, the integreated circiut, and with countless pieces of software. A compaire and contrast battle has played out time and time again inspite of the predictions of the pro copyright and patent crowd. In almost every case, the most proprietary technology has lost out in the marketplace every time.
There are plenty of examples of this sort if you take the time to do the research.
All the examples I have seen come from the perspective "will hollywood make more money if the rules change" and not from the perspective "will this create more wealth and value in society". Things like the PC, TCP/IP, and Linux create value that directly influences peoples wealth and prosperity. Things like movies, are just entertainment - sure that plays a role, but not one to justify microregulating the internet to brow beat copyrights down everyones throat.
Quite right, if you take "production" to mean "copying". Unfortunately, this isn't production, it is simply distribution. The actual production of content still requires labour, which is (and will remain) a scarce resource.
I think that's the whole point of the information age though. The true model for success in the information age centers arround value added serivces, support, customisation, branding like google, live concerts, etc... - and not arround controlling distrubution. The latter gets in the way of the former, even though it is the former where there is more money to be made overall.
The way I see it is that they are the ones that want to coerce and impose these massive restrictions and impositions on what we can copy and immitate. The burden of proof is on them. Systems exist to serve people, not the status quo. The burden of proof really is on them at all times.
Prove that you should have freedom of speech? You'd be a fool to try because that would presuppose that I have the right to take it away under certain curcunstances to begin with.
Anyone who wants to understand false "property rights" only has to open up a history book and read about the 1850's. Just as the slave plantation system had to die for society to enter the industrial revolution, the copyright content controll systems need to die in order for society to enter the information age. And as other technologies make it easier to repliacte discoveries, patents will eventually need to die too.
Yes, slavery. They called it a property right, they screamed there was no incentive without it, they said it was responsible for great wealth and prosperity of American business and commerce. And it was all bunk, even though it was geniuses that were saying it.
Well the same is true with copyrights and patents. Anyone with an IQ over 20 can easially see that they are not anything like any other kind of incentive or free market property right. And most people with an IQ over 80 can see that inspite of the theory, that is is far more the exception that copyrights or patents help the small time creator than it is the rule.
In fact copyrights and patents are not only bunk, they are often pure evil. Like how copyrights have ripped apart american culture and replaced it with hollywood and ruined the persuit of knowledge in student text book industry, or like how thousands of patnets are sat on and not used for anything but to lock out competitors. Or how disputes and lawsuits in the world court involving AIDS patents arguably caused over a million people to be dead from AIDS in Africa who wouldn't have been otherwise. And now, for copyrights, they pratically want to shut down the internet and microregulate every technology chip maker in the US. Well I say F**k em, on the internet copyrights are dead and they don't even deserve the token support they are getting.
My point about the steel industry was relative to the time. And this ...
it's because there was no profit motive for ANYBODY involved, except the owners in the government who grew rich by oppressing & mistreating their workers...
You answered your own question right there. There is always a profit motive, but government interference shifts it. Like with copyrights. There are no natural limits in supply and demand of information, so when government microregulates and creates some artifically then it has unnatural consequences like Microsoft and Hollywood - instead of centering profit arround services and value. In a copyright system, it would be natural for few little people to get rewarded as it centers arround monopoly and controll over distribution - oh hey, lookie what happened.
As far as free markets, you still don't get it, you don't succede by positioning yourself in a market when it's at it's peak. You succede by positioning yourself when it's emerging. And how could IBM or anyone else know that Linux was a real market and not a hippy movement, because free markets are about freedom first, markets second, when peoples have freedoms then they tend to use those in new and innovative ways to look out for their best interest and create markets. How funny, lookie what happeneed.
I thinkie you have the horsie before the carragie here problem. Property rights don't exist to incentivize people, property rights exist to deal with the fact that not everybody can controll the same things at the same time. The stability and justince in that system leads to an ownership incentive - but creating "(intellectual?) properties" out of thin air for the sake of property does not lead to stability and justice. The plantation system of 1850 had the same problem with slavery ... what's the matter, don't you believe in property rights ... don't you believe in the greatness and prosperity of American enterprise! Bullshit, free markets are about freedom first, profit second. Just because a bunch of cronies wine about something being a property right, doesn't mean that it is.
Pontification. Ruby is a joy to work with. Get your hands dirty before making worthless posts.
No. This is exactly what I mean ... how arrogant. There are a zillion languages out there. I don't want to sepnd all my time learning languages and frameworks, I already know dozens, I wnat to spend my time doing things. So far, it just looks like antoher layer, even after glossing over their "why use ruby", it still looks like another layer. In fact, the url likned to looked more like high level propaganda with sparse documentation with lots of quotes like "Rails is the most well thought-out web development framework I've ever used". Let me be the judge of that, please. If they're right, they have nothing to proove.
Ok, here's my understanding, please correct me (in simple non "high level" language for us pleons) if I am wrong. I'm am still happy to admit that I "don't get it"
My understanding is, you get these underlying languages that are complicated and messy, not intuitive, and have a bunch of unstandardized characteristics (or DOM's), and so much object orientation that the user has no clue as to how to grind down to the details. So to fix that, we add a layer on top of that called "ruby on rails" that hides the mess that you would otherwise be required to deal with. (or am I totally clueless here?)
Well anyhow, if so, wouldn't it just be better just to have the underlying language to be more imperitave and intuitive and standardized to begin with? No matter what kind of app you write, people always eventually half to start understanding the low levels to make things tick. It seems to me that much of the times these "innovations" allow people quickly and cleanly write things that have already been done, but for the real world - utility often requires imperitive and intuitive access to a low level to make new things work. It seems Ruby would just complicate that by adding another layer to go thru.
You don't understand freedom. For example, in the old USSR they had steel mills that were for more advanced and far more larger then their western counterparts. They were superior by every measure, the russian space program also. But the reality was that they were useless because the western industries could adapt and change and grow to finance new ventures where the USSR couldn't. Linux was a free piece of crap in 93, now it's a high end enterprise system used by IBM, hp, and sun. People who figured that out in the mid 90's and held themselves accountable to Linux did very nicely and have far more utility in the marketplace than their competitors now.
This also shows you don't get it. Free here has nothing to do with free as in cost. Hell I could charge $1000 for my Linux distro if I wanted to. Free has to do with freedom to copy and manipulate without liability. That freedom creates an accountability and growth stream that does for services what the industrial revolution did for production in a way that is unmanagable with colsed software. Nobody wants technology that stagnates as the rest of the world advances, free software guarantees that it is not pre-destined by forces outside your control.
The first way to tell that this is BS is to see if Microsoft is willing to guarantee Linux won't be sued for software patent infringement like IBM did. The fact is they won't and they don't want to. The deal here is that Microsoft has figured out that they can't beat Linux head on in the marketplace, so now they are trying to co-opt it. Watch out for the bullshit monster chasing after you and trying to give you a big fat kiss! I'm sure this is just the beginning.
Do not fall for it at all. Free software is inherently better than proprietary software because it is first of all free, and then and only then is it often better for technical or usage reasons. In free markets, freedom maters. None of the fundamentals have changed, you are what you hold yourself accountable to.
Japan got hit pretty hard in the 90's. But I think this will be far worse. The US has a lot more global investment, and foriegners who dump can do so without loosing the home they live in as well. I think it will get very ugly once people start cutting their loses and start moving their money into unleveraged commodities. Last year real-estate is SD went up 18% or so percent, this year it went up 2% with the decline starting in may (or so?). If things continue at their current rate, people will start to notice problems this next month or so, they will start to feel serious pain by christmas, and they will be in absolute panic by March 2006. The stock market, bond market, and dollar could be in serious troubble long before then and the fed will be able to do nothing about it because monitary policy usually takes 6 or more months to filter thru the economy.
IMHO, the real problem will not be the real-estate squeese, but the derivatives squeese that it's hooked to. The total notational value of derivative contracts is reported to be over 270 trillion dollars. All of that will become a liability if the shit hits the fan and would likely cause almost every financial institution acoss the globe to go under. If you start to hear about big derivative clearing problems in the news, panic like hell. It will make the great depression look like a birthday party.
Because of the things you said, hard real-estate crashes happen less often, but when they do happen - they hapen in a very harmfull way. There are some very omnious signs. Housing is starting to taper off, so banks are less willing to refi - making housing a lot less liquid than it used to be. Also, the national savings rate has been below zero lately - the lowest ever. This is also an omnious sign. 2/3'd of economic activity is from consumer spending which has also taken a sharp drop lately. There is a big threat that over leveraged housing will reduce comsumer spending which will lead to more layoffs and cutbacks which will lead to more overleveraged housing which will snowball when things start to crash.
The amount of low/defered/variable interest loans is another omnious sign. 1/3 of purchases in the last few years are investment homes, 2nd homes, or vacation homes that could easially tank the market if dumped. I think too many people see housing as no risk, I think they are in or a very harsh supprise. Also inflation is on the horizon. Usually that is good for housing because inflation relieves debt, but this time there is a lot of overseas wage pressure that will keep pay down and people are maxed out on debt, so inflation will raise prices before it relieves debt - squeesing people even more, and creating even more deflation. This is a classic symptom of stagflation, very very very bad for housing debt and the economy.