"[ACTA] limits and withholds the freedom of engagement on the largest and most significant network in human history, and thus limits particularly the future of our children."
Regardless of the path she took to get there, she hit the nail on the head with this statement. A concise, unequivocal, and accurate assessment of the fundamental societal imbalance of ACTA and other recent attempts at centralized inhibition of copyright infringement. Well said.
So you don't get confused with a real, actual engineer.
Yeah, no kidding. Have you seen what actual engineers get paid? For god's sake, don't confuse me with an actual engineer.
P.E.s who work in fields like mechanical engineering, and look down their noses at software "engineers" remind me a bit of fighter jocks in the sixties calling astronauts "spam in a can". Yeah, sure, true enough... I'm going to go whiz around the Earth at four miles per second now.:)
But are you seriously okay with hijackers destroying 10 fully loaded 747s a year?
Yes, absolutely. Pedestrian versus car accidents kill 10 fully loaded 747's worth of people each year, and I think we are in the right ballpark in expenditure in that area. I think we spend more on terrorism and do not prevent as many deaths. That money is better spent elsewhere, or returned to The People.
Definition of terrorism keeps changing as long as that definition is not stable either, then all of your calculations are not going to work.
If calculation implies finding an exact answer, I agree. The nature of measurement, however, is to estimate. Even using the broadest possible ridiculous neo-con definition, we are nowhere near 6,000 per year. So we have an accurate enough measurement to tell us what we need to know: Our anti-terrorism efforts are costing far more than can be rationally justified.
The fact that acts of terrorism which result in deaths tend to be high profile, lowers the acceptable annual death toll.
I don't think it lowers the acceptable death toll. I think it increases the requirement for public service announcements explaining how to make rational decisions about terrorism prevention. In fact, that sort of thing is precisely why we are a representative democracy instead of popular.
Would your "My Maximum Acceptable Annual U.S. Terrorism Deaths" be less if one of those deaths were yours?
If I could know in advance? Yes. (it would be irrational, but since I am agnostic and do not know if there is an afterlife, I will pay anything/everything to not die)
If I could not know in advance? No. I also do not drive a Volvo, despite the fact that it is safer than what I do drive.
I cannot know in advance, so I have to go with the probabilities.
The single most significant missing component in all our security efforts is a cost analysis. Are we spending too much, too little, or about the right amount? Some say that measuring that is hard, and it is. But measurement is inherently approximation (there is no such thing as a ruler that is exactly twelve inches long). Once you accept that, it becomes much easier to measure lots of things (see also: How to Measure Anything).
Can we begin with a very rough boundary estimate? I think we can. Here's one I did in my head while driving through the desert recently:
I am willing to accept having two of my one thousand closest lifetime United States citizen acquaintances die in terrorist attacks. That is an acceptable risk level. If we can get there, I feel we have done all we need to do. By the same token, if we are spending any significant amount of money to go beyond that level, I am less supportive. I don't think it is worthwhile to catch every terrorist any more than it is worthwhile to catch every speeder or jaywalker. Two in one thousand, lifetime, sounds like about the right number.
OK, so, how does that work out as an annualized US death toll? (please note: I did this in my head, and am mostly just regurgitating it here -- please correct me if the math is off)
Desired Death Rate: 0.002 per lifetime Lifetime Length: 80 years Annualized Rate: 0.00002 risk per-annum per-person (equals 0.998 chance each person will reach 80 before dying from terrorism) United States Population: 300,000,000 My Maximum Acceptable Annual U.S. Terrorism Deaths: 6,000
I think we should be trying to stay under 6,000 United States citizens dying from terrorism every year. It is the acceptable rate, to me, in terms of the risk of my acquaintances dying. Any significant spending we do to get under that number is -- to me -- emotionalism, not rationalism. Given we haven't reached 6,000 in the past 20 years, I suspect we are spending too much.
Why the hell do these morons keep tabling impossible and/or extremely EXPENSIVE (compute-wise) proposals without talking to someone who knows ANYTHING about IT and technology FIRST?
It is a negotiation tactic. They are rattling their sabers at Google and Bing saying, "Do you want to see it our way, or should we get our puppets in government to stab you in the neck a couple times?"
It is only a matter of time until this happens, as long as we have centralized search. Search is big business, and it will eventually realize that maximizing shareholder value is more important than satisfying the needs of the end user to see unbiased results. Everything between now and then is just big content and big search negotiating the sellout price. (along with the occasional ceremonial firing of volleys of lawyers, lobbyists, and politicians (redundant?))
Decentralizing search is hard. It certainly won't be perfect. It will be biased. But it won't be as biased as Bing and Google will become in the coming years.
What would you say if you went to join a gym and were told that it could cost you anywhere from $360 a year to $68,000 a year for the exact same usage? Don't be ridiculous, right?
While it may be ridiculous that they still allow anyone to use the $360 "all you can download" plan, they have grandfathered those people in. I don't even really find it ridiculous. I think it is their obligation to complete each contract under its original terms.
Oh, or are you saying you want your new contract to be "all you can download for $360"? Are you thick? Do you have an "all you can burn" plan set up with your local gas station?
More accurate pricing, even when does not benefit you individually in the short run, is a good thing for everyone in the long run. We want AT&T to get paid for high usage, so they are financially incentivized to build out the network. Under the old way of billing, high usage was being subsidized by low-usage customers, and AT&T was incentivized to inhibit high usage by such extreme measures as throttling, which sucks. You are being short-sighted, quit whining.
The timing of the MegaUpload takedown seems extraordinarily coincidental. There has been talk of it being retaliation for killing SOPA, but that doesn't wash, because the DoJ does not rush into things like that (for good reason). They have said it was in the works for a long time, and the indictment indicates that.
So look at it the other way. Why did they wait until immediately after SOPA died?
Once you ask that question, I think it is hard to ignore the elephant in the room. They were holding off because they knew it would make SOPA look unnecessary. They were trying to get SOPA passed before they executed on existing law.
Even assuming you think MU is guilty of the more apparently illegal stuff in the indictment (like I do), that doesn't seem right. "We're not going to execute the law, because we think we might be able to jam these mutts up harder when the new law goes through, and we don't want the public to know that existing laws already cover this." I dig how, in this case, waiting for SOPA to indict the MU leaders could be handled without triggering ex-post-facto, but it still seems like a dishonorable way to execute the law.
Punk kids run LOIC because they think the system does not respect them, and therefore they have a duty to disrespect the system. However misguided those punks may be, behavior like the above displays the very disdain for the public that is causing them to feel disenfranchised.
This is a chain reaction that is not going to stop unless one side decides to act in a mature fashion. Here is an inconvenient truth: It is not going to be the punk kids that decide to be the bigger man.
Or to put it another way, this only works when government regulation is not stacked in favor of the cartel.
Partially true -- it would not be as false were it not for government induced bias. However, bias occurs naturally in any human system, even without government. Bias occurs in pure anarchic markets, due to friction, imperfect information, imprefect competition, etc.
This is used as evidence that the free market is a better way to stop predatory pricing than regulations such as anti-trust laws.
These examples only hold up perfectly in the case where there are zero barriers to entry. That situation only exists in laboratory economics. In real-world economics, there are barriers to entry that vary from limited (as in the case of unregulated commodities, like bromine, where the only barrier is setting up the warehousing and distribution) to extreme (as in, for example, pharmaceutical distribution). The notion that an unregulated market exists, let alone that it might resemble a free market, is not remotely reflected in observed reality.
I read this and got really puzzled. I was thinking, OK, I know Google works on some strange things, like that downwind faster than the wind car, but when did they start getting into fine arts? Fiber work? Is it, like, a tapestry, or something more avant garde, like an abstract sculpture made of cloth and individual fibers?
Useful arts (also called technics) are concerned with the skills and methods of practical subjects such as manufacture and craftsmanship. The word has now gone out of fashion, but it was used during the Victorian era and earlier as an antonym to the performing arts and the fine arts.
The term "useful Arts" is used in the United States Constitution, Article One, Section 8, Clause 8 which is the basis of United States patent and copyright law:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;â¦"
In the clause, the phrase "useful Arts" is meant to reference inventions, while "Science" is meant to reference human knowledge, including that which is encompassed in literature and the "fine arts".
In his dissenting opinion in In re Bilski,[2] Judge Mayer criticized the majority for not addressing the preliminary issue of whether the claimed invention was within the useful arts. In Mayer's view this should have been dispositive, because he considered the claimed business method not to be within the useful arts. In the same case, Judge Dyk filed a concurring opinion to similar effect.
The real question is, how many sales does piracy cost you compared to how many sales it gains you by spreading awareness of your existence?
That is the real question for copyright holders to rationally support SOPA, and I agree with your implication that it may be shaky ground. Rational societal support of SOPA is even more conservative than that.
Society's balancing point is at delta copyright profit versus total cost of copyright enforcement. Your formula above, lost sales versus gained sales, is one of the factors in calculating delta profit. If that value is positive, copyright holders would support SOPA. But that is not enough for society to benefit from SOPA. For society to support it, delta profit must exceed total cost of enforcement. (if you are a pure economist -- libertarians would require still more justification for government enforcement) (authoritarians might require less, but authoritarians have no just standing in This Grand Experiment)
That is how it is with all legislation and enforcement. If the cost of jaywalking is not very high at a particular intersection (very few car versus pedestrian incidents), you don't have to enforce the law too strictly. If a particular stretch of highway out in the desert is sufficiently desolate, you don't have to invest as much in enforcing the speed limit. Heck, we even have limits on murder enforcement -- if we didn't, there would be no such thing as a cold case file.
We are acting as though we cannot stop writing more copyright law until infringement ceases to exist. As you rightly point out, this is not necessarily in the rational interests of the protected class. And beyond that is the rational interests of society, which are far more conservative regarding copyright enforcement.
Considered in this coldly rational light, it is hard to think that we are anywhere but far beyond the rational societal balancing point of copyright grants and enforcement.
I read Slashdot everyday and I haven't heard anything from Management about any opposition.
That assumes that The Management is Slashdot. I think that is false. We are Slashdot. What tells you more about how Slashdot feels about SOPA -- a post from Cmdr Taco, or this discussion by We The Slashdotters?
Or do absolutely NOTHING, like Slashdot.
I think you may have missed this story and this story. Note that those were both posted by Slashdot poobahs.
Much like Ars Technica, Slashdot is playing to their strengths as their way of protesting. Wikipedia does not have a mechanism for having a front-page discussion about SOPA among the tech elite. Slashdot does. The best Wikipedia could do (and it is greatly appreciated) was to black out. Slashdot can do more. Here we are.
It's actually pretty cool.
People need to be told that this is NOT a copyright issue, but an excuse where governments and large corporations can have unprecedented control over YOUR communications.
I am an advocate of copyright. I feel it is a very effective mechanism for channeling revenue to those who advance science and the useful arts.
We have overstepped the bounds of cost effective copyright grants and enforcement. We have exceeded the efficient level of enforcement, and I suspect we have exceeded the efficient level of revenue channeling. We have passed more copyright legislation in the past fifteen years than at any other time in our history. More than during the advent of the printing press, the radio, the cassette tape, or any other disruptive technology. We are not balancing the potential value of new technology against the perceived cost of adapting copyright to the new reality. Moreover, the legislation is not working. It is not significantly inhibiting copyright, but it is harming the progress of new business models and entrepreneurship. It is not rational to pass ever more extreme legislation when what has gone before is not working.
We are channeling a lot of revenue into copyright holders, and that money is coming back in lobbying. That cycle is self-catalyzing, and it has gone beyond what is cost effective. It is harming our ability to compete in the global marketplace, and is a cycle that is hostile to our national economic interests.
It is time to demand a moratorium on new copyright law, coupled with a serious research effort on the cost effectiveness of copyright enforcement. That research should have the explicit objective of answering the question: "How much can we reduce government interference in the market while still advancing the progress of science and the useful arts?"
Failure to do so should be seen as an act of aggression against our economy by those who are benefiting from this government fiat monopoly, and should be met with total opposition.
I haven't given any money to Wikipedia in a long time. This seems like a good opportunity to catch up on my donations. I figure to do it while the blackout is in progress, if the donation page is up, or right after if they have donations blacked out.
It is easy to find examples of people getting paid to do things that harm society. Here's a chance to pay a company, which has earned the money, for doing the right thing. They even make the first show of good faith -- every day -- by existing, not charging, and not accepting advertisements.
I think there is a distinction that can be made between the two, and that Slashdot is more on the anti-authoritarian side.
At the least, there's the difference between big-L Libertarians and little-L libertarians. The big-L Libertarians see the official tenets of libertarianism (whatever they are at some given moment, in some person's mind) as an ideological objective, rather than as the means to an end. Many here may only agree with libertarian philosophies because we are currently so far over the line. I, for example, believe in copyright -- just not in its current form.
There's also the question of whether libertarian means anarchist. For example, a maximally efficient free market depends on government enforcement of certain rules. Truth in advertising is perhaps the least controversial -- if you tell someone a product does "X", it has to do "X." Government enforcement of that requirement reduces friction in the economy and increases GDP, but a strict anarchist libertarian would say that advertising should self-regulate, through customer dissatisfaction and word-of-mouth.
Using the term "anti-authoritarian" was intentional. It reflects our cultural bias against politicians who seek power as an end in itself, while acknowledging that government regulation may have a healthy role in society.
interpreting every +5 post on Slashdot as consensus in the community would be a mistake
Very agreed -- the strength of what comes from Slashdot is not so much the +5 responses as a final packaged product. It is engaging in the process of developing a theory that can be presented in a concise manner and does not have gaping holes. Testing your ideas and seeing where they get torn down. This is an excellent idea forge, but not everyone who gets +5 is using it that way. Like education, you get out of it what you put in.
slanted first posts by a handful of users that are mysteriously modded up almost instantly.
I've been noticing those too -- good to hear someone else comment on it. I've also seen that they don't seem to hold up -- come back after a couple hours and they're usually modded into oblivion. I suspect it is pretty hard to get irrational bias-mongering to hold up to thousands of rationalists with mod points. I've had borderline posts that have bounced around between +1 and +5, and wind up settling in at +3 or +4.
They'll figure that out eventually, too, but it's OK. The thing here is to engage in the process of forging a sound perspective. Then you publish it out somewhere that the public goes. The public is not here. The mod system doesn't have to be perfect to use this as an idea forge.
All these posts on Slashdot about how bad the bill is really made a difference!
True. This really is one of the major think-tanks of information science policy. You may have meant it as a joke, and gotten modded so, but when it comes to sober and deliberative analysis of the effects of information science law, I don't think it gets a whole lot better than this. We are clearly stronger on information science policy than Congress, the BSA, or most of the major think-tanks in D.C. When we forge opinions here, they are based not on the highest bidder but on the strongest position (with a bit of an anti-authoritarian bent, admittedly). If I post something that is emotional and not well-founded, I get kicked in the jewels pretty soundly (more often than I'd like to admit). When we take the resulting theories out to the world, they are treated with respect because they have been tempered in the heated debates that happen right here. This is not far off from the new-media Federalist Papers.
The fact that we joke and rant and argue does not mean we are not getting the job done. It is possible that American Democracy has no future -- corruption may be unstoppable -- but if it has a future, this is what it looks like.
If he vetoed it, we'd spend the rest of the year watching non-stop ads about how he took away healthcare from wounded veterans
Just want to be sure I'm reading this right -- Are you saying that it is OK for an elected official to support a bill that violates the clear intent of The Constitution if he or she thinks it will make it easier to get re-elected?
Are you also saying that "I must stand on The Constitution" is a tune that won't play in the media right now? Ron Paul, who is as batty as a fruitcake, is getting national attention with little more substance than a genuine (albeit flawed) belief in The Constitution.
Sorry, those are kind of rhetorical questions, and I hate rhetoric, but I'm having a hard time framing it in a better way. Just, please, think about the long-term costs of accepting the less-wrong thing on an iterative basis. When do we pull out? When do we start getting back to being America again? When do we stop being puppets to the military industrial complex? If not the guy who was clearly elected on the plank of breaking that chain, then who?
Are we on an unstoppable downward slide?
If we are, then can't we at least have some noble sacrifice on the way down, to let us know that there is some honor left? If we're going down either way, can't we at least see an occasional flash of dignity? Or is it just "Screw it, I'm not giving up my cush job for nothin'."
Slashdot Mirror
"[ACTA] limits and withholds the freedom of engagement on the largest and most significant network in human history, and thus limits particularly the future of our children."
Regardless of the path she took to get there, she hit the nail on the head with this statement. A concise, unequivocal, and accurate assessment of the fundamental societal imbalance of ACTA and other recent attempts at centralized inhibition of copyright infringement. Well said.
So you don't get confused with a real, actual engineer.
Yeah, no kidding. Have you seen what actual engineers get paid? For god's sake, don't confuse me with an actual engineer.
P.E.s who work in fields like mechanical engineering, and look down their noses at software "engineers" remind me a bit of fighter jocks in the sixties calling astronauts "spam in a can". Yeah, sure, true enough... I'm going to go whiz around the Earth at four miles per second now. :)
But are you seriously okay with hijackers destroying 10 fully loaded 747s a year?
Yes, absolutely. Pedestrian versus car accidents kill 10 fully loaded 747's worth of people each year, and I think we are in the right ballpark in expenditure in that area. I think we spend more on terrorism and do not prevent as many deaths. That money is better spent elsewhere, or returned to The People.
Definition of terrorism keeps changing as long as that definition is not stable either, then all of your calculations are not going to work.
If calculation implies finding an exact answer, I agree. The nature of measurement, however, is to estimate. Even using the broadest possible ridiculous neo-con definition, we are nowhere near 6,000 per year. So we have an accurate enough measurement to tell us what we need to know: Our anti-terrorism efforts are costing far more than can be rationally justified.
The fact that acts of terrorism which result in deaths tend to be high profile, lowers the acceptable annual death toll.
I don't think it lowers the acceptable death toll. I think it increases the requirement for public service announcements explaining how to make rational decisions about terrorism prevention. In fact, that sort of thing is precisely why we are a representative democracy instead of popular.
That's insane. There are some things worse than death, no matter what your beliefs are.
OK, I see your point. And I agree.
Would your "My Maximum Acceptable Annual U.S. Terrorism Deaths" be less if one of those deaths were yours?
If I could know in advance? Yes. (it would be irrational, but since I am agnostic and do not know if there is an afterlife, I will pay anything/everything to not die)
If I could not know in advance? No. I also do not drive a Volvo, despite the fact that it is safer than what I do drive.
I cannot know in advance, so I have to go with the probabilities.
The single most significant missing component in all our security efforts is a cost analysis. Are we spending too much, too little, or about the right amount? Some say that measuring that is hard, and it is. But measurement is inherently approximation (there is no such thing as a ruler that is exactly twelve inches long). Once you accept that, it becomes much easier to measure lots of things (see also: How to Measure Anything).
Can we begin with a very rough boundary estimate? I think we can. Here's one I did in my head while driving through the desert recently:
I am willing to accept having two of my one thousand closest lifetime United States citizen acquaintances die in terrorist attacks. That is an acceptable risk level. If we can get there, I feel we have done all we need to do. By the same token, if we are spending any significant amount of money to go beyond that level, I am less supportive. I don't think it is worthwhile to catch every terrorist any more than it is worthwhile to catch every speeder or jaywalker. Two in one thousand, lifetime, sounds like about the right number.
OK, so, how does that work out as an annualized US death toll? (please note: I did this in my head, and am mostly just regurgitating it here -- please correct me if the math is off)
Desired Death Rate: 0.002 per lifetime
Lifetime Length: 80 years
Annualized Rate: 0.00002 risk per-annum per-person (equals 0.998 chance each person will reach 80 before dying from terrorism)
United States Population: 300,000,000
My Maximum Acceptable Annual U.S. Terrorism Deaths: 6,000
I think we should be trying to stay under 6,000 United States citizens dying from terrorism every year. It is the acceptable rate, to me, in terms of the risk of my acquaintances dying. Any significant spending we do to get under that number is -- to me -- emotionalism, not rationalism. Given we haven't reached 6,000 in the past 20 years, I suspect we are spending too much.
Why the hell do these morons keep tabling impossible and/or extremely EXPENSIVE (compute-wise) proposals without talking to someone who knows ANYTHING about IT and technology FIRST?
It is a negotiation tactic. They are rattling their sabers at Google and Bing saying, "Do you want to see it our way, or should we get our puppets in government to stab you in the neck a couple times?"
It is only a matter of time until this happens, as long as we have centralized search. Search is big business, and it will eventually realize that maximizing shareholder value is more important than satisfying the needs of the end user to see unbiased results. Everything between now and then is just big content and big search negotiating the sellout price. (along with the occasional ceremonial firing of volleys of lawyers, lobbyists, and politicians (redundant?))
Decentralizing search is hard. It certainly won't be perfect. It will be biased. But it won't be as biased as Bing and Google will become in the coming years.
What would you say if you went to join a gym and were told that it could cost you anywhere from $360 a year to $68,000 a year for the exact same usage? Don't be ridiculous, right?
While it may be ridiculous that they still allow anyone to use the $360 "all you can download" plan, they have grandfathered those people in. I don't even really find it ridiculous. I think it is their obligation to complete each contract under its original terms.
Oh, or are you saying you want your new contract to be "all you can download for $360"? Are you thick? Do you have an "all you can burn" plan set up with your local gas station?
More accurate pricing, even when does not benefit you individually in the short run, is a good thing for everyone in the long run. We want AT&T to get paid for high usage, so they are financially incentivized to build out the network. Under the old way of billing, high usage was being subsidized by low-usage customers, and AT&T was incentivized to inhibit high usage by such extreme measures as throttling, which sucks. You are being short-sighted, quit whining.
The timing of the MegaUpload takedown seems extraordinarily coincidental. There has been talk of it being retaliation for killing SOPA, but that doesn't wash, because the DoJ does not rush into things like that (for good reason). They have said it was in the works for a long time, and the indictment indicates that.
So look at it the other way. Why did they wait until immediately after SOPA died?
Once you ask that question, I think it is hard to ignore the elephant in the room. They were holding off because they knew it would make SOPA look unnecessary. They were trying to get SOPA passed before they executed on existing law.
Even assuming you think MU is guilty of the more apparently illegal stuff in the indictment (like I do), that doesn't seem right. "We're not going to execute the law, because we think we might be able to jam these mutts up harder when the new law goes through, and we don't want the public to know that existing laws already cover this." I dig how, in this case, waiting for SOPA to indict the MU leaders could be handled without triggering ex-post-facto, but it still seems like a dishonorable way to execute the law.
Punk kids run LOIC because they think the system does not respect them, and therefore they have a duty to disrespect the system. However misguided those punks may be, behavior like the above displays the very disdain for the public that is causing them to feel disenfranchised.
This is a chain reaction that is not going to stop unless one side decides to act in a mature fashion. Here is an inconvenient truth: It is not going to be the punk kids that decide to be the bigger man.
Or to put it another way, this only works when government regulation is not stacked in favor of the cartel.
Partially true -- it would not be as false were it not for government induced bias. However, bias occurs naturally in any human system, even without government. Bias occurs in pure anarchic markets, due to friction, imperfect information, imprefect competition, etc.
This is used as evidence that the free market is a better way to stop predatory pricing than regulations such as anti-trust laws.
These examples only hold up perfectly in the case where there are zero barriers to entry. That situation only exists in laboratory economics. In real-world economics, there are barriers to entry that vary from limited (as in the case of unregulated commodities, like bromine, where the only barrier is setting up the warehousing and distribution) to extreme (as in, for example, pharmaceutical distribution). The notion that an unregulated market exists, let alone that it might resemble a free market, is not remotely reflected in observed reality.
Google Fiber Work Hung Up In Kansas City
I read this and got really puzzled. I was thinking, OK, I know Google works on some strange things, like that downwind faster than the wind car, but when did they start getting into fine arts? Fiber work? Is it, like, a tapestry, or something more avant garde, like an abstract sculpture made of cloth and individual fibers?
Yeah -- weird that literature comes under "science", eh?
LOL. What the heck is "useful arts"? And what has it to do with copyright? So, not-so-useful arts get no copyrights?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_arts
Useful arts (also called technics) are concerned with the skills and methods of practical subjects such as manufacture and craftsmanship. The word has now gone out of fashion, but it was used during the Victorian era and earlier as an antonym to the performing arts and the fine arts.
The term "useful Arts" is used in the United States Constitution, Article One, Section 8, Clause 8 which is the basis of United States patent and copyright law:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;â¦"
In the clause, the phrase "useful Arts" is meant to reference inventions, while "Science" is meant to reference human knowledge, including that which is encompassed in literature and the "fine arts".
In his dissenting opinion in In re Bilski,[2] Judge Mayer criticized the majority for not addressing the preliminary issue of whether the claimed invention was within the useful arts. In Mayer's view this should have been dispositive, because he considered the claimed business method not to be within the useful arts. In the same case, Judge Dyk filed a concurring opinion to similar effect.
The real question is, how many sales does piracy cost you compared to how many sales it gains you by spreading awareness of your existence?
That is the real question for copyright holders to rationally support SOPA, and I agree with your implication that it may be shaky ground. Rational societal support of SOPA is even more conservative than that.
Society's balancing point is at delta copyright profit versus total cost of copyright enforcement. Your formula above, lost sales versus gained sales, is one of the factors in calculating delta profit. If that value is positive, copyright holders would support SOPA. But that is not enough for society to benefit from SOPA. For society to support it, delta profit must exceed total cost of enforcement. (if you are a pure economist -- libertarians would require still more justification for government enforcement) (authoritarians might require less, but authoritarians have no just standing in This Grand Experiment)
That is how it is with all legislation and enforcement. If the cost of jaywalking is not very high at a particular intersection (very few car versus pedestrian incidents), you don't have to enforce the law too strictly. If a particular stretch of highway out in the desert is sufficiently desolate, you don't have to invest as much in enforcing the speed limit. Heck, we even have limits on murder enforcement -- if we didn't, there would be no such thing as a cold case file.
We are acting as though we cannot stop writing more copyright law until infringement ceases to exist. As you rightly point out, this is not necessarily in the rational interests of the protected class. And beyond that is the rational interests of society, which are far more conservative regarding copyright enforcement.
Considered in this coldly rational light, it is hard to think that we are anywhere but far beyond the rational societal balancing point of copyright grants and enforcement.
I read Slashdot everyday and I haven't heard anything from Management about any opposition.
That assumes that The Management is Slashdot. I think that is false. We are Slashdot. What tells you more about how Slashdot feels about SOPA -- a post from Cmdr Taco, or this discussion by We The Slashdotters?
Or do absolutely NOTHING, like Slashdot.
I think you may have missed this story and this story. Note that those were both posted by Slashdot poobahs.
Much like Ars Technica, Slashdot is playing to their strengths as their way of protesting. Wikipedia does not have a mechanism for having a front-page discussion about SOPA among the tech elite. Slashdot does. The best Wikipedia could do (and it is greatly appreciated) was to black out. Slashdot can do more. Here we are.
It's actually pretty cool.
People need to be told that this is NOT a copyright issue, but an excuse where governments and large corporations can have unprecedented control over YOUR communications.
Abso-Friggin-Lutely!
I am an advocate of copyright. I feel it is a very effective mechanism for channeling revenue to those who advance science and the useful arts.
We have overstepped the bounds of cost effective copyright grants and enforcement. We have exceeded the efficient level of enforcement, and I suspect we have exceeded the efficient level of revenue channeling. We have passed more copyright legislation in the past fifteen years than at any other time in our history. More than during the advent of the printing press, the radio, the cassette tape, or any other disruptive technology. We are not balancing the potential value of new technology against the perceived cost of adapting copyright to the new reality. Moreover, the legislation is not working. It is not significantly inhibiting copyright, but it is harming the progress of new business models and entrepreneurship. It is not rational to pass ever more extreme legislation when what has gone before is not working.
We are channeling a lot of revenue into copyright holders, and that money is coming back in lobbying. That cycle is self-catalyzing, and it has gone beyond what is cost effective. It is harming our ability to compete in the global marketplace, and is a cycle that is hostile to our national economic interests.
It is time to demand a moratorium on new copyright law, coupled with a serious research effort on the cost effectiveness of copyright enforcement. That research should have the explicit objective of answering the question: "How much can we reduce government interference in the market while still advancing the progress of science and the useful arts?"
Failure to do so should be seen as an act of aggression against our economy by those who are benefiting from this government fiat monopoly, and should be met with total opposition.
I haven't given any money to Wikipedia in a long time. This seems like a good opportunity to catch up on my donations. I figure to do it while the blackout is in progress, if the donation page is up, or right after if they have donations blacked out.
It is easy to find examples of people getting paid to do things that harm society. Here's a chance to pay a company, which has earned the money, for doing the right thing. They even make the first show of good faith -- every day -- by existing, not charging, and not accepting advertisements.
[anti-authoritarian should be libertarian]
I think there is a distinction that can be made between the two, and that Slashdot is more on the anti-authoritarian side.
At the least, there's the difference between big-L Libertarians and little-L libertarians. The big-L Libertarians see the official tenets of libertarianism (whatever they are at some given moment, in some person's mind) as an ideological objective, rather than as the means to an end. Many here may only agree with libertarian philosophies because we are currently so far over the line. I, for example, believe in copyright -- just not in its current form.
There's also the question of whether libertarian means anarchist. For example, a maximally efficient free market depends on government enforcement of certain rules. Truth in advertising is perhaps the least controversial -- if you tell someone a product does "X", it has to do "X." Government enforcement of that requirement reduces friction in the economy and increases GDP, but a strict anarchist libertarian would say that advertising should self-regulate, through customer dissatisfaction and word-of-mouth.
Using the term "anti-authoritarian" was intentional. It reflects our cultural bias against politicians who seek power as an end in itself, while acknowledging that government regulation may have a healthy role in society.
interpreting every +5 post on Slashdot as consensus in the community would be a mistake
Very agreed -- the strength of what comes from Slashdot is not so much the +5 responses as a final packaged product. It is engaging in the process of developing a theory that can be presented in a concise manner and does not have gaping holes. Testing your ideas and seeing where they get torn down. This is an excellent idea forge, but not everyone who gets +5 is using it that way. Like education, you get out of it what you put in.
slanted first posts by a handful of users that are mysteriously modded up almost instantly.
I've been noticing those too -- good to hear someone else comment on it. I've also seen that they don't seem to hold up -- come back after a couple hours and they're usually modded into oblivion. I suspect it is pretty hard to get irrational bias-mongering to hold up to thousands of rationalists with mod points. I've had borderline posts that have bounced around between +1 and +5, and wind up settling in at +3 or +4.
They'll figure that out eventually, too, but it's OK. The thing here is to engage in the process of forging a sound perspective. Then you publish it out somewhere that the public goes. The public is not here. The mod system doesn't have to be perfect to use this as an idea forge.
All these posts on Slashdot about how bad the bill is really made a difference!
True. This really is one of the major think-tanks of information science policy. You may have meant it as a joke, and gotten modded so, but when it comes to sober and deliberative analysis of the effects of information science law, I don't think it gets a whole lot better than this. We are clearly stronger on information science policy than Congress, the BSA, or most of the major think-tanks in D.C. When we forge opinions here, they are based not on the highest bidder but on the strongest position (with a bit of an anti-authoritarian bent, admittedly). If I post something that is emotional and not well-founded, I get kicked in the jewels pretty soundly (more often than I'd like to admit). When we take the resulting theories out to the world, they are treated with respect because they have been tempered in the heated debates that happen right here. This is not far off from the new-media Federalist Papers.
The fact that we joke and rant and argue does not mean we are not getting the job done. It is possible that American Democracy has no future -- corruption may be unstoppable -- but if it has a future, this is what it looks like.
If he vetoed it, we'd spend the rest of the year watching non-stop ads about how he took away healthcare from wounded veterans
Just want to be sure I'm reading this right -- Are you saying that it is OK for an elected official to support a bill that violates the clear intent of The Constitution if he or she thinks it will make it easier to get re-elected?
Are you also saying that "I must stand on The Constitution" is a tune that won't play in the media right now? Ron Paul, who is as batty as a fruitcake, is getting national attention with little more substance than a genuine (albeit flawed) belief in The Constitution.
Sorry, those are kind of rhetorical questions, and I hate rhetoric, but I'm having a hard time framing it in a better way. Just, please, think about the long-term costs of accepting the less-wrong thing on an iterative basis. When do we pull out? When do we start getting back to being America again? When do we stop being puppets to the military industrial complex? If not the guy who was clearly elected on the plank of breaking that chain, then who?
Are we on an unstoppable downward slide?
If we are, then can't we at least have some noble sacrifice on the way down, to let us know that there is some honor left? If we're going down either way, can't we at least see an occasional flash of dignity? Or is it just "Screw it, I'm not giving up my cush job for nothin'."