If it needs to be explained to intelligent people, it's too complicated.
In that case, you might want to try complaining about copyright law. Though what copyright tries to achieve (chopping ideas into discreet units and assigning ownership[1]) is so different from how ideas otherwise exist I can't imagine the law every being simple.
In many cases, the GPL makes dealing with copyright less complicated - because it's a de facto standard, because you can focus on the four freedoms instead of the minutiae of the law, because you don't have to hire a lawyer every time you want to let someone use your software, because if you do let someone modify your software you don't have to worry about them turning around and suing you for using with the modified version, because there is a community to provide you with support and might even help you if your license is violated.
[1] I am aware that copyright is supposed to apply to the representation of an idea, not the idea itself. If you can figure out a way to reliabily differentiate the two, maybe you do know how to simplify copyright.
Thank you. Those rates do sound pretty high, especially the rate of cheating on exams. (Copying homework assignments doesn't surprise me, especially for math and sciences.) Am I right in supposing that an "honor code" school is one in which students are expected to sign on to a code of conduct, or is that a specific program in the U.S.?
The definition of "cheating" can make a big difference. Does copying a math proof count? Collaboration was encouraged in my first year physics, but if it hadn't been would it be considered cheating? How many indcidents are required, over what period of time? Did they ask university students whether they had ever cheated, and include asking the previous class about the quiz back in grade 10?
I would also want to know the relationship between "cheating" and plagiarism. I have heard of professors who consider missing references or footnotes as plagiarism, even if it's accidental - but I don't think anyone would call that cheating.
I'm not saying you're wrong; I've heard cheating and plagiarism are rampant. I have some doubts about the significance of this. When I was a TA, I marked a paper which seemed very suspect to me - the language was inconsistent and too academic (i.e. impenetrable). We didn't prove it was plagiarism, but it wasn't all that good anyway - it didn't do a very good job of fulfilling the requirements of the assignment.
The real problem, if you ask me, is an industrial model of education which fails to truly connect with students. If eduction is turning a 300-student class into 300 numbers, there are going to be problems whether or not there's cheating involved. Unfortunately, better education is expensive, so there's no ideal solution unless we seriously restructure the relationship between society and education.
If plagiarism absolutely must be a priority, my off-the-top solution would be to make the students open up their work (just as academics should be doing). Don't put it in a corporate archive - put it online where anyone can read it. If the students are good, everyone can benefit from their work and the publicity may help their careers. If they plagiarize, that may catch up with them. On the other hand, this makes it very hard for students to move past foolishness or indiscretions, and may reduce risk-taking.
With a free capital market, such a player can be assembled with little difficulty.
You're telling me the SEC is the main barrier to setting up a new business in an existing market? Incumbency, first mover advantage, economies of scale, brand, negotiating power... these are all relatively minor obstacles? It's classic to set one conception of the free market on one side and the government (which is hardly a blameless regardless of your perspective) on the other as if there's a simple binary choice between them. It fits neatly into an ideology, but in reality the market doesn't work so smoothly. Take this article about prices for prescription generics:
Walgreens charges $117 for a bottle of the same pills for which Costco charges $12.
Why on earth, I asked . .., would anyone in his right mind fill his generic prescription at Walgreen's instead of Costco?
His answer: if a retiree is used to filling his prescriptions at Walgreens, that's where he fills his prescriptions -- and he assumes that the price of a generic drug (or, perhaps, any drug) is pretty much the same at any pharmacy. Talk about information asymmetry; talk about price discrimination.
Sure, in a theoretical perfect free market there wouldn't be information asymmentry. But there is - and there always will be (because companies know and use this fact, because gathering information is expensive, because individuals and smaller organizations suffer from greater coordination and collective action problems than big organizations, because they have fewer resources, because information is both a precondition for the market and a product sold in that market). So assuming you can "assemble" your "player" with little difficulty, how do you intend to compete with Walgreens? Because apparently they can still compete with a price 10 times yours for an identical product.
As for the telecoms, when governments allowed competition they also (at least where I live) forced the owner of the wires to allow for competition on those wires. Otherwise we wouldn't have competition there either. I say the market is more free because they regulated, not less.
I compared copyright infringement to littering. But every method I can think of for preventing infringement for personal use does more harm (social, economic, and political) than good. I can imagine a world in which there is no prohibition on personal copying - and I think it would be a better world. Of course, that's not the world we live in, and there is some harm done even when a bad law is broken (for some laws, the good of breaking the law may exceed the harm). Litter, in contrast, would still be a problem even if it were permitted.
So I don't really believe that (private) infringement is about as bad as littering. I think littering is much worse.
I don't think what Google/YouTube is doing is right. Slapping users on the wrists and deleting infringing videos obviously isn't enough to deter infringement
There's litter all over my neighborhood. Obviously current enforcement isn't enough to keep it clean. Should we escalate the penalties until the litter stops? Much of that litter is from the local McDonald's - shouldn't they be doing something to stop this menace? (If I could think of something they could reasonably do I'd be all for it, but I can't. I'm certainly not going to propose taking away their business license because their customers suck.)
We don't pass laws to produce perfect compliance. Attempts to do that - such as the "War on Drugs" - seldom succeed; the consequences are often worse than the original problem. Persistent lawbreaking, in and of itself, is never sufficient grounds for strengthening the law. Unfortunately, copyright enforcement in the U.S. seems to be following the path blazed by the drug enforcement.
To be fair, you say you're divided about fair-use rights vs infringement on YouTube. But from your phrasing, it appears that the effectiveness of anti-infringement efforts is the deciding question.
To agree with other responses to you, personally I think this infringement is about as bad as littering. Actually, littering is probably worse, as it is a gateway to worse crimes (see broken window theory).
So an algorithm generates this map from journal articles, then lays it out as a network - and I see people on here arguing about whether the categories are biased. What more proof do you need?
Or, take a close look at social science - there's economics in there. I see asset allocation; I'm sure game theory is there too (Prisoner's Dilemma, Tragedy of the Commons, public goods theory).
What's really surprising here is not the strength of the connection between computer science and the social sciences; it's the scarcity of connections elsewhere. Where are the connections between ecology and social science, ecology and computer science? I see infectious diseases - where are the links to network theory? What about the social and communication basis for physics and the other hard sciences?
Habermas has a fascinating analysis of this. He argues that science depends on a prior consensus about how the validity of evidence is evaluated. That consensus cannot itself be scientific. In other words, scientists can't agree about the value of each other's work until they first achieve a certain level of agreement on a social and communicative level.
If that sounds suspect to you, remember that the use of the word "paradigm" debated elswhere in this discussion originates from Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scienticific Revolutions, which is about the (significantly nonrational) process by which science is conducted, and is grounded in philosophy, history, and social science.
Perhaps the biggest missing links here are philosophy (including mathematics) and history. But then, they aren't sciences. At least not now: there have been scientific theories of history; science itself was once a branch of philosophy. Hurrah for computer science closing the circle, but the circle shouldn't be in need of closing.
Copyright is a form of censorship. Justifiable perhaps, but censorship nonetheless. (And censorship can be justifiable, as the usual example of yelling "fire" in a crowded theater demonstrates). I suspect copyright prevents more speech than just about any other law. I believe the copyright laws we have today are excessive; the more excessive they are, they more they censor.
Even if you take a narrow conception of free speech protections only applying to government censorship, copyright applies because it is enforced and enacted by government. The fact that it is justified on economic grounds rather than political ones makes no difference. When applied as intended, copyright prevents the spread of ideas and information which are inherently political. Corrupted, it can be and is deliberately used for political reasons. We can clearly see this today with voting machine companies using copyright to prevent criticism of their technoolgy, DMCA takedowns of news clips and comment on YouTube, and so on.
I say this not because I wish to give France a pass - this law sounds appalling - but because I don't wish to see the U.S. given one either.
It's one thing for the police to enforce the law. It's quite another for private companies and individuals to do so. If DRM is enforcement, then it's private enforcement: companies interpreting and applying the law according to their own standards, and without oversight.
Of course, as you correctly point out, DRM itself is not enforcement. It takes people to enforce a law. Devices can only enable and prohibit specific behavior, but that's a far cry from the active human reasoning required to apply the law.
I have often seen copy protection and DRM measures described as "speed bumps" for pirates, which is a much more accurate characterization. Although again, these speed bumps are private, interfering in a public space (i.e. restricting legitimate activities of the public).
I wonder when finally FOSS will unite and start doing something TOGETHER instead of fighting some stupid wars about GPLv2 vs GPLv3 and so on?
I have a lot of sympathy with your complaint. But licenses are essential for the governance and coordination needed for open source contributors to work together. We can't (for the most part) command through hierarchies or provide financial incentives. The license represents the common ground or consensus achieved by constributors; without it, they would be unlikely to participate.
Political scientist Steven Weber has called the license a "de facto constitution . . . One way to manage complexity is to state explicitly (in a license or constitution) the norms and standards of behavior that hold the community together." So these debates aren't just about the license; they're about the rights of participants, how they see the community, governance, and so on.
Different licenses produced different software. We argue this when we suggest that closed-source software is more likely to have hidden bugs. Weber discusses Apache, for example, and says:
BSD-style projects typically rest with a small team of developers who together write almost all the code for a project. . . . There is nothing to stop an outside user from submitting code to the core team; but in most BSD-style projects, there is no regularized process for doing that. . . . as an ideal type, it is not vitally collaborative on a very large scale, in the sense that Linux is.
I said I sympathized though, and I do. Politics is no fun. Seeing people who share your goals making (what you believe to be) tragic political mistakes is no fun either. Unfortunately, the fragmentation of the community, the potential for code forks, and so on are part of what hold it together. There's no perfect solution. Though so far the open source solution has proved to be pretty good - one of the best even.
(Weber's book is The Success of Open Source. It's fantastic. My quotes are from pages 179 and 62-63.)
The movie industry, like the music industry, releases a large number of movies, but makes most of the money from a small number of hits. Since pirates will tend to target the most popular films, that 13% of films probably represents the majority of revenues and profits.
Of course, it's very difficult to determine just how much loss the existence of pirate versions of those films represents to the industry. It might be significant; it might be quite small. The MPAA hardly has a record of being honest in its assessments. How many in-theater pirated DVDs of Hollywood films do Slashdotters have? Are you folks aware of many other people with pirated DVDs? I bet it's not many, though I also suspect Slashdot's (often young, male, with disposable income, tech and pop culture savy) population is a prime target for both Hollywood and pirates. How many Thais (say) would have bought the $20 DVD if there were no pirated version? I bet that's not so many either.
One of the tenets for "fair use" is whether or not the use of the copyrighted material was whether the intent was of a commercial nature or not. Once revenue sharing starts, millions of legally "naive" video uploaders are suddenly going to find themselves thrown into the nasty side of the fair use litmus test.
The irony of course is that copyright, a mechanism intended to create a market for creative and intellectual works, effectively discourages participation in that market. The alternative of noncommercial fair use only underlines that failure. (Eliminating fair use wouldn't help: in that case, most of these works wouldn't be created and/or distributed.)
Not that this is new, it's just really obvious here. In spite of the ideology of copyright fundamentalists who preach "the more the better", economists know that copyright by its nature must introduce inefficiencies into the market.
the idea of a person having a right to the fruits of their labours existed since man formed societies. About as long as the idea that one person should be entitled to the fruits of others.
We have no way of knowing what ideas existed in the first societies. Since human beings have always existed in socities, that's going back a very long way. Certainly very few (no?) pre-modern socities were based on the right you describe. So although your statement is weaker than the one I replied to, it is still a huge claim - have you any evidence?
The concept of "rights", however, the idea that value is a product of labor, and the use of this as a theoretical jutsification for a certain kind of society is is a modern liberal phenomenon. It has more in common with Marx than Plato - indeed it was the basis for Marx's critique of capitalism.
it [copyright] confers upon the holder the right to control copies. Profit is secondary
Profit and encouraging creation, not the codification of some kind of pre-existing or "natural" property right, is at the heart of copyright law. The 1709 Statute of Anne, the first modern copyright law, lays out as its objective the financial protection of authors and publishers and the encouragement of authorship:
Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken
the Liberty of Printing, Reprinting, and Publishing, or causing to be Printed, Reprinted, and Published Books,and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors or Proprietors of such Books and Writings, to their very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families: For Preventing therefore such Practices for the future, and for the Encouragement of Learned Men to Compose and Write useful Books . ..
Honda can't create an exact copy of a Ford and sell it.
I can see numerous examples of me-too products. Where cloning physical products is prohibited by law, it has nothing to do with copyright (possibly industrial design, patent, or trademark law, or the protection of trade secrets - e.g. the Coke formula). They would be entirely unecessary in this case: Ford could not build its brand on the basis of copying Honda.
If your theatre had the same content as your competitors but you didn't pay for it, but did charge your customers to see it. That would be closer to what's happenning here, and it would be wrong, legal, and otherwise.
That's sloppy reasoning. First, it misses the distinction that YouTube is making an indirect profit from the videos users upload - just as the restaurant is making an indirect profit from the cinema. At what point is indirect profit covered by copyright? The post to which I replied suggested that all profit - direct and indirect - was due to the copyright holder. Second, YouTube is creating much of the value, its users are creating more - but the right to one's labor is not extended to them. Third - and I suspect this was not your intent, but it is all too common in debates around copyright - your statement vastly overgeneralizes. Fair use, public domain content, and open content are some of the reasons why the activity you describe may be completely proper.
As for being "wrong", as I have tried to illustrate, the idea that ideas can be owned is recent and particular to certain societies. At many times and in many places (and for many ideas even in our society), this has not been the case. We as a society define the boundaries of what is acceptable or not. Partly this is done through law, but many of laws do not reflect social understandings of right and wrong. Most importantly, the bounds of property, of ideas, of copyright can be changed. They have changed recently - much for the w
"Most societies in history have been organized quite differently, with vastly different conceptions of property and ownership. "
Hell, I want to see the same argument when discussing gun ownership , slavery and other relics of the past.
Sure, the concept that it wrong to enslave people is quite modern as well...
I'm not sure what argument you refer to, for my remark was a simple response to the claim of a 12,000 year precedent for a modern phenomenon. If I were to make an argument here, it would be about being careful about placing historical phenomena into modern categories (or vice-versa). Slavery, for example, has been understood in a variety of ways. In Roman society, for example, slaves were a class of people with specific rights. In antebellum America, slaves were not considered people at all; thus the idea that it was "wrong to enslave people" was not be incompatible with the institution. American slavery was made even more brutal by the application of a modern conception of property to these non-persons.
With regards to intellectual property, some societies have seen cultural objects as having a life or spirit of their own: they could not be "owned". For the Trobriand islanders, the holder of such an object was obliged to pass it on; the object acquired its great value by virtue of its being passed from person to person. In many cases (and to an extent even in Roman society), some objects were thought to carry a spiritual connection which could not be overcome by simple possession or physical control (see Marcel Mauss, The Gift). This is perhaps similar to our idea, embodied in copyright, that a work such as a novel is bound to its author even though we may hold it in our hands - though for us, it is the author who has the right over the work, not the work itself which possesses a spirit.
Youtube didn't pay to produce it so they have no right to benefit financially from it.
You know, that simply doesn't reflect how the economy works. If I put up a cinema, there's no reason, moral, legal or otherwise, why you shouldn't open up a restaurant next door and make a profit from the customers I draw. True, you have no positive right to do so, but there's no restriction on such activity either. Do you want to live in a world in which companies and individuals can control all positive externalities of their actions? As Lemley explains, monopolies are the best way to achieve that kind of control. The pernicious idea that copyright confers an exclusive right to profits (both direct and indirect) is at variance with almost all other market activity.
Whoever puts the money into producing the material should control it. If you make something it belongs to you unless you give or sell the rights to some one else. That isn't copyright that's been true for roughly twelve thousands years or more.
Where on earth does this come from? Market economies and the labor theory of value are a modern phenomena. Most societies in history have been organized quite differently, with vastly different conceptions of property and ownership. (Your claim preceeds the earliest writing by thousands of years!)
If you ask me, Viacom's action is a negotiating tactic. They know they benefit from the distribution of their programing. But they also know there's money to be made here, so they want as big a cut as possible. Both sides are in a contest to determine how to divide up the pie - which really comes down to a question of relative strength and weakness, not right and wrong.
Any way one can provide feedback to their government is a valid one.
It really depends who the "one" is. If the mechanism for feedback is open to some but not to others, then it can actually decrease democracy. Lobbying can be criticized on these grounds, because it buys disproportionate influence for some. So can government consultations that exclude important groups.
In Canada, for example, the minister responsible for copyright reform is meeting frequently with CRIA (effectively the Canadian branch of the RIAA), but not with Canadian artists. A similar effect can be achieved more subtly. The use of particular technologies (e.g. requirements for Internet Explorer, or even for Internet access where not all people have it) or procedures (e.g. requirements to comment in person in a different city during working hours), or the restriction of comment to certain groups, can do more harm than good.
Mind you, I'm only criticizing your assertion, not your conclusion. The British effort sounds like a good thing, though I think you're right to be skeptical about the response of government.
both camps will lose to online video content delivery. And, just like for audio, online content will be of lower quality than the one on optical disks of various kinds . . . MP3, AAC, WMA are all lossy compression format which are lower in sound quality than CD . . . but they are winning . . . because of the content delivery innovation and content mobility.
I think you're right on the money. Doing the same old thing better only gets you so far; doing something new, as the Wii is demonstrating, changes the rules of the game. Even as someone who appreciated the better picture of Beta into the 1990s, I felt the killer features for DVDs were random access and compact size, not so much video quality. And the uses and context of online video will be different. Video is different from film is different from theater, and online video will be different again. Subject to different constraints (no programming slots, no requirement for 22 or 45 minute episodes, advertising breaks, etc.), and with the potential for new producers to challenge the traditions of Hollywood, it will tell different stories in different ways. The differences will likely be very great, but trying to predict it now is probably about as useless as projecting from America's Funniest Home Videos to the success of YouTube. That doesn't mean the newer formats (or regular TV) will go away (although they will change): where now we have only "video", we may end up with multiple technologies with their own niches (just as computers and game machines are separate markets).
. . . you're wondering why a group of people would be opposed to communism would want to live in a "planned" community?
The problem is not just that Party apartments are small and uncomfortable; the opposition to communism is ideological, not only practical. I wonder why people who are ideologically opposed to central planning would want to live in a (centrally) planned community - or at least why they would not notice the inconstency. Of course, if the ideological complaint really centers on property (as you imply), not planning, then it makes sense - although in that case the arguments about the superiority of markets to central planning has been hypocritical hot air. Actually, I think this has the ring of truth to it.
There are a couple of developments here around central Virginia that have been pretty successful. The common spaces really *are* used.
The difference I see between a mall and (say) a public plaza is that the former is private property, to which you are admitted on the assumption you will help the mall owners achieve their goal (selling things). Do otherwise - playing checkers, eccentric dress, religious prosletyzing, political activites, etc. may get you kicked out. The same is not true of a public space: it is truly a place of multiple purposes and uses, in which people can meet on equal terms. If ownership of property helps people be in charge of their private lives, public spaces and institutions help them achieve the same within their society.
the kind of developers you are talking about should have no trouble getting some zone rules and other regulations changed when they are proposing a large development
I have read several instances in Canada where this has not been the case: developers have given up on innovative projects because even when the bureaucracy supports alternatives in principle, in practice it has rejected change at every step.
As for your developments in Virginia, if people really do use and appreciate them, then that's fantastic. Most (but not all) of the new urban "communities" I have seen elsewhere have failed to achieve that.
Sprawl has happened because developers were giving people what they want. Having an affordable house with a yard for the kids and decent schools are often not available in urban environments.
Probably many people have wanted those things, but many others have not. In a development monoculture it's impossible to know. Developers, like other people, often stampede to one solution, then to another. Some people may prioritize a private yards, while others may prefer shared playgrounds or courtyards. School quality is not a consequence of suburbia per-se, but correlates to the status of the people who live in an area (indeed, house prices are effectively used as a means to exclude those of lower class from schools). Given the variety of housing and urban styles around the world, it seems likely in a society of immigrants that these styles would appear. But for the most part they don't.
In the Vancouver area, where I live, we are cursed with hordes of Vancouver Specials, a kind of generic boxy house. But immigrants didn't buy them because that's what they wanted, rather because "that's what was available and they assumed it was the latest style". Now Specials are out of fashion. An architect who wanted to work with one found that "The toughest part of the challenge . . . lay in that thicket of bylaws. Robb spent all of 2000 negotiating with city-hall planners". Before you say that's just one guy, realize that innovation often starts with those on the margins. Stopping one guy from trying something new may stop
I thought this might be a contentious point; now I'm regretting not being more specific about it. I believe this mainly comes in to play when subdivisions have cul-de-sacs; otherwise, as other posters have noted, the truck can go around the block. The ability of a fire truck to turn around, however, is clearly also a product of the size of the truck. I've seen trucks in small streets in Switzerland, and they are correspondingly small. It seems to me that sizing all the streets to the firetrucks may make less sense than sizing the trucks to the streets. (I also suspect there are cases in which backing out is a realonable solution.)
You're right of course; the regulations are not all or entirely senseless. If you look at my posting history, you'll see I'm hardly one to claim regulations are all bad. The real problem here is that a style of suburban development has been codified in a set of rules that prevent the exploration of alternatives. That is starting to change; while we certainly need rules and coordination, I worry that the mentality that created the older rules will only result in new ones as inflexible as the old.
New urbanism is probably a step in the right direction, but it appears to be missing critical elements of successful older neighborhoods. Jane Jacobs emphasizes the need for buildings of various ages (and which can be repurposed as the community changes): the book shops in old houses, funky music stores, arty cafes and so on that make for a hip urban environment often can't afford the rent of flashy new buildings. It strikes me as strange that a society which so strongly rejected the idea (if not always the practice) of central planning during the Cold War prides itself in its "master planned" communities."
Furthermore, a vibrant community requires more than just residential and commercial uses. The plans I have seen often look attractive, but on closer examination bear a striking resemblance to malls turned inside out and mixed with housing. They may have greenspace or plazas, but like the landscaping around so many highrises these are often private or effectively gated. The real test of urban spaces is whether they are used. Once built, the pretty designs of planners are often lonely places. On the other hand, sometimes the least attractive spaces are great successes (think of skate parks).
So I don't really think it's ironic the planners of gated communities are building new urban spaces which can also be privatized and desolate; they're simply taking their old approach of centralization and control and dressing it up in new clothes.
On the other hand, it's not all their fault. Developers who do want to take a risk often run into senseless rules regulating every detail of their communities, such as requirements for streets big enough for fire trucks to turn around in to minimum parking spaces, wide streets, huge setbacks in front of buildings, low densities, and so forth. Sprawl has been institutionalized in North America, and bureaucracy has been slow to change. (And I suspect rather than releasing their grip they're probably just making up new rules.)
Sony and other music companies that force Microsoft do implement DRM . . . Its not as if Microsoft has a choice in this matter.
Sony and the other music companies haven't forced Microsoft to implement anything. Microsoft could have chosen to manufacture an MP3 player and set up a music store selling MP3s from more enlightened companies and artists. They could have created their own niche in the market and targeted those not well-served by Apple's lock-in model, while also selling music playable on iPod, the dominant player. Maybe it's a long shot. But then, going head-to-head with iPod looks like quite the long shot anyway. Forced? Microsoft's a big boy; I'm sure it can take responsibility for its actions.
Copyright is supposed to be imperfect and leaky. I do not want a scheme for perfectly enforcing it via architecture.
Exactly. Even when laws appear to be cut-and-dry, they require human interpretation. Is abortion murder? At what stage - conception? at some arbitrary point later?
Copyright is anything but simple. What's a copy, for example? Does a temporary file generated by a web browser count? What if you record a streaming video? Is a photograph of the Eiffel tower a copy? A few frames of network television captured while filming a documentary? Is copying sometimes justified - perhaps because the document in question is evidence of serious problems with voting machines? Is the work in question even in copyright? (There's a clear yes/no answer to that one, but it can be very difficult to figure out.) Is hyperlinking a violation? I haven't even considered fair use.
Code is not interpreted. It is inflexible. It cannot change when society changes - and society will change. There was a time when slaves and women were not "persons". Once embodied in code, the human actions that created the rule become invisible - they appear to be facts of nature. Radio is a mass medium: you can receive, but you cannot transmit. That's just how it is. Well, no: that's a choice that was made when the technology was developed. It could have been point-to-point like the telephone (just as the telephone could have been a broadcast medium - some early providers played music over the phone); it could have allowed two-way communication.
The decisions made in the development of technology cast a long shadow on the future. This is unavoidable. The question to ask then is whether the shadow cast by DRM is a desirable one. DRM entrenches the model of mass communication: of a few broadcasters and many listeners. It limits the potential for speech and participation in a free and democratic society. It reinforces hierarchy, control, monopoly power - in the market, in software, on your computer. Not your control: someone' else's. That's the DRM we are faced with today. If, for argument's sake, we accept that makers of music and video would never distribute their products online (a questionable assertion), would the trade-off be worth it? I say the price is too high: DRM is always bad.
Avoiding dataloss is perhaps the best reason for having a native file format, at least for existing applications.
I think this is a good point, particularly relevant both for existing applications and for areas of rapid innovation where it's not yet clear what should be in the app or the format. I consider myself corrected (and am somewhat embarrassed to have overlooked this in my previous post). I am not convinced it is the best case for word processing though, so I'm curious if you have any specific insights there.
Social constructivist theories of technological development describe the stabilization of the technology, at which point differing interpretations - often corresponding to different technical designs - converge on a single understanding of the technology. Word processing in particular is an established class of application for which consensus has been reached regarding its role and feature set[1]. According to this reasoning, as innovation slows, the benefits of custom formats would evaporate while the merits of standardization increase. I would therefore expect gravitation towards using open formats by default, with custom formats reserved for niche uses in need of application-specific features.
Significant innovation, I suspect, would tend to be understood not in terms of "word processing", but would be differentiated into new classes of application, which at a later date might (or might not) get folded back into word processing proper. HTML and blog post authoring strike me as two current examples of this.
None of what I say, however, is a result of direct experience in consumer application development, so your experience may point to other outcomes.
[1] Modulo a few exceptions; I'm sure this represents the vast majority of people - far more than Joel's 80% (though I think Joel overrates convergence - witness the iPod, game machines, portable DVD players, and the proliferation of other single-task technologies).
There's nothing wrong with saving in a file format that matches your internal representation, in fact, it's a darn good idea (see.ABW for AbiWord,.DOC for Word,.WPD for WordPerfect I would also wager is the same idea).
Documents are worth far more than software, and they outlive the applications used to create them. See the comment to the original article - reading documents after 5, 20, 30, 100 years or more is not optional. You can pay the price of developing an independent format now, or you can pay the price of reverse engineering over and over again every time you change your internal representation.
Repeated implementation limits future change and innovation. It's expensive: it likely costs more even for Microsoft. But they can afford it; their competitors may not be able to. Plus, Microsoft already has their first implementation.
interoperability seems to work best when taken from the ground up - when working with another application's data structure of any complexity, you simply can't do a lossless roundtrip without losing before you've started.
Perhaps so. But compare that cost to the cost I've just outlined. It is in the best interest of users and software developers (maybe even of Microsoft) to bite the bullet now, do the conversion once, and develop a clean format for the future.
Maybe you have in mind an argument you're not making, but I don't see any sufficient basis for your broad contention that using a file format based on an internal representation is a "darn good idea". In specific cases, yes (e.g. where the cost of development time or effort are the most important factors). In general, I very much doubt it. That successful applications in the past have taken that approach is weak evidence. They were developed when the up-front cost of development in a time of rapid innovation, the loss of customer lock-in, and a lack of open-format competition where good business reasons for making such a choice - even if it was inferior technically, increased cost in the long term, and was bad for consumers. In today's climate of slower innovation, competition from open formats, and customers who are running into their own long-term interests, the situation is different.
Which is not to say Microsoft's apparent attempt to set the rules of the game and throw sand in the gears of change is not in their interests, or that it will be unsuccessful.
This was the first thing that came to my mind. What are the implications for video games? If video game violence arouses the same psychological responses as real violence, then overcoming inhibitions in video games may lead to the same in real life. I know that's not a popular argument on Slashdot, but it seems to me to be an obvious connection to make.
(Personally, I have experienced the same myself. I would not engage in slave trading in Elite, and I was initially uncomfortable about slaughtering civilians in Age of Empires (I would have preferred an alternative that didn't involve committing war crimes). On the other hand, I had no problem wiping out the dark god's people in Populous.)
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In that case, you might want to try complaining about copyright law. Though what copyright tries to achieve (chopping ideas into discreet units and assigning ownership[1]) is so different from how ideas otherwise exist I can't imagine the law every being simple.
In many cases, the GPL makes dealing with copyright less complicated - because it's a de facto standard, because you can focus on the four freedoms instead of the minutiae of the law, because you don't have to hire a lawyer every time you want to let someone use your software, because if you do let someone modify your software you don't have to worry about them turning around and suing you for using with the modified version, because there is a community to provide you with support and might even help you if your license is violated.
[1] I am aware that copyright is supposed to apply to the representation of an idea, not the idea itself. If you can figure out a way to reliabily differentiate the two, maybe you do know how to simplify copyright.
Thank you. Those rates do sound pretty high, especially the rate of cheating on exams. (Copying homework assignments doesn't surprise me, especially for math and sciences.) Am I right in supposing that an "honor code" school is one in which students are expected to sign on to a code of conduct, or is that a specific program in the U.S.?
The definition of "cheating" can make a big difference. Does copying a math proof count? Collaboration was encouraged in my first year physics, but if it hadn't been would it be considered cheating? How many indcidents are required, over what period of time? Did they ask university students whether they had ever cheated, and include asking the previous class about the quiz back in grade 10?
I would also want to know the relationship between "cheating" and plagiarism. I have heard of professors who consider missing references or footnotes as plagiarism, even if it's accidental - but I don't think anyone would call that cheating.
I'm not saying you're wrong; I've heard cheating and plagiarism are rampant. I have some doubts about the significance of this. When I was a TA, I marked a paper which seemed very suspect to me - the language was inconsistent and too academic (i.e. impenetrable). We didn't prove it was plagiarism, but it wasn't all that good anyway - it didn't do a very good job of fulfilling the requirements of the assignment.
The real problem, if you ask me, is an industrial model of education which fails to truly connect with students. If eduction is turning a 300-student class into 300 numbers, there are going to be problems whether or not there's cheating involved. Unfortunately, better education is expensive, so there's no ideal solution unless we seriously restructure the relationship between society and education.
If plagiarism absolutely must be a priority, my off-the-top solution would be to make the students open up their work (just as academics should be doing). Don't put it in a corporate archive - put it online where anyone can read it. If the students are good, everyone can benefit from their work and the publicity may help their careers. If they plagiarize, that may catch up with them. On the other hand, this makes it very hard for students to move past foolishness or indiscretions, and may reduce risk-taking.
You're telling me the SEC is the main barrier to setting up a new business in an existing market? Incumbency, first mover advantage, economies of scale, brand, negotiating power... these are all relatively minor obstacles? It's classic to set one conception of the free market on one side and the government (which is hardly a blameless regardless of your perspective) on the other as if there's a simple binary choice between them. It fits neatly into an ideology, but in reality the market doesn't work so smoothly. Take this article about prices for prescription generics:
Sure, in a theoretical perfect free market there wouldn't be information asymmentry. But there is - and there always will be (because companies know and use this fact, because gathering information is expensive, because individuals and smaller organizations suffer from greater coordination and collective action problems than big organizations, because they have fewer resources, because information is both a precondition for the market and a product sold in that market). So assuming you can "assemble" your "player" with little difficulty, how do you intend to compete with Walgreens? Because apparently they can still compete with a price 10 times yours for an identical product.
As for the telecoms, when governments allowed competition they also (at least where I live) forced the owner of the wires to allow for competition on those wires. Otherwise we wouldn't have competition there either. I say the market is more free because they regulated, not less.
I compared copyright infringement to littering. But every method I can think of for preventing infringement for personal use does more harm (social, economic, and political) than good. I can imagine a world in which there is no prohibition on personal copying - and I think it would be a better world. Of course, that's not the world we live in, and there is some harm done even when a bad law is broken (for some laws, the good of breaking the law may exceed the harm). Litter, in contrast, would still be a problem even if it were permitted.
So I don't really believe that (private) infringement is about as bad as littering. I think littering is much worse.
There's litter all over my neighborhood. Obviously current enforcement isn't enough to keep it clean. Should we escalate the penalties until the litter stops? Much of that litter is from the local McDonald's - shouldn't they be doing something to stop this menace? (If I could think of something they could reasonably do I'd be all for it, but I can't. I'm certainly not going to propose taking away their business license because their customers suck.)
We don't pass laws to produce perfect compliance. Attempts to do that - such as the "War on Drugs" - seldom succeed; the consequences are often worse than the original problem. Persistent lawbreaking, in and of itself, is never sufficient grounds for strengthening the law. Unfortunately, copyright enforcement in the U.S. seems to be following the path blazed by the drug enforcement.
To be fair, you say you're divided about fair-use rights vs infringement on YouTube. But from your phrasing, it appears that the effectiveness of anti-infringement efforts is the deciding question.
To agree with other responses to you, personally I think this infringement is about as bad as littering. Actually, littering is probably worse, as it is a gateway to worse crimes (see broken window theory).
So an algorithm generates this map from journal articles, then lays it out as a network - and I see people on here arguing about whether the categories are biased. What more proof do you need?
Or, take a close look at social science - there's economics in there. I see asset allocation; I'm sure game theory is there too (Prisoner's Dilemma, Tragedy of the Commons, public goods theory).
What's really surprising here is not the strength of the connection between computer science and the social sciences; it's the scarcity of connections elsewhere. Where are the connections between ecology and social science, ecology and computer science? I see infectious diseases - where are the links to network theory? What about the social and communication basis for physics and the other hard sciences?
Habermas has a fascinating analysis of this. He argues that science depends on a prior consensus about how the validity of evidence is evaluated. That consensus cannot itself be scientific. In other words, scientists can't agree about the value of each other's work until they first achieve a certain level of agreement on a social and communicative level.
If that sounds suspect to you, remember that the use of the word "paradigm" debated elswhere in this discussion originates from Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scienticific Revolutions, which is about the (significantly nonrational) process by which science is conducted, and is grounded in philosophy, history, and social science.
Perhaps the biggest missing links here are philosophy (including mathematics) and history. But then, they aren't sciences. At least not now: there have been scientific theories of history; science itself was once a branch of philosophy. Hurrah for computer science closing the circle, but the circle shouldn't be in need of closing.
Copyright is a form of censorship. Justifiable perhaps, but censorship nonetheless. (And censorship can be justifiable, as the usual example of yelling "fire" in a crowded theater demonstrates). I suspect copyright prevents more speech than just about any other law. I believe the copyright laws we have today are excessive; the more excessive they are, they more they censor.
Even if you take a narrow conception of free speech protections only applying to government censorship, copyright applies because it is enforced and enacted by government. The fact that it is justified on economic grounds rather than political ones makes no difference. When applied as intended, copyright prevents the spread of ideas and information which are inherently political. Corrupted, it can be and is deliberately used for political reasons. We can clearly see this today with voting machine companies using copyright to prevent criticism of their technoolgy, DMCA takedowns of news clips and comment on YouTube, and so on.
I say this not because I wish to give France a pass - this law sounds appalling - but because I don't wish to see the U.S. given one either.
It's one thing for the police to enforce the law. It's quite another for private companies and individuals to do so. If DRM is enforcement, then it's private enforcement: companies interpreting and applying the law according to their own standards, and without oversight.
Of course, as you correctly point out, DRM itself is not enforcement. It takes people to enforce a law. Devices can only enable and prohibit specific behavior, but that's a far cry from the active human reasoning required to apply the law.
I have often seen copy protection and DRM measures described as "speed bumps" for pirates, which is a much more accurate characterization. Although again, these speed bumps are private, interfering in a public space (i.e. restricting legitimate activities of the public).
I have a lot of sympathy with your complaint. But licenses are essential for the governance and coordination needed for open source contributors to work together. We can't (for the most part) command through hierarchies or provide financial incentives. The license represents the common ground or consensus achieved by constributors; without it, they would be unlikely to participate.
Political scientist Steven Weber has called the license a "de facto constitution . . . One way to manage complexity is to state explicitly (in a license or constitution) the norms and standards of behavior that hold the community together." So these debates aren't just about the license; they're about the rights of participants, how they see the community, governance, and so on.
Different licenses produced different software. We argue this when we suggest that closed-source software is more likely to have hidden bugs. Weber discusses Apache, for example, and says:
I said I sympathized though, and I do. Politics is no fun. Seeing people who share your goals making (what you believe to be) tragic political mistakes is no fun either. Unfortunately, the fragmentation of the community, the potential for code forks, and so on are part of what hold it together. There's no perfect solution. Though so far the open source solution has proved to be pretty good - one of the best even.
(Weber's book is The Success of Open Source. It's fantastic. My quotes are from pages 179 and 62-63.)
The movie industry, like the music industry, releases a large number of movies, but makes most of the money from a small number of hits. Since pirates will tend to target the most popular films, that 13% of films probably represents the majority of revenues and profits.
Of course, it's very difficult to determine just how much loss the existence of pirate versions of those films represents to the industry. It might be significant; it might be quite small. The MPAA hardly has a record of being honest in its assessments. How many in-theater pirated DVDs of Hollywood films do Slashdotters have? Are you folks aware of many other people with pirated DVDs? I bet it's not many, though I also suspect Slashdot's (often young, male, with disposable income, tech and pop culture savy) population is a prime target for both Hollywood and pirates. How many Thais (say) would have bought the $20 DVD if there were no pirated version? I bet that's not so many either.
The irony of course is that copyright, a mechanism intended to create a market for creative and intellectual works, effectively discourages participation in that market. The alternative of noncommercial fair use only underlines that failure. (Eliminating fair use wouldn't help: in that case, most of these works wouldn't be created and/or distributed.)
Not that this is new, it's just really obvious here. In spite of the ideology of copyright fundamentalists who preach "the more the better", economists know that copyright by its nature must introduce inefficiencies into the market.
We have no way of knowing what ideas existed in the first societies. Since human beings have always existed in socities, that's going back a very long way. Certainly very few (no?) pre-modern socities were based on the right you describe. So although your statement is weaker than the one I replied to, it is still a huge claim - have you any evidence?
The concept of "rights", however, the idea that value is a product of labor, and the use of this as a theoretical jutsification for a certain kind of society is is a modern liberal phenomenon. It has more in common with Marx than Plato - indeed it was the basis for Marx's critique of capitalism.
Profit and encouraging creation, not the codification of some kind of pre-existing or "natural" property right, is at the heart of copyright law. The 1709 Statute of Anne, the first modern copyright law, lays out as its objective the financial protection of authors and publishers and the encouragement of authorship:
I can see numerous examples of me-too products. Where cloning physical products is prohibited by law, it has nothing to do with copyright (possibly industrial design, patent, or trademark law, or the protection of trade secrets - e.g. the Coke formula). They would be entirely unecessary in this case: Ford could not build its brand on the basis of copying Honda.
That's sloppy reasoning. First, it misses the distinction that YouTube is making an indirect profit from the videos users upload - just as the restaurant is making an indirect profit from the cinema. At what point is indirect profit covered by copyright? The post to which I replied suggested that all profit - direct and indirect - was due to the copyright holder. Second, YouTube is creating much of the value, its users are creating more - but the right to one's labor is not extended to them. Third - and I suspect this was not your intent, but it is all too common in debates around copyright - your statement vastly overgeneralizes. Fair use, public domain content, and open content are some of the reasons why the activity you describe may be completely proper.
As for being "wrong", as I have tried to illustrate, the idea that ideas can be owned is recent and particular to certain societies. At many times and in many places (and for many ideas even in our society), this has not been the case. We as a society define the boundaries of what is acceptable or not. Partly this is done through law, but many of laws do not reflect social understandings of right and wrong. Most importantly, the bounds of property, of ideas, of copyright can be changed. They have changed recently - much for the w
I'm not sure what argument you refer to, for my remark was a simple response to the claim of a 12,000 year precedent for a modern phenomenon. If I were to make an argument here, it would be about being careful about placing historical phenomena into modern categories (or vice-versa). Slavery, for example, has been understood in a variety of ways. In Roman society, for example, slaves were a class of people with specific rights. In antebellum America, slaves were not considered people at all; thus the idea that it was "wrong to enslave people" was not be incompatible with the institution. American slavery was made even more brutal by the application of a modern conception of property to these non-persons.
With regards to intellectual property, some societies have seen cultural objects as having a life or spirit of their own: they could not be "owned". For the Trobriand islanders, the holder of such an object was obliged to pass it on; the object acquired its great value by virtue of its being passed from person to person. In many cases (and to an extent even in Roman society), some objects were thought to carry a spiritual connection which could not be overcome by simple possession or physical control (see Marcel Mauss, The Gift). This is perhaps similar to our idea, embodied in copyright, that a work such as a novel is bound to its author even though we may hold it in our hands - though for us, it is the author who has the right over the work, not the work itself which possesses a spirit.
You know, that simply doesn't reflect how the economy works. If I put up a cinema, there's no reason, moral, legal or otherwise, why you shouldn't open up a restaurant next door and make a profit from the customers I draw. True, you have no positive right to do so, but there's no restriction on such activity either. Do you want to live in a world in which companies and individuals can control all positive externalities of their actions? As Lemley explains, monopolies are the best way to achieve that kind of control. The pernicious idea that copyright confers an exclusive right to profits (both direct and indirect) is at variance with almost all other market activity.
Where on earth does this come from? Market economies and the labor theory of value are a modern phenomena. Most societies in history have been organized quite differently, with vastly different conceptions of property and ownership. (Your claim preceeds the earliest writing by thousands of years!)
If you ask me, Viacom's action is a negotiating tactic. They know they benefit from the distribution of their programing. But they also know there's money to be made here, so they want as big a cut as possible. Both sides are in a contest to determine how to divide up the pie - which really comes down to a question of relative strength and weakness, not right and wrong.
It really depends who the "one" is. If the mechanism for feedback is open to some but not to others, then it can actually decrease democracy. Lobbying can be criticized on these grounds, because it buys disproportionate influence for some. So can government consultations that exclude important groups.
In Canada, for example, the minister responsible for copyright reform is meeting frequently with CRIA (effectively the Canadian branch of the RIAA), but not with Canadian artists. A similar effect can be achieved more subtly. The use of particular technologies (e.g. requirements for Internet Explorer, or even for Internet access where not all people have it) or procedures (e.g. requirements to comment in person in a different city during working hours), or the restriction of comment to certain groups, can do more harm than good.
Mind you, I'm only criticizing your assertion, not your conclusion. The British effort sounds like a good thing, though I think you're right to be skeptical about the response of government.
I think you're right on the money. Doing the same old thing better only gets you so far; doing something new, as the Wii is demonstrating, changes the rules of the game. Even as someone who appreciated the better picture of Beta into the 1990s, I felt the killer features for DVDs were random access and compact size, not so much video quality. And the uses and context of online video will be different. Video is different from film is different from theater, and online video will be different again. Subject to different constraints (no programming slots, no requirement for 22 or 45 minute episodes, advertising breaks, etc.), and with the potential for new producers to challenge the traditions of Hollywood, it will tell different stories in different ways. The differences will likely be very great, but trying to predict it now is probably about as useless as projecting from America's Funniest Home Videos to the success of YouTube. That doesn't mean the newer formats (or regular TV) will go away (although they will change): where now we have only "video", we may end up with multiple technologies with their own niches (just as computers and game machines are separate markets).
The problem is not just that Party apartments are small and uncomfortable; the opposition to communism is ideological, not only practical. I wonder why people who are ideologically opposed to central planning would want to live in a (centrally) planned community - or at least why they would not notice the inconstency. Of course, if the ideological complaint really centers on property (as you imply), not planning, then it makes sense - although in that case the arguments about the superiority of markets to central planning has been hypocritical hot air. Actually, I think this has the ring of truth to it.
The difference I see between a mall and (say) a public plaza is that the former is private property, to which you are admitted on the assumption you will help the mall owners achieve their goal (selling things). Do otherwise - playing checkers, eccentric dress, religious prosletyzing, political activites, etc. may get you kicked out. The same is not true of a public space: it is truly a place of multiple purposes and uses, in which people can meet on equal terms. If ownership of property helps people be in charge of their private lives, public spaces and institutions help them achieve the same within their society.
I have read several instances in Canada where this has not been the case: developers have given up on innovative projects because even when the bureaucracy supports alternatives in principle, in practice it has rejected change at every step.
As for your developments in Virginia, if people really do use and appreciate them, then that's fantastic. Most (but not all) of the new urban "communities" I have seen elsewhere have failed to achieve that.
Probably many people have wanted those things, but many others have not. In a development monoculture it's impossible to know. Developers, like other people, often stampede to one solution, then to another. Some people may prioritize a private yards, while others may prefer shared playgrounds or courtyards. School quality is not a consequence of suburbia per-se, but correlates to the status of the people who live in an area (indeed, house prices are effectively used as a means to exclude those of lower class from schools). Given the variety of housing and urban styles around the world, it seems likely in a society of immigrants that these styles would appear. But for the most part they don't.
In the Vancouver area, where I live, we are cursed with hordes of Vancouver Specials, a kind of generic boxy house. But immigrants didn't buy them because that's what they wanted, rather because "that's what was available and they assumed it was the latest style". Now Specials are out of fashion. An architect who wanted to work with one found that "The toughest part of the challenge . . . lay in that thicket of bylaws. Robb spent all of 2000 negotiating with city-hall planners". Before you say that's just one guy, realize that innovation often starts with those on the margins. Stopping one guy from trying something new may stop
I thought this might be a contentious point; now I'm regretting not being more specific about it. I believe this mainly comes in to play when subdivisions have cul-de-sacs; otherwise, as other posters have noted, the truck can go around the block. The ability of a fire truck to turn around, however, is clearly also a product of the size of the truck. I've seen trucks in small streets in Switzerland, and they are correspondingly small. It seems to me that sizing all the streets to the firetrucks may make less sense than sizing the trucks to the streets. (I also suspect there are cases in which backing out is a realonable solution.)
You're right of course; the regulations are not all or entirely senseless. If you look at my posting history, you'll see I'm hardly one to claim regulations are all bad. The real problem here is that a style of suburban development has been codified in a set of rules that prevent the exploration of alternatives. That is starting to change; while we certainly need rules and coordination, I worry that the mentality that created the older rules will only result in new ones as inflexible as the old.
New urbanism is probably a step in the right direction, but it appears to be missing critical elements of successful older neighborhoods. Jane Jacobs emphasizes the need for buildings of various ages (and which can be repurposed as the community changes): the book shops in old houses, funky music stores, arty cafes and so on that make for a hip urban environment often can't afford the rent of flashy new buildings. It strikes me as strange that a society which so strongly rejected the idea (if not always the practice) of central planning during the Cold War prides itself in its "master planned" communities."
Furthermore, a vibrant community requires more than just residential and commercial uses. The plans I have seen often look attractive, but on closer examination bear a striking resemblance to malls turned inside out and mixed with housing. They may have greenspace or plazas, but like the landscaping around so many highrises these are often private or effectively gated. The real test of urban spaces is whether they are used. Once built, the pretty designs of planners are often lonely places. On the other hand, sometimes the least attractive spaces are great successes (think of skate parks).
So I don't really think it's ironic the planners of gated communities are building new urban spaces which can also be privatized and desolate; they're simply taking their old approach of centralization and control and dressing it up in new clothes.
On the other hand, it's not all their fault. Developers who do want to take a risk often run into senseless rules regulating every detail of their communities, such as requirements for streets big enough for fire trucks to turn around in to minimum parking spaces, wide streets, huge setbacks in front of buildings, low densities, and so forth. Sprawl has been institutionalized in North America, and bureaucracy has been slow to change. (And I suspect rather than releasing their grip they're probably just making up new rules.)
Sony and the other music companies haven't forced Microsoft to implement anything. Microsoft could have chosen to manufacture an MP3 player and set up a music store selling MP3s from more enlightened companies and artists. They could have created their own niche in the market and targeted those not well-served by Apple's lock-in model, while also selling music playable on iPod, the dominant player. Maybe it's a long shot. But then, going head-to-head with iPod looks like quite the long shot anyway. Forced? Microsoft's a big boy; I'm sure it can take responsibility for its actions.
Exactly. Even when laws appear to be cut-and-dry, they require human interpretation. Is abortion murder? At what stage - conception? at some arbitrary point later?
Copyright is anything but simple. What's a copy, for example? Does a temporary file generated by a web browser count? What if you record a streaming video? Is a photograph of the Eiffel tower a copy? A few frames of network television captured while filming a documentary? Is copying sometimes justified - perhaps because the document in question is evidence of serious problems with voting machines? Is the work in question even in copyright? (There's a clear yes/no answer to that one, but it can be very difficult to figure out.) Is hyperlinking a violation? I haven't even considered fair use.
Code is not interpreted. It is inflexible. It cannot change when society changes - and society will change. There was a time when slaves and women were not "persons". Once embodied in code, the human actions that created the rule become invisible - they appear to be facts of nature. Radio is a mass medium: you can receive, but you cannot transmit. That's just how it is. Well, no: that's a choice that was made when the technology was developed. It could have been point-to-point like the telephone (just as the telephone could have been a broadcast medium - some early providers played music over the phone); it could have allowed two-way communication.
The decisions made in the development of technology cast a long shadow on the future. This is unavoidable. The question to ask then is whether the shadow cast by DRM is a desirable one. DRM entrenches the model of mass communication: of a few broadcasters and many listeners. It limits the potential for speech and participation in a free and democratic society. It reinforces hierarchy, control, monopoly power - in the market, in software, on your computer. Not your control: someone' else's. That's the DRM we are faced with today. If, for argument's sake, we accept that makers of music and video would never distribute their products online (a questionable assertion), would the trade-off be worth it? I say the price is too high: DRM is always bad.
I think this is a good point, particularly relevant both for existing applications and for areas of rapid innovation where it's not yet clear what should be in the app or the format. I consider myself corrected (and am somewhat embarrassed to have overlooked this in my previous post). I am not convinced it is the best case for word processing though, so I'm curious if you have any specific insights there.
Social constructivist theories of technological development describe the stabilization of the technology, at which point differing interpretations - often corresponding to different technical designs - converge on a single understanding of the technology. Word processing in particular is an established class of application for which consensus has been reached regarding its role and feature set[1]. According to this reasoning, as innovation slows, the benefits of custom formats would evaporate while the merits of standardization increase. I would therefore expect gravitation towards using open formats by default, with custom formats reserved for niche uses in need of application-specific features.
Significant innovation, I suspect, would tend to be understood not in terms of "word processing", but would be differentiated into new classes of application, which at a later date might (or might not) get folded back into word processing proper. HTML and blog post authoring strike me as two current examples of this.
None of what I say, however, is a result of direct experience in consumer application development, so your experience may point to other outcomes.
[1] Modulo a few exceptions; I'm sure this represents the vast majority of people - far more than Joel's 80% (though I think Joel overrates convergence - witness the iPod, game machines, portable DVD players, and the proliferation of other single-task technologies).
Documents are worth far more than software, and they outlive the applications used to create them. See the comment to the original article - reading documents after 5, 20, 30, 100 years or more is not optional. You can pay the price of developing an independent format now, or you can pay the price of reverse engineering over and over again every time you change your internal representation.
Repeated implementation limits future change and innovation. It's expensive: it likely costs more even for Microsoft. But they can afford it; their competitors may not be able to. Plus, Microsoft already has their first implementation.
Perhaps so. But compare that cost to the cost I've just outlined. It is in the best interest of users and software developers (maybe even of Microsoft) to bite the bullet now, do the conversion once, and develop a clean format for the future.
Maybe you have in mind an argument you're not making, but I don't see any sufficient basis for your broad contention that using a file format based on an internal representation is a "darn good idea". In specific cases, yes (e.g. where the cost of development time or effort are the most important factors). In general, I very much doubt it. That successful applications in the past have taken that approach is weak evidence. They were developed when the up-front cost of development in a time of rapid innovation, the loss of customer lock-in, and a lack of open-format competition where good business reasons for making such a choice - even if it was inferior technically, increased cost in the long term, and was bad for consumers. In today's climate of slower innovation, competition from open formats, and customers who are running into their own long-term interests, the situation is different.
Which is not to say Microsoft's apparent attempt to set the rules of the game and throw sand in the gears of change is not in their interests, or that it will be unsuccessful.
This was the first thing that came to my mind. What are the implications for video games? If video game violence arouses the same psychological responses as real violence, then overcoming inhibitions in video games may lead to the same in real life. I know that's not a popular argument on Slashdot, but it seems to me to be an obvious connection to make.
(Personally, I have experienced the same myself. I would not engage in slave trading in Elite, and I was initially uncomfortable about slaughtering civilians in Age of Empires (I would have preferred an alternative that didn't involve committing war crimes). On the other hand, I had no problem wiping out the dark god's people in Populous.)