And therein, folks, lies the beauty of the free market.
Indeed it does: the market offered a choice. Not, in all likelihood, because of the invisible hand of competition, but simply because Wal-Mart has not chosen to use monetize (nasty word) customer information like that.
On the other hand, the profit motive is probably what encouraged the other shop to insist on the information in the first place. This story seems to have captured the ugliness of the market right along with its beauty.
I agree with you that XML is ugly, that it's harder to work with than it should be. DTDs are a mistake. Namespaces could be cleaner. The wall-to-wall brackets and quotes in some XML formats drive me nuts.
That said, I'd sure rather work with a web page as XHTML than as JSON. XML is better at some things than at others; as you say, "people keep using it for task where it is just terrible". Some, for example, treat it like a database or object store. They even produce standards based on those assumptions (XML Schema *cough*).
You have certainly produced a list of poor uses for XML. It's not good for random access, nor for dense numerical data. It makes a terrible database - either object or relational. XML is a document (meta) format. It's designed for storage, for interchange, for reading and editing. The last thing you want it to do is echo your in-memory data structures. That's how Microsoft ended up storing random chunks of data from memory in their Word documents.
A good document format shouldn't be tied to the application, or to the particular version of the data. It should reflect the nature and semantics of the data, not the details of processing or implementation. It should be forward- and backward- looking: usually it should be extensible and backward compatible. That's why XML is only semi structured - your format can make tags and attributes optional, it can ignore what it doesn't understand or pass it through untouched. It should be self-documenting (which is probably a pipe dream, but the tags and attributes do help); it should be robust and unambiguous. If it's redundant, that's ok; if it's big it can be compressed; if it's slow, faster's better - but it's not the top priority.
Once you have a good format, it can be used for many different things. Then you start to gain real semantics, standard libraries, and people who really understand the format. These are huge wins. This is what has happened with HTML; it's what the Atom folks are trying to replicate. If you think these things don't matter, look at how long it took to really figure out how to use HTML to produce clear, concise, and flexible documents, or how long it took for microformats to emerge.
When the tools are there, of course, it becomes convenient to use XML for other things. With DOM and XPath it starts to look like a cheap database. XSLT, with its zero side-effects, can even be efficient about processing the stuff. Hey, I admit it: I've used XML as an internal format, with XSLT as an embedded scripting language. It worked great. But I'm not gnashing my teeth because it was a bit slow and a bit ugly. I knew I was abusing the technology. If you're using XML as your internal format for data processing, and you're concerned about efficiency or scalability, you're missing the point.
We didn't need a human accessible format. . . . we can . . . write applications to edit and display it in any way that the humans want. To make XML human readable is to mix presentation layer issues, with encoding issues. . . . We should have just used Lisp syntax, since then we would have had parsers for it in 5 mins of coding.
You know, I like Lisp S-expressions better too. They sure are easier to parse. But, to echo your argument, we have libraries for that, right?
Decades of experience have shown the benefits of human-readable (and writable) formats, for programmers and non-programmers alike. I'll focus on the non-programmers, because in the end they're the ones creating the documents that are the object of the whole exercise.
Non-programmers author XML all the time. They do it because hand-authoring offers flexibility and power beyond what their applications offer them. They do it because they don't have the applications, or they can't afford them. They do it because innovation comes first, the tools come after. They do it because they're hacking FOAF or RSS or a Creative Commons license onto their web site. They will increasingly do it because when the application is obsolete, the data isn't.
If Mr Quin is right (I don't know, I haven't seen the research), your proposal exchanges long-term access for document authors with a bit of up-front convenience for library developers. In my opinion, that's exactly the wrong trade-off to make.
There's more to the public good than encouraging the creation of original works. There's also encouraging the creation of derivative works, and having the most freedom with regard to works, soonest.
I agree with you completely. After all, all works are derivative. I agree also that there are more important arguments against IP. Speech is a foundational freedom; without it, democracy is impossible. Creativity is also itself an essential freedom, the practice of which makes us human. Copyright as it stands today threatens - and damages - both of these freedoms. (These in addition to the real-world monopolization of copyright by corporations to the detriment of actual creators.)
However, morality is (unfortunately) not enough to carry the argument. It is also necessary to address the economic grounds for copyright - and these are often misrepresented or misunderstood. Strong copyright is not an economic win - in fact, it is a threat to market competition and an overall drain on the economy.
So while I agree with you, my post focused only on why placing the public interest first can be good for business. Hence also "if" in my the premise - it is possible that copyright does not, overall, encourage the creation of more new works. I don't know; it's very hard to compare the world that is with the world that might be. The matter is academic, however: copyright isn't going anywhere. The point remains that encouraging the creation of new works serves the public good.
If you believe that copyrights, patents, and so forth encourage the creation of new works, then you must also believe they serve the public good. So placing the public good first and business second doesn't mean IP will go away. It means designing those laws so that the optimize the public good, rather than maximizing profits.
This is not necessarily bad for business. Maximizing the public good aspect of information benefits everyone. Reducing the costs of information benefits businesses who rely on it as an economic input. If more business benefits from reduced costs of information, this will result in a net gain. Yochai Benkler argues that even among businesses dependent on the creation of IP, very few rely primarily on IP protections to make their money. When you consider all the businesses who depend on information as an input but don't make a profit from it, this approach could end up being very pro-business.
Maximizing direct profits from IP, on the other hand, is a terrible idea. The best way to maximize profits is to create a monopoly and use price discrimination to charge the maximum the market will bear. When the monopoly of copyright is extended over derivative activity, this goes way off the rails. Google indexes my book? Well then, I should make some money! How much money? I'm a monopolist, so I only have to leave Google the minimum to make it worth their while; I can take all the rest (and I don't even have to do any work). This works like the market in reverse: it maximizes prices. It's like charging the storage place that sets up shop next to the U-Haul because it's benefiting from U-Haul's customers.
As for non-commercial copying, copyright used to be aimed at publishers, not private use. The recording industry's business model is relatively recent; the reliance of the movie industry on sales to consumers only came about over the past couple of decades. The current situation, in which individuals are sued for private copying, is the radical innovation. Without it, the change to their business is traceable to technology - and the other businesses who created it - not some sort of policy intervention.
we don't have a ton of people chanting patriot nonsense on national television
No, we have the Internet for that, as you have so helpfully demonstrated.
Seriously, the U.S. scares me these days. But Canada's smaller and less powerful, so we have less scope to screw things up. Give us half a chance and I doubt we'd be so superior.
Apparently there are two definitions of neoliberalism: the standard one and the American one (kind of like how liberalism has been redefined in the States). From Wikipedia (I'm too lazy to check elsewhere):
In its dominant international use, neoliberalism refers to a political-economic philosophy that de-emphasizes or rejects government intervention in the domestic economy. It focuses on free-market methods, fewer restrictions on business operations, and property rights. In foreign policy, neoliberalism favors the opening of foreign markets by political means, using diplomacy, economic pressure and, for some neoliberals, military might.
And:
In US usage, neoliberalism ("new liberalism") is commonly associated with the Third Way, aka social-democracy under the New Public Management movement. Supporters of the US version of neoliberalism present it as a pragmatic position, focusing on "what works" and transcending debates between left and right...
I'm quite familiar with the usage in Canada, but I've never heard this second definition before. I think it's significant that the Wikipedia article seems to stick to the first definition throughout.
The definition of the term is a distraction, however. Mark MF-WN is spot on. Markets require regulation to function - quite extensive regulation in fact. Regulation of contracts, of money, to create and enforce property rights (from land to copyright), and so forth. The market as a dominant institution in society is not a natural state of affairs - or rather (since either nothing or everything human is "natural"), it is a recent phenomenon. The history of the market has been one of deliberate expansion into new areas - from the enclosure of the commons to (in this case) regulation to prevent cities providing broadband.
You (dada21) say, "The free market is not zero sum". This is true. But the ideal situation you describe, in which "both sides of a barter or exchange profit from that exchange" ignores the typical inequality of parties to any deal. There are numerous reasons for this, but I'll pick on one. Frequently, one party has the freedom to "negotiate", while the other does not. When was the last time you negotiated the terms of a software license agreement? The onerous terms of Windows license agreements, region coding on video games, and disabled ad-skipping technology in DVRs are all products of the free market, not state regulation.
To continue the above quote: "A few savvy agents might complain about receiving nothing and get a token amount, but most will be unaware of what transpired."
Copyright here is being used as a weapon by the big companies (Google and the entertainment conglomerates) to crush their competition while doing nothing for artists. The conglomorates get more money while cutting off the air supply to YouTube's competitors (the article mentions how suits against other sharing sites will scare off venture capital). Any anti-piracy controls instituted by YouTube will only increase the costs of entry for potential competitors. Having YouTube on side may come in handy for the entertainment companies if artists start trying to cut out the middle man. The upshot for artists is no more money and fewer avenues to release their works.
"The page should scroll down for only two or three screens, not six". We need less news! Maybe if the whole world followed vastu shastra we wouldn't have this problem.
Furthermore, the phrase "TARDIS for children" is at best redundant, since Doctor Who was actually a kids' show.
It wasn't just a kids' show. It was made by BBC Drama, not the children's department, and although it was intended to be educational, it wasn't aimed only at children. Sidney Newman had pitched the idea (time travel teaching science and history) in North America - to the CBC I believe, and possibly in the States too. He later became head of BBC Drama and got his chance to make it happen.
As you say, it didn't stay educational for long. Though The Daleks was at least inspired by Nazism and the dangers of the neutron bomb, and the Cybermen were intended to be extrapolated from contemporary science.
I agree. The earnest optimism is painful - though today the old series is enjoyable precisely because it is a dated artifact of its time. The story in which the crew deduce an alien blob of light must be female because it cares for a man marooned on a planet stands out for its hilarious casual sexism.
TNG is another matter. Here society and culture are static. Even on a ship with hundreds of civilian family members, art, music, fashion, and literature are frozen in time. When the crew enjoy art, it is always Shakespeare and classical music. Our lives today are awash in culture; TNG's Federation is dead by comparison.
The underlying assumption in so many episodes is that people can agree if only they understand each other: the stories were famous for building up to a crisis only to defuse it. But in a truly free society, the diversity of perspectives and opinions will give rise to genuine conflicts with no simple way out (the debate between pro-choice and pro-life positions, for example). The utopian "optimism" of TNG is that of a totalitarian society in which real differences have been eliminated.
I remember watching the first episode of TNG with such enthusiasm when I was a kid. My interest soon faded; to me, Star Trek's future was - and is - a kind of man-made hell. (In fairness, this may have been somewhat remedied in DS9 et. al., of which I have seen very little.)
I really don't get the MLB guy's argument that I'm stealing from the guy in Chicago. Does he expect me to pay some cable operator in Chicago to watch one game while I'm visiting?
He wants you to pay a fee to watch that one game in Chicago. Now if you're watching it on Chicago cable, you're not watching it on SF cable. In aggergate, services provided cancel out the services forgone and it's a wash.
Perhaps the SF cable company should provide a discount, or forward part of your cable payment to the Chicago company in proportion to how much TV you watched in each place. Or hey, why not set up something like the phone system where every system that processes the content you watched gets a cut.
All of these set-ups show the extreme idiocy property systems can produce if allowed to go to far - like the apartment doors in Philip K. Dick's Ubik that charge users a nickle to open them. Transaction costs go through the roof. Incumbents, however, are protected because the high infrastructure costs discourage competition.
The mental image I have is of a Hollywood director or script writer fighting for a vision of a film and being overruled on the grounds of marketability. This kind of thing happens all the time. But then Hollywood turns around and tells everyone else, "don't you dare touch our creative vision!"
. . . of course something can be made for profit and still be a form of creative expression, it's not a "one or the other" sort of relationship. . . . you can't base copyright protection on the quality of the work involved.
I don't think we're in disagreement here. I am not suggesting that Hollywood's work be devalued. I'm arguing that the judge's comment about protecting the creative expression of the film makers elevates their creativity above that of the folks who edit the videos. Both are creative works, and - this is critical - both are based on prior sources. There is no such thing as pure original creation. The creative work involved in editing is much less, but - as you say - it's very difficult to base copyright protection on the quality of the work.
My other point is about the expansion of copyright law. You say that the law protects creators from "derivative works that the creator may not feel puts their work in its best light". This is the domain of moral rights, which are much stronger in Canada and Europe. This was not the original purpose of copyright in the U.S. Quite the opposite: copyright was intended to encourage the creation of new works by 1) granting limited monopolies and 2) expanding the public domain as the basis of new works. Perhaps this case is a pure and simple one of copyright violation, but by arguing as he does it seems to me the judge may be expanding the scope of the law and limiting the creation of new works - which is, in fact, the effect of this decision.
This is a ruling that one cannot use the motives of private censorship to in any way go against copyright laws.
You assume the distribution of the edited films was a violation of copyright. This may seem obvious to you, but the law is rarely black and white. This was surely one of the questions of the case. The judge's explanation of his decision in terms of "irreparable injury to . . . creative artistic expression" indicates a specific reason why he was inclined to find that way.
I am no lawyer, but this looks to me like an expansion of copyright. "Reading in" protections like this (a practice disparagingly called judicial activism when folks don't like the results) has tremendously expanded the scope of copyright over the years. From a law originally based on the economic motivation of promoting the production of creative works, it has been transformed into a right of exclusive control over expression and culture.
Personally, I think Hollywood's stance is transparently hypocritical. It's absurd to argue that films produced by many people at great cost are somehow a pure form of creative expression (were such a thing even possible). At every level they are designed as profit-making vehicles. Hollywood is, in effect, claiming that they have the right to allow market forces to influence their works, but no-one else does.
James Boyle provides an explanation in Shamans, Software and Spleens: he argues that rulings like this can be understood in terms of the myth of the original author who creates great works ex nihilo. Judge Matsch's comments certainly fit the theory. It's too bad. Myths, even when there's some truth in them, shouldn't make law.
And the more you stick the government in the middle of transactions between private parties, especially where evolving technology is concerned, the more mistakes happen.
The market is based on legislation. It cannot exist without it. Laws govern contracts, fraud, trademark violations, false advertising, property, theft, violence, and so on. The government is already involved in every "private" transaction.
The claim that legislation is inherently bad implicitly redefines the market as some sort of natural state of affairs. The modern economic system is very much a product of human choice and action. It is no more natural than any other economic or social regime. The blanket criticism of legislation is an ideological attempt to obscure the ability for human beings to choose their government and their laws. If you believe democratic government is the problem, by all means criticize that. Don't try to redefine "legislation" to exclude democratic change (or what passes for it anyway) from a fundamental sphere of human activity.
The failure of the Catholic Church to suppress printing is hardly the result of some kind of law of nature. The Islamic world, in contrast, *did* reject the press until the 19th century. Similarly, the Chinese, who invented moveable type centuries before Gutenberg (and the Koreans who developed metal type) followed a very different path.
The press in Europe arrived in a culture already in flux. There was great conflict in the Church, the Renaissance had begun, and feudalism was giving way to the market. Initially, the Church seized on the press as an instrument to strengthen its power; after that, the relationship was always complex.
The point is, the triumph of the press was not a natural or inevitable outcome. Things could have turned out very differently, as they did elsewhere. Who is to say we are more like 15th century Europe - a backward civilization in flux, Islam - a sophisticated culture beginning its decline, or China - powerful and advanced but turning inward? The Internet could easily be closed just like radio before it.
In the case of the Internet, I believe we are making our choice now. The technology will not make it for us.
I'm not trying to argue in favor of tyranny in China. Increased freedom and democracy are necessary to prevent an explosion (never mind for moral reasons); the government of China doesn't seem to be helping. The country terrifies me: power and control mixed in with corruption, nationalist fananticism and the potential for incredible internal violence. Maybe a revolution or break-up is inevitable. I hope not. These things generally don't end well.
I think your suggestion that corruption is at the biggest problem is probably correct (that's the real lesson of Russia). However, I wouldn't make a blanket claim about the inaction of the Chinese government. Like other governments, it is not monolithic. I'm sure there are many good people trying to do good things from within the system, just as there are others (many others) using it to enrich themselves.
The point I was trying to make is that it's not helpful to simply point at China and say "Communist!" They are something else now; the word confuses more than it explains. And when we criticize China - which we should, just as we should criticize companies like Yahoo and Microsoft when they make deals with the devil - we must get it right. Otherwise, we'll do more harm than good: when it comes down to it, most Chinese will identify with their government more than with the West and interpret an attack on it as an attack on them.
When I was in Beijing in 1998 the city looked like Bladerunner. There were Dominos Pizza places, McDonalds outlets (playing Happy Birthday endlessly), high-rise department stores, little computer shops, street vendors everywhere. There's private property, investment, a market. They joined WTO.
Of course the government is controlled by a single party with significant intervention in the economy, and that party is called "communist". However, since Tienanmen square, the government has lost its ideological halo. It is trying to legitimate itself through nationalism and growth; it's not afraid to be capitalist if that's what it takes to hang on to power.
In fact, the biggest danger is likely that the government will lose control. The great fear of those I talked to was that China would follow Russia's lead if reform were too rapid. As it is, there are worrisome challenges to the central government, ranging from petty dictators in the countryside to corrupt businesses (manufacturing fake medicine or reselling used needles, for example) and towns that operate outside the law. In these cases, the central government are often the good guys, and the capitalists are the bad guys.
When I arrived, I figured air quality was more important than democracy. I could barely breathe. The pollution was so bad you could look directly at the sun on a cloudless day without blinking; it would be brown. I hear it's much better now: the government exerted its power and outright banned coal burning and leaded gas in Beijing.
I'm not defending the many abuses in China. They need democracy. I bet lots of Chinese officials would agree (if you want to reform a one-party state, which party do you join?). But it's not so simple; there's no clean slate. And that's why it's absurd to simply call China "communist", or to use "communism" as code for "evil". I suspect that was the point Wang Xiaofeng was trying to make. I'm sad to see this reaction.
As a political term, radical refers to those who critique the roots (hence "radical") of society. Since ours/yours is a capitalist society, this entails a critique of capitalism. Liberals, on the other hand, follow in the Enlightenment tradition of pluralist democracy, capitalist free markets, etc. Hence, the main position the radicals critique is liberalism - or neoliberalism, which is inclined more towards laissez-faire and minimal government intervention. While in an American context their sympathies will almost always lie more with Democrats than Republicans, radicals are hardly knee-jerk supporters of the US government. Liberalism is not a left-wing position - except in the US, where it has been redefined to be both center/center-right in practice and leftist by reputation.
Because the success of the Web is primarily about linking together data. HTML has proved itself as a flexible way to express that data, to link it together, and (increasingly) to structure it. That's what the language was designed for. Remember, HTML was not intended as a language for layout or for graphic design. If you trade in HTML for code (as you propose*), then the structure and semantics of that data is then locked up in the code, walled off from the rest of the Web. You lose all the benefits of standard representation and network effects - which matters, because the best web apps rely on data. For example, fragment identifiers, browser extensions, web crawlers (e.g. for search), the ability to target different device characteristics through CSS, and accessibility features all rely on HTML (granted, AJAX tends to be weak in supporting some of these, e.g. accessibility). You also, incidentally, wall of your code from the rest of the content of your page.
* Admittedly I haven't looked at applets in years; maybe there has been some movement toward resolving this problem.
This is absolutely correct. First I must categorically reject the grandparent's assertion that cars are more efficient. I have a reference to a 1993 study in Vancouver, B.C., which found the average Lower Mainland automobile is subsidized to an amount of $2700 (more figures - including a claim that 15%-20% of household budgets in Canada and the U.S. are devoted to the direct internal costs of cars).
Road and transit systems are networks, so a network effect applies. The grandparent post claims that the huge cost of automobile infrastructure is offset by the huge number of trips. But the effect applies equally to transit: expanding the coverage of a transit system increases the value of the existing network because it provides more routes and destinations for transit users. If transit were built out to the same extent as road networks, it would be even more competitive than it already is.
There's one more factor though: road networks actually become self-inhibiting, so as the network expands traffic jams increase. I know of three reasons for this counter-intuitive phenomenon:
First and most obviously, more roads means more delays at intersections. Freeways can only address this to a limited extent because they rely on local roads as feeders.
Second, capacity does not increase linearly with additional lanes of traffic. Extra lanes encourage more frequent lane changes by drivers. I have been told that beyond six lanes of traffic, there is no significant benefit to adding lanes. Hence, for example, the phenomenon of parallel local highways alongside freeways.
Third, more roads require more parking even if the number of cars remains constant. Roads take up a huge amount of real-estate. Typically, people will drive to a destination, park, and then walk. If they wish to visit multiple destinations close together, they may walk between them. As roads (and parking spaces) take more space, these walking trips are replaced by driving trips. The result, as Jane Jacobs explains, is an increasing number of parking spaces per vehicle.
The result of all of this is a vicious cycle. Common-sense evidence for this is the seeming inability of roadbuilding to remedy traffic problems. Despite devoting a huge fraction of our land to roads and parking (I would guess it's on an order of a quarter or a third), we still have huge traffic jams. I don't believe any city has managed to grow its way out of this with more roads.
There are successful cities without the traffic problems, however. I remember visiting Basel, Switzerland in 1999 and being stunned by the intersection in front of the main train station. As I recall, it was uncontrolled.
Finally, transit need not be a second-class alternative. I personally prefer to take transit in many cases, especially rail transit, and I know I'm not alone. There's a reason why people and municipalities are squabbling over who gets the next rail transit extension in my area (Vancouver BC).
those with guns are able to protect their property
Uh, yeah. Property's the priority. Meanwhile, thugs shooting at emergency workers are preventing people from being saved. People are dying because of those guns - probably in large numbers. You think guns would have helped in the tsunami too?
Yes, we should all be sheep and depend on the government to protect us
You're right about the government though. As far as I can tell, their "plan" was leave everyone to look out for themselves. This wild west attitude of every man for himself isn't the solution, it's the problem.
There isn't a binary choice between complete dependence and complete independence. It is possible to make community plans which actually involve people with the plan, so that when the structure breaks down they can look out for themselves and each other. A disaster is still a disaster, and there will be thugs in its wake, but there has to be a better way.
I have been to China, my wife is Chinese, and the region where I live (Vancouver) is about 25% ethnic Chinese. China is an important country, and its power is growing - look at recent purchases (and attempts) of major Canadian and American companies. China, its culture, and its policies will increasingly impact our lives. We will be exposed to their culture and values. We can't afford to be silent about ours.
I happen to agree with those who support "thin" copyright. However, beyond the ideology, the convenience of a standard agreement can be significant due to lower transaction costs. The cost (time and effort) to the person who licenses their work is low. Because the license is standard, the cost to whoever uses the work is also low (they don't have to contact the artist, and they don't have to worry over the legal details).
If transaction costs are too high, they smother use (for example, merchants institute minimum purchase amounts for credit card use). CC may not pay artists any money, but audience fostered by the additional sharing can benefit their reputations. Because of the network effect, sharing, like interest, compounds, so that audience may be significantly larger than if the artist a) said yes to anyone who asked, or b) used a custom license.
Two comments jumped out at me in Orlowski's article. The first seems unable to distinguish the exercise of speech from the act of listening:
One picks up on the Lessig quote, "There's a class of speech that's not possible at all without P2P technologies". Rubbish, says Andy Bright.
I disagree. With a $20 bill and a trip to Best Buy, or a credit card and a trip to Amazon this class of speech is entirely possible.
Another article, responding to Orlowski's absurd claim that geeks believe the technology, not the artist, is responsible for creativity, claims that geeks believe:
That creativity is an unlimited resource, only held back by the limitations of the distribution network and these damn tools. If we could only put video cameras in the hands of every person on the planet, and provide universal access to the results, thousands of new film makers will be discovered.
Implicit in this rejection is an incredibly elitist conception of creativity as an inborn talent. It's a short step from here to saying it's a waste of time to teach writing (or painting or what have you) because the great writers are born and will write regardless.
For some geniuses that is surely true. For others, the lack isn't tools but practice: creativity, like most skills, can be improved through use. Easy access to technology helps. Easy access to culture which can be built upon, which building is essential to all art from Shakespeare to Warhol, helps even more. It is this latter lack that Creative Commons targets, and which the $20 for "speech" (i.e. passive listening) doesn't address. But these folks are too blinded by the silly "blue LEDs" to see past the technology.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed it does: the market offered a choice. Not, in all likelihood, because of the invisible hand of competition, but simply because Wal-Mart has not chosen to use monetize (nasty word) customer information like that.
On the other hand, the profit motive is probably what encouraged the other shop to insist on the information in the first place. This story seems to have captured the ugliness of the market right along with its beauty.
I agree with you that XML is ugly, that it's harder to work with than it should be. DTDs are a mistake. Namespaces could be cleaner. The wall-to-wall brackets and quotes in some XML formats drive me nuts.
That said, I'd sure rather work with a web page as XHTML than as JSON. XML is better at some things than at others; as you say, "people keep using it for task where it is just terrible". Some, for example, treat it like a database or object store. They even produce standards based on those assumptions (XML Schema *cough*).
You have certainly produced a list of poor uses for XML. It's not good for random access, nor for dense numerical data. It makes a terrible database - either object or relational. XML is a document (meta) format. It's designed for storage, for interchange, for reading and editing. The last thing you want it to do is echo your in-memory data structures. That's how Microsoft ended up storing random chunks of data from memory in their Word documents.
A good document format shouldn't be tied to the application, or to the particular version of the data. It should reflect the nature and semantics of the data, not the details of processing or implementation. It should be forward- and backward- looking: usually it should be extensible and backward compatible. That's why XML is only semi structured - your format can make tags and attributes optional, it can ignore what it doesn't understand or pass it through untouched. It should be self-documenting (which is probably a pipe dream, but the tags and attributes do help); it should be robust and unambiguous. If it's redundant, that's ok; if it's big it can be compressed; if it's slow, faster's better - but it's not the top priority.
Once you have a good format, it can be used for many different things. Then you start to gain real semantics, standard libraries, and people who really understand the format. These are huge wins. This is what has happened with HTML; it's what the Atom folks are trying to replicate. If you think these things don't matter, look at how long it took to really figure out how to use HTML to produce clear, concise, and flexible documents, or how long it took for microformats to emerge.
When the tools are there, of course, it becomes convenient to use XML for other things. With DOM and XPath it starts to look like a cheap database. XSLT, with its zero side-effects, can even be efficient about processing the stuff. Hey, I admit it: I've used XML as an internal format, with XSLT as an embedded scripting language. It worked great. But I'm not gnashing my teeth because it was a bit slow and a bit ugly. I knew I was abusing the technology. If you're using XML as your internal format for data processing, and you're concerned about efficiency or scalability, you're missing the point.
You know, I like Lisp S-expressions better too. They sure are easier to parse. But, to echo your argument, we have libraries for that, right?
Decades of experience have shown the benefits of human-readable (and writable) formats, for programmers and non-programmers alike. I'll focus on the non-programmers, because in the end they're the ones creating the documents that are the object of the whole exercise.
Non-programmers author XML all the time. They do it because hand-authoring offers flexibility and power beyond what their applications offer them. They do it because they don't have the applications, or they can't afford them. They do it because innovation comes first, the tools come after. They do it because they're hacking FOAF or RSS or a Creative Commons license onto their web site. They will increasingly do it because when the application is obsolete, the data isn't.
If Mr Quin is right (I don't know, I haven't seen the research), your proposal exchanges long-term access for document authors with a bit of up-front convenience for library developers. In my opinion, that's exactly the wrong trade-off to make.
I agree with you completely. After all, all works are derivative. I agree also that there are more important arguments against IP. Speech is a foundational freedom; without it, democracy is impossible. Creativity is also itself an essential freedom, the practice of which makes us human. Copyright as it stands today threatens - and damages - both of these freedoms. (These in addition to the real-world monopolization of copyright by corporations to the detriment of actual creators.)
However, morality is (unfortunately) not enough to carry the argument. It is also necessary to address the economic grounds for copyright - and these are often misrepresented or misunderstood. Strong copyright is not an economic win - in fact, it is a threat to market competition and an overall drain on the economy.
So while I agree with you, my post focused only on why placing the public interest first can be good for business. Hence also "if" in my the premise - it is possible that copyright does not, overall, encourage the creation of more new works. I don't know; it's very hard to compare the world that is with the world that might be. The matter is academic, however: copyright isn't going anywhere. The point remains that encouraging the creation of new works serves the public good.
If you believe that copyrights, patents, and so forth encourage the creation of new works, then you must also believe they serve the public good. So placing the public good first and business second doesn't mean IP will go away. It means designing those laws so that the optimize the public good, rather than maximizing profits.
This is not necessarily bad for business. Maximizing the public good aspect of information benefits everyone. Reducing the costs of information benefits businesses who rely on it as an economic input. If more business benefits from reduced costs of information, this will result in a net gain. Yochai Benkler argues that even among businesses dependent on the creation of IP, very few rely primarily on IP protections to make their money. When you consider all the businesses who depend on information as an input but don't make a profit from it, this approach could end up being very pro-business.
Maximizing direct profits from IP, on the other hand, is a terrible idea. The best way to maximize profits is to create a monopoly and use price discrimination to charge the maximum the market will bear. When the monopoly of copyright is extended over derivative activity, this goes way off the rails. Google indexes my book? Well then, I should make some money! How much money? I'm a monopolist, so I only have to leave Google the minimum to make it worth their while; I can take all the rest (and I don't even have to do any work). This works like the market in reverse: it maximizes prices. It's like charging the storage place that sets up shop next to the U-Haul because it's benefiting from U-Haul's customers.
As for non-commercial copying, copyright used to be aimed at publishers, not private use. The recording industry's business model is relatively recent; the reliance of the movie industry on sales to consumers only came about over the past couple of decades. The current situation, in which individuals are sued for private copying, is the radical innovation. Without it, the change to their business is traceable to technology - and the other businesses who created it - not some sort of policy intervention.
No, we have the Internet for that, as you have so helpfully demonstrated.
Seriously, the U.S. scares me these days. But Canada's smaller and less powerful, so we have less scope to screw things up. Give us half a chance and I doubt we'd be so superior.
Apparently there are two definitions of neoliberalism: the standard one and the American one (kind of like how liberalism has been redefined in the States). From Wikipedia (I'm too lazy to check elsewhere):
And:
I'm quite familiar with the usage in Canada, but I've never heard this second definition before. I think it's significant that the Wikipedia article seems to stick to the first definition throughout.
The definition of the term is a distraction, however. Mark MF-WN is spot on. Markets require regulation to function - quite extensive regulation in fact. Regulation of contracts, of money, to create and enforce property rights (from land to copyright), and so forth. The market as a dominant institution in society is not a natural state of affairs - or rather (since either nothing or everything human is "natural"), it is a recent phenomenon. The history of the market has been one of deliberate expansion into new areas - from the enclosure of the commons to (in this case) regulation to prevent cities providing broadband.
You (dada21) say, "The free market is not zero sum". This is true. But the ideal situation you describe, in which "both sides of a barter or exchange profit from that exchange" ignores the typical inequality of parties to any deal. There are numerous reasons for this, but I'll pick on one. Frequently, one party has the freedom to "negotiate", while the other does not. When was the last time you negotiated the terms of a software license agreement? The onerous terms of Windows license agreements, region coding on video games, and disabled ad-skipping technology in DVRs are all products of the free market, not state regulation.
To continue the above quote: "A few savvy agents might complain about receiving nothing and get a token amount, but most will be unaware of what transpired."
Copyright here is being used as a weapon by the big companies (Google and the entertainment conglomerates) to crush their competition while doing nothing for artists. The conglomorates get more money while cutting off the air supply to YouTube's competitors (the article mentions how suits against other sharing sites will scare off venture capital). Any anti-piracy controls instituted by YouTube will only increase the costs of entry for potential competitors. Having YouTube on side may come in handy for the entertainment companies if artists start trying to cut out the middle man. The upshot for artists is no more money and fewer avenues to release their works.
"The page should scroll down for only two or three screens, not six". We need less news! Maybe if the whole world followed vastu shastra we wouldn't have this problem.
It wasn't just a kids' show. It was made by BBC Drama, not the children's department, and although it was intended to be educational, it wasn't aimed only at children. Sidney Newman had pitched the idea (time travel teaching science and history) in North America - to the CBC I believe, and possibly in the States too. He later became head of BBC Drama and got his chance to make it happen.
As you say, it didn't stay educational for long. Though The Daleks was at least inspired by Nazism and the dangers of the neutron bomb, and the Cybermen were intended to be extrapolated from contemporary science.
I agree. The earnest optimism is painful - though today the old series is enjoyable precisely because it is a dated artifact of its time. The story in which the crew deduce an alien blob of light must be female because it cares for a man marooned on a planet stands out for its hilarious casual sexism.
TNG is another matter. Here society and culture are static. Even on a ship with hundreds of civilian family members, art, music, fashion, and literature are frozen in time. When the crew enjoy art, it is always Shakespeare and classical music. Our lives today are awash in culture; TNG's Federation is dead by comparison.
The underlying assumption in so many episodes is that people can agree if only they understand each other: the stories were famous for building up to a crisis only to defuse it. But in a truly free society, the diversity of perspectives and opinions will give rise to genuine conflicts with no simple way out (the debate between pro-choice and pro-life positions, for example). The utopian "optimism" of TNG is that of a totalitarian society in which real differences have been eliminated.
I remember watching the first episode of TNG with such enthusiasm when I was a kid. My interest soon faded; to me, Star Trek's future was - and is - a kind of man-made hell. (In fairness, this may have been somewhat remedied in DS9 et. al., of which I have seen very little.)
He wants you to pay a fee to watch that one game in Chicago. Now if you're watching it on Chicago cable, you're not watching it on SF cable. In aggergate, services provided cancel out the services forgone and it's a wash.
Perhaps the SF cable company should provide a discount, or forward part of your cable payment to the Chicago company in proportion to how much TV you watched in each place. Or hey, why not set up something like the phone system where every system that processes the content you watched gets a cut.
All of these set-ups show the extreme idiocy property systems can produce if allowed to go to far - like the apartment doors in Philip K. Dick's Ubik that charge users a nickle to open them. Transaction costs go through the roof. Incumbents, however, are protected because the high infrastructure costs discourage competition.
The mental image I have is of a Hollywood director or script writer fighting for a vision of a film and being overruled on the grounds of marketability. This kind of thing happens all the time. But then Hollywood turns around and tells everyone else, "don't you dare touch our creative vision!"
I don't think we're in disagreement here. I am not suggesting that Hollywood's work be devalued. I'm arguing that the judge's comment about protecting the creative expression of the film makers elevates their creativity above that of the folks who edit the videos. Both are creative works, and - this is critical - both are based on prior sources. There is no such thing as pure original creation. The creative work involved in editing is much less, but - as you say - it's very difficult to base copyright protection on the quality of the work.
My other point is about the expansion of copyright law. You say that the law protects creators from "derivative works that the creator may not feel puts their work in its best light". This is the domain of moral rights, which are much stronger in Canada and Europe. This was not the original purpose of copyright in the U.S. Quite the opposite: copyright was intended to encourage the creation of new works by 1) granting limited monopolies and 2) expanding the public domain as the basis of new works. Perhaps this case is a pure and simple one of copyright violation, but by arguing as he does it seems to me the judge may be expanding the scope of the law and limiting the creation of new works - which is, in fact, the effect of this decision.
I think you're begging the question:
You assume the distribution of the edited films was a violation of copyright. This may seem obvious to you, but the law is rarely black and white. This was surely one of the questions of the case. The judge's explanation of his decision in terms of "irreparable injury to . . . creative artistic expression" indicates a specific reason why he was inclined to find that way.
I am no lawyer, but this looks to me like an expansion of copyright. "Reading in" protections like this (a practice disparagingly called judicial activism when folks don't like the results) has tremendously expanded the scope of copyright over the years. From a law originally based on the economic motivation of promoting the production of creative works, it has been transformed into a right of exclusive control over expression and culture.
Personally, I think Hollywood's stance is transparently hypocritical. It's absurd to argue that films produced by many people at great cost are somehow a pure form of creative expression (were such a thing even possible). At every level they are designed as profit-making vehicles. Hollywood is, in effect, claiming that they have the right to allow market forces to influence their works, but no-one else does.
James Boyle provides an explanation in Shamans, Software and Spleens: he argues that rulings like this can be understood in terms of the myth of the original author who creates great works ex nihilo. Judge Matsch's comments certainly fit the theory. It's too bad. Myths, even when there's some truth in them, shouldn't make law.
The market is based on legislation. It cannot exist without it. Laws govern contracts, fraud, trademark violations, false advertising, property, theft, violence, and so on. The government is already involved in every "private" transaction.
The claim that legislation is inherently bad implicitly redefines the market as some sort of natural state of affairs. The modern economic system is very much a product of human choice and action. It is no more natural than any other economic or social regime. The blanket criticism of legislation is an ideological attempt to obscure the ability for human beings to choose their government and their laws. If you believe democratic government is the problem, by all means criticize that. Don't try to redefine "legislation" to exclude democratic change (or what passes for it anyway) from a fundamental sphere of human activity.
The failure of the Catholic Church to suppress printing is hardly the result of some kind of law of nature. The Islamic world, in contrast, *did* reject the press until the 19th century. Similarly, the Chinese, who invented moveable type centuries before Gutenberg (and the Koreans who developed metal type) followed a very different path.
The press in Europe arrived in a culture already in flux. There was great conflict in the Church, the Renaissance had begun, and feudalism was giving way to the market. Initially, the Church seized on the press as an instrument to strengthen its power; after that, the relationship was always complex.
The point is, the triumph of the press was not a natural or inevitable outcome. Things could have turned out very differently, as they did elsewhere. Who is to say we are more like 15th century Europe - a backward civilization in flux, Islam - a sophisticated culture beginning its decline, or China - powerful and advanced but turning inward? The Internet could easily be closed just like radio before it.
In the case of the Internet, I believe we are making our choice now. The technology will not make it for us.
I'm not trying to argue in favor of tyranny in China. Increased freedom and democracy are necessary to prevent an explosion (never mind for moral reasons); the government of China doesn't seem to be helping. The country terrifies me: power and control mixed in with corruption, nationalist fananticism and the potential for incredible internal violence. Maybe a revolution or break-up is inevitable. I hope not. These things generally don't end well.
I think your suggestion that corruption is at the biggest problem is probably correct (that's the real lesson of Russia). However, I wouldn't make a blanket claim about the inaction of the Chinese government. Like other governments, it is not monolithic. I'm sure there are many good people trying to do good things from within the system, just as there are others (many others) using it to enrich themselves.
The point I was trying to make is that it's not helpful to simply point at China and say "Communist!" They are something else now; the word confuses more than it explains. And when we criticize China - which we should, just as we should criticize companies like Yahoo and Microsoft when they make deals with the devil - we must get it right. Otherwise, we'll do more harm than good: when it comes down to it, most Chinese will identify with their government more than with the West and interpret an attack on it as an attack on them.
When I was in Beijing in 1998 the city looked like Bladerunner. There were Dominos Pizza places, McDonalds outlets (playing Happy Birthday endlessly), high-rise department stores, little computer shops, street vendors everywhere. There's private property, investment, a market. They joined WTO.
Of course the government is controlled by a single party with significant intervention in the economy, and that party is called "communist". However, since Tienanmen square, the government has lost its ideological halo. It is trying to legitimate itself through nationalism and growth; it's not afraid to be capitalist if that's what it takes to hang on to power.
In fact, the biggest danger is likely that the government will lose control. The great fear of those I talked to was that China would follow Russia's lead if reform were too rapid. As it is, there are worrisome challenges to the central government, ranging from petty dictators in the countryside to corrupt businesses (manufacturing fake medicine or reselling used needles, for example) and towns that operate outside the law. In these cases, the central government are often the good guys, and the capitalists are the bad guys.
When I arrived, I figured air quality was more important than democracy. I could barely breathe. The pollution was so bad you could look directly at the sun on a cloudless day without blinking; it would be brown. I hear it's much better now: the government exerted its power and outright banned coal burning and leaded gas in Beijing.
I'm not defending the many abuses in China. They need democracy. I bet lots of Chinese officials would agree (if you want to reform a one-party state, which party do you join?). But it's not so simple; there's no clean slate. And that's why it's absurd to simply call China "communist", or to use "communism" as code for "evil". I suspect that was the point Wang Xiaofeng was trying to make. I'm sad to see this reaction.
I expect I'll be flamed for this, but...
As a political term, radical refers to those who critique the roots (hence "radical") of society. Since ours/yours is a capitalist society, this entails a critique of capitalism. Liberals, on the other hand, follow in the Enlightenment tradition of pluralist democracy, capitalist free markets, etc. Hence, the main position the radicals critique is liberalism - or neoliberalism, which is inclined more towards laissez-faire and minimal government intervention. While in an American context their sympathies will almost always lie more with Democrats than Republicans, radicals are hardly knee-jerk supporters of the US government. Liberalism is not a left-wing position - except in the US, where it has been redefined to be both center/center-right in practice and leftist by reputation.
Because the success of the Web is primarily about linking together data. HTML has proved itself as a flexible way to express that data, to link it together, and (increasingly) to structure it. That's what the language was designed for. Remember, HTML was not intended as a language for layout or for graphic design. If you trade in HTML for code (as you propose*), then the structure and semantics of that data is then locked up in the code, walled off from the rest of the Web. You lose all the benefits of standard representation and network effects - which matters, because the best web apps rely on data. For example, fragment identifiers, browser extensions, web crawlers (e.g. for search), the ability to target different device characteristics through CSS, and accessibility features all rely on HTML (granted, AJAX tends to be weak in supporting some of these, e.g. accessibility). You also, incidentally, wall of your code from the rest of the content of your page.
* Admittedly I haven't looked at applets in years; maybe there has been some movement toward resolving this problem.
This is absolutely correct. First I must categorically reject the grandparent's assertion that cars are more efficient. I have a reference to a 1993 study in Vancouver, B.C., which found the average Lower Mainland automobile is subsidized to an amount of $2700 (more figures - including a claim that 15%-20% of household budgets in Canada and the U.S. are devoted to the direct internal costs of cars).
Road and transit systems are networks, so a network effect applies. The grandparent post claims that the huge cost of automobile infrastructure is offset by the huge number of trips. But the effect applies equally to transit: expanding the coverage of a transit system increases the value of the existing network because it provides more routes and destinations for transit users. If transit were built out to the same extent as road networks, it would be even more competitive than it already is.
There's one more factor though: road networks actually become self-inhibiting, so as the network expands traffic jams increase. I know of three reasons for this counter-intuitive phenomenon:
The result of all of this is a vicious cycle. Common-sense evidence for this is the seeming inability of roadbuilding to remedy traffic problems. Despite devoting a huge fraction of our land to roads and parking (I would guess it's on an order of a quarter or a third), we still have huge traffic jams. I don't believe any city has managed to grow its way out of this with more roads.
There are successful cities without the traffic problems, however. I remember visiting Basel, Switzerland in 1999 and being stunned by the intersection in front of the main train station. As I recall, it was uncontrolled.
Finally, transit need not be a second-class alternative. I personally prefer to take transit in many cases, especially rail transit, and I know I'm not alone. There's a reason why people and municipalities are squabbling over who gets the next rail transit extension in my area (Vancouver BC).
Uh, yeah. Property's the priority. Meanwhile, thugs shooting at emergency workers are preventing people from being saved. People are dying because of those guns - probably in large numbers. You think guns would have helped in the tsunami too?
You're right about the government though. As far as I can tell, their "plan" was leave everyone to look out for themselves. This wild west attitude of every man for himself isn't the solution, it's the problem.
There isn't a binary choice between complete dependence and complete independence. It is possible to make community plans which actually involve people with the plan, so that when the structure breaks down they can look out for themselves and each other. A disaster is still a disaster, and there will be thugs in its wake, but there has to be a better way.
Heaven help us when the quake hits Vancouver.
I have been to China, my wife is Chinese, and the region where I live (Vancouver) is about 25% ethnic Chinese. China is an important country, and its power is growing - look at recent purchases (and attempts) of major Canadian and American companies. China, its culture, and its policies will increasingly impact our lives. We will be exposed to their culture and values. We can't afford to be silent about ours.
I happen to agree with those who support "thin" copyright. However, beyond the ideology, the convenience of a standard agreement can be significant due to lower transaction costs. The cost (time and effort) to the person who licenses their work is low. Because the license is standard, the cost to whoever uses the work is also low (they don't have to contact the artist, and they don't have to worry over the legal details).
If transaction costs are too high, they smother use (for example, merchants institute minimum purchase amounts for credit card use). CC may not pay artists any money, but audience fostered by the additional sharing can benefit their reputations. Because of the network effect, sharing, like interest, compounds, so that audience may be significantly larger than if the artist a) said yes to anyone who asked, or b) used a custom license.
Two comments jumped out at me in Orlowski's article. The first seems unable to distinguish the exercise of speech from the act of listening:
Another article, responding to Orlowski's absurd claim that geeks believe the technology, not the artist, is responsible for creativity, claims that geeks believe:
Implicit in this rejection is an incredibly elitist conception of creativity as an inborn talent. It's a short step from here to saying it's a waste of time to teach writing (or painting or what have you) because the great writers are born and will write regardless.
For some geniuses that is surely true. For others, the lack isn't tools but practice: creativity, like most skills, can be improved through use. Easy access to technology helps. Easy access to culture which can be built upon, which building is essential to all art from Shakespeare to Warhol, helps even more. It is this latter lack that Creative Commons targets, and which the $20 for "speech" (i.e. passive listening) doesn't address. But these folks are too blinded by the silly "blue LEDs" to see past the technology.