I'll point out that the law is what it is, and our society is based on the rule of law. Thus, breaking the law is widely viewed as "evil" . . . Debate on the moral qualities of specific laws can become quite contentious, and is beyond the scope of this discussion.
What an absurd position! Is it unacceptable to question the morality of something because doing so could be "contentious"? Is the opinion of the majority the last word on morality? (Some would describe your position as extreme political correctness.) Was criticizing the morality of the law "outside the scope" of the discussion when the Dred Scott ruling came down? By your measure virtually all moral questions would be outside the scope of this discussion. (I am absolutely not comparing the horrors of slavery with the dangers of maximalist copyright, simply highlighting the absurdity of your claim.)
You may think winthrop's post challenges the rule of law. I disagree. Laws are not legitimate and just simply because they are the law. The corrupt and undemocratic process by which maximalist copyright has been imposed is the real threat to the rule of the law, not the protest of those on whom the law is imposed. The legitimacy of that opposition is not in the least undermined by the fact that people use the technical means available (the GPL's use of copyright) in order to try to bring about change.
So I echo the question: What is the "evil" part? Maybe we all agree Google's actions are evil, but in the context of conflicts around copyright the explanation of why is rather important. Obviously spazdor is aware of the law. His question was effectively, "I know it's illegal, but why is it evil?", to which you have basically responded: "because it's illegal."
Most American corporations think of time in terms of quarters. China consciously thinks long-term. Consciousness of the 19th century "humiliations" at the hands of the colonial powers (who did indeed behave extremely badly) is strong. The Chinese are immensely proud of their history as the most powerful empire in the world when the rest of the world was backward. They aim to be a world power again. Not next quarter or next year: they will take what time is required, whether it be decades or generations.
This is often captured in the quote attributed to Zhou Enlai, one of the most respected leaders of the Communist Party, when he was asked his opinion of the French Revolution. "It's too soon to say," he replied.
Individual Chinese also have a history of long-term thinking with the tremendous emphasis placed on education. Americans often have a knee-jerk response that because the government is "communist", it China is a) evil and b) hopelessly incompetent. This is foolish and wrong. China today is not communist, it is capitalist - likely more capitalist than many western countries. Even when it was communist, two of the stars on the Chinese flag represented the petty bourgeoisie and capitalists sympathetic to the Party. If anything, China today suffers from too much entrepreneurial capitalist zeal, not too little. If you think their government is incompetent, consider the sclerotic politics of the U.S. today and compare that with a government in China that can simply snap its fingers and get things done (no need to consider the interests of the electorate). When in the 1990s Beijing decided to eliminate leaded gasoline it happened virtually overnight, drivers of older taxis be damned.
With all of that said, I am skeptical of the long-term stability of Chinese society. The transition to capitalism is wrenching and destructive, just as it was in the west. But there's a lot of skepticism about American stability floating around too these days. It is foolish to respond to China's aspirations with arrogance.
Your framework runtime (the browser) consumes many times the resources that existing client-server applications ever did, and you still can't provide the same level of functionality.
I think you're wrong. Functionality is not the name of the game. Communication and content are. Look, I was doing client-server development in the 1990s: Mac Programmer's Workshop (C++), Unix sockets (C), Microsoft Foundation Classes (C++). I would never go back. True, your example does illustrate your point. There are whole classes of application, like word processors, for which the Web is not (currently). But those are mostly stable, well-defined categories. The Web is not a better way to write Word, but it is a better way to create other software we want even more.
1. The Web is social. When you develop an application, communication between users is practically a given. Back in the day, client-server software was deployed within organizations and was focused on access to data or business processes. Communication was rare and tended to be limited.
2. The web centers on content to which developers add various functionality. You may have to work harder on your applications controls, but HTML and CSS give you tremendous power. A framework like Flash or.NET may let you put things exactly where you want them, but this takes flexibility (e.g. text sizing) away from the user. And they are still missing significant chunks of what HTML+CSS can do.
3. The Web is simple. The learning curve for web applications is dramatically lower than for the kinds of apps you are talking about. HTML gives you hyperlinks for free. It also gives you a history with forward/back buttons, bookmarkable URLs, and a world of users who have been trained to use them. Programmers who try to develop apps without these features loose out on core benefits of the Web (hello, Flash).
4. The Web is relatively unified and transparent. I can view source on any page, or if that doesn't work use Firebug to break down the DOM. These days the standards are complex, but there are real advantages over a mess of competing frameworks. Browser implementations are inconsistent: but that beats writing client-server software that works on some mix of Mac, Windows, and assorted Unix flavors, then trying to persuade the wider world to install client software.
5. Javascript doesn't suck. I was surprised too when I found this out. It has some real weaknesses for sure (dynamic scoping!). It's no Python or Ruby, but it is powerful and its idiosyncrasies pale beside, say, C++ or PHP. Perhaps its biggest flaw is the pathetically poor standard library.
If you want to write a word-processor, the weaknesses of the Web compared to traditional client-server development may be very frustrating. You could still go with client-server, which seems like the right tool for the job. But you don't. The advantages of the Web are overwhelming. It's easier to be nostalgic about the benefits of client-server than to reinvent the benefits of the web.
so far as I can tell, the restriction on liquids isn't really for the benefit of Coke, but rather part of the recent security craze
But this is Canada. We really aren't that paranoid. While we do sometimes ape the security theater of the United States, the effort tends to be late and our heart isn't in it.
Before I reached the bag search counter there a private security guy patted me down. Which is to say he barely touched me - just looked at me to see I didn't look suspicious. I asked him what he was looking for, and showed him my bag and bottle. He shrugged and smiled and said he didn't care.
I don't blame the volunteers. They volunteered to help the Olympics (or the ideal they believe the Olympics to be), not Coke. I suspect they are uncomfortable with some of the things they are required to do. The young man beside the lady who asked me to pour out the water piped up with "you can drink some first." And the woman herself let my wife past with a small bag of nuts for our son. I bet she wasn't supposed to. She might have let my water in, too, if she had known we were together, but we were separated in the line at that point.
I no longer view the Olympics as an idealistic sporting event. I now view it as a viscous commercial enterprise that exploits the dreams of young athletes.
I live in Vancouver. I could not agree with you more.
McDonald's started running an ad before the games. I think it speaks for itself. It shows a big box of golden french fries. Beside them the words "Why Wait? Go For Gold."
Last weekend, along with my wife and son, I visited one of the "free" events for Chinese New Year. We wanted to see a Chinese dragon, dancing, and so forth. At the entrance, volunteers searched my bag and poured out my bottle of water. This was for the benefit of Coca-Cola Corp., which was selling bottled tap water (Dasani is tap water) for $3.50. I was literally (I don't mean figuratively) spitting mad. You don't go somewhere with a little kid unless you have food and water.
Keep in mind that this is not a private party: it is funded by billions of public money and staffed with thousands of volunteers. We have shut down major streets, suspended colleges and universities for two weeks, and passed specific laws for the benefit of the Olympics. Or rather for the benefit of its sponsors.
But of course this is a "green" Olympics. As the Coke booth banner read, "Refresh. Recycle. Repeat." - and you can't recycle if you're already reusing! A sign on the booth said a green light would go on when the booth was running solely on solar power. A spokeswoman had gathered a crowd of children, who were competing in a Jeopardy-style contest to guess just how Green Coca-Cola is.
So yeah, that's what the Olympics does. It speaks of sport and healthy living, then promotes poison to kids. It exploits athletes who give decades of their lives and sign recording-industry-style contracts for the hope of a few minutes of fame. It exists outside the law (truly: a Canadian court ruled the Olympics violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but did nothing because the IOC is outside Canadian jurisdiction). It goes from city to city, arranging with politicians and business leaders to transfer public money into private pockets.
More draconian is better.. prison time++ . . . Nothing will get any better until things get loony. I hope to see house confiscations, children removed from families, people put in jail. . . . Just like consuming illegal drugs, nobody is going to stop copying things that don't exist.
You are arguing that the means (house confiscations, the removal of children, jail) justifies the ends (revising copyright). I don't think that ends justifies this means.
Besides which, what makes you think insanity will lead to positive change? You have already had all these measures for illegal drugs for decades.
This is why free markets are so great. While there's great debate whether the iPad is good or bad, the destiny of the iPad is solely in the consumer's hands. If they don't like it, they buy something else and the iPad dies. If they love it, the iPad thrives. Just wait a year, and we will see if Apple made a good decision. All this huff about the system being locked down is irrelevant.
This is not an argument. That consumers make choices is the definition of the market, not an argument for it. You say the market will produce the best outcome - so whatever outcome the market produces is best!
You say that no-one should concern themselves with the the actual, practical consequences in the real world. Whether the system is locked down is "irrelevant": the actual outcome - the actual impact on people's lives and freedoms - is beside the point. All that matters is that this was a result of market choices. This is a purely abstract position that explicitly claims that practical reality does not matter.
You say, "Just wait a year, and we will see if Apple made a good decision." So we will find out whether Apple acted in its own interest. Yippee. This tells us nothing at all about whether the outcome will be good or bad, and it doesn't give a hoot about the actual empirical results. Consumers often make choices that do not lead to outcomes they would prefer. If there's a conflict between your theory and actual evidence, I'm sorry but evidence wins. Of course, real human good and bad don't boil down to a single number like price, so that involves making value judgements. Maybe you're uncomfortable with that, but there is no way around it. To make value judgments, you actually need to - you know - make value judgements. There is no magic solution that makes that go away - not even, for all its merits, the free market (which, whatever else we think of it, I think we can all agree is not "free").
But your amoral slight-of-hand claims that value judgements are superfluous. This is no different than saying "the hurricane was the act of God, therefore it must be good." Only you are replacing God with the market. Maybe you have faith that markets do produce ideal outcomes. Fine. But that is a personal conviction, not a reason "why markets are so great." You deceive yourself if you think it is.
Everyone also knows the similarity. They are in some sense connected. Technically you may argue that C is glorified assembly and C# is a modern OO language. But there is a direct lineage I think from C through C++ and Java to C# as standard application development languages, each of which attempted to remedy some of the weaknesses of the previous one.
More importantly perhaps, no-one would confuse them because C is so well known. The very popularity of C makes it easy to tweak the name just a bit and yet have the difference be universally recognized. This simply isn't the case for lesser known names. If I wrote a play titled Romeo and Julia, you would likely recognize both the reference to Shakespeare and realize that the name is different. There would be no confusion. If I picked a lesser-known title, however, you could well be confused. Would you realize that The Prisoner of Zendo was different from The Prisoner or Zenda? (Though The Prisoner of Zenda is hardly obscure.)
The lack of widespread knowledge of Go makes it particularly vulnerably to confusion with Go! Also, Google has immensely marketing power sufficient to overwhelm recognition for Go. How many participants in this discussion would have known the difference before today? I certainly wouldn't. If you named a language C', however, (assuming there is no such language already; I picked the prime because it is visually almost unnoticeable), I would instantly recognize that it was not C.
The article is not very detailed, but my reading of it is that the default dose was not unsafe. If I am correct (hard to tell), what happened was that a doctor doing a specialized procedure programmed a custom dose. Then the machine defaulted to this new value for subsequent procedures, but the staff assumed it was using it's previous (safe) default.
There was a misunderstanding about an embedded default setting applied by the machine . . . Once the scanner was programmed with the new instructions, the higher dose was essentially locked in.
What is particularly appalling is that it took 18 months to catch this, and they only found out because a patient complained of hair falling out. The FDA recommendation is that doctors double-check that the machine is actually applying the correct dose.
It seems clear to me that this is a stop-gap that indicates a design flaw. It is not enough for the machine to display the actual dose: the procedures for using it must ensure that this is not missed. From the Therac-25 link:
There also needs to be greater recognition of potential conflicts between user-friendly interfaces and safety. One goal of interface design is to make the interface as easy as possible for the operator to use. But in the Therac-25, some design features (for example, not requiring the operator to reenter patient prescriptions after mistakes) and later changes (allowing a carriage return to indicate that information has been entered correctly) enhanced usability at the expense of safety.
This describes perfectly the recent incident. User-friendly defaults resulted in health professionals making unsafe assumptions. Blaming them does nothing to prevent such problems in the future. The system is broken.
Incidentally, I am not convinced by the lessons learned about Therac-25. It emphasizes proper software engineering practices and licensing. This may be necessary but insufficient.
Taking a couple of programming courses or programming a home computer does not qualify anyone to produce safety-critical software. Although certification of software engineers is not yet required, more events like those associated with the Therac-25 will make such certification inevitable.
This might not be enough. Initial testing of the machine had been of hardware only, though the problem was with software. Following the initial reports of an overdose, the company replaced a hardware component. If the real problems fall outside current engineering practices, they may be completely overlooked. In the recent case, the problem appears to include the practices of medical staff. These are part of the technical system, so they need to be treated as such by engineers. Ignoring that is very much like focusing on the hardware to the exclusion of the software. Technical systems are not clearly bounded, and are probably less so as time goes on. There always needs to be a broader view.
Therac-25 suffered suffered (among other things) from race conditions. The mere idea of having a deadly device that is even theoretically susceptible to race conditions terrifies me: if a race condition programming error is even potentially possible, I would want to make damned sure there's an independent hardware or software check to make sure failures will be caught. Problems like this can be incredibly subtle. I wonder if overconfidence in engineering might lead to complacency.
What really jumped out at me, however, was the role of the user community, which was formally excluded from the engineering. Following the discovery of one deadly software error, the company (AECL) fixed it and assumed the problem was solved: after which another patient died from a different bug. The users asked for access to the source code. This was denied. Unlike the company (and likely its engineers), the users clearly understood that they were part of the system.
Easily pirated software. All you needed was the internet and a cd burner. No modding; burn and go. And everyone did it.
Not so. I'm sure many, many people did not. Not everyone is comfortable downloading and burning off the net. Many people will pay good money for bottled water, never mind colorful videogames.
I bought the system for one game only: Jet Set Radio. I saw a legit copy from Japan and couldn't get it out of my head. It was the only game I ever copied, because when I got my system it was not available in North America. As soon as Jet Grind Radio (the poorly-named American version) was released, I bought it. I never copied another game - though I bought a whole bunch.
The Dreamcast is the only console I have ever owned. And I have seen many consoles. I remember when Pac Man was released for Atari. But the Dreamcast was the only one that made me really, really want one.
Make the effort to send in a submission. We have written a guide to help make it easy to put one together without understanding the intricacies of the law or the extreme proposals that have been put forward. Download the guide PDF here. It only takes a few minutes to make the point that Canadians care deeply about this. Do your part, even if all you say is "no Canadian DMCA." But do it now: the consultation ends Sunday.
If the government chooses to listen, great. If not, the consultation submissions are essential for making the political case that Canadians want a fair law. This is equally true if the government changes after an election.
First, it is not correct to assume that patronage is the only alternative. There are many other models. But I want to focus on this claim:
a patronage system quickly ends up where everyone is trying to be just like Elvis because the people with money to spend on the arts really, really liked Elvis.
Something like this actually happened in the 1950s. But it was resolved without the law. Musicians, fans and the industry decided against imitation.
Up until then the market for music had focused on songs, not particular recordings. There were many recordings of each song, and listeners did not mind a whole lot which one they bought. But with R&B music, the particular arrangement of a hit became more and more important. Instead of simply producing covers of popular songs, labels started to clone them, imitating everything they could, from using the same arrangement to hiring the same backup singers. Musicians protested, calling the clones "theft." Labels and radio stations said they would have nothing to do with them (though they didn't always follow through).
But what really changed the situation was the listeners. They wanted to hear the real thing - the original they had heard on the radio, not a knock off. The clones - and the covers simply faded away.
If you are sponsoring a musician (maybe you're Coke looking for music to use in advertising, or maybe you're a group of fans who have pooled their money for a sequel to Firefly), what would you rather do: pay for something that people will see as a cheap imitation, or put your money into something different?
Sure, people like things similar to what they already know. This is part of cultural change. My description of clones in the 1950s is drawn from Elijah Wald's How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'N' Roll, where he also writes:
One reason that the music of Whiteman and the Beatles was so phenomenally popular was that it blended styles that older listeners found abrasive and unmusical with familiar elements, so those listeners could enjoy it without abandoning their previous standards and feel broad-minded and modern without essentially changing their tastes.
A lot of the best innovation comes from taking something old and mixing in something new. Is the Mac GUI just a rip-off of Xerox? Is it bad that Linux is a reimplementation of UNIX? Was it bad that Shakespeare wrote his own versions of other people's stories?
Frankly though, I don't know that I'm really disagreeing with you. As you point out, the culture industries already put much of their effort into retreads and sequels.
That is my impression too. Apparently these two women already knew and disliked each other offline:
the two women . . . knew each other from Manhattan's fashion scene and reportedly quarreled after Cohen badmouthed Port to her ex-boyfriend.
Now it may be that Port's blog really did harm Cohen's reputation. If so, then all this is justified. But I doubt it - I don't think many people would take anonymous online claims that someone is a "ho" seriously. On the other hand, while anonymity is an important political freedom, this is not what it is intended to protect.
This looks to me like a private spat that has blown way up out of proportion. It does not look to me like something that is worth the court's time. If these two women were yelling at each other in a public street, I don't think the court would care. It appears to me that we have laws designed for career-limiting libels being applied to a tempest in a teapot, wasting public money and resources that could be better used for something more significant. As a consequence, we have precedent for political speech being set by exactly the wrong sort of case.
Our legal systems seem to have real problems coping with the blurring of private and public online. "Private" used to mean something known to a few people, while "public" applied to activities that were widely observed. While anyone can read a blog, before the circus this particular blog was probably more private than public. Similar problems occur with copyright infringement, where formerly accepted activities create massive risk because they are seen as public - though in many cases they may not be any more widely observed than the mixtapes of my youth. (Admittedly it is very hard to tell which infringement online is limited to a few people, and which to a large group. But my point is that communication intended for and witnessed by a small audience is being regulated as if it was published on the front page of the New York Times. This can result in ridiculous judgments and significant waste of public resources.)
Natural selection in terms of the evolution of life forms is quite analogous to cultural phenomena taking shape over time. In both cases traits that are more beneficial to an environment are more likely to flourish.
You need a whole lot more than that to show whether it's a useful comparison to make. Memetics is not an established field. I have never encountered a reference to memes in my study of Communication, even by students. I have only been aware of them as a pop-scientific phenomenon, the sort of thing that shows up in the pages of Wired.
Looking at (gulp) Wikipedia, I find a link to an article by Luis Benitez-Bribiesca, where he writes:
while genes are well defined and their molecular structure has been extensively investigated, memes are ethereal and cannot be defined. . . . serious scientists disregard memes as the basis to explain consciousness and cultural evolution.
Memetics is nothing more than a pseudoscientific dogma were memes are compared to genes, viruses, parasites, or infectious agents thriving for their own survival in human brains. Memetics is a dangerous idea that poses a threat to the serious study of consciousness and cultural evolution.
Lots of metaphors that look nice on the surface break down when applied in depth (infringement=theft anyone?). It is easy to find some similarities between ideas and genes. To be of any value, however, the comparison needs to be done in detail, and the differences between the two phenomena need to be taken into account. Maybe that can be done, and memetics can establish itself as a useful framework alongside semiotics, critical theory, and so on - and show that it has explanatory power in areas the others lack. At this point, it does not appear to me that this has happened.
What does capitalism have to do with the free market?
Thank you. I am so happy to see you write this, and to see Slashdot moderators recognize it as an important point.
Obviously there is significant tension between capital and the market: capitalists always want to circumvent or break the market in order to stave off competitions' downward pressure on profits. But until reading Fernand Braudel's fascinating Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century (I haven't yet finished), I was unaware how far back this antagonism went. Illegal international monopolies on vital goods were a problem in the 17th century just as they are today. In fact, opposition to the market was baked right in to the birth of capitalism.
Capitalism arose where there was a need for capital and a potential for large profits. Originally, this was in long-distance trade, where large outlays of money (for ships and goods) and long turn-around times meant both significant risk and huge profits (hundreds of percent in many cases). Capitalists were traders. They simply weren't interested in other areas: for a long time they did not expand significantly beyond a few specialized activities making up a small part of the overall economy.
The market, on the other hand, actually existed in physical marketplaces. This was where producers of goods (e.g. peasants from the countryside) came to sell them. Then traders started to interfere. These traders would go out of the city and buy up the goods directly from producers. These they would bring them into the city, where they could charge a higher price because they had consolidated the supply and thus were less vulnerable to market competition. This practice was actually illegal: governments banned it in order to protect consumers. (In those days spending over half your income on food - and still starving - was not unusual, so one can imagine why even pre-democratic monarchies would want to make sure people could afford bread.)
So yeah, capitalism is one thing. The market is another. And there is great tension between them.
The pinnacle of capitalism then, as now, was finance. As soon as they could, these early capitalists got out of trade. It was too risky, and it was socially looked down upon. They insisted on a distinction between ordinary merchants, who actually did the work, and more prestigious deal-makers who only provided money. The moment they could, they placed themselves in the second group where they could make tremendous low-risk profits in finance, and pretend that neither they nor their ancestors had ever been merchants at all.
They may ask the public, but are they actually going to listen to them?
We don't know. They may not know yet either. Whatever the case, it is essential to take place in the consultation.
Consider the possibilities: a) the consultation is in good faith and they plan to listen, or b) they intend to ignore what people say and use this as cover for a warmed-over imitation of the DMCA.
In case a) participation is obviously worthwhile: the more we consult, the closer the legislation will be to what we want. And we give them political cover. When big media and the U.S. trade representative come demanding their DMCA, the government can throw their hands in the air and say, "the Canadian people made it clear to us we had no political alternative."
In case b), participation is also worthwhile - perhaps even more so. The more people push for a reasonable law the more political capital they will have to spend if they wish to go against our wishes. Tens of thousands of people protested when C-61 was introduced; next time around the number will be even greater. And when we rise up, we will be able to say, "look, we participated in good faith - but you ignored us."
Consider the alternative. If we do not participate in the process, the government can do whatever it likes and say it did so with our consent. Any protest movement against a bad bill will be neutered before it begins. "You claim to represent Canadians," the media will say, "but where were they when there was consultation?"
This does not mean we should lose our skepticism. We need to hold them to account. At this point, that means hitting them with feedback from as many Canadians as we can.
By the way, I represented Vancouver Fair Copyright at the Vancouver roundtable on Monday. I am not sure how significant it was, but many of the participants were in favor if sensible reforms like simplification of the law, flexible fair dealing, reduction or elimination of crown copyright, and no blanked ban on circumvention of DRM. The proponents of draconian law have the inside track with the government, but there is a point at which sufficient numbers of ordinary Canadians, if they take part and express themselves, can outweigh the special interests pushing for a bad law.
Copyright law draws a distinction between idea and expression. Expressions, according to the law, are copyrightable. Ideas are not. This is important because it preserves freedom of speech: you can express the same idea with a different expression. That's the theory.
Please, then, tell me, is Mickey Mouse an idea, or an expression? If it is an expression, what idea is it expressing?
A court actually ruled on this one. Its conclusion? The "idea" of Mickey Mouse is "mouse." Everything else is expression.
Great. We have the freedom to express "mouse" in different ways. But all of the cultural meanings and emotions and passions and history around Mickey Mouse? Those are part of Mickey Mouse too. Not of "mouse." They are ideas. And yet, they are protected.
Take a piece of music. What is the "idea" of a symphony? In the U.S., a single bar of music can be copyrighted. Music is all expression. No idea. What relevance does this strange division have for music?
Take Holden Caulfield. J.D. Salinger recently sued another author for writing an apparent sequel to Catcher in the Rye. Salinger won. Not because the other author used the same names, or the same plot, but because the story and the character were similar.
These immaterial things we hold in our heads? According to the law, most of them are not in fact ideas. They are expressions.
The law can define its terms however it likes. This is what we call an analytic distinction: it does not correspond to characteristics of the world. The distinction between idea and expression is invented, just like the arbitrary line drawn on a map and called a border. It's a legal fiction. Each individual case makes the difference between "idea" and "expression" more clear, and yet more complex: the border becomes every more jagged, ever more detached from ordinary human speech and experience. Case law can say what it likes, but it does not have the authority to redefine the English language. Its terms have nothing to do what ordinary people mean when they use these words.
Yes, you can copyright an idea. That's what copyright does.
Back when telephones were new, no-one quite knew what they were for. One company came up with a music service. This was before radio, so the idea of piping music to your home was radical. This may seem absurd to us now, but it isn't: radio went the other way. It is entirely possible that we could have built a world where we listened to high-fidelity music by phone, and spoke to our friends by radio. Even in the early 20th century the phone companies didn't get it: they ran campaigns trying dissuade housewives from chatting over the phone, believing that the technology was for Important business use (a few brief, high-cost calls instead of lots of cheap long ones).
I remember when people though computers were giant calculators. Then the computer became personal: it could do your books, teach the kids arithmetic, and keep track of your recipes. (Though why anyone you would want to keep their recipes in a computer was never clear). The hardware companies tried to sell to everyone, but they weren't quite sure how to do it: the truth is, most people had no real need for a computer.
Computer technology isn't personal anymore. It's social. The PC is a phone, not a calculator. That's why everyone needs one. That's what driving development of the technology. Ours is not the only possible path: computers could have remained high-cost devices for use by individuals to produce things or do business. But that was the path not taken. This changes what computers are.
To you, desktop applications may seem superior on the basis of their technical merits. Fair enough. Hollywood seems to see computers and the net as a new broadcast medium, like television, for which the current infrastructure has significant technical failings (privacy, QoS). In their case I hope their vision is never realized. But for many people, these visions are irrelevant. No matter the quality or polish of the applications, no matter the convenience of video-on-demand, for them the technology is technically inferior if it does not fully support communication and social activity. For them - and for me - the cobbled together infrastructure of the Web is far superior - technically superior - because for us it is above all a medium for communication.
First, if you prefer what the commercial networks produce that's fine by me. They have made lots of good TV shows. It's probably largely a matter of what you grew up with. I grew up with BBC shows rebroadcast in Canada, so prefer Doctor Who to Star Trek.
I prefer networks that look at their viewership numbers, and try to tailor their entertainment to what the general population wants. I've found they produce more good entertainment than any of the government-run systems.
This is not actually what the main private networks (ABC, CBC, NBC in the U.S.) do. They target specific demographics desired by advertisers. The results are quite different from what would happen if they attempted to capture a) the most viewers, or b) the viewers most willing to pay for their shows. This is obvious when you compare to programming by cable channels (e.g. HBO), which are more directly responsive to their audiences. For a long time (many decades) the networks made the (patently absurd) assumption that men made all the significant spending decisions in the family, and targeted their prime time shows accordingly. Or take The Beverly Hillbillies, one of the most successful shows of its time: cancelled not because its audience went away, but because the advertisers figured its audience was too poor. They wanted to chase hip urban viewers instead. It is largely a myth that they are rational actors directed by the market. In practice, networks are basically huge command economies inside. They're not famous for making smart decisions.
The other systems I mentioned vary widely in governance and funding models. CBC TV is abysmal due to a lack of stable funding or independence from the government. Recently, CBC radio has been following in its footsteps. I believe the BBC is quite a bit more independent than CBC, largely because it has a dependable source of long-term funding (the TV license). I don't believe NPR is government run at all. It gets very little money from government. Most of its funding comes from viewers (pledge drives), member stations, and corporate donations.
What we have seen with the non-commercial networks is that they have coalesced around a different audience not well served by the private networks. So on the one hand we have a different approach to funding and governance, on the other we have contrasting tastes and cultures (the stereotype is "popular" vs "middle/high brow"). It's not clear that the one caused the other. In a world without the private networks (which, as I pointed out, would not happen because the consumer electronics industry would profit from creating them if they did not exist - probably even if there were no such thing as copyright), the character of the programming on these systems would likely be quite different.
I am aware of the limits on Fox's rights to Star Wars, but that makes no difference to its relevance. The licensing arrangements in place today are irrelevant when conjecturing whether it could or would have been made if it were unable to depend on ticket sales. My point is that it would have been profitable even if ticket sales were zero.
They will not contain ads, they will BE ads, and nothing more. Every single aspect of the movie will only serve to advance the commercial(/political/ideological) interests.
This is already the situation for TV, radio, magazines, and newspapers. In all of these media, the real customer is the advertiser who pays for access to the audience who watches/listens/reads for "free."
Now I won't say that's a good thing. I think it's terrible. In my opinion, quality is clearly higher when it is made directly for the audience (as is the case for the BBC, PBS, NPR, or CBC radio, for example). To the extent that a changing media landscape is undercutting the advertising-supported model I am hopeful that direct payment for (and influence over) cultural works will become more widespread.
In the early days of radio, the manufacturers had a problem. Radio sales were extremely popular, but the people buying needed something to listen to. So the manufacturers created radio stations in order to drive demand for their products. It worked (though government licensing in favor of the networks also wiped out a wide range of independent and community services).
Today, the media industries argue that their production has a multiplier effect on the economy: each dollar invested in media produces many more dollars in related activity (transportation of books, sales of Star Wars toys, Macdonalds promotions, and so on). Some of this activity is really a cost of doing business, whose elimination would result in greater efficiency (e.g. it's more efficient to download a book than to ship it across the country), but much of it is new value. They present this as an argument for strong copyright[1]. In fact, it may be just the opposite: if the return on the dependent activity is greater than the cost of producing the original work, then there is an incentive to create the work even if it made no money directly. This is why Apple created iTunes, for example: not to make money from selling music, but to drive the (much more profitable) sale of iPods.
Or take Star Wars: the films earned $4.3 billion, but merchandise earned $13.5 billion. Widespread copying of the film would not touch the business case for making it, and at the beginning, when the venture was risky, wider distribution would only increase the likelihood of success (while possibly limiting the maximum possible scale of that success - to $13.5b in this case, rather than $17.8b).
We already live in a world where many movies are driven more by the model you describe than by ticket revenue per se. Producers care tremendously about ticket sales as a metric of popularity and because that's what keeps the films in the cinemas, not necessarily because that is their key revenue stream. As it happens, DVD sales recently became more profitable. So we have seen business model change on this scale extremely recently. It ain't the end of the world. (Though it might mean a lot more Star Wars-like films, which admittedly wouldn't make me thrilled: I'm not a fan.)
[1] In the recent copyright debate at The Economist, Dale Cendali, their May 8 guest made just this claim. She cited a study that found that the "IP industries" contributed "nearly 40% of the growth achieved by all U.S. private industry." Unfortunately for her argument, she failed to point out that under the category of "IP industry" the study included the whole automotive industry, big chunks of the transportation and retail sectors, a significant part of the petroleum industry, and so on. (You can see my detailed rebuttal if on page 5 of the May 8 comments.) Turned around, this appears to be evidence that IP is an input cost for many businesses, and there is a large incentive to create works regardless of copyright. (The actual economic claim is not that such works would not be produced, but that they would be underproduced. It's not clear to me that economic theory has a good answer for what the "best" (for whom?) level of production of Big Brother shows or Shakespeare plays is, or at what cost.)
Maybe we should outlaw photographs because it shows skin color.
Funny you should pick that example. When film was being developed in the 19th and 20th centuries, there was a problem: it was difficult to make photographs that showed both light- and dark-colored faces effectively.
When there are two persons in [a] scene, . . . if one has dark make-up and the other light, much care must be exercised in so regulating the light that it neither "burns up" the light make-up nor is of insufficient strength to light up the dark make-up.[1]
The white face was taken as the essential image that film had to capture effectively, and a lot of technical effort went into developing film stock that showed the white face well. "Exact reproduction" produced a "beefy" look, so the film was modified accordingly[2].
In other words, if black people had developed film, film would look different and have have different chemical characteristics from what we have today. You cannot just point to the technology and say it is "neutral", to be used for good or bad purposes. During its development, the creators of every technology encounter choices that cannot be made solely on technical grounds. Those decisions always end up embedding human values - as does the technology that results.
Here's another story I read somewhere. Early computers could only represent uppercase or lowercase letters. The first choice of the technicians was to go with lowercase, because that is much easier to read. But this was overruled: because then God would not start with an uppercase letter. Now whether this particular story is true or false (it sounds too neat to me), it is certainly representative of how many technical choices are made.
As for the burakumin, I once spoke to a Japanese woman about them. She had married an American and was living in the U.S., but she said that she would certainly never have considered a relationship with one. Not because she herself was prejudiced, but because doing so would place her outside mainstream Japanese society. We have heard this before. If you haven't, I recommend watching the film Gentleman's Agreement. I won't claim I know the best solution for Google in this particular case, but a knee-jerk response of "technology has no values" brings us no closer to any kind of truth, and represents a failure to understand our relationship to technology.
[1, 2] The quotes above are by Frederick Mills and Dvaid L. MacAdam respectively, quoted in the article "Making 'white' people white" by Richard Dyer, 1997.
When's the last time you laid out a site without a table element on every page?
Dude, I hardly ever use tables for layout. I'm not religious about it: now and then it's the practical choice. But such cases are few and far between. My blog, my development pages, my research - table free. Why? As you said, they add complexity: with all those tags they're a pain to implement and maintain.
If you learn enough CSS, most tables just melt away. Sometimes CSS is the pits and I wonder at the twisted minds that came up with the W3C box model. But usually, it's awesome. Often when using OpenOffice I wish I could drop down into CSS. Not infrequently, the formatting I want is a snap in CSS - but impossible in OO.
As for HTML, you know what I use most? Paragraph tags. And lists. Lots and lots of lists.
I think you have Schumpeter backwards
on
The Sewing Machine War
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I think you may have Schumpeter backwards.
The most compelling case for copyright, for me, comes from Joseph Schumpeter's concept of creative destruction. In essence, he argues that copyright creates more innovation because it does not allow people to use the status quo of ideas.
Did Schumpeter actually make such a claim about copyright? If so, I want to know - please point me to it.
Schumpeter argued for capitalism's need for innovation. At first, capitalists would invest in some new technology and reap high returns on their investment. Over time use of the technology would spread, and competition would force down margins. In order to start the cycle anew and again achieve a high returns, capitalists had to seek out new innovations. Thus it is capital's search for profits that drives and is enabled by innovation. This is creative destruction: constant innovation - discarding the old in favor of the new - in search of profits.
In this model, there is no need to fence off ideas to encourage innovation. Monopoly protection would do quite the opposite: by shielding profits from market competition, it frees capital from the need to pursue new ideas and technologies.
Copyright results in me-too imitation
on
The Sewing Machine War
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The most compelling case for copyright, for me, comes from Joseph Schumpeter's concept of creative destruction. In essence, he argues that copyright creates more innovation because it does not allow people to use the status quo of ideas.
Yet we end up with me-too music, me-too movies, and so on. For example, take the many TV shows that compose their own Mission Impossible-style music because they can't copy the original. The result is wasted effort for an imitation that is less effective.
What copyright prevents us from re-using is not only ideas, but also the form and social significance of cultural works. Creativity is often a matter of taking existing material (stories, songs, film footage) and using it to express new ideas. Because of copyright, a lot of effort that could be directed towards developing new ideas is instead spent on creating (often) derivative material - because only then can new ideas be expressed. Furthermore, the spread of the new ideas is limited because the audience must learn this new vocabulary. If you want to use Darth Vader to make a political statement, you can't - instead you must not only create your own Darth Vader equivalent, your audience must also invest time and effort to get the Darth Vader meaning - all before you can even make the political argument.
Think, if Shakespeare had had to come up with the plots for his plays, would he have been as innovative with language? If Disney had had to come up with their own fairy tales, would they have been able to draw on centuries of significance? Copying some things lets artists focus on their strengths. It frees them from the requirement to be jacks-of-all-trades. In an environment of strong copyright, rightsholder conglomerates (like Disney, like Sony) solve this problem by bringing together a range of content and artists together under one roof. The cost is that artistic vision must give way to commercial ownership and control ownership - control that typically prefers the tried-and-true to the innovative and new.
The justification for copyright is that it pays back the up-front cost of producing the work itself. The argument is exactly what you say - that we need more of it, or rather that it would otherwise be underproduced. But of course the important thing for society is not the content itself. It is not the words on paper, the images on film that matter: it is what we do with it. We encourage writing because we want political discussion, we want intellectual engagement, we want social activity (dancing to music, watching a movie with friends), and so on. From that perspective, copyright (at least as it stands) diverts resources away from what we really want, and towards content that in many cases adds little.
(To be fair, there is another claim for copyright, which is that it creates the infrastructure necessary to nurture talent in order to produce really high quality works. This assumes that talent is scarce and/or would not otherwise be developed, and that the infrastructure - the entertainment industries - actually do direct that talent towards and produce high quality. I don't find this convincing, but even if it were true it still has to content with the fact that copyright clamps down on the socialization, political engagement, and so on that are the real reason culture matters.)
Here is political scientist Steven Weber, writing about the tendency toward different governance styles for projects using BSD-like and GPL licenses (when he writes "Linux" he means it as an exemplar, not the only instance):
BSD-style projects typically rest with a small team of developers who together write almost all the code for a project. Outside users may modify the source code for their own purposes. They often report bugs to the core team and sometimes suggest new features or approaches to problems that might be helpful. But the core development team does not generally rely heavily on code that is written by users. 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. The BSD model is open source because the source code is free. But as an ideal type, it is not vitally collaborative on a very large scale, in the sense that Linux is.
Weber, Steven, The Success of Open Source, 2004, pp. 62-63.
Assuming his claim is true, this may be because developers see the two licenses differently (e.g. contributors may feel greater incentives to contribute to GPL projects, or they may have principled reasons, or it may have to do with their identity and membership in a community). Or it may be because of the kinds of projects that pick the licenses: the typical BSD structure he describes mirrors that of big companies, perhaps because they tend to choose such licenses. Personally, I suspect all of these factors contribute. But then I find them to be compelling reasons to pick the GPL.
Slashdot Mirror
What an absurd position! Is it unacceptable to question the morality of something because doing so could be "contentious"? Is the opinion of the majority the last word on morality? (Some would describe your position as extreme political correctness.) Was criticizing the morality of the law "outside the scope" of the discussion when the Dred Scott ruling came down? By your measure virtually all moral questions would be outside the scope of this discussion. (I am absolutely not comparing the horrors of slavery with the dangers of maximalist copyright, simply highlighting the absurdity of your claim.)
You may think winthrop's post challenges the rule of law. I disagree. Laws are not legitimate and just simply because they are the law. The corrupt and undemocratic process by which maximalist copyright has been imposed is the real threat to the rule of the law, not the protest of those on whom the law is imposed. The legitimacy of that opposition is not in the least undermined by the fact that people use the technical means available (the GPL's use of copyright) in order to try to bring about change.
So I echo the question: What is the "evil" part? Maybe we all agree Google's actions are evil, but in the context of conflicts around copyright the explanation of why is rather important. Obviously spazdor is aware of the law. His question was effectively, "I know it's illegal, but why is it evil?", to which you have basically responded: "because it's illegal."
Most American corporations think of time in terms of quarters. China consciously thinks long-term. Consciousness of the 19th century "humiliations" at the hands of the colonial powers (who did indeed behave extremely badly) is strong. The Chinese are immensely proud of their history as the most powerful empire in the world when the rest of the world was backward. They aim to be a world power again. Not next quarter or next year: they will take what time is required, whether it be decades or generations.
This is often captured in the quote attributed to Zhou Enlai, one of the most respected leaders of the Communist Party, when he was asked his opinion of the French Revolution. "It's too soon to say," he replied.
Individual Chinese also have a history of long-term thinking with the tremendous emphasis placed on education. Americans often have a knee-jerk response that because the government is "communist", it China is a) evil and b) hopelessly incompetent. This is foolish and wrong. China today is not communist, it is capitalist - likely more capitalist than many western countries. Even when it was communist, two of the stars on the Chinese flag represented the petty bourgeoisie and capitalists sympathetic to the Party. If anything, China today suffers from too much entrepreneurial capitalist zeal, not too little. If you think their government is incompetent, consider the sclerotic politics of the U.S. today and compare that with a government in China that can simply snap its fingers and get things done (no need to consider the interests of the electorate). When in the 1990s Beijing decided to eliminate leaded gasoline it happened virtually overnight, drivers of older taxis be damned.
With all of that said, I am skeptical of the long-term stability of Chinese society. The transition to capitalism is wrenching and destructive, just as it was in the west. But there's a lot of skepticism about American stability floating around too these days. It is foolish to respond to China's aspirations with arrogance.
I think you're wrong. Functionality is not the name of the game. Communication and content are. Look, I was doing client-server development in the 1990s: Mac Programmer's Workshop (C++), Unix sockets (C), Microsoft Foundation Classes (C++). I would never go back. True, your example does illustrate your point. There are whole classes of application, like word processors, for which the Web is not (currently). But those are mostly stable, well-defined categories. The Web is not a better way to write Word, but it is a better way to create other software we want even more.
1. The Web is social. When you develop an application, communication between users is practically a given. Back in the day, client-server software was deployed within organizations and was focused on access to data or business processes. Communication was rare and tended to be limited.
2. The web centers on content to which developers add various functionality. You may have to work harder on your applications controls, but HTML and CSS give you tremendous power. A framework like Flash or .NET may let you put things exactly where you want them, but this takes flexibility (e.g. text sizing) away from the user. And they are still missing significant chunks of what HTML+CSS can do.
3. The Web is simple. The learning curve for web applications is dramatically lower than for the kinds of apps you are talking about. HTML gives you hyperlinks for free. It also gives you a history with forward/back buttons, bookmarkable URLs, and a world of users who have been trained to use them. Programmers who try to develop apps without these features loose out on core benefits of the Web (hello, Flash).
4. The Web is relatively unified and transparent. I can view source on any page, or if that doesn't work use Firebug to break down the DOM. These days the standards are complex, but there are real advantages over a mess of competing frameworks. Browser implementations are inconsistent: but that beats writing client-server software that works on some mix of Mac, Windows, and assorted Unix flavors, then trying to persuade the wider world to install client software.
5. Javascript doesn't suck. I was surprised too when I found this out. It has some real weaknesses for sure (dynamic scoping!). It's no Python or Ruby, but it is powerful and its idiosyncrasies pale beside, say, C++ or PHP. Perhaps its biggest flaw is the pathetically poor standard library.
If you want to write a word-processor, the weaknesses of the Web compared to traditional client-server development may be very frustrating. You could still go with client-server, which seems like the right tool for the job. But you don't. The advantages of the Web are overwhelming. It's easier to be nostalgic about the benefits of client-server than to reinvent the benefits of the web.
But this is Canada. We really aren't that paranoid. While we do sometimes ape the security theater of the United States, the effort tends to be late and our heart isn't in it.
Before I reached the bag search counter there a private security guy patted me down. Which is to say he barely touched me - just looked at me to see I didn't look suspicious. I asked him what he was looking for, and showed him my bag and bottle. He shrugged and smiled and said he didn't care.
I don't blame the volunteers. They volunteered to help the Olympics (or the ideal they believe the Olympics to be), not Coke. I suspect they are uncomfortable with some of the things they are required to do. The young man beside the lady who asked me to pour out the water piped up with "you can drink some first." And the woman herself let my wife past with a small bag of nuts for our son. I bet she wasn't supposed to. She might have let my water in, too, if she had known we were together, but we were separated in the line at that point.
I live in Vancouver. I could not agree with you more.
McDonald's started running an ad before the games. I think it speaks for itself. It shows a big box of golden french fries. Beside them the words "Why Wait? Go For Gold."
Last weekend, along with my wife and son, I visited one of the "free" events for Chinese New Year. We wanted to see a Chinese dragon, dancing, and so forth. At the entrance, volunteers searched my bag and poured out my bottle of water. This was for the benefit of Coca-Cola Corp., which was selling bottled tap water (Dasani is tap water) for $3.50. I was literally (I don't mean figuratively) spitting mad. You don't go somewhere with a little kid unless you have food and water.
Keep in mind that this is not a private party: it is funded by billions of public money and staffed with thousands of volunteers. We have shut down major streets, suspended colleges and universities for two weeks, and passed specific laws for the benefit of the Olympics. Or rather for the benefit of its sponsors.
But of course this is a "green" Olympics. As the Coke booth banner read, "Refresh. Recycle. Repeat." - and you can't recycle if you're already reusing! A sign on the booth said a green light would go on when the booth was running solely on solar power. A spokeswoman had gathered a crowd of children, who were competing in a Jeopardy-style contest to guess just how Green Coca-Cola is.
So yeah, that's what the Olympics does. It speaks of sport and healthy living, then promotes poison to kids. It exploits athletes who give decades of their lives and sign recording-industry-style contracts for the hope of a few minutes of fame. It exists outside the law (truly: a Canadian court ruled the Olympics violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but did nothing because the IOC is outside Canadian jurisdiction). It goes from city to city, arranging with politicians and business leaders to transfer public money into private pockets.
You are arguing that the means (house confiscations, the removal of children, jail) justifies the ends (revising copyright). I don't think that ends justifies this means.
Besides which, what makes you think insanity will lead to positive change? You have already had all these measures for illegal drugs for decades.
This is not an argument. That consumers make choices is the definition of the market, not an argument for it. You say the market will produce the best outcome - so whatever outcome the market produces is best!
You say that no-one should concern themselves with the the actual, practical consequences in the real world. Whether the system is locked down is "irrelevant": the actual outcome - the actual impact on people's lives and freedoms - is beside the point. All that matters is that this was a result of market choices. This is a purely abstract position that explicitly claims that practical reality does not matter.
You say, "Just wait a year, and we will see if Apple made a good decision." So we will find out whether Apple acted in its own interest. Yippee. This tells us nothing at all about whether the outcome will be good or bad, and it doesn't give a hoot about the actual empirical results. Consumers often make choices that do not lead to outcomes they would prefer. If there's a conflict between your theory and actual evidence, I'm sorry but evidence wins. Of course, real human good and bad don't boil down to a single number like price, so that involves making value judgements. Maybe you're uncomfortable with that, but there is no way around it. To make value judgments, you actually need to - you know - make value judgements. There is no magic solution that makes that go away - not even, for all its merits, the free market (which, whatever else we think of it, I think we can all agree is not "free").
But your amoral slight-of-hand claims that value judgements are superfluous. This is no different than saying "the hurricane was the act of God, therefore it must be good." Only you are replacing God with the market. Maybe you have faith that markets do produce ideal outcomes. Fine. But that is a personal conviction, not a reason "why markets are so great." You deceive yourself if you think it is.
Everyone also knows the similarity. They are in some sense connected. Technically you may argue that C is glorified assembly and C# is a modern OO language. But there is a direct lineage I think from C through C++ and Java to C# as standard application development languages, each of which attempted to remedy some of the weaknesses of the previous one.
More importantly perhaps, no-one would confuse them because C is so well known. The very popularity of C makes it easy to tweak the name just a bit and yet have the difference be universally recognized. This simply isn't the case for lesser known names. If I wrote a play titled Romeo and Julia, you would likely recognize both the reference to Shakespeare and realize that the name is different. There would be no confusion. If I picked a lesser-known title, however, you could well be confused. Would you realize that The Prisoner of Zendo was different from The Prisoner or Zenda? (Though The Prisoner of Zenda is hardly obscure.)
The lack of widespread knowledge of Go makes it particularly vulnerably to confusion with Go! Also, Google has immensely marketing power sufficient to overwhelm recognition for Go. How many participants in this discussion would have known the difference before today? I certainly wouldn't. If you named a language C', however, (assuming there is no such language already; I picked the prime because it is visually almost unnoticeable), I would instantly recognize that it was not C.
The article is not very detailed, but my reading of it is that the default dose was not unsafe. If I am correct (hard to tell), what happened was that a doctor doing a specialized procedure programmed a custom dose. Then the machine defaulted to this new value for subsequent procedures, but the staff assumed it was using it's previous (safe) default.
What is particularly appalling is that it took 18 months to catch this, and they only found out because a patient complained of hair falling out. The FDA recommendation is that doctors double-check that the machine is actually applying the correct dose.
It seems clear to me that this is a stop-gap that indicates a design flaw. It is not enough for the machine to display the actual dose: the procedures for using it must ensure that this is not missed. From the Therac-25 link:
This describes perfectly the recent incident. User-friendly defaults resulted in health professionals making unsafe assumptions. Blaming them does nothing to prevent such problems in the future. The system is broken.
Incidentally, I am not convinced by the lessons learned about Therac-25. It emphasizes proper software engineering practices and licensing. This may be necessary but insufficient.
This might not be enough. Initial testing of the machine had been of hardware only, though the problem was with software. Following the initial reports of an overdose, the company replaced a hardware component. If the real problems fall outside current engineering practices, they may be completely overlooked. In the recent case, the problem appears to include the practices of medical staff. These are part of the technical system, so they need to be treated as such by engineers. Ignoring that is very much like focusing on the hardware to the exclusion of the software. Technical systems are not clearly bounded, and are probably less so as time goes on. There always needs to be a broader view.
Therac-25 suffered suffered (among other things) from race conditions. The mere idea of having a deadly device that is even theoretically susceptible to race conditions terrifies me: if a race condition programming error is even potentially possible, I would want to make damned sure there's an independent hardware or software check to make sure failures will be caught. Problems like this can be incredibly subtle. I wonder if overconfidence in engineering might lead to complacency.
What really jumped out at me, however, was the role of the user community, which was formally excluded from the engineering. Following the discovery of one deadly software error, the company (AECL) fixed it and assumed the problem was solved: after which another patient died from a different bug. The users asked for access to the source code. This was denied. Unlike the company (and likely its engineers), the users clearly understood that they were part of the system.
Not so. I'm sure many, many people did not. Not everyone is comfortable downloading and burning off the net. Many people will pay good money for bottled water, never mind colorful videogames.
I bought the system for one game only: Jet Set Radio. I saw a legit copy from Japan and couldn't get it out of my head. It was the only game I ever copied, because when I got my system it was not available in North America. As soon as Jet Grind Radio (the poorly-named American version) was released, I bought it. I never copied another game - though I bought a whole bunch.
The Dreamcast is the only console I have ever owned. And I have seen many consoles. I remember when Pac Man was released for Atari. But the Dreamcast was the only one that made me really, really want one.
Make the effort to send in a submission. We have written a guide to help make it easy to put one together without understanding the intricacies of the law or the extreme proposals that have been put forward. Download the guide PDF here. It only takes a few minutes to make the point that Canadians care deeply about this. Do your part, even if all you say is "no Canadian DMCA." But do it now: the consultation ends Sunday.
If the government chooses to listen, great. If not, the consultation submissions are essential for making the political case that Canadians want a fair law. This is equally true if the government changes after an election.
First, it is not correct to assume that patronage is the only alternative. There are many other models. But I want to focus on this claim:
Something like this actually happened in the 1950s. But it was resolved without the law. Musicians, fans and the industry decided against imitation.
Up until then the market for music had focused on songs, not particular recordings. There were many recordings of each song, and listeners did not mind a whole lot which one they bought. But with R&B music, the particular arrangement of a hit became more and more important. Instead of simply producing covers of popular songs, labels started to clone them, imitating everything they could, from using the same arrangement to hiring the same backup singers. Musicians protested, calling the clones "theft." Labels and radio stations said they would have nothing to do with them (though they didn't always follow through).
But what really changed the situation was the listeners. They wanted to hear the real thing - the original they had heard on the radio, not a knock off. The clones - and the covers simply faded away.
If you are sponsoring a musician (maybe you're Coke looking for music to use in advertising, or maybe you're a group of fans who have pooled their money for a sequel to Firefly), what would you rather do: pay for something that people will see as a cheap imitation, or put your money into something different?
Sure, people like things similar to what they already know. This is part of cultural change. My description of clones in the 1950s is drawn from Elijah Wald's How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'N' Roll, where he also writes:
A lot of the best innovation comes from taking something old and mixing in something new. Is the Mac GUI just a rip-off of Xerox? Is it bad that Linux is a reimplementation of UNIX? Was it bad that Shakespeare wrote his own versions of other people's stories?
Frankly though, I don't know that I'm really disagreeing with you. As you point out, the culture industries already put much of their effort into retreads and sequels.
That is my impression too. Apparently these two women already knew and disliked each other offline:
Now it may be that Port's blog really did harm Cohen's reputation. If so, then all this is justified. But I doubt it - I don't think many people would take anonymous online claims that someone is a "ho" seriously. On the other hand, while anonymity is an important political freedom, this is not what it is intended to protect.
This looks to me like a private spat that has blown way up out of proportion. It does not look to me like something that is worth the court's time. If these two women were yelling at each other in a public street, I don't think the court would care. It appears to me that we have laws designed for career-limiting libels being applied to a tempest in a teapot, wasting public money and resources that could be better used for something more significant. As a consequence, we have precedent for political speech being set by exactly the wrong sort of case.
Our legal systems seem to have real problems coping with the blurring of private and public online. "Private" used to mean something known to a few people, while "public" applied to activities that were widely observed. While anyone can read a blog, before the circus this particular blog was probably more private than public. Similar problems occur with copyright infringement, where formerly accepted activities create massive risk because they are seen as public - though in many cases they may not be any more widely observed than the mixtapes of my youth. (Admittedly it is very hard to tell which infringement online is limited to a few people, and which to a large group. But my point is that communication intended for and witnessed by a small audience is being regulated as if it was published on the front page of the New York Times. This can result in ridiculous judgments and significant waste of public resources.)
You need a whole lot more than that to show whether it's a useful comparison to make. Memetics is not an established field. I have never encountered a reference to memes in my study of Communication, even by students. I have only been aware of them as a pop-scientific phenomenon, the sort of thing that shows up in the pages of Wired.
Looking at (gulp) Wikipedia, I find a link to an article by Luis Benitez-Bribiesca, where he writes:
Lots of metaphors that look nice on the surface break down when applied in depth (infringement=theft anyone?). It is easy to find some similarities between ideas and genes. To be of any value, however, the comparison needs to be done in detail, and the differences between the two phenomena need to be taken into account. Maybe that can be done, and memetics can establish itself as a useful framework alongside semiotics, critical theory, and so on - and show that it has explanatory power in areas the others lack. At this point, it does not appear to me that this has happened.
Thank you. I am so happy to see you write this, and to see Slashdot moderators recognize it as an important point.
Obviously there is significant tension between capital and the market: capitalists always want to circumvent or break the market in order to stave off competitions' downward pressure on profits. But until reading Fernand Braudel's fascinating Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century (I haven't yet finished), I was unaware how far back this antagonism went. Illegal international monopolies on vital goods were a problem in the 17th century just as they are today. In fact, opposition to the market was baked right in to the birth of capitalism.
Capitalism arose where there was a need for capital and a potential for large profits. Originally, this was in long-distance trade, where large outlays of money (for ships and goods) and long turn-around times meant both significant risk and huge profits (hundreds of percent in many cases). Capitalists were traders. They simply weren't interested in other areas: for a long time they did not expand significantly beyond a few specialized activities making up a small part of the overall economy.
The market, on the other hand, actually existed in physical marketplaces. This was where producers of goods (e.g. peasants from the countryside) came to sell them. Then traders started to interfere. These traders would go out of the city and buy up the goods directly from producers. These they would bring them into the city, where they could charge a higher price because they had consolidated the supply and thus were less vulnerable to market competition. This practice was actually illegal: governments banned it in order to protect consumers. (In those days spending over half your income on food - and still starving - was not unusual, so one can imagine why even pre-democratic monarchies would want to make sure people could afford bread.)
So yeah, capitalism is one thing. The market is another. And there is great tension between them.
The pinnacle of capitalism then, as now, was finance. As soon as they could, these early capitalists got out of trade. It was too risky, and it was socially looked down upon. They insisted on a distinction between ordinary merchants, who actually did the work, and more prestigious deal-makers who only provided money. The moment they could, they placed themselves in the second group where they could make tremendous low-risk profits in finance, and pretend that neither they nor their ancestors had ever been merchants at all.
We don't know. They may not know yet either. Whatever the case, it is essential to take place in the consultation.
Consider the possibilities: a) the consultation is in good faith and they plan to listen, or b) they intend to ignore what people say and use this as cover for a warmed-over imitation of the DMCA.
In case a) participation is obviously worthwhile: the more we consult, the closer the legislation will be to what we want. And we give them political cover. When big media and the U.S. trade representative come demanding their DMCA, the government can throw their hands in the air and say, "the Canadian people made it clear to us we had no political alternative."
In case b), participation is also worthwhile - perhaps even more so. The more people push for a reasonable law the more political capital they will have to spend if they wish to go against our wishes. Tens of thousands of people protested when C-61 was introduced; next time around the number will be even greater. And when we rise up, we will be able to say, "look, we participated in good faith - but you ignored us."
Consider the alternative. If we do not participate in the process, the government can do whatever it likes and say it did so with our consent. Any protest movement against a bad bill will be neutered before it begins. "You claim to represent Canadians," the media will say, "but where were they when there was consultation?"
This does not mean we should lose our skepticism. We need to hold them to account. At this point, that means hitting them with feedback from as many Canadians as we can.
By the way, I represented Vancouver Fair Copyright at the Vancouver roundtable on Monday. I am not sure how significant it was, but many of the participants were in favor if sensible reforms like simplification of the law, flexible fair dealing, reduction or elimination of crown copyright, and no blanked ban on circumvention of DRM. The proponents of draconian law have the inside track with the government, but there is a point at which sufficient numbers of ordinary Canadians, if they take part and express themselves, can outweigh the special interests pushing for a bad law.
Copyright law draws a distinction between idea and expression. Expressions, according to the law, are copyrightable. Ideas are not. This is important because it preserves freedom of speech: you can express the same idea with a different expression. That's the theory.
Please, then, tell me, is Mickey Mouse an idea, or an expression? If it is an expression, what idea is it expressing?
A court actually ruled on this one. Its conclusion? The "idea" of Mickey Mouse is "mouse." Everything else is expression.
Great. We have the freedom to express "mouse" in different ways. But all of the cultural meanings and emotions and passions and history around Mickey Mouse? Those are part of Mickey Mouse too. Not of "mouse." They are ideas. And yet, they are protected.
Take a piece of music. What is the "idea" of a symphony? In the U.S., a single bar of music can be copyrighted. Music is all expression. No idea. What relevance does this strange division have for music?
Take Holden Caulfield. J.D. Salinger recently sued another author for writing an apparent sequel to Catcher in the Rye. Salinger won. Not because the other author used the same names, or the same plot, but because the story and the character were similar.
These immaterial things we hold in our heads? According to the law, most of them are not in fact ideas. They are expressions.
The law can define its terms however it likes. This is what we call an analytic distinction: it does not correspond to characteristics of the world. The distinction between idea and expression is invented, just like the arbitrary line drawn on a map and called a border. It's a legal fiction. Each individual case makes the difference between "idea" and "expression" more clear, and yet more complex: the border becomes every more jagged, ever more detached from ordinary human speech and experience. Case law can say what it likes, but it does not have the authority to redefine the English language. Its terms have nothing to do what ordinary people mean when they use these words.
Yes, you can copyright an idea. That's what copyright does.
Back when telephones were new, no-one quite knew what they were for. One company came up with a music service. This was before radio, so the idea of piping music to your home was radical. This may seem absurd to us now, but it isn't: radio went the other way. It is entirely possible that we could have built a world where we listened to high-fidelity music by phone, and spoke to our friends by radio. Even in the early 20th century the phone companies didn't get it: they ran campaigns trying dissuade housewives from chatting over the phone, believing that the technology was for Important business use (a few brief, high-cost calls instead of lots of cheap long ones).
I remember when people though computers were giant calculators. Then the computer became personal: it could do your books, teach the kids arithmetic, and keep track of your recipes. (Though why anyone you would want to keep their recipes in a computer was never clear). The hardware companies tried to sell to everyone, but they weren't quite sure how to do it: the truth is, most people had no real need for a computer.
Computer technology isn't personal anymore. It's social. The PC is a phone, not a calculator. That's why everyone needs one. That's what driving development of the technology. Ours is not the only possible path: computers could have remained high-cost devices for use by individuals to produce things or do business. But that was the path not taken. This changes what computers are.
To you, desktop applications may seem superior on the basis of their technical merits. Fair enough. Hollywood seems to see computers and the net as a new broadcast medium, like television, for which the current infrastructure has significant technical failings (privacy, QoS). In their case I hope their vision is never realized. But for many people, these visions are irrelevant. No matter the quality or polish of the applications, no matter the convenience of video-on-demand, for them the technology is technically inferior if it does not fully support communication and social activity. For them - and for me - the cobbled together infrastructure of the Web is far superior - technically superior - because for us it is above all a medium for communication.
First, if you prefer what the commercial networks produce that's fine by me. They have made lots of good TV shows. It's probably largely a matter of what you grew up with. I grew up with BBC shows rebroadcast in Canada, so prefer Doctor Who to Star Trek.
This is not actually what the main private networks (ABC, CBC, NBC in the U.S.) do. They target specific demographics desired by advertisers. The results are quite different from what would happen if they attempted to capture a) the most viewers, or b) the viewers most willing to pay for their shows. This is obvious when you compare to programming by cable channels (e.g. HBO), which are more directly responsive to their audiences. For a long time (many decades) the networks made the (patently absurd) assumption that men made all the significant spending decisions in the family, and targeted their prime time shows accordingly. Or take The Beverly Hillbillies, one of the most successful shows of its time: cancelled not because its audience went away, but because the advertisers figured its audience was too poor. They wanted to chase hip urban viewers instead. It is largely a myth that they are rational actors directed by the market. In practice, networks are basically huge command economies inside. They're not famous for making smart decisions.
The other systems I mentioned vary widely in governance and funding models. CBC TV is abysmal due to a lack of stable funding or independence from the government. Recently, CBC radio has been following in its footsteps. I believe the BBC is quite a bit more independent than CBC, largely because it has a dependable source of long-term funding (the TV license). I don't believe NPR is government run at all. It gets very little money from government. Most of its funding comes from viewers (pledge drives), member stations, and corporate donations.
What we have seen with the non-commercial networks is that they have coalesced around a different audience not well served by the private networks. So on the one hand we have a different approach to funding and governance, on the other we have contrasting tastes and cultures (the stereotype is "popular" vs "middle/high brow"). It's not clear that the one caused the other. In a world without the private networks (which, as I pointed out, would not happen because the consumer electronics industry would profit from creating them if they did not exist - probably even if there were no such thing as copyright), the character of the programming on these systems would likely be quite different.
I am aware of the limits on Fox's rights to Star Wars, but that makes no difference to its relevance. The licensing arrangements in place today are irrelevant when conjecturing whether it could or would have been made if it were unable to depend on ticket sales. My point is that it would have been profitable even if ticket sales were zero.
This is already the situation for TV, radio, magazines, and newspapers. In all of these media, the real customer is the advertiser who pays for access to the audience who watches/listens/reads for "free."
Now I won't say that's a good thing. I think it's terrible. In my opinion, quality is clearly higher when it is made directly for the audience (as is the case for the BBC, PBS, NPR, or CBC radio, for example). To the extent that a changing media landscape is undercutting the advertising-supported model I am hopeful that direct payment for (and influence over) cultural works will become more widespread.
In the early days of radio, the manufacturers had a problem. Radio sales were extremely popular, but the people buying needed something to listen to. So the manufacturers created radio stations in order to drive demand for their products. It worked (though government licensing in favor of the networks also wiped out a wide range of independent and community services).
Today, the media industries argue that their production has a multiplier effect on the economy: each dollar invested in media produces many more dollars in related activity (transportation of books, sales of Star Wars toys, Macdonalds promotions, and so on). Some of this activity is really a cost of doing business, whose elimination would result in greater efficiency (e.g. it's more efficient to download a book than to ship it across the country), but much of it is new value. They present this as an argument for strong copyright[1]. In fact, it may be just the opposite: if the return on the dependent activity is greater than the cost of producing the original work, then there is an incentive to create the work even if it made no money directly. This is why Apple created iTunes, for example: not to make money from selling music, but to drive the (much more profitable) sale of iPods.
Or take Star Wars: the films earned $4.3 billion, but merchandise earned $13.5 billion. Widespread copying of the film would not touch the business case for making it, and at the beginning, when the venture was risky, wider distribution would only increase the likelihood of success (while possibly limiting the maximum possible scale of that success - to $13.5b in this case, rather than $17.8b).
We already live in a world where many movies are driven more by the model you describe than by ticket revenue per se. Producers care tremendously about ticket sales as a metric of popularity and because that's what keeps the films in the cinemas, not necessarily because that is their key revenue stream. As it happens, DVD sales recently became more profitable. So we have seen business model change on this scale extremely recently. It ain't the end of the world. (Though it might mean a lot more Star Wars-like films, which admittedly wouldn't make me thrilled: I'm not a fan.)
[1] In the recent copyright debate at The Economist, Dale Cendali, their May 8 guest made just this claim. She cited a study that found that the "IP industries" contributed "nearly 40% of the growth achieved by all U.S. private industry." Unfortunately for her argument, she failed to point out that under the category of "IP industry" the study included the whole automotive industry, big chunks of the transportation and retail sectors, a significant part of the petroleum industry, and so on. (You can see my detailed rebuttal if on page 5 of the May 8 comments.) Turned around, this appears to be evidence that IP is an input cost for many businesses, and there is a large incentive to create works regardless of copyright. (The actual economic claim is not that such works would not be produced, but that they would be underproduced. It's not clear to me that economic theory has a good answer for what the "best" (for whom?) level of production of Big Brother shows or Shakespeare plays is, or at what cost.)
Funny you should pick that example. When film was being developed in the 19th and 20th centuries, there was a problem: it was difficult to make photographs that showed both light- and dark-colored faces effectively.
The white face was taken as the essential image that film had to capture effectively, and a lot of technical effort went into developing film stock that showed the white face well. "Exact reproduction" produced a "beefy" look, so the film was modified accordingly[2].
In other words, if black people had developed film, film would look different and have have different chemical characteristics from what we have today. You cannot just point to the technology and say it is "neutral", to be used for good or bad purposes. During its development, the creators of every technology encounter choices that cannot be made solely on technical grounds. Those decisions always end up embedding human values - as does the technology that results.
Here's another story I read somewhere. Early computers could only represent uppercase or lowercase letters. The first choice of the technicians was to go with lowercase, because that is much easier to read. But this was overruled: because then God would not start with an uppercase letter. Now whether this particular story is true or false (it sounds too neat to me), it is certainly representative of how many technical choices are made.
As for the burakumin, I once spoke to a Japanese woman about them. She had married an American and was living in the U.S., but she said that she would certainly never have considered a relationship with one. Not because she herself was prejudiced, but because doing so would place her outside mainstream Japanese society. We have heard this before. If you haven't, I recommend watching the film Gentleman's Agreement. I won't claim I know the best solution for Google in this particular case, but a knee-jerk response of "technology has no values" brings us no closer to any kind of truth, and represents a failure to understand our relationship to technology.
[1, 2] The quotes above are by Frederick Mills and Dvaid L. MacAdam respectively, quoted in the article "Making 'white' people white" by Richard Dyer, 1997.
Dude, I hardly ever use tables for layout. I'm not religious about it: now and then it's the practical choice. But such cases are few and far between. My blog, my development pages, my research - table free. Why? As you said, they add complexity: with all those tags they're a pain to implement and maintain.
If you learn enough CSS, most tables just melt away. Sometimes CSS is the pits and I wonder at the twisted minds that came up with the W3C box model. But usually, it's awesome. Often when using OpenOffice I wish I could drop down into CSS. Not infrequently, the formatting I want is a snap in CSS - but impossible in OO.
As for HTML, you know what I use most? Paragraph tags. And lists. Lots and lots of lists.
I think you may have Schumpeter backwards.
Did Schumpeter actually make such a claim about copyright? If so, I want to know - please point me to it.
Schumpeter argued for capitalism's need for innovation. At first, capitalists would invest in some new technology and reap high returns on their investment. Over time use of the technology would spread, and competition would force down margins. In order to start the cycle anew and again achieve a high returns, capitalists had to seek out new innovations. Thus it is capital's search for profits that drives and is enabled by innovation. This is creative destruction: constant innovation - discarding the old in favor of the new - in search of profits.
In this model, there is no need to fence off ideas to encourage innovation. Monopoly protection would do quite the opposite: by shielding profits from market competition, it frees capital from the need to pursue new ideas and technologies.
Yet we end up with me-too music, me-too movies, and so on. For example, take the many TV shows that compose their own Mission Impossible-style music because they can't copy the original. The result is wasted effort for an imitation that is less effective.
What copyright prevents us from re-using is not only ideas, but also the form and social significance of cultural works. Creativity is often a matter of taking existing material (stories, songs, film footage) and using it to express new ideas. Because of copyright, a lot of effort that could be directed towards developing new ideas is instead spent on creating (often) derivative material - because only then can new ideas be expressed. Furthermore, the spread of the new ideas is limited because the audience must learn this new vocabulary. If you want to use Darth Vader to make a political statement, you can't - instead you must not only create your own Darth Vader equivalent, your audience must also invest time and effort to get the Darth Vader meaning - all before you can even make the political argument.
Think, if Shakespeare had had to come up with the plots for his plays, would he have been as innovative with language? If Disney had had to come up with their own fairy tales, would they have been able to draw on centuries of significance? Copying some things lets artists focus on their strengths. It frees them from the requirement to be jacks-of-all-trades. In an environment of strong copyright, rightsholder conglomerates (like Disney, like Sony) solve this problem by bringing together a range of content and artists together under one roof. The cost is that artistic vision must give way to commercial ownership and control ownership - control that typically prefers the tried-and-true to the innovative and new.
The justification for copyright is that it pays back the up-front cost of producing the work itself. The argument is exactly what you say - that we need more of it, or rather that it would otherwise be underproduced. But of course the important thing for society is not the content itself. It is not the words on paper, the images on film that matter: it is what we do with it. We encourage writing because we want political discussion, we want intellectual engagement, we want social activity (dancing to music, watching a movie with friends), and so on. From that perspective, copyright (at least as it stands) diverts resources away from what we really want, and towards content that in many cases adds little.
(To be fair, there is another claim for copyright, which is that it creates the infrastructure necessary to nurture talent in order to produce really high quality works. This assumes that talent is scarce and/or would not otherwise be developed, and that the infrastructure - the entertainment industries - actually do direct that talent towards and produce high quality. I don't find this convincing, but even if it were true it still has to content with the fact that copyright clamps down on the socialization, political engagement, and so on that are the real reason culture matters.)
Here is political scientist Steven Weber, writing about the tendency toward different governance styles for projects using BSD-like and GPL licenses (when he writes "Linux" he means it as an exemplar, not the only instance):
Weber, Steven, The Success of Open Source, 2004, pp. 62-63.
Assuming his claim is true, this may be because developers see the two licenses differently (e.g. contributors may feel greater incentives to contribute to GPL projects, or they may have principled reasons, or it may have to do with their identity and membership in a community). Or it may be because of the kinds of projects that pick the licenses: the typical BSD structure he describes mirrors that of big companies, perhaps because they tend to choose such licenses. Personally, I suspect all of these factors contribute. But then I find them to be compelling reasons to pick the GPL.