screenplay writers are the major breadwinners yet get paid virtually nothing for their efforts . . . the studios ARE rip-off merchants, and ARE making a great deal of money off Star Trek.
Agreed. I don't understand why Hollywood lets so many movies tank because while they are willing to pay millions for big name actors but can't be bothered to buy a decent script. Obviously cost isn't the issue, as lots of less expensive films and TV shows (the old Doctor Who comes to mind) do get decent scripts.
Copyright is one of the things that makes it possible for them to do this. Instead of paying actors, scriptwriters, and so on for new material, the studios can coast on their back catalog (as with Gilligan's Island, which someone mentioned upthread). The system may be great for a few superstars, but for the ordinary Joe who pays the bills with steady work, long strong copyright is a bad thing.
Not that Harlan would let that stand in the way of a good rant about ordinary folk people "stealing" his stuff. Still, whatever the legal facts of this case, I'm more inclined to side with him than the MAFIAA.
In the real world a thoughtful qualitative analysis can be at least as useful as a quantitative one
Thank you. The author of the grandparent post might want to learn a bit about qualitative research before jumping to conclusions ("My default hypothesis about any educational reform movement is that it will have absolutely no effect on anything") in the absence of quantitative evidence that might be impossible to gather and might not be relevant anyway. Social science ain't physics. Those who think it is or should be can do terrible damage, as we have seen with the inappropriate use of economic equations for risk that contributed to the current crisis.
Just a point: "always", in this case, has not been for very long. Those who grew up recently watched more TV than previous generations, including that those who grew up more than half a century ago and didn't watch much or any TV at all.
I have read similar comments by young people before. I believe it was in the Amazon reviews of Generation Me, which I discovered via an article on danah boyd's blog. boyd says she has found the same thing in her research (she studies young people's use of social software).
Doctor Who did not "go off screen repeatedly". It simply changed to a new lead actor. When the original actor was forced to retire for health reasons, this was integrated into the show. There was never any "wouldn't it be fun if we resurrected" because there was never any question about the Doctor dying, only changing. This did not correspond to wholesale changes of the rest of the show. On only two occasions did the companions also change with the arrival of the new Doctor: once between seasons 6 and 7 (when the show was also moved to color), and once between seasons 23 and 24 (following the hiatus). In both cases, recurring characters showed up immediately to provide continuity. In both cases, the script for the first episode following the change was written by a previous writer for Doctor Who.
Stargate went 10 seasons strait, whereas Dr. Who has had how many restarts to the series
The original Doctor Who ran straight for 22 seasons from 1963. That was followed by a one-year hiatus before seasons 23-26, then cancellation. Not counting the 1996 TV movie, there was a 16 year gap before the show started up again.
One, as others have mentioned, is a lack of proof or due process.
Two, the punishment is out of proportion to the offense. Going 5mph over the limit could get someone killed. How come we don't have three strikes for speeding? Sharing music is not life-threatening. Internet access is not just nice to have, like TV or radio. For many people it is essential to their employment, to their ability to communicate (though this is a generational thing, so lawmakers are relatively unaware of it), and to their participation in a democratic society.
Three, copyright law has gone way off the rails to the point where it is significantly impairing free speech, innovation, and creativity. Century-long copyright terms, takedown notices to block speech one disagrees with, DRM that seizes control of communications technology, and a tremendous concentration of cultural ownership in the hands of a few companies are bad enough. Strengthening the enforcement of illegitimate and unjust laws only increases the injustice.
Want your culture to get support and be known? Open it up and show the world.
I couldn't agree more. If we care about our culture - or indeed any culture - then we need to create the conditions for it to thrive, not fence it in and manage it to death, continuing on a path that has already failed.
If I recall correctly, Canada is one of the world's top exporters of TV shows (who knew). We're strong in music, video games, and film production, with traditions in animation and documentary filmmaking also. Enacting made-in-Hollywood copyright laws will only continue to leave the greater part of our artists at the mercy of distribution channels that have locked us out for so long.
So far, it seems many of the most powerful arts organizations (within and without government) just don't get it (though the documentarists and many musicians are more enlightened). Though at this point the government doesn't talk to them so much (if at all), preferring to trade horses with the U.S., which in turn represents their entertainment industry.
what i believe is that there is an anglo north american culture, which canada and the usa straddle
I agree. Though I am quite disturbed when people diss the Quebecois (or, for that matter, the French). I sometimes suspect that after Britain conquered New France, it was the anglophones who assimilated to the French culture. I can't quite put my finger on it. When I travelled in Europe and ran into Quebecois, I found there was a certain common cultural understanding or attitude that made them fundamentally more like me than the Americans I encountered (who were mostly very nice folks from a variety of places).
There are many things I admire about Quebec (and some I don't). Their political influence has led to some quite bad decisions, but they have also saved us from time to time. A minor example is unpasteurized soft cheeses, whose import the government had planned to ban for unsubstantiated health reasons. Another example is their liberal attitudes towards sex. I recall a survey finding that most Quebecois would rather their teenaged kids had sex at home, instead of taking a hardline approach that would result in it happening elsewhere. I am also tremendously impressed that almost all their top TV shows are made in Quebec. I doubt many countries with five times their population can say that.
There has been a huge cultural shift. My father once told me that he was taught in school (where he pledged allegiance to the flag and the Empire for which it stood - meaning the Union Jack) that Americans were emotionally flighty and unstable. This explained their intemperate rebellion, while responsible dependable Canadians remained loyal - and in the case of some of my ancestors lost their land in New England. Not that my father believes that now or is anti-American by any stretch of the imagination. But how can I judge or reject the culture to which I have assimilated? The fact is, there was something (good or bad) that Canada was trying to protect.
There are reasons for maintaining an independent culture. Among them: It is an important bond in a country whose population is a thin line smeared along the U.S. border. The stories culture tells us hold us together - but stories from the U.S. (at least in film and TV) are always about somewhere else, as though where we are doesn't exist or is irrelevant. And we do have different political values (health care, a role for government (as in banking), etc.), which are reflected in and affected by the culture we experience. Because of TV, Canadians often confuse American laws and institutions with Canadian ones. For example, they think we have Fair Use of copyrighted works, that we elect a Prime Minister (we elect only a riding (district) representative), that we can sue for all sorts of things we can't, and so on.
places like canada, or new zealand, there is a strong legal entrenchment of cultural protectionism, because there is already a perception that everyone watches american television and movies, or listens to british music, such that if "native" culture were to lose its protection, it would wither and die . . . it seems to me to be some sort of lack of confidence on the part of canucks and kiwis. or rather, enough canuck and kiwi politicians can be persuaded of this scare tactic by captains of dying media industries
This is not the driving force for extremist copyright in Canada. The Conservatives, our current governing party, is not friendly to the arts, but they are happy to go along with American demands. Many Canadian industry and arts organizations (and many, many Canadians) are opposed to the changes, but it is largely American officials and organizations representing American interests who pay the lobbyists and get the face time with our politicians.
Now in Quebec it is true that culture is of central political importance. The large arts organizations there are in favor of extreme copyright laws. Quebec's approach to copyright is much closer to the moral imperative of authorial control in France, les droits d'auteur, than to the pragmatism of Anglo-American copyright. And I believe there is a tradition in Quebec (as in France) of seeing large organizations as important forces for the preservation of society. Those traditions are likely to support copyright extremism regardless of what tools are at their disposal - though preservation of French culture is always one of those.
I shouldn't open up a can of worms, but don't mock what you call "cultural protectionism". The United States followed a similar course in its early days (hence American spelling and the lack of respect for foreign copyrights). Though it has largely failed in Canada, and though it is used to justify ridiculous proposals (e.g. Canadian content quotas for web sites), the concern that originally drove it are legitimate. Canadian culture *has*, to a large extent, failed to thrive in the face of American imports. Americans own our movie distribution network, sell TV series cheaper than we can produce them but won't themselves buy material set in Canada, and so on. Americans tend to see this in terms of free markets for a cultural product. Many countries and peoples see culture as a matter of national identity. Canadians have long supported a greater role for government in the production of culture and information. The lack of confidence you describe does exist among some in Canada, but before you jump on "small countries" as being special in this regard, take a look at the culture wars in the United states (over prayer in schools, flag burning, prudishness about depictions of sex but not violence, and so on).
Also, the "small country" stereotype doesn't work. Before you slot France in with Canada, keep in mind that it has a larger population than the U.K. (I believe surveys have found Brits suffer from lower national confindence). The U.S. has five times the population of the U.K. Canada has a tenth the population of the U.S., and about ten times the population of N.Z. English speaking countries have fewer barriers to influence by American culture, and Canada is right next door.
The copyright war is not driven by small countries or cultural inferiority complexes. It is conducted mainly by the United States (with collaboration with allies, including Canada) at the behest of a handful of huge transnational companies like Disney, General Electric, Viacom, Fox, Time-Warner, Sony, Microsoft, a few others. Almost no countries are sufficiently powerful or independent to put up effective resistance.
When the immigrants leave with all our IP all we are left with is paper pushers.
The value of so-called IP is nothing beside the value of the skills, human relationships etc. for creating and developing ideas. Those who think innovation means resting on the creativity of 10, 20, life plus 70 years ago are doomed from the start. Creativity and innovation are activities, not artifacts. A focus on the frozen ideas of "IP" diverts attention from the real issues. The problem is not that the smart immigrants are taking American ideas away: it is that they are taking themselves.
I just thought I should point that out. Plagiarism is claiming someone else's work as your own. Sharing does not imply plagiarism. The vast majority of copyright infringement is *not* plagiarism.
One of the foundations of international copyright (and an aspect of it not strongly respected by the United States) is moral rights, including the right of the author to be given credit. I find it ironic that vigorous enforcement of copyright actually creates an incentive for sharers and borrowers to obscure the source or credit of material. This makes their activity harder to detect, and easier for them to defend ("I got this from AP" is kind of a dead giveaway).
If copyright law was closer to actual social practice, this kind of plagiarism would likely be much less common.
Personally, I find clear cases of plagiarism to be utterly dishonest and far worse than sharing.
I was not referring to terror attacks, raping and pillaging, horsemen riding and wiping out whole cities, ethnic cleansing, etc. My emphasis was on deliberate attacks on civilians in order to impair the enemy economy. In WWII that was widespread. I'm no historian, but it seems to me this requires long-term planning and hierarchical control of the military. That excludes most of history right off the bat. Though you're right, there are probably some exceptions somewhere. But the economic focus - the mindset that puts economics front and centre - is a modern phenomenon. When I play AoE and I kill the peasants to shut down resource collection I am thinking like a modern, not a medieval.
you ARE suggesting their preferences are inferior; by telling us you hate it and that you wouldn't let your children touch it; you're implying that their preferences are dangerous for children, unlike yours which are pure
See, this is a problem that happens a lot online. I am not implying it. You can interpret it that way if you like, but that is you reading something between the lines that I didn't put there, and that doesn't reflect my way of thinking. Maybe if you wrote what I wrote then that would be your intention. People are more different than my imagination could ever hope to encompass. I'm not in the habit of making judgments about them and assuming that they reason the way I do. But then I said that in two posts already, and you refuse to believe me.
From what you say, you seem to think there are universal right and wrong answers. I don't think there are. I think there are better and worse answers in different contexts. I don't believe that what is right for me is right for everyone else. I don't play Quake II, I don't watch slasher flicks. Don't like them. Like. Not "hate" as you say. Other people do like them. Some of them are friends. Do I tell them not to? No. I say, "Don't show it to me."
As for my child, yeah, I wouldn't let him play such a game. That's called being a dad: it's my responsibility to make judgments and choices for my child. About my child. Not other people's children. If I was in charge of your kids, I wouldn't let them play such games either. But I'm not, I don't want to be, and I have no interest in judging whether you're a good parent or not. Even if I could make some better decisions for your kids, that could never make up for the fact that I am not their parent. I know what it is like to be a parent: I know there are no simple answers.
Besides, what's right for children is different from what's right for adults. "Implying their preferences are dangerous for children"? Hell, driving a car is dangerous for children. Doesn't make it an impure preference or activity. The logic you present leads to a single standard for all ages. That is the shortest path to censorship.
I'm irritated because censoring all conflict and violence from your kids is deceptive and shallow. As if hiding suffering in the world will make it go away.
Good God, my son is all of three years old. Get a grip.
And you think I need to teach him about the human condition through video games? We all have a lifetime to understand that beauty and tragedy. What matters is how we face it. That is what I would hope to teach him. Not how to blow monsters into bloody chunks or squash peasants so I can grow my empire.
For those dismissing what amounts to a declaration of taste - Geof doesn't like violence in games - on the basis that such violence is "realistic" or historically accurate, please keep your position in mind next time you debate video games.
If you personally prefer historical accuracy, fine. De gustibus non est disputandum.
Otherwise, you appear to be arguing that historical accuracy is better because it is educational. Really? Instructional value should be a central concern in game design? Do tell.
You are also making it rather difficult to defend many features of games because players should distinguish fantasy from reality. Instead, you are saying the games should be less fantastic and more realistic.
Seriously. Some of you seem awfully touchy. Do you feel guilty about something? Do you think I'm suggesting your preferences are somehow inferior? Figure out what you're arguing with, then figure out whether that's really what I said.
You aren't the only one to talk about realism in your response (though the others weren't so polite). It is certainly true that history is bloody and unjust, far more than we usually recognize. Hell, the present is bloody and unjust too, with historically high levels of slavery, for example.
Personally I think realism in games is generally a red herring. Games are no less fantasies than are most Hollywood films. At best, they have only a passing acquaintance with reality. We play games to escape from reality, not to replicate it. It is too easy to pursue "realism" as a design objective, perhaps because it's easier to imitate reality than to come up with original fun.
To take Age of Empires as an example, in a realistic game we might expect to enslave conquered populations (or at least their women and children), commit religious genocide and cope with serious problems of deforestation and soil degradation. I doubt many of us would want to play a game in which our civilization suddenly and unexpectedly got wiped off the map a disease that kills a third of the population (the Black Death) or 90-99% (the Americas following first contact with European smallbox).
Not that I mean to hold up AoE as a terribly violent game. It really isn't. What bothered me is that a small feature, so easily changed, was actually incredibly brutal. Attacking an enemy's productive capacity while building up my own is the sort of approach I am inclined to take, as opposed to frontal attack. Historically, though, I suspect that conscious economic warfare is a recent phenomenon, reflecting more of a WWII mindset than an ancient one. The wars in the former Yugoslavia or Rwanda would be more representative: genocidal attacks on other groups not in order to stop them from producing, but to take over their territory and resources. During the Middle Ages in Europe, the people simply went with the land so there was no need to kill them (though that happened anyway) - it wasn't until part way through the Hundred Years War that nationalism started to take root as a consequence of military brutality.
I stopped playing first-person shooters at Quake II. I had enjoyed previous FPS games quite a lot, and I gave Quake II a good try, but the bloody chunks with the flies buzzing around them were the limit for me. Similarly, I didn't like that in Age of Empires II committing war crimes - killing enemy peasants to take out productive capacity - was the best way to win. Nor that an apparent flaw with uprisings in CivIII meant that the best way to take over cities was a bit of ethnic cleansing by way of starvation. I still played those games, but it bugged me. I never traded slaves in Elite.
This is why I liked Tony Hawk and Jet Set Radio so much. They are about being cool instead killing things.
I won't make grand claims about the effects on anyone else, but I know I don't want my 3-year old son playing violent games. I am kind of pissed off that many games I might otherwise enjoy are effectively wrecked by violence. Who knows who else is put off by violence? The people like me who are put off don't play, so they don't figure into many statistics.
They can also often take greater risks than individuals would. There are social and material sacrifices humans may be unwilling to make in order to achieve political goals. For example, most individuals are unlikely to risk their jobs, their ability to feed their families, their status in their communities, their lives, or their freedom in order to achieve anything but the most essential political objectives.
But a corporation is fully capable of risking all of this - because, in truth, it does not really exist as an independent unit. A corporation is amoral*, and it is not rational or self-interested in the sense that you or I might be. As often as not, a corporation does not pursue what we might think of as its own interests, but rather the interests of a few individuals within it. If you are an officer of a large bank and you make decisions that destroy it, you may yet benefit personally.
In this sense, corporations (and other organizations) can act irrationally in ways that might be considered insane if done by individuals. Moreover, whereas crazy individuals are unlikely to be capable of collaboration with each other, a corporation acts as a coherent unit even when its actions are irrational. The avoidance of collective action problems is in fact a corporation's greatest strength - but if it goes awry, it makes it tremendously dangerous.
A corporation might risk its success or its existence over copyright, or net neutrality, or any number of issues - issues that we would not take similar risks over. Even such a risk risk were not necessary - or even if its actions were not in its interest. And, doing so, it is much more powerful because it and all its people act as one, whereas to be effective individuals would need to find many like-minded people willing to work together and risk together.
* Note I do not say immoral. A corporation can do things that we find to be ethical, but that does not make it a moral actor (and of course it must be composed of human beings who are by definition moral actors). This is not a blanket denunciation of corporations - our society depends upon and is made better by corporations and may other kinds of organizations, all or most of which may suffer similar problems to greater or lesser degrees.
For those taking that post seriously: it's satire. Look:
every time *they* have predicted the end of the world, *they* have been wrong. EVERY SINGLE TIME! I mean, if once -- only one time -- *they* got it right, I'd be willing to listen. . . . in my long life . . . I have *never* EVEN ONCE died a horrible death from a world wide disaster of our own making.
Because, you know, if "they" had ever been right then... uh... I guess he would have died a horrible death, and then he wouldn't be here to talk about it. It's *impossible* for him to have any contrary evidence. Not because he's right: but because anyone with a different experience would be dead. His evidence is meaningless. And from how he writes, I think he knows it. Nicely played.
But for the suckers out there, please take a moment to think. Someone up-thread referred to the problem of induction on Wikipedia. Look it up. Or read Taleb's The Black Swan. Then realize that many of the arguments that we don't need to act now to prevent global warming are essentially the same as the arguments that the housing bubble was not a bubble and there could be no financial crisis.
And by the way, there have been many - many! - societies wiped out by events they didn't see coming. From ecological and environmental disasters of their own making (for which Easter Island is the poster child) to other unexpected causes (whole native American communities and cultures killed by Smallpox, cities razed by rampaging Huns, etc.). Our civilization has had some close calls historically and recently, ranging from the Black Plague and Nazi Europe to the Cuban missile crisis (the U.S. almost invaded; the Soviets in Cuba had authorization to use tacnukes which would have escalated) and that Norwegian satellite launch Russia mistook for a nuclear attack and almost retaliated against in the 1990s.
There is no special law that says that we are different. No special reason that we, too cannot fall. Our (struggling) free markets and our technology are not magic charms guaranteed to save us. Will climate change bring us down? I don't know. And you don't know either, regardless of how many times you haven't already died.
Bandwidth is a commodity. As such is interchangeable: the provider of a commodity is in competition with everyone else providing the same commodity. They have to differentiate themselves based on price, which they can only do by cutting costs and increasing efficiency. Though market competition is in our best interests as consumers, it isn't in theirs. The last thing a company wants is for market competition to work efficiently to drive down their margins. That's why they will do everything they can to avoid selling a commodity: product differentiation, branding, and so on - strategies that effectively create mini monopolies (you don't buy an MP3 player, you buy an iPod; you don't buy shoes, you buy Nike).
That's the main reason. Another, which applies especially to monopolies (hello telecoms!), is price discrimination. A company would like to charge each customer as much as that customer can afford to pay, but they don't want to lose business with a price that's too high. By developing different classes of service they can coax more money from those able to pay more. The classic example is first-class seating on flights. How much a customer is able to pay may also depend on how much the service is worth to them. It may not cost the telecom company any more to provide bandwidth for, say, VoIP users than for WoW players, but VoIP customers may be able to pay more because it saves them money elsewhere.
It is the role of good market regulation to ensure competition works effectively to drive prices down towards costs. That is broadly good for consumers and for the economy as a whole. Companies - especially incumbent companies - should be expected to do everything in their power to fight to break the market. And they do.
Your comments are very judgmental about what people should do in a given situation. You seem inclined to believe they would make rational choices accordingly. But people aren't very rational. They seldom "do the right thing", assuming they even think about it consciously and assuming it matches what you think the right thing should be.
Your comparison with Star Trek is telling. When Battlestar Galactica presents moral quandries it leaves much of the interpretation up to the viewer. Star Trek, on the other hand, resolves them: it is unsubtle in claiming what's the right thing to do. I won't make big claims for Galactica, but in my mind Star Trek's treatment is much more superficial. (And very culturally specific: I find many of Star Trek judgments and values quite foreign to me. I'm Canadian; our culture is about as close to the American one as is possible.)
very few secrets are maintained
On a slight tangent: Um, how can you know this? We only know about secrets that aren't kept, not the ones that are. Unless we're keeping them: a sample of one is not a reliable indicator of anything.
Without free OTA television it will fragment the culture more and provide less common experiences to share between people. We will further retreat to our own (smaller) cultural worlds and have less in common with our neighbors and coworkers. The Internet fosters this kind of isolationism.
I agree with your concerns. Culture matters tremendously precisely for its ability to bring people together, which is a precondition for everything from politics to basic human happiness.
However, the evidence suggests that you have your causes backwards. Research shows a strong causal connection between the advent of TV and a sharp decline in community life. Robert Putnam talks about this in his book Bowling Alone. The DVD version of The Naked City features an interview with James Sanders, who describes the impact of TV on city life in New York. Here's an excerpt:
. ..the story is, is for all of its crowding and all of its density and all of its foreignness and strangeness, it was basically just like a big village and basically was a place where the kids played and people when to market and people other people elderly people sort of watched the world passing. . . . the year it was made - 1947, crucial year. Why? Because it was one of the very very very last years before television. By '49 and 1950 . . . you had hundreds of thousands of people watching TV every night in New York City and the whole rhythm of life in big city . . . changed. People left the street. And what you see in The Naked City, in virtually its last year of existence, is a kind of a way of life, in a big city way of life, that began in, say, the 1830s really . . . you can certainly see it in the scenes down on the Lower East Side - the children are playing, the mothers are leaning out the window, the kids are playing downstairs on the sidewalks and streets and the little playgrounds. And there's just a kind of old world life on the streets that you would associate with an Italian town or something like that. But that's the way people lived in New York too, until that year or the year after and then it would all change.
As for the effect Internet, a number of studies have found that people who socialize more online also socialize more offline. Cyberspace is very rarely the '80s vision of this other world where we take on other identities and socialize with strangers (the old dog on the Internet). For the most part it's a medium we use to reinforce the relationships we have with people we know in the real world. Now that may be a step down from the street life Sanders describes - the pre-broadcast world in which we made our entertainment (playing sports, singing songs, and so on instead of waiting for someone else to provide them to us), but it's light years ahead of the private CBS & me experience of watching TV alone in the dark.
"Eureka moments" don't exist, at least not the way popular media/literature portrays it. Any decent eureka! is preceded by years and years of training and diligence or followed by the same.
It makes it sound like this guy . . . comes up with this amazing algorithm all by his lonesome. . . . this work was shared by many researchers from several institutions with a fair amount of start up capital to get going . . . Patent owners include 4 other individuals as well as NASA, Harvard, and UC San Diego in addition to MIT.
You've nailed it. This is the problem with IP. One the one hand, creativity and innovation are always the result of collaboration between large numbers of people (much of it informal, unconscious, or indirect). On the other, IP allocates exclusive rights to an individual or organization. Invariably, many or most of the contributors are excluded while the IP owner free-rides on their work. Furthermore, because ownership ends up being held by many hands, future work is often forstalled. It runs into the tragedy of the anticommons: all owners must give their permission, and each owner is inclined to overvalue their contribution - not surprising, given that the system has already overvalued it by giving ownership to more than they produced.
Why? As lawyer James Boyle so eloquently details in his book Shamans, Software & Spleens, the legal system continues to make counterproductive rulings precisely because of the romantic myth of the lone inventor or author who has that Eureka! moment and creates something new out of thin air. The illusion you dismiss is a core foundation of the system as it stands (for copyright too, if you look back at the development of the concept of authorship, which is quite recent historically).
Let me make it clear what I have said and what I have not said (not necessarily for you, but people will make assumptions): I am not making a claim about the ideal outcome in this case. Neither am I proposing to abolish patents or IP - something I could not do without weighing their costs against their benefits. My beef is with your arguments.
Road construction is not the only subsidy. Parking, for example, is never free. Regulations typically require developers to build a certain number of parking spaces. That's another significant cost. Parking spaces in turn increases distances, which then increases the costs of delivering other utilities and services (water, sewage, electricity, and so on). This may sound insignificant until you realize how much of the typical American city is paved - 25-30% I believe. Nor is the effect linear: you're increasing distances in two dimensions, and longer distances make alternative modes (mainly walking) impractical. Imagine how much road and parking space exists per car in a city, then compare that to the cost of land and you'll get an idea of the raw costs of roads and parking before anything is even built. It makes little difference that some of these costs are externalized to the private sector, while others are borne by the government.
Then on top of that you have traffic control and enforcement, never mind environmental and health externalities, loss of life (I believe traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for people under age 35), and so on. I have seen a claim of the public per-car subsidy in my area (Vancouver BC): I don't remember the exact number, but it was in the thousands. We're talking not less than $1500, probably more like $3500. Finally, the cost of owning a car amounts to what, $7000 per year on average? That's not an optional cost (indeed many families need two), given that our cities offer little alternative.
Because many costs of cars are externalized, while most costs of transit are not, cars look cheaper. They aren't. For the individual, the incentives are toward car ownership, but collectively this incurs high costs for all of us. A classic tragedy of the commons.
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Agreed. I don't understand why Hollywood lets so many movies tank because while they are willing to pay millions for big name actors but can't be bothered to buy a decent script. Obviously cost isn't the issue, as lots of less expensive films and TV shows (the old Doctor Who comes to mind) do get decent scripts.
Copyright is one of the things that makes it possible for them to do this. Instead of paying actors, scriptwriters, and so on for new material, the studios can coast on their back catalog (as with Gilligan's Island, which someone mentioned upthread). The system may be great for a few superstars, but for the ordinary Joe who pays the bills with steady work, long strong copyright is a bad thing.
Not that Harlan would let that stand in the way of a good rant about ordinary folk people "stealing" his stuff. Still, whatever the legal facts of this case, I'm more inclined to side with him than the MAFIAA.
Thank you. The author of the grandparent post might want to learn a bit about qualitative research before jumping to conclusions ("My default hypothesis about any educational reform movement is that it will have absolutely no effect on anything") in the absence of quantitative evidence that might be impossible to gather and might not be relevant anyway. Social science ain't physics. Those who think it is or should be can do terrible damage, as we have seen with the inappropriate use of economic equations for risk that contributed to the current crisis.
Just a point: "always", in this case, has not been for very long. Those who grew up recently watched more TV than previous generations, including that those who grew up more than half a century ago and didn't watch much or any TV at all.
I have read similar comments by young people before. I believe it was in the Amazon reviews of Generation Me, which I discovered via an article on danah boyd's blog. boyd says she has found the same thing in her research (she studies young people's use of social software).
Doctor Who did not "go off screen repeatedly". It simply changed to a new lead actor. When the original actor was forced to retire for health reasons, this was integrated into the show. There was never any "wouldn't it be fun if we resurrected" because there was never any question about the Doctor dying, only changing. This did not correspond to wholesale changes of the rest of the show. On only two occasions did the companions also change with the arrival of the new Doctor: once between seasons 6 and 7 (when the show was also moved to color), and once between seasons 23 and 24 (following the hiatus). In both cases, recurring characters showed up immediately to provide continuity. In both cases, the script for the first episode following the change was written by a previous writer for Doctor Who.
The original Doctor Who ran straight for 22 seasons from 1963. That was followed by a one-year hiatus before seasons 23-26, then cancellation. Not counting the 1996 TV movie, there was a 16 year gap before the show started up again.
Three problems:
One, as others have mentioned, is a lack of proof or due process.
Two, the punishment is out of proportion to the offense. Going 5mph over the limit could get someone killed. How come we don't have three strikes for speeding? Sharing music is not life-threatening. Internet access is not just nice to have, like TV or radio. For many people it is essential to their employment, to their ability to communicate (though this is a generational thing, so lawmakers are relatively unaware of it), and to their participation in a democratic society.
Three, copyright law has gone way off the rails to the point where it is significantly impairing free speech, innovation, and creativity. Century-long copyright terms, takedown notices to block speech one disagrees with, DRM that seizes control of communications technology, and a tremendous concentration of cultural ownership in the hands of a few companies are bad enough. Strengthening the enforcement of illegitimate and unjust laws only increases the injustice.
I couldn't agree more. If we care about our culture - or indeed any culture - then we need to create the conditions for it to thrive, not fence it in and manage it to death, continuing on a path that has already failed.
If I recall correctly, Canada is one of the world's top exporters of TV shows (who knew). We're strong in music, video games, and film production, with traditions in animation and documentary filmmaking also. Enacting made-in-Hollywood copyright laws will only continue to leave the greater part of our artists at the mercy of distribution channels that have locked us out for so long. So far, it seems many of the most powerful arts organizations (within and without government) just don't get it (though the documentarists and many musicians are more enlightened). Though at this point the government doesn't talk to them so much (if at all), preferring to trade horses with the U.S., which in turn represents their entertainment industry.
I agree. Though I am quite disturbed when people diss the Quebecois (or, for that matter, the French). I sometimes suspect that after Britain conquered New France, it was the anglophones who assimilated to the French culture. I can't quite put my finger on it. When I travelled in Europe and ran into Quebecois, I found there was a certain common cultural understanding or attitude that made them fundamentally more like me than the Americans I encountered (who were mostly very nice folks from a variety of places).
There are many things I admire about Quebec (and some I don't). Their political influence has led to some quite bad decisions, but they have also saved us from time to time. A minor example is unpasteurized soft cheeses, whose import the government had planned to ban for unsubstantiated health reasons. Another example is their liberal attitudes towards sex. I recall a survey finding that most Quebecois would rather their teenaged kids had sex at home, instead of taking a hardline approach that would result in it happening elsewhere. I am also tremendously impressed that almost all their top TV shows are made in Quebec. I doubt many countries with five times their population can say that.
There has been a huge cultural shift. My father once told me that he was taught in school (where he pledged allegiance to the flag and the Empire for which it stood - meaning the Union Jack) that Americans were emotionally flighty and unstable. This explained their intemperate rebellion, while responsible dependable Canadians remained loyal - and in the case of some of my ancestors lost their land in New England. Not that my father believes that now or is anti-American by any stretch of the imagination. But how can I judge or reject the culture to which I have assimilated? The fact is, there was something (good or bad) that Canada was trying to protect.
There are reasons for maintaining an independent culture. Among them: It is an important bond in a country whose population is a thin line smeared along the U.S. border. The stories culture tells us hold us together - but stories from the U.S. (at least in film and TV) are always about somewhere else, as though where we are doesn't exist or is irrelevant. And we do have different political values (health care, a role for government (as in banking), etc.), which are reflected in and affected by the culture we experience. Because of TV, Canadians often confuse American laws and institutions with Canadian ones. For example, they think we have Fair Use of copyrighted works, that we elect a Prime Minister (we elect only a riding (district) representative), that we can sue for all sorts of things we can't, and so on.
This is not the driving force for extremist copyright in Canada. The Conservatives, our current governing party, is not friendly to the arts, but they are happy to go along with American demands. Many Canadian industry and arts organizations (and many, many Canadians) are opposed to the changes, but it is largely American officials and organizations representing American interests who pay the lobbyists and get the face time with our politicians.
Now in Quebec it is true that culture is of central political importance. The large arts organizations there are in favor of extreme copyright laws. Quebec's approach to copyright is much closer to the moral imperative of authorial control in France, les droits d'auteur, than to the pragmatism of Anglo-American copyright. And I believe there is a tradition in Quebec (as in France) of seeing large organizations as important forces for the preservation of society. Those traditions are likely to support copyright extremism regardless of what tools are at their disposal - though preservation of French culture is always one of those.
I shouldn't open up a can of worms, but don't mock what you call "cultural protectionism". The United States followed a similar course in its early days (hence American spelling and the lack of respect for foreign copyrights). Though it has largely failed in Canada, and though it is used to justify ridiculous proposals (e.g. Canadian content quotas for web sites), the concern that originally drove it are legitimate. Canadian culture *has*, to a large extent, failed to thrive in the face of American imports. Americans own our movie distribution network, sell TV series cheaper than we can produce them but won't themselves buy material set in Canada, and so on. Americans tend to see this in terms of free markets for a cultural product. Many countries and peoples see culture as a matter of national identity. Canadians have long supported a greater role for government in the production of culture and information. The lack of confidence you describe does exist among some in Canada, but before you jump on "small countries" as being special in this regard, take a look at the culture wars in the United states (over prayer in schools, flag burning, prudishness about depictions of sex but not violence, and so on).
Also, the "small country" stereotype doesn't work. Before you slot France in with Canada, keep in mind that it has a larger population than the U.K. (I believe surveys have found Brits suffer from lower national confindence). The U.S. has five times the population of the U.K. Canada has a tenth the population of the U.S., and about ten times the population of N.Z. English speaking countries have fewer barriers to influence by American culture, and Canada is right next door.
The copyright war is not driven by small countries or cultural inferiority complexes. It is conducted mainly by the United States (with collaboration with allies, including Canada) at the behest of a handful of huge transnational companies like Disney, General Electric, Viacom, Fox, Time-Warner, Sony, Microsoft, a few others. Almost no countries are sufficiently powerful or independent to put up effective resistance.
The value of so-called IP is nothing beside the value of the skills, human relationships etc. for creating and developing ideas. Those who think innovation means resting on the creativity of 10, 20, life plus 70 years ago are doomed from the start. Creativity and innovation are activities, not artifacts. A focus on the frozen ideas of "IP" diverts attention from the real issues. The problem is not that the smart immigrants are taking American ideas away: it is that they are taking themselves.
I just thought I should point that out. Plagiarism is claiming someone else's work as your own. Sharing does not imply plagiarism. The vast majority of copyright infringement is *not* plagiarism.
One of the foundations of international copyright (and an aspect of it not strongly respected by the United States) is moral rights, including the right of the author to be given credit. I find it ironic that vigorous enforcement of copyright actually creates an incentive for sharers and borrowers to obscure the source or credit of material. This makes their activity harder to detect, and easier for them to defend ("I got this from AP" is kind of a dead giveaway).
If copyright law was closer to actual social practice, this kind of plagiarism would likely be much less common.
Personally, I find clear cases of plagiarism to be utterly dishonest and far worse than sharing.
I was not referring to terror attacks, raping and pillaging, horsemen riding and wiping out whole cities, ethnic cleansing, etc. My emphasis was on deliberate attacks on civilians in order to impair the enemy economy. In WWII that was widespread. I'm no historian, but it seems to me this requires long-term planning and hierarchical control of the military. That excludes most of history right off the bat. Though you're right, there are probably some exceptions somewhere. But the economic focus - the mindset that puts economics front and centre - is a modern phenomenon. When I play AoE and I kill the peasants to shut down resource collection I am thinking like a modern, not a medieval.
See, this is a problem that happens a lot online. I am not implying it. You can interpret it that way if you like, but that is you reading something between the lines that I didn't put there, and that doesn't reflect my way of thinking. Maybe if you wrote what I wrote then that would be your intention. People are more different than my imagination could ever hope to encompass. I'm not in the habit of making judgments about them and assuming that they reason the way I do. But then I said that in two posts already, and you refuse to believe me.
From what you say, you seem to think there are universal right and wrong answers. I don't think there are. I think there are better and worse answers in different contexts. I don't believe that what is right for me is right for everyone else. I don't play Quake II, I don't watch slasher flicks. Don't like them. Like. Not "hate" as you say. Other people do like them. Some of them are friends. Do I tell them not to? No. I say, "Don't show it to me."
As for my child, yeah, I wouldn't let him play such a game. That's called being a dad: it's my responsibility to make judgments and choices for my child. About my child. Not other people's children. If I was in charge of your kids, I wouldn't let them play such games either. But I'm not, I don't want to be, and I have no interest in judging whether you're a good parent or not. Even if I could make some better decisions for your kids, that could never make up for the fact that I am not their parent. I know what it is like to be a parent: I know there are no simple answers.
Besides, what's right for children is different from what's right for adults. "Implying their preferences are dangerous for children"? Hell, driving a car is dangerous for children. Doesn't make it an impure preference or activity. The logic you present leads to a single standard for all ages. That is the shortest path to censorship.
Good God, my son is all of three years old. Get a grip.
And you think I need to teach him about the human condition through video games? We all have a lifetime to understand that beauty and tragedy. What matters is how we face it. That is what I would hope to teach him. Not how to blow monsters into bloody chunks or squash peasants so I can grow my empire.
For those dismissing what amounts to a declaration of taste - Geof doesn't like violence in games - on the basis that such violence is "realistic" or historically accurate, please keep your position in mind next time you debate video games.
If you personally prefer historical accuracy, fine. De gustibus non est disputandum.
Otherwise, you appear to be arguing that historical accuracy is better because it is educational. Really? Instructional value should be a central concern in game design? Do tell.
You are also making it rather difficult to defend many features of games because players should distinguish fantasy from reality. Instead, you are saying the games should be less fantastic and more realistic.
Seriously. Some of you seem awfully touchy. Do you feel guilty about something? Do you think I'm suggesting your preferences are somehow inferior? Figure out what you're arguing with, then figure out whether that's really what I said.
You aren't the only one to talk about realism in your response (though the others weren't so polite). It is certainly true that history is bloody and unjust, far more than we usually recognize. Hell, the present is bloody and unjust too, with historically high levels of slavery, for example.
Personally I think realism in games is generally a red herring. Games are no less fantasies than are most Hollywood films. At best, they have only a passing acquaintance with reality. We play games to escape from reality, not to replicate it. It is too easy to pursue "realism" as a design objective, perhaps because it's easier to imitate reality than to come up with original fun.
To take Age of Empires as an example, in a realistic game we might expect to enslave conquered populations (or at least their women and children), commit religious genocide and cope with serious problems of deforestation and soil degradation. I doubt many of us would want to play a game in which our civilization suddenly and unexpectedly got wiped off the map a disease that kills a third of the population (the Black Death) or 90-99% (the Americas following first contact with European smallbox).
Not that I mean to hold up AoE as a terribly violent game. It really isn't. What bothered me is that a small feature, so easily changed, was actually incredibly brutal. Attacking an enemy's productive capacity while building up my own is the sort of approach I am inclined to take, as opposed to frontal attack. Historically, though, I suspect that conscious economic warfare is a recent phenomenon, reflecting more of a WWII mindset than an ancient one. The wars in the former Yugoslavia or Rwanda would be more representative: genocidal attacks on other groups not in order to stop them from producing, but to take over their territory and resources. During the Middle Ages in Europe, the people simply went with the land so there was no need to kill them (though that happened anyway) - it wasn't until part way through the Hundred Years War that nationalism started to take root as a consequence of military brutality.
I stopped playing first-person shooters at Quake II. I had enjoyed previous FPS games quite a lot, and I gave Quake II a good try, but the bloody chunks with the flies buzzing around them were the limit for me. Similarly, I didn't like that in Age of Empires II committing war crimes - killing enemy peasants to take out productive capacity - was the best way to win. Nor that an apparent flaw with uprisings in CivIII meant that the best way to take over cities was a bit of ethnic cleansing by way of starvation. I still played those games, but it bugged me. I never traded slaves in Elite.
This is why I liked Tony Hawk and Jet Set Radio so much. They are about being cool instead killing things.
I won't make grand claims about the effects on anyone else, but I know I don't want my 3-year old son playing violent games. I am kind of pissed off that many games I might otherwise enjoy are effectively wrecked by violence. Who knows who else is put off by violence? The people like me who are put off don't play, so they don't figure into many statistics.
They can also often take greater risks than individuals would. There are social and material sacrifices humans may be unwilling to make in order to achieve political goals. For example, most individuals are unlikely to risk their jobs, their ability to feed their families, their status in their communities, their lives, or their freedom in order to achieve anything but the most essential political objectives.
But a corporation is fully capable of risking all of this - because, in truth, it does not really exist as an independent unit. A corporation is amoral*, and it is not rational or self-interested in the sense that you or I might be. As often as not, a corporation does not pursue what we might think of as its own interests, but rather the interests of a few individuals within it. If you are an officer of a large bank and you make decisions that destroy it, you may yet benefit personally.
In this sense, corporations (and other organizations) can act irrationally in ways that might be considered insane if done by individuals. Moreover, whereas crazy individuals are unlikely to be capable of collaboration with each other, a corporation acts as a coherent unit even when its actions are irrational. The avoidance of collective action problems is in fact a corporation's greatest strength - but if it goes awry, it makes it tremendously dangerous.
A corporation might risk its success or its existence over copyright, or net neutrality, or any number of issues - issues that we would not take similar risks over. Even such a risk risk were not necessary - or even if its actions were not in its interest. And, doing so, it is much more powerful because it and all its people act as one, whereas to be effective individuals would need to find many like-minded people willing to work together and risk together.
* Note I do not say immoral. A corporation can do things that we find to be ethical, but that does not make it a moral actor (and of course it must be composed of human beings who are by definition moral actors). This is not a blanket denunciation of corporations - our society depends upon and is made better by corporations and may other kinds of organizations, all or most of which may suffer similar problems to greater or lesser degrees.
For those taking that post seriously: it's satire. Look:
Because, you know, if "they" had ever been right then... uh... I guess he would have died a horrible death, and then he wouldn't be here to talk about it. It's *impossible* for him to have any contrary evidence. Not because he's right: but because anyone with a different experience would be dead. His evidence is meaningless. And from how he writes, I think he knows it. Nicely played.
But for the suckers out there, please take a moment to think. Someone up-thread referred to the problem of induction on Wikipedia. Look it up. Or read Taleb's The Black Swan. Then realize that many of the arguments that we don't need to act now to prevent global warming are essentially the same as the arguments that the housing bubble was not a bubble and there could be no financial crisis.
And by the way, there have been many - many! - societies wiped out by events they didn't see coming. From ecological and environmental disasters of their own making (for which Easter Island is the poster child) to other unexpected causes (whole native American communities and cultures killed by Smallpox, cities razed by rampaging Huns, etc.). Our civilization has had some close calls historically and recently, ranging from the Black Plague and Nazi Europe to the Cuban missile crisis (the U.S. almost invaded; the Soviets in Cuba had authorization to use tacnukes which would have escalated) and that Norwegian satellite launch Russia mistook for a nuclear attack and almost retaliated against in the 1990s.
There is no special law that says that we are different. No special reason that we, too cannot fall. Our (struggling) free markets and our technology are not magic charms guaranteed to save us. Will climate change bring us down? I don't know. And you don't know either, regardless of how many times you haven't already died.
Ok, you made me laugh :) That hadn't occurred to me.
Bandwidth is a commodity. As such is interchangeable: the provider of a commodity is in competition with everyone else providing the same commodity. They have to differentiate themselves based on price, which they can only do by cutting costs and increasing efficiency. Though market competition is in our best interests as consumers, it isn't in theirs. The last thing a company wants is for market competition to work efficiently to drive down their margins. That's why they will do everything they can to avoid selling a commodity: product differentiation, branding, and so on - strategies that effectively create mini monopolies (you don't buy an MP3 player, you buy an iPod; you don't buy shoes, you buy Nike).
That's the main reason. Another, which applies especially to monopolies (hello telecoms!), is price discrimination. A company would like to charge each customer as much as that customer can afford to pay, but they don't want to lose business with a price that's too high. By developing different classes of service they can coax more money from those able to pay more. The classic example is first-class seating on flights. How much a customer is able to pay may also depend on how much the service is worth to them. It may not cost the telecom company any more to provide bandwidth for, say, VoIP users than for WoW players, but VoIP customers may be able to pay more because it saves them money elsewhere.
It is the role of good market regulation to ensure competition works effectively to drive prices down towards costs. That is broadly good for consumers and for the economy as a whole. Companies - especially incumbent companies - should be expected to do everything in their power to fight to break the market. And they do.
Your comments are very judgmental about what people should do in a given situation. You seem inclined to believe they would make rational choices accordingly. But people aren't very rational. They seldom "do the right thing", assuming they even think about it consciously and assuming it matches what you think the right thing should be.
Your comparison with Star Trek is telling. When Battlestar Galactica presents moral quandries it leaves much of the interpretation up to the viewer. Star Trek, on the other hand, resolves them: it is unsubtle in claiming what's the right thing to do. I won't make big claims for Galactica, but in my mind Star Trek's treatment is much more superficial. (And very culturally specific: I find many of Star Trek judgments and values quite foreign to me. I'm Canadian; our culture is about as close to the American one as is possible.)
On a slight tangent: Um, how can you know this? We only know about secrets that aren't kept, not the ones that are. Unless we're keeping them: a sample of one is not a reliable indicator of anything.
I agree with your concerns. Culture matters tremendously precisely for its ability to bring people together, which is a precondition for everything from politics to basic human happiness.
However, the evidence suggests that you have your causes backwards. Research shows a strong causal connection between the advent of TV and a sharp decline in community life. Robert Putnam talks about this in his book Bowling Alone. The DVD version of The Naked City features an interview with James Sanders, who describes the impact of TV on city life in New York. Here's an excerpt:
As for the effect Internet, a number of studies have found that people who socialize more online also socialize more offline. Cyberspace is very rarely the '80s vision of this other world where we take on other identities and socialize with strangers (the old dog on the Internet). For the most part it's a medium we use to reinforce the relationships we have with people we know in the real world. Now that may be a step down from the street life Sanders describes - the pre-broadcast world in which we made our entertainment (playing sports, singing songs, and so on instead of waiting for someone else to provide them to us), but it's light years ahead of the private CBS & me experience of watching TV alone in the dark.
You've nailed it. This is the problem with IP. One the one hand, creativity and innovation are always the result of collaboration between large numbers of people (much of it informal, unconscious, or indirect). On the other, IP allocates exclusive rights to an individual or organization. Invariably, many or most of the contributors are excluded while the IP owner free-rides on their work. Furthermore, because ownership ends up being held by many hands, future work is often forstalled. It runs into the tragedy of the anticommons: all owners must give their permission, and each owner is inclined to overvalue their contribution - not surprising, given that the system has already overvalued it by giving ownership to more than they produced.
Why? As lawyer James Boyle so eloquently details in his book Shamans, Software & Spleens, the legal system continues to make counterproductive rulings precisely because of the romantic myth of the lone inventor or author who has that Eureka! moment and creates something new out of thin air. The illusion you dismiss is a core foundation of the system as it stands (for copyright too, if you look back at the development of the concept of authorship, which is quite recent historically).
Let me make it clear what I have said and what I have not said (not necessarily for you, but people will make assumptions): I am not making a claim about the ideal outcome in this case. Neither am I proposing to abolish patents or IP - something I could not do without weighing their costs against their benefits. My beef is with your arguments.
Road construction is not the only subsidy. Parking, for example, is never free. Regulations typically require developers to build a certain number of parking spaces. That's another significant cost. Parking spaces in turn increases distances, which then increases the costs of delivering other utilities and services (water, sewage, electricity, and so on). This may sound insignificant until you realize how much of the typical American city is paved - 25-30% I believe. Nor is the effect linear: you're increasing distances in two dimensions, and longer distances make alternative modes (mainly walking) impractical. Imagine how much road and parking space exists per car in a city, then compare that to the cost of land and you'll get an idea of the raw costs of roads and parking before anything is even built. It makes little difference that some of these costs are externalized to the private sector, while others are borne by the government.
Then on top of that you have traffic control and enforcement, never mind environmental and health externalities, loss of life (I believe traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for people under age 35), and so on. I have seen a claim of the public per-car subsidy in my area (Vancouver BC): I don't remember the exact number, but it was in the thousands. We're talking not less than $1500, probably more like $3500. Finally, the cost of owning a car amounts to what, $7000 per year on average? That's not an optional cost (indeed many families need two), given that our cities offer little alternative.
Because many costs of cars are externalized, while most costs of transit are not, cars look cheaper. They aren't. For the individual, the incentives are toward car ownership, but collectively this incurs high costs for all of us. A classic tragedy of the commons.