It's a fact of life that as communication continues to advance, we need corporate media less and less to tell us what to think.
This is in fact the fear that drives most of the reactionary stances of the RIAA and MPAA. They love digital technologies for lowering their costs and expanding their reach. But they're starting to realize that digital technologies -- the whole telecommunications thing -- might well obviate the reason for their existence. The telecom revolution is, by and large, the death of the Age of the Middle Man.
It's all relative. When a movie like The Hulk that cost nearly $100 million to make and probably another 30-40 to market, $130 million at the box office isn't so much. (emphasis added)
What this might be telling you is, that extra $40M was wasted, or at least, not fully effective. Maybe success in the future will more closely align with -- horrors! -- the quality of the movie and not the quantity of its marketing.
Yup, the movie industry is all Republicans. That's why so many of them supported the Invasion of Iraq.
Disclaimer: I don't actually know anything about the make-up of "the movie industry". But I'd like to point out that vociferous protest by the "talent" (actors and directors) says nothing about the leanings of the people who actually decide what gets made. It's entirely conceivable that the talent is all liberal and the corporate higher-ups are all conservative.
Well, as an ex-patriate New Yorker, I am sick of the middle America bias we see in the media's coverage of culture. This is news and, whining aside, it's bigger news because it happened in NYC. Tough. New York is the financial capital of this nation and incidentally of the world, too. What's there? Hmmm, ignoring the 8 million residents and 5 million daily commuters, we also have the New York Stock Exchange, and NASDAQ, and one of the Fed Reserve Banks, and, oh yeah, the United Nations. These make it news.
If a power outage had roiled through London and an equivalent land area, it would also be news. Losing power in the desert -- not so much news.
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding. (Article VI)
So in that sense it is a law. But of course it's not a law in the same sense as a typical bill passed by Congress...:)
Security through Obscurity is not Inherently Evil.
When it comes to voting software, yes, it is. The people have the right to know that their software is as secure, bug-free, and outcome-neutral as possible. Like laws, the code to count ballots should be accessible to any interested citizen -- and there should be absolutely heinous penalties for anyone who uses a binary compiled from anything other than the open code.
Your ananlogies are flawed. This guy isn't proposing that you be metered for Net access. But people pay for HBO (even though they've already paid for cable access) and people pay for 900 numbers (even though they've already paid for phone access). So it's not entirely unbelievable that they will pay for some content, even after they've paid for Net access.
But the wheel was figured out long before physics was created, by my count so far far less than 50% of worthwhile discovery has been in the era of science and physics...
Hmmm. A 10-second list:
Steam engines
Rockets and satellites
Electrification
climate control and air conditioning
the laser
the transistor
GPS
internal combustion
composite materials
skyscrapers Yeah, I guess you're right. Almost nothing has been achieved through physics.
The way to sort through any theory whether it be new or old is through reason, logic and physical test.
How wonderfully Cartesian of you but the scope of human knowledge long ago past the point where any one person could personally verify all claims made. No one has the finances, the skill, or for that matter, the time to do all possible experiments. And science is a collaborative endeavour that has succeeded precisely because people can build on the works of others.
So, allocation of resources and a desire to avoid duplication of effort require some way for the community as a whole to evaluate new claims and advance the state of the art. Peer review and open publication is the system that has evolved. It's got its problems: It's expensive, it can lead to undue influence of personality, and yes, from time to time, it can ignore truly valid ideas if they originate on the fringe. These failings occur but they are remarkably rare and the system is remarkably robust.
So when some new outlandish "breakthrough" is announced with great fanfare, I for one will continue to await the verdict of "the system". And while I will attempt, so far as possible, to make my own evaluation of it, I will let myself be guided by the people and the system that has earned my trust.
I've never had any trouble seeing how "traditional" copyright law could and should be applied to modern technology.
Oh, really? Well, you're an infringer. You see, you've made a copy of the slashdot article and probably of the main article, too. You didn't get the explicit permission of the copyright holder, either. And maybe you've covered your dirty little crime by clearing your browser's cache, but the fact remains: To have read the article at all, you had to willfully cause to be created a copy of that article.
Ludicrous? Sure. Implicit in the whole idea of how the Net and the Web work? Certainly. In contradiction of "traditional" copyright? Without a doubt.
And before you unload on me, consider that (a) Congress had to add language providing for "emphemeral" copies and (b) the Copyright Cartel fought tooth-and-nail to stop such language from being added.
Hence it doesn't surprise me that the research for this important and highly academic topic was done by a non-academic, and he got little or no help from the academic community.
Ah, the "academia is really about suppressing the new" conspiracy theory -- the X-Files of the academic world. While there is sometimes an excess of conservatism in "academia", people usually forget how justified caution usually is. For every Einstein-like breakthrough, there are hundreds of crackpot theories. A system is needed to sort through and separate the wheat from the chaff. Oh, wait, we have such a system: peer review and open publication.
This breathless article in EurekAlert has all the hallmarks of a duped science reporter: deep-sounding (but, it seems, semantically null) phrases tossed about with abandon; derision and scorn at the stuffy old guys who just don't get it; and of course the simultaneous disdain for and desparate quoting of authorities. (That is, "most physicists don't agree because they just quote the same old authorities, but look, this Big Name likes my work, which validates it".)
I suppose we'll see how this plays out when the paper is actually published and people get a chance to take a hatchet to it. I'm guessing this will sink like a stone... if it isn't already a hoax.
And there's the fallacy of extreme free marketism. Not all value is economic value. The person running a racist business might very well feel that the emotional cost of having to serve "the wrong people" far outweighs the money he/she gets from them. So he/she would -- under exquisite economic theory -- choose not to sell. It's the "correct" decision, economically.
Anti-discrimination laws are a recognition by society that some ills will not be corrected by a market mechanism, because the market does not set its inputs. Capitalism can tell you how to maximize your efficiency in achieving your goals, especially in a material sense. But it cannot tell you what those goals are or should be.
Consumers areallowed to build web sites to compare prices.
For now. But corporations are beginning to lay the legal framework -- through suits over site-scraping -- to bar anyone from using publicly-available (i.e., Web-enabled) price databases, except as allowed by the constructor of the database. The issue of whether pricing databses are copyrighted is far from settled.
IMHO, I wouldn't have that big a problem with the DMCA if copyright terms were short (say 10-20 years)
The DMCA would be a terrible law even if copyright lasted only one day. Here's the issue: the DMCA criminalizes "circumvention devices" -- things designed to break past copy protection or access restrictions. Selling, trading, donating, or even talking about such is considered "trafficking". And this provision does not expire.
Thus, even if a work is in public domain, if someone has put it behind any sort of access control -- say, a dumb ROT13 password scheme -- it is illegal to access the mateial (despite your legal right to copy it). Under the DMCA, copyright has been superseded by something far more insidious and far more immortal. This is of course the wet dream of both magecorporations and totalitarians.
No single expert(or group for that matter) can absorb every bit of news and information about a given situation. By using a large group of people and seeing where their opinion intersects you can leverage the knowledge of many.
With information fragmented and contradictory, the free market cannot function reliably or efficiently. At best, you're going to get a poll on what people feel will happen. The market isn't magic. And free market capitalism is based on universal access to accurate information. Everything else distorts the market and leads to sub-optimal (as well as unjust) results.
Ever wonder why insider trading is illegal? Not because someone wins based on who they know. It's illegal because it allows the market to be manipulated and therefore destabilizes the economy.
In this program, everyone would be an insider trader. Information would not flow freely. So at best you get fads and trends.
Elections do not have good media coverage. All participants do not have equal access to good data.
This statement is a good example of why, even in open things like elections, the market cannot reliably operate. For terrorism, where information is massively fragmented, the output would be essentially random.
This whole project was just a case of free market ideology run amok.
if you say they can't control their creations you're saying they have no right to make a living.
Although I happen to feel creators should have rights, I'd like to point out -- though everyone labels the anti-IP crowd as "communistic" -- it is things like "a right to make a living" that are actually closer to the Communist way of speaking.
But more relevantly,
Artists, writers, musicians, programmers. They're selling ideas and expressions of ideas
This betrays a very fundamental (and possibly intentional) misunderstanding of intellectual proprty. As a matter of fact, no one is "selling ideas" -- or rather, no one is granted a state-fabricated artificial monopoly to sell them. You want to pay for an idea, go ahead. But the idea isn't protected by IP law. Only the expression of the idea is. That's the major thing messed up with patents on software algorithms and on business methods.
The majority of American voters seem to vote not on the issues but for whatever candidate looks better on TV.
And you don't think that makes them culpable? I think it makes them more so.
The market system works, more or less. If the average American insisted on being well-informed, if he/she approached news and news sources critically, if he/she demanded multiple viewpoints and in-depth analysis -- if those things were true, the networks (or some networks) would provide it, if only to make a buck.
We can rail against the nefarious forces at work, and we can fight the good fight to staunch their tide, but we have to be honest: Democracy in America is dying not due to supervilliany but to selfish disinterest.
Art' is a soft designation, and you run into big problems when you say certain kinds of creative expression shouldn't be allowed to be owned by their creators, but others should be sold in whatever manner they choose.
You can sell it any way you choose. I just get edgy when you want to use the court system to enforce the way you choose. I don't really belong in the baby-with-the-bathwater crowd who say, jettison all IP law. But I think content creators had best get used to the idea that their "right" to restrict copying (and so create an artificial monopoly, thereby creating economic value for their work) is a construct of the polity. There's no physical reason I can't make a billion copies and distribute them for essentially zero cost, and there's no physical deprivation to the creator.
All that said, I think that copyright has been a remarkably effective tool for creating economic incentive in achieving the actual goal, which is the progress of science and arts. But I'm with Lessig here: at all times remember that copyright is an artificial construct designed to help balance social goods, not an intrinsic right fundamental to the society.
However, there is still a distinction between the assets of the corporation and the assets of the shareholders
Strictly speaking, this is only if the corporation is that modern beast of commerce, the Limited Liability Corporation. You can certainly have -- and indeed, prior to the railroads, often did have -- wholly owned companies which were not LLCs. Of course, no sane investor would ever buy into Snapster if it weren't an LLC, since then the RIAA would be able to sue for that investor's personal wealth as well as that of the company.
Hmmm. I wonder if that could be a way around the ridiculous lawsuits? Incorporate yourself, then file-share as the corporation. Then.... profit!:)
It wasn't civil disobedience, for exactly that reason. You might like it or not, but it wasn't justified under civil disobedience theory. And note that all the uber-libertarians should feel this way, since a bunch of people broke into someone's ship, stole his property, and destroyed it. Recall that it was not an attack on British government offices, British royal property, or British soliders. It was the destruction of private property.
Slashdot Mirror
This is in fact the fear that drives most of the reactionary stances of the RIAA and MPAA. They love digital technologies for lowering their costs and expanding their reach. But they're starting to realize that digital technologies -- the whole telecommunications thing -- might well obviate the reason for their existence. The telecom revolution is, by and large, the death of the Age of the Middle Man.
What this might be telling you is, that extra $40M was wasted, or at least, not fully effective. Maybe success in the future will more closely align with -- horrors! -- the quality of the movie and not the quantity of its marketing.
Disclaimer: I don't actually know anything about the make-up of "the movie industry". But I'd like to point out that vociferous protest by the "talent" (actors and directors) says nothing about the leanings of the people who actually decide what gets made. It's entirely conceivable that the talent is all liberal and the corporate higher-ups are all conservative.
Whatever the heck those terms mean, anymore.
Umm, it would go dark?
Well, as an ex-patriate New Yorker, I am sick of the middle America bias we see in the media's coverage of culture. This is news and, whining aside, it's bigger news because it happened in NYC. Tough. New York is the financial capital of this nation and incidentally of the world, too. What's there? Hmmm, ignoring the 8 million residents and 5 million daily commuters, we also have the New York Stock Exchange, and NASDAQ, and one of the Fed Reserve Banks, and, oh yeah, the United Nations. These make it news.
If a power outage had roiled through London and an equivalent land area, it would also be news. Losing power in the desert -- not so much news.
Exactly the question that has the RIAA and MPAA laying awake at nights....
Well, technically,
So in that sense it is a law. But of course it's not a law in the same sense as a typical bill passed by Congress...
When it comes to voting software, yes, it is. The people have the right to know that their software is as secure, bug-free, and outcome-neutral as possible. Like laws, the code to count ballots should be accessible to any interested citizen -- and there should be absolutely heinous penalties for anyone who uses a binary compiled from anything other than the open code.
Your ananlogies are flawed. This guy isn't proposing that you be metered for Net access. But people pay for HBO (even though they've already paid for cable access) and people pay for 900 numbers (even though they've already paid for phone access). So it's not entirely unbelievable that they will pay for some content, even after they've paid for Net access.
Hmmm. A 10-second list:
Steam engines
Rockets and satellites
Electrification
climate control and air conditioning
the laser
the transistor
GPS
internal combustion
composite materials
skyscrapers
Yeah, I guess you're right. Almost nothing has been achieved through physics.
Idiot.
The Soviet Union allied with the US and UK to fight the Nazis -- it didn't make Stalin into Santa Claus.
How wonderfully Cartesian of you but the scope of human knowledge long ago past the point where any one person could personally verify all claims made. No one has the finances, the skill, or for that matter, the time to do all possible experiments. And science is a collaborative endeavour that has succeeded precisely because people can build on the works of others.
So, allocation of resources and a desire to avoid duplication of effort require some way for the community as a whole to evaluate new claims and advance the state of the art. Peer review and open publication is the system that has evolved. It's got its problems: It's expensive, it can lead to undue influence of personality, and yes, from time to time, it can ignore truly valid ideas if they originate on the fringe. These failings occur but they are remarkably rare and the system is remarkably robust.
So when some new outlandish "breakthrough" is announced with great fanfare, I for one will continue to await the verdict of "the system". And while I will attempt, so far as possible, to make my own evaluation of it, I will let myself be guided by the people and the system that has earned my trust.
Oh, really? Well, you're an infringer. You see, you've made a copy of the slashdot article and probably of the main article, too. You didn't get the explicit permission of the copyright holder, either. And maybe you've covered your dirty little crime by clearing your browser's cache, but the fact remains: To have read the article at all, you had to willfully cause to be created a copy of that article.
Ludicrous? Sure. Implicit in the whole idea of how the Net and the Web work? Certainly. In contradiction of "traditional" copyright? Without a doubt.
And before you unload on me, consider that (a) Congress had to add language providing for "emphemeral" copies and (b) the Copyright Cartel fought tooth-and-nail to stop such language from being added.
Ah, the "academia is really about suppressing the new" conspiracy theory -- the X-Files of the academic world. While there is sometimes an excess of conservatism in "academia", people usually forget how justified caution usually is. For every Einstein-like breakthrough, there are hundreds of crackpot theories. A system is needed to sort through and separate the wheat from the chaff. Oh, wait, we have such a system: peer review and open publication.
This breathless article in EurekAlert has all the hallmarks of a duped science reporter: deep-sounding (but, it seems, semantically null) phrases tossed about with abandon; derision and scorn at the stuffy old guys who just don't get it; and of course the simultaneous disdain for and desparate quoting of authorities. (That is, "most physicists don't agree because they just quote the same old authorities, but look, this Big Name likes my work, which validates it".)
I suppose we'll see how this plays out when the paper is actually published and people get a chance to take a hatchet to it. I'm guessing this will sink like a stone... if it isn't already a hoax.
And there's the fallacy of extreme free marketism. Not all value is economic value. The person running a racist business might very well feel that the emotional cost of having to serve "the wrong people" far outweighs the money he/she gets from them. So he/she would -- under exquisite economic theory -- choose not to sell. It's the "correct" decision, economically.
Anti-discrimination laws are a recognition by society that some ills will not be corrected by a market mechanism, because the market does not set its inputs. Capitalism can tell you how to maximize your efficiency in achieving your goals, especially in a material sense. But it cannot tell you what those goals are or should be.
For now. But corporations are beginning to lay the legal framework -- through suits over site-scraping -- to bar anyone from using publicly-available (i.e., Web-enabled) price databases, except as allowed by the constructor of the database. The issue of whether pricing databses are copyrighted is far from settled.
The DMCA would be a terrible law even if copyright lasted only one day. Here's the issue: the DMCA criminalizes "circumvention devices" -- things designed to break past copy protection or access restrictions. Selling, trading, donating, or even talking about such is considered "trafficking". And this provision does not expire.
Thus, even if a work is in public domain, if someone has put it behind any sort of access control -- say, a dumb ROT13 password scheme -- it is illegal to access the mateial (despite your legal right to copy it). Under the DMCA, copyright has been superseded by something far more insidious and far more immortal. This is of course the wet dream of both magecorporations and totalitarians.
Oh, I don't know. They seem to have a pretty hard time in other cases...
With information fragmented and contradictory, the free market cannot function reliably or efficiently. At best, you're going to get a poll on what people feel will happen. The market isn't magic. And free market capitalism is based on universal access to accurate information. Everything else distorts the market and leads to sub-optimal (as well as unjust) results.
Ever wonder why insider trading is illegal? Not because someone wins based on who they know. It's illegal because it allows the market to be manipulated and therefore destabilizes the economy.
In this program, everyone would be an insider trader. Information would not flow freely. So at best you get fads and trends.
This statement is a good example of why, even in open things like elections, the market cannot reliably operate. For terrorism, where information is massively fragmented, the output would be essentially random.
This whole project was just a case of free market ideology run amok.
Although I happen to feel creators should have rights, I'd like to point out -- though everyone labels the anti-IP crowd as "communistic" -- it is things like "a right to make a living" that are actually closer to the Communist way of speaking.
But more relevantly,
This betrays a very fundamental (and possibly intentional) misunderstanding of intellectual proprty. As a matter of fact, no one is "selling ideas" -- or rather, no one is granted a state-fabricated artificial monopoly to sell them. You want to pay for an idea, go ahead. But the idea isn't protected by IP law. Only the expression of the idea is. That's the major thing messed up with patents on software algorithms and on business methods.
And you don't think that makes them culpable? I think it makes them more so.
The market system works, more or less. If the average American insisted on being well-informed, if he/she approached news and news sources critically, if he/she demanded multiple viewpoints and in-depth analysis -- if those things were true, the networks (or some networks) would provide it, if only to make a buck.
We can rail against the nefarious forces at work, and we can fight the good fight to staunch their tide, but we have to be honest: Democracy in America is dying not due to supervilliany but to selfish disinterest.
You can sell it any way you choose. I just get edgy when you want to use the court system to enforce the way you choose. I don't really belong in the baby-with-the-bathwater crowd who say, jettison all IP law. But I think content creators had best get used to the idea that their "right" to restrict copying (and so create an artificial monopoly, thereby creating economic value for their work) is a construct of the polity. There's no physical reason I can't make a billion copies and distribute them for essentially zero cost, and there's no physical deprivation to the creator.
All that said, I think that copyright has been a remarkably effective tool for creating economic incentive in achieving the actual goal, which is the progress of science and arts. But I'm with Lessig here: at all times remember that copyright is an artificial construct designed to help balance social goods, not an intrinsic right fundamental to the society.
Strictly speaking, this is only if the corporation is that modern beast of commerce, the Limited Liability Corporation. You can certainly have -- and indeed, prior to the railroads, often did have -- wholly owned companies which were not LLCs. Of course, no sane investor would ever buy into Snapster if it weren't an LLC, since then the RIAA would be able to sue for that investor's personal wealth as well as that of the company.
Hmmm. I wonder if that could be a way around the ridiculous lawsuits? Incorporate yourself, then file-share as the corporation. Then.... profit!
It wasn't civil disobedience, for exactly that reason. You might like it or not, but it wasn't justified under civil disobedience theory. And note that all the uber-libertarians should feel this way, since a bunch of people broke into someone's ship, stole his property, and destroyed it. Recall that it was not an attack on British government offices, British royal property, or British soliders. It was the destruction of private property.