And this is what torpedoes the whole intellectual "property" charade: Real property does not expire. Intellectual "property" does. It's not real property.
At the very least, the backers of the IP regime should be honest: They don't really believe in the public domain -- they just know they can't outright abolish it because, well, people like libraries, for one thing. So they want to nibble at the edges, preserving the forms of the public domain while reducing its scope to triviality.
If they're allowed to call copyright infringement "piracy", then I think we have the right to call copyright extension "the pillage of the public domain". I like what this author says: All intellectual output belongs to the public domain; copyright is just a loan for a short time.
I don't know what this writer was thinking though: if IP failed two centuries ago, then the whole problem with Napster-level copyright violations would be a 200-year old running battle.
It is a 200-year-old running battle. Ever hear of public libraries? They were originally denounced, by publishers, as a mechanism for theft. Ever hear of the statutory license? It came about almost 100 years ago in response to player-piano rolls.
The point of the original author -- I'm not sure I agree, but I'm also not sure I disagree -- is that intellectual "property" has always been a flawed concept. But due to the clunkiness of the technology, its flaws could be papered over and patched. Now, under the bright light of mass digital technologies, those flaws are being thrown into sharp relief so that anyone -- even my 16-year-old students -- can recognize them.
I know that Apple will always be against DRM as it gives them a competitive edge against MS. Think Rip Mix Burn.
Yes, that's right. That's why all their DVD burners ship as DVD-for-Authors (so that you can make actual DVD backups of commercial titles you own)...
Except, oops, they don't. They sell their SuperDrives as "DVD-for-General", geared to prevent bit-by-bit copying. Oh, well. The myth of Apple as rebel against the Content Cartel certainly sounds nice.
Hmm, I think we have different views of free-as-in-beer.
I was unclear. Up until recently, there were no ads on myciti.com. Nor did you have to have a Citibank account to use it. (Of course they only marketed to their own customers.) This, I think we agree, is free-as-in-beer.
Now they are moving towards ads. This of course represents a real cost -- in bandwidth, time, or attention -- and so it isn't really "free-as-in-beer" anymore. I'm not sure about the account restriction but that would probably qualify it too.
I checked both the terms & conditions linked at the bottom of the page, and the privacy policty just above it. I didn't see any reference to advertisements of any sort.
Oh, they're sneaky alright. You have to enter your info and such, and then you click through to
My Citi User Agreement... Please read the My Citi User Agreement carefully - it includes disclaimers of liability and other matters of interest to you...
4. Marketing.
By selecting "I Agree" below, you acknowledge and agree that: (1) we may display advertisements and promotions of all kinds on our web site(s) and you agree not to disable any technology required or utilized to serve or display such advertising; and (2) you confirm the decision you made during the My Citi registration about whether or not to subscribe to receive marketing messages via e-mail from Citibank. In each case, such advertisements may be customized based upon information you may have provided us or upon information concerning the accounts and services that you access or use via our web site(s) in order to tailor them to your personal interests.
Notice that not only do you agree to read the ads. You also give them carte blanche to use your personal, confidential data in "customizing" those ads. ("John, we see your bank balance is really low. Why not use your Citibank Premiere card to pay some of your bills?")
I liked myciti.com but this seems pretty obnoxious.
The bank can now tell me what software I can and cannot run on my computer?
OK, let's be fair. myciti.com is a free service offered by Citibank to let you organize all your online transactions through one portal. It stores passwords, checks balances for you, etc. Here's the rub: It really is free-as-in-beer. Now, if they want to recoup some of the cost and so use ads, that's their right. And if they want to hinge your usage of their free-as-in-beer site on your agreement to view those ads, it's still their right. If you don't like it, don't use the site... it's hardly a necessity, just a convenience.
All of that said, it's a dumb move by Citibank. It just engenders ill will, doesn't result in any more ads being viewed, and makes them look stupid (and a little petulant).
Disclaimer: I use the myciti.com site and have found it generally nice... though hardly indispensable.
Properties shared by two things (e.g., that the internet and some metaphor/model for the internet) do *NOT* imply the identity of those things,
While you have to be aware, always, of the limits of your model, and while you must never lose sight of the fact that it is only a model(*), it's ridiculous to say that you can never derive prescriptive action from studying a model. It's done every day. Recent example: Our weather models sayd Hurrican Iggy is going to have a landfall at such-and-such a time and near this point. People living near the point get ready, by battening down or evacuating or whatever. Or are you saying you'd ignore the evacuation order because it's "only a model" of how the atmosphere reacts? (*) Insert obligatory "Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail" line here.
So have you ever had the nerve to judge the road clear and cross the street? Ever seen and used a stop sign? How about simply crossed the street, gasp, where there is no cross gaurd?
If you mean cross the street against the laws of traffic, then the answer is No. Why? Because it's dumb, plain and simple.
And if you've ever cursed at a pedestrian who blunders into the street -- and my guess, from your tone, is that you have -- then ask yourself what makes the difference? Either way, it's someone arrogating to themselves the power to decide which laws will be enforced... and making the arrogant assumption that their decision, made in haste, made with all the pressures of their particular situation, is sound enough to violate the well-established patterns of traffic.
We are talking about speeding through a red stoplight. Get off your offended high horse and consider that: Approaching an intersection, where a signal tells you to stop and cross-traffic to go, you decided, "Ah, well, laws don't really apply to me. I am Superman."
If you don't like the way these machines are being used -- if you think municipalities are using them to feather their nests and hassle legitiamte drivers -- then change the way the machines are used. But to say, a priori, that it's wrong for them to be used at all, doesn't sound like you're mad about the "dehumanization of the driver" or the "abdication of power to inaminate machines".
It just sounds like you're mad that now, you get caught. So get over it.
If the cop isn't there to see it then tough noogies for them. I got away w/a minor violation.
I don't like the machines either but I don't think running a red light is a "minor" violation at all. It's the arrogance of most drivers that they can make that judgement that leads to awful collisions.
On the other hand, I don't see why people are allowed to drive in the first place. In a century of automotive engineering, the only part of the car we have not massively improved -- and made massively safer -- is the driver.
I think the meat of their argument is that it's an obviously bad law, and they would have the best chance if they could get it overturned on those grounds
Well, "bad law" has two meanings:
"Not truly suited to advancing the public interest"
"Unconstitutional" The Supreme Court is empowered to rule only on the latter. The purpose of a legislature is make the laws and to fix laws not fulfilling the public interest -- that's why we have elections, so that people can express their views and pick legislators who will tune the laws to the public's melody. The purpose of judicial review is to make sure everyone's playing by the rules -- that no one has subverted the protections of the Constitution. That's why the justices aren't elected -- to provide some immunity to the winds of political debate.
I own what I create until I transfer ownership to another party.
And no one is taking that away from you... you still have your original file, picture, whatever. However, that is not the "property" of "intellectual property" -- or at least, it's not the bit that has everyone in an uproar. Your statement seems to imply that you have a natural right of ownership in the nebulous idea behind the program; in its very form and not just the particular bits on your computer.
I would argue that you have no such natural property right -- that in fact no natural intellectual "property" right exists ever. You have the manufactured copyright, which is a legal fiction enacted by the state to advance the public's interest in a vibrant creative field and a growing public domain.
Intellectual "property" law is based on a fiction, which explains why all justifications of it become so convoluted. Due to the unceasing efforts of the Content Cartel, we are trying harder and harder to match an inappropriate legal model -- physical property -- to an increasingly non-conforming phenomenon (intellectual output). Despite what Ecclesiastes tells you, there is something new under the sun... Intellectual output as a vast and growing fraction of the economy is a new phenomenon (perhaps two centuries, at best), and it is far from clear that old models will be applicable.
So... the state creates copyright, which purports to give you "ownership" of your intellectual output in all its expression. This mechanism is intrinsically a fraud, but has historically been a benevolent fraud. It didn't distort things too much, it created incentives to create, and seemed to more or less "promote the Progress of science and Useful Arts". The digital revolution has stripped away the incidental physical trappings that always tagged the production and distribution of intellectual output. This has, more or less by accident, revealed the intrinsically fictional nature of intellectual "property" -- ironically, just as that term gained adherence.
What we face now is a radical usurpation of power on the part of certain parties, callously upending centuries of common agreement and hoping, by throwing the framework into chaos, to cement the relatively new concept of "property" rights in intellectual output... Perhaps purely by chance -- but likely not -- this is done in such a way as to freeze-in current dominant corporations and to commoditize intellectual output. But what they have opened up (certainly without intent or willingness) is a complete re-examiniation of the whole intellectual output regime -- a review by (one hopes) an informed citizenry to ensure that the public's interest in the copyright/trademark/patent bargain is being guarded.
To cut to the chase, I think any imagined economic structure that assumes people can't attempt to sell the product of their labors -- whether you are digging holes, teaching school, writing code or creating art that rivals Michelanglo -- is absurdly utopian and not worthy of serious consideration.
The issue is not whether you can attempt to sell me a copy of your program. However, in the absence of intellectual output laws, the attempt is likely to be met with laughter. Say you charge $500 for a copy of FrobozzWord. I might buy that copy from you and then, when anyone else came to buy from you, I'd offer it for $251. If I can make even two sales, I win. And you lose.
Is this wrong, if you wrote the program and I just bought it? For digital works, including software, the copy is identical and therefore exactly as usable. You hold no special position just for being first. Of course, in this sort of world, you wouldn't sell the program unless you could make enough on the first sale to justify developing it. It could be the end of mass-produced software and the beginning of a meteoric rise for mercenary programmers who freelance jobs.
Either way, it certainly could lead to a slowdown in the development of software, with a concommitant impact on the economy and indeed the standard of living for many people. As such, the industrialized world has evolved laws for intellectual output. These laws artificially produce scarcity. Now, your copy and my copy -- although they are exact digital duplicates, indistinguishable by any test -- are no longer legally equivalent. Yours is acceptable; mine is "infringing" and therefore legally invalid. As such, I cannot claim the copy I made of your program is exactly as usable, since (in a legal sense) it cannot be used at all. This creates a market for your software (maybe) and allows you to sell multiple copies, since the marginal cost of procurement is not zero any longer.
So far, so good. But this "copyright" is not a natural right. It's created by the state to meet the legitimate ends of the public; to wit, to spur innovation and creativity by offering incentives for people to create. If the execution of intellectual "property" law begins to significantly impede this end -- if the law serves more often than not to choke off creativity and slow the growth of the public domain -- then the public is entirely within its rights to reconsider the bargain. Then we might get something interesting happenning...
As a total aside, I said earlier "You hold no special position just for being first." This is not strictly true, of course. It would be natural to assume that, because you wrote the program (whereas I only copied it), that you would be an expert in it. You could more easily solve tech problems, tweak settings for particular users, and upgrade the software's functionality. I would be playing catch-up. One could even imagine making your expertise the marketable item. If someone needs the program and tech support enough, one can even imagine making a business model of this. And it doesn't rest upon intellectual "property" laws at all.
Don't even think about claiming that "real" creators would continue to work for free. People need and expect -- and have every right to expect -- to derive revenue from the work they do.
No, they don't. No one has a "right to expect to derive revenue". Hypothetical: I just punched six holes in the concrete blocks in my apartment. I think it's art. I also think that you're obligated to pay me for my art. After all, I have "every right to expect to derive revenue from the work" I do.
Of course this is just silly. Unlike grammar school, you aren't rewarded for effort. You are rewarded for success -- for providing a good or service at a price someone else is willing to pay. If you can't add value using your business model, then too bad... you don't deserve some handout to enable you to follow your model.
The guy digging a hole doesn't deserve a paycheck, either, unless there's someone who wants a hole dug enough to pay him. Or do you suggest he go around digging holes in people's lawns and demanding money?
The issue here, as with all intellectual output, is: To what extent should the state enforce a framework under which you can make money writing software? Because in the state of nature, you wouldn't be able to... it's too easy to replicate -- far easier than to create -- and so you couldn't sell your software. Someone could always buy one copy and then undercut your price.
We invent intellectual output law to create an artificial scarcity. This pumps up the value of the output. In return, the public expects this to encourage to production of new and better works, since there is an incentive. If the shrinkwrap license punishes legitimate reverse engineering and other competitive tactics, then it's pretty clear that the public's need is not being met. And in this case, the public should take its football and go home...
I don't know if "real people" create for free. I've seen a lot of damn fine amateur work, made with no hope of compensation and for no gain save the sheer joy of creation. And of course, Mozart went on composing even though no copyright law existed in his day. Of course, that meant he didn't make money off copies; he had a different model.
The field of intellectual output -- and the just compensation for such -- is much more complex than you seem to wish.
Although some parts of the country now prefer swampland in Florida. I think that is a more recent scam involving extremely cheap land in Florida that happened to be located in the middle of the everglades swamp
Of course, given recent history, the latest scam involving Florida is buying not swampland but elections. And it only costs you five justice's robes...
So the Internet will continue to exist, and it will be hard for the US to block (censor) it's contents.
Yes and no. TCP/IP is out there and anyone can run it. But the thing we call "the Internet" travels, overwhelmingly, through a small number of portals. Knock them off, or censor them, and "the Internet" fragments back into a myriad of little unconnected networks. And the large majority of those portals live in the USA.
That's the whole point of DRM - you *can't* distribute digital media using today's technology, the p2p piracy would be simply too large.
Well, you certainly can distribute it. You might not reap the profit to which you feel entitled, but the technology clearly exists... It's the business model, not the laws of the Universe, that is keeping digital content bottled up.
Lay out the scenerio: EXACTLY how will Palladium make "software that daddy wrote" illegal.
MS offers Palladium and convinces everyone (in Washington, DC) that it's the only safe, secure operating system.
Some cracker or terrorist (or malcontent script kiddie or...) finds the Holy Grail of cracking, a heretofore uber-error that cripples all web-servers and desktops on the Net.
The economy shudders.
Congress mandates that the only computers allowed back onto a rebuilt Internet must run a guaranteed, safe, secure operating system -- including hardware lock-outs.
Since there, at that time, exists precisely one such OS -- Palladium -- it earns huge market share. And because MS owns the patents on DRMOS and related topics, it becomes difficult and impossibly slow to develop an alternative.
If Palladium is indeed a safe, secure OS, then it hardly makes sense to allow anyone to run anything else. Only crackers, terrorists, and the ilk would really want an open, "insecure" OS.
While you might have the legal right to write any code you wanted, you would face charges if you distributed anything other than Palladium-signed code.
I want a physical object. I don't want a CD-R, I want an actual physical disc of some sort.
Um, last time I checked, a CD-R is physical. You're really saying, you want someone else to press/burn it for you. I can understand that, but it doesn't change the physicality of a CD-R.
Isn't this the way that we *want* piracy to be addressed? By going after the *pirates* instead of the *technology?*
Slow down there. The article is light on details but it seems to me that the university is banning all P2P traffic, not just copyright-infringing traffic. You can insert the standard hyperbolic "But 99.9999% of P2P traffic is infringing" but it doesn't matter: They certainly do seem to be going after the technology, not the content.
I can't help but think that photographer should simply leave the cameras at home and go out to weddings with scenery and LIGHTING... amateurs simply do not understand lighting...
This might be a marketing disaster -- people want to think they're hiring a photographer and getting something -- but it's not a bad idea. If I were to try it, I think I'd also take the pictures... but give the negatives for free as part of the service. Then play up the lighting, scenery, etc. And make amateur imitation a selling point, not an obstacle.
So while you may have the source, it's pretty much useless, because you're not going to change it. You can, but you won't. And that's where your reasoning breaks.
Well, not exactly. Look at this bug. Microsoft might say, "We will simply not patch Word 97". If you use Word 97, you have only two options:
Pay hundreds of dollars for Office XP (and perhaps also thousands of dollars for a machine it can run on); or
Continue using Word 97, knowing that it has a hole. What you cannot do is, fix the hole on your own. You don't have the source and attempts to reverse engineer it are liable to violate at least the EULA and possibly a real law.
Now, imagine this in a world where you used an open source suite (say, the excellent OpenOffice.org). First, there is no single company to charge you for an update. But say the entire community decides, to heck with you -- update to v. 2.0 or die. Well, the upgrade path is free (modulo download and install time -- which you pay for with MS, too). And say you don't want even to do that... hey, you've got the source. If you insist on living in v. 1.1, go ahead... you also have the tools and the permission to patch, fix, and update that version. You might have to go it alone but you are allowed to go there...
As opposed to the closed-source proprietary model, where the question might be "Where do you want to go today?" but the answer certainly is, "You'll go wherever we decide you'll go."
Re:may god forgive him for what he has unleashed
on
The First Smiley :-)
·
· Score: 2
Blockquoth the poster:
Perhaps you are aware of this invention called "books"? They've never seemed to need any of this shit.
That's right. And the meaning of text in books has never been misinterpreted, has it? Even though a book's prose can be polished for months. The first guy to put spaces between his words probably heard much the same argument...
Once upon a time, people could communicate emotions effectively simply through the tone of their writing.
Once upon a time, people didn't have lowercase and so could not use uppercase for emphasis or to mark the start of a sentence.
Once upon a time, people didn't write spaces between words in their text.
Once upon a time, people didn't have vowels to help distinguish words.
Once upon a time, people didn't have question marks or exclamation points to indicate interrogatives or imperatives. Get over it. "The tone of their writing" is simply too unreliable a mechanism for conveying in print what body language does for us in person. Why is the smiley any more objectionable as punctuation than, say, the question mark?
Slashdot Mirror
And this is what torpedoes the whole intellectual "property" charade: Real property does not expire. Intellectual "property" does. It's not real property.
At the very least, the backers of the IP regime should be honest: They don't really believe in the public domain -- they just know they can't outright abolish it because, well, people like libraries, for one thing. So they want to nibble at the edges, preserving the forms of the public domain while reducing its scope to triviality.
If they're allowed to call copyright infringement "piracy", then I think we have the right to call copyright extension "the pillage of the public domain". I like what this author says: All intellectual output belongs to the public domain; copyright is just a loan for a short time.
It is a 200-year-old running battle. Ever hear of public libraries? They were originally denounced, by publishers, as a mechanism for theft. Ever hear of the statutory license? It came about almost 100 years ago in response to player-piano rolls.
The point of the original author -- I'm not sure I agree, but I'm also not sure I disagree -- is that intellectual "property" has always been a flawed concept. But due to the clunkiness of the technology, its flaws could be papered over and patched. Now, under the bright light of mass digital technologies, those flaws are being thrown into sharp relief so that anyone -- even my 16-year-old students -- can recognize them.
Yes, that's right. That's why all their DVD burners ship as DVD-for-Authors (so that you can make actual DVD backups of commercial titles you own)...
Except, oops, they don't. They sell their SuperDrives as "DVD-for-General", geared to prevent bit-by-bit copying. Oh, well. The myth of Apple as rebel against the Content Cartel certainly sounds nice.
I was unclear. Up until recently, there were no ads on myciti.com. Nor did you have to have a Citibank account to use it. (Of course they only marketed to their own customers.) This, I think we agree, is free-as-in-beer.
Now they are moving towards ads. This of course represents a real cost -- in bandwidth, time, or attention -- and so it isn't really "free-as-in-beer" anymore. I'm not sure about the account restriction but that would probably qualify it too.
Oh, they're sneaky alright. You have to enter your info and such, and then you click through to
Notice that not only do you agree to read the ads. You also give them carte blanche to use your personal, confidential data in "customizing" those ads. ("John, we see your bank balance is really low. Why not use your Citibank Premiere card to pay some of your bills?")
I liked myciti.com but this seems pretty obnoxious.
OK, let's be fair. myciti.com is a free service offered by Citibank to let you organize all your online transactions through one portal. It stores passwords, checks balances for you, etc. Here's the rub: It really is free-as-in-beer. Now, if they want to recoup some of the cost and so use ads, that's their right. And if they want to hinge your usage of their free-as-in-beer site on your agreement to view those ads, it's still their right. If you don't like it, don't use the site... it's hardly a necessity, just a convenience.
All of that said, it's a dumb move by Citibank. It just engenders ill will, doesn't result in any more ads being viewed, and makes them look stupid (and a little petulant).
Disclaimer: I use the myciti.com site and have found it generally nice... though hardly indispensable.
While you have to be aware, always, of the limits of your model, and while you must never lose sight of the fact that it is only a model(*), it's ridiculous to say that you can never derive prescriptive action from studying a model. It's done every day. Recent example: Our weather models sayd Hurrican Iggy is going to have a landfall at such-and-such a time and near this point. People living near the point get ready, by battening down or evacuating or whatever. Or are you saying you'd ignore the evacuation order because it's "only a model" of how the atmosphere reacts?
(*) Insert obligatory "Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail" line here.
You can contract away some of your rights. Courts have held that there are rights you cannot waive in a contract.
And yet, for some reason, you keep coming back... slashdot must offer you some value.
If you mean cross the street against the laws of traffic, then the answer is No. Why? Because it's dumb, plain and simple.
And if you've ever cursed at a pedestrian who blunders into the street -- and my guess, from your tone, is that you have -- then ask yourself what makes the difference? Either way, it's someone arrogating to themselves the power to decide which laws will be enforced
We are talking about speeding through a red stoplight. Get off your offended high horse and consider that: Approaching an intersection, where a signal tells you to stop and cross-traffic to go, you decided, "Ah, well, laws don't really apply to me. I am Superman."
If you don't like the way these machines are being used -- if you think municipalities are using them to feather their nests and hassle legitiamte drivers -- then change the way the machines are used. But to say, a priori, that it's wrong for them to be used at all, doesn't sound like you're mad about the "dehumanization of the driver" or the "abdication of power to inaminate machines".
It just sounds like you're mad that now, you get caught. So get over it.
I don't like the machines either but I don't think running a red light is a "minor" violation at all. It's the arrogance of most drivers that they can make that judgement that leads to awful collisions.
On the other hand, I don't see why people are allowed to drive in the first place. In a century of automotive engineering, the only part of the car we have not massively improved -- and made massively safer -- is the driver.
Well, "bad law" has two meanings:
"Not truly suited to advancing the public interest"
"Unconstitutional"
The Supreme Court is empowered to rule only on the latter. The purpose of a legislature is make the laws and to fix laws not fulfilling the public interest -- that's why we have elections, so that people can express their views and pick legislators who will tune the laws to the public's melody. The purpose of judicial review is to make sure everyone's playing by the rules -- that no one has subverted the protections of the Constitution. That's why the justices aren't elected -- to provide some immunity to the winds of political debate.
And no one is taking that away from you... you still have your original file, picture, whatever. However, that is not the "property" of "intellectual property" -- or at least, it's not the bit that has everyone in an uproar. Your statement seems to imply that you have a natural right of ownership in the nebulous idea behind the program; in its very form and not just the particular bits on your computer.
I would argue that you have no such natural property right -- that in fact no natural intellectual "property" right exists ever. You have the manufactured copyright, which is a legal fiction enacted by the state to advance the public's interest in a vibrant creative field and a growing public domain.
Intellectual "property" law is based on a fiction, which explains why all justifications of it become so convoluted. Due to the unceasing efforts of the Content Cartel, we are trying harder and harder to match an inappropriate legal model -- physical property -- to an increasingly non-conforming phenomenon (intellectual output). Despite what Ecclesiastes tells you, there is something new under the sun... Intellectual output as a vast and growing fraction of the economy is a new phenomenon (perhaps two centuries, at best), and it is far from clear that old models will be applicable.
So... the state creates copyright, which purports to give you "ownership" of your intellectual output in all its expression. This mechanism is intrinsically a fraud, but has historically been a benevolent fraud. It didn't distort things too much, it created incentives to create, and seemed to more or less "promote the Progress of science and Useful Arts". The digital revolution has stripped away the incidental physical trappings that always tagged the production and distribution of intellectual output. This has, more or less by accident, revealed the intrinsically fictional nature of intellectual "property" -- ironically, just as that term gained adherence.
What we face now is a radical usurpation of power on the part of certain parties, callously upending centuries of common agreement and hoping, by throwing the framework into chaos, to cement the relatively new concept of "property" rights in intellectual output... Perhaps purely by chance -- but likely not -- this is done in such a way as to freeze-in current dominant corporations and to commoditize intellectual output. But what they have opened up (certainly without intent or willingness) is a complete re-examiniation of the whole intellectual output regime -- a review by (one hopes) an informed citizenry to ensure that the public's interest in the copyright/trademark/patent bargain is being guarded.
Would that such would occur...
The issue is not whether you can attempt to sell me a copy of your program. However, in the absence of intellectual output laws, the attempt is likely to be met with laughter. Say you charge $500 for a copy of FrobozzWord. I might buy that copy from you and then, when anyone else came to buy from you, I'd offer it for $251. If I can make even two sales, I win. And you lose.
Is this wrong, if you wrote the program and I just bought it? For digital works, including software, the copy is identical and therefore exactly as usable. You hold no special position just for being first. Of course, in this sort of world, you wouldn't sell the program unless you could make enough on the first sale to justify developing it. It could be the end of mass-produced software and the beginning of a meteoric rise for mercenary programmers who freelance jobs.
Either way, it certainly could lead to a slowdown in the development of software, with a concommitant impact on the economy and indeed the standard of living for many people. As such, the industrialized world has evolved laws for intellectual output. These laws artificially produce scarcity. Now, your copy and my copy -- although they are exact digital duplicates, indistinguishable by any test -- are no longer legally equivalent. Yours is acceptable; mine is "infringing" and therefore legally invalid. As such, I cannot claim the copy I made of your program is exactly as usable, since (in a legal sense) it cannot be used at all. This creates a market for your software (maybe) and allows you to sell multiple copies, since the marginal cost of procurement is not zero any longer.
So far, so good. But this "copyright" is not a natural right. It's created by the state to meet the legitimate ends of the public; to wit, to spur innovation and creativity by offering incentives for people to create. If the execution of intellectual "property" law begins to significantly impede this end -- if the law serves more often than not to choke off creativity and slow the growth of the public domain -- then the public is entirely within its rights to reconsider the bargain. Then we might get something interesting happenning...
As a total aside, I said earlier "You hold no special position just for being first." This is not strictly true, of course. It would be natural to assume that, because you wrote the program (whereas I only copied it), that you would be an expert in it. You could more easily solve tech problems, tweak settings for particular users, and upgrade the software's functionality. I would be playing catch-up. One could even imagine making your expertise the marketable item. If someone needs the program and tech support enough, one can even imagine making a business model of this. And it doesn't rest upon intellectual "property" laws at all.
No, they don't. No one has a "right to expect to derive revenue". Hypothetical: I just punched six holes in the concrete blocks in my apartment. I think it's art. I also think that you're obligated to pay me for my art. After all, I have "every right to expect to derive revenue from the work" I do.
Of course this is just silly. Unlike grammar school, you aren't rewarded for effort. You are rewarded for success -- for providing a good or service at a price someone else is willing to pay. If you can't add value using your business model, then too bad... you don't deserve some handout to enable you to follow your model.
The guy digging a hole doesn't deserve a paycheck, either, unless there's someone who wants a hole dug enough to pay him. Or do you suggest he go around digging holes in people's lawns and demanding money?
The issue here, as with all intellectual output, is: To what extent should the state enforce a framework under which you can make money writing software? Because in the state of nature, you wouldn't be able to... it's too easy to replicate -- far easier than to create -- and so you couldn't sell your software. Someone could always buy one copy and then undercut your price.
We invent intellectual output law to create an artificial scarcity. This pumps up the value of the output. In return, the public expects this to encourage to production of new and better works, since there is an incentive. If the shrinkwrap license punishes legitimate reverse engineering and other competitive tactics, then it's pretty clear that the public's need is not being met. And in this case, the public should take its football and go home...
I don't know if "real people" create for free. I've seen a lot of damn fine amateur work, made with no hope of compensation and for no gain save the sheer joy of creation. And of course, Mozart went on composing even though no copyright law existed in his day. Of course, that meant he didn't make money off copies; he had a different model.
The field of intellectual output -- and the just compensation for such -- is much more complex than you seem to wish.
Of course, given recent history, the latest scam involving Florida is buying not swampland but elections. And it only costs you five justice's robes...
Yes and no. TCP/IP is out there and anyone can run it. But the thing we call "the Internet" travels, overwhelmingly, through a small number of portals. Knock them off, or censor them, and "the Internet" fragments back into a myriad of little unconnected networks. And the large majority of those portals live in the USA.
Well, you certainly can distribute it. You might not reap the profit to which you feel entitled, but the technology clearly exists... It's the business model, not the laws of the Universe, that is keeping digital content bottled up.
MS offers Palladium and convinces everyone (in Washington, DC) that it's the only safe, secure operating system.
Some cracker or terrorist (or malcontent script kiddie or...) finds the Holy Grail of cracking, a heretofore uber-error that cripples all web-servers and desktops on the Net.
The economy shudders.
Congress mandates that the only computers allowed back onto a rebuilt Internet must run a guaranteed, safe, secure operating system -- including hardware lock-outs.
Since there, at that time, exists precisely one such OS -- Palladium -- it earns huge market share. And because MS owns the patents on DRMOS and related topics, it becomes difficult and impossibly slow to develop an alternative.
If Palladium is indeed a safe, secure OS, then it hardly makes sense to allow anyone to run anything else. Only crackers, terrorists, and the ilk would really want an open, "insecure" OS.
While you might have the legal right to write any code you wanted, you would face charges if you distributed anything other than Palladium-signed code.
Um, last time I checked, a CD-R is physical. You're really saying, you want someone else to press/burn it for you. I can understand that, but it doesn't change the physicality of a CD-R.
Slow down there. The article is light on details but it seems to me that the university is banning all P2P traffic, not just copyright-infringing traffic. You can insert the standard hyperbolic "But 99.9999% of P2P traffic is infringing" but it doesn't matter: They certainly do seem to be going after the technology, not the content.
This might be a marketing disaster -- people want to think they're hiring a photographer and getting something -- but it's not a bad idea. If I were to try it, I think I'd also take the pictures... but give the negatives for free as part of the service. Then play up the lighting, scenery, etc. And make amateur imitation a selling point, not an obstacle.
Well, not exactly. Look at this bug. Microsoft might say, "We will simply not patch Word 97". If you use Word 97, you have only two options:
Pay hundreds of dollars for Office XP (and perhaps also thousands of dollars for a machine it can run on); or
Continue using Word 97, knowing that it has a hole.
What you cannot do is, fix the hole on your own. You don't have the source and attempts to reverse engineer it are liable to violate at least the EULA and possibly a real law.
Now, imagine this in a world where you used an open source suite (say, the excellent OpenOffice.org). First, there is no single company to charge you for an update. But say the entire community decides, to heck with you -- update to v. 2.0 or die. Well, the upgrade path is free (modulo download and install time -- which you pay for with MS, too). And say you don't want even to do that... hey, you've got the source. If you insist on living in v. 1.1, go ahead... you also have the tools and the permission to patch, fix, and update that version. You might have to go it alone but you are allowed to go there...
As opposed to the closed-source proprietary model, where the question might be "Where do you want to go today?" but the answer certainly is, "You'll go wherever we decide you'll go."
That's right. And the meaning of text in books has never been misinterpreted, has it? Even though a book's prose can be polished for months. The first guy to put spaces between his words probably heard much the same argument...
Once upon a time, people didn't have lowercase and so could not use uppercase for emphasis or to mark the start of a sentence.
Once upon a time, people didn't write spaces between words in their text.
Once upon a time, people didn't have vowels to help distinguish words.
Once upon a time, people didn't have question marks or exclamation points to indicate interrogatives or imperatives.
Get over it. "The tone of their writing" is simply too unreliable a mechanism for conveying in print what body language does for us in person. Why is the smiley any more objectionable as punctuation than, say, the question mark?