No it doesn't. If you look at how much government people use, it is the poor who end up sapping the most.
Are you kidding me. 95% of the benefits that government provide is so that rich can make more money.
* Law & Order/Military - protect the resources of the rich * Social Security - proactive law & order * Infrastructure - pooling resources on infrastructure so those with property (the rich) can make more money. * Education - create low level employees that can make money for the rich.
I find the whole Theora thing amusing. You have a bunch of people trying to push for hardware support for a codec that pretty much no content producer (pirate or mainstream) uses. I can understand if you don't have the backing of mainstream producers, but if you can't even get a fraction of the pirates on your side, then you simply don't stand a chance.
Not much difference no. Both are things that have a real value that far exceeds the free market value.
Or do you beliieve that if/when that happens we should let all who could not afford to breathe air die?
If that happens, we will have to let all who can't afford to breathe air die. It is basic economics.
Because if you are only looking at value multiplied by scarcity to determine the value of something,
No, I am looking at market value and real value using basic economic theory. If something can be infinitely reproduced at a near zero cost, then it has a near zero market value.
As for the real value of things. Any prosperous society wants lots of stuff with low market value and high real value. That is how things becomes better for everyday people. Copyright and other intellectual property laws aims for the opposite, namely to bring market value as close to real value as possible.
Agreed. He is being a dick. Just like people who download from torrents and don't share back as much as they take. Or people who go and browse the local store for what they want to buy, note what they like and then go home and order it from the Internet. There are many ways of being a dick.
If you enjoyed the content, it obviously is at least somewhat valuable to you. Maybe not the purchase price, but I don't believe you can plausibly say that the content was worth nothing (for most content at least).
He didn't say that it was worth nothing. He said the monetary value was nothing. A very important difference, unless you think everyone should pay $1000 a month for the air they breathe. Because if you are looking at pure value as a measure of how much to pay for something and ignore to factor in scarcity, that is what would be right.
Yeah, you just summed up the entire eve player base very very succinctly:)
And the reason for the success of EVE is exactly because it aims to satisfy a very specific minority.:)
So using the word antique in my original post was perhaps an exaggeration. It is more a matter of what client group you aim at. I would however be very surprised to see any new high value production aimed at world PvP. At least any western production. I know that Asia seems to have a generally different mindset around the whole PvP subject.
Yeah, but he doesn't realize how fun it is to kill someone. Take out that possibility and you take away some fun.
Only a small minority thinks it is fun to kill people in uncontrolled world PvP. And game developers generally don't care about that minority, as they cause other customers (the ones gang banged) to stop playing their game.
PvP is much better done as optional addon in controlled environments where all sides are fighting on even and clear terms. The idea of free world PvP is an antique that only ever satisfied griefers and the occasional masochist.
The comments in the Japanese business newspapers suggest that Apple believes online shopping confers an aura of 'cheapness' on their products;
Translation:
We want consumers to continue overestimating the actual usage value of our products. It is not good for our bottom line if potential buyers make objective and informed decisions.
Not that I blame Apple. It is just the ordinary day to day deceptive business practices of any successful corporation. Well informed participants in the market is not good, because it is difficult to make big profits in an actually functioning free market. In fact, in a perfectly functioning free market it would be mostly impossible to make money beyond that to pay ordinary wages and initial investments, as any business area where more money could be made would be quickly swamped with competitors.
this is one of the biggest hypes since the y2k bug fiasco... they've been telling us we're going to run out next year for YEARS now..
No they haven't. At least not the serious people. 2011 has been the projected year for quite a while. Easily verified by just using archive.org to look at the history of the potaroo.net automated IPv4 exhaustion counter. It has tracked 2011 as the year of exhaustion since at least 2006 (first entry in archive.org)
But more seriously, while the "lesser evil" argument isn't entirely valid, bear in mind that if 50% of Nader voters had voted for Gore in 2000, Gore would have won easily and the debacle that was the George W Bush administration would never have happened.
If 100% of Gore's voters had voted for Nader, the debacle would never have happened either.
So there is a good argument for "vote for the lesser evil"
Agreed. The least evil was Nader. So why didn't all of Gore's supporters, vote for him?
Why? Copyrights exist to promote the public interest by encouraging authors to create and publish works that they otherwise would not create and publish, while minimally restricting the public in terms of both the scope of protection and the duration during which the works are protected.
No. That is your and some American forefather's interpretation of why the copyright exists. In other countries, the right to be recognized as an Author of a work is already perpetual (as well as untradeable)
not only unconstitutional
Who cares except some Americans. Heck, the original constitution doesn't matter either in the long run, because you can just append it if society changes its mind on an issue.
but clearly cannot ever promote the public interest precisely because it is perpetual.
Plainly wrong. Who says it isn't in the publics interest that creators are recognized perpetually.
They harm, rather than benefit, the public;
That is your claim
; they aren't so desired by authors that authors are willing to actually do or not do anything in order to get them
Well, they already have them where I live. And they damn well don't want to lose them.
and there's nothing wrong with recycling someone else's
Which I guess is why society fully support plagiarism...
Another Canadian political party siphoning off left-leaning voters
The Pirate Party seems to be continuously under attack from right wingers who claim that they are left wing and left wingers who thinks that they are far right wing. Funny how that is.
The biggest and most important achievements in science and art happened before the existence of copyright and patent laws.
I disagree. The biggest achievements has happened in the last couple of hundred years. However, I also think that there is a huge difference between correlation and causation.
To tell people that they cannot freely share the ideas of another person for one hundred years...it just seems to fly in the face of advancement
Agreed.
If 14 years was considered an adequate amount of time to capitalize on an idea back then, before the days of speedy digital distribution (and speedy analog distribution!), why is it so long now?
Because neo-mercantilist companies and individuals have lobbied to extend it so that they can profit more. And don't expect it to change. With an expected resource crisis due to massive consumption and popultion growth on earth, the mercantalist ideas will just grow strong among those in power.
I have a problem with long copyright terms as long as the definition of derivative work is as large as it is. I also have a problem with the preventative scope of copyright in general. Exclusive rights to profit from a specific production used to be the basis of copyright. But nowadays, that is just a minor aspect of copyright.
Yeah, that's why it was never listed in the 'children' section on iplayer.. Oh wait
Miss-listed by a socially conditioned person who didn't have a clue. And the error has been corrected. Now it is correctly listed as drama and sci-fi/fantasy.
Now, a VAT would have to allow for some type of "kick back" to lower income individuals due to the regressive nature of the tax. But overall, it would go a long way to helping our economy and balancing trade.
Kickbacks only move the regressive barrier a bit higher. It doesn't change that it is still a regressive tax. And regressive taxes are bad. There is already an inherent wealth accumulating effect where the rich has a larger chance of becoming even more rich. Having the government further support that concept completely unhinges the economy.
Wealth and income taxes are generally the best kind of taxes as they are easy to make progressive. So I am constantly amazed how often regressive taxes are supported even though it has very bad consequences. Of course, that only applies if you actually have true income taxes, that tax all income, and don't allow for lots of exceptions for the rich.
That's impossible. Please find a solution that is not based at its core on a contradiction and you might be taken more seriously.
Not impossible at all. In fact, it has been well known for a long time that steep marginal income taxes are good for the economy, stimulating the middle class, and preventing the upper class from endebting the poor.
It is really basic economy.
1) Motivation is needed to get someone to perform a task. 2) Giving more motivation than needed is a bad deal.
Somehow, the rich have managed to fool the majority into thinking that rule number 2 doesn't apply to the rich.
Number three: In 1900 less than 1 percent of Americans had automobiles, now there are more cars than drivers.
And that is the way the consolidation is done. Convince the brainwashable masses that correlation equals causation, so that they will believe that advances in science and production actually has to do with giving big companies and rich people more power.
If a fair price could be set for a movie download and the distribution channels were truly that pervasive, then people would have no need to give their friends anything beyond a recommendation to download the movie.
But a fair price can unfortunately not be set, because the download itself isn't worth anything. It is the production behind that took resources to produce.
By using a monopoly driven system, you redistribute an obscene part of entertainment spendings to a few big hits, while the larger part of artists end up starving. OK, that last part was an exaggeration, but that is basically how it works. When you have a strong monopoly hold over intellectual property, the few big hits profit, while the smaller artists lose out. So, if we are looking for a non-diverse and concentrated media monopoly, we should definitely support strong IP laws.
I think a minimum should be 14 years as that was good enough when distribution was primitive
At a time when distribution and marketing was done at a far slower pace. But personally I don't really care much about the length of time that someone is able to exclusively profit from a single piece of art. It is a minor piece of the puzzle.
I am more interested in other aspects of copyright, such as how works can be used or distributed without profiting, or what can be created without falling derivative works, or the right of authors to be recognized as creators regardless of the status of the distribution rights.
People forget that trademarks and copyright are not the same thing. Realistically, if Steamboat Willy fell into public domain (yeah right, like that will ever happen...) you still couldn't go off and start making your own mickey mouse movies because mickey mouse would still be an active trademark of Disney
Trademark laws are also broken. In a sane world, Disney would be the trademark, and you would know to buy "Disney's mickey mouse movies". If something is used by the intellectual property itself (such as a name or title), it shouldn't be possible to trademark it.
Trademarks are there to protect buyers from fraud and deception. That they are used by seller's nowadays to lock in their products is plain disgusting.
Not having any incentives to invent or create art is a pretty big inefficiency.
Neither free markets or monopolistic driven "markets" are good solutions for dealing with the need to increase the knowledge base of society. I do believe that free markets are to prefer as inefficiencies don't scale up as badly as in monopolistic markets, but that doesn't say much.
But in truth, with the increasing focus on knowledge driven societies, running economies based on free market theory is becoming increasingly difficult and less efficient. It is a very difficult and precarious situation that humanity as a whole is in right now. Especially as there is a misplaced faith in the free market due to its efficiency in the manufacturing growth phase of a society. And the current solutions looks to be worse than the problem itself.
Slashdot Mirror
No it doesn't. If you look at how much government people use, it is the poor who end up sapping the most.
Are you kidding me. 95% of the benefits that government provide is so that rich can make more money.
* Law & Order/Military - protect the resources of the rich
* Social Security - proactive law & order
* Infrastructure - pooling resources on infrastructure so those with property (the rich) can make more money.
* Education - create low level employees that can make money for the rich.
I find the whole Theora thing amusing. You have a bunch of people trying to push for hardware support for a codec that pretty much no content producer (pirate or mainstream) uses. I can understand if you don't have the backing of mainstream producers, but if you can't even get a fraction of the pirates on your side, then you simply don't stand a chance.
Not much difference no. Both are things that have a real value that far exceeds the free market value.
Or do you beliieve that if/when that happens we should let all who could not afford to breathe air die?
If that happens, we will have to let all who can't afford to breathe air die. It is basic economics.
Because if you are only looking at value multiplied by scarcity to determine the value of something,
No, I am looking at market value and real value using basic economic theory. If something can be infinitely reproduced at a near zero cost, then it has a near zero market value.
As for the real value of things. Any prosperous society wants lots of stuff with low market value and high real value. That is how things becomes better for everyday people. Copyright and other intellectual property laws aims for the opposite, namely to bring market value as close to real value as possible.
A: No, but he's being a dick.
Agreed. He is being a dick. Just like people who download from torrents and don't share back as much as they take. Or people who go and browse the local store for what they want to buy, note what they like and then go home and order it from the Internet. There are many ways of being a dick.
If you enjoyed the content, it obviously is at least somewhat valuable to you. Maybe not the purchase price, but I don't believe you can plausibly say that the content was worth nothing (for most content at least).
He didn't say that it was worth nothing. He said the monetary value was nothing. A very important difference, unless you think everyone should pay $1000 a month for the air they breathe. Because if you are looking at pure value as a measure of how much to pay for something and ignore to factor in scarcity, that is what would be right.
Yeah, you just summed up the entire eve player base very very succinctly :)
And the reason for the success of EVE is exactly because it aims to satisfy a very specific minority. :)
So using the word antique in my original post was perhaps an exaggeration. It is more a matter of what client group you aim at. I would however be very surprised to see any new high value production aimed at world PvP. At least any western production. I know that Asia seems to have a generally different mindset around the whole PvP subject.
Yeah, but he doesn't realize how fun it is to kill someone. Take out that possibility and you take away some fun.
Only a small minority thinks it is fun to kill people in uncontrolled world PvP. And game developers generally don't care about that minority, as they cause other customers (the ones gang banged) to stop playing their game.
PvP is much better done as optional addon in controlled environments where all sides are fighting on even and clear terms. The idea of free world PvP is an antique that only ever satisfied griefers and the occasional masochist.
The comments in the Japanese business newspapers suggest that Apple believes online shopping confers an aura of 'cheapness' on their products;
Translation:
We want consumers to continue overestimating the actual usage value of our products. It is not good for our bottom line if potential buyers make objective and informed decisions.
Not that I blame Apple. It is just the ordinary day to day deceptive business practices of any successful corporation. Well informed participants in the market is not good, because it is difficult to make big profits in an actually functioning free market. In fact, in a perfectly functioning free market it would be mostly impossible to make money beyond that to pay ordinary wages and initial investments, as any business area where more money could be made would be quickly swamped with competitors.
where did GPP provide data?
GPP:
Remember, all those laws and benefits were in effect during a time when we had 4% unemployment (aka "full employment").
Game over loser.
this is one of the biggest hypes since the y2k bug fiasco... they've been telling us we're going to run out next year for YEARS now..
No they haven't. At least not the serious people. 2011 has been the projected year for quite a while. Easily verified by just using archive.org to look at the history of the potaroo.net automated IPv4 exhaustion counter. It has tracked 2011 as the year of exhaustion since at least 2006 (first entry in archive.org)
But more seriously, while the "lesser evil" argument isn't entirely valid, bear in mind that if 50% of Nader voters had voted for Gore in 2000, Gore would have won easily and the debacle that was the George W Bush administration would never have happened.
If 100% of Gore's voters had voted for Nader, the debacle would never have happened either.
So there is a good argument for "vote for the lesser evil"
Agreed. The least evil was Nader. So why didn't all of Gore's supporters, vote for him?
Why? Copyrights exist to promote the public interest by encouraging authors to create and publish works that they otherwise would not create and publish, while minimally restricting the public in terms of both the scope of protection and the duration during which the works are protected.
No. That is your and some American forefather's interpretation of why the copyright exists. In other countries, the right to be recognized as an Author of a work is already perpetual (as well as untradeable)
not only unconstitutional
Who cares except some Americans. Heck, the original constitution doesn't matter either in the long run, because you can just append it if society changes its mind on an issue.
but clearly cannot ever promote the public interest precisely because it is perpetual.
Plainly wrong. Who says it isn't in the publics interest that creators are recognized perpetually.
They harm, rather than benefit, the public;
That is your claim
; they aren't so desired by authors that authors are willing to actually do or not do anything in order to get them
Well, they already have them where I live. And they damn well don't want to lose them.
and there's nothing wrong with recycling someone else's
Which I guess is why society fully support plagiarism...
Another Canadian political party siphoning off left-leaning voters
The Pirate Party seems to be continuously under attack from right wingers who claim that they are left wing and left wingers who thinks that they are far right wing. Funny how that is.
The biggest and most important achievements in science and art happened before the existence of copyright and patent laws.
I disagree. The biggest achievements has happened in the last couple of hundred years. However, I also think that there is a huge difference between correlation and causation.
To tell people that they cannot freely share the ideas of another person for one hundred years...it just seems to fly in the face of advancement
Agreed.
If 14 years was considered an adequate amount of time to capitalize on an idea back then, before the days of speedy digital distribution (and speedy analog distribution!), why is it so long now?
Because neo-mercantilist companies and individuals have lobbied to extend it so that they can profit more. And don't expect it to change. With an expected resource crisis due to massive consumption and popultion growth on earth, the mercantalist ideas will just grow strong among those in power.
I have a problem with long copyright terms as long as the definition of derivative work is as large as it is. I also have a problem with the preventative scope of copyright in general. Exclusive rights to profit from a specific production used to be the basis of copyright. But nowadays, that is just a minor aspect of copyright.
Yeah, that's why it was never listed in the 'children' section on iplayer.. Oh wait
Miss-listed by a socially conditioned person who didn't have a clue. And the error has been corrected. Now it is correctly listed as drama and sci-fi/fantasy.
Now, a VAT would have to allow for some type of "kick back" to lower income individuals due to the regressive nature of the tax. But overall, it would go a long way to helping our economy and balancing trade.
Kickbacks only move the regressive barrier a bit higher. It doesn't change that it is still a regressive tax. And regressive taxes are bad. There is already an inherent wealth accumulating effect where the rich has a larger chance of becoming even more rich. Having the government further support that concept completely unhinges the economy.
Wealth and income taxes are generally the best kind of taxes as they are easy to make progressive. So I am constantly amazed how often regressive taxes are supported even though it has very bad consequences. Of course, that only applies if you actually have true income taxes, that tax all income, and don't allow for lots of exceptions for the rich.
That's impossible. Please find a solution that is not based at its core on a contradiction and you might be taken more seriously.
Not impossible at all. In fact, it has been well known for a long time that steep marginal income taxes are good for the economy, stimulating the middle class, and preventing the upper class from endebting the poor.
It is really basic economy.
1) Motivation is needed to get someone to perform a task.
2) Giving more motivation than needed is a bad deal.
Somehow, the rich have managed to fool the majority into thinking that rule number 2 doesn't apply to the rich.
Number three: In 1900 less than 1 percent of Americans had automobiles, now there are more cars than drivers.
And that is the way the consolidation is done. Convince the brainwashable masses that correlation equals causation, so that they will believe that advances in science and production actually has to do with giving big companies and rich people more power.
That makes P2P file sharing illegal, since I am receiving bits of copyrighted files in return for other bits of copyrighted files
P2P doesn't obligate someone to send you data in return. Most people do, but there is no obligation to do so.
If a fair price could be set for a movie download and the distribution channels were truly that pervasive, then people would have no need to give their friends anything beyond a recommendation to download the movie.
But a fair price can unfortunately not be set, because the download itself isn't worth anything. It is the production behind that took resources to produce.
By using a monopoly driven system, you redistribute an obscene part of entertainment spendings to a few big hits, while the larger part of artists end up starving. OK, that last part was an exaggeration, but that is basically how it works. When you have a strong monopoly hold over intellectual property, the few big hits profit, while the smaller artists lose out. So, if we are looking for a non-diverse and concentrated media monopoly, we should definitely support strong IP laws.
I think a minimum should be 14 years as that was good enough when distribution was primitive
At a time when distribution and marketing was done at a far slower pace. But personally I don't really care much about the length of time that someone is able to exclusively profit from a single piece of art. It is a minor piece of the puzzle.
I am more interested in other aspects of copyright, such as how works can be used or distributed without profiting, or what can be created without falling derivative works, or the right of authors to be recognized as creators regardless of the status of the distribution rights.
People forget that trademarks and copyright are not the same thing. Realistically, if Steamboat Willy fell into public domain (yeah right, like that will ever happen...) you still couldn't go off and start making your own mickey mouse movies because mickey mouse would still be an active trademark of Disney
Trademark laws are also broken. In a sane world, Disney would be the trademark, and you would know to buy "Disney's mickey mouse movies". If something is used by the intellectual property itself (such as a name or title), it shouldn't be possible to trademark it.
Trademarks are there to protect buyers from fraud and deception. That they are used by seller's nowadays to lock in their products is plain disgusting.
Not having any incentives to invent or create art is a pretty big inefficiency.
Neither free markets or monopolistic driven "markets" are good solutions for dealing with the need to increase the knowledge base of society. I do believe that free markets are to prefer as inefficiencies don't scale up as badly as in monopolistic markets, but that doesn't say much.
But in truth, with the increasing focus on knowledge driven societies, running economies based on free market theory is becoming increasingly difficult and less efficient. It is a very difficult and precarious situation that humanity as a whole is in right now. Especially as there is a misplaced faith in the free market due to its efficiency in the manufacturing growth phase of a society. And the current solutions looks to be worse than the problem itself.
the entitlement crowd
Is that referring to those who feel entitled to an artificial monopoly that distorts the free market and leads to huge inefficiencies?