This way you make money off the people who have countdown timers set on their cellphones for the next GTA or Blizzard game, who will happily pay $60. After that, however, all it does is discourage buying and encourage copyright infringment.
Publisher's get too greedy imagining dollar signs and don't look for the sweet spot on price as much as they should. I go through about a 50 pack of DVD-R's every month, and don't buy that many games or movies. But the last time I was next to the $5.50 bargin bin at Wal-Mart, I grabbed 10 movies before I knew what I was doing. And I saw plenty of other people, who obviously didn't come in to shop for DVD's, grab a few as well.
You have a point, but you can't deny that certain people will regard anything that apple sells as superior, whether or not it actually is
Except, of course, that those people are outnumbered by about a thousand to one by people who would poo poo Apple if they cured cancer and colonized Mars. Anti-fanboys, if you will.
They should do a Green Goblin movie, and I don't mean one featuring any of the Osborns. I mean Phil Urich, nephew of reporter Ben Urich, a kid who finds one of Norman's safehouses, complete with a spare suit and glider. The comic was about a stoner type kid who had lots of cool gizmos to play with but no real idea how to use them, and he keeps getting his ass handed to him by more experienced supervillians, and good guys who think he's one of the bad goblins. It was a nice little comic, but they killed it because that shithead John Bryne wanted to bring back Norman Osborn, THE ONE GUY IN COMICS WHO ACTUALLY STAYED DEAD, and didn't want two Green Goblins running around NY.
The Thunderbolts were a new superhero team that popped up after most of the MU heros were "unavailable" due to a horrible storyline. However, at the end of the first issue, it turns out they're actually the rather lamely named Masters of Evil. But the premise would could be cool, bad guys posing as superheros.
And I want all of you bitches to realize that neither the game nor Steam tell you were to do this. You shouldn't have to hunt around on the internet to find out about a setting that should be in the game's options screen.
Gabe Newell and his crew also brought forth two of the best FPS games ever made
Half Life 2 has to take a back seat to many, many, many other games on the "best ever" list. So far back that it doesn't even rate an honorable mention. Half Life 1 was awesome, and an excellent contender for #1 game of all time.
released a game for free
It's not so free if you had to pay for it, and you had to pay for Half-Life to get TFC. And it was just about impossible to find HL in a bargin bin; generally you could only find the latest Super Steriod Nuclear Fission Studmuffin Pack for the same $50 that you would have paid for the origional.
The only place I've really seen it railed on is/.
I've seen plenty of people on game forums bitch about it. You wont see gaming mags bitch about Steam because they are dependant on game companies for freebies.
I'm getting a strong wiff of a bs rationalization...
Is the military, incl the Army National Guard, getting smaller? Yes it is. Is it getting smaller, because of planned reductions, or is it getting smaller because they can't retain/recruit people. It is the former.
Those numbers sure sound like they're based on pre-911 peacetime. It should have been obvious to just about anyone, by oh, noon on September 11th, 2001 that we might want some more Guard troops. And as gung-ho on the military as the Republican party is on waging war (though much less gung-ho on paying for medical care and benefits for veterans), I really don't see them calling for more reductions. Unless you're again responding to shortages in the Army by talking about how the Air Force is doing just fine...
For instance, for the Air Guard, FY 2004:
I might not be able to smell bullshit across the room, but I sure as hell can smell it when someone tries to sneak it under my nose. That is the Air Guard. You know, from the Air Force. As if the Air Force is going to have massive recruitment problems when it's the Army taking the brunt of the casualties in Iraq.
The animators you mentioned may be not be able to use Mickey Mouse, but that just means that they have to create their own character. That's actually forcing innovation.
That's forcing invention, and invention is not required for innovation. For a technical example, Apple did not invent the mp3 player, but they innovated it by using a hard drive and a much faster connection interface.
First of all, characters like Cinderella are public domain, and have been used in productions such as "Into the Woods" without reprecussions as far as I know.
Yes, you can do stories based off the old fabels, but you can't do stories based off additions to the fabels. For example, you could write your own book or make your own movie on Dorothy Gale and her adventures in OZ, because the copyrights on the books have expired. But if you want to use the Ruby Slippers, which MGM added to the 1939 movie to show off the new technicolor process, you have to walk over to MGM's office to get permission, and you better be carrying a fat checkbook.
Another reason to be concerned about perpetual copyrights is because one already exists: Peter Pan. The profits go to a children's hospital, and there isn't a politician in the world who would go against funding it. It looks like the only thing that's going to stop Disney, a purely commercial interest, from having copyrights as long as the GOSH hospital is a ruling by the Supreme Court. But the current court has already ruled in favor of extentions, and with two business friendly nominees on the way, I wouldn't count on these ludicrous extentions to end for a few decades.
there are quite a few cases where foreign copyrights were not respected across the international border, particularly in the United States up to about 1960
What's funny is that the major "intellectual property" industries were themselves founded on ripping people off. Aside from the nice weather, Hollywood ended up in California to get away from Thomas Edison's patents on cameras. The radio and recording industries used loopholes to avoid paying royalties to musicians and song writers. The real problem with P2P isn't that it fails to pay out royalties, it's that it puts control in the hand of the end user, rather than a giant corporation out to make insane amounts of money.
I once saw a sensible suggestion from a Slashdot poster. Go ahead and have endless copyrights, but start charging the copyright holder fees after a certain period, let's say 50 years for an individual, and 25 for a corporation. The fee would probably have to start off flat to avoid Hollywood accounting, and it would increase by a percentage every year. Say the fee starts at $500, and increases by 5% a year, all the way up to 100%. After 5 years you'd be paying $800, in 20 it would be $80,000 a year, and at 30 years, $80 million. This would give the public something back for having to put up with long copyrights, while the holder could maintain his monopoly, though it would be unfeasible to do it forever.
One has to wonder if the above is really just some smart ass attempting to make Mac zealots look really, really stupid.
No, just a smart assed reply to some really, really stupid Apple anti-fanboyism. Another distinction you ignored is the fact that Xerox good a good sum of money from Apple over the GUI, while Microsoft didn't give anyone anything.
I wasn't suggesting that we settle. I was merely trying to say that the man had admirable attributes.
Sure, sure.:) It just sounded like the natural tendancy of people to speak very well of the recently departed, while ignoring any flaws they might have.
But a good number of current appointees seem to be chosen based on their personality, while their qualifications come in at a very distant second. See John Bolton and the director of FEMA for a couple of examples. So yes, it would be nice to get someone who takes his profession as seriously as Rehnquist.
What I liked most was that he was a true federalist. Even if I didn't always like his decisions, he understood that the US government is a limited government.
Maybe if you're colorblind. The whole problem with the "activist judge" label is that it merely a term for a judge who makes decisions that displease the right wing of the Republican party. A judge can make a straight ruling based on the Constitution and be labeled an "activist" (see just about any ruling on school prayer). However if a judge pulls stuff out of his ass on a regular basis he's not an "activist" if the right wing likes his decisions. See Roy Moore for an example.
As for Rehnquist personally, it was hard for him to find an expansion of law enforcment powers he didn't like or an unreasonable search and seisure he didn't approve. That doesn't sound "limited" to me.
Whether you agreed with his decisions or not, he was a man who was dedicated to his work.
To steal a phrase from Get Your War On, we put a man on the moon, I think we can do a little better than to merely settle for a lawyer who is "dedicated" to his work.
There were plenty of mediocre justices and mediocre decisions before Reinquist. Just look at the Dred Scott decision or for a less overly sited example, exempting MLB from antitrust laws.
This is the sort of nonsense that comes out of people's mouths when they take about the "golden age of Hollywood" but only compare crap movies from today to good movies from the past. So they'll put Biodome up next to Casablanca, but never compare Spielberg to Ed Wood.
The fees are a *tiny* fraction of the money needed to defend a patent. If you can't afford the legal fees to defend it, don't bother with the patent, because it's useless anyway. The first company with money that likes your idea will steal it, and probably sue you for violation of a few other patents in the process.
So? Patents are not trademarks, you don't lose them if you don't defend them. And if company X does rip you off and makes lots of money off your invention, then sooner or later some lawyers will be happy to take your case *for free* in return for a chunk of your very large settlement.
If your mythical "small inventors" can't find the funding to pay the application fee, how on earth are they going to find the funds to turn it into a product?
Something preventing them from selling/licensing the design to others?
This reminds me of the amusing, although almost certainly apocryphal, story of the corporation who attempted to gain all intellectual property rights over the desktop metaphor for computer interfaces using copyright.
Except that's crap, which you would realize if you looked at Windows and Mac OS for more than two seconds. "Oh, instead of having the icons on the right side of the screen, they put them on the left! And the trash can is now called the recycle bin! And instead of having the menu bar at the top of the screen, it's now on the bottom!"
So no, Apple was not suing because they wanted to own the GUI, they sued because Windows was a blatant ripoff of their design. If Microsoft had come up with something like Black Box, Apple wouldn't have cared. But don't let reality interfere with your Apple anti-fanboyism.
All technology companies patent stuff as fast as they can, to prevent scenarios just like this one (from Apple's perspective), but not all companies sue as fast as they are awarded the patents. There's only a few cases from Apple that really stand out, imo: them suing Miicrosoft back in the day, suing eMachines over their iMac look-a-like, and a few cease and desist letters over their logos appearing in aqua themes. Contrast that to Adobe and Macromedia, who would sue eachother every couple of months over some truly lame patents, such as tabs in a pallet window.
And then there are companies that don't even try to patent inventions, because they don't actually invent anything. Rather, they invent patents by looking at where an industry is going, hazard a guess as to what someone else might come up with, and run to the patent office. I read a nice story about a guy (couldn't find a link in a couple minutes of Googling, sorry) who made about a billion dollars by doing exactly that. He got millions from the auto industry by patenting a mechanical eye that would detect defective parts. He didn't do a damned thing to research or develop it, he just looked to where the industry was heading and ran to the patent office.
The problem, imo, is that the patent system is too lenient on accepting ideas and way to lax on requiring actuall implementations.
That'd be most transportation, utility, and manufacturing companies.
And you don't think transportation, utility, and manufacturing companies would benefit from more efficient technologies? You don't seem to realize that as the cost of energy increases, it will save these companies money to switch, not cost them money. I work for a company based in the midwest that makes windows, and most of our market is on the east coast. A boost of even 1 mpg would probably save my employers thousands of dollars in September alone, with gas prices shooting up to $4 a gallon.
Or another example, say GM came out with a new line of hybrid trucks that got great gas mileage, but cost four times as much as a regular diesel engine. You don't think UPS, FedEx, and just about any other shipping company wouldn't be taking a good look at these?
Give me just ONE example of where COPYRIGHT (NOT trademarks, and NOT patents) prevents innovation.
Snore...it's late and I'm actually asleep right now, but I can still answer your question, because it's that pathetically easy to do so. One word: Disney. The majority of their animated movies are based on the expired copyrights of others. Turning Cinderella from a story about the stepsisters cutting parts of their feet off to make them fit in a shoe into a classic children's movie qualifies as innovation.
And not all of the stories are centuries old, either. If Rudyard Kipling had enjoyed the copyright protections demanded by Disney, the studio would have had to pay his estate royalties for the Jungle Book.
So you get the one-two of Disney using other peoples works for themselves but no one can use any Disney created charachters. I read a nice article on how some animators would like to do something with Mickey Mouse, since the only thing Disney uses him for now is harrasing kids at theme parks, but they can't because of perpetual copyright extensions.
See, like I said, easy. Come back when I'm awake if you actually have a hard question to ask.
The GPL gives you rights not normally found under copyright law, not takes them away. So if the GPL is "unenforcable", you need to get the writer(s) permission before you can use said code.
while everyone remembers when Apple sued Microsoft in the 80s over the idea of a GUI
Not the idea of a GUI, they sued over the blatant ripoff that Windows was of the Mac OS interface. "Oh, lets rename the trash to the recycle bin! And let's have the icons on the left side of the screen instead of the right! And our menu bar will be on the bottom of the screen, instead of the top! And we'll call it the taskbar!!!"
And for the record, Xerox didn't invent the GUI, either...they just refined it. As did Apple. Microsoft didn't refine anything, they just copied someone else. The reason Apple lost the suit was some contract language over sharing code with Quicktime, not because they didn't have a case.
Slashdot Mirror
This way you make money off the people who have countdown timers set on their cellphones for the next GTA or Blizzard game, who will happily pay $60. After that, however, all it does is discourage buying and encourage copyright infringment.
Publisher's get too greedy imagining dollar signs and don't look for the sweet spot on price as much as they should. I go through about a 50 pack of DVD-R's every month, and don't buy that many games or movies. But the last time I was next to the $5.50 bargin bin at Wal-Mart, I grabbed 10 movies before I knew what I was doing. And I saw plenty of other people, who obviously didn't come in to shop for DVD's, grab a few as well.
You have a point, but you can't deny that certain people will regard anything that apple sells as superior, whether or not it actually is
Except, of course, that those people are outnumbered by about a thousand to one by people who would poo poo Apple if they cured cancer and colonized Mars. Anti-fanboys, if you will.
Can you say...bullshit? True Lies, a 911 type movie if there ever was one, was a big hit, almost ten years before 911.
They should do a Green Goblin movie, and I don't mean one featuring any of the Osborns. I mean Phil Urich, nephew of reporter Ben Urich, a kid who finds one of Norman's safehouses, complete with a spare suit and glider. The comic was about a stoner type kid who had lots of cool gizmos to play with but no real idea how to use them, and he keeps getting his ass handed to him by more experienced supervillians, and good guys who think he's one of the bad goblins. It was a nice little comic, but they killed it because that shithead John Bryne wanted to bring back Norman Osborn, THE ONE GUY IN COMICS WHO ACTUALLY STAYED DEAD, and didn't want two Green Goblins running around NY.
The Thunderbolts were a new superhero team that popped up after most of the MU heros were "unavailable" due to a horrible storyline. However, at the end of the first issue, it turns out they're actually the rather lamely named Masters of Evil. But the premise would could be cool, bad guys posing as superheros.
And I want all of you bitches to realize that neither the game nor Steam tell you were to do this. You shouldn't have to hunt around on the internet to find out about a setting that should be in the game's options screen.
waiting until PC hardware matched or exceeded the console's (about 2 years)
2 years? Sure you aren't making the common mistake of comparing future console hardware to today's PC hardware?
Gabe Newell and his crew also brought forth two of the best FPS games ever made
/.
Half Life 2 has to take a back seat to many, many, many other games on the "best ever" list. So far back that it doesn't even rate an honorable mention. Half Life 1 was awesome, and an excellent contender for #1 game of all time.
released a game for free
It's not so free if you had to pay for it, and you had to pay for Half-Life to get TFC. And it was just about impossible to find HL in a bargin bin; generally you could only find the latest Super Steriod Nuclear Fission Studmuffin Pack for the same $50 that you would have paid for the origional.
The only place I've really seen it railed on is
I've seen plenty of people on game forums bitch about it. You wont see gaming mags bitch about Steam because they are dependant on game companies for freebies.
The first Half-Life belongs in the top of the top ten, no question about it. Half Life 2, on the other hand, doesn't even rate an honorable mention.
I'm getting a strong wiff of a bs rationalization...
Is the military, incl the Army National Guard, getting smaller? Yes it is.
Is it getting smaller, because of planned reductions, or is it getting smaller because they can't retain/recruit people. It is the former.
Those numbers sure sound like they're based on pre-911 peacetime. It should have been obvious to just about anyone, by oh, noon on September 11th, 2001 that we might want some more Guard troops. And as gung-ho on the military as the Republican party is on waging war (though much less gung-ho on paying for medical care and benefits for veterans), I really don't see them calling for more reductions. Unless you're again responding to shortages in the Army by talking about how the Air Force is doing just fine...
For instance, for the Air Guard, FY 2004:
I might not be able to smell bullshit across the room, but I sure as hell can smell it when someone tries to sneak it under my nose. That is the Air Guard. You know, from the Air Force. As if the Air Force is going to have massive recruitment problems when it's the Army taking the brunt of the casualties in Iraq.
Nice try, Sparky.
The animators you mentioned may be not be able to use Mickey Mouse, but that just means that they have to create their own character. That's actually forcing innovation.
That's forcing invention, and invention is not required for innovation. For a technical example, Apple did not invent the mp3 player, but they innovated it by using a hard drive and a much faster connection interface.
First of all, characters like Cinderella are public domain, and have been used in productions such as "Into the Woods" without reprecussions as far as I know.
Yes, you can do stories based off the old fabels, but you can't do stories based off additions to the fabels. For example, you could write your own book or make your own movie on Dorothy Gale and her adventures in OZ, because the copyrights on the books have expired. But if you want to use the Ruby Slippers, which MGM added to the 1939 movie to show off the new technicolor process, you have to walk over to MGM's office to get permission, and you better be carrying a fat checkbook.
Another reason to be concerned about perpetual copyrights is because one already exists: Peter Pan. The profits go to a children's hospital, and there isn't a politician in the world who would go against funding it. It looks like the only thing that's going to stop Disney, a purely commercial interest, from having copyrights as long as the GOSH hospital is a ruling by the Supreme Court. But the current court has already ruled in favor of extentions, and with two business friendly nominees on the way, I wouldn't count on these ludicrous extentions to end for a few decades.
there are quite a few cases where foreign copyrights were not respected across the international border, particularly in the United States up to about 1960
What's funny is that the major "intellectual property" industries were themselves founded on ripping people off. Aside from the nice weather, Hollywood ended up in California to get away from Thomas Edison's patents on cameras. The radio and recording industries used loopholes to avoid paying royalties to musicians and song writers. The real problem with P2P isn't that it fails to pay out royalties, it's that it puts control in the hand of the end user, rather than a giant corporation out to make insane amounts of money.
I once saw a sensible suggestion from a Slashdot poster. Go ahead and have endless copyrights, but start charging the copyright holder fees after a certain period, let's say 50 years for an individual, and 25 for a corporation. The fee would probably have to start off flat to avoid Hollywood accounting, and it would increase by a percentage every year. Say the fee starts at $500, and increases by 5% a year, all the way up to 100%. After 5 years you'd be paying $800, in 20 it would be $80,000 a year, and at 30 years, $80 million. This would give the public something back for having to put up with long copyrights, while the holder could maintain his monopoly, though it would be unfeasible to do it forever.
One has to wonder if the above is really just some smart ass attempting to make Mac zealots look really, really stupid.
No, just a smart assed reply to some really, really stupid Apple anti-fanboyism. Another distinction you ignored is the fact that Xerox good a good sum of money from Apple over the GUI, while Microsoft didn't give anyone anything.
I wasn't suggesting that we settle. I was merely trying to say that the man had admirable attributes.
:) It just sounded like the natural tendancy of people to speak very well of the recently departed, while ignoring any flaws they might have.
Sure, sure.
But a good number of current appointees seem to be chosen based on their personality, while their qualifications come in at a very distant second. See John Bolton and the director of FEMA for a couple of examples. So yes, it would be nice to get someone who takes his profession as seriously as Rehnquist.
What I liked most was that he was a true federalist. Even if I didn't always like his decisions, he understood that the US government is a limited government.
Maybe if you're colorblind. The whole problem with the "activist judge" label is that it merely a term for a judge who makes decisions that displease the right wing of the Republican party. A judge can make a straight ruling based on the Constitution and be labeled an "activist" (see just about any ruling on school prayer). However if a judge pulls stuff out of his ass on a regular basis he's not an "activist" if the right wing likes his decisions. See Roy Moore for an example.
As for Rehnquist personally, it was hard for him to find an expansion of law enforcment powers he didn't like or an unreasonable search and seisure he didn't approve. That doesn't sound "limited" to me.
Whether you agreed with his decisions or not, he was a man who was dedicated to his work.
To steal a phrase from Get Your War On, we put a man on the moon, I think we can do a little better than to merely settle for a lawyer who is "dedicated" to his work.
There were plenty of mediocre justices and mediocre decisions before Reinquist. Just look at the Dred Scott decision or for a less overly sited example, exempting MLB from antitrust laws.
This is the sort of nonsense that comes out of people's mouths when they take about the "golden age of Hollywood" but only compare crap movies from today to good movies from the past. So they'll put Biodome up next to Casablanca, but never compare Spielberg to Ed Wood.
Are you still back in Iraq? If so, you must have a lot of down time. :)
The fees are a *tiny* fraction of the money needed to defend a patent. If you can't afford the legal fees to defend it, don't bother with the patent, because it's useless anyway. The first company with money that likes your idea will steal it, and probably sue you for violation of a few other patents in the process.
So? Patents are not trademarks, you don't lose them if you don't defend them. And if company X does rip you off and makes lots of money off your invention, then sooner or later some lawyers will be happy to take your case *for free* in return for a chunk of your very large settlement.
If your mythical "small inventors" can't find the funding to pay the application fee, how on earth are they going to find the funds to turn it into a product?
Something preventing them from selling/licensing the design to others?
None of these cases involve patents, you anti-Apple fanboy.
This reminds me of the amusing, although almost certainly apocryphal, story of the corporation who attempted to gain all intellectual property rights over the desktop metaphor for computer interfaces using copyright.
Except that's crap, which you would realize if you looked at Windows and Mac OS for more than two seconds. "Oh, instead of having the icons on the right side of the screen, they put them on the left! And the trash can is now called the recycle bin! And instead of having the menu bar at the top of the screen, it's now on the bottom!"
So no, Apple was not suing because they wanted to own the GUI, they sued because Windows was a blatant ripoff of their design. If Microsoft had come up with something like Black Box, Apple wouldn't have cared. But don't let reality interfere with your Apple anti-fanboyism.
All technology companies patent stuff as fast as they can, to prevent scenarios just like this one (from Apple's perspective), but not all companies sue as fast as they are awarded the patents. There's only a few cases from Apple that really stand out, imo: them suing Miicrosoft back in the day, suing eMachines over their iMac look-a-like, and a few cease and desist letters over their logos appearing in aqua themes. Contrast that to Adobe and Macromedia, who would sue eachother every couple of months over some truly lame patents, such as tabs in a pallet window.
And then there are companies that don't even try to patent inventions, because they don't actually invent anything. Rather, they invent patents by looking at where an industry is going, hazard a guess as to what someone else might come up with, and run to the patent office. I read a nice story about a guy (couldn't find a link in a couple minutes of Googling, sorry) who made about a billion dollars by doing exactly that. He got millions from the auto industry by patenting a mechanical eye that would detect defective parts. He didn't do a damned thing to research or develop it, he just looked to where the industry was heading and ran to the patent office.
The problem, imo, is that the patent system is too lenient on accepting ideas and way to lax on requiring actuall implementations.
That'd be most transportation, utility, and manufacturing companies.
And you don't think transportation, utility, and manufacturing companies would benefit from more efficient technologies? You don't seem to realize that as the cost of energy increases, it will save these companies money to switch, not cost them money. I work for a company based in the midwest that makes windows, and most of our market is on the east coast. A boost of even 1 mpg would probably save my employers thousands of dollars in September alone, with gas prices shooting up to $4 a gallon.
Or another example, say GM came out with a new line of hybrid trucks that got great gas mileage, but cost four times as much as a regular diesel engine. You don't think UPS, FedEx, and just about any other shipping company wouldn't be taking a good look at these?
Give me just ONE example of where COPYRIGHT (NOT trademarks, and NOT patents) prevents innovation.
Snore...it's late and I'm actually asleep right now, but I can still answer your question, because it's that pathetically easy to do so. One word: Disney. The majority of their animated movies are based on the expired copyrights of others. Turning Cinderella from a story about the stepsisters cutting parts of their feet off to make them fit in a shoe into a classic children's movie qualifies as innovation.
And not all of the stories are centuries old, either. If Rudyard Kipling had enjoyed the copyright protections demanded by Disney, the studio would have had to pay his estate royalties for the Jungle Book.
So you get the one-two of Disney using other peoples works for themselves but no one can use any Disney created charachters. I read a nice article on how some animators would like to do something with Mickey Mouse, since the only thing Disney uses him for now is harrasing kids at theme parks, but they can't because of perpetual copyright extensions.
See, like I said, easy. Come back when I'm awake if you actually have a hard question to ask.
The GPL gives you rights not normally found under copyright law, not takes them away. So if the GPL is "unenforcable", you need to get the writer(s) permission before you can use said code.
while everyone remembers when Apple sued Microsoft in the 80s over the idea of a GUI
Not the idea of a GUI, they sued over the blatant ripoff that Windows was of the Mac OS interface. "Oh, lets rename the trash to the recycle bin! And let's have the icons on the left side of the screen instead of the right! And our menu bar will be on the bottom of the screen, instead of the top! And we'll call it the taskbar!!!"
And for the record, Xerox didn't invent the GUI, either...they just refined it. As did Apple. Microsoft didn't refine anything, they just copied someone else. The reason Apple lost the suit was some contract language over sharing code with Quicktime, not because they didn't have a case.