And conversely, if I'm foreign I shouldn't be affected by American laws, unless of course I set foot on their jurisdiction. Now you tell that to Gary McKinnon, for example.
What could company A gain? Well, it could be argued that they might be secretly trying to squash a competitor.
The competitor could do the same to them.
Also, they could gain notoriety in people's minds as the actual distributor of the work, rather than the actual publisher, so that people who obtain it might browse a bit more and also buy buy some of company A's actual works.
Unlikely, people are usually interested in works, not publishers. For that to work, the publisher's actual works would have to be something in which people would be interested already, regardless of there being any free distribution of someone else's works. In your example, if publisher A doesn't publish anything that interests me besides the free copies of publisher B's work, I ain't buying anything from publisher A.
Oh, and you're still comparing oranges to apples, or in this case massive copying with small-scale copying.
Note that I said "most", hoping that you would be able to understand that simple word and not be childish enough to resort to the "sadist" argument* (or anything simillar, such as "psychopath"). Clearly, I was expecting too much of you.
Except that factor would be gone in a world with replicators. And so would most criminals, if not all of them. Therefore your point is rendered moot by your inability to comprehend the consequences of having something like the replicators.
What Anon Coward? You know far too well who I am, considering what I'm answering to and how. Excuse me for the limitations that Slashdot places on posting.
Oh, and let me know when you've graduated from elementary school. I'm not one to enjoy trying to have a serious conversation with an uneducated brat.
And how do you expect me to think anything about it without watching it? By reading the reviews? That's not what I think, is what others think. By seeing the trailer? Yeah, because trailers are perfect to get a good idea of the whole movie.
Let's be serious, without seeing a movie, at most I can think that I might like (or not like) it, based on who directed it, the actors that take part on it, the general idea of the plot, etc. And even then it could end up being the opposite of what I expected, so I'd occasionally end up watching crap, or missing excellent works.
I am not a baby boomer (I'm not even 30), but a good percentage of my CD's is music from the 60's and 70's, and that's because there's practically nothing amongst those "modern works" that I find as good as the old stuff.
I pray that you, and the likes of you, are never allowed to make laws, or into any position of responsibility related to running a community (and that includes communities as small as a family, by the way). Sure you can figure out why.
Fair enough, creators (and I'm using the term loosely, to account for musicians and car designers, and that's only two examples) have to get paid so their salaries must be included in the price of the copies of their creations. So, riddle me this: why do musicians not have a salary, and why do cars cost the same after enough cars have been sold to account for the salary of the designers?
When you make a copy of a copyrighted work, you do not deprive the seller (or any other involved parties, such as the author, or the big company making most of the profit for said copyrighted work) of any profit or livelihood. Therefore, since your whole point is based on a false premise...
Without a major sea change in the way that society thinks and acts it would indeed grind to a halt.
Another claim without proof. As for that change, it's precisely the central point of the argument: the Universal Replicator. If that doesn't change society, nothing will.
The education required to change our societies that much would require the entire world to first accept communism and socialism as the norm.
No.
Then when no production is required and no one needs to produce raw materials and no one needs to worry about being sued you might get to the point that you could make these replicators work.
You don't even understand the premise of the replicators and how they're supposed to work. Read the previous posts again.
This ain't the Star Trek universe sadly.
You realize it was a hypothetical situation, right?
So where (and when) exactly did I say that copying a certain number of bytes constitutes a theft? Oh, that's right, I didn't.
If you had proper reading comprehension skills you would have correctly interpreted my message as meaning "copying a copyrighted work is not always and everywhere considered copyright infringement" instead of the ludicrous interpretation of "somewhere, under certain circumstances, copying a copyrighted work is considered theft" that for some reason you thought was correct. So, since practice makes perfect, I suggest that you start reading lots of stuff as soon as possible.
Yeah, the fifty million they dropped on the movie is practically zero; they earn it back the instant it goes out to theaters, and once they reach the magical line of $0, they ought not make a profit. The whole point of movies is to entertain people, after all; it isn't a business!
Wait, what?
MARGINAL. COST. For Pete's sake, can't you people read? Or is it that you do not know what marginal cost is?
I mean, I get that you aren't physically stealing a disk and then kicking a baby, but it's hardly justified. In the end, someone put their time into something, often doing something that few people can (As terrible as Transformers was, they truly did have some revolutionary graphics with millions of polygons and animations in the faces alone). While I find DRM and anti-consumer behavior appalling, it's a far cry from justifying not paying.
Whoever said anything about not paying? Who justified anything? Certainly not me.
If you have a problem with their policy, stop consuming their product. Are we really all such blind consumers that we can't live without their DRM laced crap? Do we need it to the point where we'll blatantly break the law just so we can have their shit for free? We can't honestly take our money elsewhere?
First, I'm not blatantly breaking the law. I wouldn't be even if I downloaded stuff. Don't assume the laws in your country apply elsewhere.
Second, don't assume I'm consuming their product.
By God, I can connect this to cars!
Please don't. Car analogies have been proven to be inadequate again and again.
Say that you design a bloody brilliant car. Everyone wants to own it, but it's a little pricey. Well, you set it out in the world, all of these copies of your prototype. Someone buys your car, and figures out how to copy it. He copies it a few hundred times, and just starts giving them away to people. Suddenly, the car you designed is being produced rapidly by someone else, without any flaws in the new model at all. People caught with the copy of your car argue that they were never going to buy your model, that it had some sort of flaw in it that prevented it from going over 70 Mph which made it suck.
See? Inadequate analogy, and not only because it treats industrial property as intellectual property and tangible goods with a marginal cost that is not practically zero as intangible products with a marginal cost that is practically zero.
In short: If you can't afford it, if you're too lazy to go get it, if you think there's a flaw in the software, or if you can't get it in your region...don't get it.
But if I can afford it, I'm not too lazy to get it, and regadless of me thinking there's a flaw in the product (which may or may not be software), but there's a better (and legal, at least where I live*), cheaper way of getting it... Gee, whatever should I do?
*Note that this doesn't necessarily mean I approve of someone doing it if it's illegal where he lives.
The marginal cost of most medicines, relative to the cost of their initial development, is also practically zero.
Marginal cost is never relative to the cost of initial development. And if you meant to say the ratio of marginal cost to cost of development, do the same for the movie, please.
The cost of a movie is the year or so of filming, a half dozen significant actors, a dozen less significant actors, maybe a bunch of extras; several dozen behind-the-camera people and support. Maybe a couple hundred million.
That is completely unrelated to marginal cost.
The marginal cost of production is maybe $0.02. The cost of putting a drug into production is a decade of development (assuming you don't count the decade or two of basic science preceding it), dozens of top-notch, PhD scientists, hundreds of clinicians and postdocs, thousands of human volunteers and animal subjects. Design and construction of a plant to mass produce the chemical. Maybe a couple billion. The cost of producing a single pill: not much more that $0.02. Probably not much more that $0.0002 for something really popular.
If a cookie costs $0.05 to make, that's a marginal cost. If a CD costs $0.05 to make, it's marginal cost too.
True. But I don't remember saying otherwise...
But then the cookie will cost $0.10 in retail and the CD will cost $50
Tue. And irrelevant.
Stealing $100 (retail)worth of cookies will cost the manufacturer much more than stealing $100 worth of CDs. The baker lost $50. The label lost $0.10. Still, even with cost of zero, the label will claim it lost some...$800,000?...while the baker can't claim more than $100 in losses anyway.
Again, true. Again, that has nothing to do with what I originally said.
No, something in the public domain has no rights associated with it at all.
Not true. Moral rights, such as the right to be credited, still apply to works in the Public Domain. It's "commercial" rights (excuse the poor wording, English is not my mother tongue and legal systems other than those in European countries -with the exception of the UK- don't have an important clear distinction between the two types of intellectual property rights) that don't apply: the rights to distribute, sell, make copies, etc. For more on this subject, refer to the Berne Convention, art. 6 bis.
I can say "Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio," as much as I like.
True.
I can attribute it to Plato, or to Luther Blisset, if I like.
True. However, you cannot do the same when distributing a copy of Hamlet.
I could even produce a whole, unabridged Hamlet without ever acknowledging the author, because it's been in the public domain for centuries.
Not true, see the Berne Convention.
For something like Hamlet, many people recognize both the work and the author, but for most of the crap that's in PD, no such fame accords, and the absence of credit may lead to misattribution.
That doesn't change the fact that the right to be credited cannot be forfeited by the author, and it never expires. Therefore, works in Public Domain still must be credited properly. Therefore, you are wrong.
No, you are not. What I'm suggesting is that it's not a deal, neither big or small, simply because when something is practically free to reproduce and exclusivity over the process of making said reproduction cannot be had or enforced, you cannot stop people from reproducing it. Sure, if you have the law in your side you can prosecute a few and hope that the rest get scared and stop, but we all know it's not gonna work.
The same reasoning ("the right to expect contracts to be fulfilled guarantees ownerxhip of X") could apply to everything. Congratulations, you just defended the existence of slavery.
Slashdot Mirror
And conversely, if I'm foreign I shouldn't be affected by American laws, unless of course I set foot on their jurisdiction. Now you tell that to Gary McKinnon, for example.
What could company A gain? Well, it could be argued that they might be secretly trying to squash a competitor.
The competitor could do the same to them.
Also, they could gain notoriety in people's minds as the actual distributor of the work, rather than the actual publisher, so that people who obtain it might browse a bit more and also buy buy some of company A's actual works.
Unlikely, people are usually interested in works, not publishers. For that to work, the publisher's actual works would have to be something in which people would be interested already, regardless of there being any free distribution of someone else's works. In your example, if publisher A doesn't publish anything that interests me besides the free copies of publisher B's work, I ain't buying anything from publisher A.
Oh, and you're still comparing oranges to apples, or in this case massive copying with small-scale copying.
Note that I said "most", hoping that you would be able to understand that simple word and not be childish enough to resort to the "sadist" argument* (or anything simillar, such as "psychopath"). Clearly, I was expecting too much of you.
*or rather, non-argument.
Except that factor would be gone in a world with replicators. And so would most criminals, if not all of them. Therefore your point is rendered moot by your inability to comprehend the consequences of having something like the replicators.
What Anon Coward? You know far too well who I am, considering what I'm answering to and how. Excuse me for the limitations that Slashdot places on posting.
Oh, and let me know when you've graduated from elementary school. I'm not one to enjoy trying to have a serious conversation with an uneducated brat.
And how do you expect me to think anything about it without watching it? By reading the reviews? That's not what I think, is what others think. By seeing the trailer? Yeah, because trailers are perfect to get a good idea of the whole movie.
Let's be serious, without seeing a movie, at most I can think that I might like (or not like) it, based on who directed it, the actors that take part on it, the general idea of the plot, etc. And even then it could end up being the opposite of what I expected, so I'd occasionally end up watching crap, or missing excellent works.
Or you could explain why this isn't so.
I am not a baby boomer (I'm not even 30), but a good percentage of my CD's is music from the 60's and 70's, and that's because there's practically nothing amongst those "modern works" that I find as good as the old stuff.
I pray that you, and the likes of you, are never allowed to make laws, or into any position of responsibility related to running a community (and that includes communities as small as a family, by the way). Sure you can figure out why.
Fair enough, creators (and I'm using the term loosely, to account for musicians and car designers, and that's only two examples) have to get paid so their salaries must be included in the price of the copies of their creations. So, riddle me this: why do musicians not have a salary, and why do cars cost the same after enough cars have been sold to account for the salary of the designers?
When you make a copy of a copyrighted work, you do not deprive the seller (or any other involved parties, such as the author, or the big company making most of the profit for said copyrighted work) of any profit or livelihood. Therefore, since your whole point is based on a false premise...
That's only on the (very ludicrous) assumption that I would have paid for it if I couldn't get it any other way.
No.
Without a major sea change in the way that society thinks and acts it would indeed grind to a halt.
Another claim without proof. As for that change, it's precisely the central point of the argument: the Universal Replicator. If that doesn't change society, nothing will.
The education required to change our societies that much would require the entire world to first accept communism and socialism as the norm.
No.
Then when no production is required and no one needs to produce raw materials and no one needs to worry about being sued you might get to the point that you could make these replicators work.
You don't even understand the premise of the replicators and how they're supposed to work. Read the previous posts again.
This ain't the Star Trek universe sadly.
You realize it was a hypothetical situation, right?
So where (and when) exactly did I say that copying a certain number of bytes constitutes a theft? Oh, that's right, I didn't.
If you had proper reading comprehension skills you would have correctly interpreted my message as meaning "copying a copyrighted work is not always and everywhere considered copyright infringement" instead of the ludicrous interpretation of "somewhere, under certain circumstances, copying a copyrighted work is considered theft" that for some reason you thought was correct. So, since practice makes perfect, I suggest that you start reading lots of stuff as soon as possible.
Yeah, the fifty million they dropped on the movie is practically zero; they earn it back the instant it goes out to theaters, and once they reach the magical line of $0, they ought not make a profit. The whole point of movies is to entertain people, after all; it isn't a business!
Wait, what?
MARGINAL. COST. For Pete's sake, can't you people read? Or is it that you do not know what marginal cost is?
I mean, I get that you aren't physically stealing a disk and then kicking a baby, but it's hardly justified. In the end, someone put their time into something, often doing something that few people can (As terrible as Transformers was, they truly did have some revolutionary graphics with millions of polygons and animations in the faces alone). While I find DRM and anti-consumer behavior appalling, it's a far cry from justifying not paying.
Whoever said anything about not paying? Who justified anything? Certainly not me.
If you have a problem with their policy, stop consuming their product. Are we really all such blind consumers that we can't live without their DRM laced crap? Do we need it to the point where we'll blatantly break the law just so we can have their shit for free? We can't honestly take our money elsewhere?
First, I'm not blatantly breaking the law. I wouldn't be even if I downloaded stuff. Don't assume the laws in your country apply elsewhere.
Second, don't assume I'm consuming their product.
By God, I can connect this to cars!
Please don't. Car analogies have been proven to be inadequate again and again.
Say that you design a bloody brilliant car. Everyone wants to own it, but it's a little pricey. Well, you set it out in the world, all of these copies of your prototype. Someone buys your car, and figures out how to copy it. He copies it a few hundred times, and just starts giving them away to people. Suddenly, the car you designed is being produced rapidly by someone else, without any flaws in the new model at all. People caught with the copy of your car argue that they were never going to buy your model, that it had some sort of flaw in it that prevented it from going over 70 Mph which made it suck.
See? Inadequate analogy, and not only because it treats industrial property as intellectual property and tangible goods with a marginal cost that is not practically zero as intangible products with a marginal cost that is practically zero.
In short: If you can't afford it, if you're too lazy to go get it, if you think there's a flaw in the software, or if you can't get it in your region...don't get it.
But if I can afford it, I'm not too lazy to get it, and regadless of me thinking there's a flaw in the product (which may or may not be software), but there's a better (and legal, at least where I live*), cheaper way of getting it... Gee, whatever should I do?
*Note that this doesn't necessarily mean I approve of someone doing it if it's illegal where he lives.
The marginal cost of most medicines, relative to the cost of their initial development, is also practically zero.
Marginal cost is never relative to the cost of initial development. And if you meant to say the ratio of marginal cost to cost of development, do the same for the movie, please.
The cost of a movie is the year or so of filming, a half dozen significant actors, a dozen less significant actors, maybe a bunch of extras; several dozen behind-the-camera people and support. Maybe a couple hundred million.
That is completely unrelated to marginal cost.
The marginal cost of production is maybe $0.02. The cost of putting a drug into production is a decade of development (assuming you don't count the decade or two of basic science preceding it), dozens of top-notch, PhD scientists, hundreds of clinicians and postdocs, thousands of human volunteers and animal subjects. Design and construction of a plant to mass produce the chemical. Maybe a couple billion. The cost of producing a single pill: not much more that $0.02. Probably not much more that $0.0002 for something really popular.
Your point being...
not really.
If a cookie costs $0.05 to make, that's a marginal cost. If a CD costs $0.05 to make, it's marginal cost too.
True. But I don't remember saying otherwise...
But then the cookie will cost $0.10 in retail and the CD will cost $50
Tue. And irrelevant.
Stealing $100 (retail)worth of cookies will cost the manufacturer much more than stealing $100 worth of CDs. ...while the baker can't claim more than $100 in losses anyway.
The baker lost $50. The label lost $0.10.
Still, even with cost of zero, the label will claim it lost some...$800,000?
Again, true. Again, that has nothing to do with what I originally said.
No, something in the public domain has no rights associated with it at all.
Not true. Moral rights, such as the right to be credited, still apply to works in the Public Domain. It's "commercial" rights (excuse the poor wording, English is not my mother tongue and legal systems other than those in European countries -with the exception of the UK- don't have an important clear distinction between the two types of intellectual property rights) that don't apply: the rights to distribute, sell, make copies, etc. For more on this subject, refer to the Berne Convention, art. 6 bis.
I can say "Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio," as much as I like.
True.
I can attribute it to Plato, or to Luther Blisset, if I like.
True. However, you cannot do the same when distributing a copy of Hamlet.
I could even produce a whole, unabridged Hamlet without ever acknowledging the author, because it's been in the public domain for centuries.
Not true, see the Berne Convention.
For something like Hamlet, many people recognize both the work and the author, but for most of the crap that's in PD, no such fame accords, and the absence of credit may lead to misattribution.
That doesn't change the fact that the right to be credited cannot be forfeited by the author, and it never expires. Therefore, works in Public Domain still must be credited properly. Therefore, you are wrong.
No, you are not. What I'm suggesting is that it's not a deal, neither big or small, simply because when something is practically free to reproduce and exclusivity over the process of making said reproduction cannot be had or enforced, you cannot stop people from reproducing it. Sure, if you have the law in your side you can prosecute a few and hope that the rest get scared and stop, but we all know it's not gonna work.
Honest question: why is "law" the only place that matters? Why can we not also bring "ethics" into the discussion?
Whose ethics? Yours? Mine? The Pope's? Bin Laden's?
It wouldn't be regarded as a copy. Otherwise, it would be illegal to, for example, browse a website.
The same reasoning ("the right to expect contracts to be fulfilled guarantees ownerxhip of X") could apply to everything. Congratulations, you just defended the existence of slavery.
Because two people to which the same laws apply may have a different set of ethics.
Funny how you didn't prove it would grind to a halt either. Funny how jabjoe and mini_me just proved you wrong.
So, when are you going to be like 'Yup - I was wrong'?