> What we actually need, generally, is a law like > this: > "Any person or company which manufactures a > technological device which grants a user access > to intellectual property content, must include > functionality allowing the user to perform upon > that content, any and all actions which may be > legal." > You need to rethink this a bit. Your proposal > as written would make it illegal to produce a > playback device that didn't include a full > range of copying and editing functions.
The precise wording isn't really my concern; I hope the point I was trying to make stands without it. The wording is very hard to get right: you can't refer to 'preventing' or 'stopping' legal use of material, because not implementing the use isn't considered either of these.
(Oh, and what's so bad about banning the sale of pure playback hardware? It would certainly generate a very interesting market. The price of the editing/copying hardware would be pushed down by demand and sponsorship (IP creators would sponsor the production of the devices, so that consumers could afford them and then buy stuff to play back on them from the IP firms). The problem is that if the hypothetical law allowed some hardware to be made that lacked these functions, the manufacturers could get around it: sell the crippled hardware that can't do fair use at $100, sell the fully functional hardware at $10000000, and argue that they have kept the law because hardware capable of performing the functions *is* available on the market.)
We immediately have a big problem that it continues to use the word "right".
Unfortunately, "rights" legally are rather wussy. Basically, they mean that nobody can take legal action against you for doing these things. It does not oblige them to make it possible (or easy) for you to do them.
What we actually need, generally, is a law like this:
"Any person or company which manufactures a technological device which grants a user access to intellectual property content, must include functionality allowing the user to perform upon that content, any and all actions which may be legal."
Unfortunately, the UK is missing a BIG piece of the jigsaw: unlike the US, the UK does *not* have any legislation which says that copies made in the course of using something (copy of computer program in memory for execution, temporary copy of dvd/cd stream for decompression, etc.) are protected from counting as copyright violations.
This means that the licences for software and similar are a lot harder binding.
> No, but you have to pay the rent,for the space, > electricity, water, sewage, garbage, cleaners, > etc etc etc. And that office/space could have > been put to better use. As could the computer > time. We'll just never know. > So just face it - it cost money to do this.
Yes, it does. But the assumption "it could have been used better" is not necessarily the case.
Suppose that you write free software on your home computer. Now, you would have paid the rent, electricity, water, etc.. ANYWAY, and you probably would have had the computer anyway, so writing free software doesn't cost you anything in terms of these (because if you decide not to write free software, you still pay pretty much the same). Since free software development tools are themselves free, it doesn't cost you any of those either.
But what about the time? Could you have been more productive? Well, I suppose you *could* ignore a huge commons of existing work and generally helpful developers and try on your own to hack out a project to sell. Only to, likely as not, have it crushed by big competitors who can defeat you on every front simply by having more money. (That does have to be borne in mind, by the way. I'd be a lot happier writing free software for Windows than I would be for PalmOS, for instance.)
If you want to do that, you have the choice. Nobody is forcing you to write free software. It's really up to you what you want to try for - a relatively small amount of extra money, or no money but a whole lot of happy feelings. Given that a lot of free programmers enjoy programming for its own sake anyway, they are fine to do it for the happy feelings. It is not economically unviable, because it doesn't cost them any more of their day job earnings than NOT writing free software would.
> I take it that the scarce resource involved > is... erm... the boxes? The store shelf space? > Shrink wrap? CD Burners? Schmucks who will pay > for something they can download for free? IQ > points?
In those cases, it's the SERVICE of getting them into the shops and making it easy to obtain. It's also the support provided by the companies. Of course, using support or manuals as the scarce resource creates perverse incentives with regard to user-friendliness, but that doesn't mean other items couldn't be found to be scarce, especially when much software depends on network services.
He has the right to sell his software. He has the right to have his intellectual property protected.
But he DOESN'T have the god-given right to make money from doing it. Any capitalist will tell you that. And if a bunch of people band together and make a free product that they give away, and that makes it hard for him to compete, then that's tough in the commercial world just as in the free software world. IE, exactly.
It's not *quite* communism, but it has some similarities. And yes, a number of the communist flaws stop applying with software:
- In communism, some of the work you do is taken away from you to be given to the commune, and if you do more work, more is taken away without you necessarily getting any more in return (because you still just get 'your share'). This sucks. With software, though, you can give your work to the commune *and* keep its full benefit for yourself. If you speed up the Linux boot sequence, your Linux install will boot faster and you can make everyone else's do so without slowing yours down.
- In communism, horrible forcing measures have to be put in place to stop people not working or slacking - ie, lowering their contribution to the commune while getting all the benefits of it. In software, though, additional users of a piece of free software do not take anything out of the community, even if they do not contribute to the development. In fact, they HELP it in a very valuable way, because the software is competing for market share within the wider capitalist society.
- Corruption. Under GNU there is no way for anyone to be corrupt, because nobody has more power than anyone else. If some author or licensor or whatever suddenly decided to freeze a GNU product and sell it as a prioprietary item, they would still have no way to stop other members of the community giving it away.
> Somebody has to pay for the time and effort. > RMS is a fraud -- we all know it. He left MIT > to do GNU but was fortunate that the director > of the AI lab allowed him to comtinue to use > its facilities (publicly-funded - so you and I > paid for it).
Umm, the AI lab already had their computers. We might have paid for them to set up, but we probably didn't pay much extra for RMS to work there. Same with most people. If you already have a computer, you don't need to pay for it.
> He needed money: so sold GNU > EMACS at $150 a pop and funded himself from "a > software distribution business" (his words). > Sounds like Bill et al to me.
EXCEPT that under the GNU anyone can do that. This is the old 'free software' confusion. Free software doesn't have to be given away. If I wanted to sell copies of GNU Emacs, I could do, as long as the people I sold it to had permission to sell it on themselves.
The normal cry here is: "but! You can't really make money selling free software, because since you can't stop others distributing it, those other people can give it away for nothing and you'll lose the money you made." Yep, that's right. But then, even if you were making commercial software they'd still be no guarantee you'd make money doing it. And a competitor might well try and push you out by giving an equivalent product away (Internet Explorer anyone?).
There can still be commercialisation and competition in free software. Witness the Linux boxed distros. The only difference is that the scarce resource involved isn't the software.
> And why is is all Microsoft versus Linux? What > about the rest of us trying to earn an honest > living out of selling our software?
You have every right to do that. Only a few people believe that *ALL* software should be OS, and even then, it's "should be" (ie, it would be nice if the authors chose it to be), not "should be forced to be".
It's only forced to be if you base it on other free software - and that's only because, were there no free software, you would have probably had to pay a big-ass licensing fee to get at the source code you based it on, if you were even allowed to see the source in the first place.
> Why should I expose all my genius to have every > half-wit so the he/she can copy it, corrupt it, > and persuade his boss to give him a raise for > it?
Well, you said your software was for Linux, so calling the people who might have written the kernel 'half-wits' is a shade hypocritical..
> DOn't I deserve more than a mindless "credit" > in the source code -- (and half of you take > those out as well, in my experience).
Of course you do. Go persuade your boss to give you a raise based on your product, just like the other guy did. If he could do so and you can't, then, well, he's obviously improved the product and deserves his raise.
> No, no, no and no again. You're wrong-headed, > misguided, foolish and economically illiterate.
The capitalist economy is fully operational on free software. It's just that you have to find something other than the software to be scarce. Think you're such a hot programmer? Sell the service of making custom alterations to it. Grab distributions, test them for hours to ensure industrial standard and then sell them with proven certifications. Sell support. Write about the software then sell the book. It's all there.
> Britney knew that when she signed the contract > her music wouldn't be allowed to be distributed > over the internet without hefty costs. But the > benifits outweighed this drawback because the > record company provided a great service. No one > is expolited when both parties are willing > participants.
Wrong.
Suppose you want to eat, and five people have all the food. You go to one, and they say they'll let you eat their food - but only as much as THEY choose, and they can change their mind anytime - provided you give them every cent you ever earn. When you ask the other four, they say the same thing.
You are forced to accept this, because otherwise you'll starve. But the food owners can then claim you've done so "voluntarily", and so you can't be being exploited.
> So either put up or shut up, Marx boy.
It is evidently too much to ask that you should know something about the principles and markets you're criticising.
Record companies *are* effectively immune to downfall. No starting company can ever amass the capital required to compete against them. Yes, this is a flaw in capitalism loudly identified by communists, but the fact I agree with the flaws they found doesn't mean I agree with their solution to them. Further, most of the value in record companies is in their reputation.
Saying they provide a useful service is a feint because that service is only useful because the record companies themselves rig it so it has to be. If there were no record companies, artists could deal with retailers directly and similar. But as soon as there are record companies, artists who deal with retailers directly become second or even third-class citizens from that retailers point of view. Get rid of the record companies and this effect disappears. Only their existance justifies themselves.
No. You're right, copy prevention doesn't work. The objective is not so much copy prevention as making the copies useless.
So (for example) you can plug your audio cable from your CD player into your PC and sample the CD. However, your PC then refuses to play the audio, because it contains a watermark identifying it as needing a keyed source to play from and it doesn't have one.
Now, of course, this leads to a weird suggestion I heard. Suppose you get a load of copy-protected disks, make copies of them, and distribute them. Of course, they are useless unless somebody comes up with a way of getting around the protection. However, people might still buy them in anticipation of that.
Are you breaking copyright law? Well, if you are, then that means that the copy protection failed to prevent you doing so, even though you visibly did NOT bypass it. And that, in turn, means that the copy protection is NOT effectively enforcing the rights of the copyright holder, and has no DMCA protection.
But do you think any company would have the guts to *not* prosecute somebody who was handing out copies of protection failures?
Actually, I seem to recall that in one of the DeCSS lawsuits there was a comment made that the DMCA did *not* stop you decrypting copyrighted material in order to make fair use of it. (Decryption for that purpose is not "unauthorised use of copyrighted material".)
It *does* however stop you obtaining the information on how to do so or a device that does so from another party (because that party would then be distributing a decryption device). But if you decrypted it purely by yourself AND you did so for fair use, then as far as I'm aware the DMCA has no beef with you. This is the crux of the RIAA argument about "we have to let you use it, but we don't have to make it easy".
So if a TiVo-type device was made which could decrypt uncopyable TV transmissions, then PROVIDED the same device ensured fair use (by, perhaps, automatically erasing the recordings once viewed to ensure it remainined in the province of time shifting), would that be legal under the DMCA?
(Also, if the DMCA protects "technological measures for preventing violation of rights granted by the copyright act" - well, a consumer's fair use is one of those rights, and a decryption system could be a technological measure preventing that right from being taken away, so would adding extra encryption be breaking the DMCA?;) )
If they actually made copyright extensions roll all the way backwards as well.
For example, suppose copyright is extended. We would then apply that to all older works too, and find that when Disney made their Jungle Book film, the Jungle Book itself was still copyrighted. Thus, Disney must immediately start negotiations with Kipling's estate or lose the royalties they got from the film (inflation adjusted). Likewise with Hans Christen Andersen, etc..
I think this is a really good idea, actually - after all, if these firms seek copyright extensions they surely ought to seek for *all* artists to get the extension, including those whose lapsed copyrights were exploited in the past.
After all, heaven forbid that they were using the law as a competition weapon by cherry-picking the public domain now and then having copyright extended to cement their claims on the ideas..
The problem is that making this assertion generates a whole bunch of problems.
If you say that "preferred form" means preferred by the developer who releases the code, then the company can argue that the obfuscated form is preferred by them. This is probably bull, but it gives them plenty of scope for dragging out the lawsuit. (eg, refusing to show evidence that they use the obfuscated code in their development process because stronger legal proof is required to justify access to confidential business process information, yadda yadda yadda...) Also, as suggested elsewhere, they could internally use tools which substitute the obfuscated values for proper ones in the UI.
If you say that "preferred form" means preferred by an average GPL developer then you hit a problem. For example, suppose that a Japanese firm got some GPL code, produced a derivative work and released it under the GPL, as they are obliged to do, with no intent to cause trouble or fraud. However, they also translate all the comments, variable and procedure names into Japanese, meaning that when viewed in a non-Japanese IDE they come out as garbage undefined characters. Of course, this is far preferable to them because they do not have to read English variable names and similar. But since "average" GPL developers appear (by and large) to speak English, it could easily be argued that this was *not* their "preferred" form and thus that the Japanese firm had violated the GPL even thought they had no intent to.
Because the ad providers aren't going to go bust if they don't sell their ads. The content provider probably is, since chances are they didn't get money any other way.
The point is that the conversation could move to another faciliator.
For example: addgroup Alt.slashdot. Indicate moderation changes and similar by posting signal messages. Get some open source news clients and knock up custom versions that respect the signal messages when producing the threadview. Use GnuPG signing and trustweb to authenticate the people posting these. Make the news clients capable of parsing pages pulled off Google Groups in the absence of an NNTP server. Even though all the checking will be client side that doesn't matter - a spammer could hack their own client but that won't help if everyone else is using trusted ones.
But, you also have to see the other side of the coin. SlashDot cannot pay for the ISP in positive contributions. And one of the old problems with internet commerce is that you get MORE costs as you get more customers. Viewing stuff costs money for bandwidth. Posting contributions, no matter how positive, costs money for bandwidth and storage.
Because, my dear fellow, they face the old problem that killed the dot.coms:
Positive contributions don't pay the rent. (Or, in this case, the bandwidth.)
Netters are used to lots of different kinds of rewards. There is karma, respect, long threads attached, etc. Unfortunately, there's only one that's useful in the rest of the world, and unfortunately it's the one that can't be given out freely.
I expect a fair number of slashdotters have ad filtration enabled anyway so this won't make any practical difference. Personally I don't care much about ads unless they're on a seperate server in badly written tables so that the slow ad server lags the rest of the page.
Or how about a *true* sharing system for internet content?
You join, and offer in a bunch of stuff (software, music, etc.) You then say you'd like some stuff from the group (same sort of things) and stub files for it get put on your hard disk.
Whenever you want something, the server sees if somebody has it and they're not using it. If they aren't, it gets sent to you to replace the stub files on your disk, and THEIR COPY GETS REMOVED AND REPLACED WITH THE STUB FILES. Effectively, both the product and the license are transferred to you. When you finish with it, someone else can grab it off you.
Effectively, this would just be the Internet equivalent of a bunch of mates sharing CDs and software, etc., which is entirely legal in most cases (as long as they kept to the software licenses by deleting it from their HDs when it was transferred).
Could this "internet kibbutz" enable fully legal content sharing and save money for all those involved?
>Now, after listening to reason, don't you feel a >little less sorry for these guys? I mean, is it >the record companies fault that these people are >myopic?
I fully understand that people can sign with record companies overestimating the level of success they're going to have as a result. However, I expect that most of them did kinda expect they'd be making more than a few hundredths of a cent per sale of their songs.
>Another point is that it is entirely feasible to >make a living in the business of music without >the help of major labels.
A lot of difficulty booking venues due to being unknown..
> selling CDs themselves,
The cost of pressing CDs, the cost of manufacturing enough, the impossibility of getting them distributed..
> finding an independent label to take them on > and give them a decent contract?
Why should the indie label do that when it KNOWS it can get the artist-hoser contract which is better for it?
> Set up a website to give away their mp3s to make > them popular enough to have some push when they > do sign with a big label?
Aaaa.. hem. The labels won't give a damn. They know that the band's alternative is going back to giving away MP3s (which is not professional musicianship). And getting people to download free stuff proves nothing about its quality.
> They can still be a band and make money..
Um, most of the options you've described above lose money.
> They sign their rights away because they want > big money NOW, they don't want to wait.
No. You're very, very naive. The music industry is just like all other industries will eventually become in the present economic system: dominated by the big players who can never be toppled because their previous successes have given them enough power to crush competitors immediately they begin.
The only reason why artists have to sign these stupid contracts is simple. If they don't get with a company, their song just won't appear in the shops or on the radio. Even if they self-publish they still won't have much of a chance, because shops only buy from sources that will sell (the reputation catch-22 again) and recording companies "book" radio time for their own songs.
The *theory* was that new artists could use the internet to distribute music. Now, it's true, they probably wouldn't have used Napster to do it, they'd have used something like MP3.COM where there is a payment system available.
Except that the artists have usually been asked to waive the minima.
Even then, there are known loopholes on some other sites. For example, "promotional copies" are usually not counted as sales. Since the new music sharing services are startups encouraging customers, the recording firms can argue that every download is part of a promotion and thus is a promotional copy.
> If musicians want to make money, they need to > get absorbed into the industry machine. > Britney, N'Sync, Metallica, Beatles, Eagles, > Tony Bennet, or just about any of the big name > groups are not hurting for cash.
Guess what. They didn't get there by "selling out". They got there by being such big names that they could pick and choose between recording companies.
On the other hand, your average band can't do that. They can maybe get one company interested. If they don't like the contract, tough. The company doesn't care, probably no other company would offer them a better contract, and they have plenty more bands around the corner. To use your analogy, both big and little bands sell their souls. The difference is that the little ones have to do it on the devil's terms.
> but they're the ones that signed the contract. > Nobody is screwing the band/artist, except > themselves.
Not true. For the vast majority of bands, the choice was: sign the contract OR don't get published, don't make any money at all, and don't become professional musicians.
This is the oldest trick in the book when it comes to "rights". Yea, you have rights, and we'll defend them as long as they're useful. But as soon as you actually want to achieve anything - bam! You have to sign your rights away, and then everyone can say it's your own fault because you "chose" it.
What this would require, of course, is strengthening the rights granted by copyright law so that the rights granted are actually protected - ie, cannot be signed away in agreements, and cannot be blocked from exercise by practicality. But, of course, that would have a VERY interesting effect on software licenses..
Heh. Based on this, they should have blocked imports of the Dreamcast to Neo-Geo Pocket interfacing cable too, because that's what the original coder's cables were made from.
There's no way this is about piracy, though. When people were developing for the DC VMS, Sega discussed giving them access to the professional development kit! And the homebrew DC API libraries explicitly omit all routines for accessing GD-ROMS precisely to discourage the use of coders kits for piracy...
> This whole circular argument sounds exactly like
> the common problems entry-level people out of
> college (like myself) have finding jobs. People
> can see your skill, but don't necessarily want
> to hire you because you don't have experience.
> You can't get experience without being hired by
> *someone*. It's a vicious circle that needs to
> be defeated by a company or individual giving
> you a shot (which, fortunately for me, has
> happened).
Yea, although it's a different problem from the other end. IP sellers and distributers don't want to give you a break because they don't know you'll sell. If you WOULD sell, on the other hand, they most definately want you, and if you have proven that you do sell they will actively fight over you.
Employers on the other hand don't want to give you a break even if you WOULD sell (or rather, help them sell), because they don't want to save your next employer the cost of training you. It's the "tragedy of the commons" in reverse; every employer wants there to be more skilled and experienced people out there, but when it comes to actually granting people their initial skills and experience, every employer says "Uh... you first."
I can, unfortunately, really think of no way around this, apart from possibly rebooting the economy every 20 years or so. Unfortunately, that's the kind of thing that makes people emigrate.
It is worth remembering that the majority of IP doesn't come from an idea forwards; it comes from the market backwards. People don't have an idea and develop it. They see what the market wants or what they need to compete in, then start working in that and throw in any ideas they have that fit.
>Same for IP. All of these things match your
> paragraph on IP, yet people still manage to
> break through. Example (and a bit of a poor
> one): South Park. The original idea of South
> Park came from two guys who decided to create
> something totally original. When selling wasn't
> feasible, they gave the first video tapes away.
> Gradually, the intellectual property went from
> free to owned.
Yes, occasionally it does break through. Trey and Matt started by making cartoons by pushing arranged bits of coloured paper around on a desk under a stop motion camera. J.K.Rowling was similar.
The difference, though, is that if you're going for a job, it's justifiably OK for the employer to get to decide if you get the job or not. Although the way they decide might be rather unfair, it is still reasonable that they should get the decision.
But, for IP, you should be able to roll your own ON YOUR OWN if you choose. It's called free enterprise and a free market, folks. A free market shouldn't require you to convince an exec that your product is good in order for it even to reach the market. A free market doesn't charge admission ("advertising") to avoid having your product inevitably crushed. If developing IP is so beneficial to society that we have these great wide-spanning copyright laws to protect it, why don't they give anything to make it easier for the little guy to develop IP?
>Sure. I'm all for IP. I think being able to own
>ideas is a *good* thing. I think that people
>against it are primarily doing so because they
>themselves don't know how to make money.
No. It's usually because they actually can't.
IP is supposed to protect ideas. But, you can't get any legal protection of your IP unless you realise your idea ("fixed in a tangible representation"). That's fair enough, say the IP fans: an idea that never gets realised is no use to society, and giving people IP on unrealised ideas would let them use licencing to make it unattractive for anyone to realise them.
But realising an idea is hard. You need to buy tools and possibly raw materials to do it with. And those tools and raw materials are expensive, because they sell to people who are already established in the IP industry and can afford high prices. Not only that, but you may not be able to get them, because you can't prove you aren't just going to use them to copy other people's material. To prove that you need a reputation, which you can never get because you can't get started without the tools.
So, suppose you've paid a load of money and gotten the tools. Now you have to do the work. This takes time. And, you have to eat while you're working. And, you can forget about having a day job to pay the bills, because your employer can use your contract to grab all your IP if you do that. So you've just lost even MORE money. (Or, far more likely, you've found you can't afford it and given up or never started.)
And if you manage to get a realised idea - you still have to get it distributed if you want to make money, and you also need distribution to get meaningful IP protection because otherwise anyone can copy you and claim parallel development. But again you are stuck: distributors and publishers are *really* only interested in reputation, which you can still never get because you can't get started. You could try internet distribution, but that's rather variable.
And even if you get a product out there - you still need to advertise, because your competitors are going to. And guess what? There is NO WAY to afford that unless you're established, because the demand for advertising by the established companies is high enough to keep the prices in more figures than you'll probably ever see.
Basically, you're screwed. To even get to market requires so much money that you'd be hard pressed to ever get it if you're starting from scratch. If you get to market, you then have to compete with the established firms - in a market where the one who spends most money on hype usually wins. Guess who that won't be?
And all of this acts the same way: to freeze the common person out from making money from their IP. Corporations are very fond of saying they "just don't have talent", but there is (I believe) no scientific evidence for talent even existing (and if it did, it would make IP nothing more than genetic fascism). Is it then no surprise that people do not respect IP law? Is it not possible that at least some of the 'freeware' today is just the result of the average joe throwing his hands up in the air and surrendering any attempt at making money from his own work?
And this is the old point. IP advocates like saying things like "If you spend the time writing a really awesome program, and I spend my time watching trash TV, don't you deserve the rights to what you've done and a reward for it?" The answer is yes, but even if you write that program you're not going to get a reward for it.
Is there anything that can be done about this? I don't know. My pet IP revolution would be:
- Create an inverse ultra vires on copyright: "Any act, which is explicitly permitted, or which is not explicitly prohibited, by copyright law, is raised to the status of an inaliable right."
- The inverse DMCA: "It is an offense to use technology to block any of the rights created by the above modification, to artifically complicate any of the rights so created, or to omit to include an interface permitting their exercise in a piece of technology whose hardware is capable of doing so."
- Block can't-progress-without-it agreements: "The rights created by the above modification, together with (other ones to be determined), may never be surrended or waived, not even voluntarily."
Which somewhat helps. Of course, you then have to sort out the markets:
- Criminalise advertising. (Harsh and sounds ridiculous, but it's the only way to stop those who have money already always being the ones who win the market wars.)
- Criminalise irresponsible consumer behaviour (as a very minor crime; capitalism assumes responsible and selective consumers, so if you don't behave as one, you're breaking it).
But I think those might be a little bit extreme for this debate.:)
Slashdot Mirror
> What we actually need, generally, is a law like
> this:
> "Any person or company which manufactures a
> technological device which grants a user access
> to intellectual property content, must include
> functionality allowing the user to perform upon
> that content, any and all actions which may be
> legal."
> You need to rethink this a bit. Your proposal
> as written would make it illegal to produce a
> playback device that didn't include a full
> range of copying and editing functions.
The precise wording isn't really my concern; I hope the point I was trying to make stands without it. The wording is very hard to get right: you can't refer to 'preventing' or 'stopping' legal use of material, because not implementing the use isn't considered either of these.
(Oh, and what's so bad about banning the sale of pure playback hardware? It would certainly generate a very interesting market. The price of the editing/copying hardware would be pushed down by demand and sponsorship (IP creators would sponsor the production of the devices, so that consumers could afford them and then buy stuff to play back on them from the IP firms). The problem is that if the hypothetical law allowed some hardware to be made that lacked these functions, the manufacturers could get around it: sell the crippled hardware that can't do fair use at $100, sell the fully functional hardware at $10000000, and argue that they have kept the law because hardware capable of performing the functions *is* available on the market.)
It isn't.
We immediately have a big problem that it continues to use the word "right".
Unfortunately, "rights" legally are rather wussy. Basically, they mean that nobody can take legal action against you for doing these things. It does not oblige them to make it possible (or easy) for you to do them.
What we actually need, generally, is a law like this:
"Any person or company which manufactures a technological device which grants a user access to intellectual property content, must include functionality allowing the user to perform upon that content, any and all actions which may be legal."
Unfortunately, the UK is missing a BIG piece of the jigsaw: unlike the US, the UK does *not* have any legislation which says that copies made in the course of using something (copy of computer program in memory for execution, temporary copy of dvd/cd stream for decompression, etc.) are protected from counting as copyright violations.
This means that the licences for software and similar are a lot harder binding.
> No, but you have to pay the rent,for the space,
> electricity, water, sewage, garbage, cleaners,
> etc etc etc. And that office/space could have
> been put to better use. As could the computer
> time. We'll just never know.
> So just face it - it cost money to do this.
Yes, it does. But the assumption "it could have been used better" is not necessarily the case.
Suppose that you write free software on your home computer. Now, you would have paid the rent, electricity, water, etc.. ANYWAY, and you probably would have had the computer anyway, so writing free software doesn't cost you anything in terms of these (because if you decide not to write free software, you still pay pretty much the same). Since free software development tools are themselves free, it doesn't cost you any of those either.
But what about the time? Could you have been more productive? Well, I suppose you *could* ignore a huge commons of existing work and generally helpful developers and try on your own to hack out a project to sell. Only to, likely as not, have it crushed by big competitors who can defeat you on every front simply by having more money. (That does have to be borne in mind, by the way. I'd be a lot happier writing free software for Windows than I would be for PalmOS, for instance.)
If you want to do that, you have the choice. Nobody is forcing you to write free software. It's really up to you what you want to try for - a relatively small amount of extra money, or no money but a whole lot of happy feelings. Given that a lot of free programmers enjoy programming for its own sake anyway, they are fine to do it for the happy feelings. It is not economically unviable, because it doesn't cost them any more of their day job earnings than NOT writing free software would.
> I take it that the scarce resource involved
> is... erm... the boxes? The store shelf space?
> Shrink wrap? CD Burners? Schmucks who will pay
> for something they can download for free? IQ
> points?
In those cases, it's the SERVICE of getting them into the shops and making it easy to obtain. It's also the support provided by the companies. Of course, using support or manuals as the scarce resource creates perverse incentives with regard to user-friendliness, but that doesn't mean other items couldn't be found to be scarce, especially when much software depends on network services.
Yes, that's exactly the flaw I saw too.
He has the right to sell his software. He has the right to have his intellectual property protected.
But he DOESN'T have the god-given right to make money from doing it. Any capitalist will tell you that. And if a bunch of people band together and make a free product that they give away, and that makes it hard for him to compete, then that's tough in the commercial world just as in the free software world. IE, exactly.
It's not *quite* communism, but it has some similarities. And yes, a number of the communist flaws stop applying with software:
- In communism, some of the work you do is taken away from you to be given to the commune, and if you do more work, more is taken away without you necessarily getting any more in return (because you still just get 'your share'). This sucks. With software, though, you can give your work to the commune *and* keep its full benefit for yourself. If you speed up the Linux boot sequence, your Linux install will boot faster and you can make everyone else's do so without slowing yours down.
- In communism, horrible forcing measures have to be put in place to stop people not working or slacking - ie, lowering their contribution to the commune while getting all the benefits of it. In software, though, additional users of a piece of free software do not take anything out of the community, even if they do not contribute to the development. In fact, they HELP it in a very valuable way, because the software is competing for market share within the wider capitalist society.
- Corruption. Under GNU there is no way for anyone to be corrupt, because nobody has more power than anyone else. If some author or licensor or whatever suddenly decided to freeze a GNU product and sell it as a prioprietary item, they would still have no way to stop other members of the community giving it away.
> Somebody has to pay for the time and effort.
> RMS is a fraud -- we all know it. He left MIT
> to do GNU but was fortunate that the director
> of the AI lab allowed him to comtinue to use
> its facilities (publicly-funded - so you and I
> paid for it).
Umm, the AI lab already had their computers. We might have paid for them to set up, but we probably didn't pay much extra for RMS to work there. Same with most people. If you already have a computer, you don't need to pay for it.
> He needed money: so sold GNU
> EMACS at $150 a pop and funded himself from "a
> software distribution business" (his words).
> Sounds like Bill et al to me.
EXCEPT that under the GNU anyone can do that. This is the old 'free software' confusion. Free software doesn't have to be given away. If I wanted to sell copies of GNU Emacs, I could do, as long as the people I sold it to had permission to sell it on themselves.
The normal cry here is: "but! You can't really make money selling free software, because since you can't stop others distributing it, those other people can give it away for nothing and you'll lose the money you made." Yep, that's right. But then, even if you were making commercial software they'd still be no guarantee you'd make money doing it. And a competitor might well try and push you out by giving an equivalent product away (Internet Explorer anyone?).
There can still be commercialisation and competition in free software. Witness the Linux boxed distros. The only difference is that the scarce resource involved isn't the software.
> And why is is all Microsoft versus Linux? What
> about the rest of us trying to earn an honest
> living out of selling our software?
You have every right to do that. Only a few people believe that *ALL* software should be OS, and even then, it's "should be" (ie, it would be nice if the authors chose it to be), not "should be forced to be".
It's only forced to be if you base it on other free software - and that's only because, were there no free software, you would have probably had to pay a big-ass licensing fee to get at the source code you based it on, if you were even allowed to see the source in the first place.
> Why should I expose all my genius to have every
> half-wit so the he/she can copy it, corrupt it,
> and persuade his boss to give him a raise for
> it?
Well, you said your software was for Linux, so calling the people who might have written the kernel 'half-wits' is a shade hypocritical..
> DOn't I deserve more than a mindless "credit"
> in the source code -- (and half of you take
> those out as well, in my experience).
Of course you do. Go persuade your boss to give you a raise based on your product, just like the other guy did. If he could do so and you can't, then, well, he's obviously improved the product and deserves his raise.
> No, no, no and no again. You're wrong-headed,
> misguided, foolish and economically illiterate.
The capitalist economy is fully operational on free software. It's just that you have to find something other than the software to be scarce. Think you're such a hot programmer? Sell the service of making custom alterations to it. Grab distributions, test them for hours to ensure industrial standard and then sell them with proven certifications. Sell support. Write about the software then sell the book. It's all there.
> Britney knew that when she signed the contract
> her music wouldn't be allowed to be distributed
> over the internet without hefty costs. But the
> benifits outweighed this drawback because the
> record company provided a great service. No one
> is expolited when both parties are willing
> participants.
Wrong.
Suppose you want to eat, and five people have all the food. You go to one, and they say they'll let you eat their food - but only as much as THEY choose, and they can change their mind anytime - provided you give them every cent you ever earn. When you ask the other four, they say the same thing.
You are forced to accept this, because otherwise you'll starve. But the food owners can then claim you've done so "voluntarily", and so you can't be being exploited.
> So either put up or shut up, Marx boy.
It is evidently too much to ask that you should know something about the principles and markets you're criticising.
Record companies *are* effectively immune to downfall. No starting company can ever amass the capital required to compete against them. Yes, this is a flaw in capitalism loudly identified by communists, but the fact I agree with the flaws they found doesn't mean I agree with their solution to them. Further, most of the value in record companies is in their reputation.
Saying they provide a useful service is a feint because that service is only useful because the record companies themselves rig it so it has to be. If there were no record companies, artists could deal with retailers directly and similar. But as soon as there are record companies, artists who deal with retailers directly become second or even third-class citizens from that retailers point of view. Get rid of the record companies and this effect disappears. Only their existance justifies themselves.
No. You're right, copy prevention doesn't work. The objective is not so much copy prevention as making the copies useless.
So (for example) you can plug your audio cable from your CD player into your PC and sample the CD. However, your PC then refuses to play the audio, because it contains a watermark identifying it as needing a keyed source to play from and it doesn't have one.
Now, of course, this leads to a weird suggestion I heard. Suppose you get a load of copy-protected disks, make copies of them, and distribute them. Of course, they are useless unless somebody comes up with a way of getting around the protection. However, people might still buy them in anticipation of that.
Are you breaking copyright law? Well, if you are, then that means that the copy protection failed to prevent you doing so, even though you visibly did NOT bypass it. And that, in turn, means that the copy protection is NOT effectively enforcing the rights of the copyright holder, and has no DMCA protection.
But do you think any company would have the guts to *not* prosecute somebody who was handing out copies of protection failures?
Actually, I seem to recall that in one of the DeCSS lawsuits there was a comment made that the DMCA did *not* stop you decrypting copyrighted material in order to make fair use of it. (Decryption for that purpose is not "unauthorised use of copyrighted material".)
;) )
It *does* however stop you obtaining the information on how to do so or a device that does so from another party (because that party would then be distributing a decryption device). But if you decrypted it purely by yourself AND you did so for fair use, then as far as I'm aware the DMCA has no beef with you. This is the crux of the RIAA argument about "we have to let you use it, but we don't have to make it easy".
So if a TiVo-type device was made which could decrypt uncopyable TV transmissions, then PROVIDED the same device ensured fair use (by, perhaps, automatically erasing the recordings once viewed to ensure it remainined in the province of time shifting), would that be legal under the DMCA?
(Also, if the DMCA protects "technological measures for preventing violation of rights granted by the copyright act" - well, a consumer's fair use is one of those rights, and a decryption system could be a technological measure preventing that right from being taken away, so would adding extra encryption be breaking the DMCA?
If they actually made copyright extensions roll all the way backwards as well.
For example, suppose copyright is extended. We would then apply that to all older works too, and find that when Disney made their Jungle Book film, the Jungle Book itself was still copyrighted. Thus, Disney must immediately start negotiations with Kipling's estate or lose the royalties they got from the film (inflation adjusted). Likewise with Hans Christen Andersen, etc..
I think this is a really good idea, actually - after all, if these firms seek copyright extensions they surely ought to seek for *all* artists to get the extension, including those whose lapsed copyrights were exploited in the past.
After all, heaven forbid that they were using the law as a competition weapon by cherry-picking the public domain now and then having copyright extended to cement their claims on the ideas..
The problem is that making this assertion generates a whole bunch of problems.
If you say that "preferred form" means preferred by the developer who releases the code, then the company can argue that the obfuscated form is preferred by them. This is probably bull, but it gives them plenty of scope for dragging out the lawsuit. (eg, refusing to show evidence that they use the obfuscated code in their development process because stronger legal proof is required to justify access to confidential business process information, yadda yadda yadda...) Also, as suggested elsewhere, they could internally use tools which substitute the obfuscated values for proper ones in the UI.
If you say that "preferred form" means preferred by an average GPL developer then you hit a problem. For example, suppose that a Japanese firm got some GPL code, produced a derivative work and released it under the GPL, as they are obliged to do, with no intent to cause trouble or fraud. However, they also translate all the comments, variable and procedure names into Japanese, meaning that when viewed in a non-Japanese IDE they come out as garbage undefined characters. Of course, this is far preferable to them because they do not have to read English variable names and similar. But since "average" GPL developers appear (by and large) to speak English, it could easily be argued that this was *not* their "preferred" form and thus that the Japanese firm had violated the GPL even thought they had no intent to.
Because the ad providers aren't going to go bust if they don't sell their ads. The content provider probably is, since chances are they didn't get money any other way.
The point is that the conversation could move to another faciliator.
For example: addgroup Alt.slashdot. Indicate moderation changes and similar by posting signal messages. Get some open source news clients and knock up custom versions that respect the signal messages when producing the threadview. Use GnuPG signing and trustweb to authenticate the people posting these. Make the news clients capable of parsing pages pulled off Google Groups in the absence of an NNTP server. Even though all the checking will be client side that doesn't matter - a spammer could hack their own client but that won't help if everyone else is using trusted ones.
But, you also have to see the other side of the coin. SlashDot cannot pay for the ISP in positive contributions. And one of the old problems with internet commerce is that you get MORE costs as you get more customers. Viewing stuff costs money for bandwidth. Posting contributions, no matter how positive, costs money for bandwidth and storage.
Because, my dear fellow, they face the old problem that killed the dot.coms:
Positive contributions don't pay the rent. (Or, in this case, the bandwidth.)
Netters are used to lots of different kinds of rewards. There is karma, respect, long threads attached, etc. Unfortunately, there's only one that's useful in the rest of the world, and unfortunately it's the one that can't be given out freely.
I expect a fair number of slashdotters have ad filtration enabled anyway so this won't make any practical difference. Personally I don't care much about ads unless they're on a seperate server in badly written tables so that the slow ad server lags the rest of the page.
Or how about a *true* sharing system for internet content?
You join, and offer in a bunch of stuff (software, music, etc.) You then say you'd like some stuff from the group (same sort of things) and stub files for it get put on your hard disk.
Whenever you want something, the server sees if somebody has it and they're not using it. If they aren't, it gets sent to you to replace the stub files on your disk, and THEIR COPY GETS REMOVED AND REPLACED WITH THE STUB FILES. Effectively, both the product and the license are transferred to you. When you finish with it, someone else can grab it off you.
Effectively, this would just be the Internet equivalent of a bunch of mates sharing CDs and software, etc., which is entirely legal in most cases (as long as they kept to the software licenses by deleting it from their HDs when it was transferred).
Could this "internet kibbutz" enable fully legal content sharing and save money for all those involved?
>Now, after listening to reason, don't you feel a
>little less sorry for these guys? I mean, is it
>the record companies fault that these people are
>myopic?
I fully understand that people can sign with record companies overestimating the level of success they're going to have as a result. However, I expect that most of them did kinda expect they'd be making more than a few hundredths of a cent per sale of their songs.
>Another point is that it is entirely feasible to
>make a living in the business of music without
>the help of major labels.
How?
> What's stopping them from touring themselves,
A lot of difficulty booking venues due to being unknown..
> selling CDs themselves,
The cost of pressing CDs, the cost of manufacturing enough, the impossibility of getting them distributed..
> finding an independent label to take them on
> and give them a decent contract?
Why should the indie label do that when it KNOWS it can get the artist-hoser contract which is better for it?
> Set up a website to give away their mp3s to make
> them popular enough to have some push when they
> do sign with a big label?
Aaaa.. hem. The labels won't give a damn. They know that the band's alternative is going back to giving away MP3s (which is not professional musicianship). And getting people to download free stuff proves nothing about its quality.
> They can still be a band and make money..
Um, most of the options you've described above lose money.
> They sign their rights away because they want
> big money NOW, they don't want to wait.
No. You're very, very naive. The music industry is just like all other industries will eventually become in the present economic system: dominated by the big players who can never be toppled because their previous successes have given them enough power to crush competitors immediately they begin.
And that was what the internet was going to do.
The only reason why artists have to sign these stupid contracts is simple. If they don't get with a company, their song just won't appear in the shops or on the radio. Even if they self-publish they still won't have much of a chance, because shops only buy from sources that will sell (the reputation catch-22 again) and recording companies "book" radio time for their own songs.
The *theory* was that new artists could use the internet to distribute music. Now, it's true, they probably wouldn't have used Napster to do it, they'd have used something like MP3.COM where there is a payment system available.
Except that the artists have usually been asked to waive the minima.
Even then, there are known loopholes on some other sites. For example, "promotional copies" are usually not counted as sales. Since the new music sharing services are startups encouraging customers, the recording firms can argue that every download is part of a promotion and thus is a promotional copy.
> If musicians want to make money, they need to
> get absorbed into the industry machine.
> Britney, N'Sync, Metallica, Beatles, Eagles,
> Tony Bennet, or just about any of the big name
> groups are not hurting for cash.
Guess what. They didn't get there by "selling out". They got there by being such big names that they could pick and choose between recording companies.
On the other hand, your average band can't do that. They can maybe get one company interested. If they don't like the contract, tough. The company doesn't care, probably no other company would offer them a better contract, and they have plenty more bands around the corner. To use your analogy, both big and little bands sell their souls. The difference is that the little ones have to do it on the devil's terms.
> but they're the ones that signed the contract.
> Nobody is screwing the band/artist, except
> themselves.
Not true. For the vast majority of bands, the choice was: sign the contract OR don't get published, don't make any money at all, and don't become professional musicians.
This is the oldest trick in the book when it comes to "rights". Yea, you have rights, and we'll defend them as long as they're useful. But as soon as you actually want to achieve anything - bam! You have to sign your rights away, and then everyone can say it's your own fault because you "chose" it.
What this would require, of course, is strengthening the rights granted by copyright law so that the rights granted are actually protected - ie, cannot be signed away in agreements, and cannot be blocked from exercise by practicality. But, of course, that would have a VERY interesting effect on software licenses..
Heh. Based on this, they should have blocked imports of the Dreamcast to Neo-Geo Pocket interfacing cable too, because that's what the original coder's cables were made from.
There's no way this is about piracy, though. When people were developing for the DC VMS, Sega discussed giving them access to the professional development kit! And the homebrew DC API libraries explicitly omit all routines for accessing GD-ROMS precisely to discourage the use of coders kits for piracy...
> This whole circular argument sounds exactly like
> the common problems entry-level people out of
> college (like myself) have finding jobs. People
> can see your skill, but don't necessarily want
> to hire you because you don't have experience.
> You can't get experience without being hired by
> *someone*. It's a vicious circle that needs to
> be defeated by a company or individual giving
> you a shot (which, fortunately for me, has
> happened).
Yea, although it's a different problem from the other end. IP sellers and distributers don't want to give you a break because they don't know you'll sell. If you WOULD sell, on the other hand, they most definately want you, and if you have proven that you do sell they will actively fight over you.
Employers on the other hand don't want to give you a break even if you WOULD sell (or rather, help them sell), because they don't want to save your next employer the cost of training you. It's the "tragedy of the commons" in reverse; every employer wants there to be more skilled and experienced people out there, but when it comes to actually granting people their initial skills and experience, every employer says "Uh... you first."
I can, unfortunately, really think of no way around this, apart from possibly rebooting the economy every 20 years or so. Unfortunately, that's the kind of thing that makes people emigrate.
It is worth remembering that the majority of IP doesn't come from an idea forwards; it comes from the market backwards. People don't have an idea and develop it. They see what the market wants or what they need to compete in, then start working in that and throw in any ideas they have that fit.
>Same for IP. All of these things match your
> paragraph on IP, yet people still manage to
> break through. Example (and a bit of a poor
> one): South Park. The original idea of South
> Park came from two guys who decided to create
> something totally original. When selling wasn't
> feasible, they gave the first video tapes away.
> Gradually, the intellectual property went from
> free to owned.
Yes, occasionally it does break through. Trey and Matt started by making cartoons by pushing arranged bits of coloured paper around on a desk under a stop motion camera. J.K.Rowling was similar.
The difference, though, is that if you're going for a job, it's justifiably OK for the employer to get to decide if you get the job or not. Although the way they decide might be rather unfair, it is still reasonable that they should get the decision.
But, for IP, you should be able to roll your own ON YOUR OWN if you choose. It's called free enterprise and a free market, folks. A free market shouldn't require you to convince an exec that your product is good in order for it even to reach the market. A free market doesn't charge admission ("advertising") to avoid having your product inevitably crushed. If developing IP is so beneficial to society that we have these great wide-spanning copyright laws to protect it, why don't they give anything to make it easier for the little guy to develop IP?
>Sure. I'm all for IP. I think being able to own
:)
>ideas is a *good* thing. I think that people
>against it are primarily doing so because they
>themselves don't know how to make money.
No. It's usually because they actually can't.
IP is supposed to protect ideas. But, you can't get any legal protection of your IP unless you realise your idea ("fixed in a tangible representation"). That's fair enough, say the IP fans: an idea that never gets realised is no use to society, and giving people IP on unrealised ideas would let them use licencing to make it unattractive for anyone to realise them.
But realising an idea is hard. You need to buy tools and possibly raw materials to do it with. And those tools and raw materials are expensive, because they sell to people who are already established in the IP industry and can afford high prices. Not only that, but you may not be able to get them, because you can't prove you aren't just going to use them to copy other people's material. To prove that you need a reputation, which you can never get because you can't get started without the tools.
So, suppose you've paid a load of money and gotten the tools. Now you have to do the work. This takes time. And, you have to eat while you're working. And, you can forget about having a day job to pay the bills, because your employer can use your contract to grab all your IP if you do that. So you've just lost even MORE money. (Or, far more likely, you've found you can't afford it and given up or never started.)
And if you manage to get a realised idea - you still have to get it distributed if you want to make money, and you also need distribution to get meaningful IP protection because otherwise anyone can copy you and claim parallel development. But again you are stuck: distributors and publishers are *really* only interested in reputation, which you can still never get because you can't get started. You could try internet distribution, but that's rather variable.
And even if you get a product out there - you still need to advertise, because your competitors are going to. And guess what? There is NO WAY to afford that unless you're established, because the demand for advertising by the established companies is high enough to keep the prices in more figures than you'll probably ever see.
Basically, you're screwed. To even get to market requires so much money that you'd be hard pressed to ever get it if you're starting from scratch. If you get to market, you then have to compete with the established firms - in a market where the one who spends most money on hype usually wins. Guess who that won't be?
And all of this acts the same way: to freeze the common person out from making money from their IP. Corporations are very fond of saying they "just don't have talent", but there is (I believe) no scientific evidence for talent even existing (and if it did, it would make IP nothing more than genetic fascism). Is it then no surprise that people do not respect IP law? Is it not possible that at least some of the 'freeware' today is just the result of the average joe throwing his hands up in the air and surrendering any attempt at making money from his own work?
And this is the old point. IP advocates like saying things like "If you spend the time writing a really awesome program, and I spend my time watching trash TV, don't you deserve the rights to what you've done and a reward for it?" The answer is yes, but even if you write that program you're not going to get a reward for it.
Is there anything that can be done about this? I don't know. My pet IP revolution would be:
- Create an inverse ultra vires on copyright: "Any act, which is explicitly permitted, or which is not explicitly prohibited, by copyright law, is raised to the status of an inaliable right."
- The inverse DMCA: "It is an offense to use technology to block any of the rights created by the above modification, to artifically complicate any of the rights so created, or to omit to include an interface permitting their exercise in a piece of technology whose hardware is capable of doing so."
- Block can't-progress-without-it agreements: "The rights created by the above modification, together with (other ones to be determined), may never be surrended or waived, not even voluntarily."
Which somewhat helps. Of course, you then have to sort out the markets:
- Criminalise advertising. (Harsh and sounds ridiculous, but it's the only way to stop those who have money already always being the ones who win the market wars.)
- Criminalise irresponsible consumer behaviour (as a very minor crime; capitalism assumes responsible and selective consumers, so if you don't behave as one, you're breaking it).
But I think those might be a little bit extreme for this debate.