I think the real limitation on games as aesthetically significant works is not their *commercial* nature, but the *collective* manner in which they are made, which limits individual creative freedom and risk taking
By this definition, you also disqualify movies from being art. I doubt you intended that.
Actually, you only have a right to expect that because of copyright. You are correct that copyright law enables society to do things without making everyone sign a contract any time they purchase something, however copyright also covers a great deal many other things. The purpose of copyright is not to enforce the will of the creator, it is to encourage things to be created. If copyright law does not do that (which in my opinion it no longer does, the fact that works continue to be created faster and more so than ever despite piracy is proof enough) then it is unnecessary.
Now, going from the absurd amount of copyright we have to no copyright at all would cause chaos and economic mayhem. I understand that, but the progressive weakening (starting with shortening its length) of copyright is a good way to go about reaching the optimal terms of copyright which maximize creation of works.
Yet not a single study has been able to prove that it harms the economy. In fact, studies have shown that copyright infringement has has between no effect and a beneficial effect on the economy.
Wow, way to set up a strawman there. The water seller doesn't have the right to have anyone do anything about water that it isn't providing. That is nothing like copyright, which is a mechanism for enabling the creator to say what people can do with his or her own work.
For the express purpose to increase the innovation of the arts and sciences. Since there is still creativity and innovation in both the arts and sciences, I fail to see why copyright should be made stronger. In fact, there is a lot of evidence that says by reducing copyright (particularly the length of copyright) we would increase innovation and advancement thus furthering the goal of copyright. =)
A creator has the right to, as part of the terms of selling his work, require that the receiver not make copies for anyone else.
Sounds like a contract. That is civil law and is already codified. There is no need to turn it into a felony the government should not be policing private contracts, the justice system should handle civil matters as it already does.
Sue for payment according to the contract I signed that states that I am to be paid such and such amount of money as a salary. This would probably result in me being fired, but at least I'd get the salary that was owed to me up till that point.
Really? Because I've set up numerous linux based machines for friends AND family, both techy inclined and n00bs and maybe once did I run into a serious issue. The rest of the time they worked flawlessly or I just had to download the non-free driver after installation. =)
Yet, many people have gotten tons of money from $1 games on phone App Stores, be they iPhone, Android, or whatnot. Large companies also make money by this model. Let's look further. If you lower the price you gain customers. So, if you can figure out how many customers you gain by lowering the price, you can figure out the optimal price to have which I'm certain is not $60. Hell, look at Valve's recent L4D experiment. By dropping the price 75% they gained over 1400% in sales revenue (not units). Looks like your entire premise is flawed:)
Slow down there fanboy. Apple did not License anything from Xerox. In fact, midway through the lawsuit against Microsoft, Apple was sued by Xerox. Xerox had invited the Mac team to view their GUI machines at the PARC research laboratory which unintentionally had the impact of highly impacting the design of the UI for the Mac.
In addition, Android's UI is, while similar, quite different from the iPhone UI. Considering the addition of widgets and other things that are not just app shortcuts that can be put on the "desktop" of the phone, etc.
In fact, if you read the court case against Microsoft, the judge determined that "almost all the similarities spring either from the license [agreement] or from basic ideas and their obvious expression... illicit copying could occur only if the works as a whole are virtually identical." So while I hate Microsoft as much as the next slashdotter for various reasons, this is not one of them. No stealing occurred, and it seems that Microsoft actually licensed elements of the GUI from Apple while Apple didn't license anything from Xerox. Please get your facts straight.
Disassemble it; attach a debugger; check function imports; log important API calls.
Much proprietary software prevents this from the average engineer. Unless you're trained in reverse engineering and circumventing the many ways there are to prevent your program from being debugged, simply "dissassemble and attach a debugger" won't help much.
I would love to vote for government controlled health care. Too bad no one is actually instituting it in the US yet. They just have incentives and subsidies to help people buy health care from the corporations. Ugh.
The ability to prove or disprove without a doubt has no effect on whether the argument I am using in order to convince you that my opinion is correct is valid and logical. It appears that despite my argument being valid and logical, you simply disagree. That is fine, but if you believe it not to be logical please point it out. =)
The average user will not be installing their own OS. The Average user will have a friend/family member/tech support install their OS or buy a computer with it already installed. Therefore the requirement of knowing how to configure the OS if you're installing it makes perfect sense.
I don't know why OpenSUSE can't watch Hulu considering it is just flash. But being unable to watch Netflix on Linux is the fault of only Netflix. Having to install separate pieces of software in order to watch DVDs is due to licensing and some distros just say screw it and include the DVD packages anyways. It seems the problems you speak of are not within the control of Linux to fix.
Actually, since you cannot prove or disprove it there is all the more reason to argue the validity of the opinions. If we could just prove or disprove it, there would be no reason to argue because one of us would simply point to the proof. Mind you, there is a way to prove or disprove it: allow copyright and patents on clothing to be much more available and provided faster. If the industry ceases to function you were right, if it just slows down then I am right. =) Oh wait, they are currently trying to do that, I guess we'll wait and see.
Again, my point is that the only reason the fashion industry moves as fast as it does is due to the lack of IP enforcement. You even admitted that having to enforce IP results in time delays. I just disagree that the fashion industry couldn't function, in my opinion it would simply slow down. It's not irrelevant because my point is that the fashion industry is not so different from any other kind of invention like you insist. My point is that patents slow down innovation, without them the result would be faster innovation than there is now. Yes, new styles and fashion and clothes are designed and created much faster than any other invention people would conceivably be talking about. However, it is a great example that because people aren't waiting for patents to expire they can innovate immediately. Despite the lack of IP enforcement, the designers and companies thrive contrary to all the people who insist that without IP protections no industry could survive because no one could ever make a profit.
Repeat: it's unique due to the lack of IP enforcement compared to other industries and the unusual circumstances WOULD apply to inventions in many other fast moving industries (like software and other technology). It's not as unique as you think. Again, the point I was making is that patents and the like have caused a slow down in innovation. Specifically look at the mobile computing field, it's not quite as fast as the fashion industry, but it has been changing massively over just the last 3 or less years. Who knows how much faster it might move without everyone having to stop and fight out giant law suits of software patents?
This talk from a while ago is a great example how a lack of IP protections and "piracy" result in the fashion industry's fast-paced innovations.
Fashion changes so often from year to year for many reasons, one of which is because you have to continue to innovate because if you don't everyone will just copy your design and capitalize on it so you innovate to keep ahead and compete. It seems that is an excellent model for IP reform. Isn't competition and fast innovation the goal?
People do not buy Android phones. They are given away "for free" with the contract. The only phones people are really buying is the iPhone.
Perhaps I should ask Verizon for my money back when I purchased the original Droid early last year. Or what bout the cost of the HTC Evo? Or the other tons of Android phones which are at various price points which range from some "free" with contract to being at the same price point as the various iPhone models. Sorry, but claiming that "The only phones people are really buying is the iPhone" is just flat out bullshit.
Let's see: Firefox version 3.6 has been downloaded 396,351,549 times since january 31, 2010. Now that's ONLY version 3.6 and only from firefox's website, not counting any of the hundreds of other places you can get it. So when you count all the versions of Firefox and downloads per year, it's pretty much guaranteed that Mozilla would have to pay.
Freedom is just another word for having no more than 100.000 downloads a year. Firefox is too big to be free.
Wait....what? It's too big to be free? Says who? Firefox is free to download, free to modify, and you can submit patches and fixes and they'll get incorporated if they're good. So...how is Firefox too big to be free? Or do you think that since it has so many downloads it just "shouldn't" be free?
They have granted a free license for free web video streaming. If you give away a dvd or other video (ie not streaming via the web) you still have to pay.
If the patents they already had for H.264 applied to WebM, then the MPEG-LA wouldn't be publicly requesting the creation of a patent pool against WebM and asking anyone with patents they believe are essential to step forward. What that says is they don't have anything.
WebM has some hardware support, and the support is growing.
As an end user I simply want to keep watching video for free or cheap
So why would you want whoever is giving you video to have to pay? Or whoever is giving you your decoder to have to pay? or whoever is encoding the video you're watching? The only part of the chain that is free is for someone to provide a video for streaming. Whoever encoded the video had to pay for the encoder. Whatever is decoding the video had to pay for the decoder distribution. Etc. WebM is free for encoder, decoder, streaming, etc.
You realize the problem wasn't because Microsoft gave IE away for free, the problem was that they used their position in the OS market to bundle IE with the OS and give themselves an advantage over Netscape.
If you release your product for free you don't have to provide a good product, because anyone who wants to actually make money from people who would pay for it will never be able to enter the market. Once Google's "free" product is entrenched, it becomes impossible to make money selling or improving a competing OS, and competitors wither away, unless they bind their hardware to their OS and use sales of one to subsidize the other, like HP and Apple. Consumers no longer have a choice of OS, because there's really only one game in town for their phone, and entrepreneurs who want to create a new OS face the proposition of having it lose millions of dollars a year before breaking even, and significant barriers to entry among the hardware vendors -- they've invested so much in Android, Google gives them a good cut of the side revenues, lets them put their crapware and efused bioses on them, etc.
Except the actual market forces prove you wrong. The cost of an Android phone vs an iPhone vs a Windows Phone vs Symbian phone are all around the same. The customers aren't seeing a drop in price for a phone because the OS is free, so your argument fails because Android has outsold Windows Mobile, Symbian, and RIM due to people actually wanting them because they like them better. Whether it's the OS, the hardware specs or whatever, it's definitely not the price.
As for the barriers to entry among hardware vendors and whatnot, I can agree with you but that has nothing to do with Open Source or Android at all, it's a problem with the entire system. The fun part is that because Android is Open Source and Free, anyone can just take the Android code and fork it. They can give it a new name, rebrand it, whatever they like and just release it. You can't do that with Windows Mobile or a RIM phone or iPhone. If a company with enough resources decided to give it a go, they could definitely compete by using Android or by creating their own if they make a better product.
Just for fun, submit a patch to Mozilla that changes the factory default search of Firefox to Bing, and see how "immune to this kind of treatment" Open Source Software really is.
Why do I have to submit a patch to Mozilla? I can just fork the code, create my own version with the search set to Bing by default and distribute it myself. Done. Try having a version of IE where the factory default search is Google instead of Bing.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the real limitation on games as aesthetically significant works is not their *commercial* nature, but the *collective* manner in which they are made, which limits individual creative freedom and risk taking
By this definition, you also disqualify movies from being art. I doubt you intended that.
Actually, you only have a right to expect that because of copyright. You are correct that copyright law enables society to do things without making everyone sign a contract any time they purchase something, however copyright also covers a great deal many other things. The purpose of copyright is not to enforce the will of the creator, it is to encourage things to be created. If copyright law does not do that (which in my opinion it no longer does, the fact that works continue to be created faster and more so than ever despite piracy is proof enough) then it is unnecessary.
Now, going from the absurd amount of copyright we have to no copyright at all would cause chaos and economic mayhem. I understand that, but the progressive weakening (starting with shortening its length) of copyright is a good way to go about reaching the optimal terms of copyright which maximize creation of works.
Yet not a single study has been able to prove that it harms the economy. In fact, studies have shown that copyright infringement has has between no effect and a beneficial effect on the economy.
Wow, way to set up a strawman there. The water seller doesn't have the right to have anyone do anything about water that it isn't providing. That is nothing like copyright, which is a mechanism for enabling the creator to say what people can do with his or her own work.
For the express purpose to increase the innovation of the arts and sciences. Since there is still creativity and innovation in both the arts and sciences, I fail to see why copyright should be made stronger. In fact, there is a lot of evidence that says by reducing copyright (particularly the length of copyright) we would increase innovation and advancement thus furthering the goal of copyright. =)
A creator has the right to, as part of the terms of selling his work, require that the receiver not make copies for anyone else.
Sounds like a contract. That is civil law and is already codified. There is no need to turn it into a felony the government should not be policing private contracts, the justice system should handle civil matters as it already does.
I'd handle it very simply:
Really? Because I've set up numerous linux based machines for friends AND family, both techy inclined and n00bs and maybe once did I run into a serious issue. The rest of the time they worked flawlessly or I just had to download the non-free driver after installation. =)
Hmm, you said:
Obviously game developers can't live on $1 a game
Yet, many people have gotten tons of money from $1 games on phone App Stores, be they iPhone, Android, or whatnot. Large companies also make money by this model. Let's look further. If you lower the price you gain customers. So, if you can figure out how many customers you gain by lowering the price, you can figure out the optimal price to have which I'm certain is not $60. Hell, look at Valve's recent L4D experiment. By dropping the price 75% they gained over 1400% in sales revenue (not units). Looks like your entire premise is flawed :)
woosh!
Slow down there fanboy. Apple did not License anything from Xerox. In fact, midway through the lawsuit against Microsoft, Apple was sued by Xerox. Xerox had invited the Mac team to view their GUI machines at the PARC research laboratory which unintentionally had the impact of highly impacting the design of the UI for the Mac.
In addition, Android's UI is, while similar, quite different from the iPhone UI. Considering the addition of widgets and other things that are not just app shortcuts that can be put on the "desktop" of the phone, etc.
In fact, if you read the court case against Microsoft, the judge determined that "almost all the similarities spring either from the license [agreement] or from basic ideas and their obvious expression... illicit copying could occur only if the works as a whole are virtually identical." So while I hate Microsoft as much as the next slashdotter for various reasons, this is not one of them. No stealing occurred, and it seems that Microsoft actually licensed elements of the GUI from Apple while Apple didn't license anything from Xerox. Please get your facts straight.
Disassemble it; attach a debugger; check function imports; log important API calls.
Much proprietary software prevents this from the average engineer. Unless you're trained in reverse engineering and circumventing the many ways there are to prevent your program from being debugged, simply "dissassemble and attach a debugger" won't help much.
You've described the "tivo-ization" clause in the GPLv3 which prevents precisely what you described.
I would love to vote for government controlled health care. Too bad no one is actually instituting it in the US yet. They just have incentives and subsidies to help people buy health care from the corporations. Ugh.
The ability to prove or disprove without a doubt has no effect on whether the argument I am using in order to convince you that my opinion is correct is valid and logical. It appears that despite my argument being valid and logical, you simply disagree. That is fine, but if you believe it not to be logical please point it out. =)
Every place I had wanted to submit a resume accepted PDFs, LaTeX can produce PDF files, thus you're fine =)
The average user will not be installing their own OS. The Average user will have a friend/family member/tech support install their OS or buy a computer with it already installed. Therefore the requirement of knowing how to configure the OS if you're installing it makes perfect sense.
I don't know why OpenSUSE can't watch Hulu considering it is just flash. But being unable to watch Netflix on Linux is the fault of only Netflix. Having to install separate pieces of software in order to watch DVDs is due to licensing and some distros just say screw it and include the DVD packages anyways. It seems the problems you speak of are not within the control of Linux to fix.
Actually, since you cannot prove or disprove it there is all the more reason to argue the validity of the opinions. If we could just prove or disprove it, there would be no reason to argue because one of us would simply point to the proof. Mind you, there is a way to prove or disprove it: allow copyright and patents on clothing to be much more available and provided faster. If the industry ceases to function you were right, if it just slows down then I am right. =) Oh wait, they are currently trying to do that, I guess we'll wait and see.
Again, my point is that the only reason the fashion industry moves as fast as it does is due to the lack of IP enforcement. You even admitted that having to enforce IP results in time delays. I just disagree that the fashion industry couldn't function, in my opinion it would simply slow down. It's not irrelevant because my point is that the fashion industry is not so different from any other kind of invention like you insist. My point is that patents slow down innovation, without them the result would be faster innovation than there is now. Yes, new styles and fashion and clothes are designed and created much faster than any other invention people would conceivably be talking about. However, it is a great example that because people aren't waiting for patents to expire they can innovate immediately. Despite the lack of IP enforcement, the designers and companies thrive contrary to all the people who insist that without IP protections no industry could survive because no one could ever make a profit.
Repeat: it's unique due to the lack of IP enforcement compared to other industries and the unusual circumstances WOULD apply to inventions in many other fast moving industries (like software and other technology). It's not as unique as you think. Again, the point I was making is that patents and the like have caused a slow down in innovation. Specifically look at the mobile computing field, it's not quite as fast as the fashion industry, but it has been changing massively over just the last 3 or less years. Who knows how much faster it might move without everyone having to stop and fight out giant law suits of software patents?
This talk from a while ago is a great example how a lack of IP protections and "piracy" result in the fashion industry's fast-paced innovations.
Fashion changes so often from year to year for many reasons, one of which is because you have to continue to innovate because if you don't everyone will just copy your design and capitalize on it so you innovate to keep ahead and compete. It seems that is an excellent model for IP reform. Isn't competition and fast innovation the goal?
People do not buy Android phones. They are given away "for free" with the contract. The only phones people are really buying is the iPhone.
Perhaps I should ask Verizon for my money back when I purchased the original Droid early last year. Or what bout the cost of the HTC Evo? Or the other tons of Android phones which are at various price points which range from some "free" with contract to being at the same price point as the various iPhone models. Sorry, but claiming that "The only phones people are really buying is the iPhone" is just flat out bullshit.
Let's see: Firefox version 3.6 has been downloaded 396,351,549 times since january 31, 2010. Now that's ONLY version 3.6 and only from firefox's website, not counting any of the hundreds of other places you can get it. So when you count all the versions of Firefox and downloads per year, it's pretty much guaranteed that Mozilla would have to pay.
Freedom is just another word for having no more than 100.000 downloads a year. Firefox is too big to be free.
Wait....what? It's too big to be free? Says who? Firefox is free to download, free to modify, and you can submit patches and fixes and they'll get incorporated if they're good. So...how is Firefox too big to be free? Or do you think that since it has so many downloads it just "shouldn't" be free?
They have granted a free license for free web video streaming. If you give away a dvd or other video (ie not streaming via the web) you still have to pay.
If the patents they already had for H.264 applied to WebM, then the MPEG-LA wouldn't be publicly requesting the creation of a patent pool against WebM and asking anyone with patents they believe are essential to step forward. What that says is they don't have anything.
WebM has some hardware support, and the support is growing.
As an end user I simply want to keep watching video for free or cheap
So why would you want whoever is giving you video to have to pay? Or whoever is giving you your decoder to have to pay? or whoever is encoding the video you're watching? The only part of the chain that is free is for someone to provide a video for streaming. Whoever encoded the video had to pay for the encoder. Whatever is decoding the video had to pay for the decoder distribution. Etc. WebM is free for encoder, decoder, streaming, etc.
You realize the problem wasn't because Microsoft gave IE away for free, the problem was that they used their position in the OS market to bundle IE with the OS and give themselves an advantage over Netscape.
If you release your product for free you don't have to provide a good product, because anyone who wants to actually make money from people who would pay for it will never be able to enter the market. Once Google's "free" product is entrenched, it becomes impossible to make money selling or improving a competing OS, and competitors wither away, unless they bind their hardware to their OS and use sales of one to subsidize the other, like HP and Apple. Consumers no longer have a choice of OS, because there's really only one game in town for their phone, and entrepreneurs who want to create a new OS face the proposition of having it lose millions of dollars a year before breaking even, and significant barriers to entry among the hardware vendors -- they've invested so much in Android, Google gives them a good cut of the side revenues, lets them put their crapware and efused bioses on them, etc.
Except the actual market forces prove you wrong. The cost of an Android phone vs an iPhone vs a Windows Phone vs Symbian phone are all around the same. The customers aren't seeing a drop in price for a phone because the OS is free, so your argument fails because Android has outsold Windows Mobile, Symbian, and RIM due to people actually wanting them because they like them better. Whether it's the OS, the hardware specs or whatever, it's definitely not the price.
As for the barriers to entry among hardware vendors and whatnot, I can agree with you but that has nothing to do with Open Source or Android at all, it's a problem with the entire system. The fun part is that because Android is Open Source and Free, anyone can just take the Android code and fork it. They can give it a new name, rebrand it, whatever they like and just release it. You can't do that with Windows Mobile or a RIM phone or iPhone. If a company with enough resources decided to give it a go, they could definitely compete by using Android or by creating their own if they make a better product.
Just for fun, submit a patch to Mozilla that changes the factory default search of Firefox to Bing, and see how "immune to this kind of treatment" Open Source Software really is.
Why do I have to submit a patch to Mozilla? I can just fork the code, create my own version with the search set to Bing by default and distribute it myself. Done. Try having a version of IE where the factory default search is Google instead of Bing.