Switzerland is a good place to have international meetings. The meeting that brought many works out of the US public domain happened in Uruguay, but I don't think they have all the much to do with that provision.
Yes, people do. Unfortunately, many resources are scarce given current technology. If we get to have a Star Trek economy (replicators, warp drives, practically limitless clean energy), than most of the things that are scarce will become plentiful.
Monsanto are dicks, and I wish the executives of that company were subject to horrible torture. However, just because they are dicks doesn't mean that their entire field of research isn't.
Having a service problem doesn't mean there isn't a pircing problem as well. The three biggest issues IMO are pricing, service, and respect, although I'm sure other issues play a role as well. However, the respect problem isn't the 'pirates don't respect intellectual property' garbage, but rather, the lack of respect for customers from copyright holders. The FBI warnings on DVDs being a good example of disrespect that only affects those that actually BUY the product.
HTC did innovate, and they were innovating in smartphones long before Apple did. The problem was that they didn't have as powerful a patent portfolio. Really, the problem probably isn't with HTC itself. Rather, the difference is that they've largely gone from WinMo to Android. Switching from Apple's BFF to Google means that all that cross-licensing stuff between Apple and MS no longer applies to them.
The market for most works is practically 0 outside of say, 10 years. The long duration of copyright only benefits a very small minority, pretty much all of whom have received plenty of money already. However, it's probably a bigger side effect that in many fields, such as movies, the licensing of other works (and lack of material to freely license) greatly increases the cost of producing a competitive product. This higher barrier to entry means that major studios are subject to far less competition, allowing them to attain greater profits.
One thing to consider is that Europe doesn't have a universal healthcare system. Nations that are in Europe do. In regards to size, most of these nations are more like states, so the equivalent would be universal healthcare at the state level. That's a lot more doable.
"Lets see, the gas company, the electric company, the water company, the ISP... probably well over a quarter of my income goes to monopolies.
Some utilities are owned by cities or counties, but most are corporate-owned"
You limited your example of legal monopolies to utilities. In my experience, electric companies are generally coops, and water companies are generally municipal owned. I don't have a gas company, so I can't speak to that. ISPs were my example of what a horrible thing happens when we have a private legal monopoly. Outside of utilities, copyright, and patents, you don't see legal monopolies too often. The only other one I can think of is the company that has a legal monopoly on cocaine in the US.
"What makes you think that more would be written without copyright?"
The evidence available seems to suggest that. It makes sense, given that it's an economically backwards policy.
"And although I enjoy learning, what's wrong with entertainment?"
Nothing in particular, but copyright tends to give entertainment works a competitive advantage, which means that copyright discourages informative literature. Part of it would be that facts aren't copyrightable. It's particularly interesting, given that the Statute of Anne's stated purpose was the 'encouragement of learning', and nonfiction tends to fit that bill better than fiction IMO.
Competitors can totally compete on price. They can actually use much of the Android codebase, and the licensing costs of the OS are rather minor. Also, I don't see how they are leveraging their search market here. They will let other OS's use Google, and I'm pretty sure it's not hard to use non-Google search on Android.
Privately held legal monopolies existed in the medieval period. Copyright is a privately held legal monopoly. There are very few places where we still allow privately held legal monopolies. The only place legal monopolies make economic sense is in utilities, since they are natural monopolies already, but most of those are state or member owned. The main exception in utilities is telecommunications, which are privately held monopolies, and if AT&T and Comcast are any indication, privately held monopolies are awful even when the business is a natural monopoly. Publicly known intangible ideas, on the other hand, are the complete opposite of a natural monopoly, and making private monopolies out of them doesn't make any sense.
Without copyright, we would likely have MORE written, and interestingly enough, a higher proportion of what is written would be informative instead of for the purposes of entertainment.
Apple doesn't have to share source code, but the license includes attribution, which doesn't appear to have happened (if it did, we'd have known that from the day Siri was first available). It is possible, however, that it uses an independently developed codebase that fits the speex spec, but that would be a waste of time for most people.
I don't think it actually has been a good thing in the past, it just hasn't been awful enough to offset social and technological progress. The idea of copyright is a strange holdover from medieval economics, which is where privately held legal monopolies should have stayed.
There are a number of problems. One is that most solutions are inconvenient. It seems like another would be that there are multiple incompatible technologies, making finding the right content a pain (although I might be wrong on that matter). Another is that most 3D movies are not well done. In addition, there are some biological issues that will remain as long as we have a flat screen. Finally, we can get a pretty good gist of what is going on in 3 dimensions with a normal screen.
XP was 2001. Newgrounds was 1995. Back in the day, it was one the most popular websites on the internet, and was probably the biggest site for Flash content.
That's why a lot of flash is streamed these days, so you don't have a flv that you can just grab out of your Temp folder. If you know a way to easily and quickly download content directly from say http://www.thedailyshow.com/ , let me know, last time I looked, there wasn't any working one on Linux.
Flash wasn't the first, ActiveX and Quicktime where much earlier. Flash won because it was the best and could do things that no other thing could do at the time.
No, Flash won because sites kept telling people to download this plugin or that plugin (quicktime, realplayer, some other random proprietary solution), and that got annoying since half of the time it was malware. People already had Flash because of Newgrounds and some other game sites, so sites that had flash video were less annoying in that regard.
Search engines, either specialized or generalized are going to be the primary way of finding it. I wouldn't consider this a centralized source unless it is for some reason only available on one search engine. You can find torrents on google, bing, yahoo, duckduckgo, probably even dogpile, askjeeves, or such.
Trackerless torrents pretty much have it covered, although even having different trackers presents decentralization. However, even with usenet, that isn't the case. Usenet isn't centralized. News-service.com is. Other usenet providers are still up.
Again, by the end of the film, Tarkin is dead, and the Death Star is destroyed. The party it didn't END well for was Tarkin, Leia got the short end of the stick in the short run, which is kind of standard fare. The captor attacking the captured when the captured taunts him with the uncomfortable truth of their inevitable failure is a pretty common response, but that doesn't change the fact that the hero almost always does what was claimed by the captured and the captor is usually dead or imprisoned. I will admit it is overused, but so is the stupidity of the music recording and film industries that makes themselves line up with the evil empire cliche.
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Switzerland is a good place to have international meetings. The meeting that brought many works out of the US public domain happened in Uruguay, but I don't think they have all the much to do with that provision.
Yes, people do. Unfortunately, many resources are scarce given current technology. If we get to have a Star Trek economy (replicators, warp drives, practically limitless clean energy), than most of the things that are scarce will become plentiful.
True, but practically all of the creative individuals you mention are the accountants that shit on the actual artists.
Everybody knows goombas are better at predicting earthquakes.
Might have had something to do with the terms of the post-war treaties. Or we just felt like being a dick.
Monsanto are dicks, and I wish the executives of that company were subject to horrible torture. However, just because they are dicks doesn't mean that their entire field of research isn't.
Inkjet printers are pretty much the bane of all technology. I would strongly prefer that they be used as little as possible.
most of the problems seem to be legal issues, not technological issues.
Having a service problem doesn't mean there isn't a pircing problem as well. The three biggest issues IMO are pricing, service, and respect, although I'm sure other issues play a role as well. However, the respect problem isn't the 'pirates don't respect intellectual property' garbage, but rather, the lack of respect for customers from copyright holders. The FBI warnings on DVDs being a good example of disrespect that only affects those that actually BUY the product.
HTC did innovate, and they were innovating in smartphones long before Apple did. The problem was that they didn't have as powerful a patent portfolio. Really, the problem probably isn't with HTC itself. Rather, the difference is that they've largely gone from WinMo to Android. Switching from Apple's BFF to Google means that all that cross-licensing stuff between Apple and MS no longer applies to them.
The market for most works is practically 0 outside of say, 10 years. The long duration of copyright only benefits a very small minority, pretty much all of whom have received plenty of money already. However, it's probably a bigger side effect that in many fields, such as movies, the licensing of other works (and lack of material to freely license) greatly increases the cost of producing a competitive product. This higher barrier to entry means that major studios are subject to far less competition, allowing them to attain greater profits.
One thing to consider is that Europe doesn't have a universal healthcare system. Nations that are in Europe do. In regards to size, most of these nations are more like states, so the equivalent would be universal healthcare at the state level. That's a lot more doable.
Tell that to the US. A big part of this is trying to control foreign websites, which are not within the US's jurisdiction.
"Lets see, the gas company, the electric company, the water company, the ISP... probably well over a quarter of my income goes to monopolies.
Some utilities are owned by cities or counties, but most are corporate-owned"
You limited your example of legal monopolies to utilities. In my experience, electric companies are generally coops, and water companies are generally municipal owned. I don't have a gas company, so I can't speak to that. ISPs were my example of what a horrible thing happens when we have a private legal monopoly. Outside of utilities, copyright, and patents, you don't see legal monopolies too often. The only other one I can think of is the company that has a legal monopoly on cocaine in the US.
"What makes you think that more would be written without copyright?"
The evidence available seems to suggest that. It makes sense, given that it's an economically backwards policy.
"And although I enjoy learning, what's wrong with entertainment?"
Nothing in particular, but copyright tends to give entertainment works a competitive advantage, which means that copyright discourages informative literature. Part of it would be that facts aren't copyrightable. It's particularly interesting, given that the Statute of Anne's stated purpose was the 'encouragement of learning', and nonfiction tends to fit that bill better than fiction IMO.
Competitors can totally compete on price. They can actually use much of the Android codebase, and the licensing costs of the OS are rather minor. Also, I don't see how they are leveraging their search market here. They will let other OS's use Google, and I'm pretty sure it's not hard to use non-Google search on Android.
Privately held legal monopolies existed in the medieval period. Copyright is a privately held legal monopoly. There are very few places where we still allow privately held legal monopolies. The only place legal monopolies make economic sense is in utilities, since they are natural monopolies already, but most of those are state or member owned. The main exception in utilities is telecommunications, which are privately held monopolies, and if AT&T and Comcast are any indication, privately held monopolies are awful even when the business is a natural monopoly. Publicly known intangible ideas, on the other hand, are the complete opposite of a natural monopoly, and making private monopolies out of them doesn't make any sense.
Without copyright, we would likely have MORE written, and interestingly enough, a higher proportion of what is written would be informative instead of for the purposes of entertainment.
Apple doesn't have to share source code, but the license includes attribution, which doesn't appear to have happened (if it did, we'd have known that from the day Siri was first available). It is possible, however, that it uses an independently developed codebase that fits the speex spec, but that would be a waste of time for most people.
I don't think it actually has been a good thing in the past, it just hasn't been awful enough to offset social and technological progress. The idea of copyright is a strange holdover from medieval economics, which is where privately held legal monopolies should have stayed.
There are a number of problems. One is that most solutions are inconvenient. It seems like another would be that there are multiple incompatible technologies, making finding the right content a pain (although I might be wrong on that matter). Another is that most 3D movies are not well done. In addition, there are some biological issues that will remain as long as we have a flat screen. Finally, we can get a pretty good gist of what is going on in 3 dimensions with a normal screen.
XP was 2001. Newgrounds was 1995. Back in the day, it was one the most popular websites on the internet, and was probably the biggest site for Flash content.
It's a bit more convoluted than it used to be, but most sites still use /tmp on the GNU/Linux client, they just erase the file just after it's creation, so, you have to get it from /proc. http://n00bsys0p.wordpress.com/2011/02/10/how-to-download-flash-10-2-video-streams-in-linux/ explains how to do this, along with other sites.
No, Flash won because sites kept telling people to download this plugin or that plugin (quicktime, realplayer, some other random proprietary solution), and that got annoying since half of the time it was malware. People already had Flash because of Newgrounds and some other game sites, so sites that had flash video were less annoying in that regard.
They are pretty good at marketing, they just don't have any competent programmers.
Search engines, either specialized or generalized are going to be the primary way of finding it. I wouldn't consider this a centralized source unless it is for some reason only available on one search engine. You can find torrents on google, bing, yahoo, duckduckgo, probably even dogpile, askjeeves, or such.
Trackerless torrents pretty much have it covered, although even having different trackers presents decentralization. However, even with usenet, that isn't the case. Usenet isn't centralized. News-service.com is. Other usenet providers are still up.
Again, by the end of the film, Tarkin is dead, and the Death Star is destroyed. The party it didn't END well for was Tarkin, Leia got the short end of the stick in the short run, which is kind of standard fare. The captor attacking the captured when the captured taunts him with the uncomfortable truth of their inevitable failure is a pretty common response, but that doesn't change the fact that the hero almost always does what was claimed by the captured and the captor is usually dead or imprisoned. I will admit it is overused, but so is the stupidity of the music recording and film industries that makes themselves line up with the evil empire cliche.