Has it occurred to you that, if people are completely unwilling to pay for music recordings, that they simply won't get music recordings, no matter what free market tricks you use?
I fail to see the problem. This is how free market works. You get what you're willing to pay for.
Hmm. Last time I checked, the "outdated" business model that you're referring to is currently more favoured by both artists and consumers than, say, your suggestion for a business model. I wonder which one is the less feasible?
That's nothing more than market inertia. Entertainment industry won't adopt new marketing models because those models can't support dinosaurs this big. Most of the entertainment industry will fall sooner or later with a loud Earth-shaking thud and alternative models will take over because they give the author much more money than the industry. Even though the consumers pay a lot less.
No, this doesn't affect software. But if you compose or record a song under CC, you need to register it otherwise Czech collecting societies will collect royalties from Czech Internet radios which play it.
Software is safe for now because it's not subject to statutory licenses. However, I'm pretty sure we'll see some lobbying about free software before the law gets to the parliament.
The major WTF of Czech copyright law is that you can get a valid license for some uses only from the collecting society, not from the author himself. Even the author himself has to pay to the collecting society in order to use his own works this way. This provision has to go and it has to go now. That's why the registration is just plain wrong.
No, the trail leads to the collecting societies because they get the most out of it. They wrote the law themselves after all, since big media is busy pushing ACTA through Brussels.
The article was written in Czech for Czech readers so it doesn't say some facts about Czech copyright law that may not be obvious to foreigners. First, Czech collecting societies have complete monopoly over their culture area once they register. The law also states that collecting societies don't need any contract for collecting royalties from TV, radio and their Internet equivalents. That means that if you start an Internet radio, you have to pay royalties even for most CC-licensed music. The registration is there to opt out from this.
This draft is a nice example of what happens when collecting societies get to write copyright law while the big media is busy lobbying somewhere else. They write the law for themselves.
No, it's not. The registration is required in order to prevent the collecting societies from collecting royalties on your behalf. Since collecting societies have a monopoly, they don't need any contract to collect royalties. This doesn't affect the existence of your copyright, only what you can do with it.
The short answer: You don't. The long answer: The law states that there can by only one collecting agency registered for each area of culture at any given time. Since most of what can be registered already is registered, we're out of luck here.
Yes, there are barriers to entry. The law specifically states that each collecting society has to register with the Ministry of Culture and once it's registered, it has complete monopoly over its assigned area of culture. For example, OSA has monopoly over sheet music and lyrics, Integram has monopoly over music recordings, DILIA has monopoly over literature etc. No other collecting society can register for these areas until these cancel their registration.
Right, the BSDs. You mean those guys who managed to lose 20 years of head start over Linux in just 5 years and who also get the majority of userspace contributions from Linux distro developers? At least they can pat themselves on the back for helping Apple make a whole lot of money. Too bad they won't get anything back.
Look at the big picture. You take open source code, make some changes and release it as closed source. Congratulations, you've just made a fork which will sooner or later become a stub. The resources you put into it are wasted because they didn't help move the open codebase forward. It will move forward nevertheless but at the cost of additional resources to reimplement your changes. Now imagine that there are thousands of people who do this every day to the same project. Can you see those millions of stub branches faning out from the open trunk? Do you realize the amount of wasted effort that went into those stubs? And can you imagine what would happen if all that effort was put into the open trunk instead?
GPL makes sure there's as little wasted effort as possible. BSD code may very well have a lot more developers than GPL code. But a lot of those developers hack their own closed source forks and waste time reinventing the wheel. GPL code can manage with much less resources and achieve much, much more. If you don't like that, you're always free to go back to the closed source world because without GPL, there would be nothing open worth using.
So let me get this straight, you hate closed source even more than GPL for the obvious reasons but you also hate GPL because it forbids closing the source and thus protects you from being stuck in a closed source world? O_o
You're forgetting another key function of the patent system. When the patent expires, there's a good-enough technical description of the invention free for others to copy and develop. Patents not only protect the initial investment, they also ensure that everybody can get access to the invention a little bit later. GPL does the same thing without any delays.
Your argument is flawed because it reduces the entire world to just one situation. Closing the source forces everybody else to reinvent the wheel. Think for a while about this: In the GPL world, everything needs to be invented and implemented exactly once and anybody can improve what was implemented before. In the closed source world, everybody has to start from scratch and works on his own hook. Even if the total amount of resources in the closed source world is more than thousand times bigger than in the GPL world, the GPL world can still have the edge. The total amount of resources in the closed source world is meaningless because most of those resources are used to do the same thing over and over again. You have to compare individual players from the closed source world with the entire GPL world to get accurate picture about who's on the edge.
If you're doing it for fun and the feeling of being useful instead of money, forget about jobs. Just pick some open source project you like and start hacking right away. Either way, don't forget to check out new coding tools as well as new languages. Version control systems for example went a long way from the 80's and you should definitely try GIT or Mercurial.
Slashdot Mirror
Has it occurred to you that, if people are completely unwilling to pay for music recordings, that they simply won't get music recordings, no matter what free market tricks you use?
I fail to see the problem. This is how free market works. You get what you're willing to pay for.
Hmm. Last time I checked, the "outdated" business model that you're referring to is currently more favoured by both artists and consumers than, say, your suggestion for a business model. I wonder which one is the less feasible?
That's nothing more than market inertia. Entertainment industry won't adopt new marketing models because those models can't support dinosaurs this big. Most of the entertainment industry will fall sooner or later with a loud Earth-shaking thud and alternative models will take over because they give the author much more money than the industry. Even though the consumers pay a lot less.
No, this doesn't affect software. But if you compose or record a song under CC, you need to register it otherwise Czech collecting societies will collect royalties from Czech Internet radios which play it.
Software is safe for now because it's not subject to statutory licenses. However, I'm pretty sure we'll see some lobbying about free software before the law gets to the parliament.
The major WTF of Czech copyright law is that you can get a valid license for some uses only from the collecting society, not from the author himself. Even the author himself has to pay to the collecting society in order to use his own works this way. This provision has to go and it has to go now. That's why the registration is just plain wrong.
No, the trail leads to the collecting societies because they get the most out of it. They wrote the law themselves after all, since big media is busy pushing ACTA through Brussels.
The article was written in Czech for Czech readers so it doesn't say some facts about Czech copyright law that may not be obvious to foreigners. First, Czech collecting societies have complete monopoly over their culture area once they register. The law also states that collecting societies don't need any contract for collecting royalties from TV, radio and their Internet equivalents. That means that if you start an Internet radio, you have to pay royalties even for most CC-licensed music. The registration is there to opt out from this. This draft is a nice example of what happens when collecting societies get to write copyright law while the big media is busy lobbying somewhere else. They write the law for themselves.
No, it's not. The registration is required in order to prevent the collecting societies from collecting royalties on your behalf. Since collecting societies have a monopoly, they don't need any contract to collect royalties. This doesn't affect the existence of your copyright, only what you can do with it.
The short answer: You don't. The long answer: The law states that there can by only one collecting agency registered for each area of culture at any given time. Since most of what can be registered already is registered, we're out of luck here.
Yes, there are barriers to entry. The law specifically states that each collecting society has to register with the Ministry of Culture and once it's registered, it has complete monopoly over its assigned area of culture. For example, OSA has monopoly over sheet music and lyrics, Integram has monopoly over music recordings, DILIA has monopoly over literature etc. No other collecting society can register for these areas until these cancel their registration.
Right, the BSDs. You mean those guys who managed to lose 20 years of head start over Linux in just 5 years and who also get the majority of userspace contributions from Linux distro developers? At least they can pat themselves on the back for helping Apple make a whole lot of money. Too bad they won't get anything back.
Look at the big picture. You take open source code, make some changes and release it as closed source. Congratulations, you've just made a fork which will sooner or later become a stub. The resources you put into it are wasted because they didn't help move the open codebase forward. It will move forward nevertheless but at the cost of additional resources to reimplement your changes. Now imagine that there are thousands of people who do this every day to the same project. Can you see those millions of stub branches faning out from the open trunk? Do you realize the amount of wasted effort that went into those stubs? And can you imagine what would happen if all that effort was put into the open trunk instead?
GPL makes sure there's as little wasted effort as possible. BSD code may very well have a lot more developers than GPL code. But a lot of those developers hack their own closed source forks and waste time reinventing the wheel. GPL code can manage with much less resources and achieve much, much more. If you don't like that, you're always free to go back to the closed source world because without GPL, there would be nothing open worth using.
So let me get this straight, you hate closed source even more than GPL for the obvious reasons but you also hate GPL because it forbids closing the source and thus protects you from being stuck in a closed source world? O_o
You're forgetting another key function of the patent system. When the patent expires, there's a good-enough technical description of the invention free for others to copy and develop. Patents not only protect the initial investment, they also ensure that everybody can get access to the invention a little bit later. GPL does the same thing without any delays.
Your argument is flawed because it reduces the entire world to just one situation. Closing the source forces everybody else to reinvent the wheel. Think for a while about this: In the GPL world, everything needs to be invented and implemented exactly once and anybody can improve what was implemented before. In the closed source world, everybody has to start from scratch and works on his own hook. Even if the total amount of resources in the closed source world is more than thousand times bigger than in the GPL world, the GPL world can still have the edge. The total amount of resources in the closed source world is meaningless because most of those resources are used to do the same thing over and over again. You have to compare individual players from the closed source world with the entire GPL world to get accurate picture about who's on the edge.
If you're doing it for fun and the feeling of being useful instead of money, forget about jobs. Just pick some open source project you like and start hacking right away. Either way, don't forget to check out new coding tools as well as new languages. Version control systems for example went a long way from the 80's and you should definitely try GIT or Mercurial.