Govt provided internet would (among many other bad things) reduce choices.
It reduces choices, that's true. But choice is not always beneficial. The weird thing about networks of any kind is that they *are* monopolies naturally. You're either on a network or you're not. Yes, there are interconnections, but those interconnection points are either opportunities for wasteful bickering that hurts customers on both sides of the bridge, or for collusion that's as bad as a monopoly. Think about roads or sewers. How efficient would it be to have 7 redundant systems of highways? We'd all end up paying for those wasted resources one way or another. People who blindly argue for competition as a utopian and perfect solution to every problem are really misguided, I think.
So if we have 7 vendors duplicating efforts to provide wifi infrastructure, we'll wind up paying through the nose. Once we agree that a monopoly is a necessity in network infrastructure, we have only to decide who will own the monopoly. I say in terms of public benefit, it's probably a toss up whether a closely regulated private firm runs the monopoly, or whether the government runs it. I don't trust an unregulated private firm at all, and I'm not sure I trust a regulated private firm any more than I trust the government. But since, in principle and ideally, a government is devoted to the public good and not to private gain, the possibility exists of setting its policy on the basis of argument rather than on the basis of market activity. And that principle -- the use of rational argument to develop policy -- is the hallmark of liberal democracy.
Of course, actual liberal democracies are becoming rather unpopular these days, as they are clumsy and inefficient.
I disagree with a couple of the things you've said:
but I don't think it is unreasonable for people to want compensation for their work
The fact that a person wants compensation for work does not make it reasonable for that person to receive it. I may want compensation for writing a novel that no one wants to read. Tough luck. I may want compensation for parenting. Again, tough luck. Having some rights to the fruits of one's labour is different from demanding fruits from that labour. I'm sure you would agree that this scenario (expecting to be paid regardless of the costs to society) is just as problematic as that in which all software is free as in beer. Patents and copyright impose costs on society, and so those costs have to be balanced against the benefit of patent and copyright policy. The benefits must outweigh the costs or the policy must be attenuated. Like you, I'm trying to point out that this issue is not black and white or cut and dried.
It's not cheap or easy to develop new compression technology, I work at a university that does JPEG 2000 research and there's a lot of time and money spent on it. That's got to come from somewhere, and the people that put it up want a return.
Many universities (I would guess most, but I don't have the statistics handy) are funded largely by taxpayers. There's a good reason for that: You can't journey into the unknown on a budget and with a rigid five-year plan. Private industry would be almost entirely economically incapable of advancing human knowledge. If you do research work inside a university, the work has already been compensated. Wanting a cut of the royalties is more than just wanting "compensation for work".
Universities have begun playing the patent game because they are chronically underfunded and they need money desperately. As universities are starved for research money, patents and copyright play a greater role in generating creative output than they used to. In other words, less money for universities means more reliance on patents and copyright as the key policy instruments for advancing human knowledge. I think that is a very unfortunate trend.
I also think that patents in communication and file format standards are very different from other kinds of patents. Patents in communication standards prevent me from participating in culture without a private firm's permission. A communication standard (such as a file format standard) is no different than a language. I shouldn't have to pay a private company to participate in human language. Not only would that be a huge pain in the ass for everyone, it would make it even more difficult for dissenting opinions to be heard than it already is. Would you like to pay a fee to some private company for the right to speak English? Or pay based on the number of people who read your writing? That would be counter-productive from the perspective of encouraging the advancement of human society, which is the reason patents exist in the first place.
This leads, I think, to a homogenization of public discourse and a gradual concentration of power in the hands of fewer voices. That can't be a good thing for a developing a healthy, engaged populace.
So you cannot ask "where" the big bang occurred, because if you take all the points in space as far as can be seen, all of those points in space were at one single point at the moment of the big bang. So the best answer to "where" is "everywhere".
So the best answer to "Where is everywhere?" is... What? I've been looking for everywhere forever.
Fine. He'll write his book and sell it at $ 50K to his closest, richest friends/art lovers/commissioners: *THEY* will not copy and share it because they paid it so much and they just don't care about you. Is that what you want? Absolutely. Someone who is that focused on getting paid for their ideas obviously can't have anything of importance to say to humanity. If you have anything at all of importance to say, your deepest instinct as a creator -- your primal need -- will be to say it to the widest possible audience. The very purpose of art is to speak to humanity not just the rich or the well-connected.
In short, I have no objections to keeping such works private because they cannot ultimately be of much value.
Like I said in another post: If it is owned, it *cannot* be culture.
Oh, please. If I'm a writer and spend a year of 40+-hour weeks to write a book, should I not be able to profit from that effort if I choose? No, you should not be able to profit simply because you choose to write a book. Its not a matter of your own choice exactly because other peoples' freedoms are restricted by your choice. Whether or not society decides to afford your book copyright protection is a decision that must involve all those whose life it affects.
Most of your post only makes sense when viewed through the lens of total abolishment of copyright, which is so unwise that few rational people even consider the concept for long.
Why is it unwise? Rational people lived for several thousand years without copyright. Yeah, people who support copyright term extension are doing so for good reasons -- which would make them rational in a sense -- but not because they care about artists or culture. The US needs to copy DVDs to compensate for its massive trade deficit. No wonder so many people credulously accept this ideology -- their lives depend on it. See http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lawpoli/finance/ip-vs-inf lation.php
The model has been that you create content that people are willing to pay for, and you limit the distribution of that content, and people buy it. If you kill off the ability to limit the distribution of that content then you've killed off the incentive to invest resources into commercial media.
Hooray. Commercial, one-way media of all kinds deserve to die, or at the very least stop multiplying like virii.
Some random thoughts on this topic:
Money encourages production, not creativity.
What is owned cannot be culture. For me that's an axiom.
Own it if you want, but don't pretend that its got anything to do with culture. If I have to ask someone's permission to use it, it isn't culture. Culture *is* that which can be freely shared.
If you pay me to say it, I'll eventually end up lying.
Money encourages production, but it often encourages the production of crap. The "market" doesn't impose any standard of quality on what gets produced.
The reason we give people a monopoly on copying is so that eventually we have lots of free stuff. Unless you can show that the benefit of increased production outweighs the harm of restricting freedom, don't dare talk about extending copyright in time or space. In fact, we should reduce the term and reach of copyright to the minimum level required to encourage production. *That* makes sense to me. The idea that all this shrink-wrapped blather is someone or other's private property seems to me to be a parlour game gone bad.
Creativity can be encouraged in many ways. In Canada, parents are paid to spend time (a year or something) with their newly born child. Why couldn't individuals be given sabbatical to produce something of cultural importance? If you don't produce, your time off is repaid from source deductions.
Re:Blog First, Then Scientific Journals.
on
Dark Matter Exists
·
· Score: 4, Funny
maybe we catch a peak
or we might catch a trough. Depends if you're a pessimist or an optimist.
What do you tell users whose software and services can't be ported to Linux?
Most find that they can do what they really need to do with free software. Is the 5% loss in convenience worth denying poor kids the right to use, share, and learn about software? Is it worth denying people the opportunity to participate in making the rules that govern the digital world? I like people to think about free software as fair trade software.
When someone (your boss, the government) isn't forcing you to use some kind of proprietary software, when you are free to choose, what proprietary software do you absolutely *have* to use? What is there that you cannot live without? Most people are willing to give up a little in convenience if they know it will make things better in the long run. Recycling works like that. So does traffic flow. A crazy driver might get where he's going sooner, but he'll cause havoc for everyone else. Most people would see behaviour like that and say, "What a jerk". The rest of us just accept the few minutes of extra driving time in return for safer, more orderly streets.
You're wrong. I've helped dozens of people, young and old, experienced and inexperienced switch to Linux, and people have very few problems getting used to Linux. What does hurt them is peripherals and other add-ons that only work with Windows. I make absolutely certain that everyone for whom I install Linux understands that:
1. Software is a process not a product, so learn to live with change. Software is like a city -- continuous change that works. 2. Hardware should be checked for compatibility before buying. What doesn't work now might work in 3 or 6 months. Be patient. 3. Whatever "problems" you experience cannot be so great that it is worth denying people the right to share and control software. By way of comparison: Democracy is complicated, messy, costly, inconvenient, and inefficient and means that sometimes we don't get our way. But we choose it over totalitarianism because it is a choice that preserves the freedom to choose, and that freedom is essential to human dignity (as well as to more abstract things like "the market").
You are so right. All of this nonsense is about maintaining the status quo, not wiping out any threat. More people (by orders of magnitude) die every year from smoking than from terrorism. We have much more to fear from the tobacco industry than from a few terrorists.
Secrecy is the perfect weapon. No wonder kings feared an open court system and public institutions like parliament. That's why I really wonder about Microsoft's motivation to help the Toronto police build software to identify child porn users for which they were so universally and credulously lauded. How convenient would it be to have the ability to magically produce indisputable evidence indicting someone (a competitor, an unfriendly bureacrat) with the most heinous crime imaginable? With child porn, an accusation is all that is required to decimate an opponent. No one's name ever gets cleared if they are later found not guilty ('not guilty' is never quite the same as 'innocent'). Every time someone threatens to make things difficult for Microsoft, their name coincidentally shows up on a list of suspects.
Likewise, Microsoft could also benefit by using their software to protect people who were really guilty in return for favours. All in all, it's a very sad time for justice and perhaps the end of democracy.
But in the realm of ownership, there is no concept of reasonableness. How much could I reasonably use your back yard without your permission? Once you accept ownership and property as applicable to the realm of ideas, all of these problems (DRM, Broadcast Flag) are unavoidable consequences, implicit in the premise of owned ideas.
If you want a system that's reasonable, stop thinking about ideas as property, and start thinking about economics. Ideas are naturally free and non-rival. Any restrictions upon their transfer causes great transactional friction, so it should only be done when absolutely necessary. Arguably, one such necessity is providing royalty-based rewards for creators. In order to do this, we grant creators rights to control certain uses of their work. We only grant such rights in order to encourage creative production, and granting more rights than is absolutely required to encourage that production is economically inefficient. The public is, in a sense, being overcharged for production if it offers more protection than is necessary to achieve that result.
We give up way too much ground by saying things like "Yeah, if you as an artist want to put DRM on your stuff, that's your right". We make laws for a reason, not just because it serves the interests of a certain group (creators, record industry). The reason behind copyright law, its rationale, is to encourage production. If you grant that creators have inherent property rights in their work, then it is wrong to simultaneously oppose DRM, Broadcast Flag, and other restrictions that content "owners" dream up. If the basis for copyright law is to protect a public good, i.e. the benefit to society of creative production and cultural activity, then one can without contradiction support creators and yet still oppose DRM or other totalitarian means of obstructing that activity. Unfortunately, terms like "benefit to society" are seen as old school.
This is an absolutely brilliant idea. The fact that the number of patents is fixed would put pressure on the government to optimize the patent term to make it as short as possible while still encouraging commercialization. You *must* submit this idea to influential politicians.
1.) Natural untouched Eden
2.) Eden marred by unclean man
3.) Make man feel guilty so he follows religious tenets to save himself from impending end of world
It's probably even worse than that, more like:
Natural untouched Eden
Man exerts his awesome power
Man proves how powerful he is by destryong Eden
It's a fantasy about human omnipotence, not guilt.
People love to think of themselves as more important than they really are.
Someone told me once that volcanoes emit more CO2 than all the world's vehicles and factories combined. I don't know if I believe that either, but people do love drama, especially if it's of the tragic variety, where every powerful hero is doomed by a fatal character flaw. The fact that it is *his* flaw and not an external force that kills him proves the hero's omnipotence and thus proves him worthy of worship.
Apparently English class offers more certainty than science.
What we want is for things that are made to conform to open standards. Then we don't care so much if the product is "open" (whatever that means when applied to products) so long as the standard is independant, unencumbered and freely available.
It's interesting that your statement, which is commonly taken to be the most rational and balanced view, is actually quite reactionary and dogmatic. In every age, the broad popular understanding of the technology upon which civilization is built was critical to stability and progress. Proprietary software is analogous to medieval guild system which went to great lengths to keep technical knowledge from the users of its products so that it could maintain power, pricing, and control. In the age of the automobile, almost everyone knew how to repair engines (this age has now ended since computers have invaded combustion engines). Everyone at least knew how a combustion engine works. Auto repair was taught in school. If you artificially limit the pool of available talent that can be applied to technological problems to suit the interests of the incumbent powers, you'll fail to solve those problems. Eventually that will catch up with you as a civilization and things will start to fall apart.
All this is in addition to the already well recognized fact that software represents a kind of legal constitution; where the opacity of proprietary software intersects with basic rights (voting machines, fair use, but much more too) it is dangerous and weakens democracy.
I find it strange that people accept something even as simple as a spyware detector being made as a proprietary product. What sense does it make to allow one private company to determine which other private companies' software is legitimate and which is not? Controlling the behaviour of the endpoints of a network (every standard constitutes a kind of network) means you can make the rules for the network, even if the network standards are "open".
These are just some of the reasons why I think the Free Software movement is an important civil society effort to defend democracy, not just a battle for the freedom to tinker. Democracy *means* having the freedom to tinker. To turn over whole domains of culture to opaque systems of control is a huge mistake.
I agree that it reeks. Microsoft gets their legal fees paid plus some extra dough for massive free advertising. I wouldn't mind it if the money went into some kind of public trust. But the fact that MS just gets an extra 7Mil means that they are beneficiaries of spam business. That's really more of an encouragement than a deterrent. Now any joe who can make 20 million will get slapped with a lawsuit by MS, MS will get their cut, and the spammer can retire. Great business model. Everybody wins except the people whose mailboxes are choked with Viagra flyers.
Interesting thought. Voila, now there is no such thing as a clean room implementation of anything -- everyone has been tainted by being able to see Solaris code. Now we're all like IBM employees who have access to SCO code -- our contributions to free software create copyright infringement liabilities. Plus any MS patents that Sun might have used could find their way into an Open Source project and cause even more trouble.
I happen to be visiting DisneyWorld right now from Winnipeg, Canada. I would recommend using DisneyWorld as a location for your data centre. They have their own back up generators, and no above ground power lines. That said their pursuit of endless copyright term extensions is totally lame.
They can always go into the theatre, which doesn't depend on royalty collection for its revenue stream. (although it pays royalties to playwrights) With the death of big hollywood, local theatres would probably become much more popular. Maybe people would pay 50 bucks a seat to see a great play, even done by local performers, just the way they pay 50 bucks to see a big pop music star today.
The distinction between obvious and non-obvious is far from trivial. I think the onus should be upon supporters of the patent system to prove that the cost of making and proving these distinction is balanced by equal or greater benefit. Otherwise the patent system is a net loss for the economy.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you a coder? It's just that your post resembles an SQL statement. Naw, It was a loose connection on his caps lock key.
Govt provided internet would (among many other bad things) reduce choices.
It reduces choices, that's true. But choice is not always beneficial. The weird thing about networks of any kind is that they *are* monopolies naturally. You're either on a network or you're not. Yes, there are interconnections, but those interconnection points are either opportunities for wasteful bickering that hurts customers on both sides of the bridge, or for collusion that's as bad as a monopoly. Think about roads or sewers. How efficient would it be to have 7 redundant systems of highways? We'd all end up paying for those wasted resources one way or another. People who blindly argue for competition as a utopian and perfect solution to every problem are really misguided, I think.
So if we have 7 vendors duplicating efforts to provide wifi infrastructure, we'll wind up paying through the nose. Once we agree that a monopoly is a necessity in network infrastructure, we have only to decide who will own the monopoly. I say in terms of public benefit, it's probably a toss up whether a closely regulated private firm runs the monopoly, or whether the government runs it. I don't trust an unregulated private firm at all, and I'm not sure I trust a regulated private firm any more than I trust the government. But since, in principle and ideally, a government is devoted to the public good and not to private gain, the possibility exists of setting its policy on the basis of argument rather than on the basis of market activity. And that principle -- the use of rational argument to develop policy -- is the hallmark of liberal democracy.
Of course, actual liberal democracies are becoming rather unpopular these days, as they are clumsy and inefficient.
I disagree with a couple of the things you've said:
but I don't think it is unreasonable for people to want compensation for their work
The fact that a person wants compensation for work does not make it reasonable for that person to receive it. I may want compensation for writing a novel that no one wants to read. Tough luck. I may want compensation for parenting. Again, tough luck. Having some rights to the fruits of one's labour is different from demanding fruits from that labour. I'm sure you would agree that this scenario (expecting to be paid regardless of the costs to society) is just as problematic as that in which all software is free as in beer. Patents and copyright impose costs on society, and so those costs have to be balanced against the benefit of patent and copyright policy. The benefits must outweigh the costs or the policy must be attenuated. Like you, I'm trying to point out that this issue is not black and white or cut and dried.
It's not cheap or easy to develop new compression technology, I work at a university that does JPEG 2000 research and there's a lot of time and money spent on it. That's got to come from somewhere, and the people that put it up want a return.
Many universities (I would guess most, but I don't have the statistics handy) are funded largely by taxpayers. There's a good reason for that: You can't journey into the unknown on a budget and with a rigid five-year plan. Private industry would be almost entirely economically incapable of advancing human knowledge. If you do research work inside a university, the work has already been compensated. Wanting a cut of the royalties is more than just wanting "compensation for work".
Universities have begun playing the patent game because they are chronically underfunded and they need money desperately. As universities are starved for research money, patents and copyright play a greater role in generating creative output than they used to. In other words, less money for universities means more reliance on patents and copyright as the key policy instruments for advancing human knowledge. I think that is a very unfortunate trend.
I also think that patents in communication and file format standards are very different from other kinds of patents. Patents in communication standards prevent me from participating in culture without a private firm's permission. A communication standard (such as a file format standard) is no different than a language. I shouldn't have to pay a private company to participate in human language. Not only would that be a huge pain in the ass for everyone, it would make it even more difficult for dissenting opinions to be heard than it already is. Would you like to pay a fee to some private company for the right to speak English? Or pay based on the number of people who read your writing? That would be counter-productive from the perspective of encouraging the advancement of human society, which is the reason patents exist in the first place.
This leads, I think, to a homogenization of public discourse and a gradual concentration of power in the hands of fewer voices. That can't be a good thing for a developing a healthy, engaged populace.
So the best answer to "Where is everywhere?" is... What? I've been looking for everywhere forever.
No, you've been misspelling lager
In short, I have no objections to keeping such works private because they cannot ultimately be of much value.
Like I said in another post: If it is owned, it *cannot* be culture.
Why is it unwise? Rational people lived for several thousand years without copyright. Yeah, people who support copyright term extension are doing so for good reasons -- which would make them rational in a sense -- but not because they care about artists or culture. The US needs to copy DVDs to compensate for its massive trade deficit. No wonder so many people credulously accept this ideology -- their lives depend on it. See http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lawpoli/finance/ip-vs-inf lation.php
Hooray. Commercial, one-way media of all kinds deserve to die, or at the very least stop multiplying like virii.
Some random thoughts on this topic:
Money encourages production, not creativity.
What is owned cannot be culture. For me that's an axiom.
Own it if you want, but don't pretend that its got anything to do with culture. If I have to ask someone's permission to use it, it isn't culture. Culture *is* that which can be freely shared.
If you pay me to say it, I'll eventually end up lying.
Money encourages production, but it often encourages the production of crap. The "market" doesn't impose any standard of quality on what gets produced.
The reason we give people a monopoly on copying is so that eventually we have lots of free stuff. Unless you can show that the benefit of increased production outweighs the harm of restricting freedom, don't dare talk about extending copyright in time or space. In fact, we should reduce the term and reach of copyright to the minimum level required to encourage production. *That* makes sense to me. The idea that all this shrink-wrapped blather is someone or other's private property seems to me to be a parlour game gone bad.
Creativity can be encouraged in many ways. In Canada, parents are paid to spend time (a year or something) with their newly born child. Why couldn't individuals be given sabbatical to produce something of cultural importance? If you don't produce, your time off is repaid from source deductions.
or we might catch a trough. Depends if you're a pessimist or an optimist.
Most find that they can do what they really need to do with free software. Is the 5% loss in convenience worth denying poor kids the right to use, share, and learn about software? Is it worth denying people the opportunity to participate in making the rules that govern the digital world? I like people to think about free software as fair trade software.
When someone (your boss, the government) isn't forcing you to use some kind of proprietary software, when you are free to choose, what proprietary software do you absolutely *have* to use? What is there that you cannot live without? Most people are willing to give up a little in convenience if they know it will make things better in the long run. Recycling works like that. So does traffic flow. A crazy driver might get where he's going sooner, but he'll cause havoc for everyone else. Most people would see behaviour like that and say, "What a jerk". The rest of us just accept the few minutes of extra driving time in return for safer, more orderly streets.
You're wrong. I've helped dozens of people, young and old, experienced and inexperienced switch to Linux, and people have very few problems getting used to Linux. What does hurt them is peripherals and other add-ons that only work with Windows. I make absolutely certain that everyone for whom I install Linux understands that:
1. Software is a process not a product, so learn to live with change. Software is like a city -- continuous change that works.
2. Hardware should be checked for compatibility before buying. What doesn't work now might work in 3 or 6 months. Be patient.
3. Whatever "problems" you experience cannot be so great that it is worth denying people the right to share and control software. By way of comparison: Democracy is complicated, messy, costly, inconvenient, and inefficient and means that sometimes we don't get our way. But we choose it over totalitarianism because it is a choice that preserves the freedom to choose, and that freedom is essential to human dignity (as well as to more abstract things like "the market").
Secrecy is the perfect weapon. No wonder kings feared an open court system and public institutions like parliament. That's why I really wonder about Microsoft's motivation to help the Toronto police build software to identify child porn users for which they were so universally and credulously lauded. How convenient would it be to have the ability to magically produce indisputable evidence indicting someone (a competitor, an unfriendly bureacrat) with the most heinous crime imaginable? With child porn, an accusation is all that is required to decimate an opponent. No one's name ever gets cleared if they are later found not guilty ('not guilty' is never quite the same as 'innocent'). Every time someone threatens to make things difficult for Microsoft, their name coincidentally shows up on a list of suspects.
Likewise, Microsoft could also benefit by using their software to protect people who were really guilty in return for favours. All in all, it's a very sad time for justice and perhaps the end of democracy.
If you want a system that's reasonable, stop thinking about ideas as property, and start thinking about economics. Ideas are naturally free and non-rival. Any restrictions upon their transfer causes great transactional friction, so it should only be done when absolutely necessary. Arguably, one such necessity is providing royalty-based rewards for creators. In order to do this, we grant creators rights to control certain uses of their work. We only grant such rights in order to encourage creative production, and granting more rights than is absolutely required to encourage that production is economically inefficient. The public is, in a sense, being overcharged for production if it offers more protection than is necessary to achieve that result.
We give up way too much ground by saying things like "Yeah, if you as an artist want to put DRM on your stuff, that's your right". We make laws for a reason, not just because it serves the interests of a certain group (creators, record industry). The reason behind copyright law, its rationale, is to encourage production. If you grant that creators have inherent property rights in their work, then it is wrong to simultaneously oppose DRM, Broadcast Flag, and other restrictions that content "owners" dream up. If the basis for copyright law is to protect a public good, i.e. the benefit to society of creative production and cultural activity, then one can without contradiction support creators and yet still oppose DRM or other totalitarian means of obstructing that activity. Unfortunately, terms like "benefit to society" are seen as old school.
This is an absolutely brilliant idea. The fact that the number of patents is fixed would put pressure on the government to optimize the patent term to make it as short as possible while still encouraging commercialization. You *must* submit this idea to influential politicians.
2.) Eden marred by unclean man
3.) Make man feel guilty so he follows religious tenets to save himself from impending end of world
It's probably even worse than that, more like:
It's a fantasy about human omnipotence, not guilt.
People love to think of themselves as more important than they really are.
Someone told me once that volcanoes emit more CO2 than all the world's vehicles and factories combined. I don't know if I believe that either, but people do love drama, especially if it's of the tragic variety, where every powerful hero is doomed by a fatal character flaw. The fact that it is *his* flaw and not an external force that kills him proves the hero's omnipotence and thus proves him worthy of worship.
Apparently English class offers more certainty than science.
It's interesting that your statement, which is commonly taken to be the most rational and balanced view, is actually quite reactionary and dogmatic. In every age, the broad popular understanding of the technology upon which civilization is built was critical to stability and progress. Proprietary software is analogous to medieval guild system which went to great lengths to keep technical knowledge from the users of its products so that it could maintain power, pricing, and control. In the age of the automobile, almost everyone knew how to repair engines (this age has now ended since computers have invaded combustion engines). Everyone at least knew how a combustion engine works. Auto repair was taught in school. If you artificially limit the pool of available talent that can be applied to technological problems to suit the interests of the incumbent powers, you'll fail to solve those problems. Eventually that will catch up with you as a civilization and things will start to fall apart.
All this is in addition to the already well recognized fact that software represents a kind of legal constitution; where the opacity of proprietary software intersects with basic rights (voting machines, fair use, but much more too) it is dangerous and weakens democracy.
I find it strange that people accept something even as simple as a spyware detector being made as a proprietary product. What sense does it make to allow one private company to determine which other private companies' software is legitimate and which is not? Controlling the behaviour of the endpoints of a network (every standard constitutes a kind of network) means you can make the rules for the network, even if the network standards are "open".
These are just some of the reasons why I think the Free Software movement is an important civil society effort to defend democracy, not just a battle for the freedom to tinker. Democracy *means* having the freedom to tinker. To turn over whole domains of culture to opaque systems of control is a huge mistake.
I agree that it reeks. Microsoft gets their legal fees paid plus some extra dough for massive free advertising. I wouldn't mind it if the money went into some kind of public trust. But the fact that MS just gets an extra 7Mil means that they are beneficiaries of spam business. That's really more of an encouragement than a deterrent. Now any joe who can make 20 million will get slapped with a lawsuit by MS, MS will get their cut, and the spammer can retire. Great business model. Everybody wins except the people whose mailboxes are choked with Viagra flyers.
Interesting thought. Voila, now there is no such thing as a clean room implementation of anything -- everyone has been tainted by being able to see Solaris code. Now we're all like IBM employees who have access to SCO code -- our contributions to free software create copyright infringement liabilities. Plus any MS patents that Sun might have used could find their way into an Open Source project and cause even more trouble.
I happen to be visiting DisneyWorld right now from Winnipeg, Canada. I would recommend using DisneyWorld as a location for your data centre. They have their own back up generators, and no above ground power lines. That said their pursuit of endless copyright term extensions is totally lame.
governments don't have a monopoly on abusing power.
They can always go into the theatre, which doesn't depend on royalty collection for its revenue stream. (although it pays royalties to playwrights) With the death of big hollywood, local theatres would probably become much more popular. Maybe people would pay 50 bucks a seat to see a great play, even done by local performers, just the way they pay 50 bucks to see a big pop music star today.
Ha, and the Boston Tea Party.
The distinction between obvious and non-obvious is far from trivial. I think the onus should be upon supporters of the patent system to prove that the cost of making and proving these distinction is balanced by equal or greater benefit. Otherwise the patent system is a net loss for the economy.
start saving your hydrogen fuel cells to power the notebooks. Duracell lasts 10^-308 seconds on "Power Save" mode.