namely the corruption in the government would nearly annihilate the giving out to the poor.
Yeah, I agree governments can be corrupt. But so can not-governments. It's people who do the corrupting, so no matter how you slice it, you're going to get burned. Unless, of course, you're one of the two or three who come out at the top of the pile smelling like roses.
I think things like this depend more on what you believe is right than on some possibly flawed, circumstantial, or anecdotal evidence. If you go around saying this or that government is a bad government, then you are admitting that you have some idea of what would make those governments better. So you agree that good government is good. Now we can discuss how good government can be achieved. Sometimes the public good can be served by taking away someone's property, especially if:
A documented process exists in laws or regulations which sets out a dispute resolution mechanism.
The citizen whose property is being expropriated has legal recourse to appeal the expropriation. I don't think anyone is talking about having hit squads raiding someone's house.
I don't think anyone would call this an ideal solution, but it may be the best possible solution given the circumstances.
I'd rather lose a house after a few years than lose the rights to my ideas
You never had property rights to your ideas in the first place.
You only have rights concerning the public expression which your thoughts are given.
So even without copyright law, you would still have the "rights to your ideas".
Granted, you might not be able to make as much money by excluding others from the enjoyment of "your" ideas, but then if you'd rather give up your house than your ideas, I suppose money is no object anyway...
How much fun would your ideas be if they were only yours and no one else's. Would anyone even understand you?
Copyright ignores the obvious fact that most of the value of the work consists in its being understood and appreciated by audiences.
The level of understanding and appreciation depends as much on the audience's effort as the artist's. In the world of ideas it takes two to tango.
What good would copyrighted work be without an audience?
If royalties are set by negotiation or compulsory licensing, Napster (and its users) will have to pay in order for the site to survive ? but at least survival will be an option. Otherwise, the recording companies will be able to shut out Napster entirely in favor of their own,
industry-controlled, online services.
Uhh, I thought Napster was owned by the record industry. Didn't Bertelsmann AG buy it a while back? Or did I miss something?
Sorry to sound like such a dope, but I can't remember much with all the aluminum in my drinking water.
life of the artist for copyright and 20 years for corporate copyright.
What would prevent artists from signing contracts which assigned their rights to a company?
Are you saying the benefits of copyright belong to the artist, but that they can't really decide what to do with their rights? I suppose anything is possible if the government wills it, but I can see lots of difficulty in preventing someone from assigning rights which are presumably theirs to do with as they please.
Executive power is a defining characteristics of what one ordinarily means when one uses the word property. If I am not allowed to decide for myself whether I want to sell or keep my property, then there's not much point in calling it property. This is not to say that the word "property" has any impact in itself. Just that a situation in which you couldn't dispose of your rights in whatever way you see fit would leave most copyright holders unsatisfied.
Didn't the Cdn government rule against MS a year ago when one of their federal departments chose MS office over Corel Office? I remember Corel ended up getting something like $20 million smackaroos!
Yes, you're right. I had forgotten that, but a quick google search yielded this link. In any case, I don't think Corel's complaint had anything to do with MS's unfair business practices, just with RevCan's bid management.
Nobody in Canada will do anything about unfair or deceptive trade practices or anything else related to Microsoft. They can't afford to apply commercial law to Microsoft because Microsoft is a major sponsor of the Federal Government's "Connecting Canadians" initiative. They're afraid to do anything bad to MS because MS might retaliate by dropping their sponsorship of the myriad of government programs which MS sponsors. Too bad we don't have activist organizations here that have the courage to stand up to this kind of treatment.
The government can't deliver mail without posting huge losses.
That's becaue the government is stuck delivering all the mail that people depend on even if it's not profitable. The courier services have taken all the profitable delivery services away, leaving the government with stuff that's bound to be less profitable.
Me:What's the difference between a large segment of the population acting in concert, or the government acting on their behalf?
You: Very big difference. The former is the direct democracy of the free market. The latter is the supposed representatives supposedly acting on the population's behalf, but all too often acting to increase the power of government instead.
So what if it's the "direct democracy of the free market". That's just a name; just a bunch of words. The result might end up being the same either way. If the particular government in question happens to have bad people leading it, then that doesn't mean that the idea of government is bad. But what I'm saying doesn't even depend on whether you accept what I say about government. If the end product is the same, why would you care what name I use to describe the entity that brought about the desired end? If you say tomayto and I say tomahto, aren't we talking about the same thing? Doesn't it seem trivial to be making a big deal about the difference?
I understand now what you mean by accountable. You mean "customers and workers can get together and force companies to do stuff". Isn't this exactly what safety and environmental standards are supposed to do? Those things are put in place by the government acting on behalf of its citizens. What's the difference between a large segment of the population acting in concert, or the government acting on their behalf? If a large enough segment of the workers or the customers gets it into their head to declar war on somebody, they can do that just the same as a government can.
As for corporations being 100% accountable, what do you mean? Corporations depend on private property ownership which in turn depends on one of two things: a naturally harmonious populace, or the threat of violence. The government supplies the latter so that companies (and individuals) can maintain their ownership of private property. In return for this protection, Companies (and individuals) must be accountable to the general public as well as to their workers and customers. So not all of what they must be held accountable for is subject to market pressures. And that is what concerns environmental activists and labour activists.
And the community such a co-op would encompass is who, exactly?
Check out the co-operatives that undoubtedly exist in your community. There are lots of ways to skin a cat. People always have different interests, motives, backgrounds, vision, but they can find a way to bridge their differences if they each benefit enough from the relationship to make the effort worthwhile. It doesn't always work, much less work perfectly, but neither do the alternatives.
I'm really unclear on how you would set this up in a way that doesn't amount to a government -- it's going to be too large to be directly representative (remember we're talking about users here, not coders).
So what if it gets set up in a way that amounts to a government? Am I supposed to unflinchingly agree with you that governments are evil in principle? The problem with this kind of ideological tunnelvision is that in order to support your statement, you have to provide evidence taken from history, which your opponent (should they be as ideologically anaemic as you) can discount as being flawed for one reason or another. The tiresome debates over "Capitalism vs. Communism" fall into this category. Capitalist ideologues say "See, the Soviet Union collapsed -- communism doesn't work" to which the Communist ideologue replies "But the Soviet Union wasn't a true example of communism. It was just a flawed attempt to realize the communist ideal."
So where does this leave you? With a big headache. Stop thinking in terms of how you can turn the debate into one for which you already know all the lines. Start thinking about solving people's problems in the most efficient way possible, i.e. the way which incurs the least amount of pain, suffering, and loss.
Me: If you decide to build a pig barn in the middle of a residential neighborhood, how do you propose to deal with the complaints of your neighbors? With a shotgun?
You: No, with lawsuits. Between the redtape beforehand, and the lawsuits afterwards, every significant kernel revision would take 10 years.
Never mind the fact that it already takes nearly that long (just kidding, Linus). Your suggestion involves lawsuits. My suggestions (might) involve lawsuits. So that leaves only the "redtape beforehand" as the difference between the two. I suggest that a good city planning document can forestall lawsuits and cut red tape at the same time. Since the standards are widely distributed and published (as long as they aren't prohibitively expensive, like ISO standards) you have no excuse not to follow them. Any red tape you have to deal with is probably your own fault.
The FBI may have saved your skin more times than you know. You should really have a look at your file.
the return on investment of Social Security
I don't think Social Security was intended to provide anyone with a return on investment, other than to maintain the value of the fund on an inflation-adjusted basis. What were you expecting? A VA Linux IPO?
the service commitment of the Interior Department
I don't really know much about the service committment of the Department of the Interior, but if it's anything like the service committment of my DSL provider (two full days out of every month have been lost to technical failures) they probably deserve whatever rap they've gotten. Just because you're a private company doesn't mean you're immediately service oriented. Have you ever visited the reception area of a towing compound? They don't exactly greet you with smiles...
the customer-friendly payment policies of the IRS
Hey, don't bite the hand that feeds you. The IRS collects taxes that enable the government to do what you elected them to do, even if they do it badly or not at all. If that's the case, then go out and get involved in politics and make the system better. Nothing's stopping you from doing that.
the fine management practices of the Senate
Once again, I'm not really sure what the in joke is here, but the management practices of the senate cannot be a lot worse than the management practices of Union Carbide at Bhopal. Or those of Royal Dutch Shell, Pfizer, Exxon-Mobil, Adobe, Microsoft, IBM, GE, GM or any other big company you can think of. Good management involves more than just making a profit. That's why we need a force in civil society to balance the immense (albeit sometimes well-earned) power now held by corporations.
But there are private roads. They usually get built when the gov't isn't willing to fork out the money. Paid for by tolls, plus some profit to the company (though in many cases they revert to the public at some point and the toll booths are removed).
But even when the roads are "privately owned" the public still demands performance constraints, such as meeting minimum safety standards, and not arbitrarily restricting passage (say, on the basis of race, or whatever). The contracts with these private companies are probably filled with regulations and standards and red tape anyways, as well they should be. You don't just give public property away without some serious guarantees that quality and other public concerns won't be compromised.
I do think co-ops are a pretty good idea. I believe the city of Tacoma, WA forced some co-op like provisions (free access for libraries and schools, no redlining of certain neighborhoods) on AT&T when it acquired TCI.
I think co-ops are a very good idea. Another poster mentioned co-ops earlier. I'm not saying that we should give all this power directly to a (perhaps) corrupt government, just that we should not sit idly by while our government is giving away the farm to huge corporations. They're not much better, in a lot of cases, than big governments.
Absolutely. Do you have any idea what kind of social upheaval we would face if the Cartoon Network were interrupted?
Well, seriously. I didn't really mean the content, which is 99.9 percent hogwash, but rather the connection; the cable itself. Don't you remember the Emergency Broadcast System? It's essential during civil disasters to contact citizens as quickly as possible so that they can avoid harm. Cable stations (in my area, at least) already do this by broadcasting storm warnings and such.
You mention software platforms. So you're saying you want the government to own Linux? Uh, which government? And that would be good how?
Why have such a limited view of ownership? You could create cooperatives (as one previous poster suggested) which would own property that the community required to conduct its business. It would be good because it would prevent any entity from utilizing market power to reduce consumer surplus for its own gain. It doesn't matter so much in manufacturing where network effects aren't quite so strong, but in areas which require common ground, it would enable the lowest possible transaction cost.
So we have to file a "codebase impact statement" before we can write code? Will there be permits, approved contractors, minimum minority ownership requirements?
Why not? We put up with these forms of red tape and bureaucracy because even private works such as buildings (which often require municipal approval) make a significant impact on the surrounding area. If you decide to build a pig barn in the middle of a residential neighborhood, how do you propose to deal with the complaints of your neighbors? With a shotgun?
I also forgot to mention another consumer-friendly feature of monopolies:
Monopolies usually create network effects -- the benefits of having lots of people using the same product or service. This creates great value for consumers, e.g. a telephone system which connects every user with every other user. People depend on network effects to carry on trade and commerce. Language, currency, weights and measures, time, and other common media make transactions possible. Like phones and roads, digital communications (and software platforms) have become essential gears in the machinery of commerce and therefore in the interests of fairness, they should be owned or at least regulated by government.
As with any service which is essential to the economy, leaving network infrastructure in the hands of private companies doesn't work.
Since networks have a negligible marginal cost structure (the cost of adding one user) centralization and concentration bring huge benefits.
Therefore, in almost every case, the profit motive works to diminish competition rather than increase it.
The bigger you are, the lower your overhead and the greater your profit. Yes, this applies to other businesses, but the marginal cost in manufacturing is much higher. The incentive to form conglomerates isn't as strong.
But the corporations driving the media and broadband concentration aren't stupid. They know a good thing when they see one. The benefits of these kind of monopolies (the ones where massive cost savings can be achieved) are huge. Consumers stand to benefit through lower prices.
But wait, why would a monopoly lower it's prices? Well, actually, it wouldn't.
So there's this dillemna -- monopolies can reduce overhead, which can be good for consumers, but monopolies are very unlikely to pass these cost reductions on to consumers.
So what should we do? Either nationalize network infrastructure (like we do with roads) or regulate the private monopolies so that they can only increase prices where such increases are justified by rising input costs.
Either way there are probably efficiency trade-offs that would be made, but in the end, if you really want some service to be there for you whether it's profitable or not, you need to think about nationalizing, not privatizing, some parts of the essential infrastructure.
This generally false impression has panicked a whole generation of parents about technology, resulting in the hysterical jailing and persecution of some hackers, and triggered the installation of blocking and filtering systems on home computers, as well as many purchased with federal money.
I totally agree. My 9 year old daughter brought home an Internet Acceptable Use Policy form that I had to sign, which said, in effect, that I was responsible for whatever my daughter did on the internet. It relieved the school of any responsibility for monitoring my child's activities. It was basically some lawyer trying to cover the school division's ass.
But why should they be more concerned about covering their asses where the internet is concerned? Shouldn't they have a similar acceptable use policy for the school library or the playground? It is because everyone hears the word "Internet" and thinks "Ooohh... internet bad". It's really no worse than a myriad of other things my daughter might encounter while at school. The only difference seems to be the mystique of the internet.
I think Katz is probably right that the media have a vested interest in whipping us into a frenzy of fear about the internet. The internet is too free for their purposes. It's much harder for them to control the flow of information. They can't deal with anything interactive because it can't be controlled. That's why they talk out of both sides of their mouth. They don't want you using the internet to look at anything besides Corporate Authorized Content. Even if it is the same kind of crap that they try and create hysteria about.
MS is not the real problem. Everybody else in business uses the same tactics. People should focus their energy on promoting the use of Free Software in schools. That's where you'll break the dependency on MS products.
Most people don't understand why Microsoft is any different than Sun or IBM or GE. Every business tries to do things to screw up their competitors. That's business. Sometimes that type of competition harms consumers, but nobody says anything against it because they're too sheepish and they think "That's just the way it is. There's nothing I can do about it..."
Discerning a difference between the behaviour of MS and the behaviour of AT&T or GE is 12th decimal place operation. Either we go after all the big guys or we go after none of them. Since we're too chicken to go after all of them (or the economic consequences would be too politically damaging), we may as well put Anti-trust laws out of their misery.
Get out your VCR's yer CD rippers, DAT machines and high volume duplication equipment. Time to rip off some of what was ours to begin with.
Tired of having the same old stories being sold back to you at 12USD a pop? Tired of seeing the endless merry-go-round of merchandising being turned into content being turned back into merchandising? Tired of seeng re-runs? Tired of seeing sequels and remakes? Tired of feeling like a criminal when you copy a rented tape? You don't have to anymore! Now that the entertainment industry has declared open season on our traditional stories, we have every right to sample, pre-record, post-record, time-shift, quote, redistribute, parody, and otherwise show general disrespect for Copyright. It was an OK idea 300 years ago, but we're already drowning in the crap that Hollywood has to churn out just to keep people employed. We don't need to offer incentives for stuff that we already have too much of. The last thing we need is to have the stuff that we already paid for (reruns, remakes, sequels etc) and for which gave up our freedom to copy turned into something even more vapid and unctuous than the original. Next summers top 10 box-office blockbusters:
Chia-Pets On Venus
The Life and Times of a Playtex Tampon
Tiddly-Winks: The Movie
Slashdot: Lowest Rated Posts
The Burger King Drive-thru Memoirs
The David Letterman Movie
Minnie Mouse Does Dallas
N'Sync Goes to the Bathroom
Assholes in Space starring Dubya
American Express Extra Value Movie
If you think my humour is tiresom, check out Prime-Time Television.
Let's get just make do with the entertainment we've already got or make our own. The entertainment industry obviously has nothing left to offer. It seems we always have to provide raw material for Hollywood anyway. Why just let them use us? Let's have fun with it!
under copyright for decades more which is PLAIGAIRISM
Plagiarism is an academic term. The word (phrase) you want is copyright infringement. There is a different set of rules about plagiarising a work that is not copyrighted (like your classmate's essay). Generally you get your ass kicked out of school, but you don't pay large fines or go to prison.
Now say of market success what you will, but it is no coincidence that the vast majority of widely recognized artists choose to sign, despite the presence of supposedly equal or superior distribution alternatives. To merely write it off as the product of a monopoly on distribution is intellectually dishonest.
Your sample is skewed by considering only "widely recognized" artists. Obviously under current market conditions, one would *expect* that almost all widely known artists are under contract with major labels. The major labels made them well known. The major labels have a large degree of control over what is or isn't widely known.
The general gist of the publishers' argument is that closed markets are a requisite of intellectual production: limiting the supply of intellectual goods increases their value encouraging inferior (inefficient) producers to enter the market, thereby increasing the supply. So we have to restrict the supply in order to increase the supply. As unintuitive as this sounds, even if I accept it (which I probably would) as an accurate description of how things work, a description in no way implies a prescription -- in no way implies a vision of how things *ought* to work. While I can't just pull ideas out of thin air, discussions of what-ought-to-be need not be restricted to what-is.
My point is not that the scientists care for the publishers' financial well being; my point is that the artists clearly want those publishing functions and if their demands make the act of publishing economically un-viable, then no one wins, not the scientists, not the greater public, and certainly not the publishers. Put simply, I do not need to know precisely what their objectives are to reasonably this.
What do you mean by economically viable? If you mean viable in the more limited sense of "capable of being produced through private ownership for profit" then I agree that the scientists' demands are non-viable. But a publicly (sp?) funded system can be considered economically viable if the citizens who pay taxes can agree that scientific research is important enough to justify the required expenditure.
As an example of the narrowness of your definition of "viable", look at public education.
The public education system is not economically viable in the sense of being profitable, but people (taxpayers) value the services provided by schools enough that they are willing to pay a non-profit body to run them. Privately owned profit-generating activities are not the only economically viable endeavors. Something is viable if people are willing to support it. If there are too many public initiatives, then there will not be sufficient revenue derived from taxes to pay for the public initiatives and the public will refuse to pay higher taxes. If there are not enough public initiatives -- as is now the case -- then people will begin to see civil infrastructure begin to crumble. This is indeed what is happening in most developed nations.
I would argue that the barriers to court records are truely not that much lower. Although the courts may make them available, they are not all accessible online by any means. In fact, Lexis/Nexis and numerous other services make a great deal of money because they are the only effective way to get to them electronically.
Yes, that's exactly my point. The more these essential sources of information are privately controlled, the higher the barriers to access. Thomson Corp, for instance, owns WestLaw, which is the exclusive source for Federal court transcripts in the United States (If i am not mistaken). Thomson is a Canadian company. Is it fair that Americans have to pay a Canadian to look at transcripts of their own court proceedings? The fact that Lexis/Nexis make a great deal of money from selling public records is more evidence for my side of the argument. They are not engaging in entrepreneurship of any kind. They are taking the output of a public institution and repackaging it for private sale. What benefit does the free market bring to this activity other than higher costs, less intellectual freedom, and more corporate secrecy?
Firstly...
what sets the major labels apart from the myriad of other methods is CAPITAL and MARKETING
If your goal is to mass-produce and distribute music by building "brand recognition", then you are correct in suggesting that capital and marketing on the scale provided by the major labels is required. If on the other hand you believe that the enjoyment of music doesn't require brand recognition, then good distribution systems can be built with very little capital. You must be one of those who prefers music in a can to music in the flesh. So "merely delivering music from point A to point B" is a very worthy objective.
Secondly, the only way this protest will help scientists is IF this proposal does, indeed, make economic sense. This may well not be the case.
This is a very narrow view of what benefits scientists. You are assuming that you know better what is in their interest than they do.
Most of these journals have quite narrow focus and deal with matters in such details that the vast majority of them really do not concern the person that does not specialize in that field
Court transcripts are not of concern to lay people either, but they are part of the public record because public trust in the justice system depends on the principle of public access to the evidence and arguments presented in court. The same holds true for scientific research. We value the pursuit of scientific knowledge because it is a worthwhile human endeavor, not (solely) because it provides industry with better mousetraps. A large part of the benefit of scientific research is that any sufficiently literate person can avail themselves of the best research in the world. An informed citizen is a citizen that can participate in a rational way. Elitists, mandarins and aristocrats thrive on secrecy. Their political power depends on keeping the people in a state of ignorance. I find your sentiments to be profoundly undemocratic.
Theft is simply what it is defined as by law and by this definition this is theft. A statement like flamingcow's does not make it not theft any more than me quoting Marx makes all individual property theft. If I go on to steal flamingcow's car I can still justifiably get busted for grand theft auto.
If copyright infringement were legally identical to theft, there would be no need for a separate statute. Theft is theft and copyright infringement is copyright infringement. Using the word 'theft' to describe copyright infringement is just corporate propoganda. If you want to stick to the law, then you should stick to the law.
Slashdot Mirror
Wasn't there supposed to be an episode of the X-Files featuring /. characters? I seem to remember reading something about this in Variety...
Yeah, I agree governments can be corrupt. But so can not-governments. It's people who do the corrupting, so no matter how you slice it, you're going to get burned. Unless, of course, you're one of the two or three who come out at the top of the pile smelling like roses.
I think things like this depend more on what you believe is right than on some possibly flawed, circumstantial, or anecdotal evidence. If you go around saying this or that government is a bad government, then you are admitting that you have some idea of what would make those governments better. So you agree that good government is good. Now we can discuss how good government can be achieved. Sometimes the public good can be served by taking away someone's property, especially if:
I don't think anyone would call this an ideal solution, but it may be the best possible solution given the circumstances.
From the article:
Uhh, I thought Napster was owned by the record industry. Didn't Bertelsmann AG buy it a while back? Or did I miss something?
Sorry to sound like such a dope, but I can't remember much with all the aluminum in my drinking water.
Yes, you're right. I had forgotten that, but a quick google search yielded this link. In any case, I don't think Corel's complaint had anything to do with MS's unfair business practices, just with RevCan's bid management.
Nobody in Canada will do anything about unfair or deceptive trade practices or anything else related to Microsoft. They can't afford to apply commercial law to Microsoft because Microsoft is a major sponsor of the Federal Government's "Connecting Canadians" initiative. They're afraid to do anything bad to MS because MS might retaliate by dropping their sponsorship of the myriad of government programs which MS sponsors. Too bad we don't have activist organizations here that have the courage to stand up to this kind of treatment.
That's becaue the government is stuck delivering all the mail that people depend on even if it's not profitable. The courier services have taken all the profitable delivery services away, leaving the government with stuff that's bound to be less profitable.
Fuck off you socialist eurotrash wannabe.
That really improves your credibility.
So what if it's the "direct democracy of the free market". That's just a name; just a bunch of words. The result might end up being the same either way. If the particular government in question happens to have bad people leading it, then that doesn't mean that the idea of government is bad. But what I'm saying doesn't even depend on whether you accept what I say about government. If the end product is the same, why would you care what name I use to describe the entity that brought about the desired end? If you say tomayto and I say tomahto, aren't we talking about the same thing? Doesn't it seem trivial to be making a big deal about the difference?
As for corporations being 100% accountable, what do you mean? Corporations depend on private property ownership which in turn depends on one of two things: a naturally harmonious populace, or the threat of violence. The government supplies the latter so that companies (and individuals) can maintain their ownership of private property. In return for this protection, Companies (and individuals) must be accountable to the general public as well as to their workers and customers. So not all of what they must be held accountable for is subject to market pressures. And that is what concerns environmental activists and labour activists.
Check out the co-operatives that undoubtedly exist in your community. There are lots of ways to skin a cat. People always have different interests, motives, backgrounds, vision, but they can find a way to bridge their differences if they each benefit enough from the relationship to make the effort worthwhile. It doesn't always work, much less work perfectly, but neither do the alternatives.
I'm really unclear on how you would set this up in a way that doesn't amount to a government -- it's going to be too large to be directly representative (remember we're talking about users here, not coders).
So what if it gets set up in a way that amounts to a government? Am I supposed to unflinchingly agree with you that governments are evil in principle? The problem with this kind of ideological tunnelvision is that in order to support your statement, you have to provide evidence taken from history, which your opponent (should they be as ideologically anaemic as you) can discount as being flawed for one reason or another. The tiresome debates over "Capitalism vs. Communism" fall into this category. Capitalist ideologues say "See, the Soviet Union collapsed -- communism doesn't work" to which the Communist ideologue replies "But the Soviet Union wasn't a true example of communism. It was just a flawed attempt to realize the communist ideal."
So where does this leave you? With a big headache. Stop thinking in terms of how you can turn the debate into one for which you already know all the lines. Start thinking about solving people's problems in the most efficient way possible, i.e. the way which incurs the least amount of pain, suffering, and loss.
Never mind the fact that it already takes nearly that long (just kidding, Linus). Your suggestion involves lawsuits. My suggestions (might) involve lawsuits. So that leaves only the "redtape beforehand" as the difference between the two. I suggest that a good city planning document can forestall lawsuits and cut red tape at the same time. Since the standards are widely distributed and published (as long as they aren't prohibitively expensive, like ISO standards) you have no excuse not to follow them. Any red tape you have to deal with is probably your own fault.
The FBI may have saved your skin more times than you know. You should really have a look at your file.
the return on investment of Social Security
I don't think Social Security was intended to provide anyone with a return on investment, other than to maintain the value of the fund on an inflation-adjusted basis. What were you expecting? A VA Linux IPO?
the service commitment of the Interior Department
I don't really know much about the service committment of the Department of the Interior, but if it's anything like the service committment of my DSL provider (two full days out of every month have been lost to technical failures) they probably deserve whatever rap they've gotten. Just because you're a private company doesn't mean you're immediately service oriented. Have you ever visited the reception area of a towing compound? They don't exactly greet you with smiles...
the customer-friendly payment policies of the IRS
Hey, don't bite the hand that feeds you. The IRS collects taxes that enable the government to do what you elected them to do, even if they do it badly or not at all. If that's the case, then go out and get involved in politics and make the system better. Nothing's stopping you from doing that.
the fine management practices of the Senate
Once again, I'm not really sure what the in joke is here, but the management practices of the senate cannot be a lot worse than the management practices of Union Carbide at Bhopal. Or those of Royal Dutch Shell, Pfizer, Exxon-Mobil, Adobe, Microsoft, IBM, GE, GM or any other big company you can think of. Good management involves more than just making a profit. That's why we need a force in civil society to balance the immense (albeit sometimes well-earned) power now held by corporations.
But even when the roads are "privately owned" the public still demands performance constraints, such as meeting minimum safety standards, and not arbitrarily restricting passage (say, on the basis of race, or whatever). The contracts with these private companies are probably filled with regulations and standards and red tape anyways, as well they should be. You don't just give public property away without some serious guarantees that quality and other public concerns won't be compromised.
I do think co-ops are a pretty good idea. I believe the city of Tacoma, WA forced some co-op like provisions (free access for libraries and schools, no redlining of certain neighborhoods) on AT&T when it acquired TCI.
I think co-ops are a very good idea. Another poster mentioned co-ops earlier. I'm not saying that we should give all this power directly to a (perhaps) corrupt government, just that we should not sit idly by while our government is giving away the farm to huge corporations. They're not much better, in a lot of cases, than big governments.
Absolutely. Do you have any idea what kind of social upheaval we would face if the Cartoon Network were interrupted?
Well, seriously. I didn't really mean the content, which is 99.9 percent hogwash, but rather the connection; the cable itself. Don't you remember the Emergency Broadcast System? It's essential during civil disasters to contact citizens as quickly as possible so that they can avoid harm. Cable stations (in my area, at least) already do this by broadcasting storm warnings and such.
Why have such a limited view of ownership? You could create cooperatives (as one previous poster suggested) which would own property that the community required to conduct its business. It would be good because it would prevent any entity from utilizing market power to reduce consumer surplus for its own gain. It doesn't matter so much in manufacturing where network effects aren't quite so strong, but in areas which require common ground, it would enable the lowest possible transaction cost.
So we have to file a "codebase impact statement" before we can write code? Will there be permits, approved contractors, minimum minority ownership requirements?
Why not? We put up with these forms of red tape and bureaucracy because even private works such as buildings (which often require municipal approval) make a significant impact on the surrounding area. If you decide to build a pig barn in the middle of a residential neighborhood, how do you propose to deal with the complaints of your neighbors? With a shotgun?
I totally agree. My 9 year old daughter brought home an Internet Acceptable Use Policy form that I had to sign, which said, in effect, that I was responsible for whatever my daughter did on the internet. It relieved the school of any responsibility for monitoring my child's activities. It was basically some lawyer trying to cover the school division's ass.
But why should they be more concerned about covering their asses where the internet is concerned? Shouldn't they have a similar acceptable use policy for the school library or the playground? It is because everyone hears the word "Internet" and thinks "Ooohh... internet bad". It's really no worse than a myriad of other things my daughter might encounter while at school. The only difference seems to be the mystique of the internet.
I think Katz is probably right that the media have a vested interest in whipping us into a frenzy of fear about the internet. The internet is too free for their purposes. It's much harder for them to control the flow of information. They can't deal with anything interactive because it can't be controlled. That's why they talk out of both sides of their mouth. They don't want you using the internet to look at anything besides Corporate Authorized Content. Even if it is the same kind of crap that they try and create hysteria about.
Most people don't understand why Microsoft is any different than Sun or IBM or GE. Every business tries to do things to screw up their competitors. That's business. Sometimes that type of competition harms consumers, but nobody says anything against it because they're too sheepish and they think "That's just the way it is. There's nothing I can do about it..."
Discerning a difference between the behaviour of MS and the behaviour of AT&T or GE is 12th decimal place operation. Either we go after all the big guys or we go after none of them. Since we're too chicken to go after all of them (or the economic consequences would be too politically damaging), we may as well put Anti-trust laws out of their misery.
Get out your VCR's yer CD rippers, DAT machines and high volume duplication equipment. Time to rip off some of what was ours to begin with.
Tired of having the same old stories being sold back to you at 12USD a pop? Tired of seeing the endless merry-go-round of merchandising being turned into content being turned back into merchandising? Tired of seeng re-runs? Tired of seeing sequels and remakes? Tired of feeling like a criminal when you copy a rented tape? You don't have to anymore! Now that the entertainment industry has declared open season on our traditional stories, we have every right to sample, pre-record, post-record, time-shift, quote, redistribute, parody, and otherwise show general disrespect for Copyright. It was an OK idea 300 years ago, but we're already drowning in the crap that Hollywood has to churn out just to keep people employed. We don't need to offer incentives for stuff that we already have too much of. The last thing we need is to have the stuff that we already paid for (reruns, remakes, sequels etc) and for which gave up our freedom to copy turned into something even more vapid and unctuous than the original. Next summers top 10 box-office blockbusters:
- Chia-Pets On Venus
- The Life and Times of a Playtex Tampon
- Tiddly-Winks: The Movie
- Slashdot: Lowest Rated Posts
- The Burger King Drive-thru Memoirs
- The David Letterman Movie
- Minnie Mouse Does Dallas
- N'Sync Goes to the Bathroom
- Assholes in Space starring Dubya
- American Express Extra Value Movie
If you think my humour is tiresom, check out Prime-Time Television.Let's get just make do with the entertainment we've already got or make our own. The entertainment industry obviously has nothing left to offer. It seems we always have to provide raw material for Hollywood anyway. Why just let them use us? Let's have fun with it!
Plagiarism is an academic term. The word (phrase) you want is copyright infringement. There is a different set of rules about plagiarising a work that is not copyrighted (like your classmate's essay). Generally you get your ass kicked out of school, but you don't pay large fines or go to prison.
Your sample is skewed by considering only "widely recognized" artists. Obviously under current market conditions, one would *expect* that almost all widely known artists are under contract with major labels. The major labels made them well known. The major labels have a large degree of control over what is or isn't widely known.
The general gist of the publishers' argument is that closed markets are a requisite of intellectual production: limiting the supply of intellectual goods increases their value encouraging inferior (inefficient) producers to enter the market, thereby increasing the supply. So we have to restrict the supply in order to increase the supply. As unintuitive as this sounds, even if I accept it (which I probably would) as an accurate description of how things work, a description in no way implies a prescription -- in no way implies a vision of how things *ought* to work. While I can't just pull ideas out of thin air, discussions of what-ought-to-be need not be restricted to what-is.
What do you mean by economically viable? If you mean viable in the more limited sense of "capable of being produced through private ownership for profit" then I agree that the scientists' demands are non-viable. But a publicly (sp?) funded system can be considered economically viable if the citizens who pay taxes can agree that scientific research is important enough to justify the required expenditure.
As an example of the narrowness of your definition of "viable", look at public education. The public education system is not economically viable in the sense of being profitable, but people (taxpayers) value the services provided by schools enough that they are willing to pay a non-profit body to run them. Privately owned profit-generating activities are not the only economically viable endeavors. Something is viable if people are willing to support it. If there are too many public initiatives, then there will not be sufficient revenue derived from taxes to pay for the public initiatives and the public will refuse to pay higher taxes. If there are not enough public initiatives -- as is now the case -- then people will begin to see civil infrastructure begin to crumble. This is indeed what is happening in most developed nations.
Yes, that's exactly my point. The more these essential sources of information are privately controlled, the higher the barriers to access. Thomson Corp, for instance, owns WestLaw, which is the exclusive source for Federal court transcripts in the United States (If i am not mistaken). Thomson is a Canadian company. Is it fair that Americans have to pay a Canadian to look at transcripts of their own court proceedings? The fact that Lexis/Nexis make a great deal of money from selling public records is more evidence for my side of the argument. They are not engaging in entrepreneurship of any kind. They are taking the output of a public institution and repackaging it for private sale. What benefit does the free market bring to this activity other than higher costs, less intellectual freedom, and more corporate secrecy?
Firstly... what sets the major labels apart from the myriad of other methods is CAPITAL and MARKETING
If your goal is to mass-produce and distribute music by building "brand recognition", then you are correct in suggesting that capital and marketing on the scale provided by the major labels is required. If on the other hand you believe that the enjoyment of music doesn't require brand recognition, then good distribution systems can be built with very little capital. You must be one of those who prefers music in a can to music in the flesh. So "merely delivering music from point A to point B" is a very worthy objective.
Secondly, the only way this protest will help scientists is IF this proposal does, indeed, make economic sense. This may well not be the case.
This is a very narrow view of what benefits scientists. You are assuming that you know better what is in their interest than they do.
Most of these journals have quite narrow focus and deal with matters in such details that the vast majority of them really do not concern the person that does not specialize in that field
Court transcripts are not of concern to lay people either, but they are part of the public record because public trust in the justice system depends on the principle of public access to the evidence and arguments presented in court. The same holds true for scientific research. We value the pursuit of scientific knowledge because it is a worthwhile human endeavor, not (solely) because it provides industry with better mousetraps. A large part of the benefit of scientific research is that any sufficiently literate person can avail themselves of the best research in the world. An informed citizen is a citizen that can participate in a rational way. Elitists, mandarins and aristocrats thrive on secrecy. Their political power depends on keeping the people in a state of ignorance. I find your sentiments to be profoundly undemocratic.
If copyright infringement were legally identical to theft, there would be no need for a separate statute. Theft is theft and copyright infringement is copyright infringement. Using the word 'theft' to describe copyright infringement is just corporate propoganda. If you want to stick to the law, then you should stick to the law.
One small step backward for homogeny is a giant leap forward for hegemony.