Sneaky. Most people don't know what Zorn's Lemma is, or how it is equivalent to AC, or even what AC is.
Yes, I actually started to write "Axiom of Choice", since that's one of the postulates that people commonly "debate" with respect to its "truth", but then I decided it was much more fun to pick a more obscure equivalent.
As an aside, one of the most eye-opening statements I ever heard regarding the formal systems and their interpretation was an off-hand comment from one of my undergrad math profs. I had just learned a little about AC (though I didn't really understand it) and I asked this prof if he "believed it was true". At the time I didn't understand what a silly question that was, but his answer so elegantly addressed both my surface understanding and a much deeper conceptualization that didn't come until later that I'll never forget it.
His answer was: "I don't believe in infinite sets."
And then you drop the facts and the law on them and they vaporize.
Do you have any idea what it is that lawyers do? They read and interpret texts and create arguments that relate specific sets of facts to them. Theologians are very, very good at doing those things, and those at the Vatican are the cream of a very large crop.
(Note, BTW, that I'm not Catholic)
This is why law isn't founded on logic.
Umm. You're dead, flat wrong. The court process is all about logically applying statutes and rules to criminal cases or civil dispute in an attempt to achieve "fairness" -- where "fairness" is actually defined more by the statutes and rules than anything
Logic lacks semantics, and you can prove anything if your postulates are false.
No, you can prove anything if your postulates are contradictory. "False" and "True" are words that don't apply to postulates. Is Euclid's parallel postulate true? How about Zorn's Lemma?
In the case of the law, statutes and rules of procedure are the axioms, and "justice" and "truth" are derived from them. Often the result is consistent with what we would consider "justice" and "truth", but not always.
Lawyers, mathematicians, philosophers and theologians all have in common a well-honed ability to take a particular set of axioms and find ways to derive from them the "truths" that are of interest. The abilities aren't exactly the same, but they're closely related. And good theologians are seriously smart people.
There's no reason a church should ever win a court case, except that somehow they've got the entire court system to postulate that god exists.
How would the existence of god be relevant to a case about software piracy?
The Vatican has very deep pockets and its argumentative strategies are generally a leap of faith.
The first part of that is true, but the second... I don't think it could be more wrong. Theologians are people whose life is debating and thinking about minute points of logic, finding ways to interpret texts to mean what they want them to mean and devising detailed logical arguments in support of their positions. They're more lawyerly than lawyers.
Your comment reminds me of Richard Feynman's attempt to logically confound Jewish seminary students. He failed, utterly.
Okay, I realize you're probably just trolling here, but you do realize that he reinvented integration, not just learned how to solve a couple of integrals, right?
You, the submitter and the editor all need some remedial education in Calculus. Hint: What Tai "discovered" is not integration.
I am not sure the methodology produces better software; it does however produce software companies can use and modify to their needs without paying ongoing license fees. That's why they use it - it allows them to develop other, higher-value, products and maintain control over the source and not be beholden to some third party company.
I think there's another piece or two as well, and I think the bit about "no license fees" is overstated. Sure, not having license fees to pay is nice, but in most cases companies who are building profitable products wouldn't care about paying some money for an OS license. They can buy something like QNX for relatively small amounts of money and customize it however they like, without the requirement that they publish their changes to potential competitors. So why don't they do that?
I think you're right that it comes down to cost, but not cost of license fees so much as cost of maintenance and cost of developer training. On the maintenance side, it's cheaper to get your improvements pushed into the Linux kernel than it is to maintain your own set of patches on top of whatever base OS you're using. I suppose it might be possible to push your additions into QNX, but it's not done that way, mostly I think because there's a reticence to give your valuable work for free to a company who will sell it back to you. In the case of Linux, the "giving back" is considered both "good citizenship in the community" and, basically, the price paid to use the OS to begin with.
A side benefit of this contribution model is that the software progresses much faster than it would if it were dependent on the work of one company, unless that company is exceptionally large and well-funded (e.g. Microsoft -- but they're reluctant to provide source in many cases).
As for developer training, Linux is available for free to anyone who wants it, so people use it and play with it themselves, and its usage in industry is widespread so many developers have experience with it from other employers. The same applies to development tooling as well.
I think the lack of license fees does play a small part as well, but mostly because it allows speculative projects to start up with very low costs, which may grow into more "serious" projects. Projects that begin with ample funding and a significant development staff wouldn't be bothered by some license fees, but are often convinced to choose Linux by the maintenance and training issues.
With TPM chips being cracked previously, after apparently being tamper-proof
TPM chips were never claimed to be tamper-proof. One of the fundamental design assumptions was that they would not be secure against someone with access to the hardware. It's right in the documentation. This isn't because it's not possible to make it very hard to tamper with a chip, it's because it's expensive to make a strongly tamper-resistant device.
Of course, it probably is impossible to make a completely tamper-proof device, no matter how much money you put into it, but you can make it hard enough that it's extremely difficult/expensive to successfully tamper. If in addition to that you make the key inside each device unique, so that spending the money to successfully compromise one device ONLY compromises that device, you can achieve a very high level of security. But that's expensive and difficult, which is why the Trusted Computing specifications never even attempted to go there.
We pay the loans back constantly, and they routinely choose to reinvest.
We pay the interest on the loans and a tiny bit of the principal, but borrow more than we pay off.
Plus, compared to other possible investments, it's extremely low risk.
Until we realize that we simply can't raise enough money to pay the interest, which is already a significant portion of the entire annual federal debt. At that point, we have to consider either defaulting or intentionally devaluing the dollar as ways to escape the crushing burden -- and the investments become not just risky but actually bad.
Well sparky it takes real work to make a novel. There is nothing fictitious about it.
Irrelevant. The value of intellectual property rights has nothing to do with the effort required to produce works. The Supreme Court has clarified that numerous times.
I am all for keeping the copyright laws where they where before the Bono law and in line with the rest of the world.
Okay, that's your opinion. And reasoning to justify it? Any evidence to support your reasoning?
Simple solution if you don't like it don't read their works. Write your own and put them in the public domain when you want to.
Huh? How is providing healtcare to those that can't afford it wealth redistribution?
Obviously, it's forcibly taking money from those who can afford it and giving it to those who can't. You might argue that's a good thing, but you can't argue it's not redistribution.
And while we're on that topic, why is always considered a bad thing when wealth redistribution benefits the lower-middle income, but it's a good thing when it benefits the upper 2% (e.g. tax breaks for the wealthy)?
It's a bad thing in both cases -- though I think you're a little confused with your example. Reducing the amount that the government is taking from the wealthy isn't the same thing as redistributing wealth to the wealthy. It's just redistributing less from them. The sort of government redistribution TO the wealthy that we have to watch out for isn't reducing their taxes, it's allowing them to use their money to manipulate government into giving them other favors, like protection from competition, big government contracts, etc.
He would rather have zero bearing and give people hope by showing us that yes, a man can play by the original rules, than sell out.
I'd rather have an elected representative that actually gets things done that better my life.
Since that sort doesn't seem to exist, I'd rather have the one that doesn't worsen my life. And, actually, I think that if there were enough like RP in office, they would do things that better my life. And they'd do even more to better my children's lives.
The REAL difference here is that the other examples you mentioned are real property, not fictitious intellectual property. This fictitious property does have a valuable purpose, which is to motivate the publication of materials so that they'll enrich the public domain. As such, the copyright term needs to be set so that it achieves sufficient incentive effect with the minimum damage to the public domain -- meaning, ideally, just long enough to motivate creation and publication, but not a day longer.
Will a working author who is making his living from writing books decide to quit doing it and go flip hamburgers if his grandchildren won't be living easy on his royalties? Not likely. I'm not saying that copyright should necessarily end right at death. That might provide a disincentive for an author who is elderly or terminally ill or for some other reason doesn't think he might live long enough to benefit adequately from the work. But extending it much beyond the end of the author's life undermines the rationale for copyright.
For that matter, for young authors there's no point in extending it to the end of their life. No 30 year-old is going to decide not to write a book because it'll only pay him until he's 50.
I'm all for copyright reform, but this idea that authors are somehow different than anyone else in that their literary works, while still under copyright, shouldn't be part of their estate seems ridiculous to me.
What do you mean "different than anyone else"? If I'm a plumber, should the pipes I install somehow continue generating revenue for my kids after I've stopped installing them? I can pass on the money I've made without any need for some sort of perpetual revenue stream, and so can authors.
If you're a plumber shouldn't the business you invested in pass to your kids?
If my kids operate my plumbing business, they're going to have to actually work to make their money, not just sit back and watch the royalty checks roll in.
If the children of famous authors want to make a living by writing books, they're more than welcome to, and they actually have a significant leg up on their competition due to their name recognition, contacts in the industry (you can bet that Brian Herbert's offerings never languished in a slushpile, even if I think that's where they belong) and the opportunity to have learned their craft from their parent. Not to mention the inherited money, which may free them from having to do other work while they build their own reputation.
RSI would be terrible working at something that physical for 8 hours a day
I think the opposite would be true. Working at something like that all day might be tiring, but it would be much less repetitive than the tiny, continuous movements imposed on us by keyboards and mice. I think the variation in movements, and the much larger movements, using large muscle groups as well as small muscles, would result in exertion that is much more similar to the work that people did prior to the information age. Not as strenuous as, say, farming, of course, but about as varied.
I also suspect that if you worked at something like that all day, not only would you not have repetitive stress injuries, but you'd build significant upper body strength and endurance. Nothing like lifting weights or doing hard labor, but I think you'd be stronger and more toned than the typical office worker today. That could be a good thing!
It helps that Baen's non-free ebook prices are also very reasonable. With bundles of five or six books for $15 through webscriptions, or individual books (by their best authors, even) in the $4-$6 ranges typically.
That helps the sale of their non-free e-books, but the point is that their free e-books boost the sales of their non-free dead-tree books, including not only other works by the same author, but even the very works that are distributed gratis electronically.
I cannot agree: if I'm writing my software and releasing it in open source for everybody to befit, then I want to stay opened until I go to grave (after that, I wouldn't know).
Okay, it's fine that you want that. But what you haven't said is why you think society should spend its resources to force your desire on others, to its own detriment.
Because otherwise I might not be inclined to release the software in open source (so that many others may benefit)? Hell, maybe I'd be not inclined to write that software at all?
Really? You would choose not to write or release your work because it'll only be protected for 20 years, rather than your whole lifetime? You're seriously looking that far down the road when you write something to scratch your own itch?
If so, I think you're unique, or close to it. I've written and released a fair amount of code under the GPL, and my motivation for writing it has always been that it was something I needed for myself, and my motivation for releasing it has always been that I hoped others would pitch in to help me. Whether or not someone might be able to make a closed-source version of my work in 20 years would have been completely irrelevant to me, especially since unless the project dies, in 20 years the codebase will be radically improved.
Returning your question: how the world will benefit from this? (for instance: would you say the world is better with iPhone only and no Android and Nokia?).
I don't see how that has any bearing on the discussion at hand.
Are you able to guarantee IP lawyer would NOT be able to spin this on the line of:
-Well, the kernel was first published in 1991. 2011 makes a couple of decades from publication, formally I can take the kernel and the bug fixes... you know, there are some bug fixes in 20 years... and use it as I please.
Yep, easily.
All it takes is one kernel contributor to point to one feature that they implemented more recently and own the copyright to and say "You're using code that I own the copyright to, without my permission."
But, really, in the case of the Linux kernel, it has changed so much that there's really no possibility of a question. Even if every line in a 1991 kernel were completely unmodified, it would still only represent a tiny fraction of the code in a 2010 kernel. The last 1991 release, version 0.11 only HAD 13K LOC as compared to the 13.5 million LOC in 2.6.36. So if every line were unmodified, that 1991 kernel code would represent only 0.1% of the current codebase. And, it's unlikely that those 13K lines are umodified. It wouldn't surprise me if analysis were to show that a 2010 kernel and a 1991 kernel only have a few hundred lines in common, and that those lines are almost entirely trivial.
For that matter, if we just look at the changes in Linus' git repository (which only goes back to April 2005) we see that the kernel has grown from 6,718,838 lines to 13,913,125 lines(*), a net increase of 7,194,287 lines -- more than doubling the size of the codebase in 5.5 years. Running git diff --stat to find the differences between the April 2005 version and today's version shows that in 5.5 years there have been 10,683,974 lines added and 3,493,136 lines removed.
Honestly, for the Linux kernel, a copyright duration of even 5 years is probably perfectly adequate to ensure that no one is interested in building on a public domain kernel. And even if someone did, so what? Do you think progress on the GPL kernel would stop, or even slow? The BSD kernel continues moving, and not that much more slowly than Linux.
Linux is something of a special case -- and a very poor choice as your example -- but if you go with 10 years, much less 20, the same will hold true of any open source software. If software has gone that long without changes, it's because no one cares about it any more. Even codebases as marvelously stable as Knuth's TeX undergo changes quite regularly -- and if they didn't, if they so perfectly do their job that there's no need to update them, there's not going to be much value that can be added by a closed source version.
No, copylefted software has NOTHING to fear from 10-20 year copyright terms.
(*) Line counts included all files in the source tree, excluding only the contents of the.git tree. Excluding the git tree was done by the simple expedient of mv'ing it out of the way, then line counts were produced with find . -type f | xargs cat | wc.
Personally I don't see why the author's death should figure into it at all. A couple of decades from publication to public domain is plenty. If you don't want your thoughts and ideas to enter the public domain then keep them to yourself.
I cannot agree: if I'm writing my software and releasing it in open source for everybody to befit, then I want to stay opened until I go to grave (after that, I wouldn't know).
Okay, it's fine that you want that. But what you haven't said is why you think society should spend its resources to force your desire on others, to its own detriment.
I think your comment arises from the common, but misguided, notion that creators of intellectual works have some inherent, natural right to control those works at the same time they're distributing them far and wide. This erroneous idea arises partly from the poorly named "copyright" and partly from big media pushing the idea on us all because it's to their benefit. The reality is that ideas and expressions are inherently unownable or, if you prefer, owned primarily by society as a whole including all of the many giants on whose shoulders the creator must stand in order to create.
Copyright is a fictional sort of property which was created for the express purpose of motivating the growth and improvement of the public domain. As such, it makes sense to define and enforce copyrights to the extent that they actually do increase the flow of materials into the public domain. This has nothing whatsoever to do with any theoretical inherent "rights" of the creator; it's a construct intended purely to benefit society as a whole, and the fact that it aids the creator for a while is a secondary benefit at best, and arguably just a side-effect.
Given that perspective, how does it aid society for you to retain control of your software until your death? It doesn't, especially for software. 20 or 30 years from now, any software you've written will likely have zero value to anyone, and if it does still have value it will only be because it has been subsequently modified and extended by others, whose later work will perpetuate the openness because of their later copyrights.
So, it's fine that you want that. But why should anyone else care that you want that? And why should you care about copyright extending to your death given that long copyright terms aren't even necessary to achieve your stated goal?
I'm all for copyright reform, but this idea that authors are somehow different than anyone else in that their literary works, while still under copyright, shouldn't be part of their estate seems ridiculous to me.
What do you mean "different than anyone else"? If I'm a plumber, should the pipes I install somehow continue generating revenue for my kids after I've stopped installing them? I can pass on the money I've made without any need for some sort of perpetual revenue stream, and so can authors.
n the contrary. Google's settlement only applies to Google and no-one else. They didn't trailblaze so much as monopolize.
Regardless of the fact that the terms of the settlement only apply to Google, it establishes a precedent. Not a precedent in the normal sense of a legally binding rule which judges must follow, but a precedent in the sense of "this sort of agreement was found to be reasonable by these parties, it makes sense that it should be done here, too." That precedent won't avoid or even limit a lawsuit, but it will pave the way to another settlement or, if PG can garner enough support, to legislative changes.
That said, I think PG's best bet is to follow the DMCA to the letter, and hopefully the onus of copyright policing their works can be left squarely with the authors and their deadbeat descendants.
Does the DMCA Safe Harbor provision actually help PG here? I guess that depends on who is putting the works up. If PG can say they're just providing a hosting service for user-contributed materials, then the DMCA will help them.
Baen, unlike PG, does sell copies of the same work. IOW, there's a contribution mechanism there if you feel like the work is worth some money. Not the same thing at all.
It's irrelevant who provides the for-sale, dead-tree versions of the work. The point is that free electronic distribution sparks a demand for hardcopy sales of formerly dead, or at least slow-selling, works. Unless you think that people who read the e-book for free are buying the paper copy as a donation. I suppose there might be some of that happening, but I really, really doubt it's in any way significant. What happens is that people who start to read the e-book decide they'd rather read a paper version, or they tell their friends about this great book and those people go buy a paper version. The people who buy the paper copy don't really care that they're paying the same people who gave them the e-book. They just care that it's a book they wanted and they were able to buy it.
I think the point is that when you're talking about half century-old, out-of-print works, PGs approach *should* be the expected one. Luckily for PG, Google has already blazed this trail for them. If you recall, Google's settlement with the publishers is actually pretty similar to what PG is doing -- out-of-print works are made available unless someone objects. Google has placed some limitations which PG has not, but the concept is very similar.
Is this all about semantics? I mean, Project G is very clear about this: If a copyright holder makes a claim, they take the material down. I would think putting this stuff out there, rather than letting it rot is hardly a disservice to the authors/publishers.
Based on Baen publishing's experience, making electronic copies freely available will likely rouse enough interest in these old works that whoever owns the copyrights will probably be able to make some money on a new printing. It's a little counter-intuitive, but Baen says the effect is quite consistent and reliable.
I've never seen any evidence that IBM acquires patents in order to lock up inventions. If IBM doesn't implement it, they'll license the patent. What IBM does do (from what I've seen as an outside observer -- I work for IBM but none of this has anything to do with my job) is use the patents defensively, meaning they don't get enforced at all, even though someone is infringing on them, unless that someone threatens to sue IBM for infringement on some of their patents.
Slashdot Mirror
Sneaky. Most people don't know what Zorn's Lemma is, or how it is equivalent to AC, or even what AC is.
Yes, I actually started to write "Axiom of Choice", since that's one of the postulates that people commonly "debate" with respect to its "truth", but then I decided it was much more fun to pick a more obscure equivalent.
As an aside, one of the most eye-opening statements I ever heard regarding the formal systems and their interpretation was an off-hand comment from one of my undergrad math profs. I had just learned a little about AC (though I didn't really understand it) and I asked this prof if he "believed it was true". At the time I didn't understand what a silly question that was, but his answer so elegantly addressed both my surface understanding and a much deeper conceptualization that didn't come until later that I'll never forget it.
His answer was: "I don't believe in infinite sets."
And then you drop the facts and the law on them and they vaporize.
Do you have any idea what it is that lawyers do? They read and interpret texts and create arguments that relate specific sets of facts to them. Theologians are very, very good at doing those things, and those at the Vatican are the cream of a very large crop.
(Note, BTW, that I'm not Catholic)
This is why law isn't founded on logic.
Umm. You're dead, flat wrong. The court process is all about logically applying statutes and rules to criminal cases or civil dispute in an attempt to achieve "fairness" -- where "fairness" is actually defined more by the statutes and rules than anything
Logic lacks semantics, and you can prove anything if your postulates are false.
No, you can prove anything if your postulates are contradictory. "False" and "True" are words that don't apply to postulates. Is Euclid's parallel postulate true? How about Zorn's Lemma?
In the case of the law, statutes and rules of procedure are the axioms, and "justice" and "truth" are derived from them. Often the result is consistent with what we would consider "justice" and "truth", but not always.
Lawyers, mathematicians, philosophers and theologians all have in common a well-honed ability to take a particular set of axioms and find ways to derive from them the "truths" that are of interest. The abilities aren't exactly the same, but they're closely related. And good theologians are seriously smart people.
There's no reason a church should ever win a court case, except that somehow they've got the entire court system to postulate that god exists.
How would the existence of god be relevant to a case about software piracy?
The Vatican has very deep pockets and its argumentative strategies are generally a leap of faith.
The first part of that is true, but the second... I don't think it could be more wrong. Theologians are people whose life is debating and thinking about minute points of logic, finding ways to interpret texts to mean what they want them to mean and devising detailed logical arguments in support of their positions. They're more lawyerly than lawyers.
Your comment reminds me of Richard Feynman's attempt to logically confound Jewish seminary students. He failed, utterly.
Okay, I realize you're probably just trolling here, but you do realize that he reinvented integration, not just learned how to solve a couple of integrals, right?
You, the submitter and the editor all need some remedial education in Calculus. Hint: What Tai "discovered" is not integration.
I am not sure the methodology produces better software; it does however produce software companies can use and modify to their needs without paying ongoing license fees. That's why they use it - it allows them to develop other, higher-value, products and maintain control over the source and not be beholden to some third party company.
I think there's another piece or two as well, and I think the bit about "no license fees" is overstated. Sure, not having license fees to pay is nice, but in most cases companies who are building profitable products wouldn't care about paying some money for an OS license. They can buy something like QNX for relatively small amounts of money and customize it however they like, without the requirement that they publish their changes to potential competitors. So why don't they do that?
I think you're right that it comes down to cost, but not cost of license fees so much as cost of maintenance and cost of developer training. On the maintenance side, it's cheaper to get your improvements pushed into the Linux kernel than it is to maintain your own set of patches on top of whatever base OS you're using. I suppose it might be possible to push your additions into QNX, but it's not done that way, mostly I think because there's a reticence to give your valuable work for free to a company who will sell it back to you. In the case of Linux, the "giving back" is considered both "good citizenship in the community" and, basically, the price paid to use the OS to begin with.
A side benefit of this contribution model is that the software progresses much faster than it would if it were dependent on the work of one company, unless that company is exceptionally large and well-funded (e.g. Microsoft -- but they're reluctant to provide source in many cases).
As for developer training, Linux is available for free to anyone who wants it, so people use it and play with it themselves, and its usage in industry is widespread so many developers have experience with it from other employers. The same applies to development tooling as well.
I think the lack of license fees does play a small part as well, but mostly because it allows speculative projects to start up with very low costs, which may grow into more "serious" projects. Projects that begin with ample funding and a significant development staff wouldn't be bothered by some license fees, but are often convinced to choose Linux by the maintenance and training issues.
With TPM chips being cracked previously, after apparently being tamper-proof
TPM chips were never claimed to be tamper-proof. One of the fundamental design assumptions was that they would not be secure against someone with access to the hardware. It's right in the documentation. This isn't because it's not possible to make it very hard to tamper with a chip, it's because it's expensive to make a strongly tamper-resistant device.
Of course, it probably is impossible to make a completely tamper-proof device, no matter how much money you put into it, but you can make it hard enough that it's extremely difficult/expensive to successfully tamper. If in addition to that you make the key inside each device unique, so that spending the money to successfully compromise one device ONLY compromises that device, you can achieve a very high level of security. But that's expensive and difficult, which is why the Trusted Computing specifications never even attempted to go there.
We pay the loans back constantly, and they routinely choose to reinvest.
We pay the interest on the loans and a tiny bit of the principal, but borrow more than we pay off.
Plus, compared to other possible investments, it's extremely low risk.
Until we realize that we simply can't raise enough money to pay the interest, which is already a significant portion of the entire annual federal debt. At that point, we have to consider either defaulting or intentionally devaluing the dollar as ways to escape the crushing burden -- and the investments become not just risky but actually bad.
To be fair, the foreign interests actually make money off of the loans they extend to the U.S. government.
Only if we pay the loans back.
Well sparky it takes real work to make a novel. There is nothing fictitious about it.
Irrelevant. The value of intellectual property rights has nothing to do with the effort required to produce works. The Supreme Court has clarified that numerous times.
I am all for keeping the copyright laws where they where before the Bono law and in line with the rest of the world.
Okay, that's your opinion. And reasoning to justify it? Any evidence to support your reasoning?
Simple solution if you don't like it don't read their works. Write your own and put them in the public domain when you want to.
Whoosh!
unfairly redistributing wealth (healthcare).
Huh? How is providing healtcare to those that can't afford it wealth redistribution?
Obviously, it's forcibly taking money from those who can afford it and giving it to those who can't. You might argue that's a good thing, but you can't argue it's not redistribution.
And while we're on that topic, why is always considered a bad thing when wealth redistribution benefits the lower-middle income, but it's a good thing when it benefits the upper 2% (e.g. tax breaks for the wealthy)?
It's a bad thing in both cases -- though I think you're a little confused with your example. Reducing the amount that the government is taking from the wealthy isn't the same thing as redistributing wealth to the wealthy. It's just redistributing less from them. The sort of government redistribution TO the wealthy that we have to watch out for isn't reducing their taxes, it's allowing them to use their money to manipulate government into giving them other favors, like protection from competition, big government contracts, etc.
He would rather have zero bearing and give people hope by showing us that yes, a man can play by the original rules, than sell out.
I'd rather have an elected representative that actually gets things done that better my life.
Since that sort doesn't seem to exist, I'd rather have the one that doesn't worsen my life. And, actually, I think that if there were enough like RP in office, they would do things that better my life. And they'd do even more to better my children's lives.
The REAL difference here is that the other examples you mentioned are real property, not fictitious intellectual property. This fictitious property does have a valuable purpose, which is to motivate the publication of materials so that they'll enrich the public domain. As such, the copyright term needs to be set so that it achieves sufficient incentive effect with the minimum damage to the public domain -- meaning, ideally, just long enough to motivate creation and publication, but not a day longer.
Will a working author who is making his living from writing books decide to quit doing it and go flip hamburgers if his grandchildren won't be living easy on his royalties? Not likely. I'm not saying that copyright should necessarily end right at death. That might provide a disincentive for an author who is elderly or terminally ill or for some other reason doesn't think he might live long enough to benefit adequately from the work. But extending it much beyond the end of the author's life undermines the rationale for copyright.
For that matter, for young authors there's no point in extending it to the end of their life. No 30 year-old is going to decide not to write a book because it'll only pay him until he's 50.
I'm all for copyright reform, but this idea that authors are somehow different than anyone else in that their literary works, while still under copyright, shouldn't be part of their estate seems ridiculous to me.
What do you mean "different than anyone else"? If I'm a plumber, should the pipes I install somehow continue generating revenue for my kids after I've stopped installing them? I can pass on the money I've made without any need for some sort of perpetual revenue stream, and so can authors.
If you're a plumber shouldn't the business you invested in pass to your kids?
If my kids operate my plumbing business, they're going to have to actually work to make their money, not just sit back and watch the royalty checks roll in.
If the children of famous authors want to make a living by writing books, they're more than welcome to, and they actually have a significant leg up on their competition due to their name recognition, contacts in the industry (you can bet that Brian Herbert's offerings never languished in a slushpile, even if I think that's where they belong) and the opportunity to have learned their craft from their parent. Not to mention the inherited money, which may free them from having to do other work while they build their own reputation.
RSI would be terrible working at something that physical for 8 hours a day
I think the opposite would be true. Working at something like that all day might be tiring, but it would be much less repetitive than the tiny, continuous movements imposed on us by keyboards and mice. I think the variation in movements, and the much larger movements, using large muscle groups as well as small muscles, would result in exertion that is much more similar to the work that people did prior to the information age. Not as strenuous as, say, farming, of course, but about as varied.
I also suspect that if you worked at something like that all day, not only would you not have repetitive stress injuries, but you'd build significant upper body strength and endurance. Nothing like lifting weights or doing hard labor, but I think you'd be stronger and more toned than the typical office worker today. That could be a good thing!
It helps that Baen's non-free ebook prices are also very reasonable. With bundles of five or six books for $15 through webscriptions, or individual books (by their best authors, even) in the $4-$6 ranges typically.
That helps the sale of their non-free e-books, but the point is that their free e-books boost the sales of their non-free dead-tree books, including not only other works by the same author, but even the very works that are distributed gratis electronically.
PG is far older than google books.
Absolutely true, but I don't see the relevance.
I cannot agree: if I'm writing my software and releasing it in open source for everybody to befit, then I want to stay opened until I go to grave (after that, I wouldn't know).
Okay, it's fine that you want that. But what you haven't said is why you think society should spend its resources to force your desire on others, to its own detriment.
Because otherwise I might not be inclined to release the software in open source (so that many others may benefit)? Hell, maybe I'd be not inclined to write that software at all?
Really? You would choose not to write or release your work because it'll only be protected for 20 years, rather than your whole lifetime? You're seriously looking that far down the road when you write something to scratch your own itch?
If so, I think you're unique, or close to it. I've written and released a fair amount of code under the GPL, and my motivation for writing it has always been that it was something I needed for myself, and my motivation for releasing it has always been that I hoped others would pitch in to help me. Whether or not someone might be able to make a closed-source version of my work in 20 years would have been completely irrelevant to me, especially since unless the project dies, in 20 years the codebase will be radically improved.
Returning your question: how the world will benefit from this? (for instance: would you say the world is better with iPhone only and no Android and Nokia?).
I don't see how that has any bearing on the discussion at hand.
Are you able to guarantee IP lawyer would NOT be able to spin this on the line of:
-Well, the kernel was first published in 1991. 2011 makes a couple of decades from publication, formally I can take the kernel and the bug fixes... you know, there are some bug fixes in 20 years... and use it as I please.
Yep, easily.
All it takes is one kernel contributor to point to one feature that they implemented more recently and own the copyright to and say "You're using code that I own the copyright to, without my permission."
But, really, in the case of the Linux kernel, it has changed so much that there's really no possibility of a question. Even if every line in a 1991 kernel were completely unmodified, it would still only represent a tiny fraction of the code in a 2010 kernel. The last 1991 release, version 0.11 only HAD 13K LOC as compared to the 13.5 million LOC in 2.6.36. So if every line were unmodified, that 1991 kernel code would represent only 0.1% of the current codebase. And, it's unlikely that those 13K lines are umodified. It wouldn't surprise me if analysis were to show that a 2010 kernel and a 1991 kernel only have a few hundred lines in common, and that those lines are almost entirely trivial.
For that matter, if we just look at the changes in Linus' git repository (which only goes back to April 2005) we see that the kernel has grown from 6,718,838 lines to 13,913,125 lines(*), a net increase of 7,194,287 lines -- more than doubling the size of the codebase in 5.5 years. Running git diff --stat to find the differences between the April 2005 version and today's version shows that in 5.5 years there have been 10,683,974 lines added and 3,493,136 lines removed.
Honestly, for the Linux kernel, a copyright duration of even 5 years is probably perfectly adequate to ensure that no one is interested in building on a public domain kernel. And even if someone did, so what? Do you think progress on the GPL kernel would stop, or even slow? The BSD kernel continues moving, and not that much more slowly than Linux.
Linux is something of a special case -- and a very poor choice as your example -- but if you go with 10 years, much less 20, the same will hold true of any open source software. If software has gone that long without changes, it's because no one cares about it any more. Even codebases as marvelously stable as Knuth's TeX undergo changes quite regularly -- and if they didn't, if they so perfectly do their job that there's no need to update them, there's not going to be much value that can be added by a closed source version.
No, copylefted software has NOTHING to fear from 10-20 year copyright terms.
(*) Line counts included all files in the source tree, excluding only the contents of the .git tree. Excluding the git tree was done by the simple expedient of mv'ing it out of the way, then line counts were produced with find . -type f | xargs cat | wc.
Personally I don't see why the author's death should figure into it at all. A couple of decades from publication to public domain is plenty. If you don't want your thoughts and ideas to enter the public domain then keep them to yourself.
I cannot agree: if I'm writing my software and releasing it in open source for everybody to befit, then I want to stay opened until I go to grave (after that, I wouldn't know).
Okay, it's fine that you want that. But what you haven't said is why you think society should spend its resources to force your desire on others, to its own detriment.
I think your comment arises from the common, but misguided, notion that creators of intellectual works have some inherent, natural right to control those works at the same time they're distributing them far and wide. This erroneous idea arises partly from the poorly named "copyright" and partly from big media pushing the idea on us all because it's to their benefit. The reality is that ideas and expressions are inherently unownable or, if you prefer, owned primarily by society as a whole including all of the many giants on whose shoulders the creator must stand in order to create.
Copyright is a fictional sort of property which was created for the express purpose of motivating the growth and improvement of the public domain. As such, it makes sense to define and enforce copyrights to the extent that they actually do increase the flow of materials into the public domain. This has nothing whatsoever to do with any theoretical inherent "rights" of the creator; it's a construct intended purely to benefit society as a whole, and the fact that it aids the creator for a while is a secondary benefit at best, and arguably just a side-effect.
Given that perspective, how does it aid society for you to retain control of your software until your death? It doesn't, especially for software. 20 or 30 years from now, any software you've written will likely have zero value to anyone, and if it does still have value it will only be because it has been subsequently modified and extended by others, whose later work will perpetuate the openness because of their later copyrights.
So, it's fine that you want that. But why should anyone else care that you want that? And why should you care about copyright extending to your death given that long copyright terms aren't even necessary to achieve your stated goal?
I'm all for copyright reform, but this idea that authors are somehow different than anyone else in that their literary works, while still under copyright, shouldn't be part of their estate seems ridiculous to me.
What do you mean "different than anyone else"? If I'm a plumber, should the pipes I install somehow continue generating revenue for my kids after I've stopped installing them? I can pass on the money I've made without any need for some sort of perpetual revenue stream, and so can authors.
n the contrary. Google's settlement only applies to Google and no-one else. They didn't trailblaze so much as monopolize.
Regardless of the fact that the terms of the settlement only apply to Google, it establishes a precedent. Not a precedent in the normal sense of a legally binding rule which judges must follow, but a precedent in the sense of "this sort of agreement was found to be reasonable by these parties, it makes sense that it should be done here, too." That precedent won't avoid or even limit a lawsuit, but it will pave the way to another settlement or, if PG can garner enough support, to legislative changes.
That said, I think PG's best bet is to follow the DMCA to the letter, and hopefully the onus of copyright policing their works can be left squarely with the authors and their deadbeat descendants.
Does the DMCA Safe Harbor provision actually help PG here? I guess that depends on who is putting the works up. If PG can say they're just providing a hosting service for user-contributed materials, then the DMCA will help them.
Baen, unlike PG, does sell copies of the same work. IOW, there's a contribution mechanism there if you feel like the work is worth some money. Not the same thing at all.
It's irrelevant who provides the for-sale, dead-tree versions of the work. The point is that free electronic distribution sparks a demand for hardcopy sales of formerly dead, or at least slow-selling, works. Unless you think that people who read the e-book for free are buying the paper copy as a donation. I suppose there might be some of that happening, but I really, really doubt it's in any way significant. What happens is that people who start to read the e-book decide they'd rather read a paper version, or they tell their friends about this great book and those people go buy a paper version. The people who buy the paper copy don't really care that they're paying the same people who gave them the e-book. They just care that it's a book they wanted and they were able to buy it.
I think the point is that when you're talking about half century-old, out-of-print works, PGs approach *should* be the expected one. Luckily for PG, Google has already blazed this trail for them. If you recall, Google's settlement with the publishers is actually pretty similar to what PG is doing -- out-of-print works are made available unless someone objects. Google has placed some limitations which PG has not, but the concept is very similar.
Is this all about semantics? I mean, Project G is very clear about this: If a copyright holder makes a claim, they take the material down. I would think putting this stuff out there, rather than letting it rot is hardly a disservice to the authors/publishers.
Based on Baen publishing's experience, making electronic copies freely available will likely rouse enough interest in these old works that whoever owns the copyrights will probably be able to make some money on a new printing. It's a little counter-intuitive, but Baen says the effect is quite consistent and reliable.
I've never seen any evidence that IBM acquires patents in order to lock up inventions. If IBM doesn't implement it, they'll license the patent. What IBM does do (from what I've seen as an outside observer -- I work for IBM but none of this has anything to do with my job) is use the patents defensively, meaning they don't get enforced at all, even though someone is infringing on them, unless that someone threatens to sue IBM for infringement on some of their patents.