*groan* Since when has regulation ever made anything open, cheap or innovative?
*groan* The telephone is cheap, open, and innovative because regulation created the baby bells from the old regulated monopoly and regulation has so far forced the companies to be independent. As a result of some legislative compromises for broadband service, etc., the free market is being allowed to prevail and the phone companies seem to be merging back into one, and keeping out competition for local service: if this happens you will see real stagnation and high prices. Other obvious examples of regulatory success are other monopoly breakups like oil, steel, IBM (not successful, but thwarting), and soon to be Microsoft. Airline deregulation was a success, but the current market is anti-competitive with respect to small (new) competitors. The recent agreement by the record industry to stop colluding on pricing is regulation, and etc.
According to perfect market theory, there are a number of "natural" sources of market failure and all require regulation to forestall; I mentioned one, natural monopoly. the *groan* people who don't understand this and oppose all regulation out of misguided and kneejerk principle are a real source of problems, but admittedly not as big source of problems as their kneejerk regulating counterparts.
yes, but he said "glass TTY", referring to a dumb terminal, as you know, an integrated keyboard and display connected via RS-232 serial featuring built-in memory for ASCII and a character generator. The C64 was far more advanced!
You raise an interesting point about who should bear the cost of operating the servers, but I don't think your analogy gets to the heart of the matter. I believe that I should be allowed to stop spam in my email, and spam on my instant messenger, and to me this has to do with the legitimate regulation of commercial and harassing speech, not the cost of operating my mailbox.
On the cost of servers issue, I think bundling is in general a bad idea for consumers as it generally represents an attempt by a company to leverage some strength in order to gain share for some inferior product or to damage a legitimate competitor. As consumers we protect ourselves if we set up markets such that we are not faced with choices of bundles that include inferior products.
So, the answer would depend on AOL's revenue model. If ads pay for the servers, then I'd be happy to require that clones run the same ads. If they're giving away the service in order to garner share, then AFAIC they've agreed to give it away.
I agree with your sentiment also, but not at all with the details. I don't believe that corporations have any responsibility to the community other than to fulfill their promises. Their products should do what they say they do, and they should pay their employees what they say they will, and they should obey other applicable law, including primarily looking to maximize shareholder value. If they do anything beyond that, I believe that they are being irresponsible. There are a whole diversity of people who may be shareholders. Let them each behave responsibly in the way they want to and not be coerced into accepting responsibilities they don't agree with.
Am I a glassy-eyed libertarian? Not in any way. The community has a responsibility to itself and we should insist that AIM and services like AIM have open standards, and we should legislate, hack, clone, whatever to get there. I want to achieve the same "best" result you do, but I don't want to get preachy and moralize about it. There's nothing wrong with AOL's attitude, but we need to make sure they don't get what they want as it hurts us.
it's easy to agree with the sentiments in your post, but they may not be accurate.
if they only want their client to talk to their server, they are entitled. This may suck for everyone in the
short term,
certainly they are entitled to want that, but it is questionable whether they are legally entitled to have that, and doubly questionable whether they should be legally entitled to have that. Consider the telephone. It used to be that you could only connect a Bell telephone to the one company's circuits. Now you can connect any kind to a choice of servers, and the world is unquestionably a better place. The changeover required a change in the law and it took 100 years. That did suck for everyone, and lets not repeat it.
but alternatives will prevail if they stay closed.
Not necessarily. This industry, like the telephone, could be an example of a natural monopoly, in which case it takes active opposition/regulation to keep it open, cheap, and innovative.
people always quote that "nuts" story from the Battle of the Bulge: an American commander and his troops were surrounded and running out of ammo. The Germans sent in a message along the lines of "surrender?" (which in this case, it should be noted, was a humanitarian gesture) to which the American replied simply "nuts", an American idiom the Germans had trouble translating. The Americans held out till being saved, IIRC.
I have no idea why this story gets quoted. It is not funny or interesting. Imagine if the situation were reversed and the Germans had sent back... I don't speak German, how about... "Berliner". Oh, hardy har har, isn't that funny! NOT.
however, this particular use of the story is a meta usage which isn't so bad. I read it as "if the protocol wants to hear back "nuts", we'll send back "nuts".
you have a basic misunderstanding that screws up the rest of your thinking.
the dot.com model is the same as any other startup business model: attract capital, spend it on productive assets, put off current profitability in favor of growth, then share future profits with investors. Much of the success of the model is based on first-mover advantages. When you are trying to achieve FMA, "lobbying for changes in the law" sure doesn't sound like it's always the smartest thing to do.
and nowhere puts restraints on the rights of individual citizens
...and also nowhere put constraints on the power of the Supreme Court to make the by definition constitutional decisions they've made. The Supreme Court declared businesses to be places of public accomodation because of the realization that equal-protection was meaningless in the face of the atmosphere that prevailed in the Jim Crow south. None of which has anything to do with constraining the rights of individuals to discriminate.
in order for a backlight to do anything, the light would need to pass through filters. There are LCD technologies that filter a backlight, but active matrix displays would not benefit from backlighting.
releasing a Pentium-200-based laptop... backlights are the powersucker.
ROTFL! There are no [cough...choke] "backlights" anymore. Active matrix means each pixel is its own teeny, tiny incandescent bulb! Sherman, set the Way-Back machine to...
There are some low power machines somewhat simiilar to what you propose. They tend to eliminate the hard disk in favor of non-volitle ram and run WinCE on a weird processor, but people don't want them: too slow.
Record companies don't make gobs of money on every CD they sell... they
lose plenty on releases you've never heard of.
You are distracting yourself. Record companies do make gobs of money overall. That should raise questions about the rest of your argument.
you're doing a half-quantitative analysis which you don't finish, and thus qualitative conclusions are difficult to draw. (BTW, that bit about the "first copy bearing the full cost" is sort of completely nonsensical... corn is a commodity but the first ear sold does not carry all the costs.)
Making a CD today involves shelling out money for recording facilities,...
Yes, there are large investments in manufacturing and distribution. Guess what? the record companies don't own this property, plant, and equipment, they buy those commodity services from a few huge suppliers who charge only cents per CD. That is why you see shelves of stuff, it doesn't cost much. Which makes it all the harder to see why prices are so high. In ordinary competitive markets, merchants reduce prices on old inventory to make it move, even below cost. Only monopolies and cartels manipulate high prices to reduce demand.
In terms of the gamble, there's little risk in that industry precisely because of the consolidation. The music labels use collusion and bribes to control each element of the chain, from signing garage bands, to controlling DJ playlists, , to store price and inventory, precisely for the purpose of taking the risk out of their investment. This would be good thing if it led to lower prices, but it hasn't.
Come off it: try to be a little more rigorous in inspecting your own arguments. In the catalogs of the big record companies are large volumes of perfect substitutes, and they all have the same inflated prices, prices they would not have in a competitive market.
Demand for those particular artists is created through cartel control of DJ playlists. It is part of human nature to want to hear familiar songs over and over. Cynically manipulating that need with monopoly pricing is different than selling addictive drugs and controlling mob turf only in degree; the analogy works well to points out the market forces at work. The world would be a better place for the vast bulk of consumers, some of quite moderate income, if we (a) abandoned erroneous assumptions about intellectual property and (b) embraced more rigorously anti-monopoly policy.
Quite, but not perfectly substitutable. People would rather pay to listen to a band they like than listen
to music they don't like for free
but you are ignoring (willfully?) that most of the time each individual has many distinct likes which are perfectly substitutable, or else there'd be no shuffle play button. Same goes with books, computer games, movies, etc. as evidenced by the choosing dilemma at the video store.
I saidHowever, by colluding to restrict the supply of music, the record companies minimize their
costs and ensure high prices.
you said
Yes, there are monopoly forces at work here - it's called intellectual property.
I pointed out the music industry's actual collusive cartel behavior; your response dodges that question.
But as to your response, yes, you've now come full circle. If you go back in the thread, the intellectual argument (which I give away for free:) is that since intellectual so-called property is an artificial construct, we should rethink why we constructed it. I don't believe it is "moral" or necessary to produce the very results that its proponents want, creative output.
Witness the open software movement: now those are artists who produce because they can't do anything else. seems to me intellectual property laws protect the uncreative, it's the straw they cling to.
with me it is something personal. I think timothy is a bit of a twit and his "take your ball and go home" attitude is a good example.
timothy, it's not that we don't want the stories you cover. We like what everyone else has to say, we just don't want to hear what you have to say, unless it's in the discussion and you get modded like everyone else. We can't turn off the editorial comments, and we can't mod them down. This actually contributes to the problem because you editors know that and are thus more reckless.
Of course artists need to
get paid - doing it by paying for 'intellectual property' is just the way it has been done in recent
monopoly capitalism.
There are other exciting and viable models...
people say this stuff without thinking about. Artists do not need to get paid, and there are many models of artists who don't. Choirs, garage bands, etc. We may want to pay them if it encourages higer quality or quantity, but we could just as easily follow our hearts and treat art like love: make it something illegal to pay for.
You can't have it both ways - either your computer is a digital recording device and you pay the
RIAA tax on every computer, hard disk and data CDR media, or it isn't...
actually, you and the White House are overlooking something that should make a lot of sense to slashdotters: programmable computers are not one thing; they virtualize a whole bunch of things. My computer is not an audio device. But my computer with a media player program is. If there is to be a royalty, it would correctly be on the software.
CD's are not a perfectly competitive market because they are not perfectly substitubable. You
cannot substitute a Patsy Cline CD for an Eminem CD. CD's are in a market classified as "monopolistic competition".
You're being simplistic. Just because the CD market shows some elements of monopolistic competition does not mean that one factor explains everything. There is tons of music available, and it is quite substitutable in each genre (ever stood next to a jukebox?), not to mention many more bands waiting in the wings. However, by colluding to restrict the supply of music, the record companies minimize their costs and ensure high prices.
Monopolistic competition is by any definition good for the consumer. Consumers value
variety and are willing to pay for it.
Customers of a monopolist are willing to pay as well. That's not the point. The point is that utility maximization takes place at the market clearing price and the music industry operates high above that level, enriching a few at the expense of the many. True monopolistic competition would have Patsy Cline competing against the Judds head to head on price (or other factors), not both controlled by one company which coordinates their activities.
If CD's were perfectly competitive and substitutable, there would be only one CD title, which you
could buy anywhere. This is bad.
this is an example of nonsense: if it is "bad" they wouldn't be perfect substitutes. You need to understand what your definitions mean.
The marginal cost of delivering information electronically is not zero. There are constant costs such
as electricity, additional bandwith expense...
Oh please. I was obviously (a) exaggerating, using colloquial speech, (b) "copying" as I said is close to zero; you are talking about distribution, and (c) networks have high fixed capital costs with zero marginal cost within great ranges anyway, and the consumer has already purchased the bandwidth he is using.
Since you invoke the gods of my favorite temple, ECON 101, you live or die by their grace:
CDs cost too much
There's no law that says...
actually, there is a law that says monopolies and price-fixing cartels are illegal. The major record labels just caved on such an case, all but admitting guilt, and other lawsuits against them have been filed. They've been illegally keeping prices artificially high fro a long time. Perhaps they reap what they sowed.
Information wants to be free.
What the fuck does this mean?
It means two things: in ECON 101 you learned (or apparently did not) that in a competitive market, price will drop to marginal cost. Since copies of information in the digital age have a marginal cost of zero, it can be seen that information does indeed want to be free. The high prices of CDs indicate thas some other non-market forces must be at work. Second, the other meaning is that if you teach me something, why should I be restricted from teaching it to someone else since that costs you nothing? Consider mankind in prehistoric times, or children on a playground: they learn from each other, and it's a good thing too. That's what "it's a free country" means. You need to make the case for restricting freedom, and I don't think "because it makes a small number of people rich" is good enough, nor does the argument that the information would not otherwise be produced... there has been music for as long as there have been people. The only new aspect are the robber barons.
Indie bands give away music
Actually, my response to this is that every interview you hear/read coming out of Hollywood has the creatives telling us how it is their calling: they write/act/dance/sing because they can do naught else, it's the very fabric of their being. So, since they're not in it for the money, why give them any. At least make them admit they are a bunch of lying money grubbers first.
The RIAA rips off artists. So if they are already getting ripped off then that makes it OK for you to rip them off?
Huh? MP3s get ripped from the ripper off-ers.
then why isn't it OK for corporations to incorporate
GPLed code in their closed source products? After all information wants to be free
you are slyly restricting the meaning of free, excluding freedom. If GPLed code is locked away, it is not free. It's only free if they grant the same freedom to their customers... oh, that's that's the GPL.
if it is OK to pirate music then
it is OK to pirate software after all the rhetoric is the same and information wants to be free.
not exactly right, but you are on the right track. It's OK because it is not piracy to steal from pirates. And a number of the points I raised speak to the actual circumstances, not just the fact that people are selling copyrighted material. Look at video rental: nobody bothers to rent and copy videos because they don't cost much. But people often bring food to the movie theater because of the price gouging.
Furthermore, when the people think the government of the society they live in is corrupt, the idea of taking matters into their own hands is enshrined in our (US) Declaration of Independence. Interestingly, the corruption then was the same as now, protecting the interests of fat cats at the expense of the unenfranchised. Every lawsuit we see seems to be settled with Big Marketing Companies being allowed to buy and sell data about us, and stuff our mailboxes with spam, and still more illegal to take the cover off the box and see how they are spying (violation of ECON 101's perfect information axiom) or price fixing.
You're the one who needs an introduction to analogies. You don't have to agree with an issue to see an analogy. For example, consider "abortion of fetuses shown to be defective is analgous to the Nazis killing people they deemed defective." You are not agreeing to any side of either position if you say, "I can see the analogy." It is true that most people find analogies they agree with to be more convincing, but it's still ignorant.
BTW, the American Medical Association just released a study in which, try as they might to find a ray of sunshine, they were forced to conclude that the Brady Act did not have any effect on gun crime. Other studies have credibly (but not definitively) shown that legal handguns do reduce your risk for being victimized by crime.
I agree with you about the "there oughta be a law" sentiment, but I think you're offbase here. I don't think any chip has gotten a reputation for being unstable due to hacker overclocking. Though, some do get the +karma for being so overengineered that the overclocking range is phat.
I think AMD is underestimating the value of the positive word of mouth they get when they allow maximum overclocking. the more the powerusers walk around talking about overclocking an AMD, they more they are saying "AMD". Reminds me of the old saw, "advertising is when you say you are good in bed. PR is when your ex-girlfriends say it. PR is better."
without defending the system or taking sides, I believe that the "robustness" claim was about the secure authentication and data transmission (they're probably using ssh:) while the disclosure they wish to avoid is how the "AI" or "grep" that they're using works, what it keys on, vocabularies, etc. because they don't want people to work around it.
you chose a bad example: there is no cure for cancer and the research is for the most part not privately funded, but I get your point (did you think I'd never heard that argument? I have an MBA.)
My point was that you should consider intellectual property rights artificial, a man-made creation rather than a "moral" right. Intellectual property rights could be artificially created in narrow cases where they are needed if they are truly needed.
But are they needed? Your argument says that there would never be a free operating system, yet there are several of them. I'm friends with a number of cancer researchers: all of them, MDs and PhDs, work for peanuts, and gladly, they just need a lab... and, they don't have any property rights to what they produce, but they do want to tell the world about it when they're done. Geeks are not particularly motivated by money, and the information just wants to be free.
Yes, I understand your argument, but just because you say it doesn't make it true, and I don't think the case has been made: open source shows that there is another way, and the entire history of science agrees with that model. R&D for products? Sure, companies make more money if you give them patent monopolies, but you haven't made the case that they are necessary. There are plenty of competitive industries without patent protection and people work all the harder to produce products and make money. It's human nature to innovate, and it's human nature to copy innovations. The information wants to be free.
And that's leaving aside the whole world of copyrights. Artists keep telling us how they produce because they can do nothing else, it's just their calling. So, why give them monopolies? If we do give them temporary monopolies, why 100 years later do you need to pay a royalty to sing Happy Birthday? There's nothing "God given" about the term of the monopoly. How about 5 years?
Morally, if you don't want me to sing your songs, don't teach them to me. The information wants to be free.
Slashdot Mirror
*groan* The telephone is cheap, open, and innovative because regulation created the baby bells from the old regulated monopoly and regulation has so far forced the companies to be independent. As a result of some legislative compromises for broadband service, etc., the free market is being allowed to prevail and the phone companies seem to be merging back into one, and keeping out competition for local service: if this happens you will see real stagnation and high prices. Other obvious examples of regulatory success are other monopoly breakups like oil, steel, IBM (not successful, but thwarting), and soon to be Microsoft. Airline deregulation was a success, but the current market is anti-competitive with respect to small (new) competitors. The recent agreement by the record industry to stop colluding on pricing is regulation, and etc.
According to perfect market theory, there are a number of "natural" sources of market failure and all require regulation to forestall; I mentioned one, natural monopoly. the *groan* people who don't understand this and oppose all regulation out of misguided and kneejerk principle are a real source of problems, but admittedly not as big source of problems as their kneejerk regulating counterparts.
yes, but he said "glass TTY", referring to a dumb terminal, as you know, an integrated keyboard and display connected via RS-232 serial featuring built-in memory for ASCII and a character generator. The C64 was far more advanced!
On the cost of servers issue, I think bundling is in general a bad idea for consumers as it generally represents an attempt by a company to leverage some strength in order to gain share for some inferior product or to damage a legitimate competitor. As consumers we protect ourselves if we set up markets such that we are not faced with choices of bundles that include inferior products. So, the answer would depend on AOL's revenue model. If ads pay for the servers, then I'd be happy to require that clones run the same ads. If they're giving away the service in order to garner share, then AFAIC they've agreed to give it away.
Am I a glassy-eyed libertarian? Not in any way. The community has a responsibility to itself and we should insist that AIM and services like AIM have open standards, and we should legislate, hack, clone, whatever to get there. I want to achieve the same "best" result you do, but I don't want to get preachy and moralize about it. There's nothing wrong with AOL's attitude, but we need to make sure they don't get what they want as it hurts us.
if they only want their client to talk to their server, they are entitled. This may suck for everyone in the short term,
certainly they are entitled to want that, but it is questionable whether they are legally entitled to have that, and doubly questionable whether they should be legally entitled to have that. Consider the telephone. It used to be that you could only connect a Bell telephone to the one company's circuits. Now you can connect any kind to a choice of servers, and the world is unquestionably a better place. The changeover required a change in the law and it took 100 years. That did suck for everyone, and lets not repeat it.
but alternatives will prevail if they stay closed.
Not necessarily. This industry, like the telephone, could be an example of a natural monopoly, in which case it takes active opposition/regulation to keep it open, cheap, and innovative.
I have no idea why this story gets quoted. It is not funny or interesting. Imagine if the situation were reversed and the Germans had sent back ... I don't speak German, how about ... "Berliner". Oh, hardy har har, isn't that funny! NOT.
however, this particular use of the story is a meta usage which isn't so bad. I read it as "if the protocol wants to hear back "nuts", we'll send back "nuts".
the dot.com model is the same as any other startup business model: attract capital, spend it on productive assets, put off current profitability in favor of growth, then share future profits with investors. Much of the success of the model is based on first-mover advantages. When you are trying to achieve FMA, "lobbying for changes in the law" sure doesn't sound like it's always the smartest thing to do.
...and also nowhere put constraints on the power of the Supreme Court to make the by definition constitutional decisions they've made. The Supreme Court declared businesses to be places of public accomodation because of the realization that equal-protection was meaningless in the face of the atmosphere that prevailed in the Jim Crow south. None of which has anything to do with constraining the rights of individuals to discriminate.
you're too generous... how about I'm high on crack? :)
in order for a backlight to do anything, the light would need to pass through filters. There are LCD technologies that filter a backlight, but active matrix displays would not benefit from backlighting.
ROTFL! There are no [cough...choke] "backlights" anymore. Active matrix means each pixel is its own teeny, tiny incandescent bulb! Sherman, set the Way-Back machine to...
There are some low power machines somewhat simiilar to what you propose. They tend to eliminate the hard disk in favor of non-volitle ram and run WinCE on a weird processor, but people don't want them: too slow.
You are distracting yourself. Record companies do make gobs of money overall. That should raise questions about the rest of your argument. you're doing a half-quantitative analysis which you don't finish, and thus qualitative conclusions are difficult to draw. (BTW, that bit about the "first copy bearing the full cost" is sort of completely nonsensical... corn is a commodity but the first ear sold does not carry all the costs.)
Making a CD today involves shelling out money for recording facilities, ...
Yes, there are large investments in manufacturing and distribution. Guess what? the record companies don't own this property, plant, and equipment, they buy those commodity services from a few huge suppliers who charge only cents per CD. That is why you see shelves of stuff, it doesn't cost much. Which makes it all the harder to see why prices are so high. In ordinary competitive markets, merchants reduce prices on old inventory to make it move, even below cost. Only monopolies and cartels manipulate high prices to reduce demand.
In terms of the gamble, there's little risk in that industry precisely because of the consolidation. The music labels use collusion and bribes to control each element of the chain, from signing garage bands, to controlling DJ playlists, , to store price and inventory, precisely for the purpose of taking the risk out of their investment. This would be good thing if it led to lower prices, but it hasn't.
Come off it: try to be a little more rigorous in inspecting your own arguments. In the catalogs of the big record companies are large volumes of perfect substitutes, and they all have the same inflated prices, prices they would not have in a competitive market. Demand for those particular artists is created through cartel control of DJ playlists. It is part of human nature to want to hear familiar songs over and over. Cynically manipulating that need with monopoly pricing is different than selling addictive drugs and controlling mob turf only in degree; the analogy works well to points out the market forces at work. The world would be a better place for the vast bulk of consumers, some of quite moderate income, if we (a) abandoned erroneous assumptions about intellectual property and (b) embraced more rigorously anti-monopoly policy.
but you are ignoring (willfully?) that most of the time each individual has many distinct likes which are perfectly substitutable, or else there'd be no shuffle play button. Same goes with books, computer games, movies, etc. as evidenced by the choosing dilemma at the video store.
I saidHowever, by colluding to restrict the supply of music, the record companies minimize their costs and ensure high prices. you said Yes, there are monopoly forces at work here - it's called intellectual property.
I pointed out the music industry's actual collusive cartel behavior; your response dodges that question.
But as to your response, yes, you've now come full circle. If you go back in the thread, the intellectual argument (which I give away for free :) is that since intellectual so-called property is an artificial construct, we should rethink why we constructed it. I don't believe it is "moral" or necessary to produce the very results that its proponents want, creative output.
Witness the open software movement: now those are artists who produce because they can't do anything else. seems to me intellectual property laws protect the uncreative, it's the straw they cling to.
no problem: just make sure the royalty is a %age ;)
timothy, it's not that we don't want the stories you cover. We like what everyone else has to say, we just don't want to hear what you have to say, unless it's in the discussion and you get modded like everyone else. We can't turn off the editorial comments, and we can't mod them down. This actually contributes to the problem because you editors know that and are thus more reckless.
people say this stuff without thinking about. Artists do not need to get paid, and there are many models of artists who don't. Choirs, garage bands, etc. We may want to pay them if it encourages higer quality or quantity, but we could just as easily follow our hearts and treat art like love: make it something illegal to pay for.
actually, you and the White House are overlooking something that should make a lot of sense to slashdotters: programmable computers are not one thing; they virtualize a whole bunch of things. My computer is not an audio device. But my computer with a media player program is. If there is to be a royalty, it would correctly be on the software.
You're being simplistic. Just because the CD market shows some elements of monopolistic competition does not mean that one factor explains everything. There is tons of music available, and it is quite substitutable in each genre (ever stood next to a jukebox?), not to mention many more bands waiting in the wings. However, by colluding to restrict the supply of music, the record companies minimize their costs and ensure high prices.
Monopolistic competition is by any definition good for the consumer. Consumers value variety and are willing to pay for it.
Customers of a monopolist are willing to pay as well. That's not the point. The point is that utility maximization takes place at the market clearing price and the music industry operates high above that level, enriching a few at the expense of the many. True monopolistic competition would have Patsy Cline competing against the Judds head to head on price (or other factors), not both controlled by one company which coordinates their activities.
If CD's were perfectly competitive and substitutable, there would be only one CD title, which you could buy anywhere. This is bad.
this is an example of nonsense: if it is "bad" they wouldn't be perfect substitutes. You need to understand what your definitions mean.
The marginal cost of delivering information electronically is not zero. There are constant costs such as electricity, additional bandwith expense...
Oh please. I was obviously (a) exaggerating, using colloquial speech, (b) "copying" as I said is close to zero; you are talking about distribution, and (c) networks have high fixed capital costs with zero marginal cost within great ranges anyway, and the consumer has already purchased the bandwidth he is using.
CDs cost too much There's no law that says ...
actually, there is a law that says monopolies and price-fixing cartels are illegal. The major record labels just caved on such an case, all but admitting guilt, and other lawsuits against them have been filed. They've been illegally keeping prices artificially high fro a long time. Perhaps they reap what they sowed.
Information wants to be free. What the fuck does this mean?
It means two things: in ECON 101 you learned (or apparently did not) that in a competitive market, price will drop to marginal cost. Since copies of information in the digital age have a marginal cost of zero, it can be seen that information does indeed want to be free. The high prices of CDs indicate thas some other non-market forces must be at work. Second, the other meaning is that if you teach me something, why should I be restricted from teaching it to someone else since that costs you nothing? Consider mankind in prehistoric times, or children on a playground: they learn from each other, and it's a good thing too. That's what "it's a free country" means. You need to make the case for restricting freedom, and I don't think "because it makes a small number of people rich" is good enough, nor does the argument that the information would not otherwise be produced... there has been music for as long as there have been people. The only new aspect are the robber barons.
Indie bands give away music
Actually, my response to this is that every interview you hear/read coming out of Hollywood has the creatives telling us how it is their calling: they write/act/dance/sing because they can do naught else, it's the very fabric of their being. So, since they're not in it for the money, why give them any. At least make them admit they are a bunch of lying money grubbers first.
The RIAA rips off artists. So if they are already getting ripped off then that makes it OK for you to rip them off?
Huh? MP3s get ripped from the ripper off-ers.
then why isn't it OK for corporations to incorporate GPLed code in their closed source products? After all information wants to be free
you are slyly restricting the meaning of free, excluding freedom. If GPLed code is locked away, it is not free. It's only free if they grant the same freedom to their customers... oh, that's that's the GPL.
if it is OK to pirate music then it is OK to pirate software after all the rhetoric is the same and information wants to be free.
not exactly right, but you are on the right track. It's OK because it is not piracy to steal from pirates. And a number of the points I raised speak to the actual circumstances, not just the fact that people are selling copyrighted material. Look at video rental: nobody bothers to rent and copy videos because they don't cost much. But people often bring food to the movie theater because of the price gouging.
Furthermore, when the people think the government of the society they live in is corrupt, the idea of taking matters into their own hands is enshrined in our (US) Declaration of Independence. Interestingly, the corruption then was the same as now, protecting the interests of fat cats at the expense of the unenfranchised. Every lawsuit we see seems to be settled with Big Marketing Companies being allowed to buy and sell data about us, and stuff our mailboxes with spam, and still more illegal to take the cover off the box and see how they are spying (violation of ECON 101's perfect information axiom) or price fixing.
BTW, the American Medical Association just released a study in which, try as they might to find a ray of sunshine, they were forced to conclude that the Brady Act did not have any effect on gun crime. Other studies have credibly (but not definitively) shown that legal handguns do reduce your risk for being victimized by crime.
I think AMD is underestimating the value of the positive word of mouth they get when they allow maximum overclocking. the more the powerusers walk around talking about overclocking an AMD, they more they are saying "AMD". Reminds me of the old saw, "advertising is when you say you are good in bed. PR is when your ex-girlfriends say it. PR is better."
if the high end chips are also overclockable, it does not screw up the business model, it would enhance it.
without defending the system or taking sides, I believe that the "robustness" claim was about the secure authentication and data transmission (they're probably using ssh :) while the disclosure they wish to avoid is how the "AI" or "grep" that they're using works, what it keys on, vocabularies, etc. because they don't want people to work around it.
My point was that you should consider intellectual property rights artificial, a man-made creation rather than a "moral" right. Intellectual property rights could be artificially created in narrow cases where they are needed if they are truly needed.
But are they needed? Your argument says that there would never be a free operating system, yet there are several of them. I'm friends with a number of cancer researchers: all of them, MDs and PhDs, work for peanuts, and gladly, they just need a lab... and, they don't have any property rights to what they produce, but they do want to tell the world about it when they're done. Geeks are not particularly motivated by money, and the information just wants to be free.
Yes, I understand your argument, but just because you say it doesn't make it true, and I don't think the case has been made: open source shows that there is another way, and the entire history of science agrees with that model. R&D for products? Sure, companies make more money if you give them patent monopolies, but you haven't made the case that they are necessary. There are plenty of competitive industries without patent protection and people work all the harder to produce products and make money. It's human nature to innovate, and it's human nature to copy innovations. The information wants to be free.
And that's leaving aside the whole world of copyrights. Artists keep telling us how they produce because they can do nothing else, it's just their calling. So, why give them monopolies? If we do give them temporary monopolies, why 100 years later do you need to pay a royalty to sing Happy Birthday? There's nothing "God given" about the term of the monopoly. How about 5 years?
Morally, if you don't want me to sing your songs, don't teach them to me. The information wants to be free.