This is hardly the first time in US history that local officials have bullied their way into a legal mess, and I'm sure it won't be the last. The difference is that the Internet makes it much easier for the EFF and other advocacy groups to publicize local abuses that in other eras would go completely unnoticed. The good news is that the court will resolve the dispute between EFF and the government according to our laws and constitution; we have a system of checks so that courts can stop overzealous government from infringing on individual rights. The court is working exactly as it is supposed to -- both sides are presenting their arguments and explaining why their actions are or are not legal.
If you don't remember, the free press in this country has always been in tension with the demands of government. It's a constant back-and-forth that over time has led to a reasonably stable balance of protecting individual rights. The examples go very far back: In 1798 (yes, "seventeen-hundred and ninety-eight") the Alien and Sedition Acts made it illegal to criticize the government, on pain of criminal prosecution. Lincoln arrested three newspaper editors for publishing stories he didn't like (two for publishing the story and one because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time) and suspended publication of the same papers for two days. The Sedition Act of 1918 made it criminal to criticize the government during World War I (repealed 1921). The list goes on and on.
National coverage of these issues is good, and the legal system is functioning as it should. One side is demanding more than the legal system can support and the EFF is properly standing up in a fair proceeding to stop it. The right answer isn't to leave the country, but to recognize that this is part of a long back-and-forth over rights that is an important part of American history. Have a sense of proportionality and your urge to flee will lessen. It's important that EFF fight the good fight here, but the fact that we're hearing about the story is a good sign -- it means the press is still doing its job. Anyway, you can do far more good here than in the vast frozen tundra of the far north.
That's venture capital investment, not spending on the final product. VC investment is usually leveraged into much (several orders of magnitude) higher sales figures, otherwise the investors would never get their money back.
Can you provide a link to the page where Nanosolar alleges that their products from the San Jose, California plant will be sold exclusively to Europe? I have read their press releases and blogs and not seen such a claim.
Second, if you care about the net carbon footprint of the human population then it shouldn't matter whether the first sales are to commercial users or to home users. If anything, large commercial installations will be better able to work out the inevitable kinks in a Version 1.0 project, and companies (guided by the profit motive) are more likely to deploy the panels efficiently (in sunny areas, think Nevada) where they can generate the most energy possible -- consumers may choose to install panels wherever they happen to live (think New York) even if that's not the most efficient place for solar energy.
I'll address just part -- There's no alternate energy grid because building a second, redundant power grid would be about the most ironic wasteful use of resources imaginable. Instead, power gets fed into one big grid from "clean" and "dirty" sources. Power distribution companies (the ones with their name on your electricity bill) buy power from other companies, both clean and dirty. The way to get clean energy into your home isn't to buy directly from the producer--almost nobody does that--but to buy through the distributor. The distributor owns the copper, there's no reason to build a second set of copper.
I can't tell you why nanosolar isn't selling to the public yet, but it sure sounds like they've been selling to large projects in the US. And, to be clear, Google has not invested in Nanosolar. The Google founders have invested their own personal money in the company. There's a big difference. Reading their press makes it sound like manufacturing is just ramping up with the new manufacturing facility opening in November (last entry). Contrary to popular belief, it takes time to build manufacturing facilities -- if they opened the plant in November then it's understandable that on December 2 they might not be ready yet.
I have no doubt that Exxon-Mobil has little interest in alternate energy. The good news is that they don't have to; Nanosolar is perfectly happy to take up the slack, and the local power distributor is perfectly happy to distribute power from whatever source it comes from.
Why can't we all use solar? Because the sun is dark at night and batteries are expensive. It's not clear that, even if the actual panels cost 1/10th the amount it costs to run a generator that the resulting power will be 1/10th the cost. First, the claims of Nanosolar are likely inflated puffery; no Version 1.0 product in tech ever works as well as claimed. Second, we still need the old power grid for night time and cloudy days (or to build expensive batteries or hydro-electric storage facilities). Third, we still have problems with maintenance, and need to rent a large amount of land to put the things on. Those costs can drive the price up significantly. I'm sure it'll make a difference, but it's not going to slash prices on energy by 90% overnight--if it could then Nanosolar (in this for the profit) would just raise prices on the solar panels until the price was just pennies below traditional energy.
I have no idea why Baltimore sucks, but it sounds like a regulatory battle that has nothing to do with the vast multi-national oil companies headquartered in Baltimore. Mainly because there aren't any. Baltimore should get on it and fix the poorly-written law, or the local distributor should explain why it isn't able to effectively utilize the reverse current (does it come at the wrong time or day or in an unpredictable fashion?). Fully agreed that the problem there should be fixed.
Wait, you're suggesting by "I dont know of any company that could afford to beat out the fossil fuel companies to do so." that there aren't companies in the US trying to make money off alternative energy? Further, lots of state governments are actively trying to promote alternative energy, which undermines the theory that the government is afraid of a tax revenue collapse. State governments are subsidizing alternative energy using those very tax revenues, in the hopes that home-grown alternative energy producers will create even more tax revenue in the future.
I hate to sound like a slashvertisement, but I think the following US companies and groups would all disagree with you:
The New York Times has a story about this issue: "Venture Capital Rushes into Alternate Energy" suggesting that $1.5 billion in VC money was invested in 2006 alone in new companies who hope to profit from overthrowing the energy status quo. If you add private equity money then there was $18.1 billion in dealflow in 2006 in the alternate energy sector. Or listen to a 2004 story about the same issue.
It's nice to think that there's some great conspiracy against alternate energy, but the simple truth is that there is a lot of market action in the field and nothing stopping people from making money in it. There is a HUGE amount of money to be made from alternate energy and plenty of people are trying to make it.
who cares if you copy a CD that you're allowed to copy?
Because the whole problem that BestBuy had was techs copying material from customer computers. It sounds like the rule was "no copying of CDs, period" because that's a clear bright-line rule that is easy to enforce. If a CD is being copied then there's a problem. The alternative rule ("no copying unless you can prove it's yours") introduces a nightmare of proof and its own maze of privacy violations: if a supervisor suspects that a CD of personal data is being copied then he'd have to look through the files on it, which could be the employee's personal files or the customer's personal files. Inevitably there would be disputes as to whether the files could be copied or not ("I swear I was just copying software, not documents, from the customer's computers" or "this is my friend Billy's computer and he said it'd be OK") and the problem wouldn't get solved.
In large organizations with a bunch of employees, bright-line rules are fair for everyone as long as they're well-publicized. Employees know exactly what behavior is and is not allowed, and the company can protect the privacy of its customers.
Look for a new job, kid. It sucks that you lost this one, but there are a lot of better jobs out there.
To continue from above -- in fact, flying on standby is the exact opposite of the free-rider problem. You pay for a standby ticket, you don't get it free. And you get to utilize a standby ticket when NOT ENOUGH paying customers were willing to pay full-fare. That's the exact opposite of a model where some total number of fans have to pay into a pool, and then everybody benefits when enough do. Standby relies on there being TOO FEW customers paying full price.
Flying standby doesn't work as an analogy because there's no chance that the airline would ever say "oh, okay, you didn't pay but enough other people did so come onboard free!" If that ever happened then you might have an analogy.
And the Radiohead example is a weird one -- they benefited from the massive wave of publicity from being the first major band to use that model. And even despite that, the majority of fans chose not to pay a cent. Magnatune is the real "name your own price" label and they've had middling success. Certainly their artists are getting paid, but not nearly as much as artists signed with "traditional" labels.
Option 1 - Listen to song, decide if song is any good, buy song. Option 2 - Buy song without ever hearing it.
Do you buy a new car without looking at a model on the lot? I don't think so.
By your logic, people are so generous that we shouldn't bother enforcing tickets on planes and trains, right? If I don't pay my fare, there's a chance that the plane won't fly. You forget that I feel the cost of every dollar I spend in fares, but I only feel a small increase in the likelihood of the plane flying that day. It costs me $300 to change the likelihood of the flight leaving by 1%; why would I not just show up and board without paying and hope for the best? It costs me nothing to try.
Heck, why don't we do away with taxes entirely? If I don't pay my share, there's a chance that the government will collapse. Then again, it hurts me for every dollar of tax that I have to pay, but I feel only a 0.00000001% change in the liklihood of government collapsing. Faced with that option, I'll keep my 30%, thank you very much.
People are greedy. It's an unfortunate reality at times, but it's reality plain and simple. People will not pay for what they can get for free. It is the classic economics problem with non-rivalrous public goods: how to avoid the free-rider problem.
Yes, but if they sell you something they don't have a right to sell then you get to sue them. If you sell my "your" car and the bank shows up the next day to repo it because you don't own it then I get to sue you and get my money back.
If random Internet Forum Guy posts code without explaining whether he has the ability to sell it or not, then you're SOL if SCO comes and sues you (or if somebody tries to enforce the GPL on you).
Nobody is claiming that's a copyright violation to LOOK at the code in the browser window. The question was can he copy the code, paste it into a project, and then make copies of the project. There are undoubtedly copies made in that process.
Your argument is like saying that since the copyright holder can't control my use of a book, I can photocopy it and then distribute the photocopies as a form of "using" it. Putting the code into a project and selling the project is like photocopying a book and selling the copies.
And it's impossible to know if this is fair use or not without knowing more about the code.
There are only SO many ways to write something and sometimes a bit of community code works better than beating your head into the wall for weeks with a deadline looming.
Sure, looking at the means by which others have solved a problem is a great idea. A lot of common problems have been faced by others and it'd be very wasteful to not share ideas. To read code and say "oh, I see, the iterated both variables" is a great insight.
But, that doesn't mean that taking code effectively verbatim (changing the variable names doesn't count) is the right answer. I'd be worried about a programmer who didn't understand the code well enough to put it into his own words. Yes, there are only a few ways to write some loops, but the exercise of re-writing it is a good way to make sure that you understand why it works. Otherwise you're begging for trouble.
The best test I've heard is the "Gilligan's Island Rule" -- you can look at any other code sources you want, but you have to do 30 minutes of completely unrelated activity (like watching an episode of Gilligan's Island) before writing your own code. Inevitably you'll write slightly different code than the code you previously reviewed.
> Otherwise, what is to stop FDR family from claiming copyright on the phrase "we have nothing to fear by fear itself"?
About four things:
First, it's too short to be a likely candidate for copyright protection. Copyright is about creative works, not short phrases. The most protection one can get for a short phrase is trademark, and that's only for use in connection with selling things. For example, if the FDR family sold bear repellent spray, they might be able to use "Nothing to fear but fear itself" as a trademarked slogan in connection with the sale of the bear spray.
Second, back in FDR's day one had to actually register the copyright to get protection, and renew from time to time. The deadlines to register and renew have all long since passed. The quote comes from his inaugural address in 1933 (in reference to the Great Depression). See chart of copyright by year.
Third, most use of the phrase would be "fair use." The concept of "fair use" is that I can't stop others from commenting about me or my work, or reporting on the news, or parodying my work. Simply saying "FDR said 'the only thing we have to fear is fear itself'" is definitely reporting on the news and matters of public concern. Quoting the speech in a biography is the same thing.
And, further, it's possible that there's an exception in this case because the government does not claim copyright on government works. It's a hard sell--while he was a government official, it's not like his job was to produce maps or photos the same way that NASA releases its maps without copyright--but worht a shot.
Wait, so if I want to hear a new record from Fall Out Boy, I have to find other fans, gather together with them, and pay money in advance? How in the world am I supposed to know if the new song is any good or not? Yes, there are some areas where we can estimate the value of future personal services -- for example, we are able to evaluate how to pay IT consultants and wedding photographers -- but that's because the employer spends a lot of time interviewing and evaluating. Even then I challenge you to find somebody over 30 who doesn't know of a wedding photographer horror story (usually the photographer who has been paid in advance for creative work will shirk his duty and produce crap).
That's too much effort to invest in new music; I like being able to hear the song on the radio, and THEN evaluate it. The best way to evaluate the quality of music is to listen to it. But in your world we can't listen to the song until we've already paid for it. The whole point of IP is to allow people to conduct these voluntary exchanges -- you let me listen to the song so that I can decide how much I want to pay you for it. In the IP world, I listen to the song on the radio, or listen to a 30-second sample on iTunes, then I decide if I want to pay $0.99 for the song or not. That's the REAL free market there; I listen to the song, then I decide if I want buy it or not. That's the beauty of IP: I get to show you the thing that you're bidding on before you have to commit to buying it. (Imagine instead this was some new invention; if I couldn't show anybody what it was, how could they decide if it was worth investing in a manufacturing facility? In your world once I described the invention to them they could just go off and make it on their own.)
Lastly, why would I bother doing all that if I could just let somebody pay for the music up-front and enjoy the proceeds later? It's the classic free-rider problem. Once the song is out there, in your world there's nothing stopping free distribution. If a song has been produced then I can always get it free. That's great, but why would I ever pay money to get a song produced? If it costs $50,000 (in just fixed costs by the time you count studio time, a producer, re-recording, etc--all before the band's cut) to produce a new track, it'd never be worth my time to invest money if I knew that other people were going to do it anyway. Yes, a little progress bar is neat, but most people would much rather just keep their money and spend it on other things. Politics is a weird exception because of the emotional involvement.
Finally, imagine the contracting costs. I like listening to a bunch of music in the morning. Even if I felt the moral obligation to pay each musician for their work, I really don't want to be bothered trying to decide which new songs from 50+ artists I should invest in. I simply have better things to do with my time than to evaluate songs that haven't even been written yet.
If you, the artist, feel that the time and talent you'd invest in writing a song are worth $10,000, then you can ask for $10,000, and refuse to work until your audience has put up that much money.
Sure, but who is "we"? The government? Sure -- I'd love a Department of Music (or, if you will, a Ministry of Sound) that decides how much to pay budding artists for their works. I'm sure we'd still have the amazing diversity of music that we see today. Of course, it's not a problem that the government would impose standards of taste--no no, the NEA has never denied funding for an artist because it offended religion (NSFW). And I'm sure politics and pork would play no role in it.
Yes, in an ideal world there would be a prize for developing a cool new drug or writing a cool new song. Then the results should be shared freely. But modern technology has yet to invent a way to figure out how big that "prize" should be for each drug and song. The market seems to be a far better predictor.
So, yeah, in theory you are 100% right, but in practice you need to explain "we" a lot better.
You apparently have never worked in the pharma industry.
Let's ignore what it takes to get from a molecule-of-interest to human trials. A lot of people estimate that it takes up to 6-8 years just to get from lab to human testing in a cancer drug because of the slow reaction between the drug and the animal or tissue sample; it's simply not possible to work faster than the drug acts (and to make sure that the condition doesn't re-surface). Similarly, of 1000 interesting compounds in the lab, only 1 might end up making it to human testing, just because of the incredible complexity of the human body.
Just looking at the FDA's mandatory requirements for human testing before a drug can be released:
First, the company has to conduct Phase I trials on 20-80 healthy volunteers. These patients are paid, usually pretty well, for the risk of taking an untested drug. Then, the FDA requires Phase II trials on a larger group, usually up to 300 volunteers, again all paid. All the while one must pay for doctors, insurance, support staff, record-keeping, etc. Then, the FDA requires yet another round of testing with Phase III multi-center trials. One must support up to 3,000 patients, again with all the associated doctors, nurses, support staff, record-keeping, insurance, etc. Depending on the drug, Phase III trials can last from several months to several years. These tests must be distributed across several testing centers.
At any point it could turn out that there is some safety or efficacy problem that renders the drug worthless. Then all the investment has gone down the drain.
Sure, we could make drug testing more "efficient" by cutting down this three-stage safety and efficacy testing procedure, but I for one am glad that the FDA requires drugs be tested before being released. It's no guarantee of safety, but it sure as heck cuts down on the number of dangerous drugs sold.
I don't know why you think drug companies aren't competing in the free market with each other to come up with new drugs; it's just a long, difficult, and expensive process.
You're missing the point of drug R&D. 99% of phramaceuticals are very easy to manufacture. And the FDA requires that the final ingredients be publicly-disclosed. A skilled chemist could learn how to reproduce GSK's drugs by reading the FDA disclosures and analyzing the pills.
Once Joe's Discount Drugs has learned how to reproduce GSK's drugs, you would never sign a deal with GSK (at, say, $100 / month) if you can buy it from Joe's Discount Drugs for $20 / month. Contract alone CAN'T solve IP unless the underlying IP is protected.
The "street performer protocol" doesn't work as well since we want public distribution of the results; the whole point of the venture is to spread the information beyond your 10 select researchers.
And if you think Youtube replaces studio movies then it's a sad future we have. I enjoy watching Youtube at work as much as anybody, but there's no substitute.
This is actually a point with a lot of debate in the world of biographical scholars. A lot of families of artists and historical figures are trying to keep their correspondence private, using copyright as one justification. The logic is that if the family/estate owns the copyright in their letters, then they can prevent scholars from reproducing the letters publicly.
It's an interesting balance. On the one side, you have a family with a significant privacy interest. On the other hand, you have the public's interest in knowledge about the family/history. Copyright law--thanks in part to the old "moral rights" or "author's rights" theory--still includes the ability to prevent others from publishing even if you yourself are not.
I know I shouldn't feed the anonymous cowards, but this is obviously a vast over-simplification. IP obviously has plenty of drawbacks--you suggest some of them--but nobody has come up with a better way to create incentives to put R&D into ventures which pay only IP rewards. For example, it costs billions of dollars to develop a new drug, but manufacturing drugs is incredibly easy. Everybody complains about the patent system for drugs, but nobody has come up with another system that would give sufficient incentives for a pharmaceutical company to invest billions in lab research and clinical testing of new drugs. A system without IP would not lead to innovation in pharmaceuticals; there's no way to recoup a billion-dollar investment if generic manufacturers could undercut the price of the drug from Day 1. No new drugs means none of the new drugs that have changed the lives of millions, from Lipitor to Prozac to Viagra.
The same goes, to some extent, for movies. It's true that it costs tens of millions of dollars to produce a movie. If there were absolutely no IP laws and commercial copyright infringement were allowed then nothing would stop ABC from showing a movie that was out in theaters and not paying the studio. Or for a theater to show the movie and not pay the studio. Or for cut-rate vendors to sell the movie openly on DVD the day it comes out in theaters. With absolutely NO IP protection then movies just won't get made.
There might be a better balancing point than what we're at now, but it's far from clear that "no IP" is the right solution.
simply trying to commercialize the fruits of mind, but since we depend on the free exchange of ideas, such laws hinder society and must be resisted
No, quoting parts of a work for the purpose of criticism (which is exactly what you were doing) is the prime example of fair use. No liability, you're OK. Look, I'll even quote yours to prove it:
since I quoted the article, I engaged in illegal duplication of a copyrighted work for public display
If you had quoted the entire article on your blog and just added one or two sentences of commentary then it's unlikely that you'd be engaging in fair use, but here you quoted a very small part of the total article and added a substantial amount of commentary (even if it was in part inaccurate). Fair use saves the day.
You have clearly never watched Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The movie should be required viewing as an artifact of cold-war culture; even if its lessons aren't directly relevant today (we longer live in a world defined by two nuclear powers in an eternal standoff with a hair trigger) it captures the absurdity of the era very well. Plus, as a pure comedy, the movie has aged well.
I'm trying to understand where the "scam" is here. You officially became a joint owner of the account. Presumably there were some documents and signatures involved. You never told Wells Fargo that you were no longer the joint owner of the account. Wells Fargo, thinking you to still be the joint owner of the account, did exactly what "joint owners" do. You get all of the benefits AND all of the drawbacks.
The right thing to do would have been to do more than return the ATM card to your ex-, but also remove yourself from the account.
Obviously SETI isn't limited to SETI@Home, but there is the point that the distributed computing power being applied to SETI@Home could be applied to projects like Stanford's Folding@home which promises to yield much more directly applicable knowledge about protein synthesis.
Many of the distributed projects via BOINC have more directly applicable results than SETI@Home.
That said, any basic research is defined by its lack of direct results. Early research into the atom looked like it had very little use until we discovered x-rays (accidentally) and nuclear power (intentionally). Saying "why is Benjamin Franklin bothering to fly that kite, what good is this 'electricity' he talks about?" would cut off a lot of research that later proves useful in completely unanticipated ways. And, yes, I know the story of the kite is partially folklore (a Frenchman may have been the first to use the electricity from lightning), but it's good folklore that makes the point.
They have a great set for today, but what happens when new symbols are needed? Is there a clear version path so that future updates are backwards-compatible, and it's clear who has which version? I'd hate to send a manuscript to the printer only to find out that I had version 2.0 and they had version 3.0.
they needed a font set that had all the symbols you'd ever want to type in science
At least one of the earlier unlocks required re-soldering inside the phone. That's not like taking your sports car racing on dirt roads, that's like adding a NOS system and asking for warranty support when the engine overheats.
I agree the argument doesn't apply to the software unlocks, but the hardware ones meet your analogy.
"Unauthorized use" might be things like taking your sports care racing on dirt roads.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't stand living here anymore.
This is hardly the first time in US history that local officials have bullied their way into a legal mess, and I'm sure it won't be the last. The difference is that the Internet makes it much easier for the EFF and other advocacy groups to publicize local abuses that in other eras would go completely unnoticed. The good news is that the court will resolve the dispute between EFF and the government according to our laws and constitution; we have a system of checks so that courts can stop overzealous government from infringing on individual rights. The court is working exactly as it is supposed to -- both sides are presenting their arguments and explaining why their actions are or are not legal.
If you don't remember, the free press in this country has always been in tension with the demands of government. It's a constant back-and-forth that over time has led to a reasonably stable balance of protecting individual rights. The examples go very far back: In 1798 (yes, "seventeen-hundred and ninety-eight") the Alien and Sedition Acts made it illegal to criticize the government, on pain of criminal prosecution. Lincoln arrested three newspaper editors for publishing stories he didn't like (two for publishing the story and one because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time) and suspended publication of the same papers for two days. The Sedition Act of 1918 made it criminal to criticize the government during World War I (repealed 1921). The list goes on and on.
National coverage of these issues is good, and the legal system is functioning as it should. One side is demanding more than the legal system can support and the EFF is properly standing up in a fair proceeding to stop it. The right answer isn't to leave the country, but to recognize that this is part of a long back-and-forth over rights that is an important part of American history. Have a sense of proportionality and your urge to flee will lessen. It's important that EFF fight the good fight here, but the fact that we're hearing about the story is a good sign -- it means the press is still doing its job. Anyway, you can do far more good here than in the vast frozen tundra of the far north.
That's venture capital investment, not spending on the final product. VC investment is usually leveraged into much (several orders of magnitude) higher sales figures, otherwise the investors would never get their money back.
Total spending is much higher.
Can you provide a link to the page where Nanosolar alleges that their products from the San Jose, California plant will be sold exclusively to Europe? I have read their press releases and blogs and not seen such a claim.
Second, if you care about the net carbon footprint of the human population then it shouldn't matter whether the first sales are to commercial users or to home users. If anything, large commercial installations will be better able to work out the inevitable kinks in a Version 1.0 project, and companies (guided by the profit motive) are more likely to deploy the panels efficiently (in sunny areas, think Nevada) where they can generate the most energy possible -- consumers may choose to install panels wherever they happen to live (think New York) even if that's not the most efficient place for solar energy.
I'll address just part -- There's no alternate energy grid because building a second, redundant power grid would be about the most ironic wasteful use of resources imaginable. Instead, power gets fed into one big grid from "clean" and "dirty" sources. Power distribution companies (the ones with their name on your electricity bill) buy power from other companies, both clean and dirty. The way to get clean energy into your home isn't to buy directly from the producer--almost nobody does that--but to buy through the distributor. The distributor owns the copper, there's no reason to build a second set of copper.
I can't tell you why nanosolar isn't selling to the public yet, but it sure sounds like they've been selling to large projects in the US. And, to be clear, Google has not invested in Nanosolar. The Google founders have invested their own personal money in the company. There's a big difference. Reading their press makes it sound like manufacturing is just ramping up with the new manufacturing facility opening in November (last entry). Contrary to popular belief, it takes time to build manufacturing facilities -- if they opened the plant in November then it's understandable that on December 2 they might not be ready yet.
I have no doubt that Exxon-Mobil has little interest in alternate energy. The good news is that they don't have to; Nanosolar is perfectly happy to take up the slack, and the local power distributor is perfectly happy to distribute power from whatever source it comes from.
Why can't we all use solar? Because the sun is dark at night and batteries are expensive. It's not clear that, even if the actual panels cost 1/10th the amount it costs to run a generator that the resulting power will be 1/10th the cost. First, the claims of Nanosolar are likely inflated puffery; no Version 1.0 product in tech ever works as well as claimed. Second, we still need the old power grid for night time and cloudy days (or to build expensive batteries or hydro-electric storage facilities). Third, we still have problems with maintenance, and need to rent a large amount of land to put the things on. Those costs can drive the price up significantly. I'm sure it'll make a difference, but it's not going to slash prices on energy by 90% overnight--if it could then Nanosolar (in this for the profit) would just raise prices on the solar panels until the price was just pennies below traditional energy.
I have no idea why Baltimore sucks, but it sounds like a regulatory battle that has nothing to do with the vast multi-national oil companies headquartered in Baltimore. Mainly because there aren't any. Baltimore should get on it and fix the poorly-written law, or the local distributor should explain why it isn't able to effectively utilize the reverse current (does it come at the wrong time or day or in an unpredictable fashion?). Fully agreed that the problem there should be fixed.
Wait, you're suggesting by "I dont know of any company that could afford to beat out the fossil fuel companies to do so." that there aren't companies in the US trying to make money off alternative energy? Further, lots of state governments are actively trying to promote alternative energy, which undermines the theory that the government is afraid of a tax revenue collapse. State governments are subsidizing alternative energy using those very tax revenues, in the hopes that home-grown alternative energy producers will create even more tax revenue in the future.
I hate to sound like a slashvertisement, but I think the following US companies and groups would all disagree with you:
Evergreen Solar (producer based in Mass.)
Heliodyne (producer based in California)
Google (installing panels on its roof)
Solar Energy Industry Association (US trade group)
Tesla Motors) (selling 100% electric cars in the US)
List of solar manufacturers in the US
US solar power installations increase 33% year-to-year
The New York Times has a story about this issue: "Venture Capital Rushes into Alternate Energy" suggesting that $1.5 billion in VC money was invested in 2006 alone in new companies who hope to profit from overthrowing the energy status quo. If you add private equity money then there was $18.1 billion in dealflow in 2006 in the alternate energy sector. Or listen to a 2004 story about the same issue.
It's nice to think that there's some great conspiracy against alternate energy, but the simple truth is that there is a lot of market action in the field and nothing stopping people from making money in it. There is a HUGE amount of money to be made from alternate energy and plenty of people are trying to make it.
who cares if you copy a CD that you're allowed to copy?
Because the whole problem that BestBuy had was techs copying material from customer computers. It sounds like the rule was "no copying of CDs, period" because that's a clear bright-line rule that is easy to enforce. If a CD is being copied then there's a problem. The alternative rule ("no copying unless you can prove it's yours") introduces a nightmare of proof and its own maze of privacy violations: if a supervisor suspects that a CD of personal data is being copied then he'd have to look through the files on it, which could be the employee's personal files or the customer's personal files. Inevitably there would be disputes as to whether the files could be copied or not ("I swear I was just copying software, not documents, from the customer's computers" or "this is my friend Billy's computer and he said it'd be OK") and the problem wouldn't get solved.
In large organizations with a bunch of employees, bright-line rules are fair for everyone as long as they're well-publicized. Employees know exactly what behavior is and is not allowed, and the company can protect the privacy of its customers.
Look for a new job, kid. It sucks that you lost this one, but there are a lot of better jobs out there.
To continue from above -- in fact, flying on standby is the exact opposite of the free-rider problem. You pay for a standby ticket, you don't get it free. And you get to utilize a standby ticket when NOT ENOUGH paying customers were willing to pay full-fare. That's the exact opposite of a model where some total number of fans have to pay into a pool, and then everybody benefits when enough do. Standby relies on there being TOO FEW customers paying full price.
Flying standby doesn't work as an analogy because there's no chance that the airline would ever say "oh, okay, you didn't pay but enough other people did so come onboard free!" If that ever happened then you might have an analogy.
And the Radiohead example is a weird one -- they benefited from the massive wave of publicity from being the first major band to use that model. And even despite that, the majority of fans chose not to pay a cent. Magnatune is the real "name your own price" label and they've had middling success. Certainly their artists are getting paid, but not nearly as much as artists signed with "traditional" labels.
You have got to be kidding.
Option 1 - Listen to song, decide if song is any good, buy song.
Option 2 - Buy song without ever hearing it.
Do you buy a new car without looking at a model on the lot? I don't think so.
By your logic, people are so generous that we shouldn't bother enforcing tickets on planes and trains, right? If I don't pay my fare, there's a chance that the plane won't fly. You forget that I feel the cost of every dollar I spend in fares, but I only feel a small increase in the likelihood of the plane flying that day. It costs me $300 to change the likelihood of the flight leaving by 1%; why would I not just show up and board without paying and hope for the best? It costs me nothing to try.
Heck, why don't we do away with taxes entirely? If I don't pay my share, there's a chance that the government will collapse. Then again, it hurts me for every dollar of tax that I have to pay, but I feel only a 0.00000001% change in the liklihood of government collapsing. Faced with that option, I'll keep my 30%, thank you very much.
People are greedy. It's an unfortunate reality at times, but it's reality plain and simple. People will not pay for what they can get for free. It is the classic economics problem with non-rivalrous public goods: how to avoid the free-rider problem.
Yes, but if they sell you something they don't have a right to sell then you get to sue them. If you sell my "your" car and the bank shows up the next day to repo it because you don't own it then I get to sue you and get my money back.
If random Internet Forum Guy posts code without explaining whether he has the ability to sell it or not, then you're SOL if SCO comes and sues you (or if somebody tries to enforce the GPL on you).
IANAL.
Nobody is claiming that's a copyright violation to LOOK at the code in the browser window. The question was can he copy the code, paste it into a project, and then make copies of the project. There are undoubtedly copies made in that process.
Your argument is like saying that since the copyright holder can't control my use of a book, I can photocopy it and then distribute the photocopies as a form of "using" it. Putting the code into a project and selling the project is like photocopying a book and selling the copies.
And it's impossible to know if this is fair use or not without knowing more about the code.
There are only SO many ways to write something and sometimes a bit of community code works better than beating your head into the wall for weeks with a deadline looming.
Sure, looking at the means by which others have solved a problem is a great idea. A lot of common problems have been faced by others and it'd be very wasteful to not share ideas. To read code and say "oh, I see, the iterated both variables" is a great insight.
But, that doesn't mean that taking code effectively verbatim (changing the variable names doesn't count) is the right answer. I'd be worried about a programmer who didn't understand the code well enough to put it into his own words. Yes, there are only a few ways to write some loops, but the exercise of re-writing it is a good way to make sure that you understand why it works. Otherwise you're begging for trouble.
The best test I've heard is the "Gilligan's Island Rule" -- you can look at any other code sources you want, but you have to do 30 minutes of completely unrelated activity (like watching an episode of Gilligan's Island) before writing your own code. Inevitably you'll write slightly different code than the code you previously reviewed.
> Otherwise, what is to stop FDR family from claiming copyright on the phrase "we have nothing to fear by fear itself"?
About four things:
First, it's too short to be a likely candidate for copyright protection. Copyright is about creative works, not short phrases. The most protection one can get for a short phrase is trademark, and that's only for use in connection with selling things. For example, if the FDR family sold bear repellent spray, they might be able to use "Nothing to fear but fear itself" as a trademarked slogan in connection with the sale of the bear spray.
Second, back in FDR's day one had to actually register the copyright to get protection, and renew from time to time. The deadlines to register and renew have all long since passed. The quote comes from his inaugural address in 1933 (in reference to the Great Depression). See chart of copyright by year.
Third, most use of the phrase would be "fair use." The concept of "fair use" is that I can't stop others from commenting about me or my work, or reporting on the news, or parodying my work. Simply saying "FDR said 'the only thing we have to fear is fear itself'" is definitely reporting on the news and matters of public concern. Quoting the speech in a biography is the same thing.
And, further, it's possible that there's an exception in this case because the government does not claim copyright on government works. It's a hard sell--while he was a government official, it's not like his job was to produce maps or photos the same way that NASA releases its maps without copyright--but worht a shot.
(IANAL, but studied IP law)
Wait, so if I want to hear a new record from Fall Out Boy, I have to find other fans, gather together with them, and pay money in advance? How in the world am I supposed to know if the new song is any good or not? Yes, there are some areas where we can estimate the value of future personal services -- for example, we are able to evaluate how to pay IT consultants and wedding photographers -- but that's because the employer spends a lot of time interviewing and evaluating. Even then I challenge you to find somebody over 30 who doesn't know of a wedding photographer horror story (usually the photographer who has been paid in advance for creative work will shirk his duty and produce crap).
That's too much effort to invest in new music; I like being able to hear the song on the radio, and THEN evaluate it. The best way to evaluate the quality of music is to listen to it. But in your world we can't listen to the song until we've already paid for it. The whole point of IP is to allow people to conduct these voluntary exchanges -- you let me listen to the song so that I can decide how much I want to pay you for it. In the IP world, I listen to the song on the radio, or listen to a 30-second sample on iTunes, then I decide if I want to pay $0.99 for the song or not. That's the REAL free market there; I listen to the song, then I decide if I want buy it or not. That's the beauty of IP: I get to show you the thing that you're bidding on before you have to commit to buying it. (Imagine instead this was some new invention; if I couldn't show anybody what it was, how could they decide if it was worth investing in a manufacturing facility? In your world once I described the invention to them they could just go off and make it on their own.)
Lastly, why would I bother doing all that if I could just let somebody pay for the music up-front and enjoy the proceeds later? It's the classic free-rider problem. Once the song is out there, in your world there's nothing stopping free distribution. If a song has been produced then I can always get it free. That's great, but why would I ever pay money to get a song produced? If it costs $50,000 (in just fixed costs by the time you count studio time, a producer, re-recording, etc--all before the band's cut) to produce a new track, it'd never be worth my time to invest money if I knew that other people were going to do it anyway. Yes, a little progress bar is neat, but most people would much rather just keep their money and spend it on other things. Politics is a weird exception because of the emotional involvement.
Finally, imagine the contracting costs. I like listening to a bunch of music in the morning. Even if I felt the moral obligation to pay each musician for their work, I really don't want to be bothered trying to decide which new songs from 50+ artists I should invest in. I simply have better things to do with my time than to evaluate songs that haven't even been written yet.
If you, the artist, feel that the time and talent you'd invest in writing a song are worth $10,000, then you can ask for $10,000, and refuse to work until your audience has put up that much money.
Sure, but who is "we"? The government? Sure -- I'd love a Department of Music (or, if you will, a Ministry of Sound) that decides how much to pay budding artists for their works. I'm sure we'd still have the amazing diversity of music that we see today. Of course, it's not a problem that the government would impose standards of taste--no no, the NEA has never denied funding for an artist because it offended religion (NSFW). And I'm sure politics and pork would play no role in it.
Yes, in an ideal world there would be a prize for developing a cool new drug or writing a cool new song. Then the results should be shared freely. But modern technology has yet to invent a way to figure out how big that "prize" should be for each drug and song. The market seems to be a far better predictor.
So, yeah, in theory you are 100% right, but in practice you need to explain "we" a lot better.
You apparently have never worked in the pharma industry.
Let's ignore what it takes to get from a molecule-of-interest to human trials. A lot of people estimate that it takes up to 6-8 years just to get from lab to human testing in a cancer drug because of the slow reaction between the drug and the animal or tissue sample; it's simply not possible to work faster than the drug acts (and to make sure that the condition doesn't re-surface). Similarly, of 1000 interesting compounds in the lab, only 1 might end up making it to human testing, just because of the incredible complexity of the human body.
Just looking at the FDA's mandatory requirements for human testing before a drug can be released:
First, the company has to conduct Phase I trials on 20-80 healthy volunteers. These patients are paid, usually pretty well, for the risk of taking an untested drug. Then, the FDA requires Phase II trials on a larger group, usually up to 300 volunteers, again all paid. All the while one must pay for doctors, insurance, support staff, record-keeping, etc. Then, the FDA requires yet another round of testing with Phase III multi-center trials. One must support up to 3,000 patients, again with all the associated doctors, nurses, support staff, record-keeping, insurance, etc. Depending on the drug, Phase III trials can last from several months to several years. These tests must be distributed across several testing centers.
At any point it could turn out that there is some safety or efficacy problem that renders the drug worthless. Then all the investment has gone down the drain.
Sure, we could make drug testing more "efficient" by cutting down this three-stage safety and efficacy testing procedure, but I for one am glad that the FDA requires drugs be tested before being released. It's no guarantee of safety, but it sure as heck cuts down on the number of dangerous drugs sold.
I don't know why you think drug companies aren't competing in the free market with each other to come up with new drugs; it's just a long, difficult, and expensive process.
You're missing the point of drug R&D. 99% of phramaceuticals are very easy to manufacture. And the FDA requires that the final ingredients be publicly-disclosed. A skilled chemist could learn how to reproduce GSK's drugs by reading the FDA disclosures and analyzing the pills.
Once Joe's Discount Drugs has learned how to reproduce GSK's drugs, you would never sign a deal with GSK (at, say, $100 / month) if you can buy it from Joe's Discount Drugs for $20 / month. Contract alone CAN'T solve IP unless the underlying IP is protected.
The "street performer protocol" doesn't work as well since we want public distribution of the results; the whole point of the venture is to spread the information beyond your 10 select researchers.
And if you think Youtube replaces studio movies then it's a sad future we have. I enjoy watching Youtube at work as much as anybody, but there's no substitute.
This is actually a point with a lot of debate in the world of biographical scholars. A lot of families of artists and historical figures are trying to keep their correspondence private, using copyright as one justification. The logic is that if the family/estate owns the copyright in their letters, then they can prevent scholars from reproducing the letters publicly.
It's an interesting balance. On the one side, you have a family with a significant privacy interest. On the other hand, you have the public's interest in knowledge about the family/history. Copyright law--thanks in part to the old "moral rights" or "author's rights" theory--still includes the ability to prevent others from publishing even if you yourself are not.
I know I shouldn't feed the anonymous cowards, but this is obviously a vast over-simplification. IP obviously has plenty of drawbacks--you suggest some of them--but nobody has come up with a better way to create incentives to put R&D into ventures which pay only IP rewards. For example, it costs billions of dollars to develop a new drug, but manufacturing drugs is incredibly easy. Everybody complains about the patent system for drugs, but nobody has come up with another system that would give sufficient incentives for a pharmaceutical company to invest billions in lab research and clinical testing of new drugs. A system without IP would not lead to innovation in pharmaceuticals; there's no way to recoup a billion-dollar investment if generic manufacturers could undercut the price of the drug from Day 1. No new drugs means none of the new drugs that have changed the lives of millions, from Lipitor to Prozac to Viagra.
The same goes, to some extent, for movies. It's true that it costs tens of millions of dollars to produce a movie. If there were absolutely no IP laws and commercial copyright infringement were allowed then nothing would stop ABC from showing a movie that was out in theaters and not paying the studio. Or for a theater to show the movie and not pay the studio. Or for cut-rate vendors to sell the movie openly on DVD the day it comes out in theaters. With absolutely NO IP protection then movies just won't get made.
There might be a better balancing point than what we're at now, but it's far from clear that "no IP" is the right solution.
simply trying to commercialize the fruits of mind, but since we depend on the free exchange of ideas, such laws hinder society and must be resisted
No, quoting parts of a work for the purpose of criticism (which is exactly what you were doing) is the prime example of fair use. No liability, you're OK. Look, I'll even quote yours to prove it:
since I quoted the article, I engaged in illegal duplication of a copyrighted work for public display
If you had quoted the entire article on your blog and just added one or two sentences of commentary then it's unlikely that you'd be engaging in fair use, but here you quoted a very small part of the total article and added a substantial amount of commentary (even if it was in part inaccurate). Fair use saves the day.
You have clearly never watched Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The movie should be required viewing as an artifact of cold-war culture; even if its lessons aren't directly relevant today (we longer live in a world defined by two nuclear powers in an eternal standoff with a hair trigger) it captures the absurdity of the era very well. Plus, as a pure comedy, the movie has aged well.
I'm trying to understand where the "scam" is here. You officially became a joint owner of the account. Presumably there were some documents and signatures involved. You never told Wells Fargo that you were no longer the joint owner of the account. Wells Fargo, thinking you to still be the joint owner of the account, did exactly what "joint owners" do. You get all of the benefits AND all of the drawbacks.
The right thing to do would have been to do more than return the ATM card to your ex-, but also remove yourself from the account.
Obviously SETI isn't limited to SETI@Home, but there is the point that the distributed computing power being applied to SETI@Home could be applied to projects like Stanford's Folding@home which promises to yield much more directly applicable knowledge about protein synthesis.
Many of the distributed projects via BOINC have more directly applicable results than SETI@Home.
That said, any basic research is defined by its lack of direct results. Early research into the atom looked like it had very little use until we discovered x-rays (accidentally) and nuclear power (intentionally). Saying "why is Benjamin Franklin bothering to fly that kite, what good is this 'electricity' he talks about?" would cut off a lot of research that later proves useful in completely unanticipated ways. And, yes, I know the story of the kite is partially folklore (a Frenchman may have been the first to use the electricity from lightning), but it's good folklore that makes the point.
They have a great set for today, but what happens when new symbols are needed? Is there a clear version path so that future updates are backwards-compatible, and it's clear who has which version? I'd hate to send a manuscript to the printer only to find out that I had version 2.0 and they had version 3.0.
they needed a font set that had all the symbols you'd ever want to type in science
At least one of the earlier unlocks required re-soldering inside the phone. That's not like taking your sports car racing on dirt roads, that's like adding a NOS system and asking for warranty support when the engine overheats.
I agree the argument doesn't apply to the software unlocks, but the hardware ones meet your analogy.
"Unauthorized use" might be things like taking your sports care racing on dirt roads.